Genius who I can really trust
It was a new millennium and everything about internet commerce was exciting and fresh.
I was a website proprietor looking to increase my revenue and along they came with a scheme to get me plenty more customers.
You just bet I signed up. You just bet I ramped up the spending when I discovered that for every dollar I spent I got four back.
Reader, those were very good years. Right up until the day it stopped. As if shot. Suddenly it was no longer four dollars out for one dollar in, it was a dollar for a dollar and then it wasn’t as good as that.
I was quite sure I understood what had happened: the product was wrong, the optimisation was inadequate, I’d done a poor job on the things that mattered.
This was true as far as it went, but a bigger truth is one that I only fully grasped a decade later, talking this week with tech sage Paul Brislen.
He reminded me that the model for behemoths like Google and Facebook has evolved into something more or less feudal: they take the bulk of your profit and leave you the crumbs. The algorithm makes you a serf for the company store.
Obvious, really. But it helps to bear it in mind when you’re beating yourself up for being useless at running your business.
The hazard of our time is to assume that geniuses might not be jerks, or worse.
Rupert Murdoch’s empire-creation suggests genius, but in weaponising the media he creates a vast machine for disenfranchisement.
In the Senate impeachment trial, the president’s counsel Alan Dershowitz might be showing legal genius arguing there’s nothing wrong with a candidate doing anything at all to get themselves elected, but where does that leave America if its constitutional protections have no force?
It shows a certain kind of genius to get millions to back a deal that gets the super wealthy of Britain out from under EU tax haven rules, while the actual net benefit for ordinary Britons is slim to sweetfanny-adams, but you couldn’t call it care for your fellow citizens.
In this election year do we have a genius we can trust? I couldn’t say I’m wild about the incumbents.
Yes, politics is the art of the possible, and I can see how you might find it hard to get far with a coalition partner pulling the handbrake, but if the climate crisis really is to be this government’s nuclear-free moment, being cautious and incremental isn’t going to cut it.
An Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal kind of approach might. Problem is, to carry something like that you need to be a bit of an actual genius.
The hazard of our time is to assume that geniuses might not be jerks, or worse.