You know what’s not fake?
Coffee shops, record stores, and diners filled with wonderful people who know your name – that’s real.
Shows filled with people who paid for a ticket when they had a zillion other entertainment options at home on their couch – that’s real.
Long emails with old friends, message threads with friends far away, phone calls with best friends – those are real.
So much of our work is built on a foundation of for-real relationships, connections, and places. They’re hard to measure or quantify, but that doesn’t make them any less real.
Meanwhile, the promise of the internet and log files and Google Analytics promised us cold, hard metrics that would gauge and improve upon.
And here we are, years later, questioning if anything on the internet is real or not. Do we give up, throw away our Twitter handles, and cancel our internet service?
No.
But maybe we count metrics that matter, like actual customers, instead of “eyeballs.”
Revenue, instead of (possibly fake) likes.
Profit, instead of (possible fake) comments.