Artification

A very popular topic in the tech world in the last two years has been gameification–the notion of making things look more like games in order to increase their appeal. This idea has been applied from everything from websites to public facilities, with goals that stretch from increasing site traffic to building better societies. A huge amount of money has been invested in gamefiying our everyday lives. Weirdly, though, a parallel trend, which is, if anything, even more important and potentially lucrative, seems to have been mostly ignored. As far as I know, it hasn’t even had a name (until now).

The trend I’m talking about is artification, the idea of making ordinary activities feel like artistic achievements, and allowing people to share that creativity with others. Consider Instagram–what does it do? It enables people with a smartphone to feel like they’ve made a piece of photographic art with very little effort. The pictures of their dog that they take are still just pictures of their dog, but now they feel special.

If this sounds cynical, I don’t mean it to. Enabling people to put individual flair into simple acts has incredibly powerful consequences. Those dog pictures are almost certainly better because of Instagram. And not just because of the filter. The fact that the user of the phone camera is thinking like an artist means that they put more care into the picture that they take. And this effect isn’t limited to taking photos. It’s fundamental to the human condition.

Consider the classic complaint of the professional designer. The designer goes to a client and receives a brief. The designer then comes up with a half-dozen ideas and goes back to the client. However, the client, as it turns out, wants them to use the idea that he came up with. What he really hired the designer for is to make his idea look cool. Finding jokes about this experience on the internet is not hard to do.

In this scenario, everyone wants to be the creative person. The designer is usually someone who has chosen a less lucrative career path in order to be able to have room for art in their job. The executive client feels strongly that one of the perks of the hard work he’s put in is that now he gets to make some of the ‘fun’ decisions.

What’s crazy about this is that creativity used to come for free in a lot of jobs. Whether you were a monk illuminating manuscripts, a carpenter making chairs, or a grocer running a market stall, there was usually an opportunity to express yourself in some limited way. Industrialization and its commensurate drive for ‘efficiency’ temporarily convinced us to dispense with playful design. However, removing creativity from the workplace generally makes people significantly less efficient. This is because it removes one of the key channels through which people can engage with what they do. Consequently, people check out and the quality of their work degrades. And why? Because of the nebulous, but commonly held sense that things that resemble the result of a homogeneous industrial process are somehow more professional looking. It’s easy to see an office filled with identical gray cubicles as ‘smart and tidy’ so long as you don’t have to work there.

The trend toward cookie-cutter blandness is now thankfully starting to reverse itself. In part this is down to a better understanding of psychology. (You don’t see many gray cubicle farms in companies like Facebook that are striving to gather and maintain talent.) It’s also driven by the fact that new processes in manufacturing suddenly make it just as cheap for a person to receive a personalized product as it is for them to receive one that fell off a production line. The net effect is that the market for software that enables artification has suddenly become huge.

To my mind, tools like Instagram have only scratched the surface of artification. My suspicion is that in the next three years, people will catch on. The wave that follows will change our lives massively for the better, whether it involves tools to improve workplace engagement, programs to stimulate the integration of communities, or simply more exciting product design.

After all, not everyone is a gamer, but pretty much everyone wants to exercise creative control.

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What happened to fashion?

The other day I had a great conversation with my mum. In it, I asked her: Why isn’t fashion changing any more? Look, for instance, at the change between 1959 and 1969, or the change between 1975 and 1985. Then compare that to the change between 2002 and 2012. We have the same hoodies, the same trainers, the same T-shirts, etc. The pace of musical evolution seems to have slowed down too, along with TV and movie styles, product design choices, and a slew of other trend-based phenomena.

My mum’s response, which I think was bang on, was “it’s because of the internet, isn’t it.” I agree with her, and think it has implications for the current social media boom.

These days, rather than having just a few fashions or musical options to choose from, people have hundreds. In fact, they have so much information thrown at them that large-scale trends in popular culture can’t have the same traction that they used to. Each individual meme is drowned in noise.

