I have a hunch about MRI that comes from seeing a company that an old uni friend has built around liver disease.

The original insight of my friend, who is a doctor, is to do with a particular liver condition which is (or was) diagnosed with a biopsy. Obviously that’s a medical procedure. It’s invasive. He discovered that the biopsy could be substituted with an MRI scan plus new techniques in computer vision.

And I wonder how many medical diagnoses are tractable to that same approach?

Add to this three points:

1. MRI machines and the associated setup are pretty portable. I’ve seen pictures of an MRI unit in a shipping container, dropped into a hospital car park. So treat is like a black box: patient in; images out. Like any technology, the more MRIs that are run, the cheaper it’ll get.
2. MRIs aren’t x-rays. As far as I know, you could have an MRI every day of the week and it wouldn’t do you any harm. You might get a bit of a headache from the clanking of the electromagnets as they quench but that’s it. (It was pretty noisy when I got an MRI for my knee, but I remember thinking at the time: I’ve paid more money for worse gigs.)
3. Beyond the initial imaging, all the work of diagnosis is data and software. It’s quick, parallelisable, and machine learning models can be upgraded over time: hetting a second opinion is not like having to get back under anaesthetic to collect another sample for biopsy. As there is more training data and the software improves, second and third and fourth opinions can be run on the original images without having to return to the patient.

Put all of this together:

Could our future include pro-active regular screening for all kinds of conditions?

Imagine you get a full-body MRI every 6 months. Nothing wrong necessarily, it’s just like going to the dental hygienist. Then 100s of different machine learning models run, one looking for a particular liver condition, one looking at another organ, another looking for such-and-such anomaly elsewhere, etc. It’s purely precautionary; a way to pick up issues before they get serious; a Check Engine light for your body. You’d get a notification on your phone the next morning.

An app ecosystem around regular, precautionary MRI:

It’s unlikely that the company which is good at MRI machine manufacture is the same as the company which is good at customer relationship and operations, and it’s unlikely that either of those will have the software focus to train machine learning models to identify specific conditions (each condition probably being the topic of a whole stack of doctoral theses).

So I see something that is more like a software ecosystem. As a consumer, you pay (or your insurance pays) for the twice yearly scan. A portion of that fee gets divided amongst the hundreds of separate companies that provide computer vision modules that run across your full-body image, like paying for Spotify streams.

OR BETTER, to complete the feedback loop, each company might run their software on the image at their own cost, and they receive a success fee for each condition that they identify which is also successfully confirmed. (With some kind of adjustment to incentivise a low number of false negatives too.)

The role of the operations company is to orchestrate the ecosystem and economics, also managing the distribution to the computer vision app developers of training data (source imagery and eventual known outcomes from existing biopsy techniques and medical records).

One analogy is the company Planet which uses 200 satellites to take daily, high resolution images of the surface of the entire globe. Some of the satellites are to 50cm resolution.

Think of what you can do with high frequency global photography: look at infra-red signatures to figure out, to the day, when your crops are ready for harvest; monitor container ship positions to predict future pricing; see where to target your roof insulation sales effort; check for broken street lamps against a “known good” list; or whatever.

Sure you could achieve these by installing sensors, or using drones, or even walking the streets… but why bother? The satellite imagery has already been collected. The rest is software that runs on a schedule in the cloud.

Computers don’t get bored. Software is perfect for trivial or speculative repetitive tasks. It’s pixels and algorithms and compute cycles, that’s all.

I wonder what it would take to develop the technology (and establish the market, private or public) for this kind of MRI-based early warning system for personal healthcare. I can’t imagine that existing MRI tech would be a good fit for regular full-body – but maybe, one day, given the right incentives?

From a policy perspective: what kind of white paper would you have to write such that politicians would choose to fund this as industry-sector-creating R&D?

Anyway it feels kind of inevitable, though I’m not sure how we get there.

More posts tagged: political-fantasies (9).

There are a bunch of ersatz foods that were invented out of scarcity and necessity, but have somehow stuck around.

Salad cream. Canonical substitute food done good. Basically a bit like tangy mayonaisse but with less expensive mayonaisse and more oil and vinegar.

Orange squash. I’m guessing orange squash was as close as the chemicals industry could get to orange juice without actually going near an orange, but now I’ve started thinking about it, I quite fancy a glass.

Ready Brek. This is easy porridge I guess? I’m not sure if this qualifies as “ersatz” because I think it may be simply branding a generic, which does not count. But I am certainly into the way it is marketed on the Tesco website which includes the immortal line "Oat grain fibre contributes to an increase in faecal bulk." Which is… good? I guess?

Margarine, surprisingly interesting butter substitute.:

[Emperor] Napoleon III saw that both his poorer subjects and his navy would benefit from having easy access to a cheap butter substitute, so he offered a prize for anyone who could create an adequate replacement.

Invented by a French chemist in 1869.

Spam. I’ve not been to Hawaii but I’ve heard that spam is part of the cuisine there – though from a distance it’s hard to tell whether the spam love is ironic. Because it is disgusting.

I debated about monosodium glutamate which was invented in 1908 by Kikunau Ikeda as he worked to isolate the meaty flavour of "dashi, a fermented base made from boiled seaweed and dried fish." And MSG is now a common ingredient. Is it ersatz dried fish? No, I think, like rosewater, we would call it an essence.

I’m trying to think of more. This is possibly just because I like saying “ersatz.” Possibly.

More posts tagged: food-and-so-on (12).

1.

The term bardo "refers to the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth."

also translated as “transitional state” or “in-between state” or “liminal state”.

Liminality, from the Latin "meaning “a threshold”":

the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete.

When you step through a door, the door has width – a couple of inches. For a fraction of a second, you’re not in/out but liminal.

Walking through doorways causes forgetting.

“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.

“Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.”

2.

Photos of sea mountains.

3.

To make Lemmon Cakes, a recipe from 1670, from the cookery book The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet: Stored with all manner of Rare Receipts For Preserving, Candying and Cookery. Very Pleasant and Beneficial to all Ingenious Persons of the Female Sex by Hannah Woolley.

The history of sugar in Europe.

"During the 18th century, sugar became enormously popular. Britain, for example, consumed five times as much sugar in 1770 as in 1710."

4.

Something interesting is happening: "Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate."

Despite its name, I wonder whether this is the real common thread running through the sharing economy… there’s nothing on the balance sheet.

So look at the Bring Your Own Device trend… maybe this is the same, workplace IT with no technology. So what about facilities with no offices, menswear stores with no clothes.

The realisation that the heart of business is the ops machine and not the assets – orchestration not ownership. That’s a valuable insight.

Take this trend, cross-breed it with the shift to subscription box companies (of which there are trillions because a company that takes advantage of life-term value can out-market one that doesn’t when it comes to customer acquisition), plus fluid workplaces such as holacracy… where do we get? Don’t know. On my mind. Feels like we’re on our way somewhere.

More posts tagged: filtered-for (122).

I barely use the phone on my phone anymore, maybe once every 2–3 days. Usage is split evenly between making a call, receiving a call (50% spam/marketing), and missing a call.

Given it’s not working, maybe there’s room to rethink what a call is?

Maybe a call could

• take advantage of there being a screen involved,
• and lean into the idea that a call that I don’t answer can still be a successful call?

When a friend calls me, they should feel like they’re travelling to visit my phone. Like, they tap my name and they see themselves as a silver surfer zooming down tunnels - like the surf the BT Cellnet ad from 2000 (YouTube) - whatever it takes.

They arrive.

Maybe I’m not there. Then they can leave a note.

Maybe I am there but the door is shut because I’m busy. But perhaps I’m interruptible. Then they can ring the doorbell. A phone call is two steps: travelling to me, then choosing whether to interrupt me.

(This lobby space can have a few purposes. Perhaps I hang up a poster with info about why I’m busy. Or perhaps there’s an AI bot there who answers FAQs for me. Or - how about this - if someone else is visiting at the same time, my two visitors can hang out with each other, on my front stoop.)

Ok but say I’m in, and the call connects.

Then we can hang out, and I can drag other photos, docs, etc into the call. It’s a shared canvas.

At the end of the conversation, all the docs and a transcript/summary drops into my messages app.

Or, at the end, we decide we want to visit you next, so we need to see if you’re in. Tap your name. Off we surf, together.

I should sketch this.

Back in 2009, I wrote down all the different ways I heard “designer” used as a job title. There were seven types.

I just went digging through my notes, having half remembered it this afternoon. Here’s the list.

1. Where the designer specialises in a particular material or object, and design is matter of creativity and taste: graphic design, book design, furniture design, interior design.
2. Where the designer exists as a job role between, say, architects and engineers, doing technical drawing and mechanically finding the space between rules.
3. Where the material is metaphorical and the approach and methods are designerly: service design, interaction design, experience design.
4. In strategy/consultancy, where “design thinking” is a way of approaching problems in product, marketing, brand, organisational change, etc with a method that combines intuition and rationalism.
5. In design operations/management, giving direction and explaining but not working on the material.
6. Designers who create “design objects” which are closer to art than problem solving.
7. A transitory role; a name for any person who performs any act of design, no matter how briefly or in what context. "Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order" – Victor Papanek.

In my notes I’ve also got a reference to the “big-D Designer,” the person who is the holder of the vision, and often uses all the other types (and other job roles besides) to bring that vision about. I think the big-D Designer can fit into any of the above roles; it’s dependent on the person and the context.

The purpose of this list was to understand confusion. If you told someone else you were a designer, what else could they believe that you meant?

This isn’t meant to be a typology with hard edges. It was a list made from observation.

Since I made the list in 2009, twelve years ago:

• Design started being taken seriously by business, outside the creative industries. I’ll credit IDEO for legitimising design thinking, as an approach to strategy, and Apple’s success for for cementing design’s commercial importance.
• Software ate the world, and the “product” role emerged from technology firms. My take is that you can trace a path from design, to (software) product/interaction design, to a widened conception of the domain of design which became called “product”, and finally to the mini-CEO role which is the modern product manager. Engineering was another tributary to this unique role, but I feel like there’s a good strong “designer” part of the lineage.

So I don’t know what these trends have done to my list. There are a lot of roles that I would say are design-adjacent, that once could have functionally been performed by a designer, but they have many paths in and are increasingly their own distinct roles. I’m thinking of roles like product marketing, and interface copy.

Does the list still hold up in 2021?

Are there any new ways that designer is used in job titles?

I’ll also make a distinction between designer-as-job-title and designer-as-vocation.

Designers who have been to design college have become part of the culture of design. They have visceral understanding of method (the brief, the material, the crit), and training (which gives not just technique but a particular perspective), but also a connection to design as a historical conversation, which combined means that the designer can go on and be an author or a racing car driver, but they will always be a designer.

Whereas I have (back in the day) co-founded a design studio, but haven’t been to design school, so while I could inhabit a “designer” job role, in the same way I could inhabit other job roles, I would never be a designer in the vocational sense.

I think.

This archeology of my notes prompted by reading Org Design for Design Orgs (2016) by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner, which I’m reading as a chaser to Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (2018) by Marty Cagen.

Inspired is a fantastic handbook to the product role in tech companies from startups to behemoths like Google. (Thanks Sippey for the recommendation.) It’s basically a giant outline of the product role, hugely practical, with minimal extraneous words, from a place of deep experience – high signal/noise ratio. My favourite kind of business book.

I’m reading around the topic of design leadership, in its broadest sense, in tech companies, so any recommendations of companion reads to Org Design for Design Orgs (which I’m greatly enjoying) will be gratefully received.

After the lockdown, I can’t see people returning to offices in the same numbers. Those who liked remote working will agitate for it to stay that way. And businesses will realise how much cheaper it is to rent only half the floorspace, and push the facilities cost onto employees.

That doesn’t necessarily mean working from home. There are some advantages to being in a workplace with other people – focus, energy, networking, etc. And there are advantages to having professional facilities: printers, a decent video conferencing suite, not having to make your own coffee…

but what if you could kill the commute?

There are tons of people who take the train into London for 60-90 minutes every morning. If I were WeWork, I’d roll out their exact setup to office buildings right by commuter belt railway stations. Sell package deals to city-based firms for separate 3-4 person offices in 20 different towns, for all the employees that live in those places; sweat the details about integrating with I.T. department and make sure there’s secure internet. Show those firms how much cheaper it is against city-centre rent and subsidised peak time season tickets. Not to mention the extra 2 hours work every day.

Then so long as you’re working from a telecommute hub, why not roam too?

I know a guy who sold his company then negotiated that, during the earn-out, he could remote work. Then moved to a ski resort and worked from there.

I’ve worked in companies where you were never entirely sure, until the meeting started, whether your colleagues would appear in person or on the screen. Like, if you could work just effectively in another city, wouldn’t you go stay with friends for a week, just for a change of scene and maybe some sun?

So “working from home” doesn’t mean working from home. It could mean normalising working on the road.

All of which leaves city centres with a bunch of spare office capacity, once firms downsize their permanent desks and lease terms come up. I guess what happens is that the businesses pushed out before by expensive rent will move back in. So from the outside, nothing will really appear to have changed.

But in that changeover, I hope that local government takes the opportunity to lock in vibrant, creative, mixed neighbourhoods for the next few decades. How about zoning for a minimum number of artist studios, co-working spaces, and live-work units, mixed in alongside the flagship HQs and cubical firms, both on the city fringe and right in the middle of the financial district.

Anyway.

As I write this it’s Tuesday of week 9 and it’s 8.30am so there are only two of us in the office: me and the founder of one of the startups.

Week 9 marks a change of pace. For the last five weeks, “programming” (that is, meetings and workshops) has been relatively light. The focus has been on “Services”–the strategically-led creative work provided by agency teams that makes this particular startup accelerator different from the others. In addition there are weekly meetings with me that the industry universally and mysteriously calls Office Hours.

The team working on Services has produced fantastic work. It’s spot-on. The feedback has been tremendous. And the Presentations work has already resulted in exciting pitches, radically more easily understood.

Warning: working practice simplification and stereotyping ahead.

The cadence of how startups work:

Do something end-to-end, whether it’s a web product, hardware prototype, or pitch deck. Get it in-front of its eventual users, customers, or consumers. The earlier and uglier the better. Observe feedback. Iterate.

The cadence of how agencies work:

Follow the process and build foundations for the first 80% of the time. Foundations are answers to questions like: what are the values of this brand? To what customer segments should it appeal, targeting what motivations? At what points of the experience of the product or service can these brand values be made evident? Then suddenly the invisible work is completed. For the remainder of the time create highly visible executions–web pages, sales collateral, dashboard wireframes, point of sales communications, guides to words and phrases to use in future marketing.

Both methods are highly effective.

The Services phase of this program poses a challenge. To a startup, agency cadence has pros and cons.

• Pro: the rigorous process forces each startup to better understand itself, its value proposition, and its customers, and gives it language to talk about and iterate all of that
• Pro: the result is a newly professional appearance–essential to be taken seriously by business customers
• Con: the agency cadence can be abstract and hard to grasp. In my Office Hours I make sure we discuss how to use and build on the deliverables
• Con: the agency cadence lacks iteration in the face of true customer feedback

To me this last point is the most serious: no matter how much thought and strategy has gone into it, no work survives contact with the market. An iterative approach is essential.

Yet work that has been over-thought becomes brittle and slow to change.

So the risk of agency work to a startup is that it takes the startup down a dead-end with no way to turn around.

My response is to ensure that the Services phase focuses on amplifying what is already working. Create only where there is traction and proof that customers are responding positively.

Given the above, the question is why run a program that includes agency services supplied to startups? The same can be asked of the Presentations phase. I’ll let you know in another 540 words.

I said there had been a change of pace. Services is winding down; Presentations is winding up.

This four week stretch is about creating a 5 minute pitch deck. There’s assistance with crafting the story, speaker training, and design help to make great-looking slides.

What’s the deck good for? It’s always handy to have an intro that hits all the bases: the what and the why of the product; the business potential and customer traction; the team and roadmap; the secret sauce. This intro, with adjustments, will get used for investor intros, and also to explain the company to partners, customers, and new hires.

