This past weekend I drove from Saint Louis to Oklahoma City on the original Route 66 – “The Mother Road.” A friend of mine wanted to attend a meetup of Saab owners using the classic highway, so I road shotgun to provide company and observe what remains of the roadway that was the primary route between Chicago and Los Angeles from 1926 to 1960. In the end, I really wanted a lot of housepaint and a crew of painters.

Let me explain.

As you come out of Springfield. Missouri you eschew the popular I-44 and ignore the redirected U.S. Route 66, turning down some back roads to arrive at the real Route 66. This is the view from 1940, photographed this weekend:

I can only imagine that this was the view that your grandfather had as he made the classic journey Westward: cement concrete roads, barely two-lane, isolated services, generally unspoiled landscapes, the road wandering off into the promise of America. Also: gas for twelve cents a gallon! This is the Route 66 of the Nat King Cole song – a long and winding road that goes through a bunch of beautiful, thriving communities on the way to California. It goes through Saint Louie – Joplin, Missouri, Oklahoma City – criss-crossing through Galena, Kansas, Catoosa, Oklahoma and many other communities whose names are obscured to all but the locals.

In 2013, this road does indeed wander off into the promise of America, but that promise has been broken. When the Eisenhower Interstate System was completed in the 1960s, the endless flow of motorists opted for wider, faster roads that did not bother stopping for every little town. As information technology and biotech has advanced, centralized farming has either moved farming under giant corporate holding companies, or to new places all together, such as California and points west. Light manufacturing has gone to points far east. As such, the view of most of the small communities on Old Route 66, is more like this:

I’m going to spare you the photos of the endless array of trailers and makeshift houses along the way, linked only by the cracked and weed-ridden concrete of the old Mother Road, left to rot. This, too, is America in 2013, and if you extrapolate the trend into the future, it leads straight into a vision of dystopia.

My mind wandered to all of the various wars and bailouts that have consumed this nation’s blood and treasure. Since 2001 there have been those two wars in far off lands, followed by a decade of nation building. Later, after a senseless deregulation of the banking industry we sent endless rivers of printed cash flowing into the coffers of the banks whose recklessness nearly set the world ablaze. We guaranteed the survival of General Motors, AIG, Fannie and Freddie. The total cost for these policies: trillions of dollars.

All I want is some paint.

I see the men, women and children scraping around the remnants of these once-thriving American communities, and I wonder how they can keep their head up, walking by abandoned downtown building after burned out house after dilapidated mobile home park. Our national government jumps at the chance of keeping car companies and banks from suffering the consequences of their mismanagement, and meanwhile, vast swaths of the United States are left to rot. We pour out our treasury to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, and turn a blind eye to the Heartland.

We could have, during this interminable series of bailouts, set aside one billion dollars for a paint job. Imagine the collective impact of repainting downtowns in bright fresh colors. Think of the people of these communities, once the backbone of our nation, told by the rest of us – you are not forgotten. Consider the difference in a young person between growing up in a place rotting off the bone versus one in a town that is still honored.

One billion dollars- that’s a fraction of what we spend on the drug war, interest on the debt, policing the hills of some country that Americans can’t identify on a map anyhow. Senators spend one billion dollars before you have had your morning coffee.

Imagine what it would mean to these people.

Imagine what it means to have pride.

The post One billion dollars of paint is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

When my friend Doug Stephens, retail futurist par excellence with a great new book out, told me about this, I almost thought that it was satire of the marketing profession. And yet, it’s a real thing – selling candy through the lens of the gay rights movement - and a signpost that tells us about the future of branding.

In an effort to make the “Mike & Ike’s” brand of candy relevant to young adults, the brand’s managers decided to bolt on a story about Mike & Ike as some sort of romantic couple now going through a divorce. From the article “Brands Come Out of the Closet“:

Caught in the crossfire of the gay-marriage debate were Mike & Ike, Just Born’s old-school fruit-flavored candy from our childhood. The candy brand has been around since the 1940s, but has been relatively quiet the past few years. All that changed in April 2012, when in an attempt to capture a younger demographic, the company launched a marketing campaign based on Mike & Ike’s troubled partnership.

Though the advertising, social media and packaging campaign attributed the split to creative differences, it wasn’t long before rumors were flying that it was part of a “gay divorce.” The Family Research Council publicly denounced the brand, saying, “It’s just another subtle example of society chipping away at the value of marriage.” Is the world ready for a maybe-gay candy? It appears so. Mike & Ike had its best year sales-wise in a decade, up more than 7%; it also tripled its Facebook fanbase.

The company has reinforced this original take on candy with images designed to remind your of the impending personal strife facing the two male characters who have never been seen in public.

Evidently, Ike is taking the whole thing rather hard and erasing any trace of Mike. You know how it is when a romance goes bad.

But wait! Facebook update! They are getting back together! Or something!

Is the future of branding in surreal stories?

Once upon a time, people actually sold products by describing their benefits.

Then, as time went on, they moved on to showing how the product reinforced whatever identity the customer already had (or aspired to have)

Now, we’re in a brand new era. The future of branding seems to be about intriguing people with a story that captivates them – even if it really does not have a thing to do with the product or service sold.

In the old days, you would actually describe how delicious Mike & Ikes are. If you followed late 20th century logic, you would need to show how Mike & Ike defined you as a fun-loving or creative or whatever kind of person.

What we see today has no connection to that logic whatsoever. Nobody really thinks that Mike & Ike candies cause your gay romance to go bad – so it’s not a question of product feature. And nobody at the ad agency is attempting to say – “Mike & Ikes – the candy for people who believe in gay marriage, even bad ones.” And thus this isn’t a call to some form of identity.

No, the bad gay romance thing is just kind of funny. It’s ironic. For a young adult (the kind that isn’t aware of the diabetes epidemic) perhaps this kind of entertaining narrative will induce them to buy this brand of candy more often because – who knows what those crazy guys at Mike & Ike will come up with next. So, as we can see from the results, more people are willing to “like” the brand and purchase the product just because the narrative is unexpected.

In fact, this kind of phenomenon is revolutionary. What matters here is not the product or the consumer, but the brand itself. The customer is potentially drawn to the product because the people behind the brand seem to be plugged into the zeitgeist. Gay marriage is a cresting a huge wave all over the world; just as I write this, the French Senate approved the “Loi Taubira,” thus making gay marriage and adoption the law of the land. What does this have to do with candies? Nothing. But the brand is stating clearly, “Hey, we’re hip – we know what is interesting and relevant.”

Branding is really old hat these days – the new generation has been marketed to death since they were in diapers. Hearing about new products and what they mean to our identities is really old and busted. Connecting with a group of people – even through something trivial like candy – who know what’s important in the world – that’s something people seem to hunger for.

Is your brand able to connect itself to the larger cultural evolutions in the world? It seems to be driving sales.

>>>>>>>>>>>

Planning an event, and want to talk about the future of your brand? I do a keynote all about  The Future of Branding and how marketing communications are changing. Click here to see samples and learn more.

The post Why Mike & Ike’s gay divorce is part of the future of branding is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

You really need to be following the writing of Sarah Kendzior this week as she rips the major media outlets for their utter incompetence in understanding the role of race, ethnicity and nationality in the Boston Marathon bombing. The fact is: we don’t know what motivated these men. There will be a trial – and then we will know more. In the mean time, the American media has been throwing out every possible stereotype (indomitable mountain men!!!) and disjointed factoid from Wikipedia their interns could gather.

Now, Juan Cole isn’t really “the media,” and I normally enjoy his analysis of Middle East affairs quite a bit – but I was perplexed by his trying to use 19th century literature to explain Monday’s actions in absence of thorough knowledge about the motive’s of the alleged bombers.

“They were playing the nihilists Arkady and Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons,” explained scholar Juan Cole, citing an 1862 Russian novel to explain the motives of a criminal whose Twitter account was full of American rap lyrics. One does not recall such use of literary devices to ascertain the motives of less exotic perpetrators, but who knows? Perhaps some ambitious analyst is plumbing the works of Faulkner to shed light on that Mississippi Elvis impersonator who tried to send ricin to Obama.

Cole’s connection to philosophical nihilism might be a stretch, but it’s sure a lot better than those hyperventilating that one of the suspects was named after a brutal Mongol warlord!!! As my own son is named after the Norman conqueror who slaughtered Saxons to dominate England, I find this analysis unhelpful.

Why can we not just say, “I don’t know. Nobody knows. This was horrible. Our justice system will tell us the rest?” That would be honest, calm and dignified – but this is the American media we are talking about.

Now, for those of you without backgrounds in intercultural analysis, maybe this doesn’t seem too ridiculous. Let me illustrate how inaccurate such wild speculations would sound if it were about a culture you did understand.

