Nate Sullivan

If there’s anything decent people have come to realize over the last year, it’s that many of us lead very, very different life experiences. As soon as you start getting into the specifics, things start to get complicated (and often testy), so let’s just stick with that observation for now. The lives we lead, the things we start with, or without — they’re all really different, and there are combinations and possibilities in play that a lot of us have never even considered, been aware of, or made accommodations for. I don't think this is especially controversial, but I guess everything is now.

Equally non-controversial, I would think, is that this reality is at the root of a lot of problems and a lot of resentment. Some of it is really big, impactful, and existential to things like the functioning of our republic. Some of it just leads to people getting stressed out at work, or losing themselves in pointless fights on Twitter, or Reddit, or (God forbid) somewhere in real life.

Of course, it isn’t all bad. To the contrary, it feels like today there are way more examples than ever of people getting past resentments by understanding one of these blind spots, and better accommodating someone else. Maybe, as with the bad things, we’re just hearing about more “things” in general thanks to technology and new media, but I’d at least like to think we’re making small bits of progress every now and then. 

At work, people like me hear a lot about “empathy”, and especially that we need to have it, or learn it, and use it. Lots of well intentioned, often well-educated, millennial white people (waves to camera like he's in the background of a local news report) have sort of looked around and tried to figure out what the right thing to do is in a world of situations that aren’t really about us, but are definitely affected by or perpetuated by us. It’s a weird position to be in. Not necessarily hard, but definitely weird, because it's very morally ambiguous and there's aren't a lot of good, obvious historical scenarios to emulate. There is a lot of conflicting advice out there, though probably because there are a lot of different scenarios happening, and unfortunately most of them require bespoke, complex solutions, difficult conversations/moments, mistakes, vulnerability, all that good stuff. 

With all that complexity and a burning need for a Ted-talk sized solution, the quick one is “have empathy”, and to be fair, there are certainly worse principles to abide by. Being generally interested in the welfare of others and aware of the fact that you probably have blind spots is, frankly, a better starting spot for doing good than most people find themselves in today. So if we can nail that, it’s definitely a positive. But… we need to understand what we’re accomplishing, and what we’re not. 

Emotional intelligence is not a panacea

The main thing to keep in mind is that empathy is not shared experience. The way I look at it, empathy is not necessarily understanding a scenario — it’s understanding that a scenario can exist. Those are not the same things, and if you’re trying to contribute to building a better world by expressing empathy, you can’t get caught up on having a shared experience you can never actually have. You have your experience, and you oftentimes have the ability to make your experience richer, and more informed, and more three dimensional. Wonderful! But other people's lives are not series of merit badges you can collect. I lived in Ohio for two years. That doesn't sound like a lot, but I didn't know anybody and I was hundreds of miles from home and I didn't have any money, so it felt like a really long time. But I don’t know what it’s like to be from the midwest, or even just from Ohio, or to feel any of the cultural affinity that’s most common from people who are. I have a better sense of what it is, and what it isn’t, than I did before I moved out there, for sure. But I don’t get to hand wave anyone away who thinks I don’t understand the midwest from other perspectives, because I don’t. Maybe, in some contexts, it doesn't matter that I don't understand that experience. But if that's the case, that's the argument I need to make, not that I somehow share experiences that I don't.

I picked a pretty lame example there because it’s harmless and doesn’t really have a lot of societal baggage — different kinds of suburban white people learning about each other’s regional differences, whoop-dee-damn-doo. But obviously this is also true for differences in experience that have much greater consequences, like race, gender, and economics. It’s a good thing that we are trying to understand each other more. But we have to know that people trying to understand YOU really can’t beyond a certain level — that’s just a limitation of the human experience — and on the other side, that knowing you have a blind spot can help you mitigate it, but is unlikely to ever truly remove it. It just gives you the ability to drive a little more carefully in certain scenarios. 

There are a lot of social and political changes that I think need to happen to build what I consider a (more) virtuous society that best reflects not the literal, textbook America we started off with, but the ideal I think we were at least shooting for in our weird, stunted, hypocritical way back in the 18th century. But those changes are necessary to solve the very specific challenges we face right now, which are less fundamental problems of humanity, and more individual injuries and damages we’ve inflicted to certain groups for certain reasons. I know a lot of people don't like to hear that, but you don't have to read Howard Zinn to look at history and conclude that America has some very specific baggage that isn't even all that old. We have to fix the resulting damage, and it’s going to make a lot of people angry, and if I knew how to resolve that I’d run for office. 

However, those things aside (yes, that’s a lot to ask), baking in general empathy, the ability to see it and accept it, and most importantly, an understanding of what can and cannot be accomplished with it, is a change and a social investment that can do a lot of good over the indefinite future, as we deal with more problems that surface from our past decisions, and even ones we haven’t created yet, but almost certainly will. We should do this. It’s not weakness, it’s not pandering. It’s becoming more human in the best way, and as small as the world is now, it’s increasingly something we can’t afford to do. 

Two of the say, maybe six companies that run the world are fighting. This time, it's Facebook and Apple. Fortunately for those of you who don't really pay attention to this kind of thing and want to get up to speed quickly, it's a very simple argument.

Apple makes money off of a lot of things, including selling gazillions of phones and a variety of rapidly growing services (music, cloud space, etc.), but one thing they don't make money off of is user data. It's entirely plausible that they choose to do this because either (a) people in charge like CEO Tim Cook find it kind of gross and don't really want to do, or (b) they just don't think it's a very good business and, unlike companies that do, they have extremely lucrative alternative models a data-selling or advertising business might compromise. It's also possible that Apple is just not very good at this. Either way, it's not how they make money (and they are very good at making money), which is the safest way to predict that a company won't do something.

Facebook makes almost all of their money from advertising. They sell a bunch of random stuff like VR goggles and TV webcams and stuff like that, but the vast, vast, vast majority of their very large profits comes from selling targeted advertising. They target these ads by hoovering up as much data as possible about anyone who uses Facebook products, including data that has nothing to do with using Facebook products. For example, Facebook has always attempted to (and often succeeded) in tracking your browsing and application behavior (again, outside of Facebook properties) adding it to their information about you, and targeting to you with it. There are other things they might do with that data, but that's the main one we know they make most of their money from, and as mentioned when discussing Apple, we therefore know it's something they're probably going to keep doing, and continue to try to grow.

Inevitably, we've reached a conflict. Apple wants people to buy phones and use Apple services. There is real financial benefit for Apple from building these complex user behavior models. Maybe they can build a better experience for their products with it (or at least one you're more likely to buy), and they do that to some degree with their action recommendations and stuff like that. But they don't need to guess what you want to buy, so in general they don't really try to find out.