A key skill in any pitch, whether you’re a founder or a young designer, is to quickly and uncontroversially explain your idea space, so you can concentrate the discussion on what matters. For example, how to work together. This deck does that job.

Producing the pitch deck in this form does another job, which is to shake out the inconsistencies in the business.

There are standard formats for pitch decks, such as the Kawasaki 10 slide deck, or the more recent Y Combinator seed deck template.

I think of these decks as a narrative versions of the Business Model Canvas. I used to be a skeptic. Surely it doesn’t make sense to outline an entire business in nine boxes on a single sheet of paper? But I’ve become a convert.

The Business Model Canvas is like an electrical wiring diagram but for flows of motivation and money. For example:

• you itemise your customer segments. There’s another box to list how you reach customers. Wire them together. There’s another box for the product value propositions that should appeal to your different customers. Wire them up. Ok, so your product has a particular point of value that should appeal to a particular type of customer… but there’s no way of reaching them? Whoops
• there are costs. There are revenues. Wire them up. Oh so revenue comes in on a per-product-sale basis but costs are on an annual basis? Impedance mismatch, rethink the business

So you draw out the business and look out for gaps or anywhere the gears grind. When I’m starting a new project, I make a quick Business Model Canvas to give me an idea of any dark corners. It’s not everything, but it’s a sketch.

When you run through a pitch deck, ideally it should cover all the same points–but with proof too. Ok so the goal is to sell such-and-such product to such-and-such customer? Well how can that be demonstrated? Ok so the business is dependent on a special technology. Well does that tech exist, and can it be protected? And so on.

In Office Hours over the past two months, I’ve tried to keep in mind each company’s upcoming pitch deck, and I’ve been steering the conversation towards exploring some of the gaps.

I believe that a good pitch (and a good startup website, and good startup sales collateral, and a good introductory paragraph) has got to include belief and desire.

Desire: make your audience see dollar signs in their eyes. Make them want it.

Belief: make this seem inevitable. Show the detail. Build trust.

The sizzle and the steak.

So given my above misgivings, why do this work with the startups? Why not operate like other accelerators, focusing on coaching and pitching?

First–some teams need to plug a design gap. If you help with the right ‘kit of parts’ then it’s a proper leg up.

Second–the process is useful. But you could get the thinking via Office Hours and conversation, right? Why do the additional hands-on strategically-led creative if there’s a risk of compromising the startup’s ability to iterate?

So, for me, the answer can be found on the customer side: some customers, big and small, judge a book by its cover. Even when meeting a startup with crazy new technology, a radical business model, or simply a better mousetrap, they’re put off because the website isn’t professional, the sales deck doesn’t quite express the whole story, or the dashboard looks a bit fiddly.

Big corporates are not monolithic. They are, internally, networks, and these networks resist anything which is hard to understand. Sales material will be passed around behind the scenes to people who are finding out about the startup for the first time. The product will be used be people unfamiliar with startup norms, and seen by people who aren’t trained. An aspirational story will transmit better than a hair-shirt story. Etc.

More than that: an employee of a big corporate who takes the reputational risk of introducing a startup wants to look smart to their colleagues. No matter the quality of the startup’s product, if the benefits are hard to understand or it’s easy to give a kicking, it’s not going to fly.

In short:

Corporates want to be innovative. A path to being innovative is to work with startups. But when they meet a startup, they often can’t digest it. So either the corporate has to change. You could push water uphill. Or the startup can change–just a little bit–to accommodate the relationship. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

Iterate with the agency cadence, then amplify with the agency cadence.

My feeling is that’s what makes R/GA’s programs different: in the DNA of the organisation is partnering with corporates around innovation.

One last thought. Despite all of this, startups shouldn’t look too professional. The character of the team should still shine through.

Once you take away the product and the revenue model and the technology breakthroughs, the big reason that a person working in a big corp wants to work with a startup is that they love hanging out with startups.

For a few years I’ve run a session at Bethnal Green Ventures about sales and marketing 101. (It’s an incubator for social good startups. Early stage. Great organisation.) I joke about people who work in corporates. I say they have miserable lives. I say they wish they could leave but they have mortgages and school fees and they’re addicted to holidays. Instead they live vicariously by working with startups. So take advantage of it.

It’s a horribly mean thing to say and it’s certainly not the whole truth. But there’s definitely a glamour that mustn’t be washed away. So I’m also paying attention to that, in the Services and Presentations phases.

Anyway. It’s Friday now, somehow. Next week: week 10.

[Short version: Coffee morning on Thurs 14 April in Old St! I sent this out to the coffee morning newsletter last week. Subscribe to the newsletter here.]

My Dearest Droogs,

We haven’t had a hardware-ish coffee morning at all this year. I’ve had no Thursdays because I’ve been avec job for a few months earning coins. I know, I know, but it happens to all of us sometimes. Still, done with that now, and fingers crossed I can avoid gainful employment for a little while longer.

Let’s hang out and drink too much coffee and talk about hardware! Same bat-time, same bat-channel:

Thursday 14 April, 9.30am for a couple of hours, at the Book Club (100 Leonard St).

Same old format… If you’re curious about, or working in… designing physical things, paper or weird sensors, installations, knitting, manufacturing, internet-connected doodads, retail for hardware startups, sculpture, investment, or whatever, please come along.

There’s no formal intros so it’s easy to sneak off if everyone is horrendous. (They’re mostly not.) Come say hi to me when you turn up, and we’ll make sure you chat with interesting folks. (Most everyone is interesting.) Everyone loves prototypes, so bring em along if you have em. There are usually one or two.

If you’re a woman, or don’t present or identify as a dude, please do feel welcome. It’s a concern to me that this tech industry, while very human and egalitarian in its early days (this goes for mainstream tech and hardware startups too) appears to heavily skew to Mainly Dudes as time goes on. That’s something I can push against, a tiny bit, by trying to ensure these coffee mornings don’t go the same way.

(On which serious note: If you don’t feel you would be welcome - obviously or in hidden ways - at a hardware-ish coffee morning, and you’d be willing to share your feedback privately with ideas of how I could improve the format, I’d like to hear. My personal email is matt AT interconnected DOT org. Thank you!)

See you on the 14th!

Matt

ps. I’ve got a new hobby and it’s a robot bookshop that tweets. You can visit it! Here it is. It’s called Machine Supply.

I’m on my hols right now.

Breakfast from the supermarket and bakery, for three people, costs a shade over 7 euros. Two fancy-pants coffees to-go costs a shade over 8 euros.

That seems like the right kind of gearing? Essentials are easily within reach; luxury items you have to think about.

Essentials are like: basic groceries, broadband/phone, roads, education, healthcare, energy, water, rent up to a certain amount etc. “Normal” coffee, house wine, that kind of thing.

It’s very hard to justify, in my head, why these should be the province of profit-seeking companies. Given we all have to have them, why should some people get to leach on that? Yes the profits are taxed but that’s an inefficient way to collect extra money from citizens.

We all form a government which is a kind of enlarged co-operative really. Why don’t we make a basket of essentials, democratically argued about and iterated over time, then nationalise not-for-profits to run supply chains and shops for them?

Just… take essentials out of the for-profit bit of the economy.

Our priorities have lost their way somewhere along the line.

And good for for-profit companies too, right? People without broadband can’t buy from Shein; can’t receive deliveries from Amazon. People without their health, without education can’t staff them. Remove the friction by making essentials work.

Something related I’ve been thinking about is:

What is a company for?

There’s the Coasean definition of the boundaries of the firm – you outsource paperclips when it’s economically more efficient for you to do so, given that outsourcing incurs transaction costs.

But for me that misses purpose.

I saw a post online about someone comparing their own company comprising themself, two contractors, $4m annual revenue and large profits, with another company: same revenue, small profit, many dozens of employees. Implying that their company was better. Higher ROI I suppose.

Yet.

For me, a company is, at least to a degree, for the people in it. Right?

A company that makes not too much profit but is the collective endeavour of many people is a good company, surely? Or rather, it occupies as many people as it requires and allows those people to enjoy a relaxed life.

Imagine a company staffed by people with enough room in their days to build intuitive skill in their work and show empathy to customers. To be not transactional.

And to take long lunches.

That’s good for them and good for the community the company is part of, right?

An aside:

My second job was as Saturday boy at the local ironmonger’s.

One day we cut the hedge and swept the street. We did it for the neighbour too because, as Eric said, that’s what neighbours do.

On the other hand. My first job was word processing for an actual drug smuggler, no kidding. I didn’t know at the time. He had a cover company. I designed its logo.

We’ve been taking local buses over the last week.

An essential if ever there was one.

They’re cheap here and they run bang on time. They’re not super regular (you consult the timetable). They stop for an hour over lunch.

So going somewhere takes planning, unless you want to pay more and hop on an express. The drivers get a proper break.

That seems… an ideal trade off?

People aren’t super wealthy, as far as I can tell, or at least it’s not as ostentatious as London. Admittedly it would be hard to have the extremes of London, and I’m in a town and not a global financial and cultural centre. Even so.

Also people aren’t overweight so far as I’ve seen.

Partially that’s the sunshine and the quality of the produce, I’m sure.

Partially… well, I don’t see much need for Ozempic, looking around. The miracle weight reduction drug, and also generalised impulse dampener, is papering over something, cracks that aren’t apparent here.

It’s hard not to see it all related: the cost of living, how helpful and unharried people are in shops, the buses and the lunch breaks, the lack of wealth and health extremes.

The convivial life is a natural semaglutide demand inhibitor?

So we miss something, I think, in conversations about working hard for early retirement and then living the good life.

Like – why not both.

Come to Europe and get low-key radicalised haha

The EU may (or may not) be making technology policy missteps, but they are gently and patiently promoting a certain way of life which feels globally very, very special, and fundamentally counter to the hypercapitalism found elsewhere.

Honestly I’d like to see serious economic papers that compare the two approaches. Why not do it this way? Why not go further and, as I suggested, choose radical nationalised businesses for essentials? Genuinely what is the problem with that? Why isn’t it simply obvious that we should live our lives in comfort, with room to participate and be kind to each other, and knock off early to go to the beach early on sunny days? And that’s not compatible with profit-extracting water suppliers etc, and shops run by people not just on minimum wage but without any kind of employment protection?

Why can’t politicians propose these kind of ideas, even as a generational directional plan rather than an election promise, without getting yelled at?

That’s holidays for you I suppose. These feelings will evaporate with my tan as I’m back in my esoteric work bubble, back home. A day dream.

It shouldn’t be a dream.

Hybrid working is the idea we won’t go back to working in an office after the pandemic, not entirely, but nor we will go fully remote. Instead we’ll mix it up.

Augmented ambience

There’s something neat about having desk neighbours – it allows for teams but also cross-team connections. But if you’re at home 2 days/week, working out of cafes 1 day/week, and hot-desking at the office the rest of the time, how can that work?

Imagine your desk has a fixed position but in a virtual office layout.

Now let’s imagine that on the physical office desks, and on your home office desk, you have an array of small speakers around the perimeter of the desk. The speakers also have microphones. This is the product.

When you sit down to work, you sign in, and you hear directionally accurate sound from your virtual neighbours, as if you’re in adjacent cubicles – keyboard tapping, chair scraping, coughs, and so on. Sound from your workstation is also picked up and transmitted.

Voices would be detected by AI and automatically muffled.

Bonus points: if you’ve got spatial audio-enabled headphones, like the Apple AirPods Max, you don’t need the special speakers. You can hear your virtual neighbours even when you’re working remotely from, say, a plane. Assuming any of us ever fly anywhere ever again.

Drone zoom calls

This is a use-case for augmented reality smart glasses.

The idea is that you should be able to take Zoom calls when you’re out and about because, to me, hybrid working is also about incorporating walking.

I’ve seen people I know on Instagram skiing with follow-me drones. It turns out follow-me functionality is pretty great now: the drone maintains a consistent angle, dodges around trees, and so on. And that’s while the target is skiing!

So a follow-me drone made for Zoom calls should be way simpler. You would only be going at walking pace.

You still need to see the other person while you’re on the call, and that’s where the augmented reality smart glasses come in. They see you via a streaming cam on the drone; you see them via a hovering virtual screen projected in your glasses. (The glasses also have a built-in mic.)

See also previous thoughts about new office furniture, which referenced scorpion chairs and cyberpunk aprons.

1.

Xerox scanners used to have a bug that would silently replace numbers in the text of documents to make them compress better.

The bug was discovered by David Kriesel in 2013:

We got aware of the problem by scanning some construction plan last Wednesday and printing it again. Construction problems contain a boxed square meter number per room. Now in some rooms, we found beautifully lay-outed, but utterly wrong square meter numbers.

It’s to do with the image compression algorithm:

Images are cut into small segments, which are grouped by similarity. For every group only a representative segment is is saved that gets reused instead of other group members, which may cause character substitution.

Eg "The 65 became an 85 (second column, third line)."

Invoices, engineering plans… scanners and copiers in the Xerox WorkCentre line had this bug, undetected, for 8 years.

For PDFs that were scanned with the named Xerox devices during the last 8 years, it cannot be proven what characters were on the original sheet of paper at the places that are now defined by reused patches.

(See that link for Kriesel’s full write-up.)

It would be neat to trigger this deliberately… a document that, when scanned, turns into something else.

Maliciously: could I do wet signatures on a contract with a company that, when the agreement is scanned to accounts payable, leads them to transfer me a different amount of money?

SEE ALSO: that time I got my hands on a real-life ugly shirt, "a ridiculous-looking garment that magically renders the wearer invisible to CCTV."

2.

The Einstein-Marilyn optical illusion, a photograph of the face of "Albert Einstein if the image is large or close up, and Marilyn Monroe if the image is small/seen from a distance" – it’s to do with spatial frequency.

See the illusion at the Mind Hacks blog.

Which also explains how it works.

High spatial frequency changes means lots of small detail. …

Depending on distance, different spatial frequencies are easier to see, and if those spatial frequencies encode different information then you can make a hybrid image which switches as you alter your distance from it.

References provided.

3.

Excel is a behemoth in the spreadsheet world and is regularly used by scientists to track their work and even conduct clinical trials. But its default settings were designed with more mundane applications in mind, so when a user inputs a gene’s alphanumeric symbol into a spreadsheet, like MARCH1 – short for “Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1” – Excel converts that into a date: 1-Mar.

This is extremely frustrating, even dangerous, corrupting data that scientists have to sort through by hand to restore. It’s also surprisingly widespread and affects even peer-reviewed scientific work. One study from 2016 examined genetic data shared alongside 3,597 published papers and found that roughly one-fifth had been affected by Excel errors.

AND SO, "over the past year or so, some 27 human genes have been renamed, all because Microsoft Excel kept misreading their symbols as dates."

Humans have a bunch of feedback loops to prevent signal degradation in communication: we have a moral code against factual inaccuracy (you’re either a liar or unreliable, depending on intent, and our morality is constructed to see both as failings); the legal system has “protected characteristics” – you are not allowed to pejoratively stereotype when it comes to gender, race, and so on. Stereotyping is a disallowed form of data compression. (The feedback loops adapt over time to handle changes in the machinery of inter-person signal transmission and the data for which we demand high fidelity.)

What is the equivalent for machines? Is Excel a liar? How should an application be made to feel ashamed?

4.

"iPhones are no longer cameras in the traditional sense. Instead, they are devices at the vanguard of “computational photography,” a term that describes imagery formed from digital data and processing as much as from optical information."

How the camera works depends on what (it thinks) it’s looking at.

when a user takes a photograph with the newest iPhones, the camera creates as many as nine frames with different levels of exposure. Then a “Deep Fusion” feature, which has existed in some form since 2019, merges the clearest parts of all those frames together, pixel by pixel, forming a single composite image. … The iPhone camera also analyzes each image semantically, with the help of a graphics-processing unit, which picks out specific elements of a frame–faces, landscapes, skies–and exposes each one differently.

Do some faces trigger a stronger spike than others? What faces are loved by the iPhone camera? What machine misinterpretations are being laid down in the historical records, and how may we discover them?

