Category Archives: Personal

A collection of personal thoughts and stories

The Calcification of a Columnist

First: the Caveat. I’m old and grumpy. That is self-evident. There is no need to remind me.

But even with this truth established, the fact is that I’ve noticed a trend. Increasingly, when I come to write this column, I get depressed. The more I look for a topic to write about, the more my mood spirals downward.

I’ve been writing for Mediapost for over 12 years now. Together, between the Search Insider and Online Spin, that’s close to 600 columns. Many – if not most – of those have been focused on the intersection between technology and human behavior. I’m fascinated by what happens when evolved instincts meet technological disruption.

When I started this gig I was mostly optimistic. I was amazed by the possibilities and – somewhat naively it turns out – believed it would make us better. Unlimited access to information, the ability to connect with anyone – anywhere, new ways to reach beyond the limits of our own DNA; how could this not make humans amazing?

Why, then, do we seem to be going backwards? What I didn’t realize at the time is that technology is like a magnifying glass. Yes, it can make the good of human nature better, but it can also make the bad worse. Not only that, but Technology also has a nasty habit of throwing in unintended consequences; little gotchas we never saw coming that have massive moral implications. Disruption can be a good thing, but it can also rip things apart in a thrice that took centuries of careful and thoughtful building to put in place. Black Swans have little regard for ethics or morality.

I have always said that technology doesn’t change behaviors. It enables behaviors. When it comes to the things that matter, our innate instincts and beliefs, we are not perceptibly different than our distant ancestors were. We are driven by the same drives. Increasingly, as I look at how we use the outcomes of science and innovation to pursue these objectives, I realize that while it can enable love, courage and compassion, technology can also engender more hate, racism and misogyny. It makes us better while it also makes us worse. We are becoming caricatures of ourselves.

800px-diffusion_of_ideas

Everett Rogers, 1962

Everett Rogers plotted the diffusion of technology through the masses on a bell curve and divided us up into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. The categorization was defined by our acceptance of innovation. Inevitably, then, there would be a correlation between that acceptance and our sense of optimism about the possibilities of technology. Early adopters would naturally see how technology would enable us to be better. But, as diffusion rolls through the curve we would eventually hit those for which technology is just there – another entitlement, a factor of our environment, oxygen. There is no special magic or promise here. Technology simply is.

So, to recap, I’m old and grumpy. As I started to write yet another column I was submerged in a wave of weariness.   I have to admit – I have been emotionally beat up by the last few years. I’m tired of writing about how technology is making us stupider, lazier and less tolerant when it should be making us great.

But another thing usually comes with age: perspective. This isn’t the first time that humans and disruptive technology have crossed paths. That’s been the story of our existence. Perhaps we should zoom out a bit from our current situation. Let’s set aside for a moment our navel gazing about fake news, click bait, viral hatred, connected xenophobia and erosion of public trusts. Let’s look at the bigger picture.

History isn’t sketched in straight lines. History is plotted on a curve. Correction. History is plotted in a series of waves. We are constantly correcting course. Disruption tends to swing a pendulum one way until a gathering of opposing force swings it the other way. It takes us awhile to absorb disruption, but we do – eventually.

I suspect if I were writing this in 1785 I’d be disheartened by the industrial blight that was enveloping the world. Then, like now, technology was plotting a new course for us. But in this case, we have the advantage of hindsight to put things in perspective. Consider this one fact: between 1200 and 1600 the life span of a British noble didn’t go up by even a single year. But, between 1800 and today, life expectancy for white males in the West doubled from thirty eight years to seventy six. Technology made that possible.

stevenpinker2Technology, when viewed on a longer timeline, has also made us better. If you doubt that, read psychologist and author Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature.” His exhaustively researched and reasoned book leads you to the inescapable conclusion that we are better now than we ever have been. We are less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than at any time in history. Technology also made that possible.

It’s okay to be frustrated by the squandering of the promise of technology. But it’s not okay to just shrug and move on. You are the opposing force that can cause the pendulum to change direction. Because, in the end, it’s not technology that makes us better. It’s how we choose to use that technology.

 

 

 

The Mindful Democracy Manifesto

 

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Winston Churchill

Call it the Frog in Boiling Water Syndrome. It happens when creeping changes in our environment reach a disruptive tipping point that triggers massive change – or – sometimes – a dead frog. I think we’re going through one such scenario now. In this case, the boiling water may be technology and the frog may be democracy.

As I said in Online Spin last week, the network effects of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory may be yet another unintended consequence of technology.

