Massively Networked

SXSW 2010: We are all bees

We’re all bees now, apparently.  Hive mind may no longer be a metaphor but a gadget-mediated reality when we all peer into Foursquare apps to see which locations are trending and who is setting the trend so we can be sure to fly off to where the (usually) King Bee is hanging out. When we arrive, we’ll check in and report to the others our location – signaling we’re in the know by Tweet name-dropping “w/ @briansolis @scobelizer”.  Congratulations – you’ve unlocked your Super Swarm badge at The Speakeasy.

Foursquare debuted at last year’s SXSW capturing interest among those who saw the potential of a location-based service (LBS), especially given the mass adoption of the iPhone with its geolocation features. Gowalla followed shortly thereafter, offering a similar ability to check in your location, share tips and get stuff: points for showing up, rewards for being a loyal visitor and cred for taking your game to the next level.

Foursquare and Gowalla are racing to gain the greatest market share in this critical early stage. Perhaps moreso than any other product or service, an LBS in the social space is only as valuable to its users as the numbers of their friends using it. I can own a Mac or PC or both because each may serve a different purpose – one I tend to use for multimedia and one I use for business. Even with social services like MySpace and Facebook there can be a reason to engage with both – one I use to connect with my musician friends and the other I keep for family and work friends. With LBSs however, I can only be in one place at a time so it doesn’t add any value to be using two services. It will be interesting to see if Gowalla can overcome Foursquare’s first-mover advantage or if it gets assimilated.

DIY civil works for the 21st century

Residents of Kauai heard news that flood damage in much-touristed Polihale State Park would take the cash-strapped state two years and US$4 million to remedy, likely forcing several businesses to shut down. Eight days later the repairs were complete. For (almost) free. Did the state realize the potential impact on local business, get really clever about sourcing supplies and kick the project into high gear? No. Residents affected by damage volunteered their time and donated supplies to get 'er done. Welcome to DIY civil works in action.

Horatio Alger bootstrapping, lack of stigma attached to failure and openness to change provide much of the scaffolding for the mythos that shapes attitudes in the United States - so perhaps it's no surprise that Hawaii residents felt empowered to ignore the state's answer and find a way to fix the park themselves. What makes this story potentially more interesting is when you align it with the current growing economic crisis and other DIY movements afoot. What happens when economic necessity meets DIY culture and a technological platform that enables massively networked coordination of resources?

John Geraci, founder of DIYCity.org, has a practical vision for participatory civil engagement by creating open-source tools that can draw upon the collective intelligence of city residents to find ways to create the city they want. Much like the Kauai example, citizens would be drawn together by a common frustration - say, inefficiencies in the public transit system - and collectively assemble the human and technological resources to make public transportation a better experience.

Unlike Kauai, however, the DIY civil works projects need not be in response to a crisis. These projects could simply start with the question "What would improve your experience of the city?" or "What would make your life more enjoyable? More fun? More satisfying?" The emergent nature of massively networked communications can coalesce a movement toward positive and creative changes that could not have been anticipated by rational, bureaucratic processes.

Moreover, the coalescence and focusing of human intent is only part of the DIY equation. The other part is enabling the physical environment to participate in the communication. Right now there are hundreds of projects in maker/hacker spaces that are bootstrapping technological innovations on the cheap. Many of these projects leverage wireless technology, inexpensive circuit boards and radio frequency tagging to create environmentally-responsive communicants that can be embedded within physical spaces. The Arduino open source electronics platform, for example, puts creating something like an iPhone-like accelerometer within the reach of a reasonably intelligent tinkerer.

Take the kind of focused human intent found in the Kauai example, empower it with inexpensive and accessible creative resources, feed it all into a massively networked platform for communication and collaboration - and, like the folks on Kauai, we need not wait for the state to set the agenda any longer. The tools for 21st century DIY civil works are in our hands right now.

April 14, 2009 Update: A great example of DIY civil works from Estonia

Thought bubbles: DIY (& die?), governing the leaderless revolution, decentralizing conscious intent

   Thought Bubbles shares bits of news, ideas, links and random scribblings. Feel free to email me your own.

I've spent the entire month of February so far hosting a googolplex of viral and bacterial creatures, kicked off by the flu week one - thus the long break in posts. I'll get back on it soon. In the mean time, some items I might write more on later:

DIY - & die?: March's Wired columnist Clive Thompson is enthusiastic about the maker culture revolution wherein "everything you want could soon be micromanufactured just for you." Yea! - right? Well maybe not so much, or at least not so fast. Sven Johnson shares several examples of DIY manufacturing gone wrong. You might want to think twice before putting those darling necklace beads you ordered from Etsy in your mouth.

Governing the leaderless revolution: "Thanks to the internet, the tools for revolutionary change are at our fingertips, but as of yet this revolution has no name, no leaders and no formal agenda. We have barely tapped into its potential to become the advanced operating system that will allow us to catch up with the future." -from a SpaceCollective.org project. Brings up questions about governance and organization in a dynamic, emergent system. Kevin Kelly has some thoughts on governing the swarm as well.

Decentralizing conscious intent: Interesting juxtaposition (to me, anyway) of two TED presentations - Elizabeth Gilbert talking about relating to genius as an external entity that communicates inspiration and Juan Enriquez talking about the rise of a new, technology-enhanced, hominid species "homo evolutis." Both these talks have in common the notion that we as human beings are informed and formed by forces not wholly governed by our conscious intent.

Welcome to the Momma Matrix, buh-bye Papa Grid

Our current culture is good at pattern recognition. The race to be the first to capture the zeitgeist has become a popular pastime. How about all those books with pithy buzzwords on the bestseller lists? We've apparently hit the tipping point in a flat world where the long tail and crowd sourcing shape the new, new, new economic reality! Whew.

