There is no right way of thinking.

Diversity of thought is what creates progress. If you can only think of what has already been thought of, no one ever learns anything new.

Diversity of thought comes from diversity of viewpoints. Young people, maturing people, old people. Single people, married people. Men, women, non-binary people. People with backgrounds from all over the planet. People that come from socialist countries and people that come from war-torn countries. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, atheists, zealots, iconoclasts. People who believe in the ascendance of the free market and collectivist communists. People who look and think and act just like you and people who look and think and act completely differently from you.

If anything is off-limits, that’s a problem for ideation. Even “toxic” ideas.

Creative people need the freedom to be wrong.

About diversity of thought

Science happens because people fervently disagree about what the truth of the world is and test it.

Financial markets work because people passionately disagree about the value of things and place bets with each other on that.

Politics evolves because people furiously disagree about what nations should be doing and debate about it to win over popular support.

International rivalries happen because nations disagree about the path to prosperity and create alliances and sanctions (and sometimes, wars) to promote their way of thinking.

Consider all of these systems. They have rules — there are rules about how to do science, how to participate in markets, how to hold elections, and even how nations in conflict are supposed to behave. But within those rules there is breathtaking disagreement and diversity. More rules usually means less creativity and less progress. But a lack of rules also makes progress difficult.

Think about the internet, which is perhaps the greatest invention for the progress of world thinking, where there are rules enforced by code (if you don’t code your site according to those rules, other people can’t see it) but within those rules, you can post anything from the Communist Manifesto to beat poetry to a documentary on baseball to pornography.

Of all the things we have created as a species, the idea of “markets” of all kinds — ideas, commerce, sport, art — may be the most fertile. Markets grow things. Individual participants in markets fail and succeed, but taken together, they advance us all. Breathtaking.

But now . . .

The U.S. government is cancelling grants because researchers are studying things with words like “women” in them.

The federal government is vying to put supervision in place at Columbia University to make sure it complies with its agreement to root our thinkers who believe in diversity.

These sorts of choices are stupid and shortsighted because they deny the fundamental principle of human progress: diversity of ideas and disagreement are where growth comes from. If you tell people what they are allowed to think, they stop thinking of things that are not allowed, and innovation stagnates.

Two things got us into the situation. First, a majority of U.S. voters voted for someone who insisted that people who think the wrong way are “disgusting.” Now he’s doing what he said he’d do — stopping people who look and think and act and love differently from what is “normal.”

But the other thing that got us here is the degree to which federal government money funds the places where thinking happens: research institutes and universities. If the feds fund thinking, the feds can decide not to fund certain sorts of thinking. Universities and research institutes who assumed that they’d continue to get funded to think of new ideas just because they always had been were, in the end, naive.

Regrettably, I worry that this genie cannot be stuffed back into the bottle. Even if other people take control of federal funding in the future, it would be difficult to permanently restore protections for diversity of thought. And there is a risk that people of a different ideological bent would just use the same mechanisms to enforce their way of thinking. (It’s still worth trying to restore funding for a greater diversity of research, I just worry that any solution would be politically vulnerable to a regression to what’s happening now.)

The alternative is for other sources of funding to step up. Harvard has a $50 billion endowment. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has $70 billion. The total value of all foundations exceeds $1 trillion. This is a moment of crisis that seems to demand a complete shift in the funding of research and diversity of thought.

I wonder, if foundations created funds specifically dedicated to diversity of thought, would rich individuals contribute? Would venture capital and private equity funds? Would companies? Would all of us?

It pains me to think that our government is losing the ability to fill this role. But it is too important to lose altogether.

What do you think?

Could there be a place in every big city dedicated to the latest thinking on business ideas, a place where serious business thinkers would love to hang out? Consider what follows my business plan.

What got me thinking about this was a Ben Cohen article in the Wall Street Journal titled “That Cool New Bookstore? It’s a Barnes & Noble.” It chronicles how new Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt, who became successful as a bookseller in London, is changing Barnes & Noble to make it once again a place where local people might want to hang out, with each store featuring displays merchandised and designed by local managers and staff.

Daunt and the new Barnes & Noble recognize that the reader who knows what book they want is not going to take a trip to the local bookstore to buy a copy; they’re going to buy it online on Amazon or bookshop.org (or bn.com). Barnes & Noble retail stores cannot compete on size and efficiency with Amazon. So instead, the idea is to make the local Barnes & Noble a unique, local, curated experience that’s ideal for its community, generating not just a friendly atmosphere but impulse purchases. I find it notable that the return rate (percent of unsold books sent back to the publisher) at B&N, formerly between 20% and 25%, is now down to 9%, and Daunt wants it down further (at Waterstones, the chain he ran in the UK, returns were only 3.5%). This is a great sign that the new B&N is a better retail experience.

What do you know? If you treat customers as humans, not buying units, they actually respond.

Designing the Business Idea Store

Think about the last few business books you bought. Where did you buy them? Your most likely answer is “online.” The buyer experience is simple: hear about it, decide to buy it, buy it online, get it in the mail (or on Kindle or Audible), and then consume it. There’s a reason that your local bookstore has so few business books, and that even in big general-interest bookstores, the choice of titles is so limited. Business book buyers aren’t perusing bookshelves to decide what to buy.

There is one other place where there is a collection of business books: airport and train station bookstores. But every book in one of those stores, outside of big bestsellers, is there because the publisher or author paid to put it on the shelf. Because they are small, their selection is limited (which is why they can charge for shelf placement). No one chooses to hang out in airport bookstores on purpose, so they’re not really a model for attracting visitors.

So let’s start with a different proposition: we want to create a physical place so packed with cool business ideas that businesspeople will want to visit it, just to expose themselves to those powerful business ideas.

What would such a place look like?

It would have a much larger selection, thousands of titles. This would allow it to include 300 titles on marketing, 500 titles on investing, 300 titles on small business, 1,000 titles on coding, 100 titles on manufacturing, 200 titles on leadership, and so on. You would know that whatever you were looking for, you’d have choices. (This is decidedly not true for business books in the average bookstore.)

