Only Dead Fish

Longplayer, and the Long-term View

Longplayer is Jem Finer's intriguing project to write and perform a one thousand year long musical composition: "It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again". As part of it, he has launched Longplayer letters and invited thinkers and writers to engage in an ongoing chain of correspondence on the subject of long-term thinking. The first is a provocative letter from Brian Eno who writes of how, inspite of the fact that our geographical ‘circle of empathy’ is expanding, our view of time, and our future horizon and backwards view, are not:

“In terms of time, however, the picture seems to be narrowing. Public attention is increasingly focused on very near futures: businesses live in terror of the bottom line and the quarterly results, while politicians quake at tomorrow’s opinion polls and formulate policy in terms of them. We’ve heard tales of farmers planting olive trees or vineyards for their grandchildren to harvest, or of foresters cultivating groves of oaks to replace a chapel roof hundreds of years in the future, but by and large, we don’t do that anymore. We have less active engagement with our future than our ancestors did.”

Eno goes on to talk about how our appetite for robust solutions and quantifiable activity ("it’s very natural to think that the best way to defend any system is by hardening it so it becomes unassailable") can reduce our capability to evolve, adapt and improvise to deal with unpredictable events. Fascinating.

Photo Credit: RíPO via Compfight cc

HT @paul_armstrong for the link

Speed Freak

"The Beethoven that you and I know, and that we all know, may in fact not be the Beethoven that Beethoven wanted us to know. We may be hearing his music in a way he did not intend at all."

I was rather stopped in my tracks by this short Radiolab podcast about the speed at which the famous composer's work should be played. Aged 47, steadily going deaf, and with a huge body of work already behind him, Beethoven was one of the first composers to embrace the metronome, which had just been invented. He used it to mark (and attempt to permanently fix) the tempo at which some of his most famous works should be played. The thing is, the tempo he set is much faster than that at which the pieces are traditionally played. So fast in fact, that when played at their intended pace, the work is hugely challenging to play, becomes completely different, and is almost designed to push the boundaries of comfortable listening. Almost every conductor has ignored these speeds and performed the works more slowly and with a sizeable dose of grandiosity. This practice has become so entrenched that myths have even perpetuated (since proved false) that his metronome was faulty. Amazing. There's a good exploration of some of the myths and truths around the metronome markings here.

Falling Into The Audience

I did like this new TED talk from activist-performer-singer-songwriter-blogger-provocateur (people who defy description make me happy) Amanda Palmer. She talks evocatively about the art of asking for support (financial and otherwise) from your following, and how that process can help build powerful connections with people. She calls it 'falling into the audience' which is a description I immediately loved.

Amanda believes that music should be "as free as possible...unlocked...shared and spread", and that "in order for artists to survive and create, their audiences need to step up and directly support them". It should be, she says, an honor system, her recorded music being "the digital equivalent of street performing". Amanda raised $1.2m on Kickstarter to support her new album, and has been on the end of some pretty harsh and unwarranted criticism for her approach. 

Kickstarter has seen $503m pledged to projects (at time of writing) for no equity return. Maria Popova (and many other content creators) are using tip jars to supports their efforts. Andrew Sullivan's efforts to relaunch the Dish as a paid subscription-based site seems to be working (three weeks after the meter went into effect they've raised $611,000 against their goal of $900,000 for the year). It's a myth that people won't pay for content. But the path to establishing a new kind of relationship with your audience is not always the smoothest. So I applaud people who are trying.

I was always somewhat miffed that after five years of using Delicious, a service which stagnated under Yahoo and came close to closing down several times, I was never asked to contribute to something that I would have happily paid to maintain and make better (I've since moved to Pinboard). But as my Mum used to say, if you don't ask, you don't get.

