MANILA, Philippines ? The long and shirt of it
A tree turns into a circuit-board that can plug into the soil, a long-haired mermaid seduces a wayward deep-sea diver, a trio of bold soldiers wages war with electric guitars, and Captain Awesome and the Wonder Friends prepare to save the world.
These aren?t flashbacks from the last time we tuned in and dropped out? they?re T-shirt designs from our latest consumer crush, the DIY fashion firm Threadless.com. This brilliantly simple conceit allows amateur designers to submit graphics to a cooperative voting pool. Members select their favorites, and Threadless picks and prints the finalists. It?s the new paradigm of consumer democracy, where the ?people? decide what?s manufactured. In fact, they turned down Target, who came after Threadless wanting to sell their tees. It just didn?t seem right.
Global couchsurfing
So you?ve found yourself in a common bind wanting to check out the nightlife of Zagreb, Croatia, but lacking the necessary funds to spring for a hotel room. While intrepid travelers may have been out of luck in the past, Net-savvy adventurers are now logging on to Couchsurfing.com, an innovative hybrid that combines elements of Facebook with traditional housing and apartment-swap services. Kind souls around the world offer up their futons, inflatable mattresses, and spare floor space to frugal globetrotters who?d rather keep it real than crash at the Hyatt. Couchsurfing members can peruse the database of more than a million profiles from 130+ countries, with transitory digs available from Aruba to Yugoslavia. It is, at the very minimum, a place to say; but it ends up being so much more than that for people?a way to see a foreign place from a local?s perspective.
Greetings from the Axis Of Evil
The latest vacation perversion is now upon us: totalitarian-state tourism. And North Korea may well become the new It destination. Who needs hang-gliding camp when you can hang in the axis of evil? The tour service KoryoGroup.com, a specialist in this newest fare, is optimistic that foreigners will soon be allowed to partake in gulag getaways that promise to be Kim Jong Illest. Relax at a cooperative farm, or hike along DMZ. Cultural events might include viewing such Korean movie classics as ?Five Guerrilla Brothers? or ?Young Chief of Staff, Parts 1 and 2.? You might even catch the ?Dear Leader?s? birthday festivities. Of course a trip to the Axis of Evil can?t be all fun and games. Beyond slow room service, visitors are not allowed to roam freely or snap photos unless given permission. But in classic totalitarian tradition, if you?re caught misbehaving, you won?t be punished?your tour guide will.
Betting on what?s next
By 2020, wearable voice-recognition devices will record our conversations, providing searchable ?supplemental memory.? By 2030, passengers will fly in pilotless planes. At the Longbets.org website, run by the San Francisco-based Long Now Foundation, forward thinkers can publish their predictions or challenge predictors to a bet. Winners won?t pocket any money?everything goes to charity?but the glory will be all theirs (if they live long enough). Forecasters post detailed position papers, yielding fodder for sci-fi writers and Research & Development techies. Amateurs win almost as often as experts do, but some futurists, instead of planning to win bets, are ?gaming? the forum in an attempt to stir up protest activism about avoidable woes. By 2025, electronic tracking devices will be embedded in half of all human bodies, predicts one man, who states in his argument that technology and freedom are often ?mutually exclusive concepts.?
Video Starr
When Steven Starr was first getting started at the William Morris Agency in New York, MTV was still a music video mecca. Now that MTV has abandoned any pretense of being, well, music television, Starr?s Revver.com is there to fill the video void. On the site, aspiring video directors and filmmakers upload their original work, which is tagged with an ad at the end of each clip and equipped so that the director can track the piece?s performance wherever it ends up online. When viewers watch a video and click on its ad, directors earn 50 percent of the revenue. Revver also prides itself on connecting video directors with copyright-free music by up-and-coming artists. Shorter clips get better click-through, making this the ideal competitive forum for video directors. Keeping up with Jonzes has never been so user-friendly.
