But what if you weren’t?
What if you replaced “doing” with “improving” or “reinventing” or “transforming”?
When we do our job, what happens to it? Does it go away, to be replaced by tomorrow’s endless list of tasks? What would happen if we had enough confidence and trust to reconsider the implications of how we do what we do?
The internet clearly has a trust problem. As with most things, it helps to start with the Grateful Dead.
After their incarnation as the Warlocks, they became more than a band. It was a family on the road. There were people who gave up their careers to follow them around, living on buses… they were seeing thirty or forty shows a year. You traded tickets, did favors, built relationships. People in the family knew that they’d be seeing each other again soon.
And then, in 1987, Touch of Grey went to #1 (their only top 40 hit) and it attracted a huge (and different) crowd to the shows. Reports were that the intimacy and trust disappeared.
Glen Weyl points out that the internet was started by three tribes, as different from each other as could be. The military was behind the original ARPA (and then DARPA) that built and funded it. Professors at universities around the world were among the early users. And in San Francisco, a group of ‘hippies’ were the builders of some of the first culture online.
Because each of these groups were high-trust communities, it was easy to conclude that the people they’d be engaging online would be too. And so, as the tools of the internet and then the web were built out, they forgot to build a trust layer. Plenty of ways to share files, search, browse, chat and talk, but no way to engage in the very complicated things that humans do around identity and trust.
Humans have been in tribal relationships since before recorded history began. The word “tribe” appears in the Bible more than 300 times. But the internet isn’t a community or a tribe. It’s simply a technology that amplifies some voices and some ideas. When we don’t know who these people are, or if they’re even people, trust erodes.
When a site decides to get big fast, they usually do it by creating a very easy way to join, and they create few barriers to a drive-by anonymous experience. And when they make a profit from this behavior, they do it more. In fact, they amplify it.
Which makes good business in the short run, but lousy public policy.
Twenty years ago, I wrote that if someone goes into a bank wearing a mask (current pandemic aside) we can assume that they’re not there to make a deposit.
And now we’re suffering from the very openness and ease of connection that the internet was built on. Because a collection of angry people talking past each other isn’t a community. Without persistence of presence, some sort of identity and a shared set of ideals, goals and consequences, humans aren’t particularly tempted to bring their best selves to the table.
The system is being architected against our best impulses. Humans understand that local leadership, sacrifice and generosity build community, and that fights and scandals simply create crowds. Countless people are showing up, leading and pushing back, but algorithms are powerful and resilient, and we need some of them to be rebuilt.
Until there’s a correlation between what’s popular or profitable and what’s useful, we’re all going to be paying the price.
“Yet”.
You can append it after any sentence related to your journey of achievement and contribution.
“I haven’t finished the project”
“I haven’t learned how to juggle”
“I haven’t made the sale”
YET.
And along the way, “Yet” turns “can’t” into “haven’t.”
Yet isn’t the result of brazen persistence. It’s what we earn with learning, insight and generosity.
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PS I just finished George Dyson’s latest, Analogia. It’s a stunning tour de force, a wide-ranging book that includes a heartbreaking chronicle of the genocide of Native Americans, riffs about Project Orion (a spaceship powered by atomic bombs) as well as a three-hundred-year arc of the past and future of computers and our co-evolution with them. I could see this book being the only thing studied over the course of a semester, it contains so many rich eddies, currents and insights. And don’t even get me started on the treehouse and the thirty-foot kayak.
People talk about ego like it’s a bad thing. But our desire to do a good job, our self-trust, our willingness to dance with fear–these are fuel if used properly.
Egomania pushes us to ignore useful feedback, to bristle at input and to refuse to do the work to get better at our craft. It’s actually a sign of fear and weakness.
Ego strength, on the other hand, makes us eager to learn more, engage with the market and figure out what it will take to have the project actually succeed.
Quick! Get on Myspace, it’s where all the good stuff is.
Wait! Better build your following on Facebook. It’s a land rush and once you amass enough followers… And Pinterest. Definitely.
What’s your Twitter handle? Will you be live tweeting the presentations at SXSW?
Let’s get your show on Quibi… Build an Insta and a Finsta…
Did you see how much they’re making on Substack?! Blogs are dead.
The urgent advice usually ends with “blogs are dead.”
Like Groundhog Day, we keep repeating the same pattern.
Any platform that’s reasonably open has a long tail. That means that a few people get most of the traffic and most people get very little. If there’s money involved, that’s definitely what happens.
Statistically, whatever you build online isn’t going to get a lot of traffic. There are no magic shortcuts in open systems, because the short head depends on scarcity.
By the time you show up to chase the cool kids, it’s probably too late to guarantee a sinecure.
What’s the alternative?
Publish. Consistently. With patience. Own your assets. Don’t let a middleman be your landlord. Yell at Google for blocking your emails and hope it’ll work eventually. Continually push for RSS and an open web. With patience.
Getting picked is great, when it works. Someone needs to be in the spotlight and it might as well be you.
In the meantime, catch your breath, show up and contribute.
It all adds up.
Most people build a Keynote or Powerpoint presentation in a very direct way: I have things I want to say, I will list them, slide by slide.
Over time, you might get fancier or more skilled at the tactics of how you present each thing you hope to say, but what if we took a step back and used intention to come up with a strategic framework for the deck.
Overall question: Who is this presentation for?
And the follow-up: What change are we seeking to make?
If you’re not trying to cause an action or some other change in attitude or belief, then what’s the purpose of the deck?
And then, for each sequence of slides, the questions are:
What did this person believe before we got here?
What do I want them to believe after they see this?
Brick by brick, step by step, your slides conspire to cause this change to happen.
The font you choose, your grammar, the size of the letters, the quality of the picture–each of these tactical decisions has a purpose. What’s the change I want this element to contribute to?
The sequence of slides, the tension as you move from one to another–it has a purpose.
It may very well be that your purpose is to create deniability, to get the meeting over with, to have a digital record that you did, in fact, do the work, express your effort and get it off your desk. But it’s entirely possible you can accomplish even more than that.
Most of us played with blocks when we were kids. Building structures that seemed magical. Do that.
Do you have to use all the time in the brainstorming session? Fill in the entire page of your creativity notebook?
It turns out that many of the best ideas we have start out as filler. Stuff in the margins. Last-minute extras simply to fill space.
Because the stakes are low and our defenses are down.
They’re different.
Knowledge changes all the time. When we engage with the world, when we encounter data or new experiences, our knowledge changes.
But belief is what we call the things that stick around, particularly and especially in the face of changes in knowledge.
While more knowledge can change belief, it usually doesn’t. Belief is a cultural phenomenon, created in conjunction with the people around us.
The easy way to discern the two: “What would you need to see or learn to change your mind about that?”
We have windowpanes because glass used to be really expensive. Panes allowed us to use smaller sheets, with the added bonus that if one broke, you could simply replace part of the window.
Today, big sheets of glass are much cheaper, and many windows feature fake panes of glass–a process that uses one big sheet with moldings crisscrossed over it. Of course, this actually costs more to create than a simple window would. We’re overpaying to reproduce the effect that we originally put into place to save money.
If you look around, you’ll realize that we make choices like this all the time when new technologies arise. Cruft is a comfort.
Fashion is everywhere.
It’s not simply the clothes you chose to wear today (and the ones that haven’t seen the outside of your closet for years).
It’s the music that you’re loving right now, songs you wouldn’t have tuned into ten years ago.
It’s the way we understand how the world works, which policies make sense to us and what sort of food we eat. Even the investments we make or the debts we incur.
It’s the rhythm of our days, our priority list and our urgencies as well.
Almost none of our choices in the world are the result of independent direct experience. Instead, we make them in the context of culture, of our surroundings, of ‘people like us do things like this.’ We choose to align with a segment of the culture and take our cues from them.
Sometimes, there’s a coordinator.
Forty years ago, fewer than 100 people determined what songs were going to be the popular ones, the ones that ‘everyone’ would be listening to next week. And a consortium of industry titans decides what colors are going to show up in appliances a few years from now.
We might want to believe that culture simply happens, that it’s organic, distributed and based on millions of independent decisions. And sometimes it is. But more often, there’s an instigator and a benefit for someone along the way.
While many fashion systems are more open and permeable than before (there aren’t three TV networks, there are a million YouTube channels) there are still gatekeepers and narrative setters.
How does the coordinator decide? Are they working in your best interests? Are they erratic, self-deceiving, elusive, selfish, or perhaps a long-term thinker? Do they have a bias toward reality and resilience or is it simply a hustle?
In Latin, the expression is Cui Bono. Who benefits? If it’s you, if it’s us, then fashion is working for us. On the other hand, if it leads to negative outcomes, disappointment and disconnection, it’s worth asking if it’s something we want to keep doing, even (especially) if it feels right in the moment. Because everything we do feels right in the moment.
It’s not a secret conspiracy and it is a choice. Who decides today what’s going to be important tomorrow?
