Tayken MetaMeetup
As I prepare for another installment of my “wildly successful” meetup venture, Tayken on the Town, I thought it responsible to reflect briefly on the theme: The Future of Knowledge and Work.
A Modern Arms Race
We live at what feels like an unprecedented junction point in history (I know, those words have been uttered numerous times before…but really, this time is different) wherein the battle between the digital and biological has hit an impasse. As a society, we seem simultaneously starved for authentic human interaction and also pulled helplessly towards the call of the siren server (i.e. big data, AI, hyper-growth, capitalism, etc.). Whether or not we choose to acknowledge and confront this dilemma is irrelevant. This is an arms race, and from my view, the fate of humanity is quite literally at stake.
The Weeee Company
Fortunately (….sort of), there’s a perfect case study through which to view this dangerously evolving contradiction. The recently rebranded We Company (WeWork, WeLive, WeGrow) is on a mission to Elevate the World’s Consciousness. If that cultish tagline doesn’t creep you out a little (knowing that this is now a $20B company) I’m not sure what will. After acquisitions of Meetup ($200M), Teem ($100M), and most recently Euclid (undi$clo$ed), a spacial analytics company, The We Company now simultaneously represents the most terrifying and hopeful indication of where we might land as a species.
And while I’m far from confident in making a prediction as to who/what wins this race, I’ll gladly acknowledge such a race is well underway. Most mega-corporations of 2019 are surely aware of the importance of human connection, but they’re equally aware of their stock price (btw, The We Co. has filed for IPO with the SEC). The We Company is a unique case because it’s undoubtedly driven by traditional VC economics, but (at least on the surface) also driven by deep ethos of promoting biological proximity — one recursively feeds the other. Where this ultimately lands is anyone’s guess, but it would be hard to argue that it’s not worth our attention.
Towards Reflection
There may be a million different ways to connect a billion people, and each way will reveal something new about us.
As we navigate our daily routines, it’s often difficult to maintain a macro-perspective, but I think it’s important to keep tabs on the emergent exponential (and existential) properties evolving around us. We’re quickly entering a MirrorWorld (everyone should read more Kevin Kelly) and if we don’t make conscious choices about the work we do and the knowledge we gain, we might quickly become the machine in the mirror and forget that it’s the humanity that truly makes life worth living.