Furthermore, because there are so many options, joining any given trend doesn’t afford you much in the way of social advantage in the way it used to, because hardly anyone else is going to make the same choices. Hence the rise of hipsterism–the trend of having nothing in common with others, because it’s a lot easier to do.

In my post on Social Waves, I talked about social communication as an activation wave, rather like a forest fire. I think that metaphor applies strongly here.

Let’s say that you have a forest in which trees take years to grow and a single roving arsonist. Wherever the arsonist goes, he can start a new fire. Those fires will burn for days and scorch a lot of territory. The arsonist can’t burn the same acre twice in one month because the next time he lights a match, there’s nothing left. But he can always walk for a few days and start again. In the mean time, the burnt bit of forest fills up with green shoots. Given enough forest, the system is stable.

However, what happens if you fill the forest with arsonists? There’s never enough time for the forest to regrow. As soon as something looks flammable, an arsonist jumps on it. Hence, the fires just never get that big. In this metaphor, arsonists are people seeking to initiate a new social movement. It used to be that only a few people could do that. Now everyone can, which is the same as saying almost nobody succeeds.

Now let’s consider another forest in which the trees are randomly connected by explosive roots. Set light to a tree in one place and others all over the place will start burning up. Waves don’t spread with coherent shape any more, which means they burn out faster.

This is why the biggest fads of the last ten years aren’t bands like the Beatles, but rather are apps like Instagram. An app channels a person’s pattern of communication and builds a new, dedicated bundle of explosive roots to propagate trends through. It subverts the existing structure of the social forest in order to enable a social wave to burn when nearly all the raw material for excitement is already extinguished.

In some ways, this is awesome. The apps we’re making are incredibly powerful new tools for promoting social change. But it comes with a cost. By making information so fluid, we’re creating a society that really struggles to form any coherent social movements, except those that rise and fall just as fast as the information they rely on.

So for the decade ahead, I’d expect more flash-mobs but not much in the way of new music. And don’t throw that old hoodie out just yet, you might be needing it.

Is Facebook Toast?

My wife has been saying for a while that she thinks Facebook is toast. She said it again when she came across the news that GM was yanking its Facebook advertising. There has already been some interesting speculation about Facebook, in the wake of the news, such as this article on Wired. People seem divided at this point as to whether it’s indestructible, or ready for a fall.

Until today, I was certain my wife was right. After all, when a company floats, I think it’s usually an indication of the fact that the people running it are ready to cash out and let the company get stupid. It’s like deciding that you’re done with your old phone and that it’s okay to hand it to a bunch of kindergarten children to play with.

I say this because I suspect that it’s really hard to run a company properly once it’s floated. It turns into a short-term profit machine with a million fighting hands on the tiller. Every non-obvious strategic decision comes with idiotic consequences from the market, which means that only simple decisions, that your competitors can read just as well as your investors can, are viable. And I don’t think it would be any different for Facebook. There are a huge number of people waiting in the wings for an opportunity to influence the company’s direction and make a bunch of money off it.

The flip side of this is that I learned today that Zuck seems to have retained 57% percent control of the organization. My guess is that he’s intending to hold onto that control and use it to push Facebook in a rather ambitious direction, post-float. Thus, the alternative outcome here is that Facebook gets bigger rather than smaller. Once the boring, unavoidable admin of the IPO is out of the way, Facebook uses the financial momentum to grow aggressively in a new direction. The hush-hushety plans with Microsoft might be busted out here. Or, if Zuck really is serious about changing the world, we might suddenly see Facebook getting political.

However, while the waters are muddy, I suspect that my wife is right. Facebook is toast anyway, even though it might take longer than people imagine. This is because I think Zuck is going to find it really hard managing all those barbarians once he’s invited them into his castle. He might still be the king, but the king of what? Investors have a habit of finding ways to make their influence felt, regardless of what share they might appear to have, and what the CEO has in mind.

Social Waves

One of the more interesting research projects I’ve done recently was with the excellent and fascinating Mark Laidre, a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley. We were studying the propagation of gossip through social networks using software simulations. The research was great fun. It also changed the way I think about society.

