Author: JP

In writing my previous post, I really wanted to get the quote from Po Bronson’s Bombardiers right. So first off I looked for the book in my library, and couldn’t find it. Probably packed away already, I’m in the process of moving house. Oh well.
So I thought I’d try Amazon Online Reader. Found the book in Amazon, went to Excerpt, went to Search Inside This Book, and then entered “First Law” as my search term.

Bingo, I got a number of results returned, including the specific one I wanted, on page 81. Which I guess I could have linked to, which is what I have done here.

Seems completely fair use to me; I don’t have many readers, but if even one person buys Bombardiers from Amazon as a result of my post, then that’s one book more worth of revenue than Amazon or Bronson had before I did what I did.

This is me just experimenting on what could be, when everything is scanned and searchable, what Google and Amazon have been trying to do in different ways. The potential in education and in research is amazing.

Of course, there are obvious drawbacks. The population of books scanned is still relatively low. I can’t use highlight or print as yet. When something I want to quote happens to go beyond a page boundary, it is messy from a linking point of view, the physical page concept is deeply ingrained for obvious reasons.

But worst of all, there was no way for me to copy and paste, so the only thing I could do was to swivel-chair engineer it. Read it, memorise it in chunks, type it out. [Yes I know there are other drawbacks, some of which I mention later. Here I am concentrating on drawbacks to existing functionality, rather than missing functionality].
It’s great to be able to do what I’ve been able to do so far, so thank you Amazon. I’ve tried bits of this before, but this was the first time I did so “in anger”. [Wonder how that phrase came about. Must check. Odd].

Unfortunately, since I don’t live in the US, I have not been able to participate in the Amazon Upgrade program. But even if I could have, my understanding is that the program is restricted to books I personally purchased from Amazon directly. [Wry grin as I think about someone who lives in the US but buys books from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de, and how the “system” will cope with that.]

What I would really want is a LibraryThing equivalent where I have a simple way of telling Amazon which books I have, leading up to some recurring fee with low frequency (like an annual season ticket) allowing me to have digital access to all my books; this fee should not care how many books I have, how often I use the service. What I pay for is the software-as-service; the books are mine; the information I generate is mine; but the process by which I transform what I have is something I have to pay for.

Such a service has to, just has to include books I have bought from sources other than Amazon. Cue Dick Hardt and Doc Searls and whose information it is.

The kernel for this post is a comment and a question from Stephen Smoliar on a recent post of mine. [I think this post should come with a health warning on its length and its subject matter. You have been warned :-) ]

Gresham’s Law, simply put, states that Bad Money Drives Out Good.

If there is “Something” commoditised and in circulation, with real and measurable intrinsic value, this “Something” can be replaced by “Something Else” with lower intrinsic value, provided the Something Else has a way of having its artificial value upheld or warranted. Please do look at the linked Wikipedia entry if you are not familiar with the term, rather than rely on any of my mutterings.

Is there a Gresham’s Law for information? Not yet. Could there be a Gresham’s Law for information? There will be, if we let it happen. Should it happen? I think not; I hope not.

My reasons:

• Information, particularly digital information, is an extreme nonrival good
• For digital information to have value, we (the consumers/producers of information) must impute that value to information
  
• That imputation of value should not come from seeking to make an abundant commodity scarce, but from new ways of imputing value to digital information
  
• We already have new ways of imputing value to such information
• The velocity of information is increasing, and traditional responses will not scale
  

We have the power to prevent Gresham’s Law from being applicable to information. It is up to us.

Let me now take each point in turn.

Information, particularly digital information, is an extreme nonrival good.

