Happy New Year!

I hope you had an excellent time with friends and family over the holiday break. I have a lot planned for The Fusionist this year, starting with this first special installment of 2025, introducing a new structure! Each newsletter will feature the latest insights in four sections:

1. Navigating Our Techno-Sapien Condition will focus on behavioral insights and perspective into the “spheres of human activity, proximity, and engagement” as we navigate the emerging digital/physical world I’ve written about in previous articles. I aim to describe a layer deeper into each of the seven domains I’ve outlined in my SHAPE Map concept and what to remember as those areas become more relevant to our everyday lives.

2. The S.o.S. Field Guide will provide professional and personal development insights from my experience and that of other successful people. Based on the idea of building a System of Success (S.o.S.), these short, applicable entries will act like a field guide for helping other professionals reposition themselves to succeed in the ever-changing world of the squiggly career.

3. Ripples to Watch summarizes recent technological events and their predicted impact on humanity across whatever domains and dimensions they may affect. It’s experimental, and it allows me to explore forecasting and strategy methods for the technologies I’m most interested in, such as AI and AI-driven products.

4. One Last Thing will be a section for my reflection on current events and other ponderings I’m prone to contemplate that I hope you’ll find helpful if not at least interesting. Like what I’ve included below! 😄

I’ll kick off the new format next month with insight on eight psychological trends of the impact of digital products on the self, how to be good enough at context-switching but master not letting it drain you, and ripples to watch from AI Robots and more. I think you’ll enjoy what’s coming this year, so please tell a friend or two to sign up so they can enjoy it as well.

I also want to share what inspired this re-formatting and why I will be more disciplined with my writing this year, as I was inspired to Think Beyond the Feed last year.

Think Beyond the Feed

As AI started to take over mainstream platforms and find its way across larger enterprises worldwide, I’m growing more concerned that people need new cognitive tools to resist misinformation, false claims, and deceit, which are getting more difficult to recognize with today’s content feeds.

“Think Beyond The Feed” is becoming a new motto for me. However, as I try to find ways to detach myself from my feed and its opinions to think more critically, I’m finding it’s not only tricky but also seems to be designed to keep me ensnared… forever. Thinking beyond the feed goes beyond fact-checking. This phrase is a deepening principle to guide my digital behavior, especially as more false claims, fake news, deepfake content, AI-generated data, and overwhelmingly stoked rhetoric fill my digital experience. Being in the industry of building amazing digital technology, I suspect it is difficult to hear the signal from the noise by design driven by business objectives set on growth at all costs, at least partly, and here’s why.

In the 1920s, GM revolutionized a new strategy for selling kitchen appliances that proved significantly more effective. Over the last 100 years, this strategy has evolved how people and consumers think and communicate as a culture.

Back then, Frigidaire, which GM owned, struggled to sell refrigerators. The paradigm shift and key takeaway GM discovered is that marketing language that presented a personal benefit was significantly more effective than sharing technical facts. When Frigidaire and others stopped relying on technical facts about how well their products functioned and focused on the domestic or personal benefits of owning their products, sales skyrocketed., Every other company that employed this tactic saw the same result; thus, modern marketing strategies were born.

We still do this today!

As a capitalist economy, this seemed like the right way to go. Still, at a national scale and over the next 100 years, people have adopted an expectation to hear more about self-important values instead of facts. I think this is a foundational reason why we excessively prefer spectacle over substance today.

A strongly stated opinion or the promise of value rather than straight facts is more profitable across all media, content, and information platforms. If you notice, most things in your feed are always a “claim” or “opinion” followed by “evidence” to support that position. It’s an effective framework commonly known as the "Claim-Evidence" structure or the "Claim-Reason-Evidence" framework. It's also called the "Opinion-Reason-Evidence" structure when applied to opinions. These frameworks are fundamental to a compelling argument and critical thinking but are just as effective in convincing another to believe in something. The good use of this approach is clearly stating a claim and then using verifiable evidence to back it up.

Unfortunately, many people misuse the Claim-Evidence framework today and state a few things they find on the internet as if all “evidence” is equally true (which it is NOT). They do this because they seek your attention, not your edification. After all, it’s more profitable with less effort. It provides easy manipulation for the uneducated because now we can be enticed instead of informed. We can see this over the history of traditional media, especially newspapers and national TV news stations. The ratio of entice-vs.-inform has continually shifted toward enticing and away from informing for at least the last 100 years.

In today’s multi-screen environments, 24/7 news and content streaming, and a heavy bent toward stimulating our senses rather than educating our knowledge base, I’m convinced we are stuck in the churning hamster wheel of spectacle over substance. Even the institution of scientific journals is prey to this corruption. We need to be more diligent about what we digest and discard, what we should treat seriously and silly, and keep our guard up to not fall prey to attention-seeking platforms with little substance to offer. I hope The Fusionist will be a valuable resource to help you learn how to be more aware of the systems around you and how they affect your everyday way of life and further strengthen you to be more in control to think beyond the feed.

I also discuss similar topics with my friend Tom on our new podcast, My Next Big Move... It’s like taking a stroll through the woods as we talk about what it takes to discover your purpose, place, and profession in today’s ever-changing landscape. You can meander with us any time on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.