Having created such a large selection, the staff could organize it in interesting ways. If I were managing such a bookstore right now, I’d make a huge bookshelf with nothing but books on AI: managing AI, writing with AI, designing AI, doing customer service with AI, the dangers of AI, the future of AI, and so on. Maybe there’d be a table next to it full of titles on Web3: cryptocurrency, the metaverse, NFTs, what comes after Web3, why Web3 is hoax, and the like. You could have displays on content marketing, they hybrid workplace, or B corporations. If Daniel Pink has just come out with a new book, you could include a table full of his other books, too. This is all in addition the usual organization with shelves on marketing, leadership, business narratives, personal growth, networking, and so on.

As with the airport bookstores, you could have paid placements as well. I imagine there’d be a Harvard Business Review Press section, and a Dummies shelf as well.

There are thousands of worthwhile self-published business books that never get stocked in local stores. But at a store like this, some of these titles might find a home. Titles published only through Kindle Direct Publishing (Amazon) would be hard to stock due to distribution challenges, but those published through Ingram Spark can easily be distributed to any bookstore. Ingram Spark might even want to invest in this bookstore venture as a way to gain an edge in competing with Amazon.

Since you may not be able to find exactly what you’re looking for, there will be kiosks that let you search the inventory and find where specific books are shelved (and what ratings the books got from readers). The kiosks will suggest related books to what you’re searching for, as well.

And of course, there will be knowledgeable local staffers who know the business idea landscape. A college student majoring in business and looking to make a few extra bucks is going to get a lot more out of working at the Business Idea Store than the Gap. They’ll get instant access to the best business ideas and a chance to connect with leading business thinkers and other local professionals who may be hiring.

Are you ready to visit yet? Maybe we need to to do a little more to get you to come by.

Let’s have a small event space with room for about 50 people. So we’ll have business authors come by about once a week in the evening and do a presentation or a reading. This benefits the authors, or course, but it also reinforces that when it comes to business ideas, this is the place where you come to hear about them.

When the event space isn’t hosting an author event, the Business Idea Store will rent it out to local groups. The local small business networking group, ScaleUp group, entrepreneur’s club, advertising club, Young Presidents’ Organization, or business student association should be able to rent the space for a lot less than a local hotel meeting room. This exposes more businesspeople to the idea store and reinforces that it’s the place business connections happen — between people and thinkers, between people and ideas, and between people and other people.

Another revenue stream will appear: sponsorship. Local law firms, accounting firms, and marketing agencies will pay to sponsor the meeting room or the idea store’s website. If businesspeople are gathering here, they’ll be more open to the idea of working with local service companies that are supporting the space where they gather.

There is a natural affinity between such bookstores and events. Let’s say that a city is hosting an event like the Small Business Expo. Such events often have a bookstore, but managing the books and book sales at such an event is typically a pain in the butt for the event staff. So the expo works with the local Business Idea Store to stock books in a space at the event — books by the speakers as well as related books about small business. The local Business Idea Store handles acquiring books, stocking books, staffing the store, selling books, and managing book signings. They pay a share of each purchase to the event. And unlike most sales at events, these sales, since they go through a retailer, will actually count towards bestseller lists.

The ideal place to locate these stores is in business downtowns where people can pop in at lunch time or after work, in places like Boston’s Seaport District, Brooklyn, Atlanta, Seattle, and Silicon Valley. (Of course, there will be a cafe, since every bookstore has one now.)

Will I see you at the Business Idea Store?

Would you visit this store?

Would you like to join this venture? What skills do you have?

Would you like to invest?

Comment below. Add your own ideas. Or send me an email at josh at bernoff dotcom.

I won’t be running this: I’m no retail wizard. But I’m sure interesting in making it happen.

Everyone starts new things on the first of the month, or on a Monday. This is the wrong approach. Here’s why you should start something big on a Friday.

1. Starting things is hard. Starting on a Friday lets you put in a full day of hard work in the knowledge that you’ll have the weekend off.

2. Spend the first day on planning. Then you can start executing your plans in the full week starting the following Monday.

3. Make a list of people to contact. Track down or look up their contact information. Draft the emails or messages you’ll send them. Get them all cued up, then execute on Monday afternoon when they’ll be most likely to be receptive to hearing from you.

4. If you run into roadblocks or insurmountable challenges, you can take a “mulligan” and re-start again on Monday, which will feel good as your “real” starting date.

5. Working hard on something new will stir things up in your mind. You’ll inevitably come back to them, sometimes subconsciously, over the weekend. When you start on Monday, you’ll have a new perspective.

6. Mondays are always hard. Fridays feel much easier. You’ll be more relaxed, which will lead to more creative thinking.

Circle that big Friday start on your calendar. Block off the day. Then dive in. The best starts are Friday starts!

How do you decide who to vote for? I see three ways people are deciding: policy, team loyalty, and trust.

Rational Papers Posts are directed at the group I call the deciders: conservatives, moderates, undecided, and third-party voters considering their choices in the 2020 US Presidential election.

Choosing based on policy

In a traditional election, policy is the deciding factor. Voters determine who they feel will be a better choice for the economy, health care, taxes, foreign policy, and the like.

This is what was behind the James Carville 1992 quote suggesting that the election between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush was about “the economy, stupid.” His perspective was that voters who felt the country was doing well would vote for Bush, and those who felt it was doing poorly would vote for a change: that is, for Bill Clinton.

If you are a policy voter, then you may be choosing based on, for example, who will better manage the COVID-19 epidemic, immigration policy, climate change, and the need to get the American economy and its hard-hit small businesses back on their feet. Like everyone else, I have an opinion on which candidate would do better, but I won’t be arguing that in this post.

