Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Lauren Weinstein posts about being accused of being unhelpful.

But a message from another privacy personality was as polite as it was disturbing.

The sender noted pretty much essential agreement with my arguments regarding the lawsuit, but strongly asserted that my post was “most unhelpful” by “undermining” efforts to bring Google into advocacy group consultations.

Solidarity has it’s function, and for many groups it is their most substantive source of power.  When opposing such groups divide and conquer can be a particularly effective strategy.
Lauren counters with a few of the standard counter points.

For example he labeling the shunning as “ad hominem attacks.”  One of the puzzles of group dynamics is how solidarity is maintained.  How does the group signals to a participant that he’s out of bounds?  How does it even negotiate the consensus about it?  There are always boundary keepers that will volunteer to do this function, and it seems they often over shoot.  The phrase party disciplinarian comes to mind.  No doubt the most vitriolic of the reactions he got were offensive attacks on his person rather than the topic under discussion.  When the full bore shunning takes place, the triggering issues fall by the way side.

My point here isn’t to dig into the issue.  My interest is in the group dynamics.

In the internet identity design space the group dynamics is what interests me most.  The ebb and flow of each group’s positions.   One of these groups is the loose collective of folks who I think self identify as Privacy Advocates.  Lauren is  a founder of that group.  That he has triggered their immune system makes this an interesting case study.
Lauren points out the Google, the other party in this particular dispute, is a group too; like Soylent Green it’s made up of people.  Of course Google is not a group of people in anything like the sense that the Privacy Advocates are.  While there some weak status and hence hierarchy in the PA community it is primarilly an open system from the get go.  They are a loose collective of reasonably like minded folks.  No doubt that movement could use a bit more organizational muscle, but as rebels against power it’s a tough sell.
Google, on the other hand, is a corporation - the entire design pattern of corporation runs contrary to open systems.  Presumably it struggles against that tendency, but the defaults are what they are.  Just to take one particularly small example, Google Apps reveals the email of any user who signs up for an application to the application vendor - it’s a choice, and they had to make a choice.  Their scale (their power) means that choice point is highly leveraged.

Scale, as usual for me, is the interesting part.  The Internet Identity standards battle is one of the few standards wars that deserves the nearly full blown military metaphor.  Armies, some of these groups are best treated as armies. The landscape under dispute is extremely valuable and some groups on the field are entirely focused on winning an owning that real estate.

That’s a polarizing framing, eh?  Groups, like the privacy advocates, who’s power, solidarity, is grounded in being rebels against these powerful, often mindless, armies are likely to view chatting with the enemy as traitorous.  It’s ironic though.  Lauren in making the argument that the other guys are made up of people is in fact appealing to a core value of the privacy advocates, e.g. that the individuals trump the group when making any design choice in this space.

One of the puzzles in this standards space is how hard it is to negotiate with any of these groups.  Most of them are not able to cough up a representative with whom you can negotiate.  The privacy advocates are the worst case of that.  There are dozens of people in that group with stature; but if you expend a few man months of effort negotiating with one of the his agreement doesn’t buy you the assent of the larger collective.  The privacy advocates aren’t organized in a manner that delivers a throat through which they can speak.  While I think that’s a good thing it makes the standards bodies prefer to ignore them.

But the other groups are just as awful.  Some of these are rent seeking.  Some of fear for their existence.  Some of them are playing property rights games.  Some of them send diplomats to the negotiation with false authority, since their senior management is uninterested in this standard’s battle.

To me it is a key point that the negotiations, and the battle, is between these groups.  Oh sure, there is an dialog between individuals that is critically important - since that’s were the design that actually works will be discovered.  Understanding the nature, culture, and motivations of these groups is the key.   In each of these groups there are a few people who are coming to see that they must work on the problem at this level.

For those people the hardest part is negotiating with their own people.

I wonder if there is any data on the distribution of stock ownership for a large sample of public companies.  It assume it’s conventional wisdom that management can capture a large portion of the profits when the firm’s share holders are more diffuse v.s. when the  ownership is concentrated in a few hands.  I think I’ve seen articles showing that result.  This is, yet again, a question about the power-law distribution.  It would be fascinating to see some analysis of company performance versus how skewed the ownership distribution is.

