 When several readers suggested I read Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate for a different perspective on human nature and violence, I was glad to oblige. When I discovered that Pinker is a psychology professor, I should have realized I would find the book annoying, and I did. It’s massive and muddle-headed, and full of some truly bizarre rants. If you’re looking for a good book on ‘nature versus nurture’, there are much better choices.
Hobbes made Pinker’s point on human violence four centuries earlier: He argued that humans, like one of our two closest ancestors, the chimpanzees, are inherently violent, for three (later to be recognized as Darwinian) reasons: competition, fear, and reputation, and that it has always been so. The argument is that:
There is great debate about whether prehistoric humans were violent, or whether, as with most other animals, widespread human violence occurs only as a response to extreme scarcity that nature’s normal checks and balances have been unable to remedy, and in rare psychopathic individuals who (in natural environments anyway) usually eliminate each other from the gene pool. I’ve said before that I find the scientific arguments that violence is a stress-reaction quite compelling and well supported, and the myth that early humans lived nasty, brutish and short lives to have been convincingly refuted. But in addition to the Hobbesian arguments, we often hear that today’s remaining indigenous peoples live incredibly violent lives, that many aboriginal peoples throughout history kept other humans as slaves, and that many treated other animals, especially the large mammals hunted to extinction, with thoughtless savagery, not reverence. And while the bonobos, our matriarchal free-loving cousins, appear to live peaceful lives, our other cousins, the male-bonding chimpanzees, have quite a penchant for violence, and are likely to survive after the bonobos have been rendered extinct by human slaughter and encroachment. My belief in the inherent ‘goodness’, or at least peacefulness, of the human species is therefore not entirely intact. That belief is based on the illogic of murder and violence as a means of successful survival. Except for rare periods of climatic peace and warmth (like the last 5,000 years — the warmest and stablest in the planet’s history, to the best of our knowledge), our often-inhospitable planet keeps throwing curve balls at life all across its thin, fragile biosphere. We living creatures have usually needed to focus our attention on surviving ice ages, meteor strikes and volcanic holocausts — the history of life on Earth is riddled with extinction events. It therefore makes Darwinian sense that we — all life on Earth — would pull together, and success for each of us would depend on the success of the whole. We are all biophiliacs — we intuitively love every precious life that struggles with us to survive. This has nothing to do with morality: The principles of evolution would suggest that a highly diverse, interdependent and mutually supporting biosphere would survive better than a melee of competitive creatures constantly fighting each other to the death. We’ve had hundreds of millions of years to ‘learn’ this. In periods of great stress, however, as biologists have confirmed, these peaceful, cooperative rules give way to an often-violent culling of the weakest members of the community to conserve resources for the strongest to hunker down, without upsetting the balance of the rest of the ecosystem. This, too, is a ‘learned’ behaviour of the global life organism — we behave that way because it’s been proven to work best — to optimize the health of life collectively on our planet. One of the arguments made for human male violence is that you don’t need as many males as females to optimize the health of a human community, and that if strong males kill off weaker males and keep harems (as is allegedly done in some chimp communities), that will make the community as a whole more successful. I think this is preposterous — if that were so, we would have evolved to produce more female babies than males, to make the killing unnecessary. I don’t understand why psychologists and sociologists have this need to come up with a complicated explanation for human violence that vindicates our pathetic ways of dealing with it — executing and locking up the perpetrators and other expensive, devastating and ineffectual deterrent laws, that no other animal species has any need to introduce, when it seems obvious that what is driving it is our grossly excessive and unsustainable human population and wasteful and extravagant overconsumption of increasingly scarce resources — billions of needlessly struggling souls crowded into unnaturally small areas, totally dependent on others for their survival, angry, helpless, stressed-out, humiliated, living lives of political and wage slavery, reduced to mere consumers of crappy, unhealthy products. Even the students of chimpanzees have admitted that if chimps were jammed into spaces and living conditions like those of our human civilization, they would quickly slaughter each other to extinction. But I guess if we were to acknowledge this, we’d have to admit that our species isn’t really that special after all, and that we are so invested in the one, fragile, teetering civilization culture left on this planet that we wouldn’t know where to begin to dismantle it and replace it with asociety that is workable, sustainable — and relatively violence-free. |
February 28, 2006
Are Humans Violent By Nature?
February 27, 2006
If Your Whole Life Was Filmed, Would You Watch the Re-Runs?
 Dale Asberry has been working on a Personal Knowledge Management project that essentially treats your hard drive as an extension of your memory — an easily retrievable ‘aide-mÈmoire’ like speaker’s notes or mnemonics. Dale’s idea is to use tools akin to blogs (to capture stories and other context rich ‘memories’), wikis (to capture conversations and other multi-participant ‘memories’) and visualization tools to represent how these memories are connected. The poor guy has had to delve into the whole ‘categorize vs. tag’ taxonomy debate to try to decide whether/how the PKM ‘interface’ would index all these memories. It’s not clear what method our brains use to ‘look up’ and ‘retrieve’ memories, though we know that sensory clues are probably more important than conceptual correlative ones: A once-familiar smell will ‘bring back’ memories decades old far more effectively than ’searching our brain’ to recall who we talked with and what we said about subject or idea X.
