Category: Futures

Weekly ammo #12

Right, let’s do this. Four fresh Culture Shock-y items.

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What your culture really says - by @shanley

Oh man. This is so good. So so good. Please read all of it. It’s like an antidote to the sunny optimism that pervades my work and that of others, where there is only upside and no scepticism.

Check this out for an ‘ooof’ kick in the stomach:

 An economic and class-based revolt of programmers against traditional power structures within organizations manifests itself as an (ostensively) radical re-imagining of work life. But really, you should meet the new boss. Hint: he’s the same as the old boss.

I need to re-read this piece weekly, because I do blithely drink the kool-aid, I do include examples in my evangelical talks that I pick up with little research or sceptical interrogation. I do need to question much much more.

Hat tip Mark Higginson

Read it now.

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Up a creek, Pirate Party looks for a paddle - Spiegel Online

Ooops, another example I promote in my work, and touted only last week – but it seems that the German Pirate Party has hit a downward spiral.

I talk about the Pirate Party as vibrant example of how politics is being disrupted in the same way as business (and education, and science and government and so on) by networked, purpose-driven organisations with a new kind of DNA.

I still believe that, of course, but this is a very interesting snippet that relates to a big theme in Culture Shock of openness and transparency:

The party’s culture of open debate and transparency has, if anything, provided a powerful argument for the kind of discretion with which most parties go about their business. Hardly a week goes by without a brutal and public personal attack made by one Pirate Party member against another.

One to watch with interest.

Read it now.

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 Martin Sorrell on what’s next - HBR

I just liked this for the fact that Sorrell, a notorious and open micro-manager and self described ‘old fart’ describes his 162,000 person organisation as being in a state of anarchy. At our consultancy we believe that all organisations are spinning into a worldly state of affairs that is more anarchic than they have ever experienced or are indeed ready for, so good to hear Sorrell saying as much.

HBR: You’ve been quoted as saying that your business is in a state of anarchy. What do you mean by that?

Sorrell: There are four forces creating anarchic pressure. The first is what we call faster-growth markets—Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe. The second is new media: digital, search, display, video, social, and mobile. The third is the application of technology to our business, including unifying all the sources of data that our clients use. And the fourth is what we call horizontality, which means getting people to play together.

Welcome to anarchy.

Read it now.

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Before I die – another awesome Candy Chang project

Just love this project from Candy Chang – its purpose, its format and its open-source spreadable nature. (An instance of it has popped up in my city, Brighton).

Here’s how they open sourced the project with a toolkit – kinda Hexayurt-y:

After receiving many requests, we created the Before I Die toolkit and this project site to help people make a wall with their community. You can also download all files for free on this site to remix or create your own stencils. Thanks to passionate people, over 100 Before I Die walls have now been created in over 10 languages and in over 30 countries, including Kazakhstan, Portugal, Japan, Denmark, Australia, Argentina, and South Africa. Each wall is unique and reflects the people of that community. Each wall is a tribute to living an examined life.

Read it now.

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Hope you enjoyed some o’ that.

And if you did, please spread word of Culture Shock!

On that note, I am grateful for this interesting and positive review by Simon Robinson – a consultant and lecturer in chaos and complexity theory, innovation, creativity and sustainability living in São Paulo, Brazil.

Onwards yeah? Will.

Modern slaves

After writing Culture Shock I went on a bit into a bit of a sofa-slouching-brain-resting phase: bought a PS3, developed a bad habit around Battlefield 3, and stopped reading business books.

I’m sort of still half in that phase. Still can’t get my head back into business books, for example.

Good things came of this slovenly phase. I learned a lot from getting back into video games and ended up writing this piece for Wired UK: ‘Modern business is a video game: a bad one’.

I’ve also been bingeing on the Game of Thrones books. Basically ‘fantasy’ Lord of the Rings-esque series, describing the rise and fall of elite families and their characters in a mythical world. Brilliant, easy reading for a geek like me.

(Sorry for the long intro here – I’m winding up to something interesting, I think…)

All of which is a long way of saying that I’ve been spending an hour or so a night in bed immersed in stories of a feudal world, with the hierarchies of old – from Kings and Queens down to filthy poor peasants and slaves.

At the same time, consolidation in the social media and social business sectors has continued. Many of our peers have now sold their businesses to bigger companies, all part of that natural ecosystem of business, where the entrepreneurs reach the end of their natural phase, want to move on to the next thing, and where incumbents want to buy in some of the sizzly new stuff. That’s all good: I’ve been really happy seeing people I like achieve their goals and more and more I can see the sense in this cycle.

