Information is slow
Someone messaged me to ask what I thought when one of the startups I had written about in 2022 for TechCabal got into the news because of a fallout with investors. The implication meant my earlier positive coverage of the startup’s path was misplaced. It was just a text, and the person who messaged me probably didn’t mean ill. It was undoubtedly someone who respected my work. But it shook me nonetheless and made me more cautious about writing startup features—or business news in general.
That lesson did not leave me. If anything, I became increasingly aware of how little I knew and how much I needed to figure out. Over time, this way of thinking also helped me see how little, it seemed, a lot of people with much larger profiles, platforms, and even positions knew. Investors, entrepreneurs, startup support consultants, and so forth, so many people understood so little and were responsible for so much. One way people try to fill that knowledge gap is to turn to the news. Indeed, this is why news media exists.
Unfortunately, we tend to mistake “gist” for information. The Twitter question, “What is happening?!” is our subconscious question whenever we tune into the news or login to social media.
News, by nature, is instantaneous. That freshness is part of its today value, and people are hardwired to be fascinated by the new. It is why CNN is a $1 billion EBITDA business and why countless man-hours are lost on social media. It is also not a modern phenomenon. According to the Christian apostle Paul of Tarsus, the people of 1st century Athens would have loved Twitter if it existed in their day. They “spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.”
Modern news operates in pretty much the same way because of the collective incentive space in which it exists.
While it is OK to indulge the human tendency to know the latest gossip occasionally, It is only self-respect to remember that a snapshot in time, a.k.a the news, is a poor predictor of what happens over time.
But what if you were looking for a set of knowledge to guide a decision?
New news cannot help in this instance since you are just knowing a snapshot, a single variable. While a piece of news may contain information, it is uncommon for daily news to carry information valuable enough for proper decision-making. New news can, in fact, be dangerous for decision-making (with exceptions, of course). I think it is a bit of an irony that a good chunk of the information value of news is only created as the news becomes old, like wine.
And it applies whether the piece of old news was “good” or ‘bad”. At the same time, old news does not miraculously develop an information property because it is old. In effect, the woman who is informed about the latest and the historian with the golden (and blinding) benefit of hindsight may not necessarily have information. What they do have, however, is an abundance of noise and the potential for insight.
Doing the work to extract that insight is a different matter.
“Over one year we observe roughly 0.7 parts noise for every part performance… Over a short time increment, one observes the variability of the portfolio, not the returns,” wrote Nassim Taleb in Fooled by Randomness. Besides public markets, the fast and noisily social online world of startup and technology companies is probably the most variance-heavy business category today. We jump from excitement to judgment just as easily. The headline is often deterministic.
When irokoTV was new and headlined, was that information? When you read Jason Njoku’s blogs about the experience of building an African streaming service today, is that information? What about the news about the French group Canal+ acquiring Multichoice? Is there information there? Is the big headline about Amazon Prime’s retreat from Africa information?
What do you now know about digitalised commerce in Africa from the range of headlines about Twiga, Marketforce, Jumia, etc., to pick from?
We tend to think of information as though we are the judge; the present is the juror, and the past is the accused. “Our emotions are not designed to understand the point,” Taleb warned. I am not immune, and neither are you.
People who know me know I occasionally ask too many “Why” questions. I often do this in personal settings versus professional conversations, as it can be annoying. I like to think that I don’t mind being asked “why”. It is probably untrue. Maybe I’ve not been tested by persistent why-askers.
It is true that the “why” question can be annoying. But as long as the question is genuine and not deployed as a game, it is a helpful tool to help your thinking—when used correctly and patiently. The point is that a “why”, i.e. the cause of an effect, is not always knowable in the short term. You cannot depend on single news items to decipher, and you should not try to play Oracle solely by looking at the randomness of what makes it to the news.
There is a wide open space for the slow, tedious and unexciting task of finding information. It also differs from building a social media creator personality as a “data guy” for educational purposes. It is also not on the same level as running a traditional market research paid report writing firm, although I understand the revenue need that drives that approach. It is about a deep affinity for the “Why” questions. And it is most definitely not about charts. Illustrations can be distracting.
One more thing. This is not just about “slow news”. It is about realising and embracing the indeterminate nature of loud, intensely private and fast-moving (or at least talking) technology businesses in an environment of uncertainty and informality such as Africa. It is about the learning, not the content.
Seventy-two days ago, I left my full-time journalist role to work in an integrated communications, brand and program design/support role. It was an odd trade and took some months to make. However, the subtext is the space and time to sift through the news noise and build competence in the slow business of information. What am I learning? For one, I am learning that the scope of need-to-learns, even in a narrow berth like “Digital Economy”, is wider than you think.
The simple reason for this is that what we refer to as the digital world is far more embedded in physical market reality, politics, and human behaviour. In Africa, loud offline/informal overtones are part of the package. As the funding tide continues its full retreat and the hype dies down everywhere in the technology startup world, information about the true state of digital market verticals will be sorely needed, especially in Africa, where the digital world is becoming a vital pull factor for semi-formalisation.
I hope the demand follows the need.