Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate.

-Alexis de Tocqueville

Articles of the week

• Foreign Policy: Think Again: Big Data
  Kate Crawford, prinicipal researcher at Microsoft, makes the case for curbing our enthusiasm when it comes to Big Data and instead employing more caution and forethought. Most of the concerns she highlights here stem from the fact that data out of context can be misconstrued, and can therefore be a liability.
• Caixin Online: Why Foxconn’s Switch to Robots Hasn’t Been Automatic
  Johannes’ recent talk at re:publica discussed what happens when machines replace us at work. Foxconn is an interesting example of a company in the midst of just such a transition, and demonstrates many of the social and logistic difficulties that come with the territory.
• Smithsonian Magazine: What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
  Jaron Lanier is another voice advocating caution to the techno-utopians – a group he used to belong to. He’s especially critical of the notion of the “wisdom of the crowd”: “This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant.”
• New York Times Bits Blog: Google Buys a Quantum Computer
  The D-Wave quantum computer that was in the news a while back has been bought by Google and NASA, who are collaborating to work on AI and machine learning. Take note of the other companies and organizations mentioned in this article – it’s an interesting crew.
• Wired Threat Level: Drugstore Cowboy
  A long read and a crazy story about a con man who cooperated with the US government to nab Google for supporting illegal drug sales through AdWords.

Photo by Gregor Fischer

Ok, two-thirds of the spring conference season are over. It’s been an intense one so far.

NEXT13

At the end of April, I joined Teresa Bücker and Sue Reindke for a workshop at the Next conference about digital work. We wanted to reflect on all the amazing possibilities for more flexible work and why so little of the vision has become reality. So we facilitated an actual workshop. You know, one with group work etc. Insider tip: if you tell attendees beforehand that you’ll be doing this – we explained our plan on the first slide that people saw when they entered the room – some will leave. But that’s ok as the ones who are staying bring the motivation needed for a productive workshop. We divided the attendees into four groups and gave each group a role. One represented the lawmaker, one the employers, one the employees and the fourth represented the education system. Each group got the task to develop five propositions to make sure that a fictive female student could live the life she wanted in 2020. They got half an hour and then five minutes to present. This worked out beautifully. The conversations I joined where some of the most fruitful I’ve ever heard at a conference. Lots of great ideas but also a lot of new awareness about the hurdles.

republica 13

What Next is for the digital business world in Germany, Republica is for digital politics and society – a gathering of bloggers, thinkers, activists, entrepreneurs and lots more that grew to 5000 attendees this year.
I gave a talk labeled ‘The End of Work – Will Machines take away our jobs?,’ which got some great reviews. The video of the talk (in German) and most of the material I used, is linked up here.

This was one of the tougher talks to prepare as I hadn’t talked about this topic before and it’s a very broad one. It’s always a bit of amusing to observe myself going through the same process with a talk like that.
I usually prepare by reading tons of material and gathering everything in Evernote. I create the talk on post-its, every post-it representing a slide, to define the story I want to tell. I then transfer the post-its into Keynote slides. 24 hours before the talk, the panic arrives and I question everything I have so far. I think that I need much more time and accuse myself of procrastinating for too long. As I’m familiar with this pattern by now, I resist the urge to throw everything away and just keep refining the talk here and there. At the morning of the talk, the panic is usually gone and I start looking forward to giving the talk. I can’t wait to get on stage. The best talks I’ve given are the ones where I’m really fascinated with the topic and want to share that excitement.

iico 2013

Yesterday I gave another talk at the iico conference here in Berlin. I looked at the current hype around big data and took the usual stance for us at Third Wave by asking what needs to happen now that we’ve got the technology. It’s time to create a more holistic approach to data and we could start by teaming data scientists with social scientists.

But now enough with the talk-giving … for this month. I’m actually looking forward to being back at my desk and diving into some client projects.

We’re reaching a cliff of AI, where the height of human knowledge falls off into a wasteland of poorly automated social grace.

-Mark Wilson

Articles of the week

• Wired Magazine: Q&A: Bill Gates on Flying Cars, the Malaria Epidemic, and Article-Writing Robots
  Amusing matter-of-factness and interesting perspectives on technology, philanthropy and education from Bill Gates, who in addition to feeling sorry for Peter Thiel, suggests a malaria epidemic in the blogging community to get the media’s priorities straight.
• The Verge: How @breakingnews keeps news junkies current in a crisis
  NBC’s internal startup @breakingnews, its “pressure to be second” when reporting stories, its not-quite-real-time approach to the news, and its experiments with monetization.
• Medium: Teens aren’t abandoning “social.” They’re just using the word correctly.
  Cliff Watson on how “we’ve come to define ‘social’ in unintentional Orwellian double-speak,” and how kids’ use of social media is heading more in the direction of what the word “social” really means: “making contact with other human beings.”
• Quinn Norton: ACM Web Science talk, as written
  An insightful talk from writer and journalist Quinn Norton on the gap in language and literature when it comes to digital life.
• Adam Greenfield: On augmenting reality
  A long read, actually a draft excerpt from Adam’s forthcoming book, on what AR is capable of and the various forms of delivery it can take.

