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Authentic is the new black
Generic is no longer good enough
Rob Norris
April 30, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
Table of Contents
Pull to Eject
When is generic no longer good enough?
Shopping malls moved us away from main street specialty stores.
Walmart offered big box store convenience with less choice.
Amazon replaced almost everything else with cheap imports you can have tomorrow.
Sure, there’s a craft resurgence on Pinterest, but we’ve traded down unique goods and services for convenience.
Generic is a race to the bottom.
We’ve slowly let ourselves be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
It probably started with mass production.
"Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.’
The real innovation of mass production was in manipulating consumer demand: creating a complacent buyer with reduced expectations of quality.
Over time we’ve accepted the “good enough” widgets.
Absence of choice is hard to sense.
What is really being manufactured is us — and our perceived needs, our attitudes toward what is good — our willingness to settle for “good enough.”
We have accepted mediocre because it can be delivered to our door tomorrow.
Generic Education
It’s not just that we wear the same clothes or drive the same cars.
We’ve accepted good enough in the far more important issue of education.
It shouldn’t be polarizing - educating the next generation is a bipartisan need for our future success.
And since the 1983 Nation at Risk report was released, many aspects of the education reform agenda did have bipartisan agreement.
But that has changed in recent years.
Charter schools and private schools have had far more growth since the debacle of poor leadership around COVID.
Terrible decisions made by adults set kids back by years. Many will never recover.
I listened to a podcast with Marc Andreessen on a recent road trip and he’s homeschooling his 9 year old.
The man who invented the modern browser can afford to send his children to the absolute best schools, yet he and his wife are teaching their son at home.
His 9 year old is learning rocket science and gaming.
His education will be anything but generic.
It’s telling how many top Silicon Valley executives are choosing to homeschool their kids.
It’s damning how many have not let their kids use smart phones. But that’s a topic for another time.
Generic Technology
We have also settled for a lot of generic technology - from modems and beige boxes to bloated word processors and slide presentations - most of the new new things have been … meh.
Sure, ecommerce and social media were big, but they’ve dumbed us down even more.
The latest shiny bauble is AI.
The truth is that there is no such thing as “artificial intelligence.”
All the hype tools we read about - ChatGPT, Midjourney, Jasper, CopyAI, Rytr and various content creation tools are not authentic intelligent minds.
“As sophisticated as they are, they are only language and image models fed with the results of human innovation scraped and stolen from the internet.
Having analyzed what we have written or depicted before, these programs then statistically anticipate what the next most likely word in a sentence should be, or what color the next pixel in an image should be.”1
We accept the generic paraphrasing of things we’ve written before because the tools turn it around quickly.
The inauthencity of AI will be accepted just like we accepted Amazon products.
What is being mechanized by AI is our tastes — our ability to discern quality, or originality, at all.
And it will be more difficult to discern.
This pink haired woman is a model created by artificial intelligence by an agency in Barcelona. Meet Aitana, she makes $10,000 a month online!
Pay attention.
It will be harder to sniff out the generic stories, headlines and images regurgitated by these tools.
Or - hear me out - you can create your own stuff that can only be crafted by you.
In my opinion, authenticity will be even more valuable in the AI future.
Now go launch something 🚀
It starts with not having a hangover with
the way things used to be.
This Launch 🚀 kit guides you through market validation, customer definition and messaging examples to use your uncommon knowledge and create a standout product.
Frame up your unique experience and authentic voice.
Modern Tools
Do you need to stay on task when you’re online? Can you not figure out which tab the sound is coming from?
Take a look at this free Chrome extension to hack your productivity.
No need to switch browser tabs for each fresh thought. All the things you use in a one-click sidebar.
Old School Wisdom
Violate them at your own risk. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.
They are all great for product development, but the Law of Category stands out.
If you can't be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.
This is the polar opposite of generic.
Classic advice from Al Ries and Jack Trout that is just as important today as it was when they wrote it.
Free Knowledge
Go crack some eggs.
Shaan Puri is becoming one of my favorite interviewers.
He and Sam Paar have built one of the best business podcasts in the world. Weekly goodness.
This 4 minute rant by Shaan is about not just watching people cook (start a business), but doing it yourselves.
Let him cook.
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1 AI and the Rise of Mediocrity https://time.com/6337835/ai-mediocrity-essay/
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