Some years ago, incensed by the jiggery-pokery of the “copyright industries”, I wrote a post seeking to expose the way they went about making the most outrageous claims when it came to the volume of illegal downloads prevalent. I described them as Numbers of Mass Distraction.

It is clear that recent events surrounding SOPA do not represent the end of the war waged by the copyright industries; at most it’s a skirmish they will concede, albeit very grudgingly, as lost. Judging from the experiences we faced in the UK with The Digital Economy Bill (I covered some of those shenanigans here in Musing About Downloads In The UK) dealing with SOPA (and PIPA) is going to be a long hard war of attrition. A war where every one of us needs to understand the weapons being used against us, as well as the absolute flimsiness of the ammunition.

I intended to write another long post on this flimsiness, then found that someone else had done a far better job than I could’ve. So what I shall do instead is to link to the wonderful post on the subject by research fellow Julian Sanchez at the Cato Institute. Headlined How Copyright Industries Con Congress, it’s a must-read. While you’re at it, it’s also worth reading Julian’s earlier piece on the subject in Ars Technica. The elevator version is as follows: numbers related to the value of illegal downloads as well as numbers related to the number of jobs affected are at best wild unsubstantiated estimates, and at worst devious attempts to flim-flam a legislature crying out to be flim-flammed. The $200-$250 billion number, while it came from a sidebar in a reputable magazine, was actually an unsourced estimate of the value of all counterfeit and pirated goods worldwide, and was clearly stated in the magazine as such. And the 750,000 jobs lost number was taken from a 1986 speech by the then Secretary of Commerce, a number that has never been endorsed by the Department of Commerce.

Julian also reminds us that to make matters worse for the pedlars and purveyors of such phony pap, in April 2010, the United States Government Accountability Office released a report titled Intellectual Property: Observations on Efforts to Quantify The Economic Effects Of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods. Here’s what it says on the first page:

Incidentally, if you still don’t know what SOPA threatens to do, then this Khan Academy video is a good place to start.

Tim O’Reilly has repeatedly cited the lack of sound, independently verifiable, evidence on actual loss in the context of illegal downloads. It is not in the interest of the copyright-industries-lobby to participate in or support any activity aimed at filling this important gap. So more Numbers of Mass Distraction will continue to fly around, seeking to encourage lawmakers to enact first and ask questions much, much later.

We need to keep doing as much as we can to educate all and sundry about all this.

….because sometimes they do matter.

I’ve been fascinated by what people share, when they share it and how they share it for some time now. And for even longer, I’ve been thinking about why we share what we share. [Those of you who’re interested may want to read some of my earlier posts. Why We Share: A sideways look at privacy and Musing About Sharing And Privacy are two that come immediately to mind.

Take this post. The trigger for my writing it was StumbleUpon (I’m a fan!), who wrote to me saying they thought I’d like a particular set of sites. One of which I loved. Because it contained illustrations like the two below:

You guessed it. Someone has spent time taking the world map and reassembling it in order to depict the twelve signs of the Chinese Zodiac. He’s a graphic artist called Kentaro Nagai, you can see the entire work, entitled Twelve Animals: Piece Together for Peace, here.

I loved it. And thought I should share it with you. Because somewhere out there there may be one person whose day becomes brighter by reading this. Because somewhere out there there may be one person inspired to do something about something as a result.

That’s what matters. We’re human beings, social animals who look to each other for friendship, support, camaraderie, motivation, inspiration, whatever.

When I started writing blogs I had some very deep-seated views about what I shared, when and why. When I started on Facebook I had some similarly deep-seated views about the whys and wherefores. By the time I started using Twitter around five years ago, I’d figured out how little I knew about all this, my views were no longer as well-formed or as deep-seated as when I began.

Take Twitter. When I started tweeting, I said to myself “Share only when you have a clear idea how it would be valuable to someone. Even if occasionally that someone is you.” As I learnt more about the phenomenon, those views changed.

Now, I tell myself, “Share as long as you know it will not cause someone else harm”. It was arrogant of me to presume I would know how something would be valuable to someone else, and to filter everything else out.  I realised that the “do no harm” filter was a better one to use. Is it perfect? Certainly not. I rely on your feedback to tell me when I do harm. I will make mistakes. But this way it is more likely that through the organic process of people reading posts like this one, someone somewhere who needed to read this gets to read this.

Life is about abundances and scarcities. For most of my life I’ve seen stuff like bad news and negativity and criticism and cynicism regularly in abundance, and things like good news and encouragement and building people up and saying well done and smiling and making someone happy, all in scarcity.

For some reason, it appeared that what we term as mainstream media tended to focus on the negative, apparently because it “sells”. I can never figure out why. Time we inverted that. And maybe it’s happening.

I find social media in general much more upbeat, more focused on the positive, more willing to thank, to encourage, to support, to enthuse, to motivate. I don’t have a rose-coloured spectacle view of the web, about social networks or about social media: I am acutely aware of how dark a place it can be, how evil cyberbullying can be, how truth can be twisted, how people can subvert the web to nefarious purpose.

But still, overall, I find the web to be an uplifting place where people can and do support each other. It’s something they put in the water. And it’s one of the reasons I share what I share.

Why do you share what you share? Let me know, I’m interested. Fascinated.

I love being human. And I love human beings.

