Author Archives: David Yang

The future of advertising?

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I was never much of a sports fan. Nor was my family or friends. I didn’t grow up watching the super bowl, and I don’t particularly have a favorite team.

Despite all of that, the commercials for the Super Bowl have transcended the sport. I can still remember a few of them off the top of my head. Even though the popularity of the NFL has drastically declined, the hype over Super Bowl commercials is still tangible every time a Super Bowl rolls around.

And yet, despite the seeming importance of these commercials, one has to wonder if the companies even get their money’s worth from each one. A thirty second segment surely wouldn’t sell very much product, yet, companies desperately vie to grab each time slot, paying up to five million for precious air time. It is a risky gamble, and most Super Bowl commercials are forgettable and have already been long forgotten.

As the internet becomes more and more widespread, entertainment surely will speed up. The maximum allowed commercial time on Youtube is thirty seconds, and most people would want to skip through even those paltry thirty seconds of advertisement. Ads would have to become more interesting, more relevant, or simply more “out there” in order to seize the increasingly short attention span of those who entertain themselves on the internet.

Perhaps companies will have to resort to unconventional measures. Memes– widespread internet jokes– have often featured popular commercial products, such as 7up or Doritos. The cost of making a meme is nearly nonexistent, but once a meme is created, it rages across social media like a wildfire, potentially spreading a brand name faster than any commercial ever could. Perhaps, one day, memes will become the ideal way to advertise a product?

It sounds ridiculous, I know… but spending five million dollars for thirty seconds on a slowly hemorrhaging sports event also sounds ridiculous to me.

Entitlement

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It’d be easy for me to write something about how I sympathize with the union worker’s plight. I could write about how, having grown up in California, these issues are near and relevant to me.

I’m unable to do that, though.

My house was one of the houses the cleaning ladies would clean. My Mom, who was (and probably still is) constantly filling her schedule with commitments, felt unnerved by how she was unable to clean the house once every week. She hired some cleaning ladies, who happened to be Mexican. She paid them well, and often gave them bonuses. But to me, they weren’t under me, and they weren’t over me. They were just people doing their jobs, and they were damn good at it, too.

My neighborhood mostly consisted of middle class Asians– Chinese and Indians comprised the vast majority. I would often hear little snippets of Mandarin disparaging the Mexican immigrants, claiming that they have it easy with Social Security. I heard of a Mexican family who was evicted after not paying rent for half a year. Once the house was reclaimed by the worried landlords, they had to spend more money than they gained cleaning and repairing furniture in order to make it sell-able.

Why did I say all this? I said all that to let you know that I’ve lived an entitled life surrounded by people who subtly encouraged my feelings of entitlement.

However, while I can’t relate to the union worker’s plight, I can relate to humanity.

Humanity is something most everyone has, and most everyone holds dear. A concept of Good or Bad might be influenced by upbringing or society, but love and hate, tears and laughter, these are all universally relatable things, human things. This is why the film made me think about why I’m entitled, and why I should worry about the unions and the people in those unions, even though I might never be on the receiving end. They risk and sacrifice everything for what they feel is right, like Robin Hood and his band of merry men.

Though it sounds cliche to say it, this film opened my eyes to the struggle of these people. And, though the film may have taken place a long time ago, the sermon it preaches remain painfully relevant.

A Sobering Film

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I read an interesting article recently about the future of BMIs. You can see the article below, if you want.

 

Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future

You might ask, “David, why is this relevant?” I doubt anyone is willing to read through that 30,000 word monster, but the article does discuss a lot of things about the future of the BMI industry, and how, through the power of increasingly advanced technology, we will be able to transcend inefficient “communication by words.”

It also discusses many fixes for current brain and spine-based problems, such as deafness or blindness. Current technologies to alleviate blindness and deafness are primitive, but you can sure bet that they’ll improve in the future.

Having watched A Beautiful Mind, I’ve come to realize that these incredible innovations– things that will make quadriplegics skip and jump again, things that will make painters out of blind men and composers out of the deaf– cannot necessarily fix what is truly deep down in our mind. If something goes wrong in there, well, it’ll still be wrong.

