Picasso and Computing

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers". Thus said Pablo Picasso in the earliest stages of computing (he died in 1973). An interesting observation then, but given advances in artificial intelligence, is that statement in any way still true? From a technological perspective, probably not, but from a human one? Allow me a contrarian opinion - that Picasso was a hypocrite, blind to his own reality. What can one make of his black and white works - are they not "binary", the visual equivalent of zeroes and ones? If the beauty lies in the shade, does not the beauty of code lie in its results (the graphic image), not its electronic essence (zeroes and ones)? Say you what you will about co-gen artwork it is certainly visually arresting. And does it not reflect the creativity of its programmers more than that of the machine itself? Picasso should have spoken to McLuhan to understand computing as an extension of the human self. Technology is neutral, it reflects us. Look hard enough, and computers can give you plenty of questions as well as answers.

The Filter Bubble

It warms my quasi-libertarian heart to see that Internet privacy, which is at base an issue of individual (not collective) human dignity is embraced by portions of the "progressive" (ie, liberal) community. Such is certainly the case with Eli Pariser's "The Filter Bubble", Mr. Pariser being a former head of the MoveOn group.  The book is about the risks to the individual and to the polity of the excessive personalization of information and concomitant tailoring of content in the era of Big Data. This permits ultra-precise (or so say algorithms) targeting of what we, the net users, "want" to see based upon our inputs. Mr. Pariser's point, a humanist one, is that we are more than the sum of our clicks - we often want and should want (there we go again with liberal scolding)  to see things other than our own point of view, material which contradicts our mindsets rather than confirming them. Pariser is right - read any book on cognitive development or business innovation and you will find that view strongly touted. So why, then, do large internet companies such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, et al. continue to give us only what we want (or better put, what they think we want)? Several answers - (a) their advertisers want that superfiltered data; (b) how are algorithms supposed to know what opposing viewpoints we would consider desirable; (c) confirmation bias - a cognitive bias in which humans see events as confirming their preexisting conceptions (eg, a single politician is convicted of corruption and we say "I knew it - they're all corrupt); (d) because it works (see (a)). Much like the overarching threats to privacy which many people don't care about because they do not understand the nature or extent of the threat, so with the "bubble" created around our netsurfing experience by this filtering - people don't notice that it's happening, or only see the beneficial aspects ("Boy, isn't that Facebook amazing? It knew just what kind of clothes I wanted to buy!").  Arguing against the proliferation of filtering is futile and Luddist - it's inevitable. Taking active steps to prevent its nasty consequences is not, as Pariser shows.  I'll leave with this quote from the book which, while being somewhat anti-corporate (natch), is a fair critique of cyberutopianism: "Technodeterminism is alluring and convenient for newly powerful entrepreneurs because it absolves them of responsibility for what they do.  Like priests at the altar, they're mere vessels of a much larger force that is futile to resist. They need not concern themselves with the effects of the system they've created. But technology doesn't solve every problem of its own accord. If it did, we wouldn't have millions of people starving to death in a world with an oversupply of food". Starvation is often a political result (Mao's China, Stalin's USSR, Mugabe's Zimbabwe), but still, he has a point....

McKinsey Agrees with Me

Nice to have support from McKinsey re: my post You Are Not Steve Jobs:

The perils of best practice: Should you emulate Apple?

Outliers are exactly that. Duplicating their performance is harder than we might wish.

SEPTEMBER 2012 • Marla M. Capozzi, Ari Kellen, and Sven Smit

Source: Strategy Practice

In This Article

• Exhibit: Companies that innovate at scale outperform competitors in their sector.

• About the authors
• Comments (10)

It’s no mystery why companies emulate their most successful peers. Tried-and-true approaches often seem preferable to starting from scratch, whether for developing new products or running efficient supply chains. The quest for such methods went global during the 1980s and 1990s as European and US companies sought to retool their operations by transplanting Japanese factory practices, such as kanban and just-in-time production. Management consultants—ourselves included—naturally facilitate the process by extolling successful companies as models from which others can learn proven practices that reduce risks.

However, perils abound when truly exceptional companies morph into ever more ubiquitous examples. Observers and management theorists alike, blinded by star power, eventually assume that everything these companies do should be regarded as best practice—often without examining the context in which they derive their success or without parsing the true nature of their accomplishments. Managers tempted to distill universal insights from what are in fact exceptional companies put their own businesses at risk for strategic or operational missteps.

