Most product opportunities are ephemeral, rising off the whims and fads of the social world. Likewise, most products and services cater to temporary needs, momentary desires, and passing fads. There are certainly a bounty of successful business models that capitalize on such trends (remember Beanie Babies?) and there will be plenty more, but in the long run all are doomed to pass after a few years at best, downcycling more resources and adding yet more volume to the world’s landfills. Ultimately, product solutions that don’t speak to the more fundamental motivations of the human animal will rise and fall on the endocrine tides of psychology.
The technologies that are really transformative and sticky are those that help people adapt better to their world (duct tape being a contemporary classic, environmental concerns aside for the moment). They make it easier to be an effective human. The technologies and solutions that make the biggest mark on the landscape are those that reinforce biological imperatives. The ability to harness fire established several millenia of product iterations designed to deliver heat to the needs of humanity. Agriculture, metal alloys, the printing press, immunizations, the car, the telephone, the computer, and Google all created enduring markets by providing adaptive advantages to the user.
Now in the hyper-connected, hyper-accelerated world of the Digital Age it seems as if we’re caught up in constant revolutions in technology, each Big Thing laying the foundation for The Next Big Thing. The marketplace is driven to spot the upstart that will unseat the previous generation in innovative cycles that are increasingly impacted and shortening. And when they find one, the antibodies flare up to test its mettle. Is it really that innovative? Is it useful? Will it make any money?
Twitter is a prime example of this condition. In 2 short years it’s gone from nothing, to something cute & fun, to presenting a viable challenge to the world’s largest information house, Google. Hitting the hype crescendo lately, everyone is trying to figure out why Twitter is useful and why anybody would use it in the enterprise and how & when they’ll start drawing revenues. The answer to these questions seem plainly obvious when we acknowledge that the fundamental needs of the human animal will always trump all other market factors.
So, how can you spot deep innovation that addresses the core requirements of the human animal? You have to ask these questions:
1) Does it enable you to more effectively address a fundamental biological need? Eat, drink, sleep, mate, procreate, move, establish dominion…
2) Does it enable you to more effectively address a fundamental social need? Communicate, collaborate, contact, support, share, trade…
3) Is it presented in simple & clear terms? Easy to learn, obvious functional use, immediate advantage…
4) Can it easily be integrated as an entrained extension of the user? Simple to use, second-hand adoption, action without thinking…
5) Does it provide the user with a selective advantage in the competitive landscape? Finding and obtaining resources, getting work and pay, making friends and collaborators, finding potential mates…
A truly profound illustration of these principles is the mobile phone. This seemingly simple technology addresses and enables almost every one of the above needs. Data on cellphone uptake shows the sharpest arc of adoption of any device ever. In every case the technology enables humans to be more successful at being humans, particularly in the ability to easily coordinate group efforts towards socioeconomic and biological ends. Clay Shirkey explores this phenomenon in depth in his seminal work Here Comes Everybody.
To turn this eye towards Twitter, we ask “Why does it work?”. Two things are immediately clear: It’s simple to use and it enables much greater communication & coordination. Specifically, it allows one person to quickly communicate with large groups of people while simultaneously drawing information about the landscape from the larger herd. With mobile integration each user becomes a sensor communicating to the tribe, and when in need the user can appeal to the tribe for immediate assistance. In this context, it’s obvious how Twitter would be of value within a secured enterprise, enabling ostensibly coordinated individuals to see more into the operations & needs of their collaborators & their company, while providing the channel to reach out for information and assistance in accomplishing the goals of the business.
Of critical importance, and why Twitter succeeds in ways that other social networks don’t, is that It forces communication to be succinct and to the point. The 140 character limit forces communications into small, digestible chunks, limiting the overhead of use and managing the potential for overload in signal. Passing a link, a question, or a simple plea, “ARRESTED”, brings the core of the communication up front & center rather than buried within paragraphs of narrative padding. Granted, all datastreams require management as the volume of input rises, but the word limit fundamentally rewrites the game of communication – and even language itself – in ways we don’t yet fully realize.
There will obviously be many more successful business models that don’t cater to the evolutionary, socioeconomic, & political needs of the human species, just as there will be many more billions of dollars spent on using energy and creating waste to capitalize on the current desires of the marketplace. I submit that the truly compelling and enduring innovations – the innovations that build long-lasting behavioral & business opportunities – are those that design for the fundamental needs hardwired into every human user on the planet; that design for the immediacy of an interconnected planetary ecology; and that reflect Tim O’Reilly’s call to work on stuff that matters.
