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Jim

The Dash Button - Can you say lock in?

Amazon announced the Dash Button this week and most of the buzz was of the “is this an April fools joke?” variety. That’s unfortunate because it’s a really interesting development and deserves more careful consideration. The Button is simple but it demonstrates the impact of inexpensive inter-networked things.

 

Simon Wardley’s take was probably the most interesting I’ve seen, if a little bit breathless. The Dash Button is best suited for recurring consumables and while that will hurt local grocers, I don’t see it cratering their businesses despite the importance of paper towels and milk to their bottom lines. I also don’t buy into the idea that Bezos bought the Post (and Buffett bought Media General) to turn it’s printing presses and delivery trucks into a Button manufacturing and distribution engine. 

 

To put my money where my mouth is I bet Simon a cup of tea that Warren Buffet won’t be making a “small fortune” by 2030 on the manufacture and distribution of digital electronics via printing presses. He should have said “Berkshire Hathaway” because I’ve got not only the weight of my argument on my side but the actuarial probability of Warren’s expiration by then as well. If I lose, I’m counting on the mists of time to intervene on my behalf and maybe Simon will just forget our bet by then. 

 

The thing that struck me immediately about the Dash Button is that each one is branded. It’s not a configurable device that you the user can connect to any product on Amazon. There is a limited set of products from large manufacturers that you can choose. Why did Amazon, the exemplar of the long tail in retail, give you so few options? I mean, Amazon’s whole business has been about virtualizing supply so that they can *offer* you everything without necessarily carrying the cost of stocking it. Maybe this is no big deal, but Amazon *narrowing* your choices seems likes a big deal, and a kind of reversal.

 

Amazon might have taken this approach to simplify the Button-using experience. There is already some (maybe not insignificant?) friction in authenticating the device to your wi-fi. Perhaps Amazon thought that if you had to link a particular button to a particular product and quantity it would tip you over some to-hell-with-it complexity threshold.

 

Or, and I think this is more likely, Amazon sees the Button as a way to increase their marketplace leverage.  Buying space on a branded Dash Button might be the digital equivilent of the shelf slotting fees that get your label at eye level. If you pick the product, no slotting fees. If they pick, they can get paid and presumably brands are going to pay (now or in the future) for the privelage of being included. Just like on grocery shelves the larger brands will be able to better afford it, and it will probably be worth it to them.

 

When you go to the grocery store to buy consumables, P&G et al are relying on brand power and shelf placement to keep you buying the same thing every time you go in. It works pretty well, but there is the potential for leakage. Other brands can buy eye-level space too, and they can offer coupons with littly blinky lights to catch your attention and tempt you to switch. However, P&G knows that once you put a Dash button on your washing machine you’ll never even go down that aisle again. In fact, you may not even notice when the price goes up. P&G will be turning Tide into a recurring (and unthought about) revenue stream like the cable bill that goes straight to your credit card. Brands that participate will be paying for the privelage, but in return they get even greater customer lock in and loyalty. Lock in that can be monetized with future price increases and lower marketing costs. It’s the brand equivalent of that thing on your phone where the app defaults to “sure, you can access my data."

 

Pulling this thread a little bit further, you might wonder why the button isn’t just built into the product packaging instead of shipped out as a separate item (I did). I think there are a few reasons. First, the electronic components inside the Button cost about $1.50 or so. That’s not a lot to amortize across a year or more of purchases (until the battery dies) but it would be too much to add to every in-store purchase (shipped re-purchases would be packaged without it) given that many of them would go unused. 

 

Of course, the bigger reason (that made me go “duh” when I thought of it) for this is that this *is* a disintermediation play and no grocer is going to allow a Button’d product on their shelf that encourages Amazon re-purchases. That’s the button that the large grocery chains should have built (but didn’t for the reasons that Simon points out). 

 

Actually, I think that’s wrong. This isn’t a disintermediation play (you won’t be buying Tide direct from P&G), this is a *reintermediation* play that simplifies P&G’s logistics and gives them better customer lockin, but with a tradeoff should scare them. If Button works they will get the lock in they want, but via a partner with the kind of market power that only Walmart wielded in consumer goods up until now. It looks attractive today, but down the road they’ll probably be looking at Amazon the way book publishers do.

 

Oddly, while Amazon isn’t letting consumers (or retailers) configure their own Dash Buttons, they did also announce the Dash Replenishment Service that allows developers to embed auto replenishment into a device’s electronics (think printer cartridges) either through a button push or automatically when something runs out. It doesn’t appear that Amazon charges any fees for this they appear to doing it for the spend-through it will generate.

 

By the way, if there is a surprise in this, it’s that Walmart didn’t do it. After all, there would be tremendous synergies between in-store and online purchases. Walmart *could* put buttons on the shelves with no worries about losing the downstream business, and they are a reasonably technical company (at least in analytics) so might have been immune to some of the innovation problem of more traditional retailers. However, without Amazon’s online focus plus growing hardware competency, it probably just wasn’t in the sweet spot of possibility.

 

It’s worth returning to Simon’s notion about the tie-in between newspapers and the Dash Button for a moment. The Dash Button solves the problem of recurring orders of high-use consumables, but it may make the problem of marketing new products worse as a result (if it keeps you from even walking into a grocery store, or down certain aisles). Newspaper ads with embedded buy buttons might be the perfect antidote, assuming they still exist. 

 

I see some difficulty in this though. Assuming it becomes practical to print electronics as complex as wi-fi or bluetooth onto newsprint, it seems unlikely that we would go through a cumbersome wi-fi authentication process to push a buy button on a one time ad. Would we authenticate an entire newspaper, or even our subscription? Maybe, but if my copy of the paper isn’t electronically unique all kinds of fun pranks come to mind. My neighbors have barking dogs that just won’t shut up. I’d love to stand on the sidewalk in range of their wi-fi and push all the buttons for incontinence products, even if all it does is fill their inbox with “did you order this?” messages.

 

Asking a printing press to print unique electronics and then deliver each version to the right house so that wi-fi authentication only has to be done once is going to be a hard and logistically expensive problem to solve. So, pick your poison: delivery custom uniquely personalized papers to each doorstep or accept a non-authenticated “buy” button sitting on your doorstep. Near field communications embedded into the paper might solve the authentication issue by enforcing proximity with a reader in your possession (and authenticated to you), but then you might as well skip the cost of embedding electronics and just a QR Code. 

 

This post is about first impressions, which needless to say may turn out to be wrong, and there is one other impression that the Dash Button made on me on first encounter. When I watched Amazon’s video the thing that jumped out at me was the giant cardboard box used to deliver that one jug of detergent. With the Dash (not the button) Amazon advertises that you can scan items to add to a list for future delivery, but with the Dash Button they seem to be saying that every button push will be delivered separately. In an era when grocery stores are encouraging us (or compelling us, depending on where we live) to re-use grocery bags, this strikes me as irresponsibly wasteful. And that’s not counting the fuel cost to deliver those packages to our doors. 

 

 

Figure: That's an awful big cardboard box for one jug of Tide. 