In an emotional election such as this one, when the country is hurting, policy arguments don’t tend to be very persuasive with voters like you, the deciders. Those who love Democratic policies are probably voting for Biden; those who love Republican policies are probably voting against him. We’ll get into those in future posts.

But let’s look at two other ways that people are deciding to vote, ways that are far more persuasive in this election.

Choosing based on team loyalty

The 2020 election is the culmination of the “us vs. them” rhetoric that increasingly characterizes American political dialogue.

It many ways it is no different from loyalties in sports. I may be a Red Sox fan and you are a Yankee fan — you think I and my team are awful and your team is awesome. Or maybe you love the Cowboys and despise the Forty-Niners, or you root for the Clippers and hate the Heat.

Once you define your loyalties based on being on a team, it’s extremely easy to overlook the flaws in your own side, and magnify the flaws of the other side.

In this characterization, Trump is a flawed candidate (I think even his backers would acknowledge this), but one who has rallied a group of loyal voters behind him. These voters often feel that he articulates their perspective in a relatable way, and they have been ignored before this. Such voters identify with Trump.

There are, of course, many voters who vote Democrat and will seize on what is most admirable about their candidate and what is lacking in their opponent.

Now we even have media outlets that reinforce our team loyalties. Fox News is for Trump, just as the YES Network is for the Yankees. It’s not an unbiased source, but it’s a great way to immerse yourself in the cheerleading.

If you are ready to cheer for your political team no matter what, I’d urge you to stop a second and think. It is an excellent shortcut for voters, since it means they can make a choice without thinking that hard about current events. But the purpose of the Trump campaign is to win and retain power. The purpose of the Democratic Party is to win and perpetuate its own power. That’s how they work.

At some point, you may decide that there is more to the choice in front of us than picking a team. Advance yourself to that point to right now. Even as both teams are shouting about how they need your support, you should become suspicious. What will they actually do in the next four years? That’s a lot more important than whether you identify with the Red team or the Blue team.

Choosing based on trust

In my opinion, this is the fundamental deciding issue in the 2020 election: who can you trust? Which of the two major party candidates is more likely to behave in a way that preserves the American system of government and the nation we share?

In many elections, trust is not the deciding factor. Obama and McCain were both politicians who behaved in line with the ideals they put forth. So was Mitt Romney. So were John Kerry and George W. Bush and Al Gore. In these elections, we were able to choose based on policy.

But both Biden and Trump have been in office long enough that we can decide whether they behave in a way that we can trust.

Biden has been quite consistent. While he’s made decisions that, years later, feel out of step with current Democratic ideals, he does not have a history of inconsistency or lying at anywhere near the level that Trump does. You can certainly ask whether he behaved with integrity regarding his son’s activities in the Ukraine, but the latest government report from Republican Senators only goes so far as to show it was “problematic,” not corrupt.

Trump, on the other hand, has a serious trust problem. His misrepresentations happen daily. Just this week, he retweeted a doctored video of Biden to make it appear that Biden played the song “Fuck Tha Police” at an event (he didn’t). He routinely exaggerates and invents government statistics. And he consistently describes events that didn’t actually happen, like that the “Entire city [of Portland] is ablaze.“

He concealed all the details of his private meeting with Vladimir Putin, even from members of his own diplomatic team. He has refused to release his tax returns (even after promising to do so), so we don’t know what conflicts of interest he has with his business and his government job.

The most troubling aspect of all of this is the way in which, in his government, the distinction between Trump the man, Trump the head of government, and Trump the candidate has been erased. Why has the Trump Justice Department taken a position in a lawsuit alleging Trump raped a woman in the 1990s, long before he was President? Why has his administration removed five inspector generals, officials whose job is to identify corruption in government departments?

Even in a world where trust in politicians is low, this pattern of untrustworthy behavior is consistent and troubling.

Consider the impact of your vote on the next four years. If Trump continues and extends his pattern of lying and behaving in contempt of the public trust, there is no further check on him. He will no longer need to run for reelection. He can do pretty much whatever he wants, and with the loyalty of his Attorney General, conceal everything that he does.

If you vote for Biden, you will get a politician with a reputation for trust, and one for which the usual safeguards of government will apply.

But if you vote for Trump, or for a third-party candidate, or if you fail to vote, and Trump wins, then there may no longer be any way to block the merging of Trump’s personal interests and the operation of government. Trust will be gone — permanently.

This is the reason that so many prominent Republicans are backing Biden (including, today, John McCain’s widow). They are concerned about our ability to trust government if Trump wins, and for them, trust is more important than policy differences.

The impact of this change goes beyond the next four years. Whoever takes over after eight years of Trump will be able to control all the levers of government, just as he has attempted to do. That’s pretty scary.

A vote for Joe Biden is a vote to step back to a day when we could feel, at least most of the time, that government was actually operating in our own best interest, not in the interest of the President. That’s the real thing that made America great. And it’s why, arguably, that a vote for Biden is the best way to make America great once again.

For the origin of the Rationalist Papers, see this. All Rationalist Papers posts available here.

It’s hard to think long-term right now, with everything changing rapidly. But you don’t have to react — and communicate — as if your time horizon is measured in hours. Think a few weeks ahead, and your messaging will look a lot smarter.

I thought of this because of the string of messages I got recently from my doctor’s office (on my health portal — so I had to click through to see if they were personal or urgent). The series of messages looked like this (all of these are abridged, I’m only sharing the beginning of each message):

17 March: Dear Patient,

With the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all navigating uncharted territory. We recognize that some of our patients have questions, some are scared, some are feeling down, and some are sick.

At [name of practice], we want to be there for you. We are also mindful of being there for our staff and their families. In addition, we are trying to take every precaution to keep our physicians/physician assistants available working to avoid quarantines that would deplete the supply of health care providers.

Starting Monday March 16, we will no longer have in-person office visits. . . .

