“You are the Special...and so is everyone”

The Lego Movie as a manifesto and blueprint for collaborative economies

The Lego Movie was a hard sell. I saw the trailer in the theater waiting for Monsters University to be screened, and I did laugh, but I also worried just a little bit. I had played the Lego co-branded video games a little (at least Lego Star Wars and Lego Harry Potter), and I had seen a couple of the Lego cartoons, and I was generally pleased but not overwhelmed—and I’ve never been a fan of the “scraping for a tie-in” film genre either. Two things put me over: Will Arnett’s delivery as Lego Batman, and the fact that I have a five-year-old son.

I wasn’t able to find much commentary other than standard reviews (NPR called it “a cash grab with a heart”), but Alyssa Rosenberg of Think Progress took a solid crack at interpreting the movie as a critique of American popular culture. It could very easily be so much more than that. (Important Note: I don’t believe that the following is the authors’ intended interpretation, but it is one interesting way to view this strangely great film.)

Let’s start with the villain. Will Ferrell’s Lord Business steals a superweapon called “the Kragle” in the introduction. Soon we find him as the ruler of a moneyed empire, including the city of Bricksburg. President Business is a very obvious face of the real capital-government alliance (the so-called “military-industrial complex”), for which Fox News attempted to take the movie down a peg. The world of Bricksburg is a case of what Marxists might term “late-stage capitalism”: there’s monolithic production of culture, threats of violence to those reject conformity in meaningful ways, widespread corruption, and bait-and-switch incentivization tactics like Taco Tuesday.

Emmet is an everyman, a full consumer who derives his social identification from the consumption of mass culture, the willful stifling of his own creative impulses, and the joyful acceptance of his own wage servitude (overpriced coffee! yes!). He is so successful at complying with the institutionally-sanctioned sociocultural norms that he lacks even the minor aberrations that make a personality, and he is unsuccessful at making friends. It’s important to note that consumption, even when done in a community setting, is insufficient common ground upon which to build a relationship. Emmet is not rejected because he is weird—he’s rejected because he has suppressed his humanity, becoming one with the state which has produced his culture.

Emmet’s journey begins when he comes face-to-face with Wyldstyle, one of the rogue, individualistic Master Builders. Diverse, largely youthful, artistic, spiritual, and independent, this class of creatives lives separate from the institutional worlds dominated by the strict organizational forces of Lord Business. For such a brick in the wall as Emmet, simply meeting someone this unique causes his personal narrative to fracture, and this fissure only widens upon being forced by fate to take up the Builders’ cause. The mass culture participant attempts to find a pigeonhole in which to shove the creative (“Are you a DJ?”), but forced to a crisis by his exclusion from the economic system, his only chance at forming lasting social ties lies in the Creative Class itself, the only social stratus that will accept him.

Though it is savvy to the fact that mass culture is a front for Lord Business’s stasis-inducing, rent-seeking rule, the Creative Class cannot succeed on its own because it rarely presents a collective front. When it does, it unwisely chooses frontal assaults on capital itself, or runs away to communes (see Cloudcuckooland). Ultimately, the Creatives can never gain the numbers or the organizational strength to defeat the corrupted corporate state without connecting the machinery of collaborativism to the engine of capitalism, and this only as a last resort suggested by a participant in the normal wage-economy. Emmet assumes a leadership role both as a liaison and a double-agent in planning against the state. The last thing President Business expects is that we follow the instructions, building collaborative trojan horses with the skins of mass culture and state-sanctioned consumer products.

The Master Builders are by themselves far more capable, gifted, and talented than the regular schlubs in Bricksburg (of whom Emmet is schlub prime), but can neither work together nor with the schlubs. Previous attempts to subvert Business have failed precisely because the Creative Class is outnumbered and their attitudes toward popular culture are offensive to the average blue collared minifig. There needs to be a gentle conversion process, by which a loving evangelism of sharing and peer-to-peer exchange turns workers away from capital-funded goods and services, by turning them on to the community.
As such, even the most canny creative-class plan with everyman guidance cannot succeed. The masses need to participate, and cannot do so until 1) they are threatened with violence (the Kragle is apt—it freezes the masses in their place, much like the modern elite's systemic refusal to raise pay) and 2) they have the support and guidance of the creative-plus-enlightened-everyman alliance. As the micromanagers descend and the cyanoacrylate death looms, the masses’ initial reaction is panic, then solidarity as the collaborativist Creative Class leads the resistance.

