mathoda.com

In a prior post I stated that the American military appears to have deployed relentless see-through-walls flying terminator like unmanned drones.

America’s most powerful tool in shaping the world may be something far different however: Oprah.

As the NY Times reports:

Once a month, Nayla [a young Saudi Arabian homemaker] says, she writes a letter to Oprah Winfrey.  … “I feel that Oprah truly understands me,” said Nayla, who, like many of the women interviewed, would not let her full name be used. “She gives me energy and hope for my life. Sometimes I think that she is the only person in the world who knows how I feel.”

…

When “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was first broadcast in Saudi Arabia in November 2004 on a Dubai-based satellite channel, it became an immediate sensation among young Saudi women. Within months, it had become the highest-rated English-language program among women 25 and younger, an age group that makes up about a third of Saudi Arabia’s population.

…

Ms. Winfrey provides many young Saudi women with new ways of thinking about the way local taboos affect their lives — as well as about a variety of issues including childhood sexual abuse and coping with marital strife — without striking them, or Saudi Arabia’s ruling authorities, as subversive.

…

The largest-circulation Saudi women’s magazine, Sayidaty, devotes a regular page to Ms. Winfrey, and dog-eared copies of her official magazine, O, which is not sold in the kingdom, are passed around by women who collect them during trips abroad.

The entire article is well worth reading.

It seems to me that some ideas succeed not because they are true, but because the audience attracted to the idea will by its composition be inclined to agree. An example is a statement that Plato ascribes to Socrates, that “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Socrates meant that he must be free to examine the wisdom of his actions, without the restrictions Athenian voters wished to place upon him, or he would not find it worth living (thus the drinking of the hemlock). That’s certainly a point of view that may be widely shared, although different people and cultures would disagree as to what level of restriction on thoughts or speech might make life not worth living.

While Socrates’ decision is defensible, subsequent philosophers tend to take Socrates’ statement a bit further. They conclude from his statement that it is the process of examining life that gives life its value. Of course philosophers find value in examining the wisdom of ideas and lives, and feel their study of the matter gives them special insights. A philosopher who was unwilling to examine life is a bit of a contradiction in terms. That Socrates was willing to die rather than give up his right to examine his own life has made philosophers sing his praises ever after.

Personally, I have found great value in examining the wisdom of many acts in my life, yet there are many types of people in this world, and if some do not ponder the wisdom of their actions much at all, must we (or particularly they) conclude their life is less worth living? It seems awfully condescending. The people who don’t examine their lives much probably aren’t examining Socrates statement. If they did, they might object to the interpretation with which it is adopted by philosophers.

A less strongly phrased statement might be, “Until you examine your life, you are ignorant of whether it is worth living,” but is even that statement true? Perhaps life is always worth living because of something innate, because of the experiences even an unexamined life gives, or because of the effects a life can have. We ascribe a value to the life of a pet regardless of how unaware the pet is of itself or the wisdom of its own actions.

Whether a life is worth living is a subjective judgment imposed by an observer, not an objective fact. Given the many attributes that might make us conclude a life is worth living, to rest all of a judgment on whether the life is “examined” seems rather excessive. That may be what gives Socrates’ statement its power, but it may also be what robs it of some important truth.

In the spirit of Socrates, here’s a bit of parting wisdom (but even without it I bet your life is worth living): Never trust an audience who are made more self important by their admiration.

Many ideas about how the Internet will effect the world are right only in certain situations, yet they are held to be true about all situations and stated in a manner that leads to overly broad interpretations.

Let’s examine some commonly held ideas about the Internet more closely:

The Idea of Disintermediation:  “The Internet allows people to contact each other directly without a middleman, and in so doing eliminates the economic value of the middle man.”

When people interact they do so in an environment that has been paid for by someone and potentially benefits someone.  If you meet someone at a club, it is paid for by the club owners, and potentially benefits the club owners.  If the environment is a sidewalk or other public location, it is paid for by taxes, and may benefit retail stores or billboard companies nearby that location.  If people interact over a phone it is paid for by one or more of the participants and benefits the telecommunications companies that provide the service.

Changes in technology can cause the manner and types of human interaction to change significantly.  People now interact on Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Youtube, Ebay, Skype, Flickr, blogs, and countless other places on the Internet.  These environments and tools clearly can generate tremendous benefits for those setting up the meeting place.

More powerful digital tools and distribution are becoming available to greater numbers of people, allowing Youtube celebrities, Ebay store owners, and others to prosper. Yet the largest single monetary reward goes to the founders of the companies that create the most useful environments. New companies may unseat old ones in creating the environments and tools that people want to use, but until all the services that all people want done for them can be done best without cost or advertising, the creator of the environment will continue to receive a generous helping of the monetary rewards.