The turning point in this project for me was the following realization: gossip is a wave. In case you haven’t already come across this idea, I want to seed it for you here so that I can refer back to it later.

Admittedly, for anyone out there involved in network science or social media, this parallel may not seem new. However, the real depth of the similarities struck me when I was trying to implement some code to handle the passing of information from one person to another. We wanted gossip to follow certain simple rules, such as ‘if I’ve told you a certain juicy tidbit in the last five minutes, you shouldn’t try telling me exactly the same thing’, and we wanted to implement it as cleanly as possible.

The more I looked at the problem, the clearer it became that I had already written the code I needed, but for a completely different project–one about quantum mechanics. As soon as I bolted in the QM code, simulating gossip suddenly got a lot easier.

I should say that I’m not talking about any old waves. I’m talking specifically about excitable media waves. These are the kind that you get in forest fires, heart-tissue, and neurons. They show up when you’ve got a sea of linked components that can be in one of three states: ready to fire, firing, or getting over it. The rule is, if somebody next to you is firing and you’re ready to fire, then you fire too. Afterwards you need a little break before you can fire again.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that human society is an excitable medium. After all, we get excited and we talk to each other. Furthermore, our language is full of metaphors that make the parallel easy to see: ‘catching the wave’, ‘being swept along’, etc.

However, I think what’s interesting here is not just noticing the connection, but the implication of actively using and extending it. While I’m sure that there are people working on this already, it strikes me that this area is ripe for research growth. As well as building simulations to watch how rumors propagate, we might use similar code to analyze the readiness of social groups for different kinds of change, or model how social unrest occurs.

Perhaps even more significantly, the same class of software models might allow us to model how society changes, and this is where the technology industry angle comes in. The quantum mechanics simulation I borrowed from was all about networks that rewrite themselves. With a little adjustment, it would be easy to explore models that showed the effects of new forms of communication, eg: Twitter, spreading through society and altering the political landscape in their wake.

There’s a lot of ground to cover here, and I suspect it’s going to be an fascinating journey.

Google vs. Oracle: are we there yet?

The likely conclusion of this trial is starting to look a lot clearer. It’s shaping up to be a fail for Oracle, as expected. However, the specific financial outcomes for the two big players in this game aren’t really the point here and never have been. The real casualty of this fight, as we’ve touched on before, is likely to be the Java language.

Others seeking to build on Java will think twice now, because they will have seen Larry E’s eagerness for aggressive legal behavior. At the same time, Larry’s stewardship of the language is bound to be brought into question. A lot of people are going to quietly wonder if Java has become a dangerous choice. That means that Oracle is going to have to work doubly hard to try to make Java an attractive option–something it hasn’t really managed to do much of since taking over the helm.

I can’t help but wonder if Larry Ellison has maybe been replaced by a robot built by Microsoft, who’s mission is to botch Oracle altogether and push its business into Balmer’s hands. Mind you, we don’t have to worry to hard. If that were true, they would have had to reboot him at least once during the trial. And so far he hasn’t asked anyone to cancel or allow his ghastly decisions.

Who really wins patent fights?

Battles in the software world have become a lot more patenty than they used to be. Here’s an example from today, but they aren’t hard to find. Comments on the web seem to broadly take one of the following stances:

1: What do you expect? It’s sensible business practice to use the weapons you have.

2: Patent fights are nasty. Big companies should be better behaved.

In my opinion, Stance 2 is correct and Stance 1 is wrong, but not for the reasons that I suspect most pundits bring to bear.

Let’s start with Stance 1. It’s absolutely true that businesses need to use the tools at their disposal to fight for their survival. The patent-attacks on Google which forced it to purchase Motorola make this clear. It’s a dirty world out there, and anyone who doesn’t defend themselves will undoubtedly get hurt.

However, let’s take a look at how come these patent-wars erupted in the first place. They started because law in the US was changed to allow software patents to exist, which was not formerly the case, and people started trading these patents for money. At this point, innovators aren’t being protected any more, they’re being crowded out. There are dozens of blog posts already out there that will tell you much the same.

But if we just frown at the big tech companies for getting us into this mess, we’ve missed the point. The point is that the current state of the legal landscape is stable because it’s stable for lawyers. The legal institutions aren’t going to change this status-quo because we’ve taken a field of human endeavor that used to be about competitive innovation, in which they play no part, and we’ve turned it into one that’s about competitive legal wrangling, in which they run the show. Even the most earnest, well-intentioned, honest lawyers are likely to prefer to frame a problem in terms of the tools they already understand, and will recommend against doing otherwise.

This is a hard trap for the tech industry to get out of, because everybody has to agree to lay down their patent guns at the same time and back away, which nobody feels like doing now that the bullets are flying. Particularly given that the current disasterfest rewards big companies with powerful legal teams at the expense of smaller ones. However, eventually, enough companies may start bleeding to death that sense may begin to reign again.

I see the recent move by Twitter as a source of hope. There’s a company making an awesome, non-obvious, innovative choice. In other words, exactly the kind of choice we’re supposed to be valuing tech companies for in the first place. A little more thinking like that, and we might actually reclaim our business sector.

The Google/Oracle case gets lamer

I watch the Google/Oracle case with a sort of mounting disbelief. Not only do we have Larry Ellison apparently trying to do his best to destroy the Java language, but now we have a jury who can’t decide whether APIs come under copyright. Do they have any idea how much misery will ensue in the software industry if they decide that they are? Did the court result from Europe not help them figure this out?

It’s hard to watch a language you’ve invested years in go pear-shaped, even when you think it’s flawed. 

What is Larry Ellison thinking?

Why is Oracle taking Google to court over Android? Regardless of the legal issues here, what do they hope to get from it? Cash from Google for every Android device? That’s not going to happen. Here’s why.

If Oracle wins and gets to slap a tariff on Android, Android will start to sink. It already has problems because Microsoft takes a cut every time an Android phone is made. One more leech on the side of the beast is likely to be too many, because, let’s face it, Oracle will take as big a bite as they can. Android will lose ground against Apple, and nobody in that ecosystem will make any money, except perhaps Amazon, and Amazon won’t pay Oracle a dime. Google will put the whole thing out to pasture as soon as it’s costing them money, and move on. This probably wouldn’t happen immediately. It’d take a while, but it’d happen. In a market as fast-moving as mobile, not having a healthy platform equals death. Just ask RIM.

This seems pretty clear so I can only assume that Oracle is either A: composed of idiots, which seems unlikely, or B: fighting this battle for some other reason. So let’s look at the possible reasons.

1: They imagine that they’ll build the replacement Java mobile OS and control the market. This also isn’t going to happen. Oracle is in the process of botching server-side Java. Now they have every Android developer in the world hating them. At this point, control of the mobile space isn’t something Oracle can have. Even if they pick up what remains of Android after they force Google to drop it, what’s left won’t be worth owning.

2: They are in cahoots with Microsoft and this court case is the secret weapon that’s supposed to enable the MS phone to overtake Android. If this is what they have in mind, it also seems pretty doomed. People just don’t want to buy MS phones, because phones feel private and cool, and almost everything MS makes feels old and like their job. This will be doubly true when both mobile and workplace operating systems look the same. Unless the win for Oracle is uncoupled from the consequences for MS, there’s no clear win for Oracle either, particularly as MS has an extraordinary reputation for abandoning partner organizations.

3: Oracle are in cahoots with Apple. Apple have said something like ‘we would add support for iOS apps written in Java if it didn’t make us vulnerable to Android’, and Oracle has bought it. (This seems unlikely to me.) If Oracle expects a win from Apple in the wake of this court case, they’re crazy. Apple does things their own way. They couldn’t care less about Oracle and would sell them up the river without a second thought.

