Beer, gamification & prophetic visions
Social media, social classes & the Met Gala
JG Ballard wrote science fiction and much else, but was also quite the futurist. Sample this, where he looked ahead to a world (our world) of search engines, back in 1971.
“The technology of the information-retrieval system that we employ is incredibly primitive. We fumble around in bookshops, we buy magazines or subscribe to them. But I regard myself as starved of information. I am getting a throughput of information in my imaginative life of one-hundredth of what I could use. I think there’s an information starvation at present and technology will create the possibility of knowing everything about everything.”
So what is the intersection between JG Ballard's prophetic visions, controversial and uncomfortable stories, and an opulent celebrity do in 2024? Beats me, but I had brief thoughts on it below, where I also share a lovely little BBC piece which tried to figure out the dissonance of the theme for this year’s Met Gala.
Friday Find
Apologies, baseball fans, but the sport has never appealed to me. Maybe I find it dull, maybe its just that I love cricket.
What does appeal, and is definitely not dull? This sneaky & swift creative work in today’s ‘Friday Find'!
Baseball game on. Batter smacks the ball. It hits a sponsor LED, takes a light out. There’s now an unsightly black square on the sign. So far, so inconsequential.
Except the batter is Shohei Ohtani. The brand is Coors Light. And they were having none of this ‘inconsequential’ stuff.
Reactive marketing to the fore- a commemorative can is made, sold, goes viral, reaches Japan where the brand hasn’t sold before.Now there’s one kind of black box we like! (and not too shabby a video case study as well, I'll say).
from Rethink
Oh, Goodness
(sharing some good reads)
If you are on Substack, and well likely if you are not, this might have reached you. A long read, but as with much from
’s The Prism, this is very much worth your time.
From last year, a powerful and different perspective on the Oppenheimer era from The Wired.
The closer we get to the bomb’s completion, the more marbles go into the bowl. But there’s no mention in the film of where two-thirds of that uranium came from: a mine 24 stories deep, now in Congo’s Katanga, a mineral-rich area in the southeast.
As the marbles steadily filled the bowl onscreen, I kept seeing what was missing: Black miners hauling earth and stone to sort piles of radioactive ore by hand.
This is The Dark History Oppenheimer Didn’t Show.