The degree to which we cherish old photographs suggests that sensory triggers are quite critical to rich memory recall. Our visual sense is the only one we currently capture aides-mÈmoire for, through photographs and home-made videotapes. While snapping photos is considered socially acceptable (in some places and contexts, anyway), making audio recordings of conversations has never caught on (except among some of society’s more bizarre elements, and then principally to incriminate). I have some scented candles that bring back floods of teenage hippie-days memories, certain music also stirs powerful memories, and sometimes an overheard voice reminds me of someone I knew long ago and makes my hair stand on end — but for the most part our sensory aides-mÈmoire are pretty thin and fragile. I suspect that most of what we’ve really learned in our lives has been quickly and almost totally forgotten, at least to the point that the few fragments we still recall are no longer useful and may even be dangerous to rely on. The BBC this morning reports on a new British university study that suggests your ability to remember depends more on your ’state of mind’ immediately preceding the event than during and after it — so that you must essentially ‘prepare to remember’, or you won’t. This has some intriguing implications for loss of short-term memory as we age, and for Alzheimers research. Perhaps as we get older we’re not quite really there anymore — we don’t live in the moment so we perceive less and as a result are less prepared to remember anything. Why would that be? A coping mechanism for a world that eventually just gets to be too much? Information overload making our brains physically incapable of absorbing any more? And why is it that certain events, settings, even times of day (”midnight shakes the memory, as a madman shakes a dead geranium”, as Eliot said — hey! I remember that word for word!) seem to provoke memories that otherwise lie dormant, seemingly forgotten? If information overload is a culprit in our fading and unreliable memory, especially as we age, Dale may be on to something. Many of us use techniques like Getting Things Done, one of whose principal functions is to clear out our short term memory of ’stuff we have to remember to do’ so that that memory can be used to support more concentrated processing instead of being tied up. It is dangerous to draw too many parallels between the human brain and computers (the processing is utterly different), but the fact we call computer storage ‘memory’ suggests it is analogous to what our brain uses and does to store and retrieve what we have sensed, perceived, conceived and learned. If ‘personal knowledge management’ technology can help us to recall more, better, when we need it, this could be one of the most important uses of information technology of all. It also explains why portability and shareability of our new technological ‘memory’ is so intuitively important to us. We don’t want to leave our memory at home. Suppose, further, we had a way to capture, with greater sensory richness, much or all of our lives using recording ‘media’? If we could maintain a private ‘film’ of everything we did in our lives, taken from both an inside view (what we saw and sensed) and an outside view (how another viewer would have seen us at the same time, with our body language visible etc.), how often would we later refer to it, and for what? If your whole life was filmed, would you watch the re-runs? If you could use these ‘recordings’ to keep old memories much more alive, how would this change you? Would it make us less amenable to change, and more nostalgic? Would some of us (those prone to grow up slowly) end up getting buried in the past, reliving cherished times over and over in preference to the terrible knowledge, dimmed senses and checked emotions of the present? Or would it allow us to learn much more, and keep those important learnings alive in ourselves? An even more intriguing issue is the value of these filmed archives to others. Why settle for a mere story when you can see the story-teller’s experience, and the experience of each of the characters in the story, first-hand? Suppose you had access to (or inherited) your grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ filmed archives — the most amazing experiences of their lives, good and bad, to learn from almost as if you experienced them personally, in much more detail than any recounting could ever achieve. Suppose you could fast-forward through the life of a personal hero — a great scientist, or humanitarian, or businessperson, or athlete, or artist. Or experience the wonder or horror of a day in the life of an Inuit villager, a Darfur survivor, an Iraqi businesswoman, a Rio street-child, an elected official. Economist Herb Simon famously said “I keep my knowledge in my network”. When we want to recall something that we learned from someone else, we often call that person and have them ‘recall’ it for us. With a lifelong filmed archive for everyone, we wouldn’t have to bother them, or limit ourselves to people in our network. We could keep our knowledge in everyone’s network. Aside from the obvious issues of technological feasibility (bandwidth and digital memory aren’t quite free, yet) and privacy, how might we edit, organize and search such a vast archive, so that what is most important could be found easily among the minutiae of everyday life? Or could we just leave this up to everyone, relying on billions of browsers to ‘bookmark’ the most valuable passages of our own and others’ lives, to the point we could just surf on top of others’ research, and live much of our lives ‘learning vicariously’? It would be interesting to discover how much is lost, missing, in the absence of knowledge of what the participants of the events we are ‘reliving’ were personally thinking and feeling. Can such a grandiose play function without a narrator? When we blog, we are not just telling stories (ours and others), recounting the sensory details. We are telling others what we think about them, what we feel about them. Is it enough to see what a street urchin in Rio sees, says and does in a day in her life, in order to appreciate what such a life must be like, and learn important lessons about the world from such a perspective, and the imperative of making the world for such children better? Or are we missing the real story if we don’t hear what she has to say, hear her tell the story of the fear and aching she feels waking up every morning and at every moment during her anxious day? Does listening to an organic food co-op owner’s explanation for why she made a particular decision add or detract from the learning value of witnessing a day in her life? Simon and Garfunkel’s song Old Friends concludes with this ‘bookends’ theme: Time it was, and what a time it was! It was
A time of innocence, a time of confidences: Long ago, it must be — I have a photograph. Preserve your memories: They’re all that’s left you. Our life is a play that we are writing the script for as we live it. Now that we have the technology to show us the ‘rushes’, the out-takes, and what the other 6.3 billion producers came out with today, last year, a century ago, can we afford the time to press ‘re-wind’ and take a closer, sober look at what we have done, what we are doing, and what we are not doing, and think about, in that context, what we should bedoing tomorrow? Self portrait pencil sketch made yesterday, drawing on the right side of the brain (no memory required!) |
February 26, 2006
Ten Reasons Young People Are Afraid to Start Their Own Business
 As part of my research for my book The Natural Enterprise, I had the chance this weekend to speak informally with a group of young people (in their 20s and 30s) about whether they would ever consider starting their own business. Most of them like the idea of doing so, but confess to being afraid to do so, to the point most would never even seriously consider it. Here are the ten reasons they gave for this, along with my thoughts on how a Natural Enterprise could overcome these fears.
