How To Break Anything

The monsters we deserve

Recently, a video clip has been circulating the web that purportedly shows a rabbit born earless due to the radiation at Fukushima. BoingBoing has a convincing take-down of the claims of the video: earless rabbits are a fairly common mutation, mother rabbits sometimes chew off their ears of their young due to stress, and no one even knows where the video was filmed.

More interesting than the video is the fact that we want to it to be real. Radioactivity should have immediate, visible consequences. Bodily harm should be  made manifest, and any disturbances in the natural order need to be seen to be believed. After the nuclear bomb explodes, we all head to the ocean to watch Godzilla pop out of the waves.

The earless rabbit is an example of the pathetic fallacy, a form of personification that attributes human sentiment, morality, or motives to random natural occurrences. Nature, is this case, holds a mirror up to human actions. The rain cries with you, the sun shines when you smile. While the bunny is cute, other monsters of technology are usually bloodthirsty, unpredictable and nearly indestructible.

On our need for immediate tangible feedback, a subset of our paradoxical need for reality to match our constructed (read: not real) narratives of it.

Arthur C. Clarke told us, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Head back to the 1800s with a Taser or a Prius or an iPad and the townsfolk will no doubt either burn you at the stake or worship you.

So many doors have been opened by technology in the last twenty years that the word “sufficiently” is being stretched. If it happens on a screen (Google automatically guessing what I want next, a social network knowing who my friends are before I tell them) we just assume it’s technology at work. Hard to even imagine magic here.

I remember eagerly opening my copy of Wired every month (fifteen years ago). On every page there was something new and sparkly and yes, magical.

No doubt that there will be magic again one day... magic of biotech, say, or quantum string theory, whatever that is. But one reason for our ennui as technology hounds is that we’re missing the feeling that was delivered to us daily for a decade or more. It’s not that there’s no new technology to come (there is, certainly). It’s that many of us can already imagine it.

I like to talk a lot about how culture is reactive, meaning something to the effect of "art exists in the voids left in the wake of change." That is to say, we're fond of worrying that some new change or new technology will obliterate the essence of meaning from the artist or the parent or any such thing. Or in the above case, the worry that technology is obliterating the essence of magic. 

And of course technology does obliterate these things, but of course some new, equally meaningful perspective enters the scene, precisely because the old one was transformed. I sometimes draw this as the below (referencing a sociocultural flavor of the Adjacent Possible popularized by Steven Johnson, as a way to illustrate the notion that art exists on the cultural periphery):

The case of the meme idea illustrates a general puzzle. Cultures do contain items — ideas, norms, tales, recipes, dances, rituals, tools, practices, and so on — that are produced again and again. These items remain self-similar over social space and time: in spite of variations, an Irish stew is an Irish stew, Little Red Riding Hood is Little Red Riding Hood and a samba is a samba. The obvious way to explain this stability at the macro level of the culture is, or so it seems, to assume fidelity at the micro level of interindividual transmission. Little Red Riding Hood must have been replicated faithfully enough most of the time for the tale to have remained self-similar over centuries of oral transmission or else the story would have drifted in all kinds of ways and the tale itself would have vanished like water in the sand. Macro stability implies micro fidelity. Right? Well, no. When we study micro processes of transmission — leaving aside those that use techniques of strict replication such as printing or internet forwarding — what we observe is a mix of preservation of the model and of construction of a version that suits the capacities and interests of the transmitter. From one version to the next, the changes may be small, but when they occur at the population scale, their cumulative effect should compromise the stability of cultural items. But — and here lies the puzzle — they don't. What, if not fidelity, explains stability?

Well, bits of culture — memes if you want to dilute the notion and call them that — remain self-similar not because they are replicated again and again but because variations that occur at almost every turn in their repeated transmission, rather than resulting in "random walks" drifting away in all directions from an initial model, tend to gravitate around cultural attractors. Ending Little Red Riding Hood when the wolf eats the child would make for a simpler story to remember, but a Happy Ending is too powerful a cultural attractor. If a person had only heard the story ending with the wolf's meal, my guess is that either she would not have retold it at all — and that is selection — , or she would have modified by reconstructing a happy ending — and this is attraction. Little Red Riding Hood has remained culturally stable not because it has been faithfully replicated all along, but because the variations present in all its versions have tended to cancel one another out.

