Force one: Creation is amplified.
Publish a book or sell a painting or customize your car or design a house—whatever your passion, it’s easier to do it, it’s faster to do it, and it’s more likely that (part of) the world will notice what you do. The ability to reach and change those around you has been changed forever by the connections of the Internet and the fact that anyone, anywhere can publish to the world.
Force two: Rich allows us to do what we want, and we want to be weird.
Only wealthy organisms are able to culturally diversify, and as human beings get richer and richer, our instinct is to get ever more weird. As productivity has skyrocketed, so has our ability to do what we’d like instead of merely focusing on survival.
Standing out takes time, money, and confidence. More of us have all three now.
Force three: Marketing is far more efficient at reaching the weird.
The long tail isn’t just a clever phrase; it’s an accurate description of the market for just about everything.
It’s easier than ever to reach particular pockets of weird people with stuff they’re obsessed with. That makes it far easier to be obsessed, because marketers are willing to go along with your desires, instead of forcing you to do only what they want.
Don’t underestimate the power of marketing to make things happen. The fact that some marketers are enabling weirdness is a significant force in the way we act.
Force four: Tribes are better connected.
Because you can find others who share your interests, weird is perversely becoming more normal, at least in the small tribes that we’re now congregating in. The community you choose can be a mirror and an amplifier, furthering your interests and encouraging you to push ever further. The Internet connects and protects the weird by connecting and amplifying their tribes.
The historical trend toward mass vs. the new trend toward weird
Here’s that conflict again. The thing that made us rich was our ability to process in mass, produce in mass, ship in mass, and market in mass. The advances in productivity were largely about large-scale innovations in production and delivery. Consider nylon, say, or the interstate highway system.
This wealth, though, is fueling a movement that undermines the foundation that earned us the wealth. We needed a mass audience to leverage the assembly line, and the assembly line was supported by TV ads, but as the marketers and factory owners got wealthy, that wealth made the market wealthy enough to no longer sit still and obediently do what we’re told to do, undermining the very system that created the wealth in the first place.
Which is fine, because the next breakthroughs in our productivity and growth aren’t going to be about fueling mass. They’re going to be relentlessly focused on amplifying the weird.
At the same time, marketers of all stripes have eased up on the pressure to fit in. Social structures have shifted and the heroism of outliers has been celebrated again and again. McCarthyism faded and Arlo Guthrie stepped in.
Antelopes don’t have hobbies
You need to be rich to be weird.
Not Rockefeller rich, of course, but rich enough to not worry about surviving. Rich enough to care about choice.
Most animals aren’t rich. Ever. They forage or hunt, and if they don’t succeed (daily), they die.
Human beings, on the other hand, have figured out how to be productive. And as we’ve gotten more productive over time, our weirdness has followed. Pre-historic cultures, not nearly as productive as ours, show little evidence of the weirdness our culture has recently developed.
Consider the cave paintings in Chauvet in southwest France. 17,000 years ago, human beings became rich enough to paint. That meant that someone was given weeks off from the work of hunting or foraging to spend his time painting instead. It means that the community took the time to make brushes and paints and to admire his work. Few of us would consider this group of cavemen to be rich, but compared to every other organism before them, they were. They were making choices.
Fast forward… compare that one French cave painting to the explosion of work on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There’s an almost endless array of subject, medium and approach, all created in the last century. It’s not a discussion of better or worse—it’s about variety. And variety often comes only if there’s wealth. For 17,000 years, we’ve been on a productivity binge, creating ever more efficiency and value and yes, wealth. Art at the edges is no longer an oddity, it’s the norm.
The truly poor don’t get to say, “I don’t like vanilla, I want chocolate.” Rich people, a group that is more and more of the planet, are now expected to say just that. Despite the growing gulf between what politicians label as rich and poor, in much of the world even the poor are rich enough to make choices, rich enough to have passions, rich enough to care about what they watch or what they eat.
When people are truly poor, “Take it or leave it” is an appropriate marketing strategy. Poor means no choice, so the provider gets to choose. Commodities were the best you were going to get, so marketing was primarily limited to “here, want some?” If all you can afford is beans and rice, then beans and rice is all you get. Not a lot of room for initiative or anything we might call weird.
One of the most exciting changes in the way aid flows from the richest countries is that we’re realizing that even the disadvantaged want choices, that even people we label as “poor” want control over what they do and how they do it. When we give people choice, we make them richer.
Many who work in international development are quick to agree that people in the developing world deserve choice and want choice, but their actions belie this. The easiest knee jerk reaction is for the wealthy to decide what’s needed, and ship it out in a giant container or dispense it from the back of a truck.
Over and over, we see that when you give people a choice, they take it.
Weird as an expression of being human
The marketplace isn’t merely about turning a profit. Adam Smith might have embraced the market because capitalism leads to productivity, but that’s only part of it. The market also encourages personal choice and engagement. It enables us to be weird if we choose to, not merely to be the compliant masses, waiting for a handout.
Matt Ridley reported on how much time (or work, or money, same thing) it cost us to buy light, a fundamental building block of our civilization. Twenty-two hundred years ago, you would need to work fifty hours to buy an hour of light from a sesame oil lantern. Today, you can buy an hour of clean, bright light in about half a second.
The rapid increase in the availability of things we now take for granted—food, transportation, shelter—means that the world has gotten richer at an astonishingly fast rate of speed. Now that most of us can buy survival without spending the whole day working, we’re left to figure out how to spend the rest of our time and money, and marketers are building ever more ways for us to choose.
Often, when we talk about helping poor communities, we’re actually working not to save a life but to offer more choices. That’s how we improve our well-being—by enabling choice.
Today, there are people who can make a living as painters or professional bowlers or even poets. There are 10 million households with a net worth of over a million dollars. And there are millions (perhaps a billion) people who make enough money from their day job that they’re able to pursue something they enjoy with their spare time. More and more often, the thing they enjoy is something weird. Choice is what we choose.
Wealth compounds, and that brings more weirdness
Visit Etsy.com and you can buy a typewriter, rebuilt by hand, that has a USB cable coming out of the back. It’ll cost you about $400 to be able to type a novel on your iPad using a fifty-year-old typewriter. The market (and our newfound wealth) enabled Jack Zylkin to embrace his hobby, and it allows you to own something no mass marketer would ever consider making.
For just a hundred dollars more than that, anyone can buy a month-long JetBlue travel pass. Here’s what you get: hundreds of planes, hand-built in Seattle or France, staffed by thousands of trained pilots and flight attendants, maintained by thousands of mechanics, controlled by computers (at a cost of billions of dollars of research and development), all standing by, waiting for you to decide where to go. And then they’ll take you there, safely. And you can do it again tomorrow.
How much light you get for a minute of work
Any city you want. Every day.
We’re surrounded by miracles, by leverage and by the choices created by 10,000 years of increasing productivity. Is it any wonder we’re now spoiled for choice, that we expect it, that we demand it?
Productivity compounds. Right now, we gain wealth from inventions made a hundred years ago, discoveries that our parents or grandparents made, shortcuts that were discovered long before we got to work. The ever more networked nature of our world means that we have huge assets at our disposal—laser cutters, roadways, chemical compounds, and innovative ways of processing ideas—all standing by, waiting for us to do something new.
A computer should cost a billion dollars. Instead, you can buy one for $200. The reason? The insights and investments and innovations of a decade or two ago have already been paid for. We get the benefit of the innovations that came before, but we don’t have to pay for them—not just the advancements in manufacturing, but those in our networks, in our markets, and in the way various media leverage what we create.
The demand for normal (fueled by the explosion of our productivity since the industrial revolution hit its stride in 1920) is now ironically and inevitably clashing with the trend toward weird (fueled by the explosion of manufacturing and marketing productivity since 1920).
Making an impact on our own culture
Without special training or permission, people can design a T-shirt, throw a party, sing a song, or write a poem. That’s not news—these aren’t technical skills, they are cultural ones. Human beings have always been creators. We express ourselves, connect with people, and make our home in the world through the culture we participate in.
