In my life, new product ideas are always showing up. However, whether we’re talking about new products or just new ideas, if too many people get involved in making them “better”, the whole thing can fall apart. Perhaps a story would help me to make my point.

(This is a guest post by Jim Anderson of Blue Elephant Consulting. Click here if you are interested in guest posting.)

My favorite story of what can happen when you let too many other people get involved in designing a solution has to do with a boat. Maybe I should say this more clearly: it has to do with a ship that was created a long time ago in Sweden.

(Picture by Javier Kohen, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0)

The Story Of A Boat And A King

This is a story that starts back in 1626 when the king of Sweden, King Gustavus Adolphus, ordered the building of the Vasa. It took two years for his boat builders to design and create this ship. King Adolphus was keen to have it because at the time he was trying very hard to rule the Baltic Sea. The more boats that you have, the easier it is to accomplish this.

Just to prove to you that things really don’t change, you need to understand that King Adolphus was deeply involved in the design of all of the ships in his naval fleet. Can you say “too much senior management involvement”? Rare is the king who is also an expert boat designer.

Now you need to understand that at this time back in the 1600′s, warships had one deck of cannons on both the left and the right side of the ship. The commission orders for the Vasa ordered that she be created with this design.

Give Me More Cannons!

Now at just about this time, good King Adolphus discovered that his dreaded competitors for control of the Baltic Sea, the Poles, had somehow created ships with two decks of guns on them. Needless to say the King developed a serious case of cannon envy.

Since he was king and could do anything that he wanted, King Adolphus modified the design of the Vasa to now include two decks of guns. To the king’s credit, on paper the Vasa was now the most powerful ship of its day and had a great deal of firepower. However, that’s not all that it had…

As with all great senior management plans, this one had just one little flaw. The designers of the ship realized that there was now a problem and attempted to explain that to the king. What they had discovered was that the ship’s design called for it to have too little ballast in order to support two heavy gun decks. They believed that building the ship that the king had designed would result in a ship that would be unsafe to sail.

Thanks for that input guys. You know how this story goes – it’s good to be king. The king wanted his ship and he wanted it the way that he had designed it. The building of the ship continued.

Physics Wins (This is my favorite part of the story)

In 1628 the ship was done and ready for initial testing. One of the tests that they did was a stability test. In this test, 30 sailors were selected and asked to run back and forth from side-to-side on the ship’s deck. If the ship didn’t tip over and sink then it was basically good to go. During this testing of the Vasa, the ship started to tilt widely and they ended up canceling the test.

You would think that this was the end of the story. But it isn’t.

On August 10th, 1628, the king’s mighty ship the Vasa set sail for the first time. The ship got about a mile away from the dock when a good stiff breeze came along and knocked the ship sideways, she took on too much water, and then she promptly sank.

Of course there was an investigation in order to find out what had gone wrong. Since the king, of course, could not have been the problem, the question was who was to blame. In the end, the sinking was chalked up to an “Act of God” and forgotten.

However, in the 1960′s the Vasa was raised from the sea and was placed in a museum in Stockholm. If you ever get there, make sure that you drop in and see it – a shrine to all of us who’ve ever had to deal with meddling senior management.

If I had to summarize my life philosophy in one phrase, I would pick the Russian proverb, morning is wiser than evening. The phrase appears in many Russian folk-tales. I used to read these avidly as a kid. The world of Ivan the youngest of three sons, Vasilisa the beautiful and my favorite, Baba Yaga the witch, who rode around on a stove, is a sad and pensive one, but one you yearn to visit. Morals are careless afterthoughts. Russian folktales  are primarily impressionistic little gems that create a mood more than they tell a story. If you read the stories, you get a sense of where Chekov got his more grown-up inspirations. Chekov is, to me, the quintessentially Russian writer. I’ve read some Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but neither captures what I imagine the Russian landscape to be like, the way Chekov does.

I have never been to Russia, but whenever I see or hear something Russian, I think of Chekov, not the others. The first piece of Western classical music I ever heard was Tchiakovsky’s Marche Slave (Slavonic March). In the years since, I’ve listened to most major composers, but few have affected me as much as Marche Slave. I think of Chekov when I hear it. Curiously, another piece of music that affects me the same way is Dvorak’s popular Symphony No 9 (the New World symphony). I find that this very Russian musical portrait of America captures the emotions and rhythms of the continent better than most American music. Dvorak was among the first to realize that American music would come to be strongly shaped by Black culture. His music seems to find the sadness in the American landscape that Americans themselves seem to have been furiously trying to avoid since Whitman. If Tocqueville managed to read and write America, Dvorak managed to hear and sing it.

The visual images of Russia in my head — drawn from sources ranging from James Bond movies to the beautiful new documentary Wild Russia — seem to have a distinctive character.  There are other northerly countries whose landscapes are shaped by snow, but Russia seems special. Movies like Trans-siberian are worth watching for the visuals alone.  Read Jeffrey Talyer’s Atlantic essay on traveling solo, overland across Siberia. Chances are, you’ll never make this journey, so you might as well read about it in this very visually evocative essay.

Sadly, I can’t easily find my Soviet-era childhood favorites anymore.  Back in the 80s, in pre-liberalization Soviet-leaning India, some of the best and cheapest English reading material you could find was Soviet-produced English translations of classic and not-so-classic Russian works. Many of these books came from Mir Publishers, which apparently still exists. But the books are hard to find. At least, they aren’t a click away on Amazon. I suppose if I did some diligent hunting, I’d find used copies somewhere, or some obscure seller of remaindered copies. Or maybe some equivalent Western translations (but these are not the same. There’s something about Soviet-era Soviet-produced English translations of Chekov, for instance, that seems to be missing in more readily-available translations). The death of any empire, even one labeled evil, is a sad thing in at least a few ways. Things slowly get lost. The adult classics will at least survive in some form. The children’s books may be lost forever.

One of my favorite “lost books” was called Happy Days, a story about a little Russian boy, Vanya, growing up on a farm. I can’t find it anymore. It was a little square book with a red cover. The book is about Vanya’s life, but also about his desire to see a moose. He gets to see one. Portraits of young-boy views of life are perhaps the truest views of a country. I wouldn’t say Vanya is the Tom Sawyer of Russia (there is no comparison as far as literary quality goes), but it is the same sort of perspective.

In the 19th century, Europeans used to call Africa the Dark Continent. Today, as some cultures get amplified and distributed in accelerated ways, thanks to the (still largely-Anglo) Internet, parts of the world are going digitally dark. Russia among them. It isn’t about poor connectivity or infrastructure. It is about bits dying if they are not actively traded. Russia as an idea seems to be fading in the global consciousness far faster than you would expect. This isn’t just the normal rise and fall of empires. In the age of the Internet, there are only two continents: the main, harshly-floodlit continent, and the digital Dark Continent. The former is about the bit-churn at the forefront of the Real-Time Web. The latter is about forgotten empires, hard-to-find books, and young people furiously striving to make an American buck. Dying empires in centuries past used to live on, like spent supernovae, in what came after.  Graves were respected spaces. But the biases of the Internet interrupt that natural process of cultural reincarnation, and cause a more complete forgetting. If a memory isn’t online, it doesn’t exist. If a culture dies, tweets from the vigorous, living cultures flood the resulting global attention vacuum before any process of local regeneration can begin. Bits that aren’t constantly churning in the Real-Time Web are dead bits. Memories of Soviet Russia are dead bits. The dead-bit graves of the Internet are not respected spaces.

It is not nostalgia or conservative traditionalism that is coming over me these days. I don’t really do nostalgia, and I am not a traditionalist. I think what is descending is a sense of mourning. The Internet is shaping a new vortex-world, and the still waters are being forgotten, which is the same as digital death.

But it is late, and morning is wiser than evening. Perhaps tomorrow I will hear news of Google launching a major effort to find, digitize and bring into the shining digital floodlights, the remains of Soviet Russia. Maybe I’ll find Vanya again on Google Books.

This is a call for guest posts. Interested? Read on. The open-mic stage is officially open.

Over the three years that this blog has been in existence, I’ve rarely had people guest posting. Just 4 guest posts by my count. You can view the map of the  Guest Post trail here, and start browsing here.  It’s a rather eclectic bunch: George Gibson did a review of Predictably Irrational, Marigo Raftapoulos talked about video gaming in business, Dorian Taylor talked about his own take on the lean startup movement and Michael Michalko posted about how geniuses think.

I figured it’s time to get the guest posting thing a little more organized.

This is quite a demanding audience to write for.  But if you are up for the challenge of performing for a very tough-to-please and scarily knowledgeable crowd  (but one that is very generous with praise when it is pleased), and have something stimulating to offer, I am open to contributions.

You get noticed by a significant and high-quality audience (currently around 2300 regular RSS subscribers and about 17,000 – 20,000 visits a month), and if you can impress this lot, given the caliber of comments, you’ll get some high quality readers for your own blog and/or personal connections.  And I mean high quality. I am routinely surprised to find that some high-level exec or well-known entrepreneur, writer or professor has read something on this blog (personal high point: William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and cyberpunk pioneer, tweeting my Container Shipping post; can’t find the damn tweet now; should have bookmarked it. I doubt he’s a regular though). Scares me a bit, I admit, and I basically try not to let it worry me.

Rule #1: No purely commercial stuff or blatant self-promotion.

Rule #2: Your contribution has to be “Ribbonfarmesque.” If you don’t know what that means, spend some time reading stuff on the site.

Interested? Just cut-and-paste your contribution into this contact form. Or if you prefer, use the form to send me a proposal and if if I accept it, you can email me the thing as an attachment.

And please forward this to others who might be interested.

Venkat

p.s. In case regular readers are wondering why I am soliciting guest posts now, two reasons. First, I’ve got a VERY busy few months coming up and second, after years of wondering whether this blog has a distinct identity separate from my own writing voice, I’ve finally concluded it does. There is definitely a “Ribbonfarmesque” way of seeing the world and thinking/writing about it that many others share (the term was actually coined by a reader to describe somebody else’s work, so I am not trying to slap my brand on others’ styles!).

The Web of Intent is a term that’s starting to get tossed around a lot, and I’ve gone from being wary about it to believing strongly in it. I was introduced to the term by Nova Spivack of Lucid Ventures about a year ago and was initially skeptical. Could Web ADD be reversed? Can technology give us a true knob to allow us to tune our engagement anywhere from ‘distracted’ to ‘laser focused’? From knee-jerk reactive to coolly deliberate? Actually that’s how I think of the concept: a technology model that gives users this control knob to manage their online experiences:

The evidence is slowly starting to roll in. This conceptual knob can be created through a generation of “Intent” technologies. What’s more, this knob is what will likely save the publishing and media industries.  It will also save our brains from getting fried, and create a new dynamic in the ongoing disruption of all types of information work.

As many of you know, my day job is Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Xerox, where I run the Trailmeme project (currently in invite-only beta). Nova and other seasoned industry folks have been telling me for a while that Trailmeme is actually a perfect example of an Intent technology for the Web. I was initially skeptical and concerned about linking our product positioning to a potentially ephemeral trend, but as I thought more about some of the core ideas (see Nova’s posts What’s After the Real-Time Web? and The Birth of the Scheduled Web), I started to understand the power of the model. Whether or not the term catches on, I think there is definitely something going on, and given the panel proposals, I think it will burst into the open at SXSW 2011.

This is where I am placing my bets. Not the 3D Web, not the “Mobile/Touch Web”, not the “Internet of Things” and not the “Semantic Web.” Those are important, but secondary. I am going all-in on the “Web of Intent” as the next main act that will reshape the Internet. As I’ll explain later, it is a gritty, greasy, roll-up-sleeves, fix-it vision, that is emerging in response to actual problems, as opposed to a vision born out of new possibilities (combined with the smoking of illegal substances).

If I am wrong, well, I can always pivot my life and the Trailmeme project.

So here you go: my primer on what the Web of Intent actually is, in terms of user experience (UX), concepts and technology, and my related panel voting recommendations for SXSW 2011 (including one by Nova and me). We’ll need to start by reframing what Web 2.0 actually is.

Web 2.0 is a Messaging Bus  with Human Switches and Buffers

You may think of Web 2.0 as “social media,” or technology becoming social in the human sense. It may look like it’s all about user-generated content, online communities and rich apps to improve our personal and collective lives. A utopia of sharing and co-creating. It’s all about technology democratizing power and empowering average humans, right?

How conveniently anthropocentric. And wrong.

Social media is not about technology becoming part of human society. It is about humans becoming part of technological society, in a Matrix sense. Power isn’t migrating from the old plutocrats to the new long-tailers as much as it is migrating from humans to technology. Social media isn’t a set of tools to allow humans to communicate with humans. It is a set of embedding mechanisms to allow technologies to use humans to communicate with each other, in an orgy of self-organizing.

Om Malik nailed it when he called Twitter the “messaging bus” of Web 2.0. That’s a raw, lowest-level hardware metaphor, the level with the highest volume of raw bytes. And we’ve plugged ourselves right into the switching circuitry at that level. Think about it, Twitter is a massively parallel stochastic switching circuit built as a global human bus, where more of us are routing bit.ly links than actually reading them. Think about the fact that even the name BIT-ly, which beat out other brands, is a bus-level metaphor. Humans don’t deal in bits, chips do, right? We’ve moved ourselves into the bottom layer of the information work stack.

The Matrix had it wrong. You’re not the battery power in a global, human-enslaving AI, you are slightly more valuable. You are part of the switching circuitry.

“Oh no, I actually read stuff, not just tweet” you say? Well, my friend @amitseshan has a hardware, chip-level metaphor for you too: he classifies people as long-buffer (people like you and me who read and write 2000 word posts), and short-buffer (people who add value primarily by quickly scanning and passing links along strong and well-curated social networks). Feeling dehumanized yet? And you thought social media was going to let you truly express your humanity. And if you want to find the perfect expression of this “embedded humans” architecture, look no further than Mechanical Turk and Demand Media. There is no better illustration of power migrating into the technology, with humans being mere electronic parts. The industrial age had its indelible image of Charlie Chaplin literally becoming caught in in a gear train in Modern Times. That’s what humans as “cogs” meant. The image today is someone furiously RT’ing links on their iPhone. Here’s my bad attempt at capturing history repeating itself:

Here’s the looming extreme Dystopia: writers hired via Mechanical Turk create content that Demand Media believes will sell, and then we shorten those Demand Media article links using bit.ly and busily pass it around on Twitter. And the long buffer types read the most popular of THOSE articles and bid on new Demand Media writing jobs that are automatically generated based on that popularity. Not to pick on those companies (they are all locally-optimizing in good faith), but where the heck is the actual creative thinking and new value in this madness-of-the-crowds churn? We are faced by a downward spiral into the world of the movie Idiocracy.

The fact that the technology matrix is dumb and entirely lacking in goals and intentions actually makes things worse, not better. We are not being enslaved by Skynet. We are being enslaved by an emergent retard whose behavior is basically a viciously randomized reflection of our own collective manias.

Now reconsider the classic symptoms of “social media disruption” within this new framing. What has Web 2.0 actually done to us?

1. It has unbundled all sorts of content and driven the center of gravity towards the 140 character tweet
2. Appointment Content  has started to move to On-Demand Content
3. Fixed publisher-subscriber models have been changed to Twitter/Facebook stochastic diffusion
4. The temporal horizon has changed from past-present-future to just a narrow present
5. We are starting to rely increasingly on analytics, and squeezing out creative intuition
6. Polished content and code has given way to perennial beta
7. Static search based on content-to-content links is starting to get displaced by dynamic search based on live social filtering

The scary part is that each of these is individually a good thing, but it all adds up to a toxic state of affairs.

That last two points are why we are switches in a messaging bus.

Implication of point 6: trading in incomplete stuff makes us part of the process middleware of some giant machine. The finished product that is finally made out of beta code and content is probably something like the hypothalamus of the emergent beast.

Implication of point 7: instead of linking to articles we like on our slow-changing static content, we are tweeting them live. In Web 1.0, while you slept, somebody could click on a link on your “home page,” find a valuable page, and be grateful to you. Win. Now that person is increasingly likely to ask a question on Twitter instead. And you lose sleep trying to stay in the stream, watching for every “real-time” opportunity to answer questions (or more likely, just flooding the timeline with your own tweets, hoping to intercept random intentions).

The whole thing could be called the “Random, Anxious Simul-Screaming Web!” (RASSW!).  The social psychology of the RASSW! is not pretty:

• We are all desperately shouting to be heard above everybody else, anxiously scanning several firehoses, watching for our opportunities, and navigating this chaos using a random soup of tweeted links.
• On-demand content, far from helping us manage our time better, has gotten us into an anxious state of over-demand. We now have the freedom to pack in extra RSS feeds and reading into every spare moment, and we do.
• There is none of that relaxed letting go of the news between broadcasts/newspaper editions. We are like the monkey in that famous experiment that was given a button to stimulate the pleasure centers of its brain. It got into a frantic self-stimulation loop and almost starved I believe. In our case, our competitive status-seeking/money-making instincts have been hooked, rather than our pleasure centers.
• We are being devoured alive by a mindless, formulaic empiricism; SEO aka “writing to the machine” is just the tip of the iceberg

Why are we doing this to ourselves? Are we just masochists with a species-wide death wish?

Actually no, it is a sort of tragedy of the attention commons. To see why ask yourself: why can’t we all agree to just take Sundays entirely off the grid as a planet?

The Tragedy of the Attention Commons

A finance expert once told me that most of the gains in the stock market in the last 50 years happened on just a handful of days. If you’d happened to be out of the market on those days, with your assets in cash, you’d have seen losses instead of the historic 8%. That’s why, he explained, buy-and-hold is best for long-term investing. You won’t miss those unpredictable big-jump days if you’re always in the market.

The same thing applies on the Web. Except that your Web 1.0 “Home page” is no longer your investment in the Web. Your personal live presence is.  Imagine having to show up on the NYSE floor everyday and having to shout above the noise, “I am still in!” to keep your investments in the market. Going off the grid is not really an option. Twitter eroding the position of RSS as a blog distribution medium for is the clearest instance. I now have to tweet new posts at optimal times. No more publish-and-forget.

But here’s why it is a tragedy of the commons: everybody is more frantic, but nobody is actually better off. It’s like one guy standing up at the stadium to get a better view, causing a chain reaction leading to everybody standing up. Now nobody has a better view, and everybody is paying the added cost of standing up.

Or to return to my “Sundays off” hypothetical, if there’s just one guy looking to buy something, tweeting on a Sunday, and just one guy willing to get on Twitter to listen on a Sunday, the rest of us are screwed. Now we all have to get on Twitter on Sundays or miss potential big wins. Actually we don’t listen much. We all choose to scream all the time.

There’s probably a nice game theory model here, but I’ll leave that to someone else.

