The hierarchy of innovation

May 14, 2012

"If you could choose only one of the following two inventions, indoor plumbing or the Internet, which would you choose?" -Robert J. Gordon

Justin Fox is the latest pundit to ring the "innovation ain't what it used to be" bell. "Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20th century," he writes, summing up the argument, "the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live." Fox has a lot of company. He points to sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, who worries that the Internet, far from spurring a great burst of creativity, may have actually put innovation "on hold for a generation." Fox also cites economist Tyler Cowen, who has argued that, recent techno-enthusiasm aside, we're living in a time of innovation stagnation. He could also have mentioned tech powerbroker Peter Thiel, who believes that large-scale innovation has gone dormant and that we've entered a technological "desert." Thiel blames the hippies:

Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost.

The original inspiration for such grousing - about progress, not about hippies - came from Robert J. Gordon, a Northwestern University economist whose 2000 paper "Does the 'New Economy' Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?" included a damning comparison of the flood of inventions that occurred a century ago with the seeming trickle that we see today. Consider the new products invented in just the ten years between 1876 and 1886: internal combustion engine, electric lightbulb, electric transformer, steam turbine, electric railroad, automobile, telephone, movie camera, phonograph, linotype, roll film (for cameras), dictaphone, cash register, vaccines, reinforced concrete, flush toilets. The typewriter had arrived a few years earlier and the punch-card tabulator would appear a few years later. And then, in short order, came airplanes, radio, air conditioning, the vacuum tube, jet aircraft, television, refrigerators and a raft of other home appliances, as well as revolutionary advances in manufacturing processes. (And let's not forget The Bomb.) The conditions of life changed utterly between 1890 and 1950, observed Gordon. Between 1950 and today? Not so much.

So why is innovation less impressive today? Maybe Thiel is right, and it's the fault of hippies, liberals, and other degenerates. Or maybe it's crappy education. Or a lack of corporate investment in research. Or short-sighted venture capitalists. Or overaggressive lawyers. Or imagination-challenged entrepreneurs. Or maybe it's a catastrophic loss of mojo. But none of these explanations makes much sense. The aperture of science grows ever wider, after all, even as the commercial and reputational rewards for innovation grow ever larger and the ability to share ideas grows ever stronger. Any barrier to innovation should be swept away by such forces.

Let me float an alternative explanation: There has been no decline in innovation; there has just been a shift in its focus. We're as creative as ever, but we've funneled our creativity into areas that produce smaller-scale, less far-reaching, less visible breakthroughs. And we've done that for entirely rational reasons. We're getting precisely the kind of innovation that we desire - and that we deserve.

My idea - and it's a rough one - is that there's a hierarchy of innovation that runs in parallel with Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs. Maslow argued that human needs progress through five stages, with each new stage requiring the fulfillment of lower-level, or more basic, needs. So first we need to meet our most primitive Physiological needs, and that frees us to focus on our needs for Safety, and once our needs for Safety are met, we can attend to our needs for Belongingness, and then on to our needs for personal Esteem, and finally to our needs for Self-Actualization. If you look at Maslow's hierarchy as an inflexible structure, with clear boundaries between its levels, it falls apart. Our needs are messy, and the boundaries between them are porous. A caveman probably pursued self-esteem and self-actualization, to some degree, just as we today spend effort seeking to fulfill our physical needs. But if you look at the hierarchy as a map of human focus, or of emphasis, then it makes sense - and indeed seems to be born out by history. In short: The more comfortable you are, the more time you spend thinking about yourself.

If progress is shaped by human needs, then general shifts in needs would also bring shifts in the nature of technological innovation. The tools we invent would move through the hierarchy of needs, from tools that help safeguard our bodies on up to tools that allow us to modify our internal states, from tools of survival to tools of the self. Here's my crack at what the hierarchy of innovation looks like (click on the image to enlarge it):

The focus, or emphasis, of innovation moves up through five stages, propelled by shifts in the needs we seek to fulfill. In the beginning come Technologies of Survival (think fire), then Technologies of Social Organization (think cathedral), then Technologies of Prosperity (think steam engine), then technologies of leisure (think TV), and finally Technologies of the Self (think Facebook, or Prozac).

As with Maslow's hierarchy, you shouldn't look at my hierarchy as a rigid one. Innovation today continues at all five levels. But the rewards, both monetary and reputational, are greatest at the highest level (Technologies of the Self), which has the effect of shunting investment, attention, and activity in that direction. We're already physically comfortable, so getting a little more physically comfortable doesn't seem particularly pressing. We've become inward looking, and what we crave are more powerful tools for modifying our internal state or projecting that state outward. An entrepreneur has a greater prospect of fame and riches if he creates, say, a popular social-networking tool than if he creates a faster, more efficient system for mass transit. The arc of innovation, to put a dark spin on it, is toward decadence.

