Chris Anderson's Zeitgeist

As some may be aware by now, Wired guy Chris Anderson presented at Pop!tech last week and made waves by not talking about the now well known long tail metaphor. Instead, he riffed on what happens when “things get to be free” or, in fancier parlance, economies of abundance.

As in, what happens when, say, computer chips become crazy powerful because they’re loaded with thousands of free transistors…Well then, you start designing playful GUI interfaces a. la. the Macintosh and liberate folks from having to use those old-fashioned command-line interfaces many of us still miss...

This leads to the observation that traditional media is really much more the outcome of economies of scarcity rather than economies of abundance. There’s limited space on the newsstand, limited channels on your television, limited space on your grocer’s shelf etc. As a result, we tend to get these lowest common denominator products which are designed to offend no one and, in the process, have no sense of genuine appeal.

By contrast, things like the blogosphere and YouTube are described as economies of abundance, where without the limits of conventional economies, folks are free to express theirselves in ways previously unimagined (which ironically channels the familiar naïve, myopic optimism which has long plagued free-market economies).

Next Anderson hits on several of the critical trends emerging as we move from economies of scarcity to economies of abundance—and it’s a very familiar territory…You know, the old rule of turning everything on its head for rhetorical gain. …If scarcity is about paternalism, abundance is about equality…scarcity was top down, abundance is bottom up…if scarcity was about command and control, abundance about losing control…We seem to remember Clinton using this same “inversion” trick to trash big Bush in the '92 election.

Then Anderson touted his new management style “I just try to listen and do whatever my intern tells me to do…” (if the rest of us over the age of 40 did that, we’d likely be having a heck of a lot more fun…which I suppose is the real point...)

The talk then closed with a wonderfully produced video (done by others, no doubt) on the nature of abundance and long tails and new media and what not…

I think the real take-away here is not so much whether Anderson is right or wrong, or whether you agree or disagree with the fervor and optimism surrounding Web 2.0, consumer generated content and so forth. Rather, Anderson seems to have a knack for capturing that certain spirit of the moment—the Zeitgeist if you will.

And that spirit is alive and kicking and screaming to be heard in the following video currently making the rounds:

Comments

[eas]

Interesting timing, especially now that data center space seems to be in short supply due to an inability to get enough power where it is needed.