Upstream #171
potential, inconvenience, pixar power, eat the problem, farewell.
Hey, I hear Summerâs been scheduled for next Thursday now. Couple of flickers of light, which have been nice. But sheesh. Let's keep hope alive though. Right, letâs go.
âThe ability to self-organise is the strongest form of system resilience. A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itselfâ.
Donella Meadows
culture // potential
Weâre obsessed with potential. Businesses, brands, people, platforms. The potential of what might be. We briefly hover to find out. Then move on. Boom. Bust. More. Now. We celebrate potential. Not actual existence. Culture has become anticipation. Rooted in pre. Driven by the hype machine. Weâll remember Barbie for the hype, not the movie. So hyped, we eat it whole. Who cares how it tastes. TikTok is eating broadcast TV for example, driven by our insatiable appetite. But this fever is unsustainable. Soon we'll understand that the opposite of more isnât less, itâs better. That being bored is good. That leisurely hype-less loafing is use-full, not use-less. And that moments experienced fully and savoured properly, matter more than any future desire.
brands // inconvenience
Andrew Geoghan works for PZ Cussons (Imperial Leader etc). He's ex Diageo. Proper brand marketers. He wrote about the crisis in brand building. How tech eclipses the essential brand building basics. You know, the hard work of understanding the customer and turning that into strategic, insight led brand growth. Nick Cave wrote about ChatGPT making things faster and easier and how itâs âfast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imaginationâ. How âit renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessaryâ. And BBH wrote about the curse of convenience, how easier isnât always better and the benefits of positive inconvenience. A world full of nothing but fast, easy, convenient solutions is soulless. We canât forget that. Because the world needs more, not less soul.
technology // pixar power
This piece on how the future of tech looks a lot like Pixar, described our inevitable march to immersive. How books, evolved to radio, then to tv and film. And how text (twitter), moved to photos (Instagram), then to video (Youtube) and will inevitably move to 3D. It described Pixarâs ambition in animation, which spawned the 3D tech (Goo and RenderMan) that will build that 3D future. Appleâs new alliance with Pixar, Nvidia, Adobe, and Autodesk (Alliance for OpenUSD), will âdrive the standardization, development, evolution, and growthâ of Pixarâs Universal Scene Description (USD) technology. This solves one of the big âmetaverseâ stumbling blocks of easily moving from one place to another (interoperability). Plus itâs Open source, for developers, so the world will have Pixar power. Which sounds pretty exciting.
creativity // eat the problem
The application of creative thinking is great. Problem solving, imagination, divergent and disruptive ideas. And as we stumble forward in this haze of tech, itâll become more important. Because creativity is unpredictable and chaotic and it can bring us to unimaginable places. Like, what if you had an invasive poisonous species of fish endangering an ecosystem. How might you solve that problem? Ogilvy thought, what if we get people to eat the problem? And got Columbia to put it on their menus. This is the Lionfish problem, and the Terribly Delicious case study is here. Creativity can have so many amazing applications, when we unleash it on the world. Unleash yours.
five random (ish) things:
We all get there differently đ.
Tesla has the world's best selling car đ.
Young people, old hobbies đŚ.
The Healthy Home report đĄ.
The weaponization of loneliness đł.
watching // farewell
Got distracted by a family bereavement. So to finish, will just include this. One of my dads favourite tracks. Hug someone close to you. Life is a passing gift.