Why this Disrupts Work and Media

Step back and you will see in this complex of effects the reason for both the disruption of the world of work and the world of media. We’ve paid a lot of attention to the coarse lifestyle level effects on work, such as virtual/distributed work and the economics of free agency. We haven’t really thought as much about the minute-to-minute work we are actually doing sitting at home, in our pajamas, working Skype and watching our free-agent earnings trickling into our Paypal accounts.

Yes, there are benefits, and added independence, and I’ve blogged about the positive side. But it isn’t a pleasant reality overall. The real-time Web so far, has created a race to the bottom in the labor force. We have to fight harder, with fewer protections, for every AdSense dime, rather than trusting that our paychecks will see us through our retirement. And a lot of the work is generally much duller. Not just the Mechanical Turk level of mindless drudgery, but also 90% of  formulaic “7 ways” list-post blogging drudgery. Hardly a fulfilling creative life for people inspired to write by Shakespeare.

The impact on media is an indirect effect, via the impact on work. Publishing “amateurs” (bloggers and the like) looking to establish free-agent/personal brand voices for the new economy are the prime villains in the disruption of old media. What frustrates Old Media attempts at creating new business models overnight is that people like me are grabbing thin slices of the attention that used to belong exclusively to them, and given the weight of numbers, it adds up. We are simultaneously eroding their attention market-share and disrupting their distribution channels (the blogosphere is like a giant, crowdsourced Walmart where every employee is creating his/her own store microbrands in addition to reselling bigger brands).

There is a solution. I hinted at it in a recent post on VentureBeat, reviewing Nick Carr’s Shallows. I offered the cautiously optimistic argument that technology is just a lever and that there is a powerful “intent” side and a manipulated “passive” side.  This post is a refinement of that argument: humans, not technology, are the only truly intentional beings in the picture at the moment. We’re not dealing with Skynet here, but a random, dumb emergent beast.

Greasy, Fix-it, Damage Control

I’ll define the Web of Intent in a very simple way:

A Web architecture that reduces the number and frequency of decisions you have to take, lets you control when you make those decisions, and prunes the number of options among which you need to choose in a trustworthy way. The overall effect of the Web of Intent will be to allow you to get OFF the Web without suffering an anxiety attack.

The Web of Intent isn’t like other big visions for the Internet. It is a trend that is emerging to solve an actual problem as opposed to creating a vision somebody figures is attractive. It isn’t a stimulating “new possibilities” vision like the Semantic Web or the 3D Web. It isn’t an enabling vision like the Mobile Web or the Internet of Things that allow us to do new things. It is also something of a damage control vision: lessons learned in the last 10 years show that our Great Information Overload Hope: filtering and “relevance” technologies, weren’t working well enough to significantly reduce our decision-making and information processing load (that’s why I said “prunes in a trustworthy way.” Most of us still don’t trust the existing relevance/filtration technologies). At the same time automation of decisions and action was also not really working. Most information still needed human judgment. Outside of a few things like email forwarding rules, we do most information handling manually. Information work is still largely manual labor.

The Web of Intent is a roll-up-your-sleeves, grungy, grease-stained “fix-it” vision. A vision that is about fixing the huge problems created by Web 2.0, which we’ve ignored while being distracted by the huge opportunities. We can’t live in the RASSW! for much longer without going collectively crazy. I can just imagine some crazed #iranelection style Twitter phenomenon in a few years creating the brinkmanship conditions for a nuclear war.

The Web of Intent solves these huge problems by amplifying the power of human intent, and taking power back from the (dumb, non-malicious) machines. It attempts to fix Web 2.0 before moving on to some new horizon labeled Web 3.0.

So as a fix-it vision, it starts not with the grand visionary designs of a single genius mind, but the collection of small local solutions that are already emerging, based on existing technology, to fix specific intent (little i) problems. We just need to generalize, grow and integrated these solutions into a coherent architecture. Here’s my list:

1. DailyLit and Instapaper allow you to schedule and control your reading
2. Trailmeme allows you prune and add intent to your browsing
3. Newer Twitter clients like HootSuite allow you to gain some time control over your Twitter account
4. Clicker is bringing back some of the benefits of the much-maligned Appointment TV without its costs
5. Nova is up to some interesting general scheduling technology with Live Matrix
6. Flipboard allows you to step back a bit from the Twitter feeding frenzy and bring some of the old leisurely magazine feel back to your Twitter/Facebook fueled reading
7. Meetup is a scheduling, back-to-real-world technology that is the beginning of the “get off the Web” aspect of the Web of Intent.
8. As befits a fix-it greasy vision, email, much maligned by the younger technologies, is being redeemed and restored to its position of respect
9. In a way, the failure of Google Wave is another piece of evidence in favor of the Web of Intent. It aimed to improve email, but turned it down an anxiety/frenzy increasing path. We said, “No thanks.” Perhaps that’s the big turning point.
10. The rise of social gaming on Facebook is very revealing. It may seem like distraction from a work point of view, but it is an example of how you can create intense focus in the middle of the Random Anxious Simul-Screaming Web (RASSW!).  It is particularly revealing that kaChing, a stock trading social game on Facebook, has now become an actual stock trading technology.

Will the Web of Intent Emerge at SXSW 2011?

I don’t know exactly how the Web of Intent will come together, and solve the problems of Media and improve the future of work, but that’s what I am hoping will emerge at SXSW 2011.

So let me leave you to ponder and, I hope, vote for, my picks for SXSW 2011. With help from some buddies, I managed to find 9 strong-sounding panels that seem like if they are done right, will catalyze the emergence of the Web of Intent. It could be the coming out party. There’s panels on long-form content, gaming media, the future of work, computer-aided journalism.

Here is a trail that you can walk through to review all 9 of my recommended panels and vote for the ones you like. Mine is included of course, so make sure you vote for that one. Here’s the quick list of individual links:

• Are Intention and Attention Casualties of the Real-Time Web (mine)
• Hacking the News (Bert Herman)
• Breaking the Page: Overcoming the Web’s Constraints (Dan Donald)
• Newstopia: The New Business Models for News (Mark Briggs)
• ARGS Doesn’t Work: The Future of Trans-Media Stories (No Mimes Media)
• The New Author Platform (Mary Ann Naples)
• Work 2.0: Thriving in the Gig-Economy (eLance.com)
• The Evolving Workplace (Liz Elam)

I found a couple of good blogosphere conversations that took me far off my usual reading routes this week. It started with an article about whether language influences culture, Lost in Translation.  Here’s the sort of insight the new research offers:

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world’s languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

This is Lakoff -Sapir-Whorf hypothesis territory so if you are interested in backtracking, you may want to read an old post by me, Sapir-Whorf, Lakoff, Metaphor and Thought. My online wanderings this week were sparked by two posts in this general cultural territory. The first is about a fascinating 19th century Algerian leader, Abd-El-Kader, who I’d never heard of. The other is a conversation about the use of Twitter in the Black community, sparked off by Farhad Manjoo of Slate (which was pretty much universally slammed), a subject I’d never thought about. Here’s the tour. Warning: severe online wanderlust ahead.

Abd El-Kader and the 1860 Siege of Damascus

The El-Kader thread of reading I did has to do with this superb post on colonial history in Algeria, and specifically with Abd-el-Kader and events in Damascus late in his life (after his Algerian days). His story so inspired the world in the mid 19th century that there’s actually a town in America, Elkader, Iowa, named after him. Today, the guy would have won the Nobel peace prize. The post is long even by Ribbonfarm standards, (it is 6000 words; only one of my posts is longer), but beautifully written, and perfect Sunday reading. It grabbed me in particular because I’ve been reading about the Roman empire, and in parallel watching some TV shows on the Hittite (pre-Greece Anatolia) and Byzantine (post-Rome Anatolia) Empires, and reading a lot about the Ottomans (post-Byzantine Anatolia, when it turned into Turkey) on Wikipedia. I am only now working my way up to the early-modern history of the region. Quite fascinating, as well as very sad, since it shows just how recent the radicalization of Islam is, and to what extent it was the creation of colonialism. This post telling the parallel stories of Napolean III and el-Kader is also interesting. If the French had managed to beat the British at world domination, this post would have been in French, and Abd El-Kader would be better known than Gandhi.

Damascus, at the time of the events, was under Ottoman rule, and El-Kader had made his reputation in Algeria fighting the French, who had displaced the Ottomans there. So there’s a strong Ottoman angle to this whole story. The reason this particular story (El-Kader’s role in the 1860 siege of Damascus) is fascinating is that it gives you a glimpse of the entire, complex 4000 year history of the region.  The events seem strangely similar in flavor to events in the same region almost 3000 years earlier, during the Battle of Kadesh, between the Hittite and Egyptian empires, in 1264 BC (which I learned about in one of the documentaries I’ve been watching).  Each story gives you a sense of the same rich, turbulent complexity. Taken together, the two events made me think about how  little humans have changed in thousands of years. With my more cynical hat on, it also tells me that the region is an irredeemable mess. Nothing has really changed since 1264 BC, so it seems foolish to think we can solve the Middle Eastern crisis (if crisis is even the right word). The region’s religious-political illegibility, instability and messiness stretch way back to pre-Islamic and pre-Jewish history.

The reading made me think (as I often do these days) about how interconnected world history really is. For instance, Abd-El-Kader’s story was part of the beginning of the eventual decline and fall of the Ottoman empire. When the empire finally began to crumble,  in the aftermath of World War I, far away in India a movement started among Indian Muslims called the Khilafat Movement, which was about trying to save the Ottoman empire (it became part of the Indian independence movement for obscure reasons).

When I first learned about that history in high school (it wasn’t on my history syllabus, but I was doing some random side reading), I wondered why on earth the Indian independence movement got all tangled up with the fate of the Ottoman empire. I am only now beginning to understand the complexity and interconnectedness of the world in those medieval and early-modern centuries. The Mughal Emperors of India (1526 – 1862) were partly of Turkish descent. The founder Babur was descended from Genghis Khan and Timur, so the empire was Mongol-Turkic in origin. Indians know this but they usually still think of the Mughal empire as an Indian empire that had little to do with the rest of the world. We tend to be frogs-in-the-Himalayan-well that way. But then, India only joined the Asian plate 55 million years ago, so we have an excuse.  We used to be an island, joined at the hip to Australia at one point. I am not actually surprised the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese don’t really think of us as Asians. We aren’t. We are Gondwanalandians (even though we actually populated the region post-collision. But geography is still destiny. Location, location, location in a plate-tectonic sense).

I never really thought much about what the rest of the world thought about the Mughals until I met a Turkish student in grad school. The Turkish student casually said something like “At the height of our glory, we ruled the world from India to Eastern Europe.”  I think he was right. The Mughals and Ottoman Turkey were to their centuries what Europe and America are today:  a single cultural block. It makes a certain amount of sense that early 20th century Indian Muslims would feel enough of a sense of connection to the Ottoman empire to fight against its dismantlement.  The Mughal empire in India was, in at least a weak NATO-like sense, the eastern wing of an Ottoman-led federation.

Last week we were dining at a rather posh Indian restaurant in DC, Rasika (easily one of the best Indian restaurants in the US). Our waiter was a charming Turkish guy who abruptly decided to have a conversation with me. “Just look at all these colors!” he exclaimed, indicating the food at our table. “India must be a very colorful country; are you Indian?” I am always mildly uncomfortable with such conversation openers, so after some ritual responses, I turned it around asked him where he was from. “Turkey” he said, “it is not so colorful.” And so we chatted pleasantly for a few minutes about Turkey, and I told him I’d been watching a documentary about Istanbul, the Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque, and that I wanted to visit one day. He said he wanted to visit India and that we should exchange notes after.

Ironically, though our waiter didn’t seem to know it, the food we were eating was more Turkish than Indian. Naan and tandoori food in general are Central Asian in origin. What is known as “Indian” food in the US is usually called “Mughlai” food in India (most Americans haven’t eaten truly native Indian food at all). Mughlai is a blend of Punjabi, Persian and Central Asian cuisines, and in case it isn’t obvious, it was the food of the Mughal elites. At best Indians can take credit for adding a few more spices and colors. While on internationalism in Indian food, it sometimes strikes me as amazing that the most characteristic elements of Indian food: potatoes, paneer (a kind of ricotta cheese) and chillies, are all colonial-era imports. Our favorite snack, the samosa, appears to be an Indian-ocean-rim species that is found everywhere from Ethiopia to Indonesia. I once read a description somewhere of pre-Islamic Indian cuisine, and the description seemed almost alien to me.

It’s a connected little world, isn’t it? The more you learn, the harder it is to get angry about any sort of historical unpleasantness and injustice. It is all so damn complicated, I sometimes wonder how the hell we even made it down from the trees and onto the Savannah. Guys like Abd El-Kader make the rest of us sorry idiots look good, and have been carrying us along, kicking and screaming, towards becoming more civilized. I sometimes think I have more in common with monkeys than people like El-Kader.  Give me a banana and leave me alone, or I’ll hit you with a stick.

Twittering While Black

On to a very different cultural wandering.

Manjoo’s article How Black People Use Twitter put him near the top of the “People I’d rather not be this week” list.  I was as puzzled by Manjoo’s article as the responses which followed.  I didn’t know what to think of either. Well, at least I got my introduction to the Black blogosphere. Let’s call it the “Twittering While Black” conversation, by analogy to “Driving While Black.” Here’s an overview.

The critical responses as far as I could tell, all appeared to start with variants/refinements of the “don’t group all Black people together” idea.  One thread of responses, a mostly sarcastic one, dismissed Manjoo as somewhere between clueless and unknowingly offensive (the only redeeming thing about his piece, according to one blogger, was that it was not as bad as this one from April, on Business Insider). My Urban Report took Manjoo to task for asking the question in the first place:

The Slate article does a great job of presenting the, “Why do they talk, walk, or dress like that?” perspective, but that is shallow and narrow minded.

Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket puts it a little more bluntly,

With “How black peo­ple use Twit­ter,” it’s the con­ver­gence of “Slate doesn’t write about race well” and “Farhad Man­joo can be a super­fi­cial tech colum­nist.

For the record I didn’t know Slate had this reputation, but perhaps that is because I usually ignore race-related writing on Slate (or anywhere else for that matter; I have to admit this conversation hooked me because of  “what does this reveal about Twitter?” curiosity, not “what does this reveal about Black people?” curiosity.)

This response post is worth a look simply for all the cute stereotypical-black Twitter-bird cartoons.

The Black Snob traces the general “gawking” at this particular aspect of Black culture to a November article last year in The Awl, and comments, in a post dripping with irony and sarcasm:

But, you know, a lot of those teenagers are black and they manage to get trending topics going so THIS IS A THING! And apparently it needs to be discussed and we need to understand “why.” Our friends at Slate.com (and their over-sized baseball cap wearing, black Twitter bird*) are on the case!

From irony and sarcasm, shift over to the other thread of responses, the earnest one, which suggests that Manjoo might have clumsily asked an important question. We have one blogger embarrassed and saddened by the “blacktag” phenomenon and implicitly suggesting a potential contributor to why non-Blacks lump the entire community together: possibly one sub-group is dominant enough to own the “brand.” (Makes sense when I think about it; no other race appears to be viewed in such monolithic ways).

Also in the earnest-reponses thread is possibly the most intellectually intriguing response,  Missing the Point, by Anjuan on Black Web 2.0:

So, he [Manjoo] became interested in black people on Twitter because he was entertained by what he saw them posting on Twitter.  This brings to mind the long tradition of minstrel shows and the work of actor Stepin Fetchit which both presented entertainment for white audiences by engaging in stereotypes about African Americans.

Which puts Manjoo in decidedly uncomfortable Amos and Andy territory. I wouldn’t have thought to put him there. And to round off the overview, I somehow found my way to two articles bemoaning the lack of diversity in Web 2.0 circles. This Chris Messina piece/graphic provocatively titled “The Future of White Boy Clubs.” and this interesting post arguing that conference organizers’ abdication of their responsibility for creating diverse events is not acceptable.

So much for Twittering While Black. About the only thing I was able to make of it was that the two threads of responses, (sarcastic or earnest) seem to be 2010 echoes of the older W. E. B DuBois vs. Booker Washington dichotomy in Black discourses. I could be way wrong. I usually am on these matters.

But overall, this just reinforces my strong view that people of Asian descent should just shut the hell up when it comes to weighing in on racial black/white matters in America. Even if they are American-born like Manjoo appears to be (his name makes him Persian, so he could be of either Indian-Parsi or original Iranian descent. I couldn’t figure it out. Curious how this thread connects up to the El-Kader thread via Manjoo).

Frankly, everything I’ve read by Asians on the subject of “Race in America” suggests that we basically don’t get it, and that I am not alone. We don’t really get reactionary White anxiety either. As far as socio-economic privilege goes, Asians in America can basically be “rounded up” to “White” and perhaps it isn’t such a bad thing to be excused from this conversation. This is dominantly a Black/White/Hispanic country and Asians should probably watch and stay informed, but otherwise just sit this out. Race is a conversation where the race of the speaker actually matters a lot, and Asian names are just unnecessary noise for now, that confuse an already complicated black-white conversation.

And if you don’t like that thought, just remember, I am not Asian. I am Gondwanalandian.

Now I remember why I don’t normally blog about the work of my fellow bloggers. I tend to wander way too much. I should stick to books.

It was cool and mildly breezy around 8 PM today. So I went for a walk, and I noticed something. Though I passed a couple of hundred people, nobody else was taking a walk. There were people returning from work, people going places with purpose-laden bags, people running, people going to the store, people sipping slurpies.  But nobody taking a walk. Young women working their phones, but not taking a walk. People walking their dogs, or pushing a stroller, with the virtuous air of one performing a chore for the benefit of another, but not themselves taking a walk. I was the only one taking a walk. The closest activity to “taking a walk” that I encountered was two people walking together and forgetting, for a moment, to talk to each other. The moment passed. One of them said something and they slipped back into talking rather than taking a walk.

My observation surprised me, and I tried to think back to other walks. I take a lot of walks, so there are a lot of memories to comb through. In my 13 years of taking walks in the United States, I could remember only ever seeing one native-born American taking a walk. All other examples I could remember were clearly immigrants. Middle-aged eastern European matrons strolling. Old Chinese men walking slowly with their hands behind their backs.  Even elderly Americans don’t seem to take walks the way elderly immigrants do. They walk slowly, but they look like they’re doing it for the exercise. They often look resentfully at young runners.

It is not hard to take a walk. The right shoes are the ones nearest the door. The right clothes are the ones you happen to be wearing. You will not sweat. You may need a jacket if it is cold, or an umbrella if it is raining.  If you pass anybody, you are not walking slowly enough for it to be “taking a walk.” If you need to make up a nominal purpose like “get more bananas from the store” you are not taking a walk.

