If you’ve heard me speak at conferences over the last few years, then you’ve heard me say this:

It took IBM 40 years to “become evil”. It took Microsoft 20. It took Google 10. It took Facebook 5. It took Twitter 2.5…….

Actually nobody “became evil”. Becoming evil is not suddenly getting easier. What we’re seeing is the confluence of a number of trends:

• Growth in the power of the consumer, in consumerism, a post-Nader, post-Sixties phenomenon
• Advances in information transmission and reproduction, particularly with the advent of the internet and the web
• Emergent affordability and ubiquity of edge devices that increase the number of people connected to each other

I also think that investors have become more and more short-termist over the years, accelerating poor behaviour by companies, but that’s just a personal hunch and not a trend I can prove.

So now more people get to know about more “bad things” more quickly, and have more ways of responding and protesting, more ways of doing something about it. Which is why you can insert pretty much any company name into the search term <…….. sucks> and you will get a number of hits. When “Herman Miller sucks” gets over 18,000 hits you know that something different is happening. [ When I was young, I had to work, I couldn’t take the time off to study management. So I learnt what little I learnt “on the job” and through the brilliant books of Peter Drucker and Max De Pree. And so, somewhere along the line, I acquired a healthy fascination in the chairs of Herman Miller, and in Herman Miller as a company.]

Where was I? Oh yes, this increasing propensity for firms to “be evil”. Investors want to invest in stuff they can rely on, with reasonable levels of predictability in demand, supply, input and output prices, revenue and profits. This has always been the case. During the agricultural revolution it was easy. During the industrial revolution it remained easy. As we moved from agriculture and manufacturing into services, it became harder and harder to control the factors of production, much less the factors of consumption.

As we entered the information/knowledge economy, things became even worse. So for the last forty years or so, companies have striven to recreate some form of control over the market by doing one of two things: monopolising the market; or locking in the customer.

In a digital world, these things are harder to do, often needing the collusion of regulation and/or government. Even with the collusion, all that can be done is to stave off the inevitable, which is what will happen with the DMCA, the ACTA, the Digital Economy Act, Hadopi and others of that ilk. If I called them shortsighted I would be acting too kindly. [But that’s not the subject of this post so I shall move swiftly on.]

When infrastructure is commoditised, when monopolies and cartels are illegal, when capital is cheap, when global distribution and reach are available to all, firms are desperate to find new ways to “lock in” the customer, to try and bring some predictability to the whole shebang. This has been happening for a while.

No new business models have emerged in the meantime: since the year dot, there have only been three ways of collecting value for services provided: pay-per-drink, all-you-can-eat, get-someone-else-to-pay. We have a litany of terms for the third way: advertising, sponsorship, patronage, gifting, subsidy, freemium, it doesn’t matter. There are still only three models.

So what’s a poor firm to do?

One of my favourite professors, Venkat, used to keep saying to me that we’re migrating from hierarchies of products and customers to networks of relationships and capabilities. So what firms are now doing is trying to find ways of locking in customers at the relationship and capability level. This happens at a number of levels:

• First, the static data to do with the customer: contact names, addresses, and so on. The network of relationships that becomes the friend graph.
• Then, the flow data associated with the customer: transactions, purchases, etc. Why I can’t merge my Amazon purchases with my Abebooks ones.
• Then, valuable artifacts left by the customer in trust with the firm: photos, music, ratings, reviews, etc. Much of the current social network challenge.
• Then, even more valuable artifacts derived from customer transactions and interactions: the basis for collaborative filtering, for targeted advertising, for recommendation engines, for the development and growth of attention and intention markets.

Look very carefully. Everything in the list of points just above this sentence relates to data. Data you generate. Data that cannot exist without you. Now that data is valuable, it is the new lock-in. Anyone can build another auction site, but 200 million ratings can’t be acquired overnight. Anyone can build another bookstore, but 10 million reviews can’t be acquired overnight. Google. Amazon. eBay. Flickr. Facebook. YouTube. Everything where the value is created via data you create in the first place.

