Rational-izing

I've said it before, Congressman Dennis Kucinich's proposal to place a 4% tax on stock transaction addresses the revenue side, while placing a necessary break on speculative behavior.
I also think we need to return to 50% plus marginal rates over $1 million. It's how we paid for WWII. It's the only option we have. Let's see the rich try to reallocate their assets to escape it now. If they leave, fuck them. But it will have a rationalizing effect on investment. And for the long term, that's what we need. We need to re-structure the financial system to provide jobs for people, to provide adequate services for people, rather than an upswirl of ephemera that in the end served nobody.

People used to make things

Ron Chernow in today's New York Times picks up what I hope will be a defining theme for the coming Obama administration. Getting back to making stuff again.

The Design Service Manifesto

The recent sturm und drang on wall Street and throughout the economy point to the fact that we are at an inflection point -- the point at which society's notions of what to do and how to do it are no longer adequate for this issues we face. Of course this isn't a new concern, but the degree to which the existing financial capitalism/lawyer capitalism model had ruptured; how the system's lack of integrity has been exposed; has been quite dramatic.

I reflect on the fact that only at the begining of my worklife was I involved with a venture that made something. That company made loose leaf binders. I didn't have anything to do with the actually making of the binders; I was the "information systems guy" and I facilitated the making of them; the scheduliong, costing, and overall management of the system. But that was the last time I had anything to do with making things -- my work has been to facilitate the movement of bits in the ether, or the pushing around of air molecules. It's not bad, or wrong, but it is ethereal. And certainly while that ethereality is part-and-parcel of functioning in the new millenium, there is, for me, a sense of simething missing. And inability yo point to any thing that is my legacy. Somehow this experience is out of line with my nature; I'm discomforted by it -- I'm called to make something, and then I bemoan the fact that i don't know what to make, and more despairingly, I don't know how to make anything.

Resolving this paradox, this sense of not knowing how to make things, is step one in delving into the design service society. Because designing is making.

Electioneering, Part I

I paid almost no attention to the 2000 election. I suppose I wrote Shrub off as a joke; I remember thinking "How stupid and desperate are the Republicans that they had to settle for this clown?"
I wasn't passionate about Gore and Lieberman further dampened any trailing enthusiasm I might have had. I recall the time now as being very busy with work and not having a lot of interest.
Then watching the election returns, when one of the networks called Florida for Gore, I saw a name and a face I'd never encountered: one Joe Allbaugh. He was on screaming "no way, we won Florida, we won Florida." I found his air of certainty puzzling and at a deep intuitive level I had the thought "the fix is in."
On 12/12/2000, I watched breathless reporters on the Supreme Court steps at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday reading the court ruling aloud, trying to parse it. When it was concluded that the Florida certification would stand, I had that same deep intuitive sense "we're in for 40 years of this shit/" The architecture of the "permanent majority" had been cemented in place.
The lesson, I suppose, is that I won't let myself be so unconscious again.

Detritus

In anticipation of moving, I'm reviewing all the old disks -- mostly application installs and the like -- that I've accumulated and saved through the years. I know that I've gone through a series of trash-outs in the past, but I'm surprised to find that I still have 5.25-inch disks, in addition to 3.5-inch disk, and CD-ROMs going back to gold disks of Windows '95.
The disks I'm interested in are the MaxThink -- Neil Larson's famous Hypertext processor from about 1991. I can recall his little ads in Byte and PC Magazine. i paid $100 for the software at a time when I didn't really have $100 to spend on software. Then I couldn't figure out how to use it, or at least use it effectively. More fool me.
I also have a copy of Lotus Agenda, another package that I think was too clever by a half. It
I've ruminated previously about the best way to dispose of this plastic and metal and toxic waste that it would be good to keep out of a landfill. I don't want to move this stuff, and I don't want to throw it in a landfill.

Remake, remodel

I found myself wishing and wanting like a little schoolgirl -- I want an information architecture that easily ties together all my disparate web entities and creations into a single flow. from joeraimondo.com to polyopticon.com to designanticipation.com. I want it all hosted in the same place and based on the same template. i want the ability to flow stuff into it and have it all managed. I want to be able to build out into other web properties like elance in order to establish a presence there.
It's a gestalt thing as my chiropractor said yesterday. I'm looking for the "How To" and it doesn't really exist.

