Category Archives: The New Marketplace

My Many Problems with the Metaverse

I recently had dinner with a comedian who had just did his first gig in the Metaverse. It was in a new Meta-Comedy Club. He was excited and showed me a recording of the gig.

I have to admit, my inner geek thought it was very cool: disembodied hands clapping with avataresque names floating above, bursts of virtual confetti for the biggest laughs and even a virtual-hook that instantly snagged meta-hecklers, banning them to meta-purgatory until they promised to behave. The comedian said he wanted to record a comedy meta-album in the meta-club to release to his meta-followers.

It was all very meta.

As mentioned, as a geek I’m intrigued by the Metaverse. But as a human who ponders our future (probably more than is healthy) – I have grave concerns on a number of fronts. I have mentioned most of these individually in previous posts, but I thought it might be useful to round them up:

Removed from Reality

My first issue is that the Metaverse just isn’t real. It’s a manufactured reality. This is at the heart of all the other issues to come.

We might think we’re clever, and that we can manufacturer a better world than the one that nature has given us, but my response to that would be Orgel’s Second Rule, courtesy of Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA: “Evolution is cleverer than you are.”

For millions of years, we have evolved to be a good fit in our natural environment. There are thousands of generations of trial and error baked into our DNA that make us effective in our reality. Most of that natural adaptation lies hidden from us, ticking away below the surface of both our bodies and brains, silently correcting course to keep us aligned and functioning well in our world.

But we, in our never-ending human hubris, somehow believe we can engineer an environment better than reality in less than a single generation. If we take Second Life as the first iteration of the metaverse, we’re barely two decades into the engineering of a meta-reality.

If I was placing bets on who is the better environmental designer for us, humans or evolution, my money would be on evolution, every time.

Who’s Law is It Anyway?

One of the biggest selling features of the Metaverse is that it frees us from the restrictions of geography. Physical distance has no meaning when we go meta.

But this also has issues. Societies need laws and our laws have evolved to be grounded within the boundaries of geographical jurisdictions. What happens when those geographical jurisdictions become meaningless? Right now, there are no laws specifically regulating the Metaverse. And even if there are laws in the future, in what jurisdiction would they be enforced?

This is a troubling loophole – and by hole I mean a massive gaping metaverse-sized void. You know who is attracted by a lack of laws? Those who have no regard for the law. If you don’t think that criminals are currently eyeing the metaverse looking for opportunity, I have a beautiful virtual time-share condo in the heart of meta-Boca Raton that I’d love to sell you.

Data is Matter of the Metaverse

Another “selling feature” for the metaverse is the ability to append metadata to our own experiences, enriching them with access to information and opportunities that would be impossible in the real world. In the metaverse, the world is at our fingertips – or in our virtual headset – as the case may be. We can stroll through worlds, real or imagined, and the sum of all our accumulated knowledge is just one user-prompt away.

But here’s the thing about this admittedly intriguing notion: it makes data a commodity and commodities are built to be exchanged based on market value. In order to get something of value, you have to exchange something of value. And for the builders of the metaverse, that value lies in your personal data. The last shreds of personal privacy protection will be gone, forever!

A For-Profit Reality

This brings us to my biggest problem with the Metaverse – the motivation for building it. It is being built not by philanthropists or philosophers, academics or even bureaucrats. The metaverse is being built by corporations, who have to hit quarterly profit projections. They are building it to make a buck, or, more correctly, several billion bucks.

These are the same people who have made social media addictive by taking the dirtiest secrets of Las Vegas casinos and using them to enslave us through our smartphones. They have toppled legitimate governments for the sake of advertising revenue. They have destroyed our concept of truth, bashed apart the soft guardrails of society and are currently dismantling democracy. There is no noble purpose for a corporation – their only purpose is profit.

Do you really want to put your future reality in those hands?

Looking at Life through Ad-Coloured Glasses

Love em or hate em – you have to admit that ads are a fascinating creative form. They are – more perhaps than any other form of creative expression – a message with a mission.

Orson Welles once said, “The Enemy of Art Is the Absence of Limitations.”

Lorne Michaels – Executive Producer of Saturday Night Live, agreed, “To me there’s no creativity without boundaries. If you’re gonna write a sonnet, it’s 14 lines, so it’s solving the problem within the container.”

I do agree with both Mr. Michaels and Mr. Welles, so let’s strip down advertising to the 4 bare walls that make up the boundaries of a commercial message:

  • It has to get your attention when you may not want to give it
  • It has to get you to think about something you’re not currently thinking about
  • It has to persuade you to buy something or do something you probably don’t absolutely need to have or do
  • It needs to get its message across in an incredibly short span of time

Given these limitations, a successful ad gives us a fascinating glimpse into the context of the culture it was created within. In order to successfully tick all the boxes above, it can’t be subtle. It has to prick our consciousness, piercing through the fog of the cloud of cultural content we exist within. And, in doing all that, it then has to leave us feeling somewhere north of ambivalent about the product or brand that the ad is about.

For this reason, ads have to be unapologetically commercial, often blunt and sometimes push against the edge of what’s acceptable to us. They have to arouse our brains without triggering outrage. The boundaries of an ad help define the form of creativity that goes into the creation of an effective ad. This creativity, in turn, becomes an interesting reflection of the culture in which that ad has to perform.

