Data is Eating Clocks

January 17, 2013 By

It struck me recently that Marc Andreessen’s now-famous observation, that software is eating everything, has a special case that is particularly interesting for students of the history of the industrial revolution.

Data is eating clocks.

Fifteen years ago, I used to wear a watch.  One day, I lost it and never replaced it. The only time I look at a clock these days is when I have to catch a train or plane. I only think about the date when I have to sign a legal document. Most of the time, the day of the week matters more.

The clock was both a motif for the industrial revolution and a critical piece of technology driving it. Every small town in Europe gradually acquired a village clock tower. In the US, time zones emerged alongside transcontinental railroad clocks.

One reason precise time-keeping was so important in the industrial age is that when data is scarce, synchronization becomes critical to many activities. If you don’t know where your friend is, you have to set a precise  time and place to meet: “let’s meet at Starbucks at 10:30. But if you can text, you can coordinate in much looser ways: “I’ll text you when I am close to downtown and we can figure out where to meet.”

Behavior becomes more responsive to real-time situational details, and more robust to delays. Synchronization, a fragile coordination technique, becomes less necessary.

Interestingly enough, Chet Richards, a close associate of John Boyd, told me that Boyd hated the idea of synchronization, which was antithetical to his conception of maneuver warfare. Synchronization, however, was central to the idea of network-centric warfare, which is often viewed as an opposed doctrine.

I think the human world is increasingly going to become liberated from clocks and calendars. This is the literal manifestation of atemporality. Clocks will remain extremely important to coordination between artificial technologies, however. Cellphones, satellites, data centers: all need very precise clocks to talk to each other properly.

The artificial world is going through its own industrial revolution apparently, going by the increasing importance of clocks to the inner workings of technology.

Eternal Hypochondria of the Expanding Mind

January 16, 2013 By
This entry is part 7 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

The story of neurasthenia or “invalidism” is a curious mid-nineteenth-century chapter in the story of the emancipation of women. As Barbara Ehrenreich argues in Bright-Sided, it was almost entirely a social phenomenon:

The largest demographic to suffer from neurasthenia or invalidism was middle-class women. Male prejudice barred them from higher education and the professions; industrialization was stripping away the productive tasks that had occupied women in the home, from sewing to soap-making. For many women, invalidism became a kind of alternative career. Days spent reclining in chaise longues, attended by doctors and family members and devoted to trying new medicines and medical regimens, substituted for masculine “striving” in the world.

What makes this curious, and rather ironic, is that invalidism was becoming widespread just as new possibilities were being opened up to women, through the slow substitution of fossil fuels for muscle power.

This was not a coincidence of course.

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Refactorings Extended: Please Welcome Mike, Drew and Kevin

January 11, 2013 By

I’ve been writing ribbonfarm as a solo act for over five years now. Blogging can get to be a pretty lonely activity, so I figured I could use some company for a change. I didn’t quite like any of the existing models of collaboration in blogging, so I invented my own: the blogging residency. Think of it as something of a cross between a sabbatical and a writer-in-residence program.

We’ll start our little experiment with Mike Travers of Omniorthogonal, Kevin Simler of Melting Asphalt and Drew Austin of Kneeling Bus, all of whom contributed guest posts last year. For me at least, their posts were like breaths of fresh air in this increasingly insular little refactoring shop, which has gotten a little too full of my own in-a-rut ideas over the years.

Each of them will be contributing between 4 to 6 posts here through the year. Check out the Blogging Residencies page to learn more about the “refactored perception” themes they plan to explore.  Thanks to your ongoing support since I began accepting sponsorships, I can afford to actually pay these guys small honorariums for their contributions. So there is hope yet for the future of publishing.

To kick things off, I asked all three of them to articulate their understanding of “refactoring,” the umbrella theme here at ribbonfarm. So here you go (and for once, I can grab the popcorn and let somebody else defend their ideas).

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Schumpeter’s Demon

January 2, 2013 By

For a while now, I’ve been dissatisfied with our shared mental models around the creative destruction being unleashed by the Internet.

On the one hand, we have coarse-grained and abstract models based on long-term historical cycles and precedents. This is the sort of thing I’ve explored quite a bit in previous posts. It involves careful analogies to previous technological revolutions. It involves debates around whether or not technological progress is stalling and whether a return to growth is possible.

On the other hand, we have detailed situational models, full of incomprehensible minutiae, that seem to develop around specific important decisions. An example is the  set of mental models that drove the “fiscal cliff” farce, which just played out in the US Congress.  Another is the set of mental models in evidence around the SOPA/PIPA debate last year.

The first kind of mental model is so large-scale in its concerns, it is effectively a fatalistic level of analysis. The other kind is ineffectually preoccupied with each immediate situation in turn. It quickly drives itself into a dead-end each time, and defaults to buy-more-time decisions.

I’ve thought of an allegory for understanding economic creative destruction, that I’ll call Schumpeter’s Demon. It just might be capable of informing meaningful action.

Roundup of 2012 Tempoblog Posts

December 30, 2012 By

Here’s a roundup of the original posts from 2012 on the Tempo blog, not counting reblogs, announcements and such-like. A total of 28 posts. Here’s the 2011 roundup. I am quite surprised I managed this many, but I see that most of them are from the first half of the year. Things got kinda crazy in the second half. I seem to be developing a somewhat different style here on the Tempo blog, different from my main blog at ribbonfarm. I spent a lot of time through the year thinking through some of the core themes of the book in greater depth and identifying interesting patterns of ideas for incorporation into the book.