You.

So everyone spends an incredible number of cycles figuring out ways, building new tools to make it easier for you to share your data. Mountains of data. There’s gold in them thar hills, podner.

And as a result of all this data being mountainised, a thousand new flowers of service are blooming. And retrograde green shoots of predictability and order are re-entering the environment. We’re encouraged to stay on the consumer side of the argument, and not become producers. We’re being encouraged to purchase things where we can’t tinker with them, where we can’t look under their hoods or take spanners to them. We’re being encouraged to share what we have in order that others can create new layers of lock-in using what we shared in the first place.

These are some of the issues that Doc’s VRM is trying to deal with. These are some of the reasons why privacy and sharing and not-sharing are needing to be discussed, understood, legislated for. These are some of the reasons why identity and intellectual property and net neutrality are critical issues, issues that must be resolved in a sensible way.

Nobody’s being evil. There’s a Wild West out there. And there’s a lot of gold out there as well. Gold that is based on usage patterns, relationships, transactions, flows. Gold whose very existence needs us to think differently about many things, in order to develop and enhance our potential.

Observe. Experiment. Participate with care. Don’t drink too much of the Kool-Aid. There’s a lot of good stuff happening out there, and the potential for a lot of bad stuff as well.

Once we recognise that we are all pioneers, it becomes easier.

People are exploring, staking ground out. Homesteading. Migrating in large numbers. Going West as Young Men. Hoping to find their fame and their fortune.

And we’ll see inventions and innovations aplenty, many Levi Strausses. There will also be many unscrupulous people, trying to make their bucks as fast as possible, selling their snake oil.

So when you see the danahs and the Stowes and the Docs say what they say, recognise that they’re not trying to stop the pioneering. They’re just making sure we circle the wagons every now and then when we come under stress.

It’s going to take some time before we have the conventions, practices and laws to make the digital landscape the land of the free and the home of the brave. Until then, our watchword should be careful experimentation. But experimentation nevertheless.

This is a follow-up post to one I wrote nearly three months ago, Musing About Sharing and Privacy. This time, I’m trying to focus on just one thing. What makes people share. Incidentally, while talking about sharing: if you’re interested in privacy I would strongly recommend you read this post by Danah Boyd and this post by Stowe Boyd (no relation).

I was particularly taken with danah’s Five Things You Must Know About Privacy In A Digital Context, something I’ve had the privilege of hearing danah speak about in person. Here’s an excerpted version:

• We must differentiate between personally identifiable information (PII) and personally embarrassing information (PEI).
• We’re seeing an inversion of defaults when it comes to what’s public and what’s private…. you have to choose to limit access rather than assuming that it won’t spread very far.
• People regularly calculate both what they have to lose and what they have to gain when entering public situations.
• People don’t always make material publicly accessible because they want the world to see it.
• Just because something is publicly accessible does not mean that people want it to be publicized. Making something that is public more public is a violation of privacy.

danah also makes a key comment during her SXSW talk, linked to earlier:

Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows.

The public/private/secret distinctions that Stowe draws out are also worth noting and considering. danah and stowe, in their different ways, have spent considerable time seeking to explain to others what they’ve learnt and understood about privacy, and I don’t want to undermine any of it. Rather, I want to look at things from a slightly different perspective, trying to figure out why people share.

photo courtesy the Green Children Blog

Nearly a decade ago, I was transfixed by a book called Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Organisations. I have no hesitation in recommending you read it; the book did more for my understanding of post-Maslowian thinking than any other I had read before or since. [And I am so pleased to see that one of the authors of the book, Nitin Nohria, is to become Dean of Harvard Business School from 1 July 2010.

In the book, Nohria and Lawrence make a very simple assertion, summarised below:

Editor’s Note: In Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, the authors combine the latest thinking from the biological and social sciences to lay out a new theory on human nature. The idea: We are all influenced and guided by four drives: acquiring, bonding, learning, and defending. In this excerpt, Lawrence and Nohria examine how an organization built around the four-drive theory might look.

