Strands of Genius: The Great Rewiring (?), McKinsey Pays Staff to Look for Another Job, Solar Eclipses
Plus: A Bingo Venn of Ing
WRITING FROM | Chattanooga, TN
WORKING ON | brand new brief delivered on Easter Sunday while I was ‘at church’ ;)
LOOKING AHEAD
March 10 - April 11 | Chattanooga, TN
April 11 - 15 | Nashville, TN
April 15 - 19 | Chattanooga, TN
April 19 - 26 | Beersheba Springs, TN
April 26 - 30 | Miami, FL
April 30 - May 18 | Worcester Park, UK
May 18 - 20 | Nashville, TN
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
HIYA! April fools day, eh? It’s a weird one and like lots of weird things we think of as traditions its origins are murky but there has always been a tendency towards inversion and mockery throughout medieval festivals where the fool becomes the king for a day.
“Historians have also linked April Fools' Day to festivals such as Hilaria (Latin for joyful), which was celebrated in ancient Rome at the end of March by followers of the cult of Cybele. It involved people dressing up in disguises and mocking fellow citizens and even magistrates and was said to be inspired by the Egyptian legend of Isis, Osiris and Seth.”
And why not frankly, these sort of cultural inversion holidays are forms of collective release but, like everything nowadays, have become dominated by brands who feel free to have a little fun for a day.
Or a week nowadays, apparently.
Now, as we move into an election year of intense media and technology challenges and no regulation of political speech, arguably what is true and not true is going to get even harder than it has been. So perhaps in a time of supposedly diminished trust it’s bad for brands to prank consumers.
And yet.
Perhaps the point is that everyone now assumes or probably should that everything they see is shaped at the very least by power and money (Chomksy should be so proud of the MSM skeptics and yet I suspect he’s not because weaponizing skepticism into blanket denials of reality isn’t what I think he was reaching at when he pointed out that commercial media is inherently biased towards making money, which is essentially tautological in this version of capitalism) and so maybe April Fools is the perfect holiday for a culture that is slipping into hyperreality.
Thanks Baudrillard.
Anyway, this is Strands, not a prank, although arguably it would be funnier to do it the day after instead of throughout the week before as is now the primary brand comms strategy.
It’s the coming to the end of season of the sticks, there are new buds blossoming in the garden that Rosie is digging and planting. Easter is derived from the anglo-saxon word for dawn which became anthropomorphized into a goddess of spring and rebirth and such. The world intuitively knows the year doesn’t really start on January 1st, it starts….NOW. Ready? Lol me neither but here we go.
UPDATE: On April Fool’s Day Faris went running in his new neighborhood and when he runs to drum n bass and jungle he waves his arms around in a jerky elbow-focused way that is what he calls dancing. A neighbor, concerned about his appearance and odd behavior called the cops, which led to an interesting conversation about raving with a nice young man with a moustache. Ha ha ha DONK. Hilarious prank…
ps. If Jesus is an egg laying rabbit, was he a monotreme? These are the kind of jokes Faris, and only Faris so far, likes. He doesn’t love pranks or being SWATed on the street tho.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Chris&Ali, especially because Ali said she reads Strands ;-), Megan for stopping by and showing us her van and introducing us to her excellent dog Mack, Chris C for the inspiring text chat that meant a lot, Alex for voice chat that did too, Jennifer for canning expertise, jokes and kindness, the very welcoming Roller Derby community in Chatsville, the sheriff I suppose, wash cloths, Spiderman 2, Leffe Blonde, being alive & YOU.
:: THE LINKS ::
THE GREAT REWIRING (?)
Jonathon Haidt is an academic social psychologist that wrote a really interesting book called The Righteous Mind which explores why people of different political persuasions always think they are right and tend to demonize ‘the other side’. It also helpfully glob ally contextualizing the modern liberal sensibility of morality as a univalent ‘do no harm’ proposition, since the majority of ‘moral matrices’ around the world tend to have more axes of concern around family and hygiene and gods &c. Anyway, more recently he has decided that the mental health epidemic young people are experiencing is ‘caused’ by smart phones. This is now a common point of view but…well this book review in arguably the world’s most prestigious science strongly journal suggests otherwise…if fact it suggests a completely inverted causation theory caused by correlative analysis and ideology:
MCKINSEY OFFERS TO PAY STAFF TO LEAVE
You may have noticed there have been a lot of layoffs *gestures broadly* of late. McKinsey, whose primary business model is to support CEO, company and increasingly nation state profitability / stability in the short to medium term by eliminating costs and identifying threats / opportunties to juice market valuations, has made an offer to its own staff. “The management-consulting giant McKinsey is dangling career-coaching services and nine months' worth of pay to staffers keen on leaving the firm, the British newspaper The Times reported on Saturday.” It also announced record revenues of $16bn last year. Based on their exposure to market trends globally this seems like a early indicator of something something AI something, although it’s worth remembering that McKinsey alumni almost always become clients when they land somewhere else….(MSN)
WHY AREN’T THERE ECLIPSES EVERY MONTH?
The Three Body Problem TV show is named after Newton’s explanation that it’s functionally impossible to accurately predict the motion of more than two gravitational bodies operating on each other (or something like that - come at me physicists). We have often discussed how hard it is to model the orbits of Sun/Moon/Earth in our heads and this video helps quite a lot. Tl;dr it’s the angles. (YT MinutePhysics).
Want to chat, comment, question, compliment?
:: AND NOW :: DO YOU KNOW BINGO?
If you don’t Mr Bingo is a very nice man and a wonderful artist. He took the last year off to explore what not working looks like and all his notes were delightful. This is his most recent piece.
If you are not British you may need to look up dogging but I’d advise against it.
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 | your friends over at geniussteals.co
(still want more? @faris is still “tweeting” while @rosieyakob prefers instagram stories)
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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. We have a distributed team ourselves, an accounting team is based in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, 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.
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