Disconnect as the New Standard

The disconnect between what people know about how the Internet (and by extension social media) “works” (choices, behaviors, options, etc.) and what people use the Internet (and social media) to accomplish (tasks) is underrated and massive.

Part of the disconnect comes from a lack of interest and caring about how the world of communication (and the tools in it) work, not only for the people with whom we are immediately communicating but also for the people not part of the communication.

Part of the disconnect comes from distractions that exist in the world of social interactions between people, and differing filters of awareness and attention. Individuals pay attention to all kinds of things that other individuals believe are unnecessary, irrelevant, uninteresting, or even unknowable. And then, because the human mind seeks order out of chaos, individuals, make judgments, create attributions, and create frames and boxes for language and ideas that further the disconnect.

Part of the disconnect comes from a lack of curiosity and even a lack of education about what to pay attention to. Lack of curiosity is endemic in discussion around the Internet (and social media) because our communication tools have prioritized lack of curiosity as the “new normal” in social interactions. Lack of education comes about when the market responds to a lack of curiosity as a new standard, and then complies by providing less nourishing meat (education) and more easily digestible milk (displays where people advance by how well they kiss).

The disconnect is massive and troubling, for two reasons:

In the market’s breakneck race to monetize every human interaction and behavior, combined with the alarming reduction in human economic productivity, we have a recipe for a society and culture where the very tools of educating, enlightening and uplifting are being monetized and controlled by a select few individuals—or organizations.

Which would be fine if those individuals and organizations were angels, but like most people, they’re just people.

The second reason is economic in that we have prioritized facility and adaptation as ways to get ahead in a world of Internet-based (and social media based) communications where competition for attention and awareness is fiercer than ever. But if the average individual is non-curious (or too disinterested or disconnected to care) about where their future dollars to pay their future electric bills are going to come from, then we have opened society to the wavering whims of every political, social, cultural, and economic demagogue (both individual and organizational) promising to make such important decisions “simple.”

“Simple” of course meaning, “Simple in a way that works for me, my power base, and my tribe, and creates distractions, confusion, disillusionment, and disengagement, for you, your power base, and your tribe.”

Which would be fine if those individuals and organizations were angels, but like most people, they’re just people.

A standard of anti-intellectualism comes from a standard of non-curiosity, which combined with the disconnect between people and how they use their new communications tools, leads to the creation of a world of communication, rhetoric, persuasion, and power, we should all be wary of.

To resist the new standard, we need to fight to establish access to education about how to use our new social tools across the disconnect, eliminate distractions as a way to encourage disillusionment and disengagement, and re-establish curiosity about the unknown (or about blind spots) as an alternative “normal.”

Otherwise, the conflict outcomes could be disastrous for everyone.

The Opposite of Artificial Intelligence

When was the last time you…

…asked fierce questions?

…emphasized uniqueness?

…engaged with others?

…told stories that related past victories to potential solutions to present–and future–problems?

…ruthlessly eliminated hurry?

…were direct, but not demeaning?

…established a foundation of empathy with another person?

…didn’t read from the manual, but spoke from the heart?

…focused on the connection as the product rather than trying to persuade, cajole, or move another person into buying whatever it is that you are selling?

It’s hard to connect with others because performing the actions listed above is hard.

Not “hard” like plowing a field for planting wheat is hard. Or “hard” like picking lettuce in a field for $4.00 a day is hard. Or “hard” like working on a construction site to break up concrete.

Those kinds of “hard” are increasingly being performed either by human beings (who will soon be replaced by machines and artificial programs that can perform those actions better) or by machines and artificial programs that are performing those actions better right now.

It’s always been hard to make an emotional connection with other people and to break down the carefully constructed resistance to change we have constructed in our heads—that then manifests in our tools, our systems, our organizations, and our civilizations.

For humanity to remain a relevant, vibrant, force well into the future, we had better figure out how to make space for all human beings no matter their status to do the hard work of connecting.

Otherwise, what really separates us from the machines who will replace us?

Dollar Value of Mediation Skills in the Connection Economy

It’s hard to place a dollar value on human-to-human interactions in the current (and growing) connection economy, because connection is about engaging in acts of caring.

And whoever put a dollar value on acts of caring?

But here are a few challenge questions if that’s your attitude:

Whoever put a dollar value on the act of raising crops in an agricultural economy?

Whoever put a dollar value on the act of building a widget in an industrial economy?

Whoever put a dollar value on the act of providing a customer service in the service economy?