In fact, it's even more than that. Since there's no opportunity cost there for Apple (or, again, because this is some principle they have, but we're talking about pretty big, very profitable companies here so I'm trying to stay away from that argument), they've attempted to leverage the other direction increasingly structuring their ecosystem around user privacy, or more accurately, user control of their own data. Since this has some technical disadvantages (notably a lack of magic cloud services that guess everything you want before you want it), it makes sense that they would stress the advantages as well -- namely, that when you're using an Apple device, it's less likely that advertising companies are constantly tracking your every move and attempting to monetize it.

Pick your poison, or don't

In my opinion, Facebook is now extremely gross both for its increasingly creepy business model and the general low-quality information and interactions available on its product. I haven't used it or WhatsApp (which it owns) in nearly three years, and I'm just about done weaning myself of Instagram (which it also owns). Obviously I'm not putting a freaking camera or whatever from these guys in my house, either.

That being said, I don't think Facebook's revenue model is entirely immoral. It's just a choice; do you prefer free products & services that are subsidized in ways you may not fully understand, or do you prefer paying what is frequently quite a bit of money for products where that cost is more directly related to the value you get? Say whatever you want about Facebook -- it's does a lot of stuff for a free service, and as a company, it offers a LOT of things without every actually asking any of its users to spend any money. That works for certain people.

As mentioned, while I prefer Apple's stance here (and, more broadly their general approach to business -- there is a reason I own a lot of Apple products), they're not some benevolent charity. Completely unrelated to these issues, I think they've engaged in a mix of anti-competitive and high-leverage revenue maximization strategies that are either illegal or should be illegal. I say unrelated because unlike "free product" and "opaque user monetization", Apple's abusive App Store policies aren't necessary to support its strategic focus on privacy that I prefer. Facebook, on the other hand, is stuck -- you can't coherently argue that Facebook should remain free while not monetizing your usage in other ways.

Stan in the Place That You Are

Now, the reason I mention all of this "Apple's no angel" thing (even though it's completely unrelated) is because I'm surprised at how necessary that seems to be to make a compelling argument that Facebook's user data policy/strategy sucks. It's seems obvious to me that Apple's anti-competitive App Store policies, for instance, or their dependance on (and kid-glove treatment) of the Chinese government have literally nothing to do with a stance on user data. But somehow, evaluating billion dollar conglomerates is often treated by people as some kind of character test, like we're trying to figure out who handles arbitrary moral challenges better and then just defending that actor from any and all criticism (at least relatively) by default.

Now, if this were the way I felt issues and policies should be evaluated, I'd totally be an Apple Stan. But it's not, and that means no matter how often I agree with Apple on different policies, I'm never simply going to agree with something they do just because they do it.

(For those of you -- likely my more life-experienced readers -- who don't what a "Stan" is, here you go.)

Instead, the purchase decision for a product of service will -- as with all similar things -- come down to some kind of cost/benefit analysis that includes whatever relevant moral component is involved, and I'll go on a case by case basis. I don't need to buy half my products from Apple and half from Amazon or whatever to prove this, either. I choose to take part in the Apple App Store despite it's bad policies, because in general the store is better for me even with them in place. This is also why I'd like many or all of those policies investigated and potentially regulated away. I can literally choose Apple (or anyone else) over various technology rivals 100% of the time, and still think something Apple chooses to do is the wrong choice.

In some ways, the way we're starting to think about this smaller and smaller number of companies that effectively define and advance consumer behavior is uncomfortably similar to how we think about political parties -- the ultimate zero-sum duopoly. Now, it's worse for a lot of reasons, namely that there are even fewer options (although you really only have two options for phone platforms), and because tech companies generally overlap in weird Venn diagrams while our two political parties increasingly seem to exist primarily to oppose each other.

But... it's still bad, and just as with political parties, Stans don't challenge the things they love, which is a necessary part of not just holding them accountable, but making them better. That's why the point isn't to both-sides everything, but to look past the actors involved and assess the thing they do, propose, or stand up for. Your favorite brand or politician can be right 98% of the time (in your eyes), but you still need to be ready to call out actions and concepts that aren't right.

People refer to the instinct of the moment to bring everything down to an equal, terrible level as cynicism, and maybe that's right. But I don't think useful, constructive cynicism (my favorite kind) is about looking for terrible things from a faction so you can ignore or, God forbid, justify other terrible things from another. There are an infinite number of things to beat up for being terrible, immoral, or wrong. So many, in fact, that if we find it especially reassuring to know that our disfavored factions are wrong, we're never going to get to the part where we make anything right.

I am not the first person on the internet to tell you that since 2016, the number one thing that’s been eroded and removed from American society is the idea of “norms” — things you “can” or “cannot” do not due to a specific consequence (like going to jail, or being removed from office), but due to the generally shared understanding that doing that thing would eventually destroy the consensus that keeps the country functioning.

We’ve all learned just how much of our country operates under inertia, versus the true rule of law, where rules aren’t “expectations”, but are codified with real enforcement mechanisms that are ready and willing to activate when said rules are violated. Some things, like making everyone an “acting” head of a function so you can avoid confirmation hearings, or ignoring how much the chief executive is literally shoveling public money into his businesses, are just tasteless and embarrassing acts of bad faith. Maybe they are technically legal acts under the laws that exist, or maybe they are just so gross and weird that we never thought to put a law in place.

Other acts are even bolder — they rely on enforcement of a very real, legal limitation simply not working, or having insufficient resources. This is like robbing a bank, escaping the local police, and then arguing that what you did is fine, or else someone would have arrested you. When Congress issues a subpoena to a relatively ordinary White House official, they are supposed to show up. While you can end up in a legal battle over what questions they are required to answer based on different executive prerogatives, you have to at least show up. If you don’t, you should be found in contempt and put in prison, which is what would happen if I didn’t show up for a subpoena. Now, it’s become a courtesy to show up, because people played chicken with the enforcement of the rule, and won.

Maximalist Chicken

Most reasonable people I talk to — regardless of their politics — are uncomfortable with the second thing, because it really does feel like the system is broken. Ask a non-political person if something political is okay or not, and eventually you’ll probably end up talking about whether said action is “actually illegal”. People understand the difference between the letter of the law, and the spirit of the law, and they live in a society where everyone from local government to Verizon constantly leans on the former and ignores the latter. But, they generally believe that, when push comes to shove, laws should be enforced.

What people seem to undervalue is the impact that the removal of norms and non-legally binding political behaviors have on society, primarily because people associate “norm” with “social grace”, and either don’t believe or just aren’t aware of how much actual power is kept in check by people simply deciding it would be bad for everyone in general to exercise that power.

That doesn’t mean I think relying on norms is a good way to run a society; in many ways, it’s not. Norms are both weak and alarmingly amoral. Norms have protected racial caste systems, sexual assault, and a host of objectively awful things in place even when said things could no longer be protected by law. But the fact is, America has been (for all it’s problems) a pretty good place to live, and a pretty good social framework to build on, largely due to norms that have insulated us from fascism, communism, theocracy, and other failed systems. Those norms have survived because we’ve looked at those various -isms and thought “we actively do not want this place to turn into that”, and that was always more important than getting to be in charge for another 2 or 4 years.

