Peak Attention and the Colonization of Subcultures

January 27, 2012 By

Coded, informal communication — significant messages buried inside innocuous messages — has long interested me.  I don’t mean things like “NX398 VJ899 ABBX3” that the NSA might deal with (though that’s related). I mean things like this:

You: let’s get coffee sometime

Me: Sure, that’d be great

We both know that the real exchange was:

You: let’s pretend we want to take this further

Me: yeah, let’s do that

The question of how such coded language emerges, spreads and evolves is a big one. I am interested in a very specific question: how do members of an emerging subculture recognize each other in public, especially on the Internet, using more specialized coded language?

The question is interesting because the Web is making traditional subcultures — historically illegible to governance mechanisms, and therefore hotbeds of subversion — increasingly visible and open to cheap, large-scale economic and political exploitation. This exploitation takes the form of attention mining, and is the end-game on the path to what I called Peak Attention a while back.

Does this mean the subversive potential of the Internet is an illusion, and that it will ultimately be domesticated? Possibly.

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The World is Small and Life is Long

January 18, 2012 By

In the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling repeatedly uses a very effective technique: turning a character, initially introduced as part of the background, into a foreground character. This happens with the characters of Gilderoy Lockhart, Viktor Krum and Sirius Black for instance. In fact she uses the technique so frequently (with even minor characters like Mr. Ollivander and Stan Shunpike) that the background starts to empty out.

This is rather annoying because the narrative suggests and promises a very large world — comparable in scope and complexity to the Lord of the Rings world say — but delivers a very small world in which everybody knows everybody. You are promised an epic story about the fate of human civilization, but get what feels like the story of a small town. Characters end up influencing each other’s lives a little too frequently, given the apparent size of the canvas.

We are used to big worlds that act big and small worlds that act small. We are not used to big worlds that act small.

Which is a problem, because that’s the sort of world we now live in. Our world is turning into Rowling’s world.

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Seeking Density in the Gonzo Theater

January 11, 2012 By

Consider this thought experiment: what if you were only allowed 2000 words with which to understand the world?

With these 2000 words, you’d have to do everything. You’d be allowed to occasionally retire some words in favor of others, or invent new words, but you’d have to stick to the budget.

Everything would have to be expressible within the budget: everyday conversations and deep conversations, shallow thoughts and  profound ones, reflections and expectations, scientific propositions and vocational instruction manuals, poetry and stories, emotions and facts.

How would you use your budget? Would you choose more nouns or verbs? How many friends would you elevate to a name-remembered status? How many stars and bird species would you name? Would you have more concrete words or more reified ones in your selection? How many of the most commonly used words would you select? Counting mathematical symbols as words, how many of those would you select? Would you mimic others’ selections or make up your own mind?

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2012 Reading List, January – June

January 6, 2012 By

The last time I froze and posted my short-term reading list on August 12, people seemed to appreciate it. Going by my Amazon Affiliate data and random conversations with some of you on Google+ and Facebook, it looks like at least a few dozen people bought one or more of the books and read along, in a sort of invisible de facto book club. So I figured I’d make it a routine feature.

I personally finished 6.75 of the 8 books I posted (one book got swapped out for an alternate) by December 31. That’s a reading rate of just under a book every 3 weeks. Which means I should be able to get through about 8.7 books by the end of June.

Here’s my book list that I plan to get through by June 30, beyond the backlog of  1.25, which leaves me with an allowance of 7.45. I’ll round that up to 8. Here’s the list.

  1. Notes on the Synthesis of Form: A seminal book on design, recommended by Dorian Taylor and Xianhang Zhang.
  2. Cognition in the Wild: Another seminal book on decision-making in real-world settings, also recommended by Dorian Taylor
  3. Shop Class as Soul Craft: A book on the philosophy of making stuff, and the value of working with your hands. Recommended by Art Felgate, Daniel Lemire and a couple of other people.
  4. Invisible Giant: Cargill and its Transnational Strategies OR Merchants of Grain: The Power and Profits of the Five Giant Companies at the Center of the World’s Food Supply (haven’t picked yet): Books on the global food industry, recommended by Megan Lubaszska.
  5. The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution: From my own list.
  6. Why Beauty is Truth: the history of symmetry: From my unread pile.
  7. Design in Nature: how the constructal law governs evolution in biology, physics, technology and social organization: bit of a wildcard, due to be released January 24th. Recommended by John Hagel.
  8. Infrastructure: a field guide to the industrial landscape: a recommendation off Quora. Seems like fun mind-candy, targeted more at the “How Things Work” kids’ market than adults, but still…

Infrastructure and Making

Two themes seem to pop out here: infrastructure and making.

