When Systems Created to Serve Us Begin Serving Themselves
Sometimes I look at the systems around us and wonder:
When did all of this become normal?
A celebrity enthusiastically recommends a product, and we rarely stop to wonder whether that enthusiasm is an experience or a transaction.
We consume news while knowing that what gets covered, how it gets framed and what receives prominence may be influenced by ratings, clicks, ownership, access, advertising and editorial priorities.
We live in a world of contracts, disclaimers, waivers, arbitration clauses, privacy policies and pages of terms and conditions designed largely to protect one party from another.
Medicine, one of humanity’s greatest achievements, exists within an economic system in which treating illness can sometimes be more financially rewarding than preventing it.
Technology promises convenience, then creates entirely new inconveniences—and sometimes an entirely new industry appears to protect us from the consequences of the convenience.
None of these things necessarily began with bad intentions.
And perhaps that is precisely what makes them worth examining.
When Good Ideas Become Systems
We often imagine dysfunctional societies being created by bad people doing bad things.
But perhaps some of our greatest dysfunctions arise differently.
Good ideas become institutions.
Institutions become industries.
Industries need revenue.
Successful industries are expected to grow.
And eventually, without anyone consciously planning it, the survival of the system can begin competing with the purpose for which the system was created.
Advertising began as a way to tell people about products.
Journalism developed to inform society.
Medicine exists to heal.
Law exists to protect rights and resolve disputes.
Technology exists largely to solve problems and make life easier.
Each serves an important purpose.
But what happens when the institution built around that purpose must continuously grow?
When Trust Becomes a Commodity
Consider advertising.
Celebrity endorsements are hardly new. But social media has blurred the distinction between personal recommendation and paid promotion.
The Federal Trade Commission requires material relationships between advertisers and endorsers to be disclosed and says endorsements must reflect honest opinions and experiences.
The existence of such rules tells us something important.
We have created an environment in which trust itself has commercial value.
A person does not merely sell a product.
They lend the product their credibility, familiarity and relationship with their audience.
Perhaps the useful question when we encounter an endorsement is no longer simply:
Is this a good product?
But also:
Am I receiving information—or am I experiencing advertising designed to feel like information?
When Information Must Also Capture Attention
Something similar happens with news.
Most journalists probably enter journalism because they want to inform people, investigate events and tell meaningful stories.
Yet journalism now operates inside an enormous attention economy.
News organizations need viewers.
Websites need clicks.
Television needs ratings.
Social platforms reward engagement.
And emotionally charged information often attracts more attention than quiet, nuanced information.
This doesn’t require a room full of people deciding to deceive society.
The incentive can influence the system all by itself.
Perhaps the question isn’t:
Can I trust journalists?
A more useful question might be:
What happens to information when truth must compete with attention?
When Healing Becomes an Industry
Modern medicine has transformed human life. Vaccines, antibiotics, surgical techniques, diagnostics and countless medications have saved and improved millions of lives.
That deserves acknowledgment.
But healthcare is also an enormous economic ecosystem.
And whenever an industry earns revenue through treatment, an uncomfortable question deserves consideration:
How do we make sure the economics of treating disease never overshadow the importance of preventing it?
There is even a term—disease mongering—used by critics and researchers to describe situations in which the boundaries of illness may be broadened or ordinary experiences increasingly medicalized, potentially expanding markets for treatment.
That doesn’t mean diseases are simply invented.
It means economic incentives deserve scrutiny even within institutions doing enormous good.
Perhaps the healthiest society would be one in which the ultimate success of healthcare was measured not merely by how much treatment was delivered, but by how little treatment people ultimately needed.
Have We Institutionalized Distrust?
Then there is law.
Law is essential to a civilized society. It protects us when informal trust fails.
But sometimes I wonder whether we have traveled so far in protecting ourselves from one another that distrust itself has become embedded into ordinary life.
We sign agreements before participating in activities.
We click through pages of legal language before using software.
Companies warn us that calls may be recorded.
Websites require consent notices.
Employers create policies to protect themselves from employees.
Employees document interactions to protect themselves from employers.
Businesses protect themselves from customers.
Customers seek protection from businesses.
Everyone is protecting themselves from everyone else.
Each protection may make perfect sense individually.
Yet collectively I wonder:
Have we created so many systems for protecting ourselves from one another that we have gradually institutionalized distrust?
And what does living inside that environment do to us?
First We Sell the Convenience. Then We Sell the Solution.
Technology offers another fascinating version of the same phenomenon.
We create something to remove friction.
Then its unintended consequences create new friction.
Then another business emerges to remove that friction.
Subscriptions made purchasing convenient.
Automatic renewal made subscriptions even easier.
Then people accumulated so many recurring payments that managing subscriptions itself became a problem.
Digital technology gave us unprecedented access to information.
Then information overload became a problem.
So we created productivity applications to manage the information created by our productivity applications.
Social media connected us.
Then many of us began searching for ways to disconnect.
Smartphones put the world in our pockets.
Now applications exist to help us stop looking at the smartphones carrying those applications.
Sometimes the absurdity deserves a smile.
But underneath it sits an important pattern:
Problem → solution → unintended problem → new solution → new industry.
Perhaps economic growth sometimes depends not upon permanently solving problems, but upon continuously generating new ones to solve.
Nobody Has to Be the Villain
This is the part I find most important.
It would be easy to blame corporations, lawyers, journalists, pharmaceutical companies, politicians, advertisers or technology companies.
But that may prevent us from seeing the deeper issue.
Systems develop incentives.
People enter those systems and respond to those incentives.
A journalist needs a job.
A company needs revenue.
An employee needs to meet targets.
An executive answers to investors.
A media platform needs engagement.
A lawyer represents a client’s interests.
A pharmaceutical company must fund research and also generate returns.
A technology company needs users to keep using its technology.
Most people inside these systems may simply be doing their jobs.
Yet collectively, perfectly rational individual decisions can sometimes produce an irrational society.
Perhaps we do not need villains to create dysfunctional systems.
We only need incentives that gradually drift away from their original purpose.
Maybe we as a collective need to reflect if incentive is everything in every aspect of life. We have been trained to think of success only in terms of dollar gain. The question is – dollar gain for whom?
What Have We Normalized?
Maybe that is why these contradictions become difficult to see.
We were born into many of them.
We adapted.
We learned the rules.
We clicked “Accept.”
We signed the waiver.
We renewed the subscription.
We watched the advertisement disguised as a recommendation.
We consumed the outrage.
We bought another solution.
And eventually the unusual became ordinary.
So perhaps once in a while we should stop asking:
How do I succeed within this system?
And ask instead:
Why does this system exist?
Who was it originally meant to serve?
Does it still serve that purpose?
And what would it look like if success meant needing less of the system rather than more of it?
Because societies don’t only change when people overthrow systems.
Sometimes they begin changing when enough people simply see the system clearly.
And perhaps awareness begins with one deceptively simple question:
When did we decide this was normal?
Yes, we dont even realize that we have normalized things we know are not good for us, but quite often we do not even have a choice to avoid them.