When it comes to new ideas, most conferences are a snooze. Yes,  there’s TED and PopTech, but even when I had corporate overlords, they gave you the evil eye whenever the idea of fancy conferences came up. Fortunately, a friend turned me onto a cheap ticket to Bernd Schmidt’s annual BRITE conference, so I got myself uptown last week for two days of Branding Innovation and Technology—and what I suspected would be precious little new ground.

I was wrong. Some of it was indeed a snooze, but the minute Umair Haque (pronounced hock) took the stage—on the heels of Jeff Jarvis’s typically acerbic, but well-focused shtick for What Would Google Do? —the room went electrically silent. For one thing, Haque presented using a new (and potentially powerful) PowerPoint rival called Prezi, essentially a single slide with multiple touchpoints laid out around a circle instead of the oversimplified,  linear slide-by-slide prison of PowerPoint. Literally tabbing between these various touchpoints—a supergraphic word here, a chart there, a few good quotes and listicles—Haque could zig and zag and zoom (and I do mean zoom—this thing works somehow integrates Flash to give you the sense of high-speed motion) from idea to idea, winging along a high-stakes, high-touch, high-tech argument that the world economy has entered not just a crisis, but a Metacrisis. According to Haque, we have entered an era not only of Zombie Companies and Zombie Banks, but of an entire Zombieconomy that calls out for more radical change than the behavioral fix of a stimulus. What we need says Haque is an entire change in the way we think about innovation—to go beyond Porter, Christensen, Blue Sky, etc. to some new model of innovation based on the behavioral success  of Google.

Getting out of Haque and into Marx

Now I wasn’t taking notes, and Haque’s presentation isn’t up on Prezi or the Brite site so don’t hold me accountable for my poor memory. But as I remember it, the essence of his argument is that our very notion of strategy is itself based on bankrupt, corrupt and “evil” motivations, and as a result our strategic choices are becoming more and more limited. Instead of recent models of innovation aiming to capture “thin value” by adding a sixth blade to a five blade razor—we need to follow a path to “thick value.” Bucks from “thin value” is old school capitalism. Surplus value = more for me, less for you. Even so-called disruptive innovations (per Christensen) are really disguises for incrementalist innovation, designed to lead consumers up the old value curve to more and more consumption, no matter that Christensen says that disruption takes place by bringing new technology to market using cheaper but more powerful technology—e.g., the famous disruption of hard disk storage by cheaper, lower cost, and smaller flash memory.

On the other hand, there is Google, and what Haque called “thick value.” Google’s behavioral economics are centered around principles, building tools that turn “more for me, less for you” on their head. The Google way, says Haque, is about more for us = more for you. And if  we deliver on creating this thick value, says Haque, if we don’t look to revenue models to save us (although Google was supremely lucky that it did finally stumble across one); if we make our technology transparent (even though Google’s own technology is far from transparent); if we act, as Google shows us to, for love, for the enfranchisement of vast numbers of people whose virtuous quotidien use of technology only leads to better things for more people—if we do all that, we will solve (or at least resolve) the Metacrisis, returning companies to profitability and restoring virtue to capitalism once and for all!

To which I raised my hand and said: Gee, that sounds a lot like dialectical materialism. I got a snicker or two: the Republicans in the audience probably thought I was redbaiting Haque.  Jarvis, sitting two rows ahead of me said, got it. It was Marx “or religion,” he said, getting a bigger laugh than me. (Such a pro!) But Jeff and I both had it right: Haque has some very creative, very transhistorical thinking in his work. I don’t know how much Marx he’s actually read—I suspect that as a Pakistani Brit, he is shot through with anti-colonialist ideology of the reddest stripe—but there did seem to be some uncanny similarities between his Metacrisis and the resolution he has called (in blog postings)  “constructive capitalism” and the march of Marx’s dialectical materialism, the resolution of class conflict through various stages of history from feudalism to capitalism, socialism, and then finally to the ultimate of abundance, the big C (no, not Citibank, for Karl’s sake: Communism!)

There’s a lot more to say about this new Marxisant take on networked love, and maybe after some more reading I will. It seems to be spreading. David Rogers, the BRITE exec director had a Marx slide in his presentation, Jim Ledbetter’s excellent collection of Marx’s journalism came out last year, and the next day I noticed a piece by Hitchens in The Atlantic opening up the old red can of worms. But what most struck me in the days after Haque’s talk, was this notion that the raison d’etre of the new networked capitalism is Love: people’s love for information, for getting it right (or at least right enough), for connection. And that this newfound love of creativity for its own sake and not just Mammon is creating behavioral change in startups and perhaps even in the way we think businesses can and should be run. Et voila, Jeff Jarvis’s question: What Would Google Do (if it were running the hotels, restaurants, car companies, governments, utilities, shops, manufacturers, and even Apple)?

So where Godard once proclaimed (some 45 years ago in Masculin/Feminin) of his generation that “We are the children of Marx and Coca Cola,” we now seem to think we are the children of Marx and Google. It doesn’t have quite the same poetry, and I’m not sure about all the squishy emotion (as Shirky calls it) here, but I am noticing it, and wondering if we’re heading towards another moment of massive cultural change conflating capitalism and eros. Anybody for a Godard film night? We can always download some torrents from that secret cinema site I’ve been hearing about.

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Tagged: 2.0, Google, Haque, Marx, politics