How to Have a Good Idea
A unified theory of fantasy football; Eat, Pray, Love; and Burning Man.
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Web 2.0 worked. It won a toehold in the world. People started rallying around. It might have been the triumph of concept over reality, but it created value immediately. The concept said, “Our industry is not a hopeless heterogeneity of practices and approaches. It is some thing. Google AdSense, Flickr, BitTorrent, Napster, Wikipedia, blogging, search engine optimization, Web services, wikis, tagging, and syndication—all of this is not an experiment in free fall, but an industry charging forward.” Web 2.0 bundled nicely, and as it bundled, it clarified and galvanized.
Within a couple of years, Web 2.0 was coin of the realm, the term you could use in a meeting to a chorus of nodding heads. Eighteen months into its launch, Web 2.0 had 9.5 million citations in Google. The Web 2.0 Conference, first held in 2004 in San Francisco, drew 700 people and an array of distinguished speakers.
Of course, there were real differences of opinion about what the term meant. But at least people were now conducting the discussion under one umbrella instead of all over the place. In fact, a world of faint signals, tremendous confusion, ceaseless experiments, and widespread skepticism was beginning to cohere. Now we could be more like hedgehogs (who, as Isaiah Berlin told us, think about one big thing) instead of foxes (who are obliged to think about many things). Our culture was a little more organized.
As a Culturematic, Web 2.0 delivered that most extraordinary thing: a category in our heads that would help us see the world. And from this could come a conference, a consensus, and a community. An industry pulled itself back from chaos and began again, now more confident and more purposeful. It helped coax nervous investors back into the market. It helped reignite the entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley. Not bad for a word, two numbers, and a dot.
Burning Man
Larry Harvey and Jerry James took an eight-foot wooden man to San Francisco’s Baker Beach on June 21, 1986, and set him on fire. People came sprinting up the beach to have a look. As the winds drove the flames to one side, a woman rushed in to hold the Burning Man’s hand. A stranger with a guitar improvised a song. Sparks flew into the night air, and the Burning Man burned.
Harvey and James resolved to burn another man the following year. Volunteers assembled to help. Friends brought friends. These friends brought friends. More songs were written. And after a couple of years, Burning Man was an annual fixture of Baker Beach. Eventually the city said no to a fire on the beach, and Burning Man moved to the desert. This meant creating Black Rock City, an economy and culture that now exists for a week each year, in a wasteland about 90 miles from Reno. Some 48,000 people come to participate. Burning Man makes the desert bloom and then vanishes without a trace.
Some 25 years after it was founded, Burning Man has a credo: “Burning Man is about coming together in a beautiful yet unforgiving environment to celebrate radical self-expression.” But at the moment of the first event, he was just a guy on fire. No back story. No story at all. The Burning Man website explains: “During the early years of growth on Baker Beach…organizers or workers [never] asked what it meant…no self-conscious meaning or symbolism seemed necessary.”
Harvey and James didn’t need meaning or symbolism. They had started with a simple what-if, as in “What if we build a man out of wood, take him down to the beach, and set him on fire?” It was a little Culturematic, an event with a very clear start and no clear outcome. The two men didn’t know what the Burning Man was for. They just wanted to see.
Like every Culturematic, Burning Man is both a cause and an effect. It’s a cause, because it pushes parts of American culture to new intensity, especially the democratization of art and the notion of “random kindness, senseless beauty.” It’s an effect, because it is riding what Daniel Bell called America’s “expressive individualism,” our need to explore our own and the community’s creativity.
Culturematics can’t flourish unless they catch something in our culture. But when they do, they have an accelerating effect. This makes Burning Man a little like Chez Panisse, the Bay Area restaurant that Alice Waters created in 1971 and that helped express and intensify the local-food movement. Culturematics begin as innovations tiny and obscure. But when they speak to Americans, they end up speaking for Americans.
Culturematics and the World of Innovation
The British researcher John Kearon recently looked at the innovation record of Unilever, a massive Dutch-British consumer-goods corporation. The results were surprising. Unilever has a great track record, creating not just new brands and products but entire categories: laundry powder, fabric softener, margarine, and moisturizing soap. Kearon discovered that none of these discoveries came from the innovation centers Unilever set up in the 1990s to produce such results.
Everything about the innovation centers had looked right. They hired the best people. They spent real money. They centralized Unilever’s creative efforts. And as Kearon explains, by and large they failed.
The innovation center model is good at creatively farming existing brands, and has added significant value to the likes of Dove, Lynx, and Flora. But as a model of innovation it is too centralized, too evidence-based, too “marketing science”–orientated to have the freedom and contrariness to originate new categories that can create even greater value.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
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RELEASE THE MCCRACKEN!!!
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Unfortunately, Grant is still living in the shadow of his brother Phil.
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When I heard that joke for the first time in 6th grade about 30 years ago it was a laff riot.
