Category: Four pillars

On comics and teleportation and similar Saturday meanderings into the future

Do you remember good old everyday comics? Not manga, nor the kind of stuff people treasure in polythene wrappers and pay a million dollars for. The stuff you touch and read and laugh at and with. At home, we were brought up on a rich diet of comics; I must have read my first comic book around 1962, and for sure I was reading comics regularly all the way to 1975.

Our reading was fairly eclectic and wide-ranging, despite being drawn solely from the US, the UK and India. Children’s comics were mainly from the US: Sugar and Spike and Fox and the Crow were early favourites, as was Dennis the Menace (the Hank Ketcham version rather than the UK “Beano” version, which, amazingly, made its unrelated debut just three days after the Ketcham version).

Dagwood and Blondie. Sad Sack. Beetle Bailey. The Archie series. Superman, Batman, Spiderman and the rest of the superhero class. The whole Walt Disney thing. Yup, we read them all.

We didn’t spend much time across the pond as it were, that was reserved for the hard stuff. Books. So we read Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton and Frank Richards and Anthony Buckeridge till the cows came home, and topped them off with PG Wodehouse and PG Wodehouse and PG Wodehouse as soon as our hands were big enough to hold his books properly. From what I can remember, the primary UK comics we read were the Beano and the Dandy, along with “Commando” series War comics.

And then of course we had MAD Magazine. What would we have done without MAD? Alfred E Neuman and his crazy gang kept us going during hard times; I have particular and deeply thankful memories of reading Sergio Aragones and Don Martin, on days when everything looked bleak and black and blecch. And there were a few of those.

The only “Indian” comics I remember reading, in English, were the Phantom series, the Ghost Who Walks, and the Mandrake series. [It was only some time later that I found out that the original Lee Falk series was set in some place called Bengali, and where there were pigmy people called Bandars. This would obviously not do in Bengal, where I was born and raised, and where the native was called a Bengali, and where “bandar” meant “monkey”. So, magically, the Indian version of the comic was set somewhere called Denkali, if I remember correctly. Both Phantom as well as  Mandrake the Magician were from the same Indrajal comics stable.]

And of course we had the past, represented by the Flintstones ……….

……….and the future, represented by the Jetsons:

Were you one of those people who sincerely believed that we would be flying around in bubble cars by the turn of the 21st century? I was. As a child I really thought it would happen.

And, after thirty years of commuting, I still fervently wish for a solution. Sometimes I think that the concept of the suburb did more to destroy the fabric of society than any single other “invention”; to my way of thinking, only wars have inflicted more visible damage on society.

I hate commuting. With a passion. I hate the idea that people should travel large distances to work and large distances back, every day, like lemmings. The only people who could possibly gain from that are in the transportation, fuel and insurance industries. Enough said.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

Teleportation.

Take a look at this extract from the Wikipedia article:

One means of teleportation proposed in fiction (e.g., The Fly, Star Trek) is the transmission of data which is used to precisely reconstruct an object or organism at its destination. However, it would be impossible to travel from one point to another instantaneously; faster than light travel, as of today, is believed to be most likely impossible. The use of this form of teleportation as a means of transport for humans would have considerable unresolved technical issues, such as recording the human body with sufficient accuracy to allow reproduction elsewhere (i.e., because of the uncertainty principle).

There’s also the philosophical issue of whether destroying a human in one place and recreating a copy elsewhere would provide a sufficient experience of continuity of existence. The reassembled human might be considered a different sentience with the same memories as the original, as could be easily proved by constructing not just one, but several copies of the original and interrogating each as to the perceived uniqueness of each. Each copy constructed using merely descriptive data, but not matter, transmitted from the origin and new matter already at the destination point would consider itself to be the true continuation of the original and yet this could not logically be true; moreover, because each copy constructed via this data-only method would be made of new matter that already existed at the destination, there would be no way, even in principle, of distinguishing the original from the copies.

Interesting. So what about things that are not human?