Let us say that a guy got drunk at a bar outside of Mobile, Alabama,  got in a fight with some dudes about University of Alabama versus Ole Miss college football, and ended up shooting them dead in the parking lot.

Terrible, right? Stupid, violent, too many damn guns, shame, right?

Now imagine that some foreigners slapped a crappy pseudo-anthropological analysis on top, full of weird historical references, non-sequitur references to the church, and misguided assumptions about ethnicity.

DATELINE APRIL 21, 2013

IT HAS HAPPENED AGAIN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

Yet another massacre has occurred in the historically war-torn region of the Southern United States – and so soon after the religious festival of Easter.

Brian McConkey, 27, a Christian fundamentalist militiaman living in the formerly occupied territory of Alabama, gunned down three men from an opposing tribe in the village square near Montgomery, the capitol, over a discussion that may have involved the rituals of the local football cult. In this region full of heavily-armed local warlords and radical Christian clerics, gun violence is part of the life of many.

Many of the militiamen here are ethnic Scots-Irish tribesmen, a famously indomitable mountain people who have killed civilized men – and each other – for centuries. It appears that the wars that started on the fields of Bannockburn and Stirling have come to America.

As the sun sets over the former Confederate States of America, one wonders – can peace ever come to this land?

Sometimes, people are in a cult of violence tied up with religious fundamentalism and nationalistic terror groups.

Sometimes, they are just savages who come from a place that might have churches and politically-motivated knuckleheads.

Being a real analyst of international affairs, you need to understand how subtle that difference can be.

The post If media covered America the way we cover foreign cultures is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

The uproar about Bitcoin in the last couple weeks has obscured the much larger global trend toward local currency and new forms of economic integration. That’s reasonable enough – smaller communities creating their own monetary systems appears to be somewhere between a lark and a joke for the conventional mind. But while the financial media is busy mocking everything new coming down the pike, the local currency trend is picking up steam.

I can’t believe it took me this many months to hear the news about the mayor of Bristol taking his entire salary in the new Bristol pound.

Of his salary – currently £51,000, though the figure could change – Ferguson said he would take it in Bristol pounds, a currency introduced this year and proving a success.

What is the Bristol pound? The local currency is similar to the ones used in other UK “Transition Towns” such as the Totnes, Lewes, and Brixton pounds. And like its German counterpart, the Chiemgauer, its initial value is tied to the national currency (in this case the pound sterling) but then begins to decline in value over time to discourage hoarding. There is also a penalty for trading it back into national currencies as a way to encourage people to spend locally once they make the commitment.

More details from their website:

It is a complementary local currency designed to support Bristol’s independent businesses, strengthen the local economy, keep our high streets diverse and distinct, and help build stronger communities.

The Bristol Pound is the UK’s first city wide local currency, the first to have electronic accounts managed by a regulated financial institution, and the first that can be used to pay some local taxes.

The Bristol Pound is run as a partnership between the Bristol Pound Community Interest Company and Bristol Credit Union. It is  a not-for-profit social enterprise.

You can spend Bristol Pounds using:

You can spend Bristol Pounds at every participating  business using either paper Bristol Pounds, or from a Bristol Pound account with any mobile phone by using our simple TXT2PAY sms payment system, or over the internet.

Having electronic accounts makes Bristol Pounds easy and convenient to use for the public and opens up the opportunities for business to business payments.

Currently, Bristol’s local currency  is reporting around 100,000 pounds of total deposits and a rising number of merchants accepting it as payment for services. There perhaps couldn’t be a stronger sign than the leader of the city committing his entire purchasing power to the scheme.

Be on the lookout for this and many other communities building resilience and economic vitality through these innovations. It’s looking less and less like a lark every day.

The post The mayor of Bristol takes his whole salary in the local currency is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

A couple hours ago, as my Twitter feed began its predictable digital outrage against Congress’ inability to pass any legal measure that might reduce the unfettered flow of guns around our psychically unstable nation, I was moved to spew forth one of my patented Twitter Rants.

Strap in. Oh, by the way – you’re partly to blame.

>>>>>>>>>

You want to know why Congress is so terrible? Here’s why, 140 characters at a time:

Everybody is so indignant about Congress, but only 10% of Americans can name the Speaker of the House. You want to know why America feels like a chaotic mess? We oscillate between demanding “freedom” and demanding authority figures.

• Don’t tell me what to do with my guns, money and healthcare! Wait! There’s gun violence, somebody do something!
• I don’t like Big Government! We were attacked by terrorists! The government needs to invade someone’s country, and quick!
• I don’t want Gubmint in my Medicare! However, it’s OK for the Gubmint to search my wife’s bra at the airport.
• In the years between elections, I find policy discussion’s so boring! Hey, why is policy being run by special interests?

You know why policy is run by special interests? Because the Supreme Court told you money = speech and America said nothing. You know why gun manufacturers are buying off Congress? They make 1,000 phone calls, emails and personal visits to Congress for 1 of yours.

You know who the new ambassador to Canada is, our greatest ally and trading partner? Chicago’s partner at Goldman Sachs! Why would we appoint a banker to a diplomatic position? He raised big money for Obama in 2012! That’s how it works.

The power of special interests isn’t a conspiracy necessarily. You want to know something? Lobbyists educate new Congresspeople who are dumber than a bag of hair. My office in DC was on the 9th floor of a building chock full of lobbyists. I’ve seen the game top to bottom. Some chucklehead from Indiana’s 3rd district has the biggest used car dealership. He wants to run for Congress. He’s in Washington at lobbying shops BEFORE HE EVER RUNS. He starts sucking off the lobbyist tit before his first stump speech. He meets potential staff – introduced by lobbyists – and starts meeting donors from corporations and activist groups.

Now our man goes back to actually run in Indiana, or wherever. He wins! Hooray! But you know what? He’s a used car dealer. Do you think he spent his two years of politicking boning up on nuclear energy policy or geopolitical security? No, he was grabbing money. So our new Congressman arrives in Washington, accompanied by some of his political operatives and DC staff picked by lobbyists. He gets appointed to some committees, the sucky ones with no real power, but now he has actual work to do – about which he knows nothing.

So our new Congresscritter is on the Ag committee or Science, and now he has to vote on grazing rights and subsidies for natural gas. He doesn’t have a shit of an idea. NOW WHO CALLS HIM NEXT? YOU? Your friends from Facebook? College professors? NO, LOBBYISTS. By the way, the very second he arrives in DC, he’s immediately back on the hunt for money and really busy paying off favors to donors. So he literally has no time to study the issues. And in the door walks…his friends that hooked him up with cash to begin with! And they represent various industries. They come with actual information – slanted though it may be – about what our guy has to vote on. The lobbyists explain the stakes – the history of the policy, size of the market (beef grazing in Wyoming, whatever), and the number of jobs

You are at home watching Game of Thrones, half way through a six pack. You aren’t studying grazing rights either.

So, the vote’s on Friday. So far, our man has heard from his money guys, representatives from agribusiness…and who else?

BUT WHAT ABOUT “THEY GOOD GUYS?” The “non-profits” and do-gooder networks in DC. You give them $50 every year or so – “Organic Food USA.” The guys at Organic Food USA are paid $23,000 to live in DC. They are usually a hot mess. They *might* get a fax off to our man’s office. (By the way, the reason media covers a lot of corporate press releases verbatim is…they are written correctly! And the guys call you back!) So Organic Food USA send some dogshit pamphlet to the Congresscritter’s office, MAYBE tries to get a meeting with him. Organic Food USA decides to write an emotionally-charged email to their existing database, and updates their website. It’s easier.

You, at this same moment, are looking at pictures of old lovers on Facebook.

Now it’s the night before the vote. Our Congresscritter has received one briefing from a lobbyist and some advice from two other colleagues. The only coherent point your average Freshman Congressman has received is from people paid to sway his vote for profit. Congressguy goes to a fundraising dinner, makes phone calls to his district until 11:00pm EST, and passes out with a scotch. The next morning, all things being equal, he votes for a “strong jobs policy” on that grazing thing – and moves on.

TalkingPointsMemo and HuffPost (or RedState, who cares) cover the vote. You and your friends register your indignation in the comments.

The next big vote is next Wednesday, on subsidies for pharmacogenomic medicine, whatever the hell that is. The Chinese are our competitors. This weekend, Congresscritter is flying to Indiana to attend a sporting event and meet with donors.

You listen to NPR.

This is the deal every day in Washington DC. Is it a conspiracy? It’s a pretty open one. I’m telling you what 200,000 people know. You wonder why policy from Washington sucks ass?

