Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
The technologies that are succeeding don't supplant people, or make them more efficient, but instead ease transactions and encourage something that can never be replaced by machines.
In addition to the article's appreciation of historical context, the above is brilliant about technology in general.
I ran into this video the other day on I Luv Juice, caught by the environment quote captured in the title above.
It reminded me that once upon a time I was reflecting on acclimation, a thought that I find worth considering often:
"I find it important to remember that humans acclimate to everything.
This means that things we think are bad/painful/ridiculous become ok after enough exposure and time. It also means that the things we think are good/exciting/worthwhile become ok after enough exposure and time."
It's important to note that I'm talking about acclimation in that post, which is closely related but is not the same as normalization. Both are about perception, but acclimation is concerned with affinity while normalization is a bit more complex, concerned with one's perception of how the world should function.
When I talk about acclimation, I talk about how one's affinity for a new emotional state eventually shifts away from like/dislike with exposure; this is one's affinity for a new job, new city, recent breakup, or disliked food. In the post I help qualify with the statement "this is not to say that things stay that way; I'm talking about a relatively short timeline."
Perhaps author Bernard Benson captures part of this with the following thought:
"All we really want is otherness, tossing from side to side, greeting each toss with shouts of welcome, and contempt for the previous toss."
As you see in the video above, normalization is a different beast, and a bit more complicated. Normalization is concerned with one's expectations from their environment and the world, captured best with the intension (linguistically speaking - not 'intention') of the word 'should.' That is to say that normalization is the state of subconsciously assessing your environment as operating as it 'should.'
Normalization is entirely environmental, and helps explain why you have the beliefs, values, and worldview you do. It helps explain how others have developed those things as well. It helps explain why when those things clash between you and others, only by exposing each other to new environmental norms (either directly or cognitively) can your differences be resolved. I started exploring this once with the idea that the only cure is exposure.
On a more entrepreneurially inspiring note, it helps to see how Brian in the video above uses this understanding to change the lives of students in the disadvantaged environment of New Orleans' 9th Ward.
“Versions” is a visual essay by Oliver Laric, investigating the re-appropriation and manipulation of images in our culture.
Watch the video here.
Oliver Laric does a lot of good thinking on the nature of images, in the "images as reproductions of 'real' things" sense. Click the link above for the video essay in full.
One question to ask here is: given the nature of how humans engage in and and experience the world (primarily through mimicry, the social creatures that we are), how should we measure the relative values of things like authorship, creation, motivation (in the "foundation of copyright law" sense), volition, experience and individuality?
These things (and surely there are plenty more) seem to all point to why we intuitively think some things are more "real" than others. Like Oliver and many others I find myself exploring the validity of these instincts a little deeper as well.
I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of manipulating our environment to extend our brains. I suppose it all started with early humans carving on cave walls as a way to store historical data. Now we have ebooks, computers, and cell phones to store our memories. And we have schools to program our brains. But it goes much deeper than that. Even a house is a device for storing data. Specifically, a house stores data on how it was built. A skilled builder can study a house and build another just like it.
Everything we create becomes a de facto data storage device and brain accessory. A wall can be a physical storage device for land survey data, it can be a reminder of history, and it can be a trigger of personal memories.
A business is also a way to store data. As a restaurant owner, I was fascinated at how employees came and went, but their best ideas often stayed with the business, especially in the kitchen. The restaurant was like a giant data filter. The bad ideas were tested and deleted while the good ideas stayed, most often without being written down.
It turns out that Scott Adams (Dilbert) has a very intelligent blog. His post "Exobrain" (excerpt above) is very much in the genre of thinkers like William Mitchell; Mitchell's book Me++ The Cyborg Self And The Networked City illuminates all the ways in which humans capture meaning, value, and information in objects outside of themselves.
I was actually most caught by Adams' closing paragraph, using this idea to illuminate in a new way why environments - not our internal thoughts/volition - most deeply shape our lives:
Years ago I worked with a young intern at Crocker Bank who believed his first step toward success was to find a place to live in a prosperous suburb. His theory was that the external environment would program his brain for the sort of success that his neighbors would have already found. I remember mocking him for his offbeat and naïve theory. Now I think he's a genius for understanding at such an early age that his environment was a tool for programming his brain. I lost touch with him, but I'll bet he's a millionaire now.
