ABBA, Anamnesis & social memory in the 21st Century.

14 Friday Mar 2014

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70s & 80s Music, ABBA. Social memory, Anamnesis, Bowie, Christian Theology, Dancing Queen, Dylan, Ga Ga, Gamification, i-pad, Incarnation, IPv6, Madge, mamma mia, memory, multi-generational, peta-flops, Reinvention, social networks, Socrates, Swiss Army Knife, The Day Before You Came. Ibiza, Tour Of Duty

By my reckoning ABBA and the philosophical Socratic theory of anamnesis will finally meet somewhere along IPv6, just at the crossroads where peta-flops of ’70s and ’80s pop tune mash-ups collide with the PDF of the Ga Ga/Madonna/Bowie Manual of Reinvention.

Given that there’ll be 6 billion online personas (giving the current 2Bn + users a very conservative 3 online personas each to play with) using the crossroads at the same time, its going to get messy out there.

Now ABBA, fine, got that bit – and the Lady meets Madge meets Thin White Duke stylie for reinvention and the death of discarded personas, yup. Got that but Anemwhat?!

Anamnesis. A simple philosophical Socratic theory – and a pretty powerful one. Which is why it was quickly air-lifted into Christian Theology as a fabulous way to frame an infinite eternal re-incarnate soul running through all of humanity over time, with Christian teaching merely being a way of ‘recovering’ pre-existing yet dormant spiritual knowledge within us to accompany the soul we are born with. Nice.

Wikipedia cites the following descriptor: Socrates… …suggests that the soul is immortal, and repeatedly incarnated; knowledge is actually in the soul from eternity, but each time the soul is incarnated its knowledge is forgotten in the trauma of birth.What one perceives to be learning, then, is actually the recovery of what one has forgotten.

So what on earth have ABBA got to do with it?

I reference ABBA in this piece because, for me, they represent one of those entities that have transcended standard memory and entered a longer, denser living framework of collective or social memory – one with multiple and complex networks of interrelated life times.

They have also reached far enough into the future from their heyday to touch the hem of the skirt of the Infinite Digital Now and all that it brings. And I have a feeling that, through their burgeoning role in the global fabric of social memory and the furious sharing psst! pass it on culture of the social networks, ABBA are hurtling towards a state of anamnesis.

OK, in the realm of philosophical profundity ABBA’s Waterloo doesn’t quite set the same bar as perhaps Dylan’s ‘Times They are a Changing‘ but that does not exclude them from becoming something that a classical philosophical text might describe.

How they do this is another question entirely. Maybe they’re just so wrong they’re right. Perhaps the unique fusion of chirpy and deceptively engineered pop music and the flip-flop nature of their lyrical content: from the charming euro-nonsense lyrics of Waterloo to songs like The Day Before You Came, sung with the long shadow of Leonard Cohen and Der blaue Engel hovering over it, seems to have allowed ABBA, like all music of increasingly mythical status to become one of the more powerful threads stitching together the fabric of our social memory.

ABBA, like Mozart, Piaf, Elvis, Bowie and Ga Ga, have come to be both perceived and used as a sort of socio-cultural swiss army knife. They are a lever, a key, a signpost, a mapping point, a cork-screw and an emotional cattle prod in the ever-expanding and lengthening fabric of social memory. Music like ABBA’s fixes points of social memory into a particular context, thus creating a door through which we can access them.

But just a great song doesn’t cut it. That’s just a memory – a time machine to what was. To become part of social memory – the stored, dormant library of evolution strategies that we draw upon when life’s challenges open out, shut down, twist, stutter, or fail around us – the music must be potent enough, rich enough and loaded enough to be capable of regeneration – of itself creating a living, constantly-reincarnating relentlessly-reinventing self to qualify.

Whatever it is, and whether you like it or not, ABBA have done an amazing job of creeping under the skin and into the psyche of multiple moments, moods and generations. ABBA. The moves. The powder-blue eye shadow. The melancholy. The show. The Movie. Meryl Streep!. Madonna!! The spiritual and social halo of ABBA is immense. And the ley-lines of its cultural, social and generational impacts fall across every shape and form of social group and individual typology.

For me, being a divorce child of the 1970s in southern England, living the bleak video musical backdrop of The Winner Takes It All; and with most summers spent partly on the White Island amongst Scandinavians of all hues (long before the football hooligans and pill head fraternity turned up) I can attest to ABBA being a great example of the social big bang theory – from its very particular era specific explosive beginnings to hurtle outwards in an exponentially increasing mass of social knowledge, reincarnated and recovered across many lifetimes.

The second I hear those words. “I don’t want to talk… …cos’ it makes me feel sad…” I am hurled into a cement lorry of memory and feeling. That’s already more than just a memory. It is a living recollection that occurs with feeling and context – a trojan horse of social memory: an echo of its first incarnation. On hearing it I am immediately primed to mitigate all manner of degrees of emotional distress

But also, if I am on a dance floor and hear Madonna’s Hung Up, it’s the ABBA sample and the latent recovered feeling carried in the Trojan horse of it that lifts my heart, not Madge’s new self conscious re-fabrication of it. But the complexity of emotion that the music evokes is layered by the moment in which it is now being recreated and in which I am enjoying it. It is reincarnated.

But in the same way, the surprising joy I get when I watch Mamma Mia with my 6 year old daughter is transcendent. In this way it is incarnated again with additional and highly complex additions of light and shade for me.

This to me is a good demonstration of how music moves from being an anthem for a time past to being a source of energy, revitalisation, reassurance and guidance, transforming itself as it evolves into a burgeoning strand of social memory.

It is at this evolutionary level that music moves from being a linear recollection of a bunch of chords and stuff you liked – a piece of sentimental data as someone once chose to describe emotion – to being a living evolving strand that entrenches itself in cultures communities and tribes across multiple generations, drawn on as a social tool and in doing so, becoming reborn again and again.

My daughter will internalize the Mamma Mia experience, along with my own recollections about ABBA, music, the 1970s and my parents as part of that recollection, and it will create emotional triggers and feelings that will continue to exist, carried within her – only to be reborn every time she hears the opening chords and voices of Dancing Queen.

The enriching memory and the spiritual and emotional information and knowing carried within it is evolving, becoming more dense and complex, developing a mythology of its own as opposed to simply reflecting that of the people who carry it.

It is in that way that something as trite as “I don’t want to talk…” or the first 4 chords of Dancing Queen, a shard of popular culture from 30 something years ago, begin to transcend normal memory, and become living social memory: a source of emotional intelligence and evolutionary experience that the same tribes cultures descendants can draw on to keep reweaving resilient communities, navigate turbulence and upheaval and ultimately manage change. This is much the same journey as that of pieces of philosophy, spirituality, faith and religion, continuously regenerated retold and proselytised across tribes, regions, cultures and generations to expand to cover the world.

To demonstrate the process in action, and of how the ripples of impact and emotional knowledge grow both more complex, and abstracted the further they get from their original source we might set an experiment:

If we were to play the opening chords of ABBAs Dancing Queen to a massed variant audience – a mixture of 8 years olds, 18 years olds, 30 year olds, 50 year olds and 70 year olds, both in villages and cities in different regions and parts of the world – and then, subsequently record the emotions raised, feelings felt, wisdoms recovered, the light and dark of their deeper emotional reflections; to reveal the texture and richness of social memory being stirred and potentially drawn on – I think we would be staggered at the scale, breadth and depth of social memory: the ‘recovery’ of deep rooted emotional ‘knowledge’.

More importantly, I believe the rarified theory of Anamnesis will help us to explain and navigate some of the more complex philosophical dimensions of social memory as they develop in the new landscape of the hybrid virtual and actual 21st century lives we live.

And we’re going to need all the help we can get in the moral maze of the multi-device ‘me’.

My point is this: in the modern world we are expected to live many more ‘lives’ than our forebears. In our post-modern world we re constantly reborn: professionally, personally, materially. It is seen as part of thriving.

I might also venture that consumerism, locked as it is in a relentless round of reinvention of the self through a continuous stream of new identities purchased – cars clothes homes holidays – is creating a truncated state of anamnesis – an expanding universe of reoccurring rebirth across ever decreasing periods of time.

But that is not where the tension will occur.

The tension will come from the fact that underneath all of this new multiple selves we still carry with us a far more one-dimensional primal, living memory. One bound by a much longer thread of continued existence; that gets passed down socially through nurture and the cultural context we find ourselves in, from generation to generation.

But the concept of generations is being rewritten by the modern world. Generations used to be a simple descriptor to identify the progeny of humanity in such as way as to mark them out by the fact that they exist within the same age frames in the same time frames. To be 16 in 1968 for example sets out a generational viewpoint and compass from which to define and explore many different dimensions of self. Generations were a linear thread that dropped down through history tying the past to the future.

But our new world of tech induced multi-persona living is exploding the concepts of generation sideways, upwards, outwards. There are now multiple generations of individuals, communities cultures and mindsets housed in each generation

Ancestors and descendents and the linear relationship between them and the threads of social memory they carry with them have been shattered into a glittering constellation of existence virtual, real or otherwise.

They do not just stand behind and in front of us any more. Our own multiple myths and histories scatter all about us in varying forms of existence – some live, some dead, some decaying dismissed or forgotten.

In a socially charged world of the multi-persona person: whose face-book profile might accent their personal ‘myth’ or story one way or tell of one very siloed professional individual Linked In one in another: their Sim city or Tour Of Duty persona another again – add in a few Farmville coins, on line shopper profiles and PIN numbers, multiple email tags and a twitter account and you’re up to 7 personas as it is. Each one ‘born’ and nurtured and raised to fulfil its immediate social need in the context of the device or channel it exists within.

So I would venture that social memory as it used to be, framed either by classical concepts like anamnesis or more recent frameworks like nationalism, versus how we have begun to frame and explore the dimensions of social memory in the last 10 years makes for a very different creature.

