OK Go, YouTube and the Adjacent Possible

How these four guys created the category of "video-stunt rock band"

In the fall of 2006, just 18 months after YouTube was founded, I met two founders of the band OK Go – Damian Kulash and Tim Nordwind – at the Soho Club in New York to interview them about their breakthrough online videos.

OK Go was the first YouTube-made rock band, more popular for its choreographed performance-art stunt videos than its actual songs. What I didn’t understand then was that OK Go’s early success was a terrific example of a tech-industry concept I’ve written and lectured about called the adjacent possible.

And, bizarrely, OK Go is going on tour – a tour they are calling “The Adjacent Possible Tour.”

Now, I haven’t seen or talked to the OK Go guys in at least 15 years, and I’m 100% certain they have better things to do than follow what I’m writing or talking about. So the overlap about the adjacent possible must be a total coincidence. But still – I wanted to find out.

Let’s go back a bit. I first learned about OK Go in 2005, when I visited EMI Music in New York to do interviews about how the big record labels were dealing with the surging internet. Record companies had battled Napster and were trying to figure out Apple’s iPod. The industry was still getting 95% of its revenue from selling CDs – a fast-dying business model.

I wrote: “Everybody in tech talks about how the record companies don’t ‘get it.’ But nobody ever seems to talk to the record companies to see what they don’t get. So here I am, expecting to meet some techno-phobic dolt who calls everyone ‘baby’ and aches for the days when American Bandstand mattered.”

Instead, I found thoughtful executives who realized that the record companies’ operating model had to shift 180 degrees. Record companies had always pushed content to the public. They were the ones who decided what people would listen to. The internet was creating a different dynamic. Once people could easily access any music, the public would tell the record companies what they wanted. The role of record companies would be to respond to pull.

To give me an example of this shift, EMI’s executive VP at the time, Adam Klein, told me about OK Go, a band I knew nothing about. After making their first album, the four band members shot a home video of them doing a goofy dance routine to one of their songs. Before that, EMI didn’t push the band and the album’s sales were slow. But that video instantly flew around the internet, got millions of views, and OK Go found themselves invited to be on Good Morning America. EMI started paying attention.

To their credit, OK Go and EMI then got intentional. They called in Kulash’s sister, dancer and choreographer Trish Sie, to help. “We brainstormed on how to ratchet it up a notch. It had to be some sort of systems thing,” Damian told me at that Soho House meeting in 2006. “The floor had to be moving,” Tim chimed in. Damian added: “She came up with the treadmill idea.”

You may remember OK Go’s treadmill dance to their song “Here It Goes Again.” One camera; one take. The band had to do a crazy, injury-waiting-to-happen dance perfectly. The video exploded on the then-nascent YouTube. Damian got booked on The Colbert Report and The Tonight Show. Sales of the band’s music took off. Concerts sold out. “It fits YouTube like a glove,” author Henry Jenkins told me at the time. “It has an authenticity that comes from being slightly crudely made. It feels like it’s from the bottom up, which is hard to pull off.”

In October 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.7 billion. My November 28, 2006, story about OK Go closed with this quote from Damian: “YouTube got sold for a few billion dollars, and we are their poster children. The dots connected.”

This is where the part about the adjacent possible comes into play.

In 2010, Steven Johnson published the book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. It’s a study of the patterns throughout history that lead to an explosive moment when an innovation – such as the pencil, flush toilet or battery – catches fire and changes the way we work or live.

To describe that moment, Johnson borrowed the concept of the adjacent possible from biology and modified it for his purposes. Johnson divides innovations into two categories: the possible and the not-yet-possible. The possible are things that already exist and work and are understood and adopted by the market. The not-yet-possible are, essentially, lab experiments and dreams – technology that doesn’t yet work well and that the broad market hasn’t adopted.

The adjacent possible is the thin band between these two zones. Innovations change the world when they land there. Such innovations stretch the possible beyond where it’s been before, but not so much that the technology doesn’t work or we can’t understand it.

I believe that in 2005-2006, OK Go’s video stunts landed smack dab in the adjacent possible. Before that time, those videos had no place to go. MTV probably wouldn’t have aired them – they weren’t polished enough. But then YouTube appeared, creating the first platform where home-grown videos like OK Go’s could do something that had never happened before: “go viral.”

If OK Go had made those videos a few years earlier, the videos might’ve just been something that got passed around among friends and family. A few years later, and they might’ve gotten lost amid the many other videos on YouTube. But, by accident, OK Go landed on the adjacent possible. It made all the difference.

In the years since, OK Go has embraced its position as the premier video-stunt rock band – a category it created and owns, though it’s a niche category that doesn’t seem to be overly populated. They did a zero-gravity video dance. They built an insanely complex Rube Goldberg contraption that rolled to their tune “This Too Shall Pass.” They created an elaborately choreographed Busby Berkeley-like spectacle while riding tiny scooters. Again, OK Go’s fans know the videos better than the songs the videos feature.

So, now, is all of that why OK Go named their current tour “The Adjacent Possible Tour”? (It’s also the name of the album the plan to release in April 2025.)

Apparently not. I’ve kept in touch with the band’s publicist, Bobbie Gale of 2B Entertainment. So I sent her an email asking about the origins of the tour name. Her colleague, Collin Citron, got back to me with this:

“The Adjacent Possible is a concept by Stuart Kauffman, a biologist who used computer science to figure out how things evolved,” says Kulash. “And he found that small changes create different possible futures in such radically different ways. Stumbling into the world of that reasoning finally made things make sense to me a little bit—that these little universes get created by such arbitrary, small changes.”

Damian was not borrowing from Steven Johnson, but from the original application in biology. Not quite the tech ecosystem version of the adjacent possible. Yet ultimately OK Go’s 2006 breakout is itself an example of the tech ecosystem version of the adjacent possible.

And now? OK Go is highly active on TikTok, where it has 255,000 followers. I bought tickets for its New York stop on The Adjacent Possible Tour and noticed that most of its shows are sold out.

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Below is the USA Today column I wrote about my visit to EMI, and the cover story I wrote about OK Go a year later. These were accessed through Newspapers.com.