Tragedy of the Commons Series

Part 1 of 3 The Tragedy of the Commons Series

In the spirit of Halloween, I’m going to talk about vampire bats. The only sanguivorous mammals.

There are only three species of mammal that feed solely on blood.

We consider vampire bats the only parasitic mammals, although you may have some friends or relatives that perhaps have parasitic traits.

We need to talk about vampire bats to protect you from becoming a vampire yourself.

Most bats eat a variety of food; insects, birds, fruit, nectar.

At my old house, we had this huge oak tree where several bats were living. At dusk, they would begin flying around in circles, scooping up insects.

We loved our bats because when they were around, there wasn’t a mosquito to be found.

The common vampire bat has adapted to feed on livestock.

It is believed that this is just another adaptation in a long line of adaptations.

The vampire bat’s ancestors only fed on bird blood. After settlers brought herds of cattle, sheep, and hogs to America, they opened an endless buffet for the common vampire bat.

Domesticated animals have other consequences.

In 1833, William Forster Lloyd wrote a pamphlet on his lectures, “Two Lectures on the Checks to Population.”

He shared, for the first time, the idea of overuse of the common by the commoners. Garrett Hardin later distilled this idea into the Tragedy of the Commons.

The concept is when there is a shared resource – a pasture. Those using it will act in their self-interest, and that self-interest will compound until the shared resource is irreparably damaged, resulting in misfortune for all.

A negative feedback loop. 

You and I are ranchers grazing our cattle in the same pasture and doing well in cattle sales. Each year we keep adding more cattle because business is profitable.

Until it isn’t.

Overgrazing destroys the entire ecosystem, not just our cows starving.

The tragedy of the commons is everywhere. It causes overfishing, boom and bust cycles in the hydrocarbon industry, and the attention market.

There is a finite amount of attention.

Attention has a half-life.

Those whose attention we seek are building a resistance to interruption.

We are collectively putting more stress on the commons, overfishing the waters, and putting the short-term goal before the long-term aim.

In many markets where the commons’ tragedy is happening, the feedback loop amplifies malicious behavior.

Look at commercial fishing. As it gets harder to catch fish, the price of fish goes up.

Those that can catch fish can continue to invest in novel ways to catch fish; bigger nets, longer-range ships, sonar.

The problem gets gradually worse, but those that can increase capital spending continue to succeed until suddenly they have no more fish to catch.

We are experiencing the same thing in the market for attention.

As you compete for attention:

• to sell more books in a market where 80,000 titles a month release.
• to advertise on platforms focused on increasing quarterly earnings through ad sales.

​You adapt.

You try to figure out what to do next to stay in the game.

You slowly become a vampire.

We can only speculate what happened twenty-seven million years ago that caused some bats to drink blood as its only food.

The adaptation since has been massive.  Not only has the bat physically and metabolically changed, its microbiome has also altered⁠.

Because blood is the sole food source, even the behavior in a colony of bats has changed. Bats will regurgitate in others’ mouths to feed bats that didn’t find a source of food that night. Scientists have documented the behavior and the ability to keep track of reciprocity.

Are you grossed out yet?

My biggest fear for authors is they don’t find another way. As they focus on the fastest ways to gain attention and sell more books, they will lose themselves to the lust for attention.

They won’t sense the slide down the slippery slope of the tragedy of the commons.

One day you’re no longer able to do anything but race from gambit to gambit for attention.

It’s not like a vampire bat can just start eating bananas or insects. The incremental adaptations permanently change it; it can’t go back to being an omnivore.

You won’t be able to go back either.

What’s worse is while authors and digital marketers become more perverted by the negative feedback loops focused on conversion. It destroys the attention commons. Eventually, we become what kills off the herd we depend on.

This is the future publishing faces.

We’re experiencing it right now, the incremental destruction of the commons. Increased ad costs, low return on ad spend, people being disgusted with social media, and the more and more competitive product advertised on your sales page.

In the next email, we’re going to talk about elephants and bison ranching. I’ll show how by changing our focus from attention and conversion, you can focus on a sustainable holistic business.

We will explore building a process that puts customer delight and investor needs as a higher purpose – even above selling more books.

We zig when others zag.

In the meantime, let me leave you with this.

With every decision, ask, “What will happen next?”

If you plan to run a promotion, ask what will happen next?

