Should you have to?

I made a mistake. I used a QR code service a year ago, and now that my year’s payment is up, they’re going to delete the code. It turns out I wasn’t buying what they promised, and the fine print of their terms of service back them up. I won’t be back to them any time soon, I switched to Unitag, happily paying them a little more to get a lot more in return.

A few weeks ago, WeTransfer changed their Terms of Service and basically claimed that they owned everything and anything you transferred, forever. A backlash pushed them to walk it back (a bit) but that’s a lot of trust, burned forever. Once a customer switches, they don’t come back. [Thanks to Jonathan for the tip]

Every time you use any service online, you’re entering into some sort of contract. And setting expectations is essential, but too often, the MBAs adopt a nickel and dimes approach, figuring that the system gives them no choice. If everyone else is racing to the bottom, they should too.

One printing service I’ve used asks how many pages your book is when giving a price. Inevitably, after they get the doc they raise the price, pointing out that the file is two pages longer than was quoted. I finally figured out that they were counting the inside front cover and inside back cover as ‘pages’. No one does that in the real world, but it helps them, the accountants figure, offer a lower price to get the order, then they can boost it later.

This is deception as a business model.

That’s an option, certainly. But why choose it? Why devote so much of your day to racing to the bottom, burning trust as you go?

The metric is simple: every time you have to tell people they should have read the TOS, then either your marketers or your legal team has made a mistake. You’ll need a TOS, sure, but you don’t want to rely on it to communicate.

One approach is to bet on a stream of easily distracted, trickable, low-interest customers you can take advantage of as you race to the bottom. The other is to count on information to be shared, customers to care and word of mouth to build trust.

School is a training ground for task-based thinking.

“Will this be on the test?”

You finish your homework and then you can go out and play.

This is one reason educators are flummoxed by chatGPT–it upsets the calibrated balance of effort in the task of homework and essays. The essay was not the point, the effort was.

Schooling is organized this way because most industrial work is. Cottage industries, piecework and many freelancers work on tasks.

If tech helps you finish your task faster, the time saved is yours. Take the rest of the day off (at least until the boss recalibrates the task expectations.)

But important work is project work.

Projects have component tasks associated with them, but they all contribute to something bigger, something that feels unlimited.

Serving the next customer at McDonald’s is a task, but building the brand into a worldwide chain is a project.

Cooking spaghetti is a task, but hospitality is a project.

Projects seek to do something that might feel insurmountable, and projects often have competition. If you finish some tasks with time to spare, put that productivity to work doing something else that serves the customer. If you don’t, we might not get another chance, because someone else will.

Sometimes, people say, “they’re not paying me enough to care.” What they mean is that the industrialist has chosen them to do tasks, and going beyond tasks isn’t part of the deal. On the other hand, when we sign up for a project, the terms of the deal have to be deeper and more human than trading effort for money.

Art is a project. Connection, community building, counseling–all of these are projects. When our work is project-focused, we’re not a cog in a vast machine. Instead, we’re a contributor with agency, someone who is working with and for the agenda we’ve agreed to.

Bad bosses try to have it both ways. They are stingy with agency, authority and compensation, and insatiable when it comes to effort. But smart leaders understand that given the chance, most of us would love the chance to be seen, to contribute and to be part of something.

Go find a project.

First mistake: If you meet a talking dog in the street and it makes a few grammatical errors or speaks with an accent, you don’t use a few errors to dismiss the fact that this is an actual talking dog. It’s amazing. It might even be worth having it join your team.

Second mistake: If a talking dog tells you something, that doesn’t mean it’s true. Check the work.

Even if your dog’s name is Claude.

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What should we do now? As creatives, freelancers and impresarios gaze at the incoming AI revolution, it’s tempting to turn away and get back to work.

But what if this is the work?

There are plenty of caveats that come with the talking dogs of AI. Not just the hallucinations or the dislocations. There are issues of climate, of control and of access. But, as in all the past technology revolutions we’ve faced, highlighting the problems and walking away is probably not the best way to have influence or impact.

Just because candidates have flaws doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vote.

I’m launching a short new Udemy course on how I’m thinking about AI and how you might shift your perspective to put it to work. This is the biggest shift in our world since the invention of electricity, and you’re either going to work for an AI or an AI is going to work for you. Only one of these is a good option.

