BigShinyThing

We keep running into ex-colleagues, all of whom, when asked what they’re doing, answer “it’s not that easy to sum up” by which they mean:

I’ve got a couple of paying projects going, plus I’m on the edge of other stuff that might or might not turn into work, but involves people interesting enough that it’s worth some time anyways, plus you know, I’ve got that blog thing going and bits of other stuff on the side.

Long ago, we had a gig as armchair futurists at a Famous Ad Agency. One of our favourite predictions was that the structure of creative business would go the way of Hollywood: rather than existing as long-term corporate entities, groups of highly-skilled freelancers would be assembled for the life of a specific project, at the completion of which they would pack their bags and head of to the next one.

The model never really caught on in adland. However, this month we get the feeling that our generation has finally crossed some intangible tipping point. We see signs and portents: people, it’s practically raining frogs over Soho. Key indicator: suddenly we’re all exploiting network utilities like FaceBook, and communities like PlannerSphere not just to keep ‘in touch’ but to expand the size of the network which we touch (see note [1], below).

We’re building structures which accumulate and expose opportunity, knowledge, income. Crucially, we are doing this for ourselves.

We’re also, in the flux of transmutation, restructuring our personal brands, making our own individual and collective land grabs for authority, influence, status and respect. We’re building a colony, out in the unmapped places, and things don’t need to be the same way they were back home at the centre of Empire. It’s all up for grabs.

Which isn’t to imply that we’re shortchanging shareholders in the companies that pay us — the more efficient our networks, the quicker and better we can turn the work around. Happy clients mean more income and repeat business (we’re tip-toeing quietly over the sleeping issue of where and for whom the glittering prizes of intellectual property and long-term value will accrue).

But before you drink the Electric Kool Aid, we also suggest you pick up (and yes, read, dammit) a copy of Fred Turner’s excellent From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Turner’s book offers a good critical history of exactly this kind of technotopian futurism, a worldview which comes with heavier and more unpleasant historical baggage than you might expect. We say: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. On FaceBook”.

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1. Sphere is the wrong metaphor. A sphere maximises the amount of stuff held within. Now is all about maximising surface area, expanding the opportunities for contact, the opportunities available for each of us, alone or together, to touch, engage, involve the rest of everything. We advocate forms which are the topographic opposite of spherical — hyperbolic surfaces: folded, gnarly, spaces where surface is everything. We will stand or fall by the richness of our contact with the world as a whole, not just that within the closing horizons of our tiny corner of a corner of it.