Will you get the right readers?

Will they pay full price?

Think a few moves down the chessboard to make sure the decision today doesn’t lead to further tragedy for you on the commons of attention.

Joe

P.S. You’ll only be seeing two more emails over the next sixty days. Then the new season starts January 2nd, 2021. I titled it  “Wynn-ing Ways” and it will be a story-based learning experience. If two emails aren’t enough, then get your copy of Advantage. If you already have a copy, go through it again as the concepts apply to Wynn-ing Ways.

This email is part 2 of 3: The Tragedy of the Commons Series

Recap: In part one of the series, I introduced you to the concept of Tragedy of the Commons. This is the idea that individuals acting in self-interest can destroy the shared resource pool that they share with others and depend on. I contend that Reader Interest and Attention is a Commons we share.

I talked about adaptation and how the common vampire bat adapted to only feasting on blood—something no other mammal does. Incremental changes to its physiology and metabolism have made it able to metabolize iron and not have kidney or liver failure. It can’t go back to the way it was.

In this email, we’re going back in time and visiting a few places. Before we jump in the Wayback Machine, I want to put the rest of this email and the one that follows into context by highlighting the following four premises:

• There’s a finite and fleeting common resource of customer attention.

• Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon are monetizing attention.
• In our efforts to optimize for the immediate sale, we incrementally adapt our businesses into some perversion of our original intent. We optimize for the outcome, not the paradigm or goal.
• Most authors mistake a marketing system for a business system

I might be wrong, but I see several negative feedback loops that will cause this house of cards to fall.

The commons of attention being abused and overused in the short term with no plan for if it’s gone in the long term.

Those that have become vampire bats won’t last a week without the herd.

Those that depend solely on the common resource will have no recourse.

That brings us to our first trip in the Wayback Machine.

After the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman didn’t retire.

He became the general of the Grand Army of the West.

After the war, there wasn’t much the North and South could agree on, but they had a common goal to expand west and protect the intercontinental railways.

In 1870, about 32 million people lived in the United States and related territories, along with about 60 million bison. When Lewis and Clark crossed the west, they documented huge fast-moving herds that impeded their travel for hours.

These bison herds were THE ECONOMY for the plains natives.

 On 10 May 1868, Sherman wrote to his friend and comrade-in-arms, General Sheridan, “as long as Buffalo are upon the Republic the Indians will go there. I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt and make one grand sweep of them all. Until the Buffalo and consequent[ly] Indians are out [from between] the Roads we will have collisions and trouble.”

Enter the likes of Buffalo Bill Cody. They report he killed 4,280 buffalo on his hunting expeditions. This, like many of the stories about Bill Cody, is suspect given he was an early adopter of PR and work with a Chicago Newspaperman to catalog his exploits.

 By 1884 there were 325 bison left on the plains.

Sherman was a second-order thinker. He saw that without the bison, the nomadic life of the Native Americans would cease to exist.

Sherman learned this on his march to Atlanta.

 “We must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.”

He knew the will to fight would be lost when the opposition was left to worry about where their next meal would come from.

What happens if we or others wipe out our attention herd?

Will your business adapt or die?

Will it adapt appropriately?

The paradigm and goals of your business dictate how it will adapt.

And that brings us to the question in the subject line — Can there be too many elephants?

Years ago, before I was married, I went to Africa.

Suze and I were engaged, and she won a trip to go on safari because she was top in sales at her company.

This safari was in the northernmost part of South Africa. The property ran along the Limpopo river.

This was a private game reserve, meaning a rich guy had bought up a bunch of farms and was returning the land to a state of wilderness. They would make money off of ecotourism and game hunts.

The principal work was pulling down barbed wire fence to open up the range and allow natural migration patterns to return.

Now, this wasn’t like going to a safari park where you follow a path and enter the lion area, then turn into the zebra zone. This was miles of wilderness where the rangers had to track what they wanted to show us.

Sure, they had ideas where herds were grazing and the lairs of different animals, but we drove out for hours, then got out and hiked for hours.

It was an amazing once in a lifetime experience.

One day we went to track elephants. Now they only had a few on the property, but they’re pretty easy to track.

Elephants are super destructive. Besides eating everything off a tree, they uproot the trees and eat the roots.