Markets are abstractions that merely arise off the imperatives of survival, adaptation, and success, and are often far too volatile & obtuse to be really reliable, much less enable us to be more effective members of a planetary ecology. Designing for deeper principles is imperative not only for salvaging a faltering economy, but for creating sustainable models of innovation and evolutionary adaption that bring our species into a greater degree of harmony and cooperation with the world in which we are intimately embedded. The arc of our times is quickly becoming the necessary realization of these imperatives.
Today Facebook announced a new homepage whose re-design appears to be a response to the growing popularity of Twitter. Or more explicitly (to strip away the brand and focus on the technology), Facebook is moving towards the real-time web by adding a Stream view that shows updates from friends. In the words of Facebook’s director of product development, Chris Cox, “the stream is what’s happening”.
Indeed, the stream is certainly compelling. There is potentially great value in receiving & transmitting information as quickly as possible. As Twitter shows, people want to opt-in for notices from connections & information sources, but it’s uncertain whether Facebook users will be able to handle the unrestrained volume of content that it’s users post. Information is valuable only when it’s useful. The 140 character limit of the SMS underlying Twitter forces information to be clear & concise. It’s hard enough to keep up with Twitter posts, much less following everything your Facebook connections are allowed to post. The stream may simply be too overwhelming for most.
However, the interesting bits include the addition of filters that allow users to manage stream views, offering some hope to pare down the data glut. Likewise, the proposed ability to visualize a user’s social graph – the immediate and extended connections they have in Facebook – coupled to a lifting of the 5000 friend limit will open new opportunities for connectivity and communication but will also force users to manage their filters in order to deal with the volume.
The main downside seems to be Facebook’s ongoing insistence on private networks that are probably a legacy feature from the college-only days of in-group cliques that initially colonized the service. How will the rest of the world find value in it’s thoughtstream? How will businesses leverage the trends and interests of Facebook users if it’s too prohibitive to get access? Facebook may have the advantage in user numbers, but Twitter has the advantage in connectivity.
While Facebook boasts 175 million users, they cluster mostly in private groups. As someone who doesn’t use Facebook, I often encounter links that take me to the Facebook gates only to be turned away. It’s a walled garden to which the uninitiated do not have access. If Facebook is to approach the really interesting value of Twitter as a real-time search tool, it will need to open it’s network (and its API) to the rest of the world, thereby challenging its own users. Otherwise it will remain a land of closed & Balkanized cliques content to share party pictures and trade dollar beers, which may be enough for a business model but may fall short of moving into the territory currently occupied by everyone’s most surprising competitor: Twitter.
Some analysts I admire greatly have developed highly refined predictive scenarios based on coupling new-millenial geopolitical models to what is effectively non-linear dynamic systems theory. Dynamic systems theory is the same stuff that’s used to model population growth, weather patterns, and, increasingly, economic systems. They use this lens to analyze the global condition and make reasoned approximations about where we’re headed (and perhaps why we’re in this handbasket) and how we may prepare.
So when they look at the inertia behind the current economic climate and apply the principles that describe all natural systems it’s typically surmised that we’re swinging wildly out of equilibrium and heading for a complete crash. Stockpile ammo and shore up your networks are the unavoidable implications. Each day that reports new lows in the flagging and out-dated stock market adds more credence to the rapidly approaching Global Financial/Civilizational Meltdown.
Perhaps with the deep existential need to hang on to at least some hope, I’ve been looking for reasons why, despite my own passions for systems theory, they might be wrong and we might avert catastrophe. And it occurs to me that humans are different. Not a huge leap, I know, but unlike all other entities within natural systems, which effectively run along by their own immutable rules and finite sets of variables, humans deliberately and often intelligently apply creative feedback to the world in order to modulate it’s behavior. We alone are capable of looking at the system, understanding it, and identifying the ways & means to perturb or otherwise attempt to manage its outcomes. Often we do this without even realizing it or deliberately trying to affect it. This is why one of the new trends is behavioral economics which seeks to understand the feedback effects between the two highly coupled and extremely sensitive systems of macroeconomics & human emotion. You see, human behavior, while mostly robotic and in-line with the Paleolithic Human OS1, is capable of sudden leaps that break the bonds of pure systems theory and allow us to apply sudden paradigmatic shifts to the world (witness fire, the wheel, the steel forge, writing, movable type, radio, tv, the web, cell phones, etc etc… Of course, this incessant meddling with natural systems is also how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place.
