Unfinished: Fear of Dumb

[From time to time, I’ll start writing a post, and never complete it.  After enough time has passed, I’ll just post the fragment, because I don’t believe in leaving ideas in a drawer to die - if I haven’t built it or used it, maybe the fragment will inspire something else.]

I don’t mean a fear of actual stupidity.  Fear of Dumb is something that’s visible all over the tech industry - it’s not a label or a trend, it’s the beginning of a sentence.

Fear of being dumb labour.  Fear of selling ‘dumb pipe’ (in the case of ISPs).  Fear of conducting a service, without providing value beyond execution.

Because Fear of Dumb is really just fear of irrelevance.  If all you do is put input through a process that outputs a result, you’re essentially a placeholder for a future robot, program, or younger cheaper version of yourself.

No one wants to be irrelevant.

An Unfinished Post.

I’m an english lit geek.  This informs my point of view on pretty much everything.

It’s taught me that people are stories.  If you understand narrative, understanding people isn’t that much of a stretch.

This is probably why I think of marketing as being about plot points.  Everything is a decision made by the storyteller (or the consumer) to communicate something about the character, the plot, the narrative they’ve constructed for themself.

Thinking of it this way, rather than use cases or demographics or badge theory, makes it a hell of a lot easier to plan around human behaviour.

We’re slaves to our stories, and it’s impossible for us to resist constructing them with ourselves in the lead.

[I never finished this, and started writing it weeks ago.  I’m posting it now, rather than deleting this fragment.]