Your Own Personal Workstation

I have been grappling with the issue of designing fitting, comfortable, and effective personal information ecology since...forever. Certainly since the late 1980s. I have been through all the PIMs, the outliners, the groupware -- REXX-driven TSRs, OCR-driven text input with ZyIndexing, and the like. More recently I've been dealing with all the web-driven tools -- the blogs and Wiki and so forth; SharePoint and LAMP and so on. It's all been...vaguely dissatisfying. Why?
On one hand I am being harsh, and that harshness points at something that's missing. At the same time, I should be thrilled with what I have -- I do have a personal workstation. By using Google Desktop search, all the text, e-mail -- everything on my system is accessible. Through a "broadband" cable modem connection, I can link to practically any information source on a global basis, and have the server end generally be the constrained resource. But at the same time, as I think about what it would take to craft a more amenable access to point into a person information ecology, I encounter the modern malaise -- too many choices and not enough guidance.
Let's get consultative about this: First and foremost, what is the desired end-state? At the end of the day, what's the desire outcome -- what do you (I) want to have in hand? The first thought that occurs is that I want to be fed. And interesting analogy, and one that has certainly has been dwelled on and dealt with, certainly with the emergence of RSS. But as sophisticated and the web can be spun to feed things to me, and even with he possibility of applying collaborative filtering to my meta-feed stream, it's still a situation where I need to proactively interact with the random and variable information universe out there in a and associative-bordering-on-random fashion. I need to find, then bring back into my environment , some item of interest. Now that item of interest may provoke connection to others, but there is still a linearity; it isn't really "as we may think" because, I think, there is a lot more to how we think, and how we construct connection, than what can be modeled in a 2-d system.

I want a system that keeps all my concerns in a whole and complete fashion. This involves the element of design; I will always been upgrading, tweaking, recontextualizing, and reconnectiong all the various elements on a constant basis, but I want to, at the end of the day, feel confident that all my bases are covered. I don't see any way to get that now. In my mind I can invent some of the necessary, evolutionary pieces -- I think. But it’s hard. The design language isn't quite there. Right now, I feel constrained by the 2-dimensionality of current approaches. That's why I'm working on a 3-d approach that's built on the backbone of existing technologies, but which guides and evolves the user experience toward the world as it is evolving, rather than stuck in the 2-d world as it has been for the past 60 years

Actually I think I will work up a requirements document for the personal information ecology. This is progress.

The power of Us

Last Week's Business Week featured a cover article about the new economic order emerging from the power of widespread collaboration and consumer empowerment. We have indeed arrived at Alvin' Toffler's "prosumer" -- the lines between production and consumption have totally blurred.
I finished reading Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind". Finished it more-or-less in one sitting. Well written, and Pink did an admirable job of personalizing the processes he suggests as ways to achieve left/right brain integration. His core tenet -- that the emerging creative society (what I'd call the Design Service Society" in oriented much more around "right brain" traits and activities. It's an interesting thesis, and he runs with it. The book is worth it if only for the Portfolio sections which are full of references. The website contains updated references and info.
What I'm seeing is the emergence into reality of the concepts I thought and wrote about in the first third of the 90's. It's all developing the way I foresaw it. While it's easy to say that a lot of people foresaw the emergence of a collaborative prosumer paradigm, fewer saw the importance of design (Don Norman, Steve Jobs). And their focus on design is a second-order effect -- it was more a capitalization on the value of design, not recognition of the shift toward a societal restructuring around servicing design. Target has nailed it in terms of the impact on the Zeitgeist, although I don't see too many people (beside Pink who does so somewhat more obliquely, as his focus is on the personal ecology of design, and not the societal impact)

The Design Service Economy (redux)

Reading this article in MyDD brought to mind an old notion that I’ve had that needs updating. I look back to some of the decade-old material I wrote for the Encapsulations newsletter, and realize that a lot of what we talked about then has come to pass in terms of build-out of infrastructure (large-scale adoption of computers, wide availability of relatively broadband service), the polity has not shifted into a mode that allows people to operate as agents in a design service economy – an economy based around taking advantage of the American capacity to generate nuance – new interpretation, new meanings, and then to generate the appropriate, just-in-time-delivered artifacts that pertain to perceived needs. The political powers-that-be are completely committed to a nation of weave slave-dom. They are dependent on the stream of payroll taxes paid by wage earners. But what if large swathes of the people operating in the economy suddenly constituted themselves as free agents? Imagine people constituting themselves as businesses, plugging their efforts into a matrix of income earning activities? What if the people really did own the means of production – that it was what’s between their ears, and that capacity to think is transformed into value by virtue of the capacity of the network?

The counter-argument to this runs to the common question “In an unlimited world, who kills the pig?”; that is to say, who does the grubby, non-intellectual, non-connected work in the society? My answer is: we all do. As I look into the future, there’s not doubt that the factory farming food production system put in place in this country will come increasingly untenable, given how dependent it is on petroleum. Others cover this better than I, but in a design service economy, people’s lives and livelihoods will be more varied, and there will need to be time to tend to food production and gathering at a local level, in a much more diversified and integrated way. (This topic calls for infinitely more research and development – the key points being that much of what is considered as work that people don’t want to do, when sufficiently demassified, becomes the work of the community. Again, much more needs to be worked out about this.

But imagine a world in which all people see themselves as full-enabled participants in the networked economy – free agents who recognize that their capacity to create some new, unique perception will give them the capacity to realize value as a result of their efforts. Each person contributing, each person connected.

I think the Democrat party needs to evolve toward a leadership model where the President is a super systems integrator. Somebody with the vision to address the needs of an emerging society where each person is not seen as a taxpayer, bound to the state by their payroll dedication, but as true free agents operating in new and novel ways to maximize the freedom value they experience personally which is, by definition, maximized by access to contributing to the whole of society. What is the necessary platform for integrating people in this way?

I can certainly say that very little of what exists as a platform is oriented toward this happening. The first impediment – seemingly intractable – is the very dependency of the US government on wage taxes. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the government and its various abetting agents and agencies have conformed the structure of the society to force people into relationships where the government automatically captures a substantial portion of the individual’s income. This system is patently inefficient; on the other side of the dependency is the political aristocracy that funnels these revenues into directions that it sees fit. This implies a large-scale disconnection between labor and its value. (Yes I’m self-conscious about using Marxist language, but the analytical integrity holds.) In a scenario where people are no longer locked into the wage tax model, and are free to constitute themselves as independent enterprisers, the addict’s supply is suddenly wrenched away. In this model, individuals collect all their income first, make decisions about its distribution, make investments in their own productive capacity, and then pay the government its due. In this case, people get to maximize their overall productive capacity of their network by investment in personal, family, and community resources. By so doing, they raise the overall income base. And, they demand an infrastructure that allows the nation to solidify and extend its competitive advantage in productive work. Further, in conjunction with the demassification of many of society’s “chore tasks”, each person will participate in a constant variety of productive efforts, which will add to their capacity to create nuance through the sheer multiplication of experiences.

What I present here is my own formulation of ideas that have been expounded on across the spectrum of thinkers and pundits. What’s been missing, as far as I’ve been able to discern, is a political tongue facile enough with these concepts to speak to people – to address the concerns that they actually do face, even if they have not overtly spoken about them. This is about real leadership for the future – and building a platform that brings cohesion to it all. Does it attack some of the most reliable Democratic allies – specifically unions? Well it would seem to, on the face of it. But the specific policy directions that building out such as vision implies actually present an opportunity for unions to achieve some of their long-sought-after agenda: universal health care access, educational equality, and the capacity to coordinate people’s lifelong expansion as productive agents.

The Design Service Economy is already here. Where people can plug into it and exchange their efforts by generating nuance, they are profiting. The political and economic infrastructure to support it are not yet in place, and there is little sign that anyone in a position of power has any more than a fleeting recognition of the fact that it is the prevailing model for competitive advantage in this country. The important recognition is that we need to enable all 295,000,000 people in this country to participate in it, and we need to do it quickly. Recognition is the first step.

Real Musical Diversity?

I attended two concerst over the weekend. On Friday I saw Aimee Mann at the McCarter Theater in Princeton. Last night I saw Dick Dale, King of Surf Guitar, at the North Star, in Philadlephia. Enjoyed both shows immensely. Indeed theses two artists reflect a certain diversity of tatste, but the diversity I've been pondering is the total racial segregation I observed at these two shows. In fact, I become conscious of it almost every time I go to a show -- occasionally there are soem black people at shows I attend, and certainly you can expect diversity at a jazz show, for example, but the diffusion of music away from a monolithic mainstream has led to some unexpected and (I think) kind of depressing outcomes.

Why am I thnking about this? I guess it's a concern that left to my own homeostasis that I will drift toward segregated entertainment events, or so it would seem. I live 7 miles from the center of a large, racially diverse urban area, I consider myself socailly liberal and realtively open-minded, yet I have isolated myself from a more diverse racial experience. And I think it's not right, but I don't know what to do about it.

Finger Exercises

U had fun yesterday rebuilding a toilet. I had so much fun, in fact, that I may do it again today (well maybe not today, but tomorrow for sure.)
I don't consider myself to be handy. In fact, I'm pretty far from handy. Witness the fact that I made six trips to Home Depot yesterday. That's right, six trips. All I knew is that the toilet downstairs never stopped running and needed fixing. First I thought it was the float ball and arm -- I first tried adjusting, to no avail, then I decided to replace the ball and arm (trip one). No good -- didn't work. So it's obviously something with the valve component that fills the toilet. So off to Home Depot again (trip 2) for a new valve. I picked out he least expensive valve I could find, a FluidMaster 400A. Brought it home to discover there were no instructions in side. This should have been a tip-off that something was awry with this particular package. But I'm a modern guy, if there's some piece of information I need, I go to the Internet, and within a minute I have the instruction sheet downloaded. Of course this PDF is set up for 8.5x11 printing, so when I print it, the instructions are in about 5 pt type. I'm suddenly becoming very conscious of my eyesight slipping.
So I open the patient up, drain all the water, and begin the operation. The first thing is to disconnect the toilet flush handle. As soon as I grasp it, the end of the arm disintegrates in my hand. Off to Home Depot for a new handle (trip 3). Return with the handle. Continue the disassembly, then begin the installation. When I get the new valve installed, I see that the supply line in to the toilet won't work with the new valve, and in fact the directions very plainly state that you shouldn't use the old feed line fitting. So it's off to Home Depot for a new supply line (trip #4 -- as an aside, the Home Depot is about 1.5 miles from my home. One traffic light. I guess that's why this wasn't as onerous as it sounds.) I select a new supply line, return home to complete the task and find that the valve package I bought is missing more than the directions; it's missing a crucial washer. So I take the 3/4-installed valve out, box it up, return it to Home Depot (trip #5). Now I have a complete package (with fully legible directions) and I see exactly how this thing is supposed to come together. I complete the installation, and with some minor tweaking, have a toilet that no longer leaks. Of course I had to return the float ball and arm to Home Depot for a refund (trip #6).
There are any number of ways in which this could be interpreted as ridiculous behavior. Particularly in the fact that I got in my car, started and drove that short distance, then drove back. And ecological disaster! Yet there's not accounting for it in that way (not directly, not yet), so I get away with it. It's truly toxic, but I was having fun -- I was learning, challenging myself and my assumptions about myself. I was driven by that immediate sense in the present, with a goal of not wasting water (certainly a positive on the ecological scale -- I read that a leaky toilet wasted enough water to fill a swimming pool in one year -- I believe it.)
I want to regain some of the ecological consciousness I had in the 80s, then lost. Like a lot of people, I think the ecological paradigm needs some rethinking, but the time to rework a lot of our daily practices fast approaches.

War is a Racket

Quite by accident yesterday, I discovered something about a name that I've seen since I was a kid, but I knew nothing about the person. On Route 420 in Delaware County, I 'm not sure what little town it's on -- it might by Holmes -- there's the General Smedley D. Butler US Marine Corps training center. I remember driving past there in 1973, when the Watergate hearings were on. I remember being somehow scared by the presence of a military installation -- this was but months after the formal "end" of the Vietnam war, and the country was tumbling into chaos over Watergate. At any rate, the other day I looked at my WinMX client, and one of the user names was Smedley Butler. I immediately googled him and the first link was this interesting piece. I don't think I ever expected a Marine General to write so candidly about his perceptions. He affirms the lesson that all may know, but so few seem to really take to heart -- war is about profit. It is about how the few manipulate the many to believe their cause is just so that the few can make enormous profits. Period. End of story.
Quite a character. Brings to mind Wesley Clark today. Somebody who knows the real deal. Although the times are different, it's time somebody steps forward and tells the truth.

Success (!?)

I think I finally have wrestled Blogger into submission. That was, quite literally, my experience. I had to fight with this thing, and we were inflicting damage on each other. Well certainly some damage was inflicted on me. My heart rate is till elevated from the seemingly useless effort I had to exert to get this blog established at the address that I wanted it, with no duplication. Part of it was my own fault (typo in the original URL) but the way in which the Blogger dashboard presents information -- it's hard to tell what's what. Oh well, that's what learning is all about. Remaking neuronal pathways -- it's rarely pleasant.

I was playing this morning with LinkedIn . I had a very visceral experience of the power of social networks -- 14,000 contacts. And I have invested zero in proactively generating this. Now I'm turning it into an experiment -- see where it goes.

It looks like I'm moving closer to getting a job offer. If this pulls through this way, it's nothing short of miraculous. That would be success! Of course this morning I was having so much fun with job hunting that I didn't want to to end. I also found SimplyHired, which is also very cool -- really what I've been looking for. The job search process certainly isn't what it used to be.