We are all influenced and guided by four drives: acquiring, bonding, learning, and defending.

That’s how I look at sharing. Speaking personally, most of the time when I share things (like my thoughts here), I share them because I want to learn. As I share, I make myself vulnerable, and in making myself vulnerable I strengthen bonds with the people I share with. As those bonds strengthen, trust between us grows, and I am less alone, less isolated. Which satisfies my drive to defend when under attack.

All learners are teachers as well, and there may be a sense of acquisition as learning takes place via sharing. So to my warped way of thinking, sharing is one of the mosy natural things for a human being to do: the act of sharing seems to satisfy all four of our core drivers.

Man was born to share.

My thanks to Dieter Drescher for the photograph above

The past few decades have been characterised, at least in part, by the introduction of a plethora of tools that make sharing easier. Tools we call social software or social media and a variety of other names, covering blogs, wikis, instant messaging, community media sites such as YouTube or Flickr or last.fm or blip.fm or the daddy of them all, Wikipedia, social networking sites such as facebook or LinkedIn, news and status update sites such as Twitter, even location signallers such as foursquare or gowalla; without even going into the giant landscape of “vertical” communities like epicurious.

I tend to think of all these things as belonging to one or more of four camps: places where I can share things; places where people can share things with me; tools I can use to share things with others; tools that others can use to share stuff with me.

And all these things are relatively new. So we’ve got to figure out how they work, what they’re good for, what they’re less good for. The only way we’re really going to be able to learn about these things is by using them. And finding out what works, and what doesn’t work. What to share. With whom. How. What to receive from others. Who the others should be.

David Weinberger writes eloquently about the importance of tagging, amongst other things, in Everything is Miscellaneous. Sharing alone is not enough, we have to make what we share easy to consume. So the tools become important.

For the last few years, I’ve been trying out many social sites, learning what makes them tick, how to get value from them, how to create value in them. Many of these services allow you to cross-post to others. Some tools even let you post what you’re saying in one medium on to all others. And by posting stuff all over the place, I’ve been able to learn what people like me to share, what people want me to share. And what they don’t want from me.

Over the years a few truths have emerged:

1. People are different in different electronic communities, and you have to figure out the frequency of information flow that each community feels comfortable about.

2. People are interested in different things you do, and uninterested in many other aspects of what you do. So you have to learn how often a particular community wants to hear from you; your facebook community is different from your flickr community is different from your twitter community is different from your blog community is different from the community you work with every day. I tweet every now and again in bursts. Covering conferences. Cooking. Reading. Listening to music. I have to figure out where each type of tweet should be shared, something I continue to learn about.

3. Everyone is learning about all this, so you’re going to have to subscribe and unsubscribe all over the place, as you figure out what’s useful and what’s not.

So.

While everyone worries about privacy, spend some time thinking about sharing. Think about what you want to share. Why you want to share it. With whom you want to share it.

We’re still in the wild west phase of all this: we’re learning about what we like to hear from others; we’re learning about what others would like to hear from us; and we’r learning about how we want to “control” all this. In the meantime, people who provide the services that let us do all this are trying to figure out how to make money while giving us those services. And everyone’s trying to figure out who ‘owns” what, all during a time when emerging generations are questioning the very concept of ownership. Maybe it’s time everyone re-read Lewis Hyde‘s The Gift.

Some of us, like me, are the experimenters, trying to figure out how to use all this stuff. So when I share that I’m going to a Cat Stevens concert, I’m gratified when someone thanks me for sharing that. Because their partner was a Cat Stevens freak and it made a difference.  When I share what I’m cooking for dinner, I was encouraged to use photographs, something I wouldn’t otherwise have done. When I share what I’m listening to, people complained that I was filling up their view, and I had to “turn the noise down”. When I shared my location, my daughter complained that her ex-boyfriend was stalking her through my tweets, so I cut off the Twitter-facebook feed.

These are all just examples. Real, but examples. The truth is that we have a lot to learn. And that is something that happens with anything new.

I had the privilege of meeting Freeman Dyson via his daughter Esther some years ago, at a Flight School event. It may even have been the inaugural one. And there, Freeman was regaling us with talk about what it was like in the heady “nuclear” days of the late 1940s, when they really thought they could use nuclear power to send rockets into space, without any real deep knowledge of the damage that would follow.

It didn’t happen. We learnt about the impact of that kind of radioactive fallout in time. Not in time for Hiroshima or Nagasaki, tragically, but we learnt.

And that’s what happening about digital privacy and sharing. We’re learning. And there are going to be mistakes. And there will be hurt. And out of all that new value will emerge. People like danah help us and safeguard us, because they’re looking at some of these issues deeply. People like the Web Science Trust are looking into this. People like the Berkman Center are looking into this. Even people like the World Economic Forum are looking into this. Because it matters.

In the end, it’s what danah says: privacy is about having control over information flows. What goes out of you. What comes into you. You choose. That’s privacy. And sharing.

There was a time when people had real beards and real names and real jobs. People such as Theodatus Garlick pictured below, one of the world’s first plastic surgeons, and perhaps one of the world’s first daguerrotype photographers. [Incidentally, I am grateful to the delightfully named Increase Lapham, whose wonderful collection of cartes-de-visites and cabinet cards is made accessible by the Wisconsin Historical Society, whom I must also thank.]

There was a time when it became possible to capture unusual juxtapositions of famous people, such as the photograph below, where a young Mohandas Karamchand (“Mahatma”) Gandhi appears to be wistfully unaware of his companion, the then somewhat more famous Nobel-winning poet, playwright, musician and novelist Rabindranath Tagore. My thanks to the Rare Book Society of India for making the photograph available to me.

There was a time when it became possible to capture incongruous events like this one, of Fidel Castro golfing, apparently with Che Guevara (captured by Alberto Korda, who also took the iconic Che shot that now graces t-shirts the world over):

There was a time when telephone engineers were top-hat-wearing Very Important People, festooned with tools (including some in the top hat) and nonchalantly carrying ladders and cables, as one does…. my thanks to BT Heritage for the photograph. [Incidentally, you might enjoy visiting the TeleFocus service there].

We live in amazing times, where it is possible for me to share such amazing photographs with you. Some hurdles remain, particularly in the context of copyright, but they are easing. Incidentally, this gives me an excuse to publish, for the nth time, my all-time favourite photograph, of an orphan boy hugging his first-ever new pair of shoes. [And the web has made it possible for me to identify the orphanage, the time, the year, the photographer, even the name of the boy!]. Here it is:

So where is this post heading, and what does it have to do with social objects?

Everything.

Ever since Hugh Macleod spoke to me about social objects, and pointed me towards what Jyri Engestrom had written, I’ve been fascinated by the concept. I had the pleasure of hearing Jyri at Reboot (I think it was in 2008) and he didn’t disappoint, he was excellent.

You know what makes an object “social”? We do. Without us there is no “social”, even if we use objects to extend and enhance that socialness.

Photographs are social objects, which is why it would come as no surprise if Facebook now had more photographs than Flickr. Films are social objects. Songs are social objects. Books. Sporting events. TV programs. Concerts. They’re all social objects.

When we see lists like that, we can start believing that all social objects are “content”, which gets the “rightsholders” of content salivating up the wazoo. Perish the thought.

Content is not what makes an object social. We do.

There was a time when “content” was created by a tiny minority of people, largely because the tools for making that content were elitist in nature. Scarce, expensive, needing specialist skills. To make matters worse, the techniques for distributing and sharing that “content” were also elitist in nature. So people who “owned” that “content” felt like kings.

