Space Odyssey

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but building on the new.”

Socrates

THE Dawn of Man sequence opens out Stanley Kubrick’s seminal science fiction 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY from 1968. A tribe of pre-Neanderthal, pre-Homo Sapiens struggle for food and water resources against other primates and wild beasts until a large black monolith appears out of nowhere and seemingly imparts mysterious knowledge – such as turning animal bones into weapons. In the original filmscript, this monolith is a mirror and incidents from the future are played out across it, demonstrating exactly what to do. Kubrick found it difficult to film a large glass mirror but also wished to remove the direct analogy and so he chose a black monolith instead.

This is always the way opportunity arrives. It is never a glass mirror showing us exactly what it is we must do. It is always a black mysterious object waiting to be decoded and interpreted. And it is ironic that the lead ape among the tribe is called Moon-Watcher. Because it is he who takes the first moonshot – lifting the thigh bone of a dead tapir to become the first weapon. Moon-Watcher is the first toolmaker.

Many millennia later, holographs have appeared in our world much like Kubrick’s black monolith. What do they mean? And what Moon-Watchers can process their knowledge to progress the species? Sooner or later, watching the moon is no longer enough. One must shoot for it. One must bridge the space between reality and it.

I’ve often identified with Moon-Watcher in the years I’ve been an inventor and entrepreneur. Asked myself, what is it that the tribe needs to master? What is our version of the external threat from beasts and enemies? It is clear that the digital edifice we have built in recent decades is highly disruptive – and that it threatens the environment in signal ways. One of the most telling ways it threatens the environment is that it divorces us from it – and our children from it. It is also clear that there are massive problems weakening the foundation of education and healthcare that prop up our economies. Digital retail – its huge drain on real-world shopping and its intensely wasteful returns cycle – epitomizes our careless attitude to this world.

So, it is not as if holograms have arrived as another plaything in our lives. They have already been here for many decades and effected very little. The black monolith has emitted signals, but we have not yet broken the code. It is only when holograms are deployed to solve real-world supply and demand issues that they will be revealed in all their value. And remember, knowledge and ideas are the biggest supply and demand issue, not manufacturing goods or software technologies.

If the digital recession of the early Twenty Twenties can teach us anything it is this: the rest of the world exists still and needs solving. I have taken several moonshots of my own already in the spatial realm, and they have revealed multiple new vistas and potential scenarios. When talented individuals, teams and organizations start taking their own moonshots, these currently empty spaces will thrive and bloom.

The very first step is to understand holography, not simply holograms. The art and science of graphically representing missing people, products, places and data encompasses an entire ecosystem. Single holograms are nice to have but do not equate to immersive experience. Holography is a three-dimensional language that spans an entire spectrum from human beings to things, from locations to ideas. When you enter the arena of holography, you have become a worldbuilder. Holography comprises multiple storyworlds of its own.

When the internet was invented we had years and years of cats on skateboards. When the cinema was invented, we had years and years of couples kissing and trains rushing at the screen. It took time to weave the golden thread through individual gags and spectacles. Narrative is the golden thread that weaves the holograms together. Only when narrative techniques are deployed can holography move beyond rhetorical persuasion and commercial manipulation. We hate anything that has designs upon us. We hate the thousand digital thefts of our attention every day. We love magic carpets. We adore the lift and adventure of stories that carry us along to somewhere else. When streaming hit the internet a decade ago it led to a boom in binge-watching and a renaissance in long-form televisual fiction. You can steal human attention in micro-bites but we will hate you for it. When you deliver proper narrative continuity and flow, we will love you.

Your space odyssey starts when you begin to notice all the empty space that surrounds your human talent, your physical object, your chosen venue or location, your specific data or knowledge set. Timing is no longer the issue in a simultaneous universe. Space is everything. To be two places at once, to occupy the imagination of your consumer long before your physical object appears, to enrich your real-world location with super-real additions, to guide others through your numerical data warehouse – these are the goals of your space odyssey.

Holographic episodes are the individual units of this spatial value. And they must not be cynically commercial sequences of Problem, Solution, Benefit. We hate you for doing that to us. That is why we install adblockers. We want Empathy, Suspense and Surprise first. We want the adventure first, and then perhaps the explanation. We want to see the movie first, then maybe we’ll watch ‘The Making Of’. Understanding the time-space continuum of holography is critical.

Episodic narrative creates tribal cohesion. From the cave paintings of Lascaux to the dramatic insights of Aristotle, from the sagas of the Vikings to the tales of the Arabs, from the tragedies of Shakespeare to the spectacles of Spielberg, the secret is Empathy, Suspense, Surprise. A product purchase is a narrative in miniature, and the entire customer lifecycle itself is a mini-saga. Your audience, whoever comprises it – learners, patients, consumers, tourists, work colleagues – exist in a spatial relationship with your content, output and assets. Holographs in connected sequence bridge that entire relationship.