Humanity figured out the dollar value inherent in all the economic transitions from hunting and foraging, to agriculture, to industry, to service and created functioning economic systems—from trading and bartering to late stage capitalism. And humanity will figure out the current global transition we are in right now.

The space between the old system and the new system is a space of conflict, anger, incivility, uncertainty, spectacle, entertainment, along with a healthy dose of depression, worry, and anxiety.

This is a space where the skills of mediation (particularly around distraction, diversion, and deflection) can be helpful (and monetized) at scale.

But whoever put a dollar value on the acts of caring?

Culture of Immediacy

The culture of immediacy that we have created with our digital social communication tools, has convinced our brains that problems of all kinds should be solvable immediately, to our specifications, and with little effort (or friction) on our part.

Here are a few examples. Your mileage (and examples) may vary:

Climate change could be solved tomorrow…if only the “right” people oversaw the solutions. Like the people who populate my Facebook feed…

Elections could turn out with the “right” outcome with results that I could see immediately…just like a Twitter poll does…

People could treat each other with fairness, justice, and equality in a pretty cool and hip way…if only it were the “right” people doling out the fairness, justice and equality…and all others who don’t agree (or aren’t hip or cool enough) could be blocked or never seen anyway….just like in my SnapChat feed…

Rights, responsibility, accountability, and freedom. These are human conditions that took centuries to adjudicate, argue over, and have conflict about, to come to the space of where we are now as a global culture.

They will not fall to the growing culture of immediacy anytime soon.

Netflix, podcasts, YouTube videos, search results. These are tools of communication that operate on the principles of speed to market (your eyes) and entertainment (your brain).

The slow, plodding things that need to change (i.e. systems) are hard to shift, require emotional energy in the face of human intransigence and institutional friction, and need conflict to change. It used to be that we recognized and passed on to the next generation, the idea that incremental change was enough and that lifetime change (on the scale of anywhere from 35.5 to 78.8 years) was enough to get a society and culture to where it could reasonably be expected to be.

But this idea of plodding, incremental change is slowly eroding in the face of collective minds, attitudes, and behaviors being transformed by the culture of immediacy that our digital social communication tools provide.

Combine this fact with the reality that the inner workings (both the how and the why) of our digital social communication have become incomprehensible for the average person and that we have elevated this incomprehensibility from a minor annoyance (think about how you could repair a car in your garage only 50 years ago) to a belief in the magical genius of self-interested companies (think Google and how the algorithm of search works), and we have a giant problem on our global cultural hands.

Relationships with people are boring, mundane, exciting, and thrilling.

Solutions to people problems cannot be solved through the clever application of another frictionless algorithm.

People cannot be inspired through speed, or motivated through impatience to change.

The hard work, the meaningful work, the work of people conflicting against other people, is the last thing that will survive the cult of immediacy we have built.

If we let it.

And the changes that can come about from that survival is worth leveraging all the immediacy-based, incomprehensible tools for good, that you can.

The Privacy of Memory

We lose a little of ourselves when we outsource our memory to Google.

But not in the obvious way that we think of.

What we lose in the privacy (some would say inaccuracy) of memory is the ability to forget.

And to be forgotten.

The privacy of memory and the palaces that we build in our minds of truths, facts, lies and stories is more valuable than we know to preserving the best parts of our fragile humanity.

In the rush to electronically preserve the truth in non-debatable, and factual ways, we are losing the pleasure (and the privilege) of the privacy of choosing what we want to remember—and what we have the grace, forgiveness and ability to forget.

When we can call out each other using facts we like that work for us (and avoid or dismiss the facts that don’t), our social media communications and interactions become about expressing the rawest of emotions with immediacy, in the face of overwhelming facts that are preserved as eminent, and indisputable truth.

Google can’t help us here. Neither can artificial intelligence. Neither can another social communication platform.

Only human beings can preserve the privacy of memory in relationship with other human beings.

Utopia and Dystopia in the Present

A friend once pointed out that he doesn’t watch films that portray either a dystopic future (i.e. Children of Men or Blade Runner) or a utopian ideal (i.e. Avatar or Gattaca) because they tend to be less than realistic.

There is a lot of talk (and writing) going around about the importance of either 1984 by George Orwell or Brave New World by Aldous Huxley as a literary or cultural guideposts in a time of rampant civic uncertainty and fear.

There are several problems with articulating–and living out–a worldview based off works by English authors of the early to mid-20^th century, but the biggest problem of all is the mindset behind thinking that authors of a dystopian (or utopian) future can possibly provide any actionable wisdom in the present day.

