The Dead-Curious Cat and the Joyless Immortal

March 13, 2013 By

I’ve been thinking a lot about curiosity lately. Specifically, about curiosity in the sense of  the proverb curiosity killed the cat: a potentially self-destructive pursuit of knowledge for its own sake that leads to unnecessary risk-taking. In humans such risk-taking often threatens not just the individual or even family/immediate group, but the whole species. Some people just have to go around figuring out new ways to blow things up, often with the noblest of intentions.

At a selfish gene level, the trait seems complicated, but not  mysterious. The question that really interests me is this: how do our selfish genes fool us into being curious creatures, who sometimes get themselves killed, to teach our gene pools more about the environment? Altruism, a similar potentially self-destructive trait at the individual level, manifests subjectively as love (especially for kin), a sense of belonging to one’s community, and a capacity for attachment to some notion of greater purpose. What might be the analogous subjective experience for curiosity?

Curiosity does not seem to be a fundamental drive, unlike what I am told are the  three basic biological drives (seeking pleasure, avoiding pain and conserving energy), so it is probably derived. Curiosity requires a certain energy surplus, since its visible signature is a restless dissipation of energy, but it does not seem directly motivated by energy conservation concerns. So is it derived from pleasure-seeking or pain-avoidance or some mix of the two? Does that make a difference?

I think it does, and I think the answer is that curiosity is primarily derived from pleasure seeking, not pain aversion. This has certain observable consequences.

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Binoculars versus Cameras

February 28, 2013 By

I don’t normally pay attention to token gestures, but Mar 1/Mar 2 are the National Day of Unplugging. I don’t know who is behind this idea, or how much momentum it has, but I really like it. My one experience of joining a Jewish friend to observe Sabbath was both deeply relaxing and thought-provoking.

A complete unplugging happens to be unfeasible for me, since Refactor Camp is this weekend, but I am sort of pleased about the serendipity here. I am suspending my normal 90% online life to do something that strongly depends on physical presence and face-to-face interactions.  Refactor Camp weekend is also Ribbonfarm Unplugged weekend.

So while I won’t be able to entirely unplug from the Internet (let alone electricity), I think this qualifies as observance in the spirit of the idea. If you like the concept, check out that NDU website for more inspiration. Figure out a way to unplug.

While this is a start, I don’t think a token day of ritual observance and a manifesto will really make a huge difference. What we really need, to preserve our sanity and really figure out how to regain control of our agency, is to truly understand how digital/electronic power have hacked our brains, and hack the digital forces right back. They’re not as inexorable as they seem.

I want to share one particularly good unplugging hack I discovered recently, which has made a huge difference in my life. I bought a pair of binoculars. Specifically, these excellent Pentax binoculars:

binocularsI’ve wanted binoculars since I was a kid, but somehow never got around to buying them as an adult. I am particularly proud that I had the discipline to buy small, lightweight and waterproof binoculars I knew I would actually use, rather than bigger, powerful ones that satisfy gadget-philia more than observation needs.

But why are binoculars an unplugging hack?

Because they intensify present-moment sensory experience to a degree that you end up systematically choosing the present over the camera-deferred future. It is much easier to disintermediate the camera using a different device than simply trying to use it less. It’s the gadget equivalent of the solution to the “don’t think of an elephant” problem (the answer is “think of a giraffe instead”).

This moment — and the opportunity to experience it more intensely through binoculars — will be gone immediately. You have to choose whether to experience the moment or capture an impoverished digital memory that you are unlikely to ever review.

I’ve now carried my binoculars with me on several long waterfront walks, observed seabirds, container ships, trains and snowy mountains. I’ve taken them with me on a couple of long train and car rides, and to the Swiss alps. It seems to count as odd behavior. People stare when I whip out my binoculars while they’re whipping out their cameras or smartphones.

The camera today — especially the smartphone and lightweight point-and-shoot — is a dangerous device. Twenty years ago, film cameras were cumbersome enough (and film expensive enough) that most normal people didn’t experience reality through them by default. The dangerous device then was the camcorder, which tempted you into looking at the world entirely through a viewfinder.