Much later in Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, the astronaut (a distant descendant of Moon-Watcher) disables the malicious onboard computer HAL and travels alone into deep outer space – ‘Beyond Jupiter’ – again guided by the mysterious floating monolith. He enters the stargate sequence, probably the single most celebrated cinema sequence and a daring breakthrough of cinema’s fifth wall. The kaleidoscopic warp of color and texture is mesmerizing, hallucinogenic. We are pushing beyond the frontiers of experience. Jupiter, of course, was the king of the old Gods, the patriarch. And we are moving beyond the past, beyond the conventional and traditional.

It took sixty years for cinema to move from THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY of 1907 to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in 1968. Holographic immersion will cover the same ground in just a handful. What lies on the other side of the stargate sequence for us? What will we endeavor beyond Jupiter, beyond the old gods of media? In my imagination, the spatial realm will evolve in several crucial ways.

Transmedia gurus such as Henry Jenkins, Jeff Gomez and Houston Howard define storyworlds as ever-expanding atmospheres of drama. In your storyworld, everyone becomes the protagonist. The hero’s journey is ultimately collective and is not skewed towards any one class or creed or community. The holographic rock concert or shopping mall is no longer about worshipping the band or the gear. Holograms are there for us to interact with, to participate with, and ultimately to create. The audience finally becomes the drama itself.

Is this the real reason we are leaving the world of A-listers behind? And why iconic brands will have thousands of new competitors? Holograms allow your audience to become part of the conversation. They enable your consumers to become your product collaborators. They allow your visitors to time travel through your destination. And they enable your decision makers to re-imagine your own data sets. The storyworld is not a metaverse you build and then they just inhabit. It is not a walled garden. Your storyworld is the start of their storyworld.

The arrival at creative holography for all is some years away, true. But the kernel of evolution already exists and is germinating now. The interweaving of holographic people, products, places and data is still a future scenario, but it is rapidly evolving also to become true. The original odyssey, Homer’s storyworld, was a nostos, literally a journey home – giving us today our word nostalgia. After ten years at the Trojan War and another ten wandering the Mediterranean, fighting monsters and loving demi-mortals, Homer’s hero Odysseus is driven by nostalgia for his home.

It is a global metaphor – the human in search of their place of home. Homer is one of the first great explorers of the spatial realm. Long before the fact. There is no place like Ithaca. In your own world, Ithaca represents your place of belonging. Empty space becomes a sequence of places, until one place becomes a location, a destination. People, products, places and data exist in some kind of outer space. We search for them through cyberspace, often to excess and in vain. The cyber-physical realm might be a better space to find them in.

I first encountered holograms many decades ago, in fact as a kid. I have worked with them consistently through my business career. Smart goggles and glasses are just about to open up a new realm. But it is not the metaverse of touted ubiquity. The fabled land is right here. The answer lies not in the virtual, neither in the physical world. The portal we seek lies between the real and the unreal worlds, the space where distance becomes presence and emptiness is fruitful.

For you to begin your journey to the spatial realm, I ask you to consider the following. Ask yourself this. What is the essence of your business as an idea? If your world involves energy, financial services, manufactured goods, technologies or media, essentialize yourself. Etherealize yourself. How can that idea be expressed as a holograph? And how can that holograph extend beyond a single expression into a conversation?

Let us consider two commercial scenarios as examples, spaces where holography seems to have no immediate relevance or applicability. The worlds of financial services and automotive are deep in structural change, and many of their respective brands may not even survive. Consolidation has gripped both storyworlds, always a first sign that market saturation and maturity have long since set in. The world of money and the world of automobiles are being successfully disrupted by digital contenders and rapidly shifting consumer behavior patterns. How can holography, of all things, serve to further their evolution? For a start, financial services are evolving from a transactional to a relational business, one where data and decisions are now key. Beyond electro-mobility and automation, the automobile is becoming an experience platform whereby usage trumps mere product ownership. In both of these storyworlds, narrative holography can not only stabilize fickle consumer attention but serve to dramatize the successful decisions necessary to generate wealth and realize sustainable motion. In finance, data holograms can demonstrate decision-making skills just as episodic narratives in automotive can customize journeys and inform sustainable driving behavior. Holograms act as a platform to turn transactions into learning experiences and to transform vehicle possession into environmental citizenship. Holography literally gives finance and transportation a human habitation and a name. The mere fact that a bank or a carmaker has existed for a century or more is no longer proof of survival or guarantee of evolution. Creating holistic experiences for users around services and products is about far more than spectacle or entertainment. These experiential platforms are educational, social, cognitive and environmental all at the same time.

You may begin your space odyssey at any point of the spectrum, starting with data sets, with single human talents, with specific venues or with individual products. As you build up the experience around any one vector, your growing awareness of possibilities will prompt you. Just like Kubrick’s black monolith floating in space before you. Your data will suggest a human persona. A holographic person will arrive to interpret a holographic space. Products will find narrators. As you begin to weave the storyworld together, you will become aware of more and more spatial reality around your productions.