I think we’re at a stage where we already have virtual “teleportation” of digital objects. In the digital world, when we take a piece of text or still image or moving image or music, and we “move” it across the ether, what we’re doing is tantamount to disassembling the digital object at one end of a pipe and reassembling it at the other end. Now this is fine as far as purely digital objects are concerned: it’s the reason why Kevin Kelly called the internet a copy machine, why Hollywood and Universal Music want to own the internet and make it work according to their rules, why downloaders seem to get treated worse than modern-day war criminals. It appears easier to go to war hunting for things that don’t exist than it is to go to peace attempting to change hopelessly outdated intellectual property law.

Over the past few years, this virtual teleportation (where digital objects get disassembled and reassembled at two ends of a fast and fat pipe) has shown the capacity to make considerable inroads into the physical world.

We already have the ability to take decent photographs, store them in the cloud and print them off at home, at the edge.

We already have the ability to order books via the web and then to print the books off at home: here’s the “espresso” book machine:

We already have the ability to make physical CDs and DVDs at home, and to print off the artwork.

And then we have the gift that keeps on giving: 3D printers are already here, and slowly getting better: take a look at Reprap:

When you have the ability to express something mathematically, and when you have the ability for the “ingredients” for that something to be drawn from a standardised pool, then there is no reason why the “reassembly” of physical things cannot take place at the edge: at home, at work, wherever. Using further generations of toolkits  like Arduino, this will happen. [Incidentally, we ran a cloud services workshop for the Innovate and Design leadership team a few days ago, where everyone worked with arduinos. The whole thing was set up, supported and stage-managed by Alex and her team at tinker_it. Thank you Alex, thank you tinker_it.]

Soon we will be in a place where the instructions emanate from one end of a pipe, and where standardised components get assembled at the other end. Like feeding in a recipe at one end and having the cooking done at the other end. As long as the components are addressable and accessible and standardised, this is already possible. Soon we will be in a place where remote tailoring is commonplace, where the instructions are fed down a pipe to a machine and standardised inputs in the home, in order to produce clothes at the edge. [How nice to see that the paper is imagined and written by a Calcuttan].

We’re long past the point where all we could do is to query, maintain and repair things digital remotely. The pipes are getting fatter and faster. The devices at the edge are becoming more powerful. There is greater standardisation of input materials. There is a growing ability to express the workings of markets in mathematical models, to simulate the workings of markets via abstractions. [This, I understand, is part of what Salim Ismail and friends are focusing on at the Singularity University].

There was a time when people could build machines, when people could take machines apart and when people could rebuild them. Cars. Radios. Planes. Boats. Amplifiers and turntables. And yes, computers.

There was a time when people designed and built machines that built machines.

You know something? I have this gnawing sense of unease when I write this. I begin to think about something that unnerves me, that unsettles me. And that is this:

when people were heavily involved in the making of things, the things stayed made.

Building things to last is a builder’s instinct. Building things for planned obsolescence is not a builder’s instinct. We need to stop this cycle of constant build-waste-replace-waste. The world is too much with us.

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
          Little we see in Nature that is ours;
          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
          The winds that will be howling at all hours,
          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
          It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

One of my favourite Wordsworth sonnets. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is ours. Such powerful words, stated simply.

Human beings love to make things. And that love has been denied for a while, as we moved headlong into more and more efficient manufacture of more and more obsolescence and more and more waste. This is no longer tenable, we have to take our stewardship of the earth’s assets more seriously. And the move to a digital world will help us get there. [I know, I know, the cloud consumes energy. Computers consume scarce raw materials. But these things can be solved.]

I think this human instinct to make things is what drives people like Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty over at Make Magazine, a fantastic read. I think this human instinct is what Cory Doctorow fictionalised so well in Makers. I think this human instinct is what Larry Lessig described so well in Remix.

Taken from the Makers site: Ben O’Steen got his maker on by printing out the entire text of Makers on a cash-register receipt, using a till printer.

Building things is a human instinct.

Taking things apart is a human instinct.

Rebuilding things is a human instinct.

Doing all this in a way that makes the built things last is a human instinct.

