For those who need to understand how the Web is transforming the way businesses work, yada yada yada
Meta Data
| Issue: January 5, 1999
Author/Editor: David Weinberger Central Meme: Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy Favorite Beatle: John. Duh. Current Personal Crisis: Haunted by the belief that if we only knew the answer to the following question, much about civilization would become clear: Did cavepeople wet their beds? Home page: http://www.hyperorg.com Contact information: Click here. |
ContentsWhy Don't We Vote in Business?: We all think
voting's just fine for matters of war and peace. So why don't we vote
in business? |
|
It's a JOHO World After All In the holiday spirit of self-aggrandizement, let me festively announce that KM World (http://www.kmworld.com) recently (December 15) featured the following fetid lines from yours truly on their home page as "quote of the week": "We don't need a definition [of knowledge management] that everyone bows before. We do need agreement about the core problems that KM solutions solve or the clear opportunities it addresses." Wow, talk about your controversial, powerhouse exhortations! I'm getting all trembly just thinking about it! (KM World also recently printed a column of mine on why corporations that want Knowledge ought to hire teachers.) Intranet Design Magazine (http://idm.internet.com) is currently running my write-up of the Xplor conference. (Hey, I acknowledge I'm on one of their boards and gave a keynote at the conference. Doesn't make me biased!) Chris "RageBoy" Locke has ferreted out a rather lengthy interview I purportedly gave while in India. You can read it at: http://www.indialine.com/net.views/interview41.html |
Why don't we vote in business?
We're all democrats (little d), aren't we? We believe in representative democracy, the power of the ballot box, one-man-one-vote, and the right to watch as many Jimmy Stewart movies as we can without hurling.
So why don't we vote on issues in business?
There have been three major lines of argument about why democracy makes sense:
1. No individual is as wise as a group.
2. People should have a say in decisions that affect them.
3. On some issues, there is no way to ascertain right and wrong, so we ought to do that which will bring the most people the most happiness.
Now, clearly reason #3 is a defeatist, depressing line of thought which leads to sexual profligacy, tailgate parties and the music of ABBA, so we must reject it. And reason #1 is at best a Happy Myth. If we really thought democracy were a way to arrive at the smartest decisions, we wouldn't let vote those who are not so damn smart or so well informed, e.g., the mentally handicapped, the illiterate and/or uneducated, and people who watch "Married with Children." (Yes, at least two out of three of these groups may be wise and wonderful people, but they will have trouble keeping informed about, say, complex economic arguments. We don't let children vote for something like these reasons.)
Reason #2 is, however, a powerful reason to let people vote. The government gets its authority from the consent of the people -- hey, read the Declaration of Independence, will you? -- who agree to have their liberty curtailed by the government only because the people *are* the government.
So, why don't we vote in business? Oddly, reasons #1 and #2 get switched. We do *not* have a right to have a say in decisions that affect us but it *is* often the case that workgroups are wiser than their individual managers. The group frequently consists of people who have more expertise than the manager can muster.
Ah, but you say the manager has a loftier view? She surveys the entire landscape, can see The Big Picture, understands Industry Trends and Macroeconomic Issues? Oh, fine, let's believe that Happy Myth, too. Nevertheless, she simply can't encompass the wealth of knowledge found in the group she manages. So, let her campaign for a particular position, and then put it up for a vote. Best of both worlds!
The real reason we don't vote in business is that businesses are based on military hierarchies in which goals are set at the top and then discipline results in successful execution. In fact, executing well a suboptimal decision will get you further than poorly executing a perfect decision.
Well, things are changing.
First, the pace of business and the unpredictability of the market means that being able to make, un-make, and re-make decisions quickly probably counts for more than disciplined execution. Discipline is becoming less important than flexibility, creativity and small-group initiative.
Second, decisions are harder to make. There's more to know -- more details and more gross structures. The world is fractal -- we never reach basic building blocks that are simpler than the whole they make up. This is a strong argument for relying on group decisions, for only the individuals in the group collectively have the deep and detailed knowledge required.
Third, managers are becoming facilitators, not experts. Being smart these days means not having the most content but knowing how to wring maximum smarts from a group. There's so much to know that an expert is someone who has mastered a slice of trivia. Knowledge is a property of groups.
Fourth, we now have the means for groups to engage in continuous collaboration and this brings new social structures (well, new to business, old to friends, families and street corners). While collaboration is simply fab, it's also good to come to a decision now and then. Voting is one way to do it.
Let's sum up: Knowledge is a property of groups. Voting is a way that collaborative groups come to decisions.
Oh, and top-down management is insulting, ineffective, condescending, patriarchal and breeds class resentment.
Rock the Vote, business dudes!
One Question Interview™
with Alok Nandi:
How Worldy is the WWW?
I met Alok Nandi in India. Although he describes himself as "a media writer/director working in Brussels and Paris, busy with comics on the web, graphic novels, interactive narrative, design, film/video, and writing," in fact that only skims the surface. Alok is a film maker and producer. He's recently finished a film about Mongolia and is beginning work on one about a painter traveling from Antwerp to Calcutta via Paris and Vienna at the end of 18th century. In addition, he is trying to invent a new form of comic (excuse me, "graphic novel") sponsored by the folks who own Tintin's half-toned ass; his interactive Web fiction recently won him a prestigious award from the Paris-based, unfortunately-named SCAM (Societe Civile des Auteurs Multimedia), as well as critical acclaim from Liberation, L'Express, etc.
