A few days ago I saw a trending and curious article, “Are we the Baddies?”
The article was written by a guy named George Hotz, aka Geohot, who is a kind of influencer among nerds. (He was the first to hack the iPhone and later worked at Google, Facebook, and Twitter.)
Says Geohot:
===
I signed up for Hinge. Holy shit with the boosts.
How does someone who works on this wake up every morning and feel okay about themselves?
Similarly with the tip screens, Uber algorithm, all the zero sum bullshit using all the tricks of psychology to extract a little bit more from every interaction in society. Nudge. Nudge. NUDGE.
Want to partake in normal society like buying a coffee, going on a date, getting a ride, paying a friend. Oh, there’s a middle man now. An evil ominous middleman using state of the art AI algorithms to extract just a little bit more from you.
===
Geohot goes on to helpfully prophesy that we are doomed.
You might agree with him, you might not.
My point today is simply that Geohot, a tech nerd, wrote this article, that it went viral, and that it had thousands of upvotes across sharing sites and hundreds of comments. Here’s a representative one:
===
We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.
This isn’t theoretical, it’s happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from public feeds to private DMs, and the “Do Not Disturb” generation are all symptoms of the same thing. People are feeling the manipulation and are choosing to opt out, one notification at a time.
===
Copywriting legend Gene Schwartz famously talked about “stages of sophistication.” In the shell of a nut:
Over time, each market gets exposed to more and more advertising. As a result, people in that market become more jaded and suspicious.
But it’s okay, says Gene. Because eventually, the market dies and a new market is born out of it. Tony Robbins’s Personal Power collapses in on itself, and out of that comes Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.
The one thing that Gene never talked about is that society as a whole has gone through multiple such death and rebirth cycles.
Once or twice is ok. Three times and people start to notice something oddly familiar. The fifth or tenth time, we all become a little more jaded or sophisticated in general.
And after 150 years of direct marketing, of using “all the tricks of psychology to extract a little bit more,” and dozens of such cycles, society becomes really sophisticated.
And now, with the acceleration that Geohot is talking above, of apps that everybody is using all the time, which are applying direct response insights and techniques at mass, instantaneously, backed by big data and genuine AI… well, welcome to the great disengagement.
Like the commenter above says, this isn’t theoretical, it’s happening right now.
I’m telling you this simply as a kind of warning, or a curious observation of something you might not have spotted yourself yet.
If you want more than a warning, then my best prediction is that when all is said and done, people will still want to connect with other people, be entertained, and maybe learn something new.
In the future, I imagine everybody will be an actor, or a semi-pro soccer player, or maybe a newsletter author, even if the platforms change or no longer exist, and people ignore notifications and stop trusting algorithms.
And if you don’t agree with me, you know what to do — don’t write me and tell me so.
Instead, start your own email newsletter and express your views there, to people who want to hear from you over others, even without notifications and algorithms.
And if you want my help with that: