Once a company becomes an industry leader, its employees, from top to bottom, start thinking defensively. Suddenly, people feel they have more to lose from challenging the status quo than upending it. As a result, one-time revolutionaries turn into reactionaries. Proof of this about-face comes when senior executives troop off to Washington or Brussels to lobby against changes that would make life easier for the new up and comers.

Years of continuous improvement produce an ultra-efficient business system—one that’s highly optimized, and also highly inflexible. Successful businesses are usually good at doing one thing, and one thing only. Over-specialization kills adaptability—but this is a tough to trap to avoid, since the defenders of the status quo will always argue that eking out another increment of efficiency is a safer bet than striking out in a new direction.

Long-tenured executives develop a deep base of industry experience and find it hard to question cherished beliefs. In successful companies, managers usually have a fine-grained view of “how the industry works,” and tend to discount data that would challenge their assumptions. Over time, mental models become hard-wired—a fact that makes industry stalwarts vulnerable to new rules. This risk is magnified when senior executives dominate internal conversations about future strategy and direction.

With success comes bulk—more employees, more cash and more market power. Trouble is, a resource advantage tends to make executives intellectually lazy—they start believing that success comes from outspending one’s rivals rather than from outthinking them. In practice, superior resources seldom defeat a superior strategy. So when resources start substituting for creativity, it’s time to short the shares.

One quick suggestion: Treat every belief you have about your business as nothing more than a hypothesis, forever open to disconfirmation. Being paranoid is good, becoming skeptical about your own beliefs is better.

The criticisms I have been seeing about the features of the Pixel 8, however, feel like we are only repeating the kinds of fears of nearly two hundred years. We have not been able to wholly trust photographs pretty much since they were invented. The only things which have changed in that time are the ease with which the manipulations can happen, and their availability.

We all live with a growing sense that everything around us is fraudulent. It is striking to me how these tools have been introduced as confidence in institutions has declined. It feels like a death spiral of trust — not only are we expected to separate facts from their potentially misleading context, we increasingly feel doubtful that any experts are able to help us, yet we keep inventing new ways to distort reality.

The questions that are being asked of the Pixel 8’s image manipulation capabilities are good and necessary because there are real ethical implications. But I think they need to be more fully contextualized. There is a long trail of exactly the same concerns and, to avoid repeating ourselves yet again, we should be asking these questions with that history in mind. This era feels different. I think we should be asking more precisely why that is.

The questions we ask about generative technologies should acknowledge that we already have plenty of ways to lie, and that lots of the information we see is suspect. That does not mean we should not believe anything, but it does mean we ought to be asking questions about what is changed when tools like these become more widespread and easier to use.