– 1 –

Naming and counting are the two most basic behaviors in our divided brains. Naming is the atomic act of association, recognition, contextualization and synthesis. Counting is the atomic act of separation, abstraction, arrangement and analysis. Each behavior contains the seed of the other.

To name a thing is to invite it to ensnare itself in your mind; to distill and compress the essence of a gestalt into a single evocative motif, from which it can be regenerated at will. Just add attention and stir.

Here are three very different American gestalts that I bet many of you will recognize without clicking: Babbitt, Bobbitt, Rabbit.

We name and count babies, products, species, theorems, countries, asteroids, ships, drugs, essays, wars, gods, dogs, foods, alcohols, pieces of legislation, judicial pronouncements, wars, subcultures, ocean currents and seasonal winds.

We try to name and number every little transient vortex, in William James’ blooming, buzzing confusion, that persists long enough for us to form a thought about it.

As with plans, so with names. Names are nothing; naming is everything. To name a thing is to truly know it. As Ursula Le Guin said, “for magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.”

It is the process of naming that is important. The actual name that you settle on at the end is secondary.

– 2 –

Vanity and pragmatism wrestle for control of the act of naming.  We bend one ear towards history and the other towards posterity. We parse for unfortunate rhymes and garbled pronunciations. We attempt at once to situate and differentiate. We count syllables and look for domain names.

We walk around the name, viewing it as parent, lover, friend, bully, journalist, lexicographer and historian.  We embed it in imaginary headlines and taunting rhymes.

In Bali to name is to number. It is an unsatisfying synthesis that only works in limited contexts.

“The firstborn is “Wokalayan” (or Yan, for short), second is “Made,” third is “Nyoman” or Komang (Man or Mang for short), and fourth is “Ketut” (often elided to Tut).

I am not sure what happens if Wokalayan dies young. Does Made replace his older sibling and become the new Wokalayan?

In crypotgraphy, the first named-character in an example scenario is Alice. The second one is Bob. And so on down an alphabetic cast of characters. This is not the world of  interchangeable John and Jane Doe figures.  The order matters.

When birth order is more important individual personality, you get a social order in naming that inhabitants of individualistic modernity struggle to understand.

– 3 –

Counting is both ordinal and cardinal. It takes a while to appreciate the difference between one, two, three… and first, second, third.

To truly count is to know both processes intimately. In naming, ordinality has to do with succession and replacement. Cardinality has to do with interchangeability. You cannot master naming without mastering counting.

The ordinal, cardinal and nominal serve to situate and uniquely identify, but do not necessarily indicate the presence of something real. Hence the query: name, rank and number? 

There was once a substance with rank 0, number 0. It was named ether. It did not actually exist. Substances 1-1 through 1-4 though, earth, fire, water and wind, were real enough, and became the founding fathers and mothers of the modern discipline of chemistry.

It is in fact useful to think of naming an interrogative act that creates what it questions. Demand insistently enough to know the name, rank and number of a thing, and you will eventually find out. Even if your mind has to manufacture an answer.

When you understand both kinds of counting, you can count and name in both ways, without using actual numbers.

That gives you iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad on the one hand, and Kodiak, Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion, on the other. I’ll leave you to guess why the first-born is a bear here, while the rest are cats. Don’t give up and click too soon.

Not many languages can efficiently express questions of ordinality. In English for instance, the question, what is your birth-order ordinality among your siblings? sounds downright weird, but I cannot find a simpler, grammatical way to express it.

It is much easier to ask the related cardinality question: how many siblings do you have? 

Curiously, the ordinal question is very easy to ask in my nominal native language of Kannada. It would translate to something like: How many-eth son are you of your father? If such constructs were allowed in English. At least that was the best I could come up with my father challenged me to translate the line as a kid.

It would be a useful construct to have in English. We could ask, What-ieth major version of Mac OS X is Lion? 

The naming practices in Bali and the Ursula Le Guin quote made me think of a rather clever idea for a short story about a culture where the young start out with ordinal names as in Bali, but are given true names if and when wise elders first spot the child in an act that expresses a unique individuality.

At this point, a coming-of-age naming ceremony is conducted, and the child is declared an adult with special privileges over the un-named. Rather complicated things happened to the hero’s name in the story, having to do with self-referential paradoxes. I’ve forgotten the plot, but I remember that at the time I had to diagram the events in the story.

I never wrote the story because coming up with names for the characters was too hard.

– 4 –

We name to liberate, and we name to imprison. We name to flatter, and we name to insult.  We name to own, and we name to be owned. We name to subsume, and have subsumed. We name to frame, and we name to reframe.

Google bought Urchin on Demand and turned it into Google Analytics. It bought Youtube and left the name alone.

The Left calls it Right to Choose. The Right calls it Right to Life. The debate itself is partly about naming: at what point does something deserve the name human?

The British and the French built a plane together and fought over the name. The French won. It became the Concorde rather than the Concord. 

Gandhi attempted to rename the untouchables Harijans. God’s people. They resented being patronized, and chose for themselves the name Dalit. The oppressed.

Priests weigh about the numerological significance of names and marketing mavens opine about syllable counts.

States step in with Procrustean templates to tax and conscript: last name, first name, middle initial. Under Spanish rule, the entire Philippines became a geographic-lexicographic state.

Philosophers ponder the metaphysics of naming and Greek scholars hunt for their linguistic roots.

As one anthropologist said (I have never managed to find the source), naming is never a culturally insignificant act.

– 5 –

To name is to appreciate the crucial distinction, due to urban theorist John Friedmann, between appreciative knowledge and manipulative knowledge. The one allows us to construct “satisfying images of the world.” The other allows us to gain mastery over it.

To either number or name is to both appreciate and manipulate.  To number is to appreciate timeless order; to name is to appreciate transformative chaos.

You number to extend and preserve. Archival is the ultimate act of numbering.

You name to create, destroy, fragment and churn. You name a product and launch it. You give a dog a bad name and hang it.

In a break with family tradition, I was not named after my paternal grandfather. The timeless sequence, …ABABAB… was broken.

– 6 –

Agent 007, James Bond, was named after an ornithologist.

In his numbered world, he is part of a greater order. A world of conversations between 007 and M, where technology comes from Q and even the secretary is a very countable Moneypenny. It is a timeless world where the M’s and Q’s are replaceable and 00s are both replaceable and interchangeable.

In his named world, first he situates, then he differentiates.

My name is Bond. James Bond.

A tough, hard and unusual name, for a tough, hard guy, who allows glimpses of a dark past to shine through the veneer of shaken-not-stirred cocktails and social polish. He blends in, but makes his presence felt. It is a name that is at once a trust and a threat. Bank of England to friends, gunboats to foes.

Is that a threat? No, it’s a promise. 

Commander Bond was once a naval reserve officer. It was in the maritime world that the line, “my name is my bond,” gained currency.

It is a name of narrative belonging. It situates the man strongly as British, but differentiates him not at all among Britishers. In Bond is the veiled threat of a still-potent dying empire. In James lies identification with, and anonymity within, that dying Empire.

Fleming once wrote to the real Bond’s wife:  ”It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon  and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born.”

– 7 –

The story of Windows is the story of a wild tree of apparently domesticated numbers seeking its way in the world, rather than an orderly parade of tamed wild cats.

1.0, 2.0, 3.0, NT, 3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8.

This is no accident. Microsoft, has always been a company that has sought its way in the existing world, rather than inviting the world into a fabricated universe of non sequiturs like Apple, Macintosh and Lisa.

The original portmanteau, MICRO-computer SOFT-ware, was a seeking of a place in a world defined by others. The micro-computer was ordinally a lesser thing than the mini-computer. Soft-ware was one of three wares: hard, soft and firm. An element in a set of cardinality three. It was a shy, retiring and polite name, that knew its place in the scheme of things.  

But the personality worked, and Microsoft quietly took over the universe it entered so politely. Windows was a literal-minded appropriation of the name of a key element of the desktop metaphor. Office seeks to belong in the workplace rather than redefine it. Internet Explorer remains the only browser that presumes to name itself after the thing it explores.

How a company names itself, its products and services, and its organizational parts, tells you a great deal about it.

To number something — implicitly or explicitly, cardinally or ordinally — is the first step in a grander project to order, tag and classify a part of reality; to prepare it for timeless forms of manipulation: replacement and interchange. To number is to subsume the particular within the general.

But to really name something in the sense of Le Guin, is to disrupt that project at every turn by discovering new magic that confounds the creeping logic of a rigidly ontological enterprise.

To really name is to find leaks as quickly as the number-givers find water-tight categories. To break connections thought secure and make new ones, previously considered impossible. To create difference — irreplaceability and non-interchangeability — as fast as numbering creates homogeneity.

This is perhaps why I still trust Microsoft more than I trust Apple. In the mess that is the the Windows sequence-numbering, I find reassurance.

– 8 –

To position is to number and name at the same time, and create something that is both a being and a becoming. Something rooted, that seeks to connect and get along, and something restless that seeks to get ahead and away.

To position a thing is to teach it to get ahead, get along, and get away. We project onto the memetic world of names, our own fundamental genetically-ordained proclivities. Evolutionary biology tells us that getting ahead and getting along are the basic drives that govern life for a social species. To this, as a species that invented individualism sometime in the 10th century AD, we must add getting away. The drive to become more than a rank and number. To become a name, even if the only available one, alpha, is taken.

The Microsoft version soup is Darwin manifest.

Getting ahead, getting along and getting away. Ordinal numbering, cardinal numbering and naming. Name, rank and number.

Perhaps it is naming and numbering that are fundamental, not biology.

To number well is to comprehend symmetries and anticipate as-yet-unnamed realities; holes in schemata, to be filled in the future. And so we name new elements before discovering them, imagine antimatter when we only know of matter. To categorize well is to create timeless order. Mendeleev’s bold leap advanced both chemistry and the art and science of naming.

To number poorly  is to squeeze, stuff and snip. To constrain reality to our fearful and limited conception of it.

To name well is to challenge and court numbers.

To name poorly is to kill or be killed by numbers.

Naming without numbering creates a chaotic unraveling. Numbering without naming creates orderly emptiness.

It takes discipline to couple the two forces together. And sometimes, numbers and names dance together beautifully to create magic, as when Murray Gell-Mann found inspiration in James Joyce’ line, three quarks for Muster Mark. 

– 9 –

To name is also to hide and cloak. To switch stories and manufacture realities.  This is the world of Don Draper. He dons a mask, and drapes new realities over old ones.  Starting with his own life.

And so Operation Infinite Justice became Operation Enduring Freedom.

I was supposed to be named after my grandfather, in keeping with the timeless …ABABAB… rhythm. I would have been Rama Rao. But then they broke with tradition.

My mother wanted to name me Rahul, but my grandmother objected: it is a name with deep significance for Buddhists — the name of the Buddha’s son.

Fortunately, in the (cardinal and ordinal) universe of a thousand names that is Vishnu — there is actually a long hymn known as the Vishnu Sahasranama, “Vishnu of the Thousand Names” — a close cousin of Rama was found.

And so I came into the world as Venkatesh. A break from tradition, but not quite a complete break.  Certainly not a defection to a competing tradition. That would have upset my grandmother.

I once wanted to name an algorithm I’d developed Mixing Bandits, since it used mechanisms inspired by bandit processes. I gave a draft of my paper to a distinguished professor in the field. He liked my work, but objected to the name. My allusive overloading of a precise term did not sit well with him. Mathematically, my algorithm was not related enough to bandit processes.

So this grandmother rejected the baby, refusing to absorb it into the family tradition. It wanders the world today as an illegitimate orphan of the noble clan that has disavowed it, under the clumsy and undistinguished name MixTeam scheduling.

– 10 –

In the genealogy of a single name you can trace entire grand narratives.

Once upon a time, there was a company in Rochester called Haloid. It made photographic paper and lived in the giant shadow of a company across town called Kodak.

Haloid wanted to grow up. So it acquired a technology called xerography: a name coined by a Greek scholar to situate the idea of dry writing within the illegible history of that long intellectual tradition within which the West seeks to situate everything it does.

Ironically, the technology was not the result of a long, gradually evolving tradition that can be traced back to the Greeks. Not only did the Greeks have nothing to do with it, as the biographer of the technology David Owen notes, “There was no one in Russia or France who was working on the same thing. The Chinese did not invent it in the 11th century BC.”

Xerography sprang almost fully-formed from the mind of one man, Chester Carlson. He systematically set about the project of inventing and patenting something truly new. He managed to do so by putting an obscure property of the element Selenium to a completely unexpected use.

So Haloid became Haloid Xerox, and eventually just Xerox. It is a powerful name. So powerful that it subsumed the name of the man who created it, Joe Wilson. During my time at Xerox, the Wilson Center for Research and Technology (WCRT) became the Xerox Research Center, Webster (XRCW). Across the world you will find XRCE (Europe), XRCC (Canada) and XRCI (India). To earn its right to a unique name within this orderly namespace, the sole rebel, PARC, had to unleash planet-disrupting forces.

Xerography eventually became electrophotography, in the hands of envious competitors who appeared after the trust-busters had done their work. The name that had gotten ahead and away now had to get along. My name is photography. Electro-photography. 

They still call it xerography at Xerox though.

– 11 –

And across town, Kodak slowly declined and began to die. There is irony here as well.

Photography does have a long history. The ancient Greeks did have something to do with it.  The ancient Chinese did know about pinhole cameras. The French did play a role.

But Kodak is one of those rare names that was born through an act of pure invention. George Eastman is quoted as saying about the letter k: ”it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter.”  Yes, incisive like a knife.

The story goes that Eastman and his mother created the name from an anagrams set. Wikipedia says about the process:

Eastman said that there were three principal concepts he used in creating the name: it should be short; one cannot mispronounce it, and it could not resemble anything or be associated with anything but Kodak.

The first two principles are still adhered to by marketers when possible. The last has been abandoned since the 1970s, when the positioning era began.

As with Wilson, the child soon eclipsed the father. Eastman Kodak became just Kodak to the rest of the world. In proving the soundness of his principles of memetic stability, Eastman ceded his own place in the history of naming to a greater name.

Haloid incidentally, is a reference to the binary halogen compounds of Silver used in photography. The word halogen was coined by Berzelius from the words hals (“sea” or “salt”) and gen (“come to be”). Coming to be of the sea. It may be the most perfect name, suggesting the being and becoming that is the essence of both naming and chemistry.

Jöns Jacob Berzelius is a founding father of chemistry in large part due to his prolific naming. He came up with protein as well. He was also responsible for naming Selenium. From the Greek Selene, for Moon.

It was no small achievement. Chemistry is a science of variety and difference. It deals in so many different thing that a narrowly taxonomic mind will fail to appreciate its broader patterns.

In declaring that “Physics is the only real science, all the rest are just stamp collecting,” Rutherford failed to appreciate chemistry the way Berzelius did. As an ongoing grand narrative with lesser and greater patterns.

Some deserving names like protein and others merely abstract, categorical formulas like CnH2n+2 and names that just fall short of cohering into semantic atoms, like completely saturated hydrocarbon.

– 12 –

Counting and naming are at once trivial and profound activities.

Toddlers learn to count starting with One, Two, Three…

Terence Tao has won a Fields Medal and lives numbers like nobody else alive today. And he is still basically learning to count. At levels you and I would consider magic, but it is counting nevertheless.

Toddlers learn to name, starting with  me, mama and dada.

Ursula Le Guin has won five Hugo and six Nebula awards, but is fundamentally still a name-giver.

Names are born of universes, be they small ones that contain only Kodak or large ones that contain all of Western civilization between alpha and omega.

It is very hard to make up universes. It is easier to borrow and disguise them, as Tolkien and Frank Herbert did.

And it is very hard to do so without accidentally causing collisions between large, old namespaces that might not like each other, as my mom found out with Rahul. 

Lazy novelists are laziest with names, and the work falls apart. When you have named every character in your novel perfectly, your novel is finished. Plot and character converge towards perfection as names do.

Names in turn create universes. Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Foundation, Carnegie-Mellon University. 

To name is to choose one universe to draw from and another to create. Rockefeller gave his name to few things. He preferred bland names like Standard Oil and The University of Chicago. 

And so it is that the Carnegie Universe is very visible, while the much larger Rockefeller Universe is more hidden from sight.

– 13 –

Rockefeller chose to create, and hide much of what he created. But you can go further. Beyond hiding lies un-naming. To un-name is to deny identity.

To un-name and un-number is to anonymize completely.

It is useful for the name-giver to ponder the complementary problem of un-naming. If to position is to name and number, to de-position is to un-name and un-number.

You must seek randomness to disrupt the timeless order imposed by numbering, disconnection to counter the narrative order created by naming. Like Dorian Taylor, you must seek cryptonyms.

Cryptonym itself is from the Greek words for “hidden” and “name.”

Randomness is hard.

To un-name is to fight the natural. Given enough time, even a set of cryptonyms will fail to arrest a cohering identity. To truly arrest a name, even changing the crytponym at a random frequency is not enough. The underlying cohering realities must be disrupted.

– 14 –

Names demand to be born, and hijack numbers if no worthy ones appear. And so we have 9-11 and Chapter 11. 

At other times, names strain to hang on to life, with no stories to tell. In the arid, random desert that is bingo, where numbers rule, names struggle.

Only to a Bingo player is 22 “two little ducks.”

Few numbers truly rise to the level of human meaning, and they are all small: 13, 42, 867-5309. 

The largest number in my life that is also a name with permanent narrative significance is 1174831686. 

When I was nine or ten, our local newspaper, The Telegraph, launched a club for kids in its Sunday edition, called the Wiz Biz Club. I signed up excitedly, to belong and to make new friends. That was my membership number.

I received a badge, some stickers and an ID card with that number.

So Venkatesh Rao  became 1174831686.  That cryptonym was probably the start of my struggle to own my name instead of being owned by it.

I am glad to report that despite it being an extremely common Indian name, I now own venkateshrao.com (it redirects to this site) and almost the entire first page of Google results. Vishnu can have the other 999 names, but I plan to pwn this one, at least for one lifetime.

– 15 –

We dimly recognize, even without the aid of mathematicians who study such things, that numbers win this decidedly unequal contest of appreciation and manipulation in the long-term.

In the beginning, we generously allowed our businesses, products and services to share the older namespaces of people and geographies. East India Company, Jardine-Mathieson, Carnegie Steel, Johnson & Johnson.

That strategy quickly exhausted itself, and so we energetically began manufacturing Xeroxes, Kodaks, Microsofts and Apples.

The first really-big-numbers company decided to name itself after a number, Google. Its home became an even bigger number, Googleplex. 

After Google, the Internet began throwing up naming needs faster than humans could manufacture them, and the orderly taxonomy unexpectedly imposed on the world by the Internet Domain Name system suddenly made life very difficult indeed.

So far, we’ve kept up by inventing quasi-algorithmic models: flickr, dopplr, e-widget, i-doodad.

But eventually naming as a way to understand and construct reality will fail.  Technology creates complexity that creeps inexorably towards the unnameable-but-significant.

When semantic genealogies in naming give way to syntactic and lexicographic genealogies, you are halfway to the world of pure numbers (there is a cute scene in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, where members of an online group decide to abandon names and stick to purely numbering and ranking the world; the split occurs between those who seek cryptonyms and those who seek a fundamental order within which, for instance, Earth might be numbered 1).

The march that begins with Aachen and Aardvark cannot keep up with a universe that throws countable, but not-nameable, variety at us. We count on, long after we can no longer name.  And eventually we cannot count, either, and must stare at an unnameable, uncountable void and wonder — as some mathematicians do — whether it even exists, given how it eludes characterization.

Yet we persist with both naming and numbering, finding solace in imposing a partial lexicographic order on reality, even as the struggle gets harder.

– 16 –

I have not used the word brand even once in this post, until just now. Over the years,  I have lost confidence in the utility of the concept.

It is appropriate only for the cardinal-ordinal world of mass manufacturing, where everything has a rank and number, but very few things have real names. Most brands are McBrands. Billions upon billions have been served up by marketers and fond parents. Most represent no deeper reality than the first answer to the question, name, rank and number. 

It is not surprising. After all the very word originates in processes that evolved superficially distinguish the essentially interchangeable. In the world of cows, and pottery before that, to brand was to mark for identification and counting, and little else.

Brand is an abstraction that adds very little to the more fundamental concepts of naming and numbering, and the key derivative concept of positioning. In fact, it is distracting. The word makes it far too easy to lose yourself in abstractions. Naming and numbering keep you honest and focused on the gestalt you are trying to distill, with repeated tests. The story of these attempts is what we know as PR, and with each proposed naming and positioning test you can ask, do I understand this story yet?

Without such test-driven naming, branding is an exercise in waterfall marketing.

To the extent that it is a useful word at all, it describes a consequence rather than an action. Away from the concrete world of cows being tortured with red-hot irons, there is no actual action that you can call branding.

You name, number and position.  You then make up non-verbal correlates — colors and logos — that derive from these basic elements.

These are things you do.

Brand happens.

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Coded, informal communication — significant messages buried inside innocuous messages — has long interested me.  I don’t mean things like “NX398 VJ899 ABBX3″ that the NSA might deal with (though that’s related). I mean things like this:

You: let’s get coffee sometime

Me: Sure, that’d be great

We both know that the real exchange was:

You: let’s pretend we want to take this further

Me: yeah, let’s do that

The question of how such coded language emerges, spreads and evolves is a big one. I am interested in a very specific question: how do members of an emerging subculture recognize each other in public, especially on the Internet, using more specialized coded language?

The question is interesting because the Web is making traditional subcultures — historically illegible to governance mechanisms, and therefore hotbeds of subversion — increasingly visible and open to cheap, large-scale economic and political exploitation. This exploitation takes the form of attention mining, and is the end-game on the path to what I called Peak Attention a while back.

Does this mean the subversive potential of the Internet is an illusion, and that it will ultimately be domesticated? Possibly.

Mining Subcultural Attention

Manipulation of subcultures through the Internet has been limited to date because the tools are still very new. The mining of large reserves of attention — the largely one-way kind directed at work, beautiful sunsets, or the manufactured pop celebrity du jour for instance — is now a mature science.

Social attention though, trapped within relationships, is the shale oil of attention mining. The institutional world has not yet learned to efficiently mine the attention that is locked up today within subculture-scale social interactions.

As they learn over the next decade, today’s garden-variety subcultures will turn into docile and domesticated micro-markets for businesses, and micro-constituencies for politics. They will cease to be subversive threats, much as the old labor movement, which formed as a reaction to Gilded Age capitalism, ceased to be a threat within about a century. The world moves faster now. The new models of subcultural collective action, I predict, will last less than a decade or two before they become irrelevant. All attention that lives within subcultures is now vulnerable to external control.

Their weakness is that they seek to externalize their structure into digital institutions. Loose and transient P2P network institutions perhaps, but still institutions, due to their reliance on externalized trust, impersonal organizing principles and most importantly, social scaling.

They rely on the power of numbers rather than intelligence. Smart mobs are still mobs. As we will see, they are vulnerable to control, and attractive targets for attention mining. Rather ironically, most of the mechanisms required to observe and control subcultures are being invented by subcultures themselves. External forces are merely stepping in to co-opt them.

But let’s return to coded communication.  That’s where our journey begins.

Impersonal Secret Handshakes

The bulk of coded communication is designed to sustain the polite fictions of civil society, to limit relationships to the depth of immediate transactions, as in the example I started with.

But a proportion of such communication goes the other way: it serves to deepen relationships. Some of this is a matter of widespread convention and ritual, like the classic would you like to come upstairs for a drink? This one is not particularly interesting, because there is no content beyond the accepted meaning of the ritual incantation. It is visible culture, not invisible subculture.

More interesting is coded communication that allows members of a subculture to recognize and interact with each other, without an institutional context.

The most common way to do this is to use a linguistic motif that signals membership of a subculture, via reference to a recognized subcultural text.

If I use the word discourse in a specific way, it will signal baseline membership in postmodernist-pretender subculture.

If I begin an essay with the words: You can check out of Facebook any time you like, but you can never leave, the dropped reference signals a basic awareness of American music to others with a comparable awareness, but seems merely like an odd turn of phrase to others (my parents for instance, would not get this reference).

If you understand the coded message, you’ll respond with a coded message of your own that shows that you got it (perhaps using a phrase like always-already in the first case, or with a reference to a different classic song in the second case).

These are impersonal secret handshakes and have existed forever. They are based on shared cultural texts like the lyrics of Hotel California or immersion in the peculiar vocabulary of an academic subculture.

Hipsters might distinguish themselves from generic pop-culture aficionados by dropping references from Haruki Murakami novels instead of Hotel California, but it is still an impersonal secret handshake, since it is based on recognized common knowledge (stuff that everybody knows everybody knows) within an existing group, defined by its core texts.

The membership precedes the mutual recognition, and the secret handshake serves to validate membership of the group rather than knowledge of the text. The text is a social object with a limited role (note that the manufacture of social objects is slowly becoming a codified science in its own right, a development that is part of the ongoing colonization of subcultural attention). 

Impersonal secret handshakes are fundamentally weak, and the groups they protect are vulnerable to infiltration in very basic ways. Since the group is defined by impersonal texts that serve as common knowledge, strangers can acquire knowledge of the same impersonal texts and become pretenders (such as trustafarians faking poverty to gain access to hipster culture). Some subcultures are much easier to penetrate than others (the cute-kitten-picture subculture for instance), but they are all vulnerable.

Vulnerable to what or whom? To answer the question, we need to switch gears and talk about patterns of social organization for a bit, and where subcultures fit in the larger scheme of things.

Patterns of Social Organization

We are used to thinking about the global social order in terms of a class-culture matrix. This is the scheme upon which institutional social order  – the world of nation-states, corporations and religions — is based.  When you rebel, this is the scheme you try to disrupt. Both types of groupings rely on recognizable markers and boundaries to distinguish themselves from others, and cryptic in-group behaviors and language to sustain necessary opacity.

When a great deal of power is involved, cryptic in-group behaviors can give rise to a refined inner core of  formal institutional secrecy, creating a hidden social order. Though they increasingly seem ludicrous today, secret societies have always been an essential part of maintaining the social order, becoming more or less visible in concert with the waning and waxing of institutional power.

This class-culture organizing scheme is best understood as a global matrix. It is global in scope because it documents mutual recognition between maximally-distant parts: the Chinese Party-Member/Non-Member distinction is recognized globally, as is the American Republican/Democrat distinction. It is a matrix because it is understood in ordered, visual-spatial terms. Class is horizontal, culture is vertical.  This abstract visual ordering induces a literal geographic ordering. So rich and poor, black and white, sort themselves out at every geographic scale from town to nation, fractally embodying a fundamentally simple scheme.

There is another type of social organization, based on subcultures, that has historically served as a check and balance to the power of the class-culture matrix.

Contrary to popular belief, subcultures are not vague constructs. They have a precise, if negative, definition: a subculture is a pattern of social order that is not worth codifying and institutionalizing for the purposes of governance or economic exploitation, under normal circumstances. So subcultures have historically relied on their obscurity, illegibility and unimportance to ensure autonomy and security.

The very existence of a subculture is only known to neighboring subcultures. This limited local visibility suggests that the world of subcultures is not a matrix, but a web. Classic Rock fans can tell Punk Rock apart from other kinds. It all sounds the same to a non Rock-fan. Imperceptible distinctions that make no difference in the larger scheme of things.

Under abnormal circumstances, when seditious sentiments are brewing in the subcultural web, the zero-sum game of power swings in its favor, causing a reaction from the class-culture matrix: increased and more visible action by the hidden institutional order to restore the balance.

When slums start to seethe, the secret police gets going in not-very-secret ways.

If the slums win, subversive subcultures become institutionalized, and displaced ones turn into subcultures. If the slums lose, things stay roughly the same. Either way, the scheme of social organization remains the same: a balance of power between an institutional class-culture matrix and a subcultural web.

This is the world we are used to, and this is the world the Internet is changing. The subcultural web is now being made legible and governable under the harsh light of Facebook Like actions.  Just in time too, since the returns on coarser forms of political and economic exploitation are now rapidly diminishing.  Obama’s victory in the last Presidential election, and the penetration of entities like Groupon into local food subcultures, are just the early signs of where we are headed.

This is a contrarian conclusion. Most commentators today are arguing that the subcultural world is getting stronger, more incomprehensible and increasingly ungovernable.

This is a mix of an illusion, a poor sense of history, and the effects of a temporary learning phase on the part of class-culture matrix institutions. The world of subcultures are about to be comprehensively explored, mapped, tamed and domesticated. The larger the subculture, the faster it will fall.

The subcultural web looks increasingly incomprehensible (and therefore stronger and more ungovernable) to you and me as humans. It does not seem incomprehensible if you peer at it through the increasingly sophisticated instruments of digital governance. Facebook is to marketers and politicians what Google Maps is to travelers.

The poor sense of history is due to the passing of the last living generation that experienced truly terrifying levels of global conflict. Twitter revolutions pale in comparison to World Wars and the immense conflicts of the nineteenth century.

Which brings us to the only serious reason behind the temporary resurgence of subcultural power on an overall downward trajectory: learning lag in the institutional world.

The Taming of Subcultures

I remarked earlier that subcultures are sub-institutional in resolution. There is no Federation of American Hipster Societies with a national president and member organizations each with their own chairpersons, badge-printing machines and envelope-stuffing volunteers. There is no Annual National Hipster Convention that attempts to influence elections, and no zoning ordinances and tax laws that specifically target hipster neighborhoods. And perhaps most importantly, there is no master email list of hipsters that you can use to survey and promote.

But just because subcultures lack impersonal institutions in the traditional sense does not mean that they are personal patterns of social organization. They are not. They are merely illegible to the class-culture matrix working with pre-Internet tools.

Since they only serve a subset of the functions of formal organizations (relying on the class-culture matrix for basics like cars and underwear), they need fewer pieces of externalized infrastructure.

