Social Media… Amplifying The Inner Sheep

In the early days of computing, those involved were pioneers, innovators, original thinkers, the super-passionate, driven by curiosity and the purity of adventure. These were a strong people. Proud. And though it sounds precious to say so, the early computing pioneers were not unlike other gritty pioneers in that they enjoyed being out well beyond the known, striding forward where there was no trail, no strength in numbers, no peer support, no mentors, no accepted pattern.

Now? Well now that computers have become ubiquitous, now that everyone has one, uses one like they use a knife and fork, the pioneers have long since been replaced by Plumber Joe, by the middle of the bell curve, by everyman and everywoman and their kids.

The computer industry is market driven! I hate that it has taken me this long to recognize the importance and implications of this now overwhelmingly obvious and simple fact. The diffusion of computers into the daily routine of the entire population has resulted in a dramatic shift in the demand landscape that informs what computing becomes. The market for computing is its users. The user today, the average user, is a whole different animal than the user/creator that defined its early history. Those of us that jumped in early probably resist the idea that what we care about really doesn't matter anymore. Though it might be true that knowledge and a deeply theoretical bases for that knowledge still matters, from a consumer market demand perspective, we grey hairs are simply invisible. The fact that we nerds ever defined a market for anything at all is the more surprising historical footnote. It is a bittersweet realization, that success of our industry would of mean the marginalization of its founders.

In every grade school class I attended there were a few kids (one or two) who were driven by a passion to know, to understand, to create. The rest, well the rest excelled at a completely different set of skills, getting through the day, unnoticed, blending in. The two groups couldn't be more different. The inquisitive few were internally driven. The rest were driven by the outward demands of success as defined by the curve. The inventive minds competed against their own ability to invent. The rest competed amongst themselves over the coveted 60 percentile that would define passing the class.

The computing market is now dominated by that larger part of the human population that defines success as climbing (which ever way possible) on top of the 60 percent of the population (of other social climbers) that makes up the bulk and center of any bell curve. As kids, these were the people who spent most of their time comparing themselves to the kids next to them. Looking over their shoulder at the other kid's test answers. Studying together so that they knew the base line before they got to the actual test. I say "climb to the top" but the word "top" when describing a bell curve does a disservice to the real meaning of averages. What we call the top of a bell curve is really the center of a frequency distribution. Climbing to the top is really a struggle to get into the center. Like fish trying to avoid a shark, there is a natural human tendency away from being alone, away from the vulnerability that is the open water that is original ideas and behavior. As a result, we constantly seek the protection of others. Each of us, as humans, spend a good deal of our energy trying to determine and then contort our behavior to that which best describes the center of normative behavior and attitude.

The similarities between schooling fish and human socialization pressures are profound. But there is one important difference. Where fish seek the center to avoid the teeth and gut of another species, the predator we humans work so hard to avoid is us, is public ridicule, being seen as different, standing out! We are in a very real sense both sheep and the sheep dogs nipping at the the sheep's legs. It is obvious that evolutionary pressures have conspired to build into our brains at least two modes of processing and that they are, at least at times, antagonistic. One is a great big "what if?" simulator, a novelty machine… the other, a social manors restriction system that cautions at the point of pain, behavior the least bit novel or different.

I have traversed the usual nature/nurture, cultural/evolutionary minefields. What I come to is this; traits that exist universally across most cultures and experienced many times within each individual's life, are most probably behaviors that have a significant genetic/physical component... are common regardless of our developmental environment and experience. Humans are obviously capable of profound novelty and abstract pattern analysis. But there is also a pervasive behavioral overlay of social control of which we are simultaneously, willing participant, and victim. What is confounding is the extent to which each system interferes with the function and success of the other… and that they are so diametrically opposed.

With regard to schooling (and herding) behavior, that which we share in common with fish (and sheep), is an indifference to where the school is, in which direction it is moving, and how fast. Under the social threat that triggers schooling, all that matters is that each of us as individuals finds our way as close as possible to the center. Humans will go along with almost any plan so long as social grouping allows us to avoid being seen as different. Obvious examples: Nazi Germany, Slavery in the southern U.S., the Nanking Sex Trade, etc.