I’m constantly amazed by human ingenuity. How our brains appear to work. How we construct mental models of things. How we observe, imitate, learn. How we repeat that cycle to augment learning. How, once we learn something, we show the capability to extend that learning in new ways. How we share what we do, how we use feedback loops from the people around us to adjust, to improve, to refine.

To learn.

I read somewhere that human children spend the most dependent on their parents and guardians, when compared to the offspring of other creatures. Dependent for food, for clothing, for shelter, even for mobility. Apparently we do this for a reason. To observe; to imitate where possible; to build mental models.

To learn.

Watching. Copying. Trying it out. Failing. Trying it out again. And again.

Learning.

• Learning takes place when you’re given the opportunity to observe how something “works”.
• Learning takes place when you’re given access to the raw materials used to “make” something.
• Learning takes place when you’re given the tools to mix those raw materials up in ways no one else has done before.
• Learning takes place when you’re given the opportunity to share that output with others, and to receive feedback from them.
• Learning takes place by watching, copying, making, sharing, listening, changing, watching, copying….

I spend a lot of time thinking about food. Planning meals. Getting the ingredients. Cooking the meals. Eating. Sharing what I’ve cooked, literally as well as figuratively. Listening to feedback. Adjusting, refining, sometimes even abandoning it altogether, starting again from scratch.

Cooking is one of the ways I learn. I watch programmes (usually on YouTube or similar); read recipes (usually online, like when I want to make dobin mushi); root around for special ingredients (usually online, like when I want to find out where to obtain good matsutake); cook and share that process, using tools like Instagram and epicurious.

All this is possible because generations of human beings have shared what they have observed and learned. I’ve been able to learn from them, to observe how something is done, to try it out, to hear from others how well I’m doing, to adjust and learn.

All this is possible because I have access to the raw materials, the tools, the market, feedback loops.

Last week I was reading about a few modern cooking “inventions”. Someone who really liked the taste, texture, look and feel of chocolate brownies that came from the edge of the pan designed a pan that made only brownies with edges:

Someone else liked their cereal crunchy, and didn’t like what happened when you added milk to a bowl of cereal: only the first few spoonsful were crunchy, the rest ran to sog. So they invented this:

Which was designed to do this:

Human beings have been doing this forever. I like growing a beard every now and then, and wish I had easy access to something like this: a moustache-cup for drinking:

It’s not just about food either. There’s always someone coming up with a new way of doing something, or new things that help you do something. Take a look at this:

There have been few barriers to cooking, other than the natural laws of demand and supply. Of course people have tried to subvert that law in the usual ways: creating monopolies, controlling supply by hoarding, cartelising prices, that sort of thing. But by and large the world of cooking has been open to innovation. And our lives have been enriched as a result.

This hasn’t been true in the world of manufacturing: access to raw materials, designs, tools to manufacture, has been somewhat less than democratic. But that’s changing, with opensource hardware and software and patterns and specifications. Multipurpose materials like this will soon be freely available:

The freedom to model something physical will soon be connected with the freedom to make copies of that something, which is what 3D printers are about:

The raw materials will improve in their versatility and durability; prices will drop; access will become universal. The same will happen to 3D printers. We’re heading for a time when you can “fax” over a physical object from one place to another, even an object you designed for the first time. Especially objects you designed for the first time.

This is not just about stuff for gadget freaks and people who like messing about in labs. Human beings make things for one of four reasons:

• to learn
• to enjoy
• to solve a problem
• because they can

So this sort of invention and innovation takes place everywhere, at work and at home, in the West and in the East. Let’s look at what’s happening at work. Most of you know I work at Salesforce.com. Here’s an example of what can be done when human beings have access to open platforms and tools and data:

A couple of salesforce.com engineers, frustrated with the times when printers are out of paper, or when paper stocks run out, built a simple tool, using open components, to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. Others in the company used the same tools to try and solve problems to do with green buildings and energy consumption:

These are just two examples of what incredible things can be done when human beings have access to the right materials and tools.

This ingenuity is seen in the physical world, in the design and manufacture of objects. It is seen in the world where physical and digital integrate, as in the “internet of things”.

And of course it is seen in the digital world, where the internet is the ultimate copy machine.

Give people the raw material of open data. Give them the tools of the internet. And hey presto you have “inventions” like this:

Someone thought it would be good if you could find out when your garbage was to be collected. And so they did something about it. Someone else thought it would be good to build tools for handling open data:

It’s not just about solving problems and reducing human latency or saving energy or being efficient. It’s not just about the sustenance and pleasure of preparing, cooking and consuming food. It’s deeper than that, this streak of ingenuity is in all parts of our human culture.

Watch this video: A MIDI fretboard on an iPhone.

Humans have been observing, imitating, sharing, learning, refining and making stuff forever. Cooking. Making. Creating. Thinking.

Without Shakespeare sharing Romeo and Juliet with us, there would be no West Side Story. Without Shaw sharing Pygmalion with us, there would be no My Fair Lady. Without Joyce Kilmer sharing Trees with us, we wouldn’t have been able to enjoy Ogden Nash‘s parody,  The Song Of The Open Road:

Without the internet, without the Web, without Wikipedia, without Google, I would not have been able to write this post.

Without YouTube I would not have been able to share the ingenuity of some of my colleagues.

Without Tim O’Reilly’s gigaOm interview on why he’s fighting SOPA, I would not have been catalysed into writing this post.

The intellectual property rights environment needs fixing for sure. But SOPA and PIPA are not the solution.