I’ve talked before about the psychological concept called “leveling and sharpening” – where our brains repackage our experiences to make them easier to remember and retell as stories. Unnecessary detail is “leveled” out and certain outstanding details are “sharpened” to add interest. I suspect ads may represent an intentional leveling and sharpening that make them caricatures of the culture they come from.

I have a friend who’s a history professor. Some years ago, he oversaw an archeological dig at a site that had been a railway laborer camp 100 years before. He told me that for an archeologist, the most interesting area to dig was where they had the latrines, because that’s where you threw everything you didn’t want people to find. It was there that you found out what life was really like in the camps. In this way, maybe ads are a kind of metaphorical outhouse for our culture.

This all came to mind when I happened across an online post that featured ads from the past that would be unacceptable to us now, but as a relic of the culture they came from, gives us a fascinating and often uncomfortable glimpse of what was acceptable in a different time and place.

Looking Kellogg’s ad from the early 1900s. Source: Veronica Costa / Flickr / The Commons)

Take an ad for Kellogg’s Pep Cereal, circa 1940s. The ad’s headline is, “So The Harder a Wife Works, The Cuter She Looks” The ad features a picture of a couple, wife in front wearing a dress and apron while holding a feather duster, while the husband hugs her from behind with an admiring look in his eye. This messaging is not so far removed from the cultural context that would have surrounded it. Women were meant to be at home, making the house tidy and cooking dinner for her husband. Her only other worth is hinted at in the headline.

At least that ad is a little more subtle than the one for Pitney Bowes Postage Meters from 1947. The headline here is “Is It Always Illegal to Kill a Woman?” The premise – wait for it – is that the postage meter makes life so easy for a secretary that she has more time to gossip and slack off at work, driving her boss to justifiable homicide.

(Image Source: Monolith68 / Flickr / The Commons)

This ad, in particular, makes my point. Obviously, the supposed humor in the situation has been grossly exaggerated to get your attention. But even with this, there had to be a culture that saw this as being within the bounds of the acceptable, resulting in a “wink-wink” type of bemusement rather than moral outrage.

You also have to wonder about the targeting strategies of these ads. In the case of Kellogg’s Pep, it would have been assumed that women did the grocery shopping, so the ad would have been targeted with this unspoken message: “Women, throw some Kellogg’s Pep in your grocery cart and you’ll be the perfect wife.”

In the case of the Pitney Bowes ad, men would buy postage machines for an office (no women should have that much power) and so the ad played on what an “unsufferable pain in the ass female employees were.”

It’s in these ads where you see how misogynistic the culture truly was. These attitudes towards the place of women in society were more muted and often glamorized in other longer-form media, such as movies. Consider the bluntness of the chauvinism found in these ads compared to the more subtle forms found in popular movies of the time – such as the loyalty of Donna Reed to James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life or Ingrid Bergman’s “Ilsa” in Casablanca. All views came from the same culture, but through a different lens.

Ads didn’t have the luxury of being subtle. When you only have a few seconds to get your message across, there is no room for nuance. The boundaries defined the form of the message, and the message was that culturally, women were still considered chattel.

In our current reality of cancel culture, these ads are in a category of poor taste that can only be described as jaw dropping. But they do act as a lens through which to look at another place and time. They are cultural caricatures that – hopefully – point out that we have made some progress and perhaps, the past wasn’t as golden and innocent as some would have us believe.

Risk, Reward and the Rebound Market

Twelve years ago, when looking at B2B purchases and buying behaviors, I talked about a risk/reward matrix. I put forward the thought that all purchases have an element of risk and reward in them. In understanding the balance between those two, we can also understand what a buyer is going through.

At the time, I was saying how many B2B purchases have low reward but high risk. This explains the often-arduous B2B buying process, involving RFPs, approved vendor lists, many levels of sign off and a nasty track record of promising prospects suddenly disappearing out of a vendors lead pipeline. It was this mystifying marketplace that caused us to do a large research investigation into B2B buying and lead to me writing the book, The Buyersphere Project: How Businesses Buy from Businesses in the Digital Marketplace.

When I wrote about the matrix right here on Mediapost back then, there were those that said I had oversimplified buying behavior – that even the addition of a third dimension would make the model more accurate and more useful. Better yet, do some stat crunching on realtime data, as suggested by Andre Szykier:

“Simple StatPlot or SPSS in the right hands is the best approach rather than simplistic model proposed in the article.”

Perhaps, but for me, this model still serves as a quick and easy way to start to understand buyer behavior. As British statistician George P. Box once said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Fast forward to the unusual times we now find ourselves in. As I have said before, as we emerge from a forced 2-year hiatus from normal, it’s inevitable that our definitions of risk and reward in buying behaviors might have to be updated. I was reminded of this when I was last week’s commentary – “Cash-Strapped Consumers Seek Simple Pleasures” by Aaron Paquette. He starts by saying, “With inflation continuing to hover near 40-year highs, consumers seek out savings wherever they can find them — except for one surprising segment.”

