The Elevation Economy
Or, What’s Really Missing From Tech, the World, and Us Today
I’m going to cover a lot of ideas in this essay. Tech, apps, leadership, society, my pet hamster, and the point of it all. So let’s begin at the beginning.
In the last one, I suggested: tech today is creating an infantilization economy. Concierges, chatbots, personal assistants, and so on. All these risk infantilizing people — not really liberating them.
In this essay, I want to ask the opposite question.
Can Infantilization Apps be used for beneficial purposes?
Sure.
Let’s imagine chatbots. We might use them to make virtual doctors, or virtual teachers, to help teach hapless men how not to be such eternal dickheads online, and so on. Consider concierges. We might use them to help build a functioning daycare or elderly care system, instead of…parking people’s luxury cars. Consider assistants. We might use them to help disabled people like me, or even average people not like me, but who are still vulnerable, function a little better. And so on. I’ll stop there, because finding ideas like this isn’t my job — it’s yours. My point is:
Of course. Like all technologies, Infantilization Apps can be used for good.
But that’s not really what the tech industry is doing with them.
When your chatbot asks you, “What do you want to do today?”, what it really means is: “what do you want to buy today?”. In other words, chatbots, assistants, concierges, and so on, are essentially an interactive front end for direct marketing. They’re like Clippy for capitalism.
How to Become a Billionaire
Of course, the question geeks and beancounters alike will ask is: why should infantilization apps be anything else but interactive front-ends for marketing? Virtual doctors? Forget it! VVVIP restuarant bookers are what’s profitable, right?
Wrong.
Contrast Groupon and Uber. Groupon didn’t really fill a social need, have a social purpose. It never lived up to the hype.
Uber, on the other hand, is probably the biggest success story of the last few years. Why? Because it fills a real social need. It helps people deal with the exigencies of a deeply broken transportation system and urban planning nightmares.
It’s not a coincidence. It’s simple economics. The market is bigger, the need is greater, and the discretionary spending is far larger. Social issues are where the greatest profit opportunities lie.
When VCs and geeks imagine that the biggest markets and largest profit pools for apps are…VVVIP restaurant bookings…the truth is they’re not thinking big enough.
The industries that need investment are the ones where chronic underinvestment has resulted in serious social problems. Transportation, education, finance, healthcare, and so on. Do you think that a virtual doctor would make more than a…restaurant booker? Of course! And if you don’t, you probably need to revisit econ 101.
You profit the most by making the world a little bit better. If you really want to be tomorrow’s billionaire, forget the trivial, meaningless, banal. Go and change the world as it needs desperately to be changed. There’s no guarantee. But the truth is you’ll have a way better shot by doing things that matter than wasting everyone’s lives on things that don’t.
What’s Really Missing From Tech, The World, and Us
Which brings us to the real question: why doesn’t tech get it?
Why are the best tech minds of this generation working on…helping the rich get their drycleaning done a little bit faster…helping overgrown babies with trust-funds party a little harder…when the truly epic profit opportunities are in reimagining healthcare, education, transportation, and finance? Not just because I say so — but because reality demonstrates so.
Because the tech industry is missing one key ingredient. The most magical and scarce one of all. Not money, talent, or even ideas.
But leadership.
What’s the job of a leader? All the above. It isn’t just giving speeches and cutting deals. It’s finding, creating, imagining, envisioning, delivering ways to change the world for the better. And maybe, just maybe, building a great institution, organization, mission, vision, culture, to do it.
But that’s exactly what the tech industry doesn’t have. Leadership. It has severe and chronic leadership deficits. That’s why it’s systemically squandering its resources — talent, people, ideas, money — on things that don’t matter. But these resources won’t last forever. The good times always come to an end. And then we have to take stock of what we have actually achieved.
Leaders lead people to places that matter. They elevate and expand human lives. The tech industry can indeed do that. The tools its creating can be tiny miracles. But not unless they’re put to fundamentally better uses. Not just more efficient nor more productive ones. But ones which radically, enduringly, dramatically improve people’s lives.
We can discuss precisely what that means. But it’s easy to see why a VVVIP restaurant booker doesn’t, and a virtual teacher in a failing educational system might.
The First Job of a Leader is Impact > Profit.
So why doesn’t tech have true leaders? Well, the truth is that it’s not just tech.
The world doesn’t have true leaders! Take a look around. Just today, people in Iceland, London, and Paris are staging mass demonstrations because their leaders turned out to be…what, buffoons? liars? incompetents? Try…money launderers.
So leadership is in sharp decline across the globe. The quality of today’s leaders isn’t just poor, terrible, awful — it’s horrifically bad, not just nonexistent, but negative.
My pet hamster’s probably a better leader than many of our current ones. Many of today’s leaders aren’t just bad leaders — they’re anti-leaders. They don’t take us nowhere — they’re leading us backwards. At least Hammy wouldn’t regress us into the dark ages. What the world really needs, therefore, before tech, institutions, even elections, is better leaders. Without which all the preceding don’t really have much of a point.
The problem of leadership deficits isn’t specific to tech. But it is endemic in tech. You can see it everywhere. Nearly every major tech company has embarked on a series of vanity projects…which have failed pretty disastrously…when not met with outright mockery. Google Glass, I’m looking at you. But that’s a tiny example.
Leadership deficits in tech mean: it’s an industry which is failing to deliver. Not just returns to investors, but also impact to society. For the simple truth is that while tech has accelerated into sci-fi — you now have a Star Trek communicator in your pocket — none of that has prevented or even mitigated the implosion of the middle class, the explosion of the new poor, the young turning into a lost generation, demagoguery from rising, and so on. Tech’s leadership deficits are most visible in the story of America. The world’s richest and most technologically advanced society is also the rich world’s most stagnant, underdeveloped, fractured, and impoverished.
It’s a striking paradox, right? The point isn’t to point fingers. But it is to understand that the tech industry simply isn’t using, developing, creating tech for purposes that have enough of a social impact. The truth is that VVIP restaurant bookers instead of virtual doctors are going to leave everyone a little poorer — their investors, their societies, and their economies.
That’s exactly what the missing leaders in tech have to to do. Start putting social impact at least on par with, if not above, profitability. By understanding that profitability, at least the kind we want, lasting, true, and growing profitability, is best seen as a function of impact — not the other way around.
The truth is that we can’t develop leaders in classrooms and boardrooms, though we try. That’s exactly why we don’t have them. Leaders need to live, fail, experience, suffer. They must be mentored, guided, nurtured, cultivated. They must come to know social impact, deep in their bones, before they can create, envision, and deliver it to everyone else.
So if tech wants to matter again, it probably needs to develop better leaders. Leaders capable of truly changing the world. As it needs to be changed. Not just so it can please hopeless idealists like me. But so it can fix the world’s big problems, create tomorrow’s radical innovators, and earn the legacy it should rightly have.
The Elevation Economy
I’ll call all the above an Elevation Economy. It’s in many ways the opposite, or maybe the inheritor, of the Infantilization Economy. The real challenge for tech today is creating one. It’s the challenge, too, for most industries, societies, nations. I’ve used tech here as a small example of a big challenge.
See the baby at the top of this pic? Your job is making his life radically better. Elevating him as a human being. Making it more possible for him to create, imagine, defy, rebel, build, imagine, prosper, love, grow. Not just fattening him up as a human guinea pig, sacrificial lamb on the altar of late capitalism, or targeting him as a mark in a war for his wallet.
That’s the way. Not just to profit, or even to impact. But to becoming a leader. Which is what tech, the world, and us, so desperately need.
Umair
London
April 2016