After that, the wheels come off the film. Emmet becomes a super-powerful Gandalf-the-White type leader, President Business makes a heel-face turn, and it all becomes nonsense. It’s clearly a fantastic way to end a Hollywood movie. Redeem the bad guy, everyone feels better, there's a fun ending joke, and the curtain falls. But if there were ever a political victory by those who want to moderate the influence of capital, the task ahead would not be to do battle with robot drones, but to ensure that the next generation of Presidents Business could never come to power.

We're still quite a way off from that, though. In the progression of the film, we're just entering the building trojan horses stage. I say this because we've just come out of the "get our asses handed to us after trying a frontal assault" stage that was Occupy Wall Street. I would love to argue that The Lego Movie itself represents a first crack at this, but this ending makes me question this assertion. It may just be that the writers of the film were expert lampshade-hangers, not sociopolitical subversives. "Lampshade hanging", a phrase well loved by the TV Tropes community (whence also the term "Cloudcuckooland"), means open self-awareness. The Lego Movie is about 50% lampshade by volume, from Emmet's jumping jacks, to "Are you a DJ?", to the meta-meta-meta mindscrew that is "Everything Is Awesome". Clearly, nothing was too subversive, or it would never have gotten Lego's nor Warner's imprimatur.

But allow me a little extra indulgence for just one moment, because the counter-capital economy always needs permission from the capital economy to operate. (See the recent crazytimes in re: the Uber car service.) By creating a largely inoffensive piece with truly subversive themes, perhaps the film acts just like the space freighter built to The Instructions, which carried Benny and Batman through Lord Business's gates. When fostering alternatives to the gigantic behemoth that is capital in the 21st century, it pays to be a little cynical.

This narrative may make a little more sense when one considers exactly how inoffensive the movie actually was. When opportunities to crack jokes at the expense of actual media icons arose, the writers demurred, and the parody television show “Where Are My Pants?” is not a clear sendup of anything equally banal in the real world (e.g. the reality genre). The aural confectionary “Everything Is Awesome” was cooked up by professional pop writers, sweetened by Tegan and Sara, and made silly by SNL staple comedy troupe The Lonely Island. While Wyldstyle originally makes fun of Emmet for liking it, eventually even she, the hippest and toughest of all the creatives, eventually succumbs to its beats. Perhaps its inanity is a disguise—hiding the anthem of the revolution.

New Society Manifesto

Welcoming the advent of the Wiki Wiki World.

Without any significant strain, anyone endowed with a reasonable amount of sense can see the problems that have infested the developed world. Employment is not readily accessible by all who wish to work, parliamentarians and congressmen exclusively represent the interests of moneyed entities including corrupt corporations, and supposed solutions to major social and economic problems drive the populace to tribalism. The current track of Western and other developed societies is unsustainable—but an alternative is arising. This new society should be supported by everyone who wants a better life for themselves and their posterity.

A partial enumeration of the failures and impending failures of the existing system

• Systems that ostensibly reward intelligence, hard work, and other values are becoming oligarchies run by “those who got there first”. (Christopher Hayes)
• Representatives and other officials are increasingly beholden to campaign funders, not to their constituents. (Lawrence Lessig)
• The job is dying.
• The corporation is also dying. (Venkatesh Rao)
• Employers increasingly disrespect the 40-hour workweek, expecting and requiring excessive work hours. (Bob Sutton)
• Viable goods, attention, time, and ideas are increasingly left to waste.
• The populace is becoming politically tribalized, preventing collaborative political effort.
• Prices are often unfair, and packaged quantities are being reduced in a deceptive manner. (The Consumerist)
• Information disseminated by the media is increasingly untrustworthy.
• Privacy, both off- and online, is eroding. (Rebecca MacKinnon)
• The economic problems that began in 2008 are not subsiding, no matter what national and international economic policies are implemented.
• The gap between rich and poor is widening, and the situation for the poor is not improving. (Ezra Klein)

Note that issues like police brutality and civil rights failures are big problems, but are not unique to Western or developed societies. Other problems, like overcrowded, private prisons and healthcare crises, tend to be spotty and focused on few specific places in the developed world (cough cough), but are largely subsets of other large problems listed.

