The only option is assimilation, pt 3 of 3

ICYMI

You can listen to this week’s podcast, How I hacked DEFCON with 2023 DEFCON champion and Stanford hacker Cody Ho here on Substack, on Spotify, or on Apple Podcasts.

This is part three of a three part series, click here to read part one, click here to read part two.

In part one of this series, we established a framework for deciphering what’s to come by looking back at old ‘new technologies’ to measure their impact on society and the industries they disrupt. In part two, I took a magnifying glass to the newspaper industry to get a sense of what the disruption that a century of novel new tech can do to an industry, and found that technological innovation may share less blame than popularly thought for newspapers’ fall from dominance.

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Now, the fun part - using what we’ve learned, where are we headed? Way back in part one, I quoted screenwriter Billy Ray on his opinion of the current writers’ strike in Hollywood:

“Every other strike was about corporate greed, this is about extinction, We are fighting against our extinction as a class of craftsmen.” - Billy Ray for Mercury News

Given what we’ve learned, does this quote hold up? The short answer: yes and no. The long answer: the extinction of the profession as we know it does seem somewhat inevitable, though its root cause isn’t the technology itself, but corporate greed enabled by a half century of consolidation meeting the seismic shift of medium that is AI-enabled personalization and then amplified by the disruptive effect of COVID-19.

First, let’s talk about the McLuhan of it all. Over time, as mediums evolve (think newspapers vs radio, cable vs streaming, MySpace vs Twitter), their unique characteristics shape the content that comes from them, not the other way around. Let’s look at Twitter (I will not call it X, fight me Elon) for example... the digital “town square” whose owners have always insisted is actually a cool, not demented place and that YOU’RE actually the one responsible for the mayhem residing in your feed. “Just follow different people”... right?

Wrong. In reality, Twitter is an algorithmically-driven medium, meaning that it’s personalized. What the algorithm curates for you is actually an amalgam of what it thinks you want to see and what it thinks is objectively the most provocative content on the site. This is all well and good, until it isn’t. Unlike the newspapers, the television channels, the film studios, and the magazines... Twitter isn’t responsible for the content on its platform. While it has a loose duty to do obvious things like ensuring that the platform isn’t becoming a repository for dark web drug deals and child exploitation, beyond this relatively low bar, Twitter has virtually no guardrails on its content. The medium - Twitter, is lawless and uncontrolled. How surprising can it possibly be then that the content follows suit? Amplify this with the method Twitter uses to prioritize the reach of content: engagement, and you’ve created a medium which not only fosters extreme content, but actively encourages and rewards it.

Whether it’s Twitter or trade magazines, industry e-books or 24-hour news, the medium is always the message. In his New York Times article, I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message, Ezra Klein describes his perception of the phenomena from his time in cable news:

“CNN and Fox News and MSNBC are ideologically different. But cable news in all its forms carries a sameness: the look of the anchors, the gloss of the graphics, the aesthetics of urgency and threat, the speed, the immediacy, the conflict, the conflict, the conflict. I’ve spent a lot of time on cable news, as both a host and a guest, and I can attest to the forces that hold this sameness in place: There is a grammar and logic to the medium, enforced by internal culture and by ratings reports broken down by the quarter-hour. You can do better cable news or worse cable news, but you are always doing cable news.”

There are endless historical examples which fall along the same lines... but to spare us all more history lessons: media is media, and the mediums that comprise the media, when controlled by a limited number of players under the same medium-based constraints, incentives, and structures, become standardized regardless of any nominal differences between competitors. Flip from Fox News to CNN to MSNBC, and all that will change are the words coming from the anchors’ mouths and the color of the backgrounds - everything else has been standardized to follow “industry best practice”.

So what then, is the role of AI in this mess?

Pivoting back to the screenwriters, it’s hard to argue that their role isn’t already undervalued, underpaid and overworked. None of this (currently) has anything to do with generative AI like ChatGPT, but it does have a lot to do with AI...

The fundamental uneasiness that so many creatives feel today with AI is likely due at least in part to two decades of largely negative experiences with AI-driven mediums. Social media with AI-powered algorithms becoming the de facto advertising medium for creatives, streaming services controlling which TV shows and movies reach the mainstream with their notoriously black-boxy AI-driven algorithms, Google’s AI-powered algorithm personalizing the internet for each and every person who interacts with it, determining which version of a story an individual gets. All of this personalization, this “you”-ification of the media we consume has fundamentally broken the dynamics of the industries that provide it.

