Government, Publishing and the Infinite Game
By See Tshiung Han
When I think of Vision 2020, I think of the business model of Multi-Level Marketing. The scenarios that get us to the end result are not fully formed. Rather, they need to be talked about endlessly. We can't hoard favored predictions, a good business plan takes into full account where we are in the present moment. The government isn't commited to finding out what the present moment signifies. People bemoan that the government's policies are good, but implementation is poor. Perhaps this reflects a larger problem in governance, that the policymakers are disconnected from the infrastructure that enforces policy.
Economist Dr. Jomo K.S. says on The Fairly Current Show that Malaysia had been focusing on growth over the last decade and, as a result, has run a fiscal deficit. "If you constantly are pro-growth," he says, "in the sense of constantly running a fiscal deficit then you are constrained when you really need the resources and this may be a problem the government may face in the current period." This makes me wonder how far-reaching the 9th Malaysia Plan was. It boggles the mind how the government seeks to create self-sustaining industry without any policies to encourage sustainability. But to be fair to the government, I think we are struggling with the concept of sustainability as a country.
I've been thinking about setting up a magazine over the past few years. I've talked to people about publishing, but a lot of what I've learned has come from conversations with a friend of mine who helped set up GOOD magazine and James B. Kobak's How To Start a Magazine. This has lead me to some useful observations about the publishing industry and entrepreneurship. In turn, this may yield something useful on sustainability too. Your mileage may vary.
Magazines are ad-driven. Publishers aren't selling magazines to readers, they are selling their readership to advertisers. The higher the readership, the higher the rates a publisher can charge. This puts a greater emphasis on advertising than on editorial content. Pick up any magazine off the racks and compare the number of editorial staff to the number of marketing staff. Many publishers ride on the reputation of an existing brand (like VOGUE or TATLER) that already has a large readership. Some publishers use their established publications to generate buzz for their new ones. In general, it means creating a big audience as fast as possible. What I find, is that a big and fast audience doesn't stick around after all the promotional events are done. Magazines are having to change their marketing strategy month-to-month in an effort to maintain their readership levels.
How do you emphasize editorial content over advertising? Build it into the business model. Increase the revenue that comes from magazine sales to reduce your dependence on advertisers. (Say 20% - 40% since you want to keep dry, financially speaking.) Build this into the business model too: take the time to cultivate readers. Readership needs to be grown, like a garden. The content and the ads of a magazine should reflect its readers. Increasingly these days, this means building a community around a magazine: aside from the paid professionals whose work it is to put the magazine together, the readers themselves responding to the magazine; the two groups working together, generating content and, in turn, value for the magazine.
Right now, it seems that a lot of businesses are trying to figure out how to incorporate Web 2.0 tools into their business models. NGOs are thinking about the possibilities of social or political organizing-given the severe limitations to organizing in meatspace. So is every other company in the rest of the world, it's become a cliche to mention. It should be noted that companies are still trying to find a way to monetize social networks. Facebook Applications seemed like a good start, but it's too outlier, too niche to carry on turning a profit. Besides, Facebook sucks. Unless you make your page public, it won't show up on Google. You can't zoom while viewing photos. You can't export your chat logs or your messages. Sure, there's a lot you can do--the '07 Bersih rally would not have been as successful without Facebook. But there's a lot you can't. Many of you may not have noticed the things I've mentioned, so it will depend on your level of comfort with technology in general. I want maximum interoperability between my electronic devices. I want my phone to talk to my computer, if I had a PDA I'd want that to connect seamlessly to both of them. Regardless of your level of comfort, I suspect that you want to do more with information to the extent that it makes your life easier. The point is that media and technology builds communities and vice versa. Not instantly and not in the ways that businesses want communities to be built. Community is an infinite game.
Author and editor Stewart Brand introduced me to this concept. An "infinite game" sounds like an idea invented by a mathematician or a physicist.
"It was a professor of religion, James P. Carse of New York University, who came up with the idea of 'the infinite game.' His jewel of a book, Finite and Infinite Games (01986*), begins,
"A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the game.Football, elections, and much of business are finite games: win/lose. Family, gardening, and spiritual practice are infinite games: Losing is meaningless. Finite games, Carse points out require fixed rules so that the winner and loser are determined fairly, but infinite games thrive on occasional changes in the rules-agreed to by the players-so that the game constantly improves. Finite players seek to control the future; infinite players arrange things so the future keeps providing surprises. Death-defying finite players seek immortality through their famous victories; infinite players 'offer their death as a way of continuing the play-they do not play for their own life, they live for their own play.'"
Brand, Stewart. The Clock of the Long Now. p. 160-1
Governance, Brand says, is an infinite game. So is culture-an important concept in another way because culture is a medium in which we talk to our ancestors. God knows, there are rules to governance, but they should by no means be fixed; rules should be agreed upon by the players. In governance and culture, losing should be meaningless. But in Malaysia we've lost so much and stand to lost even more (and worse, we don't know what we've lost). Publishing is a finite game. I propose to play it as an infinite one.
WIRED magazine editor-at-large Kevin Kelly has an assignment he gives people, to demonstrate what a infinite game is: "Find out what your assignment is." There is no guarantee that you'll find what you're looking for, but the pursuit improves you and the lives around you.
* Brand expresses the year as a five-digit figure, hence the extra zero.
See Tshiung Han is an Editor at Bluetoffee, a small publisher based out of Bangkok with offices in Singapore and Malaysia. He read English Literature at University of Surrey Roehampton.