Author: JP

First of all, thanks for the comments and the e-mails after my last two posts. It’s good to see the snowballs rolling, gathering momentum.

Why am I doing this? Not because I’ve suddenly become some male-menopausal closet philosopher. But because trust and relationships and identity are integral components of any market, particularly financial markets. Software has caught up, it is now possible to embody some of these principles in software. It is also possible to get them hopelessly wrong, and to throw away the advantages and opportunities that technology, more particularly information technology, provides us.

Aside 1: One of Doc Searls‘ themes at reboot was that blogging is provisional. This is important. These are conversations and discussions, not dogma. Mind Wide Open, as Steven Johnson would say, but not in this context specifically. [And Happy Birthday one day late, Steven, if you ever get around to reading stuff like this]
I’ve been thinking more about why I feel it’s so important to distinguish between trust and confidence, why I am deeply uncomfortable with the definitions getting intertwined. Language is something that’s living, and meanings and nuances change over time. Years ago, I was fascinated to learn that “nice” used to mean “complicated”, as in “That’s a very nice two-move chess puzzle”; that “fond” meant “foolish”, and conjured up images of fresh-faced Wodehousian wonders mooning cheerily over absent first loves. More recently, we’ve had the Governors of the BBC pass judgment on the use and/or abuse of the word “gay”, to Chris Moyles’ consternation and relief.

I remember the first cricket match I ever went to. And what a match; details to be found here. Gary Sobers, Conrad Hunte, Rohan Kanhai, Lance Gibbs, Clive Lloyd, Seymour Nurse, Wes Hall and Charlie Griffiths, facing off against the one-eyed Nawab of Pataudi, Rusi Surti, Chandu Borde, ML Jaisimha, Abbas Ali Baig. Bedi playing his first Test. Chandrasekhar and Venkataraghavan playing as well. Each captain bestriding the field like a Colossus. [A confession. I first tried Colossi, didn’t like it, it didn’t work. Changed the structure of the sentence. Reminds me of the Alipore Zoo curator rumoured to have written to his counterpart at the Sydney Zoo, asking for the despatch of one mongoose. And then asking if he could send a second one at the same time :-) )

India lost. But no matter, it was a great spectacle. With a terrible start. A dispute about an umpiring call led to fans in one section of the ground pulling up the seats and setting them on fire. On New Year’s Day. Setting the backdrop for the newspaper headline “Hell at Eden” the next day.

Which brings me to the point of the story. I was nine. We had to evacuate the stadium in a hurry. There were flames surrounding us. And the only way to get out was to go up, and then jump down. My father shepherded me to the jump-off point, told me that he would jump first, then catch me when I jumped.

I had no confidence that my father could jump down 20 feet without doing himself a major injury; it would have been the most energetic thing I’d ever seen him do, other than hit a golf ball. But somehow he jumped, and landed with limbs intact, aided and abetted by the throng below. [I’m not sure he could have jumped anywhere in Calcutta without landing in a throng, but that’s a different matter.]

I had no confidence that my father would catch me. But I trusted him. And catch me he did.

Trust is binary. Yes or no. Trust is sacrificial, you have to make yourself vulnerable in order to trust. Trust is two-way; A cannot trust B unless it is also true that B trusts A. Trust is a relationship, a bond. It has something to do with emotional intelligence and faith and Pay It Forward. It is based on something holistic to do with the person and the relationship.
Confidence is graduated, it is part of a continuum of values. You associate confidence with words like ratings and levels and “degrees of”. It is one-way, if A has confidence in B then it does not follow that B has confidence in A. It is an attribute about a specific skill or ability.

Trust is Because Of. Confidence is With.

Aside 2: My grandfather was a Founder Member of the National Cricket Club at Eden Gardens, founded before my father was born. Founder Members were entitled to two pavilion tickets, and you didn’t even have to wear breakfast-coloured ties to sit there. Founder Members were entitled to these two pavilion tickets each for life. Between 1967 and 1980 I watched pretty much all five days of every match at Eden Gardens. Using Founder Member tickets. The youngest a Founder Member could have been, in 1969, was 63. I was 11 then, and not the youngest queueing up either. And nobody said a word.

