When Warren Ellis accidentally spoke about my work life

At Thought Bubble a couple of weekends ago Warren Ellis gave a spectacular keynote — all about the future and history of comics — I loved it. It totally played into my own weirdly mixed feelings about my love for the art form.

There was this section of his talk though where I could of sworn he was talking about my day job. About how I feel about this whole digital transformation thing, the culture and network we built over the last decade and why I find things like One Team Gov and all the new Team #weeknotes folk so positive.

Anyway Warren just shared the relevant part of his talk so I thought I’d share it here and see if it makes sense for anybody else — just change ‘comics’ to your phrase du jour;

And, as more and more people realise that this artform is not in fact the exclusive preserve of fat old bald beardy white guys — hi — but is in fact a human commonwealth open to all — it will only get better still. New voices will be raised up, and the medium will change and grow and evolve. I don’t pay attention to what’s going in in comics at all and even I know that’s happening and will continue to happen. And it’s good. It’s making comics better.

I mean, for all that to really bed in properly, me and my generation will have to die. But I’m okay with that. Some of you probably only walked in here today because you thought I was already dead. As far as I’m concerned, it’s always been the time for ghosts.

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Old people are sneaky. It’s how we got to be old in the first place. Never trust us.

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From time to time, some of us will give up our seats and go hang out with the ghosts for a while. If you take our seats, then you know the deal — find new seats for new people to come and sit down with you. Keep growing. Keep moving forward.

I’m not quite a ghost yet but I definitely feel like it is time to make room and at least start finding more ways to share my ‘platform’ (as it were..) and to be honest I’m quite happy to take a seat with the ghosts for a while — I could do with a rest 🙂