Money is fertilizer, companies are soil

I spent a fair chunk of yesterday working on a redesign of the new ORG website, with Felix, Chris, Mike, Harry, and after we had finished for the talking with Felix about the recession and worthwhile work. We both have friends who work in the financial sector, we both get nerdily angry about bad design, and we have watched with dismay how ludicrous amounts of public funds have gone to propping up inherently rotten organisations that don’t deliver tangible value, but justify themselves by being ‘too big too fail’.

When we have such epic challenges ahead of us like dealing with climate change, the idea of allocating such epic-scale resources to keep people employed doing what they’ve been doing before, just because that’s how things have always been makes no sense.

It’s easy to become totally cynical in the face of this, and just fall into line with everyone else who chooses to turn a blind eye to the undeniable human costs associated with a lifestyle of cheap flights, new iPods every 6 months, and cheaply made stuff we don’t need from Primark, and make for the most of the next ten years before the shit really does hit the fan.

But thankfully pieces like Umair Haque’s generation-M manifesto, or Woody Tasch’s ideas of slow money, make it feel like there’s a point in not falling into line just yet.