Baby Brains

How does Google make cool, novel products like Google Wave that are getting tech writers all over the Internet buzzing?

A big secret is that while other companies treat their programmers like babies from other species, Google treats their programmers like human babies.

Google is well-known for its policy that lets programmers work on their own independent projects for 20% of their work time. In the case of Google Wave, they actually sent two programmers down to Australia and formed what amounted to a startup down under.

But as savvy as Google is to allow this kind of "free time," humans got there first. According to evolutionary scientist Alison Gopnick, interviewed in SEED Magazine, one of the great human advantages is our unique ability to imagine. This ability is fostered by the fact that for the first few years of our lives, we are not weighed down with mundane tasks such as searching for food or running around. Like the Google engineers and programmers who do not have to worry about their "day jobs" for 20% of the time, babies, by being totally taken care of longer than any other species, can learn and imagine more than other species.

Seed: You describe children as being “useless on purpose.” What do you mean by that?
AG: It’s related to one of the basic things that came out of our research: Why do children exist at all? It doesn’t make tremendous evolutionary sense to have these creatures that can’t even keep themselves alive and require an enormous investment of time on the part of adults. That period of dependence is longer for us than it is for any other species, and historically that period has become longer and longer.

The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use. So one of the ideas in the book is that children are like the R&D department of the human species. They’re the ones who are always learning about the world. But if you’re always learning, imagining, and finding out, you need a kind of freedom that you don’t have if you’re actually making things happen in the world. And when you’re making things happen, it helps if those actions are based on all of the things you have learned and imagined. The way that evolution seems to have solved this problem is by giving us this period of childhood where we don’t have to do anything, where we are completely useless. We’re free to explore the physical world, as well as possible worlds through imaginative play. And when we’re adults, we can use that information to actually change the world.

We see this emergent phenonemon play out again and again in the SPAN world in which we live. A lack of planning and an insistence on freedom can give birth to unbelievable structures. These structures will find their own form, but only after years of trial and error -- only after being given the freedom to fail, succeed, and find their own natural balance.

Let's Have a Cloudversation

The buzz around tech websites today is all about Google Wave. (Microsoft's Bing Search Engine is getting some play too, but it's Microsoft, so people aren't trusting it yet.)

What's Google Wave? This is the Google blog's description:

In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

As I wrote just yesterday, this is further evidence that the scramble to dominate all forms of web communication is not neat and clean -- everyone seems to be fighting on everyone else's turf. Google seems to have understood the challenge that Facebook and Twitter posed, and are taking some of the Twitbook turf with Google Wave.

Personally, I like the idea of creating a few different waves and being able to use them all for different purposes. It makes the jumble of communications neat and clean. And you can pull whatever information you want into a particular wave. If you want a wave of just your Twitter feed, you can do that. If you want a wave that imports comments to your blog, you can pull that in, check it occasionally, and write back. If you want a wave that just consists of funny links sent to you by the five people you know with the best taste in funny links, you can do that as well. Perhaps most importantly, you can edit a document within a wave, a capability that will be very useful in business settings.

I also like the backstory of how Google's developers thought of Google Wave:

Back in early 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping startup called Where 2 Tech, founded by my brother Jens and me. We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps.

As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point, and I was immediately sold. (Jens insists it took him hours to convince me, but I like my version better.)

Another way to look at this is that the web allows all sorts of conversations/information sharing to take place. There are one way conversations (websites), one-way, semi-intimate conversations (a blog with no comments), semi-one-way, semi-intimate conversations (blog with comments), large-scale, multi-way, non-intimate conversations (Twitter), large scale, multi-way, semi-intimate conversations (Facebook), small-scale, multi-way, intimate, non-collabortive conversations (private chat rooms), small-scale, multi-way, intimate, collabortive conversations (collaborative editing) and small-scale, two-way, intimate conversations (instant messenging). Each of these might be referred to as cloudversations, or collectively, as your cloudversation.

Right now, the cloudversation is a confusing jumble, because each part has been invented independently, with its own platform. Transfering from one platform to another, communicating from one platform to another and organizing content across these platforms is the challenge that Google undertakes with Google Wave. The mission of Google is to organize the world's information. A big part of that is organizing the world's cloudversation.

Here's a video from Google trying to explain the technical aspects of the document collaboration tools:

While this concept is difficult for me to totally grasp in the abstract, I'm excited for the public launch of this product. Anything that promises to clean up and compartmentalize our communication while enabling more of it is going to be a highly successful product.

Your Brain on Google

There's been a lot of discussion over the past year regarding whether Google is making us dumber. The idea is, since we can now look up any facts we need, we won't have to remember any facts -- only where to look things up. Peter Suderman writes:

Reading on the web is almost certainly affecting the way we process information, but it’s not making us stupid. Instead, it’s changing the way we’re smart. Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes. These days, it’s not what you know — it’s what you know you can access, and cross reference.

Ezra Klein goes one step deeper into the "Google changes your brain" meme:

I wonder whether our brains aren't becoming less like indexes and more like librarians. The situation isn't quite as Peter presents it: The key skill isn't knowing where to find information. It's knowing where to find where to find information. It's understanding connector terms and knowing the relative specialties of different search engines and finding the best aggregators and possessing ninja-level skills with Nexis.

Now, I'm not sure whether we need to remember where the indexes are that index what is indexed, or whether we just need to know how to use indexes, and we will have indexes that index the indexes. The whole thing gets confusing.

One thing I do know is that the central premise is wrong: we all know much more information than we used to know. That's right. Even in this crazy, Twitterific age of short attention spans, we all know way more good, old-fashioned facts. Grandpa facts.

How on earth could we not? Before the Internet, if we wanted to learn something, all we had was whatever books we happened to have in our homes, which were not readily searchable. And the library. You could actually get up, find your keys, go out to your car, get in the car, drive to the library, show a clerk your library card, wander around, and try to find a book on the subject you're looking for, and then remember the fact. Or, right now, you can just type into Google/Wikipedia and learn the fact. In both "ages," you could also learn from talking to others. In the digital age, though, talking to others and asking them to teach you facts is also much quicker and easier.

I'm on Wikipedia fairly often looking up random things I want to know. I'm watching Kramer vs. Kramer and I think, "this movie is great -- did it win an Academy Award for Best Picture?" I can go right to the Internet Movie Database and find out. (Yes.) Sri Lanka's in the news and I want to learn about it? Why don't I just sit right here on my bed and learn everything there ever was to know about Sri Lanka. And then there's the information that you wouldn't find in a library even if you got up, went there and had a perfect index -- try using a standard library to find a list of the fastest-growing Silicon Alley web-startups.

I understand the alternative argument. Yes, we may learn more nowadays, but we also forget more. When people needed to remember things, they remembered them, and since we no longer need to remember things, we no longer remember them. For instance, people used to remember telephone numbers, and now they don't, because you can press a single button to call someone. So yes, we remember fewer telephone numbers in the digital age.

But there are three problems with this counter-argument. First, a lot of the information we know is not information we need to know in the first place -- and so even back before the Internet, we had no real incentive to store it in our heads. I didn't need to know the names of certain Academy Award winners in 1979, and I don't need to know them now. But I probably will know them now, because it's more likely that I've come in contact with that information now. So for non-essential information, the necessity to store information is equal both before and after the advent of the Internet, but at least now, I'm much more likely to have found that non-essential information in the first place.

Second, one way to remember something is to come across it again and again. If in my Internet travels I can keep going back again and again to a piece of non-essential information, I'm much more likely to remember it than if I just saw it once in a library or on a TV show that I can no longer access. So even though there never was and still isn't a need to remember non-essential information, we're more likely to have it repeated -- and thus remembered -- in the current age.

Third, people who argue that we know so much less than we used to forget that we did write down information before 1996, and so we did look up information before 1996 -- especially information that was essential. Maybe that process just sucked so much that we'd rather forget it.

