Author Archives: ghotchkiss

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.

X Marks the Spot

Elon Musk has made his mark. Twitter and its cute little birdy logo are dead. Like Monty Python’s famous parrot, this bird has shuffled off its mortal coil.

So Twitter is dead, Long live X?

I know — that seems weird to me, too.

Musk clearly has a thing for the letter X. He founded a company called X.com that merged with PayPal in 2000. In his portfolio of companies, you’ll find SpaceX, xAI, X Corp. Its seldom you see so much devotion to 1/26th of the Latin alphabet.

It’s not unprecedented to pick a letter and turn it into a brand. Steve Jobs managed to make the letter “i” the symbol for everything Apple. Mind you, he also tacked on helpful product descriptors to keep us from getting confused. If he had changed the name of Apple to “I” and just left it at that, it might not have worked so well.

At their best, brands should immediately bridge the gap between the DNA of a company and a long-term niche in the brains of those of us in the marketplace. Twitter did that. When you saw the iconic bird logo or hear the word Twitter, you know exactly what it referred to.

This is easier when the company is known for a handful of products. But when companies stretch into multiple areas, it’s tough to make one brand synonymous with hundreds or thousands of products. 

This brand diffusion is common with the hyper-accelerated world of tech. You launch a product and it’s so successful, it becomes a mega-corporation. At some point you’re stuck with an awkward transition: You leave the original brand associated with that product and create an umbrella brand that is vague enough to shelter a diverse and expanding portfolio of businesses. That’s why Google created the generic Alpha brand, and why Facebook became Meta.

But Musk didn’t create an umbrella to shelter Twitter and its brand. He used it to beat the brand to death. Maybe he just doesn’t like blue birds.

When a brand does its job well, we feel a personal relationship with it. Twitter’s brand did this. It was unique in tech branding, primarily because it was cute and organic. It was an accessible brand, a breath of fresh air in a world of cryptic acronyms and made-up terms with weird spellings. It made sense to us. And we are sorry to see it go.

In fact, some of us are flat-out refusing to admit the bird is dead. One programmer has already whipped together a Chrome extension that strips out the X branding and brings our favorite little Tweeter back from the beyond. Much as I admire this denial, I suspect this is only delaying the inevitable. It’s time to say bye-bye birdy. 

This current backlash against Musk’s rebranding could be a natural outcome of his effort to move from being one tied to a product to one that creates a bigger tent for multiple products. He has been pretty vocal about X becoming an “everything” app, a la China’s WeChat.

I suspect the road to making X a viable brand is going to be a rocky one. First of all, if you were going to pick the most generic symbol imaginable, X would be your choice. It literally has been a stand in for pretty much everything you could think of for centuries now. Even my great, great grandfather signed his name with an “X.”

We Hotchkisses have always been ahead of our time.

But the ubiquity of “X” brings up another problem, this time on the legal front. According to a lengthy analysis of Twitter’s rebranding by Emma Roth, you can trademark a single letter, but trying to make X your brand will come with some potentially litigious baggage. Microsoft has a trademark on X. So does Meta.

As long at Musk’s X sticks to its knitting, that might not be a problem. Microsoft registered X for its Xbox gaming console. Meta’s trademark also has to do with gaming. Apparently, as long as you don’t cross industries and confuse customers, having the same trademark shouldn’t be an issue.

But the chances of Elon Musk playing nice and following the rules of trademark law while pursuing his plan for world domination are somewhat less than zero. In this case, I think it’s fair to speculate that the formula for the future will be: X = a shitload of lawyer fees. 

Also, even if you succeed in making X a recognized and unique brand, protecting that brand will be a nightmare. How do you build a legal fence around X when the choice of it as a brand was literally to tear down fences?

But maybe Musk has already foreseen all this. Maybe he has some kind of superpower to see things we can’t.

Kind of like Superman’s X-Ray vision.

The Challenge in Regulating AI

A few weeks ago, MediaPost’s Wendy Davis wrote a commentary on the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of OpenAI. Of primary concern to the FTC was ChatGPT’s tendency to hallucinate. I found this out for myself when ChatGPT told some whoppers about who I was and what I’ve done in the past.

