Episode Details

The [Broken] Circle of LIfe

Episode 193 Published 5 years, 1 month ago

When Tim Cook took over at Apple, nobody knew who Tim Cook was and now he’s a household name. Andy Jassy will experience the same.
Jeff Bezos started small with Amazon—by selling books. Marc Lore started small with Diapers.com—by selling a diaper. Now he’s building “a city of the future.” We have a new Insiders piece about this.
Lean Luxe put out an email recently that mentioned Monocle’s “Digital Decency Manifesto” which was a better take of our Late Stage Retail where we toyed with the idea of a ‘consumer’s Bill of Rights.” This article also mentioned an Air Mail article about self documentaries.
These “Me-Documentaries” started small—with Facebook and documenting our lives in a deeper way. Brian finds this both narcissistic and compelling: “I expect that we’re all headed towards having our own documentaries at some point.”
StoryCorps has created kiosks to dive into stories with family members. Someone created a tech service that sends prompts to someone in order to compile a book that helps them to tell their story.

This documenting of life can lead to narcissism, but it could also lead to untruth—for example, making an AI chat bot from communications with a lost loved one to be able to cope with their loss.
“Effectively, you can memorialize someone in such a way that even death itself can be post-truth.” - Phillip Jackson
In our new report, Vision 2021, we discuss some of these topics of post-truth: digital dysmorphia, the selfie industrial complex, and other trends in the future of consumerism.

Linking back to our Vision report, GameStop became a brand as performance art. “It wasn’t the brands themselves that were doing it, but they became the performance art because we made them so.” - Brian Lange
This feeds into our new culture of cynicism where we’re not actually reckoning with real issues and problems. What happened with GameStop stocks, AMC stocks, and others is a cynical rebellion.
People often fret over automation and technical innovation posing a threat in the job market, but we’re watching this take place digitally during this pandemic. A lot of retail is being consolidated into more powerful hands. GameStop, for example, is a retailer of products that are now increasingly going digital and subscription-based.
This is all leading to a consolidation, an oligarchy/oligopoly of brands, which we talk about in our “Changing of the Guard” Insiders piece.
On a positive note: in times of adversity, real innovation happens. The next Amazon, Google, Apple, is being born during this time. All of the tools needed are easily available for this to happen.