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Bro-Magnet Elon Musk is This Election’s October Surprise

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In searching for hidden pokets of support that could change a dead-locked election, Trump Republicans are looking to “the bros.”  

These are young men (white, black, Latino), who are under 40, ended their schooling in high school, have modest jobs when they’re working, are often un-married, have not been politically active and see themselves as modeling a particular breed of American masculinity.

It’s one that emphasizes toughness, strength and financial success as well as a suspicion (if not hostility) towards “woke” ideologies. Because some were drawn like moths to a flame by the leadership qualities Trump brought to the White House in 2016, his current campaign has targeted the group as a whole with a vengeance, seeing in them a source of new, first-time voters this election year. 

When Harris’s early momentum began to flag a few weeks ago, a greatly diminished Trump—tired, looking old, and struggling to complete a thought—found the perfect avatar for “his kind of man” when the richest contrarian in the world took up his mantle and started offering million-dollar prizes on a daily basis to those who’d take the Trump pledge. With many still on the sidelines, the bros were electrified by the appeal, and Elon Musk became this election’s October surprise just as surely as Hillary Clinton’s “missing emails” turned the tide away from her during the very same weeks of 2016.

Just last August, I’d been puzzled at first by the almost-comic prominence of Trump’s appeal to the bros at the Republican National Convention. Instead, I thought he might start looking for new support among the undecideds who clustered around the political center. 

He’d also just survived an assassination attempt, and as the convention built up to his accepting-their-nomination speech. I also expected that there might be more “Thank you for saving him Jesus” than World-Wide Wrestling Federation as they brought him onto the stage, but the agenda had clearly been set in stone long before that bullet grazed Trump’s ear. 

So the Republican candidate was heralded by a parade of rough-and-tumble, financially successful men in “the fight business,” culminating in the comic challenge of Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt at the end of his “Make America Great Again” pitch. Just minutes later, I was whipsawed again when Trump came out and started talking in soft tones about how God had spared him for just this apocalyptic moment. 

It was such a U-turn that I found myself down-playing the hour of bro-directed messaging that had come before or how much Trump’s 2024 campaign was a direct appeal to them. Now, several weeks later and on the eve of the election, Hulk Hogan’s ham-handed endorsement has been eclipsed by an even more vital and successful cheerleader, woke-poker, and twisted-genius than the man at the top of the Republican ticket: Elon Musk.

The only thing left hanging today is whether this new celebrity billionaire is the catnip that’s needed so the bros will get it up to vote in sufficient numbers to inaugurate a second Trump presidency. 

In 2012’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010,” political scientist Charles Murray discussed the widening gap that has grown between “the new upper class” and “the new lower class,” largely defined by educational attainment. New lower-class men, in particular, are generally “less industrious, less likely to marry and raise children in a two-parent household, and more politically and socially disengaged.”  Their social disengagement, according to Murray, has also involved a flight from traditional religion as a source of personal belief and meaning, so the cohort is amenable to new religion-like commitments. By contrast, a new class of men with higher educations and incomes has tended to resist these outcomes.

Now, a little more than a decade after Murray’s book came out, this divide among American men persists. A few in this new, lower class voted for Trump in 2016, and a few more did so in 2020.  The question today is whether laser-like targeting by the Trump campaign and a bro-magnet like Elon Musk can drive a critical enough mass of them to vote and make all the difference in swing-states like mine here in Pennsylvania.

This was Hulk Hogan’s big moment at the RNC in August. For a different modeling of masculinity, here is a link to my post about a music video that plots the transformation of a sullen, island-of-a-man (the terrifically physical British actor Michael Socha) into someone who’s almost akin to a real brother by the time the music ends.

Part of me doesn’t like Elon Musk very much, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t much to admire. 

They’re flip-sides of one personality. The same adolescent f*ck the establishment demeanor (see Musk’s daily obsessions on his Twitter/X feed) has also produced a dizzying array of against-all-odds innovations, including building today’s dominant electric car maker in Tesla, as well as SpaceX, the largest satellite launching and internet providing (via Star-Link) company in the world. 

Entrepreneurship has made Musk richer than anyone (and a possible role-model to some for that achievement alone) while his “against the world” rebelliousness makes him a natural champion for those who feel like much of the known world has turned against them. Musk’s split screen makes a direct appeal to the undercurrent of rootless men who can easily identify with someone who is (in many ways) even more Trump than Trump. So it’s hardly surprising that the former president’s campaign has welcomed the energy and echo that Musk has brought to it at just the right moment in time.

Of course, Trump was already trying to “bro whisper” enough young men to support his candidacy according to an op-ed last Monday in the New York Times.  Its author, John Della Volpe, nicely supplements Charles Murray’s description of Trump’s (and now Musk’s) most targeted voting block: 

Today’s young men are lonelier than ever and have inherited a world rife with skepticism toward the institutions designed to promote and defend American ideals. Men under 30 are nearly twice as likely to be single as women their age; Gen Z men are less likely to enroll in college or the work force than previous generations. They have higher rates of suicide and are less likely than their female peers to receive treatment for mental health maladies. Most young men in my polling say they fear for our country’s future, and nearly half doubt their cohort’s ability to meet our nation’s coming challenges.

(My only quibble is with his limiting the cohort to members of Gen Z.  My non-scientific observations together with Murray’s underlying data from a decade ago indicate that many lower-class millennial men should also be included.)

Della Volpe’s op-ed concludes with the observation that Trump and MAGA’s cheerleaders are “systematically exploiting the fears and insecurities of young men, making them feel that their masculinity and future are under siege”—and (even more importantly) will continue to be under siege if they don’t get out and vote for the former president. 

It’s an appeal that’s difficult, if not impossible, for the Democrats to counter. For example, what do the bros likely hear when Kamala Harris proclaims that she’s a gun owner, loves Formula One racing and once flipped burgers at McDonalds? Most likely that she’s “full of sh*t” and is pandering to them out of desperation instead of trying to find any real common ground. On the other hand, Musk is literally giving them the equivalent of their daily bread (in the form of $1M checks) and circuses (dispensed in a “come on down” lottery of dreams). Manifesting the almost cosmic discrepancy in the parties’ sales pitches, here’s a short film clip of Musk launching his new contest last weekend.