The Idea of the Death of Distance:  “Technology allows digital work to be done from anywhere with an Internet connection and is driving down the cost of transporting goods, so technology is eliminating the importance of location.”

This idea is correct only in a certain context.  Yes, American tax returns are being created by Indian workers, Russian programmers create some Chinese websites, and the coffee beans you just imbibed travelled a great distance to find you.  Capital, workers, information, and goods are being transported and organized in global supply chains more efficiently than ever.  You can hire a tutor from abroad to teach you a language through video chat (see edufire.com) or help you gain new skills. These changes are very important economically and socially.

Yet it is also true that even as the market economy gives significant rewards to creative people who can devise new ways of serving other people, such people are flocking to certain physical locations.  The maps that Google makes of the search queries it receives across the globe are not distributed equally according to population density, they are focused in certain cities rich in human capital. This is because creative people want to cross pollinate in ways that are difficult to do across just the Internet. They want to get a feel for what tools and ideas others are adopting, and that’s hard to follow purely on the Internet. It’s also sometimes hard to spot a business opportunity if you’re not immersed in the local environment, at least for part of the time.

We live very important parts of our lives in the location we are at, establishing friendships that teach us, pick us up when we stumble, and are rewarding in their own right. Digital tools can supplement those needs, but are unlikely to completely supplant them because many types of experience are linked irrevocably to sharing a location. In some ways, particularly in finding people who will share major life milestones and experiences, location is more important than ever.

The Idea that Open always beats Closed:  “Information wants to be free of constraints, walled systems are always defeated by open systems, and open source products will always beat closed source products.”

This idea rose to prominence largely due to the distaste that many had for the media company’s takedown of Napster, for the contempt they had for the design of AOL’s service, and for the hatred they held for the product design and market dominance of Microsoft. It’s easy when there are dominant companies with inconvenient rules or poorly designed products to imagine the benefits of taking products out of their control or creating a product that is free and open.

Even frustration over a single feature in a proprietary product can lead those who want to tinker to demand a more open system. The low and diminishing cost of distributing the best, cheapest solution to everyone suggests all products and services in a digital age should be easy to tinker with and free of cost to the user.

Yet many of the most respected technology companies that provide services today are not completely open, are not open sourced, and are not free. They are adept at leveraging free or commodity services and products in building proprietary products that have closely controlled elements which are hard for their competitors to duplicate.

Apple is perhaps the poster child for the economic value and dominance that can be created using closed designs and systems. Although it uses open source components for significant parts of its software stack, it does not reveal the source code for its operating system or any of its major applications, it requires the coupling of its hardware and software, it is famously secretive about the design of future products, and in the ipod, iphone and iTunes system it has created a very dominant closed system. Apple has allowed media companies some measure of control over their content, telecommunications companies some measure of reward, and provide software developers some ability to innovate, but Apple retains both ultimate control and the primary share of the monetary reward.

Google uses linux, cheap commodity computing hardware, and makes many contributions to open source projects. Yet it also closely protects its brand and it does not release the source code for any of its major products (gmail, Google news, Google Apps, etc.). It is highly secretive about future products, the methods it uses to rank search results, the methods it uses to serve relevant advertising, and the ways in which it has organized itself.

Ebay closely controls the reputation system which gives buyers and sellers historical information about each others trustworthiness. Facebook opened its system to application developers, but keeps close control of the stream of activities your friends are up to. Even Craigslist charges for some listings to reduce spam. None of these companies reveal the source code for their websites. Even the companies that do reveal the source code for their products charge for certain levels of support and installation services, which is in effect charging for certain kinds of proprietary information.

When do companies do well with closed products? Sometimes closed systems have a design purity that creates the right customer environment or solution, sometimes closed systems discourage behavior that would detract from the community that is formed, and sometimes they simply serve people better than open systems. Sometimes they don’t. Firefox is a great web browser, but Apple thought it could create something simpler and faster and more ubiquitous in Safari. To think that one is destined to be better than the other in the marketplace simply because of their open or closed nature is to grossly oversimplify the factors that lead to product distribution and adoption.

In trying to understand a new phenomena, it’s important to form ideas about it, but also understand when those ideas don’t apply. A trail of wrong predictions and sloppy writing can drill into our heads ideas that are sometimes very false. I have learned that if I can’t name a context in which an idea is false, it is a dangerous idea to rely on. As Emile Chartier stated, “Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.” (see my favorite quotes)