But the fact remains: you can bet that at least a few hundred thousand really smart people are pushing hard to make sure we can nudge the system back into some reasonable approximation of healthy equilibrium. In the age of instantaneous global comm & collab, it’s likely that the good ideas will, slowly, eventually, hopefully soon enough but probably inevitably, rise through the fetid bogs of politic and bureaucracy (which probably do need some serious systemic shocks) and mobilize the gears of industry to bust the Big Move that will save our asses from the post-apocalyptic scenarios of bartering for bread, struggling to maintain technology & the power needed to run it, while dodging tribal warfare on the way to work at the potato farm.
But I digress. The point is, we’re not wholly subservient to the whims of natural systems. We might not pull it off in time if we dawdle and fight too much but we have the capacity to analyze and overcome… to find the work-around. Hence the imperative of Tim O’Reilly and others like him to leverage the empowering tools of our age to “work on stuff that matters”. This is not just about feeling better and contributing. It’s really about marshaling our shared abilities and wielding the collective will to drive the system and actively steer our civilization away from the edge.
[This is a reply I left recently to a Global Futures question about the near-future of the web. It goes a little off-topic at the end but such is the risk of systems analysis. Everything's connected.]
Within 10-15 years mobile devices will constantly interact with the world around us, analyzing objects, faces, signage, locations, and anything else their sensors can engage. Camera viewfinders will identify visual sources using algorithms to match them up with cloud data repositories. Bluetooth and GPS will interact on sub-channels silently exchanging relationships with embedded sensors across devices and objects. A user’s mobile device will become their IP address hosting much of their profile information and mediating relationships across social nets, commercial transactions, security clearances, and the array of increasingly smart objects and devices.
Cloud access and screen presence will be nearly ubiquitous further blurring the line between desktop, laptop, server, mobile devices, and the objects in our world. It will all be screens interfacing between data, objects, and humans. Amidst the overwhelming data/content glut we will outsource mathematical chores to cloud agents dedicated to scraping data and filtering the bits that are pertinent to our personalized affinities and needs. These data streams will be highly dynamic and cloud agents will send them to rich media layers that will render the results in comprehensible and meaningful displays.
The human sensorium and its interaction with reality will be highly augmented through mobile devices that layer rich information over the world around us. The digital world will move heavily into the natural analog world as the boundaries between the two further erode. This will be readily apparent in the increasing amount of communication we will receive from appliances, vehicles, storefronts, other people, animals, and even plants all wired to the cloud. Meanwhile, cloud agents will sort through vast amounts of human behavioral information creating smart profiles and socioeconomic and environmental systems models with incredible complexity and increasing predictive ability. The cloud itself will be made more intelligible to agents by the standardization of semantic web protocols implemented into most new sites and services. Agents will concatenate to tie services together into meta-functions, just as human collectives will be much more common as we move into increasingly multicellular functional bodies.
The sense of self and our philosophical paradigms will be iterating and revising on an almost weekly basis as we spread out across the cloud and innumerable virtual spaces connected through instantaneous communication. Virtual worlds themselves will be increasingly common but will break out of the walled-garden models of the present, allowing comm channels and video streams to move freely between them and the social web. World of Warcraft will have live video feeds from in-world out to device displays. Mobile GPS will report a user’s real-world location as well as their virtual location, mashing both into Google Maps and the SketchUp-enabled virtual map of the planet.
All of this abstraction will press back on the world and create even greater value for real face-to-face interactions. Familial bonds will be more and more cherished and local communities will take greater and greater control of their lives away from unreliable global supply chains and profit-driven corporate bodies. Most families will engage in some form of gardening to supplement their food supply. The state itself will be hollowed out through over-extended conflicts and insurgencies coupled with ongoing failures to manage domestic civic instabilities. Power outages and water failures will be common in large cities. This will of course further invigorate alternative energy technologies and shift civic responsibilities to local communities. US manufacturing will have partially shifted towards alternative energy capture and storage but much of the real successes will be in small progressive towns rallying around local resources, small-scale fab, and pre-existing economic successes.
All in all, the future will be a rich collage. Totally new and much the same as it has been.