In part two of this series, I focused on the newspaper industry because it has always stood out to me as a canary in the coal mine for just how broken the current media landscape truly is. You can read part 2 to brush up on its history, but long story short: a century’s worth of disruption from radio and television did little to bring the American newspaper down, but a combination of the advent of personalized mediums and corporate consolidation were enough to create this insane graph:

Imagine your industry taking this type of nosedive (if you’re a newspaper reporter, I’m sorry). In the last installment, we discussed the corporate trends that led to this graph - namely the unhealthy consolidation of the entire media market into an oligopoly of 6 monolithic companies. But that’s just the context, the problem boiling under the surface that would eventually become untenable. For every graph of steep revenue decline, there must be an alternative story, right? It’s almost like all this is all leading to something...

Indeed it is! Here’s a graph of Google’s yearly revenue from 2002 onward:

Huh, that’s odd... it almost looks like those 50 years of growth that newspapers lost in a decade might be the flip side to the 50 years of growth that Google managed to achieve in just a decade. While it’s easy to hate on Twitter for its unabashed promotion of crap, anger and misinformation, many simply see Google’s search engine as, well, the internet. Perhaps that’s the problem...

Unless you’re a marketer, you’ve probably never thought about Google as a medium, but that’s exactly what it is. On a basic level, Google is a platform which hosts, organizes, ranks, and recommends content - that content just so happens to be every indexable page on the internet. Much like Twitter, this process is carried out constantly, and on an individually-curated basis by an AI algorithm. To Google, the weights and levers are page rank, domain authority, keyword fit and content depth. But, the outcome is the same - ask any SEO (the job title) or simply search SEO (the marketing discipline) on LinkedIn and you’ll be inundated with hacks, tricks, black hat and white hat methods for getting content to rank on Google’s platform.

The game was always to insert oneself into the conversation - whether that conversation be about which pair of headphones is the best on the market, which political candidate to support in an upcoming election, or whether or not the 911 terror attacks were actually a conspiracy by Halliburton. SEO is such a reliable science when done correctly that there exist sub-specifications for technical, content, programmatic, and social SEO experts. Millions of articles ironically vie for supremacy in evangelizing their method (and their services) for manipulating the world’s largest source of information to further your narrative, your business, your goals. But what’s the harm? I mean, people have to sell things. I myself am an SEO, and I’ve certainly never used my abilities to help subvert an election or bury a narrative harmful to my business interests.

But as always... the medium is the message. The largest group motivated to use SEO were and are the businesses, the hordes of sellers looking to monopolize whole swathes of the internet through keyword strategy. They succeeded. They published their strategies, and those strategies became rules that guide the creation of any high-performing content that reaches the platform. Then, companies began producing search engine optimized content at ever-larger scales - programmatically generating pages, hiring massive teams of writers to each churn out numerous, characteristically anemic articles a day (remember when everything was a listicle?). Everyone quickly realized that quality was outdated... stupid in fact. Why dedicate a highly paid expert’s time to writing an article when you could hire a freshly graduated (ie, unemployed) creative writing major to churn out 100 times the output in the form of listicles and social media compilations and get the same or better results from a traffic perspective?

This has been the reality of writing online for a long time now - nearly two decades. With every ‘best practice’ adjustment to the methods SEOs undertook to get their companies ranking, they simultaneously grew their traffic while decreasing the need for investment on the creative side of the industry. Over time, the quantity went up and the importance of the writer themselves went down. I know that none of this sounds like I’m talking about AI, but I am. When we talk about ‘algorithms’, what we’re really discussing is AI, it’s just AI that we’re familiar with, that we’ve come to accept as ‘necessary’. That’s why newspapers are so fascinating to me... their decline was never about content. If it was, radio would have put a dent in their sales and TV would have delivered the final knockout punch since both are objectively more stimulating as sensory experiences and are equally capable of conveying the same information as newspapers. But it wasn’t the delivery method that mattered in the end, it was the personalization - the AI, that pulled the rug out from underneath newspapers.

It was the fact that anyone, anywhere, on any internet-enabled device, could look up a question, a person, an idea, and not only instantly be delivered an answer, but one that was chosen specifically for them. If you’re the head of a local newspaper in the year 2002, this presents quite the challenge... your medium is print - inflexible, tangible, time-sensitive. Your competitor’s medium is a personalized AI algorithm optimized for delivering the entirety of human information to your shared pool of customers no matter where they are, no matter what time it is, for free.

