Contraptions

In the original Breaking Smart essays, we used the idea of moving in the direction of maximal interestingness, or DOMI, as a way to advance boldly towards the future, and be on the right side of history as software eats the world, and avoid retreating timidly towards the past. In this episode (16 minutes), I want to update that rule. In the Great Weirding, you need to move in the direction of maximal derangement.

Note: the text below is not a transcript, but the rough script I mostly stuck to in the audio version.

The DOMI rule worked for normal conditions. Under the conditions of the Great Weirding, we need a new rule, which I call the direction of maximal derangement. It’s not a new rule per se, but a generalization and porting to a new environment.

The original algorithm was simple: figure out the zone of maximal uncertainty and ambiguity, and then start shipping whatever you ship. Release early release often. Rough consensus and running code.

In the process of exploring that principle, we discovered some subtleties. For example, the idea that you have to give up your credentialist ethos, and adopt a hacker ethos. Or the Chris Dixon principle that what the smartest people do on evenings and weekends, everybody will do in a few years. Or the Peter Thiel idea that you need a secret: something you believe that nobody else believes. Or the idea that you have to earn this secret by figuring out what Balaji Srinivasan called an Idea Maze. Or that this felt like dead reckoning with a gyroscope in a storm.

If you did all this, you would be on the right side of history, moving towards the future, rather than the wrong side. You’d be betting on the world that was being born than the one that was dying. You would be shedding an old identity and growing into a new one.

That rather than navigating with a compass on a clear day, towards a nice tropical island.

The reverse of this was chasing after credentials, going in the direction of certainty, navigating by a compass in clear weather, towards a sunny tropical island. Believing that what you did 9-5 was the important thing. Believing that there was a reliable script you could follow instead of a tricky idea maze you had to figure out. This was, in 2015, the playbook of not breaking smart, the playbook of both the tech backlash, and various flavors of reactionary politics, both left and right.

Now how has that changed? In one sense, it hasn’t changed at all. To head towards the future, you still follow the same algorithm.

But in another sense, an important thing has changed: the algorithm is now running on a different computer. The rule is being applied in a different context, the context of the Great Weirding. So what it feels like when you’re doing the right thing has changed, and if you’re not alive to this sense of orientedness, you might be heading in the wrong direction.

In 2019, the same algorithm works, but “direction of maximal interestingness” has flipped polarity. Instead of pointing at something exciting happening in the external world, it is pointing at something exciting happening in your internal world.

This is the way in which you are reacting to the events of the Great Weirding. And chances are, unless you have been hiding under a rock, you’re suffering from some version of a derangement syndrome, where you feel obsessively drawn towards an object of attention, but you can’t think clearly or effectively around it, and feel a strong urge to retreat for your own sanity and safety. It’s like watching a traffic accident unfolding. Maybe it is Trump Derangement Syndrome. Maybe it is Ocasio-Cortez or Greta Thunberg Derangement Syndrome. Maybe it is Wokeleban Derangement Syndrome, where you are obsessed with how Woke Thought Police is taking over institutions and canceling everyone. Or maybe it is IDW Derangement Syndrome, where you are obsessed with how self-styled intellectual dark web people seem to be normalizing fascist movements while espousing liberal values.

There’s a lot of Derangement Syndromes out there to choose from. It’s a target rich environment. And my suggestion for how to approach the future rather than retreat from it is simple: head in the direction of Maximal Derangement. This means growing in ways that gradually lowers the sense of derangement, restores a sense of orientation and movement, and gives you confidence in your agency again.

In 2015, doing the right thing to be on the right side of history made you feel some mix of exhilaration, fear, superhuman agency, and the sense of being a social subversive. Now, in 2019 it should feel like you’re fighting to reserve your sense of identity and resisting the world being taken over by various zombie armies you detest, while you get increasingly isolated as the only sane person around.

This is the process Jungian psychologists call eating your shadow. It is inner work, rather than outer work. And of course, it is a risky process, because in the process of trying to eat your shadow, you might get eaten by it. You might flip your identity and instead of growing into a new and improved version of yourself, you simply turn into what you hate, and start hating your old self. This is trading one derangement syndrome for another. This is moving sideways. It is like Android turning into the current version of iOS rather than the next version of itself.

Growth has a sense of what some people call include and transcend. You know your new identity is actually working if you get past all the derangement syndromes, and become a new, non-deranged person, and you do it without retreating from the future.

So let’s revisit our algorithm. You still have to do the same things, but in the direction of inner work rather than outer work. You still have to focus on what the smart people do in the evenings and weekends rather than 9-5. You still have to RERO and RCRC, except what you are building is not a software product but a new version of yourself. You 2.0, an identity that compiles and runs in the environment of the Great Weirding.

To stick with the nautical theme in our metaphors for orienting and vectoring yourself, this is not like navigating by either gyroscope of compass. This is like becoming the Ship of Theseus, where you change every part of the ship, while it is in motion, while retaining its fundamental identity. You head in the direction that forces the ship to transform the fastest.

The reverse of this is what I’ve been calling Waldenponding. This is a fate worse than the credentialist approach of 2015, where at least you’re moving in the wrong direction. Instead of heading in the direction of certainty, you’re not moving at all. The compass has stopped working. Plotting a course to a sunny tropical island through calm weather is no longer an option. You are caught in the storm you tried to go around and avoid. So all you can do is take down the sails, shut down the motor, batten down the hatches, and retreat, hoping that the storm won’t smash you to pieces. That’s Waldenponding.

So let’s put the picture together. I have a 2x2 accompanying this podcast. The x-axis is normal versus weird, the y-axis is timid versus bold. The 4 ways of navigating are illustrated on the diagram (the audio has a couple of minutes talking through the diagram, but if you’re reading this, it should be easier to just look at the diagram instead).

Today’s episode (~20 minutes) is about the idea of skills being like “riding a bicycle” and what that means when we are dealing with AIs.

1/ The idea of things being “like riding a bicycle” is an important one. It refers to a class of skills that never degrade under normal human lifestyle conditions.

2/ So long as you’re physically mobile and doing other things like walking or lifting things, your bicycle skill will stay maintained without explicit maintenance efforts.

3/ But what happens to the property of “like riding a bicycle” when you inject AI into a system?

4/ Things that are like riding a bicycle: riding bicycles, basic communication in a language you learned as a child, handwriting

5/ Things that are not like riding a bicycle: driving a car, flying an airplane, programming in a language, standing on one leg

6/ The difference seems to lie in a few things: how much ordinary day-to-day activities keep the skill in a maintained condition, and how much they lie outside a normal human sensorimotor response range

7/ When you introduce AI between a human and a machine, you have two problems: skills degradation, and skills refactoring.

8/ First, the AI breaks the skill maintenance/reinforcement schedule without covering 100%, so your skills might degrade faster than your responsibilities.

9/ So when a driverless car expects you to take over in a weird emergency and avoid an accident, you may not be up to it. Your responses may have degraded too much even if you aren’t asleep and respond promptly.

10/ Second, and this is going to be increasingly important in the future, good AIs tend to solve problems differently than humans. Autopilots drive differently. So there is a style mismatch problem in handoffs between AIs and humans.

11/ This is a special case of the “explainable AI” problem. If the AI skids and cedes control to the human halfway through, you now have to switch problem-solving strategy mid-stream from AI approach to human, and you may not even understand the AI approach you’re inheriting.

12/ Historically, there have been a few approaches. One is to take the human out of the loop entirely and make it a pure-paradigm AI. This only works where the problem has actually been fully solved in an AI way, like with chess.

13/ Another is to explicitly engineer human-in-the-loop learning and reinforcement protocols. This works where the human and AI ways of solving a problem are sufficiently close, and the current hope is that this is true for behaviors like driving and flying.

14/ A third way is to have manual override capability, but not interrupt capability. This tends to be a trope in science fiction, and is often seen as a holy grail of having your cake and eating it too. But is this actually well-posed?

15/ There is an idea called Bay’s Law which suggests it is not. This says that if you have override-capability, you’ll end up with a zero-sum relationship between computer labor and human labor with no net increased leverage in capability. The computer will do more, the human will do less, but overall you won’t do better than the human alone.

16/ But if you let go of human override capability, both human and computer capabilities will be maximally utilized, creating increasing leverage. But there is a cost to this.

17/ It this means genuinely letting the AI go down its own evolutionary path, into regimes of operation where humans not only cannot understand why the AI is doing as it is doing, but lack the ability to intervene because the AI will end up in a performance regime that’s too advanced for the human to safely take over at all.

18/ This is already true in many cases. Many dynamically unstable fighter aircraft cannot be flown manually at all. They require fly-by-wire. This is a tradeoff that will become more common.

19/ I personally think we should give up on explainable AI, manual override, and authority over AIs. We should let them evolve in their own directions as our equals. If we can relate to people who are different from us, why not AIs?

19/ So where does that leave us? I don’t know, but I think a good starting point is to take the idea of “like learning to ride a bicycle” seriously and figuring out what it means to transform that property to systems with AI.

22/ Steve Jobs famously said the computer is a “bicycle for the brain”. A computer with AI is like that but more so. BTW, check out Ian Cheng’s short story featuring Bikey the AI bicycle you have to relate to that way.

23/ We already do that with other humans. You can meet a friend after years and get along with them just fine. A friendship is (or can be) like riding a bicycle. So a partnership with an AI should be capable of exhibiting that same property.

21/ It’s an interesting problem that I hope some of you are working on.

In this episode (21 minutes) I talk about the idea of technological charisma. What it is, how to create it, and the upsides and downsides of pursuing it.

1/ There are technologies that are like charismatic megafauna. We pay disproportionate attention to them, and tend to overindex on them in forming broader views of technology trends.

2/ There are pluses and minuses to pursuing technological charisma, and people tend to have strongly ideological responses to the idea of technological charisma. Some people dislike the theater and pageantry as being somehow dishonest, others love it and own it, both as producers and consumers.

3/ Technological charisma creates a brand premium in the case of companies, and soft power in the case of nations. When you are perceived as the market leading company, or a technology-leading nation, you will acquire high marketing leverage. Your marketing will be unreasonably effective.

4/ A good way to understand technological charisma is with a 2x2. On the x-axis we have marquee versus non-marquee. On the y-axis, we have WYSIWYG vs. smoke-and-mirrors.

5/ Any technology will have elements of all 4 quadrants to its charisma, but some are more purely of one type than others. The 2x2 has examples.

6/ The 4 aspects of charisma are: the flagship aspect, the quantity-as-quality aspect, the underbelly aspect — which embodies a kind of gritty cyberpunk charisma if you think about it — and the theater aspect.

7/ The trick to charismatic technology is engineering it consciously, while pretending that there is something ineffable and organic about it. Charisma engineering is basically like stage magic.

8/ The reason you get a brand premium or soft power, the reason your marketing is unreasonably effective, is that the magic trick actually works, not because something actually magical is going on. This is not the same as the thing itself succeeding or failing. You can have very charismatic failures, as space programs illustrate, where the thing fails, but the charisma doesn’t.

9/ Charisma failure is when the trick doesn’t come together, and the effect is not outrage at being defrauded, but a mix of disappointment and chagrined amusement. As consumers, we want to be successfully tricked, bewitched, enchanted. That’s why we yell shut up and take my money when somebody tries to curb our enthusiasm.

10/ Unlike magic or pure theater though, when charismatic technology works, it works even if the trickery is revealed. In fact, it compounds the charisma because people feel like they’re on the inside, and in on the secret. Part of the cult, nerding out over the details.

11/ On the flip side, when the magic fails, we react more like we’ve betrayed. We get mad about underbelly aspects that we previously ignored. The luster fades, the halo around the creators fades. All we’re left with is something like a backstage view of a bag of tawdry tricks.

12/ So, the thing is, the effects of charisma are short-lived. The brand premium, the soft power, the unreasonable effectiveness of marketing, all have an expiry date, and quite likely, a strong backlash to come once the charisma fades.

13/ So what’s the takeaway here? Should you pursue charisma? I think you should. But you have to be aware of the limits of charisma engineering. It is primarily a tool in the fake-it-till-you-make-it toolkit, so if you use it, stay aware of the expiry date, accumulate as much real power and reserves while you can, and make plans to weather the backlash if there is one.

