Category: Four pillars

It must have been late last year that Sean pointed me towards an Economist review of Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds; and yes, I bought it, read it, and it probably influenced my joining Second Life soon after. Not that I’ve done enough in Second Life, I guess First Life time prioritisation is hard enough as it is. But I will, one day; because I think there are things we can use virtual worlds for, things that we may not quite have figured out yet. At present I’m trying to work out whether there is value in using Second Life as part of enterprise induction and talent development. More of that later.

In the meantime, I see that Castronova has moved on. He’s now looking at building a business, using virtual worlds as Petri dishes to experiment with social sciences. Two worlds, virtually populated, identical in all respects. Except one. Any one. But it should be a social science variable. Like macroeconomic factors. Roll the clock forward, see what happens.

In the normal course of events I would have thought that genetic algorithms already allow me to do that. But maybe not, maybe there’s value in having real humans living virtual lives in the experiment. Maybe there’s a blink effect there that gets us to better and faster answers. Still trying to work it out, something about Castronova’s ideas intrigues me. Anyway, it’s nice to see ideas like his floating around the blogosphere, without a patent or a paywall in sight.

Can’t help thinking there are some governments, prime ministers and presidents who could do with spending some time looking at what Castronova’s planning. Or maybe England football and cricket managers.

This is from David Berlind via Doc Searls. Do you know the person who’s lost the iPod that David found?

Which reminds me. I have always wanted to change the way people “procure” software, using blogs. Why can’t I just post “Is there someone out there with something that does this?” and see what happens. Relationship and conversation before transaction. Intention Economy compresses search and transaction costs. I’m sure there are a million reasons why I can’t, but I’ll keep looking into them. And one day….

[An aside: what kind of industry are we? Why do we use terms like procurer and user? ]

Numbing down: The art of playing with numbers in order to make things seem to be what they are not.

I guess many of you, like me, wonder “How did they do that?” when looking at something novel and unusual. It’s good to be curious.

As against this, do you ever wonder “How could they possibly know that?” when you trip over statistical references? I do, and it is a source of frequent frustration for me. We live in an age of spin, and battles are fought not just with words, not just with pictures, but with numbers as well. Presidents and Prime Ministers justify what they do with statistics and polls, and much of what is behind the numbers is complex. That is, if you accept “complex” as a valid synonym for Lies and Damned Lies.

Which is why I’m such a big fan of John Allen Paulos. It’s been many years since I first read Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. Douglas Hofstadter, when reviewing the book nearly two decades ago, said:

Our society would be unimaginably different if the average person understood the ideas in this marvelous and important little book.

I was hooked from the first anecdote on the first page:

“Two aristocrats are out horseback riding and one challenges the other to see which can come up with the larger number. The second agrees to the contest, concentrates for a few minutes, and proudly announces ‘Three’. The proposer of the game is quiet for half an hour, then finally shrugs and concedes defeat.”

Read it for yourself, it’s worth it.

It is in this context that I’m delighted to see that Anant Rangaswami has started a blog about media and advertising in India, and related matters. He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.

In these days of citizen journalism, much has been written, much has been said, about authenticity and relevance and integrity in blogs and podcasts and video phenomena. Much of the pushback has come from MSM. Anant is someone who really understands what makes the media sector in India tick. The sector is important to all of us, but even more so because the learning he exhibits is in India. The sheer scale of the middle class there, the endless variety they have in the touch spaces between media and entertainment and sport and politics (is there a difference between the last two? I’m no longer sure…).

So welcome, Anant, I look forward to bigger and richer conversations.

I’ve been fascinated by the stuff that Jon Lech Johansen has been up to for quite a while now, he first came to my notice sometime in 2000, soon after he started his reverse-engineer every lock-in campaign; take a look at his blog, So Sue Me, if you’re interested. In fact, if you’re really interested, you should see his Wikipedia entry (which I’ve linked to above) and use that as a date filter into his blog archives.

In a recent Fortune article headlined Unlocking The iPod, DVD Jon (as he is often referred to) is quoted as saying:

“I was fed up with not being able to play a movie the way I wanted to play it”. [He wanted to use a PC running Linux.]

