“They were not even irrelevant, because irrelevant implies that they had been noticed” — Swiss industrialist on Japanese watchmakers, 1969, via Why Is This Interesting
“The future came from the slime while we looked for signs from the heavens” — Rishad Tobaccowala
People: Japan’s human-sized refrigerator. Job boundaries blurring: nearly half of ChatGPT tasks fall outside the user’s primary occupation. The Quartz Crisis. Pools in containers: a builder is converting maritime shipping containers into backyard swimming pools, with demand across all of France.
AI strat: Define done before starting. Approval is the new bottleneck: individuals with AI produce faster, but verification and sign-off systems were built around old paces; transformation requires rebuilding those systems, not just issuing tools. Agentic patents surge. China courts AI displacement. Constraint as capability: Kimi K3 reached benchmarks comparable to frontier Western models despite operating under export controls and limited compute access. AI capex in the pipeline.
Society: Enshittification’s price tag. Skillidays: the growing trend of combining vacations with acquiring a new skill, learning reframed as leisure, not obligation. Effort, not source.
Foresight: What’s already been decided — Shell’s scenario analyst Pierre Wack described certain change factors as “predetermineds”: things whose effects are already determined even if not yet visible, like heavy monsoon rain in the Himalayas predicting flood levels in Benares five days later; futurist Art Kleiner’s list of what we already know about the 2030s is built on the same logic. Outside the categories: “the biggest threats and opportunities come from outside one’s categories” — from what incumbents look down upon or never appear on their radar, from the slime rather than the heavens.
AI: Breadth beats depth — employees using AI across several different task types are twice as likely to report productivity gains as those using it for one or two types; specialization limits the compound effect. Value chain premium.
![Seiko] *LE PREMIER* Montre à Quartz - la Seiko Astron de 1969 : r/Watches](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2hkB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F123b9a8b-9354-44cb-8506-538198aa38a9_4080x3072.jpeg "Seiko] *LE PREMIER* Montre à Quartz - la Seiko Astron de 1969 : r/Watches")
By 1975, Seiko had brought the price of a quartz watch below fifty dollars. The movement that could not be taken seriously at the price of a car was now available to everyone who had ever worn a watch. The Swiss watch industry lost roughly half its workforce in the decade that followed. They had not lacked information. They had lacked the ability to translate information into concern for people who were not yet concerned.
Complications
The presentation had gone well, by Swiss standards, which meant that no one had interrupted.
Gerhard had spent six weeks on the report. He had obtained samples of the Japanese movement through a contact in Geneva who worked for a trading house that did not ask careful questions. He had disassembled the Seiko 35A and timed its drift across two weeks. He had built a cost model from what he could reverse-engineer. He had done the arithmetic three times and received the same answer each time, which he had initially hoped was a mistake.
The answer was: they could sell these at a quarter of our price within five years. Possibly less.
He had presented this to the management committee in September. He had charts. He had the movement itself, which he passed around the table. Three of the six men at the table did not pick it up. One of the men who did said it felt cheap.
Gerhard noted that this was true, and that it would keep time to within fifteen seconds a month, and that this accuracy was not achievable by any mechanical movement at any price. He noted that the target customer for the Seiko was not a collector. He noted that the target customer for the Seiko was everyone else.
He was thanked for the thoroughness of his work.
In the months that followed, he raised it in smaller meetings — without slides, just questions: Have you heard anything from distributors about the Japanese product? The answers were variations on: no, nothing meaningful, not really. His colleague Andreas said once that a client in Hamburg had mentioned it, but that the man collected military watches and was enthusiastic about inexpensive things generally.
By 1978, three factories in the Vallée de Joux had announced closures.
He retired in 1982. He had two watches: a movement he had finished himself, twenty years earlier, that he wore on Sundays; and a Seiko he had bought in 1973 to take apart and put back together and never returned to a box. It was accurate to within two seconds a month. He wore it on Tuesdays, usually. Sometimes Thursdays.
He had not been wrong. He had been right for six years before it mattered. The things he had pointed at had been there. He had simply been unable to communicate them into existence as a concern for people who had other concerns, and whose concerns, being other, required that the problem not yet be visible.
Later he would read about something called a “predetermined element” — a category of futures analysis developed by a man who worked for an oil company and thought carefully about rivers. The idea was that some things were already decided. The flood had already happened upstream; it was only a question of when it reached you. The man who developed this concept had thought the value was in communicating the certain future so that people could prepare. Gerhard had spent six years learning that the communication problem was harder than the forecast.1
He did not write a memoir. He thought about what he might add.
There was nothing to add.2
1 Pierre Wack worked for Shell’s Group Planning division from 1971 to 1981 and is credited with developing modern scenario planning. His signature concept was the “predetermined element” — a factor so deeply embedded in current forces that its future effect could be stated with high confidence, regardless of how scenarios diverged on other dimensions. He described it by analogy to the Ganges: heavy monsoon rain in the Himalayan headwaters predicts flooding in Allahabad five days later, and in Benares five days after that, with near-certainty. Wack believed that the hardest part of scenarios was not identifying predetermineds but communicating them to people who were not yet experiencing their consequences. He was rarely thanked for the thoroughness of his work.
2 The Swiss watch industry’s recovery came not from winning the argument about quality, but from SWATCH — a product designed to compete with Japanese quartz on price and style while preserving Swiss manufacturing employment. Nicolas Hayek built a structure that could survive being right about the wrong things for a long time. The Quartz Crisis ended not when the Swiss admitted they had lost, but when one person built something structured to outlast the admission.