Memory Memo vol. 1
"Memory, like insight, is social"
My good friend and collaborator Chris Kutarna, coined the term '“insight is social” - central to his work at New Geo. We were discussing my work at Create Something Good in an Islington pub last month, when he made the connection: “Memory, like insight, is social”.
This is why it is central our human experience. This is why collective memory is so important for the future of our communities. This is why I’m building a better way to preserve and curate our personal and corporate memories during our lives and after our deaths.
Our memories form our characters and crucially how we experience the world.
Generative AI adoption means that hyper personalization will be the norm for our experience on the internet, especially in commerce.
If OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google end up owning this layer, the memory and context layer, then the experience will be worse for consumers as generative AI tools will become like Google. An environment where you can pay for relevance as well as prominence.
The issue I see, and therefore the opportunity, is that previous actions, purchases, and behavior are indicative of initial personalization but not taste.
Behaviors in the past render current personalization but not future purchasing intent.
Taste is formed from how we experience, reflect, and refract the world over time, not simply how we behave.
I see our memories - which can be stored through memory triggers and their context - as the key to understanding, interpreting, and predicting our taste. This is the golden elixir to generate personalization that will truly improve customer experience as it engages with the internet.
Memories as the building blocks of taste is one of the long term opportunities for Create Something Good in the consumer market.
A way of recording, owning, and curating our experience of the world around us in the context of our friends, family, and others who share those experiences with us.
This enables our future experience in the digital world to be improved - truly personalized to our taste rather than simply our behavior.