The Artefact Fiction | A book about Disrupting Humans
How we over-identify with the artefacts we create. And how that is a fiction. This is the outline of a book published over the spring and summer of 2024 - full access to subscribers.
The Artefact Fiction is a book about how we misjudge the world. How we over-identify with things as we’ve perceived them. And how we take that perception and that sense of identity and project it into the future.
The book came about through a single question which is still reverberating throughout the 21st century:
Why did the music industry not see the internet coming?
Why didn’t the music industry react soon enough? And why does this kind of disruption keep happening, even when we see it? We seem unable to react.
Almost every industry, company and human ends up asking themselves some form of this question at some stage. Every company either has or is finding a Digital Transformation Director and spending millions on digital transformation programs.
And yet, years later, many of these companies have trundled on doing the same things with the same basic economics. They haven’t really transformed.
There are answers but they aren’t where we think. The answers seem to come in slide decks or in the ideas of some brilliant consultant. These are just surface fluff.
I would put money on every Powerpoint you’ve seen on how a business will change amounting to a heap of nothing. It takes huge courage and a brutal approach to change an organisation and most people don’t want to be that person.
If the answers aren’t in the deck of your overpaid consultant, where are they?
They are buried in boring business books which paint our economy as the world of finance and management; obscure stories about people most of us haven’t heard about; ideas from psychology and the arts which never figure into how we think about the technology future.
The answer to why industries get disrupted is a mixture of the typical business, technology and economic ingredients we usually talk about but with a much bigger portion of psychology, professional identity and philosophy.
Real industry disruption changes what it means to be a human. It is partly about numbers but it is about how we spend our time in our professional and cultural lives.
The Artefact Fiction
The Artefact Fiction describes how the economic and psychological combine to create a fiction based on how we perceive the world. This fiction becomes real enough for many years. It’s true until it isn’t.
When the fiction ends, our industries, organisations and us as individual humans become lost. What was true is not.
This is a book about business, culture, professional identities and technology.
But it is fundamentally a book about what it’s like to be human, and the constant dance between technology and humans.
Why didn’t they see it coming?
I started researching this more than 20 years ago when Napster questioned what the music industry should be. Napster didn’t destroy the music industry - this is a misconception I get into in the book.
Napster was always going to happen, even if the event wasn’t called “Napster”. This event did what so many industry evolutions do: shift the value, change what matters and put into question the professional identities of people.
This is what has happened and continues to happen in publishing, education, music, film, clothing, journalism and so many more things.
This is the fundamental economic, business and social question of the 21st century: how to cope with technological evolution.
I spent most of 2023 writing the content for this having spent the decade before researching, taking extra university degrees just to understand the research, interviewing experts, running conferences and working in multiple fields to validate what I thought I was seeing in the research.
Rather than publish this as a static book - which it might one day be - I have decided to publish as I go. To publish in an artefact which fits our age - here on Substack.
The Artefact Fiction tells us that we become obsessed with a particular way of providing value: we think books are the only way of imparting written knowledge. I was guilty of this for years. Substack is the 21st century alternative; it provides the same underlying value, different economics and different flows of value.
The plan hasn’t come together yet - but the plan is here. All of the chapters below are either written or nearly written. I will line them up to be published over the spring and summer of 2024.
Scroll down to see the posts I’ll be sharing over the next few months.
There will be more. Writing is not just an act of making words, it’s an act of thinking. As and when other ideas come in, I will add them in.
I’ll be active on Substack, replying to comments and seeing where these ideas crop up in the writing of other writers.
I am also active on TikTok, posting about these ideas and how we’re seeing them play out today in 2024 and beyond: https://www.tiktok.com/@nearlyinvisible. Come and say hi!
The Artefact Fiction
The (evolving) table of contents
The things we make make us what we are; The Artefact Fiction
Hiding in (boring) plain sight. Boring business books - the innovator’s dilemma; the performance trap.
Everything Ends. Eventually.
To Die is Human - Jon Henry
Black Swans
What has made the world?
Swans & disruption
What you know doesn’t matter
Experts narate
Poétes maudits
Plato’s map
Ludic fallacy
Ignoring swans
The performance trap, the innovator’s dilemma
1975: What is a digital photo album?
Not the iPhone moment: Survivor bias; 1989, General Magic
Windows (but not by Microsoft)
Exponential superstars
Fit stories
Seeing blue
“I’m going to put every one of them out of a job”
Fanzines, YouTube
Layers and layers
More from Nearly Invisible: https://linktr.ee/nearlyinvisible
On TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nearlyinvisible. Come and say hi!