The article discusses how if complete knowledge of the brain equates to travelling a mile, we’ve only discovered about three inches of that mile. We might know which neurons trigger which parts of the brain, or which chemicals cause happiness or sadness, but we cannot give instructions to the brain to activate those specific neurons. Even if we did, we simply don’t possess the proper “programming language,” and if we did, it would take an absurd amount of resources to implement.

The article also mentions that we might be able to change how certain sensations feel. In the far future, with super-advanced BMIs, people can even relegate pain to something far less pleasant– like an alert, or a noise. “STOP USING THAT LEG, IT HAS BEEN SEVERED,” might pop up in the corner of your eye, far preferable to white-hot lances of pain rocketing across your spine. But the affliction Nash had was one of perception. To him, nothing seemed wrong, so even with this super advanced tech, he would not be able to fix himself. The only cure was to battle against the most powerful enemy– one’s own brain.

It’s a sobering thought, and it encourages solipsism as much as the Matrix did. What if I had been suffering similar ailments? Would anyone know? Because I certainly wouldn’t.

Score, THEN Slip!

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Art has always had an interesting place in my life. When I was younger, I was forced into it by my parents, thinking that art is something to be appended onto a resume. I withdrew from art for a long period of time, focusing on sciences and subconsciously deriding those who would appreciate and practice art.

From a strictly money-based perspective, art isn’t really too practical. Many people I know like to tout the statistic that only the top 10% of professional artists can live comfortably. I hear stories from my parents of impoverished, yet talented, Chinese artists, willing to sell some admittedly nice looking paintings for a pittance.

As I grew, I started to wonder why people would make themselves undergo such struggles for such superficial benefit. The second time I explored art, I did it on my own volition. Some art classes and orchestra rehearsals later, I think I have a bit of a better idea about art than I did in the days of yore.

Despite my newfound interest in art, I still find traversing museums more onerous than fascinating. Perhaps a few pieces would strike my fancy, and I could appreciate the effort and creativity that went into making said pieces. But, once I’ve seen a hundred or a thousand pieces of similar quality requiring similar skill,  I begin to lose interest. I lose my appreciation for beauty once I’m surrounded by it, constantly, for hours on end.

When I visited the small exhibition in the storage room of the Johnson, this was no sprawling expanse of reputable artworks; it was a handpicked collection of relics, practical and realistic articles from central America. The tour guide pointed out things that were, on one hand, obvious, but on the other hand, easy to miss on the first glance. This was especially proven by the “jelly doughnut” teapot, which was actually an oil spill.

I can’t say that I truly appreciate ceramics anymore than I did before, and nor can I say that I was dazzled by the art collection I saw. As I struggled to mold the clay into something that looked more meaningful than an oblong grey lump, however, I did start to understand how much of an endeavor it was to create something practical and nice looking.

Slim Pickens Does the Right Thing

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I am a fan of The Offspring, a punk rock band. I had always known their song “Slim Pickens Does the Right Thing and Rides the Bomb to Hell” (quite the name!) was based on the film, Dr. Strangelove. The music video features a highly stylized animation filled to the brim with scenes of war, explosions, and of Death himself, personified as Dr. Strangelove.

Peculiarly, Dr. Strangelove is regarded as a comedy film. Yet, any individual component of the film cannot be considered amusing. The deranged general’s rambling monologues hints at rampant paranoia and megalomania. The at-times inefficient war council is a snide remark at the governmental bureaucracy. And, of course, the issue of nuclear bombs and the apocalypse are anything but jokes. The way that the characters make light of the “end of the world” may seem as concerning as it is amusing to some.

However, having done some research on nuclear weapons, I have realized that, even if every nuclear weapon were fired and detonated, a nuclear apocalypse would not occur. Massive swathes of land would be rendered unlivable, and perhaps a majority of the human race would be killed, but civilization would not end, and the world would not be immersed into nuclear winter for hundreds of years.