Perhaps back in 1992 you needed to remember what time a certain store closed. "Ah ha!" you exclaim. "Back in the eighties, I used my enormous eighties brain to remember the store closing times of every store I went to!" Yes -- either you used that huge eighties brain of yours, or you could always just call the store and find out using the number that was listed in the yellow pages. Perhaps you needed to remember your friends' home addresses -- a function that our atrophied 21st century mind finds impossible. How did that impressive eighties brain do it? Oh right. There was something called an address book where you wrote down the addresses of people you knew. Maybe if you were a lawyer, you needed to have a brain the size of a fridge to remember every case ever decided since there was no such thing as Lexis Nexis -- if you happened to be a lawyer who enjoyed working without any books, indexes, libraries or reading actual cases.

I suppose it is possible that looking this stuff up was so annoying that people remembered more of it. But that accounts for a small percentage of the information we know.

So don't let them make you jealous, craving the eighties brain you never got much of a chance to work with. The idea that we actually know fewer facts because of the Internet is both taken for granted and absurd. To remember facts, you need to first learn facts. The Internet has given us a fast, vast, efficient, indexed way to learn facts. And it's ease of use has given us a way to come into contact with those facts again and again and again, remembering them. To use a very eighties phrase, your brain on drugs may have problems. Your brain on Google is doing just fine.

Venture Capital University

I was watching a video of Mark Zuckerberg, founder/CEO of Facebook, and I realized that Harvard, his alma mater, was extremely smart/lucky to get him. He's likely to donate millions and millions of dollars to Harvard over the course of his life. All that money could have gone to Yale, Stanford or CalTech had Harvard not made itself such a premiere institution where talent like Zuckerberg is likely to attend. There's also a bit of luck involved -- maybe it was really sunny and beautiful on the day that Zuckerberg visited Harvard, and now that 75 degree day could translate into 75 millions dollars.

All of this made me think: are universities venture capital funds in disguise? Their similarities are many.

First, both venture capital funds and universities are the source of some of the greatest ideas and breakthroughs in our economy and culture. How do they attract these ideas? They attract people who either currently have great ideas or who have the talent to develop great ideas.

Second, both venture capital funds and universities find these individuals through a rigorous, intensive application/review process.

Third, VCs and universities provide similar benefits. They both provide important networking capabilities, can be sources of key introductions, and can give you access to specialized advice from people who have extra expertise in an industry.

Fourth, VCs and universities both have big financial "pops" later on. VCs and universities are both looking for those ideas that will generate wealth that can later flow back into the institutions. With a VC, this comes through an IPO or a company's purchase. With a university, this comes through the major endowment, fund, or contribution from a graduate who has hit it big in some way.

Finally, there's always been an aspect of both institutions that seems somewhat wasteful. VCs put all of this money and effort into companies and so few of them actually have a major exit event. Universities spend all of this time and effort screening candidates, finding candidates, wooing candidates, and half of them spend half their time drinking, smoking pot and playing video games. But both seem to have the attitude that for every company that never gets off the ground, and for every promising student who uses his math skills to play online poker all day long, there's that one Facebook or that one Mark Zuckerberg who will repay the institution handsomely down the line.

Te(ch)aos

Are Twitter and Facebook rivals to Google? Usually, we think of Google as a search company, and so we think that its main competitors have to be other search companies like Yahoo or Microsoft. But as this post from GigaOm explains, Facebook and Twitter are becoming new ways of finding information:

Google’s search engine has thrived because PageRank uses democratic algorithms that tracked page links. By contrast, real-time discovery engines like Twitter and Facebok use a more dynamic kind of democracy, linking to content that users finds worthwhile. As a result, content on the web is splitting into two basic models, and understanding this distinction makes clear why Google’s centralized role is being threatened.

Simply put, it’s the difference between discovery and search, between the “Now Web” and the “Then Web.” Here’s a more specific analogy: In college, most of us spent a lot of time in the library but also in a social hub like the campus coffee shop. One was a place for digging up information, the other a more dynamic, conversational setting, where ideas were casually exchanged. Google has been the web’s library: archival, organized and oriented around research. Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, are coffee shops: instantaneous, conversational and oriented around discovery.

What we are looking at its the natural and somewhat chaotic move toward specialization of the Web. But as the web is broken down into more and more discrete parts, every tech company is trying to get a foothold in every territory. As a result of this chaotic scramble for specialized space, it's getting harder to pin down who is operating in which industry. So many tech companies are all operating in similar spaces, all trying to push ahead of the others and dominate the Next Big Thing. Consider the following:

Google owns Orkut, which is a social network popular in other countries. Google also owns YouTube, which is a way of finding videos. And Google is obviously still the king of search. Yet as the above link shows, Facebook and Twitter contain links to plenty of videos, so those are also ways of finding videos -- just like Apple's iTunes store. And Apple still makes computers, but now it is a music store as well, as well as a smartphone company. But Apple's not into search, and they aren't into video game systems. But those are areas where Apple operating system competitor Microsoft competes. And Microsoft is again trying to compete on Google's territory with its new search engine called Bing. And Google is sort of in the operating system business, as it makes operating systems for smartphones -- but it doesn't have its own phone. Amazon, in addition to selling books and CDs and other items online, now sells Kindles, which allow you to search for books and download them. But now there's a Kindle app for your iPhone, so is Apple involved in the e-book business?

It all makes you thankful for Research in Motion, which for now seems to be sticking to making Blackberries, but could become a search/social networking/laptop making e-book company any day now.

In this environment, it seems like competitors can come from anywhere. In fact, as more and more aspects of society become digitized, tech companies will be moving into more and more areas of the economy. The basic capability that all of these companies have is the ability to organize and broadcast digital content. As time goes on, I assume all of these niches will be filled with certain obvious leaders, and companies may learn certain areas that they have real advantages and certain areas where they should give up. Until then, for many aspects of technology, it's anyone's game and everyone's game.

America's Business Plan

I went back to Brown for my five-year reunion this past weekend. The reunion is held the same weekend as Brown's commencement, so I got a chance to hear our commencement speaker, Fareed Zakaria. His address was excellent, and in my mind boiled down to one single point: be optimistic about America's future.

He believes that the threats to the country are real, but that advances in science and America's openness will ensure that our nation remains at the forefront of global progress. His most interesting argument was that the rise of formerly third-world nations is a hopeful sign for America -- it simply means that billions more people will be unleashed to innovate, invest and participate in the global marketplace.

What I liked about the address was that it had a broad perspective on the forces that truly determine the course of history. The identity of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the current state of the stock market, the resignation of a CEO, or an isolated school shooting are not all harbingers of either utopia or armaggedon. This post by Lane Wallace on Andrew Sullivan's blog makes that point clearly -- global trends are often unpredictable and they are based on data that is difficult to sensationalize and thus overlooked:

...enthusiastic futurists and technology evangelists have been predicting revolutionary changes in our lives for the better part of the past century. And without question, our lives have changed. But rarely as quickly, or completely, or exactly in the ways, the predictions envisioned.

At this year's TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, Tim Berners-Lee, who's credited with inventing the World Wide Web, recounted that, when he first sent his boss a memo on his idea (which his boss had reluctantly agreed to let him pursue in his spare time), his boss's comment, in the margin, was a casual, "vague but exciting." And even Berners-Lee admitted, "The things that happened with the web were much more than we originally imagined."

In fact, it seems that the forces that drive a nation's future are often the forces that drive a company's future, or the globe's future, such as disruptive technological advances and global demographic trends, as I discusssed in this prior blog posting. Seth Godin wrote about external factors in business in his original post:

The external factor is not disconnected from your bet. It is your bet, your decision. Damning the gods of fate because you made the wrong bet makes no sense. I rarely see business plans that have a section entitled, "External forces we're depending on." Acknowledging that things out of your control will change is the first step in hedging your bets in advance, just in case.

