Author Archives: ghotchkiss

A Column About Nothing

What do I have to say in my last post for 2023? Nothing.

Last week, I talked about the cost of building a brand. Then, this week, I (perhaps being the last person on earth to do so) heard about Nothing.  No – not small “n” nothing as in the absence of anything – Big “N” Nothing as in the London based tech start-up headed by Chinese born entrepreneur Carl Pei.

Nothing, according to their website, crafts “intuitive, flawlessly connected products that improve our lives without getting in the way. No confusing tech-speak. No silly product names. Just artistry, passion and trust. And products we’re proud to share with our friends and family. Simple.”

Now, just like the football talents of David Beckham I explored in my last post, the tech Nothing produces is good – very good – but not uniquely good. The Nothing phone (1) and the just released Nothing Phone (2) are capable mid-range smart phones. Again, from the Nothing website, you are asked to “imagine a world where all your devices are seamlessly connected.”

It may just be me, but isn’t that what Apple has been promising (and occasionally delivering) for the better part of the last quarter century? Doesn’t Google make the same basic promise? Personally, I see nothing earth shaking in Nothing’s mission. It all feels very “been there, done that.” Or, if you’ll allow me – it all seems like much ado about Nothing (sorry). Yet people have paid thousands over the asking price when the 100 units of the first Nothing phone were put up for auction prior to its public launch.

Why?  Because of the value of the Nothing brand. And that value comes from one place. No, not the tech. The community. Pei may be a pretty good building of phones, but he’s an even better building of community. He has expertly built a fan base who love to rave about Nothing. On the “Community” section of the Nothing Website, you’re invited to “abandon the glorification of I and open up to the potential of We.”  I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it all sounds very cool and idealistic, if a little vague.

Another genius move by Pei was to open up to the potential of Nothing. In what is probably a latent (or perhaps not so latent) backlash against over advertising and in-your-face branding, we were eager to jump on the Nothing bandwagon. It seems like anti-branding, but it’s not. It’s actually expertly crafted, by-the-book branding. Just like Seinfeld, a show about nothing that became one of the most popular tv shows in history, it has been shown that there is some serious branding swagger to the concept of nothing. I can’t believe no one thought to stake a claim to this branding goldmine before now.

The Branding Case Study of David Beckham

I have to admit, I’m not a sports fan. And of the few sports I know a little about, European football is certainly not one of them. So my choice to watch the recent Beckham documentary on Netflix is certainly not typical. That said, I did find it a fascinating case study in something I was not expecting: the making and valuation of a personal brand.

First, a controversial question must be posed: was Beckham a good player? According to those that know much more about the sport than I do, the answer is definitely “Yes” – but he wasn’t the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) – he wasn’t even a GOHT (Greatest of His Time). The closest Beckham ever came to winning the Ballon d’Or, given to the best player  of the year,  was to place second behind Rivaldo Ferreira in 1999. During his time at Real Madrid CF, he wasn’t even the best player on the team. Granted, it was a stacked team and Beckham was one of the “galácticos” (superstars), along with Figo, Zidane and Ronaldo. But, unlike Beckham, all those other players have at least one Ballon d’Or in their trophy case (Note, fellow Mediapost Jon Last recently took an interesting look at this topic in his column – The Death of Meritocracy in Sports Pay).

But despite this, Beckham was certainly the highest paid player in the world when Timothy Leiweke lured him to LA Galaxy, where his contract also gave him a piece of the profits. So, if he wasn’t the greatest player, but he was the most valuable one, what created that value? Why was David Beckham worth hundreds of millions of dollars?

As the documentary showed, there was a dimension to Beckham’s signing to a team that went far beyond his ability to put a round ball in the net. He was a global brand – the most famous football player in the world. And that’s what Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez and Timothy Leiweke respectively bought when they signed Beckham.

As I said, the documentary revealed some interesting truths about branding. What creates brand value? Who owns that value? What is the price paid for the value of a personal brand?

What the Beckham documentary showed, more than anything, is that brand value is determined in a public market. Beckham certainly brought brand assets to the table: his own athletic ability, being exceedingly good looking, a kaleidoscope of hair styles, and a marriage to one of the most popular pop stars in the world, Victoria Adams – Posh Spice from the Spice Girls. Those were the table stakes for establishing his brand value, the price of entry.

But beyond that, the value of his brand was really whatever the public determined it to be. For example, after he was red-carded in a critical match against Argentina the 1998 World Cup, all of Britain decided that Beckham had cost them the championship. Whether that was true or not (there are a lorry-full of “ifs” in that opinion) it caused his brand value to plummet. There was really nothing Beckham could do. His brand was out of his control. It was owned by the media and public.

