On Seeing Like a Cat

August 6, 2009 By

Cats and dogs are the most familiar among the animal archetypes inhabiting the human imagination.  They are to popular modern culture what the fox and the hedgehog are to high culture, and what farm animals like cows and sheep were to agrarian cultures. They also differ from foxes, hedgehogs, sheep and cows in an important way: nearly all of us have directly interacted with real cats and dogs. So let me begin this meditation by introducing you to the new ribbonfarm mascot: the junkyard cat, Skeletor, and my real, live cat, Jackson. Here they are. And no, this isn’t an aww-my-cat-is-so-cute post. I hate those too.

skeletorandjackson

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The Brain of the World

August 3, 2009 By

Metaphors frame our understanding of numbers.  The idea of per capita is one such. To use per capita in your arguments is to suggest that each of us is metaphorically associated with a “fair share” of something.  For instance, I once read somewhere that  the money spent on a typical American child was 30 times that spent on an Indian child, which in turn, was 30 times that spent on a Somalian child. Whether you are inclined to agree or argue (“yeah, that seems roughly right” or “the real disparity is much worse” or “it isn’t so bad if you look at purchasing power parity”), you’ve been trapped by the metaphor. It has stopped you from questioning whether per capita is a useful frame of reference.

I encountered another example in the ABC show Over a Barrel: The Truth about Oil. One of the talking heads, T. Boone Pickens, offered this thought: the US has only 4% of the world’s population, but uses 25% of its oil production.

Let me juxtapose a different metaphor: the human brain constitutes roughly 2% of the body weight of an average adult, but uses 20% of the body’s oxygen supply. I am suggesting, of course, that the metaphor of the world as a giant organism is the appropriate one here, and that America’s disproportionate energy consumption might be justifiable on the basis of its role as the “brain” within the body politic of the world.

I am not actually making this argument right now. I am merely wondering: to what extent are our ideological commitments hidden within our choice of metaphors?

[#2 in my short-posts experiment. 274 words]

The Book as a Social Signal

July 29, 2009 By

Thrice in recent memory, a stranger has come up to speak to me because of the cover of a book. Within the three great introvert institutions built by the book: the cafe, the library and the bookstore, book covers serve as social signals. They are ice-breakers par excellence. Or were. I recently bought the austerely cover-free Kindle.

kindle

From Wikimedia commons, GFDL

I am among those who celebrate the possibilities of the Kindle, but I have to acknowledge the dark side. With apologies to Joni Mitchell, we’ve digitized paradise, put up a plastic box. Finishing my first full Kindle-read, I realized with a sinking sadness that I was not holding a fringe toy. For all its rough edges, the Kindle is a legitimate book-killer, and it will prevail. In time, it will catalyze the formation of its own institutions and social-psychological landscape, complete with different social signals. But it will be too late for me. I am the sum total of the books I’ve read. Paper books with covers, with associated memories of intimate bookish conversations triggered by glimpses of covers. With the paper book, a part of me will die. I can imagine having a conversation with an 18-year-old Kindleworm in 2025. He will probably view me with the same incomprehension with which I, as a calculator-trained engineer, view 50-plus slide-rule-trained engineers.

This is my first stab at finding a short-format style that works for me. 250 words. What do you think? Still ribbonfarmesque?


The Crucible Effect and the Scarcity of Collective Attention

July 21, 2009 By

This article is about a number I call the optimal crucible size. I’ll define this number — call it C — in a bit, but I believe its value to be around 12. This article is also about an argument that I’ve been unconsciously circling for a long time. Chris Anderson’s Free provided me with the insight that helped me put the whole package together: economics is fundamentally a process driven by abundance and creative-destruction rather than scarcity. The reason we focus on scarcity is that at any given time, the economy is constrained by a single important “bottleneck scarcity.” Land, labor, factories, information and most recently, individual attention, have all played the bottleneck role in the past. I believe we are experiencing the first major bottleneck-shift in a decade. “Attention,” as an unqualified commodity is no longer the critical scarcity. Collective attention is: the coordinated, creative attention of more than 1 person. It is scarce and it is horrendously badly allocated in the economy today. The free-agent planet under-organizes it, and the industrial economy over-organizes it.  That’s the story of C, the optimal size of a creative group. There are seven other significant numbers in this tale: 0, 1, 7, 150, 8, 1000 and 10,000. The big story is how the economy is moving closer to C-driven allocation of creative capital. But the little story starts with my table tennis clique in high school.

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Cloudworker Board Game Revisited

July 17, 2009 By

In October last year, I sketched out a concept for an open-source board game that I tentatively titled “Brandhood” (I think I’d now want to call it just “Cloudworker”).  The idea was picked up by the NY Times and went mildly viral.

brandgame

I haven’t done much with it, since I have no idea how to actually make a board game at the detailed level.  Well now, my buddy from work, @poinky alerted me that there is a new start up called Game Crafter that allows self-publishing and selling of board games. So the question: anyone interested in collaborating with me to make this happen? I got a lot of interest/curiosity, but few actual volunteers last time around, but maybe this time, with a path-to-publication opening up, we can make it happen. We’ll sell the thing on Game Crafter and also release the source material free for people who want to make their own version. Check out the game’s home page to get the details, and connect if interested! Seems to me we mainly need Photoshop/Illustrator skills and someone with deeper detailed/technical understanding of board games than I have. I will, err…, supervise. It appears that all that is needed is the artwork for the game, a document with rules, and indications of what game play pieces (dice etc.) are to be provided.

p.s. since coming up with the concept, I have learned about Robert “Rich Dad Poor Dad” Kiyosaki’s board game, Cash Flow, which seems to have a few similar ideas.

p.p.s. This revival is also partly inspired by a discussion I participated in yesterday at copyblogger.com, about freelancing, online markets, the role of big corporations vis-a-vis little guys, etc.

The Epic Story of Container Shipping

July 7, 2009 By

If you read only one book about globalization, make it The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson (2006). If your expectations in this space have been set to “low” by the mostly obvious, lightweight and mildly entertaining stuff from the likes of Tom Friedman, be prepared to be blown away.  Levinson is a heavyweight (former finance and economics editor at the Economist), and the book has won a bagful of prizes. And with good reason: the story of an unsung star of globalization, the shipping container, is an extraordinarily gripping one, and it is practically a crime that it wasn’t properly told till 2006.

(From Wikimedia Commons, GFDL license)

40 foot container (from Wikimedia Commons, GFDL license)

There are no strained metaphors (like Friedman’s “Flat”) or attempts to dazzle with overworked, right-brained high concepts (Gladwell’s books come to mind). This is an  important story of the modern world, painstakingly researched, and masterfully narrated with the sort of balanced and detached passion one would expect from an Economist writer.  It isn’t a narrow tale though. Even though the Internet revolution, spaceflight, GPS and biotechnology don’t feature in this book, the story teases out the DNA of globalization in a way grand sweeping syntheses never could. Think of the container story as the radioactive tracer in the body politic of globalization.

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The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink

July 1, 2009 By

The hyperlink is the most elemental of the bundle of ideas that we call the Web. If the  bit is the quark of information, the hyperlink is the hydrogen molecule. It shapes the microstructure of information today.  Surprisingly though, it is nearly as mysterious now as it was back in July 1945, when Vannevar Bush first proposed the idea in his Atlantic Monthly article, As We May Think. July 4th will mark the second anniversary of Ribbonfarm (I started on July 4th, 2007), and to celebrate, I am going to tell you everything I’ve learned so far about the hyperlink. That is the lens through which I tend to look at more traditional macro-level blog-introspection topics, such as “how to make money blogging,” and “will blogs replace newspapers?” So with a “Happy Second Birthday, Ribbonfarm!” and a “Happy 64th Birthday, Hyperlink,” let’s go explore the hyperlink.

Image from Wikipedia, free license

Image from Wikipedia, free license

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Neurotic Leaders, Paternalistic Managers and Self-Absorbed Workers

June 22, 2009 By

Pondering the A. G. Lafley HBR piece that’s been doing the rounds lately, I think I’ve finally really figured out the difference between managers, leaders and workers. The title, and this cartoon I made up, capture the essence of my argument: all three archetypes within the world of business are defined by how they self-destruct. This has been unclear for millenia because it is only in the last two years, thanks to technology, that the last of the trinity: the individual worker bee, has become fully defined. So let’s reconstruct the whole picture from the ground up. mgmtvslead

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Marketing, Innovation and the Creation of Customers

June 15, 2009 By

Recently, one of my projects went through a rapid, but nearly imperceptible phase change. It went from being an “innovation-first” project to being a “marketing-first” project. The marketing hat feels at once comfortable and uncomfortable, familiar and unfamiliar. It feels like listening to unfamiliar lyrics set to a familiar tunes. This disconcerting feeling of being caught up in the dance of a yin-yang pair has had me pondering the best-known Drucker quote (from The Essential Drucker) for weeks now:

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.”

Marketing and innovation define each other in yin-yang ways. Thinking about the fundamentals of this dual pair of concepts led me to a curious definition  of the most important word in business: customer.

markinn

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Zen and the Art of Google Wave Mechanics

June 7, 2009 By

Much of the discussion around Google Wave so far has been down-in-the-weeds prosaic and business-like. So I decided to seek out physicist turned Zen Master, Roshi Tsu Nami, and historian of technology, Prof. Sophius Trie, in order to get to some deeper insights. Here is the transcript of our conversation. Warning: all three of us are ridiculously enamored of tech-geek-mysticism references, but I hope you can follow our thinking.

Me: What is Google Wave?

Roshi Tsu Nami: 47.

Me: 47? Ha ha! Don’t you mean 42?

Roshi Tsu Nami: Yes, I was referring to the Hitchhiker’s Guide, but I do mean 47, not 42. Google Wave is the ultimate answer, to life-streaming, universal communications and everything. But it is about 10% wrong.

Me: Clever. I don’t suppose I get to look smart in this dialogue. I expect I should ask next: what is the actual question?

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