After Lars Friberg’s highly appreciated guest appearance on this blog the other week, the obvious (and by many uttered) question was – who’s next?

The answer is: Martin Hugosson is next! Readers of this blog are most likely aware of him through his many smart comments and strange angles that have teased me in new directions many times. Martin is the award-winning managing director of OMD Gothenburg, a very insightful man that will grace this blog with his takes on nextopia next week.

Looking forward!

Michael Jackson has been one of the world’s most famous people for quite some time. How has he been able to stay in the public eye for so long? Well, “Thriller” experienced a great revival with its 25th anniversary earlier this year (and as I mention in the book, MJ really managed to build expectations around it, succeeding in turning an evidently quarter-century old and known album into a nextopia album), but other than that, he’s not been very musical or verbal for a long time. But all the more visual.

Not long after “Thriller” hit the stands once upon a time, MJ received the nickname “Wacko Jacko” because of his unusal behavior. That behavior manifesting itself mainly in his continous visual -facial – transformations. And 1980’s icon MJ, or WJ, has remained in the public eye in the world of any, where anyone, anytime may become a greater musical hit and earn 15 microseconds of fame, as he has involved to a new millennium expectity – “what will he look like next?”

Though his facial-transformation behavior was unusual in the old millennium, it’s won’t necessarily be so in the new millennium.

According to ASAPS (the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery) statistics, consumer plastic surgery has increased by 500% percent since the end of the old millennium. And it does not seem to lose pace, with an estimated additional 20% increase next year. Today, MJ is just one of many face-transformers, counted in 8-digit numbers - in the US alone.

According to the ASAPS stats, people age 35-50 have the most procedures (46 percent of the US total), whereas younger people, age 18-34, have the least (21 percent). The difference between the two groups? The former, obviously, have more money and are more immersed in the world of any, where they can do and buy anything. Will the younger people follow their lead? The answer, if you ask them, is yes – they are almost 50% more positive towards plastic surgery than people in the age brackets above them. Soon, they will have the money, and with the increasing scale and global supply of plastic surgery, prices will most certainly come down, so that a nose job or a chin-up may be no more than the financial equivalent of a haircut. And mentally, it already seems to be…

In the world of any, anyone, anywhere will be able to have any nose they want. Anyone can look like Michael Jackson – in anyone of his faces.

If you’re Swedish, you’ve probably muttered the answer “no, Sweden is not the capital of Switzerland” at one time or another.

In the world of any, you may not need to much longer. One first reason, obviously, is that anyone, anywhere can (and Generation In-Charge most likely will) find the answer themselves anytime. A second reason is that Sweden could very well become the capital of Switzerland at some point in time.

At present, however, it’s more probably more likely that Iceland would become the capital of Switzerland. In the connected world of any we all live in, anyone knows that Iceland is in deep economic crisis. A country being at severe  financial distress is nothing new, that happened in the old millennium as well. New to this millennium, however, is that in this millennium, the world of any provided opportunity for anyone to buy the entire country at a bargain. Opening up at 99 UK pence, Iceland was subject to auction at eBay for a few days in October, escalating  into a bidding frenzy that surpassed tens of millions of UK pounds (not everyone is out of cash, obviously…) before it was closed.

Or maybe, the Maldives would be first up for the position as the capital of Switzerland? Two weeks ago, Maldive president Mohammed Nasheed started shopping around for a new location for his country. After the tsunami in 2004, when close to 100 of the country’s islands were flooded, the government realized that the days of the present Maldive geographical location may be numbered. If global warming continues, the islands will not remain islands for long. So far, president Nasheed has discussed price tags with Sri Lanka, India and Australia. If the price is right, they would probably consider relocating the Maldives to the capital of Switzerland as well?

Or maybe, president Nasheen is actually the highest bidder that closed the auction of Iceland?

In the world of any, a country can be situated anywhere. And an economy may fall on one spot, but rise to its feet anywhere else, and in the form of any new economy and country. 

I’m pretty sure it has not escaped you that I named Barack Obama expectity of the year during his stint as the democratic presidential candidate. The focus on Obama was massive during the fall and generated a number of google hits that almost dwarfed sitting president George W (8 whole years in!) by a factor of 200 percent.

Now, the election’s over. And Obama will not be, he IS the presidential pick. Testing my notion of expectity, Martin ran a Google Trends research, and found that, already, not even in the office, but people now knowing rather than expecting him to be president, Obama seems to be less exciting – now at an all-time low.

Rock star Obama will be, Whobama is..?

 http://www.google.com/trends?q=barack+obama&ctab=0&geo=US&geor=all&date=2008&sort=1

In the book (and an early post on this blog before summer), I wrote that spending too much time online may make you less happy. The internet was hailed as the information super-highway, when it reached most of the world’s fingertips at the end of the old millennium – “now all imaginable information comes at you with super speed!” In the new millennium, it became evident that internet-facilitated awareness of the world of any – there isn’t any end to all the new things you can get and do, and people you can meet – may make people less content with what we have and more anxious to get our sticky fingers on all new opportunities racing towards us on the information super-highway. Swoosh, there goes our happiness.

A country that has started a furious race in the new millennium is China. In the last few years, the economy has exploded (how’s an annual 8 percent GDP increase rate for a recession, eh?) and the internet-facilitated connectedness has spread worse than an Asian flu. Now, China has the greatest number of citizens in the world online any given time of day.

