Man’s Search for Relevance

Thoughts from Finland, March 2018

[30.03.2018] Today I ticked off a big to-do list item: watch all Slush 2017 videos. The talks spanned three theatres over two days. The last video was a fireside chat about growth and community, that led to some random thoughts… Years ago I was surveying a large range of language learning apps, and noticed they often faced a growth bottleneck, sometimes turned out okay as a lifestyle business, but never scaled up to the stratosphere.

There were at least three main issues:

• Unit economics: for a subscription business, these numbers are like the laws of physics, cohort-to-cohort retention curves, cost per acquisition, unit margins, life-time value, etc. Customer acquisition is an commoditised competitive open market — prices can be pretty high. And most language learning apps lack the high-premium margin to sustain acquisition. The best achievable state is perhaps Babbel, with long-running flywheel machinery set up — they could just as well be selling bath oils— the machinery works well with relatively predictable results.
  Strategies to explore: skew the subscription to be front-loaded
  re-segment to target high LTV, better conversion, etc.
• Graph fragmentation: often the app offers a narrow range of interactions, for example, a series of print-to-pixel lessons or materials to go through, or a flashcard deck, or as a broker of exchange or tutoring. Whereas, if we think about all the interests and activities out there and possible ways for users to connect and interact — say, others learning the same language, or learning a different language but experimenting with similar methods, or when they come across some information that may be helpful for someone else… The conventional services limit the offering to predefined “peninsulars” or cul-de-sacs on the graph, reducing opportunities for additional touch points (which boost engagement and LTV) and for organic growth via social spread.
  Possible strategies: include more node types, design easier, friction-less ways of interacting with the “community” in a looser sense. Identify the high-engagement cases and replicate success stories (through features).
• Mode of consumption: this may be the hardest one to solve. Learning is about changing the user’s brain and a learning app is predicated on modifying behaviour. The app must compete for time and attention with not just other apps, but thousands of other things in life. This is very different from AWS selling computation to enterprises where growth is not bound by the factors of human cognition. Economies will again and again face consumption bottlenecks until new modes are invented.
  Possible strategies: virtual economy, move towards entertainment.

Mode of Consumption

Do you wear it or place it in a closet, do you cook it in a microwave or a teapot, does it require at least four people just to play — at times many steps must happen before consumers can extract value from the product.

These days when I see people walking around holding or wearing or using products, be it electronics or a box of premium rice, I sense an expansive projected galaxy of production and distribution networks and layers upon layers of value chains. It’s like the Matrix view of economics…

Medium, for example, for me it takes several hours of actual work spread across multiple days to write an article, to hit “Publish” and launch it into the dumpster of oblivion, to have this one interaction with the platform. It’s a high-effort, low-outcome type of interaction. On the other side, reading itself is also a lot of effort, maybe there’s a whole world of refined thought and marvellous ideas out there waiting for me to discover by reading…

We the obscure and unconnected are certainly free to entertain the pleasures of indulging in intellectual thoughts, even to express them more freely than fellows with spastic cerebral palsy or Lou Gehrig’s, yet we struggle to break out of this diving bell of infinite noise and indifference dictated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We end up in a world where meaning simply dissolves into nothingness, where fruitless delights have fruitless ends…

Whereas, sharing cat videos through messaging is a low-effort interaction that produces a simulated sense of bonding with your friends. There is a lot less friction for the cat video to be consumed. 30 years of advances in computer vision and what we get is adding bunny ears to a selfie. In 2015, some were asking “Where are the hoverboards?” Well, the future has arrived, it’s just different from what we imagined.

The Race is Not to the Swift

Lately I’ve discovered the podcast channel of Sam Harris, who’s very eloquent, articulate (very good at finding a fitting word or phrase), and has a likeable voice in front of a podcast microphone, and has taken effort talking to a range of really smart, thoughtful people, the discussions often carried a sense of sincerity, intellectual honesty, and a voice of reason.

There are these live shows at theatres, sometimes stadium-sized theatres, where fans buy a ticket to listen to the host talk with one or two guests. People queue up at the audience microphone stand to ask questions — it appears, quite obviously, there’s a demand to hear the opinions of those on stage, and a strong motivation to engage in conversation with them.

When you listen to the audience, it sounds like, many of them are equally intelligent and articulate, with interesting thoughts (some in the audience are researchers, professors in other fields), yet the puzzling part is, how many people find others in the general population this eager to engage in an in-depth conversation? And really, it’s not for lack of trying…

What attracts a motivated audience or interlocutors to engage in conversation? Is it the quality of the ideas? Sure, the podcast has lots of high quality ideas, but we don’t even have to examine the a museum of errors on some subjects (e.g. free will) to realise that quality is not the necessary or sufficient factor here.

What are the chances the NYT bestseller list represents the very best dozens of ideas that were discovered by humanity that year? Just look at news or mainstream entertainment or the default Quora or YouTube feed, how much popularity is attributed to banal, farcical stupidity?

There are surely long-form articles with fine editing and great taste, yet even to myself reading text is akin to sensory deprivation (meanwhile I’m readily entertained by a fast-forward summary of Ecce Mono or the Shed of Dulwich or the Holiday Hole). Long admirable articles would just become yet another saved link. Book-marking is an easier mode of consumption.