I’m now even more convinced that this book meets a serious need. My challenge will be to get young prospective readers of the book to even look at it — their skepticism about the prospects for personal entrepreneurshiprun that deep! |
February 25, 2006
Links for the Week – Feb. 25/06
 The Environment Critical Supreme Court Case Could Seal Nature’s Fate in the US: The first major case to be judged by the new Bush right-wingers threatens to eviscerate the powers of the EPA and other regulators to do anything to protect anything that happens or originates on ‘private’ land. This is why ‘property rights’ could well be the death knell for environmental protection in the US. Fuller background on how NAFTA opened the door for this here. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link. Losing Home Before We Find It: Orion has a wonderful excerpt from Melissa Pierson’s new book The Place You Love is Gone. Thanks to Rob Nichols for the link. The Scramble to Find New Species Before We Render Them Extinct: Verlyn Klinkenborg waxes poetic on the joy of discovering new species in New Guinea as thousands of other species, some of them not even discovered yet, disappear forever. Inventions Provide Power and Clean Water for Villages in Struggling Nations: Two new Dean Kamen inventions may allow poor communities to provide their own subsistence levels of electrical power and clean drinking water. New UK Ethical Business Awards: If you know of British companies or citizens doing great things to advance social and environmental responsibility, tell the Observer. Make Your Back Yard Attractive to Wildlife: Some great ideas from the Earthvalues Institute. Thanks to ex-Ecopundit Dave Pratt for the link. Dangers of Teflon Finally Recognized. It’s about time. Thanks to Craig de Ruisseau for the link. Another Responsible Shopping Guide: Worldwatch Institute has published the free Good Stuff guide. Good stuff indeed. Thanks to Wild Ginger for the link. Technology Capture All Your Blog Comments: Now here’s a great idea! CoComment allows you to track all of the comments you have made on blogs, flickr, myspace and other community spaces, so you can create a record of your participation in the entire blogosphere, and even post that record to your own blog, or get notified of new comments in any thread anywhere. Doesn’t yet support Radio Userland/Salon blogs. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link. TV Going Wireless: New inventions could soon make the cables that connect your TV (or TV-video-enabled PC) to video sources obsolete. Thanks to Innovation Weekly for this link. The Arts Blogging from the Heart: Some blogs are sheer poetry to read. They reach out to you not with ideas or cold hard information but with pure raw emotion. From these true diaries you can learn who other people really are, and that’s at least as importantas learning what to do. Amazing Juggling: Chris Bliss’ juggling act synchronized to the final cuts of Abbey Road has to be seen to be believed. His comedy is also hilarious. Thanks to Mitch Ditkoff for the link. Image: Satirical demotivational poster from despair.com. |
February 24, 2006
Taking Things Into Our Own Hands
 In recent years there have been some interesting experiments in citizen ‘advocacy’ using the Internet to organize ‘meetups’, petitions, programs and campaigns. Most of them, however, seem designed to confront the existing political system: mobilize protests, lobby, or support less corrupt politicians. Perhaps it’s time to see whether the Internet and ‘grassroots democracy’ could be harnessed for direct action, solving some of the problems we face ourselves instead of tilting against the political establishment in the perpetually uphill and futile struggle to get them to act on our behalf. How might we do this? I wrote before about Malcolm Gladwell’s tracking of Rick Warren’s ‘Cellular Church’, a religious and now social action network based on ‘cells’, political units even smaller than communities, handfuls of people with shared values and ideals working, each in their own way, on self-organized actions inspired but not directed by Warren’s ‘anti-hierarchy’. The power in the cellular church is all on the front lines. Warren is substantially just a facilitator, suggesting principles to guide the cells in deciding what to do, but not directing or coordinating those actions. He eschews the ‘power’ of hierarchy not out of altruism or humility, but because he knows that people will act more passionately, more persistently, more substantially, if the ideas are theirs than if they are ‘instructions from above’. Warren writes: If I go to church with 500 members, in a magnificent cathedral, why should I volunteer or donate any substantial share of my money? What kind of peer pressure is there in a congregation that large? If the barriers to entry become too low — and the ties among members increasingly tenuous — then the church as it grows bigger becomes weaker. One solution to the problem is simply not to grow, and, historically, churches have sacrificed size for community. But there is another approach: to create a church out of a lot of little church cells. The small group as an instrument of community is initially how Communism spread, and in the post-war years AA and its 12-step progeny perfected the small-group technique. Members sat in a circle. The focus was on interaction — not one person teaching [or preaching] and the others listening — and the remarkable thing about these groups is their power. [Churches and others soon found] the small group was an extraordinary vehicle of commitment. It was personal and flexible. It cost nothing. It was convenient, and every [member] was able to find a small group that precisely matched his or her interests.
Suppose we were to try to create a complete, new social and political ’system’, all over the planet, based entirely on personal responsibility and action at the cellular, microcommunity level, assuming the existing social and political systems can and will do nothing for us and have outlived their usefulness.
Note that this does not require a large coordinating group, or a major media outlet to connect and communicate with the cells, or a large budget of time or money to ‘coordinate’. It is deliberately anti-hierarchical, not centrally organized, unfunded, and leaderless. The model is purely organic. It will take on a life of its own and go where it will go. The principles and practices will be amended by collective consensus. The founding group will establish the initial set of principles and practices, launch The Magazine, teach the practices to others, and then get out of the way — once the movement is launched, they become largely irrelevant to its evolution. Those with personal ambitions for fame and power need not apply. How might such a grassroots political ’system’ work to solve a problem like, say, global warming? It would probably start with self-education actions, then progress to conservation actions, energy self-sufficiency (using renewable, community-based sources), boycotting of major users and wasters of non-renewable energy and polluters, pledges to buy local, re-learning to make and do things for ourselves, and cooperative programs to achieve radically simple lifestyles. As the cells and communities that do these things start to be recognized as ‘model’ communities they will be emulated by others. Companies that make housing, automobiles, and other major contributors to global warming will be replaced by those that are more responsible and responsive to the new market. As the companies that now depend on huge government handouts and subsidies lose market share and become unprofitable, they will no longer be able to buy politicians, and those subsidies will end, removing many of the distortions in the current economy and accelerating the shift to more environmentally responsible, zero-waste, cradle-to-cradle production. Conservation all by itself could have a huge impact. So would a major grassroots move to buy local — wiping out the Wal-Marts of the world and creating astonishing new markets for locally-produced products, while eliminating the need for long-haul transportation — a major contributor to global warming. As we re-learn how to make things and do things for ourselves, we will re-discover the wondrous value of community, of self-sufficiency, of taking time for simple pleasures, and abandon the malls for the much greater (and less destructive) pleasures of the back porches of those we love. None of these changes assess blame for or directly confront the major perpetrators of global warming. The political system exists to protect the wealthy and powerful and perpetuate and increase their wealth and power. The politicians and lawyers are paid to block political solutions to global warming. What this grassroots approach does is ignore the existing political system and create a new one, which we the people control, that renders the existing political system obsolete. I think the power to stop global warming is on our hands, not through the ballot box or the street demonstration, but by educating ourselves what we can do as individual citizens and consumers to stop feeding it, and to choke off its source of political and economic support through personal, responsible behaviours. In an upcoming article, I’ll take a stab at a first set of principles for such a movement. Suggestions for principles, and for a name for themovement, more than welcome. Thanks to Jon Husband for his provocative e-mail that prompted this article. |
February 23, 2006
Environmental ‘Security’: Bridge or Trap?