But that shared agreement of some basic things we don’t want to be is exactly what we appear to have lost. And with it, we’ve lost basically the only things keeping us from turning into one of those places we used to fear becoming most.

America is not legally required to be America

The biggest misconception about America — the shiny, positive version of America we want to have, that is — is that it is, by nature of its Constitution — somehow required to be the country that we’re used to living in. My best guess is that this is due to some combination of poor awareness of our own history, the increasingly dated and hard to parse language (for regular people) of our most critical founding documents, and the fact that the country has undergone enormous changes (becoming an international superpower, for one) that have been baked into the culture, but for the most part, neither our institutions nor the actual Constitution. Americans in 1975 had very different expectations of their society than Americans in 1925, but rely on the same basic founding documents with a few (important) amendments and a lot of laws. And we don’t really make laws anymore, to be honest.

The result of this is that people mistakingly assume that the American system of government, as defined in the Constitution, if played to the absolute letter of the law, will basically look like the America they know. This is, as we’re seeing, not even remotely true. The America we know and love is built on staggering levels of public, communal investment, and long-term thinking that — while influenced and affected by varying degrees of partisan politics, of course — are not a series of continuing resolutions and scorched earth governance designed to maximize the ability to jam party loyalists into lifetime court appointments. We didn’t beat the Nazis, go to the moon, end slavery, clean up a wide variety of truly ghastly environmental problems, build the world’s most dynamic capitalism, etc., etc. by constantly pushing the burden of reasonableness onto whoever would take it, as long as it wasn’t me.

None of that is legally required. America being a decent, functional society that respects its citizens and seeks the consent of the government is not baked into the Constitution. Instead, for 250 years, we’ve made the active, often difficult decision to use the Constitution as inspiration for building a place like that.

Why Mitch McConnell Sucks

I don’t agree with the political views of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or Chief Justice John Roberts, but I have wildly different opinions of the two. Roberts is the driving force behind some of the worst things that have happened to American politics and society, not the least of which is the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. The Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to a disgusting amount of corrupt, untraceable money that has poured into our elections for no good reason. He’s done immeasurable damage to some of the most important concepts in the country, because he’s an entitled, out of touch elitist.

However, he is infinitely less dangerous than Mitch McConnell because if nothing else, he understands the mortality of his own institution. The Supreme Court was not ordained by God; its specifics are barely even spelled out in the Constitution. We listen to it because we choose to listen to it, and it’s very possible that we’re approaching a moment where the part of the government that actually does stuff is told by the Supreme Court that it CANNOT do something, and simply replies “watch me”. If Democrats are the ones to do it, they’ll get it done by abusing the lack of specifics in the rules and simply adding more judges until they get what they want. If Republicans are the ones to do it, they seem more likely to ignore the Court without any legal argument at all, but simply because nothing will happen when they do it. Either way, the Court lives in a delicate world where it has to make adhering to the Court’s decisions easier than NOT adhering to them, and Roberts has (smartly) started to do this by breaking ties in ways that at least somewhat reflect the political mood.

You can write this off as judicial legislation/activism if you’d like, but remember that Roberts isn’t trying to generate policy outcomes; he’s just aware of the incredibly fragile position the Court is in, that the rest of us forget exists because this made-up-institution with lifetime appointments and broad jurisdiction has a badass looking building and an even more badass name. But Roberts doesn’t forget.

McConnell, on the other hand, is much more fundamentally dangerous. He's now running the country’s legislative function the way I play video games right before I go to bed. I save my game, and then just start doing the craziest shit imaginable in the hopes that it will work, because I’m bored and quitting anyways. That way, if it works, great! I’ll save again. If not, I’ll just turn off the game. That certainly feels like what’s happening today — Mitch just keeps making increasingly cynical, self-serving decisions, and seeing if the fragile balance that keeps the country together breaks or not, and they keep working.

The problem, though, is that eventually they won’t, and there also won’t be a saved game to go back to. Mitch might have impressed us all with his ability to control huge parts of a powerful country with a distinct minority of support (congratulations, I guess?), but it’s never enough for him. His coalition keeps shrinking without becoming any more accommodating or interested in compromise, so he has to keep coming up with more aggressive ways to stay in charge. It’s a smaller group that makes up for its diminished numbers every year with a stronger, more intensely focused dislike of the majority, and under American norms, that’s not really a governing coalition. So we get stuff like this, where we’ll use a poorly representative body to jam through lifetime appointments to an all powerful body with no electoral safeguards at all.

That is now the plan, as batshit crazy as that sounds. It can fail in two ways. One is the obvious, traditional way — the actual mechanism of circumventing popular will can fail (darn elections!) and his GOP majority could panic and crack at the thought of ramming through an appointee, only to lose anyways and invite a flood of electoral reforms that, while “extreme” by the standard of doing nothing, are mostly about allowing people to vote easily and adding representation for American citizens who lack it for no particular reason. These things will disproportionately benefit Democrats, but at the same time, they will all be inside the bounds of logic and the American norms we expect.

The other way McConnell’s plan can fail is much worse — worse for everyone, but worst of all for him. And it’s that he fails by succeeding. He rams home a Supreme Court justice, sure. But in doing so, he finally fully normalizes the kind of “hey, it’s legal” approach to governance he’s slowly become dependent on. And instead of a right wing that’s driven by activists and reigned in by a few moderates, and a left wing that’s driven by moderates and yelled at by activists, we get two wings that embrace a total war, norms-be-damned strategy. The filibuster goes immediately, which allows court packing — not just to right a wrong, but to advance an agenda, because it’s very much within the rights of the majority. Imagine a Democratic Party that worried as little about institutional integrity as today’s Republican Party, throwing the furniture into the fire just as quickly as today’s GOP.

The only outcome for Mitch that works is — fortunately for him, I guess — the one that certainly seems to happen every time, which is that he makes a slightly more disingenuous power grab that puts a slightly more disproportionate amount of power into the hands of his people, and everyone just grudgingly accepts it because they can’t come up with a norm-compatible way to fight back. And hey, this is what usually happens, so maybe it can work… forever? Let’s just say I’m skeptical. The Boomers are on the way out slowly, but it’s going to happen, and eventually it’s going to start happening quickly. At that point, you’re going to have an enormous class of diverse, relatively educated, motivated, and poorly represented citizens without any Boomer-era perks to lose (“what about my pension?” LOLOLOLOL), demanding that the ruling minority provide a reason why this system even exists at all.

Then what?

