Warning message on a South African wine box.
Thanks to Andrew Ingram for spotting it.
In praise of coffee
Nice graphic essay by Christoph Niemann.
I like coffee so much that I have tea for breakfast: The first cup of the day in particular is so good that I’m afraid I won’t be able to properly appreciate it when I am half-asleep. Therefore, I celebrate it two hours later when I am fully conscious.
Thanks to Michael Dales for the link.
I love Niemann’s New Yorker covers.
The future of news (and of lots more besides)
Three interesting pieces have appeared recently, each of which sheds light on the seismic changes underway in our media environment.
First of all, Emily Bell had a perceptive column on the TMA (“too much stuff”) syndrome, and the $64 billion question:
How does an industry that has force-fed all manner of output to an audience that can’t digest it draw back? The economic downturn will make this confrontation easier to resolve. The way out is for a narrowing at one end of the distribution pipe – the creation end. Production companies in the UK are now bigger and more powerful than broadcasters, not least because of the over-commissioning spree.
There is as much good television now as there has been for a long time – Iran and the West, The Devil’s Whore, Mad Men, Red Riding – yet it barely has space to breathe. We are moving, probably for all manner of creative content, toward the “iPlayer model”. The number of shop windows and the level of output will drop dramatically with closure and consolidation, but the opportunity to consume will exponentially expand through technology.
Rationally this is something every media business knows, but moving towards it is incredibly painful and often extremely expensive. Not to mention slow. The light at the end of the tunnel is the possibility that, when all of the current attrition is over, there will still be enough revenue from advertising to support the very best of the content. Shrinkage is the new black, even the stylish Lygo can see that. The war against too much stuff has officially begun. The challenge is to make sure we are left, when the gloom lifts, with the right stuff.
Then there was Clay Shirky’s essay (about which I’ve already blogged) in which he highlighted the blind-spot that disables most media discussion about the future of news, namely the failure to distinguish between form and function. What matters is news and journalism, not the survival of one particular form (the newspaper) which — for historical and technological reasons — happened to become the dominant way of fulfilling that function until recently. Journalists are obsessed with the importance of preserving the newspaper, rather than the thing that newspapers existed to produce. This, it seems to me, is a pretty widespread misconception, and it applies to many fields other thn journalism. Libraries, for example. Travel agents. And maybe universities.
Finally, there was Steven Johnson’s speech to the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin. This is another example of trying to take the long view of what’s happening, rather than constantly engaging in panic-stricken extrapolation from short-term trends. One thing I especially liked is that he shares my view that ecological metaphors are the best tools for discussing what’s happening.
The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem. I happen to think that this is a useful way of thinking about what’s happening to us now: today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years. So instead of starting with the future, I propose that we look to the past.
To use that ecosystem metaphor: the state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.
I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself. Because there are really two worst case scenarios that we’re concerned about right now, and it’s important to distinguish between them. There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses. And then there’s panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them, that we’re going to suffer as culture because newspapers will no long be able to afford to generate the information we’ve relied on for so many years.
When you hear people sound alarms about the future of news, they often gravitate to two key endangered species: war reporters and investigative journalists. Will the bloggers get out of their pajamas and head up the Baghdad bureau? Will they do the kind of relentless shoe-leather detective work that made Woodward and Bernstein household names? These are genuinely important questions, and I think we have good reason to be optimistic about their answers. But you can’t see the reasons for that optimism by looking at the current state of investigative journalism in the blogosphere, because the new ecosystem of investigative journalism is in its infancy. There are dozens of interesting projects being spearheaded by very smart people, some of them nonprofits, some for-profit. But they are seedlings.
So here are some principles for thinking intelligently about our emerging media environment:
Er, that’s it
LATER: Andrew Keen isn’t entirely impressed by the Shirky essay.
But for all the invigorating qualities of Shirky’s prose and ideas, I found the piece to be just a tad depressing. The weakness of his skeptical argument is also its great strength. Since we don’t know the ending to the news business saga, we can’t know for sure if this will have a happy ending. Shirky acknowledges that “many of these models will fail” and that “over time” some of these experiments might “give us the reporting we need”. I’ve bolded and itallicized that “might” because I suspect that Shirky isn’t himself completely convinced that a real solution will emerge. And that’s a depressing thought because a society without journalism isn’t a good society.
