Collecting some more thoughts on identity in the digital environment

The computer abolishes the human past by making it entirely present. It makes natural and necessary a dialogue among cultures which is as intimate, as private as speech.

McLuhan -1968 - War & Peace in the Global Village p.90

This is a great quote from Marshall McLuhan, that is clearer today than when he wrote it. And I think in some ways it was also true when we invented language, then writing, the Gutenberg press, and now the digital environment. But it is not simply a question of more - but when more becomes different. 

I'm exploring a line of thinking about the implications of Big Data - ubiquitous big data. Bear with me, because I will begin and end with McLuhan's quote. 

Like all of my blog posts this is a rambling assemblage of ideas - I apologize for any incoherence and all the errors are mine. However, the articles/books/videos/blogs I point to are great.

I'm not a physicist - but this is what I've understood from reading Manuel DeLanda (who is well worth reading and viewing - he's got lots of material that you can Google and available for free). 

The digital environment is an intense medium - a medium determined by dimension of pressure, temperature, density, and connectivity (there are more types of intensities - but these are reasonable to think about). Unlike 'extensive' dimensions like width, length, etc. intensive dimensions are subject to certain types of change.

For example temperature of water - from 99 Celsius to 1 Celsius (a change of 98 degrees) temperature seems to impart a linear change on the water - slowing feeling colder. But from 1 Celsius to -1 Celsius (a change of 2 degrees) something profound happens. Water becomes a solid - the difference in temperature is not the really important thing to discern - it's that the very nature of what it is seems to have been transformed. 

Another example can be seen when we look at changes in population density.  In my last post I spoke of the increase in population density as humans shifted from hunter-gathering to agriculture and then to industrial societies which enabled associated increases in divisions-of-labour and related modes of production. But it is more than just an exponential increase in divisions of labour that characterizes these phase transitions. Each transition includes a corresponding increase in new types of institutions and new social structures, social forms and of course new ways of being. I highly recommend this book.

The idea of a 'phase transition' arising out of increases of population density (and other social intensities) was an important insight for me. 

I haven't finished his book yet, but I'm reading Dougla Allen's book, 

The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World

The book blurb at Amazon says this: In The Institutional Revolution, Douglas W. Allen offers a thought-provoking account of another, quieter revolution that took place at the end of the eighteenth century and allowed for the full exploitation of the many new technological innovations. Fundamental to this shift were dramatic changes in institutions, or the rules that govern society, which reflected significant improvements in the ability to measure performance—whether of government officials, laborers, or naval officers—thereby reducing the role of nature and the hazards of variance in daily affairs. Along the way, Allen provides readers with a fascinating explanation of the critical roles played by seemingly bizarre institutions, from dueling to the purchase of one’s rank in the British Army.

I highly recommend this book. It provides a powerful framework for understand the disruptive impact of Big Data for evolving our current institution. Ubiquitous access to Big Data will enable (in the sense that Stuart Kaufman suggests) whole new forms of measure - measures of things we have thought inconceivable to measure before. And these measures will not be simple aggregates - averages but they will make visible the dynamic turbulences of social behavior and even of consciousness. This in turn will enable unforeseeable institutions, including those involved with work and organizations. 

Two great Edge Conversations are must reads for understanding Big Data. 

REINVENTING SOCIETY IN THE WAKE OF BIG DATA

In this conversation Sandy Pentland does a wonderful job elaborating new forms of measure that Big Data can enable. 

The next Edge Conversation that is a must read/listen is Cesar Hidalgo's 

WHAT IS VALUE? WHAT IS MONEY?

He provides the best definition of Big Data that I've read so far. Big Data is even more than when more becomes different. He suggests that there is at least three dimensions to Big Data:

1.      Size: It has to be three times big. It’s not about 10, 100 or a 1,000 people. It has to be about millions of people or millions of entities.

2.      Resolution: It has to be big in resolution. It’s not just knowing an average or an aggregate over a long period of time, or over a large amount of space. It has to have a capability to have a high spatial resolution, high temporal resolution, and high typological resolution. For example, in looking at the spending patterns of people, it’s not about their average income. That's very aggregate. It’s about where they spend, at what time, and what things they purchase together. That would make data big.

3.      Scope: It has to be big on scope. Many confuse ‘lots of data’ with Big Data. It need to be useful for understanding things other than your core business, to understand things about the world. That's a condition that is very hard to get. There can lots of data about the procurement process or the value chain of shoelaces. It can have very fine spatial and temporal resolution. There might be lots of shoelaces that are crossing boundaries, so the data might be big in that dimension, but you're not going to understand anything other than the shoelace industry from that, so the data would not be big in scope.

The key insight I got from Cesar's conversation is when he discusses the difference between money and value. He frames it as the difference between wealth and value - which I think is not quite right because the way he talks about value seem to me to be identical to the way Adam Smith talks about wealth (but that is another discussion). The issues is the difference between the value we generate and the value that can be 'appropriated' for what is generated. For a long time I've wondered where Wikipedia shows up in our GDP measures. The value generated by all the contributors, by all the users who are able to use the value they find on Wikipedia to add value to their own efforts to understand or answer questions. Unlike Facebook, Wikipedia is a non-profit foundation and therefore is much less concerned with the need to monetize the value they generate.  

Why this is important is that money is now simply information - bits transferred via digital means and measured via digital means. It is a subjective perception of value that is measure through the 'illusion of precision' of numbers. Like Olympic judges with their score - e.g. 7.8 via 9.3 - we don't know if the 7.8 is actually a higher score because the judge was awake, was paying attention, and was more knowledgeable while the 9.3 judge had not had their coffee, was daydreaming, and actually had less experience. What makes the judges ratings robust is having enough judges and aggregating their scores. Essentially this is the way the price mechanism is supposed to work if it has 'good enough' information (enough subjective perceptions of value that are aggregated and responsive to continual changes). 