The documentary really highlights the viral and frenzied nature of the market that determines the value of a personal brand. And remember, this all took place in the days before social media and the very real impact of being publicly cancelled! Since Beckham’s prime in the 1990s and early 2000’s, the market effect of branding has since been amplified and compressed. The market of public opinion is now wired, meaning network effects happen on incredibly short timelines and without even the illusion of control.

Certainly the monetary benefits of brand usually accrue to the supposed owner of the brand. David and Victoria Beckham are reportedly worth a half billion dollars, making him one of the richest athletes in the world. But the documentary makes it clear that there was a price paid that was not monetary. Much of what we would all call “our lives” had to be traded by the Beckhams for a brand that was controlled by the public and the press. There were no boundaries, no privacy, no refuge from fame.

When we pull back from the story of David and Victoria Beckham, there are takeaways there for anyone attempting to build a brand, whether it be personal or corporate. You may be able to plant the seeds, but after that, everything else is going to be largely out of your control.

OpenAI’s Q* – Why Should We Care?

OpenAI founder Sam Altman’s ouster and reinstatement has rolled through the typical news cycle and we’re now back to blissful ignorance. But I think this will be one of the sea-change moments; a tipping point that we’ll look back on in the future when AI has changed everything we thought we knew and we wonder, “how the hell did we let that happen?”

Sometimes I think that tech companies use acronyms and cryptic names for new technologies to allow them to sneak game changers in without setting off the alarm bells. Take OpenAI for example. How scary does Q-Star sound? It’s just one more vague label for something we really don’t understand.

 If I’m right, we do have to ask the question, “Who is keeping an eye on these things?”

This week I decided to dig into the whole Sam Altman firing/hiring episode a little more closely so I could understand if there’s anything I should be paying attention to. Granted, I know almost nothing about AI, so what follows if very much at the layperson level, but I think that’s probably true for the vast majority of us. I don’t run into AI engineers that often in my life.

So, should we care about what happened a few weeks ago at OpenAI? In a word – YES.

First of all, a little bit about the dynamics of what led to Altman’s original dismissal. OpenAI started with the best of altruistic intentions, to “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”  That was an ideal – many would say a naïve ideal – that Altman and OpenAI’s founders imposed on themselves. As Google discovered with its “Don’t Be Evil” mantra, it’s really hard to be successful and idealistic at the same time. In our world, success is determined by profits, and idealism and profitability almost never play in the same sandbox. Google quietly watered the “Don’t be Evil” motto until it virtually disappeared in 2018.

OpenAI’s non-profit board was set up as a kind of Internal “kill switch” to prevent the development of technologies that could be dangerous to the human race. That theoretical structure was put to the test when the board received a letter this year from some senior researchers at the company warning of a new artificial intelligence discovery that might take AI past the threshold where it could be harmful to humans. The board then did was it was set up to do, firing Altman and board chairman Greg Brockman and putting the brakes on the potentially dangerous technology. Then, Big Brother Microsoft (who has invested $13 billion in OpenAI) stepped in and suddenly Altman was back. (Note – for a far more thorough and fascinating look at OpenAI’s unique structure and the endemic problems with it, read through Alberto Romero’s series of thoughtful posts.)

There were probably two things behind Altman’s ouster: the potential capabilities of a new development called Q-Star and a fear that it would follow OpenAI’s previous path of throwing it out there to the world, without considering potential consequences. So, why is Q-Star so troubling?

Q-Star could be a major step closer to AI which can rationalize and plan. This moves us closer to the overall goal of artificial general Intelligence (AGI), the holy grail for every AI developer, including OpenAI. Artificial general intelligence, as per OpenAI’s own definition, are “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans.” Q-Star, through its ability to tackle grade school math problems, showed the promise of being artificial intelligence that could plan and reason. And that is an important tipping point, because something that can rationalize and plan pushes us forever past the boundary of a tool under human control. It’s technology that thinks for itself.

Why should this worry us? It should worry us because of Herbert Simon’s concept of “bounded rationality”, which explains that we humans are incapable of pure rationality. At some point we stop thinking endlessly about a question and come up with an answer that’s “good enough”. And we do this because of limited processing power. Emotions take over and make the decision for us.

But AGI throws those limits away. It can process exponentially more data at a rate we can’t possibly match. If we’re looking at AI through Sam Altman’s rose-colored glasses, that should be a benefit. Wouldn’t it be better to have decisions made rationally, rather than emotionally? Shouldn’t that be a benefit to mankind?

