Author: JP

Four Pillars: A postscript on anonymity

One of my favourite films of all time is Local Hero. And not just for the Knopfler soundtrack, which apparently continues to outsell the movie. I like many things about it.

 

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There was a Road-To-Damascus moment for me while watching the film way back in 1983. This MBA-clad oilman arrives at a Scottish village, stands in from of the pub he’s meant to stay at. He’s hours late, and it’s yay in the morning, and he proceeds to wake up the dead.

The pub landlord, a character named Urquhart, finally sticks his head out of an upstairs bedroom window, and says:

We don’t lock doors here.

That’s the way I feel about many things. I don’t want better locks and sharper razor wire and more CCTV and alarm systems.

I want to avoid having to lock things up.

Four Pillars: More on Opposable Thumbs: Thoughts on Identity

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Thanks to David Benbennick for the Zen koan-like sight of one thumb opposing.
Whenever you’re in a conversation about identity, two things come up regularly:

  • The need to support confidentiality and secrecy and privacy of information
  • The need to support confidentiality and secrecy and privacy of identity

I, for one, am distinctly underwhelmed by the arguments for either of these things.
If these things were obvious, then I guess there would be less need to blog about it. Conversations where people have undiluted, potentially dogmatic or even bigoted certainty can be pretty boring. There’s a Baconesque doubts-to-certainties vulnerability about blogging. And all I am doing here is sharing my doubts, to try and set a few more snowballs off.
Why am I doubtful about confidentiality and privacy and secrecy and their relationship with identity? Here’s the thing. Of late I see that people start speaking of disaggregating information to unit pieces, associating each unit piece with a sell-by-date and a time-stamp. And I smell a rat. Why?

Back to Cluetrain and conversations. Back to Doc Searls and African pastors. Back to Middle Eastern souks and Indian bazaars. Relationship before transaction. Relationship. Relationship. If I trust someone then I am willing to converse with that person and share confidences, in the knowledge that the information will not be misused. Period. And if there is any granularity or continuum to find, it is in the relationship and not the information. Which I will come to later.
Granular time-sensitive information feels like a myth created for bad DRM and bad IPR and bad IMS. People who want to control things because they can. Not consumer or community driven, but vendor-directed.

It’s like itemised billing for telephone calls, and no different from region-encoding on DVDs. We need to be very careful here.

I want to make calls. And if I were to design how I want to be billed for them, I would choose always-on eat-as-much-as-I-like call-anytime call-anywhere call-anyone. I do not need itemised billing for this.

The only reason to have itemised billing is because someone else, not me, wants the ability to charge me by item. Not because I want to pay by item. I want to pay on an unlimited basis. [ A tangent: I can visualise the possibility of there being different levels of unlimited, much like Cantor’s different infinities. As long as we keep it simple, it could work].
Just see what happens when you allow such thinking to continue. Before you know it, you have people employed in organisations whose raison d’etre is to check other people’s telephone bills. Because they can. Not because there is any value in doing it. There is no value in finding out that John Smith spent $5.83 on personal calls using his business cellphone in March 2006. The statement is a function of the existence of itemised billing. If John’s employers had a contract with unlimited calls for a fixed tariff, the statement would not exist.

It’s the sort of thinking that will install bugs in watercoolers and coffee shops and lifts. Because they can. You, sir, have been found guilty of discussing the merits of Liverpool Football Club in the lift at 1.49pm yesterday. How do you plead?

What tosh.

More worryingly, as soon as you allow people to impute “confidentiality” and “time” to a piece of information, you allow for differential charging at every point in the process. Processor and chipset. Connection and network. Software.

And all for no value. Exactly like region coding of DVDs.

Confidentiality is about trust. When the merchants of Lombardy sat on their benches and conversed and transacted, what held them together was relationship and trust. My word is my bond. Semper fi for the financial community. Not granular or selective. Covering the entire relationship.

And when trust was unacceptably broken, the relationship was over. Not a transaction, the relationship. All nine yards of it. The bench the guy sat on was broken. The banco was rutto. He was bankrupt.

So. About confidentiality. I am all for confidentiality, but at the relationship level, without granular information and without time decay. What you share you should be able to share unconditionally. And guess what? Relationships are about covenants, not contracts. They do not understand time the same way computers do. And don’t want to understand time that way either.
Confidentiality within the relationship is important, even crucial. Parent-child. Teacher-student. Pastor-parishioner. Bank-customer. Attorney-client. Doctor-patient. Journalist-source. Copper-nark, or policeman-informant. Even whistlelistener-whistleblower. And in a perfect world, government-citizen.

The confidentiality should cover the entire relationship. That is what trust is about, what builds trust and what trust builds. And I cannot for the life of me figure out what anonymity has to do with it. Here be dragons.
Allowing anonymity to be protected creates a whole new set of problems for us. These are tactical responses that in Michael Hammer speak pave over the cowpaths. Digital anonymity cures the symptom and not the disease.

Once we start worrying about showing who we are, we cause new problems. Even prisoners of war gave out their name, rank, serial number. Todd Beamer did not seem worried about his privacy of identity when he challenged the terrorists on board Flight 93. And he could not have paid a bigger price. But he did the right thing. And will remain an inspiration for me for the rest of my life.

You cannot tackle cowards with anonymity. They will keep returning, whether as terrorists or control-freak states or even schoolyard bullies.

When people ask for anonymity, we are better off trying to fix their reason for fear, not hiding the people in digital equivalents of witness protection.

I could be wrong. But my gut feel is that confidentiality and privacy and secrecy cover entire relationships and not pieces of them.

