So… every few months I put on one of these Rando Happy Hours, which is essentially me just mining my contact database and telling everyone at the same time where I’ll be drinking one evening. What ends up happening is a really fun social experiment wherein I get to see how the varied people in my offline network interact together.
There’s no goal: it’s totally rando. Hence the name. However, what ends up happening at these things are odd little personality collisions between people who would normally never talk to each other, and I love watching it happen. For instance, one of my music buddies might rub shoulders with a buttoned down colleague of mine from the Pentagon, resulting in commodious AWESOME talk about favorite bands. People have even found new leads on jobs and work through the amorphous blob that is the Du4 grid.
So if you’re in the DC/NOVA area, feel free to come join us in Shirlington on August 30th for a brew. The details follow–
Apologies to all you good people for the lack of substantial new content lately. Work at @Du4.llc has taken off in the past couple months, and a smattering of other esoteria has also begun vying for my time. Instead of whining about it though, I figured I’d post a quick update on what’s new in AWESOME-Land.
I’m hard at work on what I’m publicly calling #TheBigBookThing on Twitter. It’s a novel-like narrative that addresses a lot of my investigations into posthumanity and transhumanism here on the blog, but its design for publication will be anything but traditional book. Speaking of which, I’m looking for creative app developers that are interested in pushing the boundaries of traditional narrative storytelling on tablet devices. If that’s you, please send me a note.
Moments Places International, a Fort Worth, Texas-based bed and breakfast company, just retained my services for some web redesign and social media work. I’m seeking feedback from anyone who wants to comment on what may make their site better seen and better found.
I’m finally getting back into the music business. A couple friends and I have started up a new rock and roll project to gig in the DC / North Virginia area, so I’ve had my head down and my headphones on learning lyrics. Stay tuned to my Twitter feed and the hashtag #Facemelters for more updates on songs and forthcoming venues. Spoiler alert: there will be Oasis.
I highly encourage you to come to Realtime NY on June 6, the event formerly known as TWTRCON. The lads and lasses at Modern Media put on a GREAT show with lots of usable, valuable info.
Please consider joining me for a great regional Sister Cities conference in Riverside, California, September 30 to October 1. If you can’t go, consider sponsoring a young professional or youth enthusiast who may be interested in contributing to citizen diplomacy efforts like Sister Cities.
My Queen of Wifely AWESOMENESS and I are finally planning our honeymoon, a 2-week adventure from Florence, Italy through the South of France to Paris. Hotels, travel tips, and recommendations are always appreciated.
More AWESOME travel coming up too to New Orleans, Fort Worth, Riverside, Houston, New York, the UK, and – with luck – a cross country road trip down memory lane to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where I spent four AWESOME years with my Dad before he died.
Depending on how the summer shapes up, there may very well may be some professional work changes to report. Despite my love of the freedom of independent consulting, Sean Connery said it best: “Never say never again.”
I had a great time last week talking with my buddy Dr. Craig Hayden in his Public Diplomacy class at American University in DC. Craig and I are sometimes-partners-in-crime at the MountainRunner Institute (along with His AWESOMEness, Matt Armstrong, and “Georgia Peach” Shawn Powers). We have a lot of interesting discussions about public diplomacy, strategic communication, and the nature of information and influence in today’s post-digital world.
I’d like to give a great big THANK YOU to all the AU students I met during this discussion. It’s really heartening to me to see so many potential citizen diplomat rockstars in this soul-sucking town. Great talking with you, and I hope we can continue the conversation outside the classroom.
Speaking of which: I know a lot of you are blogging as part of Craig’s class and on your own. Please be sure to call yourselves out in the comments section of these video posts. I’d really like to promote some of the student-led commentary I’ve seen since the in-class discussion. We build our audiences socially, so I’d love to feature some of your opinions and content on Must. Be. AWESOME!!! dot com.