I walked through the dynamics I believe lay behind the election last week in some detail. This week, I want to focus more on the impact of technology on democratic elections in general. In particular, I wanted to explore the network effects of technology, the spread of information and sweeping populist movements like we saw on November 8th.

In an ideal world, access to information should be the bedrock of effective democracy. Ironically, however, now that we have more access than ever that bedrock is being chipped away. There has been a lot of finger pointing at the dissemination of fake news on Facebook, but that’s just symptomatic of a bigger ill. The real problem is the filter bubbles and echo chambers that formed on social networks. And they formed because friction has been eliminated. The way we were informed in this election looked very different from that in elections past.

Information is now spread more through emergent social networks than through editorially controlled media channels. That makes it subject to unintended network effects. Because the friction of central control has been largely eliminated, the spread of information relies on the rules of emergence: the aggregated and amplified behaviors of the individual agents.

When it comes to predicting behaviors of individual human agents, our best bet is placed on the innate behaviors that lie below the threshold of rational thought. Up to now, social conformity was a huge factor. And that rallying point of that social conformity was largely formed and defined by information coming from the mainstream media. The trend of that information over the past several decades has been to the left end of the ideological spectrum. Political correctness is one clear example of this evolving trend.

But in this past election, there was a shift in individual behavior thanks to the elimination of friction in the spread of information – away from social conformity and towards other primal behaviors. Xenophobia is one such behavior. Much as some of us hate to admit it, we’re all xenophobic to some degree. Humans naturally choose familiar over foreign. It’s an evolved survival trait. And, as American economist Thomas Schelling showed in 1971, it doesn’t take a very high degree of xenophobia to lead to significant segregation. He showed that even people who only have a mild preference to be with people like themselves (about 33%) would, given the ability to move wherever they wished, lead to highly segregated neighborhoods. Imagine then the segregation that happens when friction is essentially removed from social networks. You don’t have to be a racist to want to be with people who agree with you. Liberals are definitely guilty of the same bias.

What happened in the election of 2016 were the final death throes of the mythical Homo Politicus – the fiction of the rational voter. Just like Homo Economicus – who predeceased him/her thanks to the ground breaking work of psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman – much as we might believe we make rational voting choices, we are all a primal basket of cognitive biases. And these biases were fed a steady stream of misinformation and questionable factoids thanks to our homogenized social connections.

This was not just a right wing trend. The left was equally guilty. Emergent networks formed and headed in diametrically opposed directions. In the middle, unfortunately, was the future of the country and – perhaps – democracy. Because, with the elimination of information distributional friction, we have to ask the question, “What will democracy become?” I have an idea, but I’ll warn you, it’s not a particularly attractive one.

If we look at democracy in the context of an emergent network, we can reasonably predict a few things. If the behaviors of the individual agents are not uniform – if half always turn left and half always turn right – that dynamic tension will set up an oscillation. The network will go through opposing phases. The higher the tension, the bigger the amplitude and the more rapid the frequency of those oscillations. The country will continually veer right and then veer left.

Because those voting decisions are driven more by primal reactions than rational thought, votes will become less about the optimal future of the country and more about revenge on the winner of the previous election. As the elimination of friction in information distribution accelerates, we will increasingly be subject to the threshold mob effect I described in my last column.

So, is democracy dead? Perhaps. At a minimum, it is debilitated. At the beginning of the column, I quoted Winston Churchill. Here is another quote from Churchill:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

We are incredibly reluctant to toy with the idea of democracy. It is perhaps the most cherished ideal we cling to in the Western World. But if democracy is the mechanism for a never-ending oscillation of retribution, perhaps we should be brave enough to consider alternatives. In that spirit, I put forward the following:

Mindful Democracy.

The best antidote to irrationality is mindfulness – forcing our Prefrontal cortex to kick in and lift us above our primal urges. But how do we encourage mindfulness in a democratic context? How do we break out of our social filter bubbles and echo chambers?

What if we made the right to vote contingent on awareness? What if you had to take a test before you cast your vote? The objective of the test is simple: how aware were you not only of your candidate’s position and policies but – more importantly – that of the other side? You don’t have to agree with the other side’s position; you just have to be aware of it. Your awareness score would then be assigned as a weight to your vote. The higher your level of awareness, the more your vote would count.

I know I’m tiptoeing on the edge of sacrilege here, but consider it a straw man. I’ve been hesitating in going public with this, but I’ve been thinking about it for some time and I’m not so sure it’s worse than the increasingly shaky democratic status quo we currently have. It’s equally fair to the right and left. It encourages mindfulness. It breaks down echo chambers.

It’s worth thinking about.

