Fruit Flies, Technology and Heritage

Context: I was recently invited by Ahmedabad University Centre for Heritage Management to deliver a “curtain raiser keynote” (had to look up what that meant) at their annual research conference – The 5th International Conference on Heritage Management Education and Practice. Organized between March 15 – 17 2024, the theme of this year’s conference was “Intersections of Heritage Economics and Digital Technologies”.

When I had first received the invite, I was pretty certain that there must have been some mistake, for I had/have no authority to speak on the subject. But long story short, I took up the challenge and delivered my keynote at the Ahmedabad University CHM research conference. And to my absolute surprise, the presentation ended up receiving very positive (and very kind) feedback from the attendees. So I thought I would put it out here on brandednoise to solicit further ideas/ inputs.

So here goes my presentation. This is the direct ‘slide by slide’ rundown along with my speaker notes. Barring extremely minor tweaks (that I have incorporated to aid readability of the content as a blog post), this is my keynote – as is, in full.

Esteemed leaders – current & soon to be – from academia, research, policy and the practitioner community. It is such a privilege to be here amidst you all, precisely because I belong to none of these groups wrt the domain of “Heritage Management Education and Practice”! At best, I may call myself an observer as I seek to soak in, participate and contribute to the topic of the conference today “Intersections of Heritage Economics and Digital Technologies“.

When I thought about the rapidly growing role of Digital Technologies in Heritage Management, I naturally thought about how the technologies of AR/VR, Artificial Intelligence & advances in Cloud Computing are transforming how we interface with Heritage & Art. 

I thought I’d talk about Google’s platform where all this comes to the forefront – Google Arts & Culture. And how it uses technology to elicit user participation, engagement and drive co-creation of experiences wrt art & heritage.

But here’s the thing – that would be my “comfort zone”. 

And I thought, this is a research conference – and one of its kind at that! And what is a research conference if we don’t step beyond our comfort zone – a slight bit. That zone where we do a bit of philosophising, theorising and some crystal ball gazing, if you will? 

And that’s what I am going to do over the next few mins here. So indulge me here 🙂

My argument (or more precisely a premise) in a nutshell is as follows… 

It is clear as daylight that digital technologies have incredible value wrt heritage management & practice. 

But I’d be doing a disservice if I focus on just this aspect of technology – which is just the “tip of the iceberg” , For, if we do that we’d perhaps end up focusing on just a small subset of possibilities: i.e., digital technologies as just “techniques” to be used.

I am going to take a few more steps further and argue that Digital Technologies have an even more foundational role to play wrt the domain of heritage management. For, if you view Digital Technologies for what they truly are or what they truly can be, you could perhaps even see them as enablers of new ontological, epistemological and axiological perspectives of the domain.

So I’d say that Digital Technologies can have a lot to contribute to (even) the core philosophical foundations of heritage as a construct.

Let’s unpack that.

I’d like to start by asking a question. What is common amongst these three.

  1. A 2000 year old Japanese Shinto Shrine 
  2. The Drosophila melanogaster a.k.a the “fruit fly” 
  3. The hard disk drive

Have a think.

Let’s start with the Ise Grand Shrine – a.k.a .Ise Jingu

What can this 2000 year old Shinto shrine have to do with Heritage Management and Digital Technologies?

The Ise Grand Shrine – a Shinto Shrine – in Ise, Mie prefecture in Japan has been preserved exactly like it was around 2,000 years ago. Despite such a rich legacy, it doesn’t figure in the UNESCO world heritage list.

Why?

This is because the shrine is not built of a ‘permanent structure’. The Ise Grand Shrine is built of wood and hence it gradually loses its structural integrity over years. 

So the Shinto priests have a solution;  every 20 years they tear down the structure and rebuild another – in an adjacent plot –  in exactly the same specifications as the original using the wood from the same forest that the original structure was built from. 

Result: the shrine is forever new, ancient and original! 

The Shrine is currently in its 62nd reconstruction, the next reconstruction will be in 2033.

Despite not being on the UNESCO’s World Heritage list, the Ise Jingu Shrine is one of the highest visited Shinto shrines in the world! Now that’s saying something about Heritage Economics 🙂  

What can a 2000 year old Shinto shrine have in common with Digital Technologies?

It goes by the name “version control” / “generational cycle management”. 

The definition of Heritage is anchored around the core concept of “generations” 

  • What qualifies to be called as ‘legacy’ by a generation?
  • How does one generation view the legacies of an older generation? 
  • And what are the socio political cultural & economic imperatives that influence how a generation preserves its ‘legacy’ for its future generations?

And we can’t speak about generations without speaking about the Strauss Howe Generational Theory. What it essentially states is that history repeats itself and the sooner we understand the socio – political – cultural and economic contours of the same, we will be better served.

First a few building blocks of the theory:

  • Let’s take the average human life span as approx. 80-90 years. This is called a Saeculum and consists of four periods of approximately 20-22 years each. Which are (1) Childhood (2) Young Adult (3) Midlife and (4) Elder hood.
  • A generation – as we know – could be thought of as an aggregate of people born approximately every 20-22 years.
  • Each generation experiences “four turnings” every 80-90 years. They are (1) High (2) Awakening (3) Unravelling and (4) Crisis.

In essence, the cyclical nature of these “four turnings” could be stated as follows:

  • “Strong people” create “good times” (in general)
  • “Good times” create “weak people”
  • “Weak people” create “hard times”
  • “Hard times” create “strong people”
  • “Strong people” create “good times”
  • and it goes on…

Throwing all these elements into one chart gives us a view like this one about American generational cohorts – where you can see this cyclicity emerge across generations punctuated by the four turnings. And at any given point in time we have multiple generations co-inhabiting the time space. And the interplay between these generations is what leads to the socio political and economic imperatives that we grapple with as a society.

And the world around us – here and now – is this ‘laboratory’ where one can study this theory play out across generational cohorts.

In fact in their book “The Fourth Turning is here” the authors of this theory argue that we are collectively living through the “Fourth Turning” now. The book has been called prophetic given how it seems to have ‘predicted’ way back in 1997, many of the socio political economic cultural and technological realities that we have seen ourselves grapple with over the last two decades in this millennium.

Now let’s conduct this thought experiment.

What if we were to set up a lab where we can observe these inter generational forces at play along with their fall outs? Only this time, the generational intervals are much shorter, thereby allowing us this rare opportunity to get a sweeping view across multiple generations during one single life time.

Wouldn’t we then be able to identify hypotheses, build models, test theories and perhaps even build grounded simulations around how the notions of heritage emerge, propagate and evolve over generations?

Studying species with short generational intervals is not a novel concept. Today, scientists study evolution in species with short generational intervals. This allows for direct observation of changes over many generations, which wasn’t possible in Darwin’s time.

