A Life with a View

April 16, 2014 By

There is a memorable exchange in the Seinfeld episode The Keys, between Kramer and George on the theme of yearning. Unlike much of the show’s humor, which seems dated in the digital era, this little existential joke has improved with age:

Kramer: Do you ever yearn?
George: Yearn? Do I yearn?
Kramer: I yearn.
George: You yearn.
Kramer: Oh, yes. Yes, I yearn. Often, I…I sit…and yearn. Have you yearned?
George: Well, not recently. I craved. I crave all the time, constant craving…but I haven’t yearned.

You can imagine a more poignant version of this conversation over an iPad showing a Facebook feed. The Internet, with its constant parade of lives-that-might-have-been-yours and classmates-not-dated, is a jungle of yearnings. Yearnings that were once confined to fading and static memories of childhood, occasionally awakened by petrichor, now sneak into your life as a steady, colorful stream of living confusion, via windows in present realities. There was no equivalent in the past to being a silent spectator of other lives by default. You either had active, evolving relationships of mutual influence, or mutual invisibility. Like passengers on subways, we only saw people on other routes at stations. There were no relationships of continuous mutual spectatorship.

There was no such thing as a life with a view. 

***

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The Legibility Tradeoff

April 9, 2014 By

Kartik is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home turf at akkartik.name.

I am fascinated by organizations as a technology for agency transfer — getting people to follow some plan outside of their selves. We’re not yet very good at building such agency transformers; our organizations get gamed, taken over, taken advantage of, treated as externalities, captured by minority interests, ground down to gridlock, etc. But we’ve been getting better at it, finding better ways to influence others than the coercion and threat of violence that we started out with. In this post I want to survey the progress we’ve made, and suggest that there’s still wisdom to be milked from the old saw of “don’t micromanage, delegate.”

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Ritual and the Productive Community

April 3, 2014 By

Ryan Tanaka is a musician, writer, programmer and product manager living in the Los Angeles area. For every article that he writes, Ryan also improvises a musical piece as means of organizing his ideas. (Below, or here.)

Excerpt from my 9th “Angry Birds” String Quartet, based on the Yellow “Accelerating” Bird (Click to hear a sample recording)

In a previous article on my blog, I wrote about the possibility of creating “Sacred Spaces”, highlighting the ingredients necessary for the creation of communities within technological contexts.  Some of the ingredients include: rituals, symbolic gestures, leadership roles, group identities and group histories.  Without these basic elements to help sustain community identities, the prospects of organizations surviving for the long-term can be said to be very bleak, even with economic and/or political support.

Out of all of these ingredients, the idea of ritual can be said to be the most important, since it exists at the heart of all community-based infrastructures.

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Love Your Parasites

March 26, 2014 By

Parasitism is usually defined as a multi-party ecological organization in which one party benefits at another’s expense, and is contrasted with commensalism (the host is neither harmed nor helped) and mutualism (a type of symbiosis in which both parties benefit). Missing from this triptych are organizations in which a harm is partially offset with second-order benefits.

New research brings a little light to the subject in its analysis of the notorious brood parasites, the common cuckoo. The cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, externalizing the costs of raising its young to other species, which bear the burden of feeding and caring for the cuckoo chicks, who compete strenuously with their own. However, it was found that the parasitized nests thrived relative to those left alone by the cuckoo; and this effect was causally related to the cuckoo chicks themselves, as moving the eggs to other nests moved the beneficient effects as well.

It turns out that cuckoo chicks defecate a kind of black, tarry substance that is incredibly toxic and serves to dissuade predators, resulting in net improved fitness for the host species despite the costs.

Ecological thinking is transforming our understanding of the natural world, and is blurring many of the firm boundaries erected under the old paradigms that fetishisized ‘identity’ and assumed in advance the nature of benefit and harm. The world of software seems perfectly poised for ecological analysis, as many of its fundamental concepts parallel those of biological systems (source code as the genotype to compiled code’s phenotype, for instance).

So what would parasitism in software look like?

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The Message is the Medium

March 20, 2014 By

I’ve been in Europe all week and just got done with the European Trend Day conference in Zurich, organized by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. So instead of a regular post, you get the slide-deck for my talk, The Message is the Medium.

The slides are probably going to be a bit cryptic for those unfamiliar with McLuhan’s theory of media, so here are some (hopefully helpful) notes.

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Authors and Directors

March 12, 2014 By

Sam is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog at Moore’s Hand.

I grew up in Michigan, the older of two kids, but the second-oldest of all of my cousins. Every Thanksgiving we would drive to Cleveland for our family gathering, where I would hear about my older cousin Amruta’s exploits, and a couple years later, reproduce them.

She went to Penn; I went to Stanford. She spent a year living in India, I spent two. Post-graduation she started in management consulting; three years later, I followed suit.

Our paths led us both to San Francisco, but while Amruta got a J.D. and became a law associate, I quit my consulting job, taught myself to code, and became a programmer.

If you ask Amruta, she’ll say that the common thread of McKinsey and Big Law has been learning to operate in tough workplace environments. Her one-on-ones at McKinsey gave her detailed personality feedback; she was told point-blank to focus on her assertiveness.

Amruta was receiving training about how to effectively implement ideas in an organizational context — engaging with stakeholders, overcoming opposition, and so on.

My main job perk, on the other hand, is being able to sit on a couch all day and think. I give substantive status reports once or twice a week, as opposed to multiple times a day in consulting.

Amruta is a knowledge worker who primarily implements her ideas in an organizational context. I am a knowledge worker whose ideas primarily execute, and replicate, themselves in browsers and on servers.

We’ll call Amruta’s type Directors and my type Authors.