And the question that I’d throw back at the laissez-faire Shirky is this: how absolutely should we stand back and trust the free market to come up with a solution to the crisis of the news business? We certainly aren’t trusting this unfettered market to solve Wall Street’s financial crisis. Nor are most Americans happy with a free market in healthcare that has left millions of people without insurance. So if we can agree that the news business, like healthcare and the financial sector, is too important to fail, then shouldn’t the government be taking a more active gardening/watering role in ensuring that at least one or two of today’s digital flowers fully bloom in the future?
A Continent Adrift
Paul Krugman is worried about Ol’ Europe.
Europe has fallen short in terms of both fiscal and monetary policy: it’s facing at least as severe a slump as the United States, yet it’s doing far less to combat the downturn.
On the fiscal side, the comparison with the United States is striking. Many economists, myself included, have argued that the Obama administration’s stimulus plan is too small, given the depth of the crisis. But America’s actions dwarf anything the Europeans are doing.
The difference in monetary policy is equally striking. The European Central Bank has been far less proactive than the Federal Reserve; it has been slow to cut interest rates (it actually raised rates last July), and it has shied away from any strong measures to unfreeze credit markets.
The only thing working in Europe’s favor is the very thing for which it takes the most criticism — the size and generosity of its welfare states, which are cushioning the impact of the economic slump.
[…]
But such “automatic stabilizers” are no substitute for positive action.
Why is Europe falling short? Poor leadership is part of the story. European banking officials, who completely missed the depth of the crisis, still seem weirdly complacent. And to hear anything in America comparable to the know-nothing diatribes of Germany’s finance minister you have to listen to, well, Republicans.
But there’s a deeper problem: Europe’s economic and monetary integration has run too far ahead of its political institutions. The economies of Europe’s many nations are almost as tightly linked as the economies of America’s many states — and most of Europe shares a common currency. But unlike America, Europe doesn’t have the kind of continentwide institutions needed to deal with a continentwide crisis.
This is a major reason for the lack of fiscal action: there’s no government in a position to take responsibility for the European economy as a whole. What Europe has, instead, are national governments, each of which is reluctant to run up large debts to finance a stimulus that will convey many if not most of its benefits to voters in other countries.
Amazon waves DMCA to lock down Kindle
Another example of abuse of the DMCA. From The Register.
Amazon has invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent distribution of software for extracting the personal identifier from a Kindle, used by those wanting to shop at the Amazon-owned Mobipocket store.
The software concerned is called kindlepid.py. A simple Python script that extracts the Personal Identification (PID) from a Kindle, this file was linked to by MobileRead, who received the DMCA notice from Amazon demanding their remove both the tool and instructions on its use.
Users of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader are supposed to only shop at the Kindle store and have their books delivered over the whispernet direct to their device. But extracting the PID from a Kindle enables the more adventurous e-book buyer to purchase titles from Mobipocket and other sellers, prompting Amazon’s reaction – though it’s hard to see how extracting a number that enables perfectly legal shopping should fall foul of the DMCA.
But MobileRead don’t want to take any chances, so it has removed the content – though mirrors are already popping up (http://www.di2.nu/200903/13a.htm) around the place.
Books bought at Mobipocket actually come from Amazon, but the Mobipocket software synchronises across devices – so a book bought once can be read on a mobile phone, an e-book device, and a laptop computer – whichever is nearest or gives the greatest impression that one is working.
So Amazon still makes money, and the extraction of the PID does not disrupt the DRM system, nor threaten to do so, so it’s not clear why Amazon has taken such a step. Most likely, it’s to do with keeping the Kindle ecosystem closed so Amazon can control, and monitor, closely. They want to know how many books users are buying and which ones. Keeping the system closed gives them greater control. We’ve asked the company and will let you know when they get back to us.
The future of Twitter
One thing is certain. In the next 2 years Twitter is going to fill up with so much information, spam and noise that it will become unusable. Just like much of USENET. The solution will be to enable better filtering of Twitter, and this will require metadata about each tweet.
Discuss.
Link.
A.I.G. Planning Huge Bonuses After $170 Billion Bailout
From this morning’s NYTimes.
The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.
Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated, a senior administration official said. But the bonuses will go forward because lawyers said the firm was contractually obligated to pay them.
So, let me get this straight: the contract which must be honoured is such that it rewards employees for running the firm into the ground? At this point you really begin to wonder if the people who created this system ought to be sectioned under the Mental health Acts.
Madoff’s ‘victims’: what were they thinking?
Answer: they weren’t. Joe Nocera has a fascinating piece in the New York Times about the Madoff hearing — and the reactions of the people who entrusted their fortunes to his Ponzi scheme.
