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August 27 - September 8, 2019
Grant Study at Harvard Medical School
found that the depth and meaningfulness of a person’s relationships is the strongest indicator of level of happiness.
Facebook tracks and records your browsing history, including after you’ve logged off its app.27 It also tracks your location history, based on wifi networks your phone has accessed.28 Even if you turn off your wifi, your telco knows what tower you are near and can sell that data to companies.
Using data mined from the Facebook accounts of millions of Americans, Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked on Brexit and the Trump campaign, created a “psychographic profile” of voters ahead of the 2016 election. The company used behavioral microtargeting to deliver specific pro-Trump messages that resonated with specific voters for highly personal reasons.31 With knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself.32
Facebook, and the rest of the algorithm-driven media, barely bothers with moderates. Instead, if it figures out you lean Republican, it will feed you more Republican stuff, until you’re ready for the heavy hitters, the GOP outrage: Breitbart, talk radio clips. You may even get to Alex Jones. The true believers, whether from left or right, click on the bait. The posts that get the most clicks are confrontational and angry. And those clicks drive up a post’s hit rate, which raises its ranking in both Google and Facebook. That in turn draws even more clicks and shares.
Facebook’s sole mission is to make money. Once the company’s success is measured in clicks and dollars, why favor true stories over false ones? Just hire a few “media watchdog” firms to give you cover.
Pizzagate posts got likes and reposts in the hundreds of thousands.45 Nine percent of the electorate and 46 percent of Trump voters believed it was
having legitimate news next to fake news has only made the Facebook platform more dangerous.
the presence of the New York Times and WaPo on Facebook has legitimized fake news.
Facebook attempts to skirt criticism of its content by claiming it’s not a media outlet, but a platform. This sounds reasonable until you consider that the term platform was never meant to absolve companies from taking responsibility for the damage they do. What if McDonald’s, after discovering that 80 percent of their beef was fake and making us sick, proclaimed they couldn’t be held responsible, as they aren’t a fast-food restaurant but a fast-food platform? Would we tolerate that?
It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled.
There’s a bigger, if unpublicized, reason Facebook as of yet refuses to bring back and increase the number of human editors—it would introduce cost.
The fulcrum is reverence for and maintenance of Facebook’s profit margins, versus ensuring the world’s largest media firm can’t be weaponized by our enemies.
The most innovative thing of 2016 wasn’t the Apple Watch or Alexa, but Russia’s weaponization of our pride and joy, Facebook.
We grant Facebook unique kevlar—exceptionalism and exoneration from their role in the molestation of the homeland. If CNBC, ESPN, or Condé Nast had been weaponized by a foreign actor, and had taken money for ads actively inciting racial and political divisions, these firms would have been shut down, received massive fines, or seen major advertisers stop spending.
The worship of innovators, the influence of billionaires, and the pace of technology create a potential perfect storm that, relatively speaking, is barely yet a warm breeze. With Facebook, it’s darkest before it’s pitch black. The platform has been weaponized; our faux outrage hasn’t translated to any tangible action, and it’s going to get worse.
A disturbing aspect of today’s media duopoly, Facebook and Google, is their “Don’t call us media, we’re a platform” stance. This abdication from social responsibility, enabling authoritarians and hostile actors to deftly use fake news, risks that the next big medium may, again, be cave walls.
One sense in which Google is our modern god is that it knows our deepest secrets. It’s clairvoyant, keeping a tally of our thoughts and intentions. With our queries, we confess things to Google that we wouldn’t share with our priest, rabbi, mother, best friend, or doctor.
The temptation to create predictive links between intention and action will be irresistible to governments, hackers, and rogue employees.
Google was undertaking
to organize all of the world’s information. In particular, to capture and control every cache of productive information that currently existed on, or could be ported to, the web.
Microsoft at its peak was notorious for having the most insufferable asshole employees in American business.
totally convinced—in a classic high-tech industry mistake—that what was also luck, timing, and success was, in fact, genius.
they left by the thousands to pursue that genius—to v...