 And they have just learned what it means to be on the happiness super-highway. I don’t know if it’s the warp-speed change from not being able to reach everything to now being at a situation where anybody can tap into the world of any, but the authorities seem to be in shock:

A recently finished state survey concludes that excess internet use may be a clinical disorder. Dr. Tao Ran has been appointed chief of staff of the Beijing internet addication clinic. He estimates that as much as 10 percent of the country’s 18-30 year-olds may be internet addicts.

However, with the proper treatment (isolating patients from the internet), Dr. Ran estimates that the addiction can be cured within six months.

Let that be a warning. Stay away from the world of any, or the doctor will come get you…

On Friday, I’m off to torture doctoral candidates in a far-away land. Meaning that you get a rest from reading another blog post.

And I’ll take a rest from writing one. To enjoy the fact that, after the previous responses from a China, Germany and America, UK just got back to me with a very kind review that The Independent wrote on my recently world-wide released “Creativity Unlimited”:

“Book review: Creative thinking begins inside the box”

See you next week!

It all comes together. Remember the previous posts about how we are now 2,920 times more impatient than in the old millennium, with examples like the release of Metallica’s “Death Magnetic” 10 days ahead of the original plan, and the launch of Google Chrome two days before the scheduled date?

Now it’s Axl’s turn. As we all know, and as I’ve written here previously, the GnR “Chinese Democracy” nextopia album was scheduled some time ago to be released on November 23rd. Well, from midnight today, 3 days ’til the 23rd, it’s available on myspace.

Remember expectity-week, where I listed myspace as the world’s #1 expectity factory? It all comes together.

The world keeps revolving faster and faster. Not only may the language of the next generation seem like Martian to their parents, and vice versa. Just taking a five-year nap would probably make the language equally alien when you wake up. Youtubing, pinging, RSS:ing, and tagging are just some of the stuff we do and take for (absolutely) granted today that we weren’t familiar with five years ago. Not to mention blogging – you probably think I’m kidding, but google “blogging and 2003″ and see that it was virtually non-existent.

And while new behaviors and words pop up at warp speed, old ones sink into oblivion. My guess is, five years from now people will have to look up a dictionary (or google it – or use some other resource we don’t even know about today) to understand what you mean when you talk about a CV.

If you’re a product of the 1900’s like myself, you might still remember that CV is short for Curriculum Vitae, which basically is your own pimped record of what you’ve done so far in life with respect to educations and work experience.

But who needs a CV in the Expectations Society?

I spoke to one of my former students the other day. She just landed the position as editor-in-chief of a lifestyle magazine. “How come you got that job?” I asked, “it’s quite a stretch from what you’ve worked with previously”. She answered, “I bought a copy of the latest issue, and I didn’t like it. So I wrote a long letter to the editor and told them what I think the magazine should be like instead, and how I would do it. They called me and asked me to come on an interview and here I am. They weren’t interested in what I had done previously”.

In light of her brilliant plan and the magazine’s expectations on her future job, there was no need for a CV.

In the age of blogarazzi, where we all create our own next operas, anyone, anywhere (including companies and headhunting recruiters) can make up their own minds of your future. And that’s what they want to buy, your future and not your past. 

Just like we’ve seen previously in a number of posts on this blog that people can be fired because of their blogs, more and more people get hired because of their blogs as well. Headhunters scan blogs as a natural part of their searches, companies make cold-calls to bloggers they like. I asked my students why they blog (virtually everyone does, everyday), they gave a number of answers. None of them omitted “future career”. I  asked how many of them worked on their CV’s everyday. This year no one said yeas. Five years from now, they’ll probably ask “what is a CV?”  

The obvious answer, of course, is that none of them can fly. Lacking wings like the rest of humanity, Dolly never has been able to fly. And, as we all knew, Sterling cancelled all their flights recently due to financial difficulties (which translated into bankruptcy).

A second answer is that they used to be loved by their fans. Sterling has long been the national pride of Denmark, and Dolly even has her own themepark, Dollywood, and her whigged and padded “dollies” fans.

A third answer is that they don’t seem to be so loved by their fans anymore.

After Sterling cancelled their flights, angry Danish rallied on the web to demand financial compensation. Gathering thousands of people, and bringing Sterling to court, one of the initatiors recently stated that a good settlement would be to allow the travellers to take over the airline themselves.

After Dolly gave a concert in Malmö, Sweden, at the beginning of this summer, seven of the concert-goers decided that they neither saw nor heard something they liked. Deciding that “this is not ‘Dolly’ enough” they demanded a refund from the concert organizer. When they were turned down, they turned to the national press, and soon “we want our dolly money back” had generated more than 150,000 hits in little Sweden alone. Before summer was over, their money was refunded.

A fourth answer, thus: Dolly Parton and Sterling have entered the world of any, where anyone, anywhere can decide whether a performance is “Dolly enough” and whether cancelled flights are acceptable. And they both recently encountered Generation In-Charge, who overruled Dolly’s own judgement and nullified her concert performance, and who decided that they’d rather run Sterling themselves.

Who is Whitney Houston anyway? Though all fans may not agree with the song’s title anymore: 

OK, MD is back. And very happy that I stayed away for a week so guest-blogger Lars Friberg could grace us with five fantastic posts. They provided me with a lot of new ideas – and seem to have stimulated many other people as well. By promoting(?) his comments to (much more than) full-fledged posts, the blog was amazingly blessed with several really smart comments from other super-minds. Obviously, it takes one to lure one. Instead of ridding the blog of a super-mind commenter while Lars was the poster, it added new ones. The potential snowballing effect of this is mindboggling… 

Lars, thank you so much!

I’ve received a number of emails from people congratulating me on the smart decision to have Lars as a guest-blogger. And I think all of those emails ended the same way:

 ”So, who’s next?”