The Obsolete Truth

A New World Emerges For Better And Worse

I started a new job several months ago, which has me reflecting on how much change I've seen in my long career, which began during the very early days of the digital age.

My first job out of college was at the Columbia House company, where I was hired as a graphic designer. If you wake up in the morning with the aches of middle age, this company may ring a bell. Every month, Columbia House would send a mini magazine in the mail featuring CDs of musical artists from just about every genre. The company became infamous for its “10 CDs for 99 cents” offer, which would be the gateway to becoming a music club member. I got the job lead from a piece of paper posted on the physical job board at my alma mater, Pratt Institute. Back then, designers who had learned the tools of the trade (Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator) were in high demand as the field of graphic design and desktop publishing was becoming increasingly a digital craft.

My first day on the job, as I toured the office in midtown Manhattan, I distinctly remember one gentleman who had a different workstation than everyone else. Instead of a Mac, this individual had a large, physical drafting table with no computer in sight. He still used traditional digital graphic design tools like Xacto knives, pencils, pens, rulers, etc. Then, one day, months later, he was gone, as was the drafting table he worked on.

After a couple of years, one of my Pratt friends helped me land a job at the newly created Fox News Channel on cable. Little did I know then that I would be working (for a short time) during the birth of multiple 24/7 cable news channels, which would reshape our culture, politics, and how we get our information. While I didn’t stay there long, it’s worth noting that nearly 30 years later, Cable news is no longer disrupting the way we get our information but is instead the industry enduring disruption in an age of influencers, Podcasters, and former cable news personalities who have taken their audiences with them into the ether of the Internet age.

From cable news, my career transitioned into digital-related work, where I am still primarily focused. The earliest days of my work on the Web were spent working on the Chicago Tribune’s Website—another inflection point in media as the very early days of people getting their information from online sources began. History shows that the traditional news business (especially local newspapers) has been largely decimated. The Tribune Tower, a gothic tower masterpiece where I worked, is now a condo building. If I had made a joke in that tower that one day, this iconic structure would be converted to luxury condominiums, I would have been laughed out of the newsroom. Funny how hubris has no foresight.

But change happens, and new is always now…

The next chapter of my career would be the longest, most diverse, yet also the most dynamic and disruptive in so many ways as I entered the professional services space, working across different parts of the marketing and technology landscape. A few key moments that reflect steady change and transformation during those days:

The Agency Industry: I spent a significant amount of time working at various agencies during my career, and throughout it, the “death of the agency” has been a steady mantra since the early 2000s. A quarter of a century later, what rings more true is that agencies didn’t die; instead, many got acquired into oblivion. Also, with hindsight being 20/20, we now realize that there are worse things than death—many agencies (not all, there are still exceptions) are not the places they used to be—bastions of innovation and amazing places to work and grow long careers. For the exceptions, these gems will attract the best remaining talent who still want to work in the space, and their clients will be the ones who benefit.

Legacy Organizations: I’ve seen many organizations come and go during my career. One of the companies I worked with (BlackBerry) was shifting into the early but certain days of their decline. As an early adopter of the iPhone, once I got it in my hands and started to see the App Store built, well, I realized the writing was on the wall. On the other hand, I’ve witnessed organizations pivot remarkably. While Facebook (before Meta days) was not a legacy organization, it also wasn’t a small startup when it successfully transformed into a mobile company. Ironically, one of the executives from RIM (BlackBerry) and I were debating if Facebook could pivot into mobile, and he felt confident that Facebook was over. I believed they were very serious about their mobile-first transformation. Turns out, they were.

Big Tech: In the past quarter century, I have witnessed (and worked through) several significant digital transformations. With each one, a dominant player was established…

Organizing the Web: Google
Commercializing the Web: Amazon
Mobilizing the Web: Apple
Enterprising the Web: Microsoft
Socializing the Web: Meta

With AI, we now enter the “intelligent era” of the Web, with each of the above companies and their competitors locked in a fierce battle to achieve AI supremacy. It’s also worth noting that all of the above companies are American in origin, yet this time, China is placing just as many bets on AI as Silicon Valley.

This takes me to the present time and ironically reminds me of my first job, when I watched that graphic designer and his drafting table disappear. We’re at the same inflection point now, but it's much more significant—and it’s not only AI and the massive changes it brings across industries. When friends and I gather in deep conversation regarding the state of the world, I often try to take them back to the post-WWII era, and wax philosophical on the world order that the U.S. was proactively building in effort push back on communism, rebuild Europe, and influence the world to view the American model (capitalism) as a better way forward. The post-WWII policies set the stage for globalism, and globalism in recent decades has set the stage for a good chunk of the American public to become disenfranchised as we watched our industrial centers become obsolete.

Globalism is being replaced with something else, and at this moment, it’s unclear how exactly that will work and what it will be. The same goes for AI, but here, I am going to place the bet that I’ve been making since the day I got my hands on Generative models such as ChatGPT—we only need look to the modernization of industry, i.e. robotics on assembly lines, to know where AI is going to take us—at least in terms of the workplace. It’s the modernization of knowledge work. We’ll still need knowledge workers—just fewer of them. This is the way of automation. But there will also be innovation to balance out the efficiencies we gain and the jobs we lose.

We have a different and more recent reference point to ponder regarding AI's impending impact on society: social media. The social Web is equal parts incredible and terrible. It reunites people, connects us with valuable information, and entertains us, but it is also dangerously addictive and can be an amplifier for toxic content. Modern social media is all these things—both wonderful and awful—and AI will be similar. It will also make some parts of our current work and lives a thing of the past.

And that’s the obsolete truth.

Visually yours,

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