An Information Age Glossary

February 7, 2014 By

We live in an information-rich environment, but our minds are still wired for an environment of information scarcity. It still hasn’t really hit us that in the last 20 years, we’ve experienced a transformation that is as dramatic for our brains as climbing out of the water and learning to breathe air was for our ancient fishy ancestors. 

For the past year or so, I seem to have been unconsciously retooling my thinking and writing to operate in an information-rich environment. A big part of such cognitive ret0oling is  learning to favor particular terms (or unusual redefinitions of existing terms), and deprecating older terms and meanings that assume information scarcity. 

I figure it is time to get more conscious and deliberate about the retooling, so I am sharing the current state of my glossary. Proposals for new terms, or refinements of definitions welcome. I’ll edit this post for a while, and if people find it useful, we can try to figure out a more permanent home for it.

Very little of this is original to me by the way. I’ve credited people where I can, but a lot of this is the outcome of conversations with people I am not at liberty to cite publicly. So you can credit me for any substance here, and blame these invisible collaborators for any bullshit.

Related: I’ve wanted a CMS dedicated to creating shared glossaries for a long time, and even took a half-hearted stab at building one with a friend. I’d enthusiastically support any such effort.

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Resident Bloggers for 2014: Sam, Jordan, Kartik, Keith

January 15, 2014 By

Another fun bit of housekeeping. I’d like to welcome Sam Bhagwat, Jordan Peacock, Kartik Agaram and Keith Adams, our resident bloggers for 2014.

I’ve known them all for a couple of years now (though I’ve only met Jordan online), and I can safely say that the sophistication of my understanding of our emerging digital civilization has been greatly enhanced by my ongoing conversations with these guys. If I’ve said anything smart in the last couple of years about the world being created by computing technologies, a lot of the credit goes to them.

This blog already has a computing subtext (the “refactoring” in the tagline is a reference to a computing concept), and my own work this year is going to be dominated by projects related to software and computing, so part of my reason for inviting these guys on board this year is a selfish one. I hope they can keep my own thinking at the bleeding edge. Nothing like immersion to get you thinking like a native in a new culture.

I suspect all of you will also enjoy learning from these guys. The more our world gets eaten by software, the more the world views of software professionals matter in shaping the future. On the flip side, non-software people have to keep evolving their appreciation of computing, or risk being left behind on the wrong side of history.

To kick things off, I asked the new residents to introduce themselves with a short riff on the idea of refactoring, as I did last year.

So let me yield the floor to them.

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Refactor Camp 2014: Computing and Culture

January 15, 2014 By

It’s Refactor Camp time again.  As with the last two years, the event will again be held in the Bay Area during the first weekend in March.

This year, that’s the weekend of March 1-2. Click here to register.

refactorcamp2014

The venue this year will be the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. For those unfamiliar with the area, this is in the Bay Area, about an hour south of San Francisco. I am hoping to see more out-of-town attendees this year. In the last couple of years, we’ve had between 4-5 out-of-towners, and they definitely helped get us out of the Silicon Valley echo chamber.

The theme of the event this year will be Computing and Culture, and the format will be a pure barcamp style. More details at the Refactor Camp website.

As before, the event is organized on a non-profit basis, and limited to about 45-50 attendees. The registration is $95 and covers both days, including lunch.

If this is beyond your means, but you really want to attend, email me, and I’ll make a few limited discounted spots available.

So looking forward to another stimulating weekend with both returning attendees and new faces. About 22 spots are already taken via early invites, so if you want one of the remaining spots go register!

Consent of the Surveilled

January 10, 2014 By

I’ve been interested in the question of governance under conditions of mass physical mobility for a while. The interest is partly selfish, since I am one of those people with a romantic longing for a nomadic lifestyle. But now, there are better reasons to ask the question.