One time when I heard it from some knucklehead in a bar, I told him a long story about the Irish martyr Henry Joy McCracken and how my family's name was a proud reminder of the long struggle for Irish freedom and how none of us are willing to just sit still and let someone treat it as some kind of joke.
I'd try and act like I was getting more and more upset as I'd go through this until at the end when I'd suddenly smile and shrug my shoulders.
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If I just get high, then I will have some good ideas.
What was the question?
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People with this much knowledge wanted more involvement. Fantasy football let them into the game.
My experience with fantasy sports is exactly the opposite. The people who play fantasy sports are the least knowledgeable and the least interested in the outcomes of the games. They want something to make the games more interesting. Juggling the stats and the lineups becomes its own game for the nerdy, most of whom certainly did not play the game.
They do, of course, pick up some knowledge of the actual sport while playing the fantasy version, but only so far as it improves their fantasy team -- they know the backup running backs and quarterbacks on every team in the league, but don't really know many of the plays those players run.
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I haven't seen this. I play fantasy football and my buddies are all incredibly knowledgeable. I do agree that so many people play fantasy sports that some of them have to know nothing about the game, but that's probably a minority.
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Oh, there's plenty of people playing fantasy sports who know the sport very well, but the fantasy sports universe, especially fantasy football, brings in people beyond the core fans.
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"The people who play fantasy sports are the least knowledgeable and the least interested in the outcomes of the games."
Least knowledgeable about certain aspects of the game--probably.
Fantasy players know a lot about offensive players. They know a lot about who his backup is, too. Fantasy football players in Seattle know who the Michael Turner's backup is. Old school fans didn't know that.
So, I wouldn't say they're the least knowledgeable; I'd say they're typically not as knowledgeable as fans used to be about things like formations, defense, and who's playing gunner on special teams of their hometown team.
They don't know as much about the game, and their hometown team as the old school guys, but they know more about offensive players all around the league.
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If you want to see how Morgan Spurlock lied in his "Supersize Me" movie, watch the movie "Fat Head" by Tom Naughton. I think it's available on Netflix.
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I had the same negative reaction to Spurlock in this article. I've not seen the movie you mentioned Delroy. But I assume it covers the assertion from nutritionists that Spurlock had to have eaten twice the amount of food he claimed.
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Within a couple of years, Web 2.0 was coin of the realm, the term you could use in a meeting to a chorus of nodding heads.
Holy vapid corporate anthropologic bullshit Batman. This is approaching Thomas Friedman metaphor abuse.
Speaking of another self-proclaimed deep-thinker, the fail in this is just spectacular.
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"This is an abysmal failure of free market forces to converge the end price with the cost of production."
I don't think this person has even the slightest familiarity with the terms s/he is using.
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Aside from the abysmal ignorance of economics, consider that the dweeb can't even distinguish between a simple point to point communications link versus a cellular mesh.
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They want something to make the games more interesting.
L7805CV -
Culturematic
I know made up bullshit terms when I see them, sir.
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The other thing fantasy football freed us from was the tyranny of Monday Night Football.
It used to be that if your hometown team wasn't playing on Monday night, then Monday night football didn't really matter to you.
When you're in a fantasy league, the chances of someone playing on Monday night either being on your fantasy team or on your opponent's fantasy team are very high. As a fantasy player, you end up watching and being interested in games you wouldn't care about otherwise.
As a Redskins fan, I wouldn't give a damn, normally, about Kansas City playing Tennessee. But since I have Jamaal Charles on my fantasy team, and my opponent is playing Chris Johnson, I care very much about watching the Chiefs play Tennessee.
So, playing fantasy football frees me from the tyranny of the programmers, who decide which games are on regular TV. It's hard for a fantasy football player to find a game with no fantasy relevance whatsoever. But before I started playing fantasy, I didn't give a damn about three-fourths of the games on TV.
In fact, fantasy has created a market for satellite television where there was none before. Before fantasy, there wasn't a market for people who wanted to be able to watch every single game being played every week--because people only cared about their own home teams.
Subscription satellite TV is now a huge business. Sports bars where you watch the games you want are likewise a huge industry.
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Very informative article. I've found your post via Google and Iam really glad about the information you provide in your posts. Thank You for sharing this very informative article.
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thanks
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but don't really know many of the plays those players run.Sohbet - Sohbet Odaları
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Culturematics are the forge on which a distributed.Sohbet Siteleri - Chat Siteleri
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But not much of a hearing. Friends can be relied upon to offer discouragement.Güzel Sözler - Şarkı Sözleri
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Most of these ideas keep moving. Mynet Sohbet - Sohbet
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Last week’s exertions and heroics on the field were creating the foundation of an alternate world in the ether. Film izle - Dizi izle
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Winkenbach, you are such a loser. Sohbet - Sohbet Odaları
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and who's playing gunner on special teams of their hometown team. Oyun - Mirc indir
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I do agree that so many people play fantasy sports that some of them have to know nothing about the game. Rüya Tabirleri - Yemek Tarifleri
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