Relationships are always-on. Unlimited use. Not transaction-priced. And identity needs to be designed to understand this, not to support vast emperors-new-clothes edifices of transaction pricing and false concepts of anonymity.

Reciprocal and recursive Cluetrain: Markets are conversations are markets

Doc pointed me at Network Weaving. And I spent some time reading up what they’ve said and done. And rather than say any more, I’m going to leave it at that and just recommend you go read them.

There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. One thing’s for sure. Cluetrain is getting both reciprocal as well as recursive.

Four Pillars: Like a smoke ring day when the wind blows

When the dream came
I held my breath with my eyes closed
I went insane, like a smoke ring day
When the wind blows

On The Way Home, Neil Young

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Have you ever watched what happens when a gust of wind hits a smoke ring? Blows it to smithereens, makes it “go insane”. Do it sometime, just for a laugh. You don’t have to smoke, just know someone who still does.

It’s the same expression-of-freedom thing that happens in Cabaret, if I’m thinking of the right film. Liza Minnelli and someone else waiting in a tunnel for a train to pass, then yelling at the top of their voices as the train passes.

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Catharsis.

I can only speak for myself, but the more I see of what we can now dream of doing with technology, the more I get a sensation of catharsis. Which, by the way, is connected to the Cathars in the same way the Canary Islands are connected to canaries. The Cathars were called the Cathars becaused they underwent catharsis. The canaries were called canaries because they were found on the island.

Why this sense of being purged, why this sense of release? Take a look at this.

Here’s one way of looking at our industry (apologies for the extreme brevity and lack of references, I just want to prove a simple point):

  • Iteration 1: The customer could do nothing except through us. Everything was obscure and off limits. Our profession existed behind a thick curtain segregated away from all else, with our own jargon and our own secrets. Men wore cigarettes in their beards and coffee cups grew things. Lasted a long time. Moore writes the laws he can’t afford to buy the original papers of.
  • Iteration 2: The customer could manipulate structured information directly, could consume some structured information. The mouse and pointer and window and icon had arrived. Heady days when everyone was copying everyone and nobody knew the value of what they were giving away and nobody cared. Started while Iteration 1 was still going strong. The lovely Lisa arrived, email and mobile phones were clunking around. Metcalfe writes the laws he can’t afford to buy the original papers of.
  • Iteration 3: The customer could produce structured information. Visicalc and Wordstar had done their bit. IBM had finished setting up Microsoft and now had problems of their own. The PC was born, and IT departments had started their devolution and decentralisation. Ma Bell was finding breaking up hard to do, and SVID was freed up. More versions of Unix than you could shake a stick at. The evil that is patent and IPR and DRM today starts getting its roots firmed up.
  • Iteration 4: The customer could consume unstructured information. From the net via HTML and the browser to the World Wide Web. [ An aside, is www still the only abbreviation to have twice the number of syllables as the thing it’s trying to abbreviate?]. The AT bus, unix and PC clones, open systems and standards, despite all being very vendor-driven, create a whole new industry: the Indian offshore software companies. Until then, proprietary architecture costs and Indian import duties put paid to any other option. All you had was Indian branches of foreign computer manufacturers. Offshore staff, but no offshore industry.
  • Iteration 5: The customer could produce unstructured information. Blogs and wikis start becoming mainstream. The capacity to publish and consume information is democratised. Collaboration using technology becomes a distinct possibility. The opensource movement gets institutional traction, and vendors lose their last vestiges of monopoly control. Standards start becoming community-driven.
  • Iteration 6: The customer can do everything and it works. We see off Strassmann gloom (there is no business value in IT) and Carr gloom (there is no business value in IT innovation either) and Blue Screens of Death and start delivering measurable tangible benefits. Moore and Metcalfe continue to help. Opensource is now the norm. Utilities emerge that are true utilities, owned communally, moderated commercially, serving a specific vertical.

People get connected.

Information gets connected.

Markets get connected.

And life is good.
Because we learn to get out of the way. And allow value to emerge. Using things like Four Pillars.
After all, when all the vendors have been subjugated, we’re left with the biggest vendor of them all. Us. Internal IT departments.

This is why I feel we live in a period of catharsis, as we wash away the constraints of the past and get ready to do new things. And I’m with Neil Young watching smoke ring days when the wind blows, with Sally Bowles yelling my head off when the train goes by.

Four Pillars: Snowballs

I look at every comment made on my blog. I try and find out who the commenter is. If someone links to me, I try and find out who it is and what they’re interested in.

Manual collaborative filtering. It’s not about ego. In fact, I don’t understand why someone would blog if that someone wasn’t interested in what other people said and what common AND different interests the others had.

It’s part of the point of blogging. Wisdom-of-crowds meets madness-of-crowds and  emergence and serendipity and network effects.

So this morning I walked over to Mind This, since I saw a link and a comment. Liked the commented story, added and improved on bits of my Opposable Thumbs post. Rolled a snowball away, I know not where. Thank you Lars.

And then I saw this post by Lars. Probably been done a million times before, but it was a eureka moment for me.

A marriage is a conference is a concert is a marketing event is a school play or sports day is a community ritual gathering is a rite of passage.

We don’t call the tools social software for nothing.

And it is in the socialising of social software that better social software will emerge. For new purposes. For unthought-of purposes.

“…..O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ He chortled in his joy. From Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.

When I feel frabjous I feel very, very good indeed. Following up on something Clarence Fisher said about chess and 13-14-year-olds, I think Lewis Carroll is also a must for them. Pillow Problems and A Tangled Tale were seminal books for me.