Davis wrote, “The inquiry comes as a growing chorus of voices — including lawmakers, consumer advocates and at least one business group — are pushing for regulations governing artificial intelligence. OpenAI has also been hit with lawsuits over copyright infringement, privacy and defamation.”

This highlights a problem with trying to legislate AI. First, the U.S. is using its existing laws and trying to apply them to a disruptive and unpredictable technology. Laws, by their nature, have to be specific, which means you have to be able to anticipate circumstances in which they’d be applied. But how do you create or apply laws for something unpredictable? All you can do is regulate what you know. When it comes to predicting the future, legislators tend to be a pretty unimaginative bunch. 

In the intro to a Legal Rebels podcast on the American Bar Association’s website, Victor Li included this quote, “At present, the regulation of AI in the United States is still in its early stages, and there is no comprehensive federal legislation dedicated solely to AI regulation. However, there are existing laws and regulations that touch upon certain aspects of AI, such as privacy, security and anti-discrimination. “

The ironic thing was, the quote came from ChatGPT. But in this case, ChatGPT got it mostly right. The FTC is trying to use the laws at its disposal to corral OpenAI by playing a game of legal whack-a-mole:  hammering things like privacy, intellectual property rights, defamation, deception and discrimination as they pop their heads up.

But that’s only addressing the problems the FTC can see. It’s like repainting the deck railings on the Titanic the day before it hit the iceberg. It’s not what you know that’s going to get you, it’s what you don’t know.

If you’re attacking ChatGPT’s tendency to fabricate reality, you’re probably tilting at the wrong windmill. This is a transitory bug. OpenAI benefits in no way from ChatGPT’s tendency to hallucinate. The company would much rather have a large language-based model that is usually truthful and accurate. You can bet they’re working on it. By the time the ponderous wheels of the U.S. legislative system get turned around and rolling in the right direction, chances are the bug will be fixed and there won’t really be anything to legislate against.

What we need before we start talking about legislation is something more fundamental. We need an established principle, a framework of understanding from which laws can be created as situations arise.

This is not the first time we’ve faced a technology that came packed with potential unintended consequences. In February, 1975, 140 people gathered at a conference center in Monterey, California to attempt to put a leash on genetic manipulation, particularly Recombinant DNA engineering.

This group, which included mainly biologists with a smattering of lawyers and physicians, established principle-based guidelines that took its name from the conference center where they met. It was called the Asilomar Conference agreement.

The guidelines were based on the level of risk involved in proposed experiments. The higher the risk, the greater the required precautions.

These guidelines were flexible enough to adapt as the science of genetic engineering evolved. It was one of the first applications of something called “the precautionary principle” – which is just what it sounds like: if the future is uncertain, go forward slowly and cautiously.

While the U.S. is late to the AI legislation party, the European Union has been taking the lead. And, if you look its first attempts at E.U. AI regulation drafted in 2021, you’ll see it has the precautionary principle written all over it. Like the Asilomar guidelines, there are different rules for different risk levels. While the U.S. attempts at legislation are mired in spotty specifics, the EU is establishing a universal framework that can adapt to the unexpected.

This is particularly important with AI, because it’s an entirely different ballgame than genetic engineering. Those driving the charge are for-profit companies, not scientists working in a lab.

OpenAI is intended as a platform that others will build on. It will move quickly, and new issues will pop up constantly. Unless the regulating bodies are incredibly nimble and quick to plug loopholes, they will constantly be playing catch-up.

It’s All in How You Spin It

I generally get about 100 PR pitches a week. And I’m just a guy who writes a post on tech, people and marketing now and then. I’m not a journalist. I’m not even gainfully employed by anyone. I am just one step removed — thanks to the platform  MediaPost has provided me — from “some guy” you might meet at your local coffee shop.

But still, I get 100 PR pitches a week. Desperation for coverage is the only reason I can think of for this to be so. 99.9999% of the time, they go straight to my trash basket. And the reason they do is that they’re almost never interesting. They are — well, they’re pitches for free exposure.

Now, the average pitch, even if it isn’t interesting, should at least try to match the target’s editorial interest. It should be in the strike zone, so to speak.

