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I’ve been meaning to point to ITConversations for a while, because they feature some fascinating talks by people like, Malcolm Gladwell, Douglas Rushkoff, Grant McCracken and many others. What prompted me to actually do it was listening to a two part talk by Steve Wozniak today. A fascinating bit of history, which probably bears listening to several times to pick-up some of the important lessons it contains. You can download Part One here and Part Two Here.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
Flicking through Google looking for things on cybernetics, I found this nice quote from John Muir on Alan B. Scrivener‘s “A Curriculum for Cybernetics and Systems Theory”, which has a lot of other good stuff on it.
The Muir quote is from Chapter 6 of his ” My First Summer in the Sierra published 1911 accessible on-line from the Sierra Club. The paragraph below puts the quote in context. (For those like myself of a non-theistic disposition substitute something like ‘the wonder of existence’ for his references to ‘the Divine” and ‘God’ and we have a great example of network thinking.)
“The snow on the high mountains is melting fast, and the streams are singing bankfull, swaying softly through the level meadows and bogs, quivering with sun-spangles, swirling in pot-holes, resting in deep pools, leaping, shouting in wild, exulting energy over rough boulder dams, joyful, beautiful in all their forms. No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons. This quick, inevitable interest attaching to everything seems marvelous until the hand of God becomes visible; then it seems reasonable that what interests Him may well interest us. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow-mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains–beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.”

Another corker from Simon Caulkin:
‘… Why is so much that managers do a waste of time, if not worse? And why do they still persist in trying to make it work? To Answer the second question first: because we’re locked in. Precisely because we all know things don’t work, a whole ecology of improvers – consultants, IT vendors, outsourcers and peddlers of tools of all descriptions – has grown up with a promise to make it better. Everyone has a vested interest in the setup, even business schools producing the research that discredits it.
The reason that none of these things work, and never will, is that they are being put to the service of a clapped-out model. The paradox of today’s capitalism is that we’re still trying to manage it by central planning. Managers at any corporate headquarters or ministry in Whitehall would have been quite at home in the Soviet ministry of planning. They estimate what the market will be, allocate resources and schedule production to match the estimate.”

Nearly a year ago I wrote a short piece in which I said:
“Now I don’t know if this is just me, but the problem I see with the blog as a form is that the focus is always on the latest entries. There is little to encourage you to explore the site as a whole. I know if I arrive at a blog and there hasn’t been a new entry for a while, I tend to move on somewhere else. Of course, with some blogs this makes sense, their focus is very much on the current, on what’s happening now. But with others, this makes less sense. Something they talked about three months ago, or a year ago, or even longer may be equally as interesting as something they are talking about today. So I guess the question I end with is how could a blog look more like a web than a diary?”
I still don’t have an answer to my question, but David Auerbach (is this him?) has some interesting entries exploring blogs as a genre, here and here and here .

One of my greatest pleasures is when I come across someone, who is saying something I have been banging on about for years, but doing so with greater clarity and elegance than I have ever been able to manage.
My most recent experience of this is in an interview in Edge, where Dan Sperber,a French anthropologist, makes this point about human communication:
“Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would somehow imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox machine copying contents from one mind to another. This is where I part company not just from your standard semiologists or social scientists who take communication to be a coding-decoding system, a transmission system, biased only by social interests, by power, by intentional or unconscious distortions, but that otherwise could deliver a kind of smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part company from Richard Dawkins who sees cultural transmission as based on a process of replication, and who assume that imitation and communication provide a robust replication system.”

and a little later
“From the point of view of the audience, a speaker is providing rich pieces of evidence, which we interpret in a context of shared background knowledge, drawing on the common cultural, on the local situation, on the ongoing conversation, and so on. You construct a complex representation helped by all these different factors. You to end up with something which will have been strongly guided, sometimes guided in an exquisitely detailed manner, by the communication, by the words used by the speaker, but which end up being a thought of your own, relevant to you, a recognition, to begin with, of what the speaker meant, from which you extract what is relevant to you.”

Read the whole interview. My sense is that the implications of this view of human communication are immense and worth pondering on for a while.

There is a great, long, rambling interview with Wil Shipley, founder of Delicious Monster on DrunkenBlog. Subjects covered range from running a small company to dealing with depression and writing applications to extreme gardening. Spattered with good quotes and insights, I think my favourite is this one:
“If there’s one thing I’ve discovered, it’s that there is no stable state in life. There is no getting somewhere and going, “Ah, *NOW* I’m going to park myself down and just rake in the fat loot.” Change is scary, but it’s also the foundation of life and happiness. We need it. We get bored and lazy without it…”

