The predicament of the public intellectual is less that he or she is unwilling to engage the so-called "real world," but that he or she is not particularly welcome to do so. Anti-intellectualism is not theoretical, is it is a functional policy. It is the expert that is excluded as much as he excludes, and the history of collusion between the two is weird and uneven.
Westinghouse and CBS was not particularly enthralled with Theodor Adorno's conclusions written for the Paul Lazarfeld's Princeton Radio Study which they underwrote, that mass radio was destroying our collective capacity to genuinely hear, and that its programming of auditory experience was essential to totalitarianism. On the side more flattering to the client, compare Marshall McLuhan work for
GE and Ford which provided the former a more optimistic message about "light as a medium," or Anthony Giddens' explication of the "Third Way" for an eager Tony Blair. (As Slavoj Zizek notes early in Living in the End Times, the usual result of philosopher-as-consultant is disaster).
However, for anyone like myself, who splits their time between the intellectual autonomy of the academy and the projective contingencies of design strategy, it is difficult not
to entertain the possibility of bridging the two worlds directly. What if the incursion of market forces into research labs were inverted? What if a major corporation convened a top cabal of non-corporate
thinkers and doers, brought them to the table with their own key players with the assignment to map the landscape and evaluate what they should to next. (The Jasons are another ambivalent model) Or, in other words, instead of paying an traditional agency six figures per month to
tell you what you already know, why not pay that for one month to get a
wealth of ideas and insights you've never heard before or would never hear otherwise. Is this not the more direct means for the Brahman to counsel the warrior-sovereign? Or is it simply the more unadulterated means to provide an alibi of intellectual depth to a product process that by definition possesses none? Or, put crudely, what if the MBA's gave way to the PhD.s? Is it possible for the brontosaurus apparatus of the postmodern corporation to have a new brain surgically inserted, if only for a day or two? And if so, so what?
In different ways, I have explored for a new combination of positions that would alter the criteria by which market decisions are made and which would install the insights gleaned from the aforementioned autonomy into worldly conditions where their unlikely presence may do unlikely good. Success is elusive to say the least. Among the most instructive and interested was IF/THENMOTO, an a C-level scenario-planning
and product
road-map modeling summit for Motorola, bringing top technology, design
and
strategy thinkers into collaboration to envision the immediate future
of mobile and environmental software, which I co-produced and
programmed with Rebeca Mendez, Adam Eeuwens and the
Los Angeles Ogilvy Brand Integration Group,
The
event took place over 3 days in Chicago, and brought together a
remarkable group of designers and theorists to envision, delimit and discriminate what might be possible for the integrations
of personal telephony and the digital city.
Rene Daalder (Filmmaker, gadfly collaborator with Rem Koolhaas & Sex Pistols, VR and special effects pioneer, now Director of Space Collective, Bas Jan Ader, Koolhaas, Tim Leary)
2002 was a prehistoric era for ubiquitous computing and digital cities, and much of what was discussed that is more understood now was seemed adventurous then. Motorola was (and is) the only actor with capabilities both in embedded chips and software systems and personal handsets. In principal this should give them tremendous first-mover ability in the development of a spatial software substrate as "monteizable infrastructure." In principal, but no. The brontosaurus would not be moved.
Some of the conclusions to come of the discussions were:
Be a mobile software company and more importantly a platform for other mobile developers. Control the ecosystem by channeling the developer/user relationship (like App Store)
Make all UI elements soft. A device that is all screen, no buttons (like iPhone, kind of a no-brainer)
Link embedded chip/software capabilities to handset to grow same developer/user ecosystem for a digital city (nobody there yet).
Use automotive/handset personal interface links as basis of above digital city system (ditto though lots of movement)
Let your users (and your users kids) build up medium-range mesh networks to support new levels of data socialization (same, thought lots of interesting work on this recently)
Motorola of course did none of this. They continued to make phones. Instead of personal ubiquitous computing we got the RAZR, the last dumb phone to lead a major OEM's
product line. Ogilvy continues to play the short game of
incremental quarterly billable, a dysfunctional company is drawn a picture of what its real function might be but cannot recognize itself in that reflection. And the end result for Motorola has been predictably
unprofitable, and a giant catalog of ideas goes into
the ether.
What did come of it? More than it seemed at the time and more and more as the landscape we described comes more into view. Also, Numair Faraz became Frost's personal consultant and wrote a now infamous article on the company's failurses. and Xeni Jardin and Cory Doctorow met for the first time and went on to make Boing Boing history.
Tags: branding, center for design and geopolitics, mobility
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