Where will funding come from? What groups and ethnicities will grow in number and be empowered? Where are scarce resources located? These are the questions that smart CEOs as well as smart heads of state would be wise to ask. Zakaria is right -- beyond the daily drumbeat of bad economic news, or the occasional shock of a terrorist attack, the broader trends appear positive. He mentioned that there are more democracies today than there have ever been and that the world has more peace than it has ever had. As he quoted in his speech, "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." In other words, temporary setbacks aside, America's long-term operating environment looks strong.

We the People

As we approach President Obama's next Supreme Court justice pick (likely to be announced tomorrow, according to some sources), I think it's important to consider one of the key phrases of the Constitution that separates conservatives and liberals, and sometimes Republicans and Democrats: we the people.

The phrase "We the people" is in the preamble to the Constitution. So it's never been subject to any real litigation. But conservatives and liberals have very different ideas of who "the people" are. These different definitions explain many differences in the conservative and the liberal mindset.

To the liberal, the people means the people who are alive today. The current populace. The petitioner before the court in front of you. Protecting the people means keeping unemployment low and making sure that every American gets health care and a fair shot. It means understanding, feeling and alleviating the pain of the citizens of our country.

But the phrase "the people" can also mean something more akin to "the nation." As in, "I come from a people who are well accustomed to X" or "we are a tolerant people." In the past, conservatives saw themselves as stewards of a people -- not just today's citizens, but those who came before and those who will be around tomorrow. Traditionally, when liberals wanted to spend to alleviate the current real pain of the people, conservatives wanted to balance the budget, to alleviate the pain of generations to come. Conservatives were loathe to change ancient traditions, realizing that they were given to us, as a people, and that to change these traditions would change us as a people, even if the changes seemed to make sense in the present. Conservatives were traditionally the party opposed to international wars, understanding that while a threat can seem urgent today, war generally does not solve long-term problems, and can lead to the kinds of actions, such as torture, that (arguably) protect the people today but harm "the people" in the future, and disgrace "the people" of the past.

Conservatives were the grandparents, those who didn't give in to every current whim, fear or emotion, but who had an eye on the longer game -- the consequences that we couldn't see immediately. They were the ones who understood why something like the electoral college, which just seems silly if we take a quick look at it, might be a key component in making sure that varied states of varied size are able to remain unified. They wanted restrictions on graft and corruption, which angered those who saw occassional bribery as the fastest route to the desired solution. Conservatives were frustrating, because sometimes taking the long view really does ignore present pain, but they had a clear idea of their role -- temporary trustees of a beautiful, old, valued society.

In the lead up to Obama's Supreme Court pick, there has been a lot of emphasis on Obama's desire for justice who exhibit empathy and common sense. This posting by Stanley Fish in the New York Times today does an excellent job of describing the debate over empathy's role in a Supreme Court justice's rulings. Of Obama's style, he writes:

An Obama judge will not ask, “Does the ruling I’m about to make fit neatly into the universe of legal concepts?” but rather, “Is the ruling I’m about to make attentive to the needs of those who have fared badly in the legislative process because no lobbyists spoke for their interests?” Obama’s critics object that this gets things backwards. Rather than reasoning from legal principles to results, an Obama judge will begin with the result he or she desires and then figure out how to get there by what only looks like legal reasoning.

What this means is that Obama, unsurprisingly, wants a pick who will understand the liberal view of "the people" -- the people who are in the court suffering, who don't have the time or the ability to worry about what kind of precedent we are setting fifty years down the line, or why limiting the scope of the federal government -- when the federal government seems like the only institution that can help -- is an important goal. He wants the Supreme Court to be the last hope of an individual who has been beaten down by society and shut out of the American Dream. The conservative, on the other hand, sees the Supreme Court as the last hope of a carefully constructed societal order that might be overrun by temporary fads, mobs, crises, or programmatic needs. As Fish writes,

[Empathy] may be a fine quality to have but, say the anti-empathists, it’s not law, and if it is made law’s content, law will have lost its integrity and become an extension of politics. Obama’s champions will reply, that’s what law always has been, and with Obama’s election there is at least a chance that the politics law enacts will favor the dispossessed rather than the powerful and the affluent.

The debate over whether law is an extension of politics is the debate over who "the people" are. Should the law be seen as a sort of ancient, slowly evolving national treasure, or should it be seen as the expression of today's democratic will?

Now, at this point in 2009, the Democrats have managed to exemplify both definitions of the people. They are both more caring and empathetic and they seem more interested in being stewards of "the people" as a whole. They understand the long-term problems involved with occupying foreign countries, ignoring global warming and torturing suspected terrorists. And because of Bill Clinton's excellent fiscal stewardship, they are now even associated with balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility (we will see how long this latter association lasts).

If the Republicans are to become a majority party any time in the near future, they need to get back to their traditional role as the protectors of past traditions and responsible stewards for future generations. This Supreme Court nomination battle would be as good a time as any for the Republicans to begin to reclaim their traditional role. While I am a Democrat, I believe that we need two sides in this great debate, and caricatures of each side as beholden to special interest lobbies ignores the fact that good, reasonable lawmakers on each side of the aisle might simply have a different definition of "the people."

Twits

It's hard for me to explain why viewing people's Facebook updates can be so annoying. There's just something that gets under my skin when people post updates and are begging for some kind of validating response. I'm all for validation, but there's something about the post that tacitly pleads for it without actually pleading for it that I just can't stand.

A made-up example: "Woke up this morning to beautiful weather and went for a run on the beach. Sitting down now with a huge mug of coffee and the NYT crossword." What this person wants is for someone to comment on the status saying something like "Mmmmm, sounds perfect!" or "I'm so jealous -- that's my IDEAL morning."

I'm not sure what is more irritating though -- the egomaniacs who post every time they nail their hyper-productive Sunday morning routine, or the poor souls who play into the egomania. I'd rather people just post the following: "Woke up this morning earlier than you did and I went for a run. I'm very proud of myself, not only because I have the willpower to wake up early, but because I'm in great shape. I'm also intellectual and love doing the Times crossword puzzle. But I'm one of the people at the same time, so I DO need my coffee fix! Please feel free to praise me, and get ready for my next personal achievement to be posted."

Rant over.

Now, I'm not much of a Twitter user, but since Tweets are similar to Facebook updates, I'm sure that there's tons of overlap in how annoying Tweets can be. So I was really thrilled to see this new site: www.tweetingtoohard.com. Please check it out. They publicly list Tweets where people are "Tweeting too hard." A few examples:

nice compliment from Sting's voice coach to me "You're like him, you have a lot of internal awareness, know things." (I can rock that...:)

this morning i passed what i thought was a calvin klein ad, but it was just a mirror...how WEIRD!

We WALKED to the grocery store this morning. We are ADORABLE. And green.

and

I gave my cleaning lady a raise today, even though she didn't ask, as my own little contribution to fighting the recession.

Name-dropping. Activity-dropping. Praise-fishing. All of these are exposed at Tweetingtoohard.com. Finally, one of the most annoying and difficult to describe pet peeves of the Web 2.0 era is being exposed.

American Idol: The SPAN Bridge

Where does American Idol fit into the new, SPAN (Sustainable, Personal, Authentic, Networked) Society?

On one hand, the answer is obvious. American Idol is a throwback, a relic of a time when Americans all tuned into the same show, and were served up the kind of non-niche, generic fare that could have the widest possible appeal to the entire country. As the NYT states in an article on the series today:

“American Idol” matters not just as a pop culture phenomenon, but as an institution that works — with scary efficiency — at a time when so many other American enterprises seem flawed or imperiled. It stands out this season in particular: “American Idol” is a money-making machine in the middle of a worldwide recession, an old-fashioned must-see television hit at a time when the Internet and cable have eaten away at the networks’ hegemony.

In other words, American Idol is lacking a personal quality. It's the ultimate in mass-produced music. Singer-songwriters are not encouraged to participate -- rather, those who can best take the pain, joy, emotion of other songwriters and sing about it as if it were their own are rewarded. So it's also lacking an authentic quality.

