Head in the Cloud: Honest Remarks About Work and Social Media Monetization

Extending the reach of this post, originally shared on LinkedIn, to a larger audience:

The great twentieth-century fear was the fear of being replaced by a machine. The great twenty-first-century fear is the fear of being replaced by a lower-paid, less knowledgeable human augmented by a machine.

“Head in the Cloud: Why Knowing Things Still Matters When Facts Are So Easy to Look Up” by William Poundstone (read more)

This is probably one of those posts that will be deleted after reaching a certain number of impressions. In the book mentioned earlier, William Poundstone also discusses the Google effect and how messages posted in apps like Snapchat, where readers know the image will disappear, are more easily remembered than emails or social media posts we know will be stored. The potential reason for deleting this post, knowing it will not be quickly distributed to a large audience, is that some may perceive it as ‘brutally honest’. While being honest is generally considered a good thing, being brutally honest sometimes is not (read more on Quora). If I delete it before reaching too many people, I know not many people will remember it, but those I know it’s OK being ‘brutally honest’ with will do.

I’m not afraid and I’ve never been afraid of being replaced by anyone or by anything, so what I would like is that more people are augmented by technology, so they may one day work for a business that I own, I partially own, or share with them. By the way, I’d never use the expression “working for someone” if it’s not referring to a machine or a robot. Never to a human working for another. Whether we work for equity or for cash compensation, we are working for a business that creates shareholder value or an institution that serves people. We don’t work for other people. In some instances, we might be working for ourselves (read more on Nav.al).

If anyone reading this wonders why this website is on LinkedIn (among other social networks), this might be informative. Many people are wrong about what social media can give them and what they can give to social media because they are misled by one of the greatest buzzwords of today’s Internet: monetization. If anyone still wonders why this website and the associated social media pages exist, here’s a (brutally?) honest statement: if I were to ‘monetize’ from a social media platform I don’t own, it would be the connections I establish, not the content I post and give away to the ‘cloud’ where the content is stored. Stored along with our heads, as implied by the book title.

Read more about ‘the great twentieth-century fear’: