Talent imitates, genius steals

This is Water

2013-05-19T22:17:42+01:00

This is Water.

This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life [Kindle Edition] by David Foster Wallace, is one of my all time favorite pieces of writing.

When I first read it, I bought literally dozens of copies and gave them to people for birthdays and leaving gifts and because it seemed like they should read it.

It was written as a speach. A very unusal commencement speach.

One that profoundly impacted me when I read it, and continues to every time I read it or hear it.

It's lovely to listen to DFW deliver it. His voice is mellifluous, with just enough American twang.

I feel a sense of wonder at how clearly he thinks, and how clearly he thinks about thinking.

I feel slightly ashamed, and understood, and finally redeemed, slightly, when he says:

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.

and I resolve to try a little harder to remember that This is Water.

I think of it, in some ways, as a reflection on an aspect of the fundamental attribution error, which is the tendency to overestimate the impact of choice, personality, agency and underestimate situational factors when interpreting the behaviour of others.

So, for example, when someone is late to a meeting, it's the driver to assume that they are disrespectful or lazy or rude, rather than assume that something happened outside of their control. We tend to correct for this when considering our own lateness, because we know that the train was late.

So I was delighted to see someone

[someone being The Glossary - also check out their lovely trailer for the Cory Doctorow novella The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.]

has turned it into a rather beautiful film.

But it is an edited version, so do go and read the whole thing, or listen to DFW give it here.

On the Road

2013-05-14T23:53:56+01:00

Hello!

After 5 lovely years in New York, I recently left the city and my job, sold my furniture and my stake in the agency we started, started an innovation practice, got engaged and went out on the road.

It felt like a good time for me to be flexible.

This year I will mostly be speaking and consulting and teaching and writing and that. Looking to learn some new things and get nicer and hopefully smarter by travelling and letting it open my eyes. After five years habituation stops me seeing, even in cities as amazing as New York.

I've been doing some fun innovation projects for nice clients under my newly minted GeniusSteals banner, that took me to Brazil and Beijing earlier this year.

I wrote the first chapter of the upcoming book Digital State, published by Kogan Page, due June 2013.

Below are a few places I will be speaking in the next few weeks and months. We'll be traveling in between. I'm interested in exploring Asia a bit more after visiting China. I feel culturally ignorant of the region that contains more than half the world's population.

[I'm also interested in speaking and meeting nice people over in SEAsia before or after the Sydney gig, so do drop me a line if there's something your putting on that you think I'd be a good fit for. Or if you fancy a beer.]

ADC Hamburg, Germany - May 16th and 17th

I'm delivering the closing keynote on the first day, and then Rosie and I are speaking about collaboration on the 17th.

IAB Croatia Days of Communiction - May 18th

B&T MadWeek Innovation Day Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Australia July 15th

Do come say hello if you will be at any of them and do shout if you'd like to grab a beer while we're on the road.

I Love Your Work

2013-05-03T07:58:31+01:00

I remember opening the door to my old apartment, in a converted church building on 16th Street, about 3 years ago and seeing it was Jonathan Harris.

My friend Ela had asked if he could stay, of course, but I wasn't quite sure if it was the one I had heard of.

She was due to be staying with us, as she often had and subsequently did when she had shoots in NYC.

She is a courteous and charming houseguest and always welcome in our home.

This time, she called and said that an artist was following her around the day of her shoot as part of a project he was working on, and had asked to spend that night at ours with her. The artist would follow a different actress every day, and the producer / director at the top and tail, to capture all ten days of the shoot from every point of view, spreading out in time to cover both before and after. Waking up and going to bed.

Seemed cool and we happily agreed to host them both.

We hung out, drank wine, chatted about porn and the internet and media and being watched, had dinner, and every 5 minutes Jonathan would film 10 seconds of footage.

I may have gotten a bit ranty, especially after dinner and in my cups [it's been known to happen] and I was defintely proud of our new Roomba.

You can see all this in the interactive film I Love Your Work, as a very tiny part of a remarkable content experience, explored through a variety of beautiful interfaces. The interactive documentry explores the private lives of nine women who make lesbian porn, but the piece is also exploring points of view, narrative, time and interaction. The 'tapestry' navigation, seen above, is somewhat reminiscent of the classic Whale Hunt, but updated for film.

