Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

After waffling for a bit, I decided to go to Web 2.1 after all. I stayed late this evening at work, and I’ll head in early tomorrow, and will probably have to go in over the weekend, but it’s worth it to talk to some folks whose stuff I’ve been reading for a while.

I think the question that I’d like to see discussed is this idea that Web2.1 is for the people. The tools I see out there right now are still very tech-oriented. Ning.com just came out and is designed for people to construct their own social applications. Which is awesome. Except that I’m guessing most people don’t have any ideas for social applications. I know I’m stumped.

I think this is where we may be overselling the idea of Web2.1. It’s like the ever-popular analogy of software to architecture. No matter how easy architecture tools become, the average person isn’t going to be able to do a good job of designing a house, because it takes long years of experience and many rounds of feedback to learn the tricks of the trade. I foresee that many instances of the current round of social software will fizzle out against the same obstacle.

I think a different focus may be in order. Rather than try to give the tools directly to the people, perhaps we should focus on how we design the tools such that they are most useful to people. What are the design principles of Web2.1? I have my own ideas, but it’s a question I hope to hear some different viewpoints on.

Technorati tag: Web2.1

Last week’s Long Now talk was by Stewart Brand, one of the organizers and author of the book How Buildings Learn. This talk was about cities, and how cities learn.

He started off the talk by talking about demographics. Within the next couple years, more than 50% of the world will live in cities. And the percentage is growing exponentially – in 1800, it was 3%, in 1900, it was 14%. Is this a good or a bad thing? Brand thinks that it’s a great thing, and this talk presents the case against those that think that cities are awful and horrible, and we should all return to living in nature.

He made three seemingly outlandish claims about cities: that they solve the population problem, cure poverty, and are environmentally sound. But he makes a case for each one. They solve the population problem because people in cities don’t have lots of kids. In the country, kids are a benefit – they do chores and help out on the farm. In the cities, kids are a pain; young adults have better things to do than make babies. As he wryly put it, “Which would you rather have, a million dollars or a child?” In fact, people in cities do not even hit the 2.1 children per female average necessary to sustain a population. Since the majority of the world is now in cities, he put up numbers suggesting that the population of Earth will peak this century and then head back down to the 2-3 billion range.

His second claim, that living in cities cures poverty, is also seemingly crazy. When one sees the utter poverty and squalor of the squatter cities outside of Mumbai, how can one claim that cities bring wealth? He cites a book, Shadow Cities, where the author went and studied those squatter cities. It turns out that for many of them, the squatter city was actually an improvement over their hometown. They had more wealth, and insanely more opportunity. Back home, they were condemned to a life of poverty no matter what they did. In the city, they had a chance, albeit a small one, to escape that life, and they were willing to take that chance.

The last claim, that cities are environmentally friendly, he defends by analyzing the ecological footprint of cities. Essentially, the footprint goes up logarithmically with the number of people. Once the infrastructure in place, it basically starts to level off. Or, as he put it, if you took everybody out of a village of 10,000 people, you’d reduce the footprint of the village to zero. If you added those 10,000 people to the city, the city’s footprint would not go up linearly – it would bump up minutely, because most of the infrastructure is in place. I’m not sure I entirely buy it, but it does provide a new perspective on the benefits of cities.

The other concept that he introduced was a hierarchy of change layers. Fashion changes faster than commerce, which changes faster than infrastructure, then governance, culture and nature. He explained it as saying the top, fast-moving layers of fashion and commerce are agents of change, where things are tried dynamically, proposed and discarded if they don’t work. Things lower down, like infrastructure and governance, are more static; they take what the faster layers learn and integrate them. He originally conceived it for an explanation of how cities change and learn, and then later realized that it also maps to how civilizations change and learn. His conclusion? Civilization = cities.

Because change is so important, he points out that it is much better to design one’s structures to evolve and respond to their inhabitants than it is to try to get things right on the first try. He used the example of low-income housing. The best-designed, least-flexible housing always ends up as the worst slums. The housing that is slapped together, but that can be changed in response to people’s needs, does much better. I liked this vision of designing to evolve, because it fits in with my own philosophy.

Afterwards, in the open Q&A session, I asked whether it was possible that the differentiating factor between cities and villages was the ability of cities to evolve, to rapidly respond to their inhabitants. His response was, essentially, yes. He pointed out that cities are laboratories for civilization, that change fast and then teach everybody else how to do things. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it sparked this great vision in my head, where cities are essentially petri dishes of innovation, each innovating and evolving in its own way. And then by people choosing between the various cities’ innovations, we have a form of natural selection, where things evolve crazily, and the best things are kept. When I shared that idea with him after the talk, he pointed out that cities wouldn’t differentiate themselves, because they’re all so connected these days that they would all copy successful innovations, and discard unsuccessful ones. But it makes the natural selection analogy even tighter, I think, because traits will spread quickly throughout the population. I really really like this idea. Evolution is everywhere. Don’t design, just put constraints in place, and let things evolve and respond. It’s like Kevin Kelly’s book, Out of Control, which I should really re-read, because I think I’d get a lot more out of it now than I did ten years ago.

Anyway. Interesting talk. These Long Now talks are pretty darn good. I’ve only been to a couple that were lame, and most are excellent. I’ll keep on going, and boring y’all with these summaries. Ha!

I’ve been to a few of the Seminars about Long-term Thinking, sponsored by the Long Now Foundation. They’re hit and miss. Sometimes they’re really interesting, sometimes they’re kind of boring. This week’s speaker was James Carse, author of a book called Finite and Infinite Games. I’m not sure where I’d heard of Carse (although reviewing my notes beforehand, I found his book mentioned in a talk by Jaron Lanier at AC2004) (I should really type up those notes at some point). Anyway, he sounded interesting, so I went. And it was a great talk. Carse was a fun guy to listen to. He just kind of rambled on about topics that interested him. And he would occasionally pop out with these quotes that were just perfect observations about the state of the world. I tried to scribble down as many of those as I could, and I’ll drop them in as appropriate.

So in this talk, Carse was applying his theory of finite and infinite games to larger societal questions. In particular, he claimed that war was the ultimate finite game, and religion the ultimate infinite game. He also wanted to make the case that belief and religion were two different things; he’s apparently working on a book that’s tentatively titled “Higher Ignorance – The Religious Case Against Belief”. That distinction is important because he observed that any kind of war anywhere eventually involves the phenomenon of religion. But he didn’t want to blame wars on religion, but on belief. So he had to differentiate the two. But first he went back to reviewing the concepts of finite and infinite games, as described in his book (which I haven’t read, but plan to now).

The basic idea, as far as I can tell, is that finite games are played within a well-defined set of rules, where for one player to win, the others have to lose. The boundaries are important to finite games. There has to be an ending, and there has to be an agreement on how you get there. If you can play with the rules, the game might never end (e.g. Calvinball). Carse posits infinite games as those where the point of playing is to continue the play, changing the rules if need be. He compares the difference between finite and infinite games as the difference between a boundary and a horizon. You can approach a boundary, and cross over it, and then you’re on the other side. However, as you move towards the horizon, the horizon keeps on moving away from you, and you have changed your perspective.

He also pointed out that finite games requires “veiling”, where we consciously restrict ourselves to play the game, take it seriously, and ignore any other considerations. We are playing within the rules. He points out that it is important to realize that such “veiling” is done freely, by choice. He quoted Sartre, who apparently wrote that you always have the freedom not to fight in a war. Even if they kill you. Think Gandhi.

Random quote: “Whoever must play, can not play” i.e. forgetting that a finite game is played freely kills the spirit so that one no longer remembers the sense of play. Or so I interpret that.

So since he was blaming wars on belief rather than religion, he asked the question “What is the nature of belief itself?” Good question. He then made several observations about belief that many people would find rude, but I found wonderful.

• “Belief is the point where your thinking ends.” It’s a boundary condition. When we reach a belief that we truly hold dear, we have conditioned ourselves not to think about the implications of it not being true. Or as Orson Scott Card put it in Speaker for the Dead, “We [humans] question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.”
• “Once we have a belief, history has ended.” Belief inherently puts temporal limits on our thinking. We have essentially stated that once we believe something, nothing will change our minds. No new evidence will sway us. The world as it applies to the area of belief has frozen.
• Another way of putting that concept is that true believers don’t live “in a long now, but a ‘right now’ that stays forever.” What a great quote to tie it into the Long Now foundation, and to make his point crystalline.
• “People don’t state their beliefs, except when they are stating them to non-believers.” If we are surrounded by people who agree with us, we never talk about our belief. The whole red-state/blue-state thing comes from this. However, Carse’s extension was fascinating – “The believer can’t believe without the non-believer.” In other words, if the non-believer doesn’t exist, the believer must create him. You can’t play a finite game without an opponent. So we demonize al-Qaeda, or Saddam, or John Kerry. Once an opponent has been created, then we can use all of our techniques and methods used to win finite games. I mean, this is one of those ideas that is somewhat obvious in retrospect, but I think it may strike at the heart of some of what I feel is offensive about the conservative movement. As he put it, “Evil is where an infinite game is absorbed completely into a finite game.”
• He also commented on the importance of certainty to belief. There must be an authority. This is why many beliefs place so much importance on textual certainty. The Bible is the literal Word of God, etc. It’s not just that a text is used, it’s that the text is used to assure Truth and Certainty.

Then he got back to his original topic of religion. He had realized at some point that the great religions were among the longest lasting cultural traditions in the world, which made him speculate whether they were, in his terminology, infinite games. He pointed out that the most successful longest-lasting religions were ones that had transcended space and time. They were not tied to a specific cultural context, or to a specific place. When one asks “What is Christianity?” (or Buddhism or Islam or Judaism), the question is not answerable; it’s almost as if there’s no definable identity, no core. He posited that this was characteristic of infinite games, that they are infinitely adaptable and non-contextual, that they are slippery and elude definition because they are not tied to a specific set of rules. It’s a bit of a stretch, but maybe it will make more sense after I read his book.

Then he moved on to war. He pointed out that “War is brevity”, and that the enemy has to be veiled, because it’s important for us to think of the enemy as “one of them”, and having no otherwise humanizing characteristics because once we do, they’re no longer monkeys, and we have to treat them fairly. In a similar way to the true believer, “the army creates its enemies”. The soldier must take on most of the same characteristics as the true believer; when you are in combat, you must have put aside thinking, and just believe that you are on the right side. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that people in the army tend to vote Republican, the party of the true believer these days.

Random quote: “We get up every morning deciding to be San Francisco, our church, America.” I loved this quote, partially because I wrote something similar: “The country of America is nothing more than a shared story”.

He then moved on to the role of the poet as a possible enabler of infinite games. While Plato apparently pointed out in the Republic that poets can deceive you and bend reality, Carse pointed out that poets can also unveil us and help us escape the finite games that we are trapped in. Carse believes that we need poets to “cure” blind faith and believers, to be non-judgmental, to create a larger inclusive context (which I loved, because I’ve been positing the same role for stories). Because “finite players will destroy themselves”. Which I thought was interesting, in light of Beemer’s comment (quoted here) that “you’d be able to tell that Good was Good because Evil eventually annihilates itself when correctly applied.”

Unfortunately, he ran out of time around here (I would have happily listened to him talk for much longer), and was forced to take questions, so the rest of my notes are just random quotes.

• “A true teacher makes themselves dispensable, makes themselves disappear.”
• We are “not dealing with the enemy, but with the enemy within ourselves”. We are always most vigilant about the things that we hate most within ourselves. I know this is so true of myself.
• “All evil is itself the attempt to eliminate evil.” As he notes, Hitler was very clear on what the evil was, and took what were, to him, obvious steps to eliminate that evil. Behavior like that is why Carse posits evil as the consequence of a finite game seeing itself as the whole game. And it ties into his ideas about “veiling”; when we veil the other and turn him into our enemy, we have also veiled ourselves, and limited our ability to think outside the rules of the finite game. This is a really really powerful observation. I’ve had some thoughts about similar subjects before, but apparently was never get them together coherently enough to blog. Stuff like this was why I thought it was a great talk. These brief ideas that can change the way you look at things.
• He described a friend of his who’d put all his savings into a business that was heavily dependent on a particular supplier, and who then got screwed over by that supplier. He ran into his friend at an airport, asked him how things were going. His friend said that he’d run into that supplier just then. Carse asked “So what’d you do?”, imagining a thrashing (the friend was a former Marine). His friend said “I bought him a beer”. When Carse’s mouth dropped open, his friend said “It’s only business.” It’s just a finite game. Move beyond those self-set boundaries, and take on the infinite game of life. We have the “freedom to give up the involvements of daily life.” So easy to say. So, so, so hard to do. Or I’d be trying to turn this blogging thing into a job right now.
• On a similar note, it’s scary to think of that kind of freedom. Terrifying to realize that the only thing keeping us in the prisons of our daily lives is ourselves. Carse pointed out that true believers were essentially trying to get rid of their own freedom. They wanted history to end, to not have to think any more about what to believe. The concept of freedom was too terrifying. This topic is handled wonderfully in V for Vendetta, a graphic novel partially about anarchy, but mostly about the exploration of the idea that the most powerful person is one who realizes that he is free in exactly the way that Carse describes.
• Carse pointed out that we are often so scared of that freedom that we go to war against our own uncertainty. The example he gave, of course, was Iraq. We couldn’t deal with al Qaeda, and couldn’t deal with the idea that terrorists might be able to hurt us, so we created a new enemy (or, technically, resurrected an old one) and went to invade Iraq.
• Somebody from the audience (it turned out to be a friend of mine from MIT) asked whether science could be construed as being an infinite game, on par with the great religions. Carse agreed whole-heartedly. He used Freud as an example of a “poet” of the type that he lauded. He said that Freud may not have been a great scientist, but his conceptions of the unconscious and of dreams changed the culture of the world, because his ideas were so powerfully attractive. That was true poetry in Carse’s world.

Really interesting talk. Carse had a lot to say that I totally agreed with. I like his conception of poetry as the generator of infinite games, because I’ve been on my story kick. I’ll read his book at some point, and report back here.

Quick update. I went to the Accelerating Change conference this weekend. I also went to BloggerCon on Saturday. I’d been waitlisted at BloggerCon, but got in last week, and since the two conferences were a 5 minute walk apart at Stanford, I decided to try to cherry-pick the best of both worlds. I think I did okay, with some judicious running around.

I’ll try to do a full writeup of Accelerating Change at some point, with all of my notes and quotes and everything. But I’m pretty busy this week (couple deadlines at work), so it may not be until next weekend. My notes from BloggerCon were pretty brief, though, so I’ll put them up now.

I attended the first and last sessions, the journalism session and the election session. The journalism session was the most interesting from my perspective, even though it eventually degraded into a “Are bloggers journalists or not?” debate, especially when the folks from the AP and CBS chimed in.

Some thoughts I took away from it:

• Scott Rosenberg made a comment in the introduction to the journalism session about the possibility of journalists learning from bloggers about how to bring their personal voice into their work. My only thought was, what, like Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism? I like the image of bloggers in a hot rod convertible on the way to Vegas seeing giant bats descending from the sky…
• Somebody referred to a quote by Dan Gillmor, “The people formerly known as readers”. In a DFW moment, I made the connection to the concept of authorship in postmodernism (one of the essays in that book covered this topic), where the reader is an integral part of the meaning of a work, by providing the context in which the work is read. Way too eggheaded. I know. But it entertains me.
• I thought it was interesting that one distinction that people made was the difference between journalists and bloggers was that journalists have access to inside sources. I think that’s probably true, but having recently read Six Degrees, I was pondering who one might know that would be an inside source that a standard journalist would never know about. Given the sheer numbers of people blogging, we probably have inside sources that the mass media outlets couldn’t dream of. For instance, on many tech stories, I could call a friend from MIT and have an inside view of the situation.
• I liked a quote, from I think Jay Rosen, saying that standard journalistic objectivity could also be called the “view from nowhere”.
• One thought that occurred to me during the “are bloggers journalists” debate. Given the recent meme of the long tail, might blogging be the long tail of journalism? The idea of the long tail is that in a world of mass markets, only things which appeal to the lowest common denominator are worth producing. Nowadays, between Amazon, eBay and iTunes, we can reach the “long tail” of the other 80% of stuff which isn’t necessarily of mass appeal, but of specific appeal. The same argument might be made of mass media journalism, that only stories of mass appeal are used. Rebecca MacKinnon shared her frustration with being unable to file several international stories when she was a correspondent because her editors said that Americans just don’t care. But in a blogging world, it’s okay if there’s a small audience. Ed Cone shared the story of a friend of his who interviewed the fire chief of his town about some controlled burns they were doing near his farm and put it up on his blog. Ed pointed out that maybe only 6 people were interested, but, hey, that was okay. Blogs can be targeted in a way that mass media can’t be. So I thought it might be a way past the “is blogging journalism” hangup to think of blogs as the long tail of journalism. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to share that idea during the session, but Scott Rosenberg liked it when I proposed it to him afterward, and I figured I’d share it here.

