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Been meaning to post this for a while. Given to me by my good friend Duncan Young at Lendlease in Sydney. I’m sure he’d be OK with people using it just so long as you quote where it came from (him, not me).
Did that really just happen? If someone had put this into a scenario 5 years ago it would have be thrown out as crazy.
I know. Where’s Watson been? To be honest with you my heart has not been in it for a while. I’ve been working on the new map but beyond that I’ve not been doing a lot. But I’m back now. Spent the day with lawyers and bankers worrying about Donald Trump. He’s even scarier than Putin and clearly a man without any kind of plan whatsoever. The prospect of the pair of them is enough to make me want to buy a single ticket to Tasmania.
So you want a prediction? I think Hilary is going to win by a long margin and they’ll be an inquest into why the polls were so wrong (sound familiar?). I’m not saying this is a good result, but it’s the lesser of twin evils. But I doubt that’s the end of Trumpty Dumpty and I hate to think of some of the nasty things that will be unleashed if he does indeed lose.
On a more upbeat note, I got home tonight to find that the friendly folks at Investec Bank (not the people I was with today by the way) had sent me a copy of Yuval Harari’s new book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Can’t wait to get stuck in to that.
I’ve been silent for a while. A month in fact, which is almost certainly a record. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’m drowning in information and ideas and the only solution seems to be disconnection, which is perhaps a kind of deliberate ignorance.
Anyway, I had a drink with Dave Birch yesterday (blog here) to talk about the future of money. It’s input into my new map of mega-trends. One of the most thought provoking 30 minutes in recent months. We covered everything from the weaponisation if finance (with historical examples) to the rise of disconnection technologies and synthetic staff. I also loved the idea that the money of the future will be much like the Neolithic (I’ll leave readers to figure that one out).
We talked quite a bit about community and the collaborative economy and this map (above) was something he showed me. Link to article about here.
“And what was the true object of this superstitious stuff? A final clue came from “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention” (1996), in which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi acknowledges that, far from being an act of individual inspiration, what we call creativity is simply an expression of professional consensus. Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.” Innovation, that is, exists only when the correctly credentialed hivemind agrees that it does. And “without such a response,” the author continues, “van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.” What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise.”
Taken from Salon, ‘TED talks are lying to you’ by Thomas Frank
(Article originally published in Harper’s)
“No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be” – Isaac Asimov
Easier said that done, of course.
Latest update on the mess formerly known as the mega-trends map.
A while ago, in my book Future Vision, I wrote about people destroying technology for fun (extract above). This wasn’t an existing trend, but one I could see coming. Well it’s come true. In the USA, Canada, Russia and Italy people are setting up ‘Rage Rooms’ where people can pay $3 per minute to destroy everything from TVs to computers with a baseball bat or sledgehammer. There’s a even been a pop up Rage Room in New York and there’s a company called Tantrums in LA. whose slogan is “we break things.”
Meanwhile, and clearly connected, a poll in the US by CNN/ORC has found that 71 per cent of Americans are either “very” or “somewhat angry” about “the way things are going on in the country today.”
Breaking stuff isn’t a new thing. In the UK we’ve had crockery and plate smashing at fairgrounds for hundreds of years. But this is different. This is a cascade of rage. I’m telling you people, this is a very strong weak signal and indicative of something quite nasty potentially.
Here’s the website, still in beta. All credit to Kit Huckvale for this. A few tweaks and we’ll go live and order a bundle more physical cards too.