I quote from Rishab Aiyer Ghosh‘s opening essay in CODE below:

• The economic basis for intellectual property is nonobvious, to say the least. Unlike most forms of property, intellectual property is almost unique in requiring state support for its very existence. While it is helpful to have state protection for a plot of land, it can also be protected by, for instance, putting a fence around it, and a chair can be protected by sitting on it. Such acts of protection express your possession of your property. Information is not just an extreme nonrival good, in that many people can enjoy its benefits at the same time; information is also unusual in that ownership over it cannot be expressed through a public act of possession. You can possess information if you keep it to yourself — in which case it remains private, and nobody knows what it is that you possess. As soon as you make public the information you claim to own, it is public information that everyone can access since you no longer have any natural control over it. The extreme nonrival nature of information means that any expression of possession you make over it, after publishing it, is impotent, and your “ownership” of published information can only be guaranteed through external support, such as by the state.
• […..]
• The external protection of such a hard-to-possess form of property also runs against the gradient of economic sense. Information can be reproduced infinitely with no inherent marginal cost of reproduction — any cost is solely related to the medium of production. Since something with a zero marginal cost of reproduction is clearly not scarce, it also has no value that can be naturally protected.

The extreme nonrival nature of information is something to be cherished, to be nurtured, to be protected.

Next point.

For digital information to have value, we (the consumers/producers of information) must impute that value to information

This time I shall quote from Norbert Weiner. In a book titled Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series, he has this to say:

Let us now turn from the study of time series to that of communications engineering. This is the study of messages and their transmission, whether these messages be sequences of dots and dashes, as in the Morse Code or the teletypewriter, or sound-wave patterns, as in the telephone or phonograph, or patterns representing visual images, as in telephoto services and television. In all communication engineering —[….]— the message to be transmitted is represented as some sort of array of measurable quantities distributed in time. [……] For the existence of a message, it is indeed essential that variable information be transmitted. The transmission of a single fixed item of information is of no communicative value. We must have a repertory of possible messages, and over this repertory a measure determining the probability of these messages.

From Weiner to Winterson. Jeanette Winterson has this to say about reading:

Good books are detonating devices, able to trigger something in the mind of the reader — a memory perhaps, or a revelation, or an understanding not possible by any other means…..The introverted nature of reading is part of its power. No one knows what you are thinking as you read. No one can see what changes might be taking place under the surface of your silent repose. It is this unaccountability to external authority that makes reading both defiant and an act of free will.

Information itself has no value. We have to impute that value, by interpreting it, giving it meaning, giving it credence. Esther Dyson covered some of this ground in a recent post in her new blog. Stephen Smoliar was on a parallel path in his recent post. The whole Semantic Web concept is built around how we can impute meaning, and therefore value, to the bits. And it is we who do that imputing.

As Stewart Brand said, Information Wants To Be Free. [Or maybe the updated version is as Don Marti said, via Doc Searls, Information wants to be $6.95]

Through meaning and interpretation comes value. Remember that the only fact on a financial statement is the cash position; everything else is conventional representation. And in this context, think Enron. Think Sarbanes-Oxley. Think revenue recognition. Think back-dating of options. It is through meaning and interpretation that information has value.

That imputation of value should not come from seeking to make an abundant commodity scarce, but from new ways of imputing value to digital information

The more I think about it, the more I worry about the “evolutionary” response to freeriders and to vandals, as we increase the number of blocks and filters we place on the World Live Web, on the Writable Web. People like Doc and Esther and Chris and Cory and Ross have successfully hammered the idea of the web being live and writable into my head, and now it won’t go away.

Clay Shirky first brought this to my attention, and it seemed reasonable. Innovations adapt to survive and thrive; for things like Wikipedia, he suggests that increased governance is an evolutionary adaptation necessary for survival. I have tended to agree with him, but now I’m not so sure. I think the retrograde nature of the adaptation is a cause for concern, and that we ought to look at new governance models, not variations of the old.

On the inside front cover of Democracy and The Problem of Free Speech, Cass Sunstein is quoted as follows: “Our government now protects speech that causes harm yet forbids speech that is essential.” I have this growing fear that we will live with far too many unintended and unwished-for consequences if we fall into the Increased Governance trap for community information. It is the community that creates the information, maintains it, corrects it where needed, imputes value to it, consumes it, archives it. And we must keep it that way.

