Jul 7 2015

Burners Inspire The New Fight Club

Way back in the early years of this blog, we brought you news of the ultimate art car: Kuratas. A 4-ton, 13-foot tall, $1.3 million art robot, made in Japan.

[Kogoro Kurata, Kuratas Robot Designer]:
“The robots we saw in our generation were always big, always had people riding them. So I don’t think those have much meaning in the real world. But it was really my dream to ride in one of those giant robots, and I think that it’s a kind of Japanese culture. I kept thinking that it’s something that Japanese had to do.”

The creator showed off the Kuratas Robot at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. It is human controlled; from the cockpit, a driver can move the robot’s arms and drive it up to 6.2 miles per hour.

The battle mech is just a prototype, but Kurata’s website is already taking orders. People have options for weapons, shields, and even an iPhone holder. This prototype was armed with Gatling cannons that can shoot BBs.

But don’t break out your wallet just yet. The Kuratas Robot starts at around $1.3 million, and options can send it much higher.

[Wataru Yoshizaki, Kuratas Programmer]:

“If indeed giant robots and cars are being sold at the same price, then I would, of course, choose the giant robot.

[Source: YouTube]

Billionaire’s cars have doors that go up, not sideways. I would personally choose this McLaren P1-GTR over the art robot…

Well, America have responded with a robot of their own…and thrown down the gauntlet.

From megabots.com:

“Finally, after millennia of bullshit agriculture and metallurgy and revolutions industrial, political, cultural, whatever, shit’s finally getting good.” –Jason Torchinsky, Jalopnik

They sure are. And the big-time Burners at Autodesk are backing it. At least, they put up $2,500 for a design contest:

Winners will walk away with $2,500 cash and your designs built and brought to life by MegaBots. Designs will be unleashed at Bay Area Maker Faire 2015!

I suspect there’s a lot more money on the line here than that. The winners have been picked:

Here’s the original challenge from MegaBots:

The team behind SuidoBashi Heavy Industries robot Kuratas has responded to the challenge, and the two robots are going to fight. But, they have one stipulation: a more traditional Japanese “hand to hand” melee battle, rather than the “super-American” Big Fucking Guns (shooting paint cannon-balls).

The local team might be getting ahead of themselves. Kuratas looks pretty stable…

…while the MegaBot team’s efforts are not yet finished:

We’ve built an upper body prototype of a MegaBot, a missile turret adversary, and a walking simulation of a to-scale robot by building off of Andreas Hofmann’s Ph.D. thesis. We’re currently developing a new, tracked version of a MegaBot in partnership with Autodesk in time for Maker Faire Bay Area 2015. Soon, we’ll be designing full-scale walking robots that can compete in arena combat.

The tracks are on in these recent photos. Some reconfiguration will be needed for the melee.

from MegaBot’s debut at SF Maker Faire in May

Image: Mashable

Both robots are currently designed to have human operators inside (MegaBot has 2). This may be dangerous when it comes to real melee combat between 4-ton machines.

Mashable reports that the two robots are fairly evenly matched:

MegaBot Mark II is 15 feet tall and rolls around on a pair of giant tank treads. Suidobashi’s mech is 13 feet tall and uses four swiveling wheels.

But there are some big differences. MegaBot Mark II cost about $175,000 to build and weighs 12,000 pounds; Suidobashi’s sells for more than $1 million and is about 9,000 pounds. “[Suidobashi] is about three times faster than we are,” MegaBots cofounder Gui Cavalcanti said. “Their tech is currently more advanced, but we have about a year to catch up. I think it’ll even out.”

The fight will happen in 2016, in neutral territory.

Some readers have mentioned that this story reminds them of the Hugh Jackman movie, Real Steel.

In fact, that movie was inspired by an earlier prototype version of robot boxing, created by Burners at the same art warehouse on Treasure Island where artists like Marco Cochrane and Peter Hudson create their masterpieces.

Even before that, we had the Hand of Man at Burning Man…and other, off-Playa events.

