We have gone to places we hope you don't need to go, so that you may learn from our mistakes, successes, and failures.
There are a few people to mention for whose support I am deeply grateful.
Nicole, for being the love of my life and for choosing to reconnect with me. You were ‘the one that got away', and now we have refound each other in the midst of the turmoil that is the story behind the book. Without you, none of this would have been possible. Thanks for always hearing me out, your support, calm, wisdom, connectedness, love and warmth. I cannot wait to be futurephiles together.
To mum and dad. Thanks for accepting the challenge of facing the future together. If you decide to read this book, remember that it is written from a place of deep love and appreciation for everything you have done for me and my brother. Sometimes the best love is tough love, and yes, this love letter is a bit tough. I hope something good will come of it, and either way, I am looking forward to our social, family futures together. They are destined to be even more positively exciting soon.
To the team at Thinque. Specifically … thank you to Emma for your loyalty, support, excitement, flexibility, patience, warmth, and forward focus. You have been through thick and thin with me, and have always been a joy to tackle challenges with. To Anton and Clem – thanks for your great work on the book, from research, travel, and design, to emotional support – and being intimately involved on the hero's journey.
To my brother Gustaf. I admire your ability to remain above the issues that can create inertia, and your cool in the face of family drama. You will always be my brother, and I treasure our bond and our philosophical discussions and debates. We haven't agreed on how best to help mum and dad, but I am already enjoying the next chapter of our lives together, and not discussing family affairs any longer is a healthy upgrade. I hope. I look forward to spending even more time together with you and your family now that we are all back in Sydney.
To Hem. Your design skills, thinking and encapsulating of strategy in visualisation and brand identity are world class. Thanks for lending a helping hand in shaping yet another book that should equally be judged by its cover.
To the team at Wiley. Charlotte – you are the guru of editing and I love working with you. You take what is half-baked and you make it sophisticated and polished. Chris – thanks for your patience, and chasing me for permissions, chapters, forms, designs, and content. Kristen – thanks for finding me and for being a great collaborator – we did Digilogue together, and I am eternally grateful for the relationship with Wiley that has ensued. Lucy – you have taken over the baton really nicely, and again thanks for your patience and flexibility. Seamless has been a long time coming, but we got there, and I am thankful for your belief in the project and its merits.
To my speakers management agency – Ode Management. Leanne, Heidi, Tanja, Jay, Julie, Tanya, Becs, Michelle, Amanda, Teri, Mike, Sam, Simla – thanks for pushing and challenging me to curate this book, and to share my vulnerability and authentic voice. It's been a fun 7 years together and I look forward to continuing to make a big splash and inspiring futurephilia and seamless futures around the world.
To Georg Sörman. Thank you for starting the movement and creating the brand that lives on 100 years later, and which has provided so much analysis, soul searching, sartorialism, and neon elegance, and somehow managed to make your idea virus live on from generation to generation – a Georg Sörman meme indeed. Let us see if the 4th and 5th generations will continue your legacy.
Prologue
Start preparing for the future today, because it is where you will spend the rest of your life.
Failing to succeed – a futurist's confessions
These lines were written to the soundtrack of Coldplay, perhaps fitting, given my long-time love affair with the band. Whether I am newly in love, deeply connected with a partner or undergoing the tempest of a break-up, Coldplay seems to have composed a song that is in tune with my emotional vibrations. One of these songs that captured my heart was ‘The Scientist' in 2003. Yes, I can obsess nostalgically about a song for a long time. I was living in Vienna, Austria, when I first became obsessed, and completing my specialisation in International Law at the University of Vienna. The album had come into my hands during a train trip with my good friend, Mark, when we travelled from Stockholm via St Petersburg, Moscow, through Belarus, to Warsaw in Poland and Berlin in Germany, all the way down back to Vienna, after spending a few summer weeks in my native Sweden. I bought the album, I remember, from a street vendor in St Petersburg, and judging by the fact that I picked up about fifteen CDs from him, I don't believe I paid the normal retail price. However, the CDs were really good quality for pirated copies, and A Rush of Blood to the Head became the soundtrack during a challenging six-month period in my life.
Whenever a song really resonates with me, as my brother will attest, the song will be on repeat, usually because my ego tells me the song was penned just for me. This was the case with ‘The Scientist', which just so happened to be in the same register as my emotional state – influenced as it was by the break-up, reunion, long-distance relationship, near-infidelity and eventual long-term commitment with my girlfriend at the time, Hema. But let us go back to the start. Let us explore ‘The Scientist' for a moment. In the interest of the convergence between digital and analogue worlds, if you want to listen to the song while reading these next few lines you can do so legally and digitally by using this link on Spotify: ow.ly/WvTqb. It will literally take you back to the start.
Anyone who has ever experienced the turmoil of a tumultuous relationship and important life decision can relate, I am sure, to the lyrics in the song and the feeling of wanting to go back to the beginning of a relationship and start it all over again. Beyond the lyrics, there was also something magical about this idea of returning to a point in the past, especially when it became the inspiration for the song's video clip (which you can watch on YouTube at ow.ly/WvTOT and which won multiple MTV Video Music Awards for Best Group Video, Best Direction and Breakthrough Video in 2003). The video is so powerful because it employs an innovative reverse narrative that begins at the end and goes back to the beginning, taking us back to the start, using a reverse video technique. This technique meant Chris Martin, the band's lead singer, had to spend one month learning to sing ‘The Scientist' in reverse, so that when you view the video, his lip movements perfectly sync up with your auditory input of the song, while he is walking backwards in reverse from the end of the scene to the beginning.
As a futurist, and sometimes described as a reverse historian, this creative warping of time and going back to the source is something I want to curate for you now. Let me take you back to the start of a futurist's confession. Because my journey as the futurist mentor in one of my life's most dearest relationships didn't go to plan, was by no means ‘seamless', was filled with friction, and failed to achieve success(ion) in the short term. So this movement between friction and seamlessness plays out within this book. However, in set-backs lie the green shoots of future success, so please indulge me in sharing my futurist's confessions as we embark on a hero's journey of digital disruption, adaptation and transformation. Let me take you back to the start.
Introduction
The future really belongs to those brands that are able to weave together the past, the present and the future into a seamless and inspirational hero's journey.
The modern metaphor of seamless
The mathematics of metaphor are fairly simple: x = y. For example, in Shakespearean terms, ‘Juliet is the sun'. Now, we all know that she is not literally the sun, but that she has the sun's characteristics; attributes such as ‘warm', ‘glowing', ‘bright' and ‘beautiful' are bestowed upon Juliet by virtue of the metaphor. But while this mathematics may seem simple, our use of metaphor has a powerful influence on how we think about
