Party like it is 1999

 The early days of the internet were wild. Even the most staid businesses started acting as if all the assumptions behind their business model had suddenly become invalid. I recall rooms full of ageing executives trying to pretend they understood presentations by youngsters full of jargon and devoid of true content. It was the time to be a faker.

 

I had my best business idea at this time. I made a half-hearted effort to convince Shell that our global station network, with parking, space, security and great locations would make an ideal fit with a start-up few had heard of called Amazon. Amazon worried that people would not order valuable or large things to be left at their homes, and it was holding back their expansion from books. I still think I was right, but knew even then that being right did not win any prizes. Still, I wish I had tried harder. I might have made a real difference.

 

A year later and the whole edifice collapsed. I had just been given a job trying to create an e-business for a part of Shell, and I think I was lucky. I was one of the many emperors strutting the world at the time with no clothes, and the collapse covered my nakedness and gave me a few months to segway into a more suitable job.

 

Reading The Economist last week made me wonder if we are in a phase that is a repeat of that frenzy. There are certainly similarities. Every article within the business section carried its own evidence.

 

Bartleby wrote about Theranos and the trial of Elizabeth Holmes. It seems barely credible that a company could attract such investment when its sole product did not work at all. Surely many of the employees must have suspected this? Surely the endless rounds of due diligence by investors must have included a review of the efficacy of the product? It seems not. The only thing the employees were watching was the company valuation. The only thing the investors were watching were other investors, sure that the herd could drive up the value and determined to be part of the greedy stampede. The story comes straight from 1999.

 

The main article was about charging electric vehicles. We are supposed to believe that EV’s will dominate the roads within a few years, but it is clear that the business model suffers from a major flaw – charging. Anybody who does not have a charger at home is in big trouble, because currently it takes all night to charge a vehicle just for a typical pattern of use. The next generation of faster chargers might just work if they are at people’s offices, but what about people who live in an apartment and don’t work in an office with a huge car park, ie most of us living in cities? There are on street chargers emerging, but they are too slow, often broken or blocked, and rarely in places where people want to spend a large chunk of their day. The super-fast chargers on highways currently take a full hour to add 400km of range. It takes me two minutes to add that range in my regular car. Who has a full hour to stand around?

 

No doubt the technology will develop, but wow, it has a long way to go. And my main takeaway is that not enough people are working on these pinch points and the ones that are do not have enough skills. GM’s solution is to put chargers in their dealerships. Think about how dumb that is. Reading this article was one of the few fleeting moments I wished I still worked with Shell. My skills could be helping with this.

 

Another article discussed phone apps for mental health counselling. This was another typical internet story. Some clever people saw a high demand, piggy backed on the trend for virtual consultations, signed up a few professionals and launched an app. Income immediately resulted, costs were minimal, and investors piled in. But nobody really took the time to make the operation sustainable. In particular, customers found their appointments revoked as the professionals overbooked their calendars and self-selected their client base. Also, privacy is absolutely central to this type of service, but that was largely ignored, with predictable consequences. Various fragile lives have no doubt been damaged, but, hey, somebody made a lot of money. Less flippantly, there is actually a germ of a good idea in here and one day it might actually benefit society.

 

Then there was an article about gig workers, another mega trend where people are making things up as they go along, meanwhile hoovering up investor capital. This article highlighted the different challenges businesses face in Europe compared with the USA. Even in the USA, nobody is making any money, while volume is king and margin and afterthought. But at least in the USA there is a path forward, because of an easy regulatory environment and large demand hubs full of rich and lazy potential clients who are used to tipping. Today I passed two petrol stations on opposite sides of a corner with a price difference of 14 cents per gallon (4%): that would never happen in Europe, because everybody looks after their pennies. Uber and others are discovering that fact in Europe too, and their business models often seem doomed as a result.

 

All these stories reminded me of 1999. Ideas and charisma trumped everything, detail and sustainability were afterthoughts, and money sloshed around. Until it didn’t. The whole edifice became unstable, people started realising that, and a crash occurred. Most daft businesses collapsed and naïve investors paid the bill (using our pensions). Might this happen again? The sheer weight of such flimsy stories is one indicator that a crash might come. But there are other indicators as well.