One of the consequences is that, as we move to the top level of the innovation hierarchy, the inventions have less visible, less transformative effects. We're no longer changing the shape of the physical world or even of society, as it manifests itself in the physical world. We're altering internal states, transforming the invisible self. Not surprisingly, when you step back and take a broad view, it looks like stagnation - it looks like nothing is changing very much. That's particularly true when you compare what's happening today with what happened a hundred years ago, when our focus on Technologies of Prosperity was peaking and our focus on Technologies of Leisure was also rapidly increasing, bringing a highly visible transformation of our physical circumstances.

If the current state of progress disappoints you, don't blame innovation. Blame yourself.

Posted by nick at 12:11 PM | Comments (10)

Social production guru, heal thyself

May 11, 2012

I was pleased to see that Yochai Benkler launched a blog on Monday - and, since the first (and as yet only) post was a response to my claim of victory in the Carr-Benkler Wager, I think I can even take a bit of credit for inspiring the professor to join the hurly-burly of the blogosphere. Welcome, Yochai! Long may you blog!

I fear, however, that no one explained to Yochai the concept of Comments. You see, on Monday I scribbled out a fairly long reply to his post, and submitted it through his comment form. I was hoping, as a long-time social producer myself, to spur a good, non-price-incentivized online conversation. But, now five days later, my comment has not appeared on his blog. In fact, no comments have appeared. Perhaps it's a technical glitch, but since Yochai's blog is one of many Harvard Law blogs, I have to think that the Comment form is working and that the fault lies with the blogger. (I even resubmitted my comment, just in case there was a glitch with the first submission.)

Memo to Yochai: social production begins at home.

Fortunately, I saved a copy of my comment. So, while waiting for Yochai to get around to tending his comment stream, I will post it here:

Yochai,
Thanks for your considered reply. I'm sure you'll be shocked to discover that I disagree with your claim that you’ve won our wager. I think you're doing more than a little cherry-picking here, both in choosing categories and in defining categories. Most important, you're shortchanging the actual content that circulates online, which I would consider the most important factor in diagnosing the nature of production. For example, you highlight "music distribution" and "music funding," but you ignore the music itself (the important thing), which continues to be dominated by price-incentivized production - even on p-to-p networks, the vast majority of what's traded is music produced by paid professionals. The same goes, for example, for news reporting, where peer production is a minuscule slice of the pie. Where is the great expansion of the peer production model that you promised six years ago? Where are all the Wikipedias in other realms of informational goods? The fact is, the spread of social production just hasn't happened. Even open-source software – your primary example of social production - has moved away from peer production and toward price-incentivized production. I don’t say that this is necessarily a good thing, I just say that it’s the reality of what’s happening.

Here's my (quick and dirty) alternative rundown of whether the most influential sites in major categories of online activity are generally characterized by price-incentivized production (pi) or peer production (pp):

News reporting/writing: pi (relatively little pp)

News opinion: pi (Huff Post has mix, but shifting toward more pi, both by Huff Post paid staff and for others writing as paid employees of other organizations; other popular news opinion sites are dominantly pi)

News story discovery/aggregation: unclear (are Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon et al. really the most influential, or are they secondary to the editorial decision-making by sites like NY Times, WSJ, BBC, Guardian, Daily Mail, The Atlantic, and other traditional papers and magazines? I don't think this is an easy one to figure out. My own sense is that traditional news organizations play a dominant role in shaping what news is seen and read online, though I acknowledge the importance of social production in the sharing of links to stories and the incorporation of social-production tools at traditional newspaper and magazine sites.)

General (non-news) web content discovery/aggregation: pp

Blogging: pi (big change from 2006)

Other writing: pi

Music (creation): pi

Music (discovery/aggregation): difficult to say, as a lot of sites (eg, YouTube) have mixed models, but I would give the edge to pi based on dominance of big retailing sites (iTunes, Amazon), big streaming sites (Spotify, Rhapsody), and artist and record company sites. Certainly since 2006, there's been a shift toward commercial sites.

Photographs: pp

Video (creation): pi (with all due respect to YouTube amateurs, professionally produced TV shows, TV show clips, movies, movie clips, music videos, advertisements, now dominate online viewing through YouTube, Hulu, Netfllix, tv sites, newspaper sites, e.g. WSJ video, professional blog sites with video components, etc.

Radio/podcasting: pi

Recipes: pi

Charitable giving: pi (i.e., operated by paid staff)

Reviews: pp (a big, diffuse category that could be broken up in many ways, but I think overall pp dominates in use, if not influence)

How-to advice: pi

Encyclopedias: pp

E-books: pi (that goes for even self-published e-books)

Apps: pi

Games: pi

Advertising: pi (except classified advertising, which goes pp thanks to Craigslist)

Education and training: pi

Weather reports and forecasts: pi

Greeting cards and invitations: pi

Scholarship: pi

Political campaigns: pi (the social-networking hype that attended the first Obama campaign turned out to be overblown; campaigns continue to be professionally managed operations)

Pornography: pi (again, with all due respect to the intrepid amateurs)

The fact is that peer production hasn't revolutionized models of content production online, even if we grant (as I do) that peer production continues to play an important (and occasionally dominant) role in some areas.

