The best thing about ideological fidelity is also the worst thing. It gets people to think about the world in similar ways. Given that we don’t actually perceive reality but rather our brains interpret it for the benefit of our biological fitness, ( Donald Hoffman The Case Against Reality ), it’s quite likely that for our best perceived fitness we may all fall into ideological lockstep. I imagine that in the midst of a identitarian, authoritarian, populist politics such matters are accelerated via cancel culture. But you know that.
To bang a cracked gong once again, I perceive that stupidity is crowding out nuance and obviating those of us who value it. Groupthink is stupidity, at least it should be considered that dangerous thing in a populist democracy. After all it takes work and focus to actually learn stuff. Since I was on the early adopter curve of the brotherhood of digital basement dwellers, I have always considered myself something of a monk and computer programming as an arcane discipline of monasterial work. I’ve been holed up in my cryptic fractal of the global puzzle palace for decades, always subject to the inspections of my superiors those hackers who can look over my shoulders without my knowledge. Still, they haven’t made my life a living hell so much as the legions might believe. I don’t think my black life matters so much in the terms BLM would use in defining my black soul. I know what it’s like to overhear midwit sentiments who presume I hate guns because of the conspiracy to destroy black boys (like you, they imply).
So every once in a while I entertain nightmare scenarios of the sort that Clinton supporters indulged 8 years ago, faced with the possibility that candidate Trump would actually build a wall Mexico would actually pay for. In my scenario the prosumer marketplace shrivels up, highbrow literature only has billionaire sponsors, and all of the streaming services reduce their jazz catalogs to Miles Davis and Adele. Apple Music today ranked the Beastie Boys Paul’s Boutique above Coltrane’s Love Supreme. Don’t even get me started. In this scenario, I must reinforce the walls of my castle and go all Victorian, like Richard Jarndyce in Bleak House. I must apply to the private clubs, pull a hat down over my face and carry a sword cane if and whenever I leave the homestead. What nihilists would care a whit for my soul if they cannot even respect their own?
The enemy in this scenario is faceless for it is a monopolistic practice, not an evil sorcerer. Yet like an evil sorcerer it makes minions of the plurality. Hell it may even employ the main of the Genius class. I’m naming the enemy B2C.
B2C
You know B2C. It means business to consumer. It is the business model for the way most of us do our getting and spending. We do it online through websites, payment systems, identity providers and a wall to wall supply chain of tools, techniques and services that didn’t exist 25 years ago. B2C aims for the masses and satisfies them at scale. It delivers the OLED screen, not just with buttons to click but UX. User experience. UX evolves to what teens can thumb as their hours of usage tilts the hands of design, generates the most bugs and the loudest whining because of such bugs. The ethos of glitching is what drives quality improvement in UX. A successful company makes it impossible for you to find any holes in Oz that would allow you to peek behind the curtain.
B2C works because once a UX locks you into its virtually infinite realm of control, you lose your ability to see outside that box. The way most teens don’t understand stickshifts, clutch pedals, window cranks or cursive penmanship. And what would be your incentive if the UX is actually where you want to be? Amazon tells me that I’ve place 88 orders this year, and that’s just Amazon, perish the thought of Grubhub. I’ve watched the toilet paper looters. I wasn’t shocked, but I’d rather be home. You probably would to, unless you’ve mastered your sword cane skills. I live in California. They’re illegal. My soul is forfeit.
If you’ve ever been a frequent flier when they first invented the term, you were probably a business traveler. Business travelers who can remember travel agents know how horrible it was when Travelocity was first born. The attention you could get then is now gone, as we are at the mercy of B2C. So even if you are in love with the UX, you are now stuck with figuring out workarounds of the sort your travel agent used to work around for you. So here’s your benchmark for AI. When will you AI assistant be as good as your travel agent once was? We may never find out. The cost of building such an AI for the masses will only come from those in the oligopoly whose economy of scale makes it worthwhile to build AI B2C and aggregate the nickels and dimes of the masses.