The idea of ubiquitous Big Data is that whole new aggregations of rated values/measures become available. 

The next couple of readings help flesh this out. First is an interesting and sort of antidote to our enamourment with numbers and point out the vulnerability to the many potential consequences of our reliance on measures - where the cult of "If it can't be measure it does not exist," meet "every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure." Although this is and the following are a bit dense they are well worth the time to grasp their meaning. 

Quanto-phrenia

Gilles Paquet
Optimum Online. Vol. 39, Issue 1, Mar 2009

A few quotes:

Quantitative methods have been used from time immemorial as a powerful instrument of reasoning. The problem arises when the use of such tools becomes the basis of a cult roughly captured by the motto “if it cannot be measured, it does not exist.” Such a cult distorts the appreciation we have of socio-economic phenomena, and this mental prison acts as blinders that have toxic, unintended consequences for public policies when they are shaped by an apparatus thus constrained…..

Another important cost of the quantophrenic cosmology is the so-called Goodhart effect – a phenomenon akin to the Heisenberg principle that suggests that quantifying transforms the world it tries to measure. Hoskin (1996: 265) has suggested a formulation of the Goodhart effect along the following lines:  every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure. This is so because the calculative fantasies of managerialism transform the environment into which they are introduced. Individuals and organizations come to think of themselves as auditees, and quantification distorts the character of the universe to which it is applied (Shore 2008): its effects are irreversible and generate a fixation on the metric rather than on the creativity and initiative that any practice requires. Getting results may be the explicitly stated goal mentioned, but numerology transforms the very notion of what the goal is, of what the organization is about…….

Following up on the reference Gilles Paquet make to Hoskin - the following is an excellent article that reveals a great deal about our relationship with number, accounting and strategy. Hoskin and Frandsen's article 

WHERE IS STRATEGY?

Elaborates the origin of writing in the first human insights in how to keep measures of the products of agriculture. What is interesting is, although human's were proto-farmers for about 30,000 years they only became real farmers within the the last 10,000 years (or so). The key may have been the development of the capacity to 'measure' stuff, which finally enabled humans to develop the social-economic structures for exchange. The following quotes introduces the paper (this paper is well worth the read).

Introduction:

Given the way that strategy is no longer conceived in many organizations and settings as purely a preserve of top management or reserved to the category of ‘strategic planning’, the question ‘where is strategy?’ has a new significance. Clearly strategic planning remains integral to strategizing, but as entities claim more and more to be knowledge-based or learning organizations, strategizing is increasingly understood as needing to be disseminated down and out through entities, and within increasing numbers of their members (i.e. human subjects). This constructs new roles for accounting in relation to strategy as increasing numbers of organizational members become constructed not purely as ‘calculable subjects’ (cf Foucault, 1975), but also, as managers and strategists have always been, as ‘calculable and calculating subjects’, and in this capacity even as

strategizing subjects.

In this paper we wish to consider the relations of accounting to strategy in two ways which we contend are interconnected. First we want to suggest that this new kind of linkage of accounting to strategy is an extension of a principle which has been visible, if not always noticed, from the emergence of modern strategy in the context of the invention of modern management and the entity that Alfred Chandler (1977) attached to that invention, the ‘modern business enterprise’. Strategy in its modern and distinctive forms has always been a product or precipitate of the new kinds of (cost and financial) accounting developed as a key means of enabling management to be developed in the first place. Strategy as practiced since then has been what Chris Smith has called in the modern context ‘Strategy as Numbers’ (Smith, 2003).

But further, what we are witnessing, as exemplified in two contemporary settings we consider here, is the extension of this principle both across the extending expanse of – and down within every increasingly subdivided fraction of – organizational ‘space’ and ‘time’, something increasingly achieved by the construction (including the selfconstruction) of all of us as populations of calculating/calculable selves whose forms of calculation take shape under the sign of accounting. Thus organizationally and individually we have to answer the question, “where is strategy?”, not only by seeing it as currently or synchronically disseminating out and down in organizational space/time, but by understanding that it increasingly does so, for reasons that can be understood diachronically, as numbers, and particularly as those accounting numbers which always name and count, and so ‘value’.

The next articles in this line of thought illuminates the issues of design. The digital environment represents a wicked design problem - not simply a technological design problem but a challenge of designing measure - which are the 'environment' of evolving new cultural structures and institutions. 

Jonathan Blow, is an icon in the Game Development world. Adored my many independent game developers and sort of vilified by many commercial game makers. This is a rather long video - but is one my son recommends as the most accessible to people who aren't into video games, and one of the best. 

How are games related to this stream of thinking about Big Data and the digital environment? I think that the framework that I think is best for understanding the trajectory of video games is that they are functions as the world's most profound laboratories for experimentation with 'Governance Policy' that can shape and harness people's motivation and passion. They are the laboratory for exploring the conditions of the future of working in the digital environment. I like to think of game developers as designers of social-political-economic systems - who must also listen and motivate their citizens.

Blow is concerned with developing new types of games, ones that are less about generating and exploiting 'addictions' and more about a deeper, healthier engaged experience of self-expression/discovery. This seems to me to be key, to the creation of an innovative organizational culture. A culture not 'gamified' for productivity of a machine architected organization, but of an enterprise that enables the self-organizing of complex systems energized by positive human intrinsic passion and will.

