A Prediction on the Radical Transformation of the Internet
why revealing your true identity will be the next tectonic shift in the virtual space
Posted 2010-08-19 12:15 in business, business models, culture, ethics, human nature, improvements, marketing, social networking
The role of anonymity is a topic that comes up often about the increasingly unpleasant tenor of discourse on the internet. It’s getting harder and harder for websites and content providers to deal with the incivility, abusiveness, and venomous anger that is constantly being spewed out on their forums— almost all stemming from users who never reveal their real names or identities. As I mentioned in a previous article, as the internet has moved from obscurity into the mainstream, civil and thoughtful conversation has become increasingly rare. We’re finding that it’s easy for the public to sling mud on the internet when they can hide behind their monitors. It’s common for vigilante internet mobs to form and harass their enemies. Namecalling and insults abound.
As a thought experiment, think about this for a minute: how would behavior on the internet change if you had to use your real name?
As I see it, changing this one aspect of the internet would radically reduce the level of unseemly activity in the virtual environment. In “real life”, norms of civility and politeness help us maintain our positive appearances in the eyes of others, which to most of us is pretty important; on the the internet, anonymity allows us to largely avoid consequences of bad behavior, essentially giving us license to abandon self-control. But when your name and identity is forever linked to the comments you make, you must maintain a certain level of comportment fit for someone interacting in polite society, lest you earn a permanent mark against your character. And, as a friend of mine once said, the internet never forgets.
Thus, I predict that some day, the internet will undergo a radical transformation into a dichotomized space: there will be one portion that is anonymous; its qualities will be generally seen as chaotic, unreliable, and unstructured. This anonymous internet will not be taken very seriously by anyone— even the people who use it; it will probably not be regarded very well, and people will use it either just to let off steam or to just mess around.
And then there will be the other portion, demarcated by the use of users’ real identities in communications. This latter internet will be regarded as civil, purposeful, and reliable in its information; it will be a place where reputations and communities can be built, meaningful and polite interaction can take place, and where comments are helpful and constructive rather than snarky, dismissive, and hostile. Though it may come off initially as a somewhat sterile space, as its userbase expands, it will evolve to be as the primary virtual complement to “real life” interaction. The anonymous forums of the ‘other web’ will simply be too unstructured by comparison for long-term investment of time. A company will probably make a lot of money selling you an official identity that you will use as a login for all the websites that subscribe to this part of the internet; this will prevent you from making up an identity and ruining it for everyone.
Privacy advocates will worry about this evolution of the internet into a sphere in which we give out our real names and are forever linked to our comments, but the dystopian reality of the current internet “community” and commenting as a whole is one that both the public and those privacy advocates simply must acknowledge, as the current state of affairs threatens to undermine the internet as a whole. Currently, websites are having to employ increasingly heavy moderation to weed out bad behavior, but ultimately, content providers will find that they lack the resources and manpower to corral human nature in an atmosphere where there are no rules. However, they can avoid having to deal with this problematic behavior when they understand how the presence of social norms can suppress incivility from the get-go.
People will initially be reluctant to sign up for this idea—mainly for privacy reasons and the fact that they are accustomed to anonymity— but once they realize it’s the only ticket to entering a consistently constructive and civil society in the virtual world, I think they will understand the value, and eventually embrace it. They will see how it can be leveraged it to bolster their personal reputations, build their names, and create a lifelong history of their characters. They will appreciate how the internet will go from being a glorified anonymous chatroom to being a community of real people with valuable things to contribute. They will appreciate how having the discipline to maintain oneself will make conversations more pleasant, constructive, and intellectually satisfying. They will appreciate how knowing each others’ names will facilitate the transition from being online friends to being “real life” friends.
It will be interesting to see whether my prediction will come true, and if so, how long it will take. The level of moderation necessary on reputable sites that allow public commenting (like news sites) is reaching all-time highs, and younger generations who have grown up with the internet as a free-for-all are posting with increasing frequency. Why, even the middle-aged adults who were taught growing up to mind their Ps and Qs have, over time, been socialized by the rest of the web to drop their pretenses of civility.
Given all that, my bet is that the wheels will be in motion within the next 5 years.
Why I Waited in Line for a $20 Plate of Boiled Onions
on jumping the hurdles on the road of authenticity
Posted 2010-08-11 14:15 in branding, business, culture, experiences, human nature, marketing, postmodernism
I spent last weekend in a place called Door County. People from all over the upper Midwest travel to this area of Northern Wisconsin for its natural beauty, bucolic charm, and for something called “fish boils.” A fish boil is exactly what it sounds like— a dinner consisting primarily of two pieces of boiled whitefish, served alongside a couple boiled potatoes and a couple boiled onions. In the world of Door County, this remarkably simple set of unseasoned (with the exception of salt) ingredients dunked into hot water can run you upwards of $20 per person. What’s more remarkable is that people come in droves, cash in hand, to get a taste of the famous Door County fish boils, which in description does not sound all that appetizing.
It’s hard to understand why people are so eager to shell out what seems like a lot of money for inexpensive food that could easily be prepared at home. After all, it really does not require any level of culinary expertise to boil food. It’s also worth noting that despite the ease with which a total novice cook could boil a dinner, boiling is probably one of the least popular forms of cookery. And, I should add, I’ve met exactly zero people who have confessed that they crave eating whole onions cooked in any manner, much less boiled.
One of the first things people will tell you about fish boils is that it isn’t so much a meal as it is “an experience.” This is hard to dispute on account of the pre-dining ritual that occurs as a central part of the Door County fish boil. A large kettle filled with water is heated by fire as a group of diners stand around and watch. A so-called “boilmaster” ceremoniously dumps onions, potatoes, fish, and salt into the bubbling brew. After 10 minutes of heating, kerosene is thrown onto the fire, causing the fire to momentarily flare up in a visceral and visually arresting manner. The rapid increase in heat causes the mixture in the kettle to boil over. Apparently this flushes the fish of its oils (it’s unclear to me why eliminating the oils is a good thing, but the raging fire is fun to watch). The food is then taken out of the water and served.