Could you wear a shirt that targets the iPhone sunset detector, fooling the computational camera into boosting your colour saturation? That would help you pop in a crowd.

More posts tagged: 20-most-popular-in-2022 (20), filtered-for (122).

I always notice the Saturday before Easter: "this bit between the crucifixion and resurrection is the best. it’s like god’s out of town for the weekend, no one’s watching, house party!"

I’m not religious. I went to a Church of England school and grew up with a half dozen different faiths within touching distance. I’m not athiest, I suppose I don’t believe in God, I don’t think about it too much. I’m closest to being a phenomenologist in that I privilege perspective, so I’m quite happy to consult the I Ching because it seems to say things to me (I don’t feel the need to question it or believe in it), and I don’t like to needlessly multiple unnecessary entities.

BUT

although I joke about it, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, Holy Saturday, seems to carry some mythic resonance.

No God, just for one day. That feels like a day worth marking?

Nobody watching, nobody who always knows more than you, but also no-one to forgive, to catch you when you trip, to provide meaning when things are bad. Nobody who knows how the story ends.

What do you do when you’re on your own? When you can do anything, but… well, you don’t, and not because God or your parents or the government says not to, but because you make that decision yourself. Or when there’s a global pandemic and you can’t say “God’s will” but you have to look it in the eye.

It’s the day after school ends. It’s the day you move out and have keys to your own place for the first time, and you shut and lock the door. You’ve gone to bed and there’s a noise and you have to investigate. It’s screwing up and it’s your fault. It’s taking a trip and going on a long hike and realising that nobody knows where you are. Dan Hon has this line, No-one’s coming. It’s up to us.

It’s losing a parent. It’s also the feeling I remember on the first evening having brought the baby back from hospital.

It’s the excitement of freedom, and the responsibility, and the terror. It’s sink or swim day. It’s adulthood. (It’s the relief of knowing it’s just for one day, and the gratitude it renews.)

Sometimes I think that this is what humankind needs to stand on its own two feet: it should be the Saturday before Easter when our city-sized starships take off from Earth for the last time into the clear blue sky, off to inhabit the galaxy.

There’s no deus ex machina. The climate emergency will kill us all unless we do something about it.

So the absence of God, for one day, isn’t just about the freedom of nobody watching, it’s also about stepping up to the plate. And it isn’t about each of us being on our own, because when push comes to shove, we can’t look up so we look around, and we’ve got each other.

(Of course, this day being part of the Christian calendar, I wonder whether this is all part of the lesson.)

And that’s what I think about on the day between the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ.

Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars.

If you don’t know:

• Facebook is a corporation with a database in which they would like to record every act that every person makes, annotated with the place and time, and another database that lists every social relationship each person has. They are persuading people to do this by being the world’s second virtual society, the first being the internet itself, the difference with Facebook being that everything in the society is recorded in a form that makes cross-indexing simple.
• Instagram is a corporation with a smartphone app that lots of people use to take and share photos. Instagram makes it easy to take pretty photos, and to see the pretty photos of your friends. The photos are used to (a) represent yourself to your friends, and (b) act as condensation seeds for social interactions of the type (i) grooming and (ii) conversation.
• A billion dollars is a lot of money.

Not users but producers/consumers

The other day I picked some choice quotes from ‘Marx at 193’ (an article by John Lanchester). Here’s one: "This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world."

What is the labour encoded in Instagram? It’s easy to see. Every “user” of Instagram is a worker. There are some people who produce photos – this is valuable, it means there is something for people to look it. There are some people who only produce comments or “likes,” the virtual society equivalent of apes picking lice off other apes. This is valuable, because people like recognition and are more likely to produce photos. All workers are also marketers – some highly effective and some not at all. And there’s a general intellect which has been developed, a kind of community expertise and teaching of this expertise to produce photographs which are good at producing the valuable, attractive likes and comments (i.e., photographs which are especially pretty and provocative), and a somewhat competitive culture to become a better marketer.

There are also the workers who build the factory – the behaviour-structuring instrument/forum which is Instagram itself, both its infrastructure and it’s “interface:” the production lines on the factory floor, and the factory store. However these workers are only playing a role. Really they are owners.

All of those workers (the factory workers) receive a wage. They have not organised, so the wage is low, but it’s there. It’s invisible.

Like all good producers, the workers are also consumers. They immediately spend their entire wage, and their wages is only good in Instagram-town. What they buy is the likes and comments of the photos they produce (what? You think it’s free? Of course it’s not free, it feels good so you have to pay for it. And you did, by being a producer), and access to the public spaces of Instagram-town to communicate with other consumers (access to these spaces is so valuable to me that it keeps me using the iPhone, a model of smartphone which can run Instagram, rather than Windows Phone 7 which I have used and enjoyed, but cannot).

It’s not the first time that factory workers have been housed in factory homes and spent their money in factory stores.

Implications:

• There is a way of identifying the various value exchanges, which means there should be a way to calculate the aggregate value.
• However, Instagram is more-or-less a closed economy: producers are paid in Instagram-dollars and consumers pay with Instagram-dollars. The loop is so tight that the Instagram-dollars are invisible. So how is the aggregate value to be calculated? Instagram-town is barely connected to the US dollar so we don’t know what the value is.

I will say that it’s simple to make money out of Instagram. People are already producing and consuming, so it’s a small step to introduce the dollar into this.

The question is: what will the exchange rate be?

Island economies and colonisation

The situation of Instagram is that of an isolated island economy, separate from the outside world, being linked to the global economy. How do we figure out what it’s worth to the global economy? How do you value a closed system?

I can think of three examples: Japan’s period as an autarky (self-sufficient economy) in the 1850s; China’s transition from a closed to a linked economy over the past decade; a Pacific island such as Naura, in the middle of nowhere, being colonised.

The third makes me think that the business of these virtual society companies (there are lots) is to isolate some settlement on an island, allow it to develop for a small amount of time, and then colonise it. This is the story of empire, but it’s also the story of expansion. Think of the Wild West: first the people, then the railways, the banks, the law, and government.

But the Wild West ended up okay, part of it we call California. Both Instagram and Facebook are based there.

Maybe Instagram is worth a billion dollars, there’s certainly a lot of labour encoded in the objects of its production. More valuable, I think, for Facebook is the general intellect I have not mentioned: that developed by the factory owners. They’re highly accomplished at paying their workers very little (i.e., since there is no money changing hands, we measure this by observing that the workers are highly productive) and, out of their workers, training good marketers. Facebook needs that in order to complete their database.

Money; users

More interesting to me is the question of what happens when the workers organise, and demand a wage that is transferrable between the island economies of the internet. I’ve absolutely no idea what that would even look like, a transferrable store of labour but one in which the act and value of labour is contextually variable according to its position in a social network. But I can’t imagine money itself looked entirely obvious before it was invented either.

The second interesting point is that the word “user,” as in a user of Instagram or Facebook, is dangerous, because it hides all of this.

More posts tagged: company-scrip (3).

So I ran a marathon at the weekend.

I was going to say “my first marathon” - which it was, my first I mean - but that makes it sound like there are going to be many, which uh I don’t intend so much. Let’s see.

I expected a marathon to be hard. It was harder than I expected in a super interesting way.

Goals: (a) get round and (b) hit a target time of 3:45 if poss.

My time was 3 hours 40 minutes 12 seconds. I’m proud of that ngl (and wish I’d done better).

Why is a marathon hard? Energy.

26 miles is an interesting distance because it’s more than your body can do naturally without being genetically freakish.

I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t treat this whole thing as an excuse to get really nerdy about my body as a systems problem.

So I’ve been learning how energy works in the body, and as I understand it when you’re using your muscles you’ve got three energy sources.

• Glucose. In your blood, comes from food. There’s barely any calories here – but if you eat, that’s where it goes first.
• Fat. You can burn fat but it’s slow… which is a shame because 90% of your body’s stored energy is in the form of fat. So it contributes only about 10-20% to the mix, more as a race goes on. Really experienced runners will have more fat burning in the mix.
• Glycogen. Glycogen is the main source of energy. It’s stored glucose, and converts to glucose before it can be used. Your body carries about 1,600–2,000 calories of glycogen.

Glycogen is stored mainly in the muscles. There are up to 1600 calories in the muscles, and it can only be used for those muscles. Also about 400 calories in the liver, and that can be transported anywhere.

One thing I learned about glycogen which I’d never really thought about is that energy has a weight in your body. Of course it does.

Glycogen is about 4 calories per 1 gram. But to store it, it has to be bound to water, another 3g per gram. So your 2000 calories of glycogen is about 2kg (4.4lb) weight, and you lose that as you run.

(That water aspect is itself fascinating. Using glycogen liberates water, so you self-hydrate to a degree.)

Now once you add all of this up, you’ve got a deficit.

Rule of thumb you burn 100 calories per mile. i.e. marathon = 2,600 calories.

(For comparison I eat a little under 1,800 calories/day.)

So this is mathematically not possible: your carrying capacity is max 2,000 calories glycogen, another couple hundred contributed by burning fat. Still 400 calories to find.

How do you close the gap?

• Train and get biomechanically more efficient at moving
• Train and get better at storing and converting glycogen (up to that 2,000 calories level)
• Train while fasting to improve fat burning
• Carb load: you can temporarily store more glycogen than usual, so load up with carbs 48 hours before a race
• Eat on the way: running gels contribute 80 calories each of glucose into your blood, and that slows glycogen conversion. I had four gels on the way round. They take about 30 minutes apiece to hit your system.

Part of what’s going on during training is all these bodily adaptations and it’s amazing to see it happening. But yeah, you can’t do a marathon without doing all of the above, the distance is just enough to get you into that deficit territory. I used to think that 26 miles was a kinda arbitrary distance, and now I realise that it makes it a finely poised competition you can have with yourself.

I haven’t talked about electrolytes and water, and that’s because they never really popped up as issues for me during training.

But that’s what bit me.

Training and will

I think I’ve said before that training for me is about four things: heart, puff, muscles, will.

I help my “long will” by maintaining a training streak. (And part of what I’m training in that time is my “short will”, which is the will to keep going in the moment even when I’ve reverted to my stupid glucose-starved monkey brain.)

My streak: I’ve been training at 20 miles a week for about 10 months, since 27 May 2024, and that’s doubled as I’ve got closer to this race.

The main thing I’ve battled has been to come to terms with the fact that my days of personal bests are mostly behind me. Even when I’m at peak fitness right now, I’m a long way off where I was at peak fitness five years ago.

My first marathon was originally going to be back in 2020 and it was cancelled, being 3 weeks into the first pandemic lockdown. It was enormously disappointing and, for a variety of reasons, I was on for a great time back then.

Since then I’ve had knee injuries, Achilles injuries, IT band imbalances pulling my hip (and knee) off, months getting my puff back post bouts of Covid… and of course 5 years older.

btw I’ll mention that knee injury again.

But yeah, since May 2024 I’ve kept up this streak. I’ve taken part in one half marathon race in that period, which is a tricky moment in itself: training up to it is motivating, but extrinsic motivation eats intrinsic motivation for breakfast and it takes will to re-find motivation after the race is done. And my intrinsic motivation has had to shift from ever-increasing PBs to… something else. Enjoying being outside I guess!

Anyway I made it through training. I was pretty much done with it by the end tho.

The race itself

By the time I decided that I was going to do an actual race, and it seemed like I probably wouldn’t get injured again, and I’d be fit enough, all the high-profile marathons were full up. But Southampton had space, and you know what, that’s not so bad. It’s the city I grew up in.

The course looked hilarious. I’m running past places that I would hang out as a kid, going through parks I used to just kind of loiter in when I was 15, past the casino my mate worked at, through the stadium of the local football team, across the common I did cross-country at school, those kind of places. So it was a race of old haunts, a nice place to be.

The race went 81% well.

The start was a little chaotic and congested.

My half marathon pace felt very comfortable and so I was ticking along doing that.

What was tricky was that at 21 miles I felt pain in my knee, a bit like somebody jabbing into it HARD with a screwdriver and I couldn’t put any weight on it. My muscles had tightened up to the point it was pulling my knee out, a recurrence of that old knee injury. (If I’m being honest it had been niggling for two weeks and, if it hadn’t been for race day, I never would have risked a long run.)

So, after stopping a couple of times to stretch that out, cursing and grimacing, which at least kind of got me moving again, then cramp started.

My mental model of what occurred is that my knee made me stop, then my legs forgot their rhythm and fell into a new and dysfunctional pattern.

Now I’ve had cramp before, I suppose, but never like this.

Both calves. I can only describe cramp as having very hot animals like maybe like the size of mice forcing and crawling around under my skin all over my calves and the burning pain was extraordinary. I was barely able to walk so I would walk stubbornly and then start trying to jog a little, then the roaming boiling knots would come back and overwhelm me. Uphill was especially bad.

At a water station, a volunteer there checked in with me and he offered to help with my calves. He did something which I didn’t expect, which was not to massage them, but basically to run his hands up and down my calves, one at a time, not too hard, and that seemed to reboot them.

A superhero.

What is cramp anyway?

So I looked into cramp afterwards, and it is not, as I grew up thinking, lactate buildup.

Cramp is neuromuscular fatigue and (from my very, very partial understanding) it seems like what happens is the nerve junctions between the ends of the nerve and the muscles, these little junctions run out of the electrical juice the nerves sit in, and the juice is a combination of salt and water. The salt being your electrolytes of course, and they just dry out or stop conducting, and your nerves can’t communicate with the muscles properly, and your muscles go haywire interpreting the static.

It was wild after the race when I lay down and my wife was massaging my calves because of the cramp pain and she said to me “what are you doing with your legs?”

I was like “what do you mean?” – I couldn’t feel anything. Then I looked at my calves and I can only describe it as some kind of Cronenbergesque manifestation of worms crawling underneath my skin.

You see every so often those time-lapse videos of chemical reactions with bimodal stable states in a petri dish doing those wild, curved, radiating geometric patterns, Turing patterns. My muscles were doing the same, writhing underneath my skin, that’s all I could think of to look at it. This is what neuromuscular fatigue is, this misfiring.

It seems like when I was helped by that kind person at the water station, the movement he was doing on my calves was indeed like resetting the muscles – a new input stimulus to override the misfiring signals, and give my legs space to remember what they were supposed to be doing.

My model of what happened (stopping because of my knee, legs forgetting what to do) feels correct to me. My calves were overworked, compensating for my knee, then got confused. I have a picture of my legs as octopus tentacles, these semi-independent limbs that have their own rhythms and habits and - when push comes to shove - I have to negotiate with them.

Now the main factor, really, is that it was the second hot day of the year.

It was 20C by the time I finished, and I’ve done most of my training between -5C to +5C. It’s only recently hit 12C. So I’ve barely done any warm day training at all.

So I will have been dehydrated I’m sure, and lost more salt than I was expecting, those juicy nerve junctions parched and grainy. Then it all happened, this unfamiliar cascade.

I had enough energy though.

Now my monkey brain…

I hobbled for a mile, managed to get my knee stretched out, reset my calves, and found a pace slow enough that cramp wouldn’t overtake me but fast enough that I could still call it running, and red-lined the final three miles like gunning a car in second gear and made it over the finish line.

So would I do it again?

I went into the weekend saying this was going to be my one marathon. For closure because of the one I didn’t get to do before.

It was harder than I expected, even knowing it would be hard.

After I’d done my final 21 mile training run (you don’t go any further than that, then you taper for two weeks), I was like: I don’t know if I have another five miles left in me. It was the first time in my training that I felt doubt.

I assumed that I’d cover that 5 mile gap with a combo of energy and will. i.e. the ingredients that had got me this far.

But they weren’t what mattered. The experience beyond 21 miles was uncharted.

What this says to me is that when you go to extremes, new things happen?

There are new experiences to be found, when you go past your limits, which aren’t like the old ones scaled up. They’re something distinct. Unanticipated and unanticipatable.