Let’s do a little postmortem on one I received recently. It was titled “AI in Banking.” Fair enough. I have written a few posts on AI. Specifically, I have written a few posts on my fear of AI.

I have also written about my concerns about misuse of data. When it comes to the nexus between AI and data, I would be considered more than a little pessimistic. So, something linking AI and banking did pique my interest, but not in a good way. I opened the email.

There, in the first paragraph, I read this: “AI is changing how banks provide personalized recommendations and insights based on enriched financial data offering tailored suggestions, such as optimizing spending, suggesting suitable investment opportunities, or identifying potential financial risks.”

This, for those of you not familiar with “PR-ese,” is what we in the biz call “spin.” Kellyanne Conway once called it — more euphemistically — an alternative fact.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say that during the Tour de France half the Peloton crashes and bicyclists get a nasty case of road rash. A PR person would spin that to say that “Hundreds of professional cyclists discover a new miracle instant exfoliation technique from the South of France.”

See? It’s not a lie, it’s just an alternative fact.

Let’s go on. The second paragraph of the pitch continued: “Bud, a company that specializes in data intelligence is working with major partners across the country (Goldman Sachs, HSBC, 1835i, etc.) to categorize and organize financial information and data so that users are empowered to make informed decisions and gain a deeper understanding of their financial situation.”

Ah — we’re now getting closer to the actual fact. The focus is beginning to switch from the user, empowered to make better financial decisions thanks to AI, to what is actually happening: a data marketplace being built on the backs of users for sale to corporate America.

Let’s now follow the link to Bud’s website. There, in big letters on the home page, you read:

“Turn transactional data into real-time underwriting intelligence

Bud’s AI platform and data visualizations help lenders evaluate risk, reduce losses and unlock hidden revenue potential.”

Bingo. This is not about users, at least, not beyond using them as grist in a data mill. This is about slipping a Trojan Horse into your smartphone in the form of an app and hoovering your personal data up to give big banks an intimate glimpse into not just your finances, but also your thinking about those finances. As you bare your monetary soul to this helpful “Bud,” you have established a direct pipeline to the very institutions that hold your future in their greedy little fingers. You’re giving an algorithm everything it needs to automatically deny you credit.

This was just one pitch that happened to catch my eye long enough to dig a little deeper. But it serves as a perfect illustration of why I don’t trust big data or AI in the hands of for-profit corporations.

And that will continue to be true — no matter how you PR pros spin it.

The Spark in the Jar: Jon Ive and Steve Jobs

I sold all my Apple stock shortly after Steve Jobs passed away. It was premature (which is another word for stupid). Apple stock is today worth about 10 times what I sold it for.

My reasoning was thus: Apple couldn’t function without Steve Jobs – not for long, anyway.

Well, 12 years later, it’s doing quite well, thank you. It has a stock price of almost $200 per share (as of the writing of this). Sales have never been stronger. While replacement CEO Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs, financially he has grown Apple into a monolithic force with a market capitalization of almost 3 trillion dollars. There is no other company even close to that.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I realize I underestimated Tim Cook. But I stand with my original instinct: whatever Apple was under Steve Jobs, it couldn’t survive without him. And to understand why, let’s take a quick look back.

Jobs was infamously ousted from Apple in 1985. He remained in “NeXTile” for 12 years, coming back in 1997 to lead Apple into what many believe was its Golden Era. He passed away in 2011.

In the 14 years Jobs led Apple in his second run, the stock price went from about 20 cents to about 12 dollars. That’s growth of about 6000%.  Steve Jobs brought Apple back from the brink of death. If it wasn’t for a lifeline thrown to it by its number one competitor, Microsoft, in 1997, Apple would be no more. As Jobs himself said, “Apple was in very serious trouble,” said Jobs. “And what was really clear was that if the game was a zero-sum game where for Apple to win, Microsoft had to lose, then Apple was going to lose.

But those growth numbers are a little misleading. For you to be one of the fastest growing companies in history, it helps when you start with a very, very small number. A share price of $0.20 is a very, very small number.

Much as everyone lauds Steve Jobs for the turnaround of Apple, I would argue that Tim Cooks performance is even more impressive. To say that Apple was already on a roll when Cook took over is an understatement. In 2011, Apple was going from success to success and could seem to do no wrong. That was one of the reasons I was pessimistic about its future. I thought it couldn’t sustain its run, especially when it came to introducing new products. How many Jobs inspired home runs could it possibly have in its pipeline?