Taking walks is the entry drug into the quiet, solitary heaven of idleness (the next level up is “sitting on a bench without a view”). For modern Americans, idleness is a shameful, private indulgence.  If they attempt it in public, they are stricken by social anxiety. They seem to fear that the slow, solitary, and obviously purposeless amble that marks “taking a walk” signals social incompetence or a life unacceptably adrift. If a shopping bag, gym bag, friend or dog cannot be manufactured, nominal non-idleness must be signaled through an ostentatious “I have friends” phone call, or email-checking. If all else fails, hands must be placed defiantly in pockets, to signal a brazen challenge to anyone who dares look askance at you, “Yeah, I’m takin’ a walk! You got a problem with that?”

In America, visible idleness is a luxury for the homeless,  the delinquent and immigrants.  The defiantly tautological protest, “I have a life,” is quintessentially American. The American life does not exist until it is filled up.

Even a pause at a bench must be justified by a worthwhile view or a chilled drink.

Worthwhile. Now, there’s an American word. Worth-while. Worth-your-while. The time value of money. Someone recently remarked that the iPad has lowered the cost of waiting. Americans everywhere heaved a sigh of relief, as their collective social anxiety dipped slightly. The rest of the world groaned just a little bit.

The one American I remember seeing taking a walk was Tom Hales, then a professor at the University of Michigan. He was teaching the differential geometry course I was auditing that semester. One dark, solitary Friday, while the rest of America was desperately trying to demonstrate to itself that it had a life, I was taking a walk in an empty, desolate part of the campus. I saw Hales taking a walk on the other side of the street. He did not look like he was pondering Deep Matters. He merely looked like he was taking a walk.

That year he proved the Kepler conjecture, a famous unsolved problem dating back to 1611. A beautifully pointless problem about how to stack balls. I like to think that Kepler  must have enjoyed taking walks too.

[Addendum: A fascinating discussion of this post has developed on Hacker News]

Perhaps it is professional burnout, but lately I’ve been getting extremely tired of all the stupid things people say about innovation. Especially stupid positive things. A great deal of the stupidity in the conversation about innovation is driven by the desperate urge to be original for the sake of being original. There is a pervasive, unexamined assumption that originality is always a good thing. Copycats, by Oded Shenkar is a delightful little book that takes on a project that I strongly support: taking down the holy cow of innovation and extolling the virtues of imitation.  Ironically, it is one of the most original business books I’ve read in the last few years. It even manages to say something new about the business case everybody loves to hate: Southwest Airlines.

Imitation vs. Innovation

To understand the soul of the argument, think of comedians who do great impersonations. Andy Kaufmann, (played by Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon) had a famous shtick, where he’d get on stage, pretending to be a thickly-accented foreigner, and do absolutely awful imitations of American celebrities. Just as the audience was ready to slip from bewildered “what the hell is this?” reactions to laughing at how terrible he was, he’d change character in an instant and do a pitch-perfect Elvis impersonation. Then he’d slip back into the foreigner voice. It’s worth watching Man on the Moon for that scene alone. And to add to the artistry, that movie has a comic genius of our time, Carrey, imitating one from the previous generation, doing an act based on imitations.

At the other end of the spectrum, innovation priests often slavishly worship the innovative culture of ancient Greece and turn up their noses at Rome: “the only new thing they invented was concrete; everything else they took from Greece and other conquered lands”  True, but which civilization was mostly stuck on a small archipelago, with one failed attempt at world conquest, and which one ruled large parts of 3 continents for several hundred years? Which civilization still has enduring impact today (down to the script — Latin — used in this post, which the Romans copied and adapted from the Phoenicians)?

This is the central point of the book, and all of Chapter 2 (“The Science and Art of Imitation”) is devoted to it: the ability to imitate really well is an uncommon talent.  The brains of social animals have highly evolved imitation capabilities, such as mirror neurons, for that purpose. Even less complex organisms use imitation in very complex ways. At an individual social level, most good things spread by imitation (bad things too, unfortunately). At a civilizational level, Rome had very sophisticated philosophies of imitation.

In business, the benefits of imitation are obvious. Somebody else comes up with an idea, pays the capital costs, goes through the painful process of discovering a market and working out operating processes. Then boom, you come in and steal the playbook and build a much bigger, and better business than the original innovator. The original innovator is probably married to its idea, while you can benefit from 20/20 hindsight, unclouded by emotional bonds.

To be clear, Shenkar is talking about sophisticated high-level, skilled imitation, not the low-level illegal stuff (and to be honest, I see value in that as well. I am not a huge fan of overly strong IP laws — give an innovator a small, context-dependent head start, and then open up the game, is my position).

The First New Insight into Southwest in a Decade

Ever since Southwest Airlines became the darling of business case study writers, the example has been worked to death. I now have a “Southwest rule”: if a business book prominently features Southwest Airlines as an example, I don’t read it (an example of failed imitation in business book writing). I almost didn’t read Copycats for this reason, but then I realized there was something fresh going on.

We’ve all heard the stories of bigger hub-and-spoke carriers trying, with varied degrees of success to copy Southwest, and mostly failing. As far as I know, this is the first systematic treatment of the diffusion of the Southwest model, based on a systematic theory of imitation and adaptation. By teasing apart the behaviors of the successful imitators, Shenkar manages to shed new light on both the original Southwest model, and the processes and deep intelligence required for successful imitation.

The book is full of such refurbished examples.

The Book

The seven chapters in the book range economically over some fertile and little-explored territory. Chapter 1 sets the stage by examining several examples of failed and successful imitation. Chapter 2 starts with theories of imitation from biology and evolutionary theory, and moves on to propose that business scholarship has lagged behind in truly understanding imitation.

Chapter 3 examines the economy-wide dynamics of imitation. One interesting tidbit is that it often takes just one employee from an innovator to bring over the entire DNA of an innovation to an imitator. All the original pioneers of the laser industry were found to contain employees of the original labs. On the other extreme, sometimes innovators themselves know so little about how they do what they do, the only way to imitate even within a company is to copy blindly and wholesale (as the semiconductor industry does, with fabs).  Another interesting tidbit is about “imitation clusters” which, unlike “innovation clusters” do not form around famous universities. They form around industrial zones containing trade schools. Examples are Shenzhen for cellphones and Donggaocun for string instruments.

Chapter 4 examines actual imitation processes in the example cases. As you might have suspected, successful imitators are true imitators. They don’t just copy superficial elements. They unravel the cause-effect patterns in the original (often more insightfully than the original) and rebuild. Failed copycats usually fail by trying to have their cake and eating it too, maintaining old systems alongside new ones. This causes failure for reasons ranging from brand inelasticity to contradictory cost structures.

Chapter 5 is relatively weak. It proposes imitation capabilities and processes (such chapters are always weak in business books for some reason, so it is no great sin). It covers the usual systems, processes and culture/value aspects, and includes chestnuts like “Be Humble.” But the overall point is an effective one. You need to go well beyond neutralizing “Not Invented Here” thinking and actually build a proactive attitude towards stealing the best ideas, wherever you find them. This also goes well beyond the Open Innovation model, because it suggests that it is smart and morally legitimate to not invest in innovation at all, but simply prey on the poor, dumb innovators who don’t understand how to exploit what they’ve found. Like taking candy from babies.

Chapter 6, “Imitation Strategies” is much better, and offers a menu of high-level approaches to imitation.  It has many thoughtful points about risk management, costs and approaches (for example, careful discussions of “pioneer importer,” “fast-second” and “come from behind”).

Chapter 7, “The Innovation Challenge” ties the whole thing together and offers final high-level insights, including some rather clever and non-obvious points about overcoming some of the basic defenses of the imitatees. One I found particularly fascinating was the discussion of overcoming “signaling,” a deterrence tactic used by innovators, to puff themselves up as being more unassailable than they really are.

Paint by Numbers

Throughout, the book contains a healthy sprinkling of revealing statistics. Here are some I liked:

• The costs of imitation are 60-75% the costs of innovation
• Imitation took nearly a hundred years during the 19th century. Between 1877-1930, the average “time to imitation” of a new product/service dropped to 23.1 years. This dropped to 9.6 years between 1930-1939, and less than 4.9 years after 1940.  In the 1950s it was 2 years. Now it seems to be 12-18 months. From 100 years down to 12-18 months. That’s some massive acceleration of diffusion (random factoid: the Mughal emperor Jahangir (1569-1627) had not heard of the discovery of America more than 100 years after Columbus; partly explains why India lagged so far behind the West for nearly a millennium).
• Pioneers who create new markets generally end up with around 7% of the markets they create. The copycats get the rest.

These points suggest a whole new perspective from which to examine patent and copyright laws. Just because someone was first with an idea doesn’t mean they should be allowed to hold it hostage for arbitrary amounts of time, especially if they are terrible at execution. I think copyright and patent protection time windows should be turned into floating variables, and tuned by governments, just like interest rates.  Lower protection when innovations need to diffuse faster. Increase protection when temporary monopoly incentives are too weak to foster innovation. It’s like that cliched scene in action movies when local cops in some podunk little town discover something really valuable, and the FBI march in and say, “we are in charge now.” Sometimes that’s a good thing. Remember, the costs of imitation are not zero. They are 60-75% the cost of innovation. Imitators are adding their own value and creating a market an order of magnitude bigger than most innovators could, left to themselves.

A New Holy Cow

I think we have an innovation bubble going on (I am planning a big post on that). It has become a religion among businesses, and even in tough times, everybody seems to think they need to keep up at least a pretense of doing new things.

I say we should stop. Innovation is important, but only up to a point. Beyond that, the returns to companies, and the economy as a whole, diminish rapidly. Imitation is what typically scales and delivers innovations for the greater good. I’d say many companies would be better off dropping innovation as a strategic priority, and setting up an “Imitation Department” instead, and appointing a “Chief Imitation Officer” (or what would be more delicious, “Chief Thief.” I’d like to be Chief Thief one day).

And I can proudly declare that in this case, I practice what I preach. Wherever possible, I avoid reinventing the wheel. Every good, unprotected idea that I can legally and morally steal and repurpose for my own work, I grab.

For those of you who are offended by the apparent unfairness of this, ask yourself: just how much credit do the on-paper “innovators” actually deserve? New ideas are the result of chemistry among existing ones. Innovation itself is a social process that depends on sharing at a certain rate. Your head is just the accidental crucible. B. F. Skinner once gave an extraordinary, sardonic talk (here’s the MP3, listen to it) about the pretensions of “creative” people. Using an analogy to giving birth, and the idea that your head is merely the accidental womb where stuff from elsewhere reacts, he puts “innovation” in its rightful place. And it isn’t on a pedestal.

I am at that dangerous stage with my first book project, Tempo, where I am going around telling people the manuscript is “95% done,” but with the last 5% threatening to take 50% of the time by the time the it is actually done. But still, with cautious optimism, I can report that I really do think I’ll get the book out by November, as I’ve promised. Which brings me to the reason for this post: I need a cover design. If you are a book cover designer and want to take a shot at it, read on. If you are not, but happen to know good book cover designers, please help me out by emailing along a link to this post, reblogging it, and so forth. Designers with no book-cover experience, you can still bid, but I’ll probably favor people with experience unless they ALL price themselves out of my budget. All bids due by August 10, 2010

9 Simple Rules

1. My maximum budget is $1000. And I’d rather spend MUCH less upfront. I intend this book to recover my cash investment and start making money as soon as possible.
2. You can bid for the job by emailing me your bid with links to samples of your work. Do mention how you found out about this job. Read the rest of this list first though.
3. MY WEIRD OFFER: You can choose to bid for some mix of a dollar amount under $1000, and a per-copy profit share up to $1 per copy, on copies sold in the first year, up to a maximum of 3000 copies. So if I sell 500 copies in Year 1, and you bid $500+$1/copy, you’ll make $1000. If it becomes a runaway hit,  you make a maximum of $3500.
4. Calibration: I have approximately 500 people signed up for the book release announcement/beta lists already. And this blog has 2000+ RSS subscribers, growing steadily. You decide what that means.
5. I would prefer bids from the United States to keep the logistics and communication simple, but will consider bids from other countries.
6. If you have never done book design before, send links to samples of your most relevant work. Adjust your bid downwards accordingly
7. This is just an informal, non-binding, request for quotes (RFQ). If I pick your bid, we’ll try to figure out a deal and a mutually acceptable creative brief. If we can’t, I’ll move on to my second choice. And so on.
8. I know many readers of this blog are designers. If you choose to bid, please don’t be offended if I don’t end up picking you. I appreciate your loyalty to this site as a reader, but my priority is to get a great design.
9. Even if you are a big fan of ribbonfarm, please don’t offer to do it for free (I’ve received such offers before, but I can’t accept free work when I make money myself)

So if you’re interested, please email me your bid (dollar amount plus profit-share proposal) and samples to your work. Mention how you found out about the job.

All bids due by August 10, 2010.

If I don’t get enough good bids through this post, I’ll end up looking at the normal channels.

James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring.  The pictures below, from the book (used with permission from the author) graphically and literally illustrate the central concept in this failure pattern, an idea called “legibility.”

States and large organizations exhibit this pattern of behavior most dramatically, but individuals frequently exhibit it in their private lives as well.

Along with books like Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization, Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we Live By, William Whyte’s The Organization Man and Keith Johnstone’s Impro, this book is one of the anchor texts for this blog. If I ever teach a course on ‘Ribbonfarmesque Thinking,’ all these books would be required reading. Continuing my series on complex and dense books that I cite often, but are too difficult to review or summarize, here is a quick introduction to the main idea.

The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure

Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).

Here is the recipe:

• Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
• Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
• Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
• Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
• Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
• Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
• Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility.

Legibility and Control

Central to Scott’s thesis is the idea of legibility. He explains how he stumbled across the idea while researching efforts by nation states to settle or “sedentarize” nomads, pastoralists, gypsies and other peoples living non-mainstream lives:

The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.  Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, particularly blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people.

The book is about the 2-3 century long process by which modern states reorganized the societies they governed, to make them more legible to the apparatus of governance. The state is not actually interested in the rich functional structure and complex behavior of the very organic entities that it governs (and indeed, is part of, rather than “above”). It merely views them as resources that must be organized in order to yield optimal returns according to a centralized, narrow, and strictly utilitarian logic. The attempt to maximize returns need not arise from the grasping greed of a predatory state. In fact, the dynamic is most often driven by a genuine desire to improve the lot of the people, on the part of governments with a popular, left-of-center mandate. Hence the subtitle (don’t jump to the conclusion that this is a simplistic anti-big-government conservative/libertarian view though; this failure mode is ideology-neutral, since it arises from a flawed pattern of reasoning rather than values).

The book begins with an early example, “scientific” forestry (illustrated in the picture above). The early modern state, Germany in this case, was only interested in maximizing tax revenues from forestry. This meant that the acreage, yield and market value of a forest had to be measured, and only these obviously relevant variables were comprehended by the statist mental model. Traditional wild and unruly forests were literally illegible to the state surveyor’s eyes, and this gave birth to “scientific” forestry: the gradual transformation of forests with a rich diversity of species growing wildly and randomly into orderly stands of the highest-yielding varieties. The resulting catastrophes — better recognized these days as the problems of monoculture — were inevitable.

The picture is not an exception, and the word “legibility” is not a metaphor; the actual visual/textual sense of the word (as in “readability”) is what is meant. The book is full of thought-provoking pictures like this: farmland neatly divided up into squares versus farmland that is confusing to the eye, but conforms to the constraints of local topography, soil quality, and hydrological patterns; rational and unlivable grid-cities like Brasilia, versus chaotic and alive cities like Sao Paolo. This might explain, by the way, why I resonated so strongly with the book.  The name “ribbonfarm” is inspired by the history of the geography of Detroit and its roots in “ribbon farms” (see my About page and the historic picture of Detroit ribbon farms below).

High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to “rationalize.” The deep failure in thinking lies is the mistaken assumption that thriving, successful and functional realities must necessarily be legible. Or at least more legible to the all-seeing statist eye in the sky (many of the pictures in the book are literally aerial views) than to the local, embedded, eye on the ground.

Complex realities turn this logic on its head; it is easier to comprehend the whole by walking among the trees, absorbing the gestalt, and becoming a holographic/fractal part of the forest, than by hovering above it.

This  imposed simplification, in service of legibility to the state’s eye, makes the rich reality brittle, and failure  follows. The imagined improvements are not realized. The metaphors of killing the golden goose, and the Procrustean bed come to mind.

The Psychology of Legibility

I suspect that what tempts us into this failure is that legibility quells the anxieties evoked by apparent chaos. There is more than mere stupidity at work.

In Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson’s entertaining story of his experiences subjecting himself to all sorts of medical scanning technologies, he describes his experience with getting an fMRI scan. Johnson tells the researcher that perhaps they should start by examining his brain’s baseline reaction to meaningless stimuli. He naively suggests a white-noise pattern as the right starter image. The researcher patiently informs him that subjects’ brains tend to go crazy when a white noise (high Shannon entropy) pattern is presented. The brain goes nuts trying to find order in the chaos. Instead, the researcher says, they usually start with something like a black-and-white checkerboard pattern.

If my conjecture is correct, then the High Modernist failure-through-legibility-seeking formula is a large scale effect of the rationalization of the fear of (apparent) chaos.

[Techie aside: Complex realities look like Shannon white noise, but in terms of deeper structure, their Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity is low relative to their Shannon entropy; they are like pseudo-random numbers or π, rather than real random numbers; I wrote a two-part series on this long ago, that I meant to continue, but never did].

The Fertility of the Idea

The idea may seem simple (though it is surprisingly hard to find words to express it succinctly), but it is an extraordinarily fertile one, and helps explain all sorts of things. One of my favorite unexpected examples from the book is the “rationalization” of people names in the Philippines under Spanish rule (I won’t spoil it for you; read the book). In general, any aspect of a complex folkway, in the sense of David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, can be made a victim of the high-modernist authoritarian failure formula.

The process doesn’t always lead to unmitigated disaster. In some of the more redeeming examples, there is merely a shift in a balance of power between more global and more local interests. For example, we owe to this high-modernist formula the creation of a systematic, global scheme for measuring time, with sensible time zones. The bewilderingly illegible geography of time in the 18th century, while it served a lot of local purposes very well (and much better than even the best atomic clocks of today), would have made modern global infrastructure, ranging from the railroads (the original driver for temporal discipline in the United States) to airlines and the Internet, impossible. The Napoleanic era saw the spread of the metric system; again an idea that is highly rational from a centralized bird’s eye view, but often stupid with respect to the subtle local adaptions of  the systems it displaced. Again this displaced a good deal of local power and value, and created many injustices and local irrationalities, but the shift brought with it the benefits of improved communication and wide-area commerce.