23 March: Dear Patients,

We would like to update you about COVID-19 and [name of practice]’s care of our patients. We continue to focus on caring for you and meeting all of your health care needs while maintaining your safety and the safety of our staff. . . . We continue to care for the vast majority of patients over the telephone. Your insurance will be billed for these visits but you will not be charged a copay. Adult well visits are being postponed for the time being.

Our office hours remain 7:30am — 6pm. We will see well children for their annual exam and vaccines between 9am and noon. . . . From 5–6pm, we will clean the office again and answer phones. . . .

30 March: Dear Patients:

This week we are going to focus on . . . important items as we are learning how to give you the best care and access

Please know that you should not hesitate to reach out to us with questions or concerns.

We want to help and welcome serving you through the available telehealth and patient portal options. . . .

1 April: To our beloved patient community,

Please know that during this challenging time we are here for you in every capacity that we can be. The transition to temporarily becoming a primarily telehealth-based practice has been smooth and has allowed us to adapt quickly to continue to meet your needs. With few exceptions, we are able to provide our normal spectrum of services and care. Many of you have expressed a caring hesitation about not wanting to “burden” us with your routine or non-urgent care needs during this time. While we deeply appreciate your concern about our wellbeing, we want you to know that we actively welcome your appointments, calls, and messages. . . .

I sympathize with the problems this practice faces. And in a time of such worries over health, it makes sense that they’d send multiple messages over the course of a few weeks — even though they hadn’t messaged me about anything by my own bills, appointments, and test results for at least six months.

My question is, as they sent each message, did they consider what message they would have to send the next week? Did they understand that they’d have to go from explaining telehealth to encouraging people to use it? Or did each new development cause them to have to consider a new communications strategy?

This has absolutely nothing to do with the type of business. I got a similar series of messages from my gym (“Clean your equipment after using” . . . “We open and doing more cleaning than before” . . . “We’re open, but limited to 25 people at once” . . . “We’re closed, sorry.”). I got them from my airlines and retailers. Every email marketing and communications staff is chasing its own tail here trying to catch up to the demands of unimaginable events. (Except for the clueless ones whose marketing messaging has continued on autopilot — and if that’s you, please shut it off and think a minute.)

You can think further ahead than this

It doesn’t have to be this way.

If you’re in PR or email marketing, I understand where you are coming from. Your CEO is changing strategy every few days. Your marketing people are adjusting with daily updates on the plans. And you, at the tail end of this chain, are skittering around, just trying to keep up with all the changes. As soon as you get an email out, you need to deal with the challenge of tomorrow’s messaging, which may be completely different.

Consider it from the customer’s point of view. They see a series of messages that sound urgent but may be contradicting things you said just days ago. They are scared and frustrated already. Their ability to respond to “urgent” shifts in messaging is limited. They’re losing patience with you.

There is a better way. And it doesn’t require you to predict what will happen six months from now, which is, basically, impossible.

You just have to think about what will happen in the next few weeks. Here are some likely scenarios. (I know this is depressing, but if you’re planning messaging, it’s better to understand it than to hide from it.)

• Parts of the country that are not locked down will become locked down.
• The political blame game will ratchet upwards.
• Many more people will be dying. Many of your customers will know someone who is in the hospital, or dying.
• People will become increasingly impatient with being unable to connect with each other in person.
• Medical professionals will struggle to cope. Too many of them will get sick.
• There will be severe and life-threatening shortages of medical supplies.
• Misinformation about cures, vaccines, and prevention will be spreading.
• Everyone will be getting checks from the government.
• Small businesses will be looking into government loans and identifying other strategies to hang on while things are locked down.
• There will be a deepening recession. Millions will be out of work.
• Stocks will gyrate wildly. Many will see the value of their savings significantly reduced, at least for a while.
• There may be a timeline for some businesses opening up again based on measured improvements in infection rates. In some parts of the country where the pandemic has peaked, it will begin to recede.
• Some people will be perceived as heroes — not just medical professionals, but business leaders and government officials who are doing their best to mitigate the damage.
• Your customers will have problems to deal with — whether that’s keeping their children occupied, working from home, struggling to pay rent, understanding their symptoms, or just feeling bored and anxious.

It took me 15 minutes to write that list. Now you do it. Think about your industry and your business. What will change in the next few weeks? What is knowable? What is unknowable? When will it become knowable? How will your customers be feeling? What will they need? And how will those needs change over time?

If you can keep your eyes, not just on the current moment, but on what’s just around the corner, you can be prepared.

You can craft each message with an idea of what the next message will have to be, and the one after that. You can prepare.

This has two important benefits.

First off, your customers will perceive you as helpful, because you will be anticipating their needs, not chasing yesterdays’s catastrophic event.

And secondly, you’ll be able to help your boss and her manager to think about strategy. Instead of being on the tail end of their gyrations, you’ll be able to lead them in middle-term thinking. And they will be grateful for it, because they’re just as harried and worried as you are.

You can think ahead in a crisis. Not years ahead. Not even months ahead. Weeks ahead. It’s an exercise worth doing. Next week’s version of you will be very thankful that you did.

Google will stop targeting political ads based on behavior. That’s a start. I call on every platform to end all targeted political ads (except by geography) — and for Congress to make this the law.

Here’s what happened with political ads so far in 2019:

• Twitter banned all political ads.
• Google just announced that for election ads, the only targeting it will continue to allow is by age, gender, adjacency to content, and location (at the postal code level).
• After relaxing its fact-checking of political ads, a Facebook spokesman said “we are looking at different ways we might refine our approach to political ads,” leaving the door open to possible restrictions.

I called for Facebook to end ad targeting (except for geographic) in my recent Boston Globe op-ed, and now I want to go further.

Why political ad targeting is a problem

You may imagine that the solution is to ban all political ads, as Twitter did. That’s too extreme. Candidates and parties deserve the chance to make their cases. While Twitter, as a private company, has the right to make any policy it wants, a blanket ban on all political advertising would violate the First Amendment. Of all the people to whom freedom of speech applies, candidates are among the most important.