Others before us—notably Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford, Adrian Wooldridge at theEconomist, and Phil Rosenzweig at IMD—have issued warnings about best-practice traps and management-theory fads.¹ Yet the desire to emulate is often stronger than mere rationality, even in the face of repeated evidence that most companies won’t achieve the anticipated outcomes and that some will suffer a hard fall. Research by our colleagues, for instance, has shown that lockstep benchmarking may lead to “herding” effects that, over time, diminish emulators’ margins.

Apple is today’s all-purpose innovation icon. In the past three years alone, more than 1,500 published articles have mentioned both “Apple” and “innovation” (a Google search displays hundreds of millions of results). As of this writing, Walter Isaacson’s comprehensive biography of Steve Jobs has held a place on the New York Times best-seller list for over 40 weeks. Nearly 40 books on Apple and Steve Jobs have been published since his death, in October 2011—celebrating the company’s can-do culture, breakthrough product designs, global supply chain prowess, and legendary cofounder. A unique confluence of leadership, talent, strategy, and technology has brought Apple extraordinary success and raises the question of how relevant a model the company can be for others as they chart their own innovation course. To answer the question of how exceptional Apple actually is, we analyzed its growth using the analytic technique that underpins the 2008 book The Granularity of Growth.²

This approach, at its core, entails disaggregating the sources of growth into three categories. The first is to compete in the right markets and harness their momentum to expand sales of current products and services. The second uses M&A to, in effect, purchase growth. Finally, companies can grow organically, through market share gains from existing or new products and services.

Since 1999, the more than 750 companies in our database have, on average, derived a negligible portion of their growth from organic share gains of any kind.³ Apple, by contrast, has grown almost entirely through share gains. And that’s just the beginning of its uniqueness. Of the companies that have expanded through market share growth, only a few have created new markets from whole cloth, either by being the first to enter entirely new geographies or through “disruptive” innovation that creates completely new products, services, or business models. In fact, our research shows that from 1999 to 2008, Apple was the only global incumbent to create entire new markets, repeatedly, from disruptive innovation. This analysis, it should be noted, does not consider industry attackers or start-ups—only incumbent companies and their efforts to create new markets.

Just how unique is Apple’s performance? We looked at our database’s top ten companies that grew by creating new markets. Apple was the only one among the top ten to capture this growth through disruptive innovation and one of only three to derive more than 5 percent of its annual growth from creating new markets. Nine companies grew by entering fast-growing emerging markets. Seven of those nine, including the other two whose annual growth from creating new markets exceeded 5 percent, were from the telecommunications sector. (The remaining two were a consumer products company and a conglomerate.) At the same time, Apple’s 7.9 percent growth from disruptive innovation represented 45 percent of its company-wide growth. For others among the top ten, the average growth derived from entering new markets was just 21 percent of total growth.

Apple’s performance also has been singular among its peers in the innovative high-technology sector. The company’s growth through market creation is about six times higher than that of the second- and third-ranked companies achieving rapid growth by creating new markets—Lenovo and Cisco. In other sectors, including consumer packaged goods, retail, and health care, incumbents’ growth through creating new markets was close to zero or in some cases slightly negative.⁴

Apple does deserve its place in today’s hierarchy of esteemed companies by virtue of its unique accomplishments; its innovative products, services, and business models; its culture; and its processes and capabilities in areas such as supply chain management—not to mention the extraordinary leadership of its cofounder and current executives. In addition, we don’t mean to say that companies should never emulate Apple or other truly exceptional businesses. Many companies can draw new insights from Apple’s achievements in design, brand loyalty, and retailing, to name a few things. Rather, our analysis is a cautionary tale suggesting that executives take a clear-eyed view of the companies they want to emulate, as well as the returns and outcomes they expect from doing so.

An alternative to the headlong pursuit of disruptive innovation is what we call an “innovation at scale” strategy: repeatable and sustainable organic growth across the organization from new products and services—growth that builds on the foundation of a company’s core business. Analysis of more than 300 companies indicates that from 1999 to 2007, companies that showed positive organic share gains, year over year, for 70 percent or more of that time frame were, on average, twice as likely as other companies in their sector to outperform competitors as measured by total returns to shareholders. Companies that innovated at scale successfully at least 50 percent of the time were also more likely to outperform, but to a lesser degree (exhibit).