When probed about it, an employee at a small town visitor bureau confessed to me that people who live in Door County area don’t eat fish boil, and many have never even tried it once despite the fact that outsiders came from hundreds of miles away to get it. Some locals who have eaten fish boil, I was told, did it under the pretense of “doing that touristy thing” in order to understand what the hubbub was about. These revelations do not come much as a surprise.1 Lots of places have things they are famous for that only outsiders appreciate. When I lived in the Bay Area, I found that hardly anyone who had lived there for any period of time had spent an afternoon riding cable cars, going to Fisherman’s Wharf, or riding the boat to Alcatraz. Consigned to being tourist elements, these things are almost entirely out of the psychic purview of the average Bay Area denizen (except when relatives come into town and want to see them!).
Nevertheless, there are good reasons why certain things become famous. Just as the cable cars of San Francisco are unique, the fish boils of Door County are also unique. And it’s not just that these things are unique; they actually factored into the traditional cultures of these places at one time. They are sold as authentic expressions of regional culture. The fish boil was a tradition of Scandinavian settlers of Northern Wisconsin, and as you might figure from a meal of boiled onions and fish, this tradition was born out of extreme poverty and lack of food availability. It had long fallen out of common practice in the area, except for events like church fundraising dinners (again, a context where frugality was a virtue). It was only after a businessman who owned a place called the Viking Grill decided to package it and market it to tourists in the early 1960s that it gained popularity, and moved from the province of outdated tradition to that of the tourist trap, entirely bypassing the possibility of being a normal food for normal people living in the region.
What is fascinating about all this to me is how easy it is to get people to implicitly believe they can’t have the “real” experience without consuming certain things:
If you didn’t see the Pyramids, you didn’t really go to Egypt. If you didn’t see the Eiffel Tower, you didn’t really go to Paris. If you didn’t experience a fish boil, you didn’t really go to Door County. These sorts of hurdles extend far beyond simple tourism in half-serious cultural truisms that we’ve heard repeatedly. Some examples:
- If you remember the 60s, you weren’t there.
- If you’re not drinking Guinness, you aren’t drinking.
- If you don’t have children, you cannot fully experience the joys of life.
Here, specific acts of consumption, through various means (sometimes deliberate acts of marketing, sometimes through more obscure mechanisms), become socially-mandated pre-requisites for entry into an entire category of human experience. At that point, to partake in the consumption category without partaking in the specific consumption pre-requisite almost becomes an act of fraud, or perhaps worse, alarming ignorance.
As denizens of a post-modern world, seeking out authentic experiences is an all-consuming pastime, but what’s truly remarkable is how we’ve been trained to collect proof of our authentic experiences in the form of photographs, souvenirs, and artfully retold stories of our times spent doing things in these exotic environments. If you ask me, the reason why Door County visitors go to fish boils has nothing to do with people wanting to try boiled fish per se; it’s about wanting to experience an authentic tradition, which serves as an insurance policy against the possibility of doubts being raised (possibly by oneself) about whether one actually went to Door County. Not went, really— went went.
1 Something about the way this tradition has been marketed in Door County literature has the feel of a “tourist trap.” For starters, it seems awfully expensive for something that is supposedly a tradition actively practiced by locals— especially when the foods involved are inexpensive and cooked in a manner that should be incredibly cheap. Also the fish boil comes up way too frequently in literature about Door County, as if a concerted effort is being made to hype up the fish boil as something really special, a sort of anachronism whose bygone quality defines Door County as a whole. People talk about San Francisco sourdough and New England clam chowder and New Orleans Po’ Boy sandwiches, but despite the historic import of these foods in regional tradition, they aren’t employed as central metaphors in nearly every single piece of literature about these places. And then there’s the highly ritualistic aspect of the fish boil. The fact that it is an event that diners are specifically asked to make reservations for and told to come 25 minutes early to witness is unusual. It transforms a solitary meal into a community event, just another dinner into a highly photograph-able spectacle, one that is be easy for people to showcase to their friends at home. The roaring fire— itself a genuinely quaint symbol of an authentic retreat from modern life— couldn’t but help in this context.
Comment [4]
On Arming the Enemy: Dissecting the Consumer/Corporation War Narrative
how the cultural battle of consumers vs. companies is flaring in the marketplace and where it might take us as a society
Posted 2010-08-10 12:25 in business, consumerism, culture, economics, ethics, marketing, postmodernism
Proctor and Gamble, one of the biggest companies in the world, spent $8.6 billion in advertising in Q4 2010. This, as you might notice, is a lot of money. It’s easy to see this sort of expenditure as confirmation of the fact that as a society, we are constantly being inundated with advertising and someone’s always trying to get us to buy something. However, this massive number should also illustrate a more important point that maybe isn’t as obvious, and which culturally, we aren’t attuned to recognizing: advertising doesn’t really work. Perhaps more accurately, advertising as we’ve known it is a ridiculously clumsy tool that requires inordinate amounts of spending for a small level of effectiveness.
Think about the traditional forms of (non-internet) advertising. Companies pay millions of dollars to put on a 30 second ad during a television show— effectively broadcasting their ad to everyone who might be watching it. Or they have a full page ad placed somewhere in a magazine or newspaper. These are not very precise methods of reaching people. They might be able to target certain segments of people by carefully selecting the TV program (ex. viewers of Star Trek, for example, are likely to be very different consumers than viewers of ESPN SportsCenter) or by being selective about the magazine to advertise in (ex. readers of BusinessWeek are likely to be pretty different than readers of Martha Stewart Living), but there’s no doubt that these techniques are crude methods of gaining attention. It has been said, quite accurately, that effective advertising is the art of reaching the right person, at the right place, at the right time, with the right message. The chances of traditional forms of advertising hitting the mark on all of these levels is quite small.
Of course, the reason advertising was always like this was because of clear structural limitations; the options for advertising were few, and effective targeting was not easy given the limitation of options. Companies advertised in this ineffective way because they had to.
But these barriers are quickly melting away, and it’s creating what I see as a spectacular and fascinating clash of consumers’ cultural values and those of businesses. Here’s an example:
For some time now, Hulu, the popular internet media site that allows consumers to watch many television programs online, has allowed viewers to choose from a list of advertising that they want to punctuate the programs they choose to watch. More recently, they started to just show ads with a simple question in the upper-righthand corner asking whether the ads shown are relevant or not. Supposedly, as viewers feed the system with more and more information about what kind of ads they think are relevant, the system becomes more and more adept at giving individuals ads that matter to them; that is, it creates an individualized profile for each viewer.
I have found that as I get talking to people about marketing efforts like this, many consumers are extremely uncomfortable with the idea of receiving highly targeted ads. They are even more disturbed by the idea of feeding companies information that might make ads more targeted to them as individuals. Though clearly our media institutions are set up in a way that anyone who spends any time navigating them will definitely see ads in some form or another, many viewer are mortified by the idea of giving away enough information that they might receive relevant ads.
