ambient

Some thoughts I put down over at the Gridjit Blog.

This is just a meditation, not a peer-reviewed academic piece (which will become quite obvious), but I thought I would share it for anyone who might find it relevant to their work lives. Think of it as a devil’s advocacy piece to anyone (including myself) who finds themselves dreaming up and building technology solutions for a living.

Google (and others, of course) have successfully trained an entire generation of technologists to think like marketers and that might not be a good thing.

There are many benefits to the way technology development is shaping up. Hackers / developers, engineers, etc. are learning, in greater numbers, about how to run businesses on fewer resources, speak with investors, automate critical processes and sell useful products without the help of MBA / marketing types. This is certainly a good thing both for investors and for entrepreneurs as it removes unnecessary and expensive layers of management that, in many cases, should not exist in early stage companies.

As a result of all this contact with VCs and exposure to a business mindset, however, we have formed a few habits that probably require some thought. Primarily, it is this: hackers these days have a tendency to view their applications as marketing channels, best or most easily monetized by some sort of advertising / affiliate reward / product upsell.

Don’t get me wrong - in the business we’re in, these are often perfectly legitimate business models and I don’t blame anyone for wanting to build a profitable business (I certainly do). But something about either the nature of the apps we all spend so much time building or the state of the industry we’re in has created deep channels in our brains about what type of applications to build and how they will be monetized. Furthermore, due to the ease and common acceptance of these models, more and more businesses are completely virtual  and contain some element of leveraging user data to provide targeted or better marketing.

I do happen to agree with Google that relevant advertising is no longer advertising but useful information. All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t let ourselves fall into the trap of thinking that technology is not first and foremost a media / marketing channel. Or it shouldn’t be.

Most entrepreneurs I know treat wealth as a secondary (or tertiary) interest to building something new, innovative or useful. But I wonder if we haven’t been brainwashed to think about what constitutes new, innovative or useful by the dominant technology players (who have a clear agenda) over the last few years. Fake Steve Jobs articulates it well:

Plus you make a big deal of only hiring these super-high-IQ kiddies and the fact is that most of them truly are smart, but then you put them into this horribly dull and easy drone work on AdWords and AdSense and they’re all bored to tears and totally disappointed because they really really really thought they were going to do something meaningful with their lives and now they’re just worker bees — pampered worker bees, sure, but still — and maybe they should have taken that offer from McKinsey but they really thought Google was going to be so cool and blah blah blah.

And you know what? There is something really evil about taking thousands of the world’s smartest young people and using them to sell online text ads more efficiently. Really. Think of all the really interesting and important things that this pool of brainpower could be addressing.

Think of all the really interesting and important things that this pool of brainpower could be addressing. That’s the one phrase that comes to mind every time I think of a new product (dozens of times per day). I decided to write this post precisely because I found myself struggling to think of all the really important things I could be addressing that didn’t include new ways to market stuff. That’s not good and so I’m trying to change it.

I know and care very much that Africa is getting fucked by the rest of the world. I have serious suspicions that the G-8 summit in Hokkaido isn’t really going to result in anything groundbreaking and it really bothers me. And I am incredibly frustrated by fake technological cures to real problems (ethanol being a particularly insidious example).

I’m sure that my luddite friends would tell me that all of this technology is the problem in the first place, and there may be some truth to that.

But I’m also an optimist and I truly believe that every person has the opportunity to improve the world. My point in writing this is just to remind myself and anyone else who happens to be reading that this is true and we shouldn’t forget it.