When You Catch a Cliché, Kill It
Cliché — What a lovely french word to savor! It’s hard to miss the irony of a beautiful sounding handmaiden doomed to serve something so trite, so pedestrian forever.
It’s a great bit of onomatopoeia — Close your eyes and try spelling this word aloud.
C-L-I-C-H-E
Can you hear the clicking sound of the printing plates being used to cast ready-made stick of letters so that printers could save money and time? (See the image above)
It’s unfair we’ve scorned clichés for long when they are willing to teach us something profound about the Digital Age we are living in. If only we observed them without judgement.
Every now and then, when we arrive at an interesting moment of momentous change — what John Hagel loves to call a Big Shift- if you observe carefully, something strange happens in the world of language. Suddenly, you realize that the terms of reference have changed and a whole slew of words used in everyday business life have turned into, well, yes, clichés.
Hoary clichés of the past are aplenty. Take your pick. Do you prefer those nonsensical 3 letter phrases like B2B or B2C ? Or do you prefer sophisticated ones like CRM or AI ? (Yes, AI is fresh from the oven, and if you hang in there, I’ll explain in a moment).
Amazon doesn’t have to talk about “Customer Relationship Management” because that’s what their business is all about. Haven’t you noticed that you talk more about those things which has no relationship with what you do?
Now, those who either have an axe to grind or don’t understand the gravity of change valiantly attempt to clean the augean stables of business vocabulary by explaining the new reality using familiar vocabulary, old ways of description for a strange new world.
That’s alright, and, in fact,makes business sense, if you want to play the arbitrage game with ignoramuses by extracting profit from scavenging bull shit. Coin fancy utopian words ( Digital Transformation, anyone?), re-frame the new in terms of the old, and you can play this game ad infinitum.
But, let me also warn you, playing this game is quite dangerous, because if you continue to use the old terms, you never know when you will get deceived by them to operate by the old, unconscious ways of doing business. Now, that’s risky because, the old ways have stopped working, and trust me, that’s a good thing!
So far so good.
Let’s talk about the hottest cliché topping the smoke screen charts — Artificial Intelligence. Yes, AI has become a cliché because marketers have figured out that your eye balls have been popping out in trepidation whenever you read about them online, and as a result, they are everywhere, scaring your wits out with dystopian visions of a jobless future with treacherous robots reigning over imbecile humans.
Now, I am not saying that there isn’t a grain of truth in those visions. (That’s a lengthy topic for another day.)The foremost thing to be understood in all the chatter about Artificial Intelligence is that the original context which birthed the seed of the idea and the technology involved in far more humbling means has now been blown out of proportions.
Popular understandings rooted in digital dualism (that the online world and offline world are different realities) depicted in movies like Terminator have made matters further worse, putting us in a soup of misplaced fears and delusions.
What is the first image that comes to your mind when you think of the phrase:Artificial Intelligence?
God forbid, if you are morbid about the future, your vision might be something like this.
Or, if you aren’t so morbid, it might be something like this.
Here’s the thing: Both of these images originate from mythology, rather than technology. Aren’t you familiar with Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam?
Back then, in a world in which religion was the fulcrum of human existence, it took the imminent touch of the God to bring life to not just Adam, but all mankind.
And now, in the age of Technopoly, it takes the imminent touch of the Lords of the Machines to bring life to a brand new sapien species called Homo Digitas.
Look, as a storyteller myself, I totally understand why technology products need mythologies — stories of “Purpose” which answer the “Why” of their existence — in order to be loved and bought by millions. Steve Jobs did it first to computers, and the world has never been the same since.
Before Jobs, computers were to be feared with dystopian visions of 1984. They were huge, impersonal, made by faceless corporations. After Jobs, we began to make love with them in every waking moment.
But, when we are talking about technologies which are already opaque — black boxes of algorithmic systems made from every fiber of our digital existence, which aren’t easily deciphered by seasoned experts themselves- mythology doesn’t really help. It harms us.
Here is the excruciatingly painful truth about the “AI” Cliché — The moment you use the phrase, you are trapped by its paraphernalia of associations.You cannot proceed to have a sensible conversation with anyone without getting chafed by its mythology.
(I have merely skimmed the surface when it comes to dissecting technology’s friction with mythology. Read Jaron Lanier’s article on this topic if you are interested to explore this in detail).
If we are serious about creating something new for the future, the first thing we need to do is break up all our ready-made ideas and shuffle all the pieces.
Conventional advice have failed us because they’ve underestimated the power of clichés and thereby taught us only to avoid them (like plague), and not kill them. And so, they refuse to go away — for they are insidious, trapped inside our everyday beliefs and habit patterns. Even if we consciously avoid using them outside, we are already suffering from it, having internalized them deep inside the recesses of our minds.
You are left with only one choice: When You Catch a Cliché, Kill It.
If you liked reading this post, and feel like indulging me, go on
1) The Digital Transformation Delusion
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