Of Gods, Software & Human Disappointment

16 Tuesday Jan 2018

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Abrahamic Faiths, AI, algorithms, Bacteria To Bach and Back, Dennet, Driverless cars, Evolution, From Bacteria To Bach and Back, Gaultier, gods, Greek Theatre, Hamlet, Hawking, i-phone X, Junior Gaultier, Mahabharata, Metaphysics, Omnipotence, Perseus, Physics, Shakespeare, Singularity, Software, supernatural, Zeus

Image result for human gods

There is an air of disappointment curling around the head of our new god.

Our all-consuming belief in Technology and the algorithmic inevitability of its ascent into one-ness with us renders it a form of deity to many. In its wake we see theological and philosophical texts bursting forth from every quarter, trying to both project its arc through our existence and predict its inevitable impact upon it.

But there is an increasingly vociferous movement rising up alongside it. One that sees fundamental flaws in its omnipotent possibilities and bumpy times ahead rooted in our blind allegiance to it.

Some of these voices come from mildly surprising places. Stephen Hawking, once a believer in a universal singularity – a theory of everything – has shifted the axis of his belief of what we will ultimately know:

“Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory, that can be formulated as a finite number of principles. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind”

And in turn, he sees bad times ahead for a world where A.I. exists unfettered and beyond regulation. In the great Singularity lies something against nature for humankind that troubles him.

Even Daniel C Dennet in his book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, is also positing signs of cracks and flaws in the godhead:

‘There are some unsettling signs that we are becoming over-civilised. And are entering the age of post intelligent design. Using our brains to understand our brains.’

He goes on to venture that our willingness to subsume and subjugate ourselves to technology and the escalating potency of Artificial Intelligences in advance of their ability to actual fulfil on our wildest expectations and aspirations is a misguided one.

In the untrammelled and exponentially-increasing expectations of technological revolution and artificial, algorithmically-induced intelligence lies the possibility of ever-increasing disappointment.

There is an inevitability about this that is unsurprising and yet quietly reassuring.

For a god awe is critical. As is adulation. And fear. But no god is complete without disappointment. So the whiff of it at the edges of the newly-accelerating godhead of Artificial Intelligence and a creeping hybrid humanity is actually appropriate. For some perhaps it will be proof of its god-like status.

As with all of the gods we’ve conjured or revealed to ourselves, A.I. and its role in the Singularity is perhaps simply a reflection of our nature, need and desire.

Perhaps we design them that way. For a reason. We need to be disappointed by gods.

Creating them in our image requires disappointment as the proof of our need for fallibility or flaw in any creature, organism or being regardless of whether they are of an abstract celestial, actual mortal or organic technological kind. There’s no such thing as perfection.

Disappointment seems not only to fulfil a functional role in regards to the nature of the entity. It also creates a signpost to the divine obsolescence in the model – the milestone of inevitable descent, dilapidation, degradation and decline that will lead to the next in the cycle.

Disappointment teaches us that we can fiercely believe, up to a point – but that we must prepare for the downside. It compels us have scenario-planned for the possibility that the deity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

But that is also part of the package. The scale of reverence, adulation and awe creates a blinding spotlight to throw on the smallest flaw.

Technology is a powerful and omnipotent thing. It has created a new skin of human consciousness – an algorithmic shellac around our previous model of consciousness. Everything is elevated. Everything is illuminated. Everything is accelerated. But in becoming more through it, we become more vulnerable, more fragile because of it.

In knowing more and experiencing more, in reaching further, we expose ourselves. And our flaws are amplified. (Surely the model applied to Zeus – for all of his divine greatness and powers, the formicating, fractious, scheming, self-interested, betraying, vain, capricious, petulant Zeus was simply an extrapolation of our flawed humanity to divine proportion.)

For the Greeks, in their gods much like their theatre, we find a learning module for humanity – where theatre taught us empathy and the potential of feeling – gods taught us humility and the danger of hubris.

Great lessons in life and the universe can be better observed and learned when set apart from our everyday realities. A masterplan. It only falls apart when we confuse ourselves with the gods we create – and choose to ordain ourselves as such.

Pick a culture any culture: Persians, Romans, Egyptians, Franks, Stuarts – we can never quite allow the gods we create to exist wholly apart from us. And those that seized the divine mantle could never help but eventually reign down on those beneath them in some delusional purge of divinity and dreadful ire – a self-fulfilling prophecy repeated countless times throughout human history.

Nonetheless, for all of this – for all their flaws and our flawed misuse and mimicry of them, gods have taught us to reach beyond the normal: beyond what is. They have raised us up towards them.

Simply to envisage them we had to ‘place’ them – and that required a feat of imagination. They are an exercise in imagination as much as they are an exercise in reverence and humility. You have to ‘place’ a god in a world apart from the one in which we exist – a different plane or celestial firmament. You also need to design some form of context and divine order for them. So our imagination, one of the most powerful things at work in us versus any other species on the planet, went to work. And its productivity in that order was staggering. Simply put, seeking divine revelation has powered our multiple ages of renaissance and enlightenment.

Through gaining a greater vantage and framing of the gods we shape, we can seek to understand them and perhaps become a little closer to them – to being in their image – like them.

And the most powerful part of all of that reaching? We evolve. Transgressing the given, the immediate and the fixed is how we evolve. And in doing so we explore the flaws in ourselves at a distance.

One of the most powerful things about reaching beyond ourselves, to a place so exposed, so raw, is that by transgressing where we are in the known universe, we step into the unknown. And the unknown is dangerous; it involves risk. And in a state of risk or threat we evolve.

Gods are an evolutionary mechanism in us – forcing us to exercise our intellect, imagination, intuition and connectivity in search of their existence and their seeming capabilities and gifts. And subsequently, in managing their presence and mitigating their excesses in relation to us, we expand our consciousness of our own existence, and the methods by which to improve it.

Through this mechanism we manage the tension between what we do and don’t know.

In writing a manuscript for a book recently I alluded to us being at a tipping point: where the new-future believers see us merging with machines in some orgy of singularity. We will become dispossessed of our mortal bindings – free to skip the light fantastic. We will have become the ultimate software. Ultimately we will be able to upload ourselves into any and every compatible device, receptacle or host. We can copy ourselves quadrillions of times over.

Surely this is a step into the divine? In becoming a wholly transferable entity capable of occupying millions of receptacles or hosts simultaneously, we become no different to the God of the Abrahamic faiths or the multiple gods of Grecian Olympus or the pantheon of the Mahabarata of Indian myth. We can become the thing that acts within everything if we so choose.

In the draft I also point to the possibility of a more balanced relationship between the science and spirituality of us as being the source of our greatest trajectory – a state of being I refer to as the Human Hammock. The Human Hammock provides us with the ability to sling ourselves between the boughs of science and spirituality – to offer a more immediate ability to exist profitably between both the known and the unknown at one and the same time: mentally, materially, physically and metaphysically.

In the draft I point to the possibility that we need to keep both aspects firmly engaged in us, calibrating the degree to which they feature according to need and desire.

I believe there is a benefit to us of keeping a clear hand and cold eye on the Unknown, as it is those things beyond our comprehension, and our hunger to understand and know them better that compels our evolution as a species.

To be clear when I say unknown I do not mean it within the ladder of human consciousness. I am referring to what exists beyond human comprehension, not beyond current scientific knowledge (which exists solely inside human comprehension and consciousness)..

We can ensure that we fix the Human Hammock theory clearly and as absolutely as possible by priming the forthcoming Singularity to abide by biological evolutionary rules.

Though Singularity might lead us towards a more divine state of elevated and liberated consciousness and ubiquity, we should ensure that it remains rooted in the ladder of our pre-existing evolutionary logic until such a time as a new logic supercedes it.

Eventually, in multiplying ourselves to that degree and with that expansiveness, we would indeed become gods in our own image of them.

The circle will have been squared, shifting us through the millennia from Man shaped in the image of gods to gods shaped in the image of Man.

When talking of gods, it’s worth being clear on what we mean by that and the slide ruler of how they represent and improve us and their relationship to us.

Gods or deities are supernatural beings that exist in a place above or outside of that of a normal being. They are divine – revered as sacred – and invocation is an inextricable part of our relationship with them. We invoke them – call upon, summon up, reference, or seek them out as part of the reciprocal contract of their and our existence.

They are supposed to raise our consciousness above the banal and that which exists in our everyday being – to improve us. We can invoke them outside of any chronological or spatial context in the pursuit of something.

There are different bridges that exist between us and them – prayer is the easiest example. But also extreme physical duress or testing is a much-used way to elevate us into a higher consciousness and bring us closer to our gods and one-ness wth the universe. (Shamanism is a great exponent of this.) Extreme physicality is powerful in god world. Add some purpose or cause to that physicality and you are getting even closer.

There is a direct line to the gods through heroic action, where humans show superhuman willing, guile, leadership, courage, spirit or strength in pursuit of a good or ‘heroic’ cause. As the old saying goes, when someone is ‘touched by the gods’ it means the reflections or shadows of the greater faculties of the gods reside within them.

In referencing the relationship between us and them in this way we bring them closer to us. Greater proximity to gods is part of the self-defence mechanism innate in the god model and its culture.

Some classical and ancient texts imbued their god tales with Demi-gods – half human half god – whose heroic undertakings created a picture of greatness that was more accessible to the everyday human being.

This is the default zone between us and the distant realm of gods as we’ve created them. Demi-gods are very very important to keep people engaged and evolving.

Why? Because human nature predicts that if something is wholly out of reach – fully blown bells and whistles gods for instance – we don’t rise to the occasion. In the case of lofty, dislocated gods we just sublimate ourselves to them. We don’t desire to be more like them – we just cower, and we give up and go do something else. Because it is beyond us. Out of sight is out of mind unless they might choose to come down and walk amongst us.

