You’ve been displaced.
So often we’re making exchanges with businesses who no longer exist to serve us. In some cases, they never did.
"That will be $89.95."
"I beg your pardon?" I shifted the reusable bag strap on my shoulder to relieve some of the pressure.
"$89.95."
"That doesn't make sense. My birth control has been free for as long as I can remember."
"Yeah. Maybe you want to call your insurance company?” the woman behind the counter asked. “We have chairs over there,” she added, pointing to her left.
I sighed and moved to the side. Taking a seat in a plastic CVS-red chair, I prepared myself to sit on hold. When I finally reached a human, I asked why my birth control was suddenly not covered by my insurance. He disappeared to find an answer.
When he came back, he let me know that my past prescription was for a schedule two drug and my new prescription was not a schedule two drug.
That seemed random to me.
He asked if I would like a list of the approved drugs.
"Shouldn't my doctor be the one to decide which medicine I take?"
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Displacing the person served
This dynamic of displacing the person served occurs all too frequently in our economy. We engage with an entity that should deliver value to us, but what they do and how they do it is designed to provide value to someone else.
Displacement occurs most frequently when the person the entity professes to serve is not the same as the entity’s source of revenue. No matter how you slice it, whoever provides the financial resources required to keep the entity running (and preferably growing) is the one the business truly serves.
As the displaced, you often get limited or no value. Worse, your displacement can lead to the proffering of false value — something that isn’t valuable and may even be harmful to you — because the entity that is supposed to serve you now sees you as a means to an end rather than the person they exist to serve.
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Displaced: Patient
One of the most pervasive examples of displacement is health insurance. In the United States, we pay for health insurance ourselves or our company pays (in whole or in part) for our health insurance as part of what we’ve come to call our benefits package.
Insurance in its most basic form pools together money from a group of people. That pool of money is then available when something catastrophic happens like a house fire. Catastrophes happen infrequently enough that the insurance company can both pay to fix the house and retain enough money for the next time something bad happens.
Health doesn’t lend itself to this model. Carrying a policy that covers the cost of multiple procedures and a prolonged hospital stay should you get hit by a bus crossing the street makes some sense. But that’s not what we do. We use insurance to pay for routine medical services and we typically only pay for services when we’re already sick.
Health is defined as “the condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit” especially “freedom from physical disease or pain.” This result requires regular check-ins at a minimum, which makes a model designed for big, unforeseen, and infrequent accidents poorly suited to the job.
Many health insurance companies now believe investing in preventative care will lower their costs. If we keep you healthy, you make fewer claims. But wedging a service model like preventative care into a model that requires delivering service as infrequently as possible doesn't work.
What’s worse, inserting a health insurance company into the healthcare process adds a middleman: you are no longer the person served. The insurance company is. It's why the first question you hear at medical institutions isn't "How are you feeling?” Or “How can I help?” but “Can I see your proof of insurance?” Everything that service provider does and how they do it comes down to what the insurance company dictates, not what the medical professionals would recommend or even what would be in the best interest of your health because the insurance company pays.
You, the patient, have been displaced.
Displaced: Customer
The funding arena also displaces the person served. When an investor gets involved with a business, they transform that business into an asset. If they've invested sufficient capital, they become the person the business exists to serve. Now the business's sole focus is to give the investor the biggest financial return.
This is why Instacart and Uber are now advertising businesses; they’re looking for ways to bring in more money:
“As Instacart prepared to make its debut on the public markets, one thing was clear: it is a markedly different company today than when it was founded. Envisioned in 2012 as a service that matched people at home with contract workers who would shop for them and deliver groceries, it has increasingly focused on advertising and software products as its delivery business has slowed. Last month, Instacart revealed that the ads and software sales had allowed it to do what skeptics considered impossible — turn a profit. Instacart shows that one way for a historically unprofitable gig business to get to the public markets is to diversify into more lucrative areas and move away from its gig-economy roots."
Ads have nothing to do with the value you, as a customer, seek. As that revenue source grows, you will be further displaced, from being on the receiving end of increasingly spammy email communications to being charged more for a service that doesn’t include ads even though you could get that same service without ads at a lower price before.
