I’ve been having a recurring conversation with various people over the past few weeks. It’s always someone who’s been in the industry for a while, and is really starting to get stuck into digital. The phrase ‘getting up to speed’ gets thrown around a lot, and there’s this resounding idea that it’s so much to learn, but they feel like they’ve just about got it worked out.

My response is, usually, to let them know that this is it now. You’ll never be up to speed any more. Media, marketing, communications, technology, are all moving at such a pace, that the real skill is knowing where to look and surrounding yourself with diverse people who do the same.

I didn’t really figure this was worth a post, but in a few moments of nice synchronicity, I came across the same idea from different industries, and a different age. The first quote is from novelist F. Marion Crawford, in 1896:

The old fashioned novel is really dead, and nothing can revive it nor make anybody care for it again. What is to follow it?…A clever German who is here suggested to me last night that the literature of the future might turn out to be the daily exchange of ideas of men of genius—over the everlasting telephone of course—published every morning for the whole world…

Matthew Battle has a wonderfully brief and insightful opinion on this on his posterous.

I was then listening to a podcast by Yale Economics Professor, Robert Schiller. In it, he talks about a book by George Gibson, The Stock Exchanges of London, Paris and New York. Gibson writes about what would eventually become the Efficient Market Hypothesis, and argues that with information now shooting around the globe at the speed of light, all information about any particular market is now instantly knowable.

What’s amazing about this, is that Gibson wrote his book in 1889.

This is an idea that I’ve been comfortable with for quite a while now. I have a habit of having job titles that don’t exist until I start them, and I never have any idea where my next move will be. But, as the role of the digital world becomes more and more important, and more and more people fold it into their skillset, it’s important to know that we will never reach the pinnacle (the idea of climbing a mountain that you’ll never reach the summit of is actually one I stole from our MD, Andy Pontin. It’s a great way to visualise it, because you don’t actually climb a mountain for the view, it’s about the challenge in getting there).

But that shouldn’t be an overwhelming thing. As powerful as it is to think that our generation has created such an epic influx of information, technology and communication, this has been going on for a while now. Yet we still seem freaked out at the pace with which knowledge and skills have to be attained.

I’ve had a few conversations recently that seem to be revolving around a similar theme. We seem to be drowning in information these days, but lacking knowledge. I’d love to sit down and form some brilliant analysis of this thought, but I’m not that smart. And, ironically, I don’t really have the time. So I thought I’d really quickly pull together a few different things I’ve read recently, along with a few things I read ages ago, in the hope that it at least gets a few people thinking.

In the past couple of years, I’ve collected a large list of blogs that I subscribe to (in Google Reader, if you must know). Every now and then I go through and cull about a third of these blogs. I last did this about a month ago. As I was going through the blogs I realised that a huge majority of the advertising and marketing related blogs were simply throwing up post after post of information. Just, information.

Information is wonderful, data is exceptionally important, but the bulk of information being put forth is wholly lacking in any sort of thought or analysis. In other words, very few people seem to be building knowledge in our industry.

At best, we’re seeing facile post-analysis of social media campaigns, with a couple interesting insights if you’re lucky. At worst, we’re seeing post after post after slide after slide of context-less, unreferenced, ’statistics’ trying to scare the industry into sacking their TV department and hiring a bunch of ‘Community Managers’.

Thankfully, I suppose, this isn’t a symptom of our industry, but perhaps a symptom of technology. Mark Pesce, talking about the Australian Federal Government’s plan for every student to have a laptop, makes this observation:

“I haven’t seen any educator anywhere present anything that looks at all like an integrated vision of what these laptops mean to students, teachers or the classroom. They’re bling: pretty, but an entirely useless accessory. I’m not saying that this is a bad initiative – indeed, I believe the Government should be lauded for its efforts. But everything, thus far, feels only like a beginning, the first meter around a very long course.”

So it seems that even at the highest level of government, communication has reached an overwhelming level, whereby people only process and act on information, without forming it into knowledge.

Nicholas Carr also talked about this problem in his insightful book, The Big Switch:

“We may find that the culture of abundance being produced by the World Wide Computer is really just a culture of mediocrity - many miles wide but only a fraction of an inch deep.”

And at the risk of being a tosser who quotes Walter Benjamin in his blog, he had this to say on the topic:

“No event any longer comes to us without being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information.”