1. Money runs elections.
2. Lobbying pays a ton.
3. You are apathetic about policy.

BUT WAIT, NOW IT’S A YEAR DIVISIBLE BY FOUR!!! Now we spend the year listening to messages designed to flatter our egos for months. Yes, the money from lobbyists goes to market research, who ask YOU what YOU want to hear from your leaders. “Change.” “Small government.” There are shops that measure your pulse and eye twitching over the exact wording of policies. And they feed that back to you for a year.

You know that Obama didn’t like the “Change” thing in 2008, right? But that’s what the marketing said YOU wanted. So…YOU GOT IT! CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN! ALSO, UNICORNS THAT GIVE ME A RIDE TO WORK! TRANSPARENCY! NO HOMELESS PEOPLE. WORLD PEACE!

You asked for them to tell you these things. They told you. It was all financed by The Money Guys.

So now, it’s an odd number year, the new class is sworn in…and visited by their lobbyist chums, with fresh power points. Is this a conspiracy? No. Conspiracies are hidden from view. This is open for all the world to see. We like it this way. Oh, we don’t like the corrupt policies that it guarantees, but we sure don’t want to be bored by any policy discussions.

Sit around and discuss the implications of defense policy? Snore fest! Wake me when we bomb somebody! Then I’ll cheer/protest.

I believe in healthcare for all people/those who earned it! I do not, however, believe in learning about the cost of diabetes care!

So, Congress f***ed up and can’t pass a “simple” piece of legislation that will guarantee MAXIMUM primary challenges financed by NRA?

No – the problem is at the root. It’s time to look at this as a whole system. We all share blame – and responsibility.

Now what?

If you like this post, you might enjoy my latest book, The World After Normal, which is an irreverent look at American culture in transition.

The post Why Congress sucks is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

Nobody plants a bomb in LaPlatte, Nebraska. The terrorists of the world pick London, Madrid, New York, Tokyo, Washington and Boston as the target of their rage. This is where we house the world’s art and science, build iconic structures and hold leadership summits. In these cities you are usually walking distance from greatness, be it artistic, intellectual or financial. In the great cities of civilization you can attend a fashion show, a colloquium on energy policy, a sporting event, or simply delight in the spectacle of people on the street while you savor a cup of coffee. From the first Sumerian cities to Copley Square, civilization is man’s great adventure, the journey of an undisciplined species working together in service of universal principles.

There is also something in man that secretly rebels against this journey, a smouldering compulsion to reduce us back to wild, squabbling beasts in a bog. From Aum Shinrikyu to al-Qaeda to the psychopathic author of Boston’s tragedy, this cognitive perversion expresses itself in premeditated acts of violence against city dwellers. These bestial remains of our ancient past seek to reduce us to their animalistic level by literally covering the edifices of civilization in blood and gore. These subhumans think that by reminding us of our physical frailty, they can exact revenge against those who live by elevating their brains and their hearts instead of their twisted guts.

Boston is a civilized place, driven by refined values – erudition, tolerance, collective welfare, and tradition, among many others. From Faneuil Hall to Bunker Hill to Harvard to Fenway to Southie, Boston is a great city by any measure. Its people range from foreign scholars in Cambridge to Back Bay traditionalists to salt of the earth workers in Quincy, each contributing to one of the most successful, prosperous and celebrated cities in history.

While millions revere this city and others like it, there remains in the shadows, a beast. The great achievements of civilization remind men who would prefer to remain animals of whatever wretched insufficiency their have in their black souls. They digest themselves while leering viciously at civilization in ashamed silence. As they hate language and art, they cannot express this feeling through words and image. As they despise science, they cannot submit to medicine to heal their sickness. They can only express their grotesqueness through blood.

Cowardly violence is the only achievement to which these aberrations can cling. Meanwhile, the rest of our species must continue onward in our destiny – working together to explore the great values of art and science. We shall meet together in cities, elevate our minds and souls and aspire to greatness. We shall leave the beasts behind, even though they live deep in the hearts of man.

Civilization will prevail.

>>>>>>

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like my latest book, entitled The World After Normal, a group of essays on an American culture in transition. 

The post The beast at the gates of civilization is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

The United States is the only country in the world that treats other nations as completely optional. Obviously, I don’t mean when it comes to manufacturing our critical goods or providing us with tankers full of light sweet crude, but culturally, America acts as if Other Countries are places that exist only in text books or vacation brochures. This is most acutely evident in the narrative projected by our media outlets: America remains the center of the world and Other Places are only worth describing if 1) something is on fire or 2) we have declared war on the people there. So if you live in the United States, your view of global events is myopic at best and completely distorted at worst.

I decided to undertake an experiment – to rely completely on non-American, non-English-language media for a period of a week.  I have spent almost thirty years studying French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, Japanese and other languages. For news analysis, my French is very close to native, my Spanish is fluent, I can read Portuguese and Italian with little problem and my Japanese is limited to smack talking and effusively complimenting sushi chefs. Those were my biases in this experiment: lots of French, quite a bit of Spanish and Portuguese, considerable focus on Europe, where many of the media conglomerates for those languages are located.

Here’s what I ascertained during my week-long fast of American media:

Things are happening in countries that are not the United States

Did you know that Japan is installing Patriot missiles in Tokyo because of North Korean aggression, that France is at war in Mali, and that Iran just had an earthquake that killed thirty people? Yes, all of these are important events that took place outside the borders of the United States and which were reported widely – everywhere but in the US.

The most important bias you get beyond when leaving US-English media is the presumption that the United States is the only country worth covering with the rest jammed in the “Global” section of some website. For the rest of the world’s media (possible exceptions: Iran, North Korea) events in Perú, Austria and Thailand are not trivia for people who “studied abroad that one time” – they are simply the news.

The media is not the most important topic of the media

One of the best things to get away from in US-English media is the juvenile self-obsession of the media with itself, especially the recent focus on helping the poor media conglomerates stay in the black ink by using free labor and/or puerile moron click bait in place of maturely analyzed news. America now has TV shows about making TV shows, cable programs about making cable news programs, Narcissus on the cusp of drowning. The whole American media industry is so busy trying to maintain huge empires, luxury office space and big salaries for its “stars,” that it is taking significant time away from just doing their damn day jobs and reporting the events of the day for an interested public.

I’m not naive about the issues of quality and bias in foreign news. Having lived and worked in Paris for close to twenty years, I am intimately acquainted with the slants of French media outlets, for example. Le Monde is center-right and quite small-c conservative, a bit authoritarian. La Libération is into splashy headlines and socialist biases that would make my father’s head explode. Le Figaro has almost a royal reserve about its coverage, and Les Echos is a great financial read with simple, direct news analysis. There are new kids on the digital block with post-political biases, such as the now ascendant Mediapart. There are strengths and weaknesses to all these outlets, but all week I didn’t read one piece about how tough it is to report news in this new economy, we need free interns, bla bla bla. From Canada to Italy, I just got to focus on the news. It was refreshing.

Opinion is not news

After about three days of non-US digital news, a realization gently revealed itself: I wasn’t required to wade through page after page of anecdotally-driven opinion pieces masquerading as news. The majority of the clicks out there were of hard news stories, not a series of self-important “here is how I feel about the news” pieces. Sure, there are OpEds, and some great ones, like this piece from a Portuguese official ripping apart the German finance minister for saying that other “countries” were “jealous” of Germany. (International affairs pro tip: countries have interests and policies, not feelings)  What is missing is that which comprises a shocking percentage of US coverage – thinly researched, perspective free assertions about what something “means.” There are three categories of this that are epidemic right now:

• Lobbyist-activists producing “analysis” pieces that are really doing advocacy for some undisclosed goal (usually war)
• Executives from some institution executing a broader corporate branding plan
• “Staff writers” from Ivy League schools with zero practical experience opining about how what business or government ought to be doing this week, based on the unexamined feelings of 1400 people in San Francisco, New York, Boston and DC, as opposed to data

Opinion pieces are fine – but in non-English media, I find that they are clearly marked and provide some value other than an argument for the status quo.

Time for an enriched diet

To sum up, your choice of media very much shapes your perception of the world; my experiment reminded me that it shapes mine. This week showed me how much American media is focused on propping up authority figures, reinflating unsustainable financial bubbles, and maintaining the lowest possible cultural and intellectual standards. The thing is, America is a huge country and its media industry industry is pervasive. Also, there is a preponderance of media in English because of its use India, China, Korea and other countries as a lingua franca for business. If you live in the U.S. and want a global perspective, getting away from the US-American media bubble is going to require effort on your part.

You wouldn’t be very healthy if your food diet was both limited in diversity and low in quality. Sadly, America’s intellectual diet is increasingly resembling its food choices – heavily processed, weighted towards a juvenile palate, providing little value for a balanced life.

Fetch me my passport.

>>>>>>>>

If you like this post, you might enjoy my latest book, The World After Normal, which is an irreverent look at American culture in transition.