This is an interesting, somewhat curious observation. Again: People apparently would rather see a random smattering of ads than a bunch of specifically targeted ads that address personal interests. Why would anyone rather see things they aren’t interested in than things they are interested in? On the surface, this sentiment defies all logic.
It’s only once you understand the fundamental narrative that underlies consumers’ cultural understandings of the marketplace, that this attitude begins to make sense.
Our society has come to implicitly view the marketplace as a sort of warzone. Consumers view themselves locked, via social contract, in an epic conflict against producers. The perception is that companies will do everything in their power to ensnare, enslave, and take advantage of consumers through their business tactics (marketing, data mining, targeted advertising, attacks on privacy, etc), while consumers dutifully resist these machinations, and employ their own tactics in retaliation. In other words, there are two sides, diametrically opposite in mission; companies try to take advantage of consumers, and consumers in turn try to take advantage of companies. But it’s not that simple. Complicating the situation is that while this portrait of dueling archnemeses is going on, consumers and producers are also deeply dependent on one another. In fact, each side could not survive without the other, which means both sides have to limit their aggression and, in effect, make peace in some way.
So here we are, entrenched in a struggle that mirrors an abusive love-hate relationship. Consumers want the television programming, but they don’t want to give the enemy “ammunition” by telling them whether the ads they show are relevant or not. This is in spite of the fact that, rationally speaking, consumers really have nothing to lose (and most likely something to gain) by having more relevant ads.
Many people openly voice concern and outrage about targeted advertising. Google faced a lot of heat when their AdWords system (by far their most profitable enterprise, and the one that keeps their business afloat) was released. This system simply displayed targeted ads based on what users looked up on the Google search engine, and what words appeared in the text of the emails they were looking at in their GMail accounts. This process collected absolutely no information about users as individuals, yet the outcry was sizable.
To the naysayers, the self-described rationale is that It’s about the loss of privacy. It’s about the encroachment of commerce into every sphere of society. It’s about the desanctification and cheapening of life by turning it all into a story about consumerism. It’s about how corporations, through advertising, create of societal anxieties and pervasive feelings of inadequacy.
I do not entirely discount these fears as overblown or paranoid fantasies. These are very real and very legitimate concerns. It is not hard to see how the encroachment of commerce has, in the past, scarred the physical landscape of many formerly beautiful spaces through the addition of strip malls, chain restaurants, and giant illuminated billboards; it’s no stretch to think that the psychological landscape could be tainted in a similar fashion through invasions of privacy, the cluttering of the information environment, and the subtle integration of commerce into every activity known to man.
In the past, it was easy to cordon ourselves off from marketing messages; for example, you couldn’t receive an ad if you weren’t watching TV. But as technology changes, we find companies like Foursquare ramping up, using our cell phones to determine our current locations and targeting us for couponing and other forms of marketing that capitalize on the sorts of dynamic information that TV and magazines simply cannot make use of. Our entire lives then become transformed into a marketing landscape, a sort of augmented reality in which specific information about us and our environments are mined, processed, and returned to us in the form of new layers of information and messages that follow us everywhere we go. If you subscribe to the mainstream view of the consumer marketplace that I described above, this sounds like a very disturbing, Orwellian vision of the future.
However, that’s only one side of the equation. It’s also important, though many deliberately avoid considering it, to acknowledge how consumers’ voluntary offering of information to marketers could actually benefit those same consumers. Wouldn’t it be nice, for example, if you were thinking of buying something, and you’d get a coupon for $20 off right before you bought it? This is just one example, but it’s exactly what a lot of marketers want to do. On one hand, it’s got all the “big brother” overtones of constant monitoring, but on the other, it seems like legitimate value is being conveyed in this process. As a consumer, you’ve been given a special deal on something you were thinking of doing anyway, and you still have the option to ignore the message and move on with your life; no one is forcing you to do or buy anything. So what’s wrong with this?
Well, if you think back to the nature of this consumer struggle against corporations, the resistance makes more sense. Consumers have been culturally trained to believe that when producers offer discounts and deals, which on the surface appear to be helpful and valuable, it is actually a case of producers gladly forfeiting the battle in order to win a larger war. Here’s an example of how this perception plays out in real life.
All the major grocery store chains offer loyalty cards. Loyalty cards typically offer consumers discounts on various products from week to week. All you have to do is present your card and you’ll save a lot of money. It seems like a no-brainer to carry a loyalty card then. But many people simply will not use them because it violates a sense of propriety with regards to consumers’ own roles in the consumer-producer struggle. Using a loyalty card would be tantamount to handing power over to the grocery store; to use the loyalty card is tacit acceptance that one is willing to sell out the greater cause (consumer rights in the face of corporate hegemony) for some small discount. It is offering information to be data mined, and licensing a company to use the very same data to later exploit the consumer— and indeed all consumers again and again in the future.
Another part of this that can’t be overlooked is the cultural attitude we have towards the twin concepts of materialism and consumerism. These words lack a clear definition in the public consciousness, but it’s quite clear that no one wants to be viewed as representing those ideas, nor does anyone want to be viewed (even by themselves) as possibly promoting those values in any way. Talk to people about targeted ads and inevitably the concern comes up that people need to be protected from themselves. Yes, it’s true that advertising doesn’t force anyone to buy anything, but people (other people, never the person you’re talking to, mind you) are unduly influenced by advertising, and will consume recklessly. This is highly detrimental to our society and must be prevented. Better not to feed people with targeted ads that may lower their sales resistance.
For these reasons, highly targeted ads are viewed as dangerous exercises that threaten to undermine the very foundations of a civil society, turning it into an uncentered, amoral sphere controlled by corporations. How well founded these fears are is anyone’s guess. However, my own opinion is that as a society, we have perennial fears about corporations and concerns about how they accumulate and wield power; the form that these fears take is constantly in flux, but at its root, the fears are always the same: the very nature of society is at stake. Historically speaking though, one thing is certain: new technology is almost always met with serious concerns about its impacts on society. Introductions of any new system in which consumer information is collected and used is always decried as taking things too far. As information becomes increasingly easy to collect, transfer, and utilize, these fears too escalate in proportion. But what also seems to happen is that these systems don’t really go away; instead, after the initial furor dies down, we eventually as a society become comfortable with them as a constant presence, and we get used to having them around. They become integrated into consumer culture, and people begin to view them as institutions and even as valuable pieces of social currency, even if they don’t necessarily come out and say it or even think about them consciously in that way.