Human ingenuity is a precious thing. We need that ingenuity to solve the problems we face, problems that cannot be solved by the paradigms that created them. We need that ingenuity to be unleashed to observe what’s happening without censorship. We need that ingenuity to have access to the data and the tools related to the problems; we need that ingenuity to be able to share the learning, to learn, to adjust, to learn again.

We need this in all walks of life, in the office and at home, in private and in public, at work and at play, alone and together.

We need this to move us forward in education, in healthcare, in government. We need this to solve problems with climate change, disease control, nutrition, poverty.

We need this in our art and in our culture.

We need this.

Thanks for all your comments and tweets re my earlier post. Some of you solved the “unGoogleAble” question. Others commented on what they’d been doing with the Prime Numbers in Arithmetical Progression question. And a number of you engaged in conversation with me across a variety of platforms. It helps me think. And learn. For which I’m grateful. I hope it’s been of some use to some of you. I want to touch upon a few of the answers and comments, to see if that helps me articulate where I was going more effectively.

First, Nicole Simon’s question. Why would an UnGoogleAble cricket question teach her anything? And if it didn’t, was she a bad student as a result? Or was I a bad teacher? I promised to get back to Nicole when wrapping up this stage of the conversation. I was trying to establish a framework for constructing a decent question in our post-Google world, and suggesting three things:

• it shouldn’t be easy to find via Google
• it should teach the answerer something
• it should be fun

To explain this, I chose two exemplar areas, cricket statistics and prime numbers, each esoteric in its own way, each valuable only to the passionate amateur, particularly one already interested in the mysteries of cricket or primes. For my sins I am a member of both those sets. There was another reason I chose those particular areas. In both cases there was a lot of data on the web, available to the public while remaining not easily GoogleAble. “Open” data. I wanted to find a way of demonstrating what could happen when open data meets the curiosity of the passionate amateur. The cricket question would have been pretty much impossible without access to the data; the prime numbers in series question would have continued its regal and exclusive status of being made available only to those students talented enough to participate in mathematical “olympiads”. Open data has a wonderful democratising effect, accentuating and embellishing the level-playing-fieldness of the internet. Combined with passion and perseverance and patience, the possibilities are boundless, as human beings unleash their creativity in using the tools of the age to work on freely accessible data to test conjectures, solve problems, build new products and services. So Nicole, my answer to you is that I failed. I could not get good enough examples, generic enough examples, to make the post work by itself.  I needed the previous post to try and catalyse some of the examples via the comments and answers given, as you will see. I hope as a result you can take something of value away from this post.

Which then brings me to my second point, the comments/answers given by Obiwan Kenobi and Daen de Leon; Obiwan gave me the perfect example of someone who took my question and then worked the example out in detail, and then proceeded to share the workings with everyone else. The answer was not important. It was the sharing of how he got there, which you can see in his comment. He created a query on Cricinfo Statsguru that required no programming knowledge, just an ability to select filters and sort criteria and views; he then proceeded to copy-paste the output to his tool of choice, then came up with the answer. I’m not quite sure why he needed the copy-paste step, all I did was to inspect the same query output, the same 206 lines over 2 pages, looking for duplicates in the right-hand-most column, managing to avoid a couple of red herrings along the way. Obiwan’s example is useful in helping set out what is needed for open data to be valuable. One, people need to know what’s out there: Obiwan knew of the existence of Cricinfo Statsguru, and we may soon need specialised open data directories. [Yes, someone can write an "app" for that, but please please in HTML5 rather than as a captive device app!]. Two, people need simple tools to manipulate that data, and the ability to learn how to use those tools: Obiwan knew how to use the filters in the Statsguru query builder. And three, Obiwan needed the stimulus of my question to be bothered to do it in the first place: new classes of teacher will emerge to provide such access, training, stimulus. While Daen didn’t give us a blow-by-blow account of how he solved the prime number problem, he did two important things: one, he shared a big clue, that he could work out the constant interval using just the limit and the number of terms. That in turn would allow other readers to consider the role of the interval in the answer, while still allowing for some personal discovery as to how to use that information. But the most important thing that Daen did was to share something else   …. “I’m proud to say I figured out the interval….”.

Daen was doing something really important there, sharing with us the joy he felt when he discovered why something must be true. That’s my third point. The joy of discovery as part of the road to mastery. Kathy Sierra, one of the earliest commenters on my earlier post, is someone I have a lot of time and respect for; to me, what Daen did is the fundamental reason why all the current superficial attempts at “gamification” will fail. All achievements involve learning. The joy of learning is in achieving mastery. In knowledge work, that mastery begins when you have a little light-bulb go off in your head and you say “aha” or “eureka” or “gadzooks”…… because you know why something is true. When a process is standardised, stable and easily repeatable, knowing how may have been enough. Today, many processes are what my friend Sig calls “barely repeatable”, so exception handling becomes the norm, an unsustainable position. So now it’s no longer enough to know how, you need to know why as well. Gamers know something about nonlinear worlds, about patterns rather than processes, about the value of knowing why and not just how, about working in a peer network and using that peer base to select teams and tasks and tools. Gamers have a lot to teach us at work. “Gamification” will remain lipstick on a pig until the designers have the revelation, the road-to-Damascus moment of understanding the joy of mastery. That’s what people like Kathy are trying to get the world to understand, and the world needs to listen.