Kowloon Walled City, Podcasts and Sabbaticals

After a hiatus I've suddenly (and somewhat randomly) started listening to podcasts again. The end of this intermission was marked with this episode from Roman Mars' 99% Invisible series on the subject of the Kowloon Walled City, a 6.5 acre enclave in Hong Kong that became home for 300 interconnected high rise buildings that grew organically over time without input from a single architect, and untroubled by local planning or health and safety regulations, on the site of an old Chinese military fort. At its peak in the early 1990s, the city was home to 33,000 people, which made it the most densely populated place on earth (equivalent to 3.2million people per square mile).

Roman interviews photographer Greg Girard who spent five years in the city before it was demolished in the early 90s and took an amazing series of images (including the one above) to document it. I lived and worked in Hong Kong for a short time in 1994 with my now wife. It must have been just after the city came down, so I missed seeing it in person but we did live for a few months in the infamous Chungking Mansions, which might have been approaching an approximation of what living in the walled city could have been like, so it was fascinating.

Since then, I've listened to a few of Debbie Millman's excellent Design Matters podcasts including this interview with Stefan Sagmeister (famed graphic designer and author of the wonderful Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far).

Amongst other things Sagmeister talks about the sabbaticals that he has taken - in his case quite lengthy time away from his successful practice:

"I learned in the first sabbatical that it's maybe the best strategy that I ever came up with - to make sure that what I do remains a calling and doesn't deteriorate into a job or a career."

Debbie Millman introduces the interview with her own story of the guilt and worry she felt in taking a longer than usual hiatus from work whilst in the midst of applying for a new job:

"All I can remember about that trip now was the amazing food, the wailing wall, and how thoroughly stressed out I was for nearly the entire time I was there. Perhaps I needed to worry. Perhaps I felt guilty not working. Perhaps this behaviour was simply how I reconciled my shame. But looking back on it now my fear of being infinitely unemployed was palpable. I never once considered that I was worthy of getting a new job. I only realised now that in the grand scheme of things the time between gainful employment was very brief. Had I given myself the freedom of discovery of a foreign culture. Had I even the slightest confidence in my abilities, I might have come back capable of bigger, better opportunities."

The irony is of-course, that when she got the new job, she quickly found that it wasn't everything she'd expected and it was only after leaving that she discovered her real calling. Sagmeister's sabbaticals were upto a year long, albeit with a long gap between them. That might not be realistic for all of us, but it's that thought about giving yourself permission to take time out, however brief, which is the important one. 

The Kowloon enclave seems like metaphor. It's very easy to allow irrational concerns to pile on top of one another until we have our own densely populated, walled city of doubt. Sagmeister talks about how much of the work that he has completed in the years since his first sabbatical has been anchored in experiences or inspiration from that sabbatical year. We're very good at being hard on ourselves. Sometimes we need to remember to give ourselves the freedom to the build space into our lives.

Google Firestarters 7: Remix Culture - The Event

"Remixing is not scary, or depressing. It is empowering" 

The Firestarters events that I curate for Google are all about inspiration, challenging thinking and provocation and for our latest event on Remix Culture we had that in spades in the form of an excellent talk by writer and film producer Kirby Ferguson. Kirby is the creator of the brilliant Everything Is A Remix series of short films that explore in some depth the theory that nothing is original, and that even our most celebrated creators borrow, steal and transform in order to create the new.

The Firestarters talk built on this premis, with Kirby giving a whistle stop tour through culture with examples of referencing and recombination from music, art, writing, and product innovation. If you weren't at the event, you can get a flavour of what he talked about from his 'Embrace The Remix' TED talk (which has been described by fellow Firestarters speaker Cory Doctorow as "an amazing, must-see talk about the way that creativity comes about as the result of creative re-use of others' work").

Kirby talked about how the fundamental tenets of copy, transform and combine are not simply the ingredients of remixing, but the basic elements of all creativity. To illustrate this he started with music and some fascinating cases in point ranging from folk (Woody Guthrie said "the words are the important thing. Don't worry about tunes. Take a tune, sing high when they sing low, sing fast when they sing slow, and you've got a new tune") to Led Zeppelin and beyond to the more obvious hip hop sampling and the amazing Danger Mouse whose Grey album mashed up the Beatles White album with Jay-Z's Black album and prompted loads of cease-and-desist letters from lawyers. We also touched on the art of Picasso, and the many derivative influences and references of Star Wars.

