Category: Four pillars

The kernel for this post came from my gently meandering back and forth through Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan; I’m still reading through it for the first time.

I quote from the book, page 29

Now consider the effect of the first music recording, an invention that introduced a great deal of injustice. Our ability to reproduce and repeat performances allows me to listen on my laptop to hours of background music of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz (now extremely dead) performing Rachmaninoff’s Preludes, instead of to the local Russian emigre musician (still living), who is now reduced to giving piano lessons to generally untalented children for close to minimum wage. Horowitz, though dead, is putting the poor man out of business. […….] If you ask me why I select Horowitz, I will answer that it is because of the order, rhythm, or passion, when in fact there are probably a legion of people I have never heard about, and will never hear about — those who did not make it to the stage, but who might play just as well.

I’ve considered this innate “injustice” many times, apparently caused by the introduction of cheaper reproduction and transmission technologies. But I’ve tended to take quite a different view to that espoused by Taleb.

For me, the unfairness lay not in the reproduction and transmission technologies, but in the bottlenecks, the “experts” whose patronage was required. The people who made the stars. The people who gave the performers airtime, signed them up to record deals, promoted the works, and so on.

The way I looked at it, technological advances had consistently lowered the barriers to entry for various types of artist, only to find that someone else in a downstream process raised the barriers again. And it was these “someone elses” that I tended to look at with great suspicion.

[An aside. The roots for this suspicion were planted while I was still an undergraduate reading Economics, hearing about the concepts of “merit goods”. I could not believe that I was going to join a group of people arrogant enough to decide what was good for others. A few years later, I found myself seemingly on the other side of the fence, working as a technical writer. My boss wanted me to write the manuals so that a “Sun reader” would understand them. I felt it was my duty to raise literacy and refused to succumb to the pressure, and wrote the way I wanted to write, not explicitly highbrow but unwilling to become lowest-common denominator.]

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Taleb’s injustice is based on the evils inherent in hit cultures and prodigiously absent in long-tail cultures; evils often spawned by “experts” who believed they had a God-given right to decide on others’ behalf, a problem often avoided by wisdom-of-crowd approaches.

We used to live in a world where a street musician was a nobody until and unless some expert God came along and patronised him. The factors of “star” production were all in the hands of the expert.

Now, the barriers to entry are significantly lower. The street musician has the opportunity to burn his own CD, make his own YouTube demo, and make it to the 21st century variant of stardom driven by wisdom-of-crowds. Why 21st century variant? Because stardom is now a long-tail concept. Instead of a very small number of winners and a very large number of losers in a very big winner-takes-nearly-all pool, we now have many pools, many winners, albeit in smaller pools.

The same is true for blogs and wikis and films and books. The expert-as-judge will pooh-pooh the mass creation of culture, because he is being rapidly disintermediated. Sure there are many bad blogs, sure there are many poor wikipedia articles, sure there are many crap videos on Youtube.

But let’s not forget there are many crap newspapers, many crap TV programmes, many crap encyclopaedia articles, many crap films.

We’ve always had crap. Now we have the opportunity to allow stuff that’s not crap to rise to the surface. Let’s not give that opportunity up just because the disintermediated expert whinges.

David Eastman asked “What happened to Quaero?” in a recent comment on a post I’d written on search. Last I heard, which was early this year, France and Germany had decided to part ways on the project, but France was determined to continue. I remember reading this article while recuperating from my heart attack.

Other than what I can glean from Wikipedia (which you can read here) there isn’t much out there on the web. An article in the Daily Telegraph in early August suggests that the entire project has been “quietly shelved”. Prior to that, I’m sure I’d seen reports that Germany was funding Theseus and France were continuing to fund Quaero. But I haven’t seen anything concrete.

There’s something vaguely amusing in having to search for information on Quaero. Says it all, I guess. Unless someone else knows better, in which case please comment.

Whenever I heard the phrase Thundering Herd I used to think of Merrill Lynch, not surprising for anyone who’s worked in investment banking.

Never again. Not after seeing this video. Unbelievable.

As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. The predictions of science-fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate. Their purpose is to imagine what might happen rather than to describe what will happen. I will be telling stories that challenge the prevailing dogmas of today. The prevailing dogmas may be right, but they still need to be challenged. I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies. Since I am heretic, I am accustomed to being in the minority. If I could persuade everyone to agree with me, I would not be a heretic.

We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being burned at the stake. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. Old heretics do not cut much ice. When you hear an old heretic talking, you can always say, “Too bad he has lost his marbles”, and pass on. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of the people who read this piece may fill that role.

The paragraphs above are taken from Freeman Dyson’s latest book, A Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe.

I haven’t read through it yet, in fact I’ve only just ordered the book. What you see above is courtesy of edge.org, a place I visit frequently.

Not everyone agrees with “heretics”, particularly the kind of heretic referred to by Freeman. I had the privilege of meeting him at the inaugural Flight School some years ago, where he spoke prior to dinner. Hearing him speak about how scientists like him perceived atomic energy and its use in space travel in the 1940s was very instructive. What he brought alive was the pioneering spirit that keeps any scientist going, a spirit that is sadly lacking in much that we do today. Neither heretics nor pioneering spirits do well in risk-averse cultures.

By now people must be publishing doctoral theses on the meaning and ambience and culture of Web 2.0; so much has been said and written about it that I hesitate to add anything at all. What I will say is that Web 2.0 is about young heretics, and about a pioneering spirit. Which is why an old fogey like me finds it all so very interesting.

I look forward to reading the book.

…that’s a quote from a delicious article by John Siracusa available on Ars Technica. Headlined Stuck On The Enterprise, it looks at a number of reasons why Apple doesn’t seem to do well in the enterprise space. [I must confess a very personal interest in this topic, having more than once tried to introduce Apple into the enterprise and, shall we say, not succeeded…).

Here’s a morsel to get your taste buds going:

The “dream phone” for the enterprise looks quite different than the iPhone. It works with the corporate VPN. It does Exchange. It supports device-wide encryption and remote deletion of data on lost devices. It’s available in several compatible forms from multiple manufacturers. It has a well-defined public roadmap for hardware and software. It can be backed up and restored en masse, preferably over the network. If it has a camera, it can be disabled. The battery can be removed and replaced. And on and on.

Maybe around item two hundred in this list there might be a bit about the people who will actually use these enterprise dream phones tolerating the things. Really, as long as they don’t openly revolt, it’s fine. The people you have to please in the enterprise market are the ones purchasing and supporting the products, not the poor schmucks who actually have to use them.

And if that doesn’t get you salivating, here’s another taste:

Listen again to Steve’s final words on the subject. “We put ourselves in the customer’s shoes and say, what do we want?”

This is why Apple does not compete in the enterprise market in the traditional sense. This is why no other company created the iPhone. This is why most desktop PCs are pieces of crap. When you don’t focus on the user, the user gets shafted.

Go on, read the whole article, traverse the links, it’s worth it. It makes me think again about the sheer importance of Doc’s VRM.

As enterprise people, we have to stop building things designed explicitly to get past IT governance and procurement processes, and start making things that customers want. Maybe VRM can play a role in that.

My thanks to Bill Barnett for bringing this to my attention.