Technology and the Baroque Unconscious

November 11, 2011 By
This entry is part 5 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

Engineering romantics fall in love with the work of Jorge Luis Borges early in their careers.  Long after Douglas Hofstadter is forgotten for his own work in AI (which seems dated today), he will be remembered with gratitude for introducing Borges to generations of technologists.

Borges once wrote:

“I should define the baroque as that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all its own  possibilities and which borders on its own parody…I would say that the final stage of all styles is baroque when that style only too obviously exhibits or overdoes its own tricks.”

The baroque in Borges’ sense is self-consciously humorous. Borges’ own work in this sense is a baroque exploration of the processes of  thought. As one critic (see the footnote on this page) noted, Borges writings “serve to dramatize the process of thought in the apprehension of truth.”

Unlike art, complex and mature technology (not all technology) is baroque without being self-conscious. At best there is a collective sensibility informing its design that can be called a baroque unconscious.

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Ribbonfarm Field Trip #3: Computer History Museum, 11/19/2011

November 3, 2011 By

I’ll be in the Bay Area for some consulting work Nov 15-19, so I decided it’s time for another Ribbonfarm Field Trip. If you missed the first one (Sausalito Houseboats), I hope you can make this one. We had a lot of fun last time (here’s the post about Field Trip #1, with more  pictures).

This time, I thought it would be interesting to visit the Computer History museum in Mountain View and chat over coffee afterwards.

We’ll meet at 1:00 PM on Saturday, November 19. Click here to register (free). You’ll have to buy a ticket to enter the museum itself when you get there ($15 general admission). I’ll buy everyone a round of coffee after we’re done (after all, you guys have been buying me coffees for years now).

I keep meaning to visit each time I am in the area, but something always gets in the way. With the passing of Steve Jobs and an equally important academic figure, John McCarthy, it’s an interesting time to take stock and ponder the future of technology from the perspective of the longer story, now that Act I is sorta symbolically over. I am also reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon right now and noodling around with themes for my next book, which will likely have a strong technology angle. So all in all, we have ingredients for an interesting conversation. I’ll try to rope in a couple of gray eminences who’ve survived a couple of boom-bust cycles, to talk history and context at us.

If you register and later need to cancel, let me know. Last time, we had some people bailing at the last minute without telling me, so I didn’t have time to let the waiting-list people know, and we ended up with extra box lunches.

Same as last time,  let me know if you need to carpool.

Field Trip #2: Las Vegas Storm Drains

And in case you’re wondering about the mysterious, missing Field Trip #2, that was actually an exploration of the Las Vegas storm drain system a couple of weekends ago with Bay Area reader Laura Wood, who I met on Field Trip #1.

I learned about the extensive storm drain system (hundreds of miles of tunnels under Las Vegas) from another reader, Josh Ellis, one of exactly two readers I appear to have in Las Vegas, and told Laura about them during the first field trip.

I had no more than a casual curiosity at that point, but Laura got interested enough that she hunted down the author of a book about the storm drain system and the homeless people living in them (Matt O’Brien, the book is Beneath the Neon, I am reading it now).

When Laura told me she wanted to come down to Vegas and explore the storm drains, we briefly talked making it a larger group event and roping in more readers from the Bay Area and LA, but ultimately decided it would be too dicey.

So it was just the two of us. We first met up with Matt, got some advice and tips, and then spent several hours over the next two days exploring miles and miles of underground tunnels, filled with fantastic graffiti, garbage, smelly water and a few homeless people.

Later, I met up separately with Matt and Josh over coffee and chatted more about this and that (Josh did the initial explorations and co-authored some articles with Matt, who later explored the storm drains more deeply and wrote the book).

I’ll write a longer post about the storm drains at some point, once I am done with Matt’s book.

Anyway, if you’re up for Field Trip #2, go ahead and register.

Also, if you’re interested in meeting up 1:1 for lunch/dinner/coffee between Nov 15 – Nov 19, email me.

And finally, once again I am in the market for couches. Rather than wearing out my welcome with my gracious hosts from last time (thanks Mark, Jane and Greg) I figured I’d see if there were other potential hosts out there with whom I could stay and explore more Bay Area neighborhoods. I’ll need a place to stay the nights of Nov 15, 16, 17 and 18.

