We're getting a lot of new sign-ups, so I've decided to write a bit about what we hope to achieve content-wise and organizationally here at Hotbox.

First of all, for those new and old alike — welcome to the site! We've done a lot lately to make the software much more usable and have plans to provide multi-platform mobile functionality for content submission in the future. Please bear with us as we work out the few remaining bugs in the system; what we're doing is a little at the edge of our system's capabilities and it's taken some effort to get it to where it is now (Also: Big Thank-You to the JomSocial development team, who recently helped us troubleshoot an issue with our community software). 

Here's what we're trying to accomplish. Support for marijuana policy reform is anywhere from 44-60% in favour of decrim/legalization, meaning that it's only a matter of time before the issue reaches supermajority status and keeping the same ludicrous penalties for cultivating a simple plant will appear as insane as it actually is. The liberalization of drug laws in the United States will cause a ripple effect throughout the developed world, insomuch as one of the most ardent supporters of zero-tolerance drug policy will have severely changed its course. 

This is all fine for the Political Science geeks to debate over, but what interests us at Hotbox is the large-scale net effects this will have on culture and society. Particularly in terms of underground or alternative subcultures, the liberalization of drugs laws will have a massive effect in legitimating and creating space for groups confined to the fringes by the cultural policing inherent in the Drug War. Consider, for instance, music groups such as Cypress Hill — what happens to gangsta rap when weed is legalized? 

Or consider the outdoor electronic music festival scene, which has a long storied history in Canada but has been practically eliminated in the United States due to anti-cultural policies such as the RAVE Act. Though full-blown drug policy liberalization is probably at least a decade away, changes in how even just cannabis is policed will have a huge effect on both the kind of music being played and the feel of these events themselves.

Meanwhile we in Canada have a worsening political situation with regards to cannabis, yet it continues to be smoked in Herculean quantities. A reversal in U.S. drug policy would likely cause a very swift change in Canadian policy — can you imagine if the person who legalized pot for Canadians was... Stephen Harper? It's not that crazy of an idea; were the U.S. to legalize, Canada might likely follow suit if only for very conservative economic reasons. The idea of Stephen Harper as a hesitant cannabis subcultural hero makes me both gawk and shake my head, but I don't think it's completely out of the question if he doesn't pander to social conservatives at a crucial moment, when the question's up in the air for everybody. You'll know that moment when it happens, trust me.

Throughout all of this, however, culture will continue to happen, regardless of how lax or stupid the drug laws get. And throughout all of this, there'll be remarkable, talented, fascinating and generally-interesting people who will gather in huge numbers to throw caution to the wind and grab life by the reins. We're all connected via the Internet and we all listen to a variety of music that would make Mozart's head spin. The fact whole albums can be sent via the Internet means the proliferation and acceptance of a single kind of sound can happen at a phenomenal rate, unheard of even ten years ago. The new remix culture (Go watch "RIP: A Remix Manifesto." I'll wait.), the audience-as-spectacle element of rave and party culture, the postmodern obsession with the Artist-As-Creator (And new Internet-era obsession with Audience-As-Creator), the cult of personality inherent in both celebrity culture and social media... All of these point to an implosion of High Culture (In the hoighty-toighty, opera-watching sense) with the Low (In the Michael Jackson-adoring, tabloid-buying sense), insomuch that those who consume culture are now often creators of it themselves.

We keep switching our third section's name around because before we weren't too sure of our editorial flow. With the above in mind, it should be clear what our foci are:

Current Affairs — With regards to the War on Drugs and political developments that are actually relevant to counter-cultural elements, the CA section seeks to provide analysis and commentary in order to help organize grassroots political action and to create awareness of contemporary events in our shared social history. In providing a space for critical voices, we hope to make good Molly Ivin's idea of kicking ass and letting the world know how much fun we had in doing so. 

Entertainment — People don't notice political events until they directly touch their lives, and most often is this seen in shared cultural environments. A budget surplus, expensive technology, a high literacy rate... All of that is meaningless if we live in a world without music, or conversation, or people willing to dream. Culture is how we make sense of the world and make the most out of our existence here. The Entertainment section seeks to provide the latest and greatest news about the people shaping our larger cultural understanding through Art (Which, by the way, even that crappy action movie you paid $10 to see can be made into that in this new sample-heavy Internet-driven culture).