After you learn this, you could easily see where the elephants had been. It was like bulldozers came in to clear an area for a new subdivision.

Now, this didn’t use to be a big issue because they just kept moving on. But while these places offered free-range, it was limited.

Across the river, the problems were far worse.

Botswana had been doing a fantastic job with elephant conservation and reducing poachers. The elephant population was booming.

The problem now was that the elephant conservation was endangering the preservation of other species. It’s hard for birds to nest when all the trees are uprooted.

The conservationists applied systems thinking.

They are trying to conserve the optimal environment with the most diversity. They are also trying to limit adverse adaptation (becoming a vampire bat).

The result was they had to relocate elephants.

You might think I will compare some prominent digital marketers to the elephant and Facebook as the ecosystem (commons).

No.

Facebook and YouTube (Google) are elephants.

They have figured out how to aggregate and monetize our attention. They use data, machine learning, and behavioral psychology to capture more attention and sell as much of it as possible.

These companies are the bull elephants in the attention commons.

The bigger and better they are at capturing attention, the more destruction they do to the ecosystem.

The solution isn’t to kill all the elephants; something else will replace them.

This is a call to take responsibility for your adaptation.

Understand that adaptation isn’t bad; in fact, it is your most important trait for survival thriving.

Let me explain…

If you experienced the age of three networks and commercials, you’ll relate.

In my life, today, advertisers have been in constant adaptation.

Initially, IF you had the money, you could place ads on TV.

TV shows kept you around for commercials.

I’ll skip the introduction of cable television and go to what scared everyone.

TIVO

Tivo was the device that allowed you to digitally record shows (not a big deal; you could do that with a VCR) and quickly skip commercials.

They took a multiple prong approach. One prong was to challenge the use of TIVO and its patents in court. The second was to move product placement into the shows themselves.

Adaptation.

No one was thinking about the loss of eyeballs from the TV to the internet.

Yet on YouTube, they are applying an old school advertising model of interrupting videos with commercials.

Why won’t history repeat, and this form of attention-grabbing be evaded as well?

If not incrementally by TIVO-like devices or mental resistance to attack our attention, then by an outright collapse of attention to social media platforms.

Consciously controlling our adaption becomes imperative less we become the vampire bat.

Keep in mind that what life exists today through natural selection and adaptation is a fraction of the experience that had a chance on the earth.

If the elephants don’t change their behavior, they will cause their demise.

When our paradigm is first-order operations like interrupting attention, immediate conversion and selling more books, we set ourselves up to adapt best to those traits.

If our paradigm is nurturing the relationship between the reader and writer, then you have different outcomes.

There is a big difference between sending emails weekly to stay top of mind and having a reader anticipate your email. To stop everything, to open that email and read it.

The path to that level of engagement is not linear. It will require non-linear systems thinking.

I’ll leave you with this quote from F.A. Hayek.

“We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of a genuine error on our part and the pursuit of our most cherished ideals has produced results utterly different from those which we expected.”

On December 19^th, you’ll be sent the last email in the Tragedy of the Commons Series.

There we will discuss systems thinking as a solution to the tragedy of the commons.

Not that we can stop the elephants but build a business that so robust that it can adapt to changes in the environment, and each adaptation becomes less fragile.

Best,

Joe

P.S. I had a great interview with Leo Petracci on using Reddit to develop a fan group. I learned a thing or two. You can see it here.

This email is part 2 of 3: The Tragedy of the Commons Series

Recap: In part one, I shared the idea that individuals acting in self-interest can destroy the common resource pool resulting in the tragedy of the commons. The common resource of attention is in jeopardy. In part two, we explored the four premises: There’s a finite and fleeting common resource of customer attention. Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon are focused on monetizing attention. In our efforts to optimize for the immediate sale, we incrementally adapt our businesses into some perversion of our original intent. We optimize for the outcome, not the paradigm or goal. Most authors mistake a marketing system for a business system I discussed how the bull elephants of attention over-graze, but unlike Botswana, there are no conservationists to relocate the offenders or natural predators. I also shared the ideas of nonlinear systems thinking. I’ll go deeper into this big idea and how most digital marketers and authors mistake a marketing funnel for a business system. So let’s get started… In the last email, I told the story of how the American West was changing in the 1870s. I shared how General Sherman applied second-order thinking to use his limited resources to drive the plains natives from their nomadic lifestyle and on to reservations. Regardless of your opinion of the man, respect his ability to get to the heart of a problem and leverage the results he desired. While there was an armed conflict, the war was won by eliminating the Native American economy’s linchpin – bison. His army protected hunters and settlers on hunts and incentivized them by paying bounties for buffalo tongues. There was another critical component of changing the American West, and that was technology. Specifically Patent No. 157124. Joe Glidden’s patent of 1874 wasn’t the first barbed wire. There were others before it. What was significant about this barbed wire was that was Glidden also invented the machinery to mass manufacture the fence. Mass-produced fencing allowed farmers who homesteaded to protect crops from grazing herds and allowed ranchers to acquire prime grazing property and keep other herd owners off that property. Barbed wire was the powder that ignited range wars between parties interested in the free range’s commons. Technology can have unintended consequences. Take search engines, for example. The purpose of search engines is to get you the best answer you seek—Google or Amazon (it’s a search engine with your credit card connected). The problem is they are going to concentrate search results. As the world’s choices get more diverse, search works hard to expedite your decision by reducing options. While it’s better than not having a search engine, it’s not an educated choice. Remember the scene in Star Trek: The Voyage Home. The crew has traveled back in time and has to go to the hospital to treat a crew member. While at the hospital, Dr. McCoy talks to a 20th-century patient. Leonard “Bones” McCoy: What’s wrong with you? Elderly Patient: Kidney dialysis… Leonard “Bones” McCoy: My god, what is this, the Dark Ages?! In the future, I expect programmers and marketers to look back and comment like that about the current algorithms used by Google, Facebook, and Amazon. “My God, why did people put up with such intrusive and ham-fisted treatment?” The problem with algorithms is they are recipes designed to deliver the same result over and over. If you show interest in a topic, then they will show you advertising related to that topic. You will get ads cycled to see if it is a particular ad that gets more attention. I know this because I’ve had the algorithm try to capture my attention. Here is an example. Let’s say you sell free-range non-GMO heritage breed organic chicken, and a friend of mine mentions she got some extraordinary chickens from you, so I visit your website. Now you’re a sophisticated marketer, and you use google and Facebook to tag my visit. In this scenario, I buy it. I go through the purchase process, and you have a new customer. Now you’re a respectful marketer. You asked if I wanted to join your mailing list. I said, yes. Then behind the scenes, you put me on the customer list and segment me as a chicken buyer. You even go the extra mile and update me into your custom audience on Facebook to populate seed a lookalike audience and send me a thank you video on Facebook. Now you’re done. You will not market to me until you know I’ve gotten the product and had time to use it. But you’ve shared data with Facebook about me, and they’re now going to use the information however they want. Knowing that I’m a buyer of organic meat, they sell that interest-based attention to others. Suddenly every ad in my feed is some Co-op or ranch trying to sell me meat. They put up that barbed wire around me, then let the herd overgraze on my attention. I can go into my Facebook Profile and delete those tagged interests, then you and every other chicken seller lose access to my attention on that platform. That’s the elephant ripping up the trees looking for this quarter’s revenues. It destroys the ecosystem of attention. Remember, a while back; I asked you to think through a decision by asking what happens next. This is where we can build a unique business. As attention becomes more precious, those with money will continue to use technology to squeeze profits out of attention. It’s a slow spiral down.  