Thinking about Mario, Pompeii and the internet

I spent some time with the family wandering around Pompeii at the weekend. It was a wonderful experience; while I’d been there before, it was a long time ago: the technology of archaeology has moved forward apace; and I was twenty-five years older. [We’d gone to Sorrento for our honeymoon in 1984. We decided it would be fitting to go back there for our silver anniversary, this time with the children.]

There were many things I learnt, much that was brought to mind. Some of you probably think I read too much Jane Jacobs (and for that matter, Christopher Alexander) for my own good. So be it. I’d happily re-read The Death and Life of Great American Cities every six months or so; if you haven’t discovered Jane Jacobs stop reading now, go to the book-buying web site of your choice and order pretty much anything by her. Alexander’s A Pattern Language is probably somewhat less accessible, but still definitely worth a read.

So what did I learn?

I learnt that the buildings in Pompeii that had arched and domed rooms and gateways fared much better than the rest.

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I learnt that Pompeii was a cosmopolitan place where they’d worked out the importance of using culture-crossing graphics and symbols rather than words.

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I learnt that they had interesting models of re-use: for example, they used the fragments of ceramics smashed in the earthquake of 62AD to form and decorate floors:

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I learnt that they took real care in their design, making the roads work as rainwater escapes as well: the city was built on igneous rock which was less than perfect as a flood plain. But then it would be hard for people to cross the streets, so they embedded the streets with crossing stones at regular intervals:

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I learnt that they used natural materials as cat’s eyes, embedding pavements and floors with reflective stones as shown below:

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I learnt that they cared about waste and recycling, saw what they built under the rooms (and for that matter how they reused urine as fertiliser).

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I learnt that they had open standards and component architecture. For example, they had 38 different sizes of container for food and drink, and everyone used the same sizes to mean the same things:

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I learnt that they did all this with time for beauty and enjoyment in their architecture and layout:

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I learnt that they did all this under the shadow of Vesuvius, a fragile and beautiful peace in the presence of danger:

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But you know what? I could have learnt all of this from a book. I could have learnt all this from the internet.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

Mario. 65 years old this year. Been doing the job of personal tour guide for 48 years. A wonderful, passionate man, passionate about everything he does, passionate about Pompeii, its history and culture, passionate about archaeology, passionate about learning. Someone who has seen the impact of bad decisions from an archaeological perspective, someone who cares enough to celebrate the learning that comes from those decisions.

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All this time I was seeing things in Pompeii, and thinking about the internet.

But Mario changed all that. He saw things in the internet and started thinking of Pompeii.

You see, Mario’s stopping work for a year or two. He’s not retiring, even though he’s 65. He’s going back to school.

Why? Because of the internet. He realises that the internet (particularly the web) reduces the barrier to entry for information and knowledge; that it exposes paucity of knowledge, and raises the bar for standards in professions where knowledge is a form of expertise.

He has seen his colleagues and peers, so-called experts, fail to hold the attention of crowds, as they bleat on about things we can all find out from the web. He is too passionate about his profession, his skills, his way of life to allow the internet to weaken him. He is too passionate about Pompeii, about its history, about his history, to roll over and give up.

So Mario, aged 65, a consummate professional, a passionate expert at what he does, is going back to school.

Because of the internet.

And you know what? He’s looking forward to it.

So I will be back in a few years’ time, to see Mario. To see what he has learnt. And how he keeps ahead of the internet.

In manufacturing we speak of a “China Price”. Maybe Mario’s tale suggests that for knowledge we should start speaking of an “internet price”.

In the meantime, here’s to Mario, and to all the Marios of this world. Passionate about what they do, choosing to embrace and extend the internet.

Crowdplaying: Of Three Wolf Moons, Caroline of Brunswick (and Complete and Perfect Tutnums)

The internet’s been an interesting place this week. Particularly for crowdplaying. Crowdsourced humour.