While Benjamin’s argument is of another era, it does elude to one thing that technology has now enabled. We have all this information and data so freely available, it’s now easier than ever to create great thinking. I’m not saying we need less information, just that we need more thinking. As George Dyson brilliantly put it, “a network, whether of neurons, computers, words, or ideas, contains solutions, waiting to be discovered, to problems that need not be explicitly defined.”

While not wanting to start commentating on the commentary of the advertising industry, it does seem that on ‘the blogs’, a lot of information is getting pumped out, without a lot of thought or knowledge being developed. To use Dyson’s framework, we’re not finding solutions within the network.

Our industry has progressed at breakneck pace in the last 10 years, after what was essentially four or five decades years of (relatively) slow development. In those years Bernbach, Wunderman, Burnett and co. all had plenty of time to analyse and develop informed thinking about the industry. While we don’t have that luxury of time any more, it would be nice to see at least a little bit more knowledge emerging.

To finish on a positive note, and at the risk of turning this into a proper blog with a ‘top 10′ list, I thought I’d put together a list of advertising/marketing related blogs that I really think do add to the pool of knowledge for the industry. If you’ve got any more, please suggest them.

Alex Bogusky
David Armano
Adam Ferrier
Faris Yakob
Noah Brier

Ok that’s sad. I could only come up with 5 (and only one of them is Australian!). Surely there’s some more out there?

There’s a wonderful theory in economics describing ‘Magical Thinking’. Magical thinking is when people are convinced that they have influence over external events through overly simple actions and observations that are actually completely unrelated to the event.

This theory came about from a study by an American psychologist, Burrhus Skinner, in the 40’s. Skinner took some hungry pigeons and placed them in individual cages. He then installed in each cage a machine that would feed the pigeon a small portion of food at regular intervals.

Eventually he observed that each pigeon was displaying some form of strange, repetitive behaviour. One was making anti-clockwise circles, another was pushing it’s head into a certain corner of it’s cage, and another was bobbing it’s head slowly. Each pigeon was repeating this motion over and over again.

These pigeons were simply repeating a behaviour that once resulted in them getting some food. So they repeated it and, magically, they seemed to keep getting food.

We’ve spent the last few years talking to clients, convincing them that a digital future is inevitable when it comes to their brands and marketing. We show them charts and numbers, and play brilliant case studies of ideas that have worked.

Then, we take the most simplistic view of why those ideas work, and we try and replicate them.

But the digital world is more complex than that. Our behaviour and communications and expectations have been altered forever by the online world. We have left the world of advertising and marketing and entered the world of psychology and sociology and anthropology and data. What works is not as simple as we think. And it’s certainly not as simple as it used to be.

We measure simple things online. We draw relatively simplistic conclusions about why some things work. Last weekend the twitterati was abuzz with the real story behind the JK Wedding Dance phenomenon. What this story exposed was that there was a complex, organised, and arguably dark side to how that video achieved massive worldwide reach. For the first time, the invisible forces were revealed.

We need to look harder and deeper at why great digital ideas work. We need to start identifying the invisible forces. Great ideas will always be at the core of a successful digital campaign, but some form of behavioural strategy is now required. We should be looking at the influence of timing, of relevance, of localness, and many many other factors that fall outside the realm of advertising and the ‘traditional’ planning and strategy agencies have applied.

Making truly brilliant digital work is going to get harder, and to succeed, we need to get better at understanding the invisible. Because if we don’t, we’re just pigeons going through the same pointless motions, in the hope it will magically yield the same results.

This snippet of Larry Ellison talking about cloud computing is well worth listening to. Not just because he utterly slams the idea of ‘cloud computing’ as an evolutionary term in the software industry, but because what he is talking about goes way beyond nerds talking about Gmail or Salesforce.

What he is talking about is a problem of language, and the result it has on the mindset of an entire industry.

As technology has exponentially advanced, we have reached a point where it’s relevance and, more importantly, the way in which it’s relevance can be communicated, has outpaced the general public’s ability to understand and make use of it. In the software industry one result of this has been the concept of cloud computing. In the marketing industry, one result has been social media, and in particular the role of social media as marketing’s saviour. I would hope anyone who’s reading this accepts by now that all media is inherently social, so while the manifestations of conversations may be more visible, public, and accessible, what is happening is by no means new.

