Honesty and the Human Body

March 5, 2013 By

Kevin is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Melting Asphalt.

In economics and biology, honesty is understood in terms of signals.

Signals are anything used to communicate, to convey information. A price is a signal of value. Conspicuous consumption is a signal of wealth. A growl is a threat — and the growl’s depth is a signal of the size of the creature’s body cavity.

Signals are said to be honest when they reliably correspond to an underlying trait or fact about the world. Otherwise they are dishonest or deceptive.

The temptation to deceive is ubiquitous. Deception allows an agent to reap benefits without incurring costs. That’s why the best signals — the most honest ones — are expensive. More precisely, they are differentially expensive: costly to produce, but even more costly to fake.

This is the reason Apple retail stores are roomy and filled with helpful employees — it’s something their lower-margin competitors can’t afford. It’s also why species with good defense mechanisms (like skunks and coral snakes) evolve high-contrast colors. Unless it can defend itself, an animal that stands out quickly becomes another animal’s lunch.

Honesty is thus, in part, an economic proposition.
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Binoculars versus Cameras

February 28, 2013 By

I don’t normally pay attention to token gestures, but Mar 1/Mar 2 are the National Day of Unplugging. I don’t know who is behind this idea, or how much momentum it has, but I really like it. My one experience of joining a Jewish friend to observe Sabbath was both deeply relaxing and thought-provoking.

A complete unplugging happens to be unfeasible for me, since Refactor Camp is this weekend, but I am sort of pleased about the serendipity here. I am suspending my normal 90% online life to do something that strongly depends on physical presence and face-to-face interactions.  Refactor Camp weekend is also Ribbonfarm Unplugged weekend.

So while I won’t be able to entirely unplug from the Internet (let alone electricity), I think this qualifies as observance in the spirit of the idea. If you like the concept, check out that NDU website for more inspiration. Figure out a way to unplug.

While this is a start, I don’t think a token day of ritual observance and a manifesto will really make a huge difference. What we really need, to preserve our sanity and really figure out how to regain control of our agency, is to truly understand how digital/electronic power have hacked our brains, and hack the digital forces right back. They’re not as inexorable as they seem.

I want to share one particularly good unplugging hack I discovered recently, which has made a huge difference in my life. I bought a pair of binoculars. Specifically, these excellent Pentax binoculars:

binocularsI’ve wanted binoculars since I was a kid, but somehow never got around to buying them as an adult. I am particularly proud that I had the discipline to buy small, lightweight and waterproof binoculars I knew I would actually use, rather than bigger, powerful ones that satisfy gadget-philia more than observation needs.

But why are binoculars an unplugging hack?

Because they intensify present-moment sensory experience to a degree that you end up systematically choosing the present over the camera-deferred future. It is much easier to disintermediate the camera using a different device than simply trying to use it less. It’s the gadget equivalent of the solution to the “don’t think of an elephant” problem (the answer is “think of a giraffe instead”).

This moment — and the opportunity to experience it more intensely through binoculars — will be gone immediately. You have to choose whether to experience the moment or capture an impoverished digital memory that you are unlikely to ever review.

I’ve now carried my binoculars with me on several long waterfront walks, observed seabirds, container ships, trains and snowy mountains. I’ve taken them with me on a couple of long train and car rides, and to the Swiss alps. It seems to count as odd behavior. People stare when I whip out my binoculars while they’re whipping out their cameras or smartphones.

The camera today — especially the smartphone and lightweight point-and-shoot — is a dangerous device. Twenty years ago, film cameras were cumbersome enough (and film expensive enough) that most normal people didn’t experience reality through them by default. The dangerous device then was the camcorder, which tempted you into looking at the world entirely through a viewfinder.

Today, cameras being entirely digital and plugged into the Internet via wireless links means that they represent the temptation of continuous sharing. They are now as dangerous as camcorders used to be. Things in the environment start to be viewed and evaluated primarily in terms of their potential as online social objects. We see a spectacle and see an invisible Like button hovering under it. Once Google Glass goes mainstream, this will be literally true.