 A new phrase “environmental security” has worked its way into the political vernacular in recent years. Until recently, “security” was considered a political issue: the enemy was always people, and almost always foreign states. Now, with political violence increasingly of stateless origin, the enemy has been reduced to “terror” — no longer the nations that sponsor acts, or even the individuals who commit them, but rather the acts themselves. We can no longer identify or even define the perpetrators, so we are reduced to fighting behaviours, no matter where they come from or what their cause. The next logical step is fighting thoughts that might lead to those behaviours. Orwell’s slippery slope. The propaganda war to that end is already underway.
Security has long been the purview of the military. When the strife is civil, or more recently when it has become stateless, and the military is incompetent to handle it, the domestic paramilitary takes over: “Homeland” Security. But the strategy has always been the same: root out and kill the enemy. When the enemy cannot be identified, it cannot be rooted out, and the result, if the enemy is sufficiently disruptive, is generally civil war and government collapse. The new government identifies a new set of enemies, and the cycle starts again. These are simple strategies for dealing with simple problems. In centuries past the armies wore bright colours and carried their flags into battle to make identifying one’s enemy even simpler. Guerrilla tactics have made conflicts more complicated, resulting in the use of dysfunctional military tactics like massive aerial bombing — hugely expensive, ineffective, and ruinous to civilian populations and therefore prone to backfire, making things worse instead of better. But vulnerability to random, devastating acts of violence that can be perpetrated by almost anyone for almost any reason takes the problem of identifying and rooting out the enemy beyond the merely complicated and into the realm of the complex. Neither military nor paramilitary organizations have any capability of dealing with complex problems whatsoever, so they respond in absurd, inappropriate, useless and dangerous ways: duct tape pamphlets, random round-ups of people with ’swarthy’ complexions, brutal pointless torture, airport ’security’ measures that would be comical if they weren’t so disruptive and inept. US Homeland Security has the largest budget of any centrally-managed organization in the planet’s history, but because they are still trying to reduce complex problems to merely complicated ones, they are squandering it all and accomplishing nothing. Less than nothing, since their actions and their obvious ineffectiveness create distrust, insecurity, and intolerance among the American people, polarizing and destabilizing the nation socially as well as economically. It is no sheer coincidence that this same monstrous ineptness has been evident in military and paramilitary attempts to deal with ‘natural enemies’: hurricanes, floods, tsunamis and epidemic diseases etc. These are all complex problems, too, and defy the traditional military strategies of confrontation, destabilization, assassination, “shock and awe”, and preemption, because they are substantially unpredictable (we know they will happen, but not precisely how, when, where, or how devastating they will be). The traditional military and paramilitary have no interest in taking on “environmental security”, even if it would increase their already bloated budgets — they are flummoxed enough trying to grapple with complex security problems with human perpetrators. They want the world to go back to the simple, symmetrical Us vs Them conflicts, with the colours of both sides clearly displayed for easy identification. Strategy in such conflicts is possible, and often critical. The new enemy has changed the rules, disruptively innovating the entire war ‘industry’, and rendering all its methods and resources obsolete. The trillions that have been spent on Star Wars missile defense have all been wasted, a gift to the private defense industry for nothing of value whatsoever — because the military is still trying to reduce the complex problem of dealing with stateless, anonymous enemies to a simple or complicated problem. World poverty could have been ended for what the US has thrown away on this folly. Nature has always been a complex enemy, but because her attacks have either been shrugged off as ‘acts of God’, or have been less devastating than acts of men, neither the military nor the political elite have paid much attention to them until recently. The military group charged with dealing with this enemy in the US has been the Army Corps of Engineers (you can thank them for the New Orleans levees and a lot of the man-made destruction — dams, diversions etc. — that helped make the levees necessary). The Corps treated nature as a simple enemy, and accordingly most of what they have done to ‘combat’ nature has in fact made the situation worse, and the people living near their constructions more vulnerable. When you don’t even try to understand a whole complex system, and just go in with massive power tools to fix isolated symptoms, tragic and unforeseen results are inevitable. “Shock and awe” is no more effective on nature than it was on the bombed civilians of Iraq. A new WorldWatch paper advocates broadening ‘our’ concerns about military and political security to include environmental security. It points out that, ironically, the military and paramilitary are not the only ones resistant to such a call: So are environmentalists, who fear that if the state starts acknowledging nature as a threat to human security, environmentalism will be reduced in the public mind from a biophilial movement concerned with conservation and protection of diversity, to yet another front of the war on terror, and that nature will be (as it has been throughout most of the history of our human civilization) portrayed as an enemy to be controlled and defeated, and that what’s left of the budget of the disemboweled EPA will be turned over to Homeland Security. WorldWatch sees this as an ends-justifies-the-means coalition: If it’s the only way progressives can get conservatives to grapple with global warming, isn’t that better than doing nothing to deal with climate change? As my readers know, I’m not a fan of ends-justify-the-means. If the military, paramilitary and conservative establishment somehow embraced global warming as a security issue, they would deal with it the same inept ways they have tried to deal with other complex problems. They would try putting tinfoil in the stratosphere to deflect the sun’s rays away. They would spray chemicals to try to neutralize particulates. They would invent bombs that would blow up CO2 in the atmosphere and direct the freed oxygen at the ozone holes. In short, they would do what they always do: Apply large-scale ‘fixes’ to deal with specific symptoms of the problem in isolation. They would try to simplify global warming, imagine it reduced to an enemy that their traditional arsenal of tools and methods would combat. When all you have is hammers, you tend to see everything as a nail. The other flaw in the WorldWatch argument is the claim that once it is embraced as a security issue, people will start to approach it strategically. In the first place, governments have neither the competence nor the interest in being strategic. Their short-term mandates dictate that the primary objective is always re-election, and to get re-elected you don’t use (long-term) strategy, you use (short-term) tactics. Politics is a simple, traditional conflict with colours clearly shown. Notwithstanding the arguments that US conservatives have been strategically plotting since Nixon to take back power, the truth is that they have never really been out of power, and most of the tactics they have employed successfully to stay in power have been very short-term focused and uncoordinated. It’s a four-year game, and the strategy, if there is one at all, is usually jettisoned in favour of tactics that parry the latest tactics of the other side. What’s more, strategies don’t work when dealing with complex problems. To have a strategy, a ‘way to achieve the desired end’, assumes far more understanding of the problem than can ever be achieved when the problem is complex. In dealing with global warming, we have no way of knowing what the desired end is, nor even the faintest inkling about how to achieve that end even if we knew what it was. The problem requires an enormous amount of coordinated