Second, as the ease and price of transactions drop,...
...the spread of ownership becomes fine-grained and ever wider. Smaller and smaller investments into more and more varieties of endeavors are possible. Several banks are following the lead of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh and offering microloans. These loans amount to U.S. $100 or less, and are made to third-worlders who use the money to buy a cow, purchase some yarn, or begin some other microentrepreneurial dream. The payback rate is around 95%, making these almost as risk-free as bonds. As one banking report says, "Lending to poor people in the shanty towns of La Paz may be safer for banks than lending to the government of Bolivia itself." Large commercial banks have noticed the U.S. $7 billion already lent to 13 million people around the world, and are bringing "microfinance" into the mainstream of banking. The low cost of tracking large numbers of fast-circulating payments means that network technology can accelerate the velocity of money in such decentralized, microfinance programs. It is easy to imagine a high-yielding mutual fund based on hundreds of thousand of up-and-coming third world microentrepreneurs.
First, the spread of ownership is becoming global,...
...just as the economy itself is. In the last few years, Europe has suddenly sent a mind-boggling infusion of money into the stock markets. Europeans discovered equity culture and overnight invested hundreds of billions of dollars of their old wealth into the network of ownership. At the same time, hungry investors are pouring billions into the coffers of Asian and Latin American "emerging markets." Today, almost any investor in mutual funds, whether he knows it or not, has a stake in a company operating in a nation outside his own.
This network equity is made possible by...
...the same network technology--shrinking chips and expanding communications--that creates wealth in the first place. The tracking, accounting, and transmission of each person's wealth and slivers of ownership can happen only because computation and telecommunication have reduced the cost of a transaction to insignificance. Today there are 7,000 mutual funds--7,000 ways to divvy up the equity of wealth creation. And there are a similar number of publicly traded companies that have, in effect, divvied up their wealth to many owners.
There are several trends in this emerging equity culture, each one amplified by pervasive network technology.
Rules for Radicals
How to be an effective revolutionary
Herein are pragmatic tactics for radicals and wannabe radicals of all stripes. Originally written for hippie revolutionaries in the 1970s, today both Tea Party and Occupy folks are quoting and studying it. The "rules" really work, but they are pretty ruthless. Think of this advice as anti-state Machiavelli.
Networks promote this equity culture.
The ownership of organizations is distributed and decentralized into a thousand points. The transactional costs of owning a tiny share of someone's else's dreams and ambitions continues to drop so that it becomes feasible to possess, directly and indirectly, small parts of many companies. When you invest in a mutual fund, you invest in hundreds of thousands of other people's work. You use the wealth that your own ambition has generated to seed the generation of prosperity by others. You may own only some minuscule portion of an enterprise, but you can easily own parts of many firms, and each firm is owned by millions of individuals. This is network equity.
Out of this distributed ownership a portrait of a network emerges. Millions of lines of investment crisscross the landscape. A few individuals own a lot, but the majority of nodes are dispersed into small bank accounts in small towns. The bulk of stocks in the United States are controlled by the pension funds of ordinary citizens--by millions of individuals in the aggregate. The workers of America really do collectively own the means of production.
The sources of capital, which in the industrial age...
...were once consolidated in a few banks and individual "capitalists," are now fragmenting into millions of networked bank accounts, mutual funds, and private investments throughout society. Elite, centralized banks used to have a monopoly on capital--the engine of capitalism. Bankers loaned their assets as debt, and from this debt, industry rose. But with increased knowledge and communication, investors realized that partnerships--or investments where the investor shares risk--yield significantly more wealth in the long run. Technology has accelerated the migration from making loans to making investments. The ease of computerized accounting allows almost anyone with as little as $100 to plug into the network of equity. Despite the rise of a few gigantic global banks, increasing amounts of the wealth are now held in equity, and not in debt. Today, for instance, 28% of U.S. household assets are kept in equities--more than is kept in banks--and 44% of U.S. households own stock.
The network economy will unleash opportunities...
...on a scale never seen before on Earth. But the network economy is not utopia. It is a unique phase of economic development much like adolescence--a thrilling, disorienting, and never-to-be repeated time. The planet can progress only once through the stage when it is first completely wrapped by networks of thought and interaction. We are now at that moment when a cloak of glass fibers and a halo of satellites are closing themselves around the globe to bring forth a seamless economic culture.
This new global economic culture is characterized by decentralized ownership and equity, by pools of knowledge instead of pools of capital, by an emphasis on an open society, and, most important, by a widespread reliance on economic values as the basis for making decisions in all walks of life.
Maximize the opportunity cascade.
One opportunity triggers another. And then another. That's a rifle-shot opportunity burst. But if one opportunity triggers ten others and those ten others after, it's an explosion that cascades wide and fast. Some seized opportunities burst completely laterally, multiplying to the hundreds of thousands in the first generation--and then dry up immediately. Think of the pet rock. Sure, it sold in the millions, but then what? There was no opportunity cascade. The way to determine the likelihood of a cascade is to explore the question: How many other technologies or businesses can be started by others based on this opportunity?
Scout for upside surprises.
