Technology, Art, and Why the Future of Branding is Nonfiction

Via Fast Company.

Ahead of his appearance at the art/tech event, Rhizome Seven on Seven, Douglas Rushkoff talks to us about the changing role of artists and technologists and how brands can no longer be abstract.

By Jim Hanas

Author and futurist Douglas Rushkoff--in his books or, in this case, via Skype--is frequently the voice of unconventional wisdom. He has argued, for example, that employment is an obsolete economic indicator and, though he has long been a tech enthusiast, his latest book--Program or Be Programmed--is a technological cautionary tale. There he argues, via “Ten Commands for a Digital Age,” that the technology that takes up more and more of our lives comes with built-in biases--toward simplification of complex issues, for example, and toward anonymity--and that in order to counteract these biases, we should learn how our programs work. We should all become programmers, in other words, a process Rushkoff now admits could be “harder than I might have made it sound, especially for an adult. It’s certainly as hard as learning Portuguese.”

Next Saturday, April 14, at New York’s New Museum, he will deliver the keynote at the Rhizome Seven on Seven Conference, which pairs noted artists and technologists together and challenges them to develop a project in just 24 hours.

We asked Rushkoff some questions about Rhizome, branding, and the future of marketing. As you might expect, some of his answers are unconventional.

CO.CREATE: What is your keynote going to be about?

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: I think what I’m going to talk about is the history of the relationship of artsy to techy people, and how I feel like it’s reversed over the last 20 years. The artsiest people went into technology and it feels now like--especially when I go someplace like Rhizome and see these partnerships between technology people and arts people--that the arts people are the nerds. The technology people are the people coming up with wild ideas and going forward and building them and the arts people are the ones who say, “This is a sort of Schopenhauer-influenced post-modern blah, blah, blah.” They’re the ones creating the documentation and the historical framework around projects that are pure imagination. So it looks to me like the nature of the partnerships between artists and technology people are the opposite of what they might have been back in the day, where the art boys were the crazy, wild people, pairing up with nerds to sort of envision this technological future. And now it’s wild-eyed technologists pairing up with educated, almost PhD-like artists, in order to contextualize what they’re doing more responsibly.

In your book, you argue that brands were necessary fictions that no longer make sense. What does that mean for the brand discourse that is so prevalent today?

It means people shifting their understanding of brand. Brand always had two functions. One of its functions was to mask the long-distance industrial-age reality behind a product because people’s personal relationships with producers were being replaced by the plain, brown-box relationship to mass-produced goods. That was one function: to humanize factory products.

The other function of the brand, though, was to create accountability. The difference between a branded product and an unbranded one, was a branded one, you knew who you could go to. They’re there. It’s their way of owning the product, both in the bad kind of way and the good way. We’re standing behind this. So the we’re-standing-behind-this aspect of branding I think still holds.

Every company has a social media strategy whether they know it or not

[But] it’s not about creating a mythology around the way a product was created, so it’s no longer “these were cookies made by elves in a hollow tree.” That’s not the value of the brand. The value of the brand is where did this actually come from? What’s in this cookie? Who made it? Are Malaysian children losing their fingers in the cookie press or is this being made by happy cookie culture people? At that point, all these companies come to people like me saying, “We want to become transparent. We want a transparent communication strategy.” And I’m like “Well, are you proud of what’s going on inside your company? Are you proud enough to pull up the shades and let people see inside?” It’s that easy.

Every company has a social media strategy whether they know it or not. You can have your dedicated social media person chasing down consumer complaints, but your real social media strategy is how are the people who work at your company and the people who buy from your company and people who supply to your company, how are they talking about you in social media? The way to make them talk about you [favorably] is by walking the walk of the thing that you do. And that’s so hard for so many of these companies because they’ve become so abstracted. They’ve become so distanced from the core competence of their industry. The job of a communicator--or someone like me--is to go in and say, well, just do something. Don’t outsource one thing and then make your company about that.”

What will marketing organizations look like in the future?

It will be companies that figure out how to communicate the non-fiction story of a company, so it’s going to look a lot more like a communications company than a creative branding agency. It’s going to look a little bit more like PR, in some sense. It’s going to be people who go and figure out what does your company do and how do we let the world know about that? There’s going to be a lot of psychology involved, except instead of it being psychologists turned against the consumer, it’s going to be psychologists going in and trying to convince companies that what they’re doing is worthy. It’s breaking down this false need in companies to hide from the public what they’re doing--except for the ones that do (need to hide).

The thesis of your book is that digital technology has built-in biases that limit choices and discard information. Do you think exercises like Seven on Seven can serve to overcome, or at least reveal some, of these limitations?

I think the artist, even more than government, has become the one who is doing long-term thinking about what’s happening, what are the implications, what are we doing to ourselves? And they’re some of the only ones, really. An artist’s job is to sit outside what’s happening and reflect back to us where the human is in this. I think it’s a very valuable exercise. It’s just the opposite exercise of what most people probably think it is. It’s not for technologists to realize the visions of artists. It feels much more like it’s for artists to contextualize the visions of technologists.

CNN: The New Whistleblowers

(CNN) -- Back when I was a kid, they were called "whistle-blowers": employees of corrupt companies or government agencies, who went to the press with shocking stories of criminality or abuse.

Daniel Ellsberg risked his life to leak the Pentagon Papers, which destroyed public support for the Vietnam War. Plutonium pellet maker Karen Silkwood was exposing malfeasance at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant when she was killed in an auto wreck. Jeffrey Wigand exposed Brown & Williamson's practice of intentionally manipulating the effect of nicotine in cigarettes, forcing Big Tobacco finally to admit the addictiveness of their product.

Since the 1960s, dozens of brave, disillusioned Americans such as them have turned against employers who were breaking the law or otherwise harming humanity in some real way. They did so at the expense of their careers and sometimes even their lives.

Somehow, the recent spate of similarly public defections of employees from the corporations they work for just doesn't feel like quite the same thing. Sure, it's pretty easy for most of us to agree with Greg Smith, the Goldman Sachs derivatives dealer who quit publicly via a New York Times OpEd because "the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it."

Still, he's not complaining that Goldman Sachs is destroying the environment -- as in the air or the water -- through pollution. He's complaining about the corporate environment, the conversation in the corridors and the way the firm is choosing to make money. Instead of helping its clients make money, Smith says, the firm is now -- legally but unscrupulously -- putting its own needs first and fleecing its clients for whatever it can get. He is upset about the collapse of the corporate culture, its ability to create value for clients and the sustainability of the enterprise.

Likewise, computer engineer James Whittaker, who left Microsoft in 2009 to work at Google, returned to Microsoft last month and fired off an angry public blog post about how Google is losing itself in a "whirlwind of desperation." He says that when he first went to Google, it was "a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate." Now, he complains, thanks to its obsession with promoting its Facebook-like Google+ service, "The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus."

These gentlemen are garnering the same sorts of astonished headlines and outcry from their former employers and colleagues as did earlier generations of whistle-blowers. And while it may seem like they are turning against their companies, the real difference here is that they see themselves as speaking for their companies. These are not conflicts over corporate malfeasance, but over business plans!

Smith believes it is not just more ethical, but better business for Goldman to think about serving its clients. He thinks it is a better long-term strategy for Goldman to help its clients make smart investments, rather than convincing them to make bad investments -- and then bet against those very same clients.

Whittaker believes Google, the corporation, is turning its back on its greatest assets by focusing on advertising revenues instead of technological innovation. "The trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled," he explained, "trappings" being a good thing in this context. In short, this is not the way he thinks the corporation can succeed.

Unlike whistle-blowers of the 20th century, this new breed of turncoats reveals just how far from questioning the corporate reality we have come. They become dissidents not by challenging corporate power, but by challenging their own corporation's methodology -- as if they would have been better CEOs themselves. In both cases, they accept the underlying corporate structures and the greater economic operating system in which they function as given circumstances.

What they cannot see from their vantage point is that these companies are behaving in a manner totally consonant with their corporate agendas. The minute Google went public, its only priority was to serve its shareholders. Google is an advertising company. That's how it makes its revenue. Any technological innovations that don't serve this purpose -- and do so quickly -- will be questioned by shareholders and board members looking for big short-term gains.

Likewise, Goldman is in the moneymaking business. They always have been. They are operating on a fiscal landscape where innovation is no longer valued, and where it's easier to make money the old-fashioned way (exploiting people dumber than you are). Occupy Wall Street kids figured this out months ago, and a few million mortgage-holders and retirees figured it out a few years ago: When you have to keep growing at the rate of interest to stay alive, you are going to start making stupid short-term decisions.

In short, the kinds of sustainable, value-creating businesses these corporate escapees are calling for just can't happen within a corporate model based on borrowing, leverage and expansion. It's too little and too late for a few corporate whistle-blowers to tell us how the companies they work for are technically incompetent, distracted by revenues or losing the values that once made them great.

It's time to blow the whistle on the whole thing.

CNN: A New Role for the One Percent

(CNN) -- A whole lot of us are stuck with credit-card debt that goes up each month, mortgages worth more than our homes and student loans that extend into infinity. So it's only natural that we look at the debt crisis from the bottom up: from the perspective of the 99% who are getting screwed.

But what if we instead looked at this whole mess from the top down, from the point of view of the 1%: the billionaires and venture capitalists in Mitt Romney's world? Maybe, just maybe, their problem is our problem.

In fact, as I have come to see it, short of civilization-ending revolution, solving the debt crisis might actually mean saving the 1%.

They have the power and the money, they own our government, and they won't go down without taking everyone and everything else with them. Instead of backing them even further into the corner of fear and defensiveness, we need to help them find a way out. And that means helping them understand how they got there.

The debt crisis is not entirely President Bush's or President Obama's fault. It's not even Congress' fault. It actually resulted from a short-term "fix" to the economy made about 700 years ago.

See, for pretty much the entire first millennium -- what we call the Middle Ages -- the 00.01%, the feudal lords, enjoyed total control over the land and its people. The 99.99% worked the land and served the lords, who created no value at all. But by around 1100, the Crusades moved a whole lot of people and stuff around Europe. Peasants were exposed to sugar, cotton and all sorts of new weaving and milling technologies for the first time. Former peasant farmers started to get smarter and more productive. They established market days and traded what they grew and made with one another. They invented local currencies to store and exchange value instead of bartering.

Local currency then worked very differently from the money we use today. Someone would simply bring grain they harvested to the grain store, and come out with a foil receipt. The receipt could be broken into smaller pieces, which served as money. Since some grain was lost to spoilage, the currency's value went down over time. This meant it had to be spent instead of saved. So the money circulated very rapidly.

People got wealthy, invested in upkeep on their windmills, paid one another good wages, and got taller. Little towns got so rich that they built cathedrals. That's how a peer-to-peer economy works.

But the aristocrats weren't participating in any of this wealth. Without a dependent peasant class, they had no way to survive. They didn't know how to do anything themselves. They needed a way to make money simply by having money. So they came up with some ways to force new kinds of dependence.

Their first trick was to outlaw local currency. If people wanted to trade among themselves, they would have to borrow money from the central treasury, with interest. Wars were fought, blood was spilled, but they got their way. We have all but forgotten that the money we use today is a monopoly currency that costs us more than it's worth.

The second great idea was the chartered monopoly: the corporation. It gave just one firm -- one friend of the king -- the authority to do business in a certain industry. The British East India Trading Company, for example, had all rights to cotton in America. A farmer wasn't permitted to sell his cotton to neighbors, or to make it into anything. He had to sell it at fixed prices to the company, which shipped it to England and let some other chartered corporation make mittens and hats, which were then shipped back to America for sale.

That's why we fought the Revolution.

The problem with this scheme is that it works by stifling innovation and competition. The wealthy stay wealthy by extracting value instead of creating it. The more value they extract, the more laws they write protecting the rights and privileges of the extractors. As companies like General Electric realized, it was better to sell off productive assets and become more like a bank. The system was created for people who have money to make money. The value creators are the chumps.

The most surprising victims in this whole saga, however, are the corporations themselves. You think you're scared? Talk to the heads of America's corporations. They have sucked all the money out of the system, and don't know how to create any more. According to Deloitte, asset profitability for American firms has steadily fallen 75% over the last 40 years. In other words, corporations have managed to absorb all the money, but they don't know how to do anything with it. They have no skills, no competencies and no vision.

It's not the 99% who need to retrain themselves in order to get jobs. It's the 1% who need to face the fact that their 600-year workaround of the value creation has reached the very endpoint of diminishing returns. They need to consider whether they might actually make more money at this stage of the game by helping people create value instead of actively preventing it.

What would that look like? Right now, companies like Google, eBay, Square, Kickstarter and even PayPal and Apple are at least pointed in the right direction. They create and sell tools and services that give people and small businesses the ability to create and exchange value with one another again. They understand that real value creation comes by fostering the peer-to-peer transactions of a bottom-up marketplace rather than simply repressing such activity.

But we, the 99%, are the only ones who can show them the way. We need to begin by abandoning the fruitless quest for gainful corporate employment, and instead start working for ourselves and one another. We must stop outsourcing our savings and investments to bankrupt corporations, and instead invest in the people and businesses in our own communities -- however we define those.

In doing so, we will very quickly create demand for the kinds of networks, supply chains and services that only larger companies can provide. We will give the 1% an opportunity to re-educate themselves, to find a path to success, and -- for the first time in centuries -- to experience the guilt-free satisfaction of working for a living.

CBR - Shaun Manning's Interview and Review of A.D.D.

By Shaun Manning -  In a near-future world, a select group of teenagers are chosen to beta-test revolutionary video games full time, living in a lavish dormitory that provides everything they could ask for and enjoying celebrity exceeding that of today's most famous athletes. But what makes this group so special, and what does the corporation behind it all truly have to gain from the teens' skills? In "A.D.D.: Adolescent Demo Division," noted media theorist Douglas Rushkoff turns his attention to the world of video games and the potential for good and ill contained within something as simple as play. Rushkoff, whose previous comic book work includes the "open-source Bible" series "Testament," is joined by artist Goran Sudžuka. The book is in stores now from DC/Vertigo.

Comic Book Resources and Rushkoff had a candid discussion of "A.D.D." and the ideas behind the book.

"Most simply, 'A.D.D.' asks, 'what if Attention Deficit Disorder were not a bug but a feature?' What if the things that we're seeing emerge from our very media-connected kids, what if these weren't illnesses or pathologies but rather adaptations? What if the abilities gained by the Newtype children of manga and anime, what if some of the things we're considering disorders are actually adaptations or reactions to the media environment in which kids are living?" Rushkoff told CBR. "We sort of asked the question, and then the story grew out of that. Ok, if ADD is a feature and not a bug, it means that someone made it happen, someone put it there. Who would do that, and why? I built a world around that 'what if' and wanted to get to the place of asking, 'what would constitute resistance in a world where corporations are trying to program us into submission?"

Rushkoff, who has published several books on media culture including the recent "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments for a Digital Age," told CBR that in "A.D.D.," he wanted to examine such ideas in "a very human way," expressing his views in comic book form rather than a non-fiction treatise. The choice of artist, then, also became important, and Goran Sudžuka provided what both Rushkoff and the Vertigo editors were looking for. "Jonathan [Vankin], who was the original editor on this book, decided -- and I agreed -- that we wanted a simple, accessible style, focused on the acting rather than the environmental style," Rushkoff said. "At this point, it seemed less important to depict another version of the external media circus panoply of marketing imagery and all that -- which would be the obvious place to go -- and instead look at these kids in their starkest, most human reality you could, so you identify with the kids and their struggle. Goran's really good at the acting, at making their faces and body language exude what they're actually going through. We wanted to make these kids as human as possible so they're not just little game pieces."

Video games provide a useful context to explore Rushkoff's vision of modern society due both to the elements of play and because games are a constructed world -- much like our own, in Rushkoff's view. "A lot of these ideas occurred to me while I was in South Korea doing a television documentary that was largely about the pro gamers of South Korea. Spending time with them and seeing their world, it was so bizarre. It was such a bizarre existence that they had. On one hand, it was the idealized existence for any 14-year-old gamer, but on the other it was sort of this self-contained nightmare," the writer said, describing what is clearly a real-world analogue for the live-in game testing facility of "A.D.D." "Also, I've always been interested in gaming from the perspective of the playability of the world we're living in. Most people don't seem to recognize that we're living in a constructed world, that a whole lot of the things we take for granted as the given circumstances of nature are actually very specific creations of people, of man. And they're playable. The economy can be played with, the media can be played with. These are not laws of nature written in stone. These are very virtual worlds. We're living on top of operating systems, however much they try to hide that from us. You know, central currency is an operating system. It was developed in the 1200-1300s by specific people with specific goals. Now, we go around thinking this economy is some natural thing, this economy is the way all economies work, and it's not. Even this idea of free market -- we don't live in a free market. The extent to which this market is free is the extent to which we agree to play by the rules that were set in place by the people who invented the market that we're living in right now. Gamers, it seemed to me, especially good gamers, are people who have the ability to see beneath the rules to the actual 'who wrote this game' and 'what do they want this game to actually do.' How is this game rigged, and who rigged it, and why?"

 Pages from "A.D.D.: Adolescent Demo Division"

While the gamers of "A.D.D." are all teenagers, there are, of course, no no small number of adults playing video games. We asked Rushkoff how these older players fit into his view of games in society (or gamesas society), to which he responded, "I do think that there's a developmental period. There's something going on between 12 and 21, that isn't when they're older. What's happening when you're young is, you're kind of a native of that environment. Your neuroplasticity is at its height, the degree to which you are shaped and formed by the world that you're in is really heightened," Rushkoff said. "Whatever TV you're listening to between 12 and 20, whatever music you're listening to, whatever clothes you're wearing, whatever technology is around, those kind of come naturalized.

"I think it was Alan Kay who said, 'technology is whatever was invented after you were born.' But there's that sense that, to a kid 12-20, the newest thing that might be in a game is just the way things are. Whereas to us, it's sort of this newish thing," Rushkoff continued. "You and I might look at 'Farmville' or 'Mafia Wars' as, 'oh, those are the little social games that were built on top of Facebook,' always from outside in. But to a nine-year-old who plays 'Farmville,' it's part of their formative experience of this space. I think they think of that as a classic! They think of that the way we think of 'Asteroids' and 'Space Invaders,' as these sort of archetypal experiences. People who were in their 30s and 40s when 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids' came out probably looked at it as some weird, new-fangled thing."

Of all the teen gamers of "A.D.D.," there is only one female at the testing site -- and there is a very specific story reason for this, as readers learn. With the ongoing discussion of women in comics and video games -- particularly, the scarcity thereof -- CBR asked Rushkoff for his thoughts on the causes and effects of women being sidelined in some popular media. "I think to some extent it's harder for the forces that be to hypnotize women the same way they hypnotize men," Rushkoff said. "Women were just as susceptible to the marketing of objects. In the 1950s, when they started marketing to women in America after World War II and trying to increase consumption, that's when kleptomania was first diagnosed -- and it was a women's disease, because they were so marketed to that they would go in and steal stuff from the department store. I'm not saying women are not programmable and susceptible, they are. But it tended to be more for 'the real.' I'm finding, at least, that boys and men are more susceptible to the attraction and hypnosis of 'the virtual,' whether it's pornography or video games or ideas. They seem to be more susceptible to these abstract forms of manipulation. Maybe men are more visual and less tactile; there's probably some old evolutionary biology reasoning for it. Men were hunting, so they had to stay at a distance; women were gathering, so they had to feel the berries in their hands. Who knows what it is, but it doesn't seem, for the most part, that these worlds are quite as compelling in the same way to women as they are for men. They are compelling -- now, the numbers are changing, and I think the number of women involved in social media is greater than the number of men. As the applications change, certainly the gender biases change as well. But this ADD video phenomenon thing does seem to be more boy than girl."