He is a citizen of the world, comfortable and also curious wherever he goes. So, we began talking about whether all Web sites from every country were bound to look basically the same. I eventually sent him the following question:
JOHO: The Internet is helping English to become even more dominant as the global language. Is it also helping American customs and means of expression become more dominant? More exactly, are Web sites globally all going to look alike -- basically like McDonald's -- or are they retaining characteristics distinctive of their culture?
Alok: English and McDonald's can be found -- more and more -- everywhere. But there are subtle variations in the taste of these hamburgers, just as you can find many types of English with specific accents, words and vocabularies: the British, the American, the Canadian, the Indian, the new Euro-pudding English ... So, the local traces are taking over and re-shaping a language which is the new Esperanto, the common interface among people.
English is not quite omni-present on the Web. And where other languages exist, the page aesthetics can be affected. Look at the design of Japanese web sites. They often offer completely different aesthetics, due primarily to the positioning of the typefaces. A Japanese house (a traditional, non-virtual one) offers circulation spaces based on tatamis, resulting in a specific day-to-day aesthetics. Idem with the sushis and the chopsticks. Chopsticks are the food enabler, the media. And the sushis were designed to make the content (the food) easily flow from the plate to the mouth. But what about eating noodles or rice then? Easy solution: still use the chopsticks, but bring the bowl close to the mouth. In the same way, their web sites reveal some Japanese specificities-- tatami and chopsticks, so to speak. (However, let's keep in mind the fashion of the French cuisine in Tokyo - allowing forks to take over.)
Even in the Wild West -- Europe -- web sites are often multilingual. This results in a design which has to fit this functionality. And if we look to sites only in English, you will find a difference between a US one, and its European counterparts. This is clearly the context making its contribution and confirming that the notions of functionality are different from country to country. If you add local taste to that, web site personalities and identities are strong. A French web site will definitely show a different visual ambiance than, say, a Dutch site.
What type of differences can we notice in the Franco-Dutch example ? Here are some suggestions, which can be traced back to cultural difference between Germanic and Latin mentalities.
The Germanic are much more down-to-the-earth, practical, functional, while the French are more drowned in the word, the talk, the wine ... These may seem cliched, which they are, by the way. But they allow us to make the point of changing balance between mise-en-scene and functionality. A Dutch site is more efficient in delivering the information you are seeking. A French site will require you to better know the culture "en place" as more design elements are in the visual context, for example. Obviously, it is easy to find counterexamples of each point, but you can note trends, in a meta-reading of the Internet becoming a mass-media.
Another route to check the difference between the French and Dutch site is the approach to languages. French will skip the multilingual aspect as they usually speak only French, whilst the Dutch one will be Dutch- and English-oriented, or even English only. So, the cultural attitudes to functionality and information needs have implications in the design of web sites, implications that we only begin to apprehend, I assume.
Back to square one: 95% of the machines have the same OS, a very high percentage use the same web design software, so a very high percentage of web sites must have the same ambiance. No?
Fortunately, there is a natural influx in the design space, like in the fashion space, that should help us avoid becoming clones of each other. iMac, Palm Pilot, Psion ... are today the carriers of a mise-en-scene different from the homogeneous Windows icons.
Old stories, new media? Goodfellas and bad? Big Brother? The design is getting exciting days, because the feudal system has found its enemy: the Internet network. The key will be to balance global and local, the normalized and the heterogeneous. In the end, web sites will retain their local ambiance as the global phenomenon of the Internet is expressed in global localities.
Self Plagiarism Dept.
The Industry Standard (Dec. 14-21) on page 6 runs a letter from David Panter that says that Microsoft's claim that their browser is an integral part of the operating system
is like McDonald's claiming that burger and french fries are so closely interwoven that they are effectively one product.
Here's a headline from page 12 of the same issue, about connectivity cubicles at airports:
Do You Want Fries with that Browser?
Now,
to reply to Mr. Panter. No it's not like that at all. What it's like,
see, is like McDonald's claiming that ketchup is an integral part of their
secret sauce, while there's this like upstart Valley company that's giving
away free packets of its own ketchup, and the way this upstart makes money
isn't by giving away the little packets (duh!) but by then trying to sell
giant ketchup servers to corporations that are afraid that if everyone comes
in with their own little packet servers, there won't be any ability to share
burgers, which I guess is like where the analogy breaks down, except that
Bill Gates is Ray Kroc, Jim Clark is J.J. Heinz, and Marc Andreesen is The
Hamburglar.
War as usual
When
RageBoy first sent me a link
to a report by Phil Agre (http://www.egroups.com/list/noframes/rre/983.html),
I responded that I didn't see what all the fuss was about. Then, a week later,
the same report got covered by in Keith Dawson's 'zine -- one of our favorites
-- http://tbtf.com. Keith, unlike RageBoy,
is a sober and reliable commentator who did not do time in the 70s for ripping
off a string of Pacific Coast convenience stores while wearing a handcrafted
mask that at his trial he claimed was an homage to Marcel Duchamp. Keith writes:
Phil Agre doesn't usually wax emotional about issues of technology and culture; his 16 December piece on cyberwar is an exception. Agre attended a conference at which several honest and sincere representatives of the US defense establishment presented a seemingly new military doctrine for the online world. They proclaimed that there is, as of now, no boundary line between military and non-military facilities. Agre writes:
In the world of the Internet, it would seem, ...we are now in... permanent, total, omnipresent, pervasive war. Cold War plus plus: all war, all the time. They said this.