An article that appeared last Thursday about Musk’s latest gambit noted that it had “the goal of nudging 800,000 ‘low propensity voters’ to go the polls in support of Trump, urging them to vote early and register other voters.” As if being given a shot at a million bucks weren’t enough, Musk pushed them even further, saying “the fate of Western civilization” hangs in the balance in this election, while predicting both runaway crime and waves of illegal immigration if Harris wins.  They’re appeals to insecurity, made while waving fistloads of cash in their faces.

Despite rumblings from Pennsylvania’s governor and others about “buying votes,” no challenge to these give-aways will likely make them stop in enough time before Election Day. But Musk’s similarities with Trump have another and possibly darker side according to a deeply-researched front page story in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend. Just as the bros are drawn to these “strong and rich men,” both Trump and Musk also seem to be in the thrall of foreign autocrats and unconcerned about how their attractions might compromise the loyalties that they owe to their country.  

The story is entitled “Elon Musk’s Secret Conversations with Vladimir Putin: Regular Contacts Between World’s Richest Man and America’s Chief Antagonist Raise Concerns.”  It notes how the current American government has found it difficult to challenge Musk’s outreach to Moscow “because it is so dependent on the billionaire’s technologies,” particularly those provided to NASA and the Defense Department by SpaceX.  Perhaps to make light of the high stakes for someone like him with national security clearances to be speaking on a regular basis with the Russian leader, Musk tried to dispel any suspicions that are being cast in his direction by jokingly challenging Putin “to one-on-one combat” on his Twitter/X platform.

The bros who were paying attention probably admired his attempt at diffusing a sticky situation in such an off-handedly straightforward way–like Trump’s offer to bring peace to Ukraine in a single day when he makes his own (apparently regular) phone call to the Kremlin shortly after the election. 

Trump holds on while Musk jumps for joy at a recent Trump rally.

As I was finishing up writing this on Saturday, the New York Times posted a new interview with Pennsylvania’s junior senator, the hoodie-wearing and in many ways bro himself, John Fetterman. 

In his travels around the Commonwealth over the past few weeks, Fetterman has gotten increasingly concerned about the level of enthusiasm for Trump that he’s been witnessing across the state: an “astonishing intensity” of support was how he characterized it. Does Trump have “a special connection with the people of Pennsylvania?” he was asked. “One hundred percent,” he answered.

To explain the recent uptick in enthusiasm, Fetterman said that first and foremost, the locals here have become even more galvanized by Elon Musk’s support for the former president than they were already. 

I mean, to a lot of people, that’s Tony Stark. That’s the world’s richest guy. And he’s obviously, and undeniably, a brilliant guy, and he’s saying, Hey, that’s my guy for president. That’s going to really matter….

[W]hen they were having an A.I. conference in Washington, [Musk] showed up at my building at [the Capitol], and senators were like, [Fetterman’s voice gets very high at this point, according to the Times]  Ooh, ooh. They were like, I got to have two minutes, you know, please. So if senators are all like ooh! ooh! then can you imagine what voters in Scranton or all across Pennsylvania [are like]— You know, in some sense, [Musk’s] a bigger star than Trump. Endorsements, they’re really not meaningful often, but this one is, I think. And that has me concerned.

Then Fetterman was asked: “How will the vote go in Pennsylvania?” and he said: “It’s going to be much, much closer than anyone would want.” 

The only question is whether Musk’s much needed vitality, his true genius and even greater wealth convinces enough of the bros to leave their sidelines for long enough to actually vote for Trump.

Many have never voted before and only a few thousand of them could make a difference in battlegrounds like this one. 

From where I”m viewing it, Elon Musk is the October surprise in this nail-biter of an election. 

Caught in the Margin of Error: Why Polls Can’t Predict the Next President

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Is it me, or do more people than ever want to know what I think?  

–  about my last doctor visit;
–  my experience ordering dog food;
–  my latest Amazon delivery (including pictures taken of the boxes on my front porch); and
–  whether Doris answered all my questions when I called.

After awarding 5 stars for “ease of purchasing” something I bought–because (really) nothing is easier than purchasing in America–I’m invariably dropped into a multipart questionnaire that wants to know all kinds of other things, like whether I’d buy it again or tell friends about it, “only a couple of minutes of your time, but it will mean so much to us.”

I’ve noticed that I’m deleting more and more of these feedback requests, and that even when I want to say “Good job,” I now exit after that first screen and before the multi-question follow-ups, hoping that the sender gets my message–which is:

Yes, I had a good experience, but you’re asking more than you should be asking by thrusting 12 more questions (along with text boxes to elaborate) in my direction. Besides, your time is being paid-for by a customer service department (if you’re not just “a bot”), while I’m getting nothing more than a Thank You in advance for my feed-back. (We just don’t have that great of a relationship.)  So if you really want to know all these things, how about 5% off on my next purchase or an expedited helpline when I need to talk to somebody at your place of business who’s actually alive? 

I suspect you’re somewhere in this same back-and-forth with companies and service providers these days. And, of course, it’s not just with them. 

For years now as voters, more of us are being approached by (but declining to tell) pollsters “whether we’re likely to vote,” “whom we might support,” and “why.”  It’s a slammed door or unanswered phone that have made national elections in the U.S. “a prediction nightmare” since at least 2016.  Among other things, that’s because a sizable percentage of Trump-leaning voters that year were unlikely to tell outside data-gatherers what they were planning to do on election day or if they’d be voting at all.  Given the growing reluctance by these and other voters to cooperate, it’s fair to ask: Will any of the presidential election forecasts between now and November 5th be less unreliable than in recent election cycles—or will they merely usher in our next election-night (-week or months-long) nail-bitter? 

Maybe it’s time to ask: are today’s mostly-wrong election polls playing us, even harming us with their up-today-down-tomorrow speculations, making it better for the blood pressure to ignore them altogether?

Of course, people shutting up like clams about their views or preferences doesn’t end with shopping and electing. At a time when the world seems awash in data—including excruciatingly personal information that we’ve “exchanged” with marketers for our use of social media platforms and on-line search engines—governments are finding it increasingly difficult to gather the statistical data needed for their most basic operations and planning. Think of information like “who lives here?” and how difficult it’s become to gather basic census data. More of us simply “never get around to getting back” or feel “it’s none of the government’s business,” while other non-responders may have concluded: “I’m being vandalized enough when it comes to my personal information and I’m just not providing you with any more of it.”

