How To Break Anything

Russell Kirsch says he’s sorry.

More than 50 years ago, Kirsch took a picture of his infant son and scanned it into a computer. It was the first digital image: a grainy, black-and-white baby picture that literally changed the way we view the world. With it, the smoothness of images captured on film was shattered to bits.

The square pixel became the norm, thanks in part to Kirsch, and the world got a little bit rougher around the edges.

Yet science is still grappling with the limits set by the square pixel.

“Squares was the logical thing to do,” Kirsch says. “Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility … but we used squares. It was something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since.”

I read this as “____ was the logical thing to do. Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility … but we used _____."

I'll elaborate on how the idea of "the logical thing to do" relates to control/decentralization/self vs human interest by beginning with an excerpt from TechCrunch's take on the potential implications of/reactions to Google Me:

This obviously has the potential to be huge, and Facebook needs a strong competitor. But even if Google has an amazing site in the pipeline, creating the next Facebook is going to be easier said than done — nearly 500 million people already have their content stored on Facebook, and despite what Facebook has claimed about being open, I doubt they’ll make it easy for anyone to jump into the arms of a competitor.

The logical business move for an organization like Facebook, facing the threat of a competitor drawing from their user base, is to implement measures that make it less worthwhile for users to switch. Or, more directly, make it difficult for other competitors to draw followers in.

(This happens all the time in the tech/digital/social world, of course; while grabbing the above link from TechCrunch, I saw the following in their "Featured Articles" section: Twitpic Blocks Posterous’ Import Tool; Out Come The Lawyers)

What Kirsch above is apologizing for is that in the human-wide interest of future development, a standard was set without the foresight of understanding how that standard would actually impact future development.

I'm of the mind that given our limited capacity for calculating that impact, there's really nothing to apologize for in this case. Contrast this to the tech control battles, which are a matter of self-interest. Tim O'Reilly comments on this below, in a discussion of the Internet of Things:

"You see increasingly the giants of the internet are trading for their own account, they are building a platform in which all roads lead back to themselves. Now there is a contervailing force for openess, but we have to wary, we have to be aware of that, we have to work for openess in that web."

It's an expression of our natural human short-sightededness, to measure 'success' as a reflection of 'control'; that is to say it's natural for us to think that if your platform controls more users, your platform is 'successful'. This notion of "success through control" has of course been reflected time and again ever since humans began fighting each other over the control of resources.

The key question to ask has always been that of the degree of efficiency allowed by centralized control versus the degree of efficiency allowed by distributed openness.

Returning to the "___ is the logical thing to do": centralizing resources is not the only possibility, but it is the one that makes logical sense in the immediate-term. In fact, for a good amount of human history, going to war in an attempt to centralize resources could be argued as the better of the two options in the key question just highlighted. But in a new world where advanced communication networks allow for an exponentially greater degree of efficiency allowed by decentralization (especially in the long-term), I'm not so sure control is the right answer anymore.

For every idea you come up with, there are probably ten other people in the world executing that same idea.

I tend not to worry about people stealing my ideas.

One of the things that has developed this attitude over the years is the above thought, expressed today by Michael Karnjanaprakorn.

The other thing that has helped is something that's crossed my mind more recently, and it's about the concept of the perfect idea:

It doesn't exist.

We tend to approach life like this:

"All I need to do is think of the perfect, groundbreaking idea. Then I can execute on it. Riches, profits, fame shortly after."

That's backwards, actually. Nothing great in the world has ever started with a perfect, unchanging idea.

Ideas evolve, and they grow. Also, ideas need air to grow - they only develop when shared.

There's a third concept as well now that I think of it:

Ideas aren't valuable - being able to generate ideas is valuable. If you truly have a good idea, then it is merely an extension of the fact that you have an infinite supply of truly good ideas.

On the other hand, if you're holding on to that one, perfect idea, you've got a bigger problem than someone stealing it: it's your only one.

I feel pretty depressed every time I watch people flip out about the dangers of talking to strangers. Strangers helped me become who I was. Strangers taught me about a different world than what I knew in my small town. Strangers allowed me to see from a different perspective. Strangers introduced me to academia, gender theory, Ivy League colleges, the politics of war, etc. So I hate how we vilify all strangers as inherently bad. Did I meet some sketchballs on the Internet when I was a teen? DEFINITELY. They were weird; I moved on.

Danah Boyd on ChatRoulette, above.

In addition to being about control of our identity, privacy is about protecting ourselves from strangers.

To which I have a similar reaction as Danah's here:

"I’m still not sure what to say except that I feel this weighted sense of Le Sigh. The same mix of depression and exhaustion I felt this morning when I was playing peek-a-boo with a smiley child in an airport and her parents whisked her away, glaring at me as though I was the devil incarnate. I realize that many parents think that they’re doing good by their kids when they choose to limit their exposure to the randomness of the world, but it just makes me deeply deeply sad."

I still vividly remember once upon a time when I was little, when I was watching Interview With A Vampire with my parents. There was a family friend there as well. I couldn't have been more than 10 years old. As I remember, there's a part where one of the female characters is nude for some reason (If I remember correctly it's part of some gruesome performance where she's devoured by vampires).

I don't remember the exact comments, but I remember the family friend making some objection about me being there (not because of the gruesome scene, but because of the nudity), and I remember my parents making some response about exposure and reality.

And I remember it because it so deeply reflects the world I grew up in, in which exposure to the world mattered above all, for all it's grittiness and for all it's conflicting, differing, and paradoxical views that constantly change the way I think about things.

At some point I'll explain the idea of defining intelligence as "efficient cross-domain optimization," as I ran into at this weekend's NYC Future Salon. But for now, suffice to say that this exposure has made all the difference to me in the cross-domain realm, in the same sense that Danah expresses above: were it not for exposure to weird and scary strangers, it's likely she'd never be the academic she is today.