Surprising? Not when I applied the matrix. It made perfect sense. Paquette goes on,

“Consumers will trade down for their commodities, but they pay up for their sugar, caffeine or cholesterol fix. They’re going without new clothes or furniture, and buying the cheapest pantry staples, to free scarce funds for a daily indulgence. Starbucks lattes aren’t bankrupting young adults — it’s their crushing student loans. And at a time when consumers face skyrocketing costs for energy, housing, education and medical care, they find that a $5 Big Mac, Frappuccino, or six pack of Coca-Cola is an easy way to “treat yo self.”

I have talked before about what we might expect as the market puts a global pandemic behind us. The concepts of balancing risk and reward are very much at the heart of our buying behaviors. Sociologist Nicholas Christakis explores this in his book Apollo’s Arrow. Right now, we’re in a delicate transition time. We want to reward ourselves but we’re still highly risk averse. We’re going to make purchases that fall into this quadrant of the matrix.

This is a likely precursor to what’s to come, when we move into reward seeking with a higher tolerance of risk. Christakis predicts this to come sometime in 2024: “What typically happens is people get less religious. They will relentlessly seek out social interactions in nightclubs and restaurants and sporting events and political rallies. There’ll be some sexual licentiousness. People will start spending their money after having saved it. They’ll be joie de vivre and a kind of risk-taking, a kind of efflorescence of the arts, I think.”

The consumer numbers shared by Paquette shows we’re dipping our toes into the waters of hedonism . The party hasn’t started yet but we are more than ready to indulge ourselves a little with a reward that doesn’t carry a lot of risk.

50 Shades of Greying

Here is what I know: Lisa LaFlamme – the main anchor of CTV News, one of Canada’s national nightly newscasts – was fired.

What I don’t know is why. There are multiple versions of why floating around. The one that seems to have served as a rallying point for those looking to support Ms. LaFlamme is that she was fired because she was getting old. During COVID she decided to let her hair go to its natural grey. That, according to the popular version, prompted network brass to pull the pin on her contract.

I suspect the real reason why was not quite that cut and dried. The owners of the network, Bell Media, have been relentlessly trimming their payrolls at their various news organizations over the past several years. I know of one such story through a personal connection. The way this one scenario played out sounded very similar to what happened to Lisa LaFlamme – minus the accusations of ageism and gender double standards. In this case, it was largely a matter of dollars and cents. TV news is struggling financially. Long-time on-air talent have negotiated a salary over their careers that is no longer sustainable. Something had to give. These are probably just the casualties attributable to a dying industry. A hundred years ago it would have been blacksmiths and gas lamplighters that were being let go by the thousands. The difference is that the average blacksmith or lamplighter didn’t have a following of millions of people. They also didn’t have social media. They certainly didn’t have corporate PR departments desperately searching for the latest social media “woke” bandwagon to vault upon.

What is interesting is how these things play out through various media channels. In Ms LaFlamme’s case, it was a perfect storm that lambasted Bell Media (which owns the CTV Network). As the ageism rumours began to emerge, anti-ageism social media campaigns were run by Dove, Wendy’s and even Sports Illustrated. LaFlamme wasn’t mentioned by name in most of these, but the connection was clear. Going grey was something to be celebrated, not a cause for contract cancellation. Grey flecked gravitas should be gender neutral. “Who the f*&k were these Millennial corporate pin-heads that couldn’t stand a little grey on the nightly news!”

It makes excellent fodder for the meme-factory, but I suspect the reality wasn’t quite that simple. Ms La Flamme has never publicly revealed the actual reason for dismissal from her point of view. She never mentioned ageism. She simply said she was “blindsided” by the news. The reasoning behind the parting of the ways from Bell Media has largely been left up to conjecture.

A few other things to note.  LaFlamme received the news on June 29th but didn’t share the news until six weeks later (August 15th) on a personal video she shared on her own social media feed. Bell Media offered her the opportunity to have an on-air send off, but she declined. Finally, she also declined several offers from Bell to continue with the network in other roles. She chose instead to deliver her parting shot in the war zone of social media.

To be fair to both sides, if we’re to catalog all the various rumors floating about, there are also those saying that the decision was brought in – in part – by an allegedly toxic work environment in the news department that started at the top, with LaFlamme.

Now, if the reason for the termination actually was ageism, that’s abhorrent. Ms. LaFlamme is actually a few years younger than I am. I would hate to think that people of our age, who should be still at the height of their careers, would be discriminated against simply because of age.

The same is true if the reason was sexism. There should be no distinction between the appropriate age of a male or female national anchor.

But if it’s more complex, which I’m pretty sure it is, it shows how our world doesn’t really deal very well with complexity anymore. The consideration required to understand them don’t fit well within the attention constraints of social media. It’s a lot easier just to sub in a socially charged hot button meme and wait for the inevitable opinion camps to form. Sure, they’ll be one dimensional and about as thoughtful as a sledgehammer, but those types of posts are a much better bet to go viral.

Whatever happened in the CTV National Newsroom, I do know that this shows that business decisions in the media business will have to follow a very different playbook from this point forward. Bell Media fumbled the ball badly on this one. They have been scrambling ever since to save face. It appears that Lisa LaFlamme – and her ragtag band of social media supporters – outplayed them at every turn.

By the way, LaFlamme just nabbed a temporary gig as a “special correspondent” for CityTV, Bell Media’s competitor, covering the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II and the proclamation of King Charles III.  She’s being consummately professional and comforting, garnering a ton of social media support as she eases Canada through the grieving process (our emotional tie to the Crown is another very complex relationship that would require several posts to unpack).  