The election session was a bit of a disappointment. Although Ed Cone, the discussion leader, tried to keep it from turning into a shared disappointment-fest, he wasn’t entirely successful. It was also interesting how few suggestions I heard that I thought would make a difference in increasing the usefulness of blogging. The main point people made was that e-mail was, by far, the most useful networking tool of this election (and my experiences in Ohio bear that out). So what do blogs have to offer? Somebody made the point that we should be using blogs as a chance to engage people different from us, rather than sitting in the liberal echo chamber. Jay Rosen suggested that candidates should be blogging themselves to get their personal voice out there (although I think that might be difficult to reconcile with keeping a consistent message). Lots to think about. I especially want to spend some more time thinking about the use of blogs as a tool for inviting dialogue with people we don’t agree with. Not sure where to even begin with that.

The first and last sessions were pretty uneventful, so that’s pretty much my report. I stopped by the Larry Lessig discussion on law and blogging because I think he’s cool, but it didn’t really do much for me, and there was another presentation at Accelerating Change that I really wanted to see.

General thoughts. The “unconference” format was a little bit odd. Because the discussion leader had a microphone and everybody else had to wait in line for one, the power dynamic didn’t lend itself to a real sharing of ideas I felt. In a couple sessions I attended, the dialogue got off into a thread that I thought was pretty uninteresting, but there wasn’t really a mechanism for shutting it down and starting a new thread. I almost felt that it’d be better if the first part of each session were a brainstorming of topics and then the room could be split up into people that wanted to follow each topic, with people being free to float from one topic to another. But, then again, I’m a generalist and prefer skimming.

Neat idea overall, though. I’m glad I stopped by. It was kind of neat to see some of the powerhouse bloggers in person (I think two or three of the bloggers who blogged the national conventions were there – Dave Winer and Doc Searls for sure). And interesting to hear some of the different perspectives on blogging from people who are a lot more into it than I am.

I mentioned this talk last week, and I did go to it. Lessig is a fantastic public speaker. Organized and cogent. While watching his talk, I was reminded that I’d read somewhere that if you want to see Powerpoint used appropriately, go to a Lessig talk. And it’s so, so true. He takes what Tufte views as disadvantages and turns them into advantages. You can only fit a few words on a slide? Great! Put up the point you’re making in a one or two word phrase, and leave it there while you expand upon it. It provides the audience focus, but doesn’t lead to you reading the slide. It helps that Lessig’s presentations are idea-centered, not data-centered, so no need for graphs. But anyway…

As far as the talk itself, he didn’t say anything particularly surprising to those of us who have read his books (particularly The Future of Ideas), so go check those out for details. The main idea was drawing a distinction between “rivalrous resources” such as land, that leads to the infamous Tragedy of the Commons, where “Freedom … will bring ruin to all”, and “nonrivalrous resources” such as ideas, as described by the Thomas Jefferson quote at the top of this article. Rivalrous resources are naturally competitive; if you use more, I get to use less. Nonrivalrous resources are not necessarily so; Lessig used language as an example, where the more people use language, the more people benefit. It’s a network effect.

He then went on to discourse about the importance of the commons for ideas, and how we all benefit by having a commons. He identified two types of commons: an innovation commons (as exemplified by the end-to-end nature of the internet (aka a stupid network) and a creative commons (where ideas and images are in the public domain, as opposed to locked up in copyright, due to the ridiculous extension of copyright pushed by Disney) (he pointed out that the default is now to lock up your work – he wasn’t even sure it was possible to declare that your work was in the public domain, even if you wanted it to be).

The last part of the talk was the most interesting to me. He pointed to the rise of Intellectual Property Extremism, where IP becomes a goal in itself. He pointed out that Jefferson and the framers of the Constitution intended IP to be used to promote the public good, by making a sufficient incentive to create. His point was that IP is a means not an end. Or as he put it, “Property is a tool, like a hammer.” There are appropriate and inappropriate uses for it; for a hammer, a nail is appropriate, a butterfly is not. You judge a tool and its appropriateness for a task by its effects, not support it regardless of consequences; otherwise, you fall into the “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” trap.

So Lessig’s question was simple: does IP and current copyright law promote behavior that we want to value? His answer is no. I suspect his new book, Free Culture, available online, makes the argument more convincingly, but the gist of it is that we move forward in innovation and creativity by building off of what came before. So locking up ideas destroys our capacity for innovation. Therefore, if we judge IP and copyright law by the standard of its effects, we have to say it’s a bad idea. There are appropriate uses of copyright law and IP, and Lessig is happy to argue for them. But IP as an unalloyed good is a myth in his eyes.

Couple last vignettes:

• To combat the idea that intellectual property rights were inscribed in the Constitution and must never be touched, he mentioned the case of the Causbys, who were chicken farmers near an air force base. The planes’ landing vector took them straight over the Causbys’ farm, which led to chickens freaking out and running into walls. So the Causbys took the government to court, claiming that their property extended down to the center of the earth, and out to “the periphery of the universe”, and therefore the airplanes were trespassing. Such a definition of land ownership was also around from the writing of the Constitution. The judges dismissed that argument out of hand – “Common sense revolts at the idea.” Lessig suggested that our common sense should revolt at the idea of what is currently being done in the name of IP.
• He commented at one point about how he had a hard time convincing people of the subtleties of his argument, because they had a kneejerk reaction that breaking copyright is stealing, and stealing is bad. I asked him afterwards if he thought this might be a matter of Lakoff-like framing, where the phrase “intellectual property” puts people in a cognitive frame of property, their stuff, which you shouldn’t be able to steal. He says he goes back and forth on the issue – he thinks that for convincing the general public, a new phrase/frame might help, but legalistically, he wants to use the term property, because it’s the correct legal term. Property rights legally include the ability to exclude people from using it, and the alienable right to transfer its ownership. He also points out that real property has similar restrictions as the ones he’s proposing for intellectual property. For instance, if the town builds a sidewalk on your property, you do not have the right to build a fence across the sidewalk to prevent people from walking on it. In fact, if you do, others have the right to break the fence to continue to use the sidewalk as is their right. The analogy to publishing DVD decryption algorithms should be clear. I thought it was interesting; from a legal point of view, I think he’s correct in trying to reclaim the term property and use it properly. But from a public relations point of view, Lakoff points out that “frames trump facts”, and no matter how good an argument you make, people will respond to frames more than to their self-interest. Something to be considered at least. Of course, coming up with a better term than intellectual property is tricky. I’ll mull it over.

Good talk. Go see Lessig if you get the chance. And read his books. Good stuff.

I went to the Future Salon on Extreme Democracy last week. Some really interesting stuff was discussed. The Future Salon weblog has a full description with links, so I’ll just add my couple thoughts.

I really really like what Zack Rosen is doing over at CivicSpace. By making it easier for grass roots groups to hook up and exchange information, he’s building the infrastructure tools necessary for a new kind of bottom-up democracy that lets the best ideas bubble to the top. While I like the idea of representative democracy, it becomes hard to deliver when the representation is so coarse; in a discussion over at livejournal in response to one of my posts, doing the math made me realize that a House representative represents close to 600,000 people. That seems like far too big of a group to represent. Yet 435 Representatives in the House is already too many to have a substantive discussion. Over in that discussion, we posited the existence of something like “fractal democracy” where you have representatives of relatively small groups get together and hash things out, and then have a representative of that group go up to the next level, where it’s the same self-similar structure all the way up. And tools like CivicSpace are the way to enable such a thing. Very neat stuff.

I was also surprised by how much I liked the talk by Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute. Words like co-intelligence set off triggers in my brain of hippie new-age sentimentality, but Atlee concentrated on one key point, which is that discussions among different people often lead to better decisions. Just the very act of bringing people together who disagree can generate new and surprising solutions to old problems, as he outlines in this article. What struck me about his talk, which he outlines here, was that such deliberations allow for a new and better democracy. I lamented about democracy recently, partially based on the tendency that “When pollsters ask people for their opinion about an issue, people generally feel obliged to have one.” Given that such questions from pollsters are always framed multiple choice questions, it can lead to some pretty dumb choices. By giving citizens a forum in which they can discuss what they are actually looking for, rather than forcing them to choose among several ill-suited options, we could improve the feedback loop to government, which will hopefully lead to better decisions. It’s a way out of the bi-modal thinking that is so cognitively dangerous and limiting. A pollster asking “Are you for or against tax relief?” shuts down all other options. But in a dialogue, I could expand on my answer and say “Sure, I want lower taxes, but I also want better schools and transportation. I’m fine with the level of my taxes, but I’d like my taxes to be better spent, less on ridiculous boondoggle pork barrel defense contracts, and more on my local community.” It will be really interesting to see how Atlee’s focus on dialogue and mediation will cross-pollinate with the technology community represented by Zack Rosen at CivicSpace and Ross Mayfield at Socialtext.