The post Breaking through the American media bubble is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

The world’s Very Serious Financial Media had an amusing freakout yesterday about the relative importance of the rise in value of a novel digital currency scheme called Bitcoin. Their message is very clear:

Look you monkeys, stop paying attention to this Bitcoin thing which is a big joke and also not significant of anything, and also very dangerous. Now. Just stop. Right now. Go look at housing starts. Also, it’s a recovery. Stop looking at alternatives. Now. Because things are great.

Of course, if you think the global economy includes several people who aren’t named Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon, things are not that great and alternatives seem like a way out of some intractible problems. But then, the Very Serious Financial Media is not especially interested in people not named Buffett, Bezos or Dimon.

The event that unleashed such interest in alternatives was *sigh* yet another small country Eurozone meltdown involving people that speak Greek, megabanks, oligarchs and bailouts that take money from the locals to repair damage done by a handful of really terrible financial engineers. Cyprus’ banking system is unstable (likely resulting from too much Greek-speaking) and the government came up with the Very Reasonable Proposal of simply seizing money in the deposit boxes over a certain amount. There, all better!

What? What? Why so angry, bro?

The results have been two-fold. On the island of Cyprus, bankers and policy makers have no doubt been receiving phone calls from angry, angry men with Russian accents – men who employ various former members of the Spetsnaz. There have also been exasperated calls from Brussels, London and Frankfurt and the predictable scripts about capital requirements and austerity, responsibility, et cetera.

And in the rest of the world, something very interesting happened. Nobody bothered to go to some park in Manhattan to sit around with bongos. There might have been a protest in Paris – what with it being a day ending in “y” – but not about this issue. Even the Cypriots themselves seem to be handling the events with a certain poise. Yet around the world, a billion dollars of market capital has shot into an anonymous, stateless currency system called Bitcoin.

I’m not recapping what Bitcoin is; you can Google it yourself for technical details. And if you want an overview of the alternative currency movement in general, you can peruse Transitionistas and also check out this television program I did with Al Jazeera’s The Stream last year.

I’m most fascinated by yesterday’s paleo-media freakout on the subject of Bitcoin.

Telltale emotion

The telltale sign in any social system is when public-facing people imbued with authority suddenly become unhinged and begin showing umissable signs of emotion in their supposedly dispassionate analysis of world events. Now that Bitcoin passed the one billion mark, people who were ignoring the project a week ago now have very strong feelings about it!

Yesterday, Felix Salmon burst forth with 5000 words on the subject, as a piece of expository writing on why this novel payment scheme is such a bad idea. The essay goes from pillar to post, from discussing the role of deflation to saying that the people who have bet on bitcoin will be bitterly disappointed, to saying it smells like cabbage – the pseudo-analytical kitchen sink. Note that in not one of these 5000 words does he explore why this is happening, the growing lack of faith in the authority and reliability of dominant financial institutions. His only analysis of the emergence of Bitcoin is:

“Bitcoin has become suddenly popular in Cyprus for obvious reasons: no government can confiscate your bitcoins, or prevent you from transporting them out of the country.”

Of course, he makes no mention of the interest in Bitcoin in Finland or the United States or Australia – just countries in trouble, like Cyprus, Belarus and Ukraine. Is he asserting that only people in a state of panic see the use of this technology, and Clear Eyed Journalists At Major Publications like he are the only ones with the intellectual capacity to see past the fraud? Interesting assertion.

But Felix is concerned about the effect of Bitcoin…on democracy!

…it turns out that financial-services companies are a very important part of any democracy.

It’s because we place so much trust in banks, after all, that they are forced to take on a great deal of responsibility. Banks and central banks are given an important job to do, are regulated and scrutinized, and can be held responsible for their actions. The population of the entire country, as represented by the government, stands behind bank deposits and promises to honor them even if the bank goes bust. Money, in other words, is a key ingredient in the glue which keeps the social compact together. (What we’re seeing in Cyprus is in large part a demonstration of what happens when that compact starts becoming unglued.)

Bitcoin, in that sense, is anti democratic.

Banks and central banks can be held responsible for their actions? Excuse me while I clean the coffee I just snorted through my nose. Is this guy for real? Bernanke and Geithner were in charge of central banks prior to the greatest meltdown in history, and they were held accountable? No, they received promotions and fawning praise.

And responsible banks? In the age of Lanny Breuer, the head of criminal enforcement for the USDOJ who stated in public that he decided – in his personal wisdom – not to prosecute banks because of his own beliefs that the system would collapse if the law were to be upheld on matters of billions in fraud…that’s your system of responsibility?

To promote his stream of consciousness piece Salmon wrote:

It’s fun to watch the bitcoin bubble, but it’s also important to understand that almost no one actually wants to live in the kind of world that bitcoin enthusiasts are looking forward to. Thankfully, the rising price of bitcoins is not some kind of market signal telling us that we’re closer to that world. But at the same time, it’s certainly not something to celebrate.

You kids have had enough fun! Mr Salmon is not curious about what it all means, but he’s very certain that he knows how it will come out, and that you will prefer his vision of the future. It’s a very humble analysis, really.

Even though I don’t understand this, I’m still right

Izabella Kaminska from the Financial Times Alphaville took to writing a piece of Bitcoin based on utterly false technical understanding, mostly coming from an analyst at France’s largest bank, who – quelle surprise - is not a fan of alternative currency that bypass his institution. Exposed by another financial blogger who does understand the technology, Kaminska piroutted gracefully past her failed analysis to admit that – pax - sure, she could have done her homework – but that of course her conclusion is still correct. Because Bitcoin is risky!

I love Ms. Kaminska’s mastery of the media’s favorite technique when caught in a lack of rigor: Be quick to admit your mistake on a technicality, then immediately proceed back to claiming that your argument is still correct. Just once I want to see somebody say “You know, I have more work to do on this issue, and I’ll get back to you.”

Then again, you don’t require concise arguments or technical understanding or deep sociological insight to arrive at the conclusion to which the financial media must arrive: Any threat to the status quo puts me out of a job one day.

Why such opposition over a billion-dollar thing?

Can we have a quick reality check? We’re only talking about a billion dollars so far, which is the post-tax profit Exxon Mobil puts up in 22 days. So why the panic mode from the press?

Perhaps we can see the biases inherent in being employed by the very institutions that are on the way out. If you’re sitting in London, financed by ads from the banks themselves, the description of this group of innovations must only be seen from a negative point of view. And that is likely why otherwise decent writers find themselves stammering in the face of an undeniable trend.

By way of my own opinion, I am not a Bitcoin “enthusiast” looking to smash ideological enemies to make way for a Pirate Party-run, Bitcoin-financed global utopia. I don’t own Bitcoins and don’t care one way another whether the world turns its back on this innovation next month. I’m merely curious as to why a group of people agreeing to exchange value in a novel – and risky – way elicits such an instantaneous and inchoate response from otherwise professional analysts?

Perhaps they suspect that this story will proceed far beyond this initial billion dollars. I know I do – because this isn’t the last institutional crisis, either.

The post The glorious Bitcoin freakout of 2013 is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

This is a portrait of my hero, Roger Ebert.

A tradesman journalist who banged out copy day after day, night after night in the great city of Chicago. He wrote his guts out and pounded booze with Mike Royko and Studs Terkel (and subsequently recovered from alcoholism in 1979).

He elevated film criticism to an artform, and was extraordinarily prolific in it until his very last days. He still wrote some 287 film critiques per year, “awake in the dark.”

He loved the Midwest. He loved America.

He loved his wife.

He got sick, and wrote about it in detail that refused to be ashamed of human frailty. They cut the bottom of his face off, and HE HAD HIS PORTRAIT DONE.

He could no longer speak, and yet his voice got LOUDER. He wrote more. Said more. Mastered Twitter. Wrote more. Wrote deeper. Made his final act his most powerful.

They say America has lost its heros. They point to our corrupt politicians, our cheating athletes.

This is my hero – a lover of words, of art, of civilization. A tradesman, a philosopher, an inspiration.

Adieu, Roger.

The post A portrait of my hero is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

While the European project threatens to collapse at any moment, many Europeans are getting busy making the next economy.

BitCoin has made the biggest noise since the Cypriot banking system went sideways, but in reality, the most popular alternative is local currencies. Britain’s Transition Towns projects all feature local currencies, and the Chiemgauer in Germany has been going strong.

Today, you can add a brand new local currency to that list from the Basque Country in northern Spain. The group BilboDiru from the city of Bilbao is launching a new currency with the intention of transforming the economy of the province of Biscay (or Vizcaya or Bizkaia in Spanish and Basque, respectively) into something more sustainable, ecologically sound, and broadly prosperous.