I'll be honest — I certainly don’t blame young-ish liberals for being eager to shed some norms and kick some ass. They’ve been hearing Lucy and the football jokes for their entire lives, and being told by their own party leaders they need to cater their preferences to entitled white guys in far-off diners. Meanwhile, their political opponents take bigger, louder, more emotionally satisfying swings and at worse come out of the battle tied. Why not get their own Mitch, and stick the burden of responsibility on the GOP?

The problem is that you can’t build anything this way — just look at what’s come out of the Trump era. Basically every achievement is either some stupid military vanity project, or not doing something. Not protecting voting rights, not funding this or that, not enforcing inconvenient laws, deregulating things (sometimes by simply ignoring violations or existing regulations). What’s a new thing that works, that is better than the old thing? Freaking Space Force? Give me a break.

Power cynicism has done nothing but give McConnell and crew the reigns to a wagon they can’t even drive. Those won’t advance any kind of non-vengeance, non-resentment powered project, and the liberals I know want to build, grow and change the way a lot of things work. And that’s exactly why Mitch keeps winning — because he knows that if the goal is just to keep anything from happening, he can’t lose. The only way to stop him is to join him in destroying the system, and if the system is destroyed, how will you do anything then? Right?

And that’s where… I don’t know. I don’t know what a packed Supreme Court looks like; I don’t know what electoral reform looks like without a filibuster, or if the demographic and voting trends of the last 20 years, freed from soft-voter-suppression tactics unlocks a wildly different, technocratic America that’s been lurking just underneath the surface.

But it’s certainly possible. And we might actually find out, because if Mitch screws up and reads the room wrong, unlike me, he can’t just turn off the Xbox and go to bed.

The number one obsession in digital marketing for the last decade or so has been targeting. For all the money in ad-tech and sponsored content and other 21st century marketing things, the actual experience of being advertised to and, for lack of a better word, effectively propositioned by companies online is pretty lame. Targeting promises two things:

1. You don't have to waste time/money/effort advertising to people who are unlikely to want your product
2. You can communicate to people who are likely to be interested in increasingly personalized (and thus more effective) ways.

This is basically the promise of the whole digital marketing ecosystem. Always send the right thing to the right people, and be able to do it easily and in many cases automatically.

For years, we've seen everything about the 21st century consumer economy move in this direction. Free products, exploding social networks, huge investments in companies with basically no business model, etc., etc., all the standard Valley jokes, essentially -- all based on the idea that marketing information would get more precise, more valuable, and allow for better, more precise targeting. In fact, this has been going on for so long now that it's simply assumed by both business and consumers that this data exists, that it's accurate, and that it's only going to be more accurate. To think otherwise is to be completely out of touch with "technology".

And then... there's Apple. Perhaps you've heard of them. They recently became the first two trillion dollar company, and even if you're not into meaningless psychological market metrics, they're fabulously profitable with no accounting gimmicks and own most of the profit inside the world's most critical and lucrative consumer market. When people come after Apple about anti-trust, it's not to argue that Apple has a monopoly on phones -- it's that Apple has a monopoly on the market on payment processing for selling things on Apple phones. Think about that for a second. It's incredible! Huge (although comparably small) companies gird themselves for battle against Apple not to dethrone them from their position, but simply to demand better treatment on their devices. We've completely conceded the market for "good all-in-one-digital devices that the average person will actually like" to these guys. Whether it's because Apple is amazing, or the rest of the world just doesn't have the stomach/discipline to match, that's an enormous concession to make, and implies that Apple is effectively unbeatable at this.

Now, where the collision comes is with the idea of data privacy. Apple is notoriously bullish on privacy; they've pushed (and promoted) everything from anonymous "Login with Apple" services to on-device computing for face recognition in an attempt to leverage the idea that your data should remain private and in your control. They do this because, unlike everyone else, they make money from you purchasing their products and services, and many (most?) other huge tech companies do not. So while privacy may be some sort of cultural value at Apple, and that's cool and all, more importantly it's a clear point of differentiation and value for a brand that's often associated with relatively high costs, but generally good customer experience. In other words, it's in Apple's business interest to highlight the downsides of having your personal data sold, and to deliver solutions that make that practice less prevalent. There's no opportunity cost to them for doing so (they're not good at making non-trivial amounts of money off your personal data), but there's upside in providing value that almost everyone else they could possibly compete with is fundamentally, economically incapable of providing.

As with all the other big tech companies, Apple isn't just a company -- it's a platform. But unlike something like Facebook, which is a very large, influential platform, from a dollars perspective, Apple is the platform. If Apple won't let you do it, there's simply a very low ceiling on how much money you can make doing it. That's not because consumers don't have non-Apple choices -- thanks to Android, they have many -- but because they don't actually like those other choices, and in general the ones who spend money have shown they're going to choose their iPhone and some other app over your app and some other phone.

See where I'm going, here? Increasingly precise data collection is inevitable, because... we know how to do it, I guess? I mean hey, look, GDPR was supposed to be the death of all this and we wormed our way around that, didn't we? But meanwhile, the most important digital platform on the planet essentially has no prospective rivals, famously promotes a regulated, walled-garden approach at the expense of third parties in the name of customer experience, and -- oh yeah -- has already shown that they DGAF about your double bank shot monetization strategy.

Ad-tech and user tracking is real, but it's also a lot flimsier than I think most consumers (and even many marketing people) realize. Learning what marketing executives like to see has lead to a lot of cosmetic "improvements" ("13% of your users like snowboarding! It's machine learning!") layered on top of the same flawed technology that still spends a lot of time crossing its fingers and hoping that Apple doesn't close a web loophole via mobile Safari, and that you don't happen to clear your cache. Ad-tech has the bullshitters on its side, along with a lot of people who NEED it to be real to justify whatever dumb unicorn or unicorn-ecosystem they've invested in, but the truth is that in any sort of conflict with a company in Apple's position, it'd be less David and Goliath and a lot more "ant, boot".

So maybe Amazon will eventually have something better to retarget me with than the trash can I bought yesterday. It's certainly not impossible. But if I were a marketing-tech company, I'd be a lot more scared of Tim Cook than Congress.

POSTSCRIPT: My Spidey-Sense must have been tingling..

... because here we go. It's not the first skirmish, and it won't be the last, but the theme that runs through all of these is that advertisers/data brokers really have no leverage. They're effectively scavengers, so there's not a lot they can do when the town comes and picks up all the garbage. When you compare platform leverage, Apple's is "you aren't going to be on our platform unless you can get the government involved", and Facebook's is "we're going to tell everyone you are terrible". Only one of those things is actual leverage.

This just eats at my soul. 

Grocery workers across the country say morale is crushingly low as the pandemic wears on with no end in sight. Overwhelmed employees are quitting mid-shift. Those who remain say they are overworked, taking on extra hours, enforcing mask requirements and dealing with hostile customers. Most retailers have done away with hazard pay even as workers remain vulnerable to infection, or worse. Employees who took sick leave at the beginning of the pandemic say they cannot afford to take unpaid time off now, even if they feel unwell.

