Matter/Anti-Matter

(Credit: Plan Spark)

Now that the exhaustively inspirational Pop!Tech 2008  is over, it’s worthwhile taking a look at what’s next, in other words, at the conference's theme for 2009. The organizers’ choice is pretty telling and may be indicative of a larger shift among not only the elite thinkers gathering at Pop!Tech, but also broader public opinion. Succeeding this year’s theme “Scarcity and Abundance” will be “America Reimagined,” a “top-to-bottom look at America’s opportunities, its challenges, and its future” that promises to explore what it means to be a “superpower in the age of the Second Superpower -- the Internet.”

This theme reflects many of the informal conversations that took place at this year’s Pop!Tech where the predominantly American attendees were wondering whether in light of the depressing news on the economy every morning they maybe ought to spend more time thinking about how to solve critical domestic issues rather than trying to save the rest of the world. The Pop!Tech curators obviously recognized this latent mood and acknowledged that the pendulum has begun to swing back from innovation at the bottom of the pyramid to innovation here at home, where the top of the pyramid has gotten bloated and all of it poisoned with debt. Concerns about a new isolationism, however, are not warranted: “There is not a single global challenge that can be addressed without the US,” as the Pop!Tech site points out.

That’s true, although the relationship between the US and the rest of the world has mutated from a dependence on America to a dependence of America. “Over the past decade, America has made itself a savings-poor country and will be running financial deficits with the rest of the world for the foreseeable future,” writes economist Charles R. Morris in his book, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown,” which -- released in February of this year -- offers a both sober and prophetic account of the crisis: “The United States, the ‘hyperpower,’ the global leader in the efficiency of its markets and the productivity of its business and workers, hopelessly in hock to some of the world’s most unsavory regimes. (…) that’s where a quarter-century of diligent sacrifice to the gods of free market has brought us. It’s a disgrace.”

And no one can say we haven’t been warned of the coming agony: “For more than a decade, the international financial cop, the International Monetary Fund, forecast a hurricane was heading toward US shores, as did many heads of the treasury and the Fed,” writes economist Juan Enriquez in an op-ed piece for the Boston Globe. “There are five basic drivers of these crises, all based on excess: high income concentration, too much debt, too much reliance on foreign money, not enough tax revenue, and reckless government spending. Time after time governments believe they are different. They are bombarded by warnings but ignore, postpone, spend even more, and crash.”

Now the great unwinding is ahead of us. The US is an over-leveraged economy that has been spending 5 to 7 percent more each year than it earns. A $1,000 investment in Freddie Mac is presently worth less than the return on the bottle deposit of $1,000 worth of beer bottles. With so much debt as assets on the balance sheets, and most of it collateralized as “toxic waste,” as the financial wizards call it, it will take more than social innovation to prevent Allan Greenspan’s “flaw” from becoming an apocalyptic systemic failure – it will take a drastic behavior change.

The US requires a massive restructuring to address its debt, cutting back on its borrowing, spending, and wars. The alternative is “ugly,” as Enriquez stated in his Pop!Tech address. His analysis of the downturn and his passionate plea to the new administration (and the American people) was the emotional highlight of the conference and a welcome grounding in a distressing reality. Enriquez was agitated and the Q&A after his session just didn’t want to end. Fortunately, he also presented concrete solutions to fix the mess, in the form of his “ten commandments:”

“1 - Save the dollar
2 - Fundamentally and brutally restructure debt
3 - All entitlements are fair game:
- If you are 60-65, you probably just lost big chunks of your nest egg
- Social Security/Medicare benefits are intact
- If you are 55-60, we need two more years’ work from you
- If you’re 55 and under, we need three more years
4 - Cut back military by 2% per year for 10 years
5 - Cap medical costs at 18% GNP
6 - Triage our support for companies (do not attempt to save dying whales)
7 - The program has to be bipartisan. It has to make both Democrats and Republicans unhappy.
8 - Simplify and broadly apply Sarbanes Oxley, apply it to government, apply it to hedge funds.
9 - Invest in growing start-up companies (which create most jobs)
10 - Treat education as a varsity sport (and continue to recruit foreign PhDs)”

Download his presentation as pdf

See the full video:
Juan Enriquez (2008) Pop!Tech Pop!Cast from PopTech on Vimeo.

Immediate action is of the essence: The new administration has 30 days, Enrique noted, to make significant changes based on these commandments. If it fails to do so, the consequences will be a breakdown of public infrastructure, a hike in unemployment rates, and social tensions. "Every great empire has fallen by going into bankruptcy," he stated.

Yet the damage is not only materialistic, it is spiritual. The American people need to rebuild America, but, maybe more importantly, they need to re-imagine it -- with confidence and utmost transparency. The covert irrational exuberance in the financial markets, which has occurred outside of regulatory oversight and is now gradually revealed, has shattered trust in institutions both in the business and public sector. "Supercapitalism has spilled over into politics, and has engulfed democracy,” as Robert Reich, Clinton’s first secretary of labor, diagnoses. Public policy debates have become, Reich observes, “on closer inspection, matters of mundane competitive advantage in pursuit of corporate profit,” with the notion of the "common good" disappearing.

In 2009, citizens and consumers alike will therefore ask for more transparency, more accountability from any kind of governance, as well as for more platforms to actively participate in the process of governance themselves. The rising power of amateurs, the emergence of mass-collaboration, crowdsourcing, user-generated content, and prosumers will extend to the political realm, and the open-source nature that the Obama campaign pioneered on such impressive scale, will extend to the new administration, setting up a social media-enabled “new deal” between citizens and government based on transparency and collective civic intelligence. Applying emerging technologies and new communication paradigms to the realm of governance will likely see a renaissance. More than a decade after visions of digital democracy and e-governance were rendered hopelessly visionary, they will be put forward again with reinvigorated momentum and new practical relevance in a brave new politics 2.0 world. America can and must lead this effort.

It’s a sign of troubling times when it is science that gives you faith. Another Pop!Tech speaker, the British neuro-scientist Peter Whybrow, explained in his talk how markets rely on basic human instincts that reside in the Reptilian brain and how a “buy now, pay later” mentality has led to an abundance that remains unquestioned because we tricked ourselves into a positive feedback loop. The good news from Whybrow though is: It’s only during times of scarcity that we use our human intelligence to its full effect. You can also say: scarcity is the mother of innovation. This presents a unique historic opportunity for the creative class. Reimagining America will be followed by Rebranding and Redesigning America, and all will be daunting tasks that require the skills of artists, entrepreneurs, designers, architects, writers, and marketers. Innovation is no longer only a critical economic factor, it has become a moral obligation for all creative people. 

(Credit: Pop!Tech)

(Credit: Unconfirmedsources.com)

I just read Ellen McGirt's poignant feature story on "The Brand Called Obama" in Fast Company, and my marketing head is spinning. "The fact that Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation is no longer news," she writes, "but what has hardly been examined is the degree to which his success indicates a seismic shift on the business horizon as well." Indeed, Obama has introduced a new brand of politics, and he has caused a paradigm shift that goes beyond politics and marketing and may alter the very fabric of the American society: democratization with the means of the democratized web.

Big impact in small worlds

Many pundits have pointed out that while the Obama campaign has employed traditional one-to-many tactics, spending, for instance, hefty sums on broad TV ads, its more remarkable achievement has been to translate the concept of web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it), with its collaborative formats, micro-crowds, public deliberation, and social aggregation, into the realm of political communication.

Obama has grasped the nature of the "Distributed Internet" and sent his messages to those (online) venues that are already populated with the audiences he wants to reach. The "Yes We Can" mash-up video by the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am was a free gift for Obama and became a viral hit. The campaign's daily email blasts are smart, to the point, and written in a genuine voice that is credible and non-intrusive. Obama's Facebook group is blossoming. The BarackObama.com site offers widgets, ring tones, photos, and other social media assets that supporters can use to spread the word beyond the site itself and into the self-reinforcing orbit of the social web. And MyBarackObama.com offers fully customizable tools for blogs, mini-social networks, mini-fundraising, and events, etc. At campaign rallies, Obama's team hands out lists to the people waiting in line, asking them to call undecided voters from their cell phones. All of that illustrates the marketing genius at work here: Obama's impact has been so big because the campaign has managed scaling down to the smallest possible level of offline and online engagement.

