The End of Serendipity ?
‘‘When you give everyone a voice and people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place’’ – These were Mark Zuckerberg’s celebrated reassurances when he founded Facebook in 2004 in Kirkland House, a student dormitory at Harvard University.
Since Facebook’s inception the arguments in favour of the internet and social media have been in vogue. After all, the internet allows us to interact with people easily and cheaply, including previously unreachable people like distant cousins and high school classmates. Social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn spawn all sorts of new relationships and collaborations. We’re prompted to recognise birthdays and even flattered by strangers who endorse exceptional abilities we never knew we had.
Merit went beyond social and business connections. Most predicted that the internet would take democracy to a higher level by facilitating communication between different social groups, and making censorship more difficult because people can communicate much more directly, to name but two examples.
Until recently, ‘The Zuck’ has been lauded for enabling the cyber-enlightenment and likened to legendary advocates of ‘res publica’ like Jurgen Habermas and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But alas the unintended consequences are beginning to reveal themselves, and people are recalibrating the calculus of the costs relative to the benefits. Wired, a leading technology magazine recently published ‘Dear Mark, this is why I hate you’, an open letter to Zuckerberg by Rowland Manthorpe.
Moving from hate to caution, some are wary of its sheer magnitude. Facebook now has 3 billion users, compared to 2.5 million readers for the New York Times, and 113’000 for the NZZ. Users can be forgiven for complaining that these online behemoths are de facto monopolies. Amazon dominates US retail with 70% of online sales. Alibaba controls about 80% of e-commerce in China. 68% of online searches in America and more than 90% in Europe, are done via Google. Twitter is effectively the largest newspaper in the world. Others rightly point out the unassailable advantage conferred by “network effects’. As the semi monopoly attracts new members, more people are available for other members to interact with, which increases the benefits of membership, which, in turn attracts more members.
It seems that the more valuable they are, the less likely they pay taxes so their contribution to their nation’s social contracts tends to be negligible. Amazon was founded in 1994 and is the second most valuable company in the world valued at $800 billion. But neither the company or its founder has paid meaningful taxes in 25 years. 76% of companies that had initial public offerings in 2017, many focussed around the internet, had negative earnings.
Untaxed Value
It turns out that we are the ones taxed. Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard’s Birkman Center for the Internet said: “When something online is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product”, encapsulating the idea that social media and other free online services make money by extracting lots of data from us and then reselling it.
Others feel their privacy may be compromised. Facebook knows more than anyone about people’s private lives without security clearances, and, as the demise of Cambridge Analytica revealed, can even manipulate voting outcomes.
Sociologists warn about the danger of social media incessantly projecting its ‘my life is better than your life’ mantra – and, more importantly, inciting our urge to exert ceaseless energy to build our individual brands of significance, or at least relevance. Everyone of course wishes to be different, but community and social cohesion is about similarities.
Since anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account is in effect a publisher the sources of ‘Fake News’ are rampant. Even if the facts are accurate, they tend to be programmed to reinforce obstinacy rather than reason. Far from encouraging an understanding of different perspectives, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter confirm our own beliefs and inclinations rather than challenging them.
Jonathan Haidt, a Professor at NYU, argues in The Righteous Mind,’- that we are wired for so called “motivated reasoning“. It turns out “we judge and then we reason“, Haidt says. When we find information that disagrees with our belief, we are inclined to try to discredit the information. And the smarter we are, the cleverer we are at rationalizing away disconfirming evidence. Charles Henry Dow, author of the Dow Jones Industrial Index once said: “Pride of opinion has been responsible for the downfall of more men on Wall Street than any other factor.” (women seem to be better than men on this front)
Social media thrives on this primal human characteristic. Since most of our friends and followers are chosen because they are like minded, we automatically surround ourselves with “back patters“. Harvard’s Dani Rodrick confided to me recently that among those 412 people whose views he follows on Twitter, “almost all of them are of a similar mindset“.
This leads to an impoverishment of public discourse and, consequently, the rise of populism in many parts of the world. Intermediation of different views across a pluralistic society, the stuff that binds a society together, becomes more difficult as Eric Gujer, the editor of the NZZ, said in his recent speech to its shareholders. ‘’Every argument seems to degenerate into insult, denunciation, or stigmatization and the democratic debate becomes a war, in which everyone tries to outdo the other with loudness’’.
The ‘V’ in MoVimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement), that has just turned Italian politics on its head, stands for Vaffa! (‘Fuck off’, roughly). It is the movement’s signature slogan, and they mean it. Whatever your views on populism, what is happening in Italy, Turkey and many other places, including even the UK and US, makes it crystal clear that increasing numbers of citizens believe that their governments are failing them.
The End of Serendipity?
If all of this is not depressing enough, it gets worse. One feature that has been overlooked thus far and may be more important than all the rest combined, is social media’s impact on our serendipity.
Serendipity is the phenomenon of discovering something valuable without intentionally seeking it out. This is the so called ‘happy accident’ like finding the missing sock under the couch while looking for the TV remote. Elementary science books are stuffed with examples of serendipitous innovations like Fleming’s chance discovery of penicillin. Lindt discovered milk chocolate when an employee in Kilchberg forgot to turn off the chocolate mixer over the weekend. It was a student intern in Nutley, New Jersey who noticed that the normally erect tail of a mouse relaxed when administered an active ingredient that was being tested as an antibiotic. It turned out to be the basis for ‘Valium’; Roche’s best-selling anti-depressant drug for decades. (The Rolling Stones wrote a song after it called ‘Mother’s Little Helper’). Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel Prize winning economist, argued in ‘Competition as Discovery’, as the title suggests, that discovery is the primary source of competition. ‘Why participate in a sporting contest if the outcome is already known?’ Hayek conjectured.