Three Deep Videos and a Roundup

October 26, 2011 By

I am not normally a big consumer of online video content, but in the last couple of months, I’ve watched three very significant videos that together have turned my mind into silly putty. They are incredibly fertile, thought-provoking and demanding without being merely stimulating in an infotainment/mindcandy sense. This is protein, not sugar.

They total about 6 hours, but if you choose to invest a clear-brained morning or afternoon, you will not be disappointed. You should find that you’ve leveled-up your thinking about a lot of stuff that we talk about frequently.

I am also posting a roundup of the last couple of months, since I am now blogging on enough different venues to justify some periodic aggregation.

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The Quest for Immortality

October 19, 2011 By

This is a guest post by Greg Linster, a graduate student studying economics at the University of Denver.  He blogs at Coffee Theory about things philosophical and shares aphorisms (almost daily) at Aphoristic Cocktails.  

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death is the latest book by British political philosopher John Gray, and it explores the intellectual origins of the modern transhumanist movement in painstaking depth.  Be forewarned, the book is not exactly a cheery read.  However, Gray’s analysis is incredibly poignant and of utmost importance if we are to really understand what it means to be human.       

In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

In a world that has become increasingly secularized, I think Nietzsche presciently understood that science would become heralded as the new religion. Technology, not a traditional deity, would then become the natural place to look for a human Savior and the Singularity would signal the technological Rapture.

The scientific quest for immortality, however, can trace its roots back to the psychical investigations that began in the late nineteenth-century, and the storied history behind this bizarre pursuit to use science in order to cheat death is largely the subject of this book.

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The Gervais Principle V: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

October 14, 2011 By

At the heart of all tragedy, the Greeks saw a phenomenon they called hamartia: a fatal error born of unavoidable ignorance. Combined with a fundamental moral flaw, hamartia inevitably led on to destruction. For the Greeks, humans were cursed not just with mortality of the flesh, but also hamartia-driven mortality of the spirit. Hamartia was the Gods being Divine Jerks, randomly toying with human lives for their own pleasure, through cat-and-mouse games the latter could not hope to win.

Series Home | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | ebook

 

For the Greeks, any divine purpose, even subtly malicious randomness, in the ordering of the universe, was preferable to purposelessness. At least the gods cared enough to be cruel.

Nietzsche saw tragedy differently. For Nietzsche, God was dead and only the flesh was real. There was only the indifferent Great Bureaucrat of  the material universe, Chancellor Entropy, apathetically offering humans a form to fill out, with just one simple check-box choice: “death or booga booga?”

The Clueless disdainfully ignore the reams of fine print, and proudly check: death.

After trying, and failing to understand the fine print, the Losers cautiously check: booga booga.

Finally, the Sociopath frowns doubtfully at the form, and asks: “Can I speak with your supervisor?”

“Certainly,” says the Great Bureaucrat. “There’s some additional paperwork for that I am afraid. Just fill these out, and take them over there. Godot will be right with you.”

Welcome to the penultimate episode of the Gervais Principle series. The saga of two-plus years and 20,000-plus words of booga-booga that you have already endured is now winding its way to a tortuous conclusion.

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New Forbes Blog, Economist Video

October 6, 2011 By

A quick heads-up on a couple of off-site items. First, I just signed on as a contributor at Forbes, and booted-up my new blog there, on technology issues. I’ve posted two pieces in two days (I don’t plan to maintain a daily-posting schedule, but I felt Steve Jobs’ passing deserves a reaction on any technology blog).

You’ll see some familiar ribbonfarm themes evolve in more focused ways on Forbes.  I am hoping to keep up a weekly schedule of posts there. They will be on the shorter side (for me). I’ll be aiming for 1000-1200 words at most, probably fewer.

Hope to see you in the comments there.

Second, the video of my talk on the Gervais Principle is now available on the Economist site. Now that I am writing in so many different places (here, the Tempo blog, the Be Slightly Evil list, occasional high-effort Quora answers, Information Week and now Forbes), I think I need to figure out some sort of roundup strategy. I’ll see what I can do. Perhaps a monthly roundup?

The Stream Map of the World

October 4, 2011 By
This entry is part 3 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

For most of the last decade, Israeli soldiers have been making the transition back to civilian life after their compulsory military service  by going on a drug-dazed recovery trip to India, where an invisible stream of modern global culture runs from the beaches of Goa to the mountains of Himachal Pradesh in the north.  While most of the Israelis eventually return home after a year or so, many have stayed as permanent expat stewards of the stream. The Israeli military stream is changing course these days, and starting to flow through Thailand, where the same pattern of drug-use and conflict with the locals is being repeated.