But if we don’t ban ads outright, why ban targeting? Because everyone should see what political advertisers are doing. I don’t want political advertisers showing one message to Democrats and another to Republicans, or one to men and another to women, or one to people who clicked on a website about abortion and another to those who visited a site about guns.

(Geographical targeting is an obvious exception. People in Nebraska don’t need to see an ad from a candidate in Maine; that’s just wasteful and annoying.)

If we ban political ad targeting:

• Candidates will run a limited collection of ad formats, and watchdogs and competitors can check, evaluate, or respond to all of them.
• Lies in ads will decrease, since a candidate won’t be able to tell different stories to different voters.
• Candidates will focus on messages that resonate with the largest collection of voters, which is healthy for democracy.

A targeting ban is broader than you think

Here’s what I’m envisioning for this targeting ban:

• No targeting allowed, except by geography. This means even Google’s new policy doesn’t go far enough, since it still allows targeting by age, gender, or proximity to content.
• Applies to all media and social platforms, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Bing, TikTok, YouTube, and anything else you can think of.
• Applies to all media companies.
• Applies to all ad networks. Most of the ads you see, including on media sites, are placed by ad networks based on behavioral information. If we don’t include ad networks, there’s a huge loophole in the ban.
• Applies to all political advertisers. (Google’s ban is specifically for election ads.) So this would apply to political parties, PACs, advocacy groups, and issue advertisers as well — anything intended to influence how voters vote.
• Applies to email as well. Targeted email is another environment where secret lies intended for specific groups will flourish. Shut it down. Political email lists shouldn’t be targeted based on personal data.

As it stands now, any remaining platform that allows targeted political ads has an advantage. Advertisers who can’t target on Twitter and Google are just going to go to Facebook and ad networks.

Moves like Google’s are intended to stave off legislation — “We got this, stand down.” But until the ban is on all digital ad formats in all platforms, deception will rule. The ban on targeting must be total. Which means it must be a federal law.

I’m betting you think I’ve gone too far. Fine. What’s your argument for why politicians should be able to sneakily tell different stories to different voters?

News reports suggest that President Trump is interested in purchasing the island of Greenland which is currently a possession of Denmark. We join the President at his first campaign rally in Nuuk Stadium, capacity 2,000, a football stadium in Greenland’s largest city.

Wow. What a warm welcome!

Not an empty seat in the house. Seems like half the population of Greenland is in here.

Damn it’s cold. No global warming here, I see!

My gosh, I’ve never seen so many white people in one place.

Let’s talk. Let’s talk about what’s going to happen when Greenland becomes the biggest, most beautiful part of America.

First thing we gotta fix is the maps. You guys are getting the shaft!

Can we get a picture up here? Here’s what the lefty liberals are showing on CNN.

Puny. Puny! And here’s what Greenland really looks like!

That’s what I mean. You guys are huge. Huge. Like, big as South America. But much whiter. Greenland is great. And we’re going to make it great again.

Did you know that Greenland is set to be the biggest state in America? Bigger than Alaska, where my good friend Sarah Palin lives. You’ll be the biggest place in America.

Yeah, even if a little ice melts around the edges, you’re still gonna be the biggest.

Here’s what I’m going to do for you once Greenland is part of the USA, under President Donald Trump.

First off, we’re going to build. Build! There is so much unused real estate here.

I know building. I build lots of things. They all say TRUMP in big letters on the top.

So we’re going to build. Casinos. Golf courses — you got the land for it. A bigger football stadium, this one’s kinda small. An NFL team — The Greenland Greats. Damn, that sounds great, doesn’t it? If they can play in Green Bay, they can play here.

I found out there’s no good place to get a hamburger here. Gotta fix that. No more blubber-burgers for you.

And roads. I heard that there’s no roads in Greenland. No roads! What an opportunity. You guys are gettin’ around in dog sleds. That’s neglect by the damn Danes, that is. They’re holding you back. We’re gonna build roads and get you guys some cars. And pickup trucks. Driving around Greenland, doesn’t that sound better than dog sleds?!

Think what all those roads will do for the economy here!

Let’s talk about guns. Because you guys are leaders in that area.

There are 13,000 guns in Greenland. 13,000! Almost more guns than people! You’re a whole country full of good guys with a gun. So we’re gonna make Greenland a model for the rest of America. I want you to show those socialists how it’s done.

Now I know you’re not allowed to own pistols. And you’re not allowed to own semi-automatic rifles. That’s not freedom! And you’re lawful people, hardly anybody gets shot. Except for all the suicides. Those are a shame. But you deserve to have the guns you want.

OK, let’s talk about socialism.

Gee, that line usually gets a lot of boos. Well, anyway. . .

I know this is a socialist place. A 44% tax rate! That’s nuts. We’re gonna end that immediately. Cut it in half. In half!

You deserve to keep what you earn catching fish or guiding tourists up glaciers or shooting polar bears or whatever it is you do around here.

And speaking of socialism, we’re going to replace your health care. No more long waits for doctors. No more trekking to the hospital on snowshoes. I know your healthcare is free, but it sucks. We’re gonna pay the doctors, and you can pay a little more, too, once we cut that tax rate. The best doctors are gonna come here, because why not, it’s Greenland!

You know we have an air base here? It’s in Thule, way up at the top. The very top. Bombers, early nuclear warning, the whole thing. We’re gonna invest.

That’s right, invest in Greenland. My big beautiful American military is going to put American dollars right into Greenland, you’ll have the biggest airbase outside of the continental US.

Right after we build that long road to Thule.

Maybe put a casino up there too.

Now what’s the biggest threat to Greenland?

Outsiders, that’s what. You guys have been invaded more time than Mongolia!

It’s migrants coming here to take your jobs. Outsiders. Vikings. Icelanders. South Africans. Nigerians. Scots. Canadians.

Yeah, those Canadians know a good thing when they see it. And they’re coming to take your jobs and your beautiful Greenlander women. Ah, the women . . .