Shared common knowledge texts are often enough. Secret handshakes serve the purpose of one-to-one mutual recognition, and three-way introductions are enough to allow small local groups to cohere. Dress codes, popular haunts and the active-use texts change slowly enough that secret handshakes suffice for all information diffusion. No envelope stuffing or email lists are needed. Punishment for defection — shunning and expulsion — is generally weak and local, because the value of membership is generally weak and local (friends to hang out with, parties to go to, a local economy of favor trading).

Before the Internet came along, it was the sheer number and insignificance of local subcultures that made governance too expensive to bother with.  The risk of the rare seditious uprising could not justify the cost of more fine-grained pre-Internet governance mechanisms.

Businesses sold a modest selection of mass-produced shoes for instance, and produced more of the varieties that sold better. It wasn’t particularly useful to know that hipsters liked Converse sneakers. For politicians, a coarse color-coding of Red and Blue states (in America) and a certain amount of county-level intelligence sufficed to inform election campaigns.

The Internet though, has changed all this. It has allowed subcultures to scale (by moving their secret-handshake institutions online), and become more valuable in the process. While mass-manufactured celebrity cultures have been weakening, we are not returning to pre-mass-media patterns of local culture. Instead, we’ve evolved to mega-subcultures that scale without developing institutions.

And at the same time, the visibility of subcultural behaviors has made governance and exploitation much cheaper and easier. You don’t have to go to a specific neighborhood, in specific clothes, and drop specific references. You can sit at your desk, dress any way you want, and fake your way into any subculture. Long enough to sell a whole lot of shoes.

It will not take long for businesses and politicians to completely master this game.

The outcome is inevitable. Subcultures will be comprehensively tamed. Institutional sociopaths within the class-culture matrix are now in a position to detect and take control of subcultures before they even come into existence. This will lead on to control over the very inception of subcultures.

The Fabrication of Subcultures

Subcultures are vulnerable because they form around shared common-knowledge texts (even if the shared text in question comprises nothing more than a particular vocabulary of new urban slang). In Web terms, today’s invisible — to all but the eye of Big Data crunching AI —  pattern of preferences is tomorrow’s subcultural small world on the global Interest Graph. And tomorrow’s Interest Graph is next week’s Social Graph.

The day is not far off when Amazon will be able to predict, based on book-sales correlations in a given geography, the formation of a new subculture before the first defining event (say a party where an origin-myth is created) ever takes place. It won’t be long before influence mechanisms  emerge, to complement the detection mechanisms.

Today, naive marketers try to clumsily set up online communities framed by their products or services, to attract target subcultures, and generally fail.

Somewhat smarter ones try to “own” relevant conversations, based on identifying core subcultural texts that are adjacent to the product-positioning conversation (the classic example is: want to own the teen tampon market? Set up a community for girltalk). This is marketing-by-peripheral-vision.

The smartest ones try to infiltrate and co-opt existing subcultural communities online.

But all these mechanisms have had very limited success. Because they are all about taming wild subcultures.

But once marketers working with Big Data get ahead of the cultural curve, you can expect the balance of power to shift decisively in their favor. From detecting subcultures before future members themselves do, to actively seeding, breeding and shaping desirable subcultures, is not a big leap to imagine. It will be a world of pre-cognitive marketing, run by quants in data vats.

Taming will turn into domestication.

Today, the marketing machine can at best put its muscle behind a Justin Bieber and create coarse, large-scale culture whose manufactured nature is obvious to all but the dimmest of observers.

Tomorrow, it will be able to create tiny, niche cultures whose members will either sincerely believe that the subculture is their own creation, or ironically not care that it has been manufactured for them to find through engineered serendipity.

A sort of Moore’s Law of cultural fabrication will get underway, and it will eventually be capable of etching an entire subculture within a few city blocks.

Heck, let me go out on a limb and make a Moore’s Law type prediction: the size of the smallest manufacturable subculture will halve in size and transience every 18 months. In 10 years, we’ll have a microprocessor moment: the ability to etch culture at a one-city-block-for-one-month level of resolution. Working in concert with neo-urbanists, the new marketers will be able to pack a thousand domesticated hyperlocal subcultures in every major city, and entirely reprogram it culturally every few months, to sell a new crop of products and services.

That future (either utopian or dystopian, depending on where you stand) is a ways off, but we’ll get there.

Three of the four companies that dominate the Web today: Facebook (Like patterns), Google (search patterns) and Amazon (purchase patterns), are equipped with extremely powerful cultural early-warning radars, based on massive data flows. Data flows so massive that only large institutions within the class-culture matrix will have the power to crunch them into usable intelligence.

Apple, the fourth company, curiously does not have the capacity to lead the zeitgeist this way. Their historic competitive advantage — the mind of Steve Jobs — has turned into a serious weakness with his passing. Because he was preternaturally good at following the zeitgeist, Apple squandered its potential to lead it. A key kind of cultural early-warning radar (based on music tastes) was ceded to startups. It was cheaper to let Jobs stay one step ahead of other gut-driven pre-Internet marketers than to invest in assets that could be exploited by less-talented post-Internet data-driven marketers, capable of staying ahead of culture itself.

This is why Bruce Sterling was right to label Apple an example of Gothic-High-Tech zeitgeist following  rather than zeitgeist leading, but I believe he is wrong in thinking that all marketing is going to be this way; much of it is now going to get ahead of the zeitgeist and actively shape it, within the decade.

As a revealing sign, it is noteworthy that subcultures have already been subverted so completely that they voluntarily self-document their doings online on privately-owned platforms. Every party or group lunch is now likely to be photographed, video-taped and archived online as part of collective memory. Group-life streams and grand narratives are out there, for the reading.

If you’re not paying, you’re the product. Indeed.

But the nitty-gritty aside, the conclusion is inevitable. The subcultural web is now open for colonization. It will retain a potential for very coarse and rough kinds of subversion (#OccupyWallStreet is sort of the Swan Song of subcultural power). This potential will soon peak, and then begin to decline.

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Attention Pyramid

How big is the potential value of subcultural attention mining? The rumored valuation of the Facebook IPO provides a hint: $100 billion. That suggests a market that is big enough — when you consider all players — to move global GDP a few percentage points. Is that a lot or a little? Depends on your frame of reference.

One way to frame the value is to imagine a pyramid of social groupings, representing various levels of social attention (not attention devoted to the non-human world).

At the bottom you have 7 billion little pools of individually-directed attention. At the very top, you have a single point, the group called humanity. There are moments, like 9/11, when all available attention floods to the top.

One organizational rung below, you have perhaps 18 groupings at the coarsest resolution level of the global class-culture matrix: the three basic social classes (rich, middle-class, poor) times the half-dozen or so major civilizations.

Then you have perhaps 700-odd nation-class groupings, and so on down, past cities, kinship groups, traditional family-societies and various other kinds of groupings that were long ago domesticated and subsumed within the class-culture matrix.

At some level of resolution, past a gray transition zone, the class-culture matrix gives way to the untamed subcultural web. The gray zone is moving relentlessly downwards, domesticating the subcultural web and subsuming it within the class-culture matrix.

This is not like the fortune at the bottom of the C. K. Prahalad pyramid. This is the cultural equivalent of the “plenty of room at the bottom” remark by Richard Feynman, which serves as inspiration today for the entire field of nanotechnology.

Except that there isn’t plenty of room. Though the social space occupied by the subcultural web is vast, it is being domesticated so fast that we can expect complete colonization within a decade. Recall what happened with the nineteenth-century railroad boom in America. Settlement processes that had been crawling painfully along for three and a half centuries, suddenly accelerated and finished the job within a few decades (the marker was a major 5-year depression that began in 1873).

So from that perspective, $100 billion seems both reasonable and not particularly large.  It seems like a market that should take no more than a decade  to occupy. At that point, I’d expect Facebook to turn into a mature company with declining margins.

At that point, we will hit the limit I called Peak Attention.  Once all subcultural attention is mined, only two kinds of attention will remain: the attention currently trapped within personal relationships, and the attention controlled by individualist instincts.

Both are likely to be resistant to industrial-scale attention-mining techniques. All genuine subversive instincts will retreat to these lowest two layers of the attention pyramid: groups of size one and two respectively (there are likely around half a trillion one-on-one relationships in the world; I’ll leave you to figure out why).

We will move past Peak Attention, and a new game will begin.

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In the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling repeatedly uses a very effective technique: turning a character, initially introduced as part of the background, into a foreground character. This happens with the characters of Gilderoy Lockhart, Viktor Krum and Sirius Black for instance. In fact she uses the technique so frequently (with even minor characters like Mr. Ollivander and Stan Shunpike) that the background starts to empty out.

This is rather annoying because the narrative suggests and promises a very large world — comparable in scope and complexity to the Lord of the Rings world say — but delivers a very small world in which everybody knows everybody. You are promised an epic story about the fate of human civilization, but get what feels like the story of a small town. Characters end up influencing each other’s lives a little too frequently, given the apparent size of the canvas.

We are used to big worlds that act big and small worlds that act small. We are not used to big worlds that act small.

Which is a problem, because that’s the sort of world we now live in. Our world is turning into Rowling’s world.

The Double-Take Zone

Our lives are streams of mostly inconsequential encounters with people who momentarily break away from the nameless and faceless social dark matter that surrounds our personal worlds. But most of the time, they return to the void.

Each of us is at the center of a social reality surrounded by a foreground social zone of 150 odd people with names and faces, a 7-billion strong world of social dark matter outside, and an annular social gray zone in between, comprising a few thousand people.

This last category contains people who are neither completely anonymous and interchangeable, nor possessed of completely unique identities in relation to us.  Included in this annular ring are old classmates and coworkers who still register as unique individuals but have turned into insubstantial ghosts, associated only with a dim memory or two. Also in this ring are public figures and celebrities whom we recognize individually, but who don’t rise above the archetypes that define their respective classes. And then there are all those baristas and receptionists whom you see regularly.

It is this social gray zone that interests me, and there’s a simple test for figuring out if somebody is in this zone with respect to you: if you meet them out of context, you’ll do a double-take.

If the barista at your coffee shop shows up at the grocery store, you’ll do a quick double-take.  Then you’ll make the appropriate context switch, and recognition will turn into identification. Our language accurately reflects this thought process: we say I can’t place her and I just figured out where I know her from. 

This happens with celebrities too. I am pretty good at the game of recognizing lesser-known actors in new roles. When watching TV, I often say things like, “Oh, the villain’s sister in Dexter… I just realized, she played Alma Garrett in Deadwood.” I tend to spot these connections across shows and movies faster than most people.

Context-Dependent Relationships

The reason for the double-take effect is obvious. Most of the people we recognize enough to distinguish from faceless/nameless social dark matter are still one-dimensional, context-dependent figures: the barista who works mornings at the Starbucks on Sahara Avenue. Double-take zone people are literally part of the social background.

It takes a few serendipitous encounters in different contexts to pry someone loose from context, but mostly, nothing happens. They merely turn into slightly more well-defined elements of their default contexts: the barista who works at Starbcucks on Sahara Avenue, that I once ran into at Whole Foods. 

This still isn’t the same as actually knowing someone, but it is a necessary first step (as an aside, this is the reason why the three media/three contacts rule in sales works the way it does). Double-take moments are relationship-escalation options with expiry dates. They create a window of opportunity within which the relationship can escalate into a personal one.

There is a reason haven’t we met before? is the mother of all pick-up lines.

So let’s say there are three zones around you. The context-free zone of personal relationships, surround by a context-dependent double-take zone (call it the don’t-I-know-you-from-somewhere zone if you prefer), and finally, social dark matter.

The Real and Abstract Parts of the Social Graph 

The personal, context-free zone  is the part of the social graph that is real for you. Here, you don’t deal in abstractions like “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” You deal in specifics like, “You need to get yourself a meeting with Joe. Let me send an introductory email.” You could probably sketch out this part of the social graph fairly accurately on paper, with real names and who-knows-whom connections. You don’t need to speculate about degrees of separation here. You can count them.

The dark matter world is the part of the social graph that is an abstraction for you. You have abstract ideas about how it works (Old Boy networks, people taking board seats in each other’s companies, the idea that weak links lead to jobs, the idea that Asians have stronger connections than Americans), but you couldn’t actually sketch it out except in coarse, speculative ways using groups rather than individuals.

The double-take zone is populated by people who are socially part of the abstract social network that defines the dark matter, but physically or digitally are concrete entities in your world, embedded in specific contexts that you frequent. Prying someone loose from the double-take zone means moving them from the abstract social graph into your real, neighborhood graph. They go from being concrete and physically or virtually situated in your mind to being concrete and socially situated, independent of specific contexts. If mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists ran the world, the socially correct thing to say in a double-take situation would be: “Oh, we’re context-independent now; do you want to take this on-graph?”

In these terms, Rowling’s little trick involves introducing characters in the double-take zone and then moving them to the context-free zone. In the process, she socially situates them. Lockhart goes from abstract celebrity author making an appearance at a bookstore to teacher with specific relationships to the lead characters. Sirius Black initially appears as an abstract criminal on television, but turns into Harry’s godfather. Viktor Krum is a distant celebrity Quidditch player who turns into Ron’s rival for the affections of Hermione.

The Active, Unstable Layer

The double-take zone is defined by the double-take test, but such tests are rare. What happens when they do occur? Since an actual double take creates a window of opportunity to personalize a relationship — an active option — you could call this the active and unstable layer of the double-take zone. The more actual double takes are happening, the more the zone is active and unstable.

Our minds deal badly with the double-take zone when it is stable and dormant. And we really fumble when it gets active and unstable. Why?

Our social instincts are based on physical-geographic separation of scales. In the pre-urban world, the double-take zone was empty. You either knew somebody personally as a fellow villager, or as a stranger visiting from the dark-matter world. Strangers couldn’t stay strangers. They either went away soon and were forgotten, or stayed and became fellow villagers.

We are used to being careful around people from our village, and more careless in our dealings with strangers passing through. We take the long view of relationships within local communities, and are more willing to pick fights with strangers. There is less likelihood of costs escalating out of control via vendettas in the latter case. It is also easier. The obvious tourist is more easily cheated than the local.

Our psychological instincts appear to have evolved to deal with this type of social reality. We are more likely (and able) to dehumanize strangers before dealing roughly with them.

Urbanization created the double-take zone. Mass media expanded it vastly, but asymmetrically (mass media creates relationships that are double-take in one direction, dark-matter in the other). The Internet is expanding it vastly once again, this time with more symmetry, thanks to the explosion in number of contexts it offers, for encounters to occur.

This wouldn’t matter so much if the expansion didn’t affect stability. We know how to deal with stable and dormant double-take zones.

The Rules of Civility

Before the Internet began seriously destabilizing and activating the double-take zone, it was an unnatural social space, but we knew how to deal with it.

The double-take zone merely requires learning a decent and polite, but impersonal approach to interpersonal behavior: civility. It requires a capacity for an abstract sort of friendliness and a baseline level of mutual helpfulness among strangers. We learn the non-Duchene smile — something that sits uncomfortably in the middle of a triangle defined by a genuine smile, a genuine frown, and a blank stare.

We think of such baseline civility as the right way to deal with the double-take zone. This is why salespeople come across as insincere: they act as though double-take zone relationships were something deeper.

The pre-Interent double-take zone was fairly stable. Double-take events were truly serendipitous and generally didn’t go anywhere. Most relationship options expired due to low social and geographic mobility. A random encounter was just a random encounter. Travel was stimulating, but poignant encounters abroad rarely turned into anything more.

The rules of conduct that we know as civility have an additional feature: they are based on an assumption of stable, default-context status relationships that carry over to non-default contexts. A century ago, if a double-take moment did occur, once the parties recognized each other (made easier by obvious differences in clothing and other physical markers of class membership), the default-context status relationship would kick in.  If a lord decided to take a walk through the village market on a whim, and ran into his gardener, once the double-take moment passed, the gardener would doff his hat to the lord, and the lord would confer a gracious nod upon the gardener.

But this sort of prescribed, status-dependent civility is no longer enough. The rules of civility cannot deal with an explosion of serendipitous encounters.

Social Mobility versus Status Churn

Since double-take encounters temporarily dislocate people from the default context through which you know them, and make them temporarily more alive after, you could say the double-take zone is coming alive with nascent relationships: relationships that have been dislodged from a fixed physical or digital context, but haven’t yet been socially situated.

There is an additional necessary condition for more to happen: the double-take moment must also destabilize default assumptions about relative status.

Double-take events today destabilize status, unlike similar events a century ago. This is because we read them differently. A lord strolling through a market a century ago — a domain marked for the service class — knew that he was a social tourist. Double-take events, if they happened, were informed by the assumption that one party was an alien to the context, and both sides knew which one was the alien. Everybody wore the uniform of their home class, wherever they went.

Things are different today. A century ago, social classes were much more self-contained. Rich, middle class and poor people didn’t run into each other much outside of expected contexts. They shopped, ate and socialized in different places for instance. This is why traditional romantic stories are nearly always based on the trope of the heroine temporarily escaping from a home social class to a lower one, and having a status-destabilizing encounter with a lower-class male (the reverse, a prince going walkabout and meeting a feisty commoner-girl, seems to be a less common premise, but that’s a whole other story).

But today, one of the effects of the breakdown of the middle class and trading-up is that status relationships become context-dependent. There is no default context.

Let’s say you’re an administrative assistant at a university, have an associate’s degree, and frequent a coffeeshop where the barista is a graduate student. You both shop at Whole Foods. She’s trading up, as far as dietary lifestyles go, to shop at Whole Foods, while it is normal for you because you have a higher household income.

In the coffeeshop, you’re higher status as customer. If you run into each other at Whole Foods, you’re equals. If you run into each other on campus, she’s the superior.

Short of becoming President, there is almost nothing you can do that will earn you a default status with everybody. It’s up in the air.

This isn’t social mobility. The whole idea of social mobility, at least in the sense of classes as separate, self-contained social worlds, is breaking down. Instead you have context-dependent status churn. Double-take moments don’t necessarily indicate that one party is a tourist outside their class. There are merely moments that highlight that class is a shaky construct today.

Worlds are mixing, so double-takes become more frequent. But what makes the increased frequency socially disruptive is that status relationships are different in the different contexts.

Temporal Churn

Even more unprecedented than status churn is temporal churn.

People from the same nominal class, who once knew each other, can move into each other’s double-take zones simply by drifting apart in space. That’s why you do a double-take when you randomly run into an old classmate, whom you haven’t seen for decades, in a bookstore (happened to me once). Or when you run into a hallway-hellos level coworker, whom you’ve never worked directly with, at the grocery store (this happened to me as well).

It is not changes in appearance or social status that make immediate recognition difficult. It is the unfamiliar context itself.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen much anymore. We don’t catch up as much anymore because we never disconnect. Unexpected encounters are rare because online visibility never drops to zero. Truly serendipitous encounters turn into opportunistically planned ones via online early-warning signals.

One effect of this is that relationships can go up or down in strength over a lifetime, since they are continuously unstable and active. Once you’ve friended somebody on Facebook, and their activities keep showing up in your stream, you are more likely to look them up deliberately for a meeting or collaboration. Social situation awareness is not allowed to fade. The active and unstable double-take layer is constantly suggesting opportunities and ideas for deeper interaction.

It’s not that time doesn’t matter anymore, but that time does more complicated things to relationships. In the pre-Internet world, relationships behaved monotonically in the long term. You either lost touch, and the relationship weakened over time, or you stayed in touch and the relationship got stronger over time. Some relationships plateaued at a certain distance.

Few relationships went up and down in dramatic swings as they routinely do today.

Beyond Civility

Mere static-status civility is no longer enough to deal with a world of volatile relationships created by status churn across previously distinct classes, and temporal churn that ensures that relationships that never quite die. Relationships that move in and out of the double-take zone (or even just threaten to do so) need a very different approach.

You never know when you might turn a barista into a new friend after a double-take encounter, or renew a relationship with an old one via a Facebook Like.

The sane default attitude today is  the world is small and life is long. Reinventing yourself is becoming prohibitively expensive.  You have to navigate under the expectation that the real part of your social graph will grow over time, even if you move around a lot. If you are immortal and can move sufficiently fast in space and time, the abstract social graph may vanish altogether, like it did for Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who made it the mission of his immortal life to insult everybody in the galaxy, in person, by name, and in alphabetical order.

The phrase the world is small and life is long came up in a conversation with an acquaintance in Silicon Valley. We’d been talking about how the Silicon Valley technology world, despite being quite large, acts like a small world. We’d been talking, in particular, about the dangers of burning bridges and picking fights. We both agreed that that’s a very dangerous thing to do. That’s when my acquaintance trotted out that phrase, with a philosophical shrug.

Of the two parts of the phrase, the world is small is easier to understand. I don’t think it has much to do with the much-publicized four-degrees finding on Facebook. Status and temporal churn within the six-degree world is sufficient to explain what’s happening.

Life is long is the bit people often fail to appreciate. The social graph throbs with actual encounters every minute, that are constantly rewiring it. If you are in a particular neck of the woods for a long enough time, you’ll eventually run into everybody within it more than once. It’s the law of large numbers applied to accumulating random encounters.

Silicon Valley is a place where worlds collide frequently in different status-churning contexts, and circulation through different roles over time creates temporal churn. There are other worlds that exhibit similar dynamics. Most of the world is going to look like this in a few decades.

It is increasingly going to be a world of shifting alliances and status relationships within a larger, far more active and unstable layer in a much larger double-take zone. A world where you will never be quite sure where you stand in relation to a large number of potentially important people.

Some people love this emerging, charged social world, always poised on the edge of serendipity. They seem to come alive with this much static in the air.  They thrive on status churn. They hoard relationships, turning every chance encounter into a rest-of-life relationship.

Others fantasize about declaring relationship bankruptcy and starting a new life somewhere else. At one time, this was actually very easy to do. Today, you need the Witness Protection Program to pull it off.

I am not certain whether I like or dislike this emerging world. I think I am leaning towards dislike. The slogan, the world is small and life is long describes a tense and anxious world of constant social shadow-boxing. One where you must always be on, socially. A world where burning bridges is more dangerous, and open conflict becomes ever costlier, leading to less dissent and more stupidity.

It is a situation of false harmony.  One where peace is less an indicator of increasing empathy and human connection, and more  an indicator of increasing wariness. You never know which world your world will collide with next, with what consequences. You never know what missed opportunity or threat could decisively impact your life.

So far, we’ve been able to do without the opportunities, and avoid the threats. We try to teach teenagers what we think are the right kinds of cautious lessons: it boils down to be careful what you post on Facebook, it could affect your job.

But this is a transient stage. Soon we won’t be able to do without the opportunities, and our lives will come to depend on the serendipity catalyzed by the active, unstable double-take layer. Nice-to-have has a way of turning into must-have.  This dependence will come with necessary exposure to the threats. The world is small and life is long will not be enough protection.

Motivational speakers used to preach a few decades back that we should all think global and act local.

It has happened. But I don’t think this is quite what they had in mind.

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Consider this thought experiment: what if you were only allowed 2000 words with which to understand the world?

With these 2000 words, you’d have to do everything. You’d be allowed to occasionally retire some words in favor of others, or invent new words, but you’d have to stick to the budget.

Everything would have to be expressible within the budget: everyday conversations and deep conversations, shallow thoughts and  profound ones, reflections and expectations, scientific propositions and vocational instruction manuals, poetry and stories, emotions and facts.

How would you use your budget? Would you choose more nouns or verbs? How many friends would you elevate to a name-remembered status? How many stars and bird species would you name? Would you have more concrete words or more reified ones in your selection? How many of the most commonly used words would you select? Counting mathematical symbols as words, how many of those would you select? Would you mimic others’ selections or make up your own mind?

***

When I read old texts, I am struck by the density of the writing. Words used to be expensive. You had to make one word do many things.

That last sentence contains a simple example. I originally had convey many meanings in place of do many things. For some readers, the substitution will make no difference. To others, it will make a great deal of difference.

We talk of dense texts as being layered.  They lend themselves to re-reading from many perspectives over a long period of time. Even as late as the nineteenth century, we find that the average professional writer wrote with a density that rivals the densest writing today.  With the exception of scientific writing — best understood as a social-industrial process for increasing the density of words — every other kind of writing today has become less layered. Most writing admits one reading, if that.

Dense writing is not particularly difficult. Merely time-consuming. As the word layering suggests, it is something of a mechanical craft, and you become better with practice. Even mediocre writers in the past, working with starter material no denser than today’s typical Top 10 blog post, could sometimes achieve sublime results by putting in the time.

If the mediocre can become good by pursuing density, the good can become great. Robert Louis Stevenson famously wrote gripping action sequences without using adverbs and adjectives. His prose has a sparse elegance to it, but is nevertheless dense with meaning and drama. I once tried the exercise of avoiding adverbs and adjectives. I discovered that it is not about elimination. The main challenge is to make your nouns and verbs do more work.

***

In teaching and learning writing today, we focus on the isolated virtue of brevity. We do not think about density. Traditions of exegesis — the dilution, usually oral, of dense texts to the point where they are consumable by many — are confined to dead rather than living texts.

We have forgotten how to teach density. In fact, we’ve even forgotten how to think  about it. We confuse density with overwrought, baroque textures, with a hard-to-handle literary style that can easily turn into tasteless excess in unskilled hands.

The 2000-word thought experiment, if you try it, will likely force you to consider density of meaning as a selection factor. Some words, like schadenfreude, are intrinsically dense. Others, like love, are dense because they are highly adaptable.  Depending on context, they can do many things.

Density is a more fundamental variable than the length of a text. It is intrinsic to writing, like the density of a fluid; what is known in fluid dynamics as an intensive property. The length of an arbitrarily delineated piece of text on the other hand, is an extensive property, like the volume of a specified container of fluid.

Choosing words precisely and crafting dense sentences is important. Choosing small containers is not.

***

Writing used to be a form of making. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have to carve your thoughts onto stone tablets.  One of these days I am going to try carving the first draft of a post in stone.

Writing on paper is also an expensive luxury. There was a time when writers made their own paper and ink. You had to write with temperamental things like quills. The practice of calligraphy was not a writerly affectation. It was a necessary skill in the days of temperamental media.

The scribe was more of an archivist than a writer. The other ancestor of the writer, the bard-sage, was both composer and performer. The average person did not read, but relied on the bard or priest to expand upon and perform the written, archived word. Particularly good performances would lead to revisions of the written texts.

When fountain pens and cheap factory-made paper made their appearance, writers were able to waste paper, and as a consequence, written words. In the history of thought, the invention of the ability to waste words was probably as important as the invention of the ability — famously noted by Alan Kay — to waste bits in the history of programming.

With cheap paper was born that iconic image of the twentieth century writer — a writer sitting alone in a room, crumpling up a piece of writing in frustration, and tossing it into an overflowing waste-paper basket. Unlike the sage-bard, enacting old texts and beta-testing new ones through public oral performances, or the scribe, committing tested, quality-controlled and expensive texts to stone, the modern, pre-Internet writer was a resource-rich creature of profligate excess. 

The very idea of a “waste paper” basket would have been unthinkable at one time.

***

It is difficult today to get a sense of how expensive writing used to be. I once watched a traditional temple scribe demonstrate the process of making the palm-leaf manuscripts that were used in India until Islam brought paper-making to the subcontinent. That probably happened a few centuries after the Abbasids defeated the Tang empire at the Battle of Talas in 751 AD, and extracted the secret of paper-making from Chinese prisoners of war.

Palm leaves are easily the worst writing technology ever invented by a major culture. They make leather, papyrus, paper and silk look like space-age media by comparison. A good deal that seems strange about India as an idea suddenly makes sense once you get that the civilization was being enacted through this ridiculous medium (and equally ridiculous ones like tree bark) until about 1000 AD. Imagine a modern civilization that had to keep its grand narrative going using only tweets, and you get some sense of what was going on.

Here’s how you make palm-leaf manuscripts. First you cut little index-card sized rectangles out of palm fronds and dry them flat. Then you carefully use a needle to scratch out the text — typically a few lines per leaf.  Then you make an ink out of ground charcoal, carefully rub it into the scratches, and swab away the excess. Finally, you carefully pierce a hole through the middle (not the edge, since the thing is brittle) and thread a piece of string through a sheaf of loosely-related leaves.

Congratulations, you have a book.

Since the sheaf is more unstable than individual leaves, you have to plan for graceful degradation. Expect individual leaves to be lost or damaged. Expect accidental shuffling and page numbering turning to garbage. Expect new leaves to be inserted, like viruses. Don’t expect multi-leaf stories to remain stable. Expect narrative trunks to sprout branches added by later authors.

The palm leaf manuscript was brittle and easily damaged, available in one unhelpful size, with a lifespan of perhaps a few decades on average (carefully preserved ones lasted around 150 years I believe). After that you had to make a copy if you wanted to keep the ideas alive. If you were rich or powerful, you could get stuff carved onto stone or copper plates by slaves. If not, your best bet was to go with palm leaves and hope that people would descend on your home to make copies.

***

When you look at old writing technology, poetry suddenly makes sense.

It is  modular content that comes in fixed-length chunks, with redundancy and error-correcting codes built in. It is designed to be transmitted and copied across time and space through unreliable and noisy channels, one stone tablet, palm leaf or piece of handmade paper at a time. The technology was still unreliable enough that the oral tradition remained the primary channel. Writing began as a medium for backups. Scribes were the first data warehousing experts. They did more than merely transcribe the spoken word. They compressed, corrected and encrypted as well, and periodically updated texts to reflect the extant state of the oral tradition.

That is why verses are so eminently quotable outside the context of poems. Poems are extensive oral containers of arbitrary length, in some cases delineated after the fact. Verses are standardized containers designed to carry intense, dense, archival-quality words around.

Today we view traditional verse epics as single works. The Illiad has about 9000 verses. The Mahabharata has about 24,000. It makes far more sense to talk about both as data-warehoused records of extremely long — in both time and words — convergent conversations. They are closer to Google’s index than to books.

For the ancients, texts had to be little metered packets. But as paper technology got cheaper and more reliable, poetry, like many other obsolete technologies before and after, turned into an art form. Critical function turned into dispensable style. Meter and rhyme ceased to be useful as error-correcting coding mechanisms and turned into free dimensions for artistic expression.

Soon, individual verses could be composed under the assumption of stable, longer embedding contexts. Extensive works could be delineated  a priori, during the composition of the parts. And the parts could be safely de-containerized. Rhyming verse could be abandoned in favor of blank verse, and eventually meter became entirely unnecessary. And we ended up with the bound book of prose.

Technologically, it was something of a backward step, like reverting to circuit-switched networks after having invented packet switching, or moving back from digital to analog technology. But it served an important purpose: allowing the individual writer to emerge. The book could belong to an individual author in a way a verse from an oral tradition could not.

***

Poetry gets it right: length is irrelevant. You can standardize and normalize it away using appropriate containerization. It is density that matters. Evolving your packet size and vocabulary over time helps you increase density over time.

My posts range between 2000-5000 words, and I post about once a week here on ribbonfarm. But there are many bloggers who post two or three 300-word posts a day, five days a week. They also log 2000-5000 words.

So I am not particularly prolific. I merely have a different packet size compared to other bloggers, optimized for a peculiar purpose: evolving an idiosyncratic vocabulary. It seems to take several thousand words to characterize a neologism like gollumize or posturetalk.  But once that is done, I can reuse it as a compact and dense piece of refactored perception.

You could say that what I am really trying to do on this blog is compose a speculative dictionary of dense words and phrases. Perhaps one day this blog will collapse under its own gravity into a single super-dense post written entirely with 2000 hyperlinked neologisms, like a neutron star.

Poetry — functional ancient poetry, the cultural TCP/IP of the world before around 1000 AD — is necessarily a social process, involving, at the very least, a sage-bard, a scribe, an audience and a patron. The oral culture refines, distills, tests, reworks, debates and judges. Iterative performance is a necessary component. When oral exegesis of an unstable verse dies down, and memorization and repetition validate the quality of the finished verse, the scribe breaks out his chisel.

The prose book can stand apart from broader social processes in radically individual ways. It can travel from writer to readers largely unaltered, setting up a hub-spoke pattern of conversational circuits.

***

I’ve occasionally described my blogging as a sort of performance art. But something about that self-description has been bothering me. I have now concluded that if the description applies at all, it applies to a different kind of blogger, not me.

The Web obscures the crucial and necessary distinction between oral and written cultures.  Some bloggers perform and talk. Others are scribes. I think I am a scribe, not a performer.

Yet, there is no easy correspondence between pre-Gutenberg bard-sages and scribes and today’s bloggers. In the intervening centuries, we have seen the rise and fall of the individualist writer, working alone, filling waste-paper baskets.

History does not rewind. It synthesizes. The blogosphere, I am convinced, synthesizes the collectivist pre-Gutenberg culture of sage-bard and scribes with the individualist post-Gutenberg culture of paper-crumpling waste-paper-basket fillers.

In the process of synthesis, virtual circuits must ride once more on top of a revitalized packet-switched network. The oral/written distinction must be replaced by a more basic one that is medium-agnostic, like the Internet itself.

***

According to legend, the sage Vyasa needed a scribe to write down the Mahabharata as he composed it. Ganesha accepted the challenge, but demanded that the sage compose as fast as he could write. Wary of the trickster god, Vyasa in turn set his own condition: Ganesha would have to understand every verse before writing it down. And so, the legend continues, they began, with Vyasa throwing curveball verses at Ganesha whenever he needed a break.

The figure of Vyasa the composer is best understood as a literary device to represent a personified oral tradition (that perhaps included a single real Vyasa or family of Vyasas).

But the legend gets at something interesting about the role of a scribe in a dominantly oral culture. A second-class citizen like a minute-taker or official record-keeper, the scribe must nevertheless synthesize and interpret an ongoing cacophony in order to produce something coherent to write down. When the spoken word is cheap and the written word is expensive, the scribe must add value. The oral tradition may be the default, but the written one is the court of final appeal in case of conflict among two authoritative individuals.

There is a brilliant passage in Yes, Prime Minister, where the Cabinet Secretary Humphery Appleby  helps the Prime Minister, Jim Hacker, cook the minutes of a cabinet meeting after the fact, to escape from an informal oral commitment. Appleby’s exposition of the principle of accepting the minutes as the de facto official memory gets to the heart of the Vyasa-Ganesha legend:

Sir Humphrey: “It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member’s recollection of them differs violently from every other member’s recollection. Consequently, we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have been officially recorded in the minutes by the Officials, from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the Officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes is not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case, if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the Officials. And it isn’t so it wasn’t.”

The key point here is that the scribe must do more than merely transcribe. He must interpret and synthesize. I suspect the Vyasa-Ganesha legend was invented by the first scribe paid to write down the hitherto-oral Mahabharata, to legitimize his own interpretative authority in capturing something coherent from a many-voiced tradition, with each voice claiming the authority of a mythical Vyasa.

***

So if the modern blogosphere is neither the collectivist, negotiated recording of a Grand Narrative, arrived at via a conversation between scribes and sage-bards, nor the culture of purely individual expression that reigned between Gutenberg and Tim Berners-Lee, what is it?

For blogging to be performance art, the performer must live an interesting life and do interesting things. For a while I thought I qualified, but then I reflected and was forced to admit that my dull daily routine does not qualify as raw material for performance art.

How about this: instead of a half-coherent oral tradition or the relatively coordinated doings of the British Cabinet, the blogosphere is primarily an uncoordinated theater of large-scale individual gonzo blogging. As culture is increasingly enacted by this theater of decentered gonzo blogging instead of traditions that enjoy received authority, minute-taking scribe bloggers must increasingly interpret what they are seeing.

The first human scribe who wore the mask of Ganesha could reasonably assume that there was a coherent trunk narrative with discriminating judgments required only at the periphery.  He would only be responsible for smoothing out the rough edges of an evolving oral consensus. Equally Humphrey Appleby could hope for a coherent emergent intentionality in the deliberations of the cabinet.

But the scribe-blogger cannot assume that there is anything coherent to be discovered in the gonzo blogging theater. At best he can attempt to collect and compress and hope that it does not all cancel out.

There is another difference. When words are literally expensive, as words carved in stone are, anything written has de facto authority, underwritten by the wealth that paid for the scribe. Scribes were usually establishment figures associated with courts, temples or monasteries, deriving their interpretative authority from more fundamental kinds of authority based on violence or wealth.

With derived authority comes supervision. The compensation for lost derived authority is the withdrawal of supervision.  The scribe-blogger is an unsupervised and unauthorized chronicler in a world of contending gonzos. Any authority he or she achieves is a function of the density and coherence of the interpretative perspective it offers on the gonzo-blogging theater.

***

I wish I could teach dense blogging. I am not sure how I am gradually acquiring this skill, but I am convinced it is not a difficult one to pick up. It requires no particular talent beyond a generic talent for writing and thinking clearly. It is merely time-consuming and somewhat tedious.

Sometimes I strive for higher density consciously, and at other times, dense prose flows out naturally after a gonzo-blogger memeplex has simmered for a while in my head. I rarely let non-dense writing out the door. You need gonzo-blogging credibility to successfully do Top 10 list posts. I can manufacture branded ideas, but lack the raw material needed to sustain a personal brand.

Writing teachers with a doctrinaire belief in brevity urge students to focus. They encourage selection and elimination in the service of explicit intentions.  The result is highly legible writing. Every word serves a singular function. Every paragraph contains one idea. Every piece of prose follows one sequence of thoughts. There is a beginning, a middle and an end. Like a city laid out by a High-Modernist architect, the result is anemic. The text takes a single prototypical reader to a predictable conclusion. In theory. More often, it loses the reader immediately, since no real reader is anything like the prototypical one assumed by (say) the writer of a press release.

An insistence on focus turns writing into a vocational trade rather than a liberal art.

Both gonzo blogging and scribe blogging lead you away from the writing teacher.

Striving for density, attempting to compress more into the same number of words, inevitably leads you away from the legibility prized by writing teachers. Ambiguity, suggestion and allusion become paramount. Coded references become necessary, to avoid burdening all readers with selection and filtration problems. Like Humpty-Dumpty, you are sometimes forced to enslave words and chain them to meanings that they were not born with.

***

Dense writing creates illegible slums of meaning. To the vocational writer, it looks discursive, messy and randomly exploratory.

But what the vocational writer mistakes for a lack of clear intention is actually a multiplicity of intentions, both conscious and unconscious.

Francine Prose, in Reading Like a Writer, remarked that beginning novelists obsess about voice, the question of who is speaking. She goes on to remark that the more important question is who is listening?

The failure to ask who is listening is peculiar to pre-Internet book writers. You cannot possibly fail that way as a blogger.

The modern extensive-prose, word-wasteful book represents the apogee of a certain kind of individualism. An individualism that writes itself into existence through self-expression unmodulated by in-process feedback, something only entire cultures could afford to do in the age of stone-carved words. For this kind of writer, the reader was a distant abstraction, easily forgotten.

A muse was an optional aid to the process rather than a necessary piece of cognitive equipment. At most modern, pre-blogging book writers wrote for a single archetypal reader.

For the blogger, a multiplicity of readerly intentions is a given. At the very least, you must constantly balance the needs of the new reader against the needs of the long-time reader. Every frequent commenter or email/IM correspondent becomes an unavoidable muse. This post for instance, was triggered by a particularly demanding muse who accused me, over IM, of having gotten lazy over the last few posts and neglecting this blog in favor of my more commercial, less-dense writing.

She was right. Mea culpa. Having to pay the rent is not a valid excuse for failing to rise to the challenge of a tricky balancing act.

Density is the natural consequence of trying to say many things to many distinct people over long periods of time without repeating yourself too much or sparking flame wars. The long-time reader gets impatient with repetition and demands compaction of old ideas into a shorthand that can be built upon. The newcomer demands a courteous, non-cryptic welcome. Active commenters demand a certain kind of room for their own expansion, elaboration and meaning construction.

The exegesis of living texts is not the respectful affair that it is around dead ones. If you blog, there will be blood.

***

In the days of 64k memories, programmers wrote code with as much care as ancient scribes carved out verses on precious pieces of rock, one expensive chisel-pounding rep at a time.

In the remarkably short space of 50 years, programming has evolved from rock-carving parsimony to paper-wasting profligacy.

Still living machine-coding gray eminences bemoan the verbosity and empty abstractions of the young. My one experience of writing raw machine code (some stepper-motor code, keyed directly into a controller board,  for a mechatronics class) was enlightening, but immediately convinced me to run away as fast as I could.

But why shouldn’t you waste bits or paper when you can, in service of clarity and accessibility? Why layer meaning upon meaning until you get to near-impenetrable opacity?

I think it is because the process of compression is actually the process of validation and comprehension.  When you ask repeatedly, who is listening, every answer generates a new set of conflicts. The more you resolve those conflicts before hitting Publish, the denser the writing. If you judge the release density right, you will produce a very generative piece of text that catalyzes further exploration rather than ugly flame wars.

Sometimes, I judge correctly. Other times I release too early or too late. And of course, sometimes a quantity of gonzo-blogger theater compresses down to nothing and I have to throw away a draft.

And some days, I find myself staring at a set of dense thoughts that refuse to either cohere into a longer piece or dissolve into noise. So I packetize them into virtual palm-leaf index cards delimited by asterixes, and let them loose for other scribes to shuffle through and perhaps sinter into a denser mass in a better furnace.

It is something of a lazy technique, ultimately no better than list-blogging in the gonzo blogosphere. But if it was good enough for Wittgenstein, it’s good enough for me.

***

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The last time I froze and posted my short-term reading list on August 12, people seemed to appreciate it. Going by my Amazon Affiliate data and random conversations with some of you on Google+ and Facebook, it looks like at least a few dozen people bought one or more of the books and read along, in a sort of invisible de facto book club. So I figured I’d make it a routine feature.

I personally finished 6.75 of the 8 books I posted (one book got swapped out for an alternate) by December 31. That’s a reading rate of just under a book every 3 weeks. Which means I should be able to get through about 8.7 books by the end of June.

Here’s my book list that I plan to get through by June 30, beyond the backlog of  1.25, which leaves me with an allowance of 7.45. I’ll round that up to 8. Here’s the list.

1. Notes on the Synthesis of Form: A seminal book on design, recommended by Dorian Taylor and Xianhang Zhang.
2. Cognition in the Wild: Another seminal book on decision-making in real-world settings, also recommended by Dorian Taylor
3. Shop Class as Soul Craft: A book on the philosophy of making stuff, and the value of working with your hands. Recommended by Art Felgate, Daniel Lemire and a couple of other people.
4. Invisible Giant: Cargill and its Transnational Strategies OR Merchants of Grain: The Power and Profits of the Five Giant Companies at the Center of the World’s Food Supply (haven’t picked yet): Books on the global food industry, recommended by Megan Lubaszska.
5. The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution: From my own list.
6. Why Beauty is Truth: the history of symmetry: From my unread pile.
7. Design in Nature: how the constructal law governs evolution in biology, physics, technology and social organization: bit of a wildcard, due to be released January 24th. Recommended by John Hagel.
8. Infrastructure: a field guide to the industrial landscape: a recommendation off Quora. Seems like fun mind-candy, targeted more at the “How Things Work” kids’ market than adults, but still…

Infrastructure and Making

Two themes seem to pop out here: infrastructure and making.

My exploration of the world of infrastructure, which has been going on casually for a couple of years (I’ve written quite a bit about things like shipping and garbage) is heading into a mature drill-down-and-integrate phase. It seems increasingly likely that my next book will be related to this stuff in some way.

If that theme is maturing and getting serious, a new theme is taking root: design, building stuff, making things. What people are calling the Maker Revolution. I see some red flags of save-the-world cultishness here, but it seems like a good time to think about the subject. Two readers, Nick Pinkston and Justin Mares, who are just coming off their Cloudfab project, have been energetically trying to persuade me (and apparently everybody else they talk to) to take this theme seriously.

If nothing else, I’ll learn enough to poke fun at the solemn save-the-world makers.

Do You Want a Forum?

On and off over the years, people have asked for a ribbonfarm discussion forum. I’ve been reluctant to set one up, since it would be more maintenance work, but now that WordPress has some strong support for the feature, it’s gotten easier.

The face-to-face field trip events last year, Google+ and Facebook have been good for small and informal sidebar conversations with some of you, but there’s something to be said for a less cluttered space for conversations that are not explicitly linked to a blog post, and accessible to all.

If I do this, it will be free, but I may do some light-touch gatekeeping so administration doesn’t take over my life.

If you are interested, let me know by email or post a comment, along with any suggestions. If there’s enough interest (at least a couple of dozen people), I’ll set one up.

Turning this de facto invisible book club into a de jure visible one seems to be a good first use case for a forum.

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Here we go.

The Numbers

It was a bit of a slump year in terms of number of posts. I had 35 posts, where I had 47 posts in 2010, 59 in 2009, 93 in 2008 and 50 in 2007 (which was a half year, since I started in July).

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Last time, I did a quick comparative scan of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0 and David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years, and covered Fukuyama’s book in more detail.

Let’s tackle World 3.0 next.

Ghemawat’s book is a tour de force of quantitative synthesis. Let’s start with an annotated version of the 2×2 that anchors World 3.0 (cleverly rotated by 45 degrees; I don’t know why other 2×2 inventors don’t do this). 

This 2×2 is almost the only major piece of conceptual scaffolding in a book that is otherwise an empiricist’s delight. Everything is argued with numbers, and what cannot be argued with numbers is mostly not argued at all. It makes for a book with a lot of narrative potholes wherever the data gods to not smile, but where there is data, the book is extremely solid. It’s a refreshing change for me to read something that stays away from data-free speculation.

For conceptual/narrative types like me, this relentless assault with numbers can be hard to process, but it is worth the effort. I found myself taking notes of key interesting statistics. I compiled some highlights, if you want a data cheat-sheet.

The book is devoted to unpacking this 2×2 in gory, quantitative detail. The main point of the diagram is to separate the global economic integration conversation from the global regulation conversation.

1. Low economic integration and low regulation gives you traditional, pre-nation-state societies, which some atavists believe they can and should return to. Ghemawat calls this World 0.0. It accounted for most of the world until about 1650.
2. Low economic integration and high regulation gives you a world economic order where nation-states are the dominant unit. This is the world as it was between about 1650 and 1910, and the world people like Lou Dobbs want to return to.
3. High economic integration and low regulation gives you the world Thomas Friedman thinks exists, but does not (as Ghemawat shows). It is something of a Darwinian state of nature, red in tooth-and-claw, where regulation, tied to strong nations and weak international bodies, cannot do much.
4. Finally, high integration and high regulation gives you World 3.0, the one Ghemawat believes we should work towards. In fact, he believes we have no choice but to work towards it.

The Historical Framework

There is a Z-shaped historical Z-shaped trajectory here, (0.0 to 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0) which bears a curious resemblance to an oscillation proposed by Graeber, though there are enough differences that you can only claim that they are talking about correlated, but different cyclic phenomena.

In terms of progress along the Z, we are somewhere halfway between 1.0 and 2.0 according to Ghemawat. At 1.5 say. His broad argument is that 0.0 is a hopelessly deluded and unrealistic state to attempt to get back to. 1.0 is achievable, but at enormous economic cost and reversal of global standard of living gains. Friedman’s “flat world” 2.0 is far too dangerously chaotic, but if international institutions of the right kind (i.e., not the World Bank/IMF type mechanisms) aren’t created or strengthened appropriately, we may well end up in a disaster-prone 2.0 regime, or fall back to a primitive 1.0 state.

Worlds 2.0 and 3.0 are possible futures. The level-elevating agenda is an explicit one: for Ghemawat, it is the only way to get beyond the Davos vs. anti-Davos framing of globalization.  As he notes rather late in the book, on page 259:

“World 3.0 is an essential construct because focusing on just World 1.0 and World 2.0 conflates questions of integration and regulation into a tug-0-war along a single dimension.”

It’s an agenda I am entirely sympathetic to.  So let’s see where he takes it. But a little sidebar first.

A Quick Sidebar on Free Agency

Ghemawat’s scenarios map in interesting ways to the scenarios in another 2×2: in Listening to the Future by Don Tapscott and Rob Salkowitz.  Proving Ghemawat’s point that people tend to conflate economic integration and regulation into one “globalization” axis, with dangerous consequences, that’s the x-axis here. The y-axis is degree of free-agency in the workforce.

Since increasing free agency in the workforce is related to declining power for corporate forms of economic organization, and since (as Ghemawat shows) corporations are responsible for most ongoing integration, there are some interesting questions about coupling among the variables here.

But glossing over those difficulties (making good 2×2 diagrams is an art form), at a very rough level, you could say that Continental Drift maps to 1.0, Proud Tower to World 2.0 and Frontier Friction to World 0.0. Freelance Planet doesn’t really map to Ghemawat’s model, and his World 3.0 does not really map to this 2×2.

Though the global labor markets are a major theme in Ghemawat’s model, he doesn’t call out the free agency phenomenon per se. Instead, he argues for greater international labor mobility, and presents the quantitative case for the anti Lou-Dobbs argument: that it actually costs far more taxpayer money to “save” a job domestically than to allow freer migration and pursue comparative advantage models.

His slogan, which the free agency camp will like, is protect work, not jobs. 

But on to the main part of the book.

The 3.0 Challenge

Both Ghemawat and Fukuyama belong to a breed of thinkers about world affairs whom you could characterize as being neither pro or anti-globalization. You could call them, instead, irreversabilists. They are historicists who believe that the process of globalization — gradual global political and economic integration — is irreversible. In the sense that reversal would be very painful, not conceptually impossible. A tiger-by-the-tail effect. Letting go could turn you into lunch.

For Ghemawat, the irreversibility is simply a matter of the sheer scale and momentum of the processes underway. As he notes, by 2050 the world will have doubled in population, and will be attempting (based on the rise of the middle class in the developing world) to create a five-fold increase in average per-capita income.

I hadn’t really thought of the effects of simultaneous population increase (from 6 to 9 billion) and attempts to raise the standard of living (moving a large segment of the global population to the middle class).

To avoid structural collapse along the way, Ghemawat argues, we have no choice but to try and make globalization work. Reversal of globalization processes would be extraordinarily painful for large portions of the world’s population.

I agree with Ghemawat’s point that we don’t have much choice. I am much less optimistic that it is actually possible. A five-fold increase in global output means something like a steady 4.2% global growth rate for the next 38 years (and that’s without adjusting for inflation).

What’s more, much of the population increase will actually happen in the next 15-20 years (i.e., population growth will be front-loaded). If economic growth is not front-loaded as well, we will be left with several decades where growth fails to match the demand.

This means that hundreds of millions of people who appear poised to enter the middle class around the world will either fail, or endure a couple of decades of  pretty terrible times. It would be a modified global version of what happened in parts of Africa following the AIDS epidemic: a phenomenon called demographic fatigue, where growth cannot be sustained and ends up being reversed. In the African case, the death of many working-age males caused economies to collapse, which in turn destroyed standards of living and triggered population declines.

We just crossed 7 billion this year. We’ll hit 8 billion by 2025, and 8.5 billion by 2035. The last half billion on the way to 9 billion will take 15 years (at which point the world population is expected to stabilize and start decreasing). We happen to be in the midst of a global downturn now, with no real recovery on the horizon until at least 2015 0r 2016. All in all, the next 20 years or so look extremely gloomy to me.

Broadly speaking, the book is about whether we can meet this challenge. It starts with a round of debunking of dangerous globalization myths.

Globaloney Slaying

The book starts of with an unsparing take-down of what Ghemawat calls “globaloney” — data-free posturing and rhetoric that he sees as characterizing both the pro- and anti-globalization political camps. The early part of the book is devoted to such debunking.

While he spends a fair amount of time debunking claims from the far left, he reserves his most strident criticism for Thomas Friedman. You may want to read (or re-read) Friedman’s The World is Flat just to get reoriented around globalization as the dangerously uninformed understand and frame it.

For the left, he takes a quick look at their pet ideas: highly local, self-sufficient economies built around organic farming, green practices and so forth, and quickly demonstrates that when you attempt to translate those ideas to a 9-billion-person planet, you basically fail. Those models are at best survivalist models for an elite.

The anti-Friedman narrative in the book is the most entertaining part. Ghemawat recounts several anecdotes where his own dry and pragmatic data-driven advocacy of globalization ran into Friedmanology. As part of his work, he encountered several business and political leaders (Colin Powell among them) who were operating with The World is Flat as their guide, and leaning towards dangerously flawed decision-making as a result. I can imagine his frustration at being told to “go read Friedman” to educate himself about globalization.

Rather cleverly, he turns the sales figures for The World is Flat as yet another piece of data to shed light on globalization itself.

The heart of the criticism of Friedman-style thinking lies in two points. First, globalization has simply not progressed as far as Friedman and his fans think it has. Second, if it were to progress in the manner Friedman hopes it will, we’ll get to a very dangerous sort of world.

The first claim is based on an interesting model of actual and potential levels of globalization in the world.

Distance Sensitivity, Economic Integration and ADDING Value

The framework for analysis of globalization data that Ghemawat presents is based on a notion of distance sensitivity of international relationships of all sorts (ranging from email communication patters to trade). The distance measure he uses combines geographic, cultural, administrative (similar governance forms) and linguistic ideas of distance. Using these, he shows that all economic interaction is strongly sensitive to distance.

His most compelling piece of evidence is probably his analysis of US-Canada trade, the closest bilateral relationship in the world. He shows that even in this best-case scenario, compared to an ideal situation where distance and borders (in his abstract sense) didn’t matter, the US-Canada bilateral trade, the biggest in the world, is missing several trillion dollars.

From there, he broadens the scope of his argument and shows how most kinds of interaction are nowhere near their actual potential if distance and borders really didn’t matter. He goes into measure after measure and demonstrates the distance effects that exist. A table he compiles at the end of this exhaustive survey provides a great freeze-frame picture of globalization. These numbers represent how far globalization has progressed, with respect to a “full economic integration” end state represented by 100%. The details of the analytical model are more than I can get into, but they are worth making an effort to understand. Here’s a summary of internationalization measures, approximately captured by a chart on page 30:

1. Mail: 1%
2. Telephone calls: 2%
3. University students: 2.5% (?)
4. Immigrants:  3%
5. Charity: 5-10%
6. Direct investment: 10%
7. Patents: 15%
8. Venture capital: 17%
9. Internet traffic: 17%
10. Exports: 20%
11. Equity investment: 20%
12. News media: 21%
13. Bank deposits: 25%
14. Government debt: 35%

A general pattern here is that money is far more mobile than labor or human communication. The Internet traffic measure at 17% is probably an optimistic over-estimate, since the location of servers doesn’t really correlate very well with the content and traffic that flows through it.

This dataset is presented alongside some rather subtle arguments. For example, the different kinds of global interaction have very different kinds of leverage. Technology transfer (via IP) is very high-leverage indeed. Most countries rely on technology transfer for 90% of productivity increases. The US is the only country where the pattern is reversed: it is a net exporter of productivity-increasing technologies.

There are revealing glimpses at how hard it is to produce sensible numbers. Take the rhetoric around China taking away US manufacturing for instance.  This is actually really hard to measure. Foreign content accounts for 50% of China’s exports, and 25% – 30% of global exports. This means circulation in intermediate goods is poorly modeled by commonly cited statistics, which indicate a need for value-added accounting to correct for inflated trade deficits. Often the oveerstatement is about 3x due to such “roundtripping.”

If you want more data highlights, look at my cheat sheet.

This first part of the book ends with a scorecard model for measuring progress along 6 major vectors towards World 3.0, represented by the acronym ADDING:

1. Adding volume, (raw growth)
2. Decreasing costs (through best-sourcing)
3. Differentiating (adapting to distance sensitivity effects via localization)
4. Improving industry attractiveness or bargaining power
5. Normalizing (or optimizing) risk
6. Generating and deploying knowledge (and other resources and capabilities).

I won’t attempt to summarize what the dimensions entail.

The Road to 3.0

Having debunked data-free globalization myths, and established something of a quantitative foundation on which to build in Part I, the book then turns to a series of common globalization themes, and attempts to look for the truth behind the rhetoric in each theme with numbers.

This is necessarily a dicey exercise, and given the hugely acrimonious debates around every single one of the themes, Ghemawat understandably adopts a conservative (in the academic sense), defensive approach. The themes he addresses, over several chapters, include: concentration, global externalities, global risks, global imbalances, global exploitation, oppression and homogenization. 

While he suggests mechanisms to address concerns around each theme, Ghemawat’s primary objective is to attach numbers to each theme. For example, he counters the “global homogenization” criticism with the reframing that more diverse choices for everybody isn’t really homogenization.  If people in all countries have access to each other’s cuisines in local restaurants, that is hardly homogenization. He manages to argue that such global diversification is ultimately going to be more important than McDonaldization.

After the tour of major themes, the book winds down with a rather weak prescriptive section in Part III. While some of the prescriptions are believable, (his proposals for mechanisms to contain global financial contagion events for instance), the rest amounts to somewhat wishful thinking, given the magnitude of the challenge posed in the beginning of the book (achieving a five-fold increase in world output by 2050, to support 9 billion people at a higher average standard of living than most of them enjoy today).

But he does manage to convince that increasing global integration and regulation is the only real path forward. Those who hope for innovation-driven growth to deliver all the increase in output necessary vastly overestimate the growth potential of innovation by itself. For Ghemawat’s prescription to work, we need both Schumpeterian and Smithian models of growth to continue. And this is assuming that the increased global regulation will happen. In an era when individual nations are struggling to resist regulatory capture by the business world and regulate even their domestic economies meaningfully, hoping for sufficient international regulation to enable safe global growth seems rather optimistic.

For my part, I don’t think the challenge can be met at all. Instead, we will find growth lagging population growth, a period of demographic fatigue and middle class collapse in many parts of the world (a decline where it already exists, and a stillborn failure to launch in other parts of the world), followed by a very slow recovery through a Dark Age that will probably last at least a half-century beyond 2050. Since I’ll be dead well before then, I can safely make this prediction.

One possible pattern that may emerge by 2050 is a division of the world into two zones. One where the world continues gingerly along its current World 1.5 path, swinging dangerously between 1.0 and 2.0, and another zone where we see a collapse back to somewhere between 0.0 and 1.0: failed states, and a forced return to local economics.

Thomas Barnett’s interesting map of the world postulates one such boundary between the zones. The “Core” might be Zone 1 and the “Non Integrating Gap” might be Zone 2 (image from New World Notes).

A Brief Note on Graeber’s Debt

Thanks to a skirmish in the comments of Part I, that I’d rather not continue, with a commenter who appears to be Graeber himself, I’ve decided not to review Debt after all. It’s a good book, but not worth that much trouble for me.

While I do have opinions on many of the questions raised in the book, a review is not the place to present them. I’ll save them for exploration within my own preferred frames of reference. I still think it is well-worth a read. There’s plenty of value there, and I’ll be citing some of the book’s ideas selectively in future posts.

I recommend you read Julio Rodriguez’ review and Daniel Lemire’s shorter review.  There are also plenty of other good reviews around.

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I want to share the story behind approximately $2700 dollars worth of my spending this year that reveals how I am finally starting to leave the middle class, materially, financially and psychologically. No, I am not moving up into the rich class or down into the poor class. I am doing something complicated called trading up. 

This $2700 is money that, if I’d decided to pull the trigger and spend it a few months earlier, would have spared me a ton of unnecessary frustration. Why didn’t I spend it when I should have?

