Age Validation Made Easy

Age validation

[Music] my name is alex kotetz i do content but i also study a lot of content and i'm here in front of all of you today to do what every normal person will do on the stage to check into tedx bucharest all right let me show people i'm successful now how am i feeling feeling proud oh wait that makes me look like a douchebag feeling blessed i'm feeling blessed hashtag advertising director hashtag influencer live hashtag eat pray love the second reason i'm here today in front of all of you is because i used to download a lot of stuff illegally yeah you see stealing information runs in my family i'm romanian in the 1980s actually in the spring of the year 1980 in communist romania my grandma was walking home from work when she passed by this bookstore where she saw people fighting over a book the the shopkeeper was trying to get it off the shelves and people are trying to get it so of course she went in and she realized immediately there was no chance she could buy that book so she did what any normal romanian would do she stole it she brought it home in great secrecy to my dad and presented it to him and said i don't know what this is but i think it's important and i think you should have it that book was chill my vid by marin preda and in that week it had been banned by the communist regime and withdrawn from sale now grandma didn't know that because she had been an orphan during the war world war ii she had only received four years of education primary school but she understood the value of information she understood the power it held and when she saw people fighting over it she knew she had to have it and she always kept that book in her bookshelf till the day she died now i was lucky i grew up in the information age i didn't have to steal content but i did it anyway you see i grew up in an age where you had access to all of the information you wanted and you could make the best use out of it funny thing now i got my first computer when i was 16. i am that old i am that old i was born like in the year 20 bf before facebook so i think in the first two years of owning a computer i probably downloaded illegally 4 000 films i don't know how many songs software and so on this led me to discover a passion i like movies by stealing content i became in love with films by 18 i wanted to go to college two years after going after getting a pc i wanted to be a director but my family couldn't afford the tuition fee that was very expensive back then this was like 2004. i couldn't afford the education i wanted and i couldn't steal it you cannot steal college education yet but i didn't have to because by then education was free i enrolled in the cheapest simplest college you can go to and not struggle political science but when i was 19 i enrolled in a second college i enrolled in a college it was free you could take classes anytime and they have cats i'm talking of course about youtube the greatest university on earth and it's there where i studied directing editing sound lights post production special effects how to write a script i became so fascinated with it that i became a youtuber in just 10 years or actually less i went from stealing content to producing content to selling content right because in the age of information the democratization of content allowed all of us as prices for technology dropped to create to consume and maybe to sell our idea if it's good enough i went from stealing the content to becoming in love with it to being educated by it to monetizing it and guess what to giving it back you could say that the age of information has empowered all of us to become better people and become more educated but if you know me [Laughter] i'm not that optimistic you see the democratization of content has empowered all of us to create consume and be rewarded and that is the problem because in the age of information content is now so widespread so easily available and so accessible for anyone to produce that it is starting to lose its value we are now leaving the age of information and we are entering the age of validation and i am part of the problem i'll admit it you see when i told you that my grandma stole that book she stole it she cared for it i forgot to mention one thing she never read it she never read the book could you guess why because it was volume 2. chelma bid interpol maintain has like three volumes and she stole volume 2. you cannot start the book with volume 2 that's like watching a sitcom starting with season 8. you get all the spoilers none of the fun but what do you think was the value to her it was social she only got it because she saw people fighting for it she saw that people cared about it so she knew it was a value of importance to her that book was trending so she took it home and shared it with her own personal social network her son you see we can say that book had three types of value right economic probably cost a dollar social people obviously cared about it and informational you could learn something from it she chose number two without knowing why if you went home right now and it was raining when you got your laptops and open them what would be the first picture you'd see the rainbow the freaking rainbow oh and also a bird that burgess ruined my picture i'm gonna get less likes the freaking rainbow is like currency in the social media stock market whenever it rains when it stops the internet is flooded by pictures of rainbows someone wants to get more likes they probably do a video there are three types of investors in the rainbow the first batch of people are spot on right after it stopped raining they put cool pictures of rainbows with inspirational quotes like the colors over the city the colors in my soul hashtag love my life hashtag