Welcome to the sixth weekly edition of Nowism.
This Week
Threads laid bare
One of the least important but biggest news stories this past week was of course Meta finding the source code for Twitter, copying it, and calling it Threads. Threads offers Meta the potential for 400% more controversy, and 5% more revenue with zero thinking or imagination or innovation, which I guess is good maths for some.
There are some slightly interesting but not that important questions raised by all this. What does this mean for Facebook? What does it mean for Twitter? What does it mean for brands? In an attempt to arrive at some answers, I wrote this grumpy piece about it all.
Recent adoption records (held by ChatGPT) were smashed with 1 million people “signing up” in the first hour, 10 million in 7 hours, and probably about 100 million users by the time this is published on Sunday.
Meta’s share price has a more muted reaction, ending the week up a modest 1.2% after launch - versus the Nasdaq losing 0.9% over the same period. Perhaps investors can remember Google Plus reaching 300m users before collapsing under its own weight of emptiness. It’s engagement that matters, not signups.
As impressive as 100 million new accounts is; these are not active participants, they are people agreeing to a new feature within Instagram. 100 million users means 95% of Instagram users can’t be bothered to try it yet. I do wonder if Zuckerberg knows what he’s trying to do other than get one over on Elon. For the time being, the platform, to my taste, is one of the worse feeds I’ve ever seen.
Rather than the speed of growth, it’s the retention rate that matters. Something we won’t ever really know because Meta decided to make deleting accounts all but impossible for everyone except the most spiteful.
One trick I’ve used to ponder my news diet is to imagine all my digital media was printed out each day. What if my Linkedin feed was a magazine delivered every morning to my home? What if my Twitter feed was a newspaper? What would I feel like finding a copy of my Instagram printed left out on a bus? I don’t think anything close to the banal drivel of Threads has ever been made.
From abundance to delight?
I was eating a meal with my 15-year-old nephew last night and out of nowhere, he said he wished he’d never used any social media. This remark was unexpected from someone who, relatively speaking, doesn’t seem transfixed, traumatized, or even bothered by social media. A long chat ensued.
It got me thinking. How is there so much new stuff in the world that we don’t really love or want, and what new things are there that bring us joy?
There is no doubt that technology is improving rapidly in all areas, including connectivity, battery technology, solar power, LEDs, and new materials like graphene. This leads to a constantly expanding range of new opportunities and possibilities, with better and newer technologies creating even more potential permutations. The environment for innovation has never been more fertile, and the possibilities have never been more exciting.
However, have you downloaded any new apps in the last five years that you still use? Have any new business models caught your attention? Are there any new concepts that have tempted you? Have you been excited by any new products? Is there any VC funding announcement that fills you with enthusiasm?
There are many directions to take this discussion, rather than the standard complaint about how things used to be better. We can talk about the way VC is designed to reduce risk by recycling the past. We can talk about this being a classic mid-stage adoption phenomenon. But what strikes me is that when we endow tech leaders with enormous power who focus solely on databases and optimization, and not on meaning or vision, we end up viewing people as nothing more than brains and wallets to be exploited.
The balance seems to have shifted from things pulled by people to things pushed on people.
In the last few weeks, we’ve seen that Apple wants us to put a phone on our faces and make it harder to get kids to the dinner table. Is this something people really want?
Meta thinks it’s important to immerse us into another morose loop of scrolling. Or rather, a new way to care what strangers think of us, to chase empty metrics, and to perform and broadcast our life instead of actually living it. Is this important for people, or just important for Meta?
We now have AI to write even more stories, scrape even more content, craft even more emails, and produce even more content.
Then it hit me; everything in the last five years seems to be about more, and never better. It’s this that we need to change. A shift from abundance to delight. Looking at this, perhaps the Nest inventor Tony Fadell can be one hope.
Minimize me
TikTok and the celeb press are ablaze with stories about a class of medications called GLP-1 agonists, which although designed for those with diabetes, it turns out to suppress your appetite, and anecdotally curb other urges from smoking to drinking to shopping, to recreational drug use. So despite costing $200 - $1,000 per month, these could be the first prescription drug that saves you money.
Ozempic has been the most famous, and widely demanded drug over the last year, with stock shortages caused by social media and lax prescribing from online pharmacies mirroring the chaos of Adderall, but now Retatrutide shows even more promise.
You may be wondering why I'm covering this topic in a newsletter about technology's impact on life and business. I believe it's a fascinating debate about the role of money, beauty, and science in shaping society's future. It's reminiscent of debates about genetically engineered children in movies like Gattaca.