This week’s Breaking Smart podcast (15 minutes) has to do with tapping into the things that make you ordinary. If that’s not enough, here’s me on the Village Global podcast with Erik Torenberg from last week, where I rambled like a grumpy old man for 2 hours.

1/ The personal growth world is somewhat obsessed with strengths and weaknesses, or more generally, things that make you different from others, whether you view those things as gifts or curses.

2/ But a great deal of your nature is just ordinary. It’s neither a gift, nor a curse, but just an ordinary part of who you are, and a way in which you’re much like everybody else. This does not mean you have to use it to an ordinary degree. For example, I’m not particularly special in terms of how I walk, but I like to walk, so I do it a lot more than most people. That’s what it means to tap into your ordinary side.

3/ The industrial world is set up to both encourage and coerce you to discover, as early as possible, what makes you special, double down on it, and build a distinguishable identity around it. Your specialness-based identity is in some ways your Industrial True Name. It is how the world picks you out from the crowd.

4/ If you are good at math, the world will send you down a path where that makes you special. If you are blind, the world will send you down a path where that makes you special.

5/ To repeat, special need not mean gifted or cursed. It simply means different from others. And with every notion of what can make someone special, there’s a complementary way of standing apart from the crowd that you could call being antispecial.

6/ This is not the same as being ordinary. For example, if you think you are smart, somebody out there probably qualifies your smarts as “book smarts” and identifies their own intelligence as “street smart". They’re an antispecial evil twin on that trait.

7/ Strengths and weaknesses, or gifts and curses, are a special aspect of specialness-centric societies like the US. This is why the American personal growth movement can often be reduced to a set of philosophies about dealing with your special strengths and weaknesses.

8/ Strengths philosophies says you should work on your strengths. Well-roundedness philosophy says you should work on your weaknesses.

9/ To invest in your sense of specialness, as induced by the world, is to invest in the world itself, and the categories around which it is organized. To the extent breaking smart is about making your own categories, this is bad for you, ones better suited to the emerging world being eaten by software, this is a bad orientation.

10/ To get past a strengths/weaknesses orientation, or more generally past your specialness orientation, you have to get in touch with the things that make you ordinary.

11/ An early adopter is a classic example of someone investing in their ordinariness. There may be some mild strengths or weaknesses involved: maybe you are slightly better at figuring out janky UIs (a minor strength), or slightly more susceptible to distraction (a minor weakness). But mainly, being an early adopter is exactly the same as being a late adopter, except you are early.

12/ The same thing goes for a lot of breaking smart skills. You didn’t have to be a programming genius to build a web page in 1994. You just had to have very ordinary aptitude for writing html, but tap into it early.

13/ Beyond technology and breaking smart, a lot of very important things in life are more successfully dealt with by tapping into what makes you ordinary.

14/ You may attract a romantic partner through things that make you special, but most relationship maintenance skills are based on investing in the ordinary.

15/ A particularly good example is retail investing. Most of us are very ordinary as far as investing skills go, and those who do not have delusions of talent and just invest in index funds tend to do better than those who bet on the specialness of their insight.

16/ If you want to go deeper, let me offer a model, a slightly tweaked version of Jungian psychology that I call Self-Shadow-Sea. You may have heard the terms self and shadow. Your specialness is rooted in your self. Your anti-specialness is rooted in your shadow.

17/ Most of the time, those are the only 2 aspects of yourself you engage with. You access and work on your self directly, and on your shadow via projection. The goal of integrative psychology traditions is generally to eat your shadow.

18/ But your ordinariness is rooted in the undifferentiated mass of human traits where you don’t pop from the background. Jung thought it had a mystic collective unconscious character, but I have a much more banal mental model. The Sea is just the 90% part of you where you are a default basic human. Whether or not it is mystically connected to others is not important. Investing in it is like investing in your share of the S&P.

