Why Biology is the Ultimate Business Model

It turns out that the last generation’s Pandora’s box, Info Tech, the Internet, the Platform Economy, had another box inside it. That box’s name is Biotech, and in the next generation, it will eat the world. Just as we’re beginning to adapt and fully utilize the tools of IT (you’re likely reading this before/after a Zoom call), another wave looms on the horizon. With cheaper DNA sequencing, fully automated bio labs and faster molecular simulations, biotech’s barrier to entry is rapidly plummeting. Today’s college coders will be tomorrow’s bedroom biohackers. Today we move information but tomorrow we’ll be moving matter. This new wave has tons of promise: it promises everything from curing cancer, to shipping sustainable food, cosmetic, and packaging replacements, to creating neural prosthetics and microbial computers, to growing handbags from mushrooms, to storing data on strands of DNA at scale. But what are the risks, and how can we learn from biology itself to mitigate them?

Tech innovations are never quite what they’re slated to be. The personal computing, .com, and platform booms all came with their promises, successes, and disappointments. We were promised open source everything, redistribution of power, a global culture of collaboration and understanding, flexible work, and access to the world’s knowledge — and, in doses, we did get all that, but we also got “free” software that exploits using an advertising model, huge tech monopolies, nationalism via misinformation at scale, platform precarity, and access to unlimited distraction.

All that said, with the risks also come reasons to be optimistic. Tech alone is not enough, we have to shift our thinking to make good things happen. The pandemic has reminded us that we’re biological creatures, and the ongoing climate emergency requires a massive update to our ways of thinking and living. The good news is, biology has, along with technical innovations, a lot to teach us about how to think, live and do business. These insights, combined with direction and focus, have the potential to do worlds of good.

Biology is the ultimate business model. In their article on creating synthetic life, The Economist stated that “biological information and its implementation are inseparable. Life runs not on software and hardware, but in allware.” What this means is that the conception and execution of a biological program is one and the same. This is profound as our dominant guiding metaphor over the last decade has been one where these concepts are separate: computers. We’ve been making technology, businesses, and relationships as if parts of the system are siloed entities and don’t reverberate past a small sphere. This mentality makes it easy to skirt responsibility for things that happen outside your illusory border. We think a shift is in order. Companies like Apple started this train of thought by bringing unity to design hardware and software, but we can and should go further. Whether it’s creating architectural design software that includes data-driven urban context around the building being designed, creating a closed loop economy where resources and waste are accounted for and addressed, or updating our model for what it means to be human in the face of dissolving distinctions between man and machine, biology provides a great model for business to understand and build the future.

Biology provides a model for balance. Human history post-industrial revolution is a story of unbelievable progress. We’ve lifted billions out of poverty, put a man on the moon and connected the world. However, that story comes with a footnote, or rather, a footprint: CO2 emissions and the climate emergency. The rebranding of human nature as something above nature itself has left us with a blindspot, and thus in our race for linear progress we’ve forgotten about circular equilibrium. Nature and biology not only provide us with a model for how a world in balance might look, but also gives us the tools to make that happen.

Biology teaches us how to adapt. In a recent appearance on the AI podcast, biologist Manolis Kellis outlined how biology’s messiness allows it to adapt, how it is precisely biology’s imperfections that allow it to gain from disorder. For business, this doesn’t mean creating chaos, but building systems and narratives that can grow and live in harmony with an ever changing world. We’re stepping now into an age of adaptation, where those who can balance a unified vision (a skill of humans), contextual awareness (allware), and an ability to adapt (and evolve) will ultimately thrive.

For humanity and biology, the name of the game is symbiosis.

The Age of Biology was originally published in FNDR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What courting in quarantine taught me about the future of relationships

Aside from putting a nice shirt on over sweatpants, prepping for my most recent date was like most dates I’d been on before. Getting past the awkward formality of setting up the Zoom call wasn’t a big deal either. But as soon as my Hinge match, a girl that I had only chatted with for a few days, popped up on my screen, I was in her bedroom — on the first date. Social life in quarantine made it clear that our relationships are never going to be the same.

Staying home during a pandemic is an act of compassion; but dating during a pandemic is an act of survival. When almost everything else in our lives stopped, daters defied the dread by doing whatever we could to close the social distance. We’re social animals, after all. Building relationships is the primary directive of our species.

And for the last 20 years, we’ve tried using tech to help us with those relationships. So far, the result has been that more of our interpersonal interactions (the ones that natural selection refined over generations) are being replaced by words on a screen. We text more than we speak. We like more than we love. And feeling blindsided by our own inventions, we blame them for commoditizing our communications and driving us further into opposite corners of ideologies. We should be asking why, when technology helps us do almost everything else in life, it’s not working well enough for that which is core to our being.

Of course, it’s too soon to tell if virtual relationships, romantic or otherwise, are really any better than what we were trying. But it’s our only option as we are all thrust into history’s greatest social experiment. And like new code in a program, the human algorithm seems to have embraced this new digital literacy without a glitch (mostly — unless you’re a parent homeschooling right now and you hate me for suggesting that the transition has been easy). We’ve proven that these not-so-new technologies can work. They’re definitely functional. Now armed with another set of tools meant to connect us, the question is: what does it take for us to maximize their benefits?

Virtual Intelligence

Five minutes into my first virtual date, I realized this was a whole different game. With no distractions, there was an entirely new focus on one another. Somehow even looking at your phone feels much more rude in virtual. So, even as I was embarking on a new conversation, I was wondering what the new virtual decorum looks like.

We know a majority of our communication is non-verbal, something we’ve been missing out on for decades of lifeless chat boxes. Now that we see each other, what are the new rules of body language in a virtual space? Sure, crossed arms are still a sign of defense and hands to the lips may (un)intentionally signal “I wish you would stop talking.” But what does it say when your virtual date never turns off their virtual background? (what are they hiding back there?)

You can see this new digital body language manifesting in professional environments, too. Like what does it mean when a client goes off mute while you’re talking? What are the rules about peeking at notes or Google during an interview? Are students allowed to be visually absent from class? As we morph into avatars on a screen, we’ll need to discern a brand new set of social cues. To build relationships in the future, we’ll need a digital layer to our emotional intelligence: virtual intelligence.

Economy of Love

By our 3rd date, Quarantina and I were recreating classic game nights with the app Houseparty. One of many apps and virtual features booming in the coronaverse.

The social apps of B.C. (Before Covid-19) enabled us to connect with more people than ever. But by design, they let us exceed Dunbar’s number, the ideal number of relationships our monkey brains can handle. At least for now, it’s hard to be virtually intimate with more than 100–150 people. Think of the people whose faces you’ve seen on a screen since the shutdown. That’s your tribe. That’s your natural social network. And we should expect to see more innovations that help facilitate these tight-knit community interactions.

The last recession brought us disruptive ways of doing business. Uber, Airbnb, Venmo: they invented entirely new economies, ways to think about work, assets, space, and money. In the next wave, we can repurpose our tools to fulfill the original promise of the internet, to bring us closer together. If the last era made a business out of our relationships, can this one make relationships our business? Now that we’ve over-indexed so far on satisfying our social desires, can we build businesses that better serve our social needs? What metrics do we need to build an economy of love?

Love isn’t blind

Now that we’ve been dating virtually for a few weeks, I can honestly say that I’ve never grown closer to anyone that I met on a dating site. All without physical touch. Which got me wondering which senses we actually need most to create a bond. And what might change when we’re able to see each other in person?