 

One risk is highlighted, obliquely, in another article ion the same business section of the same Economist. A massive legacy of 2021 will be how the Chinese authorities have acted to fundamentally change their business climate. IT is a miracle how they have achieved this without triggering a domestic or an international crash, and even without sounding warning bells in America. The USA already transfers lots of money to China every month owing to the voracious appetite of its consumers. Now the Chinese are repatriating the listings of many of its businesses, especially the ones of global significance. How is the west responding? The west is run by investors who need those businesses as vehicles to keep the wheels of greed turning. So more of our pension money is now heading for China too. It is part of a brilliant and transparent Chinese strategy to make us need them more then they need us, as insurance against another Trump. One possible outcome is a sulking west imposing all sorts of new restrictions, thereby harming our own economies and creating a confidence crisis.

 

There are other risk factors too. We have lived through an unusual age of free capital. That might be closing right now, as interest rate signals around the world start pointing upwards. There is nothing like a monthly interest bill for debt to expose flawed business models.

 

Lastly there is the US government. Even I they don’t panic about China and manage to forestall large interest rate rises, it will be a strange time for businesses. The next three years will produce nothing from Congress, and Biden will respond with executive actions, spraying ill-thought-through short-term incentives everywhere. That will quickly expose flimsy businesses on the wrong side of such incentives, while creating even flimsier new ones on the right side. Altogether this is not a recipe for a stable investment climate.

 

Given all of this, it might be a good time to recall the fundamental lessons from 1999. We can have fun and grow money based on charisma and ideas for a while, but need to be ready to jump before the music stops, which could be soon or not for a long time yet. And it is a good strategy to focus on companies that will emerge more strongly once the bubbles burst. Amazon was built on solid foundations and still has them in place, and in my opinion still has growth ahead. In this cycle, the same feels true of Tesla, so far ahead in so many critical areas. There are probably other good bets, maybe in digital health or battery technology. Interface bottlenecks are good places to look, and so are businesses relatively immune to the US/China decoupling. It feels a good time to be shopping less indiscriminately and more smartly.

Reckless Driving

 The trend has been obvious to me for some time. Every time I drive now I notice more reckless driving.

 

It is most noticeable on the highways. I am happily tootling along when suddenly somebody driving at an unsafe speed passes me. The car continues its course, dodging and weaving between lanes. But I know what usually follows. A second car comes along doing exactly the same thing. They are racing.

 

I am amazed at how these drivers seem to survive. I witness the aftermath of more and more accidents on the roads, but somehow I expect these lunatics to crash almost immediately. Whenever somebody reckless passes me, I instinctively slow down, just in case I am about to become part of a pile up.

 

These highway races are the obvious manifestation, but other examples of recklessness exist as well. I am noticing more drivers jumping lights and taking illegal turns. It seems that whenever I peer into another car, I see a driver more interested in their mobile phone than the road. And drivers are angrier too. Nowadays there is invariably a honk when a light changes to green, even when a dozen stationary cars are preventing progress.

 

I looed up a few statistics and they supported my anecdotal observations. Traffic fatalities in the US enjoyed a steady decline between 2006 and 2019, before increasing in 2020 and again sharply in 2021. The increase in 2020 occurred despite a drop in road usage due to the pandemic.

 

What might be causing this? As with so much else, the pandemic is an obvious place to start. Last March we suddenly experienced empty roads. Speedsters could have more fun. The cops had other things to worry about. The reckless got away with it and speed became a habit. Perhaps a general feeling of despair and a sense of devaluation of life added to the recklessness. The new habits persisted as the traffic came back to the roads. The result is mounting fatalities.

 

This explanation seems to make some sense. But then I compared the US statistics with Europe. I could not find much data about 2021, but 2020 saw a marked decline in road deaths in Europe. Clearly there were fewer of these desperate racers there, or if not then fewer of them were killing themselves.

 

These statistics match with other areas of human progress. Fifty years ago the US was ahead of most European countries. Twenty-five years ago it was in the middle of the pack, and ten years ago at the bottom. Since then the gap has only grown and the last two years have seen an acceleration in its widening. This is similar to trends in life expectancy overall, violent deaths, maternal mortality, educational attainment and a host of other areas.

 

So what might be behind this? It is possible to come up with a few theories.

 

We can start with the state of the infrastructure. The roads in the USA are in a terrible state, filled with potholes, poorly lit and littered with intrinsically unsafe junctions. Europe seems to do a better job of progressively eliminating these death traps. Perhaps the Biden infrastructure infusion will help, but I am not holding my breath. While the roads are so bad, reckless driving is more likely to lead to catastrophic outcomes.

 

We can add ingrained driving habits. Lane discipline here is almost non-existent. On a highway there is almost no concept of a slow or fast lane, merely lanes to choose between. The result is that racing becomes more fun, yet more perilous. Why has there been so little effort to encourage better behaviour?

