In the first decade of the 2000s, I was fired up about the potential for an energized entrepreneurial scene to emerge in Austin, which was famously on the map as a city for new business, but didn’t really have the kind of creative entrepreneurial scene you see in, for instance, Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. I worked with Bijoy Goswami at Bootstrap Austin, and managed the Wireless Future project at IC2, as well as flying formation with the clean energy and sustainable business communities that seemed to have traction here. However, busy myself with a couple of startups, I became less focused on that scene. It kept evolving… Bijoy started an entrepreneur community via his work with the ATX Equation, and local entrepreneur Josh Baer started something local, similar to Y-Combinator, called Capital Factory. Gary Hoover, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of entrepreneurial history, has been teaching classes for entrepreneurs at the McCombs School of Business. There’s much better support for entrepreneurs in Austin today than there was a decade ago.
Now Josh, John Butler (of IC2) and 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe are teaching a cross-disciplinary course at the University of Texas called 1 Semester Startup. I attended a meeting last night of potential mentors for the class, in which students will form actual startup companies and try to make them fly. Mentors will be on call to answer questions and help the budding entrepreneurs avoid pitfalls and deal with inevitable mistakes and missteps. Several people (including yours truly) signed up for these mentorship roles.
There’s much wrangling about the lack of jobs in the U.S., and the economic crisis we’ve brought on with a complex combination of bad business, bad government, and outright fraud in some of the more abstract markets. To me one of the best solutions to the fix we’re in economically is to get better and better at building business and creating new markets, and that’s the promise of entrepreneurial creativity. So this course is just the sort of thing we need – more and more of it. (I’d also like to see a strong emphasis on ethics in entrepreneurial training, but that’s another rant for another day).
Bruce Sterling’s been “Visionary in Residence” again this summer at the Pasadena Art Center, where he’s been in cyborg mode, focusing on augmented reality, or reality augmented and mediated by computer-generated sensory input. Bruce has developed an application that runs on the Layar platform, called Dead Drops, inspired by the work of German media artist Aram Bartholl, which per Sterling is “all about hidden data revealed in real-world, three-dimensional spaces.” A Dead Drop is
an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. USB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project.
It’s sorta like geocaching, where the cache is digital, and anybody who finds the drop can add to it. The application Bruce has developed is for finding and mapping the drops.
John Robb connects the fall of the US Empire, like the fall of the Soviet empire, to central planning, but of a different kind:
The parallels between the rapid growth of US government bureaucracy and the Soviet bureaucracy is straight forward. As more and more of US economy was controlled by a narrow group of decision makers allocating government resources, the more sluggish the entire economy became (most of this was due to massive growth and mis-allocation in entitlements and defense). Further, the ability of government bureaucracies to extend their decision making to remaining majority of the economy through regulatory action, is also a form of centralization. However, even with all of this government growth, it’s is still not enough to account for the level of misallocation we are seeing.
There’s is something else at work.
The answer is that an extreme concentration of wealth at the center of our market economy has led to a form of central planning. The concentration of wealth is now in so few hands and is so extreme in degree, that the combined liquid financial power of all of those not in this small group is inconsequential to determining the direction of the economy. As a result, we now have the equivalent of centralized planning in global marketplaces. A few thousand extremely wealthy people making decisions on the allocation of our collective wealth. The result was inevitable: gross misallocation across all facets of the private economy.
David Brooks says that the U.S. “meritocracy” is less functional than before, He says it is based on an overly narrow definition of talent, has created new social chasms and less of a sense of connection, has less solidarity as a leadership class, is less into long-term thinking and more into fast response – “less emphasis on steady, gradula change and more emphasis on the big swing,” which “produces more spectacular failures and more uncertainty.” He alos says that we’re too transparent – “the more government has become transparent, the less people are inclined to trust it.” I’m not quite on board with that last, as one who has pushed for more transparency. Government should be functional, not mythic.
In another conversation, at Thrivable, Scott Reynolds Nelson expresses another view of transparency, speaking of banks rather than government:
Openness of books, transparency, clarity aren’t just things that are nice to have – they can make or break any institution that relies on trust to function. That includes banks but also NGO’s, funds, etc. Much of the internal workings of banks for example had been invisible to most folks. The so-called “stress test” that the federal government used on the banks in 2009 exposed some of the problems with bank operations. It turned out that many banks had much higher reserve ratios than they claimed. Likewise many of the big banks were forced to take off-the-books vehicles back into their firms for accounting purposes. In banks, anyways, that transparency can remove that semiotic doubt.
Finally, this RSA Animate video explains “Crises of Capitalism”:
Notice a lot of ads and marketing activity in your virtual ‘hood? Other forms of media are moving online, so the Internet is inherently where you go to get attention for whatever it is you’re selling – widgets, written content, audio and video, political or economic movements. Our former research and development platform, which became a platform for digital content, then a social platform, is now also defined as the marketing platform of choice. Ads are everywhere, many of them hostile to the user (e.g. those lightbox ads that overlay the content you were hoping to read). The real stars of the Internet today are not bloggers or other content providers, but marketing mavens like Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble, and Pete Cashmore.
As someone who consults about the Internet and as a web developer, I watch these developments with a large salt shaker within reach, taking everything with a grain of salt. I realize that there are many with online marketing expertise who understand how to run the numbers and have a sense what works and what doesn’t. I’m sure they’re seeing results for what they do, or they’d be canned. But much of what I’m seeing doesn’t make sense. Those lightboxes I mentioned are a great example: they’re clearly hostile to the user. You can’t avoid ’em, they’re completely in your face, but users I’ve seen are quickly entrained to find the “close” button and shut the ad down without giving it any mind, and to the extent they notice the thing advertised, it’s with some level of irritation and a mental note not to buy from the advertiser who set out to ruin their browsing experience.
One big question for me has been the relationship of marketing to social media. Social media marketing is conceptually so close to spam, and as with spam, I’m constantly surprised that it seems to be working. My substantial experience working with social media has proved to me over and over that subtle is best, that social media works to facilitate customer engagement, but overt marketing pitches feel wrong in that context. I was talking to Josiah Sternfeld of the Austin-based company Integrous Marketing about this. Josiah, who focuses on search marketing, noted that marketing professionals are rewarded for acquisition, which social media doesn’t do that well – and not for retention, which social media does do well. Broadcast approaches have traditionally driven customer acquisition, and many marketing pros who use social media are broadcasty about it. This seems to work, but I wonder if other approaches could work better – approaches that are more long term, harder to measure, and not productive of rewards and continued employment for marketing pros.
One of the more promising conversations I’ve been in lately is via Project VRM, Doc Searls’ fellowship project at Harvard, and an extenion of his Cluetrain Manifesto thinking. Project VRM is about empowering the customer in relationship with the seller, and it’s similar enough thinking to the participatory medicine concept I’ve been working with that Doc and I (et al.) have been thinking how to bring the concepts together. As a result of the Internet’s democratization of knowledge and access, it’s possible have a more symmetrical relationship between customer and seller, and between the patient and the healthcare system. In this context, marketing becomes more of a conversation (which is hard, but important, to scale). An example of VRM is the beta site Buyosphere, “a tool to help you take control of your shopping history: organize it, share it and track how you influence others.” Bazaarvoice also strikes me as a (possibly slightly off-balance) VRM company as it helps businesses “capture, display, share, and analyze customer conversations online.” I say off-balance because it still leans more in the direction of the business than the consumer… but if you dig through Bazaarvoice you’ll find a lot of interesting information about “social commerce.”
My own thought is that much of the online marketing activity we see now is transitional; that we’ll have customer-centric tools and strategies that haven’t quite been defined yet, but as they emerge and mature will change the way marketing works online, and will yield better metrics than we can get today for social media.
When I started this piece, it was going to be a response to CRM.com piece on “The Digital Age of Marketing,” an article discussing Gartner’s forecasts for online marketing. Gartner’s Adam Sarner is quoted as saying “Successful campaign management strategies have shifted from
interruptive push toward two-way conversations and addressing mutually
beneficial approaches to customers’ wants and needs, which a digital
marketing approach can provide.” I’m not sure this is completely correct (nor is the author of the article, who quote a skeptical Esteban Kolsky of ThinkJar: “You’re basically saying that four out of five people will be basing
their decision on social media. We don’t have that today, and
we won’t have four out of five people actually connected to social
media in 2015.”) Kolsky, as many others I’ve run across, favors an integrated approach with some social media along with traditional marketing approaches. My point, though, is that the relationship of the customer to the business will likely be redefined, not by social media but by a broader set of tools and new contexts for relationship. And we don’t quite know what that is yet, though Project VRM is a pointer.
