storytelling according to star wars (c/o Prescott Harvey and Demian Farnworth)

> Promise: Did they make a meaningful promise to the right audience?

Cool things happen away from civilisation, amidst bounty hunters etc.
-- the promise is to do with the frontier.

> Picture: Did they paint a compelling picture of what life will look like if said audience takes them up on that promise?

The picture people want to see is dirty, gritty, second-hand.

> Proof: Did they provide enough proof to believe their promises and picture?

(We don't always need an explanation - there's a sense of magic that
comes from the unknown!)

> Push: Did they push them to act?

The risk is real, not fun.

international

Somehow I had gotten these two quotes from Sloterdijk's "You must
change your life" (2013) merged in my memory. Putting them together,
I thought he was talking about Free/Open Source software, and some
kind of simulationist singularity.

«If one is prepared to understand the faculty, the university and the
scholars' republic as collectivizations, anonymizations and
perfections of the master function -- and this means judging the
'Enlightenment' more highly than it usually judges itself -- then one
can make analogous statements about the next two steps of pragmatic
trainer functions, namely writers and journalists. They carry the
toughening process on which the res publica of the knowing is based to
the respective wider levels - first into the classrooms, from which
tomorrow's literate individuals capable of judgement and action will
emerge, and then into the public media that serve the communication
among today's society of the knowing. From this perspective, the
teachers are character masks of the school system, just as journalists
are personifications of the press -- so they too, if they wanted to
see themselves in that way, would serve a positive dynamic of
collectivization that sought to expand a particular quality to the
level of 'society' as a whole, a quality long believed to be afforded
only to the few: that of mastery, be it the solving of a factual
problem or the art of living as such. But as long as the
collectivization of mastery - in philosophical terms, the
self-determination of 'society' (as if 'society' could possess a self)
-- does not take place, individuals would do well to continue
practising as if they were the first who will reach the goal.» (pp.
296-297)

«After half a century of militant youth movements, a creature that had
been absent from the scene for a long time resurfaced: the adult. Its
reappearance gave life to offensive pragmatisms that filled empty
word-shells like 'democracy', 'civil society' or 'human rights' with
actual content. Thus the awareness of what had been achieved was
accompanied by a broad agenda outlining the next optimization steps
for countless targets of progressive praxis. Today, this is the real
working form of a decentralized international that articulates itself
in tens of thousands of projects in the traditions of world
improvement élan -- without any central committee that would have to,
or even could, tell the active what their next operations should be.»
(p. 402)