Announcing! The Grand Virtue of Blunders in This Age of Artificial Wizards

Harder, Better, Faster Stronger - the hedonistic mantra that is to live today. This was written about banking in the early 2000s - that led to the crash. Increased dosages of media leads to the narcotisation of a nation. We are walking into something without fulling consider the implications. We are passive in our own existence. We need slow action, slow thinking - thanks to Bryan House for reminding me this week. When I wrote my thesis in college, I wanted to find some positive virutes in an all consuming media - MTV. I called it "The Cultivation of a Generation: How MTV transcended brand and became a lifestyle." I learned during this work about Lazarsfeld and Merton and how f*cked I was going to be.

 Lazarsfeld and Merton wrote that overwhelming amount of media exposure can lead to political apathy and inaction, as people substitute superficial knowledge and concern for real social or political engagement.

The mass media bombards individuals with a vast and constant stream of information, news, and entertainment. 

Instead of energizing people to act, this overwhelming flow of information leads to a superficial awareness of problems, where simply knowing about issues feels like participation. 

In essence: The media, rather than motivating citizens, unintentionally narcotizes them into a state of superficial awareness and inaction regarding important social and political issues. 

This concept was introduced by Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton in their 1948 paper, "Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action". 

The constant barrage of content can lull audiences into a passive state, reducing their motivation and capacity to engage in critical thinking or tangible actions. 

Replace politics, in this instance, with technology. Specifically, ecommerce and retail technology.

AI in ecommerce is being framed as an unstoppable force: agentic bots managing shopping on behalf of consumers, predictive analytics erasing uncertainty, content optimized in real time. The promise is efficiency at scale.

My thinking (maybe this is just me, but) : humans are not efficient. We don't need to be uber efficient or the systems around us.

Marshall McLuhan warned that technologies don’t just extend our abilities, they reshape them, often by narrowing the human experience to fit mechanical logic. Machines thrive on optimization. Humans thrive on metaphor, play, distraction, and sometimes glorious mistakes.

We would be no where without mistakes. My parents remind me that I am one.

Classic Examples of “Brilliant Mistakes”

1. Penicillin (1928) – Alexander Fleming left a Petri dish out, mold contaminated it, and it killed surrounding bacteria. The mistake became the first antibiotic.
2. Post-it Notes (1968–74) – 3M scientist Spencer Silver created a weak adhesive that “failed” for industrial use. Years later, Arthur Fry used it for temporary bookmarks. (F*ckin post it notes - rumour has it agencies would not exist but for post it notes.)
3. Microwave Oven (1945) – Percy Spencer noticed a candy bar melted in his pocket while working on radar technology. That “oops” led to the modern microwave.
4. X-rays (1895) – Wilhelm Röntgen accidentally discovered them while experimenting with cathode rays and noticed a fluorescent glow on a screen across the lab.
5. Pacemaker (1958) – Wilson Greatbatch accidentally inserted the wrong resistor into a circuit, which produced a pulse similar to a heartbeat.
6. Velcro (1941) – George de Mestral was annoyed by burrs sticking to his dog’s fur. Examining them under a microscope gave us Velcro.
7. Coca-Cola (1886) – John Pemberton, trying to make a headache cure with coca wine, accidentally created the foundation for one of the world’s biggest brands.
8. Potato Chips (1853) – Chef George Crum sliced potatoes paper-thin out of spite for a complaining customer. They became a global snack.
9. Slinky (1943) – A naval engineer dropped a tension spring by accident, saw it “walk,” and a toy was born.
10. Safety Glass (1903) – A dropped flask coated with plastic cellulose nitrate didn’t shatter. Cue the invention of shatterproof glass.

That matters when we think about the next wave: agentic bots linked to consumer wallets. Imagine a near future where your “AI shopper” automatically chooses the best price, applies the best discount, runs the comparison across 30 marketplaces, and completes the transaction before you’ve even opened the site.

From a consumer perspective, it sounds perfect. From a retailer’s perspective, it could be catastrophic. Why? Think about it for yourself. I don't have all the answers, just lots of dumb questions and thoughts. Scott Lux this came from our chat. Blame you. Conversion rates, already stuck at 2–3% for two decades, may not rise at all hey may collapse further as bots aggregate, arbitrate, and abandon in bulk.

Loyalty programs, carefully designed around human quirks and inertia, get shredded when bots optimize ruthlessly on price. Promotions and discounts lose impact when bots strip them of emotion and reduce them to arithmetic. In other words: the “efficiency” of bots may erode the messy, human inefficiency that commerce relies on. Preach. Abandoned carts today often happen because life interrupts, a child spills juice, a meeting starts, a customer hesitates and later reconsiders.

That inefficiency creates second chances.

A bot, by contrast, never reconsiders. It executes or it abandons, instantly and permanently.

Look at history:

Chatbots were meant to replace human service. Consumers rejected them.

VR commerce was meant to redefine retail. Engagement evaporated.

Personalization was supposed to transform performance. Twenty years on, the numbers look the same.

These weren’t failures of technology they were failures to account for human imperfection. COVID, our most recent yardstick showed us we were not read for online consumption methods in the way we thought we were.

Consider even, working from home(WFH). We all bought athleisure, pod mics, swivel chairs and more. We all have a ringlight. Admit it, yes you do. Organizations themselves aren’t efficient either: finance departments seek predictable ROAS, marketing wants bold campaigns, operations just want things to ship on time. The friction is real, and it won’t disappear because AI is clever.

McLuhan argued that societies need counter-environments art, slowness, even inefficiency to survive technology’s acceleration. Ecommerce may need the same.

Efficiency is a machine’s strength.

Empathy for inefficiency designing systems that acknowledge distraction, reconsideration, contradiction may be the only durable advantage.