Selling Tomorrows

Flight from the City: "What the #%&@! is Wrong with our Economy?

You have to hand it to Borsodi. He looks at the economic devastation around him in 1933, people walking around shell shocked and penniless, and outright rejects it.  Where everyone sees a savage business cycle, he sees a savage economic model.  Where others queue for breadlines, he buys farmland to grow his own food.  Absolutists are easy to admire, of course, but unlike most of them, Borsodi doesn't substitute ideology for logic.  He embraces the scientific model and applies it over and over until he finds a way out of his mess.

Borsodi makes three arguments in the book. The first is that an economic system that can't eliminate unemployment is immoral and impractical.  Snip:

..."all these victims of unemployment are alike in this respect, that they are periodically unable to support themselves and their families through no fault of their own because of their dependence upon what they earn as a cog in some part of the complex machinery of our factory-dominated civilization."

 

What Would You do if Unemployment Hit 30%? A Three-Part Look at 1932's "Flight from the City"

You know you're living in interesting times when Ron Paul's amendment to audit the Federal Reserve gets passed out of committee 43-26.  But then again, 10% unemployment has prodded a lot of people to start questioning some fundamentals.

When unemployment hit 31.2% in 1932, an economist named Ralph Borsodi wrote one of the most important utopic works of the 20th century, "Flight from the City."  And he didn't just write "Flight" -- he lived it.  Ralph looked at the depression around him and decided to pack up the family, buy a farm, and make his own economic way in the world. And it mostly works.  He's not a socialist, though he finds a lot of flaws with capitalism. And he's not a "return to the earth" kind of person, noting many times he hates backbreaking labor and finds many ways to have machines do the work for him.

Like most utopias, "flight" says more about the times in which it was written than those that came to pass.  And yet it's worth reading because the eerie similarities to today reveal how darned constant and consistent our utopic hopes are. Hopes that go back for thousands of years.  Understanding the intricacies of this dynamic is the key to laying out a CONVINCING vision of tomorrow.

Plus, it's just really fun to read.

This week kicks off a special 3-post look at "Flight." I hope you enjoy.

Year-Long Look at Behavioral Finance

PBS' Nightly Business Report has just kicked off a 12-month series on behavioral finance.  How do people decide what the future will bring?  How do they mesh global macro trends with what they anticipate their personal future holds?  And how much of this analysis happens unconsciously?  These are some of the most exciting questions psychologists and market analysts are asking today, and this series should be very useful to PR and marketing pros.

Their companion website already has a ton of info up, including why people see patterns where none exist, a Psychology Today piece on 10 ways we calculate the odds wrong, a link to a study on "Prospect Theory" that explores how people make decisions in times of uncertainty.

The video above is an intro on Behavioral from NBR's first broadcast in the series.

Recessipedia Launches to Avoid Repeat of Financial Crisis

Proud to report that my company's six-month effort with the Museum of American Finance has come to fruition today.  Recessipedia.org is a wiki designed to tap the wisdom of crowds to figure out what happened to cause the financial crisis. Check out the Wall Street Journal's coverage here and our press release here. Snip:

"Modeled on Wikipedia, Recessipedia's articles can be created, written and edited by anyone. But unlike Wikipedia, the Museum's wiki has a distinct goal of investigating past events.  The wiki also collects first-person accounts and welcomes people and organizations to contribute their own points of view about what happened leading up to and during the crisis. "
 

A Futures Market for Words on Twitter

Got a marketing campaign that's about to get people buzzing?  Put your money where your mouth is with a new futures market that lets you bet on the surge of specific words used on Twitter like they're so much bushels of corn. The bets are virtual, but the bragging rights are real.  Good summary from Mashable here.   

New Book: "Future: A Recent History" Will Change the Way You Think About Tomorrow Today

I’ve just finished reading Lawrence Samuel’s new book, “Future: A Recent History.” Suffice it to say, I’ve underlined a fifth of its passages, written in the margins of almost every page and scribbled dozens of check marks for the "wow" insights I want to remember later.  It’s that good.