As computers have been made "user friendly" and as the cost of ownership has dropped, this center of the bell curve, this mad fight for self-similarity that defines who we are as a species, this reflection and homogenization of the greater us, has become the market for computing. Which makes sense. Diffusion and all. But the whole history of modern computing is so short, just 40 years now, that it is surprising and a bit of a shock to realize finally that from a market perspective, computing is a mature industry. How could an industry just a generation old have transited already from go-it-alone pioneer to "I'm Love'n It" average?

The implications are huge. In particular, this insight brings social media into sharp ironic focus. Social media brings to computing the same access to community monitoring and control that gossip and storytelling brought to the camp fire. It is to computing what cheating off of your neighbor's test is to being a kid. As a person who likes to think of himself as a pioneer, I have reacted in horror, disbelief, and frustration to what has looked like fifteen years of computer industry regression.

If you accept that computers, like minds, are abstraction (language) machines, then it makes sense to wonder to what extent the human brain has suffered the same evolutionary pressure towards social assimilation and at least plausibly, away from innovation and novelty. To what extent is the rarity of the product of profound human creativity a reflection of actual physical and logical limits on and causal costs to creativity itself, and to what extent is the same rarity a product of evolutionary molded physical properties of the brain that conspire to restrict the production of novelty as a result of even greater survival pressure to promote behaviors that honor social cohesion?

If the current overwhelming trend that sees the computer as more of a social monitoring mechanism, and less a creative tool, is a trend that reflects market demand, then the same questions I am asking of the market pressures that shape the machinery of social media must be asked of the cultural pressures that have through evolutionary time shaped the mind. So long as computation is primarily consumed by human beings, both computer and mind will be shaped by the same evolutionary pressures. As technical barriers are overcome, the industry can and does react more fluidly and with higher fidelity to the demands of its consumers.

At which point, the question becomes; Which heaps greater selective pressure on the evolution of computing, the need for tools that stand in for skills the human brain lacks, or the need for tools that amplify our most attention demanding desirers? Can the two co-exist and co-evolve productively? Again, the question is asked practically of computation and at the same time, philosophically or anthropologically of the human brain and the cultural stew in which each is both product and survival pressure.

Where computing used to take its shape from the fecund imagination of computational luminaries, it has of late been lead instead in the pursuit of the lizard brain in all of us, the sub-conscious urges and fears that inform social mediation behavior. The result is all of this social media dribble, the likes of "Twitter", "13 Seconds", "myface and spacebook" [sic], and numerology based pizza ordering "iPhone Apps." What advantages do such time wasters render? Some argue that social media was the logical communication oriented extension of email and personal web sites, that social media greases mechanisms deeply human and "natural". I remain dubious to these claims. I tend to group the brand of communication that social media seems to breed with more negative forms of group behavior like cults, mass hysteria, fundamentalism, and other behaviors unique to group-think.

And what of pop-culture notions like "collective intelligence", "global awakening, and "cultural consciousness" which seem to be born of transcendent utopian notions (not dissimilar to those that feed religion and spirituality). The adherents of these optimisms appear to be blissfully unhindered by the need for causally logical argument or empirical evidence. If our computers have become social monitoring devices (at the expense of facilities that enable creativity), is there a danger that they will further distort our already distorted sense of truth? If a computer "wants" to agree with us more than it wants to accurately calculate a value, then we might already have crossed the threshold into a world where 2 plus 2 really does equal 5 (if the computer says so, it must be true!).

It would be irresponsible for me not to at this point remind myself to question my own rhetorically close topics.

These questions and trends have profound implications to populist concepts we tend to romanticize but rarely examine in detail. Democracy, plural-icy, consensus, society, culture, community, equal rights, individuality, etc. As the computer industry becomes more and more sensitive to consumer demand, its product WILL become a device that does a better and better job at the automation and magnification of human idiosyncratic behavior, of superstition, mythos, hubris, rhetoric, ego, at any and all of the emotional side effects of evolutionary pressures.  Forget about the cold indifference of causal truth that has motivated so many sci-fi stories.

The real villain to be feared in any inevitable future is the computer as hubris amplifier.

Computing's new "social media" face might disturb my pioneer sensibilities, but it reflects the satisfaction of common demand. As any market matures it learns to overcome the physical and conceptual obstacles that so plagued it in its earlier years. Unburdened by things like processor speed and storage density, the computer industry was able to pursue directions more in line with human consumptive desire than with the technical or theoretical goals of computer "scientists". Marketeers trump scientists when the saturation of a product becomes universal.

