Almost 1 year ago, I joined IPG to build an Emerging Media Lab in New York City. IPG Mediabrands' challenge was that with the evolution brought by digital media, planning had become more and more complex. Visualizing solutions was a necessity - it was the best way to show how we orchestrate thousands of touchpoints that can often feel intangible. We focused our energy on creating an experience that could show clients what was possible; to paint a picture of the strategic potential of using the most cutting edge media technologies. We were driven by the belief that by pairing consumer insight with imagination, software and data, could drive bottom-line results. Tonight, it's with total pride that we launch the result of that labor.
Since March, the Mediabrands website has been running a countdown clock, As we pop the corks, I thought I'd post some before and after photos. More importantly, I want to humbly thank everyone involved.
I've taken a few days to pause and catch my breath after the exhausting pace of the first 16 posts in this series. Tomorrow night we'll begin again, but for tonight I thought I'd just share some of the feedback you've give and a couple of image I dug up that I thought were cool.
First, many people have insisted that this blog's address is absurd and they're right. Problem is, I haven't settled on a name for it yet that matches an available URL, so stay tuned. I plan to have that sorted out within a week. Any suggestions for names are more than welcome.
Secondly, a lot of folks have told me that they love the stuff, but that it's overwhelming. I agree - it's also taking a lot of time, in some cases 5 hours from start to finish (much of it reading and doing a bad job of image creation.) So, once I reach the 23rd installment, which is as far out as I've planned, I'll relax and shorten the posts so they can be read with much less time investment.
Finally, here are the pictures, one called "History of the World" and the other the famous cover of the Beatles "Sargeant Pepper's" album. They appeal to me for a variety of reasons but mainly because of the way they compress time - I could stare at each one for hours, and try to mesh together the "Where's Waldo" anachronisms. A Larger Version of the first image can be found here. How many people can you name in each?
I said in the last post that this post would be a continuation of my thoughts on the Singularity. I've changed my mind for a few reasons:
The topic has humbled me. When I signed up to do a series of 23 daily posts called "Visualizing the Future" 11/11/11 , I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
I promised my wife not to stay up all night tonight. ;-)
I've been making these up as I go along.
I'm starting to appreciate just how interesting the Future is.
It's become clear to me that by definition, none of us has a clue what will happen in the Future, least of all me. It's why we talk, wonder, gamble, imagine and dream. It's what keeps life interesting and magical.
Depending on who you ask, Ray Kurzweil is either a genius or a madman. I believe both.
He's a prolific inventor, futurist and the leading proponent of the idea of the Technological Singularity. Often referred to simply as "The Singularity", this refers to a time in the future when the sum of computer intelligence exceeds human intelligence. While estimates for when such an event might occur range from 2020 to 2045 (Kurzweil is on the "conservative" end of the spectrum) the implications of such an event are profound.
From this year's prestigious Google Zeitgeist, I give you 12 minutes of Ray K at his most epic. He starts with a mellow, laid back delivery, but start paying attention around the 2 minute mark. Just give a frightened squeak at the end and I'll peel you up off the floor and read the rest of the blog to you, petting your hair whilst curl up in a fetal position and suck your thumb.
Let's begin today with a backwards glance. We're just over halfway through the 23 part series; so far we've covered quite bit of ground. Here's a quick graphic review:
Today's topic is a fun one, but before I start, here's BLATANT SCREAMING DISCLAIMER: (The title of today's post is intended to provoke thought and debate. I am well aware of the fact that this topic is often treated with starry-eyed breathlessness and a lack of scientific rigor. My intent is to simply to conduct a thought experiment, not to invite you to join the Borg)
First things first, let me explain what may otherwise feel like a jarring segue from Ponzi Schemes and the Financial System to a discussion of the internet as a brain. In developing this series, I've looked at how societies have developed, how technology has affected how we think about the future and the effect of these technical innovations on media and commerce. Once I reached yesterday's topic, I was surprised that how fuzzy the line was between a Ponzi or Pyramid scheme and the international financial system. I'm not yet sure where I come out with respect to the rage of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but something generationally defining is happening and about a broken economic system with a message spreading at net speed.
At a fundamental level (jump in here economists), both Ponzi Schemes or Health Finanacial Markets only work insofar as participants trust in the system and have faith that debts will be honored. (I covered this in detail in "The Future of Money") . I remember in 2008 during the Financial Collapse watching the headlines in the WSJ grow daily to larger and larger typeface. Running a startup at the time, each days headline made me queasier and queasier so I wrote a short piece for AdAge called "In Shaky Times, Relax". Looking back on it 3 years later, it seems both naively hopeful and creepily accurate:
"Financial institutions are repositories of trust, which they accumulate, hold and invest in the form of investors and depositors' money. As soon as the trust placed in them erodes, the funds quickly follow. The phenomenon we're witnessing right now is the result panic-amplifying feedback loops that happen in our highly networked world.This is the the societal equivalent of a healthy person who knows he will drop dead if his heart rate exceeds 160 beats per minute. Everything is good unless he starts thinking about it. And his heart-rate rises. Which worries him. And his heart rate rises and rises and then . . .pow.. . . . .The reality is that nobody will escape unscathed because we are all so fundamentally interconnected. "
No discussion of the web's evolution towards sentience would be complete without Kevin Kelly's epic talk at the 2007 TED Conference entitled "The Next 5000 Days of the Internet". In it he masterfully chronicles the first 15 years of the web and compares it's quantitative elements to the circuitry and memory of a brain. I recommend watching the whole thing, but for me the pull quote comes 5 minutes in - despite it's immensity, the Internet (in 2007) was roughly the size of 1 human brain.
