Today, Tuesday, July 16th, I will be in SF doing what every people tell me to do. It’s an experiment, a culturematic.
Starting at 9:00 West coast time, I will be in Union Square ready to act on your directives.
Please send those directives to @grant27 on Twitter, with #autoanthro as your hashtag.
In between acting on real-time directives, I will try to act on the suggestions you have sent over the last couple of days. Thank you for those!
You can follow the events of the day by searching for #autoanthro on Twitter. (I like Tweetdeck as a way of keeping track of my Twitter searches.)
We will take photos and video and post the former on Twitter and the latter on YouTube. (Thanks for the suggestion, Kate Hammer.)
We will post our location in SF using Glimpse with links announced by Twitter.
For those who miss events tomorrow, I will post a compilation on Storify in a week or so.
USA Today has given us early coverage (for which many thanks, Bruce Horovitz!). You can find the details here.
Thanks to the help of Cameron Maddox of the Academy of Art University’s School of Advertising I will have the assistance of a recent graduate, Maria Elmqvist. Thanks, Cameron and Maria!
Thanks to everyone for their support.
Best,
Grant
For background, here’s the email that first announced the project a couple of days ago.
Over the course of Tuesday, July 16, I will do whatever you tell me to do. Assuming of course that it is within the bounds of legality and morality(ish).
I am going to San Francisco this week.
I am giving a talk on Monday and come back to NYC on Wednesday.
That leaves the whole of Tuesday to …
Well, that’s the question, what do I do on Tuesday? (I should have booked a get-together, but things got busy and I never got around to it. Apologies to friends in SF, Eric and Ed especially.)
So this is my plan.
To put myself on automatic pilot.
Over the course of Tuesday, I will do whatever you tell me to do. Assuming of course that it is within the bounds of legality and mortality(ish).
Please tweet your instructions to @grant27 on Tuesday over the course of the day.
I will tweet the results, text and photos, with the hashtag #autoanthro.
I haven’t quite figured out how best to capture and sequence the requests you send me. And I can’t promise to do everything that is proposed. But I’ll try. I will.
Feel free to embarrass me. I believe myself to be one ill-chosen word away from social catastrophe in any case.
But the real object is ingenuity. What effects can you set in train in an American city by directing an anthropologist on automatic pilot. Think of it as a rolling Rube Goldberg event. Small events and larger narrative arcs are both welcome. (Everything from “Turn right.” to “Find someone to tell you the story of [x].”)
If the Twitter feed stops suddenly or you never hear from me again, well, we’ll call it a long term culturematic.
Thanks for reading and thanks for any directions you send me on Tuesday! Grant