But certainly part of the appeal -- and part of what makes it SPAN -- is found in two distinct features of the show: the fact that the audience decides the winners, and the presence of Simon Cowell. A culture that is getting used to taking matters in our own hands, whether participating in political campaigns, making our own tee-shirts or producing our own blogs, is tired of having studio executives tell them what to listen to. They want to choose pop music winners. In that sense, American Idol has crowdsourced a job usually saved for high-paid producers with an ear for what American teens and tweens want to listen to.

The other feature that speaks to SPAN Society is Simon Cowell. He brings a stark streak of authenticity to the show. He's not cheesy or sentimental. He knows what he thinks and he states it clearly.

Watching American Idol, (which I admit I do either at the very beginning to watch Simon rip apart contestants, or at the very end, so that I can participate a bit in pop culture) I do get the sense that the whole production is extremely dated. But at it's heart -- audience participation and the authenticity and honesty of Simon -- it's a bridge to the SPAN Society. The Times sums up the contradiction this way:

It’s a live show so elaborately edited and overly produced that it seems taped, yet at the same time, this formulaic series still manages to look spontaneous even in its eighth iteration.

[Late update: VentureBlog got to the American Idol/crowdsourcing angle as well, a few hours before me.]

Weekend at Bernanke's

We all remember the late-1980s classic moronic comedy Weekend at Bernie's. And we'd all like to forget Weekend at Bernie's II. These are important movies, however, in understanding the current financial crisis.

As a quick refresher, here's IMDB's synopsis of Weekend at Bernie's:

Richard and Larry are two best friends who discover that someone has been embezzling money from their company. When they inform their boss, Bernie Lomax, he is so apparently pleased that he invites then to his beach house for a weekend of fun and leisure and women. But once they arrive, they discover him dead! Richard wants to do the right thing and inform the authorities as quickly as possible, but Larry is determined to still try and have a weekend of fun and leisure and women.

After the tech bubble popped, and 9/11 happened, the economy, like Bernie, was dead. The problem is, we're a nation of Larrys. We have a hard time when people try to make us stop the party. So the Federal Reserve, in an effort to keep the party going, propped up the American economy with low interest rates.

Part of the fun and ridiculousness of Weekend at Bernie's was the fact that it seemed fairly obvious to us, the viewer, that Bernie was dead, but somehow the dumb guests had no idea, and never caught on to the fact that Bernie wasn't seen for the entire weekend without the help of Richard and Larry. Hauling around a dead guy is bound to lead to some longer-term pain (such as a potential jail sentence) than the pain of not partying, but Richard and Larry wanted to keep the party going. In their minds, maybe the partying could continue and they could somehow get away with the fact that they hauled a dead guy around a Hamptons beach house for an entire weekend without alerting the police.

Similarly, the Fed probably knew that lowering interest rates would cause some serious long-term pain, but they didn't want the party to stop. In fact, for a time, the Fed convinced itself that it could do both -- it could have extremely low interest rates without causing inflation.

In other words, like Bernie, the economy was being artificially propped up. But, low and behold, there were consequences for Larry and Richard, just like there were consequences for the economy. Eventually, the economy hit the skids again in 2008, and in Weekend at Bernie's II, we find out that Larry and Richard are fired. But once again, like good Americans, and like the Federal Reserve, they don't go softly into the night. No, they need to revive Bernie once more:

In the first film, Larry and Richard were forced to create the illusion that Bernie was still alive in order to avoid being killed themselves. In the sequel, Larry and Richard plot to use Bernie to find treasure he had buried at the Virgin Islands. Before stuffing the body into a suitcase and heading for fortune, however, Bernie is partially revived in a botched voodoo ceremony and made to walk toward the hidden treasure whenever he hears music.

Ah, the sequel. Always a little more extreme and outlandish than the original. But the lesson remains: when in doubt, revive the body any way you can.

The Fed learned the lesson well. So they went back to their old trick and did the same thing they did back in the early 2000s, except with a few new tricks. We've lowered interest rates to near zero, we've pumped almost a trillion dollars into banks, and we've passed an enormous stimulus package. And the result is, we've massively devalued the dollar and made it stupid to hold cash or to save. And so, once again, we're seeing inflation in assets like the stock market, where cash has headed for safety from inflation. And, voila, housing prices are ticking back up in some markets.

But this isn't necessarily a real uptick. Instead, the nascent recovery is more like a Weekend at Bernie's recovery. We're walking around with a dead body and sipping our cocktails. When the music of low interest rates plays, the economy will dance. But it's not really alive. If you wanted to be cute, you might even call this another form of voodoo economics.

A lot has been made of the fact that the VIX (or "fear" or "volatility") index is today at its lowest point since the crisis began. But the VIX doesn't just go around asking people how fearful or volatile they feel and come out with a number. The VIX is a measurement of volatility in stock prices. It's a measure of the potential of stock prices moving up or down drastically. Inflation expectations make it very unlikely that stock prices can move drastically lower -- inflation potential means that cash is still risky, so selling stocks for cash is still a bad move. But people are still uneasy about the future of the economy, so it's hard to see the stock market moving much higher. Therefore, the consensus seems to be that we'll trade in a range. Just like the Fed wanted, they've put a floor on an absolute collapse in asset prices, but by doing so, they've put a ceiling on how quickly we can recover. And like dead Bernie's blood pressure, our volatility is low.

I think this is the basic message of what's happened in the past year. We averted full-blown deflationary castastrophe (getting nabbed by the cops on accessory to murder charges and sitting in deflationary jail for several years), while setting in place an inflationary scenario where a true, healthy recovery is unlikely.

There's a reason it was only a Weekend at Bernie's. At some point, everyone will find out that without Larry and Richard hauling him around (which can't be sustained forever), Bernie would fall down. And without the Fed keeping interest rates dangerously low (which can't be sustained forever), the economy might fall down.

Not even in the movies can you haul a dead guy around a party pretending he's alive for more than a weekend. Let's hope that we've got a long weekend coming up.

Brooks and Dumb

David Brooks is one of my favorite columnists. This might be because his fellow Republicans have become so predictable in recent years that his semi-contrarian stances are fascinating in comparison.

But read his column today. Basically what he does is take a study and describe it. You have to wait about twelve paragraphs to get even the faintest hint of an opinion or a new and different take on the study that he describes. And then when you do, it's fairly boring. The study says that CEOs aren't flamboyant. Rather, they are persistent, consistent, and dull. He talks about this for at least a dozen paragraphs. Then he says that since all politicians are showy, personable and gregarious drama queens (there's a reason C-SPAN gets those sky-high ratings!), business leaders will need to become just as wild and personable, because they will take on the values of Washington D.C.. So those sober business leaders who never sold anything to the public based on charm or savvy are going to be corrupted by the wild radicals of Washington who are so fashionable and cunning.

We've got at least twelve paragraphs that demonstrate nothing other than Brooks' reading comprehension. Then we have a few throwaway paragraphs that make a point that's sort of okay, but not great. In fact, it's probably wrong. It's the sort of point you might make in a college class, get a mercy nod of approval from the professor, and then have him move right along.

The point of all this is that I will probably read about five blog posts today that are more interesting than what Brooks has to say. There's not even a link to the study that Brooks is discussing. And we had to wait about four days since Brooks' last column to get his book report-like discussion of the traits of CEOs. And Brooks is actually one of the better opinion columnists at the NYT.

When newspapers are thinking about what they offer the public that cannot be obtained elsewhere, highly-paid opinion columnists should not be on their list of things to save.

Ad Hominem Attacks: Sometimes Helpful

An interesting way to take a guru off his high horse is to throw an ad hominem attack at him. Sure, attacking someone's past behavior isn't a way of refuting his current argument. But it is a nice way to say to the audience, "Wait a second. This guy is brilliant at making himself seem like a guru who should get airtime. But he's actually not. He's actually got a long record of screwing things up. So before you go along with his half-brained ideas like he's the wise old Grandpa in Gremlins and end up with a trashed movie theater whose screen is ripped and there's popcorn all over the floor, let's take a look at the man who is making the statements, and then we'll get to the argument at hand."

