GGX — 2 days to go
Five days to go to the first contested election since Trump descended to the presidency. Whether 2016 was a surprise, the midterms will be anything but. In fact, that to me is the good news: either Trump will be successful at getting Republicans and enough independents to the polls, or he won’t. My instinct is that Beto O’Rourke will not beat Ted Cruz, that the Senate will retain Republican control, and that the House will flip. If I’m wrong, things will not get much worse.
Then there’s Apple’s product and platform rollout of new Macs and iPads. For those who are deeply invested in the linked value proposition of iPhones, iPads, and peripherals such as AirPods, HomePods, Apple Watch and the Pencil, this was a good announcement. For everybody else, it’s too expensive or not crucial to spend money on right now.
Meanwhile, Twitter is busy leaking possible plans to fight fake news by killing off the Like button, and more problematic, the ReTweet functionality. I look at Twitter “improvements” from a somewhat interested but impotent perspective: nothing I can do about it because however damaged we are by malicious race baiting and insult-driven agenda maintenance, in five days we’ll know how effective that is, or not. Trump will still be in office, the Democrat challengers will be more or less visible, and the media will continue to find horse races where few exist.
Ranking a list of things we can have impact on continues to be more valuable than characterizing the politics, or business strategies, or social networking in vertical areas. By ranking them by order of potential impact, we can begin to allocate limited time and resources in a more strategic way. To take several issues and conflate them across the the boundaries, we can see the impact of that investment, or at the least, discard them from the top of the list. For me, the debate around Proposition C in San Francisco neatly crosses over several boundaries — politics and social being the high order bits — as well as some broader verticals, such as the impact of mining social signals as a product versus hardware/software integration and its impact on innovation and jobs.
On Proposition C, Marc Benioff has made the case for the value of responsibility to the community outweighing the cost to the company. It might even be good business to improve the safety and minimize the collateral damage to the tech industry. But the initiative and Benioff’s investment in the dialogue on the issue is as beneficial to the other side as it is to the proposition’s backers. By drawing out the opponents on their reasons for investing against the initiative, they include Jack Dorsey, the new mayor London Breed, and other venture figures in the effort to solve the problem.
What this dialogue produces is a chance to take the best of all parties and fashion public attachment to dealing with the problem. Contrast this with the political postering in the midterms and by the cable media, and there is a sense the homelessness issue does not devolve to a give-up fatigued defeat for trying to succeed. One strategy plays to the dynamic of fear and division; the other encourages building consensus around those elements of each approach that the other can accept. Then the ratification in the election of either side helps build support for the actions that will follow the initial rendering of the issue. If C passes, we get to see how successful a business-led initiative really is, or conversely, well if not C then what? No change effectively validates the Prop C case for action.
The real struggle is between the media and the social networks. The latter’s business model is defined traditionally as an eyeball economy, where clickbait is more profitable than insight. But take a look at Netflix, and Prime, and the possible Apple device-based version of Prime, and you see analytics driving a more nuanced view of audiences than the broadcast model these services are challenging. Shows get reach among influentials in the social space, which drives a sticky validation of the overall services’ monthly or subscription cost. Instead of a prime time season of favorite network shows, valuable viewers gravitate toward binge shows regardless of destination or schedule. This on demand model more closely leverages alternate channels that grow into economic juggernauts across mobile viral communities of interest.
Trump’s attacks on the media may be effective this cycle, but they are less and less effective with digital natives who are growing in economic power. The party most well positioned to succeed in this climate is neither. Independents, or the Swing class, are waiting with confidence for signals from new networks or savvy incumbents to honor their demands for control of time and bundling decisions. The more the conventional holds off the emerging media, the more desperate we become for the antidote to anger, despair, and hopelessness. Attempts to rein in social signals of momentum and consensus will fail as the opposite is rewarded by influential market makers. Their behavior will be delivered as actionable metadata to those networks that respect the value of permission.