 

The book explores 100 years of history in 200 dense pages, taking readers on a tour of how people's expectations of the future have changed over time.  An ambitious number of topics are covered -- politics, religion, class, gender, pop culture, fashion, the home, business, jobs, travel, architecture, and lots of science and technology.  But the payoff is equally large, as Samuel’s brisk writing style delivers a fascinating look into an aspect of our culture that we are barely conscious exists.

 

Marketers and PR professionals will find Future to be an especially valuable tool for better understanding target audiences.  If you needed proof that your vision of tomorrow needs to adapt to people’s preconceptions of what’s ahead, this work offers plenty.  And while Samuel doesn't take on what people are thinking right now (many others do that) his voyage through history teaches you how to spot the patterns.

 

It’s worth noting that a lot of books make fun of futurists who have gotten things wrong.  Rightly so.  Many of them are hysterical and it's part of what makes this topic fun.  Not Samuel.  He found a chillingly large number of predictions that have come true.  Sure, sometimes the predictor got the technology right and its impact on society wrong, or vice versa.  But there are patterns to the errors, and understanding them will help you be a better marketer, historian or futurist when it comes to dissecting and using predictions.

 

If all that’s not enough, the exhaustive research that went into this work offers a treasure trove of books, articles and pop culture moments to be further explored by anyone interested in futurism. 

 

A worthy successor to I.F. Clarke's "The Pattern of Expectation," "Future: A Recent  History" will change the way you see tomorrow today.

Hugh Ferris' Metropolis of Tomorrow - Building Utopia One Skyscraper at a Time

 

"The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferris a great example of how any field, taking upon it a vision of the future, ultimately tries to create a new system of benign government.  Ferris was an architect who, in 1929, published a series of sketches about what cities could and should look like.  Plainly stating that architecture affects people's actions at the subconcious level, he creates an environment within which people might just act better. 

 

In spirit this is so much like Thomas More's Utopia or Edward Bellamy's Looking backward that it's freaky.

Ferriss's city is enourmous.  The base of its largest buildings take up eight blocks.  They're so big and specially purposed that he says the word "building" no longer fits--they should be called "centers." There's a business, government, art and science center.  Each building is its own city with banks, gyms, shops, restaurants.

In the city of the future, religions act in harmony.  They're housed in a triple building. One is for the executive offices, the next for  "aspirational activities" and the third, and the highest, is for charities.

Documentary on Jacque Fresco, Futurist Fighting Scarcity Through Design

A peer to Buckminster Fuller, Jacque Fresco has spent much of his 90+ years focusing on solving the issue of humanity's perception of scarcity; something he blames for the search for wealth, power and manipulation of people.  His designs, captured beautifully in the film Future by Design, seek to meet people's needs in ways so that they won't feel like they're missing anything. 

Fresco:  "When you try to think about the future, remember this.  The process with which you think about things is based upon indoctrination, which are given by a society.  So your range of thought is limited by the dominant values of your society."

Here's a press kit for the multi-award nominated documentary which explains parts of his philosophy.

Top 10 "tomorrows" for sale in Sleep Dealer

Saw the movie last night and have to say the comparisons to Blade Runner were right on.  Truth is, it's not fair to this film to write a review after just one viewing, but darn it, the flick is too good to hold back on.  Here's my top 10 list of "Tomorrows" that Sleep Dealer serves up.  Mucho spoilers follow.

1. Subjugation. The opening scene shows workers plugged into the network, moving like marionettes, dancing to the tune of global demand for crop pickers and construction workers.  It's a shame-flavored milkshake and the swirl of " cool idea" that makes you feel even guiltier after swallowing it.

2. Dystopia Now. The first part of the movie takes place in a small town in Mexico, far from the tech wonderland.  Water supplies are under lock and key.  Life is hard. There's heartbreaking poverty.  It looks like many third world towns today, and that's the message.  The dystopia is here now.  It's one thing to know academically that visions of tomorrow are often used to point out the flaws of today, but in this director's hands, it's a sucker punch.

3. Social networks as "Big Brother."  There's a "Memory Market" where people can sell their experiences.  We saw this idea in Strange Days, but Sleep Dealer brings a whole new level of creepiness to the issue.  In an era of social media, Sleep Dealer shows how easily "Big Brother" can switch from meaning the government to, well, everyone.   