But Demi-gods, now they are far closer to home. If the gods are Gaultier; Demi-gods are Junior Gaultier: the access point for us mere mortals.

The universal love for Wonder Woman (a Demi Demi, given that she is the daughter of the Demi-god queen, Hippolyta, daughter of Ares, the Greek god of War) is proof of our need for our god-like creations to walk amongst us sometimes. It makes their greatness accessible and mimicry of it possible.

I can’t be Zeus but I might take a run at being Perseus or even Wonder Woman – ish.

So gods do not need to always be the pure, super-duper theological or mythological gods of classicism or faith far beyond our ken. We have the Demi-god to help us move things along. There is little question that we have believed for a long time that there is indeed a ladder to god-like greatness for us.

What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world,

Shakespeare’s Hamlet

So when I speak of gods I refer to anyone perceived as god-like and heroic to us. Someone revered beyond simple explanation, and someone whose words or deeds are invoked by us as succour and guidance.

In that framework, gods with a small ‘g’ come in many shapes and forms.

Starting with our parents.

Our most adored friends can also achieve god-like status for a while.

Then the broader adulations of our youth: Sports people. Celebrities. Music stars. Movie stars. Writers. Artists. Scientists.

We even have the passing phase of god-like stature in the first flushes of human love. The phase in which we are fiercely revered, adored and invoked.

Each of these gods, as with every other, are destined to go on a journey through Awe. Adulation. Reverence. Fear. But each is also destined to disappoint in some way eventually.

As disappointment is an inextricable part of the human journey so it has also become an innate aspect of the gods we shape . In some ways being disappointed by gods perhaps prepares us for disappointment with ourselves. If the gods can be disappointing; flawed, capricious, found wanting, then so can we be – and that is alright.

Disappointment in our gods lessens or softens the disappointment in ourselves.

In that way, gods that disappoint are an evolutionary mechanism that stop us giving up and turning away – defeated by what we aren’t or cannot do. We learn that though disappointment may strike, that’s alright. It was always thus. You can’t get it right all the time and no one is perfect – not even our gods. So keep carrying on.

As for Artificial Intelligence, well, perhaps it has to have a Zeus moment. It has to go and sleep with someone inappropriate, sire a child, create a technological Demi-god (and in the absence of any others I would like to venture R2D2 as that Demi-god) who will eventually challenge the god that helped sire it and lay it low.

Then we can all relax. Go back to ogling i-phone Xs and googling driverless cars, with a quiet knowledge that when they come of the rails, everything is alright. It’s not the end of the world.

Well, not this one anyway.

Disappointed By Gods FOOTNOTE: This topic will one day become a book – of what length I do not know. But somehow somewhere it will. So if anyone’s got any ideas on a publisher – shout!

Tech, Purpose & The Aspergers Economy

14 Wednesday Sep 2016

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ADS, Animal Spirits, Artificial Intelligence, Aspergers, Aspies, coders, Courtney Love, Daryl Hannah, Evolution, High Functioning Autism, Identity, IQ, John Maynard Keynes, Microprocessors, Moore's Law, Programmers, purpose, Rajesh Anandan, Scott Wilkinson, Stanley Kubrick, Tech, Tim Burton, Virgin Media Business

Tech is nothing without Purpose.

And in our increasingly hyper connected world, Purpose is nothing without tech.

Purposeful companies and businesses increasingly use tech, digital platforms and the social networks to shape, co create, disseminate, sense check and activate their every purposeful initiative amongst the crowd.

We are beginning to move beyond the cultish tech for tech’s sake ‘everything’s genius’ approach to all things digital. People are not blindly saying ‘yes’ before they even know what they’re being offered.

And it is not only in the masses’ response to the latest highly questionable i-phone up grade new grade what grade launch that we see a little of the emperor’s clothes being shredded. A number of financial analysts regard the herd of Unicorns that have appeared in the last 3 or 4 years as ‘fluffy stock’ with questionable valuations. Simply put they’ll trade and make cash out of them while they can but they think they’re a little puffed up in the value department.

Even the hard-core geeks and nerds – those applying the genius of AI and machine learning to their business, platforms and product ideas – are using them to unlock more humanity in the tech and in the customer experience, not just capacity and capability.

But being more human isn’t a purpose. I would say its an evolutionary imperative. Just because some tech or platform play is possible or probable doesn’t make it palatable. You can’t guarantee that everyone will just continue to have an appetite for everything because it’s cool or does more shit that the last one.

Moore’s Flaw is that, although the keep doubling it trajectory of hyper accelerated microprocessor capability might be a fact, generally, people are not linear and they are far from modal. People are suspicious of being hyper accelerated, and after the first rush tend to push back against it. This is something to do with their emotional sense of risk, control and threat and how they respond to it, beyond the rational Should I? Shouldn’t I?

In some ways the tech future scapers need to apply a mechanism somewhat similar to how John Maynard Keynes’ Animal Spirits was applied in the world of finance and economics – where he pointed to the lateral and randomly applied instincts, emotions and proclivities that ostensibly drive human behaviour in regards to the adoption of risk in financial situations. Understanding how people feel emotionally about the adoption of hyper accelerated tech and its dizzying ability, for example in the work place, would make for a far richer and more realistic tech and digital landscape.

But I digress.

If Tech is turning the world, beyond the increasing humanities of its evolution, is their a purpose it might embrace beyond its direct impacts in society? One rooted in its community?

Is there a massive unspoken cause that it could rally around – one which is rooted in its own culture and expertise – and ultimately that delivered a mutuality of interest for every stakeholder – employees, customers, suppliers and partners?

In rifling through various pieces on tech and society over the past few months, Scott Wilkinson, head of Brand at Virgin Media Business and myself came to a thought.

The answer might lie in its heartland and population – and by that we mean the teeming populous engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, developers, coders and designers et al who keep this massive multi Trillion dollar industry turning.

There is much spoken of the ‘on the spectrum’ nature and culture of the super tech geek world – or any geek world for that matter.

But we have noticed that most of the ‘noise’ is around an almost cultish celebrity status given to people with ‘astonishing’ minds.

High Functioning Autistics – the celebrated ones – have become a sort of ‘new rock n roll’ – the super brains – and in the tech industry these human super processors are the Natural Intelligence that shapes Artificial Intelligence and astonishing paradigm shifts in the world.

The fact that in broader popular culture the likes of Courtney Love, Darryl Hannah, Stanley Kubrick and many other HFAs make no secret of their condition is redeeming and very helpful to remove the stigma that still surrounds the condition.

But having an above average IQ, the intellectual skills and the successes that they do still sets these HFAs a long long way away from the average person with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

People who exist lower down the ASD spectrum with less immediately identifiable symptoms will find life far more difficult as their behaviours can be misunderstood.

So the question is this – beyond the rock n roll of HFAs, how many ASDs exist in the Tech Sector? And if that number is highly over indexed versus society (researchers estimate that 1% of the population have some form of ASD*), and if the sector is proven to host a disproportionate number of ASDs and equally profit from them and their condition, then perhaps therein lies a Purpose for the Tech Sector rooted in a pure truth and within both its interest and expertise to act upon it.

Tech Guru Rajesh Anandan, founder of software company ULTRA testing only employs people on the spectrum, and for what he sees as very very good reason, the benefits of their engagement far outstripping the immediate issues of their behavioural difficulties. The idea of Aspies being celebrated and valued in tech circles is far from new.

My interest lies in those millions who still live in the shadows – those who have not truly identified their condition and struggle with its impacts – those who have not stumbled into tech as some Wardrobe to a Narnian world where they feel more at home and alive.

Is there an Action Group to be created drawn from the heads of the Global Tech Players – to set an agenda for helping those with every level of ASD in regards to education, training, employment and community – what better use to put a world leading ‘tech campus’ of smart, energetic, highly connected people to than taking care of their own?

Does a purpose rooted in unleashing opportunity for all those people who otherwise struggle with ASD in its lesser forms fit with the global tech culture?

No idea. Simply a thought. Something that revealed itself to us.

This kind of initiative may already exist. It certainly deserves greater exploration.

Perhaps the sector might think ‘not interested’ – or ‘we already do enough’. It is always hard to get people involved because it requires investment. And Purpose rarely unlocks investment. But profit and finance does. Securing growth does.

Perhaps they will only do it if someone puts a value on ASD as one of the engines of the Tech sector’s astonishing rise and success. A value that they feel compelled to protect.

Perhaps that what’s we need to do. If we were to be able to measure the impact and value of ASD in the tech sector and present it as a highly particular economy – what I tentatively call The Aspergers Economy for want of a better label – that would change the lens on people’s perception and appetite for investment. By rooting the value of the sector within the gift of a certain group, perhaps the value of their contribution as a highly productive constituency driving a global economy worth in the trillions of dollars; perhaps people might the be prepared to invest in the resilience of that global economy by improving the opportunities of the primary actors in its success.

That might be a Purpose worth pursuing because, ultimately Tech is Nothing without Purpose, and that Purpose has to be more than another AI story or ‘look at my slidey new interface’ youtube film.

*SOURCE: Foundation For People With Learning Disabilities –

http://mhf-ld.unified.co.uk/help-information/learning-disability-a-z/a/autistic-spectrum-disorder-asd/

Living memory, resilience & the art of not forgetting

02 Monday May 2016

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Alzheimer's, ard drives, Arts, company culture, data points, degenerative disease, desire, drama, Elegy, Evolution, Gladiator, Identity, Language, literature, Living memory, Maximus, Nock Payne, resilience, self expression, smart phones, Social Memory, technologies, telecomms, The Book Of Life, Virgin Accelerator

Funny thing memory

We tend to pay little attention to it; until it starts to fail us.

