There have always been trolls. Hecklers, jesters, and class clowns. The troll lives under the bridge and invents nonsense grievances in order to get attention.
But, until recently, there wasn’t much of a business model to support this career choice. It’s said that William Randolph Hearst started a war to sell newspapers, but few people owned newspapers…
Social media changes this. Algorithms can be gamed for attention. People who are willing to tear down others for fame and short-term gain can leverage their selfish actions, create clicks, and get paid for it. They stage a car crash and turn our rubbernecking attention into cash.
To make it worse, it compounds. Trolls have to outtroll each other to keep the attention coming.
Professional wrestling is a choice, but no one insisted we all watch it.
The solution is right in front of us, and won’t require many people to implement. Give us a troll button and set the default to opt-out. Deplatform the trolls, except for those who want to engage with them.
It’s not obvious how to rank and rate what qualifies as trolling, but I’m sure the algorithm wizards can figure that out. If the companies push back, they ought to be willing to acknowledge that trolling is a profit center for them, and they’re willing to trade our peace of mind and cohesion for a few bucks.
Your social media scroll might get a bit less amusing, but the upside is that the world we live in will get better. And so will your day.
When we change the incentives for people seeking attention, their actions will change as well.
You can’t go into a bank with a mask on and expect to be treated as a valued customer. We get the culture we reward.
Every day, about 16,000,000 hours of tennis are played. The percentage of that devoted to tournament play approaches zero.
So why is informal tennis built on a zero-sum model? In a game, every shot is designed to have the opponent fail. The goal is to have your opponent miss the ball, hit it into the net, or simply wear them out.
What would happen to the experience of the game if the goal was to help your opponent do ever better? To extend, to thrive, and to be in sync?
No one wins at jazz. That’s the point.
There are plenty of ways we could imagine keeping score–from high-tech watch-tracking solutions to simple ways of counting and encouragement. There are many ways to win, and we can find useful ones if we try.
The lazy use of points revolves around elimination, scarcity, and solo victory.
But we’re not lazy if we don’t want to be.
When culture pushes us to measure things that don’t matter to us, our values are captured.
Once the metrics turn a profit for corporations and those in power, they are amplified, and almost overnight, begin to matter to us, even if they run contrary to what we originally set out to do or become.
We’re easily seduced by scoreboards, competition and dark patterns.
Professor C. Thi Nguyen has written a brilliant book on the philosophy of games—big and small. The Score helps us understand that dominant industrial and cultural systems push to deskill us as we become fungible, replaceable parts in an easily measurable enterprise. His book is wide, deep, and unforgettable. (It also includes riffs on yoyos and fly fishing.)
Measurements are sticky, contagious, and relentless. Once a competitor begins to move ahead on a metric, it gives them an advantage, and that pushes us to focus on the same metric or fall behind. The Red Queen races ahead, simply because racing ahead is what they’ve been trained to do.
Perhaps, though, falling behind on a metric we don’t care about might be exactly the right thing to do.
In a game like Scrabble or chess, the values capture is right there in the rules. It’s explicit, agreed upon, and the whole point. You feel good about landing a seven-letter word because that’s what scores, and you don’t mind trading your rook for a better position—that’s the game you signed up for. But when we carry that same instinct into how we spend our working hours (and months, and decades), we might end up sacrificing far more than a rook.
Once we see values capture unfolding, we have a shot at making a choice. Measure what matters.
What’s the structure of your project? Here are three paradigms to consider:
Video game development is expensive and risky because you’re on two frontiers at once. The tech frontier, trying to do something with hardware that hasn’t been done before, and the game mechanics frontier, perfecting and polishing new forms of interaction that last. So Myst and Tetris and Doom… classics we talk about decades later. A teenager could build a knockoff of any of these in a few weeks now, but back then, they represented risky leaps.
Movies use a technology that’s over a hundred years old, with incremental improvements added all the time. But being the first with the new tech doesn’t win many prizes. Instead, successful movies are a combination of one creator’s vision and the coordinated work of hundreds or thousands of professionals using proven tools and techniques.
And books, five hundred years into the genre, still remain the work of one voice. The partnership with a largely unseen editor and publisher matters, but sooner or later, the author puts the words on paper.
[There are analogies here that go far beyond the strict adherence to the three final products of course. Slack is a videogame, developing real estate, making a record or performing surgery is a movie, and the work of a freelancer is closest to writing a book…]
I’ve done all three, and each is thrilling in its own way. As the available tech advances, each type of project is more accessible than ever. But each still comes with its own rules, risks and upsides.
We get to choose.
Steinbeck points out that the stars shine in the sky, regardless of the drama here on Earth.
Perspective fools us into believing that our point of view is primary, but it’s not difficult to imagine a more distant (or closer) one that would change everything.
The service at table 7 might not matter much to the waiter, but it matters a great deal to the elderly couple celebrating a positive medical diagnosis. The greeting you offer to a stranger might seem trivial to you, but it could change the arc of that stranger’s day. And the drama that consumes us in this moment might be forgotten in just a few days…
“Important” always requires a modifier. Important to whom? Compared to what? In what time frame?
It’s all important. And none of it is.
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