Douglas Rushkoff’s recent work has been taking a long, hard look at the ramifications of a digital world on the institutions of the past. His most recent talk at Web 2.0 argues that our current economic models are poorly equipped to handle scaling with abundance. Too bad the Internet has abundance *in spades*.
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Economics is not a natural science, the secrets of sucking less, marketing for designers, and more in this weeks Wunderkammer (the curious collection of links for 8/10).
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The ‘Week in Pop’ is that post where I gather up the various minutia from around the web generated in the course of Vox Pop operations and put it into one place.
Rushkoff’s Get Back in the Box
First up, I recently finished Douglas Rushkoff’s Get Back In the Box. I wanted to make sure I was full up on my Rushkoff-isms before tackling his latest/greatest, Life, Inc.. The 3-star review I left on Amazon.com went something like:
After reading ‘Get Back in the Box’ and watching the press run up to Rushkoff’s latest, Life Inc., I’m puzzled. Many of the stories that Rushkoff cites as impetus for creating Life Inc are thoroughly covered in ‘Get Back in the Box’.
And stories they are. While much of the anecdotal evidence is entertaining it remains personal opinion and observation. Rushkoff’s message is one, ultimately, of wanting companies to *DO* something. The clarion call is to those companies that have so fragmented and outsourced what they do that there is no real expertise or ‘craft’ to be had. This is a much needed message in an age of ‘Four Hour Work Weeks’. It makes for a compelling read. I just wish his foils weren’t such cardboard; something that makes the dispatching easy when presented in such a one-dimensional manner.
One of the afore-mentioned cardboard evils are “traditional” software companies, or companies that get paid directly for the software that they produce. The opposite business model is open source, a practice that Rushkoff spends some time on. Rushkoff dresses the movement as an ideological truth, a product of pure passion whose ubiquitousness is just a matter of time. Its as if he sees every company that charges as having an office full of mustache twirling evil-doers; those for whom plotting how to wring more profit has become paramount over creating anything resembling new software. As easy as it may be to paint faceless, large corporations as being wholly malevolent, in reality the true is much less scintillating.
And so it is for many of the other companies profiled throughout the book. In truth, none are as one dimensional as Rushkoff portrays them – and thus the optimal solution not as obvious as he would make it seem. For some, lost in a sea of change, simply regurgitating the same insights based on past experience (getting “back in the box”) will have the same sorry results. It would be like telling newspapers the way forward is to double down on their production and distribution expertise (not a good idea in the face of systemic disruption).
Delicious Links
Speaking of newspapers, lots of opining this week ended up matriculating to the delicious bookmarks:
“Even more money is then spent on internal promotion of your products or external communication and advertising to get people excited about your new product.
“What you really need is enthusiasm about your product – honest interest in using it and the right message to the right group.
“If your product targets developers this can not be achieved with marketing or PR. We’ve managed to remove the developer world from the commercial part of IT companies so far over the last few years that developers are very cynical about anything that does not relate to technology first and brand second – and neither marketing nor PR can deliver that.
“Developers however are very happy to listen to what other developers say – if these developers are very good, have their respect and deliver the message in the right way.”
“When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.”
Very true and I wholeheartedly agree. Uninterrupted time is essential for focus, clarity, and being productive in a creative task.
Umair Haque defining ‘thin value’ and how it is not what is needed right now. Businesses should seek ‘thick value’, or products and services which empower even greater economic benefit.
Recently, you released a chart purportedly describing the organization of the House Democrats’ health plan. I think Democrats, Republicans, and independents agree that the problem is very complicated, no matter how you visualize it.
By releasing your chart, instead of meaningfully educating the public, you willfully obfuscated an already complicated proposal. There is no simple proposal to solve this problem. You instead chose to shout “12! 16! 37! 9! 24!” while we were trying to count something.
So, to try and do my duty both to the country and to information design (a profession and skill you have loudly shat upon), I have taken it upon myself to untangle your delightful chart.
Week in Graphs
This week I thought I’d take some of the nice graphical abilities possible with a blank wall and way too many empties to illustrate my own ugly truth. I’m previously talked about how I need to ween myself off the carbonated stuff. As you can see from the single plotted week below, I’m well on my way to a case of type-II adult onset diabetes. I knew things were bad but seeing it in stark bar chart form with subsequent totals sound me alarmed.
New Work
This week the vacations continued for a number associates. However, beginning in August we’ll be starting a number of projects and I expect the numbers to go up. The spread between billable and unbillable time necessary to keep things running still chaffs a bit. However, I probably just need to accept that the time lost in ‘administrative’ tasks is probably just the cost of doing business.
Played in the Popperplex
White Rose Movement’s 2006 Album, Kick still remains my preferred way of getting the brain peculating in the morning. However, once I get a certain level of focus I’ve found the Ennio Morricone remix album a great way of keeping it there (Ennio Morricone is most famously known for doing the scores to scads of spaghetti westerns).
