Tiny Gigantic

We’re in New York City this week playing with a few clients and digging on the city. Last time we were here, this place kicked our asses pretty good. We worked too hard and played even harder and by the end our stay we were mere shells of our former selves. Ridiculously fun, but not sustainable. This time, we’ve given ourselves a few extra days with no obligations to allow ourselves to adjust, to open ourselves to all the surprising stuff that rises unbidden out of the city, and to give ourselves the time to meet some random good people.

So if you’re in town this week, come have a drink with us. We’re gathering the troops this Thursday night, at The Back Room (102 Norfolk St) in the lower east side. I look like a Jewish baby Elvis, and Axel has a white stripe in his hair. If you’re in town, we’d love to meet you.

Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired, has developed a countdown clock to tell him how many days he has left to live, so he can make the most of them.

I am now 55 years old. Like a lot of people in middle age my late-night thoughts bend to contemplations about how short my remaining time is. Even with increasing longevity there is not enough time to do all that I want. Nowhere close. My friend Stewart Brand, who is now 69, has been arranging his life in blocks of 5 years. Five years is what he says any project worth doing will take. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. So, he asks himself, how many 5 years do I have left? He can count them on one hand even if he is lucky. So this clarifies his choices. If he has less than 5 big things he can do, what will they be?

I decided to take the idea of number days seriously, and to revisit my earlier experience of counting down my remaining time on this lovely mortal plane. My hope was that a reckoning of my numbered days would help me account for how I spend each precious 24 hours, and to focus my attention and energy on those few tasks and projects I deem most important to me. Indeed, it might help me decide which ones are most important, which is the harder assignment.

I’ve been using this system for several months now and it has been very powerful. Day to day I am aware — and can rattle off if I am asked – how many days I have left. I decided to post my project today because on my clock it shows a handily rounded off sum. So here is the news: As of today I have 8,500 days left to live. That’s not much in my book. I can almost hear them ticking away as we speak. I look at my lifelist of current dreams and I realize that in only 8,500 days I won’t get to but a few of them. And what of any new dreams?

Link.

Via Boingboing.

Richard Sweeney makes crazy beautiful papercut forms.

So apparently coca cola’s got a new energy drink coming out. It’s called Burn, and it makes you dance. But not very well. This is one of those marketing ideas that maybe sounded good around the conference table, but never should have been allowed to see the light of day. Enjoy.

200 words or less about design. This is what A Brief Message is. It’s relatively new, but I’m looking forward to seeing an expanded definition of design. Design as arrogance seems like a good start.

We’ve discussed the problem with asking for estimates before. But the asshole fee, now that’s just brilliant. And right on the money.

Seriously. You feed them and they create synthetic human poo. Amazing and really freaky-icky and also brilliant. Explore the site a bit. You’ll see.

Ok, so a long long time ago, our genius monkey-human ancestors developed bartering, the simplest form of trade: I’ll give you three bananas in exchange for that yummy hallucinogenic mushroom of yours.

Then, some slightly less monkey-like human types created money and commerce, a more complicated form of trade: I’ll give you three materially worthless tokens that have fluctuating and subjective symbolic value in exchange for that yummy hallucinogenic mushroom of yours.

And that’s pretty much where we left off. Yah, we’ve had small innovations—credit is a good example—but it seems like we should be doing a lot more thinking about what comes next. What is the future of trade?

I ask because the economic system we are using now has some serious limitations. Right now, lots of people and companies profit at everyone’s greater loss. For example, a company could make a bunch of lawnmowers, make a profit and sell them at a price that seems like a bargain to the buyer. Everyone wins, right?

Nope.

Because those lawnmowers now exist. They will eventually sit in a landfill, leaching yuckiness into the water supply, and the matter that comprises the lawnmowers will be hard to reform into something else. All those molecules will be trapped in a form that’s no good for anyone. The money saved by the producer and purchaser of the lawnmower will be paid (tenfold? a hundredfold?) by the rest of us as we deal with the monster sitting in the landfill.

And right now, with commerce and money as we know it, things are set up to encourage people to make those lawnmowers. If we use our monkey-human-mushroom minds for a minute, it becomes obvious that this SUCKS.

We need an economic framework that’s more holistic in its vision. We need to create a system that doesn’t encourage people to profit at everyone’s greater loss. Better yet, we need a system that rewards people for creating a greater good.

I have no idea what that system would look like. And would that system use money, or something else? The economist John Maynard Keynes famously said that “Money is a congealed form of labor.” Well I propose that we need a congealed form of Karma and/or energy. (By energy I mean the resource, not the hippie concept; by Karma I mean the hippie concept.)

Lots of questions, no answers. Anyone out there got something to add? Is anyone doing good work in this area? Somebody please tell me that a team of genius monkey-humans is working on this right now in some secret underwater think-tank filled with bananas and yummy hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Better yet, someone please invite me and Josh to that think-tank.

You’ve seen the movie Smoke, right? You know, when Harvey Keitel photographs the same corner, from the same angle, at the same time every day for years? The circular life is even cooler. Go explore.