Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #122
From everyone sounding like ChatGPT to survival of the greediest, the tiny team or botscaling era, sacred work, left vs right → up vs down, system leverage points, commoning, and types of deadlines
Hello and welcome to the 95 new subscribers who joined us since last week.
THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: You Sound Like ChatGPT // Survival Of The Greediest // The Botscaling Era
📊 Numbers: AI Attention Capture
🌀 Re-Framings: Traditional Work → Sacred Work // Left vs Right → Up vs Down // Commoning
🧬 Frameworks: Places To Intervene In A System
🎨 Works: Polaroid // Types of Deadlines // Teenage Engineering Choir
⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes
🖼️ Framings
Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.
🗣️ You Sound Like ChatGPT
The more we use ChatGPT, the more we sound like it. And more crucially, by adopting AI speak, we are losing language cues that speak to our authenticity and humaneness, to our attention and care, and to our sense of humor. As with so many other things, language is becoming more machine-like.
“Join any Zoom call, walk into any lecture hall, or watch any YouTube video, and listen carefully. Past the content and inside the linguistic patterns, you’ll find the creeping uniformity of AI voice. Words like “prowess” and “tapestry,” which are favored by ChatGPT, are creeping into our vocabulary, while words like “bolster,” “unearth,” and “nuance,” words less favored by ChatGPT, have declined in use. Researchers are already documenting shifts in the way we speak and communicate as a result of ChatGPT — and they see this linguistic influence accelerating into something much larger. […]
But it’s not just that we’re adopting AI language — it’s about how we’re starting to sound. Even though current studies mostly focus on vocabulary, researchers suspect that AI influence is starting to show up in tone, too — in the form of longer, more structured speech and muted emotional expression. […]
[Mor Naaman, professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech] has identified three levels of human signals that we’ve lost in adopting AI into our communication. The first level is that of basic humanity signals, cues that speak to our authenticity as a human being like moments of vulnerability or personal rituals, which say to others, “This is me, I’m human.” The second level consists of attention and effort signals that prove “I cared enough to write this myself.” And the third level is ability signals which show our sense of humor, our competence, and our real selves to others. It’s the difference between texting someone, “I’m sorry you’re upset” versus “Hey sorry I freaked at dinner, I probably shouldn’t have skipped therapy this week.” One sounds flat; the other sounds human. […]
This isn’t a question about whether AI will continue shaping how we speak — because it will — but whether we’ll actively choose to preserve space for the verbal quirks and emotional messiness that make communication recognizably, irreplaceably human.”
» You sound like ChatGPT by Sara Parker
🤑 Survival Of The Greediest
The unbelievable, outrageous, should-cause-a-massive-revolt gap between CEO and worker pay illustrates clearly that value gains aren’t shared fairly anymore. Which is why the framing of greed is so fitting and should be used much more when talking about inequality.
“Economic inequality is often treated as inevitable and constant. There will always be winners, we’re told, and there will always be losers. […] But the facts of rising income and wealth inequality — and rapidly so — are hard to ignore. And few economic measures capture it quite as starkly as the yawning gap between CEO and worker pay. […]
If the average employee wanted to earn what Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Fran Horowitz makes over a seven-year CEO tenure (the average for S&P 500 companies), they’d have to work for… 42,000 years. That’s essentially the span of time between the first cave paintings and today. […]
The meteoric rise in CEO compensation over the past few decades hasn’t happened in a vacuum. It’s been aided and abetted by several forces — including deregulation, financialisation, weakened labour protections, etc., all of which allowed large corporations and executives to get richer and richer at the direct expense of working people. As a result, while CEO pay skyrocketed — by a staggering 1,460% between the late 1970s and today, […] — the average worker’s wages barely budged. According to the EPI, they grew just 18.1% in the same period. […]
We’re clearly being squeezed harder and harder, with 71% of the world’s population now living in places where inequality is on the rise while those at the top keep padding their fortunes. Pointing this out isn’t envy. It’s common sense. […]
It’s worth remembering that greed hasn’t always been humanity’s Achilles’ heel, even if it might feel like it sometimes now. The values that become central to our systems and stories can always be changed.
But if we’re not careful, and we wait too long to change them, it won’t be us ‘eating the rich.’ They’ll eat our world, then us, and then probably themselves, too. Because the old myths were right: greed is boundless. And no matter how many forests the ultra-wealthy tear down for their feasts, their hunger will only grow.”
» Survival Of The Greediest by
🤖 The Botscaling Era
Startups used to be all about growing fast, hiring rapidly, amassing ever bigger valuations, and growing their user or customer base. While not all of that is unimportant now, the new core focus metric, driven by advances in AI, seems to be revenue-per-employee. From blitzscaling to botscaling.
“In the era of startup “blitzscaling,” which lasted roughly from Facebook’s IPO in 2012 until WeWork’s bankruptcy filing in 2023, market capitalization and total capital raised were prized metrics. The ultimate milestone was reaching “unicorn status” — a $1 billion valuation that was often accompanied by rapid hiring.
These days, bragging rights are going to entrepreneurs who keep headcount the lowest.
If blitzscaling was powered by smartphones and the cloud, today’s faster, leaner growth comes courtesy of AI assistants, advisers, coders and marketers. […]
Jeffrey Bussgang, a partner at Flybridge Capital Partners and a lecturer at Harvard Business School, says that the new holy-grail metric isn’t a billion-dollar valuation but revenue per employee. In talks, Bussgang cites a website called the “Tiny Teams Hall of Fame” that lists companies with just a handful of employees claiming tens or even hundreds of million in annual revenue. He refers to it as “scaling without growing.” Goodbye, blitzscaling; hello, botscaling. […]
Entrepreneurs have long balanced out their skills by finding a co-founder who complements them. Visionary Steve Jobs had hardware guru Steve Wozniak; designers Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia co-founded Airbnb with their developer roommate Nathan Blecharczyk. But as AI improves, it can provide a growing number of complementary skillsets — even the business concept itself.”
» Silicon Valley’s ‘Tiny Team’ Era is Here by Walter Frick
📈 Numbers
A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:
👀 AI Attention Capture
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