When your brand's essence is a vector, your base becomes a movement.

The web 2.0 analogy does not end with content production and viral distribution. The "product" Obama itself is a mash-up, a (hyper)-text, a rich media (re)-mix of statements, tunes, vibes, opinions, and facts. Obama embodies what Manuel Castells calls the "networked society," and he not so much taps into the aggregated "wisdom of the crowd" but the collective intelligence of engaged and enlightened citizens. In the Fast Company story, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, another poster boy of the networked society, describes Obama's "adaptive leadership" style: "A leader gets people to do things on their own, through inspiration, respect, and trust. A boss can order you to do things, sure, but you do them because it's part of the contract."

It seems logical then that Obama, in his speeches, has been using the pronoun "we" far more often than "I." This is emblematic of the open-source nature of the Obama conversation. Alan Moore and Tomi T. Ahonen elaborate on Henry Jenkins' comment that "Obama has constructed not so much a campaign as a movement:" "Movements engage people around higher order ideals and beliefs, they ask people to become self-motivated. Barack Obama understands that people want to be part of the process. It's the end of retail politics and the green shoots of networked politics premised upon engagement. Obama says: Yes, you can write your own profile. Yes, you can meet supporters near you. Yes, you can plan and attend events. Yes, you can network with your friends. Yes, you can become a fundraiser. Yes, you can write your own blog. Barack Obama is saying: yes, you can be part of this, you can be part of history. You see people embrace what they create." And who doesn't want to be part of something larger than oneself -- a cause, a network, a movement of like-minded and yet diverse voices? It is this inherent transcendence that lends Obama his power. It is a lesson in how to build brands in the age of hyper-fragmentation: When your brand's essence -- in this case: aspiration -- is a vector, your base becomes a movement.

When your greatest weakness is your biggest strength, you are very hard to beat.

The Obama brand is all software and only a little hardware, and it comes with an open SDK (software developer kit) -- a dynamic, modular platform that both individual campaigners and institutional networks can plug into. Obama's entire campaign is based on the principle of "picture-in-picture web," as Steve Rubel coins it. Or, to borrow another one of Rubel's lines: Obama is a web service, not a web site. He is the "blue ocean" and not the (little) rock. He is, in the dictum of advertising agency Resource Interactive, an "open (on-demand, personal, engaging, and networked) brand" -- a franchise brand that anyone can hijack, re-shape, and remix a la carte. That makes him vulnerable and volatile (think of the "I got a crush on..." video or the Rev. Jeremiah Wright videos on YouTube ) but at the same time powerful and unstoppable. When your greatest weakness is your biggest strength, you are very hard to beat.

It's a remix culture, stupid!

Henry Jenkins argued in his keynote at SXSW Interactive two weeks ago that accusing Obama of plagiarism (as the Clinton camp did when it brought forward that Obama had borrowed words from past speeches of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick) misses the point: It's a remix culture, stupid!

It is thus no coincidence that Norman Lear just announced his initiative Remix America, co-sponsored by the USC Norman Lear Center, Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Kaltura.org, and the American University Center for Social Media. In the spirit of Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody," Remix America is a "multi-partisan" forum that invites Internet users to take clips from the site's "American Playlist" and add other clips and audio to produce their own remix/mash-up vision of America -- as a new platform for patriotic dissent and political commentary.

From Norman Lear's speech at the Take Back America conference: "This country has always been a remix, yesterday's 'melting pot' is today's remix. What did Jefferson and Paine and Adams do but mash up history. Take a little from the Magna Carta, a little from John Locke, and a whole lot of rebellion. Now, thanks to the web and digital technology at Remix America everyone can join in. (....) I see a viral explosion of Born Again Americans, Americans of all ages and ethnicities, conditions and backgrounds, awakening to their power as free citizens in a free society. I see them doing it in 3-4 minute bursts, mixing and mashing their stories and hopes and dreams with the words, images and music from the American Playlist, to give us all a glimpse of the America they wish for."