One reason is that I still have residual middle-class financial programming in my head, expertly misguiding me to the wrong answers. Getting it out of my head feels like getting a bad malware and virus infection off a computer. It is painful and messy, and there are really no completely reliable tools that work in all cases. And you’re never quite sure if you got the last infected file off the system, when the infection is really bad.

Another reason is that I was (and remain to some extent) guilty of what science fiction writer Bruce Sterling calls acting dead: being irrationally averse to spending money where it matters, in a misguided attempt to “save” money to the point that the behavior paralyzes you. A large segment of the middle class is starting to act dead these days. Which makes sense since the class itself is dying. To stop acting dead, you have to resolve to exit the traditional middle class as well, unless you want to go down with it.

Not acting dead involves a strategic spending pattern that marketers are starting to call trading up: buying premium in some areas of your life, while buying budget or entirely forgoing spending in other areas. This pattern of conscious, discriminating consumption defines the emerging replacement for  the middle class.  As the picture above illustrates, there isn’t really one “New Middle Class.” Instead, it is a fragmented social space, with each little island being defined by a specific pattern of trading-up, and an associated lifestyle design script.

This effect is a sort of the opposite of what I called Gollumization earlier this year: unthinking, undiscriminating consumption to the point that consumption defines you.

There’s a pretty neat book about it, Trading Up by Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske, which you should read if you, like me, have exited or are planning to exit the traditional middle class.

But back to acting dead and my $2700 dollars, which I’ll use as my running example to get at various things.

The Dead Great-Grandfather Test

Sterling was using the term specifically to describe the hairshirt green lifestyle that is driven by eco-anxieties. For hairshirt-green types, life is all about saving water, recycling, composting, reducing eco-footprints and various other behaviors marked by a kind of fearful, non-generative retreat from living. Permanent existential hibernation.

Sterling’s rule of thumb for spotting acting-dead behaviors is a great one: if it’s something your dead great-grandfather can do better than you, it’s a case of acting dead. Your dead great-grandfather uses no water or plastic, and is actually recycling himself as we speak, not just his possessions. Try and top that.

But acting dead goes beyond hairshirt-green behaviors. While spartan frugality is a virtue, when it becomes the entire purpose of your life, there’s a problem. For a portion of the dying American middle class, frugality has turned into a life purpose.

An example is extreme couponing, which is why I used that as an example of radical Gollumization. It is saving gone amok: never buying anything not on sale (and therefore never buying things that never go on sale) and systematically being a jerk to businesses that may be running loss-leader sales to get new customers.

So how should you spend?

Spending Money

In his talk, Sterling offers up a simple rule for how to spend money. If it is something you use a lot everyday, spend the money, and get the good stuff. Don’t buy cheap. Look for deals, but don’t let deal-seeking make you compromise on quality or wait too long. It will cost you more in the long term. Sterling’s examples are obvious and physical: a good quality bed and work chair for instance. You might spend up to 8 hours a day in each; that’s 2/3 of your life.

I own both an excellent bed and a great chair. I am not sure the latter was a good investment for me in particular, since I spend most of my sitting hours in coffee shops, but in principle, it is a great example. Other examples include: a great kitchen knife, a nice car if you spend many hours commuting per day, plenty of quality gym clothes and a membership at a good gym, so you never have an excuse not to work out. Good quality produce to cook with.

If you work mostly at your desk, a large monitor. Heck, multiple monitors. The best keyboard.

Sterling also has ideas on what not to buy, or get rid of if you already own it. Expensive china sets for example, if you never do any formal entertaining. Things you think are assets but are actually liabilities. Things you are being unnecessarily sentimental about.

Sterling’s ideas seem to have been independently rediscovered by a growing segment of the middle class. Hence the phenomenon of trading up (the book has lots of data and anecdotal evidence for the trend).

I think of these sorts of examples as “physical furniture.” Stuff in your life that can make it hoarder hell if you buy the wrong things, or heaven if you buy the right things.

$2700 Worth of Acting-Dead

My acting-dead behaviors this year were more about mental furniture. Here’s the breakdown of the $2700 that I eventually spent when I stopped acting dead:

1. About $250 to get Tempo converted to epub and Kindle formats
2. About $300 odd to get an agent to file some Nevada business paperwork for me
3. $2100 for a Matlab (scientific computing software) license

In each case, I procrastinated for months, with the vague idea of saving money. Actually, it was worse than mere procrastination, since I was expending useless effort. In each case, my dead great-grandfather could have achieved what I did around those tasks during those months: nothing. And he’d have done it more efficiently.

In the first two cases, I tried to do it all myself, even though I have an aversion to fussy kinds of technical formatting work and paperwork to the point that they should count as phobias.  When I finally pulled the trigger and outsourced the work, it was like a major load being taken off my mind, coupled with severe regret for the time already spent on pointless frustration.

In the third case, it was again about saving money. I spent months mucking around with Python, R and various other open source alternatives to Matlab. Here, the messiness of having to deal with a unwieldy and weakly integrated open-source tools, along with my own serious aversion (similar to my paperwork aversion) to fussy configuration issues, and my generally poor ability to pick up new programming skills, had me wasting months in frustrated spinning-of-wheels.

And in the meantime, I was not doing things I wanted to do, simply because I was too cheap to buy a quality tool that I was familiar with, and could save me months of painful learning (especially painful now due to the Python 2.x to 3.x transition).  As with the other two cases, finally pulling the trigger made me intensely relieved.

You could say that each poor decision (each a case of delaying the right decision) was caused by specific phobias, aversions and irrationality.

But there is also a general pattern here. I really was not able to rationally assess the costs and benefits of each decision until after I had persisted with the wrong decision for months and made the right decision out of frustration. I could only see the simple logic after I’d made the right decision and stopped rationalizing the wrong one.

The general pattern that causes such poor decision-making is the middle class financial script.

The Middle-Class Financial Script

The middle class financial script is simple really. It involves uniform spending habits within a large class, based on norms that are learned via imitation.

If you are in the middle class, you are expected to own certain things, do certain things and do so at quality levels that exceed the quality purchased by the poor class (if they purchase that category of things at all) but don’t hit luxury levels.

You are also expected to not buy certain things that are either above or beneath you, or do certain things for yourself. Vanity,  humility and a sense of entitlement are all at work here. For the middle class, there are things that are beneath your station and things that are above your station. For the rich and poor, things are much more one-sided.

To take some simple examples, you’d be looked upon with suspicion if you bought a car that was either too luxurious or too cheap for somebody claiming middle class status. You are expected to vacation in certain places and not others.

In fact, imitation and uniformity in consumption define the middle class. In countries where the middle class is burgeoning instead of dying, especially in Asia, the growth of the class is tracked via measurement of ownership rates of certain typical goods at typical quality levels. By contrast, there is much more variety in how the poor are poor, and how the rich are rich.

Why does the middle class script (or any script) exist?

Mainly because it makes financial management easy. Constantly computing the total costs of ownership, potential returns and risks around all spending decisions,  is hard. And it doesn’t seem worthwhile when the income side is predictable and comfortable. Why bother to control costs when revenues are fixed and somebody else has already made up a predictable-costs script with reasonable margins designed to get you through retirement?

In other words, the middle class in recent history has been defined by its ability to both earn and spend money in very predictable ways.

Then of course, the risks started creeping back in, around 1980, slowly at first, and then with increasing rapidity over the last few years. All the things the middle class relied on — job security, defined benefits pensions, affordable mortgages, predictably rising real-estate values — one by one, all these supports began to break down.

But autopilot spending has persisted, long after the new patterns of exposure to financial risk have become clear. The reason of course is that the old financial habits were not really financial per se, they were driven by class norms rather than financial risk-management calculations.

My own examples are a case in point. My behavior is readily explained with reference to middle class norms:

1. The eBook conversion example: Middle class people do not hire other middle class people outside of a few approved exceptions such as doctors, lawyers and accountants; they work for the rich and hire the poor.
2. The business paperwork example: Middle class people do not “indulge” in “luxuries” like hiring administrative help to do paperwork. That’s for rich people with complicated financial affairs. Honest middle-class people should be able to do their own paperwork, with at most some professional help at tax time. Needing help probably means you are up to shady things.
3. The Matlab example: Middle class people do not pay for their tools. In fact, they shouldn’t need tools beyond the basic tools of literacy (books, pen and paper 100 years ago, a computer today). Poor people use specialized tools. Rich people buy them. Middle class people merely supervise the use of the rich people’s tools (capital) by the poor (labor). Even today, if you use specialized tools to work, your membership in the middle class is suspect.

Above all this, the middle class script involves a certain aversion to talking about or dealing with tough financial decisions. It is considered unseemly. Decent people don’t talk about money, let alone risk. If you work hard and play by the rules, the money should take care of itself. If it isn’t doing that, you are probably looking for dishonest and exploitative shortcuts like the evil rich or doing dumb things like the stupid poor, and deserve what you get.

If you have to budget and watch your money too closely, you were probably being irresponsible with credit cards and deserve your pain. For decent people, paycheck-in, on-time-credit-card-payments-out should work smoothly on autopilot.

And above all, you don’t speculate. If forced to speculate by pensions being turned into 401(ks) (American stock-based defined contribution retirement plans), decent people leave the actual risk-taking decisions to professional fund managers, telling themselves things like  ”you cannot beat the professionals.”

So what will happen to people operating by such obviously dangerous attitudes in difficult times?

Turns out, we’ve been here before. They’ll die out.

Middle Class Declines in History

This is not a new phenomenon in history. Middle classes have appeared and disappeared several times before in history.

Tennessee Williams’ plays (A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie) tell exactly such poignant fall-from-the-middle-class stories set in early 20th century America.

Early twentieth century British novels set during the decline of empire (such as Agatha Christie novels), often contain aging spinsters desperately keeping up appearances and surviving on small incomes derived from being “companions” to richer old women.

You can also find examples outside the Western world. In nineteenth century India for example, where the Urdu and Sanskrit-literate middle classes, which had grown around the courts of the Nawabs and Maharajas in older medieval cities, went into severe decline. The new English-literate middle class began supplanting it in the newer cities of the British Raj.

I suspect similar middle class declines can be found in the Middle East (during the Ottoman decline), China (after the Boxer Rebellion)  and Latin America (after the Monroe Doctrine perhaps? I am not too familiar with Latin American history).

When a middle class goes into decline, you get a large segment of the population engaging in a desperate scramble to keep up appearances, while switching from collective-norm-based to individual-risk-based financial thinking.

Keeping up with the Joneses becomes far harder, because the financial support starts to collapse at different times for different people, but everybody agrees to pretend that everybody is in it together.  For the current American decline, there have already been a couple of good movies chronicling the decline: The Joneses (2009) and The Company Men (2010).

A norm-based social class will persist with disastrous financial choices long after the secure financial environment, on which its scripts are based, collapses. Simply because membership of the class is the source of all social identity and access to social capital.

Except that the social capital, which the members are clinging to, is eroding rapidly as well. There is no point in two non-swimmers with immense trust between them, clinging to each other while drowning. Mutual trust and social capital within a group only mean something when there are objective reasons to expect a prosperous future of indefinite length stretching out ahead.

When this is not the case, it makes sense to cash out your hard assets, rethink your financial life more directly, write off investments in the social capital of the declining class, and look for an alternative emerging class to join.

Trading Up and Fragmentation

As the picture I started with shows, a key effect of the trading-up phenomenon is that it causes serious fragmentation. The social landscape starts to get restructured along new lines. Cultural geography changes, as governing financial scripts change from one city block to the next (you see a lot of this in San Francisco in particular).

The transition from a monolithic middle class to one of many trading-up classes is a very tough one. First, you have to go through a period where you manage your finances very directly, with no help from a script that simplifies decision-making.

Then you have to evaluate various alternative trading-up scripts to figure out which ones might actually fit your situation and encode meaningful adaptations to the new environment. Not every lifestyle design script is likely to work.

In the last few months, going back to the broader context of my three examples, I’ve done a good deal of very direct financial decision-making. I’ve made up detailed scenario planning spreadsheets, risk models and the like. I’ve done minute tracking of spending (only for a month, to sort of calibrate; it is far too difficult and depressing to do on an ongoing basis).

Here’s the funny thing: doing this kind of very direct financial management around my small-business book-keeping felt good. It felt smart, like I was learning valuable new skills. But doing it around personal and household finances still felt somehow dirty. That’s how deeply embedded the middle class script is.

The three examples were interesting and particularly tough because they bridged the two mental models: my healthy business mental model (within which the right spending decisions would have been easy) and my toxic middle-class-paycheck mental model (within which they were unnecessarily hard).

Scared, Foolhardy and Brave New Scripts

Once you’ve worked with your finances directly for a while (it’s like working in assembly language, on a computer without an operating system) to start the transition away from the middle class script, you have to end the transition. Staying in limbo doesn’t work.

The transition can end in three ways:

1. Prolonged Misery: You get so scared, you retreat to the middle class and do your best to delay the inevitable
2. Waiting for Godot: You latch onto some script and  stick to it even after it becomes clear that it isn’t working for you.
3. Quick-Change Artists: You try on different scripts for size, attempting to force outcomes and fast failures, until you find one that fits and works, the way those quick-change artists change clothes.

Prolonged misery makes for the best tragic literature but is entirely unpleasant to live through. You act increasingly dead, get increasingly frugal, gradually squeeze out all the generativity in your life, and then finally you die.

The characteristic sign that you are practicing unhealthy acting-dead frugality is that you cut back on core expenses that might help you be more generative, in order to keep up appearances as long as possible.

If you are cutting back on the quality of the food you eat (trading fresh vegetables for canned, say), in order to buy the same clothes your friends wear, you are on the prolonged misery path. This incidentally, may be part of the reason why the middle class has become so attached to recycling and other hairshirt-green behaviors (outside of the actual merits of the behaviors) during exactly the period that the class itself has been in decline.

Waiting for Godot is your classic arrival fallacy. You fixate on specific narrative elements (like moving to Bali or working for 4 hours a week), make the few big moves, and spend the rest of your life waiting for the Big Event signifying that it is working, while slipping slowly into destitution and denial. I see a lot of people in this mode right now. They’ve never really stopped to analyze the logic of the script, but accepted it on faith based on assurances from a few for whom it has worked.

Quick-change artistry is of course, the card I think you should pick. It is a turbulent, experimental approach, where there are no absolute life truths, no permanent commitments to any script, no one-book formulas, and no easy no-brainer decisions.

It involves trying different trading-up patterns until you find one that works. It involves a commitment to stop acting dead. It involves a conscious decision to leave the middle class.

Or you can wait for all the King’s men and all the king’s horses to put Humpty-Dumpty together again.

This piece is sort of a continuation of my Las Vegas Rules series, but I’ve abandoned the attempt to keep a coherent larger narrative going. This is going to be more of an occasional diary-entry sort of thing.

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If you want to seriously level-up your thinking about how the world works, you might want to try reading 3 very ambitious books together: Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0 and David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years. All three are from the reading list that I posted in August, so I am hoping at least some of you have been attacking them.

It’s worth reading them together because they attempt to tell the same story, towards the same purpose — explaining how the world works in some sense — drawing on roughly the same body of raw material. It is illuminating to see the surprising ways in which the stories agree and disagree. All three books are also particularly valuable for me personally, since I hope to take a stab at telling the same story some day.

My version will of course be the definitive one when I write it, but let’s take a look at the versions of the story on the market today.

An Academic Celebrity Death-Match

After finally finishing all three books last week, it struck me that you’d get very entertaining Jerry Springerish outcomes if you put the authors together on a conference panel. Going by their books, I’d say that Fukuyama and Ghemawat would mostly agree but eye each other very warily, given their drastically different methodologies. Fukuyama is the ultimate metaphysical conceptualizer and Grand Narrative weaver, while Ghemawat is a data-driven empiricist and narrative debunker par excellence.

Graeber is a sort of micro-narrative ethnographer-storyteller with a visceral suspicion of both numbers and abstractions. In a way the title of Graeber’s book is misleading. Debt is not one big story spanning 5000 years, but more like a collection of 5000 little stories and arguments thrown together, with a bigger narrative almost slapped on as an afterthought. And for a book about debt, money and finance, it manages the astounding feat of filling up several hundred pages with almost no numbers, equations, graphs or mathematical arguments.

On our hypothetical conference panel, Graeber would probably start out politely but end up trying to bludgeon the other two to death within a few minutes. Ghemawat would probably fight back impatiently, with barely-concealed annoyance, held back only by a sense of scholarly dignity. Fukuyama would probably walk off the stage with the tired, resigned and martyred look of a misunderstood senior academic statesman.

Moving on from these idle fantasies of academic-celebrity death-matches, let’s talk about the books.

Where they are Coming From

Jerry Springer jokes aside, the books are interesting to read together because of the sharp differences in politics, maturity of thought and individual personalities that inform the book.

It’s interesting to note that Fukuyama was born in 1952, Ghemawat in 1959 and Graeber in 1961. Personality-wise — and perhaps this is a function of age — they come across as gentle, impatient and angry, respectively.

Along another dimension, Fukuyama is mostly descriptive (though his politician-fans often mangle his ideas into prescriptions), Ghemawat is weakly prescriptive in a tentative and technocratish way, and Graeber is strongly normative.

And along a third dimension, Fukuyama is mildly reactionary (taking on classical man-in-the-state-of-nature models, but reconstructing rather than destroying them), Ghemawat is moderately reactionary (simultaneously taking aim at what he labels “globaloney” arguments on the anti-globalization side and Thomas Friedman on the pro-globalization side) and Graeber is almost entirely reactionary (devoting the entire book to attacking the foundations of mainstream economics rather than constructing an alternative framework).

I am deeply tempted to read the three as a sort of Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva trinity. Fukuyama’s project is ultimately a creationist account of the world in a sort of “more perfect union” sense. Ghemawat’s is a preservationist account, deeply absorbed in the actual complexity and constraints of the world as it exists, and the problem of defending against threats and preventing things from unraveling. Graeber’s is destructive-nihilist, focused on fundamental inequities, social justice and a revolutionary agenda. You get the sense that he wouldn’t be too upset if everything unraveled.

Taken together, the three accounts constitute a fascinating creative-destructive reading of contemporary world affairs situated within a broader historical context.

But I won’t belabor this rather overwrought trinity metaphor, just leave it as a framing suggestion for you.

For Fukuyama, this book represents a sort of swan song in a long career in the public eye that began with The End of History and the Last Man (1993). He gained notoriety via an association with the neocon coterie around George W. Bush (a movement he later disavowed) and with this book, he is clearly wrapping up a lifetime of scholarship devoted to a single question. There is a certain sadness and poignancy in his approach to the subject matter as a result.

Ghemawat is best understood as an anti-Thomas-Friedman and anti-anti-globalists. In fact, World 3.0 is best viewed as a systematic attempt to tear down the anti-intellectual Friedman-Globalization-complex, which he clearly views as having done immense damage to the pro-globalization movement through its sloppy “flat” metaphors, shoddy arguments, and wild and ungrounded swings between alarmist and exuberant rhetoric. The most entertaining (though not most useful) parts of his book are the stories of his encounters with Friedman-influenced types. The project of countering anti-globalization types does not get as much attention, mainly because Ghemawat clearly does not take them very seriously.

As an ex-McKinsey consultant, ex-HBS professor (where he worked for 25 years), and current professor at IESE, Barcelona in the heart of the Eurozone and its present crisis, he is everything Friedman is not: an extremely careful, data-driven advocate of globalization: relentlessly pragmatic, skeptical of just-so stories, and studiously averse to grand-standing. Where Friedman is the ultimate uncomprehending journalist-outsider, going “Oh Wow!” at everything, Ghemawat is the ultimate insider-technocrat of globalization, the sort of immensely influential person who normally stays out of public conversations and sticks to persuasion in backrooms, cabinets and boardrooms.

And finally, Graeber is the (relatively) young hothead demagogue of the bunch. He appears to have been blooded in political combat during the anti-globalization movement of the eighties and nineties (he seems to have been involved in the resistance to the IMF/World Bank  approach to managing the world economy in particular). Of the three, he is clearly the Man of the Hour, given his association with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

As scholars, all three are complex people with careful and nuanced views on their subject matter. These are not the sorts of people you could reduce to simplistic political stances.

To the extent that they have actually been involved in world affairs, however, they cannot really avoid being politically pigeonholed: Fukuyama is a social and political conservative, Ghemawat is a classic business conservative/social liberal and Graeber is a cross between an anarchist and a neo-socialist.

With Fukuyama, you get a separation of scholarship and personal political history that is almost surreal. There is absolutely no acknowledgment that his involvement in Bush-era world affairs might be a relevant backstory (I was hoping to find some personal commentary in the preface, but was disappointed). The professor and the political influencer might as well be different people.

With Ghemawat, the separation is maintained, but there is open acknowledgment of how his involvements in world affairs have shaped his scholarly views (there are plenty of ideas substantiated by references to his role as a consultant to various world bodies and national governments for example).

With Graeber, there is a weak attempt to maintain some sort of scholar-activist separation early in the book, but by the end, the effort is completely abandoned and the scholarly endeavor is openly and clearly subordinated to the activist agenda. Debt starts out as a disinterested scholarly book, but ends as an openly political polemic.

The Raw Material

Each book tackles the question of how the world works, and each takes a historical approach to the question.  The time-span under consideration ranges, for all three, from roughly 5000 BC to modern times.

Ghemawat, after a quick tour of the first few thousand years, settles on the last century and the modern era of globalization (Zakaria’s Post-American World is a good companion read, since it fill in more detail around the parts that Ghemawat skips over a little too quickly, with the same data-driven approach).

Fukuyama ranges over the first few thousand years at a leisurely pace and stops just sort of the industrial revolution. His account of modernity is to be published in a second volume in 2012, which I am now impatient to read.

Graeber ranges all over the entire time-span, mainly to the detriment of his treatment of post-1800 modernity, since the 300-odd years between 1800 AD-2011 AD probably contain about the same quantity of relevant raw material as the 6800 years between 5000 BC and 1800 AD (that’s exponential trajectories for you). Where Fukuyama and Ghemawat modestly limit themselves, Graeber ambitiously tries to do it all in one book. In some ways he succeeds, and in other ways, he over-reaches.

(An unrelated reason for the weakness of the post-1800 parts of Graeber’s book is probably the difficulty of providing a purely qualitative-ethnographic account of the modern era. I cannot see any way to truly understand things like the subprime crisis without mathematics for instance).

The result is that Fukuyama and Ghemawat end up telling their stories in steady and measured ways, taking care to substantiate their arguments. Both are also somewhat predictable: the surprises they have to offer are relatively minor, but rigorously argued.

Graeber is more original than either Fukuyama or Ghemawat; there are startling insights, ideas and examples at practically every turn. But every argument seems suspect due to the hurried nature of the development.

It doesn’t help that the overarching narrative is shaky to the point of being incoherent, and unravels completely towards the end. At various points, I found myself reflecting that Debt would have worked better as a compendium of ethnographic anecdotes and short essays debunking of economic myths.

I’ve been discussing Debt with a few people over the last week and Daniel Lemire observed that the whole thing reads like somebody’s research notebook hastily published, without much editing. Justin Pickard (an alum of Goldsmith’s University, where Graeber teaches) rather evocatively called it “a mountain of intellectual rubble and tiny anecdotes that I can start playing with.” It’s an apt description: the book provides a lot of astounding value, but you definitely have to excavate the book rather than read it, and work hard to separate the politics from the scholarship.

Let’s take a brief look at each of the books in turn, in descending order of author age.

The Origins of Political Order

You cannot really understand Fukuyama’s book without reading it in the context of The End of History and the Last Man, the book that made him famous almost 20 years ago. If you just read The Origins of Political Order (which you can do, since it is written in a stand-alone way), you are likely to find the arguments less substantial than they actually are.

That’s because he dealt with the harder foundational questions to his own satisfaction (and to the satisfaction of about half the people who think about this sort of stuff) back in 1993. This book can be understood as a reading of history, assuming the conceptual framework of The End of History as a starting point, where he drew upon Hegelian philosophy to argue in favor of a strongly historicist understanding of political evolution, and came to the conclusion that the natural and necessary end point of political evolution is liberal democracy. It was an abstract and metaphysical argument rather than a historical one.

At the time, the problem of conceptually explaining the so-called “democratic peace” (the observation that liberal democracy has been spreading rapidly, and that liberal democracies normally don’t go to war with each other) was a much-debated question in political science, and Fukuyama provided one compelling answer. His former mentor, Samuel Huntington, and later Huntington’s student, Fareed Zakaria, fought back with counterarguments in books like The Clash of Civilizations and Illiberal Democracy. These reactions (in my opinion) conspired to miss the point: attempting to counter a purely conceptual argument intended to illuminate philosophical questions, sort of like the idea of general equilibrium in economics, with  empirical and historical counter-arguments. To be fair to Fukuyama’s critics, they were responding more to the co-option of his ideas by politicians seeking a post-Cold-War moral justification for “spreading democracy” than to Fukuyama himself. But in the process, they ended up resorting to thinly-disguised cultural essentialism (later, Huntington attracted a lot of criticism for his stridently cultural-essentialist treatment of the question of the rise of Latino culture in the US).

I read these books in the late 90s, during a period when I was myself rather enamored of complexity theory (I worked briefly with Robert Axelrod who was also working on computational models of the “democratic peace” at the time), so my own history of thinking about such questions has mostly been in computational-modeling terms. I fell in love with Fukuyama’s ideas mainly because they lend themselves very well to computational modeling perspectives.

In fact, The End of History served as my introduction to advanced political science debates.

I didn’t quite buy his liberal-democracy-is-natural-and-necessary conclusion, but I convinced myself that in a weaker form (contingent upon the specific conditions prevailing on planet earth, and given the peculiar psychology of homo sapiens, but not contingent upon cultural differences within humanity, which is what his critics argue), his idea of liberal democracy as the evolutionary end-state made complete sense to me.

The point of going into this extensive backstory is that without it, there is a good chance you might miss the point of Origins.

Origins is an analysis of history. Avoid the temptation to think of it as some sort of empirical “proof” of End of History. In a sense the End of History arguments are metaphysical and unfalsifiable. It is best to read Origins as a reading of history through the lens of End of History.

So what is the book about?

It is about the evolution of the institutional structure of modern liberal democracies. Given liberal democracy as the assumed end point of convergence for all political forms (think water drops flowing down from different points on the edge of a bowl to the bottom) Fukuyama wants to know where the institutions of liberal democracy come from. He identifies three core institutions in particular: the state, the rule of law and accountable government.

The book starts with classic Man in the State of Nature theories from Hobbes and Rousseau, reconstructs them in light of evolutionary biology. He argues that both Hobbes and Rousseau were wrong to posit states of war and peace amongst primitive individuals as starting points. Instead, he offers the idea that individualism itself is a relatively late (13th century) political development, and that State-of-Nature models must begin not with individuals but groups. You could say he arrives at a Hobbesian starting point, adapted for warring groups rather than warring individuals.

With traditional political science thought experiments thus reconstructed, he begins his story with kinship groups and tribes, and moves on to the formation of the earliest states (pristine state formation as opposed to competitive state formation).

Here he again breaks with traditional Western scholarship that usually begins with Greece (really, for no good reason), and chooses to start with China instead (which turns out to yield a much more coherent story).

He argues — very successfully — that the first modern state was the one based on the bureaucracy that emerged in China during the Warring States era and successfully endured, providing the first historical break from politics governed by kinship and tribal dynamics.

After noting that China did not develop the other two institutions (rule of law and accountable government) until modern times, he moves on to India where, he argues, a modern state in the Chinese sense never developed, but rule of law and a form of accountable government did, but without being embodied in stable institutional forms within which power and inertia could accrue.

Next, he moves westward and carefully examines the case of the Islamic state, which possessed a strong state capable of resisting kinship and tribal power (by developing the unique institution of slave armies and state institutions that finessed the problem of dealing with tribal loyalties — the famous devshirme and Mamluk models), and a strong rule of law, but no accountable government.

Finally, he picks up the European story with the growth of Christianity, the tussle between the church and the state, the weakening of family and kinship structures due to the impact of the church, the emergence of the modern idea of the socially mobile “individual” and ultimately, the modern liberal democracy, with functioning state, rule-of-law and accountable-government institutions.

The story is without a doubt a work of extraordinary synthesis. Having read more than a few world histories (both straight-up narratives and analytical accounts), I can safely say that Origins is in something of a class by itself. Like it or dislike it, it will definitely allow you to appreciate world history in ways that you probably have not occured to you.

Ignoring the foundational assumptions inherited from The End of History, which you pretty much have to either accept or reject based on your ideological leanings, the one weakness of the book is its uncritical assumption that the institutional structure of the world is in some sense central to the story of political evolution.  We do not really get a more fundamental account of organizations and institutional forms, and how they emerge from more basic forces. We also do not get an adequate account of the birth-death lifecycle dynamics of institutions. So you could call this position “institutional essentialism,” which makes the account something of a curve-fit of ideal and timeless notions of institutions onto the actual institutional history of the world.

I’ll stop here, since I can’t do justice to all three books in one post. Next time, I’ll cover the other two, and try to weave all three stories together into some sort of harmonious synthesis. Should be an interesting challenge.

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First, let me get an announcement out of the way: Tempo is now out on the Kindle. Buy it, give it as a gift, tweet it etc. Whew! That’s a big, high-priority item checked off my to-do list.

Speaking of priorities. I had one of my weirder Aha! moments: you can use the well-known Towers of Hanoi game as a metaphor to understand the behavior of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (or any similar hierarchy of priorities) under changing life circumstances, and the role of compartmentalization as a costly coping strategy. Here’s a picture:

If the details and implications of the metaphor aren’t immediately obvious, read on for the help-text.

The Basic Metaphor

The game involves moving a pyramidal stack of disks from one of three pegs to another without ever letting a larger disk rest on a smaller one. The number of moves approximately doubles each time you add a disk (so the full 5-level Maslow hierarchy would take 31 moves, where this simplified 3-disk version takes 7 moves).

