Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

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.

This image is lifted from an article at First Monday (A Practical Model for Analyzing Long Tails).

I’d seen this trick of using a sports field to help inform your intuition about power-law curves previously. In that case the distribution of wealth is the topic. These guys talk about the L-curve; shown here (video):

Both of these do a nice job of helping to visualize the actual shape of these curves. They help to clarify why the politics and business models that serve the two legs are very different and why the appeals that emphasis middle class values are should be treated with some suspicion. The more typical illustration, shown to the right, is preferable if you want to deemphasis the polarization and highlight the uniformity of the underlying generative processes.

Today I noticed this ad offering to reimburse you for getting a passport.  $157 per adult.  I felt some sympathy for the advertiser, an island in the Caribbean.  A place people go for the weekend; well they used to.  The island tourism folks woke up recently to discover that numbers where down and they have discovered that the newly increased tedium of getting a passport has caused huge numbers of idle travelers to decided to, well, just go someplace else.

When my 1st son got his learner’s permit it took us three trips to the registry before we managed to accumulate enough documentation to convince them to let him have the learner’s permit.  My 2nd son submitted his first pay check’s stub rather than the check and the bank called to correct the error.  A bit got set on his account that didn’t get cleared.  So the ATM ate his bank card.  It took months to get a replacement card since his school was yet to issue the ID card they required.  All N of my financial institutions have recently insisted that I add four security questions, including one involving a photograph; which is a pain since I share access to these accounts with my spouse so all 30 odd questions and their answers all have to be in some shared location.  We recently got new passports, a project that was at least a dozen times more expensive and tedious than doing my taxes.
I once had a web product that failed big-time.  A major contributor to that failure was tedium of getting new users through the sign-up process.  Each screen they had to step  triggered the lost of 10 to 20% of the users.  Reducing the friction of that process was key to survival.  It is a thousand times easier to get a cell phone or a credit card than it is to get a passport or a learner’s permit.  That wasn’t the case two decades ago.
The Republicans have done a lot of work over the last decade to make it harder to vote; creating additional friction in the process of getting to the polling booth.  The increased barriers for getting a drivers license, passport, etc. are all part of that.  This make sense because now, unlike 30 years ago, there is now a significant difference in the wealth of Democratic v.s. Republican voters.

Public health experts have done a lot of work over the decades to create barrier between the public and dangerous items and to lower barriers to access to constructive ones.  So we make it harder to get liquor, and easier to get condoms.  Traffic calming techniques are another example of engineering that makes makes a system run more slowly.

I find these attempts to shift the temperature of entire systems fascinating.  This is at the heart of what your doing when you write standards, but it’s entirely scale free.  Ideas like this are behind the intuition of some managers who insist on getting everybody in the team working in the same room with no walls between them.
In the sphere of internet identity it is particularly puzzling how two counter vialing forces are at work.  One trying to raise the friction and one trying to lower it.  Privacy and security advocates are attempting to lower the temp. and increase the friction.  Thus you get the mess around the passport, real-id, and the banks.  Wearing that hat it seems perfectly reasonable that one should present photo id when you vote, or have your biometrics captured if you cross a boarder.  On the other hand there are those who seek in the solution to the internet identity problem a way to raise the temperature and lower the friction.  That more rather than less transactions would take place.  That more blog postings garner good coments, that more wiki pages will be touched up, that more account relationships will emerge rather than less.

Of course the experts in the internet identity space are trying to strike a balance.  It’s clearly one of those high-risk high-benefit cases that people have trouble holding in their head.

There is some deeply disturbing data about the decay of human social networks (pdf).
Meanwhile bees, a social insect appear to be in big touble too; something really bad is happening to the bee populations, Colony Collapse Disorder (Wikipedia).

“It is very frightening. We don’t know the cause. … The bees are quite strong. … A week later the colony has dwindled to nothing. … It’s a mystery. … We don’t know where they are going. … Fifty to ninety percent of the colonies. …” - U of Penn (podcast)

They (pdf) are very early in the process of puzzling out what’s going on, mostly just guessing at this point: mites, fungus, contamination, stress, a combination - who knows?

I wish I thought similar resources were being brought to bear on the breakdown in human social networks.

I suspect we all know, but I just what to be sure it’s on the record, that Long Tail ideas suffer from the Base Rate Fallacy.

Which is to say that stocking more products in your store, more books on the library shelf, more details in your server logs, or keeping more of your options open does not automatically lead to a better experience. Unless of course you enjoy searching, sorting, organizing, or hording.