It's the side of porn you never see, real people and their real thoughts and dreams, moments of intense sensuality, moments of boredom. Intimate and occasionally uncomfortable, as art should be, perhaps, and definitively of and for the web.

Do you remember when WeFeelFine came out?

It was a big deal.

It was beautiful and smart, emotive, dynamic, art based on technology that explored real people expressing feelings online for what seemed like the first time.

This was back in 2006.

There were no social media strategists or ideas or campaigns or reports or anythings at the time.

There were no social listening tools. Radian6 was in the process of being formed, and I think they were the first.

Infographics hadn't become annoying, data vizualisation was just becoming a thing on the web.

[In fact it wasn't until 2008 that Noah and I wrote about it in a piece called 'Ways of Seeing' for Contagious.

Talking about WeFeelFine, we quote Jonathan:

"This is very important to me in the work that I produce: the way something is expressed visually corresponds to the nature of the thing being expressed." and the go on to suggest that "the gap between how something looks and what it means is eroded in the art of visualization", which seems to be something that has been lost in the deluge of infographics that now litter the web.]

That evening I asked Jonathan how he intended to display the piece. He told me, under the condition that I didn't 'steal the idea for a brand'.

Wondering about the ubiquity of content that was coming, and understanding that value is, usually, a function of scarcity, he was going to charge each online viewer $10 for a ticket to the show [10% of tickets sales is being donated to the sex workers union] and only allow 10 tickets to be issued each day.

So, go over to ILoveYourWork, and get in line.

Present Shock

2013-04-17T17:33:23+01:00

Thanks to an invitation from Mr and Mrs Schiller, I got to go to a launch party for Douglas Rushkoff's new book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now [Kindle Edition] a week or two ago at Meet at the Apartment.

I've just finished it and am letting it gestate but I'm pretty sure you should read it...

right now.... [Well, it's only appropriate.]

...and that it's awesome.

[In my preferred understanding of the word, it's original meaning, evoking awe, epic in scale, adjusting your view of reality.]

In 2009, I wrote a piece for Fast Company about the diminishing Cultural Latency that increased speed of communication was inevitably leading to.

I suggested one way to take advantage of this diminished latency was to respond faster to events in culture - for brands this would be low latency advertising.

Speed wasn't so much the idea, as alacrity - the ability to respond fast, not simply move faster.

This began to happen, finally coalesing as Real Time Marketing [which I think is an inaccurate and misleading term but anyway], and acheiving an apotheoisis in the SuperBowl Blackout tweet from Oreo, and fall from grace during the Oscars, because alacrity is not the same thing as planning communication alongside things you know will happen next week.

5 minutes [the time it took to get the Oreo tweet concepted, designed, approved and out] may be the latency threshold, meaning there isn't much further to push the idea, so perhaps 'Newsjacking', is now simply a part of the world of blended PR and communications.

I'm not sure anyone really wants a world of 24 hours agencies, so we can add Shift Worker Sleep Disorder to our existing list of industry neuroses.

Rushkoff's speaks to this in the book, but roams a much, much wider brief, covering the history of time, the shift to infinite games that are played not to win but to continue [think WoW], the financial collapse predicated on a financial system [central currencies and interest] built on time, and then threatened by unsustainable beliefs in endless growth, and the abstractions like derivatives tha collapse future value into a present contract you can trade.

How zombies and the singularity are expresssions of simliar concerns in the present [our media has ever shown us what we are worried about most].

It's a fascinating book, far from the "one idea, many annecdote/ case studies" model where reading the first chapter may be all you need or have time for, instead jam-packed with ideas and observations about the world as it is now, and has helped me in trying to think beyond the endless now of real time marketing, for a talk I'm writing for some upcoming speaking gigs.

[I'm often asked to speak about the future, which, as I observed here, is usually a veiled requst to decode the weirdness of the present.]

He speaks to one of the inherent problems of social media marketing as approached by older, larger companies, one identified in abstact back in Cluetrain.

Social media, creating semi-permeable membranes between companies and their customers, screams for genuine transparency - this was the promise we made to ourselves and the industy - which inevitably leads to a refocusing on behavior and away from messaging:

As strange and naive as it may sound, this means abandonning communications as some separate task, and instead just doing all the right things that you want talked about.[Present Shock]

[Or Be Nice IRL, as I put it in a talk once.]

