Category: meta

A brief catching up.

Fourteen months ago I left Mural, my work home from home of nearly three years (May 2020–February 2023).

(You might recall I was at Fullstory, a SaaS company out of Atlanta, before. I am a shareholder there now.)

While at Mural, I built out content marketing and communications, managing everything from executive keynote presentations to assisting with a rebrand and “category creation” to writing and publishing a book. For nearly half of my time there I had no obvious manager, floating from CMO to CEO to CMO to CEO. It was wild. Too many things to mention.

It was a challenging three years. I learned a lot. Got a lot of XP.

I hope Mural and FullStory succeed, though I know fewer and fewer folks there these days.

Really, that’s one of the problems with these tech companies. You could call it burn out, but you might as well call it burn up. As in, you’re there, you fuel the growth of the business, you leave, and little evidence remains. Mostly ashes. Memories.

When the work is fully remote, well, it’s stranger still. Like so much in our modern time, we see the clear benefits of technology, but we struggle to understand the hidden, abstract, long-term costs.

And if you didn’t catch it, I wrote a book that hints at these problems last August: Exec on the Desk.

The present, Spring 2024

About December 2023 I decided to have a go at building out my own marketing practice.

So I founded R-ght. I started leaning into my network, talking to folks, bidding on projects. As anyone who has done this will tell you, this is a fun rollercoaster experience. I got various leads. Some were incredibly exciting and others more raw work.

One of my leads took me to a remote monitoring and management (RMM) software company for connected products called Canopy.

What is RMM for connected products?

What is RMM for connected products and Canopy?

Canopy provides remote monitoring and management software for B2B connected products — like self-checkout kiosks, digital signs, access control boxes, and even golf simulators.

Unlike “RMM” for IT — used to manage corporate tech like laptops, servers, and phones — Canopy offers mission-control, backend software to technical support and product teams. Canopy’s RMM software acts as an agent for thousands of devices to be controlled remotely.

For example, Canopy makes it easy to remotely fix and upgrade that self-checkout lane you use. That way, it doesn’t sit broken for days (or weeks), angering harried shoppers and store employees.

B2B connected products are pervasive, like it or not, and most of these remote devices require some serious backend magic to stay working.

So Canopy helps the makers of these devices weave software, hardware, peripherals, etc. together in a way that “just works” (to borrow on Steve Jobs’ favorite phrase).

How I ended up at Canopy

You see, I got to know Canopy. I figured Canopy might become a client for R-ght.

Well, a couple months go by and out of nowhere they’re asking me to lead up their marketing efforts.

So I took them up on their offer: I joined Canopy as Vice President of Marketing three weeks ago.

This is a great opportunity. There’s much to do.

Unlike Mural or Fullstory, Canopy is the smallest company I’ve ever joined. It’s also quirkily traditional, having its roots in professional services before becoming a software company two years ago.

Presently, I’m adjusting to a hybrid work setup. This is taking some time — literally. On those three days a week I trek into the office, I lose about five hours in total. It’s the time to drive and all the time to prepare to head in.

But it’s got benefits. Talk to me about it in six months.

Now what about R-ght?

Yeah, so about R-ght. Though the business didn’t ever catch its stride, I’m happy with what I created:

Please go to www.R-ght.com and subscribe by email. During the days I was building out the business, I went ahead and built out some significant articles on concepts that nearly everyone would benefit from understanding:

• Agenda-setting theory: Understand what might be the most important concept of Internet existence — how media influences what you think.
• What you see is all there is: Daniel Kahneman’s most important idea, apart from things like prospect theory, the focusing illusion, and other ideas, of course.
• The Anxious Generation Review: Jonathan Haidt’s latest book

I want to keep going. R-ght scratches an itch. See you there?

The future you make

My beard grows grey. Time moves on. One job changes to another.

Life!

If you still keep up with me here, drop me a line sometime.

You have a genie in your pocket, technology offering to make your dreams a reality. Simply rub open your phone and tap away:

Need something? … Amazon
Directions? … Maps
Questions? … Google, DuckDuckGo
News? … 𝕏
Entertainment? … TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, Instagram
Work? … Email, Slack

For whatever you’d want to do, there’s an app for that.

But there’s a catch. Every gift from an app comes with a hidden cost.

