Detroit: Currently rebooting. Picture by PhotoFusion

Detroit, and the rest of the American economy, is in deep trouble. Drastic changes are taking place because of the skyrocketing price of oil, from GM shuttering plants to the nosediving airlines, but to fix the problems of towns like Detroit, it’s going to take more than an unlikely return to cheap gas prices.

I was so happy to see Obama finally clinch it last night, for so many reasons, but it’s going to take more than changes we can believe in. We need changes we can be involved in and instigate. To fix places like Detroit, faced with uncertain global economic conditions that change by the hour, we need systems that allow for change constantly. We need systems and organizations that can organize and reorganize at a moment’s notice. Companies and cities like Detroit need to become hackable. Ryan Holiday just pointed me in the direction of a great article on hacking industrial economies by Umair Haque over on the HBS site. Haque writes:

“Last week, I asked: how would you rethink a rusting, obsolete American auto industry?

“Let me rephrase that question, to illustrate why I asked it. I was really asking: how would you hack Detroit?

“The answers were (seriously) phenomenal: different approaches to hacking Detroit’s resources, capabilities, business model, and DNA.

“Why is that so important?

“Hacking wasn’t just a cultural phenomenon; a bunch of socially awkward dudes with even worse haircuts than investment bankers geeking out in their bedrooms. It was larger: a loose set of anti-management principles that unlocked innovative capacity companies couldn’t – and still can’t – match. Hacking was a radically different - and often hyperefficient - way to find big economic problems, and then solve them.

“And that’s exactly what we’ve been discussing: the malaise gripping the venture industry, because it’s seemingly unable to find and solve big problems. One of the reasons today’s revolutionaries are failing is because they’re losing perhaps the most essential part of their DNA: they’re forgetting what it means to hack stuff.”

It’s a good read. I think there is also another side to the point above about the venture industry. The VC business and the record industry for that matter, and many other industries besides, are not solving the big problems as well because we have other ways to solve them. We don’t necessarily need an encyclopedia company to make an encyclopedia (See Clay Shirky’s excellent book for more on this). You don’t need a $100,000 video and a fleet of trucks loaded with plastic discs in jewel cases, headed to stores you have to pay to display your plastic discs, to get a great song out there. And you don’t always need a VC firm to scale a good idea. You just need the idea.

Meaning and ideas have long been spoken of as currencies, but it seems to me their value is going through the roof while the value of hard currency is falling. Companies create value by privatizing some idea that starts as social capital - like a form of youth culture which is co-opted to sell sneakers. Sometimes this works out, and the company adds value to the culture as well as making money (see: the surf, skate and snowboard industries). Sometimes it doesn’t, and the culture becomes a bloated corporate parody of itself (see: disco). But now we are finding new ways to create value without traditional companies, and some problems that could previously only be solved with private capital can be addressed with social capital.

Take Zipcar founder Robin Chase’s latest venture, GoLoco.org for example - a great combination of carpooling and social networking. Go Loco hacked Detroit by creating a new layer of social capital on top of the value created by cars. I’m sure business is booming for them given the current price of gas. Of course by ‘business’, I mean the amount of social capital they are creating, but that means the private capital saved can be used in other ways. The money saved on gas can be spent somewhere else. Using social capital to unlock new forms of private capital, which in turn needs to be supportive of new layers of social capital, is a great way to build sustainable economies, and create dynamic systems which could regenerate rusting cities. A rising tide may indeed lift all cars.

Update

Apparently Detroit is already being hacked, for all the wrong reasons. Invincible and Finale made this music video/documentary hybrid rhyme about the impacts of gentrification on the Motor City. This piece includes interviews with community activists discussing displacement and predatory planning versus sustainable development in the D. Thanks to Dart for the heads up.