When you see battles about copyright and patent, when you see battles about downloads and DRM, when you see battles about net neutrality, don’t assume that the battles are about them, the pinko lefty tree-hugger criminals.

The battles are about you. And your right to build things and unbuild them and rebuild them. The right of your children to build things and unbuild them and rebuild them.

The battles are about the generations that will follow you and me. And their rights to follow their human instincts.

Instincts that are much closer to stewardship and conservation than those of the moguls of Mammon. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The internet was not designed to become an exclusive distribution mechanism for Hollywood and Universal Music. There is a lot of value still to be obtained from the internet and from the web, in terms of health, education and welfare. And it is our duty to see that value emerge.

So go read Make magazine, visit the web site. Buy Makers, or read it for free. Understand the cultural and creative implications of Remix. Do something.

We all need to become better stewards of what we have on earth, so that others may enjoy some of it. The “maker” culture is a critical component of this.

A coda. Thank you Jimmy Wales, from the bottom of my heart. This post would have been so much harder to write if Wikipedia didn’t exist. Thanks, Jimbo!

Musing about “sharing” and privacy

Over the last few years, with the continuing evolution of social media, there’s been a proliferation of tools that help people share information, experiences, opinions, even actions and status.  Devices have gotten “smarter” and more ubiquitous, and as a result, sharing has been made possible in more forms than before: audio, image, video and text. And, as the communications infrastructure has improved, it has meant that the things that get shared get shared more quickly.

During all this time, much has been written about privacy and confidentiality, and about the risks and dangers of sharing. I remember when the “semantic web” was beginning to get traction four years ago, there was an ACLU video that explained the “dangers” of “ordering pizza in the future”. When I had my heart attack and blogged about it, I was told how career-limiting that would be, how I would become unemployable as a result. More recently, we’ve had sites like PleaseRobMe, informing the world at large about empty homes using public signals and status information, in the hope that people will learn to be more careful about sharing such information.

It’s not just about the information people share as individuals, we’ve also had concerns about stuff we make available communally. Take this site for example: sailwx.info

A site that published the location and movement of ships. Fascinating, even mesmerising for some. And a godsend to Somalian pirates.

It doesn’t matter who’s telling the story, the moral has been the same. Sharing creates risk.  I want to talk about sharing.

1. Sharing is an inherently vulnerable act

It’s like this blog. Here I share what I think. By sharing what I think, I make myself vulnerable to you, the reader. And you can choose to comment constructively or destructively, to provide feedback, to withhold criticism or even praise. From my perspective, a blog with comments permanently closed is not a blog. You might as well have a marriage with a prenuptial agreement. Because what you’re doing is taking something that is about being vulnerable and trying to remove the vulnerability from it. Take legal separation. One of the ways that people define legal separation is by using the phrase a mensa et thoro, “from bed and board”. Sharing bed and board is a vulnerable thing to do. You’re at your most defenceless in those contexts.

2. Sharing is a state of mind, a mindset, a culture

I grew up in a Hindu Undivided Family in Calcutta, the eldest of five siblings. [So I’m a product of a patriarchal, male chauvinist society, on paper anyway….You wouldn’t dare use those words in front of my paternal grandmother, who passed away recently, in 2006. Patriarchal society indeed!] The extended family lived under one roof, and we shared everything. Our time, our interests, even our friends. As a teenager I would often come home to find that “friends of mine” had been there all afternoon, even though I’d been elsewhere. Because the friends were friends of the family, a shared resource. In such environments, sharing is in our blood. In the past year, I’ve seen every sibling, maybe half a dozen cousins, and every time I see them it feels like Yesterday Once More. This Christmas, a bunch of us are hoping to meet up in Calcutta, remember times past and have a rollicking time. You know something? We had rollicking times. Every day. Yes there were fights, yes everything wasn’t always sweetness and light, but in the main we’ve stayed very close. Because we were born that way, raised that way.