When Elon Musk fired most of Twitter, people thought it would crater the platform. Twitter still works. This reminds me of a passage from the book I read about Jim Simons’ firm. Some Wall Street analyst decided to hang out in a public park in Austin on a Thursday afternoon. He asked the sunbathers and frisbee players where they worked. He then shorted the stocks of those companies. It was a winning strategy. How do we get so many to do so little of enduring value?
B2B
The best technological feats and fits will come from demanding customers that pay top dollar for their own bespoke purposes. I have been fortunate enough to build such business intelligence systems for power companies, automobile manufacturers, banks, insurers and other serious kinds of organizations. Instead of getting several dollars worth of respect from a million consumers, I’ve been on several million dollar projects. There’s a world of difference. And unlike B2C, proving you’ve done it once for Company A doesn’t generally cut it with Company B, no matter how much you boogie woogie. [That’s a Boomer joke]. You have to prove yourself over and over, which is quite difficult in a longitudinal career that is constantly disrupted by new technologies and consequently new best practices. I think it makes us veteran practitioners all that more competent professionals than those on the B2C side, but it goes beyond that.
At some point, one realizes that you cannot pin your hopes on one technology or group of companies if you want to survive change. Changes come from the edge, and with more creators than ever, that pace of change has accelerated a great deal since the 80s and 90s when I first got started. There are an order of magnitude more coders and competents who work for a few giant companies than there were.
Both Apple and Microsoft are full of such coders and competents and they both have strategies to deploy AIs for the benefit of their customer bases. Alas most of these are consumers. We are the nuanced experts with elevated sensibilities and salaries that the UberGeniuses are trying to reduce to a series of irrelevancies, because that’s how oligopolies work. Only their geniuses matter. Only the Ivy League blacks decide which black lives matter. Only the Disney execs decide which sort of role models (generated or not) get to be the next Star Wars hero[in]es, because the masses must watch Star Wars.
Today the WSJ says that execs with good golf games are more valuable than their peers. It means the F2F aspect of human relations is not dead. Well, thank God for that, because ultimately B2C is mendacious and B2B specializes us beyond belief. We meaning us professionals and executives need to be the humans in the loop. Always. Even if only because it is more satisfying to pillory a human than an algorithm.
In every case, the way I see it, we are bound to value the human, even if we don’t quite know what it is.
We’ll figure it out when the B2C and B2B squeezes us into a corner. We’ll put up our dukes and rope them dopes, because human imagination is anti-fragile. We’ll figure out how to mock the officious seriousness, to slip, bob and weave. We will make fools of the most seriously taken market geniuses, so long as human agency has freedom in the free markets and open societies. Considering how many of us budget with pencil on the back of envelopes, our own cursive will remain opaque and cryptic. We can escape, because even Apple Intelligence only works if you have an i-something. We have eyes. Our AI is actual intelligence.
Always remember that it takes more electricity than the grid can handle to train these massive models at scale. They’re still trying to use economies of scale - which work for the masses, and we are not amassed. We of imagination. We of subtle discriminations. We of human taste and distinction. We who will not be dictated to. We who are against aggregation. We who find value in the individual, in the distinct, in the rumination of the inspired mind.. of the fleeting poetic gesture.
Half of our mission thus is to find the free reign. The fourth stanza. The fishing spot. The quiet cave. The dive bar. The break before the saxophone solo. The shade tree. The tidepool under the pier. The joke on page 245. To recover our peace of mind and recenter. The other half of our mission is to help our neighbors know the solace that can be found in silence. To invite them to put down the phone and look us in the eye. To dance with them on the sidewalk, just one more sidestep enough to make them crack a smile. To let them go ahead and take the cab. To remind them and ourselves that our soul has not been squished out of us. That we are not just a vote. That we are just not a gendered body. That we are not just anything to be aggregated in argumentum. We are not represented by lives tied to one trolly track or another, and oh by the way that’s not you at the switch either.