Category: Uncategorized

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.

Just back from reboot. Fantastic conference. Truly participative. Over 20 nationalities, incredible energy. Thomas and Nikolaj and team have really made something special happen. Thanks for inviting me, guys.
I learnt some things, was exposed to different ways of looking at things I thought familiar, met some old friends, made some new ones; even met a few people I’d conversed with for a while, but only electronically. A blogger’s rite of passage.
I’ve known for some time that there are three “I” words that need resolving before I-T can become We-T, before social software  truly socialises information and infrastructure and ideas:

• The Internet as a real “commons” infrastructure rather than a battleground (and graveyard) for dinosaurs; empowering, not restricting
  
• Identity as something personal, yet allowing participation in community and collective activity; empowering, not restricting
• Intellectual Property Rights transformed into something that enables creativity and innovation rather than stifling life; empowering, not restricting

What I realised is how much these Blefuscudian arguments have themselves morphed, to become similar to modern-day politics and elections. That they are all about memes and anchors and frames first and everything else later. That like elections and politics, hey are influenced, almost owned, by traditional media models and lobbies and incumbents.
The words we use have power. More power than we had before, because of the empowering nature of the web, the sheer impact of globalisation, the fuzzying of distinctions between production and consumption, the lowering of barriers to entry as a result of the laws of Moore and Metcalfe and even Gilder.

There’s something poetic, yet ironic, in how this battle is being fought.

Those that want the new renaissance of the digital age to happen are armed with the analogue, the grey, the weapons of words and ideas.

Those that want the status quo to remain arm themselves with the digital, the polemic and polarised debate, the black and white, the weapons of ones and zeros.

I’ll be posting something longer soon; in the meantime, it’s worth thinking about why so many good things are happening in this space in Scandinavia.

I can think of three reasons.

• One, that affordable internet and broadband penetration and connectivity is very high in these parts;
• two, that the lingua franca of this movement just happens to be English, and Scandinavians put us to shame with the command they show in what is essentially a second language; and
• three, they are culturally inclined to believe in freedom of the individual and in the freedom of the community.

These are challenging times. But don’t lose heart. Good things do happen…..take a look below:
I’m currently reading an unusual book called Telegraph and Travel : A Narrative of the Formation and Development of Telegraphic Communication between England and India, Under the Orders of Her Majesty’s Government, with Incidental Notices of the Countries Traversed by The Lines. It was written by Colonel Sir Frederic John Goldsmid, CB, KCSI, in 1874 [Note to self: Don’t need to worry about copyright infringement on this one].

Fascinating book. And hidden in the Appendix, the author reveals:

The tariff in force between England and India from 1865 to the end of 1868 was £5 for a message of twenty words.

Look what happened to the telegraph, despite the way infrastructure used to be owned then. Look what happened to the telegraph, despite the nature of patent and copyright law then. Look what happened to the telegraph, despite the restrictions on personal freedom then.

Even SMS looks cheap when I allow for 140 years of inflation. £5 for 20 words. Wow.

In the past, we used location of consumer as part of the proof of identity, and location of producer as part of the process of delivery. What happens if these are no longer held to be true, if Generation M decides that these constraints no longer make sense? What happens if we have to stop “using the tools of an old paradigm to try and solve the problems of the new“, paraphrasing Einstein?

I remember having dinner some months ago with Professor Richard Scase; he spends time looking at social and demographic trends, and painting pictures of what might be. One of his pet tangents was the structure of information we require of people, whether for job applications or credit ratings or whatever. How age and sex and marital status and number of children and time-at-address and time-in-job were meaningful attributes fifty or more years ago, when people tended to live close to where they were born, get married in their early twenties, stay married, have and raise children when they were between 25 and 44, retire at 65 and so on. Low mobility, high job tenure, low divorce rates, one heterosexual partner, and so on.

These things were then used to help predict people’s behaviour. Take views of their “riskiness” in different aspects of their lives, be it health or wealth or even happiness. Make assumptions on their preferences and project their likely buying habits. Put them into neat classifications of socio-economic status. ABC1 and all that jazz. You get the drift.

Until I heard him, I never questioned why we had boxes to tick the way we had them. What the boxes represented. Why they existed.

My bad.

Generation M has changed all that. I’m not sure that “residence” is a meaningful factor in an employment form; how do I classify members of the opensource community? I’m not sure that “income” is a meaningful factor in determining propensity to buy. If that was the case, then someone would have told Steve Jobs “I think … there is a market for maybe five iPod videos”.

Generation M will not sit down and be classified the way we are used to classifying people. They will not be taught the way we are used to teaching people. They will not be hired and employed the way we are used to hiring and employing people. They will not be compensated and rewarded the way we are used to compensating and rewarding people.

Generation M will not use technology the way we are used to doing. For one thing, they have real mobility. Mobility is key. Multitasking is key. Multimedia is key. The three Ms of Generation M.

What we are used to is Assembly Line and McLuhan. Two wonderful dinosaurs. Gone the way of all dinosaurs.

And we have to work out a way of describing identity in a non-deterministic manner. People in Generation M will have n identities at the same time. N jobs at the same time. N residences at the same time. They may choose to converge these things and settle on one in each case. Merge their different identities into one. In fact I think they will. Over time. But what do I know?
The key phrase is They Choose. Not us. And what we build has to recognise that. Not now maybe, but soon.

Something to think about.