Tapestries-23 | Open Book: #3
The virus, qualifying media, "weeks" and the messiah.
Dizzying
2 October 2020
I write a weekly column for my colleagues in Australia describing what’s happening in the US, from someone on the ground. I usually write these updates on Thursdays, to coincide with Australia’s Friday morning.
Last week, on Thursday 24 September, the election section of the update focused on the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Fast forward to yesterday, Thursday 1 October, and the election section of the update focused on the fallout from the first presidential debate. Yesterday, I noted at the start of the update:
“I just re-read my update from last week, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing feels like an eternity ago. Trump’s tax returns, which dominated the start of the week, don’t even get a mention below. There’s clearly lots happening, so I’ll jump straight in.”
Not even a day later and that attempt at perspective is out-of-date. Today, it was announced that President Trump had contracted the coronavirus and within hours was taken to a medical facility in an “abundance of caution”.
In the space of eight days, this election cycle has given us four stories - RBG passing, Trump’s tax returns, the demoralizing debate and now the president’s diagnosis - that traditionally would dominate the news cycles for weeks on their own. It’s difficult to appreciate in the moment, but the pace, regularity and gravity of these stories is absolutely breathtaking.
There’s an opportunity here for decency, and dare I say it, even unity. Irrespective of your view of the man’s performance as president, he remains a human being. Together with millions of other Americans, he now faces a challenge of unknown severity. Counterintuitively, the biggest story so far in a batshit crazy election season may provide a moment to pause.
What to do
1 October 2020
I saw this today:
I like @pomp and enjoy some of his podcasts, and also like listening to him think as his content is relatively thoughtful. But what’s worth reminding myself is that people like him, and many others, are media platforms, not sages or investment savants. If your main vocation is Twitter, podcasts and content generation, you’re in the media business.
The point being made above is a form of hustle-porn, and misses a fundamental insight: there’s survivorship bias. This line of thinking doesn’t take into account all the people who worked hard, had discipline, were relentlessly determined, and still weren’t successful i.e. they didn’t have luck. To then rebut criticism with an extract from Wikipedia highlighting a single study, is also quite silly. Not to mention the discussion of the difference between causation and correlation that the rest of the extract poses.
But that’s where we are in the media landscape. Success on the medium is conflated with some other attribute, be it real-world success, or empathy or insight. Today, a large following is taken as an endorsement or validation of mastery in whatever realm one operates or speaks about (and the endorsement may be valid). In reality though, the person is actually a master of content itself, with the subject matter being of secondary importance to the ability to communicate or broadcast it.
A challenge that content creators face is the expectation of consistent content creation. Being in the conversation isn’t a matter of relevance, it’s at the core of the model. When you overlay this requirement with complex subject matter, and the challenges of conveying nuance in tweets, you end up with content like this, which is inaccurate and can detract from the person’s brand (in the eyes of some).
Maybe this is a self-important post. But the world is full of people saying wrong things confidently, and equally full of others just nodding along saying “that’s interesting” in response. You could probably say the same thing about this post. Is it useful or interesting, or is it just tied up in my desire to write daily; to get something out so as to be in the “conversation”?
Media businesses are about content, and it’s on us to regularly qualify who and what we’re consuming.
What is a week?
30 September 2020
I was away from my office in New York for a few months this year, between March and August. There’s a lovely array of plants in the office, including two large fiddle leaf trees, a number of Sansevieria, and a collection of other small plants. Upon my return, I was surprised to see that quite a number of them were alive, and even thriving. I think the cleaners may have given them water from time to time, but the watering was sparse.
It made me realize that my previous watering routine, generally done on a weekly basis, was wrong. Different plants like different amounts of water, and weekly watering, even adapted for each plant, was not the right approach.
That got me thinking: where did “weeks” come from. As a unit of time, it seems different to its counterparts. A “day” is the time it takes the Earth to rotate once on its axis; a “month” is (approximately, and with different variations) a measure of the time it takes the Moon to complete a single orbit around the Earth; and a “year” is the time it takes the Earth to complete an orbit of the Sun.
The closest I could get to a scientific measurement for a week is that it’s a quarter of a month in the lunar calendar (see bottom for a paragraph on the first appearance of the “week”). Not useless at all, but also not incredibly intuitive.
Plants can probably, in some obscure and entirely unconscious sense, appreciate the passing of a day or a year, as those units of measurement are hard-coded into the nature of our physical world. But a “week”? As a unit of measurement, it appears to be a creation of human expediency, not something representing some absolute value. On reflection, I’ve been watering the plants on a schedule that makes sense to me, not to them.
I don’t want to go down a philosophical rabbithole here, because you could ask the same question about many units. You could raise the same issue with “hours” as dividing a day into 24 equal units feels relatively arbitrary, or using kilograms as a measure of mass. They are all useful, but are only meaningful in relation to a commonly understood standard.