This pattern of movement among young Israelis is an example of what I’ve started calling a stream. A stream is not a migration pattern, travel in the usual sense, or a consequence of specific kinds of work that require travel (such as seafaring or diplomacy). It is a sort of slow, life-long communal nomadism, enabled by globalization and a sense of shared transnational social identity within a small population.

I’ve been getting increasingly curious about such streams. I have come to believe that though small in terms of absolute numbers (my estimate is between 20-25 million worldwide), the stream citizenry of the world shapes the course of globalization. In fact, it would not be unreasonable to say that streams provide the indirect staffing for the processes of modern technology-driven globalization. They are therefore a distinctly modern phenomenon, not to be confused with earlier mobile populations they may partly resemble.

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Ubiquity Illusions and the Chicken-Egg Problem

September 29, 2011 By

I enjoy thinking about chicken-and-egg problems. They lead to a lot of perception-refactoring. Some common examples include:

  1. You need relevant experience to get a good job, you need a good job to get relevant experience.
  2. You need good credit to get a loan, you need to get loans to develop good credit.
  3. You need users to help you build a better product, you need a better product to get users.

This post is about one particular way to solve the problem, using what I call a ubiquity illusion. It is one version of what is colloquially known as the fake-it-till-you-make-it method.

Creating a ubiquity illusion is the most readily available method for solving a chicken-egg problem. It is, to be perfectly honest, not the best method. There are other methods that are superior, but they are generally not available to most people.

Ubiquity illusions are like the sculpture above (The Awakening, by J. Seward Johnson, photograph by Ryan Sandridge, Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution). It is actually five separate pieces strategically buried to give the impression of a much larger buried sculpture, of which three are visible above.

Let’s talk magic.

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The Milo Criterion

September 23, 2011 By

There is a saying that goes back to Milo of Croton: lift a calf everyday and when you grow up, you can lift a cow. The story goes that Milo, a famous wrestler in ancient Greece, gained his immense strength by lifting a newborn calf one day when he was a boy, and then lifting it every day as it grew. In a few years, he was able to lift the grown cow. The calf grew into a cow at about the rate that Milo grew  into a man. A rather freakish man apparently, since grown cows can weigh over  1000 lb.  The point is, the calf grew old along with the boy.

I have been pondering this story for a couple of years, and it has led me to a very fertile idea about product design and entrepreneurship.

I call it the Milo Criterion: products must mature no faster than the rate at which users can adapt. Call that ideal maximum rate the Milo rate.

It seems like a simple and almost tautological thought, but it leads to some subversive consequences, which is one reason I have been reluctant to talk about it. The most subversive effect is that it has led me to abandon lean startup theory, which is now orthodoxy in the startup world.

As a consequence, I have mostly abandoned notions like product-market-fit, minimum viable product, pivots and the core value of “lean.”  I only use the terms to communicate with people who think in those terms.  And I can’t communicate very much within that vocabulary.

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The Gervais Principle in New York, and Friday 9/16 NYC Meetup

September 12, 2011 By

It’s been nearly a year of procrastination since I posted Part IV of the Gervais Principle, and I am finally getting my act together. I’ll post the final part in the next few weeks. Blame hugely inflated expectations for the finale for my tardiness. But I finally decided, like Tony Hayward, that I wanted my life back. So I have legitimately started work on the finale (for those who don’t know what I am talking about: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV).  Whether it turns out to be a smooth touchdown or a crash-landing, either way the end is near.

But this post is mainly a news flash. I will be doing a 7-minute talk based on the Gervais Principle at the Human Potential conference, Sept 14-15 in New York. It is part of the Ideas Economy series of events organized by the Economist.  As far as I know, this Slightly Evil revolution is not being webcast, but the video should be available at some point. If you are attending, make sure to say hello.

I am extending my stay by a couple of days to meet people. If there is enough interest, I’d like to do an NYC meetup (or  a couple of small group/1:1 meetings) on Friday the 16th. If you are interested, let me know your availability. I expect to do any meetings somewhere midtown, 34th – 44th st or so.

Also, if you can offer me a couch in Manhattan to crash on for the night of 15th or 16th, let me know.  Thanks to my nomadic summer, I’ve acquired a serious taste for couchsurfing as a way to meet interesting new people, and have actually started to prefer it to staying at a hotel or with friends/family.