 

I grew up during the gas crises of the 1970’s. In that era we were encouraged to “make all of your stops in one trip to save gas.” People have begun to comment on the societal cost of individual Amazon deliveries of every little thing compared to a bulk shopping trips. But here Amazon seems to be outdoing themselves. They already hide the incremental cost of delivery inside of a blanket Prime account membership to take the sting out of adding a $5 delivery charge to each delivery of a $10 item but with they Button they seem to give up any pretense toward sustainable practices. It’s fascinating to see this story the same day I’m reading these stories about Canadian deforestation. Amazon, if you are going to rule this much of the American retail economy you’re going to need to learn to be more responsible than this, even if we don’t always encourage you to with our purchase habits. A simple default setting that bundles purchases unless a rush order is indicated would work wonders.

 

Looking at Dash, Dash Button, and Dash Replenishment Service, it’s clear that Amazon is intent on locking up our recurring purchases. The Dash Button is fascinating because it hints at potential for cheap, essentially disposable, networked hardware to fundamentally influence business models and business relationships and, in this case to make a recurring ordering system actually work. I wouldn’t underestimate its impact. 

Getting out of my Skinner Box

When I was a kid my teachers told me I was “hyperactive,” and they gave me lots of demerits to emphasize their point. I’m pretty sure, had I been born later, I would have been considered ADHD. I coped reasonably well for most of my life, but the advent of the smart phone was not good. Since then I’ve struggled to stay focused long enough to write and do other things that require stretches of solitude and flow. These days the one two three punch of laptop, smart phone, and Twitter are enough to keep me nearly always distracted. 

 

I have tried all of the things people try. I used RescueTime for a while but I really didn’t like all the tracking. So, I tried Freedom but I tended to just re-boot my computer when I thought to myself “I just need to look up that one reference, I’ll turn Freedom back on as soon as I do.” An hour of surfing later I’d ruefully contemplate the inadequacy of a reboot to inhibit distraction - it simply doesn’t cost enough.

 

More recently I set up a second computer that doesn’t even have a working web browser on it and started working in an attic room with the wifi turned off downstairs. I figured at least then I’d have to make a trip down and back up the stairs to turn the wifi back on. Sometimes it works. Sometimes I just get more stair climbs on my fitbit. I’ve also used all the minimalist text editors. Whatever. They are nicely distraction free in their design, but they're just a screen away from the distractions. When the itch starts to build they do nothing to prevent the quick alt-tab into the rabbit hole. 

 

I mediate regularly, I don’t check email or twitter before noon (or try not to, today I made it till 11:45). I turn off all of the notifications on everything. At one point I even considered buying a cross-country round trip flight just to have 12 hours without wi-fi just so I could finish an important project. Of course GoGo broke that strategy just as battery life got long enough to make it viable by putting wi-fi in the sky. Our last bastion of quiet ruined. I even tried using an old typewriter to get away from my computer. That sort of worked but it was manual with a heavy action that tired out my fingers too quickly, the inked ribbons were a pain in the ass, and OCR turned out to to be a painful process to get to a digital output. Also, it just felt too Luddite’y and Unibomber’ish, even by my lax standards.

 

At Alistair Croll’s BitNorth conference this year, Brydon Gilliss talked about using software intended to restrict your child’s access on your phone to restrict yourself. Cool idea. I think. I haven’t tried it yet. Seems too easy to circumvent. Yet, it was obvious from listening to Brydon that I’m not the only one trying to deal with online world distractions. Of course I’m not, articles like this are everywhere. I also don’t think you have to be ADHD to experience it, but I suspect it makes the problem worse.

 

Recently I tried something new and I think it might be working. This isn’t an end all solution to digital distraction, but it seems to work pretty well for when I need to write something and really need to be uninterrupted for a couple of hours. I think of it as my digital Faraday cage, or my concentration cave, or something. It doesn’t matter what I call it, it’s simple and it consists of two three things:

 

1) An absurdly dumb but useful Alphasmart Neo word processor that I bought used from the Houston school district for $44 on eBay with fresh batteries, a cable, shipping, and the guarantee that it had been tested and worked. It accepts typed keystrokes and saves them to a file. That’s it.

2) A $15 cell phone with a SIM card sans data plan. I can be reached, barely, since no one has the number, but I’m not going to absentmindedly pick it up and play with it.

3) My local coffee shop. It’s comfortable, serves a lot of my non-prescription ADHD medication, and is a far enough walk from my home wi-fi and smart phone (left there on the counter) to effectively deter distraction.

 

I’m at that coffee shop right now and I’ve been here for an hour so far without checking email, Twitter, or any other part of the distracto-net. This is good. If you think an hour doesn’t sound like a long time, don’t be a hater. For two long I’ve measured my productivity in 20 minute chunks. This is amazing.

 

Here’s how it works. I sit down with nothing but a pad of paper, a pen, the Neo and my feature phone (just in case there’s an emergency, and close family needs to get in touch with me), and maybe a hardcopy of my last draft of whatever I’m working on. I turn on the Neo and push one of the eight buttons that open a file and I start writing. There is no Internet. No Kindle. No games. No nothing. 

 

That’s not all that makes this device conducive to flow though. Its small liquid crystal display only shows five lines of text at a time so only the current paragraph, or maybe a line or two of the previous one, is visible. My thoughts are confined by the limitations of the machine to just this moment and this moment only. To remember something for later in the piece I resort to pen and paper. Outlines happen there too. This is as close as you can get to a typewriter without needing a scanner and OCR software later.

 

My purchase of the Neo was inspired by one line in Brian Christian’s fascinating read The Most Human Human: “When I type into ... my word processor,…” Re-reading it now I realize he almost certainly meant word processing software on a conventional laptop computer, but when I saw the words “word processor” my minds eye saw him typing into an old Brother or Wang or something like it. When I reflexively Googled “word processor” the search turned up some links about journalists and writers using the Alphasmart Neo to avoid distraction. Apparently this is a thing. I bought one about two hours later.

 

The reason it took me two hours is because I got sidetracked by a link to this beautiful device, The Hemingwrite. What an absurd yet perfect thing, made more perfect by the fact that it originated in Detroit. Basically it’s a Neo, but with the best touch typist keyboard obtainable and updated with a continuous wi-fi connection to your Evernote account. Naturally I pre-ordered one of these too.

 

It was a total impulse buy, and I already kind of regret it because the Neo is working out so well, but I’m justifying the spend because I just so badly want the Hemingwrite to exist in spite of the glut of secondhand Neo’s out there. I love the idea that someone is building hardware that does less so that we might be focused enough to do more. It’s a wonderful kind of simplification. If it takes off maybe other people will build other cool things like it. We need more of that kind of hardware diversity, I think.

 

This way of working may be a thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s not weird. At least to the culture at large. As a quick aside, here’s something fun to try. Go to the cell phone store and buy a cheap feature phone. “Are you buying this for your child?” “Nope, it’s for me.” “Oh, but we see you already own an up-to-date smart phone, did you lose it?” “Nope, it’s right here. I’m buying this phone so I can leave the smart phone at home. It’s too distracting.” “… oh."

 

Anyway, this is how I write now. For at least those periods where I need to focus on a particular project, these two devices are the key that let me out of my Skinner Box. They let me put enough physical distance between me and the pellet lever that I can find some peace from the mind traffic for a bit, and make some room for flow. It feels nice. 