Today was a good day. Not only did I find out my apartment is in GTA IV, but I also received a 3-D printed scale model of Cinderella’s Castle. A few weeks back I did a speech at the Disney Imagineering HQ in California, where 3-D printing is used to develop new designs. They made one of these for Bob Iger, one for Steve jobs, and had this one at HQ, which they very kindly sent me as a thank you, after finding out about my obsession with all things 3-D printed. It’s the most detailed thing I’ve seen come out of a prototyping machine yet, this picture doesn’t do justice to the perfect brickwork, spires and columns, nor can you see the corridors that run through the model. It’s pretty nuts. Apparently it took 11 hours to print.

Current TV just put up an interview I did a few months back with Brooklyn producers John Carluccio and Mark Kotlinkski - They dug up some cool slides I haven’t seen before. Mark also has a production outfit called 88 Hip Hop which does some great stuff - look for his film The Mural Kings about legendary graffiti artists TATS CRU - which is well worth checking out.

I did an interview for Booz Allen Hamilton’s strategy + business magazine with Edward Baker - you can read it here.

Here’s the full speech from my keynote last week at The Medici Summit on when and how it’s best to compete with pirates. There were some amazing speakers at this conference, check the Summit website for more videos over the coming months.

Apologies for the lack of activity these last few days, was taking a break in Costa Rica, but normal activities have now resumed. While I was away a lot has been going on…

Lawrence Lessig might be running for congress.

Ji Lee developed the ultimate t-shirt for Red Sox fans.

Some great books came out, like Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Gerd Leonhard’s Music 2.0

The BBC thinks the Chinese model of music-as-advertising could be the answer, I think that loss of independence will damage music and all we’ll be left with is muzak. As a revenue stream sponsorship makes sense, but as the revenue stream, it will damage music. There needs to be royalties and licenses and other ways for people to earn money from their work. I think as prices of these things fall (which they will) the value artists can create will go up, because more people will be consuming their material.

I just found this online at ereader. I didn’t know my publisher had authorized this excerpt, but figured since it was up there, I could re-post it here. Please enjoy…

“I’d noticed that hair mattered.”

He’s sitting across from me in the back of a café. You wouldn’t think that hair mattered to look at him. His dark brown hair falls around his thick-rimmed glasses down to his jaw, casually framing his face. He has that relaxed, just-got-out-of-bed look. Not the on-purpose kind media types have, but as though he actually might have. It doesn’t look as though he’s given hair much thought at all, but the man I am talking with had one of the most important haircuts of the twentieth century.

This is Richard Meyers: writer, poet, artist, and former front man of bands the Neon Boys, Television, and the Voidoids. He is better known as Richard Hell, and the angular hairstyle and cut-up clothing he pioneered in the early 1970s would come to define a movement better known as punk.

Not far from where we’re sitting on New York’s Lower East Side was the club CBGB, where Hell’s early performances inspired punk’s first generation. A runaway from Kentucky, he arrived in the city an aspiring writer, affected by beat poets and writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but quickly realized he could make a more powerful statement with music. “Part of what I liked about music was all these other means for communication,” Hell told me. “In rock ‘n’ roll it’s always been important how you looked. How you looked said something. And it was usually something about rejecting convention and the nine-to-five, and any kind of control, but you could get really elaborate with how you used the way you looked to communicate stuff. You’re always being interviewed, your album covers, your live shows, it was so broad, the areas for getting your message across. I wanted to use all of them.”

And use them he did. Inspired in part by the rebellious French poets Rimbaud and Artaud, who had sported spiky hair in the early nineteenth century, Hell chopped his mane into a short, aggressive style as a way of rejecting the hippie movement and the big-hair glamour of stadium rock. He looked at the Beatles’ bowl haircuts and asked himself, what are they really saying? “Well,” he explains, “they really say five-year-old kid. So I thought, ‘What was my generation’s haircut like when we were five years old?’ Where I grew up, the most popular haircut was called the ‘Butch.’ Short all the way around, and you’d maybe wax up the front of it. But of course being kids, we wouldn’t get to the barber that often, and we wouldn’t keep it neat, it would just be kind of raggedy…. I wanted it to be do-it-yourself. I wanted it to not be something you’d go to the barber for.”