In much the same way billions of dollars has been poured into startups offering services with a buzzword at their heart (but offering no real point of difference), brands are now starting to pay an inordinate amount of attention to these latest idioms. Partially because they don’t understand them, and partially because they have been sold on the idea that these concepts are so new and fresh that they must be the answer to all of their marketing problems. But on their own they’re not. They’re just an evolution that’s a little harder to grasp than every other step this industry has taken. And what worries me is that plenty of people are assuming that we have taken one giant leap, when in fact we’ve just moved on a bit. Everything that came before is still just behind us, and it’s still just as relevant.

“When is this idiocy going to stop? I’ve been at this a very long time. There’s still mainframes. That was the first industry that was going to be destroyed. And watching mainframes being destroyed is like watching a glacier melt.”

I’ve worked as an industrial designer, a graphic designer, web designer, and somehow ended up in advertising. But at the heart of what I have always done is communication. If you think that it’s impossible to communicate your brand through its physical design, its packaging, or its TV ad, but social media is your saviour because it’s 2-way or because it’s measurable, you’re in for a shock. It’s an evolution, yes, and it’s essential to whatever it is you’re communicating, but it’s not the answer to everything. And it’s not going to solve your inability to create great work in those other areas. Because when your customer service twitter account scales (which it must do if you actually want it to be worth the investment), it will end up as just another outsourced call centre.

And then, you’re back to square one. And the whole time you’ve been ignoring your mainframe, and it hasn’t disappeared.

Postscript: I linked to this post in a tweet with the caveat that a “healthy dose of devil’s advocate is included”. I think the thought of the current state of the marketing landscape being affected by a problem of language is incredibly interesting and not completely incorrect. If the thinking in our industry could be modeled in economic terms, I’m sure we’d be ready for a correction. And just like an economic correction, no one can tell how far off course we really are.

And what will replace it? We don’t know yet. And we won’t know until we finally admit that the old model is doomed and we move on to the next generation of advertising. And whatever this next generation of advertising reveals itself as will come from experimentation. There is a temptation to assume that the embracing of digital by traditional agencies, with traditional structures is the beginning of this next generation. But I don’t believe it. Even the best transmedia ideas come from a place that is thoroughly grounded in oldschool, top-down thinking. And while the abandoning of this method is unthinkable, so was the demise of the newspaper industry. Clay Shirky summed it up brilliantly in his post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:

“Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points….Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.”

Experimentation then. And lots of it. Sounds like a brilliant idea.

The only problem is that this leaves us, as people who do creative work for huge brands, in an extremely difficult place. The biggest agencies attract the best creative minds, and also the biggest clients. But while the former are capable of amazing ideas, the latter are unwilling to take the risk of experimentation. Yes, there has been a swag of what could be called experimental thoughts over just the past few months. Just out of BBDO Australia and New Zealand we’ve had the Yellow Tree House, Team Dry, and Christmas Clones, but these are still a long way from game-changing, and it’s certainly not enough to be considered “lots and lots”. I don’t believe that anyone has nailed the truly transformative creative thinking that will be advertising’s Craigslist or Wikipedia.

So how can we make this change happen?

One outlook would be a combination of long-term brand communications engagement, and brilliant short lived spikes of high engagement creativity. Essentially the people that love your brand or product will happily become a fan on Facebook, follow it on Twitter, and you can have an ongoing dialogue with them over months and years. But in order to remind them how cool the brand is, and in order to attract new followers, you need to have massive creative ideas that touch and entertain millions of people.

In this outlook, media agencies should evolve along with PR agencies, into macro relationship builders. They can focus on building these long term relationships. Getting the communication in the right space and keeping it consistent and on brand (keeping in mind that the idea of being ‘on brand’ will evolve immensely over the next few years).

Meanwhile creative agencies need to continue coming up with brilliant ideas. But better brilliant ideas. And this is where massive change needs to happen, from the creative agencies. How they think about what they do. We need to stop thinking about making ads, and start thinking about making things we don’t know how to make. Ideas that are authentic, adaptive, relevant, transformative, fresh, immersive and social. And nothing less.

The good news is that the next era of working in marketing and advertising could well be the most rewarding in history. No longer are you selling products that no one wants to solve a problem they never had. You may actually be helping people do stuff they want with people they like in places they want to be. Imagine that.

