Previous posts have discussed the fact that in the world of any, you can be anyone you want and look anyway you want. Scroll back to the post “YOU can be Michael Jackson” to see how the price of plastic surgery has plummeted and the demand and number of procedures have skyrocketed (still does) in the new millennium.

But if, for some reason, you could not afford altering your body, the world of any now provides a solution. At least as long as you’re a woman, for the time being.

Place your picture along with your order (“breast enlargement”, “liposuction”) on the website Operation Perfect and wait for the site’s visitors to donate money to make you “perfect”. In the world of any, anyone can give you the waist size you desire, and you can be anyone’s virtual doll…

This morning, I talked to the members of the Swedish parliament about the Expectations society and nextopia.

Great fun, a lot of laughs, astonishment, contemplation, and even some outrage. I promise you this, things are gonna happen…

One of the MP:s asked me an interesting question that I would like to forward to you smart folks.

Based on my discussion of the world of any and 15 microseconds of fame, the MP asked – “all impressions can’t be equal, can they?”

Here’s an example: Fredrik Ljungberg is known by more people in the world for the way he slips into a pair of Calvin Klein briefs than for his talent as a soccer player (if you’re not Swedish, you might need to be informed that the guy featured in CK’s underwear ads is the former captain of the Swedish national soccer team, also a former player in the Premier League team Arsenal). Fredrik Ljungberg in briefs is more known to the world than most other Swedes, even national hero Christer Fuglesang (austronaut).

This notion nagging the MP, the question was verbalized an hour later – “but although Fuglesang made an impression on far less people, he must have made an impression on more of the right people, thus making a more qualified impression?”

Is the MP right, is the number of impressions not important? Are there “right” and “wrong” people? Rather than writing what I answered, I want to get your smart views!

This seems to be turning into an Illustrated-classic-week, lots of fun! In his blog, Carl made some great observations about Anders Rydell’s and my author talk on O-baren in Stockholm the other week, with the illustration below:

Translation: “Bengt suddenly got the feeling he’d missed out on something, that, somehow, he was lagging behind…”

Have you seen any more fun illustrated classics somewhere?

After yesterday’s post (which, by the way, I was made aware was not translated for English-reading folks. Here goes: the kid in t-shirt reading “consumer” says to santa in t-shirt reading producer – “pleeeeease… Can I have the new google android phone… I promise to forget and foresake it immediately and start longing for the next thing as soon as I get it…) I was tipped about another comic strip, about the Expectations society. From the blog stockholmsnatten.blogspot.com (and also published in newspaper SvD):

 Translation: “You never showed up at Mange’s New Year’s bash, did you? Or did I just not see you?” “Hello? I’ve been dissing 2009 since September, that hype is old to me… I’m always one step ahead of the masses, y’know?” “Ah, so you fired some rockets and had some champagne in the summer, then?” “Sure thing, and then I torched my Glasvegas, Fleet foxes and Benga records and moved on… Y’know they call us Early discarders, always the first to diss hypes. It’s the new shit” “OK, but if there’s a label for it, how fresh can it be?” ”Shit man, you’re the first to diss the Early discarders, how avant garde is that?”

To me, the Illustrated classics series (which I loved as a child) has progressed beyond the illustrations themselves to become semantics – it suggests that the object of the illustrations has become something that is worth transforming and widening the scope and reach of into something that people outside the original audience – anyone – could and should take part of. It’s a favorite say of mine (which maybe no one else really gets…) – “that’s so good, it’s an illustrated classic!”

Which makes me really happy to find nextopia as a comic, below the headline “the trailer is the new movie”, at tankeflanoren.blogspot.com.

“You know you’re big when you have a comic”

Martin pointed out this news to me:

This Tuesday, the book Piraterna (“Pirates”) written by my friend Anders Rydell and Sam Sundberg, was released on the Swedish market. By then, it was old news.  Two days earlier, on Sunday, it was available for download on the fileshare site thepiratebay.org  (whose logo, by the way, is sported on the book cover – without the PB’s consent).  Two days – 48 hours according in traditional clock-time, years according to pirate-time. 

A book about file sharing, and the new millennium pirating movement, the book had stirred quite some attention and debate long before the release. Anders and I talked about this at our O-baren, Stockholm, author talk last week. Comparing our two books, we found a commonality – impatience. The Expectations society has made us 2,920 times more impatient than before. File sharing would be both an expression and a driver of this. Sharing files is a way to consume the Generation In-Charge way: “I don’t wanna wait for someone else to set the release date and distribution, I want it now!” And the infrastructure that has come with this consumption has widened the span of the world of any, where anyone, anywhere, truly can get what they want anytime.