Going back still further, Burning Man Founder John Law and others were part of Survival Research Labs, an arts collective that made use of big robot-like machines in their shows. These early Burners were also the founders of the Cacophony Society, which inspired member Chuck Pahlaniuk to write Fight Club…the secret society Project Mayhem is supposedly based on their antics and secretive, underworld, revolutionary nature.

From the titles of the SRL shows, you get the gist of the sentiment behind this crew: no love and light hippies, here. Early Burning Man featured a lot of flamethrowers, guns, and explosions…before Helco.

Crime Wave

Extremely Cruel Practices

A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief

A Calculated Foreceast of Ultimate Doom

Illusions of Shameless Abundance

A Plan For Social Improvement (based on achieving complete freedom from the restraints of civilization)

A Million Inconsiderate Experiments

This may have inspired the UK TV series Robot Wars, which started in 1998 and ran for 4 seasons.

Although sort of fun, Roomba fighting is nowhere near as exciting as Giant Freaking Robots. Even an 18 Roomba free-for-all.

Google was founded by Burners and is heavily staffed with Burners, from the Chairman and CEO on down. They were the first company to commodify the Burning Man image in their marketing, beating even Girls Gone Wild. Technically, they didn’t “officially” have a business model back then – this technicality seems to set a precedent for any other “pre-revenue” startup that wishes to use Burning Man to similarly promote themselves. Google today are still by far the largest profit-maker from Burner culture, given the lucrative advertising sold whenever anyone is watching Burning Man viral videos on YouTube, talking about BM on GMail, and so on.

Google recently acquired drone maker Titan Aviation, beating off rival Facebook

This $360 billion Burner company are also now the largest manufacturer of military robots on the planet, although they’ve been tight-lipped about their plans. They are launching their own balloons and drones to create an Internet in the Sky.

When it comes to the other side of SkyNet, the A.I. that connects all the drones and bots together, Google already have by far the most advanced artificial intelligence. One flavor of this is currently captivating the Internet with its twisted dreams.

Image via Hugh Jorgen, Facebook

Recently they “fed” the AI Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas (the movie)…teaching it how to trip.

Elon Musk described current Artificial Intelligence efforts as like “summoning the demon in a pentagram”.

Already, robots are killing us.

This is all becoming very real, very fast.

This documentary about AI and robotics is dated May 2015:

Soon we may have robot jousting – or robot polo. Or both. But I’m tipping the knight-to-knight combat will draw a bigger audience than robots pushing a ball around.

Liquid Metal is now real

The new Terminator 5 movie just opened (weakly). Like 1984 and Brave New World, the Terminator series has proved to be amazingly prescient over the 3 decades since it was launched – in 1984. Much of what was science fiction then, is starting to become real today. 2015 is the year in “the Future”, that Michael J Fox went back to. His famous hoverboard was quite recently an amusing farce with Tony Hawk and then became a real product with Tony Hawk and now is being promoted by Lexus as a “coming soon” product.

Like Mad Max (also about to get a Part 5), the Terminator franchise is older than either Burning Man or the Web. And SkyNet is older than all of the above.

It seems like Kiwi (these days) James Cameron’s other franchise Avatar is priming us for the next revolutionary world. Virtual reality has been building for a long time, and Burning Man has long been immersed in it. They launched their own online world in Second Life in 2003 called Burn 2, and Second Life founder Philip Rosedale said he was inspired to create it by Burning Man. Counter-culture guru Timothy Leary called VR “the new LSD“. VR pioneers like Mark Pesce, Howard Rheingold and Jaron Lanier are Burners. Rheingold wrote a book called Virtual Reality and coined the term “Flash Mobs” after street theater activities organized by Burning Man small-f founder Flash Hopkins. More recently, the Microsoft Holo Lens is being created by a Burner-led team.

