Keiran posts
a nice essay about a speciality of his: the world of human organs exchange. Since I know that Keiran is a fine humorist I’m confident that he has wandered into this line of research because it is so rich in outrageous amusing edge cases. Examples where the symbolic structure of the situation crosses over into physical humor. Slapstick. In these situations the humorist has the pleasure of watching his audiences eyes roll.

I see these all the time when reading the economic liturature about public goods. I just wish I was confident that the economists were aware of how amusing their work is. For example yesterday I read the following parable of about social goods.

A grenade is tossed into the trench. If one man throws himself upon it all the others will survive. But, if he doesn’t then he retains the chance that he might just survive. Hence nobody leaps upon the grenade and all the soldiers die.

Therefore public goods are unworkable and Libraries don’t exist.

While I suspect there is some varient of Godwin’s law about this kind of thing it does entertain both the speaker and the audience. The micro-motives of story telling.

Many years ago I had the fun of working in a basement in Cambridge on some products for Lotus. This was for their Macintosh group and that group had built a truely amazing product called Jazz, and then a more amazing follow on called Modern Jazz. By the time I showed up the original project team had largely scattered. There were some really interesting amazing people still there though.
Now the job at Lotus was my first exposure to consumer software, or more accurately to a company that makes consumer software. Up until then most of the software I’d built had a customer who you could go out and have dinner with, and look over his shoulder and see if you were solving his problem – if you didn’t he told you. That relationship is deep, narrow.

Consumer software is really different. The customer is this huge cloud of random folks. The relationship between the you and the customer is very thin. It’s like the relationship between a whale and the plankton – you can’t even see the customers the relationship is so broad and thin.

Firms try to solve this problem by creating these huge complex statistical sense organs to reclaim contact with the customer. Vast organizational muscle is deployed. Channel managers, market researchers, usablity laboratory teams, etc. etc. on top of that you create a vast over arching managerial network.

I was lucky to get to see this from down in the basement at Lotus. I was lucky to have a few people who were familiar and bemused by this monster. What was fun at the time was that these folks had grown up with the firm and so were approprately distanced from from the thing that had emerged. You could watch them look at this meeting or that buracracy; wince and then mumble – “Huh? Who would a thought?”
So I ran into one of them today, Adam Hertz. Which was great because it let us recall a word. Autopoiesis.

Autopoiesis: …Self-reproduction or self-maintenance. …

We used to joke that the driving force behind any meeting was to spawn two more meetings. It’s in their nature.

This week, when I find myself thinking about change. I am noticing the networks (social, procedural, organizational, structural, …) that make up the connective tissue of any institution. They make them extremely resistant to change. Or, more positively they give the system a strong immune system.
Viewed through the lense of autopoiesis I’m reminded that they also have a tendency to maintain and reproduce themselves. To create more of their own kind.

That’s a huge organizational problem. Very similar to the opportunity hording idea in Tilly’s thinking about inequality in groups.

Open source tries to tackle it by being open to fresh blood. But it’s hard. We usually have a bit of a cell membrane to protect the quality of the code. We try to let good dedicated people cross that membrane; but if for example everybody inside is a symbolic thinker and what would be really helpful is a visual thinker it’s often hard to get the membrane to open up a pore that allows a group of such folks to cross over. Sometimes we fix that by keeping things loosely coupled. So a doc group can form without having to grant them the tools to inject security flaws into the server.

Man this stuff is hard.

This is an amazing photograph. That group is formed by the photographer’s role as outsider. Try putting a name to each of those expressions; the variety is amazing.

I’ve been reading Tilly’s book about collective violence in tandem with Kotter’s book on Leading Change; they make for a volitile mixture in one’s head.
Tilly’s books create really big complex ideas that give you a lot to chew on. In this book he tries to capture a big model of what creates collective violence. I got to reading this because it’s another way to look at group forming. An example. Tilly enumerates a number of processes that can work to create collective volence; for example: us-them boundary activation. For example consider this quote: “… political entrepreneurs and violence specialists deliberately activated the Hutu-Tutsi boundary in 1994.” Add to that one this: “Jan 93- Mar 94: Rwanda imports about 580,000 machetes ..” Having read all that it’s hard for me to look at that photo without seeing a boundary standing ready to be activated. In that crowd stands an opportunity the worst kind of political entrepreneur. My brain starts humming that tune from South Pacific.

Kotter’s book is an entirely different kettle of fish. While Tilly writes from ivory tower Kotter is writing from the floor of the executive training workshop; i.e. you can almost taste the bad coffee of some luxury hotel’s conference center. Kotter is attempting to teach the art of being the political entrepreneurs; i.e. the skill of taking the large complex culture of an insitution or firm and move it into a newer more functional culture. This is skill demanded when your institution is on the threshold of getting displaced by change. But it is also the skill you need when you want to transform an existing group so it’s culture splices in new DNA that wasn’t there before.. The skills you’d need if you want to take the crowd in that photo and lead them someplace constructive.

The photo comes from here, via google image search. I keep trying to find images of groups, crowds, etc.

Having spent the last two days trying various combinations of install mechanisms to set up a freebsd server with all the trimmings I’m extremely jealous of the fun that Mr. Rhodes is having.

