From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We have a much more connected marketplace. We have had, what I reckon to be an extremely overvalued stock market since 2000. When you have that situation, you are prone to very sudden negative revaluations.
From around 2007 onwards, a new era dawned, marked by the widespread adoption of smartphones, essentially equipping every person with a sensor device. In tandem, social media platforms proliferated, facilitating incessant information sharing. Concurrently, Google services like Earth and Street View began to provide unprecedented access to geospatial data, granting us both the means and the method to verify a plethora of information.
Relationships are an emotional exchange hub. We bestow energy upon one another, help each other de-stress, and ignite joy in each other's lives. However, we must acknowledge that the digital realm filters out a significant portion of our emotional bandwidth.
Politicians, by and large, don't understand technology at all, and technologists don't understand politicians—and both tend to denigrate each other. The technologists in Silicon Valley see politicians as venal, short-term, and ignorant, while politicians view technologists as rapacious capitalists who will stop at nothing to beat their rivals and lack any ethical compass.
Without the internet and globalization, Ai Weiwei, as you know him, would not possible. My art comes from those influences and the persistent struggle to understand our time.
Social platforms are bizarrely distortive of how the social world works. What these platforms do is take local phenomena and turn them into global phenomena. That shift takes audiences that were once local and turns them global. It also puts the anointment dynamic on steroids, because now your potential reach is basically unlimited.
In rich countries, 'innovation' often means finding a better way of doing things. But in developing countries, it can mean finding a way to do things at all.
There's also a great metaphor from the world of automotive technology. The main naysayers against cars were probably the drivers of carriages in the streets of New York. At some point, the Model T factory was open. And suddenly you're looking around, you're looking at the friend that is driving a car and you're saying, wait a second – he doesn't need a barn to house your horse.
We have a much more connected marketplace. We have had, what I reckon to be an extremely overvalued stock market since 2000. When you have that situation, you are prone to very sudden negative revaluations.
You need one strong relationship in your life to remain sane. You need a relationship that doesn't depend on digital transmission! You need somebody who you understand deeply, who you can talk to directly, who can give you a reality check when everything coming through your computer and phone is bewildering.
There are a lot of people who misuse social media and then they pay the price for it. These individuals and groups are hunting for people to make mistakes, take embarrassing videos and show the world.
Slowly, over the course of a decade, we built relationships by proving we weren't there to destroy luxury's heritage and its 'unspoken codes of conduct,' but actually to protect them and enable this industry to thrive. We were fashion insiders, and we just happened to be coders too!