But what Tim Cook was great at was logistics. He took that pipeline and managed to squeeze out another decade plus of value building thanks to what may be the best supply chain strategy in the world. Analysts have said that half of Apple’s 3 trillion dollars in value is directly attributable to that supply chain.

But when you squeeze every last inch of efficiency out of a supply chain, something has to give. And in this case, it may have been creativity.

The Job’s era Apple was a very rare and delicate thing in the corporate world: a leader who was uncompromising on user experience and a design team able to rise and meet the challenge. Was it dictorial? Absolutely. Was it magical? Almost always. It was like catching a spark in a jar.

That design team was headed by Jonathon Ive. And when you have a team that’s the absolute best in the world, you can put up with an asshole here and there, especially when that asshole keeps challenging you to be better.  And when you keep delivering.

The alchemy that made Apple spectacularly successful from 1996 to 2011 was a fragile thing. It wouldn’t take much to change the formula forever. For example, if you removed the catalyst – which was Steve Jobs – it couldn’t survive. But equally important to that formula was Jon Ive.

As David Price, the editor of Macworld said,

“What Ive brought to Apple was a coherent personal vision. That doesn’t mean Apple’s designs on his watch were always perfect, of course; there were plenty of missteps. In broader terms, his arch-minimalism could be frustrating for those who wanted more physical controls”

David Price, Macworld

Ive and Jobs were, by all accounts, inseparable. In a heartfelt tribute to Jobs published shortly after his passing, Ive remembered,

“We worked together for nearly 15 years. We had lunch together most days and spent our afternoons in the sanctuary of the design studio. Those were some of the happiest, most creative and joyful times of my life,” Ive wrote. “I loved how he saw the world. The way he thought was profoundly beautiful.”

Jon Ive

For Jobs and Ive – “Think Different” was both a manifesto and a mantra. That philosophy started a not-so-slow death the minute Jobs passed from this earth. Finally, in June 2019, Ive announced his departure “after years of frustration, seeing the company migrate from a design-centric entity to one that was more utilitarian.”

It seems that companies can excel at either creativity or execution. It’s very difficult – perhaps impossible – to do both. The Apple of Steve Jobs was the world’s most creative corporation. The Apple of Tim Cook is a world leader in execution. But for one to happen, the other had to make room. Today, Apple is trying to be creative by committee. Macworld’s David Price mourns the Apple that was, “Maybe Apple is no longer a company that focuses on individual personality, or indeed on thinking different. This week we also got the news that Ive’s replacement will not be replaced, with a core group of 20 designers instead reporting directly to the chief operating officer, who is no stranger to design and likely has his own ideas. If design by committee has been the de facto approach for the past four years, it’s now been made official.”

And committees always suck all the oxygen from the room. In that atmosphere, the spark that once was Apple inevitably had to go out.

No News is Good News

I’m trying not to pay too much attention to the news. This is partly because I’m exhausted by the news, and partly because of the sad state of journalism today.

This isn’t just a “me” thing. Almost everyone I talk to says they’re trying to find coping mechanisms to deal with the news. The News industry – and its audience – has gone from being an essential part of a working democracy to something that is actually bad for you.  In an online essay from 4 years, Swiss author Rolf Dobelli equates news consumption to a bad diet:

“(translated from its original German) News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is appetizing, easily digestible and at the same time highly harmful. The media feeds us morsels of trivial stories, tidbits that by no means satisfy our hunger for knowledge. Unlike with books and long, well-researched, long articles, there is no saturation when consuming news. We can devour unlimited amounts of messages; they remain cheap sugar candies. As with sugar, the side effects only show up with a delay.”

Rolf Dobelli, 2019

This alarming state is due to the fact that the News (in the US) is supported by advertising, which means it has a ravenous appetite for eyeballs. Because of this, it is highly profitable to make news addictive.

