Tom O'Brien recently tweeted a link to Neal Stephenson's Spew, a piece in WIRED from what is essentially the dawn of time, 1994. What's crazy about it, given when it was published, is how prescient NS was on where we would be 15 years later.
Go ahead. Read the piece. It's really good, in the way that a cyberpunk piece called 'Spew' from 1994 is good. I know sometimes the links don't come through when these blogposts pop up on Facebook, but Google it if you don't see the link and read it. I'll wait...
OK, it's not the Baroque Cycle or even Snow Crash, but it's sort of what we do for a living (or should be), right?
Anyway, a few things occurred to me while reading the piece:
- Why don't people move more quickly? TV networks, publishers or advertisers don't respond to niche opportunities anywhere near as quickly as they do in the piece. I don't understand why, unless ennui, inertia or fear are fair explanations. There's no good excuse why, and we can accelerate how we move against opportunity. We just need a better infrastructure.
- Try harder to find it: finding insights that are actionable. Frankly in this day and age it's not hard to find information that matters, but honestly a lot of what we see in the business world is more often than not the result of outdated models that measure something that we all agree matters as opposed to the things that actually are happening. Not sure why this is the case.
- WTF? Do you think anyone who read this piece 15 years ago really understood what NS was talking about? Did he? Did pieces like this create our reality (which is pretty spot on, at least from the perspective of what is possible) or was NS just so hyperaware that he intuited the next 15?
- DIY: NS captures where culture really comes from perfectly. As much as in his future there seems to be some sort of corporate-entertainment-technology complex that produces 'everything' they need to be culture vultures to find out what is really happening. Technology that centralizes culture doesn't actually centralize culture creation but rather paradoxically just seems to help figure out what's really going on. Then the 'centralizer' can figure out how to take advantage (or not) of what's going on.
- Intuition and in person: As much as the character in Spew has access to all the information out there, he's not purely quant driven in his approach. He knows "something is there" without being able to put his finger on it and really can only find out by going to where the target is and seeing it in person. Data feed doesn't replace human touch.
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