This week, Jun Lee tells us about his role as a partner at Gemic, the importance of technology to the human experience, and why, going forward, the most successful companies will enable people to craft their own narratives and tell their own stories. Jun believes that narrative reached an inflection point in the 21st century with the rise of reality TV, where strong storytelling lost out to personality-driven content. In order to be successful now, he says, it’s time to put our faith back in building narratives.

To start out, could you tell us who you are and what your current role is at Gemic? 

My name is Jun Lee and I’m a partner at Gemic.

In your work at Gemic, what kinds of questions do you focus on? 

I’m interested in our relationship with technology and how it modifies and alters the experience of being human.

Something like the smartphone, for example, has insinuated into our everyday lives in profound ways. It’s eliminated the need for detailed planning from everyday life and has allowed us to be much more spontaneous.

So you think what’s more important is how technology changes us, rather than how we use it.

Yes, and it also changes the way we think about ourselves, about how we spend our time, and how we prioritize and delegate power and influence. Understanding technology is as important to understanding modern life as understanding food, health, work and family.

When did your interest in technology start?

When technology research switched from “what technology can do for us” to “what technology does to us”. I worked with someone who really inspired me to think about these questions differently than I had before.

Is there one seminal work that changed the way you think about the world?

The Real World on MTV.

That’s an interesting choice! Why The Real World?

Actually, it was the combination of The Real World, Cops, and Jerry Springer. They changed my view on the rules of narrative. These shows changed norms around what is a story and who creates stories. Effectively, it was a starting point for everything that we think about when it comes to social media and popular culture  today.

What we see in pop culture now is a shift – from an interest in narratives to an interest in personalities. A simple way to put it is, we’ve entered an era in which total strangers can be subjects of deep interest. In the past, stories were the subject of interest and those stories were told by narrators and storytellers who had established themselves as both skilled artisans and, to a degree, institutional authorities. 

In modern society we see a shift toward individualism, or individual experience, as the primary interest. When it comes to this sense of prioritizing individual values over communal ones, The Real World was the earliest signal of what we talk about as modern life.

What’s one big idea or shift you think everyone should be talking about?

I’d say the topic I get the most inspiration from right now is this gradual shift to individual narratives. 

Something I’m curious to understand is how we’ve taken apart traditional forms of narrative, and I’m not sure if we’ve figured out how to put them back together.

Jun Lee, Gemic Partner

I’ll give an example: we all find ourselves in what we call doom scrolls or those infinite stimulation loops. To use a food metaphor, it’s the equivalent of replacing your entire diet with appetizers. All content has been created to engage people, but its limitation is that it’s designed to entice you. 

Right, versus being designed to ‘nourish’ you or your mind?

The experience that we call exhaustion that comes from engaging with this kind of content is a result of the lack of a ‘beginning and end’ structure that used to define our media experiences. With this kind of short form content, there’s no real defined beginning or end – they either continue endlessly until they stop randomly, or become infinite variations on a theme. They are riffs, in the world of music or sketches — they’re things that are not complete. 

Consuming that as our primary form of entertainment or intellectual material leads to a fairly unhealthy mental state. There are some analogies here to good nutrition and diet, which is formed around a cyclical process of hunger and nourishment – you become hungry, you eat, you’re satisfied and that repeats each day. This kind of defined cyclical process doesn’t really exist in our current consumption of media. It’s just a life of snacking. 

This is also why you’ll see people going on “intermittent fasts” from social media or detoxing from their phones. You have to structure your own media experience, which is difficult to do.

What are the business implications of this idea?

Narratives shape our culture, politics and consumption behaviors. Today, we are awash in narratives that are the result of a lot of trial and error, experimentation and do-it-yourself ingenuity. While we may have empowered everyday people to tell their own stories, the results are really mixed. We talk about creating technologies that enable more people to tell their stories, but the reality is that most of these stories are not very compelling and worse, create a lot of noise, hype, scandal and anger without adding any cultural or social value. 

The irony is that those people who are self-taught. and able to produce compelling stories, are identified and brought into the world of professional storytelling. Many of today’s celebrated musicians, screenwriters and directors who people celebrate as modern self-taught storytellers are now in the professional storytelling business.

There’s an opportunity to help people participate in narrative creation – and also get better at it. They need to be given the tools to build narratives for themselves – narratives that help them engage socially and economically benefit from their efforts.

Jun Lee, Gemic Partner

Before we’re done here I want to ask you about Gemic generally – what do you think of Gemic’s role in the world? 

The way I think about what we do and how we think is that we offer a non-technocratic approach to thinking about human systems. 

