098: Objective realities and intangible values
[After - Reflection] GenAI text; Yuval Harari; Rory Sutherland; the printing press
I’m going to miss the view.
I am also extremely grateful our family had the ability to work remotely for a brief period a bit north of Puerto Vallarta. Fiber Internet is a miracle. Now we’re back in a slightly less warm Minnesota, where winter remains aloof.
Persuasion is a Continuum
The Persuasion & Marketing class met again Tuesday and opened my eyes, which any teacher will tell you is a gift.
The quick backstory is persuasion is older than human history (i.e. plants persuade insects), but time is limited, so we began the course last week with the Greeks because of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. As good a place to root a semester of Persuasion as any. And so this week we hovered over a loose thousand year period from roughly the end of the Roman Empire to Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and its aftermath, give or take a century.
I am not a historian. So our very brief levitation over a grand display of civilization was more about segueing from the Greeks trying to define and personify Persuasion through a dizzying pressure test of persuasion at scale—via government, culture, and especially religion. And to recognize the diversity of methods, technologies and motivations in which persuasion gets honed by humans over time. The task is made much easier thanks to the work of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, and his various talks, especially this one.
Central to Homo sapiens evolving from insignificant to undeniable is our ability to persuade ourselves and each other. It is our imagination and our cooperation combined in glorious (and effective) diversities, notes Harari, which creates the distinction.
For example, the concept of ‘human rights’—now seen as fundamental to our existence—evolved through many layers of persuasion, establishing rules, norms, and values that define our society. This contrasts sharply with more mundane forms of persuasion, such as decreeing potatoes to be ‘Royal Vegetables’ and then instructing guards to deliberately fail at protecting them. There is a vast spectrum of persuasion’s influence, ranging from foundational human principles to whimsical exercises of power.
Another of the beguiling contrasts in the continuum of human persuasion is the way in which we leverage objective realities and intangible values. A phalanx of pointy spears is objectively very persuasive. Yet all it took to persuade Canadians to purchase more Shreddies was photons and neurons, i.e. an idea, or “intangible value,” as described by Rory Sutherland in his inaugural and now legendary TED Talk. (The course uses Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy as a text.)
And then the printing press arrived.
Its impact on the practice of persuasion is almost impossible to articulate. (Mike Soha’s “Media History: The Printing Press Revolution” brought useful context to our discussion.) So I asked the class to write a bit of revisionist history pretending the Chinese didn’t invent moveable type centuries earlier, and Gutenberg had more compelling distractions circa 1455.
Next week Persuasion and Marketing will jump forward into more familiar territory as media begins to take shape, and persuasion codifies into its mass media incarnation. And AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs will begin exploring visuals.
AI+Creativity Update
🦁 Publicis launched an hour long immersion into its approach to leveraging AI across its business.
🤖 Adios, Bard. Gemini Advanced is live, at ~$20/mo within the Google One bundle. Casey Newton says its, “multimodal abilities are impressive.” Google seems wise to have given Ethan Mollick early access.
👁️ My favorite Vision Pro reviews so far have been Casey Neistat’s NYC walk around and Marques Brownlee’s very, very thorough breakdown.