The phrase “seeing around corners” gets tossed around boardrooms and strategy meetings as though it were a compliment, a kind of secular beatification for the executive or thinker who got there first. But the phrase deserves closer scrutiny, because what it actually describes is a discipline, and one that most people refuse to practice because the conclusions it produces are uncomfortable.
We live in an age of disposable context. We scroll through the infinite ribbon of the glass screen, pausing only for a microsecond to register a flicker of recognition before sliding our thumb upward, condemning the moment to the digital abyss. We have been trained by the Technocrats, those right-brained architects of our algorithmic prisons, to view this behavior as consumption. They tell us we are “consuming content.” But they are wrong. When we pause on a meme, that pixelated artifact of cultural shorthand, we are not consuming. We are remembering.
Sorting through a box of family photos in Nebraska last year, the physical weight of them stopped me. It wasn’t just the heavy cardboard. It was the specific gravity of each print. I held a single, fading photograph of folks I did not know, captured on their wedding day. Just one. It wasn’t one of twenty-seven burst-mode variations kept “just in case.”
The future now is here and you can watch it live, weekdays, on Boles.tv! Yes, Janna and I have taken the deep leap into the world of live streaming and we’re here to tell you all about it. The most interesting thing about going live each day is the idea that social media is really nothing compared to social broadcasting. You are your own station. You are your own dream stream.
I’m sure you know the fable of the slow-boiled frog. If you drop a frog into a boiling pot of water, the frog will leap out to escape the heat. If, however, you place a frog in a pot of lukewarm water, and then slowly bring the pot to boil, the frog won’t sense the slow temperature change and will stay in the pot of rising, boiling water, until the frog is cooked, and dead.
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