Public vs. Private Cloud: Price isn’t enough

Last October Simon Wardley and I stood on a rainy sidewalk at 28th St. in NYC arguing politely (he’s British) about the future of cloud adoption. He argued, rightly, that the cost advantages from scale would be overwhelming compared to home-brew private clouds. He went on to argue, less certainly in my view, that this would lead inevitably to their wholesale and deep adoption across the enterprise market. 

 

I think Simon bases his argument on something like the Rational Economic Man theory of the enterprise. Or, more specifically, the Rational Economic CFO. If the costs of a service provider are destined to be lower than the costs of internally-operated alternatives, and your CFO is rational (most tend to be), then the conclusion is foregone.

 

And of course, costs are going down just as they are predicted to. Look at this post by Avi Deitcher, Does Amazon’s Web Services Pricing Follow Moore’s Law? I think the question posed in the title has a fairly obvious answer. No. Services aren’t just silicon, they include all manner of linear terms, like labor, so the price decreases will almost certainly be slower than Moore’s law, but his analysis of the costs of a modestly sized AWS solution and in-house competition is really useful. 

 

Not only is AWS’ price dropping fast (56% in three years), but it’s significantly cheaper than building and operating a platform in house. Avi does the math for 600 instances over three years and finds that the cost for AWS would be $1.1M (I don’t think this number considers out-year price decreases) vs. $2.3M for DIY. You’re mileage may vary, but these numbers are a nice starting point for further discussion.

 

These results raise an interesting question, if the numbers are so compelling, why did Walmart just reveal that they are building a ginormous private cloud? Why would anyone?

 

Let’s look at some numbers. There is a large east coast bank that has about 120,000 server images. Let’s assume to simplify things that those aren’t just virtual images but map to hardware nearly one to one. 

 

I’m almost certain that BigBank's costs aren’t as high per unit as 600 Corp's. At over 100,000 instances they’ll experience at least some of the scaling benefits that AWS itself has. Rather than do a careful estimate, let’s just assume that their efficiency is half way between AWS and 600 Corp. If that were the case, their cost to buy, operate, and manage those servers might look like: ($1.1M + $2.3M)/2 * 120,000/600 ~ $340M over three years. I’ve seen it reported that they have 4000 developers and a total annual IT budget of $750M so these numbers seem at least reasonable.

 

So, if Rational CFO makes big bank switch everything to AWS, and ignoring switching costs for now, what will they save?

 

$340M - $1.1*120,000/600 ~ $120M in savings over three years, or about $40M per year. Again, this leaves out transition costs, and it also ignores out-year AWS price decreases, but it’s probably in the ball park.

 

$40M annually is a lot of money and no CFO would ignore it, rational or not. But total revenues at this company are $34B with profits of $10B/year. So, the incremental benefit of moving all compute to AWS is only .4% of profit. Again, that’s not nothing, but it’s not a top-line driver of business results.

 

Interestingly, even if AWS were to continue improving its cost advantage through a combination of increasing scale and Moore’s Law, all the way to free, a move would still only improve this company’s bottom line by .8% annually. 

 

I think this is the point that some public cloud proponents miss. We are talking about decisions that at least feel like high risk and they don’t seem to produce the material levels of ROI necessary to give up control.

 

This is not unlike the choices consumers make every day when they buy a car and choose the convenience of an SUV over the fuel economy of alternatives. For many people, the incremental fuel cost just isn’t that big of a deal in the context of their total household budget. If they do choose not to go with an SUV it’s often because of other concerns.

 

I think private cloud will be around, at least in very large enterprises, for a long time and for similar reasons. The control the CIO (and general counsel) seeks will trump the narrower interests of Rational Economic CFO. And I don’t see lots of CIO’s taking huge risks and kicking off expensive five year transition plans to improve profitability by .4%.

 

Two more thoughts before I wrap this up.

 

It’s possible that the meta-trend of corporate digitization (meaning, IT has a front end business enabler rather than just  back end record keeper) will make IT costs a more material component of a lot of businesses. This might change the character of an analysis like this for some businesses, however, I used a bank as my example, and they are already using IT aggressively at the front end of the business and have high IT costs relative to revenues. These guys have the most to gain by switching, and so far, aren’t. In fact, so far they are the kinds of companies most interested in projects like Open Compute because they see the future in their own data centers.

 

On the other hand, we might argue that companies that use IT less aggressively would be more likely to take advantage of public cloud. The argument here would be that, since they run fewer servers, their internal costs are higher on a per-server basis (they are less efficient because of lower scale) so their apparent savings per server would be higher. This is probably true, but they would also see savings *as a percentage of profit* even lower and less material. Better savings on a per unit basis, but perhaps even lower down the CIO / CFO’s priority list on a magnitude-of-impact basis.

 

Another common argument toward public cloud is “well, of course the legacy stuff is stuck, but the new stuff will go to the cloud.” This may be true, and there are obvious examples of this happening, but I don’t think it’s any more of an iron clad argument than it’s more general cousin.

 

Moving some workloads to the cloud while maintaining core systems in house adds complexity and almost as much perceived risk as moving everything, but for much lower apparent savings (How much would that bank I mentioned save by putting 100 machines on AWS?). This will certainly happen, especially for discrete workloads that are time-variant, but I’m not convinced that moving all new workloads to AWS is anyone’s low energy state.

 

I’ll caveat all of this with a “who knows?” and a shrug. However, if you’re confused as to why enterprises are taking so long to adopt public cloud, it might not be because they are stupid, it might just be that the risk relative to the savings isn’t enough to drive the behavior you were expecting (or depending on).

 

Simon, what did I get wrong?

Net Neutrality: They're too mad, we're too happy

The Net Neutrality vote is over and to some people the results suggest an end of America as we know it. To the net neutrality haters an un-elected body just voted on an impenetrable secret protocol whose true purpose is to enslave our minds with the Obamanet. Or, according to Mark Cuban, it’s little more than a vendetta against the cable companies because, I don’t know, a Jim Carey movie made us hate them or something.

On the other hand, the regulation = freedom crowd seems to think that this 300 pages of unseen but inspirational prose has finally secured the unicorn future we’re due. We’ll graze on an equal access commons of high-rez candy corn planted by anyone with a network connection, and flitted to us at light speed without regard to its maker’s race, creed, or ability to pay. But to me, it’s mostly disappointment with how policy gets made and some agita about when and how the inevitable unintended consequences will reveal themselves. Even now it’s really hard to know what we’re cheering for, or angry about, and whether the policy we haven’t seen but still manage to love or hate will come even close to achieving its lofty goals.

I count myself as part of the “we’re” on the happy side because I’ve been generally for doing something to improve net neutrality in the face of increasingly obvious monopoly power at the telecom layer of the Internet. Prices are high, speeds are low, and the network innovation the haters are afraid of choking off isn’t happening anyway. Unless you count what Google is doing. But they’re doing it as a defense, and they aren’t doing it in enough places to matter.

Besides, this proposal doesn’t do much to address the last mile, excepting for it’s support of municipal networks. From what I can tell this set of regulation mostly addresses upstream problems of access and equality of traffic and will do little to address existing structural problems in our local markets.