Serendipity explains innovations of many kinds, including innovations of thought. Changing our minds has always been difficult, but is more likely to occur when we discover a new consideration that seeps into our minds in a non- confrontational manner. But since we are living increasingly digitally mediated lives with predefined feedback loops based on algorithms, diversity of perspectives is squelched. Our opinions are increasingly fenced in, and others are fenced out.
Discovery is, by definition, unexpected and must be accidental. Information channeled by formula reduces or even eliminates the element of chance. Netflix is armed with reams of data about what people like to watch, and its algorithmically-driven platform knows what viewers watch, learns what they like, and pitches new shows and episodes based on their proven tastes. Never mind if this leads to binge watching; or the 9th sequel to Spider Man.
Several readers, in response to our survey published in our last newsletter ‘Precarity of Predictions’ (click here) complained that making predictions is ‘’too complex, so why bother?’’. It occurred to me that profitable businesses are mushrooming around us that predict for us, weening us of our desire or need to discover and thus introducing a sense of intellectual complacency. It occurred to me that the very technology that has given us so many choices, has perversely relieved us of the need to take them.
Since discovery is the source of innovation and the impetus for changing our minds, one possible remedy is to design our lives so that more accidents happen in what is termed ‘serendipity heuristics’.
Think of a flea market.
“We don’t have any assigned desks. I don’t even have my own office” Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, the CEO of Novo Nordisk, explained to me. Patrick Aebischer, the former head of the EPFL in Lausanne, told me that research is 50% planned and 50% accidental. The Pritzker Prize winning Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa won the competition to design the ‘Rolex Learning Center’ at the EPFL because it “optimized the likelihood of unplanned, chance encounters’’, according to Aebischer.
‘Serendipity Heuristics’
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‘Rolex Learning Center’ at the EPFL, Lausanne
Jan Gehl, who helped design Copenhagen’s comprehensive bike and pedestrian pathways, told me that ‘’life is more serendipitous at 3km per hour’’. Gehl went on to say: ‘Noticing is what is necessary to experience life and make new, unlikely connections’.
When is the last time you have been wrong and changed your mind about something important? If your answer is longer than three months, you may be suffering from ASSMD (”’advanced stage social media disease”) and should consider ways to to improve your ‘serendipity heuristics’.
The debate rages about the future of climate change, artificial intelligence, aging societies, and a variety of other challenges. It is surprising to see how little debate there is about the future of how we will discover, digest and judge information.
Anyone who was expecting that Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate hearing would inspire understanding and improvement was likely disappointed. It felt like a generational moment — the entrepreneur all but taking his elders by the hand as he explained the rudiments of online business.
Switzerland’s unique system of direct democracy is a laboratory for testing new policies like ‘minimum income’, or the importance of imposing limits on the federal government’s ability to indebt its country. Its recent referendum on the viability of its public broadcasting system (‘Billag’) was regrettably a wasted opportunity as the referendum had been framed in such a binary manner that debate was suffocated rather than encouraged.
Much of democratic and economic theory is built around the idea that people have a roughly accurate and shared view of what’s going on. What if they don’t? The premise of the enlightenment and the treasure of free speech is that we are sufficiently open minded and that once issues are freely exchanged and thoroughly debated ‘res publica’ arrives at the right judgements. What if it doesn’t?
As ever in history, what often appears as decline is a precursor to transition. The problems described above will not go away and, if anything, are evidence that far more debate is needed. In the words of Adolph Ochs, former owner of the New York Times, we should “invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion and pursue truth wherever it leads”.
Maybe then ‘‘the system usually ends up in a really good place’’ to draw on Mark Zuckerberg’s optimistic prognosis and he’ll receive fewer ‘Dear Mark, this is why I hate you‘ letters.
Obituary of Helmut Maucher, former CEO and Chairman of Nestle SA
Maucher insisted on keeping analyses to a few pages and warned that additional information stifles speed and decisiveness. ‘’More pepper and less paper’ was one of his popular maxims, Paul Polman recalls, the CEO of Unilever, who worked for Nestlé.
The Financial Times published my obituary of Helmut Maucher, the architect of what has become the largest consumer goods company in the world.
Special thanks to those of you who contributed their wisdom, even if you have not been attributed as per your request.
Those interested to understand how Switzerland has become the most competitive country in the world should bother less with statistics, and checklists. The ultimate independent variable is people, and they have names like Aebischer, Hugentobler, Maucher, Reding and Zinkernagel. If anything explains causality it is them, with a bit of serendipity thrown in.
Further to my introduction for Monocle’s special issue dedicated to Switzerland. Monocle has selected Zurich to host The Monocle Quality of Life Conference to take place 28-30 June. Those bashing Swiss banking have had a field day since the financial crisis, but much of it is out of date and far off target as I argue in my defense of the Swiss private banking sector published in the Financial Times.
We’re looking for a part time project manager for our Swiss Made initiative in case anyone can refer someone able to ‘leap tall buildings’. We’re also looking for a nice home interested to host the launch party for our forthcoming Spanish version (no costs required).
Wishing you an enjoyable summer, I close with my favourite cartoon ‘discovered by accident’.