3. Sharing is about being in a covenant relationship

I’ve been brought up to believe that there are two types of relationship, covenant and contract. In a contract relationship, it’s all about privacy. The contract sets out separate recourse in the event of breach. The two parties in a contract are inherently separate. As against this, in a covenant relationship, it’s all about sharing. The covenant sets out what the people in the covenant do together when things go wrong. As I’ve said before, in a contract you answer the question “Who pays?”; in a covenant you answer the question “How do we fix this?”. Whenever I think about sharing, whenever I think about being in a covenant relationship, I am reminded of the words spoken by Ruth to Naomi in the Old Testament:

Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.  Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.

Now that’s what I call a covenant.

4. Sharing has its conventions and norms

It isn’t just privacy that comes with conventions and norms; sharing does that as well. Let’s take an example. In the West, in social circles, particularly amongst youth, I’ve seen bottles shared, passed on from hand to hand. And from mouth to mouth. This just wouldn’t happen in India, where there’s this concept of “thu”, when something has been touched by someone’s saliva. So when you passed a bottle from hand to hand in India, you would drink from the bottle without the bottle touching your lips or mouth. And this had to be done visibly and demonstrably. [This practice served me very well when I first had to drink a yard of ale].

Image taken from Wikimedia Commons and used on a CC-BY-SA-2.5 licence, attributed, with thanks, to Lee Tucker

5. Sharing needs to be done by design

The cultural conventions about sharing and not-sharing become even more interesting when it comes to food. In India it was common practice for me to be walking home from school or university and inviting five or ten friends to come home with me, joining the family for a meal. That’s part of what 6/2 Moira Street was about. On any given day, there were a dozen “guests” in evidence at home, sometimes more. Friends of the family, the extended family, neighbours. Some days it was the Rangaswamis’ turn, some days the Kapoors’, some days the Sillimans’. Different groups congregated on different floors and then meandered about from floor to floor, from flat to flat, interchanging seamlessly. And somehow the families coped, food never ran out. Cups of tea and coffee aplenty, snacks appearing as if by magic. A culture of hospitality. [Note: in order to protect the innocent all the names have been retained. You have been warned.]

And then I came to England. People were hospitable here as well, don’t get me wrong. I was received warmly, very warmly. But there was a difference, best described by example. Sometime before we got married (over 25 years ago) one day we were having guests for dinner. On the way home from work, I got talking to a friend and invited him to join us. This was before the days of mobile phones. So I turned up at home with an extra guest. Which was fine, except that dinner that night was steak. And the number of steaks equalled the number of original guests, with no spares. Which meant I had to “make up” a portion for myself by shaving bits off everyone else’s steak.

You see, I never had to face this in India. Because the dishes were naturally designed to be shared, to be extensible. You added a little more rice. Diluted the daal. Chopped a few more vegetables. Made a few more chapatis.

6. There is such a thing as oversharing

It’s been an interesting time these past years, playing around with social media. Tools for sharing have grown more sophisticated and more comprehensive as the concepts of  lifestreaming, and of what Clay Spinuzzi called ambient signalling, have evolved. It’s worth taking a look at what Nick Felton and gang have been doing, and at the services that have been spawned as a result, like Daytum.

Particularly when it comes to lifestreaming, there is such a thing as too much information; if you have the right feedback loops, you will find out soon enough. Because your signal will turn into noise, and the people you’re in touch with will tell you to turn the noise down. So you need to be careful when you share what you’re doing, that you don’t overload the sharing mechanism. It’s worth reading Danah Boyd’s writings on this subject: here’s an example.

7. Sharing involves sacrifice

I love the Wikipedia definition of sharing: Sharing is the joint use of a resource or space. In its narrow sense, it refers to joint or alternating use of an inherently finite good, such as a common pasture or a shared residence. Inherently finite. What a nice turn of phrase. I guess one of the most “inherently finite” things we come across is time. Our own time on earth. So we make choices with our time, there is an opportunity cost in its usage. [Incidentally, that is why, given its inherent “nonrival good” nature, it makes no sense to hoard information and ideas. But that’s a whole ‘nother ball game.]

