Recommendations for Survival: what to do when we have salted the earth we live on.
Trump and the pandemic have upended the concept of noble lies. Noble Lies have lost their meaning and become ignoble
What are noble lies?
From Wikipedia: In politics, a noble lie is a myth or untruth, often, but not invariably, of a religious nature, knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda. The noble lie is a concept originated by Plato as described in the Republic.[2]
Some may argue that our current POTUS has obliterated the line between Noble/Ignoble lies, unlike no other. Despots, dictators, and autocrats are all a product of the human condition across millennia. History is not new, so why should this time be any different?
I believe that the power of Noble lies to scale quickly and take root across societies is at a pace never before seen because of how we consume news, what we read and listen to, and how the combination of the two inform, disassociate, depersonalize, and desensitize us to each other and our shared humanity.
Noble Lies are corrosive because we are in an abusive relationship with (T/t)echnology
I’m an early adopter of technology, and my life is spent working within and across this industry. But technology (big ‘T’ or small ‘t’) has been focused on growth without much regard for the cost of that growth. One contributing factor driving this growth is the ubiquitous (and increasingly intimate) nature of computing over the past 20 years. Ubiquitous computing means everyone can connect via phone, tablet or computer to the internet.
Digital devices are becoming more intimate. Desktop computers sat on our desks and we had to visit with the computer to be spoonfed. More often than not, the constraint of physical proximity to sit down at the computer and use it helped limit our consumption. Laptops made it easier to take your computer to bed, but there were still physical constraints that limited your always on-connection.
Cell phones are with us all the time, and are everywhere, capturing everything. There is almost no disconnection, save for sleep. 3 in 4 Americans admit to using their phone while on the toilet.
Some context: there are 275M smartphone users in the US as of Q4, 2020 according to Statista, and according to eMarketer, your typical American smartphone user spends at least 3 hours a day, staring into that small screen. To put this in perspective, the average American is averaging less than 6 hours of sleep a night.
3 hours of time dedicated to your phone is significant and indicates a long-term relationship, commitment, and different level of intimacy.
Mirror mirror in my hand, who is the fairest in the land?”
The next step is VR/AR, followed by implantable devices. Elon Musk is ensuring that computing will breach the last frontier and be embedded into your body.
Each successful evolution of technology makes our connection to it more intimate. All of them decrease the distance between content and our brain stem, and if not adjusted, ultimately will create an indestructible dopamine-feedback loop in our brain.
Algorithms represent computer-driven evolution. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are digital echo chambers that take your input and yank you by your thumbs into a rabbit hole to be spoonfed.
Digital news sites and over-the-air channels are no better, as they desperately try to play catch up to suck on your attention. Algorithms are nothing more than mathematical models that use inputs from variables, to calculate outputs. Less like Golem from Lord of the Rings and more like the headless horseman from Sleepy Hollow. Algorithms have a job-to-be-done — and are operating with limited awareness, except to reinforce against its stated, programmed, goals. When these mathematical tools are instructed to maximize engagement or growth, they dutifully do their jobs and run optimization loops that evolve the power of the model, much faster than biological systems.
We live in a hyper-connected and intertwined world. Any collection of humans is a community, and digital platforms are no different. In 2009, when I worked ON the early days of Enterprise 2.0 / Social Business, I learned The Golden Rule of all community management; when creating a new community you must seed it, feed it, and weed it. Communities are ecosystems. They need a space to grow, and seeds of activity to beget more. Like forests and fields, you need nurturing and cultivation. Communities need to be tended to — and sorted. Sometimes you need to prune them. Actively tended and maintained gardens, with responsive farmers will take into account the conditions and adjust based on what they intend to grow. All of these platforms and businesses need to take responsibility for the gardens they are tending, and what is watered.
The Holy Grail of digital marketing: online ‘activation’ to off-line ‘activity’. For so much of the early 2000s we were trying to connect the dots between online engagement and offline action. The dream of marketers was to get individuals so excited as to receive the email, then run out of the house to buy the product.
We wanted to start a revolution.
Perhaps all the digital infrastructure and over $1B+ in political advertising that the Trump campaign and its Super PACs spent on the 2020 campaign is the ultimate marketing case study.
But as poet Robert Burns said, “The best-laid schemes of mice and men, Go oft awry, And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy!”
We’re going to need to acknowledge the power of social platforms, and make them accountable.
The power of these commercial, for-profit, publicly traded tech corporations in our lives is immense, and the intended and unintended consequences of their unregulated growth are affecting our society in innumerable ways. These platforms feel like a digital commons, but we own nothing. We are digital serfs working in indentured servitude, content to click, and be exploited in ways we can’t yet comprehend.
Noble lies have corrupted the digital commons — and that’s the true tragedy. Algorithms have reinforced the propagation of ignoble lies and we are no match for them if we keep them plugged in and executing on their instructions with no oversite. We are staring at the face of The Predator and we are no match.
All of this is a combination of short term thinking and the unintended consequences of the maximization of algorithm-driven profit without consideration for the humans whose datastreams power the beast. We have salted the ground we walk on, that we have built our communities on, and raised our families on. And regardless of who salted the ground, for the sake of our survival, it must be dealt with.
We can remove the salt through hard work.
Gardeners know that the sure-fire way for salt reduction in the garden is through good drainage that will allow salts to be washed out of the soil. We need to wash the salt right out of this land. And while most plants will not grow with excess salt in the ground, a certain subset actually will survive and thrive in this toxic environment. A solution might again be in the humble mangrove.
