A Little Mouse and A Little Bird

Classes continue. In my Information Culture - Digital Economy class, a nominal focus of this blog, we're reading Lessig's book Free Culture (which you can buy here or, um, get here for free). What a terribly exciting document. Did you know that Big Media is inexorably buying up *every possible means* of cultural expression? And that pretty soon every type of culture will be copy-protected by those same big conglomerate corporations? (Full disclosure: I am currently entertaining a buyout offer from Bertelsmann A.G. I'll lay all the cards on the table: it's in the scores of dollars. I mean, you try to withstand these people, but it's a losing game, OK? At some point we all have to grow up and take the offer that's given to us. And maybe now they'll call off their Random House goons--that Cormac McCarthy scares me...and I don't know if it's him or Toni Morrison or Salman Rushdie who keeps calling and not saying anything when I pick up, but I get the message, all right? I'm getting on board.)

In short, my friends, as 2003 dawns upon us it looks like we may be in for some grim times indeed.

Oh, wait! It's not 2003 at all, is it?!? Whew. Now we have the whole relevant-search thing and easy ways of posting stuff online, don't we? Go hack your iPod, kids.

Lessig's argument is, in essence, that copyright and intellectual property rights are currently being overextended to the detriment of cultural production as a whole. He advanced this argument in the Mickey Mouse case before the Supreme Court. He is broadly right, I think, in that there's something more than a little unsavory about tiny groups of greedheads convincing government to abandon its stated principles (everyone expected a conservative Court to throw out copyright extensions) and pass blatantly favorable special-interest laws. But at some level, I have to ask "So what?" So the Mouse gets protected for another twenty years--so what? Think up your own damn character, people. And stop buying the videos and toys and clothes and "theme park experiences" and other associated crap for your kids. (It has also come to my attention that there are actually adults who spend vacation money on Disney. [No, you don't get a link.] Quite simply, this is a totally indefensible act of cultural pollution--and is so ridiculous and sad that it makes my knees wobble in despair. Go here. Or here. And do adult stuff.)

Does lack of access to Mickey Mouse stifle cultural creativity? Not in any significant way, far's I can see. In fact, his success seems to have encouraged a great flowering of animated creativity--even now, the trope of a sly or funny animal being the star of a cartoon is so deeply ingrained that it seems it was always this way...but it didn't have to be, you know. And you can't trademark that sort of thing.

In fact, we might even want to increase copyright control. This might stem the tidal wave of crappy remakes and limp "remixes" that have essentially destroyed American pop. I'm not going to link to any examples of that either. But I'm calling you out, Rhianna. (God. Even her *name* is a remix, or re-Nicks.)

In short, Lessig's book already seems a little dated (and sometimes a lot dated): with the sort of vertiginous swoop that will happen more and more often in the next few decades, the world (which will become increasingly synonymous with the Internet) has moved on. Too easy to find stuff, too easy to post stuff, no real way to stomp out a million copyright infringements (::cough::), the increasing irrelevance of a lot of Big Media anyway. Mickey and friends are priced on scarcity--they're priced as if they're the only game in town, which made a lot more sense even a decade ago--and that's just not as valuable as it used to be. There are too many options, and most of them aren't options Lessig has heard of. In one particular howler, he bemoans the increasing scarcity of independent television producers--now the networks run most production companies. On the face of it, this looks terrible--all those presumably interesting and fresh perspectives throttled in the cradle like the little princes. On the other hand, this is the intellectual equivalent of worrying that American children aren't getting enough bacon in their diets. Feed them something else.

Which brings us to the real danger--which I will call "red-state syndrome" in the sort of offhanded slur that the Internet is great for. I think that Lessig's grim future of corporate-controlled content and restricted creativity may in fact come to pass, just in states that (coincidentally. Really) are red on the political map. In other words, just as people in the flyover states are the ones buying processed foods and bake mixes and stuff in cans--all the crap in the middle of the grocery store--they seem to be the ones scarfing up the processed Disney culture, the carefully-constructed pop sensations, and so forth. Of course the country's deliciously crispy crust is helping--pop is pop because it's popular--but there's a lot of additional options that the kid in Kansas just never sees. Until he flees the farm for a life of danger in the big city. But that's another problem.