What do you see as the drawbacks of a technocratic approach to studying human systems?

A technocratic view is kind of a distant analysis of the different layers of a system. It’s a dispassionate approach — the ideal outcome of this kind of thinking is that the researcher is a dispassionate observer. You look at the world as if you have no stake in it, or that you don’t really care what kind of outcome is going to come about. 

I would say that our role is to offer a different way of looking at the world. We lean heavily on a cultural and human lens. We examine how people decide to be and what they decide is good. And we think that human values should be the lead horse and that we should bet on it. 

So we offer a human systems view that is the opposite of a technocratic view. We lean heavily on the cultural perspective to both assess and diagnose what’s happening in society – and to successfully route it to a place where we want it to go. We’re using systems in a more motivated way to achieve cultural outcomes that we think are fit for people, fit for society, and that bring us closer together. It’s a biased view of the future with people at the center. 

What will the next year hold for Gemic, and for you at Gemic?

We’re always trying to find new ways of understanding the world and explain what’s  going on. We are busy, we’ve been growing, and we’re taking on a lot of different topics. We like to cycle between doing research grounded in real-world experiences and then reflecting on them more abstractly. 

What have we learned and engaged with over the past year that has changed the way we think? Asking these kinds of questions helps us improve our approach, taking what matters and discarding what doesn’t. So I hope the next year will hold some of that reflection and growth.

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Jun is a Partner in Gemic’s New York Office, where he brings 20 years of experience in research & product development with focuses in communications, digital media use, automotive mobility, and home life. His career has been defined by a desire to understand why people embrace, reject, and in some cases, appropriate technologies in unanticipated ways. At Gemic, this translates into a desire to help companies reimagine the ways technology might change how people work, socialize, and connect to one another. Jun has a Master’s degree in Design from the Institute of Design and a BA in Neuroscience and Behavior from Columbia University. He has lived abroad in Seoul and Copenhagen before returning to New York.

Could you describe your role at Gemic? 

I’m one of the co-founders of Gemic, which we started about 12 years ago. The reasons behind founding a company like Gemic are manifold, but first and foremost I wanted to combine my interests in people, society and social science with my interest in business. This is becoming more common now, but at that time, you often had to sacrifice one for the other. I always thought that was strange because they share so many common interests, especially when you think about how societies create value. So we decided to build that bridge ourselves.

Using your Gemic lens, what are some of the key transformations you see taking place as a result of COVID-19?

Well, one of the big things we’re monitoring is the tension between local and global economies, and the disparities between who can really benefit from global economic structures. In reality, only a handful of major metropolises can benefit from the capital flows of the global economy. That disparity, especially as it impacts smaller metro, suburban and rural areas, has been thrown into stark contrast by the virus. 

At the same time, we’re seeing large global platforms take on characteristics that would normally be ascribed to regional or national infrastructure, as well as more nationalistic and political significance. So much so, that patronizing these platforms is starting to take on a weighted meaning. 

What are some real world examples of this transformation and of the tensions you’re describing?

We’re seeing a huge migration of life onto large e-commerce platforms like Amazon or Alibaba’s various properties, and for obvious reasons: we are staying home more, we have more time, and we value speed and ease now more than ever. 

These companies have also sharpened their digital offerings and their logistics to a fine point, and the type of convenience they offer has become really important during times of crisis. It turns out, we actually do prefer automation over human interactions sometimes. 

In many places, they’ve also come to replace or fix broken public infrastructures, from roads and bridges to the postal service… It’s no wonder that the US is such a hub for this type of development because much of our public infrastructure is broken. If nothing else, COVID19 has proved that to us. 

“So, we’re slowly seeing and realizing that our everyday living infrastructure is increasingly owned by private companies and platforms – but it’s also clear that they aren’t quite benefiting local economies as much as we thought they would.”

So then the question arises of who do we become and what do we support when we patronize them?

When we use global e-commerce platforms, we don’t see the clear and immediate impact of that cash flow on our local economy, at least not in the same way we might with other smaller businesses.

So, it almost becomes a question of your allegiances. Do you see yourself somehow rooted in a nation state? Or do you see yourself as part of a neighborhood that you need to support and should therefore patronize its businesses?

Or, are you this global person, who’s a free individual without any commitment, who’s able to reap the benefits of global capital flows, the global job market, etc. I think a lot of political struggles we have in our society are about this type of tension. So we will eventually feel this global-local debate on every possible level.

But what do we mean when we say local really?

Ha! That’s a question for another time…

So what do you think will happen to these large platforms? 

It’s hard to say anything for sure right now, but we may start to see global corporations invest in re-making themselves into systems that provide care for people more intentionally at a local level – both because it benefits them and because people will demand it. 

