The first Finnish Carrotmobbing event was held successfully in a bar called Juttutupa (“Chatter Lodge”, freely translated) this weekend. The event grossed over 6000€ in extra profits for the participating bar, and half of that will go to investments to make the bar more energy friendly. All in all, the first Carrotmob was a resounding success.

What I think has been missing from all the articles on Carrotmob is the WHY, as in why this kinds of things appeal to people. In a very short time, Carrotmob Helsinki’s Facebook group has attracted nearly 5000 members, a remarkable feat. But what drives people to initiatives like this?

Every now and then you will read politicians cry out that young people are no longer interested in politics (as it’s defined) in Finland and that this is a “crisis” of epic proportions. Just today Finland’s main newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported that “in 2030 under 50% of people will vote in county elections”. Not only is that an asinine prediction to make 12 years in advance (what did they do, draw a regression line from the current voting numbers? did these people also predict the rise of 1960s radicalism in the mellow 1950s?), but also so missing the point. What most politicians and other pundits fail to realize, that it’s the definition of politics that’s in crisis, not the youth.

Being politically active means more than just getting of the couch every two years to drop a piece paper into a ballot box. I think it’s astounding that the Baby Boomers, who themselves were so rebellious and active in shaping their way of doing politics (especially in universities), fail to see that younger generations want to find their own way of political activism – just like the Baby Boomers back in their time. Why should they get to be rebellious and daring in politics, where as “we” have to follow the path they laid out for us? Today’s youth engage in politics via graffiti, squatting abandoned houses, buying ethical products and donating to organizations like Amnesty International or Greenpeace, and spreading “causes” on Facebook. Members of Generation Y, the Internet generation, see the world’s problems as global, and the three major Finnish parties can’t provide credible answers in this regard. Also, special interests and consensus politics don’t really appeal to young people, who obsess over authenticity and idealism.

Of course, the powers that be are also doing a great job of alienating young people on issues they DO care about in modern politics. Tommi Uschanov had a great accord in his provocative book “What’s wrong with the Left?” (In Finnish) how a total lack of understanding and involvement in copyright and proposed internet censorship legislation (I won’t go into details here but let’s just say that it has been rather awful) left many young people feeling even more disconnected and outright disregarded in preparation of the laws. Also, keep in mind that Baby Boomers are by far the biggest generational segment in Finland and they are grossly over-represented in parliament, so it’s no wonder topics that concern young people don’t pop up too often.

All of this of course leads to a fair amount of tension and cultural fodder for counterculture. The youth have always rebelled against the establishment, but the way the establishment has failed to understand how young people are reshaping the way politics are made and disregarded the young in issues important to them has only made this tension stronger. This is where initiatives like Carrotmob strike a major nerve: they don’t have ANYTHING to do with party politics, they are authentic and accessible.

Of course, pretty much immediately after the first even was over the murmurs started that the it wasn’t “done right” (the participating restaurant used the money on new coolers, does that count as green?) or that the event got too much hype. Like I said, it’s damn hard to do politics with a group of people that are obsessed with authenticity.

I must admit, I’m not personally a fan of the idea of saving the world through consuming MORE, which in many ways this is. But I guess Carrotmob does a lot more good than harm.

I don’t think I need to lecture here how great TED talks are, but this talk was so good and thought provoking that I had to share it. TED talks often manage to engage and create new ways of thinking, but rarely do the speakers manage to flip your entire world view upside down. Michael Pollan manages to do that in just 17 minutes.

I sent the link to my cousin, who’s doing his master’s in philosophy. He said that the whole “man vs. nature” type of thinking is not universal, and it’s mostly a western way of seeing the world. Ancient Greeks divided the world into the laws of “man” and “nature”, or “nomos” and “fysis”. This type of thinking is one of the founding values of our culture: man and nature are at odds. If one thrives, the other must secede. According to my cousin, the Chinese for example see the world a lot more like Pollan explains it: they can’t understand this notion of man and nature being at odds. I find this fascinating.

If you start watching the presentation, I urge you to watch it all the way through. The last 7 minutes are the real revelation. I hope we start seeing farms like that here in Europe as well. And I hope legislators take heed too.

There are some pretty cool trends in this field, for example Wi-Fi coming to cameras and other gadgets via cheap memory cards and of course Nokia is making moves towards this field with their acquisition of Naviteq. Also, geotagging seems to be working on Nokia phones now (got the link from Ville), so look for more from Finland’s big blue in this field.

I have no doubt that hyperlocal information is very much in our immediate future, but what I’m not so sure about is we’re going to act in this future once we get there. The Wired article to me reads as a typical techie’s wet dream where the human factors of such technologies are completely ignored. Most scenarios about hyperlocal information describe people wandering around cities while constantly being delighted by a nonstop push of information on restaurants or shops through their mobile phones. While I think some people might even enjoy this in some instances, I think traveling is about discovery and searching for unique experiences.

Brandchannel had an excellent article on the upcoming trend of exclusivity in social networks, which is well worth a read. Those of us who’ve been on Facebook longer than three months probably agree with the notion that once the gold rush to the site started, the place just hasn’t been the same anymore. You get invites to the dumbest of causes or applications (trust me, I’m guilty of sending out a few!) from friends and now most of them get the “ignore” reaction immediately. Sami N described that “Facebook apps are in general the 21st century equivalent of direct mail”, which I think is very accurate. I read a study for my thesis called “Dynamics of Viral Marketing” (which I can’t link here, sorry) that shows how rapidly word-of-mouth loses its effectiviness once the network becomes too active in its recommendations and if the network is not “tight” enough, meaning the connections between its participants are not meaningful enough. It’s a scary thought, if word-of-mouth goes, what’s left for marketers? Walling your social networks and getting to pick your friends are gonna be key in the future, or at least getting to organize your friends into different clusters with different access.

So how does this relate to hyperlocality? Well, unless the suggestions you get from your mobile phone display some sort of exclusivity, I think they are going to be ignored. I mean who wants to “discover” a shop that has been discovered by pretty much everyone? People don’t come home from New York and rave about their visit to Macy’s, it’s about the small boutiques in Brooklyn and the like. Some people might make a point of it to check if a café or small shop is NOT geotagged before patronizing them. So unless companies like Nokia manage to build some sort of exclusivity to the hyperlocal recommendations you get, I think their potential will not be fulfilled.

As Ville so eloquently put it in tonight’s Open Coffee, in the future people are going to be willing to pay for NOT being connected. If hyperlocality and social networks in general are driven by technology instead of human behavior, I’m afraid that his need for disconnectedness will hit us faster than we might think.