After enjoying JWT‘s roundup of radness from their 2011 predictive trendspotting BIZINT department, I inferred a couple of times that they my have missed some things to watch in the coming year. I struggled with whether or not I was going to do a 2011 predictions post of my own (especially with all of the other great [and TERRIBLE] ones out there). As I intimated in the JWT post though, it’s tough to maintain your street cred as an armchair futurist if you don’t make some play calls – good or bad. It’s not like I can go on TV and just fry motherfuckers with my brain like Jamais Cascio:
Image courtesy of orderofchaos.soup.io
Here then is the Must. Be. AWESOME!!! 2011 Predictive Tapdance:
For all the loveliness that “hope” and “change” brought us in 2009, 2010 saw a whole lot of retrenching when it came to comprehending and engaging Islam. Look for the debate about what constitutes Islam, Islamism, what various groups of modern Muslims want in today’s world, and popular revolutions in the Middle East to ratchet up. Also keep an eye on what the Muslim Brotherhood does in the wake of Mubarak’s resignation: they will telegraph a lot of the conflict about modern Islam.
More Mashups, More Memes
I don’t care what anybody says: mashups and memes will continue to provide ample entertainment to We People of the Internetz. Look for advertisers to begin capitalizing on meme-trending and mashup-producing. Performance indicators: the next acquisition/website startup from the I Can Has Cheezburger collective AND Wieden & Kennedy after hiring the creator of this AWESOME video–
Cloud Seeding
As gaming continues to seep into the popular consciousness through applications like competitive geolocation (i.e. Foursquare and Gowalla) and passive social gaming (i.e. Farmville), look for more creative approaches to “seeding” the cloud with various types of content. Be it for advertising or grassroots mobilization purposes, effective influence and content promotion campaigns of the future will unfold via a variety of platforms. StickyBits and other QR code scanning apps are good indicators of tactical implementations of a cloud seeding strategy.
Hacktivism Triumphant
If WikiLeaks has taught us anything, masses of anonymous hackers can make or break online footprints. With Anonymous’ mobilization against Amazon and other deniers of service against WikiLeaks, it is apparent that all-out online cyberwar can and will occur at a rate of minutes and hours. Government will continue to play catch-up to the independent entities playing havoc with cybersecurity. DDoS attacks will become typical tools of the trade, and countermeasures against such attacks will demonstrate a new “arms race” in evolving security and attack technology. We will also see cyberwars play out in days between entities if not hours and minutes, the extent of which will run the gamut from mere inconvenience to full-on revolution (there’s a reason why Mubarak shut off the Internet, yo). It is possible that a wild 4channer will crack U.S. cyber defenses in 2011 and perhaps provide a 9/11-like impetus for government to begin getting serious with policy and legislation to operate in the digital age.
Barack Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech demonstrated that the U.S. government will continue to centralize public diplomacy initiatives in the White House, leaving State Department assets twisting in the wind as hollow emperors in the field. U.S. legislators will increase the depths to which they could give a shit less in 2011 about PD because PD does not create jobs for Americans. Meanwhile, 20th century institutions of public diplomacy like Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and the Broadcasting Board of Governors will continue to wither and die in the digital age as on-the-minute social reporting and citizen journalism make them further irrelevant. Funding for PD initiatives will continue to stagnate while implementers will find more creative methods of achieving strategic PD goals, mostly via the private sector tech sector and citizen diplomacy organizations. China and some European countries will continue to lead with non-obvious but concerted national efforts in global influence, the effects of which will remain undiscovered by their targets (i.e., US) for years.
Passive Social Gaming EXPLODES
Related to my concept of “cloud seeding,” 2011 will see an explosion of social games in the vein of Farmville. Already, 2011 has seen Zynga publish a suster game to its masses-tranquilizing hit called Cityville. Transmedia, alternate reality gaming, and other episodic social gaming entities will experiment further with audience acquisition, retention, and profit conversion this year. Advertisers will cash in on these mechanisms en masse, driving ad-tired audiences from game to game and forcing ad strategists to begin thinking in different ways about social advertising. We will also see a continued harmonization of transmedia and ARGs cross-platform, online and offline, for social gaming experiences that will, for example, weave in and out of Facebook, Twitter, iPad and other mobile apps, and in-person performance art. More and more people will join longer term games socially as new genres are introduced on social networks. Performance indicator: keep your eyes peeled on LinkedIn for a business-based social game that trains executives in a number of administrivial and professional functions.