The cyberspace Regional Burn2 is coming up soon…July 10-12. The theme is “Primordial – a Playa Before Time”

With all the money being spent lately on ~~3d Facebook~~ immersive realms and self-driving cars and household robot helpers that care and life-like sex dolls... giant fighting war robots probably make a good business case to someone. Hey, there are already 42 different robots you can fuck. Fucking and punching is what it’s all about, as Californication fans know.

Robot UFC, bring it on! I’d rather we train these AIs on each other, than testing on humans or animals. However, methinks there is more behind the construction of these things that mere sports and entertainment. Check out this piece at Jay’s Analysis for an interesting perspective on where it’s all come from and where it may be going.

The biggest walking robot in the world looks like some of our Mutant Vehicles…

Davina the Dragon. Artist: Christian Breeden Image: Arin Fishkin/Flickr

Gon Kirin Dragon Art Car Image: Becky Stern/Flickr (Creative Commons)

If ever there was an arena suitable for robot melee training, it’s the Playa. Just add flamethrowers!

Sep 27 2014

Creating God In The Digital Age [Updates]

We’re building an artificial god. A digitally constructed consciousness simulator, with sensors absorbing all the world’s data, monitoring and tracking our every move, connected to hundreds of acres of powerful computer farms running Artificial Intelligence algorithms.

Ask Siri “are you listening?”, and see what she says. She’s listening alright, in fact she’s completely fascinated. Siri got her name from SRI, Stanford Research Institute, the top secret Bay Area military contractor that developed the technology before spinning it out to Apple to pump out to the masses.

Understanding speech in most languages is now easy for these giant server farms that have the power to listen to every conversation in the world at once. The words themselves don’t even matter as much as the metadata which logs where you go and who you interact with. The capabilities of this system now include facial and voiceprint analysis. They can recognize who you really are, even if you’re disguised; they can tell if you’re lying or afraid. Are you happy and ready to buy something, or vulnerable and could use a kind word from someone who seems to care? They read our emails to sell us products. They control our news feeds, and the talking points in our media, feeding us a steady diet of information specially chosen for us by The Machine.

The new model for electronic organization of the masses is a hive, where we all connect to and work for the Queen Bee, even if we never get to interact with her. We’re just all happy swarming around in our digital hive together, oblivious to life away from our swarm of like-minded groupthink collaborators, popping pills and dropping tabs and smoking blunts and being entranced by the spectacle and the carnival and the electronic assault of sound waves and flashing lights, hot fire and bare flesh.

Those who are engineering this new digital god to be our Master also believe in transhumanism, the idea that humans will merge with machines and become a new, superior species. This species will be the apex predator on the planet, meaning that humans without the resources to merge with ~~SkyNet~~ The Matrix will become more like animals, livestock to be milked in virtual electronic tax farms, drones to be exploited for the good of The Collective.

Who is building this Artificial Cyber-god? Google, Facebook, and the Military/Intelligence conglomerate, if you understand history. Or, if you don’t: Burning Man. Burning Man is behind it all, the brains and power of Silicon Valley.

Well, that’s the argument of cyber philosopher Alexander Bard, who has a book coming out in a couple of weeks called Syntheism – Creating God In The Digital Age.

from The Huffington Post (emphasis and editing ours):

Participatory Culture – The Next Big Wave of Digitalisation

Posted: 22/09/2014 12:58 BST Updated: 22/09/2014 14:59 BST

Having finalised The Futurica Trilogy with my co-writer Jan Söderqvist five years ago, I thought I had pretty much said what could be said about the Internet revolution from a cyberphilosopher’s perspective. Mission accomplished. However this was before I attended Burning Man – the world’s biggest and most famous participatory festival – in the Nevada desert in the United States. There and then I realised what was obvious for me as an outsider looking in: Burning Man is the first obvious example of how the Internet is manifesting itself in the physical rather than the virtual world. The festival may be an exact copy of the Internet, but it comes in physical shape and form (check Google Earth to see for yourself). The theme of our new, fourth book was obviously right before my eyes. Why is this huge and influential phenomenon happening now, and what are the hidden forces behind it?

