Saints and Traders: The John Henry Fable Reconsidered

June 4, 2014 By

I only recently learned (from Sarah Constantin, whose new blog is worth checking out) of the American folk legend of John Henry, a steel driver who raced against a steam drill and won, only to drop dead right after. Wikipedia tells the story thusly:

He worked as a “steel-driver”—a man tasked with hammering a steel drill into rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock away. He died during the construction of a tunnel for a railroad. In the legend, John Henry’s prowess as a steel-driver was measured in a race against a steam powered hammer, which he won, only to die in victory with his hammer in his hand and heart giving out from stress. The story of John Henry has been the subject of numerous songs, stories, plays, books and novels.

The amazing thing about John Henry is not that he chose to race against a machine. The amazing thing is not even that he won a Pyrrhic victory. The truly amazing thing is that he was turned into a folk hero rather than a cautionary tale, and a symbol of human dignity when in fact his behavior was what you might call morally robotic: based on non-negotiable values that killed him.

The key word above is prowess. It’s a rather archaic word, one I’ve never heard used in conversation, but a useful one. It has connotations of both skill and valor, bundled together in a notion of dignity. On a level playing field with a closed and bounded set of fixed rules, prowess could also be considered synonymous with competitive drive. 

Unfortunately, a human racing against a steam drill is not exactly a level playing field and the economic activity of building profitable railroads is not exactly a cleanly circumscribed Olympic competitive sport. Asymmetric and open-ended conditions separate prowess from competitive ability and turn it into a liability. A large fraction of the labor force today is in a John Henry situation within protectionist sectors of the economy, so it is important to knock down this particular idol with some unsentimental revisionism.

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Artistic Forestry: 2014 Annual Letter

May 29, 2014 By

For the past three years I’ve been doing a sort of annual letter to shareholders/call for sponsorships a la Warren Buffet’s Sage of Omaha act, roughly around March-April. I am about two months late this year. I am just going to start calling this my annual letter from now on. I plan to make it approximately 5% more magisterially smarmy every year until people start calling me the Sage of Ribbonfarm (the name of a short-lived gag panel  that I experimented with in 2008. I had to give it up because Yurij, my off-oDesk Russian artist, suddenly dropped out of sight. I sincerely hope Putin didn’t do something to him).

So if you consider yourself even a minor shareholder in ribbonfarm (through comments, guest posts, sharing, recommendations, playing couchsurfing host to me on my travels, sponsorships or whatever you’ve been doing to help keep this show going), this letter is for you.

Each year, I also add one line to my evolving business philosophy. In 2011, the line was go where the wild thoughts are. In 2012, it was go deep, young man. In 2013, the line is grow branches and roots.  Continuing with the arboreal theme from previous years, this year, my line is  practice artistic forestry. That’s the first topic on the agenda. Here’s the rest of the agenda.

  1. Practicing artistic forestry
  2. The state of the forest, in numbers
  3. The Web, it is a-changing
  4. Bitcoin and online publishing
  5. The future of longform

Let’s get started.

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The Logic of Uberreaction

May 20, 2014 By

I recently made up a word: uberreact. To uberreact is to  insist that regulations which exist for the benefit of  incumbent producers in a market (and their political patrons) are there to protect the interests of consumers. The inspiration for the term, of course, is the very predictable pattern of response by taxicab companies when Uber enters a market. Here’s a particularly clear example from London, where the taxicab union is arguing that Uber drivers should be required to have licenses to act as booking centers (rather than just driver’s licenses), since they operate under minicab laws:

“It’s like when you buy a saucepan online and you use PayPal to pay for it. Your transaction is with the guy you bought the saucepan from, not with PayPal,” McNamara told Wired.co.uk. “With Uber, the guy taking the booking is the operator and so needs a license and a licensed operating center which can’t be a car…One day there’ll be a major accident in one of these cars and there will be a multimillion pound claim and an insurance company will look at it and say that the hiring didn’t take place through a licensed operating center so it won’t be insured,”…

Bertram [Uber UK GM] points out that the intention of the law is to protect passengers and that there are many public safety measures that technology like Uber’s can bring. “The point of knowing who accepts the booking is so that there’s traceability. We have the name, photo and registration of the driver, you can share a live map of the journey with family and friends and get a full copy of the details in a receipt.”

