Patterns of Refactored Agency

November 27, 2012 By

This is a guest post by Mike Travers, who develops software at Collaborative Drug Discovery, blogs on diverse topics at Omniorthogonal, collects his random hacks at Hyperphor, and has a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences.

The scientific picture of the world has some disturbing implications when its assumptions are worked out to their ultimate conclusions. Brains and bodies are pieces of machinery subject to the laws of physics, and If we are simply mechanisms, then our ability to be free seems to disappear, along many of the basic foundations of everyday cognition and action (choices, selves, values, morality, consciousness, etc). The scientific worldview has proven both extraordinarily powerful and immensely unsatisfactory, given how at odds it is with our everyday experience. The disjunction between scientific thought and traditional humanistic thought was captured by CP Snow’s Two Cultures in 1959 but has only gotten worse since then. As a scientifically trained person who has worked on the margins of artificial intelligence, I’ve always struggled for ways to reconcile these two worldviews.

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Talk on Kool Aid, VUCA Discussion, Tuesday Nov 27 at USC (Los Angeles)

November 23, 2012 By

A quick announcement. I’ll be in Los Angeles on Tuesday the 27th to do a talk at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab titled Should You Drink the Kool-Aid?

The talk is at 12:30 PM at Annenberg (which appears to be in the heart of downtown). Details at the link above.  Hope to see some of you there. Middle of a weekday I know, but if you are are in the neighborhood and in the mood to sneak away from work, this should be fun.

It will be loosely based on interesting discussions I’ve had with various people since I wrote my somewhat controversial trilogy on Forbes, Entrepreneurs are the New Labor, mashed up with ideas from Tempo and posts like The Calculus of Grit and The Crucible Effect.

There is also another event later in the day at 3:30 PM (also at Annenberg) with the folks from the USC Scenario Lab, to talk about VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity).

I am also open on the evening of Monday the 26th, in case anyone wants to meet up for dinner.  I get in around 6:30 at LAX, and will be looking to grab a bite somewhere convenient around 7:30ish before heading to my hotel. Email me if you’d like to meet up.

Thanks to reader and unofficial P. T. Barnum of Ribbonfarm, Zhan Li, for arranging both events.

Notes on Spatial Metaphors for Social Systems

November 19, 2012 By

Distance metaphors are natural in any conversation about social phenomena. We talk of the distance between governance systems and the governed, guerrilla movements and host populations,  rich and poor, Chinese and American, Red and Blue.

Kevin Simler’s recent guest post made use of the standard geometric-metaphoric scheme, the Hofstede cultural dimensions model, to talk about startup cultures. The model also forms the basis for the analysis of globalization in Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0, which I reviewed last year. So distance metaphors are very robust across a wide range of social phenomena, from small startups to the entire planet.

Topology — the study of the pre-geometric structure of a space, such as whether it is orientable or not, doughnut shaped or spherical, and so forth — is not as natural or easy to apply, but is also useful if you can pull it off, as Drew Austin’s recent post on the Holey Plane demonstrated.

When you do topology and geometry for social systems incoherently, you get frustrating books like Friedman’s World is Flat.

But more careful approaches aren’t safe either.  In particular, the more I think about Hofstede’s model, the more dissatisfied I get. Is there a better way? I’ve been playing around with a few very preliminary ideas that I thought I’d share, prematurely.

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At Home, in a Car

November 5, 2012 By
This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Regenerations

Early tomorrow morning, I will pile stuff into my twelve-year old Corolla one more time, and make the two-day drive from Las Vegas to Seattle, via Twin Falls and Boise. My car (which I bought new in 2000) is now over 130,000 miles old and has sported license plates from five states. It has traveled with me from Austin to Ann Arbor to Ithaca to Rochester to DC to Vegas. That last trip was also a nomadic driveabout across the lower 48 that covered nearly 8000 miles over six weeks. Many of you have met my car. Some of you have ridden in it as well.

To the extent that there is any sign of external continuity to my adult life, it is tied up in this car. It has also been the only non-disposable physical part of my life for a long time. Since I arrived in America at age 22, I have not lived in a single place continuously for more than three years. In about a week, I will turn 38. I will have lived in 16 apartments/houses and half a dozen cities through my adult life. My digital life will have passed through half a dozen computers, email addresses and cell-phones.

For much of this time, my car has been the only physical anchor of my sense of place and self.

***

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Deskless in Seattle, Future of Data Survey

October 31, 2012 By

First off, thanks to my guest bloggers in the past couple of weeks, Drew Austin and Kevin Simler, for covering for me. It’s been a crazy-chaotic time for me lately, but the dust is finally settling.

Two quick updates: I am moving to Seattle, and I need help with a Survey.  Details:

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Navigating the Holey Plane

October 23, 2012 By

Guest post by Drew Austin of Kneeling Bus, an excellent blog about urbanism and cities.