4: Oracle are desperate and are just making terrible decisions. This is plausible given the rise of big data, the slow die-off of Java as a programming language, and the contraction of Oracle’s core enterprise market. (If you’re in doubts about Java’s decline, just check out TIOBE’s last programming language report.)

5: Oracle are fighting Google over Android just to put a dent in Google, or to increase their leverage over something else that’s closer to Oracle’s core market strength. Maybe this is Larry E’s way of saying ‘stay out of Enterprise or I will bite you’. If so, that also seems stupid, because the real threat to Enterprise software doesn’t come from Google. Mostly, it comes from BRIC economies and their own cheaper, home-grown solutions.

6: Oracle is part of a nebulous, industry-wide attempt to nuke Google who they see as a dangerous disruptive force. They want the tech world to go back to how it was before and this seems like their best bet. This is effectively the same thing as Option 4.

Net: None of the ‘clever’ strategic goals seem likely to produce a win either, so I’m still left pondering what’s going on. Let’s look at some of the more likely outcomes:

1: Android splinters and goes wild. Whoever is holding the biggest piece when it fractures is the winner. In other words, Amazon. If Oracle are in cahoots with them, then Oracle wouldn’t be stupid but Amazon would be. I find this scenario hard to believe. On the other hand, maybe all those Amazon servers are running Oracle databases or something.

2: Android just sinks and, for a little while, there’s an ugly hole in the market that the corporate cretins all try to fill. Then suddenly, Boot to Gecko phones spread like wildfire. This is something I can see happening. If it does, then, interestingly, Brazil will have a head start on everybody, because they’re getting B2G before the rest of us.

I like this last outcome, because all the ugly dinosaurs kill each other and it’s the rest of us who win. In any case, we’ll see. The one long term winner I can’t see coming out of this is Oracle.

Let The Swarming Begin

Instagram got bought for a billion dollars. People are saying it’s another tech bubble. I don’t think it’s a bubble. I think it’s a cusp. If we, (the people who work in technology, or near it), treat this like a bubble, then that’s what it will be. However, I think it has the potential to be something far more exciting than that.

Why? Because this surge doesn’t look like the ones that came before. Something significant has changed. I noticed this first when I recently did a job search. From time to time, I dip back into the land of software contracting to stop my personal boat from sinking. It’s something I’ve done many times before. I’ve been in and out of tech companies since I was 16. And this time the change was spooky.

Usually there are the big companies offering enterprisey jobs for projects that need dozens of footsoldiers, the little startups who can’t pay much but offering interesting work, and the viable, growing companies somewhere in-between.

This time, though, I saw just two kinds of employer. First, big companies desperate for people to fill old projects. Those projects were almost exclusively dependent on software that had end-of-lifed somewhere around 2008/9. Second, I saw a wild, crazy thicket of startups run by hungry young people figuring out how to run a business as they went along.

Now, the round-time of my search wasn’t very long, and undoubtedly there are other types of company out there. But this doesn’t change the fact that the feel of the technology sector has altered. And this change matches the themes showing up in the tech news.

• The flailing around and back-biting of the major tech players suddenly looks a lot more desperate, and more oriented around patent gouging than it used to be.
• A sudden flurry of weird and wonderful languages have arrived that aren’t being pushed by a corporate backer.
• The rise of Javascript is seemingly unstoppable.
• And tiny companies delivering games and mobile apps are having a massive, unprecedented impact.

The last time there was a proper tech bubble, it was about selling things over the web. For the most part, the big companies stayed big, the small ones stayed small, and we got some new names to go with the new business sectors opening up. There was one way to get funded, which was via VC, and it was awful. After all the fluff about the ‘new economy’ died down, the languages we were using, and the nature of the industry, basically stayed the same.

This time, the change feels like it has more in common with the Arab Spring or the rise of the BRIC economies than it does with former tech booms. The heavy hitters who used to run the show have been struggling for cash and direction since the credit crunch. This means they’ve taken their eye off the ball. They aren’t automatically dominating. Meanwhile the little guys, and there are lots of them, have taken their chance. The funding community has risen up eagerly and adapted to help them.

