Have you seen the new Allianz ad?  It shows the world changing in real time.  As someone walks through it, a clothing store changes on the outside and the inside.  (I tried to find it on line.  No luck.)

Add this ad to the BMW one I talked about last week, and it looks like there’s something on here.  Another data point might be the "change + HP" campaign.

According to the HP website, this campaign is designed to "help customers capitalize on change." HP wants show "change as a positive force."  More from the website:

Today, the world’s most successful companies have learned how to transform themselves into Adaptive Enterprises, in which business and IT are synchronized to capitalize on change. HP’s new advertising campaign celebrates this fundamental shift in the way we can all think and work, today and in the future.

So what is this.  I think we know that enterprise in the future will have very specific structural properties.  Complexity theory says that enterprise will be dynamic, loosebounded, messy, redundant aggregations that exhibit almost constant non-linearity. 

This is what the future will look like, part of it anyhow.  I wonder if BMW, HP and Allianz are now in the process of setting up the corporation and the brand to take advantage.  It’s almost as if we are looking at a semiotic gold rush.  Some brands, like some people, are still blissfully ignorant of what’s next.  It’s almost as if some brands have seen the future and they are now seeking what Veblen called the advantage of taking the lead. 

References

For more on the HP enterprise, go here.

"I purposely avoid flying near Albuquerque because they’ve got some kids that don’t sound older than 10 years old doing the [air traffic] controlling."

This guy is talking about the perils of making a simulated flight into a simulated airport, guiding by simulated air traffic controllers.  It may be a virtual world, but it is a virtual world more lively and less predictable than before.  The machine world is coming of age, and it is now taking on structural properties once characteristic only of the "real" world. 

In the old days, a lot of virtual activity had a "wagon wheel" pattern to it.  Each player was a spoke, the machine was the center.  We might all be playing Flight Simulator, but we are speaking (spoking) to the machine and not to one another.  Any challenge (and all interaction) came from the machine.  There could millions of people playing Flight Simulator but each of them experienced the game as a discrete, solipsistic event.  We could pretend that the game was occupied with other creatures, but we knew perfectly well that it was just the machine vamping for our benefit. 

Then software, chips and the internet increased so much in speed and power that we can now play in a virtual world occupied by other players.  This means that a "flightsimmer" might "fly" from Seattle to Honolulu, and, as he approaches the airport there, he will see planes piloted by other players guided by controllers in a Virtual Air Traffic Simulation Network (VATSIM). Near misses are no longer part of the game because they are programmed into the software.  Now they exist in the game because they have been introduced by the happenchance of human effort and error. 

This is a big change for three reasons.

First, this is a big advance over some simulations in which interaction is premeditated and deliberate.  In the case of Second Life, most interactions take place between creatures who mean to interact with one another.  (This is the crisis of Second Life at the moment, finding the pretexts and conventions that will make game play engaging, and something truly like a second life).  But in the VATSIM case, interaction take place between perfect strangers.  My game can be changed by behaviors you "throw off" in your game without really thinking about what they might mean to me.  Flying into Albuquerque, I may "crash" because it just so happens that you, the controller, are inexperienced, tired, distracted, or wrestling with your sister for control of the family computer.  The controller is not (or need not be) concerned with what my flight simulation experience is going to be.  No, he is just doing what he does, and whatever this is will sometimes have important implications for my game play.

Second: Now to climb the hierarchy, this means we have a "Jonathan Miller" effect at work.  I have referenced this so often in this blog I am quite sure that frequent readers can supply the argument by heart.  Miller argued that the way to create a convincing performance on stage was to construct a character who defied expectation.  Any character who sprang only from genre, Miller argued, would fail to be convincing.  It is only when noise and contradiction are built into the character that the character comes to life.  This is, it seems to me, pretty close to what happens when by game play is constructed not out of the programmer’s anticipation of what I will find engaging, or someone’s deliberate efforts to engage me, but by the far more random effects of happenstance.  Other players, pursuing their own agenda, buffeted by their own peculiarities and accidents, are more likely to create the vitality of the real world than even the most inventive programmer.

Third: Up one more stage, and we are looking at a virtual world that resembles the most dynamic thing in our real world: the economy.  It is precisely when individuals engage in unmediated, undeliberated behaviors, that extraordinary social and cultural patterns begin to emerge.  To use the once fashionable language of French structuralism, the economy comes not from "structure" (the shared, preconceived, conventionalized ideas) but from "event" (in this case, behaviors, their aggregations and cocatenations). 