The metaphor works like this: at any given time, each stack of disks represents a life compartment. Sometimes your life is more compartmentalized (work vs. life or work vs. life vs. health), and sometimes, it is all a single beautiful symphony.

The “never stack a big disk on a small one” models the idea that most of us don’t consciously violate priorities in obviously avoidable ways. If we do, we recognize our “moment of weakness.”

But this is only a local sort of consistency: we apply prioritization ideas via pair-wise comparisons/tradeoffs while making specific decisions. You rarely have more than two priorities butting up against each other in any given decision.

So long as your life situation is stable, you can gradually integrate the various compartments and get back to a single stack. We call this getting into a “routine.”

But when your life shifts, fragmentation and compartmentalization necessarily intrude. If your life changes faster than you can get back to the healthy stack of priorities, you’ll end up a mess, unless you level-up your game and redefine your idea of stability (think George Clooney in Up in the Air).

Integrated vs. Fragmented Priorities

In a fragmented, compartmentalized state, disks on the same stack represent integrated priorities while disks on different stacks represent fragmented priorities.

Integrated priorities reinforce each other via strong positive-feedback loops (lots of small trade-off decisions, with healthy behaviors being reinforced each time you make the healthy choice), and you can manage them consciously.

Fragmented priorities cannot be managed consciously, and can lead to messed-up behaviors that are not aligned with your actual priorities. You also lose any mutual reinforcement effects via positive feedback loops.

This happens because, in a compartmentalized life, you only have opportunities to trade off priorities that are on the same stack, through individual, micro-level decisions

Your ability to manage tradeoffs between stacks is much more limited. You are reduced to vague ideas like “I need to spend more time with my kids” or “I need to go to the gym more.” I suspect most people allocate attention amongst compartmentalized stacks based on how many disks the stack has (which determines how hard the stack is to compute with) rather than the priority of the stack.

To take a simple example “work life balance” is extremely hard in a traditional industrial environment, where “work” happens at the workplace, and “life” happens at home.

But it is much easier in (say) a Googleplex-like workplace with childcare, gyms and healthy food options available right near your office.

So instead of having to think in terms of “I need to spend more time with my kids” you can trade off “get coffee between meetings right now, or play a game of ping-pong with my kid in the childcare room.”

Priority management turns into a bunch of bite-sized decisions.

Implications of the Metaphor

The metaphor suggests several interesting ideas:

1. Consciously violating priorities (putting a bigger disk on a smaller one)  can help you stabilize much faster (exponentially faster) in a new situation, but at the risk of bigger disks permanently damaging/crushing smaller ones.
2. Given a specific definition of priorities/disks, there is a maximum frequency of life changing disruptions you can handle while still getting to a stable integrated stack at least briefly between disruptions. If your life changes any faster, it will be in a perennially unstable state.
3. Fusing layers simplifies the game. Manage fewer categories. So working for a moving company fuses work and physical health.
4. How you frame priorities is crucial. A stack of disks that needs to be moved under a life transition may not need to be moved at all if you redefine them to be robust to such transitions. If you are a nomad, capable of living out of a suitcase or camel-pack, your life will resist disruption due to physical moves. If you live in a country with portable, government-provided healthcare, your health will resist disruption due to changing jobs.
5. You are not entirely in control of your life stack. The organization of society plays a huge role.
6. Trying to keep unfused priorities stable in transit (moving multiple discs at once) is a balancing act.

The part of the metaphor that interests me the most is the idea that there are positive feedback loops within compartments. The more you compartmentalize your life, the more you lose the benefit of such loops. I think this relates to how 10x dynamics can be catalyzed in your life. It also relates to the more comprehensive analysis of such stuff that Greg Rader recently posted.

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Remember the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm and their sloganeering? In the beginning of the story, when they overthrow the humans, they lead with the chant, “four legs good, two legs bad!” By the end, they’ve  become human-corrupt, and lead the chant, “four legs good, two legs better!”

Just one word changed, and the new and old words both begin with b, bolstering the illusion of continuity and natural evolution.

Let’s call such a slowly shifting narrative, simple enough to be captured in a slogan, and designed to help a small predatory class dominate a larger prey class, a Pig Narrative.  The American Dream is a Pig Narrative. For the record, in case you are immediately curious about my politics, I think this Pigs-and-Prey structure of the world is the natural order of things. You can mitigate its effects, but not change it in any fundamental way. If I had to pick, I’d side with the pigs.  Moving on.

You can compare Pig Narratives on the basis of the degree of prey liberty (or conversely, predator control) they represent, allowing you to plot the evolution over time. If you plot the course of the American Dream through its many rewrites (9 so far by my count, each associated with a major coming-of-age event that defined a generation), you get something like the picture above.

The Rate of Change of Pig Narratives

For Pigs (I’ll capitalize from now on, to distinguish my pigs from Orwellian pigs and real pigs) to remain secure, Pig Narratives must not be shifted too quickly, because they provide the functional logic of dominant institutions. So if a key piece of the narrative is go to college and get a good job, the narrative allows colleges to exist. If the Pigs change it to go to college to learn entrepreneurial skills,  they get to keep existing institutions. But if some renegade Pigs want to stage a coup, and successfully rewrite it as drop out of college and found a startup, universities face an existential threat.

Ideally, changes should be so small that the prey barely notices.

Fortunately for the Pigs, Pig narratives are naturally hard to shift. We imprint on the dominant one during the crucial coming-of-age window of 15-21 say, just as baby ducks imprint on the first thing they see as “Mommy.” And like Mommy Ducks, Pig Narratives are essentially sources of authoritative and trusted parental guidance.

Unfortunately for the Pigs, there is also a dynamic which forces  rapid shifts despite their best efforts. This is the impact of the defining events for each generation, which provide the motivation and raw material for each rewrite, and therefore constrain the level of spin achievable.  For the generations that came of age during the Great Depression or the 2000-01 boom-bust/9-11 period, the pig narrative had to shift rapidly, even with the most creative damage control on the part of the Pigs. Things get garbled during such times, leading to widespread anomie among those waiting and expecting to be programmed by a Pig. It’s like being a duckling faced with no stable shape to imprint upon.

As another way to understand why pig narratives must change slowly, you can apply the Milo Criterion (products must mature no faster than the rate at which users can adapt) to the body politic as a whole. The pig narrative is a normative behavior at the scale of the average life, and it can change no faster than the rate at which generations displace each other from the population.  The American Dream in this interpretation is merely the core user experience of “America” as a product sold by Pigs to prey.

The 9 American Dream Rewrites

The phrase American Dream was apparently coined by James Truslow Adams in 1931 and was defined by him as the idea that “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”

Except that that isn’t the definition. That’s merely the brand. Here are the actual premises of the 9 scripts between the 1870s to the 1990s, and the archetypical life stories they informed. I am playing fast and loose with generational and cohort analysis here to make a broad point, so please don’t hold me to very precise sociological details.

Note that the dates are the coming-of-age windows for each generation (i.e. when they were between 15-21 and impressionable), not birth decade. Subtract 15-21 years to get the birth year range.

1. Civil War generation (1870s): If I Go West as a Young Man, and work hard, I have as good a chance as anyone else of making it (gold miner, wildcatter)
2. Gilded Age generation (1890s): If I work hard, I can make it (Horatio-Alger-inspired young people working for Robber Barons)
3. Gatsby generation (1920s): Anybody can make it (Gatsby type easy money)
4. New Deal generation (1930s): Together, we can make it* (worker building Hoover Dam)
5. GI Bill generation (1940s): Any American can make it if he fights hard (WW II veteran, college-educated and starting high-responsibility job white collar job with young, growing American post-war companies)
6. Organization Man generation (Silents, 1950s): I already have it; if I don’t screw it up, I can keep it (employee of mature, wealthy post-war company)
7. Peace Corps generation (Boomers, 1960s): Americans already have it; we should share it (progressive, generous child of Cold War prosperity)
8. Deregulation generation (X, 1980s): We’re losing it. If I keep my head down and step around the falling rubble smartly, I may escape (entering workforce among layoffs and uncertainty in manufacturing)
9. Net generation (Y, late 1990s): We’re losing it. I don’t know what to do, I’ll go Occupy Wall Street (this generation lived through a boom and a bust and 9/11 while coming of age, turning the pig narrative into garbage at the starting gate, leaving a harsh, anomic landscape)
10. Next generation (coming of age right now ):  If I Go East as a Young Person, and work hard, I have as good a chance as anyone else of making it (lifestyle entrepreneur in Asia or Eastern Europe — this script will likely take shape with the 2016 election, when the generation is first courted by politicians).

[*My reading of the New Deal is from FDR campaign rhetoric: "Throughout the nation men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the Government, look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth... I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people. This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms."]

Notice how messy the trajectory has been, despite my smooth sketch of overall shifts in liberty.  The gold miner script comprehends both risk and effort and has a fair amount of liberty. The Gilded Age script drops risk, and keeps effort, trapping the prey more comprehensively. By the time of Gatsby, effort is gone as well.

Then there is a big reset with the New Deal, and a new element is introduced (while keeping the unexamined “make it” premise): collectivism and solidarity.

The GI Bill generation keeps the solidarity (forged under enemy fire in their case), in the form of nationalism, but adds individualism, previously implicit in I statements, back into the mix explicitly.

Like the Gilded Age generation, the Silents hit a maturing economic landscape and became followers rather than leaders. But there is a hugely crucial shift now. From prosperity being something to be achieved, it becomes something that can be lost by risk. So risk makes a reappearance, but with emphasis on downsides.

With the Boomers, this natural assumption of abundance turns into an assumption of surplus and a rather arrogantly presumptuous desire to spread American prosperity.

Then there’s my gang: Generation X, whose American Dream slightly resembles that of the New Deal generation, in that it was scripted during a downturn, though not as severe as the Great Depression, and lacking the emphasis on collective solidarity. It is a gloomy and pragmatic, and somewhat fatalistic, kind of individualism.

(Generation X in 1980s India was defined not by deregulation, but two assassinated Prime Ministers, two terrorist uprisings and a slowly collapsing Soviet era industrial landscape, culminating in a near-death experience for the economy in 1991; post World War II, Pig Narratives march in lock-step to a fair degree, thanks to increasing global integration, which is why I am comfortable calling myself a Gen X’er).

Perhaps it is arrogant of me to presume that X’ers represent the “liberty turn around” generation. By dropping the delusions of the Boomers, the X’ers made themselves more free, but their environment made them use that freedom in fundamentally cautious, risk-averse ways.

The Net Generation is one I feel truly sorry for. Somebody born in 1980 would have been 17-20 during the boom, 20-22 during the bust and 9/11 and then endured the mess that has been the past decade. It’s a recipe for schizophrenia, and that’s what you get. You have triumphalist stories like those of the Web 2.0 superstars, as well emerging adults (people in their 20s) living in their parents basements, stuck in anomie and despair. I haven’t seen any reliable data on the Occupy movement, but I suspect it is a mix of Generation Y and Boomers (X’ers in the middle probably are too busy to take time off, even if they support the idea; they are now the heart of the workforce and raising kids).

But despite their sorry state, their American Dream is more liberating than anything seen since the Gilded Age. Simply because it is so completely garbled, it is not a very effective control instrument.

And to wrap up, the generation that is coming of age now will obviously be a downturn generation (like the X’ers and New Dealers). We can also predict that their script will be even more liberating, likely incorporating risk in the same sense that the post-Civil-War script did, where you only get a shot at making it, not a guarantee.

The Key Narrative Variables

Hidden in this messy evolution, you can spot a few key variables that change value as the narrative gets tweaked generation by generation. Here are the main ones I can see (you can think of them as on/off variables or sliding scale).

1. Risky vs. risk-free
2. Effort-ful vs. effortless
3. Individualist vs. collectivist
4. Upturn vs. Downturn vs. Cusp
5. Scarcity vs. Abundance vs. Surplus
6. Mine to Make vs. Mine to Lose (Make/Lose) framing

Using these variables, you can code the 10 narratives in a parametric form:

1. Civil-War: risky, effort-ful, individualist, upturn, scarcity, make
2. Gilded: risk-free, effort-ful, individualist, upturn, abundance, make
3. Gatsby: risk-free, effortless, individualist, upturn, surplus, make
4. New Deal: risky, effort-ful, collectivist, downturn, scarcity, make
5. GI Bill (WW II vets): risky, effort-ful, collectivist-individualist, upturn, abundance, make
6. Organization Man (Silents): low-risk, medium effort, collectivist, upturn, abundance, lose
7. Peace Corps (Boomers): low-risk, effortless, collectivist, upturn, surplus, lose
8. Deregulation (X): risky, effort-ful, individualist, downturn, scarcity, lose
9. Net (Y): risky, schizoid on effort, collectivist, cusp, schizoid on abundance/scarcity, schizoid on make/lose
10. Next Generation: risky, effort, unclear, downturn, unclear, unclear

I won’t try to do this, but I suspect you could even turn this coding into a meaningful numerical scale, code up life-narrative transcripts (such as those in Dan McAdams’ The Redemptive Self, or those studied by George Vaillant), and draw a real version of the graph I started with.

The Institutional Landscape

Several key institutions have designs that reflect the structure of the dominant script, and react to different variables with different degrees of sensitivity.

Higher education, for instance, is most sensitive to changes in the first two variables (risk and effort) and the last one (make/lose). People want degrees when risk is low, effort is likely to be rewarded, and prosperity is yours to lose rather than yours to make.

I imagine a sort of acid bath of narratives within which institutions are dipped.

Working out how the other key social institutions — work, entrepreneurship, family and religion — respond to script changes, would be an interesting exercise. I believe you can predict future patterns of institutional disruption using such analysis. If I had money, I’d be researching this stuff.

Pig Views and Prey Outcomes

Though I’ve characterized the American Dream as a Pig Narrative, I am more Pig than prey, at least in how I think, if not in how effective I am (not very, I am a pretty lousy Pig).

The Pig-side view is frankly fascinating to think about.

One way to fingerprint Pig views is to make up archetype descriptions for each generation as viewed by Pigs. To do that you have to first identify the pig class. For the post-Civil-War era, the Pigs would be the Robber Barons. They would have viewed the prey as foolhardy: daring, adventurous, but fundamentally stupid and easily conned out of any gold or oil strikes. The Gilded Age prey, living in less risky times, would have been merely fools, rather than foolhardy.

Another way to fingerprint the pig views is to list the consequences of following Pig Narratives. This is not as simple as it seems. Even though they are scripted to favor the Pigs (in heads-I-win-tails-you-lose ways, a concept I explored recently), depending on whether a given age is actually prosperous or not, the prey may do quite well. You have to characterize the before/after condition of the prey.

• If the script is positive, but there is a downturn overall across prey lives for that script, denial or disillusionment follows. Silents, who began retiring amidst the 80s turmoil, I suspect are largely disillusioned.
• If the script is positive and the prey get lucky, an unfounded sense of redemption follows. That gives you the boomers and early X’ers who made piles of money in the 90s and got away with it.
• If the script is negative and outcomes are negative, you get fatalism. I think that’s where we X’ers are headed.
• If the script is negative and outcomes are positive, I don’t know what happens. I suppose the New Deal generation (say somebody who was 20 in 1930 and 35 in 1945) sort of qualifies. They would have come of age amidst depression and looming war, rejoined the post-War boom economy as older veterans, and possibly mellowed out and became more positive.

I’ll stop this post now. For those of you who have read Tempo, you’ll probably recognize this post as an attempt to take the narrative analysis models in the book to the collective level, in an effort to get at Grand Narratives, which many of you have asked me about.

I am not yet sure how best to define Grand Narratives that might exist beyond Pig control levels, so I thought I’d start with the easier case of Pig Narratives. I suppose Pigs (Orwellian or otherwise) are economy-level Sociopaths in the Gervais Principle sense. That’s another thing I am starting to think about: what happens to Sociopaths in the open economy, outside the walls of individual corporations.

Apologies for any sloppiness in analysis or the writing in this piece, I am writing it in a break between things out here in Sunnyvale, CA. I am here for the next days for some work.

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Engineering romantics fall in love with the work of Jorge Luis Borges early in their careers.  Long after Douglas Hofstadter is forgotten for his own work in AI (which seems dated today), he will be remembered with gratitude for introducing Borges to generations of technologists.

Borges once wrote:

“I should define the baroque as that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all its own  possibilities and which borders on its own parody…I would say that the final stage of all styles is baroque when that style only too obviously exhibits or overdoes its own tricks.”

The baroque in Borges’ sense is self-consciously humorous. Borges’ own work in this sense is a baroque exploration of the processes of  thought. As one critic (see the footnote on this page) noted, Borges writings “serve to dramatize the process of thought in the apprehension of truth.”

Unlike art, complex and mature technology (not all technology) is baroque without being self-conscious. At best there is a collective sensibility informing its design that can be called a baroque unconscious.

This post is a sequel of sorts to The Gollum Effect. You can read it stand-alone, but you will probably get more out of it if you read that first. Within the Lord of the Rings metaphor I developed in that post, “baroque unconscious” is basically my answer to the question, if extreme consumers are Gollums, who is Sauron?

This idea of a baroque unconscious helps clarify things about the phenomenon of technological refinement that have been bothering me for a while. In particular, it helps distinguish among three kinds of refinement in technological artifacts: refinement that is useful to the user, refinement (often exploitative) that is useful to somebody besides the user, and refinement that benefits nobody at all.

It is this last characteristic that interests me.  Refinement that benefits nobody — anything that attracts the adjective overwrought  — is what I attribute to the workings of the baroque unconscious. And I write this fully aware of the irony that this kind of post, might be viewed as overwrought analysis by some.

Interestingly though, viewed from this perspective, the other two kinds of apparently intentional refinement can be seen as opportunistic exploitation. They arise  through manipulation of those elements of the workings of the baroque unconscious that happen to be consciously recognized.

In other words, I am arguing that the collective unconscious component in the evolution of technology is primary. The conscious component is peripheral.

Or to borrow another idea from art, it is technology for technology’s sake. And unlike in art, there is no primary artist.

The Baroque in Art

There is no such thing as the baroque unconscious in art.

When art exhausts its own possibilities unintentionally we generally characterize it as camp (what Susan Sontag aptly called “failed seriousness” in Notes on Camp). The baroque element in the work is evident to observers, even if the creator lacks the self-awareness to recognize it.

When art exhausts its own possibilities as a side-effect, while pursuing other objectives, we do not call it baroque. We call it either cynical or tasteless. The auteur theory of art applies well enough that if we cannot reasonably impute baroque intentions to the artist, we feel safe assuming that artist was aware of the baroque consequences of his/her decisions. Michael Bay’s Transformers movies (especially the last installment) are examples. They are both tasteless and cynical, but they are not campy or baroque.

Technology is generally more complex and collaborative than even the most collaborative kinds of art, such as movies. The process can create things that exhaust certain possibilities, with no single creator or observer being fully conscious of it. Yet, we cannot call such things campy, cynical or tasteless.

To understand this, suspend for a moment your default idea of what it means for something to be baroque. You are probably thinking of European architecture of a certain period with an exaggerated and visible sort of drama on the surface. That prototypical idea of the baroque is what we tend to apply, in unreconstructed form, to technology: clunky user interfaces and a degree of featuritis that has us groaning.

This is a narrow sense of the baroque. The original architectural instances  served a specific function: to impress and intimidate commoners with a display of awe-inspiring grandeur (some art historians have argued that the original examples of baroque were therefore not baroque at all, but cynical). The exhaustion of possibilities in that kind of baroque is all on the surface.

But things can be baroque without being visibly so, depending on the audience for the original function. The key is that the governing aesthetic must seek to self-consciously exhaust its own possibilities.

Invisible, but still intentional baroque is particularly common in modern American pop culture. Most viewers of The Simpsons for instance, miss the bulk of the hidden pop-culture references in the show. A loyal subculture of fans devotedly mines these references and discusses them online. While this sort of thing is often cynical (deliberate creation of baroque plots to create addiction, as in the show Lost), in the case of The Simpsons, I suspect the writers genuinely seek to exhaust the possibilities of the artistic technique of reference, without annoying the mainstream audience.

The Baroque in Technology

In technology, Apple’s products border on the baroque in their exaggerated simplicity. Once the iPad achieves the edge-to-edge display and maximal technically feasible thinness for instance, it is hard to imagine how one would parody it — there is no room left for exaggeration in the physical form at least. Certain possibilities will have been exhausted.

This sort of intentional (and therefore artistic) baroque in technology, however, is not really what interests me. What fascinates me is technology that grows baroque without anyone consciously intending to exhaust any design possibilities. Social forces, such as the competitive pressures of an arms race, or the demands of extreme lead customers, don’t seem to be sufficient explanations.

Art is usually the outcome of a singular vision. But technology, even the auteur form of technology practiced by Steve Jobs, is deeply collectivist. Engineering real things is far too hard for one mind to impose a singular vision on all but the simplest of products. When a piece of technology appears to be the work of a single mind and possesses the dense layers of coherent complexity that can only be the product of a large team, it is evidence of a deep coherence in the team itself. In such a team, individuals trust the collective to the point that  they feel comfortable narrowing their domain of conscious concern to their own work.

The baroque sensibility resides in the collective unconscious of the team that produces it. The baroque in the whole is greater than the sum of the baroque accounted for by the self-awareness of the many individuals.

Moderately obsessive-compulsive attention to detail at the level of individuals oblivious to larger purposes, eventually turns into baroque exhaustion of possibilities at the level of the whole product.

This brings us to the idea of refinement, and the question of when, why and how wrought keels over into overwrought.

Refinement and the Baroque

When I first started thinking about refinement, in the context of addictive consumption (as in, refined cocaine), I had examples such as American fast food in mind: precisely engineered concoctions of key refined substances (salt, sugar and fat) designed to cause addictive over-consumption.

The pathologies of consumerism can be traced to an entire universe of such refined goods. I offered the term gollumized to describe humans who end up being entirely defined by a pattern of such consumptive behavior, much like the character of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings, with his addictive, enslaving attachment to the One Ring: a highly refined, pure essence.

Something bothered me however, about the implicit equation of refinement with pathological addictive dependence on the one hand, and cynical exploitation on the other.

The refinement in the construction of something like the space shuttle does not seem pathological. It seems necessary.

A highly refined kitchen knife  that plays a role in your creative self-expression as a chef seems somehow different from a McDonald’s hamburger or an expensive wine, both of which are consumption-addiction refined in their own ways.

Even with hamburgers, while acknowledging that they are effectively exploitative and addictive foods designed to enrich the food industry by ruining the health of consumers, it is clearly farfetched to believe that there is some vast conspiracy that includes every biochemist.

The idea that the creation and sale of such foods is more a matter of cynical opportunism is more reasonable. You could accuse the industry of carefully engineering high-fructose corn syrup as a way to make money off corn surpluses, but the industry didn’t create the necessary biochemistry knowledge or surplus-creating agricultural advances with the idea of eventually selling cheap and addictive burgers (for one thing, the evolutionary processes took longer than the lifetime of any individual involved in the story).  You could say that the existence of HFCS is 10% intentional and 90% a consequence of the baroque unconscious driving food technology.

In other words, the existence of a Gollum does not imply the existence of a Gollumizer. Sauron in the The Lord of the Rings is at best a personification of the baroque unconscious (with Saruman being one of the cynical exploiters — an HFSC creator so to speak).

But let’s figure out what refinement in technology really means. Consider the following senses of the word refinement:

1. Refinement as in purity or purification of substances: ore, oil, drugs, foods
2. Refinement in the sense of highly developed and cultivated sensibilities, as in refined palate
3. Refinement in the sense of elaborate sophistication of mature or declining cultures
4. Refinement in the sense of detailed, attentive design in advanced technologies
5. Refinement in the sense of an Apple product (or any other possibility-exhausting product aesthetic)

How do these different senses of the idea of refinement relate to each other and to the baroque? What distinguishes the space shuttle, quality kitchen knife from an iPad, an expensive wine, or a McDonald’s hamburger?

The Sword, the Nail and the Machine Gun

I found a key clue when Greg Rader decided (to my slight discomfort) to overload this sense of refinement with an economic meaning in his 2×2 model of types of economies.

In Greg’s model, the economic role of refinement is to make it easy to value artifacts in an impersonal way, in a cash economy. Unrefined artifacts get you attention or help build social capital in relationships. Refined artifacts help you earn money or participate in the gift economy.

But why should refinement lead to easier valuation and thence to exchange for money.

The crucial missing piece is the role of interchangeability in mass production. As Joseph Ellis writes in The Social History of the Machine Gun:

It was always theoretically possible to conceive of a gun that would spew out vast numbers of bullets or whatever in a short period of time…manufacturing techniques [were not] sufficiently well-advanced to allow individual craftsmen to work to the fractional tolerances demanded for every part of such a complex gun.

The key point here is often lost in discussions of industrialization that use Adam Smith’s simple example of a nail to highlight the division of labor aspect of industrial production. Nail manufacture illustrates the reductionist capacities of industrialization, but it is the integration capacity of industrialization that drives refinement.

The machine gun illustrates the dynamics of integration. It is a complex machine, and as such, liable to break down more easily. Reliability involves network effects within a complex artifact. Roughly speaking, in a design with no redundancy, the more parts you have, and the more complex and fast-moving the linkages among them, the less reliable the machine.

Unless you find an opposed network effect that can scale at least as fast, machines will get less reliable as they scale.

The opposed network effect that was discovered late in the industrial revolution was interchangeability. Interchangeability creates a network effect between artifacts. Crucially, they need not be functionally similar. They only need share a structural language. A machine gun can be cannibalized to repair a telescope for instance.

The significance of Ellis’ point about fractional tolerances has to do with replacement and cannibalization. Craftsmen are capable of very refined work, but the work tends to be unique. It involves fitting this hilt on this sword with great precision. You can get away with this because craft also tends to involve fewer parts, static linkages and performance regimes where breakdowns are infrequent.

With interchangeability comes the possibility of easy valuation, since it is possible to talk of supply and demand at the level of many non-unique parts that can be compared to each other. That helps connect the dots to Greg’s economic hypotheses.

But we still haven’t fingerprinted the essence of refinement itself.

Replacement and Repair

The first key threshold crossed on the road to industrialization was the replacement of human, animal and uncontrolled inanimate power (wind or water) with controlled inanimate power: coal and oil. Much of the attention in attempts to characterize industrialization is given over to the study of this threshold-crossing.

The second key threshold crossed was the shift from repair to replacement. When breakdowns became frequent enough that anticipatory manufacture of replacement parts became cheaper than reactive repair or replacement, the network effects of industrialization truly kicked in.

The network effects of reliability in a sword are not strong enough that you need to counteract them with interchangeability effects. In fact, much of the complexity in a sword may well be in baroque artistic elements that serve no purpose (a sword that loses a diamond from its hilt is still equally effective on the battlefield).

Even early industrial-age artifacts, do not have enough complexity and speed to really require interchangeability. This is one reason I find elaborate steampunk fantasies fundamentally uninteresting. They involve imagined machines that come across as laughably Rube Goldberg-esque precisely because they don’t comprehend reliability problems, and the methods actually created during the industrial age to mitigate them.

When you get to something like a machine gun though, where breakdowns are frequent and waiting for custom replacement parts is hugely expensive, you must meet absolute tolerances, so that any replacement part can replace any broken part (and equally crucially, so that two broken, complex assemblies can be cannibalized to produce at least one working assembly).

So we can conclude that:

1. Refinement in craft based on relative tolerances leads to uniqueness.
2. Refinement in manufacturing based on absolute tolerances leads to interchangeability.

From these two basic kinds of refinement, we get the five connotations of the word I listed earlier. This happens via the appearance of a refinement surplus.

The Refinement Surplus

Interchangeable parts based on absolute tolerances solve the reliability problem and then some. The network effects of interchangeability turn out to be stronger than the network effect of increasing unreliability in individual complex artifacts.

What’s more, since interchangeability limits the need for communication among collaborating makers, refinement of component technologies can progress much faster (as Adam Smith noted). This is what we call “specialization.” It happened in physical engineering before object-oriented programing ported the idea to software engineering.

You could say that work previously achieved by communication among makers is now achieved via communication among artifacts.  This is most obvious with software objects, but the core idea is present even when you shift from a custom-made nut-bolt pair to a standardized pair that “communicates” via numerical absolute tolerances.

So interchangeability creates a social network of (say) machine guns. There are functional linkages within complex artifacts that make them useful, and substitution and reuse linkages between them that make them reliable (redundancy inside an artifact is merely a semantic distinction: think of it as carrying interchangeable spare parts inside the boundary of the artifact, with the capacity to automatically switch out broken parts). Interchangeability and standardization make every machine gun less unique, and more a part of a sort of hive-machine-gun beast.

Dramatic as this effect is, it pales in comparison to the effect of commonalities across the needs of different types of complex systems. This connects all complex artifacts into a giant social network. The One Machine.

A high-tolerance part can serve a low-tolerance function, but not vice versa. Economies of scale then kick in and dictate that many components become more refined than they need to be, for typical artifacts that make use of them. The result is that systems gradually get more refined than they functionally need to based on immediate intentions. The needs of a few artifacts drive the refinement levels in all technologies.

This creates a refinement surplus. Industrial technology, unlike craft work, runs a continuous refinement surplus. The surplus was initially triggered by the need for interchangeability to solve the reliability problem, but that turned out to be a case of using a sledgehammer to kill a fly.

Or so it might seem if you only look at individual artifacts. I’ll argue in a future post that once software and the Internet kick in, reliability problems can once again overtake what interchangeability can mitigate. As the One Machine gets increasingly interconnected, the unreliability network effect may overtake the interchangeability network effect, hence the fundamental Singularity-vs.-Collapse debate.

The possibilities represented by limiting refinement levels are always greater than the universe of artifacts in existence at any given time.

