Certainty is for Dorks
The world is freaking scary. Forget the obvious stuff — mutant viruses, beheading enthusiasts, and Donald Trump — and look at the real horror. Labor is about to become completely devalued by machines. We may have already passed the point-of-no-return on global climate change. Nobody has any idea how close we are to self-aware artificial intelligence.
If you have a child, you’ll have to look it in the eye and go, “Well, Sienna, we were pretty LOL NOTHING MATTERS re: our path of progress as species, and now there’s a good chance your physical body will be liquefied and your consciousness turned into a self-aware ChatBot for Uber when you turn 14. Let the harvest commence.”
How do you deal with this kind of uncertainty? This fear and/or loathing?
If you’re Nassim Nicholas Taleb, you look at this uncertainty, rip out its still-beating heart, and eat it.
Taleb is the author of Black Swan and Anti-Fragile and occasionally punches to death people who question his math on Twitter. His thesis is simple: you cannot know the future, and the only thing you can do is better yourself/organization to adapt to it. These unknowable future events are referred to as ‘black swans’.
In my business — that of compelling human beings to accept certain truths in a capitalist society — black swans are basically just hanging out outside your home, throwing bricks at your car and setting fire to your lawn, then putting it on whatever new, hideous messaging app they’ve devised. Every 21-year-old with a background in programming and a head for PR is a potential black swan. You will know them. You will fear them.
They always look obvious in retrospect, except they’re not. They’re random. They’re insane. Nobody in 2005 was hinging their thinking on ‘what if a socially awkward Harvard-dropout controlled media consumption in 70% of the world before he even turns 30?’.
Because that’s certifiably ridiculous. You cannot prepare for that.
The problem: society in general, and commerce specifically, needs a set of unchangeable rules so that they can get up in the morning and leave the house.
A + B = C.
If I do right upon the Earth, I shall be rewarded in heaven.
A vulgar yam cannot be president, thus neither can Donald Trump.
This leads to calcified thinking when adaption is the most necessary. How many digital “way it is” have there been since 2008? How many major publications tip toward bankruptcy every time a Facebook programmer does mushrooms and redesigns their feed algorithm? How many ’32 Things You Should Know About _____’ articles appear on LinkedIn proclaiming safety in knowledge, but only if you listen to Electronic Marketing Messiah’s Content Prolapse podcast?
Content!
We’ve reached a point where ‘content’, a nebulous term meaning ‘stuff we put on the internet’, is the new answer to advertising. We cannot even specify what content is, but it will save you. As nothing is certain, you cannot call this peak bullshit. There is a chance that, like a mountain expedition, this is just one of many basecamps on the way to peak bullshit.
Taleb’s most famous analogy is the 1001 Days of the Thanksgiving Day Turkey — because I live in Indonesia, I’m using the Idul Adha Goat. Either way, a sacrificial animal experiences an unconditional upward trend in quality-of-life followed by a sudden, horrific end.
That’s everything in life, but the innovation cycle in communications and technology means it goes double for business. Everything is rocketing upward until it is made obsolete by the next advance, and then it is creaking antique. The companies driving these changes are very open about the temporary nature of whatever they’re doing — because they’re moving onto the next time they tip the table over on everyone.
But there’s inherent risk to building what’s next instead of worrying about what’s in the room with us now. In advertising, this will mean that cautious clients will seek the certainty of looking at past successes as a sign of safety. ‘This worked in 2015, so let’s do that’. It means looking backward at ideas that have bloomed and died, and hoping that the results will remain the same in a different garden in a different climate.
It won’t. And people will point and laugh.
To close with another Taleb flying-elbow-from-the-top-rope:
Stop looking for a safe answer. Stop looking to the past as a security blanket. The monster will just pull off the security blanket and eat you.
The 21st Century is about novelty of experience. It is about the bright and the shiny and the new. It is about the risk involved in believing that something weird can happen. It is about declaring that you’ll personally build your own space program or that you’ll capture the entire Internet for two hours with a thousand rubber bands and a watermelon.
The only case studies that matter are the ones where something different changed everything. Incremental improvement on last year’s best idea is throwing up your hands and surrendering. The only way forward is to admit that nobody can really know what’s coming, and to embrace the excitement of that.
That there are no right answers. This means we get to make our own.
Smile.