First off we had the almost-rained-off first day’s play at Edgbaston for the Third Ashes Test. [Now for people who don’t know anything about cricket, that’s a biennial cricket match between England and Australia]. Play was scheduled to begin at 11am; it rained all day; play did begin at around 5pm. But in the meantime:

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The Caroline of Brunswick article in Wikipedia took a mighty hammering, despite stout defence from William Avery, who did everything possible to justify his Senior Editor with Platinum Editor Star status. [Incidentally, I now have a new ambition. To become a Complete and Perfect Tutnum of the Encyclopaedia. It was a joyous morning without a ball being bowled, with edits blazing from end to end, so much so that Caroline of Brunswick was rumoured to have become the 5th most searched item on Google that afternoon.

Not quite the place to look for humour. But hey, this is the internet, where anything’s possible. Laughter in the TMS inbox I could believe, but in an article on Caroline of Brunswick?

Then, today, thanks to Chris Brogan, I found an unlikely streak of humour in an even more unlikely place: The Mountain Men’s Three Wolf Moon Short Tee Shirt.

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No, it’s not on the t-shirt. Just take a look at the reviews of the item on Amazon. 136 customer reviews. 13,171 finding the first review helpful. 181 comments on that review. Don’t stop there, you must take a look at some of the other reviews. Preferably while sitting down in a comfortable position.

Culture comes in many shapes and forms; the internet is a land of wondrous promise as people find old and new ways to do old and new things. If we let them.

Blowin’ in the Wind

I’m sure most of you have read quite enough about the Amazon “1984” incident; it received somewhat less coverage than the Techcrunch Twitter incident, which itself is saying something. I’m not going to comment directly on the merits and demerits of either incident here and now; they deserve considered responses and in the right context, not while emotions are high and views are unduly polarised.

Nevertheless, there are a few points I’d like to make.

One, we should use this opportunity to look at the idiocy of current copyright law. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about 1984’s copyright status:

Nineteen Eighty-Four will not enter the public domain in the United States until 2044 and in the European Union until 2020, although it is public domain in countries such as Canada, Russia, and Australia.

So let’s get this right. A book published sixty years ago, by an author who died the next year, may continue to be in copyright in some countries for another 35 years.

Publishing today is a global business, and the costs of reproduction and transmission are extremely low. Having regionally disparate copyright law is bad enough, trying to impose or police that law borders on insanity. So what happens if I buy a “post-copyright” copy of 1984 from a bookshop in Canada, and then cross over to the US to read it?

In a digital world, the very concept of copyright needs to be rethought. [And I am glad that many people, such as those at the Berkman Center, are doing just that.] What is happening now is as indefensible as region coding on a DVD, the desperate attempts of a historical monopoly to try and retain its rents.

A second point is best articulated via the example of Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind. For sure he wrote it. For sure he was influenced by a negro spiritual called No More Auction Block, Dylan himself has admitted to that.

No More Auction Block is cited in literature as far back as 1873.

And No More Auction Block is shown as being under copyright to Special Rider Music in 1991.

What’s wrong with this picture?

In a digital world, we really need to revisit everything to do with IPR, inclusive of DRM and copyright and patents.

The customer is the scarcity

Every economic era is characterised by certain abundances and by certain scarcities; these change over time; yesterday’s abundances become today’s scarcities and vice versa. When I was a young child in India, cotton was plentiful and polyester scarce. People valued the scarce thing over the abundant thing: so the rich wore Terylene shirts and the poor wore cotton. Even though the Terylene shirts were overpriced uncomfortable non-absorbent non-breathable stick-to-your-back sweat producers.

Most of the time, the abundances and scarcities are natural, caused by explicable imbalances between supply and demand. So cotton was cheap in India and expensive in the UK, while polyester was cheap in the UK and expensive in India.

Sometimes the imbalances are artificial: monopolies and cartels and market power abuse and price-fixing and market-cornering are examples of such artificial imbalances. Most of these have been seen for what they are, and consequently declared illegal in most countries.