So what am I saying? It is in the knowledge of the Why that the foundation of the How is laid. The What is just an instance of the How. [Yes, there's a Who's on First gag somewhere there: What doesn't Matter. What matters is How. How Doesn't Matter if you don't know Why.....] It used to be said that the person who knows how will always find work….working for the person who asks (and learns) why. We are fast approaching a world where all the Whats are commoditised. Open. Easily accessible. Published “content” may be seen to be a “what”. And if you’re in the business of making money off content, then you’re going to do everything in your power to protect your business, which means resisting the commoditisation of the what. That’s what most publishing industries face, a commoditisation of the very thing they made their money on, the “what”. The “how” continues to be valuable, so there’s a market for the tools that publish the content, that simplify access, that help massage and manipulate and mutate that content. The “why” is even more valuable, particularly because it is often scarce, tacit, hard to share. But that’s changing.

Which is why I write posts like this one.

Here’s what’s trending on Twitter right now:

And here are the top stories on Google News:

Here’s what the BBC News site has at top billing:

I tried to even the field. So the twitter trends were set to “Global”, I finally overrode Google’s very irritating attempts to point me towards google.co.uk rather than google.com, and I left the BBC News homepage untouched.

Zero connection between Twitter and Google, even though technically soccer stories made in on to both. One story in common between Google and BBC News.

Just something to bear in mind. There’s a lot we need to think about, in terms of filtering and censorship and filter bubbles; a lot to think about in terms of the impact of the locations of publisher and of subscriber; a lot to think about in terms of publisher-level algorithmic representation of trends, and subscriber-level selection of preferences.

What are your experiences? How does your area and environment compare?

A few days ago, I set a cricket question for my twitter followers. To be precise, I set a question for those among my followers who were interested in cricket, interested enough to try and answer the question.

The question was simple: Herschelle Gibbs holds the record. Vinod Kambli was the previous holder. What is the record?

I will come to the answer later. Before that I want to spend a little time on the question.

I set it that way for many reasons.

…………………………………………

First, just Googling it should not work. This is important. Why?

I like to think of the process of answering questions as  a voyage of discovery,  a journey of learning. Today, the first port of call in almost any such journey is the internet. You can choose the particular type of vessel you want to use on the journey (Google, Dogpile, Mamma, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, WolframAlpha, Copernic, Bing, Mahalo, Phone-A-Friend, Ask-The-Audience or whatever else catches your fancy). [Incidentally, feel free to add any question-answering tools you use and wish to share with others, just comment below and I will summarise comments in a follow-up post as needed. Also incidentally, does Bing really (and recursively) stand for But It's Not Google?]

The journey, the voyage, is more important than the vessel.

And the discovery, the learning, is more important than the journey. It’s the whole point of the journey.

…………………………………………..

Which brings me to the second point of any question: Answering the question should teach you something; at the very least, it should reinforce some prior learning. Let me give you an example.

Some years before finishing school, we were given an intriguing maths question to solve. We were told that there was one, and only one, ten-term arithmetical progression (or “AP”) of prime numbers between unity and 3000.  And we were asked to find it. [Yes, I have written about this before, some years ago. But please humour me, I want to take you somewhere else this time].

I must have been 14 or so. And I was enthralled by the question. Not because I found the question itself interesting, but because I was really enjoying myself trying to figure out how to get to the answer. And why I would get to the answer.

How. And why. Not what.

[I won't spoil it for the first-time reader, I'm not going to give you the answer here. If you want to know, then please ping me via twitter, details on sidebar here,  or comment below or even "inbox me on facebook" (the way my youngest daughter's generation describe emailing).]

…………………….

The third point, as important as the first two, is that answering the question should be fun. Again, an example from my teens in Calcutta. One of my friends had heard about a competition, I think he said it was in Punch, where you were given a “traditional” trivia answer and asked to formulate a non-traditional question. The example given was: A: Dr Livingstone, I presume. Alternative Q: What is your full name, Dr Presume?. [If I remember right, the winning entry in that competition was: A: Crick. Alternative Q: What is the sound made by a Japanese camera?]

The process of answering a question should be a voyage of discovery, a journey during which you learn something, and one where you enjoy yourself in the process.

As a result of answering the question, you should be able to answer most, if not all, questions belonging to that class of question. You know that cliched saying “I may not know the answer to the question, but I know a man who does”? There’s some value, some truth, in what it implies. It’s probably better expressed in the saying “It is better to teach a man to fish than to give a man a fish”. Passing on learning is far more valuable than passing on a short-term, “single-use” answer.

Knowing how to get to an answer is often more important than knowing the answer. And knowing why is the foundation for remembering the how.

This principle colours the way I view much of education. There must have been a time when people used slide rules incessantly in classes involving numerate subjects. By the time I was at school, they were already passing out of favour. In similar vein, my generation had to carry our own “log table” and “trig table” books, but I think we were the last “batch” at school to engage so closely with logarithmic and trigonometric tables. The generation after me learnt to use scientific calculators in anger.

And the generations of today know their way around the web. Or should do. [Provided, of course, they have access to the web, something I regard as a fundamental right of the 21st century, given the incredibly positive impact it can make on education, health and welfare].

…………………….

Learning by watching and copying has been the way of the world for aeons. Sometimes I’m surprised by the way that gets forgotten in some spheres of education. There’s too much focus on the answer, the “what”, and not enough on the process and the rationale, the how and why. If a student can answer a question correctly by surreptitiously peeking at someone else’s work, then it’s a poor question. If a student can answer a question correctly by simply engaging with Google and entering a “raw” search term, then it’s a poor question. If a student can answer a question correctly by simply looking up Wikipedia, then it’s a poor question.

