Rushfield: Techenfreude Grips the Town

Our data-driven overlords are stumbling; enjoy it while you can

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Ed note: Results from our big Agency, Managers and Attorneys poll are at the end of today’s newsletter.

After the heartening electoral news of the past week, there's been a gradually spreading bedlam across the economy, as it feels like someone is pulling out a thread out of the seams and the stuffing is cascading out. And shedding jobs by the battalion per hour.

Along with the obvious bad parts of the world going to hell, there's a fair amount for a dark soul like mine to enjoy as well.

Starting with: I've spent a good part of my life for the past 10 years (call it 40 percent of my waking hours) hearing how these problems of “entertainment” and “hits” were some old-timey affectation of this overly temperate backwater, that looking at “content” that way was as antiquated as worrying about what happens to the coins that roll under the machines of the penny arcades.

This newsletter was born from under the yoke of constantly being told the blockchain provided a new model for creators, that NFTs fundamentally changed the way people would react to entertainment, that virtual reality had broken down the boundaries of the creator/viewer relationship, and, initially, that the new streaming services would have data-Hoovering powers beyond the capacity of our little minds to understand. We were on the cusp of a content-data Manhattan Project so enormous that future shows would be hits… before the script was even written!