Truth is a grind.
The Role of the Entrepreneur in the age of Trump.
When I think about my entrepreneurship over the past twenty-five years, it has been driven by the desire to create things that are bigger than me and last longer than my own personal interest, using new technologies that were previously unavailable. I don’t start companies in order to bolster my own image. If that happens, it’s only a byproduct of creating something that was useful to another group of people.
Nevertheless, we are now being managed by somebody whose only experience is creating things that bolster his image: Skyscrapers. Universities. Beauty Pageants. Television Shows. It’s all about increasing his image which he believes improves his brand which he thinks helps his businesses.
Whether or not this is all true, it’s almost besides the point now since he is supposedly taking office as our President in a few weeks. And no matter how quickly he is able to yank the class of our country’s highest office into the shitter of his Mar Lago Fabio Don King abyss, it is inconceivable that his own personal brand will fail to benefit from its association with the Presidency of the United States.
We did not appreciate until now how we as a nation could fall prey so quickly, deeply and irreversibly to Donald Fucking Trump. Never forget to remember your perception of him over the past umpteen years when he struck you as a crass, ego-maniacal Atlantic City sleazy real estate developer; or your memory of him trying to explain away his “grab her by the pussy” routine while calling for Hillary to be locked up over her emails. We can ridicule the insecure boy-child that he exposes through his frantic tweeting and reality distortion field, but has become — i will grant him that — the greatest rhetorician (aka bullshit artist) of our time.
We can shake our meritocratic fists at his economic policy of crony capitalism, but we risk missing his much more significant portfolio shift away from failed dollar-denominated real estate investments, bankruptcies and lawsuits, to media-based currencies of false threats, half-truths, rumors and innuendo.
Even though he does not represent a majority position on any major issue, he continues to wage a shameless proxy battle (coached by some of the finest like Carl Icahn) to represent all of us American stakeholders under his gaudy umbrella. He uses one hand to feed fresh scraps of Bannon-ganda to the 20% of America that supports him, and uses the other hand to send his cabinet oligarchs to neuter and isolate every major civil liberty cause from the past thirty years (gender equality, racial justice, global warming, global competitiveness, etc.).
The most important question now for all of us working in Silicon Valley — for those who don’t feel that sharing the latest Kara Swisher piece qualifies as non-violent resistance — is what can we do to protect and advance our own legacy as a generation of smart, creative inventors and innovators who left the world better off.
People are responding to the election and the incoming Trump administration in a variety of ways. I imagine that behaviors will settle and evolve along these lines, with some moving faster than others through the cycles.
- Unplugged Isolated Detachment: those who try to tune out the feeds and news and make it as if there is nothing they can do about it, that it can’t get much worse, that we need to play the long game and focus on 2020, etc.
- Shared Open Grief: this is the phase when you realize that it has gotten worse since you last tuned in and you come to terms with the fact that it will likely keep getting worse and worse as he shifts from candidate to president-elect to president. “Oh my fucking god Donald Trump is the president of the united States. We are doomed!”
- Private Personal Fears: these likely start in the form of “irrational” nightmares about being backed, imprisoned or perhaps even tortured. They persist and then start surfacing during the day and stir inside of you “wait, what if they really do actually come after me for (insert moral cause) and I start getting audited, followed, harrassed, threatened???” The fears are so outrageous that you don’t want to share or risk ridicule as a hopeless liberal neurotic from your peers so you hold them inside.
- Angry Deliberate Action: this is when you grow weary of the heaviness of defeat and can’t sit any longer with the anxiety of becoming a victim, and you say fuck it and lean really, really forward to the point that you are willing to do whatever it takes to stop the madness and wrest back control of your country from corrupt, despot-loving celebratantes who treat this country like it’s their own personal country club.
When we get to the last phase, when the Ostriches have become Lions, we will need strategies to drive tactics. Here are a couple to start with that we can refine further as we go. Some are based on those that Trump adopted in the campaign, while others are different than his.
what you can learn from Trumpism:
1. Promote Your Name: narcissism is back in style, as is aggressive self-confidence. Heed the cover story called the brand called you from the Aug/Sep 1997 issue of Fast Company:
Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.
This is no time for fabrics of collaboration and quilts of partnerships. Now is the time to lead with a constant stream of selfies of you with other influential people in important places doing meaningful things. Declare shit. Set your own agenda. He is a 70-year old man with orange skin who can’t touch his toes but he never misses a photo opp. Be merciless about your own self-promotion, for the only way to minimize his influence is to increase everybody else’s.
2. Micro-target Your Messages: depending upon your audience, you need to learn how to create a custom message that plays to their hopes and/or fears. Note how Trump came to each rally in the Rust Belt armed propaganda that was highly tailored to each of his audiences, whether it be about locking up crooked Hillary, building a wall, or blaming job loss on Jewish bankers. There was a fascinating article in the New York Times about how the Republican campaign hired an obscure but highly effective british data mining company to use Facebook as a lethal persuasion machine. You need to use the same techniques to determine the hot buttons of your different audience segments and then come up with copy and art to address each segment with a highly specific offer.
3. Stage Rallies with your key audiences so that they feel more connected to you and amplify the hell out of the scenes of you receiving thunderous applause across social media. Use tools like Meetup and Facebook Live to coordinate and produce your own “victory rallies.”
What to do in opposition to Trump:
1. Establish Clear Values. Tell your team, your investors and your customers what you stand for (truth, decency, hope & opportunity) and what you do not tolerate (fascism, nepotism, cronyism, hypocrisy). Create an environment that is truly values-based and be willing to to sacrifice everything so long as you hold on to these values as being core to the foundation of your company.
2. Contract Your Own Cyber Militia: it is not enough simply to strengthen your passwords. our information is already compromised many times over. we are now at the stage of needing to pool our own offensive hacking capabilities in order to hold our government and supervisors accountable.
3. Start an Opt-in Registry: Stop playing defense about protecting the rights of the soon to be disenfranchised, and instead show some nuts before he and his cronies try to cut them off. This means putting your name on a list that says something to the effect of:
“I am American, and like the majority of Americans, I do not support the Trump administration. I am willing to do whatever is necessary to remove him and his cronies from power and will come to the aid of those who are persecuted for making this same commitment.”
I hope that our most trusted leaders of the digital estate (especially Zuckerberg, Page and Bezos) will grant us safe harbor within their networks to aggregate our majority position and organize our activities to mount effective opposition tactics. The key will be to find safety and security in numbers of opposition quickly so as to stem the tide of the coming autocratic strategies that will seek to divide and isolate us based on our differences.
Postscript: Why state-sponsored hacking and disinformation is the new bomb (or the numbers behind “Registered Republicans prefer Putin over Hillary 2-to-1”)