successful and that probably gives them 100 120 likes the guys that aren't so fast come home and they see that that option that stock option is gone and they say okay i gotta hate the rainbow so the first guy say carrots in my city and i cannot see myself i still like my city the second guys would be like omg like never seen rainbow before lame they are betting on the fact that by now enough people have seen positive things about the rainbow that they're gonna get 100 likes if they hate the rainbows and they probably get them but then some of us work really hard we come home really late the rainbow's gone and we are out of luck we cannot love the rainbow and we cannot hate the rainbow that's been done everybody got 100 likes so we do the safest thing we could opt out of talking about the rainbow because we're sure we're not going to get 100 likes or we could just take a safe bet by betting against the people that bet against the rainbow so we're gonna say oh my god can you please stop hating on people that hate rainbows oh please i'm gonna make a motivational vlog about why i hate bullying and that's gonna get a thousand likes because this video look at that rainbow people don't trust the content anymore and they don't care what they say they just wanna wanna say it so that they can use it to their own personal advantage and we will pick on any subject and talk about it whether it's an ad or a video or a song for the social value it brings not for the truth it speaks we are entering the age of validation and in the age of validation my friends content is losing its economic value i'm not saying it as a bad thing i'm saying it because i'm on the front line and i'm it's a reality to me let me explain you see 10 years ago i was stealing films four years ago i started paying because that was five clicks less watching netflix is five clicks less than torrenting a film this year there are over eight platforms that bid for my attention and offer me the smallest price to consume content and that's just for films and series just imagine platforms like skillshare just imagine platforms that have documentaries all sorts of content they all want me to consume their content that they work so hard to produce just imagine or think of your favorite series let's say that series has 12 episodes one episode is 40 minutes that's 40 pages per episode your favorite series has about 450 to 500 pages that someone had to think of and you consume it in less than one day you binge watch in 10 hours what someone would have to work for a year and a half to create we cannot keep up with the demand so what happens when we cannot keep up with the demand the user comes in and he compensates the 90 percent of content we all want that we don't have time to produce properly we outsource and social media is stepping in and taking over i'm not saying it's good and i'm not saying it's bad because there is demand you are consuming 10 hours of content per day half of which are probably insta stories that is content let's say someone didn't really have to work that hard to press the button but that is content that will disappear in 24 hours we're not using it for the message we just want to see moving images in front of us while we're on the subway oh i said the bad thing everyone does insta stories you see in the age of validation in order for content to be effective it doesn't have to give information anymore that's a side effect it just needs to give validation it's gotten to the point and this is a good thing where on the internet me and you we are equal digital citizens all of us have one vote online and brands also have one vote between me and the greatest biggest fast food company in the world we are both equal digital citizens that is a good thing but that also creates some problems see they have big budgets you don't have big budgets they get attention you want attention so what happens they're panicked that you're not consuming their content enough you are panicked then one is seeing you and we get into the circle when brands start to mimic humans and humans are acting more and more like brands we only want to see what we like and the problem is that we're becoming we're starting to only like ourselves see there's a problem with brands brands don't like other brands brands don't subscribe to other brands in their own universe they are the best they can be and no one else exists and we as individuals are starting to do the same thing perhaps without realizing it we only want to see what we like and we like to see us content has become a means to an end it's not about another's message anymore it's good if it's there but it's not important it's not about i have something important to say it's about what can i say so that i seem important and we're all doing it every day we hate ads but then we go on instagram and fake our reality at six filters add three hashtags tag a friend just for the gratification not because we really had a good day or because we really hate the subject the content is not about information the content is about us we have become the content we hate ads but we love us you know what the problem is with this baby the problem is this in the world there are probably like a million and a half brands i did some very superficial research because i grew up in the internet i don't check my facts there are 7.7 billion people we are not in a world where 1.5 million brands talk to 7.7 billion people we're in the world where 7.7 billion brands plus a million and a half professional brands scream at each other and cry for attention all of us even you right here if when you came here you posted the picture or did a check-in you just worked as a part-time personal brand manager you believe your image is worth something you're not sure