It’s a bit like what happened while the Bush administration was busy trashing American credibility in the Middle East. Without someone constantly taking the biggest piece of the pie, countries like India and Brazil got a chance to show what they were capable of. Awesome, if a little scary.

So what will come of all this radical change? That depends what the new generation of startups choose to do with their opportunity. They can fight it out between each other, which will probably eventually result in the big players staying put and technology acquiring a few more old-growth names for the forest. Or, they can change how business is done, by learning when to compete and when to cooperate.

It’s like this. You can think of big technology companies as sharks. They swim around gobbling up little fishes. Being a little fish sucks. Your existence is constantly under threat from someone bigger who has more teeth than you do. However, what happens if you put a shark in a tank full of piranhas? Let’s forget for a moment that this is functionally impossible because one species is freshwater and the other isn’t, and savor the visual for a moment. We all know what happens: the shark is toast.

So how do startups go from being little fish to being piranhas? They learn operate like a shoal, or a swarm. They move in concert when dealing with prey larger than themselves. They time their attacks and coordinate. In effect, they learn from the Arab Spring, just as the Arab Spring learned from the world of tech. They create resources for sharing money, patents, legal support, and even access to APIs in such a way that they what benefits one benefits all. More importantly, they learn the lesson that letting their fellow piranhas get eaten does not help their own power in the market. One piranha on its own is not scary.

This might seem counter-intuitive to some. I mean, Instagram got bought, which is sort of like being eaten, and they made out with a cool billion. That’s what we all want, right? Wrong. For every Instagram, there are five hundred companies just as good that don’t make it. Unless you like having the tech world be a noisy, unfair beauty contest that you can’t actually win, the trick is not to aim for money, but to aim for power.

That’s right, power. And lots of it. Because the next generation of tech companies are going to own how society communicates if they play their cards right. Industries, banks, and governments will quiver before their disruptive might. We’ve only seen the first inklings of this in places like Egypt where social technologies have flexed their muscles. However, just playing the startup game and aiming for the short-term cash win won’t secure anyone this outcome. We have to be smarter.

It’s my hope that out of this change in the tech world will come a new understanding of how to do business. I don’t know exactly how it will work, but here’s my best guess so far as to how to change the world.

• Don’t let your company get above 150 people (Dunbar’s number). Little companies move faster.
• Keep the number of middle tier people in your company to an *absolute* minimum.
• If you get bigger than 150, split instead of growing. Keep strong relationships in place and trust your swarm-brother to help you. Figure out how to make that work as you go along.
• Seek out new swarm-brother relationships whenever you can. Dedicate some staff to making it happen. Build alliances and guard them jealously.
• Share the marketing load. Find food together because the 21st century is hard to navigate.
• Share battles with enemies–if a company helps you, or even just looks a bit like you, take a bite out of their foe whenever you get a chance.
• Know when to not cooperate. When piranhas smell blood, they don’t hang around protecting their buddies.

Let’s be honest. These things are much harder to do than they might sound on the face of it. The pressure to structure and grow a company the way everyone has done it before is enormous. Even the most adventurous start-up backers are likely complain at the prospect of deliberately not letting their projects grow above a certain size. But it is doable. As I understand it, Instagram had a development team of five right up until they got bought.

If people are smart enough to make this happen, I believe it will change the face of business forever. The big, monolithic organizations with their crappy middle management, mission statements, failed strategies, and long, windy meetings will be gone. They’ll vanish like dinosaurs before an oncoming tide of small, fast, hot-blooded mammals.

Can we make it happen? I think we can.

First Post

I decided to start a blog about the tech industry. Why, you may ask, given the insane screaming chorus of blogs on this topic that are already out there? Here are a couple of answers:

• This is the world I inhabit a lot of the time. If I’m going to make my living here, I might as well write about it.
• People writing in tech tend to be tech people, as opposed to improv instructor/science fiction writer/part time complex-systems scientists.  I’m hoping to provide some perspective.