Subaru has created a free Badge of Ownership program as a way to recognize their owners loyalty and encourage them to promote their interests. The badges attach directly to the owners vehicle The main badge denotes the number of Subaru’s owned. Additional merit badges can be added including the 100,000 mile club, outdoor sports, environmental, and music/arts. In order to get any of the badges, proof of ownership must be provided in the form of a vehicle identification number.
The above reminds me that people rarely buy things for purely functional reasons. People almost always buy something for what it says about themselves.
In fact, have been having a couple of conversations recently about the idea of "people are increasingly wanting experiences more than things."
I think this is true. But it requires a bit of thought on what the difference is.
A car is a thing, and so is an iPhone. Both provide the foundations for experiences. The car both takes me places and allows me to share some experience about myself with others (generally passively, but explicitly in the above case through badges), and the iPhone lets me coordinate experiences with others. So it's hard to separate the thing from the experience.
All you need to know...
is that it's possible.
Mike sent me a great story about an ultra-lightweight backpacker:
"Wolf was carrying a super-small pack which weighed 14 pounds including food and water. When asked how he got his pack weight so low, Wolf would reply, 'All you need to know is that it’s possible.'"
One of the under-reported stories of the internet is this: it constantly reports on what's possible. Somewhere in the world, someone is doing something that you decided couldn't be done. By calling your bluff and by pointing out the possibilities, this reporting of possibility changes everything.
The statement "all you need to know is that it's possible" might sound a bit sugary or idealistic.
But it's precisely why I'm so big on exposure and experience. It's about worldview, perspective, etc.
The age old idea is that you don't know what you don't know; you only like or hate what you've been exposed to. On some level its a simple idea but on another level it completely explains to me why the kids I grew up believe completely in the Mormon faith and all it comes along with, when across the world others believe completely in something completely different and neither can seem to figure out why when they think about the other.
In fact, I drew a chart recently that I originally considered for #makeachartday:
To me, "all you need to know is that it's possible" captures why it's so important to understand that you're entirely blinded to what you don't think exists - whether physical things, declarative facts, procedural knowledge or abstract concepts.
The only cure is exposure.
The 2-Dimensional Arrow of Biological Time
Biological time is best described by a two-dimensional surface that takes the shape of a second order helix, according to a new theory of timeIt's tempting to think of time as a linear sequence of events best captured by a straight line, the x-axis on a graph for example. But physicists have never felt constrained by such a definition, on the contrary they've never hesitated to mould time to their own ends.
In thermodynamics, for example, the arrow of time comes about because of irreversible phenomena such as phase transitions, bifurcations and chaos. In relativity, space and time are as one, and Minkowski, in his famous formulation, used the idea of a 'causality cone' to explain the correlation between physical objects.
In quantum mechanics, the notion of time becomes even more strange. Time is sometimes two-dimensional, sometimes reversible to maintain CPT (charge, parity, time) symmetry and at other times discontinuous and fractal-like.
In short, physicists reformulate time in whatever suits them, or at least in whatever way provides the best predictive or explanatory power.
One way to think of that last line is in the context that we think of time as a uniform straight line in large part because of Newton. Newton needed this conception of time as a way to reconcile the thinking that surrounded F=MA. Before this, time was largely relational, conceived of as existing in the relationships of the movement of objects. Newton made time a standard so that the movement of objects could be explained independently; people like Leibniz argued him down heavily for it.
Of course, the point is that for all the progress we've made under the Newtonian model, we're finding that it doesn't account for a good number of phenomena, namely most everything that quantum physics approaches.
And the larger point is more relevant to the types of things I tend to talk about here. We typically feel that the linear model is fundamentally true, because it 'feels' true. But really theres no reason we should feel that way, except that Newton happened to be so influential. Note: not 'right,' just influential. Influential for good reason of course, but just a thought that not even our deepest and most basic conceptions are immune to this dynamic.
Hello friends and collaborators. I deal in innovation, working to build fantastic experiences enabled by the digital world. As part of this I track cultural change, primarily through observations guided by models and filters calibrated over years to sort out the cream.
These pieces of thoughts here reflect concepts that are elements of those models: ecosystem thinking, long-term value, information filters, and pattern recognition.
("How to break anything" is an abstract notion that reflects my background in observation and analysis. Rules are meant to be broken, but only through understanding the rules - observing them with an empathetic eye - can they be broken constructively.
So how to break anything? Observe everything.
[You can't observe everything so how do you know what to observe? That's another project that I call Filter Theory - see the About link above.])