what you just know people are fighting over it we are 7.7 billion brand managers talking about ourselves not listening to the other brands because they are competition brands like other brands we're just screaming and the problem is my friends there are 360 000 brands born every day look at that baby that baby probably has like 700 likes right now what did you post this year what did you accomplish that got used to 100 likes did anyone get 700 likes in the last year you did what did you do ride the camo no one i'm serious did you get no don't be jealous of the baby shut up baby don't be jealous of the baby because he has a problem you see he's already losing popularity if you like to know why it's because his sonogram got a thousand likes just by being born this baby lost 30 percent popularity it's only downhill from here for this baby by the time he's 10 he's gonna be ugly by the time he's 14 he's gonna dress bad he's reached his peak as a brand it's gone there's less and less fame available with every person born and you know how you can tell rich people why do rich people insist on being on television i'm doing songs and being in films it's because they're rich they're good at investing in something that's worth a lot of money there's more and more money being printed every day there's less and less fame available with every person born and it's becoming more and more of a problem the more we want more and more content the more we want stuff that validates us we share articles without reading them because we know the impact of the title will get us positive likes negative likes or betting in the middle we don't believe what we're saying anymore we're just in this competition with each other to stay in the game everybody's talking and nobody's listening and that's the problem i believe we will soon enter an era where instead of paying to see content as we are now just 10 years after i told you i was stealing it in order instead of paying to see content we will end up paying to block it to not see what others are doing to not see what my friend mike had for dinner to not see films we have become so bored with how much it takes us to google something that they have to do predictions they offer us subscriptions they ask us to follow or unfollow they're trying to keep us away from what we don't like to hear and we don't like to hear it because it's not about us they know we don't want to talk about other people we just want to talk about ourselves that is a dangerous situation and i'm not saying i have a solution for it i'm just here to depress all of you and tell you that it's gonna happen the i know let's say the the worst threat in the online community has become i'm gonna block you i'm so gonna block you oh you are so black you can go block yourself block yourself mother blocker and whenever you see someone saying that you kind of have a you kind of feel it don't you can i oh i wouldn't want that to happen why you're not a brand you're not going to lose money you're not gonna nothing's bad got is gonna happen to you but you do get a little because deep down inside you care you care about not losing a potential audience member a potential client of you now in this new era of we are starting to consume content more and more for the fact that it's like us or about us we are becoming superficial in what we want because the main purpose is the social one not the information one if we want to we can go and study online about something but that's not hot anymore whatsat is staying in the game and i believe that we will end up in just five to ten years in the era few flicks where we will be paying not to see content but to be seen five dollars ten dollars doesn't matter can i rent the front page of a website for 10 minutes show my face that's worth it and if you think this is absurd the fact that we will only watch ourselves or people who are better than us at being famous sorry to say that has already happened this year was the year of the great civil war in the online world between pewdiepie and t-series do you know it two major channels with more than 90 million subscribers argued over who was more famous and we all watched maybe i'm old school content i'm not saying it's gonna go away it's gonna stick around probably forever it's just that instead of being let's say fifty percent of watchwatch is gonna go down to being ten percent i'm okay i'll do fine also you help me with those 100 likes on my check-in i'm supposed to be an influencer in my country but i don't post that often i actually am a very lazy youtuber for the last two two years i think i've only done two two episodes you know why because i like to care about what i say and if i don't have something important to say i'd rather shut up and listen it's also part of my job so i prefer not to talk about myself but i do add everyone on facebook and i do follow what they do and say my final advice because again i believe this is inevitable is if we're gonna do this let us at least watch out for brands that act like people and most of all be afraid of people that act like brands and don't become one of them watch out and read through the lines to see if it's information or validation doesn't matter if it's a vlog doesn't matter if it's a song decide for yourself which of the two you want and a friendly advice the end try and listen more try and shut up for a week try not post something have it and then not post it see how that goes maybe you'll make new friends or learn something new because you're busy looking at other people for the first time and not at yourself and if you don't agree with what i say i'm gonna block you i'm gonna block all of you i'm gonna i'm gonna add you and block you you can all go block yourselves thanks but also like and subscribe