This defiance or disregard actually matters a lot because “reliable information” (like how many of us are out here and the key concerns that we have) is needed for sound decision-making in the communities where we live and work. Without it, our political leaders and civil servants are left to set policy based on their hunches, feelings or who’s been screaming the loudest, all of which may have little to do with the actual majorities they’re supposed to be representing. 

More and more, we’ve been turning off the spigots of input that help any democratic society to run smoothly. The blare of voices/opinions/diatribes on social media masks the fact that too many of the rest of us are no longer “speaking up” at all with any regularity. As a result, we’ve become a new kind of silent majority and increasingly disenfranchised by our silence.  

Unlike the feed-back loop after I buy something, when our information flows in the public sector slow or stop altogether, their systems cannot respond in the ways that they need to—even when we’re lucky enough to have elected or appointed leaders who actually want them to. 

It’s one more clog in the arteries of democracy and we don’t seem to want to unclog the pipes anytime soon. Instead, it appears that tens of millions of us would rather send “a Swollen/Senescent Middle-Finger” to the White House as a kind of resounding “No,” than to identify and entrust a future leader with the real nitty-gritty about their hopes, dreams and daily lives.

So why do I care so much about this?

As it happens, there are several reasons, including a job I once had as a good-government advocate.

Along with a “steering committee” of local stakeholders and a growing roster of “voter-members,” Philadelphians for Good Government (or PGG, for short) aimed to leverage information it gathered from polling our neighbors about their priorities and concerns and to use both “the clout of that knowledge” and its activist membership to hold Philadelphia’s elected representatives accountable to the folks who had put them in office. They were years when those elected leaders seemed particularly oblivious.

Back then, I remember word-smithing questions with our pollster (which was also polling for ABC News at the time) so that we got the information we wanted without influencing the answers. (There’s an art to it.) I remember defining groups of City residents that we wanted to hear from and then developing outreach—like focus groups and press-driven conversations—that enabled us to muster a “random sample of them” to call and to query. The effort revealed a ground-swell of interest in running the City more like a business and less like a patronage swamp, and how too many of the respondents would have lived someplace else if they could have. 

PGG aimed to produce reliable data to enable better governance through the involvement of voter-members who had an ownership stake in their information. We were convinced that as our neighbors became more invested in the democratic process—by leveraging their own “preferences”—more of them would want to build a more responsive City instead of wishing to escape an unresponsive one. 

Among other things, PGG played a role in electing a reform-minded mayor while unlocking the citizen engagement that made his most lasting reforms possible. On a more personal level, doing my poll-driven job made me feel more like a stakeholder in the place where I was living and raising a family at a time when I too had considered leaving.

So it was with more than a little interest that I read a “Numbers” column about polls in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago, listened to a recent interview with historian and journalist Rick Perlstein about the 2024 polls, and waded into the weeds of election polling with New York Times polling guru Nate Cohn this past week. Each of them described a breakdown in polling that I’d wanted to believe had been serving good governance for decades.

With a flair for assembling his arguments before making them, Josh Zumbrun regularly explores stories about the numbers that suffuse our lives—“where they originate, what they mean, what they omit, how they’re used and how they’re abused.” For me, it’s been a must-read, especially this one:  “Data Quality Is Getting Worse When We Might Need the Numbers Most,”  In it, he writes:

Our overarching problem is that so much data is based on surveys to which people no longer respond. One example is the Current Population Survey, from the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics. The survey underpins the monthly jobs report and is very good, but its response rate has fallen to 71% this year from 90% a decade ago. 

Nearly every other major survey has fared worse. The White House Office of Management and Budget once articulated a standard that survey response rates should be above 80%. Today, nearly no surveys remain above that standard.

In the relatively recent era of cellphones (ubiquitous for only about a decade or so in the U.S, and somewhat longer in places like South Korea or parts of  Europe), people in general no longer answer their phones, either screening their calls or ignoring their demands altogether, so polling over the phone has increasinly become a dead-end. By comparison, in the 1990s when I polled at PGG, nearly everyone we called eventually answered and Zumbrun tells us that as recently as 2000, “over 90% of national polls relied on randomly calling people on the phone.”

By contrast, today’s approach to polling seems almost jury-rigged. It tries to find “a random sample” of opinion in two stages:  by repeatedly quizzing panels of willing respondents that the pollsters have assembled, and then attempting to weight their responses so the resulting data is as close to what used to be obtained by random surveys as possible. 

Of course “the margin of error” always discloses how much a random sample of a certain size might differ from statistical accuracy, but the asterisk almost never reveals the differences that result when large numbers (or whole categories) of people decline to participate at all. As a result, Zumbrun correctly says: “we’re kidding ourselves to believe that the quality of data remains the same” as in the good ole days when folks actually took random phone calls on occasion.       

In a recent podcast sponsored by The Nation, historian and journalist Rick Perlstein drills is even more judgmental. He says polls are “always wrong” because of the weights that pollsters assign to various sub-groups in the electorate (like suburban women or white men without a college degree). Despite every poll’s forward look, the weighting process relies almost entirely on “subjective decisions based on the past”—in particular, how pollsters believed that these groups voted in, say, 2016, 2020 or the 2022 mid-terms. But both common sense and Kierkegaard suggest to Perlstein that past performance is a poor guarantee of future results. (You’ll have to listen to the interview to hear how he enlists the Danish existentialist to support his conclusion.)

“Always wrong” is a viewpoint that Nate Cohn, the polling guru for the New York Times, comes close to sharing–although he doesn’t want to put himself out of a job. Instead, Cohn wrote last week that “over-reliance” on how individual voters say they voted in the past is distorting the polling estimates more than our most respected pollsters would like to admit. For one thing:

A surprising number of respondents don’t remember how they voted; they seem likelier to remember voting for the winner; and they sometimes report voting when voting records show they did not.

In addition, while these recollections are “being used to help address the tendency for polls to understate Mr. Trump’s strength over the last eight years,” even when memories are accurate they’re hardly predictive of how his former supporters will vote (or not vote) this time around. For example, over the past few weeks I’ve heard several, self-identified 2020 Trump voters talking about how the January 6th assault on the Capitol, his felony conviction or some other outrage has made it impossible to support him again. So when even the most vaunted election polls “look back” to weight likely voting groups, it’s hardly a sure-fire way to make their predictions more reliable. 

But as the perceptive Perlstein reminds us: what we think we’re getting from these “always-wrong” polls is even more problematic.  