I don’t know how to explain it better than that! It seems to me that this is true of so many things. The only way to know what it’s like to run mile 22 is to run 21 miles first, you can’t shortcut your way there.

The only way to know what you’ll write as your million-and-first word is first to write a million words.

Etc.

So would I do it again? I went into it saying no. One and done.

That said, lying there under the blue sky watching my muscles writhe around, in the park in Southampton city centre, there was a part of me going, I think I could have done better knowing what I know now about race strategy.

Actually I’m sure I could.

And there’s something I saw about myself, I think, at the end of the travel upriver, into the capillary-end heart of that journey, that place of pride and brutal will – and I can’t see it clearly from my vantage point of sitting at my laptop. I want to visit that place again.

Anyway.

Race time of 3:40, hit my goals, slightly better than actually. I got a medal (we all did). Where I came is number 249 out of 1,337. 62/199 if I look at my category, which is male veterans (veteran, in the UK, means old). Pleased, yes, and also would like to have done better.

And what an experience to experience my body as pure system, this kind of metabolic system which is just astounding and fascinating, and has so many nuances and edges; I’m learning a new landscape, a geography, this surface of a metabolic manifold of surprisingly few parameters really.

I feel so in tune with and in touch with myself. If I have any regrets about my running career it’s that I wish I’d started running earlier than my early 30s, and I wish I’d started taking it more seriously earlier than I did.

And that’s another lesson I can take more generally which is to try more and if I’m going to commit, then commit faster.

More posts tagged: 20-most-popular-in-2025 (20), 5-most-popular-in-2025 (5), introspecting (6).

Week 53! It’s a whole year since launch—check out that Week 1 screen grab. Happy first birthday to Job Garden 🎂

To celebrate, we have a ton of new features, all launching today.

Colourful icons for companies!

The site has had a refresh, and all the companies a gardener endorses are now in their own tab. With the extra space, there’s room to show an icon for each company. Don’t they look neat :)

That’s the main job board page. Not a huge amount has changed there, but check this out…

…it’s the new company page.

Companies now have descriptions!

The text under the company’s name comes directly from their homepage. One of the things we found was that, as a job seeker, when you tap through to a job board, it’s really hard to tell whether a company is going to be interesting to you or not. This isn’t the entire response to that problem, but descriptions and colourful icons go a long way to helping.

(Descriptions are the result of the data spelenking in week 51.)

Incidentally, the company in that screen grab, Winnow… they just shipped their v2 product, an A.I.-enabled food waste analyser that is already in use across IKEA to save food in commercial kitchens. They’re hiring for everything from machine learning to account management so 👉 check out their jobs.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE: WATCHLISTS.

When you sign in, you’ll get your own personal, private watchlist.

This lets you watch as many gardeners as you want, and see all the jobs in one place. Nobody else will know.

Previously this functionality was only available as a weekly email. The weekly email is still available, but you can see the jobs, live, on the website too.

AND YES, STILL MORE!

Add individual companies to your watchlist too.

Now when you see a company on Job Garden, you can watch it specifically and get it on your watchlist. So if you want to keep tabs on your favourite startups, just in case your ideal role pops up, this is for you.

Ok. That’ll do for today. This is work that Phil has been leading on (remember I talked about Phil?)—so, nice one Phil 🙇

It’s super good to get these features shipped not only because they make Job Garden more useful for job seekers, but because they’re features on a roadmap that has been prioritised with early users. I like adding features in response to requests.

Next up… well, we’ll see. There’s a birthday to celebrate first.

More posts tagged: job-garden (53).

So last Friday I removed the password from the new Job Garden site, set it live, and told my friends on Twitter. John Pavlus emailed to ask about it. Here’s what I replied:

I figure all the best jobs I’ve had have been via friends, and I’m always being asked to share open jobs at startups I know, so I made a social job board I guess? Kinda like what LinkedIn could have been.

I haven’t built the sign-up screens yet. But the idea is that you could also make your own job board just by saying what companies you endorse, and then Job Garden syncs up with their hiring pages and brings everything together.

Right now it does just that. It’s ugly and it’s early and it works. The front page is my own job board, and it shows 26 open jobs at 8 startups that I am delighted to endorse. Here’s the page.

More posts tagged: job-garden (53).

I had a dream last night that I was talking to one of my old physics tutors, and he was researching the end of the universe. (This isn’t accurate. He researches Martian weather.)

The universe, he said, runs from the beginning, then gets up to a certain point, and then it ends all at once. At which point it repeats, exactly the same as before, starting from the Big Bang, but it continues a little further each time around.

In fact (this is what he told me, in the dream) while we had been speaking, in the very middle of our conversation, the entire universe had come to a complete end. Then it had restarted, and many many billion years had passed while stars formed again, the Earth cooled again, life began again, humans evolved again, history happened again, we were born again, we grew up and had our lives again, our conversation went along again, until, eventually, we arrived at the point at which we had to leave off before, and this time the universe didn’t stop. It rolled on and now here we are. This time round the universe will continue just a little longer, until it ends again and the whole thing repeats.

We stood up and walked outside.

Did you notice it happening? he said. No, I said.

Yet that’s what happened. 14 billion years between breaths. The old you died. You’re a completely different person to the one you were when we started talking. Separate lives. You feel like you’re the same but you’re not.

One question to ask about dreams is: how did you feel? The feeling is what is real; the dream imagery is assembled out of whatever material is at hand in order to specify that feeling with pinpoint precision.

I grew at the tail end of the Cold War. My unquestioned assumption was that I would probably live out my life in a nuclear wasteland.

One of the things we’d talk about was the neutron bomb. This type of bomb would leave cities buildings intact, and it had very little fallout so the city would be safe to occupy after it was dropped, but the people would all go. Not die, that wasn’t the myth of it, but somehow vapourised – raptured up to heaven, really. It was called the “clean” bomb. The mental image was of an urban Mary Celeste.

Amongst the misery of Covid-19, this horrifically unfair disease, which is too big for me to think about and so I’m feeling my way around it bit by bit, there is the the lockdown.

The lockdown is a neutron bomb for the economy. What if the buildings stay, and the people stay, but the economy vanishes?

Or at least, part of the economy. The UK government is essentially paying to keep the wheels turning of the “key” part of the economy – the life-support system. With what money? Who knows, it doesn’t seem important now. “Key worker” has a definition now that can never be forgotten. The rest: work from home please… if there’s work to be done. Otherwise, well, being a consumer is part of the key economy too, because you need to consume to live, so you get paid to do that too.

This wheat-from-the-chaff of what’s in and out of the “key” economy – it doesn’t differentiate between producing and consuming. Those words are redundant now; we need new words for the transactions taking place. If it’s key, and it isn’t happening because it the market, it’ll get paid for by the state.

So it turns out the key economy is a hyperobject that I didn’t know existed. There’s the key economy, there’s the bit which is stood up by capitalism’s free market, and the rest is evaporated.

I ran across a paper the other day, Why is Maxwell’s Theory so hard to understand? [PDF]. This is in reference to Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism which he published in 1865 and - despite his high standing in the scientific community - were largely ignored for 20 years. They turned out to be enormously significant. (That is: all of electronics, i.e. the modern world.)

What this paper puts forward is that when Maxwell introduced the idea of “fields,” it was a scientific revolution to the point that even Maxwell couldn’t speak in terms of it.

He replaced the Newtonian universe of tangible objects interacting with one another at a distance by a universe of fields extending through space and only interacting locally with tangible objects. The notion of a field was hard to grasp because fields are intangible. The scientists of that time, including Maxwell himself, tried to picture fields as mechanical structures composed of a multitude of little wheels and vortices extending throughout space.

Electrical fields. Magnetic fields.

The modern view of the world that emerged from Maxwell’s theory is a world with two layers. The first layer, the layer of the fundamental constituents of the world, consists of fields … The second layer, the layer of the things that we can directly touch and measure.

The second layer, that’s the layer you and I live in.

And just to finish off this diversion:

The ultimate importance of the Maxwell theory is far greater than its immediate achievement in explaining and unifying the phenomena of electricity and magnetism. Its ultimate importance is to be the prototype for all the great triumphs of twentieth-century physics. … All these theories are based on the [two layer] concept of dynamical fields, introduced by Maxwell in 1865.

What’s my point?

My point is that it took something radical to transition from a world with one layer to a world with two layers. And once that shift in viewpoint happened, there was a fifty year golden age of physics.

So: the key economy. I couldn’t really imagine a line drawn around it before. Now I can.

I don’t know how to draw that line, but just to know that it could be drawn… the fact lets me imagine other kinds of economy, or other orchestrations of human activity that fulfil the goals of the key economy, and it lets me question things. That line is a boundary on definitions.

Like: why should the money of the capitalism free market be same as the money of the key economy? Maybe, to run health, education, grocery stores, deliveries, we could just print as much as necessary, then remove it from the system via taxes later to avoid the system getting inflationary. Maybe make a special currency called “key activity sterling”. Why shouldn’t the people involved live as well as bank CEOs? It turns out we get to choose what money does.

Maybe money doesn’t work in the way that I thought money worked. I imagined money as something that could neither be created nor destroyed – the economy as a scaled-up version of MONIAC, that famous hydraulic model of the economy.

But maybe money is more like a lubricant in that it makes parts of the system work well together, and you can add it and replace it and remove it and clean it whenever necessary.

I don’t know. I’m still getting my head round this. Key workers, my goodness you could have spent a lifetime trying to create a list like this or argue one into existence, and now we have it.

Do we have a deep-seated need to feel part of a empowered group?

I ran across this concept in an profile of Greta Thunberg in the FT.

Sabherwal’s paper found that people who had heard of Thunberg were likely to feel a stronger sense of “collective efficacy”, the belief that they could make a difference by acting together.

That’s an interesting feeling to stick a pin in: the sense that you are part of a group with strength.

Having named the feeling, I think we can ask and immediately answer two follow-up questions:

1. Does it feel good to feel strong collective efficacy? Yes it does.
2. Do people want to feel good? Yes they do.

Which implies! Amongst all the groups a person encounters, they will move up the gradient towards stronger collective efficacy. i.e. if there are two groups, A and B, which are otherwise entirely equal but group B has a lever to choose the colour of the bike shed, people will move to group B.

Or if people feel alienated in society, the “containing” group, but some political group, or radical organisation, or whatever, promises the ability to change how things work then, by osmosis, those groups will grow in popularity.

Way too simplistic conclusion: the answer to radicalisation is to increase the collective efficacy of society - to increase people’s ability to be part of meaningful change - reducing the osmotic pressure that drives people into fringe groups.

It seems obvious written down like this, but I hadn’t thought of it from quite that angle before.

Practically, if we assume that “collective efficacy tropism” is a thing that humans have, we can ask questions about limits: How small can collective efficacy be, and still modify behaviour?

Like, do the follow qualify as teeny-weeny collective efficacy ocean floor thermal vents:

• Posting a book review on Amazon – does the simple existence of the text box create a feeling of “oh I could leave a mark here” and therefore an almost indiscernible nano tribalism to the “Amazon” group?
• Sharing highlights on a website, cf my shared social attention experiment the other week – does this femto-togetherness create any kind of measurable gravity?

Clearly at a larger scale, it’s incredibly powerful to feel part of something. Remember reddit’s amazing Place project of 2017.

But if it’s really an honest-to-goodness human need, even if imperceptible in many cases, what strategies are there to design for collective efficacy, from micro to macro?

And if a software product is designed without any such possibility (I pick on software because with physical spaces you get it for free) then will it always feel, in some nameless way, hollow?

The following was first posted on the 3 Books Weekly email newsletter and has since been archived here.

Hi folks!

Welcome to the 6th edition of 3 Books Weekly featuring Dr Anne Galloway!

Anne’s an old friend, and her perspective on what it means to be a person of human, animal, or other variety - whether that’s informed by talking to shepherds as they use (or don’t use) drones, or hanging out with her sheep in New Zealand - is always mind-opening for me. Anne runs the More-Than-Human Lab at the Victoria University of Wellington, and tweets as @annegalloway.

Some brief bookshop news… If you’d be up for sharing your recommendations, I’d love to stock them in the vending machine! You can find a mini questionnaire to fill in, and the latest weekly selection, right here. Machine Supply is a popup bookshop that has popped up at Campus London for the whole of April.

And as ever, if you’ve enjoyed 3 Books Weekly, please share with friends :) They can subscribe here.

Happy Friday!

Matt

#1. The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagihara

I read a lot of novels, but this is one I read last year that really got under my skin. Written as an intellectual memoir, this is a story of first contact, culturally relative ethics, and universal cruelty. To my mind it epitomises the fragile beauty and durable disgrace of humanist modes of inquiry, but I remain most disturbed that I wish I could cross paths with Perina. I suspect it would change me forever.

The People in the Trees: Amazon / Amazon UK

#2. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

This is an ethnographic account of companion species, one about (as Jedediah Purdy writes) “what we make of mushrooms [and] what mushrooms might make of us.” It’s a story of relationality and interconnectedness; a deeply curious and hopeful feminist ecology for the damaged worlds we share. I wish more research was like this. I wish more people thought like this.

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins: Amazon / Amazon UK

#3. The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert

The protagonist Alma Whittaker is a peculiar - and utterly beguiling - combination of insatiable and humble. But I loved this story because it taught me something important about scales of lived experience, and I think that Alma was taught something important about scales of lived experience through her encounters with moss. Seriously, all that matters here is the space-time of moss.

The Signature of All Things: Amazon / Amazon UK

More posts tagged: 3-books (34), mushrooms (4).

Deliveroo drivers are striking this week (The Guardian) over "their pay, rights and safety practices." (Deliveroo is the UK equivalent of Doordash.)

After a 4.5 year legal fight, ending in the UK Supreme Court, Uber Says Its UK Drivers Are ‘Workers,’ but Not Employees (Wired). This means drivers get "minimum wage guarantees after expenses, paid holidays, and pension contributions" but not sick pay or protection against unfair dismissal.

Deliveroo drivers and Uber drivers are performing “Below the API” jobs. Uber’s software layer (the API) dispatches a human to do a job, and…

What does that make the drivers? Cogs in a giant automated dispatching machine, controlled through clever programming optimizations like surge pricing?

And: "it’s not a secret that Uber intends to eventually replace all their drivers with self-driving cars."

Here’s Norbert Wiener in 1948, in his seminal book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (the first public use of the term). He’s talking about computers, or as he says the "modern ultra-rapid computing machine".

It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor. Such mechanical labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor, although, unlike slave labor, it does not involve the direct demoralizing effects of human cruelty. However, any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor.

I’m actually not comfortable with the use of “slavery” as a metaphor here. The lived reality of slavery is abhorrent in its own way, and I feel like it’s minimised somehow to deploy the word like this. Life under capitalism, below the API, can be criticised on its own terms.

HOWEVER: it strikes me as significant, somehow, that right at the dawn of computing, it was possible to predict the situation that Uber drivers find themselves in today, 73 years into the future.

As it happens, Wiener didn’t believe that knowledge work was immune.

There is no rate of pay at which a United States pick-and-shovel laborer can live which is low enough to compete with the work of a steam shovel as an excavator. The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions.

So we have that to look forward to.

Further back!

101 years ago, the word robot (in its current sense) was coined:

The modern meaning of the word ‘robot’ has its origins in a 1920 play by the remarkable and fascinating Czech writer Karel Čapek. The play, titled R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), begins in a factory which manufactures artificial people, the ‘universal robots’ of the play’s title. The robots are designed to serve humans and work for them, but the robots eventually turn on their masters, wiping out the human race.

But robot wasn’t a new word. It first appears in English in 1839 referring to "central European system of serfdom, by which a tenant’s rent was paid in forced labour or service."

It comes from the Czech robota meaning “forced labour” or “slavery.”

Here’s a segment from Rossum’s Universal Robots:

DR. GALL: Yes, the Robots feel practically no bodily pain. You see, young Rossum provided them with too limited a nervous system. We must introduce suffering.

HELENA: Why do you want to cause them pain?