This is Prof Thomas Hunt Morgan who was awarded the Nobel prize in medicine in 1933. His genius lies in establishing the Drosophila melanogaster as the model organism in the study of evolutionary genetics. Why? Because, the whole life cycle of the fruit fly is relatively rapid and takes only 10-12 days. 

Over the last century, this discovery has led to an exponential rise in research productivity across a diverse range of topics including genetics, embryonic development, learning, aging, behavior and more.

This is Prof. Clayton Christensen who has developed the theory of “Disruptive Innovation”. Reportedly..

Someone told him that disk drives were the “fruit flies” of technology: they were ideal subjects for studying innovation, because a generation in disk-drive technology was incredibly short. He saw that the companies that made fourteen-inch drives for mainframe computers had been driven out of business by companies that made eight-inch drives for mini computers, and then the companies that made the eight-inch drives were driven out of business by companies that made 5.25-inch drives for PCs. 

What was puzzling about this was that the eight-inch drives weren’t as good as the fourteen-inch drives—they had a lower capacity, and a higher cost per megabyte—and the 5.25-inch drives were inferior to the eight-inch drives. So why hadn’t the fourteen-inch-drive companies simply started producing eight-inch drives? It didn’t make sense.

The genius of Prof. Christensen lies in studying innovations in products/categories which have incredibly short generational intervals and rapid evolutionary cycles in order to identify the organizational, economic (and sometimes even political) imperatives that could lead to an incumbent getting ‘disrupted’ by a new entrant in an industry.

In many ways, this – exercising our focus on digital technologies as our canvas – could be inevitable as they pretty much characterise the times that we live in. Students of economics would know the Kondratiev Wave which pretty much says the same thing.

This shows the pattern in the societal waves of advancement since the industrialization era. A few things that you can immediately observe, (1) every k-wave (which is characterized by the dominant technologies of its time) is shorter than its previous wave. (2) We are today living through the 6th K-wave, which could have an even shorter interval span, and finally (3) this wave (loosely estimated to be the one between 2010-2050) could probably be the one around “intelligent technologies”.

Central theme here: Technology’s shorter generational cycles and how that creates a second or a third order influence over the corresponding socio, economic, political and cultural forces at large. It’s pretty much the story of our times.

Let’s take a few examples.

Many people would know what this is.

This is the signboard of Meta at their corp HQ at Menlo Park, California. Many people come over here to get their pictures. But not many would know that this has a peculiar “feature”.

Sun Microsystems (est. 1982) had gone defunct in 2010. Subsequently, Facebook has bought over and remodelled the property as its global headquarters by 2011. And instead of replacing the Sun sign, Facebook just flipped it over and put Facebook’s name (now Meta) on the front(!)

Beyond serving as a homage to Sun Microsystems as a company that had significantly contributed to several key computing technologies, many see this as an intentional ‘reminder‘ to those looking from within the campus.

Many of the logos that you see on the left belong to those brands that had been global leaders in their own right. They had defined standards, influenced culture, and pretty much led to our popular narratives around how societal trends and technologies have a symbiotic relationship given the breathtakingly rapid developments in this space. But today they no longer exist!

At the same time, we also have technologies/digital platforms/ device ecosystems that continue to see strong evolution over the times. For e.g., many would know that 2024 also marked the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh and one can’t over-emphasize its socio cultural influence (that spanned several domains) over the years.

It is to chronicle these very stories in technology and with a stated mission to “decode technology—its computing past, digital present, and future impact on humanity” the Computer History Museum (CHM) at Mountain View California prides itself as the largest repository of computational artifacts under a single roof. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on society.

I would like to believe that it is not an accident that the CHM’s core belief about the inter generational value of computational technologies has parallels with how UNESCO defines ‘heritage’.

(as a fun aside, I couldn’t help but notice the fact that the Centre for Heritage Management and the Computer History Museum share the same acronym!)

Therefore, the UNESCO’s charter on the “Preservation of the Digital Heritage” proposed in 2009 is a good start to the conversation. But we have a lot more to do.

Given rapid bursts of new technology breakouts coupled with ever shortening generational time spans of these technologies such as AR/VR/AI/Cloud etc, their ever expanding and evolving influence over practically every domain of our existence has a near axiomatic appeal wrt the socio economic political and cultural discourse of our times.

And that leads us to more fundamental questions.

  • What is digital heritage? (a question with an ontological lens)
  • Why study digital technologies in the realm of heritage research? (a question with an axiological lens)
  • What standards inform digital heritage identification? How do these influence how we experience & identify tangible and intangible heritage artifacts? (questions with an epistemological lens)

By virtue of the inquiry along these lines, I would posit that we might soon need to reconsider broader perspectives to help us answer even the central ontological question in our domain – What is heritage?

And that’s why I would argue that Digital Technologies have even more foundational role to play wrt the philosophical aspects of heritage management. 

We spoke about the Kondratieff Waves a few minutes ago. Another way to look at these waves, especially in the context of Heritage Management is as follows:

  • What a generation calls as ‘legacy’ could be that which it perceives as the vehicle or the marker of its ‘progress’.
  • While the first few (known) millennia of the chronicled human history saw progress around the vectors of “transforming material”, the next set of waves – characterized by a dramatically reduced scale (of centuries) – could be seen as a commentary on our progress around the vectors of “transforming energy”
  • And today, our progress (and thereby what we’d perhaps call as the legacy of our times) can probably be characterized as that pertaining to “transforming information”

And that leads to the question about: the role of digital technologies – as epistemological tools –  in helping us theorize about and understand the social, political, economic imperatives that underpin not just ‘digital heritage’ but also the construct of ‘heritage’ as a whole.

And therefore just as the Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) ended up becoming the “model organism” that revolutionized the research in evolutionary genetics, just as the hard disk drives helped serve as the “fruit flies” for research on innovation management, my premise I submit for your consideration – phrased as a question- is as follows…

Can digital technologies be the ‘fruit flies’ for research in Heritage Management?

Thank you once again for the opportunity and I wish The 5th International Conference on Heritage Management Education and Practice at the Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad University a grand success!

The Drone View Advantage

Quick read: Drone shots of the Swiss Panoramic Express could remind us about the need to sometimes take the larger ‘meta view’ vs the ‘window view’. And that could perhaps be a good reminder across contexts – from our investment theses, our career choices to even getting a better handle on how we frame our life stories.

Now don’t get me wrong.I LOVED the ride!

Especially as someone who had found every single nook and cranny of Switzerland picture post card perfect. So, what’s not to like about the truly awesome Lucern – Interlaken Express route? In fact, for once I was happy that a journey would take longer than I had expected – 1hr 55mins to be precise.

Image source

Why should I be the only one that enjoys such magnificent views? (I know! How magnanimous of me, right?) So, I sent a few of such pictures to my friend, who then dutifully responded with a few of such (👍 and ❤️) emojis.

Basking in the sunny snowy views from my train seat, I then turned to the Internet to see what’s the “official word” about this beautiful train ride. The Swiss tourism website said thus

During a train ride of roughly two hours, passengers marvel at five crystal clear mountain lakes that gather the waters from various rivers and waterfalls. At the lakeshore, steep rock faces of surrounding mountains rise up protectively and provide unique photo motifs.

Shortly before starting its steep, winding ascent to Brünig Pass, the train changes to cogwheel drivetrain technology in order to conquer the gradient. With good reason, the Luzern–Interlaken Express is part of the scenic GoldenPass Line leading to Interlaken and on to Montreux. 

Source

Just as I was trying to situate this romance within my 2-dimensional window view, something caught my eye. And soon enough I discovered I was unable to peel my eyes off these spectacular images from my phone screen.

Image source: MySwitzerland

I now sent my friend the above image and texted him saying that’s the route I am actually on.

Now as if by magic, this stubbornly laconic friend of my mine started on a paragraph of expletive ridden love letter to the stunning beauty of the Swiss landscapes. And I must confess, I found these ‘drone’ shots much more appealing than those that my rectangular windows framed for me along the route.

In order for me to get a more first person / visceral perspective of such a view, I wish I had the equivalent of the “tail camera airshow view” – that one occasionally finds on aircraft – in the train.

What just happened?

I was enjoying the view. But I was sure, the “view of the view” (call it a meta view, if you will, but let me call it the “drone view”) would perhaps be a more spectacular one. And I could bet, that drone view would have trumped my window framed 2D view in story telling too!

That’s why most of the airlines ads we see (print / video / OOH) have more footage/shots like this ..

Image source: Turkish Airlines

.. than those like this.

Image source. Photo by Babaroga / Shuttersrock

The “drone view” vs the “2D window view”.

Taking the view of the view vs well, the view.

If you think about it, that’s what financial advisors never tire of telling us.

The Ayodhya Stock Exchange

No, I didn’t make up that click-baity phrase. A popular news portal had this headline: “‘Ayodhya Stock Exchange’: 10 stock ideas to play the Ram Temple theme”.

Another one said “Ayodhya Ram Mandir becomes new investing theme: 6 stocks in focus”, and another “Ram Temple inauguration: Here are 12 shares that may benefit from Ayodhya tourism boom” and the list goes on.

But if you hear the other voices, they would tell you to stick to fundamentals and take the broader view. In other words, they caution us against mixing this “2D window view” with what should have ideally been a “drone view” that frames the larger journey for us.

And come to think about it- in many other aspects in life: from our considerations that drive career pivots and choices, to relationships, to many other things big and small – wouldn’t this be sage advice?

Of reminding ourselves of the need for taking the “view of the view” vs well, the view?

[Featured Image: Source]

Monetizable Sentiment Indices

Quick Read: Recently we’ve seen how being able to smartly parse the chatter on social media becomes valuable – especially for speculative trades. This heralds an interesting opportunity: i.e., monetising such knowhow of social sentiment, at scale.

Have you heard of BUZZ – the social sentiment ETF?

Social Media ETFs

In a previous post, we argued that there is a certain premium attached to being able to smartly parse and capitalise on the knowhow of the social media chatter on forums like r/WallStreetBets. This is best exemplified by the recently launched ETF by New York asset manager VanEck the ‘Buzz NextGen AI US Sentiment Leaders Index‘. Quoting the FT article..

The Reddit rebellion might have died down for the moment, but New York asset manager VanEck is betting that there is long term value in listening to social media chat and is launching a social sentiment exchange traded fund. The fund will invest in the stocks being most talked up on social media. (..)

Its underlying benchmark, the Buzz NextGen AI US Sentiment Leaders Index…aggregates investment-related content from social media sites such as Twitter and StockTwits, blogs and news articles. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are then deployed to attempt to “identify patterns, trends and changing sentiment which can affect market-based outcomes”. The 75 US large-cap stocks judged as having the highest degree of positive investor sentiment and bullish perception then form the portfolio, which is rebalanced monthly. (..)

Source: Financial Times

The following tidbits from the interview with Jamie Wise, CEO of Buzz Holdings and the originator of the index, shed more light on some further specifics related to the ETF.

“This is not a Reddit meme stock ETF,” said Jamie Wise, CEO of Buzz Holdings. “This is about the broader conversation around stocks mentioned on social media platforms. We are using broad social media sources, principally Twitter and StockTwits.” Wise said it also uses Yahoo Finance, Benzinga and Reddit.

How to determine “social media buzz?” Wise says the index uses natural language algorithms that examines whether the comment is positive, negative or neutral, then ranks each stock based on the degree of positive sentiment and breadth of discussion. That’s key to understanding the index: stocks are weighted by sentiment, not market capitalization, and no one stock can exceed 3% of the index. It is rebalanced every month. 

“We are aggregating the collective sentiment of the community” that comments on stocks on social media, Wise said.

Source

Is social media popularity a good way to pick stocks? Can stocks be manipulated on social media? Well the jury might still be out on that. But given the current dynamics, it is more likely that the larger question here might soon be skewed towards ‘when’ vs ‘if’.

Extending this thought further

If we are to extend this concept further, new opportunity pools could become evident. Start with any category where popular social sentiment matters, and you would see a monetizable product waiting to be packaged and sold. Few examples:

  • Sports
    • Today, there are social media networks for sports gamblers like BetSperts, but if and when these networks manage to capture, index and channel the emergent sentiment on their platforms, they could very well monetise the same. (obviously this would be subject to the prevailing legal, regulatory and policy frameworks.)
    • The idea: Derivatives for sports betting based on social sentiment indices built on realtime social media chatter. (BTW did you try Locker Room – the Clubhouse for sports fans, insiders and athletes?)
  • Music
    • In 2003 iTunes revolutionised music ownership by letting customers purchase and download the music they want for just 99 cents per song. Now, how about letting the general public participate in the actual funding and co-ownership of their favourite artiste’s tracks/albums by facilitating fractional ownership à la securities on the stock market.
    • The idea: Letting artistes raise funds for their album(s) through an IPO kind of offering to their fans/community. The value of these ‘stocks’ could be pegged to the sentiment/chatter/metrics on platforms like Spotify, SoundCloud etc. And we could have ‘exchanges’ that facilitate trading of these ‘stocks’ among the community. (Taylor Swift would perhaps not have to bother with her rerecordings then)

SoundCloud seems to have already taken a step in this direction by launching ‘fan powered royalties‘ last week.

Source: SoundCloud

Quoting from SoundCloud’s press release announcing the launch..

Fan-powered royalties levels the playing field for independent artists by tying payouts to fandom. Artists are now better equipped to grow their careers by forging deeper connections with their most dedicated fans; and, in turn, fans can directly influence how their favorite artists are paid. Fan-powered royalties reflect feedback from the independent artist community on SoundCloud who want equitable payouts, transparency, and control over their own careers.