His frustration led to his working with a few people to develop DeCSS. When you take a look at the Wikipedia entry for DeCSS, you find the following:

The licensing restrictions on CSS make it impossible to create an open source implementation through official channels, and closed source drivers are unavailable for some operating systems, so some users need DeCSS to watch DVDs at all.
We’ve all felt some, if not all, of his frustrations. Poorly implemented DRM can create content jails and denude and blight the open spaces where many of us want to live. As with any jail, there have been many attempts to break out. What’s curious about Jon’s latest attempt with the iPod is that he’s breaking in, not out.

There’s something about it that really grabs me. It’s a sort-of hide-in-plain-sight Purloined Letter response to the problem.

I think there is something for all of us to learn from developments like these:

• People are generally very frustrated at not being able to listen to, watch or otherwise interact with music and film and video. We may not be able to see it, but that’s because we’re dinosaurs. Generation M can see it. Unlike us, they will do something about their frustrations. There will be many DVD Jons out there.
• Even where solutions exist, or can be made to exist, we have a lot of licence issues to deal with. The generation I belong to probably put most energy into solving the wrong problems, often creating ill-starred tax wheezes and get-rich-quick schemes. Generation M isn’t into the same stuff as we were into, and they will work around current licence issues. There will be many DeCSSs out there.
• Generation M’s ingenuity isn’t to be trifled with. Our generation may spend time building our walled gardens and using terms like “content” and “IPR” and whatever else we come up with. They’re not going to break out with “our” stuff. They’re going to break in with “theirs”. What Jon did to the iPod was a bit like creating a master key at a hotel in order to solve the different room keys problem. Master keys are used to break in, not out. There will be many master keys out there.

Opensource has always been about free as in freedom, not free as in gratis. Generation M’s values are different from ours, their facility with modern technology is considerably greater, their ingenuity in solving problems comes from quite a different perspective.

People like Jon will devote an awful lot of energy into removing what they see as unfair obstacles. Too often, the obstacles are really about creating artificial scarcities, about protecting some perverse lock-in.

There are many people like Jon out there. Many more than people not-like-Jon, interested in building walls. And soon, with the continued growth in usage of social software, they will have some serious muscle in terms of critical mass.
Think about it before you try and build the wrong walls. Sand castles don’t do particularly well against tidal waves.

This is a Saturday Evening Post, you have been warned. Caveat Lector.

Let’s see what happens when we use the concept of the humble credit card to try and tell the future, albeit a very small part of the future. [If you’re interested, take a look at the Wikipedia entry I’ve linked to, it provides quite a lot of useful information].
The term has been around since the late 1880s, the physical object since the early 1920s, and it’s gone through a whole raft of cultural and social and technical adaptations since then; the credit card we use today bears very little resemblance to its 1920s antecedent; the credit card we will use tomorrow will be even more removed from its origins, yet it will have the same DNA.

Initially the credit card was a fuel card:

• issued by a single entity (the fuel provider)
• used for only one purpose (buying fuel)
• usable in only one place (the fuel provider’s premises)
• available only to a small elite market (1920s automobile owners in the US)

Despite these limitations, it had some interesting characteristics:

• It represented a trust relationship (between the issuer and the automobile owner)
• It identified and authenticated the bearer of the card
• It authorised and permissioned that bearer to do something
• It provided a modicum of simplicity and convenience and mobility

You can imagine what it would have been like. Conversations building and underpinning relationships and then, only as needed, transactions. The Cluetrain was running.

Now let’s look at what happened since:

The card became multipurpose. How? Through intermediation and disintermediation. The issuer was no longer a merchant with goods and services, but an intermediary that provided cash credit. A credit card issuer. A bank or financial institution. One card, many merchants where it could be used. Many things that could be purchased. That process of disintermediation and reintermediation has carried on to a point where all kinds of institutions now issue credit cards. You decide where to get your card from.