In my head these two things have begun to relate: the fortunes of the Lords and Ladies of a fictional world and the accomplishments of entrepreneurs in my world.

And for some reason I’ve started to get this idea that most people are modern slaves, at work. Or at least, disempowered and mistreated peasants. (I know many people aren’t, but this is a dramatisation, mkay!?).

If we pretend that most people are ‘modern slaves’ at work, toiling away to produce the lion’s share of rewards for a small royal elite (shareholders and senior management), when it is in fact their work that creates the rewards, then I can’t stop thinking about employee ownership as the only way forward.

In fact, I’ll go further: I believe that within 15 years, all businesses will have a significant proportion of employee ownership (let’s say more than 25%). That’s probably wrong – if it were to happen, would probably be the greatest shift of wealth ever in the history of the world or something. But it’s just what I feel intuitively – no science included.

Entrepreneurs deserve a premium for taking risk and the act of creation and early growth. I feel that strongly, personally. And shareholders deserve a reward for their risk and investment. But it feels too much, too far skewed at the moment, to me.

I am conscious that this creates a dangerous expectation for me as an entrepreneur. Personally, despite what I’m saying I would like to do a traditional ‘exit’ at some point. I think it would be interesting, exciting, and a nice lump sum would be useful too. As for NixonMcInnes (where I don’t think that’s likely), I personally think that increasing the employee ownership from 5 of us (25%) to 90%-100% would be a brilliant outcome. So what I am saying isn’t free from hypocrisy, expectation-setting or whatever: I’m talking the talk – it remains to be seen if I (and others) can walk it.

But yes. There it is. When the millions go to the few founders and executives, and the rest of the organisation usually resembles a pyramid, with most people earning not very much at all, have we really come very far in the past thousand years? Outliers like John Lewis and other-brilliant-companies-owned-by-their-staff are just that – outliers, quirks. Isn’t that a bit weird?

Aren’t most people just modern slaves, when they are toiling for others?

And won’t that necessarily change as things are becoming more transparent, people are better connected, work tools are lower cost and more accessible, and more of us in the UK work in knowledge work where the product is the people?

I think so. That’s why this topic is in my book, and why we have Margaret Elliott speaking at Meaning 2012 about her experiences creating and scaling up successful employee-owned businesses here in the UK.

But now I believe in this even more - more than when I wrote Culture Shock, more than when I curated the original speakers for Meaning. Ownership belongs here, where it happens, not somewhere else – best of all, in the hands of the people doing it. In time, this will be irresistable.

What do you think?

Designing for the psychopath

A while ago I went to hear Jon Ronson talk about his new book on The Pyschopath Test. As you’d expect if you know Ronson, the talk was both droll and fascinating. But there was that thing, again, about how many leaders may be psychopathic.

Then, in this last week or so, with more outrageous behaviour at banks here in the UK and the attitude of some of their leaders it led to a discussion – probably with Jenni – about what to do with psychopaths. And, in this pop science pub conversation, we were considering non-murdering psychopaths – those that get on and progress especially in business due to their personalities and traits, (though I admit I have no idea what I’m talking about) but don’t kill people (directly).

The question is, as society evolves is there a role for psychopathic people in life and business? What can they offer to the common good? How can they contribute? It would be easy to assume that we want a world only populated with compassionate, empathic, considerate people – that does sound quite nice, actually. But is it true?

Or to put it in the words of software developers, are psychopaths a feature or a bug in society? They seem only to be discussed as a bug, an issue that needs to be fixed.

In this pub conversation we agreed that it is easy to bemoan people who appear to have no regard for others, and the kind of audacious, utterly cold and ruthless decisions that these kind of CEOs and political leaders make. But is it possible that we need them more than we realise? I’m willing to entertain that idea.

And in the future, from the perspective of inclusion and also from using the resources we have to get the best outcomes for as many people as possible, why would we segregate people with these traits and condition any more than anyone else?

If we were designing a better world, wouldn’t an enlightened future world actually place these people in roles that suited their unique talents and abilities, and provide counterbalances and stopping mechanisms to optimise their positive contributions, whilst limiting the awful consequences of unhindered decision-making?

What is our organisation’s change velocity?

One of the things that marks out today’s cadre of digitally native businesses is their ability to change very rapidly. And their propensity to do so.

