Back about five years ago, I got a call from Steve Hayden, a friend and mentor. Steve had not only been the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, he probably won more new business for that agency than any ten other people. He was also the copywriter on Apple's "1984" commercial, a spot many people regard as the best or most-famous or most-important ever.
Steve had a client who needed manifesto-ing help in addition to good-old-fashioned thinking. Self-effacing as Steve was, he didn't feel he had the stamina to do the day-in and day-out of the assignment and he called to see if he could rope me in.
As the Barbara Stanwyck-character said about the Henry Fonda-character in Preston Sturges' funniest movie, "The Lady Eve," "I need him like the axe needs the turkey." In other words, I jumped at the chance to take on the assignment.
I did, to be honest, about 97.9-percent of the writing. Steve, as he did so well, gave me about 97.9-percent of the confidence I needed. He pushed me ahead, would say every few lines, "that's good," and once in a while would ask me why I dropped something I shouldn't have dropped or would, gently, point out a logic leap or insert or remove a word that made all the different.
Somewhere amid the thousand or so photos on my iphone, I have a picture of Steve holding up the check I mailed him with his social security number on it. We needed it for tax purposes.
Here's a bit of a manifesto we wrote for the investment firm.
The key in the writing above and the point of today's post is the phrase "unintended side-effects."
It's really hard to know what's going to happen next when you push something forward. No one knew when the car became everywhere that before-long cities would become clogged, our air would be full of lead, carbon levels would increase, the planet would warm and much of the thirty-or-so-percent of the earth's population that lives within thirty miles of the coast would be imperiled by rising sea levels.
Unintended consequences are a good reason for brakes. For looking before leaping, for regulation, which is regarded as oh-so-archaic and out-of-date today.
We don't really know what the unintended consequences of so-called artificial intelligence will be any more than we could anticipate the deadly effects of widespread tobacco use or "smart" phones. In a century or so, we might look at these "advances" and think of them like we think of the Romans using lead in their pipes--leading to a steady decline, decade after decade in cognitive ability.
What were we thinking?
Not that.
Unintended consequences is a schmancy way of saying we don't know what we're doing. Or as Yogi Berra is said to have said, "We're lost, but we're making good time."
The writer, Roland Fryer, an economics professor at Harvard (I'm impressed by titles like that) starts this way, and you know from sentence one, he's a good writer. Details like the ferry crossing being 527 feet long are rich and interesting:
The ferry crossing from Chappaquiddick to Edgartown, Mass., is only 527 feet long. But no matter how rich or important you are, you have to wait to get on the boat. Sometimes you wait in your car. Sometimes you get out. Someone complains about the line, the weather, our politics or the UPS driver who goes to the front of the queue. Someone else laughs. A conversation begins.
This isn’t a defense of bad maritime logistics. But spending time around that ferry has made me wonder if modern life has undersold inconvenience. We treat waiting as wasted time. Often it is. But sometimes waiting does something useful: It forces people into the same place, with nothing to do, long enough for conversation to begin.
The unintended consequence of all the digital friction-free-ness we've been sold isn't ease and convenience is loneliness, isolation and, I believe, a decline in the general level of work--as well in the general appreciation and tolerance of other people's points of view.
Living as I do by the sea, my little ramshackle cottage is ringed by the rock-lined shore. The stones are often rounded and are roughly soft-ball-sized. As the gentle waves of the sound move in and out the rocks are pushed here and there. They make small abrading sounds something like a single marble streaming down a chute in some sort of kids' game.
It occurred me that the elimination of friction goes against the mighty physical laws of the universe. Mountains rise through friction, continents move, rivers cut through the earth and more.
Fryer puts it this way:
Which brings me back to that ridiculously inconvenient ferry and what I call the friction theory of friendship. The idea is simple: Some inconveniences aren’t merely costs. They are the hidden scaffolding of social life....
This is why friendship is often a product of something else: work, school, church, children, sports, errands, waiting rooms. It is produced not by misery, but by enough common friction to make conversation natural. Modern life has spent decades eliminating that friction. We can work without offices, shop without stores, exercise without gyms and communicate without looking anyone in the eye. Each improvement is defensible, some phenomenal. Together they have made interaction with other people increasingly optional.
Like Fryer, I don't love going to the grocery store. Or the general boorishness when you go to a movie, show or concert. Or the crowds on the subway. Or, most certainly, the inconvenience of going into the office.
Most of these "inconveniences" are enough to pop a blood vessel
But there's the other side to them as well.
I'll call it the "kibbitz-side." The banter with the guy slicing pastrami at Katz's. The "see the game last night" with a stranger on the Lexington line. The foot-shuffle in a crowded elevator and the "are-you-getting-off-here" dance with someone who inadvertently jostles you, then follows up with a winsome, as she gets off on 4.
There's a big difference in watching a funny movie in a theater and watching it through your earpods. You might see and hear better at home. You might be more comfortable. You can pause the action when you need a pee. But in that theater, laughter begets laughter and you feel, even if just for a moment, a part of something.
But the unintended consequences of our efficient and frictionless world is our forgetting, our abnegation of the power of friction. Sharing stresses, looks, laughs, flirtations. Little meaningless moments that mean so much.
Friction-less means less-humanity as well.
For better, yes.
But mostly for worse.
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