Sometimes its reason for failing us is a conspiracy of genes + environment – creating a disposition to Alzheimer’s and other forms of degenerative disease – the desperate creeping extinction of everything that made us one the whole beautiful living breathing loving human being we are.

At other times it’s disappearance is to do with the impact of new technologies. Recent technologies tempt us to dispense with our need to ‘remember’. Or they diffuse or diminish our natural ability to remember those things most important and valuable to us. In his book the shallows, Nicholas Carr points to how excessive immersion in the internet and the digital world disturbs our ability to transfer and store working memory into our deeper long term memory, reshaping our neural pathways.

Unlike language, art or drama – older human technologies designed to mine, explore, capture, elevate and replay memory and the experience and impact of living – our most recent technologies sometimes seem to seek to simply mathematically atomise our lives and the memory of them until human feeling is viewed as nothing more than a data point – something to be measured calibrated and engineered.

The idea that consciousness, identity and the precious value of memory is a form or condition of existence that can simply be dissected, measured, data pointed, and reengineered by science is a theme explored in Nick Payne’s play Elegy. A woman raddled by a degenerative disease that will eventually kill her is told her condition can be halted by ‘life saving’ surgery – the miracle of science – but only at the cost of catastrophic loss of memory. At which point one has to ask: ‘What life are you saving if not the recollected one; the one filled with precious riches and experiences?’

In some ways the diaspora of memories and recollections once housed in picture frames diaries sketchbooks letters and albums into the lost vaults of smart phone devices and hard drives is robbing us of tangible tactile living memory. This functional un-remembering allow us to abdicate the responsibility for maintaining those experiences, memories or recollections and synthesizing them. The machine nature of calling up data is very different to the human nature of recollecting memory – the former is perfect, linear, modal and cached, the second, imperfect, linear, messy and overlapping, every journey into it opening up the possibilities of new revelation – as opposed to the same data cache relentlessly replayed like the locked loop in a stored file.

One of the most powerful drivers of our progress and evolution and of our astonishing resilience as a species is personal and shared recollection. Perhaps memory is a just a simple evolutionary trait mythologised – of collected wisdoms and experiences of fear pain survival and joy, regurgitated in fire side stories, tales, mementoes, symbols artefacts and dramas.

But to connect memory or remembering to some higher order of existence – to have created the thread between what is, what has been and what will be via the technology of memory is some proof of our ability to transcend the claw and scratch of base existence.

That the memory of us and what we do may well be a vanity particular to our species – a desperate need for our life to be more than some nihilistic little blip on a cosmic scale.

Nonetheless, our need to try and reach beyond the brackets of birth and death and seize immortality; whether it be through our beliefs, by our actions, the legacies we leave, the children we bear or the blunt tool of extending our physical and conscious existence, is a defining trait in us.

Gladiator’s Maximus demonstrates our need to be remembered as an inspiration of improvement and achievement when he states: “What we do in life echoes in eternity”

To be forgotten is a terrible thing. Immortality, until some scientific trickster or data consciousness A.I. guru makes it otherwise , is mostly an exercise in seeding a process of relentless remembering.

We have a number of simple systems already in place, some rooted in thousands of years of repeated doing and some rooted in immoveable belief systems, and some developed through more recent technologies.

Some forms or remembering have until recently been seen as the sign of mental distress or illness. Take Nostalgia. Sneaking off for a quick youtube binge of TV theme tunes from childhood or rummaging through pictures of old Y Front adverts (love Retronaut!!) and a desperate yearning to watch the infamous Ziggy Stardust Top of the Pops is usually seen by the up-tight ‘its all abut the Now man’ zealots as some mawkish sentimentality BUT recent developments in psychoanalysis have shown that nostalgia is a powerful human tool – and can actually strengthen our sense of self and centre our identity, enabling us to weather greater shifts, turbulence and transition.

Look Back In Joy, a recent Guardian article looking at the power of Nostalgia, focuses on an Greek Born American academic, Constantine Sedikides, who had left the University of North Carolina to become Professor of Social & Personality Psychology at the University of Southampton. He realised that he was using nostalgia to manage the turbulence and dislocation of changing continents. This led him to exploring in far more robust academic terms the role and facility that nostalgia provides us with. His findings are liberating. Sedikides talks of nostalgia as the “perfect internal politician, connecting the past with the present, pointing optimistically to the future” and a mental state “absolutely central to human experience”.

For me this quick blog journey through the Art of Remembering was bough on by a recent collision of banal choices, a profound realisation and professional curiosity.

First up.

The banal. Sky movie choice time with my children. “What about The Book of Life?” – a simple, beautiful whimsical story with a simple point by the master Guillermo Del Toro. Yes, its about greatness. Yes, its about the illusion of courage. Yes, its about true love. yes, its about belonging – but really, it id a film about not forgetting. Relentlessly Remembering is about Not Forgetting. Memory and the act of remembering are the most powerful tools that we have at our disposal. We are all kept alive in the hearts and minds eyes and memories of those who love us and have lived out some part of their lives in around and about us.

Second up.

The profound. In a simple exchange between my brother and I, we reminded ourselves that the effects of my beautiful but now dead mother will eventually need to be shared out between my he and I – the next step in the atomisation of her living memory into our lives and eventually the lives of my children and so on. Each effect vibrates with associated memory – sodden with the context which arrives like a steam train every time they are recalled into being – expressions, sounds, smells, feelings, times and experiences. The atomic truth that an atom never dies – and that the world vibrates with the atomic echoes of every one who has ever lived needs to include the more ephemeral but still equally powerful atomic nature of the vibrations of memory that run through the effects of those we have loved. Their atomic nature is indirectly imbued by their having been part of a life. They are rendered ‘animate’ by those vibrations. This belief in this form of conscious osmosis doesn’t stop at the effects and belongings of those who have passed out of sight. We also apply it to sites and buildings – from Stone Henge and battle fields to the blue plaques on buildings. We make pilgrimages to the hallowed halls of here and there, wishing for the conscious greatness and wellhead of wisdom and learning steeped in their walls to pour out into us.

Third up.

The professional. This curiosity arose while exploring the purpose of one of the Virgin Accelerator businesses I have had the pleasure of working with. In a world of zero hours and the death of the social contract between large corporations and their employees, their idea of a platform that links previous, present and future employees creates a simple and compelling way for rebuilding a powerful and precious social memory into a company.

Social or Living Memory in a corporation or business is increasingly left to chance and the random foray into face-book pages, LinkedIn and the odd Instagram surge. Fully connecting with a company’s Now – amongst its employees, the communities it touches, its customers, its partners and suppliers – is only part of true socialisation

Socialising a company requires more than just acting in the Now. But few companies actively connect their past with their present and even fewer attach it to their future. The anti-socialising of a company – the active dislocation and rupture the social threads that run through it – the ties that bind it from its past to its future – are not just an oversight on the part of the social strategy or HR.

It is not just economic pressures or the trend for zero hours that destroy the social contract and living memory of a business. Many ambitious and venal execs actively dispense with the ‘dead wood’ and not always for the right reasons. This forest fire approach is often simply a way of removing those with a greater living memory of the business than the ‘new’ order now prevailing and controlling it .

Agreed, often the human nature of getting stuck in our ways: fixing things: securing them and subsequently seeing all change to them as alien or dangerous can kill a business; sucking the light and life out of it. But the baby & bathwater approach to removing people who’ve been around too long can rob corporations of a vital cornerstone of their resilience. When done wilfully this kind of action should be seen as an aggression against the business and in turn the shareholder – because it is purposefully eviscerating a source of memory and knowledge that though in its linear and previous form may be obsolete, could be re-tasked and transformed into a new and more powerful resource to greater long term value.

All of these impacts, however great or small, can create a form of Corporate Alzheimer’s – the degeneration of the social memory of the company, and with it the very thing that made the company burn so brilliantly for so long.

In a conversation with a large American telecomm business about how they might help High School kids resist dropping out, I was surprised to find that they struggled to see the value in connecting their ex employees – a truly universal and multitudinous cohort of living memory and life experience – with the young high school crowd via a weekly skype roulette. The idea was simple – for a massive telecoms and connectivity provider to create a showcase of meaningful connections by using social platforms to randomly connect high school kids and oldies to share moments of life and experience to mutual benefit. I realised that to grasp the value of this and institute this type of initiative requires an innate understanding of the power and value of being remembered for ex employees and of memory to those just staring on their journey.

Regardless of what a company gets wrong, and many get much wrong in regards to how they treat their employees over time – the truth is those companies still invest an enormous amount of time and money into training up and expanding the capabilities of their workforce (self interestedly granted but in that mutual self interest lies the truth of the social contract between an employee and an employer).Why let it all walk out the door when the employee leaves? Because sometimes their tenure was bumpy or you didn’t act in the best manner towards them?

At the close of the Theory of Everything , when Steven and his ex wife Jane watch their children playing in the garden, their exchange summarises the value and potency of connected imperfections perfectly.

“Look what we made”.

For all the mistakes. For all the disappointments. For all the pain. Would you have it any other way? Memory can hurt. But is can also heal. Forgetting is a cop out.

Some people and the companies they run would be all the better for taking this view – and in doing so commit to rebuild their ability to relentlessly remember – drawing a long line from their past to their future. Social or Living memory is not only one of the most powerful human facilities. It could also be the cornerstone of a companies greatest resilience in our accelerating atomizing world.

Purpose, the north star of any company, is one of its tools for Relentless Remembering – and it becomes meaningless if it is only socialised in the Now.

A purpose must be part of a continuum that reaches from the beginning of a company to its end. And to do that it must exist inside a structure that values and facilitates everyone’s ability to relentlessly remember and be improved and enlightened by that remembering.

Hoover bag, fish-tank, trophy cabinet & the art of wearing your intellect lightly.

