Thirdness and the Efficiency Singularity
Week 9 of 10. Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week.
No technology makes a meaningful exchange any better than it already is.
This week covers the most ground in the book. Three chapters on communication, marketing, and the tools we think with. They belong together because they share one question: what happens to creative surplus when it meets mediation, optimization, and scale?
Whole and small communication
Innovation and mediation go hand in hand. Every new communication technology promises to bring people closer, and every one adds another layer between them. New ways of connecting are not new ways of communicating. Usually, they are proxy versions of the original. Faster, but thinner.
Whole communication asks for full context. People show up as persons, with history, nuance, complexity. A long conversation between friends. A letter written with care. A deep coaching session. These exchanges are slow and inefficient, and they are where all genuine meaning is made.
Small communication foregoes context. People converse as personas: job titles, reading scripts others wrote, following protocols, performing roles. An automated email sequence. A customer service chat. Most of social media: people expressing opinions for audiences they will never meet.
Communication does not scale. Meaning is one-to-one. You can broadcast information to millions. You cannot communicate with millions. Communication requires presence, context, and the willingness to be changed by the encounter.
What is thirdness?
Communication can create thirdness: meaning independent of either side and generative to both. When two people show up as themselves, not as their professional personas, the conversation produces something that belongs to neither. A new idea, a new way of seeing, a possibility neither person carried into the room. This is thirdness. The material output of two generous minds.
Thirdness cannot be manufactured or designed in the traditional sense. But the conditions for it can be created. Openness: Both people feel free to say what they actually think. Generosity: both are willing to be changed by the encounter. Presence: both are actually there, not performing, not multitasking, not drafting their next line while the other speaks.
Picture a meaning scale.
On the one hand, one: a fully meaningful human exchange with complete context. Two people are fully present, creating thirdness.
On the other hand, zero: complete mediation, all meaning lost. A bot talking to a bot about a person who is not in the room.
Context is the focal point of meaningful communication, and it can never exceed one. Technology, scale, cybernetic ambition, even space travel. None of it increases the meaning of a genuine human exchange. The maximum is already available in every conversation where we choose to show up fully.
Consider the overview effect. Astronauts report a profound shift in consciousness on seeing Earth from space1. It works because they removed mediation. The unmediated view produced a meaning that no amount of documentation could approximate.
No technology makes a meaningful one-to-one exchange any better. The astronauts expanded their consciousness by removing mediation. We contract ours by adding it.
Marketing is canning vegetables
Marketing is a unique form of communication. It is squarely not of the self. The public needs to understand it anonymously. There is no room for novel or dualistic ideas. It is the averaging of what a group needs and what artifact might deliver just enough value to close the transaction.
The biggest truism in marketing: find a category and excel within it. Find your niche. Define your value proposition. Position yourself in the competitive landscape. And so the cycle of cementing, structuring, and protocoling continues. Once a product finds market fit, a marketer writes a script and places it on the assembly line.
The whole journey is a convergence. It moves from lush creativity (the original insight, the founder’s creative surplus, the spark that started the thing) to mechanized harvesting and processing. Marketing is putting living things in static containers. It is canning vegetables.
- 01 What No One Is Asking For Week 1 of 10 – Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week 4 min read
- 02 Why This Matters Now 4 min read
- 03 Design Is Not Production 4 min read
- 04 Aesthetics Is What Doesn’t Fit 4 min read
- 05 The Practice of Discovery 5 min read
- 06 Putting Language on What You Carry 5 min read
- 07 Integration Is Not Monetization 4 min read
- 08 From Communities to Circles 5 min read
- 09 Thirdness and the Efficiency Singularity You are here
- 10 56 Prompts for Your Creative Surplus Week 10 of 10 — Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week 11 min read