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Better than the cheap alternative

Business

Frozen pizza changed the game for many pizzerias. If you couldn’t offer something better than what I had in my freezer, what do I need you for?

If the wedding photographer can’t deliver more magic than the phone in my guest’s pocket, no thanks.

Does working with your non-profit make me feel better than putting a dollar in the violin case of the busker down the street?

And if the local print shop can’t set type better than my Mac, I’ll move on.

So–is your copywriting, research, illustration or coding better than I can get from the AI on my desk?

Racing to the bottom is no fun. You might win.

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Taken for granted

Business

It’s an odd term, worth a look.

We don’t notice that the tree we planted a few years ago thrives just a bit more each day. We don’t notice that the mail shows up when it’s supposed to, that our civilization persists in the face of chaos, and that the lights (usually) go on when we flip a switch.

Granted?

What would happen if we paid as much attention to these persistent delights as we pay to the annoying surprises that unfold each day?

The narrative of our time here becomes our lived experience. We’re the directors of this very long cinéma vérité documentary, deciding what gets focused on and what we skip over.

And it turns out that choosing our focus often leads to the plot changing as well.

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Where did kiwi come from?

Business

And shiitake mushrooms, spaghetti squash, ginger and even packaged tofu?

In the 1960s, the culture changed, and so did the supermarket. Small markets with fifty or sixty kinds of fruits and vegetables transformed into supermarkets carrying hundreds of varieties. Cooking shows and cookbooks raced to teach home cooks about the new, interesting and exotic.

And Frieda Caplan showed up to orchestrate a connection between a desire for novelty and unknown international foods.

Frieda didn’t invent the kiwi. But she named it, told a story about it and brought it to the merchants who needed it. She saw that markets in flux often need narrators.

The metaphor is something we see all the time–when markets and culture change, there’s room for an agent of change to bring leverage and innovation to the world. The extraordinary thing about Frieda’s was the scale of it. One person, in the right place, the right moment, with the right attitude, transformed the diet of millions of people.

Is there any doubt that right now we’re seeing a similar shift in the culture all around us?

Go find a kiwi.

[You can see the documentary here.]

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Looking at pareidolia

Business

There’s a face on Mars.

Ever since Viking took this photo fifty years ago, some people have been sure–certain–that it clearly shows a face on the planet’s surface. Of course, once we had a high resolution image from a later mission, all resemblance to a face went away.

Human beings need a story, especially when we’re trying to understand something we haven’t already classified. And so we see faces in clouds, in grilled cheese sandwiches and on other planets.

We do it with song lyrics that don’t make sense and with technology we don’t really understand as well.

Some of drivers are:

Fear of the unknown.

Novelty and the arrival of something new.

Unpredictable inputs that seem to assert some sort of intentional action and agency.

It’s no wonder, then, that LLMs and other forms of AI lead to waves of pareidolia. We ascribe a gender, a tone of voice and most of all, intent to these computer programs that are doing nothing but math. We imagine that they are lying to us, manipulating us and getting ready to take over the world.

If imagining that there’s a little person inside helps you use the tool better, that’s fine.

But made up stories that we invented to deal with our fear often make it worse. They distract us from the hard work of understanding what’s actually happening.

When the details become more clear, we’ll then have to unlearn all the personification we insisted on learning.

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