Strands of Genius: GTP-3, Newton's Law of Culture, Long Live the (Burger) King
plus our thoughts on: The End of Snow Days
WRITING FROM | Beersheba Springs, TN
WORKING ON | Client Webinar, Finalizing SOSG Redesign
LOOKING AHEAD
Nov 24-Dec 12: Beersheba Springs, TN
Dec 12 - Jan 16: Nashville, TN
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
Happy Thanksgiving for those that celebrate it, and hey, even if you don’t… it never hurts to take some time to count one’s blessings. Especially this year, when the dominance of inconvenient and scary makes us forget all the good, rather than throwing it into sharp relief.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
family and friends, near and far.
:: THE LINKS ::
NEWTON’S LAW OF CULTURAL CHANGE
We’ve been thinking about how the shifts in culture precipitated by current events seem to move {backwards and forwards} along particular vectors that require constant renegotiation, things like ‘public vs private’. A tweeted half thought brought back a reply with this from an old friend and colleague of Faris’ at Naked, who now heads up strategy at Jones Knowles Ritchie. This feels right to us. “Cultural ideas and movements often seem to zig-zag back and forth rather than follow a straight linear path of progression. Like Newton’s third law, shifting in the completely opposite direction, with equal force, in response to the movement which preceded it.” (Medium)
GTP-3 TAUGHT ITSELF TO CODE
Artificial intelligence presents the possibility of the singularity in which an AI created by people transcends us by teaching itself to be smarter, or building a smarter AI we can’t understand. GTP-3 is an interesting experiment in natural language prediction - stick in a corpus of writing from an individual and a topic and it will write paragraphs in that style. Then someone wondered what would happen if they pushed code through it and it turns out that the same engine - one built just on just one thing (to predict the next word in a sequence of words) - can write functioning application code. (NYTimes)
LONG LIVE THE KING
It had been a much-requested theme, so Faris finally tackled the contentious topic of Burger King’s marketing in his column. The work is famous and polarizing, and perhaps this article might help you work out why you feel the way you do about it. “What’s the problem? Are these ‘just stunts’? Why is that a problem? One of the impossible to ignore aspects of the current creative strategy is speed and volume.” (WARC)
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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: SNOW DAYS ::
The weather is confusing at the best of times, but when it’s t-shirt hot on the Friday after Thanksgiving, then snowing as it is today in the Cumberland Mountains, it can feel discombobulating. Which often requires some recombobulation. Which is a great word.
Snow Days are not something that featured heavily [at all] in Faris’ UK childhood but thanks to cultural imperialism the rest of the world that didn’t suffer sudden drifts still appreciate the appeal. A regular day in which you wake up, expecting school {or work} as usual and then you look outside and see white.
SNOW DAY! Mother Nature occasionally overwhelms human infrastructure, and we lucky humans can get a day off.
When the pandemic started, at the very beginning… when all of our work for the year suddenly evaporated and we couldn’t travel anywhere… it felt weirdly like a snow day. The problem, we all discovered, is that we can’t live like ‘every day is snow day’ life, just like we can’t eat like it’s Thanksgiving every day, without feeling terrible. However you relax, or indulge, your body knows you can’t do it all the time without serious side effects. Worse, it’s hard to enjoy the relaxation if you don’t feel like you have somehow earned it. And if you aren’t enjoying fun then what’s the point.
Now it’s now, and it’s snowing, - it’s a snow day! Our little nephew is sitting to the right of us doing his daily zooms, we’re doing ours, and we asked Vera, our niece, what to write about and she said “it’s snowing!”
And it suddenly occurred to us {especially Faris, who never had a snow day growing up} that in the zoomworld there will never be a snow day again.
Or perhaps some enterprising young startup will give employees snow days, to give them a sense of normalcy, or a much-needed break, or even just an excuse to play outside. It seems unlikely considering how much offices tend to prefer their employees working billable hours, but hey, you never know - and even if we get some mental health/duvet/snow days - they won’t be dictated to all of us by the universe and thus won’t feel the same. Like….A SNOW DAY!
:: AND NOW…SWEDISH MATCH BRANDING BRAINSTORM ::
{Was it JWT? They invented Mr Kipling’s cakes … ;-)}
If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)