 |
|
|
|||||
Last week, after the Trump administration pressured ABC to drop Jimmy Kimmel from its late-night television lineup, a Daily Show guest summed up how Americans are reacting as the country slides into authoritarianism: Were like deer in the headlights. Weve watched masked men surround a PhD student on a Boston street and force her into an unmarked van and prison in response to an article shed written in a student newspaper. Weve watched the government use the military to police citizens in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Weve watched President Trump grab power from Congress as he enacted tariffs and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development. He’s threatened his opponents with retribution, accepted a $400 million gift jet from Qatar, and said that the Federal Communications Commission should pull the license of any TV station that criticized him. The list goes on. The response to all of this has been slow from politicians and citizens alike. Its similar to the attitudes toward climate change: Were witnessing the worsening of the climate, but were still not stopping it. This is a well understood and disturbing phenomenonthat people do adjust to the circumstances around them, including to greater political repression, and the loss of important freedoms, and the erosion of support for free and fair elections, says Michael Ross, a political science professor at UCLA. People have a hard time living in a state of constant emergency. And for better or worse, humans have learned over the millennia to adjust to their social circumstances. That’s clearly happening now, and very quickly. In both cases, experts have been warning about the risks for years, but their concerns have either been downplayed or ignored. Climate scientists warned decades ago that a warming planet would lead to the record-breaking disasters were seeing now. Likewise, in the U.S., political scientists have spent years describing the growth of trends that led to authoritarianism in other countries. It could have been possible to intervene earlierbetter regulating social media, for example, could have helped reduce the extreme polarization that set up the conditions for authoritarianismbut we didn’t. And the majority of people aren’t acting now. As with climate, changes that seem shocking at first get normalized. People focus on their everyday lives; the impacts can seem distant at first. For both climate and the erosion of democracy, some damage has already been done. The question is whether we’ll change direction quickly enough to prevent the worst-case scenario. The slide toward authoritarianism Now, like climate change, authoritarianism in the U.S. is accelerating even faster than experts anticipated. I have been kind of shocked by the first nine months of the Trump administration, says John Carey, a government professor at Dartmouth University. But frankly, I was surprised in the first Trump administration too. And now that feels like a simpler, more innocent time. Carey and colleagues run Bright Line Watch, a project that has been polling political scientists and the public about democracy since 2017. He expected a massive public response then that never came. We were watching what we saw as key democratic transgressions in the 2016 campaigncalling for jailing your opponents, saying publicly that you might or might not accept the outcomes of the election,” he says. “We were watching them happen and thinking, When is the public going to turn? The bright line the group was looking for was the line that, if crossed, would create a huge backlash. Were frankly still waiting, he says. As our freedoms erode, new realities can become normalized. If the National Guard is deployed on the streets of D.C., its less shocking when it happens in Memphis. The same thing happens with climate impacts. Until recently, massive wildfires in Canada were unusual, for example. Now theyre beginning to feel expected, along with smoke drifting from the fires to parts of the U.S. Human psychology makes it hard to tackle this type of social challenge Like climate, some form of denial is common even when you’re well aware of what’s happening. It’s common to think that you have enough to deal with in your life already, says Per Espen Stoknes, a Norwegian psychologist who has studied why people are slow to act on climate change. In the case of growing authoritarianism, “Folks generally go on with a ‘double life’; on the one hand knowing that it is the unmaking of a century of democratic development, on the other hand just living-life-as-always without making a fuss about it,” he said via email. The threat can also seem distant, in the same way that climate impacts often feel distant even if you’re living in a flood zone or wildfire zone. Oil companies fought climate action with misinformation; the Trump administration, similarly, insists that it’s doing nothing wrong. As polarization grows, each side believes the problems are the other’s fault and seeks out echo chambers. (In the case of climate change, although the majority of Americans now say the issue is important to them, a small segment of people still don’t think it’s happening or believe it isn’t caused by humans.) “Through confirmation bias, people will listen more to pundits and experts who confirm their view,” Stoknes says. The scale of the problem, for both issues, can feel so overwhelming that people turn away. Messages of doom don’t help. “Folks adapt, habituate, and feel fatigue to messages and messengers that repeatedly (over)use threats about slow-moving abstract issues,” says Stoknes. What messages work? A positive message can be more effective than warnings about the breakdown of democracy. New York state Assemblymember and mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is one example, says UCLAs Ross. “You may or may not agree with him, but he has a positive agenda and people, I think, are really responding to that,” he says. “It’s not just, ‘I’m going to stop this thing from happening’ and ‘I won’t allow this.’ It’s ‘I want to do these new things. I think that’s what missing right now.” For climate, that could include messages about better solutions, like cheap solar power, rather than focusing on the destruction of the planet. In both cases, Stoknes says it’s useful to keep talking to the people around you to help mobilize them, sharing small wins, and to give people simple things to do, whether that’s supporting local renewable energy or joining a No Kings protest. It still isn’t too late to act, Ross says. It’s obvious that Americans are worried: By some estimates, the No Kings protest in June might have been the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. But more needs to happen. “The most effective social movements are ones that have an ongoing organization and a clear set of demands,” he says. “They may be regularly mobilizing people for protests, but they have a lot more going on. I think there’s a tendency, maybe because of social media, to think, Hey, if we all just get together and go out for a rally, you know, then we’ve done our work. And in fact, that’s just kind of the tip of the iceberg.” There’s an extra challenge compared to trying to push for climate action: more personal risk. “If you don’t install solar and insulate your house, it’s bad for the climate and you’re not doing your part, but it’s not necessarily bad for you,” says Archon Fung, director of Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. “Whereas if you’re Jimmy Kimmel or the president of Harvard University or a law firm that stands up for democratic reform, then you [risk] being targeted by the government. And that’s an intrinsic part of how authoritarianism works that is different from climate.” Both problems are intertwined: If democracy doesn’t function, climate action also won’t happen at the speed that it needs to. It doesn’t matter whether the majority of Americans support renewable energy if Trump unilaterally attacks it. Humans clearly aren’t good at tackling problems like this that gradually unfold. And the longer we wait to do something, the fewer tools we’ll have left to fightif anyone can figure out how to do it.
Category:
E-Commerce
Damian Kulash, guitarist and lead singer of the rock band OK Go, is also kind of a creative director. His band has become world famous for its inventive, elaborate, and absurdly complicated music videos, including its breakout dance video made on synchronized treadmills, a stop-motion video shot over the course of 21 hours, and another that was made up of 64 films playing simultaneously on 64 iPhones. By the band’s own tally, its videos have been viewed 11 billion times. It’s achieved this success by approaching the creative process in a unique way. Kulash was recently on the main stage at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival in New York to talk about the inspiration behind these projects. Speaking to a capacity crowd, Kulash broke down the band’s process into simple terms: “The abstract version is that we look for the things in the world that make us go Ooh. [Photo: Jonah Rosenberg for Fast Company] He was being interviewed by Karl Lieberman, global chief creative officer of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. The two spent a lot of time talking about their creative processes, and revealed some surprising ways a rock band can work like an ad agency. Lieberman, whose firm is known for its campaigns for brands like Coca-Cola and Nike, noticed that Kulash uses an analogy for describing OK Go’s creative process that’s almost identical to his own. “Once you get an idea, you have a sandbox, you called it, and that resonates with me because I often call ideas buckets, Lieberman said. “It’s not an idea that’s fully formed, it’s more of a notion or a direction of an idea in the form of a space that can be filled with even more thinking and . . . hopefully from even more people.” Kulash says his sandbox concept is one based on play. “It’s all about discovering the thing,” he said. “We don’t start knowing it. It also allows everybody who’s involved to actually make the project better.” [Photo: Jonah Rosenberg for Fast Company] An example he shared was the filming of one of OK Go’s most famous music videos, “Upside Down & Inside Out,” which takes place in zero gravity. Aside from knowing the video would have no gravity, the band boarded the gravity-free airplane without any preconceived idea for what they’d actually do. “It was seven flights of pure play, seven flights of a rehearsal, and then six flights of actually shooting it,” Kulash said. “There is no idea until you’ve played. You have to see the thing and be like, things feel cool in zero gravity or things feel cool in slow motion, or things feel cool in stop motion.” For Kulash, play is an essential part of OK Go’s creative process, even when the band is working in partnership with a company like Apple or General Motors to help finance the project. But that doesn’t mean there’s no pressure to turn all that sandbox time into something great. Earlier this year, OK Go gave Fast Company global design editor Mark Wilson an exclusive inside look at the filming of its latest music video, “Love,” which was so technically challenging to film the band was only able to get the shot it needed on the very last try before the daylightand the budgetran out. “We’ve got a ton of skin in the game ourselves,” Kulash said. “We often pay for [the videos] ourselves, even when we have a sponsor. We can’t afford to fail at them, ever.” Plus, Kulash told the audience, the band’s got a reputation to uphold. “Can you imagine if the next OK Go video is the one that was really boring?”