Interestingly, to the 70,000-plus participants, Burning Man is nothing less than a sacred activity on holy ground. The counterculture festival can fittingly be described as a hajj to Mekka or pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Silicon Valley web entrepreneus. There would hardly have been any Google, Facebook or Twitter as we know them without this event. So if we are to understand the current Internet revolution and its enormous effects on society and ourselves, we have to understand Burning Man and its over 30 fast expanding spin-offs around the world. Learning from participatory culture is key to understanding the future of everything. And this has to start with the insight that what goes on here is, for lack of a better term, actually a fast growing religious phenomenon.

Today’s digital natives have grown up online and consequently consider the online world to be primary while the physical world is secondary, the exact opposite of their parents’ priorities. No matter how much the older generation moralises against this shift of world view, the younger generation will win out simply because it has become more rewarding and relevant to view the virtual world as the real one. And learning from history, there is no turning back. However this does not mean that the physical world is of no interest to the digital natives. Rather it is now viewed with a completely different set of glasses, mainly as a playground where virtual fantasies can be be staged.

The physical world has become a second added reality, but with the Internet generation’s obsession with co-creation and participatory culture at the forefront. Welcome to the world of Syntheism, the proper term for this new world view and social movement. The digital natives have thrown away their parents’ individualism and atomism, and replaced the old Cartesian word view with a metaphysical system of relationalism and network dynamics. Everything from the new physics to new political movements, calling for environmentalism and digital integrity, originate from and is immersed with this new metaphysical conviction.

All we had to do as philosophers was to pull the rabbit out of the hat and formulate Syntheism – meaning God can be created rather than any God who has created us – as the religion of choice for the Internet generation. In historical terms, Syntheism is the overcoming of the old and tired divide between theism and atheism. First as practice, now also as theory. The result is our new book Syntheism – Creating God in The Internet Age. And we are certainly not alone, serious thinkers like Simon Critchley and Quentin Meillassoux and pop philosophers like Sam Harris and Alain de Botton have recently and successfully adressed the very same issue. We tap into a qide and urgent need for a new spirituality beyond Christianity and New Age. What nobody foresaw though was that the Internet itself would be both the tool and the metaphor for this movement.

The dramatic effects this revolution will have on communication and the workplace can not be overestimated. The Individual is dead, long live the Swarm. Everything important from now on will be about interactivity, co-creation, collaboration (a loved child is given many names), and it will first and foremost be a cultural rather than a technological shift. Sure, this shift is based on tehnological change, but it is fundamentally cultural nevertheless. Teaching armies of professional communicators to communicate with friends rather than to shout at strangers is in itself an enormous challenge (do they even have any friends to begin with?). Corporations still spend hundreds of billions of dollars on advertising in 2014, despite the fact that the proper word for advertising online is spam and we all hate it and instantly throw it away.

The only chance to survive in this new environment is to learn and adapt fast or else become irrelevant and die. And the key to understanding this paradigm shift lies within the fastest growing and most important online community in the world, Burning Man and its many spin-offs. Perhaps we are the first philosophers to take this huge phenomenon seriously. But we will certainly not be the last. How many close friends do you have who live and work in Silicon Valley? How many burns have you and your closest friends attended? Today those questions determine how much power and influence you exert on the world. And on your very own future.

Burners.Me:

Basically, what he’s saying is: “Your future depends on going to Burning Man. Your only chance to survive. The digital world is primary, if you are not Liked on social media then you are irrelevant and will die. To get power and influence over the world, you must go to Burning Man. Burning Man is the fastest growing and most important online community in the world.”

Poppycock.

Our only chance to survive as humans is to NOT let them build these digital hives to entrap us in their swarms and commodify our souls for advertisers; NOT let them build pop-up civilizations built on propaganda and the idle few benefitting from the sincere efforts of the many.

The claim that Burning Man is the physical manifestation of cyberspace/virtual reality has been made since the mid-90’s – about the time John Perry Barlow got involved. He is credited with first using the word cyberspace to describe the modern Internet. In this interview he did with Larry Harvey last year, they claimed that Burning Man was intertwined with tech/acid culture, and that BM was responsible for the tech industry’s move from Silicon Valley to the city.