A Night at the Museum

Earlier this month we had a data visualisation event at the Päivälehden Museo. At one point, the discussion came upon the power of visualisation to change attitudes and actions. Visualisation makes certain assertions more salient. What was not easy to see before, is now obvious, through the help of the visualiser. That crafting of the lens through which people see is indeed power. Einstein had some notion that truth should be simple (or elegant), then there’s the idea of “Beauty is truth, truth, beauty.” What is made really compelling by visualisation is easily accessible to us in the sense that it’s simple and elegant and intuitive and beautiful, yet out intuitions are not tuned for science, and what we find compelling are often just good at catching attention. You study journalism, the fourth estate, its role in civil society, in democracy in a state that is not failed, then you go work for BuzzFeed and try to come up with click-bait titles for regurgitated listicles.

Is it too grandiose to consider one’s “sense of duty”? For an architect, what is the best design for a seminar room, for a petition alley, for a sauna, a garden? For a journalist, what kind of stories and visualisations should one use? To reflect what truth? For a writer, what aspects of the human condition, what kind of exploration into the language and its expressions, can one work on?

Some time ago I thought of the gifts of the three wise men as metaphors for paths of self-actualisation, finding meaning or relevance, doing something that matters, etc. etc. Gold, for riches in business. Frankincense, for exultation in academia, the temple of knowledge, a life signed away to an austere monastery. And myrrh, becoming a martyr in activism for some worthy cause.

To what extent does our sense of agency map onto reality? To what extent are we just at the mercy of circumstances? Of where and when we are, and whom we are lucky enough to meet? Are we not drifting with the currents (just happen to be engulfed in the midst of larger forces haplessly geared towards selling more ads and getting people to click on them)?

Today also happens to be Good Friday, which cross is yours to bear? Or can one, should one live on bread alone? Does mattering matter? Can we happily labour away at a sand mandala?

Stumbling into Jante

On Wednesday at 10:30am I went to see “Ready Player One” in 3D at the massive and largely empty “Scape” theatre of Finnkino. Ironically I’ve tried the headsets and virtual cinemas a few times and seen the promised land, I’m convinced Big Cinema is on a path of demise. Ateneum was also free that day.

The movie resembled little of the novel — and the novel itself is about 10% excellent HCI insight scattered through 90% of hikikomori wet dream.

The question of relevance has a very practical level, in the context of the oncoming age of automation, the discussion around UBI and whatnot. I remember Lotte the organisational psychologist mentioned that work provides structure and meaning, but we didn’t go deeper into that topic. I also remember some mentioning of psychiatry cases where patients witness a collapse of the soul in unemployment following the loss of structure. The other day I picked up a random book by Csikszentmihalyi, there was a chapter that talked about “people yearn to leave work for leisure”, yet it’s harder to craft leisure time into something meaningful and worthwhile.

It was Thursday afternoon before Easter and most people have left the office (we as students also use the floor as co-working space) to begin a long-weekend, yet this concept makes no sense to someone like me who doesn’t have to report to the office at 9am anyway, it’s the structure of work that created a sense of excitement for the holiday.

When I listen to the talks at Slush, people have interesting thoughts and they are doing immensely exciting things. Sometimes when I examine my own thoughts, there’s the conceited delusion they seem to be equally interesting, yet I’m not doing any of those immensely exciting things.

When you’re young, life can feel like an untold story to be unravelled before you. There’s some holy grail to be discovered by the pure of heart. The future is shrouded in an alluring sense of unspecified purpose, something great is yet to come, you’re sure, you have some destiny to fulfil, maybe to create a unicorn company no-one thought of… and there’s always the magical thinking of “deus ex machina” — a plot device that is very unimaginative, really — that the eagles will suddenly appear out of nowhere to save the day, things will somehow magically work out..

Isn’t this just self-aggrandising delusion? Neither saviour nor tribune nor that spinning Andromeda gives a damn about us… we mean about as much to the universe as the number of commas in the combined value of van Gogh’s works means to his dying breath. “Some day” always comes to pass sooner than expected, and it feels like not a thing has changed. And those who would change our lives magically if we had a chance to meet are just equally trapped in a world of oblivion and impossible odds.

One Medium amongst Many

What is the role of art? On the wall captions in Ateneum, it said: “At the turn of the 20th century”, Finnish artists were embracing the cosmopolitan culture, bringing back techniques and ideas from all mainland Europe, and they were trying to address the fundamental questions of the human condition… Art (painting, film, orchestral composition, literature, etc.) was a medium of exploration for these questions… Today, we might as well be virtual reality or some other technology or startups, there’s no topological difference between dollars and paint — and we still face pretty much the same questions.

In the film “Birdman”, there was a scene of Edward Norton was arguing with Michael Keaton on Broadway and the line said “But long after you’re gone, I’m gonna be on that stage earning my living, baring my soul, wrestling with complex emotions, cause that’s what we do…” That’s another echo for what you do as a medium to explore the human questions, in a world that’s more engrossed by “vroom-vroom big cinema”, one has many a means to struggle with the realisation of his irrelevance.

There was also an interview about the “signing party” for the Machintosh, Jobs thought it was only appropriate for the creators to “sign their work”, by having there signatures “engraved on the mold” so it carries off on the casing of every computer shipped. The line was along the line of, “if these people were born in earlier ages, they would have been painters and sculptors. Now in this age, this is the medium of their expression and how they create a masterpiece.”