Please read Agre's closely argued, anguished musings about these developments, and see if you don't wax emotional too.
Do me a favor and check out this article and tell me why this is even a little surprise. The Internet was built, as we know, in part to provide a nuclear-proof communications infrastructure. Heck, the interstate highway system was built (or is this an urban guerrilla myth?) not only to enable troops to be moved in fleets of radiation-proof Greyhound buses but also to enable flyboys to land their birds after the official landing strips have been, um, deconstructed.
We've used the threat of terrorism (one which we help manufacture by the pointless bombing of nations too weak to step outside and fight us like a man) to militarize everything from airport terminals ("Freeze, motherfucker, and lower that laptop ver-r-r-r-y slowly to the ground") to mailboxes (which no longer accept packages over 16 ounces) to outlawing encryption algorithms.
We live in a society permeated by preparations for war. This is news? Give me a shout when they take the Spam, canned water and cyanide Pez dispensers out of our school and library basements.
What I'd really like is for someone to tell me how I'm not Getting It when it comes to this highly recommended article.
Marketing according to RageBoy
Here's something I liked a lot. From a recent issue of EGR (http://www.rageboy.com/index2.html):
Here's a baker's dozen tenets of the "Theory of Gonzo Marketing," delivered in Obscurantist-Zen mode and in no particular order:
1) Being careful of your audience's feelings is the ultimate insult. Doing anything and everything to please, doesn't.
2) Predictability depresses web traffic.
3) Brevity is the soul of shit.
4) Consistency is everything!
5) No, we take that back. It is trivial.
6) Joe SixPack is a figment of mass media wish-fulfillment fantasies.
7) The Internet has actually made people smarter. Or at least orders of magnitude more informed. Or if not that, at least much more *engaged* with events they used to believe were none of their business.
8) People always *were* smarter than companies took them to be. The fact that companies still think they're stupid is a function of "market research."
9) The market you are targeting probably no longer exists.
10) Your employees *are* your market. And they hate you.
11) Being important is not important.
12) Logic is boring.
13) Commerce happens *after* you say hello.
To which I'd only add: Not all companies deserve to live.
BTW, you can read more of RageBoy on marketing (in particular, on the 7 deadly sins) at http://www.insarasota.com/saramedia/templatePages/CYBER/cyber0011_11.asp. Very funny. Too true.
Business and Time: A Follow-up
The special JOHO-ette on "Business and Time" resulted in some very thoughtful responses.
Eric Hall thought I was slighting the importance of content:
You're effectively saying that infrastructure is more important than content, which just has to be wrong. Infrastructure assists content, but content is still king.
I replied:
I'm saying that the medium is (sorta) the message, which doesn't have to be wrong (although it may be).
To which Eric had the audacity to respond:
You and McLuhan are both wrong. The medium contributes to the message, but the message is a unique entity that stands on its own.
You cad! I don't mind you slandering the memory of St. Marshall (a figure that has inspired a cult rivaled only by those of L. Ron Hubbard and James Tiberius Kirk), but to suggest that I might be wrong, well, all I'll say is that you're just making yourself look bad.
He continues:
Without content, [the Web is] just Neat. Same as TV and newspapers and notes-to-betty.
The correspondence then degenerated into a sort of passive-aggressive love fest:
David: Maybe intranets are more like the national highway system.
Eric: Highways are great, but the trucks make them important.
David: Surely content is important. But I don't agree that it stands on its own.
Eric: I said the medium contributes. We're in violent agreement.
Man, what's the point of violence if there's no one to take it out on? So, I'm forced into a corner and will have to disagree with myself:
Intranets aren't like highways. They're like the Jai Lai stadium by the side of I95 in Bridgeport, CT. Sure, you can hear the rumble of trucks, but it's really all about slamming a granite ball into the choppers of someone with whom you have more in common than with 99.9% of the planet simply so you can maintain that your under-read newsletter is saying something different.
Now for a long but thoroughly worth-reading response from Gordon Benett, editor of Intranet Design Magazine (http://idm.internet.com):
The JOHO-ette was pretty fascinating. So you see documents evolving from private to communal property as a consequence of Internet time. Capitalism won't stand for that, IMHO. It may be a shopworn Industrial Age idea, but Das Kapital is just as much the motor of Internet commerce as it was of the railroads.
You think going forward that the hunt for venture capital will take place in public forums (fora?) as a cascade of throw-away ideas? Or that opportunists within company walls will pour their hearts out in virtual meeting spaces? Or that patents and trademarks will be replaced by a fluid knowledge store of best practices? Success is too private an affair for sharing to become a form of competitive advantage.
I don't have a theory of Geschaft-und-Zeit proportions on this, but my sense is that you're right to a point. The production of documents is indeed shifting to the kind of collaborative, rapid prototyping model you forecast. Employees are starting to conduct virtual meetings on extranets worldwide, and the sum of their outpourings is being raked into value-added shitpiles refined by better and better content extraction engines. As a consequence, the Web (and its walled-off VPN spurs) are starting to resemble The New Document - fluid vs. static, evolutionary vs. complete, etc.
These things are happening. XML vendors are screaming about The Web as Database, which is at least a more likable slogan than Sun's The Network is the Computer(tm). But an analysis that stops here stops short of prognosis.
What I see is that only certain documents are changing in this way: newspapers, novels, office reports, memoranda. Throw in multimedia: CDs, DVDs, video, voice. True, these forms take up the vast majority of our attention and our hard drives. But not included in this majority is a subset of documents that far outweighs the others, in the way a gun outweighs a microphone: Contracts.
You don't see many mergers and acquisitions negotiated in discussion forums. And - my point, in case you were wondering whether I had one - you never will.
[Editor: Au contraire! M&A's are the subject of intense internal discussions and intranets will be used for this internally and they will eventually be used across companies and this *will* have the effect of loosening up the discussions. (I think.]
Document communism is happening, but only for the masses. The power elites still trade in hard copy - in scrolls, to take a swipe at Dan Bricklin's critique of long web pages. Yes, employees are building up corporate knowledge stores with fast-paced, evolutionary dialogues; and yes, rancor and wit Usenet-style are turning out to be key survival tactics in the guerilla infowar.
But that's just for peons like you and me and our little friends. While our e-business work products are being commodified, replicated and diluted in ways that hard goods never could, they are also being mined by those with the capital - both economic and intellectual - to privatize and transform them into personal wealth. Company workers are experiencing the New Document firsthand, with all the dislocations and future shock that entails. Company owners are exploiting the low inertia of e-documents to accelerate product cycles and boost ROI. The workers are losing individuality, memory, historicity and the ability to sustain rational discourse, while the owners are recording meeting minutes the old-fashioned way: on paper.
Right?
For now, yes. But the revolution is coming, comrade! Man, um, *staff* the barricades!
Clinton Glenn writes:
Doesn't this come down to "decision by committee" and therefore no one person to blame if it's wrong? It's great for the sheep, but would put a serious dent in the egos of those of us who like to stick our necks out once in a while. Doesn't personal recognition count for anything? I could come up with at least a dozen more questions that would make me want to run from this process you have presented.
I think we'll find other ways to be egomaniacs. Some things don't change. For example, some of us will stroke our egos by getting laughs, by writing newsletters, by always being the one to point out why everyone else's ideas are wrong ... the normal run of ego expression. In fact, I think one of the reasons people will start contributing to these sites is precisely to get their views known (for ego and other reasons).
Clinton continues:
...I have to ask you if this is "really" becoming a reality or is it just a possibility?
A fact-based question? I haven't done Reality since the early '70s, Clinton. I thought you understood that
Patrick, Lord of Kyle, writes:
Well, a lot of tonight's writing seems to be a rehash of the JOHO mission statement (unless we find that term patently offensive). Probably good, bring the troops back to the roots.
As a self-proclaimed rational anarchist (well, sort of, in a nice warm fuzzy non threatening easygoing kind of way), I've always preferred the concept of the networked (hyperlinked) corporation. However, you seem hesitant to mention what appears to be a logical progression of this idea, which is a hierarchy-less corporation. Oh, some hierarchies would form, but they would be natural. A corporation would be "a bunch of people doing jobs" instead of "some people doing jobs and others busy owning them." Makes sense so far.
Communism? Maybe. I don't think that communism is an ideal system (even if it is, redundantly, idealized) just because it still has a rather huge hierarchy caste, The People versus the individual. The People can become a new tyrant, with stupid decisions and needless prattle just like any inbred feudalistic lord. As far as companies work, communism might be acceptable just because The Company really is the point of everything corporate. The People is not the reason for us comrades to exist, however, so communism might make a far better business model than it does political model. So, a flat, networked corporation that allocates its own resources by letting its *resources* do the thinking. Where do I sign up? (I was recently downsized in a sense, as my summer job was impersonally cut last month...
Isn't it a little late in the season to get downsized from a *summer* job?? Which hemisphere are you in, anyway?
Kyle seems to insist on taking Communism as what it actually was. I prefer to think of it as a realm in which the state has withered away and all exists for the people. Unfortunately, when applied fully to today's business world, it would mean that the good of The People would come before Maximizing Shareholder Value, making for interesting annual meetings.
Australian Ron writes, referring to some particular lines (indented) in the original article:
The intranet site itself becomes the locus of value, not the finished document.
this is a little blurry with respect to the form the 'intranet site' might take - we've talked before about how such sites might sculpt legacy documents to record what was achieved - but the real legacy of what transpired at the site will still mostly be contained in the 'unrecorded' experiences of the sites participants. How this could be evolved into a 'document' management strategy is surely a little fuzzy at best..
The site has value throughout the process, while the finished document has value only once it's published.