In effect, the virtual world has struck upon the thing that Western cultures and economies embraced in the 17th and 18th centuries.  For an astonishing number and variety of reasons, the West was suddenly prepared to give the economy pride of place and to live with the dynamism that came spinning out of it.  Unlike almost every other culture and society in the ethnographic record, the West said, "we will install this difference (the marketplace) in our midst and we will live with all the differences it creates for us."  Periodically, the West lost its nerve and repudiated this arrangement, but overall and in the aggregate, this bargain with reality was allowed to stand.  Allowed to stand even when it left almost nothing standing. 

So the virtual worlds now have access to the secret of dynamism, the one difference that will create many differences.  Anthropology still hasn’t done a very good job examining it own, real, contemporary culture.  Too bad, because flights to new worlds will now be leaving terminal 1 virtually every hour on the hour.   For this anthropologist, the arrival of real dynamism in virtual worlds means that there will be more and more realistic transformational vehicles for us  to try out, and that, as we try them out, still more worlds will be generated.  Holy cow. 

References

Sanders, Peter.  2006.  In Imaginary Skies, Would-be Controllers Guide Pretend Pilots.  Wall Street Journal.  May 18, 2006, p. A1. 

I think we all remember that guy in high school, the one who never really paid attention because he was busy covering his note book with mythical creatures and fighter planes.  Much to everyone’s surprise, he actually improved his technique a little but his taste in topic never got better.  This guys was about beasts and bombers.   Aesthetics be damned.

We all know what happened to this guy.  He went on to design games for Electronics Arts or someone.  These are the games that do astonishing things technically, but aesthetically (with exception of games like Myst), they all pretty much look like crap.  The characters in Halo are particularly bad.  You can almost see the high school notebook from which they sprang.

There is good news from Fast Company.  Arvind Palep and Serge Patzak run a company called 1st Avenue Machine, and they are now famous for a video called Alias. Alias is an astonishing piece of work.  I mean, really.  Palep and Patzak have what the design world should call, after tennis, touch.  I guess Fast Company asked Palep to explain why 1st Avenue Machine was so good and now so sought after.  He replied:

Before, technology was the barrier.  But it’s faster and cheaper now, and there’s a real shift to people with artistic vision.

This means "bye bye" to the guy drooling over his notebook.  In the early days, we were obliged to hire the guy at Bungie (the authoring house that created Halo).  He might not have an aesthetic bone in his body, but he knew the code and he could make it do remarkable things.  But now the technology has begun to assist in its own invention, many more players can deliver technically superb stuff, and advantage now goes to those with "touch."

In effect, the technology has interceded on its own behalf.  It once imposed an access tax.  If you wanted to use it, you had to forswear some of the ways you would normally deliver value.  (Specifically, you foreswear design intelligence.)  But now the technology has disintermediated the guy who knows code and nothing else.  It has migrated to those players with higher order capabilities.  It has effectively put itself in the hands of those who will make it more interesting, more engaging, more beautiful.  Hmmm.  It’s almost as if the tech is engaged in an evolutionary effort to recruit the humans who can be most useful.  Does anyone else feel a chill?

I wonder if something like this is happening in the corporate world more generally.  While discussing the BMW spot, Tom Guarriello and I were contemplating the state of the corporation and specifically how many people are passionate devotees of innovation, and how many remaining implacably hostile to the idea of new ideas.  I believe the nitwits still flourish, but Tom says, no.  He believes the worst offenders are now out or outmanned. 

It’s almost as if the corporation has found a way to put itself in the hands of better humans, too.  The BMW ads are important because they say, effectively, "it’s all about the ideas and the ideators."  And increasingly, I think we see the truth of this.  Everything else can be left to a system constructed by deep thinker at a b-school, a d-school or an e-school (eingineering).  As corporations draw ever closer to the status of a complex adaptive system, superbly able now to spot opportunity and act on it, they must honor the idea above all else,  and this means, in some cases, there will have to be a change of personnel. 

In a weird way, corporations are struggling toward the light.  They do not always know the path to absolute dynamism, but they have very little difficulty figuring out who can help and who will hurt.  I think we have yet to see what the new dynamism has in store for us as a culture and an economy.  But there is no question that, after extraordinary individuals, the first flower of individualism, corporations will be the first one in.  Tom says that those who harbor anti-dynamic inclinations have been rooted out.  I am not so sure.  I think that many of them now live under deep cover.  But that we will find them out as inevitable.  Just as technology came to its own aid, disintermediating those who could not realize its full potential, the corporation will make itself steadily more dynamic and as it does so the party of resistance will become ever more obvious. 

References

Anonymous.  2006.  Special Effects.  Fast Company.  March.  p. 87.

For the Alias video from 1st Avenue Machine, go here.  (Click on "projects," choose the last box in the vertical array.)