Accountability Is Not for Suckers

How shameless predictions disorient us

Preface:

In a series of essays in partnership with Squarespace, we’re making sense of our relationship with reality and how culture is constructed.

Making it real is now an act of rebellion, a middle finger to the paralysis brought on by consensus collapse. The line between fact and fantasy continues to blur, but when reality is this negotiable, the soil for preferred futures is fertile. You can just do things. What’s the future you want to see? Making reclaims agency amidst lost meaning. So, don’t escape this reality — design the one you want. We desperately need your alternatives.

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The following piece is a collaboration between Matt Klein + Sophia Epstein.

Sophia Epstein is journalist and editor focused on technology, business and innovation, writing pieces for publications including Wired, GQ, and The BBC.

The Prediction Is the Product

Clubhouse is the future of socializing. The Metaverse will be worth $5T by 2030. We will double the number of Black managers in five years. Bored Ape Yacht Club is the next Disney.

These are just a few of the very real claims that came from our leading consultancies, brands and publications recently. Bold statements, no follow through, and zero accountability.

None of these statements came close to reality.

But do we even care?

There’s a concerning pattern across society today: our accountability muscles have atrophied – or we’ve lost the willingness to even use them. The news cycle moves so quickly from shootings to Epstein to another war, that our collective memories have short-circuited, distracting us from what we were just supposed to pay attention to. But maybe it’s not that we’ve become more forgetful or more forgiving. Instead, perhaps, we’ve just become conditioned to accept nonsense as the soothsayers become more audacious. This occurs on the geopolitical stage, in boardroom presentations and everywhere in between.

“By 2026, NFT gamification will propel an enterprise into the top 10 highest valued companies,” said Gartner in 2021. By 2024, Gartner predicted,

“50% of publicly listed companies will have some sort of NFT underpinning their brand and/or digital ecosystem presence.”

Not even remotely fucking close.

But luckily for Gartner, no one seems to remember... or care.

Hype > Logic

Predicting the future, or pledging to change it, has become a form of marketing in itself, or more precisely a performance. Many consultancies act out whatever they think will get applause or attention. For agencies, it’s whatever they have to do to get the next client. For publications, it’s whatever it takes to get the next reader. For politicians... you get it.

Today’s predictive performance is like professional wrestling kayfabe – they know it’s BS, and we suspend disbelief as they earnestly entertain us. The problem is just when we take their claims at face value. (Optimistically, they also know it’s nonsense, otherwise, Gartner’s credibility should be seriously reconsidered.)

Trend reports especially perpetuate the hype cycle, regurgitating what everyone else is saying out of fear of being left behind. But here it’s often done softly. Comb through metaverse claims from years ago, and the language is inflammatory but also noticeably couched: “This is going to be huge, unless it isn’t” – if it is huge though, it’ll be worth as much as Japan’s whole economy. It’s a pre-emptive cover – strategic fog – to conceal the existing lack of confidence and provide an easy out if that future never pans out. The terms (ex. metaverse, social shopping, agentic, NFTs, Web3, and even AI) are just broad enough so definitions can remain malleable. They can move the goal posts if they have to.

Hype compounds when many orgs farm their own “evidence.” Plant a trend name, seed it through press connections, then point to the growing mentions of it as proof of accuracy. But this is information laundering – astroturfing. It’s anything but a “prediction.” (No, you were not ahead of the “pickle girl summer aesthetic” trend. You just forced it upon people and are now measuring a reaction, not natural interest or favorability.)

“The metaverse now is much like the internet of the early 1990s or the smartphone of the early 2000s: We expect it is going to be big, and very likely change people’s daily lives,”

said BlackRock in 2022, which today has $12T under management. For McKinsey, “The average consumer will be spending four hours a day within the metaverse within the next five years.” (They specified this would definitely not just be gaming.) These promises become problems when predictions are so untethered from reality that press connections and capital only get you so far.

These false claims also victimize careers. A newly hyped technology leads to a slew of hires where — did all the Web3 Innovation Directors go? As the fad passes, they’re phased out. Chief Metaverse Officers became Chief AI Officers. Just a quick LinkedIn update and back to business. Again, hopefully no one noticed.

Sometimes no one notices. And sometimes the whiff is so absolutely ginormous – like an $80B loss on a metaverse – that it will be studied in future textbooks. We’re allowed to be wrong, have conviction and engage in market making. That’s not the problem. The problem is, without reflection or accountability – top-down or bottom-up – hype trains keep running, no one stops to learn, and nothing ever changes.

The Shame Deficit

In the case of big bets on what the future will look like, a missed prediction or ludicrous headline may result in companies losing money or face. But where it gets more insidious is CSR, DEI, or sustainability pledges, where there’s much more at stake than PR.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, a surge of companies promised to reevaluate their practices, increase the proportion of Black employees at various levels, and invest billions with Black-owned partners and suppliers.

A lot of quick checks were written reactively, but the long-term commitments... well... less evident. For one example, Microsoft, addressing racial injustice, pledged to increase the number of Black managers beginning in 2020. After two years of progress, efforts plateaued then dropped. By their 2025 deadline, the company stopped publishing the report altogether. By 2026, they parted ways with their Chief Diversity Officer. Not only do we not seem to care enough to notice, but did they even care?

In 2020, Goldman Sachs confidently claimed, “We’ll only take companies public if they have at least one diverse board member.” Their plan was to increase diversity representation requirements to two board members by 2021. But by that time, no one remembered. It wasn’t until 2025 that Fortune announced that their diversity rule was abandoned entirely.

Sustainability goals follow a similar pattern: promises of financial commitments and little evidence of actual progress. And sometimes it’s all quietly rolled back.