I had the pleasure of exchanging insights with the group’s founders, and these are the insights they gave me on their currency project.

This is the English translation of our interview – the original communications are listed below in Spanish. The author regrets that his Basque language skills are far too weak for professional usage.

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What were the roots of your decision to launch a local currency?

The BilboDiru project came out of the social movement called Desazkundea, or decrecimento in Spanish – Degrowth in English. Desazkundea is a movement that advocates for a new economic model around the concept of steady steady economics. Degrowth is the only the way to arrive at an ecological footprint that = 1, meaning an economic system that is sustainable on the planet.

The BilboDiru project is the result of a working group that studied the value of local currencies in this new economic context, and its goal is to create an alternative.

Do you have examples of local currencies that inspired you, such as the Brixton Pound or the Chiemgauer in Germany?

We studied several examples that found success throughout Europe and America. In our case, the BilboDiru is a mix of the Chiemgauer and the Sol Violette from Toulouse, France.

To what degree has the crisis in Europe moved you to create this currency?

The crisis has without a doubt been responsible for the rise of alternatives in recent days, as a criticism of neoliberal capitalism which shown itself to be clearly defective. It’s not clear to what degree [this was an inspiration] but certainly some.

Do you have a specific plan for the future in mind? For example, do you have a target for a certain percentage of transactions in the Basque Country to be conducted in local currency?

 In theory, our currency is intended for use solely inside the province of Bizkaia, one of the seven provinces of Euskal Herria (the Basque homeland). We want the currency to be truly local, so it is not our desire to have its use spread out indefinitely.

As far as how much of the economy we would like transacted in the currency, we would like the most possible. For this, we know that the key is in suppliers. But the most important thing is that the economy created out of the new currency be different than the traditional economy. We want the new economy to be ecologically sound, socially responsible and free. The quality is more important than the quantity.

Do you see this currency as part of the larger political movement around Basque sovereignty? Is this movement similar or different from political movements in the 20th century?

No, the local currency is not intended as part of a political movement toward Basque independence. The goal is to change the economic model, protecting the local economy and gaining sovereignty through money.

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If you remain interested – the BilboDiru project is now conducting a poll to choose the name of the currency. Potential names are “hazi” meaning “seed” in Basque, “ekhi” the ancient Basque word for “sun,” and many other symbolic names. As the Basques have been occupying their land since before the Romans and Greeks, and with their historic reputation as commercial pioneers, one can look for many more innovations to come from this beuatiful and mysterious land where the mountains meet the sea, and future meets past.

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Original text from the interview in Spanish:

¿Cuáles fueron las raíces de su decisión de lanzar una moneda local?

El proyecto BilboDiru surgió en el seno de un movimiento social llamado Desazkundea (decrecimiento en castellano). Desazkundea es un movimiento que aboga por un nuevo modelo económico en torno al concepto de la economía de estado estacionario, el decrecimiento es el único camino para llegar a la huella ecológica = 1, que indicaría que el sistema económico es sostenible en el planeta.

El proyecto BilboDiru es el resultado de un grupo de trabajo que ha estudiado el valor de las monedas locales en este nuevo contexto económico, y el objetivo es generar una alternativa.

¿Tienes modelos, por ejemplo, el Brixton pound o el Chiemgauer en Alemania?

En efecto, hemos estudiado los diferentes modelos de monedas locales que han tenido éxito en Europa y en América. En nuestro caso, BilboDiru es una mezcla entre el Chiemgauer y el Sol Violette (Toulouse, Francia).

¿A qué grado tiene la crisis en Europa te inspiró para hacer una nueva moneda?

La crisis ha fomentado sin duda el surgimiento de alternativas, desde una crítica al monelo capitalista neoliberal, que ha demostrado ser claramente defectuoso. No sé hasta qué nivel, pero seguro que ha tenido algo que ver.

¿Tienes algún plan para el futuro en mente? ¿Por ejemplo, están esperando un cierto porcentaje de la economía en Euskal Herria a ser tramitado en moneda local?

En principio nuestro proyecto de moneda local tiene como objetivo quedarse dentro de Bizkaia (una de las siete provincias de Euskal Herria). Queremos que sea una moneda realmente local, y por lo tanto no queremos que extienda indefinidamente.

Con respecto al nivel de economía, nos gustaría llegar al máximo posible. Para eso sabemos que la clave está en los proveedores. Pero lo más importante es que la economía que se genere con la nueva moneda sea diferente a la economía tradicional. Queremos que la nueva economía sea ecológica, solidaria, libre… La calidad es más importante que la cantidad.

¿Ves la moneda local como parte del movimiento político más grande de Euskal Herria para la soberanía política? ¿Es este similar o diferente de los movimientos políticos en el siglo XX?

No, el objetivo de la moneda local no tiene como objetivo ser un elemento hacia la independencia de Euskal Herria. El objetivo es cambiar el modelo económico, protegiendo la economía local, y recuperando la soberanía sobre el dinero.

The post Another local currency launches in the Basque Country is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

Ah, 2013. It’s a moment in American history where I am seen as “controversial” for advocating that trained professionals should not provide labor below the wages I received in 1987 to stack cow manure. What a bizarre moment indeed.

Some nice person took the time to put all the possible arguments for providing labor for free into an insightful flow chart. Should you work for free? YES or NO?

You should follow the link and check out the chart in its full glory, but I have to say I guffawed when it recommended against working for a band for free. “Just because a business isn’t profitable doesn’t make them a non-profit.” How many times have I thought that in conjunction with poorly managed musical projects? You’ll need the blue column on the abacus for that calculation, mes amis.

The post Should you work for free? Yes or no? is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

Ever since Cyprus came up with the neat plan to “bail-in” its banking system by simply stealing money straight from people’s accounts, the whole world seems to have become interested in novel approaches to commerce. This Euro thing, they said all at once, has got some issues. Perhaps time to try something new.

One of the new things that people are trying is an alternative currency scheme called BitCoin. Created by hackers in a somewhat nebulous creation myth (I come to understand that some Japanese recluse genius created the code and vanished, or something) BitCoin is a currency based on cryptography, not legal fiat. That is to say that there are a limited number of BitCoins in the world and their existence is guaranteed by peer-to-peer computing. To compare this to the United States Dollar, the greenback exists because the Treasury and Federal Reserve say it exists (hence, fiat) and BitCoins exist because the computers in the network say they exist.

Is this confusing? Dude, all of money is confusing, so hang on.

There is a lot of speculation this week about the potential for BitCoin to “replace” the Euro or the Dollar or the Kroner as a medium of exchange. As I have noted repeatedly this past fortnight, the value of BitCoin has shot through the roof, going from 40 to 95 (versus the USD) in a matter of days. A year ago, it was a strange thing that only weirdos like me and Max Keiser took seriously – now you can read about it in Bloomberg and other “serious” media outlets. This whole episode is actually an amazing example of how emergence works in complex systems. I wouldn’t say I “predicted” the rise of BitCoin, but it seemed like a fascinating idea, I interviewed as many of the founders as possible, tracked its development – and when the right moment produced itself, BOOM. BitCoin is now A Thing.

The big question – WILL BITCOIN REPLACE THE EURO AND THE DOLLAR?

Answer: No. BitCoin isn’t designed for that scale, and the complexity of global finance is, ahem, not a good fit for this particular scheme. But the fact that we have to ask the question is awesome. The world has been gripped by this financial “crisis” that always seems to require bailouts and austerity and more central power and super-wealthy people getting super-wealthier while you forgo clean socks. And the flare-ups of new crises appear so well timed and, shucks, they just never seem to get fixed.

This design failure and managerial incompetence is resulting in a tremendous amount of pent-up energy. People are generally unhappy about the state of things, but the more centralized that our systems have become, the less change can be affected on the dominant system. But all that energy has to go somewhere…

Enter BitCoin. The excitement about this system that isn’t quite ready for prime time isn’t so much about the digital currency itself. It is more about a broad willingness to try something new. And that is a wonderful thing to experience.

Here’s a reality check. If you want to make life better, you are going to need to try something new, weird and flawed. Right now, there are entrepreneurs all over the world who are obsessed about a strange idea that could improve our collective destiny if only more people took it seriously. This idea might be a platform for indie publishing, crowdsourcing applications for scientific discovery, or this awesome weirdo who wants to rekindle the agricultural trade between Vermont and New York City using sailboats like it was still 1770.

All of these cool ideas have something in common – they are dwarfed by the amount of power and investment in the institutions of the dominant paradigm. As a result, they don’t inspire as much trust as an institution that operates out of a building with giant marble columns, or even a digital venture that has massive capitalization. These innovations also stand a chance at actually improving the world, as opposed to the existing systems which appear so very reluctant to reform.

