Famous To 15 People

It’s not my intention here to brag, but back in 1989 I published a tribute to Andy Warhol where I predicted that in the digital age, every individual would be a multimedia corporation – an “art factory.” “In the future,” I wrote, “everybody will be famous to fifteen people.” That’s the Long Tail!

This is closely related to the idea behind Pajamanation. But you don’t have to be in media to participate in this sociocultural shift, you just need to have a skill or service to offer and a way to get online regularly.

As Thomas Friedman has written, communications and other technologies have made the world “flat” – it’s put us all into the same space, provided we are able to get online. And it’s increasingly distributed the desktop tools that we need to produce work at the same level as large institutions. For example, the editing power that used to cost a video filmmaker $500,000 now comes in software that can cost as little as $500 or in some cases can be had for free.

Anyway, if you’re here, you probably already know about this paradigm shift. Over the weeks, months and years to come, I will be blogging here about this new world that Pajamanation is here to service. I will post about – and link to – not only materials directly related to micro-entrepreneurialism and the decentralization of work, but the decentralization of all aspects of social relations, whether it involves people getting their entertainment on YouTube or their gourmet foods at a specialty shop instead of sticking with the supermarket.

I will also be exploring the economics and politics of the flat world 10, 20, 30 years out… (all in good time)

For starters, I think you will find this piece on San Francisco’s Neo-Nomads or Cyber-Bedouins a vivid reflection of our PajamaCulture. It is all about people who have turned our local coffee shops into their home offices.

Not that this is terribly new. The San Francisco Chronicle has run this same basic story every three years since 1994. It’s just that the convenience and the ease and the transportable digital power keeps growing exponentially, so more people can nomadize their work activity better.

RU Sirius