The next time Dancing Queen comes on – and a herd of 50 something’s, 8 year olds, 23 year olds and the ironic 41’ers charge the wedding dance floor, the old model of social memory is at work in the new world – a linear pass the parcel of collective and compounding memories, feelings, in the context of multiple pieces of data embracing occasion, company, personal fulfillment and development, fluid time and fixed geographies.

The same one that amortises their elder’s wisdoms in a box, repeats parental aphosrisms and behavioural tics. Where the work ethics and behaviours of 3 hundred years ago have been passed from Tofflers First Wave to the Second to the beginning of the third with everyone using the mistakes of the past to try and reset the opportunities of the future in an evolutionary line.

But now, where ABBA, the classic concepts like anamnesis and our 21^st century multi-dimensional and multi-existence models of social memory meet, playing out across our twittering Id Ego i – pads, there’s something altogether new and far more complex happening.

Social memory is fracturing at light speed into a hydra of persona channels – the social memory as embraced in the virtual world will evolve in a different manner to its real world cousins. The social memory of gamers will have both gamer specific dimensions as well as real world ones. The time machine of music and the ever referable digital filing systems of the cloud will create a fractured concept of temporal existence.

This is no different to what was before – just multiplied. Young men who went to war developed a parallel social memory to those of the families at home. Exclusive of of but not inextricable to the everyday lives they returned to. One they could reach in and out of as they needed to. The same stands for us. But we tend to be reaching into our parallel social memory not of trenches, gas, camaraderie, distress and man’s inhumanity to man – but that of hot dog and champagne restaurant reviews and download recommendations from last year and an blog archive!

And Philosophy, truncated by the new concepts of existence, the socially networked virtual landscape and the multiple life-strands technology offers us outside the old linear temporally locked life span, is being jugged, butter patted, creamed and squeezed through the piping gun to spell out something new: but what?

Money Money Money? SOS? Take A Chance? Dum Dum Diddle? 0r Bang-A-Boomerang?

CLYDE: a short story about Palm Oil & the curse of orange fur

28 Friday Feb 2014

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Aunt Bessie's Yorkshire Puds, ecosystems, Fiat UNO, Frank N Furter, Galaxy Chocolate, i-phones, Louisville Sluggers, Not in my name, orangutans, palm oil, Pot Noodles, Rainforest degradations, Rainforests, Responsible sourcing, Texan Weed, toxic consumerism, Vegetable Oil

Jeezus!! ‘thought fancy dress parties were meant to be fun.

The blood pouring from the cavernous wound striping across his forehead soaked the viscose orange ‘real look’ fur of Jake’s ape suit hood.

His head hurt. Bt this was no hangover. Even though they’d nailed the booze last night to be fair; and come the strike of midnight, the post spliff-munchies madness had set in. The Pot-Noodle-dunked Pringles were just the beginning.

They’d nailed every snack in the flat: Aero Bar: 1, Quality Street: 13, Ben & Jerry’s: 4 spoons, Jammie Dodgers: 7, half Dave’s Galaxy – and they even dug out the Aunt Bessie’s from the freezer, microwaved and then smeared peanut butter on them.

Nice. That ‘s Texan weed for you. Leaving no snack opportunity left unturned. But his sweetly moisturised forehead was not in great shape. Though skin tone was the least of his problems right now.

The post-binge morning had demanded the special forces of facial forgiveness and some heavy grooming to get him ‘meeting-ready’. Once he’d Gillette’d the iron fillings off his chin the cabinet beckoned.

He could still taste the vague glimmer of the Total Care Colgate at the corner of his lips, but it was overshadowed by the metallic taste of his own glottal blood.

At least he smelt great.

Trish’s smelly Body Shop soap always worked a treat; with three squeezes of her Herbal Essence shampoo just to bob things along – though this morning he could barely muster a whimper as he rinsed the foam out of his hair; let alone a half decent orgasmic screech.

He felt like screaming now though. His right leg seemed to be twitching all by its self.

And a strange needle like pain was working its way out from a pooling red stain around a large gash in his over-foamed orange belly fur.

This morning he had even nicked Trish’s smart Clinique and Elizabeth Arden crèmes (that Olay stuff of hers always made his face feel like he’d rubbed acid in it). His skin felt great!

And he didn’t throw up his Nut Clusters and over-Clovered Hovis toast at work this time so last night’s excesses were obviously being held in check, much like the rest of him slopping about inside his dressing up box outfit right now.

He looked to the side. His other leg was still twisted up and caught between the car sill and the adjustable driver’s seat. They must have got him just as he was stepping back in to the car.

He hadn’t noticed anyone in the street. Clueless. Minding his on business.

He’d told the lads he’d pick them up en-route and then they’d drive to the fancy dress party together. There was something funny about Darth Vadar, Frank N Furter (Jez would be secretly over-egging his sister’s Great Lash Mascara) Clyde the Orangutan (Toby’s one sop to his hero Clint Eastwood’s more populist cinematic oeuvre), and the uncomfortable majesty of Phil’s Elmo ensemble, all stuffed into a Fiat Uno.

He’d stopped to use the ATM next door to the RAINFOREST SPA. Hadn’t noticed a thing. He certainly hadn’t see it coming.

The first blow had knocked the bolus of Wrigley’s and one front tooth out of his mouth. After that the blows just rained down on him. Bats of some sort he reckoned. And by that he meant the blunt Ash of the slugger variety and not the flappy midnight in the rainforest kind.

His new baby, his I-phone, was smashed to pieces scattered across the pavement around him: bastards.

What had he done to anyone? Ever? His right eye went blind.

God, could murder a Mars bar right now. This thought was swiftly followed by another; the last in fact that would ever cross his conscious mind.

Last time I’m going anywhere dressed as an orangutan.

AUTHORS NOTE: This short story was written to illustrate and challenge the dislocation that exists between what is done in our name in the pursuit of industrially farmed Palm Oil and the everyday products that we use – written along the thin orange line between us and our simian cousins

Every product bar the Fiat UNO mentioned in this short story contains Palm Oil. If we were to personally pay the same bill our Simian cousins do for its place in our convenience, perhaps we’d think twice about the products we used with convenient ignorance.

Hip bone’s connected to the i-phone & the evolutionary curve of a trouser pocket.

27 Thursday Feb 2014

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American Eagle Jeans, behavourial change, efficiencies & economies, Evolution, Hot Sexy Love Strides, Human resilience, Ilipsoas muscle, RSI, smart phones, software programmer, upgrades, Wired

Okay; hands up who recognises this everyday irritation:

You’re faffing about, and then suddenly you need to crouch down or lean over: to tie a shoe-lace, pick up a child, smell a flower or rescue a shish kebab you’ve dropped on the pavement.

As you tip forwards, the space between your upper thighs and abdominal muscles decreasing, you are suddenly aware of the top and bottom of the glamorous, chic, multifunctional atmospherically connected smart phone tucked into your front jean or trouser pocket digging into your hip and thigh with perfect synchronicity.

Whoa! No thanks.

Ping. Up you go again, straightening up, digging out and transferring said chic smart phone to a, well, slightly smarter storage place – a back pocket or perhaps a surface near by.

And down you go again to complete the original action.

(This particular form of RSI – Repeatedly Stupid Inclination – is not to be confused with the lavatory based RSI suffered while turning and leaning over to flush said lavatory and watching said glamour phone slide out of your top pocket to plunge into the satanic stew below you for the fourth time in 3 weeks.)

So let’s have a closer look at this particularly ‘drinking bird’ RSI – three aspects of it to be precise: specifically; the efficiency, ergonomics and evolution of it.

Firstly, efficiency.

The repetition of the action of bending down, straightening up, reordering the phone to a back pocket or some other place, and bending down and straightening up again in pursuit of one simple action is simply inefficient.

Any Time-and-Motion or statistical geek will clearly set out in no uncertain and equated terms how, regardless of from which vantage point you view this: either that of time and motion or that of consumption of physical energy (body muscle mass and the liquids salts and sugars required to ignite and drive them) it’s simply a waste of time and energy.

Secondly, in ergonomic terms, it is all wrong, in so many ways. From a physical design aspect, having something repeatedly digging into your iliopsoas muscle at the top of your hip joint creates imperfect motion, impairs good posture, decreases cognition, creates irregular or anomalous strain on lower back muscles and therefore, ergonomically, it is flawed.

It is bad design: from the point of view of the phone design, the trouser pocket design (position) and ultimately the design of the human body.

To be fair the latter only really becomes an issue if the two former design concepts render themselves impervious to change, immoveable in their conceptual (and physical) position due either to some crushing fashion mantra insisting on the pocket’s placement being ‘just so’ or our digital compulsive-obsessive need to view ever increasing amounts of content of ever decreasing quality and charm on increasingly bigger screens continues unabated.

Yes, for the observant out there, the science of ergonomics does collide with that of human behaviour at this juncture. The behavioural scientists would point to the fact that, if we keep putting our phone in ‘that front pocket’; if we continue to simultaneously squat and bend forwards to try to pick up the pair of discarded whatevers off the floor, said smart phone will continue to jag into our hip, continue to hurt and irritate and frustrate us; the chances are we will eventually stop doing it.

Current subjective research group of one (me) and some close friends seems to point to the opposite of the evolving learned behaviours law occurring though.

So, this all brings us nicely to the third aspect of discussion: Evolution.

The question in this pocket-meets-mobile-meets-human triangulation is not so much how it will evolve but rather which pillar of it will evolve.

So, one might suggest that the phone tech companies should be the ones to evolve (given that they spuriously upgrade stuff once a week roughly as it is so why not). Perhaps they could look to ‘soften’ the line of the phone, round the shape out, or perhaps even go the extra mile and create some breakthrough flexible tech – a mobile with a flexing hi res super screen set in a pliant, rubberised polymer with built in ‘give’: but I doubt it.

So what about the apparel companies? What about the fashion brands? American Eagle developing mobile friendly slung-front pockets jeans? Patched pockets constructed specifically to off set the jagging mobile mauling? Only if you could convince the mass wearer that they were still going to look as hot as a Hawaiian chilli and be able to sashay along life’s catwalk with no loss of WOW. Otherwise, open stitched slung pockets might get a little niche action from the software programmer in Shoreditch but otherwise Uh! Uh! I don’t think so.

So if we can’t rely on human intelligence to offset the problem, and for some reason the tech companies and the apparel companies get in cahoots with each other, and apply an intransigent and frankly fascist line in the sanctity of their existing design, the impacts on the human body could get kind of funny and kind of expensive kind of soon.

Given that 5 or 6 years typing from a bad keyboard position with an imperfectly height adjusted screen is about to plunge most developed economies, employers and insurance providers into a mire of RSI absence, claim and therapy (Last year 5.4 million days were lost in sick leave due to RSI and, every day, six workers left their jobs because of RSI) underwritten by a particular crisis in generational diversity (most of these sufferers are under 45, and just over half of them are women.) imagine what this could auger for the mobile mauled hip.

If the we continue to turn a blind eye to this issue what are the consequences for us physically, spiritually and culturally?

What would happen to our bodies? How would the iliopsoas and gluteus muscles adapt given that the gluteus alone connects the ilium, sacrum, and coccyx to the femur? What would happen to their shape and muscle type?

Would our core muscles adapt to compensate? OR become corrupted in their current form?

What would the offset or ‘referred’ symptoms and impacts be? Given that, especially in the hip and lower back, conditions induced by ‘referral’ from pre-existing conditions elsewhere is quite commonplace.

Would the impaired compression and twist incurred in every repetition of the action lead to greater likelihood of prolapse discs?

Would there be an indentation, or a coarsening of the hip bone just at the point of contact developed over time? Would that coarsening be so particular as to able to be identified in the skeletal remains we leave behind? One hundred years from now would a cold-case pathologist be able to know whether Jane Doe wore a particular style of American Eagle jeans and used a Samsung Notes III just by the nature, bevel and texture of a dent in her hip?

And then we have the socio-cultural impacts!

Would there be a new development of specific Pilates and Yoga instruction and Courses for sinus coxae, or ‘Pocket Hip’ as it would become colloquially known.

Would a cache develop around having or not having Pocket Hip? (or i-hip as the Apple Disciples would call it). Would i-hip suddenly be honoured with a Double Page Spread in Wired magazine?

The mind toggles!

Anyway, just putting it out there for you.

Brand weavers, strategic threads & finding your future brand fabric.

24 Monday Feb 2014

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algorithms, brand design, brand experience, Digital Connectivity, Human Networks, human protocols, Living In The Now, multi-dimensional brand mapping, old school Ad Land dinosaurs, relentless revolutions and reinventions, Strategic Resilience

The old world of brand dimension, mapping and engineering is way past its sell-by and use-by date.

Which is why the majority of organising ideas and campaigns and even some of the movement thinking generated by agencies on their clients’ behalf fall short.

The relentless evolution of the brand experience at every touch point through every advocate and carried in every stakeholder in the brand multiplied by every value added moment that can be either created or captured in those strands and threads, repeatedly and in an evolving manner DEMANDS that the north stars, organising ideas and movement minded slogans we create to galvanise the stakeholders are fluid evolving and compelling (i.e. they compel us beyond reason to act within the desired state of the relationship to mutual benefit and effect).

The digital state of myriad-being-and-doing has shifted the nature and architecture of the brand experience for better and wiped the one-dimensional smile off its face.

Lets here is for the ‘–ing’ and the ‘–ish’ – the ever-evolving nature of the brand revolution.

No absolutes, no emphatic solid sided imperatives (unless it’s the promise you underwrite your offering with – which should be immovable immutable and non negotiable)

BRANDS AS PATTERNS FABRICS ALGORITHMS AND TEXTURES

The age of the Ivory tower plinth and altar brand is dead.

Digital citizenship and our newly connected world has rewritten the terms and rues of engagement between customer, the brand and the business that delivers it

In real terms when one takes into account the measures and dynamics of Reputation, the transactional and interactive relationships (emotional, functional and financial), the criteria of NPS and advocacy models, the culture of intense, CRM and customer-centricty, multiple channels and touch points, proliferation of content rich engagement, activation tools and the rise of the consumer activist:

The shift is more than inevitable: it is compulsory – the cost of doing great business and building a resilient company in the process.

SHIFT

FROM:

Brands as top down cascades with the dressing up boxes of marketing and communications to play with:

TO:

Brands as a relentless repetition of millions of tiny meaningful intentions, moments experiences, transactions, interactions, gestures, rituals and acts played out across time, platforms, spaces, containers, messages, between every customer, employee, supplier, partner and wider participants

Each brand presents itself in real-time and terms as an endless and evolving kaleidoscopic pattern, fabric algorithm or texture into which value must be threaded and woven to secure it and capture it.

This is where real brand resilience and saliency meet.

Through this state of being, rare experience will come.

It’s here, in and around this relentless evolving fabric of experience where leadership stories will be told – and keep being told of you.

Sshhh. Your ears are burning!

Pandora, The Big Box of Trust & The long shadow of our digital Dorians.

20 Thursday Feb 2014

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Big Brother, Collective Psychosis, Corporate Ethics, Corporate Trust, CRM, Data Day Lives, Data Security, Digital Lives, Dorian Grey, Hidden Lives, Identity, Indiscretion, Integrity, Meaningful Brand Relationships, Misplaced trust, Multiple Personalities, New Virtual Currency, On line Personas, On line Rewards, Psychopathy of the virtual self, Sanctity of personal Information, Smoke-screening data use, Spider Software. The Virtual Tsunami

“I’m not sure when it all began – the butchers, the bailers the lynchers and the faith killers

I know that the crazy happened in June. Because June’s my birthday and mum and dad got really busy and mum missed my birthday, which she never does.

But the killings and the jumpers and the religious nuts I think that came a little later

My name is Pandora and I’m 12 years old. But people say I’m quite grown up for my age.

I live in a house which is kind of big but a bit higgledy-piggledy with my brother Jake and our dog Slipper

I’ve got a hand me down 3DS from my brother but our i-pads and kindles went long ago. And all the internet stuff got burned in the garden – dad lost it when mum and dad were having a barbecue. Embarrassing.

I call all the crazy people the butchers and bailers and lynchers because that’s what my mum and dad called them.

Not sure what they were all getting so weird about. I mean WTF! have they been doing?

There used to be just one of two of them; on the news; nutters dad thought. Even when there was loads he still thought it was just some hysterical bunch of muppets. But when the boy next door set him-self on fire, dad stopped taking the piss out of them.

My mum is called Jane and my dad is called Mike

She’s a doctor at the local hospital and he’s a Paramedic. Now they’re what you call busy.

OVERARCHING NARRATIVE

Let’s start with the end. There’s a date – the day of reckoning – that never comes – futile and banal but true.

06:6:16

The date surfaced one day on a blog thread tracked to some blog in the mid west they say; the blog was on something weird like Vintage Tyres or something! Just popped up. And then everyone on one IP got the notification email. That was the beginning.

Then the usual bollocks: different people in blogs and chat rooms all over the place, decoding it and giving it different meanings: trying to tie it to their belief systems – some coded Book Of Revelations schtick. Piss off Dan brown. It’s the number of the beast yeah, bow wow woof woof, bow wow wow wow, its a Diamond fucking Dog. Grow up.

Some called it a future point after the closing of the Mayan calendar – an echo of previous catastrophic incidence – yuh! right, but mmmnnn, how did they manage to turn that into an editorial piece on the birth place of chocolate and the new One & Only resort.

What would the Scientologists make of it?…Islam?…Stephen Hawking? Dawkins? Deputy Dawkins? Scooby Doo? Those darned kids?!

Watching faith leaders and scientists throwing shit at each other makes you laugh.The scientist saying the last time someone threw this much misplaced trust into the world they called it Christianity. The fight was mental. Never seen a Bishop gouge!

The whole thing was like some online practical joke – really small, popping up here and there with funny little cartoons – like Shrigley had done an April fools day digital terrorism thing with a smile.

But then the date started to scare people. Some bloke said that society will turn on and consume itself.

Then the ‘infestation began’ – date counters popping up, unannounced and uninvited – locking everyone’s device to it – that date – toxic countdown Davina!! – and then the small overly chirpy and chilled Instruction messages appeared.

No-one was laughing any more. And then the bodies started to rain down. Who’d have a Wii!

—————————————————————————————

SAVE THE DATE! Do Not reply!

6.06.16

Hi Pandora!

We have reason to expect a massive reverse feed flow or first wave ‘spill’ of all personal data and content generated or searched on your device back to the registered user at 6am GMT; 06:6:16.

We believe that the individual data caches spilled back into your device (and any further device coupled, tethered or sync-ed to it) will include all data threads from every primary device including lap tops, tablets and smart phone devices as well as institutional work email systems secured and unsecured from 2006 – 2016.

They will also include all thread and integrated platform data of the registered user from all linked and shared data sources – including but not restricted to social networks, content share platforms, site memberships

We have identified three super Global caches of data-intel and data-history – including search histories, downloaded content, hard drive back ups, data stored in universal HISTORY and CLOUD platforms, banking security data, and medical records – which have been infected by Virii which have preset the caches to start ‘evicting’ and ‘spilling’ data back through the feeds from which they came.

It is also predicted that on this date there will also be further ‘second wave spill’ of the first wave data content to all coupled and synced devices and receivers within a 10 metre area of the user and the device. Please be aware that data, stored content, live social network activity and prior browser information may spill through any of your connected appliances or through open app access areas.

If for any reason you have any reason to mitigate the occurrence of spillage or are concerned about privacy security and the potential legal legitimacy of any materials pertaining to you and your device, click here and a CODE PIN will be sent to you within the next few days giving you details of your personal Data Nurse, a trained and certified professional who can advise you on how to manage the impacts of any content or materials of yours on your personal life or professional career.

NEXT STEPS – URGENT

Download the Dorian folder & App provided onto your principal device and copy over onto any other devices synched with your principal computing device

In the event of spill Please drag all ‘spilled’ materials – both content and data files’ from your live and stored browser, email, voice/skype into the folder name Dorian. Once activated these folders will automatically empty every hour.