Again the biggest problem here is perhaps not during the operation of the site but after its work is done. Once the 'tacit' knowledge ( did I use that wrong? ) of those that created the site is gone, how does the site maintain the wealth of knowledge that it garnered without the keystone of the minds in which it made all sense to elaborate the bits that to the uninitiated make very little? This goes beyond fuzzy to approach curly.. but not enough to turn the hose on a still promising train of thought ;-)
I don't know the answer to these questions. To some extent, the sites will be self-documenting ... much more so than the current processes (finished docs, committee meetings, etc.) because there will be all the chat and discussion recorded.
Ron continues:
The new way of working via collaborative web sites changes the line between the public and private. You'll work in the public eye for a large percentage of your time. Maybe just about all your time.
I also suspect we will work more often, in smaller chunks.
The scenario of people working in one job ( however convoluted ) for a mind numbing portion of most days, will instead be likely replaced in many fields by people visiting several jobs each day, spending perhaps a few hours or even minutes, attending to whatever is their lot with a fresh mind, before mostly pursuing whatever it was that made them good at that job in the first place.
Ron points out that these forces will lead us all (except authors of incredibly long Web 'zines) to write much more briefly:
we postulate that this will ultimately be corrupted by something like Omnisoft Limerick - A new age wordprocessor that runs from a six cd stack in order to limit your documents strictly to 5 lines, of which the first two lines and the last must rhyme with 'Bates' before it will allow you to publish.. ( it's 4.15am - what can I say ;-)
...
The concept of ownership is tied up with authorship.
...The indigenous inhabitants of this once fine land, ... quite remote from considering themselves owners of the land, ... were simply the people of the land. From it they came and were shaped, as they altered its shape, so their own was inexorably changed too. The role they assumed in its existence, we would perhaps most comfortably translate as 'guardians', though this certainly held a far more reciprocal meaning than we might at first assume.
Would it be better to suggest that ownership was in fact innately tied to a tangible(??) responsibility for whatever it is we have? ...
Actually, ownership is tied to the right to do whatever you damn well please with the crap you own, more or less the exact opposite of the notion of guardianship or stewardship.
I own it, therefore I destroy it. Now we're talking real He Man Capitalism!
Juliusz Ostrowski writes:
Your concept of "work in progress" as opposed to "finished product" is quite interesting. You applied it to ideas contained in documents and reports, but it could be extended to other products, such as software. Then it becomes similar to the two modes of software development, (Microsoft vs. Linux) described by Eric Raymond in his "Cathedral and Bazaar" paper (http://www.redhat.com/redhat/cathedral-bazaar/). So, you may have a point in seeing this as a future of our mental work.
Good point. The Linux "release schedule" will be a model for lots of products and other work of our hands.
By the way, have we yet noted that Dilbert is the first comic strip built along the lines of Linux: a very healthy percentage of the strips come from ideas contributed over the Web. It is in fact the Web's communal sense of mocking humor, filtered through Scott Adam's canny commercial, self-interested, money-grubbing (can you feel the envy?) filter.
Juliusz expandsz:
How could linux ever be "done" given the way it's being developed?
It seems to me that the energy of the community will shift to other exciting issues, such as GUI and application tools. The OS itself will most likely be maintained by a small group of devotees, or maybe even a commercial outlet, unless some new development in hardware architecture poses another challenge to solve.
An exciting prospect, but isn't the Lesson of the 90s that people would rather standardize on a mediocre tool than have the best lonely eccentricities that genius can develop? My evidence? Windows. 'Nuff said.
The irrepressible (lord knows we've tried) Bob Morris writes:
FWIW, neural systems are now understood as described by their dynamics (Heideggeran) though principally how they evolve toward their equilibrium states (Platonic).
It is typically difficult to solve directly the differential equations in which dynamical systems are cast. That is, how things change is their definition, not a closed-form prediction of where they will end up. Furthermore, with this description it becomes easy to say what chaos means: a very small change in the initial conditions causes the system to evolve toward a dramatically different equilibrium. The regions of the system containing chaotic points are also often easy to characterize, and make beautiful computer graphics for Public Television. Whether or not equilibria are really strong attractors ("asymptotically stable equilibria") can sometimes by characterized by auxiliarly oracle-like functions first understood by the 19th century Russian mathematician Lyapunov. In the dynamical systems describing both artificial and biological neural networks, finding a Lyapunov function can be an arcane art, but for a large class of systems, which includes human long-term memory mediated by the hippocampus and so-called associative memories of neural computers, Lyapunov functions can be found by use of a 1983 theorem of Cohen and Grossberg.
Put that in your office model and smoke it
Bob is a certified Professor so we can be certain that all this makes just enough sense to keep him on track for tenure. However, we happen to know that this passage was lifted at random from The Harper's Big Book of Obscurantism (Vol II). This then forces me to reply: I'm not sure that the dynamics/states polarity captures the Heidegger/Plato duality since Heidegger's point is that being (Sein) (of any sort) is to be understood in terms of time (Zeit), as both the dynamic and static views are. And I can guarantee you that *anything* Heidegger wrote is more obscure than what's dreamed of in Bob's philosophy.
FWIW.
Jon Pyke:
Is it valid to summarize all that with the comment "Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing going at different speeds" ? I can't help but worry about the "lunkheads" - my suspicion is that they will, from instinct, know how to keep warm, probably burning mayflies. But is the same true of mayflies?