In 2012, for the first time in history, there were over a billion international tourist arrivals worldwide. Chinese tourists led the way, spending $100B of a market of over a trillion dollars. The data isn’t in yet, but it seems like 2013 might turn out to have been another record-breaking year. And that’s just the beginning. What has started as a tourism boom is likely to end as a secular lifestyle shift enabled by mobile digital technologies. In a few decades, we might be living in a world where at any given time, only half the nominal population of a country is actually living and working in that country. A world with far fewer “vacations” but a lot more (and more extended) travel. At least, I hope that’s the direction we’re headed.

Mobility, especially across jurisdictional boundaries, both domestic and international, is a problem for governments because it interrupts or complicates their ability to govern. This is why the forced settlement of illegible nomadic peoples is an essential part of any serious history of governance.

As Julius Caesar once said, “hold still dammit, so I can see and rule you!”

But thanks to surveillance technologies —  and this is the silver lining to the Snowden affair — soon we might not need to hold still. Those of us who want to might be able to become nomads without dropping out of society.

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Free, as in Agent

January 1, 2014 By

A few weeks ago, I rented a spare desk from a small, local company and returned to cubicle-farm land after five feral years in the  wild coffee shops. Two as a virtual employee, three as a free agent. Looking further back, I’ve been writing about virtual and mobile work, lifestyle design and free agency from the earliest days of this blog. My earliest (and most embarrassing) posts on the subject are from October 2007. I was also researching the subject for work and leading a technology project inspired by it at the time. And looking even further back, I was flirting with the ideas and practices at least as far back as 2004.

Strangely though, cubicles feel different to me now that I’ve voluntarily chosen to return to one. Amazing though it might seem, I can actually work in them now. Apparently, I’ve returned to cubicle-dom with superpowers acquired in the wild.

There’s nothing particularly unique about my path though. For the better part of a decade, somewhere between 20 and 40% of working adults in America (depending on how you count) have been doing something similar. Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation, published in 2002, is now more than a decade old. And he was calling out a phenomenon that was already nearly a decade old at the time. The book now reads like a history book rather than an account of a contemporary phenomenon.

The transformation is over. We are no longer pioneers establishing a new lifestyle pattern. We are a twenty-year-old demographic, sandwiched between the creatively unemployed and the paycheck class, complete with our own stereotypical behaviors, vanities and delusions.  We just haven’t acquired a Dilbert strip to mirror our lives yet.

So it’s about time we defined free agency on its own terms, rather than as a reaction to, or exile from, the paycheck world.

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Complete 2013 Roundup

December 23, 2013 By
This entry is part 7 of 17 in the series Annual Roundups

It’s time again for our annual roundup.  In many ways, 2013 was a year of endings and beginnings for this blog. So, since I like marking boundaries and naming things, I am going to name the relatively self-contained 2007-2012 period The Rust Age and notionally classify it as history. Starting with 2013, we are in the as-yet-unnamed post-Gervais-Principle second age of Ribbonfarm.

New readers interested in history can dive into the past via that link, which has past annual roundups, curated selections and a map of historical interest. Those uninterested in the past can safely join the party starting with this 2013 roundup. I’ll be making a serious effort to limit my use of back-linked references to pre-2013 material, going forward. The past will of course, continue to haunt the present in unexpected ways, but I’ll try to let sleeping ghosts lie.

Now for the roundup, starting with the 21 resident/guest posts, followed by the 24 posts by me, and some commentary.

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Our Diurnal Civilization

December 9, 2013 By

As a kid I used to be afraid of the dark. I grew out of it, as most kids do. Now, as an adult, I find it hard to sleep if it isn’t pitch dark. Being a diurnal species with greater vulnerability to nocturnal predators, the association between fear and darkness has some basis in reality. It takes thousands of safe and undisturbed nights to flip that genetic predisposition through conditioning.

As Marshall McLuhan observed, industrial civilization is a highly visual one, based on an extension of sight over other senses. This suggests that any inherent biases in our visual processing are likely to show up in our larger-scale, collective civilizational behaviors. In particular, I am convinced that the metaphor of darkness is how we viscerally process uncertainty of any sort. We turn any lack of conceptual visibility into stories of hidden dangers real and imaginary. We prefer high-visibility conditions, even if they represent greater real dangers.