Thanks for your attention. More Soon.

—————————————————————————————-

TREATMENT NOTE ‘Pandora’ was originally written as both a provocative polemic and an illustrative story to test the dimensions of TRUST in the digital domain: particularly concerns around Big Data and the questionable status or privacy and identity security: and ultimately the sanctity of everything that we happily entrust to the mouthpiece, camera, keyboard and cache of our digital lives.

IMAGINE

Imagine a day when the fractured data-daubed picture in the attic of every connected mobile human being suddenly poured it guts back into the world around them – on to interactive bus stop posters, trans-vision screens, bus announcements, live emails, txts, digital TV’s, lap-tops, tannoys in airports, speakers at gigs.

Imagine the living writhing turbulent psyche of the collective digi-sphere suddenly throwing its indiscrete guts up through every device that had ever touched it

Imagine if the digital history of every illicit conversation, betrayal, desperate moment, flight of anguish, inappropriate txt; every white, red and black lie uttered, every indiscretion reported, every secret shared, every questionable purchase, every sadness and painful exclamation made public, every grubby search, predatory stalk, invasive squint and questionable image and moving picture ever considered, spilled in to the bright white light of public scrutiny?

Imagine if every piece of it played up in bits and bytes on to every live device within 100 yards of you – with no ability for you to control delete or obscure it? Imagine this following you like a data jet stream everywhere you went. Unshakeable!

A buzzing phosphorous halo of the dull, the petty and the imaginable intertwined with the inexcusable and the unspeakable – all hidden until now in some cloud attic, rendered on the living connected canvas of you.

Imagine our TRUST being thrown back in our face like that and then in looking back at it imagine that we could ever say that we should have ever done anything other than see it coming.

Funny thing, trust. Sometimes we never really think about how much of it we invest in things with little real proof whether the receptacle of it is deserving of what we invest in it.

Trust us they say. Trust is our business. Trust is the currency we trade in; Trust what we do for you – and the social networks allow us to test the trust they peddle, put it through its paces, act against it if it is found wanting. So we think we’re the puppet masters of trust.

Trust is the new Funny: and every corporation and brand is wearing the I’m Funny t shirt. But what are we entrusting them with? The linear and primary dimensions of what they promise to deliver for us and for which we hold them to account: from soap and fashion to legal services to gamification to test drives, nappies and food – are all scrutinised to the nth degree.

But what about the stuff they are hoovering up along the way. The maps of our data day selves: our highly personal tics and behaviours; the intimacies of our banality; preferred top up days, favourite days for stepping beyond our financial means, the join the dots nature of our virtually invisible online shopping basket, the routes we take home, the time we surf, the things we buy, the relationship between when we read a news article or watch a movie and what it inspires in us: social angst and need for connection? reassurance shopping? comedy youtube clips? tech porn browsing the latest upgrade? All that behavioural stuff we lovingly entrust to them. Its what enables them to ‘predict’ us, our likes, our preferred offers and in which day part, format, colour and context we wish to receive them.

Every time we invest the most intimate of information into any device, I sense we think little of the integrity of the host at its journey’s end. Sometimes, when a PIN number goes walkies or some card details get lifted, we feel stung, burned by it. Scalded by its betrayal and the sudden loss of security in our little bubble

But think of every indiscretion, every indiscrete share, message, intimacy, personal detail search, obsession, amateur stalk, desperate seeking, inappropriate image shared or searched. Every site we dwell within, the online decisions we make. And that’s before we get anywhere near the new cowardly, shitty little social art of trolling!

The history of our digital lives, lived in the ether, is in effect our Picture in the attic: and we are all the new Dorian Grey.

Luckily for us, there is little occasion for us to stare that picture in the face and see in its glistening, glorious digital technicolour every scar, pustule, sore and canker: evidence of the indiscretions, small horrors, corruptions and cruelties of our digital lives. Rarely do we ever have to comprehend the fabric of our real-time dysfunctional selves.

To point at the porn industry and the bomb makers as exemplars and leaders of the singular toxicity of on line lives lived is to make this all far too one dimensional.

Imagine if we scoured and cross-correlated the underbelly of big data along very bleak human threads: betrayal, cruelty, spite, indifference, entrapment, lying, duplicity, complicity. Imagine the swirling fabrics of our own penny dreadful data knitted together into one long spool of stuttering humanity. Imagine how each one would wrap itself around our naive model of trust and asphyxiate it in seconds.

So why do we explore trust issues in such depth in every other sphere: relationships, consumption, financial diligence, ethics in science to name a paltry few: yet this massive petaflop blind spot, this clouded issue just sits there. And we pour the smallest and most vulgar details of our lives into it shamelessly and relentlessly.

We trust that the people collecting this data are trustworthy and respectable. We trust them to only look at what they’re allowed to, as if they will coyly look away when huge tranches of data that lifts the skirt on our illicit humanity comes their way.

But that’s where the money is.

And as every cautionary tale will tell you: that’s where your problem is; the venal nasty ‘it’ of life.

Everything that you entrust to the ether; every bit of your hidden self is covered with your digital fingerprints. And that’s how money, spies and slaves are made.

I’ve got something on you, sonny. Now, all I’m asking, for us to be square, is that you do this small, perhaps slightly improper act for me and we’ll call its quits-ish.

It’s how every criminal King, twisted Queen, gangster, despot, tyrant, emperor, and oligarchy has ever controlled anyone and kept them in their thrall.

And we just keep plying our human behavioural trade through every data-grabbing geo-caching GPSisng search-saving image-hosting money-shifting elephant-memoried bit-coining device we can get our hands without the slightest thought of whether we trust the trafficker of this complex revealing and darkening data and what its real value is – both to them and us.

That is where I think the issue is. Not that we are knowing and complicit: I allow my data day self to be monitored measured tweaked and collated; and I get benefits. Sure you do.

And it’s not that we don’t trust these people to both manufacture and deliver the soap, the car, the burger, the shoes, the cheese slices, the whatever, in a manner that is both transparent and trustworthy.

All I am venturing is that perhaps, while we are being handed transparency and the ability to test the integrity of our trust in that action, we are gifting away the more important and most precious coins in our pockets.

I would venture that the rewards are relatively quite small, given what you’re giving away. If the real currency is data: our data; then perhaps the new breakthrough brand will not be another online currency; the breakthrough will be the aggregator that allows us to define a market price for our data against its lifetime customer value to these brands and businesses, liberating us to invest it where best suits us and manage the returns we make on it.

There’s a algorithm challenge. But until then, mine’s a TRUST Me! I’m a BRAND t.shirt.

Creativity, the Cosmic Fizz & the storytellers of science and faith

14 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Cosmic Fizz. Atoms Never Die, Creativity, Evolution, faith, Greek Philosophy, Human resilience, Infinity, Life Of Pi, Morality, Mythology, Nihilism, Nirvana, Omar Khayyam, Optimism, Oscar Wilde, Philosophy, Romanticism, Rubaiyat, Science, Sentimental data, Spinal Tap, Story telling, Sustainability Experts, Transcendental Meditation

Adult Pi Patel: So which story do you prefer?

Writer: The one with the tiger. That’s the better story.

Adult Pi Patel: Thank you. And so it goes with God.

Writer: It’s an amazing story.

I love this piece of writing from the Life Of Pi – because it goes to the heart of everything I believe in as a storyteller by trade and by passion.

It also points to the most sublime collision of existence and creativity for me.

The brutal truths of everything we are, that we come from, exist amongst, experience, endure and prevail upon are in themselves poetic and beautiful. But there is something so human about our need to embellish the flat dry expanse of these truths; to make them greater, more fantastic: our need to story tell around them. There is for me a perfect conflicted symmetry: of both hubris and humility in our need to do it.

That we want to use our consciousness, and the gifts of existential self-perception that it brings to ‘big ourselves up’ in the species department is par for the course. The ascending arrogance of increasing predominance is so expected as to be almost dull.

But in seeking to story tell around such profound and all enveloping concepts: of existence, creation, death, belief, faith, survival – we are also admitting that the base nature of them is simply too overwhelming to us to comprehend in their pure form, too complex and exceptional for us to divine without reduction and simplification. (Sustainability experts take note!!)

So story-tell them we have. Between Reason and Faith, the scattered facts and dynamic data of our human condition and the absolute nature of our relationship with the world in which we bear it are rendered.

In the parables, cautionary tales, prophesies, miracles, fairy tales, wisdoms, mythologies, metaphors, legends, monoliths and dream catchers, we find storytelling that is wonderful, hopeful, brutal, yet optimistic – transforming the data of our reality into ‘the one with the tiger’.

The giddying ascent of some of these ‘tiger stories’ as I will now call them into regional and world movements of dogmatic faith inevitably has seen them dragged into service as the spiritual slings and arrows of marauding armies. In doing so they have both exported a negative arrogant shading of their ‘tiger story’ while importing a culture of cruelty, violence and division into the heart of it.

It is unclear to me whether this conflicted nature is inherent within the cosmic fizz or purely a product of it. Regardless, in the evolution of these ‘tiger stories’, they have proven themselves wholly capable of extreme polarities of positive and negative outcome: the Atomic Bomb and The Inquisition being two such glorious (western) examples.

I would venture though that it is the base corruption of the storytelling concepts – and the flags and actions that they are seen to have resided over that despoils them, not the nature of the story itself or the faith or reason upon which they are built.

As Oscar Wilde pointed out quite rightly – there is not such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. The storytelling is not where the problem lies.

It is the questionable moralities of human interpretation and subsequent actions undertaken in the name of something; be it science, faith or any other where the spoiling starts. A wantonly childish and proprietary approach it seems: It’s my toy so I’ll smash it if I want to.

I believe that if we took the smashers from all sides – the pedants, the inquisitors, the lunatics and the absolutists – the ‘my book’s better than your book and oh, by the way it’s the only book’ crowd and the equally intransigent and nihilistic ‘faith is the great cop out, the great excuse’ polemicists and shoved them in a large room and closed the door we might start the conversation again.