Well played, Lisa LaFlamme – well played.

As the “Office” Goes, What May Go With It?

In 2017, Apple employees moved into the new Apple headquarters, called the Ring, in Cupertino, California. This was the last passion project of Steve Jobs, who personally made the pitch to Cupertino City Council just months before he passed away. And its design was personally overseen by Apple’s then Chief Design Office Jony Ive. The new headquarters were meant to give Apple’s Cupertino employees the ultimate “sense of place”. They were designed to be organic and flexible, evolving to continue to meet their needs.

Of course, no one saw a global pandemic in the future. COVID-19 drove almost all those employees to work from home. The massive campus sat empty. And now, as Apple tries to bring everyone back to the Ring, it seems what has evolved is the expectations of the employees, who have taken a hard left turn away from the very idea of “going to work.”

Just last month, Apple had to backtrack on its edict demanding that everyone start coming back to the office three days a week. A group which calls itself “Apple Together” published a letter asking for the company to embrace a hybrid work schedule that formalized a remote workplace. And one of Apple’s leading AI engineers, Ian Goodfellow, resigned in May because of Apple’s insistence on going back to the office.

Perhaps Apple’s Ring is just the most elegant example of a last-gasp concept tied to a generation that is rapidly fading from the office into retirement. The Ring could be the world’s biggest and most expensive anachronism. 

The Virtual Workplace debate is not new for Silicon Valley. Almost a decade ago, Marissa Mayer also issued a “Back to the Office” edict when she came from Google to take over the helm at Yahoo. A company memo laid out the logic:

“To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo Company Memo

The memo was not popular with Yahooligans. I was still making regular visits to the Valley back then and heard first-hand the grumblings from some of them. My own agency actually had a similar experience, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Over the past decade – until COVID – employees and employers have tentatively tested the realities of a remote workplace. But in the blink of an eye, the pandemic turned this ongoing experiment into the only option available. If businesses wanted to continue operating, they had to embrace working from home. And if employees wanted to keep their jobs, they had to make room on the dining room table for their laptop. Overnight, Zoom meetings and communicating through Slack became the new normal.

Sometimes, necessity is the mother of adoption. And with a 27 (and counting) month runway to get used to it, it appears that the virtual workplace is here to stay.

In some ways, the virtual office represents the unbundling of our worklife. Because our world was constrained by physical limitations of distance, we tended to deal with a holistic world. Everything came as a package that was assembled by proximity. We operated inside an ecosystem that shared the same physical space. This was true for almost everything in our lives, including our jobs. The workplace was a place, with physical and social properties that existed within that place.

But technology allows us to unbundle that experience. We can separate work from place. We pick and choose what seems to be the most important things we need to do our jobs and take it with us, free from the physical restraints that once kept us all in the same place in the same time. In that process, there are both intended and unintended consequences.

On the face of it, freeing our work from its physical constraints (when this is possible) makes all kinds of sense. For the employer, it eliminates the need for maintaining a location, along with the expense of doing so. And, when you can work anywhere, you can also recruit from anywhere, dramatically opening up the talent pool.

For the employee, it’s probably even more attractive. You can work on your schedule, giving you more flexibility to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Long and frustrating commutes are eliminated. Your home can be wherever you want to live, rather than where you have to live because of your job.

Like I said, when you look at all these intended consequences, a virtual workplace seems to be all upside, with little downside. However, the downsides are starting to show through the cracks created by the unintended consequences.

To me, this seems somewhat analogous to the introduction of monoculture agriculture. You could say this also represented the unbundling of farming for the sake of efficiency. Focusing on one crop in one place in a time made all kinds of sense. You could standardize planting, fertilizing, watering and harvesting based on what was best for the chosen crop. It allowed for the introduction of machinery, increasing yields and lowering costs. Small wonder that over the past 2 centuries – and especially since World War II – the world rushed to embrace monoculture agriculture.

But now we’re beginning to see the unintended consequence. Dr. Frank Uekotter, Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Birmingham, calls monoculturalism a “centuries long stumble.” He warns that it has developed its own momentum, ““Somehow that fledgling operation grew into a monster. We may have to cut our losses at some point, but monoculture has absorbed decades of huge investment and moving away from it will be akin to attempting a handbrake turn in a supertanker.”

We’re learning – probably too late – that nature never intended plants to be surrounded only by other plants of the same kind. Monocultures lead to higher rates of disease and the degradation of the environment. The most extreme example of this is how monocultures of African palm oil orchards are swallowing the biodiverse Amazon rain forest at an alarming rate. Sometimes, as Joni Mitchell reminds us, “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”

The same could be true for the traditional workplace. I think Marissa Mayer was on to something. We are social animals and have evolved to share spaces with others of our species. There is a vast repertoire of evolved mechanisms and strategies that make us able to function in these environments. While a virtual workplace may be logical, we may be sacrificing something more ephemeral that lies buried in our humanness. We can’t see it because we’re not exactly sure what it is, but we’ll know it when we lose it.