…

(iter (for i in '(1 2 3)) (+ i 50))
  => NIL ; on x86 and sparc
  => ERROR "2 is not a LIST" ; on ppc

… the relevant piece of information here is that since calling FOO only returns seven values, the 8th (or, counting from zero, the 7th) should default to NIL…

…the SPARC instruction set architecture has branch delay slots, such that the instruction following a branch is executed whether the branch is taken or not; the PPC has no such thing….

My problems are more along the lines of of spending a few hours figuring out that my mysql test user didn’t have sufficent permissions to run the test suite.

I want to highly recommend Josh Marshall’s excellent article printed in the New Yorker. It’s a very sophisticated look at the issue of how the United States has managed it’s emerging power on the planet.

I found particularly facinating by one story he tells.

Josh’s story expands on one of the classic cartoons that people use to sketch how communties are kept coherent; e.g. “nothing brings people together like a common enemy.” I don’t like the quality of exagerated speach in that aphorism, but I entirely agree with it’s general form that common cause is at the heart of any community. There are many species of common cause: a body of practice, a proffession, shared turf, a public good, a shared goal, a shared experiance, contracts and other kinds of ties, etc. etc. Fear of a common enemy is just one; probably a rare one.

Josh looks at what happens when our common enemy disappears from the landscape. In a community is organized around a common enemy members will subordinate their own goals and desires. They will follow leaders. They desire the coordination efficencies of a command hierarchy. They do this not out of respect for the leader but out of fear of the enemy. It is rarely as stark as that. All the baggage get’s thrown on the cart. Everybody will decorate their justifications for riding on the bandwagon. They drag out the usual suspects: shared values, a common narrative, tradition, social ties, etc. etc.

So when the common enemy disappears it’s interesting to look at what happens. One thing happens to the members and another happens to the leaders.

Regular members first. People start dropping off the bandwagon. They start following their own muse. This alone is enough to change the topology of the community. It grows less intense, more difuse. The resources that people put into it fall. The strength of the ties grows a bit weaker. A general sense of nostalgia emerges for the good old days. But nostalgia isn’t a force sufficent to create or maintain a community.

The second thing that happens is more interesting. The heart of Josh’s point is what happens to those who are at the top of that command hierarchy.

In the presence of a common foe the leaders need only to speak softly and the subordinate members listen respectfully and attempt to execute. After the common foe departs the leaders are a little like the cartoon character who’s run off the cliff but has yet to look down.

So what becomes of the leaders? One possiblity is that they pack up and go home; or at least step back from the podium; or they stop speaking softly and try turning up the volume. For many leaders their idenity is deeply entangled in the community, so walking off isn’t easy.

So Josh tells two stories that fit this pattern. In the modern story on the common enemy was the Soviet Union, the leader was America, and the rest of the industrialized world the subordinate community members. In the historical story the enemy was France, the leader was England, and the community members were England’s colonies.

In that story once England triumphed over France (we called that French and Indian war) the leader announced from the podium that the colonies should help pay the bill for the war. We proceeded to: throw tea in the harbor, hop off the bandwagon, and go our own way.

I find the ‘pay for the war’ part of that story quite enlightening. It draws our attention to a third player in the story. So far we only noticed the leaders and the subordinate community members. What ‘pay for the war’ reveals is the institutional infrastructure found in any significant community. The bandwagon’s physical manifestation. As the intensity of the community declines the resources available to fund the maintainance of the bandwagon decline.

The leader is left holding the bag. That, it seems to me, increase the chance that he will deal with the situation by raising his voice. He doesn’t really have the option of stepping away from the podium, or at least not until such time as he’s found a way to scale back the bandwagon. It’s facinating how a democracy deals with a situation like this. With lucky your community members elect different leaders. Ones who lack the same affection for the good old bandwagon. Corporate boards play a similar function, again if your lucky.

I’m a little concerned that after reading this two sentence paragraph:

Again, and not to overstate the case, what characterizes this reading of society is the existence of principles of justice, of the idea of legitimate (and by implication of illegitimate) action and so, of necessity, of rules governing market, or better exchange behavior, that are themselves not based on, or rooted in, the relations of exchange themselves (supply and demand, existing prestige orientations, and so on). Hence the existance of rules (already beyond the game, metarules, which is precisely what makes the principles of legitimation rules of justice) that are in a sense outside of society, which is, in turn, what has given them their authority (as oposed to the purely coercive propery rules that are only immament to society and it’s exchange relations).

this morning at the library my reaction was: “Exactly!”

Internalized values, justice, legitimation, sacred, authority: all the same conversation.

The user gives commands by pointing the cursor at graphic symbols on the screen, such as a paint brush and an eraser to enable the user to draw a picture, or a trash can to destroy a document.

…

Because the machine now has one drive and 128K of RAM, several sources said users might have to “swap” diskettes in order to move information from one program to another.

…

The user also will be able to divide the screen into a variety of compartments, or “windows,” that each can be used to perform different jobs. For example, the user could be writing a letter on one part of the screen, then create a window and begin another.