But here’s the rub. Compassion is an emotion. Empathy is an emotion. Love is also an emotion. What kind of decisions do we come to if we strip that out of the algorithm, along with any type of human check and balance?

Here’s an example. Let’s say that at some point in the future an AGI superbrain is asked the question, “Is the presence of humans beneficial to the general well-being of the earth?”

I think you know what the rational answer to that is.

When AI Love Goes Bad

When we think about AI and its implications, it’s hard to wrap our own non-digital, built of flesh and blood brains around the magnitude of it. Try as we might, it’s impossible to forecast the impact of this massive wave of disruption that’s bearing down on us. So, today, in order to see what might be the unintended consequences, I’d like to zoom in to one particular example.

There is a new app out there. It’s called Anima and it’s an AI girlfriend. It’s not the only one. When it comes to potential virtual partners, there are plenty of fish in the sea. But – for this post, let’s stay true to Anima. Here’s the marketing blurb on her website: “The most advanced romance chatbot you’ve ever talked to. Fun and flirty dating simulator with no strings attached. Engage in a friendly chat, roleplay, grow your love & relationship skills.”

Now, if there’s one area where our instincts should kick in and alarm bells should start going off about AI, it should be in the area of sexual attraction. If there was one human activity that seems bound by necessity to being ITRW (in the real world) it should be this one.

If we start to imagine what might happen when we turn to AI for love, we could ask filmmaker Spike Jonze. He already imagined it, 10 years ago when he wrote the screenplay for “her”, the movie with Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix plays Theodore Twombly, a soon-to-be divorced man who upgrades his computer to a new OS, only to fall in love with the virtual assistant (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) that comes as part of the upgrade.

Predictably, complications ensue.

To get back to Anima, I’m always amused by the marketing language developers use to lull us into the acceptance of things we should be panicking about. In this case, it was two lines: “No strings attached” and “grow your love and relationship skills.”

First, about that “no strings attached” thing – I have been married for 34 years now and I’m here to tell you that relationships are all about “strings.” Those “strings” can also be called by other names: empathy, consideration, respect, compassion and – yes – love. Is it easy to keep those strings attached – to stay connected with the person at the other end of those strings? Hell, no! It is a constant, daunting, challenging work in progress. But the alternative is cutting those strings and being alone. Really alone.

If we get the illusion of a real relationships through some flirty version of ChatGPT, will it be easier to cut the strings that keep us connected to other real people out there? Will we be fooled into thinking something is real when it’s just a seductive algorithm?  In “her”, Jonze brings Twombly back to the real world, ending with a promise of a relationship with a real person as they both gaze at the sunset. But I worry that that’s just a Hollywood ending. I think many people – maybe most people – would rather stick with the “no strings attached” illusion. It’s just easier.

And will AI adultery really “grow your love and relationship skills?” No. No more than you will grow your ability to determine accurate and reliable information by scrolling through your Facebook feed. That’s just a qualifier that the developer threw in so they didn’t feel crappy about leading their customers down the path to “AI-rmegeddon”.

Even if we put all this other stuff aside for the moment, consider the vulnerable position we put ourselves in when we start mistaking robotic love for the real thing. All great cons rely on one of two things – either greed or love. When we think we’re in love, we drop our guard. We trust when we probably shouldn’t.

Take the Anima artificial girlfriend app for example. We know nothing about the makers of this app. We don’t know where the data collected goes. We certainly have no idea what their intentions are. Is this really who you want to start sharing your most intimate chit chat with? Even if their intentions are benign, this is an app built a for-profit company, which means there needs to be a revenue model in it somewhere. I’m guessing that all your personal data will be sold to the highest bidder.

You may think all this talk of AI love is simply stupid. We humans are too smart to be sucked in by an algorithm. But study after study has shown we’re not. We’re ready to make friends with a robot at the drop of a hat. And once we hit friendship, can love be far behind?

AI, Creativity and the Last Beatle’s Song

I have never been accused of being a Luddite. Typically, I’m on the other end of the adoption curve – one of the first to adopt a new technology. But when it comes to AI, I am stepping forward gingerly.

Now, my hesitancy notwithstanding, AI is here to stay. In my world, it is well past the tipping point from a thing that exists solely in the domain to tech to a topic of conversation for everyone, from butchers to bakers to candlestick makers. Everywhere I turn now I see those ubiquitous two letters – AI. That was especially true in the last week, with the turmoil around Sam Altman and the “is he fired/isn’t he” drama at OpenAI.