Netflix’s dating series, Love is Blind, was an experiment that set out to prove that people would be willing to spend the rest of their lives with someone before ever having seen them in person. Couples dated for weeks inside pods where they could only hear the other person before deciding whether or not they would marry them. Of 50 singles, only 5 couples were willing to get engaged. And of those 5 couples, only 2 actually tied the proverbial knot. So the show actually proved that, in most cases, those visual and physical cues programmed into us are essential in establishing a real connection with someone.

The uncomfortable reality is that our physical interactions will never be the same. A consciousness of distance will remain. Dr. Fauci and others have called for the death of the handshake, a symbol of good faith dating back thousands of years. More solutions that minimize our need to put our hands on anything ever again are popping up by the day. And plexiglass barriers will create more borders between us than any walls ever could. A heightened sense of bacterial and infectious possibilities may be with us for generations. So in a touchless world, we’ll need all the closeness we can get. Without physical sensations, we’ll need tech to bolster our other senses, like our ability to see one another.

The Valley Beyond

Maybe this has been my most meaningful online dating experience because I shared a natural chemistry with this wonderful human on the other side of the screen. But I can’t help but think that the circumstances had a lot to do with it. COVID-19 has forced all of us to embrace new vulnerabilities. A visual vulnerability that brought outsiders into our most private spaces. A viral vulnerability that made us worry that we could become the next statistic. A collective vulnerability that prompted an urgency to share our time with loved ones, whether we knew them before or not. Do isolation and vulnerability make it easier to get closer to someone else because they force us to become better acquainted with our own nature? Do they make us better daters?

In this heightened state of self-awareness (“how am I feeling today?” has become both an essential physical assessment, and an existential check in) we’re relying on a suite of digital platforms to help us navigate these vulnerabilities, together. Dating apps have made some adjustment during the pandemic, but are they missing a larger opportunity to play a more important role in developing deeper relationships? If Tinder is an app that celebrates the single life and Hinge is the dating app designed to be deleted, where’s the app that meets somewhere in the middle and helps me both find and foster love? Dating apps today were designed to help us meet IRL, handing us off to other digital tools to fill in the gaps. Rather than being disposable matchmakers, can dating apps play a role in developing emotional, intellectual, and spiritual connections? Is the Hinge-to-Zoom, or Tinder-to-Facetime hand-off inevitable, or could dating apps stick around and be part of the date?

The Valley Beyond, like in HBO’s Westworld, is the unknown world ahead of us. We don’t know what is waiting for us on the other side. But we do know that we want to build this new world better and our digital tools will help us get there. In a world where more relationships begin like mine did, we’ll depend on the digital realm to create emotional bonds as well as efficient connections. But, if things work out, I’ll have to experience these future developments in digital dating vicariously.

Digital Intimacy in the Valley Beyond was originally published in FNDR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Just a little over 3 months ago, I found myself hopeful of what we could achieve at the start of this new decade. Fueled by an awareness only possible through reflection, perspective and space, my sights were set on identifying a next wave, filled with idealism and hope for a better way forward for business.

That idealism focused on a series of shifts we were beginning to see in business (and a new generation of Founders):

I held a whole lot of hope that, with time, our values as consumers and businesses would evolve. That with the daily efforts of Founders and their teams we could rally, and eventually we’d build better systems, better models and make much needed change.

But with this Covid Crisis these shifts have gone from being ‘nice to haves’, to ‘must haves’. From a form of Idealism to true Necessity.

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” - Warren Buffett

This shared experience of sudden human and economic interruption, is pulling the water from the shore and revealing the truth beneath the surface.

Chasing the American Dream, we’ve misunderstood economic success as human success, building systems around the wrong metrics: We’ve praised business growth, over the basics of the bottom line; we’ve given over control of our data, attention and privacy to technology all for the ease, speed, efficiency and convenience; we’ve used technology to distract us from reality and to service our every want, while ignoring our needs; we’ve outpaced ourselves with the new speed of life and we’re losing our balance, and connection with each other.

What we’ve done to make business succeed, has not protected our humanity along the way. Our collective focus on financial maximization has left human needs behind, and the ‘human recession’ is no longer a theory. We’re in it.

We are in the middle of a re-evaluation taking place on both an economic(macro) and a human(micro) level.

Our daily lives are marked with a dramatic economic backdrop — unemployment at the highest levels since the 1940’s, stock market circuit breakers, bailout packages, income inequality runs rampant, daily infection and death total ticking across the screen, signals of a long and painful recession, an unknown end and certainly no signs of a viable playbook from government leadership. All macro signals that the systems are beyond broken.

And yet, in some ways it’s been a very human crisis that has reminded us of what truly matters. When faced with adversity and a system that has left our human values behind, we’re able to clear through the noise allowing our humanity to shine: getting back to the basics, reconnecting with the family unit, looking to rebuild ‘the village’, unlocking relatability through shared experiences, sharing humanity from our homes, finding ways to live sustainably, and discovering new ways to commune. With perspective, space and no small dose of desperation, the Covid Crisis is forcing a values reset.

In whatever way we get through this, the world will not be the same. We need to take stock and ask ‘what kind of world do we want?’ and realize we all have a role to play in how we move forward. New systems will need to be built in new ways that reflect these new sensibilities and values. As we accelerate the next wave, which companies will we want to spend time with?…

… Perhaps the ones who define a new value proposition around both business & humanity succeeding.

Accelerating the Next Wave was originally published in FNDR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

User Experience vs. The Human Experience

Smooth, Seamless, Intuitive, Ergonomic, Sleek: the gold standard of experience design in the digital age. As the mediums of interaction change, our behaviors change to mirror them. On a macro level, we know humans are changing, but in our personal lives, it’s hard to catalog the effects, much less the implications on our wellbeing. Intuitive is predictable. Sleek becomes slippery. Smooth lacks grit. There’s an ongoing conversation amongst UX designers about digital humanism but a scarce few brands actually implement it on a mass scale.

Somewhere between cheap thrills through instant dopamine, perfectly measured efficiency, and DMV-style tediousness lies a balance that will make you happier. This article is an exploration of that balance.

1. THE DIGITAL GOLDFISH

Do you ever open Instagram and not know why?

If you stop and think about it, the buzzing of your phone is the technological manifestation of a nervous tick. An itch that is so meticulously crafted that even when it’s not pinging and prodding your attention will wander to it. We are in a symbiotic relationship with these amazing and aggravating little glass rectangles.

Which leads to a second, more important question: Does it make you feel good?

If you’ve been around marketing for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard this proverb: “The average consumer has a shorter attention span than a goldfish.” I’ve always wondered what that actually means. More than likely, this is just an interesting way to say, “make it short and make it good.” However, the fact that we’ve all nodded along to this comparison is more telling than the observation itself.

The optimists will likely say that it is simply humans adapting to a new digital way of living. To the realists, this must be the result of a fast nervous planet. The pessimists will argue that it was better in their day, when things actually meant something. The ever-so-clever cynics will grin at their Facebook Inc. stock and wonder how much more advertising an ADHD generation can consume. As for me, I’m left wondering how you can determine the attention span of a goldfish.

Goldfish aside, it feels as if we are moving incredibly fast. Ideas, content, conversations, and people are flickering past as we glide like a bullet train through our day-to-day. More people are texting and driving, flitting between web pages at work, and struggling to stay focused on this article. We’ve created a sea of digital information and the average person is alternating between skipping across the surface and frantically doggy paddling to stay afloat.