In times like these, perhaps it’s rules we need least. We figure that we need to create efficiencies, we need to create a lean company, keep clients happy, make money. And so we create rules.

“Rules prevent disaster. But what they put in their place is mediocrity.” - Barry Schwartz at TED.

So perhaps what we need right now isn’t rules. It’s not procedures and it’s not efficiencies and leanness. What we need right now are transformative ideas. Thinkers. Sellers. And doers. And you don’t have to be one of the three, in fact the agency that should thrive right now should be full of people who are all three. It’s times like now you need to sell brilliant ideas, make them happen for nothing, and make everyone else in the industry wonder how you managed to push out such a transformative idea at a time when they’re being told to play it safe and make money.

“Rules and procedures may be dumb, but they spare you from thinking.” - Barry Schwartz again.

Times like these are gamechanging. But it’s only the people that are really thinking who are making those changes. The rest are just playing with old rules.

“If you know your lines, then you can forget them.” - Francis Coppola to Dennis Hopper in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers Apocalypse.

The thing is, you can’t just rock up to the party with a new business model that breaks the rules and expect to succeed any more (I actually believe in the last five years this approach worked for a lot of people). You need to know the rules in the first place. You need to know them inside out and back to front, understand why they exist. Then, you can break them.

I decided to post a comment on an article on Mumbrella about our latest Doritos campaign (a campaign developed in the US, replicated in the UK, and now being handled by us for Australia). Now let me first point out that there’s a lot of blogs around that I don’t bother commenting on.  But in this case I felt that the issue had a good chance of getting out of hand. People would make assumptions, and I could see the social lynch-mob picking up on it if nothing was said. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it would be irreversible.

I was involved in the campaign from day one. I’m constantly thinking about how campaigns like this will be viewed by the social media commentators, and I was completely comfortable with what we’d done. So I posted my comment clearing up the questions from the article before they got out of hand.

So I was moderately surprised this morning to find my comment was used as the basis for a whole new article. Surprisingly, it wasn’t too bad, there was the insinuation that we’d possibly done a Tourism QLD, but not a flat out accusation. It was clear that Tim had done some pretty thorough investigation into the story. He had found the creator of one of the entry video’s, but had only found out what I’d already said was accurate. The article had an air of comment bait, but moreso linkbait, hoping one of the Social Media Mafia would pick up on it and get some incoming traffic to Mumbrella.

So here’s the thing. We didn’t do anything wrong. I know we didn’t, I’m as aware about how to operate in the online space as anyone else in this industry, and I have no problem with what we did. And yet we still got written up in a way that tried to find any possible hole in the campaign.

So it seems that every time we do something that steps in to the social arena it’s going to be put under the microscope. That’s fine, really. I’m happy for commentators to say whatever they want. I’m happy to put in my comments on a blog, I’m fully aware that it’s almost guaranteed that it will generate at least one ill-informed and usually idiotic comment, but the net result is still better than not commenting at all.

Where the bloggers (and I’m talking about serious journalistic bloggers here, people who are reporting news, not opinion) need to be careful though is how they treat the relationships they have with the people they are talking about. If I have to jump to the defense of every campaign I do that in any way leverages social media, I’m going to tire of it really quick, then I stop being part of the conversation on these sites. That’s one less person taking part in the conversation, and I’m pretty sure you don’t want that.

Probably the more important lesson out of all this though, is just how important telling the truth is. For an industry that’s not renowned for it’s honesty, the tables have well and truly turned. Not only do you have to be honest when a campaign launches, you have to be questioning the truthfulness of what you’re doing every step of the way. For Dorito’s, as with every other campaign I work on, this was the case. And I’m pretty damn happy that it seems we came out of the whole experience looking good.

By the way I’m in no way criticising the high-profile social media bloggers. Their weapons of fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the David Armano are doing a hell of a lot from stopping brands and agencies completely ballsing up the social media space forever.

And yeah, I’ll still be posting comments on Mumbrella.

A few quick, semi-related thoughts.

I really enjoyed Mike Hickinbotham’s guest post on Mumbrella. Firstly because it’s short, so I actually read the whole thing (ironic yes, because this blog is chock full of posts that are way too long, there’s not one ‘top 10′ list, and I use terribly unlinkbaitable titles).