Lifestyle — Really cool and interesting people surround cultural gatherings. These people have really big ideas that can change the world. Let's talk to some of them.

We used to be more of a cannabis subculture group, but found that greatly limited our cultural focus. Not only that, but the idea is largely redundant — you will find people who smoke weed at any concert worth going to. Celebrating that fact is worthwhile (and is done in fine publications such as Weed World or Skunk Magazine), but fails to address why these people are there in the first place. Cannabis truly is a subculture unto its own, but its pervasiveness gives it incredible utility as a uniting factor in multifarious otherwise-unrelated cultural groups.

How we at Hotbox plan to transcend traditional media boundaries is by using the incredible amount of freely-available open-source technology now available to anyone willing to learn it and combining it with our own journalistic experiences. Old media institutions such as newspapers and TV stations are becoming less and less viable by the day, creating an enormous space for disruptive technologies such as blogs and social networking sites.

We at Hotbox have combined both with a very fluid and democratic minimal-hierarchy workspace, allowing anyone under the sun to be a content contributor. To become a writer, you merely need to create an account and post work to your blog. Quality entries will be selected by our editors for their sections, tidied up if needed, and posted for mass consumption. To become a photographer or videographer, all you need to do is upload photos/videos to your personal gallery in the Community section. Editors will select the coolest and most relevant shots and pair them with articles in their section and on the front page. Contributors are paid in terms of "points," which will be eventually exchangeable for merchandise or at an exchange rate of 1 cent Canadian each (We're practically at that point now). 

If you're a person with an iPhone, you can be a roving reporter for us. Mobile devices can create text, audio, video or/or photo content on the fly, to be instantly submitted to our editors. Many people upload crazy amounts of stuff to Facebook already; uploading your content to Hotbox means it can be seen by a wide audience and that you may even get paid for it. Stay tuned for free apps to make this even easier!

The advantage of this system instead of an unfiltered array of blogs and galleries is that it both ensures high-quality content and allows our editorial staff to work with content contributors to create better work over time. If you're not the world's best writer, that's okay — editors exist for exactly that reason, grammar and spelling should not be a barrier to working in this new media environment (Provided you're willing to learn!). Don't know how to use Photoshop, but want to learn? Some of our editors have been using it since version 6; feel free to ask us for tips or links to tutorials. The larger Hotbox Community can also act as a tremendous learning resource for those wishing to create awesome content. Ask a question on the forums, you'll get a response from somebody. 

This approach means a couple things. Because all of this is community-driven, the content must remain free in all respects. We considered charging a subscription rate for specific content at a point, but this flies in the face of what we're doing. Yet, groups need money to expand and do cool things — imagine if we did a cross-Canada bus tour, taking whoever wanted to various festivals? Media should be fun, and media groups can do more when they're well-funded (See what I did there?). Thus, the solution for such things evidently becomes advertising. This is a necessary evil in many circles, but the effect of said-evil can at least be minimized. We plan to keep advertising as minimalist and unintrusive as possible on the site, in order to prevent ad fatigue and perhaps even show new products that are actually interesting to those reading the site, who may just want to eventually go buy said-products (Crazy idea!). This, however, caps us at a few thousand dollars monthly for web ads; we clearly need to innovate in some way to make Hotbox even more bad-ass.

To this end, we plan to begin to produce PDF prototypes consisting of cutting-edge exclusive interview content, comprehensive Do-It-Yourself guides, sick photography and other high-end content you'd expect to find in a magazine available at your local convenience store. These will be available for free online to members of the community, with content contributors receiving even more points than for work posted on just the website. Advertiser revenue from these PDF versions will be used to both help finance future endeavours and work towards finding a sufficient number of advertisers to bankroll print versions of the magazine, to be intelligently distributed to specialty stores in order to reduce return waste. Once we're able to sell print versions in stores, the project will be self-sufficient and we can begin to increase the exchange rate for points and other such things.

Being a journalist is fun, especially if you're covering interesting topics. You get to meet fascinating people, are given free access to concerts and festivals, receive free CDs to review in the mail, hang out with celebrities and tons more. It might not be the quickest route to fame, but you're never bored. And while it will never replace the hard working folks who put together your daily newscasts or paper, the Internet has created a unique space in which people without years of training can act in a very similar capacity and gain many of the same skills, all the while contributing to a larger intellectual discourse on a variety of topics.

Information is beautiful. Let's make some together.

-æ.