When tech shows up, it offers a shortcut and convenience.
You can use Google Maps to direct you somewhere without paying much attention to the surroundings.
You can use Claude to write your marketing copy and get a better-than-mediocre result the first try.
You can look for a gift on Amazon, pick the first match, and be pretty sure it’ll do the job.
Tech adoption often focuses on making things easier, simpler, and pre-decided.
And yet… we can also decide to use tech to do more work, insert more humanity, and amplify flexibility. We don’t try to get our time back, we try to figure out how to leverage the time we’ve got.
When a film director uses AI to create storyboards, it’s a chance to generate multiple approaches to a scene, not just one. When we sit with all the data Google Maps offers us for a trip, we might plan a less direct route, with more stops and detours, simply because we now know what our options are. And once we know what the mediocre and average marketing copy looks like, we put in the time (and take the risks) to go to edges we never would have had the resources to explore in the old days.
The best tech gives us a chance to work harder on the parts that matter to our customers and to us.
Here’s the simple fork in the road:
Professionals and organizations that use AI to save time, cut costs, and lay people off are taking a lazy road to failure and irrelevance.
Those who use it to do harder, braver, and more powerful work, who figure out how to create more value and charge more for it, and who end up hiring more people to do so, will be defining our future.
No one cares about it as much as the person who’s planning it.
Some folks waited in line for the first iPhone, but not many.
It’s tempting to try to bend the curve and put the ‘grand’ into ‘grand’ opening. But that usually creates disappointment. In any population, only a few folks get satisfaction out of going first.
The focused work of launch day, then, isn’t to maximize turnout. It’s to get the right people to come.
Not just people who like to go first, but folks who are eager to give you the benefit of the doubt, and those that are focused on spreading the word. Not because it’s good for you, but because it’s good for them.
People like you.
The Newton had a huge launch day, one of the most successful consumer electronic devices of its time. But no one ended up recommending it, so it faded away.
Launch day matters when distribution is scarce. If a movie opens poorly, the theatre puts a different film in next week. But most of the time, planting the right seeds in the right place is more important than hustling for noise.
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.
[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]
Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.