This means, well, you have to be acting like the brand you want to be, not just make utterances that speak to that idea, and that storytelling that do not correspond to behavior collapses:

That is easier said than done. I regularly receive calls for help from companies and organizations looking to become more transparent.

The trouble is, many of them don't really do anything they can reveal to the public.

An American television manufacturer that "wanted to get more social" with its communcations strategy didn't realize this would be impossible now it no longer designs or makes its television sets. (It outsourced both functions). [Present Shock].

Rushkoff writes as he speaks, fast, asssociative, pulling in thoughts and ideas from all over, all at once.

It's a fun ride, with a strong point of view, and I suspect will be framing the debate of our time[s] for, well, for now at least, and I, suspect, will be considered seminal in the future, if we ever get there.

Studying Cases

2013-04-10T16:30:49+01:00

I was on my way to the One Club to help judge the finalists of the digital Young Ones awards last night, and, as is sometimes the way of things, the universe used coincidence to tell me something...

"The thing about coincidence is that when you imagine the umpteen trillions of coincidences that can happen at any given moment, the fact is, that in practice, coincidences almost never do occur.

Coincidences are actually so rare that when they do occur they are, in fact memorable.

This suggests to me that the universe is designed to ward off coincidence whenever possible—the universe hates coincidence—I don’t know why—it just seems to be true.

So when a coincidence happens, that coincidence had to work awfully hard to escape the system.

There’s a message there. What is it? Look. Look harder." - Douglas Copeland in This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works, [Kindle edition] via Brainpicker.

OK I'm not sure about ascribing the universe agency, it smacks of anthropormorphic hubris, but I do believe ideas are new combinations, and when synchronicities happen, they only happen because of your particular, personal, pattern engine and frankly I see them as a freebee.

Max Ahlborn, one of the partners of awesome integrated production crew B-Reel, tweeted a link to a case study we had made a couple of years back...while judging the One Show Interactive.

You can see it above. Fun. Everyone else in the video is far better at comedy than I am.

But the serious point we, thanks to Max, were trying to make, is to avoid lazy cliche in everything, especially the much maligned case study, and especially the seemingly ubiquitous 'no media spend' claims.

[A point he makes in this Creativity article.]

Personally, I think case studies are necessary for several reasons.

I think the oft-levied challenge that they distract resources from the work is functionally analagous to claiming that packaged goods companies shouldn't waste their time making advertisements, since case studies and awards function like advertising for the agency.

Showing work that is experiential and systemic in nature is very difficult any other way [apart from actually having all the experiences, which would take forever, and be impracticle in the case of, say, events in foreign countries that have already happened, or branded pieces of content that last hours.]

Equally, not all work is designed to achieve the same ends, and, to some degree, when we judge work, we are juding the creativity in reference to the objective - these are advertising, not art, awards, after all.

Cultural resonance and nuance can be highlighted that may be lost on juries who can't reflect all the cultures of the world.

[This is where the inevitable barrage of blog mentions are often used. If an idea got reported on during the nightly news in a country, clearly something happened.

Getting coverage in a trade blog isn't quite the same thing, of course, but I guess it's better than if even the industry paid the idea no attention at all.]

And finding ways to package and merchandise work effectively, in a world now filled with an infinte amount of content, is important for every agency and brand manager.

But cliche is cloying, and when judging we watch literally hundreds of these videos over a few days, so endlessly repeated cliche is very hard to deal with.

So, if you are making case studies, think about the audience and context of reception, and apply the same creativity to the now-calcified case study format as you would any other piece.

[When media forms take on stable grammar, it's an ideal time to disrupt that grammar for creative effect. Just saying'...]

For more, here's a presentation I gave for the Clio awards about making awesome case studies, with lots of good examples.

[Adverblog has a great post with more tips, like never use your own hosted video player! Use Youtube. It works and is faster. If the video hangs on your player and server, and we are watching hundreds...you might not get the attention the work deserves.]

Best of luck!

The Story of The Memory of The Experience

2013-04-02T21:57:43+01:00

A while back I gave a talk at the Google Think Travel conference. It was a super fun gig.

I posted the deck and some thoughts before.

People seemed to like it and asked about the presentation itself.

