New Year’s Resolutions are popular, perhaps in part because we know that we don’t usually keep them. Still, we feel better making them, so every year I look for some inspiration for my own. This year, I got it from, of all places, our legal system.
Everyone will likely have their own take on the Elizabeth Holmes verdict, but the theme we’re hearing in the media is focused on the question of whether Theranos is just the tip of some vast Silicon Valley iceberg of fraud. Is the Valley a problem in and of itself? Is tech one vast “spin-till-you-win” cesspool? Yes and no, but it’s a harder question to answer because there’s a lot of blame to go around.
Back in the dot-com bubble, in the late 1990s, I was bombarded by companies who wanted me to help them tell their story. Some were startups, and some were giants like WorldCom and Enron, but two-thirds of them were complete nonsense. My policy is, and has always been, that I will not work with or in any way promote something I believe has no real value proposition. I actually considered retiring or leaving the field because I was totally disgusted with the way things were going, despite having 20 years of independent consulting and way more than that of network experience.
When WorldCom and Enron were in their heyday, I told every reporter who asked me that their numbers and business models simply didn’t make sense, and wrote my own features and blogs to say the same. Well, their claims weren’t real. Not only did my comments at the time have little impact on the stories I was interviewed for, after everything came crashing down, nobody in the media or government called me and asked the simple question “How did you know?” Punishing egregious violations was enough; there was no reason to ask why the problems weren’t recognized from the first, and no reason to try to change things to prevent them in the future.
How did we get to that state, and are we still in it? Who is responsible? Let of offer my own tale, and you can decide whether you agree.
Our problem started not in the Valley but in the tech media and how it’s paid for. I started enterprise networking surveys in 1982, and between 1982 and 1990 technology publications were ranked as a strategic influence second only to the experience of a trusted peer. If I called on a CTO or CIO, I’d almost certainly see a copy of Business Communications Review and Network Magazine on their desks. I wrote regularly for both publications, and some articles were almost three thousand words. Some of these publications were subscription-based, but most were controlled circulation, meaning ad sponsored. Advertisers paid to reach those with budget influence.
If you put bacteria in a growth medium, they grow. A new money-making strategy begats money-makers. If advertisers would pay for more eyeballs, then eyeball farming might be a good business to be in. In 1989, in the US, my surveys and modeling said there were roughly 14,000 points of organized network procurement, and that number roughly matched the circulation of those publications. Five years later, the number of people who filled out reader service cards to claim receipt of the publications had grown to over 55,000 and the number of points of procurement had grown only to 15,600. The eyeball factory was stamping out ad-attracting eyeballs.
By 1996, the sum of the budgets claimed in reader service cards threatened to exceeded the global gross domestic product. All of the key publications of a decade earlier were going or gone. Soon, the remainder went online, and search engine optimization (SEO) ruled the world. To get found in a search is to get clicked, and the higher up you rank in the results, the more clicks you get.
The impact of this on the media is obvious. In the ad-sponsored model, the publication or website is paid for ad eyeball impressions. People, including the people running the publications/sites do what they get paid to do. If you’re paid when somebody clicks on a link and is served an ad, you focus on getting them to click. Once they do, you’ve gotten as much from them as you can expect to get. Search engines stamped out egregious misuse, like having an “article” consisting entirely of keywords for SEO, so people got creative with content. Forget three-kiloword articles, enter sensationalism.
The eyeball focus hits the content being posted, because what gets a click is what’s novel, interesting, rather than being true or useful. A story about Steven Speielberg claimed that he was asked by a reporter what his best advice was as a young director. He thought a moment and replied “When you talk to the press…lie.” The reason is obvious; if sensationalism rules, then you have to be sensational to win. Ideally, being sensational and being truthful aren’t orthogonal, and my own consulting work makes that assumption. I talk to clients about a “marketing fable”, which is a way of presenting your product or service that magnifies media interest without stepping over into falsehood. It’s a fine line, and it’s hardly surprising that many don’t bother trying to walk it when the rewards of sensationalism are so clear, and the risks seem to apply only if you step so far out of line as to be guilty of a crime.
I’m not saying that Silicon Valley and what it represents isn’t in trouble. I’m saying that the forums carrying criticism of the Valley today are the ones who got it into trouble, and the people reading the articles are the ones who continue to demonstrate that sensationalism wins over truth. If we want “free” things, we’re really getting things somebody else is paying for, and accepting the practices of the system that does the paying. We have to promote 5G as transformational to the average user, because average users are the mass eyeball source. It’s a world of extremes; every risk is a catastrophe in the making, every benefit a changer of Life as We Know It. And guess what? It works. Because we click on the sensational links. We can name the practice “click bait”, but we can’t seem to wean off it.
The question is whether that excuses stepping over the line between positioning and outright falsehood. Everyone who writes for or talks to an audience has a responsibility for what they say. I have a responsibility, and so did Holmes. Nobody can say that they’re always right, nobody can possibly know all about everything. Everybody can, or should, say that they communicate the truth as they know it, and seek to know as much of it was they can. The jury decided that Holmes failed to do that, and I agree, but I think that a part of the crime was getting caught up in the hype wave, and she didn’t start that, nor will it end with her and the verdict.
We started it, all of us who fall for click bait or push the truth to get better coverage. We wanted the Next Steve Jobs, and so we invented one. Free entertainment, just like the TV of old, sponsored by commercials. To quote a sifi writer of old, TANSTAAFL, meaning “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” If we want goodness and truth, we have to stop rewarding the alternative.
I’ve seen a lot of bad companies succeed, a lot of bad stories rewarded. I’ve seen a lot of good companies fail, technologies that were essentially to the optimal evolution of networking get discarded…at least for a while. The market rights itself eventually, because false sensationalism is parasitic and a parasite that kills its host isn’t survivable. Since I’m quoting things here, read Emerson’s essay on compensation: “Every secret is told, every crime punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.”
Ad sponsorship is a zero-sum game. Despite the growth in online advertising and dollars-for-eyeballs thinking, ad spending as a percentage of global GDP is actually down a bit. We now end up paying for a lot of video, through cable TV and streaming providers. The question then is whether people who have to pay for tech information will be satisfied with tech entertainment instead. We may find out.
What we need now is innovation, not hype. We had three major waves of tech innovation in the last century, waves that drove tech spending up almost twice as fast as GDP. We’ve had none in the 21st century, and I think the reason is that tech is complicated, and the mass market can’t absorb its details, only consume its results. If we’re focused on promoting what we already have, or pretending we have something we don’t, to get eyeballs, our best and brightest aren’t weaving all the complexity of the tech world into something truly revolutionary. Wildebeest during the migration are easy prey, till they move on. Easy isn’t always smart, and we need smart promotion of innovative ideas and not hype, however easy hype seems today.
My resolution for 2022 is to try harder to promote the innovative truths of our industry. How about you?