It makes me want to get involved somehow. Need to start building up those tools, learning Perl, setting up a web server, etc. One step at a time.

Democracy for America is the political action committee started by supporters of Howard Dean to represent “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party”. I happened to hear of a training course they were doing on political campaigns in conjunction with 21st Century Democrats. Given my recent interest in politics, I was curious, so I signed up.

It was pretty interesting. I’m not an activist, and I’ve never worked on a campaign, which may have put me in a minority of one in the room of 150 or so people. But hearing from these people that have worked on numerous campaigns and were laying it all out for us was impressive. They get it. All of those complaints I had from the outside – they understand them. Kelly Young, the founder of 21st Century Democrats, started things off with a great presentation which pointed out that the point of a campaign is to win an election. That’s it. It’s not to spread the word about your views, it’s not to win people over, it’s to win an election. You may do those other things in the service of the campaign, but keep your eye on the goal.

She also ran some scary numbers if you believe in democracy as an idea (not that I do). Take a typical district of 75,000. That’s an overwhelming number of people you have to convince to win an election. But, of those, maybe 50% are registered voters. That’s 37,500. And, of those registered voters, maybe 40% actually show up to vote. That’s 15,000. And of those, you only have to get 50% plus one. That’s 7,501 voters you have to convince. That’s significantly more tractable and gets more so, when you break it down even further, which they covered later. So the importance of a field campaign (which is Kelly’s specialty) is paramount in convincing swing voters and getting out the vote.

When you step back and look at that, 10% of the people in a district will enforce their will on everybody else. And that frightens me a little bit. That doesn’t seem very democratic. It’s how you win an election right now, but I’d idealistically like to think there’s some way to change the system to make it more representative. We had some interesting comments over on LiveJournal about possible fractal government structures, where self-similar structures coalesce all the way up. I’d like to develop that further at some point (and think about how to design the social interface), but back to the training for now.

Kelly also made great points about the importance of organization. Make a campaign plan – “If it isn’t written down, it doesn’t exist”. Make a timeline so you know when things will happen. Keep track of your voter lists, so you know who to help go vote on election day. Develop your story – why should people vote for your candidate? Then she got into details of each of these things. I thought the parallels to project management are obvious: Gant charts (timelines), Product Concept Documents (the story), Product Specification Documents (the detailed campaign plan), etc. That probably only amused me, though.

The rest of the day had some great talks as well. Dan Chavez and Steve Ybarra from Latinos for America had some good advice about how to be effective in the field. “Drive the county” and “Visit Walmart” were notable quotes. When Steve asked the crowd how many of us had shopped at Walmart, it cracked me up when nobody raised their hand – Steve said “That’s average America – that’s who you have to talk to!”.

Bob Mulholland, a strategist for the California Democratic Party, chatted about campaign strategy and reality – I think my favorite piece of advice was to keep it simple. Don’t get into explaining stuff. His example was make your message “Stop Bush!” If you leave it at that, the person that sees it applies their own context and interprets in terms of their own personal woes. If you keep on going and say “Stop Bush because he’s against gay marriage”, then maybe that person goes “Well, I don’t know how I feel about gay marriage, so maybe I don’t agree with this campaigner.” Use the voters’ ability to supply context to your advantage. He also said it’s all about attack, attack, attack. When questioned by the audience why Kerry wasn’t following that strategy, he said he wasn’t on the campaign, but he’d guess that it wouldn’t play well with the appropriate voters of the swing states. I thought that was an interesting observation – we all assume that other people are like us, and they’ll be convinced by similar things. So because we rabid progressives want to see Kerry destroy Bush, we assume other people do as well. Maybe we’re wrong (despite my rants to the contrary).

Dan came back with some thoughts about targeting voters in an election campaign. Remember those 7501 voters you needed for that theoretical district of 75,000? How do you find the right 7501? You use the National Committee for an Effective Congress to get the numbers breakdown on your district to find out if it’s even possible, and to find out who has voted in which elections recently. Then you go out and ask people their positions. Doing that, you can start throwing people out right away. Anybody that doesn’t vote, punt. Anybody that consistently votes Republican, punt. People that regularly vote, and consistently vote Democratic, punt (this one brought protests from the audience, but he made the point that you’re wasting resources on people that are already on your side). So that leaves two main groups that you have to address. Undecided voters who always vote – these are your top priority, because not only will they not vote for you, they will vote for the opposition – you have to convince them. Then there’s the voters who consistently vote for the Democrat when they do vote, but don’t make it to all the elections – these are voters you have to make sure show up on Election Day. So you’ve winnowed the district down to a manageable number of key people. Again, that’s how the math works to win elections right now. Kind of unromantic, though

Ralph Miller followed with a great presentation on dealing with the media. The important points I wrote down were “People don’t read!” so make sure that your main point is in the headline, and that your entire story (who, what, where, when, why and how) is in the first paragraph of press releases. Second, press people are normal people (he apparently has been a press guy for years) that respond to kindness, so do your best to make their lives easy. Feed them stuff in a format they want, give them good visuals, make sure you know their deadlines so you can get stuff to them well in advance, thank them afterwards. They will appreciate it, and you’ll get more favorable responses from them in the future. It makes a lot of sense,but it doesn’t surprise me that people forget about the basics in the stress of a campaign. Ralph was also kind enough to stick around during the “breakout sessions” to talk with a few of us some more about the use of media in politics.

Oh, somewhere in there, Steve emphasize 27-9-3. If you want to get a message across, especially on TV, say it in 27 words and 9 seconds, making 3 points. He had a great example, which I unfortunately can’t remember at all. But he guarantees it will work. And it makes sense. However, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to compress my ideas down that well

The day finished with a talk by Jeani Murray, the director of Dean’s campaign in Iowa, about developing and controlling your campaign message. It’s all about telling a story. I think the most interesting aspect of the presentation was when she illustrated the use of a “Message Box”, where you lay out what you’re saying about yourself and your opponent, and what your opponent is saying about himself and you. She used the example of Kerry and Bush. And it was absolutely telling that even in this group of devoted progressives, it was hard for us to articulate what Kerry was saying about either himself or Bush. And yet, all of us knew exactly what Bush was saying about himself (“strong leader” “war on terror”) and Kerry (“flip flopper” “weak leader”). That’s a bad bad sign.

I’ve rambled on too long, as usual. Some really interesting stuff. I ended up skipping the second day of training out of exhaustion and lack of interest – it was covering the details of fieldwork (volunteer recruitment, voter contact, unions, organizing canvasses and phone banks, and getting out the vote), which interest me less than the big picture of the campaign. I have a huge book of notes that they gave out on each of the aspects of the campaign, which I’ll probably look at more later. Overall, I was very impressed by the people running the training. They were focused, efficient, experienced, and ruthless about trying to get the greatest return on their investment of time and money. I wasn’t sure such people existed in the Democratic organization (although the fact that most of these people were in Dean’s campaign says something to me). I was less impressed with some of the audience, who displayed many of the same self-righteous pleading tendencies that make me less inclined to be associated with liberals. But I think the training sessions are a great idea – we need more people out there who are willing to play hardball with the conservatives. The conservatives have developed a tremendous base of political experts in their think tanks. These training sessions and things like Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute are the start of fighting back.

I’ve been a big fan of Jaron Lanier since I first heard him talk several years ago at Stanford. So when I read that he was going to be speaking at the Bay Area Future Salon, I made sure to be there. Really interesting stuff. I’ll try to preserve the flavor of the talk by recounting his talk in chronological order, at least according to my notes, but he skipped around a lot, so apologies for the confusion. Plus, as usual, I won’t be able to resist editorializing.