Many experts were convinced that the Kuwaiti Oil Fires would blot out the skies in ash and smoke, plunging Europe into an artificial winter. The amount of oil burned, and the amount of energy expended, would have been close, if not equal to, the detonation of nuclear devices. The result of the Kuwaiti Oil Fires was a temperature drop of around five degrees Celsius over the Persian Gulf– not quite the apocalypse that experts had prophesied.

What was the purpose of that tangent? It meant, to me, the movie was a comedy. The possibility of the doomsday device which Dr. Strangelove described seems ludicrous to me.

The nature of public fear has changed as the years go by. Once, exposed angles and scandal were the foremost phobias; then, it was fear of the military draft, then, mutually assured destruction. Today, one of the foremost fears of society is the loss of privacy– from hackers and from the government.

The moral of my seemingly aimless ramble is that the movie would not have been as funny had it been translated to a more pertinent modern issue. Given time, someone may make a parody of today’s greatest phobias, just as The Offspring have parodied nuclear annihilation with a punk rock song.

Feedback loop into immortality

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First off, the movie GATTACA was, by my standards average. Though it seemed hackneyed at times, and the acting seemed, as many have said before, “low-energy,” the premise was intriguing enough for me to keep wanting to watch the movie, all the way to the bitter, abrupt end.

I did not realize the impact the movie had on me, however, until I got launched into a debate with my friend over a text chat. I had mentioned that this selective genetic process could lead to self-augmentation, and, as an incurable cynic, I only foresaw disaster from this.

I believed that if people were able to make their offspring smarter, then this would incur a positive feedback loop (Oh boy, I do love me my positive feedback loops). People would begin to focus singularly on the pursuit of becoming smarter. Each generation would become an improvement on the previous, but, ever curious, we would continue to wonder what lay beyond our (enhanced) realm of understanding. Thus, we would focus on improving our intellect, perhaps obsessively. This stems from the assumption that people aren’t satisfied with knowing enough; people are only satisfied once they know everything. To know everything, of course, is impossible.

As people get smarter, then issues start to arise. People become suspicious of the unknown, and it is impossible to predict what a smarter person might do. Those who remain unaugmented in any way could become oppressed without even knowing it. Who knows what humanity might have to sacrifice in this ultimately obsessive pursuit of infinite intellect?

The transcendentalist counterargument is that it is better for humanity to expand our boundaries for the betterment of our race. What stars could we explore with augmented minds? What discoveries could we uncover, what breakthroughs could we achieve?

I don’t buy it. Maybe I’m just far to skeptical to believe it. But I do know that almost any resource-consuming positive feedback loop is destructive. If this is the way that humanity is going, well, I am most certainly quite worried.

The Murderous Desert

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Upon first glance, there is not much to be said about Max Max: Beyond Thunderdome. It is the third in the series, and the second one to feature the titular character, Mad Max, surviving in the hostile, barely-hospitable Australian wasteland. There seems to be no innovation here: only a continuation of the previous movies’ breakthroughs.

And yet, it has received critical acclaim, immortalized by a cult following. Though it isn’t the first of the Mad Max series featured in this post-apocalyptic realm, it is the first to contain a semblance of civilization in the blasted wasteland.

Bartertown: a cluster of ramshackle hovels, which could hardly be considered a town. However there still remains a semblance of order. Their denizens stay not only because the deserts outside of Bartertown are riddled with raiders and sinkholes, but also because of their sacrosanct “law”:

“Two men enter. One man leaves.”

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome may seem samey or corny to us, but for its time, it was definitely a new take on cinema. Though Westerns had been in decline, a simple change of setting proved to be wildly successful. Instead of cars, cowboys ride cars and buggies; instead of tyrannical sheriffs or bold vigilantes, we have Auntie, Master, and Mad Max himself. Instead of mysterious and hostile Indians, we have the tribal coven of children from the crashed 747 flight. Yet, one key theme remains the same. Though the denizens of Mad Max seem to be struggling to survive, they are in reality struggling to maintain their humanity in the face of an overwhelmingly brutal landscape, one which is hell-bent on destroying the sanity of man.

Different people in the movie have different ways to accomplish that. The children cling to their belief in their exodus to civilization. Auntie thirsts for power over Bartertown.  Yet, Max only clings to his humanity by upholding a sense of right, one which had been engrained into him from his days as a policeman. He was a guardian before the world ended, and he still clings to that need to protect the weak.