Let me caveat my apparent certainty in the previous paragraphs though by saying that it has been extraordinarily difficult for concerned citizens (including me) to understand the issues and advocate for sensible policy in the midst of a debate consisting mostly of over simplifications and false equivalences. The debate, as it played out in public, was far from informative and tended to serve as little more than a Rorschach test of political ideology, a proxy for our voter registration cards, and the low-entropy implications of our political leanings. Right says free markets! Left says regulation!

The cable company and telecom’s lobbyists, while spewing money from a firehose, have teamed up with some members of the right to stoke this unfortunate dichotomy hard. Where we could have used proposals, too many of them resorted to demagoguery. This was their moment to engage in meaningful policy debate because frankly, a reasonable opposition might have had some useful things to say, but they have become so reflexively bombastic, and so reliant on the harangue as the oratorial technique du jour, that it never seemed to occur to them to treat this seriously. “Obamanet” this, “Obamanet” that.

Even Darrell Issa, the supposed tech guy in Congress, filled his twitter feed with nothing but predictable nonsense designed to stoke fires of uninformed rage-grumbling. I guess I’m not surprised. Habits once formed are hard to break and CPAC was just around the corner, so maybe he just go excited. I’m just even more disappointed in him than usual though because this seemed like an area where he might know better and could have contributed reasoned counterpoint to a proposed policy that was both secret and probably wanting.

Mark Cuban, always more than a little bit of a mad hatter, started to say some important things but then managed to go off the rails with ill-timed Ayn Rand references (are there any other kind?) and the unfortunate reveal of his credibility-straining Glenn Beck bro crush. His other argument that the Internet is just fine and needs no fixing is misleading at best and probably shows just how out of touch he is with what a $200 Internet bill means to most people. Ted Cruz? Too ridiculous for comment.

Meanwhile the left (or more accurately the pro- net neutrality true believers of whatever party) act as though we’ve never regulated competition-challenged markets before and have nothing to learn from our previous mistakes. Railroads, utilities, defense contracting, desktop software, airlines … all offer lessons in unintended consequences, all of which I guess we’d rather ignore as being off message. Some of these folks are already waking up to realize that maybe they aren’t as happy as they thought they were because the FCC didn’t create a pricing commission to regulate price. I think they should be happy that the relatively light touch of this regulation doesn’t set the stage for some future Reagan to overturn it, but they’re all like “Damn, there’s barely any Comcast schadenfreude to be had in this.”

It’s worth pointing out that the pro-net neutrality camp won this round mostly because of their successful grass roots effort to mobilize something like four million calls to Congress and the FCC. This is in itself an amazing and important part of the story, but even that success leaves me feeling like I just ate a tablespoon of saccharine. While the anti’s were falling hard for the “Obamanet” scare, much of pro’s grass roots tsunami was based on an understanding of the situation about equal in nuance. “Hey you, website visitor, yeah you. Want the internet to stay free?” “Hell yes!” “Well, then click here!” “Ok, I will! I tweeted it too!”

I’ll just add here that the cable companies need not point at the little guys who posted these calls for action when they count up what they spent and trundle about looking for someone to blame. They need look no further than their best frenemy Verizon who taught us all what to be afraid of when they replaced the latest episode of House of Cards with a little spinning “network busy” thingy during their war with Netflix. Net Neutrality was a nice little abstraction for most people right up until Verizon conducted their very public experiment in consciousness raising. This was PSA performance art done at scale, and a strategic blunder that annoyed me when my movies wouldn’t load but that I’m grateful for now.

Unless you refer to yourself as an “Austrian” (in the economic sense) you probably agree that natural monopoly left to its own devices is not in the public interest. On the other hand, unless you still have a picture of FDR over your kitchen table, you probably agree that over-regulation that accidentally or otherwise creates chartered monopoly in its stead isn’t any better. I would have loved to hear the pro-net neutrality side acknowledging the dangers of over regulation while the anti-net neutrality groups acknowledged the trouble with unconstrained monopoly. Common ground in at least the blindingly obvious would have made room for maybe a bit more actual policy discussion in the rest of the public debate.

Maybe. I’m probably being optimistic though given that this fight was really a three way fight between two kinds of monopoly interests (network layer, based on wire and application layer, based on network effects) and the public. Given the money at stake this was probably a fight destined to be dirty regardless, and while the public interest can represent itself in tweets, it rarely has the money to buy the podium pounders.

Anyway, I’m not a centrist, I’m an empiricist, and we know this from experience: regulating non-competitive markets is hard, and the choice isn’t a regulate / don’t regulate binary despite what the two camps might have us believe. Regulation happens along a continuum and no matter what choices we make, fixing one thing will often break another. Want small farms to have equal access to railroads? Check. Oh, you also get crappy infrastructure and obsolete locomotives when WWI breaks out. Want telephone service everywhere, even in the country? Check. Oh, you also get high business telecom costs in your major cities. Want cheap electricity? Check. Oh, you also get a system that is more cheap than robust and solar and wind will make it even less so. Want effective and inexpensive weapon systems? Let’s just pretend I didn’t include that one ok? Plus, in every case we also got whole new classes of special interests dependent on those regulations for power, market position, and patronage.

This isn’t a good vs. evil story (well, at least not only that). This is a conversation about “what compromises are we willing to make, in this time and circumstance, to better serve the public interest, and how can we craft policy that will allow a shift later when circumstances (most certainly) change?” Put another way, can we keep access to the Internet open and unfettered while also establishing conditions that are conducive to high rates of network innovation while maintaining reasonable prices?

My guess is, no, we can’t. Not in the absolute sense that both sides of this argument would have us believe. History tells this is a “choose two of the three” kind of game if we insist on perfect outcomes. However, good policy can do a reasonable job of balancing these conflicting desires if we’re willing to accept good enough. While some are wont to admit it, this regulation is a really light touch by historical standards and maybe it will turn out to be well-crafted. I’m hopeful. We aren’t (explicitly) controlling pricing or regional licensing for example. No rates commissions (like utilities) or additional network charters (like airlines back in the day). As far as I can tell we aren’t doing anything to break up already existing monopoly or duopoly conditions at the last mile. We’re just giving them the side eye and saying “don’t abuse your pricing power so much that I’ll be forced to do something.”

The gist of what I’m saying here is that monopoly is one of those unfortunate natural conditions of our economic world. 200 years ago it was primarily a political problem (i.e. chartered monopolies) but it has become, in our modern age, something of a mathematical side effect of our free market economic system. Left alone it hurts the public interest, managed clumsily it hurts the public interest differently (and sometimes more). Can we please, on both sides, acknowledge that the world is complex and approach our interventions thoughtfully?

Perhaps serious people were thinking deep thoughts behind the scenes, but if they were they forgot to share them with the public and they certainly didn’t contribute much to the low brow debate and absurd debate that arrived in most of our inboxes.

This is an uncomfortable admission, but I didn’t, and still don’t, know exactly where I stand on the issue. I couldn’t figure it out because the proposal was secret and the available public discourse was so stupid. As the inevitable unintended consequences unfold I hope we’ll do a better job next time debating the necessary policy course corrections. The Internet is too damned important to resort to policy-by-ideological-trope.

 

Coda: a few things that make me go hmmm…

Why wasn’t the pro- net neutrality camp hollering about not seeing the proposal before the vote? The FAA released their (flawed) proposal about drones after all. This is the norm right?