Why popular resistance and social trends will fail to bring change in the developed world

Traditional social movements seem to have sprung out of major concerns (lack of food, oppression by leaders, unsafe conditions, unequal rights) that could be summed up in one statement (Mubarak must go, Votes for women, No taxation without representation). Unfortunately, the problems with the old society are too numerous to attack in one movement. Occupy Wall Street tried this, and did lots of things, none of which actually spurred significant legislative or regime change.

Taking the broken system head on is bound to cause conflicts between people who would otherwise be able to work together, as we all focus on our hobby horse issues at the expense of other important concerns. The protection provided by pitting these conflicting forces against each other may not be an intentional aspect of the monolithic old culture, but it sure confers a devilish evolutionary advantage to this particularly mutated parasite.

The heart of old society is the idea that resources are scarce, traditional hierarchies are inevitable, and the ability to compete with other humans for resources is “merit”. It is the home of Glengarry Glen Ross, Gordon Gekko’s Wall Street, and the Godfather. It is Darwinism writ large, where pincers and scales are replaced by schemes, prestige, and privilege. It is inevitable that such a system will degrade into a great-ape-style hierarchy, where alphas enforce class distinctions by force, regardless of their actual abilities.

The task of defeating primate behavior in order to provide human groups safety and progression opportunities has traditionally been handled by governments. The development of large governments appears to have been instrumental in the formation of modern technologies (formerly things like aqueducts; in our era, the space program and the Internet), but such governments have been prone to catastrophic failure, or at the very least, wide-scale corruption.

Governments are represented by people: presidents, judges, legislators, etc. When a government becomes systemically corrupt, revolution is the only solution, because removing the figurehead does not effect real change. Revolutions are hard; they require conditions to be very unpleasant for a very large group of people, because making a transition often involves a risk to one’s life, and a risk that the new system will be worse than the old. The corporate version of revolution—restructuring—is far more common, but often fails to bring real change to business cultures and practices.

It is unlikely that any government or corporation in the West will make life too difficult for a significant group of its citizens or clients, but that does not mean that Western style governance is optimal. It is the foundational principle of a New Collaborative Society that there are better ways to do nearly everything that governments and corporations do—finding them just requires a bit of experimentation.

The role of networked electronic communication in forming a Collaborative Society

Until humans had a way of communicating, society was impossible. Language was a necessary (and perhaps sufficient) condition for banding together, building together, and protecting each other in new ways that ultimately led to human domination of Earth. Each new advance in communication has brought with it massive changes to society in general—there’s a reason we call that time before the development of writing “prehistory”. The printing press led to multiple societal revolutions, and certainly there could be no modern corporation without the telephone.

The internet has been so revolutionary—more so, perhaps, than the telephone or even the printing press—that we still do not know what the end result of its development will be. We have seen some strange and scattered effects: the rise of social media, the Arab Spring, online commerce, and distributed work and communities. We do not know what will come next, but it is wise not to ignore the strong possibility that nearly all of our existing ways of life will have changed completely by 2100. It is important that we guide that change as well as we can.

Cory Doctorow identified the “disorganized but effective” nature of online movements (they obviously can’t be called “organizations”, but “movement” or “adhocracy” works), and posited that as the cost of human transaction drops, the wiki approach might be used to plan cities, perform scientific inquiry, and explore space. This would constitute a massive human revolution, as the tasks normally reserved for governments or large corporations could be performed by people en masse, without commitment to a permanent hierarchy.

A warning about thinking on this line: it is likely to disappoint in the near future, as much of the Western world is divided between those who trust in governments and those who trust in corporations, a false choice of epic proportions. As long as those institutions have the most fans, they have power. (One can see in the world of Indiegogo, Twitter, and YouTube that having fans is essentially equivalent to having power.)

Thus, the role of the conscientious believer in a New Collaborative Society must become that of an evangelist, but a smart one. We all know auto-shills, trying to push their own blogs, music, or books onto others. The new society must preach by practicing: show the world that eschewing the hidebound universe of the old is both easy and effective. Even if the portion of the New Collaborative Society being practiced is something of a “minimal viable product”. Baby steps are better than no steps, and in the information age, those strides can increase in length exponentially.

The current state of the New Collaborative Society and its characteristics

The early effects of the Internet, meaning those that are visible now and those that are peeking around the corner at us, are sparse and sometimes inscrutable. Innovations seem to crawl in some areas and leap in others, and culture appears and disappears without much notice. (Anyone here remember Homestar Runner?) This porousness and sporadic growth translates to inconsistencies in the current iteration of the New Collaborative Society: a loose but expanding collection of practices that replace traditional institutions by disruption. As an alpha release, there’s not enough here to convince the masses to abandon decaying lifestyles for these ones.

That’s not to say that nothing has been done, however. While New Collaborative Society may be in the infant stage, it’s a whale calf, not a puppy. Early adopters have propped up projects as varied as Wikipedia and the Arab Spring, from Occupy to the Open Source movement. Deciding what forms part of the New Collaborative Society can be a little tricky—do farmers’ co-ops count or not?

By definition, any component of New Collaborative Society should be a replacement for a part of Old Society that is headed toward, or already experiencing, systemic failure. This seems fairly limited and specific, but when one examines the long term, much of Old Society appears to be balancing at the edge of a frighteningly precipitous drop, and thus open for New Collaborative Society replacements. The following are trends I believe to be parts of this change, but note that one does not have to buy into each New Collaborative Society institution in order to be supportive of New Collaborative Society as a whole:

Table A - some trends that appear to form part of the New Collaborative Society

• Freelancing and Freelance Culture
• Coworking (esp. cf. the Gangplank model)
• Lifestyle Business
• Open Education
• Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects
• Linux
• other Open Source software
• Occupy, in some ways
• Couponing
• Child care co-ops
• Food co-ops
• Healthcare co-ops
• Credit unions
• Home and charter schooling
• other alternative schools
• Home birth and Birth Centers
• online communities in general
• Independent e-book publishing
• Collaborative product/service reviews (Yelp, et al.)
• “Pay What You Want” music, esp. the “Radiohead model”
• Circumvention of ticketing / publishing services (cf. Louis CK, Aziz Ansari)
• Crowdfunding and microloans
• Code for America
• Gamification
• Collaborative Consumption (Airbnb, Freecycle)
• Open 3d prototyping
• Minimalist living

It’s clear that the drive of the current trends tends toward direct action on the market to shift small pieces away from scarcity-driven models to post-scarcity, abundance-driven ones. Beyond that, existing New Collaborative Society trends also show a movement away from complex bureaucratic administration, toward more spontaneously-organized and disorganized administration.

Missing components of a New Collaborative Society and possible solutions

The most powerful elements of society, central governments and large corporations, have few competitors in any sphere, much less rivals that actually threaten their dominance on more than one front. New Collaborative Society solutions generally work in terms of disruption and replacement rather than stepwise progression and slow change. It will be difficult to disrupt technologies like federal governments and multinational corporations because of their powerbases and pocketbooks.

Education is another area in which New Collaborative Society solutions have as yet failed to resolve some concerns. Post-secondary education is still inappropriately expensive, and degrees are not insurance policies on unemployment.

Further, there are areas with some New Collaborative Society solutions which are incomplete or incompletely applied (e.g. transportation, staple foods, child care). These areas still stand to be disrupted or replaced. Problems in these areas are real, and action must be taken to resolve them. We should be grateful that there are ideas in motion to resolve these issues, and join with the people engaged in solving them if we feel the need, but it seems very likely that solutions to even large problems of distribution are forthcoming.