My exploration of the world of infrastructure, which has been going on casually for a couple of years (I’ve written quite a bit about things like shipping and garbage) is heading into a mature drill-down-and-integrate phase. It seems increasingly likely that my next book will be related to this stuff in some way.

If that theme is maturing and getting serious, a new theme is taking root: design, building stuff, making things. What people are calling the Maker Revolution. I see some red flags of save-the-world cultishness here, but it seems like a good time to think about the subject. Two readers, Nick Pinkston and Justin Mares, who are just coming off their Cloudfab project, have been energetically trying to persuade me (and apparently everybody else they talk to) to take this theme seriously.

If nothing else, I’ll learn enough to poke fun at the solemn save-the-world makers.

Do You Want a Forum?

On and off over the years, people have asked for a ribbonfarm discussion forum. I’ve been reluctant to set one up, since it would be more maintenance work, but now that WordPress has some strong support for the feature, it’s gotten easier.

The face-to-face field trip events last year, Google+ and Facebook have been good for small and informal sidebar conversations with some of you, but there’s something to be said for a less cluttered space for conversations that are not explicitly linked to a blog post, and accessible to all.

If I do this, it will be free, but I may do some light-touch gatekeeping so administration doesn’t take over my life.

If you are interested, let me know by email or post a comment, along with any suggestions. If there’s enough interest (at least a couple of dozen people), I’ll set one up.

Turning this de facto invisible book club into a de jure visible one seems to be a good first use case for a forum.

 

 

Complete 2011 Roundup

December 21, 2011 By
This entry is part 5 of 17 in the series Annual Roundups
Time for another roundup. It’s been, ahem, an interesting year, to say the least.  I’ll do a numbers portrait and some narrative highlights for those of you who have been reading long enough to be interested in the meta-story of this blog as a piece of ongoing performance art. For those who don’t care, skip to the end for the complete list of links to 2011 posts. Should make for some good marathon reading for those of you who like to do that sort of thing.

Here we go.

The Numbers

It was a bit of a slump year in terms of number of posts. I had 35 posts, where I had 47 posts in 2010, 59 in 2009, 93 in 2008 and 50 in 2007 (which was a half year, since I started in July).

But the apparent steady decline in number of posts is misleading because the average word count, as well as the frequency of ultra-long epic posts, has been increasing. In fact, I set a personal record this year with an 8000+ word epic post (A Brief History of the Corporation). In a way, ribbonfarm is turning into a series of long posts (2500-4000 words, about the length of a New Yorker feature) punctuated by ridiculously long epic-length posts (6000+ words).

Commenting activity has also been steadily increasing, and along with it, my own comment word-count in response. Of the all-time top 10 posts in terms of number of comments, 7 have been from this year. I am actually starting to do some of my best writing in the comments sections of fertile posts rather than in the posts themselves.

I think what’s happening is that hidden themes (illegible even, or perhaps especially, to me) that have been developing for 4 years have started cohering, leading to longer, fewer posts. There is also significantly more coupling among posts now, so the body of writing is getting more integrated, though it will never cohere into something like a book. I have some thoughts on making this spaghetti bowl more navigable that I’ll be trying out next year.

This trend can’t continue indefinitely of course, otherwise I’ll be at an average of 10,000 words and an epic-peak length of 20,000 words by 2015. I am quite curious about when and how the pattern will change. Probably wrapping up the Gervais Principle series early next year, and putting it out in eBook form, will be the cathartic event necessary for me to switch into a new writing gear, with a frequency and length reset.  We’ll find out.

There was also a lot of other action in 2011. I put out my first book, Tempo and booted up the associated tempobook blog (which is beginning to acquire a recognizable personality, distinct from ribbonfarm), rebooted my E 2.0 blogging at Information Week, started a new blog on Forbes and continued the Be Slightly Evil newsletter.

