Books

Books / The Internets — Comments Off
11
Jun 11

Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle

I’ve always found Professor Turkle, from MIT, to be both thoughtful and thought-provoking — she’s spent her career observing and learning about and thinking about how we interact with technology, and how that interaction shapes us as a society. It’s interesting stuff that I wish more people paid more attention to, so I was happy to read this book about how a couple of types of technology are changing us.

The first part of the book I was a little ambivalent about; it focuses on how we interact with what I’ll call robots: physical machines in our environment, more or less humanoid. Lots of good experiment-based reflection on how we interact with objects, and I think significantly deeper and more nuanced than, say, Cliff Nass’ work a decade or so that he wrote about in The Media Equation. (Admittedly, we’re a lot further down the road now than when Nass wrote that, but even when it had just come out, I found it to be an extremely superficial analysis.)

The second half of the book is what I really wanted to get into: how are we changing the way we relate to other actual human beings as we moderate more and more interactions through electronic media. In lay terms: how are digital social networks affecting the way we communicate, experience, and live our lives, both with those who are physically with us and those who aren’t.

I thought Turkle did a good job with a bunch of this topic, with one proviso: the technology and products we use are now evolving so quickly that it seems to me that any clinical, experimental understanding of what’s going on is going to necessarily be years out of date, even for highly motivated, diligent, and speedy researchers.

I think there weren’t a ton of clear conclusions in the book, but much that we should all think about more deeply, so I’ll leave you with a few of Professor Turkle’s passages. If you care about understanding what’s changing and why in our communications and interpersonal interactions, you should read this book. A few quotes:

“Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing.”

“The media has tended to portray today’s young adults as a generation that no longer cares about privacy. I have found something else, something equally disquieting. High school and college students don’t really understand the rules. Are they being watched? Who is watching? Do you have to do something to provoke surveillance, or is it routine? Is surveillance legal? They don’t really understand the terms of for Facebook or Gmail, the mail service that Google provides. They don’t know what protections they are “entitled” to. They don’t know what objections are reasonable or possible. If someone impersonates you by getting access to your cell phone, should that behavior be treated as illegal or as a prank? In teenagers’ experience, their elders—the generation that gave them this technology—don’t have ready answers to such questions.”

“The networked culture is very young. Attendants at its birth, we threw ourselves into its adventure. This is human. But these days, our problems with the Net are becoming too distracting to ignore. At the extreme, we are so enmeshed in our connections that we neglect each other. We don’t need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place. The generation that has grown up with the Net is in a good position to do this, but these young people need help. So as they begin to fight for their right to privacy, we must be their partners. We know how easily information can be politically abused; we have the perspective of history. We have, perhaps, not shared enough about that history with our children. And as we, ourselves enchanted, turned away from them to lose ourselves in our e-mail, we did not sufficiently teach the importance of empathy and attention to what is real.”

Great stuff. Read it. :-)

Books — Comments Off
22
May 11

Lost to the West, by Lars Brownworth

I’m a pretty committed Roman History Nerd. I really like reading about all periods of the civilization, and have been learning more and more since I first took Latin in high school. It’s esoteric to a lot of people, but it’s something that’s always been fascinating to me. And I like both the “great man” aspect of histories which follow the named leaders, but also the accounts of what it was like to live in Rome itself, or in the provinces elsewhere.

But to be honest, I always start to lose the thread around the 3rd/4th century AD, after Constantine, with the continuous sacking of Rome and Italy going on by virtually everyone. And so most of the histories that I read, I gut it out until 476, when Odoacer beats Romulus Augustulus to declare himself King of Italy, and the Roman Empire dead.

So I was really interested to read this book, which is a history that goes from the establishment of the Roman capital in the East (Byzantium, to be later renamed Constantinople), initially by Diocletian, and consolidated later by Constantine, through the fall of the Constantinople in 1453 (when Mehmet II defeated Constantine XI).