In 1991 Geoffery Moore wrote the book Crossing the Chasm, looking at how technologies are adopted. He explained that it depends on the nature of the technology itself. If it’s a continuation of technology we understand, the adoption follows a fairly straight-forward bell curve through the general population.

But if it’s a disruptive technology – one that we’re not familiar with – then adoption plots itself out on an S-Curve. The tipping point in the middle of that curve where it switches from being skinny to being fat is what he called the “chasm.” Some technologies get stuck on the wrong side of the chasm, never to be adopted by the majority of the market.  Think Google Glass, for example.

There is often a pattern to the adoption of disruptive technologies (and AI definitely fits this description).  To begin with, we find a way to adapt it and use it for the things we’re already doing. But somewhere along the line, innovators grasp the full potential of the technology and apply it in completely new ways, pushing capabilities forward exponentially. And it’s in that push forward where all the societal disruption occurs. Suddenly, all the unintended consequences make themselves known.

This is exactly where we seem to be with AI. Most of us are using it to tweak the things we’ve always done. But the prescient amongst us are starting to look at what might be, and for many of us, we’re doing so with a furrowed brow. We’re worried, and, I suspect, with good reason.

As one example, I’ve been thinking about AI and creativity. As someone who has always dabbled in creative design, media production and writing, this has been top of mind for me. I have often tried to pry open the mystic box that is the creative process.

There are many, creative software developers foremost amongst them, that will tell you that AI will be a game changer when it comes to creating – well – just about anything.

Or, in the case of the last Beatle single to be released, recreating anything. Now and Then, the final Beatles song featuring the Fab Four, was made possible by an AI program created by Peter Jackson’s team for the documentary Get Back. It allowed Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and their team of producers (headed by George Martin’s son Giles) to separate John Lennon’s vocals from the piano background on a demo tape from 1978.

One last Beatle’s song featuring John Lennon – that should be a good thing – right?  I guess. But there’s a flip side to this.

Let’s take writing, for example. Ask anyone who has written something longer than a tweet or Instagram post. What you start out intending to write is never what you end up with. Somehow, the process of writing takes its own twists and turns, usually surprising even the writer. Even these posts, which average only 700 to 800 words, usually end up going in unexpected directions by the time I place the final period.

Creativity is an iterative process and there are stages in that process. It takes time for it all to  play out. No matter how good my initial idea is, if I simply fed it in an AI black box and hit the “create” button, I don’t know if the outcome would be something I would be happy with.

“But,” you protest, “what about AI taking the drudgery out of the creative process? What if you use it to clean up a photo, or remove background noise from an audio recording (a la the Beatles single). That should free up more time and more options for you to be creative, right?”

That’s promise is certainly what’s being pitched by AI merchants right now. And it makes sense. But it only makes sense at the skinny end of the adoption curve. That’s where we’re at right now, using AI as a new tool to do old jobs. If we think that’s where we’re going to stay, I’m pretty sure we’re being naïve.

I believe creativity needs some sweat. It benefits from a timeline that allows for thinking, and rethinking, over and over again. I don’t believe creativity comes from instant gratification, which is what AI gives us. It comes from iteration that creates the spaces needed for inspiration.

Now, I may be wrong. Perhaps AI’s ability to instantly produce hundreds of variation of an idea will prove the proponents right. It may unleash more creativity than ever. But I still believe we will lose an essential human element in the process that is critical to the act of creation.

Time will tell. And I suspect it won’t take very long.

(Image – The Beatles in WPAP – wendhahai)

In Defense of SEO

Last week, my social media feeds blew up with a plethora (yes – a plethora!) of indignant posts about a new essay that had just dropped on The Verge.

It was penned by Amanda Chicago Lewis and it was entitled: “The People that Ruined the Internet”

The reason for the indignation? Those “people” included myself, and many of my past colleagues. The essay was an investigation of the industry I used to be in. One might even call me one of the original pioneers of said industry. The intro was:

“As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful anymore, what happens to the cottage industry of search engine optimization experts who struck content oil and smeared it all over the web? Well, they find a new way to get rich and keep the party going.”

Am I going to refute the observations of Ms. Lewis?

No, because they are not lies. They are observations. And observations happen through the lens the observer uses to observe. What struck me is the lens Lewis chose to see my former industry through, and the power of a lens in media.

Lewis is an investigative journalist. She writes exposes. If you look at the collection of her articles, you don’t have to scroll very far before you have seen the words “boondoggle”, “hustler”, “lies”, “whitewashing”, and “hush money” pop up in her titles. Her journalistic style veers heavily towards being a “hammer”, which makes all that lie in her path “nails.”

This was certainly true for the SEO article. She targeted many of the more colorful characters still in the SEO biz and painted them with the same acerbic, snarky brush. Ironically, she lampoons outsized personalities without once considering that all of this is filtered through her own personality. I have never met Lewis, but I suspect she’s no shrinking violet. In the article, she admits a grudging admiration for the hustlers and “pirates” she interviewed.

Was that edginess part of the SEO industry? Absolutely. But contrary to the picture painted by Lewis, I don’t believe that defined the industry. And I certainly don’t believe we ruined the internet. Google organic search results are better than they were 10 years ago. We all have a better understanding of how people actually search and a good part of that research was done by those in the SEO industry (myself included). The examples of bad SEO that Lewis uses are at least 2 decades out of date.

I think Lewis, and perhaps others of her generation, suffer from “rosy retrospection” – a cognitive bias that automatically assumes things were better yesterday. I have been searching for the better part of 3 decades and – as a sample of one – I don’t agree. I can also say with some empirical backing that the search experience is quantitatively better than it was when we did our first eye tracking study 20 years ago. A repeat study done 10 years ago showed time to first click had decreased and satisfaction with that click had increased. I’m fairly certain that a similar study would show that the search experience is better today than it was a decade ago. If this is a “search optimized hellhole”, it’s much less hellish than it was back in the “good old days” of search.

One of the reasons for that improvement is that millions of websites have been optimized by SEOs (a label which, by the way Amanda, has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to be mistaken for a CEO) to unlock unindexable content, fix broken code, improve usability, tighten up and categorize content and generally make the Internet a less shitty and confusing place. Not such an ignoble pursuit for “a bunch of megalomaniacal jerks (who) were degrading our collective sense of reality because they wanted to buy Lamborghinis and prove they could vanquish the almighty algorithm.”

Amanda Chigaco Lewis did interview those who sat astride the world of search providers and the world of SEO: Danny Sullivan (“angry and defensive” – according to Lewis), Barry Schwartz (“an unbelievably fast talker”), Duane Forrester (a “consummate schmoozer”) and Matt Cutts (an “SEO celebrity”). Each tried to refute her take that things are “broken” and the SEOs are to blame, but she brushed those aside, intent on caricaturing them as a cast of characters from a carnival side show.  Out of the entire scathing diatribe, one scant paragraph grudgingly acknowledges that maybe not all SEO is bad. That said, Lewis immediately spins around and says that it doesn’t matter, because the bad completely negates the good.

Obviously, I don’t agree with Lewis’s take on the SEO industry. Maybe it’s because I spent the better part of 20 years in the industry and know it at a level Lewis never could. But what irritates me the most is that she made no attempt to go beyond taking the quick and easy shots. She had picked her lens through which she viewed SEO before the very first interview and everything was colored by that lens. Was her take untrue? Not exactly. But it was unfair. And that’s why reporters like Lewis have degraded journalism to the point where it’s just clickbait, with a few more words thrown in.

Lewis gleefully stereotypes SEOs as “content goblin(s) willing to eschew rules, morals, and good taste in exchange for eyeballs and mountains of cash.” That’s simply not true. It’s no more true than saying all investigative journalists are “screeching acid-tongued harpies who are hopelessly biased and cover their topics with all the subtlety of a flame-thrower.”

P.S.  I did notice the article was optimized for search, with keywords prominently shown in the URL. Does that make the Verge and Lewis SEOs?

An Ex-SEO Looks Back at 25 Years of Google

Google turned 25 last week. I guess you could say it’s been a successful quarter century. The term “to Google” is synonymous with “to search”.

Maybe it’s been a little too successful. Currently the global Giga-gargantuan tech giant is facing a massive anti-trust trial that starts this week due to its dominance of online search. Depending on the outcome, Google’s search business might be torn up into much smaller Google-bits.

Who would have thought all this would happen? Not me. Not on that day back in 1998 when I first “Googled.” For a good chunk of the following two and a half decades, as a SEO (Search Engine Optimizer), I had a love-hate relationship with Google.

Let me share.

First, to understand the impact of Google, you had to understand the world of SEO pre-Google. Back then, there was the band of usual search suspects, which included Excite, Lycos, HotBot, Infoseek, and AltaVista. To be a successful SEO, you had to juggle visibility on all of them, because they each had a small chunk of the search audience.

Then, you also had the directories: Yahoo! and the Open Directory project. You couldn’t ignore them, because they were the most popular choice for finding sites. But they were clunky – both to use and to submit to.