It’s just such a massive failure of capitalism as the backbone of society. And that’s coming from me, a person who is extremely aware of how much positive social stuff has occurred thanks to capitalism. But this incarnation, this “capital as God” approach to things, it just leaves too many moral holes you can drive a truck through. This isn’t a temporary inefficiency that consumers are going to fix over time as their preferences affect pricing and supply chains. This is just not needing to pay an essential social function enough money to live — this is valuing people on their ability to be replaced like they are shooting guards or product marketing directors when we need this work done and they aren’t making enough doing it to live the kind of life we believe humans should get to live. 

I don’t think government is THE answer to almost anything, but the fact is that it can be AN answer to almost anything. That seems really un-compelling on the surface, especially if you are doing okay and have alternatives. But consumerism doesn’t just lack good answers for this kind of amoral, transactional treatment of essential workers — it has no answers, and isn’t going to come with any, either. Making this situation into something decent and not completely abhorrent is just not in capitalism’s remit, at least not on a time scale that isn’t counted in decades that we don’t have to spare.

I am really okay being talked out of my support for Warren-style “save capitalism with aggressive regulation and distribution”, partially because even though it looks absolutely right to me, it sounds like an incredible challenge to implement in modern America. But we’re not going to suddenly figure out morally virtuous command economies without bread lines or whatever, and the current “hey, maybe YOU’LL be a billionaire someday, and then YOU can have human furniture” fantasy straight out of “The Running Man” is just wrong and gross and I’m not okay with it.  

The NBA started back up this week, and it’s nice to have it back in my life, even if the whole thing is extremely precarious. And of course, it is extremely precarious — the league is attempting to operate in the middle of a pandemic a few months after shutting down its season. But as I sat there watching not only a pretty amazing logistical effort involving bubbles, fake crowds, and the like, but a well-coordinated, inclusive attempt to recognize the current civil right revival that disproportionately affects their players, I couldn’t help but be impressed. Will the bubble work? No one knows. But if it does work, we’ll look back at what the NBA did and marvel at the effort. It’s that impressive.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, of course, we have baseball and football. Baseball is in the middle of collapsing literally weeks into it’s delayed start to the season, apparently blindsided by the fact that their players are humans who can both contract and spread the highly contagious virus that has plagued the world for months. They took essentially no precautions and did essentially no preparation. Since that’s going so great, football has decided to take a similar approach, leaving all possibilities open (Fans? No fans?) but not really doing anything. 

How different professional sports leagues choose to react to a black swan like this is an interesting experiment because it’s quasi-controlled. The leagues all have basically the same challenges regarding TV money, attendance, insurance, and collective bargaining, admittedly with different specifics regarding the number of players, levels of contact, and things like that. It would have been fascinating to see different approaches for every league (the NBA is by no means perfect), but instead there have really only been two broad approaches that encompass everyone — either do something about the problem, or do nothing.

“That’s not my job” is kind of a weird position to take in general; it’s certainly discouraged (often to an inefficient extreme) in the VC-backed startup world I’ve been in for the last eight years or so. But it’s absolutely crazy when it impacts you so directly. If you’re driving a truck, and another truck jumps the median and starts barreling towards you, do you just plow into him? “Well, he’s in my lane. There was nothing I could do.” You haver to admit that Adam Silver and the NBA, at the very least, turned the wheel. Maybe they’ll drive into a lamp post, or maybe the truck will hit them anyways. But they assessed the impact of a head-on collision, and decided it was probably the worst thing that could happen, so now they’re doing everything they can to avoid it. 

You could ask the same questions of American society in general. We didn’t turn the wheel so much as brace for impact; we threw some money (not much) at the problem, and now that a hundred and fifty thousand people are dead a good chunk of the citizenry are willing to cut the sleeves off an old t-shirt and put one of them over their nose and mouth. But for the most part, the entire response has been either:

1. there’s no truck
2. the truck shouldn’t be there
3. head on collisions only kill people who were about to die anyways
4. if we turn the wheel we’re going to be late for the movie
5. the oncoming truck is probably Chinese 

All these responses have two things in common. One, they don’t require any effort — they are all justifications for either doing nothing or changing the subject. Two, they don’t work. The truck still hits you, a pandemic still spreads, and now you’re left to sheepishly drag yourself out of the wreckage, or scream “I WAS RIGHT, THAT TRUCK WAS CHINESE!” while you slowly burn to death in the cabin. 

Smarter, more eloquent, and properly edited people have written about the millions of things wrong with our pandemic response. What scares me is that this isn’t “the perfect storm” to undermine American society. What scares me is that at this point, basically any storm would have done it, because our decision making is now so skewed towards protecting established interests and routines that it’s not that we can’t adapt to a situation that threatens them, it’s that we actively refuse to. 

In general, having kids has been pretty detrimental to my brain, at least in terms of raw cognitive ability. I'm tired a lot, I have way less time to think, and I have a lot of hilarious conversations that are enlightening about say, the human condition, but aren't exactly sophisticated technical or policy discussions.

I think this is why so many ambitious people (with the resources and social privileges to match) wait forever to have families. No matter how many resources you have, being a good parent just takes a lot out of you that only you can provide. It's one thing if you're rich and don't care about building an actual relationship with your kids; then you can pay other people to give you free time back. But the insidious thing about parenting is that you probably don't want that (even if you can afford it, which almost no one can). So it comes back to you to explain the difference between Iron Man and Spiderman to your son two or three hundred times a week to your son not because it's a great conversation or because it's on your mind, or even because it's enriching for him. It's just what he wants to talk about.

In between these conversations (if you can call them that), my poor, addled brain usually uses it's remaining horsepower to think about one thing -- unsurprisingly, that thing is "why he is so obsessed about X", where X is one of several very random things we keep coming back to. These include the Paw Patrol franchise, firefighters, and most recently, the Avengers.

Before I had kids, I assumed children became obsessed with random things like comic book franchises due to media saturation and advertising. Basically, the world wants little kids to badger their parents into going to theme parks and buying toys and seeing movies, so they indoctrinate kids with messages saying these things are cool at young ages. I can't be the only person who assumed this, and to be honest, I kind of always assumed this is why I liked things like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or whatever when I was growing up, even though I don't specifically remember being advertised to this way. I figured the whole thing was insidious and subconscious, because I am a cynical marketing person.

But a crazy thing happened with my kids, who as of my writing this are 3 and nearly 4 and a half -- they haven't really been exposed to much of anything. They don't go to school yet, and we've moved four times in their lifetimes (hopefully that's done) so they don't even really have friends they see regularly. They don't browse YouTube or the internet or whatever, so the algorithm isn't getting them. The only things they get exposed to are, basically, individually chosen by me and my wife. We've always worked from home a fair amount, and they've had the same daily caretaker who never puts them in front of a TV or a phone.

