Learning is Lateral
A love letter to peer-to-peer stuff
Week after week on the StreamLeader Report LIVE Panel show, Ross Brand, Claudia Santigo, and Rob Greenlee pontificate on today’s tech headlines…and I try like hell to keep up. After 25+ shows together, the TL;DR, IMHO is that the AI Takeover is real, and the people pulling the strings only sometimes have humanity’s best interests at heart.
That got me thinking about what human beings are gonna do when they start to feel duped at every turn. Did you hear about the hot new model bringing in $11,000 a month? 25, spirited and independent, undeniably skinny? The Spanish advertising agency that created this AI Influencer reports that she is soooooo much easier than working with a real creative.
Already Gen Z is serving “I’m not going to feed the machine” vibes and I wonder: How long before we pivot our efforts outside of the cloud. What if paintings, live music, and the typewriter make major comebacks? What if we start leaving our phones at home and went outside? For millenia, humans have evolved and adapted to the restrictions of our environment. We can Social Revolution like a muthrfkr.
While this isn’t a fire and brimstone call to action to hate on AI, I do think that the information we get from the internet is only going to increasingly become more and more <checks notes> suss.
And so I am here with a message of hope that if anthropology has shown us anything, it’s that we will huddle up and embrace hyper-local community building.
☝️ Yesterday my mom group chat had a lively discussion about the best financial products for their teenagers and we all learned something.
✌️ Last month my Business in the Raw besties spent two days transforming a home recording studio and exploring a commercial tech stack.
🤟 Last week I took a TO at the hustle-n-grind to teach the teenagers in my life how to make Family Meal.
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Could everyone have just ‘YouTube’d’ it? Yup. Did they? Nope.
Think about any conference, workshop, class, or program you’ve ever done; the real value was in the people you met along the way. The top-down learning is great, but the magic is in the peer-to-peer connections.
So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by feeling constantly pitched, sold to, duped out, misled, and generally afraid of what the future brings, take heart.
This wouldn’t be the first time human beings stopped doing things the way we’ve always done it and gone back to the perennial truism: We learn from each other. In fact, it’s been our singular survival strategy since the savannah.
🫶 Rebecca