Landing in Riga today, I was struck by one of those Friedmanesque "The World is Flat"-moments when the little cottage doubling for an airport (that I went through last time I was here in 1995) had been replaced by a glass and metal beast. Of course, these Friedmanesque moments have less poignancy now that we now most of the world's tall towers, airports, light railways and indoor ski slopes were built using strange financial instruments and lots of loans. Latvia is sunny, the streets filled with BMW's and Audi's and the six-lane highway from the airport is rimmed by headquarters, banks and shopping malls. We could be in Shenzhen, Moscow or Bucharest, in other words. My driver, a student at SSE Riga, is surprisingly clear-sighted. "We should just devalue", he says. I agree. It would make Swedbank and others go belly up but who cares in the long run? Propping up a currency for arcane nationalistic reasons is useless and, most likely, foolish. My driver's dream is to run his own company. "Why make money for someone else when I can make it for myself?". The comment comes across more as a punk rocker wanting to challenge the music establishment than as blind greed.
In 1998 I took a course in film production at UCLA School of Film, Television and Theatre. Many of my fellow students were terrific human beings and some of them went on to become successful writers and producers. I didn't. There are a number of reasons for this but the one that keeps haunting me is how incredibly hierarchical Tinseltown turned out to be. It made Victorian England seem like a meritocracy. The climate was surprisingly and devastatingly conservative. Whenever talk of new technology came up, most executives I met or that came to the classroom would shrug and display severe cases of ignorance ("Movies on the Internet....Nahh, it'll never fly"). Furthermore, Hollywood productions are....well...infested with labor unions. How else can you describe a situation where every driver/Teamster has to have their own vehicle, where make-up and hair people have to be available for each actor even though the actor brings in his/her own people, and so on. Kevin Smith sums the surreal nature of Hollywood up nicely in this clip about trying to make Superman Returns.
Yesterday, whilst doing a workshop about the future with the good people in Östra Göinge, a very inspiring anecdote was shared. In Örkelljunga, a smallish town along the E4 (the north-south interstate in Sweden), there is a car dealership called, unremarkably Auto-Center. Owned by a native of Örkelljunga, it has been in the town/village for a very long time with the owner doing most of the work himself on whatever tends to come his way. Then one day...Maserati and Ferrari announced what auto repair shop in Sweden would be granted the only license in the country to repair their cars. While hammering away out of sight in the repair shop, Auto-Center had generated the kind of technical prowess and know-how to impress the choosy Italian brands. Today, if any Swedish Maserati or Ferrari owner needs any kind of repair done on their cars, they only have one place to which to turn in Sweden and it happens to be located in unremarkable Örkelljunga.
Today was by big speech for Jernhusen, the state-owned operators and owners of all railway real estate in Sweden. I focued on how we might work, live and travel in the future in line with the ideas I outlined here in Monday's blog post (Thanks Stein, Walevska and Richard for your valuable thoughts and opinions on the matter!). One of the key points I made was the travel companies and facilities need to stimulate us and make us more creative in the future. Something along the lines of Virgin Atlantic's PitchTV. From PSFK:
- Business Insider has a surprisingly sombre portrait of YouTube: "Credit Suisse estimates YouTube will manage to rake in about $240 million in ad revenue in 2009, against operating costs of roughly $711 million, leading to a shortfall of just over $470 million. This half-billion dollar loss comes after more than a year of feverish experimentation in various forms of advertising, cross-product embedding, licensing and partnership deals. YouTube is adamant that ultimately they’ll find an advertising solution that will enable the ungainly behemoth to reach profitability. Looking at the math, it doesn’t seem likely." Read the article here.
- Steven Johnson has written a piece for The Wall Street Journal about how the e-book might change the way we read and write: "Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article -- sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument."
Preparing to speak at a conference for a railway company on Wednesday, I'm planning to blitz them with five predictions about tomorrow's workplace delivered within five minutes. Here's what I plan to say. Please let me know if you think I'm wrong. The time-frame here is 50 years ahead.
- Nobody will be employed (The full-time employment is a remnant from a rigid industrial society and out of sync with people's aspirations, societal demands, corporate structure, and so on).
- Nobody will have boring jobs. When entrepreneurship (whether in a corporate, social or political context) becomes the norm, everyone will be forced to address the question "What do I want to do?" and nobody will have a job that is repetitive (repetitive tasks get automated or outsourced).
- Because we'll all have jobs we like, we'll work a lot more, harder, often and longer than we do today. This is in stark contrast to the "we'll have more leisure time"-predictions of the 1960's (when many people had boring jobs). Most people will fit in at least 10+ jobs in a career of which the majority haven't even been invented yet. The transition the knowledge sector means a complete blurring of lines between work and play. We'll live longer and states will be poorer so we can forget about a 65-year retirement (unless we're wealthy).
- We'll spend fewer hours at home and none at "the office" (a relic of a past Industrial world) so we'll all be relegated to a plethora of "Third Places" - commercial as well as "free" (financed through ads, sponsorships and similar).
- We'll all go crazy in our pursuit of two things: More time and creative impulses/stimuli. The providers who can help us with any or both of these tasks will be tomorrow's kings and queens over us worker drones.
A symbol of the information abundance that I often use is the pursuit of pornography. Anyone born before 1985 is bound to remember the urban exploration-style pursuit of pornography. We dove into dumpsters. We searched the woods and the closets of our best friend's parents. The pursuit was in itself a kind of goal.
The people behind filesharing service Pirate Bay were convicted yesterday and sentenced to a year in prison and nearly $4 million in fines. Although the final chapter is far from written in this strange saga, it's worth pondering what Pirate Bay did wrong and what its future, as yet unknown replacement might do differently.