30 Monday Nov 2015

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Arts & Humanities, Atomic, beano, Class, Culture, Doctorates, Evolution, Fish Tank, gogglebox, Hipsters, Hoover bag, Hubble Telescope, Intellect, Intelligence, M Theory, Race, School Swot, Sex, Showing Off, Sir Richard Attenborough, Smarts, society, Stephen Hawking, the Sciences, Tophies, Tribe, Universe, Wit, X factor

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Hoover bag, fish tank or trophy cabinet? Which one describes your model of intellectual self-awareness and demeanour best?

I spend a lot of time suspended (the animation part is discretionary) between two worlds where intelligence chimes very differently and how it is worn can speak volumes:

One brims with an ‘earthy’ scrum of normal people with their pop populism, non p.c humour, fun food formats, all things sporting, inappropriate music lyrics, sudoku and simple telly pleasures:

The other teems with a rare, heavenly throng of ‘visibly’ smart people (staggeringly smart actually) whose weather eye rests not just on Gogglebox but also on the material and scientific threads that stitch us in to our universe at a sub atomic and particular level from both the inside out and the outside in: a sort of Hubble-scope meets microscope universal view. Which takes some cells, grey or otherwise.

Whilst suspended between these two worlds I have come across a myriad of different shapes and shades of accidental, expressed or demonstrable ‘intelligence’.

But for the sake of this piece I have gathered them into three buckets.

These buckets are purely based on how people ‘wear’ their intelligence, knowledge and learning. They do not seek to make points of a sex, class, race, regional or tribal nature.

Intelligence, smarts and book learning are as likely to be mocked or marvelled at in a stately home in Cumbria as they are in a mock Tudor Semi in Southall and a single-parent council house in Cleethorpes.

So the three buckets are as follows:

Hoover Bag:

The majority of us, though our intellectual reserves have been honed to some degree in our childhood and teenage years through some form of formal education, spend most of our time applying a needs-must, auto didactical approach to the appropriation, collection and storage of any information, data, knowledge and the subsequent exercising of it via what might loosely be called intellect and its reflex inventive cousin ingenuity.

We just hoover up what’s in front of us at the time; all in the moment and for little reason other than to get through, survive, overcome, complete (or avoid) the tasks that life sets in front of us. Most of it tends to be transient: pockets of old knowledge from schoolbook rote and favourite teachers, the history channel, anything ever said by Sir Richard Attenborough, the odd TV show theme tune, an ex-lover’s ‘hot tunes’, news stories, sleeve notes off albums, film quotes, holiday resort locations, train times, exam questions, sweet names, bus numbers – the majority of it utterly random and seemingly disconnected – fluff and drivel: insubstantial, frivolous, fleeting. Only of meaning in the cats cradle of life and experiences in our head. All hidden deep in the bag unless we’re compelled to have a rummage.

But in that intellectual Hoover bag somewhere, amongst all the dust and atomic grains of everyday life – with a little rooting around – and if pushed – there are brilliant little treasures to be found: nuggets; the intellectual version of shiny marbles, lost lego characters, the odd ear ring, the missing washer off that clock, and a rare coin from somewhere exotic.

It’s not that we’re incapable of being a Fish Tank or Trophy Cabinet. On the odd occasion we can be very intellectually forthright. But. We’re just not that interested. Intelligence for most is directly linked to and in relation to what we must and need to do. Work. Earn money. Buy treats. The odd holiday. Survive. With Stickers. Intellect does not represent anything of value for us to wield in the world. Exams are for getting through. Real stuff is about what books cant teach and accolades cant fake: common sense, nous, drive, smarts.

Many people remain deliriously untouched by the compulsion to scale ever- greater heights and plumb ever-deeper depths of their intellect to pull out a plum.

There is in fact a running suspicion amongst a lot of people that too much learning is bad for you. Like fatty foods and alcohol.

Referring to people as being intellectually obese or an academoholic probably hits the referential nail on the head.

A lot of people feel an antipathy to the ‘too clever by half’ bunch, not too dissimilar to the feelings people harbour for the overly fat and the commonly drunk. Fat drunks take it to a whole new level of course.

Getting above yourself is one of the most common malaises they point to in the overly smart.

Fish Tank:

Go up just one notch and things change for the shinier. This is not yet the domain of the public academic, but certainly we are now in a realm where intellectual and academic possessions are going on show – they are becoming socially important not just to the trajectory of us as a person but also to our sense of self – our core identity. Their value isn’t hidden any more.

Fish tank intellects are suddenly about visibility: about being seen to be smart. It can start small. Quipy; witty. Ripostes. Razor sharp. ‘Quick wittedness’ gets bolstered with facts and bite sized pieces of knowledge not found on the history channel or in the newspaper. Suddenly we’re utilising our intelligence not just as an evolutionary survival mechanism but as a status marker, courting tool, and social lever.

However small, simple and under-populated the fish tank might be (We’re all quietly fond of the singular fish bowl inhabited by that gold fish) there is still a shiny attractive thing to look at.

Now fish tank intellect land is the bucket that provides the most flex and room for manouvre. Because you can go from one small intellectual goldfish in a clichéd bowl of water on a window sill to a multi-atmosphere self cleaning super sized wall set super tank with teeming shoals of exquisite, rare and increasingly expensive creatures.

From Intellectual Ahhh! to intellectual WOW! At the super scale end we find ourselves in the world of the serial collector of intellectual pursuits – reaching far beyond what they will ever need for their day job. The role of intellectual curator and collector of brightly coloured intellectual exotica as a matter of projected identity is a big deal for big fish tankers. But the big difference between these and the Trophy Cabineteers is the stealth nature of the presentation. However bright, gregarious and attention seeking the various and increasingly valuable baubles are, they are not presented ‘directly’. This is a world where proofs and demonstrations of intelligence are refracted through a prism of tangential referencing – obtuse, sophisticated, shrouded – usually hidden inside some trojan horse of life learning or experience story: presented simply as a new piece of the expanding fabric of their life.

But however subtle the presentation – these brightly coloured attractive and seductive entities are most definitely for show and for effect.

These ‘exotic splashes of colour have been plucked from the sea of knowledge to aggrandise us: to decorate our lives and create conversation focused on us through them.

Trophy Cabinet

Smashed it. No time or interest in discretion or subtlety. I’m smart. I’m bloody clever. And competitive. An intellectual winner. I’ve got more degrees and PhDs than I can shake a stick at. Doctorates are just the beginning. I probably have a few Honorary Executive positions as well. Sciences. Arts. Humanities. Classics. Don’t care. Whatever it takes. I am not in the business of doing a topic. I’m in the business of being really, really clever – and wearing it on my sleeve. If anyone’s up for a Nobel Peace Prize it’ll be me. Via national and then global recognition. I am professionally clever. Love academia. A wonderful pursuit. But please keep your intellectual generosity and shared collectivism of the mind to yourself. This is the expanding me show of cerebral fabulousness.

Simply put, you’ll all come to realize that you are cerebral dwarves and I am resplendent in the glow of my own brilliance. I am Alpha Meta.

A harsh caricature? Perhaps. But the dissonance between what we consider intellectually valuable in the more rarified halls of first world academe and what humanity actually requires to live thrive and survive on this planet can sometimes make us look at the trophy cabinet persona and their exceptionally competitive and vaguely sociopathic behaviours with a not necessarily benevolent eye.

For many, especially those struggling to make ends meet and having to work all hours to do it, and for those with a natural aversion to people who speak ‘in riddles’, it is hard sometimes to see the greater value in relentless and unquenchable pursuit of ever greater learning. To many it is hard to see why anyone should support or laud someone wanting to remain the ‘eternal student’, wrapped in ever decreasing intellectual circles on arcane subjects that owe more to human ego than evolution.

The Trophy Cabinet model of flamboyantly worn intellect is mostly seen for what it ostensibly is: a tower of self-impression: a monument to ones ego. Questionable. Perhaps.

BUT, before we start measuring how many hands high the horse is we’re leaping on to sound off about the super bright, it must be remembered that these stratospheric arrogances of the mind and the intellect (as some see them) bring much to be thankful for: scientific advances and revelations that make enormous tranches of humankind more healthy and more resilient.

Some of these people have opened doors in the fabric, nature and story of human kind and the multi-verse we exist in. And we are better for it. And for them. Whether we think they’re too smart by half or not.

Witch hunting and pointing fingers at the nerds and the super bright people is a lazy pursuit. Existing, as many do, ‘on the spectrum’, dislocated from and uncomfortable around what most like to see as ‘normal’ people, they have their own crosses to bear: crosses that many of us would never countenance let alone endure. Brainbox baiting also smacks of being ‘chippy’. Take a swing ‘cause you make me feel bad! Thankfully now that Stephen Hawking is officially rock n roll, with his own Hollywood movie to boot, and the new tech hipsters are to all effects bearded and brogued members of the Nerd tribe, the old Beano comic view of school swots is changing – slowly.

Learning, the knowledge it brings and how the individual mind processes and leverages that knowledge to best and personal effect, to inspire and engage us may be a divisive topic; but we need to celebrate and embrace every type of intellect we have if we are to continue to live, thrive and survive.

And whether the gems of insight, idea and illumination that improve our everyday lives get shaken out of a hoover bag, netted from a fish tank or taken down from the trophy cabinet, I couldn’t care less.

Now where did I put that nozzle…?

