Group items tagged

the bell curve described the wealth and income distribution of American society

As the technology boom of the 1990s increased productivity, many assumed that the rising water level of the economy was raising all those middle class boats. But a different phenomenon has also occurred. The wealthy have gained substantially over the past two decades while the middle class has remained stagnant in real income, and the poor are simply poorer.

America is turning into a power-curve society: one where there are a relative few at the top and a gradually declining curve with a long tail of relatively poorer people.

For the first time since the end of World War II, the middle class is apparently doing worse, not better, than previous generations.

an alarming trend

What is the role of technology in these developments?

a sweeping look at the relationship between innovation and productivity

New Economy of Personal Information

Power-Curve Society

the future of jobs

the report covers the social, policy and leadership implications of the “Power-Curve Society,”

World Wide Web

as businesses struggle to come to terms with this revolution, a new set of structural innovations is washing over businesses, organizations and government, forcing near-constant adaptation and change. It is no exaggeration to say that the explosion of innovative technologies and their dense interconnections is inventing a new kind of economy.

the new technologies are clearly driving economic growth and higher productivity, the distribution of these benefits is skewed in worrisome ways.

the networked economy seems to be producing a “power-curve” distribution, sometimes known as a “winner-take-all” economy

Economic and social insecurity is widespread.

major component of this new economy, Big Data, and the coming personal data revolution fomenting beneath it that seeks to put individuals, and not companies or governments, at the forefront. Companies in the power-curve economy rely heavily on big databases of personal information to improve their marketing, product design, and corporate strategies. The unanswered question is whether the multiplying reservoirs of personal data will be used to benefit individuals as consumers and citizens, or whether large Internet companies will control and monetize Big Data for their private gain.

Why are winner-take-all dynamics so powerful?

appear to be eroding the economic security of the middle class

A special concern is whether information and communications technologies are actually eliminating more jobs than they are creating—and in what countries and occupations.

How is the power-curve economy opening up opportunities or shutting them down?

Is it polarizing income and wealth distributions? How is it changing the nature of work and traditional organizations and altering family and personal life?

many observers fear a wave of social and political disruption if a society’s basic commitments to fairness, individual opportunity and democratic values cannot be honored

what role government should play in balancing these sometimes-conflicting priorities. How might educational policies, research and development, and immigration policies need to be altered?

The Innovation Economy

Conventional economics says that progress comes from new infusions of capital, whether financial, physical or human. But those are not necessarily the things that drive innovation

What drives innovation are new tools and then the use of those new tools in new ways.”

at least 50 percent of the acceleration of productivity over these years has been due to ICT

economists have developed a number of proxy metrics for innovation, such as research and development expenditures.

Atkinson believes that economists both underestimate and overestimate the scale and scope of innovation.

Calculating the magnitude of innovation is also difficult because many innovations now require less capital than they did previously.

Others scholars

see innovation as going in cycles, not steady trajectories.

A conventional approach is to see innovation as a linear, exponential phenomenon

leads to gross errors

Atkinson

believes that technological innovation follows the path of an “S-curve,” with a gradual increase accelerating to a rapid, steep increase, before it levels out at a higher level. One implication of this pattern, he said, is that “you maximize the ability to improve technology as it becomes more diffused.” This helps explain why it can take several decades to unlock the full productive potential of an innovation.

innovation keeps getting harder. It was pretty easy to invent stuff in your garage back in 1895. But the technical and scientific challenges today are huge.”

costs of innovation have plummeted, making it far easier and cheaper for more people to launch their own startup businesses and pursue their unconventional ideas

innovation costs are plummeting

Atkinson conceded such cost-efficiencies, but wonders if “the real question is that problems are getting more complicated more quickly than the solutions that might enable them.

we may need to parse the different stages of innovation: “The cost of innovation generally hasn’t dropped,” he argued. “What has become less expensive is the replication and diffusion of innovation.”

what is meant by “innovation,”

“invention plus implementation.”

A lot of barriers to innovation can be found in the lack of financing, organizational support systems, regulation and public policies.

90 percent of innovation costs involve organizational capital,”

there is a serious mismatch between the pace of innovation unleashed by Moore’s Law and our institutional and social capacity to adapt.

This raises the question of whether old institutions can adapt—or whether innovation will therefore arise through other channels entirely. “Existing institutions are often run by followers of conventional wisdom,”

The best way to identify new sources of innovation, as Arizona State University President Michael Crow has advised, is to “go to the edge and ignore the center.”

Paradoxically, one of the most potent barriers to innovation is the accelerating pace of innovation itself.

Institutions and social practice cannot keep up with the constant waves of new technologies

“We are moving into an era of constant instability,”

“and the half-life of a skill today is about five years.”

Part of the problem, he continued, is that our economy is based on “push-based models” in which we try to build systems for scalable efficiencies, which in turn demands predictability.

The real challenge is how to achieve radical institutional innovations that prepare us to live in periods of constant two- or three-year cycles of change. We have to be able to pick up new ideas all the time.”

pace of innovation is a major story in our economy today.

The App Economy consists of a core company that creates and maintains a platform (such as Blackberry, Facebook or the iPhone), which in turn spawns an ecosystem of big and small companies that produce apps and/or mobile devices for that platform

tied this success back to the open, innovative infrastructure and competition in the U.S. for mobile devices

standard

The App Economy illustrates the rapid, fluid speed of innovation in a networked environment

crowdsourcing model

winning submissions are

globally distributed in an absolute sense

problem-solving is a global, Long Tail phenomenon

As a technical matter, then, many of the legacy barriers to innovation are falling.

small businesses are becoming more comfortable using such systems to improve their marketing and lower their costs; and, vast new pools of personal data are becoming extremely useful in sharpening business strategies and marketing.

Another great boost to innovation in some business sectors is the ability to forge ahead without advance permission or regulation,

“In bio-fabs, for example, it’s not the cost of innovation that is high, it’s the cost of regulation,”

This notion of “permissionless innovation” is crucial,

“In Europe and China, the law holds that unless something is explicitly permitted, it is prohibited. But in the U.S., where common law rather than Continental law prevails, it’s the opposite

find new ways of efficiency

arbitration between efficiency and care

a global thinking of the problem

Fighting the attention and desire resource shortage: stoping to use advertisement?

The question is rather here to think the moderation of the psychopower

empower transindividuation, i.e. to make sure that an economic activity creates more possibilities of individuation than it tend to destroy by attempting to capture attention and canalize motivation in a funnel. Empower transindividuation would imply to empowering actors of their own lifestyle, winning back the savoir-vivre prescribing production

Should marketing stop using psychopower?

marketing ethics guidelines

transactions are more likely to be morally defensible if both parties enter it freely and fully informed

the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace

putting freedom as a criteria of morality

the industrial use of pycho- and neuropower tend to fall under the category of barriers to freedom

neurotechniques – to capture the attention

psychotechniques – to attempt to create motivation

Most people think commercials are a small price to pay for these benefits

advertising

denying the schemes of addiction and the fact that we are becoming through the objects of attentions

right to avoid attention capture by advertising

progress made in cognitive sciences proving that

reward system being abnormally stimulated

Advertisements exploit

vulnerability and reinforce their overconsumption behaviors

“if food advertising on TV were banned, significant reductions in the prevalence of childhood obesity are possible.” (Veerman et al. 2009)

What is at stake falls to be much more complex than the sole Freedom of Speech invoked for the advertiser

liberty of non-reception

would mean to guaranty every citizen the right to choose where and when he wants to access the advertising information

Change in the industrial and commercial paradigm

Economy of contribution and peer production

An economy of contribution means that users of a service are contributing to the production of these services.

example

is open-source software that are contributively build by potentially hundreds of developers organized in communities

minimize the gap between the producer and consumer

blur the frontier between professionals and amateurs

The Copernican revolution of the Vendor Relationship Management paradigm

change in the commercial paradigm, described as an Intention Economy i.e. the opposite of the Attention Economy

consumers are charged to express and discuss their intention

with businesses rather than the usual paradigm in which businesses where fighting for a piece of canalized motivation

Implementing such a system would nevertheless imply that marketing departments dispose of a system in which they could value their supplies and where they could be easily found by customers. Doc Searls promotes his answer to this issue: the Vendor Relationship Management system.

the belief that free customers are more valuable than captive ones — to themselves, to vendors, and to the larger economy.