Now things have changed. There’s been some limbo-dancing. The barriers to entry for creating, publishing and distributing “content” are getting lower by the minute. Which means that the content kings are all dressed up with nowhere to go. And so the only option they think they have is to try and recreate the barriers they used to enjoy, in paradigms where they are technically and economically difficult to recreate.

The most valuable social objects are the ones we create. Our narratives, our stories. Our memories. Our lives. Hopelessly intertwined with our family and friends, our associates, our acquaintances, our colleagues, even our enemies.

We are our stories. We used other, weaker, proxies for our stories at a time when we could not capture, publish and share our own stories. And, as long as there are no paywalls or DRM or suchlike, we will continue to use proxies, but only to augment our stories. They are not the stories. We are. They are not social objects per se. We make them social.

People who used to “own” “content” still have roles to play. While digital content will continue to trend towards free, there are many ways to make money because of that content rather than with that content, the “because effect”. Time-based premia. Analog sales. Authenticity. Merchandising. All the “better than free” ideas that Kevin Kelly tells us about.

As the cost of producing content drops, as the cost of distributing content drops, as the process of creating the content gets more and more democratised, something new happens. We start having too much content. Which means the role of curators increases in importance. Curation is about access, about trust, about relationships, about expertise, about context. So the content rightsholders of old have an opportunity to excel, since they have the inside track to providing these. We used to go to them for content they generated. Now we can go to them for content we generate. That is, if they stop their paywall tomfoolery. We pay for service, not for content.

I think that’s what Andrew Savikas was trying to say.

So remember, content does not a social object make. We make objects social. Our stories. Our narratives. Our memories. Our photographs. Our songs. Our shared experiences.

Back to Hugh Macleod, who taught me so much about social objects. Thank you Hugh.

As Hugh says, it’s time to …..remember who we are.

Chichen Itza photograph courtesy JuanRojo

If you’ve been following this blog for long, then you’ll probably know that I’ve been interested in a number of themes to do with information and its implications on business structures and process. You will also know that every now and then, I use the arenas of food and music to illustrate points or issues.

Of late, much of my time has been taken up in reading (and re-reading) The Power of Pull, and I’ve written a couple of posts on the subject. Messrs Hagel, Seely Brown and Davison have really made me think about things; they’ve answered some of the questions I’ve had for a while, and raised a number of new ones.

In parallel, I’ve also been delving into collapse theory, sparked off by Clay Shirky’s excellent post on the collapse of complex business models. That led me on to digging deeper into Joseph Tainter; I ordered and read The Collapse of Complex Societies straightaway; if any of you is interested in collapse theory, I would strongly recommend you read it; it is also really worth reading a long book review that Professor Tainter did, headlined Collapse, Sustainability and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Clay has also been responsible for putting a third, connected, stream of thinking into my head, via Kevin Kelly, another must-read person. The Shirky Principle. [Incidentally, you can rest assured I will be reviewing Clay’s upcoming book, Cognitive Surplus. I’ve already ordered it; how nice it was to see that the book was actually being released same-day US and UK. I am so sick of artificial scarcities.]

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky

So that’s where my head is right now. Thinking about institutions built fundamentally around “push” principles trying to survive in a “pull” world. Thinking about institutions that are designed that way through no fault of their own; these principles have been the basis of management and economics thinking for the best part of a century. Thinking about institutions that “try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. Thinking about institutions that grow more and more complex over time, and then collapse.

Which leads me to the main point of this post. Predictability.

Esmeralda Fortune Teller Machine: courtesy of MiniatureMadness

In the Power of Pull (pg 37) the authors articulate a number of “instincts, assumptions and beliefs” that make up “the philosophy of push”:

• There’s not enough to go around
• Elites do the deciding
• Organisations must be hierarchical
• People must be molded
• Bigger is better
• Demand can be forecast
• Resources can be allocated centrally
• Demand can be met

My tea leaves: courtesy of Katherine Finch.