DR. GALL: For industrial reasons, Miss Glory. Sometimes a Robot does damage to himself because it doesn’t hurt him. He puts his hand into the machine, breaks his finger, smashes his head, it’s all the same to him. We must provide them with pain. That’s an automatic protection against damage.

HELENA: Will they be happier when they feel pain?

DR. GALL: On the contrary; but they will be more perfect from a technical point of view.

HELENA: Why don’t you create a soul for them?

DR. GALL: That’s not in our power.

FABRY: That’s not in our interest.

BUSMAN: That would increase the cost of production.

It don’t know what it means for our current pitfalls to be anticipated so long ago.

But I do feel that we need a word in the public discourse to critique what the Ubers and Deliveroos are doing with their “Below the API” workers. Something that can be said by newsreaders and unpacked by columnists. Because it’s not really well understood right now. It’s one thing to say that Uber hasn’t, historically, paid minimum wage, but the easy counter to that is that the drivers get a kind of flexibility and freedom that regular employees at other companies do not. It’s another thing entirely to say that reason that the drivers are paid below minimum wage is that they are being put into artificially amplified competition with one another and with future automation. It was inevitable. So it’s that system that needs to be unpicked, not the outcome.

Perhaps “robot” will do, as a word to use in the debate, given its history. Robots are people who are denied souls, for business reasons.

So here’s my proposal. Let’s make robot a dirty word.

i.e.: “What is Uber doing? They’re treating their drivers like robots.” Etc.

If you’re given a third arm coming out of the middle of your chest, a really long third arm, it turns out you can adapt to using it successfully in less than 10 minutes.

Homuncular Flexibility in Virtual Reality, Won et al (2015) [PDF].

What if you could become a bat–your arms acting as wings allowing you to fly through the night sky? The avatars that users inhabit in virtual reality (VR) make this possible. … For example, could people learn to control a lobster avatar that had many more limbs than its human user? … Tracked movements that the user made in the physical world would be rendered as different movements of the avatar body. Thus, an eight-armed lobster could have each limb powered by the rotation of a wrist, the flex of an ankle, or some combination of the two.

And:

In Experiment Two, participants controlling three-armed avatars learned to hit more targets than participants in two-armed avatars.

And in the “Future directions” section:

how far can we push these adaptations? Can people learn to control eight limbs, or kilometer-long arms?

Okay so that’s VR, but why not really?

The Cave was a proto-VR environment where you would stand in a cube-shaped room where a virtual environment was projected on the walls. Using a controller, you could “move” through the virtual environment – and look around you without needing to use a headset.

I don’t have a reference for this but I heard about this experiment: what they did was track the rotation of your head, as you looked from side to side, and then rotate the virtual environment the same amount again. So if you looked 90 degrees the right, it would be as though you were looking 180 degrees, directly behind you.

What I heard was that people adapt surprisingly quickly to this. You get accustomed, really fast, to being able to rotate your head all the way round like an owl.

Dani Clode’s design provocation The Third Thumb visualises a robotic extra thumb as a sixth digit on the hand, used to hold fruit and play the guitar.

MobiLimb is a robotic finger that protrudes from a smartphone. It can prop itself up so you can see the screen; it can literally point things out; it can drag itself across the table.

Why don’t we see a ton of serious research into areas like this? Given it turns out we can adapt psychologically quite happily to having extra limbs, why don’t we see R&D money being piled in?

I want to see weird-ass research lab nerds from universities walking around like Doctor Octopus, doing their best to convince the rest of us that more hands = better. I want to see folks like Apple and Google try really, really hard to get it to go mainstream, even though they will mostly fail.

Because decades of research got us the iPhone – and, by extension, the peace dividend of the smartphone wars being: drones (sensors and batteries) and the internet of things (commodity connectivity) which is massive in the industrial world). Imagine if robotic prosthetics were cheap and commonplace.

What are the mundane, everyday applications?

I want an exoskeleton chairless chair but for gardening.

I want to open the door of a cafe with my third arm when my hands are full carrying coffee.

I want to feel electric fields with my fingertips. I want to go ambling in a new city and not get lost because I have an intuitive sense of north. I want a camera stuck on the back of my neck that shows up as a stretched image round the rim of my otherwise ordinary glasses, and I want to know how quickly seeing behind me feels like a little extra sense that I couldn’t do without.

Forget showing my lost items on a map on a screen and making me treasure-hunt my way back to them. I want to be able to whistle to my phone from anywhere in the house, and have it wriggle out of the sofa and scamper across the room and snuggle into my pocket.

Imagine giving your phone a high five with a tiny hand that you don’t yet have.

More posts tagged: glimpses-of-our-cyborg-future (15), speculative-in-2020 (18).

It’s a bit last minute I know, but let’s have another hardware-ish coffee morning this week!

Thursday 9th April, 9.30am for a couple of hours, at the Book Club (100 Leonard St).

Why? It’s sunny, I’m in the mood to hang out and chat about cross-stitch and hardware startups and distribution. Zero structure though, chat about whatever you fancy – here’s how it works.

If you’ve been thinking about coming to coffee mornings 1 thru 7 but haven’t, bunk off work and come along to this one. It’d be lovely to see you.

(Reminders, as always, are sent to the coffee morning list.)

I once used a microwave oven that was unlike any microwave oven I’ve used since. This was 30 years ago and the microwave was already old at the time.

It didn’t have a rotating plate inside. So there was no motor and actually I don’t remember any noise at all. There may have been a tiny window in the door – but my memory is fuzzy, and honestly I don’t even remember there being a light.

But I do recall that it was dressed identically to all the other, regular kitchen cabinets. Just inset into the units, the only difference being the box inside and inconspicuous controls outside.

It was eery. You would open the door, put your plate in, turn a mechanical dial which was sprung so you could feel the force in it turning, but it was just like any regular kitchen timer, close the door – and wait. In silence. Then you would open the door and the food would be hot.

A magic trick!

I am kinda reminded of the crystal chamber in the Fortress of Solitude in Superman II (1980) which Superman stands in to have his powers removed/restored.

Or - in a more mundane fashion - an airing cupboard, which is like a regular cupboard only it is magic in that it dries your clothes slowly.

My microwave today feels more believable because it has the appearance that it is working. It rotates inside! There is a light! It hums and buzzes! Heating food is effortful!

BUT – I wonder how much of that is essential (yes you need rotation to avoid localised pockets of superheated O-H bonds that explode when you mix the food) - VERSUS - a bit performative maybe? It’s noisy because it stops the microwave being uncanny.

I have the same feeling with electric cars:

EVs are quiet. Teslas have their Pedestrian Warning System so that, well, pedestrians are warned, and generally there are electric vehicle warning sounds (Wikipedia).

Hyundai provides "synthetic audio feedback mimicking the sound of an idling internal combustion engine" – which, in addition to being tediously skeuomorphic, feels like a terrible missed opportunity.

And I’m sure I’ve stood near some EVs that have a more tuneful approach? Which is more like it.

See because the performative bit is the point.

Actual and apparent have to go hand in hand. Like: coronations. A prince becomes king and now has the power to CHOP OFF YOUR HEAD. This transition could happen privately, but the appearance has to match what has just happened in magnitude otherwise it would feel weird. So there’s a big song and dance about it. (The virtual is real, as previously discussed.)

Or like: porches. You were on the street and now you’re in my house. Yes you need to take your boots off and change down the gears to velocity-match the different vibe, and that transition takes room, but aside from that – it would just feel wrong to have a regular door instead of a fancy front door.

So my food gets hot! This hulk of metal and wheels actually moves! As much as I am tickled by the magic of it happening in silence, momentous acts do need to be performed and witness so that, deep down, we believe them.

It’s a missed opportunity though, that’s all I’m saying.

Because my microwave could sing!

If the mechanism were quieter (which it surely could be) then my microwave could belt out a three minute aria while my supper magically heats!

My car could sound like a burbling brook with the audible but uninterpretable sound of a crowd of fae-folk chattering and singing with increasing intensity.

As my phone charges, it could be whispering a deep and slow Philip Glass composition.

All of which would do the same job.

Yet we don’t do this.

I am desperately trying not to say “hey and generative AI could do this!” – because, yes, AI makes the composition of quote-creative-unquote works cheap.

But AI is the instrument. There is still the question of the composer. Somebody needs to decide and prompt exactly what music my electric vehicle should perform.

Though I do feel like generative AI will mean that decoration, ornament and filigree becomes cheap again? And maybe we’ll move into an aesthetic in which our furniture, white goods, and accessories superficially resemble the busy-busy arts and crafts era - but actually it’s because, well, it costs almost nothing to do (it’s just software) and it makes the object look NEW.

Exactly like, in the early 2000s, everything had blue LEDs. Yes it was kinda because blue LEDs had just been commercialised so it was a good signifier of “this is the newest kit” - but also it’s because things need lights, and blue LEDs happened to be cheaper to produce than red or green ones…

Which still leaves us with the question of the composer.

Could we buy ambient tunes for the outside of our cars like we used to buy ringtones for our phones?

Will we have a weekly Billboard chart of hits for kitchen appliances?

Look I want to download, install and play Brian Eno’s Music for Microwave Ovens, every time I heat the leftovers, is that too much to ask.

More posts tagged: sound-and-music (17), speculative-in-2023 (16).

I was looking through this gallery of popemobiles and it occurred to me that, with the transparent, upright, contained tank, this form is ideally shaped to transport a future aquatic pope. Let’s say, a dolphin.

What are the obstacles to cetacean papacy?

The pope is the bishop of Rome and, in Catholicism, only men may be bishops. (Though Mary, of course, is fundamental to the church). There’s a quote from Pope Francis on the Wikipedia page about the ordination of women which I love simply for the language:

In Catholic ecclesiology there are two dimensions to think about… The Petrine dimension, which is from the Apostle Peter, and the Apostolic College, which is the pastoral activity of the bishops, as well as the Marian dimension, which is the feminine dimension of the Church.

So female dolphins are probably excluded from elevation.

Being non-human may prove another hurdle. Dolphins are animals, so their capacity will be questioned. But if we take a hypothetical extraterrestrial of human-equivalent sentience, even they may not be admitted to the church:

If aliens exist, they may be a different life form that does not need Christ’s redemption, the Vatican’s chief astronomer said. …

“God became man in Jesus in order to save us. So if there are also other intelligent beings, it’s not a given that they need redemption. They might have remained in full friendship with their creator,” he said.

So let’s say we were to limit ourselves to male dolphins, even if we then determined that dolphins were capable of reciting scripture (or whatever our definition of sentience is), they may be still disqualified for not being in need of redemption.

Some other faiths allow for a greater divergence between leaders and followers. In Sikhism, after a lineage of 10 humans, the title of Guru was passed to the community itself (as previously discussed).

And more generally, away from the idea of leadership and thinking about the operations of worship, there are already some robots that perform religious rituals (in Vox):

In hospice settings, elderly Buddhists who don’t have people on hand to recite prayers on their behalf will use devices known as nianfo ji – small machines about the size of an iPhone, which recite the name of the Buddha endlessly.

And:

In 2017, Indians rolled out a robot that performs the Hindu aarti ritual, which involves moving a light round and round in front of a deity.

And:

For years now, people who can’t afford to pay a human priest to perform a funeral have had the option to pay a robot named Pepper to do it at a much cheaper rate.

Also, from that same Vox article, a comment from Ilya Delio, "a Franciscan sister who holds two PhDs and a chair in theology at Villanova University":

“The Catholic notion would say the priest is ontologically changed upon ordination. Is that really true?” she asked. Maybe priestliness is not an esoteric essence but a programmable trait that even a “fallen” creation like a robot can embody. “We have these fixed philosophical ideas and AI challenges those ideas – it challenges Catholicism to move toward a post-human priesthood.” (For now, she joked, a robot would probably do better as a Protestant.)

Delio is probably joking about BlessU-2, an automated blessing robot from the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau.

Delio continues: "We tend to think in an either/or framework: It’s either us or the robots. But this is about partnership, not replacement. It can be a symbiotic relationship – if we approach it that way."

Human/robot symbiosis. This is Garry Kasparov’s concept of centaurs, originally from chess: "Rather than half-horse, half-human, a centaur chess player is one who plays the game by marrying human intuition, creativity and empathy with a computer’s brute-force ability to remember and calculate a staggering number of chess moves, countermoves and outcomes."

So maybe the future is not dolphin popes but centaur popes: A singular human pope in the Vatican, with a hundred or a thousand machine popes travelling the world, issuing blessings and on-the-ground decrees wherever required.

And then if one day the human pope were to recede into the background, maybe never seen again, but a century later in 2121 the role of pope was still functionally maintained by the papal swarm, actually way more efficiently now, visiting cities, ordaining bishops, ostensibly semi-autonomous like so many Martian rovers, perhaps there’s a frail hand behind the curtain or perhaps not, it’s best not to ask too closely, would we even notice the change? Would we even mind?

More posts tagged: dolphins (6), speculative-in-2021 (16).

It strikes me that automation means that the kind of laws we have can really change.

First there are laws as deterrence.

If the state wants to reduce some action but it’s really hard to detect, there are a couple of possibilities – take for example, deterring people from driving dangerously fast. The state can make the penalty disproportionately large: so there might be only a 1 in 1,000 chance of being caught, but if you do get caught you might get banned from driving. OR: the threshold for penalty might be stricter, such as having the speed limit by 70 mph when the actual “safe” speed is 75-80 mph. (Or rather, we’re not actually trying to measure speed but danger, and speed is just a poor proxy for that.)

Multiple together the various numbers to get a deterrence factor.

Now imagine, in this era of mass surveillance and computer vision, that it’s easier to detect and prosecute. That means that the number of prosecutions can go up, but for the same deterrence factor the laws can be more lax and the penalty lighter.

Second: laws that make laws possible.

There’s an idea in cybernetics, from Ross Ashby in 1956. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety:

if a system is to be able to deal successfully with the diversity of challenges that its environment produces, then it needs to have a repertoire of responses which is (at least) as nuanced as the problems thrown up by the environment.

The complexity of the controlling system (laws, police, courts) must be at least as complex as the system being controlled (the public). Given we want the controlling system to be small, an easy way to achieve this is to somehow constrain the range of behaviours of the system being controlled – to simplify it.

That is, there are some laws that aim to make society simpler to govern, not to deter behaviour which causes self-harm. Perhaps those laws could be removed?

Using automation and mass surveillance, the control system becomes more fine-grained; more complex. This means the allowed complexity of society should also be allowed to increase – that is, become less regulated.

The police state and the dividend of automation

But when we think about mass surveillance and face recognition in cameras, etc, we don’t think about greater precision in enforcement and more freedom. We think about a police state. There are other factors at play:

• paranoia: perhaps, even though mass surveillance might allow for great freedom, fine-grained laws might mean that they are impossible to understand before they are enforced. The result would be a kind of horrific paranoia or feeling of being trapped in an abusive relationship
• oligarchy: even if greater freedom for society was made possible, perhaps the complexity or the “degrees of freedom” of a society is a bulk property, and needn’t be distributed equally. Some will be granted huge freedom, most of us not so much
• history: when profit and power are able to maintain the status quo, whether society overall is allowed to improve or not is a consequence of history. If those in power today wouldn’t be in power tomorrow, tomorrow won’t be allowed to come.

So there’s a dividend of automation that could mean greater freedom, but other forces mean it might not go that way.

The 4 day working week

I’m reminded of the 4 day working week, which was in the 2019 Labour Party manifesto.

There is a trend towards greater productivity by replacing human workers with automation. We are used to thinking about this in terms of unemployment and re-training.

But the Labour manifesto framed this dividend of automation differently. Unemployment would be a result of the dividend going into the pocket of company owners. If instead it went to society, we could think about a better welfare state, more leisure time, wealth to spend during that leisure time, vocational second careers, and so on. The “4 day working week” is a way to imagine all of that.

How to direct the dividend of automation?

The problem is that we have been trained to hear “unemployment” as a problem that the state has to deal with, not an indication that efficiency has increased, and there is now surplus time and wealth. UNEMPLOYMENT MEANS WE CAN DO THE SAME WITH LESS EFFORT.

