A wing is a bridge. Flight is a ride on that bridge from take-off to landing. Dinosaurs became bipedal, balancing their large bodies on two legs via counterbalancing tails. Eventually the same biological process—or set of processes between biology and environment—morphed wings, and thereby, flight. Using this transition as a metaphor is an trip we might do well to take.
Write to the nth power, the n-1 power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never …

Writer, filmmaker, instigator, and revolutionary, Guy Debord is probably best known for his involvement with the Situationist International (McKenzie Wark calls him their “secretary”) and their concepts of the dérive and détournement, the former of which is one of the core ideas of psychogeography, and the latter of which went on to define the culture jamming movement. Their slogans were the words on the walls during the May 1968 uprisings in France. They published the proto-Adbusters of the time, and their spirit hangs heavy over the work of Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Joey Skaggs, …

It’s difficult for me to even think about marketing or branding without thinking about Scott Belsky. His Making Ideas Happen (Portfolio, 2010) and the whole 99%/Bēhance/Action Method is as close to a working system for this stuff as I’ve seen. Belsky says to identify your differentiating attributes and emphasize them. Doug Rushkoff once told me to give people something they can’t get anywhere else, and Howard Bloom once said that if you’re not actively marketing yourself, then you’re depriving the world of your ideas. This is how you stand out without …

I mentioned earlier that it’s often difficult for adults to trust the youth, but that it’s imperative. Letting youthful vision lead is the only way into the future. Well, Tyler the Creator and his Odd Future crew aren’t waiting for permission, approval, or funding — much less trust — from anyone. They are doing it, and doing it big.

Everyone can stop mongering the minutia of Radiohead’s every move. Though they’ve done nothing but smart things since parting ways with the past, they were already famous in three solar systems when …

Ever since Matt Schulte mentioned Scott Belsky’s book Making Ideas Happen (Portfolio, 2010) on his site, I’ve been test driving Belsky’s and his company Bēhance’s “Action Method,” which is outlined in his book. Being the notebook nerd that I am, I had to get some of those Action Books to, you know, follow the method properly. So, if your new year’s resolutions are already slipping, think inside this box:

The Action Method consists of Action Steps, References, Backburners, Discussions, and Events, and the Action Book is designed to employ these categories …

In my “How To Do Stuff and Be Happy” talk, I tell people that everyone should have one “head-clearing activity.” Let me explain that by example. My friend Ben Hiltzheimer used to ride motorcycles. When he started learning how, he said that you can’t think about anything else while you’re negotiating the streets and traffic because all you’re thinking about is not dying. I have equated this experience to learning to ride a fixed-gear bicycle.
I started rock climbing a little over ten years ago, and since there’s a wall on …

Campus sidewalks meander between places of interest, connecting buildings and parking lots in a maze of concrete stripes. Often where their right angles turn near grassy areas between them and another building or parking lot, there are paths leading off diagonally. These forking paths are called “desire lines,” so named because they show where people would rather walk. There’s a story circulating that says good engineers (or lazy ones, depending on who tells the story; see Brand, 1994, p. 187) put sidewalks in last as to follow the desire lines …

Hacking, as the term is generally (mis)understood, gets a bad rap. The longstanding attempts at distinguishing between hacking and cracking have yielded little results. If you self-identify as a hacker, most will still assume you illicitly break into computer systems to steal secret information or vast sums of money.
In Hacking (Polity, 2008), Tim Jordan puts great effort into developing a solid, working definition of the term. Not only is Jordan concerned with differentiating hacking from cracking, but also in not watering down the concept (as he claims McKenzie Wark, Pekka …

For my recent guest lecture at UIC, I was tasked with three things. Mike Schandorf asked me to do a little motivating, do a little background, and answer some questions. For the first, I went back through some of the posts here, some things I used to handout at the end of the semester in my classes, and a few key essays by people who have motivated me. This is still rather diffuse, but since these are all just recommendations (i.e., you should only use what works for you and …

Magazines have always been my favorite form of media. Having grown up in rural areas of the South, I found the window to my interests opened in their glossy pages. The big photos and words from other worlds kept me connected to all that I wanted to be a part of. If this sounds a bit romantic, it was. The grocery store newsstand and the mailbox were the modem jacks of the time.
Back then, it was music, skateboarding, and BMX magazines, and though those still capture my attention on a …