Google and Wikipedia are tools. Like slide rules and log tables and scientific calculators. Or even abaci.

Knowing how to use the tool properly is important. If the tool is designed to provide enjoyment as well, even better. Concentrating on the answer provided by the tool is all quite wrong.

……………….

If you’ve read this far, then you’re probably someone who is sympathethic to my way of thinking. So humour me a little longer.

When I asked the unGoogleable question in Twitter, an old friend and colleague, Dominic Sayers, tweeted the following:

So now I have to come up with another unGoogleable cricket question.

Here goes:

On a cricket scorecard, an asterisk is used to denote the captain, and a “dagger” to denote the wicketkeeper. Since the dawn of Test cricket, with thousands of matches played, there have only been 26 “asterisk-daggers”, players who, simultaneously, kept wicket and captained the team.

26. Over thousands of Tests.

During this time, there have only been five instances where a Test has involved a “double asterisk-dagger“, where a wicketkeeper-captain has faced a wicketkeeper-captain.

These instances involved only five specific asterisk-daggers: one three times, three twice, and one just once. Name the wicketkeeper-captain who has faced a wicketkeeper-captain in a Test match just once and once only in his career.

[This is a follow-up to the post I wrote late last night; thank you very much for your comments, Likes, RTs, +1s and Shares. Active and visible feedback is a great motivator, and helps me learn to write about the right things and in the right ways].

Where was I? Oh yes. Why am I so excited about 2012? I’ve shared some of the reasons with you already in my earlier post, but there are a few more that I want to make sure I get on to your radar right from the get-go.

I’m excited about what’s going to happen with intellectual property during 2012. Let me explain. First, a bit of recent history. Here’s a quote from something Esther Dyson wrote. [Esther is a friend and mentor, someone I admire greatly, someone who has influenced how I think far more than she perhaps even realises].

The laws of physics seem to change when you enter a new environment, such as the gravity field of the moon — or the Internet and its easy replication of content. In this issue, we argue that the newly revealed physics of information transfer on the net will change the economics and perhaps ultimately the laws governing the creation and dissemination of intellectual property…call it content to avoid the presumption of ownership.

What happens to intellectual property on the net? Perhaps the question is best answered with another: What new kinds of content-based value can be created on the net? We believe the answers include services (the transformation of bits rather than bits themselves), the selection of content, the presence of other people, and assurance of authenticity — reliable information about sources of bits and their future flows. In short, intellectual processes and services appreciate; intellectual assets depreciate.

Esther Dyson, Intellectual Property On The Net, Release 1.0, 28 December

I guess some of you don’t think her views are going to pan out this year. Maybe you think she’s being a bit too futuristic, too optimistic about human ability to change, and the speed of change. Perhaps.

And perhaps not.

You see, I left out a small piece of information from that quote. The year. Esther Dyson wrote those words over seventeen years ago, in 1994. A great read then, and a great read now. [Incidentally, isn't it fantastic that I could access the archives of Release 1.0 to find the quote, all free-to-air? Thank you Esther for writing it, thank you everyone who's worked on Release 1.0 over the years for mentoring me from afar, and thank you Tim and Sara for continuing to make it available.]

So I’m excited about what’s happening with intellectual property. You must think I’m mad, what with SOPA and ACTA and Hadopi and DMCA and Digital Economy Act and who knows what else. How could I possibly think that things are getting better when they palpably aren’t? What am I smoking?

For the answer to that, I have to turn to a second friend and mentor, Clay Shirky, as quoted famously by a third, Kevin Kelly.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Change is never easy, especially if you’re the one being changed. That’s not just true of people but of institutions as well. In many ways, I was not surprised at the way the entertainment industry as a whole pushed back on changing their business models while desperately working on changing their business models. They knew that all they could buy was time.

They’ve bought their time. And the time is running out.

The key word in the Shirky quote is “try”. In the same way that nature abhors a vacuum and water seeks its own level, problems cannot be preserved beyond the paradigm and environment that created them. You can try to do that, but over time you will fail. You. Will. Fail.

And that’s what is happening now. SOPA is a terrible act of legislation because of some of the words used in the bill. Words that were put in by people desperately trying to preserve the problems of the past. And the level of desperation is a good measure of the way time is running out.

DMCA. Hadopi. Digital Economy Act. ACTA. SOPA. Yup, with the passage of time, the level of desperation is getting higher, the clauses are getting less and less workable, making the laws harder to enforce, to prosecute, socially, politically, economically. It gets harder to sponsor them when you have information from sites like Maplight available to all; it even gets harder to support, as GoDaddy found out recently.  We live in a world where trust is an increasingly important currency, and where transparency is the mint that produces that currency.

So it’s over. It may not appear so, but it is.

The culture of the internet, the Web, the communities that build it and shape it, it’s a culture of openness. There will always be people who attempt to build walled gardens in the open spaces, and they can succeed. But only up to a point, and only for a short time. It’s like the app-store and device locked apps taking on those built in HTML5. Faites vos jeux, messieurs, faites vos jeux. Only one winner.

Which brings me to my next reason to be excited about 2012. Open data.

Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt wrote an important piece in the Times last Saturday, on how the information age boosts the economy, makes our lives easier. They called data “the new raw material of the 21st century”. Sadly, unlike the archives of Release 1.0, this article is behind a paywall so I don’t have an easy way to share it with you.