Location-based Services Get Profitable
Also related to “cloud seeding,” location-based app services such as Foursquare and Gowalla will rapidly get profitable this year. While many detractors continue to ridicule the small audience size these services carry, their growth will continue by orders of magnitude in 2011, so much so that advertisers and marketers for brick-and-mortar businesses will pay oodles of dough to access their users. Look for more unique rewards for users who check in to local places and events as well as the beginning of an actual value system based on fictional goods (i.e. Gowalla’s items).
People Begin To Realize All This Social Stuff Really IS Creating Socialism 2.0
Marx said it would take capitalism to run its course and fall out of favor before true socialism could take hold of the world. Macro-philosophers and economists will slowly begin to see that that is happening on a mass scale in 2011. Group buying services like Groupon and Living Social, crowdfunded charity programs, realtime crowdsourced news reporting, and near-realtime media curation will continue to prove that power really is all about the people. Democratization of content and price will, therefore, produce The New Socialism or Socialism 2.0. This will freak out conservatives and create performance indicators on conservative news networks that decry not only a socialist presidency but a socialist economy beginning to develop. Look for influencers that combat these conservative perceptions as the emerging leaders of the Socialist 2.0 movement (which in and of itself will never be referred to as an organized, network movement with a solid objective… it will just happen). Parallel to this, fortunes will begin to change hands as sales for various product areas crash: for example, the comics industry will continue to lose sales in print as consumers demand more digital, interactive content.
We Need a New Narrative
No more Harry Potter. No more Lord of the Rings. No more Star Wars. What’s the next big franchise? 2011 will see experimental repurposing of old ideas into new franchises. My money is on Thor and Captain America to be the starting point for a huge Avengers moviefranchise in 2011 and 2012 (with reams of associated multimedia content) while Green Lantern and Transformers: Dark of the Moon tank.
What Do You Think?
Got some predictions of your own? Think I’m off-base about some of these things to watch? Let me know in the comments.
One of my @Du4.llc clients develops episodic social games, and their data confirms how effective engaging, in-game ads can be. A lot of people pooh-pooh advertising in the social age on general principle, but given a certain degree of innovation, I think there’s still a place for them.
None of these are particularly eye-opening, but IDC’s expectation of 25 billion mobile apps sold via various app stores is something to think about. We’re moving to an app ecosystem where simple web tools that enhance users’ lifestyles are becoming a ubiquitous part of life. Imagine where that could take us in 20 years where we’ll be downloading apps directly to implants attached to our five senses. I’m not seeing much in app futures right now, but the premise is sound.
So one of my favorite reads is Venessa Miemis‘s blog emergent by design. Venessa is the first futurist-in-training I’ve met who sought a formal education in futurism. I got to meet her at Stowe Boyd‘s Social Business Edge earlier this year in New York, and I was blown away by her innate creativity and motivation to discover what’s next. It’s people like Venessa that we should be listening to as they punch through the bubble of the present mundanity and shape positive visions of the future. In this post, Venessa describes Jamais Cascio‘s (another AWESOME futurist you should be paying attention to) process for Futures Thinking. It’s a process I’m going to put to work on some of my client projects. For more, Venessa posted a follow-up called 3 Tools for Futures Thinking and Foresight Development that examines some things that can help you put Futures Thinking into practical application.
Some excellent advice for creatives, independents and misifts from Chris Guillebeau at The Art of Non-Conformity. AONC is actually one of the coolest looking blogs I’ve seen in a while, and I’m having fun navigating Chris’s community and discovering old works of his. His commentary is soul food for creatives and wanderers.