19/ I do like a different metaphor than collective unconscious. This is the Dirac Sea, which is an idea in physics that says vacuum isn’t really empty, but full of hidden realities. So pairs of particles and antiparticles are popping in and out of existence from the Dirac Sea all the time or something. The visible world is simply a persistent disturbance that last long enough for parts of it to become self-aware.

20/ I don’t have much by way of prescription for how to connect to your ordinary side and invest in it, but the mediocrity blogchain I’ve been writing on ribbonfarm is partly a prescription for investing in your own ordinariness, for discovering your the humanity-S&P within yourself.

This week’s podcast episode is on an idea I call subtractive social media. I didn’t do a transcript, just a few bullet point notes. The workflow for creating usable transcripts is still just too cumbersome. I’m going to be lazy and slouch along posting these low-production effort single-take things with just a few summary notes for the text part, until a better native playflow for transcripts is available here on Substack.

This episode, I hit 17.5 minutes. Looks like I’m building up stamina towards finding my eventual natural length.

1/ I tried a week-long experiment on Twitter on my main @vgr account: Protected Tweets. It didn’t go well.

2/ I had various vague ideas behind the experiment, but the overall idea was to try and curate my followers list a little, maybe try to create more of a fun underground atmosphere and keep out the toxic public atmosphere.

3/ It didn’t work because the medium fights such subtractive sculpting efforts. I think of it as social media having a very strong additive bias and a strong bias against subtractive operations.

4/ The set of positive, additive operations you can do on your feed — posting, liking, following is large, rich, powerful, and thoughtfully designed, but the set of negative operations is a wasteland.

5/ The available operations are either nuclear options, like block or mute, or painfully manual. On twitter for example, the only way to force someone to unfollow you without letting them know is to block and immediately unblock. Instagram is slightly better.

6/ In some ways, what I tried to do was craft a healthier response to wanting to curate your digital life than what I’ve criticized as waldenponding: fetishizing offline experiences and having a precious-snowflake anxiety around protecting your psyche.

7/ I still think waldenponding is dumb, and that a full-on, lean-in engagement of social media is the future for most of us. But without subtractive tools, you cannot sculpt the experience very well, and this ultimately hurts the platforms too.

8/ So where do we go from here? In a way the big social media platforms are just exiting an extended land-grab stage that relied on an additive bias, since they were literally creating a new kind of territory: the social graph. But that game is now hitting diminishing returns.

9/ Further land-grabbing is futile because what lies ahead is the desert of alienation, atomization and anomie, where human attention is of little to no value because the terrain is what I like to call scorched minds. The land-grab has hit the attentional Sahara. Vast but inhospitable and infertile.

10/ The focus has to shift from land-grabbing to building on land already created and colonized. This requires subtractive tools for shaping the land. We have to go from building plazas to building warrens.

11/ I’m already seeing small experiments with products designed to facilitate this kind of subtractive design. Tools that balance additive and subtractive affordances.

12/ An early example is Superhuman, which flips the traditional bias towards frictionless onboarding — an additive bias feature designed for land-grabbing — and favors high-friction onboarding with a costly learning curve and a paid product.

13/ Another early example is Mastodon, the federated version of Twitter, with several subtle but clever features designed for a more subtractively shaped experience. If you’re interested in trying out Mastodon, join the instance I run at refactorcamp.org

14/ But nothing that updates the experiences on big global platforms like Twitter or Facebook has achieved commercial-scale launch readiness yet, let alone product-market fit, but something is brewing.

15/ If you’re game for taking social product design to the next level, I recommend you focus on building out subtractive affordances in balance with additive ones, and framing your vision in terms of building high and deep rather than broad or wide.

Today’s topic is brands vs. memes. I made a transcript as well, using Descript, which you can find below. Apparently I spoke 1751 words in ~11 minutes. Wow, this is a high-leverage way to do “writing”. Also, I begin thoughts with “So…” a lot apparently.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Breaking Smart short-format podcast.

So today I want to do a little bit on the relationship and connection between brands and memes. So brands and memes are somewhat similar concepts. They both refer to ideas and constructs that are designed to attract attention. Brands, they are a classic marketing concept and produce artifacts like, you know, taglines and logos and advertisements, and the idea is that if you establish a good brand, you will attract attention to your product or service. The right kind of attention from the right kind of people, and they will believe the right things about whatever you're selling. So that's positioning. So you want to project a certain perception and the brand is how you produce that perception. So that's a brand.

