Branches and Roots: 2013 Call for Sponsorships

April 25, 2013 By

Another year, another set of lessons big and small, pleasant and harsh. It’s time for the third annual call for sponsorships and backstage-peek day. If you read the 2012 and 2011 posts, you know the drill.  First, we’ll talk money, then we’ll go backstage to talk philosophy, do a little retrospective and look out at the year ahead. Things are now getting complicated enough that I need a little table of contents. If this goes on, next year I might need video. Here’s the agenda. Skip what doesn’t interest you.

  1. Grow Branches and Roots
  2. The Bristlecone Pine Business Model
  3. Refactor Camp 2013
  4. Refactorings Meetups and Online Groups
  5. Ribbonfarm Consulting Exits Stealth Mode
  6. The Gig Economy and Ribbonfarm
  7. Be Slightly Evil and Gervais Principle series finales
  8. Buy Me a Coffee retired, Crowdfunded Features in the works
  9. Resident Blogger Tryouts
  10. Now Reading

Money first. In 2012, 29 sponsors together contributed $3750 to support this site, a 66% increase over 2011 ($2250 from 25 sponsors). For 2013, four early birds have already contributed $300.  If you were considering sponsoring this year, consider this your cue and go ahead. The money is starting to make a serious difference.

Now for the philosophy. Every year, I add a single line to my evolving business philosophy. In 2011, my first problogger year, the line was go where the wild thoughts are. In 2012, it was go deep, young man. 

For 2013, the line is grow branches and roots.  What do I mean by that?

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So I Shall be Written, So I Shall be Performed

April 17, 2013 By

Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal.

I want to take it as a starting point the idea that there is a certain fictional quality to our selves. The elusive nature of the self has been a perennial issue for psychologists and philosophers; there are nihilistic and mystical and mechanistic and pluralistic theories of what we mean when we talk about the self, the thing inside of us that defines who we are. But I find that the most useful theories of the self come from literature and drama, and take as their central point the idea that selves are to some extent roles we make up and perform in the dramatic improvisations of daily life. It’s perhaps a trite observation given its presence in one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines; Goffmann turned it into sociology; for now I just want to use it as a jumping off point to talk about Facebook and the way selves are now in the Internet era.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality

April 10, 2013 By

I recently reached an odd conclusion. A sense of history isn’t about knowing a lot of history or trying to learn from the past in order to create a better future. It is about living your mortal life as though you were immortal.

To understand why this is an interesting definition to play with, consider the following allegory.  Human life is like walking into a movie halfway through, and having to walk out again two minutes later. You’ll have no idea what’s going on when you walk in. And chances are, just as you begin to get a clue, you’ll be kicked out.

So unless you are lucky enough to walk in during a scene that is satisfying without any longer narrative context (think sex or violence), your ability to derive satisfaction from your two-minute glimpse will depend partly on your ability to construct meaning out of it.

One way to do this is to pretend to be immortal. This game of make-believe also reveals a few interesting things about literal immortality seeking, in the sense of seeking longevity therapies or waiting to upload your brain into Skynet, post-Singularity.

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Overtake on the Turn, Overwhelm on the Straight

April 8, 2013 By

Sometimes, doing the right thing is just way too hard. So you have use the best approximate substitute available. When you can’t fly like a bird, you can aspire to be a frog that can jump really high, or a flying squirrel.

Decision-making is like that. There is, in my opinion, a “right way” to do decision-making in complex, dynamic environments (VUCA conditions — Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity), but most of the time, the right way is way too hard. So like most people, I use approximations tailored to current conditions (I am partial to the geeky joke that life isn’t just hard, it’s NP-hard).

To explain the right way and the approximate way, it helps to think in terms of high-speed maneuvering as a metaphor. Think of the dog-fighting in-an-asteroid-field scene in Star Wars.  There are unpredictable moving obstacles and adversaries in the environment, and potential/kinetic energy considerations arising from the physics and energy levels of your own vehicle.

The “right” way to engage such a domain is with high situation awareness and calm mindfulness. Such a mental state allows you to maneuver smoothly and efficiently, with surgically precise moves that minimize entropy generation while achieving your objectives. This is the peak-flow-state, with your OODA-loop humming away at Enlightenment Level 42.

Unfortunately, if you’re like me, you’re in that state perhaps 1% of the time. What do you do at other times?

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The Locust Economy

April 3, 2013 By

Last week, I figured out that I am a part-time locust. Here’s how it happened.

I was picking the brain of a restauranteur for insight into things like Groupon. He confirmed what we all understand in the abstract: that these deals are terrible for the businesses that offer them; that they draw in nomadic deal hunters from a vast surrounding region who are unlikely to ever return; that most deal-hunters carefully ensure that they spend just the deal amount or slightly more; that a badly designed offer can bankrupt a small business.

He added one little factoid I did not know: offering a Groupon deal is by now so strongly associated with a desperate, dying restaurant that professional food critics tend to write off any restaurant that offers one without even trying it.

Yet, I’ve used (and continue to use) these services and don’t feel entirely terrible about doing so, or truly complicit in the depredations of Groupon. Why? It’s because, like most of the working class, I’ve developed a locust morality.

