INTRODUCTION TO MUTANT TETRADS
Let the storytelling wars begin
We were amused this morning to see the a16z letter about Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad – both because it’s one of our very favorite tools for thinking and trend forecasting and because it ought to be on the obscure side a16z…but maybe not in the world we live in!
Related here is the very interesting long X post explaining the strategy behind a16z’s new media approach WTF is a16z Doing, which is definitely worth a read.
The firm’s approach fits into a larger line of thinking we’ve been doing around the way that media and markets are merging with things like Hunterbrook, Citrini, prediction markets, “cultural” prediction markets like Mira and Noise, “prediction markets for women,” etc. All of it relates to thinking shared in our Guide to Being Early.
More on all that at a later date.
For now we’d like to share some of the amazing work on and with tetrads done by our last Autonomous Strategy workshop group. We started with a relatively straightforward approach to McLuhan’s tetrad, which is well summarized in this letter of his from 1977:
You should definitely check out the Lost Tetrads of Marshall McLuhan book published by his grandson Eric (also the author of the a16z piece) for an overview of the practice, as well as a lot of very evocative and quite poetic tetrads. The tetrad really is art striving to become science; it’s rather poetic and is meant to represent a multiple simultaneous unfolding of vectors. In simpler terms: it’s meant to show the ways that media objects (i.e., anything) develop in multiple sometimes contradictory directions at once.
Even though the tetrad supposedly came from McLuhan trying to systematize and make an “incontrovertible” version of his own practice, it somehow is remains the most artsy and poetic stuff you might ever imagine (while still being a useful tool). And we will die on the hill that trend forecasting and cultural analysis are both art and science on their best days.
We know you are waiting for it…how all this fits into the remarks circulating online this week about how tech companies are hiring storytellers, based on the WSJ article “Companies are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’”.
The storytelling meme is evocative because on one hand it makes perfect sense that companies would want to be able to explain what they’re doing and make an offering in a compelling and entertaining way that resonates with people, which is storytelling. Yet it also speaks to a type of froth and rot in an overly fanciful society where we tell stories about things that we don’t really need, that don’t really work, and don’t really make sense. Beyond all this, on a deeper level, we believe it’s speaking to the fact that a lot of technical work – which was so highly prized by our tech overlords for so long – is now being automated bringing the more humanistic stuff back into the forefront, i.e., retrieving it.
Tetrad-style, all of these things can be true at once. Obviously we are somewhat biased at Nemesis HQ, given that we work on narratives for tech products quite often, and are rather personally obsessed with the ways that different new technologies make us feel.
But back to the tetrad. One of the most interesting parts of the tetrad is the quadrant regarding obsolescence because this is where you can find luxury as well. An easy example of this is how books are now obsolete as popular entertainment which makes them into valid luxury items for Miu Miu’s book club. The other most delicious part of of the tetrad (in our opinion) is the quandrant describing what the media object reverses into when pushed to its limit – which is also the trickiest part.
Here is an excellent tetrad from our workshop participant Paris Parker-Loan.
One of the themes and topics of Autonomous Strategy 3 was the relationship between strategy frameworks and what we were calling an anti-framework.
Frameworks are both helpful and can become addictive; they’re commonly overused by strategists and thinkcels and Are.na power users. Like every tool they need to be used the right way and in moderation!
For the final exercise we had our participants create what we called “mutant tetrads” – taking the basic form of the tetrad and modifying or breaking it.
Here are some of the results, from Odeta Jace, Nicolas Cevallos, Eliza Lewis (and others, email us if we’re missing your name here!)
You can check out more of the group’s tetrads and mutant tetrads on Are.na.
One of the most interesting things about the relationship between storytelling discourse and tetrad discourse is that tetrads are about multiple vectors unfolding at once, whereas storytelling is about a linear unfolding: beginning, middle, end, a Freytag triangle, etc. So in a way we’re seeing two different models of time and information come to the fore – something to keep track of and pay attention to as we see how these topics develop.
P.S. A huge thank you to our workshop participants. We learned so much from you! Also a huge thank you to Eugene Healy and Nymphet alumni for their excellent guest sessions.
As we wrap up the year, we also want to thank all of you for reading and supporting our work and for participating in our workshops. This was one of the most special years we’ve ever had as Nemesis and we couldn’t have done it without you.