“10 events of the last decade that were more important and significant than Sept 11th” is another fascinating piece of writing from Foreign Policy, this time considering perspective.

Again, I’m going to quote excerpts, and then list the 10 events as the author, David J Rothkopf, has them.

“9/11, for all its tragic and heroic drama, is an easy event to overestimate. Indeed, we have been overestimating its significance since almost the moment it happened…

In fact, the success of Osama bin Laden was in masterminding a low-cost, comparatively low-risk action by a handful of thugs that produced one of the most profound overreactions in military history. Trillions of dollars were expended and hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the emotion-fueled maelstrom unleashed by a shaken and clearly disoriented America. Bin Laden aimed for Wall Street and Washington, seeking to strike a blow against symbols of American power, but in so doing he also hit us where it would hurt the most — right in our sense of perspective.

We spoke of 9/11 as though it were somehow equivalent to Pearl Harbor, the beginning of a global war against enemies bent on, and at least theoretically capable of, destroying the American way of life (unlike al Qaeda, a ragtag band of extremists with limited punch). We spoke of cultural wars and a divided world. We reorganized our entire security establishment to go after a few thousand bad guys. We went mad…

One way to demonstrate [a] restoration of historical sensibility comes if we ask ourselves, looking back over the past 10 years, what other developments took place that exceed 9/11 in lasting importance? What events of the past decade will historians write of that will have them looking past or beyond the attack, its masterminds, or its immediate response? There are scores, I suspect. Here are just 10 that come to me off the top of my head:”

10. The American Response to 9/11
(so much of that response was irrational and more directly related to issues in America’s past)

9. The Arab Spring
(These revolutions are having a broader social impact than extremism and are linked more directly to the self-interest of the masses in the region)

8. The Rebalancing of Asia
(it touches more lives and will be of far greater impact to global foreign policy than anything that happens in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or anywhere in the Middle East)

7. The Stagnation of the U.S. and Other Developed-World Economies
(Entering an age of limitations is forcing big powers to work together differently and has put the kibosh on the momentary and misguided unilateralism of the Bush era in the United States.)

6. The Invention of Social Media
(What’s more important? Knocking down the World Trade Center and killing several thousand innocents or linking half a billion people together as never before?)

5. The Proliferation of Cell Phones and Hand-Held Computing Devices
(Everyone is connected. Everyone is a witness. Everyone is part of a global news network, an instant coalition, a mob, an electorate.)

4. The Crash of 2008
(The tens of trillions of dollars in losses sent hundreds of millions of people deeper into poverty, crushed retirement accounts, impacted the well-being of billions of people, and called into question the viability of countries and companies in ways that cannot yet be calculated.)

3. The Eurozone Crisis and the Crash of 2011-2012
(it [could] have an even more devastating impact on already weakened economies worldwide; and if it undoes the European experiment, which has helped ensure decades of peace on a continent previously riven by conflict, well, then it will again on totally different grounds easily trump 9/11.)

2. The Failure to Address Global Warming
(If global temperatures rise another degree or three this century, 9/11 will be seen as a comparative footnote to an event that could remake the nature of life on Earth and lead to a toll many, many times greater than either 9/11 or the wars it triggered)

1. The Rise of China and the Other BRICs
(The past decade has seen them emerge to the point that they are now the engines of growth that will determine whether a market crash of 2011 occurs, whether the United States and Europe can borrow to fund their ailing economies, whether the world will reach an agreement to manage greenhouse gas emissions, whether we will truly contain the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and what the real future of international institutions and agreements will look like.)

…It is important to [the] process of consigning 9/11 to history to understand both what it was and what it was not, why it was important and why it was just one of many even greater stories of the past decade.”

Again, I encourage you to read the full article and think for yourself.

This is one of the best articles about Hip Hop I’ve read in recent years, comparing Jigga to the USA, 50 Cent to Russia, southern rap’s rise as that of Asia’s increased power, the West Coast (Snoop, Dre et al) as Europe and perhaps Eminem as India or Brazil – a power in his own right that seems neither influencing nor affecting the wider world.

The following are extracts, but I urge you to read the full article by Marc Lynch, here.