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Reboot Travel vs. Pause Travel

March 10, 2014 By

I find that traveling is one of the most disruptive things in my ability to keep my workflows in reasonable order. Over the years, I’ve oscillated between two modes of travel, which I call reboot travel and pause travel.

Reboot travel in the ideal case involves getting to Inbox Zero, clearing all pending time-bound work at your home base, achieving zen mind, and then rebooting into a sort of minimalist “travel mode.”

Pause mode involves doing none of the above, but just taking care of any urgent red-flag home-base items that you are already aware of, mentally hitting “pause” on everything else, and heading out, relying on Internet connectivity to keep you going with only minor interruptions and delays and breakdowns. In pause mode, I don’t even bother to set an out-of-office (OOO) message.

In recent years, I’ve found myself increasingly favoring pause mode. I haven’t used an OOO autoresponder/voicemail message in 5-6 years. It’s slightly risky, since hitting pause without assessing the  state of your workflow means you could suddenly find yourself on the hook for doing things you can’t do on the road. But the subset of tasks that fits that description appears to be shrinking every year. If your trips are short, and you can get to a scanner, you’re covered for 99% of cases. The set of things which can’t wait till you get home and require non-digital actions is pretty small. And increasingly, you can live with the cost of delay.

I’ve come to view my workflow as a patient who is always on the brink of a medical emergency and must always be stabilized to some extent to be moved. But the patient has been slowly improving in health over the last couple of decades, thanks to better tools (not to me getting any wiser or better at staying away from the edge of chaos). So it takes less work to stabilize the patient, and the consequences of being sloppy are getting less dangerous.

Immortality in the Ocean of Infinite Memories

March 6, 2014 By

Until recently, I had never been conceptually attracted to the idea of an afterlife or prior lives, either as thought experiments or as aspirations. And definitely not in any religious sense. This is perhaps because I’ve never been able to imagine interesting versions of those ideas.

What has been piquing my interest over the last year is a particular notion of digital after lives/prior lives based on persistence of memory rather than persistence of agency or identity. Not only is this kind of immortality more feasible than the other two, it is actually more interesting and powerful. 

We generally fail to understand the extent to which both our sense of agency and identity are a function of memory. If you could coherently extend memories either forward or backward in time, you would get a different person, but one who might enjoy a weak sort of continuity of awareness with a person (or machine) who has lived before or might live after. Conversely, if you went blind and lost your long-term memories, you might lose elements of your identity, such as your sense of your race or an interest in painting. Mathematician Paul Erdos understood the link between memory and identity:

When I was a child, the Earth was said to be two billion years old. Now scientists say it’s four and a half billion. So that makes me two and a half billion… I was asked, `How were the dinosaurs?’ Later, the right answer occurred to me: `You know, I don’t remember, because an old man only remembers the very early years, and the dinosaurs were born yesterday, only a hundred million years ago.'”

Erdos’ version of course, is based on no more than clever wordplay, but I want to consider a serious version: what if you could prosthetically attach to your own mind, the memories of somebody who died on exactly the day you were born, serving as a sort of reincarnation for that person? What if you could capture your own lived experiences as raw and transferable memories that could be carried on by somebody else, or a robot, starting the day you died, thereby achieving a sort of afterlife? Or perhaps live on somewhere in the Internet, changing and evolving?

The most interesting and unexpected consequence of any notion of immortality based on the idea of a living memory, is that notions of heaven and hell make no sense within it.

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Demons by Candelight

February 27, 2014 By

I grew up with frequent power outages and load-shedding, especially during  the summer time. Dark evenings without power were a special time for children. The candle-lit hours on porches and balconies were a strange mix of an ethereal kind of intimacy,  beckoning darkness, and thoughts that retreated from both sunlight and electric lights.

You could do nothing useful during those hours. There was no TV or radio. Reading was difficult. Candle-lit meals tended to be either quick, simple affairs whipped up in semi-darkness, or leftovers. Families who turned the blacked-out evenings into family time generally sat out on the porch. Adults would use the time to tell family stories to children. Teenagers and some couples would stroll up and down the street, occasionally stopping to chat with neighbors. Younger kids would run around squealing and playing, seemingly possessed by the strange euphoria-inducing forces leaking in from another world. Or they would huddle together and try to scare each other with ghost stories.

Even back then, having never experienced cold northern climates, I instinctively knew that the Scottish word fey, born of cold foggy highlands, and which I had only encountered in books, was somehow the right word for the charged pre-Monsoon summer air around me.

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Packaging-Heavy Projects

February 24, 2014 By

I posted earlier about discovery-heavy projects that are front-loaded with input firehoses. The complementary kind of project is one that has a lot of messy complexity near the finish line. I call these packaging-heavy projects. An example is writing a book. The hard work from the 0-90% mark is relatively clean and easy to structure.

Then you hit all the packaging work: getting the cover design, figuring out formatting needs (fussy conversions to specific print and electronic formats), uploading stuff to various websites, putting information into databases, and of course, copyediting, proofreading and all the rest of it.

Cooking certain kinds of meals is another example. The actual cooking may be tricky and complex, but limited in behavioral scope. But when you have to do the finishing touches: plating, laying the table, garnishes, serving sequence, keeping stuff warm and coming out at the right time… things can get packaging-heavy.

When there is a whole lot of packaging, it’s worth asking whether you’re really trying to shoehorn an entire distinct project into the tail of the current one. Introverted maker types who dislike marketing often make this mistake: they turn an entire marketing project into a shoehorned set of short-changed activities.

But that pathology aside, packaging-heavy projects are a real thing. I haven’t yet found a good way to navigate packaging tail-end phases effectively. Sometimes you can outsource packaging activities, but other times, you just have to power through all the finishing touches and polishing. It’s a high-risk phase, because a lot of effort can fail or deliver very sub-par returns simply because you forgot a simple finishing touch.