According to Perlstein, at least since 2016 (but likely as long as we’ve had to pick between the-lesser-of- two-evils for president), election polls have become a part of our “psychological apparatus,” and depending on the amount of “politics” that’s coursing through your veins, not a small part.

(He’s talking here about the past 70 or so years of election polling. I’m talking about those who have come to follow politics with increasingly religious fervor over that same time span.)

Perlstein rightly argues that even as the quality of election polling has declined, the daily/weekly/monthly election polls have increasingly become “a substitute for civic discussion”—as if breathlessly following the numbers of one candidate over the other somehow satisfies our obligations to be informed citizens. In other words, compulsive poll-watching and analyzing gives us the illusion of knowledge, that we’re civically “in the know,” when they’re actually providing us with no more meaning as citizens than the latest cat video on TikTok.

Even more troublesome is the illusion of participation that poll-watching provides, making it worse than useless in Perlstein’s view. Because my team’s “fluctuations in the polls” feel immediate and trigger my emotions, it’s easy to think that the newest update gives me a pass from actual engagement in the political process: learning about candidates and meeting them, knocking on doors for them, talking to my neighbors, “being the change that I want.” It could be different than this.

We could begin by seeing our election-poll fixations as the shallow and meaningless encounters that they are.

We could remind ourselves that the feed-back loop of our elections is a far different animal than those annoying customer-service surveys, and worthy of much more of our time and effort.

We could use the tech tools we have at our disposal (like social networks, but increasingly AI and other digital innovations) to enable more robust democratic exchange and collaboration, as I recently discussed in “Making Technology Serve Democracy.”   

When I worked at PGG several years ago, I sensed that I was building a conduit between my priorities and the office-holders who needed to take them more seriously. 

I felt more like an owner of possibilities and less like a victim of circumstances when I found my voice and my feet in the community again.

There was nothing illusory about that at all.

This post was adapted from my January 21, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Making Technology Serve Democracy

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I got my mail-in ballot for November’s U.S. election yesterday, and plan to vote tomorrow. 

For the first time in my voting life, I’ve been following little of the on-going campaign–beyond reviewing the Harris economic plan (detail that has probably come too late for most voters in a truncated election cycle) and wondering about her objectives for the war in Ukraine (is she for setting Russia back or accommodating it?) Stifiling my interest further has been the ominous sense that whomever actually wins in a few weeks, the result will be so close that we’ll still be fighting about it in the courts and on our streets come January.

So instead of wallowing in here-we-go-again or what these divisions might mean for America’s commitments to the rest of the world, I’ve been diving into the work of two visionaries and some of their proposed solutions to the current grid-locks besetting democracy—E. Glen Weyl, an economist at Microsoft Research, and Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Technology Minister. For some years now, Weyl and Tang have been evangelists in the quest to use our digital technologies to bolster the ways that we sort through our differences and improve our governance in democratic countries. 

I start by agreeing with Weyl, Tang and many many others that innovations like social networks and AI (along with blockchains and digital currencies) have largely been deployed to maximize private profits instead of to benefit the wider public over the past 25 years. The conclusion seems inescapable that these skewed priorities have contributed to our feelings of helplessness about what-comes-next and the shape of our futures more generally.

But with Weyl and Tang, I also believe that we can use these same digital innovations in ways that promote the kinds of conversations and consensus-building that are necessary for functioning democracies. Indeed, doing so has already enabled a few fortunate governments (like Taiwan’s) to manage crises like the coronavirus pandemic with greater unity and far, far fewer “casualties” than almost anywhere else on earth.

Tang was instrumental in Taiwan’s effort, and in light of it she joined with Weyl and more than 100 other on-line collaborators to co-author a primer on how our digital technologies can be deployed to support democratic processes and reduce our political divides. It’s called “Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy.”

My aim today is to describe some of Plurality’s proposals and (via several links) point you in the direction of the wider discussion that these visionaries are hosting.

Weighing possible solutions seems a healthier way to spend one’s time these days than dreading the slow-motion trainwreck that seems likely to recur in America over the next few months.

Before the preview of coming attractions that Audrey Tang contributed to in Taiwan, a few words that might be necessary about the Taiwanese. 

Westerners sometimes harbor the view that the Taiwanese people are prone to harmony than divisiveness—or what Tang laughingly characterizes “as acting like Confusius robots”—but in reality they govern themselves very differently. The primary political and social divides in Taiwan are over whether to accommodate China’s various threats to its sovereignty or to resist them. But there are myriad, leser divides that beset this restlessly modern nation, and one or more of them could easily have produced a horrible result when its population was challenged by the coronavirus a few years back.

Instead, Taiwan already had some meaningful experience using digital access to provide greater citizen engagement in how the nation solved problems and responded to threats. According to an article in Time called “Taiwan’s Digital Minister Has an Ambitious Plan to Align Tech With Democracy,” after the country’s martial law era that ended in 1987, it’s citizens embraced computers and internet access enthusiastically because they enabled them to publish books without state sponsorship and communicate without state surveillance. According to Time, it was feelings of liberation assisted by technology that also fueled:

the rise of the g0v (gov zero) movement in 2012, led by civic hackers who wanted to increase transparency and participation in public affairs. The movement started by creating superior versions of government websites, which they hosted on .g0v.tw domains instead of the official .gov.tw, often attracting more traffic than their governmental counterparts. The g0v movement has since launched more initiatives that seek to use technology to empower Taiwanese citizens, such as vTaiwan, a platform that facilitates public discussion and collaborative policymaking between citizens, experts, and government officials.

For example, these gov-zero improvements proved instrumental when Uber launched its car service in Taiwan, sparking a powerful backlash. Tang and Weyl recalled what transpired next in a post that announced their Plurality concept: 

When Uber arrived in Taiwan, its presence was divisive, just as it has been in much of the world. But rather than social media pouring fuel on this flame, the vTaiwan platform that one of us developed as a minister there empowered citizens opining on the issue to have a thoughtful, deliberative conversation with thousands of participants on how ride hailing should be regulated. This technology harnessed statistical tools often associated with AI to cluster opinion, allowing every participant to quickly digest the clearest articulation of the viewpoints of their fellow citizens and contribute back their own thoughts. The views that drew support from across the initial lines of division rose to the top, forming a rough consensus that ensured the benefits of the new ride hailing tools while also protecting workers’ rights and was implemented by the government.

