AI Eats the World | Hope You Like Working with Dying People | Good Marketing Trumps a Karen | It’s Your Tuesday Roundup
On this Tuesday Failure to Communicate, we’re sharing some items you should know about and emptying the notebook of comms-related stuff that’s caught my eye.
Today we’re talking about a bleak jobs outlook, bleaker AI outlooks, and an example of how cop-speak invades well-intentioned news copy.
But first, this baloney…
Marlins Make Cheesesteaks Out of Toe Cheese
I promise if I wasn’t so busy I’d spend more time on that subhed. I know, it’s gross, I’m sorry.
In any case, this first story brings us a few short miles from the All Points West studios in Miami to loanDepot Park, where a Friday night MLB game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Miami Marlins went viral – but not for anything that happened on the field.
In case you’ve been under a rock since last Friday, here’s the rundown: at the top of the fourth inning, Phillies outfielder Harrison Bader sent a home run into the stands where it ping-ponged around the bleachers before being corralled by Phillies fan Drew Feltwell. Ball in hand, Feltwell walked a few rows back to his seat and gave the souvenir to his young son, Lincoln.
What happened next has satiated the bloodlust that has infected much of the internet in this post-cancel culture era. Rarely does a caitiff appear seemingly so direct from central casting and bereft of any confounding, humanizing complexities. Our collective vitriol has begun to back up in an era of unaccountable villainy and thanks to one middle-aged woman’s entitled outfield outburst, we all now have a place to aim it:
An obnoxious “Karen” archetype? Stealing a baseball from a little kid? Screaming and yelling in entitled high definition? With a literal Cruella De Ville ‘do? The floodgates broke, and so did the Internet, which oozed raw, molten hatred for the still-unnamed ball-shagger. (That’s a sports term! Not a British sex thing! Don’t get mad at me!)
As I write this early Saturday morning, I’m sure there will be no shortage of digital ink spilled on this, ahem, “story.” But rather than focus on the negative, I wanted to accentuate the positive and recognize my hometown Marlins’ PR and fan experience teams who were Johnnys-on-the-spot, bringing Lincoln a gift basket to allay the pain of what will no doubt be the first in a lifetime of Karen and/or Ken encounters (it only gets worse, kid).
This move deserves to be highlighted because it’s the kind of in-the-moment move that can only work if you’re thinking on your toes and acting with empathy. Many brands shrink away from the spotlight when they are dragged into a viral mess that attracts millions of eyeballs.
The Marlins instead ran toward the mess, even though this was a decidedly Philadelphia-flavored melee. The team could have easily ignored the situation. Instead, understanding that they are hosts even to the fans of the away team, and knowing that few things are as pure and relatable as a youngster enjoying a day at the ballpark, the Marlins took the initiative. It’s just smart thinking on your feet and good event management.
As a lifelong Yankee fan, and generally a fan of sports teams that don’t bilk billions out of their cities for mostly empty new stadiums, it brings me no joy to give props to the Marlins. But their rapid response was a great one. It can be easy to miss an opportunity like this, especially during a live event, but they made the most of it and made a little kid’s day.
****Personally, I choose to subscribe to the conspiracy theory that this was a false flag planted by the Polish paving magnate/rich douchebag Piotr Szczerek, who just days earlier became internet famous at the US Open after snatching a hat from the grasp of a young fan who had just been handed the memorabilia by tennis star Kamil Majchrzak.
I’m just imagining the Philly Karen leaving the stadium, sauntering out into the steamy Little Havana evening and hailing a cab to Miami International Airport, dropping the skunk wig and mom jeans in a trash bin as she makes the call, flatly saying, in perfect Polish, “it’s done.”****
Healthcare: Our Last Growth Industry, Or Just Dying Slower than the Others?
From a silver lining in a grey story, we go to a pitch black story with a grey lining that is just as dark (maybe darker?) when you squint just right.
Along with cancel culture being alive and well in the NL East, Friday’s news also let us know, if we had somehow missed the signs, that the larger US economy and job market is on something resembling life support. With a dismal-even-by-Trump-administration-standards report showing that a mere 22,000 jobs were added to the economy in August, along with downward revisions of June and July’s reports, “heading off a cliff” might seem to incorrectly presuppose that we still have some cliffside under our feet.
For anyone working in comms – particularly corp comms, internal comms, or change management – none of this is news.
In fact, the only bright spot in the most recent jobs report seems to be the healthcare industry, which continues to grow apace. Without the 31,000 new jobs in the sector, net job growth would have been in a deficit, or “contraction”, a phrase we elder millennial/xennials remember from the years 2007-2010. (Not great years!)
Absent that bright spot, the murmurs about recession may have resembled shouts.
But just how bright is it? When people see that the healthcare industry is growing, I think they make a pretty natural assumption that, hey, that’s good right? We’re always hearing about doctor shortages and a lack of primary care providers. More nurses and specialists and MDs, that has to be good news.
Right?
Well, maybe not. For the past few years, I’ve had a micro-obsession with a theoretical concept called the Great Wealth Transfer, a historic, intergenerational movement of trillions of dollars from Baby Boomers to their inheritors that we are told to expect in the coming years. Some Great Wealth Transfer-watchers posit that we are already in the midst of it.
I disagree. While it is natural to assume that inheritance will continue to work as it always has – wealth and assets being left to the children of the aging or deceased – the economic reality we have built for ourselves is far from natural. With hyper-commodified goods and services being produced and delivered by hyper-capitalized firms whose leadership demand exponential, unceasing growth quarter after quarter, is it any surprise that end-of-life care has come to resemble a bankruptcy court?
Consider where the actual growth in healthcare jobs has been coming. The big growth is in costly home healthcare services, which includes hospice (7,600 jobs), skilled nursing care facilities (also 7,600 jobs) and individual and family assistance (which came from the category of social assistance, accounting for nearly 16,000 jobs). Other burgeoning job categories within healthcare were found in continuing care, retirement communities, assisted living facilities. Altogether, about 31,000 jobs were created in just the elder-care-adjacent categories in August.
The dying are keeping our economy alive.
It makes sense if you’ve been paying attention. Think about many “adult daycares” (shudder) you’ve seen pop up in your town the past 15 years. Or the ad spend increase for Medicare and Medicaid plans (before this recent round of budget cuts, of course).
This trend stretches back for years, according to Bureau of Labor and Statistics data. For decades, we’ve talked about how healthcare
Our healthcare system has responded to the incentives that define it by constructing the perfect wallet vacuum – keeping the elderly alive just long enough to exhaust whatever savings they have. It’s just another perverse reality of our economy where, if you’re counting on something like a Great Wealth Transfer, you better hope mom and dad have the decency to kick the bucket quickly and quietly.
****I can only imagine how much worse this will be by the time I reach old age. I’m already putting my mind to exactly which high-risk activities I can have fun doing before I become bedridden. Might take up base jumping, I hear that’s a thrill. Or maybe I’ll become the first Puerto Rican to visit Sentinel Island.****
Speaking of AI Macro Movements…
If you’ve met me, read me, listened to me, or seen me speak, you know that I am an AI realist, not an enthusiast. Look, I even put it on my LinkedIn bio:
That’s why I was maybe less surprised than others when The Information reported that OpenAI expects to burn through $115 billion through 2029 – an amount once forecasted to be closer to $35 billion. And despite the lack of sourcing on the article I wholeheartedly believe it.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the dollars and cents don’t add up for any of these GPT models – it costs far more to operate them, and they burn through more resources than they could ever earn back in subscriber revenue.
The closest comp I can come up with is Netflix, which back in 2015 was the subject of a report that claimed it would need to charge users an eye-popping $20 a month and capture a billion subscribers to continue its churn rate. While those figures seemed crazy at the time, they seem slightly less crazy today as premium users pay $24.99 and the service just surpassed 300 million subscribers.
(All that and we still can’t get a new season of The OA?)
Copy Corner
Finally, ending on a nit I want to pick. For those who pay attention, this is a bit of a hack take but it always rankles me to see the absolute gymnastics that (usually local) news outlets put themselves through to not tell you that a cop shot someone.
I’m cutting off the byline(s) of this story and not linking to it because while there’s a joke to be made about why it took five reporters to bring us one article that is mostly just quoting and sourcing from cops, anyone who’s worked in a newsroom knows that the offending headline was likely written by an editor. (Do they still have editors?)
Here’s my rewrite of this hed: “Cop shoots man in head in Liberty City; investigation underway”. Because that’s what happened.
I find this so maddening because I actually worked for years on a city metro desk reporting stories exactly like this one. From the outside I can understand how the Adam Johnsons and Nima Shirazis of the world come to think this is the result of some sort of institutionalized failure in house style, a way to turn local news into a paean for cop worship. But honestly, I cannot remember one editor ever doing this to my copy.
It’s like black mold, it just appears out of nowhere and it’s nefarious.