The cost is buying products you don’t need.
The cost is bewilderment about places.
The cost is naive belief in search results.
The cost is distorted facts as news.
The cost is losing common experiences.
The cost is bullshit work that never ends.

The benefit is clear. The cost is not. And the cost is still more than you think.

Apps bind you.

They determine how you can interact.
They deem what can be important—and what can’t.
They set what you can see and what you can’t.
They control who you can communicate with and how.

Apps constrain the possibilities, and by constraining, they change your capabilities. They change how you think. They set the table for what you can even think about.

Apps frame our existence today.

And everyone complies by simply opening them. We extend our hands and put the shackles on ourselves, the handcuffs so obvious that we are blind to them.

But there’s hope.

The reign of apps exists only as long as you accept the bind. Realize the costs and constraints and throw off the chains.

Wake up. Wake up your family and your friends.

The technological trinkets and quick fixes are junk that’s not worth the cost.

Usual frame: There’s an app for that.
Reframe: Apps are traps.

See also an update to the parable of the blind men and the elephant — i.e. how you can hold an elephant in your hand.

Inspired by Scott Adam’s Reframe Your Brain.

Uncertainty is all around me. Not only do I not know what the day will bring, what the weather will be, or what surprises await behind every corner, but even the people I engage with! They are all unpredictable.

This is the nature of life. And while some level of unpredictability brings novelty, surprise, and excitement, too much uncertainty terrifies.

Modern life exposes me to a never ending stream of information bringing with it more uncertainty. Like the theoretical “butterfly effect,” events occurring around the world insist on proclaiming themselves to my world—whether it’s through social media, the news, or through the rapid proliferation of a novel virus literally crossing oceans in to infect my community …

Drowning in so much information paradoxically makes it harder to know what to do, what to think, how to live. What do I do about a novel virus? What do I think about the events in ________? How do I cope with knowing the suffering of human beings a world away? How do I quiet my uncertainty about the climate? About population growth? About the food that I eat?

On and on the uncertainty goes.

Today easy answers to all this uncertainty are available on demand. But there’s a problem. A decade ago I wondered about the problem of “confirmation bias”—that Google offered a way to confirm whatever strange idea I had. Today, I need not wonder. You can find any answer to life’s most uncertain questions. The right diet? Find an army of people who proclaim “_____ is the way, the truth, the light!”

Answers to uncertainty are everywhere and everywhere they contradict. See the people who are vehemently pro-[______], and see their enemies who are as dogmatically anti-[______]. Both sides, all sides, believe they know the truth. They believe with absolute certainty.

And so much certainty leads to more uncertainty.

The dogmatism cannot be trusted because paradoxically it is a sign of uncertainty. No one rages about what’s true. What’s known as true is not up for passionate debate.

What’s true is apparent. What’s true is certain.

So the dogmatism is a sign. It’s a sign many are now controlled by a dependency—the need to be certain.

So it is that desiring certainty goes from a natural, useful tendency to something more pathological.

And the pathology is now cultural. Modern man believes he can solve the riddles of reality. What can’t science tell us about the world? The universe?

Don’t adhere to a scientific world? That’s okay: What does your preferred God tell you is the answer?

Priests, experts, research, religion, answers, dogmatism … as far as the eye can see. If you want answers, you will find them.

What will make you happy? You do not know. But if you insist, someone, some product, some way to know will present itself, and you will accept it. Because you need to know.

How do you manage uncertainty? At the core, living in a world where you don’t have the answers, where we can’t know the answers, where the answers so strongly believed are probably—certainly—not the right answers …

How do you live this way?

And if you opt for certainty, the certainty of some system, what do you give up along the way?

I’m afraid we’re all going cyborg.

That might make you think of Luke Skywalker with his bionic arm or Darth Vader. Maybe it’s The Six Million Dollar Man (well before my time) or some blend of The Terminator. A cyborg is just a mix of man and machine where the machine—the technology—extends the man.

Man and machine.

Do you see what’s before you? That screen you’re staring at, the one you’re holding in your hands, the one sending information directly to your brain through your eyes, the one doing your bidding through taps, scrolls, and swipes …

That’s your extended mind.

• When was the last time you went anywhere you’ve never been before without using an app to tell you how to get there?
• How do you get information?
• How do you order products?
• How do you broadcast your life, your thoughts?

