Build for Sheep (because they’re the strongest)

As Aristotle said, man is a social animal. Our ability to collaborate effectively and our pervasive instinct to help each other is the only thing that allowed us to survive as slow, mostly hairless, goofy looking creatures with weak claws, teeth, and hides. I mean if species in the animal kingdom were players in Madden, humans despite their 99 AWR would be like a 27 overall. We owe our current dominion over the animal kingdom to our social nature and our ability to collaborate, but our greatest strength of course gives rise to a fundamental human weakness.

I don’t know how you feel about it, but my absolute favorite thing in life is when multiple individuals come together and collaborate to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Incidentally, my least favorite thing in life is corporate committee thinking, which results in a whole that is less than any one of its individual parts (that’s another post for another day). But this power comes with a price, one that I struggle with daily: the average person trusts the people that they trust more than they trust their own capabilities for logic, reasoning, and decision making.

If you’re a tech savvy person, chances are you already know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re not a tech savvy person, consider this:

See what I mean? Probably not, because you saw a chart that looked complicated and you didn’t read it, assuming I would bring you up to speed in this paragraph. So the point is made anyway (although you really should read through the chart).

Most people when faced with an unfamiliar situation or problem look first to whomever they perceive as experts in a field, then to their friends and family, and only as a last resort will they consult their own logic, reasoning, and intuition. When in more familiar territory the decision making progression looks a little different, but objective critical analysis still comes last — I would argue it goes intuition -> ask people you trust for help -> use logic to make what you consider to be an educated guess.

Now, I want to make it very clear that by no means am I advocating the other extreme, which is not trusting anybody but yourself. I think that’s actually the least effective way to get what you want out of life. I’m just illustrating what I consider to be a fact: that most people in most situations do not think for themselves. Am I somehow above this? Hell no I love collaborating and relying on other people’s expertise…I wholeheartedly believe you should only engage your mental faculties when you have to (see: “Be Chill. It’ll make you smarter.”).

Not to mention that in many industries and companies, especially large ones, this reliance on our fellow man is actually a critical aspect of society that their continued functioning depends on. Do you think Ford wants all of its employees doing critical analysis and coming to their own conclusions? The company would come to a grinding halt, chaotically trying to move in all different directions like some sort of grotesque rat king.

So, you might say, it looks like the system works. Why are you even bringing it up? Well, I think it’s especially relevant to building things for the internet. Way too often I see people in our industry with insular, elitist attitudes that “just because my mom doesn’t get how to use it doesn’t mean its not revolutionary.” Actually bruh, that’s exactly what it means. If your app relies on people progressing all the way down to their logic and reasoning skills, you’re F’ed. In the A.

Your product will never infiltrate the majority — that massive community of people that rely primarily on those around them for information and decision making. Not to say that there isn’t a whole segment of the population that relies on their logic and reasoning first and people second. But hey guess what, those people that do tend to suck at spreading word of mouth because they never saw the need for having tons of friends.

If you ignore this fundamental societal truth and you pour your heart and soul into building something that feels cutting edge and revolutionary but just doesn’t stick, you’ll end up as dejected as Kenny Powers, the Reverse Apache Master, was when he retired. As the great sage put it with characteristic eloquence, you’re just like Neil Armstrong:

I wasn’t sure where I was going when I started this, but I guess I’m leading up to a cautionary message. If you’re insulated enough by the walls of silicon valley from the clueless normies (who you’re supposed to be building this shit for in the first place, by the way!) to think that you’re just an early adopter and society is going to catch up to you, I’ve got some sad news to break to you: you may suffer from premature infatuation. Look, it’s a common thing, it happens to a lot of guys, and there’s steps you can take to get past it. But you’re going to need to get past it if you want to succeed as an entrepeneur or a developer for the consumer web.

Now, I could point to countless websites that were featured on techcrunch once upon a time as cautionary tales but I’m going to leave that task to you guys in the comments section. Aside from mentioning that Twitter wasn’t Twitter until it was on Oprah, I’m going to wrap up by with two of my favorite examples of the immobility of established societal norms:

1. Edison gave us the gift of artificial light (although he was kind of a jerk). Yet the average workday still ends when it’s dark, getting dark, or a few hours away. I mean, think about it, we can work whenever we want. We should never be at work when there’s sunlight outside, but we are. I’m not saying that a few of us as individuals should start work at 11 pm and end at 7 am, I’m saying that *everybody* should do it. Like banks should open at 11pm, na’ mean?

2. In the western world, we are beneficiaries of a ubiquitous availability of soap. Yet we still use utensils to eat. Take a second to look at your hand and flex it around. Do you think we would evolve something that freaking complex that *wouldnt* help you eat? OK, maybe spoons would still be necessary…but forks and knives and chopsticks? C’mon Man!

So as I alluded to before, I had planned to riddle this post with compelling examples of sites or technologies that suffered from premature infatuation and were bound to fail due to the immobility of society. However I didn’t have the thoroughness, preparation, or internet to do so earlier today. So why don’t u guys help me out in the comments? I’ll edit the post to add any and all of your suggestions!

Please note that due to a database error (who’s in charge of that around here, anyway??) we lost all the comments on this and a handful of other posts. Sorry to all that left something here