Narrative Highlights

In terms of narrative highlights, I got Slashdotted for the third time in my blogging career (for my Forbes post The Rise of Developeronomics). That sort of milestone is always nice.

There was also that major road-trip across the country in the summer (6 weeks, 8000 miles) during which I ended up meeting a lot of you guys in person, in all sorts of unexpected places like Nashville and Omaha.

There was some boundary expansion too. I did non-academic/non-trade speaking gigs for the first time, and pulled together three in-person events (two field trips and an improv session). So I seem to be diversifying cautiously off the blogging base. I suspect this kind of activity will increase in 2012.

Between the road-trip and the in-person events, I think I met something like a hundred regulars in 2011. That’s up from maybe 1-2 in previous years. I quite enjoyed it. Maybe I’ll start keeping count and shoot for 200 in 2012.

And of course, the big event for me personally was jumping ship from a paycheck job to full-time writing and consulting and navigating a tricky course between successful lifestyle retrenching and noble, writer-ly destitution.

The List

So here’s the list, in reverse-chronological order. My personal favorites are starred (*), and crowd-favorites are double-starred (**).

  1. How the World Works: Part II
  2. Acting Dead, Trading Up and Leaving the Middle Class**
  3. How the World Works
  4. The Towers of Priority
  5. The Evolution of the American Dream
  6. Technology and the Baroque Unconscious*
  7. Ribbonfarm Field Trip #3: Computer History Museum, 11/19/2011
  8. Three Deep Videos and a Roundup
  9. The Quest for Immortality (guest post by Greg Linster)
  10. The Gervais Principle V: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose* (not **, did I jump the shark with GP?)
  11. The Stream Map of the World**
  12. Ubiquity Illusions and the Chicken-Egg Problem
  13. The Milo Criterion**
  14. Fixing the Game by Roger L. Martin
  15. The Scientific Sensibility
  16. The Calculus of Grit**
  17. The August Reading List Freeze
  18. On Being an Illegible Person**, *
  19. Houseboats, Containers, Guns and Garbage: the 2011 Ribbonfarm Field Trip
  20. Diamonds versus Gold
  21. The Las Vegas Rules II: Stuff Science
  22. A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100**
  23. The Las Vegas Rules I: The Slightly Malevolent Universe
  24. Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia (guest post by Stefan King)
  25. My Experiments with Introductions*
  26. The Russian Fox and the Evolution of Intelligence (guest post by Brian Potter)
  27. Extroverts, Introverts, Aspies and Codies**
  28. Cognitive Archeology of the West (guest post by Paula Hay)
  29. The Return of the Barbarian**
  30. Where the Wild Thoughts Are (my “going free agent” post)*
  31. Waiting versus Idleness*
  32. The Disruption of Bronze*
  33. Boundary Condition Thinking*
  34. The Gollum Effect**
  35. How Leveraged are Your Resolutions?

If you are new to Ribbonfarm and want to go further back, here are the2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007 roundups.

Anyway, a “Welcome aboard, Ahoy!” to the new 2011 readers, and a sincere thank-you to long-time readers who decided to keep me company for yet another year. It’s starting to feel a bit surreal, now that I’ve known some of you for nearly 5 years. Maybe I’ll do some sort of 5-year anniversary event in July.

I’ll be off the grid starting Friday, until the new year, so here’s wishing everybody a good break.

How the World Works: Part II

December 15, 2011 By

Last time, I did a quick comparative scan of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0 and David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years, and covered Fukuyama’s book in more detail.

Let’s tackle World 3.0 next.

Ghemawat’s book is a tour de force of quantitative synthesis. Let’s start with an annotated version of the 2×2 that anchors World 3.0 (cleverly rotated by 45 degrees; I don’t know why other 2×2 inventors don’t do this). 

This 2×2 is almost the only major piece of conceptual scaffolding in a book that is otherwise an empiricist’s delight. Everything is argued with numbers, and what cannot be argued with numbers is mostly not argued at all. It makes for a book with a lot of narrative potholes wherever the data gods to not smile, but where there is data, the book is extremely solid. It’s a refreshing change for me to read something that stays away from data-free speculation.