When Walt Disney founded a studio just for children in the Nineteen Twenties, people laughed at him. But Walt knew two things – even in Great Depressions people do not stop spending on their children, and there remains an inner child in every adult member of the audience. A century later Disney remains the most profitable of the original studios and continues to absorb new and old production companies.

Walt took a moonshot. But he knew where his black monolith was.

Where is your moonshot?

“We become aware of the void as we fill it.”

Antonio Porchia

Here is what I hope for you, dear reader. I hope you begin to notice the spatial reality around your assets. If you are a performer, your greatest audience may yet await you in the spatial realm. Your products may overcome all newcomers once they exist spatially. Your tourist destination may surf on a crest of recognizability and intimacy once it is established as a multi-dimensional rich space. Imagine individual visits that not only adapt, for example, to each tourist, but to each visit from the same tourist? Imagine your venue has a reason to re-visit? Always? In the spatial realm, no place is ever the same.

Once you begin to notice that empty space does not have to be empty, here is what I hope happens. You will see the answer lies not in selling off physical outlets nor in plunging in headfirst into the metaverse. Both together is the answer, not one or the other. Either/or always means both. Put the cyber and the physical together in your storyworld. And start building its intelligent, augmented reality.

Whichever point of entry you choose, pretty soon you will encounter the need for interaction. Because remember, this is not your storyworld, it’s theirs. Imagine ways your audience can respond and react not just as feedback and testimonial – don’t exploit like that. Think of the interactions as listening posts to start with, then as natural conversations where people literally ‘live together’ in dialogue. To converse does not mean to pitch, nudge or influence, it means to live. Conversing is a Latin word that literally means to live alongside others. Your audience is literally living alongside your holograms.

Ultimately, when your holographic immersion becomes interactive and conversational, you will consider how to let your audience create themselves. Note again this is not some brave new Non-Fungible Token world or metaverse you are terraforming for digital serfdom. You don’t own their space. You don’t possess their headspace. The spatial realm is ultimately a creative space that surrounds people, products, places and data sets – it is not a marketplace to itself.

Although it does become a marketplace as a result of becoming creative. Your space odyssey must think beyond Jupiter and the old gods of monetization. Remember when advertising started to interrupt YouTube and how dispiriting that felt? Spamming people until or unless they paid you not to. That is commerce as form of attention theft.

Holograms do not need to steal your attention. They can earn it. They can earn the attention of your audience in fact far better than older media. Because a holographic experience is immersive, it is the ideal medium for our customer-centric zeitgeist. The audience as star. Attention is the ultimate currency and stealing it will be punished. Attention will be exchanged when the experience is actually valuable.

Dramatic structure provides the sequential pattern necessary to engage human beings meaningfully or intensely. Economic history shows us that human beings value different things at different periods. Seashells are no longer a form of currency. And even though data is sold to us as critically valuable it remains by itself a waste product. Data is merely ‘what is given’, as the word implies. What is missing is far more valuable, what we can imagine with what is given to us. As Albert Einstein reminds us, imagination outvalues mere intelligence.

So, it is not what you yourself can do with holograms that sets your worth. It is what they will imagine with your holographic storyworld. My hope for you is that the spatial realm opens up all its possibilities to you, and that your audience teach you how those options work out. Film genres do not rule Hollywood or global cinema, but how audience appetites change over time rules those genres themselves. Your business is a film genre, and audience appetite rules over it too.

So, your moonshot is not just yours to take. It is not simply your strategic goal or objective. It is their moonshot, where they wish to go. Walt Disney did not tune into himself first, but his audience. Holograms can mediate any business or professional venture into an immersive experience. They can turn absence into magical presence. They can bridge the gaps of time and availability and distribution. They can captivate attention so that your audience willingly pays it. They represent, in short, a new mass medium like telephony and television – their suffix named after the Greek word for ‘far’. ‘Distant-Sound’ and ‘Distant-Vision’ transformed social and commercial interactions over a century ago. In our era the holistic writing of people, products, places and data as cyber-physical experiences will once again transform our society and commerce.

MoonShot is the name of my new venture but it is also your platform. Whether you wish simply to inspire yourself, invest your creativity or join together in pursuit of new storyworlds, this platform will publish, create and invest in the spatial realm. It’s been a while since technology has delivered a new stargate sequence, like the iPhone. In fact, the intervening years have often been testing and depressing as a fragile polity and society around the world fragmented and fought. Space is still the final frontier – although this time it’s different. It’s not the space out there that counts any more, but the space around us. The space that surrounds us is the realm of real possibility. Too many screens have separated that space in recent years. It’s time to join the dots between the virtual and the real. It’s time to realize the realm.

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

Michelangelo