Many of the key components of the Internet were built by Burners, and before that by acid-dropping Deadheads. The inspiration for the name Apple came from the orchards where Jobs first took acid, something he called “one of the three most important experiences of my life”

Wash your own brain, Burners. Whether the power player behind the scenes of Silicon Valley really is BMOrg, or some other group that pulls the strings of all the puppets, don’t let them do the thinking for you, and don’t believe everything you’re told.

Think for yourself. Question authority…said the guy who wrote the CIA entrance exam.

[Update 9/27/14 4:55pm]

Alexander Bard gave a TED talk, “What If The Internet Is God?”. It’s eye-popping. I would say the #1 worst TED talk I have ever seen.

Note the God-trashing at the opening, as if eliminating religion is somehow necessary for the invention of technology. It continues for the whole 18 minutes. Personally, my Radical Inclusion filters were severely challenged by the dude’s outfit. YMMV.

"It is said, Percy, that civilised man seeks out good and intelligent company, so that through learned discourse he may rise above the savage and closer to God" - Black Adder

Cyber-philosopher Alexander Bard. “It is said, Percy, that civilised man seeks out good and intelligent company, so that through learned discourse he may rise above the savage and closer to God” – Black Adder

“I was one of those guys you wanted to be, sure. But I suffered from religion envy…then I went to Burning Man…Americans haven’t actually understood how profound it is...I was there with a neuro-scientist who was using me as his guinea pig…I wasn’t sober for 8 days…I was in this couch somewhere being put on these drugs giving me a female orgasm for over 6 hours…to make sure I didn’t die, the neuroscientist…had placed a gorgeous naked woman in high heels next to me doing cocaine all night long…all of a sudden she goes ‘You know what? Burning Man is Mecca. We’re doing our hajj’…we’re 60,000 people in the desert in Nevada, and we’re really practising a religion. Even with the burning of The Man on Saturday night…it really is a religion: for Atheists. They’re not even New Age at Burning Man, there’s no crystal healing going on, if it is it’s ironic.

Crystal healing, for those not neo-hippie enough to know anything about it, is white magick. Not surprising that it isn’t going on inside Burning Man’s fire magick pentagram. You want white magick to be clean and pure and free from negative energies that could interfere.

“…god is a concept far too important to leave to the religious…We live in a world without Utopia, which is incredibly dangerous. We need to get hold of a new Utopia, otherwise we cannot save the planet…we need to create god”.

If, like the majority of people on this planet, you do believe in God, you might see “We should create God” as the words of Satan, trying to implement an Evil agenda through this “cyber-philosopher” in the name of Religious Envy. The terms “False Idol” and “False Prophet” spring to mind.

“What could be a bigger, better thing to create than to create god”?

Man cannot create God. But he can create the instruments of the Devil that will be used to bind him.

“Don’t be evil”, says Google – or, at least, they used to. So they can’t be…right? Because if they were, they’d tell us. Evil doesn’t lie, they’d be really honest. Right? Sell your soul to Satan, says BMOrg. Ironically, of course.

Although the Bard doesn’t believe in God, he believes in Quantum Physics. He thinks “physics is just another word for playing hide and seek with God” Make up your mind, buddy.

“Atheos – the god who does not exist”. This is Luciferian doctrine. Satanists worship the absence of god, more so than the devil as an anthropomorphized figure. When you worship “The Void” as a god, you worship destruction.

They say Burning Man is the cycle of death and rebirth, but where is the birth part? We arrive each year to find The Man fully formed, ready to erupt in flames and fireworks after we’ve worshipped him in his magical circle for a week, guided by him with our sense of time and space juxtaposed. Wanton destruction and mayhem in the name of the fire god, and in the name of the New World Order Digital God that many Burners are involved in creating. Don’t be fooled by the Louis XIV powdered wigs.