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Acting Dead, Trading Up and Leaving the Middle Class

December 8, 2011 By

I want to share the story behind approximately $2700 dollars worth of my spending this year that reveals how I am finally starting to leave the middle class, materially, financially and psychologically. No, I am not moving up into the rich class or down into the poor class. I am doing something complicated called trading up. 

This $2700 is money that, if I’d decided to pull the trigger and spend it a few months earlier, would have spared me a ton of unnecessary frustration. Why didn’t I spend it when I should have?

One reason is that I still have residual middle-class financial programming in my head, expertly misguiding me to the wrong answers. Getting it out of my head feels like getting a bad malware and virus infection off a computer. It is painful and messy, and there are really no completely reliable tools that work in all cases. And you’re never quite sure if you got the last infected file off the system, when the infection is really bad.

Another reason is that I was (and remain to some extent) guilty of what science fiction writer Bruce Sterling calls acting dead: being irrationally averse to spending money where it matters, in a misguided attempt to “save” money to the point that the behavior paralyzes you. A large segment of the middle class is starting to act dead these days. Which makes sense since the class itself is dying. To stop acting dead, you have to resolve to exit the traditional middle class as well, unless you want to go down with it.

Not acting dead involves a strategic spending pattern that marketers are starting to call trading up: buying premium in some areas of your life, while buying budget or entirely forgoing spending in other areas. This pattern of conscious, discriminating consumption defines the emerging replacement for  the middle class.  As the picture above illustrates, there isn’t really one “New Middle Class.” Instead, it is a fragmented social space, with each little island being defined by a specific pattern of trading-up, and an associated lifestyle design script.

This effect is a sort of the opposite of what I called Gollumization earlier this year: unthinking, undiscriminating consumption to the point that consumption defines you.

There’s a pretty neat book about it, Trading Up by Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske, which you should read if you, like me, have exited or are planning to exit the traditional middle class.

But back to acting dead and my $2700 dollars, which I’ll use as my running example to get at various things.

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How the World Works

December 1, 2011 By

If you want to seriously level-up your thinking about how the world works, you might want to try reading 3 very ambitious books together: Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0 and David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years. All three are from the reading list that I posted in August, so I am hoping at least some of you have been attacking them.

It’s worth reading them together because they attempt to tell the same story, towards the same purpose — explaining how the world works in some sense — drawing on roughly the same body of raw material. It is illuminating to see the surprising ways in which the stories agree and disagree. All three books are also particularly valuable for me personally, since I hope to take a stab at telling the same story some day.

My version will of course be the definitive one when I write it, but let’s take a look at the versions of the story on the market today.

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The Towers of Priority

November 21, 2011 By

First, let me get an announcement out of the way: Tempo is now out on the Kindle. Buy it, give it as a gift, tweet it etc. Whew! That’s a big, high-priority item checked off my to-do list.

Speaking of priorities. I had one of my weirder Aha! moments: you can use the well-known Towers of Hanoi game as a metaphor to understand the behavior of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (or any similar hierarchy of priorities) under changing life circumstances, and the role of compartmentalization as a costly coping strategy. Here’s a picture:

If the details and implications of the metaphor aren’t immediately obvious, read on for the help-text.

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The Evolution of the American Dream

November 16, 2011 By

Remember the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm and their sloganeering? In the beginning of the story, when they overthrow the humans, they lead with the chant, “four legs good, two legs bad!” By the end, they’ve  become human-corrupt, and lead the chant, “four legs good, two legs better!”

Just one word changed, and the new and old words both begin with b, bolstering the illusion of continuity and natural evolution.

Let’s call such a slowly shifting narrative, simple enough to be captured in a slogan, and designed to help a small predatory class dominate a larger prey class, a Pig Narrative.  The American Dream is a Pig Narrative. For the record, in case you are immediately curious about my politics, I think this Pigs-and-Prey structure of the world is the natural order of things. You can mitigate its effects, but not change it in any fundamental way. If I had to pick, I’d side with the pigs.  Moving on.

You can compare Pig Narratives on the basis of the degree of prey liberty (or conversely, predator control) they represent, allowing you to plot the evolution over time. If you plot the course of the American Dream through its many rewrites (9 so far by my count, each associated with a major coming-of-age event that defined a generation), you get something like the picture above.

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