Telepocalypse

OPINION://Take your product higher

This is a somewhat dangerous essay to write, as you could readily draw all sorts of wrong conclusions. But I suspect there is a kernel of truth that is worth the long process of extraction.

Exhibit A: Umair anticipates "hypercivilization" -- "a space where everything is hyperreal; hyperlinked, simulated, plastic, liquid, etc.". A virtual world of virtual relationships and virtual pleasure.

Exhibit B: An extraordinarily long, detailed and challenging inquiry into the nature of human happiness, its chemical and biological origins inside us, and our liberation from "Darwinian" suffering of the mind. The debate is half pharmacological (could we replicate the positive aspects of the MDMA experience across large populations indefinitely?), half philosophical on the benefits (or otherwise) of such advances.

At the heart of their thesis is this:

Fortunately there is no reason, in principle, why an analogue of Moore's law can't be implemented in successive generations of the reward circuitry of organic life-forms. The affective, aesthetic, intellectual, interpersonal (and spiritual?) well-being of neurochemical robots like us can be genetically pre-coded. If rationally redesigned, our enlightened successors may view today's "natural" rewards as poor surrogates for genetically underwritten happiness. When the mechanisms underlying bliss and its gradients are understood, the molecular machinery of the sublime can be modulated - and amplified indefinitely.

The interesting bit to me was learning about all the different forms of reward circuitry in the brain and the interlocking regulatory mechanisms. Naturally, the elimination of mental anguish whilst maintaining touch with reality (whatever that is) is a multi-generational project of immense difficulty, as the authors stress.

The connection beween the two exhibits isn't so obscure; we're entering a world where our social relationships are frequently mediated by machines. The next "logical" step is where the link between our external senses and our internal id is mediated by technology -- in this case utopian pharmacology, gene therapy and eugenics.

The ultimate irony of "intelligence at the edge" is that it turns out to be us, and we don't always like what we see:

Jealousy, envy, resentment, ridicule, hate, anger, disgust, spite, contempt, schadenfreude and a whole gamut of nameless but mean-spirited states we undergo each day are a toxic legacy of our Darwinian past.

The ambitious program of work they lay out is intended to address this toxic legacy. Misguided? Maybe, but equally inevitible in its arrival.

But what on earth has this to do with telecom?

Technologies like SMS could be seen as a form of self-medication for temporary social isolation. Need a dopamine squirt? Text a few friends, and get your reward when they return the compliment. Remember the cocaine-fuelled lab rats self-administering hits until they drop? I bet they have some great jokes they share between cages at night about humans and SMS. Cue suitable Larson cartoon.

Well, today's there's no such discipline as biotelecology. We don't have teens strapped into fMRI scanners seeing how their mesolimbic pathway lights up for each ring tone.

But maybe we should? Forget all those boring customer surveys and focus groups. Just experiment with thousands of simulated product concepts and watch the customer neurons at work!

Sounds silly? Well, OK, let's just do it as a thought experiment instead. Imagine in my IM/VoIP client I can right-click on any contact, and select "Wave to Bob". Bob then sees his Martin icon waving back when he comes online. Maybe I can even tag the wave "Happy Birthday". No, it isn't an IM because it doesn't demand a response -- there's no text entry pop-up where Bob feels obliged to acknowledge your wave. (You don't send thank-you cards in return for birthday cards you receive, so why should you online?)

So in some way I'm triggering Bob's reward and wellbeing circuitry. It's just we have no real idea which ones. Yet shouldn't every communications product ask "how does this light up the pleasure and reward circuitry in users"?

We could be building better communications products by also asking the question: how does my product appeal to Darwinian and post-Darwinian values?

Let's take a Darwinian example first. We out-maneuvred the sabre-toothed tigers by enlarging our brains and living in close-knit cooperative communities. We are hyper-social, but also adapted to form a social hierarchy. The quoted article even argues that conditions like depression are adaptations to help low-status individuals channel (or extinguish) their survival and reproductive energies.

So how do our communications tools come to reflect social hierarchy? Here's an example. If you're both running the latest release of Skype, you can view in turn how many buddies each of your buddies has:

I now am socially humiliated - a total outcast. I mean, only 68 people on Martin's buddy list! What a loser...

(Not sure what's making Stuart look so happy, but I know I want some. Well, actually theobromine does me fine -- all donations welcome, minimum 60% cocoa, dark preferred -- and caffeine is waaay too stong for me most of the time!)

Without knowing it, Skype has just taken a small step in the Darwinian direction. What if every "Voice 2.0" telephony system published the number of calls each user made and received, the number of minutes they spent using it, and the status level of those callers? Score bonus marks if you have an assistant to answer the damned machine for you! Seriously, we have no idea how people's behaviour might change. We could guess, but a century of rigid assumptions about what telephony is and does has left us bereft of imagination of how it could be different.

I guess we can push our drugs analogy a bit further. After all, what's the point of a colourful metaphor if not to be pushed to breaking point? The Darwinian drugs are the "isolators" such as cocaine. They re-inforce destructive egotistical pleasure-seeking. The post-Darwinian ones are the ones that enhance self- and social awareness (entactogens). This is a much smaller group. (Maybe tobacco smoking is so addictive because of the social bonding it provides among smokers, as a pseudo-entactogen?) Shouldn't you be asking which drugs your product resembles, how to get the users hooked, how to enhance the high, and how to ensure coninued addiction?

Just think of the "I am socially important and necessary to the operation of this enterprise" that the Blackberry brings. First it divides the "ordinary" staff from the executives who are traditionally issued with them. Then the egos of the holders have to be stroked continually to maintain their self-esteem. Pure Darwinan approach. If you want to beat the Crackberry, build a product that puts empathy and co-operation at its heart. What does an "E-berry" look like? I don't know, but I expect it'll come in pink and the secretaries will buy them first.

Likewise, the status symbol of having a "car phone" propelled the status-worth image of cellular telephony.

Take MMS as another example. This is a post-Darwinian product; one that should bring us closer to one-another. But it was a market flop on release. One reason MMS missed the mark was because, well, it didn't deliver enough brain happy-juice for the price. A single lousy picture of the grandkids at the zoo? What you want is to share the experience with those not present, not just a moment. And that's more than one lousy picture. You want to share a whole stream of images throughout your visit. There should be anticipation of more coming. The sense of being there for grandma is accentuated as she receives in (near real-time) updates of your progress. Ooh -- they're at the monkey house now! (And you can now see how mobile video would possibly be less attractive than a stream of camera messages with the occasional tagged on audio commentary, since the temptation would be to create an anthology video later on in the event rather than the feeling of real-time sharing.)

The product and pricing didn't lend themselves to this, hence the failure to meet market expectations. Too hard to organize an album being shared as it is created, too costly to send one. A better product would probably have been priced on a "per day" basis: become an MMS user for the day, send as many as you want. Only $2! And it would always offer to send the next picture to the same recipient as the last one -- one click.

How would you re-work directory enquiries in this biochemical reward model? Can't say. There's probably a way to portray users as more socially successful. Have a TV advert that contrasts the inept non-user funbling to find a number by calling friends with someone who just stumps up the cash and calls for help. The main aim of this product is avoiding pain, not engaging pleasure. You sell more of it by exaggerating the pain of not having it.

Put on your shades and look at your computer screen. Imagine they are magic polarizers: look one way, and you see pleasure; look the other way round, pain. What about your communications tools is visibly glowing with pleasure? A new email? From whom? Which parts of my product transcend the merely functional? How can I better explot those parts? What would a super-rewarding email client do with new email? How could I share my "Wow! A message from Bob!" feeling? What if the response was automatically prefixed with "Martin immediately responds:" by the system, so Bob sees how much priority I give him? I think you get the idea, even if the example is lousy.

It isn't a surprise we don't have a root "reward" model for communications product design that reflects our biological makeup. It's a massive challenge. It's a shame we don't often relate to a Maslow-type model of reward and motivation that at least abstracts away the biochemical complexity. It's a problem when you're a telco, and you don't have a model of what makes people do more of what makes them feel good. It's a tragedy when 80%+ of your revenue comes from one or two communications products, and you have no model of what the users do with them and how you might get them to do more of it. It's a serious farce when you don't have "get users to make more phone calls and SMS messages" as key objectives!

Sadly, from what I've seen, much of the industry is at the "farce" level still. Basic questions of how to get people to consume more telephony, and get a bigger kick out of it, go unanswered. At Sprint I couldn't find anything about what people do with their mobile phones and how we might get them to do more of it! Making more phone calls wasn't a product selection criterion. Yet whether your means are Darwinian or post-Darwinian, the objective remains the same.

How we will manipulate ourselves internally in future to achieve perpetual hedonic bliss, I don't know. It certainly adds a whole new dimesion to achieving The American Dream for those on that side of the pond. But the ideas of pleasure, reward, pain and social anguish are ones that are powerful indicators of success and failure in technologies that operate outside the mind and body. You would do well to understand and harness them.

Posted by Martin Geddes at 5:01 PM

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