Every time I get ready to delete my content feed for Edelman Digital, they put out something like this. This post is a really great roundup of researchers conducting studies into the emerging field of digital anthropology. Each one has taken a slightly different approach to the task of segmenting internet users for study, and there are some fascinating links to their stories and work contained within. As an aside, last year I worked with a social networking research team at a company called Detica. My teammates were young, talented analysts with digital research aptitudes, culturally relevant skills in other languages, and a whole lot of code-monkeying savvy. Our work was very similar to what Edelman describes as digital anthropology but my teammates – ever the AWESOME crowd – coined the term “netnography” for the type of work we were doing. One of these days, I’m gonna get that to stick somewhere…
I could go on and on with links to commentary about Wikileaks’ recent diplomatic cable dump and the subsequent storm of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against it and in defense of it. This issue is probably one of the most fascinating communications events I have ever experiences. I’ve been on both sides of this debate. Having worked in the Pentagon and understanding the necessities of operational security, I’m on one hand appalled by Wikileaks’ behavior. (Moreso, I’m appalled by the inflammatory anti-American statements Julian Assange has made, but that’s a separate issue.) On the other hand, I’m loving the debate this is creating about what government transparency really is and can be. In this world where some podunk, know-nothing ass-clown NCO can lift the entire SIPRNET via CD-ROM and get it published to the Internet, can the federal government truly afford to continue adhering to default security classification just because they don’t want to deal with information getting out to the public? I’ve certainly been in situations where documents were classified for political reasons and not actual security, so the motivation to break down barriers to transparency is understandable. I just don’t think the way to do it is the Wikileaks way.
Even more fascinating in this situation has been 4chan and the Anonymous community of hacktivists basically declaring war against the internet outposts of Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Amazon, and any other online service provider that cut off its services to Wikileaks. This constitutes a citizen-galvanized retaliatory strike against perceived injustice, and most of the U.S. govvies I know who are monitoring this issue are literally left scratching their heads. I’m also astounded that the U.S. military, its component commands, and even its contractors have virtually stuck their heads in the sand to avoid dealing with the implications of Wikileaks: some defense outfits I know of are scared to death of mentioning Wikileaks in public conversations because they think they’re going to get hacked and lose their security clearances.
All this begs for more thought, so I may develop a separate post about in the near future. I definitely think Wikileaks is forcing us to redefine what we consider “free press,” “mainstream media,” and notions of transparency. It’s just going to be a long, ugly debate getting to any kind of common ground.
Anonymous's OPERATION PAYBACK call to arms (Image via Gawker)
Work lately has been forcing me to think about existential things. I’ve recently closed some client work that’s necessitated heavy research and reading into texts and ideas that really unsettled me. Much of my unease has to do with philosophical turmoil in that some of these ideas force me to take a really hard look at HOW I believe and not just WHAT I believe.
Image courtesy of Immortal Humans
(Belief being what it is, I shy away from ideological combat as much as possible. I find I can never come to a mutually settling agreement with those who believe in something so strongly that even rational conversation about those subjects become laced with emotional poison. I feel there is such disdain for rationalism these days that it makes more sense for me to listen, review, reflect, and pontificate only when I have a solid grasp of the issues involved. Of course, that’s a lot harder than it sounds. Hence my predilection for comic books, explosions, zombies, and tits.)
Cover of Ilium, courtesy of Amazon.com
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the term posthuman, which is something I first heard about from sci-fi comic book writer and futurist Warren Ellis. Ellis used the word as a more apt descriptor for superhuman or super powered heroes in his comics. Posthumanism is a different concept, however, in that it considers an evolutionary state of mankind that’s difficult to conceive but generally regarded as improved or evolved past our current state; hence the “post.” I’m most interested in the science fiction concept of posthuman. In Dan Simmons‘ Ilium and Olympos, posthumans are a race of humans who have evolved so far beyond what we perceive as normal humanity that they became super-powered gods who eventually manipulated time, space and probability to play out their whims (in these books, that took the form of a recreated Trojan War). (Ilium and Olympos actually post so many interesting and thoughtful questions, I could spend weeks getting to the bottom of them.)
