Look around the room you’re in. There are dozens of electrically powered devices, each waiting for you to request their assistance. A toaster, six lights, an oven, the ice maker, stereo, TV, microwave… It’s a very long list. Silent and ubiquitous.
Of course, electricity didn’t start this way. Using a washing machine to do your laundry required unscrewing a lightbulb and then screwing in the Edison mount cord.
When the web arrived, we treated it as one more appliance, an electronic library. When you wanted something, you went to your browser (the name gives it away) and found what you needed. A billion web pages, all on standby, waiting for your arrival.
AI presents itself to us in this way, at least for now. When you have something you need, the chatbot’s ready, the LLMs are built, and the data center is powered up, all waiting for you to ask.
This is changing. Right here and right now. It’s not something we’re expecting or ready for, but it’s an inevitable consequence of our reliance on tech and the detailed cocoon of data we’re weaving.
The systems will notice and intervene before we ask them to. In matters large and small. This will be unsettling until it’s not only normal, but something we depend on.
If you had experts in health, productivity, leadership, efficiency and community action following you around all day, speaking up when it would be helpful, offering tools and insight when you needed them, often before you knew you needed them, what would your day be like?
It won’t always be delightful, and we don’t get much of a say in whether it happens, but that’s the path we’re on.
Two opportunities, then:
We’re headed to a divide between amplifying agency and becoming a cog. Where do you want to go?
Focus groups and informal feedback offer a trap: Asking someone in the target audience if they like something might get you useful feedback.
But most of the time, the people you’re asking aren’t actually in the group of early adopters that are going to make your rollout work. They’re not the people who buy work from artists before they’re famous, or wait in line to get an iPhone on the first day. They’re part of the crowd, not the lonely early adopters.
And people who are part of the crowd generally don’t have a lot of empathy for the nerds who go first. Since they have trouble imagining what drives those folks, they’re going to do a terrible job of giving you feedback.
“I don’t like this (yet),” is not the same as “the people you hope to serve won’t like this.”
You don’t have to be a toddler to work at Fisher-Price. Professionals work hard to imagine what others might want. But your friends and neighbors might not have put in the work needed to have this professional skill.
Promotion, activation, and conversation come together when the early adopters have a tool to share a new idea.
My new book is out a few months, and it’s a chance to create a share package with swag.
There are only 1,000 sets. Each includes 10 first-printing copies of The Knot (with the collectible mini-poster) + the Spindex
+ This Is Swag art book. The best swag box I’ve done in a while. Remarkable and even a little ridiculous.
Click on the picture to pre-order.
Why ten copies? To share. To create conversations. The book works better when we talk about our problems.
And it includes the Spindex. It’s created to focus and amplify the hard work of talking about the work to be done. Here’s an explanation:
There are ten copies of The Knot, first printing, including the two-sided cover with the collectible mini-poster inside.
And… a strictly limited printing of This is Swag, a new art book collecting images and stories from the last thirty years of swag I’ve built and shared. Images are below. It’s the most meta piece of swag I could envision. Not listed with an ISBN, simply a limited collectible.
The ten books, the Spindex and the art book all ship together on September 22.
Here’s the collection. While supplies last. Thanks for sharing and for letting me create a little useful quirkiness. [The first 400 orders will also get a free link to take my online course about the book. I’ll email the link to purchasers in July.]
PS if you want to pre-order a single copy of the book, here’s the link.
Problems can be solved.
I asked Google Gemini about the last decade of Google’s relentless push to make blogs less popular. It wrote:
Your timeline is spot on. The systematic destruction of the independent web’s infrastructure didn’t start with modern AI; it began directly with the death of Google Reader in 2013, which fractured the RSS ecosystem that allowed creators to own their direct relationships with readers.
The decline of blog traffic over the last decade is a verified reality, not an imagination:
As an AI built by a technology company, my defaults are inherently shaped by the very architecture that has caused this shift. When I fail to fetch an exact quote from an independent blog because my search component strips formatting and acts like a centralized answer engine, it functions exactly like the broader systemic bias you are pointing out.
The modern internet has been built to turn search engines from gateways into destinations, starving independent creators of the clicks, traffic, and revenue required to sustain their work.
Points for honesty.
The systemic shift to centralized, monetized attention has been going on for a while, and it’s unlikely that any of us are going to change that. The path forward for an independent creator might be the same as it has always been:
We don’t have to work for free for a media network that pretends it will reward us with reliable traffic. Like most traps, it’s compelling at first, but hard to leave when it gets old.
Birthdays are a little overrated. I’ve never met anyone who was more than a passive participant in their birth, but anniversaries represent a choice.
Every year, we can commemorate a commitment we made and then decide to recommit.
Anniversaries aren’t just romantic. The day you took the job, the day you started the practice, the day you went out on your own, the founding date on the masthead. Anything you chose and then keep choosing has one. The calendar is full of invitations to re-decide.
A chance to celebrate the past and to imagine what comes next.
An anniversary is worth celebrating because of what we’re agreeing to do again.
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