We already have new ways of imputing value to such information

Linus’s Law, Given Enough Eyeballs, All Bugs Are Shallow, has itself been exposed to a good many eyeballs. Blogs and wikis are social-software instances where the same Law holds true. The opensource movement has already proven the worth of the Law; let us not give up now and revert to prior, and potentially destructive, governance models.

And we have new ways, ways that make use of the power of emergence a la Steven Johnson, of the power of democratised innovation a la von Hippel and Benkler. Ways like Reputation. Ways like Community Ratings and Collaborative Filtering. Ways like improving the concepts and implementation of the Semantic Web. Ways like better Pattern Recognition and Contextual Search, as Esther suggested. If you want examples, take a look at what Tom Bell (of the Chapman University School of Law) is doing. I quote from the abstract:

Copyrights and patents promote only superficial progress in the sciences and useful arts. Copyright law primarily encourages entertaining works, whereas patent law mainly inspires marginal improvements in mature technologies. Neither form of intellectual property does much to encourage basic research and development. Essential progress suffers.

Prediction markets offer another way to promote the sciences and useful arts. In general, prediction markets support transactions in claims about unresolved questions of fact. A prediction market specifically designed to promote progress in the sciences and useful arts – call it a scientific prediction exchange or SPEx – would support transactions in a variety of prediction certificates, each one of which promises to pay its bearer in the event that an associated claim about science, technology, or public policy comes true. Like other, similar markets in information, a scientific prediction exchange would aggregate, measure, and share the opinions of people paid to find the truth.

Because it would reward accurate answers to factual questions, a SPEx would encourage essential discoveries about the sciences and useful arts. Researchers and developers in those fields could count on the exchange to turn their insights into profit. In contrast to copyrights or patents, therefore, a SPEx would target fundamental progress. Furthermore, and in contrast to copyrights and patents, the exchange would not impose deadweight social costs by legally restricting access to public goods. To the contrary, a scientific prediction exchange would generate a significant positive externality: Claim prices that quantify the current consensus about vital controversies

I’m not saying we have the right answers already. What I am saying is that we need to look for the right answers; what I am also saying is that current retrograde governance suggestions are inappropriate.

The velocity of information is increasing, and traditional responses will not scale

And now for something completely different. Take a look at what Po Bronson said in Bombardiers:

Eggs Igino had been studying Economics for six years, and he’d never seen such a perfect display of the Third Law. He sat down at the small round table in the kitchen and tried to gather his thoughts. The First Law of Information Economics was simple. Knowledge is power. The Second Law was only a little more complicated: Knowledge is not a candy bar. If you eat a candy bar, the candy bar is gone. And if you give it to a friend, then he gets to eat it and you don’t. But with knowledge, you can’t use it up, and you can’t get rid of it by giving it away. This leads to the corollary to the Second Law: Word travels fast. Knowledge spreads much faster and more easily than any physical product, mostly because telling your friends doesn’t make you poorer. If knowledge spreads effortlessly to everyone, and if knowledge is power, then one logical conclusion was that everyone would have power. The other logical conclusion was that the power of knowledge was fleeting and temporary and we would all be powerless. Eggs Igino pulled a paper napkin off the breakfast cart and wrote on it with one of the corporate pens in light blue ink:

1. Knowledge is Power!

2. Knowledge is not a Candy Bar

2(b). Word Travels Fast

He stared at his theories. He underlined each of them twice as he rehearsed their logic. It was just so beautiful to see the salespeople so powerless and their world going to hell. For an intellectual like Igino, it was as beautiful as mitochondria in a petri dish or a mouse in a maze. Then he wrote below the other lines in large, energetic, slashing letters:

3. Power is Temporary!!!

We have learnt about the power of many. We have learnt about the corruptions that take place when reading/writing power is in the hands of a few. History is not just littered with examples, even the history we read has had its fair share of corruption.

Let’s not allow Gresham’s Law to become applicable to Information. Let’s keep traditional governance models where they deserve to be, filed somewhere even Google cannot find, and let’s concentrate on using the power of many, of peer review and rating and pressure and action.