For me it’s one of their most violent and disruptive advantages.

They eat away at industry incumbents through their ability to whip through the OODA loop many times faster than the old guard.

Another change! Another change! Another change! POW.

I am thinking Amazon vs. Barnes & Noble / Waterstones, Netflix vs. Blockbuster, Threadless vs. GAP.

And related to this, one of their other great emerging characteristics is their ability to u-turn. By u-turn I mean not just product innovation. This is wholesale changes of direction.

Whatever you think of it, Facebook has been absolutely brilliant at doing something, hearing a load of feedback, and doing a public u-turn within hours or days. It doesn’t always, and has returned to the same initiatives and goals over time, but the Beacon turnaround sticks out – though there are others. See this Google search for “Facebook u-turn” – 999,000 results (same search for “Google u-turn” returns me 18,200 results, and for Apple 19,400).

I thought of this characteristic again having followed the interesting Netflix story lately.

If you haven’t already heard, they made some bold changes to their product – divided the whole business in two with no consultation, called the DVD mailing business Qwikster, kept Netflix as the solely-focused streaming business.

The outcry has been sustained, and numbers have backed up the complaints – some commentators say this is hitting Netflix’ business.

Now I read that, 23 days later, they’ve reversed the decision – That Was Qwik: Netflix Dumps Qwikster, Won’t Split DVD-Streaming Accounts by paidContent

I always admire a u-turn:

1. You tried to innovate and make change – that takes guts and brainpower

2. You listened – that takes ears!

3. You are humble enough to publicly admit you were wrong – that takes guts

A couple of the qualities we at NixonMcInnes most want to see in businesses and organisations in the future is the ability to hear/see and then to change. We are starting to think about this agility and openness as a characteristic of Social Business.

Now having begun to write this I realise that before this little phase of reading and writing I just got off a call with a team in a gigantic multi-national bank.

Some young talents in a development programme for top potential future stars have been working on launching a business innovation. Their biggest challenge is what they describe as the internal ‘conservatism’. Making change in that organisation is really really hard. Scarily hard when you think about the above.

A mate of mine has worked his whole career in sales. He is a proud salesman through and through. And he half-jokingly introduced me to one of his favourite concepts a few years ago: “revenue velocity” – not how much work the client needs doing in total, but how quickly they need or want to invest that budget. At the time I find it a hilarious encapsulation of his persona both good and bad (though in time running this services business I’ve learnt to appreciate some of the wisdom in it).

But it makes me think about an organisation’s ability to change quickly – would it be too cheesy to think about the change velocity of an organisation? Perhaps change quotient or potential is better?

Right now I am wondering about our change velocity :)

In the virtual organisation, where is home?

There’s this huge momentum towards fluidity at work – to remote working, to portfolio careers, job sharing, the rise of ronin / freelancing, work life balance, Skype, yammer and the Cloud and so on.

For us as individuals, as workers, there’s lots to like in all of this. We are unleashed! I can work from anywhere! When I want, how I want, with who I want (and so the dreamy hype goes).
And there are – of course – tons of benefits for organisations and businesses too who have been keen to capitalise on these.

But in this working world, if we are all remote and virtual and part of loosely formed networks around projects that quickly form and then dissolve, then where is home?
Where is the centre of gravity that binds and anchors and provides that sense of HQ, of the mothership?

We know what we gain with fluidity, but what do we lose when this base goes, both as workers and business owners?

This all occurred to me after a week where I spoke with two different Managing Directors of consulting firms, both much more fluid than NixonMcInnes.

One firm was entirely geographically distributed across the States, with 20 people peppered across the whole country. Their consultants were mid- to late-career, so pretty grown up, experienced business people and the consultancy operated a reasonably traditional ‘eat what you kill’ mode of rewards. No central staff, no support or admin people not earning fees, no geographical centre of operations. Certainly makes sense from a financial bottom-line point of view.

But not everything about the consultancy was traditional – like us they do some more radical stuff in how they work together. Their MD told me that they tried to get everyone together three times a year. THREE TIMES, I thought, as I thought of how frustrated I get when we struggle to get a decent turn out for weekly team meetings, given all of the important, useful stuff there is to relay and the constant challenge to satisfy people’s desire to know what’s going on.

The other MD runs a consulting firm also in Europe that does have a centre of gravity, an office with a small central staff and then consultants distributed in different countries, all working from wherever they want to work from. But we were talking about how that might not always be a good idea commercially.