But by then, consumers are looking at new corporate inventions and thinking about how the implications are going to destroy society.
Comment [2]
Who Gets the Blame for the BP Disaster?
a look at consumption, tacit encouragement, and societal acceptance of systemic risk
Posted 2010-05-20 22:07 in business, culture, environment, ethics, human nature, sustainability
The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is set to be one of, if not the biggest, environmental disasters in history. There’s been a lot of talk about about BP’s negligence and how their abject greed and lack of concern for safety precautions led to this problem. While I agree that BP probably did neglect their duties in some ways (evidence does seem to suggest this), and in a lot of ways should be held responsible for their failures, I also think that blaming BP is a very myopic way of looking at the problem and in preventing future disasters.
It’s a longstanding theme— a trope, if you will— within the progressive cultural narrative to blame corporations for all our global and national problems, or at least to finger them as the root cause of all unwanted consumption-related externalities. This view also conveniently avoids having to take serious looks at our own behaviors as individuals and as a society, and how these continually place our country and our environment at risk. When I say this, my point is not to absolve companies of responsibility and to place blame elsewhere. I advocate a holistic view of the entire system— being contemplative about our own roles in the functioning of our society and our complicity in creating it.
Fact: there are serious risks endemic to our energy policy. An error can definitely be blamed on an oil company’s negligence, but simply blaming them does little to stem the damage the disaster creates. As a country, we seem unable or unwilling to face this. Stated another way: there are systemic risks that are inherent in the way our society has chosen to build its infrastructure, and the energy chain we now rely on to achieve the basic functionality of our society.
Blaming BP is a little like going skydiving and having your parachute fail to deploy. Yes, maybe you are right to curse, during your last 30 seconds of life, the skydiving company for their failure to properly prepare the parachute. But as you can quickly see with this example, when you’re falling 120mph towards the hard, cold earth, it’s a bit too late for finger pointing to be productive. What would have been useful to know beforehand was that there is serious risk involved in skydiving to begin with. There will eventually be an accident. No matter what. The statistics might change, but there will at some point be an accident that someone will pay dearly for. And you might be the one affected by that accident. Maybe you should think about that before you go skydiving.
Inadvertent environmental damage. Inadvertent pollution. Inadvertent destruction of natural habitats. Inadvertent damage to ecosystems. Inadvertent killing of important portions of the food chain. These are but a few of the risks we assume with our energy policy. And I would describe this as systemic risk because damage to any one of these spheres could have serious ripple effects in other spheres. A failure of one off-shore oil drilling platform could potentially kill off a vast amount of ocean life. We do not know what degree of damage this might end up being once the effects of this echo throughout the chain. The interplay of factors is complex enough that it’s difficult to predict what kind of collapse we might trigger through one disaster stemming from energy procurement. Realistically, we must come to grips with the idea that things will go wrong from time to time. But to only criticize the companies behind such environmental disasters is to look askance at our own roles in creating the conditions for things like this to happen.
Like it or not, these companies sustain us and our way of life, which is why they are drilling out there in the first place. Unless we are willing to make compromises or wholesale shifts in our consumption as a society, then we’ll continue to have periodic disasters from things like off-shore drilling because things inevitably go wrong every now and then. There is no avoiding this; it’s the nature of a complex system for periodic failures to occur. It’s naive to think that companies simply don’t care about disasters like this; for BP, it’s not only bad PR, but they’re losing billions in profit from all this spilled oil.
Yet, regardless of what happens to the companies, we all suffer for these errors, and maybe in ways we haven’t even thought of yet. One error can be devastating to the entire human race and all life on earth. Yet, we allow companies to engage in activities that expose us to these risks. Why? Because it enables our lifestyle. We could easily prevent them from doing it if we as a society (through our elected officials) agreed that this was not something that was worth risking. But we don’t. We have comfortable lives that we receive as a benefit of allowing the behavior to continue (at least until the inevitable disaster); politicians feel pressure to support risky activities because as a society, we don’t appreciate the level of risk we’re investing ourselves in until it’s too late. Yet, it’s clear that the fewer risky behaviors we encourage or allow as a society, the less number of disasters we’ll have as a whole.
Currently the cap for all damages is $75 million, to be paid by BP. This, as you might imagine, is far lower than either the estimated dollar value of the damages or the amount of money it will take to clean up the spill. Some outraged people think that we should raise that cap into the tens of billions. This sounds good, until you realize that some things are just unfixable. This oil spill (more like a geyser) is pretty much unfixable at any cost. It’s just too late.
It’s for that reason, I think we shouldn’t increase the cap. If anything, I think we should lower it. Why? Having a huge cap will offer us psychological relief that we can keep allowing industries to do things that impose great risks to our society and planet. The larger this cap is, the more we feel like we will have someone to blame and someone who is “responsible” for fixing the problem. But like I said earlier, some things simply are not fixable. A money-back guarantee from a skydiving company isn’t going to do you much good when when you’re falling out of an airplane without a functioning parachute.
If we believe this disaster to be an exemplar of the kind of risk we are not willing to accept as a byproduct of off-shore oil drilling, then we should never have allowed this kind of drilling to be authorized in the first place. If we have low caps on similarly risky pursuits in the future, we’ll probably think a lot harder about what we allow to go on. Getting someone to fork over money for cleanup is the easy part. Actually undoing damage that a disaster on this scale causes is another, largely intractable problem that we’ll suffer the consequences for for a good long time. Lowering the cap forces us, from the very beginning, to think about what we’re doing when we authorize something. That’s what having no insurance policy forces you to do; you have to evaluate things based on an uncolored view of the risks because you are the one who is going to suffer the consequences. This is a realistic proposition because in the case of environmental disaster, we are all affected; a closed system like planet Earth is at jeopardy in its entirety when just one of the checks in a network of environmental checks and balances is threatened. It’s just easy to forget it when you can bill someone else for the problems.
If we think from the beginning about the costs we all have to deal with instead of the costs “some company” has to deal with, we’ll be a lot more careful in the future. If there is a future.