study, almost certainly more money and resources than we would be prepared to commit for such a long-term project (the opposing administration, if they unseat us in the next election, would take credit for all our work!), probably more money and resources than we can, in the current, fragile, overextended economy, afford, and very likely more time than we have left before the consequences of our previous ignorance of the problem begin to overwhelm us. When that happens, we will return, as we always do, as is natural (for us and all creatures), to dealing with the immediate symptoms. So I don’t think embracing ‘environmental security’ as a cause will enable progressives to bridge ideological differences and find common cause with conservatives. I think it is a dangerous trap, one that could further marginalize environmental efforts and enable conservatives to reframe global warming as a fight against nature instead of a consequence of our ignorance of our place in it. What we need instead is to start educating ourselves and conservatives about the nature of complexity and the need for very different approaches to complex problems. This flies in the face of everything we are taught, and much of what we find easy to believe. It does not lend itself to simplistic solutions, sound bites or slogans. It requires that we start to think in holistic terms, about ourselves as part of complex, largely-unknowable systems that we can influence but never control, about the fact that this planet is too small, too fragile and too exhausted for us to have any time or room to fight among ourselves. Our only real enemy, now, is time. Image: A 2003 Stringer/Reuters photo of a Vietnamese farmer coping with the resultsof drought, and of flash floods caused by illegal logging nearby. |
February 22, 2006
Does Innovation Really Start With the Customer?
 There are two opposing views on the role of the customer in innovation. One school holds that all innovations start with conversation, observation, and understanding of the customer (current or potential) with the goal of surfacing and then filling an unmet need. The other school says that customers don’t know what they need, at least until they see it, and sometimes a need doesn’t even exist until a solution is available to fill it. There are compelling arguments for both positions, and both have their advocates. Complexity theory would tend to favour the second view. This theory holds that a true understanding of a problem (such as a need) only emerges in parallel with, and co-dependently with, awareness of possible ’solutions’ or approaches. But it could also be argued that conversations with customers, to “think them ahead” and get them to imagine possibilities, and ‘cultural anthropology’ observation of customers, are approaches that do start with the customer, in order to “find a need and fill it”. The evolution of mp3 players is worth a bit of study to decide if this is really a chicken-and-egg question. Do you remember mini-CDs, about half the size of regular CDs? They were an early attempt to grapple with the lack of portability of CD players — to fill the untapped (perceived) need for a pocket-sized music player. At the same time, some large, clunky “jukebox” players used mp3 format to compress hundreds or thousands of songs into a small hard drive — to fill the untapped (perceived) need to transport or back-up a customer’s complete music collection. And at about this time, a new product that no one thought would ever be accepted, pay (satellite) radio, was introduced. Contrast the community (the potential customer) and the job-to-be-done (the perceived need) of each of these inventions:
I bought one of the original 6GB “juke-box” mp3 players, transcribed my entire ‘favourite music’ collection to it (about 700 songs), and even bought a waterproof, rechargeable (mono) speaker that attaches to it (I use it on the pool deck in summer, and for instrumental backup when we go caroling around the neighbourhood at Christmas). I never understood the appeal of mini-CD players, or the current lot of mp3 players that only hold a few dozen songs at a time. Not my community. Nor did I understand the appeal of satellite radio, since I can simply plug my “jukebox’ into the car radio. But I acknowledge that there was a need for these products. Music is really important to a lot of people. The three products were designed for three distinct needs and customer communities. Soon, the technologies that had been adapted or developed to meet these needs improved to the point that they satisfied additional needs. The new iPod-type players render both the mini-CD player and the “juke-box” player obsolete, since they offer both in one, elegant package, with some incremental advantages to both products’ communities at no extra cost. And podcasting now allows owners of music players to prerecord ‘narrowcast’ content as well, opening the potential that satellite radio, Howard Stern notwithstanding, could be disruptively innovated out of existence just when it looked like it was getting traction. But would the iPod and its ilk have been possible were it not for the predecessor innovations that filled specific identified needs? Apple prides itself on its “second mover advantage” — not innovating, but rather studying and significantly improving on existing innovations. And without the Walkman creating the ‘need’ for portable recorded music in the first place, and the transistor radio before that, would customers have had any idea that they ‘needed’ a portable music player? Even if someone with great foresight had imagined the possibility of a device with iPod features fifty years ago, it is doubtful that potential customers would have viewed it as any less fanciful — or ‘needed’ — than the flying cars that were predicted in that era. The truth is that most innovations are evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. That doesn’t mean they are incremental — they are discontinuous, making leaps in design, technology application and functionality, but do so in response to evolving customer needs. Suppose you wanted to invent the successor to the iPod, the next great portable electronic device. How would you do it? You’d start with potential customers, observe what they are doing, converse with them about their frustrations and wants, identify constituencies or communities of customers with common needs or wants, and articulate the job to be done by the product or service that will meet those needs and wants. Now you can fill in the second and third columns of the table above for the as-yet-undetermined new product or service innovation. When you identify a whole group of jobs to be done for a whole group of different customer communities, you are ready to start imagining possible solutions, using a whole slew of techniques: individual invention, “thinking the customer ahead” collaborative sessions with some of the prospective customers, and group brainstorming. The successful ideas that emerge from these techniques need to be qualified for economic feasibility (is the technology ready; can we make money at it) and organizational fit (do we have the capabilities to produce it), and then prototypes, pilots or models need to be re-qualified by potential customers to assess market acceptance (using the flowchart above). What might this process come up with in our search for the next great portable device? Although it’s hard to speculate, I would suggest that the results would be very different from, and much better than, the results that come from more traditional ‘innovation’ processes that start with a ’solution’ (some technologically feasible idea that someone thought up, thought sexy or intriguing, and sponsored) and then go in search of a ‘problem’ (need) to apply it to. Suppose your target customer community was empty-nesters in affluent nations who are either retired, semi-retired, or working substantially from home or virtually. This is going to be a huge community in a few years. What do they need, what ‘job do they need done’, that a portable electronic device might solve? I can tell you it’s probably not about general information, or news — the kind of stuff you find on the Internet, or in the information media. It is quite possibly related to health, and to communication. It may berelated to recreation. It is almost certainly social. Do you smell some great potential innovations here, and want to know more? Start with some customers. Flowchart above is further explained in this earlier article. |
February 21, 2006
…and where will we hide when it comes from inside?