The biggest cultural shift that the Internet has amplified is the ability to make an impact on your own culture. It’s easier than it has ever been to make a video or spread an idea or live your life surrounded by like-minded people. And those like-minded people, when exposed to the poke of your creativity, poke back. New culture is created on top of the old one, and then another layer of culture goes on top of that.
The Pro-Am revolution—the increasing impact of amateurs working to professional standards—means that amateurs, unannointed by any official entity, can publish, create, and connect. It means that a single individual can change the way we think about just-in-time manufacturing, Halloween costumes, or anything in between.
Pro-Am contributors do professional quality work with significant impact, and they do it for fun. They might be discovering asteroids, editing encyclopedias or writing printer drivers for operating systems. Because they can. And the system both enables their work to be of professional quality and leverages it to have significant impact.
The effortless connection of tribes (people who share a culture) reinforces ideas that might otherwise end up abandoned. Tribes with Pro-Am members accelerate nascent ideas and spread them in a feedback loop that encourages ever more creation.
Stop for a second and consider that this was impossible forty years ago. Impossible. The chance that a typical citizen could create a story, a picture, a device or an algorithm that would change the conversation was vanishingly small. Today, the path from idea to conversation to choice is far more clear. The open door is an invitation that reinforces the impulse to create.
Consider the tragic case of Van Gogh. He sold only one painting in his lifetime, and he lived in isolation, sure that his work was being (and always would be) shunned. Imagine the impact on his life and art if he had been connected to a burgeoning circle of fans and fellow artists.
When an artist (not just a painter, but anyone creating new ideas and new work) is able to have his work amplified, it changes him and also raises the bar for those that would follow.
Post a video of yourself playing Steve Winwood riffs on the twelve-string guitar and you’ll hear back from other guitarists within an hour. You’ve been connected. You see their work, you incorporate it in yours, and you’ve been amplified.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports on the habits of millions of internet users. According to the report, “Many enjoy the social dimensions of involvement, but what they really want is to have impact. Most have felt proud of a group they belong to in the past year and just under half say they accomplished something they couldn’t have accomplished on their own.”
Chris Anderson of TED has spoken about how rapidly skills as diverse as skateboarding and public speaking have advanced. Artists, performers and geniuses of all kinds can post their work online, see how others improve it, and then raise their game in return.
One result is a rapid increase in the pace of creative development. Jokes and memes and images and inventions and ideas spread faster and farther than ever before, gaining both speed and valuable edits as they travel. And then they come back to us, bringing connection and support with them.
Five hundred years ago, the Portuguese government made it a crime to publish a map of the New World or their other imperialistic explorations. They didn’t want anyone to see what was out there. The Web and the tribes it supports are violating that law. Everyone keeps publishing detailed maps so other explorers can go ever faster.
When you don’t feel alone, it’s easier to be weird, which sort of flies in the face of our expectation that the weird individual is also a loner. Social acceptance of weird behavior makes being weird more popular. This reinforcing effect causes tribes to rapidly splinter off from the now fading idea of mass. The weird person seems normal to her small group of fellow choicemakers, but no, that behavior is not big enough to be attractive to the mass marketer.
As a result, the mass marketer keeps missing the point. He’s busy looking for giant clumps instead of organizing to service and work with smaller tribes. Probably worth slowing down and reading that sentence again, because our bias for mass is so strong and so ingrained that we often overlook it.
Smart marketers are already supporting those that wish to choose
Our culture, particularly in the United States, is still about buying stuff. And weird would go only so far as a cultural force here if there weren’t souvenirs and junk to buy to fuel our weirdness. Without stuff to buy to support our passions, I fear that many of our passions would fade.
Never fear. Marketers have shifted gears and are leading the push to weird. The smart ones are in fact co-marketing with parts of the market instead of marketing at the masses.