Jonathan Blow: Video Games and the Human Condition

This is the quote describing Jonathan Blow's presentation:

Video games have evolved tremendously over the past few decades; they're much more entertaining than they used to be. That is not by accident; we, the community of game designers, have been continuously refining our techniques. The most common way we do this is by testing out our games on you, the players, and optimizing for the "best" result (where "best" is defined by us). As this process is ongoing, what kind of relationship exists between the designer and the player? Is it artist/audience, experimenter/subject, entrepreneur/customer, or tycoon/resource? Invariably it's some admixture of these things, the particular ratios for a given game being chosen by its designers (usually without awareness that a decision is being made). Today, due to the way the Internet is widely used, and because game designers are becoming more serious about certain aspects of their craft, the iteration time of this game design optimization process is shorter than ever before: designers can observe their players much more thoroughly, and more quickly, than they ever have in the past. At some point a quantitative change becomes a qualitative one: the result of all this competency may be heavily destructive. Some aspects of the current notion of "good game design" may in fact be very bad, or at least indefensible, from an ethical standpoint. Today's "better" video games spend a great deal of effort to undermine defenses that took you tens of millennia to evolve. They tend to be successful at this. As designers keep evolving their craft and gain greater analytical power, what will happen?

The next link follows from all the others and is a natural complement to Jonathan Blow's video. This is a great blog about Janet Murray's book on Design. Which I think is the master discipline to enable a functioning digital environment, one that is human centric. Murray outlines four fundamental affordances that are the key to the digital medium - procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial. 

I think these are well worth considering. However, I would re-conceptualize what she calls procedural as 'Programmable' and would  call the spatial 'Time-Spatial'. Despite this nitpicking on my part - I think what she offers is a foundation for the design of institutions, organization, services, things, etc. in the digital environment. Again this is well worth the read.

A Humanistic Framework for Design

The following is a quote from the article:

By Gerd Waloszek, SAP AG, SAP User Experience – September 6, 2012

In her 2011 book Inventing the Medium – Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice, Janet H. Murray outlines a new (she calls it "innovative") framework for design, in which she adopts a humanistic instead of a social science or industrial design perspective. Murray regards this framework as a unifying framework for many disparate but related efforts and suggests that it helps speed the process of innovation because of its focus on core human needs and its intention to "focus designers' work on useful and lasting innovation" instead of on mere novelty.

Murray explains that digital designers have two responsibilities: "To create the artifact that best serves the needs of people who will interact with it, and to advance the digital medium as a whole." In her view, designers are engaged in a "collective design process," performing "the collective cultural task of inventing the digital medium," in other words, expanding "the meaning-making conventions that make up human culture" and "our ability to understand the world and to connect with one another." Read my review (in progress) of Murray's book for a closer look at her humanistic design perspective.

In this article, which complements that review (in progress), I want to briefly outline this approach and its humanistic design perspective because it differs considerably from typical HCI-oriented design approaches that currently dominate the UI design field. Please note that there is a certain overlap with the review.

One last link that points to one dot in the matrix of the unfolding digital environment. Google and other's are working around ever more precise measures of time - the global synchronization of data that can turn the world into a single unified database.

Google Spans Entire Planet With GPS-Powered Database

Here's the initial paragraph:

At a symposium in the mountains of Montana, Jeff Dean — one of Google’s most important engineers — revealed that the web giant was working on something called Spanner, describing it as a “storage and computation system that spans all our data centers.” He said the plan was to eventually juggle data across as many as 10 million servers sitting in “hundreds to thousands” of data centers across the globe. 

The scope of the project was mind-boggling. But Dean provided few details, and it wasn’t clear whether Google was actually using the platform in its live data centers. Then, on Tuesday, the paper hit the web. 

This week, as reported by GigaOm and ZDnet, Google published a research paper detailing the ins and outs of Spanner. According to Google, it’s the first database that can quickly store and retrieve information across a worldwide network of data centers while keeping that information “consistent” — meaning all users see the same collection of information at all times — and it’s been driving the company’s ad system and various other web services for years….

The wicked problem is harnessing the best human have to give. It involves stewarding conditions and cultures that align people's intrinsic (and extrinsic) motivations with their experiences. With ubiquitous Big Data - made visible and available with mobile technology (including Google Glasses - which will do to visualizations of data what Google Search did to our assumptions of asking questions whenever and where ever we want), we return to the McLuhan quote at the beginning. Our whole histories of interaction will collapse into an eternal present - as the foundation of a new social currency - that enables new forms of exchange necessary in the world of hyper-connection, networked individualim, responsible autonomy, and collective intelligence. 

Our ability to see our own trajectories (and those of everyone else) through the digital environment requires new concepts of 'privacy' (as the right to not be interfered with), and transparency that collapse the past into the present. The medium of exchange become our capability and our reputations.

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Some thought on Identity, Roles, and Wealth - exploring Dunbar, McLuhan and Hidalgo

My recent reading have included a number of work by or about Marshall McLuhan, and Cesar Hidalgo. I have read a couple of articles related to the Dunbar number and have not read any of Dunbar's books and therefore I may lack the level of appreciation and nuance the Dunbar is due. That said - these are my thoughts.

I've posted before about Dunbar, but let's reiterate. Dunbar suggest that there is cognitive limit to the number people with who a person can maintain stable social relationships - that number is somewhere between 100 and 230 - commonly referred to as 150. Dunbar came to this significant realization based on observations and studies related to primate behaviour and surveys of village and tribe sizes that include the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village, Hutterite settlements; the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline's sub-specialization; and the basic unit size of professional armies.

Dunbar argued that the 150 limit was a mean group size only for communities with a very high incentive to remain together. To remain cohesive such a would have to spend as much as 42% of the group's time would have to be devoted to 'social grooming'. This was because the relationships involved required that an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. The limit is dependent on long-term memory size. Once a group gets larger more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group are required. The basic size of the group - dependent on long-term memory means that it is the relative size of the neocortex that limits group size - imposed by neocortical processing capacity.