8. There is accountability in sharing

I’ve always been struck by something Clay Shirky said about wikis, more particularly about why Wikipedia was successful: I paraphrase it as “if you can keep the cost of repair at least as low as the cost of damage, then good things happen.” Look at what happens with chewing gum and with graffiti, two things where the cost of damage is lower than the cost of repair. You see? Not everyone wants to share, there are selfish people about, and Hardin’s Tragedy of The Commons is a real thing. But people can be accountable in shared space, and this is something we need to learn more about and to encourage.

Which brings me to the whole point of this post.

Stewardship.

Otherwise known as accountability in a shared space.

Complex global issues: the eradication of poverty,  stopping malnutrition and disease, stabilising climate change, preserving our environment: these are not going to be solved by individuals acting alone with walls of intense privacy around them. They can only be solved by people working together in covenant relationships. They can only be solved by people making themselves vulnerable, people sharing, people acting responsibly and accountably.

Lifestreaming is also about democratised collection of data, the aggregation of minutiae about movement, weather, climate, food, whatever. In the same way as 17th century ships’ captains’ logs have given us insights into climate change, there is a lot we can learn about what’s happening around us by sifting through the apparently boring detail of our lives. In his TED talk, David Cameron spoke about Transparency, Accountability and Choice, and mentioned his intention to publish personal, average and “best of breed” details of carbon footprint, by household, as a means of effecting behavioural change.

Stewardship. It’s a collective thing. More about sharing than about privacy. We spend a lot of time worrying about privacy.

Time we spent the same amount of time worrying about sharing.

Stewardship.

Just one. The best

I love chess for a variety of reasons. The sheer breathtaking beauty of the game, as evinced here, in “Fatal Attraction”, Edward Lasker v Sir George Thomas nearly a century ago.  The characters it throws up, as in Jose Raul Capablanca and Efim Bogoljubov. And the way chess teaches us about cause and effect in a complex adaptive environment.

By the way, I’ve written about it before, but if you have any interest in chess at all, do play out Fatal Attraction. It’s a mesmerising game.

One of the reasons I like Bogoljubov is the outrageousness of his statements. In that outrage is truth. Examples: Bogoljubov had just won a remarkable game with the black pieces, and was asked how he’d done it. And he said “When I play white I win because I play white. When I play black I win because I am Bogoljubov.” Another time he was asked how many moves ahead he thinks. His answer? “Just one. The best”.

My interest in chess, largely kindled by an old schoolmate, Devangshu Datta, stayed steady through the years largely as a result of my interest in complex adaptive systems. When it came to analogies for root cause analysis and prevention of recurrence, I found chess hard to beat. I could sit down after a game and work out precisely when I started down the wrong path, what real options I had, how I could make sure I didn’t do it again. Chess was also good as a way of learning damage limitation, what to do when you have made a mistake.

I was reminded of this recently with all the brouhaha about healthcare in the US. Somewhere along the line, the focus of discussion appeared to deal primarily with the effciency of the curing process rather than the preventing process. Too often the same happens in the enterprise world. People are so busy getting better at fixing problems that they forget the real point, which is to stop doing what causes the problem in the first place.

Improving the speed and quality at which you fix things is a worthwhile objective: that is, if (and only if) things break down less often as a result. So when you look at repair processes, it is more important to look at why things break down, and to prevent them from breaking down,  than to focus on getting better at fixing things.

For some time now, we’ve been focused on the customer experience at BT. We looked at the way we dealt with customer requests, how often we delivered what the customer wanted, when the customer wanted it and how the customer wanted it. And we would take a close look at how often we got that right. A very close look. Because it affected what we took home.

That extreme focus has now begun to pay off: that’s why CEO Ian Livingston could tell the world last December that our complaint calls had halved since we embarked on the RFT initiative. Halved. In fact, that’s partly how we’ve been able to cut costs sharply.

