Politics and Dilettantes and Cultural Visionaries

500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider

Just my opinion, but Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are both dilettantes driven by ego and fueled by too much money. They think they can get elected by saying just what our Governator said in order to get elected. They are dilettantes because, like Sarah Palin, they want to do the job because it will make them look cool to their friends. When the going gets tough they will run away, like Sarah Palin, and become dilettante journalists on Fox. But, wait – there’s hope! There are also some visionaries around here.

A visionary is someone who looks at the same things we all see and sees something different. For example, Elon Musk made money when he co-created PayPal, but he’s a visionary for creating an electric-car company called Tesla, and he’s proven himself a visionary again by partnering with Toyota to bring a $30,000 electric car to market. Seth Godin is a visionary for re-imagining marketing as a form of education, and Jacqueline Novogratz is also a visionary for using capitalism to bring dignity to the poor. All of these visionaries have something in common. What is it?

“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I mean to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.” — John Stuart Mill

This is not a time to be thinking conservatively. It’s a time for visionary thinking that cuts across boundaries. Some may contend, “Yeah, like Palin and Fiornia!” and I say to them I only get 500 words here so stop interrupting and go write your own article. Fact is, I haven’t seen much bold thinking in politics that wasn’t also stupid. (See quote above.)

I’m going to veer away from Carly and Meg and concentrate on some visionaries I’ve met recently and examine how the engine of their success is all about cutting across boundaries. At Public Architecture in San Francisco Richard Neill and I ran a workshop this week called “How to Tell a Story Online.”

It was for changemakers and activists, and we showed them how to transform a social issue, or the story of a neighborhood, or a cause, and make it into a short video piece intended to play online and inspire people. I think this is a new frontier, a re-inventing of video media that blurs the boundary between advocate, journalist, urban planner and storyteller. It requires visionaries – and there are more than a few of them at Public Architecture.

On the same day as that workshop, I spoke on a panel at the American Society of Media Photographers. Photographers like to control what’s in focus, but many of the photographers I met that night were experiencing a disorienting blurriness. Their editors are asking them to blend video and stills, and this makes for an identity crisis. To be a journalist, an illustrator, a shutterbug and a cinematographer are all becoming the same thing. I’m told that beer and Dramamine consumed together can help with this unstable feeling, but luckily photographers are by nature iconoclasts, and they need to reinvent themselves anyway all the time, so they don’t need Dramamine, they need to let the boundaries fall where they may.

Let’s welcome more visionaries who are ready to remix, recombine and renew. I’d rather focus on them than on dilettantes who pretend to be prepared, but really are right where they are not supposed to be.

Don’t get me started on people who wear sandals to fly on an airplane.

Binocular photo: M0Rt3s via Flickr and Creative Commons License. All other photos by Lee Schneider.