Embracing the Green

I notice that a concern for being more ecologically sensitive is returning to my perspective. It disappeared some time during the mid-90's -- at a time when I began driving 50+ miles a day, every day, to a job in a suburban office park.
Why now? is it the impact of the "heightened awareness" of the media? That has an impact, no doubt.

Connecting the dots

Several weeks back I set up a MyBlogLogs account after reading about it in Nick Carr's the Big Switch. There I connected all--or most of my "Web 2.0" accounts. I don't know if they're accounts necessarily -- in some cases their just log-ins. By I (as always) find myself asking the meta-questions. Are all these steams convergent or divergent? My interest -- in cataloging and reviewing books, restaurants, my musical tasted, my interests in art or tech, my marginal propensity to bookmark -- all these separate elements certainly converge at me. But is the cataloging and expression of them a process that would be better served by a more streamlined interface? Likely so, but any didactic attempt to impose that structure would probably fail.

Changing work

For a long time -- certainly the past 15 years or so -- one of the main filters through which I have passed notions about technology development and adoption is the very simple notion of work. what is being done -- the ontology of work. It seems that most analysis of technology somehow omits the important consideration of what peolpe actually do in a productive mode. There's a strange level of abstraction that occurs that fails to examine the elemental nature of work; the conversation that it represents at an individual and group level.
This assertion isn't based on any empirical observation -- it's more a function of intuition. But I have very good intuition, and I'm thinking about this as a prelude to constructing a more formal research plan. But I think it's imperative that designers pick up the mantle of understanding work at a more granular level, not work as a disaggregated set of functions.

Awash in social media

I've been reading Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch which confirms many of the ideas and insights about technology development and adoption that I've had over the past 20 years. Of course that's why I read it. On the book, Carr describes the homogenizing effect of the information filters that we're able to develop using the Internet and all the various social media tools that have emerged in the past 5 years. Specifically his cites Nobel Economics laureate Thomas Schelling's work about the segregative strategy that's often at play --- people prefer to be around others they perceive as being like them. We develop elaborate and rational filters for the world that reinforce our own biases and perceptions.
At one point Carr discusses a theoretical "friend" whose passion is Classic Mustangs. Initially the friend tried to build a site from scratch which he attempted to host on a server he'd bought. Fast forward a few years and the friend established a Wordpress blog, then uses a set of "web 2.0" tools (e.g., Flickr, last.fm. Mybloglog, AdSense, etc.) to build a veritable portal dedicated to his passion -- one that he can then "monetize." Carr makes the point that a suitably motivated individual could build this sophisticated infrastructure in a matter of hours.
Carr referred to MyBlogLog with which I was unfamiliar. I established an account -- through my Yahoo! ID -- and set about to build a profile. When I saw the page with all the various social tools on it, I was a bit taken aback -- there are about 50 services listed. Then filled in the user info for each of the sites at which I have an account -- down the list I went, Blogger, del.icio.us, eBay, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, Yelp, etc. I started to get the depth of my engagement with all these tools; my own willingness to jump in a try things as soon as I come across them is evidently quite high. I'm pulled inexorably toward these tools and places -- media if you will. I don't have a strategy for organizing them -- yet. And that's the key insight -- maybe there is no strategy. Maybe everything is miscellaneous, and the better strategy derives from movement, despite being apparently random-and generating all manner of social artifacts, some of which will prove more valuable than others.

What you need when you need it

I approach writing this post in a somewhat lightheaded and dissolute mood. I have been re-reading some of my old newsletter articles and I'm once again swept away in the soaring rhetoric and aching ambition they embody. These were tirades written by somebody who "wants to be somebody." At the same time, I'm faced with the 2008 reality of domain parking sites -- I looked at meek.com and had to chuckle at the odd juxtaposition of links -- 3D avatars and Christian Singles. I had to chuckle again at the circular logic at play in these sites -- you're never actually going to get anywhere, but somewhere, somebody has a meter running and is collecting micropennies from your confusion. The cognitive dissonance I'm experiencing has some universal resoenance, I think.

Scrutableness

I was just reading the local political and community discussion group for the town that I live in. I find that no matter my best intentions about being a good local citizen, I can't find the depth of interest that it seems to take in order to be fully engaged. When the individuals are close to the action weigh-in on school budgeting, for example, it simply defies a cursory reading. It takes something of an involved experts eye, and I don't have that to contribute.
In a recent post, in fact, someone referred to the local school budgeting process as being inscrutable. The municipal political leadership and the school board have constructed a process that remains opaque and leaves open the various back doors for unaccountable behavior that extracts a premium from everyone.
I think I'm fortunate -- I live in a place where the citizenry really value education. I was fortunate to be able to educate my son in the local public schools, and for most part that was positive although I'm sure he might argue otherwise. He certainly bore the brunt of the snobbishness and cliquishness that dominates school culture. But it would have been so no matter where he went. Us-versus-them culture is just another of the unfortunate cultural artifacts that we're convinced is a natural phenomenon, despite the fact that it's abundantly clear if you study it that it's entirely a learned behavior. But that's a story for another blog entry, and likely for an entire book.
At any rate, this remark about the school budgeting process being "inscrutable" brought to mind David Gelernter's vision in Mirror Worlds when he discussed the possibility of individuals having access to all the information processing systems iin the universe, such as the sensory systems at a hospital. On one hand theres a certain Orwellian cast to having this kind of global transparency. But at the same time, if we are to confront the deep and significant privacy issues we confront as a result of both government action (which dictate that the flow be one-way) and more open and transparent systems 9which by definition demand two-way observability.) I can better deal with the fact that I am so widely observed if I have the capability to track back to all the individuals and units observing me. The certainly is not the current paradigm. The point is that transparency and openness are certainly not built into our civic structures -- hence the "inscrutable" school budget. Addressing this issue is more than structural or procedural--it's cultural.

Continual conundrums on the personal tech front

I registered for Google apps/Google sites to get joeraimondo.com up and running. So far, I haven't achieved what I was looking to do. I went to the domain registrar (GoDaddy) to reset the CNAME Record, but the changes didn't take. There didn't seem to be a true step-by-step
All the tools are there, i suppose that what's missing is my resoluteness to make the thing work. Of course, at every turn there seems to be another tool, another approach. I downloaded HomeSite because that's what I used -- in 1998! That's when I had a website!

Information architecture for the micro-enterpriser

I have been searching for an effective guide that enables individuals to design their personal information architecture. it's something I've struggled with personally for a long time. I have defaulted to personal mastery over a small set of tools that primarily enable creation, and I've let the march of technical progress fill in the occasional piece of integration latticework necessary for making all the underlying pieces work together (from Windows to global TCP/IP accessibility to browser access to low-cost cellular infrastructure.) All these elements have emerged and provided threading or trailing interface or integration capabilities.
Of course what I'm looking for is available by finding and subscribing to a critical mass of personal information focused blogs and newsfeeds. Ot at least it is so in theory. But in pondering writing this, I've been searching in vain for a long-ago written article by George Bond from Byte Magazine about the ecology of personal information. it was one of the most influential pieces I ever read, but over time, I've lost touch with both the specifics and the general precepts.
The fallout from looking (again) for an instance of that piece online is that I stated combing through the Byte magazine archives. It's hard to believe that a publication that was so informationally-dense no longer exists. I guess there was a time that you could "cover the waterfront" so to speak in terms of "Personal computing technology" and do so effectively. There isn't anything remotely close to it today -- to achieve the same effect, you need to scour a variety of feeds.
I further reflect on the fate of publishing with the apparent pending demise of Ziff Davis. Perhaps I am experiencing premature nostalgia for an earlier era when information seemed manageable. Or certainly the commentary about its management could be constructed profitably and cohesively in hierarchical units. Now the ability to accomplish that end is more fleeting.

Props to my homey

Larry Lessig, my Penn Class of 1983 classmate, says most of what I have been thinking, much more succintly and with better production values.