TPM points out Matt Yglesias doing that to one such guru -- Newt Gingrich, who recently called for Nanci Pelosi to step down as Speaker of the House:

You know, Newt Gingrich knows a lot about saying stupid things and being forced out of the job as Speaker. ... But one way or the other -- I mean, I wasn't in the room, you weren't in the room, Newt Gingrich wasn't in the room. None of us know exactly what happened there. But whatever it is Nancy Pelosi knew about, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, they knew more. And ultimately, when we have a thorough investigation of what happened, the bulk of the blame has to lie with the architects of the policy, not with a member of the opposition party.

Now, the fact that Gingrich is a failed and disgraced former Speaker of the House doesn't really impact his argument, to be fair. But it does raise the interesting question of "why are we listening to this guy other than the fact that he insists on himself and probably takes every possible offer to get his face on TV?"

Surely there must be some reason why he is an expert. Was he Speaker during a period where a lot got done in Washington, or a speaker during a period of bitter partisan infighting and gridlock that led to a government shut down? (The latter.) Was he Speaker for more than five years? (No.) Was he the most recent Speaker of the House, before Pelosi? (No.) Recently run for President? (No.) Ever run for President? (Nope.) On the ticket? (Not even close.) Elected to any statewide office? (No. Note that Rod Blogojevich can put this on his resume but Gingrich can't.) Has he written several books that few people have read about the Civil War? Why, yes. Yes he has. (By the way, how much more can Amazon discount your book below $7.99 before it becomes more economical for them to burn the books for heat than to have them take up storage space?)

The lesson: sometimes you can get to be in the argument and get quoted because you have the confidence to insist on yourself as a guru. And sometimes if you do that, someone will question why you're even invited to the party by lobbing a sort of unfair but helpful ad hominem attack at you.

Facebook's Problem Child

Ever wondered what all the fuss is about Twitter? Do you feel like you're not even that into Facebook and now Twitter is like Facebook's wild kid from a previous marriage who throws @'s at you while you're trying to eat a pleasant dinner? Unfortunately, in this situation, you can't just splurge on a Wii, set it up in the kid's den, become his temporary hero and use it as like a magic ADHD vacuum cleaner so that you can get back to your adult conversations with Facebook. (Which were getting a little pointless and boring even before you met Facebook's kids.)

Well I'm here to tell you not to even waste time trying to suck up to Twitter and figure him out. There's an even wilder, faster, less vowel-y Twitter out there, and he's ready for his first dinner with Mommy's new friend.

Meet Flutter. Like Twitter, but less Tweeting, more Flapping. Shorter. Dumber. Faster. Smarter. Social. Share. Pancakes. Slower. Communitize. Everything is illuminated. Attention is overrated. Moore's Law. Harmonize. Revolutionize. Vulcans. Flutter.

How to Fire Your Gurus

My sister Talia came up with a brilliant line of philosophy back when she was about six years old.  It's one of those lines that people in my family now quote at certain appropriate times. Her statement?  "We all do dumb things."  Sounds simple enough, but it's a very difficult lesson to learn.

I've always been susceptible to gurus.  Gurus dispense advice.  I love advice.  I love watching interviews.  I love hearing what Warren Buffet has to say.  I love hearing Bill Gates or Steve Jobs give a speech.  I love panels where experts weigh in on who they think will win the next election or what startups will change the world.  There's something about my nature that makes me believe it all.  And so when I watch these shows, I believe that I am not just getting some dude's opinion which I can then tear apart and contrast with my own.  I believe I'm getting The Truth.

I understand that for a lot of people, distrusting gurus comes naturally.  For me, when I hear someone like Dick Cheney, it's hard for me to have the reaction that he's completely, totally, fundamentally wrong.  It's hard for me to believe that he hasn't thought the subject through. That he's not good at analysis.  To me, a man like Cheney, who has been a congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President of the United States cannot possibly be dumber than me on an issue where he has expertise.  He's gotta know something that I don't.  

But believing in gurus is paralyzing.  If you watch and read enough CNBC, you realize that everyone has an opinion.  If you follow them all, you can't make a move.  As Howard Linzon states in his blog, when it comes to finance, there really are no gurus.  Same goes for political analysts.  If you followed the advice of every guru who was sure that Barack Obama could never be elected President, you would have been a terrible political prognosticator.  

To stop subscribing to gurus, you have to watch Dick Cheney and honestly, truly believe that he doesn't know what he's talking about.  You have to watch CNBC financial analyst Jim Cramer and think that some of his opinions are buffoonish.  You even have to [note to self: Josh, don't go there, don't touch the Sacred Cow of people born from 1975-1990] realize that sometimes Jon Stewart sounds both pompous and uninformed.  You have to start calling them not solely the way others who have long track records of success and expertise have called them.  You have to call 'em like you see 'em.

For some this is easy, but I have a very deep respect for people with more experience than I have.  I think the first step to getting rid of gurus, if you have my temperament, is to live enough of life that you gain perspective and realize that most people have a very mixed track record.  2008 was a great year for that.  This year proved that even Warren Buffet is wrong sometimes, and that there very few people who are Warren Buffet in the first place.  I guess Talia reached that stage of life when she was six.  I'm 26, so I'm a late bloomer. 

To fire your gurus, you need to realize, as Linzdon says in a subsequent blog post, that failure is everywhere.  Somewhere there are some very smart people -- the kinds of older people you instinctively feel like asking for advice when you see them at a wedding -- who thought that Crocs was a can't-lose stock market investment.  People like Colin Powell -- COLIN POWELL! -- were sure that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.   I am always worried that I'll inadvertently grab an idea for a blog post and fail to credit the originator.  But that worry can also be paralyzing -- I mean, there are NYT columnists who outright grab entire lines from bloggers and publish them to millions of readers.

This past February, I was laid off from my first "real" job.  Of course, anyone laid off this past winter can take some comfort in the fact that their layoff was almost certainly due in part to economic reasons.  But the question always remains:  why me and not the majority who kept their jobs? I can look into that question forever, but a cold but almost liberating fact remains:  somehow, on some level, that layoff was a failure.

As Google says, the important thing is not to avoid failure, but to fail well.  This past year revealed that many of those elder statesmen who served as gurus were really just highly intelligent human beings who had enjoyed a long period of publicized success.  They cannot escape Talia's Law:  we all do dumb things.  Once you realize that the goal is not to follow a guru to utopia, but to keep moving, learning, adapting and changing, so that one day you might enjoy your long period of publicized success, the gurus become more expendable.  That's how build up the courage to go to your gurus and give them pink slips.  That's how you start acting like your own boss.

May the External Forces Be With You

Seth Godin makes a great point about starting new businesses in his blog:

No project, no brand, no company exists in a vacuum. You make bets about external forces when you build something.

If you want to cross the Atlantic by boat, you can build a sailboat. Your bet is that the wind will be right when it's time to sail. Or you can build a motorboat and deal with the noise and expense, but insulate yourself from the wind.

If you launch a $100 million magazine, you're making a bet that the advertising environment will support you a few years down the road. If you spend four years getting an advanced degree in computer engineering, you're making a bet that there will be plenty of high-paying jobs still waiting for you when you graduate.

If I had a hundred million dollars to invest in a business magazine, there's no way I'd invest a hundred million dollars in a business magazine. Why put all your chips on one medium, one source of revenue, one model?

The external factor is not disconnected from your bet. It is your bet, your decision. Damning the gods of fate because you made the wrong bet makes no sense. I rarely see business plans that have a section entitled, "External forces we're depending on." Acknowledging that things out of your control will change is the first step in hedging your bets in advance, just in case.

