How the Trump Election and Social Media Externalized America’s Dormant Hate | Oliver Luckett

How the Trump Election and Social Media Externalized America’s Dormant Hate

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If you ask tech entrepreneur Oliver Luckett, he’ll tell you we’re at a very interesting phase in the U.S.’s social development. The 2016 election propelled things forward drastically, and the catalyst for that largely has been social media, and specifically Trump’s raw Twitter feed. This forward propulsion? It’s not a good thing – unless you look at it from an ‘if you want to make an omelet, you gotta crack some eggs’ perspective. Sometimes you have to break down in order to build up. "Evolution is not necessarily progress," says Luckett, "it's one of the biggest themes of the book that I hope that people understand… just because something is evolving and changing doesn't mean that it's moving forward in a progressive manner."

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OLIVER LUCKETT :

Oliver Luckett is a technology entrepreneur and currently CEO of ReviloPark, a global culture accelerator. He has served as Head of Innovation at the Walt Disney Company and co-founder of video sharing platform Revver. As CEO of theAudience, Luckett worked with clients such as Obama for America, Coachella, Pixar, and American Express. He has helped managed the digital personae of hundreds of celebrities and brands, including Star Wars, The Chainsmokers, Steve Aoki, and Toy Story 3.

His book is The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Life.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Oliver Luckett: If you look at any of the kind of countercultural theorists that came out of the '60s at the Berkeley, the Neil Postman's, the Theodore Roszak's, they kind of fundamentally, even into the talking heads, they kind of fundamentally they meant something to me when I was studying French literature at Vanderbilt, Renaissance literature, which really was the period of literature that emerged after the invention of the printing press. And at first it was pornography and comedy and then it went into more secular literature, you know, stories, drama, et cetera, but it was always kind of the first to colonize is pornography and comedy. And then I started getting really into these kind of counter cultural theorists that were looking at the time at mass communications like television and radio as these everything from big brother to numbing us to selling desire in America to creating this kind of religion of capitalism.

Twitchell wrote this amazing book called Adcult where he equated modern advertising capitalism to a religion and it had its iconography and it had its dogma and it had its if you do this then this will happen and if you use the American Express card then you too will have three percent body fat walking down the beach with this beautiful person on your arm. And so those were all these I think precursors to what we're experiencing now because I think we were really trained a set of values and capitalism that meant that money ruled all. We're talking about a troll president on Twitter now but at the end of the day a majority of people think that a person that has a billion dollars is smarter than everyone else. And so at a fundamental level if that's our religion then this guy won. He's a winner. He's got his billions of dollars and his airplanes and his Twitter account and he can speak directly to the masses.

So what I think is fascinating, you never heard Donald Trump Facebook this because that's not a raw feed anymore. That's controlled by algorithms. So he saw that Donald Trump tweets this because it's still a raw fire hose and so it's still a direct connection. And so we're constantly seeing these arbitrages of these new characters that emerge. I've represented 6,500 kids that had no fame whatsoever in the world four years ago and then suddenly Vine came along and six seconds lead to fame and Instagram came along and Acacia Brinley took the perfect selfie and at 17 had a million followers on Instagram and so our value system changed overnight. All the things that we held valuable now we suddenly saw, and maybe it was always that way, but now we just had camera phones recording it. So when people make the comment about police brutality, like well it's always been there it's just now we're recording it, now we're seeing it.

And so I think that we're going through this really interesting phase, especially after this election where we now have a majority of people connected in these systems and we can now see a lot of different aspects of the world that we mig...

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