DesertLocust

Thinking about locusts and the behavior of customers around services like Groupon, I’ve become convinced that the phrase “sharing economy” is mostly a case of putting lipstick on a pig. What we have here is a locust economy. Let me explain what that means.

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Why Habit Formation is Hard

April 1, 2013 By

Recently, I moved from Las Vegas to Seattle. In the process I realized that activities like moving belongings and getting a new driver’s license are not the hardest part. The difficulty of moving habits is much higher. About 80% of the cost of a move, I suspect, is the cost of moving habits. We lose months of time in the run-up to a move and after.

An example is your gym routine. It’s possibly the most important habit in your life. But it is surprisingly hard to “move” from one context to another.

In my case, I signed up for a gym very similar to the one I used to go to in Vegas. It has similar facilities and a similar range of equipment, trainers and programs. Like my old Vegas gym, my Seattle gym is about a mile and a half from home. The membership cost is about the same.

Yet, it’s been more than a month and I still haven’t found my rhythm. By contrast, when I joined the Vegas gym, it took me less than a week to settle into a great routine.

Why is this?

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The Wave of Unknowing

March 27, 2013 By

Drew is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Kneeling Bus.

“Unable to find a place outside the capitalist system, the postmodern subject loses any possibility of fulfilling the Enlightenment ambition of drawing a map that could claim to mirror reality.”

-Kazys Varnelis

When Frederic Jameson published Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism twenty years ago, he ensured that his essay’s subject, the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, would become the world’s most intellectualized hotel. Designed by John Portman and built in the late 1970s, the Bonaventure’s monolithic presence in downtown LA (like much of Portman’s work) still represents everything urbanists hate: The massive building is a mirror-clad fortress with a rotating rooftop bar that boldly shirks any responsibility for relating to or enhancing the cityscape that surrounds it.

Inside its walls, the Bonaventure is its own universe: disorienting, windowless, and lacking reference to any external reality (aside from the rooftop bar’s panoramic views of the city). Reflecting upon the building and Jameson’s essay, Kazys Varnelis observes that its confusing, illegible layout perfectly epitomizes the contemporary era: “For Jameson, the hotel’s complexity is an analogue for our inability to understand our position in the multinational, decentered network of finance and communications that comprises late capitalism.” In the past, we believed that we could comprehend the world that we lived in—especially the parts of that world that we ourselves had made—but Portman’s hotel was a society announcing that it had finally outsmarted itself and was willing to embrace that outcome.

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Allowing Personality to Flow

March 26, 2013 By

Greg is a 2013 blogging resident, visiting us from his home blog over at On the Spiral. His residency will explore the theme “Individuality and Decision-Making” over several posts.

A couple weekends ago, during a break in the scheduled programming at Refactor Camp, I was walking around with Kartik Agaram and as we passed by a concession stand he off-handedly remarked: “I know things are going well when I can walk by something like that without experiencing any temptation.”  This was one of those statements that easily eludes our cognitive filters, but it becomes rather perplexing when you begin to tease it apart.

Why should temptation be easier to resist when things are going well?

What does it even mean for “things” to go well?

There are easy answers like – when we are preoccupied with more engaging tasks, temptations are perceived as relatively less appealing.  However, the easy answers are easily contradicted.  Sometimes when things are going well we are so preoccupied that we find ourselves guzzling coffee and eating take-out every night.  Apparently things need to be going well in a particular way in order for temptation to diminish. [Read more…]

Social Dark Matter: On Seeing and Being Seen

March 22, 2013 By

You probably remember a grade school teacher who seemed to have eyes at the back of her head. Somebody who could walk into an unruly classroom and with just a look, quell the disorder and get everybody back into their seats. When such a teacher enters a classroom, any mischief underway is abandoned instantly. Those caught in the teacher’s direct gaze freeze or try to scramble back to their seats. Those who think they are in peripheral vision try to duck and hide. Those who believe they haven’t been seen try to flee.

This sort of teacher possesses an authoritarian eye: a way of seeing shared by certain sorts of effective teachers, drill sergeants, sports coaches and the sorts of large organizations that James Scott explored in Seeing Like a State.

The classroom example illustrates something important. Authority and responses to it are primarily about seeing and being seen, rather than doing or having things done to you.

When you know you’re being watched by an authoritarian eye, you voluntarily behave in simpler (or equivalently, more orderly) ways than when you know you aren’t.

The difference between the two regimes of behavior is social dark matter. And in today’s digital social environments, it is starting to behave in ways we don’t really understand. Because we feel watched in ways we don’t really understand, by forms of authority we have never experienced before.

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How Many Steps Do You Really Look Ahead?

March 18, 2013 By

The planning/decision-making literature focuses a great deal of attention on computing actions many steps ahead. But it recently struck me that looking ahead is not actually a very natural behavior for humans in most real-time domains (which is most domains).

A simple illustration is the problem of adding milk or cream to your coffee in a self-serve situation. We all recognize that putting the milk in first and then pouring in the coffee eliminates the need for stirring (and therefore saves a wooden stirrer or a spoon-washing). But few people do it. I myself forget about half the time.

Even if you discount the people who prefer to put the milk in later for whatever reason (in order to use the changing color as feedback, perhaps), I bet there’s a sizable number of coffee drinkers who don’t care about the milk-coffee sequence but don’t choose the simpler and less wasteful sequence.

Why?

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