Thus far the reasoning seems sound - but (always a but...) what about the context- the ground, for this reasoning? The context is not simply individual survival - it is group survival where competition is less about between individual but about between groups. The intensity of necessary attention in a small group who's context is xenophobic competition between other groups truly requires a very intense investment in the grounds of trust within the group. In the constraints of this type of group - there is no 'individual identity', there is no need for last names - there is lineage, but not individuality. In the inter-personal vigilance of the hunter-gatherer group there is 'character', status related to pecking-order and allegiances related to pecking-order. Change in Character-temperament, status and allegiance do require a lot of cognitive investment to process in a way that maintains the necessary cohesion to successfully compete between groups.

Think of living in the small group and changing one's identity - the group won't have any of that - for it means everyone else in the group must change their identity too. So, identity in this Dunbar number results in an intense focus on character/temperament - and the need to maintain statuses and alert attentions to changes in status structures and relationships in a way that establishes the foundations of trust - in the context of potentially dangerous competition between groups.

In these sort of conditions, identity is more about maintaining 'character' as role and much less about identity. The 150 limit of the hunter-gatherer group doesn't support a great deal of 'divisions of labour' and bifurcations of specialization. The intense vigilance behind the cognitive demands Dunbar talks about is really not simply 'cohesion' in a conventional sense - but much more similar to the hyper cohesion of a military unit that must operate in potentially hostile context. The hunter-gatherer group needed to maintain 'good-enough' cohesion and egalitarian relations within a context of 'between-group' competition.

The hunter-gather group can afford a few specialist types of labor-division, e.g.  elder-adult-child, hunter, gatherer, healer/shaman but members have to be generalists with a few 'alphas'. As groups exceed the Dunbar number (150-250) group size not only enables, but requires new forms of 'divisions-of-labor'. As new types of expertise arise, these new divisions help form types of interdependence that augment the type of inter-personal vigilance that the small group required. This is the birth of a networked social group and thus a networked cohesion. As groups get larger, coordination challenges begin to favour hierarchic structures (which were efficient and relatively effective).

It could be that divisions-of-labor shape new forms of interdependence relieving the type of personal vigilance that was required for group cohesion. Group belonging and status  become determined on the importance and value that specialist types of 'occupations' can contribute to the group. The increases in divisions-of-labor (and correspondent interdependencies) also enabled a type of cognitive surplus that could be applied to the specialist pursuits of divided-labor. In these conditions, identity now has lineage, group, geography and 'occupation'. I would be John the baker son of John the baker, of Johnland, etc.

The conditions of identity construction, change with a change in the ground of social intensity and context.  By intensity I mean conditions of population density and connectedness. Increases in population density enable/require divisions-of-labor which in turn lead to a huge proliferation of 'roles' that form a component of identity. Thus in the urban centers arising with the advent of agriculture - came new ways of being - baker, wood-worker, potter, and on and on. However, the problems of coordination tended to be solved via hierarchy.

Since this is not a book on the history of civilization - I'll jump to the creation of the industrial labour force and the advent of 'jobs' (workers for an employer) and professions (e.g. lawyer, doctor, engineer, etc.). The industrial society was a phase transition marking the shift from a largely agricultural population to a predominantly urban population. With the advent the population density of the industrial and market-system urban society  (including vastly more social and physical mobility) can a historically new condition - comfort with the anonymous stranger and impersonal exchange. Commerce was no longer dependent on personalized networks and the protection of local 'Nobility' but dependent on a large social bases of cohesion - identity with a national state - that created common language, ensured common standard, etc.

I believe that real individuality - can only arise with a sense 'density' of encounter with unknown 'others'. Perhaps this is why our first 'models' of individuality (and still active as archetypes of individuality) are the heroes and royalty in our historical past and myth. The royal sovereign by necessity had to constantly encounter and deal with new people, situations (more so than the locally bound non-nobles) and unknowns. Through encounter with strangers we encounter moments where we have an opportunity to meet and respond to new behaviors and expectations - and this is the birth of individuality over simply character and role.

However, in the industrial model a specialist is considered a highly valued capability that may receive special privileges but only in order to keep a particular 'job' filled.

What Marshall McLuhan noted was that jobs were becoming displaced by what he called 'roles'. The specialist as a ‘container of knowledge’ – job – must give way to the person who is an applier of expertise – role. (Federman & de Kerckhove, the following quotes p.140-142).

The industrial model was carried over from blue-collar workers to non-factory employees. Many, if not all, of the negative behaviours and symptoms exhibited by assembly-line workers were also manifest in white-collar, burned-out, job-oriented employees. Considering that jobs are extensions of our highly specialized hands, it seems that often relatively little involvement is needed beyond the literal ‘task at hand.’  

Conversely, roles mean generalization and flexibility. An individual in a role is required to use a variety of skills and experience, applying them to various situations. Being in role suggests drawing on attributes and characteristics, rather than merely demonstrating a specific skill. A role necessitates the ability to assume a character or persona appropriate to the situation, much like the actor does on stage. In doing so, the individual must consolidate a relatively large amount of information and respond in a manner more akin to pattern recognition than mechanistic ‘connecting the dots’. There is total and active involvement of multiple senses, as the person-in-role continuously monitors, adjusts and responds to a dynamic and often unpredictable, environment.

For McLuhan,

…If it is merely the depth of knowledge for which an individual is valued, then that individual serves only as a convenience, saving the relative layperson from the trouble of personally obtaining the information electronically.

For example we see this in the evolution in the patient-doctor relationship. A knowledgeable patient, armed with information from credible medical Web sites, engages their physician in active consultation about options in their course of treatment. For the physician who regarded themselves as the source of wisdom and knowledge, this has been a threatening, and in some cases, traumatizing, transition. However, for the physician used to assuming multiple roles of teacher, mentor, advisor as well as skilled practitioner, the knowledgeable patient is a godsend. Both doctor and patient are fully engaged; medical outcomes are improved and the patient has a greater sense of control over their destiny. 

