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Now that it has been announced that I'm DJing during Steemfest's party night, I figured that it's a good time to talk about my alter-ego, and offer some of his deeper thoughts on music, curation markets for diversity, and entertainment in the age of information (overload).

Nowadays, I play much lesser in clubs, opting for private parties. Casual, daytime pool parties seem to be the most enjoyable kind these days. Sunlight, smiles, and good vibes all over - what's there not to love?

Before going deep into the rabbit hole, here's an obligatory music selection that I'm gonna try to shove down your eardrums. Play, and continue the read! Please resteem or share outside of Steemit if you find this interesting.

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The end of the beginning

It all started back in 2011 in an innocent lil BBQ party. A friend was there with a mini-DJ controller. Pretty cute and nifty thing. I toyed around with it, thinking.. damn I can do this shit the whole day. Certainly helped that I love all kinds of music. And also, it appeals to my anti-social side.

Now I can retreat to the DJ console whenever I run out of steam. Socialising in parties can get pretty tiring!

Immediately, I purchased a dingy Behringer DJ controller the day after. Self-learned on Youtube, crosschecked my skills with a local talent, and never looked back. The feeling of mixing tracks together and having stuff sounding dope is too damn special. I was riding high on the crescent of a wave. Even started taking profile pictures, despite my camera shyness.

Ended up with the Kaiserkev monicker. Just because Wong is so damn weird from a marketing standpoint. So I ended up with the German equivalent for Wong (which means emperor, I think).

Nailed my first gig in a rooftop pool party

I was decking it out on the 41st floor of some hotel, and to top that off - there were some base-jumping shenanigans! I took on gigs after gigs, honing my mixing skills and perfecting that jesus pose. Practising night after night, I eventually landed myself a runner up title in a local competition.

Not to humblebrag, but it only took six months after my first gig.

It was of course, a very calculated set of tracks that I played during the competition. My skills were nowhere near the old-timers. I had to figure out an edge. The edge was then to have a tasteful mix of old flavours and new upcoming trends. Hype the damn crowd.

Early 2012 was the time when the marketing cartel in America were starting to glorify EDM (Electronic Dance Music) - which is basically a marketing hook for repackaging the various European festivals' type of loud banging dance music. Honestly, most music nowadays are electronically made, hence, the irony of the EDM label for explosive sounds.

But that was the angle that I took, and it paid off. The set was banging and cheesy as cheetos, and it worked like a charm even with my almost clumsy looking presence on stage. I pressed the right buttons.

Getting into the big league..?

Got myself a weekly residency gig in Zouk KL the year after. It is one of the biggest and most reputable clubs in my region. It was a dream. Quality crowd, with the bonus of top of the class sound systems. But something was bugging the hell out of me.

I was playing the same music over and over again. A contradictory practice, given that Youtube and Soundcloud was at that time, on the verge of content explosion. The flood of creative information was on its way, all enabled by growing numbers of affordable integrated controllers, and specialised software for creative content creation. The bedroom revolution was at the tipping point.

So why was I continuing playing the popular stuff? I needed to continue exploring. Being an unknown, being the underdog, and playing what I love is way more romantic. And there are just so much good stuff out there. So I made the decision to get out pursuing the big leagues that were blasting repetitive EDMs every night.

I guess the big rooms just weren't the right fit for me, because:-

• Diversity and experimentation don't have much of a place in established clubs. Just like everything else when it comes to money. It's a supply and demand thing. Obviously, clubs don't pull enough crowd to sustain music diversity.
• I'd love to see the art of DJing progress. The big clubs only have their mainstays, without much of a decentralized nature to it when it comes to month-to-month selections. Big lack of diversity. It'd be kind of crazy if I have the funds to one day, build a public space with a DJ-console and consumer facilities that are blockchained together for shared profits and all that jazz.

Winding down to pursue true love

It was difficult at first. The hours spent scouring the Internet for endless amounts of good music, only to never use them again. And for smaller crowds. Perhaps it's for the best. There are just too damn many good music out there! Every aspiring musician can now make music right out of the laptop. Sure, there are many sucky tracks, but there are equally as many excellent ones.

There was a particularly massive surge of plunder, remixing culture, in which I've characterised as the rise of vaporwave and new age aesthetics. Bookmark it for late night delight: https://steemit.com/vaporwave/@kevinwong/the-rise-of-vaporwave-and-new-age-aesthetics

Having fallen into this deep, deep rabbit hole of the infinite collective human consciousness (lol).. I've developed an entirely new perspective on life. The singularity is here..

.. and I am the one that curates.

I really don't DJ that much anymore, despite the good, short run. Instead, I'm running a small music event business that groups up local and foreign talents in realising certain music themes. It's still a lot of fun spinning out some tracks though.