When the mangrove’s root tissues are exposed to salt water, the concentration of salt in the vessels of the root is lower than the concentration of salt in the water surrounding the plant. This concentration gradient would tend to drive salt ions across the plant tissue’s membranes into its cells. However, mangroves have various salt tolerance mechanisms that vary with species: they can exclude salt, accumulate salt, and/or excrete salt. Plants that exclude salt prevent it from entering the membranes of their roots. In other plants that do end up containing excess salt, some accumulate it into older leaves so it can be shed with the leaves. Others excrete salt, in much higher concentration than seawater, through glands on their leaves.
To remove the salt is going to take hard work and responsibility.
Every single tool and platform that has been used in the past decade to create strife needs to understand their role in the process. I find Twitter’s recent news regarding Project Bluesky and their desire to build a decentralized platform that removes the onus of moderation from the platform, an engineering-led solution. But additional tooling to make a platform distributed doesn’t decrease or remove salt.
If for-profit platforms whose business models are explorative end up harming consumers unintentionally, there is precedence for action and regulation.
Take lead paint: Congress banned the use of lead-based paint in residential structures and environments, in 1971, in residential projects constructed by, or with the assistance of, the federal government,[3] and the Consumer Product Safety Commission followed with implementing regulations, effective in 1978.[4]
But again, regulators are notorious for also being mealymouthed in the face of data. Here’s a list of additives that are banned in Europe, but allowed in US products because of grandfathered loopholes.
Its not just about technology — if all the current platforms disappeared, we would still have a citizenry divided.
Here are three recommendations that start to make them better.
1) rebuild trust in systems and organizations by making them transparent, equitable, and responsive to all.
Trust within institutions is at an all-time low. How do we build up trust? We have honest conversations about ugly truths and we go back to first principles. We ask questions of individuals and organizations to understand their business model and motivation. Basic questions around how individuals and organizations benefit directly and indirectly from their activities and transactions is a fundamental rule of understanding how systems work. Understanding individuals and organizational compensation models help provide context for their perspectives. This visibility helps people visualize how the systems work, and for whom. Part of our task is also rebuilding and restructuring systems and organizations that have not been equitable or focused on the total addressable market. The sunlight that this visibility brings, is the best disinfectant to help us heal.
2) Caveat Venditor: we must demand a higher bar of conduct from the marketplace.
Cavest Emptor is a Latin phrase that means buyer beware.
Generally, caveat emptor is the contract law principle that controls the sale of real property after the date of closing, but may also apply to sales of other goods. The phrase caveat emptor and its use as a disclaimer of warranties arise from the fact that buyers typically have less information than the seller about the good or service they are purchasing. This quality of the situation is known as ‘information asymmetry’. Defects in the good or service may be hidden
I suggest we look not at the buyer in this transaction but instead the seller, and the related Latin phrase caveat venditor: seller beware.
Caveat Venditor is a Latin term which means let the seller beware. The person selling goods is accountable for providing information about the goods to the seller. It is a counter to caveat emptor and suggests that sellers can also be deceived in a market transaction. This forces the seller to take responsibility for the product and discourages sellers from selling products of unreasonable quality.
Technology and the internet have decreased the cost of creating a product or business. That has made us all lazy and lowered the bar for what we are willing to accept or put up with. We need to increase the bar for what we expect from sellers. I’m not advocating for the repeal of Section 230, but instead saying that there are certain contracts and agreements that shouldn’t exist between sellers and buyers because there are certain basic rights that should exist for all buyers and sellers. GDPR and CCPA is just a start on the human terms-of-service that helps us outline our data rights. We need a code of conduct that promotes community growth that should be demanded by the people and incorporated by all organizations.
3) Normalize corporate social justice and make it table stakes.
Companies make money by selling goods and services to customers. It is easier to sell more to an existing customer than it is to get a new one. So why not make sure you maximize profits by making sure the Lifetime of your actual customer is not maximized?
The Government makes money through the taxation of its citizens. These taxes are not all equally distributed amongst the population and contribute to the racial wealth gap. But why not make sure your citizens are healthy and wealthy enough to pay the most amount of taxes in order to grow the system for everyone?
People make the world go round and every organization who benefits from consumer monetization should revisit the customer lifetime value equation to see how they can improve or increase the quality and quantity of that customer’s lifetime.
These same organizations would be well suited to understand the great and varied nature of our American society and the power and richness of its diversity. The appeal to all audiences, regardless of background, creed, race, gender, or is not pandering, but just common sense good business. If we are building products and services for all markets, then we must work to understand and empathize with our customers, and their pains, gains and jobs-to-be-done.
In addition to the 3 recommendations above, we should also consider more structural changes that will help us remove the excess salt that permeates our society.
- Get money out of politics and deal with Citizen’s United.
- Consider Universal Basic Income: Automation is here — everyone needs upskilling for the jobs that are being created.
- Cultivate diversity as a superpower acrosss our society — our workforce should represent the audience it serves.
- Learn from marginalized communities who have survived and subsisited on salted earth. Listen to black and brown people.
- Pandemics look for purchase amongst the populace independent of politics. Make Universal healthcare a right for all inhabitants of this great country.
- Make higher education free — the rate of change is increasing and our former, current and future workforces need reskilling and training to serve the jobs of the future.
- Tie the above with a mandatory civics requirement for all. We need to partner cities and counties across this country with other communities to cross-pollinate our divided citizenry
I’m not going to lie, in that I believe our spirit may be willing to address these challenges, but our will ultimately will be weak, because once again we will choose profits over purpose.
But despite this I hold out hope.
Arnold defeated the Predator, and he’s continuing to fight. So I leave you with his message and words of advice after the events of this year. I’m hopeful for the future because we’re willing to continue doing the work. This too shall pass. If you want to join us, sign-up and let’s keep it moving.