To be free

1. Customers must enter relationships with vendors as independent actors.

2. Customers must be the points of integration for their own data.

3. Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.

4. Customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement.

5. Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one company’s control.

This is a profoundly game-changing approach

big data that is the rush for consumers’ information potentially leading to the same dead-end of attention destruction and affective saturation than the former offline paradigm

VRM system working as a marketplace

the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace

less imperfect and less biased information in a cultural context overvaluing transparency, and a bigger atomicity due to the hereafter introduced trend for re-localized peer production.

3.2.2.3 VRM and externalization of the socialization process

Promoting the end of advertisement

means to find a new way to make the information circulate, what was the primary goal of advertisement

Until there is no alternative to massive advertisement campaign for the information circulation, it is indeed hard to ask entrepreneurs and managers to get rid of those successors of propaganda: such a transition process necessarily imply adaptation costs from the producer and the consumer side, and possible competitive disadvantage against competitors still maximizing profit through advertisement means

But the internet transformation of the general organology offers new way to think information circuits and potentially constitute an opportunity to externalize the socialization process of products that is to empower citizen-consumers organized in communities

Empowering groups of citizen doesn’t annihilate the risks of mis-use or counterproductive interest-taker behaviors but a well-designed system of trust between peers could minimize this risk by creating a dependency to what social capital other peers give you, as it is happening in the sharing economy: the credibility of a contributive peer would be guaranteed through what the P2P Foundation calls Feedback systems and peer-police

a strong structuration of products characteristics, allowing customers to personalize their choices according to their desire and constraints: such a “VRM+” system

Marketing would then be the art of being as high as possible in this ranking, as it is happening in SEO for search engines, but in this context of criteria explosion, marketing would then be the disciple of listening to customers’ wishes and aspiration needing an attention, in order to kick in the production or to adapt the following series.

3.2.2.4 Toward a possible equi-power

Such a system would tremendously re-configure the balance of power and tend toward a form of equi-power i.e. a social organization in which abuses of a “big” would be the potential object of a ranking sanction by the peers

self-regulative function

a form of economic Darwinism would let to conscious organization the right to curve their path toward a durable configuration in accordance with the social ecosystem.

the idea of equi-power is a form of homogenization of the social matter, in which the distortions in the balance of power would be compensated by the gathering of small forces sharing a common interest

Such a sanction systems, if successfully implemented, would make value-destructing businesses progressively decline and hopefully bankrupt,

long-term valuable strategic choice

long term satisfyingly high ranking

It would be utopic to think that the “being cool” marketing

would disappear, but marketers would have to make those two objectives compose together.

This social capital contagion is nevertheless a tool that would need to be controlled in its form of violence by extensive testings and iterations with forms of protections for the smallest peers, that is to say to keep this form of social violence to institutionalized, classic forms of businesses, clearly beyond the line of what should be acceptable in the global village.

the goal is here to create an artificial form of majority that is a self-censuring responsible behavior of corporations

we cannot actually see this in the figures for economic growth.

a problem of measurement. Of the way in which GDP itself is a useful but not complete measure.

certain uses of the internet actually reduce GDP: even while making us as individuals richer.

we’re measuring economic growth wrong.

We have managed to build an economy where trying something new has become increasingly difficult.

allowing the free aggregation of individuals around shared values or common value creation

a huge sociological shift

new life forms, social practices and human institutions

emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm

ethical revolution

openness

participation

inclusivity

cooperation

commons

the open content industry in the U.S. to reach one sixth of GDP.

political expressions

the movement has two wings

constructive

building new tools and practices

resistance to neoliberalism

we are at a stage of emergence

difficulty of implementing full p2p solutions in the current dominant system

At this stage, there is a co-dependency between peer producers creating value, and for-profit firms ‘capturing that value’, but they both need each other.

Peer producers need a business ecology to insure the social reproduction of their system and financial sustainability of its participants, and capital needs the positive externalities of social cooperation which flow from p2p collaboration.

peer producing communities should create their own ‘mission-oriented’ social businesses, so that the surplus value remains with the value creators, i.e. the commoners themselves, but this is hardly happening now.

Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other.

the horizontal meets the vertical

mostly hybrid ‘diagonal’ adaptations

For peer producers the question becomes, if we cannot create our own fully autonomous institutions, how can we adapt while maintaining maximum autonomy and sustainability as a commons and as a community.

