I’ve taken a few weeks of absence. There was a birthday and small surgery this week. Nothing serious, thanks for asking, but lots of time for reflection.
This is what’s bubbled to the top:
1. We are now irrefutably “the product” … and useful idiots.
I recently took a look at the first fifty items on my Facebook feed. Of them:
- 3 were group notifications.
- 3 were “people you may know” updates. Many of whom were indeed people I know and who I definitely don’t want to connect with any more than I already connect with them, which is not at all.
- 6 were friend updates, but only from 3 friends in total, and not friends I know well enough to invite to dinner.
- 16 were ads.
- 22 were random nonsense: cats falling off ladders, meme pages, spurious news reports, all with an invitation to “follow” the page in question.
That’s a doom-scroll’s worth of borderline narcotic nonsense that’s making me (us) stupid (or more stupid) and addicted. Plus, from a “poster’s” perspective, we can assume that organic reach is down to almost nil, and paid reach is still getting less airtime than unpaid “follow this page” updates from prolific publishers.
So I’m opting out and maintaining a presence only to occasionally battle for eyeballs with an advertising budget that probably can’t compete with the big swinging clicks.
(Although opting out of a public profile now has real-world ramifications if you want to enjoy the same freedom of movement you may have had before, since the US Department of State announced that “all applicants for F, M, and J nonimmigrant visas will be instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to ‘public.’”)
So I’ll be adopting an arm’s length policy. Friends’ birthdays are monitored in Dex. For anything else, they can email me their updates. If you’re not yet emailing updates, start today. Invite me to follow along and I probably will.
2. Social media is making us depressed and vulnerable and anxious and stupider
Jonathan Haidt is the author of The Anxious Generation: How The Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
Do your research, disagree with him if you choose. I choose to agree with him that:
- Instagram is closely associated with depression, anxiety and eating disorders in girls.
- Snapchat is making it easier for kids to buy drugs and be extorted after private conversations with strangers.
- TikTok is particularly destructive for the human capacity for attention. It is essentially making the whole planet stupider.
I know I’m stupider. I know I can’t read a book as closely as I used to be able to. I know I pick up my phone at least once an hour for no good reason. I know that curtailing my kids’ screen time and monitoring what they’re doing online is one of the best things I can do for them.
A little self-awareness is already going a long way.
3. Social isolation is endemic, and the social communities we’ve relied on are no longer working.
Having a community of sorts is important. Real-life is ideal. Online is the next-best thing. But the Facebook groups that we’ve relied on up until now are today irrefutably garbage and getting closed down without notice. Alternatives are imperative.
There’s no sudden surprise here. They’ve been rubbish for engagement, navigation and utility for years. Full of ads, weird display options, full of people we wouldn’t share a drink with.
Inside these groups, getting anybody’s attention requires a tag, getting everybody’s attention creates a notification that’s guaranteed to be ignored and considered an intrusion.
If you want to communicate information, you’ve always been better off sending an email. In fact, whatever you’re doing, email more.
Interest-based groups, paid at the point of use, are better.
Platforms like Skool, providing they don’t change their business model to include algorithmic “improvements” or advertising, are where we’re going. Or at least, where I’m going. Invite-only, red velvet rope policy-enforcement, good people who want to be there because there’s a barrier to entry.
And as much as I don’t love leading a community, I miss being part of one.
Plus, we should all make a pointed effort to do more interacting with strangers-who-will-become-friends in real life. Gym classes. Dancing lessons. Book clubs. Get out of the house.
4. The re-emergence of the personal brand
I’ve been in the “capturing eyeballs and wallet-share” game for almost twenty years now.
I’ve been blogging since before it was called blogging and had one of the first ever blog-to-book deals in history with How To Get A Grip.
Back in the day, the personal brand was everything. If your voice was fresh and non-corporate, you were guaranteed readership and followership. There was genuine excitement about the wild new frontier of “online”.
Iconoclasm was rewarded, cussing was unusual and noteworthy and we were excited to discover the opinions of strangers.
Then it got noisier. Opinions started to proliferate like assholes, and asshole’s opinions moved us into silos. The demands on our attention become manifold and junkier, so we sought out quality.
That quality came in the form of information. We looked for nutritionally beneficial frameworks and insider knowledge and “proven strategies”. We sought out quality ingredients.
Then money moved in. The little guys were being outspent. The thoughtful were gently edged out by the noisy. List size and reach became based more and more on your advertising budget and your ability to appear credible.
And while that’s still true today, we’re now at the stage where information is entirely free of charge. You can get condensed summaries of anything you need to know in seconds. Sitting through a 90 minute infomercial in the form of a webinar is entirely unnecessary. There are no more secrets that “they don’t want you to know”.
Selling information is out. Selling misinformation is in.
I predict a return to the personal brand. We’re going to choose who we spend our time with based on how they make us feel versus what they can “give us”. Cults, for better or worse, will hold our attention either because they appeal to our self-interest or they offer us a sense of belonging.
Which brings us back to the power of community (see above) and the ability to evoke an emotional reaction in the people who are paying us attention.
We can of course generate endless, probably convincing and ultimately heartless tear-jerkers and recycled stories with ChatGPT to get that kind of reaction.
Just as we can generate endless pieces of content “in our own voice” with careful prompting and curation by AI-powered writing tools.
And if we want to add to the endless noise, then go ahead and do just that.
Alternatively, we can do the opposite.
We can hand-craft delightful emails. We can write books with our fingers and pens. We can curate small groups of people who benefit from each other’s company.
We can show up as human beings. We can provide accountability and care and humanity.
More mindful, less mindless. More signal and less noise.
I don’t have any of the answers. I only have my gut. My gut says “be useful” and “be honest about what’s useful.”
What’s your gut telling you?
MK
PS I wasn’t going to do this, but it’s proven useful, and is therefore congruent. The Single Malt Mastermind’s doors are open until next week. More details here.