I have two friends who call me more than text. Both men. I love that it happens but hate that it feels like a novelty.

Come for the insights in human behavior and communications and stay for the book rec! open.substack.com/pub/readtrus...

TLDR: they could have just done this without the DEIA rage-bait and it would have been a perfectly legitimate comms move. They look silly and wasteful instead of strategic and thoughtful.

This has real mid-2000s vibes when corporate America thought putting a masseuse and a gym in the office would attract more employees.

(If you learn something, consider subscribing. You’ll get weekly posts like this, every Tuesday. )

And how that disrupts meaning making—experiences like this should bring a civic narrative to tangible life! Not introduce a new random tangent that takes people from saying "I just did an event that made me realize how important space for cyclists is" to "I went to a Stranger Things thing on a bike"

Full reference for any U.S. officials who are working on this:

Thank you for doing this important work. It's impossible for even media-literate folks to parse through who's trustworthy and who's not. (And I guess that's their whole business model.)

If I die and go to heaven perhaps St. Peter or Giovanni Sartori will tell me what regime type I really lived in at this moment in time. Until then, as a matter of collective sensemaking, the degree matters less than the direction of change, which is obvious to anyone who wishes to see it. (2/3)

This reporting is the prime example of industry trade mag value

But are the trade-offs worth it?

So instead of The Workshop easily advancing its brand of "benefitting humanity" (brand building), it's serving to unmuddle it (crisis mgmt).

OpenAI is using it to reeducate customers/stakeholders and differentiate from what is starting to feel like a flattening of AI features among companies (IMO).

What do all of these have in common?

They would have been more valuable to OpenAI at or before ChatGPT was handed to the masses with little guidance or instruction.

There are lots of reasons to open a "Workshop."

Primary: Educate prospects, demonstrate unique value prop, convert prospects to customers.