So here are the last 20mins of the talk, which concern travel, dynamic pricing and opportunity cost anxiety, thresholds of satisfaction, experiences, memory, memory hacking, decisions, stories and winks.

It also features short videos of Daniel Kahneman and Louis C.K., which help to break up the stretches of me talking.

So...what do you think? What was your experience of watching? What memory did it leave you with? What story would you tell?

[For enquiries about speaking engagements, click speaking up at the top and drop me a line.]

Advertising's Benevolent Dictators: Ogilvy

2013-03-19T18:36:30+00:00

is the name of a book from the 1908s I was given as a gift after a speaking engagement [thanks!].

The title comes from the tension required in those who run advertising agencies: to rule their word must be law, but to be a creative environment they must be "fair...kind and understanding...helpful...and a father [or mother] confessor when one is required".

It's a series of interviews with the "All-time Greats" of advertising.

From the list of names up there, I'm guessing that most will only truly recognize two: William Bernbach and David Ogilvy, who remain as well known today [in the industry] as they ever were.

All-time greatness is a fleeting thing.

[A couple more may be vaguely familiar, names lost inside the ever changing acronyms of agencies.]

In some ways they represent the two poles of thinking about advertising, the hard sell of Ogvily [historically associated with the USA, although Ogilvy was English] and the soft sell 'creative revolution' of Bernbach [historically associated with the UK, but Bernback was a 'born New Yorker'].

Brand versus product. Image versus claim. Idea versus research.

Of course, they shouldn't really be 'versus' at all.

Ogilvy came from a sales and then research background - hence advertising was "salesmenship in print" and research always directed the creative.

Bernbach believed that before copy and art came the idea, to be worked on together.

As I mentioned a long time ago, history is an oft neglected part of advertising education. Each generation is doomed to learn the same lessons as the previous, perhaps because the industry as a whole lacks a coherent "corpus of knowledge", especially about what works and how, the like of which Ogilvy hoped to build at his agency.

The book is available but not common - so I thought I'd share some choice cuts - today from Ogilvy.

On Getting Started//

"I got a history scholarship to Oxford, but I got some sort of block, didn't do any work, couldn't pass any exams, and got thrown out, which was very traumatic."

"So I took a job selling kitchen stoves, back in Scotland. I did that for a few years, and I got good at it - door-to-door selling of expensive kitchen stoves. One day, the company said to me, "You're a very good salesman, you've got the best sales record. Will you write a brochure for our other salesmen on how to sell stoves?" So I wrote it, and it go me a job in an agency in London, which is now our London office."

On Being Inspired//

"Now, I'll tell you why I started an agency. In those days, I thought Young an Rubicam was much the best agency. It was the only agency I wanted to work for. I admired Raymond Rubicam very much. But I thought they'd never hire me. I said to myself, "I can't get a job there, so the only thing to do is start my own agency"...I sometimes think Ogilvy & Mather is more "Rubicamish" than Young & Rubicam.

Well then, Ogilvy & Mather got started. I was the Research Director. It's the only thing I knew anything about in those days"

On Creative versus Creative Direction//

"We were what wouild nowadays be called a "creative boutique". Those words hadn't been invented on those days. We got a reputation for being a hot creative shop...We'd got fix or six famous campaigns.

I was also a good salesman. I was a moderately good creative man, and did some good campaigns, but I was a lousy creative director. What I did best was new business."

On Values//

"We had Standard Oil-New Jersey. We had a chance to get Shell. Etsy almost died when he heard I was going to try for Shell, when we'd already got an oil company. I was, "The fact that one is $13million and the other $2million does not make any difference to you." One day we had a chance to get Lipton Tea, but we had Tetley. He wouldn't let me touch Lipton. God, Lipton was something like $8million, and Tetley was $1 million. Etsy is the most honest, decent, moral man I know. He made us respectable."

On Agency Marketing//

Today the marketing function seems to be disappearing from the agency world. There was a time when the marketing people in the agencies were better than their clients. That may not have been true at Proctor, but it was at most of our clients.

On Consolidation//

Nowadays, the fashion is to go around buying other agencies. It gives me the creeps. If this trend continues, in a few years, there are going to be about ten giant agencies and a lot of little local ones.

On Education//

I don't think they should study advertising at the undergraduate level in college...I think it's better if college students get an eduction in geography, or economics, or physics, or Latin, but not advertising. I want people whose education has not been in advertising. I don't like saying that, because I don't want to start every professor of advertising thinking I am his enemy...I like people with well-furnished minds."

On Women//

In the early years, I was against women in the agency business. And then I changed my mind. Most of the things we advertise are bought by women and used by women, but most of the advertising is written by men. Idiotic. What the hell do men know about it?

On Bernbach and Background//

We are what we were. Take Bill Bernbach, whom I respect so much. His background is completely different from mine. Sometimes I look at a Doyle Dane ad and say to myself, "I don't know who wrote this, but I'll bet he has never had any experience in direct response, or he couldn't write a headline like that."

The horryifing thing to me is to see the way people in big manufacturing companies fall for "creativity". I can take them a commercial which is sounds as a bell, full of consumer benefit and demonstration, and they'll say, "It's not creative." So you go back with a commercial written by one of these entertainers, and they love it."

Let's Get Scenius [Live]

2013-02-28T12:38:27+00:00

Let's get scenius faris from Faris Yakob

Here is the live version of the article below that I performed at Social Media Week NYC and the slides that accompanied the 15 minute talk.

Followed by the very excellent talks from my mate the very inspiring Shaun Abrahsom, whose book Crowdstorm just came out:

Crowdstorm: The Future of Innovation, Ideas, and Problem Solving

[treebook {a coinage of Shaun's}]

Crowdstorm: The Future of Innovation, Ideas, and Problem Solving

[Kindle Edition]

and the very nice John Bielenberg, founder of Future Partners, who I met on the day.

I normally don't recite speaches like this, but I tend to enjoy tangents when speaking, so with a 15min slot I thought I would try doing it a little differently...

Let's Get Scenius

2013-02-16T23:17:39+00:00

is the name of this piece I wrote about collaboration for Huffington Post, as part of Social Media Week.

And here it also is:

"Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being." Gandhi

In 1958, Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation For Economic Education, wrote an essay called "I, Pencil."

In it he adopts the voice of an "ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write" to tell its genealogy, descended from cedar trees logged in Oregon, graphite "mined in Ceylon," clay from Mississippi and so on, all combined at the factory, where workers drink coffee and machines use power and glue.

The point of this pencil, if you will, is to highlight the invisible hand of the market operating across the world and to point out that "not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make [a pencil]."

That was the 1950s and the things we make have gotten exponentially more complicated since then. In response to this ever increasing level of complexity, the author Matt Ridley recently happened upon the same thought as Mr Read, pointing out at the Google Zeitgeist event that there is nobody on the planet who knows how to make a computer mouse, using much the same story as I, Pencil:

"The knowledge is not in any individual's head because the man who knows how to drill the oil well doesn't know how to refine it into plastic..." and so on. The modern world "achieves things that nobody knows how to do."

These parables are used to highlight how the market efficiently allocates resources without any central control, but they also show that all humanity's progress comes through specialization and exchange and that we can no longer be self-sufficient, at an individual level.

Western modernity has long espoused the myth of the atomized individual, achieving or failing through her own effort and merit. An aspect of this myth is the Great Man of History theory, where we focus on remarkable individuals as instruments of progress, often dubbed geniuses. If this were ever true, when lone individuals discovered new elements in home fashioned laboratories perhaps, it certainly isn't now. Yes there are exceptional people, but all the simple, one mind problems, have been solved. Now it takes teams of literally thousands at places like CERN to smash open more secrets of the universe.

Brian Eno coined the term "scenius" to express the genius of the collective. "Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius." Not simply the wisdom of a crowd, rather the collaboration of many individual minds, creating a larger distributed intelligence and a culture of creativity.

Several factors seem to precipitate this kind of culture, that occasionally has the emergent property of scenius. Mutual appreciation and respect, the rapid exchange of tools and techniques as they develop, network effects of success where credit is distributed to the community, and a tolerance for constant weirdness at the fringes of it. The open source movement has a whiff of scenius about it, as does Anonymous.

Increasingly, as Ridely point outs, thinkers become ever more specialized in every field and so we need people who can traverse different fields, or at least translate between them, to find the non-obvious combinations that are ideas and innovation.