Plus, most importantly for SEO (which wasn’t even commonly called SEO back then), you couldn’t really game the directories. But you could game AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek and the rest. Their algorithms depended exclusively on “on-the-page” elements – text and hidden text, metatags and titles. It was the heyday of keyword stuffing, cloaking and “doorway” pages – collectively called spam.

Then came Google – a game changer in more ways than one.

I, like every other user, used to rotate my searching through the available engines, because none of them was that good. Then someone pointed me to the fledgling Google. I think it might have still been hosted on the Stanford served at the time. From that day forward, I only used Google. It wasn’t that it was perfect, or even very good. It was just better than every other alternative.

And that’s when Google changed the game for SEOs. Suddenly, it was all about backlinks. It made us embrace the central concept of the Internet – the way information was connected together. And that made SEO a lot tougher.

It was tougher, but it was also a helluva lot of fun. As I now know, I had a front row seat for the historic rise of search. Today, Google has somewhere around 175 thousand employees. Back then, the numbers were in the low double digits. And I knew many of them, including Marissa Mayer (hire #21) and Craig Silverstein (hire #3). I – and every other SEO – used to hang out with Matt Cutts (the former head of the Spam team) when we were at the same speaking gigs together.

When SEOs got together for a conference in Silicon Valley, Google used to host something called the “Google Dance”. It was a little like inviting the foxes into the hen house, but there was a weird “frenemies” dynamic back then between SEOs and Google.  The first Google Dance I went to would have only been a few years after they moved out of Susan Wojcicki’s garage. I think it was probably their first office space in Mountainview. I remember both Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working the crowd. I just kept missing them. This pattern would continue. I never did meet them face-to-face. But I was in a meeting where Eric Schmidt (then the CEO) just happened to drop in and asked me “what (as a search marketer) I wanted from Google.” I wish my answer was historic, but I’m pretty sure it involved shrugging and mumbling.

That was the vibe back then. When you were on campus, you just never knew who you were going to see. Because of the research we used to do, we enjoyed a more symbiotic relationship than many SEOs had with Google. Our early research established just how valuable that Google top-of-page real estate was for advertisers and helped make the business case for Google AdWords.

I was also invited on more than one occasion to present to Google’s search team, the engineers who made the engine tick. I was lucky enough to talk to Marissa Mayer about the nuances of page design, or Peter Norvig (a literal rocket scientist who was Google’s head of research) about the role of AI in search. I was always in awe of the sheer wattage of brain power that could be found at 1600 Ampitheatre Parkway in Mountainview. A chat with Marissa Mayer was kind of like riding a roller coaster; you just hung on for dear life and tried to stay inside of your car.

My last time on the Google campus was a little over a decade ago, when I dropped out of the search business. But when this particular 25th birthday showed up on my newsfeed, it brought a lot of memories back. Some were a little traumatic (like when all your clients disappeared off of the first page due to an algorithmic update), but mostly they were good.

So happy birthday Google. And like they used to say where I grew up in rural Alberta – don’t get too big for your britches.

Getting from A to Zen

We live in a Type A world. And sometimes, that’s to our detriment.

According to one definition, Type A is achievement oriented, competitive, fast-paced and impatient.

All of that pretty much sums up the environment we live in. But you know what’s hard to find in a Type A world? Your Zen.

I know what you’re thinking — “I didn’t peg Gord for a Zen-seeking kinda guy.” And you’re mostly right. I’m not much for meditation. I’ve tried it — it’s not for me. I’ll be honest. It feels a little too airy-fairy for my overly rational brain.

But I do love cutting the grass. I also love digging holes, retouching photos in Photoshop and cleaning pools. Those are some of the activities where I can find my Zen.

For best-selling author Peggy Orenstein, she found her Zen during COVID – shearing sheep. She shares her journey in her new book, “Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater.” Orenstein has a breezy, humorous, and self-deprecating style, but there are some deep thoughts here.

In reading the book, I learned it wasn’t the act of shearing where Peggy found her Zen. That’s because sheep shearing is really hard work. You can’t let your mind wander as you wrestle 200 to 300 pounds of Ovis aries, holding a buzzing, super-sharp set of sheers while trying to give it a haircut.

As Orenstein said in a recent interview, “Imagine you were in a ballet with Nureyev and nobody told you the steps. That was what it felt like to reach shearing sheep, you know, for the first time.”

No. You might find a lot of things in that activity, but Zen isn’t likely to be one of them. Orenstein finds her Zen in a less terrifying place, cleaning poop out of the newly shorn wool. She did it the way it’s been done for centuries, in a process called carding. While she carded the wool, she would “Facetime” her dad, who has dementia.