I realise this may offend some of you. No offence intended, I am doing what I normally do, thinking aloud about things that matter to me. Always happy to be proven wrong. Comments welcome.

How do I love thee Wikipedia? Let me count the links.

This is a follow-up on something I posted a few weeks ago, with comments from Stu, Ian and TJ. The issue was about moderators becoming some sort of gatekeepers over time and the existence of some sort of continuum across which this happens.

While researching some of the control issues related to Wikipedia, I happened upon some very useful comments from Clay Shirky on all this; he was in turn responding to something Nicholas Carr had written on the “death” of Wikipedia; by following the Shirky link, you should also be able to see Carr’s original piece and his rejoinder to Shirky.

A few quotes from the Shirky piece:

• Openness allows for innovation. Innovation creates value. Value creates incentive. If that were all there was, it would be a virtuous circle, because the incentive would be to create more value. But incentive is value-neutral, so it also creates distortions — free riders, attempts to protect value by stifling competition, and so on. And distortions threaten openness.
• As a result, successful open systems create the very conditions that require [a response that threatens] openness. Systems that handle this pressure effectively continue (Slashdot comments.) Systems that can’t or don’t find ways to balance openness and closedness — to become semi-protected — fail (Usenet.)
• A huge number of our current systems are hanging in the balance, because the more valuable a system, the greater the incentive for free-riding. Our largest and most spontaneous sources of conversation and collaboration are busily being retrofit with filters and logins and distributed ID systems, in an attempt to save some of what is good about openness while defending against Wiki spam, email spam, comment spam, splogs, and other attempts at free-riding. Wikipedia falls into that category.
• And this is the possibility that Carr doesn’t entertain, but is implicit in his earlier work — this isn’t happening because the Wikipedia model is a failure, it is happening because it is a success.

Shirky notes later on in the same piece that “the rise of governance models is a reaction to the success that creates incentives to vandalism and other forms of attack or distortion.“

In the context of the continuum put forward by Ian and TJ, I think this is an important statement, and one that bears further discussion and analysis.

We need to think of governance models as evolutionary responses rather than immune system responses. An evolutionary response adapts to changing external stimuli in order to preserve and extend existence. An immune system response seeks to annihilate the interloper. While both are defensive in nature, I believe the principles by which they operate are as far apart as is possible.

An evolutionary response is open and knows no taboos. An immune system response is closed and knows only taboos.

We need to ensure that as we move across this suggested continuum, we stay on an open-with-as-few-controls-as-are required approach, rather than a this-doesn’t-work-so-let’s-bury-it-in-six-feet-of-concrete approach. What I have seen so far is too often the latter, which is why I brought this up again.

A dollar of trade is worth a hundred times a dollar of aid. It is better to teach a man to fish than to give a man fish.

These are things I have believed in for all of my adult life, influenced by things my father said, things I learnt growing up in India, things I learnt at school and at university amongst the Jesuits.

As a result, many years later, I still think education and enfranchisement are important, whatever the context. If anything, I think they’re even more important than I used to think they were. At some level of abstraction, the only way we can deal with sectarian issues and even with terrorism is via education and enfranchisement. There is growing anecdotal evidence that people who are denied both are more susceptible to joining cults and “movements”.
I think education and enfranchisement are important to each of us as individuals, in our private lives. Important to us in our professional lives, to the firms we work for and work with. Important to us in the towns and cities we live in, in the countries and continents we inhabit.

Education and enfranchisement may not solve all of the world’s problems, but they help.

So I thought I’d start a conversation about these things, with people who could help me learn more about them, who could point me to things I needed to see, and who could say things that let me see things in a different light, with a different perspective.

But how was I to start such a conversation? With a formal education in economics, and a career of over twenty-five years in technology, it made sense for me to concentrate on information and its enabling technologies and the business models used. So that’s what I did. Six months ago.