What are those external forces? First, you are betting on an industry. This means that the technology or business model of your industry will not be obsolete or superceded. It also means that there will be funding sources around who are interested in funding your industry.

You're also betting on your customer. This means that you are betting on demographics -- is the population getting older? Getting younger? Which nationalities or ethnicities will be great customers for your product? Are those nationalities or ethnicities becoming a bigger share of the world market? How much disposable cash is your customer likely to have one year from now? Two years from now?

You're even betting on employees. Are there enough people trained in your industry to support your product? Can you hire talented people at reasonable wages? How is the labor market going to change in the next five years?

Maybe most difficult of all, you are betting on a few fickle trends. Someone like Martha Stewart's brand wouldn't have worked in the 1960s and 1970s, but with the return to traditional values in the 1980s, she had an opening. J. Crew works when people are into the preppy look. If grunge returns, J. Crew is going to have a brand problem.

I'd imagine that most startup founders think these issues through, but they can be some of the more complex issues and headwinds facing a company. A lot of time one factor seems positive and another seems negative. It's probably one of the toughest things for a company's founder: predicting the future is both impossible and essential.

Loco-vores?

Not everyone is a fan of local, organic eating. According to some, if everyone is forced to eat locally, millions of Americans will starve. Watch Samantha Bee's groundbreaking reporting on how Michelle Obama's organic garden has sparked a national health emergency:

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Donors Choose Personalization

One of the coolest charities out there is undoubtedly DonorsChoose. My brother, who works in education, referred this charity to me last December, when I was asking friends if they knew of any great charities other than the classics where I could donate.

Here's the quick description of Donors Choose from their website:

DonorsChoose.org is a simple way to provide students in need with resources that our public schools often lack. At this not-for-profit web site, teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn. These ideas become classroom reality when concerned individuals, whom we call Citizen Philanthropists, choose projects to fund.

This charity is personalized on many levels. Teachers write the descriptions of their needs and choose the perfect project for their classroom that needs funding. Instead of a central school district bureacracy trying to create line items, the funding requests come from those closest to the problem -- teachers themselves. Second, donors can choose a cause that is personal to them. I'm sort of a news junkie, so I funded a request by a teacher to buy Time For Kids for all of her students to get them involved with current events. Finally, the students write personal, hand-written thank you notes to donors. This kind of authentic, personal feedback creates a real bond between donor and classroom.

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures blogged today about DonorsChoose.org, and linked to a cool "contest" where a company called Zemanta will give a reward to whatever charity is most blogged about. This post goes out to DonorsChoose.

[This blog post is part of Zemanta's "Blogging For a Cause" campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.]

How Bad Do You Want It?

Earlier, I blogged about a Front Porch Republic article that examined the ways in which our mobile, meritocratic culture can be harmful to local communities and those whose skills don't match the skills needed in the new society. It's an issue that I've taken up a few times on the blog because I really do think that society can be too impermanent, unnatural and unrooted. But according to Daniel Larson, I might just be full of it.

Key quote where Larison takes up the subject on his American Conservative blog:

The cosmopolites...see many of the advantages of localism but want none of the obligations. They are starved for what it provides, and so wish to escape the confines of their way of life, but they are unwilling to enter into the confines of the local, perhaps because they prefer status rather than happiness or perhaps because they have become so accustomed to the life of the displaced tourist that they cannot imagine being still for any prolonged period of time. The locavore and organic food habits that serve as proof that their way of life is in important ways unsatisfying are themselves a temporary remedy that serves to fill in the gaps and mask the costs of their way of life. The locals, meanwhile, want the products that the world of the cosmopolites can provide, and, as Jeremy argued, many of them want to enter into that world, never fully understanding that their homes will change dramatically and often for the worse as a result of their departure.

In other words, my cosmopolite longing for this old, rooted culture might just be that -- longing. I'm still living on the east coast. As someone who grew up in a dense suburb and has spent his whole life on the east coast among the "cosmopolite" culture, I feel like the grass is greener on the other side, but I'm still not quite ready to jump over. At the same time, the very people who live in middle America might occassionally complain about their way of life being eroded, even as they continue to reap the benefits of the technology and cheap products provided by our mobile, globalized, cosmopolitan economy. We're all complaining about wanting things to get back to how they used to be, without really doing anything about it.

Now maybe, as they say, "we're creating our own communities." Maybe we're having less face to face contact but much more laptop to laptop contact. Maybe we're replacing that communal hole in ways other than sitting on the front porch with a banjo and a lemonade. That's my hope.

But maybe, despite the noises that politicians and writers have made lately about creating a sustainable, local, authentic culture, despite the "new online communities" and the locavore movement, in the grander scheme, we're still allowing our society to become impersonal and inauthentic. If the latter is true, we have to ask ourselves: how badly do we really want it?

Small is Beautiful

Small is in. Why? There's a growing belief that small institutions result in more sustainable relationships. They result in more personal relationships. They result in more committed relationships.

According to the NYT, this now applies to banks. Why? Small banks can't take the same risks as big banks. Not because of different regulations. Not because they are less innovative. But because their incentive structure is different. Unlike big business, they have an incentive not to embarass themselves in the eyes of their peers. As the NYT article states:

Forget “too big to fail.” These banks consider themselves too small to risk embarrassment. They are run by people who grew up in the towns where they work, and their main fear is getting into a financial jam that will shame them in the eyes of their neighbors.

Small companies also seem to have a leg up in this new economy, according to Harvard Business Review blogger Peter Bregman.

The gap of confidence between small companies and big ones is growing. We used to rely on the security of big companies. That's why we worked for them. And hired them. And put our money in them.

But with the virtual collapse of AIG, Lehman, Citibank, GM, Chrysler, and many more — now even GE is in trouble — all that's changed. Now it's a risk to do business with the big ones.

We simply don't trust companies anymore. We trust people. And in big companies, it's hard to even find a person to trust as we scream "operator" into our telephones only to get transferred to another menu whose options have changed.

That gives small companies a huge advantage.

Small companies can also focus on niches where they have real expertise and can provide real value. As individuals increasingly divide into niches of interest as opposed to feeling like cogs in a large mass market, these companies can satisfy a real need:

There are hundreds of thousands of [small] businesses like John's. Small companies that aren't making millions but provide a good living for the people who work in them. Niche companies whose owners are trying to build sustainable businesses they love rather than fast-growing companies they can flip. They have no intention of retiring. They like working in them. And their clients know that. Which is why they have a loyal customer base willing to invest in the relationship.

Big investment banks are burning — but lots of small boutique firms, each with ten to twelve people, are opening up. And they're doing well. They've gone back to the fundamentals. Finding a niche in which they have value to add and deals in which they are experts. And then sitting across from other people in the deal, building the relationship, making reasonable commitments, and following through.

Small companies with low overhead, reliable owners, a small number of committed employees, personal client relationships, and sustainable business models that drive a reasonable profit are the great opportunity of our time.

I've noticed this myself in the law firm industry. I don't hear of any big law firms that are hiring at a junior level, but there are some opportunities in small law firms. It seems that clients are no longer willing to pay huge rates for an associate who doesn't know their business background, hasn't had years of training, and doesn't have a personal relationship with the company. When associates are moving in and out every year, the wheel needs to be reinvented over and over again.

Of course, not all big businesses or law firms are going out of business. There is something to be said for economies of scale, being able to staff ten smart associates on a single case, or having a massive R & D budget. But I think that the writers above are correct in sensing that the flip culture of the past few years may cede to a more sustainable, more personal, more authentic economy in the wake of the economic crisis.

Better Place Update

I've blogged about electric car network company Better Place before. The company provides electric car charging networks that use sophisticated network technologies to coordinate grids of electric charging stations across various areas.