The third thing rattling round in the same tumble-dryer of background thinking was the 37 Signals case study of distributed team, connected by digital tools, and their Meetings are Toxic mantra. They are world class in what they do, they seem to do ok without lots of face to face meetings – theoretically one of the key benefits of a central HQ.

And these conversations and thoughts made me think about what we’ve been doing with NixonMcInnes.

We’ve been deliberately developing a real physical heart, and so have invested our office space, in having administrative and marketing support, and in developing a cohort of people living and working in the same county, and almost entirely in the same city.

It’s like we are walking directly against the tide. And that’s confusing (although not unusual for us).

I wonder what organisational benefits we derive by having a home. Or are we just doing it because of the preferences of the people in the organisation, and if so what does that cost us and do we acknowledge that?

Also, do we gain competitive advantage? If we compete with a distributed firm, are we more likely to win or is the playing field level apart from the extra financial resources they have saved from central costs?

In theory, I would expect benefits to show up in areas like these:
- in trust, resilience and therefore quality under pressure in the relationships between team members leading to client retention, referrals and project profitability
- in people’s happiness and engagement at work (even as I write this one, I’m starting to question it) leading to talent acquisition and retention
- in communication between team members which then drives quality to clients and profits for the company through saved time (again, I can quickly think of counter arguments…)
- in pitching for clients business, and them having the comfort of the physical tangible sense of a team and a business (having seen the networked agency model many times I am actually more confident of this point for the time being though I think it will change over time)

Are there others?
Are these flawed, am I drinking my own Kool-aid?

The thing is, I know I want to be part of something and to me personally I like the physical part of that, the offline, the home. And I believe others do too.

But there is a tidal force here. And a string of benefits as well as costs that we are only beginning to understand.

Given all of this, I do wonder with some interest how the traditional physical centre of gravity at the heart of an organisation will change in this next generation of work.

The Fat and the Defenders

We are just back from a lovely family holiday on the coast of North Devon. Croyde, Woolacombe, Combe Martin. Beautiful.

And there, rockpooling every day, were fat people, pretty much wherever you looked. Including in the reflection I saw mirrored back at me rock pools.

Seriously. Over the past two or three years I feel like the obesity epidemic has crawled out of the newspapers, radios and TVs as a media story entity and into the playgrounds, swimming pools, schools and streets as a fully formed physical fact.

Isn’t it shocking, seen up close? How fat so many of us have got in the developed world. :(

I cannot help but think about my diet, and diets and eating in general. I am a poor role model right now. And I cannot help but think about my kids and their diets over the coming years, and kids and their diets and eating in general.

How right did Pixar get it with WALL-E? And how close are we already?!

More importantly, how will we overcome tomorrow’s challenges when we are in such morbidly poor shape?

This concerns me greatly.

Juxtaposed, I am reading some incredible output by two guys in particular on the topic of Resilience: John Robb and Vinay Gupta.

Both of their blogs are absolute must-reads for me. And both of their recent work is incredibly aposite and interesting. You need to read their work.

With these thoughts of fatness at the back of my brain somewhere, two other things collided in my head last week: the first from lusting at the magnificent brand that David Hieatt is creating over at HIUT, and in particular that gorgeous image of the light blue Land Rover Defender; the second from reading on John Robb’s resilience wiki Miiu about resilient cars.

The humble Defender is apparently one of the most resilient cars out there.

It appears on John Robb’s Miiu resilience wiki along with 25+ other ‘autos’ . The Toyota Prius, to my initial surprise, is not resilient by the Miiu community’s definition – it relies too much on the intelligence in its Engine Control Unit:

The basic engine integrated electronic component is called an engine control unit, or an ECU. Because resilient cars do not have advanced ECUs, they are easily fixed and tuned. A simple example of this is idle speed control, which in all new cars, is controlled by the ECU. The idle speed is controlled by the engine RPM. The RPM is monitored by the crankshaft position sensor, which is connected to the ECU. So, if the idle speed is too low, one would have to change it by tuning the ECU, which is an involved process. To tune an ECU, one would have to have an in-depth understanding of engine electronics and possess the knowledge and tools to tune an ECU. This is however, not the case in resilient cars. In resilient cars, the idle speed can be controlled mechanically by rotating a screw connected to the throttle that will increase or decrease idle speed.

From: http://www.miiu.org/wiki/Autos

In the future, the Defender and its fixable friends win.

And what of us, the humans? What makes for a resilient human? What traits should we seek to develop in ourselves, what skills?

