On Lifestyle Rigidity

October 24, 2013 By

I’ve been wondering about why lifestyle design, outside of a few special cases like young, single Western men moving to Thailand, is proving to be so hard for everybody trying to adapt to the Internet era. I think the key is what I call lifestyle rigidity, which can be understood in terms of the (informal and speculative) heavy-tail distribution below. 

lifestyleDarkEnergy1

The central feature of lifestyle rigidity (my informal sociological generalization of the idea of wage rigidity) is what we might call dark energy: the lifestyle energy absorbed by parts of your lifestyle that are illegible to you. My claim is that this energy has increased radically in the last century, making  the leap from Industrial Age to Internet Age much harder than the leap from Agrarian Age to Industrial Age. As a species, we’re carrying a lot more baggage this time around.

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The Mother of All Disruptions

October 11, 2013 By

I like thinking about technological disruptions that take place over really long periods of time. This is because the older a technology being disrupted, the more profound the social impact. In my disruption of bronze post, I speculated about one that probably took a few thousand years (iron disrupting bronze) and made spaghetti of the prevailing world order.

I just thought of a potential example that spans 10,000+ years: as a technology, computing disrupts natural language in the thinking and communications market.  That would make computing the mother of all disruptions in terms of time scales involved.  Well, maybe electricity disrupting fire in the heat and light markets is a contender too. Here is the disruption, speculatively mapped out in the form of the familiar intersecting-S-curves visualization used in disruption analysis.

 

computingDisruptsLanguage

Here’s my reasoning. I am convinced it hangs together.

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Truth in Consulting

October 2, 2013 By

The game of consulting frequently dumps me in situations where I am reminded of this joke from the Cold War era. A worker at a Soviet baby carriage factory, soon to be a father, decided to steal parts from work and assemble a baby carriage at home. But no matter how he tried assembling the parts, he always ended up with an AK 47.

Every functioning business has some level of disconnect between declared and actual mission. In a large organization, many might even sincerely believe that they are manufacturing baby carriages when they are in fact manufacturing guns. This is necessary for the business to work, just as suspending disbelief is necessary to enjoy movies. When the dissonance is managed right, every participant can get fully invested in work. There is no hedging. No creative energy held in reserve. No cynical second-guessing or unproductive skepticism. No mercenary effort-reward calculations. There is an all-around willingness to backstop any mission-critical activity to the individual limit and beyond. It is the state of full engagement sometimes referred to as head in the game.

Consulting in its simplest philosophical form is about doing the exact opposite of getting your head in the game: you must get the game in your head. This does not mean what you might think it means.

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Rough Books for Roughening School

September 25, 2013 By

After months of procrastination, I’ve finally managed to put together the promised ebooks of the Gervais Principle series ($3.99 on Kindle in the US) and the archives of the Be Slightly Evil email list ($2.99 on Kindle in the US), which I’ve officially retired as of last week.

I will also be conducting the Gervais Principle online workshop for the first time in the coming months. You have two opportunities to attend, on Tuesday Oct 22 or Tuesday Nov 5, between 7:00 – 8:30 US Pacific Time. It will be a small-group (limited to 8) workshop based on the Gervais Principle. Since I am test-driving the idea of this workshop, the price is basically beta-testing cheap: $95. If the thing is successful, I’ll figure out the actual sustainable price I’ll need to charge.

  1. The Gervais Principle ebook has a bonus essay on the movie Office Space, as well as an extended preface outlining a philosophy of organizational literacy, and a TV/movie watching guide for your continuing education.
  2. The Be Slightly Evil ebook has a bonus 5000-word essay called Inside the Tempo, which pulls together a broader philosophy of adversarial decision-making.
  3. The workshop will be a mix of presented and interactive material that I’ve been working on for quite a while now.

These ebooks (which are the first two in a series I am calling “Ribbonfarm Roughs”) and seminars are part of this idea I’ve been slowly developing for a sort of “roughening school” approach to business education, as opposed to the “finishing school” approach that most business training adopts. The general idea is that the transition from theory to practice requires adding an element of roughness and barbarian thinking to abstract ideas, rather than refinement and finishing touches. If these ebooks and trial seminars work out, I’ll develop and offer more such material.

So check out the ebooks and sign up for the workshop. If you’d like to help promote them, here are some tweetables and shareables for you to use. I hope you will add some enthusiastic and flattering superlatives.

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The Exercise of Authoritah

September 12, 2013 By

I have this comic fantasy of some day being in a business situation where a client comes to me with a tricky problem. I ponder impassively for a moment. Then I pick up the phone and make one cryptic phone call. I then look at the client and say, “Go home, it will be taken care of.” This Godfather fantasy of being able to deliver on firm promises with a single phone call cracks me up because it so absurdly out of whack with the way I actually operate. Phone calls like this can only happen in the context of an asymmetric mode of relationship management I call collecting. In real life, I am more likely to be on the receiving end of such a call. 

Unlike normal adult patterns of relating, which I’ll call connecting, collecting is a mode of relating that is asymmetric  at a psychological level. Even when two people know each other personally, if it is a collection relationship, one party — the collector — defines the relationship unilaterally and strives forcefully to make that definition prevail. This striving is the essence of Eric Cartman’s signature line on South Park: “Respect my AUTHORITAH!”

authoritah2

Once authoritah has been effectively imposed, it can be exercised in dramatically leveraged and highly deterministic ways. A single phone call can move mountains, without tedious consultation, arguments, second-guessing or questioning. Connecting is for normal, nice people. Collecting is for people who are headed for either world domination or madness.