In other news, a weekly response paper was returned with the comments "Entertaining--but not, perhaps, substantive." I reread the paper. This was in fact true. Sorry, Kathryn. In fact, that "perhaps" was a kindness I did not deserve. I'd meant to make a point about the articles on searching we'd read--that the mere juxtaposition of information often makes us see significance where there isn't any, necessarily, or not the significance we see, and that in turn has some real implications for modeling information gathering and search behavior. Instead I got carried off by my metaphor. Not that that ever happens to me. You can read the paper here. And, yes, there's a Solomonic connection to hoopoes.

It's Alive

A fair amount of buzz in the blogosphere today about yesterday's Yahoo! announcement that the portal's ad revenues were expected to drop because of a "slowing US economy." This is a charming idea, but the likely reason is that Yahoo!'s ad service sucks.

Search, I'm coming to realize, is a classic example of an affordance error. Humans seem predisposed at some level to make these. In essence, an affordance error has to do with misjudging the purpose of some device based on how it looks like it's supposed to work. The classic example is pushing a door when you're supposed to pull it. (Remember that Far Side cartoon--"The School for the Gifted, " I think? The Far Side Fat Kid is pushing with all his might at a door marked PULL. Sorry, Gary Larson.) But there's a pair of subtler, more insidious affordance errors. The first is assuming that something that looks simple actually is simple. The second type, potentially very dangerous, occurs when you assume that you can easily control and even predict the behavior of a simple (looking) device or situation. --Some examples? Water of unknown depth. Grenades. Search engines.

It's simple, right? You type in the word, you get a relevant site. (How quickly we've forgotten premillennial search experiences...but I digress.) How hard can that be? And wouldn't it be a good idea to start one of those yourself? Might be some money in it.

Well, the problem is that Google's simple interface hides an engine of fiendish power and complexity--in short, the Google engine is an artificial neural network that uses the sites it indexes to determine how to index and emphasize its own sites. Yahoo! is the equivalent of a really big phone directory. It's a good directory, but it doesn't learn, and it certainly doesn't learn faster the longer you run it. In fact, you could make a good argument that Google's engine is actually intelligent...probably not conscious, but a non-human intelligence nonetheless.

Of course, to anyone who's not reading about cognitive mapping and modeling, this is so much irrelevance. If you aren't a pilot and you compare a ramjet to a rotary airplane engine, you might well assume that the ramjet is inferior...it just looks too simple to work as well as the rotary. But that clean interface hides a product with a market advantage so superior that it's hard to describe, let alone explain. If you don't get this, you have no business starting a search engine company. If you do and you still start one, you're either stupid, deluded, or actively dishonest.

So this clarifies what's going on with Yahoo!. They're not stupid. They're hearing complaints from their customers and have been for a while. They know there's a problem. The answer must be that they just can't do anything about it. Even if they managed to build a neural net--and Google has done its best to hire everyone who knows anything about them--it would never catch up to a neural net that's been learning and studying for years now. So what is to be done?

1) Distract people with Panama. I wonder if this much-delayed product exists. Meanwhile, move quietly and calmly toward the lifeboats.
2) Go social. This plays to Yahoo! strengths--they've long been known as a pretty social-focused culture for a Net company, and they're trying to acquire social sites.
3) Admit you're beat when it comes to search. Which was probably a mistake--poor "message control"--but wasn't news to anyone geeking out on the topic.

The problem is that making the switch is going to take a long time and be expensive for Yahoo!. Even figuring out a new revenue model (and a culture to go with it) is going to take a long time and be expensive. Meanwhile, Google's revenue model is an extension of its neural net (see bottom of the first page in particular).

The result is clear. So's the bet.

