Miles Earn and Burn

Special thanks to Churnest Hemingway for today’s guest insightful guest post. Watch soon for his upcoming novel, The Old Man and the Fee.

When communicating with groups in person or online, one of the most important questions you can ask yourself is “Who’s in the room?” Knowing your audience and understanding their agenda (tip: it’s different than yours) should shape what you’re saying, and validate why you’re saying it at all.

This advice is also very relevant for communication about churning. Whether discussing a card benefit loophole or a foundational tool for manufactured spending, you should always stop to consider who is in the room before starting a conversation – lest you also start the death clock on the very play you’re hoping to discuss. We have seen this lack of discretion contribute to the demise of many joyful things in recent years, sometimes in conjunction with quantitative signals, sometimes not.

If you’re posting to reddit, commenting on a blog or video, or publishing content yourself, you can be confident that the marketing departments of major credit card issuers are reading what you’re putting out there. Marketers report up to other departments on product usage trends and the voice of their customer. If the voice of their customer is yapping about a loophole its not supposed to have, a feature its not using as intended, or anything else of benefit beyond what is advertised, you can be certain those goodies will be killed by product leadership sooner or later.

Similarly, when chatting or on the phone with your friendly customer service rep, you should be aware that everything you say is being logged and analyzed in dashboards, meetings, and meetings about dashboards. Just as with marketing departments, surges in specific topics or questions stick out on the radar like a sore thumb. Badgering a bank employee about a key account feature that was retired will not magically turn that feature back on. Over a hundred of these calls will raise the question of why this feature is suddenly in demand, and prompt further investigation of customers who still have skin in the game.

Sharing away from the corporate eye does not guarantee privacy, either. Smaller online communities have their own share of participants who repost tips and plays without adequately gut-checking what it means for the survival of what they’re sharing. Some of these are from well-meaning churners excited to share knowledge with their peers and build community. Less forgivably, lurking influencers capitalize on community content by monetizing it for ad-supported blogs and paid courses. This latter demographic is a scourge and the reason you should know the agenda of your peers.

Finally, a common thread between all three audiences is the new variable of AI analysis. Every reddit post, chat or call log, or private community message is now subject to any number of agents ingesting, synthesizing, and summarizing its content ad infinitum. Despite bank technology having a reputation for being old and brittle, it is simple enough to batch export data and analyze it with another application. Many churners also use these tools, undisclosed, in private communities to manage the firehose of information coming at them on a daily basis. Even if you’ve forgotten what you once posted way up in the scrollback, or are past the 90 day window of your visible Slack content, don’t worry – AI remembers, and will always remember. The act of listening has now been delegated to a technology that never sleeps. Proceed with caution.

A footnote: “X has already been shared by popularwebsite, so it doesn’t matter if I share it again” is not a good excuse for indiscretion. Visibility on a play doesn’t come from one leak, but repeated signals indicating its heat and significance. Even if a play has been shared that cannot be unshared, abstaining from a repeat broadcast is good practice for extending its lifespan and diminishing its significance to those who would treat it indelicately – or those who have the power to see it killed.

So, what should we do when we don’t know who to trust? Build trust. Know who’s in the room by getting in the actual room. Get on calls, show up at meetups, and build churning relationships that turn into churning friendships. Gracefully retract and delete overshares when other churners let you know you’ve gone too far, and give a polite nudge when you see someone else spill too much (escalate as necessary). Despite only knowing each other by first names at best, the amount of trust in our hobby is uniquely special, and the only thing that keeps it together.

– Churnist Hemingway

Pictured: AmEx RAT infiltrating a churning mixer.