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This approach, too, is challenging: just 6 percent of global incumbent companies innovated at scale 70 percent of the time during this period. Still, the data suggest that identifying ways to exploit existing assets, including technology, organizational capabilities, or business model strengths, is within the reach of many more incumbent companies than might succeed in creating new markets, as Apple and few others have done.

About the Authors

Marla Capozzi is a senior expert in McKinsey’s Boston office, Ari Kellen is a director in the New Jersey office, and Sven Smit is a director in the Amsterdam office.

Shamans, Software and Spleens

What do they have in common? Quite a bit according to Duke law prof James Boyle in his provocative book of the same title, now 16 years old. As in my last post, this "classic" (I hate using that term - it usually denotes a book that everyone praises but no one reads) on law and the construction of the information society (its subtitle) was prescient and still asks the right questions (and, in my view, posits many right solutions). Boyle's attempt to create an overarching social theory of the information age can be summarized (at my risk) as follows: the regime of intellectual property rights is built around an overly romanticized conception of "authorship" which significantly undervalues the nature and origin of source material (whether it's copyright owners borrowing from public domain material and claiming "creation", or the University of California claiming patent on a gene line derived from cells taken from the spleen of a certain Mr. Moore). This devaluation of source leads to bad consequences for creativity, innovation and increasingly closes off the public commons into walled gardens (he makes this point more clearly in his latest book, "The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind", another great read).  Using both economics and liberal political theory, Boyle explores the way in which expanded copyright, gene patents and software patents (with digressions into blackmail and insider trading, which are both "information related crimes)  do not comport with the idea behind granting limited intellectual property protection (after all, the law always disfavors monopolies) in the first instance. Boyle's views are consistent on all forms of information and information-created products, seeing information as a unique form of "property".  He elides the fracturing of information into data-information-knowledge (data is the raw "stuff", once processed and analyzed it becomes actionable "information", and once information has been used, tested, bettered and (human) filtered, becomes "knowledge") and, at each level of that analysis, provides a cogent analytical understanding of the tensions involved in granting IP protection. Or, as the ancient Greeks said, γνῶθι σεαυτόν - "know thyself".

The Copyright Robot Wars

Before I discuss the copyright wars generally, a difficult and multi-faceted topic, I want to vent about one aspect of it that is rather simple - website self-censorship on copyright issues by use of robots ('bots').  Most recently, as the below article from EFF points out, YouTube stopped access to its coverage of the Democratic National Convention, and Ustream stopped streaming the Hugo sci-fi award ceremonies, in each case because a bot they were using detected copyrighted material. True, but both cases involved clearly permitted uses under the copyright "fair use" doctrine. Had a human being been in any way involved in the decision that would have been clear - but the takedown was done by a bot. This is a classic illustration of what Lessig means when he says "code is law" - we have a bot doing what it is programmed to do before the legal system can get involved and assert its protections. Shoot first, ask questions later. But just as that method of action (if it can be called that) fails in the real world, so it should fail in cyberspace. Without the human element of "fuzzy logic" (ie, legal principles) being applied, the copyright infringement "fear" is so great that hosting sites will continue to resort to using bots to overbroadly censor what need not - and indeed should not - be censored. Bring back the humans please.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/09/copyrights-robot-wars-heat-algorithms-block-live-streams-first-and-ask-questions

Back to the Future?

It's fun every now and again to revisit "classics" of the tech era, like Nicholas Negroponte's seminal "Being Digital" and, as I did last week, Larry Downes' "Unleashing the Killer App" from 1998. At the outset of the digital age, the only thing certain was uncertainty, that tech was turning usual business thinking on its head as radically new business models emerged. Management mantras were learn to embrace doubt, be flexible, learn, ie - nobody had a clue. But perhaps there was some level of determinism in all that flexibility, and as Exhibit A I present Downes' Twelve Principles of Killer App design, parentheticals by me (remember, these "apps" were fullblown, end-to-end applications, not hacks or iPhone games, and this was written way before Web 2.0, BI, et al.) ): 1. Outsource to the customer; 2. Cannibalize your (existing physical) markets; 3. Treat each customer as a segment of one; 4. Create communities of value; 5. Replace rude interfaces with learning interfaces; 6. Ensure continuity for the customer, not yourself; 7. Give away as much info as you can (unless you're in the content business....); 8.  Structure every transaction as  a joint venture (well, maybe not..); 9. Treat your (physical) assets as liabilities (too radical); 10. Destroy your value chain (ditto); 11. Manage innovation as a portfolio of options; 12. Hire the children (ie, digital natives). Hmm - not too shabby for a 14 year old book.

