Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

A nifty information pattern shows up in today’s tech news:

An important underlying principle in congestion control and network optimization is that every user has a “utility function.” A little bandwidth is worth a lot per bit. An SMS text message can easily cost 0.01 cents per bit, and is obviously worth more to the user, or he wouldn’t be sending them. Nobody would be pirating DVDs at this price, though, as this is almost $1,000,000 per GB. So the “utility” of extra bits decreases as you get more of them. The trouble is, the core of the Internet has no idea whether any particular packet holds those expensive SMS bits or those throw-away DVD pirating bits. ^{^}

This pattern is eternal as the universe, as it’s one of the building blocks of the universe. To avoid entropy, no two things are ever equal. If things get equal, which they would if they ever existed in an absolute or universal sense, there would be no ability for energy to move between states as opportunities opened or failures happened. This universe needs tragedy and hope as the foundations of its locally unstable and chaotic, but globally stable and orderly, design.

This is why in business we have trouble coming up with an absolute or universal value for a tomato. First, that value must be measured in currency which itself changes in value; second, a buyer must be found. Finally, that buyer has different needs and abilities. To a poor person, a tomato is only worth so much before they give up and buy a rutabaga; to a wealthy person, the quality of the tomato determines its value; to a starving man on a desert island, a tomato is worth more than our wildest dreams.

We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision.

They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of past.

There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers.

The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident. Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push. – William S. Burroughs, Interzone, Viking Books, 1989

In a time when the world is connected by digital networks, when memes have greater impact than bombs, and when history has ended and been replaced by a new kind of playing field, we are in an age when the knowledge economy makes sense.

We are no longer competing for brute strength.

We are no longer competing for sheer wealth.

What we’re competing for is the right answer, and to find that, we have to be open to all possibilities, and then have razor-sharp minds to pick the right one.

It’s the intellectual equivalent of living in a cyberpunk novel, dodging the yakuza and living by your wits, hacking your way through with each day unsure of the next.

Sounds fun, when you put it that way — may that guide you to see more possibilities than disappointments in today, whichever today whenver you’re reading this.

One theory of marketing suggests that every interaction we have with other people can be viewed as a conversation, or an exchange of ideas. In this theory, blogs are like dialogue as are research papers, studies, and public events.

There is some concern, however, that too much of reducing life to dialogue separates our symbolic and emotional minds entirely from reality, as Don DeLillo suggested in White Noise, which is still probably the definitive postmodern work for me.

Some have even suggested this tendency is growing with the internet:

We moderns are less nimble at resisting great seductions, particularly those utopian visions that promise grand political or cultural salvation. From the French and Russian revolutions to the counter-cultural upheavals of the ’60s and the digital revolution of the ’90s, we have been seduced, time after time and text after text, by the vision of a political or economic utopia.

LAST WEEK, I was treated to lunch at a fashionable Japanese restaurant in Palo Alto by a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who, back in the dot.com boom, had invested in my start-up Audiocafe.com. The entrepreneur, like me a Silicon Valley veteran, was pitching me his latest start-up: a technology platform that creates easy-to-use software tools for online communities to publish weblogs, digital movies, and music. It is technology that enables anyone with a computer to become an author, a film director, or a musician. This Web 2.0 dream is Socrates’s nightmare: technology that arms every citizen with the means to be an opinionated artist or writer.

“This is historic,” my friend promised me. “We are enabling Internet users to author their own content. Think of it as empowering citizen media. We can help smash the elitism of the Hollywood studios and the big record labels. Our technology platform will radically democratize culture, build authentic community, create citizen media.” Welcome to Web 2.0. ^{^}

To me, this is the most vital point in his article: we are pursuing a utopia on the basis that if everyone can publish, we can all join the conversation, hopefully without it turning into white noise.

Generation X, as the first group of kids who grew up knowing someone who had ready access to a personal computer, could be seen as the first generation of new digital symbolists. We are, unlike our parents, comfortable with the idea that changing a byte on a server somewhere causes real-world reactions — an ambulance coming, a debit account empty, or even something as mundane as a bill paid.

But I wonder if there’s a price for this, or, if at some point, we get comfortable with changing bytes and stop changing reality.

I’ve been emailing with Frank Gregorsky, of ExactingEditor, who has worked in the past with Generation Xers on some fascinating projects. He pointed me to the community at Fourth Turning, a site dedicated to the book by William Strauss and Neil Howe which wonders how the future will be found through Generation X, Generation Y and the millenials (I’m still not sure which is which).

Looks like even the blogosphere is getting sick of its Ouroboric cliquishness:

Bringing all of this Web messaging and activity together in one place doesn’t really help. It reminds me of a comment ThisNext CEO Gordon Gould made to me earlier this week when he predicted that Web 3.0 will be about reducing the noise. I hope Gould is right, because what we really need are better filters.

I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know. People like Mike and Robert can do that, but they are weird, and even they have their limits. ^{^}

As posted here before, we need editors to make sense of all this mess. There’s no sense having every user filter through every news item, when someone who is good at that sort of thing might do it well. Otherwise, why is there a “top” of the blogosphere? What Slashdot, Arrington, Battelle, and others do well is not posting news of a tangential or duplicate nature. They find the best thesis statements on the topic, compile them, and give us the skinny.

Every time TechCrunch “breaks the news” for yet another web 2.0 service or desktop application people jump on it. Within minutes I see Twitter conversations that talk about the new application. People run around providing the developers with suggestions on how to improve the service. It’s called user feedback I believe. The problem with it is that the “user” in this case is a tech person. Which is fine if that is the target audience. But if you want to become big, if you want to be the next Google or Facebook, then you will have to remember that any non-tech consumer out there will not have the same desires as us techies do. How many people do you know outside your tech community that want to have 25 desktop applications live, running Firefox alongside with 10 tabs open, twittering 100 times a day, reading and commenting articles on Friendfeed, writing a blog post about it, starting riots to get traffic going, AND still have a normal day job and a life after that?

If anything, web 3.0 should be about the user, about user value, about letting the Internet evolve around you, instead of around some destination site or walled garden. Web 3.0 should set us free, letting the important things come to us, instead of us having to go to the important things. It’s about freedom of data. And yes, noise reduction or filtering will be nice. But that isn’t really what web 3.0 should be about. Until it is here I’ll be dreaming of a user centric web. ^{^}

Web 3.0 isn’t going to be about the user until we determine what the user actually wants and needs to be doing. This goes back to the oldest fight in the web industry, one I’ve had with clients and executives many times: they want something flashy, but those of us who are both geeks and user-centric designers want a web application that has inherent function. What are the big successes of the web? Google (research), Amazon (retail), e-mail and Twitter (communication), blogs (identity). Other than that, the many small successes are the numerous business and government sites that let you take care of life’s many details with a few clicks.

If you look in the tech world, just how many tech bloggers do we really need? How many of them are breaking stories or offering a unique angle for a unique audience that nobody would serve if they completely pulled up stakes and disappeared? Not too many. With the exception of about the top five or ten blog networks, no tech blog offers enough of a pull that an advertiser would consider them a must to invest with. And even among the top networks, the rush to publish is becoming silly to watch, as my RSS feed reader will fill up with near-identical stories, usually written by people who haven’t done any original reporting beyond reading a press release, other blogs, or listening to a financial earnings call, if they’re really serious. ^{^}

As if proof of his statement, this blog post is filled with mostly redundant views caused by bloggers commenting on each other by taking a basic idea, adding observations, and making it their own.

Looking at all the various web-based activities and projects, what we can tell is that not everyone is going to have the time to be as heavily involved in social media and we are.

Even those of us at the lower end of the range, offering up only a few hours per day, are still heavily involved with social media when we’re placed on this “real person” scale that Nina provides.

If we’re going to recommend a service or activity to a friend whose alarm goes off at 6 AM and doesn’t return home from the office until 6 PM, then we need to respect that their “spare” time is precious. Whatever new app or service we’re trying to push on them should have real value. ^{^}

Again, what the web needs is more competent aggregators with an eye toward real benefit to the user. Why do people read Slashdot? It’s the important news about technology, and its real benefit is not posting the stuff that’s duplicated or tangentially relevant.

The razor belonged to a man named Ockham and he was not a scar collector.

Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “If a proposition is NOT
NECESSARY it is MEANINGLESS and approaching MEANING ZERO.”

“And what is More UNNECESSARY than junk if You Don’t Need it?”

Answer: “Junkies, if you are not ON JUNK.” ^{^}

Go for the jugular of the story like an old time newspaper reporter. Stop information overflow — by not posting what is, in the clarity of necessary efficiency common to the last half-hour of consciousness, not necessary.

Sandwiched between 80 million baby boomers and 78 million millenials, Generation X — roughly defined as anyone born between 1965 and 1980 — has just 46 million members, making it a dark-horse demographic “condemned by numbers alone to nicheville,” as Gordinier puts it in the book. “I don’t really understand the tyranny of the boomer moment,” Gordinier says. “Great, you had a party in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, I’m thrilled for you. Can we hear about the flappers in the 1920s instead? How about the Great Depression? There’s other times in history that are interesting.”

Gordinier is no more entranced with today’s teens and twenty-somethings: “They just love stuff. They love celebrities. They love technology. They love brand names. . . . They’re happy to do whatever advertising tells them to do. So what if they can’t manage to read anything longer than an instant message?” ^{^}

We have, as marketing history would tag them, the Jazz Generation, the Greatest Generation, the Boomers, and now, the Forgotten Generation. These are, respectively, the great-grandparents of Generation X, the grandparents of Generation X, the parents of Generation X, and Generation Xers themselves.

I think we have to look at the span of generations influencing one another.

WWI was a horror for all involved. Europeans saw it as fratricide; Americans saw it as the ultimate example of the pointlessness of modern wars. People had to shift gears from “the war to end all wars” to “it was pointless” in ten minutes of conversation, and it turned their hair white. They never got over it.