It’s always a good day when the delivery guy shows up with a package from Amazon.com. In the latest corrugated wonder we have:
While I always love a good read I’m, in particular, interested in the intersection between all three. Email scammers are Sith social marketers, utilizing the power of networks and observations on people’s motivations for personal gain. They operate outside of whuffie, or the invisible social capital each one of us accrues or spends by our daily, public actions. Freed from the need to maintain ‘nice guy’ personas or brand building shenanigans, they are highly innovative in a way I’d expect Rushkoff didn’t intend.
Continue Reading...Working in small, distributed teams can be an exercise in loneliness. The solitary existence can mean missing out on a shared revelation or not getting feedback on a forming assumption. The Vox Pop Pow Wows are a chance for a group of peers to get together over Skype, talk about the news of the day, and provide that professional support that we otherwise might go without. Here’s the transcript from a recent talk [edited for readability].
A. – Matthew Reinbold, Founder and Creative Principal, Vox Pop Design
B. – Matthew Orstad, Founder and Chief Engineer, Rocket Midwest
Akoha and Alternative Currencies
A. Let’s go up to the next thing: it’s a game called Akoa which I am going to purchase a deck to get to get started. They’ve billed themselves as being the, um, let me find the term…
B. Social reality game?
A. Social reality game where you pay it forward. You get a deck of cards, go to the website, give the serial number or some signifying aspect of the deck of cards, and then each one of the cards has something on it. For example, “take someone out to coffee”, or ”tell somebody thank you”; you know, worthwhile community, society building type of things – things you should probably be doing anyway. Then as the recipient enjoys their coffee or gets their thank you or whatever, you give them the card. You say, “OK now you know, if you go to this website and you put in the identifier for this card then you can play and you can pay it forward”. You can then go back to the website and you can see that, “Oh, im the tenth in line for this card.” You can watch the card travelling around the United States.
I think it’s a really interesting idea. I would love to see this in the context of alternative currencies. There is some value exchanging hands. It’s now trackable. Exchanging these kinds of cards, you know, maybe you’d really like the card that says, “Send someone..”
B. Free doughnuts?
A. Free doughnuts, sure, why not. Free doughnuts, and you don’t know anybody that’s playing that would give that card to you …
(laughter)
A. So maybe there’s an exchange or ebay where you go and you can buy the card. Now there’s a real world exchange value assigned because you’ve stated that the ‘Free Doughnuts card’ is maybe worth 3 dollars when you bought it at the end of the auction.
Theres some talk on the website how they want to make incorporate things like 2D barcodes so you can do it all with your mobile phone. You wouldn’t have to log into the site; you’re just scanning codes and it automatically knows the web url, based on the 2d code. Rushkoff has much to say about alternative currencies.
When I was in South Dakota it turned out that my home town of Timber Lake had done some kind of experiment in alternative currencies. It failed. They tried to give them out, but there was no way of exchanging Timber Lake bucks for real dollars. And with the number of businesses in town (being a very small farming community) there’s not a whole lot of businesses to choose from anyway. The businesses that do exist looked at this and said, “Well wait a minute, I’ll accept these but there’s no way of exchanging them for real money? Why don’t I just accept monopoly dollars? Because it would be about as meaningful.” There was a lot of things in how they implemented it that made it DOA.
B. Did you ever watch Corner Gas?
A. What’s that?
B. It’s a show on WGN. It’s by a Canadian; started by a Canadian comedian Brent Butt. It’s set in the fictional town of Dark River. They basically do this and his dad is this sort of cantankerous old coot sort of character. All the local businesses are going to have Dark River dollars and if you send 10 real dollars you get so many Dark River dollars and, of course, his dad goes on and uses the city hall photocopier and prints a whole bunch of copies.
(laughter)
B. And he’s buying all this stuff and getting free sandwiches at the local food parlor and they’re like “How many of those you got?”
(laughter)
B. But anyway he gets like busted in the end. They’re like “This is counterfeit!” and he’s like “How do you know?” “…because there’s a hair on every one of them”
(laughter)
A. Rushkoff puts forth that it should be easier to do alternative currencies now than it was previously because you can detect counterfeits. If we go back to this Akoa game every single one of these cards has a serial number to make it unique. Plus, they are tracking it every step of the way; to play the game you report who it went to. Then that person reports that they gave it to somebody else. If there’s ever a copy of the card then all of a sudden they know because it’s now split: it shows up in Montreal AND Vancouver simotaneously (or something). The technology is in place where the transaction costs of monitoring the stuff have been lowered to such a degree that they can do it. You couldn’t just run to a photocopier and copy a bunch of cards. I want to get the cards, I want to play with them, I want to see how the system works, and then I would love to implement something like this for independent web workers – some kind of alternative currency for designers and developers and writers. Maybe it’s locally based. I don’t know but I need to do this kind of research to kind of see how something like that could work.
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