If you say your god is Nothing, but you need to take drugs to connect with the Void – well, maybe you should consider if the drugs are taking over your life, if it’s actually them you are worshipping, not Nothing. When he finally names his Satanic god of the Void at the end of the presentation, its name is Sin. Sin the OS. Sinternet.

“You know perfectly well that you don’t exist. You know that, and yet you behave as if you exist, and your friends behave as if you exist”

– ah, Philosophers. Can’t live with ’em…pass that dutch.

[9/28/14 00:19am]

Robotic theorist Hugo de Garis sums it up pretty well:

Amazing 2014 documentary:

Aug 31 2014

What Do Google and Gangsters Have In Common?

Google’s Eric Schmidt at Burning Man 2007. Check out the bandanna, does he wear that shit in Oakland? If he’s gangsta, he’s a Blood not a Crip

The idea that Google and Gangsters have some things in common is cautiously expressed in a fascinating article from Makeshift Magazine, which quotes from a book “The Misfit Economy”. Forbes introduces it with their own article and headline, highlighting Makeshift and the revolutionary new movement called “Maker” that underpins them, and this whole new economy.

Is this Steve Forbes taking a pot shot at Google, while its founders are out on the Playa, by suggesting they are “gangsta” and connected to the shadow economy? We know for a fact they’re closely connected to the NSA and the ruling oligarchy’s Bildeberg Group, “the most influential group in the world”.

Google were the first company to culturally appropriate Burner culture, using Burning Man’s logo to launch their own “doodle” in 1998.

At that time, Google didn’t have a business model, it was a completely free service. A text box with search results. Adding graphics was a big, bold step for them. They deliberately linked their brand with Burning Man, in an effort to appear “hip” to their Stanford classmates and the fledging dot-com industry that was booming up around them in San Francisco. But it was more than just a symbol that they were cool – it was also symbolic of them becoming a company, just like Burning Man had before them. Larry and Sergey returned from the Playa and incorporated their company immediately upon their return from Burning Man. Burning Man, this Pagan fire ritual, was the symbol used to mark the corporate birth of Google.

How much money did they make since this commercial exploit of Burner culture? Not much, only about $400 billion.

They’ve boasted about their links to Burning Man ever since, with the help of Stanford professors. They used Burning Man to prototype Google Maps, among other technologies. Whoever knows exactly what other experimentation they’ve been conducting in this big desert petri dish, isn’t telling.

Google have more than a billion customers, and read half a billion peoples’ email looking for “keywords”. That’s mostly how they make money, selling that keyword information to advertisers.

This company, staffed with many Burners, is trying to put cameras connected to the Internet on everyone’s face, as well as monitoring our behavior in our homes with the Internet of Things. It is making robotic self driving cars, and calls its operating system “Android”. The guy in charge of all this believes that humans will merge with machines and live for centuries or longer – thus creating another, superior, dominant species: and relegating Man to the status of an animal. This is called Transhumanism and his name is Ray Kurzweil, if you’d like to look any of this up for yourself.

Recently Google acquired Boston Dynamics, the maker of some of the world’s most advanced military robots. Thousands of their robots have already been used in combat zones.

Nothing to worry about, right? We all know SkyNet is good. And Google are Burners so they must be good! Right? Their motto is “Don’t be evil”, after all. What’s evil? There’s no book on it, according to CEO Eric Schmidt. “Evil is whatever Sergei says is Evil”. These days the CEO says “don’t be evil” is the stupidest rule ever, and the motto has changed to “You can make money without doing evil”. It’s the 6th of their 10 ~~Principles~~ Things, and there’s no further part that says “…and therefore, that’s the only way you’re allowed to make money”.

Lately, the Billionaire Burners from Google are talking about having their own Burning Man-style Autonomous Zones. Maybe we will start to see more robotic art cars on the Playa, on top of the hundreds of drones and famous glassholes.