Judge Denny Chin had made clear that he was not going to allow the Madoff guilty plea to turn into a Wailing Wall for the victims, so most of them stayed away. Though Judge Chin allowed them to speak, he insisted they stick to the issue before the court: whether he should accept Mr. Madoff’s guilty plea. One woman argued that the judge should not and force a trial instead, for the “opportunity to find out where the money is.” But of course there is no money — certainly nothing close to the supposed $60 billion plus he was “investing.” That is the whole point of a Ponzi scheme: the fraudster uses money coming in from new investors to pay old investors, pretending that that is their gain.
Afterward, the TV cameras surrounded a woman named Sharon Lissauer. She had not been wealthy, she said, but she’s lost everything. She didn’t know what she was going to do. She was weeping. It was hard not to feel sad for her — indeed, for all the victims of Mr. Madoff’s evil-doing. But one also has to wonder: what were they thinking?
At a panel a month ago, put together by Portfolio magazine, Mr. Wiesel expressed, better than I’ve ever heard it, why people gave Mr. Madoff their money. “I remember that it was a myth that he created around him,” Mr. Wiesel said, “that everything was so special, so unique, that it had to be secret. It was like a mystical mythology that nobody could understand.” Mr. Wiesel added: “He gave the impression that maybe 100 people belonged to the club. Now we know thousands of them were cheated by him.”
Nocera’s central question — what were these people thinking when they put all their eggs in the Madoff basket? — is just the latest reminder of the extent to which we are not rational creatures. I’ve never owned shares personally, but even I know that one should spread one’s risk. As Nocera puts it, “Diversification has many virtues; one of them is that you won’t lose everything if one of your money managers turns out to be a crook.” Many of Madoff’s eager victims had plenty of money, but most seem to have sought no professional advice before handing over the dosh. This kind of behaviour was, said one fund manager who interviewed Madoff years ago and concluded he was fishy, “like trying to do your own dentistry. It is a real lesson that people cannot abdicate personal responsibility when it comes to their personal finances.” Nocera goes on to say:
And that’s the point. People did abdicate responsibility — and now, rather than face that fact, many of them are blaming the government for not, in effect, saving them from themselves. Indeed, what you discover when you talk to victims is that they harbor an anger toward the S.E.C. that is as deep or deeper than the anger they feel toward Mr. Madoff. There is a powerful sense that because the agency was asleep at the switch, they have been doubly victimized. And they want the government to do something about it.
Never waste a good crisis
Simon Caulkin has an interesting column reflecting on an academic conference he’s been to in which people tried to extract the lessons of the financial crisis. One conclusion: the worship of “shareholder value” was one driver of the catastrophe.
Other workshop participants were quick to extend the diagnosis from the banks to publicly quoted companies in general. If – as it is now becoming permissible to suggest – shareholder value is indeed the problem, then, as Einstein said, “the significant problems that we face cannot be solved at the level of thinking we were at when we created them”. A wholesale recasting of today’s unfit-for-purpose corporate governance becomes another urgently necessary response. In short, we are a very long way from business as usual.
Of course some people argue that the situation is now so bad that preventing a future crisis takes a distant, second place to getting things moving again. One inhabitant of the real economy feared that the squeeze would suck so much life out of companies like his that we wouldn’t even care about the possibility of another bubble.
Assuming it doesn’t go that far, the dilemma is poignant. The softer the landing, the more the government will be tempted to shore up the crumbling orthodoxy, making another crisis certain. The worse the depression, the better the chances that Whitehall can be pressurised into a fundamental rethink. Neither prospect is a cheerful one. But as the Obama team keeps repeating: “Never waste a good crisis.”
Rash predictions and cloud computing
This morning’s Observer column.
So what about [Tom] Watson’s prediction of the world market for [five] computers? Once again, there’s no convincing evidence he ever said it. According to Wikipedia, the earliest known citation is in the email signature of a Usenet member in 1986, which simply says “remark attributed to Thomas J Watson (chairman of the board of International Business Machines), 1943” – not exactly an impeccable source.
Nevertheless, Watson was on many people’s minds this week, after a talk given in San Francisco by Rick Rashid, the computer scientist who now heads Microsoft’s formidable research division. According to the Financial Times reporter who broke the story, Rashid said that “around 20 per cent of all the servers sold around the world each year are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies – he named Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon”.
If true, that’s an amazing statistic, and one that suggests we are well on the way to the kind of world supposedly envisaged by Watson.