I'm old enough now to pine for the glory days of old, and that got me thinking recently about how much simpler life was 20-plus years ago. It was a time of an internet still in its infancy; of MTV when it was still music television; of The Box and AOL chat rooms (a/s/l?); of passenger seats full of CaseLogic disc binders and raised eyebrows from friends because having a cell phone meant you were a spoiled rich kid. Yeah, those were the days.
However, those weren't the days. I'm fully aware of just how skewed my perception of reality was at that time, being too young to understand a complicated life of discipline and responsibility (and one without the digital conveniences/annoyances we all take completely for granted now).
The eighties and nineties were in many ways more stressful, more demanding, and less healthful. These were the days that saw the explosive rise of what former Kickstarter CEO and techno-contrarian Yancey Strickler amusingly dubs the "Mullet Economy" in his book This Could Be Our Future: an economy built on financial maximization at all costs, resulting in cost-cutting ("business") in the front and financial windfalls ("party") in the back for shareholders. As Yancey puts it, "one group's earnings and influence get cut while the other's grows. That's the Mullet Economy."
This has been the status quo for over half a century, so it's not something many of us really question. Our overly emotional recollections of the past are rarely filled with accurate visions of the social and economic climate of an era, much like my love for the eighties and nineties with all of its analog pleasures and archaic wired technology. But our biases can and should be overcome to include reality so that a better future exists somewhere down the line, as Strickler would agree.
It's the space between the utility of technology and the authenticity of human ingenuity that we as ethical professionals are meant to occupy in a digital world.
Financial maximization (i.e., make the most money possible however you can) isn't as openly touted as a strategy in today's business climate; however, it's still very much burned into how businesses operate. It's the reason securing venture capital is still the first step in any Silicon Valley-esque startup; it's also the reason that productivity for the majority of workers has increased 81% while compensation has increased only 29% over the past five decades (not including Strickler's "Maximizing Class" of shareholders at the top).
This is not a criticism of capitalism by any means. This is a criticism of greed and excess, and of how this mindset creeps into so many other areas of our professional and personal lives. I'm concerned with the idea of maximization in general, as it goes directly against the principles of sound design technique and of the joys of living a simple life.
I can't get the notion out of my head that it's also somewhere at the root of the sudden scramble to utilize LLMs as outsourced brains and staff members, a practice that I and many other knowledge workers stand against and recognize as a fundamental misuse of an otherwise benevolent technological advancement in service to humanity, and nothing more. It's the space between the utility of technology and the authenticity of human ingenuity that we as ethical professionals are meant to occupy in a digital world. We will continue to suffer huge losses in the long run if we don't learn to balance the reality of the world we inhabit and interact with and the technology that exists to aid us—individually and collectively—in that endeavor.
I'd highly recommend Strickler's book if you'd like some background upon which to form your own opinions about how maximization is eating away at our chances of a more generous future world. The robustness of our lives (and even of future iterations of LLMs) depends on a less profit-centric and a more value-oriented mindset.
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