The talk moved into product innovation, and how the typewriter (which was originally called the 'literary piano') and QWERTY keyboard came about, the story of Apple, and how Thomas Edison didn't actually invent the light bulb but improved the idea to the point where it was commercially viable after testing thousands of different materials for filaments. Kirby's point was that rather than being individual leaps of invention by lone innovators, these were all tipping points in a long history of innovations by a stream of different people.

Kirby also touched on how the current copyright and patent system runs counter to the idea of recombinations as a powerful source of innovation and the fact that we so often build on the work of others. He quoted Henry Ford, who said: "I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other menbehind whom were centuries of work...progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable". And he gave examples of multiple discovery, of where innovations (including the telephone) were arrived at at the same time by more than one person because all the fundamentals were in place to enable that to happen. His point was that we all put stuff together with the same materials ("creative works may indeed be like property, but it's property we're all building on") but the patent system fundamentally acts against this, particularly now when patents of smaller details within larger innovations (Apple, and the wider technology market being an obvious case in point here) prevent other companies from using them as building blocks and forcing them to invent workarounds.

In the Q & A afterwards, Kirby said something really interesting, which was that "talent is interest". As Mark Carroll says in his excellent write up of the event, enthusiasm can get you so far, but it is being interested enough that creates the real point of difference and lasting value ("one will get you ideas with a shelf life and hopefully somewhat future proof while the other will most likely get you something that’s not even a remix, but just a straight copy"). This, I think, has real resonance for our industry. Remixing has been a fundmental part of human creativity and digital culture. The internet has writ large the possibilities to recombine ideas and content to create the new. APIs and the ever-increasing interconnectivity of tools and services make this more and more seamless. Being interested is perhaps one of the best tools we have for opening up the possibilities to originate better ideas, and plan and build stories. As Kirby says, our creativity comes from without, not from within, and admitting our dependence on one another is not about embracing mediocrity, its a liberation from our misconceptions.

I think it's fair to say, evidenced by the conversation afterwards and the debate on Twitter, that the talk actually started more questions than it answered, which is no bad thing. You can see the commentary and some pictures of the event from those that attended on this Storify (worth a look). And Mark Carroll has even put together an 'everything is a remix' playlist which is pretty cool.

As always, thanks go to our brilliant speaker, and to Google of-course for hosting. Here's to the next one.

*Update*

Phil Adams has written a thoughtful follow up around the 'Talent is interest' idea over here.

And you can now see the Scriberia visual from the event in all it's glory here.

Images courtesy Glyn and Graeme. 

Google Firestarters 7: Remix Culture

"The remix is the very nature of the digital" William Gibson

At our last Firestarters event at Google in September we expored the theme of digital storytelling through the lens of three excellent speakers and some great contributions from the audience. Following on nicely from some of the ideas that arose there, our next event (held at Google HQ in London on November 20th) will be focused on the theme of remix culture. The subject came up in the conversation post one of our previous events, and it is one that I think is fundamental not just to modern culture, but to modern advertising and media. We talk in our industry about creating culture rather than ads, but digital has writ large the possibilities to create original culture from the endless recombination and reworking of existing ideas and content. At the same time media itself has become elementally recombinant as content and conversation is atomised and moves seamlessly across platforms and through APIs, and we combine and remix our media consumption to create new experiences.

To take us on our recombinant journey on the 20th, I'm really excited to say that we have Kirby Ferguson - renowned writer, director and producer of the groundbreaking ‘Everything is a Remix’ series of films, who is flying over from the US for the event. I've long followed Kirby's amazing work in which he tackles the question: Is remixing a form of creativity, a production of the new on the shoulders of what precedes it, or is it just copying? His TED talk (which was described by one of our previous Firestarter's speakers Cory Doctorow as “an amazing, must-see talk about the way that creativity comes about as the result of creative re-use of others' work”) is excellent, and on the 20th he will be building on some of the ideas he talked about at TED, introducing some new ones, and considering the implications for how we originate ideas, plan and build stories for clients.