As technology has expanded what is possible in the real world -- events like the Arab Spring and Occupy movement would likely be impossible without the democratization of media made possible by smart phones, social media, and the like -- Rushkoff cautions in "A.D.D." that the very tools we perceive as liberating can also be dangerously limiting. "I wrote this 'Program or Be Programmed' book to give people commands through which they can orchestrate their media and digital experience, rather than just having them orchestrated for them. But the big one that I've been thinking about lately is not to mistake choice for liberty, or choice for freedom," he said. "A choice is not a choice if you're obligated to choose. If you're obligated to choose, it might as well be 'Sophie's Choice' or forced choice. You know, which of these detergent strategies do you want to use to clean your linen? Well, I don't want to use any of those, I want to use nuts or something -- which apparently you can use, some kind of nut shells that you stick in the wash. It's the sense of being bombarded by choice and then equating all of this increased choice with autonomy. It's just not. Every time you have to choose, you are submitting to the obligation to choose. And you're breaking your flow, you're breaking your concentration, you're breaking whatever it is you're doing to make that choice. 'Do I take this call waiting, or not?' You don't have to choose. That's a choice -- 'none of the above' really is a choice. And it goes beyond Coke or Pepsi, McDonald's or Burger King, to the fabric of reality, which is not this leaping from choice to choice but the existence that happens between the choices."

"A.D.D.: Adolescent Demo Division" by Douglas Rushkoff and Goran Sudžuka is available now.

  

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=36683

NPR TheTakeAway Interview: Will Facebook IPO Change Soul of the Company?

When Facebook becomes a publicly traded company, it will have a duty to its shareholders to maximize company profits. As it traverses from social media start-up to massive, publicly traded company, one media theorist says the company will have to battle to maintain its identity.

Facebook filed the first papers for it's Initial Public Offering Wednesday afternoon, just before the business day ended.

According to Bloomberg, Facebook has chosen Morgan Stanley to lead their IPO efforts, which are expected to generate $5 billion to $10 billion for the company and give the company a valuation of perhaps as much as $100 billion.

The IPO is expected to be one of the largest in U.S. history, certainly larger than Google and rivaling many of the largest on the global stage as well.

But the IPO will bring big changes for Facebook as well and will challenge the company to try and keep its own engineers and leaders from seeing this as the perfect time to cash in their stock shares and try to do something on their own.

Douglas Rushkoff, author of "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments for a Digital Age," said the more money Facebook takes on, the more like money it will become. In other words, when a social media company is a social media upstart, it will have vastly different motives than the motives it has when it's responsible for acting in the best interest of its shareholder — a requirement for being a publicly traded company.

"The more public company you become on a stock exchange, the more really business-as-usual you become," Rushkoff said. "The more like corporate capitalism you become."

And, Rushkoff points, out that could mean some changes for Facebook users. Because profits for Facebook don't directly come from users — but rather from advertisers and social marketing firms — to maximize profits, Facebook will have to look for ways to improve that are in the best interest of advertisers and marketers.

"Rather than us, who are the people who are using this service for free, in exchange for surrendering our data," Rushkoff said.

To some extent, Google's IPO provides at least an indication of how Facebook will respond to becoming a publicly traded company, Rushkoff said.

"When Google became public, they had much more of an obligation to prove their devotion to their shareholders' interests," Rushkoff said. "They did that. They cut programs. They have to show earnings growth. They have to show focus. The got rid of Google Labs. You don't see Google talking so much about how every employee is going to have 20 percent of their time to do what they want."

In essence, Rushkoff said, the Facebook IPO isn't so much about social media taking over the economy, but rather about how the economy forces a tech start-up, a social media company, to adapt to the economy.

http://www.pri.org/stories/science/technology/will-facebook-ipo-change-the-soul-of-the-company-8242.html