It all makes sense. I am still depressed by the anti-innovation implications of the mass market dumbing down of computing, but at least I understand why it happened, what it means. Knowledge, even depressing knowledge, should open doors, should allow more efficient planning and prediction. But what exactly are the implications when a creative tool is hijacked by a larger urge to avoid at all costs, change and novelty. What happens when the same mass-market demand pressures that cause fads and trends focus their hysterical drive towards homogeneity onto the evolution of a tool originally intended for and idealized for creative exploration? What exactly do you get when you neuter the rebellion right out from underneath Picasso's brush?, When you force Darwin to teach sunday school?

Just what does it mean when our creative medium becomes sensitive to social interaction? Pen and paper never knew anything about the person wielding them, certainly didn't know how the greater society was reacting to what was being written or drawn.

If the average human feels more comfortable doing exactly what everyone else is doing, seeking the center, would much rather copy the answers off of their desk-mate's test than understand the the course content, well then it only makes sense that, we, the royal "we", would use this computing tool in the same way that we use the rest of the stuff in our lives, to help us find the social center and stay there.

It's not just the marketplace that has shifted towards the demographic center. The schooling mentality has crept into and now dominates computing as an industry. Personnel and management which in the early days of computing was awkwardly staffed by engineers and scientists and groupie hobbyists is now as diverse (homogenous?) a mix of humans as you could find in any industry. Even the scientists are cut from a different cloth. It takes a special and rare (crazy) human being to invent an industry from nothing. When avocations become well funded departments at major universities, the graduates are not likely to be as intellectually adventurous (understatement). As any MBA knows, the success of an industry is most sensitive to its ability to understand and predict the demand of its market. Who better to know the center of the consumer bell curve, the average Joe and Jane, than that same Joe and Jane? Joe and Jane Average now dominate the rank and file workers that make up the computer industry. This means administration, it also means sales and marketing, both of which make sense. Less intuitive, is but equally understandable, Joe and Jane Average have taken over the research and design and long range planning arms of the computer industry. Even where it isn't the actual Joe and Jane, it is people who do a kick-ass job of channeling them.

Does market saturation mean the evolution of computing has reached its zenith? I don't think it does. But, once an industry has reached this level of common adoption, the appearance of maturity and stability are hard to shake. Momentum and lock-in take hold. I have tried repeatedly to sell paradigm-busting and architectural re-imaginings of the entire computing paradigm to valley angles and big ticket VC firms only to realize that I wasn't selling to the current market. Try opening a VC pitch with "The problem with the computer industry is…" to a group of thirty-five year old billionaires who each drove to the meeting in custom ordered european super cars. Needless to say, their own rarefied experience makes it hard for them to connect with anything that follows. This is a classic conundrum in the study of evolution. I presume it is a classic conundrum facing evolution itself. Why should a system that is successful in the current environment ever spend any energy on alternative schemes? How could it? It is hard to even come to the question "What could we be doing better?" when surrounded by the luxury of success.

At the same time, it is unlikely (impossible?) that any system, no matter how successful in the present, will long define success in the future. It might even be true that the more successful a scheme, the more likely that scheme will hasten an end to the environment that supported it (through faster and more complete exploitation of available resources). The irony of success!

But we a are smart species. We are capable of having this discussion aren't we? So we might be prepared as well to discuss the inevitability of the end of the current computational scheme. No? To prepare as a result, for the next most likely scheme (or schemes)? Especially those of us who study language, information, computation, complex systems, evolution. Especially an industry that has so advanced the tools and infrastructure of complexity handling. No? Surely we in the computer industry are ideally situated to have a rational vantage from which to see beyond the success of the current scheme? Yet, for the reasons I have already postulated (market homogeneity and success blindness), and others, we seem to be directionless in the larger sense, incapable of the long range and big picture planning that might help us climb out of our little eden and into the larger future that is inevitable and unavoidable. Innovations springing forth from the current industry pale in comparison to those offered up 20, 30, even 40 years ago.