Rough in some places but smart systems thinking/long-term thinking in others. Nicely articulates a lot of thoughts that float around in my head, and page 39 might be my favorite - evolution of human ideals based on our current stage of understanding the world.

[an aside: If you study human perception and decision-making long enough you know it's natural human instinct to say "right now is a special time - a fork in the road unlike any other!" So I tend to take issue with those kinds of descriptions. I suppose I'd say this: the above is a good case for why the way we think about the course of humanity is important now - and it is important; though the next era will be faced with entirely new and equally important challenges, just as all the preceding challenges have been critically important as well. in short: I'm not much for doomsday scenarios]

@freedimensional Tom Saunter

 

Just noticed @BuzzFeed have added a new tag for their posts, alongside LOL, OMG, WTF, CUTE, GEEKY, TRASHY, OLD and EW. It's WINNING. Hehe.

3 minutes ago via web

Just a quick observation that this only makes sense in the context of the cultural diegesis around Epic Win, which is itself the result of the early 2000s narratives preceding it around what might best be thought of as Moderate Wins.

tv; dt (too vague, didn't think): Culture is reactionary.

• Video - Permalink

Was life really better in the past? The Rational Optimist says “we’re all kings now” because of exchange and specialisation.

Matt Ridley

This isn’t to say that Facebook and its imitators aren’t performing an important, even revolutionary, task — namely, to keep us in touch with our existing friends.

Until relatively recently, almost everyone on earth lived in small, rural, densely interconnected communities, where our 150 friends all knew one another, and everyone’s 150 friends list was everyone else’s.

But the social and economic mobility of the past century has worn away at that interconnectedness. As we move around the country and across continents, we collect disparate pockets of friends, so that our list of 150 consists of a half-dozen subsets of people who barely know of one another’s existence, let alone interact.

Our ancestors knew the same people their entire lives; as we move around, though, we can lose touch with even our closest friends. Emotional closeness declines by around 15 percent a year in the absence of face-to-face contact, so that in five years someone can go from being an intimate acquaintance to the most distant outer layer of your 150 friends.

The story to date is a familiar one. Over the last half a century, Silicon Valley has grown into the leading technology and innovation cluster for the United States and the world. Silicon Valley has amused us, connected (and separated us) as never before, made businesses more efficient and led to the wholesale transformation of entire industries (bookstores, video rentals, newspapers, etc.)

Wave after wave of hardware, software, biotech and cleantech products have emerged from what has become “ground zero” of entrepreneurial and startup culture. Silicon Valley emerged by the serendipitous intersection of:

• Cold war research in microwaves and electronics at Stanford University,
• a Stanford Dean of Engineering who encouraged startup culture over pure academic research,
• Cold war military and intelligence funding driving microwave and military products for the defense industry in the 1950’s,
• a single Bell Labs researcher deciding to start his semiconductor company next to Stanford in the 1950’s which led to
• the wave of semiconductor startups in the 1960’s/70’s,
• the emergence of venture capital as a professional industry,
• the personal computer revolution in 1980’s,
• the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s and finally
• the wave of internet commerce applications in the first decade of the 21st century.

The pattern for the valley seemed to be clear. Each new wave of innovation was like punctuated equilibrium – just when you thought the wave had run its course into stasis, a sudden shift and radical change into a new family of technology emerged.

The Barriers to Entrepreneurship
While startups continued to innovate in each new wave of technology, the rate of innovation was constrained by limitations we only now can understand. Only in the last few years do we appreciate that startups in the past were constrained by:

1. long technology development cycles (how long it takes from idea to product),
2. the high cost of getting to first customers (how many dollars to build the product),
3. the structure of the venture capital industry (a limited number of VC firms each needing to invest millions per startups),
4. the expertise about how to build startups  (clustered in specific regions like Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, etc.),
5. the failure rate of new ventures (startups had no formal rules and were a hit or miss proposition),
6. the slow adoption rate of new technologies by the government and large companies.

The Democratization of Entrepreneurship
What’s happening is something more profound than a change in technology. What’s happening is that all the things that have been limits to startups and innovation are being removed.  At once.  Starting now.

Compressing the Product Development Cycle
In the past, the time to build a first product release was measured in months or even years as startups executed the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. This meant building every possible feature the founding team envisioned into a monolithic “release” of the product. Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features.  The founders were simply wrong about their assumptions about customer needs. The effort that went into making all those unused features was wasted.

Today startups have begun to build products differently.  Instead of building the maximum number of features, they look to deliver a minimum feature set in the shortest period of time.  This lets them deliver a first version of the product to customers in a fraction on the time.

For products that are simply “bits” delivered over the web, a first product can be shipped in weeks rather than years.

Startups Built For Thousands Rather than Millions of Dollars
Startups traditionally required millions of dollars of funding just to get their first product to customers. A company developing software would have to buy computers and license software from other companies and hire the staff to run and maintain it. A hardware startup had to spend money building prototypes and equipping a factory to manufacture the product.

Today open source software has slashed the cost of software development from millions of dollars to thousands. For consumer hardware, no startup has to build their own factory as the costs are absorbed by offshore manufacturers.

The cost of getting the first product out the door for an Internet commerce startup has dropped by a factor of a ten or more in the last decade.

The New Structure of the Venture Capital industry
The plummeting cost of getting a first product to market (particularly for Internet startups) has shaken up the venture capital industry. Venture capital used to be a tight club clustered around formal firms located in Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York. While those firms are still there (and getting larger), the pool of money that invests risk capital in startups has expanded, and a new class of investors has emerged. New groups of VC’s, super angels, smaller than the traditional multi-hundred million dollar VC fund, can make small investments necessary to get a consumer internet startup launched. These angels make lots of early bets and double-down when early results appear. (And the results do appear years earlier then in a traditional startup.)

In addition to super angels, incubators like Y Combinator, TechStars and the 100+ plus others worldwide like them have begun to formalize seed-investing. They pay expenses in a formal 3-month program while a startup builds something impressive enough to raise money on a larger scale.

Finally, venture capital and angel investing is no longer a U.S. or Euro-centric phenomenon. Risk capital has emerged in China, India and other countries where risk taking, innovation and liquidity is encouraged, on a scale previously only seen in the U.S.

The emergence of incubators and super angels have dramatically expanded the sources of seed capital. The globalization of entrepreneurship means the worldwide pool of potential startups has increased at least ten fold since the turn of this century.

Entrepreneurship as Its Own Management Science
Over the last ten years, entrepreneurs began to understand that startups were not simply smaller versions of large companies. While companies execute business models, startups search for a business model. (Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.)

Instead of adopting the management techniques of large companies, which too often stifle innovation in a young start up, entrepreneurs began to develop their own management tools. Using the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack, entrepreneurs first map their assumptions (their business model) and then test these hypotheses with customers outside in the field (customer development) and use an iterative and incremental development methodology (agile development) to build the product. When founders discover their assumptions are wrong, as they inevitably will, the result isn’t a crisis, it’s a learning event called a pivot — and an opportunity to change the business model.

The result, startups now have tools that speed up the search for customers, reduce time to market and slash the cost of development.

Consumer Internet Driving Innovation
In the 1950’s and ‘60’s U.S. Defense and Intelligence organizations drove the pace of innovation in Silicon Valley by providing research and development dollars to universities, and purchased weapons systems that used the valley’s first microwave and semiconductor components. In the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, momentum shifted to the enterprise as large businesses supported innovation in PC’s, communications hardware and enterprise software. Government and the enterprise are now followers rather than leaders. Today, it’s the consumer – specifically consumer Internet companies – that are the drivers of innovation. When the product and channel are bits, adoption by 10’s and 100’s of millions users can happen in years versus decades.

The Entrepreneurial Singularity
The barriers to entrepreneurship are not just being removed. In each case they’re being replaced by innovations that are speeding up each step, some by a factor of ten. For example, Internet commerce startups the time needed to get the first product to market has been cut by a factor of ten, the dollars needed to get the first product to market cut by a factor of ten, the number of sources of initial capital for entrepreneurs has increased by a factor of ten, etc.

And while innovation is moving at Internet speed, this won’t be limited to just internet commerce startups. It will spread to the enterprise and ultimately every other business segment.