I do not know yet if this is a good or a bad thing for the human condition. But I can sense that The Great Acceleration is happening. You feel it. We all do.

2. THE AGE OF ANXIETY

anxiety (noun)
anx·​i·​ety | \ aŋ-ˈzī-ə-tē \
plural anxieties

Definition of anxiety
Medical : an abnormal and overwhelming sense of apprehension and fear often marked by physical signs (such as tension, sweating, and increased pulse rate), by doubt concerning the reality and nature of the threat, and by self-doubt about one’s capacity to cope with it.

Anxiety has surpassed depression to become the most prevalent mental disorder in the United States. The interesting thing about anxiety is that it’s caused by both too much and too little. You can develop anxiety because you are paralyzed, like a deer in the headlights, by an upcoming work week. #SUNDAYSCARIES. You can develop anxiety because you are worried that you’re not doing anything with your life and that you’ll die meaningless and alone. #MEIRL. It’s rooted in anticipation. It’s a cognitive disconnect between what the ego decides should be happening and what is happening. It’s the feeling of the Sword of Damocles dangling above your head. Too much silence can be deafening.

We built this for ourselves. Mankind has painstakingly, over generations and millennia, tamed the world. As billions and billions of people trod towards the future we’ve flattened and polished the inefficiencies of life. In the digital era, this smoothening is the pinnacle of innovation. Everything has been crafted with efficiency and convenience in mind.

Everyone has their own custom-tailored bit of the internet. Your little slice remembers you, is molded to you, and tries its level best to deliver exactly what you want as you want it. We’ve built a world of our own design, and yet, we are uncomfortable in it.

Consider this: You’re bored on a Thursday afternoon. You don’t want to do work but you need to get something done. You click around a website and buy something you only sort of need. You are delivered a fleeting hit of dopamine. The website remembers you. You check out in one click. #SELFCARE. It’ll be here Friday. Easy, seamless and efficient give way to smooth and slippery. This is exactly what we’ve decided we wanted. You get a ping on your phone. Your package has shown up. TY Mr. Bezos.

You swear this used to make you happier.

3. OK ZOOMER

By now, you’re probably dreading the impending “if these kids would just get off their darn Instagrams, they’d just be able to focus on pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.”

For this first generation of digital natives, myself included, unplugging is no longer an option. The digital world and the physical one have melded into one existence and it is ridiculous to believe you can remove yourself from it. Humanity exists as much on the internet as we do in real life. Don’t believe me? Try to get a job, education, or house without creating a digital identity. If bootstraps still exist, they surely are made of ones and zeros.

So that leaves us stuck between two extreme schools of thought. On one hand, the good-ole days, where things were harder but simpler. You might have had to walk both ways uphill in the pouring rain to get a Coke, but by golly did it taste sweeter (it was the cane sugar). On the other hand, The Great Acceleration, where mass has become multi-niche, attention is currency, and culture moves at a mile a minute. It’s enough to make your head spin.

We’ve been so caught up in exploring how fast humans can go that we’ve forgotten that we have a breaking point. We’ve process-itized and optimized our human experience by designing for variables that don’t actually make human’s lives any better; only quicker. Leaving you with more and more time to stare at your reflection on the screen.

It’s not that we’re doomed. Perhaps digital innovation just needs to have a quarter life crisis. Remember; we’ve had to deal with widespread internet for all of 25 years. In human terms, it’s a recent grad still finding out what it wants to make out of itself. It just needs to wake up in the middle of the night sweating and wonder if anything it’s doing will actually make anyone happy.

We are facing a conflict between what we want and what we need. We want systems that reflect the potential of mankind. We build systems for our idealized version of ourselves: rational, productive, driven. These mythical “users” will interface perfectly with the mechanism and accomplish the goal as quickly as possible. And yet, humans aren’t just users, they are humans. We are imperfect creatures trying to build a perfect world and then wondering why we feel out of place in it. The digital natives designing our interactions aren’t just writing code, they are laying the building the architecture of a new human experience.

We are starting to get there. If Instagram is your social media garden perfectly groomed, Snapchat is playing with your dog in the mud. Snapchat was, at its core, unpolished, inefficient, and incredibly fun. There’s room for both refinement and eccentricity, but one makes better memories. Hinge made its name on a clever profile system that pushes you to buck up and actually go on some awkward first dates instead of just shopping for hot singles in your area. Hipcamp encourages city dwellers to get out of their comfort zones and explore. All of these companies have managed to build experiences with surprises, texture, a little bit of struggle, and ultimately meaning.

The next generation is on the way, nipping at the incumbents’ heels. With a little luck, and a lot of hard work, they are going to build digital analogs to the human experience. It’ll be amazing, revolutionary, and generate a ton of value for shareholders. All I’m asking is that they remember that we are not as fast and as smooth as the machines we create.

The Smoothening was originally published in FNDR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Illusion is the first of all pleasures” — Voltaire

Technology and humanity have become inextricably linked and it’s more pressing than ever to understand the impact on our collective consciousness.

Reflecting back on the last ten years of technology, we saw social networks promising connection morph into social media platforms measured on performance, an overabundance of information designed to be shared not processed and the rise of machine learning, AI-powered algorithms laden with bias.

We’re living in a dopamine-driven economy, addicted to algorithms that perpetuate our bias. Drowning in information but starved for knowledge. The underlying impact is a sense of urgency leading to flash decisions and closing the aperture on curiosity.

What does the world become when all that’s left are echo chambers and confirmation bias? What does it mean for individuality when groupthink takes over? What is our responsibility when falsehoods spread faster and farther than truth online?

These questions were sparked after I read an article about a liberal Jewish boy who was drawn to the darkest corners of the Internet and joined the alt-right at the age of 13. Three years later, after returning to digital consciousness, he wrote about his experience in Fast Company.

What started as a search for belonging at an impressionable age left him believing that the wage gap was a fallacy fabricated by feminists, that black Americans committed homicide at a higher rate than whites, and that Jews controlled global financial networks.

The line between fantasy and reality is thinning in our society as a whole, and especially among our youth. Studies have shown that children are able to distinguish between reality and fantasy between the ages of 3 and 5, but what happens when we, as a culture, become untethered from reality?

Sascha Baron Cohen gave a poignant keynote at last year’s ADL awards capturing the state of our times with clarity:

It’s as if the Age of Reason — the era of evidential argument — is ending, and now knowledge is delegitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. Hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities.

In 2016, while Trump’s Presidential Campaign was charging full steam ahead, Oxford Dictionary announced their word of the year: post-truth, reflecting what it called a “highly-charged” political 12 months. It is defined as an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.

In 2017, fake news was the word of the year by Collins Dictionary.

The spread of disinformation doesn’t just impact us politically. In the last three years we saw status seeking Millennials flock to the non-existent Fyre Festival (a marketing campaign that relied heavily on social media tactics), families follow deadly health advice from Facebook and flat Earth conspiracies spread around the globe on YouTube.

The democratization of online platforms and conversations around free speech have created an unruly landscape where anyone can upload anything, at any time, from anywhere. And our appetite to indulge in internet absurdities without question leading us down a dangerous path.

We’ve put too much trust in the hands of predictive AI, targeting and big tech. Ultimately removing something innately human: our ability question, to ask ‘why’. Spend time with anyone under six and they’ll ask a string of questions starting with ‘why?’