Right now, we are seeing cracks in our old systems become more obvious, and people have more time and space to really question whether things should be the way they are. One of those things is whether or not global corporations are really benefiting us at a direct level in the ways they should. 

As our lives shift onto these platforms – we will expect them to care. This is going to put tremendous pressure on these platforms, but as we hand over more and more power to them, we will expect more than just a service in exchange. We will expect them to be a reliable backbone to our society because – and this may be specific to the US – we can’t necessarily trust the government to provide that backbone anymore. 

That is really interesting – but what would it look like in practice?

Well, I think we’ve seen something like this in the way American corporations stepped up to the plate during WWII, and obviously, there are comparisons to be made to certain companies increasing production of PPE during COVID-19. But, I think the answer goes beyond owning a “moment” of patriotic national pride in production. Winning companies will make longer term change and tangible change that people can feel at a localized level.

For example, when Finland began to urbanize and industrialize at the turn of the 20th century – quite late in comparison to other nations in the region — a large number of farm workers and agricultural laborers flooded into the cities. They were largely disadvantaged, without access to capital and fair prices for many basic necessities. Almost immediately you saw the rise of these worker’s co-ops — cohorts of people who were invested in an ecosystem of retailers, banks, and farms.

These large groups of previously disadvantaged people suddenly had access to a social safety net, resources and capital through cooperatives that would eventually become some of the largest companies in the Nordics. A lot of the Northern European co ops are still massive companies to this day. They’ve kind of lost that characteristic but they were born in a time when there were dramatic social, political, and economic inequalities in society, as there are now because of the virus. 

So, there are examples of how a corporation can provide real benefits for local people at scale. I think it is likely that we will see people begin to look for this kind of tangible, local change from global corporations. The question for corporations then, is how can they build a reliable system that provides people with some sort of care? There are some really interesting parallels and lessons to be learned.

So it’s all about building mutual benefit? 

Yes, it’s about how large global e-commerce platforms, and corporations more broadly, build offerings where there’s some kind of mutually beneficial system. Not just asking how they can serve people, but how they can make change that is visible at a local, personal level. 

The interesting question now for people who participate in the platform economy is, ‘How does this platform guarantee fairness for all parties?’ How do we make you feel like you have a stake in it? That you’re not just a consumer? That there’s come real mutual benefit beyond pure convenience? I think these questions are going to be immensely important.

This sounds like a colossal amount of change in a short period of time – do you think it will really happen? 

Well, I think we may start to see an amplification of something that was already there. These questions surrounding what value global platforms provide to people in their day to day lives existed well before the virus began. We’re just seeing them come to light because we’re spending more time on them and they’re performing increasingly important functions in our lives.

We see some cracks in our current system widening, and things will start to change little by little. Not everything is going to change overnight, but the seeds are there.

So it’s in the best interest of these companies to reconsider how they can best provide people some kind of benefit that creates a sustained, mutual, beneficial relationship between themselves and consumers. I think any platform that could do this would be massively successful. 

Johannes is the Founder and Chairman of Gemic. Based in New York, he advises executives across CPG, fashion, mobility and tech on how to respond to cultural, structural and behavioral change. To do this, he believes in starting with the right questions: What business are industries really in? Where is the value in being an “iconic” brand? In guiding executives toward the right questions, Johannes has helped top-tier companies redefine their markets and create meaningful value for shareholders. Contact him at johannes.suikkanen@gemic.com

In the coming weeks and months, Gemic will be delving into the experiences of everyday people, taking a glimpse into how “normal” life is being transformed by C-19. 

This week, Gemic goes inside grocery shopping with Jared — a 30-year-old Digital Marketing manager from Brooklyn. An avid and early adopter of online services like Instacart and Amazon Fresh, Jared has recently found himself switching back to brick and mortar. In this photojournal, he gives us a glimpse into “the why” behind this switch and a window into what grocery shopping means going forward.

So, you went grocery shopping again this week?

Ha ha, yes, I did, once again! It used to be that I only went grocery shopping when my fridge was empty and I had to fill an immediate need. Now, I find myself going when my fridge is still about a quarter full. At that point, I know I probably have enough food to last for a week, but I also have no idea what’s going to happen in a week, so there’s more anticipation and more planning these days.

I recall that you were an early adopter of services like Amazon Fresh, but now it sounds like you’re going to the store more often than not

Yeah, I live walking distance from two major grocery stores, but I had been using Prime and Instacart for convenience. But now, I’m finding that they don’t have any time slots for delivery or that I’m literally gambling with the possibility of items disappearing from my cart in the time it takes to set up the delivery. It’s been a pretty frustrating experience and I’ve found myself just wanting a more hands-on experience. 