America, You’re Great (But You Might Be Surprised Why)

The first time I went to Washington D.C. I was struck by the extreme polarity I saw there. That day, the Tea Party was staging a demonstration against Obamacare on the Mall in front of the Capitol building. But this wasn’t the only event happening. The Mall was jammed with gatherings of all types – from all political angles: the right, the ultra-right and left, the rich and poor, the eager and entitled, the sage and stupid. The discourse was loud, passionate and boisterous. It was – in a word – chaos.

That chaotic polarity is, of course, defining the current election. After the second presidential debate, commentator Bob Schieffer said, with a mixture of incredulity and disgust, “How have we come to this?” The presidential debates may have hit a new low in presidential decorum, but if you dig deep enough, there is something great here.

Really.

A recent PR campaign has asked Canadians to tweet why America is great. I’m going to do it in a column instead.

You’re great because you argue loudly, passionately and boisterously. You air out ideologies in a very messy and public way. You amplify the bejeezus out of the good and the bad of human nature and then put them both in a cage match to battle it out in broad daylight. You do this knowing there will be no clear winner of this battle, but you hope and trust that the scales will tip in the right direction. There is no other country I know of that has the guts to do this in quite the way you do.

You personally may not agree with Donald Trump, but there are many that do. He is giving voice to the feelings and frustrations of a sizable chunk of the US population. And as much I personally don’t like how he’s doing it, the fact is he is doing it. Your country, your constitution and your political system has allowed a man like this to take a shot at the highest office of the land by questioning and attacking many things that many Americans hold to be inviolable. It’s scary as hell, but I have to admire you for letting it play out the way it has and trusting that eventually the process will prevail. And it has for 240 years. Candidates and elections and campaign rhetoric will all eventually disappear- but the process – your process – has always prevailed.

The polarization of the US is nothing new. It defines you. For a quick history lesson, watch The Best of Enemies on Netflix; a documentary on the televised debates of William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal clashing on left vs. right during the 1968 Nixon vs. Humphreys vs. Wallace election. What started as an intellectual dual ended with Buckley threatening to smash Vidal’s face in after being called a neo-proto-Nazi on live TV.

If you look at the US from the outside, you swear that the whole mess is going to end up in a fiery wreck. But you’ve been here before. Many times. And somehow, the resiliency of who you are and how you conduct business wins out. You careen towards disaster but you always seem to swerve at the last minute and emerge stronger than before.

I honestly don’t know how you do it. As a polite, cautious Canadian, I stand simultaneously in awe and abject terror of how you operate. You defy the physics of what should be.

You’re fundamentally, gloriously flawed..but you are unquestionably resilient. You are an amazing example of emergence. You, in the words of Nassim Nicolas Taleb – are Antifragile:

“beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

You are discordant, divided and dysfunctional and somehow you’re still the most powerful and successful nation on the planet. I suspect you got there not in spite of your flaws, but because of them.

Perhaps you’re embarrassed by the current election cycle. I understand that. It has been called “unprecedented” many, many times by many, many commentators. And that may be true, but I would say it’s unprecedented only in the vigor and volume of the candidates (or, to be frank, one candidate). The boundaries of what is permissible have been pushed forcefully out. It may not be what certain constituents think is proper, but it is probably an accurate reflection of the diverse moods of the nation and, as such, it needs to be heard. You are a country of many opinions – often diametrically opposed. The US’s unique brand of democracy has had to stretch to it’s limits to accurately capture the dynamics of a nation in flux.

I don’t know what will happen November 8th. I do know that whatever happens, you will have gone through the fire yet again. You will emerge. You will do what needs to be done. And I suspect that, once again, you’ll be the stronger for it.

To Get the Hip is to Get What it Means to be Canadian

Something strange happened last Saturday night. An entire nation stopped to watch a rock concert. And I mean the entire nation. As far as Canada was concerned, even the Olympics were put on hold when the Tragically Hip took the stage in Kingston.

“The Tragically who,” you ask? And where the hell is Kingston?

Exactly. You’re now one step closer to understanding Canadians.

The reason most of you have never heard of the Tragically Hip is because they’ve never made it big “south of the border.” That’s a very Canadian phrase. “South of the border” is where Canadians need to go to be internationally successful. They have to pack up their bags and head south, following in the footsteps of Mary Pickford, Deanna Durbin, Mack Sennett, Marie Dressler, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Christopher Plummer, Lorne Greene, Raymond Burr, William Shatner, Donald Sutherland, Dan Ackroyd, Mike Meyers, Michael J. Fox, Jim Carrey, Seth Rogen, Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Gosling, Rachel MacAdams – well, you get the idea. And that’s just a partial list in the entertainment industry. A huge slice of American culture was originally served from north of the 49th.

But not the Hip. They never made it in the States. I’m sure there are Tragically Hip fans down there, but you have to understand what the Hip meant to us. Going to a Hip concert was a rite of passage for almost every Canadian spanning 3 generations. Unlike all those Canadian stars who moved south and relegated their “Canadian-ness” to a footnote in their biographies, the Hip kept heading towards true North. I’m sure they would have loved to be discovered by the US, but Gordon Downie, Gord Sinclair, Paul Langlois, Rob Baker, Johnny Fay and Davis Manning – collectively, the Hip – never were obsessed with the spotlight “south of the border.” Their lyrics were embedded in the wheat fields of Saskatchewan, the wind-scoured rocks of Newfoundland and Ontario’s Algonquin Park. The Hip deftly plucked the heft and weave of Canadian culture; singing about hockey heroes, summer trips to cottage country and even a man wrongly convicted of murder. They remained a touring band that performed exhaustively from sea to sea to sea for over for 32 years. Over that time, they performed thousands of concerts in places like Moose Jaw, Yellowknife and Truro. Yes, they released 16 albums, but to appreciate the Hip, you had to see them live. And most of us did.

To watch the Tragically Hip perform is also to understand a little more about Canada. Lead singer Gord Downie could kindly be described as spastic on stage. The music is pure rock which as generally been well received critically. American music critic Chris Massey said, “Listening to The Tragically Hip’s first three albums is a lot like listening to the evolution of a good rock and roll band into an outstanding rock and roll band.” But for some reason, their music never hooked a US audience. You can hear echoes of the Hip in REM or The Counting Crows, but you’ve probably never heard the Hip themselves on US radio.

All this preamble is required to let you know why we as a nation were stunned into painful silence this year on May 24. That’s the day we all heard that Gord Downie was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. That’s also the day we learned they would do one last tour. Gord could still sing. Screw the cancer.

Last Saturday was the last stop of this final tour. It was in Kingston, the Hip’s hometown, but thanks to CBC, our national broadcaster, it was watched coast to coast to coast – just as it should have been. Our prime minister was there, wearing a Hip t-shirt. Canadian athletes watched the concert live from Canada House in Rio. The CBC Olympic broadcast team shut down coverage so they could watch. We pushed cancer right off the f*@king stage as we sang Wheat Kings, Ahead by a Century, Blow at High Dough and New Orleans is Sinking. We were reluctantly saying goodbye to Gord Downie, the Hip and a precious chunk of ourselves but we were also putting a stake in the ground, saying we are Canadian and this band is ours. Too bad the rest of you never figured it out.

There’s something else you have to understand about Canada. There are few places in the world where the citizens are as spread out geographically as they are here, but we agree on what it means to be Canadian. We’re quiet, we’re polite and we get each other. It’s why we cheer as loudly for bronze medals as for gold ones. It’s why we are still ridiculously loyal to a coffee and donut chain that is now owned by Burger King. It’s why we keep lacrosse as our national sport even though the rest of the world thinks its hockey. And it’s also why we’ll never, ever get Donald Trump and the circus of American politics. But most of all, it’s why, on Saturday night at 8:30 pm ET, we all stopped whatever we were doing to watch a rock concert.

Logical? No. Canadian? Absolutely.

Let me try to put this in context with an analogy for my American audience. Living next to you is like becoming friends with the kid who lives next door and who lives in a much bigger house. One weekend, you’re invited for a sleep over. You bring your toys and pack your sleeping bag. The good news is that for breakfast, you finally get to eat all the sugared cereal your Mom would never buy for you. The bad news is you have to give all your toys to your friend. Sure, you can still come over and play with them any time you want, but they’ll never be yours again.

That’s why we love the Hip. They’ll always be ours.

“A nation whispers, “We always knew that he’d go free”
They add, “You can’t be fond of living in the past
‘Cause if you are then there’s no way that you’re going to last”

Lyrics from Wheat Kings – The Tragically Hip

Happiness as a Corporate Metric

Costa Rica is the happiest place on earth. The least happy place on earth? That would be Botswana.

At least, those are the results according to by the things measured by the Happy Planet Index. The index is a measure of three factors, life expectancy, Experienced Well Being and Ecological Footprint. Western nations tend to do very well on the first two measures, but suck at the third. The index is looking for balance – being happy without raping and pillaging the earth. Here in North America, we still have a ways to go in that department.