When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars
The economic downturn in the United States has had an unexpected consequence for startups – it has created more of them. Young and old, innovators who are unemployed or underemployed now face less risk in starting a company.  They have a lot less to lose and a lot more to gain.

If we are at the cusp of a revolution as important as the scientific and industrial revolutions what does it mean? Revolutions are not obvious when they happen. When James Watt started the industrial revolution with the steam engine in 1775 no one said, “This is the day everything changes.”  When Karl Benz drove around Mannheim in 1885, no one said, “There will be 500 million of these driving around in a century.” And certainly in 1958 when Noyce and Kilby invented the integrated circuit, the idea of a quintillion (10 to the 18th) transistors being produced each year seemed ludicrous.

Yet it’s possible that we’ll look back to this decade as the beginning of our own revolution. We may remember this as the time when scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs were integrated into the fabric of society faster than they had ever been before. When the speed of how businesses operated changed forever. As the time when we reinvented the American economy and our Gross Domestic Product began to take off and the U.S. and the world reached a level of wealth never seen before.  It may be the dawn of a new era for a new American economy built on entrepreneurship and innovation.

Trend Number Three: Demonetization
Edahiro has recognized a shift from full-time work (that sounds similar to the over-worked, over-stressed 9-7 jobs here in the states) to part-time lifestyles that allow time for growing food for the family. Instead of being a full time writer for example, one might be a part-time farmer, part-time writer. The tides could be shifting to a "work to live" rather than "live to work" mentality.

Edahiro's observed trends certainly leave high hopes. As she concludes, each could potentially dent "business models seeking profit simply by selling increasing numbers of products." This potentially green grassroots movement doesn't seem the buying type.

When I see things like the above, I see the happy evolution that humanity as a collective is reacting to its experiences and learning to more deeply understand the notion of value.

That's quite a mouthful, but basically I mean that I think we're at a place where we're starting to understand the limits of equating monetary value as the only kind of value. It's a short-sighted model of the world, and I think we're starting to understand that.

I say evolution in my first statement above because short-sightedness comes from lack of perspective, and perspective comes from experience - in this case, it's the kind of experience that only amasses over hundreds of generations, and within conditions that allow for the rapid spread of ideas.

(The rest of the Treehugger article "Japanese Trends Worth Watching "is here.)

That is the question I wrestled with before leaving on a week-long trip to Costa Rica.

Even though there’s mounting evidence to suggest that digital downtime can provide a healthy break for our brains, the thought of not being in constant communication seemed almost too foreign, too scary, even, to enjoy.

As the days ticked down to my departure, I tried to decide whether I should simply leave my phone at home or bring it and banish it to some remote zippered corner of my suitcase.

Typically when I travel, my iPhone doubles as my camera and camcorder. But I worried that it’d be hard to resist posting a particularly gorgeous shot to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and the likes.

But as it turned out, I didn’t need to worry about it — the decision was made for me. I wasn’t able to get an Internet connection on my phone during the entire time abroad.

...On the trip back to New York, I prided myself on the notion that I’d been reformed, reconditioned to no longer weigh the merit of my experiences by the number of likes, favorites and shares that each photo, update and tweet earned.

That is of course, until I touched down in Miami for a layover. I immediately whipped out my phone and began checking in, posting updates and missives to Twitter and sending a couple photos through to Tumblr. But I didn’t forget the liberating feeling of no access, the freedom from digital obligations.

When travelling in London this weekend I was subjected to the same forced disconnectivity, and found myself wondering about the same question of whether or not it's a good thing to be disconnected.

I ultimately decided that it's never been the ability to "weigh the merit of my experiences by the number of likes, favorites" etc that ever drives me to constantly stay connected. Rather, it was more that without connection I lost the ability to put that small bit more value into the things I was doing.

Simple things like being able to better understand where I'm at in relation to other areas on a map and solidify that picture in my head more easily. Being able to get a bit of history on a monument or neighborhood in front of me that others around may not necessarily have on their mind. Storing a note away about a place I had a nice beer at by logging it on foursquare.

"Augmenting reality" is something humans have been doing for ages with technology; it has a lot less to do with the internet as the subtext tends to imply when we talk about "being too dependent on technology."