If we did, I think we might find that the people of science and the people of faith are connected at a deeper level than either their rigour or dogma would like to admit – and the immutable truth of that fact is being obfuscated by what is in fact on deeper interrogation a stylistic disagreement – like the one that exists in the land of storytellers between the purveyors of muscular contemporary prose and those of classic highly mannered poetry.

There is a tremor of violent agreement that runs between them that remains unnoticed (to themselves certainly) probably due to the deafening and cacophonous nature of their own ‘combative noise’.

When particular men of science call religion a fiction the only issue that arises in that emphasis for me is the inference that it is a fiction rooted in no factual or reasonable truth. Well, I am currently jury’s out on that absolutism and here’s for why.

In my wish to not polarize or propagandise my children and in answer to the question “what is heaven daddy?” (the inconvenient inquisition of children is the most brutal of examinations) I have netted out at this story-teller’s logic, and it begins with science:

Atoms never die. They just reassemble re-task and reintegrate themselves in a new form.

So, we are all one great big mass of finite circulating particles. Amazing.

In which case, if we were, theoretically at least, able to pull focus on the physical world in which we exist to reveal that great big mass of finite chaotic swirling particles; to reveal its sub and supra atomic nature, we would perhaps reveal a singular phenomena – the cosmic atomic fizz of everything. (Eat that challenge Google Glass!)

133,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms swirling around dynamically, condensing clustering conflating and coagulating for a brief while in every visible and invisible material thing we know and many we don’t, before deconstructing and reconstructing themselves somewhere else along the way.

Now your brain might be so huge as for there to be little issue for you in contemplating the jaw dropping magnitude of this, but (certainly for my tiny self absorbed brain) this is a concept so vast so complex and so overwhelming to the average human being that we would struggle to grasp its meaning.

And we hate that, us humans, the ‘can’t quite get it’ thing. It makes us feel a little small, stupid and out of control, so, we use storytelling to simplify and sort the problem. To order the cosmos. Bring ourselves closer to it.

In this instance I think we’ve effectively taken the jaw dropping magnitude of the cosmic particular mass, stuck a beard on it and called it Norman.

This is not to say that the creation of the mass, how it got there, what drove it and what the point of it all is doesn’t exist in the pantheon of life’s big questions, but I’ll leave that to David St Hubbins of Spinal Tap to ask that question for all of us:

“If the universe is indeed infinite, then how…what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then… if it stops, what’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it? So, what’s the end you know, is my question…to you”

The moment where human interpretation and the nature of our existence meet is at the moment we decide to call the infinitely finite cosmic particular fizz a name, embody it in some divine yet recognizable (like us) form, allow it to take human form, or simply see itself at work in ourselves and in all things around us.

But if we’re tooling down the storytelling pathway of the immortal atoms, lets round out the characters first shall we.

That the breath of Moses, The Christ, Buddha and the prophet Mohammad are still in the world, atomically speaking, is an incredible, philosophically charged and mind-boggling thing. But in that we must also accept that so too are the breath of Hitler, Genghis Khan and Jack The Ripper.

Our simple survival evolutionary selves have spent millennia trying to identify filter and prioritise the data of danger, relentlessly, restlessly seeking clarity around what might hinder or hurt us. So even the earliest storytellers will have been thinking of and framing our existence in very simple structural terms predicated on understanding the simple signs that guide us:

Crisp bright coloured plant: tasty and makes me feel perky = GOOD

Dark brown stinking plant: Whole village dead from soup of it = BAD

Large Screaming Drooling Sabre Tooth: Ate my mother. Ugh = BAD

Small trembling rabbit like creature: Ate for supper. Yum = GOOD

I sense the same simple storytelling principle has been applied to the cosmic fizz.

That the particular nature of the cosmic fizz can cluster and form into larger entities beautiful, brutal or otherwise inane and inert (read Turner, the Terror, Trousers and Taramasalata) demonstrates that the cosmic atomic fizz is indeed nuanced positively and negatively in ways far more cognitive and philosophical than just how those particles are charged

So, it’s no surprise that some of the earliest storytellers will refer to similarly complex concepts in the simplified form of perhaps good things and bad things, nice place not nice place, or a heaven and a hell perhaps.

We have ample evidence of where the commonalities of our beliefs, philosophies, reasoning, values and mantras – the cultures of science faith, culture and philosophy – meet, in turn finding little to differentiate or choose between them. In The Picture Of Dorian Grey the collision of ancient greek texts and philosophy, Christian morality, Islamic beliefs, eastern mysticism, Romanticism and the mind of the scientist and mathematician we find in the author’s use one of the texts from the Rubaiyat Of The Omar Khayyam (translation: the shoulder of Faith) is to me the most perfect of examples:

“I sent my soul through the invisible

Some letter of the afterlife to spell:

And by and by my Soul return’d to me,

And answer’d: ‘I Myself am Heaven and Hell”

Storytellers from every shape and shade of tribe and belief have either knowingly or unknowingly reshaped and molded the brutal nakedness of this atomic dynamism into concepts of things, beings, feelings, spirits or forces, eternally alive within everything, including ourselves.

Over time we have come to believe that our ability to connect with these forces – the ability to feel them, see them, understand them, call on and capture the essence of them – is representative of a higher state of being and existence – something to aspire to and yearn for – as an elevation out of the brutal reality of survival.

Trans-substantiation, The essential Fire, The Holy Spirit, Nirvana, Reincarnation, The Great Spirit, Sacred texts. Every one of them resides at the junction where the storyteller sits. But to simply dismiss them as ‘spun’ fictions is to mitigate what they intend to communicate, the beliefs they contain or what they are seeking to point to, however clumsily or fantastically the critic might feel they are doing it.

I believe that these stories are part of what makes humanity more resilient (not always a good thing). They exist because our evolutionary gene-pool need to prevail and the traits and tools that we need to endure in extremis require far more than just physical attributes.

It demands a strength of mind that perceives itself far greater than the sum of the physical parts it controls. An absolute belief in ones ability to complete an action, test or challenge, come what may, is what enables us to prevail against all odds. These examples of shared and disseminated storytelling enable human beings, social by nature and with an innate sense of collectivism, to transcend the confines of their physical truth. To prevail is to be optimistic (a form of positive delusion or illusion perhaps but no less powerful because of it), disposed to expecting the best of things.

But Optimism needs to be written, because it is not innate.

We all understand the brutalities of existence. Fight or Flight is innate. Primal ferocity as a predatory or defensive mechanism is innate (learned gleaned or forced over time) a living echo of all previous experience of our ancestors. We all understand that science is emotionally inert: it carries no sentiment other than through the emotional human impact of its comprehension or application.

Our emotional nature as seen through the scientific lens is simply a transportable cache of sentimental data – a form of big human data collated and conflated over millennia; cross related through social memory and learning by us to create what we believe to be a conscious, feeling aware creature with inbuilt reflexive and intuitive responses.

But the positive halo of optimism – a mannered elevating way in which we choose to capture the positive outcomes of the brutal innate truths – is in itself a lever and generator of resilience in regards to human existence and our ability to prevail.

Story telling, especially that which is designed to be passed down and around is a massive factor in predisposing fractured scattered battered tribes and communities towards constructing more positive outcomes for themselves. The shared beliefs that storytelling can engender is testament to that.

Storytelling is where the resilience of humanity lies. Even in the realm of science and the learned institutions, I would venture that there is a marked difference between those professors who light a fire in the heart and minds of the students who seek to learn from them and those that don’t regardless of both academics singing from the same curricular song sheet. The education that stays with you is that which is shaped to be remembered, not learned to be forgotten. It is only through the stickiness of more enlightening communication that we ascend and improve and bolster ourselves against the odds.

Is the culture of ‘stories spun’ open to abuse? Yes: The speed at which storytelling can moves from parables, myths and cautionary tales of improving and guidance, and of things greater than ourselves to being a corrupted propagandised text with the sole intention of suppressing, controlling and excusing untold inhumanities and predations is all too clear across history.

Should it, for that very reason, be set aside and simply forgotten? Should we make do with the less dramatic, less shiny, less embroidered version of our existence? What surrounds us and is within is us is certainly beautiful and amazing enough (though some would argue even our driest concept of self has been brilliantly inked to some extent by millennia of human storytelling)

Should we look at ourselves in the mirror without gods, tigers, and miracles to obfuscate the view? Some would argue most certainly.

Nonetheless, I would not (and given my trade could not) dismiss the story teller from the court of human existence. I could not contemplate a life without ‘tiger stories’. I believe that humanity would be less capable of great things and less resilient without them.

And rest.

Of Knowing, UnKnowing & the creative pillars of polarity. AKA Creativity Pt. 2

09 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Art History, Bi-polarity, Commercial Creatvity, Communications Industry, Creativity, Creativity in Science, Democratisation Of Creativity, Destructive Natures, Diogenes, Ego & Id, Grayson Perry, Insanity & Genius, Knowing, Mindfulness, Paradigm Shifts, Stephen Hawking, technology

Funny thing. Creation. Everyone’s at it.

(The ‘hey! lets do something creative!’ version that is; as opposed to the Birth and Big Beard Versus Big Bang kind.)

It’s all the rage: like cocaine, Taylor Swift, snapchat and uprisings.

And taking some of the creative people I’ve come across in my own ‘creative’ career as an example, rage seems the most apposite of words for this tempestuous trend.

The creative endeavor as a civilized form of howling at multiple moons is all so ‘Now’, and a lot more populist and less ‘rare’ than it once was.

The infinite collision of technology, accessibility, social collectives, the relentless inspirations of the internet and the democratization of creating offered by the endless tools and networks populating our digital lives is shifting the social paradigm of creativity.

In many ways this is a wonderful thing: but it makes the ‘purist’ creative creature out there very nervous.

For the pure creative; someone who has probably invested an enormous amount of time and energy in developing their otherness this new ‘thin’ democratized creativity is a hellish confection.

To someone who has invested their whole being to all that zigging while others zagged, the ritual disemboweling of the inner Id: all those hours crawling through the primordial intellectual soup of abstraction and expression, little known philosophers, off beat gothic novels, performance art, turbulent emotional algorithms and the most impenetrable art shows, not to mention all that self harming, disorder development, and the habit of watching certain films just because they make other more ‘normal’ people nervous: imagine what horror at the idea of ‘’er next doors being craytive‘ too.

‘It’s just not right‘ they howl moonways: ‘it lacks, well, it lacks commitment’. Being ‘different’ – being of a creative persuasion is to be frank, exhausting, very particular and shouldn’t be for everyone. The democratization of creation: the auguring of an age of everyday creativity is sending shock waves through the existential halls of the mighty.

But don’t panic! If you are in the purist club, there’s always the madness and utter self destruction to fall back on.

The newly democratized creative people out there can get as fancy as they like with their 3D printing Maker movement sculptural maquettes; and their evolving algorithm art music BUT can they take an overdose?

Exactly.

For all of these new sweeping gestures towards ‘social creation’ the old model of what constitutes the white hot crucible of true creativity is still there: the final filter: and one studiously applied by those still inhabiting the rare academies of the creative mind and spirit.

You’ve always got the get out of jail card of being or becoming (certifiably if required) nuts – troubled with a capital T and an accompanying life-threatening addiction of some form or other.

‘Real’ creativity is conflicted.

‘Real’ creativity and the people who hawk it should exist in some hellish b-polar vortex, stumbling through quantum surges of creative doing wrapped in creative being.

‘Real’ creative types must be to a lesser or greater degree consumed by their art or creative nature, usually to some destructive degree.

Twas always thus.

It has indeed always been quite the fashion for the ‘Real’ creative person to be seen to enjoy an innate disposition for ‘explosive’ expression. This is romantic and poetic phrasing for what you or I might call losing it: getting shouty and throwing shit around.

Allowing their ‘passionate’ nature to overwhelm them and most everyone else within 5 emotional yards of them has always been quite vogue for the ‘tortured artist’ (though anyone who has read the conceptual treatise of any Art Installation works recently might say that it is the observer who is in fact being tortured, not the artist.)

Raging is and always has been quite the rage.

This rage it seems has two broad brush strokes.

Sometimes the rage is internal, turned inwards on the person; consuming themselves, their mind fracturing and splintering quietly in a room.

And at other times the rage is of that of the smashing, brutalizing murderous kind. One quick leaf through the stories of Caravaggio and Shakespeare’s contemporaries will find that the quick-tempered madness of the creator is at its sharpest in the act of destroyer – of lives, of chattles, of dreams, of stability, of innocence.

Even in the secondary (or some would say basement) of the creative world – the communications industry – this polarity, once celebrated, and now mostly disappeared, is still visible every now and then, stalking the corridors of the creative floor.

Sometimes the rage is a quiet cold cruel internal force compelling the sociopathic intellectual knife twister to ever-greater heights of creative depth; and much of the product, though very funny or terribly clever, can often seem to be utterly lacking in joy, even with 26 million youtube hits.

Other times, the rage takes the shape of a shambling, fog horn, noisy trousers, whoops where’s that wrap?-chat-chatty, self-conscious-shoe-wearing creative peacock (2 syllables – stress on the second syllable) crashing into their creativity like, well, like an overjoyed drunk into a shut door in Soho House. A krispy kreme variety box of joy with toffee sauce.

This bi-polar view of creativity seems further ratified even with the smallest rummage around on http://www.creativegeniuslunatictypes.com/madness/.

In the rarer and purer atmospheres, regardless of whether the form of creativity is being applied in the sciences, music, mathematics, literature & poetry, drama, engineering, product design or architecture, the polarities at work become even more marked, though only amongst a precious few.

Most of us pretenders scuff about somewhere in the space between these manic-depressive book-ends, floundering around for some premature pop of immortality played out for a very-mortal few days or weeks on a page or a screen – a pantone book of middlin’ shades of creative variation.

(Given 3D printing’s new role in illuminating the creative txt of our invention, the great news is that we can actually render these bookends in pure alabaster; one a polished relief depicting Andy Kaufmann and Steven Wright in a Same Sex Marriage; and the other played out in a bass relief of John Belushi and Jeff Koons Buddy-Jumping from a burning pink plane)

Though highly one-dimensional, as a first-meeting finger in the air Type A Type B approach to identifying creativity in the world, these bookends do a fair job.

Though flippantly rendered, these two types do point towards something of a deeper less facile creative truth.

Take it as a given: this law of polarity is at work in all realms of creative endeavor, their two schools, distinctive and immutable opposites in most every way, still finding time to integrate, interrelate and conflate, sometimes in the same theme, often in the same person.

These pillars of polarity represent the two furthest points of the inventive lateral compass, the divine hyper-tensile high-wire of creativity, strung tight and humming between them.

Standing atop these two pillars are two quite opposite schools of thought, nature and effect.

One is founded on the Scholarly pursuit of Knowing – a relentless curious incremental acquisitive reductive sparse sharpening intellectual inquisition in an ever-reducing space, theme or manner. A spirit level approach to creativity for a Jekyll-like persona.

The other collapses backwards into the Scholarly pursuit of UnKnowing – of breakage and unlearning, fracture, disruption, chaos, danger, bestial, unruly, anarchic – the smashed train-set approach to creativity far more suited to a Hyde-like approach to life.

Yes, there are myriad confections scattered between the two but, much in the same way as with the The Hunting Debate and the discussion of Benefits Cheats, we rarely hear the dulcet tones of those in the middle, trapped as they are between the deafening silence, atomic nature and cold eye of the Jekylls and the clanging-gong parachute silk pants and rocky horror debauch of the Hydes.

On the Knowing campus we find the likes of Andy Kaufmann, Gallileo, Ferran Adria, Robert Fripp, Seneca, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Steven Hawking.

The Knowing are clearly defined in the world, set apart, celebrating their otherness through a celebration of the reductive forensic interrogation, construction and engineering of every piece of what it is they are in the process of creating. Their closed and in some ways highly scientific rational approach to the irrationality of creativity creates the dynamic tension in what they do.

The downside of the Knowing trajectory was beautifully bought to life in the first of the artist potter Grayson Perry’s Reith Lectures – in which he reads out the conceptual treatise from some art work. An over complex, over blown piece of cod-intellectual arcana; like a dysfunctional Rubik’s cube of pompous phrases that could never align to anything resembling human meaning, whichever way you might try and spin them. A corrupted bastard child of the Knowing school.

On the UnKnowing Campus we have John Belushi, Caravaggio, John Nash, Oliver Reed, Diogenes, Byron, Iggy Pop, and Kurt Cobain

The UnKnowing’s ability to traverse the fractured, chaotic randomness of creative disorder, embrace the madness of invention and all that comes with it is an anathema to the average person. The UnKnowing’s capacity for clutching to the edges of life, merrily pumping the visceral, wheezing soul of the moment and of their own mortality is simply staggering. They also demonstrate an appetite for seeking redemption through destruction. In this paradox lies the dynamic tension of their tempestuous nature.

The vertiginous nose-bleed nature of their creative leaping and scrabbling up the stepping stones of madness in search of the creative ‘it’ is reminiscent of the snow leopard character, Tai Lung, in King Fu Panda.

In the scene where he escapes from the Chor-Gom prison, he does so by springing and scrambling up falling rocks, using them as descending elevators to rise back up out of the abyss: against all the laws of nature, his upward trajectory enabled by their downward one, the opposite of all that should be. That is the against-nature nature of the UnKnowing.

But often the most transcendent moment comes when we experience someone who makes the journey or transition from Knowing to UnKnowing or vice versa. Or when someone relentlessly and seamlessly shifts from one to the other.

At its simple journey level, Picasso is a good example of the shift from Knowing to UnKnowing. His skills as an accomplished artist in the traditional mold: his sense of scale and context, his draughts-manship, his painterly skills, brushwork, colourist’s eye and capture of the subject were exceptional. So when he chose to smash the vase of his traditional expertise, reassembling the fragments of what was in a new and abstracted disruptive way, he made the journey from Knowing to UnKnowing.

But in their extremes, especially that of the transcendent form, lies the greatest turbulence and far greater likelihood of a dark mortality.

So to be creative or not to be creative and in which sphere is not really the question. But whether we choose to be of the Knowing or the UnKnowing variety.

Perhaps, if you are creative yourself or know or work with creative people, the question that we should ask is this: am I, or they the Knowing or The UnKnowing kind: or the transcendent other?

Lets start there.

(And perhaps we should also spare a kind thought for those who find themselves imprisoned by these pillars, their only escape coming when the whole edifice collapses upon them.)

Creativity, Troubled Spirits & The Art of the Commercial Creative Tantrum

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Advertising, Cannes Lions, Commercial Artists, Communications, Creative Excellence, Creativity, Mad Men, Seymour Hoffman

Part 1 (of 3)

Creativity. What a cursed word this is. Its stain and shadow seems to riddle anyone truly touched by it with a silent screaming see-saw yaw of insecurity and brilliance so profound it staggers them to a deathly stop, sooner or later.

And when I say truly touched by creativity, I am talking not of the noisy swaggerdaccio of commercial creatives who you’ll find buzzing around the ad agency, digital content and brand consultancy hives of most major and supposedly civilised cities.

That kind, my kind, are simply echoes, re-percussions in its truest sense of the dark, glittering, brilliant bangs and crashes of those truly blessed and cursed with creativity.

When I speak of creativity I speak of those people who carry their creativity deeply within themselves, not worn as a badge of entry to the latest and so, so self consciously flagged eatery as metered out on any latest given social network living or virtual.

Perhaps it was the news that Seymour Hoffman was found with the needle sticking out of his arm still, dead of an overdose that enraged me enough to wish to write this piece.

Seymour Hoffman to me was simply a reason to think that there was a god.

