Look, a list!
Ordered notes on culture, technology, play and sustainability
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Lists. I live by them. They have wonderful affordances: scannable, skippable, measurable. You have successfully completed the first item.
Meta data. Today’s newsletter features 20 items and 1,400 words (11 minutes reading) but (see Item 1) you don’t have to read them all. The most clicked link across all 27 issues of Or So Ben Thought is an optical illusion of someone stacking cubes1. For some reason “Pin it and zip it” is the most popular edition, despite “fewer linky-links than usual, more cultural vignettes and a poem!”
Me? I help arts and culture organisations find playful ways to engage with diverse audiences.
I’m a writer. Hello! You’re reading some of it! There is more. I’m delighted to have over 300 subscribers. (If everyone forwarded this to just one person etc etc…) Writing about things helps me understand the things better. Sometimes other people also find the words useful.
I’m a facilitator. I guide small or big or distributed groups of people towards the goals they set. Sometimes we do it in just a few hours. Or we take a whole year, rolling through a series of diverge-converge cycles (design thinking!) to make loads of decisions by making loads of prototypes. I have to be both firm and flexible. I must synthesise the noise into something beautifully succinct that excites people. I have been generously described as “an expert listener and communicator,” and “a master quilt stitcher.”
I’m a creative director. I hold the vision for a thing that needs to be made, like a three-minute touchscreen game about climate change2 or a medieval arcade experience with custom-built longbows and motion tracking3. It’s really hard, mostly fun and even award-winning things4 are shelved eventually.
You, Me, Bum Bum Train. It’s back! Tickets sold out instantly. If you know, you know. If you don’t: “You Me Bum Bum Train is an experience for one audience member ("Passenger") at a time. It is created with care by many people for a few.”
Wool. This ad is brilliant, tense and sensory. The aesthetic riffs on the glossy car ads we’re so familiar with. One of the few pre-rolls I didn’t skip.
Buy Now! As a natural followup to the above, Netflix’s forthcoming exposé of shopping and the nefarious lengths every brand goes to: Make. You. Click.
Join or Die! A documentary on Netflix about being part of a community, building on “legendary” social scientist Robert Putnam’s study of bowling clubs in America. The lessons apply worldwide, interest-wide.
Advice list. Kevin Kelly has lots of lists. He co-founded Wired and now finds himself in his 70s, knowing (and sharing) an awful lot about an awful lot. I’ve been asking my old man to write his own list of advice. You’ll be the first to hear when it’s done.
“The pageantry of international conferences”. Rachel Donald is as sharp as it gets on the world being in crisis. This phrase rang true as I guiltily flew to the US directly after two beautiful days at GoodFest in Cornwall, where hundreds of creatives were thinking about fixing the world. Next week I’m publishing a write up of these two conferences on Medium, one enormous and very American, the other small and very Cornish, the common thread being…communities of action?
“But what can I do?” I could link to a hundred pieces of Rachel Donald’s writing. For example, analysing BRICS and the group’s plans for dedollorisation5. However, a personal anecdote struck me. At the end of talks, people regularly ask her: but what can I do? This time she snaps: figure it out! There is no magic bullet. The question is fundamentally disempowering. Better would be: what do I need to know more about and where could I make a difference locally? Action looks different in each community: getting the Bristol Heat Network6 permission order written; turning an old department store into a pay-what-you-can restraurant7; engaging a Lawrence Weston community in participatory democracy8.
Energy, AI and doing things differently next time. Google9, Amazon10 and Microsoft11 have all separately announced plans for private nuclear power plants to fuel their surging energy demands. Researchers claim12 that an AI-generated image has the same energy-cost as charging a smartphone, or a water-cost of 0.5 litres13. Apparently 1,000 images is the same as driving 4 miles14 with a fossil fuel engine. Energy consumption facts won’t change how rapidly AI is adopted but nor am I making a luddite claim to abandon it altogether. In many ways, AI is the car of its time. A fuel-hungry mechanism for speeding things up. The industry won’t relent until AIs are parked abreast in every household. The impact of cars on American society is clear: citizens increasingly isolated and compartmentalised in cities built for cars. How Might We do cars differently, if we had our time again? And so the slightly flippant point about AI is: How Might We do AI differently, if we had our time again?
Shiny butts. What is the sculptural equivalent of “desire lines”, where the bums and nipples of public artworks are worn shiny by endless touches?
A Molly Malone statue in Dublin; A Civilian Conservation Corps worker in Zion National Park. The Onion. Remember the satirical newspaper? It’s returning to actual print form!