They’re not alone in this: I’ve heard Tim O’Reilly wax lyrical about the importance of Open Data, Vivek Kundra show his support and appreciation, people like Wendy Hall and Noshir Contractor at the Web Science Trust (working with TimBL and Nigel) have worked very hard to show what can be done.

Again, it’s a question of timing. There’s a tipping point. And the tipping point is now.

Why? It’s simple. As I said yesterday, we’re beating up on the banks for lending too much and too unwisely, and we’re beating them up for not lending and for lending too slowly. Who would be a banker nowadays? It’s not that easy for governments either, particularly those in the West. Borrow less. Spend less. Perform these miracles without putting people out of work.

If it were only that simple.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have written a very interesting book on the economic impact of modern technology on society and work. If you haven’t read it, please go out and buy the e-book. It’s called Race Against The Machine. I had the chance to talk about it with Andy a few months ago, and it’s fascinating.

Many of the current white collar jobs are disappearing and will continue to disappear. And this is where, in my opinion, open data can help us in incredibly powerful ways. How do I love Open Data? Let me count the ways:

One, there’s a lot of data out there that is paid for by the public purse. Governments don’t have to do very much to release that data. In a few cases commercial arrangements have been made about closed private exploitation of such data, but these can be reviewed, often reversed. It’s only a matter of time. The key is that the data is publicly owned and not difficult to make publicly accessible.

Two, when that data gets released, three things happen:

(a) people learn that they can build businesses around that making that “open” data useful to a wider body. The point that Esther Dyson was making in her 1994 article, about people paying for accessibility and ease of use, is coming home to roost. Incidentally, Andrew Savikas wrote a very worthwhile piece on the subject of Content as a Business fifteen years later, you can read it here. People will package and repackage and mash and create useful and valuable services, given the chance. After all, the infrastructure needed to process and distribute the services are now available for peanuts.

(b) people learn that they can build businesses around cleaning up the data, making it better, more accurate. There’s a new form of curation needed, new curators, people with the passion and the domain knowledge and, in all probability, unintended “cognitive surplus” through unemployment. if you think you’ve seen a firehose of data, just you wait. A change is gonna come, as the song goes. 21st century curation is big business, particularly for open data.

(c) as the data gets better and more accessible, there are second-order payouts for the economy and for society. More informed decisions. Less waste.

Of course there are problems to overcome, particularly when it comes to personally identifiable information. John Perry Barlow has been telling us for some time now that the very concept of privacy is changing, that social mores and values will change as well, as we move from a world where we regulated access to personal information to one where we regulate usage.

Whenever there is change there is a mess to deal with. There is an immune system response, an inertia, an attempt by the incumbents to preserve their very existence.

Whenever there is change there is a mess to deal with. There is misinformation and disinformation, as incumbents do everything they can to confuse and befuddle customers. [I work for salesforce.com, and I see the dinosaur dances of dying incumbents every day; if it wasn't for the terrible waste of resource and energy caused by the dinosaur incumbents, I would probably find the whole thing quite funny.]

We’re at a critical inflection point in our existence, surrounded by problems often of our own making, and needing to adopt new ways of thinking in order to solve them. There are barriers that prevent us from doing that, some legal, some social and conventional, some down to pure skulduggery by those who would prolong their survival.

Sometimes I think that if Henry Ford were alive today, he would find that all he could build was “faster horses”. Because the horse industry would have grown another hundred years, grown to a point where it served seven billion people, grown to a point where it had permanent access to K Street, grown to a point where it could arrange for legislation to protect its very existence.

Alan Kay used to say “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. I met Alan some years ago at a convention in San Diego, and he was affected by the experience of the decades that had passed since he said that. Now, he thinks the saying should be “The best way to predict the future is to prevent it”.

Well, people have been doing just that, trying to prevent the future.

And for a time, they’ve succeeded.

But it’s over.

2012. The Show-Me Year.

I don’t think I can remember a New Year’s Day when I’ve been more excited about the year to come.

Let’s start with the political landscape. You all know about the year we’ve had, the long-standing governments that have tumbled, the despots and terrorists who are no more, the growth in measured nonviolent protest. It’s been a year of change, and all the signs are that there’s a lot more to come.

Take a look at what’s currently happening in Russia, what people like Alexey Navalny are up to right now. [Esther, thanks for pointing this out to me]. Now there’s a little part of me that wonders whether Alexey Navalny could do in the US what he’s doing in Russia, given the signing of the latest NDAA into law, but right now it’s only a little part: I still have considerable faith in democratic process however flawed it may look at times.

Why do I have faith in democratic process? Let me tell you a story. When I was 18, India was placed under a State of Emergency that gave the Prime Minister the power to “rule by decree”; she herself was quoted as saying she’d brought democracy to a “grinding halt”. Which she proceeded to try and do, for 18 months, before calling for elections. At the point of calling the elections, this was the set-up:

• Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the country’s first prime minister, loved and revered in Indian memory.
• Her surname, Gandhi, resonated in the land of Mohandas Karamchand “Mahatma” Gandhi, even though she was in no way related.
• Her party were the only ones to have won national elections….ever.
• Her family had won her constituency seat since time immemorial.
• Her opponents were either in jail or in hiding.
• She’d been in dictatorial control for the previous eighteen months, with her young son acting as the ebullient enforcer.

You get the picture. Putin would have pouted his pleasure; Mugabe would have murmured his admiration. There could only be one winner to the 1977 election.

And yes, there was only one winner.

Democracy. Amazingly, while the opposition bayed and bleated “Fix”, the results proved otherwise. Congress lost the election. Indira Gandhi lost her seat.

Bad law can be passed. Bad law will be passed. Sometimes good law gets passed with bad bits added on by those who know how to game the system. And it takes time.

Democracies can’t be gamed. Not then, not now. Delayed, yes; disrupted, yes. But only for a time.

You can’t look at the changing political landscape without being aware of the immense social changes going on, many of which influenced the political changes. Following the success of OWS, people are really beginning to think how things are distributed today, how things were distributed before, how things may be distributed in future. Arab Spring and OWS could represent the beginning in a long journey of enlightenment of how a global society will learn to operate. Take a look at this diagram:

Figure courtesy td-architects

The 86%.

The 99% and the 1% represent inequalities in wealth distribution, perhaps in income distribution as well.

The 86% have other things besides wealth and income on their minds; things like food, water, disease control, energy, education, to name a few. There is so much to be worked out: figuring out how to get the right balance between growing food for people to eat, and growing crops that will help solve the energy and climate crises; learning how to battle new diseases, diseases accentuated by the global nature of modern trade and migration, while coping with the return of old ones, as antibiotics lose their oomph; treating water as the precious resource it is, taking care not to make it a Missile Crisis level problem as countries argue about riparian rights; dealing with those who would Balkanize the ocean depths and lay claim to large swathes of ocean and all the natural resources represented (sadly, I can already imagine a world where fish have “passports” branded on them); negotiating how to overcome the imbalance of a world where apparently 40% of new patents come from the US, where Liechtenstein is ranked 9th in the world league table for innovation, and where China, India, Brazil and Russia are notably absent. I have nothing against Liechtenstein, but puh-leeze.

Figure courtesy GOOD.is

The problems cited are not easy problems; they represent a whole new class of problem for humanity to face, global in their construct, immense in their complexity, and they’re going to need new classes of tools to help solve them.

My thanks to Vintage Lulu for the amazing photo above

Some tools aren’t appropriate any more. So we need new tools, tools that allow people to collaborate with low cost of entry, low cost of operation, low cost of change, low cost of exit; tools that work globally, consistently, across culture and geography and language; tools that are device- and location- and scale- (and for that matter socio-economic grouping-) agnostic.

Tools that have emerged, tools that continue to emerge, tools that make me realise that humans are wonderful beings. Tools that gave computer gamers the ability to solve a ten-year old puzzle related to AIDS research; tools that helped volunteers restore tsunami-damaged photographs to do their little bit in alleviating the suffering of those affected by the tragedy in Japan last March.

It’s not just tools, human beings are making breakthroughs in waters hitherto uncharted; Ronald Ross (incidentally the first Indian-born man to be given the Nobel Prize)  ”discovered” the parasite behind malaria while Queen Victoria was still on the throne. Yet it was only last year that people started speaking of a proper vaccine for malaria, a disease I know something about, having had it more than once. Similarly, I’m very excited about what Irit Sagi and team have been doing in Rehovot, experimenting with vaccines for Crohn’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis, amongst others. I have two members in my close family with Crohn’s.

I’ve just listed a small number of reasons why I’m excited about the year to come. Of course there are major challenges. The West is going to have to spend less and save more, something the West may not know how to do. The East is going to have to spend more and save less, something the East may not know how to do. Perhaps the East and the West, between them, have the answers.

We’ve chastised banks, and bankers, for lending too much, for lending to the wrong people, for investing in the wrong things. We continue to chastise the banks. We’re also chastising banks for not lending enough, for the credit squeeze, for holding up growth. In fact we’re doing so much chastising of banks they’re finding it hard to hire and train people to do the things we’re asking them to do. Hmmm. Something’s gotta give.

We’re going to have to understand more about economic growth, what it means, whether it is desirable or not, when it is desirable, when it isn’t. We’re going to have to understand what relationship that has with jobs, and what that means for society. We’re going to have to understand the role  played by what we call today a country, with its strangenesses of political and economic borders, how that changes.

As we enter 2012, there are many things that appear uncertain, starting with the economic, social and political landscape; this is true wherever we look.

Everything is up for change.

And you wonder why I’m excited about 2012?

And you know/the darkest hour/is always/always/just before the break of day/

And it appears to be a long/appears to be a long/appears to be a long/time/

Before the dawn.

David Crosby, Long Time Gone. Crosby Stills and Nash, Crosby Stills and Nash.

I made this collage up for the previous post. Some of my favourite albums from that time. See how many you can guess without enlarging the photo.

Born in 1957, raised as part of a liberal and progressive family in Calcutta, schooled by the Jesuits from 1965-66 to 1978-79: there is much in my background to explain why I espouse many of the beliefs of the Sixties. It begins with my family and my faith; it manifests itself in how I’m passionate about community and in communal activities, in a participative society, in a collaborative workforce. It underpins my interest in the “maker society”, in open source, in emergent behaviour, swarming, and servant leadership. It is to be seen in my attitude to ownership of material goods, it is to be seen in my attitude to ownership of ideas. It affects how I think about nature and the environment, and informs my beliefs in stewardship. It defines my approach to tolerance and to forgiveness, to war and to peace.  It even influences the way I read and write, what I eat, what I cook.