Why p2p have failed to create successful alternatives in some areas?

In commons-oriented peer production, where people aggegrate around a common object which requires deep cooperation, they usually have their own infrastructures of cooperation and a ecology combining community, a for-benefit association managing the infrastructure, and for-profit companies operating on the market place; in the sharing economy, where individuals merely share their own expressions, third party platforms are the norm. It is clear that for-profit companies have different priorities, and want to enclose value so that it can be sold on the marketplace. This in fact the class struggle of the p2p era, the struggle between communities and corporations around various issues because of partly differential interests.

Even commercially controlled platforms are being used for a massive horizontalisation and self-aggregation of human relationships, and communities, including political and radical groups are effectively using them to mobilize. What’s important is not just to focus on the limitations and intentions of the platform owners, but to use whatever we can to strengthen the autonomy of peer communities.

requires a clever adaptation

use for our own benefit

The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create,

platforms that can easily and quickly offer services, creating network effects

without network effects, there is no ‘there’ there, just an empty potential platform.

p2p activists should work on both fronts

using mainstream platforms for spreading their ideas and culture and reach greater numbers of people, while also developing their own autonomous media ecologies, that can operate independently, and the latter is an engagement for the ‘long haul’, i.e. the slow construction of an alternative lifeworld.

The commons and p2p are really just different aspects of the same phenomena; the commons is the object that p2p dynamics are building; and p2p takes place wherever there are commons.

So both p2p and the commons, as they create abundant (digital) or sufficient (material) value for the commoners, at the same time create opportunities to create added value for the marketplace. There is no domain that is excluded from p2p, no field that can say, “we wouldn’t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamics”. And there is no p2p community that can say, we are in the long term fully sustainable within the present system, without extra resources coming from the market sector.

One trend is the distribution of current infrastructures and practices, i.e. introducing crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social lending, digital currencies, in order to achieve wider participation in current practices. That is a good thing, but not sufficient. All the things that I mention above, move to a distributed infrastructure, but do not change the fundamental logic of what they are doing.

we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.

No matter how good you are, no matter how much capital you have to hire the best people, you cannot compete with the innovative potential of open global communities.

the p2p dynamics

the new networked culture

the opposite is also happening, as we outlined above, more and more commons-oriented value communities are creating their own entrepreneurial coalitions. Of course, some type of companies, because of their monopoly positions and legacy systems, may have a very difficult time undergoing that adaptation, in which case new players will appear that can do it more effectively.

the corporate form is unable to deal with ecological and sustainability issues, because its very DNA, the legal obligation to enrich the shareholders, makes its strive to lower input costs,  and ignore externalities.

we need new corporate structures, a new type of market entity, for which profit is a means, but not an end, dedicated to a ‘benefit‘, a ‘mission’, or the sustenance of a particular community and/or commons.

abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets

open design community

will inherently design for sustainability

for inclusion

conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing

entrepreneurs attaching themselves to open design projects start working from an entirely different space, even if they still use the classic corporate form. Prevent the sharing of sustainability designs through IP monopolies is also in my view unethical and allowing such patents should be a minimalist option, not a maximalist one.

The high road scenario proposes an enlightened government that ‘enables and empowers’ social production and value creation and allows a much smoother transition to p2p models; the low road scenario is one in which no structural reforms take place, the global situation descends into various forms of chaos, and p2p becomes a survival and resilience tactic in extremely difficult social, political and economic circumstances.

accelerated end of capitalism

Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!

I don’t really think in terms of technological breakthroughs, because the essential one, globally networked collective intelligence enabled by the internetworks, is already behind us; that is the major change, all other technological breakthroughs will be informed by this new social reality of the horizontalisation of our civilisation. The important thing now is to defend and extend our communication and organisation rights, against a concerted attempt to turn back the clock. While the latter is really an impossibility, this does not mean that the attempts by governments and large corporations cannot create great harm and difficulties. We need p2p technology to enable the global solution finding and implementation of the systemic crises we are facing.

gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism

innovation is the new selfishness

mastery of public relations

making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject

memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.

