Zig Zig
Fast-following has gone on for decades, and whose strategy are we following?
“When they zig, we zag.” Sensible words, but words probably not uttered in scholarly publishing in 30 years or so, as I discussed recently in a post entitled, “Monkey See, Monkey Do.” There, the idea of groupthink was front and center.
How this manifests into strategies is what matters, and for a couple of decades, it’s been a period of, “When they zig, we zig.”
Being fast-followers of tech trends became an obsession at early across an industry spending most of its money on technologists. For a time, that seemed a prudent strategy. But, like all things with momentum, if you don’t steer and adjust speed, you can easily overshoot.
If you don’t zag, you can straightline into a wall.
Our single-mindedness to zig when the tech leaders zig seems to come from two classic sources — hope and fear.
Those who are hopeful about tech pursuits follow trends in a sort of reflexive good faith. It may be naïve, or they may sense opportunities, or both, but that naïveté isn’t aging well as the exploitation of hopes and the naïve becomes all the more apparent, making the opportunism bite back.
Those who are motivated by fear seem focused on remaining silent in order to not alienate the currently rich and powerful. They don’t want to stand before an angry board convinced tech is always worth pursuing, or reveal a deflating truth to a boss whose strategy is tech-infused noodles.
- As Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project said on a recent podcast about AI doomerism and its religious and financial motivations, “Corporate America is filled with people who are not very good at managing, and they have bought into the hype, too.”
Just in the past couple of years, we’ve seen publishers almost mindlessly chase AI aspirations and one supposes riches because that’s what everyone else has been doing.
For the tech hopeful, the short-term rewards were so clear and defensible. A big licensing deal. Some cool promotion. Buffing up the brand. Beating the competition to the table. And more.
For the fearful, silence was more than prudent. It was a survival skill.
As a result, hopeful and fearful governance bodies aren’t providing a check on tech enthusiasms and hidden vulnerabilities roiling their strategies — ones that don’t fit mission or make long-term strategic sense.
These bodies seem just as spellbound and befuddled as their zig-zig management teams.
After a few decades, we can see what a generation or two of this has yielded in a scientific system now run by the creatures of the Internet:
- More measles cases in the US since RFK, Jr., appointment than in the previous 25 years combined, with an outbreak topping 900 in Pennsylvania alone
- Scientists fleeing the US for Europe and Canada, moving the center of gravity for science away from the US, even as China continues to invest
- Academics generally being poached by China, Europe, and Canada
- Tech oligarchs running most of our lives without consequence or concern
- Weakened laws, norms, and standards as those interested in exploitation whittle away at barriers
If scientific publishers had deployed technology that didn’t chase the attention economy, the consumer Internet, the general search engine, and so forth, and instead deployed it to serve each community as needed with boundaries between these communities, high standards, and reasonable norms, who knows what the world of science might look like today.
The road not taken . . .
Would we have better science? Would we have a less-confused public? Would the grifters and clowns toying with climate, health, and “consciousness” research have lacked the basic nutrients they need to thrive? Would the public feel more confident about science because it was still respectable and expert?
- Yes, there were problems in the “old way,” but we haven’t actually addressed any of those you might bring to mind.
- Tell me what we’ve solved by fast-following tech. Please. I am genuinely hoping someone can convince me there were benefits.
But fast-follow we did. They zigged, we zigged.
The Internet pivoted to ads and producer-pays. So did we.
The Internet pivoted to scale and speed. So did we.
The Internet pivoted to more information as categorically a good thing. So did we.
The Internet embraced LLMs dressed up as “superintelligence.” So did we.
Since then, we’ve found how corrupting, sloppy, and malleable all these things have made information.
We should have zagged.