No matter what your predilection or passion, marketers are now able to sell to you and are interested in doing so. Disney will help you get married in Orlando. Zappos will sell you precisely the shoe you have in mind, in whatever size you desire. NetJets will have a private jet waiting to take your CEO wherever he wants to go on an hour’s notice. We’re so used to having choices, it’s almost shocking when we don’t have them: what do you mean, no one makes x-c ski boots in wide sizes?
Threadless goes much further than this. They have no art department to design their T-shirts. Their customers design them, and then sell them to their other customers. Want a T-shirt featuring “The Eating Habits of Bears”? They’ll happily sell it to you.
In addition to being able to make what the market desires, this new breed of marketers are also far better at figuring out what the market desires. And as they identify and connect with these non-mass pockets of interest, they’re encouraging further weirdness from whatever niche they are in.
If you want to sell $900 handmade rifles to obsessive collectors, the easiest way to grow your sales is to grow the market of obsessive rifle collectors. That means that marketers evangelize this particular weirdness to those who might be entranced by it. And then, as the market grows, they go further, pushing the envelope, making ever lighter and more desired rifles… which means further pushing the edge of what it means to be obsessed. More choices, less mass.
The cycle continues, with the nascent spark of weirdness being noticed and then fanned by the marketers, who in turn hand it back to the market, who get weirder still, further pushing the marketers along the path.
Stereophile magazine runs ads for 3-meter-long speaker cables that cost $1000 per meter (that’s for a pair, sure, but still). Those ads pay for the magazine, a magazine filled with articles about weird audiophiles and their silly expensive hobby. Those articles encourage readers to push the hobby further, and manufacturers respond by making ever sillier products.
This cycle leads to the used-goods market, a place like audiogon. com, where less well-heeled but just as passionately weird listeners can buy and sell used gear for half the price of new. Even better, they can find discussion boards where they can discuss, for example, this online post:
Connect the primary (high side) leads to an audio oscillator or function generator. These are the blue and brown leads for a push-pull transformer, or blue and red for a single ended one. Set the frequency to 1000 cycles per second and the output to maximum. Now use an AC voltmeter to read the voltage on both the primary (high side) and the secondary (low side). Divide the larger number by the smaller one and square the result. This is the impedance ratio.
Or consider this one, from a forum about a conversation few of us can imagine being involved in:
Dislocation Meshing is a new and promising approach to automatic hexahedral meshing for FEA. The goal of the group is to exchange knowledge, experience and insight on how Dislocation Meshing can solve the practical problems of today and tomorrow.
Tribes are better connected
Just as marketers have actively worked to amplify the feedback loop that makes weird more accepted, individuals are doing the same thing, even when money doesn’t change hands. The reason that people are walking away from mass is not so that they can buy more stuff. Material goods and commerce are not the goal, they are merely a consequence. The goal is connection.
Go to a Tea Party rally and you’re more likely to move further from the political mainstream and into the mainstream of the Tea Party instead. Visit a website about extreme tattoo art and you’re more likely to get more ink. Attend a conference on just-in-time manufacturing theory and you’re more likely to push your company to go ever faster.
Obvious? Of course it is. But it’s only in the last few decades that these connection tools have become both ubiquitous and efficient, and the move toward multiple silos instead one giant community is accelerating fast.
One hundred and forty-one brave firefighters in Barbados belong to the Bajan firefighters group on Ning. This online community connects them and reassures them that they are normal in their weirdness. They’re obsessed about their craft, and they want to do it right. Not right by our standards (most of us don’t understand why someone would spend 80 hours a week risking one’s life for free) but by the standards of the community of firefighters.
These communities are each their own silo, each a micro-culture that embraces the original weird notion and then drifts off in its own direction.
Amplified creation, marketing efficiency and the support of tribes, then, are pushing toward one outcome: we’re getting weirder. Mass is withering. The only things pushing against this trend are the factory mindset and the cultural bias toward compliance.
We can argue about whether the loss of a cultural center is a good thing or not, but it really doesn’t matter what one generation believes is good for the next… all of our choices are leading in just one direction, which is away from the center.