In another study – the 2015 UN’s World Happiness Report – a different weighting of factors treated the western world a little better. When we tip the balance towards individual happiness and away from the environment and sustainability; Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Finland and Canada topped the rankings. Apparently, snow is good for the soul. At the bottom of the list were Benin, Afghanistan, Togo, Syria and Burundi (it’s hard to believe anywhere scored worse than Syria – mental note: stroke Burundi off my travel bucket list).

Jigme-Singye-Wangchuck

The 4th King of Bhutan: Jigme Singye Wangchuck

In 1971, the 4th Dragon King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck was so enamored with the idea of happiness as a goal that he introduced a new measure of a nation’s worth: Gross National Happiness. He believed that the western world’s obsession with materialism represented by Gross National Product shouldn’t be the sole measure of progress. Things like sustainable development, care for the environment, good governance and preservation of culture deserved to be measured as well. In the 45 years since the idea of Gross National Happiness was first floated by his Royal Dragonship, it’s been slow to take, but perhaps it’s time has come. By the way, in the UN survey, Bhutan was in the middle of the pack for happiness, ranking 84th out of 157 countries.

Happiness should be important with companies as well. There’s even an investment fund that invests exclusively in companies with happy employees. But happiness can be an elusive goal, especially when we try to wrestle it to the ground in the way of a hard performance metric in a corporate environment. What exactly are we measuring when we measure happiness? And who’s happiness are we measuring? Our customers? Our shareholders? Our employees? All of the above?

Let’s single out employees. Companies like Zappos and Southwest Airlines have tried to make employee happiness a metric that matters. But what makes an employee happy? Perhaps we can find a clue in a recent survey from Ypulse that asked Millennials which companies they’d most like to work at. The top 10 answers were:

  1. Google
  2. Apple
  3. Disney
  4. Non-profit/charity
  5. School/community/university
  6. Hospital
  7. U.S. government
  8. Myself/my own company
  9. Amazon
  10. FBI/CIA

It’s an interesting list. It’s not the list you’d expect from a generation that simply wants to get rich quick. You don’t work at a hospital or the FBI if you want to make big bucks. This is a list that comes from people who want to make a difference. They want meaning. In the words of Steve Jobs, they “want to put a ding in the universe.”

I get that. I recently discovered just how hard happiness is to pin down. After selling my company, I was fortunate enough to achieve financial independence and retire at 51. I should have been deliriously happy, right? Well, I wasn’t suicidal by any means, but I would say my level of happiness actually decreased after I tried retirement. I was at the other end of my career path from Millennials, but meaning remained just as important to me.

In a study of retirement satisfaction published in the Journal of Financial Counselling and Planning, Sarah Arsebedo and Martin Seay found that psychologist Martin Seligman’s positive psychological attributes, referred to as PERMA (Positive emotions, Engagement, [Family] Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment) – don’t go away when we retire. These things are necessary to happiness. For men in particular – and increasingly so with women – we rely on our jobs to provide many of these. This was certainly true for me.

It’s good we’re paying more attention to happiness. But it’s also important that we understand what we’re talking about when we refer to happiness. It has little to do with monetary measures of success. Whether we’re talking nations, corporations or employees, it turns out that happiness means a sense of interconnectedness, contribution and personal values. It means living beyond ourselves and leaving some footprint that won’t fade when we no longer walk this earth.

Ultimately, it means doing stuff that matters.

 

What Would a “Time Well Spent” World Look Like?

I’m worried about us. And it’s not just because we seem bent on death by ultra-conservative parochialism and xenophobia. I’m worried because I believe we’re spending all our time doing the wrong things. We’re fiddling while Rome burns.

Technology is our new drug of choice and we’re hooked. We’re fascinated by the trivial. We’re dumping huge gobs of time down the drain playing virtual games, updating social statuses, clicking on clickbait and watching videos of epic wardrobe malfunctions. Humans should be better than this.

It’s okay to spend some time doing nothing. The brain needs some downtime. But something, somewhere has gone seriously wrong. We are now spending the majority of our lives doing useless things. TV used to be the biggest time suck, but in 2015, for the first time ever, the boob tube was overtaken by time spent with mobile apps. According to a survey conducted by Flurry, in the second quarter of 2015 we spent about 2.8 hours per day watching TV. And we spent 3.3 hours on mobile apps. That’s a grand total of 6.1 hours per day or one third of the time we spend awake. Yes, both things can happen at the same time, so there is undoubtedly overlap, but still- that’s a scary-assed statistic!

And it’s getting worse. In a previous Flurry poll conducted in 2013, we spent a total of 298 hours between TV and mobile apps versus 366 hours in 2015. That’s a 22.8% increase in just two years. We’re spending way more time doing nothing. And those totals don’t even include things like time spent in front of a gaming console. For kids, tack on an average of another 10 hours per week and you can double that for hard-core male gamers. Our addiction to gaming has even led to death in extreme cases.

Even in the wildest stretches of imagination, this can’t qualify as “time well spent.”

We’re treading on very dangerous and very thin ice here. And, we no longer have history to learn from. It’s the first time we’ve ever encountered this. Technology is now only one small degree of separation from plugging directly into the pleasure center of our brains. And science has proven that a good shot of self-administered dopamine can supersede everything –water, food, sex. True, these experiments were administered on rats – primarily because it’s been unethical to go too far on replicating the experiments with humans – but are you willing to risk the entire future of mankind on the bet that we’re really that much smarter than rats?

My fear is that technology is becoming a slightly more sophisticated lever we push to get that dopamine rush. And developers know exactly what they’re doing. They are making that lever as addictive as possible. They are pushing us towards the brink of death by technological lobotomization. They’re lulling us into a false sense of security by offering us the distraction of viral videos, infinitely scrolling social notification feeds and mobile game apps. It’s the intellectual equivalent of fast food – quite literally “brain candy.

Here the hypocrisy of for-profit interest becomes evident. The corporate response typically rests on individual freedom of choice and the consumer’s ability to exercise will power. “We are just giving them what they’re asking for,” touts the stereotypical PR flack. But if you have an entire industry with reams of developers and researchers all aiming to hook you on their addictive product and your only defense is the same faulty neurological defense system that has already fallen victim to fast food, porn, big tobacco, the alcohol industry and the $350 billion illegal drug trade, where would you be placing your bets?

Technology should be our greatest achievement. It should make us better, not turn us into a bunch of lazy screen-addicted louts. And it certainly could be this way. What would it mean if technology helped us spend our time well? This is the hope behind the Time Well Spent Manifesto. Ethan Harris, a design ethicist and product philosopher at Google is one of the co-directors. Here is an excerpt from the manifesto:

We believe in a new kind of design, that lets us connect without getting sucked in. And disconnect, without missing something important.

And we believe in a new kind economy that’s built to help us spend time well, where products compete to help us live by our values.

I believe in the Manifesto. I believe we’re being willingly led down a scary and potentially ruinous path. Worst of all, I believe there is nothing we can – or will – do about it. Problems like this are seldom solved by foresight and good intentions. Things only change after we drive off the cliff.

The problem is that most of us never see it coming. And we never see it coming because we’re too busy watching a video of masturbating monkeys on Youtube.

Dad: Unplugged

I went off the grid last week. It wasn’t intentional. First we changed ISPs and the connectivity we take for granted had a hiccup. We were soon back online, but it was irritating none-the-less.

As luck would have it, it was a warning of what was to come. The main logic board on my laptop packed it in the next day and I was once more cut off. I realized how dependent I am on that little 10 by 15 inch slab of brushed aluminum and electronics. My world was unplugged. It felt like it was a very big deal.

Given that I felt like my right arm was lopped off, you would think this might impact the quality of my Father’s Day. And it did. But it was all for the better. I didn’t have to check emails. There were no task reminders beeping. No Google searches itching to be launched. No Facebook posts to like. I was off the grid. And the day was glorious.

I realized that the things my daughters were thanking me for on last Sunday had little to do with the thousands and thousands of hours I have spent online in my life. They seem to appreciate my sense of humor. That predated the Internet by at least three decades. They like that I’m fairly calm and levelheaded. To be honest, being online generally has a negative correlation with my current state of calmness. I’m a pretty good listener but I’m a much better listener when my attention is not being distracted by a nearby screen. I try to be thoughtful. I’ve previously gone on record as saying that I fear the thoughtfulness of our species is eroding in the world of wired instant gratification. And finally, I try to be a good and ethical person. While being online helps inform those ethics, they are mostly the product of that off-line thoughtfulness I try to set time aside for.

I certainly felt the pain of being off-the-grid, but I realized that much of the urgency that caused that pain was a by-product of my being online. I think technology is creating it’s own cloud of noise that continually intrudes on our lives. These things all seem urgent, but are they important? Are we ignoring other, more important things because of the incessant noise of our digital lives?

If we sat down and made a list of the values that we hold to be important to us, how many of these would require being connected? Would being online make us a better parent? A better husband or wife? A better son or daughter? Probably not.

Technology should be a tool we use to help express the person we are and what we hold to be valuable and true. Technology should not define us. It should not be it’s own truth. It should not create it’s own values. But when technology becomes as ubiquitous as it has become, I fear the line is becoming permanently blurred. Our being online may be changing who we are. I’m pretty sure none of us intend to be distracted, short tempered, disconnected or intellectually shallow but the world is increasingly being filled with such people. I sometimes am one of these people. And I’m usually online when it happens.

This Sunday reminded me that there are things that can wait. This includes about 99% of what we do online.

And there are things that can’t wait. Like children who grow up way too fast. My kids are now 22 and 20. I’m pretty sure neither of them wish their dad had spent more time doing things on his computer.

 

 

 

Can Stories Make Us Better?

In writing this column, I often put ideas on the shelf for a while. Sometimes, world events conspire to make one of these shelved ideas suddenly relevant. This happened this past weekend.

The idea that caught my eye some months ago was an article that explored whether robots could learn morality by reading stories. On the face of it, it was mildly intriguing. But early Sunday morning as the heartbreaking news filtered to me from Orlando, a deeper connection emerged.

When we speak of unintended consequence, which we have before, the media amplification of acts of terror are one of them. The staggeringly sad fact is that shocking casualty numbers have their own media value. And that, said one analyst who was commenting on ways to deal with terrorism, is a new reality we have to come to terms with. When we in the media business make stories news worthy we assign worth not just for news consumers but also to newsmakers – those troubled individuals who have the motivation and the means to blow apart the daily news cycle.

This same analyst, when asked how we deal with terrorism, made the point you can’t prevent lone acts of terrorism. The only answer is to use that same network of cultural connections we use to amplify catastrophic events to create an environment that dampens rather than intensifies violent impulse. We in the media and advertising industries have to use our considerable skills in setting cultural contexts to create an environment that reduces the odds of a violent outcome. And sadly, this is a game of odds. There are no absolute answers here – there is just a statistical lowering of the curve. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, the unimaginable still happens.

But how do you use the tools at our disposal to amplify morality? Here, perhaps the story I shelved some months ago can provide some clues.

In the study from Georgia Tech, Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison used stories as models of acceptable morality. For most of human history, popular culture included at least an element of moral code. We encoded the values we held most dear into our stories. It provided a base for acceptable behavior, either through positive reinforcement of commonly understood virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope and charity) or warnings about universal vices (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride). Sometimes these stories had religious foundations, sometimes they were secular morality fables but they all served the same purpose. They taught us what was acceptable behavior.

Stories were never originally intended to entertain. They were created to pass along knowledge and cultural wisdom. Entertainment came after when we discovered the more entertaining the story, the more effective it was at its primary purpose: education. And this is how the researchers used stories. Robots can’t be entertained, but they can be educated.

At some point in the last century, we focused on the entertainment value of stories over education and, in doing so, rotated our moral compass 180 degrees. If you look at what is most likely to titillate, sin almost always trumps sainthood. Review that list of virtues and vices and you’ll see that the stories of our current popular culture focus on vice – that list could be the programming handbook for any Hollywood producer. I don’t intend this a sermon – I enjoy Game of Thrones as much as the next person. I simply state it as a fact. Our popular culture – and the amplification that comes from it – is focused almost exclusively on the worst aspects of human nature. If robots were receiving their behavioral instruction through these stories, they would be programmed to be psychopathic moral degenerates.

For most of us, we can absorb this continual stream of anti-social programming and not be affected by it. We still know what is right and what is wrong. But in a world where it’s the “black swan” outliers that grab the news headlines, we have to think about the consequences that reach beyond the mainstream. When we abandon the moral purpose of stories and focus on their entertainment aspect, are we also abandoning a commonly understood value landscape?

If you’re looking for absolute answers here, you won’t find them. That’s just not the world we live in. And am I naïve when I say the stories we chose to tell may have an influence on isolated violent events such as happened in Orlando? Perhaps. Despite all our best intentions, Omar Mateen might still have gone horribly offside.

But all things and all people are, to some extent, products of their environment. And because we in media and advertising are storytellers, we set that cultural environment. That’s our job. Because of this, I belief we have a moral obligation. We have to start paying more attention to the stories we tell.

 

 

 

 

Why I Love New York

I love people watching. I find the passing tableau of human drama endlessly fascinating. Trust me – it’s worth putting the smartphone away and paying attention to what’s happening around you. This past weekend, I hit the trifecta of snooping: subways, airports and shops in New York City.

Scene 1: We’re on a subway and an elderly Polish lady, dressed all in pink (for Mother’s Day, perhaps), going to Penn Station randomly asks a hulking young man of decidedly intimidating appearance for help getting her bag out of the car and onto the platform. You could not have picked a more unlikely duo for this particular dialogue.