Essentially, any context where popular sentiment (now readily available through the hose pipes of social media) lends itself to be indexed and tracked, could potentially be transformed into a monetizable opportunity to unlock value and disintermediate the equation between creators and fans.

And we might perhaps see more such opportunities becoming evident thanks to the alignment of these three forces:

  1. the emergence/growth of platforms that democratise and aggregate media of all types on the Internet
  2. the rapidly growing creator economy and associated ecosystems and
  3. the rise of new modes of interdependencies between (1) and (2) connecting the users’ utility, consumption and communications patterns at scale

Even then we are perhaps just seeing the tip of the possibility iceberg.

[Featured Image: Source]

Schema Incongruent Advertising

Quick Read: A dollop of ‘schema incongruence’, strategically thrown into an ad, could sometimes serve as a powerful stimuli.

Did you know that Reddit put together its recent Super Bowl ad in less than a week?

The ad is remarkable.

Quoting the NYTimes article..

The Reddit ad started out like a clichéd car commercial, with two S.U.V.s racing across the desert. Then the signal seemed to fry, and Reddit’s orange-and-white alien-head logo commandeered the screen, followed by a lengthy printed statement that left viewers scrambling to grab a photo or screenshot...

The Kellogg School Super Bowl Advertising Review, an annual ranking from Northwestern University’s business school, reported shortly after the game on Sunday that Reddit’s commercial was among the most effective commercials of the broadcast. The Kellogg School’s list measures the execution of the commercial, the quality of the attention it generates, its memorability and other factors...

When one analyses this ad from Reddit and attempts to theorise the ‘how and why it worked the way it did’ one is sure to run into the concept of ‘schema incongruence in brand messaging’.

Schema incongruent advertising

When incoming information can be well organized into one’s existing knowledge structures, it can be called as schema-congruent information. When the information does not easily fit into the existing knowledge structures, the information is schema-incongruent.

In a seminal paper in 1982, George Mandler from the University of California, San Diego proposed his Theory on Schema Incongruity. His thesis centered on the notion that although people generally like things that match their expectations, moderate incongruity can be arousing and thus intriguing. Furthermore, because moderate incongruity can be resolved with minimal effort, it tends to result in favourable evaluations. (source)

Over the years, several researchers have validated the impact of schema incongruence on brand messaging. For example, in an oft quoted research paper by Halkias, G., and Kokkinaki, F. (2012) titled ‘Cognitive and affective responses to schema-incongruent brand messages‘, the authors empirically investigate and validate that incongruent stimuli may attract more of the recipients’ attention, increase their cognitive arousal, and may finally elicit more positive judgements.  

And in another research paper by Hye Jin Yoon (2015) titled ‘Understanding schema incongruity as a process in advertising‘, the author states that strategies evoking schema incongruity have often been used in advertising because information incongruent to schema has the potential to increase interest, memorability, and persuasiveness in consumers.

And to help elucidate this further, she proposes a four-stage process model (see below) and discusses each stage in detail with a focus on the impact factors that need to be addressed for using a successful incongruity strategy in advertising.

A process model of incongruity in advertising, Hye Jin Yoon (2012), Source

So the next time you see an ad that seems irreverent, fun and provocative (the tropes most often employed by ‘impulse brands’ like candies, chewing gum etc) you know the method to the madness behind their creative work – a dollop of ‘schema incongruence’ strategically thrown in to serve as powerful stimuli.

And yeah, by the way, just in case it didn’t come to your notice, Robinhood (this is a quick follow up to the previous post, remember?) also aired an ad during this Super Bowl. And let’s just say that it did get some attention.

Mainstream, not meme

Quick Read: The next time you see something labelled as a meme, ask yourself if it is actually actually the expression of a mainstream culture (or counter culture) albeit within a specific societal context. Calling something a ‘meme’ strips off the necessary nuance and clouds comprehension. So – it’s mainstream, not meme.

1: r/Wallstreetbets

Would I expect to find Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Warren Buffet on r/WallstreetBets?

Unlikely.

After all, why would some of the world’s richest people fancy a speculative bet on fundamentally weak stocks? So I would be surprised if they’d even know, much less care about stonk memes.

Park that thought and we’ll be right back.

2: The 3-Ladders of Social Class

Alex Danco’s “The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class” has been one of the most thought provoking posts that I have read in the recent past. A highly recommended read in case you haven’t yet.

In it, he speaks about ‘Michael Church’s 3-ladder system’ and how once you recognise it and its constituent dynamics, you cannot unsee it play out across demographics and domains all around you. He writes:

Several years ago, Michael Church wrote a neat summary of the American social class system, and how the traditional metaphor of “climbing the ladder of social class” is wrong in an important way. There isn’t one single ladder; there are three – each with different values, norms and goals. You have the first, and largest ladder, Labour. Next, you have the “Educated Gentry” ladder that corresponds to what we typically call the Upper Middle Class. And finally, you have the elite ladder.

Climbing the labour ladder means making more money. At the bottom are really tough jobs, typically paid hourly, informally, or with tips. Above that there are stable, but modest blue collar jobs; then high-skilled or good Union-protected careers. Finally at the top you find “Labour leadership”, which doesn’t mean being a union boss, but means, “You’ve made it. You own stuff. You drive a new F-150, you have income properties, you enjoy nice things.”

If you’ve made it to Labour leadership, you are by no means hurting for money. But you have not actually escaped the category of “economic losers”, because the Labour ladder does not create paths to leverage. That is the fundamental difference between how the labour ladder works versus how the elite ladder works. The people on the labour ladder fully understand this. (…)

Skipping the middle ladder for a second, we move to the Elite ladder. The Elite ladder has a lot in common with the Labour ladder: it’s straightforward. You move up by getting more money and more power. The only fundamental difference is that you climb the Labour ladder by working hard, whereas you climb the Elite ladder by acquiring leverage. (..)

The middle ladder works completely differently from the other two. This ladder isn’t about money or power; it’s about being interesting. You climb this ladder by being more educated, and towards the top, by having costly habits and virtues. 

At the bottom is also a transitional layer: it’s how you get onto this ladder if you weren’t born there, often via Community or 1st generation College. Above that is the upper-middle class Petite Bourgeoisie. Higher up the ladder are “elite creatives”, people with obscure or virtuous-sounding PhDs, notably interesting lives, or Blue Check Marks on Twitter. (They may well earn less money than those below them on the ladder – this ladder isn’t about income.) At the very top of this ladder is an exclusive group: “Cultural leadership”. The litmus test for attaining this group is, “could you write an opinion piece in the New York Times.” 

Source: The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class. By Alex Danco

When I accept this construct even at a broader level, I’m tempted to posit the following.