In the interview, she said, “You know, I could just slow down. These ancient arts are slow. They’re very slow and (I would) sit with him and just be next to him and have that time together and sing.”

When I heard her say that in the interview, that hit me. I said, “I have to read this book.” Because I got it. That slowing down, that inner connection, the very act of doing something that seems mindless but isn’t – because doing the act creates the space for your mind to think the thoughts it normally doesn’t have time to do. All that stuff is important.

To me, that’s my Zen.

Now, unless you’re a Mahayana Buddhist, Zen is probably nothing more than a buzzword that made its way westward into our zeitgeist sometime in the last century. I am certainly not a Buddhist, so I am not going to dare tell you the definitive meaning of Zen. I am just going to tell you what my version is.

For me, Zen is a few things:

I think these Zen acts have to contribute to the world in some small way. There has to be something at the end that gives you a sense of accomplishment – the feeling of a job well done.

Maybe that’s why meditation is not for me. There is not a tangible reward at the end. But you can look at a pile of newly shorn fleece or a lawn neatly delineated with the tire tracks of your lawnmower.

The brain must be engaged in a Zen task, but not too much. It needs some space to wander. Repetition helps. As you do the task, your mind eventually shifts to auto-pilot mode. And that’s when I find Zen, as my mind is given the license to explore.

I think this is where step one is important – whatever you’re doing has to be useful enough that you don’t feel that you’re wasting time doing it.

Finally, it helps if your Zen tasks are done in a place where the Type A world doesn’t intrude. You need the space to push back interruption and let your mind wander freely.

I realize there are some of you who will immediately connect with what I’m saying, and others who won’t have a clue. That’s okay.

I think that’s the magic of Zen: it’s not for everyone. But for those of us who understand how important it is, we sometimes need a little reminder to sometimes go seek it. Because in this Type A world, it’s becoming harder to find.

When the News Hits Home

My, how things have changed.

My intention was to write a follow up to last week’s post about Canada’s Bill C-18 and Meta’s banning of news on Facebook. I suppose this is a follow up of sorts. But thanks to Mother Nature – that ofttimes bully – that story was pushed right out of the queue to be replaced with something far more tragic and immediate.

To me, anyway.

I live in Kelowna. Chances are you’ve heard about my home in the last few days. If you haven’t, I can tell you that when I look out my window, all I can see is thick smoke. Which may be a good thing. Last Friday, when I could see, I spent the entire evening watching West Kelowna, across Okanagan Lake from my home, burn in the path of the oncoming McDougall Creek Wildfire. As the flames would suddenly leap towards the sky, you knew that was someone’s home being ignited.

We don’t know how many homes have been lost. The fire has been too active for authorities to have the time to count. We have firefighters and first responders pouring in from around our province to help. . Our Air Quality Index is 11 on a scale of 10, as bad as it can get. Thousands are out of their home. More thousands have their things packed by the door, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. We’re one of those.

But that’s enough about the fire. This post is about our weird relationship with the news.

When something like this happens, you have a very real, very visceral need to know what’s going on. For those of us that live here in British Columbia, the news has hit home in a way we could never imagine. A few posts ago, I said it might be healthier for me to ignore the news, because it’s always alarming and very seldom relevant to me. Well, those words are now coming back to haunt me.

This disaster has thrown our reliance on Facebook for new into stark relief. This last Friday, Canada’s Transportation Minster, Pablo Rodriguez, asked Meta to reverse its current ban on news, “We’ve seen that, throughout this emergency, Canadians have not had access to the crucial information they need. So, I ask Meta to reverse its decision, allow Canadians to have access to news on their platforms.”

But there’s another dimension to this that’s a bit more subtle yet even more frightening. It goes to the heart of how we handle crisis. I think you necessarily must “zoom in,” performing some type of terrible triage in your mind to be able to imagine the unimaginable. As the winds shift the fire away from your home, there’s relief. But other homes now lie in the path of the fire. In your head, you know that, but emotionally you can’t help but feel a lift. It’s not noble, but it’s human.

So let’s “zoom out” – a lot. We’re not the only ones this is happening to. This is a global crisis. Twenty-six thousand people are evacuated on the Spanish island of Tenerife. A friend of mine, who’s an airline pilot, was one week ago volunteering to fly people out of Maui who had lost their homes in the tragic Lahaina fire.

Take a look at Nasa’s FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management) website, which gives a global map of all hotspots from wildfires burning. I’ve set this link to wildfire activity in the last 7 days.

