Universal Basic Conflict

Granting every working-age member of a population a stipend of money per month, per year, for the rest of their lives will do little to mitigate the two states it’s designed to relieve: human avarice and envy, and a lack of meaningful employment opportunities. No matter how much the AI technologists promise that such schemes will, in some utopian future society, we will never arrive at.

Jealousy (of people), envy (of things), and avarice (the desire to acquire more) are human emotions that aren’t often acknowledged as the darker motivators for people to engage with work. All of these emotions, along with vanity and pride (all emotions grounded in negative storytelling), are typically at the bottom of many people’s motivations to chase money, status, titles, honor, and respect. And because they’re all lurking in the basement of every human heart, the materialist rationalist utopians among us are inevitably surprised when they manifest as genuine, but irrational, resistance to the desire for a Universal Basic Income-driven future.

A fellow named Dostoyevsky, however, put words to what the technologists can’t seem to name, around 160 years ago, in a pre-Industrial Revolution, agrarian monarchial society:

“Now I ask you: What can be expected of man since he is being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he would have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man will play you a nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.” ~ Notes From Underground, Part One, Chapter Eight

In our post-modern society, the era of “make-work” is over. And it’s been over for a while. But the thing is, we have also arrived at the end of the hangover from the end of the Industrial Revolution, so the era of “we financialize human effort in just a little bit better ways” is also about to be over with the dominance of LLMs that can do all that average make-work better and financialize it faster.

This is a real problem because, under the scheme that has built the last 125 years of scalable economic systems, meaningful employment was typically not found at the beginning of the employment ladder in minimum wage positions for many people. But now, even those rungs of the ladder are being hewn away. Without addressing both a lack of meaningful work opportunities for people at the beginning of their careers and the inherent built-in drivers toward accomplishing goals and earning money, all the Universal Basic Income in the world will only serve to exacerbate conflict, providing enough impetus for people to engage in conflict en masse. Because without work, idle hands will surely “…play you a nasty trick.”

Work provides spiritual, psychological, and emotional meaning for many people. But because those intangible outcomes don’t appear anywhere on a spreadsheet, they are either discounted as being meaningless or not even considered in the first place. A universal basic income does nothing to address any of those needs, emotions, or drivers in people. As a matter of fact, such schemes spit in the face of human motivators and dare the human being to do something about it. History proves that’s a negotiation human beings are fine with accepting the consequences of. And just declaring “Game on” doesn’t quite do justice to what will surely result from such schemes.

Human truth and what lurks deeply in the dark human heart are fundamentally what defeat all UBI schemes, whether from the State, from businesses, or even from our current crop of techno-utopians, drunk on AI outputs. Such proposed schemes really come down to giving people money, hoping to cure the deep disease of the human heart and the human spirit without ever engaging in performing the uncomfortable surgery of examining–and acknowledging–much deeper and darker motivations. You know. Those ones that have always lived deeply in the human soul, where even the state and technology cannot reach.

This is a sure recipe for universal basic conflict. And at scale.

What's on Offer?

The thing that’s on offer—the thing that’s being negotiated—is rarely the thing that we are fighting over.

Our conflicts rarely get to the core truth of what needs to be resolved. This is why management of a recurring conflict situation is a better posture toward conflict than one of trying to persist in getting to a resolution. It’s also another reason why we are all terrible negotiators.

The issues that we are fighting over—and the options for resolution that should be on offer—must be sold, managed, persuaded, and packaged for other people’s consumption in the way that they want them to be on offer.

Not the way you want it to be offered.

This core truth is what unites marketing and conflict management. Human beings like being persuaded, marketed to, and talked to, in very specific ways, and if you violate conventions in the pursuit of getting to a deeper truth, you run several risks, but the biggest ones are as follows:

Being unheard.

Being ignored.

Being unfairly (or fairly) maligned.

Being marginalized when another more persuasive party comes along.

The counter to the question of “What’s on offer?” is the equally compelling question “What’s the truth of what we are fighting over?”

Obnoxious and Competent

At a job you’re typically going to do better if you’re competent at the work you’re hired to do.