Just as there is no single ladder, but three – each with different values, norms and goals, there is no single cultural construct, but (at least) three – each with different values, norms and goals – that correspond to each of these social/societal ladders (this is diversity in cultural constructs that is over and above the conventional manifestations of cultural diversity that we usually recognise around the dimensions of region, religion, ethnicity etc). The idea here is that culture is contextual to its underlying societal ladder.

This might sound obvious (and it is to a large extent). But when we accept this thesis, one should also accept the corollary – there is no one counterculture. Because, different people relate in different ways to what is labelled as counterculture in popular discourse. For, what might resonate with me as a ‘cultural norm’, or what might appear to me as an artefact of an emerging counterculture in my social/societal context, might appear as an entirely different thing (or sometimes might not even be evident) for someone on a different societal ladder living with different constructs/conceptions of culture. So the emergent idea for me here is that counterculture is contextual to its underlying ladder (vs being a universally applicable relic of time).

Caroline Busta in her thought provoking article recently said that The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram. I’d add a little further to this argument and say that I may, after all, perhaps find manifestations of counterculture on Instagram – but only I ; while others may perhaps find that on Reddit and others on Clubhouse.

The Internet has only siloed the contexts where the drivers of the (counter) cultural forces emerge and the canvas on which the strokes of (counter) cultural expressions takes form and shape. That’s why for people who worship at the altar of NYT Op-eds or meticulously follow the blue checkmarks on twitter, the Gamestop short squeeze would have come as a sensational meme or ‘breaking news’, while for those that are on r/Wallstreetbets it was just another day when a topically relevant cultural expression found its restless voice.

Gully Boy, Source

That’s why when the rest of India was enjoying it as a Bollywood movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime, the artists in the slums of Dharavi were discovering and finessing their craft through TikTok (now banned in India) and ShareChat.

3: Gamestonk!!

And that’s why I find Elon Musk’s tweet revealing.

When even those like Hedge Funds that have an existential stake in the emergent buzz cooking up in the worlds of Reddits and Robinhoods were caught unawares of the power of the ‘Gamestonk’ phenomenon, an unlikeliest person seems to have not just understood but also arguably played an influential role in the unraveling of a grassroots phenomenon on r/Wallstreetbets.

After all, that’s the world’s richest person showing that he is more culturally attuned to what is cooking up among the crowds versus anyone else that one may expect to care. He seemed to be able to see something as a mainstream force of a cultural expression – that has just been waiting for its time within a societal context – versus just as some amusing meme unleashed by Robinhood frenzy.

In a parallel universe he might have been a true blue marketer (which he perhaps already is albeit a wealthy one) or better still ……….. a President of a nation state*.

*Did you know that Elon Musk holds triple citizenship? US, Canada and South Africa. (source)

Narrative Violations and Narrative Primitives

Quick Read: Sometimes narratives could have ‘violations’. And sometimes, what might at first appear to be a ‘violation’ could prove to be intrinsic to its narrative. Knowing the former from the latter could help unlock great value – across verticals or contexts.

Making sense of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” is said to be difficult.

It is considered by many to be one of the most revered and feared compositions in Jazz history. In fact generations of Jazz musicians are known to approach ‘Giant Steps’ as the pinnacle in Jazz improvisation.

Why? This video could provide a delightful crash course of an answer.

Or take Afrobubblegum – the new film genre redefining on screen representation of Africa.

It refers to fun, fierce and frivolous African art that has joy and hope at the centre of it. The pioneer of this style, Wanuri Kahiu a TED fellow and a Kenyan filmmaker says “We’re so used to narratives out of Africa being about war, poverty and devastation. We believe that Africa is joyful and full of pride and respect and hope,” and continues to champion the need for such art that captures the full range of human experiences to tell vibrant stories of Africa.

And tell she did!

In 2018, Wanuri Kahiu’s story of young lesbian love, Rafiki, made international headlines for being the first Kenyan film programmed at the Cannes Film Festival in 71 years of French Riviera cinema history.

What is common between Wanuri Kahiu’s ‘Afrobubblegum’ and John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’?

The genre of Afrobubblegum or the Jazz track ‘Giant Steps’ standout because they ‘violate’ the popular narratives around their respective art forms or subjects. They are examples of what venture capitalists call Narrative Violations.

Narrative Violations

While the term could seem like a fancy jargon to reference the essential characteristic of what makes something a ‘contrarian bet’ to a VC, I should admit that it serves its semantic purpose of helping us put a label on something specific through descriptive and non ambiguous terminology.

Perhaps it is this pull that made Geoff Lewis and Eric Stromberg – the founders of Bedrock Capital – write a manifesto for their firm titled ‘In Search of Narrative Violations‘ stating the following..

Some recent ‘Narrative Violations’ listed on Bedrock Capital’s manifesto letter

The letter in its entirety is eloquent and makes for a great read and ends on an inspiring note saying..

“..As our keystrokes hunt for the next narrative high, thousands of possibilities that will never be remain trapped beneath our fingertips. When we allow popular narrative to dictate who, where, and what is worthy of our time or capital, breakthroughs that could transcend remain overlooked, underestimated, or simply fade away.

Against all odds, a few brave entrepreneurs violating the narrative today will come to define profound new truths tomorrow. We’re on a mission to find them“

To be clear, the concept of ‘Narrative Violations’ has also had its fair share of critiques for being too reductive. It was even declared 2019’s ‘VC Bingo’ buzzword of the year.

Nonetheless, I find the concept to be a clarifying filter that helps me process or question most things with a healthy dose of scepticism and encourages me to seek out edge cases in popular rhetoric, including say even that around the concept of ‘Narrative Violation’ itself.

Why?

Consider this question.

What if, sometimes, narrative violations are part of the narrative?

i.e., what if a ‘violation’ is actually an inherent part of a larger pattern that constitutes the narrative itself? Like say, a recurring motif that becomes apparent if only one were to step back and consider the big picture. Being able to see if and when that is the case could help us identify emerging paradigms and recognise how such paradigms propagate.

For e.g., after the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, Carlota Perez published her seminal book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital arguing that the ‘burst’ was completely normal and qualified it by drawing patterns from four similar epochal periods over the last two centuries: the industrial revolution, steel and railways, electricity and heavy engineering, the automobiles and mass production.

Across each of these periods, she pattern matched its associated moments of ‘crash’ (the equivalent of the dotcom bubble burst from 2000) and recognised such instances as inalienable parts of larger cycles that play out over several decades (as opposed to say some inexplicable violations to the popular narratives of their times).

Source: Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital,2002

The master stroke of her framework is that it inherently provisions for moments of ‘big bangs’, ‘bubbles’, ‘crashes’ and then again necessary ‘recompositions’ as part of a single unified narrative that cohesively explains the interplay between financial capital and technological revolutions. And then continues to shine a spotlight on how this narrative seemed to have repeated itself across ages almost inviolably.