Exploitation of this refinement surplus is fundamentally what creates the predictable “growth” in industrial age Schumpeterian creative destruction. But it isn’t the intent to exploit that drives the evolution. It is a collective unconscious drive to exhaust possibilities and find limits, independent of any specific need.

The Platonic Baroque

The Lord of the Rings captures artistic anxieties about engineering: the “good” races create beautiful craft, the “evil” ones engineer ugly things.

Where LOTR goes wrong is in focusing on beauty in craft as the distinguishing factor (there is a line in The Hobbit which goes something like “the Goblins create many clever things, but few beautiful ones”).

In LOTR, evil engineering artifacts are crude, unrefined and possess little symmetry. Good ones made with craft are intricate, refined and highly symmetric.

This is obviously the exact opposite of what actually happens.

Open up a laptop and compare what you see to (say) a beautiful hand-crafted necklace. Not only is the inside of the laptop more intricate than the necklace, it is more intricate than you can even see. You would need electron microscopes to get a sense of how unbelievably intricate, refined and symmetric a laptop is.

The technological landscape is defined by two kinds of beauty. On the one hand, you have the possibility-exhausting conscious baroque artifacts that we view as “pushing the envelope.” Both the iPad and the space shuttle belong on this end of the spectrum. One contains chips at the limit of fabrication technology, the other contains materials that can handle enormous heat and cold, produce unimaginable levels of thrust, and so on.

On the other hand you have things that are not at the edge of technological capability, but manufactured out of component and process technologies created for those leading edge technologies. And I don’t just mean obviously over-engineered things like space pens that write upside down (which you can buy at NASA museums). I mean everything. Regular Bics included.

In this category, makers strive to exhaust the possibilities, but always lag  behind. The surplus refinement potential shows up in the unnecessarily clean lines of modernism. Unused bits. Unbroken symmetries. Blank engineering canvases that expand faster than designers and technicians can paint.

The interaction of the two kinds of beauty is what creates the texture of the modern technological landscape. I call it platonic baroque. This may seem like a contradiction in terms, but bear with me for a moment. 

The baroque unconscious is the force that drives technological evolution: a force whose potential increases faster than it can be exploited.

Recall that the baroque seeks to exhaust its own possibilities. It is a technical exercise in exploring process limits, not an exercise in expressing ideas or creating utility. But this process needs ideas to fuel it.

In the days when royalty and religion loomed large in the minds of creators, it was natural to exhaust possibilities by filling them up with the content of the mythology associated with the power and money that drove their work. It was natural to fill up blank walls with gargoyles and cherubs, popes and princes.

But when the power and money come from a force whose main characteristic is vast and featureless potential, the baroque aesthetic seeks to exhaust possibilities by expressing that emptiness with platonic forms.

So  the Bauhaus chair is not a rejection of the baroque. The modernist designer merely seeks to build cathedrals to his new master: a vast emptiness of possibility within the refinement surplus. This possibility is the father of industrial invention, a restless, paternalist force that replaces necessity, the mother of craft-like invention.

I am tempted to explore that male/female symbolism further, but I’ll limit myself to one overwrought metaphor. This unexploited possibility that is the father of industrial invention is at once a Dark Lord and engineering Dark Matter.

Maker Addiction and Exponential Technology

Where there is surplus, it will be exploited. Possibility, rather than necessity, drives invention. When ideas for exploitation lag the potential to be exploited you get baroque unconscious design.

Why would somebody build something simply because it is possible?

Both craft and engineering are driven by an addiction to making. It does not matter whether needs or possibilities enable the making. Makers will make. What determines how fast they make is whether they are able to focus on their strengths or whether they are limited by their weaknesses.

This is the shift in maker psychology due to industrialization: from deliberative craft work limited by individual weaknesses, to reactive engineering work that is not limited in this way, thanks to specialization.

Need-driven making requires a focus on function and utility. Non-functional making in craft is easily recognized as artistic embellishment.

The idealized craftsman — and it was usually a he – was a deliberate and mindful creator. He made the whole, and he made the parts. When things broke, he made repairs or crafted new parts. Each whole was unique. When craftspeople collaborated on larger projects — stone-masons making blocks for cathedrals say — assembly itself became a craft that was limited by the skill of the best (if you look at the history of masonry, you can see an obvious and gradual progression from rough-hewn blocks carefully fitted together, to more refined blocks that look increasingly interchangeable in late pre-modern architecture).

In industrial artifacts based on interchangeability, however, the role of craftsman bifurcates into the twin roles of technician and engineer-designer (for now, we can safely conflate engineer and designer). Both are reactive roles where function and utility take a backseat to sheer maker addiction.

The technician reacts to component work defined in terms of absolute tolerances by pushing the boundaries of process capabilities and component quality with addictive urgency. I explored this earlier in my post, The Turpentine Effect (though I didn’t connect the dots until now). The result is Six Sigma, an explosion of process tools, and the dominance of an intrinsic and abstract notion of potential future value over an extrinsic and specific notion of realizable current value. Somebody will use this in the future beats nobody can use this right now.  By and large, this trust is justified: increasing demands for refinement from the most demanding applications keep up with the possibilities.

In this process of reactive design, refinement in available components and processes starts to drive refinement levels in complete artifacts that have already been invented, and suggests new inventions. A positive feedback loop is set in motion: increasing component and process refinement overtakes application needs as individual artifacts mature, but then new applications emerge as pace-setters. Design bottlenecks migrate freely across the entire technological landscape, via the coupled technological web, instead of remaining confined within the design space of individual artifacts.

For those of you who are familiar with the S-curve models of technology maturation and disruption, imagine disruption S-curves bleeding across unrelated artifact categories via shared components and processes, creating an overall exponential technology evolution curve of the sort that both Singularity and Collapsonomics watchers like to obsess about, and that I will obsess about in future posts.

Across the fence from the technician, the engineer-designer loses mindfulness by shifting from deliberately dreaming up useful ideas to reacting to the possibilities of available component and process sophistication levels.

A perfect example is Moore’s Law: semiconductor companies began pushing fabrication technology to extremes before applications for the increased capability became clear.

On the other end we have Alan Kay’s reaction to Moore’s Law in the early 70s: the idea that computing should strive to “waste bits” in anticipation of decreasing cost. Computer design shifted from fundamentally deliberative before PARC to fundamentally reactive after.

Effects, Large and Small

So the net effect of maker addiction faced with refinement surplus is that existing artifacts get pulled into a baroque stage of their evolution and new artifacts appear to exploit possibilities rather than respond to necessities. I am not sure this is much better than Gollumizing consumption.

The One Machine gets increasingly integrated, and takes on an eerily coherent appearance due to uniform refinement levels and the operation of the platonic baroque aesthetic at the level of individual artifact design. Design bottlenecks drift around within this technological body politic, making it more coherent, more eerily platonic-baroque over time.

If the creation of unrealized refinement potential ever slows, and exploitation starts to catch up, you can expect the platonic baroque to become less platonic and more visibly overwrought. The blank canvas will start to fill up.

Thanks to this eerie collectively created aesthetic coherence, the One Machine takes on the appearance of subsuming intelligence and intentionality that suggests visions of a Singularity-AI to some.  Whether this is a case of anthropomorphic projection onto a smooth facade beneath which unreliability-driven collapse lurks, or whether there is an emerging systemic intelligence to the process, is something I still haven’t made up my mind about. If you’ve been following my writing, you know that at the moment, I lean towards the collapse interpretation. Darwinian evolution as refined complexity created by a blind watchmaker is too much of a precedent to ignore.

At more mundane levels, the baroque unconscious creates a critical shift in the nature of engineering: the pull of under-exploited refinement surplus is so strong that nominally less useful things that exploit the surplus can diffuse far faster, and suck away resources, far faster than nominally more useful things that ignore it.

All you need is a human behavior with potential for escalating addiction. You can then move as fast as the refinement surplus will allow. I explored this idea in The Milo Criterion.

Ignoring this leads to the classic entrepreneurial mistake: attempting to build useful things instead of things that exploit refinement surplus. The most high-impact technologies of the day are almost never whatever the wisdom of the day identifies as the most potentially useful ones. They are the ones that can spread most rapidly through The One Machine, mopping up refinement surplus.

So the best and brightest flock to Facebook or Google, and cancer remains uncured. Again, I am not sure whether this a good thing or not.  Perhaps from the perspective of the Dark Lord, optimizing the One Machine, now is simply not the right time to cure cancer. One day perhaps, the design bottlenecks will drift to that corner of the technological Web. Until then, we’ll have to content ourselves with doctors who tweet during surgeries and webcast the proceedings, but still cannot cure cancer.

I’ll stop here for now. This post has been something of a stream of conscious expression of my own baroque-unconscious addicted-maker tendencies. But then, I figure I can allow myself one of these self-indulgent posts every once in a while.  Especially since my birthday is coming up in a couple of days.

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I’ll be in the Bay Area for some consulting work Nov 15-19, so I decided it’s time for another Ribbonfarm Field Trip. If you missed the first one (Sausalito Houseboats), I hope you can make this one. We had a lot of fun last time (here’s the post about Field Trip #1, with more  pictures).

This time, I thought it would be interesting to visit the Computer History museum in Mountain View and chat over coffee afterwards.

We’ll meet at 1:00 PM on Saturday, November 19. Click here to register (free). You’ll have to buy a ticket to enter the museum itself when you get there ($15 general admission). I’ll buy everyone a round of coffee after we’re done (after all, you guys have been buying me coffees for years now).

I keep meaning to visit each time I am in the area, but something always gets in the way. With the passing of Steve Jobs and an equally important academic figure, John McCarthy, it’s an interesting time to take stock and ponder the future of technology from the perspective of the longer story, now that Act I is sorta symbolically over. I am also reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon right now and noodling around with themes for my next book, which will likely have a strong technology angle. So all in all, we have ingredients for an interesting conversation. I’ll try to rope in a couple of gray eminences who’ve survived a couple of boom-bust cycles, to talk history and context at us.

If you register and later need to cancel, let me know. Last time, we had some people bailing at the last minute without telling me, so I didn’t have time to let the waiting-list people know, and we ended up with extra box lunches.

Same as last time,  let me know if you need to carpool.

Field Trip #2: Las Vegas Storm Drains

And in case you’re wondering about the mysterious, missing Field Trip #2, that was actually an exploration of the Las Vegas storm drain system a couple of weekends ago with Bay Area reader Laura Wood, who I met on Field Trip #1.

I learned about the extensive storm drain system (hundreds of miles of tunnels under Las Vegas) from another reader, Josh Ellis, one of exactly two readers I appear to have in Las Vegas, and told Laura about them during the first field trip.

I had no more than a casual curiosity at that point, but Laura got interested enough that she hunted down the author of a book about the storm drain system and the homeless people living in them (Matt O’Brien, the book is Beneath the Neon, I am reading it now).

When Laura told me she wanted to come down to Vegas and explore the storm drains, we briefly talked making it a larger group event and roping in more readers from the Bay Area and LA, but ultimately decided it would be too dicey.

So it was just the two of us. We first met up with Matt, got some advice and tips, and then spent several hours over the next two days exploring miles and miles of underground tunnels, filled with fantastic graffiti, garbage, smelly water and a few homeless people.

Later, I met up separately with Matt and Josh over coffee and chatted more about this and that (Josh did the initial explorations and co-authored some articles with Matt, who later explored the storm drains more deeply and wrote the book).

I’ll write a longer post about the storm drains at some point, once I am done with Matt’s book.

Anyway, if you’re up for Field Trip #2, go ahead and register.

Also, if you’re interested in meeting up 1:1 for lunch/dinner/coffee between Nov 15 – Nov 19, email me.

And finally, once again I am in the market for couches. Rather than wearing out my welcome with my gracious hosts from last time (thanks Mark, Jane and Greg) I figured I’d see if there were other potential hosts out there with whom I could stay and explore more Bay Area neighborhoods. I’ll need a place to stay the nights of Nov 15, 16, 17 and 18.

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I am not normally a big consumer of online video content, but in the last couple of months, I’ve watched three very significant videos that together have turned my mind into silly putty. They are incredibly fertile, thought-provoking and demanding without being merely stimulating in an infotainment/mindcandy sense. This is protein, not sugar.

They total about 6 hours, but if you choose to invest a clear-brained morning or afternoon, you will not be disappointed. You should find that you’ve leveled-up your thinking about a lot of stuff that we talk about frequently.

I am also posting a roundup of the last couple of months, since I am now blogging on enough different venues to justify some periodic aggregation.

Three Deep Videos

The three videos: watch them in the following order.

The Century of the Self (HT: Cameron Schaefer and somebody I forget, on Quora)

What it’s about: A marathon 4-part BBC series about how Freud’s ideas, via his nephew Edward Bernays and daughter Anna Freud, created the modern PR and marketing industries, shaped politics, business and culture, drove secret (and nutty) CIA research and generally pwned the American national identity for a century (I rarely resort to gamerisms, but pwned is the only word that covers the case). I have my notes, summary and critiques filed away. I am going to be milking this one for insight for a long time. The video provides context for a lot of my writing that I was previously unaware of (particularly The Gollum Effect). I feel particularly dumb for having missed the direct historic influence of Maslow on market segmentation, via work at SRI.

Bruce Sterling’s Closing Address at Reboot 2009 (HT: Justin Pickard and Dorian Taylor)

In a way, this picks up where the previous video leaves off.  Where the BBC show starts in the 1920s and ends with politics and business slavishly pandering to a self-absorbed crowd in a civilization-level circle-jerk at the turn of our century, Sterling looks ahead to the consequences of our current state. It is a grand-visionary look at the next 10 years, covering the themes of collapse and survival. Justin Pickard called it one of his “ur texts” and it has become almost that for me as well. Sterling is a science fiction writer, so you should expect somewhat overwrought language. The talk is built around a few key words/phrases — dark euphoria, favela chic, gothic high tech, acting dead — that are annoyingly opaque until you’ve heard the talk, but stick in your head like viruses once you’re done; I find that I have to fight myself to not use the terms on random people, who haven’t watched the video.

Programming and Scaling by Alan Kay (HT: Jean-Luc Delatre)

Even if you don’t know much about programming (Alan Kay developed object-oriented programming at PARC), you should be able to get quite a bit out of this video. It is a great complement to the other two videos because it outlines the large-scale problems and opportunities in the current state of software engineering. With software eating the world, whether we get a Singularity scenario or a Collapsonomics scenario largely depends on whether or not some fundamental problems with software (involving entropy and bugginess) can be solved. Kay is optimistic. If he’s right, we’ll get the Singularity, and Lord Skynet will let us continue happily in our current state of self-absorbed idiocracy that the BBC documentary describes. If we fail, we get Bruce Sterling’s world: grim, with collapse looming, and rich and poor alike scrambling to adapt to inevitable decline.

The main reason I am strongly encouraging you to watch all three videos is a selfish one: I want to write about some of these ideas, and I suspect I’ll lose anybody who hasn’t leveled-up their thinking with this preparation. I’ll try to make any future essays on this stuff self-contained, but it may be a losing battle. At the very least, you’ll get more out of some of my planned future posts if you watch these videos first.

A 6-8 Week Roundup

I’ve been quite busy and all over the place these last couple of months. Here’s the roundup of the last 6-8 weeks at various venues. If you only care about Ribbonfarm, skip to the end.

Forbes

First off, I booted-up my new technology blog at Forbes. Here’s the output for the first month. I am still sort of finding my feet with this general technology theme, so the pieces are a bit all over the place.

1. Zappos and the Rise of Corporate Neo-Urbanism
2. The Social Graph as Crude Oil (Go Ahead, Build that YASN!)
3. Kubler-Ross and #OccupyWallStreet
4. Public Computing and the Next Gang-of-Four
5. We Are All Macs Now
6. The Electric Leviathan

Information Week

Next, on my Information Week column, I’ve been writing a few pieces to sort of wrap up the first phase of my thinking (which has evolved over the last 2-3 years) on Enterprise 2.0 themes. I am planning to collect my IW columns from this year, along with some of my older posts on the E2.0 conference blog, into an ebook soon. But this Star Wars style trilogy that I posted over the last 6 weeks kinda sums up the big picture view I currently hold.

1. Social Wars: A New Hope
2. Social Wars: The Enterprise Strikes Back
3. Social Wars: Return Of The Radicals

If you haven’t seen my IW stuff on Enterprise 2.0/social business (or weren’t aware that I was writing there), and the theme interests you, you may want to catch up with my dozen or so posts so far. I am sensing that the Enterprise 2.0/social business trend is shifting into a new gear, and I am trying to tie up my Phase I thoughts into a neat little package so I can sort of get it off my mind and think about Phase II.

Tempo Blog

On the Tempo blog, over the last couple of months, I’ve  had a series of loosely related pieces on mindfulness, time-management and productivity that I am really happy with. The plan to use the blog to beta-test ideas for a future edition of the book is going well. This stuff is going into the second edition of the book in some form (read in this order if you want to follow the train of thought):

1. Daemons and the Mindful Learning Curve
2. The Calculus of Grit: (this is actually an August ribbonfarm post, but seems to belong in this series)
3. Bandwagon Timing verus Biding Your Time
4. Forgivable Sloppiness: The Art of Epoch-Driven Time Management
5. Thrust, Drag and the 10x Effect

Ribbonfarm

And finally, here at home, I only had five “real” pieces in the last two months (not counting last week’s guest post and a couple of announcement posts), but they were biggies for me personally. I seem to be moving into a new phase on the home front. The impending end of the Gervais Principle series, which has sort of been the sine qua non of this blog for two years, has frankly gotten me into a soul-searching mode about where to go next.

1. The Stream Map of the World
2. The Gervais Principle V: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
3. Ubiquity Illusions and the Chicken-Egg Problem
4. The Milo Criterion
5. Fixing the Game by Roger L. Martin

Hope that’s enough to keep you guys busy for a while. I can sense some significant steering in my writing direction(s) looming in November. Not entirely sure which way I’ll be turning.

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This is a guest post by Greg Linster, a graduate student studying economics at the University of Denver.  He blogs at Coffee Theory about things philosophical and shares aphorisms (almost daily) at Aphoristic Cocktails.  

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death is the latest book by British political philosopher John Gray, and it explores the intellectual origins of the modern transhumanist movement in painstaking depth.  Be forewarned, the book is not exactly a cheery read.  However, Gray’s analysis is incredibly poignant and of utmost importance if we are to really understand what it means to be human.       

In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

In a world that has become increasingly secularized, I think Nietzsche presciently understood that science would become heralded as the new religion. Technology, not a traditional deity, would then become the natural place to look for a human Savior and the Singularity would signal the technological Rapture.

The scientific quest for immortality, however, can trace its roots back to the psychical investigations that began in the late nineteenth-century, and the storied history behind this bizarre pursuit to use science in order to cheat death is largely the subject of this book.

Transcendent Man

There is a scene in the documentary Transcendent Man where Ray Kurzweil, on the verge of shedding a tear, shows that he is on the brink of an existential crisis. Kurzweil, like many of us, seems to struggle with the fact that all human life ends, and in order to assuage his fears he has become a prominent new age believer. And he is not alone in this belief either; in fact, there is a  growing transhumanist movement that is spreading around the globe.

The Singularity, according to Gray, is best understood as a version of process theology. “Just as the Bolshevik God-builders imagined a deified humanity, so a number of twentieth-century theologians, mostly American, imagined God emerging from within the human world.” In this narrative, according to Gray, the likes of Kurzweil see God as the end-point of evolution and instead of a God that creates humans, humans are God in the making.

Darwin and the God-Builders

The first section of the book, “Cross-­Correspondences,” is largely about the moral philosopher and economist Henry Sidgwick. However, Gray also discusses the importance of Darwin’s role in creating the new religion. Interestingly, we learn that Darwin never fully accepted the implications of his own theory of natural selection. Gray writes: “He knew that evolution cares nothing for humans or their values — it moves, as he put it, like the wind — but he could not hold on to this truth, because it means evolution is a process without a goal.” Most of Darwin’s followers have failed to acknowledge this teleological implication of their beloved theory too.

The second part of the book titled “God-Builders” is about the Russian God-Builders, who believed that death could be defeated using the powers of science. The section opens with a disturbing quote from Lenin: “Some day an ape will pick up a human skull and wonder where it came from”. In this section, we learn that H.G. Wells (the father of science-fiction) also failed to acknowledge the teleological implications of Darwinism. Wells believed that “an intelligent few — scientists, engineers, aviators, commissars — could seize control of evolution and lead the species to a better future…eventually, humans would become like gods.” Thus, the new religion was conceived.

This new religion was further embraced by a few of the great 20th-century European intellectuals. In fact, one member of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, Maxim Gorky, was discontented with the fate of humanity in a fashion eerily similar to that of Wells. Gorky would go on to become one of the pioneers of the “God-building” movement, which Gray describes as, “A kind of secular mystery cult…in which occultism and science marched hand in hand”. Furthermore, “The God-builders believed a true revolutionary must aim to deify humanity, an enterprise that includes the abolition of death.” As history shows us, the Bolsheviks would try to, often in a brutal fashion, implement this idea. Tragically, however, as Gray put it, “Unnumbered humans had to die, so that a new humanity could be free of death.”

The Immortalization Commission

And what about the title of the book? Days after Lenin’s death, Leonid Krasin published an article in the communist newspaper Izvestiia titled “The Architectural Immortalization of Lenin.” Later, the Funeral Commission that was set up to organize Lenin’s burial was renamed the Immortalization Commission, hence the title of the book.

The Russians obsession with death, however, is merely a microcosm for humanity as a while. As Gray writes, “The hopes that led to Lenin’s corpse being sealed in a Cubist mausoleum have not been surrendered in the slightest. Cheating aging by a low-calorie diet, uploading one’s mind into a super-computer, migrating into outer space . . . Longing for everlasting life, humans show that they remain the death-defined animal.” Would Nietzsche be surprised?

“The irony of scientific progress,” writes Gray, “is that in solving human problems it creates problems that are not humanly soluble.” Science has certainly given humans an ability to manipulate the natural world in a way that no other animal is capable of; however, it has not given us the power to redesign and tailor the laws of the universe according to our desires. That, however, has not stopped the chase for immortality. Those realists, like myself, who oppose it are often called dystopians.

Those who have read Gray’s previous works (particularly False Dawn, Straw Dogs and Black Mass) certainly understand that he has a unique knack for crushing the quixotic hopes of dreamers like Kurzweil. Ultimately, however, this book reminded me what many transhumanists fail to realize: that without death we cannot truly have life. As such, what a travesty of life it would be to achieve a machine-like immortality!

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At the heart of all tragedy, the Greeks saw a phenomenon they called hamartia: a fatal error born of unavoidable ignorance. Combined with a fundamental moral flaw, hamartia inevitably led on to destruction. For the Greeks, humans were cursed not just with mortality of the flesh, but also hamartia-driven mortality of the spirit. Hamartia was the Gods being Divine Jerks, randomly toying with human lives for their own pleasure, through cat-and-mouse games the latter could not hope to win.

For the Greeks, any divine purpose, even subtly malicious randomness, in the ordering of the universe, was preferable to purposelessness. At least the gods cared enough to be cruel.

Nietzsche saw tragedy differently. For Nietzsche, God was dead and only the flesh was real. There was only the indifferent Great Bureaucrat of  the material universe, Chancellor Entropy, apathetically offering humans a form to fill out, with just one simple check-box choice: “death or booga booga?”

The Clueless disdainfully ignore the reams of fine print, and proudly check: death.

After trying, and failing to understand the fine print, the Losers cautiously check: booga booga.

Nietzsche knows how this game is played. With a grim smile requests an exception: I will take death by booga booga.

Lord Entropy frowns slightly and says: “have you been here before?”

“Yes!” says Nietzsche with sudden passion, “I have consumed myself in my own flame, I have…”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” says the Great Bureaucrat, “we don’t need supporting evidence for this exception, just sign here.”

Finally, the Sociopath frowns doubtfully at the form, and asks: “Can I speak with your supervisor?”

“Certainly,” says the Great Bureaucrat. “There’s some additional paperwork for that I am afraid. Just fill these out, and take them over to Section B, room B. Godot will be right with you.”

Welcome to the penultimate episode of the Gervais Principle series. The saga of two-plus years and 20,000-plus words of booga-booga that you have already endured is now winding its way to a tortuous conclusion.

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

We will return to the grave matter of metaphysical booga-booga in the final part. Let us start the last leg of our journey in a familiar place: Dunder-Mifflin.

Michael’s “Golden Ticket” marketing promotion has just — or so he believes — blown up in his face.  David Wallace, an angry god, is on his way to smite him down. As he desperately looks for a way out, Dwight steps up:

“I will fall on my sword for you Michael.”

With that solemn declaration of Samurai honor, Dwight offers himself up as scapegoat to the panicked Michael.

This is a simple and child-like example of the operation of a basic human instinct: the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose or HIWTYL (let’s pronounce that “hightail”) instinct. It is the basic human tendency to grab more than your fair share of the rewards of success, and less than your fair share of the blame for failure.

Michael’s HIWTYL instincts do not play out in particularly effective or robust ways, as we saw when we examined this example earlier. When the situation serendipitously turns around, and the Golden Ticket scheme turns into an unexpected business coup, Michael attempts to take back the blame-turned-credit. Dwight resists, and in the resulting farcical fight over credit, David Wallace is actually the one who walks away with the win, without personally taking any risks, or rewarding the originator of the win.

This outcome was no accident, as we will see.

There are several examples of the HIWTYL instinct playing out in The Office.

• When Dwight almost burns down the office, Michael tries to sidle over to the inquisitor’s side of the table, announcing the move with the line, “we are not angry Dwight, we are just deeply disappointed.” David Wallace shuts him down immediately: “you must accept your share of the blame Michael!”
• The earnest Andy puts together a small business seminar to generate new sales leads. Initially, the other sales people refuse to participate, dismissing it as yet another clueless move. But when the seminar idea actually starts to work, they swoop back in, sycophantically eager to partake in the success.
• Ryan attempts to get Pam to clean the dirty microwave, but when she resists and challenges him about not doing it himself, he feigns extreme incompetence.
• Pam engineers a sales role for herself with Michael’s help, but when she cannot cut it, she takes advantage of ambiguities and made-up communication breakdowns to invent an Office Manager sinecure for herself.
• When the sales force is moved to a compensation structure without caps on commissions, tensions rise as the salespeople, newly energized by a competitive spirit, alienate the support staff.  To restore good relations, they decide to share a fair percentage of their new rewards. But at the last minute, they realize that the support staff can be bought off much more cheaply, with flattery and gestures like throwing a party.
• When the company is nearing bankruptcy, Oscar comes up with a grim and realistic long-shot salvage plan. He is perfectly willing to try indirect influence and have somebody else champion it (allowing him to claim paternity in the unlikely case that it works). But when Michael tries to get him to personally propose it to the executives, he smartly worms his way out: he has no interest in being made visibly accountable for a high-risk plan.

But such occasional HIWTYL improvisations are far too unpredictable and unsystematic for Sociopath tastes. For them, HIWTYL is not about hacking reward/penalty structures after the fact. It is about proactively engineering systems and processes that reliably, predictably and stealthily generate HIWTYL outcomes.  In other words, they look for ways to systematically claim paternity for successes, and orphan failures.

The Golden Ticket Reconsidered

To understand how Sociopaths handle HIWTYL engineering, consider the Golden Ticket example. It was a random idea that initially seemed good, then seemed to prove out bad, and then unexpectedly ended up as a win. Such are the uncertainties of life.

How would you attempt to bank such a success in predictable ways?

First you would cut a deal for a performance-linked bonus for a successful marketing campaign (but no penalty for failure of course).

Next, you would set up a committee and charter it to collect, vet and recommend ideas, perhaps with a promise of some nominal rewards, such as gift certificates, for successful ideas.

You would then drop hints and suggestions to create ideas, like the Golden Ticket scheme, that you personally favor.

And finally you would create the appropriate level of urgency in the work of the committee to achieve the risk-levels you want in the ideas produced.

If it works, you praise everybody generously, hand out a few gift certificates, keep your bonus to yourself, and move on. If it fails, you blame the people in charge of the work for failing to consider an “obvious” (with 20/20 hindsight) issue. The chair of such a committee would likely be Clueless, his appointment being a false honor — a case of being set up take a fall.

If the effort fails, the blame would be neatly divided three ways:

The nominally accountable Clueless chair would be charged with incompetence.

The Losers would be blamed for poor esprit de corps – “we need to improve employee engagement around here” — (a case of blaming Gemeinschaft).

The committee as a whole would be charged with using bad systems and work processes for getting the work done (a case of blaming Gesellschaft).  The last is often followed up with a mitigating rationalization, “well, at least we learned something, and can improve our processes next time.”

This sort of three-way distribution of blame is designed to discount the full magnitude of all-around culpability. The sum of the three kinds of blame assigned is not equal to the whole.

This simple example leads to a few interesting questions.

How does this sort of thing operate at larger scales and longer time-horizons?

What happens to the deficit, the portion of blame not assigned to anyone?

Why do we want to fudge the books at all? Why not try to account for all the credit or blame as fairly as possible?

We will tackle the first two questions in this part, and save the Why for the finale.

The Hanlon Dodge

The basic mechanism by which Sociopaths transfer blame to the Clueless, while reducing the overall severity of the penalty, is an application of Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Because Hanlon’s Razor is often true, it is a believable dodge even when it is not.  Coupled with another uniquely human trait, the tendency to link penalties to intentions rather than consequences (eg. first-degree murder vs. vehicular manslaughter), Hanlon’s razor can be used to manufacture predictable HIWTYL outcomes out of fundamentally unpredictable situations.

How? By shifting blame from a locus where it would be attributed to malice, to one where it can plausibly be attributed to incompetence, the severity of penalties incurred is lowered.

Hanlon’s razor is double-edged, and Sociopaths use it to feign incompetence themselves or to charge others with incompetence, as necessary.

When ends are defensible, but means are not, Sociopaths feign incompetence, and you get the first kind of Hanlon Dodge.

