YOU COULD FINISH the previous section and think, OK, writers are screwed. Not exactly a brain-busting observation, especially with all the current overhyping of AI. That’s just the way things are going…for writers.
If this sentiment were true—if the practitioner-promoter, boom-bust dynamic were limited to one profession—I wouldn’t bother with this book. It would simply be a phenomenon that’s both sad for my financial prospects and a dangerous next step in the decline of discourse, wherein everything gets reduced to propaganda. And while those things are terrifying, a lot of people could shrug them off.
Very few, after all, have shed a tear for the looming extinction of cobblers, which, according to the Associated Press, have “dwindled from 100,000 in the 1930s to 15,000 in 1997 to about 5,000 today [reported in March 2019].”
I personally mourn the fact that there are no cobblers in my hometown, and how that correlates with a rising number of people who feel like it’s OK to wear Crocs in public, but I lack both the knowledge and power to do anything about it.
Unfortunately, there are corollaries of this boom-bust dynamic growing in almost every industry. Look, for a moment, at all the people shilling investment systems, real-estate strategies, blueprints for starting a business, or otherwise proclaiming they have the key to your prosperity and happiness.
It’s the same fundamental shift into abstraction, the same false promise, the same misalignment of incentives, and the same asymmetry of risk and responsibility. And these other promoters are worthy of the same, if not more, scrutiny.
Take, for instance, the guy on YouTube, walking through the mansion he booked on Airbnb and then standing in front of a leased Lamborghini while he uses his infomercial voice to explain how you can get rich with his fail-proof investment system.
The most important questions you can ask are, If this guy is getting so rich with his system, why doesn’t he just keep getting rich with his system? Why has he instead taken the time and money to create this course and run all these YouTube ads to sell the system?
Spoiler: The answer isn’t “Because I want to help people.” If that dude wanted to help people, he could give the system away for free. Or hire people and teach them the system through a profit-sharing agreement. Instead, he wants the relationship to end at the point of sale.
People who sell systems, courses, or other secrets—they’re often phrased as “secrets” despite the aggressive broadcasting of whatever it is—want the asymmetry that comes from selling picks & shovels. They want to make money upfront, with no responsibility for the customer after the transaction. And they want to do it on a giant scale.
So just as with all those folks on Medium, almost every endeavor that involves doing something to achieve a desired outcome is getting eclipsed by an adjacent industry that involves talking about that activity—specifically, talking about how it can be easier, simpler, faster, or more profitable. And that disproportionate amount of promoters to practitioners offers the same signal that trouble is brewing.