The card became ubiquitous. More issuers. More people using cards. More places to use cards. Initially restricted to a few Western countries, the credit card is everywhere now. You decide where to use it.

The card represented different pricing models. The initial card was a fixed term fixed limit charge card. Charge only, pay the whole balance off each time. Fixed payment credit, pay a fixed amount back each time. Hybrid, choose what you want to pay, within certain minima and maxima. Low interest, zero interest, high interest. With an annual fee. Free. All kinds of everything. You decide the funding model.

The card became personalisable. Initially the card was Any Colour You Like as Long as It’s Black. Ford Model T, come back, all is forgiven. You didn’t get to choose what it looked like, how your name would appear on it, anything. You took what you were given. Now you can choose “skins” for the card, select “affinity” programs and wear your card with pride, choose how your name appeared on the card. You decide what it looks like.

The card became an objective carrier of trust and identity. Whether it was credit-rating, credit-score or even deposit-driven, the card became a token bearing trust. Initially it was used to support a delayed-payment transaction. Now you can use a credit card to guarantee things, to underpin who you are, sometimes even to exhibit your Bling status. Centurion cards and all that jazz. You decide the purpose.

The card became a target for criminals. Security became an issue. As the card became ubiquitous and multipurpose and “clonable”, it created a new business opportunity. Crime. Initially this was physical and analog crime. As the underlying technology for the card evolved, so did the technology used by the criminal. Card crime soared. And we kept building new ways of protecting the card from misuse. Today, with signature and chip and PIN and CSV and encryption, cards have become fairly secure. Without making them fundamentally useless or rendering them unusable. You use them simply and safely.

Card production costs decreased sharply. By now it probably costs me more to work out how much a card costs to produce than to produce the card itself. By now much of what makes a card up has reached Made In China status. The ultimate cost-decrease accolade. Now you can have as many as you like, or as few as you like. You decide how many.

Card longevity increased. Original cards had to be replaced often for two reasons: the materials used to make the card, and the process used to read and validate and use the card. As a result, card validity was kept short. Now, with advances in materials technology and reading processes, cards are issued for much longer periods. You decide how long to use them.

Cards became shareable. Initially you had one card, just for you, tied to a specific bank account. Now you can have multiple cards, tied to a card account and not a bank account. You can use the multiple cards yourself, for segregating transactions. You can give cards to family members and to friends. You decide who else can use your card.

You decide. You decide. You decide.

I think I’ve made my point, but there are a few more things, important things, to point out:

Everything that happened, happened as a result of four things:

• innovation through market adoption
• simple and relentless standardisation
• consolidation amongst industry participants
• emergence of global mega-utilities

So what happens next?

We will see cards consolidated even further, as customers push back against proliferation. One credit card underpinned by limits from multiple credit providers. But for this to happen, there has to be a fundamental shift in the concept of card ownership. Today, the card is the property of the issuer, and must be returned on demand. Tomorrow’s card will be the property of the customer, who “mashes up” the facilities and credit lines and limits and affinity rewards. One card.

We will see personalisation taken even further. Make your own skin up. From Flickr if necessary. You will choose your own “number”, but there won’t be a 16 digit thingummybob right across the front of the card. You need some unique handle, but there’s no need to display it. As long as a digital version of it is embedded and readable. Your card.

We will see both online and offline behaviour supported. Cards will work even when you’re not connected, but in Safe Mode. Lower Limits. Fewer places to use them. Always On.

We will see more virtualisation. The physical card will not be the only game in town; you will have virtual cards, logical extensions to current payment models like PayPal and WorldPay and even Grameen. Virtual and physical.

The credit card. Multipurpose. Ubiquitous. Personalisable. Plug and Play anywhere anytime for any purpose. Based on open standards. Solving pieces of the identity and authentication and personalisation puzzles. Safe and secure. Shareable. Mashable. Highly mobile, simple and convenient to use and manage. Your device. Your terms and conditions.

Did I say credit card? I’m sorry. I meant to say personal computing device. Your PC. (Or, if you’re like me, your Mac.).

Just musing. On a Saturday Evening :-)