This power and potential is great so long as we remain conscious of what social sharing adds to the present experience. Does it enhance it or impoverish it? Does the act of sharing make you pay closer, more mindful attention to what you are looking at, or are you turning snap-and-share into a mindless operation like filing unread paperwork or retweeting unread links on Twitter?

Is your camera encouraging you to file away your life instead of living it?

These are not isolated behaviors. They represent a widespread abdication of agency and indeterminate deferral of direct experience. We are starting to inhabit a culture where we  are more likely to forward the experiential possibilities of our life to other people, our unreliable future selves, or digital systems, rather than choosing specific experiences in the moment.

I am never big on prescription, but I’ll offer one here: don’t do that.

And if you buy binoculars to counter the power of the camera in our lives today, please don’t buy those terrible camera-binocular hybrids you see advertised in Sky Mall catalogs. That would defeat the purpose.

I’ll stop here, just short of 900 words, which for me is a pretty disciplined act of unplugging in its own right, since I normally go on for at least 3000 words. But you’ll probably be hearing more from me on this topic in the future. I might even try to figure out a way to regularly observe a digital Sabbath (anyone want to write a WordPress plugin for me called “Digital Sabbath” that takes this site offline every Friday-Saturday and puts up a “Get offline!” page instead?)

The National Day of Unplugging

February 28, 2013 By

Tomorrow is the National Day of Unplugging, a concept that extends the Jewish idea of Sabbath into a more general, secular idea. I wrote a post about it on ribbonfarm. Check out the site, and consider observing the NDU.

Here’s the blurb from the Sabbath Manifesto site, which appears to be promoting the idea. A very Tempo-ish idea of figuring out how to slow down.

Way back when, God said, “On the seventh day thou shalt rest.”  The meaning behind it was simple: Take a break. Call a timeout. Find some balance. Recharge.

Somewhere along the line, however, this mantra for living faded from modern consciousness. The idea of unplugging every seventh day now feels tragically close to impossible. Who has time to take time off? We need eight days a week to get tasks accomplished, not six.

The Sabbath Manifesto was developed in the same spirit as the Slow Movement, slow food, slow living, by a small group of artists, writers, filmmakers and media professionals who, while not particularly religious, felt a collective need to fight back against our increasingly fast-paced way of living. The idea is to take time off, deadlines and paperwork be damned.

In the Manifesto, we’ve adapted our ancestors’ rituals by carving out one day per week to unwind, unplug, relax, reflect, get outdoors, and get with loved ones. The ten principles are to be observed one day per week, from sunset to sunset. We invite you to practice, challenge and/or help shape what we’re creating.

Good idea. Now go unplug.

Solidarity and Recursion

February 20, 2013 By

Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal. Also, Gregory Rader of On the Spiral is joining us as a blogging resident on the Tempo blog this week. 

“Solidarity” is an old-fashioned term, trailing connotations of earlier generations of union activists and leftists, but rarely used in mainstream discourse. We don’t think about it much, and we don’t miss it, although every so often a pundit will point out a deficit of something sort of like it, usually under more anodyne terms like “community” or the grating “social capital”. Corporations try to instill it in their employees, again under some depoliticized term like “team spirit”, but only the clueless really buy it. The military depends on it and have their own jargon for it (“unit cohesion”). But the term itself is as musty and out-of-fashion as the old-school industrial trade unions who used to sing songs about it.

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The Cloistered Hedgehog and The Dislocated Fox

February 19, 2013 By

Greg is a 2013 blogging resident, visiting us from his home blog over at On the Spiral. His residency will explore the theme “Individuality and Decision-Making” over several posts.

For this first guest post Venkat suggested that I discuss a contention (based on Philip Tetlock’s research) in Nate Silver’s book  The Signal and the Noise regarding the fox and hedgehog archetypes.  As I haven’t yet read Silver’s book I’ll have to reference Venkat’s paraphrasing of Silver:

…while all humans are terrible at predicting the fate of complex systems, foxes (“knows many things”) tend to do better than hedgehogs (“knows one big thing”), and improve over time, while hedgehogs tend to do worse, and get worse over time as they grow more doctrinaire.