Science, Limitations, Metaphysics

Technology being applied science, I thought these observations (by The Economist magazine) and quote from Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of British radio telescopy, to be quite apt. "On the deepest questions, he believed, cosmology must give way to metaphysics. He said in his final Reith lecture: "I am no more surprised or distressed at the limitation of science when faced with this great problem of creation than I am at the limitation of the spectroscope in describing the radiance of a sunset or at the theory of counterpoint in describing the beauty of a fugue"". Perhaps Sir Bernard is capturing the essence of what I am trying to do in this blog - to show that the point of "limit" may well be the point of human departure, that limitations should be pushed and stretched but not broken, because what lies on the other side may help to define who and what we are.

Clay Shirky meets the Bell Curve

In his book of the same title, Clay Shirky makes much of the digital ability to aggregate "cognitive surplus", ie the ability of people, by digitally cooperating, to take advantage of each others' cognitive abilities or "surplus". Effectively, Shirky praises social media platforms and related digital technologies for enabling greater creativity, cooperation and, hopefully, progress. The idea that social media foster cooperation is true, as far as it goes, but whether we are creating any cognitive surplus (multiplier factor, synergy, call it what you will) is a different question. A few years ago, Charles Murray and Edward Herrnstein got into trouble with their book "The Bell Curve" because certain passages in it were viewed as indicating that African-Americans were intellectually inferior. The uncontroversial point they make is that human intelligence generally  is subject to distribution along a bell-curved structure, like most other human attributes - height, weight, athleticism, etc. The corollary of that is that very few people have much of interest to say (mostly on the right-tail end of the curve) or to substantially contribute to any "cognitive surplus".  How many blogs do you read that are vacuous or repetitive? How many facebook posts or tweets are "going to the mall", "dinner with friends" or other postings which add little to our collective knowledge? The number of people who could create a true cognitive surplus (and I'll leave aside here the issue of Big Data as cognitive surplus, which I do not think Shirky intended by his term) is small, and while social platforms do get them together, they were likely seeking each other out before.  To put it crudely, to the left of that right-side tail, there is very little to be added to cognitive surplus - 50 million times zero is still zero - and Shirky should recognize that limit rather than touting the small amount of progress on the other side. Digital technology is not (yet) making humans smarter.

Noam Wasserman's "The Founder's Dilemmas"

Noam Wasserman’s “The Founder’s Dilemmas” is a knowledgeable and accessible quantitative analysis of startup dilemmas – when to found, with whom, how to split equity, when and whom to hire, when to step down as CEO, “king v. rich”, et al.  Let’s say you’re an “average” startup professional, say a VC, banker, lawyer or consultant.  Wasserman’s data set is huge – several thousand startups over a ten year period. But - you’ve faced these dilemmas a hundred times, you know what works and what doesn’t, you know the applicable tweaks and the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches.   Do you really need to go through 350 pages of (albeit well-written) quantitative analysis?  Can you actually learn something from someone else’s war stories? The answer is yes for two reasons – one, mathematics, and two, humility.  First, the math. Scholars study large entities and large samples so that they can weed out the idiosyncrasies of any given situation and better find the patterns that are applicable to a larger sample – ie, are more genuinely representative and thus more likely to be similar to a given situation at hand.  Take as an example 50/50 equity splits between founders. Your “gut” (and common wisdom) is that these divisions are highly problematic. True, but isn’t it better to see that X% of these splits in a  large sample led to negative results of Y? Isn’t your “gut” better tuned to seek out those few situations in which this split might be effective?  One need not cite statistical chapter and verse (“73% of these situations in a  sample of 2500 companies led to a split within 2 years”) to be able to use such statistics to better advise founders. Or do you really wish to sell your advice solely on your “gut”?  Second, the humility. Anyone who has dealt with entrepreneurs knows the ferocity of their passion – and anyone who has studied behavioral economics knows the cognitive biases that cloud everyone’s (including entrepreneurs’) judgment. Entrepreneurs by nature or definition are more likely to go it alone or step away from the “certain” middle path. They are idiosyncrasy writ large. Again, say you are an “average” startup professional – have you really heard every story, seen every arrangement under the sun? Even with 30 plus years of experience, a degree of self honesty and humility would dictate that the answer is no. Therefore, Wasserman’s “war stories” may also be of help. I, too, am an old dog, but I always want to learn new tricks.  Wasserman’s book is well worth the read.