You must embrace the weird stuff

So here’s your call to action. If you want a better world, you can’t just go through life using all tried-and-true products and services. If you agree that the world is in a tight spot, and gosh darnit somebody ought to change it – the onus is on you to act differently. You are going to need to start doing business with freaks. You need to get a subscription (yes, for MONEY) to that blog you like so much. You have to drop a few bucks on Kickstarter when you see something amazing that needs to come into existence. Ever do car sharing? Well you might need to try.

There is risk involved here – you may run into some problems. The people with whom you are doing business might be better at vision than execution. There will be flaws and false starts. And you need to get over that and take the risk anyhow. We cannot have the comfort of old, timeworn-yet-stupid systems and expect the world to magically improve. If we’re creating a world that is in a perpetual beta, then we need to be beta testers, calmly pointing out how to improve things while remembering that the creators bore us no malice in their errors.

If you’re like me,  you already love weird, so this isn’t a big stretch. Maybe you like weird, too. Then it’s incumbent upon us to convince our siblings, parents and colleagues, the cautious ones who own the four-door family sedans with the best crash test ratings, to try out something new that needs our support.

This is the fundamental insight that keeps me whistling in the mornings. Yes, some things in this world are a hopeless mess (the European currency scheme, for just one example) but there are thousands of brilliant ideas popping up the world over that will make this a more prosperous, verdant and humane place to live if we but give them a little trust.

I’m in – are you?

The post You have to try weird stuff is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

Yesterday we covered the sudden spike in the value of BitCoin, a virtual, nation-state-free currency that is back by software instead of institutional fiat. I have been tracking it for around eighteen months in my study of emerging alt-economies, and in that time it has gone from an occult project for libertarian hackers to a market indicator that gets followed on Wall Street. As far the currency is concerned, this week will be of historical significance. BitCoin saw a parabolic jump in its trade with the U.S. Dollar following the financial catastrophe in the tiny EuroZone nation of Cyprus. Upon the mere mention of a proposal to seize bank deposits as a “bailout tax,” local Cypriots flooded toward ATM machines and (evidently) several Russian oligarchs began looking toward alternative locales to sluice their spare petro-bucks. Simultaneously, the value of BitCoin shot through the roof.

Why?

Is it because BitCoin is well designed as a replacement for the currency that currently operates enormous economies in seventeen industrialized nations? Could it possibly be used as a replacement for the currency that underlies trillions in financial instruments, corporate debt, sovereign debt and more? Not even close.

What does Bitcoin mean? What does all this signal? A crisis of faith.

The market is telling the world’s central bankers that their attempts to neatly control all of the world’s economic activity from a handful of cities (controlled by apparatchiks from a handful of universities) are a failure. Whereas in the 1990s and 2000s, globalization grew based on uniformity and “best practices” – almost always emanating from the West, it seems that One Size will not Fit All for the 2010s and beyond. We got our first taste of this failure in 2008 with the sudden announcement that if the United States did not agree to prop up its Too Big to Fail banks (while continuing to pay bonuses, natch) then Everything Would Blow Up. Within a year, that same crisis visited European shores for reasons of sovereign debt more than subprime mortgage paper. The root cause of the West’s problems are the same – corruption has been flourishing under these gigantic institutions that are proving unmanageable by even our most stalwart and confident technocrats. Whether it’s Paulson or Bernanke or Geithner or Monti or Juncker or Paris Hilton, there’s really nobody capable of managing the complexity that goes on under the smooth surface of these currency schemes.

Bitcoin is just one option that is finding renewed interest in the wake of managerial failure. Local currencies have been on the rise from Germany to the UK and beyond, usually accompanying a more holistic rebirth of local economic control. Irrespective of how sanguine Frau Merkel is about the EuroZone project, average Germans are getting sick of worrying about how bad a bunch of sunburned nap-takers are at managing their own bank accounts. They are looking closer to home for their economic future, in everything from what they buy to how they buy it.

For those looking to disparage the surge of Bitcoin because of its connection to illicit activity or its unlikeliness to replace the Euro, perhaps you are technically right. But the real story here is in a people getting closer to supporting brand new, and likely smaller, institutions that will carry their social values better than the current batch of risk-prone financial systems.

The post The Bitcoin surge is a crisis of faith is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

Today I did a webinar for my friends at Aurora WDC entitled How to Spot and Cope with Emerging Transitions in Complex Systems for Organizational Stability. Basically, how do you deal with chaotic transformation when you are a large institution?

This may sound awfully close to that thing called intelligence which I repudiated not so long ago. The fact is, two words that used to be very important for me – future and intelligence - are actually expunged from my vocabulary. I no longer believe in that thing called intelligence that came out of the 1980s and 90s. I think it is based on the notion that one group of people in an organization will be privy to all the most important information, and that they will give out the answers to decision makers as asked. That worldview is hierarchical and static and no longer makes sense.

These days, I believe more than ever in analysts, people whose job it is to collect, interpret and disseminate information. It’s just that their role will be peer-to-peer, not hierarchical. The use of this information will be real-time, not published. It will be about dialogue, not certainty. Moreover, these learning communities will pop up, ad hoc style, to provide value when and where it is needed, rather than being an everyday part of an institution. The tools we learned in the previous three decades of “intelligence” will be useful as a guide, much in the same way that the medical profession learns older methods and speeds right past them as some as new innovations are available.

This new approach to what was once called “intelligence” is the only way I think organizations will rise to their newest challenges – spotting the emergence of new dynamics out of complex, interconnected systems.

The slides I used are below. As soon as the presentation is available, I will let everybody know in this space.

The post How to spot emergence in complex systems is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

As a contributing writer to The Atlantic, I have been closely following the controversy that has erupted since Nate Thayer stepped forth to publicly expose your payment practices of freelance contributors. The statements from your leadership and staff editors around this issue of failing to pay trained, experienced adult professionals have exposed glaring inconsistencies and intellectual failings that tarnish the reputation of your organization and threaten your credibility.

Given that The Atlantic Media Group is one of many companies posting record profits and yet pushing its labor force into accepting little or no pay, I watched closely to see how your organization would handle this public relations exercise. Since economic inequity is the great story of our age, I assumed that the finest minds in America, residing putatively at The Atlantic, would be able to muster a searingly deep introspection about what this means and where to go from here. At the very least, I wondered if the leaders of your institution might fall on their sword, deliver a heartfelt mea maxima culpa and explain how this sort of thing will never happen again.

The real performance of your organization in the past few days has fallen well beneath that standard. Let us start with Editor-In-Chief James Bennet’s quickly released public statement of March 5th. In it he states, “When we publish original, reported work by freelancers, we pay them.” This sounds like a clear statement that this kind of thing has been one big misunderstanding. He then follows up with: “Our freelance rates vary, depending on the kind of work involved. We do publish some unpaid pieces, typically analysis or commentary by non-journalists, if the work meets our standards and if, of course, the writer sees value in publishing with us.” And so the initial declarative statement is immediately followed by Washington-style wiggle room. Then Mr. Bennet continues: “The case involving Nate Thayer is unusual.”

That statement is disingenuous. Based on my own experience and that of several of my colleagues who have contributed to The Atlantic’s digital operation, the offer to Mr. Thayer was not at all unusual, but in fact the standard operating procedure of your publication. For my part, I have had multiple of your editors tell me upon our first communications, “We unfortunately do not have money to pay you.” Not that you prefer not to pay writers if you are not forced to, but that you actually have no budget. This is a common and amusingly transparent negotiation tactic, usually delivered by a doe-eyed newbie editor who may in fact believe it. It is galling – The Atlantic maintains Class A office space in one of the most prestigious buildings in the world, a gorgeous setting overlooking the Potomac from the Watergate Building, but it claims that it hasn’t got any money at all to pay its contributing writers.

In my experience, once a writer informs you that he or she has other options, your editors often come back to the negotiating table to arrive at a price. I played along with this kabuki precisely once, and only because unlike Mr. Thayer I did not have a history of magazine bylines. (I was, however, a two-time, internationally published author of books.) When I submitted my second piece, I negotiated a reasonable price with your editors.

As you know, many millions of Americans have found themselves with sharply reduced or completely destroyed livelihoods since the financial crisis of 2008. It is likely the most important story of our current age, a cleverly obscured Great Depression. During this troubling moment we have had a nearly complete failure of the authoritative institutions of a free, democratic society – our legislature, civil government service, judiciary, financial institutions and so on. The Media, of which your organization is a prominent member, has tragically abetted this failure, supplanting credulousness for skepticism and genuflection for fearlessness at a time when we required a global discussion about this sudden traumatic renegotiation of our collective fortunes. Or to put it more plainly, The Media has largely stood by while an organized gang of financial criminals picked the world’s pockets.