Richard fused the Beatles, the “Butch,” and two radical nineteenth-century French bohemians into his new do-it-yourself hairstyle, and hell literally broke loose. In 1974 Television took to the stage at CBGB on Sunday nights. Hell wore clothes slashed as aggressively as his hair, held together with safety pins and emblazoned with slogans such as PLEASE KILL ME. “It was a rejection of having who you are imposed on you by corporations who were gonna profit from making you feel insecure about how you look,” he says. “I’ve just always been really skeptical and suspicious and resentful of people who try to sell you stuff by intimidating you.”

Hell’s statements were a full-frontal assault on the senses, burning his ideas into the minds of his audience, who at the time happened to be some of the most influential people in New York City, and in pop culture period. After Television’s success, CBGB (which stood for “Country Blue-Grass Blues”) switched to a punk rock–only format every night, becoming a creative hotbed for artists and bands such as the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, and Debbie Harry, all of whom cut their teeth on its stage. Malcolm McLaren, then manager of another influential group, the New York Dolls, was so stimulated by Hell’s look he took it back to London and used it to create a new band: the Sex Pistols.

Punk exploded.

Thirty years after it first shook the world, punk is in a museum. A few miles uptown from where Hell and I are sitting, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is holding a punk exhibition sponsored by multinational luxury goods brand Burberry. Tourists are studying early British punk clothes—made by now world-famous fashion designers such as Vivienne Westwood—and listening to a podcast commentary by the world-famous Sex Pistol Jonny Rotten.

Punk is dead.

But Hell survived. Instead of becoming a parody of his former self, he moved on. He remains on the Lower East Side, under the mainstream’s radar, but credible in many other circles, now the successful poet and published writer he always aspired to be. This new attitude, career, and his current, less threatening hairstyle are all part of a strategy. “The interesting thing is to not remain the same,” he muses. “To me that’s what’s boring; I don’t really care to see fifty-year-old people going around in punk leather jackets. The point is to stay unclassifiable. Then they don’t own you.”

When the hairstyle lost its meaning, Hell lost the hairstyle. But his statement and the do-it-yourself ideal he promoted affected the world. Today it is the driving force behind a new generation of D.I.Y. entrepreneurs who are raising hell once again. Disruptive new D.I.Y. technologies are causing unprecedented creative destruction. The history of punk offers us valuable insights into how this new world works. Punk was an angry outburst, a reaction to mass culture, but it offered new ideas about how mass culture could be replaced with a more personalized, less centralized worldview.

Punk has survived in many incarnations musically—it became new wave, influenced hip-hop, and conceived grunge and the notion of indie bands. But more important, its independent spirit also spurred a do-it-yourself revolution. D.I.Y. encourages us to reject authority and hierarchy, advocating that we can and should produce as much as we consume. Since punk, this idea has been quietly changing the very fabric of our economic system, replacing outdated ideas with the twenty-first-century upgrades of Punk Capitalism.

Suddenly like at a punk gig, today everybody is getting smashed together in a much more turbulent, concentrated environment that is constantly changing. There are fewer conventional “jobs,” and increasingly complex relationships between those consuming and those producing. And changes in manufacturing mean soon all of us could have the means to create literally anything ourselves, from the comfort of our own homes.

As we shall now see, the possibilities of D.I.Y. are reaching new heights. Like a roomful of teenagers with green hair throwing bottles at one another, this new world can look frightening. But once you get it, it’s obvious it’s a better place to be. The end of top-down mass culture is creating opportunities and freedoms for us all.

Hell used the past to create a hairstyle that shaped the perspective of a generation. Generations since have grown up using ingenuity and creativity to do the things punk always promoted: tearing down hegemonies and hierarchies, starting over, and improving the way we operate as a society.

