Deviants, Inc.

Does it make you uncomfortable to dwell among the denizens of deviance? Don't get too tense: The simple fact is that deviance's impact is ubiquitous. Look around a bit, and you'll see that all innovation and progress -- commercial, biological, social, scientific, artistic, and personal -- is a direct result of deviance. Think of deviance as an innovation virus, one that infects the status quo, changing traditional thinking at a cellular, primal level. Now imagine that innovation virus with a voice -- call it the "devox." The devox describes how deviance -- in individuals, ideas, or products -- is expressed as it vectors across a fixed, linear, predictable, and measurable passage from the "Fringe" (where it first appears in the mind of a true deviant) to the "Edge" (where it picks up a small following) to the "Realm of the Cool" (where it begins to develop a broader following among trendsetters) to an arena we call the "Next Big Thing" (where the formerly unthinkable becomes almost de rigueur) until it finally arrives at "Social Convention."

Go back to the cover of Rolling Stone. What really happened over the past three decades was that deviance, not reason, began to drive the social and commercial agenda. The result? Things that we found repugnant only yesterday we lionize today. Deviance migrates from the Fringe to Social Convention, rapidly creating markets and permanently changing the rules of the social and commercial game. The pace of change has picked up to the point where the functional distance between the Fringe and Social Convention has all but disappeared.

For businesspeople, the implications are increasingly important and dramatically risky. Markets form -- and dissolve -- in unanticipated places and at record rates. The opportunity to monetize a devox as it migrates from the Fringe to Social Convention, becoming successively tamer at each step of the journey, is simultaneously more prevalent and more ephemeral. Yesterday's pariah is tomorrow's market darling, and what was once beyond the social pale is suddenly a hot commodity. The pace of deviant change is so intense and so relentless that we are beginning to witness compound deviance. The rules of the game keep changing before we have a chance to write them down.

Today, if you want to catch the wave of the future, you have to start surfing a lot closer to the Fringe.

How to Gain the Deviant's Advantage

In the beginning, there were tribal chants and pounded rhythms among Western African tribes, the kind of sounds that Europeans would have dismissed as primitive babble. In the beginning, there was a moment of stark, unimaginable shock when Captain Cook's sailors encountered a Polynesian tribe whose bodies were covered with brightly colored geometric patterns created by dyes that were pierced into their skin -- a sure sign of the natives' distinct lack of civilization. In the beginning, there was Leonardo da Vinci in 1500, dreaming alone of a strange, unimaginable device that could be used to conduct far-fetched calculations. Or, perhaps the beginning came 125 years later, when Wilhelm Schickard touted his version of a mechanical calculator to a response that was a far cry from an avalanche of venture capital and a surefire IPO on Wall Street. That "harebrained" scheme was not much of a market maker.

At the beginning of every transforming, mass-market creation is the deviant on the Fringe. That goes for rock and roll, tattooing, and computing (as well as a huge number of truly crackpot schemes that never got beyond the Fringe). In the beginning, the devox has an audience of one -- the original deviant. Sometimes, the devox is only audible to a hermit, a mystic, or a psychotic. But it always manifests itself first on the Fringe, where the lone deviant is the only one interested in communicating it.

The next step along the path to Social Convention is the Edge, a zone that is a single notch over from the Fringe. There, the devox starts to find an audience, as the solitary deviant finally leaves his apartment and begins preaching on the street or the artist begins to show her work to a handful of trusted acquaintances. At the Edge, embryonic markets begin to form. The devox starts to develop limited commercial appeal, carried by followers of the original deviant, who spread the message by word of mouth. The audience expands, but a trace of the vision's authenticity begins to diminish.

Rock and roll moved to the Edge when African and African-American slaves turned the chants of their forebears into field calls and work songs in the American South. The sounds of West Africa were morphed and modified by other devoxes, vectoring into the space that was occupied by the sounds of Southern Christian churches and the indigenous music of the next-lowest social tier: indentured servants from Ireland, Scotland, and other lands.