“Open source software” was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O’Reill

It’s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source software before 1998; the concept’s seeming contemporary coherence is the result of clever manipulation and marketing.

ideological cleavage between two groups

Richard Stallman

Free Software Foundation, preoccupied with ensuring that users had rights with respect to their computer programs. Those rights weren’t many—users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public

“free software.”

association with “freedom” rather than “free beer”

copyleft

profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.

Plenty of developers contributed to “free software” projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills.

Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types

he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association

By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outlet—the Open Source Initiative—and brought in O’Reilly to help them rebrand.

“open source”

The label “open source” may have been new, but the ideas behind it had been in the air for some time.

In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda

This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined.

extremely decentralized manner, using Internet platforms, with little central coordination.

In contrast to free software, then, open source had no obvious moral component.

“open source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. It’s an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results

While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.

Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate

O’Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for O’Reilly books and events

The coup succeeded. Stallman’s project was marginalized. But O’Reilly and his acolytes didn’t win with better arguments; they won with better PR.

A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, O’Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform.

much of Stallman’s efforts centered on software licenses

O’Reilly’s bet wa

the “cloud”

licenses would cease to matter

Since no code changed hands

So what did matter about open source? Not “freedom”

O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied.

the freedom of the producer

who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics.

The most important freedom,

is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”

O’Reilly opposed this agenda: “I completely support the right of Richard [Stallman] or any individual author to make his or her work available under the terms of the GPL; I balk when they say that others who do not do so are doing something wrong.”

The right thing to do, according to O’Reilly, was to leave developers alone.

According to this Randian interpretation of open source, the goal of regulation and public advocacy should be to ensure that absolutely nothing—no laws or petty moral considerations—stood in the way of the open source revolution

Any move to subject the fruits of developers’ labor to public regulation

must be opposed, since it would taint the reputation of open source as technologically and economically superior to proprietary software

the advent of the Internet made Stallman’s obsession with licenses obsolete

Many developers did stop thinking about licenses, and, having stopped thinking about licenses, they also stopped thinking about broader moral issues that would have remained central to the debates had “open source” not displaced “free software” as the paradigm du jour.

Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators likened the “openness” of open source software to the “openness” of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech.

“open to intellectual exchange”

“open to competition”

“For me, ‘open source’ in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the market”).

“Open” allowed O’Reilly to build the largest possible tent for the movement.

The language of economics was less alienating than Stallman’s language of ethics; “openness” was the kind of multipurpose term that allowed one to look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics

highlight the competitive advantages of openness.

the availability of source code for universal examination soon became the one and only benchmark of openness

What the code did was of little importance—the market knows best!—as long as anyone could check it for bugs.

The new paradigm was presented as something that went beyond ideology and could attract corporate executives without losing its appeal to the hacker crowd.

What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.

What they had in common was disdain for Stallman’s moralizing—barely enough to justify their revolutionary agenda, especially among the hacker crowds who were traditionally suspicious of anyone eager to suck up to the big corporations that aspired to dominate the open source scene.

linking this new movement to both the history of the Internet and its future

As long as everyone believed that “open source” implied “the Internet” and that “the Internet” implied “open source,” it would be very hard to resist the new paradigm

Telling a coherent story about open source required finding some inner logic to the history of the Internet

“If you believe me that open source is about Internet-enabled collaboration, rather than just about a particular style of software license,”

everything on the Internet was connected to everything else—via open source.

The way O’Reilly saw it, many of the key developments of Internet culture were already driven by what he called “open source behavior,” even if such behavior was not codified in licenses.

No moralizing (let alone legislation) was needed; the Internet already lived and breathed open source

apps might be displacing the browser

the openness once taken for granted is no more

Openness as a happenstance of market conditions is a very different beast from openness as a guaranteed product of laws.

One of the key consequences of linking the Internet to the world of open source was to establish the primacy of the Internet as the new, reinvented desktop

This is where the now-forgotten language of “freedom” made a comeback, since it was important to ensure that O’Reilly’s heroic Randian hacker-entrepreneurs were allowed to roam freely.

Soon this “freedom to innovate” morphed into “Internet freedom,” so that what we are trying to preserve is the innovative potential of the platform, regardless of the effects on individual users.

Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression

Forced to choose between preserving the freedom of the Internet or that of its users, we were supposed to choose the former—because “the Internet” stood for progress and enlightenment.

infoware

Yahoo

their value proposition lay in the information they delivered, not in the software function they executed.