I'm not putting a moral component on this life of theirs -- I'm just saying the result is kind of a controlled consumer experiment. My kids really aren't saturated with anything they don't ask for, and they only ask for things we showed them, because they don't know about anything else.

What consumers inherently love

Where this gets interesting is in what my kids become obsessed with. I like all the things I introduce my kids to pretty equally, although obviously I'm a little more amped up about certain personal passions, favorite bands, and things like that. But they get exposed to almost all of my favorite bands/etc. to some degree, and only become obsessed with certain things. And with no marketing, no peer pressure, and no saturation you actually get a window into what ideas, art -- and yes, products -- are just inherently compelling.

There is no reason for my son to love Paw Patrol, except that, by his standards, it's f$#@ing awesome. And when I think about it, the concept is kind of awesome, even if the particulars don't appeal to me as much as they would if I hadn’t already spent 38 years on earth. But little kids love animals, they love vehicles, and they love saving the day, because when you think about it, those things are all fantastically entertaining. Paw Patrol combines them in a way that is both interesting and easy to process for a little kid. It doesn't need any marketing at all, outside of literally getting a kid to know it exists.

My son has never seen the actual Paw Patrol cartoon. He doesn't know one exists (thank God). He doesn't need to -- he saw a library book with a picture of all the characters and simply wanted to know more. What are their names? What do they do? Why are they doing it? What does that one do? Does he drive that awesome looking truck? Can I be one of them? He didn't need marketing material to drive these questions in his brain -- he just looked at an exciting, intriguing thing and came up with all of them.

Superheroes are another example. Like many consumers (I assume, based on their box office returns), I have a soft spot for Marvel movies. I wouldn't say those movies are in the Top 100 of my interests, but they are enjoyable distractions and I think they are good stories told well. There is also a five year old in my brain that likes cool robots and explosions and awesome fighting scenes where bad people get what's coming to them. It's hard to argue that these Marvel movies aren't good products for all of these reasons -- but given how much promotional money goes into releasing them, I think there's also an assumption that people like me partially like them because we've been convinced to like them.

I had zero intention of introducing my kids to superheroes for several more years. Number one, it wasn't really on my list of priorities compared to things like "ride a bike" and "use a toilet", because I figured they'd eventually discover entertainment like that on their own timeline. But then one day, their babysitter bought me a kind of awesome, definitely ridiculous t-shirt with 1980s style versions of Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and Spider-Man on it that says "TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK" in huge block letters. It's great and very comfortable, but it's not really office wear even for me, so I mostly wear it around the house.

My kids were obsessed with it immediately. Unlike Paw Patrol, which my daughter is only semi-interested in, this one fascinated both of them immediately. With literally no additional reference material, we talked about those four comic book characters at least once a week for months. What are their names again? Are they friends? What do they do? How are they different? Where did they meet? I always answered honestly, with both whatever plot information I was aware of ("Thor is from space"), as well as logistics ("they are all made up"). This just made them more interesting. Eventually, I cracked and showed them one or two little tiny, non-violent scenes from a couple of MCU movies. Spider-Man swinging around. Iron Man trying out his new suit. Captain America jogging. Nothing epic, nothing more than once a day, and certainly nothing longer than two or three minutes.

Doesn't matter. Both of my kids are completely obsessed with these characters, to the point where my son took my USB camping light and asked my to put it on his shirt so he could pretend to be Iron Man.

 

But you know what? Who can blame him? Iron Man is totally badass as a concept, and the limited amount of information/validation my kids have confirms, without a doubt, that he is in fact totally badass. They don't need to be saturated with Marvel marketing to convince them of the quality of these ideas -- the only thing the marketing needs to do is make sure they know these ideas exist. That's important, but it's a different job from what a lot of people expect promotions to do; i.e., make us interested in something.

It's the product, stupid

I thought back to my childhood obsessions and realized most of this applied. I loved Jose Canseco because he was an amazing freak of a human specimen (yes, manufactured by illegal drugs, but like I knew that in 1987, or would have cared either way). I loved Legos because they're an absolutely incredible idea that lets you do awesome things. I loved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the same reason my son loves MCU characters -- they're awesome, and exciting, and awe-inspiring and just basically cool as hell. Sometimes I loved something kind of stupid, like Starcom, because the other kids in my kindergarten class liked it, but those things never lasted. I still like Legos.

I run into this problem all the time as a person who does product marketing (and not consumer product marketing either, but no one seems to think that matters). No one straight up says it, but the edict is clear -- make people want this. They should want it, and if they don't, that's nothing we can't fix with the right message.

I see a lot of value in good product marketing, and to this point specifically, good product promotional marketing. You gotta get the word out, and when you aren't selling inherently jaw-dropping concepts like armor you can fly into space and shoot lasers out of, you have to articulate value propositions and make arguments. It's totally true, and if it weren't, I would deserve a major pay cut.

But I still think people wildly underestimate the importance of good or great ideas executed in jaw-droppingly good ways. That's why people truly love things, whether it's some IT platform for remote wiping laptops, or a movie. They might buy something for another reason; social pressure, some emotional weak spot, or whatever, but at the end of the day those things are fleeting. And yet still, even back in 2010 we had alleged product people looking at the iPhone -- the iPhone! -- and saying "this is a marketing creation, Nokia has been doing this for years" and just completely and totally missing what was going on around them.

Now, there's probably a whole other post about how this entire argument is what great product marketing -- not product promotion -- is actually about; building the right thing. But I have kids, so I'll probably have that one ready in about five years.

It's only my opinion, but one of the more interesting things I've written (and then promptly lost in a tangled web of SQL dumps while messing around with this site) was a piece on managing people and the different approaches towards setting goals. I thought of these two approaches as engagement and compliance, where the former attempts to create a positive reason for you to do what I want, and the latter simply orders you to do it with the threat (implied or otherwise) of bad consequences.

Because this was before the world ended, the piece mainly focused on using these concepts at work, especially as a relatively inexperienced but still pretty cynical people manager. Unsurprisingly, my spineless neoliberal conclusion was that the best approach was a mix of the two approaches, because both had limitations when taken to their logical extremes, which I explained (as is my way) by creating hilarious straw-men scenarios and clubbing them to death for thousands of words. For a blog post from an un-credentialed keyboard jockey, I thought it was pretty good. Maybe someday I'll scrape it out of those SQL dumps and piece it back together.

Now, back to today. Since the world ended, I've been introduced to two really stark, very non-straw-men examples of these extremes, and wow are they ever terrible. Let's review.

21st Century Policing, a.k.a., "Compliance Addiction"

In theory, the reason police exist is to keep people safe. Even if the actual reason is something completely different, the actual reason people THINK the police exist (and thus continue to support them existing) is still... to keep people safe. Not some people, not the police themselves, not buildings, but ultimately people.