And it influences the music I listen to. Take a look at the image below:

It’s a collage of 100 album covers, and represents the first 100 albums I would buy in vinyl if they were available at a reasonable price and in reasonable condition. I’ve “owned” these albums before, sometimes multiple times. I’ve paid for them time and time again, in vinyl format, on prerecorded cassettes, as CDs, as 25th-anniversary-with-extra-tracks-you-never-knew-you-needed-(and-you-were-right!), sometimes even in DVDs. Do I hear you say “sucker”? Yup, that’s me.

I’ve managed to buy quite a few of them on mint vinyl already, not as reissues but by being in the right place at the right time. But.

But given a chance, I would buy them as a single transaction, a job lot, a bundle. Even if there was some further negotiation to be done with respect to the sequence in which I would receive them, and the time over which that would happen.

It’s not just about music. I travel a lot. And I’d love to go to an airline and say, I’d like to buy 100 flights. Return. Most of them are on sectors you fly. I will use those flights up in a year. It may not be just me travelling. I will vary the class of travel, “turning left” for longhaul business travel and for at least one family vacation.

It’s not just about travel. I read a lot. And I’d love to go to a bookstore and say, I’d like to buy 100 books. Most of them are on subjects you stock. I will use up those credits in a year. It may not be just me doing the buying, I will vary the class of book, “turning left” for signed numbered limited editions occasionally and for at least one set of family presents.

Music. Travel. Books. Clothes. Eating out. In some ways it’s all the same to me. I want to tell someone what I’m in the market for, build a relationship between that “person” and me. Tell them how much I’d be prepared to spend and over what period and for what class of thing. Work with them to figure out the sequence, frequency and timing.

And expect them to invest in that relationship as a result, be my friend, guide, partner through that process.

But it needs them to think differently, in order to view what they do differently, move from the product perspective to the customer perspective.

Without that fresh perspective, we’re going to continue to see abominations like region coding on DVDs. Which customer was that designed for?

Let me give an example of something that does not work.

Let’s take Premiership football in the UK. Most grounds have capacities in the 30-50,000 range, with a few clubs below 30,000 and a few above 50,000. All of them have fan bases that are multiples of that number, large enough fan bases to warrant the payment of very large sums of money to acquire “exclusive” rights to the live games.

And then someone chooses which games are broadcast live in the UK…. it would appear that if you didn’t live in the UK, you can watch pretty much all the games live. So my brother in India gets to watch his choice of UK-based Premiership game live, while I can’t. Go figure.

OK, so the hardened supporter buys a season ticket to go to all the games. Guess what? Analog is scarce, so there are waiting lists for many of the clubs. [That's true for most sports at an analog level, and why touts make real money: Lord's, Wimbledon, Twickenham, the O2, the story's the same.].

Since I can’t get an analog season ticket, the smart thing to do is to buy a digital one, right? Wrong. Because you can’t. You’re only the customer. Someone else decides what bundle of matches you get to watch, a bundle designed to disappoint every customer.

Which brings me to the nub of this post.

Customers are fundamentally unpredictable.

In the eyes of people trying to sell them things, that is.

Why is this? It’s because customers want to buy things their way, in terms of the nature of upfront commitment, the choices represented, the frequency, the sequencing, the bundling and the discount. And the ability to change everything.

I want to be able to buy 100 books or flights or albums. Or 10. Or 1000. I want to be able to buy it all from one provider, even if that provider has to source some of the services from elsewhere. I want to be able to choose what and when and how. And to change my mind. Of course, if I do change my mind, I will have to pay for it. But only as and when I exercise that “right”.

I don’t want a buyer’s market, I’m happy to see the service provider make a turn on the service provided. Everyone’s got to eat.

The trouble is, it’s been a seller’s market for far too long. Based originally on natural scarcity and monopoly, now more often based on artificial scarcity, regulatory arbitrage, ploys and schemes you don’t want to believe. All designed to ensure that business becomes more predictable….. at the cost of customer service, service quality and even freedom of choice.

This will change.

Customers will choose to make long-term commitments with companies that give them simplicity, convenience and freedom of choice. In many industries, the early movers have provided simplicity and convenience but not freedom of choice, as a consequence of which there are people who believe that the freedom of choice is not important. That’s a big mistake.

A time is coming when the customer decides on the bundle of products and services to be acquired, not the provider. In fact, that bundle will comprise services from more than one provider…. the services themselves will commoditise, but there will be a premium payable for simplicity and convenience, payable to the “prime” who constructs the multiprovider bundle. The customer chooses the bundle.

A time is coming when the analog components of that bundle will last, as they used to last. Cars. White goods. Entertainment systems. All examples of analog goods that used to be built to last, and are now designed for rapid obsolescence. This won’t be tolerated any more. Planned obsolescence will no longer be accepted.

A time is coming when everything, as a result of commoditisation: every bundle, every analog item, every digital item, will come with a published cost of change. The cost of change will be payable in two forms: an “option price” for the right to change, and  an “execution price” to make the change. The penalty for change must be published upfront.

A time is coming where the maintenance and repair of what is purchased will also be commoditised: where you can choose to go where you like for analog spare parts or digital equivalents. A time is coming when every customer will have the right to look under the hood, to tinker with the product or service, to make changes personally, A time is coming when the current warranty system will be overthrown, when the principle goes back to “fit-for-purpose” rather than “will work for a year or so”.

A time is coming.

Why has this time not come already? Because companies have designed products and services with the overriding principle of aiding predictability rather than meeting customer needs. 

A time is coming.