The complaint calls coming in were a useful proxy for the number of problems we were causing. But we have to be careful. In large organisations, it is normal, understandable, even tempting to create an environment where the focus shifts from preventing problems to curing them. So before you know it, all the energy is deployed in fixing things, and not preventing the occurrence of the problem in the first place. That’s why you have to be careful what you measure, and how you use the measure. Finding out that you’re solving problems faster and faster is a good thing ….. provided the absolute number of problems is going down, and the problems aren’t repeating. Don’t get seduced by the message that you’re fixing things faster, cheaper better. They shouldn’t be going wrong in the first place.

So look ahead, be a Bogoljubov, and play that best right move. Concentrate on making sure you don’t make the mistake in the first place; the introduction of automation is a commonsense way of achieving this. As long as the environment is in steady state, this should be tractable. When you introduce change, then mistakes can be introduced, found, dealt with. As Esther Dyson says so often, “always make new mistakes”.

Parallel lives

For the next few days, while I am at the World Economic Forum at Davos, I’m going to be spending my time guesting on the Telegraph blog. My first post went up this morning, and can be found here. Let me know what you think.

Walls and bridges: even more on Facebookisation

Whatever gets you through the night it’s alright, it’s alright
It’s your money or your life it’s alright, it’s alright
Don’t need a sword to cut thru flowers oh no, oh no
Whatever gets you thru your life it’s alright, it’s alright
Do it wrong or do it right it’s alright, it’s alright
Don’t need a watch to waste your time oh no, oh no

John Lennon, Whatever Gets You Thru The Night, Walls And Bridges, 1974

Note: The song was Lennon’s first and only US solo number 1 during his lifetime. (Just Like) Starting Over, the only other Lennon single to make it, didn’t actually make number 1 until after his untimely death.

Do you remember the “high street” banks of the UK in the Sixties or Seventies or Eighties? What wonderfully decrepit institutions. A place where 85% of the space was devoted to “admin”; where customers didn’t exist, only account numbers; where the plysical manifestations of these account numbers, the human beings, were sardine-smashed into the remaining 15%; where staff took lunch breaks to make sure queues were at their highest at the only times customers could come in; where bank managers ruled, and considered it an insult if you actually came in to withdraw some money.

Do you remember?

The key thing that struck me during that time was the enormous amount of space given over to the internal workings of the firm, and the tiny area allowed for the customer.  A tiny area that was usually not air-conditioned, smelled of damp and dank, looked like a check-in queue for prison.

You know something? We still have them now. In most firms. They’re called e-mail systems. [Stowe Boyd, come in, I can hear you calling. Time to tell everyone about your Publicy, Privacy, Secrecy. And your love for e-mail :-) ]

Think of e-mail within a firm as a physical space consisting of 100 square units of “stuff”. Then divide that stuff into two parts. Stuff that stays within the firm. Stuff that goes out of the firm, or comes in to the firm: stuff that crosses the firm’s boundaries. And think of these two kinds of stuff as represented in a ratio.

In many firms, “internal” stuff far outweighs “boundary wall crossing” stuff. Check for yourself. In my experience the ratio is close to 9:1. Ninety per cent of e-mail is generated by the firm and never leaves the firm.

Note: I did not count external spam in this measure. Spam is not mail.

Think about it. The majority of collaborative conversations taking place in an enterprise mail world do not involve the customer. Words fail me. Well actually some words come to me. Words like “unbelievable” and “circle” and “jerk”, but then I’m too polite to string those words into a coherent sentence.

Why do I spend an entire post on this point? Because it is really important. Facebook is facebook because it is multitenant. Multientity. Not to do with a single person or home or firm.

Whatever we do in the enterprise, we need to ensure that the walls of the enterprise do not keep customers out. Think Cluetrain.

Collaborative systems are still evolving, people with collaborative instincts are still evolving. Whatever we do, we must ensure that the model of collaboration we build is a holistic one, one that encompasses staff, customers and supply chain.

Building a walled garden in your own enterprise is the equivalent of taking your computer and burying it in six feet of concrete. [On the other hand, since that is precisely what so many firms are wont to do, perhaps I should not be surprised].