Romanticism and Classicism (Assembly Required)

September 11, 2012 By

I’ve been obsessed with the concept of an aesthetic recently. In particular, aesthetics applied to things other than art and design. I’ve come to believe that your aesthetic posture is one of the most important determinants of how you think.

This post was threatening to snowball into a 10,000 essay (here’s why) so I decided to spare you the pain and provide three sampler pieces of the dozen or so I am trying to assemble into…something. Instead I’ll leave you to try and assemble something out of these pieces yourself.

Hint: you may want to try viewing a variety of distinct examples that are not formally pieces of art using these three constructs. Like say, coffee, the Republican/Democrat parties (in America), popcorn, a slum, a forest, a language, a mathematical result, a piece of code, an approach to planning a vacation, a way of organizing a desk…. So here you go, your first DIY ribbonfarm post.

First, always a good idea to start with a 2×2. Here, the challenge was to come up with a useful y-axis.

Next, an attempt to link aesthetics with attitudes about time. Paired-term lists are always good for exploring a dichotomy, and time is a reliably fertile variable to attempt to link to just about anything else.

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The Varieties of Scientific Experience

August 30, 2012 By

Note: this post has nothing to do with the book by Carl Sagan of the same name, which I just learned about from a comment. Damn Carl Sagan for using up a great title.

I recently realized that certain uses of words like science and scientific really annoy me. The train of thought started with this video of a TED talk by Jane McGonigal. Now, I don’t agree with a lot of what she says in the talk, but that isn’t really what bothered me about it. A lot gets written or said about scientific ideas that I don’t agree with. Disagreement and contention are a normal part of science. Nor was it the fact that it was a TED talk, with everything that signifies. I’ve made my peace with the existence of TED in our world. No, what bothered me was the specific rhetorical approach she adopted, in deploying the idea of “science” in a broader discourse. In other words, I disagreed with her way of talking about science and its place in society more than I disagreed with the science she was talking about.

Thinking more about it, it struck me that people who deal with science experience it in different ways. These varied experiences of science show up primarily when scientific ideas are situated within broader secondary discourses (I’ll leave primary scientific discourses for another post).  When people disagree about science at meta-levels, these different experiences are often the reason.

So something like what William James said about religious experience holds true of scientific experience as well: It comes in some distinct varieties. What are these varieties, and what light do they shed on incidents like my reaction to the TED talk?

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Waste, Creativity and Godwin’s Corollary for Technology

August 23, 2012 By

For the last six months, the scarcity/abundance dichotomy has been annoying me.  All dichotomies are false of course, but some are more of a bitch to transcend than others. On a 10-point scale where good vs. evil is a 4 in terms of transcendence difficulty, I’d rate scarcity versus abundance at 8.5.

And it is more than a harmless intellectual distraction. The scarcity versus abundance dichotomy is central to all technological thinking. The two sides of the dichotomy also have the two most powerful ideas in science — the second law of thermodynamics and evolution — as their respective intellectual motifs (I once called these two ideas the only sexy ideas in science; I think they appeal to humans because they both involve irreversibility, but that’s a story for another day).

So anytime you talk scarcity versus abundance, you are holding a sort of sumo wrestling match between two heavyweight ideas. This is why the respective poles of technological visioning, the ideas of the Singularity and Collapse, exercise such a powerful grip on our imagination.

I can’t say I’ve managed to rise above the dichotomy yet, but I am beginning to see a glimmer of a way out of this particular cognitive trap.

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Realtechnik, Nausea and Technological Longing

August 16, 2012 By
This entry is part 2 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

The story of barbed wire is one of the most instructive ones in the history of technology.  The short version is this: barbed wire (developed between 1860 to 1873) helped close the American frontier, carved out the killing fields of World War I, and by spurring the development of the tank as a counter-weapon, created industrial-era land warfare. It also ended the age-old global conflict between pastoral nomads and settled agriculturalists (of animals, vegetables and minerals) and handed a decisive victory to the latter. Cowboys and Indians alike were on the wrong side of the barbed wire fence. Quite a record for a technology that had little deep science or engineering behind it.