And that’s why I care about the internet and about connectivity. About intellectual property rights and digital rights management. About opensource software, technologies and platforms. About identity and confidentiality and privacy. About avoiding path pollution and avoiding device and vendor lock-in.
If we get them right, more people will have affordable access to information, more people will be enfranchised to participate in the world.

If we get them wrong, we will waste opportunities we have never had before. Opportunities provided by the continuance of Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law and Gilder’s Law. Opportunities provided by the Ohmae Three, Globalisation, Disintermediation and the Internet. Opportunities provided by the democratisation of innovation and the availability of social software. Opportunities provided by telephony becoming software.

Opportunities for whom? For the disenfranchised of today. Disenfranchised because they’re too young. Or too old. Disenfranchised because they’re not connected or unable to connect or unable to afford to connect. Disenfranchised because they’re unable to use “traditional” computers because of physical constraints. Disenfranchised because they’re always on the move. Because they don’t have access to electrical power. Because English is not their mother tongue. Because they’re too shy. Because they’ve never had the opportunity.

If we do the wrong thing about the internet, about intellectual property and DRM, or about identity and its  related issues, then we will miss the opportunity. But only for a while. Nature abhors a vacuum. The opensource community will find a way around the messes we create, the constraints we put in place, the barriers we raise.

If we do the right thing about all this, then we will have a different way of dealing with information. Because the underlying technology has caught up, information need no longer be trapped by its enabling technologies, information can begin to have the social life it was meant to have, as John Seely Brown has reminded us.

And that’s why I blog about Generation M, about Web 2.0, about Four Pillars, about Syndication, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation.

I wondered about whether I should only blog about all this in the context of the individual, then realised maybe a year ago that all this is true for institutions as well. Education and enfranchisement and Four Pillars are as meaningful in an enterprise context as anywhere else.

The Cluetrain guys called markets conversations, and helped me understand a few things. John Seely Brown and Steven Johnson placed a few other things in context for me about the social life of information and how it flows, how it emerges and moves. Doc and his Lakoff conversation helped me get snowballs.

So blogging it had to be. I don’t read blogs to find out things faster than anyone else; I don’t read blogs to find things to link to and comment on before anyone else; I don’t read blogs because I can’t find any books to read.

I read blogs because they’re participative, they are accessible, they help me learn. I write blogs because I want to participate. In a community. Everyone wants to make a difference, everyone wants to leave a legacy. Blogs are useful in both cases.

Someone I was reading, I’m afraid I can’t remember who it was or where it was, mentioned that conversations can be about events, people or ideas. People-related things tend to be best live and we will always have some form of radio and television, even after we’ve time-shifted it and place-shifted it and mutated it. Event-related things tend to be best in short “factual” bursts and we will always have old media around in some form or the other covering this. Sure, people and event conversations are migrating to the web, but I guess alternative forms will exist.

When it comes to ideas, the blogosphere is hard to beat. What Doc called a snowball is often a sense of revelation for me; I read something and my brain goes Ping, I see it in a different perspective. I experience a different understanding, walk away with a different meaning, all because somebody said something that triggered something else in me. And it helps me learn. When I write something, the comments and feedback and links help me learn as well. And I guess I hope that some readers get that as well from reading what I write.

You may have wondered why I blog about the things I blog about. Now I guess you know. Method or madness? You decide. :-)

I read this story by Hugo Rifkind in the Times today, about a plan for a somewhat different protest in front of Parliament in London. Comedian Mark Thomas has issued an open invitation to all comers, to apply to the police for a “lone protest” licence (which needs six days’ notice and apparently tends to be granted). And then for all the “lone protesters” to turn up next Thursday, in what could be termed an orchestrated cacophony of protest; in order to stay within the law, every person must protest about something different. The law they are not-protesting about banned demonstrations without a licence within a kilometre of Parliament; see related story here. You can almost imagine everyone with individual and personalised tiny gapingvoid cartoons on business-card sized banners….
Smart mobs taking an unusual turn? Let’s see what happens :-)