I really, really liked this book. It suffers a little bit from over-focusing on emperors and generals, but I learned a lot about how to think about the parts of the empire, and later the relationship between the Crusaders, Islam, and the Eastern Roman Empire, led from Constantinople. I hadn’t really thought too much about how the lineage from Rome affected how Constantinople viewed the world, or the nuanced way it sat between East & West. (And, to be honest, my geography of the region needed a bit of a refresher, as I always think that Turkey & Constantinople are further to the east than they actually are.)

Anyway, if you’re a roman history nerd like me, and don’t mind reading about 11 different Constantines over the course of a thousand years or so, this is a great book to pick up. (“great e-book to download”? how are we going to talk about books in our digital future??)

Books / Mozilla / nerdTech / Personal stuff — 11 Comments
12
May 11

Placeholders

I’ve been super busy lately, and haven’t had a lot of time to write here unfortunately, but hoping to fix that in the coming few days. Lots to write about; wanted to put down a few placeholders of things I’m planning to write about.

On Scaling: spent some time talking with a professor friend of mine over the past few weeks about how organizations scale to have massive impact; realized that there are fundamental differences in approach. On one side, you assume that the core that you have — yourself, a small org, whatever — is the essence and you want to extend that to the rest of the world — but in some way, the new converts will always be pale reflections of the core. On the other side, you assume that you’ve figured out how to do something interesting, and want to enable lots of other people to do it as well as unexpected and new things — so the assumption here is that by scaling you increase diversity, increase quality, and you get better overall as you get bigger, not weaker & thinner.

Not Understanding Modern Technology & Products: In an NYT article a month or so back, HBS professor David Yoffee said this: ‘“The problem for both Firefox and Chrome is how are they going to convince customers that they have a significantly better product, worth the hassle of actually going and downloading something that’s new and different.”’ This was very surprising to me — it’s such old thinking, not really in line with the way technology products (Internet products in particular) spread in today’s world. I don’t know Prof Yoffee, but in my view, technology products spread today much more like political campaigns and memes, not as careful, considered evaluations of whether other alternatives are better than what someone has today. I’m not putting a value judgement on that phenomenon at all, just noting it, and think that it’s worth exploring a bit.

Living Inside Everyone Else’s Greatest Hits Albums: just some thoughts about how status feeds are changing the way we think about other peoples’ lives, and our own. Maybe a profound observation, maybe a banal one, who can tell?

My First 4 Months in VC: I’ve been at Greylock full time now for about 4 months, have some initial observations and things to write about. Steep learning curve, very busy time (and also busy personally), but want to take some time to deconstruct the experience so far and share what I can. (I also have a post on why I joined Greylock in particular to write. Quick hint: it’s the same reason that Soylent Green tastes so delicious.)

Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle: Interesting book, finished it a while back but haven’t had time to write about it yet. Lots in there.

And then a few other odds & ends, including a great book I’m reading about the history of the Eastern Roman Empire from about 300 AD until 1500 AD. I get that this will be of incredibly limited and esoteric interest to even my nerdiest friends, but I’m loving it. Fish gotta swim.

Hopefully more soon. What else should I write about? :-)

Books / Mozilla — 5 Comments
10
Apr 11

The Master Switch, by Tim Wu

This is a fantastic book about how information empires rise and fall — everyone in technology industries should read it. Tim is a professor at Columbia Law School, and one of the most advanced thinkers about a number of technology network effects, but especially Net Neutrality.

It’s a history of various information technology waves, from the telephone to movies to television to the Internet, some analysis of what’s happening in today’s landscape with Google and Apple and others, and some of Wu’s suggestions for how to create more effective public policy in the future. I loved the first part (although I’m a technology history nerd of first order), and found the part about the current landscape interesting but already a bit out of date, and probably not as deep an analysis as I was hoping for. The prescriptions he outlines I thought weren’t quite right. I had a hard time really understanding how to think about the remedies he was suggesting, and how they could really work.

