Dream Engineering, How to Effectively Boycott AI and the Mysterious Black Taj Mahal 

Dear Fellow Non-Obvious Thinker,

It’s hard to believe we’re cruising right into the end of the first quarter of the year already. For me, this month will be filled with book launches, live events, college tours and maybe a few days at home in between. Things are in full swing right now, and the stories this week reflect that energy as well. It’s good to know that even amidst the conflicts happening in the world right now, there are still people thinking about how to get us off the addiction of recycling perfectly good phones after only a year of use. Or research continuing around wildfire-suppressing drones.

Those are just a few of the stories you’ll read about in this week’s edition as I also explore the fascinating emerging science of dream engineering, offer a video tour of the Taj Mahal (including the story of the Black Taj Mahal that was never built) and the boycott movement that may soon become the most effective in human history.

Enjoy the stories this week and always stay curious,

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This Week’s New Videos …

The Wildly Effective #QuitGPT Movement May be the Easiest Boycott in Human History

The #QuitGPT consumer boycott movement is accelerating. More than 2.5 million people have chosen to delete ChatGPT and switch to another AI model such as Anthropic’s Claude. The Claude app catapulted to #1 in Apple’s App Store. Many of these recent consumer defections have come after Anthropic took a stand against the US government refusing to allow certain uses of their technology while OpenAI quietly did a deal with the US government to allow exactly those same uses. One of the leading voices in the campaign to Quit GPT, historian and author Rutger Bregman, also offered a fascinating historical perspective into why this boycott might actually work:

“Cancelling ChatGPT is a piece of cake. You can do it in 10 seconds, and the alternatives are just as good or even better. History shows why #QuitGPT has so much potential: effective campaigns such as the 1977 Nestlé boycott and the 2023 Bud Light boycott were successful because they were narrow and easy. They had a clear target and people had lots of good alternatives.​

The great boycotts of history did not succeed because millions of people suddenly became heroic activists. They succeeded because buying a different brand of coffee, or choosing a different beer, was something anyone could do on a Tuesday afternoon. The small act, repeated at scale, becomes a political earthquake.”

The most interesting part of this story is the emerging central role that trust is playing. OpenAI and Sam Altman are suggesting that their deal with the government does have some controls built in. Others criticize the company for either lying or being naive. Either way, the flood of users quitting ChatGPT seems to come down to one thing: no one trusts Sam Altman.

The head of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, on the other hand seems to be building exactly the opposite reputation. At the end of the day, this may be the most important element for success. As in other industries, the most trusted player usually ends up winning. So far, that looks like Anthropic.

People Are Taking Pride in Using Old Devices

You might call it the longevity flex. As more cell phone services offer constant phone upgrades as soon as you hit the one year anniversary for using your device and improvement on phones year after year becoming meaninglessly incremental, there is a growing case for why there really is no need to upgrade your device so relentlessly. Now, a French company has created a sticker designed to help you celebrate your refusal to upgrade. These stickers, designed to be used as a badge of honor, broadcast the years you have been using your device and are inspired by the Swiss habit of retaining their car toll vignette stickers year after year.

“Instead of lecturing people about e-waste, it makes longevity a flex. That cultural reframing aligns with a broader pattern worth replicating: brands and creators finding ways to make sustainable behavior socially desirable rather than morally obligatory.”

What do you think? Could this sort of virtue signaling make a meaningful difference in how long people choose to keep their devices? Or would a monetary message work better where someone could visualize just how much money you are giving away to device makers and cell phone providers by choosing to upgrade each year?

The Pioneering New Science of Dream Engineering

It sounds like a story out of science fiction. Technology that can influence how we dream and what we dream about. This fascinating new field is known as dream engineering and it’s creating lots of excitement and some concern among the people following it closely. The idea is that an enhanced sleep tracker can not only measure when you drift into various stages of sleep, but influence what you dream about through verbal prompts. In turn, this could help with better sleep, improved health and all sorts of other wellness benefits.

Thankfully, the early tests of this technology involve a user recording their own verbal prompts that get played at the right moment to influence the eventual dreams that come later. The process is getting even more sophisticated than just voice also:

“Today, technology allows dream scientists to use tools like Dormio to target different sleep stages and attempt to influence dreams across the night. Beyond incubating on a certain topic for creative inspiration or problem solving, dream-engineering techniques aim to rewrite nightmares, facilitate lucid dreaming, consolidate memories, and boost learning. This is done using different kinds of external stimuli, like sound, smell, or touch, which are introduced at certain stages in the sleep cycle.

Dream engineering is now moving beyond the lab as scientists design apps and other tools that we can use at home.”

The concerns so far seem to center around how this might be used by companies to influence your perceptions about everything from their brand to reality itself. When you can influence people in such an intimate way through what they dream about, the appeal of this may attract so much funding that “dream influence” may become a real thing. But for now, it feels more experimental. There’s even an app called Dust available where you can try it for yourself (currently available in private beta only).

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

MOVIE: Wag the Dog

Amidst the coverage of the US-Israel coordinated attack on Iran this past week, the NY Times posed a key question that journalists are trained to ask: why now? After all, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been the Iran’s supreme leader for almost 37 years and for most of that time the US and other nations have wanted him ousted. So why launch a military campaign at this moment? The question brought to mind a movie called Wag the Dog that I watched many years ago that went relatively unappreciated because of its political overtones and despite its impressive cast of Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman.

The movie presents a fictional scenario where a President finds himself in the midst of a sex scandal two weeks before a big election, so his fixer-in-chief hires a Hollywood producer to fabricate a war against a random country (they pick Albania) to distract the American public and it works. The “war” is sold through a series of scenes designed for the news media to broadcast and go viral and ironically the whole movie (released in 1998) was done before social media was even around to amplify it. The cynical point of the movie is that even war can be politically convenient to wage in under the right conditions. It does seem like this is a message worth sharing right now.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Superbloom

Nicholas Carr is a well-known thinker and Pulitzer Prize winner who writes about how the Internet has affected our brains. In his latest book published last year, he explores once again what social media has done to our brains and offers some antidotes to take our thinking back from the algorithms that subvert us. He writes:

“As for the rather small set of voters who spend a lot of time reading, thinking, and talking about politics, the research reveals that their heightened engagement rarely broadens their minds. They’re actually the ones most inclined to narrow and fervent partisanship. The more news they gobble up, the more convinced they are that they’re right and anyone with a different view is wrong.”

More than just cataloging the way our thinking gets warped by the algorithm, though, Carr explores a potential solution through frictional design. The idea is to reverse the trend of reducing all friction in the digital world and instead embrace it as a design feature rather than a bug. Key to this idea is the introduction of so-called “desirable inefficiencies” to limit the unchecked virality that can cause so much cultural and geopolitical damage:

“Limits could be set on the number of times a message can be forwarded or the number of people it can be forwarded to … a delay of a few minutes could be introduced before a post appears on a platform. A broadcasting license might be required for any account with more than a quarter of a million followers or subscribers.”

If you want a broad view of how media shapes our modern society combined with a powerful argument for why the best impact we can have is to change our own media habits instead of focusing on trying to change the algorithm, we might be able to reinvent the way we see our society and one another.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I’m able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hoursgoing through hundreds of storiesin order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop? 

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