The problems in education are more complex. While there are groups in existence leveraging the surplus in educational content, the issue lies in the matter of accreditation and degree-granting. Like money, educational certificates only have value based on the approval of an institution, and the system bases its awards on an educational facility’s ability to approximate an Old Society model. This will be difficult to overthrow, as it will require a New Collaborative Society organization to prove itself to Old Society institutions (either accreditation groups or employers themselves).

Governments and corporations are very unlikely to see the benefits of current New Collaborative Society organizations with regard to their operational tasks. Currently, however, governments are finding the costs of performing certain tasks, like operating prisons (in the US) and managing security, much too high. Private contractors are hired to do these jobs, but these in turn exacerbate ethical problems—monetizing human suffering seems unlikely to yield any good results.

Relief from sub-national entities as the state, Home Nation, county, province, départment, or canton seems very unlikely. Some of these (US State, Home Nation) have “nation envy” and tend toward the same entrenchment of Old Society’s scarcity-obsessed norms as their parents. Other sub-nationals lack autonomy or authority to do any sort of governing whatsoever. Converting a sub-national to the New Collaborative Society cause is unlikely at best.

It may be possible to convince a small national or sub-national entity to contract some of its responsibilities to New Collaborative Society organizations, but it’s quite likely that governance is something that will have to be endured rather than embraced by the New Collaborative Society for the time being. Engagement is the key—voting always for those laws that will allow for the disruption and replacement of failing institutions, and against laws that further expand and entrench said institutions.

A call to action

The task for anyone interested in effecting Carnegie’s “real and permanent good” in the digital age will be to embrace, live, and spread the New Collaborative Society. This means to engage not only in collaborative projects that immediately interest and concern you, but to identify others that could interest and concern you, to create new collaborative projects and movements, and to connect those seeking solutions to collaborative projects that meet their needs, especially if they’re currently frustrated with the scarcity-based institutions that are failing them.

Interested parties can consistently strive to solve problems by creating collaborative projects that disrupt and replace old institutions. If collaboration supporters use demonstration, protest, and other forms of reactive behavior only when absolutely necessary, possible opponents to New Society norms will find no legitimate grounds for their opposition.

With very very few exceptions, all collaborative projects should be open to any and all parties who have the skills and desire to help. Inasmuch as collaborative projects avoid seeking to ally themselves with a political, religious, cultural, or ethnic group, party, or sect exclusively, they can avoid harmful labeling and other damages that frequently arise in the tribalized world.

The New Collaborative Society should, and will, succeed at creating a new human universe full of peace, opportunity, and abundance.

Writing About Technical Subjects (Pt. I)

So, you're a company intent on empowering people with hardware, software, and/or other new tech. Or you're a non-profit with Big Ideas about digital rights, tech literacy, or another 21st Century cause. Or you're a copywriter, learning to ply your craft in the content economy. Telling compelling stories about complex topics is exciting, but challenging. This fact is your greatest friend and most terrifying enemy:

We now live in a world where the "simple facts" are not so simple.

Take Facebook. The second most-frequently visited place on the web is one of a handful of websites that has spawned its own verb. (When was the last time you said you were "facebooking"?) Behind the scenes, though, it's a complex messaging, image-sharing, networking beast of a site-slash-app, not to mention the developer interface for third-party apps.

The features aren't what Facebook splashes on the sign-up page, though. It says,

Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.

There's a simple principle in effect here: you don't sell features, you sell motivations. I've long appreciated market researcher and TED Talker Simon Sinek's verbiage:

Start With "Why"

That's hard and fast for me: successful pitchmen and copywriters have always done this, even if it wasn't worded exactly as above. That doesn't change in the world of software. In fact, in a world of rapid development and widespread innovation, there's even less place for people selling boxes of features.