This is the real state of affairs in the world, as we all strain to create a cognitive framework to make our lives seem normal and tolerable. This is the backdrop against which the controversy with Mr. Thayer has erupted. The last five excruciating years are why the story of yet one more organization trying to skinflint its workers created a swift outcry. If you feel that your past reputation should have guarded you against such criticism, let me state, on the contrary – it is your positive past reputation that exacerbates the situation. For if even the great and venerable Atlantic is part of this new era of pocket-picking, where does that leave us? If a journalist climbs to the top of the heap by developing sharp analytical skills and strong prose, is able to be courted by The Atlantic and still finds him or herself asked to work for little or nothing, where does that leave the rest of us?

As this crisis continues to spread silently throughout the land, talented, hardworking people have decreasing options for stable, long-term, family-feeding, future-securing jobs. As unemployed time goes on and savings accounts run dry, many people are praying for any kind of break. They perceive that writing in a prestigious magazine – even for free – would be that break. Things were not quite this bad several years ago, but now they are. You have leverage at the negotiating table – and you use it every time you can to secure the much-touted profitability of your website. This is the real reason your new editor reached out on purpose to offer a veteran journalist the “opportunity” to spend his time editing a 4000-word essay into a 1200-word piece suitable for your magazine for zero dollars. Many people are more desperate and less proud than Mr. Thayer, a behavioral tick that the men who write your paycheck take to the bank.

This is what caused a simple blog post consisting of a few routine administrative emails between a new editor and a journalist to flare up into a crisis of conscience over your publication. Your negotiation tactics mimic exactly those who would continue to fleece what remains of the Middle Class in this and other nations, while maintaining a leering smile that this is all normal.

That your college tuition goes up while your job opportunities go down – this is normal.

That the executives of your company received raises while your compensation is frozen, soon to be devoured by the increasing cost of healthcare. – this is normal.

That jobs in your chosen industry have gone from 40 hours a week with benefits to 32 hours a week with no benefits – this is normal.

That you might have to get your parents to pay for you to work for free in a major city for months or years in the hopes that an internship will become a job – this is normal.

And that you shall now compete for jobs with those willing to work for “exposure” – don’t get excited, this is now normal.

It is not normal and it is not right. The way the staff of The Atlantic has handled this situation has betrayed such a lack of understanding of the common plight of Americans, that one can scarcely trust your judgments in other matters. If the people running The Atlantic cannot understand the depth of suffering caused by this economy, the most obvious issue of our day, then why should readers trust you on anything?

There is no reason that your organization cannot compensate skilled, professional adults for their labor as a matter of course. You could have publicly agreed to raise your absolute minimum compensation to $50, something, a show of solidarity and understanding with the society in which you hope to maintain influence. That is, unless the proportion of free content on your website is in fact higher than you insinuated in James Bennet’s letter of March 5th.

As a contrast to the economic story you tell would-be contributing writers, your publication recently crowed about its record-breaking revenues, stemming from the success of its digital model. To have one more institution bragging about record profits while negotiating its laborers to the end of their ropes is too much to bear.

Based on your recent behavior, your institution cannot be trusted to challenge the status quo and speak truth to power when its behavior mimics the very practices that make this an age of suffering for so many.

The post An open letter to The Atlantic regarding the payment of workers is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

One of the great hustles of the post-Crisis economy is the insinuation that every person entrenched at a powerful institution ascended to their post after a long period of getting “exposure” by producing high-quality work for free. Since the average 23 year old intern does not have the experience to automatically detect this as the Three Card Monte flim-flam that it is, let me briefly provide my experience as a 38 year old who is well entrenched in his career.

I did not ever work for free as a young man. You should not, either.

I began my career at my father’s farm store in Rutland, Vermont back in 1987. I was paid the princely sum of $3.30 per hour, the Vermont state minimum wage. My duties included stacking bags of cow manure, horse feed, seed, and of course the GIGANTIC MENHIRS OF ICY PEAT MOSS EXTRACTED STRAIGHT OUT OF THE FROZEN CANADIAN SHIELD.

Starting at age 13, I was paid as an official employee – nothing was done under the table. My father then confiscated 50% of the post-tax compensation to place in a fund for my first year of college, the rest being allowed to finance guitars. For those of you adept at math, my post-tax, post-college-fund income was around $1.00 per hour – but it was something.

Every single job I had after that icy, filthy experience also included compensation – Kentucky Fried Chicken, The Super Store (appliance warehouse), Video Superstore, the Radisson, and ultimately, upon leaving university, my first job in the world of competitive intelligence, which I obtained with a bachelor’s degree at age 23, paying $27,000 annually.

The only exception was my internship in Paris working at the American Chamber of Commerce in France, where I was not paid, but I received far and away one of the most important educations of my career.

Coming from rural Vermont and lacking anything that resembled professional, sophisticated polish, working at the highest level of European society was like a sudden bath in Lake Champlain in February. I learned with brutal rapidity how much I lacked in terms of poise and social grace. My position at the front desk of the Chamber required me to immediately interact with any member of francophone or anglophone society in English or French on the phone or in person – on any subject they chose pertaining to American business interests. My English was riddled with an awkward informality typical to young men in general and Vermont in specific. My French, though fluent, had been picked up from grandmothers, truck drivers and hockey commentators from nearby Quebec, and so I sounded like a 20-something lumberjack. These linguistic inadequacies were cauterized from my speech pattern through mockery and the sheer discomfort that came with my growing awareness of what I was lacking – in both of my languages.

My written French was subjected to a training regimen I would have received nowhere else. In 1995, the Internet was not yet prevalent in French business, and the old system remained dominant – utterly formal written communications. The United States had long since jettisoned the notion of formality in business writing, while the French still ended even simple letters with “Je vous prie d’agréer, cher Monsieur, l’expression de mes sentiments les plus distingués.” (“I beg to you to recognize, dear Sir, the expression of my most distinguished sentiments.”) Il n’y avait pas de LOLs, mes amis.

I tried releasing a business communication once without sending it through three layers of proof-reading, so young and cocky was I. The following morning, the dapper and sophisticated Executive Director of the Chamber came silently by my desk and floated ever-so-gently my fax from the day before, marked up in twenty places with blood red correction ink. The errors were subtle, but numerous - subjunctives, adjective gender agreements in secondary clauses, misspellings. The French have a saying: c’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute. It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.

He did not stay for the boucherie to follow, leaving the task of brutal grammatical discipline to my immediate superior, who informed me with extraordinary gravity that, Mister Garland, this is an international chamber of commerce, and we do not ever release communications that exhibit even one single error in any language.

Ouch. OUCH. Lesson learned.

For this experience, I paid $13,000 for six months, an outrageous sum for the time. It was the costliest investment of my university years, and the best. This investment was defined: it was a specific set of enriching experiences I could get nowhere else, lasting a predetermined duration, with a single price tag.

Less than two years later I turned this experience into a series of jobs that required such unusual skills, all of which paid enough money for me to meet my daily obligations. I did not, nor have I ever done work for which I am already trained for free.

Compare this with the modern scam of asking trained adults to do work for which they are qualified for free as a way to introduce their faces to the industry. This “exposure” is often not a particularly rare commodity, it could last indefinitely, and the amount of free labor is never agreed upon in advance.

That’s not an enriching experience. It’s an impoverishing experience.

Young people, I hope you recognize the difference.

The post Do not work for free is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

Geena Davis has apparently become a Big Data geek and decided to prove mathematically that Hollywood systematically undervalues women.

Dude, did you know that Hollywood has the same balance of male versus female roles than it did in 1946? Well, Geena did the math.

This is a very cool talk, and speaking as the father of a little girl, one that will definitely inform our house’s entertainment choices going into the future.

The post Geena Davis: We’re raising a generation that still sees women as inferior is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

“Money – it don’t make me happy, but it sure does pay the bills.” – Cree Rider 

America’s national relationship to money has become perverse and comical, like some sub-sub-sub-group of the Craigslist personals. You look at what people desire and laugh at how little sense it makes with observable reality, and you wonder what it really reveals about our society.

Lately, my colleagues and I are tracking the terrible proliferation of non-paid and under-paid labor in America’s Permanent Crisis Economy. Sarah Kendzior has been doggedly exposing the plight of academics, who work in a neofeudalist system while getting their degrees, and who afterward are forced to either work for poverty-level wages or leave the field to which they just dedicated their young adult life.

Monica Nixon is relentlessly fisking the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to show that not only are many more people unemployed than is officially reported, millions of jobs are being converted from well-paying full time positions into health insurance-free, unstable, poverty-level part-time jobs.

Joshua Foust was willing to face heat from his Washington DC employers for writing a piece about the unfairness of the pervasive use of unpaid interns in Washington DC, a piece illustrated even more richly in Hannah Seligson’s Washingtonian piece entitled “The Age of the Permanent Intern.”