The worry seems to be that technology distracts us from the world around us, but as with most things there's a useful way to use tools and then there are also less useful ways to use tools. Inevitably there will be those who find themselves in one boat or the other. I find it hard to make the blanket statement "connectivity and vacations should not go together."

This discussion will inspire attendees with the means to observe short-term phenomena through the lens of long-term perspective.

Many savvy SXSW attendees follow immediate-term trends as part of their daily business; this level of trend includes new technologies/platforms & hot items of public discourse. Just beyond this level of trend exist short-term microtrends, which help explain the 2-5 year impact of immediate-term trends by highlighting patterns that emerge through analysis of individual manifestations.

Understanding these types of trends is indeed important, but this discussion aims to illuminate how these short-term patterns fit within long-term sociological narratives that span decades. These are difficult to see manifest, and it is even more difficult to consider how they might impact long-term value when making decisions about the near-term.

Attendees will leave with insight on why long-term perspective is valuable to anyone hoping to design tools that speak to fundamental human truths. The concepts of "revolution vs evolution" and change blindness play important roles in our story, as considerations in capturing perspective on present-day developments.

This discussion does not aim to teach attendees how to predict future trends. Instead it will provide the tools for thinking about micro-level manifestations within a macro-level scale of historical development, as a way to better think about potential implications for the future.

Thanks for considering this concept. The team at SXSW had nice things to say about it in their confirmation letter; I agree with their sentiment and the sentiment of the commenters thus far that it's a discussion that we could all stand to be a part of. I try to speak to this briefly in the above - most SXSW attendees and readers here are all quite savvy when it comes to staying abreast of daily culture and hot items of public interest. But there's also deeper value in being able to pull out long-term patterns from analysis of these nanotrends, driven by an understanding of how humans fundamentally interact with each other and their technologies that is grounded in historical consistencies. 

This is organized as a dual-panel discussion, which leaves room for fascinating friends of PSFK who have identified interest in sharing their great insight on long-term perspective. We're looking forward to this as an exploration of value, as it applies to seeing past the hype and excitement of near-term nanotrends into capturing a deeper socio/techno-cultural understanding of how people interact in the world.

Update: Timely enough, Seth here has just shared some thoughts on this exact subject, in characteristically pithy fashion; do read on, if you're interested: Resilience and the incredible power of slow change

New York Times reports on a disturbing trend among college students who are simply unmindful or intentionally involved in plagiarism when it comes to using resources from the web. Several surveys conducted have proved that many students do not cite the author or credit the source when copying from a site, even believing its not “serious cheating”. The Times adds that the Internet may be changing the way how students understand the concept of authorship on the web.

Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.

But why is this phenomenon of plagiarism so widespread in the digital world? Sarah Brookover, a student at the Rutgers University provides an apt explanation:

This generation has always existed in a world where media and intellectual property don’t have the same gravity. When you’re sitting at your computer, it’s the same machine you’ve downloaded music with, possibly illegally, the same machine you streamed videos for free that showed on HBO last night. Because you’re not walking into a library, you’re not physically holding the article, which takes you closer to ‘this doesn’t belong to me,’ ” she said. Online, “everything can belong to you really easily.”

NY Times: “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age”

via psfk.com

A fantastic discussion brewing around this development. On one level this is about the form/style of attribution, and it's relation to academic honesty, etc. On another it reflects the impact of digital accessibility to/ephemeralization of content - most notably manifested in notions like Faris' idea of recombinant culture/remix culture; one critical question here is "to what extent is one person's ideas their own?" It's a question that can now be asked and studied in a meaningful way directly because this digitization.

“Versions” is a visual essay by Oliver Laric, investigating the re-appropriation and manipulation of images in our culture.

 

Watch the video here.

Oliver Laric does a lot of good thinking on the nature of images, in the "images as reproductions of 'real' things" sense. Click the link above for the video essay in full.

One question to ask here is: given the nature of how humans engage in and and experience the world (primarily through mimicry, the social creatures that we are), how should we measure the relative values of things like authorship, creation, motivation (in the "foundation of copyright law" sense), volition, experience and individuality?

These things (and surely there are plenty more) seem to all point to why we intuitively think some things are more "real" than others. Like Oliver and many others I find myself exploring the validity of these instincts a little deeper as well.

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.