1. The tyranny of targets - how we've allowed quantifiable metrics to seep in to every aspect of our life, and the consequences of that. Source: The Score by C Thi Nguyen. Builds on Charles Goodhart of 'Goodhart rule' fame, that suggests metrics become corrupted when 'pressed in to service' as targets. The problem is not just that we contort our behaviour a bureaucratic incentive, it's that we cease to realise that we're contorting our behaviour at all. All metrics are reductive by design and the simplicity changes how we judge what matters and what can be cast aside. The outcome is that nuance and subtlety and personal values are abandoned in favour of what can be conveniently measured. There are four reasons this happens: portability, accessibility, interchangeability and co-ordination. Modern life, politics, science, tech, education...etc etc are dependent on these four variables, so are our love lives, sleep and exercise patterns and our view of what is good and bad. Each has a trade off. Usually the trade off is the swap of consistency and comparability with the loss of context. Decision making becomes more rigid, outliers are rejected, averages promoted. Netflixification: An ongoing example is the impact of Netflix on Korean cinema. The incentive to please the global entertainment market's gatekeeper has made Korean culture less interesting. The edges get smoothed. What worked before is tried again. The thing becomes a parody of itself. A caricature of Korean film is an average of what Netflix's algorithm deems 'a good show'. Supported by inarguable data. Gamification as prison: Games have rules and a score. The difference between games and life is that the goals are endlessly challenging and utterly unimportant. Games are fun because they are hard but can be played again. Rules as scaffolding for mastery. Gamified lives turn rules in to scaffolding for productivity, or a cage for poor players.
  2. It's hard to get rich doing something fun. From Janan Ganesh in FT. An explanation of the Epstein affair. There are two types of elite. The private 1% and the public 1%. Rich people want social status that comes with the arts, politics, journalism, the vibe. Intellectuals, politicians, actors etc want money they think should come with their social status. The traditional ways of making big money, banking, business, tech for example, are not intrinsically interesting. Some buy a football team or sponsor the arts to compensate. 'The public 1% are vulnerable to doing bad things for money, and the rich know it. Mandelson 'adored the public game but chafed at its penury'. Good line.
  3. Is the audience following or leading? Something I've been trying to articulate but not quite getting to the nub. I've had a few conversations recently about the assumption of the sports marketing industry that the product leads the audience: as in, you get your sports property on telly or YouTube or wherever, and the audience grows from there. Cricket and golf make me think something less obvious, or less linear, is happening. Golf is booming at grass roots level despite the shit show at the tour level, where the snafu between LIV and the PGA etc has bored golfers rigid. They are playing, club rates are soaring. Golf as TV product is a sideshow for those interested in that sort of thing. Cricket outside the formal economy is also an example, talked about in this week's podcast on the T20 World Cup. What has driven the audience for the game in Nepal, US, Netherlands etc? It isn't bilateral test cricket on television, which still pays for the 600million annual ICC revenue pool. You quickly get to a public v private frame, with governing bodies as government, and franchises as private money. The free market lobby will say that the associates have benefited from franchise leagues, which goes against the usual story of 'too much cricket confusing the audience' you tend to get from the governing bodies, who want to sell their thing. It's not binary. But it's also not linear.