Scary as hell, right?

But can we actually process that, in a way that lets us move forward and start coping with this massive issue? Is it enough to change our behaviors in the way we must to finally start addressing climate change?

In a recent article on BBC.com, Richard Fisher talks about “Construal level theory” – which says that the greater the psychological distance there is between the news and your life, the less likely it is to make you change your behavior. For me, the psychological distance between myself and climate change is roughly 1 kilometer (just over half a mile) as the crow flies. That’s how far it is from my house to the nearest evacuation alert area.

It doesn’t get much closer than that.  But will we change? Will anything change?

I’m not so sure. We’ve been through this before. Exactly 20 years ago, the Okanagan Mountain wildfire raged through Kelowna, displacing over 30,000 people and destroying 239 homes. It was a summer much like this, at the time the driest summer on record. This year, we have smashed that record, as we have many times since that fire. Once we picked up, rebuilt our homes and got back to life, nothing really changed.

And now, here we are again. Let’s hope that this time is different.

How Canada is Killing its News Industry

In Canada, an interesting game of brinkmanship is happening. To help bring you up to speed, here are the Cole’s notes:

  • Like everywhere in the world, Canada’s news outlets are starving for revenue. Advertising is drying up, as more budget moves online.
  • In an ill-advised attempt to shore up the Canadian News industry, the federal government passed bill C-18, the Online News Act, which says that Facebook, Google and other tech giants must pay news organizations when someone comes to a web story through a link on one of their platforms.
  • Meta said – basically – WTF? We’re sending you traffic. You want us to pay for that? Fine, we’ll shut off that traffic.

Back in June, Meta posted this notice:

“In order to comply with the Online News Act, we have begun the process of ending news availability in Canada. These changes start today, and will be implemented for all people accessing Facebook and Instagram in Canada over the course of the next few weeks.”

Those changes started stripping news from our social media feeds in the last few weeks. I haven’t seen one news item on my Facebook feed in the last week.

 If you’re confused, you have a lot of company north of the 49th. Logic seems to be totally missing from this particular legislative hammer toss from Justin Trudeau and his merry band of lawmakers.

If there is any logic, it may be that for many some users, they never bother to click through to the actual story. They apparently get all the news they need from doomscrolling on Facebook.

Michael Geist, the Canadian Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, calls the bill a “Lose-Lose-Lose-Lose.” 

For the media outlets that this bill is supposedly protecting, Geist says, “It is difficult to overstate the harm that Bill C-18 will create for the media sector in Canada, with enormous losses that will run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Oops.

Geist details how lobbyists and supporters of the bill were sure Meta was bluffing and would come to the table to negotiate when bidden to do so. A law professor from Carleton University said “I am not worried. The threats they are making, they are doing this all around the world.”

But Meta wasn’t bluffing. And why would they?  When you hold all the cards, you don’t have to bluff. Some news publishers estimate that as much as 50% of their traffic comes from these online channels. A recent study by Maru Public Opinion showed that 26% of Canadians say they get their news from social media sites. For younger age cohorts, this percentage jumps to 35%.

News publishers have now lost that traffic, with no offsetting revenue from Bill C-18 to compensate for it. For a bill that was supposed to save the Canadian news industry, this seems to be hammering nails in the coffin at an alarming rate.

Like Geist said, this is “a cautionary tale for a government that blithely ignored the warning signs, seemed to welcome a fight with the tech companies, and had no Plan B.”

If there are lessons to be learned – or, at least, points to be pondered – in this Canadian debacle, here are two to consider:

This shows that legislators, not just in Canada but around the world, have no idea of the new power dynamics in a digital economy. They still carry the quaint notion they are the power brokers within their borders. But this shows that Meta could care less about the Canadian market. We are a drop in their global revenue bucket. Not only have they not caved in when confronted with the awesome might of the Canadian government, they haven’t even bothered coming back to the table to talk. When the Liberal lawmakers decided to take on Meta, they were taking a knife to a gun fight.

Secondly, I wonder how one third of Canadians will now be informed about what’s happening in the world. With any information sources with even a shred of journalistic integrity stripped from their Facebook and Instagram feeds, who will they be listening to? In a bid for survival, Canada’s news publishers are supposedly launching a desperate campaign to “re-educate” us on how to find the news.

Yeah. We all know how successful “re-education” campaigns are.

Finally, in the irony of ironies, as they squared off against Facebook in this ill-fated battle, Canada’s Liberal government launched a new campaign asking for us to share our thoughts on a “Summer Check-In Survey.”

Their platform of choice for this campaign? Facebook.