He was engrossed in a conversation with his friend and didn’t hear her at first. When she asked again, he wasn’t sure what she said because of her thick accent. Finally, a young pregnant girl beside them offers to help. The Polish lady refuses and starts pointing at the man and scolding vigorously. The young man shrugs, the Polish intonations still coming a little too thick and fast for him to understand. The young girl translates, “She wants you to help because you’re big.”

He grins sheepishly and picks up the suitcase. The Polish grandmother toddles off happily.

Scene 2: We’re walking through an airport and a young man is coming home from college (again, perhaps for Mother’s Day.) He’s meandering his way from the gate, weaving back and forth across the concourse and trying to carry on a somewhat agitated conversation with said mother. My first instinct is to pass him but then I decide to hold back and eavesdrop a little bit. The son obviously has no patience for his mother:

“Mom, I told you, I never asked you to come and get me. It was your idea…”

“Why are you picking me up in departures? I’m arriving. You should be in arrivals…”

“I can’t help it if you have to go all the way around again to get there. You should have thought of that before you pulled into the airport.”

I can only imagine how the rest of this Mother’s Day visit went. Next time, let him catch a cab.

Scene 3: We’re in one of those tacky souvenir shops off Times Square (no, it wasn’t my idea). Two elderly ladies come in and ask to see a T shirt that says “Help Donald Drumpf make America Great Again”

“Why is it spelled ‘Drumpf’?”

The shop owner (in another thick accent – Middle Eastern this time), “It’s wacky spelling.”

“Why?”

“It’s a joke. It’s a jokey T-shirt”

“Do you have one spelled correctly?”

“You want real t-shirt?”

“Yes”

“No, we only have the jokey ones.”

Meanwhile, outside a sidewalk prophet is yelling that Jesus is the only true way and that we are headed straight to hell while standing under a 60-foot high electronic screen advertising “The Book of Mormon.”

New York – you crack me up.

The World in Bite Sized Pieces

It’s hard to see the big picture when your perspective is limited to 160 characters.

Or when we keep getting distracted from said big picture by that other picture that always seems to be lurking over there on the right side of our screen – the one of Kate Upton tilting forward wearing a wet bikini.

Two things are at work here obscuring our view of the whole: Our preoccupation with the attention economy and a frantic scrambling for a new revenue model. The net result is that we’re being spoon-fed stuff that’s way too easy to digest. We’re being pandered to in the worst possible way. The world is becoming a staircase of really small steps, each of which has a bright shiny object on it urging us to scale just a little bit higher. And we, like idiots, stumble our way up the stairs.

This cannot be good for us. We become better people when we have to chew through some gristle. Or when we’re forced to eat our broccoli. The world should not be the cognitive equivalent of Captain Crunch cereal.

It’s here where human nature gets the best of us. We’re wired to prefer scintillation to substance. Our intellectual laziness and willingness to follow whatever herd seems to be heading in our direction have conspired to create a world where Donald Trump can be a viable candidate for president of the United States – where our attention span is measured in fractions of a second – where the content we consume is dictated by a popularity contest.

Our news is increasingly coming to us in smaller and smaller chunks. The exploding complexity of our world, which begs to be understood in depth, is increasingly parceled out to us in pre-digested little tidbits, pushed to our smartphone. We spend scant seconds scanning headlines to stay “up to date.” And an algorithm that is trying to understand where our interests lie usually determines the stories we see.

This algorithmic curation creates both “Filter” and “Agreement” Bubbles. The homogeneity of our social network leads to a homogeneity of content. But if we spend our entire time with others that think like us, we end up with an intellectually polarized society in which the factions that sit at opposite ends of any given spectrum are openly hostile to each other. The gaps between our respective ideas of what is right are simply too big and no one has any interest in building a bridge across them. We’re losing our ideological interface areas, those opportunities to encounter ideas that force us to rethink and reframe, broadening our worldview in the process. We sacrifice empathy and we look for news that “sounds right” to us, not matter what “right” might be.

This is a crying shame, because there is more thought provoking, intellectually rich content than ever before being produced. But there is also more sugar coated crap who’s sole purpose is to get us to click.

I’ve often talked about the elimination of friction. Usually, I think this is a good thing. Bob Garfield, in a column a few months ago, called for a whoop-ass can of WD 40 to remove all transactional friction. But if we make things too easy to access, will we also remove those cognitive barriers that force us to slow down and think, giving our rationality a change to catch up with impulse? And it’s not just on the consumption side where a little bit of friction might bring benefits. The upside of production friction was that it did slow down streams of content just long enough to introduce an editorial voice. Someone somewhere had to give some thought as to what might actually be good for us.

In other words, it was someone’s job to make sure we ate our vegetables.