Avast

Thirteen of us sat around the table interviewing a candidate for Webmaster this afternoon. --Except for our clothes and generally academic level of fitness (that is to say, not terribly high) we might have been galley pirates trying to fill out the boat. (Beards were, after all, well-represented.) Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour, perhaps it was the letdown from yesterday's holiday that led me to think in these terms. (Perhaps it was a truly nasty story, "Under the Pitons," which I'd read on the train coming in. It's in Stone's Bear and His Daughter, which I bought remaindered seven years ago, which almost didn't make the move in July, and which is turning out to be very, very good indeed.)

Seth Godin wants to get rid of interviews. He may well have a point.

Time constraints and the number of participants kept us from going very deep--basically each interviewer got to ask a single question. This reminded me of a few things :

1) Social search is probably going to be terrible. Chris Sherman thinks so too. To sum up his post, when you get a bunch of people who aren't experts in the subject area, you're going to have a race to the bottom in terms of results.
2) It's long been known that groups tend to have a powerful urge to reach consensus. What's interesting though is that this result, familiar to anyone who's been on a committee, may actually be a "bad apples" phenomenon--the actions and words of certain individuals may have a disproportionate effect. I saw some of that today (and, um, I tried to be part of the solution). Marcus Buckingham would probably call these folks Harmonizers.

How do Harmonizers relate to the Long Tail? Do they build blockbusters by leveling taste? That might be too glib, I suspect. Discuss.

Three Versions of Darkness

This morning before the sun was fairly up I found myself thinking about the DeLillo I'd been reading the night before--Underworld, again, and with a little jolt I realize it's been almost a decade since I first finished it. If that's the word. I'd remembered the cover for what it suggested--an impressionistic spray of green and gray darkness--and not for what it was--the Twin Towers jabbing like horns out of the lowering brow of Manhattan. Not, maybe, for what it came to be. DeLillo's quick take on the towers, half fillip and half sneer--Klara Sax sees them rising over the early seventies like some kind of crass salesmen of apocalypse--makes it worse, not because he was wrong but because he was right.

My friend Robert quotes Kafka in his letters: "I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."

Cormac McCarthy, who is about to visit a new darkness, quotes Boehme as epigraph to Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West:

It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.

In a thirty-year-old Paris Review interview, William Gass opines wearily that "(t)o write sentences out of context is a fool's business, but I set about doing the fool's business." All writing, perhaps, is borne up out of its own darkness. Which makes four.

The Future of Reading

MSNBC Interactive, admittedly not one of the best arguments for a free press, bloviates about the future of reading this morning. But what do I know? After all, here's a powerhouse that combines the technical savvy of Microsoft with the enduring reach and relevance of a major television network.

More seriously, Rogers's piece is lazy at best and dishonest at worst. (It references a report from December 2005--he might just have had a tight deadline and a slack brain.) I'm expected to believe that a Stanford grad and putatively successful novelist thinks this? He might want to consider that we live in the utopia Wells imagined--with his background, one would hope that he could.

Perhaps, then, reading is just unnatural--the equivalent of the dog that walks on its hind legs. (Stay tuned for a post on why Johnson invented the blogosphere.) As William Gass points out in his pugnacious "Pulitzer: The People's Prize,"

Because we have a large, affluent, mildly educated middle class that has fundamentally the same tastes as the popular culture it grew up with, yet with pretensions to something more, something higher, something better suited to its half-open eyes and spongy mind, there is a large industry of artists, academics, critics, and publicists eager to serve it--lean cuisine, if that's the thing--and the Pulitzer is ready with its rewards. (Gass, in Finding a Form, Random House 1996, p. 13. Buy Gass's book.)

That is, widespread reading and literary culture may be a temporary and acutely historical aberration, the equivalent of a half-hearted jogging regimen whose jig may soon be up. Nonetheless, in an Information Age, wouldn't you rather be one of the haves? Reading allows for complex symbolic representation and manipulation--exactly the sort of skill set, the last time I checked, that is needed now and will be even more important tomorrow. Ask Neal Stephenson.