Maybe it’s loyalty. A few weeks ago, the Wharton School of Business published an article entitled, “Is Workplace Loyalty Gone for Good?” We have all heard of the “Great Resignation.” Last year, the US had over 40 million people quit their jobs. The advent of the Virtual Workplace has also meant a virtual job market. Employees are in the driver’s seat. Everything is up for renegotiation. As the article said, “the modern workplace has become increasingly transactional.”

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe not. That’s the thing with unintended consequences. Only time will tell.

Sensationalizing Scam Culture

We seem to be fascinated by bad behavior. Our popular culture is all agog with grifters and assholes. As TV Blog’s Adam Buckman wrote in March: “Two brand-new limited series premiering this week appear to be part of a growing trend in which some of recent history’s most notorious innovators and disruptors are getting the scripted-TV treatment.”

The two series Buckman was talking about were “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” about Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and “The Dropout,” about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

But those are just two examples from a bumper crop of shows about bad behavior. My streaming services are stuffed with stories of scammers. In addition to the two series Buckman mentioned, I just finished Shonda Rhimes’ Netflix series “Inventing Anna,” about Anna Sorokin, who posed as an heiress named Anna Delvey.

All these treatments tread a tight wire of moral judgement, where the examples are presented as antisocial, but in a wink-and-a-nod kind of way, where we not so secretly admire these behaviors. Much as the actions are harmful to well-being of the collective “we,” they do appeal to the selfishness and ambition of “me.”

Most of the examples given are rags to riches to retribution stores (Holmes was an exception with her upper-middle-class background). The sky-high ambitions of Kalanick Holmes and Sorokin were all eventually brought back down to earth. Sorokin and Holmes both ended up in prison, and Kalanick was ousted from the company he founded.

But with the subtlest of twists, they didn’t have to end this way. They could have been the story of almost any corporate America hustler who triumphed. With a little more substance and a little less scam, you could swap Elizabeth Holmes for Steve Jobs. They even dressed the same.

Obviously, scamming seems to sell. These people fascinate us. Part of the appeal is no doubt due a class conflict narrative: the scrappy hustler climbing the social ranks by whatever means possible. We love to watch “one of us” pull the wool over the eyes of the social elite.

In the case of Anna Sorokin, Laura Craik dissects our fascination in a piece published in the UK’s Evening Standard:

“The reason people are so obsessed with Sorokin is simple: she had the balls to pull off on a grand scale what so many people try and fail to pull off on a small one. To use a phrase popular on social media, Sorokin succeeded in living her best life — right down to the clothes she wore in court, chosen by a stylist. Like Jay Gatsby, she was a deeply flawed embodiment of The American Dream: a person from humble beginnings who rose to achieve wealth and social status. Only her wealth was borrowed and her social status was conferred via a chimera of untruths.”

Laura Craik – UK Evening Standard

This type of behavior is nothing new. It’s always been a part of us. In 1513, a Florentine bureaucrat named Niccolo Machiavelli gave it a name — actually, his name. In writing “The Prince,” he condoned bad behavior as long as the end goal was to elevate oneself. In a Machiavellian world, it’s always open season on suckers: “One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.”

For the past five centuries, Machiavellianism was always synonymous with evil. It was a recognized character flaw, described as “a personality trait that denotes cunningness, the ability to be manipulative, and a drive to use whatever means necessary to gain power. Machiavellianism is one of the traits that forms the Dark Triad, along with narcissism and psychopathy.”

Now, however, that stigma seems to be disappearing. In a culture obsessed with success, Machiavellianism becomes a justifiable means to an end, so much so that we’ve given this culture its own hashtag: #scamculture: “A scam culture is one in which scamming has not only lost its stigma but is also valorized. We rebrand scamming as ‘hustle,’ or the willingness to commodify all social ties, and this is because the ‘legitimate’ economy and the political system simply do not work for millions of Americans.”

It’s a culture that’s very much at home in Silicon Valley. The tech world is steeped in Machiavellianism. Its tenets are accepted — even encouraged — business practices in the Valley. “Fake it til you make it” is tech’s modus operandi. The example of Niccolo Machiavelli has gone from being a cautionary tale to a how-to manual.

But these predatory practices come at a price. Doing business this way destroys trust. And trust is still, by far, the best strategy for our mutual benefit. In behavioral economics, there’s something called “tit for tat,” which according to Wikipedia “posits that a person is more successful if they cooperate with another person. Implementing a tit-for-tat strategy occurs when one agent cooperates with another agent in the very first interaction and then mimics their subsequent moves. This strategy is based on the concepts of retaliation and altruism.”

In countless game theory simulations, tit for tat has proven to be the most successful strategy for long-term success. It assumes a default position of trust, only moving to retaliation if required.

Our society needs trust to function properly. In a New York Times op-ed entitled “Why We Need to Address Scam Culture,” Tressie McMillan Cottom writes,  

“Scams weaken our trust in social institutions, but their going mainstream — divorced from empathy for the victims or stigma for the perpetrators — means that we have accepted scams as institutions themselves.”

Tressie McMillan Cottom – NY Times

The reason that trust is more effective than scamming is that predatory practices are self-limiting. You can only be a predator if you have enough prey. In a purely Machiavellian world, trust disappears — and there are no easy marks to prey upon.

Same War, Different World?

I suspect if you checked Putin’s playbook for the Ukraine invasion, it would be stale-dated by at least six decades — and possibly more.