If you’re lazy and incompetent no one at work will be inclined to help you or do you favors. Also, your supervisor, management, and leaders will be less inclined to preserve your job when someone better comes along.

If you’re competent and obnoxious, and no one likes you personally, but you get work done at a high level of competence, supervisors, management, and your co-workers will deal with you. And they’ll defend all manner of obnoxious behavior as long as your competency continues to increase.

Where people fail at work is that they neglect to increase their moat of competency.

And they grow their moat of obnoxiousness.

Or they grow their moats of incompetence and laziness.

None of which are going to help you when better technologies, better people, better ideas, or better systems come along to disrupt, remove, or replace you or your job.

Relevant to the Vision

In business, leaders are often tasked with selling a vision. Sometimes it’s a vision they can see because they had a hand in designing it, brainstorming about it, or attending the multiplicity of meetings it usually takes in a bureaucratic system to get a vision onto a piece of paper.

Later on, when the vision works, the leader is hailed as a visionary and is then invited to stages, platforms, and boards to tell others about how they accomplished the vision, led teams through the seeing of the vision, or wrangled support from recalcitrant others to make sure the vision stayed coherent. Of course, if the vision doesn’t work, those same leaders are castigated, criticized, and critiqued from stages, platforms, and boards by people who believe they could “do it better.”

But here’s the thing: The critics can’t do it better. That’s why they’re critics. If they could lead a team with a vision better than that of the leader, they’d be doing those acts of leadership. And the same can be observed in the opposite direction: The supporters can’t do a better job either. That’s why they’re supporters. If they could lead a team with a vision better than the leader’s, they’d be doing those acts of leadership.

If you’re in the arena, both the boos and the applause are irrelevant to the thing you’re doing.

Liars' Poker

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a deeply pessimistic Russian writer with a streak of Orthodox Christianity that he could never reconcile with the 19th-century ideals of a mythical European rationalist utopian project, was also an inveterate gambler. This habit gave him a unique view on risk, loss, victory, and the thrills that can only emanate from the depths of resentment, envy, and anger. It also gave him insight into how individuals lie, how we lie to each other in social relationships, and how even the apparatus of the state can be corrupted by lying.

Dostoyevsky wrestled with all of this in a time before Freud’s insights into human psychology really got a hold of the Victorian mindset. His writing was positioned during a transitory era in the mid-19th century, before what we now know as “the modern world” began truly seeking the transcendent. Mostly self-published, Dostoyevsky was the anti-Tolstoy, penning The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and, notably, Notes From Underground.

The problem Dostoyevsky put his finger on in Notes From Underground, a rambling volume profiling the resentments of a dyspeptic and unreliable narrator, is that, while the individual liar needs a society to operate in (1984), a series of distractions to fool and narcotize himself and others (Brave New World), and the totalizing force of the state to ensure no one gets out of line and maintains the absurdity of the lies (Invitation to a Beheading), the liar can never fully escape the one person he hates and fears the most—himself.

And, since the moral courage to face himself is lacking, the liar–gambling on escape, social control, or command structures to do the work he cannot fully do himself–instead of abandoning his lies, spins the roulette wheel of philosophy and lands on nihilism, existential dread, or even a species of pet rational cynicism. Dostoyevsky knew that moral courage was the antidote to despair in a modern rationalist world, but he couldn’t figure out how to get people from the comfort of their intractable lies, or their adoption of alternative facts to soothe their moral turpitude, to the uncomfortable place where ultimate, knowable Truth resides.

We have the same problem with liars playing poker in our era. Except the liars are playing poker at a technological, social, and cultural scale that would be unfathomable to Dostoyevsky. And the problem can only be solved by each of us, individually, adopting the moral courage to say the Truth. The economist, author, and researcher Thomas Sowell once noted that, “It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. ”

There’s no surer way to spread panic among a multitude of liars than to bet on the Truth.

Moats and Deltas

In business, particularly in startups, there is an idea that a business must possess a significant enough moat in order to stave off potential competitors in a crowded marketplace. Often attributed to investor Warren Buffett, moat, is a term used to describe a company’s competitive advantage. Like a moat protects a castle, certain advantages help protect companies from their competitors.