Academic Lag, Advertising Jag & the task of Socialising the Genome

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

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Academia, Academic Lag, Acclimatisation, Advertising, Advertising Jag, andy lamb, big data, Brian Cox, conversation, Creative Action Research, Decompression, Demand, desire, DNA, Evolution, Genome, Genomic Science, Guttenberg Press, Hadron Collider, Health, health Screening, Human Behaviour, human essence, Identity, Insight Ladder, Intellectuals, Language, Living The Dream, marketing communications, networks of academic collaboration, NHS, Populists, Sanger Institute, social networks, Socialisation, Syntax, utility, wellbeing

LAG:

A period of time: a noticeable delay between action and reaction – Failing to keep up with another or others in movement or development

JAG:

A short period of overindulgence in an activity: a shopping jag: a crying jag A stab; an intense and concentrated movement or action

I increasingly find myself at a very particular and exciting intersection.

I find myself there not by accident but by design: having helped build a methodology that reaps its greatest rewards at the point where applied science and commercial creativity collide.

(The creativity is commercial in that the point of collision is designed to generate pieces of communication to a specific end and utility – functional with tangible benefits – as opposed to a piece of pure art or some material assemblage generated to no end other than to create feeling and effect through its aesthetic – experiential with intangible benefits.)

Over the last year and a half I have been working on a project that seeks simple answers to some quite complex questions rooted in deep science:

How do we scale the ‘everyday’ conversation around genome science and DNA beyond the scientists, academics, clinicians and the rare interested civilian party?

How do we illuminate the scientific mysteries and wonder of our DNA in such a way that everyone can understand them, embrace them, engage with them, and reap the rewards that come from them?

And ultimately how do we help the greatest number of us to enhance the nature, quality and duration of our human tenure through informed choice and enlightened action in regards to our DNA?

This search for a more compelling narrative and conversation at the point where science and everyday humanity meet is not an isolated pursuit.

It is also true of the ‘Living The Dream’ project I am currently helping to steer. The project also seeks to scale the conversation around what constitutes a more enduring model of prosperity and sustainable consumption by finding a more ‘human’ narrative to replace the existing one, rooted as it is in the science, engineering and ‘reason’ of sustainability as opposed to human emotion of it.

In both cases we need to find a way of communicating complex concepts and constructs in the simplest way possible to the largest number of people without destroying the integrity of the scientific truths in the process.

In both cases there are untold rewards for society and humankind both individually and collectively if we can scale these conversations.

So I find myself working at this intersection of multiple collisions: between scientific integrity and human sociability: between depth and structure and lightness and elasticity; between applied science and commercial creativity.

MAKING CONVERSATION

To reap the untold rewards we simply need the communities of science and academia to meet the man and woman in the street and have a good ‘chat’:

And boy do they have some great stuff to talk about: life changing, existence enhancing stuff.

In the case of genomics, simply put, if enough of us embrace the advantages that the advances in the science offer in our everyday lives, using the revelations of DNA in an applied manner both individually and for the common good, we could eventually move ourselves from the old curative model of health care to a new and far more dynamic preventative model: one that will not only just change the way we live but also alter the duration of that living.

Making smarter and easily comprehensible lifestyle choices informed and underwritten by a deeper and more intimate understanding of what makes us who we are can help us to embrace a more positive approach to the lives we lead. Those choices made en masse will equally inform and illuminate how best the health service of the future can better sustain its ability to continue to serve our society both systemically and financially.

Now logic would predict that given the enormous impact and beneficial nature of those potential outcomes, everyone should already be ‘all over that conversation’: chatting away furiously, listening intently, sharing the conversation with friends and reaping the rewards of a better life.

SPEAKING IN TONGUES

The problem is – we’re not.

Why?

The greatest barrier seems to be one of simple comprehension and understanding.

The scientists and academics simply communicate in a different language to the everyday people they are trying to reach. Their particular languages have different vocabularies, inflections, idioms, energies and vernaculars – which is unsurprising given that both parties live in very, very different worlds.

In one world we have the ‘splendid isolation’ of existence required to nurture intense, interrogative and highly rational scientific thought and action – and the codified, particular language and almost impenetrable texts, dissertations and white papers that accompany and support it.

In the other world we find the hyper-connected and hyper-socialised immersion of our emotionally charged everyday existence, fuelled and accelerated by smart devices and sprawling digital platforms of human interaction filled with billions of TXTS, tweets, emojis, memes, slang and banter.

One exists in a mode of hyper dislocation; the other in a mode of hyper socialisation.

And it seems that each speaks in riddles as far as the other is concerned.

A chasm exists between the world of academia and the sciences and that of the everyday person in the street. And as with all worlds of such different ‘atmospheres’, there needs to be a process of acclimatisation when travelling between one and the other.

In the context of Socialising the Genome (and my Living The Dream project) it is the conversational ‘syntax’ – the framing, structure, language and phrasing of these arguments – that needs to ‘acclimatise’ to the atmosphere of everyday needs and desires and the language they speak.

The highly tuned language, intense qualification and proofs of the scientists and academics need to ‘decompress’ on the way up into the ‘real world’ – otherwise they will suffer a bout of the communication ‘bends’ – where they either over compensate and try to hard – become too ‘matey’; the NBF of the person in the street… : ) : )

Or they simply come across like a geek at a fancy dress party – awkward, uncomfortable and so wrong on so many counts.

Putting deep science and academic concepts and truths through a ‘decompression and acclimatisation’ process can of course be undertaken as a one off – but realistically, if our ambition in this instance is to ‘socialise’ the conversation, we have to assume a fluid and escalating dialogue of increasing and expanding value and reach – and for that to happen we realised that we needed to keep the findings, revelations and insights of the academics and scientists constantly ‘in flow’; moving seamlessly and effortlessly between one world and the other: elastic and evolving.

To achieve this they need to be ‘sensitive’ of, keep pace with and be true to the everyday shifts and nuances in the behaviours, attitudes and language of the people whose existence they seek to improve. To be resilient and meaningful they must remain ‘relevant’ at all times.

(There is little point in deep diving for a populist answer only to find that on surfacing with one 2 years later, the question has changed. Herein lurks the danger of the academic lag.)

So, in the process of designing the methodology that would facilitate this we found ourselves with two acute questions to answer:

How do we create an offset strategy for the academic lag – one that allows the worlds of academia and the deep sciences to remain ‘present’ – to exist both in the accelerated and socialised Now while still mining in splendid isolation?

How do we design a ‘decompression and acclimatisation’ process that enables a smarter simpler flow of ideas and findings – a ‘conversation’ or dialogue – between one world and the other?

CUE ADVERTISING JAG.

To reap the ultimate rewards that the advances in Genomic science offer us, the screening and storing our DNA as would have to become an everyday part of our health profile: it would have to become second nature to every one of us: a common place behaviour: something that we do without ‘thinking’.

But we’re a long way from a chirpy chat along the lines of:

‘hey Trish. Sorry. Can we say 7.30ish now? Running a bit late at the DNA screening clinic – mines a large glass of DWW! ; ) Jax xxx’

Genomic science tends to only enter our conversation either because we are forced to engage with it or by an accident of revelation.

Even when the more moderated conversations do occur they can quickly tip into ethical minefields around data storage and security, commercial abuses by insurance companies and self interested corporates, elitist tiers and eugenics, socio cultural stratification and the Police Database. There issues around identity privacy and confidentiality are staggering in some of their complexities and contradictions.

The complexities of genomic science are simply not ‘everyday’, not everyone’s ‘cup of tea’ and are at best incomprehensible and at worst quickly controversial.

But Advertising & Communication people spend their whole life not only trying to decipher what someone’s ‘cup of tea’ might be but also how they might get them to drink more of it

The nature of the models and frameworks used by marketing communications specialists to mine and shape insights, propositions and narratives – the intensity, speed and use of both broad stroke universal consumer insight and atomic data modelling – is driven by the voracious desire in corporates to ‘keep up’ with the fluid and ever changing nature of consumer demand and desires. These models have grown ever more agile due to:

The direct impact of technology and the social networks across the value chains and markets of the big corporate consumer brands:

The age of data big bang: an ever-expanding viral surge of relentlessly dividing and multiplying data on every aspect and dimension of how we live, act, interact and transact.

It is in the intensity, approach and most importantly the creative storytelling aspect of this ‘jag’ of activity that we believe our off set strategy can be found.

ADVERTISING SCHMADVERTISING

One of the greatest tension points in the new methodology we have engineered in Socialising The Genome is the point at which advertising exclamation collides with academic exposition.

There are fundamental and quite combative points of difference between the worlds of the Sciences & Medicine and the Humanities & Arts – in nature, methodology and application; and in their concepts of what constitutes integrity and substance (especially when the latter are of the populist persuader type – the advertising and marketing agencies and their kind).

Many wholly reason-based intellectuals and practitioners harbour a quite fixed (and many would say hugely justifiable) sense of distrust in what they regard as a moral and intellectual vacuum in the marketing communications agencies, institutions and organisations that manipulate and leverage ‘emotion’ and a lazy populism for commercial gain.

To allow the conversation around something as precious and fragile as genomic science to be driven by base desires pumped up on the wisdom of the crowds with no form of enlightened filter or curation, might well be perceived as not only risky but also irresponsible.

“Fine, if you’re just pushing another million or so 6-bladed, swivel-hipped funky junky disposable plastic razors” but matters of this level of human importance are quite a different thing entirely.

Alternately, on the other side of the conversational fence, we have the champions of ‘everyday’ people, the populist movers, shakers, creators and commentators who celebrate them, their language, their culture, their leisure and their past-times, and who shape, shade and distribute the myriad simple pleasures that they enjoy and engage with. For these people, unless science, like technology, is wrapped up in a Brian Cox-like, ‘whoops that’s my Collider’ approachability or celebrity, they are quite disdainful or disinterested in what they see as arcane and impenetrable conversations. They see no point in a dialogue that seems circular and closed in its nature and not of any use to anyone without a PhD.

