Portfolious

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in… marketing, music, film, publishing, media… we’ve got to face up to the fact that open and transparent services are the future. So hand over control to the people, earn trust, have conversations as opposed to indulging in monologues / broadcasting / messaging and promote enablement, not prevention / hindrance.

Thumbs up:

Gerd Leonard: http://www.mediafuturist.com/
Radiohead: http://www.radiohead.com

Thumbs down:

Hakan Roswall, IFPI: http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-day-10-calls-for-jail-time-090302/
Feargal Sharkey, UK Music: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7722340.stm

Duh!

As Bob Dylan said:

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

Thanks to my fab friend Steve Moore, I sneaked into the Reboot Britain conference last week. To cut a long story short, the premise was along the lines of ‘we’re all screwed up – economically, politically etc – what we gonna do about it’, focusing on digital means of mending our broken society.

MPs, journos, activists, corporate folk, entrepreneurs and all sorts were there. There was a sniff of revolution in the air… BUT… what’s with the incessant harping on about ‘Digital’? Digital revolution. Digital age. Digital solutions. Come on guys… get with the program. Yes, you can and should stream MP’s debates live over the net; yes, you can and should use twitter if you find it useful; but all that is a given. It has been a given for ages. Get over it. Quit the reframing, accept the now and take some action. LIVE ACTION.

Witnessing the clamoring awe surrounding digital, as if it were a tangible entity and lifeforce, is a bit like watching your dad dancing. My outrage culminated in a posh panelist shouting ‘tweet that on the hash tag’. Er… yeah man.

There’s a distinct danger of increasing numbers of folk (often those who’ve had an epiphany while reading Wikinomics or Here’s Comes Everybody) disappearing up their own digital asses. Don’t get me wrong, those books are fab, but borrowing catchphrases and concepts without changing behaviour is futile.

Let’s stop talking about as if there’s a divide between digital and non-digital. Let’s stop focusing on technology. It’s about PEOPLE. What are people going to do to make things better. What can we each, as individuals, do RIGHT NOW that’ll have a micro or macro impact on the world and others around us.

If there’s one thing I hope everyone takes away from Reboot Britain, it’s that whatever you do, don’t wait around for institutions to change things. Start. Now.

Knock on every door on your street and ask your neighbours if they’ve ever thought how bonkers it is that there are 40 lawns and 40 lawnmowers… then set up a lawnmower sharing club. Start a global tribe of like-minded passionistas around something that matters. Fed up with a crappy council service? Crowd-source an alternative. Chip in and take it upon yourself. The technology is a given.

If you’re stuck, ask your kids.

People live, then they die. Get over it. We all die and life is short. This is the fundamental fact of life that causes us to seek meaning… to crave it (so as not to feel pointless – hence religion… and brands).

Marketers sussed this out. Roll on the brand campaigns that attach meaning to things they want us to buy… mass marketing and broadcasting (human standardisation). So we buy stuff. It differs according to our environment (e.g. I’m a London business dude so I really can’t possibly be a non-failing happy person without a flash car, expensive new boots and a crazy-priced flat). We buy loads of stuff. Our impact bias, influenced by the marketing bombardment (though not as much as they’d like to think!) causes us to overestimate how happy the stuff will make us. Conversely, the same bias causes us to overestimate how crappy we’ll feel if we take a risk and it all goes wrong. Hmmm.

Imagine accepting your lifespan and making the most of it. What’s the most useful thing I can do in my short window of opportunity, that’ll make me the most fulfilled? What would contribute most to the overall progress of the human race? What would be of most value to others? Do I care? Do I just want to pursue pleasure and to hell with the rest of them?

Whatever we decide to do, hopefully it isn’t on auto-pilot, with fear-clipped wings and hangups about stupid shit like the credit crunch, piracy, predetermined life-paths and hierarchies.

Leading on from the previous post about the coolness of chaos…
 

Have you ever had to deal with a big lumpy piece of complex old software that was written years ago, then updated countless times, new bits added on, a new guy adding another bit, bolt-ons, sticking plasters and fixes… until it’s a big slow cumbersome piece of crap nobody can change or work with?
 

That’s pretty much industry as it stands – and other big systems for that matter (e.g. government, education). Since the industrial revolution, we’ve built up this massive ball of crap. Now nobody can do a damn thing with it.
 

The most obvious example that’s hurting right now is the whole free thing. We can listen to music for free. We can watch TV shows for free. We can read books for free. This of course screws record companies, publishers, broadcasters… oh yeah, and then there’s the whole fact that we don’t pay a blind bit of notice to advertising. The big massive balls of crap are stuffed because they’re prisoners within their own structures – too slow, too fat, too inflexible. They’re waiting to die, with their fingers in their ears, screaming ‘lah lah lah!’ as nimble network-based businesses spring up under the radar, taking over the world at lightning pace.
 

At the end of the day, all a business traditionally does is ensure people get paid. That’s it, when you think about it. Traditionally the big boys get paid much more than the little boys, but it’s just a bunch of individuals getting paid.
 

Now, think about the overhead in a big-lump-of-crap business. Big shiny offices, management structures, HR departments, blah blah blah. Think about MARKETING BUDGETS… zillions and squillions… to make sure you sell LOADS to make sure you can pay the overheads and pay the individuals (staff, bosses, shareholders etc). So we pay more to make more to sell more to pay more.
 

And it ain’t just the hippies who know sustainability is an issue. We need to stop producing so much crap. Reuse, reduce, recycle and all that jazz. Yet still we need to make people want more so they buy more so we sell more to pay individuals.
 

What if we scrapped all the crap?

What if there were no management structures?

What if there were no multi-million advertising / marketing budgets?

What if there were more or less no overheads?

Answer? We wouldn’t need to sell as much, so we wouldn’t MAKE as much. Sweet! It isn’t rocket science.
 

And could we do business without these business-as-usual / this-is-business stuff that costs so much? Hell yeah. It’s already happening. It’s soooo easy to change from ground level, as a bunch of individuals, with no management, a pinch of leadership and a sprinkling of magic dust – in comparison to attempting change from the ‘top’. It’s no surprise that people feel pretty darn good when they’re an individual within a collective, creating profit through good growth, without all the psychologically, environmentally (and every other ‘ally’) damaging self-fulfilling prophecies inherent in business as we know it.
 

I mean, we all know we went a bit crazy over the past few years (decades). We all got a bit carried away. It’s like full on raving in the 80s/90s (or whatever equivalent!). Bloody hell what a blast. Dance your face off – time of your life. But after a few years everybody starts to feel like crap, go nuts and realise it’s no fun any more and life’s better when you feel good. The individuals-formerly-known-as-consumers are just started to ease off the uppers. They’ve been turning your brain cells to mush and it’s much nicer to be wide awake.
 

So what now? Sit back and wait until the chaos period is over and this network-based commerce phase kicks in and emerges as the new status quo?
 

Err… that would be pretty boring.
 

Instead you could join a tribe. Or you could start one. Soon it’ll pay way more than your job (if that’s what you care about)… and really when you get into the swing of the new way you won’t give a toss.
 

Take it a leap beyond ‘markets are conversations’ into the realms of DOING, not planning. ACTION IS THE NEW FORECASTING.

I haven’t blogged in any great depth about Scrmblr (’scrambler’), so thought it was about time.

Scrmblr is a global network of content producers (Scrmblrs) who create anti-ads (Scrmbls).

Marketing used to be about advertising, but advertising is often expensive, fake and dumb. What remains important is the act of telling stories about the things we trade – stories that sell and stories that spread.

Scrmblr gives power to the people – the talented people of the world, enabling creators of great content to reap fair rewards, while enabling organisations who couldn’t dream of affording video ads the opportunity to air Scrmbls (much better!). Cheaper, better, faster.

Scrmblr removes the unfair, prohibitive supply-chain mess that sits between talented people who make stuff and people who buy great stuff.

Fair trade.

The Scrmblr website has just been launched here. 20% of profits will be donated to microcredit projects, in a drive to do something good. The first scrmbl created was for UK charity ShelterBox, by Tel Aviv scrmblr Danny Aronson.

Scrmblr already has a presence in UK, ISA, Israel and Canada… and is on the lookout for more talent (filmmakers, producers, animators, designers, creatives etc).

Let’s compare for a moment. You can compare in terms of pretty much anything: efficiency, effectiveness, happiness…

Some brief examples:

Communications

C: Spread from the top down
T: Spread from anywhere to everywhere, via the centre

Growth

C: Recruit from the top, hiring below
T: Recruit from anywhere, hiring everywhere

Innovation

C: Creation from the bottom, managed from the top
T: Creation from everywhere, no management needed

Bliss

C: Everyone spends their time inside the company’s expensive box, developing ideas with others from the same company
T: Everyone works from anywhere, developing ideas with a diverse range of people they like to spend time with

I know which one I’d rather join, or start.

As David Weinberger said in The Cluetrain Manifesto, ‘Management is a powerful force, part of a larger life-scheme that promises us health, prosperity, calm and no surprises in every aspect of our lives, from health to wealth to good weather and moderately heated coffee from McDonald’s. We are all victims of this assault on voice, the attempt to get us to shut up and listen to the narrowest range of ideas imaginable.’

Here here.

It’s bizarre, when you think about it, that we seek health, prosperity and calm in a framework that’s configured to avoid surprises (not to mention the fact such management frameworks do quite the opposite, restricting prosperity and wrecking your health… duh!).