Over the years, policing has involved a lot of different tactics to keep people safe. As a young white kid in the suburbs, there was a fair amount of "engagement" for a while (I won a basketball and a savings bond for winning an essay contest about not using drugs), and then as I got older things moved more towards the compliance end (I was pulled over four times in one summer home from college for no discernible reason; one time I was told I shouldn't be out so late), and now that I'm basically an upper class white Dad we're moving back into engagement for criminal things, and definitely compliance for things like building permits and such.

Based on this, my assumption was that policing had a whole lot of discriminatory bias, but that it was still fundamentally based on the idea of keeping people safe. If the means were immoral, the ends at least were still agreed upon (even if they weren't reached due to the flaws of the means). In other words, I believed that the police often applied tactics that were wrong, and even worse, applied those tactics differently based on how people looked or where they lived, but I still believed that they wrongly applied those tactics in an ham-fisted attempt to achieve the goal of keeping people safe.

Holy shit was I ever wrong! It turns out that when the largest, most visible police forces in the country were forced to choose between keeping people safe, and ensuring that those people complied with the orders of the police, they overwhelmingly, shockingly, violently committed themselves to the compliance part.

I cannot overstate this. Hundreds, maybe thousands of sworn police officers chose (and continue to choose) to do things like shoot random people standing on their porches with riot control weapons, or beat them senseless with batons, or fire rubber bullets into their faces, rather than accept the non-compliance of those people with the orders of the police. Shooting groups of non-violent people with tear gas (or beating up a reporter, or whatever) for violating curfew again and again and again, knowing full well everything is being documented, is not a subtle example of that choice being made.

That is CRAZY, and shows you just how unshared the goal of public safety is by citizens and, if not a majority of individual cops, the collective of police as represented by things like police unions. Can you imagine if you ran a sales team like this?

It's patently absurd, to the point that no one would ever do it in a business environment. The sales manager would be fired immediately, not just for the inappropriateness of beating a human resource with a baton, but for the obvious lack of dedication to the shared company goal of growing revenue. But that's exactly where we are. "Safety" isn't irrelevant to the police, but it is clearly secondary to the idea of compliance with police orders. (Note that equating the two with an unbreakable link -- saying that there can be no safety without compliance -- is the same thing as putting compliance first, especially if you admit that there is such a thing as compliance without safety, which is obviously true because no cop is Superman).

Maybe that's where the analogy is just starting to break down, or at least break off into different realities. I've always thought of the police as a sales manager -- someone vested with authority (by the TRUE authority) to drive a series of goals through a mixture of compliance and engagement of their choosing (within boundaries, of course), but ultimately held accountable to those goals. Instead, law enforcement sees something totally different; that they are the highest authority, the ultimate arbiter of what the goals should even be, and everyone else is allowed to ride along until they disagree.

Facebook, a.k.a. "Algorithm Addiction" (not to be confused with "Addiction Algorithm", which is also Facebook)

With the police making the religion of compliance look so terrible, it's almost hard to imagine how damaging an equally extreme engagement strategy could really be by comparison -- until you look at Facebook.

Social media is built on engagement, largely because its goal (making money off of users looking at and clicking on ads) is more about engaging people than punishing them. That's why everything about the platform is about giving you what you want, so long as it leads to you being on the platform more -- because the longer you're there, the more you see and click on ads. The last thing Facebook wants to do is tell you something you don't want to hear, or show you something you don't want to see, so it spends all of its time trying to avoid that. In fact, the only time Facebook ever puts any kind of judgement or filter on anything is when their failure to do so starts to make people think the platform as a whole might be a bad place to be. Naturally, they address this by applying high-visibility (but extremely low-impact) things like overly deferential fact checking labels (thanks Daily Caller, for your input) on things that allow people to continue to get the most enraging content possible put before them at all times.

The Facebook problem is sort of the perfect inverse of the police problem, in that while the particulars are completely different, the core issue is the same -- we've been lead to believe that Facebook is ultimately most interested in building a "good" platform that causes "good" things (just as we assumed police inherently prioritized public safety above all else) and that if the platform started producing BAD things, Facebook would see to change it. But that's not what Facebook's goal is. The method -- engagement -- is the goal. Like the police, Mark Zuckerberg conflates the goal we think he has, and the goal he actually has, because the goal he actually has is bizarre and sociopathic. So we're told that people connecting and engaging on Facebook always leads to the greater good, and that therefore, we're all in agreement! We want good things, and connection causes them. So, connection.

Except... it's increasingly obvious, even to Facebook employees, that this level of connection and engagement on a social network causes bad things, and actually way more of them than good things. The more people push, the more defensive Facebook gets, except they don't have tear gas and batons.

... yet.

One of the funny things about any kind of economic system is that, by definition, you learn a lot about it simply by existing in it. But as more and more people are realizing, there are a wide variety of ways to exist in any system, thanks to a bunch of different factors we have limited or no control over. The of the virulently pro-capitalist immigrants from Soviet bloc countries, or jaded left-wing twenty somethings drowning in college debt. Think of racial minorities, or women, watching Jared Kushner standing up at a podium with enormous power, completely oblivious to the fact that he is utterly unqualified to be commenting on a Reddit thread about pandemic logistics, let alone leading the federal response or lecturing us about its efficacy.

Increasingly, in fact, even I am starting to have this reaction to 21st century American capitalism, and I'm a healthy, middle aged white guy who makes plenty of money. And yes, I've been yammering on about captured markets and corporate sloth for a long time, but even as I've watched my station in life improve pretty dramatically over the last decade, it doesn't feel like the system works at all.

In some ways, I wish it was simpler. Americans love a simple enemy, and I am no exception. But there's nuance; we live in a society where merit is not irrelevant, but we don't live in a meritocracy where merit is the most important thing. People who work hard and make rational, risk-informed decisions are more likely to succeed than those who don't -- but they still too often are derailed by things outside of their control. Conversely, people from a certain social class who don't work hard, and don't make good decisions almost always end up totally fine, and while these people are relatively small in number, it seems like more and more of the world is built around their needs and preferences.

Anyways, I am aware this is a pretty standard, center-left, Warren-ian societal criticism, and I'm aware that people like me who feel this way are often puzzled why more people don't agree with them, so I'll stop here.

So what should I tell my kids?

My kids are in kind of a weird, middle ground position not unlike the one I grew up in, just updated for the 2020s. They have tons of advantages, and basically no disadvantages, so they actually kind of will grow up in a meritocracy, at least to the extent that there isn't anything obvious that will unfairly or irrationally hold them back. As discussed previously, shed no tears for the Sullivan children.

