Wednesday, March 10, 2010

How to Become a Culture Hacker (in 5 min.)

I gave a talk at Ignite Montreal last week. The slides in Ignite talks are set to auto-advance every 15 seconds, no more, no less, and every talk must last exactly five minutes.

For the occasion, I challenged myself to pack a high-level view of everything I've learned so far about how our actions make culture evolve into that constrained 5-minute format.

Let's just say there was a lot of meat to remove, but I think I've kept the essence intact, and I'm pretty sure the culture hackers in the room recognized themselves. At any rate, the talk landed me a memorable lunch with avant-garde composer (and programmer) Andrew Culver, a fascinating man who now lives in Montreal and was also speaking that night.