Category: food for thought

Change means luddism

Interesting quotes from Clay Shirky, the hottest web thinker of the moment:

If the web is boring you use it to augment other medias:

“And what’s happened now is that the Web has gotten boring for a whole generation of teens and twenty-somethings [[so I'm not the only one thinking it's boring now]]. And so, because they can take it for granted, they’re using this platform to add interactivity around regular media consumption.“

With quantity doesn’t come quality:

“what the Web does is that it does what all amateur increases do, which is it decreases the average quality of what’s available. It is exactly, precisely, the complaint made about the printing press. [...] people made the same complaint about comic books, they made the same complaint about paperbacks, and they made the same complaint about the vulgarity of the printing press. Whenever you let more people in, things get vulgar by definition.“

With change comes resistance to change:

“There’s always a new Luddism whenever there’s change. [...] Luddism is specifically a demand that the people who benefited from the old system be consulted before any technology is allowed to disrupt it. [...] What Luddites are is anti-change, and, in particular, they are anti-change in a way that discomforts the beneficiaries of the previous system.“

Overload is a ridiculous notion, it always existed:

“information overload started in Alexandria, in the library of Alexandria, right? That was the first example where we have concrete archaeological evidence that there was more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime, which is almost the definition of information overload. [...] So there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, right?“

Link (thx Michèle)

“Good ideas have lonely childhoods”

A-lister Hugh Macleod – who became such a rock star since his Lift06 talk that he doesn’t answer my emails anymore :D – is preparing another brilliant piece of thinking in his next book “Ignore everybody“. Hugh talks about something many entrepreneurs have experienced, the sorry/uncomprehending/dis-motivating/negative feedback you get when you present your breakthrough idea to someone who doesn’t understand it:

1. “Good ideas have lonely childhoods”. When I say, “Ignore Everybody”, I don’t mean, “Ignore all people, at all times, forever”. No, other people’s feedback plays a very important role. Of course it does. It’s more like, the better the idea, the more “out there” it initially will seem to other people, even people you like and respect. So there’ll be a time in the beginning when you have to press on, alone, without one tenth the support you probably need. This is normal. This is to be expected. Ten years later, drawing my “cartoons on the back of business cards” seems a no-brainer, in terms of what it has brought me, both emotionally and to my career. But I can also clearly remember when I first started drawing them, the default reaction was “people scratching their heads”. Sure, a few people thought they were kinda interesting and whatnot, but even with my closest friends, they seemed a complete, non-commercial exercise in futility for the New York world I was currently living in. Happily, time proved otherwise.

2. “GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE POWER BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS, THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED.” The older I get, the truer this sentence seems to be. Especially in industries that are more relationship-driven, than idea-driven.

Link

Rock on!

Is Silicon Valley turning into Detroit?

As I try to come up with a theme for the first Asian edition of LIFT, I am somehow getting a strong intuition that we are leaving the revolutionary phase of the Web industry, and about to enter a more boring and less innovative period (Bruce Sterling won’t disagree with me). A number of weak signals seem to be announcing the end the cycle of hyper innovation that marked what will one day be remembered as the early days of the web, or the 1994 – 2006 period.

At Kinnernet, I jokingly told Thomas Mygdal that the Silicon Valley is facing Detroit-a-zation. What were once innovative and agile startups are increasingly becoming pachyderms hampered by overgrowth, internal politics and shareholders pressure. The big CEOs – once mavericks celebrated and envied by the whole business community – are becoming bus drivers. Eric Schmid’s days probably look more and more like the ones of Marcel Ospel or Carlos Ghosn, and with each hour passing Google’s organization inches closer to the IBM model rather than the edonistic company proned by the Zentral Intelligenz Agentur. Web companies employees have too much work, need to stay later than their bosses, have to raise their profiles to get good reviews, etc.

While in Korea, I systematically asked my interlocutors what they thought were today’s “hot” topics. Their answers: ubiquitous computing, urban technologies, robotic toys, green technologies, open source objects, etc. The web? “It was interesting seven years ago!”  It is now a commodity, and this has a deep impact on the industry and on its culture. What happened?

  • The rise of incremental innovation
    Incremental innovation has replaced fundamental innovation. We are not discovering new territories – like when Friendster, Google, or Hotmail were invented – but are developing the ones that have already been explored by others, bringing smaller improvements like a new interface, a new way to receive an information, a new mix of existing services. A striking example of this is social networks, where entrepreneurs are almost done exploring the different possibilities. It started with networks about the past (classmates, copains d’avant), then about the present (Facebook, MySpace), and now it is about the future (dopplr, mixin). Nothing revolutionary, just a lot of talented people busy not leaving any stone unturned in the same field, exploring a finite space.
  • Maturity = less hunger
    The industry is more mature, which means many of us have something to lose. We all have a status, more conflicts of interest then ever (the web 2.0 world is skunk drunk on its own kool-aid), bigger egos. Time goes by, and most industry leaders are fifteen years older and nature made them more risk averse. Sneakers have been replaced by leather shoes, and the Johnny Cash rule (which says you are never as good as when hungry) is now playing against us.
  • Early adopters became gatekeepers?
    Where is the new generation? Aren’t they interested, or is it that we don’t listen to them? Have we – the early adopters – become gate keepers? Every time I go to a web conference I am struck by the fact the average age of speakers is always around 40. What happened here? Do we really only have Kevin Rose, Matt Mullenweg and Mark Frauenfeld innovating under 25? Could it be that there is a whole layer of innovation we simply don’t look at?
  • Excitement is building in other fields
    If you haven’t watched Bruno Bonnel and Rafi Haladjan‘s talks you probably haven’t noticed, but robotic toys have a huge future. Mobile continues to rock Africa and Asia, green technologies are the hot topic in Sand Hill Road, new interfaces are opening up huge possibilities. It seems other fields are offering more exciting opportunities than the web!

