Waiting versus Idleness

February 10, 2011 By

We spend a lot of our lives doing nothing. Doing nothing is usually viewed as wasting time, and there are two ways it can be done. When you waste your own time, it’s called idleness. When others waste your time, it’s called waiting. I enjoy idleness.  I don’t like waiting.

Wasted time is not empty time. Empty time is meditation. You could argue that meditation is about subjective time standing still. Your productive potential, in theory, is either preserved or enhanced through empty do-nothing.  Wasted time is also not the same as recovery, relaxation or recharge time. That’s about using this minute to make another minute more potent.

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Boundary Condition Thinking

January 19, 2011 By

It is always interesting to recognize a simple pattern in your own thinking. Recently, I was wondering why I am so attracted to thinking about the margins of civilization, ranging from life on the ocean (for example, my review of The Outlaw Sea) to garbage, graffiti, extreme poverty and marginal lifestyles that I would never want to live myself, like being in a motorcycle gang. Lately, for instance, I have gotten insatiably curious about the various ways one can be non-mainstream. In response to a question I asked on Quora about words that mean “non mainstream,” I got a bunch of interesting responses, which I turned into this Wordle graphic (click image for bigger view)

Then it struck me: even in my qualitative thinking, I merely follow the basic principles of mathematical modeling, my primary hands-on techie skill. This interest of mine in “non mainstream” is more than a romantic attraction to dramatic things far from everyday life. My broader, more clinical interest is simply a case of instinctively paying attention to what are known as “boundary conditions” in mathematical modeling.

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The Gollum Effect

January 6, 2011 By

Throughout the last year, I’ve been increasingly troubled by a set of vague thoughts centered on the word addiction.  Addiction as a concept has expanded for me, over the last few months, beyond its normal connotations, to encompass the entire consumer economy. Disturbing shows like Hoarders have contributed to my growing sense that conventional critiques of consumerism are either missing or marginalizing something central, and that addiction has something to do with it. These vague, troubling thoughts coalesced into a concrete idea a few weeks ago, when I watched this video of a hand supermodel talking about her work, in a way that I can only describe as creepy.

The concrete idea is something I call the Gollum effect.  It is a process by which regular humans are Gollumized: transformed into hollow shells of their former selves, defined almost entirely by their patterns of consumption.

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Socratic Fishing in Lake Quora

December 7, 2010 By

Allow me to introduce you to Seb Paquet, an expert Socratic fisherman on Lake Quora.  He is particularly adept at baiting the hook just right to catch fish of the species Wannabis Oracularis, to which I belong. He is entirely to blame for getting me addicted to Quora in the last month or so (you can follow me here). For those who haven’t yet heard of it, Quora is a booming Q&A site. It just might be the next big social media site to cross the chasm and go mainstream. It is certainly booming right now, and is the darling of tech watchers. But unlike other recent Valley favorites like FourSquare (narrow appeal) and Groupon (for shopaholics), Quora might well become as fundamental to the Web as Google, Facebook or Twitter. Everybody asks and answers questions after all.

If you think the Q&A market is a tired and played-out ancillary market (lazy schoolkids looking for help cheating on homework on Yahoo Answers, tedious transactional Q&A on LinkedIn, let-me-Google-that-for-you sites), you’d be wrong. Quora has demonstrated that Q&A is a viable fundamental market, not a bolt-on ancillary to other markets like social networking or asymmetric messaging. Hang Zhang first helped me appreciate the very subtle social design lurking underneath the apparently simple architecture of Quora, and Seb Paquet, through his baiting, has provided me, over the last month or so, with a crash course in the dynamics of Q&A. Initially, I thought Quora was a fad, that owed its initial meteoric growth to the pedigree of its founders and early backers. I even unfairly labeled it in my head as “Valley mutual admiration society,” but I have now become a convert.

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What Does it Mean to Work Hard?

November 29, 2010 By

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I tried, and failed, to relax. I am sure I am not alone, and that many of you had the same experience. But I failed in a very revealing way, that led me a very interesting definition of work.

What happened was this:

I was reading a book to relax (Robert D. Kaplan’s excellent Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the future of American power). It was pure relaxation in the sense that the subject has nothing to do with either my work or subjects I normally blog about (my other “job”). But a few chapters in, something very interesting happened: I suddenly decided I might want to blog about the book. And just as suddenly, a relaxing experience turned into “work,” and within a half-hour, I felt I needed a “relaxation break.”  So what happened?

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Warrens, Plazas and the Edge of Legibility

October 27, 2010 By

Long-time reader and astute commenter, Xianhang (Hang) Zhang wrote a very interesting post a couple of weeks ago on his blog: The Evaporative Cooling Effect. It is part of a fascinating series he is doing on social software. The post explores a phenomenon that is very close to the status illegibility phenomenon I explored two weeks ago, and in fact draws inspiration from the same Groucho Marx/Lake Wobegon observations that I started with.

Evaporative cooling is basically the effect of the highest status people in a group leaving, lowering the average status of those left behind.

What I found fascinating though, was Hang’s suggestion for how to combat the effect (and thereby stabilize groups). In my post, I proposed that status illegibility helps create the stability. Hang brings in another dimension, which is illegibility in the group’s environment/context.

In particular, in social software (or physical environments for that matter), smarter-than-average early adopters often leave when the “unwashed masses” start to jump on the bandwagon, devaluing the social cachet. Hang proposes that one of the best ways to combat this is to build (or rather catalyze the evolution of) “warren” architectures instead of “plaza” architectures. Here are the pictures that pair of evocative terms produces in my head. You might imagine something else:

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The Gervais Principle IV: Wonderful Human Beings

October 14, 2010 By

Each of them – and they constitute 80% of humanity – is born the most beautiful baby in the world. Each is an above-average child; in fact the entire 80% is in the top 20% of human beings (it’s crowded up there). Each grows up knowing that he or she is deeply special in some way, and destined for a unique life that he or she is “meant” to live.

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

 

In their troubled twenties, each seeks the one true love that they know is out there, waiting for them, and their real calling in life. Each time they fail at life or love, their friends console them: “You are a smart, funny, beautiful and incredibly talented person, and the love of your life and your true calling are out there somewhere. I just know that.” The friends are right of course: each marries the most beautiful man/woman in the world, discovers his/her calling, and becomes the proud parent of the most beautiful baby in the world. Eventually, each of them retires, earns a gold watch, and somebody makes a speech declaring him or her to be a Wonderful Human Being.

You and I know them as Losers. Welcome to Part IV of the Gervais Principle series. Read Parts I, II and III first, otherwise you will misunderstand (and possibly be deeply offended by) this post.

Last time, we left one of the unfortunate Clueless, Andy Bernard, staring with deep frustration and anger at the world of the Wonderful Human Beings, pining to join, but rejected and humiliated.

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Cricket as Metaphor

September 14, 2010 By

I am rather surprised that the game of cricket has never gained popularity as a comprehensive metaphor for work, life and business. I don’t mean localized figurative metaphors like “on a sticky wicket” (tricky situation) or “bowled over” (fell in love/was caught by surprise). I mean a broad, coherent conceptual metaphor. The way American football is sometimes seen as a metaphor for industrial organization, soccer as a metaphor for reactive and opportunistic “network” styles of decision-making, and basketball as a metaphor for an artistic, Zen-like approach to life.  I think I know why this has been the case, and why it might change in the near future.

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Morning is Wiser Than Evening

August 30, 2010 By

If I had to summarize my life philosophy in one phrase, I would pick the Russian proverb, morning is wiser than evening. The phrase appears in many Russian folk-tales. I used to read these avidly as a kid. The world of Ivan the youngest of three sons, Vasilisa the beautiful and my favorite, Baba Yaga the witch, who rode around on a stove, is a sad and pensive one, but one you yearn to visit. Morals are careless afterthoughts. Russian folktales  are primarily impressionistic little gems that create a mood more than they tell a story. If you read the stories, you get a sense of where Chekov got his more grown-up inspirations. Chekov is, to me, the quintessentially Russian writer. I’ve read some Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but neither captures what I imagine the Russian landscape to be like, the way Chekov does.

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The Greasy, Fix-It ‘Web of Intent’ Vision

August 17, 2010 By

The Web of Intent is a term that’s starting to get tossed around a lot, and I’ve gone from being wary about it to believing strongly in it. I was introduced to the term by Nova Spivack about a year ago and was initially skeptical. Could Web ADD be reversed? Can technology give us a true knob to allow us to tune our engagement anywhere from ‘distracted’ to ‘laser focused’? From knee-jerk reactive to coolly deliberate? Actually that’s how I think of the concept: a technology model that gives users this control knob to manage their online experiences:

The evidence is slowly starting to roll in. This conceptual knob can be created through a generation of “Intent” technologies. What’s more, this knob is what will likely save the publishing and media industries.  It will also save our brains from getting fried, and create a new dynamic in the ongoing disruption of all types of information work.

As I thought more about some of the core ideas (see Nova’s posts What’s After the Real-Time Web? and The Birth of the Scheduled Web), I started to understand the power of the model.

This is where I am placing my bets. Not the 3D Web, not the “Mobile/Touch Web”, not the “Internet of Things” and not the “Semantic Web.” Those are important, but secondary. I am going all-in on the “Web of Intent” as the next main act that will reshape the Internet. As I’ll explain later, it is a gritty, greasy, roll-up-sleeves, fix-it vision, that is emerging in response to actual problems, as opposed to a vision born out of new possibilities (combined with the smoking of illegal substances).

So here you go: my primer on what the Web of Intent actually is, in terms of user experience (UX), concepts and technology. We’ll need to start by reframing what Web 2.0 actually is.

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