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The amateur dreads becoming who she really is because she fears that this new person will be judged by others as "different." The tribe will declare us "weird" or "queer" or "crazy." The tribe will reject us. Here's the truth: the tribe doesn't give a shit. There is no tribe. That gang or posse that we imagine is sustaining us by the bonds we share is in fact a conglomeration of individuals who are just as fucked up as we are and just as terrified. Each individual is so caught up in his own bullshit that he doesn't have two seconds to worry about yours or mine, or to reject or diminish us because of it. When we truly understand that the tribe doesn't give a damn, we're free. There is no tribe, and there never was. Our lives are entirely up to us.
Turning Pro
Steven Pressfield
Few know better how dictatorships have remade themselves than Ludmilla Alexeeva. The eighty-four-year-old human rights defender is one of the last Russian dissidents who can trace her resistance to official Moscow to the late 1960s, to the early days of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Even now, frail and unable to walk far without assistance, she spearheads a movement to win Russians their right to freely assemble. On the morning I sat with her in her apartment in Moscow, the phone rang off the hook. (“Human rights defenders are in demand today,” she said, laughing. “We are very popular in our country.”) When she began as an activist, the risks were grave. A Soviet dissident needed to be “prepared to sacrifice himself or one day find himself in prison or in a mental clinic. Nowadays, the same person must face that he can either be made disabled or murdered.” Once the regime would have arrested someone, and he would never be heard from again. Now he has an accident or appears to be the victim of a random attack.
The Dictator's Learning Curve
William J. Dobson
But as the Apple and HBO business models demonstrate, there was one important way that the world of digital media was the same as the old, analog media world: there was still a great advantage to be had in control. In the old media world, you could control one of two things: the method of distribution of the content or the content itself (or in some cases both). Broadcast networks like NBC and CBS controlled their networks and also developed exclusive content such as TV shows, sports events, and news broadcasts. Studios like Warner and Disney created movies and shows. In the new digital media world, broadcast networks and studios would lose their control on distribution, to be replaced by applications on internet-connected devices. As time went on, we realized that Amazon Video On Demand was stuck in the middle of the value chain—the valley, really. We didn’t control the upstream end of content development. We didn’t control the downstream end of playback devices. We were essentially a digital distribution system, with nothing unique or proprietary about it. No wonder we kept slamming into barriers on both ends of the value chain—content development and distribution on devices.
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
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