It’s like an invasion. And it has to stop. It has to stop now.

You know how you stop an invasion?

You build a wall. I’m doing it in America, and it’s working. And I’ll do it for you.

That’s right. With the help of my good friends in Russia, we’re going to build a big, beautiful wall right on your southern border. Dig down into that permafrost and just put up a barrier. That’ll stop those Canadians.

You’re gonna be bigger than Puerto Rico. Bigger than Guam. The biggest island in the world, part of the USA.

That’s making Greenland great again.

I’ll be back when this is America. Make Greenland Great Again! Make Greenland Great Again! Make Greenland Great Again!

(Waves, exits stage.)

(Off-mike): Dammit, Kellyanne, get me out of this icy shithole. Where’s Air Force One?

A decade ago, in the social media business book Groundswell, Charlene Li and I described online social technologies as an uncontrollable grass-roots movement. I had hoped social media would be a force for good. But now Facebook, along with its subsidiary Instagram, dominates that movement. It controls more of our collective attention — and gathers more of our collective data — than any other entity on earth. And it’s flailing.

Facebook has now admitted that Cambridge Analytica abused its data to influence the election; that its job, housing, and loan ads were discriminatory; that it shared data with 150 other companies without users’ permission; that its advertisers can target users based on phone numbers supplied solely for security purposes; that it stored hundreds of millions of unencrypted passwords in files accessible to its employees; and finally, that it broadcast the Christchurch massacre live. And that’s just in the last year or so.

We rigorously regulate financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase that are “too big to fail” because their failure would crater the world economy. But the attention economy that Facebook dominates is far more pervasive in our lives. Facebook now counts 2.3 billion active users; the average American user spends nearly an hour a day there, plus another 53 minutes on Facebook’s Instagram platform.

Facebook’s failure to behave responsibly with our data and our attention is a threat to civil society. It’s too big to flail the way it does.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s endless string of apologies can’t fix its repeated violations of trust. Neither can a welter of privacy settings that just emphasize how its default is to gather data on nearly everything. To ensure the public good, we regulate companies that build useful, compelling, or addicting products. We require seat belts in cars, determine how drug makers are allowed to interact with doctors, and block cigarette companies from advertising. What should we do about Facebook?

We must regulate it in two key areas: data stewardship and newsfeed fairness.

Start with data. Facebook has historically treated our data as its property. Forrester Research vice president and privacy expert Fatemeh Khatibloo explains, “Facebook has been incredibly cavalier and paternalistic when it comes to how they use people’s data. Their perspective is that the world must be open and connected. That is not good and right for everyone, and yet Facebook has unilaterally made the decision to make the world more open and connected for everyone.”

Last December the New York Times exposed how Facebook shared our data with its partners, allowing Amazon to get our friends’ contact information and Netflix to access our private messages. It then used a loophole in its own terms and conditions to justify this access. As Christian J. Ward, data partnership expert and coauthor of Data Leverageexplains, Facebook “acted as though those major companies were acting as its agencies, so it didn’t have to disclose the data sharing.”

The remedy starts with reviving the government’s moribund regulatory regime. In Move Fast and Break Things,Jonathan Taplin’s eye-opening book about the excesses of tech companies, he explains how Robert Bork’s libertarian theories have neutered antitrust enforcement, restricting it to cases of unfair price manipulation. “Google, Amazon, and Facebook are all monopolies that would be prosecuted under antitrust statutes if it hadn’t been for Robert Bork,” he writes. Some legislators and candidates agree; Rhode Island Congressman David N. Cicilline has called for the government to investigate Facebook under antitrust laws, and congressional candidate Brianna Wu says “an antitrust conversation is long overdue.”

Splitting Facebook from its acquisitions Instagram and WhatsApp, as Senator Elizabeth Warren proposes, wouldn’t reform its culture of data abuse. Instead, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should immediately initiate enforcement against Facebook for its repeated abuse of users’ data — and for skirting its 2012 FTC consent decree about data-sharing. The next settlement must include monthly public reporting on all new data-related programs and relationships.

Rather than attempting to undo past acquisitions, the FTC should block what’s happening now: Zuckerberg’s recently announced plan to integrate messaging within Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The government should also block future acquisition of social media or messaging competitors, like the video sharing social network TikTok.

And what of the news feed? While Facebook says it will de-emphasize the feed, it remains a powerful influence on consumers. Even as Facebook hides behind the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which say that it is not liable for content others post, it blocks nudity and ejects provocateurs like Infowars’ Alex Jones for inciting violence and hate. As author Taplin says, “They need to begin to take responsibility for what’s on their platforms.”

I don’t want the government deciding what’s shown on Facebook. I want Facebook to be clearer about how it decides. The next FTC consent decree should require Facebook to invest far more in the detection and blocking of pernicious content. It must clearly and publicly describe how the algorithm works and how it is changing. And it should make that algorithm available for testing by news organizations, non-profits, and even advocacy organizations. A media property with this much influence should be subject to regular audits for bias by groups across the political spectrum.

Regulation will gum up Facebook’s operations a bit. But with its 37 to 40 per cent profit margins, it can easily afford to spend more on compliance, transparency, and fairness. As a Globe article earlier this month pointed out, regulation and antitrust actions didn’t kill IBM, Microsoft, or AT&T — they simply made it possible for competitors to generate a diversity of new ways to interact.

As my Groundswell coauthor, Altimeter Group senior fellow Charlene Li, reminded me, Facebook is now “screwed” by the groundswell of its own users’ desires. “They can’t control what people want to share, it’s an absolutely impossible situation,” she says. But we can hold the company to a higher standard of data stewardship — and require a lot more transparency about how it works. Otherwise it will continue to use our data and attention to its own benefit, amplifying the worst of our impulses as it flails. Regulators must act, because a company this wired into our body politic is simply too big to flail.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced a major strategy shift towards messaging and “privacy.” Don’t be fooled. It’s not about making you feel safer — at all.