There is a link here between the fat and the Defenders. I cannot quite draw it out, but it is here, just beyond my fingertips.

And though I can’t quite reach it, I instinctively know I want to be a Defender. Adaptable, fixable, resilient. And not too fat to help myself or others :)

Time creation, the billion dollar opportunity

Business and entrepreneurial literature describe the big new business opportunities: cleantech, the bottom of the pyramid, health 2.0 and so on it goes.

I believe these are all big, valid market opportunities.

Another one is – or should be – time creation.

Study after study shows that people say they are too busy, that they don’t have enough time. (I was reminded of this today at the Arts Marketing Association’s annual conference in Glasgow where I was part of the opening keynote and where my fellow speaker Jerry Yoshitomi shared a study from New Zealand that showed that by far and away the biggest cited reason for people to not attend arts events was lack of time/too busy.)

These people I refer to are already afforded an abundant life full of necessities and luxuries. They are mostly in the developed world, mostly in the West.

What these people are generally (but not always) driving for are chunked experiences, shorter emails, on-demand stuff that can fit in.

As information overload grows to crisis levels, as our internet addiction spirals and our positive and counterbalancing moves towards greater work life balance and more integrated lives add to the pile of tasks to do, so our time fritters away.

There are products and services that create or reclaim time for us.
The concierge and virtual PA. Google’s Priority Inbox. The Getting Things Done religion. And much more I’m sure.

There are products and services that have sympathy for the time constraints we now willingly live with.
On-demand and catch up TV. Reminder text messages from dentists. Other things you can probably think of.

This is a huge business opportunity. If I were starting a business today I would be asking ‘how does this reclaim time for our customers?’ and ‘how does this play nice and fit into the madly busy lives of our customers?’.

If you believe we could be doing good, useful things with the reclaimed or unlocked time, then this is also an important contribution to society.

Time creation: it’s where the smart money should go.

The Interactive Blackmail Squad: NEW SERVICE!

LONDON/MOSCOW/MUMBAI 2011

“As of today I am delighted to announce that we are offering a new high value, long-term investment service.

We call it The Interactive Blackmail Squad.

You give us a list of upto 25 up-and-coming people you think will be movers and shakers in the next 10 years.

They might be competitors, peers, industry rising stars, family members or randoms plucked from a telephone directory.

Using our blackhat techniques, proprietary methods and over-the-counter digital tracking & monitoring technologies we immediately start collating as much of their digital footprint as possible – following them across different avatars and pseudonyms, across different social platforms and spaces, aggregating and storing their contrails and online contributions. (In fact, we may already be tracking them as we add to our database every single day!).

And when it comes to finding them online, there is no place we won’t go!

Annually, we provide you with a bespoke ‘Yearbook’ report into each of their digital lives, detailing uncovered sensitive facts, infographics highlighting interesting trends and patterns in their behaviour and an executive summary of their gaffes, flirtations, mentions of key brands/individuals and any other non-generic statements/actions.

The Yearbook will also include visual graphics depticting your trackees social graph, with a brief narrative on ‘connections of interest’.

We will also contact you at this time to arrange your annual consultation with our Global Privacy Engineers based for a 45 minute VOIP briefing and Q&A. This is your opportunity to really dig deeper.

However, the real value is in the accretion and synthesis of data collated over time. We expect our clients to reap the greatest Return-on-Investment in their 8th, 9th and 10th years of this ten year service – just as their trackees careers reach their apogee. WINNING!

Payment is accepted in Bitcoin (pref) or US Dollars. The service requires an investment of ¢5,000 per trackee, per annum.

Think long-term, pick some winners, and invest today! “

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Related: http://willmcinnes.co.uk/2011/01/29/you-know-me-the-president/

What the Hari kerfuffle is really about

Seen from close up the Johann Hari kerfuffle is about accusations of plagiarism, churnalism and therefore the trust in one of Britain’s foremost journalists.

It’s a fair debate, and with Hari’s response and apology today, one I hope will  naturally quieten down soon enough.

But seen from a step back what I feel this is really about is our society grappling and coming to terms with the new transparency that is afforded by the Internet.

The massively connectedness of the internet, the memory storage and recall of technology, and the human intelligence and diverse motivations and interests that reside in our social networks mean that we are in a new age of transparency.

In my opinion we are still only reaching the very earliest and most basic understanding of what this means for our lives and for the world around us.

