Talent imitates, genius steals

Books And Fast Company

The Best Book in the World Book Shelf competition is now closed! The winner will be announced in a following post, once I get a chance to collate the list of best books as recommended by you.

[Feel free to keep contributing suggestions in the comments - I shall include them all]

In the meantime, I'm guest blogging over on Fastcompany all this week - first piece is about how language changes can tell us about what's important and Cannes....

Lions and Language and Geeks [Oh My]

Another piece will go up today. At some point. Once I write it.

And here it is.

Cultural Latency.

Raving = Lots of People Copying Each Other

Appropriately enough, Mark, the Herdmesiter himself, turned me on to this clip last week. It's been popping up ever since.

What does it show us?

That people love to copy other people.

That one person [or thing] can change behavior, if persistent, because it doesn't happen right away, and if the actions, and the copying, are visible to enough people.

That raving, like a lot of group behavior, is lots of people copying each other according to local rules.

That we are far more likely to do something, the more people we see doing it.

[Watch as the crowd increases in size, and then imagine the curve. See?]

[9 out of 10 cats]

That we love to be social, love to be in groups, love to create groups and be involved in their creation, but need something, or someone, to hold the group together.

That's there's something euphoric, and perhaps liminal, in taking part in group behaviours like this.

That raving up hills can be brilliant.

Wearing the Web

The Invisible Web is closer than I thought - thanks to the genius of MIT's Media Lab.

All the talk about the third screen and the screen generation - everyone glued to screens all hours of the day - slightly misses the bigger point. The true integration of the web and the world is when the digital leaves the screen behind.

The device itself is a barrier, as they point out at the beginning of the film above.[People don't want drills, they want holes.]

The web itself is our sixth sense - an extension of the Cartesian theatre of operations that outsources certain functions to the cloud - that accesses data in real time to make it useful for where you are [geotility] and what you are doing [contextility].

Using your hand as a keypad is just awesome - the brain implant is to come.

[Thanks to Ramzi [who blogged this ages ago] and Matt and Bruce, who reminded me]

The Future is Haptic

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The future is another country - they do things differently there.

I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the future.

So do technology companies.

Inevitably we are restricted in our forecasting by the bias of presentism - we take the concerns of now and extrapolate, so the truly novel will always escape us.

In the 1950s the future was all clunky robots and jetpacks - because that's what cars with fins looked like at the time.

Today, the future is one big touch screen because we are currently obsessed with haptic interfaces. 

But it looks awesome all the same. 

An Object in Motion Remains in Motion

 

My mate Chris, who makes awesome things, made these photos, using some kind of magic.

[Couple more pics here]

ElectroFace

I was showing my mate Chris the eyebrow dance spot below and he wistfully wondered why they hadn't synced the eyebrows to the music properly, which reminded me of the film above, where the music is synced to the facial movements via electric shocks.

It gets very awesome [and, one assumes, relatively painful] towards the end.

Probably couldn't get away with electrocuting little kids though.

Creative Breaks

Hopster from six twenty two on Vimeo.

What some of my lovely creative friends here do in between.

Nothing is Original

by Mark Malazarte

via and thanks Nick

I could start on about how there being something truly original doesn't really make sense as an idea - where would it come from, how would we understand it, how far back do you have to go to claim absolute originality - using concepts, words, pictures, matertials etc etc

But I don't think I really need to - Jim nailed it.

Love the Future

Courtesy of Wolff Olins

Happy New Year!

Bet on the Future

The Rockefeller Center in New York is, in my opinion, one of the most inspiring buildings in the world.

Like most things, the inspiration comes not so much from the thing itself, but the stories that surround it - and like all the best stories [and yes, alright, go on then, brands too] it has many lovely little pieces that all, somehow, fit together.

John D Rockefeller leased the space from Columbia University in 1928 to build a venue for the Metropolitan Opera.

Then, in 1929, the biggest stock market crash ever happened, for reasons that no one can really explain, and the USA entered the Great Depression.

The Metropolitan pulled out of the project and Rockefeller faced a very serious decision.

"It was clear that there were only two courses open to me. One was to abandon the entire development. The other to go forward with it in the definite knowledge that I myself would have to build it and finance it alone."

He decided to push ahead as the sole financial backer of the biggest development project in the history of the world.

It gave thousands of people hope, and jobs, throughout the Depression.

Rockefeller had no promised tenants for the building, but happened to have an interest in an emerging technology called radio.

Thus 30 Rock became the bleeping heart of the America's mass media industry.

Rockefeller, by all accounts, hated popular music - he was into opera - but he gave the leg up needed for RCA and NBC and the beginnings of a popular mass culture.

He hired Samuel 'Roxy' Rothafel, an infamous silent film and show impresario, to conceptualise and open Radio City Music Hall.

[Roxy once said: Don't give the people what they want - give them something better.]

Rockefeller made one of the biggest bets in history, at the very beginning of the worst economic crash of modern times, on the future.

Next year is going to be hard. No denying it.

But we live at a time where the economics of cultural production are being radically decentralised - where never have so many had a voice in the history of humanity, nor social motivations been so empowered to create culture and effect change.

Where, fundamentally, economic motivations are no longer the only supposed driver of human activity, if ever indeed they were.

The beginnings of a new kind of culture, created bottom up by the many, not top down by the few.

I think that's pretty awesome.

I'm betting on the future.

Merry Christmas.