The theme in all of these articles is the epidemic of adult-age people in America working for amounts of money that cannot pay the bills, a behavior they are expected to continue well into their late twenties and early thirties, depending on the industry.

Cross-reference this with a recent OpEd by the president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, who penned “Don’t Judge a College’s Value by Graduate’s Paycheck,” as a response to criticism that university education’s pricetag has skyrocketed even as the economy has tanked and wages have sunk to their lowest level in the post-War economic era. After comparing the situation of today’s youth to the economy she inherited as a Baby Boomer – the largest economic expansion in the history of man – she concludes, “Equating the value of education with the size of a first paycheck badly distorts broader principles and commitments essential to our society and our future.”

From every institution in the United States, there is a message broadcast on all channels to America’s educated youth that hopes to enter active economic life, ‘Dude, why are you all hung up on money? RELAAAAAAAX!”

Take a step back, take a deep breath and consider this message in the context of the rest of American life. Are you breathing?

WOW, WHAT AN AMAZING LOAD OF BULLSHIT. 

First, let us revisit one of the fundamental tenets of American life, present since Alexis de Toqueville wrote Democracy in America: Money matters in America. We don’t have official royalty, and the whole place is designed around economic growth and opportunity, so we elevate our wealthy to serve as our social and cultural elite. It’s a capitalist Divine Right of Kings, if you will. This country was founded by protestant Puritans, followers of Jean Calvin’s beliefs that God smiles on those he intends to save and gives them position and wealth in this life before granting them eternal paradise. For both philosophical and practical reasons, Americans believe that, in general, if you are rich, it is because you earned it, and if you are poor, it is because you earned that, too.

For the love of Pete, we elevate the Kardashian family to fame and fortune, despite their being about  as useful and attractive as a plantar’s wart. But no matter – if you are rich in America, it must be an admirable thing.

Let us take the non-famous. When you go back to your ten and twenty year reunion, your old classmates are wondering How are you doing?  What are you doing for work? Where do you live? What kind of car did you drive up in? Are you in a dead-end job or are you successful, prominent and…RICH?

Sorry, I’m laughing as I write this – why even detail the importance of money in American life? It is the most obvious thing about this culture.

And that’s why the official stance of these broken, obsolete institutions is so funny. They are looking at America’s young people and honestly asking with a straight face - hey, what do you need money for, anyway? YOU SHOULD BE FULFILLED JUST TO BE WORKING HERE! YOU’RE LUCKY TO HAVE A CHANCE…

Sorry, as the kids would say, LOLOLOLOLOLOOLZZZ.

Note: NOBODY IS ASKING THIS OF THE EXECUTIVE CLASS RIGHT NOW. Did you by any chance notice this minor inconstency in the messaging? Executive compensation rates have actually increased since the “crisis” of 2008. And what is the rationale behind this?

Oh, we can’t risk losing the talent! 

Heavens to Betsy, even though all the money is on fire and people are losing their jobs left and right, we couldn’t possible ask the CEO to  receive less than a 10% increase this year! Why, these jobs are so, so, so special, if we asked the executives to receive the same compensation as last year, THEY MIGHT LEAVE! They might go to Belize or South Sudan and run a university there! Or Upper Mongolia could steal them away to run a healthcare company there! So, please, for our mutual future, you must realize that money is very important to these people.

But wait! No! I mean fulfillment is very important! You must be fulfilled by your potential future, not by that filthy, sensuous lucre! What did you need that money for anyhow? You’re only 28. Or 33. You have a long career ahead of you. You can get paid later! After all, we don’t have budget for interns this year. We used that money to increase executive pay at a rate five times greater than the cost of living. Because the economy is terrible right now! And we’re at all time record highs of corporate cash reserves and profits. But it’s terrible! Hey – why are you getting angry? YOU KIDS TODAY EXPECT SO MUCH!

I take it back. That stuff in Backpage and Craiglist is way less freaky.

The post You didn’t really want that sexy dirty money, did you? is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

Several of my sources around the world are predicting disruptions in global markets later this year based on something most people take for granted – shipping. It appears that there is a great mismatch between the number of ships, the price of fuel, and the amount of goods being trafficked around the world. And while the reaction to this imbalance is not immediate, the piper must be paid eventually. Or not paid. Sort of like the shipping companies that are not paying their bills, leaving many banks worried about their exposure to bad debt.

Shipping is in the middle of the worst downturn since the 1980s, said Martin Stopford, president of the research division of Clarkson Plc, the world’s biggest shipbroker.

Ten German banks have 98 billion euros ($129 billion) in shipping loans between them, according to Moody’s Investors Service. German banks’ exposure to Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain totals about $360 billion, including bonds and lending to governments, banks and the private sector, figures compiled by Bloomberg Industries show.

HSH Nordbank has outstanding loans of 29 billion euros on about 2,800 vessels, said Nieswandt. The closely held company said on a December conference call shipping accounted for “the lion’s share” of 458 million euros in net loan-loss provisions, or money set aside for nonperforming loans, in the third quarter.

Wait, if there’s a global recovery, why aren’t people shipping more goods, or at least much as before? Isn’t GDP growing again? Why would this most fundamental industry find itself with too many ships competing for too few cargoes if GDP is growing slowly?

Quartz has part of the story, with this fascinating tidbit about how Asia is reacting to softness in its trade with Europe by simply trading with its neighbors:

Consider this in the context of the sickening of the American retail market, detailed compellingly in the Atlantic. Just have a look at the number of jobs that have been stripped out of America’s overblown retail sector since 2001:

Something is clear – the pattern of consumption is changing in a very significant way, and the infrastructure of business may not be able to absorb the shock gracefully. It is in the interest of bankers, ad-seeking media and government tax collectors to keep your “consumer confidence” as high as possible, so that you keep consuming these (Asian-produced, cargo ship-dependant) goods in the way you have in recent years – but one gets the sense that this isn’t really possible. The Transition is simply bigger than all that, and denying its existence is like sweeping back the ocean with a broom.

Keep an eye out in the coming months for news about banks being rocked by shipping companies unable to pay their bills – but don’t forget to ask why this is happening in the first place.

The post WORST SINCE THE 1980s: Global shipping unable to pay its bills is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift

Right on time, the media is rekindling its affair with Futurists, the love that dare not speak its name.

The cycle is the most predictable thing in all of predictology – as we blossom into the mania of Boom and Bust, the media becomes enamored of these exotic creatures that call themselves experts in the study of what’s next. Who Are These Futurists, and What Can They Tell Us? Lately, I have seen several major consultancies launch “foresight” services, business magazines are speaking glowingly about these useful forward-looking chaps, and even Al Gore’s new book is nothing but classic futurist material, entitled THE FUTURE. It’s as if we’re back in the good old days of Thinking About a Shiny Future! Hooray!

Full disclosure: I am one such Futurist, though I have become a very public critic of the field itself and its relationship to organizations. I have been in the field long enough to see several Boom/Busts where foresight is concerned. And after the drubbing foresight took in the last five years, I see the current uptick in references to foresight as nefarious.

Our collective desire to go back to The Future is not the same thing as appreciating Foresight.

Here’s what I mean: The Future is about tech-driven growth of the current model. It is the media-friendly version of futurism, the one that focuses 90% on gadgets, 5% on new business models, and at maximum 5% on dystopian visions of a world gone completely wrong. It’s a pep rally for the big and the splashy, driven largely by trends in technology, awash in venture capital. Economic fundamentals, social trends and philosophy are last to be invited the party, arriving only in time for the hangover, The Bust.

Foresight is a balanced approach, one that encourages us to consider all of the trends in front us: emerging technologies, eroding liberties, economic inequality, new values, potential risks. This version of looking ahead isn’t just obsessed with shiny toys and lots of money; it exists outside of Boom and Bust and abhors easily predictable speculative bubbles. It is always the type of thinking that is first to go in a crisis, as we saw when thoughtful futurism was shown the door after the traumatic events of 2001 and 2008. Internal foresight groups got fired. Innovation was forsaken in favor of short-term security and cash flow management. Authority trumped imagination.

I say you should ignore this new round of future giddiness entirely – unless you are also interested in figuring out why we refuse to consider a balanced approach to foresight when we need it most – as a way to avoid man-made financial catastrophes and as a way to choose humane solutions for society.

If you aren’t going to appreciate foresight for its true usefulness, spare me your obsession with gadgets and money

>>>>>>>>

My second book, How to Predict the Future…and WIN!!! is a satire that shows how executives can look ahead without repeating the mistakes of other businesses that got the future wrong. Free sample chapter.

The post FORGET FUTURISTS: Unless you plan on doing futurism right is from Eric Garland | future trend analysis, social change, economic shift