Making Sense of Culture Amidst Contradiction

Brian Lange puts it brilliantly: “Transaction is identity exchange.”

Consumers exchange capital for identity, and makers exchange their time, labor and expression for the goods or services they sell. Commerce is a continuous exchange of identities.

Acknowledging this bias or incompleteness is perhaps the most important part of the work.

Answers are mere theory.

these “cultures” are ever-evolving . (Latin ‘cultura’ = grow, tend, cultivate, to care)

Overtime we’ve begun to treat this nuance and ambiguity as friction and something to program out. Computers don’t like it. Algorithms can’t categorize it. So we remove it.

Yet we so desperately need this “in between” and neither “yes” nor “no” thinking.

For an organization to operate within society, it must be not just be mindful, but active in these changes — or “tending.” Failure to do so results in lack of resonance and more dire: disruption .

Our moment is a war of competing myths.

The future belongs to those who write it — as always — for better or worse.

The irony is that the hard parts, like writer’s block and openness, is where there’s self-examination, progress and growth.

And if we’re not pursuing creativity for that, then why are we? The clicks?

Do the dichotomies of reason vs. feeling, objectivity vs. subjectivity, man vs. machine, and physics vs. metaphysics still make sense?

MK: This is the computer-thinking speaking. These are binaries . 0’s and 1’s are for computers, and arguably should only be for computers.

I thoroughly believe, alongside thinkers like Douglas Rushkoff, that we must ... See more

Culture, particularly our media, has become so participatory, that everyone is self-nominating and submitting their own myths into the zeitgeist. And as a result, individuals play an increasingly powerful role in shaping narratives.