Social networking? Yes, social networking is, by definition, social networking, but even in what we define as social networking, do you really dispute that price-incentivized content is not playing an ever larger (rather than smaller) role? Here, to illustrate, are the Top 20 most popular Facebook pages as of the end of 2010 (most recent stats I could find):

1. Texas Hold'em Poker (Zynga page)
2. Facebook
3. Michael Jackson
4. Lady Gaga
5. Family Guy
6. YouTube
7. Eminem
8. Vin Diesel
9. Twilight Saga
10. Starbucks
11. Megan Fox
12. South Park
13. Coca-Cola
14. House (TV show)
15. Linkin Park
16. Barack Obama
17. Lil Wayne
18. Justin Bieber
19. Mafia Wars (Zynga)
20. Cristiano Ronaldo

Of the ten most viewed YouTube videos of all time (as of this month), nine are professional productions and only one (yes, it's "Charlie Bit My Finger") is a non-price-incentivized production. Even Twitter is far from a pure p-to-p site; many contributors contribute as part of their jobs. I think what we’re learning – and it’s hardly a surprise – is that when a for-profit corporation operates a social network, it becomes steadily more commercialized.

I don't expect that I've convinced you that I've won the bet, but it sure would be nice if you would acknowledge the web's shift, since 2006, to a medium ever more dominated by professionally produced content and ever more controlled by commercial interests, for better or for worse.

And welcome to blogging,

Nick

Posted by nick at 11:39 AM | Comments (1)

FarmVille: a Gothic fantasia

May 08, 2012

"You built it yourself, with play-labor, but politically it’s a slum."
-Bruce Sterling

Hardware is a problem. It wears out. It breaks down. It is subject to physical forces. It is subject to entropy. It deteriorates. It decays. It fails. The moment of failure can't be predicted, but what can be predicted is that the moment will come. Assemblies of atoms are doomed. Worse yet, the more components incorporated into a physical system - the more subassemblies that make up the assembly - the more points of failure the apparatus has and the more fragile it becomes.

This is an engineering problem. This is also a metaphysical problem.

One of Google's great innovations in building the data centers that run its searches was to use software as a means of isolating each component of the system and hence of separating component failure from system failure. The networking software senses a component failure (a dying hard drive, say) and immediately bypasses the component, routing the work to another, healthy piece of hardware in the system. No single component matters; each is entirely dispensable and entirely disposable. Maintaining the system, at the hardware level, becomes a simple process of replacing failed parts with fresh ones. You hire a low-skilled worker, or make a robot, and when a component dies, the worker, or the robot, swaps it out with a good one.

Such a system requires smart software. It also requires cheap parts.

Executing an algorithm with a physical system is like putting a mind into a body.

Bruce Sterling gave an interesting speech at a conference in 2009. He drew a distinction between two lifestyles that form the poles of our emerging "cultural temperament." On the one end - the top end - you have Gothic High-Tech:

In Gothic High-Tech, you’re Steve Jobs. You’ve built an iPhone which is a brilliant technical innovation, but you also had to sneak off to Tennessee to get a liver transplant because you’re dying of something secret and horrible. And you’re a captain of American industry. You’re not some General Motors kinda guy. On the contrary, you’re a guy who’s got both hands on the steering wheel of a functional car. But you’re still Gothic High-Tech because death is waiting. And not a kindly death either, but a sinister, creeping, tainted wells of Silicon Valley kind of Superfund thing that steals upon you month by month, and that you have to hide from the public and from the bloggers and from the shareholders.

And then there's the other end - the bottom end - which Sterling calls Favela Chic. These are the multitudinous "play-laborers" of the virtual realm.

What is Favela Chic? Favela Chic is when you have lost everything material, everything you built and everything you had, but you’re still wired to the gills! And really big on Facebook. That’s Favela Chic. You lost everything, you have no money, you have no career, you have no health insurance, you’re not even sure where you live, you don’t have children, and you have no steady relationship or any set of dependable friends. And it’s hot. It’s a really cool place to be.

The Favela Chic worship the Gothic High-Tech because the Gothic High-Tech have perfected unreality. They have escaped the realm of "the infrastructure" and have positioned themselves "in the narrative," the stream that flows forever, unimpeded. They are avatars: software without apparatus, mind without body.

Except when a part fails.

H. G. Wells, in his Gothic novella "The Time Machine," used different terms. The Gothic High-Tech he called Morlocks. The Favela Chic he called Eloi. Of course Wells was writing not in a time of virtualization but in a time of industrialization.