Max Kennerly has posted the best legal overview I’ve seen of the Aaron Swartz indictment. He analyzes whether there’s actually a case to be made, and finds many weaknesses in the indictment, concluding that “the whole case looks like the iPhone prototype saga again: a civil claim that some overly aggressive prosecutor is trying to dress up as a federal crime. JSTOR has more than adequate civil remedies for whatever transpired here.” The worse problem: “This prosecution will give every “hacker” — and I use that term in a complimentary fashion, like the UNIX hackers of old, the people who built the Internet and its tools through creativity and determination — pause before they do anything outside of a bona fide API. The chilling effects will make us all worse off.” So this relates to the ongoing question whether we can sustain the free and open character of the Internet as monied interests come increasingly into play.
Tonight I’ll be giving my “future of the Internet” talk at Bootstrap Interactive. I’ll cover a bit of history and evolution of the Internet and ‘net applications, talk about what’s been changing, related effects, and network trends. We’ll talk about the kinds of applications that are emerging, and utopian and dystopian scenarios for the future. This’ll be interactive; come tell me what I’m missing. Free, at Conjunctured, 1309 E. 7th in Austin, 7pm.
I’ve been researching, thinking about, and presenting on the future of the Internet, and this week I’m preparing to propose a SXSW panel and getting ready for a presentation next week at Bootstrap Interactive in Austin. At the moment I’m thinking we’re in a “post-Internet” era. The collaborative, peer to peer network of networks has been co-opted and overlaid by a very few large corporations, and as was the case with earlier information technologies (film, radio, television) monopolies (or duopolies) are forming for network access, hardware, and information services, and the advertising model originated by David Sarnoff et al. for radio is pervasive on an Internet thick with ads – increasingly sites you visit throw an obnoxious full-screen ad in your face as you land. I’m hearing more and more conversations about building a new alternative Internet (and, for that matter, alternative economies and forms of governance).
As I was thinking hard about this, and digging deeper, Google + launched, and the geekiest cohort among my friends started showing up for the limited beta. Plus is YAAS (“yet another activity stream”), probably better-engineered and more social than Facebook’s. No real marketing vibe so far, just a lot of people hanging out (often literally, using G+’s “Hangout” feature, a high-quality form of videoconferencing that’s very cool but crashy).
Google + is the Next Big Rockit. People who are (or wannabe) paid to think about social media are filling many buckets with bits of speculative and often redundant information about the system, which doesn’t strike me as particularly new and innovative in the patterns it’s aggregated. But it is a welcome change from the other high-adoption social environments du jour, namely Facebook and Twitter. Unlike Twitter, it allows longer-form posts and inline media-sharing. Unlike Facebook, it has functional management of relationships (via Circles) and better handling of both transparency and privacy…
And did you mention Diaspora? Their launch has been so constrained as to be a mere whisper, next to the great swooshing sound of the Google+ launch.
I saw Robert Scoble post that he likes it because he can share videos and articles with everybody, and I assume that his emphasis was not on the ability to share (because we’ve been sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed et al), but on the idea of sharing “with everybody.” Google + is structured so that you can see and reach more people, and when you’re selective about what you see it’s your choice, not a selection by algorithm as you have in Facebook’s “Top Stories.” At Google + you can drop people into “circles” according to whatever categorization scheme fits your DNA, and that’s really the only operational filter at this point.
But, back to my point about the post-Internet world, what’s been cool about Google+ so far has been the absence of that overlay of commercial messaging that has fogged other sites. It’s been a relatively spam-free zone, reminding me what fired me up about online social spaces from the 80s onward. How long the beta period will last I don’t know, but it’s been a nice reminder of what we could potentially have, if we could turn down the volume the advertising and marketing blasts that seem so much pervasive online lately than even on television or radio.
Back to thinking hard about the future of the Internet.
It’s a weird culture that mashes Chekhov into the same week with Optimus Prime, but we followed an experience of Uncle Vanya (with terrific performances by Rob Matney and Liz Fisher, and staging that puts you right there on the farm) with a 3D romp through the Transformers universe, and somehow I’m trying to connect the dots. In Chekhov’s play, you could see trouble brewing – Rob says “that Vanya is about the moment before an epochal and cataclysmic culture shift as a culture and these lives look into a future that appears to promise little.” Sound familiar? Transformers, on the other hand, offers a world where one set of massive robotic aliens wants to enslave the human race, and another set – against all logic – are sworn to protect us. A massive battle levels Chicago; at the end, humanity is free from Decepticon enslavement (but not necessarily from our own particularly human enslavements, not addressed in the film, though the nastiest character on board is the human accountant, played by Patrick Dempsey, who makes a devil’s deal with the Decepticons).