Comment [6]
Corporate Social Responsibility Can't Happen By Itself
emphasis on short-term profitability stunts CSR’s ability to thrive in the market
Posted 2009-10-01 22:40 in business, business models, culture, economics, ethics, finance, improvements, marketing, sustainability, unfinished thoughts
Regulation is a pretty hot topic. And when I say “hot,” I mean that it has an uncanny ability to divide a crowd. Progressives seem to generally favor regulations as a means of limiting the damage caused by corporate recklessness, and they have been quite vocal in pushing for greater government oversight in what companies can do, and how much they can do it before incurring serious penalties. Meanwhile, proponents of the free market maintain that the only fair and effective way to handle regulation is to allow the market to do the work; they believe in an efficient economic system that automatically controls problems that really matter (i.e. the problems most people care about). I personally can sympathize to some degree with both sides of this debate, but am not convinced that either can be implemented as solutions to the problems we currently face. What follows is my logic.
Before we can go on though, we have to face facts: it’s been obvious to those paying attention that market forces have not been effective in curbing devastating environmental damage caused by companies who have ignored the social costs of their operations. It’s not limited to environmental damages, either. The recent financial meltdown almost certainly would have been prevented with more oversight.
The traditional progressive (read: “liberal”) line about all this is that these corporations are just greedy and soulless, and don’t care about anything but profit. But this views corporate activity within a vacuum, and denies the economic realities underlying their behavior. In the absence of proper incentives, no company will behave in a manner consistent with diffuse, idealized social goals. Companies by their very nature act in ways that are most beneficial to themselves in the marketplace; even companies that try to do social good still have financial and publicity incentives underlying their behavior. Why? Because if they don’t, they effectively get punished by Wall Street and the market; remember that when we’re talking about the stock market, the bottom line is that public companies (i.e. the biggest organizations on the planet, who control the most money) pretty much need to post higher-than-expected profits consistently— or else. On Wall Street, nobody gives a hoot about how socially responsible you are— unless you’re making money from it. And tragically, our system is structured in such a way that companies really cannot afford to piss off Wall Street, for a number of reasons that go beyond the scope of this commentary.
Nevertheless, that is an economic reality; to condemn a company for being socially irresponsible overlooks the conditions that encourage the sort of reckless behavior that we hear so much about. In my opinion, it’s more of an indictment of our social and financial structure than it is of a company to say that they act irresponsibly. Like I’ve said before, we should think of corporations like organisms. They do what it takes to survive now. They typically can’t afford to think too far in the future, because Wall Street does not reward thinking far into the future; Wall Street rewards thinking about next quarter. Whose fault is that? I’d argue that it’s all of our faults. In an environment of high competition and high risk of market punishment, it’s unfair to blame companies for playing the game by the rules we ourselves constructed. Of course, it doesn’t make what they do ethically right, but like in any evolutionary context, the concept of justice doesn’t play a large role in behavioral decision-making; surviving does.
So yes, public companies do operate by almost strictly by financial motives, just like many progressives indignantly charge. But I would argue that this financial motivation should not at all detract from the actions of, say, Wal-Mart, who has done more than almost any other company in the world to enact serious green initiatives. True, they’ve done it for themselves, their own bottom line, and Wall Street— but still, they’ve done it. And if that’s the motivation they need to do it, then perhaps we should encourage that. Besides, if they were supposed to adopt a sudden conscience about their activities and rectify them, whose social goals are they supposed to strive for, anyway? Lots of different social factions have lots of different goals, and many of them have incompatible or actively contradictory goals.
For this reason, it seems fair to place the decision-making process in the hands of the public, through market forces. That allows a sort of collective decision-making process that is free from being regulated by “some guys on a board,” and allows for us to ostensibly have a shared voice in determining the direction that we take as a planet. Unfortunately, however, there are some problems that such market forces don’t resolve. For example, the economically well-endowed have a disproportionately large voice and thus the ability to unilaterally have a strong negative impact with their choices. And there’s still no guarantee that the aforementioned group will pay attention to social well-being if they’re still being held hostage by Wall Street demands. Free market economics as a means of regulation is dependent on not only market efficiency, but ethical, rational, and well-informed decision-making on the part of consumers— many of which are corporate entities.
But as consumers we are neither rational nor omniscient. We are sometimes ethical. But we can’t know everything about all the downstream effects of all our purchases at the time of purchase. This makes it pretty hard to argue the point that the market will be able to curb environmentally damaging business practices through selective consumption.
That may seem like a slam dunk for regulation, and many on the political left would love to see this happen. But it’s not that easy. The problem of regulation is complex, and it is difficult to enact regulation in a way that appears fair to everyone. Here’s the main problem: if there are regulations, who gets to call the shots?
Some might argue that we should use science to guide our regulatory policy, at least with regards to environmental concerns. But what science? Even science can have an agenda. The more you look into scientific research, the more you see how there is a chain of funding. Funding is a political process. People conducting research are subject to biases. No matter what the science says, or the preponderance of evidence suggesting one thing or another, when it comes down to drafting law, there will almost always be some arbitrary component about implementation (e.g. exactly how many tons of CO2 a company can release per year; exactly what chemicals a company can and can’t produce). And those people whose economic interests are being impinged will no more welcome the validity of the science or the arbitrary lines being drawn than a liberal would welcome Sarah Palin’s views if she was placed in charge of preserving endangered wildlife. Ultimately, any laws will be seen as political tools with embedded agendas.
Though it is debatable how much this might change corporate attitudes towards CSR, I think part of the fix is to change the nature of Wall Street. It does not serve companies or society to have such a heavy focus on short-term profitability. This structure denies companies the opportunity to act in ways that favor their own long-term efficiency, the public’s best interest, and the well-being of the planet. If companies didn’t have to keep impressing Wall Street, they could better take actions that could, over the long term, make their operations more efficient, streamlined, and less wasteful. That would be good for their bottom line and for environmental concerns. But that takes time, and it might require a few consecutive quarters of what may appear to be subpar financial performance. Right now, this is a highly risky strategy that most companies wouldn’t consider because they will not be rewarded for it.
Weirdly, even amidst all the talk about reform in the financial industry, I have not heard any talk about this. Admittedly, I’m not sure if anyone has worked out the details about how a “new and improved” stock market system would work, or if anyone has suggested a better set of economic incentives for waste reduction, but perhaps it’s time we started a national dialogue about it. It seems rather important.
