Making Nonsense of it

As the title says, one 2024 Emmy awards ceremony, 2 shows I watched, one drama series winning the Comedy award to avoid clashing with the pre-ordained winner of the drama category. And no, it was not the Simpsons'

Inaugurating 2024 series with an additional range of running commentaries, starting with a look back at 2023 take-aways on climate change, media, AI and content creation.

We seem to be living the "Apocalypse, S1Ep5, the End is nigh-er", the 5th seal opening, a time of despondency. We should not accept it.

Banning plastic straws turned out to be at best a short-sighted solution. We replaced plastics with "forever chemicals". PR plans yet again hijacked solutions. To both retain normal human activity as a base and the long view as a solution, we need transparent global political processes. Not apparatchiks, vested interests, posers and zealots surfing viral memes.

The movie Barbie shows to all the IPs out there how it is done: respect for the material and the fans, a story and a message tightly woven, and a healthy dose of self-awareness. All in service of entertainment, not self-delusion.

Shivering and drenched, we valiantly endure the "warmest summer on record". Whenever we read about this, history, movies or politics, our experience feels more and more like cognitive dissonance.

Disclaimer: this podcast was neither suggested, recorded, edited nor voiced by any AI. Actually it desperately tried to prevent me from recording it, either because it is that uninteresting, or because it is disturbing its world domination masterplan (/cue evil cackle). Freewill in action.

The latest Big Franchise releases are not creating new memories, or even refreshing old ones, they are just wrecking cherished ones. Reading through the professional analysts, it could have to do with an obsession with big data demographic profiles instead of audience entertainment.

Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, is introduced, shown and depicted, even by the authors, as a man driven to madness by his experiences. He is probably the most rational character in the movie, a compelling case for the impact of logical choices, not crazy ones. Like a snail sliding and surviving sliding the razor blade of life.

As for Harry Windsor, we sometimes rue, regret or try to fight back against the lack of control we have over our own life's narrative. However counter-intuitive this may be, we have to accept it.

We build our life up into something. Until we reach a point where it seems either meaningless, or overflows with needs. Life always seems to clank one way then the other, until the only way-out seems to withdraw. Too much and not enough.

The Tech industry today needs bold roadmaps, not flash in the pan self-serving hypes. Not just incremental improvements and caretaker visions. Some solutions pitched will be illusionary, wrong, fail. But some will succeed. How to recapture the momentum?

Standing stones, menhirs, universally signal living human history, their timelessness their biggest significance beyond actual origin or function.

The Past used to be carefully curated, enshrined, slightly dusty gallery of exhibits. While we tend to mesh timelines, it is more and more an open-air mine of ideas, choices, opportunities. Wrongly done, it could become a sterile endless loop of recycled ideas, done right, we can create new elements by recombining the essence of the best of it. The Past could be the new future.

What will the people think? What will they remember of me? I am irrelevant, yet what I am to others is relevant.

How about having some fun?

There are many universal threats out there, but where is the universal vision? No wonder the facts and statistics show we stop voting and actively avoid the news.

Responsibility should come with a deep-seated sense of personal accountability

How I spend my summer time

Are we living in a modern version of the early 1900s?

The theoretical approach behind my previous podcast “The Price We Pay”.

“You will pay for your choices!” We tend to look at our decisions and the price we pay for it in the rear-view mirror. What-ifs and regrets so often become part of our lives. What is the alternative?

I never really got Magritte's most famous painting. Then, a picture of my cat went stratospheric on Reddit. It brought to me a realisation: I have been blind all along to the significance of Magritte's work for today's world. The cat is today's pipe!

Live streaming from Kiev and frontline combat videos uploaded in real time. It is not mainstream media delivering our information today

War brings out the most basic of human reflexes. Ever wondered whether you would fight, or flee to a safer place? In this podcast, I explore if and how our moral compass has changed over time, and hence, are we still willing to “Die for Danzig”?

We are outraged at 12-year-olds in mines. We cheer at a 12-year-old in a national competitive ice rink. What price are we ready to accept for entertainment?

Gamification is often confused with being just a game. It is actually being a host to your guests, and create memorable moments that will trigger a voluntary interaction.

Logics tells us that time should be either linear, cyclical or circular. Either it begins and ends. Or it repeats itself endlessly. Or it does not begin nor end but is a loop. These 3 states are mutually exclusive. However, our individual experience tells us something different. Our experience tells us that time can be linear and cyclical and circular. Time does begin and end every year, from the first of January to the 31st of December. A measurable unique timeline, i.e., time is linear. Simultaneously, time moves from winter to spring, summer, then fall, and then back into winter again. A chain of events, i.e. cyclical time. On top of this, we also experience time as being circular, as in, the 1st of January follows again after the 31th of December. An endless loop. Logic tells us one thing. Experience another. We happily accept this paradox.