4. Plugging in means losing yourself. The process of inserting the node plugs into the body (which look a lot like what we saw in the Matrix) is violent, invasive and dehumanizing.  Metaphorically, it speaks to the degradation that people will suffer to support their families or be a part of something larger.  Paraphrasing here a bit, Memo (the main character) says after his surgery, "at last, I'm plugged into the global economy."  At the beginning of the movie, each plug is a symbol for a lost piece of humanity.  By the end, we're reminded that it's now what you're made of, but what you do that makes you human. 

5. “It’s people!  Soylent Green is made of people!”  A white pipeline is shown snaking through the wilderness in several scenes.  At first I thought it was an oil or water pipeline.  Then I realized it’s holding fiber optic cables.  So it’s not so much data coursing through the wire, but the physical work of the sleep dealers as their actions are transmitted to robots across the border. Often times today, human labor is categorized as a natural resource.  Here that metaphor materializes.  Labor is broken down into bits and bytes, normalized, commoditized and extruded into whatever form the market requires.  I'd call it beautiful and ghastly.  Luz (Memo’s girlfriend) would just say I’m “old fashioned.”  

6. Fear that we won't know what we've lost.  On the "old fashioned" thing for a second, this film, like many dystopias, generates a feeling of dread because as bad as things are, it's somehow worse because the future generation on the screen doesn't KNOW how bad it is. They've grown inured.  And that ranks up there with the “unknown” for things so scary we usually don’t think about them consciously.  (See earlier post on why we WANT to call this the Great Depression.)

7. Redefining "Writer" & "Reader." In this vision of the future, the woman sells her memories online, complete with narration.  She calls herself a "writer."  And when she makes contact with the man who purchased her memory, she refers to him as a "reader." It’s an interesting prediction on the future of these terms.  Remember when we referred to phones as "cellular telephones?"

8. The Campfire: The happiest points in the movie come when Memo sits around a fire with a couple old codgers in a shantytown.  They talk of ageless issues—relationships—and it’s the only point at which life in this world feels real, legitimate, worth it.  This image’s ancient roots are no accident. 

9. Superior technology doesn't equal moral superiority: Recalling that Germany was technologically ahead of most countries in the 1930s, the movie reminds us that as much as technology can instantly connect us to other people or reduce the physical pain of work, it can't make us more moral.  This is a critical point.  Most techno utopias are built on the premise that "if only we could talk with each other" or "if only we didn't have to labor so hard" then crime and wars would go away.  Hundreds of years ago when canals and hot air balloons promised to connect Europe, the intellectuals of the day believed that connection and communication would eliminate the causes of war.  Sleep Dealer reminds us that this STILL won't be true in the future.  

10. "A future with a past if I connect and fight:" At the end of the movie, Memo utters this phrase.  It captures Tom Friedman's argument that only by holding onto our olive trees will we be satisfied with our Lexus.  That being engaged is critical for peace.  And finally, fights for the moral good must be undertaken. 

Why we WANT to think of this as a Great Depression

If it wasn't locked into the public's conciousness before, then it sure is now.  Paul Volcker says we're in a "Great Recession."  

Why does the label matter so much?  Because at a certain point, perception starts to affect economic activity more than reality.  And labels generally tend to short circuit nuanced thinking.  That's fine for thinking about big issues, but on a person-by-person basis, where job stability, savings, house prices and a hundred other factors can mean your situation can vary from the mean substantially, it's pretty faulty.  

As to why THIS label matters so much, I think it's because in many ways people want to believe this is like the Great Depression. Consider, as bad as the GD was, it did end.  And since we got through it and thrived for decades after, thinking that this is like the GD may actually serve as a coping technique for keeping hopes high.  As so often seen in dytopic movies and fiction, as scary as Mad Max's world appears, NOT knowing what's going to happen is still considered worse.

By the way, for fans of "history repeating itself," consider that Volcker was despised -- though today revered -- for jacking up interest rates in the early 80's to get inflation under control.  I've lost count of the trillions we're printing to save the economy, but is that deja vu I see in my crystal ball?