Swarm Creativity Blog

Our team at MIT and galaxyadvisors has been creating e-mail and other social media based social networking maps for the last 15 years. The question we have to constantly answer is why it is a good thing to have these social networking maps, which I call “social landscapes”. The way to think about them is like a "Google Map for social landscapes". Google Maps has become immensely useful to me for driving the congested roads in Boston and Zurich. While I have been living in both cities for multiple decades, and usually know my way around, Google Maps has become indispensable for seeing where precisely I am, and where to go next. Through location tracking it shows me where precisely I am. And by aggregating the changes in anonymous location tracking information of thousands of drivers like myself, it shows me where the traffic jams and road construction is, taking me on the fastest way to my destination, and accurately predicting when I will reach my goal. Our social med...

In my previous blog post I introduced the three big virtual tribes of our Western world, which I called the Jingoists, Progressives, and Treehuggers. In more popular terms, the Jingoists can also be called the “Fatherlanders”, as they believe in God and the Fatherland, while “Nerds” is another term to describe the Progressives, whose religion is science and technology.   Each of the three tribes has their distinctive leaders and role models. The Fatherlanders look up to Donald Trump, who promises to makeAmericaGreat again, cutting back on almost everything inside the fatherland except on a strong army and building a wall around the fatherland. The Nerds identify with science geeks like Elon Musk whose goal in life it is to bring humanity to the Mars. The treehuggers admire Pope Francis who is organizing conferences about global warming and climate change in the Vatican. In this post I will illustrate how our Coolhunting approach makes it possible to fin...