In 1996 I visited a friend of mine, Zach, who worked as a programmer in an online sex … I don’t know what you call it. A store? A facility? Basically, there were about five cubicles with girls in each one of them. All night long guys would pay for these girls to undress in these cubicles and chat with them over the internet. Video technology wasn’t what it was today so it was sort of like the guys would get a bunch of photos one after the other. In the meantime, the girl would IM them and they would pay about $5 a minute. All of the girls were pretty except for one ‘woman’ who apparently was a world famous porn star.
Zach had quit high school, never went to college, had a beard that was about two feet long, was about 28 years old, but was a great programmer and, as he told me, “the girls here love me and after a long night its often easy to ‘hang out’ with them.”
Around two in the morning we ordered donuts up. It was great, my friend and I, an old woman who was the “manager”of the facility, the famous porn star who was ugly as sin but the guy delivering the donuts seemed to recognize her, and four of these girls in their underwear taking breaks to eat glazed donuts, their hands all sticky as they went back into their cubicles.
My friend’s job was to make sure everything kept working. They were getting a lot of traffic for back then. Things could go down. And when things went down, money was lost. Time equals money and time equals brand. If you’re up 24 hours a day, then the brand stays fresh and money is made. Zach made about $100k a year because nobody was better than him at keeping all the wires going.
After we said goodbye to the last girl, around 5:30am as the sun began to rise (her goodbye to us, “next time you see me I’m going to look completely different. I’m going to have larger breasts!”) Zach and I went for breakfast. “I’m an addict,” he told me. “If I don’t look at four naked girls all night long, I would feel empty inside.”
I know how he feels. I’m an addict also. A horrible one. And the addiction is getting worse. So bad I’m about to schedule for myself a two week meditation retreat to see if it helps. I hear meditation helps cure addictions.
Just like Zach and the all night customers of his place of employ, I need constant stimulus. At first it wasn’t so bad. I’d write a book, which would take me six months or so, and when the book came out I’d look for reviews, I’d look for people talking about it on message boards, I’d check my email all night to see if people were writing to me about the book, etc. But after I wrote the second book (and now I’m on book number six) I knew I needed more. I started writing more articles. Even though I was fulltime running a fund of funds my main needs were met by writing two, maybe three or four articles a day for the Financial Times or thestreet.com or Forbes or Yahoo or wherever, and hoping I get more and more feedback. Any feedback, positive or negative.
Now twitter feeds the addiction. You no longer have to spend 6 months writing a book and another 6 months waiting for it to get published. You no longer have to slave over an article all night and then pray, hope for someone to read it over the next week. Now you can come up with a pithy thought in a few seconds, spend 140 characters (not even words. Characters, including spaces) putting it out there, and wait within seconds for someone to respond, retweet, share it, facebook it, whatever. If more than a few seconds go by…despair.
The creativity-feedback loop is now almost instantaneous. Foursquare is even better. You don’t even have to write something. You just have to BE somewhere and now people can respond: maybe they can show up there, or RT that you exist somewhere. Or maybe you can be a “mayor”. Just Being is enough now to get stimulus. Acknowledgement that you exist as a person simply because other people recognize that a thought you have, or a place where you happen to be, is real and special because it involves you.
Businesses that work now (foursquare, Groupon, twitter, penny auction sites like justhaute, zynga, etc) provide that instant stimulus that the world now craves. Every interaction proves that you exist and that your existence might have meaning. I don’t know how to get off the train. But if its not too much trouble, can you spare a re-tweet of this article?