Musings of A Matriarch. Part One: The Networked World Order.
- jane evans
- Oct 17
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 22
The greatest thing about being an advertising creative is that before you get a brief, a very clever strategist has read white papers, research reports, and academic materials that most people either can’t get access to or glaze over halfway down the first page.
The strategist then gives a rational explanation of everything they have learned to a creative brain blessed with the genius of simplicity, and a level of complexity most can’t comprehend.
The definition of creativity is combining seemingly unrelated ideas and turning them into something beautiful, useful, or interesting. Ad creatives have an added level of difficulty because we usually have to convey difficult things in 30 seconds or less.
Not easy when the brief describes:
“A clusterfuck. A moving, multi-dimensional clusterfuck where everything affects everything else and none of the old maps work anymore.”
Zoe Scaman is probably the most brilliant creative strategist on the planet and her recent article The Networked World Order theorises that we’re shifting from empires of land and labour to empires of infrastructure. Control now lives in cloud contracts, chips, data centres, identity rails, and code. We are heading to a world where infrastructure is policy and code is control.
It's a scary read and she ends the article with:
“The foundations are already built. The dependencies already locked in. That’s the shape of the problem. That’s the map I’ve been trying to draw. Now the question is: what the fuck do we do about it?”
Challenge accepted.
The optimum time for an ad creative to work on a brief is three weeks. It’s only been three days, so I’m nowhere near any eureka.
But two things really stood out.
Empire is being replaced by Network.
This is a game changer for me and our business plan. Instead of waiting for empire to destroy itself and make sure we have something better to replace it with, we need to be staking our claim and stamping our humanity on the new networks. Now.
Because the major difference between network and empire is this: a network only works if people choose it. An empire works even when they don’t.
When I showed the article to the team, they agreed it made sense of geopolitics but also found it mind-bogglingly overwhelming and suggested we just focus on what we can change.
And the lowest-hanging fruit is what I’ve been banging on about for years. Anti-anti-ageing is the most obvious way for any country to have real power in a networked future. Zoe’s article claims many countries, and especially China, will be disadvantaged by having an ageing population. This is not some distant future: there are already more people over the age of 60 than under 20 in China, and the other superpowers are following in their steps.
“Aging populations don’t innovate at the same pace. The breakthroughs in AI, biotech, semiconductors - they come from young researchers, young engineers, young entrepreneurs taking risks.”
Age-old ageism is the first position on the new map to conquer. First of all, it simply isn’t true, on an individual level, high-growth founders are typically midlife, not fresh-out-of-uni. Using U.S. census-linked records, Azoulay, Jones, Kim and Miranda found found the average founder of the top 1-in-1,000 fastest-growing firms is about 45, with prior industry experience a major predictor of success. On groundbreaking scientific work, across Nobel-class discoveries, the prize-winning work commonly occurs in the early-to-mid-40s on average (physicists skew a bit younger, chemists a bit older).
We need to cast aside our youth fetish and rewrite the story. Because the greatest gift of this new age is a longer, healthier life. And the Iron Age stories of empire that ultimately lead to wise women disappearing into the woods or ending up burnt at the stake need an urgent 21st-century glow-up (and not the Kris Jenner kind).
My grandmother always used to say, “I’ve been your age, you’ve never been mine.” It annoyed the crap out of me when I was a teenager. What did that old bag know? Now I’m 63 and I do know what she knew, and I wish I’d spent a lot more time with her. I also know that all the wild and crazy ideas that won me awards and a glittering career would never have seen the light of day without a team of people much older and wiser than me doing the grown-up stuff of refining them, selling them, producing them, and broadcasting them to the world.
Empires need total control. Networks need collaborators. Start ups need founders that invest in systems not foosball tables.
Singapore has got the right idea, they recognised a few years ago that almost everything a 40 year old had learnt at university was irrelevant or outdated in a networked future. So they designed a programme where anyone over 40 could go back to university.
Lifelong learning and multi-generational teams is the temple that sits at the heart of the cities of the future.
The second thing that stood out was who shapes culture.
“Whoever shapes African digital culture shapes global digital culture in twenty years.”
This is an absolute no-brainer. Have you met a young African? Who is the person in the whole world who has the most influence on them?
The matriarch. The auntie. The women who love them with a fierce passion, always keep them in line and safe, and can take a lot of the credit for who they are today.
Empire is so programmed to view the world through its ancient patriarchal lens it doesn’t see on-the-ground reality. Matriarchy in Africa may appear to play by the rules by giving men the titles, but the wise know where the seat of power belongs. The simplest way to ensure the digital freedom of young Africans is by educating the Elders, the ones with the power to take control and action change in every corner of the continent.
And the planet.
Because we have one resource the world has never seen before: a new breed of matriarchs. Highly educated, massively experienced, ridiculously healthy, glitteringly networked, and wise beyond our years.
We have razor-sharp intuition honed by years of bending ourselves to fit systems that don’t fit and finding ways around obstacles that seem insurmountable.
While they are building data centres that use more power than cities of millions and are connecting networks that demand complicity, The 7th Tribe is going off-grid, gathering women and our allies around kitchen tables to chart a map to a better destination for the planet and humanity.
Because this is not the first time we’ve faced such a choice. Three thousand years ago the world chose empire and the violence, theft, and male dominion that came with it.
A decision that still resonates today. You know that feeling when a guy steals your ideas and hard work? It’s more than just an annoyance, it’s something deeper, something primal. That’s because it is. Before empire, every single footstep towards civilisation was led by women. Every city was built on our knowledge, skills, and trade. We were silenced for nearly 3,000 years.
Nobody is replacing empire by force or without our blessing this time.
Next In the series coming soon: Empire needs one story. Networks need all of them.
Brilliant rebel raising stuff ; a call to get involved and make change happen. My only ask is that we have more focus on the wild women of the Midlands and North who have fought many battles and are still standing tall. Online doesnt do it for us....