(Bonus reads: Two of my favourite thinkers, Alex Danco and Ben Thomspon have recently used Carlota Perez’s framework to write about Debt Financing and Paradigm Shifts in tech. Highly recommended reads indeed.)

To reiterate, a key takeaway for me here is the idea of the narrative as a paradigm that propagates.

Such a narrative construct that propagates needs to be essentially indivisible, should have a full self contained arc of a structure to serve as a standalone story if need be and be able to play out as a cohesive whole even with trivial variations in contexts or actors.

Matthew Ball has a term for this – The Narrative Primitive.

In one of the most intellectually stimulating podcasts I have listened to in the recent past, Matthew Ball joins Patrick O’Shaughnessy to discuss movies, the Metaverse and more and refers to the concept of ‘Narrative Primitive’ to explain why the worlds of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the Star Wars stand out as expansive and immersive. The following lines from the podcast’s transcript shine light further.

… “how would you have told the story 80 years ago if you had all the tools available? How are those stories going to change in the next 10 years?” And in some instances that is unlocking what you might call a narrative primitive, that’s perhaps some of the reasons why the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the tales of Star Wars are so expansive today, so immersive.“

Now, when I consider these two concepts – Narrative Violation and Narrative Primitive – together, I am tempted to posit the following.

The essential insight that rock star traders, venture capitalists and story tellers possess is this – they know a good narrative when they see one. And more importantly they have an eye for a narrative violation. Because they think in narrative primitives.

Noteworthy ingredients – that may or may not have gone into the making of this blog post:

[Featured Image: Pendulums on freepik]

The Liminal Space

Quick Read: Motion blur in animation, the current pandemic times and quadratic voting systems have one thing in common – they magnify and normalise that moment in time/space/perspective that’s neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’. And that could have its own benefits.

Motion blur is an interesting concept in animation.

In fact it’s a unique technical challenge that consumed Ed Catmull and his team during his early days leading to Pixar Animation. Quoting from his book Creativity, Inc.

“Another technical challenge that occupied us was the need for something called motion blur. With animation in general and computer animation in particular, the images created are in perfect focus. That may sound like a good thing, but in fact, human beings react negatively to it.

When moving objects are in perfect focus, theatregoers experience an unpleasant, strobe-like sensation, which they describe as “jerky.”  When watching live-action movies, we don’t perceive this problem because traditional film cameras capture a slight blur in the direction an object is moving. The blur keeps our brains from noticing the sharp edges, and our brains regard this blur as natural. Without motion blur, our brains think something is wrong. So the question for us was how to simulate the blur for animation. If the human eye couldn’t accept computer animation, the field would have no future.“

-From Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

Today, motion blur has its own place in the craft of visual expression across still photography, film making, animation and video games.

Figure-Animation2 (1)
Two animations: with motion blur (left) and without (right) Source

Without that, we’d have no way to capture and process the concept of ‘something being in a state of motion’ – that state of being neither here nor there, that state of ‘in-betweenness’.

At its purest, motion blur could be said to be the visual expression of an abstract concept called ‘liminality’.

What is liminality?

In anthropology, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. (wikipedia)

Evidently when liminality as a concept was first developed, it was more in the anthropological contexts of rites and rituals. But today, the usage of the term has broadened to describe socio, political and cultural changes across contexts. Sample this, again from Wikipedia..

During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established.

–Wikipedia on liminality

Reminds you of something?

To be in today’s pandemic crisis is to be betwixt and between. Our conception of space and time is unmoored from the conventional constructs of ‘home’ and ‘work’.

What does this liminality mean to our individual and collective consciousness? How does this change our relationships with institutions – our offices, schools, places of worship? How does this redefine our notions around concepts like commute, entertainment, socialising? Who knows?

But at least these liminal times are forcing us to question our deeply held assumptions and mental models and be a bit more tolerant to well considered alternatives while arming us with a better compass to help navigate our complex world.

In fact, I tend to wonder if the current Covid times and the recent mass mobilisations in support of movements like Black Lives Matter have a good degree of causality associated with them. Which leads me to..

Liminal Thinking

It might be instructive to take a closer look at the word liminal. It’s a derivative of a Latin root that means threshold – which literally means doorway.  Seen with that lens, a threshold is essentially a boundary that marks a point of transition between one state and another.

How do you then find, create and use ‘thresholds’ to create change that matters? How do you deliberately create those opportunities to make a transition from one world view to that of another? What is obvious to you that is not so obvious to someone else? And how do you recognise that?

Liminal Thinking is Dave Gray’s answer to this question through his book by the same name. A quick whiteboard version of his book here.

Our world today, a boiling pot of divisions and polarisations could perhaps do with a dose of liminal thinking so we seek out and normalise that middle ground versus prying it out of shape and character in an attempt to take one side or the other.

And speaking of polarisation

One just needs to look at the democratic politics today to see that one of its key problems is the lack of a middle ground. The result: political polarisation and amplification of extreme views.  Now juxtapose that with another key element of our reality – that while we may seem more divided than ever before, many people on all sides of the political spectrum care about the same handful of issues — education, healthcare, pensions, and etc.

So how do we make a provision for the expression and capture of a more nuanced voting preference in a participatory democracy.

One potential answer: quadratic voting. Unlike a binary “yes” or “no” vote for or against one thing, quadratic voting allows a large group of people to to express the degree of their preferences, rather than just the direction of their preferences through a decentralised voting system.

In fact, the Colorado’s legislature has successfully become one of the first test cases for quadratic voting in the public policy realm. This is the remarkable story of how it deployed Quadratic Voting to normalise the middle ground (vs amplifying the bi-partisan extremes) and how it managed to get a ‘better signal with less noise’.

Seventy-second General Assembly first regular session.
Chambers of the Colorado Capitol where the quadratic voting took place. Source

So there we have it, while we see ourselves stuck in an unfavourable state of liminality in the current times, sometimes it is these very liminal spaces that could potentially make allowances for solutions that magnify and normalise perspectives that are unfettered by extreme/bi-partisan imperatives.

And just sometimes it might mean that we become a bit more tolerant, a bit more inclusive in our beliefs and a bit more optimistic as we hope to see our world become a better place.

Noteworthy ingredients – that may or may not have gone into the making of this post:

[Featured Image: Motion Blur expressed through Still Photography, Source: BGU] 

Pixels to Pronouncements

Quick Read: Pixels – the building blocks of our digital edifices – could be assuming an influence of mammoth proportions across verticals. For e.g., an interesting wave of ‘virtual dressers’ is catching the fashion world by storm.

30 Rock..

..or 30 Rockefeller Plaza is a skyscraper that forms the centrepiece of Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. When walking by its Sixth Avenue entrance one might find something curious. It has four sculptures – bas reliefs, carved in stone by Gaston Lachaise, an American sculptor  – placed all the way up on the third floor.