Yes, the lunkheads seem to be impervious to extinction. There is virtue in slowness. On the other hand, the mayflies get to wear the cool clothes.
Coincidence? You be the judge!
While browsing for presents inexplicably requested by relatives, I noticed that amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com have identical synopses for "The World of Chas Addams":
Synopsis. From 1932 until his death in 1988, CHarles Addams contributed more than 1,300 cartoons and covers to The New Yorker. This large, beautifully printed volume brings together 300 of the most wonderful of them, as well as 24 pages of covers in brilliant full color. A retrospective celebration of the ominous, lovable, dark, and infinitely hilarious "Addams family."
I wrote to Amazon about this amazon' coincidence and received the following from Wendy Gallliart:
We build our catalog information from many sources, including publishers, book covers, submitted reviews, etc. The synopses is actually something gathered from the back of the book itself, I believe.
Yeah, well how do you explain the identical typo, hmmm?
Conspiracy theories are welcome...
Links Worth Linking (or not)
Andy Weinberger (possibly some relation -- our fact checkers are looking into it) writes:
Try http://www.medical-research.com and go to the Winner's Circle area. There are at least three moving images, one of which blinks. The mailbox drives me nuts too, and there is a lower screen scrolling banner. Plus, the site is pure hucksterism of the lowest most deceptive sort. The studies are not blinded or controlled. The weight loss patch study also required the patients to be on a rigid diet! Perhaps you'd like to try the sex help cream. You apply it to your inner thigh -- I suppose it's better if the right person applies it. In any case, the blinking, etc. is amazing.
Andy, we'd really rather not hear about how you blink when having sex creams applied to your inner thigh. Really, can't we leave this to purveyors of smut like Larry Flynt, The NY Times and the 105th US Congress?
Dave Seaman points us to the obscenely long URL: http://www2.idg.com.au/cwt1997.nsf/8525601d005a204e85255fdc007c1fc e/b31515801f24c63f4a2566dd007db941?OpenDocument , a Michael Schrage article in Australian Computerworld Today on "Why No One Wants Knowledge Management."
Dave also points out a deliciously broken link:
http://www.eterm.com/cigi/index.html
Press the "Authentic Verisign site" button to verify their site. (It causes an error with Internet Explorer, and nothing with Netscape)
It's like the "close door" button on many elevators that are actually no-ops. On the other hand, who in his right mind would press the Verisign button (other than you, Dave)?
Kyle, Lord Patrick, writes:
The kindness and deep pockets of Santa have bestowed Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 upon me, so I've spent most of my waking (and I'm starting to suspect a few of my sleeping) hours working on some VB stuff. I've posted the latest goodie at http://www.cyberramp.net/~kpatrick/programming.html, and you may feel free to have a look-see. I don't think it's that bad for a whopping 3 days of work and no prior knowledge of Visual Basic. Details are on the page.
I hope the holidays went well. God, where did this millennia go?
The program ("Sinusoidal, Recursive Graphing Bauble") draws pretty thingies. It requires the VB6 DLL, a 1+MB download. But, no matter what your interest in downloading Kyle's thingy-drawer, you gotta love the last line of his message, don't you?
Middle World ResourcesA Compendium of Resources |
|
| Walking
the Walk
Computerworld, a magazine I don't usually read because no matter how much I lie they won't give me a free subscription, reports that Michelin is using an extranet. The article by Carol Sliwa (Nov 30) says that 286 of their 1,700 dealers are now connected to an extranet called "Bib Net Web." (About the name: It derives from their fat tire mascot "Bibendum," or literally, "Bloated from drinking." Then Michelin added both "net" and "web" hoping one of them was right.) The extranet lets dealers order products, check the inventory, start claims, check status, and see a national account directory. Soon they'll also be able to see their purchase history. And the system will do error checking when they place an order. Michelin managed to spend $5M on Bib Net Web and even after two years, the system has not paid for itself, thus producing: a) One of the worst ROI's in extranet history, b) college degrees and a Mediterranean vacation for the children of some of the implementers. Amazingly, Michelin is still happy about this. Lynn Melvin, manager of electronic-commerce application development, said "We didn't really go into this to save money. Basically, we wanted to create close partnerships." (Melvin announced recently that she either won the Irish sweepstakes or came into an unexpected inheritance, but in any case, she no longer needs to work full weeks.) An analyst at the Giga group says: "With Web-based customer service of all sorts, companies should not expect to break even in the first year. The second year, some may break even. The third year, they may see 10% to 40% savings in customer service costs." Giga also said that the cost of processing an order can drop from from $8-25 to $0.03-1.00. Consultants and analysts, however, experience a ROI in the first 2 days when working with companies such as Michelin. Consultants note: Might be worth a cold call.... |
Cool
Tool It was RageBoy who forced me to buy a Microsoft Cordless phone. He did this with the hoary strategem of calling me up and saying, "Guess what I'm talking to you on?" Am I going to let RB beat me in the technotoy department? Hardly! The phone is a very cool idea that has, for me, gone from broken to flawed to unusable. The cool idea is that this is a high-quality 900MHz phone (i.e., the reception is good) with a base module that plugs into your computer, integrating its call center software with your Outlook address book. So, to call someone, you simply look the name up and click on a button. It logs the call, and if you have Caller ID (I don't), it identifies the caller. It also comes with what looks like a full implementation of a phone answering system (software -- you've go to leave your computer on), but I already have one so I didn't try it. It even comes with Microsoft's voice recognition software so you can speak into a mike attached to your computer and order your computer around. You can select any text on your machine and say "Call this!" and it will do its best. Unfortunately, the recognition software frequently mistook the sound of my keyboard as the instruction to "Delete this!," so I defenestrated it. Now for the annoying flaws. I couldn't get it to integrate with Outlook's contact manager, so when you use the "place a call" button on a contact card, it fails. And, even though you are dialing from a number in your address book (remember, for reasons buried deep in Microsoft's twisted psyche, your contact list and your address book are separate), it does not recognize and record the name of the person you were dialing. More important, once you've started a call, there's no way to type in notes and have them associated with the call. Now for the total breakdown. I installed Windows NT 4.0 Workstation recently. The phone software doesn't work with NT. Anyone want to buy a phone?? |
Email, Arbitrary Insults, and Suspicious Hacking Coughs
Ted Weinstein (no relation) writes:
Hey, I thought you might be interested to know that I have registered the following domain names, as a private individual with no ties to the Gore campaign.