One problem so far with traditional batteries in electric cars is that the range is limited. Better Place solves this problem by installing battery swap stations across a geographic area, so that if your battery runs out of power on a long trip, you can swap it out. They recently revealed their first swap station in Japan (h/t The Stimulist):

Step Sister Souljah

Andrew Sullivan calls out the media for their instant, unthinking praise of Obama for his "Sister Souljah" moment on torture. For background, Sister Souljah was a rapper who had songs with anti-white lyrics. Bill Clinton, campaigning in 1992, called her out publicly for her racism. The media loved it -- not so much for the merit of his position but because he did the best thing a politician can do in the mainstream media's mind: go against "the base." Here's Sullivan:

David Ignatius describes the president's about-face on torture photos as a "Sister Souljah" moment. The MSM cannot see the question of torture and violation of the Geneva Conventions as a matter of right and wrong, of law and lawlessness. They see it as a matter of right and left. And so an attempt to hold Bush administration officials accountable for the war crimes they proudly admit to committing is "left-wing." And those of us who actually want to uphold the rule of law ... are now the equivalent of rappers urging the murder of white people. And the authorization of torture is reduced, in David's words, to "controversial Bush-era issues such as interrogation."

There is truth and power. In this town, you know what side the MSM is on. Just keep on walking. And let's have no more curiosity about this bizarre cover-up ...

Now I'm sure that Obama did think through his decision, and this issue might not be quite as black and white as Sullivan makes it seem. But on his criticism of the media, I couldn't agree more with Sullivan here. Sullivan is post-partisan in the least 1990s, mainstream media kind of way. He's post-partisan in the way that many people of my generation are post-partisan. He reads widely. He thinks. He takes in dissent. He has clear, uncompromising opinions and he sticks to them. And when he finds out that he's wrong, he changes his mind.

But for some reason the old-guard of the media can't distinguish this kind of post-partisanship from the kind that ruled the day for years. The MSM fetishizes anything that seems like it gets the support of the moderate middle. Any position that can get some Democrats and some Republicans to agree is good. Any position that draws strong dissent from the opposite party is bad. Instead of respecting people like Russ Feingold or Ron Paul, who are post-partisan in that they think for themselves, these leaders are maligned because they just can't seem to get along. The better fellow Senators like you, the more "post-partisan" you are. If you take some conservative stands and some liberal stands, you're too difficult and cranky to figure out. If you take no stands, you're a leader. In the pre-SPAN Society, post-partisanship was about compromise. If Bush wants war, we'll give him a war but give CYA speeches warning about potential problems. If Bush wants two trillion in tax cuts, we'll give him one trillion.

Post-partisanship in the SPAN Society means being tolerant and open-minded. It means that you don't fit neatly into either party because you have some "conservative" positions and some "liberal" positions, not because your position is just a little bit of everything -- a little torture, a little war, a little tax cut, a little stimulus, a little Patriot Act. It doesn't mean that you just cut every tax cut, government program or moral outrage in half, smile for the cameras and call it a day.

An Army of iPods

I thought the iPod Touch was just something that Apple threw into the mix when you bought a new MacBook. Now I realize it's also something they throw in when you sign up for the army:

At their fingertips, soldiers can stay electronically linked to other troops, tap applications for language translation and cultural information, and access data such as maps, photos, videos and voice recordings. A variety of protective covers fit the iPod Touch casing-does it come in camo? Glare and scratch resistant coatings stick onto the touch-sensitive screen. All of which makes the iPod Touch rugged enough for a soldier in the field.

This made me think of another fascinating post on the Union Square Ventures blog, this one by Brad Burnham. In it, he talks of the flow of innovation changing:

At some point, I said that the vector of innovation has changed. It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. I suggested that one reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.

In the 1950s and 60s, innovation started at the most distant, centralized, powerful place possible (NASA), and then slowly trickled through society down to the consumer. Now, says Burnham, the innovation starts with the consumer, and is only later adopted by larger institutions like the military. I think the military iPod Touch story above is a perfect example to prove his point.

God's Crowdsourcing Ctd.

The post below on God as a crowd-sourcer makes the argument that many aspects of the web use the evolution concept over the intelligent design concept. I meant to link as well to this post from the Union Square Ventures blog, which was an inspiration for my argument, this time applying it not to the design of a site or program, but rather to the design of a company itself. The post is from waaaay back in 2005:

Nick is right, there are two ways to build a company (and probably many more).

You can design it from scratch, figuring out exactly what you want to build, getting it all down on paper, raising some money, and then building it. And there are plenty of success stories for that way of building a company.

Or you can just find yourself doing a startup because something you started as a hobby, or to serve your own needs, just took on a life of its own and you have no choice but to evolve it into a business.

We don't have a preference for one way or the other, but I will say that there is something particularly special about the companies that are created via the evolution approach.

They seem more "authentic", to borrow a word from David Beisel.

Locavore Update

This article from the NYT gives a great overview of the local, sustainable foods movement. Like many movements, it started as something small and authentic. But now bigger corporations are getting in on the game.

“You know the locavore phenomenon is having an impact when the corporations begin co-opting it,” Ms. Prentice said. “Everyone should know where things are processed. The ‘where’ question is really important.”

As the movement has grown in popularity, it has made some compromises along the way:

Other companies are embracing the term “local” in their own ways. Foster Farms, a $1 billion company that is the largest producer of poultry products on the West Coast, markets its fresh chicken and turkey as “locally grown” because it contracts with hundreds of local growers in the states where it operates.

Some producers are stretching local to mean locale, emphasizing the geographic origin of their food. Dairy products from California, oranges from Florida and almost anything made in Vermont are getting special attention from marketers. Kraft is trying to figure out whether people in Wisconsin will buy more pickles if they know the cucumbers that go into a jar of Claussen’s are grown there.

For some though, even foods that really are grown locally are not local enough. No, they need their food to come from their backyards. Check out this piece from the Kansas City Star about the "urban chicken" movement for more on this phenomenon.

Bottom-Up Empathy

One problem that I've always had with liberalism was its supposition that we need to care about the whole world's problems the way we care about our own. Of course, that would be the right thing to do, but it seems so unnatural and difficult. In fact, caring about the lives of strangers can devolve into condescension, which can devolve into an imperial "white man's burden" to save everyone from themselves. We all care about our children's suffering much more than the suffering of strangers. We care about people we know. Emerson, quoted by a reader of Andrew Sullivan's, puts it this way:

And the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact: his party, his sect, his church, his class of society: the man may be called, by comparison almost liberal and large-minded to whom it means anything so comprehensive as his own country or his own age.

The conservative would respond that that's the way things have always been. Let's preserve those old structures and not "remake the world anew." It's not good to spread your affections too broadly, the traditional conservative would argue. Keep your affection mostly for yourself, and then give it to your family, and then to your country, and only very rarely give your love to the rest of the world -- to strangers.

It's possible that a middle-ground solution is to simply develop policies which encourage individuals to form authentic relationships with more people around the world. If we can use technology to develop personal, authentic relationships with people across the globe, instead of "saviour/victim" relationships, then we won't need liberalism to convince us or force us to care about each other. We won't need liberalism to convince us that we are all one human family. Instead, that's what we'll naturally be.

Take the gay marriage debate as an example. The key to the growing acceptance of gay marriage is the fact that the culture changed and more gay people began coming out of the closet. As the majority of the population developed relationships with openly gay people, denying them the right to marry became more and more difficult. Gay marriage can be hard for people to accept, especially as a government mandate -- but only so long as they don't know any gay people who would love to be married.

Bottom-up, natural, authentic empathy is the middle ground -- and perhaps the future -- of politics.

God's Crowdsourcing

A lot of big companies nowadays are platforms. They don't create the content, they create the platform for you to create the content. (Craigslist, Wikipedia, Facebook, Blogger, YouTube). Either the customer personalizes an item him/herself, or a task or function is crowdsourced.