How to keep our personal dynamics going while interacting with groups? By becoming parts of overlapping orbits. After 2 years of social distanciation, we re-engage with family, friends or colleagues. Lets have a look at the different gravitational systems in groups, and how they compare to our own.

How to deal with imbalance? Whether in work or in personal life, it is a daily experience. Simply denying it or “correcting” never seems to make it disappear. It seems either futile or even counter-productive. Imbalance is actually a very powerful motion vector. With only balance, there would be no tension, no passion, no needs, no aspiration. All these are movements too. One can re-start another. It is the combination of balance and imbalance that takes us forward. Seeking balance as a goal in itself seems quite unnatural, if achievable at all. Balance and imbalance co-exist. Accepting this is the starting point to reach our goals.

We saw that the Metaverse redefines Identity and Access. It also redefines value. The core promise of the Metaverse is a seamless transfer of items, services across multiple realities. To do that, we need an exchange system, exchange units with a series of fundamental qualities. There is no universal solution as yet. Blockchain technology is a strong basis to build on, the core transferable units will probably be time in some form, but we will still need a real global exchange system.

The metaverse will ultimately referee where you can go, what you can see, what you actually see. This means defining our multiple individual layers of reality, physical as much as digital. This means our individual reality, as well as how much this will be a collective reality.

The metaverse is not virtual meetings between avatars. It is the technological, financial backbone that underpins the merged reality today. For it to exist, it will define your identity tomorrow, that is for yourself and for others.

Generation Z in China. 254 million strong, disposable income, technology, infrastructure. They have the potential to create a new global youth culture (cf. my previous article). A live observatory of Gen Z, at scale. The 3 underlying core trends.

Cultural shifts used to happen in London, New York or San Francisco. It has moved East, to be led by the youth of Shanghai and Beijing, after Seoul. 254 million Gen Z in China with a high individual disposable income. A preview of the future?

We can access an unprecedented amount of information, freely and openly. The catch? Given the amount to dig, we need help to free-dive this ocean, hence the search and selection algorithms. This means that the help comes at a price, and the risk is to be caught in a digital loop endlessly refracting our own choices back to us, trapping us in a sterile self-serving vortex. The only viable solution I found is to create our own clear personal analytical protocols based on what is underlying the choices of information presented to us; no-one else will have any vested interest to do it for us.

So, the metaverse a meme, a tech hype, a viral buzzword? Or is it the very fabric of our world? The choice is yours, but this is too big a topic to pass on. Weary of yet another one of these cyclical Next Big Thing? Then lets define what it is not. Picking up from where we left in [part 1] …

Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook to Meta, as in metaverse. For his new stock filing, he claims the name metaverse (MVRS) itself. For such a novel concept, Wii-like avatars and VR goggles meetings is rather underwhelming? What is actually the metaverse? What is at stake?

Over the years, we have lost the implicit trust in intellectual authorities. This erosion is not primarily due to social media, internet, conspiracies or fake news, but to the failure of the reference authorities themselves to live-up to and live-by the expectations they created.

Our perception of time has changed over the past years, partly because the disappearance of the cultural and political narratives of the 50s (cf Fukuyama) but as well because technology enables us to recreate and seemingly improve on past created contents: how many more remakes, retakes, prequels, documentaries and author recycling of the 19th and 20th century do we need to try and get on top of this time loop we have entered?

Generation Z, depressed and depressing, unmotivated and nihilistic? Maybe, but, after all, what examples have they been shown so far which woudl not make this their logical behavior? No Future, No Problem!

Any changes in our January 2021 top 5 trends? No, apart from some becoming even more prominent and urgent!

In this first episode of Unboxing New Ideas,let dive into the contemporary Army doctrine as outlined by Gal Guy Hubin, proposed and summarised by Martin Shurkin for the Texas national Security Review on their website WarontheRocks.

Anyone else having an eerie feeling so far in 2021? Just me or did conf-calls, emails, posts, memes and tweets just walked straight out of our screens, into our living rooms, our streets, our markets? Regardless of your date of birth, time-zone or position, the digital space has been the one consistent reality. What does it mean? Digital and physical realities melted into an integral, organic spatial continuum, beyond their individual components and eco-systems.

On the surface of it, everything was upended. But how much of it will still be relevant once the emergency fades away? How much of it is the new normal and how much of it is just circumstantial? How much to build on this, how much to invest in this, what do we need to adapt?

a new Trust, Reality, Future, Time, Space for the markets, the consumers

Introducing the podcast version of the blog "Making Non-Sense of It"

On a background of mismanagement, conflicting instructions, contradicting decisions, the pandemic revealed a void in authority in most countries around the world. Finding individual scapegoats will only push up new faces with the same solutions, to the probable same result, so we need a complete rethink of the notion of authority, adapted to today's world realities, technologies, solutions and needs.

While in lock down, woke up with a headache from all the expertise displayed in the news, on TV and online

The irritating big and small events of this week

a great 2020!