A man is known by the company he keeps.
Aesop’s fables
I am a freak, per the statistics. The 2.5 million words I have written for Commsrisk run to double the length of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and three times the entire works of Jane Austen. That is just my output for Commsrisk; I do not spend every waking minute thinking about risk in the communications sector. As time passes, my mind increasingly wanders to other topics. The proof comes with the realization that I did not notice the twentieth anniversary of this website, which came and went last week.
James Greenley took over as Managing Editor earlier this year, and I am thankful for that. He is the right man to take Commsrisk forward. The telecoms industry that hired me decades ago is undergoing a slow death. Its operations are being digested per the instructions of execs whose forte involves replacing staff with commodity hardware and easily reconfigured software. They are not wrong from the perspective of maximizing ROI though they may be very wrong from the perspective of serving the societies in which they live. The industry which increasingly talks about restoring trust is the same industry that profited by doing things which destroyed trust. When it comes to human relations, to lose trust and then restore it is more difficult and less likely than preserving trust. Telcos were trusted, once upon a time. To seek to restore trust is to admit that mistakes with long-term consequences were made in the pursuit of short-term gains.
The challenge for current telco execs is to sustain the pretense that machines and processes which are increasingly abstracted from living people also have the capacity to care about customers. The physical bones of telecoms remain — fiber optic cables and radio masts, plus more satellites than before — but these assets keep being spun off while the nerve centers of telcos are morphing into something new. Human intelligence is being replaced by artificial intelligence. Rather than opposing this tide, James is harnessing AI to compile the data that will hold telcos to account. He has the right skills to do that, much to the chagrin of people who want to speak on behalf of the industry without seemingly possessing the data that would reveal whether they are doing a good or bad job. There is something farcical about Commsrisk having a 20-year mission to persuade decision-makers to examine the data before they make decisions; perhaps James’ automated and animated charts will allow him to make more progress than I could.
The process of writing and assimilating information has also changed. A freakish ability to produce words is of less value when everybody uses AI to do their writing for them. This begs the question of whether AIs will read what AIs will write because no human being will bother to do either. Some barely literate people have apparently transformed into talented wordsmiths during the last few years. What is less apparent than the improvements in grammar and style is the extent to which using AI encourages homogeneity of expression, and then of thought. Being born a native speaker of English was an advantage in the global marketplace for ideas, but now it is becoming a disadvantage. People who natively think, read and write in other languages as well as English benefit from defenses against groupthink because they will be aware of the differences between the kind of groupthink occurring in the English language and the alternative perspectives that flourish in their homeland. It will be increasingly difficult to argue against mainstream opinions expressed in English. Social media already reinforced dominance through its algorithms, and LLMs now hallucinate facts that support the dominant narrative. Machinery can aid thought if used wisely; it erodes thought otherwise. In such circumstances, arguments need to be even more grounded in data if they are to make any headway against opinions that are widely but incorrectly held. What I did with words is now surpassed by the things that James is doing with visualizations of data.
All dinosaurs are buried eventually so I do not mourn the passage of time, even though technology has made some of my skills less valuable than before. Do not be nostalgic for the past; there was much that was wrong with the telcos of 20 years ago. We now possess more data than ever before. The danger is not that change will occur but that the wrong changes occur. The most consistent theme of this website across those two decades has been the need to learn from mistakes, and the frequent refusal to do so. The continued internetification of communications is both inevitable and desirable, but the most poignant criticism of the internet is that it accelerates the enshittification of life. Instead of learning from mistakes made with email, social media, websites and other networked technologies, the comms sector often appears to be doubling down by tasking the people who made those mistakes to find new ways of repeating them. Experience does not lead to expertise if the so-called expert has not learned from past failure. Repeating the same mistakes while expecting a different outcome is madness.
Technology changes but the principles of risk management do not. The management of risk is the management of uncertainty. We can reduce uncertainty by learning more and by improving our ability to forecast the future. We can reduce the dangers inherent to uncertainty by becoming more resilient, by being more adaptable, or by trading risk for certainties like the cost of an insurance policy. This website was created to improve the information available to professionals. It is rather sad that some professionals still want bottlenecks in the flow of information so they can then censor and manipulate what others will learn. Marketing is not education. One reason that James is assembling the most comprehensive dashboard of fraud metrics ever compiled for the communications sector is to contrast expansive impartial data with the cherrypicked and anecdotal information supplied by some ‘trusted’ sources. Seeking information by attending the events of some associations is like seeking information by opening a newspaper; the difference is that readers of a newspaper are somewhat conscious of the range of bias on offer, and the type of bias they specifically chose to consume.
Whatever Commsrisk has accomplished, I certainly learned a lot along the way. When I was still employed by telcos, I learned that sharing everything you know via a website prompts complete strangers to tell you even more, with the result that you are always gaining knowledge by giving it away. I also learned about PHP (a hot topic recently) and how to write a headline (plainly state the most interesting part of the content) and how many lamps are needed to hide my wrinkles when livestreaming (as many as I can fit around my desk). Less happily, I discovered what it is like to receive threats from Carter-Ruck, the most notorious libel lawyers in the world, and how to be excommunicated from industry committees that mislead regulators by obfuscating how little is done to tackle crime. I learned I could kill one ‘global’ association at the cost of losing a job, though I never succeeded in destroying another global association that issued too many bogus qualifications to ever be forgiven.
Learning how people cover up mistakes provided some of the most important lessons. My first experience of telecoms was as an auditor, and that experience continues to shape how I gather and interpret new information about this industry. Auditors are professional skeptics. I made many mistakes too, but not many I regret, and none so shameful that I refuse to talk about them if asked. A genuine desire to learn goes hand-in-hand with the desire to teach. Most of all, I learned about the good and bad in people.
Reflecting upon those 20 years, there is one lesson I would choose to teach before all others because it is so counterintuitive. Being popular is not the same as being liked. I have crossed swords with likable people. I did so because I believed they were doing something wrong. This website kept growing in popularity because I told the stories of those encounters, and other stories that people did not like, whenever I was free to do so. Meanwhile, a growing number of people who really know how to do their jobs kept telling me about how they do their jobs. Setting myself up as an enemy of wrongdoing led me to make far more friends, in far more places, than I ever would otherwise. The enemies gifted me better headlines, but it was the friends who enabled me to persist for so long. They gave me the tips that resulted in new content and the encouragement to persist when I became disheartened.
US President Franklin Roosevelt once asked voters to judge him by the enemies he had made. The approach evidently worked; he won four elections in a row. Rivalries make for juicy stories but true friendships outlive everything else. My thanks go to everybody who has kept me company during this 20-year journey. I am here because you were there for me. Please now keep faith with the mission as James propels us forward. Help him to succeed; I know you will. It makes me proud to hand over such a fine audience of professionals.