three am: so i get up and stare out the back window: i put on my snowsuit and trudge out in the middle of our ‘toboggan hill’ i stop, plunk down in the snow other than the wind i hear only
i worry about keeping things together: we don’t dare show who we really are i worry about not knowing what i’m meant to do hah! yet still i wait here, paralyzed “the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting”, i worry about all the creatures in the world it is for those unknowing, all of them, and us, who can’t imagine i worry for the generation after next: the snow’s picked up so what terrible knowledge intervened why can we no longer hear thanks to fellow Slogger meg at blogcabin for the inspiration |
these days i worry about everything:February 20, 2006
The Future of the Media
  Industries that cannot or will not adapt to changing customer needs die. That has been the case since our economy began. Public opinion about the trustworthiness of the media and their ability to meet customers’ needs is abysmally low (only tax collection authorities rank lower). The number of customers of newspapers, radio and television, and the amount of time those customers are willing to invest reading, listening to, and watching the media, is in long-term decline. So are the number of customers of the so-called ‘entertainment media’, though the companies hide the decline by reporting revenues instead of units sold. Oligopolies control substantial amounts of many of the information and entertainment media, and each year they are reducing the amount they produce (fewer articles, fewer new titles) and becoming more and more dependent on a few ‘blockbuster’ entertainment releases and on inexpensive freelanced or shared information sources for their economic survival. Meanwhile the number and popularity of independent producers of both information and entertainment are soaring, filling the gap left by the retreating mainstream companies.
Perhaps because some of the media oligopolies are in both the information and entertainment media, many of them seem to be unaware of the fact that the function of these two types of media are completely different. The purpose of the information media is to provide actionable information. The purpose of the entertainment media is to provoke emotion. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the National Review are in the information business. Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, CNN, Jon Stewart, lots of editorial columnists, and Fox ‘News’ are in the entertainment business — they are satirists (”artists using sarcasm, derision and wit”), out to provoke you, not to inform you. Different objectives, different audiences. Many young people may rely on Jon or Rush as their main source of ‘news information’, but that ‘information’ is sterile — it does not form or ‘inform’ their actions, even though it might well influence their beliefs. Even the antiwar music of the 1960s was emotional preaching to the converted, and though it led to an important action — the end of the Vietnam War — it was not the music that informed us of the need for that action. So let’s look at them separately, starting with the information media. As I explained recently, a small majority of Americans, and a growing number of young people in other affluent nations, are essentially disengaged from the political processes in their countries. My reading of their beliefs is that they don’t believe anything they do will make any substantial difference in the world, so to them, there is no actionable information. They are lost forever to the information media. They’ll watch CNN if there are interesting car chases, bomb explosions, celebrity scandals or tracer pyrotechnics to entertain them, for the same reason they will switch to The Simpsons if there aren’t. So we have a steadily dwindling market for information media — the ‘news’ sections of some newspapers, and some news and public affairs programming on some radio and television networks, are fighting over fewer and fewer customers. A lot of them have chucked it in and migrated their information programming to entertainment programming, calling the new segments ‘human interest’ or ‘lifestyle’ stories. Some days you can read USA Today or watch a ‘public affairs’ program and not find any actionable information in it whatsoever — the market for entertainment seems to be larger, more durable and less expensive. But this is a losing proposition — these programs can’t hope to compete for the entertainment audience with programs that pander purely to provoking emotion, like all the so-called ‘reality’ TV programs, or video games. So what about the independent media, including blogs? They, too, have two distinct audiences. The New Technology indymedia and blogs provide some useful, actionable information for people in technology businesses. But a lot of them also focus on tech toys and tools that enable technologies to be used substantially for entertainment. Likewise some political indymedia and blogs provide information not available anywhere else (principally local information), and some useful analysis that may suggest the need for some specific political action (again, usually at the local level). But a lot of them are echo chambers, preaching to the converted with little more useful information content than one of Dylan’s 1960s protest songs. As I mentioned in my Saturday post, their purpose seems largely to be to provide emotional reassurance that you, the disenfranchised, disgruntled, outraged minority, are not alone, and are justified in your outrage. And that makes them entertainment media — fun, satisfying, but not really informative in any actionable way. I read a lot of progressive blogs, and I enjoy them, but most of them are short on useful ideas and new information you can act on. Ten years ago I addressed a conference of Canadian information media representatives and told them that, if they wanted to rebuild an audience, and become more profitable, they would need to start providing more actionable information, and more analysis of information that would tell readers what they should do about the information they were reading. I told them that actionable information is usually local (e.g. Wal-Mart proposing to rezone parkland in your community for a distribution centre). I told them people would probably pay for analysis that could lead to constructive action that would make communities and people’s lives better. I told them that no one would pay them much longer to edit and reprint stuff from newswires, and that printed classified ads would probably be extinct in a generation. They chided me for my “doom and gloom” predictions for their industry. Perhaps if I repeated my remarks today they would listen. The information media, if they are to survive at all, need to:
I am dubious that the legacy media will be able or willing to make this adaptation to survive. Today they collect and pontificate, tomorrow they must analyze, partner, facilitate and organize. It’s a very different skill set. I think it is more likely that the newspapers, radio and television will decide that there is little profit in information media, and they will (with a few exceptions) either migrate to all-entertainment formats (some of them are already there) or fold. The indymedia and bloggers have a better chance of succeeding in this role, but I would say the odds are not good. They (we) are very disorganized, overly enamoured of our own personal and collective points of view, too lazy, busy or cowardly to become truly investigative journalists, and lack good research and facilitation skills. We are too inclined (when we become popular) to mimic the failed example of the legacy media, too addicted to the daily ego-gratification from our small ‘audiences’ to get away from the computer and do some of the real, in-the-trenches, thankless, time-consuming fact-finding and organizing work that could really change things. We find it too comfortable to re-report, rather than doing original reporting. And we would find it humbling to have to focus attention, at least at first, on small, local, messy issues instead of presuming to add valuable analysis from our armchairs to the global issues of the day. It is possible, however. We are acquiring skills, and those with whom we could network online have the remaining skills we would need to pull this off. Imagine if every bribe of a local politician, every local incidence of pollution, every corporate decision that would have an impact on a community, every attempt to hush up a local scandal, every rezoning application, were being scrutinized, investigated, analyzed, publicized, critiqued by thousands of networked ‘journalists’ in every community, and publicized to everyone in that community. And once those local journalist networks have cut their teeth on local issues, imagine if they started banding together to do the same work, with eyes and ears everywhere, drawing on thousands of now-trained, relentless volunteer activist journalists, to dig into state, national and global issues, and showing and telling the world what was really going on. If we’re lucky, that’s the future of the information media. No profit in it, most likely, but enormous personal satisfaction, grass-roots empowerment, and real impact. I see the entertainment media as engaging in a race to the bottom. Once we have movies that are so violent and disgusting that people start to find them offensive and exploitative rather than ‘thrilling’, once we have dumbed down the oligopoly music ‘product’ to pretty, choreographed, all-sound-alike resampled nursery rhyme chanters, once TV starts showing live executions instead of just people prostituting themselves eating worms for cash, we will run out of ways to shock and manipulate people into watching or listening to crap. I figure that will take another ten years. By that time, I suspect, real reality lovers will be able to tune into any of millions of tiny, hidden cameras over the Internet and watch anything from live sex to street fights to emergency ward admissions to celebrities’ bathrooms. Why watch phony scripted ‘reality’ when you can watch the real thing, in real time, and chat with millions of others watching in? During this time, independent entertainment will continue to flourish, and with the Internet it will be able to evolve a market for virtually every taste. It will learn to be better at entertainment, it will, in ways the mainstream entertainment media have never been able to do, find and connect with and respond to the needs of its audiences (some independent artists are already accepting ‘commissions’ for personalized compositions). This is the real entertainment marketplace (as Jon Husband says, “a true market is a two-way conversation”), and it will flourish because every one of its millions of independent songs, videos, games, films, programs, and works of art will be a learning experience that everyone will share and build on. And most importantly, a certain proportion of the work of each artist will be available free, commercial-free and on demand, delivering a knockout punch to the mainstream entertainment media who still see the flow as product-down, cash-up, with the producer in control of the transaction. What will transform this more than anything else will be the facility for high-quality online collaboration. Millions of musicians and writers and film-makers will instantly be able to find like-minded talent to work with, and be able to produce new works asynchronously. And if you like parts of a song or film you may be able to disaggregate it, keep the parts you like, and create your own compositions on that foundation. With the evolution of animation, you might even be able to produce your own drama or comedy production with invented, realistic characters of your own creation. With all this technology power in your hands, entertainment could once again become something that people do for themselves. And with the skills we will be able to acquire, and the power of networks, this could allow spontaneous, community-based entertainment to flourish again. These two media evolutions could have something more in common than being grassroots and networked — they will both allow us to contribute our time instead of our money to meet, collaboratively, our information and entertainment needs. Throwing a ton of money at them has not resulted in development of better information or entertainment products — in fact there’s lots of evidence that big budgets and preoccupation with profit has made the products much worse. You hear a lot, from all over the political and moral spectrum, about the need to ‘take back the media’. Maybe it isn’t the media that we need to take back, as much as the work that the media has failed so utterly to do for us. |
February 19, 2006
Could We Handle Real Reality on TV?
 I have recently written about our responsibility for teaching ‘our’ children, and about the importance of telling them stories, and paying attention to them, instead of giving them instructions. But are there some stories we should not teach them? Are there some secrets better left untold? I’ve been reading Canadian poet Patrick Lane’s extraordinary autobiography There Is a Season (published in the US as What the Stones Remember). Lane’s childhood, in the 1940s in the rugged timberlands of Eastern BC, was impoverished and flecked with violence, but probably not significantly more so than that of most of our parents or grandparents growing up in that era. Here’s an excerpt (caution: contains descriptions that will be troubling to the sensitive reader): Behind the truck were three more, all piled with apples from the orchards. There was no market for them anywhere in Canada and rather than give the fruit away it was burned. The trucks rumbled onto the flat and then backed up to the tip where they disgorged their loads.
The edge of the dump was a cliff of fruit. At the bottom were women and children. They were chinks, ragheads, injuns, bohunks, polacks or wops to us. They were at the dump to scavenge apples. They leaned into the charred pile and tried to find fruit that hadn’t been burned. When they found a fresh lode they carried armfuls to small wagons and wheelbarrows they had pulled or pushed all the way from town. The man on the tip watched them and when they began to cluster around a spill of fruit he would pick up a can and fling a twist of kerosene and diesel down the slope. When it flowed through the burning air, it exploded and the women and children dragged their wagons back. The man on the tip rolled cigarettes and smoked as he watched them sidle back into the billowing smoke and flame. Quiet among the rusted car bodies, we watched as the empty army trucks returned to the orchards and packing houses for more apples. Then we made our way to the bottom of the drift away from the slope of burning fruit. There was almost no fire where we were. Here and there a pocket of thin flame flickered among torn clothing and broken chairs, but most of what was there was still intact. I remember poking a stick into a mottled paper bag. The thin paper tore and a small cotton bundle fell out onto the inverted curve of a rusty fender. The bundle was knotted in the middle and I took the stick and picked at the knot. My brothers were below me, sifting through the discarded effluvium of the town. The knot gave way and I flicked at what looked like a cotton shirt. It slowly unfolded at my prodding and a tiny arm fell out, its fingers clenched, its skin a pale blue. I stared at the thin arm and then prodded until the rest of the cloth gave way. It was a baby, a girl, and I gazed at her infant limbs, her swollen belly, and the bruises that suffused her skin. I pushed the edge of the fender with my bare foot. The metal tipped and the body fell into a crevice, the fender coming down and covering it. I looked at the flaking paint and moved away. The small body both existed and and didn’t exist in my mind. I walked away from the secret grave and placed the dead baby somewhere deep inside where it could be lost. There was no one I could tell, not even my brothers and not my mother or father or friends. If I did, it would somehow be my fault. We were not supposed to be at the dump. The last time we were caught our father had taken us to the woodshed and beaten us with a strip of boxwood. I didn’t want to be beaten again… Those were hard and brutal years. There was only one policeman in town and he was ineffectual at best. That wives and children were murdered and babies aborted with coat hangers or boots was a thing left to a family. Privacy was the measure of freedom. My friend’s father prostituted his Down syndrome daughter for twenty-five cents to anyone who had the money. When his father wasn’t home, my friend sold her to older boys for half a popsicle. I learned early to hide such knowledge, for whatever I might tell would have repercussions, involve my family in things that were better left alone. Dead babies, the dump, memories of childhood, swirl around in me. Who should I tell now? What good comes out of the past? To go back over those days brings down on myself the caul of childhood. That a neighbour beat a small friend to death in his woodshed when I was six, that another neighbour locked his idiot daughter away in an attic for years, and that a man my father worked with beat his wife insensate every weekend were what I thought was normal. Secrets and the silences that surrounded them governed my young life. To do or say anything was anathema. Grief and memory are burdens that cannot be lifted by going back. How many of those of us now in their 60s, who we meet every day in our busy activities in our affluent lives, have stories, secrets like these? How many of those who come from less affluent countries, neighbours and co-workers and friends of friends, much younger, could tell us more recent stories that would shock us, cause us to wonder what it is that holds our fragile civilization together? What is our responsibility, to the young, the naive, those who cannot see beneath the veneer of respectability and calm that allows us to deny what is really going on all around us? What do they need more: To know the real truth, so that they can learn to cope with it and act on it, or to be protected from knowledge so terrible that it can render us senseless, numb, paralyzed, without hope? If our parents and elders told us awful truths, would that destroy our trust in them, our ability to see them as role models, as exemplars of our moral compass, or would it cause that trust to deepen, a conspiracy of transparency and honesty without bounds? Would it weaken us or make us stronger, sensitize and mobilize us, or demobilize and disengage us? Five years ago we had a new, environmental decking put around our swimming pool. The contractor was Italian and the head of his work crew was second-generation Chinese Canadian, but the other five crew members were all new Canadians who spoke virtually no English. As soon as the contractor and foreman were out of sight, work stopped — whenever I looked out the window I could see no sign of the crew. At first I just lamented the lack of progress to the contractor, but when that didn’t change anything I decided to go out myself and see what was happening. As regular readers know, we live on protected wetlands, and the low-lying half of ‘our’ property must be kept in (as near as is possible in any developed area) wilderness state. I heard the crew screaming at each other, and the sound of running through the underbrush, down by the shore of one of our ponds. When I called out to them, they all froze — no sound, no movement. They were waiting for me to leave. I waded down through the brush and told the first crew member I found to come up to the driveway. He called the others and followed me. The crew came up, two of them with hand-made snares in hand — they were hunting for foxes, muskrats, any of the abundant and trusting wildlife they could find. One of the five spoke a little English and said they were on their ‘break’. I told him what they were doing was against the law and they could go to jail. I asked him why they were hunting, and he just shrugged and smiled. I was shaken, on the edge of tears. Instead, I spoke slowly and said the next time I noticed them not working I would call both the contractor and the police, and walked away. From then on the work was completed promptly. I tried to put it out of my mind. It became my dark secret. I didn’t want to tell anyone. What good would it do? It would just get others as upset as I was. I didn’t understand their behaviour anyway, so there seemed no lesson to be learned from it. I just wanted to forget it, to pretend it had never happened. Although I would not in any sense equate this experience with the more serious traumas that people face everyday, it gave me a sense for why the victims of trauma go into a kind of shock, denial, self-belittlement, as if they were somehow complicit in the crime committed against them, in the conspiracy of silence that follows. What would happen if, instead of the fraudulent, manipulative, humiliating, scripted crap that passes for ‘reality TV’, the networks were to broadcast some real reality: A hidden camera in a crackhouse, an animal laboratory, a prison, the bedroom of an abused spouse or child, a factory farm, a village in Darfur, a forced labour camp in China, a nursing home for the poor, a back alley or underpass in any poor part of any city in the world. What would we see, what truths would we learn, and how would it change the way we see the world? Would it change our definition of what it means to be a ’survivor’? Would it change our definition of courage? Would it rise us from our complacency, or instead drive us to use the channel changer to flee the horror it revealed? If there is nothing we can do, here, now, after the fact, in the absence of any imaginable human solution, what purpose can be served by showing ussuch truths? To Lane’s question What good comes out of the past? should we add What good comes out of the truth, if it is beyond our imagination or power to act on it? |