Results from the Innocentive open innovation platform show again and again that when progress in a specific field stalls, it is often a thinker from one slightly adjacent, with a set of different mental models but still able to understand the problem at hand, that achieves a breakthrough. Translators and facilitators are crucial when different collaborators speak vastly different languages, of science, technology and human behavior.

No man is an island, entire of itself. It's this, rather than the specificity of government, that I choose to believe President Obama meant when he said:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

We face a world of exponentially increasing complexity, driven by Moore's Law, and rapidly escalating numbers of people with which to solve the problems we will face. Collaboration, scenius, is what will drive big new solutions. Practical ways to collaborate with large numbers of different ideas and people across massive distances is the challenge we face today. Not so much crowdsourcing as crowd creation.

Fortunately, Homo sapiens is uniquely suited to this challenge. Our ability to work together is why we are the most successful species in the history of the planet. Language and cooperation made us better hunters than anything red in tooth and claw and allowed us to build technology to shape our world around us.

So, hopefully, social collaboration technologies and opportunities will remind us that we need each other, and need to need each other, to be human.

Ex Libris 2013

2013-01-31T16:15:28+00:00

[I still get and have a lot of [analogue] books. I'm an in-betweener. I love Kindle reading, but I love the carapaces of books too.]

A while back I wrote a piece for the International Journal of Advertising called Ex Libris. [It's a regular column where someone shares books that are important or formative to them.]

A few people have asked me lately for some more book suggestions. So, here are some things I've read recently that I think you might enjoy in 2013.

MINDS

Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman [Kindle Edition]

The Nobel prize winning father of behavioral economics delivers his magnum opus and it's fantastic. This is required reading, no excuses, especially if you work in or around advertising.

Sleights of Mind - Stephen Macknik & Susana Martinez-Conde [Kindle Edition]

A New Yorker article about pickpocket magacian Apollo Robbins led me down this rabbit hole into magic, neuroscience and cognitive illusions.

How to Create a Mind - Ray Kurzweil [Kindle Edition]

I have to admit to being a Kurzweil skeptic, in the classic bigot position of having not read any of his stuff but made up my mind already. I saw him speak at TEDx, was impressed, and read this book. It's explanation of neuroanatomy is impressive, and his track record of predictions is remarkably compelling.

Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior - Leonard Mlodinow [Kindle Edition]

The book explores the science behind all the different kinds of drivers that affect human behavior and decision making that operate below the level of consciousness and how our minds create rational explanatory fictions to explain our decisions to ourselves.

ADVERTISING

Cultural Strategy - Douglas Holt and Douglas Cameron [Kindle Edition]

A seminal recent work in the field of strategy, Holt and Cameron point out that almost all brand and product propositions are derived from an escalation of rational and emotional product benefits. By thus conceiving all brands as a phenomenon of mind - rather than society or culture - the opportunities for innovation created by historical changes in society is ignored.

The Better Mousetrap: Brand Invention in a Media Democracy - Simon Pont [Kindle Edition]

Simon has a wonderful way with words [and has just published his first novel] and this book takes us through a broad look at elements and ideas of modern brands in modern contexts.

Confessions of a Mad Man - George Parker [Kindle only]

In the world of advertising, George has been there, and George has done it. This is a sparkling memoir of the world's most incorrigible adman. There being really only one other contender...[See Sorry about the Lobsters by Neil French, currently only available from his website.]

LIES [also know as fiction]

Adiamante - L.E. Modesitt [Kindle Edition]

SciFi is the last bastion of the 'novel of ideas' where a philosophical discussion plays out as speculative narrative. This is a wonderful, thought provoking book about the morality of power and the nature of society, stratifed into cyborgs, superhumans and norms.

Daemon by Daniel Suarez [Kindle Edition]

Freedom by Daniel Suarez [Kindle Edition]

Suarez's first book was rejected numerous times and finally published thanks to being championed by the tech community. It's a remarkable tech thriller, based on a very deep understanding of technology, that poses some big questions about the near future, but reads like you are inside a video game. The sequel, Freedom, is even better.

The Visible Man - Chuck Klosterman [Kindle Edition]

Klosterman's novel about a voyeur with the technology to make himself invisible is appropriately weird, disturbing and beautifully realized, and reminded me that maybe SciFi isn't the only remaining home for a novel of ideas.

Enjoy, let me know what you think, feel free to add some other recommendations in the comments.