Not all artificial scarcities have been termed illegal as yet: the most glaring example is that of “intellectual property rights”, where something is made artificially scarce using the power of the state; no other rights depend exclusively on state intervention. Strange, that.

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The digital age has given rise to more and more artificial ways of creating and assuring scarcity. Computer ports are a classic example: when all the ports were hardware ports, scarcity was easy to understand. When the ports in question were software ports, the concept of scarcity was less easy to establish.

Analogue things are usually scarcer than digital things, since the cost of digital reproduction and transmission is extremely low. As Kevin Kelly said, the internet is one great copy machine. [if you’re a fan of KK, do take a look at some of his other essays in related areas: Better Than Owning is well worth a read, for example.

Two other Kevin Kelly essays stand out in this context: People Want to Pay and Why People Pirate Stuff. I quote from the Pirate essay:

[Game developer Cliff Harris asked the online world “Why do people pirate my games? And in the answers, …] He found patterns in the replies that surprised him. Chief among them was the common feeling that his games (and games in general) were overpriced for what buyers got — even at $20. Secondly, anything that made purchasing and starting to play difficult — like copy protection, DRM, two-step online purchasing routines — anything at all standing between the impulse to play and playing in the game itself was seen as a legitimate signal to take the free route. Harris also noted that ideological reasons (rants against capitalism, intellectual property, the man, or wanting to be outlaw) were a decided minority.

Similarly, one of the key points made in the Want to Pay essay is this:

People buy stuff, but what we all crave are relationships. Payment is an elemental type of relationship. Very primitive, but real.

There are some caveats in this urge to pay.

Paying has to be super easy, idiot-proof and frictionless. There can’t be hurdles. The easier it is to pay, the more eager people are to pay.

The price has to be reasonable. That means it has to be reasonable in relation to similar stuff that is free!

The benefits of paying have to be evident and transparent. This takes creativity to produce and work to convey simply. Unless the benefits of paying are obvious, paying is made difficult.

Every artificial scarcity will be met by an equal and opposite artificial abundance. Port vulnerabilities will be exploited, as Microsoft users have found out to their cost. DVD players will be “chipped” to overcome the insanity of region coding on DVDs (which, by the way, is one of the stupidest things I have ever seen done). Music and film and book DRM will be hacked, as Jon Lech Johansen showed elegantly.

When I was a child, “English” films (which included those of both US as well as UK origin) tended to come out a year to eighteen months after release abroad. Not surprising in an analogue world, with very high production and distribution costs and a scarcity of copies as a result. Today, when there is an artificial gap between US and Indian or Chinese release, the artificial abundance kicks in. Piracy.

Protecting artificial scarcity is an expensive proposition, and ultimately a losing proposition. More and more people will volunteer time to help correct artificial scarcity, because they see it as path pollution, the desecration of core values by profane behaviour.

People see DRM as something that is an irritant, a pollutant, a time waster. They want to pay, but not at the price of artificially imposed inconvenience. There is also a key trust issue here: similar to the issues related to identity, privacy and confidentiality, there is a pervasive belief that those who use DRM will act more and more unreasonably.

Take Amazon. I like much of what the company does and stands for. The recent incident with Amazon and 1984 may not dent the company’s reputation overall, but many people will not buy a Kindle as a result. And I am one of them. Remotely-managed deletion of electronic copies of 1984 from people’s Kindles, copies that were legitimately paid for, is a monstrous thing to do. Incidents like “1984” will spur the pushback against DRM even more.

This post is not about the 1984 incident; although we will see consequences, the incident will pass. This post is about something far more important.

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[My thanks to Bergen Moore for the photo above.]

This post is about the customer. Customers are creative people who transform scarcities and abundances in strange and beautiful ways. If two-wheelers are abundant and four-wheelers are scarce, then a way will be found to make a two-wheeler behave like a four-wheeler.

