But today, the business of most businesses isn't just mass-manufacturing product (industrial age), plastering slightly slicker stickers on it (branding age), or even gleaning vital intelligence faster than rivals (information age). The business of most businesses is interaction. […] Today, we live in a world of strikingly dismally low-quality interactions. […] Here's the rule that we must remember: High quality interactions expand human potential. Low quality interactions reduce, diminish, and shrink it. Thus, learning to produce high versus settling for low quality interactions is one of the great challenges of competence for institutions today. —

Umair Haque on one of the modern Web’s most important problems.

I could’ve quoted many other sentences from this article. Great points, as always — and powerful parallels with Seth Godin’s The Icarus Deception.