Barbed wire is an example of a proximal-cause technology that eventually disturbed multiple human balances of powers, starting with the much-mythologized cowboys-versus-ranchers balance. When things finally stabilized, a new technological world order had emerged, organizing everything from butter to guns differently.  Barbed wire was not a disruptive innovation in the Clayton Christensen sense. It was something far bigger. Its introduction marked what Marshall McLuhan called a break boundary in technological evolution: a rapid, irreversible and wholesale undermining of a prevailing planet-wide technological equilibrium. So ironically, the ultimate boundary-maker of physical geography was a boundary breaker in technology history.

The story of barbed wire illustrates the core principle that I want to propose: an equilibrium in technological affairs is necessary for an equilibrium in political affairs. There is no possibility of a realpolitik equilibrium without a corresponding realtechnik equilibrium: a prevailing, delicately balanced configuration of technological forces across an entire connected political-economic-cultural space (which today is always the entire planet).

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The Interesting Times Triangle

August 9, 2012 By

You’ve probably heard of the Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. The line apparently isn’t really Chinese in origin, but it certainly seems very Chinese in spirit, so I’ll stick to calling it that. I’ll let you ponder why it is appropriate to call it a curse rather than a blessing (hint: try the Future Nausea post from a few weeks back).

Anyhow, you and I, we certainly live in interesting times in the sense of the curse.  So in lieu of a proper long post this week, I offer you this pick-two (at most) triangle for your lifestyle designing pleasure.

I first posted this as an unqualified pick-two type bon mot on Facebook, and a lot of friends seemed to find it thought provoking. Then I thought some more, and realized that the 2-out-of-3 nature really reflects environmental conditions during interesting periods in history, when it is hard or impossible for anybody to do all three. I used the triangle in this form during a recent talk, to get at how different people adopt different strategies to either survive or thrive in interesting times.

Then it struck me that even picking two out of three is pretty hard. Many people manage to do only one, or none at all. I mapped those to the Gervais Principle taxonomy of Sociopaths, Losers and Clueless, and came up with the legend you see alongside the triangle now.

I won’t attempt to supply or defend examples of people who’ve made each of the 7 possible choices, since that tends to excite controversy. I’ll leave you to do that yourself. But I’ll offer these archetype labels:

  1. Money+Beauty: Sell-Out Artist
  2. Money+Sense: Soulless Arbitrager
  3. Beauty+Sense: Intellectual Dictator
  4. Only Beauty: Self-Absorbed Artist
  5. Only Sense: Armchair Intellectual
  6. Only Money: Dull Douchebag
  7. Nothing: Drowning Person

You can of course, also add an intensity knob between “drowning” and “thriving” where drowning is 0 and thriving is 0.67.  And if times get much tougher than they are today, we’ll all be demoted to Losers, and eventually to Clueless.

The Guerilla Guide to Social Business

July 31, 2012 By

I don’t quite recall how it happened anymore, but in September 2008, I wrote a post for the Enterprise 2.0 blog titled Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War.  The post — probably the purest piece of deliberate flamebait I’ve ever written — went viral. Many of you found ribbonfarm via that post.

I continued writing about the Enterprise 2.0 theme irregularly after that, first on the E 2.0 blog and then on Information Week. I recently decided to wrap up my thoughts on the theme and close out this thread of blogging with a final post: The Enterprise 2.0 Backlog: 100 Ideas.

This close-out post is about as close as I’ve ever gotten to outright prescription. It is also the only significant list post I’ve done in my life (list blogging is the lowest kind of blogging there is of course, but there is some redemption to be found in epic-sized lists that cross 100 items).

Anyway, I figured I’d put together the essays into a convenient PDF collection. So here you go: about 29,000 words and 104 pages worth of slightly evil thoughts on social business: The Guerilla Guide to Social Business.

Read it, share it, print it out and leave it lying around, pass it along to friends, bosses, unsuspecting VPs with budget money to run through before year-end who might hire a consultant in an unguarded moment, etc.

It was a fun ride, the first bandwagon I rode from start to finish, through the ups and downs of the hype cycle. The ride also helped kick off my consulting business.

I think it is safe to say now that the ride is mostly over. The conversation has matured. Andrew McAfee’s well-timed phrase heralding the trend, “Enterprise 2.0,” has been replaced by the more permanent-sounding (ominously so?) “Social Business.”  The Enterprise 2.0 conference has rebranded itself (rather cryptically) as E2 and settled in as steward of a long-haul conversation.

