Category Archives: Observer

Sic transit gloria mundi

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This morning’s Observer column.

Some years ago, when the Google Books project, which aims to digitise all of the world’s printed books, was getting under way, the two co-founders of Google were having a meeting with the librarian of one of the universities that had signed up for the plan. At one point in the conversation, the Google boys noticed that their collaborator had suddenly gone rather quiet. One of them asked him what was the matter. “Well”, he replied, “I’m wondering what happens to all this stuff when Google no longer exists.” Recounting the conversation to me later, he said: “I’ve never seen two young people looking so stunned: the idea that Google might not exist one day had never crossed their minds.”

And yet, of course, the librarian was right. He had to think about the next 400 years. But the number of commercial companies that are more than a century old is vanishingly small. Entrusting the world’s literary heritage to such transient organisations might not be entirely wise.

Compared with my librarian friend, we have the attention span of newts. We are constantly overawed by the size, wealth and dominance of whatever happens to be the current corporate giant.

To which, of course, the best riposte is probably Keynes’s: In the long run, we’re all dead.

The vision behind Google Glass

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This morning’s Observer column.

What endears the Google Glass project to me is that it’s the latest instalment in a long and honourable tradition in computer science. It goes all the way back to one of the great luminaries of the business, Douglas Engelbart, the man who invented the computer mouse and was a pioneer in networked computing and the design of graphical user interfaces. (In December 1968, in San Francisco, he gave a live demonstration of what networked computing could do that had a profound influence on the people who built the internet and much of the technology we use today.)

What motivated Engelbart from the outset was a passionate belief that computers had the power to augment, rather than replace, human capabilities. Machines, he believed, should do what machines do best, thereby freeing up humans to do what they do best. And this idea of “augmentation” has inspired a good deal of research in the decades since Engelbart embarked on his mission to change the world.

Digital capitalism 101

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This morning’s Observer column.

Need a crash course in digital capitalism? Easy: you just need to understand four concepts – margins, volume, inequality and employment. And if you need more detail, just add the following adjectives: thin, vast, huge and poor.First, margins. Once upon a time, there was a great company called Kodak…

LATER: It occurred to me that “Digital Capitalism” would make an interesting university course. One of the textbooks I would use is Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System by Dan Schiller, plus his How to Think About Information.

This recent seminar presentation gives a flavour of Dan in action:

Another essential text would be Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian. It’s now relatively old, and yet still seems highly relevant.

From the site to the stream

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This morning’s Observer column.

The communications theorist Marshall McLuhan observed that “we look at the present through a rear-view mirror”. And that “we march backwards into the future”. Amen. Remember the horseless carriage? Not to mention the fact that we still measure the oomph of a Porsche 911 in, er, brake horsepower.

But the car industry is a ferment of modernism compared with the computer business. When the bitmapped screen and the Wimp (windows, icons, menus, pointer) interface first surfaced in the early 1970s at Xerox Parc, its geeks searched for a metaphor that would make this new way of relating to computers intelligible to human beings. So they came up with the “desktop” on which were displayed little images (icons) of documents and document folders, just like you’d find on an actual desktop. Well, on the desktop of an efficient bureaucrat anyway…

I inadvertently added 100 years to John Locke’s life in the last line of the piece. The essay dates from 1696, not 1796. I should have spotted that: Locked died in 1704. What a difference a key makes.

LATER: Some commenters on the piece asserted that it was Apple who put the trash can on the desktop. Not true: Here’s the desktop of the Xerox 8010 with the trash clearly visible on the bottom.

Gove’s decision

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This morning’s Observer column.

Michael Gove is possibly the most unpopular minister in the government, but on Wednesday he made a courageous and enlightened decision. On that day, the Department for Education announced that computer science will be included in the science options for the Ebacc (English baccalaureate), which is one of Mr Gove’s keystone reforms of the school curriculum. Given the amount of hostility there is to these reforms, this development attracted little attention, but in the long run it could turn out to be a really big deal.

Why? Because it signals a determination to undo an educational disaster that’s been running for decades in British schools – the ICT (information and communications technology) curriculum. This was based on the idea that most of what the young needed to be taught about computing was how to use software. In practice, this turned out to be learning how to use Microsoft Office. For both the schoolchildren who had to endure this, and the teachers who had to instruct them, this was a demoralising and dysfunctional experience. Kids would come home from school complaining (as my children did): “Dad, you’ll never guess what we had to do today – PowerPoint!” The result was that ICT became the educational world’s equivalent of a toxic brand.

Sic transit gloria mundi

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This morning’s Observer column.

Nothing lasts forever: if history has any lesson for us, it is this. It’s a thought that comes from rereading Paul Kennedy’s magisterial tome, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, in which he shows that none of the great nation-states or empires of history – Rome; imperial Spain in 1600; France in either its Bourbon or Bonapartist manifestations; the Dutch republic in 1700; Britain in its imperial glory – succeeded in maintaining its global ascendancy for long.

What has this got to do with technology? Well, it provides us with a useful way of thinking about two of the tech world’s great powers.

Aaron Swartz: cannon fodder in the war on internet freedom

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This morning’s Observer column.

Even those of us who shared his belief in open access thought this an unwise stunt. But what was truly astonishing – and troubling – was the vindictiveness of the prosecution, which went for Swartz as if he were a major cyber-criminal who was stealing valuable stuff for personal gain. “The outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron,” wrote Lawrence Lessig, the distinguished lawyer who was also one of Swartz’s mentors. “It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behaviour. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterise what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The ‘property’ Aaron had ‘stolen’, we were told, was worth ‘millions of dollars’ – with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of academic articles is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.”

The phrase that came to mind when I first saw the indictment against Swartz was Alexander Pope’s famous rhetorical question: “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” It would be possible to write off the Swartz prosecution (as some have done) as the action of a politically ambitious attorney general, but actually it fits a much more sinister pattern. It was clear that a decision had been made to make an example of this cheeky young hacker and in that sense this grotesque prosecution sits neatly alongside the treatment of Corporal Bradley Manning, not to mention the hysterical reaction of the US authorities to WikiLeaks…

The baroque Net

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This morning’s Observer column.

“Dumb network, smart applications” was the mantra that they [the designers of the Internet] used to express the philosophy that all of the ingenuity should be left to those people developing applications at the edges of the network.

These turned out to be very good ideas. They enabled the “organic” growth of the network to happen. And they triggered an explosion of creativity as smart people thought up clever applications that the network could be used for. Some of these applications (for example the web) were beneficial; some (viruses, worms, and malware generally) were destructive. And many (file-sharing) were somewhere in between. The consequence was that, over time, a network that was originally seamless and uncluttered came to be overlaid with a grotesque accumulation of add-ons and patches, to the point where it begins to resemble a baroque excrescence rather than a classical design.

This is beginning to concern some people whose job it is to worry about these things…

The tyranny of Power Laws

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This morning’s Observer column.

Everywhere you look on the internet, you find power laws – yes, even in the Guardian’s online comment forums, where 20% of comments are provided by 0.0037 per cent of the paper’s monthly online audience. And, while there are millions of blogs out there, a relatively small number of them attract most of the readership. Various sinister explanations have been canvassed for this, but really it’s just an illustration of the power of power law distributions. As Clay Shirky once put it: “In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution”.

This is where the mathematical and political interpretations of “power” fuse into one…