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Onto this thing I call future vibes

Time went by pretty quickly during the memefication of Facebook, the stage of life when everything I see on that social platform became so banal and mind-numbing. It was entertaining, of course. But there was a great divide. There wasn't any easy way to get involved in meaningful communication.

It was as if I was just watching life passing by on a speeding bullet train. I was liking all sorts of shit, but where the hell did the "let's build stuff together" and "make the world a better place" koombaya go?

Relationships were turning into relationshits.. and what's the underlying problem, the root cause of such perceived degradation in the quality of human relationships? Was it all just a reflection of my state of mind? Perhaps. But there was a certain crutch. We're getting lousy entertainment, leeching on our precious attention, and only on a one-way street..

But maybe it's not that bad, we just need that certain kick for us to start seeing value in everything that people do. Why do they do it? Is it really banal? Diversity requires perspective to be appreciated.

Plus what's with the time-sink, when the future is ours to shape and define?

Not my image, but can be found here!

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Everything is entertainment

To set the stage for further discussion on the future of entertainment. Let's take a look at the evolution of music, and relate them with the other facets of life from the micro to macro perspectives:-

• Sticks and stones (Approximately 100,000 years ago). This stage involves blunt physicality. You apply direct force on atoms to produce sound.

• Wind, strings, and drums (Approximately 5000 years ago). This stage involves delicate physicality. You control your muscles to apply force on atoms to produce sounds that occupies a wider spectrum of frequencies.

• Samplers and electronic synthesizers (Approximately 100 years ago). This stage involves containing the movement of atoms across time. It's like taking the entire physical dimension into the domain of frequency. If you're a guitar player, this is characterised by the frets and chords. It is at this stage that anyone can begin playing entire tracks by just stringing on the (abstract) guitar.

• Data-driven composition and sound design (Approximately 40 years ago). This stage is the equivalent of driving sound spectrum, putting them in places that tickle the infinite human consciousness. That's why popular music are sounding the same these days. Music marketers are exploiting this to no end. It is in this evolution of entertainment that good curation is slipping away from the exponential uptake of human creativity. This stage is getting more evident with each passing day.

• Parallel simulation, evaluation, and modification of music (In progress). This is where we're in right now, at least for those who are looking to build meaningfully in a sea of contents / motivations / entertainment. We are building towards infinite narratives, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence, procedural generation, and ever better computing paradigms. Parallel universes? Look no further. It's already here. It is up to us to look out for orderly chaos amidst the growing entropy.

Commissioned work rendered by @lgm-1

The question now is.. where do we even begin to look? For one, look no further than cryptocurrencies (or crypto-economic state machines). The old world computing paradigm is thoroughly gameable and corruptible. How does one even begin to handle the infinite in great fidelity? There's not much point in curating if they are not transparent, accountable, and in the hands of all that it serves. Even worse if it can be taken away.

Enter Bitcoin, Ethereum, Steem, and the other cryptos as well. Scamcoin, lamecoin, or not, they're even up for our curative efforts!

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The future of entertainment

Ever since immersing myself in my thoughts about Steemit and @curie, truth is this - nobody really knows what is going on, other than navigating through the flood of information, putting value where value it should be. We're just curating and mindfully communicating with the rest of the community on the daily, like Sisyphus endlessly rolling that boulder up the mountain (in the best way possible).

Subscribing to theories of antifragility and decentralization, I'm actively devising integrative methodologies for building agile, organic, and voluntary organisations on the blockchain. And Steemit makes it easier.

Like every good science fiction, we are on the cusp of dealing with the extremities of human constructs. Information is free, information is infinite, information is there to be absorbed and transformed. To entertain and move us.

How are we building our shared reality?

And how we are going to deal with the many various, fictitious laws and social values in the eternal sea of entertainment?

The future of entertainment is a diverse body of work, and it's up to us to curate and reward goodness. That's the narrative that we ought to build.

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Wrapping this up, I wish to list out once again of my upcoming pieces. I certainly hope you enjoyed this.

• Three Key Steps to Global Abundance.
• Are You Worth It? (An Essay on The Perception of Value)
• Why Fear Artificial Intelligence When You Can (And Should) Embrace It?
• The End of Nations: On Identity, Diversity, and Civilisation.
• The End of Plagiarism: On Law, Order, and Chaos.
• Revelations From Playing Sim City 2000 (And Other City Simulators).
• The Perfect Format - A Study on The Art of Steemit Blogging.
• Selling Art and Poem on Steemit - Is It Sustainable?
• The Cost of Diversity & Decentralisation (An Analysis for Market Speculators).

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Follow me @kevinwong