We don’t fact check, we throw out outrageous claims as justified truths. We read headlines but not the whole article. We buy Instagram brands and are disappointed when its quality is poor and 10x smaller than we thought when scrolling the 4:5 frame.

The Internet has its own language and wraps everything in it, from the profound to the profane, making every topic of the same importance. This flattened space holds no weight or repercussions. We consume Trump tweets about war in Iran next to memes of baby Yoda next to dinner recipe ideas. Time has bent on this new plane and nothing has a lasting impact. We are living in a new form of surrealism. One we can’t escape or look away from.

Technology has made things easy, convenient and efficient. But the better technology gets at automating tasks and anticipating our behavior, the greater the threat to our own skills. We’re thinking in memes, talking in Tweets, learning from Reddit and dependent on Google for our answers while reasoning, critical thinking and focus are weakening.

In a world where we can find exactly what we’re looking for, confirm any belief possible, and follow it as the rule, we need to bring back a sense of skepticism. To question and be curious about what is served up to us.

Skepticism will become a critical skill for the future.

Skepticism is defined as:

doubt as to the truth of something

a person who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual

Skepticism helps scientists to remain objective when performing scientific inquiry and research. It forces them to examine claims (their own and those of others) to be certain that there is sufficient evidence to back them up.

The Greek word skepsis means investigation. When we investigate, we bring a healthy dose of questioning to a seemingly solid case. We become inquisitive and soften to new ideas. Our curiosity is piqued. Curiosity is an essential tool in understanding differing opinions.

In the words of Brian Grazer, [curiosity] empowers– enables me to have a better, more accurate sense of what ideas feel authentic and what ideas feel inauthentic or copycats of other ideas. So in my– in the business of storytelling, you look for– you know, storytelling meaning movies or television or documentaries– you’re looking for originality.

You’re looking for originality in the subject, and you’re looking for originality in terms of a point of view. And having all these different sort of curiosity conversations and being interested in other people and other subjects, it gives me a deeper, richer filter in which to create ideas and hear ideas.

I propose three ways to bring skepticism to the Internet, starting with the individual, expanding to big tech and infiltrating our education system:

1. From groupthink → To independent working minds

In our personal life, we need to identify our own filters blocking us from reasoning and empathizing. To be a little more curious. To entertain other sides of a story and make our own assumptions. To welcome, challenge and understand diverse schools of thought.

2. From algorithms confirming bias → To algorithms that prod for skepticism

Big tech needs to take responsibility for the impact they’re having. How can we rearchitecture these platforms with new behaviors and the whole human in mind?

3. From sourcing papers → To spotting fallacies

Our education system needs to be redesigned for the Digital Age to help the next generation of leaders identify false claims and spot deepfakes. Thinking back to English class, we learned how to write papers, properly sourcing and citing our facts. What would a digital curriculum look like with this new objective?

We must challenge people to come to the internet not with blind acceptance, but a healthy dose of skepticism. To be curious.

We must preserve and protect our independent working minds. They’re becoming endangered species.

Sources

• False news spreads faster than truth online thanks to human nature, TechCrunch 2018
• The number of young American girls turning to self-harm is skyrocketing, QZ, 2017
• I became part of the alt-right at age 13, thanks to Reddit and Google, Fast Company 2019
• Sacha Baron Cohen’s Keynote Address at ADL’s 2019 Never Is Now Summit on Anti-Semitism and Hate, ADL, 2019
• Fake news is ‘very real’ word of the year for 2017, The Guardian, 2017
• ‘Post-truth’ declared word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries, BBC, 2016
• Fyre Festival: The Most Successful Social Media Marketing Campaign for a Failed Music Festival, Ever, Tandem Interactive, 2019
• REVEALED: HOW DANGEROUS FAKE HEALTH NEWS CONQUERED FACEBOOK, The Independent, 2017
• Flat Earth: How did YouTube help spread a conspiracy theory?, BBC, 2019
• What makes us human? Newsstatesman, 2014
• Are We Losing Our Ability to Think Critically? Communications of ACM, 2009
• Stanford psychology expert: This is the №1 work skill of the future — but most fail to realize it, CNBC, 2019
• Brian Grazer on the Power of Curiosity, Harvard Business Review, 2014

Read with Skepticism was originally published in FNDR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How the internet created 5 Billion digital refugees.

For almost thirty years we have tried to fathom the internet; how it came to be and what its lasting effect will be. To understand this sprawling metaverse of digital connectivity is no easier than looking upon a far away planet like Mars. A part of our consciousness yet something other, distant, out of sight, yet all too real.

The internet is a dematerialized universal condition but to unpack it one needs to look at it through a universal metaphor of reality.

Let’s imagine, if you would, an unimaginable scenario.

What would happen if the entire world, or at least the majority bar a few bemused bystanders, showed up in one place on planet Earth thirsting for something?

What you can imagine, if it was even logistically possible, is the ensuing chaos. A crushing weight of humanity beyond what the eye could see or the mind could comprehend. Without hierarchy, order, or hope of maintenance. A crowd that would overwhelm and break any existing best laid systems. A crowd that could not communicate from the center because the center ceased to exist. Left instead to distribute the information to the extremes through unstable word of mouth. What you would have is less system shock than total system failure.

Now let us try to imagine what it is or was that drew them to this place. What was it that could cause this mass migration of humanity to up sticks, leave the safety and reality of their worlds behind and gamble on the idea that they might get some, some of whatever it was that started the stampede in the first place. What was it that first drew a curious trickle that would in turn cause the tectonic shifts that would create a human tsunami?

What if it was ‘Attention’.

As humans we are born needing attention, we crave being attended. Our mental, social and physical wellbeing are dependent upon a high level of attention.

In early times it wasn’t a problem getting attention. We lived and moved in small groups and individuals in need of attention were easily identified and satisfied. But as our populations grew we had to fight for attention. Attention became scarce and, in turn, a privilege. Some had plenty and others had none. It became a form of wealth, as much about economics as human nature. The economically wealthy countries tended by nature to be attention rich whilst those worse off were attention poor. The levels of attention and conflict became related. High attention countries were peaceful and low attention countries were more prone to unrest. Or rich countries could be attended to and poor countries neglected. But even in the most well off societies it wasn’t equally distributed.

As the world’s population exploded it became harder to find and even harder to get. We were being starved of attention. The privileged got greedy and the poor got needy. The world as we knew it was out of balance, an unsustainable need had overwhelmed our now limited resources of attention.

So God created the internet and it captured the whole world’s attention. Here was an infinite space, a new gold rush with the promise of riches beyond our imagination, but most importantly, an attentive audience. An attention rich universe created on a universal platform upon which everyone could perform for attention. The internet turned us all into performers who sacrificed our humanity for a single Attention coin. It became the attention capital, drawing first the speculators followed by the dilapidated souls and, in time, the rest of us would follow, motivated by either our greed or our need. But this attention was different: it lacked origin, context or feeling. The performance, the unrequited cry for attention without the possibility for true resolution. It is a metric illusion based on an emotional delusion. This is not real or safe, we are eternal outsiders seeking to integrate ourselves by ingratiating ourselves to others. This distorts our sense of self. The reality of this connection defies our expectation for true detection.