The specific problems are best articulated by others, but the general issues that face believers searching for truth in any conception of utopia (or dystopia) are three-fold:

Utopia (or dystopia) look different based upon your frame of reference. This is the main problem in applying the logic of utopia (or dystopia) to fleeting present-day political disputes and disagreements, rather than seeking longer term wisdom. The fact is, for every person who views a position as a dystopic one, there is a person who at the least views the position as not a problem. And for some, they view the position through the frame of utopian thinking.

The dystopia (or utopia) that a person is looking for (typically one represented in film or literature) is rarely exactly the one that manifests in the real world. The specific tent poles of culture, politics, and societal considerations are fluid and dynamic, not static and solid. There are elements of utopia (or dystopia) that manifest, but not all of them. Not exactly. And the fact is, when there isn’t exactitude in the manifestation of a prediction, the credibility of the predictor (and by extension the reputation of the prediction itself) seems to fail miserably.

How people think about what’s happening now influences how they mentally construct utopias (or dystopias), and then emotionally “buy-in” to them. This mental and emotional construction is more of an analysis about the nature of a present condition of conflict, rather than about genuinely deep conflict analysis. This is why films and literature aren’t good predictors of what will happen, what can happen, or even what should happen.

The fundamentals that underlie films and literature about dystopias or utopias are snapshots in time, representing a particular conflict mindset, and a particular set of perspectives on the world and events in it.

We would do well to be skeptical of attempts to glean too much understanding of current events from them, and would do better at managing and engaging with the conflicts we are currently in, by dealing bravely with the utopia (or dystopia) we’re creating right now.

Where the Hammer Will Fall the Hardest

The courage to make the decision to act in the first place is the thing that is lacking the most.

The courage to raise our hands, take responsibility, and to engage with accountability (rather than assigning blame or taking credit) is the work that your children will eventually be paid for.

But not handsomely.

It’s also the work that you’re not getting paid for now, but that your boss, team leader, supervisor, or coach really wants you to lean into.

The people who understand these two principles, that are now coming online as fundamentals of development, engagement, and interaction between people, will “win” the future.

In case you’re thinking “Well what if I don’t want to be responsible beyond my own desire to be? What’s the future look like for me and my children?”

The top three areas of growth, innovation, and development (which will translate to wealth making and value creation in the future) will be in the following areas if the current trajectory of education, work, organizations, and society, doesn’t change significantly:

Making something so “new,” no one has ever thought of it.

Working for the person who made the “new” thing.

Selling the “new” thing.

But since “new” things only come along once in a great while (i.e. the car, the I-phone, the Internet, etc.) the chances of being able to survive as a visionary as the first one are slim.

Which means that in the next two areas, working for someone who’s innovating, or selling the innovation, education, work, organizations, and society need more individual people to behave courageously, engage where it’s uncomfortable, and do the things that are hard now in the present-day, which will resemble a game of patty cake later.

Courage (the lack of it, the abundance of it, or just enough of it) is where the hammer of the unknown in the future will fall the hardest.

Are your children ready?

Are you?

Network Leap 3

Most people don’t see it.

Confusing the primacy of what we can see, touch, taste, and feel, closes our human perceptions to the potential financial and monetary value of what we cannot measure and codify with our five senses.

This is evident in the primacy of the use of relationship networks in every aspect of our lives.

We cannot touch connection, though we can experience a story with other people.

We cannot see engagement, though we can engage in active listening and experience the positive effects of someone listening to us intently, and the negative effects of someone ignoring us.

We cannot see the value in a relationship, but we can feel with our hands and our emotions the ways in which people grow in relationship transactionally with us.

We cannot see the cruft, bad feelings, negative emotions, and life experiences where the relationship didn’t “work out” as transactionally as we would like, which often creates in us a sense of caution at getting back into relationships and connections.

We have all observed the causal outcomes of the impact of things we can’t see (relationships) and have experienced the power in maintaining and growing connections (networks) to people who may—or may not—be able to “help” us advance in the world.

We all know someone who has gotten a cake job, attained a plum position, or moved up the ladder of an organization, not through technical skills, but through the value of human connection.

Most people don’t see it.

We cannot directly observe the functions of the Internet.

We cannot directly observe how information spreads through bits and bytes and is translated into images, text, and videos.

We cannot directly observe how those videos, texts, and images impact the mind and change the perceptions of the receiver of those messages, but we all accept the reality of these changes happening.