The same thinking can be applied to our work world, where there are two kinds of people using our LLM tools. One type uses LLMs like fortune cookies or magic 8-Balls. They ask an average question they would have used search to answer four years ago, and instead of generating a collection of search results that they would have had to parse and critically examine, they get an LLM regurgitated version of a mediocre answer.

These people are coasting along right now, using Chat GPT, Claude, Microsoft Co-Pilot, and on and on for entertainment, planning their next trip, flooding the attention zone with AI slop, or just lurking about, wondering what to do with these tools next.

The second type of person uses LLMs to examine assumptions and to level up what they are already doing at work. They are interested in prompt engineering and search for context inside the LLM’s answers to queries, and when the answer is average–like an answer from a fortune cookie–they push the tool past its limits. These people know and understand how language, persuasion, sales, negotiation, and conflict work at deeply interpersonal levels between people in the real world, and they employ critical thinking because they have mental and emotional discipline.

They are building a bigger and bigger moat, one prompt at a time, that eventually will transform into a delta; that is, a concrete, measurable variable of change between two states: those who have a large moat, and those who don’t.

As the delta between these two groups increases, and one group declines while the other one ascends in the economy of the future we’re building the rails for now, which one of these two groups do you think will have a more defensible moat in their job, their career, their financial situation, and even in their cultural life in America, as we breathlessly outsource more and more of our average outcomes to these new machines we’re building?

And here’s another question while you’re pondering the answer to that one: Which group of people will complain–or advocate if you will–for more fairly distributed outcomes as rewards begin to accrue to one group over the other economically and socially?

My advice to all of you reading: Expand whatever moat you’re working on right now into an ever-growing delta.

The Pitch

Everybody pitches.

From the moment we are born until the Grim Reaper comes for us, we are all selling, and buying, everything, all the time. Which is to say, humans are consistently seeking to persuade, inveigle, negotiate, convince, and influence the behavior of the people around us. And they are doing the same to us. These acts of buying and selling, from the womb to the tomb, are a huge part of what make human beings social animals.

Even in our oldest stories, humans are documented as trying to persuade, inveigle, negotiate, convince, and influence the behavior of transcendence itself. But why? What is the meaning behind our acts of selling? And why do we struggle to think deeply about what all this might mean at all? There are no philosophers of sales. And there are no philosophy of persuasion courses available on the Internet or via higher education. Sure, you can get all the instructions on the mechanics of selling and buying, but the reason for doing the mechanics in the first place?

Well. The shelf is thin on volumes of books at that end of it.

There are two reasons (among many) why humans don’t think much about why we sell and buy ideas, opinions, perspectives, products, services, problems, and their solutions to and from each other. The first reason is that we fear that thinking too much about the philosophy, the “why,” behind the behavior of selling itself might cause the “magic” of whatever approach we’ve been successful with to go away. This is nonsense. But it’s on par with the object permanence nonsense we genuinely believe when we play peek-a-boo as nine-month-old infants.

The second reason we don’t explore the philosophy of why we are compelled to sell to other people–and why we allow their selling to work, or not, on us–is because we don’t want to think too deeply about how really gullible we are. This is disturbing to us because it puts paid to our deeply held conviction that we have autonomous free will, independent agency, and the ability to make decisions without other people. Now, let me be clear: I believe in free will. And I believe in the power of humans to persuade, inveigle, negotiate, convince, and influence the behavior of other humans to surrender their free will in service of themselves, others, or even something greater than themselves.

Think carefully before you pitch to others.

Most People are Terrible Negotiators

Most adults, for better or worse, are terrible negotiators.

This is for many reasons, but the two primary ones are, one, adults don’t know how to ask clearly, concisely, and consistently for what they want from other people. And two, adults aren’t honest enough and vulnerable enough with themselves to know what they really want in the first place.

