Monthly Archives: June 2007

Craft v.s. Art.

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This is a very elegantly written posting.

Most people are not aware of the depths of the argument that between the fine craft establishment and the dominate fine art elite.  I used to think about that debate more; but I’m pleased to note something about it.

Fine art is at it’s core about scarcity; fine craft is much less so; and what has come to be called crafting hardly at all.  The fine craft movement, which weaves it’s way back through all of history and all nations, in it’s modern manifestation, I’m surprised to note, a lot like open source.

I hate to play that card.  The term open source has almost fallen dead for me.  So many people play that card in an attempt to grab a bit of legitimacy for what every scheme they are executing that involves sucking talent out of the vast pool of people on the other side of the internet; and don’t get me started on the neologism ‘democratizing.’

What is going on in the modern crafting movement, as manifested in the web, is the thing I think is coolest about the Internet.  First off it has a pool of people of common interest finding each other, like a giant pot luck dinner or a stone soup.  They are creating energy and knowledge that wasn’t there before; in an commons.  Secondly the energy of this movement comes from the periphery; the respect of the participants faces toward the periphery.

When this works you get the opposite of scarcity based activities.  In fine arts the entire community is polarized by the pervasive question of who’s at the top, who can command the premium prices, who’s hot, who’s not.  In a periphery facing community the tension, the anxiety if you wish, is where on the vast periphery the next insight will emerge, the next cool trick of the trade, the next breath taking bit of design.

The Offensive of Tagging

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One of the seeming puzzles about identity is how tags placed upon people don’t work as one might hope. For example if I tag somebody as “short,” the act can be many things: accurate, insulting, invasive, diagnostic, etc. You can’t treat the act of tagging independent from the context. You need to know a lot about the actor who generated the tag and your likely to need to know the conversational context the tagging took place in.

This problem is particularly subtle when the tag assigns a person to a group, i.e. when it ascribes group membership. It’s more fraught in that scenario because the boundaries of groups are always disputed territory. In some situations the boundaries are only marginally disputed, such as in the case of short people; but even then there are people who care deeply about the boundary and what it’s functional purposes are.

The problem becomes more acute when there is polarization being engineered on the boundary. When two groups are in dispute, when the rights of the group members are in play, when states are at war, etc. These cases are not rare, both because you can get two groups into opposition at any scale (marketing v.s. sales, offense v.s. defensive squad, freshman v.s. sophmores, etc. etc.) but also because there are numerous benefits that agents in these games can harvest from playing with these boundaries (hightened common cause, humor, separation of concerns, etc.).

So I’m amazed that Google has decided that one, just one, such case deserves a bit of special handling. This is the fundamental problem of a system like Google’s. All words are tags, all search terms have contextual meanings. I like that they have tried to do something. I hope they find a way to make it scale.

Expect

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I recall reading a paper, probably a tech report, from the Rand corporation in the mid 1970s about a little AI program they had written which would watch a user interact with a time sharing system and then attempt to extract a script to automate that interaction.  Later in that decade I used Interlisp who Read-Eval-Print command loop, or repl, included a feature known as DWIM, or do what I mean.  DWIM was yet another primitive AI, it would look over your shoulder as you worked and try to help.  It was amusing, though in the end there was a consensus reached that it was more party trick than useful.

A while later, on unix, a serious problem emerged.  A delightful game, Rogue, appeared which we all played far too much.  When Rogue would fire up it would randomly setup a game for you to play, and some of these were better than others.  This gave rise to a serious need; i.e. automation to find good games.  So people wrote programs to do that.

When Mac came out countless hours were wasted complaining about how it lacked a command line.  Interestingly one of the things it included, right from the start, was a record/playback mechanism.  Developers used this automate testing.  (I should note here that the Mac had 128K bytes of ram.)

All these systems are a work around for a general problem.  Given a interface designed to target human users what can we do to bring computers into that interface.  We have this problem writ large these days, since most of the content on the web is targeted at humans it is continually frustrating how hard it is to get the websites to interact with the computers.

It’s a “who do you love?” question.  Unsurprisingly most website designers love the human users.  They labor to serve them well.  That crowds out efforts to serve the computers well; which has a perverse side effect of making it hard for the computers to help the humans.  This in turn, of course, plays into issues like RSS, XML, RDF, Rest, etc.

Interfaces designed for humans are, unsurprisingly, different from those designed for computers.  A good list of what separates these two would be a extremely useful!  For example human interface is likely to be more visual, more asynchronist, more multi-threaded, more decorative, more commercials.  That list would be useful because we build lots of tools to bridge the difference.  Web spiders are one example.  Screen scrapers are another.  Automated testing tools are a third.

All this was triggered by my delight at discovering that my Mac, which has the unix tool set installed, has bundled in a program called ‘expect’.  Expect is a tool for just this kind of bridging.  It is the direct decedent of the tool written to get you a good game of Rogue; in fact it’s examples include a script to do just that.  Expect is designed for writing scripts to manipulate command line interfaces which were designed for humans.  The examples include all kinds of slightly perverse things.  Editing a config files on N machines simultaneously, for example.  It’s a hoot.

It seems to me that there are powerful reasons why the dynamic that leads to tools like these spans so many decades.  For lots of reasons implementers love humans more than computers.  In some cases implementors hate the computers, while wanting to reach the humans.  Because of this the human facing APIs will always be richer than the computer facing ones; and we will forever be writing tools to bridge the gap.

Equality under the law

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Cool, the Finns have progressive traffic fines; i.e. the fine is proportional to your income. I’d love to see more examples of that!

The Robinhood question has been the fundamental dialectic in politics. The power of government can be used to make the lives of small economic actors better, or it can be used to make life easier for large economic actors. There are of course plenty of other disputes going on at the same time, i.e. the power can take sides between subgroups of the large players or subpopulations of the small ones. Those disputes provide a bit of color to what is otherwise pretty black and white.

At the heart of the progressive movement was a choice to weigh in on the side of small economic actors. This was a direct fall out of the shocking discovery of just how much wealth and power the large actors had accumulated during the industrial revolution. Marx, in particular, was so shocked by the distribution of wealth that he presumed the small actors would rise up and institute forms of government to look out for their interests. That coordination problem is a lot harder than he thought.

The progressive project has lead to a vast array of programs that aid the small actors with funds taken from the large actors. We have a broad program of cutting the little guys some slack which unsurprisingly large actors sometimes abuse. What the Finns are doing is an example of how you can refine the system to work around that.

In the US in the late 1950 through about 1975 we had a strong consensus that the progressive movement had won. The political debate became much more colorful, less black and white. That’s over. In the last few decades the economic right has broken away from that consensus. They can’t win elections without votes so they formed an alliance with a TV watching evangelical segment of the population. These alliances are all fake, since the right’s actual allegiance is to large economic actors. The so-called rightwing cabal hides behind propaganda necessary to keep their voting electorate polarized. This is populism of the worst kind.

Taking for granted that there is a consensus around the progressive movement is now dangerous. One of the two parties no longer accepts that consensus. A friend pointed out how Lawrence Lessing has decided that his time would spent to the issue of corruption in politics rather than IP rights and their relationship to the commons. I don’t disagree in that switch of emphisis, but I think he somewhat misunderstands what the problem is; what he has been working on is a natural subplot of the progressive movement. I.e. the presumption that giving the vast population of smaller economic actors access to ideas is a good thing. What he has discovered is that there ain’t any consensus about the advantages of that sharing in our political house at this point. Large economic actors want their property rights.

This entire rant was triggered by this posting by Chandler Howell musing about how these issues arise around the management of security and risk; with his particular examples being the Finnish parking tickets and an emerging trend that allows prisoners to purchase better accommodations. Talk about a throw back to pre-progressive times! He starts out by mentioning a principle, i.e. equality before the law. My reaction to that was, no. No, governments work by deciding how to balance the inequality that exists. That’s what politics is about. The default state is extremely unequal and you can assemble governments that accelerate or temper that.

During the Civil War, before the progressive era, it was common for well-off young men who were drafted to hire somebody else to fill their place in the Army.  It’s delightful that the Finnish system creates an incentive for the wealthy to hire somebody else to drive for them.

Mr. Rytsola, who was issued the $71,400 speeding ticket in October and another $44,100 ticket in August for zigzagging in downtown Helsinki, says he supports income-based penalties, but with a cap on traffic fines. Under the present system, he says, “if you earn enough you shouldn’t even touch a car,” noting that accidentally driving too fast could cost the richest Finns hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Bad Lands

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Businesses that provide a platform for third party developers are directly analogous to real estate development with the platform vendor in the role of landlord. The ultimate landlords are, of course, nation states. How all that is governed is the primary turf under dispute in politics. For example in colonial Boston the state delegated to Harvard University the rights to build a bridge over the river. Running the bridge was quite profitable, and later when the state wanted to build a second bridge Harvard sued them for breach of contract. Later the state licenced a lot of toll roads and canals, which mostly turned out not to be profitable. When the private operators folded the state got left holding the bag. Historically you needed to get a license from the king to run pretty much any business. Some of these where “licenses to print money,” others less so.

Vendors Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. etc., like states, manage their platforms to create economic growth on the platform for all the various reasons. For example Tivo averages $8.78 per subscriber per year and one way for them to increase revenue is to raise taxes or get more customers to move onto their platform. But an example like that can be extremely misleading. The bloom of economic activity around a platform offers many options, and the king can manage those licenses in numerous ways. The traditional technique is to employ the relatives. But more profitable is to spin off private businesses to friends and family.

The European kings handing out license for regions of the new world was mixed bag for the license holders; but the US government handing out license for the cross continental railroads was a pretty good deal. The railroad barons managed to retain the rights to much of the land around the rail lines. That’s an interesting contrast to the Louisiana purchase where the Federal government believed it would recoup the cost of the purchase by selling the land, but since we already had a long tradition of taking rather than paying for land it never did.

The railroad barons (like modern platform vendors) would advertise to attract settlers (developers) to their real estate (platforms). Here’s a story:

IN THE BEGINNING, there were 10 families of Germans from Russia, who arrived in Fresno, CA on June 19, 1887.

On May 8, along with 219 other immigrants, they had left the villages of Straub and Stahl am Tarlyk, on the Wiesenseite of the Volga River, journeying westward traveling by wagon, train, and boat through Poland, East Prussia, and Brandenburg to Bremen, Germany, the port of embarkation. When they docked in New York, they intended to go to Lincoln, Nebraska.

52 days later, on June 19th, 31 of these pioneers arrived at the old Southern Pacific Railroad Depot in Fresno, California. They brought their families to this great San Joaquin Valley to seek a better life for themselves and scouting for other families in their home villages in Russia.

According to Alex C. Nilmeier, of Fresno, his grandfather Philip Nilmeier had become acquainted with a Jewish salesman on board ship. He was a man of the world who believed the San Joaquin Valley had great potential as an agricultural area. Philip Nilmeier was able to convince ten families to change their destination from Lincoln, NE to Fresno. In 1919, he said that certain articles in a little booklet, setting forth the attractions of Fresno County, for working people, also induced him to break away from the homeland.

That worked out! But golly, think about the risk these folks were taking. All on the basis of a little booklet.  The visitor center of a national park I once visited had a picture taken about that time showing a barren landscape spotted with occasional hovels, in the foreground a family stood in front of theirs. The caption informed us that these were sod houses, since there was no other building material and that everybody died that winter.  I doubt their little booklet used the modern name for that park The Badlands. A tremendous load of Survivor Bias is built into the stores that get told about all these platforms.

gaze at the moon till I lose my senses

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Digital identity systems have a natural progression. They are introduced first in applications where the individuals being identified are weak and powerless. That pays for the first copy costs, creates an installed base of craft knowledge, debugs the technology, clears questions about how to use the system in practice, sets standards. It is then resold to communities where the identified individuals are, at least going in, less powerless; but yeah it’s a cheap proven system. So if you want to see the future you need to look at how industry solving identity problems for the powerless, e.g. cattle, prisoners, children, shipping containers.

Here’s an example that’s actually a bit different. The start up costs of this system were paid to identify one largely powerless population, i.e. prisoners, but it’s moving not toward a more powerful one; but toward a less powerful one, i.e. cattle. Virtual Fencing for cattle. It’s an obvious idea of course. Each animal wears a collar and with the help of GPS tracking they are taught to remain within the bounds of the virtual fence, and then you can move the fence around to manage your pastures. (Great, we are back to the turf maintenance and ground-cover problem again.)

I am reminded of the cowboy’s lament

I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can’t look at hovels and I can’t stand fences
Don’t fence me in.

Progressive taxation is the enemy of the Professoriate

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This is rolling on the floor funny:

” … Theorists love the model of job market signaling . In this model agents perform a costly effort which produces nothing useful. The only point is that it is less costly to the able. Thus an equilibrium exists in which the able signal their ability by performing the costly effort (the example is obtaining a BA). Employers require the lowest level of signaling such that it is not optimal for the less able to produce the signal of high ability. The able can save on pointless effort by paying the less able to be honest. This is a collective action problem. They can implement this strategy by taxing each other to pay a subsidy to those who admit they have low ability and, therefore have low incomes. Obviously the policy helps the less able (they get something for nothing). Therefore, in a model of job market signalling a progressive tax and transfer program can be Pareto improving …”

So true!

Lending a Hand

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At some point in the last 24 hours a blog on some random web page slipped thru my peripheral vision. I only recall the tag line it was using.

“When supply and demand need a hand”

What a great tag line for an intermediary, a market maker, the hub in a two sided network, a dating service. I’m guessing here I but I bet it was an Ad for a head hunter, directed at the hiring side. But it’s a nice tag line for any number of scenarios where you want to reduce the transactional friction, for example it’s not a bad way to talk about what is often the motivation for specifying standards.