There are people that don’t believe natural monopolies even exist. They just ignore that the life of a natural monopoly is often longer than a human generation and suggest that “eventually something will displace it.” Or, maybe they are saying “Na na, at least they’re not as bad as government chartered monopolies.” These don’t strike me as practical or particularly reasonable people. On the other hand, they are probably the source of the argument Silicon Valley uses for not regulating monopoly derived from network effects.

And on that note, maybe Google and Amazon mostly stayed on the sidelines of this fight so we wouldn’t notice the apparent inconsistency of regulating monopoly based on physical plant while mostly ignoring the kind based on network effects. If you’re in a fight over the other guy’s monopoly privilege, that probably isn’t the best time to bring attention to your own, even if most people seem to accept that your kind of monopoly is more ephemeral, and thus less monopoly’ish. Which, I think is doubly odd, given how much network effect monopoly rent Microsoft extracts still from Windows and Office. Just do what I do, think of Windows as the So Bill Gates Can Do Good Tax and it will make you feel better.

This FCC Chairman, who just compared net neutrality regulation to the First Amendment, is the same FCC chairman who just a few months ago was arguing for pay to play fast lanes? How did that turnaround happen? Should we care if the independent FCC was “got to?”

 

And finally, with apologies. Q: “If the internet ain’t broke, why fix it?” A: “Because the damn rent is too high.”

Hacking Authenticity

Have you heard of Shinola? I first heard of the company when my brother called: “Hey, there’s a really cool new company making watches in Detroit. They’re the first watch made in America in a long time. I pre-ordered one.”

I’m originally from Detroit and the house where I lived as a child is abandoned and broken.  It's a pretty good stand in for a city as a whole. Once the "Paris of the west” we all know that it has seen much better times. So any good news from Detroit makes me happy, and naturally I wanted a Shinola too. Then last year I got one as a gift. I love the watch, and the packaging was over-the-top well done. It even came with a little tin of leather cream to use on the band now and then. Nice touch.

When the little orange lightning bolt thread in the strap unraveled, I made the trek to their Tribeca flagship store for a replacement. The place had an uncannily well done retail presence that brought to mind Anthropologie’s  temple of too-expensive-to-be-real cool. And it was filled with a too-perfect collection of leather goods, bicycles, and watches in an awesome space replete with a hipsterific 3rd generation coffee shop in the foyer.

You know, this place might just too good to be the scrappy Detroit-based startup it presents itself as. What’s going on? I Googled them, but at the time I didn’t find a whole lot except for bits here and there extolling them for bringing manufacturing jobs to the Motor City.

 

 

Can you tell shit from Shinola? Maybe that’s this brand’s challenge to all of us?

 

 

Two weeks ago I attended Alistair Croll’s BitNorth conference in the woods outside of Montreal. It was a fun intimate event held at the Canadian Association of Music summer camp (“One time, at band camp…”). Jaethan Reichel gave an interesting talk about reviving old brands that was centered on the Shinola story. It turns out that the guy who built the Fossil brand around the idea of importing watches into the mid-level fashion market, had left that gig and was now running an investment fund called Bedrock (yes, after the Flintstones - this guy can’t be all bad). Bedrock essentially invented Shinola from thin air after a conversation at a Plano Texas conference table. “Can you tell shit from Shinola? I don’t know, let’s see if the mark is available.” It was, and they could.

 

It turns out that old brands, even one for a shoe polish who’s heyday ended with the second world war, are super valuable. We remember something about them even if we’re not sure what, and those deeply buried inchoate associations in our cultural brain give them tremendous value. And maybe it isn’t just the awareness that’s valuable, it’s probably also the subtle promise of time honored authenticity. Buying into such a brand is a peek into our cultural rear view mirror, the same kind of nostalgic looking back that powers hipsterism writ large, farm-to-table restaurants, the Barrett-Jackson auto auctions and many other cultural accouterments of our moment.

 

When I started life in the mid 60’s we thought 2015 would be all personal helicoptering to work and colonies on the moon, now we want 2020 to be 1960 again. What sucked then seems like paradise to a generation raised on war in the middle east and ever-imminent climate nightmares. I guess. So, here we are, a society whose brains are full of surprisingly-robust dead-brand associations in the middle of a looking-backwards cultural moment. There’s money to be made in that.

 

So, of course Shinola isn’t alone. As it turns out, there is a whole wave of old brands being revived for their latent value. There is a cottage industry of sorts right now of people who are digging up old brands from newspaper microfiche to revive them with new methods and new manufacturing. The promise of nostalgia wrapped in modern, efficient, and reliable design easily manufactured from foreign parts is great - Shinola is assembled in Detroit, but it’s a Swiss quartz movement after all.

 

Jaethan’s talk was a kind of how-to guide to the process for small scale entrepreneurs, and one worth thinking about, and I don’t mean this post to be a criticism of his talk. There are lots of opportunities to build good businesses this way and attaching oneself to an existing (but languishing) store of value is a great way for an entrepreneur with limited budget to get started.

 

So, why was I thinking about my watch and feeling more and more like my brain had been hacked? The phrase “inauthentic authenticity” kept tumbling around in my head. My question is: how can we do something with a cultural storehouse full of brand equity without feeling icky about it? Or making our customers feel icky later that they were taken in by something false dressing itself up as an authentic experience?

 

Maybe this one just hit close to home because of the Detroit connection for me. I’m growing tired of brands attaching themselves to our fascination with its ruins, while the death rattles continue unabated and its people suffer. Detroit is not something to be trivialized. It’s not a set piece for your authenticity hack. It’s a city in deep trouble full of people living difficult lives (read this instead of Chrysler marketing copy).

 

Anyway, this isn’t my first experience with authenticity hacking (once you look around you realize it’s no one’s first experience with authenticity hacking). I own a Ducati motorcycle that was manufactured after Cagiva bought the mark. Ducati was a going concern when Cagiva bought them, and they didn’t exactly AMF them (see Harley Davidson in the 1970’s). Ducati even today continues to build engines with desmo valve trains and only recently dropped their “here comes a Ducati” dry clutch while beginning the move away from their traditional trellis steel frames. So, there is continuity in this story - a lot of Ducati DNA was alive and thriving inside of Cagiva when they made my bike in 1993.

 

But later Cagiva pulled off a trick much closer to the Shinola gambit when they purchased the MV Augusta name in 1991. MV hadn’t manufactured anything since 1980 and yet many people carried at least amorphous associations with their pre-1980’s racing exploits in their heads. I remember coming across the first MV Augusta F4 in 1997 at the Fast by Ferracci showroom and wanting it. So. Bad. I loved how it wrapped Italianess around a screaming inline 4 cylinder engine. It was everything I loved about my Ducati (well, a lot of it) coupled with the performance of a modern Japanese bike. Yet, I can tell you if the exact same bike was called a Cagiva F4 I would have barely noticed it. Too recently Cagiva was a machine tool company (or something equally glamorous) that started into the bike business by making bad bikes. Well, my position on that probably says as much about me as it does about authenticity hacking, but there it is. Would I buy a Cagiva? Nope. Would I wear a $550 watch by Fossil? Nope.

 

What’s different? Does a brand need to imply continuity with previous experience to make sense to me? Is that why they work? They say that “brands are a promise,” but a promise of what exactly, and whose?

