Future Here Now: Mediated -> Unmediated. How does that change us?
Signals
One of the big shifts that our brains have not caught up to yet is the fact that the age-old sources of wisdom and guidance don’t seem to have that power anymore. It’s not just that we've got more voices available to listen to, but also that we are more of aware of all the things they sometimes fail to tell us (as recent complaints about traditional outlets’ coverage of the presidential campaign have highlighted, again).
That’s a huge shift. And one that we’re not all dealing with well, as the rise of conspiracy theories and the worn our refrain of “fake news” shows us.
But mediated → unmediated isn’t just about news. We are also seeing this trend develop across finance, business management, public policy and more. And where we’re not seeing unmediated information in action, we’re often seeing grassroots pressure to decentralize the ownership of information — and power.
If you hold a position of authority, of any type, this trend should give you some discomfort. It’s a direct challenge to the listen-to-me-I’m-the-expert framework that most of us have taken for granted. Unmediated information means that no one can unilaterally control the narrative, and that means that our choices are to double down on force, or figure out how to collaborate. And the first approach might work for a minute, but in most circumstances we can’t pull that off for long.
Today’s stories look at the impacts of unmediated information from three perspectives: what people are paid, how they work and how they remember when memory falls apart.
Radical Pay Transparency
https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/gen-z-battles-widening-pay-gap-one-tiktok-post-at-a-time.html
What a company paid a certain individual has long been a closely-held secret - and one that many employers forbade you to talk about. While that might have protected some people’ privacy, it also made it easier for employers to pay people of different backgrounds widely differing salaries, even when their work was the same. Women, younger employees and people of color have been shown over and over again to bear the brunt of that silence.
But when you can share and find information without direct mediation, that landscape can change. Fast.
This quote from the article particularly illustrates this unmediated point of view:
One online contributor is Los Angeles resident Kristy Nguyen, who works as an Aldi supermarket manager, night security guard, and thriving content creator. She uses her own income, budgeting, and savings practices to help people manage theirs. The 23-year-old told The Post that Gen-Zers' decisions to reveal what they earn online is second nature, and that they do it to raise awareness about pay discrepancies in ways that would have never occurred to older, tighter-lipped cohorts.
"A lot of that shift has to do with the fact that we, as a younger generation, are more open on social media," Nguyen, 23, told The Post. "We feel like if we're more open and vulnerable about it, it can make a difference for other people."
So if you’re a manager or a boss, what’s the best way to respond to this? Do you try to punish anyone who’s sharing that information? Do you make everyone’s information available? Do you create some kind of opt in system? What would you do?
The trust-dependent social market
Social media looks unmediated when it comes to developments like the pay transparency above, but in other situations it’s a highly controlled and centralized environment. In most western countries, we assume that a platform like Amazon or EBay and the built-in review process will protect us from getting swindled. And we still do that even though sites like Amazon has been shown to permit scraping our data and online shops like Etsy have become dumping grounds for cheap mass produced items.
But if you live in a part of the world where enforcement of consumer protections doesn’t happen, the promises of an EBay-type vendor don’t mean much. And as this article from The Economist details, African online businesses are relying on direct personal relationships via WhatsApp and Facebook rather than the search functions and sales systems that westerners use:
But perhaps the most important motive to use social media is trust, which small businesses identify as the biggest barrier to customers shopping online. Many Africans are wary of buying from strangers, especially in countries where consumer protection is weak. Social media have a personal touch that faceless retail platforms lack.
Some startups are trying to build on that appeal. “People buy based on trust and relationships, not necessarily based on brands,” says Felix Manford, a Ghanaian entrepreneur who co-founded Tendo, a platform that connects suppliers to traders, in 2021. Users of its app select a product they wish to sell, then receive images and a personalised payment link which they can post on their social media. Another example is Vendorstack, in Nigeria, which helps small businesses create their own web page to chat with customers and sell online, backed by verification and escrow accounts to reduce fraud. If social commerce is DIY, then these apps are like flatpack furniture, offering ready-made parts that anyone can assemble.
In some respects, the reliance on personal relationships for sales feels like a throwback, but in other ways it could be the future of retail, especially as unscrupulous actors continue to work around conventional sales platforms’ protections - and as the Big Tech platforms themselves squirm away from any attempts to get them to act transparently. From this perspective, the DIY relationship-based sales strategy might make perfect sense. In an unmediated (or unreliably-mediated) world, trust might be the strongest reason to buy.
How do you feel about this? Would you rather buy or sell with someone you know, or would you prefer anonymity? Do you see any part of online business going in this direction?
Your story, your memory. Even when memory fades.
Years ago, I gave my mother one of those fill-in-your-life-history books. I had heard so many vivid stories from her growing up, and I didn’t want them to get lost to time. But I was a young working mother with two small kids living at the opposite end of the state, and I didn’t have the time to sit with her and write down or record all of the stories that she had tossed off while folding laundry or drying dishes as a kid.
She never did it. I think she was intimidated by the prospect of all those blank pages, or she didn’t believe her stories were worth writing down. When I found the book after her death, the binding looked brand new.
This story is specifically about recording stories to help Alzheimer’s patients, but I can’t help but think that maybe this software could have helped her overcome that hesitation, even though she never lost her lucidity:
The core function of bAIgrapher is to gather narratives from patients and their loved ones, employing digital interviews as the medium. These collected memories then converge into personalized biographies, a tangible connection to their past.
These biographies take the form of printed books or engaging audiobooks, providing Alzheimer’s patients with a unique channel to revisit cherished memories.
The driving force behind bAIgrapher is a finely-tuned large language Model (LLM) AI system, drawing wisdom from over 400 biographies. It seamlessly combines its prowess with complementary systems to craft captivating life stories.
You can find a video of the process at the bottom of the article.
In years past, the biggest barrier to developing a personal history like this might have been getting affordable access to a printer. We’ve developed technology more recently to capture that without an expensive publishing run of more books than we ever needed, but we still have the age old barrier of the blank page - the fear of writing, confusion over where to start - that keeps so many stories like my mother’s in the realm of ephemeral spoken word. And if that was too hard for my mother, who could certainly write, imagine how impossible that would be for a person experiencing Alzheimers.
The power of a technology like this isn’t just in its ability to help a patient, although that of course is huge. The great opportunity of AI might be a whole new level of unmediated communication - a system that makes it possible for people with Alzheimers, or just anxiety about writing, to tell their own story in something much closer to their own voice than they have ever had access to before.
Done correctly, the move from mediated to unmediated communication isn’t just about a Wild West of deepfakes and conspiracy theories.
It’s also about giving a new, direct voice to people of all kinds who have been historically stifled.