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Roundup, May-August 2013, September in Bay Area, Sponsorship Update

August 28, 2013 By

Time for a roundup and Labor-Day long-read fodder for some of you. It’s been a summer of fairly ambitious posts for me. Besides finally finishing up the Gervais Principle series, I managed one usual-ribbonfarm-bag-of-tricks post (#8) and three that strike out in a new and somewhat difficult new direction of thinking/writing for me (#4, #10, #11). Residents Drew, Mike and Kevin added five more essays.

  1. The Gervais Principle VI: Children of an Absent God
  2. Civilization and the War on Entropy (Drew)
  3. Aphorisms: Collection 1
  4. On the Unraveling of Scripts
  5. War and Nonhuman Agency (Mike)
  6. Players versus Spectators
  7. Consciousness: An Outside View (Kevin)
  8. You Are Not an Artisan
  9. The Networked Narrative (Drew)
  10. The Quality of Life
  11. On Freedomspotting
  12. An Archetypes Map
  13. I and Thou and Life in Aspergerstan (Mike)

I also had one ambitious off-Ribbonfarm essay in Aeon Magazine: The American Cloud.

Sponsorship Update

It’s been a slow year on the sponsorship front. The 2013 total stands at $2275 so far, 61% of the 2013 total ($3750).

I suspect turning off the buy-me-a-coffee end-of-post link had something to do with this. It seems to have functioned as a sponsorship entry drug.  But since I don’t like playing behavioral economics games, I’ll leave that turned off.

If you’d like to see this increasing investment in this site, pitch in. I am hoping we can beat last year’s total and hit at least $4000.

Spending September in the Bay Area

In other news, I will be in the Bay Area all through September, working onsite with a consulting client. I am planning on catching up with folks in the area in the evenings as much as I can, and also go fishing for interesting new clients.

There will be a meetup of some of the Bay Area regulars from our Facebook group at La Boulange cafe on University Ave., Palo Alto, on Wednesday Sept 4 at 7 PM. The plan is to drink coffee, eat sandwiches and discuss the interesting developing trend of containerization of code.

I’ll try to pull together at least one more meetup in the city. Maybe a hike/outdoor activity of some sort. Suggestions welcome.

Email me if you’re interested. I should be free to meet up most evenings somewhere in the Peninsula/South Bay area. I’ll probably make it up to San Francisco a few evenings as well.

An Archetypes Map

August 14, 2013 By

I’ve been trying to organize my thinking around archetypes into a broader landscape. Here’s my first stab at organizing a subset of the many I’ve played around with over the years. This exercise interests me because I am trying to level up my sophistication in dealing with archetypes.

archetypesMapLet’s do a quick guided tour.

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On Freedomspotting

August 8, 2013 By

Of all the seductive ideas in psychology, none is more dangerous than the idea that one is free. Humans have a tendency to jump to conclusions on the matter, on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence. We also believe that freedom is fragile. So humans who do suspect they are free are usually reluctant to advertise the belief. They suspect that to act visibly free is to invite some form of unwelcome authoritarian attention.

This classic exchange in The Dark Knight Rises illustrates how we think about freedom (Daggett is a corrupt executive with designs on Wayne Enterprises and Bane is the super-villain he has allied with, against Batman):

Bane: [to Daggett’s flunkey] Leave us!
John Daggett: No! You stay here, I’m in charge!
Bane: [puts his hand on Daggett’s shoulder] Do you feel in charge?  (flunkey leaves room)
John Daggett: I paid you a small fortune.
Bane: And this gives you power over me?

How does a free person act? Like Bane? Like a Bodhisattva? Like an Ayn Rand caricature? Like a successful entrepreneur with an early-retirement stash? Like a jerk? Like Frederick Douglass in Diary of a Slave when he has his first epiphanies about the nature of freedom in an environment of whippings?

All of the above. Freedom is a set of archetypal patterns of behavior rather than a state of being. Learning to detect these patterns is an interesting pursuit I call freedomspotting. It can be pursued as a hobby, or as a calling by teachers, investors, dictators, revolutionaries and others with a professional interest in either fueling or extinguishing sparks of freedom.

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The Quality of Life

July 31, 2013 By

The idea of quality of life is very twentieth-century. It sparks associations with ideas like statistical quality control and total quality management. It is the idea that entire human lives can be objectively modeled, measured and compared in meaningful ways. That lives can be idealized and normalized in ways that allow us to go beyond comparisons to absolute measures. That lives can be provisioned from cradle-to-grave. That an insistence on a unique, subjective evaluation of one’s own life is something of a individualist-literary conceit.

I suspect the phrase itself is a generalization of the older notion of modern conveniences, a phrase you frequently find in early twentieth-century writing. It referred to the diffusion of various technologies into everyday pre-industrial life, from running hot and cold water in bathrooms and garbage collection to anesthetics and vaccines.

That conception of the quality of life, as the sum total of material conveniences acquired and brutalities of nature thwarted through technology, seems naive today. But with hindsight, it was much better than what it evolved into: baroque United Nations statistics that reflect institutionally enabled and enforced scripts, which dictate what people ought to want.

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You Are Not an Artisan

July 10, 2013 By

A couple of weeks ago, after reading yet another piece of high-minded marketing copy, full of words like hand-crafted and artisan, a silly verse popped unbidden into my head:

This is not the renaissance.
You are not an artisan.
Go around to the back door,
you’re a smelly tradesman. 

So long as we’re pretending that we’re rediscovering an early-modern work ethic, I think I can call myself a bard and allow myself a bit of anachronistic doggerel.

Thinking through the implications of the whole artisan-crafts-guilds meme in the future-of-work debates led me to an odd conclusion: the future is significantly brighter (or less bleak) than people realize. So long as you stop thinking in terms of crafts and aim to practice a trade instead, there is more work for humans than people realize.

What’s the difference? It’s the difference between bards and chimney-sweeps.

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