 Although connectedness is the spirit of the city, and will probably remain so, the American version has always harbored a tendency to explode, to atomize, and to spread itself as far as possible. Today this may be exacerbated (or made more possible, if you like) by the media of virtuality.

— Lars Lerup

 “Connectedness” is one of the great buzzwords of the Internet Age. The claim that everyone is now more connected than ever before is the platitude upon which plenty of techno-optimism rests. Count the number of times Mark Zuckerberg uses the word whenever he explains Facebook’s role in the world (on his own profile, for instance). Then, count the number of times he explains what he actually means.

Within the context of Facebook, of course, Zuckerberg shouldn’t have to explain what “connected” means. Everyone knows. If more information can flow between two people via Facebook than was previously possible, those two people have become more connected—at least by the standards of the Facebook universe. Does this mean that Facebook has brought about its stated objective, a more connected world? Has the internet even accomplished that? What about the last century of technological progress in general? What does it mean to be connected, exactly, and what have we given up in order to reach that state?

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Economies of Scale, Economies of Scope

October 15, 2012 By

I’ve been trying hard over the last several weeks to wrestle a very tough idea to the ground: economies of variety. Yes, there is such a thing, and I don’t mean either the Starbucks menu of mass-customized combinatorial choices or some charming favela economy that has variety, but not economies of variety. Economies of variety are related to, but not the same thing as, the idea of superlinearity.

I’ll leave that subject for another post, when I beat the thing into some sort of submission, but the process of wrangling the idea has led me to a much deeper appreciation of the two existing economies — of scale and scope respectively — that characterized the industrial age. So this is a sort of prequel post. If a well-posed notion of “economies of variety” can be constructed, it will need to be really solidly built in order to punch in the same weight class as these two mature ideas. A business that achieves all three will be close to unbeatable by competing businesses that only manage one or two out of three.

Amazon is the first company that is getting dangerously close to 3/3. That should give you a hint about where I am going with the economies of variety idea. But let’s figure out scale and scope first.

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The Abundances of Ages

October 4, 2012 By
This entry is part 6 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

High culture organizes its world views using overarching frames: intellectual superstructures that serve as extrinsic conceptual coordinate systems.  “Globalization” and “Industrialization” are examples of such frames.

Popular culture on the other hand, tends to be driven by the most visible and drama in the immediate environment.  From the chaos of turbulent change, popular culture tends to pick out specific motifs around which to grow a world view. These motifs mostly arise from the economic abundances that drive that particular age.

In trying to compare and contrast the motifs of different ages, something interesting struck me: the motifs tend to cycle between material, object and cognitive motifs. The objects aren’t random objects, but ones created by the operation of technology. So iron is a material motif for the Iron Age, the steam engine is an object motif for the Industrial Age, and writing is a cognitive motif for the Bronze Age.  Here’s an approximate and speculative table of the motif-cycling I made up.

(I have endnotes for the less obvious table entries, which may need some explanation; and obviously the model is more speculative for ages for which contemporary written records are not available to us).

Why is this cycling important? Well, for all you futurists out there who are stuck in a mental rut asking yourself, what’s the next big thing? the next big thing is almost certainly not going to be a thing at all (object motif).  It’s going to be a material motif. So the right question is what’s the next new material? 

So answers like “3D printing” are wrong in a specific and interesting way. Let me explain.

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Cloud Mouse, Metro Mouse

September 27, 2012 By

The fable of the town mouse and the country mouse is probably the oldest exploration of the tensions involved in urbanization, but it seems curiously dated today.  The tensions explored in the fable — the simple, rustic pleasures and securities of country life versus the varied, refined pleasures and fears of town life  — seem irrelevant today. In America at least, the “country” such as it is, has turned into a geography occupied by industrial forces.  The countryside is a sparsely populated, mechanized food-and-resource cloud. A system of national parks, and a scattering of “charming” small towns and villages pickled in nostalgia, are all that liven up a landscape otherwise swallowed up by automated modernity.

In America, larger provincial towns and cities that are just a little too large and unwieldy to be nostalgically pickled, but not large enough to be grown into metropolitan regions, appear to be mostly degenerating into meth-lab economies or ossifying into enclaves of a retreating rich.

So the entire canvas of the town mouse/country mouse fable is being gradually emptied out. If there is a divide today, it is between two new species of mice: metro mice and cloud mice.

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Money as Pain Relief

September 20, 2012 By

I’ve been thinking about four ideas related to money lately, and about why I am generally uncomfortable framing life goals in financial terms.

  1. The classic idea in sales that people buy only two things: happiness and solutions to problems
  2. The idea that “money is a problem to be solved” (I don’t know the source of this idea)
  3. The idea that only central banks can make money, and that everybody else should think in terms of taking money from someone else (this one is due to Dorian Taylor)
  4. The piece of folk wisdom that says (contrary to the first idea) that money cannot buy happiness

When you put the four together, you get quite a nice little theory about why most people find it hard to make take enough money for their needs. And you end up with the interesting conclusion that all money is pain relief.

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