Musing about filters and brakes: A long post

A detour

My use of “filters and brakes” was not meant to be clickbait to entice you here on false premises. This isn’t a post about cars, or anything to do with cars. This is the wrong place to come to if you want to read about cars. I’ve never owned a car. I’ve never rented a car. I have had a company car, but I’ve never driven one; my wife did drive the one I had, however.

I have never driven. Never had a licence. Never passed a test.

I once did have, and still continue to have, a vicarious interest in cars, for a fairly odd reason.

James Leasor.

I discovered the author around 1971, through the auspices of the British Council Library, which used to be on Theatre Road in Calcutta. As schoolboys we went there ostensibly to borrow books, but also because it was air-conditioned and quiet. Gold dust in those days. (And probably gold dust again soon, the cost of cooling may increase faster than the need for cooling, which is growing rapidly enough).

Every time I went there I’d make a beeline for 823.91 and look through the new arrivals before continuing to beachcomb the rest of the modern fiction section. It was one way to discover a new author. The first Leasor book I read, when I was 13, was called Never Had A Spanner On Her, and it introduced me to the protagonist Jason Love. Now Love had a penchant for Cords and Duesenbergs, and Leasor waxed so very lyrically and eloquently about them I began to think that they would be the only cars I would ever want to drive.

Soon I’d read everything that Leasor had written, not just the Jason Loves. That was the way people like me used to read: read extensively, always the “latest” book by an author. Then, if you liked the author, go through her entire oeuvre chronologically, one series at a time, until none remained. My dreams of Cords and Duesenbergs were built then, but not in some maniacal or obsessive way. It was like telling myself “One day I will eat Tournedos Rossini because Nero Wolfe thought they were amazing” … at a time when I lived in a vegetarian Hindu Brahmin home, one that had never even seen any meat enter it, let alone be cooked or consumed there. (And yes, since then I have had Tournedos Rossini one or two times. A year).

Those Cord and Duesenberg dreams, of cars built with passion by artists, of cars that could be built without using power tools, lasted a long time from 1971. I never imagined myself driving, it wasn’t something I aspired to. Maybe it was an instinctive reaction to knowing that the family couldn’t afford a car, so why think about driving? I never learnt to swim either, we didn’t belong to any clubs with pools in those days. What I couldn’t have I didn’t aspire towards. I had so many other things to look forward to, to daydream-believe, to make happen.

Twenty-odd years later, in my early thirties, as I began to think about maybe driving, the internet had been democratised and the web was emerging. So I could investigate Cords and Duesenbergs. Didn’t take me long to figure out what the answer was. You could call it sticker shock. I knew I’d never be able to afford one.

But I never forgot one thing about the 1929 Duesenberg, that it was the last car made without power tools that could be safely used on the road. That sort of thing appeals to me.

There’s a purity about it. It’s like never playing a word at Scrabble that you didn’t know the meaning of or couldn’t use in a sentence.

But I digress. Back to my original post.

Abundances and scarcities

This morning, by 10am, I had blocked a half-dozen handles on X. Ads which I wasn’t interested in and didn’t want to see, ads that were clouding my feed. I’d also emptied my various junk mail folders, after some cursory inspection to ensure that I’d missed nothing and promoted perhaps 1% to not-junk status, something I do once every few days. And I’d also deleted a plethora of “How Was It For You” requests, seemingly spawned by anything I’d touched digitally. (Oddly enough, the only one I didn’t delete was from Bentley’s, a place I’d visited in person, an email that was written personally and written to me specifically, rather than a cookie-cutter conceived and delivered without human involvement). Perhaps not that oddly. A personal message from someone, personally crafted, directed specifically at me, and related to a physical experience, feels tolerable, almost human.

That’s the trouble with abundance. It’s not always everything it’s cracked up to be.

Now I’m a big fan of Clay Shirky, and hold a number of things he said close to my heart. One of them is this:

There is no such thing as information overload, only filter failure.

Ever since I heard that, I’ve been fascinated by information filters, and even wrote a long series about them a long time ago. Here’s the main link: Filtering: Seven Principles, which I wrote here over a decade ago.

One of the other Shirky aphorisms I treasure is this (and here I paraphrase him, so much so I’m at risk of mangling his intent and misrepresenting it):

In order for a commons to thrive, the cost of repair must be at least equal to, if not lower than, the cost of damage.

There’s one other person I need to quote here, so that you can easily get my drift. And that’s something George Gilder once said, again paraphrased by me:

Every economic era is characterised by its own unique abundances and its own unique scarcities. A successful business takes into account both of these, the new abundances as well as the new scarcities.

Now there are some things he’s said that I disagree with, and some I disagree quite strongly with. But that doesn’t take away from the beauty of his “abundances and scarcities” framing.

An aside involving Gilder. When I was at Dresdner Kleinwort, while working for Al-Noor Ramji, we had an incredible team there. Really talented people, I was privileged to be part of that set-up. One day in 2000, Al-Noor asked me to organise a conference on mobility. An internal conference, focused on training the tech teams. We’d managed to get Gilder commit to opening the conference, his “Telecosm” hadn’t quite hit the shelves but he was all the rage and we wanted to hear what he had to say. We negotiated a price for his bringing his friend Marty Cooper to speak about the birth of the mobile phone and what it was like three decades earlier, and where he saw it going in 2000. Then we had pulled favours to get Hyacinth Nwana from BT to speak about connectivity. And we wanted to bring it all together to look at what we could learn from all the data that these connected devices would sense and collect.