In 2016, when Taiwan faced mass protests over an impending trade deal with China, Tang again played an instrumental role during protestors’ 24-day occupation of the country’s legislative chamber by enabling the protestors to peacefully boardcast their views on digital platforms and avoid a longer crisis. Shortly thereafter, Tang was appointed Taiwan’s digital minister without portfolio, in 2022 she became her country’s first Minister for Digital Affairs, and last year was appointed board chair of Taiwan’s Institute of Cyber Security.

The formal appointments in 2022 and 2023 followed Tang’s assistance throughout the pandemic using “pro-social” instead of “anti-social” digital media, which she described in an interview on the TED talks platform as being “fast, fair and fun” approaches to what could easily have become a country-wide calamity.

When word first came from China about a “SARs like” viral outbreak in Wuhan, Taiwan quickly implemented quarantine protocols at all points of entry, while simultaneously insuring that there were enough “quarantine hotels” to stop the spread before it could start.

Fairness via digital access and rapid dissemination of information, about say medical mask availability, was also critical to maintaining calm during those early pandemic months. As Tang recounted:

[N]ot only do we publish the stock level of masks of all pharmacies, 6,000 of them, we publish it every 30 seconds. That’s why our civic hackers, our civil engineers in the digital space, built more than 100 tools that enable[d] people to view a map, or people with blindness who talk to chat bots, voice assistants, all of them can get the same inclusive access to information about which pharmacies near them still have masks.

Taiwan’s rapid challenges to unfounded rumors before they had the chance to spread included another key element:  the effectiveness of viral humor as a antidote to panic buying and similar anxiety-driven behaviors. Here’s Tang again:

[I]n Taiwan, our counter-disinformation strategy is very simple. It’s called ‘humor over rumor.’ So when there was a panic buying of [toilet] tissue paper, for example, there was a rumor [circulating] that says, ‘Oh, we’re ramping up mass production, masks use the same material as [toilet] tissue papers, and so we’ll run out of [toilet] tissue soon.’ [So to counter the rumor] our premier digitally shared a very memetic picture that I simply have to share with you. He shows his bottom, wiggling it a little bit, and then the large print says ‘Each of us only have one pair of buttocks.’ And of course, the serious table [that he also shared] shows that tissue paper came from South American materials, and medical masks come from domestic materials, and there’s no way that ramping up production of one will hurt the production of the other. And so that went absolutely viral. And because of that, the panic buying died down in a day or two. And finally, we found out the person who spread the rumor in the first place was the tissue paper reseller.

Through the use of digital tactics and strategies like these, Taiwan got fairly deep into the pandemic before it reported a single case of the coronavirus among the locals. In many ways that was because, as Time reported, “Taiwan leads the world in digital democracy.”  It not only shares vital information with its citizens in a timely and engaging format, it consistently provides them with digital access to their government so that issues of public interest can be debated and often resolved.

Notwithstanding this momentum, in Plurality Tang and Weyl foresee even greater public benefit when democratic processes are more closely aligned with technology.

Some of these pro-social benefits involve counteracting the most anti-social effects of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchains and crypto-currencies when they introduce disruptions into the democratic conversation. As reported in the Time article: 

Plurality argues that each of these [technological innovations] are undermining democracy in different, but equally pernicious ways. AI systems facilitate top-down control, empowering authoritarian regimes and unresponsive technocratic governments in ostensibly democratic countries. Meanwhile, blockchain-based technologies [like crypto-currencies] atomize societies and accelerate financial capitalism, eroding democracy from below. As Peter Thiel, billionaire entrepreneur and investor, put it in 2018: ‘crypto is libertarian and AI is communist.”

To elaborate on the substance of these threats a bit, it’s clear that AI’s ability to muster and re-direct vast amounts of information gives governments with anti-democratic tendencies the ability to manage (if not control) their citizens. Moreover, it is block-chains’ and crypto currencies’ ability to shelter transactions (if not entire markets) from regulatory control that can undermine a country’s ability to “conduct business” in ways that serve the interests of its citizens. Tang and Weyl argue that more robust digital democracies can help to resist these “pernicious” effects in myriad ways.

But these are just the defensive advantages; there is also a better world that they’d like to build with digital building blocks. As Tang and Weyl described it while announcing the Plurality concept and book, what has already been accomplished in Taiwan’s digital democracy: 

just scratches the surface of how technology can be designed to perceive, honor and bridge social differences for collaboration. New voting and financing rules emerging from the Ethereum ecosystem [which also relies on blockchain technology] can reshape how we govern the public and private sectors; immersive virtual worlds are empowering empathetic connections that cross lines of social exclusion; social networks and newsfeeds can be engineered to build social cohesion and shared sensemaking, rather than driving us apart.

From where I sit this morning, I can stew in the bile and trepidation of America’s current election cycle or try to conjure a better future beyond the digital mosh pit of Twitter/X and much that appears on our news screens every day. 

Tang, Weyl and Plurality are providing a platform for reinvigorating a democracy like ours by aligning it with digital technologies that can be put to much better uses than we’ve managed until now.

Tomorrow, I’d rather be voting for a robust future that our tech could enable if only we wanted it to.

+ + +

In line with two recommendations in Plurality, previous postings here have considered how community theater and a virtual reality headset can foster both engagement and empathy around issues like policing and homelessness (“We Find Where We Stand in the Space Between Differing Perspectives”) and how to guide the future of AI with a public-spirited “moon-shot mentality” instead of leaving its roll-out (as we seem to be doing today) to “free market forces” (“Will We Domesticate AI in Time?”).

This post was adapted from my September 29, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Our Work Includes Repairing the Commons of Public Life

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I’m somewhere between anger and resignation, sadness and fear these days because the quality of almost every “public good” that we share as Americans seems to be declining in quality faster than the public’s servants can process erosions like these, let alone address them.

By the public’s servants, I’m not talking about government workers whose jobs are to maintain and improve our communities. No, it’s the members of our communities—the folks that JFK had in mind when he observed: “Ask not what your country can do for you.” The rest of us also have personal stakes in the quality of the streets we walk on, the governments we elect, the markets that build our wealth, and the political debates we have with one another. These days, fewer of us seem to be bearing those responsibilities, and those who continue to do so can easilly despair given the extent of the challenge.

No bureaucracy will ever be large enough to do the work of a public that no longer feels these stakes or finds them too daunting to bear.

There are many examples of course, but I’m thinking this morning about the the kinds of quality-of-life “crimes” that riled a New York City Police Commissioner 25 years ago, and that persist to this day just outside my door. 