On the interface we are all refugees, untethered from origins or borders and starved of attention, we are seeking much needed solace. On the internet we can be free of origin, without origin we stand out (that is good yes?) yet over time we become unrecognizable to ourselves (that is bad no?). The interface does not assimilate it appropriates — a population too vast to be intimate it doesn’t so much give us attention then beg and steal from us.

So where does that leave us at the beginning of the next chapter of our digital age?

Now more than ever we need to see the wood from the trees so that we don’t mindlessly destroy the forest and starve ourselves of the wood. The greatest regret of the internet is that it is the stage upon which technology itself has been judged.

Is technology good? Is technology great? I suspect it is both but the platform upon which it is measured on a daily basis distorts our ability to see the good from the bad. By making it [the internet] a destination, we corrupt and undermine technology’s true value as a tool.

The legacy of the internet is that technology and our need for attention have become indistinguishably entwined. We crave it and loathe it all in the same breath.

We need a renewed approach, one that disaggregates technology from the internet so we may look beyond the attention of the interface and see the TRUE intention of technology. A power tool which can help us meaningfully attend to ourselves and others around by putting our human EQ on top of technology’s IQ.

Broken Fruit was originally published in FNDR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

They showed up in the first few days of the new decade, as conversations swirled around where we are heading and how to make it better. A challenge from Equinox to Upgrade my Fitness Regime, an invitation from Upgrade Labs to try a Vasper Cold Hiit or Joov red-light. The message was clear: now’s the time for self-improvement.

And whether it’s in the name, or just the intention, from drinking more water to avoiding toxic friends, the theme remains the same. January 2020 is all about the upgrade.

Like so many contemporary human descriptors, the language of upgrade came from tech. The idea was originally practical, and if not always better (Windows Vista, anyone?), then at least benign. But the newsworthiness of the upgrade corrupted the upgrade cycle: a desperate race for new features forced the spectacle of the upgrade to become more significant than the upgrade itself.

The velocity of upgrade culture is driven by that familiar villain: planned obsolescence.

“Obsolescence can be achieved through introducing a superior replacement model, or by intentionally designing a product to cease proper function within a specific window. In either case, consumers will theoretically favor next generational products over the old ones.”

Whether it’s intentional or the result of genuine improvement, the effect is the same. The products that we surround ourselves with are designed or destined for obsolescence, not longevity. When things were built to last, we were careful with them. When we know that something will soon be redundant, because another version is waiting impatiently in the wings, we can care less about it, in turn creating a careless culture.

Think about the perpetual dissatisfaction surrounding iPhone, one of the most transformative and thoughtfully designed pieces of personal tech over the last couple of decades. And yet people are never happy. People didn’t want the iPhone 5C. Or the 7. Definitely not the XR Max.

They wanted a new different thing. That had the same novelty and beauty and mind-bending social, cultural and business impact as the original iPhone. A new different thing. Every fucking year. Even Apple got impatient with itself, releasing the 8 and X on the same day. No time for a 9, too busy upgrading.

People compare the two versions — the upgraded and the outdated — and feel cheated by the “amount” of upgrade achieved. Every phone drop is accompanied by a stream of reviews that scream “boring”, “not enough”, “not what I wanted”. Living in anticipation of the next at the expense of the now.

Inevitably we moved from upgrading things to upgrading people.

In 2006 Beyonce demanded “Partner, let me upgrade u”. With the switch from a noun to a verb, an upgrade went from something that you bought to something that can happen to you…with or without your permission.

Leonardo diCaprio raised the stakes by encouraging us to look at ourselves — “Every next level of your life will demand a different you” — and once that infiltrated the inspirational quotes websites, it gained that strange status of opinion stated as fact. So no surprise that business followed: Pat Divilly, Entrepreneur and Forbes magazines all offer guidance for how you can “Upgrade Your Life”.

We’re all searching for the next level: whether it’s a phone, a partner or our own identity. And the intoxicating speed of upgrade culture often means we forget to enjoy what we currently have or appreciate who we currently are as we imagine what comes next. The unintended effect of upgrade culture is that the desire to upgrade one thing becomes a desire to upgrade everything.

We used to anthropomorphize technology; now we technomorphize people.

Our willingness to consign other products (and people) to obsolescence is really an expression of our own fear of irrelevance. This is both a personal fear — am I too old/young/inexperienced/experienced for that job/person/dress/festival — and a species fear. Harari and Hawking both suggest Homo Sapiens’ destiny is to become outdated and irrelevant as we merge with AI in the ultimate upgrade.

“Most humans won’t be upgraded, and will consequently become an inferior caste dominated by both computer algorithms and the new superhumans.”

We are all approaching obsolescence from the time we’re born. We’re all obsolsecents.

In his frequent polemics against the negative effects of Big Tech, Tristan Harris — the ex-Googler-with-a-conscience who founded the Center for Humane Technology — has his own term for what’s going on: the human downgrade.

“While we’ve been upgrading our technology we’ve been downgrading humanity. [It’s a] downgrading of our relationships, a downgrading of our attention, a downgrading of democracy, a downgrading of our sense of decency.”

This is what happens when you let let tech set the pace. Tech has clear objectives for itself — efficiency, precision, scale, replication — but no affection for us. It does not care when our best intentions and hopes go sideways.

And the acceleration continues. Moore’s Law, our accelerometer for measuring processing speeds for over fifty years, is being challenged by the emergence of quantum computing, which promises “doubly exponential growth relatively to conventional computing”.

Qubits — the basic unit of quantum information — can exist in a superposition of two states simultaneously. Likewise we are more available, more valuable if we become quantum consumers. Our superposition: bingeing Netflix at the same time as Tweeting/Twitching/TikTokking and buying the infinite stuff on Instagram and Amazon.

Like many things quantum, this can feel like a kind of magic, extending the number of consumer hours available to any smart company. But there is nothing super about a position when it all feels like distraction.

Technology and people work at different speeds. Rather than trying to keep up with tech, how tech work better at human scale?

It should be no surprise that two of the biggest hits at CES — which claims to be “the global stage for innovation” — were sausages and vibrators. Amidst the AI and AR and robots and smart cities and promises of autonomous everything, here were things that we could use right now.

This is NormTech. Rather than waiting for the next shiny, disruptive gadget to deliver us to an unreal future, this is technology that helps us live better today. In this moment, not a perpetually deferred tomorrow. Solving important problems — closing the pleasure gap, rethinking how 7 billion people should feed themselves without further destroying the planet — by understanding what people need, not what technology can do.

A culture of upgrade raises questions. What’s the right balance between ambition and dissatisfaction? We all want to move on. But how fast? What do we leave behind? And how do we jump off the upgrade cycle?

We can start with how we view ourselves. A 21st century condition: the delusion of our own exceptionalism. We look high; we believe we are better than others, so we deserve better things. But perhaps we are at our best when we think below ourselves. And demand less.

Can we measure ourselves a little less? The myth of the quantified self — delivered through a stream of metrics that range from the mundane to the precious (hours and quality of sleep, calories consumed, steps taken, heart beats, number of friends, like-ability, attraction) — is that we will get to know ourselves better. The reality is that this kind of incessant self-tracking is more likely to bring with it a constant sense of background dissatisfaction, a gnawing feeling that we’re not doing right by ourselves. Humans are a work in progress; we are not made to be measured.

The very nature of self-optimization requires us to take an objective look at ourselves and count the ways we fall short of some idealized and unlikely future version. But when it comes to ourselves, objectivity is impossible. We can only take ourselves personally. Where is the line between complacency and dissatisfaction?