Thanks are due to Rob Preston, Steve Wylie and Paige Finkelman at TechWeb for providing a platform and tolerating my grumpy, dystopian blogging through the hype cycle. Also thanks to Mark Masterson and Doug Neal at CSC and Daniel Pritchett, for many interesting conversations on E 2.0/Social Business. Apologies if I missed anyone.

For those of you who follow me primarily on Information Week, I’ll be taking a sabbatical from that site, until I find another suitable theme for which that’s the appropriate channel. If and when I start a new theme there, I’ll do a heads-up here.

Happily Almost Ever After: Towards a Romantic Account of Détente

July 24, 2012 By

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of détente. I am fairly certain it is going to play a big role in my next book, but I haven’t figured out the precise details.

A détente is a general easing of tensions within an adversarial relationship before underlying conflicts have been resolved (otherwise you would call it “peace”). I think of détente as a “happily almost ever after” narrative pattern. Unlike a truce though, a détente is a sort of indefinite cessation or slowing down of conflict without specific expectations of alternative approaches towards resolution, or specified time limits. You know a decisive drive towards an outcome will be resumed, but you don’t know when, why, how or where for sure. You just collectively agree that now is not the time or place.

I’ll sketch out in general terms why the concept is interesting, but I am going to wander quite a bit along the way and use this post as an excuse to philosophize about game theory and academic culture, and share an interesting anecdote. You’ve been warned.

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The Generalized Hawthorne Effect

July 13, 2012 By

The Hawthorne Effect is a basic idea in social science research that I first encountered in William Whyte’s Organization Man. I remember making a note of it at the time but never got around to thinking more about it, until it came up again in a recent conversation.

It is a sort of Heisenberg Principle for social science. The effect hypothesizes that the changes in participants’ behavior during a study may be mostly caused by the special social situation and treatment they receive from management.

I think the principle has far greater significance than people realize.

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My New Book Project, Upcoming Talks in Los Angeles and Malmö, Sweden

July 10, 2012 By

A few quick announcements before we get back to regular programming later this week.

First up: after several months of exploring various themes and ideas, I’ve finally figured out what I want to do for my next book project. The book will be titled Game of Pickaxes and I expect it to be done by mid 2014. You can sign up for email updates at the book website. Thanks Adam Hogan for whipping up a quickie draft cover on short notice. Makes the whole thing feel more tangible, even though I don’t even have a rough outline at the moment. Just a germ of a high concept and a set of themes that seem to fit together in an interesting way.

I won’t reveal more right now,  since the plan for the book is still coming together, but if you happen to be in the Los Angeles next week, I’ll be doing a first-look preview of the themes and ideas in the book at the Lean LA meetup in Santa Monica, on Wednesday, July 18 at 7:00 PM.

You can register here ($15). Thanks to host Patrick Vlaskovits for agreeing to let me air some very preliminary thoughts in public.

Also, next month I will be speaking at the Media Evolution conference in Malmö, Sweden, August 22-23 on “Public Computing” (this too, will be loosely related to the book). I know there are at least a couple of readers in the region, so it would be great to meet up. I plan to stay on for a few days after the conference to explore a bit, since I’ve never been to Scandinavia. I will be in Copenhagen for sure, and am wondering whether to check out Stockholm, Oslo or something else altogether. Email me if you are in the area and would like to meet up.

Five Years of Blogging

July 3, 2012 By

July 4th, 2012 will mark the fifth anniversary of ribbonfarm. Now that I’ve completed a retrospective of five years worth of writing through the last month, I figured it was time to step back and put the whole thing together. Here’s the picture I came up with.

Before I give you a tour of SES Ribbonfarm (that’s “Slightly Evil Ship”), some housekeeping matters. I now have a glossary, which many of you asked for, and a For New Readers page. Links to both are on the menu bar. The latter contains links to the four roundups I did in June, as well as downloadable epubs and links to reading lists of the posts on readlists.com (you can use their app or send the lists to your Kindle or iPad).

If you’ve been reading ribbonfarm for more than a couple of years or two, and have useful thoughts for new readers, please post them as a comment on that page. This should also be a good page to point people to if you want to introduce them to ribbonfarm.

Now for the ship.

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