Silver’s assertion may be surprising to people who are familiar with studies, like those by management guru Jim Collins, which associate preeminent business leaders with the hedgehog archetype.  Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code and Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule are other popular themes that would seem to favor the hedgehog.

To put some context around Silver’s claim it will be useful to consider the influence of environment on personality.

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Adventures in Amateur Talking-Headery

February 15, 2013 By

It’s now been over two years and a dozen talks since I first started speaking with my blogger hat on. Each time I go to one of these things, I realize just how out of place I am.

The talking-head conference circuit (as opposed to academic) is designed around polished and powerful speakers with a true flair for the dramatic. They manage to be theatrical without being corny. They are engaging and accessible without coming across like used-car salespeople. Even when you are aware of the halo effect, you cannot help but be enthralled by people who are truly, naturally good at this stuff (like Bill Clinton say).

These are professional speakers  in the fullest sense of the word.

Me, I mumble, hem and haw, get tempted down unscripted rabbit holes on stage, lose track of time, go too fast or too slow, pause too much or too little, forget to repeat for emphasis, and generally put on a pretty amateurish show each time.

But here’s the funny thing: increasingly I find that it is people like me who seem to be on the agenda at these things. It is sort of like the rise of reality TV over scripted, or the rise of blogging over traditional publishing. I seem to be part of a broad amateurization of the speaker circuit.

I fully expect some sort of iStockSpeaker site to pop up soon, full of people like me in the directory.

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Resilient Like a Fox

February 13, 2013 By

Last week, I was at the LIFT Conference in Geneva to speak on “resilience.” I did my 20 minute talk using a very Tempo-esque angle on the subject, using the fox and hedgehog archetypes that I talked about in Chapter 3 of the book. My thinking on using archetypes to analyze complex themes has been slowly getting more sophisticated, and I hope to do a stronger treatment of the idea in a future edition.

I’ve embedded the talk below, and you can also get to it via this link. You may also want to check out some of the other talks. If you’re based in Europe, I highly recommend the LIFT conference. It is unusually well designed and choreographed.

I’ll be developing this fox/hedgehog theme further in my upcoming talk at ALM Chicago in March.

Machine Cities and Ghost Cities

February 5, 2013 By

Drew is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Kneeling Bus.

“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”   -Henry David Thoreau

New York and New Jersey have a first world problem: The Bayonne Bridge, which connects the two states, will soon block the entrance to the largest seaport on the East Coast, the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal. In other words, New York City and its surrounding region have too much infrastructure, and the older infrastructure is starting to interfere with the newer infrastructure, forcing a public evaluation of priorities.

The Bayonne Bridge, which fulfills the modest task of enabling people in cars to cross a river between Staten Island and its namesake city, needs to be raised: Its 151-foot navigational clearance is too low for Post-Panamax ships (the mega-vessels that will become the ocean’s biggest and most efficient movers of goods after the Panama Canal is widened in 2014). If the bridge remains in place, the port conveniently located closest to the Eastern seaboard’s largest population center will potentially stagnate as a Norfolk or Savannah arises to take its dominant position (just as Port Newark itself surpassed similarly obsolete facilties in the mid-twentieth century). If the Bayonne Bridge does not get out of the way in time, the global freight network will re-optimize itself at a slightly less efficient level, forcing goods to travel farther and more expensively. The plan is to raise the bridge 60 feet higher.

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Stone-Soup for the Capitalist’s Soul

January 31, 2013 By

The fable of Stone Soup is probably my favorite piece of European folklore. In the Russian version, which I prefer, called Axe Porridge,  the story goes something like this:

A soldier returning from war stops at a village, hungry and tired. He knocks on the door of a rich, stingy Scrooge of a woman. In response to his request for food, she of course claims she has nothing. So the canny soldier asks her for just a pot and water, claiming he can make “axe porridge” out of an old axe-head he spots lying around. Intrigued the woman agrees.

You know how the rest of the story goes: the soldier quietly hustles a bunch of other ingredients — salt, carrots, oats — out of the old woman, under the guise of “improving the flavor” of the axe porridge. He does this one ingredient at a time, offering an evolving narrative on the progress of the porridge (“this is coming along great; now if only I had some oats to thicken it.”)