This creates a state, as Dobelli points out, where even though the news is highly inflammatory, like a constantly jangling alarm bell, almost all the news we consume is irrelevant to our daily lives. While the news we watch pushes all our hot buttons, it doesn’t serve a useful purpose. In fact, it does the exact opposite: it leads to chronic mental and physical ill-being and may cause us to start ignoring the warning signs we should be paying attention to.

A study last year (McLaughlin, Gotlieb and Mills) found ties between problematic news consumption and mental ill-being. The study found that 16.5% of 1,100 people polled in an online survey showed signs of “severely problematic” news consumption, which led them to focus less on school, work and family, and contributed to an inability to sleep.

Dobelli’s essay goes even further, pointing a finger at excessive news consumption as the cause of a list of issues including cognitive errors, inhibiting deeper thinking, wasting time, killing creativity, making us more passive and even wiring our brains for addiction in a manner similar to drugs.

All these negative side effects come from chronic stress – a constant and pervasive alarmed state that excessive news consumption puts our brains into. And if you thought Dobelli’s list was scary, wait until you see the impact of chronic stress! It actually attacks the brain by releasing excessive amounts of cortisol and restricting the uptake of serotonin, which can increase inflammation, lead to depression, shrink your hippocampus and impact your memory, make it difficult to sleep and impair your ability to think rationally.

To put a new twist on an old saying, “No news is good news.”

But let’s put aside for a moment the physical and mental toll that news takes on us. Even if none of that were true, our constant diet of bad news can also lead to something known as “alarm fatigue.”

Alarm fatigue is essentially our response to the proverbial boy who calls wolf. After several false alarms, we stop paying attention. And on that one time when we should be paying attention, we are caught with our guard down.

There is one other problem with our news diet: it oversimplifies complex problems into simple sound bites. Thomas Jefferson said, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” But when the news abdicates its role as an informer to pursue profit as entertainment, it is no longer educating us. It is pandering to us by stuffing bite sized opinion pieces that reinforce our beliefs – right or wrong. We are never challenged to examine our beliefs or explore the complexity of the wicked problems that confront us. Real journalism has been replaced by profitable punditry.

All this leaves us with a choice. Until the News industry cleans up its act (I’m not holding my breath), you’re likely far better off to ignore it. Or at least, ignore the profit driven platforms that are hungry for eyeballs. Stay informed by turning to books, long articles and true investigative journalism. That’s what I’m going to start doing.

Failing all that, just think about things. I understand it’s good for you.

Leaning Into the Little Things

“We might not be the ones to change the world. We might not belong to the few that ‘put a ding in the universe.’ We might not be something the whole world would celebrate. But…In the little corners that we live; in the lives that we’ve played a part in, we should be nothing but unforgettable.”

Nesta Jojoe Erskine – “Unforgettable: Living a Life that Matters“

Shirley May was not a celebrity. She was not a CEO, a politician, a scientist or an inventor. She was — quite simply — a cashier at a local family-run grocery store in the city where  I live. Shirley always had a smile and a kind word for everyone.

And that made Shirley unforgettable. At least, she was unforgettable to those who knew her, here in the little corner we live in.

Shirley left us a few weeks ago. Her online obituary has almost 100 notes of condolence. The social media post saying farewell to Shirley has more. There are many, many people whose world is a little sadder, a little less uplifting, because Shirley is no longer part of it.

Almost all of them were people who may not have known Shirley well, but what they knew of her they loved. 

This is heartwarming proof that a light touch can still leave a deep impression.

We live in a world that skews towards the big, the loud, the astounding, the overwhelming. We trade in hyperbole. We revel in excess.

Shirley was none of those things. She was — well, there’s really no other word for it — Shirley was simply lovely. Her light shone from inside and touched those that crossed her path, even for the briefest of encounters.

A few years ago, in the midst of COVID, I said I missed the mundane. In that post, I said how “mundane” had gotten a bad rap. We think of mundane things as dull and boring. But it doesn’t have to be. Mundane is simply the stuff of our everyday world.

Shirley was part of that world. And if we stop and pay attention, if we take the time to appreciate each of those little moments that make up our day, we will probably discover Shirley’s secret: We will treasure the tiny things. And, if we’re persistent, if we’re generous, if we light the world up from inside, we too might become unforgettable.