Hell is right. Hair mattered.

Long live punk.

I loved this talk from TED by J.J Abrams who “traces his love of the unseen mystery — the heart of Alias, Lost, and the upcoming Cloverfield — back to its own magical beginnings, which may or may not include an early obsession with magic, the love of a supportive grandfather, or his own unopened Mystery Box.”

Abrams makes some great observations about where the real value is in our ideas today. In a world where high tech means of production are ubiquitous, creating and spreading ideas has become democratized. But good ideas can still be very low-tech, and are as scarce and important as they ever were.

The book had an incredible first day, way better than I’d expected, hitting the #1 spot on Amazon’s rap books list, #2 on the economics/free enterprise list and #4 on the pop culture list. One of the highlights of yesterday was doing the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC, which you can listen to part of here:

You can also win a copy of The Pirate’s Dilemma over at Josh Spear and I wrote an article for Torrent Freak on piracy which you can read here. Spent the rest of the day signing books in stores, by the time I got to Barnes & Noble in Union Square to sign some copies, there was only one left. Thanks to everyone who supported. No more self-indulgent posts about selling books after this one – I promise to get back to the serious business of piracy and related issues first thing tomorrow.

The Pirate’s Dilemma: A Kung Fu Trilogy in Four Acts – Act 1: The Remix

Today is the day The Pirate’s Dilemma comes to a book store near you – a day I’ve been looking forward to for the last eighteen months, and it’s going to be a long one. I’ll be on The Brian Lehrer show at 11am, then doing lots of book signing around NY, and probably a bunch of other stuff I haven’t been told about yet, but it’s all good.

We’ve had a great run so far. The book has already received a 9 out of 10 review in Wired, was named one of Fast Company’s top five ‘Smart Books of 2008’, and BusinessWeek’s ‘Innovation of the Week.’ It’s been featured in local and national press up and down the country and there’s plenty more coming over the next few weeks and months. It’s been on all kinds of great blogs, featured everywhere from The New York Times/Freakonmics blog to streetwear site Hypebeast to U.K band Hadouken’s weblog. Seth Godin, the world’s biggest marketing writer, called it “stunning.” Frans Johansson, one of the planet’s finest innovation writers, called it “remarkable,” and Jeff Chang, one of the greatest music journalists of all time, described it as “a series of leaps of imagination (that) always lands with style.”

When I wrote this I thought people would be throwing tomatoes (still in their cans) at me for suggesting piracy is good for us, but I’ve been invited to speak up and down the country over the last few months, and been amazed and humbled by the positive reactions to the ideas in the book. It’s already doing well on pre-orders - I don’t know how many books can say they’ve been in Amazon’s top ten bestselling lists of ‘rap’ and ‘economics/free enterprise’ books at the same time, but The Pirate’s Dilemma is one of them.

Help me get up on that list this crucial first week by getting your copy today/tomorrow/sometime this week. If you have a blog/magazine/speech to make later today in New Hampshire – it would be great if you could get the book in there somehow. Purchase spares for your friends and loved ones, and strangers too. Even if you don’t care about piracy, or how the way we all use information is evolving, or how a nun in the 1940s invented disco, get one anyway. Even if you can’t read, the book is also great for lighting barbecues, stabilizing wobbly tables and eradicating small to medium sized rodents from your property. Do what you will with your copy, but help me make this year the year of the pirate.

One of the most exciting things happening today is the launch of the first of the four videos we made to celebrate/promote the ideas discussed in the book. Enjoy Act 1 of The Pirate’s Dilemma: A Kung Fu Trilogy in Four Acts responsibly above in all its YouTube grainy-ness, and also in full-flash glory here in a few hours. More on these later today and why they’re so different from other videos, but now I gotta sleep for a few hours.

All the best, and thanks for reading and sticking with me this far.

Matt