The Best Science Fiction for Marketers – Part 1
Science Fiction can often predict the future. This is true not only for technology but for other societal trends as well.
Today, the team at Strongpages started talking about how some of our favorite sci-fi stories have dealt with future of advertising and realized there were some great reads we’d love to share. So, we flipped through our bookshelf and are pleased to present these tales from our future and alternate present:
(photo courtesy of wikimedia commons)
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
We’re starting with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow.
This brilliant early novel by Doctorow imagines a post-money economy, where the value of your work is based purely on how many people like it. This value is assessed via something called “Whuffie”. Whuffie is similar to the concept of “social capital” – a public measure of your popularity and the success of your past projects.
Just as with money, your ability to purchase goods and services is directly tied to how much Whuffie you have. You earn Whuffie by working on projects. However, with no corporations, big projects are undertaken by “ad hocs”, or voluntary organizations of people dedicated to completing tasks.
When your ad hoc’s project is successful, your Whuffie increases accordingly. When you fail, your Whuffie is instantly depleted. Thoughts on the future of marketing abound in this story of Julius, Lil and Dan as they work to rejuvenate Disney World’s Magic Kingdom Park. This is an excellent book for anyone looking for fresh ways of looking at the future of marketing and economics.
It’s also worth mentioning that Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom partly gained in notoriety as the first book ever released under a Creative Commons license. This made the work freely available for other artists to download and remix, and represented an interesting marketing tactic in-and-of-itself.
Doctorow is a founder of BoingBoing.net and the author of several other books dealing with the future of technology and marketing. You can read more about him on Boing Boing or from creative commons.
Get a free audiobook of this novel here: http://craphound.com/down/
or here: http://podiobooks.com/title/down-and-out-in-the-magic-kingdom/
Read the full text legally from Project Gutenberg here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8086
Or support the author and pick up a copy on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Down-Magic-Kingdom-Cory-Doctorow/dp/B000B85BDM
Quick Bonus:
Minority Report by Philip K. Dick.
It isn’t in the original story, but the targeted marketing sequence at the start of this movie haunts me every time I set up a remarketing campaign:
Here’s the video: