Roshambo: Culture over Technology and Commerce

Roshambo.
Also known as “Rock, Paper, Scissors.” Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, paper beats rock. I've long loved this game for its simplicity and its intrinsic equilibrium – a reassuring balance of powers.

Today we’re playing a real-life version of roshambo with high stakes and big throws: Culture, Technology, and Commerce.

In 1995, when I joined an initial development team of just five people, tasked with building Yahoo!, we witnessed the exhilarating momentum of an epoch in which proponents of Culture commanded new Technology, and used it to assert cultural values like democracy, transparency, and accessibility. 

This assertion of values was enabled by new technologies and it upended the established powers of Commerce, re-imagining business models and revamping entire industries.  

“Disintermediation” soon became a new buzzword. Once-stalwart industry leaders from retail to publishing to entertainment to newspapers to travel (just to name a few) faced mortal threats from a flurry of small startups who mastered the new technologies and promoted new value systems that resonated immediately and deeply with the Culture.

So we saw that Culture can beat Technology and in turn, Technology can beat Commerce.

But it was not long before Commerce would fight back. And in able pursuit of its highest value – profit maximization – Commerce inevitably began to suppress Culture. Then, Commerce seized the power of Technology in order to increase productivity, improve efficiency, and scale to ever larger markets.

This shift was rapid and it was global, and before we knew it, we found ourselves praying to the God of Scale without examining the costs. Productivity, efficiency, scale – to what end?

We lost sight of our ultimate goal: to enrich human lives.  We’ve substituted efficiency for beauty, productivity for passion, scale for satisfaction. We’ve replaced shared experience with anywhere/anytime individual gratification.

Beauty, passion, satisfaction, and now community – it’s these intrinsic human values that are at stake. In an age when everyone is a writer, everyone is a photographer, craft is quaint and artisans are antiquated. 

As artists and as proponents of core human values, we cannot abdicate our responsibility to return a sense of equilibrium to the equation. It's time to throw scissors, to let Culture cut through the new normal once more and help restore some balance to our lives.