How come the dividend of automation doesn’t lead to greater leisure and greater freedom? How come we’re not even asking the questions about how this can happen?

I think it’s because there isn’t being painted a clear enough picture of a better future, and engaging everyone in a discussion about how to get there. Give me novels and movies of sci-fi almost-utopias. Make me ask, how do I live there. Make me ask and demand, how do we get there.

I was driving in the dark last week and listening to the whole Twin Peaks soundtrack (Wikipedia).

Wife napping. Kid asleep in the back. No road lighting, no Moon.

On YouTube: Angelo Badalamenti Twin Peaks theme. 1990!

It holds up, it holds up.

Also on YouTube: Angelo Badalamenti explains how he wrote Laura Palmer’s theme - so beautiful, do please watch this, you have to hear him play and narrate how he worked with David Lynch.

For ‘Laura Palmer’s Theme,’ he described a lonely girl coming from out in the woods, and the sycamore trees calmly blowing in the wind, and then make me start on a melody. He would always speak very softly in my ear, and I would play something the whole time while he was speaking. Oh, Angelo, we’re in the dark woods, that’s good, that’s good. Play it slower. De-da-de-da-de-da. Play it slower, okay. Angelo, yeah, that’s good, you slowed up, but play it slower.

So you see it fits very well.

Taillights and headlights and dreamy haunting jazz.

Such a vibe, you know?

There are a few albums that work best, driving in the dark. Dummy (1994) by Portishead is one.

The Dead Texan.

Literally anything by Cliff Martinez, the Solaris soundtrack for instance.

Which of course takes me to my favourite TV ad of all time which is Night Driving (Ad Forum; watch the 90 second spot there) for VW Golf by adam&eveDDB. Cliff Martinez, the dark empty streets of LA, and Under Milkwood read by Dylan Thomas.

It’s such an eternal cognitive location, night driving.

Different thoughts come when you access that state.

Like writing PowerPoint in hotel lobbies.

I talked about this! Three feelings that I don’t have words for (2020).

Number #3: "Hotel lobbies always feel the same to me. The exotic, and melancholy."

The hotel lobby exists outside time. In that place, I’m 28, I’m 42, I’m all ages in-between. I feel like, sitting there in 2012, I could probably remember the future yesterday of 2016 …

Atemporality.

This moment of communion is also picked up on by Borges, as previously discussed (2012), not just breaking the barrier of time but also the barrier of individuality:

"All men who repeat a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare."

I think you access something other and special when you escape time, escape selfhood, whether that’s driving in the dark or sitting in a hotel lobby or walking, that’s another one.

It does a disservice to this cognitive state to believe that it can be found only with psychedelics or meditation or whatever, whereas there are mundane apertures too,

and we do a disservice to alternative cognitive states to choose to name “flow,” simply because it relates to productivity, and to leave nameless this mode of becoming diffuse and sensitive, able to sense resonances and new ideas from species memory and from the future, and from there, pluck them, and return home with them.

150, Dunbar’s number, is the natural size of human social groups. Robin Dunbar’s 1993 paper, where he put forward this hypothesis, is a great read – it’s got twists and turns, so much more in it than just the 150 number.

(If you design software for people to socialise or collaborate, like Slack or Google Docs, then what Dunbar says is useful to know! Also true if you build communities in Discords or DAOs, I reckon, good knowledge to have when structuring the spaces and processes for interaction.)

I’ve added a reference to Dunbar’s paper, Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans, at the bottom of this post. It’s not online but you can snag a pre-print PDF here.

The paper and the number are both super well-known.

BUT - I insist! - still not well-known enough in our software and design circles. Especially given there is a revitalisation and renewed interest in building and innovating with the social internet.

So I figured I would share my favourite bits.

Dunbar lists a bunch of places this 150 group size appears. To pick out a convincing selection…

• 6500-5500 BC: "the size of Neolithic villages in Mesopotamia are of about the same magnitude."
• In South Dakota: "the Hutterites regard 150 individuals as the limiting size for their farming communities: once a community reaches this size, steps are taken to split it into two daughter communities."
• Academic communities: "research specialities in the sciences tend to consist of up to 200 individuals, but rarely more."
• Professional armies have a basic unit of about 150 men: "This was as true of the Roman Army (both before and after the reforms of 104 BC) as of modern armies since the sixteenth century."
• Work: "the likelihood of having friends within the workplace reaches an asymptote at a shop size of 90-150 individuals."

It’s the number of people on your Christmas card list. When AOL Instant Messenger launched, it was the maximum allowable number of buddies.

(And the number of Pokemon in generation one… 151. Huh.)

Pretty compelling. Something to be explained.

The clever bit:

The catarrhine primates: Old World monkeys (baboons, macaques, mandrill, and ~130 other species) plus the apes… tailless simians including gibbons, gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans.

Dunbar’s insight was to look at the catarrhine primates and realise that these three factors are connected:

• Group size
• Time devoted to social grooming: a bonding mechanism (if you wanna have friends, you gotta spend time picking fleas)
• Neocortex size, being the amount of brain available for tracking the social group, i.e. a limit on "the number of relationships that an animal can keep track of in a complex, continuously changing social world"

Dunbar gives equations that relate these.

Then:

If we extrapolate from the nonhuman primate regression, what group size would we predict for anatomically modern humans, given our current neocortex size?

Oh-ho, a prediction!

"Equation (1) yields a predicted group size for humans of 147.8."

So there’s the observed number 150, right there in the size of the brain.

BUT THEN, A TWIST:

"The group size predicted for modern humans by equation (1) would require as much as 42% of the total time budget to be devoted to social grooming."

We (humans) clearly don’t spend all that time on social grooming. There’s not the time in the day. It’s incompatible with resting, foraging, and staying in the shade on hot days. Chimpanzees are the most comparable to humans, and they have a social time budget of about only 15%.

So what gives?

Humans, says Dunbar, must have a method of social grooming that is 2.8x more effective than the method used by the nonhuman primates. But what is it?

What is our ultra efficient bonding mechanism, better than caring, grooming, and picking fleas? It is LANGUAGE.

The observed mean group size for chimpanzees (presumably the closest approximation to the ancestral condition for the hominid lineage) is 53.5 (Dunbar 1992a). Since the predicted size for human groups is 147.8, this implies that language (the human bonding mechanism) ought to be 147.8/53.5=2.76 times as efficient as social grooming (the nonhuman primate bonding mechanism).

Speaking is way better than grooming, which requires 100% attention and is one-on-one. But we can talk to more than one person at once! See: "not only can speech be combined with almost every other activity (we can forage and talk at the same time), but it can also be used to address several different individuals simultaneously."

Dunbar’s suggestion is that language evolved as a "‘cheap’ form of social grooming," a way to increase group size. And there follows a cascade of consequences and speculations…

The interesting bit, for me, is about the “natural” size of a conversation group.

Dunbar’s prediction, based on the estimated efficiency gain versus chimps: "human conversation group sizes should be limited to about 3.8 in size (one speaker plus 2.8 listeners)."

And this holds up!

• Looking at restaurant reservations: "the mean size of 3070 groups was 3.8."
• In a university refectory: "the average number of people directly involved in a conversation (as speaker or attentive listener) reached an asymptotic value of about 3.4 (one speaker plus 2.4 listeners) and that groups tended to partition into new conversational cliques at multiples of about four individuals."

Which feels about right, right?

I mean, think of a sitting with friends round a dinner table. Two people, three people, four people, it’s one conversation. Five people, it’s still one conversation – just. At six it’s hard to maintain; the conversation often splits and oscillates between 4/2 and 3/3 modes.

The cognitive limit corresponds to how our ears and voices work.

It turns out that there is, in fact, a psycho-physical limit on the size of conversation groups. Due to the rate at which speech attenuates with the distance between speaker and hearer under normal ambient noise levels, there is a physical limit on the number of individuals that can effectively take part in a conversation. Sommer (1961), for example, found that a nose-to-nose distance of 1.7m was the upper limit for comfortable conversation in dyadic groups; this would yield a maximum conversation group size of five individuals with a shoulder-to-shoulder spacing of 0.5m between adjacent individuals standing around the circumference of a circle.

“Comfortable” conversation means "background noise levels typical of both offices and city streets" – our normal voice levels, our normal hearing, our normal comfortable personal social distance, our normal width of shoulders all combine to produce conversional groups of… 5 people.

Absolutely wonderful. It makes me laugh every time I read this bit.

Evidence for Dunbar’s Number in the analysis of 6 billion phone calls:

Dunbar actually doesn’t say that we devote “grooming time” to the whole social group of 150. Rather he says that the 150 is made up from "welding together" much smaller “primary networks”: coalitions, friendship groups. Intensive grooming (language, for humans) is reserved for close friends. Our intimate group is very small, averaging just five.

Dunbar suggests other group sizes too, in papers that follow his 1993 original…

Individuals, he says, generally have up to five people in the closest layer. The next closest layer contains an additional 10, the one beyond that an extra 35, and the final group another 100. So cumulatively, the layers contain five, 15, 50, and 150 people.

And this result is new to me:

Looking at "some six billion calls made by 35 million people" they did some number crunching and…

the average cumulative layer turns out to hold 4.1, 11.0, 29.8, and 128.9 users.

Ta-da! Dunbar’s number proved, close enough.

You can get the PDF on arXiv: Calling Dunbar’s Numbers (2016). I’ve included the full reference below.

Kinda amazing to have evidence for something that feels so intuitive (the average number of best friends/family) and that lends confidence in the discovery in the data of Dunbar’s number itself too.

BTW I found that second paper via Ethan Mollick (@emollick) on Twitter who daily shares and summarises fascinating papers and is 100% a must-follow.

Again, why this is relevant: if you’re designing systems for working in groups, whether that’s IRL workgroups and committees, or online chat groups, or software, the relevant numbers are 150 people who can be recognised over time, and approx 5 in a simultaneous conversation. That’s what it suggests to me anyway.

The numbers are just averages, of course, and we’re each individuals and you shouldn’t put too much weight on evo psych or be deterministic about this stuff, but what we can do is use these as springboards to provoke new feature ideas. Such as…

• could a Figma document suggest how to subdivide itself once more than five people are involved? Could my Twitter auto-segment into groups of 150?
• could we automatically adapt the interface of Zoom at the various Dunbar layers? Can we visually (and with interaction design) represent the structure of a 150 group “welded together” from smaller table-sized conversational groups, the two scales operating simultaneously?
• in pseudonymous groups where everyone is represented by avatars and obscure names, such as web3 communities on Discords, what is the right level of detail to help our ancient recognition systems to kick in, so we can get to Dunbar’s number and all the helpful formal and informal networks and subgroups that arise?
• when we’re building software-enabled co-ops or, in new language, creating governance and consensus systems for DAOs, could we optimise around Dunbar’s layers in order to avoid the inevitable bureaucratic requirements when we don’t – bureaucracy which is now perhaps revealed to be a social technology, a kind of relationships prosthetic for when self-organisation caps out.

(Those last two points relevant now the global public timelines of 2010s social media are evaporating into the unindexable Discords and WhatsApp groups of 2020s virtual private neighbourhoods.)

AND SO ON.

References

Dunbar, R.I.M., 1993. Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, 681–694. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032325

MacCarron, P., Kaski, K., Dunbar, R., 2016. Calling Dunbar’s Numbers. Social Networks 47, 151–155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2016.06.003

More posts tagged: 20-most-popular-in-2022 (20), 5-most-popular-in-2022 (5), multiplayer (32).

I was interviewed for the 84th edition of People and Blogs, "the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs."

So if you want to read about the backstory to this blog, or my creative process, or the technology (and my philosophy around it), then head on over. Lots of hyperlinks of course.

Read: P&B: Matt Webb.

A taster:

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

If I were to start a blog today, I would start an email newsletter. And that would be a mistake.

Also: check out the archive. Loads of names you’ll recognise there. The questions are the same, every edition. Thank you Manu Moreale for the invitation to take part! What a great project.

I feel like I’ve talked about blogging a whole bunch, lately. What with the reflections on 25 years etc.

More posts tagged: meta (20).

Pensions have a very particular schedule. You pay in to the same plan - at a rate of 10% or more over a large chunk of your career - and it starts paying out at a fixed point: at age 55, or 60, or whatever.

It seems to me that a pension’s particular schedule should instead be one end of a spectrum, the other end of which is credit cards and savings accounts. And then we should fill in that spectrum.

See, savings accounts are a way of putting a little bit of money aside for a big future purchase or a “rainy day.” Unemployment insurance does the same job, but it has a fixed pay-out trigger.

Savings accounts, unemployment insurance, and pensions are all ways to smooth out spikes in income over time.

A credit card provides for smoothness too, only it smooths out income spikes into the past whereas a savings account or a pension smooths out income spikes into the future. There are also fixed term investment vehicles with tax benefits.

I wonder whether there’s another kind of income smoothness service, one possible only with modern computerised record-keeping?

I’ve been using Twitshift, which lets me follow myself from a year ago on Twitter. I get to see all the things I was doing and thinking from 365 days in the past. Timehop does a similar job, but across lots of social media. I like the continuous, day-by-day nature of it.

Also I think a little about Bob Shaw’s concept of slow glass which is "glass that is so opaque that light takes as long as ten years to pass through it. From a practical standpoint, then, if you looked through a window made of slow glass, you’d see events that took place outside that window ten years ago."

I would like a slow savings account.

A slow savings account would work exactly like a regular account – I could pay money into it, and transfer money out. The difference would be: when I pay money in to a slow savings account, it appears in the available balance exactly one year later.

Additional slow savings models might include:

• Continuous partial pension. A pension doesn’t start at a fixed date, but is paid continuously over my entire life. I pay into it, and it pays me a very small amount every month (which, of course, I could use to pay back into my pension, deciding to feed the present to the future). This would give me a direct and visceral sense of the strength of my income as a 65 year old - having income of just 10 bucks a month from my continuous partial pension would certainly make me want to contribute more to it - and also gradually raise my safety line, the minimum level of income to which I am able to fall. A higher safety line lets me take more risks to find happiness and/or wealth, which is the advantage had by people from rich backgrounds.
• Spike smoothing. Whenever my current account balance spikes above a certain threshold, the surplus is taken and distributed evening over the next year. This achieves one of the functions of a regular savings account, in an automatic fashion.

A slow savings account would be the exact opposite of a credit card: it distributes present income into the future, instead of borrowing from the future; it deals with assets instead of liabilities; it encourages smooth spending instead of enabling large spike purchases; it raises the level of the safety net instead of raising the level of indebtedness.

My formative experiences of computing and the internet are now regarded as “history” haha

Which is BRILLIANT because I get to experience them all again, only via people who are doing the work to actually document and interpret it.

So, some links!

Cybercultural is by Richard MacManus who founded and edited ReadWriteWeb from 2003–2012. This was the period in which we all figured out that the web wasn’t a magazine, or a shop, or a TV, but a new kind of medium, with people and attention as the matter and energy of its physics. Anyway, he knows what he’s talking about, that’s what I mean.

I loved GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet which has screenshots I’ve never seen, and the origin story of how and why_ they wanted to "give people the sense that they had a home on the internet."

The History of the Web by Jay Hoffman and updates twice monthly (you can get a newsletter). I’ve found the best way to explore is to scroll down the timeline and click on articles as you see them.

This history of Perl and Python, The Linguist and the Programmer, brought back so many memories. (And made remember hanging out on the perl usenet back in the day… Abigail!)

Then these two articles about early online publishing:

• Salon, Slate, and a History of the Tricky Business of Publishing Online
• The Web After Suck

What I really appreciate about Hoffman’s writing is that there are many, many links in the Sources section for these articles. Thank you!

Folklore is an older project and still a great one: "Anecdotes about the development of Apple’s original Macintosh, and the people who made it."