The “infoware” buzzword didn’t catch on, so O’Reilly turned to the work of Douglas Engelbart

to argue that the Internet could help humanity augment its “collective intelligence” and that, once again, open source software was crucial to this endeavor.

Now it was all about Amazon learning from its customers and Google learning from the sites in its index.

The idea of the Internet as both a repository and incubator of “collective intelligence”

in 2004, O’Reilly and his business partner Dale Dougherty hit on the idea of “Web 2.0.” What did “2.0” mean, exactly?

he primary goal was to show that the 2001 market crash did not mean the end of the web and that it was time to put the crash behind us and start learning from those who survived.

Tactically, “Web 2.0” could also be much bigger than “open source”; it was the kind of sexy umbrella term that could allow O’Reilly to branch out from boring and highly technical subjects to pulse-quickening futurology

O’Reilly couldn’t improve on a concept as sexy as “collective intelligence,” so he kept it as the defining feature of this new phenomenon.

What set Web 2.0 apart from Web 1.0, O’Reilly claimed, was the simple fact that those firms that didn’t embrace it went bust

find a way to harness collective intelligence and make it part of their business model.

By 2007, O’Reilly readily admitted that “Web 2.0 was a pretty crappy name for what’s happening.”

O’Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan, running events with titles like “Gov 2.0” and “Where 2.0.” Today, as everyone buys into the 2.0 paradigm, O’Reilly is quietly dropping it

assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances

Take O’Reilly’s musings on “Enterprise 2.0.” What is it, exactly? Well, it’s the same old enterprise—for all we know, it might be making widgets—but now it has learned something from Google and Amazon and found a way to harness “collective intelligence.”

tendency to redescribe reality in terms of Internet culture, regardless of how spurious and tenuous the connection might be, is a fine example of what I call “Internet-centrism.”

“Open source” gave us the “the Internet,” “the Internet” gave us “Web 2.0,” “Web 2.0” gave us “Enterprise 2.0”: in this version of history, Tim O’Reilly is more important than the European Union

For Postman, each human activity—religion, law, marriage, commerce—represents a distinct “semantic environment” with its own tone, purpose, and structure. Stupid talk is relatively harmless; it presents no threat to its semantic environment and doesn’t cross into other ones.

Since it mostly consists of falsehoods and opinions

it can be easily corrected with facts

to say that Tehran is the capital of Iraq is stupid talk

Crazy talk, in contrast, challenges a semantic environment, as it “establishes different purposes and assumptions from those we normally accept.” To argue, as some Nazis did, that the German soldiers ended up far more traumatized than their victims is crazy talk.

For Postman, one of the main tasks of language is to codify and preserve distinctions among different semantic environments.

As he put it, “When language becomes undifferentiated, human situations disintegrate: Science becomes indistinguishable from religion, which becomes indistinguishable from commerce, which becomes indistinguishable from law, and so on.

pollution

Some words—like “law”—are particularly susceptible to crazy talk, as they mean so many different things: from scientific “laws” to moral “laws” to “laws” of the market to administrative “laws,” the same word captures many different social relations. “Open,” “networks,” and “information” function much like “law” in our own Internet discourse today.

For Korzybski, the world has a relational structure that is always in flux; like Heraclitus, who argued that everything flows, Korzybski believed that an object A at time x1 is not the same object as object A at time x2

Our language could never properly account for the highly fluid and relational structure of our reality—or as he put it in his most famous aphorism, “the map is not the territory.”

Korzybski argued that we relate to our environments through the process of “abstracting,” whereby our neurological limitations always produce an incomplete and very selective summary of the world around us.

nothing harmful in this per se—Korzybski simply wanted to make people aware of the highly selective nature of abstracting and give us the tools to detect it in our everyday conversations.

Korzybski developed a number of mental tools meant to reveal all the abstracting around us

He also encouraged his followers to start using “etc.” at the end of their statements as a way of making them aware of their inherent inability to say everything about a given subject and to promote what he called the “consciousness of abstraction.”

There was way too much craziness and bad science in Korzybski’s theories

but his basic question

“What are the characteristics of language which lead people into making false evaluations of the world around them?”

Tim O’Reilly is, perhaps, the most high-profile follower of Korzybski’s theories today.

O’Reilly openly acknowledges his debt to Korzybski, listing Science and Sanity among his favorite books

It would be a mistake to think that O’Reilly’s linguistic interventions—from “open source” to “Web 2.0”—are random or spontaneous.

There is a philosophy to them: a philosophy of knowledge and language inspired by Korzybski. However, O’Reilly deploys Korzybski in much the same way that the advertising industry deploys the latest findings in neuroscience: the goal is not to increase awareness, but to manipulate.

O’Reilly, of course, sees his role differently, claiming that all he wants is to make us aware of what earlier commentators may have overlooked. “A metaphor is just that: a way of framing the issues such that people can see something they might otherwise miss,

But Korzybski’s point, if fully absorbed, is that a metaphor is primarily a way of framing issues such that we don’t see something we might otherwise see.

In public, O’Reilly modestly presents himself as someone who just happens to excel at detecting the “faint signals” of emerging trends. He does so by monitoring a group of überinnovators that he dubs the “alpha geeks.” “The ‘alpha geeks’ show us where technology wants to go. Smart companies follow and support their ingenuity rather than trying to suppress it,

His own function is that of an intermediary—someone who ensures that the alpha geeks are heard by the right executives: “The alpha geeks are often a few years ahead of their time. . . . What we do at O’Reilly is watch these folks, learn from them, and try to spread the word by writing down (

The name of his company’s blog—O’Reilly Radar—is meant to position him as an independent intellectual who is simply ahead of his peers in grasping the obvious.

“the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think”

As Web 2.0 becomes central to everything, O’Reilly—the world’s biggest exporter of crazy talk—is on a mission to provide the appropriate “context” to every field.

In a fascinating essay published in 2000, O’Reilly sheds some light on his modus operandi.

The thinker who emerges there is very much at odds with the spirit of objectivity that O’Reilly seeks to cultivate in public

meme-engineering lets us organize and shape ideas so that they can be transmitted more effectively, and have the desired effect once they are transmitted

O’Reilly meme-engineers a nice euphemism—“meme-engineering”—to describe what has previously been known as “propaganda.”

how one can meme-engineer a new meaning for “peer-to-peer” technologies—traditionally associated with piracy—and make them appear friendly and not at all threatening to the entertainment industry.

O’Reilly and his acolytes “changed the canonical list of projects that we wanted to hold up as exemplars of the movement,” while also articulating what broader goals the projects on the new list served. He then proceeds to rehash the already familiar narrative: O’Reilly put the Internet at the center of everything, linking some “free software” projects like Apache or Perl to successful Internet start-ups and services. As a result, the movement’s goal was no longer to produce a completely free, independent, and fully functional operating system but to worship at the altar of the Internet gods.

Could it be that O’Reilly is right in claiming that “open source” has a history that predates 1998?

Seen through the prism of meme-engineering, O’Reilly’s activities look far more sinister.

His “correspondents” at O’Reilly Radar don’t work beats; they work memes and epistemes, constantly reframing important public issues in accordance with the templates prophesied by O’Reilly.

Or take O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts around cyberwarfare.

Now, who stands to benefit from “cyberwarfare” being defined more broadly? Could it be those who, like O’Reilly, can’t currently grab a share of the giant pie that is cybersecurity funding?

Frank Luntz lists ten rules of effective communication: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context.

Thus, O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts usually result in “meme maps,” where the meme to be defined—whether it’s “open source” or “Web 2.0”—is put at the center, while other blob-like terms are drawn as connected to it.

The exact nature of these connections is rarely explained in full, but this is all for the better, as the reader might eventually interpret connections with their own agendas in mind. This is why the name of the meme must be as inclusive as possible: you never know who your eventual allies might be. “A big part of meme engineering is giving a name that creates a big tent that a lot of people want to be under, a train that takes a lot of people where they want to go,”

News April 4 mail date March 29, 2013 Baffler party March 6, 2013 Žižek on seduction February 13, 2013 More Recent Press I’ve Seen the Worst Memes of My Generation Destroyed by Madness io9, April 02, 2013 The Baffler’s New Colors Imprint, March 21, 2013

There is considerable continuity across O’Reilly’s memes—over time, they tend to morph into one another.