And the more we rely on our phones to extend ourselves into the world, the more like cyborgs we become. Yes, the interface between our extended selves is clunky—synapses mediated through glass, WiFi, camera sensors, speakers and screens. Yet it’s your extended self all the same.

Reflect on that for a moment. How does that make you feel? And what what does it mean for you, for me, everyone?

Analog to digital

Real life is messy. You take in the world through your eyes, your feet, your smell, your skin. “Real life” is analog. It’s full bandwidth and continuous, all cylinders firing. You take in more information than you can process and your focus directs your mind. You send out more information through your body, your face, your actions and inactions. To the extent that you can “escape” from real life, it’s done by physically separating yourself from others. You can’t really shut it off. Though you try.

Digital is clean. You open an app. You scroll. You click. Your eyes take the information in through words and pictures. Digital is binary. 0s and 1s. So clean. You can only take in what’s there. Low dimensionality. Only what you want.

You want to engage with the world? Send out information, edited however you want. You want to escape? Close that app. (Or open another one.)

That space between

What about all that space between? What fills in the gaps between all the zeroes and ones?

That’s the question before us all. Because the more we engage through those extended pocketable and oh-so-pampered rechargable and inexhaustible brains, the more we reach out and touch a virtual world through the smooth touch of glass, the more we run from the real world, the more our minds must fill in the gaps.

And boy do they. Using whatever decompression algorithms we have, within the context of whatever mood holds us, under the pressure of news, anxiety, social feeds, personal philosophy, politics, whatever … we decompress all that’s presented to us. We bring that digital into our analog space. And though it’s as lossy, pixelated, and full of artefacts, because it’s the only information we have, we take it as truth.

This is life today. Zeros and ones served out and served up to us, held up as truth like so many filtered selfies, not real yet reality.

We’re going cyborg. And we need to face this and try to understand it. Because at some point the machine takes over.

Why does that happen? And what’s lost along the way …

The frontier and freedom

There’s a wonderful thing about the frontier. It’s a place where the rules don’t exist. Anything is possible … so long as it sustains existence on the frontier.

America was a frontier—”The New World”—a place where humanity was able to experiment with new ways to exist as a society—ways forbidden by the prevailing powers in the Old World. Perhaps more than anything, frontiers lack structure and reigning institutions, regulations, and norms. It’s within this vacuum that novelty has a chance.

The Internet, too, has been a frontier. A digital plane where new business models, new ways to engage and communicate, and more could all be tried.

Freedom is found on the frontier.

The tyranny of the status quo

And what’s the opposite of the frontier but the rules, norms, and prevailing powers of the status quo? Ruling states, businesses, wealth, and more exert monopolistic constraints that choke out the possibility of alternatives. The chance for novel ideas.

It is the established order of things—the status quo—that makes it hard to think differently. So what do you do?

All is not lost

Thankfully, the status quo is stagnant … systems wound up like a mechanical watch that can only work in a very calculated way. Rigid.

Over time, systems start opposing their proper purpose. They grow so large—or even so specialized—as to be inefficient, brittle, and unable to adapt to changing conditions.

This stagnation results in opportunity because the status quo can’t adapt to changing conditions. And it’s innate inefficiency means some are under-served. Before long, there emerges a possibility of new frontiers.

This is a cycle

It’s this ebb and flow between the frontier and the status quo that we cycle back-and-forth, iterating and evolving over time. It’s the way of evolution. It’s the way of systems. It’s the way of life. And it’s been this way for millions of years.

Could You Join a Cult?

You’ve likely never worried about inadvertently joining a cult. “Only whack-o’s join cults,” and, “I could never be like that …”

Of course, to be sure, who could be like that? The notion you might abandon your sense of self, adopt a doctrine of unquestionable beliefs, and in the course, cut ties with friends and family to become a card-carrying, kool-aid drinking cultist … It makes no sense. Cults are for crazy people.

Except that doesn’t seem quite right—the math doesn’t check out. So what’s going on?

What if cults take normal people—that is, as normal as any of us are—and upend how we understand the world. What if they do it slowly, methodically—and without any magic, voodoo, or overt conspiracy? And in so doing, they change how individuals process reality, ultimately converting well-adjusted individuals into glossy-eyed true believers.

Maybe this could happen to you.

And maybe this is what makes cults so terrifying.