Comment [12]
The New Wave of Advocacy of Financial Recklessness in Advertising
in which desperation about the economy starts to set in
Posted 2009-06-24 01:17 in business, business models, consumerism, economics, ethics, human nature
The poor economy has hit a lot of people very hard. As such, there’s been a glut of commercials on daytime television extolling the virtues of various cost-saving products. But one in particular that I’ve seen lately has been striking in its unbridled pomposity. This commercial features a nicely-dressed, middle-aged, middle-class couple talking tough about their finances. The wife reveals, in a rather distressed manner, that their monthly paycheck is “spent before we even get it.” Her husband adds that they decided that they needed to make serious cuts to their monthly expenses. “That’s why,” the woman says shortly before her husband sits in a nice leather chair opposite a a rather large, late-model flat panel television, “we switched from [a certain brand of satellite television network] to [another brand of satellite television network].” Huh?
Commercials like this trouble me. Obviously, the goal of some marketers is to get people to fork over money for things they don’t necessarily need. However, the mechanism employed by this commercial is to encourage financial recklessness by actively reinforcing the idea that certain luxuries are actually necessities. This demarcation of necessity/luxury is being increasingly blurred by advertisers, many of whom are now attempting to leverage latent consumer concerns about financial security to get them to actually spend more! By buying this [unnecessary] product, you’re actually demonstrating good financial judgment. Objectively, this assertion is not true; yet commercials like this one create an illusory social consensus about the wisdom of certain ill-advised consumer behaviors. After all, why would that nice couple on TV lie to us?
This trend is not limited to premium television channels. Many cell phone commercials seem to suggest something similar about “saving” money through consumption, as do many home internet services. No doubt, these services are extremely convenient, but for most people they are far from necessary, particularly if you are concerned about losing your house or climbing out from under a mountain of debt, both of which are probably much bigger concerns. The auto company Hyundai began running ads encouraging consumers to buy their cars, stating that they would allow a consumer to return the vehicle if their income stream was interrupted in any way. Ford and other car companies soon followed suit with similar programs. The question remains as to whether it is a wise idea for anyone who is concerned about the future of their income stream to purchase a car in the first place; after all, shouldn’t such people be trying to save money for future financial straits for when they potentially lose their jobs?
This brings us to rather salient questions about marketing ethics. Marketers are already considered pretty low on the food chain in terms of ethics, but in the midst of a global financial crisis, advocacy by companies of personal financial indiscretion is still a very ugly sight to behold. We should recall that lifestyles of excess were at the root of the sub-prime crisis, and we might be concerned by the idea of consumers being egged on by industry to continue doing it. We can’t legislate morality, but as consumers we can certainly question the ethical standards of companies whose competitive business model rely heavily on their customers’ bad judgment. But to be fair, we also can’t discount the role of the consumer either; surely consumers must take some responsibility for their own financial well-being.*
Troubling as it may be, I see this as simply a continuation of what has always been going on in marketing communications: companies try to promote certain beliefs, consumers hear it and form a dialogue with it. The ideas that consumers find convenient and/or believable stick; those that do not, fall by the wayside. It’s not perfect, but at least it’s somewhat democratic. But like democracies, sometimes it’s the stupid ideas that win out in the end.
* We tend to think of the U.S. economic system as being largely modeled on free market economics, which is in many ways built on the idea of consumers making informed choices, companies responding to market needs, and companies competing with each other to provide needed goods and services. Shift all the responsibility on any one party, and the equation starts to break down.
Comment [1]
Marketing Privacy
amidst consumer fears and self-consciousness, retailers should offer something that’s hard to get
Posted 2009-06-15 13:06 in business, consumerism, culture, human nature, improvements, marketing
It’s not infrequent that you hear people lamenting about the loss of privacy in modern society. Grocery stores want us to get loyalty cards so they can monitor what we’re buying and change their marketing mixes to capitalize on it. Facebook wants to sell our user information so marketers can post up banner ads about things they think we might buy. Data mining software on our computers watch what we’re doing and send that information to various companies that sign us up for junk mail and email spam lists.
Some of us actively combat this trend by being secretive when companies try to get information from us, while many of us are just resigned to it; but it remains true that privacy is a highly-valued commodity in our society. Some people value privacy because they don’t want to deal with the irritation and annoyance of people constantly trying to sell them things. But there are also real concerns about things like identity theft and corporations mining information for purposes that many people don’t feel comfortable about. Then there’s the fear of humiliation; sometimes people simply don’t want others— friends, acquaintances, and even strangers— to know certain things about them. There are, for example, fears of looking pathetic or comical in the eyes of others, or fears that potentially embarrassing information might circulate.
This morning, I happened to be in the pharmacy buying some calamine lotion for a poison ivy problem, but I noticed that in the same aisle there were numerous products for problems of a more embarrassing nature, like the slew of products for jock itch. Some people would rather live with the jock itch (or buy a $5 product online and have it shipped out for $7) rather than take that to the counter and face the cashier, knowing that they’re probably snickering under their stoic fascade and laughing about it with co-workers later.
Two aisles away were the condoms, prophylactics, and lubricants. I bet that only a quarter of people looking to buy “male enhancement drugs” in a pharmacy actually have the nerve to take the product to the counter.
In bookstores, I wonder how much potential revenue from the sales of self-help books, health and medical literature, and erotica (or pornography) is lost due to the inability of consumers to work up the gall to look another human in the eye while the price scanner brings up the book title on the computerized cash register.
I mention all these things not because they are humorous and we may see the universal human emotions involved in them, but because there’s a real marketing problem involved here. Consumers want to purchase things but are thwarted by their inhibitions, insecurities, and retailers’ apparent inability to acknowledge these feelings. Retailers are damaged not only because of the lost revenue from salable products that people are actually willing to fork over money for (but won’t), but because these products are taking up shelf and warehouse space and aren’t getting the turnaround that they could. There are high inventory costs to products that don’t shift units.
Some grocery stores, to save on labor costs, have implemented self-checkout lines in which customers ring up their own sales and pay for them through a machine. A system such as this would be incredibly valuable at stores like a bookstore or pharmacy. It offers customers an outlet to pay for an item and retain their privacy. They don’t need to talk to anyone, they don’t need to feel embarrassed, and they don’t need to feel like they are being judged. Retailers benefit because it keeps customers focused on getting the things they need, rather than feeling uneasy about making the transactions. These machines are a little clumsy in the grocery stores, but they would work much better in these venues than they do in grocery stores because you’d typically have a lot fewer items, and all the items have UPC codes (unlike vegetables in the grocery store, which are a pain to ring up).