One of the things I like a lot about Lanier is that he’s a great public speaker, willing and able to adapt his talk on the fly to his audience. He did that again for this talk, where he started out “exploring the talk space”, by giving descriptions of several different sorts of talks he could give, and ideas he’d been exploring. The talk was nominally about the Singularity, an idea that Vernor Vinge has been promoting for about ten years, where we can see that change, especially technology change, is changing at an ever faster rate; therefore, at some point, the change rate will essentially go vertical, and we will no longer be able to predict past that point. Vinge associates this with the moment when we create self-programming, self-aware computers (think the world of Terminator 2 for a pop culture reference). Others associate it with when nanotechnology makes the first molecular self-assemblers. In any case, it’s been a powerful meme, one taken up by Ray Kurzweil, among others. Jaron Lanier composed his response to this “cybernetic totalism” in his “One Half of a Manifesto”. This talk was aimed at conveying ideas about the other uncompleted half of that manifesto.

However, when he surveyed the room, he realized that most people in the room didn’t really believe in the Singularity (my comment was that since technology has to be embedded into social contexts to be adopted, and social institutions adapt more slowly than technology, I wasn’t particularly worried), he skipped the anti-Singularity portion of his talk, except to note that software had become the anti-Moore’s Law. He showed a bunch of interesting graphs allegedly from NIST showing that software is taking longer to develop, is much slower to run, and is becoming harder to manage (he showed one great graph illustrating the difference between estimated completion of software projects and actual completion was growing exponentially). So he’s not worried about software taking over the world no matter how far Moore’s Law takes us, because, well, we suck at software.

He then went on to throw some other ideas out there. One question he raised was “How do people use theories of the future to inform the present?”, a question touched on by Peter Schwartz when I saw him talk, and one that informs the whole concept of scenario planning. So he used the rest of the talk to throw out his own theory of the future that was, as he put it, somewhere “between truth and bullshit” hopefully hitting “the sweet spot of utility”.

He started by discussing the idea of different ramps. A lot of engineers and scientists like what he called the ramp of technology progress, the idea that we are increasing our power of technology and our understanding of the world in a continuous fashion. We are on a one-way ride to a future powered by technology. And things like Moore’s Law and the idea of the Singularity seem to reinforce there’s no getting off this ramp and that this is inevitable. But Lanier has issues with developing technology for technology’s sake. I’ll get to those in a second, in an attempt to follow the way the talk actually went.

So if we don’t believe in the technology ramp, what should we believe in? Well, Lanier pointed out that some people believe in a ramp of moral improvement, where we are all becoming better people, and will eventually all be paragons like Martin Luther King or Gandhi. As Lanier pointed out, there _may_ be continuous progress made along those lines, but it’s hard to see because there’s a lot of noise in that system, and people today are still doing awful things to each other.

After rejecting that ramp, Lanier proposed a McLuhan-esque ramp, one based around media and ever-increasing interpersonal connection. This ramp roughly goes along the lines of grunting to language to arts to writing to printing to today’s computer-mediated-communication and beyond to things like virtual reality, of which Lanier is a big proponent. But Lanier immediately asked the question: what are the job requirements of a ramp? If a ramp comes up to us and applies for a job as our dominant paradigm, what should we be looking for? This is a meaningful question, since, as he said at the beginning, theories of the future determine how we act in the present, so choosing the right ramp can be of great importance.

The criteria he proposed are that the ramp allows us to talk about the future in a way that is not immediately self-destructive. He started with the moral ramp, because he had the most snide comments about it. One of the problems with the moral ramp is that any moral system so far developed that gave a strong enough sense of identity to provide guidance, also created a sense of exclusion, which immediately leads to problems. As soon as some people are on the outside, they want to fight to get in, and thus the system is empirically self-destructive. He does concede that there is definite progress on the ramp of morality; if we look at the past, we see that things have been much worse. But there’s definitely still a lot of work to be done, and going around trumpeting one’s own superiority is probably not the way to do it.

We took a detour here (which is a good thing – Lanier’s digressions are more interesting than most people’s entire talks). I’m not sure whether these are my comments or his, but improving technology actually has enabled the moral ramp; because we have been brought closer together, both by improved transportation and improved communication, we are more likely to treat each other as people rather than disembodied enemies. Then I have another side comment of his about the “Marin approach”, where people check out and do their own thing, which he derides because it doesn’t accomplish anything and is narcissistic.

Back to the ramp discussion, and on to the technology ramp. He points out that our planet is very much like a group of extremely clever bored teenage hackers trapped in a guest house equipped with a chemistry lab, all sorts of electronics, etc. What is the inevitable result? The house blows up. “Boredom is the most powerful force in the universe to smart people.” and “Armageddon is a disease of young men.” Because of that, there is an inherent tendency towards an academic desire for stasis, for completeness, where everything just stays the same (I’d say that this is extremely related to the conservative movement’s desire to turn back the clock to the happy days of the 50s). But it’s impossible. As we all grow more connected in an attempt to create wealth, we are also creating hazards as well. Most technology is value-neutral; it can be used for constructive or destructive things. So the technology ramp is also the ramp of being able to do increased damage to each other. He detoured again into the history of arms races, starting with the Greeks who realized they could overcome being outnumbered by fighting as a synchronized unit in a phalanx. They kicked off an organizational theory arms race that basically hit its own singularity when the atomic bomb was created, whereby everybody dies if a war happens. But because the technology ramp enables and encourages increasing technology without bounds, he feels that it will inevitably lead towards self-destruction as well, since if the technology exists, he thinks people will be unable to resist using it.

So he dismissed both the moral and the technology ramp because they were inherently self-destructive. But he proposed some other criteria for a good ramp. One quality is that it needs to be challenging for smart people; again, smart people get bored easily – they need to be engaged, or they’ll go off and blow things up. It needs to be fascinating in a non-destructive fashion. It needs to sustain interest in technology without the accompanying tendency to kill ourselves. He believes that we are at the stage where we need to turn away from the technology ramp and to the McLuhanesque ramp. He feels that we are not at the edge of technology transition, as the proponents of the Singularity would have you believe, but at the edge of a cultural transition.

Then he got really distracted for a bit. He discussed the cephalopods that he brought up in the talk I saw several years ago, except that this time he had a video of the mimic octopus, which are just mind-blowing. Nobody in the room believed it was real – they all thought it was computer animation. The octopus can control both its skin color on a pixel-by-pixel basis, and distort its shape using muscles under the skin to mimic its background incredibly well. The video clip in question had a scuba diver sneak up on one that was hiding in a bush, and we all were shocked when it suddenly appeared and swam away. Even on a frame-by-frame rate. Very neat stuff. Roger Hanlon from Wood’s Hole is the marine biologist that he references, but I haven’t had a chance to follow up.

He then started talking about early childhood, and the confusion of reality and fantasy that is part of childhood, where anything you imagine pops into being, making the child basically a god. If a kid imagines a mile-high tarantula made of amethyst crawling around Palo Alto, they can see it there in their mind’s eye immediately. If somebody actually wanted to create such a thing, it could never happen. So the moment when kids realize that the world is not theirs to control, that they are not gods, is a moment of leaving childhood. The real world has its benefits, like companionship and other people, but it’s still quite a loss. But it immediately begs the question for the child: what parts of the real world _can_ be controlled?

Then he got distracted again by his continuing interest in post-symbolic communication, which he also referenced in that earlier talk. The idea is that “Symbolism is a speed hack”. If I actually wanted to show you a mile-high amethyst tarantula over Palo Alto, it would take forever to construct it. But if I use the symbols to represent it, you can imagine it without me having to do that work. It’s easier and faster. The natural followup is what would our lives be like if symbols weren’t necessary, if it was as easy as thought to create things? How would that be possible? Given his history with virtual reality, Lanier’s answer isn’t surprising. If children grew up in a world of virtual reality, where imagining made things real, that they could share and show to others, they would develop a completely different language than the one we have based on symbols.

He tied that idea back into the cephalopods. Given their ability to mimic things, they could use their morphing abilities to communicate. Rather than use symbols to represent an object, they could just turn themselves into it. They don’t appear to do that, but that’s probably a good thing. If they developed language and the ability to transfer information between generations, Lanier feels that they would rival humans in their mastery of the world. In fact, he made the analogy that “humans plus virtual reality equals cephalopods plus culture”. An interesting thought to be sure. And the idea that our childhood matters, since that is when we are brought up to speed on a whole host of accumulated learning in the form of culture, is pretty compelling.

Lanier started talking a little bit about his previous work in virtual reality, from way back in the early days of the 80s, when everything was incredibly clunky. He said there was some really interesting work done with avatars, where people given distorted bodies adapted incredibly fast, whether they were given really long legs, or huge hands, or whatever. In fact, if you gave them a completely different body, such as a lobster body with too many limbs (the middle limbs of the avatar were controlled by a combination of trunk and hand movements), people were still able to figure it out quickly. Somebody in the audience pointed out his own similar experience in real life when he learned to drive a forklift; even though it had five levers and all sorts of pedals, by the end of the day, he was just lifting things without thinking about the controls.