Interop - Theory and Practice

Harvard's Berkman Center has produced some of the best thinking around on the relationship between technology and society.  The latest book by its John Palfrey and Urs Gasser - Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems - does not fit into that category. Interoperability - the ability of systems to communicate with each other and thus function in tandem is indeed critical to the functioning of increasingly complex and interconnected systems. Palfrey and Gasser go in search of every scholar's meme - a theory of interop - and fall flat. To describe what interop is is not to describe what it really means. Rather, since by its nature it is so complex, adaptive and ubiquitous, one wonders what gain a proper "theory of interop" would grant. Ultimately, it doesn't matter because Palfrey and Gasser simply give example after example of interop while failing in their self-set task - to unify a theory of it. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with technology will find this book uninformative.  Better luck next time

You are not Steve Jobs

Yes, Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs is a great work about a fascinating man. When Jobs does it was amazing to see the outpouring of sympathy for him on cyberspace - this for the CEO of a large company at a time when CEOs were viewed as barely better than rapists and murderers. People talked at that time, and when Isaacson's book was published, about how "inspiring" his life had been. Clearly, Jobs had been no ordinary CEO and, reading not too far between the lines, he could have been a much better one, as well as being a better human being (at which he was godawful). He was a visionary whose vision was so acute that he could create markets where none had existed before. His most audacious statement - "Some people say - give the customers what they want. That's not my approach. People don't know what they want until you show it to them". Brilliant stuff, right? Inspiring, right? WRONG! Not wrong because every Harvard Business School professor will tell you so, though they will. Wrong for a much simpler reason - you are not Steve Jobs. He was a one-off (perhaps thankfully), and no amount of "inspiration" will give you his gifts, Most of us (nay, all of us) lack any degree of Jobs' vision - and  so what? We can still appreciate the beauty and brilliance of his products (I deliberately keep my iPhone unsheathed just to look at its lines). We can stand in awe of his accomplishments, and in judgment of his faults. But if we try to imitate him, we'll fail. I am reminded of an old Hasidic tale - the rabbi finds Mendel alone in the synagogue, weeping. "Why are you weeping, Mendel?" asks the rabbi. Mendel looked up and said "I am old and dying. I am not a great man of learning like you, rabbi, I am a simple farmer. But when I go up to heaven, I am farid of the question I will be asked". "What question is that?" the rabbi asked. Mendel replied :God will not ask me why I have not been a great scholar or pious figure. He knows the modesty of my accomplishments. Instead, he will ask me if I have been the best Mendel I could have been, and that question I fear".  Don't try to be a pale imitation of Steve Jobs. Be the best Mendel you can be.

Tom Friedman Forgets to Read Evgeny Morozov

In his latest op-ed piece in the NY Times, Tom Friedman is shocked - shocked! - to find that Facebook and Twitter alone are insufficient to establish a democracy or a functioning civil society sector in Egypt. Tom should have read Evgeny Morozov's "The Net Delusion" before expressing his surprise publicly. Morozov steadily, consistently and completely demolishes the notion that the Internet is inherently democratizing - for many of the same reasons Friedman ignores. The distributed architecture of the Net is wonderful - until you hit a national firewall - eg, China, Iran, North Korea. Going gaga over tech's ability to mobilize people quickly ignores the facts of power on the ground (witness Iran's abortive "Spring") and downplays (dangerously so) the ability of the state to control the physical space as well as cyberspace. Moreover, building democracy is a process, not a result - it is the messy clashing of interests, making of tradeoffs and hopefully insuring some levels of freedom while actually trying to govern societies that have been closed to people participation for years. Democracy doesn't sprout up overnight (how many former Soviet Socialist Republics are truly democratic? Is Hungary backsliding on its democratic underpinnings?), it is a hard slog through muddy terrain and must be defended constantly. Tom, read Morozov's book. It's disheartening but utterly convincing. Then you (of all op-ed writers) won't be surprised when Egyptians of many stripes give up on their Facebook/Twitter-induced "revolution". To quote The Who: "meet the new boss, same as the old boss". The Net doesn't change that.