The result is some excellent porridge that they share, while applauding the idea of axe porridge together. The shared fiction that soup can be made out of an axe-head results in the fact of real porridge for all.

There are some deep insights into the psychology of wealth and the nature of progress in this fable, insights that are very relevant for our times.

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Jailbreaking the City: Announcing Refactor Camp 2013

January 28, 2013 By

On the weekend of March 2 and 3, we will be organizing the second annual Refactor Camp. The theme for Refactor Camp 2013: Jailbreaking the Bay Area. The event will be held at the San Francisco zoo, same as last year.

refactorcamp2013

Regular tickets are $75 and sponsoring attendee tickets are $150.  The ticket includes lunch on both days, and is organized on a no-profit-no-loss basis. As with last year, the goal is to do a small and intimate event, where the intent of the talks is to catalyze small group conversations. We’ve kept the event size the same (40 odd attendees), but extended the event to two days instead of one, based on feedback from last year’s attendees, many of whom will be attending again this year.

Approximately 28 of the 40 odd available spots are already taken by early invitees, so if you are in the area (or are able to drive/fly in) and would like one of the remaining dozen spots, grab ’em while they’re still available. You can register via the link above.  The link also has details on the theme and a detailed agenda.

This year, the event will have a slightly broader footprint, since a handful of people are flying in from other parts of the country (including me of course, from Seattle).

As with last year, we’ll have a field session at the zoo itself, and another on the beach across the street.

Last year, after the inaugural Refactor Camp, we started a Facebook group for the attendees that has since grown into an active online/offline community with monthly meetups.  If you’re interested in the group, this is the easiest opportunity for you to join, since the membership rule is that you must meet at least two current members in the real world.

The Theme

If you’ve been following my writing over the last year, you probably know that I’ve developed a growing personal interest in urbanism, particularly the problem of revitalizing aging cities through retrofitting of clever technology. From Uber to Airbnb, this sort of thing is already happening, and what interests me is whether such technological developments can be connected up to ideas like superlinear corporations, civic entrepreneurship and so forth.

I think of these possibilities as “jailbreaking” old cities with a lot of locked-up potential. San Francisco is a particularly good example to think about in detail, but I am hoping the insights that emerge from our discussions will be applicable more broadly.

We’ve got a really stimulating mix of talks that will touch on everything from real estate markets and ride-share models to school reform and the charter city project in Honduras. One of the highlights is a simulation exercise on Saturday afternoon,  devoted to figuring out how to build a post-apocalyptic survivalist community, complete with zombie defenses.

New York Area Readers Meetup on January 30

Finally, if you’re in the New York area, and are interested in meeting other readers in the area, message me. A few volunteers have started an online/offline meetup group in the area, and are hoping to get enough critical mass going to do something like Refactor Camp on the East Coast. The first meeting will be on January 30.  I won’t be able to attend, but hopefully I’ll be able to make it to one of the future meetups.

I definitely hope we can pull off an East Coast Refactor Camp sometime, perhaps as early as this fall. Though I’ve now moved to the West Coast, I think I am fundamentally not a one-coast guy, so it would be nice to develop roots for ribbonfarm in the New York area.

I was a reluctant convert to the idea of doing events related to ribbonfarm, but after over two years of experimentation with formats ranging from 1:1 coffees with people, to small meetups to a larger event like Refactor Camp, I’ve really started to enjoy this aspect of writing a blog. Let’s see how long we can keep this going. I even bought the refactorcamp.org domain, so I’ve made at least a $10 commitment to keep this going.

LIFT, Geneva Next Week

Finally, I’ll be in Geneva to speak at the LIFT conference next week. If you’re planning to attend, do find me and say hello. I’ll  have some time for coffee etc. too, on Feb 6-8, in case you are interested in meeting up outside the conference.

This will be my third speaking gig outside the United States, so I think I can now call myself an “internationally known speaker” now. Woohoo, the climb up the talking-head greasy pole continues.