For almost my entire life, I’ve lived, worked or gone to school a few blocks from Route One. Both proximity and congestion on this Maine-to-Florida roadway always had me thinking about the public (and semi-public) spaces that we’ve carved out for ourselves along the expanse of it. It’s also let me observe the sad path from neglect to disrepair of these shared spaces, with self-interest (and its debris) trumping the public’s interest at nearly every turn. 

For instance, almost daily I see its casual evidence on the grassy strip between sidewalk and street in front of my house.

I live one-house-down from a small intersection and traffic light, which has come to mean a daily tide of discarded water bottles, fast food wrappers, and similar rubbish washing up on my strip of green from the stream of passers-by. Since my neighbor at the corner rarely picks up her yard, the downward sweep of traffic also brings much of “her” litter my way before too long. During the pandemic, when I complained on this page about regularly picking up discarded underwear, used Kleenex and rubber gloves, one of you gifted me with a trash-picker so I no longer had to think about touching it.

My much-maligned strip is a semi-public space. The City owns the trees, the energy and communications providers their rights-of-way. Anyone is free to stop or park along the curb. For all that public access, I get to mow the grass and maintain “our curb appeal.” Driver and pedestrian disregard has always been an irritant, but over the past 20 years the mess that’s left in their wake has become a daily chore.

Jedediah Purdy foresaw these quality-of-life and broader erosions of our public goods in 1999’s For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today.  In the course of his provocative book, he describes what he means as “the commons of public life” from two different angles. On the one hand, it consists of: 

“the things that affect us all, and [that] we can only preserve or neglect together. In the end, they cannot be had alone.” 

But at the same time, it is: 

[a] good deal of what we value most, whether openly or in silence, meaning…the things we cannot avoid having in common, and whose maintenance or neglect implicates us all.

The commons is a roadside or park. It is a communications medium like the internet or the evening news. In a democracy like ours, it is the gears of governance and decision-making. We hold such things “in common,” Purdy argues, whether we acknowledge our ownership and our responsibilities as owners or not.

He also mentions what ecologist Garrett Hardin once called “the tragedy of the commons” or the consequence of the public’s exercising freedoms that come with common ownership but not their responsibilities. 

According to Hardin, self-interest often causes those with access to the commons to take as much as possible, such as overgrazing or clearing forests, before others [who are similarly motivated] can do the same….  What is taken is not renewed, and soon the commons are exhausted….[But] the laws of self-interest that move Hardin’s analysis are not laws at all.  Instead, the tragedy is a cultural and ethical event.  It takes place only when we join self-interest with mutual indifference.

How do we rise to our common duties? Purdy’s response:  “Just by living in the world, just by caring for things, we take on a responsibility for the world’s well-being.” 

Will our care be enough to over-come the tragedies that degrade it? His response is much the same: “The question is not whether to hope” that our common things will be maintained, repaired or even improved “but whether to acknowledge our hope, to make it our own.” 

The common areas around trees on the Upper East Side of New York and somewhat less grandly (but more accessibly) a few streets over in my neighborhood.

Where the commons are concerned, things always come to a head when there is not enough of a common good that people prize. Such is the case with “green space” in cities like New York or Philadelphia, and for my interest in a recent Times article called “In the Fight Over N.Y.C. Sidewalks, Tree Beds Are the Smallest Frontier.” (Here’s a paywall-free link.) When the surface-level green on a street is as small as its tree-beds, who gets to decide how this shared and common space gets used?

Street trees provide shade in the summer and lower ambient temperatures while producing oxygen and absorbing CO2 year-round, so the Parks Department (which has jurisdiction for maintaining New York City’s) has been enlarging tree beds to allow roots to spread and to drink in more storm water. Formerly no more than 5 by 5 feet in size, they now can be 5 or even 10 feet longer. That means these tree-centered areas have been expanding. As of today:

Over 660,000 trees line the streets of New York City, and the beds around them take up more than 400 acres, according to a city estimate. While many people just walk by the rectangular openings in the sidewalk from which the trees spring — or, worse, use the spaces as trash cans— others lay claim, unofficially, to these pocket-size patches of land for their own uses.

“As the weather warms, these caretakers swing into action.

“They plant flowers, post signs to ward off dog owners, and fashion fences from broomsticks, linoleum tiles and old skateboards. Some create mini memorials to departed loved ones.

“It all makes sense. In a concrete jungle where few residents have yards, the tiny parcels offer New Yorkers a rare chance to dig into the soil, connect with nature and make something beautiful grow.

Moreover, weekend gardeners (and their admirers) aren’t to only ones who want to benefit from these common spaces. Tree advocates argue that barriers about tree beds block rain from flowing off the sidewalk and reaching the tree’s roots, while placing too much soil in a concrete or brick “container” around a tree’s trunk can cause the bark to rot and lead to disease. 

Not surprisingly, dog owners have their own perspectives. The Times article mentions that a local dog owner ripped out a picket fence that had been erected around a tree bed “to make it easier for his dog to do its business,” noting (with some satisfaction) that he was “hauled into court” shortly thereafter. The writer also observes how “[p]ooch pee and poop, it must be said, can harm plants, not to mention create hazards for those who work the soil.”

But having spent time with a dog in New York, I was often at a loss while searching for the necessary bare (though fragrant) ground that Rudy (at the time) or other City dogs would find appealing during walks. Maintenance and improvement of common areas amidst the concrete could also dictate tree-free but open stretches that dog owners (in turn) might maintain, including the relatively-modest provision of poop bags to all comers, a can to dispose of the waste, and an arrangement with the Parks Department to empty them regularly.

When users become owners–transforming the hope that these common places will be maintained and repaired into their hope–it’s possible for competing needs to be accommodated, for the beneficial sharing of common resources to become a reality, and for communities to strengthen. 

Wild flowers that I noticed somebody had planted in a West Philadelphia median strip, maybe as their own expression of hope for this public space.

As I write this post, I notice that today’s newspaper includes two more stories where public neglect and private self-interest have been sullying—more than any dog could—other features of the American commons. One story was about a cheating scandal affecting a Little League baseball team in suburban Washington D.C. where the player’s prominent and powerful parents may have had more of an incentive to see their kids win than was good for anyone concerned. 