Broad dissemination and individual choice turn most technologies into a plus. If only the elites have access, it’s a dystopia.

-Ramez Naam

Articles of the week

• Quartz: How robots are eating the last of America’s—and the world’s—traditional manufacturing jobs
  As more and more jobs become automated, an “hourglass economy” is forming where middle-rung jobs are increasingly hard to come by – unless you’re a robot.
• Fast Company: Mailbox’s Gentry Underwood: What Hackers Should Know About Design Thinking
  An interview with Mailbox’s CEO, who does a good job of explaining the concepts of “lean startup” and Human Centered Design.
• MIT Technology Review: Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface
  John Pavlus on the awkwardness created when technology tries to turn your body into an interface. As he puts it: “Your body isn’t a tool for delivering your experience: it is your experience.”
• The Atlantic: How Facebook Designs the ‘Perfect Empty Vessel’ for Your Mind
  Alexis Madrigal talks to designers at Facebook about the tricks and decisions behind the interface that encourage users to create as much content as possible.
• Medium: Ramblings on Middlemen
  How the internet destroys middlemen and creates new ones while simultaneously shortening their potential life cycle.

Last week I met with a teacher at a primary school in our neighborhood in Mitte, both to get some input for our project on technology and autodidactic learning and to get some hints for my career pursuits. We discussed the nature of the school community and how to bring technology into the classroom – to the benefit of both the teacher and the students.

In terms of community management, parents of schoolchildren are a really interesting community to look at. The school is providing a service to the children as well as to their parents, who of course are deeply invested in seeing their children do well. My teacher acquaintance told me she has had plenty of colleagues who are afraid of parents, and who try to avoid them and their concerned questioning whenever possible. She has some interesting strategies for developing a good relationship with the parents and avoiding conflict, and these can be applied in many more areas of work than education. (If in search of business advice, for “parents,” read “customers.”)

Her philosophy when it comes to working with parents is complete transparency. She spends the first few months of the schoolyear concentrating on communicating with parents, as well as getting to know the kids. She makes sure parents know both how to contact her and that they are welcome to do so, and she takes time to answer their questions promptly and in detail. She mentioned that she uses Pinterest to collect her ideas about primary teaching and more specifically teaching math, both so that she can have a collection to refer back to and so she can quickly share links with parents about her teaching philosophy and methods. If they have any concerns or specific questions about her methods, she invites them into her classroom to watch class as it’s happening and see for themselves what it’s like. She said it’s especially from this gesture that she gets a lot of respect, since parents can then see how much patience and skill it takes to manage a 20-strong classroom of young children, and since they can understand more clearly why she goes about things the way she does.

This creates an atmosphere of trust and open discussion – she has nothing to hide from them, and there is no reason for parents to get upset if they know they can voice their concerns without hesitation. She is also able to feel more confident in her work, knowing that she and the parents are on the same page. They are also on same side – clearly working towards a common goal. This way she can make allies out of potential critics and opponents.

Transferring these ideas to business: this teacher, if she were a business, would be exemplary. In order to make her own work more effective, she gets her customers on her side, letting them in on the process and establishing trust.

In the startup world, you work very hard to make other people rich. Other people.

-Bruce Sterling

Articles of the week

• Quartz: The fun and games are over. Even the internet’s got to make a living
  Changeist’s Scott Smith explains why we’re headed towards a “leaner, increasingly meaner, buzzkill web,” where web companies have to shut down free products and services and invest more in ones that make proper money.
• MIT Technology Review: Moore’s Law and the Origin of Life
  An interesting and puzzling theory has emerged that life on Earth could predate the planet itself.
• Ben Grosser: Facebook Demetricator
  Ben Grosser came up with a browser extension that removes metrics from Facebook – no more like-counts, friend-counts, share-counts, etc. He hopes his Demetricator will make the experience more qualitative than quantitative, as well as making the user less prone to the behavior prescribed by the interface.
• Stephen Wolfram: Data Science of the Facebook World
  A deep dive into piles of data from Facebook users and the resulting surprisingly detailed information about the trajectories of human life (or at least the lives of those on Facebook).
• Medium: I Know What You’re Collectively Thinking
  Jan Chipchase on the potential outcomes of search engines (read: Google) being able to predict the future based on the searches of other companies’ employees.

Third Wave has been changing a lot. To the better. The shape of the company has been adopting to our needs, to our expectations and we are moving towards a new phase. When Maddie told us that she will be quitting, Johannes and I decided very quickly that we have no intensions of growing right now. At this point in the companies history, we are performing at an exceptional pace even by our own standards. Between a full pipeline of client projects, we are exploring various new topics, partnerships and even products. It is as if for the first time we actually have the right setup to perform all of this without any unnecessary friction.

Things will change. We will grow at some point. Recently we had the pleasure to get a different perspective on what is generally possible to achieve as a small company in the innovation business. To get there and beyond will require patience, persistence and great deal of hard work.

I’m very much looking forward to it.

So what is real about ourselves depends not some internal ability to think or feel something but the ability to externalize it as processable data. We surrender the prerogative of claiming to be self-created and learn to love the self the data tells us we are.

-Rob Horning

Articles of the week

• The New Inquiry: Google Alert for the Soul
  Great piece on how widespread use of social media changes the concepts of authenticity and the self, and what the next era in self-perception might entail.
• Russell Davies: a unit of delivery
  Russell explains how the British Government Digital Service got started and how it works, and addresses some common misconceptions about what it’s like to work on a project like GOV.UK, where “the product is the service is the marketing.”
• BBC: Hagfish slime: The clothing of the future?
  On the fascinating, mysterious hagfish and how the slime it uses to defend itself could hold the keys to more sustainable materials for clothing than the oil-based synthetic ones we often use today.
• The Creators Project: Viral Style: Tumblr-Inspired Fashion And Tag-Popping Tees
  Looking at the interaction between the internet and fashion, with some interesting examples of digital-influenced pieces.
• Adam Greenfield: The canonical smart city: a pastiche
  A “shooting script for one of those concept videos so beloved of the big technology vendors,” composed by mashing up visions of future city life proposed in these vendors’ promotional literature. The result is rather disturbing.

A core digital pattern

It’s been fascinating for me to observe that in our discussions around the future of publishing, we always come back to the same principle: There is no big idea at hand that will replace old revenue sources. The only way forward is to invest in a lot of small ideas that will add five to ten percent to revenue. Among these small ideas might be one that has the potential to become a big revenue source one day. But right now, there’s no way to predict which one it will be.

The interesting thing is that this is a core pattern of anything digital. It’s already well known in the seeding and venture capital world, where you invest in ten startups with the hope that one will be successful. That’s why you can see incubators emerging left and right. They produce and nourish even the smaller ideas.

It’s also becoming a new approach for marketing communications that move away from the single big campaign. In a context as fragmented as the digital world, it’s careless to believe that one can predict which ideas will work.

I think we will see more agencies and marketers taking on the incubator concept from the invesment scene and applying them to their ideation and implementation processes. A client will green-light ten ideas and whichever one gets traction will get more budget to make it bigger.

This is a tough change for the advertising industry that is basically built on the concept of the big idea. But as long as they cling to it, we will see ideas that seem to work well in award videos but tank when it comes to effectiveness and consumer receptiveness.

And it won’t just be investment and marketing. Watch this pattern manifest in the near future in more and more industries and contexts that are gradually becoming more digital.

I’m in London for the whole week. If you’re around and want to meet up, let me know.

I was alive when people thought it was just amazing to have a fax machine. Now I’m alive and people think it’s amazing to still have a fax machine.

-Bruce Sterling

Articles of the week

• Neurofiction: What if a book could read you?
  Machine learning meets EEG meets fiction: a piece of neurofiction uses feedback from your brain to change the story.
• The Chronicle of Higher Education: You’re Distracted. This Professor Can Help.
  Prof. David Levy of the University of Washington is trying to help his students improve their focus and decrease their internet multitasking using meditation exercises.
• Quartz: Mobile computing no longer exists
  An interesting notion: the distinction between “mobile” computing and all other kinds of computing is decreasing in relevance, as our various screens become increasingly interchangeable.
• Fast Company: Editorially Wants to Redesign Writing For The Web
  Editorially, a “lightweight plaintext editor,” is designed to deal with the needs of digital publishing by removing some of the social and technical awkwardness of the tools we’re used to.
• MIT Technology Review: Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Disappearing Messages Are Everywhere
  On the popularity of “ephemeral messaging” apps and changing privacy values. Jenna Wortham also addressed this topic a couple months ago, noting their deviation from the “success theater” that social media often seems to encourage.