Case in point: Three-year-old children are really good at negotiating with adults and other children. They know what they want, and they ask for–or demand–that which they want clearly, concisely, and consistently from other people. They are also radically transparent, vulnerable, and honest with themselves about what they want. Adults tend to view how a three-year-old expresses their needs and desires as immature, selfish, and naive, but adults, for all of their social sophistication in masking their needs and desires from other adults out of fear of being taken advantage of, aren’t any less immature, selfish, and naive.

When adults know what they want and dare to express those needs and desires in a way that other adults can hear and respond to, they become better negotiators. They also become less fearful of outcomes and consequences. Both of getting what they want and of not getting what they want.

The social sophistication adults demand of others in a negotiation is really, at the bottom, just a deep desire for those other adults to be as confused and misdirected as they are. Because the kind of direct clarity that successful negotiation requires scares adults with its power to change status, change social games, and change culture. Continuing a pattern of confusion and misdirection through terrible negotiation leads to increased conformity, preserves fragile status games, and allows the myth of an egalitarian, non-hierarchical society to continue. Which is what adults are really negotiating over all the time.

If those fragile, egalitarian, and non-hierarchical structures are the psychological, social, and cultural constructs we’re bent on preserving as adults with our terrible negotiations, then let’s just be honest with each other about it. And let’s not act surprised when a moderately sophisticated negotiator who has radically different desires comes along and upsets the apple cart of our carefully constructed, yet terrible, paradigm.

The Twilight of the Novel

The book, as a technology for transmitting information, ideas, and concepts across time, is probably one of the top five inventions human beings have ever created. Included in that august list would also be indoor plumbing, penicillin, capitalism, and the internal combustion engine. The book–for all of the handwringing about its position as a technological influencer in Western culture right now–in its current modernist (or post-modernist form, if you will) is not on its last legs.

The novel, a variation of the liquid of ideas the container of the book holds, may indeed be on its last legs, however. The reasons for the death of the novel are many, including the following:

1). Human interiority and curiosity about the internal psychology of other people built the novel, and the deconstruction of that curiosity has led to its destruction.

2). The length of a reader’s attention spans and an audience’s cultural connection to historical material and social references across time go hand in hand. That chain has been breaking for at least the last thirty years.

3). The supremacy of other, more visually compelling media that get across the primary message of interiority to an audience better, e.g., film, TV, and of course, video on the Internet, has combined to beat up the novel.

But remember, even with all this, a novel is just a story placed in the format of a book. From Don Quixote to As I Lay Dying, and from Play It as It Lays to the current list of popular, AI-produced novels featured on Goodreads, the novel has probably gone about as far as it can go within the confines of the medium of the book.

This fact doesn’t mean that stories themselves are dead. Humans have been telling each other stories since the beginning of creation and will continue doing so until creation is wound up. It means that the types of content a book can contain will subtly shift.

Over the next 125 years of the book, the medium won’t die. It’s too resilient for that. But what will happen, I think, is that brave creatives, not trapped by the assumptions of the last 300+ years of Enlightenment novelization and cultural storytelling modes, will take the book itself in completely different directions.

Perhaps even, back to the future to a past–a pre-modern place populated by the works (but not novels) of Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, the Old Testament authors, Tacitus, Seneca, and Saint Augustine–where we haven’t been as readers, in the West, in a while.

Under Pressure

Pressure is a valuable state. It focuses and sharpens concentration, creates friction inside an experience, and it encourages the growth of resilience under stress.

Pressure creates diamonds along with heat and time in the geologic realm. In the psychological realm, pressure creates stress and trauma, along with emotional heat.

Pathologizing stress into trauma and encouraging avoidance of pressure rather than acceptance of the fact of pressure leads to creating not diamonds, but pieces of coal with stress fractures that, when heat is applied, burn and fade.

Social Shame and Embarrassment as the Friction that Develops

The use and presence of our AI tools in business and organizations will be used as an excuse to stop developing junior employees because, well, “AI can do it better.”

The first generation of college students who have been exposed to ChatGPT for the last four years are graduating from college this June. They enter a work world where they will automatically have agency from organizations and employers to build slop, believe in slop, and advocate for slop arguments. And, to make matters even worse, the work world represents the final iteration of a social and educational world that has validated their every thought and assertion, right or wrong, since they were in kindergarten.