 

Ducati is, even now, connected to its roots. They’ve traded hands a few times (they are owned by Audi now) but as a company with at least some DNA intact, not as a brand detached from the things that make it real. If I were to buy a new Ducati today I could reasonably expect it to have something in its essence similar to the one I own. Although, as I say that, I’m wondering what I could expect from a piece of Ducati branded Tumi luggage.

 

Meanwhile MV Augusta is Cagiva wearing clothes it found in a second hand store. I would wager there wasn’t a single MV engineer involved in the F4. And want to hear the punch line? Cagiva doesn’t even call themselves Cagiva anymore. They changed the name of the company to MV Augusta Motors a few years ago. MV’s success has made it more important to Cagiva than the things that used to be called Cagiva, and I suppose they've painstakingly built a new brand, so I guess that’s no sin. It could certainly be worse (Phillip Morris nee Altria and Blackwater nee Xe nee Academi I’m looking at you).

 

I’m obviously just the right kind of dupe for this game since I also own a Mini Cooper that was designed and built under BMW’s revival of the brand. Is BMW promising that a modern Mini Cooper is designed by Mr. Cooper? Obviously not. So, is it enough to say “we are selling you a car designed with the same spirit?” Or are they saying “we’re selling you a BMW that we could never market as a BMW because it’s too far from that brand’s promise, and it has funny gauges.” Anyway, I love the car so I guess it has kept whatever promises it made to me in 2006 when I bought it.

 

Even now I have mixed feelings about Shinola. I like my watch, I like that they are creating jobs in Detroit, and I like that they really seem to be trying to build a supply base in the United States. I still feel manipulated though. Like my brain was hacked by too-good marketing, a too-slick narrative, and too much money to spend making it all too perfect. There is a fine line between borrowed (appropriated?) authenticity and a false promise.

 

If I were going to dig through old newspapers looking for a store of latent neuro-association value to build a business around, I’d want a set of guidelines for making and keeping the promises of the brand. Where the brand is attached to a still-going concern I think a big part of that promise-keeping would revolve around maintaining the continuity of as many of the things that make up the mark’s DNA as I could. And of course a lot of that is inside of the people that make up a business.

 

In the case of a brand that has long detached from the company that built it, it seems like a more complicated undertaking. I mean, I never thought that Shinola in 2014 was related in any direct way to the Shinola of 1945. I knew that it was a brand revival, but I guess I just thought it was scrappier. I didn’t expect a $100M war chest and a $15M flagship store in Tribeca (I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they spent more on their Tribeca real estate than they did on their Detroit manufacturing operation). I’m not completely sure what an “authentic” Detroit revival story would look like here, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t it. Authenticity is the accretion of little things. Of experiences and associations over time, and it can be simulated in a big bang, but not really recreated.

 

So, maybe that’s the answer. You can build a new business on an old brand, but you can’t do it by appropriating authenticity, you do it by building your own authenticity on top of that existing storehouse of associations, one good experience at a time. The trademark you buy is the starting point, but the brand you build with it is yours, and just like the original meaning of that brand, will take time to build. Or, maybe Shinola proves me wrong, and I’m just an oddball with an awkward set of sensibilities when it comes to authenticity.

 

By the way, I used to fly “Pan American Clipper" from Trenton, NJ to Bedford, MA. The connection back to the original brand was so laughably transparent as to be ignored. My brain certainly hadn’t been hacked by a fit of nostalgia into flying with those guys, they were simply the only airline flying that route. I didn’t feel hacked or duped by the name, just sort of bemused that the name that used to decorate glamorous clippers was painted on the side of my little puddle jumper. I wasn’t surprised at all when the government eventually shut them down for their unwillingness to follow safety regulations. 

 

Velocity Conference talk - DevOps and Intentional Emergence

I'm going to do some more writing on this topic but in the meantime, I've posted the slides from my recent Velocity Conference talk:

 

The main point of this talk is that the information age is having as large an impact on corporate organization as the industrial age did, and that the organizing principles of that era (e.g. bureaucracy) don't translate well into this one. 

The web grew up in the information age though, and therefore, the way web companies work and organize might make a useful model for the corporate enterprise in transition. The web has been emergent from the beginning, for the corporate enterprise to become emergent faster it's useful to make emergence a goal, to pursue it with intention.

Maybe it's time for emergence on purpose

For ten years I owned the domain “intentionalemergence.com.” It seemed obvious to me when I bought it that the world had become post-modern and networked but that companies were still behaving like Napoleonic government bureaus. Their industrial age information designs out of synch with our complex and emergent era.

I was doing some work for the U.S. Army at the time and I saw first hand how a top-down, planned, hierarchical, and reductionist bureaucracy was ill-suited to deal with a fast moving, emergent, and networked environment. The common prescription to go through all of those serial bureaucratic processes faster faster faster simply had no chance in hell of working. I proposed that they put tools in the field that would encourage users of all kinds to field their own solutions rather than waiting on the center to provide things for them. I wanted them to intentionally create fertile soil for systems, organizations, and behaviors to emerge at the edge where they were needed. 

The center, still useful, would provide those platforms and services that enabled the edge, the edge would provide the ideas and sweat to make them happen, or at least to get them to the “working prototype” stage. (The center would be the Amazon AWS to the edge’s startups).

Later, when I left defense work, I adapted this work to my corporate clients (less emphasis on the independently acting edge, more emphasis on encouraging internal emergence).

Well, a decade later (approximately), I got frustrated waiting for The Priests of Corporate Reductionism to get on board and I let the domain lapse just last December. But it looks like I should have kept it, because emergence on purpose with a different name (deliberate) might be back. And who knows, perhaps some companies are finally realizing that it takes a network to survive in a network and that hierarchical planned bureaucracy isn’t cutting it in this new world.

I decided not to keep paying for the domain, but I didn't give up completely. Next week I'm giving a talk on intentional emergence at the Velocity conference in NY. Maybe I'll see you there. 

Silicon Valley and traditional corporate enterprises aren't just manifestations of different processes in action, they are different evolutionary branches, based on a completely different set of assumptions. Silicon Valley corporations aren't a different tribe, they are a different species. The only question is, are these two species going to mate and create hybrid offspring, or are some neanderthals about to disappear from the planet?

I'm not looking for an iPad shaped like a car

Last year at OSCON I heard an automobile manufacturer employee describe their product as a “mobile container for electronics, now it’s an iPad shaped like a car.” More recently I spoke with a chip manufacturer about their vision for compute power in the car - lots and lots of it powering everything from driver assist functions to computer vision and other computational intensive tasks. (Aside: are you ready for your computer to watch your face from a visor mounted camera and decide if you look too sleepy, or perhaps ragey, to keep driving?). Soon there will be enough high-clock-rate CPU and GPU in the trunk to make your car like a mini mobile datacenter, and for it to make a meaningful dent in the car’s energy consumption.

It’s fascinating to think what cars will be when their trunks are full of teraflops. I don’t think self-driving and social-connected infotainment are the only interesting outcomes (I sure as hell hope it’s not just the latter). I’m confident there will be some surprises ahead as engineers and designers have the chance to pull concrete improvements out of these new capabilities (Mini’s predictive shifting [pdf, section 5] hints at one new kind of possibility). I also think the moment that driving becomes an immoral act when the automated version is both safer and more efficient is going to be a difficult one for society (and me) to accept. But that’s the topic for a different post.

What I’m really interested here is the way automobile manufacturers and their suppliers are rushing to fill our cars with digital unnecessaria in an era when 60mpg still qualifies as a huge win. This post is about is about the basics. About cars as means of transportation, and the more efficient the better. I simply can’t understand why most automobile manufacturers seem so disinterested (although VW does seem to pop up a lot on the interesting side of the ledger).

If you are the least bit a gear head and haven’t read Jason Fagone’s Ingenious yet, pick it up. It’s a great read with the takeaway that the 200mpg car is difficult, but achievable. Right. Now. And while Tesla crows about its 89 mpge and .24 Cd, that thing is a fat-faced tank. I mean, it’s definitely a step in the right direction, and I’ll give Musk and crew a ton of credit for getting people’s heads wrapped around the idea of the viable electric car, but the fact remains that that car weighs a porky-assed 4,650lbs and its conventional layout makes sure that it has a big frontal working against its good Cd. 

Bits can only so much after all, in the world of atoms physics is still physics, even if your car has batteries and it’s own Android app. Automated cars will platoon and hyper-mile by default which will helpfully optimize our fat and heavy cars. But what we really need are lighter cars (by an order of magnitude), with small frontal areas and great Cd’s, have better power plants (when can I get my diesel electric hybrid?), and full of tricks like energy recovering suspension. In short, there is a lot of core R+D left to be done before automobile manufactures call efficiency and safety a solved problem and shift all of their focus to where to put all the OLEDs on the dashboard.

Unfortunately, what most of them seem to be saying with word and deed is “Yes, we may have hit peak oil, we may be warming the planet with our exhaust, and we may still be killing 35,000 of your countrymen, woman and children every year, but what we really think you’ll buy is the same old steel-clad beast, but now with a cool display screen on the dashboard and a disembodied digital assistant to read your tweets to you while you disinterestedly drive. And maybe we will, markets being democratic and all, so maybe it’s not them, it’s us.

A room with a (limited) view

I have always had trouble with focus and attention. When I was a kid they didn’t call it ADHD, they just said I was hyperactive. That term also works, to a point, but it implies a higher state of stimulation while failing to capture the dimension of internal struggle that comes from trying to stay on point. It’s difficult to ignore the squirrels in my peripheral vision. Or eventually, the absence of a squirrel, which sets my mind to looking for one. It’s like a timer in my head that starts at 60 seconds and at 20 makes me jumpy waiting for the next micro-burst of stimulation. 

The advent of the smart phone brought me to a crisis of attention and over the years I’ve tried various strategies to retain a modicum of presence and achieve flow when I have to have it. At one time or another I’ve implemented most of the strategies suggested in @jakek’s piece here. I’m working on a bunch of writing projects right now and too often the computer I’m writing on feels like a bar full of my friends, so his timely post gave me impetus to rebuild a framework for solitude when I need it.

I took his recommendations for my phone and removed email and twitter (those are my primary distractors) and already the twitch to reach for my phone in line at the coffee shop is receding. More interestingly, I decided that the phone wasn’t enough. I needed space for writing too so I re-built a spare computer into an isolation chamber of sorts. A digital equivalent of a room with window, a comfy chair and desk, book shelves and filing cabinets, and little else. I installed dropbox, writing tools (Pages, Scrivener, …), Evernote, and DayOne (I use it for stashing ideas) and nothing else. 

So far it feels like that first month of going paleo with my diet. Hard but rewarding with gradually improving focus. I hope that, like with diet, I’ll be able to build some longterm habits that make concentration and presence easier and more rewarding.

Emergence works best when it's planned

In a moment of energetic ambition (or, maybe it was a lapse of judgement) I proposed a talk for the upcoming Velocity conference in New York. DevOps, and operations in general, isn’t my usual haunt, but I felt inspired to try to place DevOps into a bigger picture - an environmental context in which large organizations are changing dramatically with the diffusion of information age technologies.

I’ll say right up front that my thinking on this topic remains inchoate and incomplete. I don’t have a theory to promote. The talk, like this blog, is me thinking out loud.

One of the books that I’ve been re-reading lately is Science, Strategy and War; The strategic theory of John Boyd. Boyd is the originator of the OODA loop, perhaps the only term as haphazardly applied to business as Lean. But what the book is reminding me is that Boyd’s lectures weren’t just discussions of his theories, they were also expositions of his journey to them. He didn’t just want his audience to understand “fast transients” and the OODA loop, he wanted them to understand what he read and what he thought about to arrive there. In a sense Boyd was less a theorist, and more of a curator and synthesizer of an extensive reading list that ranged well outside the expected corpus of military strategic theory.

Thomas Osinga, the book’s author, points out that strategic theorists like Boyd live in a world with Godel-like constraints. Dealing with the complexity of war, society, and politics, their theories are by necessity incomplete. Theories of war are no better than theories of next week’s weather. However, like Eisenhower’s plans, even flawed and incomplete theories of war can still be useful, as is the intellectual development that leads to them. They prepare the mind to react to complex stimuli either intuitively, or consciously but faster.

Theories about business are like this too. Business also operates at an intersection of complex processes, psychology, society and evolving technologies. Which is why, with Boyd as an example, I’m comfortable pointing out well-sources of ideas that seem applicable, attempting some synthesis, and thinking about the connections out loud. I’m not claiming theoretical completeness or anything like it, I’m simply pointing out things that have made me say “huh.” 

The problem is that now that I’m trying to write the talk, I’m stalling out in an endless loop of “If still ambiguous, go more meta.” Before I get so meta that I can’t see that the turtle at the top of the pile way down there, I figured I’d just try to write down a few things for this blog. If reductionism is the pursuit of “turtles all the way down,” my project is rapidly turning into a kind of expansionist “it’s meta all the way up.” I’m hoping that writing a little bit out it will force me to get concrete and slow that process.

In the last few years I’ve done a bunch of talks on “Corporate Evolution” and “Intentional Emergence.” What all of them share is an exploration of the challenges large organizations face as their environment becomes more networked and more complex. Most of them also explore the ways in which the emergence of the web can be applied to more traditional enterprise. Put another way, the information age is forcing bureaucracies of all kinds to transition. Finally. From a kind of feudalism to a post-modern post-bureaucratic form. One that is prepared for the complexity of a networked world, and that takes full advantage of its own networked body.

Corporations have always (or for a long time at least) operated in an environment with emergent properties. Price in a marketplace is an emergent phenomena after all. But what I’m talking about here is a recognition in corporate settings that the reductionist notions of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and planning are inadequate to many modern situations. The degree of connectedness and complexity is simply too much for the lazily looping feedback systems of bureaucracy to cope. Go through the loop faster is a poor (and impossible) prescription when the loop spans such wide swaths of corporate cruft.

As corporations become more internally wired shadow organizations emerge. The official org chart tells less and less of the reality on the ground. The idea of intentional emergence is to recognize this self-adaptation as a positive (rather than treat it as a cancer) and create policies that make emergence of unplanned organizations and organizational behaviors more likely. DevOps, Lean, and other tools of agility have a role here in tightening feedback loops and, by creating small cells of activity, making a fertile organizational substrate for emergent teaming.

Paradoxically, emergence in the corporate setting works best when it’s planned.

Bringing back Limn This

I’ve been writing at the Radar blog for the last few years and as you can see, have allowed this personal blog to languish. Maybe I’m part of a trend though, because it seems that there is a subtle renaissance building in personal blogging.

I’m reviving mine mostly for control. First, I just want to have control over what I write, and by owning the control, own the constraints. When I write on other people’s properties I absorb the limitations of their brand, or their editorial direction, their voice, or whatever. Self censorship follows close behind - a kind of self restriction that tamps down on creativity by narrowing the field of addressable topics, or one that whispers “You don’t know enough about that to write with any kind of expertise.”

I loved writing for Radar (who wouldn’t want to write for an audience that Tim O’Reilly built?). But with the audience came some expectations that were hard to fulfill. Tim is a great writer. He can go from amorphous idea to clean well-thought-out essay in one draft (and probably one hour). I can’t do that. I’m not a particularly talented writer and it takes me time, coffee, and an internet router with the plug pulled to find the space and clarity necessary to turn out something readable.

But it’s not just a question of focus. Sometimes it was hard to write for Radar because of the unspoken expectation that you were supposed to be like Tim and write some kind of world-changing essay every time you touched the keyboard. I mean, no one put that expectation on me, I did it myself by absorbing his audience’s expectations. 

By the time I started writing on Radar Tim wasn’t posting very frequently, but the things he did post were deep, essay-like, and frame changing. I might have one of those in me a year (if it’s a good year) but I like writing more than one post per year.

Anyway, since it’s hard to write The Definitive Essay, and with Twitter acting as an escape valve for partially formed ideas, the pressure rarely built up enough to get me to push the more complex pieces out the door. In short, I didn’t write as much as I wanted to, because of this unstated need to be making a definitive statement - the frame changing piece that would wake an audience up the next morning viewing the world through a different lens.

The funny thing is that, short of a few important pieces, Tim didn’t really write that way either, or at least not always. The Radar blog when it started out looked more like Twitter. Looking back at his Radar posts from 2006 this one seems pretty typical. Basically Radar back then felt a lot like Twitter with room for a bit more color. Frankly, it makes me wish Twitter was more like Google Plus…, but that’s another story.

So, back to Limn This. When I started this blog back in the way back, I named it that because I saw it as a place to ask questions, to find, not make, explanations. I imagined it would be a place where I posted partially formed ideas and where the feedback would help me make them better. Blogging didn’t always work that way, but I still see this as a place to think out loud and I hope that framing it that way will make it easier for me to post more frequently, to keep the “post” button threshold lower.

I should add that I was somewhat inspired to do this by reading Dan Hon’s newsletter. He’s been writing a daily newsletter to hone his writing skills and to find something to say every day. I’m more comfortable with a pull rather than push model for my own writing, but I like the idea of a space where I can write whatever comes to mind and not worry about whether it fits the remit of someone else’s site.

So, here goes...

Digital Tramp Stamps - Your friends are tattoos you may regret

I read somewhere that the single most important predictor of an individual's obesity risk is whether or not their friends are obese. Eventually we can count on Facebook's implementation of machine vision, weight estimating algorithms, and the publicness policies to justify them. That will be super awesome because it will save us all the trouble of updating our weight on our profile manually. We won't even have to own tweeting scales to know just how obese are friends are.

In such a perfectly data rich world, Facebook's voracious crew of ever curiouser Wants will be able to use the edge-strength-weighted average mass of your friends to easily predict your future displacement too. Where your friends are you will stochastically follow.

Just imagine your sense of wonder when you are innocently reading a well-paid blogger on Huffington Post and bam! An ad for a globo gym pops up in the margin. Why will that instill "a sense of wonder" you ask? Because you are two screening and 30 seconds later an ad for the exact same globo gym appears on your television too. Whoa! And the crazy thing is just this morning you were standing in front of the mirror thinking "Dammit, I wish Tim Ferris wasn't such a tool, because I'm almost as fat as my buddy Dave and I really need to do something about it, but I can't read that 4 Hour Fitness horseshit."

Throw in politics, interests, hobbies, religion and every other thing about you that can be inferred from your cluster of friends, along with some inexpensive computational time to do the predictions and there they have it, your temporally distributed propensity functions for anything and everything you might spend money on. This my friends is what Chief Marketing Officer's sacrifice chickens for. The truly killer app. Prepare to be pwned as they narrowcast their stream of perfectly timed and personalized sway at each and every one of your exact moments of want. We can haz yur wallet.

It's not that easy? Fine. But I can say this with certainty: while you're checking your Klout score (again) and reflecting on just how influential you are - a beacon of irresistible intelligence, wit, and wisdom - what's really happening is your friends are influencing you. After all, you're just one tiny voice to them, but they are a veritable din to you and they're making you fat, politically angry, and probably high. Plus it's all being conveniently digitized for later wantnalysis.

We like to think of social media as a platform for our personal expression but its a bi-directional conduit of ideas, expectations, affiliations, and all of the other grist of human social interaction. Part experiential and part aspirational the links say who we are and who we want to be. It's a self-curated mesh of meme-sharing and world view that transforms us from an "I" to something more meta, the less differentiated "we." We are so interleaved it's impossible to know the vectors of cause and effect and influence. But regardless, the cluster centered on each of us has both descriptive and predictive power.

The other day LinkedIn told me that I should refer a few of my connections to my current employer. Apparently companies can send LinkedIn copies of their open job requisitions now and they'll use machine learning to match your contact's bio's with them. Two of the referrals LinkedIn suggested used to work here so there must be something to the underlying logic. Apparently a naive bayesian algorithm and a bunch of commodity compute is all it takes to suggest that you might be a fit for a job you used to have.

That's pretty cool but eventually I think they'll do more than just match bio to req. Why not rank order the referral list by the probability of a successful fit - and do it by looking at the referral's cluster of contacts and the attributes that are influencing them to either be successful, loyal, and dedicated, or lazy, shiftless, and job jumping. If Facebook's social graph can predict what you'll buy, LinkedIn's should be able to predict how you'll do.

Now my Mom was just like your mom when she said "I don't want you hanging around with Mark and his stoner friends. Can't you meet some nice people?" Well, now the Internet knows what your Mom knows - if you hang around with losers you are likely to turn into one, and conversely if you take a more aspirational approach and hang out with, well, Amy Chua's kids, you'll probably be awesome.

Fortunately back when I ignored my Mom it was before the Internet and there are no records of my bad choices. It used to be cool like that. Unless we were stupid enough to get arrested, the evidence of our transgressions decayed with the drug-diminished half-lives of our more stupider friend's memories.

You, I'm sorry to say, aren't so lucky. The Internet never forgets (Hadoop is an elephant after all) and it's not just the picture of you puffing with Michael Phelps at some random party, but your relationship with that freak of nature itself is immortal. Your social errors preserved forever in the edge of a graph. Every connection you make with your loser, stoner, and stupid friends accretes another bit of ink to the web that once just influenced you, but now tattoos you.

You are your social cluster, and like that semi-ironic sleeve of barbed-wire ink you wear, it isn't going away.

 

Redistribution goes both ways

This is SO much easier than blogging. My first every twitter essay.