Sounds great. Democratic. Empowering. So what's the problem? For designers, it's not fun anymore. That's one reason why Douglas Bowman left Google:

Mr. Bowman’s main complaint is that in Google’s engineering-driven culture, data trumps everything else. When he would come up with a design decision, no matter how minute, he was asked to back it up with data. Before he could decide whether a line on a Web page should be three, four or five pixels wide, for example, he had to put up test versions of all three pages on the Web. Different groups of users would see different versions, and their clicking behavior, or the amount of time they spent on a page, would help pick a winner.

This article brought to mind another big lesson from What Would Google Do?: sometimes the best move is just to get your brilliance out of the way of the customer. Don't over-design. Don't over-predict. That, according to author Jeff Jarvis, is the key to craigslist founder Craig Newmark's success. He barely puts any effort into consciously designing systems -- rather he sets a few basic rules, provides the tools, and lets the people roam free.

To get theological/poetic, I can see God having this debate in his head. Does he want to design a world perfectly from scratch? Or does he get something better, more interesting, more creative, and more surprising if the Universe is a platform, and evolution creates the content. In other words, does God crowdsource?

Creationists say that the design of the earth is so beautiful that it must have been designed by a single, omnipotent God. Darwinists believe that what we have is the result of a sort of massive natural crowdsourcing.

But maybe God is more like the founder of a Web 2.0 company. God, CEO of startup Earth, is inundated with great ideas from various Angel investors, each of whom has a brilliant design idea for the world. "Forget all this," says God to the Angel investors. "Let's give Adam and Eve some DNA, command them to be fruitful, multiply, submit questions and comments, call customer service with their prayers, link their knowledge to others and embed this information in new generations. We will give them the ability to have a few mutations. We'll then see what works, and what doesn't -- what gets the most evolutionary votes and what is eliminated. Eventually, after billions of years (or, in Google's case, a few beta runs and some time in Google Labs), we'll get something pretty beautiful. I'll design the basic structure, give them some really cool tools and let the human customers figure out how they want their world to be."

Along these lines, in the book Emergence, Steven Berlin Johnson relates the story of a computer programmer who wanted to beat the world record for fewest lines of code needed to organize a certain set of random numbers. It was one of those age-old problems among computer programmers. Other programmers tried to come up with the most brilliant code just by using their own minds. What Johnson's programmer did, however, was simply let a computer run millions of completely random codes and see which was best at coming up with a code that solved the age-old problem. Eventually, his random code generator, built with certain core instructions, was able to solve the problem almost as well as any human computer programmer could.

The lesson: it's not about you. Even Douglas Bowman seems to understand this -- in the article, he didn't fault Google at all. He understands that Google, like God, may have realized that the best and most beautiful designs --like craigslist or the Universe -- are emergent. They come from from the shared input of millions of users, all testing out new pathways, turning back, and then inventing something new again. Human beings, like Google's designers, all have to come to grips with the fact that we're not supposed to get it right instantly. Our choices are flawed. Our history and our lives are the result of trial and error. They are made with only the vaguest hope that a few of our decisions can play a small part in the world's long perfection.

[late update: for the spark for this idea, check this post: http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2005/11/evolution_vs_in.html]

Pop(inski) Culture

As I've written before, one of the best reactions a customer or user can have when they see a product is "Wow, they know me!" Companies like Muze Clothing, which makes tee-shirts with movie quotes, base much of their business on getting that reaction from customers. If Muze has a tee-shirt with a quote that you yourself have used, you'll spend money on it because it feels so personal and authentic.

That's how I felt watching this awesome promotional video (below) for Wii's new Mike Tyson Punch Out game (h/t Mike Leahy). When I was a kid I spent hours playing Punch Out and watching my siblings do the same. It's the kind of connection that feels very personal and authentic. For instance, even putting the video game aside, I'd be much more likely to buy a tee-shirt that had a Punch Out character on it than just some tee-shirt from the Gap. Check it out:

The Green Divide

In the midst of the economic downturn, the New York Times says venture capital funds are shifting their investment strategies in the cleantech sector. From 2005-2007, the excitement was in new fuels and alternative energy sources. Silver Spring was a typical example of the company that was too boring to get a venture capital firm's interest during this time:

Investors in clean technology were just not excited about Silver Spring, because it makes hardware and software that utilities use to connect electric meters in a digital grid. They were more interested in companies that envisioned making energy from the sun’s rays, algae or tropical plants.

There's now a split is between companies that want to shoot for the moon (investors in alternative energy) and companies that want to improve the way we use current technology (investors in energy efficiency technologies). Many of the energy efficiency companies use networks, grids and personal energy use measurements to save consumers money. Recently, this group has gained the upper-hand because firms are looking for less capital-intensive investments.

Visionaries such as Vinod Khosla, of Khosla Ventures, aren't ready to cede the green ground to "boring" investments just yet:

“I think that’s a false generalization for people who take a very superficial view of clean technology,” said Vinod Khosla, the firm’s founder. “It’s not that hard to find ways around capital intensity. We are very active in doing that, and it involves technology or business strategy.”

Despite Khosla's optimism, in a tough fundraising environment, the article suggests that those funds that bet big on the next biofuel or solar technology might be regretting having so much money tied up in a risky bet when smaller and less capital-intensive investment opportunities were out there:

“There are a lot of people who went down that path of solar and fuels and wish they didn’t,” Mr. Grosser said. “From where we sit, we are very grateful we didn’t put a pile of money down.”

Google, Goliath and OODA

I've been reading What Would Google Do?, and one of the key themes is that Google "makes mistakes well." Google doesn't wait and hold back new technologies and programs that it has already deemed perfect. Instead, they release everything in beta, gather information, and then adapt, change and tweak the product until it meets their standards. Their ability to gather information and act on it, rather than simple genius, is one of the keys to their success.

Malcolm Gladwell, in this recent column in the New Yorker, argues that similar techniques aided David, Lawrence of Arabia and the Kentucky Wildcats in their quests to defeat larger opponents. He says that speed, adaptability, and rapid information gathering are why insurgents are capable of beating much "larger" foes. He uses David from the Bible as an example:

“The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.”...David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.

In other words, David wasn't bigger, stronger or more skilled than his opponent. He just decided what he was going to do more quickly. He didn't wait for the opponent to respond. He didn't go along with the conventional back-and-forth, give and take, wait-your-turn culture of ancient combat. Gladwell also states that underdogs can win basketball games by employing the full-court press and doing away with basketball's wait-your-turn culture:

Pitino trains his players to look for what he calls the “rush state” in their opponents—that moment when the player with the ball is shaken out of his tempo—and L.S.U. could not find a way to get out of the rush state.

Reading about Google, Goliath and the Wildcats, I realized that bloggers operate in a similar state. They publish quickly, can tenaciously stay on a story if necessary, move to a new story when needed, enlist loyal supporters to help gather information and correct mistakes quickly and with ease. They are publishing insurgents.

The heart of this strategy was discovered long before the rise of Google. In the 1980s, U.S. military strategist, Colonel John Boyd, popularized the concept of the OODA Loop, a battlefiend decision-making strategy. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. OODA is what Google, David, underdog basketball teams, and bloggers all do.

The basic concept is simple. Whoever can "cycle through OODA" the fastest will generally win in air combat. Rapid cycling through OODA puts the opponent in what Pitino called the "Rush State." The unpredictability and unobservability of a fighter pilot who is quickly cycling through OODA makes defeating him virtually impossible. If an enemy fighter pilot can observe, orient, decide and act in the time it takes you to observe, your observation is meaningless by the time you get to the second step.

A big part of success in the SPAN Society comes from having an OODA attitude. Using modern communication networks, you can surprise, stun and disorient your opponents. According to both Gladwell and Boyd, it's not necessarily the brute force applied or even tactical skill that makes the difference in combat. It's the ability to out-observe and out-decide your opponent that matters. Whoever gathers information (observes), processes that information (orients), makes a decision (decides) and executes that decision (acts) in the shortest period of time, cycling through the loop again and again, will win the battle.

These skills, above and beyond brute force or manpower, are the slingshots of SPAN.