Games for TV and for Life. Broadcasters making a play for play is not new. The BBC spends big on its portfolio of educational games. As Netflix joke, their competition is sleep. But their experiment with mega-complex branching narrative stuff15 didn’t exactly kick off, so the next logical step is… mini games? Streaming platforms are now pushing reskins of Candy Crush alongside on-demand TV. I have no useful commentary other than to remind parents, with valid concerns about gaming addiction, to cultivate healthy relationships with play. There’s lots to unpack in that, sorry. Basically, it doesn’t all have to be screen-based shoot ‘em ups and mindless colour matching. Bananagrams, maybe!? Or a game of critical thinking and creative action16. Or a lovely spiritual twist on Snakes and Ladders17.
“Gyan Chaupar takes you on a journey of self discovery” Content of the week. Adam Koszary (of “absolute unit”18 fame) is posting weekly and it’s really good: a handy shortcut to contemporary content formats like “Gen Z write the marketing copy”19 , HRP’s “Cosy content”20 or 200 Creators21 (which is a surprisingly forward thinking program for an august Trafalgar Square institution celebrating 200 years). It’s the sort of initiative Critical Action Lab needs to do next. One of the Lab’s goals is to tell stories of action to inspire more people to take action.
Scale. Remember MSCHF? The enigmatic creative team behind viral-prank, internet-stunt “drops” like Finger On The App, Medical Bill Art and Ascii Theatre22. This article23 looks at how they scaled up without compromising their artistic vision. “Scale is not the goal. Scale is a tool to make the concepts better and more powerful.” Greg Hahn (MSCHF co-founder) spoke on the Uncensored CMO podcast24 about why the biggest risk is not taking risks. We’ve been thinking about how Critical Action Lab might grow well and the exciting news is that Sarah Brin has joined to help us work it out 🥳
Recap slide during an end-of-year presentation in August 2024. “The Next Big Thing” was the working title for what became the Critical Action Lab - a network that supports applied critical thinking and youth action around the world. “When do I call you?” A good question that freelancers and business owners alike should be able to answer. So to wrap up this unusually-shaped edition, I’ll answer it, and give you your day back:
Call me when you’re planning something playful and technologically adventurous
Call me to lead your team through a process of design thinking
Call me when you want to make a game!
Oh. And call me to talk about land-based learning, sustainable living and resilient communities.
If you’ve made it this far, your actual todo list will be suffering.
Go and attend to it, frog first.
B.
PS - Using footnotes was an experiment in legibility (and accountability). The list thing was also an experiment. Tell me what you think by unsubscribing! Better still, reply, comment or forward this to someone who would benefit from notes on culture, play, technology and sustainability. I’ve been dancing there for nearly 20 years!
Illusion of the Year contest 2023 - stacking cubes
“Race to Adapt” is a game exploring how much easier it is to adapt when the climate changes slowly... Some pics here
Nottingham Castle’s Robin Hood games, made whilst at Preloaded https://bentempleton.co.uk/project/robin-hood/
Award-winning things like Magic Tate Ball https://thefwa.com/cases/magic-tate-ball
Trickle down BRICS, looking at de-dollorization with Rachel Donald
Bristol Heat Network development order https://www.bristol.gov.uk/council/policies-plans-and-strategies/energy-and-environment/bristol-heat-network-local-development-order
The Long Table Cirencester https://thelongtableonline.com/the-long-table-cirencester
Participatory democracy https://www.ambitionlw.org/about-us/
“Google turns to nuclear power…” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c748gn94k95o
“Amazon buys nuclear powered data center…” https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpowered-data-center-from-talen/
“Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to restart to power Microsoft AI operations” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/20/three-mile-island-nuclear-plant-reopen-microsoft
“Making an image with generative AI…” https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/
“Making AI less thirsty…” https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271
“Power Hungry Processing…” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.16863
“Bandersnatch, from a Producer’s perspective” https://artfulspark.org/2019/02/07-in-review-bandersnatch-blast-theory-vr-and-dansathons/
CRACT! the game of critical thinking and creative action. Rules here: https://bit.ly/CRACTrules Reply to this post to request a deck.
Absolute Unit meme by The Museum of English Rural Life https://x.com/TheMERL/status/983341970318938112?lang=en-GB
Curry’s Tik Tok experiment “Let Gen Z write the marketing script”
Stop scrolling and listen to the fire being lit in Henry VIII’s kitchen, from HRP https://adamkoszary.co.uk/posts/content-of-the-week-cozy/
200 Creators from National Gallery https://adamkoszary.co.uk/posts/content-of-the-week-7-200-creators/
“Ascii Theater - stream text-based movies in your browser” https://ascii.theater/
An article on Every about scaling up without losing creativity https://every.to/napkin-math/the-art-of-scaling-taste
Uncensored CMO with MSCHF’s Grag Hahn https://uncensoredcmo.com/146
Hey Ben, thanks so much for featuring Gyan Chaupar. That came as a nice surprise as I read through the list! I love the AI comparison with the car. You've got me thinking...