Found in the tubes

The Boss at SXSW

“So rumble, young musicians, rumble. Open your ears and open your hearts. Don’t take yourself too seriously and take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have ironclad confidence, but doubt. It keeps you awake and alert. … And when you walk on stage tonight to bring the noise, treat it like it’s all we have. And then remember it’s only rock ’n’ roll. I think I’m going to go out and catch a little black death metal.”

Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler may suffer from the same affliction I have. Optimism.

The Authors of Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, interviewed by Sam Harris.

“Today, a Masai warrior with a cellphone has better telecom capabilities than the President of the United States did 25 years ago. If he’s a Masai warrior on a smart phone with access to Google, then he has access to more information than the President did just 15 years ago.”

Douglas Rushkoff – “Branding doesn’t work. So now what?”

Fun one. Had never actually seem him speak. Unnecessarily cynical for my taste (reminded me of Gillis)… or a critique of a time already gone. A critique of “brand” from the days of mass media. (It is two years old. Maybe that explains it. Kidding. Maybe.)

Will brand go away? Nah. Branding works fine. But what a brand needs to do has changed a ton. The Quaker brand isn’t the picture on the box. An effective brand isn’t “fiction” anymore. The Quaker guy and Keebler Elves are easy targets in that sense. What about the Apple logo? Is it a brand? It’s a symbol for a brand. Is Apple’s brand effective? Is it a fiction? Now we’re having a discussion.

This is where we get to the optimistic part from my POV. The days of brand fiction are already over (though many haven’t grasped). The parts of Apple’s brand that are fiction – ie, that run counter to what they say they care about – eg, this unsavory business – will, if uncorrected, be serious liabilities, openings for competitors. But Apple’s brand generally is a tremendous asset.

A brand is an organization’s shared sense of what drives it. It is a plan for action, the criteria of success. Or viewed from the other side, a brand is the way an organization would like to be seen. (The actual brand, of course, is the subjective sum how an organization actually is seen.)

The co-opting of technology and art for commerce is a fact of life, too. Human nature. Couldn’t be otherwise. (The same forces drive tech and art, arguably.) There’s a sense from Rushkoff that something especially nefarious is happening there. But Facebook wasn’t invented to take advantage of people and I don’t believe that’s what drives it even now. It’s a whole planet, with the forces of good and evil duking it out. We’ll put up with the BS that comes with Facebook, Inc or we’ll all eventually opt out for something else… and Facebook knows that… or they’ll live to regret it. I guess that’s why Rushkoff’s cynicism doesn’t work for me… or I’ll live to regret it!

Hard for me to imagine the social web – you know, the Internet with people on it – not continuing to be an irrepressible force toward decentralized goodness. “The arc of the moral universe” and all. Facebook will play a part in that, too, won’t it? The genie’s out of the bottle. Or am I wrong?

Paddy Ashdown: “The paradigm structure of our time, ladies and gentlemen, is the network.”

It’s the capacity to network that matters.

“In the modern age, where everything is connected to everything, the most important thing about what you can do is what you can do with others. The most important bit about your structure, whether you’re a government, whether you’re an army regiment, whether you’re a business, is your docking points, your interconnectors, your capacity to network with others.”