The odds just went up for the Terminator 4 movie. We’ve known for some time now (what else, in the Expectations society) that it’s scheduled for release in May of next year.

While the T4 movie started out as an old-millennium product, being conceived and preannounced after the first three movies in the series, the makers have now embraced the new, Expectations society, business logic. Quite some time ago, they announced that the Dark Knight Christian Bale would star in the movie, and they have continuously leaked news on the cast and the plot.

And now, they’ve taken it one step further, making T4 a subscription to the future by preannouncing that it will be followed by a T5 scheduled for a 2011 premiere. Kind of like what Disney did with its preannouncement of the “Cars 2″ movie release. Though Disney went even further into the future with its 2012 release date, Halcyon Co (the company who owns the legal rights to the Terminator series) counters with a trilogy marketing program, making known that a T6 will also follow. Could there be a more suited movie series for a subscription to the future? 

Speaking of which, I’m starting my subscription to Christmas today, shoppers and dinner hosts beware, I’m all in from now on!

See you all after the holidays!

A perfect mesh of two Expectations society icons (who could have known back then?):

Eleven million readers every day of the week, daily citations in TV shows and major newspapers, and seven-figure google hits. Launched in October, The Daily Beast has become the world’s hippest magazine (in a traditionally rather conservative and slow industry) at the kind of warp speed we’re getting used to in the Expectations Society.

What’s so special about it?

1) It relishes in the world of any, where anything is available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Which means that the magazine’s writers don’t make stories or make interviews, they find them online by prowling every corner, any source, of the web any  and every minute of the day (most notably, night-time).

2) They let Generation In-Charge decide what’s interesting, both in terms of input, and in terms of rating the stories. They even enable rating of the raters. The magazine’s payoff says it all: “Read this. Skip that”.

3) They extend the minisode logic from TV and movies (and books, as I wrote about previously) to the magazine, making (what I of course call) ministories their top features.  There’s a Cheat Sheet that features short recaps of the most talkworthy news stories, and the crown jewel Big Fat Story provides a collection of microtakes that one can pick and choose from on a central ministory (today features “Caroline Kennedy – Natural Senator or Queen of Entitlement?”, a perfect topic to spark a conversation, with a central three-sentence ministory and six related five-or-so-sentences microtakes on that story to pick and choose from).

4) This one’s standard procedure for any news provider by now – adhering to the Expectations Society’s 43-hour day, the magazine is availabe in any form, in twitter form, on your iPhone, facebook, anywhere. 

I’ve written before about how American Idol (and all its international adaptations) has become the world’s premier expectity factory.

Here’s another great case from the Swedish Idol series. Last week, one of the major tabloids conducted a web survey where thousands of people voted for their favorites among the winning idols throughout the series. The results:

Moments-ago-crowned idol 2008: 49 percent of votes
Last year’s idol 2007: 3 percent of votes
The idol of 2006: 22 percent of votes

If you connect the numbers with a straight line, you get a skewed V. The exact same V that I write about in the book. The V that describes our views of virtually any activity in our lives – dates, job projects, tennis matches, etc. We tend to rate the next one, the nextopian one, the highest – the next date or project will be the most exciting, enjoyable, satisfying ever! And the latest one, on average, tends to be the least exciting and satisfying. That latest one being the closest one to the actual experience (however, it is worth noting that even that low-point is rather satisfying in absolute terms, after all, we tend to be positive creatures).  Then, if you ask people about any previous date, project or tennis match that comes to mind, it almost always tends to be a really good one. In hindsight, when reality fades, we tend to remember most things as really great (that’s what keeps us positive and hopeful for the future, “it is never too late to have a happy childhood”).

Mr. Swedish Idol 2008 is the new edition from the expectity factory, which of course will be the greatest! Ms. Idol 2007 was the latest, real, least exciting edition. Mr. Idol 2006 is that really great, past edition.

While I’m on the non-professorial track, here’s another personal note.

Yesterday, I attended the Lucia celebration at my kids’ kindergarten. Yes, yesterday.

For non-Swedish people, this doesn’t say much, I guess. But for Swedes, this seems very strange. I know this from experience, having witnessed surprised reactions from many people when I told them that, on Monday, I would go and enjoy Lucia-caroling.

The reason why Swedish people are appaled, is that everyone knows that Lucia occurs eleven days before christmas – which makes Saturday the correct day. On Saturdays, schools and kindergartens are closed, and there is nothing strange in celebrating Lucia on another day, a week-day. Which is what virtually all schools and kindergartens did. Last week. BEFORE Lucia.

Celebrating Lucia before the actual day can even make it more festive, celebrating what’s to come, reveling in the expectations and savouring a piece of the forthcoming, nextopian version of Lucia.

But why, in the Expectations society, would anyone want to celebrate AFTER the actual day, when we know how it turned out and expectations are already consumed? In the world of any, there are new, greater things to pine for, somewhere, anywhere, when the new week starts.

Or is there? Couldn’t Lucia celebrations be just as magic at a delay?

Sorry to say (write…), no. I compared the mood of the parents yesterday with the mood of the parents I met after their celebrations last Friday. Though the “yesterday parents” had a really good time, the “friday parents” had a really great time.

Which could explain why we can devote the entire month of December (and even latter part of November) to running between christmas dinners with co-workers, collaborators, friends and many more, but I’ve never heard of anyone offering or enjoying a christmas dinner in January. If you are one of the few people who dislike the fact that the christmas spirit sneaks into everything from November on, just imagine what a lagging christmas spirit throughout February would be like…  

Here’s a short, not very well thought-out post. Fuelled by severe frustration.

I intended to write a rather lengthy post about TV shows today, but I don’t have the time anymore. I have to dash off, so this will be a short one. Which probably makes you relieved, being part of the impatient population of the Expectations society.

The reason why the post has to be short is that, once again, my blog server has insisted on shutting me out. Which leaves me clicking, clicking, and clicking the refresh button on my web browser. After a couple of hundred clicks, I realize that I tend to do the same thing even when I’m signed in, to check for incoming links. Which reminds me of my repeated “new email” update checks once I’m on rare occasions logged on to my email account for more than five minutes. “There’s gotta be some new, exciting emails on the way”.

For once, I have no statistics or experiments backing me up, so here’s a very non-professorial, philosophical statement. Take that, Forrest Gump:

“Life is like one big refresh button”

Johan Örneblad sent me a great post from his blog:

Nextopia has proven itself through a new feature on iTunes, where you can see the top content in the store for this year. It is unfortunately not available in Sweden, so I have not been able to verify it. But anyhow, even though the movie The Dark Knight has not yet been released it has outsold all other movies this year on iTunes.

The value of the movie is more likely to be higher when it is out of reach but still at your fingertips. Following the same rational, it will probably sell less and for a lower price just after it has been released. Since we constantly are looking forward to the next big thing, the movie will not anymore be as satisfying if it is accessible for all.

That the pre-order outsells other similar products released in the more common way has been proven several times with the Radiohead album In rainbows released last year. Even though the pre-ordered albums were at a pay-what-you-like-price they outsold the band’s previous album.

In a time when we literally have everything at our fingertips, the things that are the most valuable are the things we cannot get. At least what we cannot get right away.

What we do not have can be imagined to be whatever we want. That is the life in Nextopia.

I’ve written before, here and in the book, that we don’t live by the numbers anymore. In the Expectations society, nobody lives by the old millennium rule that creativity ends by the age of 27 anymore. Sixty-six year-old Paul McCartney’s new stint on the music charts last year with his transformed song-writing (and mandolin-playing) is one high-profiled example.

Eighty-six year old Jakucho Setouchi is an ever higher-profiled one. Buddhist nun and celebrated for books written way back in the old millennium, Jakucho realised she could not rely on her past performances to gain attention in the new millennium, where you are never better than your next performance. In the Expectations society, a brick-sized novel grows old quickly, the 2,920 times more impatient people of today want to get to the last page quickly, and new, potentially more interesting, novels are released anywhere, anytime, all the time, in the world of any.

Jakucho hence transformed her thousand-page novel writing into next opera story telling. “Tomorrow’s Rainbow” was released as a cellphone novel, with short episodes about a young school girl’s family trouble and love life published daily in the form of sms messages. Which kept millions of people in suspense, active readers of the entire story everyday. 

Next, she took on a centuries-old, well-known Japanese story, “The Tale of Genji”, publishing daily episodes of the next opera, bookisodes, on her own web site, with cliffhangers in the form of updates and twists to the original story, keeping the audience constantly guessing what the next turn will be.  

It did not take long before next opera storytelling became the new big thing in Japan, with cellphone novels and bookisode websites spreading like wildfire. And, as you will soon notice, it’s reaching the mainland as well, from China through Europe.

Which reminds me of the, now classic, microsodes. Here’s a goodie:

A few posts back, I wrote that in the world of any, anyone can be Michael Jackson. With a 500 percent increase in consumer plastic surgery in the new millennium, and a projected additional 20 percent increase next year, it’ll soon be safe to say that you can look anyway you want and be anyone you want, and no one will go through life with one and the same appearance, just one nose, one chin, one of anything.

Then again, there are easier ways of going about. Just ask Lindsay Lohan. The other week, her facebook account was shut down. Why? There were so many Lindsay Lohan accounts and the good people at facebook figured they couldn’t all really be Lindsay Lohan’s. Perusing the accounts, they shut down the least plausible ones. Including Lindsay’s own, sending her through the roof.

Obviously, in the world of any, anyone can be Lindsay Lohan – and more so and better than LiLo herself…

Chances are, you are. As I write about in the book, nowadays, everybody advertises. We turn our lives into next operas and expose them on our blogs, for the world to see and stay tuned. Should the advertising industry ever have to call it quits because everybody does their own advertising, the unemployed people can just re-educate themselves to become blogger burnout councellors.

Blogger burnout, exhaustion caused by rapidly accelerating attempts to keep the personal next opera alive, is becoming part of our everyday vocabulary, generating thousands of google hits and labeling an increasing number of self-help groups.

Warning signs:

1. You start thinking about what events in your life and future that could be worth blogging about.

2. You start viewing every event in your life from a blog perspective – “how can I blog about this?”

3. You start viewing your future from a blog perspective – “what should I do next, so that I have something to blog about?”

4. You stop doing things. Instead you blog about what they would be like.

I can think of one level beyond this, but it might offend sensitive readers, so I’ll save that one ’til I’ve figured out some kind of self-screening mechanism…

Did I miss any levels?

Guest-blogger Martin Hugosson sure managed to put nextopia.info on the blog super-highway! The speed of his posts seems to mirror the swiftness of his mind. Not only did I receive a number of mails and questions from people wondering “who’s next”, but they were also wondering “when’s next?”

Martin sure spoiled us, not only with his smart observations but also with the tempo of his semi-daily posts.

Thank you very much Martin, for gracing the blog with your great guest appearance! And me with some tempo angst… more on that tomorrow…