Essentially a framework that avoids surprises is setting us up for a fall, given that life is totally unpredictable (just look at the accuracy of trending, forecasting and predicting in retrospect – we’re pretty much always wrong, usually wildly, except for the one in a zillion folk who are hailed as heros / experts because they won the prediction lottery).

We’re actively encouraged (forced?) to surrender our individuality in return for a financial bribe and a supposedly non-disturbing, secure, predictable, managed environment. How damaging is that?

If we focused on understanding basic psychology – and in particular neuropsychology – rather than technology, management, or most things to do with ‘professionalism’, we’d learn to cope with surprises. There’s no anti-depressant and productivity tool quite like understanding what your brain is up to (which is normally the opposite of all the crap we reel off in our inner narrative). We’d learn to adopt calm by flicking switches that send neurons on productive paths, as opposed to destructive panic / depression / fear trains of thought. Most importantly, we’d learn that we have myriad choices… without all the BS constrains we confabulate, largely as a result of managed structures and irrational fears.

Coupled with the lack of cynicism and suckerism for imbalance and hype, our denial, biases and love of fallacy are at best sub-optimum… at worst bloody dangerous.

Every last pirate-lynching dinosaur the management structure spews out has been conditioned to fear change – to be unwilling to accept that bettering society involves doing new stuff that isn’t business as usual. It’s not business as usual! IT IS NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL!! Some folk never seem to get it. “But I’ll be out of a job!” they shriek. “More fool you,” we think quietly, while we bend and flex and change at pace with the world… mostly ignoring them and opting to avoid a ‘proper job’ at all costs (although some of us work form the inside).

The thing is, the pirates, the Scrmblrs and every single one of us are changing and bettering society from the bottom up. We’re faster, more innovative and powerful. We organise without organisations. We run on leadership, not management; passion, not KPIs. We’re not afraid to let one-another loose… in fact we love loose cannons. They’re our favourite.

You know who you are!

(Email me!)

Seth Godin’s recent post here hit the nail on the head. He says ‘TV advertisers are finally discovering that YouTube + viral imagination = free media… The biggest shift is going to be that organizations that could never have afforded a national campaign will suddenly have one. The same way that there’s very little correlation between popular websites and big companies, we’ll see that the most popular commercials get done by little shops that have nothing to lose.’

Funny he should say that. It’s exactly what we Scrmblrs (’scramblers’) are up to (Scrmblr is a global network of producers who create low cost, good quality video and audio content… what you might call anti-ads).

It was a sad day when the Pirate Bay guys – Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde – were been banged up and ordered to pay $4.5m damages.

“There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that,” said International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) chairman John Kennedy. Unbelievable. And it gets worse: “The trial of the operators of The Pirate Bay was about defending the rights of creators, confirming the illegality of the service and creating a fair environment for legal music services that respect the rights of the creative community. Today’s verdict is the right outcome on all three counts.”

What a load of crap.

Up speaks Ludvig Werner, Chairman of IFPI Sweden: “The court has delivered a simple and clear judgement, which is that people and businesses engaged in creative activities have the fundamental right to be rewarded for their work and to be protected from massive copyright violators like Pirate Bay. The criminal conviction of the Pirate Bay operators will not only hearten the music and film community – it is also a huge shot in the arm for legitimate producers and entrepreneurs, who are trying to create a thriving legitimate online business based on proper respect of copyright.”

I’m in the music and film community. I’m a legitimate producer and entrepreneur. I’m trying to create a thriving legitimate online business. But I’m certainly not trying to do is ‘based on proper respect of copyright’. That would just be plain dumb.

Yet more nonsense, this time Helen Smith, Executive Chair of IMPALA: “This is music to the ears of the thousands of small independents and artists who produce the majority of new releases today. It demonstrates a real understanding of the dilemma that if no one pays for music today who will make the exciting new music of tomorrow?”

The unimaginative granny-suing sticking plasters and folksy claims on behalf of us little producer/creative types will only stretch so far. Reminds me of a mobile operator head putting his hand up at a recent conference and asking what they were supposed to do if mobile ads switched from opt-out to opt-in… aw… shame! No, it’s not business as usual, but while ‘industry’ scratches its had and jails creative developers, those who’ve bothered to think of a better way are taking over. Industry has had it too easy for too long. The result? Imbalance and hampered innovation. Not for long.

A more rational comment from Rickard Falkvinge, leader of The Pirate Party… “This wasn’t a criminal trial, it was a political trial. It is just gross beyond description that you can jail four people for providing infrastructure.”

Micah White, a Contributing Editor at Adbuster, claims in this recent blog posting ‘The only way forward, toward the original dream of censorship-free communication, is to build mainstream support for online piracy based on the argument that piracy is a litmus test for authentic culture.’