Bookies

Americans still read books, according to a new Gallup poll.

In fact, they're reading books at the same pace they did 15 years ago, before the onrush of mobile gadgets.

Nearly half (48%) of Americans read from 1 to 10 books last year; 35% read over 11.

The findings suggest "book reading is a classic tradition that has remained a constant in a faster-paced world, especially in comparison to the slump of other printed media such as newspapers and magazines," Gallup's analysts say.

While young and old adults read slightly more of them, books are read by all age groups (kids were excluded from the poll).

The majority (73%) of Americans read printed books; only 20% read books on e-readers.

If you're at a loss for a title to select, consider one of David Bowie's Top 100 Books.

Post-Competence

Pundits call ours the post-truth era.

I think it's the post-competence era.

In fewer than 10 days, we've seen:

• Mariah Carey botch lip-synching before 11.6 million viewers on live TV
  
  
• Walt Disney recall 15,000 Minnie Mouse infant sweatshirts due to a choking hazard
  
  
• Express (published by The Washington Post) illustrate its cover story on the Women's March on Washington with the male symbol
  
  
• Yahoo Finance Tweet "Trump Wants a Much Bigger Navy" using the "N word"

Dan Lyons' 2016 memoir, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, provides a strong clue for why we're engulfed in post-competence.

Taking his cue from Steve Jobs, Lyons calls it "the bozo explosion."

Bozos explode in companies when "B players hire C players, so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players."

Of course, there's another, more powerful force in effect: companies' drive to profit at their customers' expense.

That drive manifests itself every day in companies' ready willingness to subject customers to post-competent employees—and to the fiascos they create.

Both Sides Now

CMOs who hope to keep their jobs must use both the left and right sides of their brains, according to Forrester's 2017 Predictions.

Those who can't—the "analytics-only" and the "brand-only" CMOs—will be pink-slipped.

A CMO's right hemisphere "designs experiences to engage customers." Her left "masters technology and analytics to deliver personalized, contextually rich experiences."

“'Whole-brained' CMOs are in the minority—but they will soon be the competency standard for both B2C and B2B companies," the report says.

Release the Kraken!

Every new technology will bite back.
The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused.                                                          

― Kevin Kelly

Futurist Brian Solis warned us: the stuff in the cloud is mighty.

Every day, millions of people share experiences on line, recycling others' content and creating their own.

"This content doesn’t self-destruct like SnapChat images," Solis says. "Shared experiences build upon one another, forming a collective repository in the cloud that’s indexable, searchable, and influential."

All those millions of blustery pre-election blog posts, Tweets, videos and memes were shared among the mortals, darkening their minds and eclipsing traditional media.

Who of us knew the Russians were seeding the cloud? But that's beside the point.

Zeus, the cloud gatherer, has released the Kraken.

Welcome to The Puritan Tyranny

An amoral and self-indulgent elite is peacefully ousted by a new gang of autocrats who are devoted to "schooling the world with considerable austerity."

Welcome to The Puritan Tyranny―how 2017 looked to H.G. Wells when he published his 1933 novel, The Shape of Things to Come.

"The Tyranny," as Wells named it, "tidied up the world" and "altered the human face forever."

Under the Tyrants' rule, reprobates and oddballs of every kind disappear.

So do introverts.

But, wait, there's more.

"History becomes a record of increasingly vast engineering undertakings and cultivations, of the pursuit of minerals and of the first deep borings into the planet," Wells says.

"New mechanisms appeared, multiplied, and were swept away by better mechanisms. The face of the earth changed. The scientific redistribution of population began."

In the name of progress―they prefer the term "business"―the Tyrants also "invent work," Wells says.

"Earth became an ant-hill under their dominion, clean and orderly, but needlessly 'busy."

The Tyrants tear down everything in sight.

They destroy "the huts, hovels, creeper-clad cottages and houses, old decaying stone and brick town halls, market houses, churches, mosques, factories and railway stations," replacing them with stark and sterile buildings.

And the Tyrants censor books, known as "fever rags" for their ability to incite people to doubt, complain, laugh and have sex.

"You may call it a tyranny," Wells says, "but it was in fact a release; it did not suppress men, but obsessions."