Putin wants territory. This invasion is a land grab. And his justification, outlined in a speech he gave on February 21, is that Ukraine was never really a country, it was just an orphaned part of Russia that should be brought back home, by force if necessary:

“Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space,” he said, per the Kremlin’s official translation. “Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians.”

Those words sound eerily familiar. In fact, here’s another passage that follows exactly the same logic: 

“German-Austria must return to the great German motherland, and not because of economic considerations of any sort. No, no: even if from the economic point of view this union were unimportant, indeed, if it were harmful, it ought nevertheless to be brought about. Common blood belongs in a common Reich.”

That was written in 1925 by Adolf Hitler, while in prison. It’s an excerpt from “Mein Kampf.” Thirteen years later, Hitler brought Austria back to Germany with the Anschluss, under threat of invasion.

Both strategies — which are essentially the same strategy — come from the nationalism handbook. Despite knee-jerk spasms of alt-right nationalism that have appeared around the globe, including here in North America, I must believe that our world is not the same as it was a century ago.

Then, nationalism was still very much THE play in the political play book. Power was derived from holding territory. The more you held, the greater your power. The world was anchored by the physical, which provided both resources and constraints.

You protected what you held by fortified borders. You restricted what went back and forth across those borders. The interests of those inside the borders superseded whatever lay outside them.

Trade was a different animal then. It occurred within the boundaries of an empire. Colonies provided the raw resources to the Mother Country. But two world wars decisively marked the end of that era.

The McDonald’s Theory of War

After that, the globe was redefined. Nations coalesced into trading blocs. Success came from the ease of exchange across borders. Nationalism was no longer the only game in town. In fact, it seemed to be a relic of a bygone era. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Thomas Friedman wrote an essay in 1996 that put forward a new theory: “So I’ve had this thesis for a long time and came here to Hamburger University at McDonald’s headquarters to finally test it out. The thesis is this: No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.”

It was a nice theory, but the Russia-Ukraine conflict seems to have put the final nail in its coffin. Both countries have hundreds of McDonald’s. Even Thomas Friedman has had to note that his theory may no longer be valid.

Or is it? Perhaps this will be the exception that proves Friedman right.

In essence, the global economy is a network that relies on trust. If Friedman was right about his theory, repeated in his 2005 book “The World is Flat,” the world is not only flat, it’s also surprisingly small. To trade with another country, you don’t have to be best friends, you just have to make sure you don’t get stabbed in the back. And to be sure of that, you have to know who you’re dealing with.

China is an example. Politically, we don’t see eye-to-eye on many things, but there is a modicum of trust that allows us to swap several billion dollars’ worth of stuff every year. The trick of trade is to know where that line is where you piss off your partner to the point where they pack up their toys and go home.

Putin just rolled his tanks right over that line. He has doubled down on the bet that nationalism is still a play that can win. But if it does, it will reverse a historic trend that has been centuries in the making — a trend toward cooperation and trust, and away from protectionism and parochial thinking.

This is a war that — initially, anyway —  seems to be playing out unlike any war in the past.

It’s being covered differently. As Maarten Albarda, poignantly shared, we are getting reports directly from real people living through a unreal situation.

It is being fought differently. Nations and corporations are economically shunning Russia and its people. Russian athletes have been banned from international sporting events. We have packed up our toys and gone home.

We are showing our support for Ukraine differently. As one example, thousands of people are booking Airbnbs in Ukraine with no intention of ever going there. It’s just one way to leverage a tool to funnel funds directly to people who need it.

And winning this war will also be defined differently. Even if Putin is successful in annexing Ukraine, he will have isolated himself on the world stage. He will have also done the impossible: unified the West against him. He has essentially swapped whatever trust Russia did have on the world stage for territory. By following an out-of-date playbook, he may end up with a win that will cost Russia more that it could ever imagine.

The Canary in the Casino

It may not seem like it if you’ve watched the news lately, but there are signs we’re balanced on the edge of a gigantic party. We’re all ready to treat ourselves with a little hedonistic indulging.

As I mentioned in a previous column (rerun last week), physician, epidemiologist and sociologist Nicholas Christakis predicted this behavior, but not for a few years yet. Christakis predicted a sort of global “letting loose” starting some time in 2024:

“What typically happens is people get less religious. They will relentlessly seek out social interactions in nightclubs and restaurants and sporting events and political rallies. There’ll be some sexual licentiousness. People will start spending their money after having saved it. They’ll be joie de vivre and a kind of risk-taking, a kind of efflorescence of the arts, I think.”

So, there is light at the end of the pandemic tunnel — but, according to a report just out from the American Gaming Association, some of us can’t wait a couple of years. First out of the gate were gamblers. Well before we started emerging from the pandemic, they were already rolling the dice and starting the party.

According to the report from the AGA, U.S. commercial gaming revenue hit a record $53 billion in 2021. That was more than 21% higher than the previous record, set in 2019, and a huge rebound of 77% from 2020 numbers, when COVID forced casinos to shut down for months at a time.

You might think online gaming accounts for the jump, but you’d be wrong. In-casino gambling underpins this huge spike, accounting for $45.6 billion of the $53 billion total. People were saying to hell with health mandates and streaming into casinos across the country, with most of the top markets seeing significant gains from pre-COVID 2019.