Secondly though, it’s a really great illustration of the sometimes ridiculous infighting (or just hyperbolic navel-gazing) that goes on between the two camps of advertising and marketing (two camps that I somehow found myself square in the middle of).

There is a reality that we can’t deny in what we do. As much as the Greasers, to use Mike’s analogy, may be right about the future of media, the unfortunate fact is that brands are still wanting to (and to a degree, expected to) operate like brands. Something the Soc’s allow them to do. Consumers expect to tolerate brands, not to have value offered to them by brands. For now. That will change. We know it will. In the meantime I just hope there’s no stabbings or church fires (and stay golden Ponyboy).

While I’m on the Mumbrella post, and the whole Witchery thing, I just couldn’t help thinking that both sides of the camp seem to have spent the last 2 weeks whinging about whether it was a good or bad idea, whether it was succesful and whether it was handled well . But there hasn’t been a lot of though about how events like these shape the average consumer.

You know when you get out a pair of socks and you think they’re black?

Then someone tells you they’re blue. And it’s only when you put them next to a pair of black socks that you realise they’re blue? Ideas like the Witchery jacket are dark blue swans. They definitely look like black swans, but when put next to the real thing, you realise you’ve been duped.

The problem is that black swans are pure, enjoyable events (I’m talking about internet meme’s and viral social content here, we’ll get on to the other black swans in a moment). Every time a dark blue swan comes along, the consumer is expecting one of these purely enjoyable moments. Instead, after a hard look, they hold it up to the light and realise that it’s not what they thought it was.

Every time this happens, the impact and expectation from a real black swan is diminished. So, for every failed Witchery campaign, the chances of you having a successful (and truly black swan) campaign are slipping away.

Which brings me onto war (of course!). I recently read John Robb’s Brave New War. It’s a book that is worth a read if you’re at all interested in organisational logic and the social structures inherent in any group of humans. What’s fascinating is that while we (advertising and marketing types) think we’re carving out new territory in the social web and tribal communications, the fact is that if you want to truly see the edge, you need to look at 4th generation warfare.

To save any more waffling, here’s a few choice quotes that really rang true for me:

“…whenever a state takes on a guerilla movement, it will loose. The reason is that when the strong are seen to be beating the weak (knocking down doors, roughing up people of interest, and shooting ragtag guerillas), they are considered to be barbarians. This view, amplified by the media, will eventually eat away at the state’s ability to maintain moral cohesion and drastically damage it’s global image.”

“A critical mass of participation is necessary. A certain minimum number of participants, either individuals of component groups, are necessary for microaction to translate into macroaction. It also means that without a minimum number of interactions between these participants, the statistical nature of macrointelligence won’t emerge. The simple catchphrase for this is more is different.”

“Hindsight bias is the tendancy to believe that the event was predictable based on knowledge gained after the event occurred. In effect, people unknowingly substitute current knowledge of outcomes into gaps of knowledge that were present when building earlier expectations of potential events.”

“Given the speed and complexity posed by the black swans we face, the nation-state would need instantaneous responsiveness, infinite resources, and godlike insight to be effective.”

And a final note. Mark Pesce rcomended Brave New War to me when I was doing an Amazon order. When I started reading it, I realised that John Robb was the author of one of my favourite blogs, Global Guerillas . That’s definitely the first time I’ve been excited at the realisation that a book is by a blog author, rather than finding a blog by a favourite author. I’m sure it won’t be the last though.

A hundred thousand years ago cavemen had a very good reason to be neophobic. They knew that the familiar things in their environment did not kill them (and those that could kill them, they knew to avoid).

Anything new was, until proven otherwise, a threat.

Like many human instincts, this neophobia is still lingering in a world where it is an obstacle rather than a benefit. Moving advertising and marketing into the social web is, to a vast majority of clients and agencies who are presented with it, something new. Especially in the way it is presented to them. And so their instincts tell them it is something that could harm them. And rightly so, the web is full of bloggers heralding social marketing agencies as nothing short of the second coming, the twitterati are aghast that everyone else doesn’t ‘get it’, and in the past 12 months trade press has even occasionally giving some ink to ’social media experts’ telling brands that if they’re not in there already, they may as well not exist.