I love reading about Mister Macintosh, a weird dumb idea (all the best ones are). From Steve Jobs:

Mr. Macintosh is a mysterious little man who lives inside each Macintosh. He pops up every once in a while, when you least expect it, and then winks at you and disappears again. It will be so quick that you won’t be sure if you saw him or not. We’ll plant references in the manuals to the legend of Mr. Macintosh, and no one will know if he’s real or not. …

One out of every thousand or two times that you pull down a menu, instead of the normal commands, you’ll get Mr. Macintosh, leaning against the wall of the menu.

Then you get the Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set and the origin story of rounded rectangles.

50 Years of Text Games by Aaron A. Read was originally a Substack and you can still read it there: "A deep dive into text game history, from The Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon." One per year.

It’s more than that: it’s a lens to see the culture around computing over two important generations.

Every piece in the archive is gold. Two faves are 1990: LamdaMOO about multiplayer, co-created text gaming… and the social structures they had to discover. (Also the subject of the amazing and prescient My Tiny Life (1998) by Julian Dibbell, which I mention here.)

And 2017: Universal Paperclips about a super-intelligent AI that makes paperclips…

Buy the 50 Years of Text Games book. I own it. 100% worth getting a copy.

Benj Edwards, literally anything written by him. Not a project but a person, Edwards is a tech journalist and video game/tech historian. So go browse his archive of deep-dives and also on Ars Technica.

I really enjoyed Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies (and also it reminded me about Leisure Suit Larry… what an era).

This is a classic: Who Needs GPS? The Forgotten Story of Etak’s Amazing 1985 Car Navigation System – how do you build satnav with no satellites? In other articles Edwards extended the story to the earlier video games and to Google Maps; I connected the dots here.

So from time to time I lecture on folktales from early computing. (A highlight was doing the whole 3 x 1 hour series on successive nights at a tech conference. Evening entertainment!)

The reason I love the early web - outside my usual period - is because (a) I was there, a little bit, and (b) it’s when computing stopped being primarily about the military, and business, and academia and became just about… life.

Let’s define the period as the September that never ended and everything after: in 1993/94, commercial ISPs got people online en masse, and the flood of newbs couldn’t be absorbed by existing cyberculture. In previous Septembers, students in the new academic year had netiquette beaten into them eventually but… so we’re the visigoths that trashed Rome. I love it.

But mainly, (c), this reason: we were all still figuring it out.

So there are all these roads not taken that are none-the-less fascinating, and I use them as references all the time in my work and I would love to dig deeper, and discover what I missed at the time.

i.e. I would love to follow along if you have a history project that hits on Kai’s Power Tools or SmarterChild or Taligent or net.art or… you know what I mean. lmk?

More posts tagged: computing-history (10).

The original word for bear has been lost. From this article about euphemisms:

Our ancient ancestors were so worried about bears, they didn’t even want to name them because they feared [the bears] might overhear and come after them. So they came up with this word – this is up in Northern Europe – bruin, meaning “the brown one” as a euphemism, and then bruin segued into bear. We know the euphemism, but we don’t know what word it replaced

There’s some more about bears and also mushrooms and dandelions in this old blog post.

I keep coming back to this article A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 (which I first read back in Week 315), in particular the section "Schumpeterian Growth and the Industrial Economy (1800-2000)" which is about (and I quote) "THE COLONIZATION OF TIME" which I have written in caps and underlined because it is meant to be said out loud like this:

The COLON IIZ AAAATION OF TIIIIIME.

Per capita productivity is about efficient use of human time. But time, unlike space, is not a collective and objective dimension of human experience. It is a private and subjective one. Two people cannot own the same piece of land, but they can own the same piece of time. To own space, you control it by force of arms. To own time is to own attention. To own attention, it must first be freed up, one individual stream of consciousness at a time.

The Schumpeterian corporation was about colonizing individual minds. Ideas powered by essentially limitless fossil-fuel energy allowed it to actually pull it off.

Aaaaand:

The equation was simple: energy and ideas turned into products and services could be used to buy time. Specifically, energy and ideas could be used to shrink autonomously-owned individual time and grow a space of corporate-owned time, to be divided between production and consumption. Two phrases were invented to name the phenomenon: productivity meant shrinking autonomously-owned time. Increased standard of living through time-saving devices became code for the fact that the “freed up” time through “labor saving” devices was actually the de facto property of corporations.

Gosh, feels like the internet doesn’t it.

For the same two centuries it seemed like time/attention reserves could be endlessly mined. New pockets of attention could always be discovered, colonized and turned into wealth.

Then the Internet happened, and we discovered the ability to mine time as fast as it could be discovered in hidden pockets of attention. And we discovered limits.

And suddenly a new peak started to loom: Peak Attention.

Sidebar: There’s something I faintly remember reading in Lefebvre, Love & Struggle: Spatial Dialectics by Rob Shields. It’s so faint I’m not sure I’m remembering it correctly. But I think it was something about Henri Lefebvre writing in post-war France about home automation - washing machines and the like - and seeing it as a turning inwards of the forces of colonisation: France was no longer colonising other countries and instead was eating itself in a colonisation of everyday life. Which gives me an image of a country-body made from rapacious corporations, starved after being cut off from their food of the various European empires, digesting its own body of workers and consumers, burning the healthy fat pockets of attention and boredom and creating the jittery, never at rest, meth-addled population we have today.

One final thing from A Brief History of the Corporation (READ IT), this line: "I am not sure who first came up with the term Peak Attention, but the analogy to Peak Oil is surprisingly precise. It has its critics, but I think the model is basically correct." I think I might have said it first, here and here. But who knows, it probably wasn’t me.

Return on Equity

And the thing for me is I like to trace the paths between abstraction and acts. For example, at work we’ve recently been doing some consultancy with a company on new product development, and part of the work (I encourage it to be part of the work) is to consider not just new concepts, but how to ensure new concepts are adopted. That means understanding the business, the audience, route to market, etc, but also the personality of the organisation: what will work well in the organisation, and what will the organisation resist?

The personality of an organisation is embodied in its structure (which encodes both who socialises with who, which is my best model for how understanding and influence is transmitted, and the values and worldview of its management), and also its myths: what is its origin (this will be held up as a triumph to mimic); what examples does it use as patterns to mimic or run away from?

So I like to be able to simultaneously speak about the personality of an organisation (the abstraction) and how that abstraction manifests in action – that is, the behaviours of individuals and much smaller groups. This is my route to figuring out how to change an organisation… and honestly, getting an organisation to produce a new product or support a new concept is always going to involve change, because if the organisation didn’t need to change then it would already be doing whatever we’ve been brought in to help with.

One of the things that has intrigued me is how the pursuit of profit by a corporation - the concept of which is bizarre, by the way, that “pursuit” is a something that can be done by a “corporation,” a thing/idea partially comprising but also transcendent from the humans who can actually pursue - anyway, how the pursuit of profit by a corporation leads to the very many (but not all) frankly shitty organisations that exist in the world today, organisations which

• neither make the people in them happy;
• nor make the people who interact with them happy;
• are none-the-less profitable!
• but dealing with them feels a bit like dealing with a person whose memory is sub 3 seconds, and whose left hand and right hand are controlled by separate bodies who fell out once over a silly and probably avoidable situation and a decade later now won’t even go to the same parties, the misunderstanding having calcified and cooled into a mutual avoidance which is no longer seething - it would show up as dark blue on one of those thermal imaging cameras - but is utterly fixed.

Intrigued that is until I read End the Religion of Return on Equity in the Harvard Business Review which puts the blame firmly at the feet of a human named Donaldson Brown, of the company DuPont, in 1917:

A hundred years ago, the focus on squeezing every drop of return out of equity capital made great sense. …

The ability to do that rose to a new level in 1917, when General Motors was in financial difficulty and DuPont took a major position in the company. (GM represented an important channel for Dupont’s lacquer, artificial leather, and other products, and Pierre du Pont was on GM’s Board.) DuPont sent Donaldson Brown, a promising engineer-turned-finance staffer, to Detroit to sort things out, and sort them out he did.

Brown noted a simple fact: Return on equity can be broken down into a three-part equation. It is logically the product of return on sales times the ratio of sales to assets times the ratio of assets to equity. By parsing ROE into the DuPont Equation (very rapidly to become a business school mainstay), he provided the basis for organizations divided into functions with their own objectives. He reasoned that if marketers worked on maximizing return on sales, production managers were rewarded for the sales they squeezed out of their physical plant, and finance managers focused on minimizing the amount of equity capital they needed, ROE would take care of itself.

Thus Brown not only sowed the seeds of the today’s hated silos, he also set three “runaways” in motion. That is to say, he created objectives with such strong feedback loops that they were pursued single-mindedly, even to unhealthy excess.

The DuPont Equation.

Bang! Read that again. Each of the three components of the equation is a top-level division of the company, as separately run as it is possible to do, with different goals, requiring a different mentality from the people in the divisions.

Again: Each ratio in an equation written by a man named Donaldson Brown in 1917 has become separated into different divisions in org charts of corporations almost 100 years later.

No wonder some corporations can feel so schizophrenic.

The article makes it clear…

In their pursuit of margin, marketers sought market power even to the point of monopoly, requiring antitrust laws to cry stop at the last moment of the end game. Similarly, production engineers treated their factories royally and their labor as expendable, until unions and labor laws intervened. Financial managers, supported by their bankers, increased their debt-to-equity ratios until capital requirements were imposed-oops, we mean until there was a catastrophic financial crash and a depression.

…and then it continues into speculating about a new formation for the DuPont Equation. It’s worth your time.

How these ideas of Peak Attention and the DuPont Equation are linked

Don’t know, still thinking about that.

In the new normal, I imagine we’ll need a few new room types for our homes.

1. Quarantine room

Now when we get grocery deliveries, Amazon parcels, or hand-me-down toddler clothes from friends, we take them directly from the front door to a holding zone where they sit for 24 hours before being allowed into the house proper. (Covid-19 does linger on surfaces for longer than that but the concentrations drop quickly.) The holding zone is the corner of a bathroom. Cold items go on a special isolation shelf in the fridge.

Maybe we could build a porch onto the front of our house and create a quarantine room. Bonus points: if we could give one-time access codes so deliveries can be left somewhere safe indoors, but without having grant full access.

2. Video conference room

You have to care about different things when you’re working from home. Backdrops are important, as is lighting. I take my video calls with a neutral grey wall behind me. And while I was considering bookshelves for that wall before, now I want to keep it clear.

Doing the PE with Joe live workouts at 9am every day, I’m struck by how considered his backdrop is – it’s definitely his home with his personality, but it uses neutral colours and all the ornaments are non-overlapping and mostly low contrast. It probably compresses well. Here’s a pic.

It’s easier to maintain a space like that at home if it’s just one space. Everywhere else can be a mess. And so long as I’m always going to use that single space, then why not attach a proper webcam to the wall opposite, add some soft furnishings to dampen echos, etc.

There’s probably a good business in being an interior designer who curates Zoom-friendly home office backgrounds. Though in this age of lockdown you’d have to figure out how to do it without actually visiting the house. Maybe in the interim Ikea could supply pop-up video call snugs with well-positioned lamps and tasteful decor.

Also I wonder how this will impact fashion? I noticed I was looking like a mountain man so I shaved my hair off. But I haven’t worn a nice pair of shoes for weeks and I’m mostly in sweatpants. Zoom life is all haircuts and no trousers.

3. A home that pays its way

Ok, Airbnb is getting a shoeing because it turns out that (as everybody knew…) people were hoarding property and farming them with short lets, damaging neighbourhoods and driving up rent. BUT the original idea makes sense: rent out a room in my home, or the whole place when I’m not there. The sharing economy innit.

And the wider picture is that your home needs to work for its living. In unstable economic times, a home should also be a source of income, so what does that mean? A room with its own entrance, and a second door (lockable from both sides) that goes into the kitchen for breakfast, to be rented out? Solar on the roof, obviously, sold back to the grid. A kitchen garden. A Powerwall home battery to store cheap electricity and then sell it to neighbours?

Maybe the future of the “front room” is to be a mixed public/private space, a bit like the shopfronts or workshops of old – a space which is made to run a small artisan business: massage, haircuts, I.T. support, neighbourhood parcel drop-off… a counter, a big welcoming window to the street, a secure internal door to the rest of the house. How would architecture respond if the ground floor of a duplex, or the front half of a home was assumed to be semi-permeable interface to the outside world like this?

More posts tagged: speculative-in-2020 (18).

Some choice quotes from Marx at 193 by John Lanchester.

Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from ‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production.

On the origin of value, "In Marx’s judgment surplus value is the entire basis of capitalism: all value in capitalism is the surplus value created by labour." And so Marx "creates a model which allows us to see deeply into the structure of the world, and see the labour hidden in the things all around us. He makes labour legible in objects and relationships."

Lanchester digs into Facebook and into airport check-in:

This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world. … When you start looking for this mechanism at work in the contemporary world you see it everywhere, often in the form of surplus value being created by you, the customer or client of a company. Online check-in and bag drop at airports, for example. … They’re transferring their inefficiency to the customer, but what they’re also doing is transferring the labour to you and accumulating the surplus value themselves. It happens over and over again. Every time you deal with a phone menu or interactive voicemail service, you’re donating your surplus value to the people you’re dealing with. Marx’s model is constantly asking us to see the labour encoded in the things and transactions all around us.

Sidenote: I have an objection to the Dyson Airblade in that previous generations of hand-driers encouraged me to move and play with my hands, attempting to find for myself some kind of expertise or intelligence in drying, but the Airblade, in order to achieve its own efficiency forces all of its users to adopt identical movements, removing autonomy from millions to save money for the owners of the establishments in which it is installed. I have been roboticised.

Back to Lanchester: the rest of Marx at 193 covers the variety of capitalisms developed since his work, the limits of natural resources, China and Mass Group Incidents, "basically anti-authority riots which occur regularly all over China and seem never to be reported in the Western mainstream media," and this nugget about life expectancy:

UK life expectancy is now over eighty and rising so sharply that buried in the statistics is a truly strange fact: a woman who is eighty today has a 9.2 per cent chance of living to be a hundred, whereas a woman of twenty has a 26.6 per cent chance. It may seem weird that the person sixty years younger has a three times better chance of making it to a century, but what it shows is just how fast progress is being made.

Read the whole thing.

Lanchester’s article is in the current issue of the London Review of Books which is a total treat. Another joy is Thomas Jones’ review of two biographies of David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust, So Ordinary, So Glamorous, which is a must-read for the whole story but also for this simultaneous smack-down and correction: "Trynka doesn’t often go into details about the music, which is perhaps just as well. In his discussion of ‘Starman’ he talks about its ‘opening minor chords’ when they’re nothing of the kind, and says that ‘the key changes from minor to major’ at the chorus. But there’s no key change, and it’s important that there isn’t: the effect Trynka’s hearing, the sense of ‘release’ and ‘climax’ he gets when the chorus kicks in, would be lost if there were. What happens is that for the first time, the melody hits the tonic; Bowie gets through 15 bars in F major without singing an F, and then on the word ‘starman’ he hits two of them, an octave apart." BANG!

Here’s Starman, live in 1972, and listen out for that avoidance of the F and then suddenly when you hear it. Wow.

If I was in charge of industrial policy, I’d be betting against the hegemony of the centralised supply chain. That is: no more getting everything manufactured in China; instead, move to local manufacture and many more, smaller, networked factories. I’m talking over a couple of decades.

It’s worth thinking about why centralised supply chains exist.

Here’s an interview with Liam Casey, founder of contract manufacturer PCH International (and who is, by the way, a good egg) – which means you probably have stuff in your house that they’ve made, but it’ll never say that on the label. "I can take a product from the production line in China to a consumer in San Francisco in 4 days, 5 hours, 14 minutes. We’re 3 hours from all the factories we work with, and we’re 3 days from 90 percent of the consumers around the planet that buy our products."

I can’t remember where I heard this observation, but these timings means the entire transaction is entirely inside the credit window: a consumer can order something on a website, then the material is ordered, the item is manufactured, packaged, shipped, landed, and paid for, all before the invoices from the suppliers become due. That’s the reverse of how inventory usually works, where material sits on your balance sheet – and both loses value as it ages, and adds risk because demand might change.