Like many people who live and work in London I spent chunks of yesterday playing “what if?”.
It began quite early as the news of the bombs began to come through. My first concern was “what if” my partner Mimi, who travels by Tube, had got caught up in the mess. Her direct line wasn’t answered. I couldn’t get through on her mobile. The main switchboard at her workplace was constantly busy. There was no reply to my email.
After a while I heard the front door open and she was back home, having been unable to get on the Tube.
The “what if” then changed to what if she hadn’t had a task to do locally and had caught a train at the normal time.
Then another “what if”. Her company used to have its offices in Tavistock Square, where the explosion in the bus had taken place and had only moved six months before. She used to take the bus there every day and might well have been on it at the time of the explosion had they still been there.
Our “what ifs” then changed to concerns about colleagues and friends, who we knew traveled along what we thought were the effected routes.
So far we have been lucky and so far as we know nobody we know was directly effected by the bombs, though many found their normal working lives disrupted and one friend living close to the site of the bus explosion was unable to get back to his flat last night.
No doubt the “what ifs” will linger in our minds over the coming weeks and months. We will look more suspiciously at the packages and litter on the buses and the Tube. We may look at our fellow travelers and wonder whether one of them is a nutter, who has turned him or herself into a bomb, in the belief that by doing so they are winning the approval of their invisible friend.
But mostly, we will go on going on.
Yes, of course, we will be more frightened than we were before. Our fears are understandable, for we seem to be programmed to take more notice of the exceptional and the rare, than the more likely risks of everyday life. But, despite this natural reaction, it becomes particularly important not to let our fear overcome our reason.
In a post last year, I quote John Mueller of the Cato Institute, who pointed out that “Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.”
Despite more exposure to acts of terror here, the odds of any one of us or any one we know being killed our maimed in an act of this kind must be pretty similar.
Yes, of course, we should all feel sympathy and concern for the families and friends of those who died as a result of this crime and for all those who were hurt or traumatised as well. And, yes of course, every effort should be put into tracking down the criminals involved in this horrible crime, so that they can be put on trial and put away where they can do harm. And, yes of course, we should take sensible precautions to try to prevent similar events occurring again. And that should be it.
But, and here we come to a more long standing “what if”, what if the fears created by this exceptional event create a political environment where still more erosions of our civil liberties take place in the name of security. As I wrote some time ago:
“…as we have seen over and over again there is a kind of symbiosis between the people who plant bombs and the people in authority whose instincts are essential anti-democratic. The number of voices arguing that the rights won by our ancestors at a cost to their liberties and lives must be sacrificed to guard against the possibility of exceptional events occurring is rising. Moves in that direction are dangerous and, as history has shown us, ineffective. And those seductive voices that promise security should make us afraid – our freedoms are more fragile and more easily eroded than we sometimes imagine.”
Politicians often talk of terrorists “threatening all we hold dear”. Terrorists can’t unless we let them. What does offer a threat is the anti-democratic responses their actions can prompt.
So let us hope that this time the politicians will follow the action, that most Londoners seem to have adopted, which is to accept that something horrible has happened, to hope that those responsible get caught, and then to go on going on.

By one of those not so strange coincidences following my last entry, “Half a Brain”, I came across this article by Dan Gillmor in the FT where he says:
“I am a dinosaur. Scott McNealy told me so.
Really: I�m one of those people who still thinks it�s a good idea to carry my data around with me. Well, not all of it, but most of what I need for my work, and quite a lot of my leisure data as well, namely music in my MP3 collection.
Mr McNealy, the co-founder and longtime chief executive at Sun Microsystems, thinks my notions are quaint. My data should be as available, wherever I happen to be at the moment, as electricity.
He told me this in a recent conversation at Sun�s Silicon Valley headquarters. In a small conference room, one of the tech industry�s longest-surviving (corporately, that is) chief executives pulled out a �smart card,� plugged it into a stripped-down Sun workstation, typed in a password and there was his desktop. That�s how it will work in the future, he said.”
Roll on the future say I.

Thanks to a bug in Mac OS X I have effectively been computer-less for the past few days – unless “starting login window” and stopping there counts as being connected. Although I have access to other computers, the loss of “mine” has left me feeling as if I am operating with half a brain – an interesting example of McLuhan’s “extensions of man”.
All of which reminds me of an article I wrote many years ago where I was arguing the case for VIPs (Virtual Internet Presence). The idea was that instead of my computer existing on a device in my possession, my computing environment would exist on a server somewhere, that I could access from any connect device anywhere.
At the time most people felt uncomfortable with the idea. They wanted their data in their possession. Now many of us have “always on” connectivity, where the division between “my computer” and the net have become blurred, I wonder whether the idea now has legs. The technology to do it has been around for years – that was what prompted my article. Now so many of us find so much of our lives and brains are embedded in our computers and our computers are so vulnerable to failure or loss, my sense is that a secure personal computing environment “out there” may be becoming increasingly attractive.

A nice quote from Richard Farson, continues my situation design theme:
“Design achieves its power because it can create situations and situations are more determining of what people will actually do than personality, character, habit, genetics, unconscious motives or any other aspect of our individual makeup. Nobody smokes in church, no matter how addicted.”