About eight or nine in the morning I came to the same seat of yellow metal from which I had viewed the world upon the evening of my arrival. I thought of my hasty conclusions upon that evening and could not refrain from laughing bitterly at my confidence. Here was the same beautiful scene, the same abundant foliage, the same splendid palaces and magnificent ruins, the same silver river running between its fertile banks. The gay robes of the beautiful people moved hither and thither among the trees. Some were bathing in exactly the place where I had saved Weena, and that suddenly gave me a keen stab of pain. And like blots upon the landscape rose the cupolas above the ways to the Under-world. I understood now what all the beauty of the Over-world people covered. Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.

The young, multibillionaire technologist is left with only two avocations: space travel and the engineering of immortality. Both are about escaping the gravity of the situation.

There are two apparent ways to sidestep death. You can virtualize the apparatus, freeing the mind from the body. But before you can do that, you need to figure out the code. And, alas, when it comes to the human being, we are still a long way from figuring out the code. Disembodiment is not imminent. Or you can take the Google route and figure out a way to quickly bypass the failed component, whether it's the heart or the kidney, the pancreas or the liver. In time, we may figure out a may to fabricate the essential components of our bodies - to create an unlimited supply - but that eventuality, too, is not imminent. So we are left, for the time being, with transplantation, with the harvesting of good components from failed systems and the use of those components to replace the failed components of living systems.

The Gothic High-Tech, who cannot abide death, face a problem here: the organ donation system is largely democratic; it can't be easily gamed by wealth. A rich person may be able to travel somewhere that has shorter lines - Tennessee, perhaps - but he can't jump to the head of the line. So the challenge becomes one of increasing the supply, of making dear components cheap.

A week ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a move that he said was inspired by the experience of his friend Steve Jobs, announced that Facebook was introducing a new feature that would make it easy for members to identify themselves as organ donors. Should Zuckerberg's move increase the supply of organs, it will save many lives and alleviate much suffering. We should all be grateful. Dark dreams of the future are best left to science-fiction writers.

Posted by nick at 04:13 PM | Comments (2)

The economics of digital sharecropping

May 04, 2012

With a reported 900 million active members, Facebook is, by far, the largest digital-sharecropping operation that the internet has yet produced. About one out of every eight people on the planet sharecrops for Facebook today - and their collective labor is expected to put a billion dollars of cash into CEO Mark Zuckerberg's pocket when the company goes public in a few weeks. In a 2006 post, I explained why sharecropping is such a powerful business model for social networks and other online businesses:

One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It's a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It's only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale - on a web scale - that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it's simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.

Facebook's most recent financial filing provides a great illustration of the "two economies" that underpin digital sharecropping. As Techcrunch noted, Facebook reported that it earned an average of $1.21 in revenue from each of its members during the first quarter of this year. What Facebook calls ARPU - average revenue per user - is one of its crucial financial measures. Here's what it said about ARPU in its filing:

During the first quarter of 2012, worldwide ARPU was $1.21, an increase of 6% from the first quarter of 2011. Over this period, ARPU increased across all geographies ... ARPU in the first quarter of 2012 declined 12% from the fourth quarter of 2011. We believe the sequential quarterly decline was driven by seasonal trends, which also affected ARPU trends from the fourth quarter of 2010 to the first quarter of 2011, during which period ARPU declined by 10%. In addition, the sequential decline in ARPU in the first quarter of 2012 was affected by the fact that our user growth was higher in geographies with relatively lower ARPU. ARPU increased 32% from $3.08 in 2009 to $4.08 in 2010 and 25% to $5.11 in 2011. In these periods, we experienced ARPU growth across all regions.

Because Facebook's content is created by its members, ARPU also tells us the monetary value of each member's labor. If the average Facebook sharecropper were to be paid a revenue share for his or her work on the site, that member would make a buck and change every three months - about enough for one crappy cup of coffee. Needless to say, the amount is so small that Facebook members never think about it. The amounts only become economically interesting when, as I wrote earlier, you aggregate them on a massive scale.

I would argue, in fact, that while Facebook very much wants ARPU to grow steadily, it probably doesn't want the number to get so large that it becomes a meaningful amount to its members. If that happened, members might start thinking about the cash value of their labor rather than just its attention value. The line between the two economies would blur. By keeping ARPU modest (and focusing on scale), Facebook maintains the all-important divide between the attention economy (in which members see themselves as working) and the cash economy (in which the company reaps the monetary value of the members' work). The last thing a for-profit social network wants is for its members to start seeing themselves as laborers.

Posted by nick at 10:11 AM | Comments (11)

Pay up, Yochai Benkler

May 01, 2012

My reservoir of patience, deep as it may be, is running dry. Nearly a year has passed since the culmination of the fabled Carr-Benkler Wager, and Yochai Benkler has yet to pay his debt to me. Dude, have you heard of PayPal? I haven't even received a simple acknowledgement of my triumph.

What, you ask, is the Carr-Benkler Wager? Well, that's hard to say definitively. But here's how Benkler defined it back in July of 2006, when Web 2.0 was still an innocent babe cooing happily in its mother's arms:

We could decide to appoint between one and three people [that never happened] who, on some date certain - let's say two years from now, on August 1st 2008 [this was later extended to five years, so the operative date was August 1, 2011] - survey the web or blogosphere, and seek out the most influential sites in some major category: for example, relevance and filtration (like Digg); or visual images (like Flickr). And they will then decide whether they are peer production processes or whether they are price-incentivized systems. While it is possible that there will be a price-based player there, I predict that the major systems will be primarily peer-based.

I took the bet. I argued that, if you looked at the most influential sites across major categories of online activity in 2011, you would find them to be dominated by price-based players (i.e., commercial entities), whereas Benkler argued that they would be dominated by peer-production players (i.e., loose, unmanaged groups of unpaid contributors). Basically, the wager boiled down to this: Is the web fated to follow the path of earlier media and become dominated by commercial interests, or will it be ruled by amateurs operating outside the traditional marketplace and its money-making incentives? (Just to be clear, neither Benkler nor I saw this as a black and white question. Peer production and commercial production will both continue to exist online - as they always have offline. What Benkler predicted is that peer production would be the dominant mode of online production; I disagreed.)

This is an essential question - maybe the essential question - about the fate of the net. It's pretty much the same question that Tim Wu posed, more eloquently, in his 2010 book The Master Switch:

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the second closing of the traditional information industries was complete ... [T]he industrial concentration had reached levels not seen since the 1950s. The one great exception to this dominion of big business was the Internet, its users, and the industry that had grown on the network. Amid the consolidation, the 1990s also saw the so-called Internet revolution. Would it lead to the downfall of these consolidating superpowers? Some certainly thought so. "We are seeing the emergence of a new stage in the information economy," prophesied Yochai Benkler. "It is displacing the industrial information economy ..."
Unfortunately, the media and communications conglomerates didn't consult Benkler as their soothsayer. With aggregate audiences in the billions and combined revenues in the trillions, they had - in fact, have - a very different vision of the future: the Internet either remade in their likeness, or at the very least rendered harmless to their core business interests. ... Is the Internet really different? Every other invention of its kind has had its period of openness, only to become the basis of yet another information empire. Which is mightier: the radicalism of the Internet or the inevitability of the Cycle?

So what's happened over the last five years? Let's look at the blogosphere. Many of the most popular sites in 2006 were strictly amateur productions, often written by a lone scribbler. Today, the most popular blog sites are almost all corporate productions, usually written by teams of wage-earners employed by corporations, often large media corporations. That doesn't mean the amateurs have gone away; it just means they've been marginalized. Video? In 2006, YouTube was a playground of amateur videographers, uploading their work for kicks. The amateurs are still there, but the most popular videos today are corporate productions - from TV networks, film studios, recording companies, publishing companies, game studios - and even a lot of the amateur productions are wrapped in advertisements. Beyond YouTube, online video is dominated by sites syndicating professional productions: Hulu, Vevo, Netflix, and the various TV networks, et al. Online music? Definitely dominated by sites offering professional productions from record companies (iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Amazon, etc.). Again, there's still plenty of amateur music online, but the dominant outlets are fundamentally commercial. Even open-source software - one of Benkler's core examples of peer production - has shifted in the last five years toward commercial dominance, with many contributors to the largest open-source projects being salaried employees of software firms.

There are certainly places where unpaid contributors continue to play a dominant role online - photography, Wikipedia - but they are exceptions to the net's general evolution away from a populist medium and toward a commercial one. There is also, importantly, the phenomenal rise of Facebook and Twitter. But what is the nature of Facebook and Twitter? Certainly, most contributors are not getting paid for their activity, but many of the most popular tweeters and Facebook pages are motivated by commercial interests - entertainers and other celebrities promoting their (profit-making) careers, journalists contributing as an element of their (salary-paying) jobs, corporations using the networks as PR or marketing channels, etc. And, beyond the individual contributors, Facebook and Twitter are of course commercial entities that operate their sites for profit (or at least for IPO riches). What Benkler calls social production is not going to disappear from the net - thank goodness - but, like amateur radio, it is turning into a sideshow. Wu's "Cycle" is, once again, playing out. The dominant production systems in most online media categories are commercial ones.

I am happy to consider the counterargument - that Benkler was right and that the web has become less commercial over the last five years. But even a cursory glance over the net's recent history makes it hard for me to believe that such a case can be made. So I will continue to await my PayPal windfall from Yochai Benkler.