…

Within the next few months, Microsoft Inc., a Bellvue, Wash. software publisher closely allied with IBM, is scheduled to introduce a spreadsheet package for making financial projections, a graphing package and the Basic programming language.

    — San Jose Mercury News

Each Apple dealer got three. They all sold out immediately. I got mine at a boating electronics store. The boot blocks were layed out on the disk so that it played a little tune as it booted. The audio was stored in gaps in the display’s RAM. Microsoft never did ship that Basic implementation, but they did force Apple not to ship the one they had ready to go at launch. The 128K!

I’m almost done reading Quicksilver and it has certainly delighted me. There are any number of very delightful passages. I particularly liked a passage that appears early in the book were a price negotitation in a marketplace is intermediated by negotiating the value of each coin that will be used in the transaction. Each coin has any number of attributes that temper it’s value: the metal it’s minted from; the nation that made it; the extent to which it has been quartered, shaved, and worn; and it’s provance. The merchant and buyer can discuss all these attributes rather than discussing the actual price of the goods to being exchanged. Toward the end the merchant accepts a particularly lousy coin as part of the trade since, he explains, he owes a debt to a gentleman he dislikes and it would please him to pay off the debt with such a joke of a coin.

People forget, money is like that.

It’s a mystery to me why there are so few books about the middleman, the intermediary. Quicksilver isn’t quite about that, but it does touch on a lot of the issues. Like communication, money, encryption, the function of knowledge and secrets in making markets, the emergance of the edge between church and state – that all come into play around the role occupied by the middleman.

Quicksilver is also extremely funny. It brings back the funny undercurrent that gave Snowcrash it’s glow. That glow seemed to dissipate in Diamond Age (which I’ve always felt reflected the author’s horror at waking up one morning with an infant child in the presense of his clear vision of the the world our technology is creating).

I read many many years ago in some high end Optics Society journal about what I came to think of as “the white light.” The article argued that if one extrapolated the patterns in communication there would come a time when the cost of routing information around the network vs. the cost of broadcasting everything everywere would cross and at that point the end points on the net would see everything and just pluck out just the bits intended for them. In contrast to that I came to think of the birth of the web as creating a kind of great darkness; that every bit of knowledge that exists prior to the creation of the web is outside the web inaccessible. That the ease with which out can get knowledge in the web is so high – bathed in the bright light – that knowledge outside the web has, in effect gone dark.

Reading Quicksilver is a wonderful generator of examples of this. There are hundreds of tiny historical facts in Quicksilver. For example that after the Duke of Monmouth failed to overthrow King James the rebels were sold into slavery – i.e. English citizens were made into slaves. If you want to know more your going to have to go into that dark place to find this and most all the other facts in Quicksilver certainly aren’t out in the bright light of the web. Well, not so far.

I’m in Sydney. It takes 20 hours on planes to get here from Boston,
many more if you fold in the waits and to and fro from airports.

If that doesn’t make it perfectly clear that this is almost
another planet a visit to the botanical garden will. White parrots
with yellow horns pick at the grass in flocks. Fig trees the size of
althletic fields. Some trees with 70% of their mass dedicated to
their trunk; some like bottles and others like cones. The trees are
tough here. The axes of the settlers would break when they attempted
remove them.

The most stricking though are the flying foxes. They rest like
wasp nests in the high branches of trees; five hundred or a thousand
of them. Occationally one comes or goes. The size of a large hawk
but with a sound like a large canvas of leather, a huge bat.
Occationally a vast number of them take the air in flock; very
biblical.

Against that ecological background it is odd how very much like
London Sydney is. Herds of business men in identical color, black.
Subways with tiles and signage right out of the 19th century. Largen
department stores, with men in tuxs playing pianos at the base of the
elevator wells, entire floors of shoes, ladies hats that remind me of
Easter sunday in the early 1960s outragous piles of feathers.

Very good wine.

This reports that dumb flies out perform smart flies (from New Scientist 24/Sept/03).

The quick summary. Breed up a population of smart fruit flies. Insert smart flies into general population. Make food scarce. Smart flies don’t do so well. What’s smart? Smart was defined as 1) the skill to taste a poison, and 2) the skill to avoid laying your eggs in and around that poison. Why didn’t they do so well? “They are slower at feeding.”

Do with it what you will.

Different environments reward different portfolios of skills. I assume that evolution has found a way to keep the library of skills highly diverse so that as the environments shift from one generation to the next a species can survive.

For example lets say that the environment rewards risk taking (i.e. the environment is rich and full of opportunities). For a few generations the risk takers thrive. Suddenly the environment shifts so that the careful and risk adverse win. If a species evolves too quickly to fit the first environment it’s going to be in big trouble when the environment shifts.

In Jane Jacob’s book “A Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle of Sovereignty” she suggests that Toronto succeeded Montreal as the #1 city of Canada because Montreal’s entrepenures were more cautious; a strategy that had served them well for a century but a strategy that turned out to be inappropriate during the boom years following the second world war. I feel that something similar happened between Rt. 128 in Massachusetts and Silicon Valley in high tech during the last 25 years.

I remain hopeful that we are in the last generation that rewards people who can spell.