Hey Ringly, you’re doing the future wrong.
(Note: This post originally appeared on the Tapir Zookeeper Blog, where we regularly post about startups, growth, and animal husbandry.)
For awhile, I assumed that my disdain for Ringly related to its narrow interpretation of ‘smart wearables for women’ as ‘pretty vibrators that you wear.’
But superficial cynicism of wearables seems so gauche when most of us don’t even care how ridiculous they look.
No, where Ringly and I part company is in our divergent visions for the future. And more than that, we differ in our understanding of an entrepreneur’s responsibility to manufacture that future.
I recently claimed that my Ringly rant is one of my best. I’ll let you be the judge…
The Wrong Future
The concept of an ‘imagined future’, defined in stark contrast to the ‘present,’ is a relatively novel idea. Before the early 1800s, “the social order, like the natural order, was considered static.” The Victorian era witnessed rapid demographic and industrial changes. From these transformations emerged new disruptive attitudes towards technology and progress.
Victorian futurists like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, manufactured our modern preoccupation with the future. Science historian James Burke describes their legacy as the belief that “technology manufactures not gadgets, but social change…using the tool changes the user permanently.”
If you accept that, then our job as builders, inventors, and tinkerers is to change our users in some way. For most of us this change will be small. At Tapir, we want to take the daunting concept of ‘early growth’, and allow startups to visualize it as the sum of their happy customers. A simple, but hopefully effective change in perspective.
Other more disruptive innovators will make lasting changes to how we experience the world around us. I got out of a taxi last week without paying. The driver tensely reminded me of my financial obligations. “It’s on the card,” I breezily replied as I turned to walk away. “I’m not an Uber,” he laughed.
For 400 years the rites of taking a taxi were fixed: find a taxi (be it carriage or car); give your destination; pay cash. It was a routine we accepted to be fraught with friction. It took Uber less than five years to recondition our collective expectations of the taxi experience.
What future world does Ringly envision? As near as I can tell from their video: when you’re dancing alone, and your fella calls, your jewellery will make muffled fart noises so you won’t miss ‘the things that matter most.’
Funny enough, this mildly condescending sexism seems familiar to me. YouTube has dozens of videos tagged as ‘retro futurism.’ A term used to describe artefacts from the past with laughably quaint speculations for the future.
Take this Whirlpool laundry machine ad from 1950, ‘Mother takes a holiday’. Since it’s inexplicably 30 minutes long, I’ll transcribe my favourite part:
Betty [filing and painting her nails]: What does the emancipation of American women mean to you?
Carol [confused and stammering]: eman…? emancipa…? emancipation??
Betty: Yeah, liberation, etcetera.
Marilyn: Something about new freedom in our own home…freedom from drudgery. Oh my gosh! Talk about emancipation, take the family wash for instance! … Boy, here’s REAL emancipation from old-fashioned chores…that’s the kind of emancipation that ANY woman can understand!
This era produced similarly patronising ads selling everything from vacuums to dishwashers. These inventions imagined a future where housewives would have more time to do…well…whatever it was a housewife did. A vision that with hindsight seems completely oblivious to the impending upheaval of the second-wave feminist movement. Women didn’t want more time to laze and look pretty; they were bored as fuck and ready to significantly enter the workforce. 65 years later the Ringly video seems equally tone-deaf in its depiction of ‘freedom’ for women. Why are the ‘things that matter most’ to women still being portrayed as so trivial?
But the future is unknowable, and we rarely get it right. H.G. Wells famously thought that air travel would never catch on. To paraphrase sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, tomorrow obeys our predictions, the way lightning obeys the weatherman.
In fact, there are five types of prediction, and the most effective form doesn’t worry too much about the future at all. Rather it focuses on identifying the most applicable audience. “If individuals have never encountered modernity, then you can tell them about real, genuine things that are already happening — for them, that is the future.”
I guess for anyone unfamiliar with modernity, Ringly’s anaemic vision of the future could seem persuasive. The fact that it bears a striking resemblance to the present wouldn’t be as troubling for them as it is for me.
Dude, Where’s my Future?
Why even worry about the future? It’s big, it’s approaching, and we live in a time of unprecedented progress.
Except, we don’t.
The Golden Age of scientific and technological progress sputtered to a halt around the same time disco hustled in. A single generation, spanning from 1945 to 1971, moulded most of what defines the modern world: the pill; electronics; computers and the internet; nuclear power; TV; antibiotics; space travel; civil rights; and the list continues.
Science journalist Michael Hanlon describes the ‘great’ innovations of the current era as mostly “consumer-driven, often banal improvements in information technology.” This is the grievance that Peter Thiel expressed in his legendary burn: “We wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters.”
“We could be living in a world where Alzheimer’s was treatable, where clean nuclear power had ended the threat of climate change, where the brilliance of genetics was used to bring the benefits of cheap and healthy food to the bottom billion, and where cancer really was on the back foot.” — ‘The Golden Quarter’
As for why progress has slowed? Hanlon lists a suite of potentially aggravating factors: the fetishization of ‘growth’; systemic issues relating to the availability of capital; and our escalating aversion to risk.
My theory? You need a compelling vision of the future in order to fuel progress towards it.
Selling the Future
So yeah, we probably have a social obligation to create tools rooted in the future they’ll occupy. But there’s an even better reason to think of our products in this context, particularly for startups. Regardless of what it is you’re building, what you’re selling is the future.
Nikola Tesla understood this. JP Morgan didn’t fund his failed Wardenclyffe project on the pitch of transmitting power through the earth. Instead Tesla had sold a future that juxtaposed the fantastic with the everyday.
Drew Houston pitched Dropbox to Y Combinator on the premise that “Tom Cruise in Minority Report is not carrying around a thumb drive.”
Elon Musk and SpaceX offer the most emblematic example of the ‘Future Now’ sales pitch. “He says we are doomed if we stay [on earth]…He says we should go with him, to that darkest and most treacherous of shores. He promises a miracle.”
The public reception to Microsoft’s recently announced holographic goggles is testament to the power of their Future Now narrative. “In the very near future, you’ll compute in the physical world, using voice and gesture to summon data and layer it atop physical objects…Cyberspace will be all around you.” Translation: shit’s about to get real.
That’s how you sell wearables. That’s how you sell the future.
While it may be tempting to conclude that we were promised hover cars and ended up with Ringly, maybe there’s hope in knowing that regardless of what we were promised, at least we got Elon Musk and holograms. In the hands of a visionary, a single version of the future can reshape the world. That’s not hyperbole. Jules Verne is credited with inspiring Sir Ernest Shackleton, Jacques Cousteau, Jim Lovell, Edwin Hubble, Yuri Gagarin, and Guglielmo Marconi.
Returning to Ringly, I have reason to believe that this rant might not be lost on its founder and CEO, Christina Mercando. From a recent HuffPo interview:
“Ringly’s core belief is that technology can be more discreetly and smartly integrated into our lives…There’s nothing more rewarding than seeing your vision unfold and having others believe in it too.”
That sounds a bit like a vision of the future, doesn’t it? That sounds like someone who could share a giggle watching their silly Kickstarter video. That sounds like someone who might concede that sure, you gotta sell the future, but also acknowledge that you gotta get paid today.
If that’s the case, then this is my worst rant ever, because it ends with an apology.
I’m sorry Ringly. Maybe you’re less boring in the future?
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