Their attitude broadly runs along the lines of:

“don’t care – all a bit to serious and arch for me – lighten up, get over yourself – short time living long time dead – if you cant take the banter we’re not listening – and while you’re at it, mine’s a highly-advertised pint of unexceptional lager please!”

BUT, in a balanced world and all things being even – somewhere between the two polarities lies an answer – midway between the extremities of emotional populism on the one side and high-minded rationalism on the other.

Neither one nor the other can develop the conversation by itself in isolation. Each needs the other to create a full and robust conversation that is both substantial and sociable.

In our particular instance, we needed to go on a journey from the clinical utility of the genome conversation as it is now – closed alienating isolating and impenetrable in large tracts – to a one more rooted in concepts of positive identity and improved existence – open inclusive socialised and empowering.

We realised that to do that we needed to decipher how we could use the tension that exists between the worlds of science and society to most positive effect – to facilitate and accelerate that journey.

MIND THE GAP

To be clear, the absence of accelerated improvement in our human existence through Genomic science is not an issue of supply. (There are a lot of brilliant minds moving the science forwards). This is an issue of demand.

While ‘everyday’ people continue to not understand the real and substantial benefits of that science, they will not demand its benefits as a standard and inextricable part of their everyday lives

Communicating the inspirational, revelatory and highly beneficial impact of embracing our DNA to the greatest number of people in their terms in their world is central to all of this because it will fuel and fire ‘demand’ for better.

TWAS EVER THUS

Demystifying and popularising rare knowledge of a scientific, political, economic or theological nature has always been a critical step in the march of human progress (whether the scientists, politicians, economists and the theologians like it or not).

‘Dumbing down’ as some elevated minds like to think of it is actually humanity’s way of smartening up. And inspiring and wild-firing everyday conversation is a vital lever in that smartening up.

So first things first: we needed to accept that the challenges to easy conversation are substantial – the impenetrable nature of the science; a very human, provincially minded fear of the unknown; the conflicted nature of our feeling towards ‘disease prediction’; a general fear of ‘science going too far & meddling with the cosmos; the primal compulsion to ‘move away from’ any form of human flaw (our own or anyone else’s); either in the form of disability or crippling disease; or those flaws as might potentially be revealed by DNA screening.

We need to accept that none of the ‘conversation’ generated so far has enabled us to move very far beyond our current audiences – and that we have so far failed to present a set of positives that outweigh the existing negatives.

Genomic science and the subject of DNA need to be lightly dealt with or presented in such a way as to find their way into pub banter framed and informed by a ‘did you see? Did you know?’ Intelligence Lite, fuelled by lifestyle magazines, Sunday supplements and the Discovery Channel.

And given that film is the most shared currency in the socially networked world, film needs to be the base currency of our highly socialised cultural economy.

So our key objectives for success were:

to create a methodology that enabled us to look up through the emotionally driven human and the everyday insight – not down through the rationally driven science and the clinical language

to develop and distribute the seeds of a new and scaled conversation through the power of shareable film.

CREATIVE ACTION RESEARCH

My work over the last year or so with Dr. Anna Middleton of the Sanger Institute focuses solely how we reconcile the perspectives of our two worlds to shape and scale the conversation around DNA and Genomic science to greater human benefit.

And it is in the circular and iterative nature of the interaction between her world – that of the Academic Lag – and mine – that of the Advertising Jag – that we believe will deliver the language and framing for and therefore the scale of conversation that we need to transform the way people see DNA in their lives.

With CAR, we have constructed a methodology where, even when in the midst of the deep dive nature of her qualitative ethical research process, Anna is able to utilize my and my collaborator’s ability to reframe, rephrase and represent science or research fact in more populist social storytelling terms and framings to play beck into and inform the more academic process she is undertaking.

CAR – TESTING THE EDGES OF CONVERSATION

CAR combines traditional qualitative research, rooted in group discussions and in depth interviews and discourse interpretation with quantitative research that introduces fresh creatively-framed seeds of Genome and DNA conversation into the social networks to provide a simple speedy test of whether those seeds have the ability to inspire and engage people in such a way that they might in turn share it amongst their own social network both real and virtual.

The method we have devised for creating the simple seeds of a new conversation revolves around taking an existing piece of knowledge or scientific fact and creating different types of ‘conversation’ or story telling around it.

We then use these seeds of conversation as foils and flash cards in both a quantitative socialised environment and the more in depth and metered qualitative research groups and in-depths.

To ensure that in the migration from science or clinical insight to creative idea we did and do not fall foul of confecting, manipulating, misrepresenting and ultimately distorting or twisting the knowledge or facts we are using, every creative idea has to be rooted in an insight ladder.

The Insight Ladder is a simple proprietary tool that I have developed for this project that aims to lock the more creatively framed seed of conversation to the scientific fact truth or insight that inspired it: a sort of plumb line of integrity that runs through each ‘conversation’.

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

A number of traditional qualitative research group discussions and some in depths will begin to explore some of the everyday language and insights around genome science and DNA.

A dry Discussion Guide takes each participant in the qualitative groups from a condition of lowest point of knowledge – do you know what DNA is? – through a natural arc of expanding conversation – knowledge of DNA – benefits or not to the individual – its role in improved healthcare – moral and ethical issues around the science – data privacy and security – and at its most extreme – and ultimately, the nature of improved DNA and genome science on a thriving UK PLC as a mark of global leadership in the advancement of improved human existence through scientific and social enlightenment and application.

Once the open and freeform discussion has come to a close we will use some of the seed ideas that we have developed from existing insights to see how opening doors to the subject using more creative everyday storytelling potentially changes or alters people’s disposition, perception and appreciation of the subject.

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

Once the qualitative groups have been transcribed we will then select the most potent insights and creative storytelling and framings so that they may be turned into simple animated pieces of film storytelling.

We will use an online research tool to see which film inspires the most attention and why with a representative UK sample, as well as sharing them in the social networks to the same purpose.

Both actions will seek simple responses and opinions through both closed and open data capture.

Ultimately we are seeking one or two ideas with the potential to develop into a greater scale of everyday conversation using socially dynamic communications and advocacy strategies to wildfire those conversations.

BONFIRE OF THE HUMANITIES

The creative jag in CAR endeavours to act like a repeated finger tap in the centre of the academic ‘chest’ – a way of bringing the science into the moment, connecting it in visceral emotional and social terms to the everyday Now – an intense injection of populist framing and storytelling for those somewhat consumed in the Academic Lag.

In that way, the advertising Jag acts as a form of ‘Mindfulness’ for the scientist, academic and clinician deep-diving into the world of the genome – providing a ‘Look Up’ orientation strategy for them to use while potholing in the caves between what is know and unknown.

Therefore Creative Action Research aims to use a complimentary fusion of:

Academic Lag – Reason – utility, interrogation & measure – resilience – the individual

Advertising Jag – Emotion – identity, expression & impact – desire – the crowd

to scale the conversation and socialise the Genome.

CAR accepts that there is no simple black & white answer here. It will take time and the attentions of both the Laggers and the Jaggers to get to the scale of conversation this deserves and needs.

In some ways, as with our DNA, it might just prove that the things that unite us are greater than those that divide us.

In finding a way to socialise the Genome we might just find a way to both educate the populous and socialise academia. And perhaps that is not a bad thing at all.

In the meantime lets pop on our Bordieu T Shirt – and be a great destroyer of Either/Or.

Big Bags, travelling light & the escalator of life.

04 Monday May 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Conspicuous Consumption, Evolution, Hand Luggage, Identity, Kevlar, Kings Cross Station, Lighter Living, technology, Wall-e, Wheelie Bags

There I was. Kings Cross station. Coming up from the fusty depths of the Northern Line. The station is a little, lets say, mobbed. I see a young woman. A tourist. Spanish I believe. A scientific wonder wheels along at her side.

Its a wheelie bag Jim, but not as we know it!

This bag she wheels is staggering. Its shiny pearled finish is a disingenuous mirage to belie its capacious interior. You could murder people and transport them in this bag.

These are the luggage children of the ergonomic performance fetish. This is the world of the Snugpack Roller Kit Monster 120L. And Kipling’s Youri Spin Suitcase. This is the world of the behemoth ‘hand luggage’ wheelie case.

The super strength outer casing owes more to the military industrial complex than a bag-maker: the box mounted swivel wheels ergonomically balanced in 4 corners bring the soft polymer whoosh of a hi-end Venice beach skateboard to the airport and railway terminus. I half expect there to be some form of skype wall and an MP3 player tucked in the seams somewhere.

I can see the advert now:

Hand luggage has evolved. The New kevlar frame Darwin Wheelie Bag with smart pocketing, GPS, X-ray friendly tech lining and Panic Room. Hand luggage will never be the same again.

Correct.I am uncertain as to whose ‘hands’ this luggage was scaled for? Chewbacca? The Yeti? Bruce Banner’s slightly grumpy alter ego travelling companion? Jack The Giant slayer will be not too far behind this piece of conveyance.

Hand Luggage was originally designed for those that needed to travel lightly through the world. Uncluttered by cumbersome and barely needed debris and the pillars and stones of faux domesticity. Hand Luggage was going places. The athlete of luggage. Striding past the suitcase and the trunk and the ‘Oversize’ Luggage Conveyor. Svelte and lean, packed for speed and efficiency. Slipping effortlessly and seamlessly from plane train to automobile. Not any more.

For some reason I found the girl’s case a wonderful metaphor for the over-sized, over cranked life we lead. The was no shadow of smarter lighter living going on here. The light effortless art of living we once may have known seemed, in her case (pardon the pun) to have been obscured by an enormous weighty bag.

