Television Proposal

Hackers & Designers television is 2 - 4 hours of documentary content delivered in 5 - 10 minutes packages over the course of 12 months born out of the idea of “can one host an event without a time or a location?”

On Events

“Events are the new magazines” - Bruce Sterling

People are increasing overwhelmed with the amount of event opportunities available literally on a daily basis, and thus have become growingly more selective in which events they will attend. Events can be defined as conferences, meetups, hackathons, lectures, talks, exhibition openings, book launches, concerts, festivals, parties, etc. Platforms like meetup.com and Facebook attempt to facilitate organization of these events, but RSVPs no long indicate actual interest or attendance, and concepts like Facebook’s new “interested” are too light and affirm only solidarity with the topics or the organizers themselves.

Rebirth of video

Video is having a rebirth on the internet. Unexpectedly there is suddenly swarms of millennial and post-millennial individuals flocking to video content created by YouTube stars (YouTubers), Vines/Periscopes, Snapchats, and the like. Older generations are perfectly comfortable with binge-watching Netflix over a laptop. Even traditionally strong old media television foundations like the Daily Show with new host Trevor Noah has seen a decline in television viewers, but an upswing with millennial viewers online. Even Jerry Seinfeld has launched a talk show, Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, solely distributed via online streaming via Crackle.

Concept

Hackers & Designers seeks to leverage this new online video momentum to launch it's own online television talk show to document and explore the same topics it would in it's traditional meetup format (ex. Example topics include hybrid publishing, typography, web scraping, cryptography, internet bots) but formatted for internet consumption (ex. Facebook feeds, Twitter, web distribution, P2P, YouTube, etc.). Although these platforms themselves are not new, and multimedia web distribution is not new, the idea of creating asynchronous anonymous discourse not dependent on time or location as opposed to a synchronous meetup that only exists in the moment seems like a logical next step