Except… if you look at the last hundred years, we haven’t seen many useful advances in mousetraps, despite the number of people who have tried. It feels like an infinite market, so it attracts a lot of entrants.
You probably won’t come up with a better mousetrap. But you might find the empathy and focus to find a small group of people with a more specific problem and solve it for them in a way that earns you trust, traction and word of mouth.
Who is Nicole Bennet and why does she keep calling me?
A few times a day, a voice pretending to be someone named Nicole rings my cell, and in a petulant, entitled voice, insists she’s calling me about a loan that I never applied for. I’ve never interacted, I block each number, but the calls keep coming.
AT&T certainly has the technology to block calls like this, but they don’t have an incentive to do so.
At the same time, many subscribers to this blog don’t receive their emails because Google has a clear incentive to move the emails to the promotions folder. Google benefits by forcing marketers and writers to pay them for access to folks’ attention.
Merged medical practices have an incentive to charge patients more, push doctors to work even more unreasonable hours and cut corners on medical outcomes.
Instagram has an incentive to make people feel as though they’re falling behind unless they adhere to the algorithm. And Amazon has an incentive to denature the business model of most of their merchants by charging for advertising, even though they know the ads serve neither merchants nor customers.
Tim Wu is our best explainer of how, without boundaries, networks always spiral out of control. His new book is twenty years too late or exactly what we need right now.
42 years ago, Apple’s 1984 ad ran on the Super Bowl. Once. It’s generally considered the most effective ad of its kind, creating a legend and also a trap.
Was this ad the reason the Mac is still around?
Or was it Regis McKenna’s work in getting Steve on the cover of more than 20 magazines the month it launched?
After all, they say that getting the word out is the key to marketing.
That’s not what did it.
It was Guy Kawasaki’s tireless year of evangelizing the platform to software developers, creating an ecosystem that made the Mac useful from the start.
And it was Susan Kare’s and Bill Atkinson’s unreasonable standards that made the experience of using the Mac unlike its alternatives–an advantage that has lasted half a century.
Why do books and records have standard pricing? You’d think that a record from Miles Davis or Patricia Barber would cost more than one from the local garage band.
Economists tie themselves into knots trying to explain why wine and handbags have such wide price variation, but tickets to movies do not. They invoke “credence goods” and “focal point coordination” and “transaction utility” and “cost disease.” Darby, Karni, Schelling, Baumol, Thaler—a parade of Nobel-adjacent thinkers building elegant models to explain what’s sitting right in front of them.
It’s simpler than that, I think. People don’t go into publishing or music to make a profit (not most of them, not the smart ones). They do it to create culture and to be part of a culture. They’re not going to brag about making a lot of money, they’ll brag about finding art or sharing it.
Meanwhile, down the street at the hedge fund, the entire point is to find and capture price differences. Leaving money on the table isn’t just a missed opportunity—it’s an embarrassment. It means you weren’t paying attention.
The pricing norms in any industry reflect the identity of the people who built it.
Hermès could auction Birkin bags and make more money. They don’t, because scarcity-through-restraint is the elegant move, the identity-consistent move. It’s what people like them do.
Movie theaters were built by showmen who inherited vaudeville instincts: pack the house, give ’em a show, make it up on popcorn. Uniform ticket pricing isn’t economically optimal. It’s simply what people like us have always done.
This explains why industries are so stable—and why disruption feels like betrayal.
When concert tickets went dynamic, the backlash wasn’t about economics. It was moral outrage. Artists who adopted surge pricing weren’t just changing strategy; they were declaring themselves to be a different kind of person. The fans noticed.
Amazon didn’t share publishing’s allergy to profit. Ticketmaster didn’t share the old promoter’s loyalty to fans. They weren’t optimizing within the culture—they were violating it.
The price variation in any market reflects not what the market will bear, but what the people in that market can bear to charge.
The economists will keep building models. But if you want to understand why things cost what they cost, don’t ask what’s efficient. Ask what kind of person would be embarrassed to charge more. Or embarrassed not to.
A user interface, a map or a recipe all require empathy.
That’s because the person writing it knows something the reader doesn’t. In fact, that’s the only reason to do it.
But because instructions exist to bridge this gap, we benefit by understanding and focusing on the gap. The instructions aren’t there to remind you of how to do something. They serve to help someone who doesn’t know, learn.
Here’s a useful way to begin:
Assume less.
Yes, the person reading your recipe knows what a knife is, but do they know you keep your mustard in the food cabinet, not the fridge?
List every step you could imagine, and then list some more.
Once the overdone, step-by-step instructions exist, begin removing them. The interface for your induction cooktop probably doesn’t benefit from having icons so obscure they’re meaningless, but it also doesn’t need every step for boiling water enunciated in capital letters.
In my experience in reading instructions, it’s easier for the user to skip over steps that are too complete than it is to try to guess what the person writing the directions had in mind.
We are story-processing creatures, and the most effective stories are often embodied in people. Living examples of the lesson we’re trying to learn and the posture we hope to model.
