| name | value |
| date | 2025-01-17 |
| location | Miami, US |
| author | Anton |
Three new stories today. Connected by the common trend.
Year 2018. I live in San Francisco but come to visit Ukraine. In Kyiv I go and attend a few tech meetups. There is some book from Google on management or something that is all the rage. Everyone is talking about it. How to build and run software company told by some manager from Google(I’m writing this from my memory, so the exact details might be wrong).
I’m a bit surprised. It’s been 4.5 years since I moved to SF and I’ve never heard of this book. No one I knew talked about it in California. I’m even more surprised because at the time - 2018 - Google already had a bad reputation in SF. Like it was considered a very corporate and boring company milking money from their ads. People usually went there to earn high income doing little work. And it was definitely not a benchmark of organizational efficiency. So no one I knew would be even remotely interested in reading such a book.
At that moment I also realized two things:
- information spreads with a different speed around the world through the human systems. There is huge time latency(several years) between something is known eg in California till it will make it to the mainstream in some other place around the world.
- you can sell anything to the people around the globe if you put some well known label. Like a person who worked at Google can write book on any topic and it will sell. It doesn’t matter if experience of that person is relevant to the readers (that was the same time when Sheryl Sandberg book was selling well around the world. People wanted to read a book because it was from a person working for a famous company).
Let’s move on to January 2025. I’m in Playa del Carmen - slow beach town in Mexico. I enter coffeeshop and pick a free table. I sit down. Immediately I realize my mistake. There is an American woman at the closest table. She is loud. And she is talking to some guy about astrology. With a confidence of an expert she explains what a “typical aries” person is. It goes on for a long time. I’ve heard it before. In California. Person talking absolute crap about the bullshit topic. But with this sense that she knows something and is an expert and can explain it to another person. You see that she feeds energy from this situation. From that feeling of “being an expert”. And that goes on and on for almost an eternity. I’m in pain. I already know that if some stupid things becomes popular in California there is high chance it will spread around the world. I’m scared that I’ll see this more and more around the world in the upcoming years.
Somehow it never works the other way around. I grew up in Ukraine where in 90s astrology was a big thing. So many people cared about their sign and read predictions in magazines and followed dedicated TV programs. Did all that “knowledge” help us? Of course not.
Have people in California who discovered astrology in 2019 done any investigation into whether that thing worked anywhere? Of course not.
It’s always the same trend. Eg take communism. You can find modern communists in California. They always tell you that communism can be achieved if Americans try it. But most of them never try to learn anything from the people who actually lived through communism.
And the last story. At one of my jobs, we had reorganization. A new manager came in. He decided to do a small thing - reorganize the team’s Slack channels. So he doubled the amount, and we went from 2 to 4.
A few weeks later, I noticed that I’m a bit confused because now I’m not sure in which channel to post, but that it’s okay. I got a response - “I empathize with how you feel about new channels, but we are going to continue tomorrow”.
“Empathize”? I’m okay with any solution. But why do I need someone to “empathize” with me on such a trivial thing? Why do we start talking like that? Why is this Californian way of talking now spreading around the globe(my new manager wasn’t American and only visited the US once)?
All of those 3 stories I described remind me of California. California is the place where many ideas or cultural phenomena come alive. Unfortunately not all of them are good and not all of them are worth spreading.
Reflections
- some regions influence the world way more than others in both positive and negative way. I hope we can build some filters to protect us from the spreading of bad ideas.
- Californian communication style is not good. In fact it’s a bit antihuman. It’s misuses words, it plays with notions of expertise and it hides conflict and aggression inside some weird package.
- if something is popular(or made NYT bestseller list - I have another story on that later) - it doesn’t mean it’s good.
- when people see known brand our bullshit defense is often lifted. It’s a very dangerous situation because with the right branding any idea and any product can be sold.
- common knowledge in one place might become common knowledge in another after many years. Cultural latency is a thing. Especially now when we all live in our isolated informational bubbles - something that is obvious to us might not be know to another person for 3 more years.