Spring Cleaning the Mental Attic

Today is the first of May, which means spring has officially arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, at least on paper, regardless of what it is currently doing outside. Tradition holds that this is an appropriate moment for spring cleaning: throwing open the windows, hauling things out from under the bed, and confronting the accumulated detritus of the preceding year with a bucket and a sense of purpose.

I am doing this, but to my head.

There is, in the mental attic of anyone who spends a great deal of time thinking about technology, a collection of ideas that arrived ahead of their time and have been sitting up there ever since, wrapped in slightly dusty cloth, waiting patiently for the infrastructure to catch up. Today feels like the right moment to unwrap some of them, air them out, and see whether the world has finally built the plumbing they require.

It largely has. This is either exciting or alarming, depending on which of the ideas you are looking at.

 

The Contact Form Is Already Dead. It Just Hasn't Noticed Yet.

Consider, for a moment, the contact form. Name. Email. Subject. Message. Submit.

This is a technology whose fundamental design philosophy dates to approximately the same era as the fax machine, and which persists in the modern web with the cheerful obliviousness of a creature that has not yet been informed of the meteorite. It asks you to supply information that, in a very large number of cases, the system already possesses, or could obtain in the time it takes to draw a breath.

The early prototype of what I have in mind is already running at supremegenius.net. The contact form there asks for precisely one thing: your name. That is all. By the time you have typed it and pressed submit, the system has already gone off and found your social media presence, assembled a picture of who you are, and delivered a notification to me containing more useful context than any "Subject: enquiry" email ever could. The form does not ask for your Twitter handle, your LinkedIn profile, your job title, or your company. It finds them. You just told it where to start looking.

This is, currently, a party trick. With modest additional infrastructure it becomes the standard. Why would a business ask a potential client to fill in a ten-field form when they can ask for a name, or nothing at all, and know more about that visitor in three seconds than a traditional form would reveal in three pages? The answer is that they would not, once someone explains to them that the alternative exists. Most of them have not yet been told.

The contact form will not die with a bang. It will simply be quietly replaced one day by an experience so frictionless that nobody will remember what came before, in the same way that nobody mourns the carbon copy.

 

The Website Built for an Audience of One

The contact form idea is, however, merely the aperitif. The main course has been sitting in my attic considerably longer and is considerably more interesting.

A website is, in its current form, a piece of content delivered identically to everyone who asks for it. You type the address, the server sends the page, and whether you are a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Auckland or a sixty-year-old procurement director in Munich, you receive the same words, the same images, the same call to action, calibrated to an imaginary average visitor who, as we have already established in a different context, does not exist.

Now consider what is actually possible.

Between the moment a person clicks a link and the moment the page loads, there is a gap. It is small. It is, in human terms, imperceptible. In computational terms, it is quite long enough to do something rather remarkable: assemble a website specifically for that person. Their professional context, their likely priorities, their industry, their known interests, their probable objections, the things most likely to resonate and the things most likely to cause them to close the tab. Research done. Profile assembled. Page constructed. All before the spinner has finished spinning.

The automation infrastructure to do this is not theoretical. It exists. I have demonstrated it. What it currently lacks is access to sufficiently rich profile data at the point of query, which is where I would gently note, for the benefit of any large search engine companies who might be reading this, that certain organisations are sitting on precisely the data required to make this extraordinarily powerful. My offer to discuss terms remains open. I am, as it happens, not hard to find.

The sales implications alone are considerable. A website that greets a visitor not with generic marketing copy but with content precisely calibrated to their situation, their role, their challenges, is not a website. It is a conversation. The best salesperson you have ever employed, available at infinite scale, who has already done the research before they open their mouth.

 

The Dark Mirror

And here is where I must, in the interests of intellectual honesty, turn the idea over and show you the other side. Because the same capability that makes the on-the-fly website a powerful and benign sales tool makes it something considerably more troubling in other hands.

I have written about this before, in a piece on censorship disguised as service, and the argument bears repeating here because it has only become more relevant since I first made it.

The most dangerous form of censorship ever devised is not the kind where someone removes the book from the library and you notice the gap on the shelf. It is the kind where the library simply never shows you the shelf that contains the books that would challenge you. You do not see the gap because you do not know it exists. You go home with an armful of books that confirm everything you already believe and feel thoroughly well-read.

A non-syndicated news website that assembles its front page from your profile is not giving you the news. It is giving you a personalised reflection of your own existing worldview, presented in the font and with the photography that research suggests you find most credible. You read it. You feel informed. You have been, in the only sense that actually matters, kept completely in the dark.

This is not a hypothetical. Versions of it are already running. Social media feeds have been doing a cruder version for years, which is why entire populations have managed to reach the same election simultaneously holding completely contradictory beliefs about what is actually happening, each side baffled that the other cannot see what is obviously true, because what is "obviously true" has been individually curated for each of them by an algorithm that learned, long ago, that outrage retains attention and confirmation soothes it.

The on-the-fly website takes this capability off the social platforms and puts it anywhere anyone wants to deploy it. The same technology that builds you the perfect sales page can build you the perfect propaganda delivery system, invisible, frictionless, and personalised to your specific vulnerabilities. You will not notice. You will simply feel, somehow, that this website really gets you.

Which is precisely the problem.

 

A Spring Clean Has Two Stages

The tradition of spring cleaning is not merely to find the interesting things in the attic and bring them downstairs. It is also to decide which of them are worth keeping and which should be, with appropriate ceremony, thrown out.

These ideas are worth keeping. The contact form replacement: straightforwardly good, with no meaningful dark side. The on-the-fly personalised website: powerful, benign in the hands of a business that wants to speak relevantly to its visitors, and in urgent need of governance frameworks before someone points it at a population rather than a customer. The invisible personalised filter: a capability that should probably come with a visible label, somewhere, that says "this page was assembled for you specifically," in the way that food packaging is required to list its ingredients even when you would rather not know.

The attic is lighter now. Some of this will happen with or without the governance, which is the normal trajectory of technology: it arrives, people find uses for it, some of those uses turn out to require rules, the rules arrive somewhat after the damage, and everyone agrees that someone should really have thought about this earlier.

Someone should really have thought about this earlier.

Happy May Day. Mind the gap between the click and the page load. Something interesting is happening in there.

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