I used to have a really good idea of what I was doing here and why. It started as "here are some stories from my career that have illustrated the need for empathy in your work life to create great digital products". But the more I write, the more it always comes back to, "if I could change the world this is what I'd do" in sweeping generalities that aren't implementable but more are guidelines I use to track if I'm feeling good or bad about my performance as a human being.

And I guess that's as good a premise as any for a blog. But I have a feeling that it's not sustainable. Even now, I struggle thinking "What's the most pressing thing that I want to talk about?" Because I hate to break it to ya'll (especially those who work with me currently lol) – it ain't work.

If anything it's more about society and culture. I consume a LOT of media. I'm someone who can't really sit in silence anymore. I used to treat this like a super power. I am able to quiet the noise in loud situations to find the hidden nugget that is the "why are we making all this noise" and then turn that into a problem and a solution. And that IS in fact a super power. Think of the last big meeting you were in – what was the purpose? What was the intended goal? What signified success? What was the thing that people were spinning around that we could either ignore or at the very least wait until later to talk through fully?

And that skill/super power has served me greatly throughout my career and honestly let me also get away with a lot of shit.

If you're the one identify the problem and the solution, then often times you will lead the solution, but you're not the one DOING the work. You're talking about the work. You're thinking about the work. But you're not putting your hands to the keyboard and writing code.

And I'm finding more and more that I want to drown those silences out to find the place in between where I'm a problem solver, without the responsibility of building the solution.

It'd be easy to see that as a flaw in my character. It probably is if we're being honest. But that flaw isn't what I want to dig into, what I want to dig into is what's the noise that I'm paying attention to and why.

1. Lack of accountability everywhere leads to lack of success everywhere
2. Lack of media literacy makes building digital products easier and more difficult
3. Lack of a mono culture creates a lack of share experiences which makes building digital products more difficult

Let's tackle each of these as their own section, so that way I don't get lost in the sauce lol.

Lack of accountability everywhere leads to lack of success everywhere

Let's deconstruct this sentence to make sure we're all on the same page.

Lack of accountability everywhere – now obviously, this isn't true across the board. We're seeing people held to account in all sorts of places and ways… but what I'm referring to is the plethora of "bad actors" we see (mainly in the news, whether it's political or business) who get away with continuing to act like bad people without any sort of real consequences.

Some of the many examples I could go through:

• Jack Dorsey over hiring, admitting he's to blame for Block's financial situation, and keeping his job/laying off 4k people only to see his stock value and net worth rise dramatically
• Everyone in the Trump administration (if you want me to get into it in the future I will but I think this is good enough for now)
  • Specifically let's call out Kristi Noem (literally from when I started writing this to when I finished she got fired, so maybe I'm full of shit lol) and all the DHS thugs that are killing with impunity how about that?
• Every exec who lays off employees because of "AI"
• Every person who is committing heinous acts in the Epstein files
• Netanyahu
• Putin
• You get the drift.

The reason these matter isn't just the individual depravity of how any one person or even small group of people act. The problem is that it enables OTHER people to act badly, regardless of if they have some sort of consequence for their actions.

A rouge ICE officer killing someone in the streets enables rouge rando's who either agree with them OR DISAGREE WITH THEM to feel like they can act similarly – either it's "if they can do it so can I" or it's "if they're not going to be punished by the justice department, I guess vigilante justice is our only option left."

To put it in terms I am more comfortable with, it's like in The Dark Knight, when the vigilante fake batmen are running around at the beginning of the movie and they ask Batman what makes him different that it's ok for him to enact vigilante justice but not for them to do it and he responds, "I'm not wearing hockey pads." Fun and badass moment for Batman for sure, but it missing the underlying point which is a theme of Batman… one vigilante begets more. If you create tactics that involve becoming a fake bat who takes out bad guys, the bad guys have to adapt to your methods. And so do the good guys. All you're doing is enabling MORE vigilante justice.

The right way to do things was the way Bruce's father tried to go about things. Make a public transit system people want to use. Be a philanthropist.

The second you move outside of the rules of accountability as an individual you enable others to do the same and that just makes all of us less safe.

If you can now just drive down the street and not know if the guy stopping in front of you and getting out of his car with a ski mask and gun is carjacking you, or is an ICE officer, or is someone trying to protect you from some greater evil that you can't see yet, it DOESN'T MATTER, in all of those cases you are now less safe not just because of that person but because the number of options of bad shit that can happen you are increasing exponentially.

It's an old adage in football, that run games are better than passing games, because only 3 things can happen when you pass the ball and two of them are bad (yea yea, modern football is different blah blah, but you get the meaning).

All that lack of accountability in the system does, is create more potential outcomes… but instead of adding equally to the positive and negative things that could occur, we just keep adding negative outcomes, making the positive outcome less and less likely every day.

Lack of media literacy makes building digital products easier and more difficult

Even if this was the only byproduct of it, this would be an incredibly valid reason to do away with AI lol. Honestly people just aren't equipped to be shown things that are just fake enough to seem off but not so fake that you immediately scream "this is fucking AI garbage". They get hit with all sorts of nonsense nonstop on social media, in legacy media, in anything digital anywhere, and it's really hard to distinguish what's what.

Now AI built websites are flooding the market "selling" things that are "coming from China" or something like that so you get distracted by the fact that it'll take 4-6 weeks to ship, and then by the time you remember you bought something from them, it's too late. They have your money. No product is coming your way. They're just bilking you because you're gullible and they can make a great website that'll convince you the product you're buying is real.

Hell, they're even showing up on Amazon and Walmart.

This is just an offshoot of enshittification to some degree, but it's also that we're woefully lacking in critical thinking skills that make you more adept at navigating any media landscape let alone one as rife with corruption as ours.

For the most part, I've abandoned social media outside of Bluesky (when I just need to get some rage scrolling in) and LinkedIn (because after getting laid off you realize that you need to always have a backup plan, with it's own backup plan, and yet another backup plan… and you're reading one of the many backup plans lol). But even I still get served a TON of garbage that I have to look at and think "this is making me feel a certain way… but is it real?" And I have had to go down some truly stupid rabbit holes to just figure out if something is real.

Yesterday a video was making the rounds of a marine getting dragged out of a senate hearing and having his arm broken by a sitting senator (like in office, not literally sitting, though that woulda been wild to break someone's arm while you're just chilling on a couch in the senate. yeesh, that'd require some investigating for sure lol) and before I shared it fully with the wife, I had to go through and do a deep dive on "did this actually happen? what hearing was this? what day was it? why am I just seeing a random insta reel video that was reshared on bluesky instead of an article".

You can't just trust videos anymore, and you can't trust pictures, and you can't trust what anyone says whether you genuinely trust them or not, because you don't even know if the content you're interacting with was theirs! It could be an imposter! They could have had a bad day and just said "Claude go do this for me" and then suddenly a school in Iran gets bombed again.

But you get my meaning, it is impossible to have a real "truth" without doing your research and making sure that it's coming from a reputable source. And given what the news industry is becoming even THAT is a dangerous and difficult thing to do, because you never know what the Washington Post, NY Times, LA Times, or Wall Street Journal is going to say, and whether it'll have any basis in reality or just be some wacko spin that is just meant to serve people in power and let them get more powerful.

And they can get away with it because we want things to be breezy and easy. We don't want to have to interrogate everything we hear. That's exhausting.

Now imagine trying to build a digital product! Not only do you have to drive desire and interest, but you need to be able to prove THAT YOU ARE REAL. That you're not just a fake site on the internet ready to take people's money.

Lack of a mono culture creates a lack of share experiences which makes building digital products more difficult

This all leads to this lack of a mono culture. Mono culture being a thing that everyone agrees on and consumes in real time. Think of families sitting down to watch some TV show (for my generation it was TGIF, then NBC Thursdays, but it might be the nightly news, or Jeopardy or whatever), or that everyone saw the movies that are nominated for academy awards (now we all are scrambling to figure out "wtf is this movie I've never even heard of that's about to win best picture?").

Those cultural touchstones were unifying even if we weren't as a culture unified. They gave us a baseline for everyone to stand on and then you could stray slightly but it kept people all within a realm of "reality" that we all agreed on.

But the fragmentation of media created a fragmentation of culture. We made it exceedingly easy to create media with platforms like YouTube that then extended into Insta Reels, TikTok, and I'm sure something else the kids are now using that I'm fully unaware of.

And while the goal was democratization of media and of ideas, what it created was feedback loops to allow people to have their most odious and socially unacceptable ideas validated. This was originally meant as a means to give under-represented people a forum to have more representation, give people who were considered outcasts opportunities to find community, etc. But it's impossible to give those communities we think deserve more recognition that recognition without also enabling people who are hell bent on dissembling those communities and destroying those people WITHOUT SOME LEVEL OF MODERATION.

And moderation is expensive… and political. You can't moderate without putting your thumb on the scale, and honestly you can't build a digital product in this age without making a political choice. Who you enable, who you deplatform, who you promote, what your algorithm is driven by, all of these are political choices.

Think of the evolution of marketing and media from the .com era of the late 90s early 2000s to the current era we're in. We used to be focused on just getting people to go to our websites because the discovery was the hard part.

Now the discovery isn't the hard part, it's the sorting through what's real and what's total fabrication.

And the idea that we can build digital products without wrestling with that is a fallacy. The world is changed and continues to change. Right now the focus of building a product online seems to be "how much advertising can I put in this thing" along with "can I grift you out of your money for either a product that is clearly not what you thought you were buying or isn't for a real product at all".

This isn't what USERS want or what BUYERS want but it's what drives revenue. And keeps the stock prices high. Or is just an easy grift that doesn't require a long term plan, just a short term money making scheme. Which leads back to earlier conversations in this post and prior posts that the focus on quarterly earnings breaks the brains of companies and the lack of accountability enables the grifters to keep grifting until they need to move on to another grift.

So, as John Oliver would ask – what can we do about it?

Well, the first step is to start holding people accountable for their actions. And obviously we can't do it all on our own - luckily it seems like the work that the senate and house did with Noem might have gotten some accountability out there (though all my political podcasts are saying that the reason she was ousted is… because of her ads that focused on her name ID and not on Trump and MORE IMPORTANTLY SOMEHOW saying that Trump was ok with it? Honestly what a bunch of idiots.).

But what we can do is start holding our own circles accountable. At work that looks like asking people why they're doing what they're doing, asking for evidence for why things should happen, or even something as little as saying "wasn't this your responsibility?" when something goes wrong and no one seems to want to own it.

At home, it looks like not letting people say shit that is obviously awful. This is especially for the dudes – don't let other dudes get away with saying heinous shit. Dudes tend to want to just go along and get along and don't want to cause trouble – honestly, I think this is a product of media where you just constantly see men getting upset over the most minor levels of accountability and either beating the shit out of people or outright killing them and men are ALSO AFRAID OF OTHER MEN.

But a part of holding people accountable is sometimes being uncomfortable while you're doing it to help make the world a better place. You can't make meaningful and lasting change without some level of discomfort and fear, and sometimes we just have to be brave and stand up and do things that people are going to feel uncomfortable with (like me making jokes about how Claude is great at some things, like building this website with me! But it's not something I'd trust with targeting data for missiles being launched into Iran).

I think after that, the tactics to deal with lack of media literacy and a shared reality are aligned – you have to start questioning everything. And it's tough. But how often do you hear people at work or home say something WILD with no push back. I literally do this all the time with my family lol – I'll tell them about some wild ass thing that I'm hearing from Bluesky democrats (knowing that they're reactionary, don't have a shared reality, and are often exaggerating everything) and then my family goes "tell me where you actually saw that because that sounds insane" lol. AND THEY'RE RIGHT TO DO IT! Because me saying "trump is storing the profits from stolen Venezuelan oil in Qatar" sounds like something a crazy person would say (and it's true… and there's "explanations" that would make sense with any other president… but yeesh it just feels weird lol https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/15/business/qatar-venezuela-oil-sale-account).

In tandem with questioning anything you're hearing (even if it's less insane than sending Venezuelan oil money to Qatar), you also need to be able to back up the things you say with verifiable information. Back in my childhood, we would say weird shit all the time and you would just believe it and be an idiot until someone showed you data to prove you were wrong. But that cycle went from "a few years of believing the B in BMW stood for British" (yup, that was 4th grade me!) and then feeling stupid later to believing it FOREVER and being able to find obviously bad faith people on the internet who will back up whatever crazy shit you believe. You can't just say "I saw it on the internet" you have to say "here's the link to the article with the backing data to prove that it's not just bullshit" and those things have to come from a source that you might not love because you need to prove it to someone else (I wouldn't normally use a CNN link to prove my point because CNN is losing it's status as a consistently reliable narrator, but it's also more convincing than me posting to some media matters lefty site that would easily let people say "oh Scott and his bleeding heart will believe anything").

I'm less hopefully today than I was a year ago about all of this. And there's obvious political reasons I can point to but I want to make sure I don't just let this be a political screed because it's ALSO incredibly impactful in the lives of people who build digital products – I think we're missing the boat on questions of "how do we create trust" or "how do we create user value that is more evenly distributed rather than focused on a single group of users" or "if we're gonna have to live with AI how can AI create democratization without creating cesspools of people who want to eliminate their fellow people just because they look or sound different".

And the only way to solve it, from my perspective, is to admit that we can't just build for buildings sake anymore. We need to spend more time on ideation, experimentation, product definition, user definition, personas, etc. It's already built into the Agile ways of working that we've all adopted, but it's not enough. Corporations tend to think of the build process as 10% product definition 80% build, 10% test validation (not hard and fast rule, it's just generally how investments are thought of). But it's no longer our reality.

The reality is that you should be spending 40-60% of your time on product definition and ideation. The remaining 60-40% is build and test validation.

The reason is, we keep building without thinking through all the implications, and it's driving more of everything I'm complaining about. Building without definition makes accountability hard (who is to blame? it's not the devs, they're just doing as they're told! it's not the pm they're being told by the business that they need this feature out asap! it's not the execs because they're just trying to create shareholder value ahead of the next quarterly earnings call!). Building without definition also leads to narrow adoption, which drives more inequity in the system and creates more silos, making it impossible to share a reality.

It's all a product of not spending enough time thinking. And that's right that thinking should be focused on… empathy for your users.

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