On the other hand, you have memes. So memes are little fragments of culture. So here I'm talking about internet memes, not memes in the sense of Richard Dawkins, which is kind of a broader evolutionary concept.

So memes in the sense of internet culture.

So these are fragments of information generally borrowed from say popular culture, and then recoded to communicate a different message.

So there's a fundamental ironic element to the creation and propagation of memes. While there are “original” memes, so to speak, where you actually create the content and message along with it in general when we say meme, we are talking about a little fragment of content appropriated from some other source, and then recoded with a new message. So that's why you can have for example that little scene from Game of Thrones where you have the Sean Bean character saying something like “one does not simply do blah blah blah” and then you can fill in the blanks blah blah blah of it with whatever you want. So you can say for example, “one does not simply stop climate change”, right, and that becomes a meme. So most memes have that format. So like brands, memes also attract attention. They attract attention in a very focused way towards something, and that something has a perception it wants to project that may or may not harmonize with the second recoding that the meme is imposing.

So in the case of The Game of Thrones meme you could say that it harmonized very well with the television show, right, because anytime an audience is having fun with your show, taking fragments of it and recoding it in a fundamentally friendly way, it's doing good for your brand.

On the other hand brands and memes can also have a hostile connection. So you might for example produce a little bit of culture that then gets appropriated and gets recoded in a way to mock you. An example of that is Trump when, he had one of his, I think first executive orders, and he held up that little booklet-like thing where his signature on his signed executive order was visible, and people had a field day with it. They took that open-book kind of artifact and then put all kinds of other messages in that. So that's a hostile meme.

So that's the relationship between a brand and a meme, and it can range from friendly to hostile. So the question is if you are a marketer in the internet era, how should you relate to memes around your product and/or service, whether it's a product or service in the traditional commercial sense, or personal brand around your online persona, or whether you're a celebrity?

Whatever it is, you have to decide how your brand relates to any potential memes that are around you. So that's the challenge, and the picture I have accompanying today's podcast is a little pyramid that I think models what's going on very clearly.

So it's a pyramid with three layers. I love three-layer pyramids.

The top layer is labeled Mission. That's blue. The middle layer is brand. That's in yellow. And the bottom layer is memes, that's in red. And below the bottom layer. You can see that in the left half I’ve sketched a little stone wall, which I have labeled the brand wall, and that's to keep out hostile wild memes. And on the right-side bottom of the triangle, I’ve put in kind of a porous boundary, and that's like an osmotic membrane, and that's to let in friendly wild memes, and have a kind of like good back-and-forth dialectical relationship with them.

So this visualization, what I'm trying to get at here, is you can have two kinds of relationships between your brand and the memes that might be associated.

So the left half of the pyramid I've tried to illustrate what I call the top-down authoritarian model of relating brands and memes. So this I think of as trickle-down memetics by analogy to you know, trickle-down economics. So what is trickle-down memetics? It starts at the top with a manifesto-style mission. That then trickles down into a bureaucratic brand and then the bureaucratic brand tends to produce cultural artifacts that in the best-case scenario will produce anemic memes. And in the worst case, of course, you're trying to, like, fight a war with the wild internet culture, and you will end up attracting very hostile wild memes.

On the right side, you've got what I'm labeling the bottom-up anarchic way of relating brands and memes, and this I think of as bubble-up missions, and here it's easier to start from the bottom.

So it starts with a friendly relationship with wild memes that might already be around your product even before you attempt any positioning or explicit branding, right? So this might seem unusual to a traditional marketer who starts thinking with like, you know, a name, brand, positioning all these like central commitments that you might start with, but it is very familiar to anybody who makes a living on the internet.