While some of us might not be ready to ditch the masks and belly up to the bar, I suspect these gamblers are an early indicator of things to come. Call them a canary in a coal mine, if you will.

Because I can’t resist interesting historical tidbits, I thought I’d share the story behind this saying about how canaries ended up in coal mines in the first place. Early in the last century, canaries were used as an early warning system for poison gas in England. John Scott Haldane, who was researching the effects of carbon monoxide on humans, suggested using canaries as a “sentinel species,” an animal more sensitive to the impact of poisonous gases. They were kept in cages throughout the mines — and if a canary died, the miners were warned to evacuate the mine.

But why canaries?

Canaries, like most birds, need tremendous amounts of oxygen to fly and to avoid altitude sickness. They actually take in oxygen twice on each breath, once while inhaling and again when exhaling. This, combined with their relatively small size, make them hyper-sensitive to the impact of a poisonous gas. Also, canaries were easy to come by in England and convenient to transport. So, they were recruited to help keep humans alive.

This makes them analogous to gamblers in the following way: Gamblers, by their nature, are built to be more willing to take some risk in search of a reward. You could say they are hyper-sensitive to the rush that comes from rewarding themselves. As such, they are the early adopters in the onrushing desire to put bad news behind them and let loose with a little hedonistic hell-raising. They are not atypical; they’re just ahead of the curve in this one respect.

Sooner or later, the rest of us will follow. Look for similar huge rebounds in the travel and hospitality sectors, entertainment, events and other industries focused on providing pleasure. The world will become one giant spring break party.

Which is perhaps only fitting, coming after a two-year-long winter of our discontent.

The Joe Rogan Experiment in Ethical Consumerism

We are watching an experiment in ethical consumerism take place in real time. I’m speaking of the Joe Rogan/Neil Young controversy that’s happening on Spotify. I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but if not, Canadian musical legend Neil Young had finally had enough of Joe Rogan’s spreading of COVID misinformation on his podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience.” He gave Spotify an ultimatum: “You can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Spotify chose Rogan. Young pulled his library. Since then, a handful of other artists have followed Young, including former band mates David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, along with fellow Canuck Hall of Famer Joni Mitchell.

But it has hardly been a stampede. One of the reasons is that — if you’re an artist — leaving Spotify is easier said than done. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Rosanne Cash said most artists don’t have the luxury of jilting Spotify: 

“It’s not viable for most artists. The public doesn’t understand the complexities. I’m not the sole rights holder to my work… It’s not only that a lot of people who aren’t rights holders can’t remove their work. A lot of people don’t want to. These are the digital platforms where they make a living, as paltry as it is. That’s the game. These platforms own, what, 40 percent of the market share?”

Cash also brings up a fundamental issue with capitalism: it follows profit, and it’s consumers who determine what’s profitable. Consumers make decisions based on self-interest: what’s in it for them. Corporations use that predictable behavior to make the biggest profit possible. That behavior has been perfectly predictable for hundreds of years. It’s the driving force behind Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. It was also succinctly laid out by economist Milton Friedman in 1970:

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

We all want corporations to be warm and fuzzy — but it’s like wishing a shark were a teddy bear. It just ain’t gonna happen.

One who indulged in this wishful thinking was a little less well-known Canadian artist who also pulled his music  from Spotify, Ontario singer/songwriter Danny Michel. He told the CBC:

“But for me, what it was was seeing how Spotify chose to react to Neil Young’s request, which was, you know: You can have my music or Joe. And it seems like they just, you know, got out a calculator, did some math, and chose to let Neil Young go. And they said, clear and loud: We don’t need you. We don’t need your music.”

Well, yes, Danny, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what Spotify did. It made a decision based on profit. For one thing, Joe Rogan is exclusive to Spotify. Neil Young isn’t. And Rogan produces a podcast, which can have sponsors. Neil Young’s catalog of songs can’t be brought to you by anyone.

That makes Rogan a much better bet for revenue generation. That’s why Spotify paid Rogan $100 million. Music journalist Ted Gioia made the business case for the Rogan deal pretty clear in a tweet

“A musician would need to generate 23 billion streams on Spotify to earn what they’re paying Joe Rogan for his podcast rights (assuming a typical $.00437 payout per stream). In other words, Spotify values Rogan more than any musician in the history of the world.”

I hate to admit that Milton Friedman is right, but he is. I’ve said it time and time before, to expect corporations to put ethics ahead of profits is to ignore the DNA of a corporation. Spotify is doing what corporations will always do, strive to be profitable. The decision between Rogan and Young was done with a calculator. And for Danny Michel to expect anything else from Spotify is simply naïve. If we’re going to play this ethical capitalism game, we must realize what the rules of engagement are.

But what about us? Are we any better that the corporations we keep putting our faith in?

We have talked about how we consumers want to trust the brands we deal with, but when a corporation drops the ethics ball, do we really care? We have been gnashing our teeth about Facebook’s many, many indiscretions for years now, but how many of us have quite Facebook? I know I haven’t.

I’ve seen some social media buzz about migrating from Spotify to another service. I personally have started down this road. Part of it is because I agree with Young’s stand. But I’ll be brutally honest here. The bigger reason is that I’m old and I want to be able to continue to listen to the Young, Mitchell and CSNY catalogs. As one of my contemporaries said in a recent post, “Neil Young and Joni Mitchell? Wish it were artists who are _younger_ than me.”