“[The] basic argument [is] that Jay-Z handled his hegemonic position by exercising restraint, declining to engage in most provocations in order to avoid being trapped in endless, pointless battles. Jay-Z battling the Game would have risked being dragged down into combating an endless and costly insurgency with little real upside. Better for the hegemon to show restraint, be self-confident, and to carefully nurture a resilient alliance structure to underpin leadership…

The structure of the balance of power in the rap world continued to evolve towards multipolarity over the last two years, if not an actual hegemonic transition, in the midst of a serious financial crisis afflicting the entire industry — a situation not unfamiliar to the White House…

Rap’s center of gravity was being pulled relentlessly away from its New York roots, taking on a more southern and more international feel. The entire industry faced a massive financial crisis, as the internet and market fragmentation continued to contribute to the steady collapse of the business model for albums and record companies. What is more, there was every reason to view Jay-Z himself as a declining power. While a Jay-Z album could still dominate the rap space as completely as the U.S. military could dominate any global battlespace, that dominance rested on deteriorating foundations…

Watch the Throne therefore should not be judged as an album, but rather as a move in this savvy strategy of institutionalizing hegemony in the face of potential decline. Kanye and Jay-Z’s alliance offers a new blueprint for managing decline in a turbulent world from which international relations scholars and American foreign policy practitioners alike should learn. And if political scientists don’t want to take lessons from hip hop artists, then allow me to give the last word to Cyhi Da Prince: “my haters got PhDs, y’all just some major haters with some math minors.”

Brilliant writing from my new news source, Foreign Policy and Marc Lynch. Props.

The assumptions that increasing affluence would lead to a happier, wealthier and more equitable society have driven the economy for the last 30 years, but with the understanding that whilst some would get rich faster, the benefits would be felt by all of China’s 1.4bn citizens.

The Dr Damian Tobin of the School of Oriental and African Studies at UCL, on the BBC, offers a different opinion:

The emergence of a middle class, combined with high levels of personal savings and low levels of personal debt, offers tantalising evidence of China’s new-found wealth.

Yet, behind these headlines, there is compelling evidence that although economic growth has created vast wealth for some, it has amplified the disparities between rich and poor…

 

Read the full article here

Technode wrote an article “If RenRen is not Chinese Facebook, what is? Kaixin, Sina Weibo or Douban?” that’s started me off nicely.

(click the image for a larger version)

RenRen started off as Facebook – you make a page, you like brands and connect with friends, comment and add pics etc… but it’s evolved into more of a community than Facebook has, with people rallying around topics of conversation and brand-chat rather than around their own profiles and spying on others’ activity.

Weibo is the big hitter of the moment – it’s like Twitter but with on-site picture and video sharing, and more. Add me here! Like Twitter, you can follow fans, brands and news sources… but not everyone’s on there. And there are plenty of fakes. Just like Twitter. But unlike Twitter where much of the content is re-Tweeting or news-casting, Weibo seems to be much stronger in connecting with friends and having real communication. More like Facebook then…

Interestingly, both RenRen and Facebook started life as University social networks, Facebook has been more successful in its expansion. “People use RenRen when they are still in the universities, and switch to Sina Weibo when they start working,” said a hedge fund manager invested in Chinese internet stocks.

Enough of my excitable new learnings, read the experts and their thinking here

Oh, and btw, in China, lunchtime is the new primetime – all the junior staff are sat at their desks watching catch-up TV over lunch… or sleeping. I’ll share a photo on this soon. Interesting insight for anyone wanting to reach office folk.

Contagious suggested today that we think about marketing in the following 4 brackets, with accompanying examples.

1. Advertising as entertainment. How can you engage and sustain your audience?

For example: Jay-Z and Bing teamed up to launch Decoded, Jigga’s book; Intel’s Museum of Me perhaps shows the weird skew to your real life that is Facebook, but a charming idea nonetheless; Arcade Fire’s Wilderness Downtown broke my laptop, but it’s a great execution; Mini Getaway in Stockholm; and of course my own favourite, Nike GRID.

2. Reacting in Real Time. How can you or your brands harness the power of a response? Can you turn disaster into an opportunity? Can you extend the relationship you have with consumers (people) who increasingly expect a dialogue with you?