We cannot see how searching for information on the Internet, using a tool such as Google, unites us as disparate people in a communal desire to connect, engage, and to grow our interests, our curiosities, our agreements, and our arguments.

Most people don’t see it.

But Google does.

Think about it: Google as a search engine tool proves—in a form monetized at enormous scale—that the networks of connections matter more for making money, making more connections, making products, making ideas, and making services than anything else tried in human history up to this point.

But there’s an upper limit to that knowledge.

Trapped by the confines of the box in your pocket (i.e. your mobile phone) or the box in your house (i.e. your TV or desktop computer) or the box in your briefcase (i.e. your tablet), there’s a hardware limit to a software solution.

There might not be a software solution to the problems that people have, but in the 21^st century, Google (now Alphabet) is going to do its level best to break out of the boxes it is currently trapped in, and prove that networks between people in the physical world, can be scaled and monetized just as easily as they were through a search function.

Google sees it.

Do you?

The News Continuum

There’s always been news. There’s always been a continuum of what’s considered news by audiences and what’s not.

But what’s been lacking has been information, wisdom, and knowledge.

The continuum of what’s news has been debated for years by those delivering the content, and is now heating up with accusations of biases, “fake” news, propaganda, and “false flags.”

Of course, with the rise of social media, it has become infinitely easier for all manner of actors without the best of intentions, to engage in the process of deciding what’s news and what’s not.

The continuum, though, breaks down like this:

“not news” – Seemingly “obvious” information that very few people find relevant, interesting, or factual, but that some find to be a resource. Information that is classified as “not news” usually is dismissed by whatever mainstream reporting outlet seeks to gain power from holding onto it.

“fake news” – What used to be classified as propaganda at the most extreme end and gossip at the least extreme end, “fake news” is a term that’s currently being thrown around with abandon, not because the information is spurious (it might well be) but because the distributor of the information is perceived as being biased.

“false news”—This is information that isn’t “obvious” but also isn’t “non-obvious.” It is the information of a cloistered group of people (or a tribe) who have insider knowledge and seek to use their access to distributors and purveyors of news to sow the information to a broader public that isn’t privy to their knowledge. “false news” exists not only in the gray areas between who’s “in” and who’s “out,” but also it exists as a weapon and a wall to keep people silent—or ignorant—of all the facts of a situation.

“news” – Is exactly that: Information that is new that provides facts to an audience unaware of the facts before. This is in the middle of the spectrum, for two reasons: One, in an information-saturated culture, it’s hard to determine what audiences know and don’t know more now than ever before. Two, as audience choice of what information they have access to, has gone up, audience attention spans have gone down.

“old news” – Is information that seems to have gained traction by audiences coming to a consensus that they are bored of hearing about it. In the modern media landscape, that which is old is determined by how few clicks it gets from the audience.

“new news” –This is the hardest to describe, identify, and attain in an information landscape dominated by Google. No information seems “new” to an audience trained on a diet of irony, sarcasm, and short attention. “new news” should inspire and delight and expose information, wisdom, and knowledge never before considered.

The drivers of all of this are the audience. And the conflict between the audience, and the people with the cameras, the audio equipment, the websites, the networks, and the bandwidth is going to get more and more divisive as audiences drain the lifeblood of attention away from what used to be universally agreed upon as news, and move on to create their own identities, outlets, and perspectives.

And they do so without asking for permission, or forgiveness.

[Opinion] All Others Bring Emotions

Pursuing the chimera of “Big Data,” means little in the face of human irrationality and unpredictability when the impact of emotions is removed from the analysis.

Emotions are everywhere, and all around us, driving our reactions to events, our desires to record and document those events, and our drives to connect with each other.

But there is little appreciation of the impact of emotions, as the explanations for people’s individual and corporate reactions to conflicts and strife, have been reduced to little more than economic reasoning (Marxism), or scientific surety (Darwin, et.al).

Neither of which explain the passion of emotions, the irrationality of people at mass, or the unpredictability of human reactions. We desire this predictability (or at least governments and corporations do) to control and direct desirable outcomes; not to grow and enlighten people about themselves.

Instead of gathering ever more data points, arguing ever louder about whose facts are more truthful, or dismissing ideas that we believe are irrational, maybe instead, it’s time to do a deep dive into the oldest of all drivers of conflict in human beings:

Envy
Anger
Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Pride

They used to be called sins.

But in an era of economic causation, and fetishized data gathering, we dismiss the power of ancient drivers, psychological and otherwise, at our continued peril.