The event will be held at 5.30 on the 20th and is invite only but as usual I have a few guest passes to give away (first come first served) to readers of this blog. If you'd like one, let me know (I won't be able to respond to everyone but will notify the successful applicants).

How Movements Happen

There's a really interesting chapter of Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit (Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change) analysing the habits of societies and how social movements happen. Duhigg uses the example of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the mid 1950s which was sparked by Rosa Parks being arrested after refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man.

There were of-course many factors surrounding and leading up to the incident which contributed to it becoming a spark for the much wider movement that became the Montgomery Bus Boycott and an early catalyst for the civil rights movement. But Duhigg makes the point that similar incidents had happened before but it was only this one that became a catalyst for a something much bigger. This, he believes, is because it completed three stages that are critical to a social movement. Societal movements, he says, "rely on social patterns that begin as the habits of friendship, grow through the habits of communities, and are sustained by new habits that change participants' sense of self". In other words, it helped that Rosa Parks was connected and well respected in both the black and white communities and her action triggered a series of social habits amongst these 'strong ties'. The movement then grew through the 'weak ties' between the members of the community, herding and peer pressure. And it endured because the Reverend Martin Luther King lead the boycott (bringing him into the national spotlight at the time) and he preached new habits that fed the desire for belief in the possibility of change, a feeling of new identity and ownership, and resulted in new patterns of behaviour.

Fascinating, and lots to take from that I think.

How I Write

One of the regular readers of this blog Olivier Legris was kind enough to give me some good feedback on a recent post and as part of that happened to ask me about my process for writing. I'd never really thought it through before, but doing so made me realise that I definitely have a way of doing things. Whilst I'm not suggesting that my way is the right way (everyone should and no doubt does have their own), or that I know more about writing than anyone else (for tips from people that really do know what they're talking about, take a look at some of Maria Popova's posts on the subject), I thought it might be useful to share some of those thoughts here, so here they are:

Connecting the dots

When I started thinking about how I wrote, I found I couldn't get very far without thinking about why I write. Andrew Sullivan once wrote in The Atlantic: 'Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.' I guess for me, blogging is thinking aloud. It helps me figure out what I think about stuff. To order my thoughts and connect lots of disparate thoughts that seem to swim around in my head, often provoked by something I've seen or read, until I can write about them. Posts often combine over time to into strands of thought that I revisit or which inform thinking about other related things. It's a fantastically useful thing for me. And the feedback I get in the comments serve to make it even more so. I also write a regular column for New Media Age, which is an interesting discipline in that (unlike blogging) there's a (quite strict) word limit and I can't lazy-link out to explain concepts or ideas. I link out a lot. It's useful not only for the readers, but for me as a way of pulling disparate things together and making sense of it all. 

The importance of reading

This may be a personal thing, but I've found that the quantity and quality of input directly affects the quantity and quality of output. So seeing and reading thought provoking opinions, articles, talks (and lots of them) is really important. And I'm not talking about all those list posts that lots of people seem to like to share ('10 best this, 20 worst that, 7 ways to blah, blah, blah). I once wrote about why I thought companies should be encouraged to employ people who blog. Writing about the industry that you're a part of enables you to start fires and make connections that wouldn't otherwise exist. It shows that you have an opinion and, frankly, that you are bothered. I think this is still true. 

Make use of the tools

I use a surfeit of bookmarking/reading tools to help: Pocket, Evernote for some things, Twitter favourites, Delicious (I keep meaning to migrate my 6 years of bookmarks over to Pinboard as the Delicious UX is getting no better but somehow haven't got round to it yet), RSS (these days usually via Flipboard), Zite. They're all good at different things but finding your own composite of different tools to use is important I think. 