At the center of this two-step are two different definitions of privacy.

When you think about privacy, you are thinking “I don’t want my private information shared.”

That’s not what Zuckerberg means. When he says “privacy” he means “We’ll encourage you to send more ‘private’ messages and make fewer public posts.” He still wants to sell ads against your profile which will emerge from those messages, which means he’ll be sharing information about them with advertisers.

To understand what I mean, consider the following messages that you, or anybody, might send.

“It’s only been three weeks, but think I’m pregnant.”
“I know we’ve been together for ten years, but I’m going to dump her.”
“Herb has been embezzling funds for years.”
“My husband pretends to be a liberal but I know he voted for Trump.”
“I’m so depressed that, sometimes, I think about suicide.”
“My boss hit on me and then squeezed my butt. Ugh.”
“If Sarah can get that raise, we’ll start looking for a house.”
“Mom is dying. I just can’t get my head around it, but I guess this is it.”

It’s hard to imagine making posts like this on Facebook or Instagram. Even if you posted only for your friends, you most likely wouldn’t do a post to all of them about being sexually harassed or who you think is embezzling. But you certainly might send these as private message.

And the next day after you send one of these messages, you will start seeing ads — on Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp, or random websites you visit — for baby stuff, apartment rentals, labor lawyers, psychiatric services, depression medications, realtors, or hospice care.

That is what Zuckerberg means by privacy.

What Zuck wrote

Zuck’s post is very long, but let’s look at some pieces of it and see if I’m right. Consider how it starts:

A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking

MARK ZUCKERBERG·WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 2019

My focus for the last couple of years has been understanding and addressing the biggest challenges facing Facebook. This means taking positions on important issues concerning the future of the internet. In this note, I’ll outline our vision and principles around building a privacy-focused messaging and social networking platform. There’s a lot to do here, and we’re committed to working openly and consulting with experts across society as we develop this.

Over the last 15 years, Facebook and Instagram have helped people connect with friends, communities, and interests in the digital equivalent of a town square. But people increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room. As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms. Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.

Today we already see that private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication. There are a number of reasons for this. Many people prefer the intimacy of communicating one-on-one or with just a few friends. People are more cautious of having a permanent record of what they’ve shared. And we all expect to be able to do things like payments privately and securely.

Public social networks will continue to be very important in people’s lives — for connecting with everyone you know, discovering new people, ideas and content, and giving people a voice more broadly. People find these valuable every day, and there are still a lot of useful services to build on top of them. But now, with all the ways people also want to interact privately, there’s also an opportunity to build a simpler platform that’s focused on privacy first.

I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform — because frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing. But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.

I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever. This is the future I hope we will help bring about.

We plan to build this the way we’ve developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case — messaging — make it as secure as possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services.

This privacy-focused platform will be built around several principles:

Private interactions. People should have simple, intimate places where they have clear control over who can communicate with them and confidence that no one else can access what they share.

Encryption. People’s private communications should be secure. End-to-end encryption prevents anyone — including us — from seeing what people share on our services.

Reducing Permanence. People should be comfortable being themselves, and should not have to worry about what they share coming back to hurt them later. So we won’t keep messages or stories around for longer than necessary to deliver the service or longer than people want them.

Safety. People should expect that we will do everything we can to keep them safe on our services within the limits of what’s possible in an encrypted service.Interoperability. People should be able to use any of our apps to reach their friends, and they should be able to communicate across networks easily and securely.

Secure data storage. People should expect that we won’t store sensitive data in countries with weak records on human rights like privacy and freedom of expression in order to protect data from being improperly accessed.

Over the next few years, we plan to rebuild more of our services around these ideas. The decisions we’ll face along the way will mean taking positions on important issues concerning the future of the internet. We understand there are a lot of tradeoffs to get right, and we’re committed to consulting with experts and discussing the best way forward. This will take some time, but we’re not going to develop this major change in our direction behind closed doors. We’re going to do this as openly and collaboratively as we can because many of these issues affect different parts of society.

Many people are skeptical that Zuckerberg will basically turn Facebook into WeChat or a more elaborate version of WhatsApp. But that’s not what he said. I am going to take him at his word, that Facebook wants to make these sorts of messaging easier, and will put more effort into that and less effort into its public platform.

So imagine for a moment a world of social messaging where your messages go to the people you want, are encrypted, disappear from view, aren’t visible to strangers, work with other Facebook messaging systems, and aren’t visible to tyrants.

Even if Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp delivers perfectly on that promise, it can still observe your behavior; combine it with your behavior on other sites; profile you; target you with ads on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp; and sell that targeting profile to advertisers off of Facebook. None of what Zuck wrote changes any of that. In fact, the more you message, the more intimate details Facebook will know, and the better the targeting will be.

Does any of this post make you feel more secure? A few more excerpts:

This sense of privacy and intimacy is not just about technical features — it is designed deeply into the feel of the service overall. In WhatsApp, for example, our team is obsessed with creating an intimate environment in every aspect of the product. Even where we’ve built features that allow for broader sharing, it’s still a less public experience.

It will feel private, until you see an ad. Your friends won’t be watching, but Facebook will.

People expect their private communications to be secure and to only be seen by the people they’ve sent them to — not hackers, criminals, over-reaching governments, or even the people operating the services they’re using.

There is a growing awareness that the more entities that have access to your data, the more vulnerabilities there are for someone to misuse it or for a cyber attack to expose it. There is also a growing concern among some that technology may be centralizing power in the hands of governments and companies like ours. And some people worry that our services could access their messages and use them for advertising or in other ways they don’t expect.

End-to-end encryption is an important tool in developing a privacy-focused social network. Encryption is decentralizing — it limits services like ours from seeing the content flowing through them and makes it much harder for anyone else to access your information.