Don’t believe me? Look at where we are now in our meat industry. Long gone are the fabled days of cowboys out on the range bringing the herd into the market. Now cattle are packed into feedlots and treated with antibiotics to reduce disease. It’s not a lot of dots to connect barbed wire and dead bison to bland beef. What’s worse than bland beef is that there is hard evidence that this free-range loss is essential to the climate as the Amazon rainforest. Back in 2014, I was in the Oil and Gas industry. We had a business that did water treatment for the oil industry. Our focus was the Niobrara shale play in Wyoming. A hundred million years ago, Wright Wyoming was under the Western Interior Seaway. Today it is home to the Durham Ranch. I was there with our company’s president to discuss with John Flocchini, the owner of this 55,000-acre ranch if we could secure the exclusive rights to treating all the water on the property. When you own a ranch this big, this old, and sitting on an ancient seabed, you have some oil wells on your property, and the Durham Ranch had quite a few, and with that comes water that needed to be treated. What is interesting about this ranch isn’t the oil wells. It’s that they have one of the largest herds of bison. The only herd larger was the one on Ted Turner’s ranch in Montana. With 3,000 head of buffalo, they currently steward around 1% of all the American bison in the world. You can learn more about the ranch here. So while we were getting to know each other, John shared that they practice Holistic Management International_ model of herd management. It was counter-intuitive and mind-blowing to me. John explained that the property was so lush compared to the rest of the area was the herd’s scale to the property and that they let the herd roam free on the property. The herd can’t overgraze because it’s so big that they trample the grass and defecate while on the move in the process of eating. They leave behind fertilizer, till the manure into the soil, and never eat all the grass because much of it gets trampled. To best understand the concept, watch this TEDx. After seeing that video about White Oak Pastures and speaking with John, it amazed me how much I thought I understood was wrong. Thinking we can simplify things that are complex and interrelated is arrogant. So how do we create an ecosystem for attention? Rather than trying to corral it or force it to what we want, imagine creating a place where attention naturally wants to focus. Of course, we want sales. But we can see the tactics like rapid release and conversion marketing may be “unnatural.” Not sustainable. White Oak Pastures (the ranch featured in the video has the tag line: “radically traditional.” I love that! How can an author be radically traditional? By getting back to the basics of putting the customer experience first. What I mean by first is that we elevate customer delight to a goal or even higher as the paradigm for the business. What if you changed your business paradigm from earning a profit from book sales to delivering investor needs through customer delight? How would you structure your business? Will a marketing funnel accomplish this? Would you rely on the same key performance indicators? It forces you to clarify what the investor (you) needs from the business. It requires you to define what customer experience you want to bring to your readers. Even if we want to use machine learning to find new customers, it’s only as good as the data set we give it. Would the data set be different if your focus was on your best customers’ characteristics rather than the ones that convert the fastest? What will happen next? This question won’t go away. Another part of the paradigm shift is applying systems thinking to your business so that positive results multiply, summation through positive feedback loops. Let’s look at the herd analogy. This year’s size is one input in what the herd size will be next year. Two variables will determine the size next year in a simple model; Death rate Birth rate As long as the birth rate exceeds the death rate, the herd will grow. Flip the two, and the herd shrinks. The larger the herd, the more births, and the more deaths as the loops compound on the current stock level. The herd will continue to scale up until it hits some other constraining loop like food supply. What if instead of thinking about your publishing business as a funnel driving towards conversion, you think of your publishing business as a dynamic system? The paradigm of creating interconnected loops designed to build the right ecosystem for customer delight. Growing a place where attention is freely given. What if your business wasn’t built on the dependence on Facebook advertising but a sanctuary from it? Could we build a system that people’s distaste from social media drove them into your arms? A place where customer experience was placed above the transaction. To build this, we have to think differently, and several moves down the chessboard, use those what if and what next questions. So, what’s in store for you? On January 2nd, 2021, I’ll send you the first email in Wynn-ing Ways. We will be talking about casinos, evolution, customer experience, and systems thinking. By the end, you’ll be applying systems thinking and evaluating your decision-making process like an Ivy League MBA. I’ll do my best to get you to kick the funnel habit and spinning up your feedback loops designed to perpetuate higher-order goals and paradigms. Rather than furrowing your brow over a dwindling conversion rate and increased cost to advertise, we will work building a publishing business that is built for whatever 2021 and beyond have in store. One thing 2020 has taught me, I can’t predict what will happen but I can design a business that is, in the words of Nassim Taleb, “anti-fragile.” That’s what we’ll do. Until then, my best wishes in these Holidays and to you having a prosperous New Year. Joe P.S. 2021 may be the year we see everything change. The symptoms of the rampant bull elephants are evident on the commons. Facebook and Google face national, and state court battles over their practices. Apple is one flick of the switch away from limiting Facebook and Google’s conversion data from working. All of this will cause turmoil for advertisers. You’re in the right place because we’re seeing where this is going and are quietly stepping out of the path of the stampede.

Get 20% OFF $12.50 $10.00 I’ve just released ADVANTAGE as an audiobook. You can buy it direct and listen to it in the BookFunnel App (it’s awesome). As a subscriber you can use the coupon Sound20 ​to get the book for 20% off my regular price.   GET MY ADVANTAGE