The taxicab union argument against Uber conflates the principle of protecting the consumer interest with a specific technology-dependent mechanism for doing so, and Uber representatives very reasonably offer the counter-argument that their technology actually offers many improvements towards the intent of protecting customer safety.

But what is curious here is why both the taxicab unions and Uber seem to have tacitly agreed to talk about customer safety rather than what the rest of us assume is the issue: suddenly devalued million-dollar medallions and jobs under threat.

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Science! and Other Off-the-Wall Études

May 8, 2014 By

Last year,  around this time, I posted a selection of attempted aphorisms from my Facebook wall (you can follow my public posts if you want the live firehose). I thought I’d do another selection, this time focusing on a new length I am practicing: sub-300-word études (inspired by the corresponding form in music) written as single dense (but not aphoristic-dense) paragraphs. If you are mainly a long-form writer, I highly recommend this composition form to improve your game, and Facebook public posts as the best medium for practicing it. If I ever put together that writing-for-thinking course as I keep meaning to, études and aphorisms will be a major part of it.

Here is a selection of what I consider my better études over the past year. Use the date hyperlinks if you want to share a specific étude with someone.

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Product-Driven versus Customer-Driven

April 24, 2014 By

I have lost track of the number of times I’ve had conversations about product-driven versus customer-driven businesses in recent years. It’s a distinction that just keeps cropping up, and has featured in every consulting gig I’ve had in the last three years, but surprisingly I haven’t found any treatment of it that satisfies me. So this post is partly an attempt to save myself from future repetition.

The distinction is central to many questions people ask in business:

  1. Which kind of business should you build?
  2. Can you transform your business from one kind to the other?
  3. Is one kind provably better than the other?
  4. How can you tell which kind is which?
  5. Which kind suits your personality?
  6. Can you hybridize the two and get the best of both worlds?
  7. Should you listen to customers?

These questions have been discussed for decades, at least since Henry Ford didn’t make clever remarks about faster horses. So why are we having this conversation with increased frequency and urgency these days?  Two words. Steve Jobs. 

But it isn’t just the inspiring dent-in-the-universe life of Jobs that is forcing this conversation, or even the fact of Apple’s exceptional performance in the market during a decade when many businesses were thrashing about in search of a direction. The reason this debate is at the forefront today is that the life and work of Steve Jobs suggested a set of polarizing, absolutist answers to these questions, which have historically attracted hedged answers beginning with it depends. 

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A Life with a View

April 16, 2014 By

There is a memorable exchange in the Seinfeld episode The Keys, between Kramer and George on the theme of yearning. Unlike much of the show’s humor, which seems dated in the digital era, this little existential joke has improved with age:

Kramer: Do you ever yearn?
George: Yearn? Do I yearn?
Kramer: I yearn.
George: You yearn.
Kramer: Oh, yes. Yes, I yearn. Often, I…I sit…and yearn. Have you yearned?
George: Well, not recently. I craved. I crave all the time, constant craving…but I haven’t yearned.

You can imagine a more poignant version of this conversation over an iPad showing a Facebook feed. The Internet, with its constant parade of lives-that-might-have-been-yours and classmates-not-dated, is a jungle of yearnings. Yearnings that were once confined to fading and static memories of childhood, occasionally awakened by petrichor, now sneak into your life as a steady, colorful stream of living confusion, via windows in present realities. There was no equivalent in the past to being a silent spectator of other lives by default. You either had active, evolving relationships of mutual influence, or mutual invisibility. Like passengers on subways, we only saw people on other routes at stations. There were no relationships of continuous mutual spectatorship.

There was no such thing as a life with a view. 

***

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The Message is the Medium

March 20, 2014 By

I’ve been in Europe all week and just got done with the European Trend Day conference in Zurich, organized by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. So instead of a regular post, you get the slide-deck for my talk, The Message is the Medium.

The slides are probably going to be a bit cryptic for those unfamiliar with McLuhan’s theory of media, so here are some (hopefully helpful) notes.

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Immortality in the Ocean of Infinite Memories

March 6, 2014 By

Until recently, I had never been conceptually attracted to the idea of an afterlife or prior lives, either as thought experiments or as aspirations. And definitely not in any religious sense. This is perhaps because I’ve never been able to imagine interesting versions of those ideas.