Today, cameras being entirely digital and plugged into the Internet via wireless links means that they represent the temptation of continuous sharing. They are now as dangerous as camcorders used to be. Things in the environment start to be viewed and evaluated primarily in terms of their potential as online social objects. We see a spectacle and see an invisible Like button hovering under it. Once Google Glass goes mainstream, this will be literally true.

This power and potential is great so long as we remain conscious of what social sharing adds to the present experience. Does it enhance it or impoverish it? Does the act of sharing make you pay closer, more mindful attention to what you are looking at, or are you turning snap-and-share into a mindless operation like filing unread paperwork or retweeting unread links on Twitter?

Is your camera encouraging you to file away your life instead of living it?

These are not isolated behaviors. They represent a widespread abdication of agency and indeterminate deferral of direct experience. We are starting to inhabit a culture where we  are more likely to forward the experiential possibilities of our life to other people, our unreliable future selves, or digital systems, rather than choosing specific experiences in the moment.

I am never big on prescription, but I’ll offer one here: don’t do that.

And if you buy binoculars to counter the power of the camera in our lives today, please don’t buy those terrible camera-binocular hybrids you see advertised in Sky Mall catalogs. That would defeat the purpose.

I’ll stop here, just short of 900 words, which for me is a pretty disciplined act of unplugging in its own right, since I normally go on for at least 3000 words. But you’ll probably be hearing more from me on this topic in the future. I might even try to figure out a way to regularly observe a digital Sabbath (anyone want to write a WordPress plugin for me called “Digital Sabbath” that takes this site offline every Friday-Saturday and puts up a “Get offline!” page instead?)

Adventures in Amateur Talking-Headery

February 15, 2013 By

It’s now been over two years and a dozen talks since I first started speaking with my blogger hat on. Each time I go to one of these things, I realize just how out of place I am.

The talking-head conference circuit (as opposed to academic) is designed around polished and powerful speakers with a true flair for the dramatic. They manage to be theatrical without being corny. They are engaging and accessible without coming across like used-car salespeople. Even when you are aware of the halo effect, you cannot help but be enthralled by people who are truly, naturally good at this stuff (like Bill Clinton say).

These are professional speakers  in the fullest sense of the word.

Me, I mumble, hem and haw, get tempted down unscripted rabbit holes on stage, lose track of time, go too fast or too slow, pause too much or too little, forget to repeat for emphasis, and generally put on a pretty amateurish show each time.

But here’s the funny thing: increasingly I find that it is people like me who seem to be on the agenda at these things. It is sort of like the rise of reality TV over scripted, or the rise of blogging over traditional publishing. I seem to be part of a broad amateurization of the speaker circuit.

I fully expect some sort of iStockSpeaker site to pop up soon, full of people like me in the directory.

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Stone-Soup for the Capitalist’s Soul

January 31, 2013 By

The fable of Stone Soup is probably my favorite piece of European folklore. In the Russian version, which I prefer, called Axe Porridge,  the story goes something like this:

A soldier returning from war stops at a village, hungry and tired. He knocks on the door of a rich, stingy Scrooge of a woman. In response to his request for food, she of course claims she has nothing. So the canny soldier asks her for just a pot and water, claiming he can make “axe porridge” out of an old axe-head he spots lying around. Intrigued the woman agrees.

You know how the rest of the story goes: the soldier quietly hustles a bunch of other ingredients — salt, carrots, oats — out of the old woman, under the guise of “improving the flavor” of the axe porridge. He does this one ingredient at a time, offering an evolving narrative on the progress of the porridge (“this is coming along great; now if only I had some oats to thicken it.”)

The result is some excellent porridge that they share, while applauding the idea of axe porridge together. The shared fiction that soup can be made out of an axe-head results in the fact of real porridge for all.

There are some deep insights into the psychology of wealth and the nature of progress in this fable, insights that are very relevant for our times.