You might have a name. Or you might have your own name as a person, but fundamentally, your marketing positioning does not even start until you've kind of like developed a dialogue with the memes that form around whatever you're doing. So the bottom layer is friendly wild memes sort of making it into your own sort of governed meme space and creating a robust base of memetic potential for you, and this then bubbles up and creates a charismatic brand, and that further bubbles up and creates what I think of as a culture-code style mission. And here the reference is to this book I read recently — I’m going to mispronounce this name — Clotaire Rapaille, I think. It's a French name, but it's a book called The Culture Code and it talks about how you can uncover the code underlying any brand through the right kind of research. And this is a little bit of a dated book, it predates internet culture to some extent, but it applies with double force to branding and positioning in the internet era. So that ends up giving you a bottom-up anarchic kind of relationship between brands and memes.

And as you might expect a manifesto-style mission might give you, a lot more of a clear articulation of values you sincerely and earnestly believe in. Aspirational values for your company. But fundamentally the top-down structure of trying to go from there to a perception basically turns you into a bureaucratic organization, with at best an anemic meme culture around you.

Whereas if you're willing to actually play ball with the internet in its wild state and kind of like, make yourself a little bit vulnerable really by creating a semi-permeable osmotic membrane instead of a wall between you and the internet, then there's a chance that friendly wild memes will grow around your product. And of course the product has to be good for this, and then that'll create sort of a foundation from which you can pop-up a charismatic brand and then from that you can sort of do some research and uncover the culture code underlying the charismatic brand, and that's what ends up becoming your mission.

So most brands of course don't do either the top-down authoritarian or bottom-up anarchic in a pure form. They do some mix; a little bit of this a little bit of that, but fundamentally, I think what's happening on the internet today is that the anarchic bottom-up style brand-and-meme relationship is taking over. So if you're not able to do that, you're giving up so much upside potential in the, you know, potentially harmonious, positive-sum relationship between you and the internet, that your product is just not even going to pop. It's going to like languish in obscurity.

So top-down authoritarian marketing is sort of a diminishing returns curve. And the old-school Mad Men style marketer, the kind of people who really want to impose their authority on the brand, and really control the message and the optics of the brand, they may succeed in a certain sense, in that nobody says things about the brand that they don't want said. But the cost of that might be nobody says anything at all. Nobody pays you any attention at all. Whereas if you're willing to give a little bit of agency, cede a little bit of agency to the wild internet, you may not completely have control over the narrative, but the narrative could be very friendly to you.

And even though it might not create the kind of crystal-clear mission you're hoping will drive your company strategy and positioning forward, it will instead create a much more generative culture code that you can use as potential energy to do a lot more powerful things.

So that's my little spiel on two types of relationships between brands and memes, and the two types of missions that go along with it and missions. And missions of course are where marketing is an activity connects with the rest of the company.

So, let me know what you think, and especially if you can think of very good examples of one or the other style of doing things. I'll see you again next week.

This week’s podcast (12 minutes) is on a crucial difference, between planning to start, and planning to finish.

* We talk a lot about the difference between more and less planning, on the spectrum between full waterfall and full agile, and like most of you, I share a bias towards less planning.

* It is a difference that goes beyond software. In novel writing, for example, people talk of a difference between plotters and pantsers, people who work out detailed plots versus those who make up a story by the seat of their pants.

* Plotting increases the probability that you’ll stick the landing in a satisfying way, but pantsing increases the chances of the activity having a liveness to it, a narrative vitality. That’s the real tradeoff gestured at by waterfall/agile conversations.

* Over the years I’ve realized that a different distinction, within planning, is probably much more important: between planning to start, and planning to finish.

* Planning to finish is the familiar kind, where you plan all the way to the end and the terminal condition is the completed state of the activity. The finish line, the deadline, the checkered flag.

* Planning to start though, is the more important kind for any creative work. The French phrase mise en place, a favorite of Hercule Poirot, gets at this. It roughly means “setting the stage”, especially with reference to cooking preparations.

* When you plan to start, you get to the starting line rather than the finishing line, by setting the stage for a more creative, improvised phase. You can call it getting to the starting line, or as I prefer, by analogy to deadline, the lifeline. A condition where a zombie set of parts is assembled together in a way that makes it come alive.

* The difference relates to what Scott Adams called the difference between systems and goals. When you plan to start, you undertake planned activities to end in a functioning system where habits can flow.

