Space and Hipsters

The Intergrated Space Plan was created by Rockwell International in the 1980s to play with the events and criteria that would be required for humans to begin to colonise the solar system and beyond. The original can be found here. Right about now we're supposed to be a 'biplanetary civilisation' but instead we just cut funding to NASA.

Apart ffrom that, here's a great quote from Venkatash Rao about why the embrace of hipsterdom will refresh market activity:

To really go beyond industrial age models, we need to forget about the technology and challenge customers to engage us in relationships that are, quite simply, more sophisticated. Relationships that effectively use irony and humor to at once acknowledge the artificial and simulated nature of the manufactured “personal” relationship and make use of its undoubted practical utility. Irony and humor have always been humanity’s primary tools in creatively engaging contradictory realities. The alternative is a dystopian nightmare of unacknowledged, or worse, unrecognized theatricality that will ultimately only make the relationship, and the entities on both sides of it, stupider and poorer in every way. Just as “wrestling” is fun when everybody conspiratorially shares in the fiction that it is real, but tragic, dehumanizing and infantilizing when grown-ups don’t realize it is a show, social at scale will need to rely, ultimately, on crafting creatively ironic relationships with customers. Companies that fail to do this will become exploitative.