“I hear a very gentle sound… With your ear down to the ground…”
Talk of the global mind tends to look primarily at intellectual and cultural endeavors, digitized and uploaded to the cloud. In this conception the hyperconnectivity of humanity provides instant access to all the data we’ve thus far gathered and to all the content we’ve thus far generated. As culture digitizes our individual selves grow closer to one another, unbound by the restraints of locality and empowered by the technologies of connectivity, integrating towards some hypothetical merger or emergence of a global mind.
But this conception neglects the emotional body of humanity, arguably far stronger and more willful than our ideations. Beneath much of the mind lies a torrent of emotional content often deeply informing (or barely restrained by) the words released to share those nameless currents. While scientific method offers perhaps the apotheosis of restraint most of what we as humans engage in and communicate is driven by psychology, not intellect.
Witness the very foundation of modern civilization: the global economy. Our economics are radically mathematic and rigorously intellectualized. Most of us have only a basic understanding of how such an enormous interconnected system of numbers actually works, let alone the few capable of articulating the obscene calculus of it’s proactive management. Our markets of commerce are left to the banking and finance wizards whose trust must be infallible to secure their credibility in such an occulted domain upon which our very lives rest.
Yet it’s clear from current events that no one has more than a tenuous grasp of what this enormous nonlinear system is doing at the moment. It’s completely out of our hands and the world’s governing bodies are scrambling to make sense of it all in time to reel it back from the precipice of total catastrophe. They try bail-outs and capital injections and various other methods only to watch the markets plunge in a downward spiral of fear and panic. The machine of global commerce is gripped in depression, tossed in the great and swelling tides of human emotion.
By nature of their abstraction and the collective faith required to sustain them, the markets are more a construct of psychology than finance. Panic and fear become self-fulfilling as investors bail-out as fast as possible when the economic indicators falter. Fight-or-flight takes over and the human animal, who so abstracted the biological imperatives of food and shelter into hedge funds and credit-deferred swaps, is seized by adrenalin and sent running in fear. The sound of chambered bullets grows across the land, hunkering down for a long struggle.
These days I can feel it without even looking at the markets. The Fear grips my gut on mornings of great decline. We’re wiring up very quickly, so engaged by the miracle of communication and content, externalizing our minds for all to witness. We get lost in the news cycle and the blogosphere, and in all the deep and meaningless experiences stuffed into increasingly ineffective syntax. We’re wired to invention and distraction, dimly aware of the currents working their way through our evolution.
Underneath the global mind is the global heart, tremulous and open, more intent on externalizing the Soul than the Mind. We’re sharing our emotional bodies far more than we realize and it’s at times like these that the herd feels it. Danger is on the air. A great predator is rustling through the brush. The vibe is harshed and global. The very foundations of human behavior are shifting and rewriting themselves. This is no market correction. It is a civilization correction. The Great Work of our Age is underway, unifying Heart and Mind and all opposites, comfort and commodity be damned. If we can’t evolve willfully, then the system will evolve for us.
Hear the words of the Rastaman say:
“Babylon throne gone down, gone down.”
Just a quick note (and props, kudos, & cheers) that Douglas Rushkoff is guestblogging at Boing Boing for the next week or so. From his intro:
The current culture wars, as I understand them, are between people who look at our circumstances as pre-existing conditions, and those who see them as largely of our own making. Those in the former camp prefer to see reality as confined by the operating system of a Creator, and the human role confined to behaving within the rule sets established by Him. Those in the latter camp recognize the function of evolution, and the opportunity (if not obligation) for human beings to participate in the ongoing construction of our world and its operating systems.
This is simply awesome. I love it! I hope it gets mirrored everywhere before The Mouse buries it.
Srsly, Diznee: this is exactly what you want kids doing with your content. Make it hip and cool. Give to the commons so we want to give back. Seeing this makes me want to rent/buy the animated classic.
This weekend’s Coachella music festival found ex-Floydist, Roger Waters, banging out a full Dark Side to the massive crowds. Of special note, and in classic fashion, a large pig was deployed condemning US warmongering and offering a not-so-subtle solution (click through link for vid):
But Waters’ biggest prop was an inflatable pig the size of a school bus that emerged while he played a version of “Pigs” from 1977′s capitalism critique, “Animals.”
The pig, which was led above the crowd from lines held on the ground, displayed the words “Don’t be led to the slaughter” and a cartoon of Uncle Sam wielding two bloody cleavers. The other side read “Fear builds walls.”
The underside of the pig simply read “Obama” with a checked ballot box alongside.
To briefly elaborate on an earlier post about Second Life… And specifically, ways in which I believe a modern 3d immersive world can leverage the new wave of cloud tech and create a truly compelling experience:
I want downtown billboards streaming Twitter feeds, rich dataviz, global network traffic, weather patterns, Flickr streams, and cycling media channels. I want to Dj from Traktor directly into a virtual club. I want interactive music and video remix tools that include the world as a substrate. I want to endow my avatar with metadata callouts, grouped in trust profiles, that display my affinities, affiliations, tag cloud, LinkedIn profile, sms number, twitter id, and credit accounts as appropriate to those I meet. I want to be free to re-purpose 3D assets from 3DSM, Maya, and Sketchup into my worldspace. I want a beautiful living homeworld that gathers the populace and inspires users and developers to create their own content elsewhere on distributed servers. I want to join friends on a virtual hilltop and watch the clouds drift past, watch the sun set, and the moons rise. I want to get lost in emergent behaviors, intelligent agents, and the beauty of physical dynamics. I want to easily find friends across multiple servers, across social nets, and out into mobile, gsm, and phone networks. I want an open-standard, opt-in, cloakable virtual ID that can be searched for and found across all dominant gaming and immersive networked worldspaces – and then when I find my friend I want to be able to join them wherever they are. I want peer-to-peer drop-boxes and back-channels that can address files to dominant industry and open-source applications, then back to in-world interfaces. I want an in-world, heads-up fly-out phone/sms/notepad/web-browser overlay that’s data synched to my mobile phone. I want to stumble into sinuous plotlines that sweep me away to distant parts of the virtual world. And yes, I want an SDK that allows EA to stick the Tony Hawk trick and physics model into a nice binary that can be purchased and installed into my client so I can skate around the place. And yes, I will try to grind your avatar if you have any linear edges sticking out.
I’m totally dreaming, I know. But dreams are what the future is built upon.
I’ve been enjoying the playful edge of the bleeding digital arts scene vicariously through we make money not art for some time now, but I have to give them renewed props for their site design. Love the aesthetic!
Alterculturalist, sonic datamasher, and cat lover, Wes Unruh has posted his latest work in the Philip K. Nixon project. Logosagogo! The Hyperstition of Philip K. Nixon is a Matrix-meets-machine-elf aural memescape that slices and dices the zeitgeist like television chopped into glass & oil. Somebody in Hollywood needs to hire this guy as an SFX developer…
The great century ahead of us will be dominated by the digital democratization of the individual. For the first time in history it’s possible – even simple – to collate vast amounts of data extracted through the API’s of social networks. Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace. All of these sites track and record the data communicated by millions and millions (billions?) of users. Instead of crufty old Gallup polls that attempt to extrapolate the zeitgeist of a nation based on a minuscule sample of a few thousand sources, social nets across the web yield precise and voluminous data about large populations of the global citizenry.
Twitter is a great example. Spend a few minutes on Twittervision and you get a feel for the amount of data traveling across the Twitternet. It’s pretty much a constant stream of tweets, each and evry one being logged and recorded. Now head over to Politweets and you can see the power of the Twitter API in action. Politweets grabs the Twitter stream, searches it for candidate names (eg Obama, McCain) and then posts the matching tweets to it’s output stream. On the left column you have the Blue tweets and on the right you have the Red. Of note, the Blue tweets are mostly positive notes on Obama, while the Red column is mostly negative tweets about McCain. And as of 6pm PST 3.20 Twitter is breaking the Obama passport scandal with the media scrambling to catch up.
All of the social networks mentioned above have deputized their users to generate the content and participate in a ranking selection that naturally brings the important bits to the top. Items of great interest stay on the radar longer while the fringe drifts off the chart. But everything stays in the database. Every post, comment, chat, tweet, vote, etc… It’s all there in beautiful, incorruptible binary ready for any savvy programmer to break open the public API and build a new tool to pull out trends and patterns. Obviously, this is a radical evolution of the community of conversation. What was once personal is now overtly and proudly public.
Social, cultural, and political trends can all be extracted from these vast living datastructures. Mike Elgen wrote about this yesterday in a post called Has Digg Already Picked the President? He talks about how the major social sites end up endorsing candidates just by the measure of their post demographics. For example:
…every link with significant popularity on Digg about John McCain that has an “opinion” is negative, every one about Hillary Clinton is also negative, and every one about Barack Obama is positive. The preference by the Digg community for Obama is very clear.
