InfoByte | SingularDTV (SNGLS)

Decentralize Media!

Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.
--- Orson Welles

Lots of links to SDTV pages on https://dontpanicsell.com/2017/06/30/sngls/

I'm transcribing the description here this time just for fun. The catch is on my actual site I provide a ton of links embedded in the words to back up my points. So don't think I'm just raving off without lots of proof.

Also are mods possible for Steemit? That would be pretty swell.

Description

SingularDTV is an Ethereum ERC20 project. It is a self-described Centrally Organized Distributed Entity (CODE) that promises to bring a blockchain media publishing and hosting platform to the world. The platform was successfully crowdfunded in late 2016, selling out 7.5 million dollars in tokens in 15 minutes. It will provide 11 applications initially built on their open-source “Tokit” API, from a decentralized exchange, a decentralized rights managing service, and a crowdfunding service, to their TVOD (Transaction-Video-On-Demand) service, a blockchain-based movie streaming service set to launch at the end of 2017.

What’s new about SingularDTV is it allows publishers to create tokens (SNGLS) around intellectual property and royalties and manage it themselves, meaning no more middlemen or gatekeepers (i.e. music artists generally only make 10%-25% of the cut through major publishing avenues and lose rights to their own music half the time), instead a fluid peer-2-peer system. Combined with Tokit, SingularDTV hopes to be the progenitors of millions of blockchain applications they call “tokenized ecosystems,” where assets are all accounted for via blockchains. This is amazing as the publishing legalese is coded for and complied with in a way that anyone can suddenly be their own financial manager for their creative works, no matter what scale, and mostly automatically.

I’m pumped to see how this service turns out because of its implications for opening up art and journalism to be far more sustaining for creators. They will need a lot of processing power on the blockchain to fuel a streaming and distribution service with potentially extremely high demand. This would reward miners well, though. The team building SingularDTV expect to see that demand within 5 years, and most of Singular’s base apps will be finished by 2018. I expect to see it take off, I really don’t see a reason why not aside from the tech still needing finalization – which is obviously the lynch-pin to all this. Their Medium blog is loaded with juicy ideas and radical thinking, it’s a real treat to read through and will expand your thinking on blockchain matters.

Media conglomerates have highly concentrated publishing power in the United States, owning the vast majority of the well-known TV, Radio, Newspaper, and Cinema companies by acquisition. This means 90% of what you see and hear is controlled to some degree by these conglomerates (now 5, not 6), even your internet access. That’s also the majority if not all of what people receive from the US in other countries, too.

----- Some necessary commentary… ------

In the age of Apple and Disney, we’ve begun to see a weird monotone arise in the flood of corporate-backed focus-grouped pop culture over the years. The top-40 of today is the same top-40 of a few years ago mostly (and the last decade), with mixed-and-matched 80s and 90s songs everyone’s heard a million times plus a bunch of “woahhh” music, you know, the hit song formula of this decade. Many of the top movies today are formula romances, formula comedies, formula adventures, formula “will it win an Oscar?” movies and formula gritty remakes. There used to be thousands of independent publishers but most were bought out while others are now simply ignored and drowned out.

“We have to fight back the cultural fascists with our powerful hit music!”

I firmly believe – as someone who’s studied a bit of mass psychology and propaganda in-depth – that this homogenization of art is directly tied to the concentration of power, and is good for nobody but a few. It’s the new kitsch, now in the form of rappers surrounded by dehumanized bouncing booties, and surgically-altered women on special diets playing haplessly into lives that they genuinely think are their own. Exoticism and using wealth to brag/overindulge has never changed, though, which is also rampant in media. If everybody is exposed to the same few things you can bet they’re going to have a lot of similarities and can be predictably marketed to, with the marketer gaining greater influence over time as they capture more attention.

That’s my beef with most of my experiences with American society today, honestly. I can’t go anywhere without it being the same basic trip with the same jokes, the same desires, the same memes, the same mass-marketed tastes, the same baseless ignorance, the same loneliness, and the same problems therein. Thankfully I learned to filter content on my own and branch out a bit. I don’t think most people even really know where to begin with that, however, since most people’s exposure to media is primarily marketed to them on the screen or in the endless droll of a supermarket top-40 station. It gets locked in when these mass-marketed materials become the items of individuals’ social circles. It really does take some scope to understand there’s a big, wild, enthralling world of art out there just begging to be appreciated. I hope SingularDTV is looking to boost that kind of diversity and not just their own fees.

The entire legal structure around US media favors centralization, while most of the world still partakes in censorship. This isn’t even mentioning how propaganda plays a part in all this, in that centralized communication makes it a lot easier to propagate ideology – something incredibly dangerous especially today where propaganda campaigns actively sustain the US incursion in the Middle East and the support of the Saudi regime, among a million other issues at this point.

By the guy who invented the term “public relations” or PR

I’d also like to point out that the US currently has a going rate of mental illness at 18%, according to the National Institute for Mental Health. How are we not freaking out about exploitative culture with that many vulnerable people, not to mention kids? That’s enough people to form their own country with a 100% mentally ill culture, yet we wonder what’s really happening to people here. Again, just my two-cents.

A semi-relevant Park Chan-wook film

Maybe that’s too political or shocking for some of my readers. Just know I’m making this site about cryptocurrencies because I see an extremely robust and promising solution to this whole mess of a global community – one desperate to feel its own heartbeat amidst the muted cynicism bred by endless war, poverty, and individual feelings of irrelevancy in a giant machine-organism that decides a lot of things for you before you’re even born.

It won’t be a sudden “enlightenment” by our current system that does it, many governments and economic systems were built on a myth of stability and unconsciously work to maintain that false sense of stability. It will be us on every corner of this floating rock commandeering the means by which we all economize and communicate and make actual long-term improvements to our own and other’s lives. It has to be done in a way that is not so vulnerable to manipulation and misdirection as it was before information became radically more accessible with the internet and eventually internet 2.0 with the new privacy, accountability, and incentive schemes like Basic Attention Token, Factom, and New Economy Movement.

The relatively few people (and their heirs) who have transformed the economy successfully (not necessarily honestly) are in their ivory towers right now, rewriting the rules in their own ideologically-insulated and self-interested favor. Pre-1980s there were a few thousand separate publishers in the US. Since cross-ownership laws have been relaxed and propaganda has gotten worse, the diversity of opinion and thus expression has decreased dramatically. It feels like the waves are about to crash again in terms of a cultural shift away from that, but hey that’s just me saying vague and poorly contextualized things.

Screw this conglomerate bullshit, seriously. I get my news these days with amazing groups like TheRealNews, Bill Moyers, Aljazeera, teleSUR English (especially Abby Martin’s work), and a few of RT America’s shows like “On Contact with Chris Hedges” and “Watching the Hawks” (which are 100% independent, just published by RT’s network).

How about a TruthCoin where a crowd rewards truth-telling in journalism? That would be an interesting social experiment even just for the data of what percentages of people consider what to be true, not whether the good journalists (usually the most underpaid) actually saw the rewards… Wait, don’t steal my idea. Here’s a trademark logo to scare you away: TruthCoin™

Check out this latest film from Adam Curtis:

// Written June 30, ’17. Price at the time: $0.168 / SNGLS