Everyone, Revisited

Last month, Bessemer Ventures partner Jamin Ball suggested in his newsletter that we’re headed to the fourth Industrial Revolution.

The name, he suggested, might be The Intelligence Revolution. A more apt name—one that’s more zeitgeist-y in nature—might be The Artificial Revolution.

Any good industrial revolution name needs to capture the spirit of both an unrelenting wave of innovation and the counterculture, which rails against “progress.” (Not to mention every previous Industrial Revolution required “intelligence” to create.)

And we seem ready to widely rail against “progress” in many forms.

Google, right now, is getting a heavy dose of criticism for a Gemini ad being run during Olympics coverage. The ad, if you’re not familiar, features a dad asking Google’s ChatGPT competitor to help his daughter write fan mail to track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. In fact, it got so bad they pulled the ad (though it’s still on YouTube…probably so Gemini can use it in its training model).

Commentary around what made the ad “gross” is that craft, expression and authenticity shouldn’t go away. It’s the same thing that people hated recently about Apple’s iPad ad. But, weirdly, it’s the same thing some are complaining about with Nike’s “Winning Isn’t For Everyone” ad, which we covered last week.

What Nike might be onto is that we’re all waking up to the fact that we’re tired of not just the Instagram aesthetic, but the Instagram framing of our lives and copycat, trend-hopping nature of our TikTok accounts. And if you thought those were “sanitizing” in nature, just wait until we weave generative AI into our fan mail.

Absolute obsession with winning is as anti-algorithm as a kid’s fanaticism with a star athlete’s performance.

As we enter this fourth Industrial Revolution and weave more artificial inputs into everything, we’ll see a natural rebellion against that. And we’re just figuring out how to grapple with it.