Tonight's post involves some sleight of hand. If you've ever watch a shell game or 3 card monty, you know that being told you're going to be tricked doesn't help at all. You're still the shill and you always pick the wrong shell.
So I'll explain the trick quickly. Tonight, I will give you a brief introduction to the topic and hopefully, arouse your curiosity. The rest of the trick will wait until tomorrow. Here goes.
Whether it's a roll of the dice, flip of a coin or an ace on the river, the concept of "Chance" is more central to the "Future" than any other. In Greek mythology, Zeus, Hades and Poseidon divided the Universe with a roll of the dice. Religions focus on the role an individual plays in determining his fate; so much so that the word "divine" can either refer to holiness or an ability to predict the future. In some ways, you could argue that chance, whether referred to in literate as Fate or Luck or in philosopy as Free Will or Determinism, is THE central concern of modern society. And why not? What could be more important or as interesting as understanding what will happen next?
I've touched on a breadth of large subjects in this series but none of them has proven to be as large, difficult or interesting as Chance. For this reason, I've decided that it deserves more than a single post. How many, I don't quite know -- if you have yet realized, I have only a vague roadmap on this trip and when I reach areas requiring more time than my midnight oil will afford, I might as well just extend them. So strap in for an extended, potentially meandering journey. I've also figured out that these posts are more fun to write when they stem from personal stories. I hope the same is true for you, the readers .
In 2003, I had recently moved from New York to California and gotten married. My business partners were back East and after a few months of trying to make a startup work remotely I received a stern talking to from my wife. I needed a job. My network in San Francisco was fairly lean and as I began to look around, my sister-in-law mentioned that she had a friend who needed someone to build a website for his project. She put me in touch with her former colleague, Andrew Pascal who had recently been lured back to Las Vegas to help his uncle launch an ambitious new casino on Las Vegas Boulevard. His uncle's name was Steve Wynn.
Where do companies that change the Future come from? These days the answer almost always begins with the seed of an idea, followed soon by an infusion of Venture Capital. Silicon Valley legend has it that the VC phenomenon is an American concept, a mid-20th century phenomenon that paired the founders of companies like Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, and HP with George Doriot and his proteges. As always, it depends how you look at it, but I'll argue that venture capital is much older and much more interesting.
As an entrepreneur, I've always thought of starting companies in nautical terms. It starts with an idea. (For me, I can usually tell it's decent if I'm still thinking about it weeks or months later). Once the idea becomes an obsession, all the seafaring metaphors begin. A voyage must be planned, the ship designed, a crew assembled and finally, when the winds are right, launched. If you're lucky, fortune smiles and years later, you return from distant shores with the hold laden with exotic treasures. Or you're never heard of again and people assume that the Davy Jones, the sharks or cannibals got you. But before any of this is conceivable, someone's got to foot the bill. To invest.
In yesterday's post, I brought up the Golden Age of Holland; an era marked by an explosion of scientific and economic innovation. At the heart of this innovation was the Dutch East India Company, the world's second multinational corporation (the British East India Corporation was formed 2 years earlier in 1600). It was also considered the world's first Megacorporation (just in case you were wondering - it's a real term). The VOC, as it was known, survived for 200 years and paid an 18% annual dividend to shareholders over that period. In modern terms, that's the equivalent of extrapolating Warren Buffet's performance at Berkshire Hathaway (current market cap is $198B) for another 150 years. Not bad.
In the fall of 1982, my sixth grade Science teacher lowered the lights and turned on a reel-to-reel film. I remember vividly the sound of the spinning spools and the flickering effect as the film began. Within 20 seconds, all else receded and we were transported on a journey to the outer edges of the Universe and then inward, to the center of a carbon atom. For the next 9 minutes we were transfixed. When it was over and the lights came on there the room was silent. The film was called "Powers of Ten" and it changed the way I thought about everything from that day forward.
The full film is below. It was made in 1968 by the renowned husband and wife design team of Charles and Ray Eames and inspired by the work of Dutch educator Kees Boeke, father of the "Sociocracy" movement . Whether you watch before finishing reading this post, I hope you'll find it both as humbling and wonderful as I do.
Yesterday's post about the OneCosmos project discussed the concept of Space; how it has inspired great curiousity, audacious ambitions and sometimes, folly. Today, I hope to take things a little further by using the Eames film as a guide. My goal is to look at how science has impacted our perspective, quite literally. More importantly, I plan to explore how the of the concepts of scale in "Powers of 10" might be applied in the decades to come.
Yesterday's post ended by concluding that future optimism often overlooks social changes by focusing on technological advances. Clearly, progress is multifaceted but today I'm going to begin where we left off. The 1939 World's Fair marked the beginning of 30 years of global mood swings. From the optimistic uplift of the Fair to the despair of the WWII and Holocaust to the Cold War, the word plowed forward technologically, in large part fueled by the tension bewtween the USSR and the US. Whether fueled by fear of ideological aggression or by the surplus of the post-war era, the dawn of the space era represents one of our species' finest achievements.
From the earliest of times, space has inspired us - looking up at the stars simply inspires wonder. But rather than delve into the Space Program, I'd like to begin this with a personal story about a project I was involved in 2000 called OneCosmos. It's an odd tale that I haven't talked about for a while. Despite being having happened during the of the Dotcom Boom, (and perhaps because of it) the project shaped my life immensely.