  1. The Examined Life
  2. Annealing the Tactical Pattern Stack
  3. Demystification versus Understanding
  4. Breakout Moves and Exponential Outcomes
  5. Positioning Moves versus Melee Moves
  6. Stress Failures versus Decay Failures
  7. Not Important, Not Urgent
  8. Fertile Variables and Rich Moves
  9. Analysis-Paralysis and The Sensemaking Trap
  10. Appreciative versus Manipulative Mental Models
  11. Time Lensing
  12. Forged Groups
  13. The Daily Ugly
  14. How Life Imitates Chess by Garry Kasparov
  15. Creative Desks versus Administration Desks
  16. The 6-Hour Maker-Manager Work Day
  17. Hacking Grand Narratives
  18. Trigger Narratives and the Nuclear Option
  19. The Tempo of Code
  20. The Fundamentals of Calendar Hacking
  21. Routine, but Cannot be Automated
  22. The Second Most Important Archetype in your Life
  23. Live Life, Not Projects
  24. Motifs, Mascots and Muses at Refactor Camp, 2012
  25. The Tempo Glossary
  26. Does Culture Eat Strategy for Lunch?
  27. Steer, Ready, Fire
  28. Squeakastination: The Opposite of Procrastination

Complete 2012 Roundup

December 19, 2012 By
This entry is part 6 of 17 in the series Annual Roundups

Time for another annual roundup and post-game analysis session. Here are the roundups from 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007 for new readers who want to go dumpster diving in the archives. I don’t recommend it since there is now a set of curated lists of the best posts on the “for new users” page (which are also gathered into convenient PDF/ePub compilations).

2012 has been a special year in multiple ways. Among other things, I celebrated my five-year anniversary, crossed 5000 RSS subscribers, and hit a record $3900 in sponsorships, nearly twice last year’s total (thank you, sponsors).  But perhaps the most important development was that I finally got the sense that I know what I am doing here. Every post performed pretty much exactly as I wanted it to, and the few surprises were pleasant ones. I was able to match intent to output, and predict responses pretty well. While putting together this roundup, I did some analysis of my blogging history that I think will interest other long form bloggers, as well as anyone growing any sort of business.

But first, the roundup of posts, in chronological order.

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The Ultimate Lifestyle Planning Guide and Map

December 14, 2012 By

Occasionally I get in a silly mood and make things like this. I’ve used the phrase getting ahead, getting along, getting away before as a shorthand description of the basic challenge of living life (an overload of a 2-pronged phrase from personality psychologist Robert Hogan: getting along and getting ahead) and I like to use it to frame any writing in this general department.

I’ll do my annual round-up next week and then take the week after off, so consider this my holiday gift to you (festive colors, don’t you think?). If you have trouble unwrapping this (hehe!) some hints after the image.

You need some basic Venn diagram and yin-yang diagram literacy to read this. The colors have less symbolism, so you can get away without knowing color science 101. For more notes, read on.

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Should You Count Near-Misses as Successes or Failures?

December 8, 2012 By

Wired has an excellent article on research on near-misses:

It is the paradox of the close call. Probability wise, near misses aren’t successes. They are indicators of near failure. And if the flaw is systemic, it requires only a small twist of fate for the next incident to result in disaster. Rather than celebrating then ignoring close calls, we should be learning from them and doing our very best to prevent their recurrence. But we often don’t.

…

“People don’t learn from a near miss, they just say, ‘It worked, so let’s do it again,’” Dillon-Merrill says. Other studies have shown that the more often someone gets away with risky behavior, the more likely they are to repeat it; there is a sort of invincibility complex. “For ego protection reasons, we like to assume that past events are a product of what we controlled rather than chance,” Tinsley adds.

This reminds me of similar research mentioned in Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic, on driving accidents and a device that teaches young drivers using near-misses, which are far more common than the drivers realize others.

HT: Jordan Peacock

Patterns of Refactored Agency

November 27, 2012 By

This is a guest post by Mike Travers, who develops software at Collaborative Drug Discovery, blogs on diverse topics at Omniorthogonal, collects his random hacks at Hyperphor, and has a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences.

The scientific picture of the world has some disturbing implications when its assumptions are worked out to their ultimate conclusions. Brains and bodies are pieces of machinery subject to the laws of physics, and If we are simply mechanisms, then our ability to be free seems to disappear, along many of the basic foundations of everyday cognition and action (choices, selves, values, morality, consciousness, etc). The scientific worldview has proven both extraordinarily powerful and immensely unsatisfactory, given how at odds it is with our everyday experience. The disjunction between scientific thought and traditional humanistic thought was captured by CP Snow’s Two Cultures in 1959 but has only gotten worse since then. As a scientifically trained person who has worked on the margins of artificial intelligence, I’ve always struggled for ways to reconcile these two worldviews.

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Talk on Kool Aid, VUCA Discussion, Tuesday Nov 27 at USC (Los Angeles)

November 23, 2012 By

A quick announcement. I’ll be in Los Angeles on Tuesday the 27th to do a talk at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab titled Should You Drink the Kool-Aid?

The talk is at 12:30 PM at Annenberg (which appears to be in the heart of downtown). Details at the link above.  Hope to see some of you there. Middle of a weekday I know, but if you are are in the neighborhood and in the mood to sneak away from work, this should be fun.

It will be loosely based on interesting discussions I’ve had with various people since I wrote my somewhat controversial trilogy on Forbes, Entrepreneurs are the New Labor, mashed up with ideas from Tempo and posts like The Calculus of Grit and The Crucible Effect.

There is also another event later in the day at 3:30 PM (also at Annenberg) with the folks from the USC Scenario Lab, to talk about VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity).

I am also open on the evening of Monday the 26th, in case anyone wants to meet up for dinner.  I get in around 6:30 at LAX, and will be looking to grab a bite somewhere convenient around 7:30ish before heading to my hotel. Email me if you’d like to meet up.

Thanks to reader and unofficial P. T. Barnum of Ribbonfarm, Zhan Li, for arranging both events.