Everyone wants you but they don’t understand you. The answer is to proselytize.
Words by Ibba Bernardo
Illustration by Dempson Mayuga
It’s fitting that I’m in San Francisco, jet lagged on Mission Street thinking about disruption. This community, the religious center of the hipster world, is being disrupted. It’s being disrupted by unicorns, megatech giants, venture capitalists and $10 coffee drinking wannabe hipster tourists like me.
One street down, you have local merchants selling piñatas that look like Donald Trump, unlicensed Warrior shirts and liquor―a lot of liquor. One street up you have an Interstellar Pilates Bikram Yoga slash coffee shop. And in the middle you have the Mission District. Is change good? Not necessarily, but is it inevitable? Most definitely.
I’m here to attend the Global Entrepreneur Summit. It is a place where innovators and entrepreneurs meet and create. The keynote speaker is President Obama, an innovator and disruptor in his own right; and Mark Zuckerberg, some guy who dropped out of Harvard.
The Mission District is like a microcosm of what’s going on in the world here things are changing at a ridiculous rate. Companies like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram who have just started making ridiculous amounts of money are already being disrupted by startups like WeChat, Snapchat and my app DSCVR 360. It seems like just a few years ago when Titans like IBM got usurped by Microsoft who in turn got whooped by Google. The cycle is getting shorter and shorter and the bets are getting ludicrously bigger and bigger.
So how does someone like me fit in? It seems like I’m always in the missionary position, a little bit ahead of the wave, doing the tech gods work and preaching the vision of a new virtual paradise. Being a VR evangelist is tough. I’ve been preaching Virtual Reality for the last two years via I Am Cardboard and now DSCVR and only now has this technology started getting traction.
The problem with being in the missionary position is that everyone wants you but the technology is still so new that they don’t understand you. Virtual Reality is a perfect example. Clients have coke-high expectations with shabu budgets (I don’t do or usually condone illegal drugs but I thought this sounded great, coz you know some people be trippin’ like they’re on something) We’ve had clients try to engage us for projects that would have worked just as well in normal 4K 2D rectangular video. The big moral dilemma is do you take their money and run or do you just politely tell them no? Or do you put on your preacher robes and start proselytizing? The answer is the missionary position because if your tech gods miracle fails, faith is shaken to the core.
The challenge is, in the Philippines, we only hear echoes of the tech gods works. Like religious books, we misunderstand and misinterpret. To most, I speak in tongues, but to the few, this geek makes sense.
This article was first published in the July-August 2016 issue of adobo magazine.