Old Spice’s Responses; Mitsubishi’s Live Drive; James Ready’s Blank Bottle Cap recall; Kulula.com airline’s marketing during the World Cup (the link is only part of the whole campaign… sorry).

3. Work in Projects, not Campaigns (sure, there’s a time and a place, but real change comes with commitment – work that is born to live, not built to die).

This works off the idea of building a bonfire that draws people in to your point of view/ambition/(product). A little strange given that not long ago we talked about how “If you build it they will come” is an outdated model… but hey, that’s the Internet for you.

Good examples include GE’s Vacuum cleaner made from the floating plastic islands; Norte’s “best excuse ever”; WWF’s unprintable PDF; baby carrots sold as junk food; IBM’s Watson computer taking on the best Jeopardy contestants as a (de)volution of Deep Blue vs Kasparov (I write (de)volution, but really the Jeopardy test is arguably more interesting a measure of intelligence than chess… or is it simply memory?)

4. Marketing a service design. An interesting development from the first principal, furthering the idea that your advertising should enhance consumer’s existing behaviour.

Heineken’s Star Player is an incredible game to play during a group vieiwng event, and can easily be extended form Champion’s League football to include, for starters, US Open, Olympics, even X-Factor; Footlocker created the Sneakerpedia – sure, to enhance sneakerheads’ engagement with Nike, Adidas, etc… but really to develop incredible insight into that world for Footlocker, which can then be sold on to Nike etc when considering re-issues, collections to buy etc. It’s a CRM tool, really.

Below is a comment from Naomi Klein in the Guardian. Ten years after No Logo, Naomi Klein considers how corporate branding (marketing) has taken over America. I found this on Comme des Fuckdown who read it on somethingchanged, who must have quoted it from The Guardian. It’s relevant in a way, so I highlighted the bit I thought was most interesting.

“Personally, none of this makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns. All of their high-priced market research had found a longing in people for something more than shopping – for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. Of course the brands tried to exploit that longing to sell lattes and laptops. Yet it seemed to me that we on the left owed the marketers a debt of gratitude for all this: our ideas weren’t as passé as we had been told. And since the brands couldn’t fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.”

Deep.

Thanks, Contagious.

How does one find authentic creativity? In his last talk before passing away, Malcolm McLaren tells remarkable stories from his own life, from failing school to managing the Sex Pistols. He argues that we’re living in a karaoke culture, with false promises of instant success, and that messiness and failure are the key to true learning.

More at TED.com

In getting himself fired from Two and a Half Men, this privileged child of the media’s sprawling entertainment Empire has now become its most gifted prankster. And now Sheen has embraced the post-Empire, making his bid to explain to all of us what celebrity means in that world. Whether you like it or not is beside the point. It’s where we are, babe. We’re learning something. Rock’n roll. Deal with it.

DailyBeast has Brett Easton Ellis’ full article that appeared in Newsweek recently, enjoying the trauma left in the wake of Charlie Sheen’s escapades. He explores the idea that Sheen is the true face of celebrity in our modern, “Post-Empire” age.

“Post-Empire”? Ellis writes:

Post-Empire started appearing in full-force just about everywhere last year while Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You” gleefully played over the soundtrack. The Kardashians so get it. The cast (and the massive audience) of Jersey Shore gets it. Lady Gaga arriving at the Grammys in an egg gets it, and she gets it while staring at Anderson Cooper (Empire!) and admitting she likes to smoke weed when she writes songs—basically daring him: “What are you gonna do about that, bitch?” Nicki Minaj gets it when she sings “Right Thru Me” and becomes one of her many alter-egos on a red carpet. (Christina Aguilera starring in Burlesque doesn’t get it at all.) Ricky Gervais’s hosting of the Golden Globes got it. Robert Downey Jr., getting pissed off at Gervais, did not. Robert De Niro even got it, subtly ridiculing his career and his lifetime achievement trophy at the same awards show.

Good article.

He pulled together over 1.5 million individual bus rides from Transport for London to create the visualisation.

To view stats on a particular route, use the drop down at the top right. You will also need to click “Show Route”-then you can see the route on the map and the detailed fare and usage stats at the bottom.