Just as tech predictions are purposely vague with movable goalposts, with sustainability promises, there are purposefully no interim milestone check-ins. Amazon, in 2019, promised to get 50% of their shipments to net-zero carbon by 2030. Four years later, they deleted the “Shipment Zero” blog post in favor of a wider sustainability initiative with a 2040 target. They kicked the empty can down the road. Some corporations are now referring to their sustainability goals as “moonshots” rather than realistic aims (one opined that “the moon has gotten further away”).

From a place of privilege, it’s easy to forget these decisions affect real people and environments. In 2003, developer Bruce Ratner used eminent domain to seize homes and businesses in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn to build The Barclays Center. The team promised that any displacement would be offset by thousands of new affordable housing units by 2025. The agreement was a $2,000-per-month fine for every missing apartment. Forty percent still have not been built over two decades. But rather than upholding what would be a roughly +$10M fine, Mayor Adams and New York’s Empire State Development waived the penalties. (Those fees would have been used to finance more affordable housing.) Seemingly, contractual agreement or moral motivations are moot.

We see this everywhere today.

We live in a heavily bureaucratic, rule-filled society, but rarely do the biggest offenders face consequences.

This isn’t about pointing fingers (we wouldn’t have enough anyway). It’s a systemic issue. As Daisy Alioto pointed out, “We’re in the K-shaped economy of shame.” While many still have a surplus of it, those most desperately in need of shame remain shameless.

“It’s the paradox that the shameless are unshameable.”

Perversely, the shame now usually ends up with the consumer. Brands externalize their ethical responsibilities by turning them into choices for consumers to make: more-expensive products not wrapped in plastic, carbon offsets you pay for at checkout, and greener delivery options which are more expensive and less convenient. We all know why Big Oil popularized the “carbon footprint.” The burden is designed to fall on the individual, while the brand gets reputational credit for some semblance of infrastructure and a PR promise. This is accountability theater, putting on a performance of virtue, but extracting both labor and money from the very people the brand is performing for. Enjoy your paper straws.

Accountability-Maxxing

It all feels like we’ve reached a breaking point.

Even those making the predictions are tired of it all. In a ZINE survey of 150+ cultural researchers and strategists from around the world, 68% agree there’s too much BS in trend work, while 75% say there needs to be more accountability for bad takes and decisions.

The call is coming from inside the house.

But where are we expecting this accountability to come from?

We need to strengthen our atrophied accountability muscles. What if reflecting upon our ethics and decisions became more common practice? What if the post-mortem actually happened? The phrase ‘strong opinions, loosely held’ is tossed around a lot, but what if proudly changing your mind – admitting when you’re wrong, even revelling in it – became encouraged?

“It’s a very peculiar way of orienting inside yourself emotionally,” Henrik Karlsson said on Jackson Dahl’s podcast.

“But to start to feel a certain joy in being wrong, asking, ‘How can I be more wrong faster?’ and to recode the shame of being wrong, that just takes a lot of practice.”

As Karlsson has written, he interrogates his ideas as soon as they are rigid on the page, looking for cracks so he can fill them.

“Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. It often requires breaking old ideas.”

Or consider,

“It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who,” as Kyra Dempsey wrote about why plane crashes are so rare. In aviation, accidents elicit a “blameless post-mortem,” a process focused on preventing future accidents rather than figuring out which human made the error. Fallibility is an accepted inevitability, so workers are encouraged to self-report errors “to gather as much data about those errors as possible.”

What if we chose fluidity over finality, interrogating our own ideas constantly? What if we had the same conviction for our follow-ups and reflections as we had with our original predictions? A16z following up on their Bored Ape thesis, or McKinsey on their metaverse forecasts would not just be profound reputation management, but incredibly insightful – for themselves and for the industry.

Ego sucks.

An alternative here — acknowledging stubborn pride — is that companies could make predictions and pledges designed for accountability from day one. Have a public methodology, outlining each phase of the process, naming potential risks and conditions for failure, and building in post-mortems and periods of reflection to strengthen the next phase. Bake in pivots and humility.

But do we want any of this accountability? Or just want to want it?

Are we actually willing to demand accountability, not just from nameless corporations but from ourselves? Or are we fine continuously being lied to, and doubling down on our own lies to avoid admitting miscalculation? Are we fine pretending to be right and then gaslighting our audiences and clients into believing we were always right? Do we really want this world? It’s as unhinged as it sounds.

This Has Nothing to Do With Blame

Accountability is, at its most fundamental level, a relationship with reality.

There is a shared reality that can be violated and then corrected. Accountability provides narrative consistency, a prevention and antidote to the disorientation we face today. Accountability is a commitment to the idea that the world is constructed of things that happened – and that those things can be named, examined, and reckoned with.

Our words carry weight. They don’t just evaporate in the next news cycle. Accountability gives what we say a gravity, ensuring that our language doesn’t float away, losing its meaning.

Back to thinking about the future, accountability allows us to see the future as something real – something with physics to it. Already, the future is too abstract for most. But without accountability, the future bends to the largest spectacles, repetition and whoever is the most shameless. Accountability grounds us, reminding us that for every action there is a reaction. There are effects. Consequences.

When predictions are made without reflection, when pledges are abandoned without acknowledgment, and when milestones are passed without follow-up, the message is that nothing we say matters. That the future doesn’t care.

But, no. Our words and efforts are real. And so is the future.

We’ve built systems and cultures that actively punish the honesty required for this accountability – as if admitting anything is a weakness. But error is inevitable. We’re allowed to be wrong. Our minds and environments change.

But we’ve seemingly forgotten this. Paradoxically, admitting error is not the end of credibility, but the foundation for it – the most effective way of kindling the trust so many corporate and cultural institutions need.

Accountability is the most efficient path to making something real.