A decade ago, then Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Nell Scovell wrote a book called “Lean In.” The book was about women taking charge of their careers and “leaning in” to the challenges that face them. While their advice to “Lean In” was in an entirely different context, I can’t help but think that it also applies to Shirley May. She leaned in to every moment, not matter how small. She owned that moment, savored it, gently prodded it to find the pleasure, then passed that pleasure on to others.

How wonderful is that?

The most wonderful thing is that this is so easy to do. All you have to do is smile and be open to serendipity. Treat every encounter with someone else as an opportunity to “lean In” to the moment. Embrace every day by embracing the “everyday.”

Shirley May did that. And for hundreds of us, she was unforgettable.

Why I’m Worried About AI

Even in my world, which is nowhere near the epicenter of the technology universe, everyone is talking about AI And depending on who’s talking – it’s either going to be the biggest boon to humanity, or it’s going to wipe us out completely. Middle ground seems to be hard to find.

I recently attended a debate at the local university about it. Two were arguing for AI, and two were arguing against. I went into the debate somewhat worried. When I walked out at the end of the evening, my worry was bubbling just under the panic level.

The “For” Team had a computer science professor – Kevin Leyton-Brown, and a philosophy professor – Madeleine Ransom. Their arguments seemed to rely mainly on creating more leisure time for us by freeing us from the icky jobs we’d rather not do. Leyton-Brown did make a passing reference to AI helping us to solve the many, many wicked problems we face, but he never got into specifics.

“Relax!” seemed to be the message. “This will be great! Trust us!”

The “Against” Team was comprised of a professor in Creative and Critical Studies – Bryce Traister. As far as I could see, he seemed to be mainly worried about AI replacing Shakespeare. He did seem quite enamored with the cleverness of his own quips.

It was the other “Against” debater who was the only one to actually talk about something concrete I could wrap my head around. Wendy Wong is a professor of Political Science. She has a book on data and human rights coming out this fall. Many of her concerns focused on this area.

Interestingly, the AI debaters all mentioned Social Media in their arguments. And on this point, they were united. All the debaters agreed that the impact of Social Media has been horrible. But the boosters were quick to say that AI is nothing like Social Media.

Except that it is. Maybe not in terms of the technology that lies beneath it, but in terms of the unintended consequences it could unleash, absolutely! Like Social Media, what will get us with AI are the things we don’t know we don’t know.

I remember when social media first appeared on the scene. Like AI, there were plenty of evangelists lining up saying that technology would connect us in ways we couldn’t have imagined. We were redefining community, removing the physical constraints that had previously limited connections.

If there was a difference between social media and AI, it was that I don’t remember the same doomsayers at the advent of social media. Everyone seemed to be saying “This will be great! Trust us!”

Today, of course, we know better. No one was warning us that social media would divide us in ways we never imagined, driving a wedge down the ideological middle of our society. There were no hints that social media could (and still might) short circuit democracy.

Maybe that’s why we’re a little warier when it comes to AI. We’ve already been fooled once.

I find that AI Boosters share a similar mindset – they tend to be from the S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) School of Thought. As I’ve said before, these types of thinkers tend to mistake complex problems for complicated ones. They think everything is solvable, if you just have a powerful enough tool and apply enough brain power. For them, AI is the Holy Grail – a powerful tool that potentially applies unlimited brain power.

But the dangers of AI are hidden in the roots of complexity, not complication, and that requires a different way of thinking. If we’re going to get some glimpse of what’s coming our way, I am more inclined to trust the instincts of those that think in terms of the humanities. A thinker, for example, such as Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens.

Harari recently wrote an essay in the Economist that may be the single most insightful thing I’ve read about the dangers of AI: “AI has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. AI has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.”

In my previous experiments with ChatGPT, it was this fear that was haunting me. Human brains operate on narratives. We are hard-wired to believe them. By using language, AI has a back door into our brains that bypass all our protective firewalls.

My other great fear is that the development of AI is being driven by for-profit corporations, many of which rely on advertising as their main source of revenue. If ever there was a case of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse, this is it!

When it comes to AI it’s not my job I’m afraid of losing. It’s my ability to sniff out AI generated bullshit. That’s what’s keeping me up a night.