Category:
E-Commerce
Tony Stubblebine moved Medium from losing $2.6 million monthly to achieving its first profitable month in August 2024, after 13 years of losses. The CEO, who previously founded habit-tracking company Coach.me and helped develop early Twitter, has refocused Medium on serving writers more interested in sharing their expertise than profiting from their words. For Stubblebine its about the expert economy, not just the creator economy. Known for viral productivity techniques like Interstitial Journaling and his 75-minute guide to iPhone optimization, Stubblebine has grown Medium to over one million paid subscribers while maintaining its ad-free, quality-focused approach. Now the company is launching a new app for notes and writing, called (fittingly enough) TK, in a bet that strong design will distinguish it in a crowded marketplace. Stubblebine spoke with Fast Company about why he still prefers paper notebooks for meetings, and how Medium differentiates itself from creator platforms like Substack. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Youre launching a new writing app. Why does the world need another writing tool? I had to make this case to get people inside the company excited. There are four things I want that I don’t see right now. First, the Medium design ethos matters to me. I want my words to look and feel beautiful. I was already drafting things in Medium’s editor that I never intended to publish just because I like the typography better. Second, this world of second brain apps exists, but the idea of a second brain is a mainstream concept without mainstream implementation because you have to do so much manual organization. Most people are not that organized. A messy system almost always beats a regimented system. This is a great use case for AIour view is it’s meant to elevate people, not replace them. AI can completely alleviate all the manual organization that would typically go into Roam or Obsidian. Third, theres a way to use AI as a writing assistantnot to write for you, but to do your bidding. A lot of what I publish needs citations. The other day I was writing about an old Medium program launched by founder Ev Williams. I highlighted the paragraph and said to the AI assistant: Ev wrote about this on the Medium blog in 2017. Find the link and add it. It figured out the core concept, found the link, and added it. Im easily distractedif I had to find that link myself, I would have been lost for an hour. Fourth, I’ve never seen any note-taking apps attached to a distribution network. My writing is very sensitive to the idea that you could share it and get validation and help someone else. Sometimes youre working on something and realize this could be helpful to other people. We’re excited to attach Medium’s massive network of readers to this genre of software. Youve taken a strong stance against AI training on creators work. Why? Were the only social media platform that if we can get money out of the AI companies, is planning to give 100% of it back to the creators themselves. We refused training deals with AI companies worth low single-digit millions because we heard from our writers that they felt it was unfair for companies to make money off training on the Medium network without giving anything in return. Theres still an ongoing negotiation across the industry about whether these companies will pay creators. We just supported an initiative called the Really Simple Licensing standard. We hope that gives consent and control back to the creators. How do you compete with Substack when writers can earn more there? The people who actually make the most money on writing are not charging for the writing itself. We sort of forgot in the rush to the creator economy how lucrative the expert economy is. Some of the best-paid writers on Medium are technical leaders who post twice a year, but those postings are their calling card when they go get jobs that sometimes pay upwards of a million dollars a year. The creator economy is kind of a content treadmill and doesnt always pay that well. Meanwhile, building yourself up as an expert authentically often opens up really interesting work opportunities. If you’re committed to the creator economy, you should follow a strategy of publish once, syndicate everywhere. Medium folds into that as a place to syndicate, to get additional traffic and subscribers back to your main mailing list. But if youre not in the creator economy, you’ll build an email following on Medium faster than anywhere else because you have a built-in network of people you don’t already reach. We’re much more built for that group, which is the majority of the internet. How did you engineer Medium’s turnaround? The key thing is, even if you turn around the business, you have to end up with a business that you’re proud to be running. A lot of the turnaround was in the product itself, making Medium a place where smart amateurs write regularly. Until that point, we’d either been a place where professional journalists were writing or where the new wave of content creators would write for small dollar amounts. We looked at that as paying to create more content mill stories that otherwise wouldn’t exist, and that felt bad to us. Beyond that, its run-of-the-mill business. Every dollar you spend is meant to bring back at least a dollar. If you dont have a theory on spending money, you shouldnt spend it. The startup industry was very lax about how it spent money for a while, and Medium was definitely in that boat. Just getting tighterpeople call it cost cutting, but I think of it as role clarity. Every person needed a role connected to how we work as a business. What advice do you have for technical founders transitioning to CEO? The bar for companies has gone up. It used to be build it and they will come, or you only had to be good at one or two things. Now people are so savvy about how to build a company that you really have to plot the whole business model through. Its not just can you build a better mousetrapcan you build a distribution channel? Can you build a business model where you can make money? The last company I started in 2011 was just like, I hope if I build something cool, people will use it. I came to regret that pretty quickly because I didn’t know how I was going to market it, let alone make revenue. When people come to me and say they built a better habit tracker, I tell them: I believe you, but how are you going to get people to use it? How are you going to make money? Why is this a business? If you don’t design that into the plan, good products just get abandoned because they don’t work as businesses. What does your current daily tool kit look like? I have a pretty simple work life. I’m mostly meeting with people, so I’m spending a lot of time either in Zoom or Google Meet. I typically have a paper notebook in front of me because my view on note taking during a meeting is that it’s a form of active listening. I have a strong opinion about the ideal paper notebook. We found notebooks that are landscape format, which means they’re wider rather than taller. The thing I lie about wider is that I caught myself thinking deeper about my own notes. It’s like taking the idea of writing in the margin and blowing that up. I end up with almost always three columns: raw notes as Im trying to follow along, a second column for things I need to come back to or how I want to participate in the meeting later, and this empty third column for total epiphanies. The way that form factor interacts with the way your brain works, I found fascinating. What’s your current relationship with your iPhone after writing that viral optimization guide? I still basically believe the premise of that postthat it takes 75 minutes to reconfigure your iPhone for productivity. The meta point was that these software tools are not preconfigured to make your life better. The worst offender is notifications, which should be called interruptions. If an app asked you, Is it okay for me to interrupt you mid-meeting? you’d think harder about whether thats okay. I keep basically all my notifications off unless its text messages from certain people or phone calls from my favorites, which is three people. I always try to keep in mind that the iPhone is meant to be a tool for me. My front screen is all Google utilitiesmaps, calendar. The action button is set to photos. Youve mentioned considering going even further offline. Whats your experience been with that? I did a four-month camper van trip around the U.S. and drove 9,000 miles. The thing that blows people’s minds is that I didnt listen to anything during the drive, unless I was tired. I tried to have quiet time for thinking and seeing where I was going. That was one of the happiest periods in my entire life because my brain was not buzzing all the time with brain candy that exists on your phone. If I wasnt working, I would probably opt to be nearly fully offline beyond extremely helpful things like Google Maps. Opting out seems like a good way to live for most people.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||