What has been piquing my interest over the last year is a particular notion of digital after lives/prior lives based on persistence of memory rather than persistence of agency or identity. Not only is this kind of immortality more feasible than the other two, it is actually more interesting and powerful. 

We generally fail to understand the extent to which both our sense of agency and identity are a function of memory. If you could coherently extend memories either forward or backward in time, you would get a different person, but one who might enjoy a weak sort of continuity of awareness with a person (or machine) who has lived before or might live after. Conversely, if you went blind and lost your long-term memories, you might lose elements of your identity, such as your sense of your race or an interest in painting. Mathematician Paul Erdos understood the link between memory and identity:

When I was a child, the Earth was said to be two billion years old. Now scientists say it’s four and a half billion. So that makes me two and a half billion… I was asked, `How were the dinosaurs?’ Later, the right answer occurred to me: `You know, I don’t remember, because an old man only remembers the very early years, and the dinosaurs were born yesterday, only a hundred million years ago.'”

Erdos’ version of course, is based on no more than clever wordplay, but I want to consider a serious version: what if you could prosthetically attach to your own mind, the memories of somebody who died on exactly the day you were born, serving as a sort of reincarnation for that person? What if you could capture your own lived experiences as raw and transferable memories that could be carried on by somebody else, or a robot, starting the day you died, thereby achieving a sort of afterlife? Or perhaps live on somewhere in the Internet, changing and evolving?

The most interesting and unexpected consequence of any notion of immortality based on the idea of a living memory, is that notions of heaven and hell make no sense within it.

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Demons by Candelight

February 27, 2014 By

I grew up with frequent power outages and load-shedding, especially during  the summer time. Dark evenings without power were a special time for children. The candle-lit hours on porches and balconies were a strange mix of an ethereal kind of intimacy,  beckoning darkness, and thoughts that retreated from both sunlight and electric lights.

You could do nothing useful during those hours. There was no TV or radio. Reading was difficult. Candle-lit meals tended to be either quick, simple affairs whipped up in semi-darkness, or leftovers. Families who turned the blacked-out evenings into family time generally sat out on the porch. Adults would use the time to tell family stories to children. Teenagers and some couples would stroll up and down the street, occasionally stopping to chat with neighbors. Younger kids would run around squealing and playing, seemingly possessed by the strange euphoria-inducing forces leaking in from another world. Or they would huddle together and try to scare each other with ghost stories.

Even back then, having never experienced cold northern climates, I instinctively knew that the Scottish word fey, born of cold foggy highlands, and which I had only encountered in books, was somehow the right word for the charged pre-Monsoon summer air around me.

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The Cactus and the Weasel

February 20, 2014 By

The phrase, strong views, weakly held, has crossed my radar multiple times in the last few months.  I didn’t think much about it when I first heard it, beyond noting that it seemed to be almost a tautological piece of good advice. Thinking some more though, I realized two things: the phrase neatly characterizes the first member of my favorite pair of archetypes, the the hedgehog and the fox, and that I am actually much better described by the inverse statement, which describes foxes: weak views, strongly held. 

If this seems counterintuitive or paradoxical to you, chances are it is because your understanding of the archetypes actually maps to more commonplace degenerate versions, which I call the weasel and cactus respectively.

strongweak

True foxes and hedgehogs are complex and relatively rare individuals, not everyday dilettantes or curmudgeons. A quick look at the examples in Isaiah Berlin’s study of the archetypes is enough to establish that: his hedgehogs include Plato and Nietzsche, and his foxes include Shakespeare and Goethe. So neither foxes, nor hedgehogs, nor conflicted and torn mashups thereof such as Tolstoy, conform to simple archetypes.

The difference is that while foxes and hedgehogs are both capable of changing their minds in meaningful ways, weasels and cacti are not. They represent different forms of degeneracy, where a rich way of thinking collapses into an impoverished way of thinking. 

I seem to have been dancing around these ideas for about a year now, over the course of three fox/hedgehog talks I did last year, and even a positioning for my consulting practice based on it, but I was missing the clue of the strong views, weakly held phrase.

It took a while to think through, but what I have here is a rough and informal, but relatively complete account of the fox-hedgehog philosophy, that covers most of the things that have been bugging me over the past year. So here goes.

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