I’m going to go off on my own here, because I didn’t get a chance to mention this at the talk, but I’m pretty sure that the key here is feedback. If you provide consistent, useful feedback to a human, they can figure out how to do pretty much anything, whether it’s drive a forklift, control an avatar, or do a handstand. This is why current software is so terrible; it provides inconsistent, unuseful feedback, so it’s impossible to figure out what’s going on. The editor vi is a great example; it’s apparently incredibly powerful once you learn to use it, but if you’re thrown into it, it’s bewildering. The behavior of keys changes depending on what mode you’re in, or what order you hit them. Terrible feedback, making it impossible to learn naturally. In a virtual world, providing useful feedback is critical to engaging the learning sections of our brain. In the real world, there are all sorts of constraints and ongoing feedback from our bodies that we integrate in our brain to learn. Driving a car is a perfect example – you see how the car changes positions in the lane depending on your movement of the steering wheel, and that’s it – people learn how to drive pretty much instantaneously. And yet, put the same people on a driving video game, they do much worse, because the connection between their controls and the feedback that they get is minimal, making it much harder for them to adjust. Anyway. Back to Lanier’s talk.

Lanier went on a rant that believing in strong artificial intelligence correlated with designing terrible software. Designing for AI is designing for the computer, not for the person, and therefore such software has horrible usability. He said that the Turing Test was terrible for AI because you can’t tell the difference between the computer getting smarter and the human getting dumber to compensate. It’s not empirical. His example was credit ratings (the same one he used in his previous talk), where credit companies have these really dumb algorithms that determine your rating, which allegedly predict your creditworthiness. Instead, sensible people do dumb things, like borrow money they don’t need, to increase their credit rating. He also referred to Ask Jeeves vs. Google in the search engine wars. Ask Jeeves tried to put the intelligence in the server. Google made the server side simple and relied on people to do its work for it.

He related a cute anecdote about a meeting back in the 50s between Marvin Minsky and Doug Engelbart. Minsky was so excited, talking about all the ways he was going to make computers better and smarter. Engelbart said “You’ll do all that for a machine, but you won’t do anything for people?” Engelbart, of course, went on to do the famous 1968 demo, which basically demonstrated every user interface technology that has been used since, including the mouse, windows, file systems, etc.

Lanier then implored the audience, a majority of whom were software engineers, to design for the user. Design for people. Join the McLuhan ramp, oriented towards people, rather than the technology ramp, oriented towards the machine. He pointed out the benefits – that the results would be empirical, because you can measure the happiness of the user, that it’s just darn cool and intense because helping other people is evolutionarily bred into us, and that it’s just better. And I actually piped up here to argue with him. While I totally agree that software should be user-oriented, I thought it was unrealistic for Lanier to try to sweep the culture away like that. For one thing, his definition of empirical is pretty weak. Most software engineers like their metrics of algorithmic efficiency, and cycle time, and things like that, compared to the messiness of dealing with real breathing humans that don’t think like you want them to. Lanier responded that those were “fake metrics”, that didn’t measure anything useful – you could develop software that met those metrics, and still not produce something usable.

Again, I totally agree with him, as my previous post illustrates, but I think it’s hard to change the culture. As I pointed out, “That’s nice, but the people doing the hiring of software engineers like those fake metrics and will hire people that fill them”, which was the basis of my complaint in that post. I kind of suspect that Lanier has the opinion that I once heard from Richard Stallman, when he advocated that all software engineers should only work for companies that had open source code. When somebody asked him what they should do if they were at a company that didn’t, Stallman told them to quit, because if they were any good, they should be able to dictate the terms on which they work. And while that may work for the geniuses like Stallman and Lanier, for the rest of us trying to pay our rent and the like, it’s not so easy.

But I do agree with Lanier on the intensity and pleasure of a user-centered engineering effort. The first time I built something as a consultant where the customer turned to me and said “Wow. This is so cool! I could never do this before!” I was hooked. It was so much more satisfying to me than the ineffable rewards of academia that my graduate school career tried to promote. And I have run my career ever since in that way. But I’m not sure I’m hireable. I don’t have the right skill sets. I don’t care about the right things. I don’t write code in the most efficient way, so when they ask me the interview question of “write a function that reverses a string” I do it in the non-optimal way, and lose points. Anyway. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Lanier, as usual, had a bunch of interesting ideas. I’m not sure I agree with all of them, but they’re thought provoking, and tie into a lot of my own thoughts. If you get the chance to hear him speak, I’d highly recommend it.

Most of the rest of my notes are one-liners:

• He commented that first person shooters were the worst thing to happen to virtual reality, because they sucked up all the money in a totally useless uninteresting direction.
• He said that when there’s a lot of money at stake, people adopt superstitions, and that superstition is the enemy of creativity.
• For multiplayer games that seem to be doing things the right way to promote the McLuhan ramp and “real” virtual reality, he recommended Linden Labs Second Life, because they promote people building their own things inside the world, and explicitly give users ownership of things they build.
• He mentioned his Karma Vertigo idea again, and that’s one of the reasons he’s promoting the McLuhan ramp, to get people who are developing new technologies thinking about reordering their priorities towards people and away from the machines.
• “The difference between the ordinary and extraordinary is the tone of voice you use to talk about it.” I think this was referring to the “Wow, that’s so cool” nature of doing things for people.
• James P. Carse, “Finite and Infinite Games” – I think this refers to zero-sum, or finite, games, vs. virtuous circle, or infinite, games. Lanier believes the McLuhan ramp is an infinite game.
• The McLuhan ramp is grounded in human experience. It’s about art, which is about interpersonal connection – art is meaningless without an audience. The ramp needs to be so wonderful and amazing that it will be cool enough to distract us from mass suicide.

A couple weeks ago, I went to a talk by Paul Saffo down at Xerox PARC. I knew very little about Paul Saffo, other than that he was a well-known futurist, but I had heard good references to him in enough places that I wanted to see what he had to say. So I went.

It was a great talk. If you ever get the chance to see Saffo speak, do so. He’s an excellent public speaker, comfortable in front of a crowd and always ready with an appropriate and interesting anecdote. Moreover, he’s got something to say. He has a coherent viewpoint that has stayed relatively consistent over time; several points in his talk were similar to points he had made in older articles that I had read on his website before going to the talk (go see my footnote for more discussion of one of those essays).

Saffo centered his talk about the well-known S-curve of technology adoption (PDF file). But unlike most people, he didn’t talk about the steep part of the curve, where everybody’s adopting the technology and the investors are making more money than they could have imagined. His talk was focused on the flat part of the S-curve, long before the steep part. As he quoted, “It takes twenty years to be an overnight success.” His first example was Douglas Engelbart and his famous 1968 demo, where he debuted the mouse, a graphical user interface, hypertext, word processing, dynamic file linking, and many other innovations. Note that it took until at least the Macintosh in 1984 for such innovations to reach the mass market, and until Windows in 1990 for them to become commonplace. Twenty years. In the years following the demo, Saffo said that Engelbart must have felt like a genius elevated to tragic hero, as people took his ideas and ran with them, but in stupid and brain-damaged ways that made it clear they didn’t see the whole picture. Saffo joked that Engelbart must have wanted to say “Wait! Wait! No, you don’t understand!” Thus, Saffo’s thesis for the talk was that the secret to innovation was to pay attention to the flat part of the technology curve. There’s a lot of stuff there that is ripe to be exploited.

He pointed out that most people’s tendency to project the future linearly leads them to be wrong twice if the technology S-curve is the right model. They both overestimate the immediate future (where the S-curve is flat, and they’re trying to project a linear rise), but underestimate the further future (where the S-curve rises above the linear projection). So his Rule #1 of Innovation was know where you are on the S-curve. In particular, to get a short-term success, look for something that’s been failing for twenty years. That means it’s just about finished the flat part of the S-curve and is ready for the steep rise where somebody can make money off of it.

He then bemoaned the fate of a technology forecaster (the term he uses for himself rather than futurist). The problem is that when the future happens, it happens late and different and in an unlikely fashion. For a technology forecaster to be credible, their predictions must be plausible, consistent and believable. Reality is not constrained by any such characteristics. So the outlandish will often come to pass before the credible. His example was flight. When the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, they invented a one person aircraft. If you’d asked them how long it would be until personal aircraft were as common as cars, they would have thought it reasonably soon. If you’d described a 747 to them, and said that was going to happen first, they would have laughed at you. Outlandish before the credible.

