and more worried about the fact that you can make film of this quality for $500. See more of The Purchase Bros work here.

This video raises so many questions – the first one being is it really user generated? Trader Joe’s is certainly the kind of brand that could inspire such a high form of praise from its customers – their products, the in-store experience, as a regular there I’ve always found everything about the place to be exceptional. But this is still really slick. The whole trying-to-make-it-look-like-it-was-filmed-on-a-Treo-even-though-it-clearly-wasn’t-filmed-on-a-Treo thing could be a giveaway, or not.

The real questions start when you assume it is genuine. What then? This is a clear departure from viral marketing instigated by the company that stands to benefit from it, and the rules are very different. Trader Joe’s, or anyone else for that matter, wouldn’t produce an ad where the narrative was quite so focused on the honestly come-by experience of a single fan. But that is it’s genius. Is there a point in the future when non-user generated ads will no longer be credible? If this catches on, shouting too much about your own company might become socially unacceptable, like creating your own glowing reference on Wikipedia.

We are already at the point where companies are under more pressure than ever to be transparent, create real meaning rather than empty slogans, and genuinely add value to the customers lives with their ad campaigns. Is the next logical step, or perhaps the step after that, the death of the company-generated advert? It sounds ridiculous now of course, but then again so did user generated music distribution.

My friend Cat Laine gave a great presentation at BIF this year. AIDG, the organization her and partner Peter Haas run, is doing some amazing work, I’ve always thought of them as the good Halliburton. AIDG helps people in developing countries get environmentally sound and affordable access to energy, sanitation and clean water, creating small businesses that manufacture, install and repair green technologies for people living between $2-4 a day. It’s brilliant because it breaks the vicious cycle of development being large scale, funded by dodgy international loans that can quickly become toxic, crippling debt. AIDG thinks small, but gets huge results. Find out more here, and check the video Wedia made for them here.

For the longest time I’ve been getting requests to do a T-shirt – and today being a quiet Sunday afternoon I finally got round to it. You can plaster logos on a ton of horrendous crap using cafepress, but I decided to keep the selection down to nine tasteful items. As well as apparel featuring the pirate logo, there are also a few pieces featuring Art Jaz’s Punk Capitalism cartoon that he drew for the book.

Get all the pirate booty here!

MY speech from Pop!Tech last week has just gone up. I talked about a few other things besides competing with pirates, including virtuous circles, a subject I’m getting really interested in. There were so many great speakers there – two others worth watching are Juan Enriquez’s “10 commandments” talk on the state of the economy, and Benjamin Zander, who was sort of talking about virtuous and vicious circles too, and was just incredible.

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.