What To Stop Doing

Jim Collins, Best New Year’s Resolution?

Suppose you woke up tomorrow and received two phone calls. The first phone call tells you that you have inherited $20 million, no strings attached. The second tells you that you have an incurable and terminal disease, and you have no more than 10 years to live. What would you do differently, and, in particular, what would you stop doing?

I had a subarachnoid aneurysm a few years ago, and at one point I was informed — erroneously — that my brain injury was inoperable. I had some time to reflect on that, and even after it was clear that surgery was, in fact, an option, the mortality stats on my condition were pretty harrowing, with at least 50% mortality, and given the severity of my situation, significantly higher.

Subarachnoid hemorrhage

I have changed a great deal since then. I started playing the guitar again, after about 20 years hiatus, for example. I’ve started writing music and poetry again. I drink a lot more champagne, too. Have to smell those roses.

But I still need to stop once in a while and ask: what should I stop doing?

This year, I intend to raise even greater barriers to long-distance travel, which is so costly in time and often so meager in payback.

I am involved in a foundational transition in my work, started last year. I am transitioning from a modality of acting as an advisor to companies (usually software start-ups), and investing more of my  my work-related efforts into various, well-defined research initiatives, often working cooperatively with other researchers. I will be saying more about these initiatives later this week, with more specific announcements.

The book that I have been talking about for the past few months (formerly called Liquid City) will be sewn into the new research agenda, and will be rolling out in pieces this year, in a slightly reconsidered form, and a new title (in process).

I have recommitted myself to connecting with the community here, in Beacon NY, my adopted home, and I am working to get a food cooperative off the ground. Most critically, my family is buying and moving into a new place here in the next week, and in the next few months we will be putting in a garden, fixing up the place, and settling in. Going to dedicate a lot to that.

I am working in NYC from the Grind coworking space, and I hope to be an active and involved member of that community, and the tech and innovation community of NYC, as well. This will all be keeping me relatively close to NYC, more local than I have been in decades.

I still plan to do 12-15 conferences in distant places, but I intend to keep to that number as a max, and the rewards — on some level or another — have to be pretty high to get me to go.

Say yes to some things, and no to most others. But I am open to discuss new ideas with people. I will be starting open office hours in February, after the move is over.

The real work of architecture that adapts and reflects this new mediated world is yet to come. A discussion about “social media and architecture” is still more likely to consider how architects can use Facebook—or Architizer—to market their work, rather than how social media changes our experience of it. And a conversation about “technology and architecture” is probably about parametric modeling, not about how the two spaces we inhabit—one physical, one virtual—might be pulled together. A world where we are all “alone together,” in Turkle’s formulation, is a haunting image of the future. But there remains the possibility of a new richness arriving along with our divided attention, an additional layer in our experience of the built world.

“Public spaces are always going to be sites of negotiation. They are not places, like your laptop screen, where you can do whatever you want,” David Benjamin, of The Living, told me. But what if our screens engaged in that conversation? If our building facades didn’t just communicate information to us (à la the Jumbotron), but we communicated back, communally? After all, what makes cities vital are their color and diversity, the wild mix of scales, even the noise and confusion. This has been the defining sensation of modernity, from the Parisian boulevard to the contemporary aerotropolis. Social media has the potential to amplify this quality, making people feel disoriented and overwhelmed—but also focused and inspired. Great cities have always done both, and architecture’s role has always been to help make sense of it all. It took Mies to show how the lowly industrial I-beam could be transmuted into something as grand and symbolically profound as the columns of a Greek temple. What architect will turn the networked screen into a chapel?

Andrew Blum, Here but Not Here | Metropolis Magazine

The Future of Brick and Mortar Space - Mark Alvarez

Mark Alvarez via Rebellionlab

Here’s where I see technology changing the store in the next 15-20 years.

1. The cash register will cease to be an organizing principle. You’ll be able to pay from anywhere in the store. Right now, the current is working in both directions — tablet apps that allow salespeople to complete sales from anywhere in the store, and phone-based apps that let the customer scan a bar code and buy.

2. Corporate stores will resemble local venues. They’ll all have your data, tablet-equipped salespeople will have access to your entire history with the store. Yeah, a lot of us don’t like talking to salespeople, but they could come in handy if they know our purchase history.

3. Stores will be able to better predict and control traffic flow. Everyone by now knows about geo-fencing and location-based services. But stores will soon have geo-fencing within them, making any area that a customer is in more interactive but also, more interestingly, giving more control over where people circulate and when. Got a bunch of grumpy customers in a customer-service line? Flash sale, aisle five.

Other technologies will allow retailers to better predict traffic flow. Space is at a premium, so retailers will need to maximize its effectiveness.

