Every time I see a freeway full of cars, I get angry. Aside from the environmental issues, which should get everyone riled up, I see a great mass of human brain power devoted to nothing. I see lost productivity. By lost productivity I mean not only in the traditional economic sense, but lost time. Time to spend with family and friends; time to play, to create. The "human capital" that we squander in service of our automotive fetish is astronomical. It’s just an extra bonus that we’re doing grave damage to the planet at the same time.
In the Greater Toronto Area alone, I wouldn’t be surprised if we squander a million person-hours per day getting from home to work and back. If we say that this applies to a population base of roughly five million, extrapolate that to a North American population of 300 million, we come up with a cool 60 million hours. Of course, Toronto has legendary problems with traffic congestion, so let’s be conservative. Divide by two and call it 150 million as a ballpark estimate for average. If everyone chose to work those hours, using an eight hour day, that represents a workforce of almost 19 million. Of course given the choice, probably 15 million of those would choose to watch television, but that still leaves four million to do valuable things, like think and create, to contribute to society. Even if my estimates are way out of whack, that’s a lot.
Clearly there’s a huge indirect payoff to building better, faster mass transit systems with comfortable environments that allow people to do something other than play human sardine. Then at least while you’re stuck in motion, you have a chance of getting some work done instead of focusing on not getting in an accident. Is this likely to happen? No. Government policies seem to enshrine — if not deify — car culture. Support of the automotive sector is taken for granted as "the engine of the economy", when it’s really an engine of decay. But trying to change this is tantamount to tilting at windmills, particularly since the capital investment required would probably be in the trillions.
The way I see it, there are two classes of activity that people engage in: creating and consuming. These classes apply quite broadly, from creating wealth and consuming goods, to creating art and absorbing information (a form of consumption) by reading a book.
Left to their own devices, I believe most humans have a need to create. Whether it be knitting a scarf or developing a cancer fighting drug, creating is an intrinsic part of human existence.
Yet in our mass-marketed, consumer driven culture, individual creativity seems to have suffered greatly. Cultural gateways such as large publishers and mololithic music and entertainment companies arbitrate and edit our views, selecting what we see based more on economic potential than cultural value. Thousands of people are creating works that may be of value, but we rarely discover them. Individuals who might otherwise be creating their own works are watching television with their minds only partially engaged, or worse, expressing their creativity by assembling the latest and greatest over-branded, over-promoted consumer goods into a "personal statement" of cookie-cutter uniformity.
The Internet is an immensely positive disruptive force that provides hope of to reversing this destructive trend. Once musicians discover that they can both find an audience and earn a substantial living by dealing directly with fans, record companies will cease to add value. They will lose control and become "disintermediated" in short order. New intermediaries who provide value that is relevant to the Internet age will thrive (officialcommunity.net is a good example).
Large entertainment companies will be restricted to projects that require large capital investments, but even then the prevalence of easy copying will limit their potential returns, which will be reflected in smaller production budgets. The days of the quarter-billion dollar blockbuster are numbered.
Sites like lulu.com will revolutionize publishing. Blogging and photo upload sites give a stage to hundreds of thousands of people with something to say, or with images to share; They provide a platform for creativity.
Idealists refer to this as the "democratization" of culture, but they couldn’t be more wrong. Any widely distributed, truly democratic process is subject to displacement by larger commercial interests with profit as a motive. Ironically what’s required are large, strong, profit-oriented corporations who embrace "quasi-democratic access" as a paradigm, and who find a way to profit without interfering with the mechanics of that paradigm. This is why Google, Yahoo, eBay, and even Amazon have become culturally important institutions. These companies will serve as the seed for a new cultural renaissance.
Making the transition from thinking “hey, I can do a blog” to actually doing it is a bigger jump than one might expect. It’s much like maintaining a paper journal at a level that wouldn’t bore all but the most self-obsessed, except the potential audience isn’t a fiction anymore. Who wants to read a bunch of poorly written posts about nothing? For that matter, who wants to read well written posts about nothing?
So now the requirement to write posts that actually say something is a little daunting. The hundreds of allegedly interesting things I wanted to say have evaporated.
Apologies and rationalizations aside, there’s some content to this post. First off, I find it interesting that the “Blogger Profile” section lists a number of instant messaging networks, but Google Talk isn’t one of them. Considering blogger.com is a Google property, this is quite the oversight. Also there’s this assumption that people use just one IM network. With several cross-network products like Gaim available, and with Gaim’s lead developer now a Google employee, this is also surprising. These are good indicators that Google has grown beyond its capacity to effectively integrate all of its initiatives. It’s also a good sign that Google isn’t (or soon won’t be) a “cool” place to work anymore; organizations that have grown too fast tend to compensate by putting systems in place with the intent of ensuring that everything works as a great monolithic whole. Of course those are the very systems that stifle innovation and creativity. The best way to get a nice uniform public face is to change as little as possible. If I had shares in Google, I’d be selling them off sometime in the next year or so.
This reminds me of a much smaller company that I once did some contract work for. The company rode a wave of innovation in small telephone systems (PBXs in telecom parlance) and grew from zero to annual revenues over $100M in a few short years. But as they moved into larger systems, they stumbled pretty badly. Partially this was simply because larger projects need a different management approach, and the corporate culture was deeply opposed to that.
A large portion of the staff had been recruited from a much larger organization, tempted by the opportunity to work for a more flexible, more innovative company. Implementing the controls and checks that a large project required was just not in their conceptual plan, and they paid a great price for that. I came very close to convincing them to hire me in a role that I think every rapidly growing company should have: Executive Vice President of Everything Else (although these days it would have to be “Chief Everything Else Officer” — gag). The idea was that someone with a fair bit of authority should be mandated to go stick their nose into everything that was going on in the organization, looking for redundancies, opportunities, and innovations that might otherwise be overlooked. In the case of the telecom company, I had talked to two independent groups that each had teams of about five engineers working on two board-level components that were about 90% identical. Despite the fact that the boards were going into a standardized chassis, and that it was early in the development cycle, neither manager was willing to knock several person-years off their project by sharing the work. What they really needed was someone to come in, gather requirements, develop a specification that met the needs of both groups, and then have them coordinate development. And it needed to be driven by someone with sufficient authority that it would have taken an appeal to the company’s President to overrule them. Of course the flip side to that is the person in the VPEE role had better be pretty good at making the right decisions.
I think this is something Google needs. Rather than building systems to track all the loose ends at the cost of organizational inflexibility, charge a few really bright people with finding the points where things can work better, and then give them the power to make it happen.
Another interesting blogger quirk is that if you want to provide a profile picture, you need to provide an external URL, yet you can add images to posts. There’s a simple solution to this little contradiction:
Perhaps it’s somehow appropriate, considering the title of this journal, to start with a “release version” that isn’t. The latest hypewave running through technology circles is “Web 2.0”. It’s caught on to the point where it’s a venture capitalist buzzword and every hip business plan claims to be an integral part of it, whatever it is. (more…)
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