How much will that windfall amount to? Exactly this much: $0.00. Unlike the web, the Carr-Benkler Wager exists outside of all price-incentivized systems. It is a purely social bet.

Posted by nick at 12:28 PM | Comments (10)

First-person hoer

April 27, 2012

Galleycat notes that a team at USC has nabbed a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to, as the grant states, "support production costs for a video game based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond. The player will inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods."

This game is going to kick some serious ass. Check out the trailer:

Right after that bass-fishing mission, there's a killer bean-field mission where you do battle with a gang of woodchucks using a two-handed hoe as your only weapon. I also hear that - spoiler alert - the game culminates in an insane melee with the local tax collector that begins in the Concord jail and ends in the kitchen of Emerson's house.

And, no, there's no multiplayer option.

Posted by nick at 10:56 AM | Comments (2)

The DPLA and the quest for a universal library

April 25, 2012

Ever since the Library of Alexandria burned to the ground two thousand years ago, people have yearned to rebuild it. Today, thanks to the internet, the dream of a universal library seems closer to fulfillment than ever before. But as Google's ill-fated Book Search project has revealed, the challenges to creating a comprehensive online library remain great - and they have little to do with technology.

In the new issue of Technology Review, I report on the latest and perhaps most ambitious effort to create "the library of utopia": the Digital Public Library of America, or DPLA. Led by Harvard luminaries, the DPLA has big plans, big names, and big contributors, but it, too, faces big obstacles, not least of which is its hesitancy to define what it wants to be.

Here's a bit from the article:

If you were looking for Larry Page's opposite, you would be hard pressed to find a better candidate than Robert Darnton. A distinguished historian and prize-winning author, a former Rhodes scholar and MacArthur fellow, a Chevalier in France's Légion d'Honneur, and a 2011 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the 72-year-old Darnton is everything that Page is not: eloquent, diplomatic, and embedded in the literary establishment. If Page is a bull in a china shop, Darnton is the china shop's proprietor.
But Darnton has one thing in common with Page: an ardent desire to see a universal library established online, a library that would, as he puts it, "make all knowledge available to all citizens." ...

Read it all.

Posted by nick at 09:56 AM | Comments (3)

A debate on the substance of nothing

April 23, 2012

Ross Andersen has a superb interview with the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss at the Atlantic's site. Krauss's recent book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing has, by design, kicked up a controversy. Krauss argues in the book that science is now "addressing the question of why there is something rather than nothing" and that, indeed, recent scientific discoveries in this area "all suggest that getting something from nothing is not a problem." In his afterword to the book, Richard Dawkins writes, “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages." In a New York Times review last month, the Columbia University philosopher David Albert begged to differ, writing that Krauss is "dead wrong." Albert argued that what Krauss claims is "nothing" - in short, "empty space" - is actually something and that, therefore, Krauss's explanation does not "amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing." In the Atlantic interview, Krauss calls Albert "a moronic philosopher."

Fun stuff.

But important stuff, too. As Andersen writes, "To see two academics, both versed in theoretical physics, disagreeing so intensely on such a fundamental point is troubling. Not because scientists shouldn't disagree with each other, but because here they're disagreeing about a claim being disseminated to the public as a legitimate scientific discovery." More than that, they're arguing about whether non-scientific approaches to explaining or even contemplating the origin of the cosmos - not just theological approaches, but also philosophical ones - still have any legitimacy. Krauss has little regard for philosophy, as he makes clear at the outset of the interview:

Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, "those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym." And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; ... it's really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I'd say that this tension [between science and philosophy] occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't.

And yet - and this is testimony to Andersen's skill as a questioner - as the interview proceeds Krauss begins to sound as much like a philosopher (a philosopher of science, even) as a scientist:

Andersen: I think the problem for me, coming at this as a layperson, is that when you're talking about the explanatory power of science, for every stage where you have a "something" - even if it's just a wisp of something, or even just a set of laws - there has to be a further question about the origins of that "something." And so when I read the title of your book, I read it as "questions about origins are over."
Krauss: Well, if that hook gets you into the book that's great. But in all seriousness, I never make that claim. In fact, in the preface I tried to be really clear that you can keep asking "Why?" forever. At some level there might be ultimate questions that we can't answer, but if we can answer the "How?" questions, we should, because those are the questions that matter. And it may just be an infinite set of questions, but what I point out at the end of the book is that the multiverse may resolve all of those questions. From Aristotle's prime mover to the Catholic Church's first cause, we're always driven to the idea of something eternal. If the multiverse really exists, then you could have an infinite object - infinite in time and space as opposed to our universe, which is finite. That may beg the question as to where the multiverse came from, but if it's infinite, it's infinite. You might not be able to answer that final question, and I try to be honest about that in the book.

The universe is still big enough to accommodate both scientists and philosophers - and even philosophical scientists and scientific philosophers. I suspect it will remain that way for some time yet.

