Reboot8: How to be a Renaissance man, and help Google eat itself

After the opening dinner at the Reboot8 conference, Ben Hammersley goes on stage. He is a British tech writer - he coined the term "podcasting" - living in Florence. He gives a hilarious "speech" on "how to be a Renaissance man". He is funny, and very serious, a kind of Guy Kawasaki with a comedic edge. Here are Ben's 4 rules to be a "Renaissance man":

1. Steal from the best (like Brunelleschi reverse-engineering ancient Roman architecture in order to build Florence's extraordinary cathedral dome (photo) - or like today's web designers hitting the "view source" button on Web pages).
2. Never say no (like Michelangelo accepting the challenge to paint the ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel despite his preference for sculpture and little experience in fresco painting).
3. Indulge ("slack, leive early, do other stuff: one of the things in being a Renaissance man is actually not doing your job; in order to create great art, to create great legacy you have to indulge your senses and passions" - example: Filippo Lippi, a XV century painter).
4. Complexity is good ("let your different interests feed upon each other").

"What's holding you back?", Hammersley asks the audience. "We live in the most exciting possible time, can access every corner of the planet and every bit of information, have very powerful tools.  The secret is: consume more data, suck stuff in like sponges, have passion. The secret rule number 5 is: no matter what opportunities come to you, what interest, what encounter, what curiosity, say yes: grasp it, do it, yield to it, and create new things!".

Then up comes Hans Bernhard, an Austrian artist (Uebermorgen.com) who was one of the four members of famed tech-art group etoy that in 1994 started presenting themselves on the Web anonymously, bald, almost interchangeable, coming up with one digital happening (or prank) after another. Bernhard tells about media hacking (manipulating the media - like when he got into CNN describing the "vote auction", a site offering US citizens, during the 2000 presidential election, to sell their vote on an auction, which was taken so seriously that several States issued temporary restriction orders and the FBI launched an investigation), about digital hijacking (deliberate sabotage of search engines results), about negative affirmations (the idea of magnifying an affirmation so that its absurdity becomes visible - check out the bank statement generator) and about the "toywar" they launched when web merchant eToys sued them in 1999 to get their domain name etoy.com.
And he describes his latest project: GWEI - for Google Will Eat Itself. "We serve Google text ads on a series of hidden websites, and with the money so earned we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google with their own ads, in an autocannibalistic model", he said. They already own 75 Google shares. Not many: at this rhythm it would take 202 million years until GWEI fully owns Google. But the artistic gesture is certainly original. And with the Google shares nearing 400 USD, the money is not bad either.

[tags: reboot8 google]