On MySpace, you can gauge candidate support by searching Google for mentions and counting them, as most mentions tend to be expressions of support. Searches for “John McCain” gets 56,800 Google links; “Hillary Clinton” 120,000; and “Barack Obama” 161,000.
You can see a similar trend in the wildly popular user billboards for Obama and Clinton. Hillary is almost always negative while Barack is everyone’s best friend.
Elgen goes on to wonder how well these sites reflect the actual democracy of our country. Is there parity? Are they more accurate than the mainstream media? Is the online world inherently skewed in some fashion? Then, in the most suggestive and compelling inevitability of the modern digital age, he offers:
After all, the very definition of a Web 2.0 site is one that derives its value from the actions of users. Users are voters, and if these user-voters choose a candidate, shouldn’t that candidate win democratic elections?
And this is the final crux; the salvation of our wavering and beleagured democracy. The digital paths increasingly worn by all of us as we move deeper and deeper into the datasphere are totally traceable. Transparency is growing and it won’t be long before all of the actions that a candidate engages in – the record of their public lives, their opinions, voting history, political and fiscal affiliations, campaign promises and campaign donations – will all be a matter of public record.
New media and digital democracy is empowering everyone and simultaneously laying our lives open for all eyes. We’ve never seen anything like it.
Monochrom: Austrian activist art collective.
Austria – little, strange & post-modern. Pac-Man in Wienershnitzel.
Post-modern leftists. Try to take interesting philosophical and political concepts and find a medium to present. Weapon of mass distribution.
Examples: telerobotic social network in ’97; musical about software checking credibility for a bank; database of applied office art, bored with capitalist life; overhead cumshots; Instant blitz copyfight notices captured in movie theaters; Massive multiplayer thumb wrestling; Festival for cocktail robotics; bury people alive for 15 minutes; publish theory around brand culture; puppet film from Kiki & Booboo.
Shift from disciplinary society to a society of control. Shift in the perception of work culture. Differentiation between workers and owners has blurred. Disciplinary society has a clear distinction between workers and authority. Hence, there are clear ways to violate the boundaries and subvert authority. Now, many workers believe they are part of the management, part of the business. Therefore, they stay in line more because they do not wish to revolt against themselves.
Why is it so hard to provoke today? Why is it so hard to provoke? We are now in a society of control. No boundaries. It’s no longer Us against Them, it’s all of us against each other.
Ex: Jackass – more revolting than earlier dadaist & provocative revoutionaries but somehow acceptable. In an open society is is harder to revolt. Late Capitalism feeds on dissent as content. Ex: The Yes Men – Political activists, featured on Hustler. Why? Why is revolt popular culture? In the West, everyone criticizes the system but nothing changes. In Eastern Bloc, no-one was allowed to criticize but the system collapsed.
Georg Paul Thomann, early avant-guard Vienese activist. Didin’t actually exist. Monochrom created him and wrote a 500pg bio (Who Shot Immanence?). Set him up as official Vienese art representative in Sao Paulo biennial world art fair. Monochrom was “technical support team”. Cultivated rumors of his mythology. Created an extremely awful installation. People thought it was really cool. But Georg didn’t show. Made it even cooler cause he was so enigmatic. Artists are tradeable commodities.
LJL. Group of old Austrian artists. I have a deadline & I’m very drunk. Created an Art Lodge, like P2. Lord Jim Lodge (Joseph Conrad). Made a stupid logo. Put it on everything. Try to get memebers but if anyone asks, don’t let them in. No women allowed. Do it for a long time to make the logo famous (more famous than Coka-Cola. Created a series of oil paintings about the creation story of LJL. Last member gifted the Lord Jim Lodge to Monochrom. Monochrom organized a hostile takeover of LJL, franchise it and create spin-off start-ups. Fought Art Market for 15% profit of selling art works that contained the LJL logo (original artists had died and become famous since), had owners in panic for 2 months. Owners offered to settle out of court, but monochrom never took any money. Bought Amish hats and wnet to America and talked to people about making money on LJL. Managed to get 10 thousand Coca-Cola bottles made with the LJL logo! Decided to sell paintings of LJL history and myth. Outsourced painting to China using Coca-Cola money. Put in gallery and sold for 4500 euros each. Money is being shared with the Chinese artist.
China is copying everything, including art. Nothing is sacred in the market. Corporations own much of the cultural heritage of the planet.
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