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I am always slightly amazed at the way that relevant stuff just seems to pop up when you are working on a project. I say “slightly amazed” because by now I shouldn’t be surprised. But despite what I know intellectually it still seems like magic. Of course, the magic lies in what you notice and that depends upon what you are paying attention to at the time.
I was reminded of this the other day when I came across a conversation with Neil Gershenfeld in Edge, which was stuffed full of interesting ideas. What leapt out me was some something he said about just-in-time education:
“…You can view a lot of MIT’s instruction as offering just-in-case education; you learn lots of stuff in case you eventually need it. What I’m talking about is really just-in-time education. You let people solve the problems they want to solve, and you provide supporting material they can draw on as they progress.”
Now the concept of just-in-time education was just what I need for a little project I was hurrying through with little time for the research and the thought that seemed to be needed. Now the point I am making here is that is that I wasn’t looking for this concept. I didn’t arrive at it through careful research. In fact, I found it when I was distracting myself from what I felt I “ought” to be doing by cruising round the web. Perhaps this is yet another example of the importance of allowing yourself enough time to “drift”.

Some years ago I went to a lecturer by Jacob Nielsen where I began to get very excited when he talked about the distribution of visits to web sites following Zipf’s Law. Putting it very crudely Zipf’s Law states that with things like words in a language or the popularity of web sites there will a small number that are used a lot, a mid-range that will be used a bit and a very large number that will used hardly at all. If you represent this as a diagram you have a very steep gradient on the left, gently tapering off as you move to the right. (There is a very nice example of this here) What excited me about Nielsen’s talk was his suggestion that it was in the more gentle part of the curve that the richest new commercial possibilities lay.
I was reminded of my original excitement when I read Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” in Wired. There is a lot of fascinating stuff here, including the diagram I’ve already mentioned that explains all the key stuff in one picture, but this extract may explain why I am bouncing up and down on my chair, mumbling, “the internet really does make a difference”.
“Chart Rhapsody’s monthly statistics and you get a “power law” demand curve that looks much like any record store’s, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero – either they don’t carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.
The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.”

I haven’t posted anything here since the end of August. I wish could say that it is because I have been on an exotic holiday, without internet access or that I have been so absorbed in an important project that I just haven’t had time. The reality is more mundane. It is not that I haven’t had anything to write about – there is a lot of stuff happening in the world, much of it pretty depressing, but also some rumours of hope. No the truth is that I have been in drift mode – dealing with the most pressing tasks, like cleaning the kitchen or chasing some cash – but doing little else except for thinking and chasing ideas on the web.
Now as regular readers will know I am a great advocate of drift, that’s what Purposive Drift and entries like Echoes of Purposive Drift are about. But drift needs to be tempered with purpose and knowing whether you are on purpose is sometimes difficult to recognise. This is particularly true when you are in a slow drift when it is hard to know whether you are drifting productively or simply lost. I had reached this point, when, after a long and complex trail, I came across this from Stewart Brand, writing shortly after the collapse of the dotcom boom:
“For years, the fashion was to sprint, collapse, and then get up and go for it again. It was the do-more-faster age, so people did more faster. But was it better? There wasn’t enough time for relaxed thinking. In fact, people were often punished if they let their mind drift. Today, however, you can afford to step back and chase idle thoughts. That’s the whole point of downtime: to wander around and pick up anything that arouses your curiosity.
If you don’t have to sprint, why would you? What’s urgent isn’t truly important. The urgent finds you; you have to find the important. So when you’re going as fast as you can, there’s not much room for choice. Between urgencies, however, you can work on the stuff that you really care about because you can afford to slow down. Importance is not fast. It is slow. It is not superficial. It is deep. And as a result, it’s extremely powerful. When important matters go wrong, they undermine everything. When they go right, they sustain everything.”
That old distinction between the urgent and the important reminded me that doing what is important is the purposive bit of purposive drift. The tricky bit is recognising what is important. As that wise, but neglected figure, Geoffrey Vickers once remarked; “Learning what to want is the most radical, the most painful and the most creative act of life.”
What makes recognising what is important tricky is that learning what to want and doing important stuff is not a static process. You change and more importantly the world changes. There are some signals when you are on purpose like a sense of pride in what you are doing and a sense that it is worthwhile. But this is not always the case, particularly in a time of deep transition, which is where we are now.
One of the signs of this transition is that so many people I talk with are either seeking something more worthwhile to do or, more sadly, feel that their context for action has changed so much and placed so many obstacles in the way of doing what is important that they have to get out. I am talking here mainly of people in public services, like teachers or health workers, but the same can be said of people working in the private sector too.
But there are signs of hope in the widespread sense of frustration and dissatisfaction one finds in private conversations. The cult of the manager that has so distorted our lives for the last two decades is slowly imploding as it failures become exposed. The associated notion that the world is nothing but a marketplace is also crumbling as people remember that much of what we value cannot be priced.
The shift from this paradigm to whatever comes next is likely to be slower than many of us would wish. But if you are a questor for something else, and I speak to myself here as much as you, I would suggest that looking for something, however small it may seem, that helps speed this shift is an important thing to be doing. Two clues to what something may be and how to do it may lie in two extracts from previous entries.
The first is from Geoffrey Vickers again; “The meaning of stability is likely to remain obscured in Western cultures until they rediscover the fact that life consists of experiencing relationships, rather than seeking goals or ‘ends’.”
The second is mine, “…the strongest advice I could give to any individual or business is to become sensitive to where you fit in your networks, learn to think in terms of nodes and connections and the complex interactions and feedback between them, and be conscious of the dynamics of your patterns of connection. Whether you are aware of it or not, your success or failure is going to bound up in how well or not you identify, create and navigate your networks.”

Whenever I write about Grant McCracken or recommend his site to my friends I always feel the urge to throw in a caveat. This entry shows why. He is a bit of a mystery, who needs a Grant McCracken to untangle his identity. As I said in my last entry, his writing is usually filled with interesting ideas and original insights. He also occasionally lapses into clich?s drawn straight from the neo-con hymn book. I find it hard to reconcile the two. As I said a mystery worthy of one his insights.

Grant McCracken is on a roll, scattering ideas and insights in his wake. I have linked to him before when I pointed to a piece by him on welcoming difference and another on modern identity. But thinking about some of his more recent entries, highlighted for me what seems to be a problem with the blog as a form. McCracken’s site is rich in ideas and things to think about. 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?

Some weeks ago I wrote a piece where I asked how we could encourage rather than discourage children to ask powerful questions. Stumbling around the web I came across this impassioned piece, “Grazing the Net” by Jamie McKenzie. In it he says:
“Unfortunately, schools have traditionally neglected the development of student questioning. According to Hyman (1980), for every 38 teacher questions in a typical classroom there is but one student question. Schoolhouse research, sadly, has too often fallen into the “go find out about” category. Topical research (Go find out about Dolly Madison) requires little more than information gathering. We must move beyond this traditional search for answers to simple questions. Instead of asking elementary students to find out all they can about a particular state or nation, for example, we should be asking them to compare and contrast several states or cities for a purpose – sifting, sorting and weighing the information to gain insight, to make a decision or to solve a problem.”
In contrast to what he calls the traditional approach he argues that:
“… We must teach students to start with what Sizer calls “essential questions” – the kinds of probing inquiries which might extend over a month or a lifetime – questions worth asking, which touch upon basic human issues – investigations which might make a difference in the quality of life – studies which might cast light in dark corners, illuminating basic truths. And then we must teach them how to conduct a thorough research study. Questioning persists throughout all stages of such a study.”
And concludes:
“What is a “free range student?” It is simply a student fed on the wild grains and fragments available in the magical world made accessible by the Net. Just as some gourmets prefer free range chickens to their plump cousins raised on processed grains and feed heavily impregnated with hormones and chemicals, the theme of this article is the value of raising children to think, explore and make meaning of their worlds for themselves. No more second hand knowledge. No more sage on the stage. Students will learn to make sense out of nonsense and order out of chaos. They will ask essential questions and solve complex problems. They will join electronically with brothers and sisters around the globe to cast a spotlight on earth-threatening issues which deserve attention and action.”

My wild prediction for today is that the idea of a Universal Basic Income will become a hot political issue over the next ten years or so. As Philippe Van Parijs defines it, “By universal basic income I mean an income paid by a government, at a uniform level and at regular intervals, to each adult member of society. The grant is paid, and its level is fixed, irrespective of whether the person is rich or poor, lives alone or with others, is willing to work or not.”
Although I have been interested in the idea of a UBI for some years, I arrived at today’s thought by a somewhat circuitous route. It began with a link in the excellent Crooked Timber to a piece by Jacob Hacker about the rise in the instability of family income in the USA. Hacker writes:
“…. what my evidence shows is deeply troubling. When I started out, I expected to see a rise in the instability of family income. But nothing prepared me for the sheer magnitude of the increase. At its peak in the mid-’90s, income instability was almost five times as great as it was in the early ’70s, and, although it dropped somewhat during the late ’90s (my data end in 1999), it has never fallen below twice its starting level. By comparison, permanent income differences across families have risen by a more modest, if still troubling, 50 percent over the same period.”
While the US may be a particularly extreme example, this sense of economic insecurity seems to be growing throughout the industrial democracies, with curious consequence of people becoming less rather than more engaged with the political process. This linked to the numerous other examples of people’s alienation from party politics, such as this piece recently featured on the BBC news site, leads me to believe that if we are to have functioning democracies something must change. What we have in the UK and USA where a Government only represents a small minority of potential voters looks like a recipe for social discord.
A UBI would give every voter a clear stake in society and a solid reason to participate in the political process. And curiously, although the UBI is very much a fringe concept at present, the fact that it has advocates from across the political spectrum leads me to believe that it is an idea that has got legs.

My good friend Ben Copsey (double REALbasic prize winner 2004) sent me this link to Paul Graham‘s essay on “Great Hackers”. One of the bits that particularly struck me comes quite late in the essay. This is where he talks about the importance of good taste in producing good work. As he says:
“Many people in this country think of taste as something elusive, or even frivolous. It is neither. To drive design, a manager must be the most demanding user of a company’s products. And if you have really good taste, you can, as Steve Jobs does, make satisfying you the kind of problem that good people like to work on.”
This led me on to looking at some of his other essays – all of them interesting – but the one I particularly liked was “Taste for makers”. Personally, I think Graham gets too hung up on the issue of whether taste is subjective or objective, but where I do agree strongly is his concluding argument that the cultivation of good taste is a requirement for doing great work:
“Intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough. You have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing. You have to do your homework. But as you become expert in a field, you’ll start to hear little voices saying, What a hack! There must be a better way. Don’t ignore those voices. Cultivate them. The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.

I guess most of us have an America inside our head. Actually it’s probably it’s more complicated than that. Most of us have several contradictory Americas in our heads struggling for supremacy at any particular moment in time. The America that has often inspired me was summoned up in an entry in Bruce Sterling’s blog a few days ago. Taking a quote from Kurt Andersen, in an essay about Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, Sterling writes:
“It goes like this:
‘But when I look at the body of Michael’s work — and for that matter, at Michael himself — the common threads I see are most of the admirable American virtues. By which I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, the virtues embodied by (for instance) Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain and Charles and Ray Eames: industry, populism, pragmatism, playfulness, honesty, unpretentiousness, a sense of humor, a light touch, an appreciation of pleasure, a basic frugality, a rejection of cant, a cheerful magpie mongrelism, a balance between city-on-a-hill conviction and big-tent laissez-faire tolerance.’
There’s a lot to what Andersen says here. That’s precisely the kind of virtuous America that I want to be American in. What a great place. I wonder what happened to it, and what one has to do to get it back.”
Curiously, I rediscovered someone who seems to have the answer to Sterling’s questions yesterday. Michael Moorcock, a legendary Notting Hill figure in the Sixties, is now living in Austin, Texas – Stirling’s home time. In a very long interview, as an activist taxpayer without a vote, Moorcock does a brilliant dissection of the American psyche – well worth putting aside some time to read.

Back around the time of the Madrid bombings I wrote a short piece where I argued that we had more to fear from the responses to the fear of terrorism than from terrorism itself. I was pleased to see that Steven Johnson has taken up a similar theme. As he says in the conclusion to his piece:
“To be clear: terrorism is a threat to us, and our politicians and law enforcement officials should be focused on ridding the world of those threats as effectively as they can. But those leaders should also be focused on giving us a sense of proportion. By any reasonable statistical measure, ordinary Americans are safe from terrorism. It would be nice, for once, to have our leaders remind us of that.”
Well worth a read.
Harvey Molotch, whose book, “Where Stuff Comes From”, I have been urging all my friends to read has also ventured into this territory. In a long essay written with Noah McClain “Dealing with Urban Terror” (PDF) where they thoughtfully explore some of the things that could be done to deal with this problem they conclude:
“Authorities charged with addressing the September attacks have proclaimed an endless war against the perpetrators, harkening back to the most regressive traditions of dealing with crime and disorder, domestic and foreign. We know from this past history that fear of crime – to take the crucial precedent – leads to major policy consequence, including race and class effects. Fear of terrorist crime in the US now escalates to global consequence, including abuse of human rights and the potential for cycles of turmoil around the world. With some analytic and empirical help it may be possible to transmute an understandable public anxiety into outcomes that increase rather than curtail social enfranchisement, protect civil liberties, and add some safety. We need more knowledge about how cities, including those in the rich centers of the world, work in the context of terror – both for the sake of better policies as well as more informed and effective populations.”