Can we upgrade our lives by downgrading the level of examination and inspection that we put ourselves through every day? How great might our lives be now if we weren’t always trying to make them better?

Upgrade Culture: We’re all Obsolescents was originally published in FNDR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 1999, as we headed towards New Year’s Eve to ring in the new millennium, I was as intrigued as anyone about Y2K. Would the clocks stop? Would the ball stop dropping? Were the Doomsday predictions right? We all had this expectation that everything could collapse in on itself. The technology we had created might fail us, turn on us …

But as the ball dropped and champagne glasses clinked, we began to realize that, perhaps, the Apocalypse wasn’t coming for us right then and there — it was as if we were given a free pass.
We could go wild.
Create, challenge conventionality, break things, build anew.
Redistribute, democratize, capitalize!
Connect, work, commute — all digitally.
Speed everything up.
Hide our insecurities, expose our vulnerabilities, and, with nothing more than a pointed finger, like, swipe and scroll through this new world…

Every action became lighter, simpler, faster and more convenient.
We saw technology as the promise we could take control, and we did.

I can’t imagine going back to life without an iPhone, asking Google everything, shopping on Amazon instead of doing just about any errand or being able to hop on the Peloton before my son wakes up in the morning. We can just app our way through the mundane bits and pieces of life and fast-forward to the “good stuff”.

But as I stop to take stock of just how far we’ve come in the first 20 years of the 21st century, I find myself wondering if all of this innovation has really changed us as humans for the better.

With all of this innovation, have we really created something new or have we just solved for new methods of distribution with Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix?
Have we really created connection or have we simply created new forms of distraction with Facebook or Instagram?
Have we understood that we’ve crowned new monarchies while forgetting we wanted democracies?
Have we even begun to realize the unintended consequences of it all or the price we are paying with our data?

Are we really getting to the “good stuff” in life, in business, and for the world, or have we just created a new set of systems that we are all in service of?

We’ve seen technology power a wave of innovation that has created new businesses and entire new industries, with progress unrivaled by any other time in history. But with it, we’ve become obsessed with the scale, and our sole metric has become growth. We’ve lost sight of the fundamentals of good business and created systems designed to maximize shareholder value at the expense of human impact. We’ve crowned new leaders because they could code, not because they had a higher order human ethics or ideals.

With it, we’ve given up so much power to the leaders of the companies who drive so much of our lives, but we don’t understand their intentions or motivations, and they certainly aren’t accountable to us, the consumers.

I’d propose that the focus of innovation needs to shift and that innovation as we’ve known it, is not the true opportunity of the future. To put it simply, technology has been outpacing the human condition and we need to create a new balance. We need to focus on innovation that not only creates value, but captures value for businesses, shareholders and, most critically, for the people participating in them.

Luckily, the shift has already started, and we’re seeing it come to life working with some of the Founders creating this next wave. These Founders are not the same — they are not pure technologists, but they understand the human condition — they have multidimensional human experiences and are focused on designing for empathy, connection and trust. They are building right-sized businesses that are equally as good for the business as the people who will use them. They have a clear human intention and are driven to live up to it.

At FNDR, we’ve identified three fundamental shifts the Founders of the next wave are creating:

1) A shift from Disruption to Adaptation. Rather than breaking down and reclaiming existing solutions, they are creating new innovation around the way we want to live. If the ethos of the last wave was “move fast and break things”, the ethos of the new wave is “move forward and make things.”

2) A shift from Distribution to Contribution. The first wave created never before seen access and methods of distribution. We have better, easier ways to get to the things we want, but did things fundamentally change? The next wave will succeed by solving for the content itself, not just for the way to get it.

3) And, finally, a shift from Distraction to Interaction. The first wave created platforms to capture our attention and capitalize on us. The next wave needs to live up to its original intent of creating real human connections and interactions — those that bring true value to the end user.

So as we wake up to a fresh decade, with renewed spirits and hope for a future filled with new opportunities, we need a new set of Founders to take up and lead the new wave. Maybe it won’t be as fast, or as big or as the last wave, but maybe that’s a good thing. I think we’ll all be better off for it.

The Next Wave was originally published in FNDR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Do you remember the first time you saw one of those scooters? You know, the ones you rent by the second. The Birds and the Limes, the Jumps and the Spins.

Maybe it was discarded in front of your neighbor’s house, as if a child was returning at any minute. Maybe it was in a pile, forming a tangled sculpture. Maybe in a tree.

Companies scattered them in cities without asking permission, and they came with no rules of the road. BirdGraveyard shows how riders took the No Instruction Manual approach beyond the initial questions — Sidewalk or road? One or two people? Helmets? — to another level — Do they float? Do they burn? What happens when you drop one from a six storey building?

These kind of disturbances, these performances, used to be the preserve of art, questioning how we are living now, and how we may live in the future. These days — when the height of radical artistic performance is eating a banana — it can feel businesses are doing a more provocative job: managing to disturb more people’s reality and encouraging us to think differently.

On November 19th 1971, in a Santa Ana gallery, the artist Chris Burden asked his friend and assistant — Bruce Dunlap — to shoot him from a distance of fifteen feet. The .22 bullet was meant to scratch Burden, but ended up going straight through his arm. Despite the very real blood that spurted from the wound, this was not an act of violence. This was Performance Art.

On November 21st 2019, in a Los Angeles theater, the entrepreneur Elon Musk asked his assistant — okay, design chief, Franz von Holzhausen- to lob a metal ball at the armor plated glass of his new SUV — the CyberTruck — to demonstrate it was bulletproof. The window smashed. Twice.

Neither of these stunts went exactly how their creators planned. Or how their audiences expected.

Burden had to go to hospital, but “Shoot” made him infamous. Fifty years later, it remains his best known work.

And despite headlines screaming “Flop”, “Fail”and “Fiasco”, claiming Musk had lost nearly $1bn as Tesla shares dropped overnight, two days later, Elon was claiming 200,000 pre-orders. With no advertising. Just a “failed” launch.

If you’re not familiar with Performance Art, it’s worth checking out this short (under 5 minutes) documentary to remind yourself how fucking crazy ambitious art can be. Other Burden performances included “spending five days and nights in the fetal position inside a locker, having a spectator push pins into his body, being ‘crucified’ to a Volkswagen Beetle, being kicked down two flights of stairs”.

Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Burden’s art was meant to portray the reality of pain to a desensitized audience, and to raise questions of responsibility and participation.

Performance Artists questioned the state of society, the role of art and the relationship between the artist and the audience. There was one main question: how far can an artist go?

A little different to the gilded age of Koons, Hirst and Vicari, where it can sometimes feel that the only question artists care about is: how much can I get paid?

Performance Art peaked in the seventies. These days businesses are taking its place, and in true capitalist fashion are asking both questions: how far can business go? And, how much can we get paid?

Companies have been performing for us for decades: from the Pepsi vs. Coke grudge match, to the annual beauty pageant that is the Super Bowl to a man falling out of a capsule 50,000 ft above Earth so that the world could drink more taurine.

This used to be called branding, or advertising: a fictional layer placed on top of a business to entertain and seduce its audience. We were in on the game. We understood that behind these frivolous performances, there were serious businesses.

Things are more fluid now; performance is not a thin marketing layer, it permeates the business. This is not a gradual migration; it’s a different behavior, a sharp turn.