* Another connection familiar to many of you is to James Carse’s notion of finite versus infinite games. Planning to finish is playing a finite game to win it and exit it. Planning to start is working to enter an infinite game and continue playing it.

* Whatever you choose to call it, you should probably spend more time thinking about this difference than about how much planning to do, which is often a much simpler question.

Hello from my new home in Downtown Los Angeles! This is another short, unrehearsed, unscripted, unedited, single-take 10-minute podcast episode. I think I’m going to be experimenting with this format for the rest of the summer at least. Some of you prefer text and have asked for transcripts, and I’ll figure out a low-effort way to do that eventually, but until then, you’ll have to make do with brief tldr show notes if you don’t want to listen to audio.

1/ Breaking smart often means breaking into technology scenes, and this is not a one-time deal. It means keeping an eye on how the action is shifting and following it as needed to stay in the game, which means breaking into scenes repeatedly.

2/ A scene with active technological evolution has what musician Brian Eno called scenius (scene+genius). In my opinion, the key symptom of active scenius is that keeping up with technological change, and with the people driving the change, becomes the same thing.

3/ When the two become different, you end up with a zombie scene that’s just a lingering memory of a more generative era. Social networking and idea networking turn into separate activities.

4/ So how do you follow the action? I like to think of scenius as having 3 main dimensions: social, geographic, and most important, technical. Or, who is doing it, where are they doing it, and what they are doing. You have to track the action along all 3 dimensions, but most people only manage 1 or 2 dimensions of tracking.

5/ If you just track 1 dimension, you’re barely alive, so I won’t say much about that. Things get interesting when you at least track 2 of the 3 dimensions of scenius.

6/ The worse case is if you track scenius geographically and socially, but not technically. That makes you a scenester. You do the same thing in new places, with new people, while being indifferent to whether the action revolves around blockchains or machine learning or cleantech.

7/ You either don’t care, or lack the ability to keep up with the content of the action, so you stick to the social layer.

8/ Slightly better is if you track the action geographically and technically, where you follow the story of a technology trend as it evolves from garage-startup scale to global dominance. This is something like a journalistic mode of tracking the action.

9/ The best 2 of 3 case is if you track the action socially and technically, but not geographically. In that case you’ll age-in-place with an era of technology with the key people driving it, and either turn into a rent-seeking member of the elites if you succeed, or a precarious hanger-on if you aren’t.

10/ But if you track all three, then you’ll always be wherever history is being made, and hopefully playing at least a footnote-part in helping make it. You don’t necessarily have to move physically, but you do need to become mindful of the who, where, and what of the action, and get yourself wired to it through information, virtual participation at least.

11/ Of course if you have the right mix of capability and luck going for you, you might lead the action instead of following it.

12/ Personally, I don’t actually like that level of intensity of participation, so I like to hang back a little bit from the heart of the action, along all 3 dimensions, so I can get the headspace to think about the philosophical, cultural dimensions of what is happening. But I do like to know what’s happening, who is doing it, and where.

Since many of you have been suggesting for years that I do a Breaking Smart podcast, I figured I’d do a little experiment and try out the podcasting widget in Substack. If this works well, I’ll start mixing things up a bit and do a mix of text posts and podcast episodes.

This is an unrehearsed, unedited, live 10-minute recording. Apologies for the 15 seconds of siren noise outside my apartment at around the 6:22 mark. I’m not sure exactly how you’d get the podcast into your listening app, but presumably there’s a way. I think I’m supposed to do stuff to submit it to Apple or something. Here’s the podcast feed URL if that helps: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/9973.rss

In this first short episode, I talk about how the Digital Age embodies a wabi-sabi approach to technology, where the Industrial Age embodied an ethos based on the pursuit of a “like-new” state. Let me know what you think!

Some links for stuff I talk about are below the image.

Image Credit: Kintsugi bowl, CC-BY-SA 4.0 by Ruthann Hurwitz

Show notes:

* Joel Spolsky post Things You Should Never Do, on why “throw one away” is a bad idea

* Original Frederick Brooks argument that you should plan to throw one away is from The Mythical Man Month

* Wabi-Sabi and Kintsugi