On the other hand, it is extremely unlikely that they end up with the kind of bulletproof financial security that comes from being the child of millionaires; we're doing great, and it doesn't seem crazy that we can retire comfortably someday (after a lot more working), but neither my children's parents or their grandparents are going to bequeath fortunes to them. Their privileges will be numerous and important -- but the won't be the kind that ensure long-term success. So yes, they can putz around and play in bands as long as they stay out of trouble, but at some point they're going to need to feed themselves and figure out how not be crushed in the gears of late-stage capitalism, just like their dad.

With that in mind, here are some things that seem like they'll be useful to be good at.

Systems

I know I'm not alone in this, but I think "everyone should learn to code" has always been the wrong way to think about kids, technology, and job prospects. Writing code (and doing it well) is a really specific subset of something much larger, which probably has a real name, but I'm simply going to refer to as "systems"-driven thinking. Basically, can you break something up into logical pieces, see patterns, and translate things you're trying to do into processes or concepts that work at scale. Whether you're building software, using it, or just trying to deal with its existence, thinking this way is really useful. As someone who does very little coding of any sort anymore (and was never very good at it), the ability to think of the things around me as objections and functions has served me well, and I've seen a lot of people who can't think that way struggle.

History

If there's anything we've learned from watching the Boomers grow up, it's that every time it feels like the "end of history", it's not. All kinds of old things are becoming increasingly relevant, from the roots of World War I, to the underpinnings and motivations of the New Deal. So many concepts and institutions that make modern society work have atrophied, set on cruise control and forgotten, or stripped for parts over the last forty years or so and at some point we're going to have to rebuild them. Trust-busting, the relationship of labor and capital, international trade, and the idea of what borders mean and what they're for all seem like ideas that need to be redefined, reasserted, or both. Anybody with a really great grasp of history is going to be able to skip a lot of steps in an otherwise very painful, trial-by-error process.

Communications

Whether we continue to live in what we recognize as a democracy, expand into something even better and more involved, or descend into factions and mobs, mobilizing people is going to be a huge part of it. I'm not talking about being comfortable using Twitter -- I mean actually getting people to stop, listen, and consider what you're saying. It's really hard. I'm actually pretty good at getting people to understand technical concepts they struggle with but want to understand. Getting people to consider societal/political/economic ideas they actively distrust is a whole other ballgame, and it's something I'm not especially good at. But some people are, and if that's a skill you have, I think you're going to have very little trouble finding relevant work over the next fifty years or so.

Materials

We make too much garbage, and we have no idea how to live in a way that isn't based on making and disposing of TONS of stuff. I don't know how this ends, but if it doesn't involve all of us choking on millions of plastic bottles, we're going to have to figure something else out. Plus, materials seem to always lead to really cool advancements, even if they're subtle -- from batteries to all the crazy stuff we do with aluminum in consumer electronics. And they are currently the limiting factor on a lot of things, even though we always seem to be getting better at it. Let's just say if my kids show any aptitude for chemistry (that would definitely not be from me), I'm going to be very supportive.

Bonus Answer: Proximity to Stupid Capital

This is actually the best and worst answer, in that I'm the most convinced it'll be useful, and I'm the most scared it's what my kids will end up actually being good at. But honestly, you can't go wrong with rich idiots thinking you're worth bankrolling. It's gotten a million terrible businesses started, and more than a fair share of them acquired. It represents everything that is wrong with 2020s capitalism --- a bad idea attached to established financing is more valuable than a great idea that has to earn financing on its own.

I won't give my kids this advice. But it'll be in the back of my mind if they're banging away at some dead-end job and living in my basement at 25.

One time, when I was in college — at some point in the dreary middle, so let’s say 2002-2003-ish — I asked my Dad what I should try to do for a living if I wanted to maintain the ability to step up or step down my work. This was mostly because (at the time) I was looking for a way to be in a touring punk rock band without having to mooch off my parents forever, but it’s actually a pretty reasonable question for a lot of more practical concerns, even if I wasn’t really thinking about them back then. Careers and the ability to sustain yourself financially (let alone do what you want) come into conflict with raising a family, continuing education, getting involved in your community, etc.

This is a really hard question to answer, and now that I have kids (albeit ones who are not worried about this in any way whatsoever yet) I realize that a lot more. I was asking my Dad to take knowledge of both me and the world as it was, project how both of those things would grow and change over the next decade or so, and prescribe some kind of method for how they should interact. It’s a big ask, but I guess that’s why we have parents.

In my case, my Dad gave what in hindsight was a pretty amazing answer. He said a lot of people were obsessed with everyone gaining skills in “technology”, but the real thing that was going to become valuable was the ability to sort through a lot of information, sort out the good stuff from the junk, and summarize what in the hell was going on to people who were both busy and unable to parse that same information as quickly. This was a problem everyone was sort of skating past at the time, because they were relying on the benefits of a 20th century infrastructure for thinking, evaluating, and validating claims, and assuming the benefits and status quo of that structure would scale as everything went online and everyone became deluged with every possible claim and perspective at once. But that scaling of our ability to make sense of things wasn’t going to happen by itself (or maybe at all), and that was where Dad thought the skill gap would be. He also thought I could be good at this sort of thing (this is something old millennials aren’t universally good at, but in my experience are disproportionately good at compared to other groups), and that I could do it in bursts, in between traveling the world playing songs about how I refuse to wear a tie or whatever.

Good thing we have parents

So basically, Dad predicted the fake news apocalypse of 2016 — among other things — well over a decade before it happened, whether he intended to or not, by simply trying to give his skinny, hoodie-wearing son some direction in life. That’s pretty good, and it rivals his mid-90s prediction that really, really good flat panel displays would become unthinkably cheap within twenty years.

In addition, one of the great things about my Dad’s answer was that while I was looking for him to say something like “learn to operate a CXZ-2202 lathe machine, you can make $80 an hour and work seasonally” and make my immediate problem go away, he actually gave me something that opened up far more possibilities than that. Those possibilities became clearer over time, especially as I worked several technical writing jobs, moved from there into technical product marketing, and from there into more general business and organizational roles. All this stuff stacked; no matter what my job title or day to day was, I never really stopped spending most of my time inhaling information and trying to spit out a coherent summary and maybe some sort of larger perspective that put multiple problems and/or opportunities into proper context.

Like I said, I have kids now, and I’d really, really like to give them as good of a launching pad as I got from this conversation. So I spend a lot of time and brain cycles looking for the larger trend of things, in the hopes that I have that (and my kids’ inclinations) figured out well enough to give them some direction if they ever ask.

So what's my answer? That'll be part two. Unfortunately, it's a little dark, so I want to think it through a little more. Maybe that's 2020 talking (or the remnants of 2019), but I'm more than a little worried I might be as prescient as my Dad in this case.

But I can't wait too long. Knowing my almost four-year-old daughter, she might ask me this in a couple of weeks, so I better be ready.