/digital

So it turns out you can buy a £3 supermarket rollerball and make it write like a £200 Mont Blanc writing instrument. All you need is a sharpish craft knife, the aforementioned rollerball (a Pilot G2, favourite of writers and doodlers the world over) and a refill from a Mont Blanc Classique (I think it's this one). Detailed and entertaining instructions are here.

Why do I mention this here, at shave.com? Well, there are a couple of reasons:

• First, this is an almost perfect illustration of the changed status of the brand in the networked era. Nobody has any respect for what comes in the box any more. Spotty schoolkids are trashing expensively protected IP daily: hacking the iPhone, uploading mashups, modding PCs.
• It also nicely illustrates the clever, unorthodox geek mindset: most people want a Mont Blanc so they can wave it around ostentatiously when checking in at the Travelodge (posh people don't buy them any more, you see). The geeks want a Mont Blanc because they've heard it writes well but spending £200 on a pen would be stupid.

Brands, especially engineered brands, physical brands that embody their making, are obviously especially vulnerable to this kind of disassembly but there's no reason to believe they won't all be affected. Even intangible and experiential brands are vulnerable to an attitude that challenges ownership, that says "you may have invented and manufactured this product but now it's mine to play with and improve". It's an attitude, after all.

So what happens to brands then? They're less uptight, more open-ended. The hyper-polished, perfected and protected brand of the late industrial era is probably a thing of the past: brands in the future will be provisional entities, placed in the public domain for completion by their customers. To begin with, of course, this is going to be all about attitude. Brand launches will change. Brands will be more playful, more open to experiment, less locked-down.

Here's an example of a brand launched on the old model: Antony Worrall Thompson's green cleaning products - a dreary launch in the hottest emerging category. Nothing going on here at all. Just bottles of stuff: no room for improvisation, no play at all. Now read what Russell and Matt are up to with Howies' new shop in Carnaby Street. Nuff said?