One might ask, “What are they doing all the way up there?”

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Sixth Avenue Entrance of 30 RCA Building. Source

The answer is that when Rockefeller Center was built, the elevated train still ran up Sixth Avenue. The Lachaise reliefs were placed so these ‘El riders’ passing through the station could see them.

This happens all around us. 

When real estate is at a premium – from facades of iconic buildings to the shelf space in our neighbourhood grocery stores – one can make an entire career out of optimising the design/layout of the underlying physical space for our attention, so it delivers on its intended ‘return on placement’.

These days it could almost be trite to state that it is actually the ‘digital real estate space’ that arguably commands a greater premium vs that of any physical space. And the job of the UX/UI designer thereby becomes one of the most influential (and in my opinion – one of most fulfilling) roles in Product Dev/ Management. In fact, the ‘pixels that they design’ essentially become the gateways to digital products/services shaping the user experience for millions of us around the world. No wonder great UX/UI designers are in great demand.

ux-design-book-combined

And never is the product designer’s* significance more evident than in the current Covid times when the design/layout of an app could be a true window into its product’s soul. (*’product designer’ as a catch all phrase for all design functions in the service of a product) 

For e.g,. given these unprecedented times, how does a product balance its rational (product/services) promise with that of its emotional (empathy/sensitivity) narrative? What are its core values and beliefs and how does the product reconcile it with its commercial underpinnings – its core reason for existence?

Check out a highly recommended read here on this very topic. Post reading it, one could even be tempted to take a walk down one’s playground of pixels (a.k.a one’s apps on their phone) to try and infer those subtle truths that govern their design.

These days, pixels don’t just make for subtle commentary, but also influential pronouncements impacting the zeitgeist of the times.

When pixels become fashion pronouncements

In what now feels like a different meta verse, human beings used to gawk at outfits on the streets or ogle at chic strangers’ coats to see what new brands/designs/designers people are into while designers used to organise their new expositions through coveted fashion shows and had hordes of fans waiting in lines for their exclusive pop up sales. Well now (or rather here in this current meta verse of social distancing) some designers have still been able to do this and more.

For e.g., on a recent weekend, the fashion designer Sandy Liang held an extremely exclusive pop-up sale. Only six people were allowed in at a time, with attendees (the list that swelled to almost 100 people at one point) waiting in line for over two hours.

Before you panic about the potential social distancing violations involved, know that this sale took place on a completely virtual plane: an island in the video game Animal Crossing.

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Enter a captionScene from Sandy Liang’s Animal Crossing pop-up. Source

For the uninitiated, a quick crash course on Animal Crossing below:

With the Nintendo game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, players can customize their looks to show off outfits that reflect their personal style, something that piqued the interests of fashion enthusiasts playing the game, who quickly began designing custom looks that riffed on the trendy designers of the moment. Coupled with social distancing and less opportunities to show off fits in-person, it’s created an unorthodox, but amazing opportunity for Animal Crossing users to show off their outfits — so much so that many real-life fashion designers are creating official clothing codes so users can cop designs from their latest collections.

–Time

Today there are entire Instagram communities centered around Animal Crossing fashion. Marc Jacobs even created his virtual fashion line available for gamers through codes.

And if I’ve run out of style codes or ideas, there are even virtual stores like nookazon (a fan built enterprise) where I can buy clothing for in-game characters. And we have not even scratched the surface of this trend of fashion-conscious people using the game as a platform for style expression by dressing their avatars in pixelated versions of clothes by Gucci, Celine, Supreme and more.

For many, it could even look like Animal Crossing is the only place where people seem to get dressed up for now. Clearly ‘pixels’ seem to have become our canvas for self expression like never before.

Could this change the way fashion works forever?

[Featured Image: Animal Crossing illustration on The Washington Post]

The Sci-Fi Pay Phone Fallacy

 

Quick Read: Future predictions could sometimes just be past projections – repurposed to fit the current context. Sometimes that could make for a liberating realisation – especially in current times.  

3.15.20

That’s the name of the latest album by Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino – an American actor, comedian, writer, producer, director, musician, artist and DJ – a polymath in the entertainment business.

What’s unusual about this album?

It has no title except the date of release, 3.15.20; no artwork; and except for 2 songs, none of the 12 tracks has a title. Quoting Sanjoy Narayan on mint:

On Sunday, 15 March, Donald Glover Jr, better known by his stage name Childish Gambino, launched a new website called Donaldgloverpresents.com and released a new album, which streamed on a loop on the site for most of that day. There was no fanfare; no announcements; no publicity.

For an artist as high-profile as Glover, this was an unusual approach….

…Shortly after his new website stopped streaming the album and went blank, Glover’s, or, rather, Gambino’s, new album got more conventionally released on music-streaming services where you can hear it now. It has no title except the date of release, 3.15.20; no artwork; and except for the second and third songs, Algorhythm and Time, none of the 12 tracks has a title. Instead, Gambino has chosen to title his tracks by time codes—the points in time that they come up on the album. For instance, the first track is labelled 0.00; the fourth is 12.38; the fifth 19.10; the sixth 24.19; and so on.

donald-glover-presents
The album initially played on a loop on the site ‘Donald Glover Presents’, accompanied by an unfinished illustration depicting a very modern scene of rioting, fiery chaos and selfie-taking. (Source)

What’s truly unusual about the album, however, is how it mocks at our assumptions and shatters our accumulated biases about his music. Quoting Sanjoy Narayan again:

It’s an astonishingly experimental album on which Gambino is, in parts, a rapper, a soul, funk and R&B guy, and a sonic innovator who composes melodies and harmonies and melds them to make songs that push every boundary…

..It’s a super ambitious album that traverses so many genres and styles that it would require multiple listens to try and list out or even describe. Funk and soul collide with electronic music; modern hip hop gets to mate with elaborate orchestral arrangements; and smart lyrics comment on the state of the world and other serious issues.

Unique juxtapositions, delightful blends, unexpected connections, inventive remixes and surprising twists. That’s always been the recipe for great story telling across formats from stand up comedy and sci-fi thrillers to food and fashion.

It is compelling how consistently it works every single time – get people to default to their baseline expectations and add in an unexpected twist to move the carpet off their feet and presto, you have a winner! In fact an entire movie was made literally off this very premise.

Turns out getting us to default to our baseline world views/expectations is not that hard after all. Simply because we tend to base our assumptions of a likely future basis our previous experiences. In fact, research suggests that humans predict what the future will be like by using their memories.

Imagining the future then becomes a kind of nostalgia. 

This fallacy could sometimes be evident in sci-fi movies.

Let’s take a classic example: the original Blade Runner from 1982.