In all these cases, you could argue that the formula merely replaced a set of locally optimal modes of social organization with a globally optimal one. But that would be missing the point. The reason the formula is generally dangerous, and a  formula for failure, is that it does not operate by a thoughtful consideration of local/global tradeoffs, but through the imposition of a singular view as “best for all” in a pseudo-scientific sense. The high-modernist reformer does not acknowledge (and often genuinely does not understand) that he/she is engineering a shift in optima and power, with costs as well as benefits. Instead, the process is driven by a naive “best for everybody” paternalism, that genuinely intends to improve the lives of the people it affects. The high-modernist reformer is driven by a naive-scientific Utopian vision that does not tolerate dissent, because it believes it is dealing in scientific truths.

The failure pattern is perhaps most evident in urban planning, a domain which seems to attract the worst of these reformers. A generation of planners, inspired by the crazed visions of Le Corbusier, created unlivable urban infrastructure around the world, from Braslia to Chandigarh. These cities end up with deserted empty centers populated only by the government workers forced to live there in misery (there is even a condition known as “Brasilitis” apparently), with slums and shanty towns emerging on the periphery of the planned center; ad hoc, bottom-up, re-humanizing damage control as it were. The book summarizes a very elegant critique of this approach to urban planning, and the true richness of what it displaces, due to Jane Jacobs.

Applying the Idea

Going beyond the book’s own examples, the ideas shed a whole new light on other stories/ideas. Two examples from my own reading should suffice.

The first is a book I read several years back, by Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, which made the argument (originally proposed by the orientalist Bernard Cohn), that caste in the sense of the highly rigid and oppressive, 4-varna scheme was the result of the British failing to understand a complex social reality, and imposing on it their own simplistic understanding of it (the British Raj is sometimes called the “anthropological state” due to the obsessive care it took to document, codify and re-impose as a simplified, rigidified, Procrustean prescription, the social structure of pre-colonial India).  The argument of the book — obviously one that appeals to Indians (we like to blame the British or Islam when we can) — is that the original reality was a complex, functional social scheme, which the British turned into a rigid and oppressive machine by attempting to make it legible and governable. While I still don’t know whether the argument is justified, and whether the caste system before the British was as benevolent as the most ardent champions of this view make it out to be, the point here is that if it is true, Scott’s failure model would describe it perfectly.

The second example is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I am slowly reading right now (I think it is going to be my personal Mount Everest; I expect to summit in 2013). Perhaps no other civilization, either in antiquity or today, was so fond of legible and governable social realities.  I haven’t yet made up my mind, but reading the history through the lens of Scott’s ideas, I think there is  strong case to be made that the fall of the Roman empire was a large-scale instance of the legibility-failure pattern. Like the British 1700 years later, the Romans did try to understand the illegible societies they encountered, but their failure in this effort ultimately led to the fall of the empire.

Aside: if you decide to attempt Mount Everest along with me, take some time to explore the different editions of Gibbon available; I am reading a $0.99 19th century edition on my Kindle — all six volumes with annotations and comments from a decidedly pious — and critical — Christian editor. Sometimes I don’t know why I commit these acts of large-scale intellectual masochism.  The link is to a modern, abridged Penguin edition.

Is the Model Relevant Today?

The phrase “high-modernist authoritarianism” might suggest that the views in this book only apply to those laughably optimistic, high-on-science-and-engineering high modernists of the 1930s. Surely we don’t fail in these dumb ways in our enlightened postmodern times?

Sadly, we do, for four reasons:

1. There is a decades-long time lag between the intellectual high-watermark of an ideology and the last of its effects
2. There are large parts of the world, China in particular, where authoritarian high-modernism gets a visa, but postmodernism does not
3. Perhaps most important: though this failure mode is easiest to describe in terms of high-modernist ideology, it is actually a basic failure mode for human thought that is time and ideology neutral. If it is true that the Romans and British managed to fail in these ways, so can the most postmodern Obama types. The language will be different, that’s all.
4. And no, the currently popular “pave the cowpaths” and behavioral-economic “choice architecture” design philosophies do not provide immunity against these failure modes. In fact paving the cowpaths in naive ways is an instance of this failure mode (the way to avoid it would be to choose to not pave certain cowpaths). Choice architecture (described as “Libertarian Paternalism” by its advocates) seems to merely dress up authoritarian high-modernism with a thin coat of caution and empirical experimentation. The basic and dangerous “I am more scientific/rational than thou” paternalism is still the central dogma.

[Another Techie aside: For the technologists among you, a quick (and very crude) calibration point should help: we are talking about the big brother of waterfall planning here. The psychology is very similar to the urge to throw legacy software away. In fact Joel Spolsky's post on the subject Things You Should Never Do, Part I, reads like a narrower version of Scott's arguments. But Scott's model is much deeper, more robust, more subtly argued, and more broadly applicable.  I haven't yet thought it through, but I don't think lean/agile software development can actually mitigate this failure mode anymore than choice architecture can mitigate it in public policy]

So do yourself a favor and read the book, even if it takes you months to get through. You will elevate your thinking about big questions.

High-Modernist Authoritarianism in Corporate and Personal Life

The application of these ideas in the personal/corporate domains actually interests me the most. Though Scott’s book is set within the context of public policy and governance, you can find exactly the same pattern in individual and corporate behavior. Individuals lacking the capacity for rich introspection apply dumb 12-step formulas to their lives and fail. Corporations: well, read the Gervais Principle series and Images of Organization. As a point of historical interest, Scott notes that the Soviet planning model, responsible for many spectacular legibility-failures, was derived from corporate Taylorist precedents, which Lenin initially criticized, but later modified and embraced.

Final postscript: these ideas have strongly influenced my book project, and apparently, I’ve been thinking about them for a long time without realizing it. A very early post on this blog (I think only a handful of you were around when I posted it), on the Harry Potter series and its relation to my own work in robotics, contains some of these ideas. If I’d read this book before, that post would have been much better.

I have three off-ribbonfarm posts this week that should interest you guys.

Is the Internet Making us Smart or Stupid?

A guest post on VentureBeat, my review of Nick Carr’s The Shallows (a book-length build on his Atlantic piece, “Is Google Making us Stupid.”

The Dangerous Art of the Right Question

On the Trailmeme blog. This post seems to have gone somewhat viral via Hacker News, Lifehacker and a couple of other significant mentions. Slightly lighter fare than you guys are used to here, but should still be of interest.

My Remarkable, Famous Graph

Also on the Trailmeme blog, this one is a sort of follow-up to the previous one, examining the emerging world of infographics, using 3 of my own ribbonfarm graphics to examine the difference between mind-candy and true insight graphics.

Head on over, comment etc.

I rarely read biographies or autobiographies of individuals or groups. This is because I rarely find accounts of success or failure by the people involved, or hired hagiographers, very believable. I usually wait for somebody to tell the story more critically, within a broader context, such as the history of a sector. But I made an exception for Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness for three reasons. First, I wanted to steal concrete ideas from the Zappos playbook about customer-centeredness. Second, I was puzzled by the apparent cultural mismatch in Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos. And finally, I was curious about what a genuinely happiness-centric approach to business looks like. Deconstructing the Zappos story seemed like a good idea. This post is mainly about the last question, as well as some general thoughts about “corporate culture.”

Hsieh’s Story

The book is Hsieh’s story. It is also the Zappos story because he clearly personifies the Zappos DNA. So let’s understand it on those terms.

Hsieh clearly believes deeply in the idea of happiness. It pervades the book, in completely genuine ways. There is a whole section with uncritical adulation of the Positive Psychology movement that is innocent of any skepticism (for skepticism, see my review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided). He also apparently believes that everybody fundamentally wants happiness:

…if you keep asking yourself “Why?” enough times, you’ll find yourself arriving at the same answer that most people do when they repeatedly ask themselves why they are doing what they are doing: They believe that whatever they are pursuing in life will ultimately make them happier. In the end, it turns out that we’re all taking different paths in pursuit of the same goal: happiness.

This incidentally, is not universally true. When I play this game, my final answer always tends to be “so I understand the world better, even if it makes me miserable.” I suspect I am not the only one whose answers converge to something other than “to be happier.” There have to be species besides hedonists and masochists.

Hsieh clearly walks the talk.  There is an extended discussion of his involvement in the rave scene and what he learned from raves about feeling connected to something larger than yourself. It was news to me that the rave movement is about more than dancing Matrix style, and actually has values: PLURR: peace, love, unity, respect, responsibility. What his board called “Tony’s social experiments” seem to have been genuine attempts to create a happiness culture based on his rave experiences.

Here’s a quick précis:

The book starts with early-childhood entrepreneurial experiences, winds its way through a pizza business at Harvard and his first success with LinkExchange, which he and his partners sold to Microsoft. Though that was a financial windfall, he views that episode as a failure because he failed to recognize the importance of culture.

After a description of the brief, mandatory interlude of Web-millionaire poker-playing (there’s quite a good bit on poker-as-metaphor-for-business), we get to the main story: Zappos. Starting as an investor and then getting involved in running the business and taking on the CEO role, Hsieh navigated layoffs, liquidated nearly all his wealth during a death-and-resurrection period, while waiting for a line of credit from Wells Fargo, and led Zappos on to success.  The last part of the book is an argument-by-example, rather than a story, about why culture matters, and why happiness-centric culture is the reason behind Zappos’ success. His own narrative is interspersed with supporting bits authored by others (they are selected to elaborate on, or illustrate his story, not to provide alternative readings of the story itself).

Hsieh comes across as somebody whose life centers around relationships, friendships, group experiences and bet-the-farm gambling instincts.  This is a fun-loving guy who likes manufacturing realities/experiences for his own and others’ entertainment. His interest, evident even in his early childhood stories, in magic tricks, practical jokes and party-planning, all obviously helped shape his character. Those formative experiences are clearly part of the reason why he was able to build an entire company on the strength of its obsessively-attentive customer experience operations.

He is also clearly an extremely smart technocrat, with excellent strategic, financial and technological instincts. But he also comes across as extraordinarily polyannish, with an almost child-like simplicity when it comes to other people, relationships, values and culture. The biblical phrase and a child shall lead them (Isaiah 11:6) kept popping into my head.

Putting the book on the couch for a moment, the story is almost a textbook example of the sort of story that successful, generative adults (and by extension, corporations) tend to tell about their lives, in the sense of  Dan McAdams’ The Redemptive Self, which I have cited before.  And it suffers from all the flaws of that narrative template. For example, there is no acknowledgement or examination of the dark side of experience-manufacturing as a strength: it is also a capacity for deceit.

The way he tells the story, there is no sociopath side to his character, and no sociopaths anywhere around him. Zappos was apparently entirely built by Wonderful Human Beings. I find that hard to believe, but if it is true, then Zappos may be the case study that falsifies all my theories of management. I’ll wait for a few more versions of the story to emerge before I make any revisions though.

Like most autobiographical accounts of events, the book does not  entertain the thought that others might read the events differently. It is written with the unexamined assumption that privileged access to the facts leads naturally to the best account of those facts, so no attempt is made to separate data/facts from conclusions. The book even begins with a disarming acknowledgement:

“Finally…you’ll notice some sentences that aren’t the best examples of English grammar… I wrote this book without the use of a ghostwriter. I’m not a professional writer, and in many cases, I purposely chose to do things that would probably make my high school English teachers cringe, such as ending a sentence with a preposition. I did that partly because I wanted the writing to reflect how I would normally talk, and partly just to annoy all my high school English teachers (who I appreciate dearly).

It is interesting that he believes “professional” writing is about grammar and prepositions rather than about maintaining a certain critical detachment towards your own thoughts. It shows. Charming and endearing though the sentiment is, I immediately saw it as a red flag. To get any value out of the book, I’d have to treat it as the transcript of a psychoanalysis session, rather than a trustworthy and critically self-aware text.

That said, Hsieh is clearly too smart to offer an obviously deluded or flawed account of the events, and is also genuinely selfless enough to not turn the story into a self-serving one. He has made a good case, and he believes in it.

The question is, should you? Or is it too good to be true?

The Zappos Corporate Personality

It certainly isn’t too good to be true in the sense of presenting a false picture of a happy company. From the contributions by others in the company, it is clear that most of the employees are actually significantly happier than employees of other companies.

The Zappos corporate personality appears to be an extension of his own, and this is an outcome of deliberate design. Through the friendship and partnership choices that fueled his entrepreneurial career, as well as the hiring practices he put in place, Hsieh was able to turn his social environment into a projection of his own personality (the social synchrony aspect of the rave culture is not a peripheral element in this story; it is the main point). Everything I’ve said about how he comes across appears to be true of the company as well. The following quotes are particularly revealing:

“Although it seems obvious in retrospect, probably the biggest benefit of moving to Vegas was that nobody had any friends outside of Zappos, so we were all sort of forced to hang out with each other outside the office.”

“I thought about all the employees I wanted to clone because they represented the Zappos culture well, and tried to figure out what values they personified. I also thought all the employees and ex-employees who were not culture fits, and tried to figure out where there was a values-disconnect.”

“There are a lot of experienced, smart, and talented people…but a lot of them are also really egotistical, so we end up not hiring them.”

“The best team members have a positive influence on one another and everyone they encounter. They strive to eliminate any kind of cynicism and negative interactions. Instead, the best team members are those that strive to create harmony with each other and whoever else they interact with.”

Now I am trying my best to be fair here. I am not trying to use selected out-of-context quotes to misrepresent the Zappos culture. I think this is how they actually view themselves, and want their culture presented. This is textbook bright-sidedness/positive psychology. They seem like genuinely fun and nice people (the book makes them sound close to Amway/cult-like, but I don’t think they are that bad; I think I’d like them socially even if I couldn’t dream of working with them). As a company, like Hsieh himself, they walk the happiness talk.

They actually have a “culture fit” HR interview designed to keep things this way. It is clearly a test designed to keep, well, jerks like me out.

If you’ve been reading this site for any length of time, especially my Organization Man series, these quotes should be huge red flags. They are the classic signs of groupthink, assumed consensus, suppression of real dissent and a determined elevation of harmony-seeking over truth-seeking. I doubt anyone at Zappos would agree with this harsh reading, but the conclusion is inescapable. I would be very surprised if anyone at Zappos has read The Organization Man. If the book is in their famous library, and checked out more than three times by people who are still there, I will be guilty of having seriously misjudged them. The library seems to be dominated by books like Fred Factor and Fish, in addition to the usual Seligman-gang Happiness tomes and Tribal Leadership (I haven’t read this one).

What is more, not only is this the culture dominant, it is viewed as having no costs, and as the primary cause of Zappos’ success. Both are deeply dangerous thoughts. The latter particularly so. As I noted in my highlights post on Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization, the “Organization as a Cultural System” is just one of at least 8 major metaphors of organization. Each of the other 7 will yield an alternative account and causal hypothesis of the Zappos story.

The companies of the 50s with a similar “happiness” culture, that Whyte analyzed in the Organization Man, hit a reality shock starting in the late 70s. What killed the culture back then was the  end of the happy, easy-growth era, and the emergence of real and vicious competition as markets matured and stagnated across the board. A new, much harsher culture appeared overnight all over the economy, much better adapted to the new realities. If I am right, and Zappos is a case of déjà vu all over again, they are enjoying the benefits of being the market creator in the growing online-shoes business. If a credible competitor ever emerges, this culture will be in serious trouble. Going by historic time constants in these matters, we can expect that around 2020. Generally, major economic sectors, as they near maturity, attract at least one major challenger which helps create the mature, zero-sum market with razor-thin margins. It remains to be seen whether the Internet-fueled growth era will obey this law.

But we’re wandering. Let’s get back to Zappos, and the three questions that made me read this book.

Zappos as a Customer Experience Role Model

As a playbook to steal from, in building customer-centric organizations, the book succeeds brilliantly, and I got more than my money’s worth in terms of the ideas it gave me for my own projects.  I won’t attempt to summarize or distill the ideas.

Enough said on that. If customer experience is a problem for you, read the book. You will learn a lot.

Zappos and Amazon

I am not going to share my conclusions on this subject. For pretty much the first time on ribbonfarm, I am self-censoring my own thoughts because I think they might get me into arguments I don’t care to get into, and offend people I don’t want to offend. I have an answer that satisfies me, and I’ll forgo the value of debate. I think I am starting to get old.

Happiness as a Business Premise

If you’ve been reading ribbonfarm for any length of time, you know that I steer by a truth/happiness yin-yang dichotomy (see my Philosopher’s Abacus post). So my starting position on the “happy company” hypothesis is a skeptical one.  I’ve sketched the historical-precedent argument why a happiness-culture may run into trouble with market maturation, but I haven’t provided an analytical argument.

Despite my personal preferences, I don’t think being truth/reality-centered is necessary or a better alternative to “happiness” as a foundational premise. In fact “truth-centeredness” can be a lousy foundational premise, because it can be a centripetal force that tears a company apart, as easily as it can be a cohesive force that keeps it together.  Truth informs dismantlement as often as informs mergers (see my Gervais Principle series).

What holds for humans, holds for corporations: beliefs that help you survive and beliefs that are  true are not the same thing.  The pursuit of knowledge can be detrimental not just to your happiness, but to your survivability as a human being or a corporation. It is a self-indulgent luxury like any other life value.

With my own biases out of the way, let’s talk happiness. While Hsieh is very careful to point out that all corporate cultures are different, you get the impression that he thinks happiness-maximization ought to be a foundational premise for all cultures (going back to the “we’re all taking different paths in pursuit of the same goal: happiness” quote).

The part of the book where the happiness idea comes through most clearly is in Hsieh’s discussion of how he came up with the list of core values for the company. I was aghast at how seriously they seem to take a subject that is normally just an exercise in cynical perception-management in other companies. It was a bottom-up process based on what employees thought were the core values. The 37 initial bottom-up value suggestions were eventually edited and distilled down to 10.  The actual lists are revealing enough that I am going to reproduce them:

The Bottom-Up List

Culture is everything, WOW/Service, Trust and faith, Idealism, Company Growth, Long-term, Personal growth and stretching, Achieving the impossible, Team, Family/relationships, Emotional connections, Developing your gut, Empowerment, Ownership, Taking initiative, Doing whatever it takes, Not being afraid to make sacrifices, Unconventional, Bottom-up meets top-down, Partnerships, Listening, Overcommunicate, Operational Excellence, Built for change, Continuous incremental improvement, Innovation, WOM [Word of Mouth], Lucky, Passion and positivity, Personality, Openness and honesty, Fun, Inspirational, A little weird, Willing to laugh at ourselves, Quiet confidence and respect.

The Final List

Deliver WOW through service, Embrace and drive change, Create fun and a little weirdness, Be adventurous, creative and open-minded, Pursue growth and learning, Build open and honest relationships with communication, Build a positive team with family spirit, Do more with less, Be passionate and determined, Be humble.

(apologies for the paragraph style; a bullet-list would have made this post a mile long).

I spent quite a lot of time deconstructing these lists, but I won’t bore you with the details. I concluded that the final list is an accurate distillation/summary of the bottom-up list (not surprising given the cloning-culture; the process is in a sense a validation that Hsieh’s strategy of building the company in his own image actually worked. Unless there were closet cultural skeptics who kept their mouths shut). But there are a couple of interesting highlights:

Lucky didn’t make the cut. Somebody clearly thought that luck (of the ‘being in the right place at the right time’ variety) had something to do with the story. I think sheer dumb luck has something to do with every story. There is only so much you can do to make your own luck and do the whole “fortune favors the prepared mind” thing. But as critics of positive psychology like Ehrenreich and McAdams point out, downplaying dumb luck is one of the first moves in going bright-sided.

I initially thought humble meant being existentially humble in the face of all the randomness and arbitrariness of the universe. It is the flip-side of acknowledging “lucky.” But apparently, Zappos idea of humble is the more basic interpersonal “don’t brag” kind, designed to cut egotistical jerks down to size (assuming the recruitment process accidentally let them through).

“Open and honest relationships” doesn’t seem to mean trying hard to see the truth and then telling it like you see it, when necessary. At Zappos, it seems to mean being open and honest about what you really feel. This is a share-your-feelings therapeutic sort of openness. Another reason low-reactor jerks like me, who rarely share feelings, wouldn’t make it past the front door. Again, to be clear, I am not saying this is a bad thing. It is what it is, with costs and benefits.

Finally, there’s a lot I agree with on both lists. Values I share. But it is the ones that I don’t share that ultimately matter. Cultural fit is a matter of complete consensus, not sufficient alignment.

But the biggest surprise to me is that nowhere, not even in the original version, is there any kind of truth-seeking value. I thought I’d see at least one sentiment along the lines of “we don’t hide from reality” or “we admit when we are wrong.” Even though such behaviors are part of the story (such as when Tony and his team admitted that drop-shipping as a business model wasn’t working and that they needed to shift to an inventory model), reality-centeredness isn’t articulated. As I already said, I don’t think truth/reality centeredness is necessary or always useful. But you still expect lip service at least. Again, no judgment, just a note of surprise for me. I am not about to argue with success.

Analyzing the DNA

Is happiness-centeredness as modeled by Zappos necessary under some conditions? History suggests that perhaps early-stage growth companies that are creating a new sector need to be happiness-centric. But I don’t think this is true. I recently reviewed The Lords of Strategy, and it is clear that at BCG, the growth company that created the sector, the governing value was some version of truth-centeredness.

Perhaps happiness-centeredness is necessary for growing market-creating companies that are based on a strong sales culture? This, I think, may be true. I’ve seen other examples that fit the mould (including, though I don’t want to overemphasize these examples, Amway and Saturn).

Is happiness-centeredness irrelevant to success? Are Hsieh and Zappos making a huge, collective correlation-to-causation leap of faith? If we look through non-cultural organizational metaphors, will we find other, more compelling explanations? I don’t know, but when the Zappos story matures, and more versions of the story are available, this would be an interesting PhD thesis question for some student of organizational behavior in 2022 to tackle.

The Broader Corporate Culture Issue

The Zappos story is one of the many things making “corporate culture” a hot topic. I think the topic has gained currency because as “social” enters the brand narrative of companies, the internal culture becomes part of the external brand (Hsieh says as much). With that in mind, a couple of interesting items you should look at:

1. Google, I think, is another happiness-centric company, and its culture has been in the news. I made a trail about it, Google Culture: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, with what I could find. The recent Pandas vs. Lobster post and an older New Yorker feature are particularly useful.
2. Dan Shapiro’s post, Your Company Culture is a Meaningless Platitude, also a response to Hsieh’s book, is a must-read.
3. I haven’t synthesized my thoughts, but a while ago, I wrote this post on the E 2.0 blog: There is No Such Thing as Culture Change

Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization is a must-read for those who want to develop a deeper understanding of a lot of the stuff I talk about here. Though I’ve cited the book lots of times, it is one of those dense, complex books that I am never going to attempt to review or summarize. You’ll just have to read it. But I figured since I refer to it so much, I need at least a simple anchor post about it. So I thought I’d summarize the main idea with a picture, and point out some quick connections to things I have written/plan to write.

(For once, the picture was complex enough that I chose to draw it and scan it in, instead of doing one of my ugly MS-Paint sketches). Here’s the main idea of the book –The Eight Metaphors

Morgan’s book is based on the premise that almost all our thinking about organizations is based on one or more of eight basic metaphors. The main reason this book is hugely valuable is that 99% of organizational conversations stay exclusively within one metaphor.  Worse, most people are permanently stuck in their favorite metaphor and simply cannot understand things said within other metaphors. So these are not really 8 perspectives, but 8 languages.  Speaking 8 languages is a lot harder than learning to appreciate 8 perspectives. I consider myself a bit of an organizational linguist: I speak languages 2, 5, 6 and 7 fluently, 1 and 3 passably well (enough to get by), and 8 poorly.

1. Organization as Machine: This is the most simplistic metaphor, and is the foundation of Taylorism. Any geometrically structuralist approach also falls into this category, which is why I have little patience for people who use words/phrases like top down, bottom-up, centralized, decentralized and so forth, without realizing how narrow their view of organizations is. The entire mainstream Michael-Porter view of business is within this metaphor.
2. Organization as Organism: This is a slightly richer metaphor and suggests such ideas as “organizational DNA,” birth, maturity and death, and so forth. I really like this one a LOT, and have so much to say about it that I haven’t said anything yet. I even bought a domain name (electricleviathan.com) to develop my ideas on this topic separately. Maybe one day I’ll do at least a summary here.
3. Organization as Brain: This may sound like a subset of the Organism metaphor (and there is some overlap), but there is a subtle and important shift in emphasis from “life processes” to learning. Organization as brain is the source of information-theoretic ways of understanding collectives (“who knows what,” how information spreads and informs systems and processes). The System Dynamics people like this a lot, especially Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline). I cannot recommend the SysDyn approach though; I think it is fundamentally flawed. But the learning view itself is very valuable.
4. Organization as Culture: I’ve written about this stuff before (There is No Such Thing as Culture Change on the E2.0 blog), and plan to do so soon, when I review Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness and in the next Gervais Principle post. I honestly dislike this metaphor, but can understand its appeal objectively. More so than others, culturalists tend to be extremists; they think the culture metaphor is the most important one, and this rigidity traps them in peculiar ways.
5. Organization as Political System: Most of the Gervais Principle series falls within the boundaries of this metaphor, though I sometimes step out to the Psychic Prison metaphor.
6. Organization as Psychic Prison: I chose to represent this as a guy in a prison, since that is immediately obvious to everybody, but the right symbol (and the one Morgan uses) is the Plato’s cave symbol, which would be obscure to most people even if I could sketch it in a recognizable form. We’ve talked about this on the edges of the Gervais Principle series, through our discussions of exile/exodus, and also extensively in my old Cloudworker series.
7. Organization as System of Change and Flux: Think of a dynamically stable whirlpool or eddy in a flowing stream, and you get this one. It highlights some of the same aspects of organizations as the Organism metaphor, but in different ways. For example, notions of stability, dissipation, entropy, and other physics ideas are used. This is where things like GTD,  lean startups and agile programming fit.  The idea of creative destruction also fits in here. If the Machine metaphor is the dominant one, this one is the market-leading alternative metaphor.
8. Organization as Instrument of Domination: This is NOT the same as the political metaphor, since it involves naked aggression in some form. This is where you get themes of oppression, sweat-shops, social costs (such as the BP oil spill), the military-industrial complex and so forth. This used to be a lot more important than it is now, because humans are selfish creatures. So long as the subjects of oppression were human laborers, this was the leading metaphor. The moment that variety of oppression began to wane, and corporations shifted their oppressive gaze to animals, via factory farming, and the environment, via wanton damage out of public view, we stopped caring as much. Fortunately, that is starting to change, because ‘out of public view’ is an increasingly difficult state to maintain. Cases in point: Iran, Burma and BP.

There is a lot to be said about each metaphor. Morgan’s book is not particularly original in its analysis, but it is magisterial in its scope, coverage and organization. It surveys and contextualizes a lot of work by others in organizational theory. Bits of it can be tedious and too cautious/conservative, but overall, this is one of those “get your foundational education” books that you truly must read. I don’t want to tempt you into an illusion of understanding with this post, but just give you a taste of what is in store for you, if you choose to read the book.

I plan to do a series of such quick-tastes of books that I consider very important, but don’t plan to review/summarize.

In the early eighties, after lunch, around 1 PM on hot — and I mean Indian hot — summer days, I’d step out onto the verandah, push two straight-backed chairs together to create a sort of bench, and take a nap. There were ceiling fans inside, and even one room with an air-conditioner, but I preferred the verandah with its still, hot air. It was a natural sauna and sensory deprivation chamber. It induced a sort of death-sleep and occasionally, mild hallucinations.  Reflecting on these memories and the 100 degree days we’ve been experiencing here in the DC area this week, it struck me that I am a very seasonal kind of guy. Which is why I dread being forced to move to California. Something about sharply marked seasons fits very well with my personality. At least when I am able to harmonize my own manic-depressive mood swings with the local seasons. In my winter post from exactly 6 months ago, I noted that I like bouts of extreme, deathly cold because they represent rebirth and renewal. Deathly summer heat on the other hand, feels like suddenly hitting the pause button in the middle of the most exciting action in a movie.

Indian summers are hotter, but North American summers are actually harder to deal with, for two reasons.

First, the northern latitudes create ridiculously long days. Your usable outdoor hours get pushed to before 8 AM and after 8 PM, and the American social clock, lacking a siesta, is simply not stretchy enough to accommodate them well.

Second, the summer ends in the horrible, listless August lull (a month so awful, David Plotz of Slate proposed getting rid of it), while in India, the summer ends with the Monsoon punching you in the face. There is really no contest. Though you can get sick of the relentless rain very quickly, the Monsoon makes you glad to be alive. It even makes you feel virtuous and gritty, since even getting to school or work can feel like an accomplishment. The American August, on the other hand, is a kill-me-now kind of misery. Much of the misery is due to the effects of the American calendar. You have to endure the lack of momentum and the dread of the unfinished work of the year. The post Labor Day charge looms menacingly, making it impossible to enjoy the enforced lull. In Europe, they at least have the sense to just take the whole month off en masse, so you know for sure nobody else is working either. Here, enough of us are forced to push on that we can ruin things for those who dare to go on vacation.

Both the American clock and the American calendar need some reform, but that’s neither here nor there.

The hottest week or two in July represent the onset of the psychological doldrums. The motivational winds of spring die away with extreme suddenness. You are becalmed.

Being becalmed psychologically isn’t necessarily a symptom of inadequate internal drive. It is an environmental and social psychological effect.  Even though we call it drive, human motivation is more about a sense of direction than inner propulsion. It is about handling rudder and sail. Human beings have no engines. Your progress is powered by the wind. And the winds of motivation arise from the behaviors of those around you and your reactions to the seasons.

Extreme, windless heat induces both internal and external stillness in those who are sensitive to the seasons.  In winter,  external stillness hides furious internal renewal and rebooting. Us seasonal types are busy introspecting, making resolutions and contemplating our entire lives. The stillness of summer is inside-out stillness.  You know where you are going, you know what you need to do next, and there is no real value in thinking too far ahead. When that week in July hits, you are in the middle of stuff, not at the beginning or end.

And then the universe hits the pause button in your head. It is the lunch-time of the year. We should stop calling it summer, and borrow that wonderful word Italians use for the mid-day break, pausa.

Deadlines may loom and anxiety may mount, but you cannot move. You cannot get restless about time being wasted, because you are on a temporal siding. The main tracks are being used by Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, South Africa and Chile. You cannot waste time, because the time isn’t yours to waste. The July temporal siding is a sharp reminder that time isn’t personal property. Nature budgets the use of the temporal commons. The time-winds of motivation are blowing elsewhere on the planet.

About the only thing you can do with July is make sure your back-burners are adequately stocked with important stuff that needs simmering. The front burners are going to be turned off, whether your like it or not.

I have now officially gone beyond merely mixing metaphors to pureeing them. For those who haven’t been counting, the puree contains sailing ships, stretchy clocks, railway tracks, both metaphorical and literal sorts of wind, an electronic pause button, computer rebooting, boxing (“punch in the face”), property rights, cooking (burners and simmering), the day as a metaphor for the year, space (doldrum latitudes) as a metaphor for time (summer) and momentum in the sense of physics.  The puree deserves its own metaphor. Let me call it garam masala. Hot spice-blend. Fresh garam masala is usually made as a wet puree rather than the dry powder you get in stores. It normally contains 20-30 individual spices. Bad garam masla tastes like crap.

While on spices and summer, there are interesting thoughts there. Everybody likes lemonade in summer, but the variants are interesting. Americans just add sugar. Sweet and sour. Indians add salt as well. If we have it handy, we prefer black rock salt, a wonderfully pungent substance that almost no other nation on the planet can handle.  Indian summer cooling foods always have spicy/salty overtones; we can’t stand pure sweetness. I like to put black salt on pineapple slices. I like to eat my water melon with some fresh lime and finely chopped green chili peppers. Punjabis like sweet lassi, but I can only handle the salty kind, known as chaas. But Punjabis are crazy anyway, and don’t count. Food temperature is another area of difference. I prefer hot tea or coffee  to soda, iced tea or coffee. Americans don’t seem to get that hot liquids on hot days can actually work. But you need to accept, rather than fight, the psychological doldrums for that hot-and-hot combo to work. You don’t fight summer with ice. You make friends with it, with heat.

Curiously, I don’t like ice cream very much in the summer. It is way too heavy. Ice cream is for late spring and early fall.

You know the doldrums are over when you suddenly start craving different foods. There is a restless stir in the air and a growing hunger for movement, and your stomach senses it first. Perhaps because the new temporal regime demands a different kind of bodily fuel. My tastes are still stuck in Indian Monsoon grooves. I know summer is drawing to a close when I start craving pakoras and chai, classic Monsoon food. There is nothing better than sitting on your verandah with a cup of chai and some crispy pakoras, watching the rain pound the earth mercilessly, the near-opaque sheets of water walling you in. Unfortunately the pakora-chai combination is awful for the American August. Another reason to ban the bloody month.

Still, at least I am not in California.

July 4th will be the three-year anniversary of Ribbonfarm. I normally celebrate with a retrospective-plus-roundup, but this year, I thought I’d do something different. I am not entirely sure what you guys get out of my writing, but for me, the act of writing this blog has clarified, reinforced and (for better or worse) hardened a certain philosophy of life. This philosophy is a set of coupled choices on a set of either/or spectra. The best visualization I could come up with is something I call the philosopher’s abacus. Here’s a picture (feel free to share, pass along etc.)

I believe the abacus represents fundamental genetic constraints that define a life-philosophy design space. I believe it is nearly impossible for humans to transcend the abacus. Let me explain how it works.

How the Abacus Works

I share with Lord Kelvin an inability to visualize ideas except in the form of mechanical models. The abacus is a set of spring-linked beads on a curved wire frame. If you move all the beads to one end or the other, you get a set of relaxed springs: there is no internal tension or conflict to manage. If you choose any other configuration, the effort it will take to maintain that philosophical stance is proportional to how much you stretch the springs.

I am reluctant to label the left and right sides, but I suppose you could call them “manic-depressive truth-seeking” and “deluded happiness-seeking.” The left is creative-destructive, cat-like, Nietzchean, Dionysian, Taoist and Saivite. The right is preservation-focused, dog-like, Aristotlean, Apollonian, Confucian and Vaisnavite. The great divide I am trying to capture has occupied philosophers, comedians, bureaucrats and dictators of all ages, so there is very little original here.

Rather satisfying to me is the fact that I feel comfortable classifying, towards the right, anyone who claims the abacus can be transcended. So from where I stand, towards the left (the picture roughly reflects my own position), the abacus is unfalsifiable, and therefore self-contradictory, since it could be metaphysically delusional. It also makes me doctrinaire, and incapable of listening seriously to the abacus-rightists. I have spent a couple of decades trying earnestly to be open-minded, and am starting to enjoy being close-minded, hidebound and narrow for a change.  I suppose I’ll be among those headed for the guillotine when the revolution comes.

By the way, right and left here refer to the abacus drawing. The political right/left divide does not correlate at all to this picture. I have met both Democrats and Republicans who are abacus-left and abacus-right.

Where does the abacus come from? I believe it comes from genetics. Darwinism manifests itself in human behavior as an uneasy balance between our social natures and our competitive natures. Everything we do comes down to it.  Genetics even drives our philosophical imagination. I know a lot of you will itch to challenge both this foundational premise and the specific ideas I have baked into the abacus visualization. The idea that truth and happiness are fundamentally opposed, and that happiness rests on a foundation of delusion, is a position that a lot of people will strongly object to. But let’s not have that argument on the Ribbonfarm birthday week, okay? I have written, and continue to write, in defense of this picture. This whole blog is in a sense an ongoing defense of this picture. So we can continue the arguments as we go along (the next Gervais Principle piece is going to be about this stuff in particular).

I just picked seven spectra to put on the abacus, but there are others you could add obviously. For example, if you wanted to throw in a couple of more biological spectra you could add (reading left to right), promiscuity-monogamy and fasting+gluttony vs. moderation on there. Slightly higher up, you could add introversion-extroversion. But I am primarily interested in the structure biology induces, many degrees removed, in philosophy.

I’ve placed the control-pleasure “primary drive” spectrum in the middle because it is the force that enslaves you to your true nature. That bead, I believe, cannot be moved much by nurture. All the other beads also have default at-birth positions, but can be moved around a bit by nurture. If you are control-driven, you will end up living a truth-seeking life in some sense. If you are pleasure-driven, you will end up living a happiness-seeking life. Wherever you position the beads, you pay an ongoing cost through some mix of manic-depression and delusion.

I spent a long time fighting the abacus. I believed there are achievable states of Buddhahood that allow you to transcend the abacus; that truth is reconcilable with happiness or some acceptable cousin (such as ‘transcendental calm’ perhaps). I’ve concluded that the there isn’t. I believe you’ve got to pick a side. Those springs get loaded with unbearable tension otherwise. As you age, your ability to move the beads diminishes. It also takes less effort to keep the beads in a configuration that contains some tension. Perhaps you could view that as the wires rusting with age, so the beads get locked in place by friction rather than deliberate effort.

And there is a certain kind of peace in this acceptance. I can’t be sure, but I don’t think it is the same kind of peace that all those who flock to ashrams and spiritual retreats seek, and sometimes claim to have achieved.

If you want to compute with the abacus for yourself, go right ahead. You don’t need instructions. The thing is easy enough to sketch. Just sketch your own. Ponder, don’t take too seriously. You can temporarily escape the tensions in your internal springs by laughing at your sketch.

Happy Third Birthday, Ribbonfarm

It’s been a good year. I moved from the D-list to the C-list, got my first Google $100 advertising check, crossed 2000 subscribers, incorporated as a business, started my second product (the Be Slightly Evil email list) and made great progress on my book. But most importantly, Ribbonfarm is starting to fulfill the purpose I hoped it would. There was some deliberate symbolism in my choice of July 4th, 2007 as the launch date. In three years, Ribbonfarm has become my main source of philosophical independence. It has helped me escape partly from the condition Thoreau described as “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.”

If you like writing, you should blog. Writing has never been a more philosophically rewarding activity in history.

Word-of-Mouth (WOM) vs. Broadcast is the emerging Mac vs. PC debate in marketing. There are relevant facts, but they don’t matter, because battles inevitably turn ideological. If you did the Mac-vs-PC ads for WOM vs. Broadcast, an episode might go as follows:

WOM: Hey Broadcast, how are you doing?

Broadcast: Great, I just finished a multi-million dollar Master Marketing Plan for my Fortune 100 client, with a textbook positioning strategy, a great branding theme and 3 superbowl ad concepts. All in just 3 weeks.

WOM: Oh wow! That’s impressive. How did the customers respond?

Broadcast: Very funny WOM. We both know it takes months of stakeholder conversations and focus groups before you can roll out a marketing campaign. If all goes as planned, 50% of our marketing will work; we just won’t know which 50% of course, ha ha. Even someone as good as me can’t break the Golden Rule of Marketing after all.

WOM: Well actually Broadcast, I just finished a 3-week concept-to-execution campaign for a small business, for just $800, where we used a Facebook page to talk to customers. And I know exactly which pieces worked, and why.

Broadcast: Oh I have a social media component in my master plan too. We’ll have a Facebook page AND a Twitter feed AND a blog AND a YouTube Channel. And we’ve already sourced the first 50 professionally written blog posts. So looks like I am  a little ahead of you there, WOM. You really should try more planning instead of just jumping in. You’ve got to maximize reach and optimize your channel mix; it’s all about eyeballs baby.

WOM: You do know that Twitter is not always best for all types of conversational marke….

Broadcast: Tweet Tweet Tweet Tweet TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET. I can’t hear you. TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET

The WOM-vs.-Broadcast debate, which is currently at this level, is incredibly shallow and juvenile (though sometimes entertaining). The WOM camp is getting prematurely smug, and the Broadcast camp is defending the wrong parts of classical marketing. So let’s try to take the conversation up a notch.

Framing the New Marketing

It’s been a year since I wrote a marketing post (I posted Marketing, Innovation and the Creation of Customers in June last year), mainly because I’ve been too busy actually trying to do it.  I’ve learned one big lesson: there’s a widening schism between the WOMers and Broadcasters, and neither side knows how to go from thesis and antithesis to synthesis. Both are pretending furiously though.

The WOM’ers, if I may call them that, view the Broadcasters as hopeless Luddites, who spend too much money pitching unwanted and obsolete messages loudly and boorishly to large, irrelevant and unreceptive audiences, and deluding themselves about their effectiveness because they measure nothing.

The Broadcasters — and this is a slightly unfair label since were doing WOM long before the rise social media — view the WOMers as naive amateurs who don’t understand the fundamentals of marketing and occasionally get lucky. They’d probably rather describe themselves as classicists, and swear by “fundamental” 101 concepts, like segmentation, positioning, controlled brands, channel mix and focus groups.

Both sides are right and wrong.

WOM’ers are innovating and breaking new ground, but their claims about their ‘discoveries’ are wildly exaggerated.

This is because almost everything they’ve discovered is highly tactical, and not very far removed from tool-use expertise. Stuff like optimal tweet length and timing. Their attempts at building an intellectually rigorous Marketing 2.0 theory that can supplant existing textbooks are laughably naive and pollyannish. It’s all about “authentic” people having “conversations” inside “tribes” apparently. And it seems the customer now “owns” the brand, and you should be properly humble, and gratefully cede all control, and feel honored that they’ve chosen to own it. Even if all they do is tyrannically mob-vandalize it. When the wise crowd says “jump,” you say “how high?”

Kill me now.

These are the fond utopian hopes of a newly-empowered, once-marginal group, who suddenly find themselves wielding influence. They are merely bashing values they don’t believe in, and calling it theory. And they believe they have some sort of democratic mandate from an oppressed voiceless customer, who wants them to do this. This is simply wrong. They’ve been empowered by a new two-way medium, not by customers oppressed by broadcast marketing.

On the other hand, Broadcasters/Classicists mostly are for the most part as clueless as the WOM caricatures suggest. They defend exactly those parts of traditional marketing that are being undermined completely. The idea of static segmentation for instance. I still use segment-language to communicate coarse approximations of my thinking to those who don’t speak WOM, but basically, the concept is past its expiry date. Most classicists continue to waste time with focus groups and lagging trend indicators even when wildly inappropriate, instead of learning real-time analytics. Almost none of them understand peripheral vision or know how to listen outside their core. While most of them appear to have heard the idea that brands need to evolve from static identities (company genes) to dynamic narratives (company genes and their expression over a lifetime), few have any clue what it means to manage at narrative level, rather than brand level.

Worse, they actually fail to defend what is worth defending, cravenly ceding the moral high ground to WOMers and their “authentic” rhetoric.

I believe that the biggest value in classical/broadcast-centric marketing is a certain attitude and philosophy. There are two elements to this, and together these elements constitute what I call the Classical Marketing Contract.

The Classical Marketing Contract

The first element has to do with the value governing the relationship between marketers and the marketed-to.  The antithesis of authenticity is not artificiality/fakeness. That’s just a strawman argument. The true antithesis of authenticity is irony. And I don’t mean irony in the sense of recent hipster grads wearing “Yes, We Can” Obama t-shirts ironically and pretending to understand the Foucault they were force-fed in school.

I mean irony in the sense of classical marketing, be it a tailored pitch to a CEO for a $100 million account, or using sexy women to sell cars, or equating Coke with happiness. Both marketers and customers recognize, and accept, that they are interacting through some manufactured theater. Both know that there is subliminal manipulation going on, and that it is okay. Both know and accept that there are long-term social consequences and costs (for example, the perpetuation of specific stereotypes about women that happen to be useful in selling to men). The only case where all this is considered immoral is when such layered messaging is targeted at children below about 8, who lack the capacity for ironic processing.

This governing value of irony is a sophisticated and adult one, as opposed to the naive one the WOM’ers think can come to govern marketing, true “authenticity.” I believe that is impossible, not because classical marketing will resist, but because “authentic” is a very unnatural thing for humans to be (and if you think like me, it is not a desirable thing either).

The second element of the attitude and philosophy is the acknowledgment of the fundamentally adversarial relationship between marketer and marketed-to. All marketing, even “permission marketing” (at the opt-in stage) involves a minimal, non-zero level of adversarial intent, and a peremptory hijacking of attention against somebody’s will, through interruption or distraction. You can dress it up and call it being “remarkable,” but it is always a peremptory “look at me” act.

And this adversarial nature of marketing is again accepted by both sides. Customers cede some autonomy over their attention in exchange for choice, and accept the burden of separating signal and noise in the messaging that comes in through the ceded attention channel.

Irony is actually necessary to make this work, because if you’ve ceded autonomy over part of your attention, theatricality, mutually acknowledged artificiality and drama at least make the incoming messaging entertaining, even if you never buy 99% of the stuff that is thrust onto your radar.

This sublimation of an adversarial situation into an uneasy peace, accepted by both sides, and the adoption of an ironic stance towards the messaging, together constitute what I call the Classical Marketing Contract, by analogy with the Social Contract. In a social contract governance is based on the consent of the governed, and it sublimates an adversarial situation into an uneasy peace by trading some autonomy of behavior for security. The governing value of the social contract is empathy, which swings the natural competitive-cooperative balance of human society towards “cooperative.”

Replace governance, governed, behavior, security and empathy with marketing, marketed-to, attention, choice and irony, and you get the Classical Marketing Contract.

Can We Write a New Contract?

When I say classical marketing defends the wrong bits, this is what I mean. They should be defending these underlying values and the Classical Marketing Contract. Instead they defend the conceptual and technical apparatus of classical marketing. The textbook can be thrown out and replaced the moment we all figure out how to build a defensible theory of social-media focused WOM-centric marketing.

But the contract must not be torn up. Classical marketers seem to be universally acting contrite and apologetic, and promising that they will reform and adopt “authenticity” and drop the “attention-share” war-fighting mindset. And then they go back to their old values, feeling guilty about it. They shouldn’t.  The values are nothing to be ashamed of. The contract, for all its flaws, is worth fighting for.

Because I don’t believe we can write a better one.

To see what I mean, consider a reductio ad absurdum. WOM idealists don’t like the adversarial nature of traditional marketing, even though customers don’t actually complain about the general principle (they complain about specifics like the quantity, quality and location of the interrupts). A belief seems to be taking hold among the idealists that it is possible to have a true peace, based on mutual respect, where all messaging is by permission only. That marketers and the marketed-to can honestly say, “let’s all be friends” and shake hands.

Related to this is authenticity. If there is no adversarial intent, true authenticity is possible. Even assuming you can get rid of adversarial intent, true authenticity is not even particularly desirable. I don’t know about you, but all that earnestly “authentic” messaging, both on social media (some authentically blathering idiot of an intern) and WOMized advertising on TV, which sounds like bad reality TV, make me want to scream.

The assumption that you, the marketer, are my friend, and are being open and frank towards me, and not attempting to manipulate me with overt or subliminal tactics, when it is sincerely held, leads to dull and ineffective messaging in general. If you are trying to fake authenticity, and doing it transparently badly, that’s even worse.

Please, please spare me. I don’t want authenticity, and I am fine with you trying to manipulate me. Irony is still the better governing value because it legitimizes everything that’s entertaining. I’d want that even if we could get rid of all adversarial intent.

The only good kind of authenticity is ironic authenticity, where the decision to play “authentic” itself is an artistic one, like the faux-reality-TV mode of The Office. Even those kids attempting to make their slapstick videos go viral get this, fortunately. We sometimes mistake the amateurishness and poor production values for “authenticity,” but it isn’t. The fact that producers of the classic viral videos usually try to be outrageous tells us that they are operating within the classical marketing contract. Good.

But continuing the reductio ad absurdum, the absurd end-state is when marketers are completely authentic and non-adversarial in everything the say/do, and all messaging is by pure permission only. People only hear what they want to hear, from people they trust, and the message is always “authentic” with no layers of meaning and intent. Since even the marketer’s “opt-in” interrupt involves an element of manipulation, this means the only people allowed to market are your own friends, and the only way a marketer can get to you is through a chain of friendship links, and hope that the trust doesn’t weaken along the chain to the point where permission is not implied.

I hope I don’t need to say it, but this is idiotic. Such values would reinforce mutual-admiration echo chambers which could never be penetrated by new information. It would create a fragmented universe of deluded, self-reinforcing cults. That spells A-M-W-A-Y.

Fortunately it isn’t happening broadly, but it is still important that we question any philosophical stance that would lead to the conclusion that this is a good idea.

Towards a Synthesis

My hope is that we retain the classical marketing contract, and feel comfortable tossing out any obsolete conceptual apparatus. On the WOM side, we need all the ongoing experimentation and discovery of tactical knowledge to eventually build up to a solid theory that can be put into textbooks. We’re not there yet, but without the right marketing contract governing the relationship between marketers and the marketed-to, it will take far longer.

I’ll end with one little idea, the sort of thing that I believe belongs in a new theory of marketing, which illustrates the real conceptual, non-ideological differences between WOM and Broadcast, and why the classical marketing contract is still the right way to frame the analysis.

Mutual Belief vs. Common Knowledge

Broadcast isn’t just an inefficient ancestor of social-media-accelerated WOM, and it isn’t just for mass products (like Budweiser or Coke) that can tolerate the inefficiency due to the reach.

Broadcast and WOM are different because they create different types of knowledge over different time frames.

Broadcast directly, and immediately, creates what logicians call common knowledge. WOM creates a different type of knowledge called mutual belief that may or may not grow into common knowledge. To understand the difference, let’s consider Google vs. Bing.

Remember how you first found about Google? In my case, a computer-scientist friend came up to me excitedly and told me, “You’ve got to try this thing called Google, it is way better than Altavista.” It was like being personally let into a secret. This is how WOM works. Isolated pockets of people learn about something. But the isolated groups don’t know that the other isolated groups know.

It is 1998. I know about Google, you know about Google. But unless we happen to be in the same small group (technically, small world), you don’t know I know, and I don’t know that you know. We are in a state of mutual belief.

If I overhear you mention Google, now I know you know, but you still don’t know that I know. If we talk, things move up one degree.

Common knowledge is the state where I know that you know that I know…. ad infinitum, and you are in the same state. Under WOM dynamics, common knowledge can only appear when a message diffuses and echoes sufficiently broadly, and individuals have discovered each other’s knowledge state to sufficient depth (you don’t need an infinity of interactions, at some point we all make the leap to ad infinitum).

Here’s the deep bit about broadcast. It creates common knowledge instantly, by taking advantage of a shared context containing previous pieces of common knowledge. Broadcast media like TV create this base. All football fans can watch a Superbowl ad and instantly know that every other football fan has seen it too.

This is incredibly valuable because the market can now talk within itself, leading to network effects. For Google, the sign of the leap to common knowledge was when it became a verb in common knowledge (“I googled this…”), which requires an assumption that knowledge of Google is common knowledge. This took years.

For Bing, it took minutes, because they used broadcast. Perhaps not very effectively (I haven’t heard anyone say “Can you bing that?”), but the point remains.

In classical WOM, common knowledge is restricted to small groups, and the basis of previously shared common knowledge often does not exist, and has to be artificially created. Jeremy Epstein, who does Dan Pink’s marketing, had to create a “Bunko Breakfasts” series so that readers of the book (The Adventures of Johnny Bunko) could bootstrap from a mutual belief state to a common knowledge state, within a small group.

So a marketing choice between WOM and broadcast should depend on, among other things, your assessment of the distribution of common knowledge you need. If you merely want everyone to know, WOM will do. If you are happy with small groups in common knowledge state, WOM will do. If you can wait years for a message to spread so that it naturally makes the leap to common knowledge, WOM will do. But if you want instant common knowledge, even very good WOM can’t do it. You need broadcast.

And yes, broadcast requires the classical social contract to legitimize and enable it.

And even within pure WOM, if your content is remarkable enough to spread broadly and make the organic leap to common knowledge, you probably need the contract too. Google didn’t need a remarkable message because the product itself was so remarkable, but for most things that want to follow the Google diffusion model, you need a remarkable message. Which means you need to hijack attention. Which means things are at least a little adversarial and ironic. Which means you need the classical marketing contract.

Between individual life scripts and civilization-scale Grand Narratives, there is an interesting unit of social analysis called the folkway. Historian David Hackett Fischer came up with the modern definition in 1989, in his classic, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America:

…the normative structure of values, customs and meanings that exist in any culture. This complex is not many things but one thing, with many interlocking parts…Folkways do not rise from the unconscious in even a symbolic sense — though most people do many social things without reflecting very much about them. In the modern world a folkway is apt to be a cultural artifact — the conscious instrument of human will and purpose. Often (and increasingly today) it is also the deliberate contrivance of a cultural elite.

Ever since I first encountered Fischer’s ideas, I’ve wondered whether folkways might help us understand the  social landscape of globalization. As I started thinking the idea through, it struck me that the notion of the folkway actually does the opposite. It helps explain why a force as powerful as globalization hasn’t had the social impact you would expect. The phrase “global citizen” rings hollow in a way that even the officially defunct “Yugoslavian” does not. Globalization has created a good deal of  industrial and financial infrastructure, but no real “social landscape,” Friedman-flat or otherwise. Why? I think the answer is that we are missing some folkways. Why should you care? Let me explain.

Folkway Analysis

Folkways are a particularly useful unit of analysis for America, since the sociological slate was pretty much wiped clean with the arrival of Europeans.  As Fischer shows, just four folkways, all emerging in 17th and 18th century Britain, suffice to explain much of American culture as it exists today. It is instructive to examine the American case before jumping to globalization.

So what exactly is a folkway? It’s an interrelated collection of default ways of conducting the basic, routine affairs of a society. Fischer lists the following 23 components: speech ways, building ways, family ways, gender ways, sex ways, child-rearing ways, naming ways, age ways, death ways, religious ways, magic ways, learning ways, food ways, dress ways, sport ways, work ways, time ways, wealth ways, rank ways, social ways, order ways, power ways and freedom ways.

Even a cursory examination of this list should tell you why this is such a powerful approach to analysis. If you were to describe any society through these 23 categories, you would have pretty much sequenced its genome (curious coincidence, 23 Fischer categories, 23 chromosome pairs in the human genome). You wouldn’t necessarily be able to answer every interesting social or cultural question immediately, but descriptions of the relevant folkways would contain the necessary data.

The four folkways examined by Fischer (the Puritans of New England, the Jamestown-Virginia elites, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and migrants from northern parts of Britain to Appalachia), constitute the proverbial 20% of ingredients that define 80% of the social and cultural landscape of modern America. These four original folkways created the foundations of modern American society. It is fairly easy to trace  recognizable modern American folkways, such as Red and Blue state folkways, back to the original four.

Other folkways that came later added to the base, but did not fundamentally alter the basic DNA of American society (one obvious sign: the English language as default “speech way”). Those that dissolved relatively easily into the 4-folkway matrix (such as German, Irish, Dutch or Scandinavian) are barely discernible today if you don’t know what to look for. Call them mutations. Less soluble, but high-impact ones, such as Italian, and Black (slave-descended), have turned into major subcultures that accentuate, rather than disrupt, the four-folkway matrix; rather like mitochondrial DNA. And truly alien DNA, such as Asian, has largely remained confined within insular diaspora communities; intestinal fauna, so to speak.  The one massive exception is the Latino community. In both size (current, and potential) and cultural distance from the Anglo-Saxon core, Latinos represent the only serious threat to the dominance of the four-folkway matrix. The rising Latino population led Samuel Huntington, in his controversial article in Foreign Affairs, The Hispanic Challenge, to raise an alarm about the threat to the American socio-cultural operating system. To complete our rather overwrought genetic analogy, this is a heart transplant, and Huntington was raising concerns about the risks of rejection (this is my charitable reading; there is also clearly some xenophobic anxiety at work in Huntington’s article).

I offer these details from the American case only as illustrations of the utility of the folkway concept. What interests me is the application of the concept to globalization. And I am not attempting to apply this definition merely as an academic exercise. It really is an extraordinarily solid one. It sustains Fischer’s extremely dense 2-inch thick tome (which I hope to finish by 2012). This isn’t some flippant definition made up by a shallow quick-bucks writer. It has legs.

