Some more distributed intelligence

RC Dean correctly identifies the blog-banging of Rather and his forged document as an exercise in distributed intelligence. So, can this model for cooperative intellectual activity be applied to other tasks? Can the combined power of the Internet be brought to bear on other creative tasks, rather than just the destruction of the pretensions of forgers and their mainstream media dupes?

Open Source software famously makes use of distributed intelligence. And I seem to recall hearing on the British BBC1 TV show The Sky at Night that the Internet is also already used to do combined astronomy. Also, I recall reading, but do not recall where or when, about a list of famous maths problems that have baffled the greatest maths minds for centuries, which have now all had cash prizes attached to them.

But in the case of those maths problems it is only the publicising of the problem that uses the Internet. The solutions will pretty much come from individuals. Or is that wrong? Will major proofs of major theorems get themselves constructed line by line, in public, with dozens of different mathematicians chipping in with their own pennyworths, with each step not being enough to justify a journal article, but the combined effect being mathematically stellar?

Could a film script perhaps be concocted in this way? Consider this, from Terry Teachout on Wednesday:

I was thinking today about how so few public figures are willing to admit (for attribution, anyway) that they’ve done something wrong, no matter how minor. But I wasn’t thinking of politicians, or even of Dan Rather. A half-remembered quote had flashed unexpectedly through my mind, and thirty seconds’ worth of Web surfing produced this paragraph from an editorial in a magazine called World War II:

Soon after he had completed his epic 140-mile march with his staff from Wuntho, Burma, to safety in India, an unhappy Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell was asked by a reporter to explain the performance of Allied armies in Burma and give his impressions of the recently concluded campaign. Never one to mince words, the peppery general responded: “I claim we took a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, and go back and retake it.”

Stilwell spoke those words sixty-two years ago. When was the last time that such candor was heard in like circumstances? What would happen today if similar words were spoken by some equally well-known person who’d stepped in it up to his eyebrows? Would his candor be greeted by a wholehearted roar of astonished approval? Or would he be buried under the inevitable avalanche of told-you-sos from his sworn enemies and their robotic surrogates, amplified well beyond the threshold of pain by the 24/7 echo chamber of the media, old and new alike? …

Teachout then alludes to a movie that made a big impression on me also when it first came out, Network not least because of the amazing scene where Faye Dunaway has sex while continuing to rant about her latest TV ratings strategy. But I digress. Back to Treacher on Speaking Truth With Power. Now comes this:

… it occurs to me that such a scenario might well make for an interesting movie. …

… Imagine, then, a film about a present-day public figure who screws up in a big way, calls a press conference, admits his errors, and throws himself upon the mercy of the public. It’s not hard to see how a socially aware writer-director like, say, John Sayles might weave the resulting tangle into a smart story about imperfect people who get caught up in the whirlwind of circumstance.

Treacher himself isn’t going to write the screenplay of the drama he has sketched out. But suppose someone else did. And suppose, instead of mass-laser-printing-it and bombarding Hollywood with it, they instead simply stuck their script up on the Internet.

And suppose others then joined in, with technical assistance about the nuances of news conferences and of the particular milieu our Candid Hero was operating in (“that would never happen, but what you could do is …”), and with snappier dialogue, and with casting suggestions, and with observations about plot non-sequiturs, and with suggested solutions. Home movie makers might even get to work on actually shooting rough versions of some of the scenes using lesser known actors eager to show what they can do. People could suggest cheaper locations, the best available person to direct, report on suitable buildings which which are about to be demolished (Hollywood loves demolishing buildings).

In short, amateurs could horn in on the work now done by movie professionals, at such vast expense and with such huge travelling budgets.

The reason I like the idea of applying Distributed Intelligence to movie making is that the best movies are rather like maths theorems. They have a rightness to them, a quality of having been discovered rather than merely created, of having been dug up in their finished state rather than merely thrown together. I am not saying that they are dug up, merely that they feel like this. (All the best art is like this. Discuss.)

There are many advantages to putting a movie together like this, not least that financing it and (perhaps above all) publicising it might be pretty much taken care of.

It just, as they used to say in older movies, might work. (Because I believe this, and because I like thinking of movie ideas myself, I have a category at my Culture Blog called Movie ideas. Not as in ideas about movies, but ideas for movies.)

One particular skill that ,ight particularly be needed in the world of distributed, yet paid, intelligence would be the skill of tracing the history of an idea and of a creative process (whether it is a movie, a maths theorem, a chemical formula, or a new idea for a cheap gadget or an new kind of car or airplane) so that key contributors could be appropriately rewarded. Because, once key contributors do get appropriately rewarded a few times, this will enormously increase the willingness of all manner of people to make appropriate contributions.

You get a taste of how this rewarding process would work when you read the better mainstream media articles now being written about how the Blogosphere Got Dan Rather. “The story began when CBS unveiled Document X on 60 Minutes last … whichever night it was, whereupon a commenter at Blog A said … whatever he said, about proportional spacing, and Blogger B then did an exhaustive analysis of Microsoft Word and Blogger C lashed up that oscillating graphic. Meanwhile ex-National-Guardian P spoke to Blogger D …”. You know the kind of thing. Once the history of the creation has been established, then the final makers of the thing (movie, car, whatever) could divvy up whatever profits they might make, on a “do you agree? – and if you do, and promise not to sue us if it makes ten times more money than any of us now dream of, do we have a deal?” basis. Tricky, I agree. But doable. Hollywood already has skills along these lines now, does it not?

Or then again, maybe, the whole idea of distributed intelligence movie-making (in particular) will separate itself out from money-making movie-making, and the whole process will be done for free, and distributed for free, and watched for free. What are the odds that the smash summer holiday hit of 2012 will be a blog-movie, on super high definition DVD, playable not only in home cinemas but also in cinema cinemas (by any cinema that wants to show it), while Hollywood is stuck with its latest unsellable Dinosaur Sequel and snarls, Rather-like, that civilisation as Hollywood knows it is at an end. Which it very possibly would be.

The general principle here is that – Vinegar Joe Stilwell style – you set about solving your problems, or, in more peaceful times, seizing your opportunities, by first stating in public just what they are, and inviting Distributed Intelligence to get to work on them, rather (Rather!) than by keeping your problems secret until your secret hirelings have solved them, or can plausibly claim to have solved them. And only then does Distributed Intelligence go to work second guessing, or improving on, or making monkeys of the hirelings.

Think of it as Western Civilisation only more so.