4. New sales spaces. Right now, brands that are using smart-display tech are mainly doing so for marketing. Nordstrom set up a Kinect-powered virtual window that allows customers to “write” on store windows. That’s fascinating — and the possibilities are infinite. But the big idea is to use digital technology to create a store in previously inaccessible space. Tesco’s subway virtual store is the most well-known example of this, and it’s brilliant — you’re basically setting up another retail location, without any of the overhead.

5. 24 hour access. The other thing that surface-display technology will lead to is the 24-hour store. Smart windows will allow passersby to look at and purchase store inventory from smart posters attached to their windows or walls. Yes, this is already done, and yes, even more people are designing for it. Especially in areas with high levels of night-life traffic, allowing passers-by to immediately purchase that coat displayed in the window. The ultimate impulse buy.

6. And that will make holiday displays awesome. Not that anything can really beat toy trains or a window full of kittens, though.

Keep in mind that not all of this is 100% tech dependent, so it’s going to take architects and designers getting into the act — and from what I’m seeing, they’re coming up with some huge ideas in integrating physical and internet architectures. But, like in fashion, this is a new generation, and a lot of these people are still in school.

This is the video of the recent keynote I presented at the Infopress Réseaux Sociaux (social networks) event in Montreal. The talk is called An Architecture For Cooperation, and is a much longer version of the TEDxMidAtlantic 2011 talk I gave last week, which should be available for viewing in a few weeks.

The slides for the Montreal talk can be viewed here. The slides are not shown in the video.

This topic will form the first chapter of the book I am writing, called Liquid City: A Liquid, Not A Solid; A City, Not An Army. The most recent status update on that project is here, and if you’d like to be updated on the project, fill in your info, here.

Liquid City: The Book

A few months ago, I kicked off a book project called Liquid City, with these words:

The web is the largest, most expensive, and most revolutionary human artifact every created. And the most explosive part of the web is the emergence of social networks, which provide unprecedented degree of human connection, and which are already in use by billions, perhaps half of the world already. This parallels the growing urbanization of the world: already 50% of humans live in cities, and the United States is leading all nations, with over 85% living in cities and surroundings.

These two complementary trends are setting the stage for a nearly unimaginable quantum shift in human social density, both online and off. We’ve learned in recent years, thanks to the work of researchers like Geoffrey West, about the superlinearity in performance and efficiency that comes from increasing the size of cities, and social network research has demonstrated how innovation can come from increasing social connections. As we move to a new wave of technologies — like ubiquitous connectivity, tablets and other smart devices, gestural interfaces, and social operating systems — what sort of increase in social density can we expect?

A third, independent trend is the explosion of cognitive science that is providing a scientific, reality-based understanding of how people are far more social that was ever  guessed. In particular, research in social cognition shows that our thoughts are truly not our own, and that our perceptions, values, and behavior are deeply shaped by social connection.

And how will we surmount the challenges that confront us in today’s already webbed and urban world? Issues like personal privacy in an increasingly public world, the need for a new social contract in a freelance world of business, and the downsides of greater social connection.

I tried the Kickstarter route, but I think I got the pitch wrong or misjudged how much to ask for ($10,000). It wasn’t funded, but that hasn’t decreased my interest in the project, really, just moved it back to being a writing project and less of a community building exercise.

So, I will be writing the book a chapter at a time, starting in November, and adding a new chapter each month for ten months, with topics like these:

  • The Rise Of Liquid Media
  • The Social Revolution: It’s Not Democratic, It’s Neo-Tribal
  • Social Cognition: Your Thoughts Are Not Your Own
  • Social Density, Influence, And Social Scenes
  • Privacy versus Publicy: Identity Politics and Social Contracts
  • The Architecture of Cooperation and The Rōnin Economy
  • Webbed And Urban: Supercharging Superlinearity?

November’s essay is based on the recent presentations I gave in Montreal and TEDxMidAtlantic, entitled An Architecture For Cooperation.

I will be selling the chapters for $1 each, and the entire book for $10. Sign up here to be notified of status updates.

Are Social Tools Pushing Us Past β Superlinearity?

Tim De Chant comments on a 2009 research paper by Marcus Hamilton and colleagues which explores the mathematics of population density when humans first started moving out of Africa, around 50,000 years ago.

Tim De Chant, Density solidified early human domination

Our predisposition to living densely, they suppose, may have contributed to our stunning success beyond the savannas of Africa.

A sublinear relationship between population size and home range size—meaning that larger groups live at higher densities—imparts special advantages for species that can deal with the twin burdens of density, overshoot and social conflict. Overshoot describes a population that overwhelms its habitat, devouring all available food and otherwise making a mess of the place. Social conflict is as it sounds, where tight proximities provoke fights between individuals. Together, those snags can bring a once booming population to it’s knees.

But social animals are uniquely adapted to cope with those problems. For one, social behavior soothes tensions when they do rise. And when it comes to the necessities of life, density conveys a distinct advantage for social species—resources, chiefly food, become easier to find. Larger, denser populations squeeze more out of a plot of land than an individual could on his or her own.