Globalization and Folkways

Globalization is, if Tom Friedman is to be believed, an exciting process of massive social and cultural change. A great flattening. Friedman’s critics (who have written books with titles like The World is Curved) disagree about the specifics of the metaphoric geometry, but don’t contest the idea that “globalization” is creating a new kind of society. I agree that globalization is creating new technological, military and economic landscapes, but I am not sure it creating a new social landscape.

We know what the “before” looks like: an uneasy, conflict-ridden patchwork quilt of national/civilizational societies. It is a multi-polar world where, thanks to weapons of mass destruction, refined models of stateless terror, and multi-national corporations binding the fates of nations in what is starting to look like a death embrace, no one hegemon can presume to rule the world. Nobody seriously argues anymore that “Globalization” is reducible to “Americanization” (in the sense of a wholesale export of the four-folkway matrix of America). That was a genuine fear in the 80s and 90s that has since faded. The Romanization of Europe in antiquity, and the Islamization of the Middle East and North Africa in medieval times, have been the only successful examples of that dynamic.

But it is still seems reasonable to expect that this process, “globalization,” is destroying something and creating something equally coherent in its place. It is reasonable to expect that there are coherent new patterns of life emerging that deserve the label “globalized lifestyles,” and that large groups of people somewhere are living these lifestyles.  It is reasonable in short, to expect some folkways of globalization.

Surprisingly, no candidate pattern really appears to satisfy the definition of “folkway.”

With hindsight, this is not surprising. What is interesting about the list of “ways” within a folkway is the sheer quantity of stuff that must be defined, designed and matured into common use (in emergent ways of course), in order to create a basic functioning society.  Even when a society is basically sitting there, doing nothing interesting (and by “interesting”  I mean living out epic collective journeys such as the settlement of the West for America or the Meiji restoration in Japan)  there is a whole lot of activity going on.

The point here is that the activity within a folkway is not news, but that doesn’t mean nothing is happening. People are born, they grow up, have lives, and die. All this background folkway activity frames and contextualizes everything that happens in the foreground. The little and big epics that we take note of, and turn into everything from personal blogs to epic movies, are defined by their departure from, and return to, the canvas of folkways.

That is why, despite the power of globalization, there is “no there there,” to borrow Gertude Stein’s phrase. There is no canvas on which to paint the life stories of wannabe global citizens itching to assert a social identity that transcends tired old categories such as nationality, ethnicity, race and religion.

This wouldn’t be a problem if these venerable old folkways were in good shape. They are not. As Robert Putnam noted in Bowling Alone, old folkways in America are eroding faster than the ice caps are melting. Globalization itself, of course, is one of the causes. But it is not the only one. Folkways, like individual lives and civilizations, undergo rise and fall dynamics, and require periodic renewals. They have expiry dates.

Every traditional folkway today is an end-of-life social technology; internal stresses and entropy, as much as external shocks, are causing them to collapse. The erosion has perhaps progressed fastest in America, but is happening everywhere. I am enough of a nihilist to enjoy the crash-and-burn spectacle, but I am not enough of an anarchist to celebrate the lack of candidates to fill the vacuum.

The Usual Suspects

We’ve described the social “before” of globalization. What does the “after” look like? Presumably there already is (or will be) an “after,” and “globalization” is not an endless, featureless journey of continuous unstable change. That sounds like a dark sort of fun, but I suspect humans are not actually capable of living in that sort of extreme flux. We seek the security of stable patterns of life. So we should at some point be able to point to something and proclaim, there, that’s a bit of globalized society.

I once met a 19-year old second-generation Indian-American who, clearly uneasy in his skin, claimed that he thought of himself as a “global citizen.” Is there any substance to such an identity?

How is this “global citizen” born? What are the distinguishing peculiarities of his “speech ways” and “marriage ways”?  What does he eat for breakfast? What are his “building ways?”  How does this creature differ from his poor old frog-in-the-well national-identity ancestors? If there were four dominant folkways that shaped America, how many folkways are shaping the El Dorado landscape of globalization that he claims to inhabit? One? Four? Twenty? Which of this set does our hero’s story conform to? Is the Obama folkway (for want of a better word) a neo-American folkway or a global folkway?

These questions, and the difficulty of answering them, suggest that the concept of a “global citizen” is currently a pretty vacuous one.  Fischer’s point that the folkway is a complex of interlocking parts is a very important one. Most descriptions of “globalized lifestyles” fail the folkway test either because they are impoverished (they don’t offer substance in all 23 categories) or are too incoherent; they lack the systematic interlocking structure.

1. “Multicultural” societies are no more than many decrepit old folkways living in incongruous juxtaposition, and occasionally coming together in Benneton ads and anxious mutual-admiration culture fests
2. “Melting pot” societies are merely an outcome of some folkways dissolving into a dominant base, and others forming distinguishable subcultural flavors
3. Cyberpunk landscapes are more fantasy than fact; a few people may be living on this gritty edge, but most are not.
4. “Intentional” communities, which date back to early utopia experiments, have the characteristic brittleness and cultural impoverishment of too-closed communities, that limits them to marginal status.
5. Purely virtual communities are not even worth discussing.
6. Click-and-mortar communities, that might come together virtually, have so far been just too narrow. Take a moment to browse the groups on meetup.com. How many of those “interest groups” do you think have the breadth and depth to anchor a folkway?

The genetic analogy helps explain why both coverage (of the 23 categories) and “complex of interlocking parts” are important. Even the best a la carte lifestyle is a bit of a mule.  In Korea for instance, or so I am told, marriages are Western style but other important life events draw from traditional sources. Interesting, perhaps even useful, but not an independent folkway species capable of perpetuating itself as a distinct entity. That’s because a la carte gives you coverage, but not complex interlocking. On the other hand, biker gangs have complex interlocking structures and even perpetuate themselves to some extent, but do not have complete coverage. I’ve been watching some biker documentaries lately, and it is interesting how their societies default back to the four-folkway base for most of their needs, and only depart from it in some areas. They really are subcultures, not cultures.

Latte Land

I don’t know if there is even one coherent folkway of globalization, let alone the dozen or so that I think will be necessary at a minimum (some of you might in fact argue that we need thousands of  micro-Balkan folkways, but I don’t think that is a stable situation).  But I have my theories and clues.

Here’s one big clue. Remember Howard Dean and the “tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show” culture?

Perhaps that’s a folkway? It wouldn’t be the first time a major folkway derived its first definition from an external source.  It sounds a la carte at first sight, but there’s some curious poetic resonance suggestive of deeper patterns.

For a long-time I was convinced that this was the case; that Blue America could be extrapolated to a Blue World, and considered the Promised Land of globalization, home to recognizable folkways. That it might allow (say)  the Bay Area, Israel, Taiwan and Bangalore to be tied together into one latte-drinking entrepreneurial folkway for instance. And maybe via a similar logic, we could bind all areas connected, and socially dominated by, Walmart supply chains into a different folkway. If Latte Land is one conceptual continent that might one day host the folkways of globalization, Walmartia would be another candidate.

I think there’s something nascent brewing there, but clearly we’re talking seeds of folkways, not fully developed ones. There are tax-hiking, latte-drinking types in Bangalore, but it is still primarily an Indian city, just as the Bay Area, despite parts achieving an Asian majority, is still recognizably and quintessentially American.

But there are interesting hints that suggest that even if Latte Land isn’t yet host to true globalized folkways, it is part of the geography that will eventually be colonized by globalization. One big hint has to do with walls and connections.

In the Age of Empires, the Chinese built the Great Wall to keep the barbarians out, and a canal system to connect the empire. The Romans built Hadrian’s wall across Britain to keep the barbarians out, and the famed Roman roads to connect the insides.

Connections within, and walls around, are characteristic features of an emerging social geography. Today the connections are fiber optic and satellite hookups between buildings in Bangalore and the Bay Area. In Bangalore, walled gated communities seal Latte Land off from the rest of India, their boundaries constituting a fractal Great Wall. In California, if you drive too far north or south of the Bay Area, the cultural change is sudden and very dramatic. Head north and you hit hippie-pot land. Head south and you hit a hangover from the ’49ers (the Gold Rush guys, not the sports team). In some parts of the middle, it is easier to find samosas than burgers. Unlike in Bangalore, there are no physical walls, but there is still a clear boundary. I don’t know how the laptop farms of Taiwan are sealed off, or the entrepreneurial digital parts of Israel from the parts fighting messy 2000 year old civilizational wars, but I bet they are.

Within the walls people are more connected to each other economically than to their host neighborhoods. Some financial shocks will propagate far faster from Bangalore to San Jose than from San Jose to (say) Merced. I know at least one couple whose “marriage way” involves the longest geometrically possible long-distance relationship, a full 180 longitude degrees apart, and maintained through frequent 17 hour flights.

Curiously, since both the insides and outsides of the new walls are internally well-connected, though in different ways, the question of who the barbarians are is not easy to answer. My tentative answer is that our side of the wall is in fact the barbarian side.  Our nascent folkways have more in common with the folkways of pastoral nomads than settled peoples.  Unlike the ancient Chinese and Romans, we’ve built the walls to seal the settled people in. I’ll argue that point another day. Trailer: the key is that “barbarians” in history haven’t actually been any more barbaric than settled peoples, and the ages of their dominance haven’t actually been “dark ages.” We may well be headed for a digital dark age driven by digital nomad-barbarians.

Our missing folkways, I think, are going to start showing up in Latte Land in the next 20 years. Also in Walmartia and other emerging globalization continents, but I don’t know as much about those.

In the meantime, I am curious if any of you have candidate folkways. Remember, it has to cover the 23 categories in “complex and interconnected” ways, and there should be a recognizable elite whose discourses are shaping it (the folkway itself can’t be limited to the elite though: the elite have always had their own globalized “jet-setting” folkways; we are talking firmly middle class here).  How many folkways do you think will emerge? 0, 1, 10 or 1000? Where? How many conceptual continents?

Random side note: This post has officially set a record for “longest gestation period.” I started this essay in 2004, two years before I started blogging. It’s kinda been a holding area for a lot of globalization ideas, about 20% of which made it into this post. I finally decided to flush it out and evolve the thread in public view rather than continue it as a working (very hard-working) paper.

Random side note #2: There are lots of books that are so thick, dense and chock-full of fantastic ideas that I could never hope to “review” or “summarize” them. In a way, this post is an alternative sort of book review, based on plucking one really good idea from a big book. Fischer’s book is a worthwhile reading project if you are ready for some intellectual heavy lifting.

There is a technology trend which even the determinedly non-technical should care about. The bad guys are winning. And even though I am only talking about the bad guys in computing — writers of viruses, malware and the like — they are actually the bad guys of all technology, since computing is now central to every aspect of technology. They might even be the bad guys of civilization in general, since computing-driven technology is central to our attacks on all sorts of other global problems ranging from global poverty to AIDS, cancer, renewable energy and Al Qaeda. So turning around and winning this war might even be the single most important challenge facing humanity today. Even that bastion of the liberal arts and humanities, The Atlantic Monthly, has taken note, with this excellent feature on how the best security researchers in the world are losing the battle against the Conficker worm. Simple-minded solutions, ranging from “everybody should get a Mac” to “just stick to Web-based apps and netbooks” to “practice better digital hygeine” are all temporary tactical defenses against an adversary that is gradually gaining the upper hand on many fronts. I have concluded that there is only one major good-guy weapon that has not yet been tried: sexual computing. And it hasn’t been tried because major conceptual advances in computer science are needed. I’ll explain what I mean by the term (it is a fairly obvious idea for those who know the background, so there may be more accepted existing terms for the vision), but I’ll need to lay some groundwork first.

The Ground and Air Wars

The bad-guy ecosystem today is unbelievably diverse. Digital threats abound, from viruses and malware on your PC, to attacks on Web servers, Twitter and Facebook hacks and large-scale identity data theft from banks. Add cyberwarfare among countries and between countries and MNCs (as in, Google vs. China), and the existence of organized botnets, and the term “hacker” starts to seem quaint. You could broadly break this down into a ground war (stuff happening at the level of your PC or other end-user devices) and an air war (involving web servers, organizations (criminal, state, stateless and “good guy”), and the cloud infrastructure).

The annoying old semantic quibbling by the good guys (“we are the hackers, they are the crackers”) has gone from being merely annoying to dangerously inaccurate, because it suggests that the war is between two anarchic groups of  roughly similar lone individuals. The ecosystem on both sides is now so complex and organized that we need a whole new set of names just for the various roles. For instance, there are good guys who do nothing besides run rooms full of open, exploitable computers as “honeypots” to attract the newest malware. And there are other good guys working on esoteric encryption technologies. On the bad guys’ side, there are low-level foot soldiers who troll around online and offline looking for credit card numbers to steal, and then there are the big mob bosses running botnets, and (I assume) liaisons who manage the financial relationships between spammers and the pornography industry. Things are so complex that even the experts on both sides have to specialize. Even within my workgroup, the three people I rely on to educate me on this stuff have different areas of expertise.

I’ll leave it to a digital ethnographer to figure out good names all around. For now, I am just going to call them “good guys” and “bad guys.”

Barbarians at the Gates

Let me share my personal experiences with the bad guys, as a poorly-armed civilian digital homesteader. It is no contest. I feel like an 1850s settler in the American West, in my sod hut on the prairie, with only an old musket to defend against the Medellin Cartel, armed with Uzis and helicopters. I am actually particularly lucky, since I work closely with a couple of  learned security guys, and can call on them for help when I need to. Most of you are on your own. The only reason I haven’t suffered really badly is that I am just not important enough to be worth individual attention (unlike say, Paris Hilton and her cellphone).

When I first encountered a virus in the mid-80s (an infected floppy, on a pre hard-disk PC), the war against the bad guys was no more than a bunch of isolated skirmishes against not-very-skilful digital vandals who were in it for fun. Any technically-minded person could educate themselves on all the details in a week, and reformating floppies was all it took to get rid of threats and back to your life, after a brief interruption (today, a serious digital security problem can stop your life cold, as comprehensively as a heart attack.)

Then for a couple of decades, I was basically safe (and lucky) in Pax Digitalia. I recall no serious virus-like problems in my increasingly active digital life between about 1990 and 2007. I kept up with the news and best-practice advice and, rather sloppily, with my antivirus updates, which seemed to be working. Then around 2007 all hell started breaking loose. I was under the impression that if you kept your anti-virus software up to date, avoided shady (in particular porn) websites, were smart with passwords, and didn’t download suspicious attachments, you were safe. Apparently not. Here’s a rundown of stuff I’ve encountered since 2007.

• As End-User: Three serious malware infections. All three managed to disable my main anti-virus software from getting updates, and mightily resisted attack by multiple alternative anti-malware programs, which mostly failed to even find something wrong. In the first case, what eventually did the trick was running a couple of different programs in a specific sequence, very quickly after a reboot. In the second case, I had to resort to one of the lesser-known anti-malware programs because the bad guys had apparently figured out how to block all the most popular ones. In the last case, I had to upgrade from XP to Windows 7. I am now seeing small signs that my Windows 7 PC is probably infected again. In each case, the symptom was the usual one, unwanted ads popping up all over the place.
• As Website Owner: I discovered, purely via a casual check, that Google was blocking one of the parked domains I own, as “suspected of distributing malware.” Further checking revealed that 3 of my domains (in fact, ALL of them EXCEPT for ribbonfarm.com) had been hacked, and contained malware-distributing code. I had to clean up my sites, lock them down, and get them off Google’s blacklist. This shattered my illusion that Unix systems were fundamentally safer than Windows systems and that ISPs take care of this stuff. Ribbonfarm escaped (I think) because it runs WordPress, which adds an additional line of defense, but that’s hardly much comfort, since WordPress has its own changing set of exploitable security holes. Its vulnerability goes up and down as it evolves.
• As Customer of Big Organizations: I received one of those ominous letters from an organization I used to be part of, telling me that I was among several thousand users whose personal data had been stolen from the organization, and offering me a free subscription to an identity-theft fighting company’s services to manage any potential consequences. Fortunately, my identity didn’t seem to have been stolen.
• As Professional Technologist: Finally, Trailmeme, the project I manage for Xerox, which runs on Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure was, for a while, an innocent civilian site caught in a broader war. We couldn’t send email from our servers because a vendor of lists of spam sources (used by many firewalls) had added a lot of Amazon-owned IP addresses to their blacklist. For those who aren’t familiar with cloud computing, services like Amazon’s allow you to juggle Web servers like a circus clown, which adds a whole new layer of obscurity and illegibility to Web infrastructure, something that helps the bad guys more than the good guys. Compute clouds, like the real things, obscure visibility. It took some hard work from my team members to get ourselves off the blacklist. More broadly, I’d estimate that the time my development team spends on building the security features of our product is a very non-trivial fraction.
• An Autoimmune Collapse: Like many of you, my laptop, running XP, succumbed to that strange auto-immune mess a month ago, when a flawed McAfee update deleted a legitimate and critical system file, crashing my system comprehensively. I am sure the bad guys were laughing it up, watching the good guys trip over their own feet.
• Twitter hacks: I accidentally gave my Twitter login information to fake services twice, before I clued up and learned what to look for, to tell legitimate Twitter ecosystem services from exploits better (100% certainty is impossible of course). Now it looks like I’ll have to learn a new set of Facebook security behaviors.

And I am not even counting baseline bad-guy stuff, like the fact that there is more mail caught in my spam folders than legitimate stuff in my inbox, or that this site attracts more spam comments than real ones (so far, Akismet is keeping up). That’s my relatively-informed civilian view of the war. That I even understand this much is because I am an engineer (aerospace, not computer) and work directly with computing technology and software professionals. Chances are, you are not exposed on all these fronts, but the fact is, the bad guys are slowly gaining the upper hand on all, and you will be affected, directly or indirectly. Chances are, you imagine your online life is governed by social contracts and the rule of law like your city. Perhaps you think that the online world is just a little bit more Wild West. Like that one small bad neighborhood you avoid in your town.

You are living in a bubble. There is no rule of law; the digital landscape is mostly small islands of civilization surrounded by ungoverned and (currently) ungovernable wild lands. The barbarians are at the gates, and Rome is closer to collapse than you think.

A Fragile Security Bubble

Movies like Live Free or Die Hard, which had a relatively sophisticated depiction of cyberanarchy, still base their scripts on omnipotent digital Merlins on both sides. The good guys can hack into anything anywhere with just a cell phone, while the bad guys are led by one evil genius who can “shut down Norad with a laptop.” There are two desires driving such perceptions.