Do you trust this? If Facebook can’t see your messages on WhatsApp, how will it make money from advertising? This is not a promise, it is a “feeling.” Facebook has made many statements like this in the past, but when a violation happens, it’s always some kind of exception or loophole.

For example, when you send a message, Facebook’s client (Messenger, Instagram messaging, or WhatsApp) could see it, identify markers in it, and encrypt it. Then “Facebook” (the mothership) doesn’t see your actual entity. But it knows what you’re talking about.

Embracing the Zuckerberg definition of privacy will indeed make the services more private. You won’t be so exposed to the public — you’ll be safer from that. You’ll only be exposed to the entity known as Facebook. And we all know we can trust Facebook, can’t we?

The wizards from Black Mirror have delivered a new kind of entertainment on Netflix: a “choose-your-own-adventure” interactive drama called “Bandersnatch.” It involves the viewer (player?) in a way that’s goes beyond both games and film. I think “Bandersnatch” is a harbinger of amazing new kinds of entertainment to come.

“Bandersnatch” is the story of Stefan Butler, a young guy building a computer game in 1984. Stefan’s game is based on a “choose-your-own-adventure” book, also called Bandersnatch, and like the book, the game design allows you to make binary choices at various points in the game and see the consequences of your choices as the game’s plot moves forward. This also describes “Bandersnatch,” the Black Mirror entertainment on Netflix — as you watch Stefan experience his life, you get to make choices as trivial as what cereal he eats for breakfast, and and as consequential as whether he chooses to work with a professional games company or develop the game at home, on his own.

Taken purely as a film or video, Bandersnatch is first-rate. The acting is subtle and engaging, while the retro setting is a convincing recreation of 1984, including the crude computers of the time. As with all Black Mirror offerings, the plot is intricate and plunges you ever deeper into an abyss made up of equal parts emotion and technology. This is not a cheery piece of entertainment.

I may be the perfect reviewer for an interactive film like this, because I have a weakness — I am way too eager to suspend disbelief. I love any well-written movie or TV show. I identify strongly with characters and am easily sucked into their challenges. If you watch me closely as I view entertainment, you’ll see my heart rate change and tears come to my eyes at the the most trivially sentimental points. If the entertainment is cleverly scripted, well acted, and well produced, I’m likely to get sucked in.

That’s why “Bandersnatch” made such an impression on me. Unlike a game, where you have an objective, this production uses the power of linear narrative, acting, and video to engage you. This is similar to any other film or video. But once you are engaged, the action gets to a critical plot point and you, the viewer, need to make a choice.

These choices engaged me emotionally. You have to choose whether or not Stefan will take LSD as his mentor suggests, whether he will assault or back off from a confrontation from his father, and, in some cases, who will live and who will die.

It is an awesome responsibility to script a drama, because you are manipulating the characters and their interactions to move the plot forward and challenge the viewer. But in this case, the scriptwriters have shared the responsibility with me, the viewer. The viewer has only ten seconds to make these choices. I was genuinely torn between choosing the “right” moral path for Stefan and choosing a more evil path that might lead to a more interesting development in the plot. When I did the latter I actually felt guilt, as if I were misleading a friend I cared about. But when I chose the more moral pathways, often the results had terrible, unexpected consequences (plot twists, like actual life choices, don’t always go where they should).

This created an experience much more engaging than a typical drama, but far more realistic and involving than a video game. I wasn’t stabbing and shooting pretend game characters, I was manipulating the lives of people I cared about. To make the experience even more creepy, as “Bandersnatch” moves forward, Stefan begins to suspect that someone else is manipulating his choices. My guilt swelled as the character sank deeper into paranoia (but is he crazy if someone actually is out to get him — me?).

“Bandersnatch” is a masterpiece. I want more of this.

I know that interactive entertainment with choices is not completely new — remember Clue and “Leisure Suit Larry”? And the trope of following narrative branches has been plumbed by films like Sliding Doors, About Time and Source Code (or even It’s a Wonderful Life). But this is something new, combining the immersion of film with the viewer engagement of interactivity.

How the creators of “Bandersnatch” broke new ground

Why does “Bandersnatch” work?

Basically, its creators have had to develop a new visual language.

First, like their own protagonist, they need to develop a branching narrative and film all the branches. But it goes much further than that.

Some branches lead to dead-ends, from a narrative point of view. When you reach one of those, you loop around and get to make different choices in the narrative. But looping around could be very boring, since you don’t want to sit through a whole 15 minutes of exposition that you already saw once.

As a result, the creators of “Bandersnatch” use a narrative device of recapping the action up that point quickly — a device that all of us are comfortable with from so many narrative dramas — and then once again confront you with a choice.

The other brilliance of this piece comes from the choices. The writers and producers have determined which points have maximum drama, and fully thought out the resulting narrative paths. “Bandersnatch” works because it succeeds as a narrative — but one that runs on multiple tracks.

I’m certain that the scriptwriters (developers?) must have suffered the same level of anxiety and stress as their protagonist in keeping these paths all straight, and all equally interesting.

But having cracked that code, I would like them to branch out and deliver interactive narratives in other genres — and they don’t have to be as meta as “Bandersnatch.”

I want to see alternate histories. I want to relive the Cuban Missile Crisis with John F. Kennedy and his advisors, and make different choices from the ones they made. I want to see what happens if Nixon doesn’t resign or if Hillary Clinton campaigns in Wisconsin and Michigan.

What would Schindler’s List look like if Schindler makes different decisions? Could we see a branching version of The Godfather or Citizen Kane?

And what about movies, like “Bandersnatch,” that are designed just for this genre? Let’s follow the life of a woman choosing to marry the guy who has charmed her completely or the girl that’s her best friend; the ambitious young man who could be a priest or a politician; the undercover cop who decides to stay honest or become a criminal.

I don’t have the imagination to decide how to pick these stories; I write nonfiction. But I do know that if you can plunge the viewer into the moment of creation, you can build something amazing.

“Bandersnatch” marks the start of something new. I can’t wait to see what comes next.