What Jess Did Next: Tick — A Manifesto for a New Year… a New Internet
“Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master” Christian Lous Lange
As a tech entrepreneur, I have always been motivated and inspired by the limitless opportunities that tech offers to make our lives easier, cheaper, more connected, more fun and more empowered. I believe in an internet built to provide equal access to information, cheaper, better products and services and with meritocratic opportunity for self-growth and continual, lifelong learning.
But… it’s not working. Something’s gone wrong.
Over recent years the reality of the Internet has gradually shifted from this vision towards becoming a force for harm, societal discord and rapidly increasing rates of anxiety.
The great intentions and inventions of masterful tech engineers and visionary entrepreneurs that have enhanced our lives so much have inadvertently also created worrying, damaging by-products that we are only now starting to recognise and retrospectively correct for.
But is the current papering over the cracks all too little, too late?
Too Much
The Internet is flabby, unfit and weighs us down. We drown in too much information; we are bombarded with long-form answers to quick questions, enticed by advertising on every click or swipe and click-baited by smart algorithms down rabbit holes of non-essential information.
A simple recipe request or ‘how to’ query can set us on a path to a 40 image long slide-show of home hack ideas to impress our guests (or maybe that’s just me), YouTube autoplays a next, frighteningly relevant-to-you video in an effort to keep you there longer (‘ok, just one more’), and then a link pops into view advertising the exact shoes you admired on a fellow commuter that morning (? how!?).
Too ‘Tribal’
Algorithm-driven echo-chambers are one of the most publicised by-products of late, with a great deal of conjecture around how they may have influenced elections, referendums and accelerated political and ideological polarisation.
In increasingly religiously-agnostic Western societies we now align ourselves with our ideological tribes along identity-politics lines, to the exclusion and vilification of those whose faces, backgrounds or opinions don’t fit. Rather than blurring differences, this accentuates them.
We self-censor for fear of falling foul of ideological mobs and every foolish opinion or action from days, even years past can be served up online to undermine and potentially destroy us. As a result, we are less free and open to personal growth and the potential to change our minds. Debate and free speech is dying. Censorship is everywhere, driven now by the social mob, not the dictators.
Too Constant
We all feel the constant stress of living online and ‘open for business’ 24–7. Slack messages, Trello alerts and colleague Whatsapp notifications interrupt weekends, family meal times, and elicit instant responses from heads still on pillows. Countless browser tabs are open at one time for later reading; tweets bookmarked to come back to; podcasts accompany our commutes; thought-leader newsletters fill our inboxes… all contributing to a constant sense of needing to do more, read more, react faster, keep more plates spinning.
Even downtime is phone-in-hand. Twitter accompanies live events; IMDb accompanies Netflix; cameras capture our food before tastebuds can; our spelling, handwriting and mental arithmetic is in decline as we outsource basic brain skills and rely on thumbs and technical shortcuts.
Of course, I’m as nomophobic (phone-addicted) as the next person –my weekly iPhone report makes for terrifying reading — as the hours revealed online, the number of phone pick-ups when I should have been tickling children or playing hide and seek both fascinate and horrify me.
Too ‘Me’
We waste hours of our lives feeding off the dopamine hits of social media and all our intimate experiences and opinions are offered up to friends and strangers alike for validation (or not).
We’re really not so far off the Black Mirror utopian view. According to a 2017 survey run by The Sun, three quarters of children now aspire to become YouTube stars; last summer I watched 80% of visitors in a gallery at the Louvre turn their backs to the art to selfie it rather than take mental snapshots; the smile wrinkles our offline experiences gifted us are filtered away; our language has become acronym-riddled, cynical and clone-like: ‘that time when..’, ‘imho’, ‘tldr‘, and an enthusiastic ‘hey guys’ kicks off every ‘look-at-me-I’m-awesome’ YouTube monologue.
Thumb-scrolling teenagers worship at the altar, purchase the over-priced eyebrow paint and juxtapose themselves to their triangle-browed idol. We all compare our innermost, insecure insides with other peoples’ seemingly-perfect outsides.
The narcissism inherent in all this is not only depressing, but more devastatingly, fatal — with suicide rates for young girls having doubled over the last few years, directly linked to social media exposure and usage. 24–7 FOMO, FOBLO (fear of being left out) and exposure to unrealistic filtered lives devastate self-confidence and result in perpetual anxiety.
So what’s the answer…?
As disheartened as I am by all of these trends (and sorry if I’ve depressed you!), I remain an optimist. Eternally so. I genuinely believe that the same forces for good that kicked off these trends can be harnessed to correct them… and my business partners and I intend to be amongst the drivers of that change.
Many experts are rallying to solutions. Tech experts working on better algorithms, fake-news detectors and more responsible business models; educators training children in how to discern fact from fiction; ideologues hosting rich, deep debates on YouTube in defence of free speech to counter media over-simplification and much more.
We don’t need to entirely dismantle what we have as many of these initiatives are harnessing the same technologies, but we do need to do more to redistribute online powers, coax people into new, more altruistic, but still enjoyable online behaviours, and harness the internet to re-empower offline lives.
‘Tick’ is a small but I hope, powerful contribution to the fight back.
We are building a global micro-video platform for hobbies, hacks and smarts that intends to inspire people with delightfully simple step-by-step inspiration, practical knowledge and new skills in less than a minute.
It’s the internet squeezed out for all its good stuff; it’s the study guide to the 800 page book; It’s Snap or Instagram sans ego. It’s Trinity in the Matrix learning to fly a helicopter by instant memory download.
Tick content is user-generated (on a smart-phone, on-the-go, using a simple, intuitive creator tool). Our intention is to redirect the social media habit of instantly capturing our passions and skills into a globally accessible, ego-free bank of evergreen content, solving others’ problems, answering practical questions quickly — so as to send them back offline, creating, fixing, playing and doing together.
Crucially, all Tick content will live and breath on the open, global web, as opposed to being stuck (or dissipating) within social channels. The captions and keywords embedded throughout each Tick story are rich for both search engine discoverability and instant language localisation.
Whilst we don’t pretend to defend against all the above challenges, our vision is to free and democratise access to all the knowledge at the practical, ‘how to’ end of the spectrum and we hope in the process, to drive better social behaviours. Just-in-time learning. Take-away knowledge. Tick. Done.
Hopefully you’ll agree that this is an exciting, bullish vision and one we’ve been fortunate enough to already attract world-leading investors, advisors and talented new team members to over the last 9 months.
So most importantly, how can you get involved?
- We all have passions and skills. If you, or anyone you know wants to join us as a ‘Pioneer Tick Creator’ with the opportunity to kickstart your category of interest — see/ share here instructions for how to do so. See this quick Tick story about how it works and then download our Testflight version for iOS and have a play with the simple creator tool.
- If you’re a business, tell your product ‘how to’ stories in less than 1 minute and get them seen by the world. See this example for one of my favourite apps.
- Spread the word! Share this manifesto. Share your Tick videos. Follow us on social: Twitter. Instagram. Facebook. Linkedin
- Contact us directly to find out more and see how you can get involved.
Our mission is to empower a billion people with a million new skills.
New Year, New Internet… Get involved!
(And a brief note for the cynical… (you know who you are)… yes, I’m aware of the irony of posting a long blog about how we need less content online. 🤓 Each platform to its own. I, like most of you, love the longer form for deeper ideological, nuanced content– but let’s fix the simple, practical end of the content spectrum together..)