The business model itself — the way the products are developed, distributed, launched, used, returned, hacked, destroyed — is always in motion, always learning and iterating, as we participate. It’s all performance.

When business is performance art, it takes us all to a more uncertain place, raising questions about the nature and reach of business, while raising the stakes for both businesses and audiences.

All familiar markers are off. All judgement — of objectives, of success, etc — is relative.

Business becomes unreasonable.

Performance art was originally defined as an antithesis to theatre. It implied “a productive disagreement with itself”.

Today it can seem as if the antitheses of today’s performative businesses are some combination of: boardrooms, business plans, profits, revenue, product, customers, growth, adherence to the law….all the serious stuff we thought we needed to be in business.

These logical underpinnings of business are being discarded. Not entirely or consistently, but more patchily, by companies who know better. Every business is wondering: which of these do I need, which of these can I get by without?

As the recent Vanity Fair expose puts it: “WeWork executives had long grown accustomed to Neumann’s belief that the laws of economics — even reality itself — didn’t apply to him. It was in the nature of unicorns that they bent reality, and that certainly had been true of WeWork.”

It’s not always easy to tell the rare Unicorns from the illusory ones. Ideas that seem bizarre or impossible succeed and are suddenly part of the everyday. Going from the fantastical to the familiar in the time it used to take to draw up a business plan for the board.

We have lived through two decades of disruption. We are used to outlandish ideas becoming billion dollar businesses that make the things we love and change the way we live. We expect flamboyant CEOs to describe the exciting futures they are building for us, while laughing at Luddite critics.

We expect every industry to be overturned by a brilliant upstart.

They said it couldn’t be done is the triumphant conclusion to many an entrepreneur’s founding story.

We are all part of the performance.

Using candy colored computers instead of beige boxes.

Smoking a pen not a cigarette.

Smoking cannabis (legally) from a more expensive pen.

Sitting in the back of a stranger’s car rather than taking a cab.

Sleeping in a stranger’s bed in a foreign country.

Letting a stranger walk your dog.

Folding a phone like a sheet of paper.

Drinking all of your meals.

Juicing packets of diced fruit.

Wearing glasses that record every second of your life.

Wearing a stranger’s designer dress. Once. Then sending it off so another stranger can wear it.

Taking pictures of yourself in the bathroom and letting millions of people watch.

Watching a whole series in a night. #bingeing.

Swiping, ghosting, vaping, fasting, benching, fizzling, optimizing.

Giving one drop of blood rather than several test-tubes.

Finding the love of your life by moving your fingers an inch to the right.

Speaking to a woman whose face you have never seen but who knows you more intimately than your partner/parents/friends. Telling her everything.

R&D has moved from the lab to the streets, with the pop-up store as theater: selling mattresses, matcha, weed, water bottles and all versions of wellness. But only for an instance: they have learnt the lessons of Macy’s, Barney’s and Forever21. They’ve watched Supreme. They don’t expect to be around for any longer than it takes to materialize an Internet brand.

There are often cryptic releases. Mysterious products appear. Unfamiliar services. New subscriptions.

It’s up to us to work out how to use them. There are no instruction manuals. TL;DR. We don’t always know what we’re getting into.

We are all part of the experiment.

This is exhilarating. Figuring products out together, tweeting suggestions direct to a young CEO. Joining in. Adopting early. Being part of the experience.

Performance Art keeps its audiences on their toes. You never know what to expect or when the fuzzy barrier between artist and audience is going to dissolve completely. Which is half the fun.

As Performance Art merged artist and audience, so performative business aims to bring its audiences — its communities — as close as it can. Brian Chesky often referred to Airbnb as one company, or community, made up of employees, hosts and guests. A smart move when your business owns few assets, and relies on the generosity and mutual respect of its community. Airbnb also encouraged its community to perform for each other.

At their annual Airbnb One conference, Super Hosts — the best performers — come together for an enthusiastic few days of sharing stories and tips with each other, and sharing suggestions with Airbnb. Their mission is to make each guests feel that their trip is unique and personal. Two million different homes and rooms offering discovery with an undercurrent of uncertainty; feedback welcome.

Tesla drivers share predictions as they await the next upgrade to their car’s performance. Oscillating between the useful — Sentry Mode — and the playful — Caroake — the stream of features keeps the car feeling fresh, and the driver feeling like they’re part of the dev team. And, like any good host, Musk takes requests.

While Steve Jobs set the bar for the CEO as ringmaster with his signature “one more thing”, the Mac Air magicked from an envelope, the products that seemed to defy logic, Musk commands the biggest stage today, and the tailcoat fits him well.

Shooting a Tesla-driving astronaut into space feels like the kind of stunt Chris Burden might have tried, if he could have afforded to, and they let him drive. This feels like pure performance, no business.

But this was Elon’s ultimate launch and, this time, a flawless product demo: a performance about performance, demonstrating the power of the Falcon Heavy, and ensuring that the Roadster will be the solar system’s fastest car for some time, as well as the best traveled. No range anxiety here.

Once again, we were part of the act. When someone suggested he pack a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Elon went one better: “Plus a towel and a sign saying “Don’t Panic”. The most expensive nerd joke in history.

Back in the seventies, we called these Happenings. Now we call them Events or Experiences. We have whole businesses built around providing them. Each one more outlandish, more unreasonable, more memorable than the last.

This is also terrifying.

It can feel like we’ve been brought in way too early, before important things have been figured out. We know that business moves faster than legislation, so we’re used to companies trying stuff out before asking. Test and learn. Always in beta. Move fast and break things.

This is a time when a semi-credible hypotheses is all you need to get to some funding and an MVP. Nobody’s got time for rehearsals or research. Why bother when the world’s out there, happy to get involved and give you immediate feedback?

That’s how you get to a company like Juul, replacing the stink and smoke of cigarettes with a silent pen, giving off the vibe of some futuristic health device.

The initial intention was to give adults a healthier way to smoke so they could smoke less.

Instead they invented a way that people could smoke inside again…all of the time. Replacing the cigarette break with the continual vape.

What happened to years of rigorous study to see whether vaping helped smokers smoke less? Or to researching the effects of breathing oil before letting everyone have at it?

What happened to considering the unintended consequences, like the fact that e-cigarettes are an easier first step for non-smokers, as demonstrated by the fact that a quarter of high school students claim to vape, a number that’s doubled in the last two years, offsetting the declines we’ve seen in tobacco smoking over the last decades?

Rather than a pain-free way to kick the habit, Juul seems to have discovered a more efficient way of introducing nicotine to the maximum number of people.

The Theranos documentary, The Inventor, stopped being just another tale of Silicon Valley hubris and misjudgment right around the time you realize that the fake equipment was experimenting with real people’s real blood and giving them false results to keep their story alive.

It’s not just the users who get burnt by these experiments. We Work’s recent performances have been well documented, from the barefoot stroll around Manhattan to the fashion shoot of an IPO submission to the rumors of enforced tequila shots, and hotboxing private planes. An essential audience for these performances was the employees, to maintain the low salaries they balanced with their dreams of future millions.

Apple, Airbnb and Tesla show how it can be done. What it can look like when there is no gap between product, brand and community. When a founder has a coherent and intentional narrative, supported by products and experiences that perform and capture people’s imagination.

So when companies like Theranos, Juul and WeWork show up, with their troubled performances, we are conditioned to believe in them. But these performances don’t demonstrate, they distract us. From the lack of an actual product, or from a realistic plan for growth, or from having any idea about, or interest in, the impact your company’s inventions are going to have on people.