The qualities needed to succeed in the network economy can be reduced to this: a facility for charging into the unknown. Disaster lurks everywhere, but so do unexpected bonanzas. But the Great Asymmetry ensures that the upside potential outweighs the downside, even though nine out of ten tries will fail. Upside benefits tend to cluster. When there are two, there will be more. A typical upside surprise is an innovation that satisfies three wants at once, and generates five new ones, too.
Why can't a machine do this?
If there is pressure to increase the productivity of human workers, the serious question to ask is, why can't a machine do this? The fact that a task is routine enough to be measured suggests that it is routine enough to go to the robots. In my opinion, many of the jobs that are being fought over by unions today are jobs that will be outlawed within several generations as inhumane.
Our minds will at first be bound by old rules
...of economic growth and productivity. Listening to the technology can loose them. Technology says, rank opportunities before efficiencies. For any individual, organization, or country the key decision is not how to raise productivity by doing the same better, but how to negotiate among the explosion of opportunities, and choose right things to do.
The wonderful news about the network economy is that it plays right into human strengths. Repetition, sequels, copies, and automation all tend toward the free and efficient, while the innovative, original, and imaginative--none of which results in efficiency--soar in value
"Need" is a loaded word.
The key point in economic terms is that each actualization of a desire--that is, each new service or product--forms a platform from which other possible activities can be imagined and desired. Once technology satisfies the opportunity to fly, for instance, flying produces new desires: to eat while flying, to fly by oneself to work each day, to fly faster than sound, to fly to the moon, to watch TV while flying. Once technology satisfies the desire to watch TV while flying, our insatiable imagination hungers to be able to watch a video of our own choosing, and to not see what others watch. That dream, too, can be actualized by technical knowledge. Each actualization of an idea supplies room for more technology, and each new technology supplies room for more ideas. They feed on each other, rounding faster and faster.
This ever-extending loop whereby technology generates demand, and then supplies the technology to meet those demands is the origin of progress. But it is only now being viewed as such. In classical economics--based on the workings of the brick and smokestack--technology was a leftover. To explain economic growth, economists tallied up the effects of the traditional economic ingredients such as labor, capital, and inventory. This aggregate became the equation of growth. Whatever growth was not explained by those was attributed to a residual category: technology. Technology was thus defined as outside the economic engine. It was also assumed to be a fixed quantity--something that didn't really change itself. Then in 1957 Robert Solow, an economist working at MIT, calculated that technology is responsible for about 80% of growth.
We see now, particularly with the advent of the network economy, that technology is not the residual, but the dynamo. In the new order, technology is the Prime Mover.
A dry room with running water,...
...electric lights, a color TV, and a toilet are considered so elementary and primary today that we outfit jail cells with this minimum technology. Yet three generations ago, this technology would have been officially classified as outright luxurious, if not frivolous. In the government's eyes 93% of Americans officially classified as living in poverty have a color TV, and 60% have a VCR and a microwave. Poverty is not what it used to be. Technological knowledge constantly ups the ante. Most Americans today would find living without a refrigerator and telephone to be primitive, indeed. These items were luxuries only 60 years ago. At this point an automobile of one's own is considered a primary survival need of any adult.
Needs are neither fixed nor absolute.
Instead they are fluid and reflexive. The father of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, claims that his passion for inventing VR systems came from a long-frustrated urge to play "air guitar"--to be able to wave his arms and have music emanate from his motions. Anyone with access to a VR arcade can now have that urge satisfied, but it is a want that most people would have never recognized until they immersed themselves into virtual reality gear. It was certainly not a primary want that Plato would have listed.
At one time a useful distinction was made in economics between "primary" needs such as food and clothing, and all other wants and preferences, which were termed "luxuries." Advertising is undoubtedly guilty, as critics charge, of creating desires. At first these manufactured desires were for luxuries. But the reach of technology is deep. Sophisticated media technology first creates desires for luxuries; then technology transforms those luxuries into primary necessities.
Faster than the economy can produce...
...what we want, we are exploring in every direction, following every idle curiosity, and inventing more wants to satisfy. Like everything else in a network, our wants are compounding exponentially.
Although at some fundamental level our wants connect to our psyches, and each desire can be traced to some primeval urge, technology creates ever new opportunities for those desires to find outlets and form. Some deep-rooted human desires found expression only when the right technology came along. Think of the ancient urge to fly, for instance.
KLM, the official Dutch airline, sells a million dollars worth of tickets per year to people who fly trips to nowhere. Customers board the plane on whatever international flight KLM has extra seats on, and make an immediate round-trip flight, returning without leaving the airport at the other end. The flight is like a high-tech cruise, where duty-free shopping and simply flying in a 737 at a steep discount is the attraction. Where did this want come from? It was created by technology.
Finance writer Paul Pilzer notes perceptively that "When a merchant sells a consumer a new Sony Walkman for $50, he is in fact creating far more demand than he is satisfying--in this case a continuing and potentially unlimited need for tape cassettes and batteries." Technology creates our needs faster than it satisfies them.
Sourced Quotes, 14
Find one – that’s right, just one – video game that is not about learning. -- Keith Devlin, profkeithdevlin blog, January 29, 2012
The internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. Just as globalization and de-unionization have been major drivers of the growth of income inequality over the past few decades, the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. -- Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, Feb 17, 2012
The easiest way to become irrelevant is to stop. -- George Clooney, The Australian, Standing on the side of history, February 20, 2012
Whenever I tackled the impossible or the miraculous, I remembered the magician Rene Lavand, who had only one arm. Poet and extraordinary card manipulator, he baffled fellow illusionists by concluding his brilliant demonstrations with, "What I just showed you can also be done with two hands!" -- Philippe Petit, Man on Wire, 2002, p. 236.
Usually we talk about whatever is the most urgent question right now. Sometimes, especially early on, the most urgent question is to figure out what the most urgent question should be. -- Paul Graham, What Happens at Y Combinator, February 2012.
If we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. — Shawn Achor, The happy secrete to better work, TEDXBloomington, May 2011
We don’t really live in a country. We live on the Internet. -- Mr. Ljung, Betabeat, February 28, 2012.
Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas. -- Keith Sawyer, via Jonah Lehrer, Groupthink, The New Yorker, January 30, 2012
The intangible world of information merges with the material world of money, and new phrases that combine the two, such as "intellectual capital" and the "culture industry," come into vogue. So the people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products. These are the highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success. The members of the new information age elite are bourgeois bohemians. Or, to take the first two letters of each word, they are Bobos. -- David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, 2000 p. 11
The best way to get the most out of engineers is to surround them with other great engineers. -- Felix Salmon, Why Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't listen to management gurus, Reuters, February 10, 2012
Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots. -- Cole Stryker, The New York Times, February 27, 2012.
There are only two types of companies, those that have been hacked and those that will be. -- Robert Mueller, head of the FBI, in the New York Times, March 5, 2012.
A genius is the one most like himself. -- Thelonius Monk, Monk's Advice, 1960, Lists of Note.
SwissRoomBox
We have not tried this set up, so can not vouch whether it is a cool tool. It is a new modular household that unfolds from the back of a SUV, rover, or car with hatchback. See the website for a full expansion.
The feature-set is great idea for certain kinds of travel; what is not clear is how well the set-up is executed, and whether it is worth the price of at least $4,000. But for some excursions, the arrangement and design might be ideal. It is cheaper than buying an RV. There is at least one installation of the larger version being tried on a pan-African expedition. You'd have an mobile kitchen, bedroom, shower all in one system packed in a standard van or SUV, instead of an RV. You would still have daily disassembly, but you would gain in fuel efficiency, maneuverability, and cheaper cost of the vehicle.
The manufacturer is currently offering two versions: a full heavy-duty outfit (about $8,000) and a smaller compact version, which is shown above.
If someone uses this, please let us know how well it works. Also, there are competitors, such as Yatoo and Westfalia. I'd be interested in a review of any of these systems if someone recommends them.
-- KK
It takes 56 hours of wasting time on the web...
--clicking aimlessly through dumb web sites, trying stuff, and making tons of mistakes and silly requests--before you master its search process. The web encourages inefficiency. It is all about creating opportunities and ignoring problems. Therefore it has hatched more originality in a few weeks than the efficiency-oriented Dialog system has in its lifetime, that is, if Dialog has ever hatched anything novel at all.
The Web is being run by 20-year-olds because they can afford to waste the 56 hours it takes to become proficient explorers. While 45-year-old boomers can't take a vacation without thinking how they'll justify the trip as being productive in some sense, the young can follow hunches and create seemingly mindless novelties on the web without worrying about whether they are being efficient. Out of these inefficient tinkerings will come the future.
Before the World Wide Web there was Dialog.
Dialog was pretty futuristic. In the 1970s and '80s it was the closest thing to an electronic library there was, containing the world's scientific, scholarly, and journalistic texts. The only problem was its price, $1 per minute. You could spend a lot of money looking things up. At those prices only serious questions were asked. There was no fooling around, no making frivolous queries--like looking up your name. Waste was discouraged. Since searching was sold as a scarcity, there was little way to master the medium, or to create anything novel.
Factual eBook Review
Download the Universe
The Science EBook Review
This is pretty good. A site that reviews original science-based long-form factuals on ebooks. OK, that means serious non-fiction that is shorter than a book, but longer than a normal magazine article, yet that is only available as an ebook, and not available on paper or previously published. In other words a true digitally native "book." These new things also colonize a middle duration between a blog post and a epic saga. They take a couple of hours to finish reading rather than days, and more than minutes. This emerging genre sports the marvelous compression and intense editing of a good magazine story, but gives the subject a bit more depth. And the e-booklets generally sell for $3 or less, download instantly, say as a Kindle Single. Amazon itself is publishing these at a rapid rate, dealing with authors directly. TED conference is publishing them. Scientific America is publishing them. And this website, a gang of science writers, is reviewing them. So far, the quality is great.
I am using it to find great writing about fascinating topics where I don't want or need a whole book. This is a bright spot in an industry that could use a bright spot.
-- KK