Glimpsing the Future with Felicia Day and Kudos for a Fine Fencing Blog Post

There are moments when current events allow you to glimpse the future. One example took place on May 21st, 1929 when Charles Lindberg landed at Le Bourget field in Paris having crossed the Atlantic alone in the Spirit of Saint Louis thus presaging an age of international travel and catapulting himself into instant celebrity, one of the first. Another such moment , was in September 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland using highly coordinated massive air, artillery, armor in their strategy of lighting warfare or “blitzkrieg.” The highly coordinated use of overwhelming force was not only a defining aspect of World War II but remains a viable strategy as the US demonstrated in its “shock and awe” campaign against Bagdad.

I have the sense that two recent events, of vastly different scales, in very different areas of human experience may prove just as prophetic albeit in a very different way. The first, and most obvious, is the nuclear crisis in Japan. It’s hard to imagine a more clear and terrible demonstration that statistically highly unlikely events must be planned for and managed at an international level. It’s an expensive and unpleasant realization, but the plain truth is that the world is too interconnected, the technologies are too potent and the potential consequences of indifference are too terrible for us not to do so.

The other example, has to do with business. Not too long ago, the movie rental giant Blockbuster was forced into bankruptcy by Netflix and their inability to adapt to Netflix’s online/mail delivery based model which eschewed late fees. For their part, Netflix always saw that innovation as a bridging strategy and now it’s battling against Amazon et al, for online streaming delivery of entertainment content.

My sense is that even if one of them wins that war it may be a pyrrhic victory. That surmise follows from the other recent event I alluded to: the announcement by Bioware/EA that they had begun production of a web fantasy series with Felicia Day. Ms. Day is perhaps best known for her project “The Guild,” an indie web series about the fortunes of a group of people playing a massively multiplayer online role playing game akin to World of Warcraft. The DVD of season 4 of “The Guild” has just been released to DVD and, according to Ms. Day in a recent interview with Jimmy Fallon, the series has had over 100 million viewers online. I consider it a seminal event because it’s hard to imagine a more clear demonstration that financial power in entertainment is flowing inexorably from distribution organizations to content creators such as Ms. Day. Bioware/EA’s new project with Ms. Day could be seen as a clear recognition of that fact. I suspect Netflix realizes it as well as they are in negotiations to produce and develop Kevin Spacey’s project, a remake of “House of Cards.”

On an entirely separate topic, there’s a fencing tournament in Park City this weekend which I’m going to try to make even though I’ve had to miss my last two weeks of open fencing practice as well as class. I must admit to being inspired to do so by Fencing Bear’s decision to compete in Detroit last weekend in spite of much greater obstacles. And I should mention that her blog of March 15th contained one of the coolest and sharpest descriptions of what goes through your mind while fencing that I’ve yet read. It’s definitely worth a read, Why that last bout really sucked