gorebradley.org
gorebradley2000.org
gorefeinstein.org
gorefeinstein2000.org
goredaley.org
goredaley2000.org
gorekerry.org
gorekerry2000.orgWhy did I do this?
1. I'm a lifelong Democrat and I didn't want any potential dirty-tricksters (Republican or otherwise) to have the chance to grab these domain names.
2. I was surprised that Gore - who styles himself as Mr. Tech Savvy - didn't have his campaign folks do this already.
3. It raises interesting issues about how and when the Gore folks should have done this, without signalling whom they might be considering as a running mate.
Since it sounds like you're a loyal Dem, too, what should we do about this? There are at least a coupla dozen more Gore-based domain names that the DNC or SOMEBODY should be reserving, but I don't want to spend the few thousand more bucks it would take to sew 'em up. Should we pass the word around and start a collection? Any other ideas?
By coincidence, I myself own:
gorehillary.com
goremadonna.com
hillarylewinsky.com
kerrysnowballinhell.com
and, the Money 'Main:
thebody2000.com
We could put together a consortium to scarf up the rest of the likely ones, but by 2000, frankly my dear, no one's going to give a damn about presidential elections. Monica's epitaph: "Blew a president, ended democracy as we knew it."
I'm sooooo depressed.
Paul Dupuy responds to my quotation from Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier:
"I ask the rabbi to avail me of the diabolical CD-ROM in his possession..."
Most major spiritual traditions exemplify the claim that knowledge is "embodied" in people. For example, in the canonical Buddhist text *Entry into the Realm of Reality*, Sudhana visits many beings in his quest for knowledge. Even Zen flavored Buddhism concedes that the knowledge corresponding to enlightenment is imparted via contact with a Master (e.g., *Transmission of Light*), though this is typically obscured by throwing the sand of Void in inquiring eyes.
Like the "three jewels" of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, the Sufic tradition has the Teacher, the Teaching, and the Taught. In *Treasury of Mysteries*, Nizami enjoined those who would know the Teaching, "By yourself you can do nothing: seek a Friend".
Similarly, the core knowledge of Jewish Kabbalah is only imparted through personal interaction. As with the others, this tradition also maintains that the most important elements "may not even be taught individually, except to one who is wise, understanding from his own knowledge" (Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, *Talmud*).
Transmission of knowledge through an Expert's individual instruction does not take place in a vacuum of documents: these spiritual traditions are rich in highly detailed textual "information". The method is a consequence of the fact that knowledge exists not in books but in those who know.
Ahavah!
Million Dollar Idea: A series of in-house white-collar training sessions: "Putting the Kaballah to Work for You and Your Corporation." In fact, I see a whole new business trend forming: Kaballah Management. Price of Admission: Your ROI.
Mark Dionne responds to our statement that "Crappiness takes a while to detect while lateness is apparent immediately."
I like this. It's a great corollary to the software developer's creed: This project has three parameters: schedule, features and quality--you get to pick any two. (Low quality takes a while to detect...)
Clearly this derives from the Scholastic way of explaining how bad things can happen in God's universe: God is omnipotent. God is Omniscient. God is good. Pick two. (Potential employers please note: Mark Dionne *is* a software developer.)
Larry Fitzpatrick comments on our brief coverage of "Raw Iron," Larry "Smelly" Ellison's plan for a version of Oracle that comes with its own operating system (sort of "~Windows "):
This is the way high performance databases used to be. Oracle can probably pull it off, they have enough of the support tools. You know, you can buy machines that have just a file system on them (Auspex, Network Appliances), which is usually one of the functions of the OS, so why wouldn't a "DBMS toaster" work?
He goes on to comment on Henry Fuckhead Hyde's frighteningly stupid discussion of the meaning of "dismeanors."