With the advent of the digital environment a person with a considerable depth of knowledge placed in a variety of roles, as opposed to being kept tightly contained in the lab, the marketing department or some other job. Place that knowledgeable individual in areas as diverse as sales, strategy, or finance in the role of teacher, storyteller, visionary, leader or builder. That role-player can now offer tremendous value to the corporation by virtue of the changes they can effect. 

Thus the industrial mode of production operating in the digital environment will end up squandering the value [the Wealth] of their people if they are kept in jobs. They focus on the efficient consumption of their time disregarding the wealth of their real potential value. 

This brings me to a wonderful Edge Conversation with Cesar Hidalgo, about the difference between Wealth and Value. The thoughts that Hidalgo explores are co-joined with a broader discussion of Big Data (in fact, he provides the best definition of Big Data that I've read). For me the salient point is that his exploration is also an exploration of the phase transition into the digital environment - that is the consequence of 'intensities' - increases in population, communication and connectedness density that the digital environment enables/embodies. 

The key is the difference between value that can be generated versus the value that can be commercially appropriated. - These are vastly different. Hidalgo uses the example of Facebook - as an endeavour that in serving almost a billion people, is and has generated a tremendous amount of value for all it members. However, Facebook, despite its past and current efforts to monetize itself can only appropriate or 'harvest' a very tiny portion of this value. And this is probably inherent in the traditional 'business model' that Facebook is trying to embody as a private sector enterprise in the digital environment. A counter example could be Wikipedia which also generates huge value (one could well wonder where this value shows up in the GDP of any country?) but is not pressure to have to appropriate that value as a non-profit foundation. Facebook users might well be better served if Facebook could transform itself into developing some form of 'foundation' model.

Another example: Google is a similar example. Google also serves, for free, searches for billions of people on a daily basis. It's the number one site on the Web, and it's generating an enormous amount of value: giving access to information. But it's appropriating very little of that value.       

Hidalgo as what is value about? and how do we measure value? His answer is that we have generally have only been able to measure value by the amount of money we can appropriate from the value we generate. This has increasingly been a smaller portion of the value (e.g. human and social capital) that we generate.

The tension is increasing between the capacity to generate value through new business, technologies, networks and the old models of appropriation of the value generated.

He gives a great example of the value of what I would consider that a 'smart city' can generate: Shared cars can be used as another example of the difference that I see between the generation of value and the appropriation of value. If you go outside, you will see a large number of vehicles. Many of these are parked, and when a vehicle is parked it's not being used. If we wanted to increase GDP, well, we might want to increase the number of vehicles that get sold, and the number of people that own vehicles, and the number of vehicles per person. But if you think about it now, when there are technologies that are starting to ripen, such as the technology that allows us to have self-driving cars, you can think that actually you can reduce the number of cars needed by having self-driving cars as shared vehicles. You can have a transportation system that is much more shared. That is going to reduce the amount of money that flows through the car industry, simply because you're going to need fewer cars because their use is more efficient when this are shared.

When we begin to think about the movement away from 'job' to complex multi-dimension role based on expertise applied to a the 'costless' network of a digital environment we can find ourselves right back to Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' - as the productive capacity of a people - the ability to generate value/wealth and perhaps a new focus on the 'social' appropriation of value. This requires us to re-thing our political-economy and the corresponding institutions.

This has been a long ramble - and I'd like to try to bring it back to 'identity'. The digital environment may require all of us to truly become 'individuals' defining ourselves less by our past narratives, our lineages, our cultures, our geographies, our 'jobs' or 'occupations' and much more by the trajectories of our passion/curiosities/questing-dispositions. An embrace to a paradoxical sense of self that demands a greater courage and responsibility for self-determination that is simultaneously more social and aware of fundamental interdependence of a networked world.

We not only don't have the corresponding institutions for this embrace of paradoxical social-and-self-determined self, but the institutions we do have (social, political, economic, etc.) remained mired in an industrial and sometime modern paradigm of a society that is simple an aggregate of isolated, atomistic 'characters'.

I believe we have entered an era that is determined through a new environment that fosters/demands a new form of identity - a paradoxically social-yet-hyper-individualistic-evolving-self. This self, is not dependent on a Dunbar number, it is an instantiation of a networked idividualism that is also mobile, transparent, and has an audience (see Networked: The New Social Operating System).

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Sex, Gender, Success and Technology - Reflections on Reading Marshall McLuhan

I recently finished reading Marchall McLuhan's first book "The Mechanical Bride" published in 1951. It really is a fantastic read. What McLuhan does in this book is produce a series of Ads from various popular newspaper and magazine publications - with each ad he has a small - one or two page essay that probes its meaning and through this we can see the beginning of his grasp of Medium as Message. 

What I want to explore here (offer as a probe into an exploratory space) is some reflection on a few of these essays - a reflection that ends up being an assemblage of snippets and my own musings.

On page 84, McLuhan presents a typical ad for a 1950 car, he calls this essay "Husband's Choice". You have to imagine a typical car ad (1950) highlighting a male oriented 'curvaceous' and powerful car.

"It is a common mistake to regard this brand of advertising as a mere ‘vulgar’ effort to hitch sales curves to sex curves. The mistake is made by not observing how girdles and related equipment are sold on an engineering and technological basis: ‘an all-way stretch and resilient control. Girdle and garters act in harmony to give you a slim hip and thigh line… It lives and breathes with you.’ The body as a living machine is now correlative with cars as vibrant and attractive organism."

I think this is a brilliant observation. We could reduce this blending of technology and organism to rabid consumer capitalism. But I think this type of reduction is a mistake. As Kevin Kelly in his latest book as suggested - technology is the 7th Kingdom of life (e.g. birds build nests, ants farm aphids to harvest mold, evolution itself depends heavily on the 'selection mechanism'). One can argue that shaping and being shaped by technology is the very heart of what has made us as human - that language, writing, culture are this type of shaped/shaping technology. 