 

There is minimal enforcement at the very front end, with driving tests. The physical test here requires almost literally driving around the block and parking. In Holland and elsewhere only drivers ready to face the roads safely are permitted to drive, and car ownership, including petrol, is more expensive. The reckless are usually young, poor and immature. In Europe these people are not driving at all.

 

Then there is enforcement. The police here are everywhere – except, it seems, patrolling the highways. In Europe I suspect these racers would be pulled up fairly quickly and be off the road for an extended period. More cameras are coming in, but far behind Europe and more for political theatre than anything else. The racers know where the cameras are, and Waze and other apps even tell them where to expect police – surely a travesty? With the technology available today, enforcement should be much better than it is. It is probably toxic politics that stops it.

 

I am disappointed in the insurance companies. Some seem to be embracing technology, but it is far too slow. Years ago I had an idea of an app that would allow everyday drivers to report the plate numbers of reckless drivers in real time. For me it is still a good idea waiting for insurance companies to take up. One result of the current US insurance climate, dominated by accident chasing lawyers filling the TV screens, is very high premiums, so high that reckless people, who may be the reckless drivers, don’t bother with insurance at all.

 

That leads to societal factors. Driving recklessly on unsafe roads is placing a low value of ones own life, as well as on the lives of everyone else. This implies a degree of desperation, or disconnection. Many communities here are places of despair and disdain. The one thing many youngsters locked into such environments seem to be able to afford is a cheap souped-up second hand car. Add in fast food and drugs, and disaster lurks. Reducing this is just one of many hidden benefits of a welfare and equity based polity – and the benefits flow to those of us caught in crossfire, reducing the risk death on the road and lowering premiums, as well as to the disadvantaged.

 

Then there is the freedom factor. The land of the free has produced a set of people who consider their freedom to mean doing whatever the heck they like, whatever the impact of anybody else. The Trump crowd epitomise this, and the vaccine refuseniks use such specious arguments. I often find myself arguing that refusing to be vaccinated is similar to refusing to follow stop signs or to drive on the allotted side of the road. Well, these reckless drivers are basically following that mantra. Much of the USA could find value from a crash course in understanding what freedom really means, before they experience a crash of a very different kind. 

 

Many of my blogs cast blame on Hollywood, and in this instance I will extend that to video games. Reckless driving in the real world is an extension of what many kids have been spending their time doing in the virtual arena during the pandemic. The difference of course is that computer games can’t kill you, but I wonder how many kids give this inconvenient fact as much consideration as they should. Movies don’t help when protagonists seem to be increasingly immortal.

 

Finally I wonder about the role of journalists. I had to work moderately hard to find my road accident statistics this morning. Occasionally we see reports or read articles about multiple pile-ups, especially if they offer a good picture or sentimental story, but I would like to see more focus on the underlying trends and issues. In the USA, there is also little effort, by journalists or seemingly by anybody else, to compare and learn from other countries. I wonder how many Americans realise what a dangerous society they live in compared with European peers.

 

It is hard to conclude which of these factors play a role, and especially which ones have led to the recent comparative decline in US road safety. But there is plenty of ammunition here in terms of ideas for campaigns to improve matters. Bill de Blasio started with a blaze of good intentions with his vision zero initiative, but as his term closes I hear fewer strong words and see less meaningful action, and the terrible results speak for themselves.

 

It is also worth noting that road safety is just one of many extreme sports we are forced to play by choosing to live here. The many other lagging areas will have overlapping sets of root causes, and the same frustrating lack of priority given to them by politicians, civil servants, journalists, or really anybody else.    

Attention Span

 One trend in society that has been undeniable during my lifetime is a reduction in attention spans. Everything happens much faster these days and there is no tolerance for wasting time. It would be stereotypical of somebody of my age to bemoan this trend, but I take more of a mixed position. The trend has certainly done some damage but it has had benefits as well. The trick would be to limit the damage while enjoying the benefits.

 

To comprehend just how strong the trend has been I only have to recall my own experiences. At school, lessons were forty-five minutes and once we reached fourteen most classes became double that length. At sixteen I sat a long series of three-hour exams (perched next to a huge south facing gym window during a historic heat wave), most of which required several essays to be scrawled in long hand.

 

When I started at work, I would often have to read or even create a business or project plan, and anything under fifteen pages of tight script was considered thin. In my thirties a rather austere mentor called Tony Brearley taught me the art of the concise note. I would pay visits to Shell businesses around Europe, and try to summarize my findings within two pages of (by now typed) script. I titled these Actions and Agreements and the struggle was always to find language that was clear, complete and concise. I have been grateful to Tony ever since, for that skill has served me well.

 

Nowadays I often need to compose e-mails or documents for choir business. The topics may be more mundane but the requirements are the same – clarity, completeness and concision. But I notice now that two pages is far too long: the most I can get away with is one page, and even then I have to accept that most people will not read the whole document. I have to place the critical bits in bold right at the top and refer to them again in cover notes. I am told that my language is too dense, and people request pictures or videos or other excuses to avoid spending a few minutes digesting something. I try to adapt but I always seem to be behind the trend.

 

You can see the same trend in all media. I started a subscription with the Guardian Weeklytwenty-five years ago, and the periodical is about the same overall size now as it was then. The difference is that each article is now about half as long, and most have pictures, whether or not the picture actually adds anything to the story. They also include sidebars so that our precious attention can be retained. I would much rather read properly researched stories presented in sufficient depth.

 

The Economistis a glorious exception, and that may be one reason I love it so much. It might also explain its successful growth in popularity. There can be a market for refusing to bow to a trend.

 

In TV, I notice a difference between the US and the UK. Pretty well everything produced primarily for a US audience nowadays pays homage to short attention spans, with fast moving plots and constant visualisation, at the expense of depth. Many of the best UK programmes have become successful precisely by bucking that trend. In comedy, look at The Caféor Detectorists, among others. I cruelly describe these shows as “nothing ever happens”, but that is their charm. In real life scenarios develop slowly, and individual characters respond to situations gradually. This sort of show allows an audience to empathise.

 

We can be grateful for Netflix, because slowly even the Americans are realising that different fare is effective for different segments, and new technology allows for more of those markets to be served. Now there are many more series that I can find to enjoy.

 

The same trend can be seen in sports. Cricket has retained its slow, strategic format but added faster alternatives. Baseball has not adapted, its devotees obsessed with historical statistics, and its popularity has suffered, though I adore the game just as it is. Rugby has been smartest, introducing a series of rule changes to add pace and entertainment. I still remember Billy Beaumont commenting on a dull international in the 1980’s: “That’s the goal in rugby; kick the ball off the pitch”.

 

The examples show that short attention spans have benefits, especially if flexible formats can satisfy different audiences. The demand for instant satisfaction has led to positive innovation in many fields.

 

What about politics? My daughter gave me a revealing quote when we saw her over the summer. “Has Biden done anything yet?” She picks up her news from the feeds on social media. Social media feed the frenzy for sensation. Biden doesn’t feature at all.

 

So who is the villain here? Is it social media, populist politicians, my daughter or none of the above? We can’t blame social media: they only give the public what they want. I can ask my daughter to show more interest in the world around her and to be more discerning about her sources, but that is her business really. And we can argue that the populist politicians are also only doing their job, at least as long as there are not lying: a good marketer understands media and message.

 

I can make a gripe about basic education. Advertisers, moviemakers and snake oil salesmen all have an incentive to try to simplify issues, so that an action or preference can be prompted by something as simple as a talking point. So education has to balance this tendency.

 

We could be taught a module on logical reasoning. It goes back to those over-long business plans that my career started with. The chapter headings remain as valid as they ever were. Define a problem or challenge, then a goal and why it is beneficial. Explore possible diagnoses and solutions, with pros and cons and risks and possible unintended consequences. Then propose a solution and a plan to achieve it, with roles, milestones, incentives, performance indicators and contingencies. If we could all mentally run through this sort of checklist every time we read that “the Dems want to give money to illegals”, and also understood a little more about all the pitfalls of our biases, then we could avoid falling for so much simplistic guff.

 

We should follow our own logic to avoid a simplistic narrative that things used to better before, and that Mark Zuckerberg and others are plotting to dumb down society for nefarious purposes (though Rupert Murdoch does have a lot to answer for). True, in the past plans were more thorough and political parties published long manifestos. But did anybody ever read them? I don’t think so. Complexity and fancy language was how the establishment elite kept control – Tony Brearley was a master of that and taught me the same dark art. Even my concise two-pagers were dense enough to bamboozle people whose native language was not English. If there is manipulation now, it is just different manipulation by different people.

 

And anyway, who wants to watch a sport when the ball is never on the pitch or when players waste time as a tactic? Let progress happen and don’t blame the platforms for doing a good job, indeed celebrate technology for allowing a segmented diet so even fogeys like me can be satisfied. But also champion education in the modern skills that we all need to navigate the world successfully.