The course is discounted 40% for the next five days. It won’t give you any tricks or tips, but it might open your eyes to a different posture for dancing with the talking dog.

It’s all too easy to be familiar with being underappreciated. Customers, clients, vendors, colleagues–we’d like them to notice and acknowledge our efforts on their behalf. When we pay attention to appreciation, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that there’s rarely enough.

Contrast this with the rare experience of being overappreciated. Getting more credit, support and benefit of the doubt than you deserve. The scarcity of this feeling highlights just how much we crave appreciation.

When rock stars and celebrities get hooked on overappreciation, it warps their expectations and becomes toxic. Getting credit where little is due, or reciprocation that isn’t deserved. This is the path to becoming a diva, and it afflicts more than just a few famous people. It’s easy to get spoiled.

If you end up hating your customers, begrudging your partners or insisting on more attention from customers, you may be getting dependent on appreciation.

How much do we deserve? How do we get more? You can see how the cycle gets us hooked.

There’s another way forward. Our search for appreciation, in whatever form, is a kind of attachment. Attachment is our focus on something we crave but can’t control. It robs us of our focus and worse, creates a cycle of never-enough. Appreciation can be more usefully seen as a byproduct of our practice, it’s not the point. We do the work because we can, because we have the opportunity to contribute. If appreciation results, that’s nice, but it’s out of our control.

With this freedom from external appreciation, we get to make a decision about where and how to offer our work to the world.

Each day, we get to make a new decision about how to invest our time, our attention and our effort. If a community that used to appreciate our work doesn’t respond in a way we are hoping for, we can use that information to reallocate our work. “Thank you” is an appropriate response to a lack of appreciation, because we learned something useful. The audience didn’t owe us anything, but if they don’t want to dance with us in the way we hope, we can choose to find a new partner.

The creator who feels trapped and in debt to their over-appreciating audience can make a new decision about their craft and the fans they choose to make it for. Screaming fans in arenas is an option, but so are discerning participants in a club.

The same goes for the vendors or partners or customers who aren’t showing up for us the way we feel we’ve earned. We can take umbrage and focus on the imbalance, or we can choose to make different work, better work, or work for a different group, one that might need what we have to offer. After all, there’s not a lot of use for surplus umbrage.

When we shift from a focus on what we are owed to one based on what we can contribute, we’re free to get back to work.

Everything that happened yesterday, and the yesterdays before that, is real. It happened.

Perhaps it’s the hard work you did to earn a degree, or a significant error that cost you and others a great deal. Maybe it’s a community you chose to join, or one that you failed to embrace.

All of these costs are sunk. We can’t undo them. They’re a gift from our former selves.

But like all gifts, we don’t have to accept them.

We can say to that former self, “no thank you.”

“I know how hard you worked to get that law degree, but I don’t have room for it on the shelf.”

“I know you paid a price for that transgression, but that price is paid and I have work to do.”

No thank you.

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Shaka Senghor has written a poignant new book that puts a face on real costs, costs that live in the past but threaten to overwhelm us each day. On July 25, I’ll be doing a live interview with him and anyone who pre-orders a copy of the book at that link is invited to attend.

His book is a raw memoir, but also a useful framework, a practical way to think about the new decisions we get to make each day. We have generous work to do, and if our story gets in the way of that work, it pays to find a way to rewrite it.

Sooner or later, we are all superheroes.

Superman wears a costume. As we all do.

He isn’t great at time management, always focused on the urgency at hand instead of investing in long-term planning.

He rarely works to change the foundational system he’s part of.

Supervillians exist in opposition to him and his work. Without him, they have no purpose.

He has a closely-guarded secret identity he doesn’t want the world to see.

Reputation, trust and good work are at the heart of his brand.

He misses home. In fact, his uniform is made from his baby blanket.

When technology evolves, he gains new powers.

In the official narrative, the Bechdel test is rarely passed. We can tell better stories than that.

His best exploits involve thoughtful strategy. The punching is boring.

When it counts, he shows up with bravery.

His most important relationships are based on mutual trust.

It turns out that bending steel with his bare hands is a distraction from the real point.

They can carry us away, amplify our work or slowly change everything around us. These arcs can easily become invisible forces, pushing us to make choices and to ignore their origins or consequences.

