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For the past couple of months I’ve been engaged in reporting on the nexus between major brands and pirate bit-torrent sites. It has been like lifting up a rock to see all the weird life forms crawling out of the light. The New York Times characterized the efforts to pin down who was responsible to Whack A Mole. But what really interested me is that the whole future of the advertising business seems to be based on the premise of what I call a Geo-Behavioral Targeting System. The implicit assumption is that consumers don’t care if Google, Facebook or an Ad Network has a total window into the most intimate details of your personal life, your finances, your aspirations and dreams. All the better to sell you your own future. In the futuristic novel,Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel, Gary Shteyngart posits a world in which your credit score, sexual preferences and other details are available to anyone who points their smartphone at you.

I was reminded of all this reading an piece by Evgeny Morosov in yesterday’s New York Times. Morosov has been a lonely voice in the wilderness, protesting against the rise of Techno-utopianism. In The Perils of Perfection, he worries about what the rise of the ubiquitous App Culture is doing to us.

LAST month Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s former marketing director, enthused about a trendy app to “crowdsource absolutely every decision in your life.” Called Seesaw, the app lets you run instant polls of your friends and ask for advice on anything: what wedding dress to buy, what latte drink to order and soon, perhaps, what political candidate to support.

Seesaw offers an interesting twist on how we think about feedback and failure. It used to be that we bought things to impress our friends, fully aware that they might not like our purchases. Now this logic is inverted: if something impresses our friends, we buy it. The risks of rejection have been minimized; we know well in advance how many Facebook “likes” our every decision would accumulate.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley. Whatever their contribution to our maturity as human beings, decisions also bring out pain and, faced with a choice between maturity and pain-minimization, Silicon Valley has chosen the latter — perhaps as a result of yet another instant poll.

Maybe people don’t want the responsibility of making choices anymore. Maybe our whole lives should be crowdsourced. After all if my friends told me to do something, its not my fault if it turned out to be a stupid move.

I noticed a lot of comments on the suicide of young Aaron Swartz on my last post. It’s a tragedy when anyone takes their own life and I can’t really write about the issues surrounding the legal case he was involved in because I’m tired of dealing with the Mob– the idiots that send me emails saying “Why don’t you shove a nail in your ass” after we released our report on Ad Networks and Piracy. The problem with the copyleft is that they can’t imagine someone actually having to go to jail for stealing intellectual property. That was probably part of Aaron’s problem. It never occurred to him that breaking into a server was the equivalent of breaking into a house. He had a history of depression and wrote romantically about suicide in the comic book movies he loved. He seemed like a very generous soul. But he was clearly not ready to go to jail.

But the fact that I feel constrained to speak my mind about piracy because I am tired of the mob is sad. Last year I wrote about my friend David Fanning having his whole web enterprise destroyed by Lulzsec because his show Frontline reported on the darker side of Julian Assange’s sense of morality. I know for a fact that most musicians are scared to speak out about having their content exploited by criminals like Kim Dotcom, because they are afraid of the cyber mob. I don’t know how the hell we are going to have a civil conversation about IP with those of us who want to defend the artist’s right to get paid for their work, being under the threat of bodily harm (note that most of the most threatening comments have been taken down)?

My friend and colleague John Seely Brown gave a speech yesterday that really lifted my spirits. He said we are in a Cambrian Moment with a whole new tool set consisting of Cloud Computing; Graphic processing chips/systems;Social Networks; Big Data Analytics engines that allow us to do extremely granular sentiment analysis; The rise of the second screen and the Ubiquitous computing environment that John and his colleagues at Xerox PARC described in 1991; Transmedia and its many logics; 5D Immersive Design. As John said, “each one of these is a big deal, but together they create awesome opportunities and also awesome disruptions.”

Unlike JSB, I am only an aspiring polymath, and so I had to research the Cambrian explosion that John uses as his metaphor for our current moment. The Cambrian Explosion was the sudden appearance around 530 million years ago of a huge number of forms of animal life. In other words an explosion of evolutionary progress.