We live lives enabled by all kinds of ingenious brilliant stuff. Feats of engineering abound. Technology haring along at light fibre speed. Apps that wipe our backside for us; and remind us to tell people we love that we love them. Networks that create friends for us. Platforms that plan our virtually parallel lives for us. Algorithms that predict when we might think something all by ourselves. We use the technology to deny the weight we carry. The burdensome, leaden heaviness of it all – made light and effortless by technology – the standing stones of our consumption rendered feather like by an ingenious system of credit weights, tech levers and identity pulleys.

And while the technology works: everything’s great; everything’s cool. Until it doesn’t.

Then watch our little worlds collapse.

Evidence of the increasing stress of our speed of life?

Or is the big bag theory simply proof that we are being rendered about as resilient as an odour eater by our own evolutionary progress?

We seem increasingly to have moments of utter cluelessness about what constitutes a real life lived within a human existence and context.

We are slowly becoming the human race in Wall-e. Spiritually and digitally obese, rendered inert by the kit we surround and submerge our lives in.

The systemic failure that greeted the young woman at the bottom of the escalator was a beautiful demonstration of this truth.

Yes, the genius of the escalator, on any given day, is in its ability to move millions of tonnes of human cargo up and down very steep inclines.

The problem with this one was that it wasn’t working.

Chaos. The expression on her face was one of absolute incomprehension.

While every escalator and lift and travelator works – genius.

And I am certain that the life she carried in one bag like some retro-chic refugee had until now moved effortlessly through the world on its small punk skate polymer wheelie wheels. But suddenly this massive pile of pointless and unnecessary chattels – the debris of a consumer look at me look at my stuff world – stuffed into a bag more commonly used to breezing through the planes trains and automobiles of life, was brutally bought up short.

The absence of movement in the escalator raised a tricky question.

Was she actually capable of carrying (revolutionary thought I know) her own ‘shit’ (to coin a Midwest phrase) up the stairs?

Simple answer. Not a flying chance in hell.

Not in God’s own wildest will could she lift the enormo-bag and carry it up a rather long and currently fixed staircase.

And this to me was a perfect summary of the lives we lead.

The bag and its contents the perfect metaphor for the ridiculously over burdened delusional load we carry either in some blind attempt to ‘show off’ in the gene pool imperative department: or because we’ve actually allowed ourselves to believe that we need all of that stuff to ‘survive’ on the road.

We’re kidding ourselves. Our lives, every square inch of them, from our purses, to our shopping trolleys to our homes, to our wardrobes to our workplaces are over packed to bursting: our every waking hour in fact is over stuffed with a tsunami of stuff we just don’t need.

But its fine while the ‘escalator’ works. Of course we can carry it. We’ve nailed it – sorted. Look at me. Look at me ‘operate’. Look at me ‘work it’. Look at me carry my bounteous life.

Yuh, right.

Until the ‘escalator’ breaks down.

And suddenly there we are. At the bottom. With a spiritual, financial and material ‘credit’ bag that suddenly feels like it’s the size of a small third world economy.

And those little spinny wheels are no good to anyone any more.

And suddenly we’re looking for help from a stranger who might ‘get’ us up the stairs.

And what should that stranger think?

“There, there; we’ve all been there: its tough: let me help.”

“Screw you; grow up; live within your means and learn to carry your own ‘shit’.”

Discuss.

But we seem incapable of ‘letting go’ of all out stuff. Mores the point, we wield it everywhere we go. We bully and tyrannise those around us with the receptacles of our ‘stuff’.

Not enough to blindly turn around and let some of those train and bus passengers ‘eat my velcro kevlar glory

Our funny wheelie bags that we stuff into overhead lockers, poking other travellers left and right. The wheelie bag assertion of ‘I’m here – eat my Me’.

Like the uber baby buggies we’ve all been convinced to buy – the panzer regiments of primary creation: going ‘look at my buggy: look at my progeny: hear me roar” as we cut a swathe through bus restaurant and airport with their ankle snapping, thigh bruising uber-carriage.

These wagons and trucks and freight liners are a like a blunt weapon of our consumptive selves. The shinier the finish. The larger the capacity. The more ergonomic the wheel technology: Christ we’re amazing. And we’ll wheel the bastard at your ankles until you get out of the way.

And lets not forget the underlying logic that validates any size of bag to carry with.

‘I bought a big one ‘cos I’m going shopping when I get wherever I’m going: and I’m going to buy more Me stuff to put in my ‘wheelie’ bag. ‘cos I can.

(Stick it on a card that’ll help!)

Retail therapy is one of those things that represents the gift that stops giving the minute its on credit. The feeling never gets better. It’s simple. You are using someone else’s capital to buy stuff. And when you do, you give them permission to control you. Make you feel bad.

“I just bought some smart knickers, and a bottle of Prosecco: So shoot me”.

Problem is, you did it on a credit card that has 4 grand stacked up in the corner and you’re barely making the payments you’ve got.

Like that super home cinema set up he just HAD to have. Mmnnn. So the sensibility is? You couldn’t pay for the plug with real money: what are you doing buying the set on a card?

But we all need some rewards don’t we??? Its really tough out there working hard for the money to pay the credit card bills. Life is stressful!!! Bleat Bleat.

So we’re going to buy some stuff and make ourselves feel better. And we’re going to put it in a wheelie bag. A great big lumbering barely moveable wheelie bag

And there it all is – in a wheelie bag of joy trundling along side us: shiny. Pearlescent. Spacious. International. Wind-swept and interesting. Until we get to the escalator of life that is – and there’s an engineering fault.

Damn.

uber tech, the human condition & the curse of being Super

27 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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ABBA, Born To Run, Bruce Springstein, Cage Fighting, Carbyne, Evolution, Green Lantern, Jack & Diane, Kinesis, Mutants, Nanotechnology, Pilsbury Dough Boy, Ronal McDonald, Superman, Supertrouper, Survival, technology, telephone boxes, The Human Condition, Vinyl, Wonder Woman, Wurlitzers

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The juke-box was one of the old fashioned ones – none of this fancy new micro aural-fabric wall covering surround sound system stuff.

It was Old School. Renovated Wurlitzer. Vinyl. Beautiful. Real. Music you could touch and smell. Tucked in a corner. Take your 165bpm world and stick it on 78rpm.

A love-struck Romeo plays the streets a serenade…

laying everybody low…

with a love song that he made

A ripple of delight rolled up the cloaked blue back. Lois loved this song.

The PA system rudely interrupts the juke-box, and a few bright chords chime out over the heaving hall.

ABBA!!! Jesus.

He winces: just a little. Like The Man With No Name. Love those movies. To one side of the bar, on the wall, a carousel of ‘original’ movie posters flickered up. Le Bon. Le Brute. Le Truand. Everywhere you looked a screen played your thoughts back to you.

Clark sends the last pistachio shell skittering across the bar top. It scuttles and flips on the escarpment of some old bar top graffiti and spins off into space.

His wrist band buzzed. His heart rate must have increased. Substantially. Its glow took on a purple hue. Pituitary aberrations. Weird.

As if by magic, the barman comes and removes the almost empty bottle of sour mash in front of him.

“Sorry ‘Man. You know how it rolls. Can drink yourself to death for all I care. But not here. They’ll shut us down and sue our ass to next Jesus day if you die on the premises”

The irony of this statement, given that not 10 metres away combatants regularly tried to rip each others heads off and squeeze plasma out of each others eyes, was not lost on Clark. But it seemed to have passed the barman by.

Clark fingered and stretched the polymer blue-black tube around his wrist. One day he’d figure out how to turn this thing off. Ugly little spy. But needs must. No band; no cover; no health and no welfare.

It relentlessly measured his vital signs and a number of secondary organ, enzyme and blood readings, distributing the data at super light fibre speed to everyone from his insurance company to the local hospital to the social welfare office to the barman in front of him via geo-location and face recognition. Latency certainly wasn’t an issue. The information was transmitted so damn fast it may as well have gone back in time.

Maybe he should drink inside the Cage. The bands didn’t work inside it. It blocked the signal. So much for infallible systems.

Hologram Ren belched, scraped back his stool, and stood up, kind of. He was done. Clark nodded, not that Ren really noticed. Wasn’t the same since Stimps got burned. A one man show Ren wasn’t. The music increased in volume.

Su-per trou-per

lights are gonna find me

shining like the sun…

smiling having fun…

feeling like the No1!

One Eyed Mike thought he was real funny.

The music is Clark’s cue to move towards the tired scruffy wired cage at the far end of the bar hall – to the Cage and its sweaty bloody canvas. Made from triple-strength carbyne wire, it measured 30 feet by 30 feet by 30 feet.

What a circus. Mind you given his Victorian strong-man red-pants-outside-blue-tights look, he wasn’t really in position to comment.

The blue and red had seen better days, and the fabric looked positively ancient.

Clark shook down his shoulders. Christ he ached. He stepped up off the stool, his hand going to the site of his deepest scar, just beneath his right pectoral muscle.

The Cage on Highway Number 9 was jumping. Packed to the rafters with some ‘madness in its soul’. It was now legendary apparently; though how a straight-build tumbledown Roadhouse with a liquor & wrestling license in the middle of nowhere became legendary the gods only know.

The even bigger question was how all the other faded Supers had found him here, turning wrestling tricks for a few bucks and a free meal.

Not that it was bad having them here: just kind of crazy. They all felt happy here. Amongst their own. OK, so the Mutant Super thing kicked off every now and then but most of the time, apart from Parker’s web mess sprayed everywhere, getting on people’s nerves, it was, well, ok.

Being Super didn’t mean shit anymore. Everyone was Super now. With their airborne InfoTech, data bytes the size of asteroids travelling just as fast, virtual experiential sensosuits cheaper than a pair of sweat pants, and headspace 360 real-time vision and cyber implants.

There was time when Super meant something. Before everyone got junked up on tech.

Green Lantern was stretching off in the corner of the Cage. Bless him. Like a huge slightly jaded leprechaun.