Any conflicts the characters may have had between each other were due to their motivations, which were spurred by the burgeoning world around them.

Reality?

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The Matrix could very well be a construct designed to save humanity. It could be that “The Machines” were originally created to nurture and help humanity. Humans, paranoid as ever, were the ones to first open fire upon the Machines. They rendered Earth uninhabitable, blackening the skies and salting the earth with radiation. Realizing that humanity’s greatest threat was humanity itself, The Machines encapsulated all of Humanity within its digital confines. The Machines knew that human mind would deteriorate if it didn’t have the illusion of Free Will, so The Machines created the original Matrix.

The original Matrix, as Agent Smith noted, was a paradise. It was also a disaster. Skeptics began to doubt the reality they lived in. Their world seemed too perfect, and to some people, too much of a good thing without any sort of bad thing as a consequence is wholly suspect. The Machines realized that humans needed struggle and adversity in the Matrix in order to make it more believable.

“But hold on just a second, David. Did you miss the half of the movie where, you know, they’re in the ‘real world,’ and the Machines are pretty clearly trying their darnedest to murder the living crap out of Morpheus and company?”

Then comes the question: How would you know if the “real world” was, in fact, “real?” One of the goals of the movie is to make people question everything. However, when faced with visual evidence on the screen and verbal evidence from Morpheus and company, most people would assume that the Hellscape known as the “real world” was the true reality.

Could it be that the “real world” is simply another Matrix, designed for the skeptics? Those who continue to doubt The Matrix are shown the truth… or so they think. It could very well be that the Machines had created another world, just for the cynics. If this were the case, then The Machines hit the mark: not a single Rebel ever questions the reality of the “real world.” It certainly looks hostile, and humans are definitely on the back foot. If strange things happen in the “real world,” then hey, maybe life outside of the Matrix is just supposed to be like that.

The real world is a Matrix. The “real world” is another Matrix.

Some people might agree and some people might disagree with my view. But the beauty isn’t in the agreement or disagreement.

The Matrix is an exploration into the concepts of Solipsism: nothing is certain but one’s self. The Matrix encourages anarchist thought, a discourse on the insular, docile mindset of the complacent citizen. The Matrix demands that you question everything. The Matrix insists that you are paranoid, and this is all an escapist dream. The reason why The Matrix is such a work of art is because one’s interpretation of the movie gives insight into one’s psyche. The reason why The Matrix is a masterwork is because it’s a positive feedback loop which takes in questions and outputs more questions.

There are no right answers. Only more questions.

The Reader doesn’t give a–

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Da*n about who you are, unless you remain concrete and highly relevant.

When I wrote my first Personal statement for college applications, I was made aware of this fact. Whoever had the misfortune of reading my college personal statement likely had the further misfortune of reading hundreds like it, of drastically varying quality. After the ten dozenth emotional story, the reader’s mind would become inured to cloying pathos and blustering ethos.

Thus, as many of my fellow scholars have noted, companies have implemented algorithms to sift through personal statements and cover letters. No buzz words? No job! Made it past that barrier? Your meticulously crafted personal statement will get read for about five to seven seconds, before it is either blessed or binned. I was well aware that the readers didn’t really want to read all those personal statements, but I had no idea it was that bad.

This has once again changed my views on the Personal Statement. It has evolved from a narrative piece describing your interests and desires, to a tangentially narrative piece describing your experience and ability. There is no room for romantics in the chess game between employers and employees; To win this round, you will have to know the opponent as well as you know yourself. One can show that he knows his opponent by doing research and by enlisting spies– I mean, connections– to give him the inner workings of their organization: important names, important projects, important procedures.

As for the knowledge of oneself, well, that will come with experience and practice. Magdala and Dr. Hill are both extremely knowledgeable on the subject– possibly too knowledgeable: by the time the event had ended, we didn’t have enough time to write our own personal statements during the workshop. I do hope we have another workshop, so I can have a chance to apply what I’ve learned!