This is analogous to yesterday’s point, via Bob Wyman, about how when a platform vendor successfully atomizes the size of the options created by his platform can improve his monopoly.  Large firms always labor to keep their complementary players commoditized; management presumably always labors to keep shareholder power fragmented; and anti-democratic movements always labor to keep group forming limited to the family unit.  It’s why we are suspicious of populism, and why I’m doubtful about the Deep Green’s enthusiasm for local.
It would be cool to have the SEC require reporting of the aggregate statistics of firm stock holdings.  Who knows, possibly that data is reported.  Say indirectly thru reporting of shareholder voting data.

I still think lightning rockets are the coolest, but it appears that playing with high powered lasers some folks making similar trouble.

This posting by Bob Wyman is most excellent, do read it.

Platforms, it is often argued, create innovation.  They do that by creating large option spaces where third parties can bring their domain knowledge to bear.  It’s an efficient way to structure the search because domain knowledge is sticky, otherwise the platform vendor would do the search in-house.  The value created is then split between the platform vendor, the developer, and the end user who get’s his problem solved.

Developers select platforms for numerous reasons.  Developers, for example, switched their attentions from Microsoft toward the LAMP stack for lots of reasons.  Including the fresh option space the LAMP stack created, the impression that the value split around the LAMP stack would leave more on the table for them, and the discovery that Microsoft (”cut off their air supply”) couldn’t be trusted.

Much innovation that happens on top of a platform is too fine grain to be converted into value for the innovator beyond the intrinsic pleasures of inventing, having fun, and the extrinsic pleasure of solving the problem at hand.  For all of those the platform(s) involved can roll up the innovations into to the greater good - of the platform or the society, it varies.

Innovation comes in all scales.  Some of the smaller stuff is, well, just hacking.  Hackers, innovators, developers, entrepreneurs might be names for various scales.  Bob’s posting is more about entrepreneurs.  he highlights a kind of chilling effect that comes as you atomize the options on the platform.  It makes the platform stronger, empowers it’s winner take all nature.  More hacks to roll up to it’s greater good.

That in turn reduces the number of platforms, which drives away the entrepreneurs.  Since they are in it more for the exit strategy.  Fewer platforms means greater pricing power for the platform and lower valuations for the startups. He takes a swag at how one might go about managing that risk, i.e. how you might “reducing the anti-innovative power of the platforms.”

Note that, platforms as anti-innovative is the opposite of the usual story we tell about platforms.  Neat and right on.

Finally Google is revealing some of the means they will provide to allow third parties to run code closer to their assets. Last week was good for Python! Since, we learned that Google’s leading language for developers will be Python. While they assert that the platform is language neutral it certainly looks like only Google can “harden” and deploy a new language. The crowd demanded both an unknown language and Perl, the presenter flinched. That is going to be very rough on the long tail of languages.

I found the 1st and 2nd segments of their announcement videos interesting. Everybody got very nice hair cuts.

There is a lot of value in this offering and the “you don’t have too” theme that runs through out their patter is a strong way to present that. They really are taking a lot of pain out the developer’s job! So while they are probably encouraging the die off of a lot of interesting languages they are enabling a lot of tiny applications.

Their persistent store is cute (note you can’t write to the file system otherwise). I suspect this is a lock-in point, though the semantics of the store look reasonably simple.
In addition to writing to the file system, no pure TCP/IP interfaces, and no threads. Which reflects the nature of the underlying computer. Amusingly this is a non-preemptive computing model, just like the old Macintosh. You have to do all your work triggered by http requests, and those can’t run too long.

I’m fascinated by my emotional reaction to all this. While I’ve rationally seen this coming for a very long time. In fact I’m surprised it’s taken so long! It makes me sad to see the old craft skills become less necessary. It makes me excited to see the opportunities this opens up; it’s always fun with a large population is empowered to author software. That’s one of the big-hard-problems, letting more people be authors.

That kind of somewhat discombobulated emotional reaction in an expert is a good sign in a platform offering. This is going to be big and it is a nice counter point to Amazon’s approach.