The first one, easy to dismiss, is simply Hollywood’s preference for strong individual heroes and villains, wielding tons of individual power. They know, and we know, that this is unrealistic. The second is a more seriously dangerous desire: the desire to believe that what’s going on is actually simple enough that individuals or even small groups can comprehend and operate in the cyberanarchy. This is a problem of miscalibration. It is like mistaking World War II for a small-scale gang war in New York. Just because only a tiny fraction of the population is involved in combat does not mean that it is a small war. It merely means very few people have any combat training. If Hollywood were to truly do a cyberspace story, it would be more like The Longest Day, with multiple narratives and an ensemble cast,  than a terrorist hostage thriller driven by a single pair of antagonists.

This isn’t entirely perverse Hollywood ignorance. The security companies and the major “good guy” vendors have fostered the illusion that they know what they are doing and have things under control.  My Norton software for instance (and I don’t mean to pick on them particularly), has a reassuring UI composed of bold green “good” check marks and red iconography for dangerous stuff. There are things like shields and glossy metallic-looking color schemes. When it runs checks, it tells me reassuring things I want to hear, like “Your System is Secure.” It is a manufactured sense of assurance. Windows promptly delivers key security updates. You get the sense that if you just behave, avoid bad neighborhoods, and keep up with the good guys, you’ll automatically stay ahead of the bad guys. You don’t realize the good guys are the ones who are behind and trying to catch up, until they fail you. When your defenses fail, you end up in Dr. House mode; trying one diagnostic test after another, trying different defender programs in varying sequences, gradually losing heart as you contemplate that nuclear option, a full reformat and OS reload (and several weeks of lost work and costly information recovery). Norton would like you to believe that their program is all you need, and that big, reassuring button, “Scan Now” is all you need to hit to magically get rid of every digital ill.

Unfortunately, that’s not true, and can’t be true; there are no digital panaceas, anymore than there are biological ones.There’s even a theoretical result that states that figuring out whether there is a virus on your computer is a formally undecidable problem (“undecidable” has a very precise meaning in computer science, but for our purposes, all you need to know is that no single “Scan Now” button can ever ensure complete security, even in theory).

Which brings me to the biological metaphor that’s been around since the beginning of the war. The biological metaphor is getting more solid every day, as the digital ecosystem becomes increasingly organic. The good news is that things have gotten sophisticated enough that we can borrow very powerful elements from biology now. I am talking about an idea called the Red Queen.

Homogeneity and the Red Queen

The war we are talking about has the character of an arms race. The defenders and attackers both have to keep working harder and harder in order to keep the defended where they are. Even if you’ve done nothing online in the last 15 years but send email and read the New York Times online, just maintaining those capabilities has cost both the bad guys and the security establishment increasing amounts of expense. It’s like the increasing military budgets on both American and Soviet sides during the Cold War. Eventually, one side can’t keep up the spending. In that case, communism couldn’t keep up. In this war, it is starting to look like it is the good guys who can’t keep up.

This “running to stay in the same place” is the reason people like the phrase “Red Queen” to describe such dynamics (I assume you know your Alice in Wonderland).  In biology, the best example is the arms race between hosts and parasites (which is why the “virus” metaphor works so well). We all like big, powerful creatures and pay more attention to predator-prey interactions (and watch our shark shows and lion/tiger documentaries). But parasite-host dynamics may well have been the more important driver in evolution.

Matt Ridley’s very entertaining The Red Queen, a book about sexual selection in biology, explains the very compelling theory that sexual reproduction evolved primarily as a defense against parasitism. It turns out that this is the most general sort of defense known. Why?

The reason the bad guys are winning the cyberwars is that they have one major advantage: mass production of computing infrastructure. Find one hole in one computing system, attack it in every computing system that looks like it. Even penny-scale benefits multiply into millions of dollars. Economies of scale and mass production of any sort invariably create security brittleness and hand the bad guys a decisive advantage: enormous leverage.  This isn’t a particularly new insight. In agriculture, monoculture crop lands can be devastated by a single bug. Airlines and air forces that use homogenous fleets can be laid low by a single defect. Diversity breeds robustness. Every bit of information that can be used to exploit a system has less leverage.

The problem with diversity though, is that the amount of diversity required to stay ahead of the parasites is far higher than the amount of diversity required to actually accomplish whatever the systems are designed to do. You need only one airplane design to run an airline, but to make it robust against single-point failures, you need more varieties, which add costs faster than they add any useful advantages. That’s one reason Southwest is so cheap. They’d be in trouble if a serious flaw were discovered in 737 designs (and I imagine they’ve thought through and insured against such scenarios).

Let’s distinguish two types of diversity. One is simple inter-species diversity. If there are cats and dogs around, cat diseases will probably not jump over and decimate the dog population. But this fact doesn’t particularly help cats. It makes the ecosystem as a whole more stable, but not cat populations. Having both cats and dogs around in a mixed group reduces the frequency of cat-cat contact and transmissions (since there are now dog-cat interactions), so species diversity slows down the spread of dangers through individual populations. For the minority species, it also adds a kind of protection-of-minorities, since parasitic attackers will find more room to grow in the majority species (think Windows vs. Macs until recently). But these are minor advantages.

The technology ecosystem is undergoing an explosion of this kind of  species diversity. There are now vastly more kinds of “computer” devices than ever before. It isn’t as significant as it might seem on the surface, since the number of operating systems behind this diversity is fewer than the number of device types. It might even be a loss, because most of this new diversity is in the form of tethered devices (like your Wii or TiVo) that you don’t really have access to, and are hooked into a large-scale system with its own vulnerabilities of scale. You can’t defend yourself, and you are hooked into single-point failure modes on the backend.

The other kind of diversity is intra-species diversity. Different kinds of cats in short.

Here, sexual reproduction drives security because it limits the utility of a parasitic advantage in time and space. At any given time, a parasite that evolves to exploit a flaw in a particular genetic type can only spread to other individuals that share that vulnerability. The advantage is also automatically temporary, since the next generational churn of the gene pool could remove the exploitable pattern, or contain a defense.

The cost of this intra-species diversity defense is sex. A fun cost you might say, but a cost nevertheless, since continually churning out new functionally identical designs is work, and because a whole new Red Queen’s race emerges (the focus of Ridley’s book): the one between male and female. Let’s not go there, read the book if you are curious. It might offend some of you politically, so you’ve been warned.

Biology isn’t the only place this happens. Among corporations, mergers and acquisitions serve a very similar function (an implicit premise in my Gervais Principle series; with the Clueless being the parasitic class).

Sexual Computing

That brings me to my big point. In this war, the good guys have no real offensive weapons, only defensive ones. They build what they hope are secure and safe systems, the bad guys find exploits, the good guys react, and the whole cycle repeats itself. Periodically, a good guy comes up with an architectural advantage that buys a period of peace.

This is asymmetric, and the advantage is with the bad guys. The good guys have to anticipate and block all known holes. The bad guys only have to find one oversight or new flaw (the Conficker story contains very scary examples of this kind of thing).

In biology and corporate ecosystems, sexual reproduction provides a true offensive weapon to the good guys. Sexual reproduction creates diversity fairly cheaply, without tying increasing diversity to the harder problem of  increasing functionality.  You have two control knobs, the frequency of mating, and the degree of mixing. Bad guys moving faster? Mix things up more frequently and broadly. The nice thing is that it is a generic defense, and one that can run somewhat ahead of the bad guys.

The problem is that nobody knows how to do sexual computing. That I know of. If any of you have kept up with the theoretical CS literature better than me, please educate me. Von Neumann showed decades ago that computer programs could evolve and reproduce, just like real biological systems, so long as there was a source of random mutations. There are things called genetic algorithms that allow individual programs that fulfill the same function to reproduce and evolve sexually. But as far as I know, nothing that allows entire computers to behave like sexual beings.

What we want is an architectural paradigm that can churn the gene pool of computing design at a controllable rate, independently of advances in functionality. In other words, if you have a Windows PC, and I have one, we should be able to have our computers date, mix things up, and replace themselves with two new progeny, every so many weeks, while leaving the functional interface of the systems essentially unchanged. Malware threat levels go up? Reproduce faster. Today computing only evolves at the pace of needed (or available) new functionality. New OS versions come out when there are useful new features to be added (not counting cosmetic releases that are simply created to make money). That’s too slow. Yes, upgrading from XP to 7 cured one of my infections, but that was a side effect (and an unreliable one, since Windows 7 is an asexual descendant of Windows XP).

I have no idea how to do that, but it ought to be one of the Grand Challenges of computer science. I don’t believe it is, but the impending collapse of computing civilization, under the onslaught of digital barbarians, should really be a good enough reason to prioritize this challenge.

Are there other promising directions of attack? I can’t think of any, and neither, it seems, has biology, which has been at it for a billion years. It’s a whole other long debate, but every argument I’ve ever heard about how to make computing sustainably secure has been local and tactical. There will be no permanent victory, ever (theory tells us that), but we are in danger of losing even the fragile dynamic equilibrium that has been maintained so far. Parasites are not known for foresight. Even if they destroy themselves in destroying their hosts, they usually proceed anyway.

Sexual computing seems like the only strategic capability we could conceivably build to stay ahead. We might need a Manhattan project sized effort.

You may have noticed that in the last few weeks, I haven’t exactly been posting spectacular original content on this blog. A vacation and the simultaneous bootstrapping of two new writing outlets (the Trailmeme blog and the Be Slightly Evil email list), are part of the reason. The other part of the reason is that all my current ribbonfarmesque ideas are currently in the form of several rather demanding drafts (reading Gibbon’s 6-volume “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” doesn’t exactly catalyze tweet-sized ideas). So rather than post hasty dreck, I figured I’d just point you to some of my posts on the Trailmeme blog that might interest you.

• In Rent vs. Buy and Digital Lifestyle Design I looked at what’s happening to an age-old decision due to the impact of future-of-work forces
• In The Marcus Aurelius School of Curation, I argue that information curation (an emerging new profession) is less like being a librarian, and more like being a stoic emperor. And yeah, this post is partly inspired by my current obsession with the history of Rome. Expect a lot of Rome references from me in upcoming writing. The fact that I was actually vacationing in Italy, and wandering around Pompeii, while reading the thing, probably helped burn the book into my head a lot more vividly.
• In The Eight Belts of Information Ninja-Hood I have one of my usual overworked metaphors.

These are just a sampling. There’s more stuff there. Between me and a colleague, that blog sees about 4 new posts a week. Subscribe to that blog if this vein of writing interests you. The Be Slightly Evil email list is turning into an interesting project as well, and after 4 experimental mailings, I am finally beginning to get a sense of how and what to write there. All you sociopath wannabes — subscribe if you haven’t already.

And oh yeah, the book is coming along nicely. I had some writer’s block going for a while, but things are back on track.

Lots of balls to juggle, but I am making my writing processes more aerodynamic all along, so you should see things back to normal here in a week or two. I have a couple of really interesting (to me at least) posts shaping up.

The phrase “In the real world…” comes up in many different contexts and conversations, and is deployed by all sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons. Over several years of watching and filing away instances, a script for a funny SNL style sketch, stringing together several of these conversations, occurred to me. Well, at least I think it is funny. I wanted to do it as a comic-strip, but never got around to it.

Here’s the script for the sketch. I call it The Circle of Life. Okay, my dialogue is not exactly Shakespeare quality, but bear with me here. Bad fiction in the service of a non-fiction point.

The Circle of Life

Scene 1: At a student-faculty mixer, a graduating engineering student, slightly drunk, is taking the opportunity to give a literature professor a piece of his mind.

Student: I’m glad I only had to do one literature course to satisfy my humanities requirement. That stuff is useless crap. I am glad the Dean is cutting your department’s funding. In the real world,  it’s only the engineering and math courses that matter and get you good jobs. Nobody can afford to pay for any shit that doesn’t help you make money.

Professor: Umm…

Scene 2: The student starts his first job, in machine design, and encounters a street-smart older man, a self-taught talented tinkerer who hasn’t been to college. The eager young student, faced with a problem, proposes a textbook design he learned in school, and gets laughed out of the room: he has forgotten all sorts of practical engineering issues.

Street-Smart Guy: In the real world, all your textbook solutions don’t matter a damn. You only learn how to design mechanisms through hands-on experience and getting your hands greasy.

Student: Umm…

Scene 3: Layoff time, the smooth-talking MBA Empty Suit type has just laid off both the student and street-smart guy. All three meet in the elevator, and Empty Suit can’t resist a jibe.

Empty Suit: You know, I used to hear you guys arguing about book smarts versus street smarts all the time. You are both deluded, like most techies. In the real world, it is not what you know, but who you know that matters.

Street-Smart Guy and Student: Umm…

Scene 4: A big re-org, with some major fallout. The senior executive, on whose coat-tails our Empty Suit was riding, has been shoved aside. Empty Suit has been maneuvered into position neatly, as fall guy, by a killer-instinct sociopath.

Sociopath: If you’d stopped to think before spending all your time kissing up to that asshole and networking with other idiots, you’d have realized something. In the real world, all your connections aren’t worth a damn if you lack the killer instinct. You retards just walk around with your eyes shut waiting to be put out of your misery. I have no sympathy for you.

Empty Suit: Umm…

Scene 5: Drunk after a night of partying (to celebrate his big bonus), the sociopath is walking home through a bad neighborhood. He runs into a mugger in a dark alley. The mugger grabs our sociopath’s wallet, pistol-whips and kicks him to the ground. The shock triggers a heart attack.

Mugger: You rich assholes in your fancy suits, you think you rule the goddamn world. Not so powerful now, are you? In the real world, the guy with the gun is the guy with the power.

Sociopath: Umm…

Scene 6: Five years and a prison sentence later, our mugger is lying on the street, broken. He is missing a leg, amputated after a bad gunshot wound in a gang war. He is now a cocaine addict and a complete wreck. A social worker finds him and takes him to a rehab shelter. Looking at his case file, she can’t help moralizing:

Social Worker: You guys think you are so damn tough just because you go around robbing, fighting and killing. Look where it’s got you. And you’re not even 30. To get ahead in the real world, you gotta stay clean, stay out of trouble, get yourself through school and get yourself a job. I am a single Mom and I am putting myself through school at night. It’s hard, but in 3 years, I’ll have a college degree, a good job and a future. You need to think about things like that. It’s still not too late for you. If I can do it, you can too.

Mugger: Umm…

Scene 7: After struggling for years and failing to juggle work, debts and night school, and completely depressed by the tragedy and misery around her, the social worker is thinking of dropping out. She runs into our literature professor at a faculty mixer.

Professor: You know, I see a lot of career-minded students working really hard, but never thinking beyond grades and how much money they can make at their first jobs. Those are the ones that burn out. In the real world, it’s the ones who look for a higher sense of meaning and purpose in their lives who succeed. That’s what literature is for, to liberate your mind and sustain you through difficult times in the real world.

Social Worker: Umm…

The End

There is no such place as “the real world.” We all think our world is more “real” than others’ worlds. In the real real world, all worlds are equally unreal.

Okay, on second thoughts, that sounded more funny in my head than written down. But I bet a more talented fiction writer than me could turn this into a really funny script.

An Einstein quote that I disagree with is the following:

Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

It is the best known of various cautions against “intellectual greed.” I once interviewed at a university where there seemed to be a particularly strong fear of intellectual over-reach. Every faculty member I talked to had a word of caution about young researchers and “intellectual greed” — taking on too many, too big, or too wide-ranging a set of intellectual interests. If this is a sin — and it sort of sounds like one, which is why the biblical word “gluttony” seems more appropriate to me — I am certainly guilty. But if I am going to hell anyway, I might as well know why in a little more detail.

Einstein’s own take can actually be dismissed fairly quickly. He was speaking from the perspective of a particularly original guy in a field that especially rewarded, even demanded, originality at that particular time in history (I am pretty sure it was his originality that saved him from having to read too much, not the other way around). If you look at the work of people who actually study creativity (such as the books of Dean Simonton, who has written extensively on the subject) in broader ways, two things become clear:

1. There is very systematic variation in the age of significant achievement in different fields, and the correlation is predictable. Historians and literary scholars achieve their greatest works later in life than mathematicians and physicists. Literature and Physics Nobel prizes also reflect this.
2. There is a big difference between low-paradigm and high-paradigm fields of knowledge. Roughly, the latter are those (such as physics), where there is a lot of agreement about foundational ideas and basic methodologies. The former are those, such as political science, where 10 different scholars will give you 1o different answers if you ask them what the three most important ideas in their field are.

People study this quite a lot. I forget the reference, but it turns out, for instance, that in high-paradigm fields, peer reviewers are more likely to err on the side of caution and accept work that is potentially of low importance, but seems correct. In low-paradigm fields, when in doubt, peer-reviewers reject rather than accept.

What does this have to do with intellectual gluttony?

In certain fields, it takes a lot more reading and thinking through others’ contributions before you can make a credible one of your own. Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi smartly defines creativity as the relationship between an individual, a field and a “symbolic domain” and argues that  good researchers internalize the standards of their fields, to the point where they know how work will be perceived even before others review it. Obviously it takes more time to develop that level of internalization in low-paradigm fields.

In other fields, you can get going after a relatively short time. In mathematics, you can find reputation-making problems that you can actually attack after just a couple of years of college. It is very unlikely that you will make a significant contribution to Shakespeare scholarship before 30. And you’ll read a lot more.

Which brings me to the question, once you know what your interests are, how much should you read? How much should you slow down your reading as you age? What is the most fertile ratio of reading to creating?

The answer can be tricky. As fields mature, and apparently unsolvable controversies start to dominate (such as has happened at the edge of physics, around superstring theory), a high-paradigm field can become low-paradigm. Subfields can differ: “systems engineering” is lower-paradigm than electrical or mechanical engineering.

But Einstein is right about one thing: the “living vicariously” part. That, rather than sheer quantity of reading, is actually the critical part. Depending on what problem you are trying to understand or solve, your reading may take you the rest of your life, or be done in two years. But how you read can determine whether you become a pedantic bore who contributes nothing, or somebody who makes new contributions.

The dangerous, mind-freezing approach to reading has a very good word to describe it: erudition. My biggest fear is that I might one day become erudite. Somebody who reads and collects knowledge for the hell of it, rather than with interesting and specific questions and unknowns driving the reading. Too much reading is only “too much” if it teeters towards erudition.

For me, the struggle is endless. My interests tend towards questions which are of the “100 years of reading” variety, whether it is a question in world history I am thinking about, or technology/mathematics. So I am constantly on guard against erudition.  One of the best defenses is to always start all your intellectual journeys with very small questions, growing them into big, ambitious, projects.

If you ask “What is the fate of human civilization,” you are doomed to erudition. If, on the other hand, you ask, “Why did Obama pick that particular phrase to make that point in his speech on healthcare,” typically you will go on a creative, active-mind journey.  Even if takes you through thousands of years of world history, that question will keep you intellectually alive in a way the first question will not.

(I’ll be out of town when this post is published, so I may be a day or two late in responding to comments).