Related and connected examples must include:

Yesterday I gave a talk at the PR Week ‘Ultimate Crisis Conference’ where I floated the idea that we are entering an Age of Crises.

For me, until we reach a new equilibrium in society – which will include a better understanding of transparency, changed behaviour in ourselves, and adjusted expectations in what we consider to be normal and abnormal behaviour in others – we can expect more of crises like these.

More of the great and the good being challenged, half found out (or not), memos leaked, personal spicy emails massively circulated. Learning the hard way, all of us to some extent, at scale, and in public.

I have no idea how long this will last.

The Hari affair is just another step on the road towards a better understanding of what it is to live in this new world we have created…

Will algorithms make life better?

The idea of algorithms has been knocking around my head lately.

The first was this tweet from Tim Dyson, CEO of NextFifteen, which I can no longer find which said something like:

‘Will algorithms make better decisions for us than we do or can?’.

And I thought: hmmm, that’s interesting.

The second stimulus for these thoughts is the excellent talk by Kevin Slavin on ‘Those algorithms that govern our lives’ which is absolutely required viewing for all.

So with then I’m accepting that algorithms are already hugely influential in my life, and starting to wonder about what life would be like as they become more present, more influential.

And when it comes to our behaviour, I often think about the things we do that we shouldn’t – they’re the interesting bits.

There’s the mundane stuff, like I eat too much, some people might smoke or drive when they could walk (I sometimes do both of these too!) or stare at attractive people, eat noisily etc etc.

And then there’s the big stuff we do that isn’t good for us – the partners we choose, the financial decisions we make, the workplaces and job crap we accept, the roles we play and the behaviours and habits we allow to lead us.

There’s a lot going on that could in theory be improved, if only we could help ourselves, right?

So we could do with some help, in theory at least. This idea that we could somehow Nike+ life in general, optimise LIFE itself is quite a promise (unless you’re healthily sceptical, which I’m getting to a bit later).

Then if I think about how algorithms – in a form to be described e.g. floating voices that follow us around or robot monkeys or computerised jewelery or whatever – started to ‘help’ us make better decisions, what would that be like?

Would they inform us of the full range of options? ‘Will, I see you’re about to order your seventh burger – have you considered the other options…?’

Would they interrupt and take charge? ‘Excuse me sir, but we’d like to cancel that seventh burger – Will’s cholesterol count is perilous’

Would they act ‘non-invasively’, insidiously influencing us FOR OUR OWN GOOD? Me: ‘Weird, I haven’t fancied a burger in ages. Just don’t even like the idea of eating a burger at the moment. Yuck. Got any apples?’.

Perhaps, being on-trend, they’d somehow combine visualization and gamification (add Transmedia for the full bonus point multiplier) and use these powerful levers combined to inform and influence our behaviour? ‘Calories consumed today – 2,587, 7% more than your daily intake, 45% more than other 33 year old males in your neighbourhood’ etc etc

So there’s the whole ‘even if they did exist, how would they manifest themselves’ that I’m sure will be figured out pretty easily.

But the thing that really interests me is then what would life be like in world where this happens universally?

If everything, every edge of our personality, every burr and rough quirk, was evened out like some kind of valium-for-behaviour, thanks to algorithms, what would society be like?

Would algorithms and then perfecting brilliance make life really better?

Would life really be more rich, more deeply satisfying?

Or would we be like GAP advert cut-outs, wandering through clean streets (this is making me think of Malmö in Sweden – a truly lovely place to visit), pastel-coloured pullovers drawn over our shoulders, sipping healthy volumes of mineral water and smiling like lunatics?

To me, that’s repulsive, shallow, uniform, repugnant. Just awful.

The last bit of this thought about algorithms brings me eventually to art.

In my philistine and fairly primitive mind I end up thinking, ‘what is the opposite of consistent and optimised and right-first-time?’. And I’ve probably got the wrong end of the stick but I end up thinking that maybe art is the last bastion of humanity – maybe this is what art is, the mess, the edge.

And then, just as I think I’ve figured it out – that algorithms will make life better (shallow), but not BETTER (deep) – I remember the art that Matt Pearson aka Zen Bullets creates or at least oversees. It may be worth noting that Matt also does not see this as art, but we disagree on this.

And so there it is, in all of its glory: art created by fucking algorithms!

And at this point I give up. I submit to the all-pervading algorithms. Will algorithms make life better? Shit, I hope so. I guess our only help is in influencing the definition of ‘better’ :)