A lot of pressure is put on companies to be ethical, with no real monetary reasons why they should be. If we want ethics from our corporations, we have to make it important enough to us to impact our own buying decisions. And we aren’t doing that — not in any meaningful way.

I’ve used this example before, but it bears repeating. We all know how truly awful and unethical caged egg production is. The birds are kept in what is known as a battery cage holding 5 to 10 birds and each is confined to a space of about 67 square inches. To help you visualize that, it’s just a bit bigger than a standard piece of paper folded in half. This is the hell we inflict on other animals solely for our own gain. No one can be for this. Yet 97% of us buy these eggs, just because they’re cheaper.

If we’re looking for ethics, we have to look in other places than brands. And — much as I wish it were different — we have to look beyond consumers as well. We have proven time and again that our convenience and our own self-interest will always come ahead of ethics. We might wish that were different, but our spending patterns say otherwise.

It’s the Buzz That Will Kill You

If you choose to play in the social arena, you have to accept that the typical peaks and valleys of business success can suddenly become impossibly steep.

In social media networks, your brand message is whatever meme happens to emerge from the collective activity of this connected market. Marketers have little control — and sometimes, they have no control. At best, all they can do is react by throwing another carefully crafted meme into the social-sphere and hope it picks up some juice and is amplified through the network.

That’s exactly what happened to Peloton in the past week and a half.

On Dec. 9, the HBO Max sequel to “Sex and the City” killed off a major character — Chris Noth’s Mr. Big — by giving him a heart attack after his one thousandth Peloton ride. Apparently, HBO Max gave Peloton no advance warning of this branding back hand.

On Dec. 10, according to Axios,  there was a dramatic spike in social interactions talking about Mr. Big’s last ride, peaking near 80 thousand. As you can imagine, the buzz was not good for Peloton’s business.

On Dec. 12, Peloton struck back with its own ad, apparently produced in just 24 hours by Ryan Reynold’s Maximum Effort agency. This turned the tide of the social buzz. Again, according to data from Newswhip and Axios, social media mentions peaked. This time, they were much more positive toward the Peloton brand.

It should be all good — right? Not so fast. On Dec 16, two sexual assault allegations were made against Chris Noth, chronicled in The Hollywood Reporter. Peloton rapidly scrubbed its ad campaign. Again, the social sphere lit up and Peloton was forced back into defensive mode.

Now, you might call all this marketing froth, but that’s  the way it is in our hyper-connected world. You just have to dance the dance — be nimble and respond.

But my point is not about the marketing side of this of this brouhaha – which has been covered to death, at least at MediaPost (sorry, pardon the pun.) I’m more interested  in what happens to the people who have some real skin in this particular game, whose lives depend on the fortunes of the Peloton brand. Because all this froth does have some very IRL consequences.

Take Peloton’s share price, for one.

The day before the HBO show aired, Peloton’s shares were trading at $45.91. The next day, they tumbled 16%. to $38.51.

And that’s just one chapter in the ongoing story of Peloton’s stock performance, which has been a hyper-compressed roller coaster ride, with the pandemic and a huge amount of social media buzz keeping the foot firmly on the accelerator of stock performance through 2020, but then subsequently dropping like a rock for most of 2021. After peaking as high as $162 a share exactly a year ago, the share price is back down to spitting distance of its pre-pandemic levels.

Obviously, Peloton’s share price is not just dependent on the latest social media meme. There are business fundamentals to consider as well.

Still, you have to accept that a more connected meme-market is going to naturally accelerate the speed of business upticks and declines. Peloton signed up for this dance — and  when you do that, you have to accept all that comes with it.

In terms of the real-world consequences of betting on the buzz, there are three “insider” groups (not including customers) that will be affected: the management, the shareholders and the employees. The first of these supposedly went into this with their eyes open. The second of these also made a choice. If they did their due diligence before buying the stock, they should have known what to expect. But it’s the last of these — the employees — that I really feel for.

With ultra-compressed business cycles like Peloton has experienced, it’s tough for employees to keep up. On the way up the peak, the company is running ragged trying to scale for hyper-growth. If you check employee review sites like Glassdoor.com, there are tales of creaky recruitment processes not being able to keep up. But at least the ride up is exciting. The ride down is something quite different.

In psychological terms, there is something called the locus of control. These are the things you feel you have at least some degree of control over. And there is an ever-increasing body of evidence that shows that locus of control and employee job satisfaction are strongly correlated. No one likes to be the one constantly waiting for someone else to drop the other shoe. It just ramps up your job stress. Granted, job stress that comes with big promotions and generous options on a rocket ship stock can perhaps be justified. But stress that’s packaged with panicked downsizing and imminent layoffs is not a fun employment package for anyone.

That’s the current case at Peloton. On Nov. 5 it announced an immediate hiring freeze. And while there’s been no official announcement of layoffs that I could find, there have been rumors of such posted to the site thelayoff.com.  This is not a fun environment for anyone to function in. Here’s what one post said: “I left Peloton a year ago when I realized it was morphing into the type of company I had no intention of working for.”

We have built a business environment that is highly vulnerable to buzz. And as Peloton has learned, what the buzz giveth, the buzz can also taketh away.