London’s burning

The marriage of the internet and the mobile phone has helped to organise and mobilise revolutionary movements in a wide variety of countries with autocratic and repressive regimes – in Tunisia, Egypt, Serbia, Burma, North Korea and many more. That’s the upside.

Of course, at the same time it has facilitated all the looting and burning in London and around the UK in recent days, mobilising and directing large groups of people at a moment’s notice.

Right now the police appear to be operating totally in the past, always behind the play.

Where will it go next? And how quickly can the authorities catch up, if at all?

From living room to den to phone to…

In an interview in Rolling Stone in 1994, Steve Jobs spoke joyfully and perceptively about the shift of focus from the living room, the “set-top box”, where convergence had been headed up to that point, to the “den”.

“I love it,” he said. “I think the den is far more interesting than the living room… I’m very excited about having the internet in my den.”

And so it came about.

But now, as my friend, Jackie Bradley, points out, it’s no longer the den – it’s the phone through which it all converges. And my business partner, Alison Duffy, is a total convert. Jobs got that one right too.

Not for me. I like it in the den. And I can’t bear the idea that I’m connected to everything, everywhere I go, every minute of the day, no matter what I’m doing. I still want a life of my own, with broad expanses of thinking and being time.

Or is that just not going to be possible?

And where to next? Better ask Steve.

Strangeness in proportion

There are always problems in recognising breakthrough innovations at the initial idea stage.

Incremental innovations are a doddle to get by comparison. I’m sure there are no hard and fast rules. But generally real breakthrough ideas do make one feel uncomfortable. Sometimes even slightly cross.

The real question to ask is: is it really intriguing? Is there something about it that, although it feels unnerving, has one sensing that it just might change the game, be disruptive, break current rules, create a new way of being?

Sir Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare (wrongly believed by some to have written those amazing plays and poems), wrote: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in proportion.”

Worth bearing in mind when you’re confronted with tomorrow’s equivalent of the internet, the mobile phone, the airplane, the bicycle, the light bulb, the plough, the wheel…