Interestingly, this has been labeled piracy. Piracy, a kind of consumption that is illegal because it does not fit with traditional (old-millennium) models of business, copyright, etc.  One side will have to yield, and the indicators (go back to last year’s post about German downloading acceptance levels for an example) point toward a solution where the old-millennium models will have to succumb to the new-millennium consumption.

Ironic, but not that unexpected, that the book about this phenomenon would make a striking case in itself.

But knowing Anders, I’m sure there’s a already new model behind that book venture.

So, buying a car makes you sky high. And everybody, from rats to pigeons to people (it’s the most basic program in our system), wants to be sky high. If buying a car is such a powerful happy pill, then how come the car industry is going through such rough times (the happy pill-competing pharmaceutical industry evidently isn’t)?

Obviously, there’s a mismatch between what the car manufacturers are selling and what people are buying. People are buying three months of happiness while the companies sell a year of mortgages or a year’s savings (or even more). And before the year is over, possibly even before the three months have ended, the happiness super-highway has made them aware that there are now even fancier, more nextopian cars around.

And the car industry has been excellent at nextopia marketing, with their concept cars, car salons, and continuous advertising of the next model. And there’s the nextopia paradox – constantly hinting at the next car model, who dares buy today’s model, expecting that this forecloses the opportunity to buy the next one?

To solve the paradox, the car industry would need to sell what people are actually buying – and disconnect the actual, year savings, cars from nextopia…

Being does not make you happy, but becoming does – getting promoted can make you sky high, but having had the new job and title for a while (say, three months…), you’re back on the ground again. The same goes with school achievements, personal successes, and relationships.

Similarly, acquiring something can make you sky high, whereas having that something does not. One of the things that research has found makes people sky high when they acquire it is a car. Buy a car and be happy for a maximum of three months. Considering the price of a new car, that sky high feeling is rather expensive. Which, to some extent, could explain the difficulties the car industry has been facing lately.

And maybe it could also to some extent explain the competitive race between a number of manufacturers, like Moller and Terrafugia who are promising that before the end of next year, they will market cars that can fly: “We promise that you can stay sky high for as long as you want…”

In the world of any, you can soon drive your car anywhere

I’ve mentioned before that I think it’s a shame that not more of all the smart comments I get on the posts on this blog are actually published on the blog. Get what I mean? That is, some really smart and insightful people grace this blog with comments (thank you so much!), but a lot of other clever people email me comments or give them to me verbally when we meet (thanks a lot to you, too!). Which means that all you readers of this blog miss a lot of good stuff.

I just came to think of one reason why many people don’t want to publish their comments here:

You’re afraid I might try to hire you?

Remember the hippest magazine on the planet that I wrote about before christmas – The Daily Beast? When their boss was asked who they managed to recruit top talent, she answered: ”I read each and every comment that is published on our website. And whenever I stumble upon a really smart comment, I go after the person behind it!”

Yet another example of CV:s turning Martian (interestlingly, the post on that topic  received the greatest number of comments to date…). To make the hippest magazine on the planet, it is of no interest what potential co-workers have done in the past – all that matters is what their views of the future and their ideas how to get there.

I want to push the knowledge barriers way forward and revolutionize the way we think and act – stear clear from commenting on this blog, or I may try to hire you!

Did you make sense of Friday’s new word, antetrination?

It’s the combination of anticipation and indoctrination. The flipside of all good that comes with nextopia. Although nextopia makes us live longer and fuller, the future can have disastrous effects as well.

The future is an insanely powerful rhetorical device (I should know…) – before it has taken place, it has no key, no correct answer. And by definition, the future never takes place. Hence, arguments building on the future can never be wrong. And as all of us love thinking about the future (it’s the most common theme of our everyday thoughts), we can really indoctrinate ourselves with futuristic arguments. The alluring almost (go back to the alluring-almost-week and refresh your memory) makes us fill in the blanks and form a really convincing picture of the future based on vague (but by definition non-contradictable) arguments.

Whereas nextopia keeps us mostly thinking peter-pan-happy thoughts, we can run astray if someone provides us with negative thoughts instead.

Which is what Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara and Pyotr Kuznetsov did. Pointing towards a future close enough to be meaningful but distant enough to allow for large amounts of antetrination they got people to kill themselves and others. Look them up, in the world of any, you can find the info anywhere.

Did the three men kill all those people – or did the future?