“Though Netflix ushered in the era of ad-free, subscription-driven monetization, today ‘virtually every major streamer’ is offering a cheaper ad tier, which generates more money per user, The Wall Street Journal reports. Corporations outside of media, including United Airlines, are now considering starting their own ad-sales businesses, hoping they could bolster revenue. ’Attention is the new oil well of money making,’ says one ad expert.”
Or said another way:
You, the customer, have been displaced.
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Displaced: Beneficiary
A similar displacement occurs with nonprofit organizations. As I’ve written about before, nonprofits operate with a split focus. The people they serve and their sources of revenue are not the same. Somehow, they must deliver value to their donors on top of delivering value to the people they serve. Delivering value to donors often takes time, resources, and focus away from the people they serve.
As an example, one of my clients is a nonprofit that thrives on a subscriber model. They know their subscribers are the ones they exist to serve. When increasing grant funding came up as a goal the organization should pursue, the leadership noted, “Grants take a lot of time. They also come with regulations for what we do and how we do it. Accommodating all of that will take away from the projects our subscribers have asked us to pursue.”
This statement acknowledges the fundamental question, “What’s the point of pursuing grants? Is it the money? Or something else?”1
Unfortunately, many nonprofits get their financial resources from someone other than their beneficiary. They have no choice but to invest time, change processes, and even develop programs to secure that funding. In short, many nonprofits are doing what they’re doing the way they’re doing it because “That’s what the donor wanted,” not necessarily because it’s what will effectively deliver value.
You, the beneficiary, have been displaced.
Displaced: User
Perhaps the most culturally discussed example of displacement is that of social media and media at large.
, Co-Founder of Substack, sums it up well:“This is a critical insight for writers who are seduced by the idea of ads on top of subscriptions for ‘revenue diversification.’
If you are doing ads as well as subscriptions, you are serving two completely different types of customers. In my opinion, everything gets better when you focus on subscribers as your customers.”
Most of us miss the human connection social media promised to provide. Some of us would settle for less angry yelling, empty videos, and other brain rot. I think we all would like media — social or otherwise — that produces content that we value.
Herein lies the rub: because these companies serve the advertisers, they make choices that keep us on their platform — whether that’s what’s best for us or not.
author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, rightly said they can’t keep our attention if what’s being served up doesn’t get us to click, watch, keep scrolling, or even pile on with comments.What gets clicks isn’t generally valuable. It’s geared to the lowest common denominator because mass appeal is the only answer when attention is for sale. Yes, you can argue that these companies publish clickbait headlines and design their platforms to prey on our biology to benefit advertisers. But we must also recognize that our obsession with stupid-ass puppy videos and inability to keep ourselves from posting that ranting comment contributes to our misery.
If we demanded something better, the platforms would have to find a way to give it to us to keep us engaged. While it could lessen our misery to some degree, it doesn’t change the fact that we’re still not who these media companies serve; their interest in keeping us engaged extends only so far as it benefits their advertisers. They will (and arguably have) manipulate us to get the content and attention they need.
You, the user, have been displaced.
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Alternative: Substack
In the case of media, Substack claims to have an answer: refocus the relationship so that the person served and the source of revenue are the same. According to their homepage:
“Substack is much more than a newsletter platform. A Substack is an all-encompassing publication that accommodates text, video, audio, and video… Anyone can start a Substack and publish posts directly to subscribers’ inboxes…. Without ads or gatekeepers in the way, you can sustain a direct relationship with your audience and retain full control over your creative work.”
As for who pays, they wrote:
“This is the beating heart of our mission: we need integrity to build a trustworthy
media system, and at the core of it are writers and readers with full agency and
intention who invest their time, money, and attention into work they deeply value.”
This is the ideal situation in the value economy. I choose to pay a writer because I value what they’re delivering to me. That certainly includes the pieces they write, but can also include how they moderate their community or what additional resources they provide.
The challenge, of course, is that few people pay. According to Substack’s own Going Paid Guide, you can expect 5-10% of your total subscribers to become paid subscribers. That means that 90-95% of the people receiving value from you don’t pay for it.
You’re therefore stuck either working for free or embarking on the same tired pursuit of more because you need many thousands of subscribers to make a living.
Oof.
Actually making the shift
As a culture, we’ve become accustomed to being displaced.
We’re used to reading whatever we want on the internet without paying for it. We’ve always had a health insurance card. We accept or frankly don’t even register the trade-off that comes with investor and donor money.
When we aren’t the source of the financial resources required to keep the business operating, we give up our place as their focus and our role in defining what’s valuable. The choice to give up our place perpetuates a world that isn’t built for us. It fundamentally undercuts our options — and our own agency. There’s nothing more damaging to the value economy and our ability to make the most of our time.
We need to reclaim our place. That starts by adopting new habits and expectations. The first and perhaps most important is normalizing the idea that we’re generally better off exchanging our financial resources2 for the value we seek. As I discussed with
over Notes, it will take time and it will require people to make the case for why we should pay for the things we’ve become accustomed to getting for free.3Then we’ll need to get comfortable with the uncomfortable realities of change. We’ve been displaced in many arenas for so long, that undoing what we’ve created will require incremental shifts over a long time horizon.
Replacing health insurance as we understand it would result in dismantling the current health insurance industry which would then force price changes as healthcare providers adjust to a new market: their patients. That says nothing of patients adjusting to a new way of selecting doctors or paying for service and medicine.
Moreover, eliminating investors entirely would make certain businesses impossible to launch just as eliminating donors entirely would render many charities unable to exist. In addition to identifying better methods, we would need to rethink our definitions of success and at a minimum turn down funding that creates a new master.
We can start small. If we aren’t paying for something, we need to investigate who does. The largest revenue source will inevitably be the person who dictates value. If it isn’t us, we need to look for an alternative.4
I, for example, pay many of my healthcare providers directly, pay for quite a few newsletters (and deleted my social accounts), and refuse to take investor money to grow my company because I don’t want the investors dictating how I build my business.
I realize not everyone has the resources to make the choices I have. I also realize that transforming a business or a whole industry presents massive challenges. There’s a limit to our financial resources and tolerance for change.
But we can start to move in the right direction.
This organization set up parameters to ensure all grants would be pursued based on their benefit to subscribers rather than the dollar amount attached or for the sake of saying, “We won the grant!” They also reserved the right to refuse grants whose time to manage outweighed the benefit to their subscribers. All eyes were wide open.
As my grandmother always says, nothing in life is free. You’re exchanging something for that free app; it’s a matter of knowing what it is.
I’d love to see Substack put more effort into cultivating the concept that paying for writing (and videos, and podcasts, and whatever) is the better choice in addition to giving me tools to publish. I know they’re focused on helping me build an audience, but a paying audience is a whole different beast.
Or you can accept the tradeoffs and lean in. Like this mom who in her efforts to help her daughter realize her influencer dream has accepted that she’ll need to include pedophiles among her followers. Katherine Blunt reported for the Wall Street Journal: “The daughter loved coming up with creative posts. She told her mom she wanted to become an influencer, a ‘dream job’ she could pursue after school and dance practice. To reach the influencer stratosphere, the account would need a lot more followers — and she would have to be less discriminating about who they were. Instagram promotes content based on engagement, and the male accounts she had been blocking tend to engage aggressively, lingering on photos and videos and boosting them with likes or comments. Running them off, or broadly disabling comments, would likely doom her daughter’s influencer aspirations.… The mom said yes. And with that, she grew to accept a grim reality: Being a young influencer on Instagram means building an audience including large numbers of men who take a sexual interest in children.”
All I can say is that false value has warped this mother’s value schema something terrible.
Other random thoughts: Stop glamorizing raising capital. Start elevating profitable businesses that (bonus) actually deliver meaningful value. Stop talking about health care and health insurance as the same thing (they aren’t). Start thinking outside the box about how to improve health care and be willing to test out those trying.