I am sure I could come up with more reasons but let’s hear your opinion first. Do you feel like it is the end of a cycle? Why? Is the web just another industry where success depends more on having an MBA than a revolutionary idea and a taste for risk?

Update: ChangeWaves says the Infotech sector is not yet geriatric. We can resume normal breathing.

TED08

Loads of amazing ideas are being thrown around at the moment in Monterey and Aspen. TED is now, and as usual they have a flurry of bloggers in the room bringing the debates to the world. Read master Giussani’s reports on lunchoverip.com and let’s start they day with this wonderful quote by Matthieu Ricard:

“Western science is a major response to minor needs. We [Buddhist monks] don’t really believe that you went to the Moon, but you did; you don’t believe that we can achieve enlightenment in a single life, but we do.”

Different perspectives, always enriching.

Eight things I think I think

Every time I do a personality test I end up on the intuitive side of things, not on the sensing side. The MBTIs the former-big-5-consultant that I am had to take were always filing me under “imaginative and conceptual”, not “practical and organized”. So I tend to feel things without really being able to explain why. In the past I would wait until the image would stop being blurred, and write about it after a long maturation process.

But I am out of time these days, and after all it’s fun, so here are the things I think I think (but can’t really tell you why):

  1. Celebrity will soon be perceived as a disease. Young stars will receive government funded psychological treatment, and governments will have to create services dedicated to teach celebs how to deal with things like the loss of privacy or control of their identity.
  2. Google rank will become a political argument. Instead of saying “this is why I am right” political leaders will say “type ‘Iraq war’ in google and look at how my speech comes up first”. Google will be perceived as the ultimate organizer of relevance, and as nobody can control it it will provide the needed crowdibility (that’s a new word I just made up) politicians have lost. If you are on top of google you are right, and you are right because the population put you there.
  3. Strikes will follow wars and happen online. It makes so much sense. Web War I proved that you can impair a government with online activities, and unions will need to stop bothering clients who have more and more tools to hit them back and influence public opinion with blogs and cell phone cameras.
  4. Work will be an socially accepted reason for divorce. “I am leaving you for my job”. Work is becoming so intensive and personal, private and professional lives are merging so much, so more and more people will find the level of socialization they need at work, a much easier to control and therefore tempting environment.
  5. Our whole economic system will be reinvented around the correct assumption that people do not create for money but for fun. That day copyright and intellectual property will stop making sense, and the 99% of the inhabitants of this planet who create for pleasure and not for business will finally be treated fairly.
  6. Somebody will get stabbed for speaking too loud with his mobile phone in a public place. Every time I am in a situation where somebody disrespects an entire bus to say hi to his grandmother, I find the general hate level is becoming higher and higher.
  7. Entrepreneurs will equal adventurers. Where is the excitement these days? Crossing the Atlantic is so twentieth century. Entrepreneurs will be among the cool dudes, hit the Jay Leno show and get coverage in tabloids.
  8. Presence applications will impact sociality in a negative way. Twitter users will stop talking about their life to others, not knowing if the person received updates he or she sent over Twitter or Facebook. Presence applications will create a fear to send the same signal twice. (this one I write to make sure you guys comment on this post ;)

The bus drivers era

I had a recent discussion with a Skype exec who was telling me how bad the integration with eBay was going, as eBay was such a hierarchical and procedural organization. Hierarchical and procedural? Not something you would expect from a young company like eBay right?

But it is not 2000 anymore. Time has passed. Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon, Google, these organizations are now mammoth struggling with big companies problems like inertia, internal politics, miscommunication, etc…

This Cory Doctorow article on Amazon’s problems with understanding the logic of the download market further confirmed my intuition that we entered a new era: the bus drivers era.

The internet industry is not driven by young hot mavericks anymore. It is now headed by big time CEOs with shareholders, middle managers and a focus on quarterly reports. Their job is to keep their user base satisfied via incremental innovation, not to change the world anymore. The CEOs of the internet industry are now like the CEOs of any industry : they are bus drivers.

Ebay looks more and more like Microsoft. Yahoo currently seems to be as exciting a company as AT&T or GM. Google is slowly cutting itself from users every day. Growth has a price as it forces you to manage a very different set of non value-adding things.

And the web industry is certainly less fun than it used to be.