It’s quite obvious that you simply cannot defeat Google as a medium, not even if you joined forces with every other newspaper in the world. You are a fast horse that costs money, and it is a Ferrari for free. Now you have to compete on content... digitize, become a trendy digital media company of sorts, while maintaining the journalistic qualities that defined your legacy as a print paper. Except that’s impossible, because as we already discussed, this type of content is not what’s rewarded on Google’s internet. You hire a firm to help with SEO and they recommend changing your content to produce more stories, shorten the word count and focus on more national interest stories with better search potential.

Your print ad revenue disappears and you’re forced to lay off half your writing team. You adjust and survive for a time, going ‘lean’ like all the hot tech startups. Your stories are shorter, less detailed, but they’re still accurate and there are still real reporters behind them. But every year the costs further outstrip the revenues. Eventually you’re forced to either shutter the business or sell to one of the big 6 media companies, who do not care in the slightest for your small town, and simply see your hundred-year-old paper as an effective mouthpiece for infiltrating your town with their blend of rightwing propaganda and cheap QVC-style garbage. Oh and gold coins for some reason, they really market the shit out of gold coins.

You’re one of literally HALF of all American newspapers who’ve been faced with this exact scenario over the past two decades. Reluctantly, in 2014, you sell your business. Two years later, the world’s first AI-enabled president is elected by a sweeping majority in your town and a narrow minority nationally. Seven years later, there is no local news in your town. There is only Google, and what it decides to show you next.

So... what does the future of the media look like with AI? Journalist Khaled Diab of Al Jazeera has the most informed take I’ve seen yet:

Just as the rollout of digital technology and the internet did away with untold jobs in the media, the advent of AI may cull many of those that remain. The day may not be far off when the buzz of newsrooms is a thing of the distant past and they become – almost – worker-less factories.

Khaled’s views align closely with what I’ve observed in other industries as diverse as marketing, software engineering and illustration. The creative process was always in the crosshairs of big business. Compare the lavish lifestyles of newspaper writers in the 60s and 70s to the wage, workload, and opportunity crunch that came in the 80s and 90s with consolidation. The golden age of reporting was a time when the creatives controlled a large percentage of the power in the industry, and when the business dynamics shifted, so too did the medium, and so too did the message.

The same can be observed in the 1970s film industry, in which directors and writers became superstars in their own right, with workable mid-tier budgets and expanding creative freedom. Compare this to today’s cookie cutter world of mega-budget remakes, legacy sequels, reboots and comic book movies where the IP is valued so much more highly than the creatives behind it that the Barbie movie looks like a radical statement simply because it actually has a semblance of individual artistic voice (something that used to standard in high-performing films). This is the impact of consolidation and corporate greed.

Both of these industries were already at tipping points. For newspapers, the shove off the cliff was Google, who not only ate the demand for their product but relocated the entire advertising market built by the newspapers over a century to their own platform within the span of less than a decade. For filmmakers, writers and actors, the ‘over the cliff’ moment has come slower, but just as surely.

Generative AI is a new player in this fight, and while it may be the method by which the executives replace creatives, it won’t be the catalyst - that battle has already been fought. And lost. In a different world, a better world, the creatives would still have the power, and they would be able to use generative AI to create things previously unimaginable. In our world, it’ll be used to create more. Not better. Just more.

Signoff

Thank you for joining me for the conclusion to my series, The Only Option is Assimilation. This has been a passion project since the first installment, and if you’re reading this after making it through the entire thing, I really can’t express how much I appreciate you lending me your time, your mind, and your consideration. These newsletters take a ton of effort to research and write, and I do all of this on my own, on top of my normal work responsibilities - often at extremely late hours of the night, which have been at their latest and longest this past month as we prepare for a big launch over at PlayerZero.

It’s pretty special when you get the chance to create something that actually means something to you, and creating Future of Product has added so much meaning and purpose to my life. The scale of this project will ultimately determine whether I get to keep doing it or not - since this is supported by my work, they will pull the plug if it comes down to it and it’s truly necessary. But honestly, I have a really hard time caring about how big this thing gets (cover your eyes work dad, you didn’t read that).

This is so much more to me than ‘work’, it’s a chance to meet the people building our collective future, to build and distill my thoughts on this new era of AI and, most importantly, to engage and share ideas with you. You are who this newsletter is for. You, the person who read all the way down to this sentence. You, are the reason I’m going to keep doing this - even when it feels like shouting into the void. So to all the you’s out there... thank you. Oh and maybe comment if you get a chance so I know you exist lol.

- Max