Competence porn, Dyson, and reversing the enshittification of everything
This essay comes together, I promise
Competence porn is the new hotness
Much ink has been spilled about The Pitt, HBO’s hit medical drama and spiritual ER sequel as an example of competence porn.
Competence porn describes anything where ultra-high skilled people in extremely stressful situations handle themselves well. The Pitt, one of the most intense and, according to internet observers, accurate medical dramas, fits the bill.
I’ve been catching up on For All Mankind, an alternate-history show where the space race never ended, where NASA remained a stalwart fixture of American culture and the American psyche. It, too, is competence porn — manned space travel is, on balance, one of the most dangerous things a human being can do. The ability to solve problems on the fly, making science cool, and the operational rigor that would theoretically go into manned exploration and colonization of the moon and Mars is competence porn manifest.
And in an era where many leaders are, shall we say, not shining examples of professional competence — and I’m not naming names here, so think what you will of this statement — media depicting people being really good at really hard jobs is an emotional salve.
Though, it’s not just because so many people in positions of power and fame seem bumbling. AI drivel all over the internet and fast fashion clothing that falls apart after a few wears and every movie being IP crap rather than original stories and shrinkflation (give me back my full bag of chips) and every app getting new AI-powered updates that make them worse — it’s all the enshittification1 of everything.
We, collectively (and perhaps subconsciously), crave quality. So, as I watched For All Mankind’s astronauts and cosmonauts tackle the unforgiving vacuum of space, I naturally thought of Dyson.
Space travel and hair clips are definitely the same
Dyson is a company that makes household appliances, most well known for its vacuums and hair dryers and stylers. A video of Dyson’s engineers talking about what went into the design of the company’s hair clips, along with the “Kinetic Endurance test” to show just how well the clips work, has made the rounds on Twitter recently.
The gist of the conversation was: Damn, they made the hell out of these hairclips.
So naturally, I bought them for my wife, and dear reader, they exceed the hype2. They are so well made. You can feel the craft and care. Dyson did not need to spend the engineering resources to make peerless hairclips, but they did. These hair clips too, are competence porn manifest — there are people at Dyson who decided to do a thing — and do it incredibly well.
Whole-assing → competence porn
In one of my earliest essays, There’s only one way to learn from failure, I wrote about living whole ass.
Ron Swanson, easily a top five sitcom character of all time, is played by Nick Offerman on the show Parks & Rec. His character became known for his brash one-liners.
“I’m a simple man. I like pretty, dark-haired women and breakfast food.”
“Any dog under fifty pounds is a cat and cats are useless.”
“Fishing relaxes me. It’s like yoga, except I still get to kill something.”
My personal favorite Swansonism is “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” In other words, caring about one thing and doing it well is better than being mediocre at multiple things.
The emergence of competence porn in our media is a corollary to living whole ass. As we see people in positions of power fail to wield that power with competency, we collectively yearn to see people do, well, not that. We want people to be competent. We want to see people live whole-ass — to commit to something and excel.
In my own professional corner of the world, I’ve worked with a lot of startups, which, in their early marketing and comms days, try to do a little bit of everything. ‘We have nothing going on,’ they think, ‘so we might as well throw some darts and see what hits.’ The spirit of experimentation is good, but in truth, it’s just the enshittification of comms and marketing.
They end up spreading themselves so thin that they’re unable to execute anything well enough to understand if it’s a meaningful experiment in the first place. You gotta get enough information to make a decision about whether or not something is working. And to get sufficient information, you need to do something well.
Concretely, the bad version of a startup just beginning its comms and marketing journey might look something like this:
A blog, with customer case studies and product updates
A newsletter from the founders
Founder-led social
Company social
Media engagement
Digital marketing
Event marketing
Imagine you have one full time employee (or often, as is my case, only a part time freelancer as the lone comms/marketing person). There is no reasonable way to execute all of these workstreams well enough to know whether or not they are worthwhile.
It’d be much better to first assess company goals (not comms/marketing goals), pick two or three things from that list that you believe will contribute to company goals, whole-ass the hell out of them, and then decide: Did this work? Why or why not? Should we change how we execute a program or stop it all together?
It’s more than our jobs
I recently wrote that radical competency is a key for freelancers to stand out in a crowded industry. It’s a take I wholeheartedly stand by, but, after writing it (and thinking about this essay), I’ve come to the conclusion that people want radical competency in all aspects of their lives, the personal and the professional.
Quality. Radical competency. Competence porn. Living whole-ass. Making things well. These are all the same way of saying the same thing: Do a good job. Anything you do, do it well.
Professionally, for me, that’s communications. Personally, it means exacting a measure of care over the things I do. For you, reader? I don’t know. But I do know if we all care about how we show up in the world and care about what we do and what we make both big and small, the world’s enshittification will not last.
Dyson is proof of the road less traveled, of the value of aiming high and succeeding, of doing a few things — and doing them damn well.
Let us all be our best Dyson.