As Dan Bricklin pointed out wonderfully in his book Bricklin on Technology, we must always remember that the role of the technologist is to build tools for people to use, not to constrain them from doing things. [incidentally, Dan’s partner-in-crime during the VisiCalc days, Bob Frankston, is an excellent source of learning as well. I have had the joy of listening to him on many occasions, count both him and Dan as personal friends. If you get the chance, do read Bob on Zero Marginal Cost and on Assuring Scarcity.

People are incredibly creative. If you plan for ten uses of a tool while designing it, you can rest assured that they will find an eleventh use. Take cooking as an example. And the concept of recipes.

Recipes are tools for the transfer of cultural enjoyment. They show some classic opensource behaviours, to the extent that NEA applies. For most recipes you can say: Nobody owns them. Everyone can use them. Anyone can improve them.

I love cooking. I speak to chefs regularly in order to find out how to make what they made. Sometimes they have cookbooks, and sometimes I buy the cookbooks. Why? Because it is convenient, and I am happy to pay for that convenience, for that service. Content is a service business, as Andrew Savikas points out eloquently. Sometimes I get the book signed by the author, triggering some of Kevin Kelly’s Better Than Free generatives, especially those of authenticity and embodiment and patronage.

But what happens after I get the recipe verbally, or after I buy the book? I’ll tell you what happens. I do it my way.

I change things. I experiment with the ratios and quantities in the recipe; add ingredients, drop ingredients. Change the way it’s meant to be cooked. Pass on my learning, the comments of my guests. And learn from others as they do the same thing.

Can you imagine being told that you can’t share recipes with others? That you can’t change ingredients or quantities? That you can’t enrich, augment, mutate the ideas involved? In many ways that is what DRM and IPR is designed to do, prevent us from being creative. [Pharma and IPR is a whole separate subject, yet essentially related. I will cover that in a post on some other day].

Customers want to be creative, to experiment with things, to change things, to share what they learn, to learn by sharing.

We are fast approaching an age when many analogue things will become virtual, digital, easily copied.

We can choose to invest time and effort in making digital things harder to copy: we can choose to create artificial scarcity, and lose.

Or we can choose to invest time and effort in making digital things easier to consume, to share, to enrich. And to pay for.

The customer is willing to pay. If we get the consumption model, the paying model, the sharing model, right.

The customer is the scarcity. Let’s focus on valuing that scarcity, on giving the customer what she wants when, where and how she wants it. With the right consumption and payment and sharing models.

In praise of fleshy fruit and the power of the Web



Nongu, originally uploaded by Kamala L.

I love the web.

There I was, quietly watching the golf at Turnberry, occasionally switching over to the cricket at Lord’s, seated in my favourite armchair at home.

Felt a little peckish, so I went and got myself a handful of fresh lychees. Peeled each one carefully so as not to have the juices spurt everywhere. Extracted the seed carefully. Then savoured the taste of the fruit, one by one. A heavenly fruit.

Which led me on to thinking of other exotic fruit, fleshy and juicy and oh-so-tropical. I began to recall childhood memories of eating a very unusual fruit as a young boy, the only name I could remember was the Tamil word we used at home for it: Nongu.

Now I haven’t seen a nongu for forty years. Had no idea what its “Western” name was.

Today it doesn’t matter. Google the word. [So what if the word is in Tamil?] Inspect the results, find there’s one that leads straight to Flickr. Find what I’m looking for in Flickr, notice I now have an option to “blog this”. Take one minute to configure Flickr for posting straight to my WordPress blog. And there you have it.

The fruit of the palmyra tree, resplendent and peeled and ready to eat. Something I will definitely do next time I am in Madras during the right season.

So thank you Google, Flickr, WordPress, for the tools to make this possible.

Thank you Kamala L for posting the photo on Flickr and making it possible for me to write this post.

Thank you community at large for sharing stuff on the web, making it possible for people like me to participate and share.