Also, I think I’ve decided that for me – a relatively young and healthy person with no pre-existing conditions – it just makes more sense to go to the grocery store. It’s weird because it feels like I’ve had to become some kind of a hunter-gatherer, whereas before I would’ve just waited for things to show up. But now, I prefer going into the store and getting that immediate confirmation of seeing items that I know can work. 

Plus, a lot of stuff in my nearby store is local, so I feel like it’s merchandised for me and my neighborhood, not for just anyone and everyone on the internet. It’s the difference between ‘eggs for you!’ and ‘internet eggs.’ 

So what does your actual shopping routine look like now?

Well, I obviously spend more time getting ready, but I’m trying not to go overboard. I’m wearing my mask and my regular clothes. I’m not wearing gloves because I prefer to just touch the things I need to touch and wash my hands afterward, rather than have a false sense of security from the gloves. 

I’ve also started making grocery lists. When this all started, I was literally going to the store and buying everything I could carry, but now I feel like there’s been more consistency and leveling off. It’s almost a sense of normalcy if that makes sense? I don’t expect things to get any worse, so I’m just buying what I need to get by. Part of that is going in with a better understanding of what’s essential – what’s a ‘must-have’ or ‘a need’ vs. just ‘a want’ or a panic purchase. The list helps with that, and I feel more confident that the store will have something of value.

And where are you doing most of your grocery shopping now?

I go to Amazon 360, or rather, Whole Foods 360! Whole Foods is basically the Amazon grocery store in my mind. I figure that because it’s Amazon, they’ll have more options and better variety. That said, I’ve found myself buying a lot more of the Amazon or Whole Foods brand stuff because it’s cheaper and better stocked than other brands.

Can I just say though, that this experience has really made me miss Target, of all places! My Target was always overcrowded and I was always complaining about the people in there, but I didn’t realize how much it meant to me before now. The idea of a one-stop-shop where you could literally buy a latte, a lamp, and frozen pizza – imagine! I really look forward to the day when I can take walks through Target again.  

On that note, how has the in-store experience changed for you?

I definitely have a greater sense of ‘am I going to catch something in this place’ since the risk of catching something is still very real. At the same time, I can’t live in that kind of fear, so I just choose to proceed with caution and pay very close attention to hygiene. It helps that everyone is wearing masks and there’s more regulation over how many people can shop at once. Also, it’s Whole Foods, so people are relatively polite about keeping a safe distance.

That said, you can’t help but notice the slightest bit of competition with other shoppers. It’s those moments when you lock eyes with someone who is also walking toward the last loaf of bread. I’m not necessarily worried about the stores running out of food, but it’s jarring to see empty shelves or shelves with just a single item. I’m seeing that a lot with things like pasta sauce, jelly, frozen foods, deli meats…gone! What are people doing with all the pasta sauce?

That may be why I’m starting to notice brands that I never noticed before. For example, there’s this healthy food brand called Evol – apparently, they’ve been around for a while, but I never noticed them until now, as the shelves are so bare. 

Who or what’s behind all those empty shelves?

I think it’s a combination of panic buying and issues with the supply chain, especially when it comes to labor. It’s crazy to think people might be getting sick to keep me fed. 

I suppose that’s another reason why I’ve been doing more grocery shopping in-store than online – because when I push that delivery button, I know that someone is going to have to go collect those 30 things, put them in several different packages and send them to me. Before, it was a question of people in factories and warehouses in suspect working conditions, but now it’s a question of someone putting themselves and their loved ones at risk to make my packages get delivered, which is unreal. How do you negotiate that as a society, much less a consumer? I don’t know, but I think it’ll be the next frontier for workers’ rights. 

In the meantime, I find myself asking whether I can just find the item I’m looking for on my own, or if I can get it through some other means beyond delivery – at least when it comes to food and drinks. 

How else do you think this experience might change the way you approach grocery shopping?

That’s a good question and to be honest, it will probably depend on how this plays out. Here’s what I can say for sure: I have a much deeper appreciation for what it takes to get food on the shelf and for the workers who make that happen. 

I think we’ve all been spoiled by a culture of on-demand and this moment feels like a good reset on that. Reckoning with the fact that I’m not always going to be able to get exactly what I want to get exactly when I want it, is actually helping me reassess what’s essential. I wouldn’t be surprised if I stopped buying certain things altogether, because I’m realizing they’re not very useful or they don’t add some other value to my life. 

Lastly, I don’t think I’ll ever take Target for granted again.