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Microsoft continued to crush one exciting young company after another, it suddenly became embarrassing to admit you worked for the Evil Empire.
young talent no longer wanted to work there.
young companies with nothing to lose can (and do) get away with the deception, thievery, and outright falsehoods that are unavailable to companies with reputations, markets, and assets to protect. Not to mention the Justice Department doesn’t care about little companies until they get big.
Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton issued a report calling for the procurement of European industrial technology through “proper provision and due pains”—even
U.S. patent law was modified in 1793 to limit patent protection to U.S. citizens, thus depriving European owners of this intellectual property any legal recourse against this theft.
China, eager to achieve horseman status on the world stage, is sending its own Francis Lowells over, in person and through cyberspace, to grab whatever can shorten the path to prosperity.
Theft has been the strategy of business leaders and nations for centuries.
Two months after Snap’s CEO defined the company as “a camera company,” Zuckerberg announced, “We believe a camera will be the main way that we share.”4
The point is not that young companies just “steal” things to become great, but they see value where others don’t, or are able to extract value where others can’t. And they do so by whatever means necessary.
Another way the Four cheat is by borrowing your information, only to sell it back to you.
Mayer testified, Google provided “a valuable free service to online newspapers specifically by sending interested readers to their sites.”8 She sounded disappointed that the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune weren’t thanking Google for all it had done for them. Perhaps this was because Google’s “valuable free service” was, in fact, rapidly gutting the advertising base of the American media—and rerouting all those revenues to Google.
For a marketer, each string tugging at the consumer’s heart translates to margin. There’s (among others) beauty, patriotism, friendship, masculinity, devotion, and above all, love. These are values you can’t put a price on—but marketers do.
We, as a species, have mostly figured out what makes us happy: time with loved ones, physical and mental stimulation, substances that heighten or deaden those feelings, Netflix, and sassy church signs.
I believe P&G will begin acquiring grocery retail, as they must develop distribution that’s growing, and not depend on Amazon, who is their frenemy . . . minus the friend part.
In sum, my business strategy message boils down to “What can you do really well that is also really hard?”
We used to admire firms that created hundreds of thousands of middle- and upper-class jobs; now our heroes are firms that produce a dozen lords and hundreds of thousands of serfs.
The power of big data and AI is that it signals the end of sampling and statistics—now you can just track the shopping pattern of every customer in every one of your stores around the world—and then respond almost instantly with discounts, changes in inventory, store layouts, etc. . . . and do so 24/7/365. Or better yet, you build in the technology to respond every second, automatically.
In sum, the parent brand “China” provides an unwelcome halo of “We may not be cool, but we are corrupt.” In high school, the “Bad Boy” who was also lame did not get laid.
Uber figured out a way to isolate the lords (8,000 employees) from the serfs (2 million drivers), who average $7.75/hour, so its 8,000 employees could carve up $68 billion.31 So, Uber has said to the global workforce, in hushed but clear tones: “Thanks, and fuck you.”
it’s never been a better time to be exceptional, or a worse time to be average.
Excellence, grit, and empathy are timeless attributes of successful people in every field. But as the pace and variability of work increase, success will be at the margins, separating successful people from the herd.
your work and achievements should speak for themselves. They don’t. Figure out how you are going to reach 10, 1,000, 10,000 people who otherwise wouldn’t have been exposed to your work and awesomeness.
if your feeds can be cleaner, stronger, and more fun, make improvements.
The fifty-five-year-old who says (proudly) he or she doesn’t use social media has given up or is just afraid.
Use every social media platform (okay, not Snapchat, you’re too old) and, more important, try to understand them (best practices, user reviews, Instagram vs. Instagram Stories). Buy some keywords and post a video on Google and YouTube.
The path to rich(es) is a path of living below your means and investing in income-producing assets. Rich is more a function of discipline than how much you make.
