It’s hard to believe but I registered this domain in November 2003. At the time I was busy preparing Lucire for print publication, taking an unprecedented step of turning a website into a fully fledged magazine (as opposed to the one similar effort that had taken place before, with Slate, whey they made the website into Word docs for copy shops to print off). We may have subsequently used the word Fiduci in something in Lucire, but nothing ever resided at this domain.
I liked the word. I liked how it was truncated from fiduciary, how it gave an air of authority, how it could be used for business matters. A friend asked if he could have it in exchange for some work he did, and I said yes, but ultimately nothing came of that. I asked if I could have it back (although the domain was never legally transferred and I kept paying for it, but a man’s word is his bond, so it was only right I asked again). That was a couple of years ago. In 2023 I began sketching out what would sit here.
Business magazines come and go, and in the heady days of dot com, the fun ones to take in were Fast Company and Wired. I liked Business 2.0, not just because I wound up in it. Inc. and Entrepreneur appealed but not as much as the New Zealand title Unlimited, which I thought encapsulated the growing knowledge economy of the mid-2000s perfectly, and not just because I wound up in it. My favourite was the short-lived Condé Nast Portfolio, not just because I wound up in it.
What has been missing in amongst this company—though such titles do exist elsewhere—was a business magazine that combined a sense of social purpose with commerce. This had been hard-baked into my thinking for most of this century, ever since I headed to Medinge Group and its 2002 meeting, where we believed that brands could have a social purpose and conscience. Those early meetings, hosted by Thomas Gad and his partner Annette Rosencreutz, were at a heady time in the global economy where we could indulge in such thinking. While 9-11 had dampened the market, especially the dot-com world, there was still a sense that humanity could progress. Surely consumers wanted brands with corporate social responsibility? Or we could figure out a way to make social more appealing? (The genesis of Lucire partnering with UNEP, its first fashion industry partner, was right here, as was its subsequent coverage of responsible brands.) Whether the audience has shifted since 2002 is debatable—Shein makes a lot of money, for instance—but the goal is still worth pursuing. People still want meaning. And if we can give a form to that meaning, a voice to good, then that is ultimately a net positive.
Another thing that Lucire did well was give voice to those who might not have had big enough budgets to prompt some ‘editorial support’ in the likes of Vogue but had a great story to tell. And therein lies another purpose to Fiduci: to be meritorious with our gaze and what we share.
Of course there’ll be an evolution of these principles: time doesn’t stand still and nor should we. But what I hope won’t change is a sense of humanity.
Regardless of “AI” and other technologies, we think people always come back to humanity. The original works that came out of desktop publishing were garish and, in some cases, unreadable, as people experimented with the technology. Ultimately the craft was restored as we still had to communicate and our human perception of what looked good and what was readable didn’t change. “AI”, we think, is the same: it may be great at generating imagery and videos, but there comes a point where we have a thirst for humanity and want to know (even if we already do, given that “AI” has ingested human outputs to get it to where it is) that a human hand was present as the creative spark of a work. In writing, we want to know a person did it, not a machine. In photography, we want to know who shot the primary image, even if it had been manipulated since.
“AI” has limits: we’ve witnessed conversational drift as early as the first response when fed enough data, not the 15–20 Google Gemini says it requires before it suffers collapse; it cannot highlight certain facts without humans telling it what is important; and we can even get it to escalate an argument, going against its programming to not cause harm. It’s flawed, and maybe it’ll improve in some respects, but Drs Timnet Gebru, Emily Bender and others were right all along: the stochastic parrots have hard technical limits, as well as financial ones (who makes it pay?).
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata, so the second half of the Māori proverb goes: it is people, it is people, it is people. The timelessness of that saying keeps us true even in this time of great technological change, shaky financial ground, and a climate emergency that “AI” exacerbates with its emissions and pull of resources.
The scene having been set, welcome to Fiduci.
Jack Yan
Founder and publisher