An actor whom I found to be so audacious in his characterisations, so breathtaking in his personification of characters whom, until he lit a torch inside them, lay across the page, inert and inhuman. His rendering of legendary and well-documented Characters like Truman Capote, surely an impossible task, simply allowed Seymour Hoffman the opportunity to be more Capote than the man himself. He has utterly delivered on the concept of a performer and performances that transcend every possible preexisting point of reference or comparison.

And for that I feel he deserves a prize as great as any our druid forebears could give to any man or woman who could encapsulate the human condition under the gaze of he gods in such a way as to enable every observer to learn something profound, however small and in such a way as to improve their own.

His bravery in putting out there what he felt to be the prima version of what was expected of him reaches so far beyond the cowardice of the average commercial creative it is hard to even begin to measure the distance between them

The renaissance nature of him – his ability to reach into corners – his breadth depth and well of influence was simply staggering.

The depth of his creativity – of observation, on human nature, the tics and flinches of human behavior, its emotional eddies and whip-pools, its penchant for small tragedies played out in the inane and banal – and the wealth of invention required to conjure all of that into a moment under the cruel and unforgiving gaze of the camera. That is what I call creativity. It is naked and raw, and spiritually incapable of being repaid.

But perhaps in the cruelty of the lens lay a black truth. Maybe that was the masochist at work in him. Throwing himself relentlessly at the feet of an unforgiving master – one whom he knew would ultimately never let him go.

It is when I look at creativity at work in people like him that I wonder at what seems to pass so often otherwise as creativity.

I am bored with the wannabees and the almosts. There are times when the crippling truth of the real deal should make us draw breath and admit for perhaps even the most fleeting second that the pure genius of those that truly have it make those of us who simply exist in their slipstream, small and recondite in nature.

And then I view creativity through the eyes of the scientists, the poets, the architects and the mathematicians and then look through the rear view mirror at the communications jonnies and wonder where their arrogance came from.

No Cloths of Heaven. No Suspension bridge. No Higgs Bosen. No Rubik. No 3D printers.

What in god’s name have the commercial creatives given us that illuminates our life in such exceptional and poetic manner that they deserve one passing second of attention beyond some Cannes obsessed self gratifying accolade?

That we, the Ad kids think that creativity demands eating the last 10 D&AD annuals and spewing forensic facts about who won what for typography or platinum content really matters: that both being difficult and using the comedic sums of money that we’re paid to buy some more toys to throw out of our pram.

Like we really do exist in some rarified existence with the answer to anything bar selling 100 more txts and minutes packages and 2 million more 7 blade razors with pointless emollient strips.

Have we ever considered the beauty and commitment that it requires to deliver a Caravaggio into the world? That we might consider for even a moment what the exceptional requires of us beggars belief.

That I have seen the most average of creative thinkers claim some primary space in the world based upon the mediocrity of what spews from them troubles me to my core.

Their only reason for existence is that they feed the creatively inert business ambitions of the corporate gristle that pays their bills. That it should succor their self-belief is a weak and ultimately nihilistic pursuit and an exercise in self obsessions.

The creative people that I value in my life are indeed the butcher the baker the candlestick maker. The real creators in this world we live in.

And I add to them the performance artists that make me stop, heart racing, befuddled and illuminated by their capture of the human condition.

I also add those that disassemble the scientific condition of our existence. Creating new intellects and formulae for understanding.

And I feel it is time to call it on the idiots and the fakes. Lets hear it for the true creators and let the rest go to overpaid hell.

If you ever walk into a room with a budget in your pocket for creativity and purchase some distant echo of what purports to be it, please call it as so.

How many more times do we need to sit in a room and listen to a commercial creative play a youtube clip, show an artists work, stream a song, or catwalk the work of a designer far, far greater than they and be told ‘it’ll be something like that’ and asked to pay top dollar for it?

I say go to the source and buy it pure.

If you need this fix to drive your business or your ambition forwards, die on the needle of purity or stop pretending.

And if you are some Byron obsessed creative with your self-destructive, insecure (but strangely enough never ultimately critical) tooting and gacking crutch, or your strategic side kick who believes that you have a god given right to be heard in your creative mewling, be true and be real and die on the commercial sword of what you suggest.

Never expect someone to expend hundreds of thousands of pounds on something you barely believe in yourself beyond what It might bring to your own personal glory.

If glory and recognition is what you seek there are a myriad collection of garrets and studios in lost forsaken places populated by people earning nothing fighting for their art.

If that is what you seek stand up and next to them and take what comes.

But if you are the person who endeavours to commercialise the creative process, remember, just prior to your next tantrum, that in greater footsteps than yours you travel, be respectful, and endeavour to be as close to the pure genius of them as your pay check allows.

Remember greater creative spirits than you die with a needle in their arm. God help them and god thank them for the price they pay for what you imitate in a room somewhere and for which you will never ultimately pay the price.

If this makes me a Wyndham Lewis, damning my own ‘creative’ class, I’m OK with that. Why? Because they’re fine. They are Ok in their tower, never really having as their only option a mine shaft, a production manufacturing line that steals their life, a trawler boat that goads their nerve and heart, or the banality and drudge of Till 3 on the check out at 4pm on a wet wednesday.

The Needle and The Damage Is Done.

03 Monday Feb 2014

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Adaptive Governance, Advocacy, Communications, HR, leadership, Mutual Desire, resilience, Social Dynamics, storytelling, Value Chain Modelling & management

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Having recently been on the receiving end of the questions – “what exactly do you believe?” and ‘what do you do all day?” I thought that I should set out my Thin Air Factory stall a little more clearly.

A Storyteller’s Manifesto

AKA what I get to do and love to do when someone asks:

I believe that one of the greatest factors in securing the exceptional resilience of a company lies in identifying and creating the most resilient nature and model of its storytelling.

Resilient Storytelling© is storytelling that can inspire every stakeholder to more resilient actions that are beneficial to the nature and performance of the company without danger of that storytelling being set aside, dismissed as an excuse for inaction or evasion or seen as excluding: storytelling that cannot be called ‘thin’, inappropriate, inauthentic, irrelevant; dismissed as gloss or icing, or simply seen as faddy, fluffy, short-term and short-sighted.

By its very nature Resilient Storytelling© must:

be resilient in itself – able to take the knocks, whether they come from an investigative or riled NGO on the one hand or a disgruntled consumer activist agitating in the social networks on the other.

inspire greater resilience in others: every audience being moving by even the slightest degree towards greater advocacy and engagement with every telling

To do that it must be fit for purpose, forged from a whole picture of the company – not just its individual functions and layers. To create storytelling that can absorb the turbulence and flux of the ever-changing, ever-evolving world a company seeks to thrive in, that storytelling must embrace the 4 corners of the company; from the top of its brand to the bottom of its business supply chain, and from one end of its value chain and stakeholder group to the other.

Resilient Storytelling© creates a clear sense of unified purpose beyond profit, a clear central tenet of adaptive governance to shape, manage and distribute the mutual endeavour that purpose demands, and the shared benefits it offers: it engenders greater and more cogent social collectivism and engagement across every stakeholder group.

Resilient Storytelling© is inclusive, inspiring and as adaptive as the company. It frames the integrity of every relationship the company generates and engages in, and shapes every piece of communication the company produces in undertaking and maintaining those relationships. Resilient Storytelling is storytelling that can relentlessly inspire and drive advocacy in every stakeholder.

Resilient Storytelling© is one that reconciles and reframes the most compelling, differentiated and most valuable points of systemic, operational and material resilience (the sustainability and CSR aspects and traits in the company) to the greatest number of shareholders with meaning and effect – allowing these truths of shared resilience to be drawn up into the storytelling in a way that is accessible to all (not just the brilliant scientists, engineers and strategists who define, design and deploy the drivers of those sustainability truths).

Resilient Storytelling© must be founded on exploring, understanding and respecting the relationship between the different shades of desire enshrined in every stakeholder across its Value Chain, including which points of resilience are most compelling and authentic to every one of them.

(There is little point focusing on points of resilience, and then storytelling around them in isolation – they are and must be seen as just one evidential part of a wider and more coherent value system at work and have been reconciled inside it.)

Resilient Storytelling© is both the VOICE of MUTUAL DESIRE in the company: and the reflection of the strongest and most compelling points of SHARED RESILIENCE, and a primary source of increasing resilience in itself.

A slightly weird diagram to prove a point:

Most storytelling operates in very distinct vertical or horizontal blocks – for example, broadcast and bought media delivering desire generating materials with little reference to points of systemic material or social resilience of the company – a bit too much y and not enough x.

Equally, most resilience-focused storytelling focuses too much on its detail and integrity with little sense of how that might fit into the desire model of the audience it’s aimed at or resonate across the broader stakeholder group. A lot of x but y bother?

To truly engineer Top Of The Brand to Bottom of the Supply Chain storytelling that resonates across the whole Value Chain stakeholder group, you need to have generated the most mutual desire around the most compelling points of shared resilience across the greatest percentage of your communications touch-points. (Get to the top right corner and you will feel the love!)

To do this, Resilient Storytelling© must not only be completely representative and respectful of every dimension of the company but also be authenticated by being true to the everyday language and vernaculars of the everyday people who drive the company, its partners and suppliers. Too much Consultant and Business School speak becomes impenetrable and impossible for everyday people to act upon; too much slang and brand puffery lacks the substance to sustain engagement or fend off every detractor that might turn up.

The simplest and most human storytelling is what will take the smartest, most enduring and most innovative ideas from thinking to doing.

The human nature and openness of the storytelling is in itself a large part of what creates a state of shared resilience. The focus, scale and application of actions a Value Chain needs to both embrace and inspire to maintain its integrity and endure demands storytelling that can communicate the financial, commercial, operational and social benefits of doing so to best effect.

A resistor to Resilience?

Clients at the moment are enjoying the queue of agencies, consultants and advisors clamouring at their door. Myriad thinking and IP is being poured in one side and zero hours and zero waste relationships pouring out the other. It is simply not in any one agency or consultant’s interests, business model (or skills & capabilities to be fair) to create a singular and cohesive narrative that truly delivers Resilient Storytelling©. Their differentiated interests usually direct a client towards the most lucrative end point and outcome which they can reasonably protect.

Clients in their rush to seem smart, shrewd and masters of integrated thinking court these clashing and conflicting agendas to best results for themselves. This is only partly to be true to their own commercial needs and ambitions and the budgetary and structural limitations that come with them.

There is also a top note of presenting oneself as ‘nobody’s fool’ – especially when every other C Suite heavy hitter sees the (quote unquote Cost Plus Cowboy) Marcomms ‘professionals’ as worthy of a strategy of ‘Approach With Extreme Caution’. The legendary mickey-taking profiteering Ad Agencies of old, the overblown promises and myopia of the Marketing Emperor’s New Clothes – from Sales Promotion, to Direct Marketing and now the new nirvana of Digital – and their accompanying (and often spurious) fees and mark ups has left a very bad taste in mouths old and new.

So my plea is this – view Resilient Storytelling© not as a Communications Upgrade but as an Act of Adaptive Governance.

Its value stretches far beyond the remit of Sales & Marketing. It is as likely to optimise more enduring HR strategies and more focused innovation and R&D funnels as it is to create greater social advocacy across the stakeholder group, engage peripheral partners and suppliers and generate the ground work for qualitative growth.

But there needs to be an owner: and perhaps Brand should or could be that Stakeholder.

WHY? because it will undoubtedly take collaboration between agencies, consultants and advisors to deliver this kind of Storytelling. Only the Brand owner can enable this – only you can set the terms of Play Nice.

If you do, your advisors and touchstones will then see the commercial benefit of not rug pulling, dissing and discarding each other or treading on each other’s commercial toes and perhaps seek a better model of engagement and collaboration to a more efficient and economical effect. And please don’t say that the likes of the existing Loop Meeting models are an example of this in practice.They are fundamentally an exercise in leadership and agenda grab taking up torturous hours of politicking and pre prepping and post controlling.

Create and compel a truly collaborative, holistic and complimentary structure that uses opposing dynamics and forces to their best effect and you have the beginnings of a value centre in the company: one of greater use across the C Suite need set – and not just a continuation of a cost centre.

But that means that Brand needs to be fit for purpose: with an innate understanding of the previously impenetrable concepts of supply chain and value chain modelling and management, CSR strategies and impacts, R&D dynamics and the complexities of decent HR frameworks, communities, behaviours and rewards. To upgrade these traits and reflexes in the Brand function of a company is to make the first move towards a more resilient company and set the stage for a more inclusive innately collaborative and open leadership model. Then the landscape becomes rich with possibility.

Imagine if you put Resilient Storytelling© at the centre of your stakeholder constellations informed by every function and then mapped every communications touchpoint against it, with a weather eye on managing the overlap and the duplication: that would be exhilarating.

As Jack Nicholson’s Joker quips as he enters the art museum “Gentlemen!..let’s broaden our minds”

Zoos, MAMILs & The Art of Going around in expensively dressed circles

31 Friday Jan 2014

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Exec Ed, London Zoo. Self Assertion Courses, louboutins, MAMILs, Rapha, Regents Park, road cycling, Sherlock Holmes, velodrome

In trying to cross the outer circle of Regents Park to go and do my slightly shabby walk/run around its perimeter (a first world life structure challenge certainly), the most dangerous occurrence to present itself at 6.30am is not that of early doors muggers, the confusion of hybrid arctic meets monsoon weather or even a distinct lack of appropriate clothing; but a cluster of MAMILs moving at high speed.

(I am uncertain of what the collective noun might be for a group of densely-packed middle aged men in black and fluorescent lycra on bikes – a ‘weave’ perhaps? Or a ‘knob’?).

Much like our captive creature cousins at the Zoo across the park, these middle aged men disported in their tightly brightly tailored costumes (there’s theatre in every fibre of them) seem trapped in some perimeter prowl, hawking and screeching, unable or incapable of breaking free of the infinite circular trajectory they have locked themselves into – for an hour or so at least.

Now given the circular nature of their journey, there is little to concentrate on other than the ‘track’ curvature, rendering itself relentlessly to the left (they have projected the spirit of the Olympic velodrome onto the roads of Camden), the choreography of their individual pieces of kit and their own performance pay grades.

But I can tell you this: they do like a chat.

I sense this is both part of the bonhomie of a shared passion and a way of humanizing what might as with all obsessions be a cause often fought alone.

There seem to be two shades to their conversations that I hear wafting across the park when it is empty enough of people and other noise to allow their conversations to carry, whipping past ones ears as they hurtle through their next pain thresh-hold. And both of these are played out against a very particular audio backdrop.

So I’d like to just take a slightly closer look at:

1. Kit & Attack 2. Shop talk 3. Sound design

1.KIT & ATTACK

KIT – Discussing the detail (and believe you me the devil is indeed in the detail) of this exceptional pastime is the foundation stone of the evolutionary laws of the MAMIL. And though one might find the creation of a cycling babel fish highly desirable to navigate the conversation that would belie the integrity of their attentions.

The conversational skip jump through the delicious details of custom-moulded high-modulus carbon frame, pro-level transmission, Schwalbe Ultremo ZX, tyres and wheelsets, Titanium rotor and shift bolts, carbon Shimano and Campagnolo brakes (or should I say derailleurs) and the concepts of vertical compliance and decreased road buzz – simply demonstrates that this is cyclng at the top of its game.

I am told that the sheer exhilaration fused with exceptional attention to detail and a geek like obsession with kit and detail creates an experience that speaks for itself: which is a good job; because from some of the commentary I came across it might be better that no one else is allowed to. For example:

“Formula R1 with 203 rotor, these pads have the grip to endo at 30mph with no fade! Lets be fair from a single pot that’s seriously impressive. By no means is this compromised on pad life, Uberbike no what Business is all about, make a decent product and let the product do the talking. Theses pads were fitted along with some standard rears, despite all the pain the front brake has gone through the rears are shot and the front only half worn!! Speaks for its self. ”.

Attack – the manner in which they attack the task of circling the park demands fine shadings of performance between steadily increasing pace riding, sprints, and practicing the invisible baton change strategies of team position shifting across the pack line.

The circular whole comes into perfect balance when the excellence and performance metrics and shadings of the ride itself fuse with the cod motivational woops and c’mON!s and let’s push it PEOPLE! cries that fire out of the middle of the pack every now and then. But more of that in 3.

2. SHOP TALK

The Day At The Office chat attacks are a little more difficult to bear. These are the equivalent of discussing staplers and A4 photocopier paper on the tour de france warm up stage. The nature of conversation is wholly at odds with the Rapha wrapped primaloft-insulated insects buzzing around the Regents Park velodrome

The most shocking aspect of some of the conversation is the ‘Office’– like banality of the content. It delivers all of the bleak ennui yet with neither the knowing nor the wit. It did cross my mind that perhaps this particular group that I encounter are a highly advanced cycling syndicate of data management programme software designers and logistics analysts with a distinct digital chip on their very slim shoulders, and far from representative.

But in retrospect I am certain they are in fact top of their game execs who drive their entrepreneurial and corporate businesses as hard as the super light weight framed pedal machines they sit atop: and I am probably just jealous of their camaraderie, observed from my lonely and slightly scruffy vantage point.

3. Sound Design

Sound Design seems quite an important part of the MAMIL cycling experience. The most emphatic aspect of this comes from the resonant motivational ‘call signs’ of the group carrying across the empty spaces or warping across your path as they pass. Most of the time these are indistinct, an aural fabric which they weave as they encircle the park. But these ‘caws’ ‘barks’ and screeches’ do become recognisable if one gets on the right side of them. When they become clear enough to be heard you realise that there is a healthy (or unhealthy some might say) use of highly Americanised Whoops, Yeahs! C,mons, DO IT people, Push ITs!!! and various other inspirational inducements to better shouted aloud (or should I say ejaculated, given our proximity to 221B Baker Street and the oral outbursts of Holmes & Watson).

This may be to do with the style of institution or the cultural provenance of the corporations they work for. Or they may just have attended too many motivational Leadership and Performance Excellence seminars at a Golf Club Manor House Hotel just outside Guildford. Bonding over the shared air of a whiteboard conference ‘suite’ exec team session, high burn team building exercises, comedy evening drinking, a full cooked breakfast buffet with compulsory hangover bravado and finally zip wiring through a wall of flaming underpants to the deafening roars of ‘Lets win this thing’ leaves its mark on a person. Perhaps the mark is so deep it simply compels the MAMILs to exclaim motivational speaker speak at deafening volume in some fit of Exec Ed tourettes.

But the most particular, unique semiotic ‘sound’ resonates only at the point at which this streamlined gathering finally pulls to a rare stop; usually at the far corner of the park closest to Gt Portland Street. And that sound is the clatter of magnetic shoes released from the pedals to touch tarmac. The clack of a mag ball cycling shoe puts down a marker of the highest order.

The catwalk cacophony of the magnetic cycle shoe, the Louboutin of the cycling world, is powered by more than just a functional and material truth. It is a signature of seriousness, a statement of intent. CLACK I mean it CLACK Look at my thighs CLACK I burn commitment like coal CLACK protein super hero drink CLACK eat my TITANIUM.

Only committed people clack happily around in the non-cycling universe, the intermittent percussive nature of their movement proof that they are not bluffing.

To be fair this group are it seems exceptionally fit and have little in common with the MAMIL of legend – the Family Guy sporting the equivalent of Elvis’s Hunk Of Burning Love Suit rendered in under sized spandex, webbing and lycra. The ones I see are a rarer creature.

But it is for that reason that I would flag a cautionary note.

I would suggest that perhaps, given their proximity to the zoo, their ‘matey’ calls, bright plumage and tendency to flocking, they might choose to be a little more discrete and less visible, less their rare species starts attracting the wrong kind of attention.

It would not surprise me to find, on my next visit to the Zoo with my children, a ‘weave’ of MAMILs circling a much smaller and far more contained enclosure; delighting the onlookers with their caws, calls and clack footed dance.

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