As the rate of change speeds up, it becomes ever more challenging to capture and control reality by naming it. Just check out the accuracy of recent past predictions of the current future. Certain elements might be accurate, but the aggregate of lived reality is impossible to capture.

The emerging reality is a process-oriented one and different skills will be called for as we hit escape velocity from time-based, historical, location-dependent, statically codified and hierarchically ordered reality. Reality is moving toward a massively networked, generative Momma Matrix and leaving the presumptive order of Papa Grid behind.

Building the kind of skills that will allow us to successfully engage the emerging interactive marketplace (and by marketplace I’m thinking of something closer to an ancient agora than a modern mall) requires developing the habit of exploring possibilities as if seeing the world for the first time and in the moment, rather than trying to capture and codify the big picture.

Participatory vs speculative engagement in an emerging environment

A reader sent me a great email noting how object-oriented design provides a workable model for facilitating collaboration with qualities of a dynamic, emergent system. We shared a couple of thoughts on the topic of how systems can work. She noted how emergent systems are evident all throughout nature and summed by saying something along the lines of, "we just need look at how God designed things, and that’s the best way to go.” 

Though I respect where she is coming from, her intelligent design comment struck me as odd on the heels of our conversation. I realized later that’s because at the heart of what I see changing is a collapse of dualistic thinking and speculative engagement in the world in favor of a participatory one. The designer “deus ex machina” God is perhaps simply an artifact left over from a mechanistic worldview with linear causality, i.e., “if something exists, something else must have created it.” 

Successfully engaging a dynamic, emergent system, I believe, requires a fundamental change in awareness and worldview. It’s a worldview that embraces amorphous meanings, the ability to tolerate ambiguity and to understand the sense in which seemingly opposing ideas can both be true. It doesn’t rely on linear causality or export responsibility for knowing what’s right to an external authority. External authority and descriptions of causal relationships are valuable to the extent they resonate as being accurate, and remain so only as long as they continue to pass the inner value test. Those who successfully navigate this emerging environment of evanescent meanings and nonlinear causality will be those whose inner compass works best.

Mistaking the instrument for the music (or, Why having children is always immoral)

John Kenneth Galbraith's 1955 book The Great Crash, 1929 is apparently a great read right about now. It's among Amazon's bestsellers and was among those featured in this week's Economist. I haven't read it yet (I will), but the decade-plus of reviews on Amazon were worth a read in themselves as the US economy has hit its troughs and heights. From what I have read, the central thesis is that speculating for speculation's sake is what led to to the 1929 crash (and subsequent depression) - which is no doubt why it's resonating with so many folks currently.

Stepping back to take a neutral view of the components of our current economic system, I see that the very thing that makes the creation of value possible within the system is the same thing that destroys it. It's like a group of music lovers that get so focused on creating more intricate instruments with which to play better and better music. Eventually they spend so much of their time and expertise eeking every improvement out of each instrument, they forget what the instruments are used for in the first place and start hording the instruments themselves.

Credit instruments within the economic system are perhaps similar. It's a good thing to have credit. Credit allows entrepreneurs to start a business that can add value to the marketplace. Credit gives people the opportunity to purchase a home so they have a secure base from which to become contributing citizens. When the drive for eeking every improvement out of each financial instrument gets to the point where it's an end in itself, however, we've forgotten what the system was supposed to accomplish in the first place.

It's the nature of all established systems. By the time I became a Philosophy undergrad, the system had perfected itself to the point where logic - in and of itself - was the standard by which to assign value. A PhD star student teacher who had made her way up the academic ranks quickly enough to be getting her doctorate in her late teens, authored a much-praised paper on why it is always immoral to have children. It's a good thing to use logic. Logic is a useful instrument to test assumptions and help tease out the details of an argument. But when logic becomes an end in itself, we've lost the value of philosophical enquiry and end up with conclusions that fail to make much of a meaningful contribution outside the system itself.

So, is it fated that all systems carry within them the seeds of their own demise? Yes and no. The beauty of the world we live in now is we have the means to create a system from the get-go that acknowledges things will fall apart, and reassemble and fall apart again before we get so invested in a system that its demise is tragic. A dynamic, emergent system lets us leave a system that's not working before it gets to a state where whoever gathers the most intricate musical instruments wins, and those who still know how to play music no longer have the means to do so.

The power of decentralized, emergent networks

  2008 will be remembered as the year when the world, especially Americans and Europeans, got the 411 on how the global economic system really works - well, kind of. In reality, financial instruments and ways of keeping track of them have become so convoluted that I'm not sure anyone can make sense of it all. I am sure, however, that the current economic system isn't fixable at this point - it's just a question of time before it completely unravels. The good news is that the system was really only working for a small percentage of the population, anyway. We have the chance to challenge our assumptions about the goals of an economic system and create one that works better.

The online marketplace doesn't require that we figure this out in advance. It doesn't follow linear rules of order or a top-down, command-central process. It behaves more like a self-organizing organism where ideas, interests, people and production hold together as long as they find synergies and move apart as those synergies dissipate. When the right elements come together, something new is created that could not have been fully realized by simply looking at its disparate parts. Its inherent structure is dynamic and the material costs of trying things out are insignificant, which makes finding solutions more a game of creative imagination rather than work.

My hope is that Massively Networked will be one of the hubs in that process by bringing together forward-thinking entrepeneurs from around the world who can find synergies among businesses and have access to resources to create business success in the emerging interactive marketplace.