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Jailbreaking the City: Announcing Refactor Camp 2013

January 28, 2013 By

On the weekend of March 2 and 3, we will be organizing the second annual Refactor Camp. The theme for Refactor Camp 2013: Jailbreaking the Bay Area. The event will be held at the San Francisco zoo, same as last year.

refactorcamp2013

Regular tickets are $75 and sponsoring attendee tickets are $150.  The ticket includes lunch on both days, and is organized on a no-profit-no-loss basis. As with last year, the goal is to do a small and intimate event, where the intent of the talks is to catalyze small group conversations. We’ve kept the event size the same (40 odd attendees), but extended the event to two days instead of one, based on feedback from last year’s attendees, many of whom will be attending again this year.

Approximately 28 of the 40 odd available spots are already taken by early invitees, so if you are in the area (or are able to drive/fly in) and would like one of the remaining dozen spots, grab ’em while they’re still available. You can register via the link above.  The link also has details on the theme and a detailed agenda.

This year, the event will have a slightly broader footprint, since a handful of people are flying in from other parts of the country (including me of course, from Seattle).

As with last year, we’ll have a field session at the zoo itself, and another on the beach across the street.

Last year, after the inaugural Refactor Camp, we started a Facebook group for the attendees that has since grown into an active online/offline community with monthly meetups.  If you’re interested in the group, this is the easiest opportunity for you to join, since the membership rule is that you must meet at least two current members in the real world.

The Theme

If you’ve been following my writing over the last year, you probably know that I’ve developed a growing personal interest in urbanism, particularly the problem of revitalizing aging cities through retrofitting of clever technology. From Uber to Airbnb, this sort of thing is already happening, and what interests me is whether such technological developments can be connected up to ideas like superlinear corporations, civic entrepreneurship and so forth.

I think of these possibilities as “jailbreaking” old cities with a lot of locked-up potential. San Francisco is a particularly good example to think about in detail, but I am hoping the insights that emerge from our discussions will be applicable more broadly.

We’ve got a really stimulating mix of talks that will touch on everything from real estate markets and ride-share models to school reform and the charter city project in Honduras. One of the highlights is a simulation exercise on Saturday afternoon,  devoted to figuring out how to build a post-apocalyptic survivalist community, complete with zombie defenses.

New York Area Readers Meetup on January 30

Finally, if you’re in the New York area, and are interested in meeting other readers in the area, message me. A few volunteers have started an online/offline meetup group in the area, and are hoping to get enough critical mass going to do something like Refactor Camp on the East Coast. The first meeting will be on January 30.  I won’t be able to attend, but hopefully I’ll be able to make it to one of the future meetups.

I definitely hope we can pull off an East Coast Refactor Camp sometime, perhaps as early as this fall. Though I’ve now moved to the West Coast, I think I am fundamentally not a one-coast guy, so it would be nice to develop roots for ribbonfarm in the New York area.

I was a reluctant convert to the idea of doing events related to ribbonfarm, but after over two years of experimentation with formats ranging from 1:1 coffees with people, to small meetups to a larger event like Refactor Camp, I’ve really started to enjoy this aspect of writing a blog. Let’s see how long we can keep this going. I even bought the refactorcamp.org domain, so I’ve made at least a $10 commitment to keep this going.

LIFT, Geneva Next Week

Finally, I’ll be in Geneva to speak at the LIFT conference next week. If you’re planning to attend, do find me and say hello. I’ll  have some time for coffee etc. too, on Feb 6-8, in case you are interested in meeting up outside the conference.

This will be my third speaking gig outside the United States, so I think I can now call myself an “internationally known speaker” now. Woohoo, the climb up the talking-head greasy pole continues.

 

Eternal Hypochondria of the Expanding Mind

January 16, 2013 By
This entry is part 7 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

The story of neurasthenia or “invalidism” is a curious mid-nineteenth-century chapter in the story of the emancipation of women. As Barbara Ehrenreich argues in Bright-Sided, it was almost entirely a social phenomenon:

The largest demographic to suffer from neurasthenia or invalidism was middle-class women. Male prejudice barred them from higher education and the professions; industrialization was stripping away the productive tasks that had occupied women in the home, from sewing to soap-making. For many women, invalidism became a kind of alternative career. Days spent reclining in chaise longues, attended by doctors and family members and devoted to trying new medicines and medical regimens, substituted for masculine “striving” in the world.