We decided we had to have Mike Lynch from Autonomy. DrKW were the house brokers to Autonomy in those days, I’d met him a couple of times and reached out to ask him whether he would speak at the conference. He laughed when I said it was an internal one, just for our tech teams. And when I told him we had chosen to hold it at a college in Cambridge, his smile grew bigger. (We used that location for three reasons: 1 It was beautiful, it was functional, it was cheap 2 Gilder’s wife had gone to that college, and it made convincing him to speak at an internal conference a little easier; 3 we could try and convince Mike Lynch because it would be convenient for him).

Mike agreed, on one condition. No fees, no mess, no fuss. Just one special request. His dog had to be allowed to accompany him, and would have to be looked after while he spoke to us. He said he would take the dog for a walk, make a detour to speak to us, and then go back home with the dog. He kept his word, gave us an hour of his time, and we were entranced. Thank you Mike Lynch. RIP.

Capacity and constraints

You can’t really think about filters and brakes without also thinking about capacity and constraints. Since this is something I wrote about quite recently, I thought the best thing to do was to link to it here rather than repeat myself.

Friend of a friend

While studying the intricacies of the London Money Market at university in the mid-1970s (yes I am that old; I think the particular textbook we used for that class and topic was Modern Banking by R.S.Sayers, published 1938), I was fascinated by how discount houses and acceptance houses worked, and how effective that trust model was. The discount houses knew how to treat bills where the payer was known to them, but had a problem with situations where the payer was foreign not just to them, but located exotically as well. Enter the accepting house, with a man in every port that mattered to Empire, whose job it was to assess the worthiness, credit- and otherwise, of all the major companies there. The accepting house would sign the bill, and the discount house would do the needful, as they used to say at Writer’s Building. (I think I hear the phrase “please do the needful” only in India today, a trivial relic of the Raj).

So the discount house no longer needed to know the foreign payer, they only needed to know the firm that accepted the bill. Friend of a friend trust model in action, centuries ago. (An aside. In my first job, one of the banks we provided systems to was Brown Shipley, then a member of the Accepting Houses Committee. I was overjoyed to learn that such firms still existed, decades after the textbook).

Blogrolls

I started playing with blogs in the late 1990s, and was allowed to write internal-only posts by around 2002. It would be 2005 before it was considered okay for someone like me to have my own personal public-facing blog while working in senior roles in a bank.

Doc Searls and Chris Locke, two of the powerhouses behind the Cluetrain Manifesto — what an amazing book, it totally floored me when it came out — encouraged me to get out there and blog publicly. I was in New York to see Doc, and he introduced me to Halley Suitt Tucker, the organiser of the event at the Harvard Club. She was also organising a Blogger’s Dinner at Katz’s Deli that night, something she wrote about here.

That night at Katz’s, because of people like Doc and Halley, I met many people who till then were just trusted names on my blogroll. Trusted. On my blogroll.

Many of them still write. Maybe we will see a resurgence of the “blogosphere”, those days when people wrote “provisionally” about things, secure in the knowledge that they were amongst people who wanted to learn through civil discourse as embodied in that corner of cyberspace. Recently I’ve seen Doc show up here and there on my radar, as also Dave Winer (who’s been blogging since before we had a term for what he did) and Anil Dash, to name but a few who were there at that dinner.

I knew them because of what they wrote about, and because I followed them and read them. I knew them because someone I was already reading had linked to them via their blogroll. I knew them because someone I trusted “recommended” them by linking to them.

Blogrolls were wonderful discovery mechanisms, letting you find little-known bloggers who wrote passionately about stuff they were interested in. The recommendation process was also interesting, since linking to someone didn’t signal that you agreed with everything they wrote: the only signal was that they were possibly worth reading.

More importantly — and here I’m probably adjusting my rose-tinted rear-view-mirror — the blogroll wasn’t a filter bubble. There was diversity of opinion embedded within each person’s list of links. When I saw a new blog because it was mentioned somewhere, not necessarily by someone I knew and trusted, I used the blogroll as a validator of potential value. One that would allow me to be challenged in my thinking, rather than any form of groupthink.

Maybe that changed later, but my memories of the early blogrolls remain pristinely rosy.

Nobody goes there any more: it’s too crowded

One of my favourite Yogi Berra quotes.

We live in a world where we can’t move anywhere without being assailed by armies of notifications, drowned by the despair of a zillion requests for feedback, neutralised into nothingness by the noise of NPS. Even in cyberspace. Especially in cyberspace.

This is now a filtering problem. A serious one. It’s no longer about spam mail or abusive interactions in social media. It has entered the world of business. And that’s serious.

There is no spam as bad as corporate spam

It is now common for me to be asked to provide feedback for a service that I’m still experiencing: “how was your trip with us?” … a trip I was still on at the time.

It is now common for me to be reminded to do something I have already done, because the process by which I can tell the particular system that I don’t need reminding is broken.

It is now common for me to be recommended a purchase I have already made, just because I looked for possible items in that category a little while earlier.

When everything is connected, and everyone thinks they are making my life better by notifying me of stuff, of reminding me of stuff, of asking me about stuff, of recommending me stuff….

Then I stop listening. I stop reading. I stop responding. And, in the rare instance where I do do something about it, it’s not what the requester wants to hear or see. Put it this way, it’s not going to do their NPS scores any good whatsoever.

I’m tempted to write a more detailed post just about notifications and alerts and requests for feedback and reminders. But that will depend on whether there’s any interest. In Doc Searls’s “conversations with George Layoff” mode, this post is provisional, and may snowball. Or disappear into its own nothingness.

Speaking “provisionally”, I’ve been thinking of a structure that covers: