Cross-Currents: The Mortar Between The BRICs
Hard as it might be for our anti-Copernican Western minds to believe, the BRICs do share things with each other without revolving around our Western cultural Sun. A number of common trends, behaviors, and ideas kept popping up again and again in my travels.
Specifically, I developed stories on youth culture, urban rivalries, religion and spirituality, cultural Marxism, color in design, and Internet innovation.
Losing Our Edge: The BRIC Kids Come Up From Behind
Their kids are way cooler than our kids, because they’re interested in everything and doing more with what they discover. It’s this spirit that will drive the engine of BRIC creativity in the next 20 years.
Four Tales of Two Cities: Urban Opposites, Sort Of
The mixed-up rivalries between Rio and São Paulo, Moscow and St Petersburg, Bombay and Delhi, and Beijing and Shanghai define a 21st century ‘on-the-fly’ type of urban planning.
God. New and Improved!: The Spirit of Competition
The BRICs are hothouses for new spiritual competitors: Brazilian retail populism, Russian revival, Indian new age, and modern Confucianism.
The Marx Brothers: Karl’s Reinvention Tour
All of the BRICs had Marx in their past one way or another. It's a cultural thing today, part kitsch communist chic and part artistic tenets that migrate from class struggle to creative ideas and ideals.
Color My World: Where Nothing Is Ever Neutral
A heightened role for color in design: intensity, symbolism, and celebration not found in the West, especially Armani’s recent ‘Indian’ collection of neutrals.
A Tangled Web We Weave: Life on the BRIC Internets
How the BRIC Internets are out-innovating the West with new twists on old applications, alternative platforms, and fun underground Net cultures and memes.
One thing is likely. If 2.5 billion people in four completely different parts of the world are doing the same thing in different ways, it’s a good bet that these trends will go global as their influence grows.