What makes this curious, and rather ironic, is that invalidism was becoming widespread just as new possibilities were being opened up to women, through the slow substitution of fossil fuels for muscle power.

This was not a coincidence of course.

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Refactorings Extended: Please Welcome Mike, Drew and Kevin

January 11, 2013 By

I’ve been writing ribbonfarm as a solo act for over five years now. Blogging can get to be a pretty lonely activity, so I figured I could use some company for a change. I didn’t quite like any of the existing models of collaboration in blogging, so I invented my own: the blogging residency. Think of it as something of a cross between a sabbatical and a writer-in-residence program.

We’ll start our little experiment with Mike Travers of Omniorthogonal, Kevin Simler of Melting Asphalt and Drew Austin of Kneeling Bus, all of whom contributed guest posts last year. For me at least, their posts were like breaths of fresh air in this increasingly insular little refactoring shop, which has gotten a little too full of my own in-a-rut ideas over the years.

Each of them will be contributing between 4 to 6 posts here through the year. Check out the Blogging Residencies page to learn more about the “refactored perception” themes they plan to explore.  Thanks to your ongoing support since I began accepting sponsorships, I can afford to actually pay these guys small honorariums for their contributions. So there is hope yet for the future of publishing.

To kick things off, I asked all three of them to articulate their understanding of “refactoring,” the umbrella theme here at ribbonfarm. So here you go (and for once, I can grab the popcorn and let somebody else defend their ideas).

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Schumpeter’s Demon

January 2, 2013 By

For a while now, I’ve been dissatisfied with our shared mental models around the creative destruction being unleashed by the Internet.

On the one hand, we have coarse-grained and abstract models based on long-term historical cycles and precedents. This is the sort of thing I’ve explored quite a bit in previous posts. It involves careful analogies to previous technological revolutions. It involves debates around whether or not technological progress is stalling and whether a return to growth is possible.

On the other hand, we have detailed situational models, full of incomprehensible minutiae, that seem to develop around specific important decisions. An example is the  set of mental models that drove the “fiscal cliff” farce, which just played out in the US Congress.  Another is the set of mental models in evidence around the SOPA/PIPA debate last year.

The first kind of mental model is so large-scale in its concerns, it is effectively a fatalistic level of analysis. The other kind is ineffectually preoccupied with each immediate situation in turn. It quickly drives itself into a dead-end each time, and defaults to buy-more-time decisions.

I’ve thought of an allegory for understanding economic creative destruction, that I’ll call Schumpeter’s Demon. It just might be capable of informing meaningful action.

Complete 2012 Roundup

December 19, 2012 By
This entry is part 6 of 17 in the series Annual Roundups

Time for another annual roundup and post-game analysis session. Here are the roundups from 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007 for new readers who want to go dumpster diving in the archives. I don’t recommend it since there is now a set of curated lists of the best posts on the “for new users” page (which are also gathered into convenient PDF/ePub compilations).

2012 has been a special year in multiple ways. Among other things, I celebrated my five-year anniversary, crossed 5000 RSS subscribers, and hit a record $3900 in sponsorships, nearly twice last year’s total (thank you, sponsors).  But perhaps the most important development was that I finally got the sense that I know what I am doing here. Every post performed pretty much exactly as I wanted it to, and the few surprises were pleasant ones. I was able to match intent to output, and predict responses pretty well. While putting together this roundup, I did some analysis of my blogging history that I think will interest other long form bloggers, as well as anyone growing any sort of business.

But first, the roundup of posts, in chronological order.

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The Ultimate Lifestyle Planning Guide and Map

December 14, 2012 By

Occasionally I get in a silly mood and make things like this. I’ve used the phrase getting ahead, getting along, getting away before as a shorthand description of the basic challenge of living life (an overload of a 2-pronged phrase from personality psychologist Robert Hogan: getting along and getting ahead) and I like to use it to frame any writing in this general department.

I’ll do my annual round-up next week and then take the week after off, so consider this my holiday gift to you (festive colors, don’t you think?). If you have trouble unwrapping this (hehe!) some hints after the image.

You need some basic Venn diagram and yin-yang diagram literacy to read this. The colors have less symbolism, so you can get away without knowing color science 101. For more notes, read on.

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