There’s no doubt that persons in positions of power at retail organizations have recognized this issue. Yet, short of grocery stores (which have ostensibly implemented them for different reasons), I have yet to see one brick-and-mortar store do anything to remedy this misalignment. There may be a number of reasons for this, including concerns about theft, space, bucking convention, and good ol’ status quo; but in my view, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks by a significant margin— and for consumers, it would be a welcome change from feeling like their every move is being watched. For bookstores, it has the added bonus of keeping them as anonymous as Amazon.com, who they’ve been claiming has a competitive advantage over them.
Comment [2]
The Mystery of Coffee Refills
barriers to behavioral change are not always obvious
Posted 2009-04-21 00:30 in business, economics, environment, human nature, marketing, sustainability, unanswered questions
There is a Peet’s Coffee stand in the cafeteria of the building where I spend my days. They have a deal where you can bring in any size container and get a refill for $1.50. The cheapest size of coffee you can buy without getting a refill is $1.65, for a small size. I’m not a big coffee drinker, but as the semester rolls to a close, I find myself going there somewhat frequently. I always bring my old cup so I can get the refill. It saves me a few cents, and besides, I don’t like throwing away coffee cups. It’s not just the cup that bothers me, it’s the heat-insulating jacket and the plastic lid as well. It seems like a lot of stuff to be throwing out, especially if you buy coffee every day, or multiple times a day.
What I find very strange is that I’m surrounded by people who drink a lot of coffee— like 3-4 cups a day— and yet I feel like I’m the lone soul who brings in his used cup to refill. This seems particularly odd because a lot of the people around me are other students who, like me, are living their lives dangerously close to the poverty line and could probably use every cent that they might save.
Unsure about this incongruity, I asked the cashier one day if many people refill their cups. “Hardly anyone,” she replied, “but there are some people who refill huge containers.” She motioned with her hands to show how big the containers were. They were rather large.
Peet’s is apparently okay with this abuse of their refill policy, but the cashier seemed to think it was crazy. The reason Peet’s is okay with it probably has something to do with the facts that 1) they want to promote some kind of environmentalism, 2) refills save money on cups, lids, and insulators which are somewhat expensive, 3) it serves to reduce their waste disposal costs, and 4) hardly anyone gets refills.
But I find the fact that few people get refills curious. Of the people who frequent this coffee shop, many of them are graduate students, staff, and professors, who have offices within the building. Many of the undergraduates have storage lockers in the building as well. Yet the incentive structure is apparently not appealing enough for many of these people to get refills.
For a number of reasons, it is very interesting to observe the lack of consumer response to this initiative. First, it’s not very difficult for anyone to take advantage of it; that is, it doesn’t really create much inconvenience (especially for the customers who have offices or lockers within the building). Second, it demands very little change to habitualized behavior to get the refill (people just have to remember to take the cup with them to the coffee shop). Third, people— particularly those who drink a lot of coffee and multiple coffees per day— stand to save a good amount of money (if you buy a large coffee, you can save some 60 cents per drink, which can add up very quickly). Fourth, it demonstrates how inured we are to our disposable culture; the thought of refilling probably doesn’t occur to most people because they’ve simply never lived their lives in this manner.
As a person interested in understanding how to make behavioral change more appealing in social marketing contexts (this being of environmental concern to me), I note this: despite the bevy of benefits (reduced costs to the consumer, access to virtually infinite quantities of coffee, significant reduction of environmental waste) and the relatively minor drawbacks (you have to keep the cup and remember to bring it when you visit the store), this effort to promote refilling has generally failed. So I ask: what kinds of changes need to happen to make the reuse of coffee cups appealing for the customers of this particular store?
Post your thoughts or comments below, particularly if you are a regular customer of this or any coffee shop!
[Note: I realize that if you read the previous entry on this blog, it may seem to conflict with my attitude here. I should explain: this entry is about encouraging behavioral change that promotes certain ideals; the previous entry was expressing frustration with the repeated insinuations from industry that behavioral change is unnecessary if you just buy the right products. That said, I do not mean to discount the importance of careful and well-considered consumption, and its role in making social impacts; I simply reject it as a singular strategy.]
Comment [3]
Organizations as Evolutionary Entities
the simple yet complex task of curbing unwanted behavior
Posted 2009-04-04 15:01 in business, business models, economics, human nature, marketing
In two separate incidents yesterday, I was conversing with friends who were lamenting about how awful the press is, with their sensationalist headlines, sordid gossip-mongering, and terrible invasions of privacy. “It’s awful,” my colleague remarked, “They are ruining the world. Why don’t they take it upon themselves to be more constructive and positive?”
I don’t disagree that the press is ridiculous sometimes. But at the same time, anyone who understands marketing has to understand that corporations, including the press, are mirrors of our society. They must be to survive. If sensationalism didn’t sell, no one would be publishing such stuff; it just wouldn’t make business sense.
I think of organizations as animals operating in an evolutionary context. Give a dog a treat when it acts in a certain way and it will instinctively continue to perform that action in the future in order to get more treats; it’s a simple matter of self-preservation. If you can secure your food source, you are less likely to die. Punish the dog for an action, and over time it will eventually stop; clearly, you don’t want to piss off the hand that feed you.
We like to complain about tabloid newspapers, environmental destroyers, and otherwise irresponsible companies, but when it comes time to punish them for what we claim to disdain, we do the exact opposite and throw them a treat— whether that is by buying their products, rewarding short-term profits on Wall Street, or by throwing up our hands and disavowing our own role in the process.
The concept is very simple. Money is the lifeblood of organizations. Withhold it from them and they’ll stop what they’re doing.* It just makes economic sense for them. And while that may be a hollow victory to some who want companies to acknowledge some moral responsibility for their reformations, this is probably the best they’re going to get on any global scale for now. And besides, even though it may only be for economic reasons, scientific inquiry has repeatedly shown: economics is one of the primary drivers of behavior in modern social settings— and it would be foolish indeed to ignore that.
* Take for example this article, which talks about how an angry internet mob banded together to stop buying Tropicana orange juice because they were angry about the redesigned package. In my opinion, a ridiculous, laughable reason to get outraged; but nevertheless, they got the company to revert to their old design by causing a 20% drop in sales! Now imagine if people were outraged about things that really mattered…
Comment [2]
Business, Social Justice, and the Problems of Fairness
Posted 2009-03-28 11:03 in biology, business, business models, economics, human nature, politics, sustainability
If you observe traffic in India long enough, you’ll arrive at the conclusion that there are no road rules in India. But this is not true. There is one rule that dictates driving behavior: Might is right. To Westerners, this is a discomforting thought, because it bypasses the systems of social justice that we are used to in the West. Shouldn’t you, as a small car, have the same rights on the road as a mammoth SUV? Shouldn’t you, as a pedestrian, be able to cross a crosswalk without fear of being flattened by a speeding vehicle?