In the film, Harrison Ford’s character Deckard makes several calls to other characters using a “videophone,” which is essentially a glorified payphone with a VHS-quality video screen glued on top. Incidentally, the film is supposed to take place in a futuristic 2019, but it makes a faulty assumption that human beings will still be using pay phones as their primary form of communication by then.

payphone
Video Pay Phone in Blade Runner (1982), Source

Back to the Future II also prominently featured payphones and fax machines—both of which were prevalent at the time the film was made, but are obsolete today.

Writers even have a name for this – the science fiction pay phone problem. It essentially refers to how we often assume the continuity of our previous experiences, and subsequently bring our accumulated biases with us, when trying to predict the future.

This could perhaps help serve as an instructive reminder to us that even though we can dream up detailed, novel scenes of things yet to come, our imagined futures could sometimes really just be projections of our past.

And nowhere is this reminder more relevant than in the current times when we are inundated with predictions and discourses about what a post Covid future could look like and how it could potentially impact us, our educational institutions, organisations, cultures, traditions, industries, economies and nation states at large.

As the sci-fi pay phone fallacy reminds us, the future always holds more surprises than we might predict. So instead of stressing about and losing our minds on what a post Covid scenario would pan out to be, sitting back, relaxing and enjoying some Childish Gambino could just be what the doctor ordered for us.

Stay safe. And here’s hoping we all come out of this better, stronger and together. Real Soon.

[Featured Image: Payphone from Back to the Future, digital wallpaper source]

 

Santa Claus and Peppa Pig

Quick Read: If ‘brand’ is a story and if ‘we’ constitute a culture, interesting things begin to happen when a culture seeks a story or when a story seeks a culture – all in that classic quest for resonance. 

When a Culture Seeks Out a Story

Rovaniemi – is a Christmas lover’s dream. It is a Finnish town that has – over the years – established itself as the home of Santa Claus. This sleepy town of around 60,000 inhabitants manages to attract over 500,000 visitors annually from all over the world all seeking the story of Santa Claus, or in other words the experience of the brand Santa Claus. 

It has the Santa’s office where people queue up for a brief 3 minute meeting with him, Santa’s post office that receives a flood of letters from all around the world addressed to  “Santa Claus, Lapland”, the Santa’s official elves and you get the drift – essentially the entire Christmas package that you could ever ask for. 

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Santa Claus at Rovaniemi. Source

While this could constitute a fascinating case study in itself about the power of an iconic brand as an enduring story, the last 18 – 24 months have seen an interesting phenomenon emerge. 

Let’s start with the letters. The Santa’s post office is said to have received upwards of 500,000 letters in 2018. Till 2017, most of the letters used to come from the UK. But now China is said to be way ahead. Apparently the Post Office is said to have received more than 100,000 letters from China alone last year. (source)   

Now the visitors. By some accounts in 2017 alone, close to 580,000 visitors flew into Rovaniemi (double the number in 2010) and much of that  growth is said to be driven by visitors from China. In fact as per this article..

Now, just about everywhere in Rovaniemi accepts Alipay, Alibaba Group’s mobile payment system, which is also available on Finnair flights from seven Chinese cities to Helsinki. …At (hotels) you can pay in Alipay and communicate with reception using WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese social media/messaging service.

 

santa china
Xi Jinping with Santa. Source

Now this is the interesting thing. 

Christmas is not an official holiday in mainland China, and has in fact increasingly been banned in various cities in recent years. On Dec. 15 2018, security officials in Langfang, a city in Hebei province, issued a notice prohibiting the display of Christmas materials and spreading of “religious propaganda” in public areas including schools and plazas. The notice also warned against selling Christmas products and instructed local workers to ensure a “healthy and orderly environment” during the Christmas period. One city even said it would fine individuals caught selling or making fake snow. (more on that here)

But Chinese visitors and letters addressed to Santa from China constitute the majority. Why?  

Most Chinese children may not be fully aware of Christmas’s religious background nor of China’s complicated relationship to the holiday. But the story of Santa Claus and Christmas –  the universal values of generosity, hope, and gratitude, could be what’s driving them to write to Santa Claus or visit the town of Rovaniemi. 

In many ways this phenomenon could be said to be the classic example of a ‘culture’ seeking out a ‘story’.

Nothing represents this sentiment better than the following lines from a letter written by a 19 year Chinese girl to Santa (as quoted in this article)  

“In China, we don’t have Christmas, and family is more important than gifts,” she wrote in both English and Chinese. ”But you know, one small present can mean so much to a child, and bring so much happiness. Although you don’t really exist, kindness does. In my heart, you represent kindness.”  

When a Story Seeks Out a Culture 

If you are not a parent, let me quickly get you up to speed on Peppa. 

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Peppa Pig. Source

Peppa Pig is a British preschool animated character that has spawned a multi billion dollar worth empire of TV series, toys, books, films, theme parks, merchandise and even video games. Each day this muddy puddle loving pre-school character has been winning legions of little fans from all over the world.  

In 2018 Peppa’s memes were banned from social media platforms by Beijing. So its chances looked dicey in China.

Well that was till early this month. 

By mid January 2019, Peppa Pig has been experiencing a huge boost to its popularity in China after the runaway success of a trailer released to promote a Peppa Pig film.In fact the trailer’s Mandarin hashtag #WhatisPeppa had been viewed more than 1.45bn times on popular microblogging platform Sina Weibo and the official video had garnered hundreds of millions of views across various streaming platforms. (source)

This short video, co-produced by Canadian media group Entertainment One and China’s Alibaba Pictures story has supposedly found its best resonance with the Chinese audience given the timing of its release –  the Chinese New Year marking the start of the year of the Pig – and for realistically depicting how societal changes such as urbanization and generational culture gaps have had an impact on Chinese families.

Given this, the short video makes for an uplifting story of the potential that could be unlocked when we have a story that successfully seeks cultural resonance. 

Now Try This Exercise

Think of a phenomenon gone viral or a campaign that back fired. And for each such example that comes to your mind: 

  • Identify if the brand or the central theme has a clear story to tell, a positioning that it seeks to carve out in people’s minds with a clear and a consistent narrative. Is it coherent or half baked? Is that rooted/ does it seek to root itself in the zeitgeist of the times or does it look like it is pushing its luck by tapping into a topical trend? 
  • Now, look at the recipients of the story (or sometimes the seekers of the story). Is there a tenet that unifies them –  a common characteristic, a cultural theme that binds them? Can there be a common story that could appeal to this culture? Or is the underlying cultural theme too fragmented or too nuanced that no single story could have a satisfying chance to resonate with it?  

Chances are that, a successful campaigns/ popular phenomena would always be rooted in strong stories appealing to strong cultural themes or the other way round. Have either one of these stand on weak or flimsy grounds you have a recipe for a backfire. 

[Featured Image: Peppa and Her Family Dress up as Santa Claus for Christmas, Video thumbnail]