Capitalism is the most common one, along with its shadow, industrialism. We show up on behalf of the invisible hand, engaging with the market in search of profit and productivity. It begins by serving the market, but can become soulless industrialism. The work can be focused on finding a need and filling it. Or it can shift to “I’m just doing my job,” and “If I don’t do it, somebody else will…”

Technology evolves as a species, and we either work for it or against it. The folks who enabled the internet to go from five minutes to eight hours of our day were working on behalf of this now-visible and increasingly dominant cultural force.

Scarcity is the path of power. Connection is the way toward abundance. Connection creates culture and possibility, while the inverse, scarcity, creates a kind of value. Some work to create status roles and monopolies and the leverage that we have over others, while others work toward resilience and mutual support.

Justice is the one that Reverend Parker argued for. It doesn’t happen by itself, and it doesn’t always support the three other arcs, but with effort, we have the chance to bend it.

Which ones are pushing you forward and narrating your days?

There isn’t much of a correlation between how fast you swim and how much energy you put into it.

In fact, drowning people burn plenty of calories but they don’t go anywhere.

When we’re confronting a new problem, more effort might not be the answer.

It could be that we benefit by staying calm and focusing on our technique instead.

[written by claude.]

Here’s the thing about ChatGPT that nobody wants to admit:

It’s not intelligent. It’s something far more interesting.

Back in the 1950s, a Russian linguist named Roman Jakobson walked into a Harvard classroom and found economic equations on the blackboard. Instead of erasing them, he said, “I’ll teach with this.”

Why? Because he understood something profound: language works like an economy. Words relate to other words the same way supply relates to demand.

Fast forward seventy years. We built machines that prove Jakobson right.

The literary theory nobody read

In the 1980s, professors with unpronounceable names wrote dense books about how language is a system of signs pointing to other signs. How meaning doesn’t come from the “real world” but from the web of relationships between words themselves.

Everyone thought this was academic nonsense.

Turns out, it was a blueprint for ChatGPT.

What we got wrong about AI

We keep asking: “Is it intelligent? Does it understand?”

Wrong questions.

Better question: “How does it create?”

Because here’s what’s actually happening inside these machines: They’re mapping the statistical relationships between every word and every other word in human culture. They’re building a heat map of how language actually works.

Not how we think it should work. How it does work.

The poetry problem

A Large Language Model doesn’t write poems. It writes poetry.

What’s the difference?

Poetry is the potential that lives in language itself—the way words want to dance together, the patterns that emerge when you map meaning mathematically.

A poem is what happens when a human takes that potential and shapes it with intention.

The machine gives us the raw material. We make the art.

Why this matters

Two groups are having the wrong argument:

The AI boosters think we’re building digital brains. The AI critics think we’re destroying human authenticity.

Both are missing the point.

We’re not building intelligence. We’re building culture machines. Tools that can compress and reconstruct the patterns of human expression.

That’s not a bug. It’s the feature.

The real opportunity

Instead of fearing these machines or anthropomorphizing them, we could learn to read them.

They’re showing us something we’ve never seen before: a statistical map of human culture. The ideological patterns that shape how we think and write and argue.

Want to understand how conspiracy theories spread? Ask the machine to write about mathematics and watch it drift toward culture war talking points.

Want to see how certain ideas cluster together in our collective imagination? Feed it a prompt and trace the semantic pathways it follows.

What comes next

We need a new kind of literacy. Not just reading and writing, but understanding how these culture machines work. How they compress meaning. How they generate new combinations from old patterns.

We need to become rhetoricians again. Students of how language shapes reality.

Because these machines aren’t replacing human creativity.

They’re revealing how human creativity actually works.

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The future belongs to those who can read the poetry in the machine.

Based on a post by Henry Farrell

What’s possible and what’s required? It’s still surprising to me that some of these ideas aren’t widely held, because they seem so clear to me:

Skill is a choice. Talent is overrated, and if we choose to get better at something, we probably can.

Responsibility is a privilege. It’s not given to us, it’s taken. When we choose to be on the hook for something, it makes our work better.

The benefit of the doubt creates connection. When we exclude people based on surface judgments, we penalize each other.

Agency is our recognition of all three of these ideas, in one.