Up until writing this I thought “anthropomorphism” was both a great word to drop into conversation as well as the act of attributing human traits to animals. Turns out it’s about all non-human entities. I’m not sure that watering plants in the rhythm of human “weeks” fits the definition, so maybe we need an equally cool word to attributing human practices onto non-human entities. Plants don’t know what weeks are. That is all.
—
The “week”: This brain-fart led me to do a little exploring. My impression was that the “week”, comprised of seven days, had its origins in the Book of Genesis, where god created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, giving us the Sabbath. But it turns out the seven day cycle pre-dates whenever Genesis was “written”, as the concept goes back to the Bronze Age, around the time of the Epic of Gilgamesh and of Noah’s Ark. A little more digging shows that the number seven has always had an element of mystique, spirituality and luck.
Where to from here?
29 September 2020
The last few years have been wild, bewildering almost. But now, we have data; we’ve lived through them and now have some experience. And with better data, we can make better (or some) predictions.
There are two trends that stick out to me over the last 10+ years (which is the timeframe I can try and think critically across). The first is the cult of celebrity, and the second is the seeking of answers or explanations. The trends aren’t new, and arguably are as old as human civilization. But the way we consume information, and its concomitant impact on how we think, mean that we can re-interpret how these trends play out today.
First, the cult of celebrity.
Not a new phenomena, but it’s playing out in interesting ways. Take the world of investment, where I spend a lot of my time. The last few years have given us Adam Neumann, Elon Musk and Trevor Milton. The fact I’m typing their names right now means that all three possess some special skills, and I’d argue that Musk’s name doesn’t really belong here, because he is actually building real things that look like they may change the world.
But common to all three men is that the narrative they were able to (and in Musk’s case, continue to) spin far outgrew the realities in which they operated. WeWork was never worth $47bn, even if it was elevating the world’s consciousness; Tesla makes great cars but… yeh, where do you start; and Nikola may have literally rolled a truck down the hill as its “demo”. In all three cases, investors and people who should have known better, completely suspended belief in thrall to these larger-than-life characters.
Turning to politics. Whether it’s Donald Trump in the US (a TV personality who played a businessman), Imran Khan in Pakistan (legendary cricketer) or Volodymyr Zelensky in the Ukraine (comedian, actor, screenwriter), the celebrity-cum-politician is alive and well. The trend isn’t pervasive per se, and the aforementioned countries aren’t exactly competing for the title of “world’s best governance”, but nevertheless, a few datapoints.
Second, the seeking of answers or explanations.
Again, not a new phenomena, but how does it manifest today? We now have the “explanation economy”, comprised of organizations like Vox, Business Insider, and others who lead with headlines like “[X]…what this means for the upcoming election” or “These [Y] people hold the key to the future of media”. It’s intentionally designed to acknowledge that (1) there’s lots of stuff going on, (2) some of it is important, (3) there are some important implications to consider and (4) this is the place to make sense of it all for you. And generally, it’s pretty good and does what it purports to: explain.
The world is very noisy, and whether it’s organizations like these, or individuals on Twitter, finding someone that can explain the dizzying things happening in real-time is really useful. There’s also clearly been a resurgence in interest in conspiracy-theories or similar narratives, but that’s a topic for a post I hope to never write.
So what does this all mean? Where does it lead?
The convergence of celebrity and a desire for answers logically leads to a messiah complex. But that’s impossible to predict, right? It’s pretty bizarre to sit here and suggest that what may emerge in the coming year or two is the anointing of a messianic figure.
But that’s exactly what happened in 2016, when amongst other things, evangelical Christians voted for Trump in droves, forming a key part of his base. They were attracted by the role Trump appeared to play in the prophesy of the coming “End Times”. And while the analogy may be weak given the centrality of the messianic story to their belief systems, it is still a useful data point. I do not raise this example to make any political points, only to show that it is possible for a large group of people to suspend their beliefs (at least from our ideological perspective).
If this is a literal example of the emergence of a “messiah”-like figure for a particular group, how can we draw broader analogies? What are some causes, other than the messiah itself, that could result in the cult of celebrity and the desire for answers converging to lead to other messianic complexes?
Nationalism, tribalism or even critical race theory? They all serve to divide, which seems a necessary pre-cursor to the rise of such a person. Global warming is a wave cresting over the horizon, and its effects will not simply be more intense fire seasons and increasingly ferocious storms. Climate change will shift the way countries engage with natural resources. Access to arable land and water will change; populations will be displaced; tensions between sovereign neighbors will escalate. The prospect for conflict is real.
I may be completely off base and sound like a raving lunatic, claiming that climate change could bring about the conditions to elevate a false prophet. Mark Twain said that “history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes”, and history is littered with times of turbulence that spit out these types of people. I’m not saying it’s likely, or if that person were to arise he or she would have any real success, only that it would take a fool to suggest something is impossible from her. All you have to do is look into our past - the recent and the ancient - to understand that these things can and do happen.
Now to watch the debates!
Photo by ASTERISK