And so this typical ad, is illustrative of a collective conscious/unconscious grappling with the mind/body, organism/machine faux-duality. That what is being amplified is the bringing to consciousness (the emergence) of a narrative beyond that pre-modern and modern split between human and nature. This emergence is itself both a product and a tool of manipulation by a market-driven political economy. 

However, the focus of McLuhan's thoughts. He goes on and refers to Margaret Meade (who he draws upon frequently throughout the book).

"… Meade is not considering the car as a ‘dream date’ offered to men, but as it is valued by women. She adds that this envy of the male organ, ...[is a] desire for an instrument of power... In both these respect it can be seen how the body gets linked with the desires, sexual and otherwise, for mechanical power. The cult of Superman and rocket sips has a phallic relationship which has frequently been pointed to by psychologists who have not succeeded in carrying the observation past this point of the symbolic reference.

...."But the car ads make it plain that there is a widespread acceptance of the car as a womb symbol and paradoxically enough, as a phallic power symbol. ... The attempt to represent speed and phallic power, so much in demand on the distaff side, is crossed up by the attempt to create a world of ‘floating power’ and womblike comfort and ease. Exactly the same contradiction is expressed in the ‘sweetheart of a figure,’ [Ad/archetype] which seems all bust and long boyish legs. The meaning of the twin desires for comfort and power’ could not be more directly stated in terms of sex and technology. The fact that these conflicting wishes are incorporated unconsciously in a wide range of popular objects testifies at once to their prevalence and to the character of the collective trance which prevents the recognition of the tensions.

When I read this - it was the first time that I understood why vehicles of all sorts (ships, cars, spaceships) are mostly referred to as 'she' - yet paradoxically embodying an identification with male power. Womb and Phallus - Jung's mysterium coniunctionis - the mystery of conjunction, the mystical marriage of Solar/Lunar, Male/Female, Spirit/Matter, Yang/Yin. 

But the problem is the the feminine/female (acknowledge in the reference of a she-name) is sublated within a conscious identification with cultural constructions/referents of male-type power. It is interesting that in Star Trek - the 'ship's computer - i.e. the ship has a female voice - but in Space Odyssey the ship's male voice is Hal - becomes hyper-rationally insane with the aim of destroying 'its creator'. This could easily be argued as a masculine love-hate of the womb/creator. A denial of Gaia in a worship of Logos. 

In an earlier essay in the book, called "Looking up to my son", McLuhan writes:

If it were possible to define success in a great number of ways, a success drive might not be destructive. If there were as many recognized kinds of success as there are temperaments, tastes, skills and degree of knowledge, a society dedicated to success might yet develop very great harmony amid variety and richness of experience and insight.

This is a theme that is highly important in a post-industrial, post-consumer world and for the emerging political economy of the digital environment.

While the industrial/consumer political economy measured success in terms of consumption goods, with the result that success measured by actualization or fulfilment intrinsically motivated pursuits (passion that involves the giving up of ourselves/sacrifice to a larger aim/pursuit) becomes overcrowded by an obsessive race to the narrow goal. Poverty, rather than richness of experience and expression is the result. And bitterness rather than quiet self-possession is the state of mind of those not qualified for the narrow goals set up by [mechanical] and executive pursuits. And even for  

the successful there is often the sense of paying too much for a success which, after all, does little to satisfy their deeper human qualities or which easily palls on the daily domestic audience. Not to have lived according to the dictates of one’s own reason but to have sought, even successfully, goals alien to oneself is no recipe for happiness.

The challenge of building a better society with more agile and adaptive political economy, involves developing an institutional framework that enables dynamic work processes for more discrete types of work by wider varieties of expertise and knowledge and stewarding requisite conditions for epistemic communities to align efforts to achieve desired effects and generate a greater wealth of people.

This proposition can be condensed into a McLuhan-esque axiom:

If Social Media is the Medium

Then Social Computing is the Message.

This entail that modes of production must become programmable

This means that organizations cannot be architected as ‘manufacturing machines’ but must be architected to be Programmable and Constrained Complex Adaptive Systems.

The digital environment and its economics represent a post-scarcity paradigm. This is so because it is based on the human wealth of knowledge and the increasing returns arising from the sharing of knowledge. The exception is that time, attention, motivation and talent are the most important scarce resource. The constraint of the wealth of people is the quality of attention that people are enabled to give to their endeavours. The challenge and opportunity in the digital environment revolves around the question of how local resources can serve global outcomes and how global resources serve local outcomes.

For McLuhan, a Medium was anything that extended the mind, body or senses. Thus a Medium could be a new technology, process, idea or original creative work. As a new Medium is created, its message becomes clear in the resultant changes in the nature, pace and scope of human interactions and activities. The nature of these changes of scale, pace, or pattern that a medium causes in us, in society or culture, are distinct from the content of the Medium. Thus it is not the information conveyed through the Medium but rather it is the Medium’s ability to effect change that is the key factor that enables us to realize and understand a Medium.

For example,…by contemplating the Message, that is, the resultant change in scale, pace or pattern caused by television, we can begin to understand the true nature of the Medium. In this instance, we can see that television has the capacity to effect significant behavioural change in powerful and influential monolithic entities by extending vision, hearing and the ability to share ever more powerful and influential ideas. (quoting McLuhan in ‘Understanding Media’, in Federman & de Kerckhove, 2003, p.27)

Social computing then is the capacity for a large network or ‘swarm’ of people to explore in parallel a problem space and produce a range of effective solutions, and/or produce a good or service. Examples include Wikipedia, the many Open-source initiatives, and the increasing use of crowdsourcing, and crowd-funding approaches as new modes of production.