Density itself wasn’t directly responsible for the first forays out of Africa. Those groups were were too small and dispersed to receive a substantial boost from density. They faced the worst the natural world had to offer, and many probably couldn’t hack it.

Where population density conferred its advantages was when subsequent waves of colonizers followed. Density allowed those people to thrive. They joined the initial groups, growing more populous and drawing more resources from the land. This made groups more stable both physically and socially—full bellies lead to happier and healthier people. As each group’s numbers grew larger, their social bonds grew stronger and their chances of regional extinction plummeted. In other words, once people worked together to establish themselves, they were likely there to stay.

It’s a heartwarming story the scientific paper tells in the unsentimental language of mathematics. It implies that the essential success of our species can be boiled down to one variable, β, and one value of that variable, ¾. The variable β is an exponent that describes how populations scale numerically and geographically. Its value of ¾ is significant. When β equals one or greater, each additional person requires the same amount of land or more—the group misses out on density’s advantages. But when β is less than one—as it is in our case—then a population becomes denser as it grows larger.

The degree of our sociality has allowed us to bend the curve of population density in our favor. If early humans had been an entirely selfish species—each individual requiring as much or more land than the previous—β would be equal to one or greater. We wouldn’t have lived at higher densities as our populations grew, and early forays beyond the savanna might have petered out. Instead of conquering the globe, we’d have been a footnote of evolution.

And here is where we can consider how this affects our modern lives. Population density may have aided our sojourn out of Africa, but it’s clear there are limits. Hunter-gatherer populations appear to be limited to around 1,000 people, depending on the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. Technology has raised carrying capacities beyond that number—as evinced by the last few millennia of human history—but we don’t know it’s limits. A scaling exponent equal to ¾ may have helped our rise to dominance, but it also could hasten our downfall. Technology may be able to smooth the path to beyond 7 billion, but what if it can’t? What if ¾ is an unbreakable rule? What happens if we reach a point where density can no longer save us from ourselves?

I am betting that social tools — based on liquid media — and new levels of urban living will enable us to push β past 3/4. My prediction is that we will pass over a new threshold when 90% of the world’s population is living in urban settings, and 90% of the world is cooperating and collaborating through online social tools. In effect, we will change the equation by allowing higher degrees of social density while managing contention for resources through lower cost cooperative techniques.

Shutting Down The Liquid City Kickstarter, Starting Liquid City Book

Some friends have said that I set the target too high, others said my video was too long: whatever. It looked pretty clear that with 9 days left and only $2100 so far, I am unlikely to hit $10,000. So I am shelving the Liquid City kickstarter project.

However, I am going to write the book, anyway.

Things will be slightly different. I won’t be setting up an elaborate gated community on Squarespace, so community participation will be more haphazard and open. But I am going to set up a dedicated site for my monthly ruminations, which will — as before — culminate in a monthly essay.

And each month, I will sell the essay for the princely sum of $1. The final book will be $10, comprising 10 essays, an intro and an outro. I may do webinars, if enough people sign up for them. On that, more to follow.

Essays will include these:

    The Rise Of Liquid Media

    The Architecture of Cooperation

    The Social Revolution: It’s Not Democratic, It’s Neo-Tribal

    Social Cognition: Your Thoughts Are Not Your Own

    Social Density, Influence, And Social Scenes

    Privacy versus Publicy: Identity Politics and Social Contracts

    Webbed And Urban: Supercharging Superlinearity?

I think I will start with The Architecture of Cooperation, since that is the subject of the TEDxMidAtlantic talk I am presenting in a few weeks.

Preface To Liquid City

An excerpt from the preface for the Liquid City open book project:

I’ve spent the last decade investigating the rise of the social web and the tools that have shaped the culture that we now almost take for granted.

I’ve invested my time in a philosophical investigation of the rise of the social web, the world that created that rise, and the impact that social tools are having on media, business, and society. By ‘philosophical’ I don’t mean an abstract theoretical approach, something impractical from an ivory tower. But I have been looking for broad answers to fundamental questions. I have little time for petty issues of social media brand building or shallow discussions about building influence online. Instead, my focus has led me to look into the societal forces that have set the stage for billions of people to adopt social networks, for example, and the way that our values and perceptions are changing as we work and live together, online. But, I am interested in what is happening at street level: new tools, new forms, and new adaptation to the change that continues to accelerate in the world that the web is making. In fact, I spend a great deal of my time working with start-ups building new tools.

I have come to characterize myself as having two sides. On one hand, a web anthropologist, looking back to see where we have come from, and the forces that have shaped us. On the other, a futurist, attempting to divine where we are headed, and how things will shake out as we infiltrate our shared and changed future.

To learn the derivation of ‘Liquid City’ go read the whole post or watch the video on the kickstarter page.

[btw - I will be hosting the project on Squarespace because of their excellent access controls.]