The Groove Issue 15 - The Future Leaks Into The Present
Welcome to the fifteenth issue of The Groove.
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THE FUTURE LEAKS INTO THE PRESENT
Andy Warhol photographing Pia Zadora. July 1983.
It’s All Happening Now
Many artists and entrepreneurs are called “prescient” because they seem to have this ability to see or predict the future. But the truth is that we create the future by being grounded in the present.
There’s no magic ball, there are no paranormal faculties. It’s by having full awareness of our surroundings, especially in our era where so-called “weapons of mass distraction” (social media, ads, mainstream media, streaming services, podcasts, etc.) are relentlessly competing for our attention, that we are best able to spot the needs of society and to create ways to fulfill them, whether with art, services, or products.
In the 1970s, Warhol charged $25,000 for his commissions to celebrities and non-celebrities alike. He witnessed and understood people’s narcissism and obsession with fame and capitalized on them like no other artist has ever done.
Every good entrepreneur and every good artist is deeply attuned to societal changes and watches their evolution quite closely. That’s why Warhol became obsessed with elevating actors, singers, athletes, politicians and socialites to a level of celebrity that they sometimes didn’t even deserve.
Warhol knew that his subjects’ insecurities and narcissistic tendencies would become a huge source of revenue for him. And they did, as Warhol profited from commissions from known and unknown people and from reproducing portraits of celebs like Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy in different mediums from paintings to screenprints. Watching all this spectacle up-close is the reason why Warhol anticipated the phenomenon of reality TV and social media 40 years before its massive explosion. “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” he said in 1968.
Opportunities Can Be Spotted by Those Grounded in the Present
Jeff Bezos didn’t start as the richest man in the world the day he quit his job at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in 1994. Bezos, a voracious reader, and a man who was grounded in the present, casually came across a piece of information declaring that the web had been growing by more than 2,300 percent a year.
He couldn’t shake that figure out of his mind and needed to find how to get a piece of that growth. He looked around and saw there were needs in certain segments that could be better served. Book readers, for example: he loved books, they were nonperishables, could be bought directly from distributors, and there were more than 3 million titles in print – plenty of inventory to choose from. From the day he wrote his business plan, he also had the goal of saving his costumers money and time with easier online searches, excellent e-commerce capabilities and better shipping than what existed at the time.
Amazon shifted and grew from that point onward until the behemoth it is today through decisions taken by Bezos and his team while being firmly rooted in the present: analyzing consumer behavior and looking around to see what others do so that they can do it better. (They don’t always succeed at this, but they try quite hard at it.)
Artists who are currently capturing our societal struggles and shifts are the ones who are in most demand and are driving the cultural conversation: whether it’s about race, politics, climate change, economic disparities, gender issues, diversity. These artists aren’t shuffling tarot cards, they are creating from their place in the world and representing what they see every day.
Nina Chanel Abney’s Guns and Butter and In the Land Without Feelings. Mixed media on canvas, 2017.
The Speed of Change Will Not Slow Down
Future Shock is a book written in 1970 by Alvin Toffler, an American journalist who died in 2016, and who was constantly meeting people and listening to their ideas. For Toffler, “Future Shock” was a term used to label a situation where there was “too much change in too short a period of time”. According to him, this change overwhelms people. He argued that the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves us disconnected and suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation”.
Toffler wrote about the future and described the world that we are living in at least 35 years before its arrival. He stated that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock he popularized the term “information overload”. Incredibly, it is this information overload (which could also be translated to option-overload, choices-overload, etc.) where many businesses are thriving.
After reading Toffler’s book, it is easy to see that we now live in constant Future Shock because some entrepreneurs are too good at knowing exactly where we are as a society, watching what we like and need, collectively and individually, and giving it to us at the speed of lightning. For example: when we thought we couldn’t handle Facebook and Twitter, we got Instagram, and when we thought that was enough, Snapchat came with their 24-hour duration and face filters. Instagram didn’t like this and launched the Stories. But TikTok saw a different dance (no pun intended) among Gen Z and captured millions of them before Instagram reacted with their Reels. This same example can be translated to any industry today. The critical thing to consider is that even as overwhelmed as we are, and as shocked as we feel by the speed of changes, there is room for more.
And so the question is: how attuned are you to the present? What are the repeated patterns you’ve seen lately but aren’t yet mainstream? What’s a problem that people right now have that could be better solved? Or what’s a niche that could be served differently?
It’s all happening here and now. That’s why the future leaks into the present. It’s up to us to identify those clues and maximize them to our benefit, so we too can write the future before it happens.
Thank you for reading this far. Wishing you a very happy New Year and looking forward to a great 2021 (it has to be better than 2020!)