Radio was seen as piracy too, but became a publicity engine

But more than just being a source of fees, radio was also a huge publicity engine for music, and eventually this became so obvious that at one point record labels were giving radio stations and disc jockeys “payola” under the table to promote their music. And now we have come full circle with Neil Young’s comment:

I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around.

No Straight Lines – the new read/write book from Alan Moore – argues that we have reached the nadir of the adaptive range of an industrialised world, in fact we are now faced with a trilemma of social, organisational and economic complexity, tensions and questions. And therefore face a design problem. No Straight Lines presents a new logic and inspiring plea for a more human centric world that describes an entirely new way for true social, economic and organisational innovation to happen.

Love this. I've been fascinated by our tendency towards linear thinking for quite some time now; see also Modeling Change Through "If, Then" and Linear vs Exponential Logic

"...Maybe this sensation is why, in the past few years, there has been a resurgence of artisanal analog technology"

[no maybe about it - culture is reactive]

"It strikes me that the current fetishization of analog technology has less to do with nostalgia than it does with an urge to slow down the transfer of data from the internal to the external, from the individual to the collective, and to make it all less instant, less ephemeral, less interchangeable, and more tangible, more linear and more contextual."

[yep; there's always culture to react to. "Nostalgia" is just what we use to characterize its artifacts]

A few days ago I had been thinking on a complex problem, and it struck me that the easiest way to solve any problem is to first organize it.

It's not really that profound of a thought; really it just comes from my background as a trends consultant, since trends consulting is basically just a process of organizing information. It was back then that I started to realize that in many ways my primary talent in life, in many various facets, is simply: organization.

But the thought struck me deeply because I realized this has been my approach for as long as I could remember.

I instantly flashed back to being young - elementary school - finding it odd that people thought I was smart at least because I was so good at math. (Arithmetic didn't seem like something that should be hard, so it struck me as odd that people would use it to judge how smart I was.) In a way that I can only say in retrospect, arithmetic was supremely natural to me, because numbers are so easy to organize. One popular commenter on the video above feels like something I may have even tried to tell a classmate once upon a time: "You just shuffle numbers to make easiest, fastest way to process."

That strange feeling just kind of went away to the background of subconsciousness for a long long time.

And then I saw the above video.

It really hammers in the point that the "organization" philosophy is simply this:

To reality and the universe, information is the same no matter how it's presented - so organization can indeed seem superfluous. But presenting it in certain ways can make information mean different things to *humans*, and that is all the difference. 

<img style="margin-top:-395px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/61fe905b73903dc5ce28782c0977754d.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-360px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/aaf845d1edfc0b13a404edf5b7625afa.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-654px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/7f893bc915f72fef7b1d2aff61e402d0.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-648px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/59fcb0e56adb05e8d0eec22f42ce1253.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-611px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/1a4b0395fc1505b907be5f708c6cbebb.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-401px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/5b34939436c0b72d3c09a681c05d673a.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-481px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/328b510a8d6e1769715b92cf8c1ed5d4.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-565px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/09f6e2b5373c35a6cfa714a617d8aa0a.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-397px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/9d8c544152dcc7a03aee3ee4ddd4f42a.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-442px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/10354579aea888837d3dd1345d5a7645.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-402px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/5282ccadd6f9888f0f57160a578665a0.png" />

Quite a brilliant blending of varied cultural narratives across an array of levels. Beautifully complex blends of (at very least):

1) the narrative captured in the stories themselves
2) the narratives we construct around the individual actors and directors
3) the cultural eras associated with both of the above

This is why I have an entire Evernote notebook dedicated to collecting "design metaphors." Also I frequently recommend reading Lakoff / Johnson's seminal Metaphors We Live By.

Stanford reviews a study showing how a simple change in wording can dramatically affect how we respond to the same information:

Psychology Assistant Professor Lera Boroditsky and doctoral candidate Paul Thibodeau have shown that people will likely support an increase in police forces and jailing of offenders if crime is described as a “beast” preying on a community. But if people are told crime is a “virus” infecting a city, they are more inclined to treat the problem with social reform.

And:

In five experiments, test subjects were asked to read short paragraphs about rising crime rates in the fictional city of Addison and answer questions about the city. The researchers gauged how people answered these questions in light of how crime was described – as a beast or a virus.

They found the test subjects’ proposed solutions differed a great deal depending on the metaphor they were exposed to.

And:

“People like to think they’re objective and making decisions based on numbers,” Boroditsky said. “They want to believe they’re logical. But they’re really being swayed by metaphors.”

This is why I have an entire Evernote notebook dedicated to design metaphors.

Imitation is collaborative: It might be technically possible to dig back and find the originator of, say, Socially Awkward Penguin or Privilege Denying Dude, but the knowledge would be perfectly useless. Whatever life or value these things have lies in their reuse.

What a beautiful explanation for why there are no firsts on the internet. (Not any that matter, anyway.)

I wouldn't be surprised if people stop telling ghost stories in the future. Much like how the idea of telling the stories ancient people told about their gods would seem a bit silly now; the narratives will simply no longer have the need to exist.

“Since the time when man began to control the environment he has been plagued by his limited ability to speculate..."

The first 2:30 of this video might be my favorite description of human limitation, design, and innovation through exposure for quite awhile.

“the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey

"The right art ", cried the Master, `is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too wilful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.

Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel

Part of the direct / indirect metaphor I like to employ

Over the past few years, a bunch of web-based marketplaces have gotten popular – Etsy, Kickstarter, AirBnb, to name a few. Many of these business ideas had been tried before but are succeeding only now.

When a trend like this emerges, it’s always interesting to ask “why now?” For example, for almost a decade, entrepreneurs tried to create video sharing services like YouTube, but only succeeded when certain key dependencies – broadband, digital video cameras, a version of Flash that “just worked” – became widespread.

I asked Roelof Botha the “why now” question regarding web-based marketplaces. He said something I thought was really interesting: marketplaces depend on trust, and trust requires knowing the reputation of a prospective counterparty. Today, for the first time, you can get background information on almost any prospective counterparty by searching Google, Facebook etc. Or put more simply: we finally have an internet of people.

There were a few exceptions, like the protests that, along with sanctions, helped end apartheid in South Africa in 1994. But for young people, radical critiques and protests against the system were mostly confined to pop-culture fantasy: "Fight the Power" was a song on a platinum-selling album, Rage Against the Machine was a platinum-selling band, and the beloved brave rebels fighting the all-encompassing global oppressors were just a bunch of characters in The Matrix. (See pictures of protesters around the world.)

"Massive and effective street protest" was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.