The irony is that a throng of communications experts have failed at getting the people that matter to listen to them about the social web. And as the blog posts and twitter buzz increases in volume, it seems to be widening the gap and failing harder. All this at a time when marketing budgets are shrinking and social media is missing out, even though there is a valid role for it in the current climate. It’s inexpensive, accountable, and excellent at building a brand’s long term value.

The problem is that social media has a branding problem.

We are by nature social animals. In this sense the majority of advertising up until now has been unnatural, it has been one-way, anti-social. The social space should be even easier than every other area we work in, because it is how humans naturally want to communicate.

Every brand manager, marketing manager, and agency type are now comfortable with the online world. It’s not the big scary beast it once was, and it’s value (in one-way marketing) is proven. Taking this one-way comfort into the social space should be an organic evolution, social media is not the new scary animal in the jungle, it’s just an evolution of something that’s already existing. It’s an evolution of what we already do, and have always done: we communicate with consumers.

Social media needs to just evolve into everything we do. Any creative idea or strategic approach must include a social element. This is how we move forward, not by scaring brand managers and using the latest bloggerati buzzwords. What we will be doing will not be groundbreaking, because it doesn’t need to be, it’s just evolution. Digital didn’t become part of mainstream agencies by standing out on it’s own shouting about how cool it was, it simply became ubiquitous in every piece of work we did. In the same way, social media will not become relevant in advertising by going solo, it must blur into every single idea we have.

Edit: Tellingly,  both Gavin Heaton and Julian Cole have made interesting new years resolution posts today. Gavin has promised not to use the word ‘brand’ all January, while Julian Cole is abstaining from using the term ’social media’. Stephen Collins has also posted a reply to this one, arguing (correctly in my opinion) that it’s also problem of language.

I. Living in a future mindset.

In his recent post on Anachronistic Science, Kevin Kelly talks about knowledge gaps and the anachronisms in thinking prevalent throughout history. He uses the example in which a modern scientist could return to Aristotle’s time and still perform a huge number of experiments to prove theories only developed in the last few decades.

“If anachronistic science occurs in the past, then by definition there must be future technology that we are capable of creating today, if only we knew how.”

Which made me think, does this apply to online social tools? Have we created an anomaly in cultural development? Are the tools we are using today possible in the past? Are the social behaviours, insights and technologies they rely on anachronistic?

It would be wonderful to think that we’ve somehow created a glitch in the cultural matrix. That we truly are unique thinkers and pioneers of culture. But I honestly don’t believe this. The sheer limit of bandwidth makes many of the great ideas from the past 5 years impossible on a basic executional level, but the essence of most great ideas enabled by the internet have always been possible, we just haven’t had the mindset.

If this is the case, surely there is an argument for letting go of the boundaries we work within, and simply develop ideas regardless. If we can live in a future mindset, we can worry about executing the ideas later. Easier said than done, yes, but I don’t think this happens often enough.

II. Stop building spaceships.

Another area that Kelly only briefly touches on is that the development of pioneering thinking has, in almost every advanced civilisation, simply reached a point where it’s innovation slowed dramatically.

“Why didn’t China, which invented so many other things in the first millennial, just keep on going and invent science by 1000 AD? For that matter why didn’t the Greeks invent the scientific method during their heyday? What were they missing? “

I’m not sure that this question is really answered, and that is telling (Kelly simply states that they didn’t have the mindset). There is an argument here that intellectual, cultural development can eventually slow down, even when it has great momentum.

Like right now.

This argument is given further weight by ideas such as Richard Watson’s thoughts on Extreme Teens. We are simply so overwhelmed with new ideas now, that our ability to actually move forward cognitively in a meaningful, constructive way has been significantly diminished (how many new sites do you sign up to every week? Of those how many do you really understand?).

So where this gets interesting is in the startup industry. There are thousands of people and millions of dollars currently devoted to being “the next Facebook/YouTube/Twitter/X”. Perhaps we have evolved in this online space to a point where we are cognitively full? Perhaps we should be focusing more on understanding and refining exactly what we have created in the last 5,500 days?

Perhaps, just maybe, there is a wealth of ideas, information and insights already created online that are being ignored because we are so focused on driving forward. And if this is the case, the real innovators in the next few years may come from people that understand where we have been, not necessarily the ones that are blazing forward into the unknown.