Henry Hyde: I'm fascinated by the discussion of what the words mean, "high crimes and misdemeanors," and I've read a little bit on it
Sadly, has no one explained the meaning of the word "and"? If so, we'd (logically) be arguing about the clearly higher bar of "high crimes." Sigh... I suppose if this were obvious, search engines wouldn't suck so bad ;-)
It is frustrating that otherwise intelligent people (that is, we're leaving Hyde out of it for now) find the use of Boolean operators so frightening. Perhaps it would help if we stopped calling them "Booleans" which sound vaguely Eastern European and communist. Let's come up with a friendlier word that doesn't require us to spray spittle when we say it. A mini-bogus contest is hereby declared.
Mary Dugan points out that my homemade bulk mailer screwed up, causing me to have to acknowledge this humiliation in yet another issue. (I suppose Little-Miss-Perfect never made a mistake in her life? (Not according to my investigators ... I'm currently wrestling with what to do with what I've learned.)) Here's what she says:
Undoubtedly you've been notified that JOHO arrived twice in your subscribers' mailboxes. Much to my disappointment, I might add, since I thought I had received two different ones.
I replied:
There were very subtle differences between the two -- slight differences in line breaks and gradations in white space. Careful work comparing the two will reveal a secret message of astounding importance.
Mary riposted:
I read them both backwards and now know that RageBoy is dead.
Koo-koo-kachoo.
Bogus contest: UnPredictions
It's the time of year that our culture, Janus-like, insists on post-dictions of the past and pre-dictions of the future. Since we at JOHO spend all year providing you with glimpses of the future (remember, it was in the JOHO of January 7 1998 that you first heard about SXML, the standard for the interchange of bodily fluids), we thought we'd kick off the last year of the World As We Know It by predicting some events that won't happen. For example:
|
UnPrediction |
Qualifier |
|
Microsoft will not come up with a branded version of the boardgame Monopoly |
...although it will maintain that the new Microsoft Microwave is an integral part of the Windows 2000 operating system. |
|
Matt Drudge will not get a Pulitzer prize |
... although he will then out three Pulitzer judges for having too much fun at the City Pound. |
|
Bill Clinton will not have the nerve to sponsor an anti-pornography bill for the Internet |
... although he will also not have the nerve to veto The Clean Hands Act, a Republican bill requiring all candidates to log when they have masturbated and about whom/what. ("How can our Republic stand if Senators are voting for families during the day and pleasuring themselves thinking about the Olsen twins at night?")
|
|
Amazon will not begin to stock and sell a selection of metric nuts and bolts in addition to books, CDs and video tapes |
...although its revenues will plummet as people spend most of 1999 actually reading the books they ordered from Amazon in 1998. |
Please do better.
Contest Results
Kyle, Lord Patrick, responds to our ooooold contest asking for e-words that have some meaning relating to the Web. It's more complex than that, but his entry should make it all clear:
E-Mask-Elate (emasculate): The odd phenomena of a grown man who receives joy by disguising himself as a young girl for the purpose of reducing the manhood of fellow males through deceptive online chatting.
That one is pretty bad (not to mention about a month late), but it was complicated enough that I thought it might be worth relating.
It's never too late for another e-nt-rant in this contest. Thanks.
Chris Worth writes about our "frame jacking" contest, i.e., people who get the context radically wrong:
I'd suggest a common example: People who, when talking to an English-speaking foreigner, adopt the accent of that foreigner in the belief it'll aid communication.
BTW, when my daughter was in 1st grade, she befriended a recent Russian émigré child who spoke no English by speaking to her in fluent gibberish. Not quite frame jacking, but a different way to fail in a frame (and charming in its own right).
Jonathan Schull suggests the following, way eccentric, bit of verbal frame-jacking:
Renting a flat in a sonata.
Hmmm. Took me longer than I'd like to admit to Get It. And then it brought back: Did you ever see a barn dance? A slip knot? A web page? Does your nose run and your feet smell? Then you're built upside down!
So, as the scent of library paste, warm milk and Mallomar Madeleins induces a reverie of second-grade warmth and incomprehension not unlike reading a corporate mission statement, we let this issue snuggle in its warm blankie and drift just above the waves of sleep in which banner ads frolic and ecommerce is something that only adults have to worry about. You know that JOHO will be trying to keep the mattress dry until next time ... yawn .... . . .
The following information was found trapped at the top of my washing machine when I ran some issues of JOHO through it.
JOHO is a free, independent newsletter written and produced by David Weinberger. He denies responsibility for any errors or problems. If you write him with corrections or criticisms, it will probably turn out to have been your fault.
Subscription information, or requests to be removed from the JOHO mailing list, should be sent to [email protected]. There is no need for harshness or recriminations. Sometimes things just don't work out between people.
Dr. Weinberger is in a delicate nervous state, but if you want to send positive comments to him, his email address is [email protected].
Dr. Weinberger is represented by a fiercely aggressive legal team who responds to any provocation with massive litigatory procedures. This notice constitutes fair warning.
Any email sent to JOHO may be published in JOHO and snarkily commented on unless the email explicitly states that it's not for publication.
The Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization is a publication of Evident Marketing, Inc.
"The Hyperlinked Organization" is trademarked by Open Text Corp. JOHO gratefully acknowledges Open Text's kind permission to use this felicitous phrase.
For
information about trademarks owned by Evident Marketing, Inc., please see
our Preemptive Trademarks™™ page at http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/trademarks.html.