Being meta-reflective

I was thinking about my own thinking the other morning, and I was thinking about what it takes to self-generate my own meta-reflection. It's really the praxis I've been pursuing. It's this creation of self-aware thinking, and self-aware thinking based in design -- based in what I call solution as human agency -- that's been the focus of my capital T Thinking about design (again capital D) for the past 15 years.
There's a lot floating around in my head in terms of how to best present these ideas -- really how to transfer them. It's all so ripe right now, and my focus is pulled in 50 directions at once, so it seems. It's almost as if I could self-diagnose myself with AD/HD. But it's really a question of dicisplining myself andd training my environment to support development.

Election Day

I cast my vote in the Presidential primary in new Jersey today. I went into the booth -- I still need to adjust to the fact that the curtain doesn't swing back as it did with the old mechanical machines. The machine is now electronic; I notice my trepidation at casting a vote that registers only in electronic form. I have to push my anti-Diebold paranoia back and at the end of the day I need to empower the system.

The Technical Imagination

I have crossed a kind of threshold; last night, at a party, I told someone that I was "leaving IT." That's significant--working in IT or IS or MIS or whatever you want to call it has been part of my identity for half my life. But the past year has made it clear to me that those days are over. The market no longer supports what I want to do from a "align yourself with the available job offerings and plug yourself into that system" perspective. Interestingly, I'm beginning to see that maybe it never did.
So now I'm in the Systems Design and Innovation business. Perhaps I always have been.
I've been noodling with his ideas of developing an integrated curriculum called "The Technical Imagination." I think it's really what I called "The Shift" over 20 years ago; it amazes me that the relevance or my own (perhaps deluded) sense of its market-worthiness hasn't waned. I don't know of or see anybody incorporating all the notions I put together over 20 years ago and offering it in a way that fits the way people learn today. I see it as a great opportunity.
There are people operating on this same wavelength -- the people in the knowledge management sphere such as Dave Snowden are perhaps the closest to it. But they are driving a process-based approach, whereas I'm envisioning this as technology mediated inquiry. A process for agent design. And that's the definable outcome -- a mindset for agent design.

Notching it up

Today I made Principal at design Anticipation my job on LinkedIn. It's a big step, and I don't know if it's permanent. In fact, I find myself conflicted -- it seems like it can't be permanent, I have to get a job and work for some company to make enough money. Wow, I really am in prison, aren't I?
I guess the way to get out of prison is to recognize that you're in it, and that I am the one who put myself here.
At any rate, there was substantial movement in the design anticipation world starting last Thursday. I am getting and grant and an SBIR consultant. I may have found a playmate -- the resource I've needed to connect with to really get a prototype built. It is progress.
Now I'm establishing the desiganticipation.com website. After all these years, it's still a learning experience; one I approach with trepidation.

Creative Capitalism

Bill gates gave a speech at the davos wolrd Economic Forum on Thursday about "creative capitalism". Gates has been talking for a while about the shortcomings of the modern capitalist system; he's one of the few business leaders not in thrall to the free markets at all costs mantra. Gates was speaking about an issue that is generally subsumed under the rubric of "corporate social responsibility" and although he makes it clear that he iis not talking about that, it's unfortunate that the post hoc journalism about the event will push the issue into that particular known and readily-digestible topic area.
There is no question that what Gates is leading is transformational in the sense that nobody has ever operated with such a huge finacial platform to transform the possibilities for the world in such a self-aware fashion. From what I've seen, the Gates Foundation is attracting the best and brightest and enabling them to develop program structures and tools for capturing the core requirements for building a sustainable future -- the proverbial "world that works for everyone." They are developing metrics and dashboards that respond to the genuine issues that exist, and although their efforts are deeply embedded inside first world assumptions, it is clear also that they are on the ground in the developing world and feeding that reality back in ways that a representative sampling process is in place. It's all worthy from my perspective.
Yet Gates seems constrained in his still-current role as the Chairman of a modern US corporation to see that corporate activity and activism is likely not the medium of solving the world's problems. likewise, when he points to governments as being the primary sources of aid, he still misses the point. He still hasn't crossed over -- or transformed -- into seeing the outline of real solutions for the human predicament -- what I consider to be the eemergence of a global polity. A global polity is one in which the pre-eminent context for a human being is service and contribution. Gates points to this when he quotes Adam Smith and recognizes the fundamental human drive to be "interested in the fortunes of others." In the early part of the 21st Century, we've been "game theory-ed" out of this belief.
This discussion of how best to coordinate and integrate the existing set of actors -- corporations, governments, NGOs -- is certainly worthy and no-trivial. Yet at some point there needs to be the recognition that, as Einstein said, "The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them." The new level of thinking recognizes different starting assumptions about the capacity of the physical universe to provide.

A few things I think about

1) Why doesn't the US have a central bank? We have the Fed, but that's not an instrument of monetary policy, inasmuch as it has NO de facto accountability to the Exectuive or Legislative branch, and it really isn't a government entity at all. The fed does what suits its members, no matter whether those decisions might, partculalrly in the long run, but counter to broader social interests. (Equilibrium is an admirable goal, but it's only admirable fo so long.
2) What is industrial policy in a post-industrial world? in the US, I think it's defined as tax policy, and that is totally the wrong instrument.

Investment

For some reason I want to just start writing what I've been thinking about investment and investing. I think I'm a very naive investor. I don't see the world three steps ahead in terms of how to get a given amount X to turn into X plus some percent on an ongoing basis. I see all the possible things to invest in -- I always thought Apple was a good investment, and remember thinking that when it was at $25 a share. There would always be a return to design. But I think the world is in a critical phase in that the conversation "investment" has been hijacked by a small minority with an oligarchic, plutocratic bent. They are investing in a house of card, an amalgam of financial instruments so inter-woven and inter-levered that while the outcome is to shuttle money into their accounts, the broader macro-economic outcome is to reduce the capacity to invest in things that make the world more sustainable, more livable, and more fundamentally (and seldom considered) providing people with the means to achieve a sense of purpose in life.

Tools and marketing

Yesterday I posted the link to an on-line blogging course that I'm interested in taking. I don't know if this guy Mark Joyner is a charlatan or a genius, but I've bought his book and subscribed to his Simpleology list for the past two year.
I've spent the last few years trying to grok the on-line marketing zeitgeist from a number of different angles. On one hand -- my cynical view -- I see a small number of people manipulating other people's hopes and dreams in the face of rapidly fading opportunity in the US domestic economy. It seems like we're all going to end up selling each other our own self-help programs and "how we did it" stories based on filling up blank templates that hucksters like Joyner provide. On the other hand I could see that we're engaged in a great cultural and economic shift that involves people recognizing the need to "live out loud on-line" so to speak. Those who have taken the first tentative steps into this brave new world are acting as guides or Sherpas for the rest of us.
I've been "blogging" on and off for over 10 years. Back when it was cutting HTML by hand and posting files through a text interface on FTP. I actually had a decent little personal site on the Well back then. And all along, I've wanted something more. I've wanted to develop a personal portal. I wanted a way to post all my legacy content, along with a real-time listing of media and book consumption, links, etc. All these things are now enabled by an amalgam of new technologies (e.g., Twitter) I'm looking for away to integrate them, but more importantly I'm looking for the design pattern that enables mass adoption. That's my UML for the Design Service Society concept I mentioned earlier.

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

On Intelligence

I just finished reading Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence. Hawkins -- the developer of the Palm Pilot -- has delved into cortical physiology to explain a model of thought and memory that provides a testable theory of intelligence. Hawkins' raison d'etre is to develop a model of intelligence that can be transduced into digital processing systems.
I am not a neurophysiologist, and Hawkins freely admits his theories are subject to controversy within the scientific community. His independent scholarship is, in my eyes, quite admirable, and he has the personal resources to pursue a research program that will certainly move the state of the art forward. The important notion is that the brain is a pattern matching and generation system that predicts existence, taking sensory input and piecing it together with memory. It is physical affirmation that much of what we experience as reality are, in fact,
Hawkins book provided me with a new appreciation for meta-thinking and meta-appreciation. It provided a new way of understanding some peculiar experiences -- where I could not literally understand my own senses It's particularly exciting as Hawkins has chosen to carve out a niche in developing a computing paradigm that extends the capacities of intelligence without humanizing it -- recognizing that the capabilities of intelligent system do not result in systems that in any way emulate or mimc human behavior.