What is meant by programmable modes of production – is the rapid and agile generation, assemblage and harnessing of knowledge networks, as and when needed, in a way that doesn’t require an organization to re-configure, retool, or re-architect its management/leadership structures and processes. A programmable mode of production is reliant on responsible autonomy (based on trusted personnel, agent-forum accountability, and context/competence-based leadership) and networked individualism – as a social operating system (Lee & Wellman, 2012). For example, a computer (as a programmable machine) doesn’t require a hardware/process reconfiguration in order to run innumerable applications. Unlike the industrial enterprise which must reconfigure it’s organization charts, reporting relationships and physical accommodation to enact organizational change.

OK, so how does sex gender, technology and success all come together? 

Perhaps we must start shift the Figure back to the safety and security that technology has always sought to create - a productive flourishing womb, a protected space for creation and let the Ground become the instrumental power. 

This is a challenge to both men and women (of all types of gender) because it is not a dominance of feminine (Gaia/Anima/Womb/World) over the masculine (Logos/Animus/Phallus/isolated-atomistic-being) but rather a different relationship. For example, such a shift would be evident when the salient 'selling-point' of the car is now its protective, creative, foundation - for an ultimate flourishing/actualization of personal and intrinsic motivation. Perhaps in some ways this is already perceivable in the framing of our personal technologies. 

In this new digital environment - definitions of success have to shift toward actualizing of intrinsically motivated pursuits - where it is the freedom to pursue that is rewarding, rather than the extrinsic rewards our pursuits can provide for us.

A.N. Whitehead in Science and the Modern World

"In being aware of the bodily experience, we must thereby be aware of aspects of the whole spatio-temporal world as mirrored within the bodily life. …my theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time."

In the digital environment we are no longer simply located in a single space-time, body/frame - rather we inhabit a multiverse of selves, spaces and networks.

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Why the Market Must be Governed

This is a presentation I have been playing with the ideas are still very rough, but I think they should be shared if they are to be improved. :)

The thesis is simple – challenge a fundamentalist neo-classical concept of ‘free market’ economics – the concept of Equilibrium – which is based on the 19th Century physics of a closed system of atomistic, isolated entities.

What I want to propose is the political-economics represent living/complex systems. And these types of systems are now well established as existing 'far from equilibrium'. And so the necessary concept is not equilibrium but rather is Homeostasis.

Equilibrium applied to political economics and social dynamics represents a fundamental epistemological pathology (e.g. Gregory Bateson’s Mind & Nature).

I want to explore some of the Entailments of these concepts as metaphors from 19^th Century physics versus metaphors from 21^st Century biology – including:          Corresponding Distributions and Implications for economic policy/theory

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes

Marcel Proust

While economists were pursuing their vision of the economy as an equilibrium system, during  the latter half of the 20th century, physicists, chemists, and biologists became increasingly interested in systems that were far from equilibrium, that were dynamic and complex, and that never settled into a state of rest. ...refering to these types of systems as complex systems. ...a complex system is a system of many dynamically interacting parts or particles. In such systems the micro-level interactions of the parts or particles lead to the emergence of macro-level patterns of behavior. (p.17-18)

Beinhocker, Eric D. 2006.

The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. Harvard Business School Press.

The concept of equilibrium (as applied in modern [liberal, neo-classical economics) arose from the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics. This could be defined as the tendency that over time, for differences in temperature, pressure, and chemical potential to equilibrate in an isolated physical system.

The Oxford Dictionary of Physics defines it as: a State of a system where forces, influences, reactions, etc. balance out until there is no net change. In essence, it sees the economy as or a rubber ball rolling around the bottom of a large bowl. Eventually the ball settles into the bottom of the bowl, to its resting equilibrium point... or lowest Entropy

In this way:

The ball will stay there until some external force shakes, bends, or otherwise shocks the bowl, sending the ball to a new equilibrium point. Since the late 19^th Century the organizing paradigm of economics has been the idea that the economy is an equilibrium system, essentially a system at rest. ...the primary inspiration for economists from the late 19^th through the mid-20^th centuries was not biology, but ...the physics of motion and energy. Traditional economic theory views the economy as being like a rubber ball rolling around the bottom of a large bowl. 

Eventually the ball will settle down into the bottom of the bowl, to its resting, or equilibrium, point. The ball will stay there until some external force shakes, bends, or otherwise shocks the bowl, sending the ball to a new equilibrium point. The mainstream paradigm of economics over the past 100 years has portrayed the economy as a system that moves from equilibrium point to equilibrium point over time propelled along by shocks from technology, politics, changes in consumer tastes and other external factors.

While economists were pursuing their vision of the economy as an equilibrium system, during the latter half of the 20^th century, physicists, chemists, and biologists became increasingly interested in systems that were far from equilibrium, that were dynamic and complex, and that never settled into a state of rest. ...referring to these types of systems as complex systems. ...a complex system is a system of many dynamically interacting parts or particles. In such systems the micro-level interactions of the parts or particles lead to the emergence of macro-level patterns of behavior. (p.17-18)

Beinhocker, Eric D. 2006. 

The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. 

Harvard Business School Press.

Homeostasis, on the other hand is the ability of an open system, especially living organisms, to actively regulate its internal environment. Unlike equilibrium as a path of least resistance – the ball in the bowl, Homeostasis is an active ‘intervention’ against equilibrium & entropy, to dynamically maintain a ratio of forces, factors, influences, reactions integral to the a systems. An ‘identity’ which is constituted through its processes and structure.

Homeostasis, therefore is different from equilibrium. Where equilibrium is the tendency  to a path of least resistance - a coming to a natural balanced distribution - something that will or should happen of itself (e.g. the ball in the bowl). Homeostasis, is an active 'intervention' against equilibrium and entropy, in order to dynamically maintain a necessary ratio of forces, factors, influences, reaction.... that are integral to a system's 'identity' - its fundamental processes and structure (autopoiesis). 

