Dejour Magazine has a fascinating interview with Hub Culture founder, Stan Stalnaker. Author of the forward thinking 2002 book Hub Culture: The Next Wave of Urban Consumers, Stalnaker shares his insights on where the hot spots of cultural innovation are happening now. He covers the increasing extreme interconnectedness of the world and shares stories of pros and cons of living in post-national global village.
Stan on the connected world:
In my view the ‘butterfly effect’ is a repercussion of this shift towards a revealed collective identity, where we finally realize (really realize, feel) that the tree falling in the Amazon affects our beef in New York, that the bottom of the pyramid bears the weight of the top, and that our actions, no matter how small, contribute to a combined common reality. As the ‘top of the pyramid’ in recent years has realized that they are part of a common hub, I think soon the rest of the planet will see that too. This means that farmers in Africa and factory workers in Vietnam and taxi drivers in Shanghai will soon find solidarity with each other, probably driven by low cost mobile technology, with nodal connections already at 3 billion and counting. This will change our view of the world and force us to address some quite awkward issues. Can Paris Hilton really skank the bling when half of Africa can watch her in real time? Is flaunting excess still acceptable when you’re finally face to face with someone who has nothing? It will have to shift.
As transparency drives efficiency, there will be no other place to live than this global village, and it means we’ll all be competing on more open playing fields. Right now its good, but in the long run, its a race to the bottom unless we find ways to build value at all levels. I think that will be addressed through collective systems that pay out on the micro-level, and Hub Culture people will have to prepare for the day when not just blue and white, but green and black collars are all outsourced to the global market. At that point, the size of our networks and the value of our reputations will be immensely important.
He also drops a surprising idea; what if the really innovative stuff is actually happening in strange remote locations, as opposed to the major hub cities -like the suburbs?
I also have this new hunch that the action is really in the suburbs, - anonymous locations where people are leading in a different way - immersed in online worlds. This is where the real cultural innovation is taking place, and its scary because its not what hub culture itself would consider desirable - living in a condo off an interstate, but king of some wild Internet gaming frontier. Soon that frontier will be where we all live, when the web becomes a mobile, 24/7 part of our existence that we just toggle on the go. We may find ourselves not the dominant power in such a world.
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I am sure, somewhere, the Studio 54 of our generation is taking place in a MMORPG with players from the Philippines to Chile to New Hampshire all leading the charge.
Studio 54 was not about innovation — it was about coked up parasites living off of the creativity of others.
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:06 am
thanks much for the highlight here, dan.
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Sooo, rich people are going to get “embarrased” when millions of poor people see them being rich?? LOL. The internet is going to replace real human interaction? LOL. try it out, see how healthy it is. I don’t know if you (or he) is aware, but people need people. The fact is, more is going on in the cities, because people there are interacting IN PERSON with other smart people. Maybe joe in his suburb made an online something-or-other, but thats not the norm. Most online companies are STILL based in cities. I wonder why.
July 26th, 2008 at 1:05 pm