Most Westerners probably think so. Fairness and equality is ingrained in our outlook on the world. We look for courts and governments to level playing fields for us. If someone smashes our car in an accident, we use the law to restore ourselves to the situation we were in before the accident. We call that justice.
The ideals of social justice, fairness, and equality are lofty; it’s hard not to get upset when you hear stories of unfairness (persons being wrongly convicted of crimes, people losing all their money in elaborate frauds, etc.), and it’s even harder not to demand justice when something like this happens to you. Yet, I have recently begun to understand the sorts of costs that this has had on our society, both in an economic sense, but also in a psychological sense. I fear that despite the high-minded ideals of social justice, it does not always serve us well as a society to rectify every injustice leveled against us.
I wonder about how the concept of justice fits into an evolutionary context. Does it fit in it at all? Evolution would suggest that some individuals (organizations) are better suited for prevailing conditions than others. The weak and frail will be consumed by the environment, and the strong will soldier on, and grow. Evolution is the law of nature for all beings, and it is a law that is the supposed lifeblood of capitalism. Despite this, our system (at least in the U.S.) continually ensures that those who cannot compete— fairly or not— can be sustained artificially by a system that will nurse them regardless of their strength or potential to compete effectively in the future. This is not true for all firms, but it’s true for many. Think of GM and Ford, think of AIG, think of the ridiculous amount of subsidies given to industrial farms.
You might be wondering where I am going with this. What does bailing out companies have to do with social justice? Remember why the government is currently bailing companies out; it has very little to do with the companies themselves. It has everything to do with the idea that some people unfairly lost their life savings in them, and hundreds of thousands of people will unfairly lose their jobs, and the resulting economic meltdown will unfairly ripple throughout society and affect people who had nothing to do with it. So what is the solution? A lot of people feel that ‘investing’ billions of dollars into these organizations will re-establish justice to not the auto company, but people who might have been impacted by their problems. All those hapless investors won’t lose their hard-earned money. All those dedicated auto-workers who labored at GM for 35 years won’t lose their jobs. And all those bystanders won’t be leveled in the narrowly-averted nuclear winter.
I can’t help but anthropomorphize this situation a bit by comparing it to the way a parent welcomes back the proverbial prodigal son with open arms despite the kid’s waywardness. At least to some degree, we expect this from good parents. Madonna’s song “Papa Don’t Preach” has the narrator begging her religious father for support instead of judgment despite what in his eyes is her grievous sin of becoming pregnant as an unwed teenager. But we’re talking about supporting wayward organizations here, which will have broad social impacts. Welcoming back companies that recklessly screwed over investors and their own employees should not necessarily be supported in return, though it’s tempting to do it because of the other parties that might be affected by a failure to do so. So let’s start with why it may not be a good idea to bail out these companies, and then move on to why it’s even bad for the related parties.
There’s a good chance that Madonna learned her lesson and won’t get pregnant again, but the guys at GM are more akin to heroin addicts than teenagers who made some bad decisions. They’ve been supported by government money so long, are so far from market-orientation, and so incapable of the sorts of organizational change that are necessary for detoxification that it seems impossible to give them any sort of support without tacitly feeding their addictions. Sure, you can give GM money to go rehab, but there’s absolutely no indication that they’re interested in rehab. They want to stave off the looming disaster on the horizon for one more day. If perhaps they showed the least bit of interest in market orientation and willingness to be innovative, it might be different. But that’s not the case at all. They simply expect to be saved because they always have been, and the government plays into their hands largely out of habit.
Despite this, no amount of money given to the company is going to restore the lives of the victims of corporate irresponsibility, and no amount of money alone will prevent the threats of insolvency from being constant and recurring events. Of course, we are often victims of the sunk-cost fallacy, which suggests that because we’ve already wasted so much money on these companies and they’ve already created so much chaos, that we should escalate our commitments to them to hoist them from the tarpit from which they’ve carelessly driven into (again)— which is precisely the wrong tack in this situation. The best thing to do is to walk away and never look back, despite their anguished screams.
I know that many people would be affected negatively by this course of action. I realize that many retirements will be ruined, many workers will hit the skids, and their kids may never be able to attend college. I understand and empathize with this hardship. But what worries me is that trying to correct these unfairnesses actually set us up to create exponentially more of them, and make us more susceptible to future crises of the same or greater magnitude— and it has nothing to do with the actual transfer of money, and everything to do with economic incentives.
Put bluntly, these organizations are drains on the system, and further feeding them and the people who they have hurt is an even bigger drain on the system. That said, I understand that we live in a society, and we can’t always think about things in these terms. I don’t advocate, for example, that we stop all social services, which many perceive as drains. But it’s damaging to the business environment and ultimately consumers to support businesses just because we always have. It not only encourages organizations to be reckless about their management habits, but it encourages those who work for them and invest in them to behave carelessly and greedily. Aggregated over a nation and over decades, it’s primes us perfectly for future disasters of equal or greater magnitude.
Put the right incentives in place, and you can avoid this sort of thing. If you knew that no one was going to bail you out, your company would probably act in a much more controlled manner. If you were investing your life or your live savings in that company, you might spend a bit more time scrutinizing the management practices of that company. Which is what these organizations and people are supposed to be doing in the first place.
Consider this: a herd of antelope will never try to nurse or save an injured antelope, regardless of whether it was maimed by a predator or by another antelope. To do so would jeopardize the future of the rest of the herd. Standing around and attending to the injured puts them all at risk. And indeed, some antelope will need to serve as fuel for the predators. These predators probably aren’t viewed positively by the antelope (if they have such a capacity), but in a way, they are actually protecting the antelope society as a whole because they enable a systematic checks-and-balances that promotes a balanced ecologic sphere that keeps the antelope’s environment stable. Without this, the antelope would overpopulate and eat themselves to famine. Then all of a sudden, the seeming prosperity would reveal itself to just be an elaborate illusion, and they’d see that actually there wouldn’t be enough food or resources to go around. Does this sound at all familiar?