Homeostasis, is enabled by a 'governance' system or mechanism of an organism, whereby the entirety of its existence is self-regulated. This is done to maintain he integrity of its identity. 

The entailment of equilibrium then is: 

• A natural phenomena arising out of a balance where all should be equal 
• Suggestive of a 'normal' distribution

Wikipedia explains that in probability theory, the normal distribution is a continuous probability distribution, that has a bell-shaped curve - the 'bell-curve'. The logical conclusion from this concept of equilibrium is that a 'free market' will 'average' difference in a way the creates a large middle class. Thus, an ungoverned market will distribute the gains of productivity in a way that theoretically distributes/allocates resources and benefits in an efficient normal distribution.

However, equilibrium can only arise in conditions of a 'closed system' (which made a logical sense in the age of independent, isolated nation states composed of equally independent and isolated 'rational, atomistic beings'. Another condition is that normal distribution only applies to certain measurable characteristics.

The most fundamental criticism of the 19th century physics adopted by modern economics is that many natural phenomena are not distributed in a 'normal', bell-type-curve, the are distributed in a power-law curve - the '20-80' rule. For example, 20% of the books published constitute 80% of the profits, 20% of the earthquakes create 80% of the damage - this applies to craters on the moon, solar flares, foraging patterns of many species, the sizes of activity patterns of populations, the frequency of words in most languages, frequencies of family names, the sizes of power outages, and so much more. 

Some of the entailments of a Power-Law relationship include, the exponential acceleration of comparative advantage: 

• The more connected you are - the more likely you are to be able to form new connections
• Wealth Concentration, Condensation, where created wealth tends to become concentrated in the possessions of the already wealthy (the more money you have the easier it is to make more money)

The long tail of Wealth distribution - or the 'Trickle-up Economy'. Thus, what we see in an unregulated, 'free-market' is the 'normal' long tail of wealth distribution. But, in these conditions of de-regulated market-systems, where is the 'middle-class' of the 'normal' distribution? The engine of consumption & exchange that powers a market system to be able to consume its own products.

What happens is the reversion to a power-law distribution of a feudal society - of a landed (ownership) nobility/aristocracy and rabble - the cancerous erosion of what a real market system must be founded on.

However, the entailment of a concept of homeostasis suggest that an active intervention is necessary to maintain a chosen homeostasis that dynamically balances a societies chosen values. For example, from 1945 to 1980: the bottom 90% of the population had almost 70% of the wealth, while the top 1% had 10% of the wealth.

This began to change dramatically after the advent of the Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney governments shifted to monetarist economic philosophies. The result was that by 2005, the bottom 90% of the population had only 50% of the wealth and the top 1% had over 20% of the wealth.

The Homeostically Governed Market

The establishment of perfect justice, of perfect liberty, and of perfect equality, is the very simple secret which most effectually secures the highest degree of prosperity to all...

Adam Smith “The Wealth of Nations” p.726

In 1776 two documents were published – The Wealth of Nations and The Declaration of Independence. Both were presupposed on Responsible Autonomy – the necessary belief that individuals were capable of pursuing what interested them as necessary conditions for their own flourishing. 

Both concepts – democracy and a market-system, required justice, equality and freedom from domination. According to Philip Petit, political thinkers of the day thought this initial interpretation of liberty/freedom was thought to be too difficult to actualize and thus came to be understood as a less effective ‘freedom from interference’. In fact, an understanding of liberty as ‘freedom from domination’ is also more consistent with creating social conditions that support an effective application of ‘equality’.

Therefore, another way to view of Smith’s three necessary (system design) principles, is as guides to:

• Create and sustain a system that enables the maximization of both individual liberty and prosperity
• Minimize the Gini coefficient, representing robust conditions of an equality of social wealth and productive capability – e.g. an optimal middle-class
• And a way to protect the commons and other necessary public goods as the foundations of social prosperity (since the profit motive cannot adequately provide for such commons).

The Gini coefficient is a measure of the inequality of a distribution – a value of 0 expressing total equality and a value of 1 maximal inequality. It is commonly used as a measure of inequality of income. Worldwide, Gini coefficients for income, range from approximately 0.23 (Sweden) to 0.70 (Namibia) although not every country has been assessed.

The Principles of Market Homeostasis 

Homeostasis is the dynamic regulation of a system based on the shifting states (gradients) of key values that determine the ‘identity’ and integrity of the system. The values outlined by Smith are not only orthogonal but are generally in conflict with one another. 

For example, Communism/Socialism focuses primarily on conditions for equality (and perhaps as a consequence, also emphasized centralization of decisioning/control). On the other hand, ‘laissez-faire’ free-market capitalism focuses primarily on liberty (freedom from interference of individuals, which perhaps is why corporation have needed to be seen as ‘persons’, an interpretation of liberty as freedom from domination would have dramatically different consequences). Thus:

• Primacy on Equality eliminates incentives to excel
• Primacy on Liberty – privileges ‘might’ & Long-Tail income distribution

The cure to this is not related to the size (e.g. small) government, (the smaller the government the easier it is for a small group to control), but rather on the effectiveness and agility in establishing appropriate ‘course correction’s for the homeostatic balancing of a political economies core values (e.g. justice, liberty, equality) that form its identity. The cure is agile regulation based on fundamental values integral to democratic/market identity through ongoing process of negotiation – something that the life-work of Eleanor Ostrom has well established.

The aim of a homeostatically governed market-system is the same – establishing a robust democracy that supports the responsible autonomy. This means an ‘equal’ playing field with incentives for competition and cooperation for excellence & innovation to increase the Wealth of People and human flourishing and consistent with a self-governing political-economy. 

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