Rule #2 of Innovation was that innovation is built on failure, not success. His example was that interactive television was a total failure. It imploded in the early 90s, leaving “one very important byproduct, a community of laid-off C++ programmers who were now expert in multimedia design, and out on the street looking for the next big thing.” (see his article for more discussion) Sure enough, the web appeared as an idea, they all leaped on it, and look where we are today. But if there hadn’t been this ready pool of talented programmers available, would the web as we know it exist? Saffo finds it unlikely.

So his advice to the aspiring entrepreneur is to look for total failures and see if they’ve matured enough that they’re almost through the flat part of the curve (“look for diamonds in the bubble rubble”). In particular, something is ripe for takeoff when people dismiss it and make fun of it. Interactive television was one example. Push technology was another; why was push technology a disaster? Because the vast majority of people were connected to the net by dialup at that point, and nobody wants data pushed to them when they have to pay for bandwidth. In an always-on broadband world, the equation changes, and we’re already starting to see that with aggregators and their kin.

Why is the flat part of the curve so long? Why does it take twenty years? Why are things slow? Because people are stubborn. They hate change. It’s not a coincidence that the flat part is 20-30 years, an interval that also corresponds to a human generation. That’s how long it takes for a new generation to grow up comfortable with the new technology.

Saffo then moved onto the second focus of his talk, which was the declaration that the Information Revolution is over. It’s won. Information is no longer scarce, a precious commodity to be husbanded. It is mobile. It is ubiquitous. It has become media, and with its ubiquity, it has become personal media. In fact, he says that a technology has matured when it becomes media. His examples were that television was invented in the 1930s, but it took until the 1950s for broadcast television to become a standard, that time sharing computers were invented in the 1960s but email was not common until the 1980s, or that client-server computers were developed in the 1980s but took until the mid-1990s to become the Web. He also noted that the cycle appears to be quickening (peer-to-peer became Napster almost immediately). His prediction for the next wave would be for sensors to become “smartifacts” (see this article or this interview for further discussion).

The Media Revolution (analogous to the Information Revolution) is happening now. We are experiencing the transformation of media from mass media to personal media. The selection of media is quickly becoming tied to our selection of physical artifacts. His example was that he realized that his Mercedes was basically a computer with wheels. You’re paying for the software on those myriad of chips, from the fuel injection systems to the electronic stability control. In fact, with the addition of Tele Aid to Mercedes cars, some of the software is now subscription-based. He told the funny story of how, at the end of his free first year, a Tele Aid operator called and talked to him in his car and tried to convince him that he should renew the service. He said it wouldn’t be long until the car was given away, and all the money would be made on subscription fees. And I’m not so sure he’s wrong.

Another interesting point was that the Media Revolution entails the death of interfaces. The idea is removed from the vocabulary. You interact with media in various ways, but you don’t need an interface as a window to some remote world of information. You read the newspaper, or you watch television. When the interface fades to invisibility, then the technology has turned the corner. Donald Norman makes the same point in his book The Invisible Computer. The iPod is a media object in that sense; we don’t think of it as technology with all the negative connotations. It’s just like a walkman. And that’s why it continues to outsell its competitors (I own an Archos Jukebox that is a pain to use).

Along the same lines, he mentioned how technology enables the next round of media. Voice over the Internet (aka VoIP) is a technology. It’s kind of lame. Very few people use it. However, iChat AV makes using VoIP so easy that you don’t think of it as a technology. You just click on your friend and start talking. It’s so easy that you’ve now created a shared space. John Perry Barlow has a nice account of how it changes how you think about communication. In fact, it’s so easy that it will probably replace phones in the future to the point where Saffo predicts that the touch tone pad will disappear. Who would dial a number when you can just click?

Okay, the rest of my notes are pretty disjointed so I’ll just type them up (this is what happens when I don’t type up my notes immediately after the talk). He talked about the rise of personal robots, and noted that most Roomba owners had named their Roomba, and 25% had taken their Roomba on vacation. He talked about the rise of gnat cameras (as also discussed by David Brin in The Transparent Society). He said that even though the invasion of Iraq saw the first extensive use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in war, we’ll know that UAVs have really arrived when we see them with a CNN logo filming the next war.

Then we got into the question and answer session, so the thoughts get even more disconnected…

• One interesting idea is that the 802.* protocols for wireless internet are merely enabling technologies. What will be the media built on top of them? This is in direct analogy to iChat being built on the VoIP technology?
• Search as a technology is almost dead. In fact, Google’s IPO will pretty much signify its death in the same way that Netscape’s IPO signified the death of the browser as technology rather than media.
• Cyberspace is becoming cyberbia and appealing to the clueless masses. I can’t figure out if this is my thought or something Saffo said, but it was in my notes so I’m typing it. It falls into the technology becoming media viewpoint, so it could go either way.
• Read the science fiction of kids today to find out what technology will look like 10 to 15 years out, because those teenagers will grow up and want to build what they read about. Like how many aspects of cyberpunk are being built now.
• He mentioned the Gramine Bank, and how they are giving cell phones to Bangladeshi women to turn them into businesspeople as mobile phone booths. I googled to find this article.
• He forecasts that cheap Faraday cages will become increasingly popular as people seek to protect their devices and their data from interference from the outside. A Faraday raincoat would be especially popular he suspects. You could sell RFID disablers to the paranoid.
• Back to science fiction, he talks about the possibility of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game scenario. He also recommends Vernor Vinge’s books. Since I love both authors, I thought that was cool.
• It’s all about dematerializing objects, substituting bits for atoms (of which he noted that Nicholas Negroponte was the most well-known proponent).
• Step back for a larger perspective. I have scrawled in the margin “McLuhan fish water discovery”, which Google informs me is probably a reference to this Marshall McLuhan quote: “It�s like the fish in water, he said, we don�t know who discovered water but we know it wasn�t a fish. A pervasive medium is always beyond perception.” The point being that technology is merely technology as long as it’s visible. When it becomes invisible, when it becomes ubiquitous, then it’s turned into media, and is like water to a fish. For an innovator, this encourages two lines of attack: one is to make the invisible visible again and seek to improve it, and the other is to figure out ways to make the visible invisible, turning technology into media.

All in all, a great talk. Lots to think about, and more importantly, it provided a nice framework to tie together some ideas I had and gives me some terminology to start using with those ideas.

Saffo spun off many amusing quotes during the talk. Since they were often tangential, I’ll just collect them all here:

• The S-curve makes “venture capitalists sleep like babies; they sleep for two hours and then wake up and cry.”
• On why he’s a good public speaker, “I’m shallow, glib, and speak in sound bites.”
• He asked the audience who the #1 business author was. Many incorrect answers were shouted out. Then he revealed the answer: Scott Adams, author of Dilbert and the associated books. I don’t remember the point that he was trying to make, but it’s amusing nonetheless.
• On the startup culture, “You have big ideas, not a lot of money, and little adult supervision. So the impossible happens.”
• On failed innovators, “They mistook a clear view for a short distance.” In other words, they could see where they wanted to go, but didn’t realize that it was a heck of a long climb from where they were. Pretty much sums up technology innovation in a nutshell.
• (paraphrased from my poor notes)”Four centuries ago, you knew a form of media had arrived when the Pope opposed it. Today’s equivalent is Jack Valenti, of the MPAA – he’s always wrong. The movie industry opposed VCRs at the start; now it’s a major revenue stream for them. Now they oppose recordable DVDs and Napster. Guess what…”
• “All great civilizations fails by reducing everything to entertainment.” Just like the Roman Empire and bread and circuses.
• “You gotta be nuts to be an innovator!”

Footnote to Saffo’s talk
This doesn’t really have anything to do with Saffo’s talk, which is why it’s in a footnote, but I really liked his article on information surfing. Written in 1989, long before the rise of the web, Saffo projects the idea of information surfing. I especially like this bit:

We have become a society of specialists, each knowing more and more about less and less.

An information surfing future will be one of generalists capable of teasing knowledge and understanding out of large information flows. Information surfers will be pattern finders applying new intellectual skills and working in close concert with radically more powerful information tools.