But overall, fantastic book, and has changed the way I think about technology waves.

While I was at Mozilla day-to-day, when I talked about open and closed systems, I would say something like this: new technologies (e.g. the PC, the smart phone, the tablet, etc etc) nearly always start closed and proprietary — it’s easier to create something completely new that’s innovative and disruptive if you control all the pieces, aren’t trying overmuch to play nicely with others. But then over time, technology tends to open up, as the techniques become more widely undertsood, horizontal layers come in to drive costs down and increase variety of solutions, etc. The interesting variable in every technology wave, I said, was how long and messy the “middle” between open and closed is — and of course, Mozilla’s mission with respect to the Web was to make the proprietary phase as short as possible, and get to open as quickly as we could.

After reading Wu’s book, I still think that’s essentially true, but not really the whole story. I now think technology waves tend to go from closed/proprietary to open and then back to closed, based around the strength of network distribution. In other words, and especially with communications and information technology, you tend to go from proprietary invention to open innovation and then things settle down as a small number of players control the distribution of content on their own networks based on the open technologies. These networks then tend to be few in number, and overwhelmingly dominant in their control over how people experience the technology and content.

The only thing that really unseats these networks is the rise of the next technology wave — that’s possible because successive technology waves tend to be much larger than what came before. That’s what’s happening now, with mobile completely overwhelming the previous waves of computing, being available to more people, more of the time, with more touch points in their lives.

And that’s why the fight between Apple, Google and Facebook is so, so fierce. Everyone is trying to move from the current wave of IT into the mobile one. Everyone is trying to become dominant, in order to take the wins from the network effects from the PC/Web battles and use them to win the next Mobile/Networked battle.

[As an aside, it's tough to imagine what technology wave will displace billions of people carrying smart phones (little network connected computers) around with them all the time, but what we do know is this: it will happen. Some giant new information tech wave will eventually make this mobile technology boom, which looks absolutely massive to us now, look small in retrospect. It's the nature of communications technology.]

Another thing that’s clear as you look at historical technology waves is that they’re getting shorter. Disruption is coming faster and faster. This, too, is an intuitive result. Each technology wave means that we’re able to communicate and collaborate more effectively and more quickly.

Companies that are dominant in one wave do not tend to be dominant in those following. They can be relevant, and even extremely relevant, but they don’t tend to dominate in the same way. Lots of reasons for that. They’ve got existing businesses to protect. They’re built on previous models of efficiency optimized for previous waves. They get big and complex and tired. I’m beginning to think that companies don’t dominate like this because not only are their innovators dilemma issues inherent in moving from one wave to the next, but also because you’ve got to not just jump waves, but also go through the closed-open-closed cycles of the new technology, and that’s an unnatural set of transitions to go through.

What I find so interesting about our current context — everyone who was dominant in the PC/Web era moving to the mobile era — is that they’re trying to jump directly to the closed network phase. Mobile systems right now look extremely vertically integrated, from services to servers to devices to content. I can’t yet discern the really open phase of mobile. I believe it will come, but it’s hard to see quite how right now, and I think this “open” battle between Apple and Google is really just prelude.

But who knows. It’s an exciting time to be alive and working. Every day I wake up and meet people who are building technologies and products that promise to completely rework the way we interact with our world and with each other. It feels like so much open water here; everything seems up for grabs.

I can’t recommend reading Tim Wu’s book highly enough. Whether you agree or disagree with any particular bit of it isn’t that important. Thinking about the technology waves that have come before help us think about what might come next, and how they might feel.

Books — Comments Off
10
Apr 11

Regarding Ducks and Universes, by Neve Maslakovic

Fun science fiction book about alternate universes, based in Palo Alto & San Francisco. Some fun parts, including thinking about how small events shape our histories and even geographies. But I didn’t really love it.

I did really love the title, which I think is just terrific.

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