There is a popular saying in some parts of the world that goes, "there is no such thing as being ugly - only poor." So, if it costs $1,000 per month and zero willpower to be thin, and thinner people earn more money, what are the consequences? What new societal lines will emerge, and what happens when the world's greatest business model - people paying $1,000 per month to stay thin - takes off?
The pharmaceutical industry is a fascinating area with incredible new dynamics and questions that I'll explore in a future deep dive. For instance, we can examine how the worlds of pharma, beauty, and wellness are converging. We can also observe the growth and impact of online prescriptions and looser prescription laws. Furthermore, we can analyze the impact of empowered consumers, changes brought by social media or self-diagnosis, the ever-growing elderly population, the move towards consumer brands in pharma, and even direct-to-consumer. There's a lot to explore.
Is AI growth already slowing?
Although I promised to write less about AI, here are some statistics on slowing AI downloads and lower traffic. It could be due to kids going on vacation, companies clamping down on usage, or a more limited appeal than we originally assumed. Another possibility is that AI is not yet useful for most people.
Chart of the month
Ah, nature is healing as new crypto startups finally reach zero.
Things I liked this week
It’s always quite weird to me that McKinsey can predict the value of the Metaverse to be $5 trillion, Citi can predict it to become a $13 trillion thing, and then when it turns out to be worth nothing, nobody loses their job, or even looks a bit embarrassed.
Honestly, as someone always very keen on recycling, I’ve absolutely no idea what can be thrown away, what can be reused efficiently, what is separated then just burnt anyway, so I’m hopeful about this AI system to “see” rubbish. I’m always amazed how carbon emissions have become the big sexy cause in green issues, not the incredible waste we chuck away thoughtlessly.
Allbirds is completing its pivot from slippers for the slack class to “sustainable wool” with a new shoe called the “M0.0NSHOT” which is promised to be the world’s “First Net Zero Carbon Shoe.” I’ll do a piece on green-washing soon, but this shoe seems genuinely sustainable. I would add, however, that real sustainability would be a shoe that both lasts a long time and also seems fashionable for a long time, of which this seems like neither.
The review landscape is weird. I’ve no idea why Google or Amazon shows any reviews from anyone who hasn’t bothered to leave five prior reviews and weigh the score based on how many reviews they’ve done. But until that time, the FTC is working quite hard to ban fake reviews.
One day I want to do a big exposé on quite how much of the digital ad world is a murky mess of fake. Far greater than anyone imagines, and far more pointless and wasteful. But until then you’ll have to read this piece about how AI is turbocharging it.
Little ones
A crisis is not always an opportunity for transformation — this new study explains why.
This is a fun way to see every single advert placed in any country by any brand on Google. It’s a bit depressing how bad most are.
From audience selection to setting the scene, to the subjective validation loop, fun reading on how LLMs follow the psychics’ con. I always felt like most AI text output, like a horoscope, was as good as we wanted it to be.
Texan households are making up to $150 per day selling solar power.
I enjoyed this critique of the Three Horizons model by JP Castlin.
A fun piece on how houses and other buildings could be recycled.
Thoughtful writing on the issues with self-driving cars.
Prediction of the Month
A Chinese car company will buy rights to the Saab brand this year.
Chinese car companies are about to thrust themselves upon the world (less so the US), they make good cars that are increasingly totally alike. The only way to differentiate is to either spend months and billions on expensive brand building or find an old brand worth bringing to life, like how SAIC did with MG.
The rights to the Saab name are held by the old defense and aerospace parent, who have assets of $7.2 billion. But I’d guess the license to use Saab branding could be worth a few billion.
While we're on the subject, I also believe that Aston Martin, a company with a market capitalization of only $3 billion, is worth significantly more as a lifestyle brand. Realistically, these days it’s a tiny car company that loses money making stunning and incredible, yet flawed cars, while its brand is used to develop luxury condos, submarines, planes, watches, and more. Perhaps Geely will step up and buy out the rest of it.
The section on delight over abundance is so thought-provoking... thanks Tom.
I agree that the "pushers" have been over-active recently, but I do think there's a role for both the pullers and the pushers. If we're always 100% comfortable, pulling when we see fit, we're stunting our growth and limiting our potential (I'm guilty of this on an individual level...). Sometimes we need a push!
Thank you! I enjoyed reading this critical perspective on the reality..