It doesn’t take much for the ringleader to become the clown, or the magician the daredevil. For a performance to become a stunt.

With Shoot, Burden put himself in jeopardy. While Neumann or Bowen may suffer the humiliation of a few negative articles, the real pain is elsewhere. With these business experiments it’s the customers or even the employees who suffer from unexpected consequences.

We love performances; but when we are invited to take part we should expect a level of responsibility and care from the performers. We know things won’t always be perfect, but when there are glitches, we expect the performances to be fixed. We expect the show to go on and to get better.

A performance without accountability is anarchy not art.

Business is the New Performance Art was originally published in FNDR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Genesis 3:3–5

“For God Knows that on the day you eat thereof your eyes should be opened and you shall be as Gods.”

In 1980 South African filmmaker Jamie Uys released the popular film “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” The film chronicled the improbable journey of a Bushman tribal leader who travels to the ends of the earth to return an errant empty Coke bottle that had fallen from the sky.

The villagers found numerous good uses for this object that was seemingly gifted to them from the Gods. However, over time its scarcity created tension in the tribe and they started to fight over it. Unnerved by the never-before-seen disharmony, the leader decides to return the unwanted gift to the Gods.

The film also shows that the origin of this Coke bottle was not the Gods but rather the human pilot of a small aeroplane who, whilst flying over the desert, finishes the Coke and promptly disposes of it through the window, allowing it to fall into the lives of the Bushmen.

What strikes me looking at the world as it is today is how prescient this movie was. Far from the maddening crowd in isolated apartheid South Africa, Uys prophetically tapped into a zeitgeist that would not arrive until almost forty years later with the advent of the digital age. Even more accurately, Uys portrayed how the human hand could be misconstrued for the hand of the Gods.

Six years later, in 1986, Diego Maradona would score one of the most controversial goals in soccer World Cup history. Playing against England, Maradona went up for a header but instead, cleverly disguised, used his left hand to put the ball in the back of the net, giving Argentina the victory. The goal was promptly named “the hand of God”, which has stood ever since.

Both Uys’s film and Maradona’s eponymously named goal opens a wider aperture to a social dilemma that is gripping us today as a species: The idea that we are playing God, or perhaps more accurately that we have progressed from being God-fearing to fearing the idea that we may be God!

We are living in a world that can seem to be spiralling out of control. Our patterns and sense of order are being radically challenged or totally disrupted. The status quo has been upset and the institutional systems of trust have failed or been found wanting. As these old systems fail we find ourselves looking for new corridors of trust — seeking consolation not based on facts but rather on a sense of non-abused credibility. There is a new uncertainty as we begin to capitalize on this loss of orthodoxy. We are no longer merely at the behest of the untrustworthy institution but rather the untrustworthy individual. We have created a society of undetermined character based on a culture seemingly fixated with self-value creation. Every situation is one that can be exploited, resulting in a deep unease fuelled by an extreme polarization of society. The idea of community today, or the tribe, is less a sense of aggregation around a common belief than it is a manipulation of an anxious majority.

The advent of modern technology has put us under a unique added pressure. For the first time we have a tool (technology) that can allow us to truly take care of ourselves. Free of our dependency on system thinking, we are seeing a split in society. We’re witnessing a rise of digital natives who are embracing this new power tool and in doing so rendering our systems mute. They are creating a new interdependent future, driven by people connected through technology. The Internet is a sprawling, man-made metaverse creating new beliefs, behaviors and even gods. A new culture of leaders and followers of biblical proportions. From Trump’s ‘I Am The Chosen One’ declaration to Kanye’s newest messianic album “Jesus is King” to Gywneth’s cult of wellness, the savoir messages of today’s self-appointed deities rely on the interface as pulpit.

So where did it go wrong? What did we do?

We are by nature a species of believers and our creation of belief systems has been foundational in the building and maintenance of culture. Religion is perhaps the most successful example of our ability to organize ourselves around shared doctrines. Psychologists will tell you that our faith in gods is an extension of our recognition of others and thereby creates the ability to both relate, and function, with others. Natural order emerging from the chaos of human nature.

As our populations have grown, the role of religion in establishing order through obedience has not been insignificant. Religion and power have always been linked. For most of our history one has thrived in concert with the other. The greater the religion’s ability to distance the Gods from the everyday people — physically, emotionally, and spiritually — the greater the chance of uniform obedience.

Religion was the comfort that there was a higher order of things, that we were not merely the products of our own doing but rather that of a higher being. We put our faith in this belief, the complete trust and confidence in the other relieving us of taking full responsibility for ourselves as well as the consequences of our actions.

We are born helpless; as a species we have created a belief that we need to be taken care of. We have designed a continuous sequence of systems to take care of us during our lives. In many ways religion was the backstop: if all else failed we had our faith, the notion that our fate was in the safe hands of our destiny, exercised by us but defined by another. It allowed us to make sense of our seemingly infinite nature. It softened the extreme paradox of being human, the fact that we possessed infinite capacity, yet our lives themselves were finite. As long as we had a God we could find comfort in the infinite, the ability to see our place both within it, and without it.

We put the fear of God to work creating our idea of civilization. Civilization was the great rebranding of human behavior. In many respects, our obedience to God put us at war with human nature. God working in mysterious ways was our way of forgiving the uncertainty and unpredictability, where in reality it gets closer to explaining our own untrustworthy nature.

Over time we began to play God and in turn challenge the idea of God. The Age of Reason saw us use science to make sense of nature, loosening our dependency on faith and questioning the dogma of religion. Our minds became a battleground for the understanding that would create an irreversible tear between fact and faith. We moved from being in awe of Nature, and in turn God, to becoming in awe of ourselves.

Today we are at a point of crisis. Our infinite belief seems challenged by the incomprehensible idea that nature is limited, if not dying, and our planet is in fact finite. This anxiety is only compounded by the uneasy truth that our situation appears self-inflicted. We have become the architects of our own destiny with nowhere to hide and no one else to blame. To an outsider looking in, we are self-sabotaging our own existence not as individuals but as a whole, a form of mass extinction.

The very foundation of the belief that life is eternal, and that we are merely servants of this assertion, is in question. What started as doubt is now taking on the appearance of certainty. A self-imposed conspiracy to test our own sense of control, the ability for our will to be that of a God.

We all now have access to a supernatural human power that is simultaneously bringing us closer whilst tearing us apart. The space between us and the Gods has decreased to such an extent that it has all but disappeared. We have been brought face to face with ourselves, confronting the unbearable idea that there is no longer anything between ourselves and our nature. All beliefs are being tested and found wanting. The stability upon which thousands of years of culture have been built has ruptured and the world has gone soft.

With each passing day we see polarized attempts to shape this new fluidity. Populism, a conflict between those who want to take care of themselves and those who fear that they are not being taken care of, has risen out of this dissolution. A careless culture of ‘care’ is being built around misinformation, ego and vulnerability. A battle of the Gods for the hearts and minds of the masses.

This ideological warfare is unmasking the simple truth that there is no longer a universal truth.

We have been exposed for what we are: an intelligent species whose infinite capacity for love, joy, pain, cruelty, creation, and destruction has lead us to the inevitable conclusion that, whilst buoyant, we are alone, alone in our thoughts, alone in our faith and perhaps alone in our salvation, a God of our own making.

The Gods Must Be Crazy was originally published in FNDR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.