That is exactly the role that I am moving towards in my career. I no longer have to know everything or even anything myself. I just have to know enough to know where to look it up or who to ask. As specialists become more and more wrapped up in their individual subfields, I think there will be a greater call for people who can tie things together. My dream job was described in Stand on Zanzibar, a sci-fi novel by John Brunner written in 1968. One of the main characters is hired by the government as a “Synthesist, Dilettante Department”. As he puts it, when told there’s too much to learn,

“Of course you can’t if you’ve been taught the way I have, on the basis of memorising facts, but what one ought to learn is how to extract patterns! You don’t bother to memorise the literature – you learn to read and keep a shelf of books. You don’t memorise log and sine tables; you buy a slide-rule or learn to punch a public computer! …You don’t have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary.”

So his job is to go to the library, read up on disparate fields, make any connections that he can, and report them upwards so that the scientists involved can coordinate their research. Insights in one field applied to the other. Such a cool job. Anyway. I find it interesting that the quote from Brunner mirrors Saffo’s quote so well despite preceding it by twenty years. Which ties back into Saffo’s talk, so if you got here by the link, go back now to read about the talk.

After missing the talk by Brian Eno last month, I really wanted to see the next talk in the Long Now series. The December talk was by Peter Schwartz, a well-known futurist and business strategist. Schwartz was a co-founder of Global Business Network, a consulting company that uses scenario planning, a strategy of exploring possible outcomes and how they affect one’s strategy. Schwartz has also written several books on corporate strategy, including
The Art of the Long View. This talk was appropriately titled The Art of the Really Long View, purporting to talk about planning for decades if not centuries into the future.

I went in with a fair amount of skepticism because the accelerating pace of change seems to make it impossible to project into the future with any degree of reliability. Several authors have commented on this phenomenon; Vernor Vinge and his description of the Singularity and Ray Kurzweil in his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, both address the question of what happens when computers become self-evolving. Other technological phenomena that have the potential to drive change at an exponential rate include nanotechnology, biotechnology and genetic engineering, all of which are poised to become commonplace in the next few decades. So how can one make any plans for the future when the ground rules seem likely to be changed in the relatively near future?

In my understanding of scenario planning, the idea isn’t necessarily to predict a single future, but to identify key issues and key questions and answer those questions in a variety of ways to see how the different answers affect the future. That’s the approach that Schwartz took in this talk; he identified what he saw as being the important questions and how they might affect what happens. To use a concrete example, he started with discussing the effects of population on the environemtn. Paul Ehrlich apparently once identified environmental impact as being a function of three variables: population size, affluence, and technology. So Schwartz quickly outlined a variety of possibilities along those three axes. We could keep growing to a size of 50-100 billion, crammed in tightly all over the globe, living in relative squalor. If technology improves to reduce the environmental footprint of humans, perhaps it could even be done sustainably. We could level off demographically at around the size we are now. There could be a drastic reduction of population, accompanied by an increase in technology, such that millions of people could enjoy what he called “100,000 acre haciendas”. Or there could be a disaster such as an asteroid or a plague, and the millions of people would be living in a hunter-gatherer state. All sorts of possibilities. But the world is very different depending on how those possibilities develop.

So what are some of the questions that Schwartz asked? The first one he addressed was the question of evil. If people do bad things, do we view them as evil or do we view them as mentally ill? The answer determines a lot of how we react to the situation. Mental illness can be treated, and then it’s over. Evil is an eternal struggle against the devil. Societies based on one premise will be very different than one based on the other. Another example was reason vs. faith. How are they balanced? He noted in passing that it seems likely that faith is going to win this one, not because of its merits, but purely by demographics; people of faith have more babies than the “intelligentsia”. He claimed that going by current demographic trends and birth rates, all of America will be Mormon by 2085

Another interesting question is the question of citizenship and governance in societies, especially as we move towards a global society. How do we construct world-spanning governments that have the loyalty of people? People are evolutionarily programmed to be loyal to a tribe; how do we transfer that allegiance to larger and larger organizations? What does it mean to be a global citizen? Is the EU a good example of how we should be proceeding? (their pathetic attempts at a constitution would seem to indicate otherwise) (although he did make an interesting point that the EU is not about merging economies; it’s primarily about keeping the Europeans from war – in particular, keeping France and Germany from trying to take over the continent. Again.) A related question is whether we will learn how to build and fix countries, a question of obvious current relevance with America’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the EU’s experience in the Balkans. An obvious extension in my eyes is whether countries are going to continue to be a relevant social entity. It seems likely to me that nation-states are at an awkward size – too big to earn the personal loyalty of its citizens, but too small to deal with issues of global significance like the environment, or even terrorism. I can see the powers of the nation-state devolving in both directions, where the personal loyalty will move down the chain to a tribal level, and the global problems move upwards to some sort of global association of tribes, like the United Nations except more effective. Anyway.

Some science and technology questions that Schwartz singled out as potentially having a large impact include:

• Control of matter, energy and biology. I took this to mean things like nanotechnology.
• Dynamics of climate change, both long and short term. Are we experiencing global warming? Does human technology have any impact on climate changes? He mentioned an interesting theory that the rise of human agriculture over the past several thousand years may have caused global warming, to an extent that it prevented a mini ice age. So was it a good thing?
• Real life extension. Right now the limit on human life is around 120 years; that’s where the body breaks down pretty much irreversibly. The life expectancy gains of the past century have mostly been about eliminating accidental deaths and early deaths to sickness. But if we could learn to extend lifespans beyond 120 years or even indefinitely, that would have a huge impact on how most people approach life and how society is constructed.
• Cheap clean energy. What happens when the oil runs out in about a hundred years? The whole world economy will obviously change as well.
• Space flight. If we don’t have to support everybody on this planet, what happens?

The rest of my notes are kind of disjointed, which is somewhat of a reflection of his talk, which had a lot of interesting ideas, but no real continuous thread to tie them together.

One thing he mentioned was that his definition of “better” in terms of evaluating decisions is that which creates more options for the future. He wondered whether we would be the first generation to leave our children with fewer options than ourselves. I think he’s being unnecessarily pessimistic. Just in my memory, there have been vast changes as far as providing more options to people: the internet allows a plethora of communication channels, airflight deregulation has made it totally reasonable to fly across the country to visit friends regularly (at one point a few years ago, I met up with one friend 5 times in 5 different cities over the course of 7 months), etc. But it’s an interesting way to evaluate decision-making processes, and one that I suspect scenario planning does well on.

Another interesting thread was discussing the difference between powerful ideas and good ideas. Powerful ideas are those which are strong memes, which persist and spread, cooperate and compete, and which increase options. Good ideas are those which improve the lot of human hosts, help humans adapt to new situations, and which increase options. There are plenty of ideas which satisfy only one of these – a couple virulent powerful-but-not-good ideas are Naziism and Communism. The best ideas are those which are both good and powerful, obviously. So keep an eye out for those. In particular, he likes “meta-inventions”, inventions which allow other inventions to be made, again keeping with the idea of increasing options.

He referred to one topic that Brian Eno apparently discussed, called the Big Here in analogy to the Long Now. The Long Now is about expanding our consciousness to take responsibility for our actions across a long time frame. The Big Here (in my understanding since they still haven’t posted Eno’s post yet but they promise to do it at some point) is about expanding our consciousness outside of our normal social circles and communities to a larger community, possibly including the whole world. I just like the concept of the Big Here, and how it changes your viewpoint to even be aware of it. He suggested the questions of “How Long is your Now?” and “How Big is your Here?” when evaluating projects.

Other quick one-off comments that he made:

• The future exists only in our mind, just like the past, but the only thing we can affect the present. So the point of scenario planning is not to predict the future, but to get people to do something in the present. (approximately) “With multiple scenarios, it’s easy to get the future right. It’s much harder to get anybody to do anything about it.”
• I really liked the phrase “Conversation of the Long Now”, even though I can’t remember the context now.
• He mentioned his experience with the Peace Corps, and his description is that the Peace Corps will teach you a lot about yourself, but don’t expect to make a difference in the developing country where you are sent.
• When he asked somebody in Russia when they would know they were free back when it was still the Soviet Union, the response was that they would be free when they publish the laws. If the laws are published, then they can’t drag somebody away on trumped-up charges. I thought this was interesting, describing law as the published contract between government and citizen.
• Similarly, Schwartz thought we needed laws to address the relation between people and the ecosystem.
• Books he recommended included
  On the Origins of War by Donald Kagan, and
  Constant Battles by Steven LeBlanc.

• He also recommended the Gordon conferences as a place where science gets shaped today.

A pretty decent talk all told. It could have used a better unifying theme, and the discussion felt superficial to me. But some thought-provoking ideas regardless.