Now I had been prepared for this burst of optimism late last week by a visit from our erstwhile correspondent Alex Bowles. Like John, Alex was brimming over with evolutionary optimism. He felt that technology (many of them on John’s list) would lead us to a new age of transparency where bad actors would have a hard time hiding from the 99%.That our ability to literally “see” how much carbon was pouring out the smokestacks of Koch Industries, would embarrass even the most heartless oligarch into cleaning up his mess.

As readers of this blog well know, I have been saying since 2007 that we are in an Interregnum, a period where “the old is dying, and the new cannot yet be born”. It could be that JSB’s Cambrian Moment signals the end of the Interregnum. At the Lab I run, the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, we have been working on most of the technologies on JSB’s list  and I would say we lead the field in three of his categories: Transmedia, Big Data Analytics and the Second Screen. But our challenge is to move beyond technology and create context for these new tools. As John said in his Stanford Commencement address

We are now, again, in a moment where we need to think of world building but now of a new kind. It is a moment that is not only about making amazing things. Perhaps, also, for the first time we can make contexts as easily as we make content/things. And as all of you here know, shaping contexts allows the emergence of meaning in powerful new ways – for better or for worse. But in addition to having a new arsenal of tools for shaping meaning we now have ways to create a networked imagination – one that emerges around joint action.

Well I hope JSB is right. That this sudden Cambrian explosion of new capabilities will lift us out of this paralyzing Interregnum. If he is right, I think a lot of the new ideas will come out of what my Dean, Ernest Wilson calls The Quad; creative partnerships between public, private, civil and academic sectors. If we take our task of world building seriously, the next few decades could be amazing.

I will add but a few words to the millions that will be written in the next few days about Steve Jobs.

At the Innovation Lab we try to inculcate the notion that you can’t be afraid. You can’t be afraid to fail. You can’t be afraid to “be different”. You can’t be afraid to celebrate the weird mix of art and science that is true innovation. Steve Jobs embodied all of those qualities. I wrote a bit about him in my new book and there is a cool video in the book of his graduation speech at Stanford that you will see replayed too often in the next few days.

I think Steve Jobs represents everything we hope for in our vision of the entrepreneurial America we have in our dreams. As a country and as leaders, we fall short of that dream on a daily basis. At Apple, which has been a wonderful partner to our Lab, they have a saying, “Culture eats strategy for lunch every day.” Steve inculcated a culture of innovation into the people he worked for. That may have been his greatest gift.

I’m lucky in that I get to work pretty closely with Apple at the USC Annenberg innovation Lab. So if I have anything to add to the reams of copy written this morning about Steve Jobs’ decision to step down as CEO of Apple it is this: “Culture eats strategy for lunch, everyday.” That’s a saying you hear around Apple a lot and it is one that needs to be understood in the halls of Congress, in other executive suites and in the society in general. Apple is the most innovative organization in the world, not because it has a strategy of innovation, but because it has a culture of innovation.

From my vantage point that culture has two elements: reward risk and marry science to art. In the long succession of hit products in the last decade, it’s hard to remember that Steve Jobs had some epic failures early in his career. Anyone remember the Lisa or the Newton? Both were total flops, but the Lisa morphed into the Mac and one could argue that the dream of the Newton ultimately was realized in the I Pad. So the culture rewards both risk, failure and the lessons learned from both. And then there is the marriage of science and art, at which Steve Jobs and his team excelled beyond his competitors. There is a bad tendency in this country to think our “innovation deficit” lies in what policy makers call STEM (science,technology, engineering and math). But Jobs understands that the magic formula is STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math). It is the basis of what we teach at The innovation Lab and it is the core of the Apple brand. Steve’s obsessive belief in the role of the artist goes way beyond his early fascination with typography. What makes each of his products so thrilling is that they are aesthetically pleasing just to look at, never mind how cool they are to operate.

So here are my take aways from Steve’s departure. We better start building a culture of innovation all over this country. That means we have to let lots of experiments happen at the state and city level in order to start putting people back to work. Some of them will fail, but hopefully we will all find the best practices quickly. In congress, they better stop thinking about strategy every morning and start thinking about culture. And in our schools we better keep teaching the arts and not just concentrate on math and science. As to the continuing success of Apple, I have no doubt. Because innovation was never a top down strategy, but rather a bottom-up culture, Apple will thrive. Steve’s vision will be missed, but he embedded the culture throughout the organization.