So I’m thinking about all of this in terms of a question: “Where are we going?” From here, from our myopic view bound by present perceptions of time, I’m falling deeper into the well of contemplating our shared future. Or futures plural. In some cases, the existential questions brought on by increasing degrees of ideological combat in today’s perception space lead me to feel more and more pessimistic about the future. So I’m what I’m trying to do is link the unfortunate human realities of the present to something much more rewarding, scientific and dynamic… something posthuman.
None of this thinking is taking the form of actual product at this time, save for blog entries like this. I have a rough idea for combining some of this thinking about posthumanity with socio-political observations about the present into some type of narrative. This would be a lot of fun to produce, but I need to spend a lot of time ironing out the theory into a story. An AWESOME story, at that.
On that note, here’s a more specific list of some of the things that have inspired this line of thinking. If you have any additional recommendations for study, please let me know in the comments.
The thing I love about the modern day is how goddamn EASY it is to do whatever you want to, whenever you want, however you see fit. Feel like creating an internet empire on the back of your G.I. Joe doll collection? Go to it. Found some out-there idea no one else has and want to gas-pedal that thing into notoriety? Make it happen.
What seems like a million times a day, people complain about reasons NOT to do something. This is the very definition of LAME. They give endless excuses on why they’re not qualified, how they don’t have time, how they’re not well-connected, on and on, ad nauseum.
You think just because somebody else did something AWESOME that you CAN’T? I say fuck that shit, man. Stop saying, “Why THEM?”
WHY NOT YOU?
Within the last thirty days, I have closed an immense deal for my consultancy, traded sellable ideas with a television creator, booked travel to five different places I never thought I’d visit, gotten elected to the boards of two august institutions, and made personal contact with one of my own internet heroes. I did all this because I said, “Why the fuck WOULDN’T I do this???” I made it happen. I didn’t prevaricate, commiserate, or otherwise masturbate about how and why things couldn’t work out. I Scott Pilgrim‘d my way into some great things. That’s a lot of “I’s” but these are just examples of an attitude change I made early on this year that’s paying craploads of dividends now.
The Gov 2.0 Expo has been a pretty amazing experience, speaking aside. I’ve met some really great people working at hyperlocal levels of government on extremely cool, forward-thinking means of connecting with their citizens. Sometimes you have to really have to embed at these events to get a good understanding of their value, and this one delivered.
I’ll write up a more in-depth analysis of the event once I’ve had some time to think on things. But in the meantime, here’s video of my 5-minute presentation from Tuesday’s Keynote Kickoff. (Thanks to the fine people at O’Reilly Media for recording, livestreaming and promoting this!)
I am a huge proponent of the concept of social business design, or the calibration of a business according to social objectives (as opposed to profit objectives). The thinking in this area, oft spearheaded by people from The Dachis Group, addresses the social imperatives inherent in any use of social media or social networking technology.
Last week, I got the chance to participate in Social Business Edge, an event organized by blogger and thinker Stowe Boyd, that explored the furthest envelopes of thinking about social business design. The overarching theme of this event involved the very act of being social and how humans, as social creatures, must begin to structure their businesses to accommodate that fact. Social networking technology has enabled such enterprises of the future that industrial era business is slowly becoming more ineffective, unpopular, and unprofitable.
The ever-awesome Deanna Zandt and host Stowe Boyd talking about something rad.
Social business will necessitate a fundamental redefinition of “work.” People, for example, will trade productivity for connectedness every time… but this leads to previously unseen new levels of productivity.
Another common theme involved how business 1.0 used war as a metaphor. Social business, some argued, should be considered “village building” instead of “army raising.” The traditional business goal of achieving maximum profit margins was shunned in favor of collective dialogue between everyone in a business ecosystem: executive, employee, customer, and so on.
Baratunde Thurston, one of the chief minds behind The Onion, argued that creativity and humor sit at the center of social interactions. He used several examples on Twitter of how one can use humor on Twitter to galvanize community building. (Check out @baratunde‘s Twitter lists. One example is a “twitcom” where users came together to create an on-the-fly Twitter sitcom using many obvious sitcom stereotypes.)
I really responded to Baratunde’s in-your-face presentation. Here’s a guy who makes his living “not giving a shit and outright hating” his audience (his words!). He’s one more AWESOME influencer I can point to who catalyzes us to do our own thing… even when that thing is terribly foul. Despite the naysayers and the language police, Baratunde’s work on The Onion and elsewhere continues to bring in the clicks.
Baratunde Thurston telling people to get their fuck-off on.
The event featured several other amazing presenters including John Hagel III (who brainfucked me with his AWESOME talk about the future of knowledge in social networks); Venessa Miemis, a Twitter acquaintance who is harnessing the collective power of her connections (and their connections, thereby socially steamrolling) into a video chat-based Junto; and Lee Bryant, CEO of Headshift (a social business company that Dachis recently acquired). I think Lee’s preso best exemplified the themes and takeaways of the day, and he graciously made it available for embed below. Lee talked at length about why businesses should be social and how to recognize the individuals within an organization that will advocate social business change.
I had a great time in New York meeting and hanging out with the Social Business Edge presenters and attendees. This was a group of thinkers and doers whose influence challenges me to think in different ways about social business. I think one of the hallmarks of the social business age is an inherent ability to lean forward into one’s network and not absorb the knowledge that network transfers but act upon it and improve it. As a social animal myself, I already picked up conversations with many of these folks on Twitter (which seems to be the popular social media tool of choice for conversation-replicant dialogue). I can’t wait to “do some business” with these peeps in the near future.
Check out the hashtag #sbenyc for more livetweets from Social Business Edge. I have also embedded Lee Bryant’s video preso below. Below that, I’ve added a number of additional observations about the event that I collated in a trip report for The Rendon Group.
Additional insights from the event:
Social business is not about closing deals; it’s about collectively enhancing your group’s social capital and expand the resulting relationships.
Social businesses will attain social capital (and eventually profit from that) by opening their systems and processes to their communities and demystifying themselves.
Customers will tell you how to sell to them if you treat them socially, as members of a greater community or ecosystem… and NOT as faceless masses.
New business models are warranted: command-and-control structures create massive costs versus open and distributed models.
Passion is equally proportional to connectedness. However, passion does not equal happiness. Some of the most passionate people in organizations are the most frustrated because they see what is possible and are unable to move the organization to attain those possibilities.
Debi Klein of Communispace briefed a company case study on how she creates closed, researchable online communities to conduct market intelligence. For teenage boys, they do this for brands like Axe & Gilette by starting a private online community for boys to talk about getting girls. This listening technique is a valuable source of business intelligence.
Unanswered question: How do you resource social business? Many of the techniques involved require lots of overhead and pre-investment. There was no discussion of how current businesses budget for such transformation.
Updated to include video of John Hagel III’s AWESOME talk. Pay attention to what he says about knowledge flows (versus stocks) and change driven by vision (versus threats):
Phew! Lots of conferences, workshops, and summits lately. Given that I love connecting and networking with people, I find that even the least relevant of conferences can yield super positive experiences.
Still, time is a commodity, and it’s sometimes hard to determine what’s worth your while. I used to work for a government program manager who used to tell me that meetings and conferences were a waste of time; that you spend more time trying to determine if the event is worthwhile than actually working. We always butted heads about this because my view was that even at the most time-wasting event, you can still find value if you know where to look and you have an objective.
I’m getting ready to board a train to New York for the Social Business Edge conference put on by Stowe Boyd. Despite missing all of The Dachis Group‘s Social Business Summits this year, I’m still convinced that social business is the new big concept for strategic thinkers and planners. Since this is a path on which I intend to take @Du4.llc, I’m willing to “waste” a little time and money connecting with this community, integrating some of their skills into my business offerings, and, hopefully, booking some work.
Here are a couple places you can catch me over the next couple months. Feel free to holler at me if you want to connect in person in and around any of these events:
New York, April 18-20 (Social Business Edge)
Los Angeles, May 2-4 (super secret squirrel engagements!)
Washington, DC, May 10-14 (reporting on and conducting workshop seminars linked to InfoWarCon 2010)
Washington, DC, May 25-27 (presenting at Gov 2.o Expo)