First the introduction, from Forbes magazine:

According to an upcoming book and Kickstarter project, The Misfit Economy, it appears that Google and gangsters have more than a few things in common. The shadow economy, hidden economy, and informal trade are all names for what some also call the black market. It is that “place” where trade happens illegally, but these terms would not capture the full story of changes in the world’s economy.

Makeshift magazine writes about this undercover, below the surface, movement if you could call it a movement. I call it reality.

They are not, from my perspective, seeking to cover or promote solely illegal activity (such as drug dealing), but the innovation that takes place when resources are scarce. One could argue that people get into dealing drugs or trading illicit/illegal products do so because of a lack of education or resources or any variety of reasons, however, the reality is some of the rules are bound up in cultural rules that those on the fringe of mainstream society do not find relevant or fair or useful.

The fascinating part about this new magazine is that it has citizen journalists, blogger/travelers, who are finding and sharing unique approaches to commerce and innovative solutions to common problems…there are new rules of capitalism andMakeshift is catching that long tail in a new economy.

Read the rest of the introduction here.

From Makeshift:

What do gangsters and Google have in common?

Two young drug dealers marvel at the ingenuity of their Chicken McNuggets and imagine the innovator who must have become incredibly rich off his invention. An older, more experienced dealer, D’Angelo Barksdale, mocks their naiveté, explaining that the man who invented the McNugget is an unknown at the very bottom of the McDonald’s corporate ladder who dreamed up a moneymaking idea for those at the top. What does this story tell you? It’s essentially a debate on the provenance of innovation: is it driven from the top, by the big hitters? Or from the bottom, from the unknown, underground “misfits”?

This scene—one of the best in The Wire (if you could ever choose)—captures the essence of perhaps the most prevalent myth of innovation: that it comes only from those at the top, within the closed doors of corporate, Silicon Valley, and Ivy League labs across the globe. Most, like the young drug dealer, still believe the engine of the economy is fueled by innovators working in the formal world and on the pages of Harvard Business Review.

The Misfit Economy, an upcoming book and growing movement, is dispelling this myth. The “itch” to innovate also comes from the ships of pirates, the underground world of hackers, the havens of Mexican drug lords, and the enterprising underworld of Mumbai. Misfit innovators operating outside of the formal economy are a vital part of our economic history (consider how Johannes Guttenberg, Nikola Tesla, and even street peddlers shaped modern cities). And they are a part of our economic future: by 2050, one third of the world’s workers will be employed by the informal economy. If you combine the annual income of informal markets across the globe, it comes to a staggering USD 10 trillion.

…Gang life…is not all hip hop and Pimp My Ride. It’s also teeming with practical ingenuity… like every forward-thinking manager, [gangs strive] to create a culture of entrepreneurialism. Consider Google’s now-famous 20 percent rule. As the company grew more hierarchical, it sought to maintain its enterprising start-up feel. So it continued to encourage its employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on their own ventures, many of which became formal and indispensable Google products like Gmail and Google Talk.

In gang life, as in the corporate world, entrepreneurial spirit or the drive to “get ahead” can also threaten those in power. The pursuit of recognition and esteem drives progress yet can also be disruptive. But there are notable differences too. While whistle blowers in companies are often penalized, many within gangs constantly face opportunities to rat out colleagues. And the odds are, the bigger the gang, the higher probability there will be a rat. For this reason, gangs have had to radically downsize in recent years to ensure loyalty.

The art of loyalty is something Google knows well. In an effort to recruit and retain employees, Google is notorious for creating a “sticky” culture. The company is known for a culture of play and experimentation. Successful gangs are similar. They understand that culture is the number one value proposition.

And in 1996, …[a gang] overhauled their vision and brand, transitioning from a “street gang” to a “street organization” with a more mission-centric focus. The [gang] involved themselves in political demonstrations while still maintaining its “sacred cows”…

Read the entire article here, and the Forbes introduction here.

Also check out this interesting infographic from Makeshift:

Burners.Me: Me, Burners and The Man

Snarky. Cheeky. Grumpy. Dopey. Never Bashful.

Tag Archives: robots

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