I walked by a psychic’s storefront studio. The window said that this person had been reading palms and predicting the future since 1989. It was a large space on a vibrant New York City corner. The rent must be astronomical. Or else the purveyor owns the building.
Given that this retail space is quite coveted and the storefront is almost always empty, is this the best use for the space? Wouldn’t the psychic owner do better by renting it to someone who values it more highly?
The metaphor for our use of time is clear.
The next few minutes or days or months–sure, you own them, and you can put them to whatever use you choose. But just because you’ve been using your time in a particular way for a long time doesn’t mean you need to keep doing that.
At first, this stop sign sign makes a lot of sense:
Lives are at stake. Break the rhythm, turn something ignored into something noticed.
The challenge with “highlighting” is that it fades. When everything is in all caps, nothing is. Exclamation points are like salt.
When people are commanded to pay attention, it’s worth reminding ourselves that we’re asking for payment. That attention is scarce. And that we waste it, all the time.
When we prioritize our pattern breaks, rotate them and keep them fresh, we’re more likely to get the useful attention we need. Also…
In a free market for attention, someone is always racing to the bottom.
Shoplifters lurk in the shadows. They realize that they will have an easier time if they quietly steal stuff, because speaking up about it won’t help their cause.
Sometimes, though, some people seek to change the culture in a way that celebrates taking. “I own this jetski and I can ride it as long, as loud as I want to. Get out of my way.” It’s clearly in the owner’s interest to take over the lake, but not really in anyone else’s.
It’s a short-term dead end, though. Your selfish today will probably be replaced by somebody else’s selfish tomorrow.
Culture is what happens when the community insists.
Engineers can optimize a bridge. There are some bridge designs that satisfy aesthetic, financial, durability, safety and efficiency needs better than others. The work of optimization is finding the best set of tradeoffs.
Maximization, on the other hand, seeks the solution that ranks the highest for just one goal.
After it peaked, Yahoo sought to maximize short-term stock price (and the needs of its top executives) instead of optimizing for customer experience, innovation, resilience and utility.
Over time, social networks fade away for similar reasons. They turn users into the product instead of treating them like customers.
Maximizing something is simple and may be satisfying. It doesn’t involve difficult tradeoffs and it’s easy to measure.
If you don’t realize that you have power, you might not be able to exercise it.
The power to speak up, to participate, to invent, to lead, to encourage, to vote, to connect, to organize, to march, to write, to say ‘no’ or to say ‘yes’.
It’s tempting to imagine we have less power than we do. It lets us off the hook. For now.
For thirty years, texting has been a powerful medium. It’s the thing that vibrates in our pocket. It promises something urgent, and a reply that’s demanded equally urgently.
“I’m running ten minutes late,” is a fine text, and “okay” is a great response.
Like all digital media that works, it’s sticky and has a powerful network effect. Once someone sends you a text, you need to send one back. Once your colleagues are texting, you need to text as well. It works better when you do it the way others are doing it.
And, like all digital media that works, it gets corrupted. Sometimes by evil spammers that send texts pretending to know you, “want to play golf tomorrow?” or “your wife said you were selling your house…”. And sometimes by people who aren’t evil at all, but simply have a different sense of the medium than you do.
And so here’s a text in which 15 people are cc’ed. You don’t know most of them, so all you see is their phone numbers. And it requires you to stop what you’re doing and open your calendar and calculate whether that day is free or not. And whether the people you hope to interact with are going or not. And of course, if anyone hits reply, everyone gets the reply. And of course, one of those people then decides to ‘get the word out’ and tell everyone else on the thread about their unrelated garage sale, coming up in just a few days…
Pretty soon, your pocket vibrates enough with both kinds of texts often enough that you simply don’t prioritize checking, and then, the next time an urgent text comes along, well, it’s ignored.
Texting is first come next served. There’s no nuance to it, no priority list, nothing but ‘I read it’ or ‘I didn’t.’
The asymmetry of the dynamic here sows the seeds of the demise. It’s up to every single person you know to protect your attention, up to each of them to be generous and discreet and not waste your time. And the cost of them simply doing what everyone else is doing is so low that the whole thing begins to degrade.
Add to that the ease with which telemarketers and spammers can now weaponize your initial contact (14 notes about one dinner reservation!) and you can see how the path only goes one way.
The magic of widespread media like the telephone, email and texts is that it’s an open API. No one is actually in charge of the inputs, but this is also the problem.
I’m hopeful that services like texts.com or even the folks in Cupertino will take a deep breath and create a protected tier for useful interactions that actually have permission. The structure of the interface determines the utility of the system. If it’s easy to cc 15 strangers, people will.
In 1994, I led a team that invented games you could play by text. It almost turned into a killer idea, and maybe it’ll be back one day.
And in 1999, I tried to coordinate the work around buying cheap stamps for email, so that the API might be slowed and focused a bit.
Perhaps AI will start being an (imperfect) filter, but the problem is so hard to solve after the fact, I’m not optimistic.
The rule is pretty simple: bad noise crowds out good signal in just about any useful communications medium. The opportunity is to design against bad noise and to be vigilant about maintaining the magic that made it useful in the first place.
A lot shifted when the Apple Macintosh was introduced, and it wasn’t about the RAM, the chips or the processor speed. Our world changed forty years ago today. Marketing, technology, commerce, luxury brands, communities, communication and our expectations for how we might spend our future all shifted, and fairly quickly.
Guy Kawasaki brought me one to use as a beta tester. I was 23 years old and amazed. What I didn’t realize was that revolutions like this were extremely rare, and here was one, at exactly the right moment for my career and for a new cadre of creators.
A big shift the Mac announced was turning the computer from a hobbyist novelty into the center of pop culture, productivity and creative work. The Commodore 64 was a toy. This was a car. The first leap like this since Henry Ford.
The device itself didn’t do nearly as much as we hoped it would (yet), but the clear and actionable promises that it brought with it changed what we expected and imagined might be next.
Regis McKenna never got enough credit for being the visionary behind so much of the marketing and the ripples it caused. Susan Kare became a minor celebrity–for giving a computer a face and a personality.
It was the first time the launch of a new product (other than the Edsel, perhaps) was a media event of this magnitude.
The Super Bowl ad (which Jobs didn’t even want to do) marked a shift from ads being about the product to also being about the ads.
Once we got the joke, we wanted to tell everyone else. Insiders and outsiders. Early adopters and the mainstream. Evangelists. A pattern that’s been repeated hundreds of times since then.
There are few concepts that can’t be explained with an Apple anecdote, and it largely began with the launch of this one device.
[I invented two devices to work with the Mac–the first fax board in 1986, and a precursor to Sonos that would pipe your music across the room. It turns out that it’s easier to write about Apple than to work with them…]
I’m typing this on perhaps the 20th (okay, 40th) Mac I’ve owned. The pace of innovation has now slowed to a crawl as Apple seeks to take profits instead of following the path that the Mac started down two generations ago–to not just sell a product, but to change the culture.
Even if they’ve lost the instinct to make something insanely great, they taught people all over the world to want to do so.
The change we make is at the heart of the work we’re able to do.
January 22, 2024
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