The advantages of NOT being a digital native

People in their 20's and younger are the so-called "digital natives", those who have grown up in the tech age and for whom "being digital" (as Negroponte put it) is simply part of their nature. Those of us "of a certain age" look at digital natives with a combination of wonder and skepticism, amazed at their physical skills of digital multitasking while remaining dubious of their actual accomplishments. I have taken well to tech for a person of "that certain age" who is not an innovator on the tech adoption bell curve but I am in no way envious of the digital natives. In fact, I think it should be the other way round. Being an "analog native" means that I recall well the pre-digital era and its difficulties - bulky, time consuming physical research methods, large, heavy media storage units (they were called LPs), overseas news coming in three days late on newspapers sent by air freight - ie, the bad old days. Every time I pick up my iPod Classic, which holds over 1100 of those LPs and CDs and is barely over half full, every time I access the Net and have instant news from all over the world in several languages (instead of listening to shortwave radio broadcasts in my room), every day when I see Moore's law mean that paperless can really mean paperless (and more room in storage closets) I am thankful for the ability to contrast the digital age with my analog upbringing. I am no cyber-utopian by any means; I prefer to think of myself as a tech connoisseur, one who appreciates the subtlety and grandeur of technological possibilities in the digital age. Sorry digital natives, but you can't do that - insufficient contrast. You just don't know how lucky you really are.

Is Tim Wu's The Master Switch Inevitable?

Tim Wu's The Master Switch is a great work of history;  the real question is - is its predicted outcome inevitable? Wu traces the development and ultimate consolidation of a number of information industries - telegraphy, movies, radio, television, telephony - from a dispersed group of competitors to a small group of oligopolists or a single monopolist. Wu calls this pattern of development the "Cycle" and then, of course, applies these historical findings to the newest information industry/infrastructure, the Internet. Wu draws parallels but not conclusions - he's far too cautious an academic for that. Yet the conclusion seems inevitable - that despite its distributed architecture, we are subject to (and may be already seeing the rise of) Net oligopolies. No, this is not about outright state intervention in Net access (e.g., the "Chinese Internet"), though that possibility remains strong in certain societies (witness the attempts of repressive governments to censor or block Twitter and Google). Rather, it is about the importance of the Net to both day-to-day life and to political and self expression, and the threat to that posed by emerging oligopolies. One need not look far to see emergent oligopolies (can one imagine a viable competitor to Facebook in the pure social sharing space, despite the IPO flop? Or a serious competitor to Google in search/traffic metrics?) and oligopolistic behavior (eg, device manufacturers prohibiting jailbreaking even by knowledgeable hackers). Yet we are not yet at the point of the three television networks of the 1940's controlling all the flow of televised data and we may well never be - because of the distributed nature of Net architecture, because of the (still) varied ways in which it can be accessed, because of the diligence of certain parties in exposing this danger (eg, Wu, the EFF),and because of the constitutional nature of the protection of speech (even though the Net is essentially privately-owned and controlled, though government (ARPA) invented - sorry Al Gore). Wu is right to raise these concerns and to show that in industry after industry involving data, this "Cycle" has run its path. It may be frightening to rely on antitrust enforcement as a real backstop, since its enforcement varies from administration to administration - but it is a strong tool. What remains to be seen is the level of political will to enforce it should further consolidation in pipes (mobile operators, satellite, cable, et al.) or further strengthening of the competitive position of dominant incumbents (like Google and Facebook) prove anti-competitive. The distributed architecture of the Net standing alone will not save it from oligopoly or restriction. It is incumbent upon us the users - and our legal system - to guard carefully, having been properly warned by Wu. History is not destiny, unless we allow it to so become.

By way of introduction.....

"technology" and "limitations" in the same sentence? I'd argue that one is impossible without understanding the other. The world at times seems to be divided between cyber-utopians and cyber-cynics; I wish to tread a more independent middle path. I'd like to explore how a variety of forces - physical, social, economic, regulatory and just-plain-human, affect and at times limit our ability to maximize technological progress and benefit. As a tech lawyer, I'd like to show how the legal system, by nature conservative and reactive, is actually shaping the contours of tech development. It's no accident that some of the best thinkers on the impact of tech on society, Yochai Benkler, Tim Wu and Lawrence Lessig, are all professors of law. There is more similarity between an algorithm and a chapter of the Code of Federal Regulations than first meets the eye. I'd like to explore the works of some great thinkers (and doers) about tech and society, behavioral economics and code, to come to a holistic consensus on the roles and interactions of tech, law and human cognition. Sound like your cup of tea? Read on.