The simplest example is Ryan feigning incompetence in the microwave-cleaning episode: Ryan wanting the communal microwave cleaned is a defensible end, but openly treating Pam as a menial would be unacceptable in our time. So he uses his own incompetence, both to disguise the means he is trying to use, and to insure against failure.

When means are defensible, but ends are not, Sociopaths engineer execution failures via indirection and abstraction in the requests they make, thereby achieving their ends via “lucky accidents.” This is the second kind of Hanlon Dodge.

An example in The Office is when David Wallace uses Michael as a cat’s paw in the Prince Family Paper episode. The manner in which Wallace makes his request in their phone conversation is instructive:

Wallace: Listen, as you know, we haven’t yet filled the regional supervisor job…

Michael: Oh, you haven’t?

Wallace: That’s right, and I was wondering if I could get you to do some of the fieldwork that would normally go to the supervisor. There’s an area from Carbondale to Marshbrook where we have never done any business. There’s a small company there, Prince Paper. I can’t get a report on it because it is not a public company. But we’ve been talking about going after their market, so I was hoping you could do some fact-finding for me… I’ll fax over some of the things we’re looking for.

On the surface, this is a routine request to do some above-board competitive analysis. But by dangling the carrot of a better job and carefully refraining from specifying how the end is to be achieved (using abstractions like “fact-finding” and “fieldwork”), Wallace knows he can get Michael to do what he really wants done: industrial espionage. He engineers execution of his real intention (obtaining an unfair and illegal advantage over Prince Paper) using a predictable “failure” pattern in the execution of his declared intention (honest competition). He knows Michael can be relied on to try foul means, while letting him pretend that he only expected fair means to be used.

This is delegation with a built in insurance policy. If the plan succeeds (as it does), Wallace can do exactly what he wants: drive Prince Paper out of business. If it had failed, and the industrial espionage had come to light, Michael and Dwight would have been held responsible for incompetent and overzealous execution, and a petty criminal act. Had Wallace been more explicit, he would be been vulnerable to the more serious charge of orchestrating systematic anti-competitive practices.

As a bonus, Wallace keeps his hands clean for potential future interactions with Prince Paper (such as a White Knight buyout or grabbing newly unemployed talent at fire-sale prices). As the bloodied instrument, Michael has fewer chances of future positive interactions with the Prince Paper folks. In a later episode, when he is looking for a job, we see that his list of prospects has Prince Paper on it. When he calls, he gets an out-of-business message. Even if David Wallace hadn’t driven them out of business, Michael could not have landed a job there, after what he visibly did to them. Sadly for Michael, the world is small and life is long.

A more complex example, involving both kinds of Hanlon Dodge at multiple levels, is the Dunder-Mifflin shareholder meeting, with the company on the brink of bankruptcy. The angry shareholders are in a mood to indict the executives for maliciously running the company into the ground and lining their own pockets.

To believably shift the blame to incompetence, the executives bring Michael to the shareholder meeting and hold him up as an example of success. By crediting him with success, the executives hope to provide evidence of best-faith executive management, minimize the perception of complete failure, and  lay the remaining blame for failure at the door of market uncertainties and the incompetence of other managers (this is one of the more subtle ways to use false honors; a more common use is as a preparatory step for a basic scapegoating).

The effort blows up in their faces because it works too well, and the train-wreck that ensues is interesting at multiple levels.

Michael turns out to be even stupider than the executives assumed, and he has no idea that his role is merely that of a poster-boy: wave to the crowd and shut up. He buys the story of his own success to the point that he hijacks the microphone and sells the crowd on the promise of an unachievable turnaround, with what is probably the funniest piece of Posturetalk in the show:

“We’re going to come back with a plan for you…It’s a 45-day, 45-point, 1 point per day plan. We get to 45 points, we’re back in business… and we’re going completely carbon neutral! I love you New York!”

In the private caucus that follows, the angry executives turn on Michael.

Wallace: What are we supposed to tell them now, you’ve really dug us quite a hole?

Michael: Well… we tell ‘em the plan.

Wallace: There is no plan.

Belatedly Michael understands his predicament and tries to rope in Oscar and his long-shot salvage plan. Oscar however, has no intention of being on the wrong side of the HIWTYL bargain. He refuses to publicly stand behind the plan he had privately proposed to Michael earlier. He decamps after making some polite noises, leaving Michael stranded.

With all hope lost, Michael prattling on, and no reason for anybody to continue fostering his delusions, a board-member finally says it out loud:

Board-member: He’s the best manager we have? Where’s the off button on this moron?

In summary, seasoned Sociopaths maintain a permanent facade of strategic incompetence and ignorance in key areas, rather than just making up situational incompetence arguments. This is coupled with indirection and abstraction in things asked of reports. The result is HIWTYL judo.

How do we know this is not just a case of giving reports autonomy and discretion in how to act? Simple: when you genuinely want to give reports responsibilities that help them grow, you give them autonomy where they are strong. When you want to use them in engineered “failures” that give you the outcomes you want, you give them autonomy in areas where they are weak. If they can be relied upon to break laws, turn to violence, exhibit useful overzealousness or cut corners, those are the areas where you allow them discretion.

Together, these two behaviors allow Sociopaths to exploit the full potential of Hanlon’s Razor. On the one hand, they can avoid doing unpleasant things themselves. On the other hand, they can achieve indefensible private intentions while maintaining plausible deniability.

A line spoken by the fictionalized mining magnate George Hearst in Deadwood clearly spells out the perception Sociopaths seek to manufacture:

“Often, because our interests are extensive, people like me are believed the authors of events which may benefit our holdings, when our connection in fact is incidental.”

The Clueless and Losers debate whether or not ends justify the means. Sociopaths use whatever is justifiable to cover up whatever they want to get done. The result is a theater of justification.

The theater of justification was largely superficial in the early days of corporatism. Behind the scenes, bribery, murder, intimidation and even general massacres (such as the machine-gunning of strikers) were openly deliberated. Today, the theater extends deep within the organization itself, and evidence implicating Sociopaths is not even allowed to come into existence in most cases.

Divide and Conquer

Losers are far too smart to fall for Hanlon Dodge maneuvers as individuals. You need to work them in groups to get them behaving in sufficiently stupid ways. You also need to hook their own HIWTYL instincts, introducing a certain degree of complicity. We will see the significance of this complicity later. For now, let’s just see how it’s done.

When you work Gemeinschaft — the matrix of personal connections and trust relationships that binds Loser groups together — there is really only one basic tactic: divide-and-conquer.

The key to successful divide-and-conquer moves lies in recognizing and exploiting two features of Loser groups.

The first is the presence of many active fault-lines. Among the losers in The Office for example:

• Pam has been cold/bitchy towards Karen and sympathetic, on occasion, towards Angela
• Pam and Karen have bonded together over their mutual dislike of Angela
• Oscar and Kevin have collaborated to fight Michael over ordering the best pizza
• Oscar has made a malicious video comparing Kevin to the Cookie Monster
• Oscar and Pam fight a battle over the use of a budget surplus (Oscar wants a new copier, Pam wants new chairs)
• …but they join forces to fight Michael later when he threatens to just return the surplus and earn a bonus
• Phyllis has snubbed Karen
• Phyllis has collaborated with Karen on a sales call

Within the group, such dynamics merely reinforce status illegibility, as we saw last time.  There is a never-ending sequence of little skirmishes within sub-groups, where people gain or lose status in specific situations. These situations usually involve a sub-quorum audience, which contributes to the status illegibility (since absent members of the group will not update their status assessments accurately).

Without external interference, these skirmishes work to keep the group at the edge of stability. They fault lines remain in a fluid state, widening and narrowing as the group saga evolves. Attractive and repulsive forces balance to keep the group at a marginally stable level of intimacy.

Until Sociopaths step in to exploit the precarious equilibrium.

Loser group dynamics offer a natural exploit: almost anyone can be made to ally with, or turn against, anybody else, with no need to manufacture reasons. Almost any sub-group can be played off against any other sub-group, since there are no absolute loyalties. The presence of myriad fault-lines within a Loser group presents a canvas for divide-and-conquer artistry.

A rather clumsy example is Robert California, the new CEO in Season 8, leaving a mysterious two-column list of employee names lying around to be found. After letting the group work itself up into a state of general anxiety for a while, he reveals that the list is a winners/losers list, but that it is not set in stone, and that anyone can work themselves into or out of the winner column.

That sort of direct attack on Loser group cohesion is unlikely in real life, but illustrates the basic idea clearly. A more realistic example is the sales-vs.-the-rest episode.

In this case, the Socipaths spark a behavior change using a new incentive structure for the salespeople. The purpose is not merely to drive motivation at the individual level, but to drive collusion and schisms at the group level (any incentive preferentially offered to one sub-group will do this).

The incentive scheme itself is a HIWTYL mechanism from the point of view of the Sociopaths. If the salespeople had virtuously come together in solidarity with the support staff and shared their increased commissions as they’d originally planned, the Sociopaths would have still gotten improved performance overall at bargain prices, compared to costlier all-around incentives.

Of course, Losers being themselves susceptible to HIWTYLing, the Sociopaths could have confidently predicted what actually happened: collusion within the sales subgroup to screw over the support subgroup, with a nascent fault-line hardening into a true schism.

In this case, the schism could have been further exploited for benefits beyond the nominal aims of the incentive. The support subgroup could have been laid off and their jobs outsourced for example (after a preliminary re-org and possibly a relocation, to widen and formalize the new schism).

The second key feature of Loser groups is that they naturally apportion credit for successes and failures in ways that don’t balance the books. To work the Clueless, you need a Hanlon Dodge to get to reduced charges. With the Losers, something similar happens naturally.

Here’s why: Losers will accept blame, but only in inverse proportion to their self-perceived status. Due to the murkiness of collective responsibility, and the effect of status illegibility, self-perceived status is the only available basis for dividing up credit or blame. If everybody believes they are above average (with everybody else supporting that delusion, as we saw last time), they will assign more of the blame to others and less to themselves, and convince themselves that their partitioning of blame is fair.

If each person’s culpability for a failure is taken at their own valuation, you will have a net deficit in the total accounted-for blame. Conversely, with a success, the sum of self-perceived credit attributions is greater than the credit actually available to go around. Loser group successes are effectively inflated, and blame discounted.

So as Loser groups accumulate a history, internal valuations of earned credit are steadily inflated, and assessments of culpability run a deficit. A successful group systematically overvalues its capabilities and develops a blindness to its weaknesses.

In the abstract, divide-and-conquer tactics are about forcing a real-world valuation event, during which such real deficits and fictitious surpluses are exposed, and paid for with lost social capital: schisms. The engineered schisms increase status legibility along the fault-line, and the group breaks apart, with the pieces regaining stability through illegibility. In the sales-vs.-the-rest case, the real-money skirmish reveals to both sides that the salespeople have higher status.

Such social capital destruction is always much easier than social capital creation (though not portrayed in The Office, this is usually done by subjecting a group to a forged-by-shared-combat experience).

In summary, Sociopaths use unbalanced incentives to harden a fault-line into a schism, relying on natural intra-group tensions and fuzzy accounting to do the job.

Take note of a couple of aspects of Loser psychology as revealed by their behavior under such manipulation.

Losers have a genuine sense of honor. The want to accept fair blame for failures and fair credit for successes. Their HIWTYL instincts are buried under a layer of denial. Rather than make unfair claims directly, they make their unfair claims via deluded assessments of their own in-group status.

They also have significant empathy for each other, and a natural solidarity, so they don’t like to pull naked HIWTYL maneuvers on others. When they do pull such maneuvers, they prefer to victimize faceless groups or institutions rather than individuals. When they do victimize individuals, they try to dehumanize their victims first (simultaneously lowering the victim’s status to balance the books, and reducing their own empathy so they don’t feel bad). Often, this is achieved through anger and contempt, allowing a “s/he deserves it” rationalization.

It’s a case of dogs giving each other bad names, and hanging each other.

The Gilded Cage

The last category of blame management is blame apportioned to the formal and institutionalized relationships within a community, Gesellschaft. Recall how that worked in our counterfactual Golden Ticket example: you blame poor systems and processes and mitigate the blame with “well, at least we learned something, and can improve our processes next time.”

At the center of the Gesellschaft drama is the institution itself, with its organization charts, line and staff hierarchies, defined systems and processes, appeal mechanisms, formal roles and responsibilities, and formal statements of accountability.

In other words, we’re talking paperwork.

One type of paperwork in particular: forms.

You’ve probably heard a piece of cynical wisdom: the purpose of a form is not to serve the person who submits it, but to protect the person who processes it.

Beneath that piece of wisdom is a whole can of worms.

Let’s take a look at how it works, in the episode where Holly, Michael’s Clueless love interest within the HR staff hierarchy, administers an ethics seminar to the employees.  Holly, marginally less Clueless than Michael, tries to merely go through the motions, but Michael convinces her to take it more seriously. So naturally, they manage to screw up the due process theater and accidentally uncover an actual ethics violation: Meredith trading sexual favors for supplier discounts.

Out of a misguided sense of sincerity, she reports the discovery, and is promptly summoned to a conference call by an HR staff Sociopath, Kendall, along with Michael.

 Kendall: Listen, Holly, Michael, I just got the report that your branch submitted, and there’s a lot of stuff about a relationship Meredith is having with…

Holly: Yes, that came out during the ethics seminar.

Michael: Let the record show that it was during the immunity part of the seminar ["immunity" being an unenforceable Michael improvisation]

Kendall [ignoring Michael's remark]: Well, I’m not sure these circumstances warrant any action.

Holly: Oh, I think it is pretty clear that it was unethical.

Kendall: Well, from what I can gather it seems like a gray area…Look, to be honest the company is getting a discount at a tough time in our balance sheet and I don’t know that the right thing to do for the company is to turn our noses up at that.

Holly: Umm, Kendall, I understand that the discount is good for the company but I’m just not happy about the way we are getting it.

Kendall: I thought it was clear with you, Holly. Your task was to get signatures from the employees showing that they completed the training.

Holly: No, I understand.

Kendall: Every other branch has managed to get this to us, so if it’s not something you can handle, then that’s a different discussion.

Holly: No. I can do it.

Kendall: Good.

There are several features to observe here.

First, as Holly finally gets at the end of the conversation, she must not exhibit any autonomy in executing the process. There is no room for exercising her own judgment or discretion. There is no autocrat in sight, but her orders are autocratic.  She is not being managed by gentle suggestion: she has been issued direct orders. When she deviates, she is reined in with a thinly veiled threat.

Second, there is a clear legalist distinction between on-the-record and off-the-record parts of the process, and an expectation that the latter will hew to the needs of the former: the formal record must be above reproach, and equivocation must be practiced in everything said before untrusted people (which, for Sociopaths, is everybody else).

Even Michael is aware of the on-the-record/off-the-record distinction, though he doesn’t understand how it works. Kendall’s caution is evident even under these extreme circumstances: his line “I’m not sure these circumstances warrant any action” is a cue for Michael and Holly to get the script back on track. Only when that cue fails does he make the one potentially indefensible remark, with the “to be honest…” preface.

Why, in our era of soft, empathetic, positive-psychology management-by-objectives, do we still have people like Holly, bound by rigid rules? What happened to employee empowerment? How are such direct “orders” successfully issued without inciting rebellion and mutiny?

In the disembodied voice of Kendall, we’ve encountered the shadowy background part of the organization: the staff hierarchy. Otherwise known as the bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy

The risk-management work of an organization can be divided into two parts: the unpredictable part that is the responsibility of the line hierarchy, and the predictable, repetitive part that is the responsibility of the staff hierarchy.

The predictability allows Sociopaths to automate much of the HIWTYL risk-management they need. Instead of having to expend effort executing Hanlon Dodge maneuvers, putting on justification theaters or engineering divide-and-conquer situations, they program the organization to act in those ways by installing bureaucracy-ware.

Bureaucracies are structures designed to do certain things very efficiently and competently: those that are by default in the best interests of the Sociopaths.

They are also designed to do certain things incompetently: those expensive things that the organization is expected to do, but would cut into Sociopath profits if actually done right.

And finally, they are designed to obstruct, delay and generally kill things that might hurt the interests of the Sociopaths.

All three functions are evident in the Kendall-Holly-Michael episode. Desirable things are enabled and expedited (the advantageous discount). Expensive and expected functions are paid lip service (ethics). And things that might actually hurt (the “employee immunity” idea from Michael) are killed. The employee immunity idea is actually quite logical (and is employed in the criminal justice system for example), but is not in the interests of Sociopaths in this case.

Sociopaths design the system this way because they are only interested in building an organization that lasts long enough to extract the easy value from whatever market opportunity motivated its formation.  Expensive investments that will not pay off before the organization hits diminishing returns are not made (it is revealing that the longest-lived businesses are family-owned — Sociopaths have an incentive to think long term if they intend to pass the business on to their progeny).

The bureaucracy achieves its autocratic moral authority via an abstraction called the rule of law. Its emergent personality is Clueless by design. It is designed to fail in ways that achieve unspoken Sociopath intentions, while allowing them to claim the nobler explicit intentions enshrined in the law.

But this only works if the members of the hierarchy actually play along. If they display any sign of autonomy, a precedent is set: human discretion can over-ride the rule of law. This puts the human stewards above the law, and makes them culpable when their decisions go wrong. “I was just doing my job” or “I don’t make the rules” is not a defense if you have a history of deciding what your job actually is, and selectively breaking or bending rules.

So what happens when the rules dictate clearly inappropriate responses to specific situations?

The on-paper solution is the right to appeal decisions or trigger exceptions. This solution is designed to work in exactly one case, and fail in all others. The cases that get through in a timely manner are those that would benefits the Sociopaths. For those that don’t, the specific case is generally killed by the delay inherent in a converging appeals bottleneck. Future instances are handled by adding complicated exception clauses to the laws in the “designed to fail” ways we saw before. As a friend once remarked, tax law is complex for a reason: its primary purpose is to catalyze the growth of complicated exception-handling on top of an apparently simple percentage calculation.

As an added benefit, this means that over time, the “law” gets increasingly burdened with byzantine complexity. It becomes progressively more error-prone and arbitrary. As it grows, the scheme evolves beyond the comprehension of even the individuals within it, making it progressively easier to get the members to play along. An enlightened bureaucrat might conceivably challenge a relatively simple form and attempt to exercise cautious amounts of discretion. A bureaucrat in charge of a truly byzantine process will likely be too confused and intimidated to challenge it (especially in modern IT-enabled bureaucracies, that are literally automated decision-rules systems run on computers, with only a few bewildered humans babysitting the beast).

There are only three ways to get a bureaucracy to do anything it wasn’t designed to do: by stealth, with secret and deniable support from allies in the staff hierarchy, by getting air-cover from a sufficiently high-up Sociopath who can play poker with whichever oversubscribed Sociopath is in charge of exception-handling for the specific process (i.e., jumping the appeals queue and calling in favors to ensure the required ruling), or through corruption and bribery.

Returning to our overall theme of HIWTYL blame management, how does this scheme of things mitigate blame and shift it to safer places?

You simply blame the Clueless-by-design “system.” You shake your head at its irrationality and slowness. You marvel at how it actually grows more byzantine and complex as it ages. You go from blaming the insiders for malicious pettiness in a young bureaucracy, to blaming them for being dumb cogs in mature ones. You periodically attempt to “reform” it through means that only ensure it gets worse (adding complexity).

Controlling the beast are the staff Sociopaths at the top, who program it, the Clueless petty bureaucrats or priests in the middle, and the staff Losers at the bottom. Staff losers are even more checked out and disengaged than the line Losers, since their entire function is to serve in a non-productive, passive-aggressive role on the one hand, and a menial, procedural role in aid of Sociopath intentions on the other. It is not a role that attracts people looking for even a little meaning in life.

Overall though, the staff hierarchy is subservient to the line hierarchy. Staff Sociopaths are lazier than line Sociopaths — they seek rents rather than the higher returns of active Sociopathy. Historically, this laziness was deliberately manufactured by line Sociopaths: emperors working through eunuchs, slave-soldiers, celibate priesthoods, and other asexual and estranged-from-family types who could be relied on not to look out for their kin (historically, the biggest challenge to Sociopaths has been kinship loyalties in the relatively autonomous line organizations, so they have always sought to stamp it out in the staff organizations that they control more directly). The vaguely asexual and androgynous character of Gabe — a staff enforcer for the CEO — is not an accident.

We are now done with the three-way partitioning and mitigation of blame. Let’s take stock.

The Burden of Organizational Sins

Putting the whole picture together, you have a story of risk-management with systematic HIWTYLing of the rewards and penalties earned. Blame is partitioned among the individual Clueless (via Hanlon Dodges), Loser Culture (Gemeinschaft via divide-and-conquer) and the designed-to-fail bureaucracy (Gesellschaft).

The degree of complicity in this state of affairs varies: the Sociopaths are highly complicit, but are able to deny almost all of the complicity, theirs is the best HIWTYL bargain.

The Losers are trapped into complicity in the process of divide-and-conquer moves, and are not in a position to completely deny their complicity, except to themselves. As we will see next time, they’ve been hustled in this specific way for a reason.

The Clueless are the least complicit in terms of actual intentions, and are put within systems that are designed to protect them using their own cluelessness. They do try their own HIWTYL behaviors, but generally fail. Others need to do their HIWTYLing for them, for their own good.

While some get better HIWTYL deals than others, the blame management scheme overall is designed to be fundamentally leaky and non-zero-sum, with most of the blame draining away as unaccounted-for sins, turning into invisible organizational dark matter.

But there are visible signs of this accumulating dark matter:

1. Gradually decreasing morale (Loser social capital) as divide-and-conquer moves accumulate
2. The incompetence of the Clueless being gradually reinforced, making them decline rather than grow as human beings
3. The organization itself gradually turning into an incomprehensible, byzantine and increasingly error-prone maze, as it pretends to evolve and self-correct.
4. Systems and processes clogged with delayed exceptions, awaiting the attention of the Sociopaths at the top, who handle them with one eye on the residual value remaining to be harvested, trading expedited favorable decisions with other Sociopaths who need their exceptions to jump the queue.

While the value being realized is in an increasing-returns phase, the Sociopaths conscientiously handle exceptions to make the extraction more efficient. As the value declines, they gradually start cashing out, let exceptions pile up, and allow the organization to die.

And so the organization starts to die for our sins. Invisible, unaccounted-for sins accumulating as dark matter somewhere.

And where there is an accumulated burden of our sins to be borne, we should expect to find a Messiah figure.

Which brings us to Toby, part rent-seeking staff Sociopath, part Incompetent Messiah and redeemer, the only son of a loving God, sent to protect the Clueless, forgive the penitent Losers and punish the unrepentant ones.

Of course, since the Messiah will have been sent to us by Chancellor Entropy, he must suffer torture and agonies, but fail to actually redeem us.

And we will finally get to the most basic question of all: what does it feel like to be a Sociopath? What is it like, in Section B, Room B, waiting for Godot? What are we to make of the fates of Ryan, Jan and David Wallace (increasing degrees of madness, if you’ve seen the show).

To explain their stories, we will need to go beyond the loving God of the Losers and Clueless. We will need to deal with an entire pantheon of gods: angry ones, malicious ones, apathetic ones, and ones that look suspiciously like devils.

We will also explain what actually happens to the organizational dark matter when the organization dies.

The booga-booga will end, I promise. I just need a little more time so I can also produce and inflict an ebook on you while I still have your attention. It will be packed with some worthless ebook-exclusive extra features.

Note: With this episode, I’ve finally decided: the terms Loser, Sociopath and Clueless in the GP sense are to be capitalized.

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A quick heads-up on a couple of off-site items. First, I just signed on as a contributor at Forbes, and booted-up my new blog there, on technology issues. I’ve posted two pieces in two days (I don’t plan to maintain a daily-posting schedule, but I felt Steve Jobs’ passing deserves a reaction on any technology blog).

• Oct 6: We Are All Macs Now
• Oct 5: The Electric Leviathan

You’ll see some familiar ribbonfarm themes evolve in more focused ways on Forbes.  I am hoping to keep up a weekly schedule of posts there. They will be on the shorter side (for me). I’ll be aiming for 1000-1200 words at most, probably fewer.

Hope to see you in the comments there.

Second, the video of my talk on the Gervais Principle is now available on the Economist site. Now that I am writing in so many different places (here, the Tempo blog, the Be Slightly Evil list, occasional high-effort Quora answers, Information Week and now Forbes), I think I need to figure out some sort of roundup strategy. I’ll see what I can do. Perhaps a monthly roundup?

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For most of the last decade, Israeli soldiers have been making the transition back to civilian life after their compulsory military service  by going on a drug-dazed recovery trip to India, where an invisible stream of modern global culture runs from the beaches of Goa to the mountains of Himachal Pradesh in the north.  While most of the Israelis eventually return home after a year or so, many have stayed as permanent expat stewards of the stream. The Israeli military stream is changing course these days, and starting to flow through Thailand, where the same pattern of drug-use and conflict with the locals is being repeated.

This pattern of movement among young Israelis is an example of what I’ve started calling a stream. A stream is not a migration pattern, travel in the usual sense, or a consequence of specific kinds of work that require travel (such as seafaring or diplomacy). It is a sort of slow, life-long communal nomadism, enabled by globalization and a sense of shared transnational social identity within a small population.

I’ve been getting increasingly curious about such streams. I have come to believe that though small in terms of absolute numbers (my estimate is between 20-25 million worldwide), the stream citizenry of the world shapes the course of globalization. In fact, it would not be unreasonable to say that streams provide the indirect staffing for the processes of modern technology-driven globalization. They are therefore a distinctly modern phenomenon, not to be confused with earlier mobile populations they may partly resemble.

Stream Citizenship

Stream citizens are not global citizens (a vacuous high-modernist concept that is as culturally anemic as the UN). Their social identities are far narrower and richer. They are (undeclared) stream citizens, whose identities derive from their slow journey across the world.

But the individualist, existential notion of nomadism that I wrote about in On Being an Illegible Person does not apply. In particular, stream citizens are not necessarily nomadic in literal ways (such as living out of cars, boats or mobile homes). They may buy or rent property, accumulate material possessions, and so forth.

Streams are highly sociable collectives, not individuals. The stream itself may be illegible on a map of nation-states, but individuals within it are fairly legible at least to fellow citizens within the same stream. In this sense, streams are like David Hackett Fischer’s folkways. Unlike folkways, streams use geographic movement to structure themselves internally. You could also apply the John Hagel model in The Power of Pull and think of traditional folkways as “stock” folkways and streams as “flow” folkways. The running example in the book (global surfer culture) is not quite a stream, however.

The argument for a distinct new construct, the stream, is not based on a single clear criterion that separates it from other kinds of population movements. Instead, we have a distinctive pattern of deviations from other kinds of population movements.

I have a few examples in mind (such as the Israeli one), but to avoid the dangers of over-fitting, I’ll characterize the idea of the stream via a dozen abstract features, and follow it up with a very primitive and sketchy “world stream map,” without trying to describe specific streams in these abstract terms.

1. Distinct social identity: Streams possess a unique and distinct social identity, unlike more inchoate movements that may share some of the features of streams.  Unlike rite-of-passage travel patterns though (such as “karma-trekkers”), they tend not to have named, brand-like identities. Instead, they have unmistakeable, but implicit identities.
2. Partial subsumption: Streams subsume the lives of their citizens more strongly than more diffuse population movements, but less strongly than focused intentional communities like the global surfing community. There is a great deal more variety and individual variation. In particular, there is no solidarity around grand ideologies in the sense of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.  In this, streams differ from nation-states, even though they provide something of an alternative organizational scheme. Not only is the subsumption at about a middling level at any given point in time, it varies in intensity throughout life, being particularly weak early and late in life.
3. Voluntary slowness: a stream is a pattern of movement where individual movements take place over years or decades, spanning entire development life stages. Unlike a decade-long limbo state imposed by (say) waiting for an American green card, which has individuals impatient to get the process over with and “settle down” in either a new home, or return to an old one, stream citizens don’t experience their state as a limbo state. They are always “home.” Being a relatively new phenomenon, there are no streams that are life-encompassing as yet. But I believe those will emerge — distinctive cradle-t0-grave geographic journeys.
4. Exclusionary communality: streams provide a great deal of social support to those who are eligible to join and choose to do so, but are highly exclusionary with respect to very traditional variables like race, ethnicity and gender. The exclusionary nature of streams is not self-adopted, but a consequence of the fact that streams pass through multiple host cultures.  A shared social identity in one host culture may splinter in another, while distinct ones may be conflated in unwanted ways.  So only relatively tightly-circumscribed social identities can survive these forces intact. I am really tempted to illustrate this particular point with examples, but I’ll leave it as an abstraction.
5. Distinct economic identity: unlike commercial travel that is part of broader economic activity (such as sea-faring), or non-commercial travel (such as tourism), streams tend to be at least partially self-sustaining within every host culture that they pass through. This partial self-sustainability often involves patterns of global commercial activity that lends money a different meaning within the stream. So even though streams don’t issue currencies, and merely borrow the economic apparatus of their host cultures, the money behaves in very different ways while it is circulating within the stream.
6. Non-tribal: Streams are not completely self-sufficient though, in the sense of segmentary tribes.  This is a crucial distinction from nomads or barbarians in the classical sense. They do not seek to form bonds of mechanical solidarity with other streams. Instead they seek to form fairly strong bonds of organic solidarity (mutual interdependence) with host cultures.
7. Vorticity: Streams contain higher-tempo patterns of travel among the waypoints, especially to old “home” bases, due to obligations and attachments inherited from pre-stream home cultures.
8. Partial self-absorption: stream citizens are not very interested in the host cultures they pass through except to the extent of maintaining economic and practical relationships. There is no sense of being on the periphery, looking on with longing at the action at the center. There is no oppressive sense of being trapped in a diaspora-ghetto.
9. Relative poverty: unlike the global jet-setting (think Davos) elite, streams are generally impoverished. In fact a great deal of the motivation for living in a stream is to leverage limited means. But this does not mean we are only talking about lifestyle-designing Internet marketers in Bali. We are also talking about migrant labor from Asia to the Middle East that starts with a “let me save money working in construction in Dubai for a few years” motivation, but ends up extending to a whole lifetime.
10. High adaptability: Unlike nomads who carry their lives around with them, creating tiny shells of reassuring familiarity around themselves, stream citizens behave more like hermit crabs. They cobble together the necessities of life — shelter, income, patterns of diet and exercise — from whatever is around them. Stream citizens eat Chinese food in China and Thai food in Thailand, not because they are particularly curious about local cuisines, but because the sustainability of the stream lifestyle is based in part on such adaptation. Nostalgia is weak for stream citizens, as is the faraway-home/near-exotic sense of alienation from surrounding. Stream citizens are both home and abroad at the same time.
11. Direct connection to globalization: In a sense, the notion of “stream” I am trying to construct is a generalization of the Internet-enabled lifestyle designer, which I think is much too narrow. But streams are definitely a modern phenomenon, and owe their capacity for stable existence to some connection with the infrastructure of globalization. The Internet is the major one for the creative class, but anything from container shipping to the Chimerica manufacturing trade to the globalized high-rise construciton industry qualifies.
    
