A day of analog with PSFK

I feel like I’ve been hard wired to the Internet since 1992 and vividly remember the day I installed the Mosaic browser on my Compaq PC and saw the world wide web for the first time. My life changed that day as the floodgates opened to a world of information and a career that centered around the web and HTML for the next 8 years or so. As the Internet has grown and we’ve got more connected and connected everywhere, I sometimes feel an anxiety that comes from being online so much –  for a while I thought I was just tired and jittery until I realized I truly needed to disconnect. For the last few years, I’ve methodically learned to block out time (or days at a time) to just disconnect and get away from things. That usually involved grabbing a pile of magazines and heading to somewhere like a library to get some time away from the pixels (Seattle’s Public Library is one of the best places in the world for this). I like to think of it as “going analog”.

Last Friday I went analog in a big way – in New York City at the PSFK conference – and I couldn’t recommend it more. Piers Fawkes and his team have been gathering thinkers, creators and do’ers to their New York event for 6 years and though I’ve been to events of theirs in San Francisco, this was my first New York experience. It was also my first time speaking at a PSFK event.

On Thursday afternoon I dropped by the The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park to hand off my presentation, check all was well with AV and get a sense of the venue. It’s a great spot for this kind of thing and after tinkering with my slides to ensure the Segoe font made me look better than I am, I headed off for an evening of wondering how I’d compare with the other speakers. It turns out being asked to talk for 15 minutes gives me a greater sense of trepidation than talking for the usual 45 minutes these types of affairs have become accustomed to. It focuses the mind wonderfully and it’s one of the things that I think makes the PSFK conference great – short, espresso sized shots of creativity with no audience questions. As a friend told me, questions at these kinds of events are rarely more than a moment for questioner to promote themselves.

My talk turned out okay, I think – people laughed at my poor jokes and I even heard a gasp as I showed some videos of the latest technology from Microsoft’s labs. The intention of this post is not to promote my own talk (there will be plenty of time for that…) but to get you ready for the videos of all the other speakers that will roll out on PSFK.com over the next few weeks. It was an awesome lineup of people starting with Jonathan Harris (I’ve been a big fan since We Feel Fine) and finishing with Clay Shirky. In between those guys was a heady mix that kept me away from my laptop/cellphone/slate apart from the off tweet to exclaim that each speaker had jolted my mind.

I won’t go through all of the speakers in detail here but two that stood out for me were Abe Burmeister of Outlier who talked about the Realities of Internet Disruption from the perspective of building a clothing company from scratch. Not just any clothing company, the future of clothing. It was a brilliant story…

…and only surpassed for me by Todd Carmichael, CEO & Co-Founder of coffee company La Colombe Torrefaction. This was the epitome of analog. Todd stalked the stage looking increasingly like a caged animal (I suspect he was actually scared as hell) that made his talk even more riveting. He didn’t use any supporting PowerPoint or Keynote slides as a crutch and never tried to promote his company. He paced back and forward, unaware of the projector beaming on to his face and looked down at a yellow legal pad to remind himself what to talk about next. A presentation expert would have slayed him but it didn’t matter – his content was as addictive as his espressos. He’s spent 18 years advancing the way we experience coffee and here he spent about 18 minutes, talking about the brand philosophy of his company. He tore into the use of the word passion, explained why he doesn’t serve sandwiches and broke down who he thinks of La Colombe not as a brand but a decent person. He has an image of the company in his mind and that image is a person – one he treats with decency rather than brand values. It was unbelievably refreshing and punched you in the stomach with it’s rawness. “People, at the end of the day, like decent people” Todd told us. Amen.

More than any talk I can remember in recent years, it really left a mark on me. It reminded me that analog can be a state of mind as much as a place you go with a pile of magazines each month. I wish you could have been there to see it – fortunately, the digital world does have benefits and it’ll be available soon on PSFK.com. I’ll be sure to send a link out from here too…

Now back to my web browser.