While I experienced fanboy delight at the expert use of 3D and exquisitely choreographed robotic battles in the Transformers film, the very real tensions within Uncle Vanya were more real and more compelling. No Decepticons there, but the sense of a subtler, willing enslavement – hard-working farmers exploited by a spoiled elite, and everyone miserable except perhaps the character Sonya, who ends the play with these words: “We shall hear the angels, we shall see the whole sky all diamonds, we shall see how all earthly evil, all our sufferings, are drowned in the mercy that will fill the whole world. And our life will grow peaceful, tender, sweet as a caress. . . . In your life you haven’t known what joy was; but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait. . . . We shall rest.” (This makes me think of the idea of grace in Malick’s Tree of Life, which is probably a reference to the concept of “actual grace”: a supernatural gift of God to intellectual creatures (men, angels) for their eternal salvation, whether the latter be furthered and attained through salutary acts or a state of holiness.)
After Vanya and Transformers, we had a muted 4th of July – in the midst of drought, no fireworks, surely a metaphor for our times.
I’m aware of open spectrum… I’m in other conversations with various wonks & engineers who’re discussing bandwidth, spectrum, etc. Of course we could have a much different scene if we weren’t constrained by markets and politics. People how can see one sense of the obvious often miss another, which is that the world we’re in is not an ideal world, and the ideals we can conceive are not necessarily easy or even possible to implement. I pay less attention to the “next net” list we’re both on because so much of it is fantasy and masturbation.
I own a nice home in rural Texas but I can’t live there because I can’t even get 500kbps. I thought it was amusing that Vint is arguing for gigabit bandwidth when most of the U.S. is dark and there’s too little monetary incentive to bring light to the darkness. Of course I think we need a public initiative to make it happen, but in this era “public” is a dirty word. I halfway expect to see all roads become toll roads; a world where only the elite can travel, and only the elite will have broadband access. Though aging, I’m struggling to remain part of the elite… *8^)
Internet prime mover Vint Cerf echoes what I’ve been hearing from other architects of the TCP/IP network: we should focus on building much fatter pipes, and get away from the enforced/legacy scarcity and build gigabit broadband networks. Nothing here about the cost of providing gigabit access, nothing here about the fact that much of the (rural) U.S. has no access to broadband at any speed. What policies do we need to have pervasive gigabit broadband, urban and rural, in the U.S.? Who will pay for the buildout? [Link]
Something immense is happening as the world transitions to a hyperconnected state where, for many, the distinction between the real and virtual worlds has ceased to exist. All the trailing paraphernalia of states and borders and government-to-government palavers, not to mention privacy laws, look so 20th century.
The more I speak and write about “the future of the Internet,” the more I realize that I’m talking about the future of the human world. Cohen goes on to say “that technology and international relations are becoming interchangeable topics. There are many more networks in our future than treaties.”
Clueful, yes. Also interesting is the article’s mention of Google Ideas and Jared Cohen’s thinking
that technology is agnostic: It can be used in the cause of freedom — and has been to great effect from Tunis to Cairo — just as it can be used in the cause of repression. So how do you “tip the balance in favor of the net positive?”
There’s seven billion people in the world, population’s growing every day. We’ve been organized as nations, and more recently corporations have been taking power and authority for action (though they still work through legacy forms, i.e. legislatures that are influenced by various means, including contributions of money and personal persuasion). We see a tendency for people to want to have something we call “freedom,” though the meaning of that label, and its limits, are not always clear. Traditionally effective action has been associated with authority and leadership, and the nature and meaning of leadership in a democratized world is unclear. (Also the pervasive influence of corruption, and how it will play out if systems of authority are diminished, as we have more “freedom.”)
We live in exciting and “interesting” times, but we should be skeptical – and I appreciate Jared Cohen’s point about the uncertain potential in social technology. We should be exploring how to tip the balance.
The Tree of Life may be the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (or not); in his film called “The Tree of Life,” Terence Malick plays with the universals – grace and nature parallel good and evil. Nature is will, ego; grace is nurturing. The film’s narrative plays out in Waco, Texas and in the vast cosmos, infinite space and time, surrounding it; it places one very human story in a vast transhuman context. In one primeval scene, one dinosaur, a predator, chooses not to kill and consume another… this establishes grace as something that precedes the human; I think the point is that nature and grace always coexisted, and always will, and grace seeps into nature. “Good” and “evil” are complex and intertwingled.