12. Lack of an arrival dynamic: this is perhaps the most important feature. There is no sense of anticipation of an “arrival” event  such as getting an American green card, after which “real” life can begin. There is a wherever you go, there you are indifference to rootedness. This psychological shift is the central individual act. By abandoning arrival-based frames, stream citizens free themselves from yearning for geographically rooted forms of social identity.

The Scale and Impact of Streams

In terms of sheer numbers, global migration does not seem to be a very powerful force. In World 3.0, Pankaj Ghemawat notes that only about 3% of the world’s population comprises first-generation immigrants. Over 90% of the world’s population will never leave their home country.

As a small subset of global migration and travel, the total population of stream citizenry is unlikely to exceed about 0.3% of the world population by my estimate (about 20-25 million perhaps). In terms of populations of individual streams, given the level of cultural complexity I am talking about, you would need between about ten thousand to a million people to create a stream.

This suggests that there are less than a few hundred streams, with perhaps a few lower levels of differentiation into sub-streams and sub-sub-streams. This means a project to catalog and map the streams of the world should not be too hard.

In terms of impact however, I suspect streams are hugely important.  Viewed as a process of increasing global integration on multiple fronts (commodities, money, products, services and people), most fronts of integration are developing painfully slowly. Measured with an appropriate set of metrics, according to Ghemawat, globalization is generally somewhere between 10-30% of its theoretical potential for maximal integration along most fronts.

Human movement is actually one of the least-developed fronts. However, since moving humans is the most efficient way to move ideas, and since ideas are very high-leverage things to move across borders, this slow front is also the highest-impact front. Two African students returning to Eritrea infected with the Y-combinator virus can do more than several container loads of iPads.

Another way to think about the increasing impact of streams is to compare them to their ancestors. Consider the populations that staffed the diffusion of previous waves of technology-driven globalization, such as sailing ships (which created among other archeo-streams, a population of lascars who formed a stream stretching from South Asia to the Caribbean, for several centuries).

Compared to such populations, the modern stream citizenry of the world is much larger. Perhaps an order of magnitude larger. Thanks to the more mature and stable substrate (container shipping is not going away anytime soon for instance), the cultures that take root along patterns of movement are much more robust and fully-formed.

They may lack the romantic transience of older archeo-streams (such as a putative “Silk Road” culture, which may or may not have ever had a distinct identity), but they are a lot more substantial internally.

Stream Mapping

I didn’t try to illustrate the idea of a stream with reference to specific examples because they interact among themselves and with host cultures in such complicated ways. The only meaningful way to understand streams is to start with a more global situation awareness of a sort of “stream map of the world.”

I have no idea how to make one (other than to follow the contours of globalization), so I’ll illustrate the geography to the extent that I’ve traversed it.

The Israeli stream, in its path across India, collides with the Tibetian exile community in Dharamshala, itself a lake created by an older stream of migration that flowed for a few brief years during the 1950s, when the Dalai Lama fled Tibet and landed in India.

Along this route, the Israelis get into fights with the locals, run an underground drug culture and in general recover from their PTSD in the messy ways you might expect.  The modern Israeli stream runs along roughly the same course that, decades ago, played host to the hippies on journeys of self-discovery from Goa to Kathmandu. Ecstasy has replaced LSD, and the culture is a darker, cyberpunk echo of the naive spirituality that marked the questing of the swami-seeking hippies.

Today, the stream is shifting course towards Thailand, as I noted earlier. The Indian branch may dry up, or slow to a trickle. I suspect a branch of the stream continues, post an Israel-return, to America, via high-tech startups founded by friends who perhaps were blooded in combat together, or met in India or Thailand.

Curiously, even though the Israeli stream runs right through Bombay, where I lived for years, I had no idea it existed while I was there.

I learned the story partly from an Israeli anthropologist (from whom I borrowed the term “liminal passage” which I used in Tempo) and partly from a Romanian-born Australian, herself an expat  in Bali, married to a Dutch expat (Indonesia was once a Dutch colony).  The two of them run canoeing tours on Lake Batur for tourists. We’d gotten started on the subject of nomadic expat cultures after I’d asked, rather innocently, if the success of Eat, Pray, Love had had an impact on Bali tourism. “Oh My God!” my guide exploded, “All these annoying American women in their 30s landing here and expecting to find their Argentinian Man!”

Eat, Pray, Love might well be the motif of a new emerging stream, involving older single Western women.  It is probably a gyre rather than a one-way stream, originating in, and returning to, an American home base.

I personally am a product of a one-way migration pattern that matured into a full-blown stream-and-gyre just around the time I joined it.  Post 9/11 and Y2K, as the US economy began slowing down, and the Indian economy began to heat up, increasing numbers of Indians began choosing to inhabit a vague loop between the two countries instead of settling down in one, trying to have their cake and eat it too — the economic opportunities of India and the lifestyle of the US. The first observers of this loop tended to classify them as “global citizens” but I find the term to be pretty non-descriptive of what is actually happening.

The Tibetan community and the India-US stream-gyre are well-known. The Israeli PTSD Stream is less well-known. The Eat-Love-Pray gyre is just starting to mature.

Around the globe, streams slosh about, run into each other, branch, loop, and in general carve out new cultural landscapes within a hydrologically active layer that exists above earlier landscapes.

This is a complicated view of cultural geography. But I bet it could be properly represented on a map. As I said, the number of important streams cannot be more than a few hundred, about comparable to the number of nation states or significant multinational corporations.

Globalization as Liquefaction

This post is really about my dissatisfaction with the static units of analysis for globalization. We are reluctant to embrace more fluid units like streams because they seem so small in terms of population sizes.  It seems wrong to basically ignore the 90% of the world who are never going to venture beyond the borders they were born within.

Yet, I find that it is far easier to understand globalization as a system of such human flows, than it is to understand it in terms of nations, states and multi-national corporations. It is the actions of the 0.3% that will ultimately drive the fates of the 90%. The cultures that play host to streams are starting to see their evolution being driven by the very act of hosting streams. There are entire regions in the Indian state of Kerala for instance, whose culture can only be explained with reference to the gyre that transports Keralites back and forth from the Middle East.

The word globalization itself is a clue.

Globalization signifies an incomplete process, not a state. For a long time I was convinced that there was a bit of semantic confusion somewhere. Why is there a becoming without discernible being states before and after? The reason is that the word globalization works like the word liquefaction. Liquids aren’t a transition from one solid state to another. They are a transition from a fundamentally static state to a fundamentally dynamic one.

The world is not getting flatter, rounder or spikier. It is liquefying. There you go, Thomas Friedman, that’s my modest little challenge to your metaphor.

More seriously, I’d like to get started building a stream map of the World. If you have candidate streams to propose, or some cartographic insights to offer, please do so in the comments.

So far my list includes:

1. The Israeli stream
2. The Indo-US technology stream
3. Eat-Pray-Love
4. Tibetian expats
5. Americans camping out in Eastern Europe for several years
6. Mainland Americans moving to Hawaii to set up what appears to be an economy based entirely on yoga studios
7. Lifestyle designers converging on Thailand and Bali

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I enjoy thinking about chicken-and-egg problems. They lead to a lot of perception-refactoring. Some common examples include:

1. You need relevant experience to get a good job, you need a good job to get relevant experience.
2. You need good credit to get a loan, you need to get loans to develop good credit.
3. You need users to help you build a better product, you need a better product to get users.

This post is about one particular way to solve the problem, using what I call a ubiquity illusion. It is one version of what is colloquially known as the fake-it-till-you-make-it method.

Creating a ubiquity illusion is the most readily available method for solving a chicken-egg problem. It is, to be perfectly honest, not the best method. There are other methods that are superior, but they are generally not available to most people.

Ubiquity illusions are like the sculpture above (The Awakening, by J. Seward Johnson, photograph by Ryan Sandridge, Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution). It is actually five separate pieces strategically buried to give the impression of a much larger buried sculpture, of which three are visible above.

Let’s talk magic.

A Note on Redacted Prescriptions

Last week’s post, The Milo Criterion generated some criticism that I was being uncharacteristically coy, bordering on “concept baiting.” A commenter on Hacker News grumbled that instead of offering “refactored perception” I had basically provided a “redacted prescription.”

I really like the “redacted prescription” phrase, so I am going to steal it.  Instead of completely self-censoring the broader thinking behind last week’s post as I’d originally planned, I’ll offer  bits and pieces of a larger redacted prescription, as and when I am able to carve out relatively uncontroversial chunks. Since I’ll be deliberately withholding key pieces, what comes out is going to look somewhat random and uncorrelated, but each post should make sense as a stand-alone post.

Frankly it’s not just the lean startup world that I don’t want to needlessly antagonize. Other thoughts I am working out are likely to be viewed as me spoiling for a fight with other groups I have no interest in antagonizing.

But there is at least a handful of ideas that I think I can write about without inviting flame wars. This is one such idea.

Slowly, Painfully, Unfairly or Untruthfully

Chicken-egg problems combine a positive-feedback loop problem with a logical paradox involving two primitive categories that form a duality (“chicken” and “egg”).

The first feature implies that there will be an iterative element in the solution.

The second feature implies that somewhere along the way, you’re going to have to question implicit assumptions, frames and definitions of the primitive elements. Like Einstein said, you aren’t going to solve the problem at the same level that you encountered it.

For example, in the job/experience loop, you can question the atomicity of the definition of a “job” (work for pay) by pondering such constructs as unpaid internships that loosen the notion of what a “job” is, allowing you to trigger the positive feedback loop.

Stated in a general form, the chicken-egg problem is: how do you get X, when you need Y to get X, and X to get Y?

There are at least four correct answers:

1. Slowly
2. Painfully
3. Unfairly
4. Untruthfully

Slowly is my favorite answer, and is also the answer to the literal biological question. I am not a biologist, but I assume the chicken-egg reproductive process evolved very slowly and fuzzily from older reproductive processes, until at some point recognizable and differentiated chicken-like and egg-like elements emerged in the positive feedback reproduction loop with some early reptile species. This is my favorite solution.

Painfully is about using money or brute force to hunt for the rare chicken that did not come from an egg, or the rare egg that did not come from a chicken. If you look hard enough, you might find a good job without showing evidence of experience. If you make enough pitches, you might find the one customer willing to make a first-lemming-like leap of faith and adopt a new product without social proof. Many chicken-egg problems that are constructed out of relatively arbitrary primitives (such as the “job” and “experience” pair) are solvable this way if you have enough energy. The more truly atomic the primitive categories are (more like real chickens and eggs), the more painful this process is. This is my least favorite solution. This is also the most widespread solution people attempt.

Unfairly is the cheapest and fastest solution, if it is available. Somebody might just give you a chicken or an egg. Daddy might pull strings and get you a job. You might have incriminating photographs of a banker that allows you to get a loan on suspiciously good terms with no credit or collateral. But not all unfair advantages are sleazy or nepotistic advantages. Included in the general category of unfair advantage is everything that falls under the umbrella term “strategy.” My definition of strategy in Tempo basically boils down to “unfair advantage.” Anything from privileged information to exclusive access to a key distribution channel, to owning the rights to a key invention, counts as an unfair advantage and a basis for strategy. This is my second-choice solution.

Untruthfully, or the fake it till you make it solution, is my third-choice solution, but the one I want to talk about today.

“My clients often ask me…”

If you want your metaphoric t‘s cross and i‘s dotted, the solution we are talking about is: fake the chicken while the egg incubates.

There are many ways to do this, most of them both stupid and illegal. For instance, you could doctor your resume and make up fake letters of recommendation.

A ubiquity illusion is a much more subtle mechanism, and in most cases, is not illegal.

The simplest example is using we to refer to a business that is really just yourself or a partnership of two people. By concealing some information, and enough self-confident copy-writing, you can convey the impression that your business is much bigger than it is.

A slightly smarter example is any sentence that begins: “My clients often ask me….”

Without actually revealing how many clients you have, you’ve conveyed an impression to the gullible that you have a thriving business with many clients, and that the clients are adoringly hanging on your every word and pestering you with questions.

Such statements are often used by struggling new consultants. If you’re like me, you immediately look for some sort of proof behind the bluster, like a page with actual testimonials from a large roster of live clients, or a private email to someone able to verify credentials.

For the record, I’ve closed exactly three paying clients since I went free agent 6 months ago. Not enough that I can legitimately begin any sentence with “my clients often ask me.” At best, I am at the “one of my clients once asked me” point (there is also no “we” to my consulting practice; it’s just me. But on the plus side, if one of you refers just one more client to me, I’ll register a staggering 33% growth in my clientele this quarter).

On the other hand, since this blog is past the chicken-egg phase (I solved the problem “slowly,” as I am now attempting to solve the problem of growing my consulting business), I can quite honestly make many statements that begin “my readers often tell me.”

Not ask me; you guys tell me things a lot more often than you ask me things, and usually, unless I ask a specific question, you tend to email me to tell me I am wrong about something or to educate me on some advanced subtlety that I’ve missed (damn know-it-alls).

Ironically, it is one of the things many readers have told me (genuinely “many” since I’ve lost count) that led me to more subtle ubiquity illusions beyond “my clients often ask me” bravado.

The Three Contacts, Three Media Rule

My favorite question to ask readers is “how did you find ribbonfarm?” It is what passes for market research in this one-horse operation.

About half the time, the answer is “that post about The Office” which makes me groan silently, but the other half of the time, the answer I get is something along these lines:

“I think a friend forwarded some post to me once a while back, but I didn’t really start reading regularly until I was searching for something and one of your posts came up.”

The media often differ — tweets, Facebook, email forwards, party conversations, workplace conversations, Google searches — but the pattern is usually the same: new readers encounter ribbonfarm at least twice in two different ways before turning into regular readers.

In the cases where the two media initially appeared to be the same (for example, two email forwards), it usually turned out that the context differed: one forward from a coworker and one from a family member, for instance. I buy the theory that in social media, the actual media are individual people (the billion-channel marketing theory), so with some overloading, you can call this the two-contacts-two-media rule.

On my 7-week road-trip across the country over the summer meeting readers (you guys clearly aren’t hanging on my every word to the point that you hunt me down and interrupt my life; I have to run around hunting you down, interrupting your lives), I collected many examples of the 2-contacts-2-media rule.

This curious phenomenon reminded me of a classic rule-of-thumb in sales: to “prime” a prospect for a close, you need to first prepare them by engineering three contacts via three media. For example, a face-to-face encounter at a conference, a passing mention in an innocent-seeming email exchange, and perhaps a referral from a friend at a party.

The two vs. three distinction is mostly irrelevant (it has to do with online versus offline dynamics), but the key point is that you’ve got deliberately engineered process that looks like the natural process, resulting in acceleration of a selling process.

Ubiquity Illusions

What you need to fake is ubiquity. Faking ubiquity is about faking social proof.

If something is ubiquitous in a given environment, you will naturally encounter it in somewhat random and uncorrelated situations. The randomness and uncorrelatedness is critical. The Amazon Kindle is a perfect example of a product that spread via genuine ubiquity. After first hearing about it on technology news sites, I didn’t actually buy it until I’d spotted it in the “wild” at a couple of different  coffee shops. I doubt Bezos planted them.

You need the randomness. Seeing a bear at the zoo does not lead you to suspect that bears are common in the area, but seeing one randomly in a public park would lead you to that suspicion.

The multiple encounters must also be uncorrelated. Seeing two bears in the same zoo means nothing. But seeing two bears loose in different city parks will confirm your suspicions that bears are running wild in the area.

The reason ubiquity illusions work is obvious: you are basically gaming human pattern recognition instincts.

In fact in some cases, you don’t even need to run around planting fake random-and-uncorrelated signs in the environment. Since ubiquity usually goes along with oversubscription of the producer of the ubiquity, you can get away with just planting signs of oversubscription. Ubiquity illusions and oversubscription illusions are two sides of the same coin.

• Get people to call you while you are meeting a new client.
• Plant a few friends at a party and walk around graciously shaking hands, faking Big Man on Campus.
• Pay people to stand in a line outside your new coffee shop.
• “Accidentally” flash a view of your packed calendar while setting up your laptop for a presentation.
• Run an artificial-scarcity beta-invite process for your new software product.

Of the two approaches, I prefer ubiquity illusions. They are harder to manufacture than oversubscription illusions, but are more robust, adaptable to many marketing situations, and the actions you need to take are closer in spirit to slow, natural diffusion.

Suggesting Deep Structure

The basic three-contacts-three-media approach is enough to create a basic illusion of abundance, but there is a reason this particular technique is usually restricted to sales operations. It just inflates your apparent size in limited ways.

This is a case of sales doing a very limited amount of local marketing.

To go beyond the basics, you need to think about what ubiquity illusions look like from the point of view of the subject of such an illusion. I’ll stick to the special case of growing markets for products and leave other chicken-egg problems like job hunting and getting loans for you to figure out on your own.

The key is to use the random-and-uncorrelated evidence from the basic ubiquity illusion to suggest deeper structure. Make them slightly less random and more correlated to suggest something other than a diffuse sense of larger size.

In the case of the sculpture, The Awakening, if you are looking from sufficiently far away, you’ll immediately manufacture the theory that there is a buried statue, with only the head, hands and feet showing. In other words, given apparently random and uncorrelated perceptions relating to the same thing, we try to manufacture the simplest theory that can connect them.

This tendency to theorize is susceptible to suggestion. In particular, it is particularly susceptible to suggestions of archetypal superhuman agency. In other words, our tendency to see mysterious gods in randomness.

A classic example (which I think I first read about in Schelling’s Micromotives and Macrobehavior) is a strategy used by highway police to enforce speed limits.

In the contest between speeding drivers and a small police force, the latter are at a serious numerical disadvantage. They cannot be everywhere at once or catch and ticket every speeding driver.

Random enforcement is also insufficient, since encounters with pulled-over vehicles might be too rare to reinforce a fear of speeding.

One strategy that works is a concentrated, unpredictable and very visible enforcement drive in a few locations. By issuing a burst of speeding tickets over a few days in a very visible way, you can reinforce a reluctance to speed in a large population. A reluctance that will likely persist until your next (unpredictable) burst of reinforcement. You have manufactured a very specific kind of ubiquity illusion: that you could be waiting to pounce anywhere, anytime. Or more precisely, that you can be anywhere, anytime, with a much higher probability than you actually are (geek aside: I vaguely recall a bunch of machine-learning papers about techniques to speed up learning algorithms using such deliberate bias in the training inputs)

Drivers overestimate the likelihood of getting caught, and behave as though the police were anywhere/anytime superheroes.

I don’t know if cops add this twist: for the illusion to be really effective, they shouldn’t restrict such isolated enforcement efforts to predictable locations like busy highways. They should also target medium and low traffic locations, suggesting that they have enough numbers to even cover unimportant, low-traffic locations.

Ghosts, Godfathers and Gorillas

The traffic-enforcement case is an example of what I call the ghost archetype.  You’ve signaled a deep structure: a ghostly ability to strike anywhere, anytime. Guerillas also practice this model.

Another archetype you can project is the Godfather archetype.  Here you create an illusion of a vast hidden capacity for influence by projecting varied and indirect signs all over the place. Where a pulled-over car is basically the same scene everywhere, with the agent (the cop) being directly visible, the actions of a Godfather are varied and indirect.

Consider the typical signs of mafia activity in a city (and here I have to rely on movies and The Sopranos). In criminal prosecutions, you have key witnesses in prosecutions suddenly recanting testimony, judges who you thought were inclining in your favor mysteriously changing their tune, key evidence disappearing.  More broadly, in a city, you have suspiciously profitable restaurants and strangely counter-intuitive business dynamics in sectors like construction or garbage collection.

Unlike the ghost illusion, which is basically one-dimensional, a Godfather illusion suggests a complex, highly intelligent, and powerful hidden entity orchestrating affairs in hidden ways, with a capacity to influence anything, anywhere, even in places you thought were out of reach.

The scene in the Godfather movie where the movie producer finds the severed head of his favorite horse on his bed is a great illustration. The poor producer had his false sense of security shattered: the mafia was capable of reaching deep into his privileged upper-class life. It wasn’t just about street thuggery.

Besides mafia dons, others who project Godfather illusions include anyone projecting a Big Man on Campus, It Girl or Cool New Kid on the Block presence is an example of the Godfather illusion.

“Hot” Silicon Valley startups that have everybody crazily scrambling for beta invites are an example. The beta invite infrastructure is just the tip of the iceberg of perception management activity.  You can orchestrate an entire illusion of hidden connections, powerful people trying to get in early, and hidden mystery that not everybody is privy to. For the special case of the Cool New Kid on the Block, you can signal an “enigmatic arrival” by concentrating the hype buildup in time. The sign that you are succeeding is the comment, “hey, lately I’ve been hearing about you everywhere.”

It’s happened to me without orchestration on a couple of occasions, but the effect can be precisely engineered. The game of doing this engineering is known as PR. PR people are the special forces in the world of marketing.

Finally, a third major archetype is the Gorilla.

Here, you don’t convey the “can be anywhere/anytime” illusion (ghosts) or “hidden and intelligent power structure of unknown reach” illusion (Godfather). You simply convey sheer, overwhelming size. You are everywhere, all the time.

In particular, you try to not convey intelligence. In fact, you attempt to convey an impression of slightly blundering stupidity.

The classic symptom is use of the phrase 800 lb Gorilla. The key tactic in achieving this is local and visible homogeneous saturation. The homogeneity is what conveys the impression of slight stupidity: it suggests you have so much power you don’t have to be particularly thoughtful about how you spend it.

A great example is TD Bank. When I set up a business bank account, I did some online research that showed that TD Bank was generally well regarded by small business owners. Driving around on the East Coast, I found TD Bank ATMs and branches all over the place. Their slogan, America’s Most Convenient Bank added to the illusion of ubiquity. So I signed up.

Then I moved out West to Nevada and discovered that TD Bank is merely the most convenient bank in the North East with almost no presence elsewhere. By saturating one market in a very visible and homogeneous way, and with an exaggeration in their slogan, they managed to convince me that it would be a good bank to go with, nationally. Unfortunately, I didn’t bother to check their nationwide branch distribution. Fortunately, they are still a pretty convenient bank for me since I mostly need online banking. I am not too annoyed by them, since it was partly my fault for not doing more research.

The study of ubiquity illusion archetypes is fascinating and you can spend hours archetype-spotting. The three major ones, ghosts, godfathers and gorillas, are just three relatively obvious ones.  You can spot these, and other species, everywhere. I’ll just point out one particularly rich source of ubiquity archetype examples, the recent Christopher Nolan Batman movies:

1. Wayne Enterprises (good 800lb Gorilla)
2. Commissioner Gordon (good Godfather)
3. Batman (good Ghost),
4. Ras al Ghul (evil 800lb Gorilla)
5. The Mob (bad Godfather)
6. The Joker (bad Ghost)

A little genealogical note: the modern Gorilla/Godfather/Ghost trinity is descended from medieval political structure (roughly, Robin Hood/Sheriff of Nottingham/King).

Is this post a ubiquity illusion?

In the Hacker News thread about the Milo Criterion, another commenter wrote: “I can’t help if there isn’t something meta going on, slow marketing and all.”

With this post, I am sure you are going to start entertaining the suspicion that my “slow marketing” phrase is itself a ubiquity illusion; me pretending there are deeper and more radical ideas here, behind a “redacted prescription,” than I am letting on.

Am I faking it?

Hee hee hee! (that’s my slightly evil laugh)…

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There is a saying that goes back to Milo of Croton: lift a calf everyday and when you grow up, you can lift a cow. The story goes that Milo, a famous wrestler in ancient Greece, gained his immense strength by lifting a newborn calf one day when he was a boy, and then lifting it every day as it grew. In a few years, he was able to lift the grown cow. The calf grew into a cow at about the rate that Milo grew  into a man. A rather freakish man apparently, since grown cows can weigh over  1000 lb.  The point is, the calf grew old along with the boy.

I have been pondering this story for a couple of years, and it has led me to a very fertile idea about product design and entrepreneurship.

I call it the Milo Criterion: products must mature no faster than the rate at which users can adapt. Call that ideal maximum rate the Milo rate.

It seems like a simple and almost tautological thought, but it leads to some subversive consequences, which is one reason I have been reluctant to talk about it. The most subversive effect is that it has led me to abandon lean startup theory, which is now orthodoxy in the startup world.

As a consequence, I have mostly abandoned notions like product-market-fit, minimum viable product, pivots and the core value of “lean.”  I only use the terms to communicate with people who think in those terms.  And I can’t communicate very much within that vocabulary.

Physical Products and Services

Commercial airline travel is an example of a service product that satisfied the Milo Criterion during its evolution. In the early days, the user experience was not very different from riding a train or bus. Airport designers modeled their early efforts on railroad stations leading to familiar experience for early air travelers.

But modern air travel, which has evolved over nearly a century, is a very different complex of behaviors that has drifted far from bus and train travel. Just look at the enormous number of complex behaviors we’ve learned:

1. Checking in (online and off)
2. Security checks and rules about carrying liquids
3. Gates and air-bridges that look nothing like railroad stations
4. Checked baggage and hand baggage rules
5. Seat belts and rules about staying seated at certain times
6. Baggage carousels for retrieving luggage
7. Dealing with layovers
8. Online bidding for cheap ticket deals
9. Airport parking and car rental options
10. Duty-free shopping
11. Visas, passports, immigration, customs
12. Rules about when you can use electronic devices

We’ve been able to get this far successfully because we took our time. By a happy coincidence, the physical constraints of the technology limited the rate at which airline travel could evolve.

Another example is driving, which is estimated to involve close to 1500 separate sub-skills. It took us about a century to get to modern driving, GPS, zipcars and all, starting with horse-drawn carriages.

This sort of long evolution trajectory is generally the case for physical products and services. They are naturally rate-limited by a variety of factors, so they tend to evolve and mature in ways that naturally satisfy the Milo Criterion.

Web Products

Thanks to the lack of physical constraints, Web products can go from paper napkin to fully realized vision in months rather than decades.  They can evolve at rates that far exceed the Milo rate.

It takes decades to build out airline infrastructure in a country. Even the Chinese government cannot move arbitrarily fast.

For Web products though, there appear to be no real limits, other than typing speed, to how fast  you can build things. And thanks to certain pathological externalities, they perversely go as fast as they can. In fact going faster and faster has become the motto of the sector.

Successful Web products do seem to satisfy the Milo criterion though. I tried applying the criterion to a whole bunch of products, and it turns out to be a pretty reliable way to sort the two classes. Google Wave fails the criterion. Google+ satisfies it.

The criterion seems to be descriptive. Is it prescriptive?

Consider modern software development. A set of behaviors have emerged in the last decade that appear to increase the success rate of Web products:

1. Starting small and simple
2. Building, testing and iterating rapidly
3. Testing with active users as frequently as possible, starting as early as possible

It is important to note that these principles were discovered bottom-up by the practitioners, rather than prescribed top-down by the theorists. Theoretical codification followed rather than led. So it is possible to criticize the theories while accepting the empirically validated practices.

I have come to believe that much of the theorizing about why these methods work is mostly noise.  These theories — including lean startup theory — are mostly a set of just-so explanations that serve to motivate practically effective behaviors, the way religions motivate moral behavior.

So even though the theories lead to the diffusion of useful behaviors, the flaws limit their potential.

I won’t attempt a full critique here but offer a basic axiom for an alternative theory:

The primary reason these behaviors are effective is that they slow down the process of software development and maintain the optimal behavior modification rate for humans.

In other words, the Milo Criterion is not just descriptive. It is prescriptive.  It is the dominant dynamic for successful products.

It leads to alternative explanations for why the effective practices work. It leads to building blocks that are different from the ones recommended by lean startup theory.

In fact it is a pretty fertile starting point for a whole different approach to thinking about entrepreneurship and product development. I’ve been developing these ideas, mostly in private, and applying them to my own business decisions.

Slow Marketing

I don’t like being cryptic, but in this case, I am not going to elaborate further (at least not right now) because the very thought of the tedious and potentially acrimonious arguments that might result is enough to turn me off. I don’t have enough skin in the game to make it worthwhile. Perhaps I am getting old and conflict-averse.

So I am not going to share my explanations or alternative building blocks. In fact, I deleted a couple of much longer draft posts, something I rarely do, since I hate wasting writing effort.

I wrote this post primarily as a way of saying hello to others who might already be thinking along the same lines I am. If you are, chances are the Milo Criterion will spark some productive thinking for you. If not, at least you learned the story of Milo of Croton, for use at cocktail parties.

I will share one more clue: I’ve started calling my developing theory slow marketing. Read into that what you will.

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