Deconstructing a Predatory Marketplace

Last week, I talked about a predatory ad market that was found in — of all places — in-game ads. And the predators are — of all things — the marketers of Keto Gummies. This week, I’d like to look at why this market exists, and why someone should do something about it.

First of all, let’s understand what we mean by “predatory.” In biological terms, predation is a zero-sum game. For a predator to win, someone has to lose.  On Wikipedia, it’s phrased a little differently: “Predatory marketing campaigns may (also) rely on false or misleading messaging to coerce individuals into asymmetrical transactions. “

 “Asymmetrical” means the winner is the predator, the loser is the prey.

In the example of the gummy market, there are three winners — predators — and three losers, or prey. The winners are the marketers who are selling the gummies, the publishers who are receiving the ad revenue and the supply side platform that mediates the marketplace and take its cut.

The losers — in ascending order of loss — are the users of the games who must suffer through these crappy ads, the celebrities who have had their names and images illegally co-opted by the marketer, and the consumers who are duped into actually buying a bottle of these gummies.

You might argue the order of the last two, depending on what value you put on the brand of the celebrity. But in terms of sheer financial loss, consumer fraud is a significant issue, and one that gets worse every year.  In February, the Federal Trade Commission reported that U.S. consumers lost $8.8 billion to scams last year, many of which occurred online. The volume of scams is up 30% over 2021, and is 70% higher than it was in 2020.

So it’s not hard to see why this market is predatory. But is it fraudulent? Let’s apply a legal litmus test. Fraud is generally defined as “any form of dishonest or deceptive behavior that is intended to result in financial or personal gain for the fraudster, and does harm to the victim.”

Based on this, fraud does seem to apply. So why doesn’t anyone do anything?

For one, we’re talking about a lot of potential money here. Statista pegs the in-game ad market at $32.5 billion worldwide in 2023, with projected annual growth rate of 9.10% That kind of money provides a powerful incentive to publishers and supply-side platforms (SSPs) to look the other way.

I think it’s unreasonable expect the marketers of the gummies to police themselves. They have gone to great pains to move themselves away from the threat of legal litigation. These corporations are generally registered in jurisdictions like China or Cyprus, where legal enforcement of copyright or consumer protections are nonexistent. If someone like Oprah Winfrey has been unable to legally shut down the fraudulent use of her image and brand for two years, you can bet the average consumer who has been ripped off has no recourse. 

But perhaps one of the winners in this fraudulent ecosystem — the SSPs – should consider cracking down on this practice.

In nature, predators are kept in check by something called a predator-prey relationship. If predators become too successful, they eliminate their prey and seal their own doom. But this relationship only works if there are no new sources of prey. If we’re talking about an ecosystem that constantly introduces new prey, nothing keeps predators in check.

Let’s look at the incentive for the game publishers to police the predators. True, allowing fraudulent ads does no favours for the users of their game. A largescale study by Gao, Zeng, Lu et al found that bad ads lead to a bad user experience.

But do game publishers really care? There is no real user loyalty to games, so churn and burn seems to be the standard operating procedure. This creates an environment particularly conducive to predators.

So what about the SSPs?

GeoEdge, an ad security solution that guards against malvertising, among other things, has just released its Q1 Ad Quality Report. In an interview, Yuval Shiboli, the company’s director of product market, said that while malicious ads are common across all channels, in-game advertising is particularly bad because of a lack of active policing: “The fraudsters are very selective in who they show their malicious ads, looking for users who are scam-worthy, meaning there is no security detection software in the environment.”

Quality of advertising is usually directly correlated with the pricing of the ad inventory. The cheaper the ad, the poorer the quality. In-game ads are relatively cheap, giving fraudulent predators an easy environment to thrive in. And this entire environment is created by the SSPs.

According to Shiboli, it’s a little surprising to learn who are the biggest culprits on the SSP side: “Everybody on both the sell side and buy side works with Google, and everyone assumes that its platforms are clean and safe. We’ve found the opposite is true, and that of all the SSP providers, Google is the least motivated to block bad ads.”

By allowing — even encouraging — a predatory marketplace to exist, Google and other SSPs are doing nothing less than aiding and abetting criminals. In the short term, this may add incrementally to their profits, but at what long-term price?