Another story involves the misuse of America’s financial markets to raise billions of dollars for a politically-connected company with little track record, deep losses and principals who have utilized the public stock offering process unsuccessfully before. Marketing this so-called “meme stock” seeks profit with no fundamentals and, while technically legal, makes a mockery out of performance-based attempts to secure public financing though stock offerings on a national exchange. At a time when the U.S. economy’s success is the envy of the world, its guardians (like my bosses at the SEC) should be far more aggressive than they’ve been in deterring questionable use of the public-offering process.

Neither of these stories recounts “somebody else’s problems.” Little League baseball and the nation’s stock markets—along with the hopes that we invest in them—belong to us all. 

Unfortunately, instead of re-claiming this hope too many of us (including me) fall into resignation and withdrawal from public life because the challenges facing the commons I benefit from too can feel overwhelming. 

The antidote is reclaiming our ownership over the parts of our public lives that are most important to us, perhaps starting with the most proximate ones. If it’s trash between the sidewalk and street in front of your house, then clean it up as part of your gratitude for living in a beautiful neighborhood that you hope will remain beautiful, and stop grousing about it. (There may also comfort in the fact that clean sidewalks invite less future trash than already littered ones.)

Is it the use of tree-beds on City streets? The quality of the conversations on social media? Opposing bias and propaganda in the local news. Whatever it is, we can put our stakes down and clarify (at least to ourselves) why we’ve done so in this valued part of our public lives. 

It could transform our dread about an impoverished future into something that includes (in our actions) a small engine of hope about the repairs we’ve begun. 

+ + +

On a related note, I briefly profiled an excellent New Yorker essay called “The Theft of the Commons” in an earlier post. Among other things, its arguments have implications for currently unclaimed parts of the oceans, the Arctic and Antarctic, and nearly every aspect of outer space. 

This post was adapted from my March 24, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The 2024 Super Bowl Ads Totally Missed America

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One of the conclusions that might be drawn from last week’s post is that Americans aren’t nearly as generous as they used to be. Why? Because we’re no longer able to muster “a celebrity soup” of sponsors behind well-meaning causes like “famine relief in the horn of Africa.” 

These days, if the recent Super-Bowl ads are any indication, we’d rather deploy the likes of Beyonce and Jennifer Lopez to sell stuff like Verizon plans, Dunkin’ Donuts (and themselves, of course)—while we’re presumably basking in the stun-guns of their celebrity. I suppose the theory is that we’ll feel better about ourselves eating a donut because a goddess like J-Lo eats them too. (Yeah, right) But since a minority of viewers are susceptible to delusions like this, they keep serving them up to the rest of us. 

“Viewer identification” with products like these should be making the Super Bowl the most powerful sales vehicles of the year.  But beyond the faux “feel like a celebrity too” experience, shouldn’t marketing success depend on how many of us are actually buying more donuts or wireless plans because of them? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this year’s Super-Bowl ads totally failed to boost consumption if “more” was actually their mission. 

But it might have been otherwise if advertisers had plugged into the far deeper currents that are running through Americans these days.


In this country I remember when there were social institutions (other than the National Football League) competing for our allegiance and attention. 

But we already know that fewer of us are going to churches and other houses of worship every weekend. And beyond the social justice warriors and conspiracy theorists, the vast political middle no longer affiliates very strongly with either political party, whatever the draw of a marquee huckster and his supposed foil. Local organizations formed around shared work, heritage or region are struggling for members when they’re surviving at all. On the other hand, American sports—which always appealed to some—have gained near-monopoly status when it comes to belonging to something bigger and (so we’re told) more important than ourselves. That means an event like the Super Bowl becomes a kind of national ritual with its own priests, altars and a stadium full of true believers that get trotted out for us to share in on an annual basis. 

These days when considering the faces that we use in public, it looks like a lot of Americans might be fans before we’re anything else. And if your team happens to melt-down after early signs of greatness (like my team in Philly did this year) well, then our fandom easily shifts to, say, the incumbent Super Bowl champions or this game’s underdogs, as well as to the famous faces that dot the stands, the half-time spectacle, and the ads that hold us captive in our seats for 3+ hours.

With 120 million pairs of eyes glued to their Super Bowl screens on February 11, it’s fairly easy to make the case that National League football (and its Big Game in particular) provides the town square or national house of worship where the greatest share of Americans gather during the fall and winter months, culminating in a kind of High Holy Day when February finally rolls around. 

So for the marketers—convincing their clients to pay $7m for every half-minute of product promotion—the ads themselves provide a kind of  “read” or “diagnosis” about Who (exactly) the ad creators Think We Are these days, and therefore, How Best to Reach Into Our Hearts as well as Our Wallets before we’re on to the next riviting visual. 

Sadly this year, neither the viewer diagnosis nor the sad parade of ads that it spawned hit their intended mark.

Ben Affleck crashes Jennifer Lopez’s party, but only Matt Damon seems embarrassed by the ridiculousness in what, we’ve been told, was one of the Super Bowl’s most beloved ads.

In an op-ed she wrote around 2023’s Super Bowl, WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan described her view of its advertisements this way.

I have been watching these ads closely for 40 years, for fun but also to hear the inner dialogue, the sound of a nation talking to itself as it sells things to itself, which, in America, has always been about as intimate an act as there is. [emphasis mine]

Indeed, even more so than sex.

Noonan knows this because she’s been a kind of marketer herself, first deploying her skill with words and their particular heartstrings to build affiliation with her former boss (the already kindly-sounding Ronald Reagan) when he was president and she was one of his speech-writers. 

What the marketer in Noonan saw last year was a Super Bowl audience made up mostly of Americans still suffering a pandemic hang-over, experiencing new assaults from inflation at the grocery store and gas pump, and increasingly worried about the arc of their day-to-day lives. So why, she wondered, were the ads she’d just seen “jittery, rather cruel and cynical—Super Bowl ads for a nation of losers.” She thought “the ad makers must have asked themselves: What does America want? And answered: dumb, loud, depthless and broken.”

It wasn’t at all the audience she was seeing last year, and certainly not what she thought any of us needed as a sales pitch.  Noonan began, rather grandly, with how she knows that the stupid and cynical approach “for an intimate act” like an ad pitch doesn’t work:

I’m here to say I’ve met America and that’s not what they want. What they want is ‘Help me live, help my kids live, help me feel something true.’

