Signal/Noise — CW 33/2017
Signal/Noise is a weekly collection of commented articles and essays that we deem worthy of your time.
Alvin Toffler’s Models of Change
“The narratives built on Future Shock have been those used by Silicon Valley and their associated venture capitalists to justify practices that have the effect of making them richer at the expense of the rest of society. These stories, which are a smokescreen for monopoly, are about change creating constant disruption. Used futures, it turns out, have performative power even after they lose their explanatory value. Toffler, a lifelong radical, might have been disappointed.”
Despite what would have been a great founding myth, I can not claim that we named our company after Alvin Toffler‘s book. At that time, we‘ve been just really into coffee. Like really, really.
There‘s plenty of reading material out there about Toffler and his books, and yet I found this particular piece to be of some interest because it makes a clear distinction of how his two canonical works have been used differently.
“Old people‘s business models and values stole our internet,“ as I used to say and it seems that not even the people at the heart of Silicon Valley are aware of the indeed performative power of the narrative that is being used to make them work and perform in a certain way.
What then becomes almost a tragic comedy is how the rest of the world adopts old mechanics that are dressed in a new suit (hoodie and jeans), entirely convinced that this is the only way to go.
Source: Medium
How the US Lost Its Mind
Not facts, but the right story wins in the New Normal. When anticipating the development of a future becomes impossible in an interconnected world, only the people and organizations can succeed who understand how to tell the kind of stories that can spread through the network.
Take Elon Musk for example. I‘m convinced that his strongest ability, by far, is to recognize the kind of story that is both plausible and desirable (by a significant amount of targeted people). Those stories that he tells, be that of fully believable electric mobility or humanities need for ambition to go to spaces shapes whole markets. Not because he is right per se, but because he makes everyone else having to either follow his story or come up with one that can rival his. Following his story means that one is never in control of the story oneself. This is a path that too many European companies are willing to take. Coming up with an alternative story is no small feat either. For one, there aren‘t many good storytellers out there. Then, from an organizational perspective, there is also the fact that Elon Musk doesn‘t need to consult that many people in his organization when shaping his story. For a classic DAX30 corporation it‘s nearly impossible to come up with a coherent story that can be both believed by the employees sufficiently to be executed, by the shareholders so that they can play the kind of long game so that this new narrative can have enough time to spread and be told by others.
All of this is a very long lead in for this amazing story in the Atlantic. It, on the surface, attempts to explain how the world ended up with President Trump. By doing so, it goes way deeper into some of the most fundamental fabrics of society. It touches everything from Fake News to our ability to associate us with certain ideologies while discounting others. It sources stories that have to lead to this world in which there is no way to convince some people that climate change is real because in their world it is not. It‘s not your classic business read, but then again in this VUCA world what is? And if there‘s one certainty in this uncertain world then it is that one way or another, it will remain highly critical to understand where the US is going to develop to understand both global economics and world events in general.
Here are few of the many, many highlights that I’ve made in this article:
The sense of cultural and political upheaval and chaos dissipated — which lulled us into ignoring all the ways that everything had changed, that Fantasyland was now scaling and spreading and becoming the new normal. What had seemed strange and amazing in 1967 or 1972 became normal and ubiquitous.
The way internet search was designed to operate in the ’90s — that is, the way information and beliefs now flow, rise, and fall — is democratic in the extreme. Internet search algorithms are an example of Gresham’s law, whereby the bad drives out — or at least overruns — the good. On the internet, the prominence granted to any factual assertion or belief or theory depends on the preferences of billions of individual searchers. Each click on a link is effectively a vote pushing that version of the truth toward the top of the pile of results.
The idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum, as if powered by a Newtonian law, was always a very American belief. However, it’s really an article of faith, the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending reconfigured during and after the Enlightenment as a set of modern secular fantasies. It reflects our blithe conviction that America’s visions of freedom and democracy and justice and prosperity must prevail in the end. I really can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into irreversible decline, heading deeper into Fantasyland.
Source: The Atlantic