It used to be, up until about five minutes ago, culturally and socially, that the social and cultural shame and embarrassment attached to not knowing facts, ideas, or even the underpinnings of facts and ideas were enough to encourage curiosity. Or at least shame and embarrassment prevented the aggressively ignorant from asserting the wrong things at an increasingly loud decibel level.

But such social and cultural guardrails have been seen for at least two generations as merely limiting creativity and creative expression. And leveraging those tools by mid-career and senior leaders is now associated with delivering undeserved trauma to juniors who are, quite frankly, ignorant. And thus, the use of those tools of shame and embarrassment has been eroded quite significantly.

We are arriving quite quickly at a weird cultural and social cul-de-sac in the world of work. One where the junior employees we are seeking to develop confidently assert facts that are based on AI slop, social media algorithmic feedback loops, and an astonishing lack of practical education. And they don’t have the experience, maturity, courage, or competence to spot the slop, fight the algorithm, or get the education.

On the other hand, we have senior and mid-career leaders who can’t be bothered to employ even rudimentary social norming tools in the workplace because the backlash from leveraging those tools isn’t worth the outcomes they never see. Instead, it’s just easier to pay $100 a month for an AI stack that “Can do it better.”

There must be a way out of this cul-de-sac. Because if there isn’t, it’s going to be a long next twenty-five years in the work world.

Disrespecting Your Audience

When you insist–despite all evidence to the contrary–on having a meeting instead of understanding that your meeting could have been an email, you have effectively disrespected the people in the meeting. Not just their time, but also their attention, their focus, and even their mental energy.

While such disrespect can be overcome, it is impossible to stop the erosion of trust that occurs in leadership when even the small things are ignored, or when the small things are made into much larger events than are warranted.

The objection, that “people don’t read the emails,” is facile on its face. Your employees read the emails. They just don’t think that responding to them on your timeline is the most important thing.

Alignment is happening on disrespect from both ends. But the alignment on respect is what’s lacking. To fix this misalignment, leaders must go first.

The Rights You Have

You don’t have a right to the market, the attention, the money, the status, or the education you think you deserve.

You don’t have the right to lecture to the people who have earned the market, the attention, the money, the status, or the education you think they don’t deserve, about what they can or can’t do with the fruits of their labor.

If you don’t like the way in which the eponymous “they” earned the market, earned the attention, earned the money, earned the status, or earned the education, then you have two options: 1) Change the systems, or 2) See the first option.

Changing people might feel sexier, but changing systems is the real work.

But if you’re not willing to work to achieve the market, the attention, the money, the status, or the education that “they” earned in the first place in order to outcompete “them, I can see how it would be more attractive to complain about the outcomes of a system that would take work to change.

Anonymous Verification

The marketer and author, Seth Godin, made a point years ago, in either a book of his or on his long-running blog site, that sets the table for my observations today, “No society ever survived anonymous feedback.”

He was right, of course.

And as our national and global public discourse has declined into tribalism, violence, and polarization, calls for identifying people verifiably as people for the purposes of policing online discourse have increased.

The problem with verification of “humans as humans” and not “humans as bots” is not a “free speech” smothering problem.

People are free to speak (or write), but they have never been free from the consequences of such speech or written words. That’s why the 1st Amendment in the US Constitution is followed closely by the 2nd Amendment.

The problem with the verification of “humans as humans” for the purposes of making humans behave in their online communication is that humans have been shaped in their behaviors, communication patterns, and appetites by the Internet, as much as the Internet has been shaped by them. Problems with anonymity were just the tip of the iceberg in human communication and behavioral challenges with this new technology.

I am not opposed to human verification to police toxic commentary on the Internet. But I am opposed to verifying humans as humans as a shortcut to the hard work of mitigating behavior that is as much psychological and spiritual as it is material and emotional.

The problem lies not in the Internet, the trolls, or even the bots, dear Internet Commentator, but in ourselves.

And if we want society to survive, neither anonymity nor verification is going to serve well as cudgels to get humans to behave and communicate more humanely.