watery gin in the city of cognitive surplus
To be more precise, I actually “won” the ticket (Amit makes life into a series of fun games) when I responded first to beat out the other 1,337 people who follow Amit on Twitter.
And so, I lucked into the PSFK SF conference and walked in thinking about response times and lightweight applications, pausing briefly to pick up a bottle of what looked to be gin. (Note: I spent years in academia where full liquor bottles are highly desirable commodities, and free liquor bottles not to be passed up at any hour of the day.)
(Read the rest after the jump)
This is, of course, bottled water in a container shaped like a gin bottle, which presenter Chris Riley commented alters the way you drink it as he swigged water during his talk. Almost a trick, really, to take a familiar container shape and switch the expected liquid—and a one-way trick at that, as the reverse—putting gin in a water bottle (and thus encouraging gulps of gin)—seems a terrible idea.
The techgeek crowd has been thinking about gin since April, when Clay Shirky gave his Web 2.0 talk about gin and cognitive surplus.
Shirky opened the talk (full video below, well worth the fifteen minutes) by talking about a “collective bender”:
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
Shirky goes on to suggest the current energy expended in social media like Wikipedia is from the cognitive surplus that sitcoms and non-participatory media have been “masking” for decades and that this is actually a one-way shift like the Industrial Revolution. Hard to go backwards once you’ve tasted the good stuff.
San Francisco is a city of cognitive surplus, and certainly the cognitive surplus was bouncing off those walls in Fort Mason as we sat and listened and asked questions at the end of sessions.
Looking around the room full of creatives swigging water out of plastic gin bottles, gathered to listen to talks about design, creativity, trends,
I thought about the one-way shift in the cottage industry of conferences and convening that unconferences and barcamps have begun to force. It is always lovely to hear smart people expound articulately on interesting and inspiring subjects, and the PSFK roster was impressive and thoughtfully chosen.
And yet, the more industry events I attend, the more conferences that haven’t scaled effectively (note: PSFK is smallish to my way of thinking, at around 250; the scaling issues I’m referring to are at larger conferences), the quicker I grab a water bottle.
To futurecast for a moment, demos and hack sessions may be the way we pick up a name tag, put down the bottle, and begin harnessing that surplus.
p.s. Part of my day job is thinking about how to convene people effectively; I would welcome your thoughts or examples of successful events or techniques in the comments—
p.p.s. More Shirky? Have another swig.
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Posted Sunday, July 20th, 2008, 9:58 am * Filed in Design, Drink, Travel, Video. * Tags: clay, cognitive, conferences, gin, kristen, kthread, psfk, shirky, surplus, taylor. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
