Questions and Cancers
What Happened to the Information Superhighway?
What is the purpose of the internet? Besides making a lot of money for some dudes who already have too much of it, obviously.
Economic growth? Maybe industrially, but certainly not for individual people.
Connection? Possibly, but there’s not really a need to be connected to everyone.
Porn? Very likely.
The most common answer in a LinkedIn poll I ran yesterday, which I full agree with, was “Information.” Indeed, one of the internet’s early monikers was The Information Superhighway, because it promised speedy access to humanity’s collective knowledge, a technology that could satiate and spur our every interest.
And the messy, barely monetized, organic early internet delivered on that promise. Even with a tiny fraction of the webpages that exist today, geeky teens (and everyone else) in the mid-90s could get lost (in the best way) inside the digital rabbit hole, discovering ideas that only led to more questions, which led to more ideas.
But the informational value of the web has been nearly destroyed. Fake News isn’t even the biggest problem. It’s the digital ecosystem’s insistence on stifling curiosity by prioritizing ANSWERS over questions.
Most impactfully, the web has been systematically re-engineered to hinder discovery in order to drive people as quickly as possible to commercial end points. Search Engine Optimization, paid search, affiliate links, and walled gardens create increasingly singular paths for digital users to trod.
For all marketers’ talk about funnels and consumer journeys, the reality is that we’re really trying to move people through that journey as quickly as possible (to our specific end point). As a result, we create our answers by obfuscating and short-changing, by limiting the dialogue. How many times have you visited a brand’s website and found it impossible to find out how much the product costs without seeming to click through endlessly? Or how many digital purchases were accompanied by unasked-for suggestions for complementary products you didn’t need?
Even Google search apparently sucks now.
And of course there’s “social” media, which rewards strong opinions presented as fact, regardless of context, veracity, or usefulness, and algorithmically punishes content that might lead users off-platform to explore a topic more deeply. LinkedIn might actually be the worst culprit: Even this newsletter’s metrics tell me that the platform greatly prefers when I attack a made up problem (like this very post) than when I raise a complex topic and pose potential hypotheses.
This has all led us to a point where the inspirational and utilitarian functions of digital information are upside down: answers to straight forward questions are difficult to find, while easy solutions to life’s big ponderings (success, love, happiness) are being shoved down our throat by social media life coaches, spinfluencers, and digital snake oil salesmen.
So if the early internet was the Information Superhighway… what is it now?
The Cul-de-Sac of Misinformation?
A library that replaced all its books with demented Dewey Decimal cards?
Or just one big answer to a question nobody asked. No, not an answer… a Canswer. A metastasizing abnormality with no real purpose other than self-perpetuation, slowly killing its host from the inside.
Is there a cure for this Canswer? While it would be helpful to surgically excise tumors like Elon Musk and MFA sites, I think it will take a broader change.
In his brilliant book The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee says “Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact.…”
I suppose the same is true of this digital Canswer. The modern internet has evolved to take advantage of our base need for certainty and repress our capacity for exploration. It’s, like Mukherjee says, “a pathological mirror of our own” life.
Which means the cure for Canswer is to reconstitute the digital world to better reflect our more hopeful human attributes: our curiosity instead of our anxiety, our capacity for discovery and discussion instead of easy answers and hot takes. We need to re-orient the internet around questions, not answers.
We can do it, but brands will have a big role to play. At a minimum, they can cut off funding for misinformation, made-for-advertising content, and the most divisive sites and invest in publishers promoting good faith discussions. But perhaps more importantly is reevaluating their own digital relationships with their audiences through a knowledge ethics lens. Are you respectfully guiding a potential customer toward an answer they need, or are you the greasy guy in front of the tourist restaurant? Is your optimization de-optimizing the consumer experience?
One of the emerging platforms that gives me hope is Sublime, which I would describe as a personal digital library combined with Twitter without the engagement focus that made it toxic. It’s one of what I hope is a number of new gathering places that prioritize the sharing of ideas and make curation easy. (Sublime’s founder Sari ran a workshop on how she builds her personal library that showcases the tech here.)
And in the spirit of my dream internet, I’m adding a new weekly feature to the newsletter: the weekly prompt, a question or series of questions for marketers (and their agencies) to ask themselves to (hopefully) inspire some new ideas.
The Weekly Prompt(s):
How can we make it easier for potential customers to get answers to specific questions about our brand?
And how can we more proactively contribute to discovery about our category before just trying to sell our product?
This Week’s Whimsies
Marketing Stuff
They have created a new edition of Scrabble to make gameplay faster and more social to appeal to Gen Z. Purists are aghast, but this is exactly the kind of low-risk (and low-reward) innovation that brands should be pursuing beyond the giant swings.
Free brand idea: The “Taylor’s Version” of “Look What You Made Me Do” will be premiering in an episode of the documentary about the New England Patriots. What brand has the strategic chutzpah big enough (and pockets deep enough) to cut Taylor a check for her to debut another TV song in one of their brand assets?
Random Stuff
This is a very long piece about the precarious business model of Hollywood and the impact (ie no or shit jobs) it has on writers.
And this is an awkwardly hilarious breakdown of the decline and fall of Vice.
A pretty scathing review of the Humane AI Pin, which enlightens the danger of full steam towards AI without really examining the use case.
Upcoming Topics
A preview of thoughts that are coming together for future posts...
When to make the Performance to Brand Leap (MARKETING)
Something about Live Events/Sports as the Savior/Villain of the Media World (MEDIA)
Death & Marketing: A Match Made in Purgatory (CULTURE)
Board Games (CULTURE)
Why Context Matters In Marketing and in Art (CULTURE/MARKETING)
Framework Roundup (MARKETING)
What’s the Difference Between Strategy and Tactics? (MARKETING)