A manufacturing cluster gives you that economic advantage, plus optionality over suppliers (reduces risk and cost), easy access to expertise, etc.

BUT.

Shipping costs are increasing. Shipping is a carbon nightmare, and fuel rules are changing which will hike costs hugely. As we get more serious about climate change, that trajectory will continue. So how does that change the economics? And what other numbers are changing that I haven’t run across?

Maybe - just maybe - local manufacturing is on the verge of making sense. From this article about Arrival, the new(ish) UK electric van startup: "Electric van maker Arrival has secured a €400m (£339m) order for 10,000 vehicles from United Parcel Service (UPS) … The purpose-built electric vans will be rolled out in the UK, Europe and North America starting this year and continuing until 2024."

And:

The first vans have been built at the company’s first “microfactory” in Banbury, Oxfordshire, but others will be made close to their end markets, likely near major markets such as New York and Los Angeles.

The UPS deal implies that the base price of an Arrival van will be about £34,000, compared to a £27,900 sticker price for a new Ford Transit with an internal combustion engine – although with lower maintenance and fuel costs the total cost of ownership for electric vans could be lower.

So for at least one product - this electric van - the calculus has changed enough such that it’s worth manufacturing locally.

The hegemony of manufacturing in China is assumed. But my feeling is that the threshold between centralised and local is a fine line, and it’s closer than it looks.

I was reading recently about loo paper, because of course I was. Apparently it’s always made close to the place of sale because it’s cheap and not very dense and so disproportionately expensive to ship. So where else are these fine lines, and how quickly could we tip over them?

Another interesting data point: Ocado investing in vertical farms. That is, Ocado (massive UK grocery delivery firm, and now a platform supplying software and fulfilment centres to other territories) is investing in herbs and produce that can be grown in racks, indoors, right in the delivery depot.

I imagine the reasons for an economic cluster existing are similar to the reasons for a firm existing. As explained by Ronald Coase: "Firms exist to economize on the cost of coordinating economic activity." That is: finding people to buy shit from costs money. If all the stuff to buy is in one place, it’s cheaper.

But at a certain point, coordinating activity can be automated. That’s the internet. That’s machine learning. Routing supplies between factories, that’s packet switching and it was invented in 1931.

So imagine the numbers in the equation change… long-haul shipping gets more expensive; the internet means it’s easier to have lots of smaller factories that supply interchangeable parts to the bigger ones; the drivers of mass production diminish…

Hang on, mass production? Well mass production is tied to mass consumption is tied to mass marketing. None of the three precedes the other. But the logic of it all comes from a very particular era of distribution: physical shops, and awareness built using broadcast media (TV, newspapers). Think department stores. Brand is key.

But now we’ve got micro-targeted advertising and e-commerce. It’s absurd to stock physical stores with items that probably won’t be bought, just to make a particular size and colour available. And there’s no ABC1 sociodemographic group now, people form their own communities. You can launch a micro-brand on Instagram in an instant (and either keep it niche or scale it to billions). Where’s the requirement for mass anything? The logic collapses.

So maybe the logic supporting centralised supply chains has collapsed too.

Let’s not even get into (gestures ineffectually) the current situation. It’s clear now that every country needs its own manufacturing base so that - when push comes to shove - it can be redirected to make what needs to be made.

Expect government incentives to support local (or at least national) manufacture in the coming years.

I don’t know what this future world of local manufacturing looks like. Not 3D printing, that’s too far. But maybe final assembly happening in many, many towns, each local to a handful of markets in a hub and spoke model? Maybe more shared components to allow that… what if all shampoos, cleaning products, fruit juice, etc came in standardised bottles, so packaging could happen in the supermarket warehouse? How would you industrialise packaging-free zero waste shops?

But yeah, if I was in charge of the UK’s industrial policy, I would assume this was the destination for 2040, and then invest to build towards that future.

More posts tagged: 20-most-popular-in-2020 (20), speculative-in-2020 (18).

The following was first posted on the 3 Books Weekly email newsletter and has since been archived here.

Hi folks

For 3 Books Weekly edition #5, I’m delighted to share recommendations from Benjamin Southworth, well-known in the start-up world as a catalyst here in London, through 3beards and more.

Check out the Unicorn Hunt job board, and find Benjamin on Twitter as @inthecompanyof.

Bookshop news! The vending machine opened for business at Campus London (Bonhill St, London) a few days ago. Thank you Google for hosting :) Here’s a photo. Here’s it in action.

And it’s not only a bookshop in a vending machine – it’s a bookshop that tweets when it makes a sale. I couldn’t help myself, it had to be done. Follow @MachineSupply to check it out.

Come visit. Campus is near these tube stops: Old Street, Moorgate, Liverpool Street.

A new week means an ALL NEW SELECTION. Here’s a sneaky preview of the 12 books that will be stocked from Monday, you’re the first to know. They’ll be stocked for one week only. As always, every book is recommended by a Real Live Human. The recommendation is on a card on the front of each book.

Now, on with the show. Happy Friday!

Matt

#1. A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara

I’ve always been a reader, and it’s normal for me to have several books on the go at a time. However, as I went through my stack of the books nominated for the Man Booker, this one was a frightening prospect. It’s a beast of a book, physically, and emotionally. The story of 5 friends over 20 years. We become silent witnesses to a breathtakingly powerful story. A book to change philosophies and mental models, a depth charge for the soul.

A Little Life: Amazon / Amazon UK

#2. A Little History of the World, by Ernst Gombrich

Best known by his seminal work “The Story of Art”, here Gombrich dissects history as if educating his 8 year old nephew in this charmingly generous romp through Greece, Iran, Moscow, and the world, as we’re taken on a journey of the most perfect paternal storytelling. A great shortcut to make up for not having read history at college.

A Little History of the World: Amazon / Amazon UK

#3. Act of Creation (Picador Books), by Arthur Koestler

The essential guidebook to your creativity. As someone who has to use creativity as a skill, there is much to be made of having many other creative pastimes, painting, sketching, music, for example. Koestler guides us through the various skills and impacts of why we create. Sadly no longer a set text, but in the age of screen framed myopia this remains more powerful and fascinating than ever.

Act of Creation (Picador Books): Amazon / Amazon UK

More posts tagged: 3-books (34).

Amazon Dash… yup, makes sense. Give away light-weight Internet of Things gadgets to encourage purchase of fast-moving consumer goods. Tiny plastic buttons that allow for instant product ordering: "Your entire house is now a shopping cart."

We worked on a bunch of similar stuff at Berg – such as Cloudwash where purchasing washing powder was part of the machine itself, and some secret projects where the transactions and connectivity explored different configurations. It was my colleagues who spent most time figuring out the service design and all the mini design interactions – but I was steeped in this for a year or two, so I figured I would dash out some notes…

Dash. Ho ho.

Look, a warning. I haven’t proofread these notes so they might make no sense. And there’s nothing about how the Dash is designed, or what this means for your strategy. Feel free to get in touch for a coffee if you want to talk about either of those aspects, or if anything in what follows rings a bell for you…

It makes economic sense

By putting the Dash Button in the home, it lowers friction to purchase and shifts the distribution channel to Amazon.

This is good for:

• customer retention through reduced churn. You’re a loyal Tide customer, but you’ve run out. Instead of running to the nearest store and grabbing whatever brand is on sale today, you hit the button
• customer retention through reducing the replenishment time
• switching to a low-cost distribution channel. Cost of sale is likely lower with Amazon or direct sales, versus physical retail that needs to cover in-store inventory and staff

You could probably make a pretty simple equation out of this, saying something like… it’s worth it when:

revenue from selling N buttons + N1 * channel cost saving + N2 * margin on additional sales + value of effective marketing > development cost + server cost for 1 year + cost of producing N buttons

where N1 is the number of buttons used by existing customers who switch channels, and N2 is the number of buttons used to make new purchases.

Assuming you’re giving these buttons away, and assuming you don’t have access to the marketing budget, the relevant costs become:

• how much do these buttons cost to develop (not much if you’re Amazon, because you already have all the bits from your other products)
• how much do these buttons cost to run (not much if you’re Amazon, because you already have the back-end servers and the logistics)
• how much do these buttons cost to produce – the component cost has dropped sharply over the last year or two. Note that the Dash Buttons are small and use battery powered wi-fi… they fall out of the smartphone supply chain. Or to put it another way, these buttons are the peace dividend of the smartphone war

And when these costs fall enough, the question becomes: Do you reckon you can make a profit on the 2% of customers who will buy 5% more a year?

It’s the new marketing

I brushed over the marketing benefits above, but let’s not forget that we’re enamoured with web-connected physical things. Internet of Things gadgets are novelty; brands that launched with Amazon will be pleased with the publicity.

Though… why not go with a Youtube video for the publicity, and not bother making the thing itself, like Evian’s fridge magnet launching their water subscription service? It’s a lot cheaper.

I can think of a couple of marketing benefits to actually making and distributing the button itself.

Advertising is changing. You need Adwords and Facebook ads to fish where the fish are… but come on, they’re boring, they don’t create the emotional impact of a full-page glossy magazine ad, or a great TV spot.

So, for me, these buttons are the first step to a new channel. Sure, they’re utilitarian – they order more consumables. But they also tell a story that this brand is there for me, it’s in my home, it’s at hand, on-demand. Products are people too and this button has a character… it’s now up to us to create physical objects that have different characters, one that might be more suitable for high fashion, fragrance, whatever.

You need these different marketing channels because building awareness requires a drip-drip approach… a banner ad here, a Buzzfeed list there, a button on the fridge. A new advertising component.

E-commerce continues to grow at the expense of physical retail, and discovery in e-commerce continues to suck. Another way to think about the Dash Button is that it’s doing the same job as a shelf-end promotion, or a BOGOF. This is a replacement for the lost world of point-of-sale discovery tricks, and it’s in-home.

In a way, we’re really seeing the future of marketing here. We’ve separated awareness (advertising) and distribution (stores) for so long, but it’s no longer the way. When you get a Buy Now button in a tweet you’re seeing ads and distribution merging, and the Button is the physical instantiation of this same trend.

In the future that Simon Wardley paints, this is a warning shot against the supermarkets, and in the future every product will carry a buy button. We’re already in this world with smartphone apps: Because App Store discovery sucks, the best mode of distribution is word of mouth. The more downloads you already have, the more downloads you’ll get. Which is why app publishers need to get their dirty mitts on your address book. Is this a future we’ll see with consumable home products, too?

Why Amazon?

The costs of making the button dropped for Amazon before anyone else – as I said above, they have the technology Lego bricks already, and the logistics available. But there are two other groups I’ve run into repeatedly who have looked seriously at the same concept

Traditional manufacturers of either FMCG or the kit that consumes it (that is, makers of washing powder and makers of washing machines). In 90% of cases, these manufacturers don’t know how to speak with end consumers. They maybe know how to speak with consumers pre-sale… but they tend to outsource that to marketing agencies. But typically their customers are distributors and retailers, not end consumers.

This is a problem because the Dash Button isn’t just a button, it’s a communications channel. It’s an app. It’s push notifications. It’s the update emails. Somebody needs to write that copy, somebody needs to manage the feedback, somebody needs to choose when to do a price promotion.

For most manufacturers, there’s not a group in the company that knows how to do this, so making the Button isn’t an engineering challenge – it’s a difficult corporate re-org where the voice that would advocate that strategy isn’t even present in the leadership team.

There’s a particular problem for the device manufacturers, as opposed to the manufacturers of the consumables. Connectivity of shared objects means back-end servers, and these cost money to run. When you’re a big company, you think via the profit and loss. A connected machine which just offers neat user features (e.g. a notification when your wash cycle has finished) doesn’t make sense on the P&L: it just means you have to knock points off your margin when you first sell it, to put cash aside to keep the service running. The only way connectivity makes sense is to align the recurring costs with some kind of recurring revenue.

In 2015 that means creating a sales channel for consumables… which the white goods manufacturers don’t have available to them. Ink-jet printer manufacturers do. And we won’t be stuck as this stage forever. Give it 12 months, and you’ll have a microwave with in-app purchase. I’m only half kidding.

The marketing agencies get it. But marketing agencies are organised (have teams; do sales; are paid) around campaigns. Campaigns have a beginning and an end. In the web world, we’re used to the KPIs of ongoing services (acquisition, activation, retention, etc): we measure Monthly Active Users. That’s what you need to build a new sales channel. But it’s not how you run a successful campaign.

And besides, marketing agencies need to do something different every quarter – they don’t build up a tight ops machine of technology and logistics. Building the Dash Button isn’t, for them, just the next easy thing to do.

On my list of startups I would do - which is way too long and honestly, mostly awful - is an agency that offers to speak with customers post-sale.

So the manufacturer of Break Maker X would get us in to run the communications channel with the customers… either a button on the machine or just the app. And we’d all come from the web world, so it would be all A/B testing emails, looking at the button stats, partnerships with legendary bakers to sell artisan yeast, all that nonsense. We’d run it on a retainer basis, and eventually get bought by one of the big networks for a billion quid.

By the way, there is one group I’ve met who do (a) know how to have a customer conversation, and (b) have an incentive to cross-sell and up-sell on that channel. And that’s the retailers, especially the retailers who already have a logistics network and run post-sales activities such as an extended warranty programme.

In the UK, that means John Lewis/Waitrose – I was half expecting to see this button come from them, first. But they don’t have “retail platform” in their DNA like Amazon.

And there are some manufacturers who understand that the product is the channel. But I can’t say who because I’m still under NDA.

Last thoughts

I have to say, the Amazon Dash Button makes a ton of sense to me, as the near future of the Internet of Things, in a way the internet fridge never has.

I’ve always said that if I was making an internet fridge, I’d just make a fridge magnet that ordered milk. Or, better, a tiny talking Fridgeezoo pet that - when tapped - would text both me and my wife “we’re out of milk!”

It’s that shared use that makes this button really great. Smartphones are still stuck in the Personal Computer era… but my shopping list isn’t personal. We live with flatmates, families, and friends. We can hack it – at home we use shared Reminders on iPhone for the weekly shopping. But my online grocery order is associated with a single user account. It seems dumb; the button fixes that.

It’s the ability for some kid in the household to say “hey, need more toothpaste” that leads to the button requiring wi-fi: Bluetooth is cheaper, but it would need a paired smartphone around.

And I am curious to see how it all works. The service design is complicated… without a screen, or any feedback, maybe your order is already on the way because somebody else hit the button, but how do you know? Sure the button automagically doesn’t place a repeat order until the delivery is made, but what about more complex orders, or what if what you want is out of stock? Ultimately, this’ll do for 80% of the cases, which is more than enough.

And then - for the rest - there’s the Dash Replacement Service, Amazon’s button-to-logistics technology all wrapped up, and ready to be integrated into whatever product you’re creating. I see Quirky are building this replenishment service into the device itself:

a new line of smart appliances including an artisanal pour-over coffee machine, a baby formula maker, and a pet food dispenser. Each appliance will measure remaining consumable supplies and place an order using DRS before running out.

DRS is the best bit. Can you imagine what the life-time value is, for Amazon, if [white goods manufacturer] bake this into a washing machine, an item with an 11 year replacement cycle?

Where next

We’re seeing the various stacks line up to own the smart home ecosystem:

• Apple… offer Homekit to chip makers and device manufacturers, make every product in the home a smartphone peripheral. We’ll make it easier to get to market, but only if you commit to us.
• Google… with Nest establishing a beach-head, go for a data and orchestration play, providing feature differentiation. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Homekit-like play.
• Samsung… leading the charge for the white goods manufacturers with SmartThings and the open ecosystem it promotes.
• Amazon… end-to-end technology, combining both hardware connectivity through to back-end servers, payments, and logistics. Give it a year, then make the underlying chips available to any developer.

I know the Dash Button feels utilitarian – but to my mind it’s also eminently sensible, and executed in exactly the right way. I like it. If it does well, it’ll make possible connected devices which are less utilitarian. I’ll like that even more.

More posts tagged: yeast (4).

Things are not good. Staying undercover for a bit, back later perhaps.