Heroes, mentors, martyrs, examples, icons, avatars, archetypes, and even villains.
Sometimes those people are fictional, living in an anecdote and refined to form a legend.
The leverage of media, though, has made history more powerful than any made-up story ever could be.
When we rehearse and amplify the story, we can’t help but make the person less real. The story has a purpose, and its purpose is to remind us of who we could be and how we move forward.
This is what saints do for us. This is why we put pictures on the wall or invoke the memories of the people who came before us.
Reminded of our heroes, we know we can improve. We can work harder for justice, find more compassion and show up as a contribution. We can look at the ordinary moments when someone chose to keep going and realize that choice is available to us as well.
There are so many extraordinary people who have come before. It’s on us to choose our heroes wisely and to do the hard work to honor the contributions they made. Even when it’s difficult and unpopular. Especially then.
Today is a fine day to consider who’s on our wall.
Celebrity gossip, fortune-telling and superstitions are the original forms of fake news, but now it’s increasingly widespread. In every field from science to world affairs, it’s troubling to see. People who are familiar with reality can’t understand why it’s popular–in a low-trust world, why would people engage with made-up noise disguised as information?
The irony is that it’s easier to trust fake news. It’s consistent, simplified, coherent and predictable, all the things that humans look for when we’re seeking solace.
The challenge for all of us is that while it’s easier to trust in the short run, it ultimately disappoints.
The trust we earn with complex and consistent analyses of reality takes more effort, but it’s worth more in the long run.
What sort of trust are you selling? And what are we buying?
Kevin Wilson wrote a great short story about the workers who have to sort the tiles that go into a Scrabble box. The hero is responsible for searching through the pile for the letter ‘q’. All day. On commission.
At this absurd level, it’s clear that the game isn’t made this way. They’d never produce all 26 letters, mix them up and then sort them. It pays to be thoughtful about the production process, so you simply make what you need in the first place.
But now, particularly with digital output, we’re doing it backwards. Making lots of stuff and then sorting it later. There’s very little cost to making more, and it’s getting more and more time-consuming to find what we’re looking for.
We’re replacing the magic of Google’s ability to sort through the miscellaneous with a new system based on simply making more, on demand.
Trust and attention remain the building blocks of brands and culture. We ignore this at our peril. There are no good shortcuts.
Once a company hits a plateau in its market share, the pressure begins to mount.
Investors want more of a return, shareholders want the stock price to go up. Managers pay attention to the metrics they’re held to, and the squeeze begins.
At first, the squeeze focuses on efficiency. Cut obvious costs without diminishing customer delight or the conditions that the employees work under.
That doesn’t pay off forever, particularly in competitive markets.
At this point, there are two options:
The first is to reengage with the market. Innovate. Create opportunities for customers to find more opportunities and value. Use the resources you have to make something better.
The other, which is far more common, is to squeeze people–imagining that they might not notice, and then, with full knowledge that they do, but betting that they don’t have much of a choice.
Diminish the quality of life for employees. Demand more, offer less. Increase stress and forget what the original focus of the organization might have been.
Raise prices but lower quality and portion size and service at the same time.
Fedex decided that answering the phone on the first ring, happily honoring their guarantee and bringing extraordinary service to customers wasn’t as important as increasing their bottom line. Phone trees, unattended email boxes and plenty of fine print all exist to squeeze a few more dollars out of their existing sales.
JP Morgan Chase actively chooses to maximize short-term profit, betting that customers are too entrenched to switch. They’ll invest in coal, amplify credit card debt and outsource whatever they can to increase their margins.
If you use either of these companies, or any of their peers, can you honestly say that they care more and deliver more value than they used to?
Cory Doctorow describes the monopolistic dead ends built into most corporate financing schemes. Enshittification isn’t the decay that comes from neglect. It’s the active squeeze, trading the path of better for the short-term goal of making a few more pennies.
When an organization races to the top, they’re very clear about what they’re doing. They’ll engage their team and the market in a mutual dance toward possibility and improvement.
But when an organization is focused on the squeeze, they know precisely what they’re doing, but will obfuscate and deny instead of admitting it.
I had no idea what “mad magazine autostereogram, cutecore” meant, but it was enough for Midjourney to create this:
Older generations have always been left out of the codewords and trends of the makers of pop culture, but the gatekeepers and lack of shelf space kept pop, popular. There are only 40 songs in the Top 40, only a few hit network TV shows.
Three things have changed:
The long tail means that there’s room for more. Always. As many as 25% of all Spotify songs have only been listened to a few times. The average video on YouTube is seen once a day.
AI generation of art, music, video and writing means that the pace of creation is going to grow exponentially.
Memetic identities, genres and codewords are easier for AI to begin with than complex images. And so, new genres multiply, get exaggerated, evolve and morph into new genres. It’s genetic material, run amok.
The end result is that pop is not popular anymore. It may never be again. The center was a moment in time, but the edges are now everywhere.
We should plan accordingly.
January 15, 2026
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