The only writing app I use (despite there being many good ones) is a text file. I find it useful to list ideas/thoughts/quotes/snippets that I've found interesting there. It often helps me remember them, but they also often combine to make something new. They say you make your own luck. To a certain extent I think you make your own serendipity too.

These days I tend to write posts directly into Typepad, but I think John Willshire's Artefact cards can be a useful supplement to help get disparate thoughts into some kind of order. The important thing here is to find what works for you.

It's a Commitment

Writing takes a lot of time. At least it does for me. So it's got to be worth it. I'm all for people leaping in and trying it out, but to write continuously for years means that it has to become part of the fabric of what you do and the way you work, in order to not get squashed by the latest client deadline or episode of Masterchef. This may change but for now I can't imagine a time when I didn't blog about something. It's an itch I have to scratch. 

Finding your own style and voice

Most of the blogs I go back to again and again have a strong and unique tone of voice. Finding that tone of voice can be difficult but the best advice is to write for yourself. As the audience grows on some blogs, it can feel as though the author is starting to write for what they think their audience might like rather than what they find interesting or obsess about. I can see how this might work but in my experience those are never the most interesting blogs. Another thought on this comes from Stephen King, whose On Writing is still one of the best books I've read on the subject. In that, he talks about writing for your 'ideal reader' - one person who can represent your readership, give you feedback and tell you when you've written a load of old hogwash. There's no right and wrong with what you choose to write about as long as it matters to you, and blogs should rightly evolve. Somehow, for example, I seem to be doing less of the 'saw this and thought it was interesting' type of quick post, and more of the 'here's what I think about that' type of exposition. There's clearly room for both, but I do wonder if the former hasn't shifted more permanently to the likes of Twitter and Tumblr. 

Anyhow, as I said at the start, this is a personal view and simply what works for me. But I hope it's useful in some way.

Image courtesy

On Company Values

I'm not really a fan of mission statements. Rather than being an exercise in inspiration, looking at an aggregated list of the mission statements of the Fortune 500 companies makes you realise how vague and riddled with corporate-speak many of them are. Mission statements are all too often just that - a statement of intent that is not really brought to life through the culture and daily interactions of the business. 

That said, I think it's very important for companies to have defined values that inform their culture, vision, hiring choices and just about everything they do. As Fred Wilson once said:

"Companies are not people. But they are comprised of people. And the people side of the business is harder and way more complicated than building a product is. You have to start with culture, values, and a committment to creating a fantastic workplace. You can't fake these things. They have to come from the top. They are not bullshit. They are everything. There will be things that happen in the course of building a business that will challenge the belief in the leadership and the future of the company. If everyone is a mercenary and there is no shared culture and values, the team will blow apart. But if there is a meaningful culture that the entire team buys into, the team will stick together, double down, and get through those challenging situations."

Some of these articluations of company culture can be very powerful (like the note that greets Apple employees on their first day). In a separate post, Fred mentions the nine things that Twilio (the web and mobile apps telephony business which is a portfolio company of Union Square) have set out as their values (click to enlarge).

One of my favourites, though, is Biz Stone's set of seven assumptions that he says all Twitter employees are asked to pay attention to and embrace. Despite the fact that we know making assumptions isn’t ideal, he says, we do it anyway so if you’re going to make them, make it these:

1. We don't always know what's going to happen. And that’s OK.
2. Leave space for the unknown.
3. There’s a creative answer to every problem.
4. There are more smart people outside your company than there are inside. Use them.
5. We will win if we always do the right thing for our users.
6. The only deal worth doing is a win-win deal.
7. Your co-workers are smart, and they have good intentions.

Excellent.

Image courtesy

Google Firestarters 5 Visualised

It can't have been easy for the guys at Scriberia to visualise Cory Doctorow's amazing talk at last weeks Firestarters event. But chief scribe Dan has done a fantastic job at committing to illustration a talk crammed with great metaphors and delivered at some pace. So, as a follow up to the write ups of the event, it's worth taking a look. You can view it in its full glory here.