Recently, Twitter posted a guide to help journalists and other newsy sorts use their service. They didn't have to—heaven knows people have already been using Twitter to do news since the dawn of tweets—but they did it as a help to their userbase. #TfN may not be copy, but it follows another guideline I love:

Solve a Problem

When possible, I present services as solutions to problems that people face. (As an aside, I think the use of "solution" as a buzzwordy substitute for "service", "application", or "product" dilutes the semantic power of that word.) Some companies don't use much text to show that they solve a problem—apps like Turntable.fm solve a problem (or perhaps "grants a wish") in an obvious way, and sell themselves on word of mouth alone. For everyone else, there's copy.

Trouble is, you have to explain a complicated problem like "T1 connections used to be state of the art, but nowadays you get more bandwidth if you sign up with a Wireless ISP" to someone who may not understand "T1", "bandwidth", or "Wireless ISP". If you're a Wireless ISP, that's going to cause problems.

The writer, then, has to make the problem and its solution simple enough to be clear to the reader. "Telling your story" has become a popular phrase in the marketing industry, and one of the tricks of the trade is just that: making copy into a story, with a conflict, a resolution, a hero, and—if necessary—a villain.

Tell a Story

Of course, you don't want to take storytelling to the extreme, either, or your reader will think you don't respect them. Leave some complex concepts in the narrative, and explain what must be explained.

Don't Condescend

Here's a bit of copy I wrote for a client that I think exemplifies these ideas:

For years, network service was fastest when it was delivered by physical cables and circuits, the “T1” being the most popular with businesses. The T1 was a workhorse, but, as content on the web has become more complex, it’s clear that T1 just can’t keep up. Fortunately, wireless technology has kept pace with increasing bandwidth needs—OneAxis.net wireless can offer speeds comparable to those of cable internet[...]

So, there you have it, an overview of copywriting on complex topics. Next up: News writing.

Intentionalism, Limbic Advertising, and the New Workplace

This post includes: four (4) book recommendations, including one I haven't even read yet, two (2) embedded videos, and three (3) interrelated topics. Set aside something like half an hour if you want to absorb all of this content at once.

I'm not even sure where to start, so I guess I'm going to start with: why. Simon Sinek, last year at a TED conference, gave the following talk, entitled "How great leaders inspire action". You can watch it now, or just read my discussion of it below the embed.



His big premise is this, which he repeats several times: People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. The major scientific underpinning of this idea is that people make decisions in their limbic brain, which is not in any way responsible for the production of language. The emotional core is best accessed by appealing to that emotion, by explaining why you are doing what you're doing and selling to your kindred spirits.

For a more in-depth exploration of this idea, go read William Gibson's Bigend novels: Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. I recently described these books as, "like sci-fi, only take out the hyperdrive and put in viral marketing." There's really no other way I can put it. From Pattern Recognition, mischievous bazillionaire genius Hubertus Bigend, on "knowing something in your heart":

You “know” in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things.

Back to Sinek, whose conclusion is that to have thriving organization, we must have a purpose, and make that purpose the primary talking point. We can't just produce something that no one else produces, we must be something that no one else is.

Which brings me to Rework. The short text by the founders of 37signals, creators of web-based business efficiency software, turns the traditional model of American business on its head, proclaiming that the customer is not always necessarily right, meetings are a necessary evil at best (just plain old evil at worst), demanding work ASAP is poisonous, and working long hours is actually detrimental to one's output. The phrase "highly recommended" does not cover even a small part of how I feel about this book. I have a copy. I'll mail it to you, if you promise to return it. Jason Fried, one of the authors, about meetings: (link here but click around the site and listen to more of his stuff).

The 37signals crew is buying into intentionalism wholeheartedly, preaching that you don't sell things that you believe in, that you do things you believe in, and then you can sell what results from that. With a big enough world, with varied enough tastes, there's probably a market for whatever you are obsessed with.

Which brings me to this blog. I'm pretty obsessed with new ideas, and the way the world is changing. I believe in making the best new ideas accessible to people who wouldn't normally come in contact with them. I can't do it alone, really, especially with the micro-audience this blog has. Um, who wants to write with me? Seriously, email or comments section.