In other words, our civilizational itself is a diurnal one, partly driven by fears of monsters lurking under beds at night. We have a fear of dark ages.

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Deep Play: An Impressionistic Theory of Innovation

November 19, 2013 By

I have my second essay up at Aeon Magazine, Deep Play. It’s an attempt at an impressionistic picture of how the world of innovation works.  Here’s an extract:

The EMP Museum, the Gates Foundation, and the MOHAI form what I’ve dubbed the Titan Triangle of Seattle, a zone of violent urban terraforming. Sometimes, on my walks, an absurd image pops up into my head: Bezos, Gates and Allen standing like thousand-foot colossi at the three vertices, hammering away at the earth, with the ghost of Boeing looking on. Violence is the key word here. To scurry about within Titan Triangle is to be struck by the relentless violence — physical, financial, social, and psychological — of a process dubbed ‘creative destruction’. As popularised by the economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 1940s, this is the technology-driven unravelling and cohering of social orders in the human world.

But standing between the EMP Museum and the Gates Foundation, and taking in their opposing visions of innovation, I am equally struck by the fact that the transformative violence of creative destruction still appears to be governed by that apparently intractable question: how can you talk of colonies on Mars when there are starving children in Africa?

Billions of dollars are apportioned according to the logic of that question every year. And one has to wonder, do the financiers of creative destruction operate by better answers than the ones you and I trade at parties?

Without giving too much away, the essay tries to get at the fundamental structure of industrial-age innovation models using a happy/broken families metaphor, with some inspiration from Clifford Geertz’ notion of deep play.

And in case you missed it, here’s my first Aeon essay, American Cloud, which appeared earlier this year.

These pieces at Aeon have been an interesting challenge: trying to treat themes as complex as the ones I attempt here at ribbonfarm, but in a more accessible way for a mainstream audience. Tough game, since it means doing without random engineering metaphors or too much obscure conceptual scaffolding (the first draft of this essay was a cheerful mess of yin-yang references, genies in lamps etc. which I would likely have let through untouched if I’d posted here).

Am learning as I go along, thanks to my editor there, Ross Andersen.

No time for a full post this week, but this one should keep you busy.

The Gooseberry Fallacy

November 13, 2013 By

Tolstoy’s 1886 parable, How Much Land Does a Man Need has been on my mind recently. In the tale, the debt-ridden peasant Pahom rises to the status of a small landowner but remains dissatisfied, unable to let go of the idea that if only he had more land, he would not even fear the devil.

The devil of course, takes him up on his challenge. Pahom is presented with an unusual land-grab opportunity by the apparently simple-minded Bashkir family. For a thousand rubles, he can have as much of their land as he can run around, between dawn to dusk. If he manages to return to the starting point, the land is his. If not, he forfeits the thousand rubles.

In the story, Pahom overestimates his stamina and attempts to claim too much land. As dusk nears, he realizes he has over-reached, and desperately races back to the starting point. He makes it back, but dies of exhaustion at the finish line. He is buried in a six-foot grave, providing both an answer to the question in the title and a moral for the story derived from Tolstoy’s late-life pacifist Christian-anarchist views.

By preaching a morality of modest, self-limiting aspirations, the good Count was trying to have his feudalism-cake and eat serf-emancipation too. It is a response to destabilizing patterns of opportunity that has become all too familiar in our own time.

I call it the gooseberry fallacy. Let me explain.

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On Staying Grounded

October 31, 2013 By

Walks are my main grounding ritual. I used to prefer easy nature hikes, but these days, I prefer semi-urban walks through landscapes that are a blend of the natural and artificial. The Seattle shoreline is a perfect example. Five minutes from my home, there is a waterfront park from where I can watch trains, ships, airplanes, cars and of course, lots of containers. On a recent walk, I took this picture of four ships waiting to dock. A rare sight, since the port of Seattle does not seem to experience many traffic jams.

ships

The interesting thing about walking the same route over and over is that you notice little changes and seasonal patterns. For example, variations in shipping activity. The variations are what create a sense of direct, living connection to the human drama playing out on Planet Earth.

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