UPDATE: Two more perspectives:

At the Huffington Post, Victor Senger writes:

Albert is not satisfied that Krauss has answered the fundamental question: Why there is something rather than nothing, that is, being rather than nonbeing? Again, there is a simple retort: Why should nothing, no matter how defined, be the default state of existence rather than something? And, to bring religion into the picture, one could ask: Why is there God rather than nothing? Once theologians assert that there is a God (as opposed to nothing), they can't turn around and ask a cosmologist why there is a universe (as opposed to nothing). They claim God is a necessary entity. But then, why can't a godless multiverse be a necessary entity?

And here's John Horgan, at Scientific American:

Science has told us so much about our world! We now understand, more or less, what reality is made of and what forces push and pull the stuff of existence to and fro. Scientists have also constructed a plausible, empirically founded narrative of the history of the cosmos and of life on Earth. But when scientists insist that they have solved, or will soon solve, all mysteries, including the biggest mystery of all, they do a disservice to science; they become the mirror images of the religious fundamentalists they despise.

And let's not forget Wallace Stevens's portrait of the man

... who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Posted by nick at 04:50 PM | Comments (1)

Social networks as recreational drugs

April 22, 2012

This morning I had cause to look at Tim Carmody's tweetstream. Man, that cat can tweet. Anyway, it got me thinking about whether you might be able to categorize social networks according to their resemblance to recreational drugs. If a sharing site were an abusable substance, which abusable substance would it be?

Here's my first cut:

Twitter = Black Beauties

[symptoms of abuse: hyperactivity; increased awareness of surroundings; increased interest in repetitive or normally boring activities; decreased appetite; decreased ability to sleep*]

Facebook = Pot

[symptoms of abuse: red, watery eyes; fuzzy-mindedness; inexplicable laughter; weight gain; self-absorption; suspicious changes in friendships]

Pinterest = Quaaludes

[symptoms of abuse: slowed heart rate; drowsiness; indiscriminate displays of affection; regrettable decisions; stupidity]

YouTube = Cocaine

[symptoms of abuse: dilated pupils; accelerated heart rate; public blathering; manic episodes; impotence]

MySpace = LSD

[symptoms of abuse: colorful hallucinations; bad taste in clothes; psychosis]

Google+ = Ambien

[symptoms of abuse: sleep, drooling]

Posted by nick at 04:44 PM | Comments (6)

Technology and culture: a test case

April 20, 2012

Which is stronger: technology's power to shape local culture, or local culture's power to influence the way technology is adopted and used? If it's the former, as I suspect it is, then technology becomes a homogenizing force, tending in time to erase cultural differences. If it's the latter, then technology plays a subservient role; the uniformity of the tool does not impose uniformity on the tool's use. Culture prevails.

We're going to get some insight into this question over the next decade or so as e-readers - in the form of both devices and apps - spread and become even cheaper. As Caroline Winter of Bloomberg Businessweek reports, in two of the most prosperous Western countries - the U.S. and Germany - the adoption of electronic books has so far taken very different routes. E-books are booming in the U.S. Less than five years after the introduction of Amazon's Kindle, e-book sales already account for about a quarter of all U.S. book sales, and that percentage continues to rise sharply. In Germany, where e-readers are also readily available, e-books still represent just 1 percent of overall book sales.

The difference is largely a cultural one. Germany, the birthplace of Gutenberg and his printing press and the home of the Frankfurt Book Fair, is very much a country of the book. Bookstores are everywhere, and readers are attentive not only to the quality of a book's writing but to the quality of its paper and its binding. As Spiegel's Aaron Wiener recently observed, "Books are simply more deeply ingrained in the German way of life [than in the American]." German readers continue to have a strong sense that reading from a printed page is superior to reading from a screen.

There are also economic differences. In Germany, publishers set book prices, and the prices don't vary from store to store. E-book prices follow these same rules, which means that they have not undercut print prices to the same degree that they have in the U.S. But this policy, too, is rooted in culture: it is aimed at preserving the diversity of the book trade. (It must pain Eric Holder enormously to travel to Germany and see so many flourishing bookshops.) E-books are also taxed at a higher rate than print books, which enjoy a tax exemption in Germany - another manifestation of the book's special place in the culture.

So what happens from here? In the long run, will the book markets of Germany and the U.S. continue to diverge, with the e-book becoming the dominant form of the book in America but the printed book retaining its dominance in Germany? It will be interesting, and illuminating, to watch. One small hint: Although e-books represent just 1 percent of the German book market, sales of e-books nearly doubled there last year. As Dominique Pleimling, of the Institute of Book Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, says, "everything may change very quickly.”

