I’d always presumed that the word ‘behoove’ meant, in effect, that one should ‘get a move on.’ I’d assumed that “hoove” had the same root as hoof, i.e. a horse’s foot. I found that amusing. But then I’m a sucker for foolish made-up games about word roots.
But it turns out that that ‘hoove’ like ‘have’ out of the root ‘kap’. Kap is also an ancestor of words like captive, accept, even deception. and recipe.
Martin is toying with a very thought provoking glimmer of an idea about the future of Telephones…
… In an oversimplified nutshell, the Western approach puts the individual in the centre of the universe. The Eastern idea is to put the group in the middle. …
That could go in all kinds of directions. For example it is marvelously synergistic with my gleam of an idea that the 80s enthusiasm for personal computing leads to a kind of blindness about what is really going on in the Internet era. For example it echos why Fukuyama wrote Trust, a book on groups, after writing about the End of History.
But here’s one of them.
This is great. It shifts the value proposition of the telecom business out of the pairwise and into the group forming; i.e. from Metcalf’s toward Reed’s law.
Groups need rendezvous points. So this also bounces right back on the number one problem the traditional telecom companies have competing with the dumb networks. Dumb network owners loose if they horde the options to search for innovations.
Trying to horde the option to create these rendezvous points frustrates the search to find them. You can’t find the high value rendezvous points without a tremendous amount of experimentation, i.e. a r-Selected strategy. The careful husbanding of options done by the telecom companies is fatal.
When the market signals that you have become a platform vendor it behooves you to listen, and learn learn how to be a platform vendor.
For the last few years I have worked off an on on the issues around Identity on the internet. Browser redirects, browser cookies, web bugs embedded on the page, plus the occasional bit of JavaScript to orchestrate browser behavior loom large in the toolkit used to design these systems. The systems that invade people’s privacy, like DoubleClick, uses these same tools.
I’m kind of proud of my gossip model for thinking about these problems; e.g. that what really bothers people about the problems of privacy invasion is the sense that people are talking about them; passing gossip, slander, and which articles in the paper they read this morning. That gossip is passed across back-channels your unaware of. That gossip is aggregated by brokers who provide gossip-knowledge-pools for their customers. The gossip brokers don’t necessarily have any relationship the folks, you and me, about whom they are accumulating data.
The architectures for internet identity that strive to be respectful of end-user privacy are complex because they draw the end-user into the negotiation about what information may be passed between to parties that have relationships with that user. So if your mortgage company wants to work with your bank in a manner that respects your privacy they need to bring you into the loop and get your permission. The internet identity solutions manage this using the tools (redirect, cookies, etc) to orchestrate that.
Of course parties that don’t respect your privacy can use the same tools to pass data back and forth. In effect using your web browser to help them establish the back channel they need to be able to gossip about you. Thus if a few customers of a gossip broker, like DoubleClick, all drop a web bug on their pages then the broker can act as a clearing house for information about your behavior at each of their sites.
So, I enjoyed this paper on “New Covert Channels in HTTP: Adding Unwitting Web Browsers to Anonymity Sets” because outlines a delightful point in the spectrum such systems. It sort of turns everything on it’s head.
In this case, instead of a group of gossip-broker customers coordinating the web pages they present to users so they can pool their knowledge of how those users behave we have a group of sites that are looking for a way to pass messages around anonymously. In particular they want to be sure that no outside observer can tell who is exchanging messages with whom.
For example I have a few friends who practice good privacy hygiene and with those I encrypt almost all my email. This way observers listening in on the wire can’t see what we are talking about. That’s good, but what’s bad is that these observers can see who my friends are, and they can tell when I’m communicating with them. Which, frankly, is none of their business.
To solve problem you need a special black box. I poke my message into the box and sometime later it pops out on at my correspondent. You can’t trust anybody to run this box, so you have to figure out a way to run it without a central authority. The traditional means to that end is to run a swarm of email servers - called remixers. You poke your message at one remixer and it jumbles up it’s parts and timing and scatters it out to the swarm. Slowly but surely the scattered bits rattle around the swarm until they pop out on the other side.
The paper reframes that idea with one key additional trick. The nodes in the swarm are web servers. These web servers never connect to another member of the swarm. Instead when an unwitting browser lands on them, like a bee on a flower, they use the bag of tricks used for gossip passing (redirects, cookies, etc.) to push their message fragments onto other nodes in the swarm.
I love it. For example; notice how this is a peer to peer network with two classes of actors; the unwitting browsers and the servers of those who which to remain anonymous.
Because it is proported to be about emotions I have been looking forward to getting my hands on the new book out of the Harvard Negotiation community (Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as you negotiate by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro). Most books about emotions written by rational intellectual people are crap, so it’s a relief that this book is pretty good.
It’s not without it’s flaws. It does tend to revisit a lot of ground covered in the other books from their negotiation community. There is a certain disconnect between the power of emotions and the advice the book gives. Sure, it is a good thing to find common ground with your partner. Discover shared hobbies! On the one hand that’s all well and good because it is these small building blocks from whence real common ground is assembled. On the other other hand it continues a the tradition found in most geek written books of excessive distance and reductionism when talking about emotions.
Having gotten that out of the way - the structure of the book is just marvelous.
They avoid one of the more common traps of writing about emotions, e.g. enumerating them like a butterfly collector pinning each one down and drying it out. Instead they note that humans have some very core concerns, to find a fulfilling role for example. If these core concerns are not being met then strong negative emotions will follow. If they are met, strong positive ones will rise. Skilled negotiators entice the positive emotions out, and avoid baiting the negative ones. Their reward: productive flexible creative problem solving sessions.
I particularly liked that they complement each core concern with a verb; so here they are:
While this book is written with negotiation in mind - i.e. an episodic attempt to engage in collaboration - these issues clearly arise across the spectrum of collaborative effort. Keep a score card with every participant (individual and institutional) v.s. each of the five. Encourage action, via those verbs.
All this has triggered a number of insights I’ve been enjoying. I’m much enjoying the insight that if you struggle and win a particular role there is the risk that there will be negative emotions created - because winning is not choosing.
It is particularly fascinating to me that role and status are pulled apart here, because they are so often casually treated as synonymous. Similarly it is quite generative that affiliation and autonomy appear rather than the more commonly used term - loyalty with it’s implication of hierarchy.
People often fall into the trap of simple hierarchical thinking and presume that role is equivalent to status. Who knows, maybe that’s because role sounds like royal. Maybe it’s because you can’t fulfill a social role unless other actors fufill their complementary roles (e.g. you can’t take up the role of seller without buyers, or follower without leaders) and complementary sounds like it’s equivalent to acknowledging status. Roles, as the word suggests, are like the parts in life’s many plays. In a collaborative context it’s productive to acknowledge the role of all parties but only when your role interfaces with theirs do you begin to tap into the issues of how to collaborate in particular - efficiently, while leaving them maximum choice, and striving to be fulfill both parities role. These are two very different emotional trigger points. Only in the most primitive of power hierarchies to they pretend that you can collapse the two together.
Affiliation is, I’m reasonably sure, another way to look at the issue that in community dynamics I call common cause. It’s binding force of the collaborative effort, like gravity. And people get very emotional about it for all the reasons that people guard the public goods of their communities thru scolding, patriotism, loyalty, etc. etc.
Part of what creates the freedom is a rich pool of public goods and the only way to create those is thru communities of common cause. In the context of this book, i.e. negotiation, autonomy means something else as well. It means the scope of freedom of the other side in the negotiation is presumed to have because their are limits to the reach of the negotiation.
In business jargon they sometimes talk about the nature of the power between the supplier and consumers along the supply chain. It’s a pain to be a buyer when the supplier has all the power, and via versa. One way to visualize that is to think about the arcs in the supply chain graph. If you have a single supplier for a key component, for example funding, then that supplier will be powerful. You might say that you are tightly affiliated. If you have billions of tiny customers then no one of them has much power and you autonomy is protected. Some of the forces that lead to firms merging arise out of this. In a simple example two firms A &B that discover that A’s only customer is B and that B is dependent on A for a critical component are very likely to merge. Or in a more complex example two firms will often merge to reduce the power of their overlapping customers or suppliers.
I found it fascinating to realize that all that is very analogous to the Affiliation/Autonomy pair enumerated in the core concerns above. Clearly there is something deep running thru the dynamics of all exchange networks that these five issues can help to inform.
Here’s a nice word, gemütlichkeit, but what is it doing in an English language dictionary. And! It is fun to say.