This is an example of what’s happening today. One of the things the Web is challenging is the market lock-ins that prevent natural secondary trading from taking place. More and more, we will see “not-transferable” items becoming more liquid, more tradable. Entertainment and sports event tickets are the likeliest candidates to start with, but even airline tickets will go that way.

To make this happen, we will need better understanding of how identity is altered on such instruments. The answer is not to prevent the transfer, but to solve the identity transfer issue. There will also be cases where the “instrument” is transferable only after a “first refusal” hoop-to-be-climbed; this is reasonable as well. We have to solve the process by which we can portray identity accurately and allow for first-refusal clauses, rather than prevent something as natural as secondary-market trading.

I’ve just returned from reboot in Copenhagen. Exhilarating. Google reboot8 and take a wander through the 140,000 hits you get, it should give you a flavour.

How do I feel now? Like Doc’s snowballs met the Sony Bravia ad. Millions of ideas bouncing at me in glorious technicolor. [An aside. Was that ad real? I hear stories about damaged cars on the Bullitt streets of San Francisco. Try Bravia on flickr and it all seems so very real. Does anyone out there know for sure? Please do share the story with us.]

So rather than comment further on reboot, I thought I’d do a recap of Four Pillars, but in the context of what I’d learnt at the conference.

The Foundations of Four Pillars are the places that make up the Internet. Infrastructure in Stewart Brand terms, as shown in Doc Searls’s Making a New World. Open to all. No barriers to entry. Providing a host of utilities that are the heat and light and shelter of the new world. Utilities that range from processor to memory to storage to connectivity. Utilities that are non-discriminatory in nature, with a common pricing model, available to all.

The Four Pillars are Syndication, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation.

Syndication is nothing more than habitual signalling of intention, almost passive in nature, yet alive. A long view. When you subscribe to an information feed, you are signalling an interest, a nascent intention.

Search is nothing more than ad-hoc signalling of intention, almost active in nature, very much alive. A more transient view. When you search for something, you are signalling an interest, an active interest.

Conversation is how you feed and sustain the relationships you need within these market places, how you convert your syndications and your searches into buying and selling signals. Conversation is how you discover the recommendations of people you trust, in order to decide what you buy or sell.

Fulfilment is how you consummate your intentions.

Propped up by these Four Pillars is Relationship and Identity and Trust. Identity has no meaning except in a relationship. No man is an Iland intire of it selfe. I am not a Rock. A relationship has no meaning except in trust. Covenant not contract. Identity is first and foremost who you are, defined by your beliefs and values and mores and ethics. Who you are. Not what you are. Identity is defined within one or more relationships.

[An aside on Privacy. We live in a world where nanny states are fashionable, where powers-that-be insist on deciding what you can do and what you can’t do, for your own good. This is a natural consequence of flawed ideas of privacy. People in relationships need to be open and vulnerable in order to build trust. Vulnerability can only exist when you are accountable, when there is a connection between your actions and their consequences. Remove that connection at your peril: once you remove accountability and “traceability” then someone else has to figure out how to deal with the disconnected consequences that materialise. Nanny states and litigiousness become the norm. Counterintuitively, the more accountable you are, the less someone can sue you.]

There’s a lot of open space between the Four Pillars and the Roof they support. Open spaces where we meet and converse as part of trusted relationships in communities. Communities that overlap and mesh and coalesce and separate. Communities that are alive. Communities where we use the most valuable assets we have, ourselves, to create new things and consume them. Communities that don’t know the difference between first, second, third and other worlds. Communities that can make an impact on things that matter.
And there’s a lot to be done to make this world happen. Done in terms of internet “governance”, in terms of reworked intellectual property approaches, in terms of meaningful and usable identity. These are difficult concepts and will need us to work together to make it happen, to avoid the sins of the past, to ensure that we don’t lose sight of what can be achieved by getting stuck in polarised politics and emotion.

We have to learn to love our open spaces, our open market places, rather than fear them. Agoraphilia.
Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Thanks to JD Salinger. [BTW I came across this review of Salinger’s book from the New York Times of 28 January 1963. How nice to find it in an open space. Thank you NYT.