Posted by nick at 11:01 AM | Comments (14)

Flame and filament

April 17, 2012

One of man's greatest inventions was also one of his most modest: the wick. We don’t know who first realized, many thousands of years ago, that fire could be isolated at the tip of a twisted piece of cloth and steadily fed, through capillary action, by a reservoir of wax or oil, but the discovery was, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes in Disenchanted Night, “as revolutionary in the development of artificial lighting as the wheel in the history of transport.” The wick tamed fire, allowing it to be used with a precision and an efficiency far beyond what was possible with a wooden torch or a bundle of twigs. In the process, it helped domesticate us as well. It’s hard to imagine civilization progressing to where it is today by torchlight.

The wick also proved an amazingly hardy creation. It remained the dominant lighting technology all the way to the nineteenth century, when it was replaced first by the wickless gas lamp and then, more decisively, by Edison’s electricity-fueled incandescent bulb with its glowing metal filament. Cleaner, safer, and even more efficient than the flame it replaced, the light bulb was welcomed into homes and offices around the world. But along with its many practical benefits, electric light also brought subtle and unexpected changes to the way people lived. The fireplace, the candle, and the oil lamp had always been the focal point of households. Fire was, as Schivelbusch puts it, “the soul of the house.” Families would in the evening gather in a central room, drawn by the flickering flame, to chat about the day’s events or otherwise pass the time together. Electric light, together with central heat, dissolved that long tradition. Family members began to spend more time in different rooms in the evening, studying or reading or working alone. Each person gained more privacy, and a greater sense of autonomy, but the cohesion of the family weakened.

Cold and steady, electric light lacked the allure of the flame. It was not mesmerizing or soothing but strictly functional. It turned light into an industrial commodity. A German diarist in 1944, forced to use candles instead of lightbulbs during nightly air raids, was struck by the difference. “We have noticed,” he wrote, “in the ‘weaker’ light of the candle, objects have a different, a much more marked profile — it gives them a quality of ‘reality.’” This quality, he continued, “is lost in electric light: objects (seemingly) appear much more clearly, but in reality it flattens them. Electric light imparts too much brightness and thus things lose body, outline, substance — in short, their essence.”

We’re still attracted to a flame at the end of a wick. We light candles to set a romantic or a calming mood, to mark a special occasion. We buy ornamental lamps that are crafted to look like candles or candleholders with bulbs shaped as stylized flames. But we can no longer know what it was like when fire was the source of all light. The number of people who remember life before the arrival of Edison’s bulb has dwindled to just a few, and when they go they’ll take with them all remaining memory of that earlier, pre-electric world. The same will happen, sometime toward the end of this century, with the memory of the world that existed before the computer and the Internet became commonplace. We’ll be the ones who bear it away.

All technological change is generational change. The full power and consequence of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their outdated parents to the margins. As the older generations die, they take with them their knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived, and only the sense of what was gained remains. It’s in this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be.

This brief essay originally appeared as the epilogue of my 2008 book The Big Switch.

Posted by nick at 01:01 PM | Comments (0)

Pinball CPU

April 16, 2012

Here's an ingenious contraption:

The creator, Lior Elazary, provides a full explanation of the clock here, along with instructions for building your own. Here's my favorite part of the instructions:

Start by creating a 12” diameter disc and attach a Flip-Flop to it. A Flip-Flop is a device that alternates its state with a given input. For example, a politician might change his stance on a specific issue based on some event, and then will change it back based on another event. In that case, we say he is a Flip-Flop, and we might be able to build a computer out of him.

[via Slashdot]

Posted by nick at 03:52 PM | Comments (0)

The Shallows: the album

April 10, 2012

Now this is pretty cool: The U.K. band I Like Trains has a new album coming out called The Shallows, which was inspired, at least in part, by my book of the same name. The album is an eerily propulsive work - heavy and light at the same time - and it's one that's easy to get lost in.

The record comes out on May 7, but if you order a physical copy now - from here - you can download a digital copy immediately.

And take a listen to the first single, "Mnemosyne":

Posted by nick at 09:39 AM | Comments (7)

The web expands to fill all boredom

April 05, 2012

Clay Shirky says:

The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”
It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

"Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment": that's well put. We don't like being bored because boredom is the absence of engaging stimulus, but boredom is valuable because it requires us to fill that absence out of our own resources, which is process of discovery, of doors opening. The pain of boredom is a spur to action, but because it's pain we're happy to avoid it. Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom. That's dangerous for everyone, but particularly so for kids, who, without boredom's spur, may never discover what in themselves or in their surroundings is most deeply engaging to them.

Perpetual boredom is an unattractive state. So is perpetual nonboredom.

Posted by nick at 05:34 PM | Comments (10)

A history of the future of the book

March 27, 2012

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 14, I will be giving a talk, "The Book as Gadget: The Rise of E-Readers and E-Reading," at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The lecture is part of the Newberry's History of the Book series. It's free and open to the public, but you have to register in advance. Details are here.

Posted by nick at 09:47 PM | Comments (3)

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