The End of "Weirdness"

Good morning, it's Tom Guarriello. My friend Lisa says that I should start calling us, that we should start calling ourselves YouTubians. I think somebody else may have used that moniker before, but I think it's a good one. So hello, YouTubians. I just watched a video that really made me laugh and made me think about some things I wanted to say. It was this video called AcoustiCore, two virgins with two guitars or something like that, and it made me laugh because it was really weird. And the fact that it was really weird and that it made me laugh got me thinking about something because of something also that I'm reading. I'm reading my friend Grant McCracken's new book called Flock and Flow. And, and you guys, um, you really, really should read this book. This is a terrific book about stuff that's happening. It's really very important, terrific ideas in here. But anyway, um, when I, when I started to put together the— this video with what was going on in this book, it just got me thinking about the huge changes that are going on in what I'm starting to think about as kind of the interconnected parts of the global culture. Interconnected parts— this is an idea that I got, by the way, from another terrific thinker, a guy named Tom Barnett, who wrote a book called The Pentagon's New Map that does a great job of talking about those parts of the global culture that want to come together economically, culturally, socially, and those parts of the global culture that don't want to do that, that kind of want to be out there on their own, want to be insulated from what's going on, because we know that there are parts of the global population that don't want to be interconnected with us at all. They don't want anything to do with us. That's another story. But the parts that do want to be interconnected are— something very interesting is going on in these parts. And I'm thinking about it as kind of the end of weirdness. You know, the end of weirdness. So, um, so it used to be that we had this word taste, right? Taste. You had good taste or you didn't have good taste. And taste, um, very discriminatory kind of word, you know. The worst thing— I've worked a lot in my career, I've worked a lot in the fashion industry, and the worst thing you can say about somebody is they have no taste. So taste is a heavy-duty discriminatory kind of word, and it used to be that taste was kind of dictated by, you know, proven authorities, right? So like in the fashion— and in some ways it still is, of course— so like in the fashion business, the runway really still dictates an awful lot about what millions of people feel like they have to look like. You know, that the whole industry is driven in some ways by the runway. In Hollywood, you know, Hollywood still dictates a lot about the way stories are told in our culture. And the music industry, you know, record companies still— I mean, they sell billions of dollars worth of CDs, and so that has a great controlling influence on what gets played on the radio and what you see on MTV. And, you know, so a lot of, um, a lot of these controllers, dictators of taste still exist. But every one of those points of control, if you will, of taste is under attack today, and they're all under attack by us. Right, we're, we're— and people like AcoustiCore, you know, or even me for that matter, you know, who used to be very shy. Uh, those of us who were a little weird in the way we looked at things, were a little shy, a little reticent about putting out, um, any material that might be seen by other people, uh, because, you know, it was weird. It was a little, it was a little It was a little different, but weird isn't so weird anymore. Grant says something in his book, just says a— has a little line that I think is really good. He says, um, uh, we're a culture that no longer stigmatizes the far margin. So, um, so what does that mean? So it's like, that's us. We're the far margin of what people want to call content creation, right? We're at the far margin. We're, you know, sitting here on our decks in Connecticut. Renato's, you know, sitting in his den in Columbus, and, you know, Sut Steve is sitting in his room in Georgia, and we're all kind of here, but we're creating content from these weird angles. And when, you know, Some of those folks are getting lots of acclaim. And, you know, so no longer— it isn't that people aren't just not being stigmatized. It's that the appropriation of the kinds of ideas that are being produced in these alternative manners are— these ideas are getting appropriated by the mainstream in a much faster way than they have in the past. So, and so look, you know, what used to be thought of as weird now might be the next big thing. You know, take a look at MySpace. MySpace, you know, when MySpace first started, oh, way back, what, 2 years ago, year and a half ago, whatever, there was a lot of talk it was weird, there was predators, there was all this stuff. What happened? Well, Rupert Murdoch And News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million, YouTube-ians. $580 million, right? You realize that the same company that owns Fox News also owns MySpace? That's amazing, right? And Sumner Redstone just fired a guy because he didn't think he was hip enough to what was going on in this fast-moving space. So there's a lot going on that starts to say that weirdness isn't so weird anymore and isn't to be stigmatized, but it's to be learned from. I'm wearing a t-shirt that I bought from another very interesting fringe weird creative person, a guy named Ze Frank, and the, the t-shirt is on from his, uh, his ongoing web project called The Show. Just Google him, Ze Frank, F-R-A-N-K, and go watch some episodes of The Show, and you'll see what I mean about how more people now are having access. The fancy word for this is disintermediation. Content creation is being disintermediated. The intermediaries, the people in the middle, the publishing companies with the books, The movie companies with the movies, the record companies with the music, all of the con— you know, in the fashion industry now you're having people creating fashion from some very weird angles that didn't happen before. Anyhow, uh, when I saw the Acoustikor video, it just made me laugh. It made me think, you know, weird is not so weird anymore. And, and maybe we're actually at a point where we're coming to sort of the end of weirdness as something to be disdained, but more maybe something to be, um, at least interested in. So, um, have a great rest of your weekend and, um, see you again soon. Thanks. Bye.