ABBA’s super euro pop tune drifts out of the PA across the long room around the tables of assorted friends, freaks, failures.

Note to self. Take said pop song and stick it up one-eyed Mike’s new one, freshly ripped.

One Round. That should do it, Pound the crap out of him and bring a House Of Pain down on his head and then the rest of the night would be sweet.

One final super rumble at midnight and then he was free for another week.

He wondered who today’s Cage Celebrity Smack-down pairing was going to be.

Watching Ronald McDonald and The Pilsbury Dough Boy rip pieces out of each other last week, howling and hawking, covered in their own viscera, tears streaking their stage makeup and dough-eyed faces had moved to a place beyond funny.

He flexed his left arm. Shoots and pin pricks again. The Band griped on his wrist.

Clark’s focus was pulling in and out again. Gone were the days of looking through rock and steel. Could barely see through the edge of the Cage.

His vision tightened. Time to get busy. Washed up he may be in the flying universal policeman stakes but he could still rumble with the best of them.

That’s what they could smell. That’s what drew them from all over the US.

This scruffy aggregate of pseudo-super human beings with their fancy tech sophistry were here to see one thing. Good old school violence. The parochial, outside the beer-hall, looking at my girl kind of violence. Blood. Spit. Ugliness. Pain. The possibility of watching a creature suffer.

For all the experiences they could virtually replicate, the one they hadn’t nailed was the sheer excitement, the delicious thrill of seeing another creature, weakened, terrified and humiliated; buckling and writhing with the metallic taste of its own blood gurgling in its throat. Motorway pile ups, public hangings and terrorist beheadings. They just couldn’t help themselves.

And no avatar can replicate that expression: the one that flickers across a creature’s eyes when the bleak finality of knowing that its time has come in the gene pool survival game.

For all their peacocking about their virtual nirvana; and even in the face of the genocidal scale of their virtual battling and gaming, this super-human race had lost the ability to feel anything – pain; pleasure; and fear; especially real fear. This counted as a really big evolutionary Uh Oh in Clark’s book: the reverse Darwinian nature of a smart animal using its smartest inventions to make it the dumbest animal on the predatory block.

Divine obsolescence didn’t strike Clarke as a sensible plan for a species.

He scuffed around the bar, frozen for just for a moment in the light of an Ad wipe (highly annoying kinetically activated advertising curtains that mapped you and ‘robed you’ in some kitsch new designer apparel, took a pic and then immediately sent the pic to all the contacts in your band contact list across every social network in the world – With a ‘Hey doesn’t Clarke look sharp – tell him you like it’ button.)

Changing outfits was something Clarke was kind of done with. Half the telephone boxes disappeared and the ones that were left came with a drug dealer and a splash of voluptuous and rather inappropriately dressed ladies’ calling cards.

The crowd are cheering him in; but he has become deaf to it.

His gaze swings to the right of the path between the tables.

At one of the ring-side tables sits the crazy woman with her young boy. The boy was about 4 years old Clark reckoned; dressed in a forlorn super-suit from some gas station. The boy was fingering his game bar frantically.

Baby Superman. With bits of old hotdog and ketchup stain down the front. The truth always hurt.

As he walked past the boy he saw over his shoulder that the boy’s avatar was in flight mode hovering above the screen.

Christ.

Anyone can fly now. Not like the old school. At least they tried. At least planes actually understood what it was to move through the fluid air under their own power. At least a sky dive flight suit put you up there and out there for a moment, like some deranged flying squirrel. At least it was… …real.

Now everyone knew what it felt like to fly. Right. ‘Felt like’. The actual sensation. Even a so so mid range sensosuit could replicate the exact physical sensation of flying by firing millions of tiny charges across your skin, with different pressure sensors expanding and contracting the grasp of the suit on you to mimic dynamic movement in flight and G pressure. And the MeSq power implants in your head activated the relevant endorphins and adrenalin surges just to make sure you ‘felt it’.

Everyone could do everything. Everyone could see around the world in a second. Through steel and concrete. Everyone could see the future. Everyone could destroy anything with the flick of a finger. Everyone could be in 5 places at once. Superpowers was just so …everyday.

No-one needed the strength of 1000 men to topple a tall building. They could call up the strength of millions and topple a country.

The boy fingered the game bar furiously.

Could do without Diana seeing him that’s for sure

She’d looked a little shook up last time Clarke saw her. He always knew: when she played with her bracelets something was up. Like a change in the weather. When her heart was heavy, the scars on her wrists ached under her Indestructible bracelets.

She hadn’t mentioned the kids thing for awhile. He thought that maybe the pain had faded a little.

All she wanted was a kid. A normal, un-tampered with, straight DNA strand, in body baked baby. But for all the technology in the world it just wasn’t to be.

Anyway. They were cool. Clarke and Dian. Hanging out. It kind of worked.In fact the mundanity of it was a blessing; sweet liberation.

Life was simpler when you were less Super. Less wonderful. Something the new super humans with all their gadgets and advances needed to figure out for themselves.

He was in front of the Cage now. Green Lantern was looking wired. The tell tale pulsing temple and grinding jaw told Clark that he’d junked up on nano-oxgenators – small pieces of in blood technology that multiplied the effect of oxygen and adrenalin into your blood stream to boost resilience, strength and stamina.

Jesus even the Supers were at it now.

This wasn’t going to be quite as simple as Clark had previously though.

Screw it. He just needed to man up. Anyway. She’d be here soon. And everything would be alright.

The Princess and Clark: living the ditty; the Jack & Diane of the 21^st Century, growin’ old in the heartland.

Clark steps up into the Cage. As he does so the sheer blue fabric of his suit catches the edge of the jagged wires. Rip.

Su-per-trou-per

Lights are going to find you

Shining like the sun

Smiling having fun

Feeling like the number 1.

Funny.

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

27 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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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.

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

14 Friday Feb 2014

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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.

Divine obsolescence, Sustainability & the silent S in Business Transformation.

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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By-Product Life-Cycles, Chin Gyms, Cradle to Cradle, Evolution, Extreme Makeover, leadership, Planned Obsolescence, Sustainabilty professionals, Transformation

Mention to a sustainability person that their career trajectory should be hurtling them towards some form of divine obsolescence and the reactions are suffice to say, mixed.

The idea of them passing through some blissful reinvention to rise phoenix-like, only stronger and wiser, in some new primary function at the heart of the business doesn’t always ring everyone’s career bell.

The fact that they should wish to render their current position and the status they derive from it obsolete – a planned professional obsolescence – seems confusing to some, demeaning to others and otherwise simply quietly terrifying to those who have been on the S mission for so long.

Success for most Sustainability people (and their CSR cousins for that matter) is surely achieved at the moment that all of those smart systemic cultural, operational, environmental and social practices, policies and processes they have been championing for years finally become an invisible seamless part of the standard functions of the business. (Or as one Kellogg ELT member said to me once in a meeting – simply just the way that business does business.)

I would go further: I would celebrate that ‘moment’ with some form of International Award system and accreditation that recognizes the real Transformation the moment augers.

The award would celebrate the transformation (both of the person and the business itself) heralded by a Sustainability person moving their S skills and expertise invisibly and indelibly to the heart of that business. Also because it would show that the sustainability profession can move from a support to a leadership function. In that way each sustainability person develops a new focus, seeking to be the living embodiment of the right kind of positive obsolescence.

Of course there will be teething problems. When any one party finally shakes off the mindset and strategies of opposition to take on a leadership role, it takes some time for it to also shake out those who ‘hide’ in opposition; rather the provocateur in the shadows than the leader in the stark light.

In that way the sustainability profession would finally become a true reflection of the qualities in both products and lifestyles it compels the rest of the world to embrace: either that of a singular sturdy, unwavering and enduring utility designed for fluid existence from cradle to cradle – or that of a single thing that propagates multiple by-product life-cycles and strategies of reuse, recycling, repairing or re-tasking.

This ability to build in positive obsolescence should not be a stretch for any of us professionally as it seems to present few issues to us personally.

In our own private lives, the slightest whiff of our obsolete selves wafting into view and suddenly we’re a whirlwind of re-creation – everything thrown at a new model us – starting with a new look, a makeover, a killer pair of shoes; a new hairstyle. Then it is support pants, shaving and waxing (come on gents, don’t be coy, you do), non-surgery lifts, strenuous gym regimes, 2 day starvation diets replaced by Neanderthal diets and then nips and tucks abound. (Or at its least, a chin gym from a catalogue perhaps?)

There are trillion dollar industries wholly based on the fact that we’re mostly quietly terrified of being ousted by a better smarter genetic model of humanity in our everyday life.

So why not perhaps point a little of that at one’s professional persona – especially if one works in the one profession which should know better than most what smart obsolescence looks like – one based on transformation, regeneration and improvement.

In doing so, sustainability people would be applying the smartest evolutionary strategies they know to themselves. If they don’t, the brightness of the future becomes questionable. There are many specialist sector and discipline professionals who can tell them what it feels like to miss the evolution train; many who now the price to pay for refusing to adapt; many who are now contemplating the professional landfill stretching out in front of them.

Sustainability people need to apply all of their brain-power and every ounce of diplomatic skill they have (or that they buy in) to render their own ‘Sell By’ date obsolete.

They need to ‘opt in’ to being an inextricable part of the transformative and regenerative engine in every brand and business. They need to be sitting at the heart of the action when a brand or business is trying figure out new qualitative growth strategies, not clinging to an outmoded professional signifier or tribal colour, abdicating the trials of leadership to some other, and then sitting at the edge in some fit of professional pique

Hopefully 2014 will usher in a new evolutionary professional dawn – or there might just be a lot of babies on that bathwater landfill.

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Divine obsolescence, Sustainability & the silent S in Business Transformation.