The generation after them hoped to avoid the same horrors, but was so busy with the hangover of WWI, called by some The Great Depression (and what was so great about it?) that it rejoiced in the chance to redeem itself through modern warfare. We hear about how great these people were without getting the message that they were basically on a turkey shoot against a ferocious but tiny enemy. Few historians were amazed that the bad guys didn’t win WWII.

Of course, with all that Greatest Generation hoopla floating around, the generation after them had to prove itself somehow. Their war was so obviously pointless they became selfless, pacifistic altruists who were in private greedy hedonists. We hear about how great the hippies were, how pure, and now they’re all bankers who don’t regret all that free sex, free drugs, free ride from a Greatest Generation that couldn’t stop tooting its own horn.

I have another term for Generation X: the shellshocked generation. This whole load of horrors I’ve described came down on our shoulders and we couldn’t find anyone to trust. Generation X became slackers because they didn’t trust American culture, or its counterculture, or even each other. We wanted to get the heck out of Dodge as quickly as possible, and if that meant camping out in a garage apartment eating Ramen for a decade or so, we were cool with that, at least until we turn 37 and “get responsible.”

Current generations inherit from these last four generations. Good luck to them. Gordimer to my mind takes a funny but unkind look at these people. Just like some slackers turn out to be heroes, maybe some IM-ers will turn out OK too.

I love the news. It’s a giant feast of stuff thrown out you to see what sticks. And while most of it is crap, and we all know that bad news sells because good news is no news, there are some gems that reveal patterns, Gibsonian “nodal points” forming in the fabric of our human universe.

Today’s pattern is that of people gaming the system. This means that when we create a well-intentioned method for handling a situation, someone looks at it and thinks, “I can’t change the underlying mechanics of the situation, but I can make the method think I did.” Kind of like putting a xeroxed dollar bill in a vending machine, or putting a stone in the middle of your aluminum foil ball so you get extra pennies at the recycling place.

Looking at all the various web-based activities and projects, what we can tell is that not everyone is going to have the time to be as heavily involved in social media and we are.

Even those of us at the lower end of the range, offering up only a few hours per day, are still heavily involved with social media when we’re placed on this “real person” scale that Nina provides. ^{^}

The hype is always greater than the reality because for good news to be news, it has to be oversold and imply bad news, or a need. You don’t sell products by pitching inertia. You sell products by pitching change and/or implying a need for fear. Otherwise, why stir oneself from that La-Z-Boy and Battlestar Galactia full season DVD? Social media is a system that games itself.

Google Inc. manipulated a U.S. government spectrum auction by bidding just enough to trigger rules that will open a nationwide set of airwaves to any device and then walking away, Republican lawmakers said.

The rules were a “social engineering” experiment by the Federal Communications Commission that prevented the spectrum swath, known as the C-block, from raising billions of dollars more, he said.

Google offered $4.71 billion for the C-block, surpassing a $4.6 billion threshold that activated the rules. Verizon Wireless later won the airwaves with a $4.74 billion offer. Google, the most-used search engine, said that while it was prepared to win the airwaves, its main goal was to ensure the open-access rules took effect. ^{^}

Google makes its money by keeping systems open, and then selling ads within them to try to control the anarchy of open systems. It was a smart move. We can all learn from this type of gaming, because it could benefit us. Well, scratch that — could benefit us in some ways, I mean. Open systems are nicely flexible, but anarchic. Closed systems are ripoffs but orderly. The internet thrived because of the balance, not the excess.

And finally, a more sobering reminder:

In an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, two leading researchers warn that the entry of big companies like Microsoft and Google into the field of personal health records could drastically alter the practice of clinical research and raise new challenges to the privacy of patient records. ^{^}

As Google showed us above, gaming the system is often good business. Why do companies want health records in permanent databases? They hope to leverage that data for something. Selling it. Using it to reduce risk. Finding targets for advertising. Permanent identification to keep customers honest. Whatever it is, we have to be careful that this system doesn’t get gamed against us.

The enlightenment was a beautiful thing. People cast aside dogma and authority. They started to think for themselves. Natural science flourished. Understanding of the real world increased. The hegemony of religion slowly declined. Real universities were created and eventually democracy took hold. The modern world was born. Until recently we were making good progress. So what went wrong?

The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable.^{^}

That consensual reality thing, that sounds so good when you’re on acid or in church? I guess it’s for real. Could mean problems. Definitely the prevalence of both corporate symbols on everything we own, and religion infusing our politics to a fanatical degree, as well as an inability to admit that despite great wealth we are as a society often unsure of our future, suggests a dark age.

On the other hand, many of us don’t suffer these problems because we haven’t bought into the consensual reality.

Thinking for yourself sounds great, but to paraphrase Bill Cosby, what if you’re an asshole? (His original comment was about “mind expanding” drugs.)

Some of my friends say they’re a good idea because they fear the incompetence of others. Others say the cameras are an awful idea, but I think it’s because they’re afraid of getting caught. I just detest them. Cameras do not understand special circumstances, and they prompt a very negative reaction of slamming on the brakes suddenly when approaching a stale green turning yellow.

Photoenforced lists red light cameras and camera speed traps around you. If you can’t avoid them, see if you can run into them so I can avoid them.