To those who made the commercials and pay for them: Advertising is a great and honorable craft, at its best even an art. But you can’t do it well if you have no regard for and barely even know your audience, which is your country. Why don’t you go into another line of work? Why not go to a nonprofit and dislike America from there? Or go into politics. [again, the italics are mine]

That’s not to say that some percentage of Super Bowl viewers aren’t dumb, loud, depthless” and maybe even “broken;” they surely are. But Noonan’s sympathies were going towards that “silent majority” that no one ever seems to be listening to or trying to meet where they live—the folks that Reagan (and even Bill Clinton after him) kept zeroing in on with their political-animal instincts. 

We were worried last year, in need of assurance and a genuine sense of solidarity with our fellow Americans instead of some juvenile, celebrity-driven kind. 

So did this year’s Super Bowl ad creators similarly miss the audience mark? 

Yes they did:  and even more spectacularly than they did last year.

Beyonce, trying to be inoffensive as Bar-bey, in her self-promoting ad for Verizon.

According to a quick post-mortem I saw called “Super Bowl Ads Launch Celebrity Blitz with Goal of Playing It Safe”:

The Super Bowl ads on Sunday variously appealed to America’s sweet tooth, pleaded for tolerance and sought redemption for Bud Light [after its transgender promoter led to a customer boycott]. But most shared one thing: marketers’ even deeper-than-usual desire to avoid offending anyone.

It certainly seemed true given “the safety” of the humor in last weekend’s ads. According to a marketing prof at the Kellogg School of Management, nobody was “pushing the edge of these jokes” or “hinting at anything remotely controversial.”

A related story about the Uber Eats’ ad we eventually saw demonstrated how thin-skinned (as well as simple-minded) the advertising industry thinks we’ve become. This food delivery service was apparently:  

chastised for a joke in its commercial, which it [had] released online before the game, that showed a man asking, ‘There’s peanuts in peanut butter?’ while breaking out in an allergic reaction. [Well] food allergy advocacy group FARE criticized the ad, saying it featured ‘inappropriate use of humor depicting food allergies.’ FARE said Uber Easts had told the group that the commercial would run without the allergy reference [and] by Sunday, Uber Easts had posted a version of its ad on YouTube with the joke removed.

What Uber Eats attempted wasn’t even that funny. But all of the ad humor in the game was reduced to the kindergarten level, where everyone who is at least 4 years old can get the jokes and nobody would go home crying to mom or dad over what they’d just heard or seen. 

The same pablum and hyper-sensitivity also seemed evident in the mild suggestions of the “He Gets Us” campaign, making its second Super-Bowl appearance this year. Over pictures of individuals “who looked different than us(?)” it encouraged viewers to love their neighbors as they say that Jesus once did. Asking “Why can’t we all be friends?” a couple of times between J-Lo and Beyonce certainly wasn’t worth their million dollar price tags when the aforementioned extremists are regularly at one another’s throats and the vast Middle-of-America is afraid of where all the gnashing of teeth, automatic weapons, and purported saviors on both ends of the political spectrum are leading them.

The 2024 Super Bowl ads treated us like we’re over-protected children who can’t handle any more dissonance or discomfort. So have Americans really exchanged “want-to-get-smarter” for “just-plain-stupid,” “resilient (in the face of challenges)” for “fragile (at the suggestion of anything unsettling”)?

Again, for that vast middle of America, I don’t think so. The Americans I know—and I’ve met some too—want to be approached like adults and to become stronger instead of weaker “in the face of it all.”  By refusing to treat us the way that most of us want to be treated, the Super Bowl advertisers have (once again) failed to hear the TRUE sound of our nation “talking to itself” while “it sells things to itself,” which for those of us who’ve grown accustomed to it, “has always been about as intimate an act as there is” around here.

These days, we’re far more “rooted” than the advertisers ever imagined.

Why aren’t today’s Super Bowl ads speaking to:

  • our spirit of enterprise (or our MacGiverish ability to be practical problem-solvers)?
  • our commitment to fairness on every playing field (instead of wanting to treat every player like they’re equal or the same or that we’d ever want them to be)?
  • our desire to win (as opposed to giving everyone who shows up to play a trophy)?
  • our capability for wonder and awe (not only before the jaw-dropping beauty of our country, but also given the brightness—instead of darkness—of the unknowable future that we’re building, even now)?

Instead these ads have become one stupid dog trick after another, although substituting our favorite celebrities for the dogs of yore, because anything more demanding than this might offend somebody’s sensibilities. 

I’m reminded of a post I wrote in April of 2021 when the pandemic was already somewhat “long in the tooth” called Higher Winds Are Coming.  It spoke to the kinds of reserves we’d be needing because the buffeting we’d been experiencing still wasn’t over. Today, almost 3 years later, we need some of the wisdom that I tried to summon there even more.

For example, I cited Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2012 book, tellingly called Antifragile, which he nearly summarized in 3 of his book’s best lines:

Trial and error is freedom.

Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.

I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.

I quoted Barry Lopez, a particular hero of mine, who asked us to remember the people that we used to be:

How much natural resilience and willingness to rely upon one another has our freedom, wealth and belief in progress allowed us to forget, but that we’ll need to remember if we’re to adapt and survive in this increasingly ‘throttled’ world?

And finally, I recalled Buddhist teacher Pima Chodron’s urging us to be more curious about the fears that make us so fragile—to bring these secret worries into the sun’s bright glare so we’re no longer as frightened by their shadowy unknowns. As I went on to explain:

With true hope, she says, there is always fear that whatever you long for won’t come to pass. Accepting that your hope is always bound up with your fear—so that you are as curious about your fear as you are about your hope—can liberate you from your own constraints.

These observations actually add-up to a pretty short list of things that are great and laudable and TRUE about most of us today:

Our spirit of enterprise, or how difficulty “wakes up” our genius. 

Our commitment to a level playing field where every player has a fair chance to win. 

Our capacity for wonder and even awe. 

Remembering our natural resilience and our willingness to rely upon one another, maybe by consulting our personal and collective histories.

Being curious about our fears so they can never inhibit our hopes. 

In a national event that claims to champion our competitive drive towards excellence, it seems natural and even necessary to further elevate The Big Game with marketing that appeals to each and every one of these capabilities, commitments and emotions.

And because they would speak not only to “who we are” but also to “the people that we want to be,” marketing to an audience that’s framed like that would sell a hell-of-a-lot more (of whatever it is that we’re selling) than the fragile and stupid ads that were on parade last weekend.

This post was adapted from my February 18, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

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