I thought the film was magnificent; in it I saw scenes familiar from my own life growing up in a Texas town in the 50s and 60s, though I wasn’t in that family, and I was far more innocent. And Malick’s family has no television set in the living room… imagine what a difference that would make.
The vision of the “tree of life” represents a sense that all life on earth is related… and there’s a tree of life web project that shows that connectedness. The planet is teeming with life, but all species are endangered by the actions and operations of one – is this nature acting without grace? Last night Oliver Markley spoke to the Central Texas World Future Society on the subject of risk and resilience – is civilization at a tipping point toward collapse?
Some issues seem to exceed even the management skills of the more advanced countries, however. When countries first detected falling underground water tables, it was logical to expect that governments in affected countries would quickly raise water use efficiency and stabilize population in order to stabilize aquifers. Unfortunately, not one country—industrial or developing—has done so. Two failing states where overpumping water and security-threatening water shortages loom large are Pakistan and Yemen.
Although the need to cut carbon emissions has been evident for some time, not one country has succeeded in becoming carbon-neutral. Thus far this has proved too difficult politically for even the most technologically advanced societies. Could rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere prove to be as unmanageable for our early twenty-first century civilization as rising salt levels in the soil were for the Sumerians in 4000 BC?
Another potentially severe stress on governments is the coming decline in oil production. Although world oil production has exceeded new oil discoveries by a wide margin for more than 20 years, only Sweden and Iceland actually have anything that remotely resembles a plan to effectively cope with a shrinking supply of oil.
This is not an exhaustive inventory of unresolved problems, but it does give a sense of how their number is growing as we fail to solve existing problems even as new ones are being added to the list. Analytically, the challenge is to assess the effects of mounting stresses on the global system. These stresses are perhaps most evident in their effect on food security, which was the weak point of many earlier civilizations that collapsed.
Everybody’s head is a strange universe filled with echos of voices they’ve heard over and over again. Against this, we try to manifest our intentions, to persuade with more voice, more conversation. Sometimes we get through, but even when we get through, we’re often filtered, just as we’re filtering. Is it any wonder that it’s so difficult to build and sustain an effective collaboration?
I’m looking at the ways that we strive to aggregate our attentions, find common ground, and work together. Over the years I’ve approached this through the lens of democracy, or what I’ve referred to as the “democratic intention” to create a participatory process that works. The older I get and the more I think about it, the more I realize that this intention, though we so often profess it, is actually rare. Most of us would really like to assert our self interest, our own preferences, but society is a collision of interests and preferences, we have to give in order to take. In a recent discussion of the book The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, I was struck by the hardwired assumption that self-interest inherently rules, and cooperation is reached most effectively with an understanding of that point, thus the prisoner’s dilemma. In fact, I find that real people are fuzzy on that point, they’re not necessarily or inherently all about self-interest. We’re far more complex than that.
There’s a force of democratization in this world that I suspect is an inherent effect of two factors, population growth and density (which forces us to socialize and co-operate) and human evolution (hopefully we’re growing wiser, more capable, and continuing to adapt). I see aspects of it in work that I do. My internet work is often about building contexts to bring people together for shared experience and collaboration. At the Society of Participatory Medicine I’m involved in communications, and the concept of participatory medicine is driven by a democratization of health information and process. In politics I’ve focused on grassroots emergence, ad hoc and headless organizations, methods for effecting and enhancing participatory culture and activism. In thinking about markets, I’m drawn to the Cluetrain Manifesto and Doc Searls’ current Project VRM, or vendor relationship marketing, which is about giving consumers tools for symmetrical power within the vendor/customer relationship.
I’m thinking about all this in the context of my ongoing fascination with culture, media, and the Internet, and developing thinking that might feed into several interesting projects here and elsewhere. One thought I had was about a potential revival of Extreme Democracy and new conversations about emergent democracy. These are potentially lush gardens of thinking and doing that at the moment are barren, having been untended for a while.
Speaking at the 2011 Personal Democracy Forum, Doc talks about how power relationships work in markets vs how they should and could work. Markets are conversations, and they should be symmetrical conversations. Note his bit about how the language of marketing parallels the language of slavery.
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As I was thinking hard about this, and digging deeper, Google + launched, and the geekiest cohort among my friends started showing up for the limited beta. Plus is YAAS (“yet another activity stream”), probably better-engineered and more social than Facebook’s. No real marketing vibe so far, just a lot of people hanging out (often literally, using G+’s “Hangout” feature, a high-quality form of videoconferencing that’s very cool but crashy).
