It’s not your imagination – we want our time back.
Ask anyone who truly understands investing what the most valuable asset is and they’ll tell you Time. It’s the only one you can’t buy more of!
Now take a look at this amazing Polaroid advertising campaign below:
Now ponder this: Is it anti-tech or pro-analogue? For me, it’s probably pro-analogue, and I think we can have our ‘tech cake’ and eat it too.
I think most of us want to spend less time on screens. But it’s difficult when our work, our families, and our social lives have all been sucked into the screen vortex. My hope is that AI can, in some way, allow us to escape the screen—to reduce our need to attend to it so we can spend more time on the human side of life.
I think a lot about industrial technology, and I believe it is far more mature—not just older as a technology, but more mature in its relationship with humanity. It requires less from us. It is truly automated.
That can’t be said for the screen. It’s like a little baby crying for attention.
Think about how much industrial machinery we rely on around the home: the washing machine, the dryer, the refrigerator, and the heating and cooling. We flick a switch and they simply do the job.
One of the key problems with modern digital technology is that the product itself is unfinished until we attend to it. Big Tech likes to call it user-generated content, but without us there is a void. The machine doesn’t really work. Could AI be the solution we’ve been seeking?
There’s some potential that AI could create an offset, where we automate our digital lives and escape screens. In the same way a washing machine does its job without requiring us to stand there watching it, guiding it, and cajoling it.
Either way, this campaign—and the ones that will inevitably follow by tapping into this zeitgeist—can work incredibly hard. We are beginning to realise that the world is irrevocably physical, and that we are physical beings.
Great advertising campaigns often give us permission to make the societal changes we were already hoping for.
Big Tech Gets Investment Heavy
I also think analogue businesses could become more financially competitive in open markets as Big Tech companies increasingly become infrastructure businesses rather than software businesses. They are committing staggering amounts of capital to AI build-outs and data centres, which is already reducing their free cash flow. In the past year, Amazon’s free cash flow fell by around 95%, while Alphabet’s fell by around 47%.
Ironically, the very AI these companies are investing in—with little financial upside so far—is lowering the operating costs of the analogue businesses they serve. Perhaps this is Big Tech industrialising itself. Instead of building products that constantly demand our attention, they may end up building digital infrastructure and intelligence that requires far less human input. In that sense, the industry itself could finally mature.
This could be the beginning of a major shift in valuations, profitability, and competitive advantage across a wide range of markets.
The upside for humanity and entrepreneurs is to lean into the human. From AI slop to taking back time and control, the market is starting to provide some real signals to a shift, one many of us can leverage.
Keep Thinking,
Steve.
** Get me into do a Keynote at your next event. I’ll use this as my testimonial!