Speaking of which; I just found the resource list for Pattie Maes' "New Paradigms In Human Computer Interaction" class at MIT's Media Lab. These are video clips of speeches and demos of early and not so early computing pioneers showing off their work prescient work. Mind blowing. The future these folks (from places like MIT, Brown, Stanford Research, the Rand Corporation, Xerox PARC, and other institutions), well, it is sooooo much more forward looking than what has become of computing (or how the average computer is used). Everyone would do well to sit down and view or re-view these seminal projects in the context of their surprisingly early introduction.

I have written quite a few essays lambasting what I see as the computing industry's general loosing of its collective way… at the very least, a slowing down of the deep innovation that drove computing's early doers. Even when potentially powerful concepts ("Semantic Computing", "Geo-Tagging", "Augmented Reality", "User-Centered Cloud Computing") are (re-)introduced, their modern implementations are often so flawed and tainted by an obsession to kowtow to market pressures (or just plain lie or fake it) that the result is an insult, a blaspheme of the original concept being hijacked.

Over ten years ago, I gave a talk at Apple titled: "Apple Got Everything It Has For Free, And Sat On Its Ass For Eight Years While The Rest Of The World Caught Up".

Which is true, at least with regard to the Lisa/Macintosh which Xerox PARC handed them (check out the Star System) and the way they just kind of sat on the WISIWG mode-less graphical interaction scheme while other computer companies (Borland and then, reluctantly, Microsoft) eventually aped the same. At the time of my presentation, Apple had wasted its eight year lead extrapolating along the same scheme… a bigger badder WIMP interface, when they could have been introducing paradigm vaulting computational systems (that would put Seattle on another eight year chase).

But from a marketing perspective I couldn't have been more wrong. I have got to keep reminding myself that I no longer represent the market for computers! I wish I did, but I don't. I am an outlier, a small dot on a very long tail, I am pluto or maybe even just some wayward ice and dust comet to the big ordinary inner planets that trace out wonderfully near-circular orbits around the sun. In later presentations, I explained that Apple's critically acclaimed "Think Different" campaign and the elitist mindset from which it was derived, was the reason they had never garnered more than 2 or 3 percent of the computer market. I explained that Bill Gates' "genius" lie not in his profound insight, but in his ability to understand the motivations that drive the average person… namely to never be caught doing something that someone else could question. That means acting the same as everyone else. That means knowing how everyone else is acting. That means social media!

Nobody (other than wacky outliers like me) wants to be compared to iconoclasts like Einstein or Picasso or Gandhi or Gershwin. Very few people really want to "think different". Most people wouldn't be caught dead risking that type of public audacity. You have got to be pretty confident that you have an answer to the dreaded question "Why are you doing that?" to ever DO THAT (individually creative thing) in the first place.

Pioneers know exactly why they do what they do. They are driven by knowing more than others and by the excitement of being somewhere others haven't been… by being very much outside of the ball of fish that others seek as protection.

But if you want to sell a billion computers instead of just a few thousand, then you want to pay attention to the fish in all of us and not to the smiling and sock-less Einstein's on a bike.

But the larger and longer implications of mass market sensitivity are profound. While it is entirely true that paying attention to the center of the cultural bell curve will allow any industry to exploit more of the total available consumption potential, such behavior does not necessarily produce the paradigm jumping disruption upon which long term progress depends. If your Twinkies are selling really well, you might not notice that your customers are all reaching morbid levels of obesity and malnutrition or that the world is crumbling around the climate changing policies upon which your fast food empire is based.

The satisfaction of human center-of-the-fish-school urge is not necessarily the best recipe for success if success means more than short term market exploitation. In the long run, potential and satisfaction are decidedly not the same thing; they are, as a matter of fact, very often mutually antagonistic. Rome comes to mind. What comes to mind when I mention the phrase "dot com" or "mortgage backed securities" or "energy deregulation".

The mass market topology that has driven computing and communication towards a better and better fit with the demands of the largest and most homogenized consumer base the earth has ever witnessed could very likely work against the types of creative motivations that might be necessary to rescue us from the bland and the average, from the inward facing spiral of self-sameness that avarice alone yields. I am increasingly worried that the computer's seemingly endless potential to be warped and molded chameleon-like to perfectly satisfy our most basic evolutionary proclivities, to amplify unhindered, urges made strong against real scarcity in the natural environment, has already so distracted us within our egos and desires that we might not be able to pull our heads out before we get sucked completely down and into our very own John Malkovich-ian portals of endless identity-amplication.

And why does it matter? Because, like it or not, progress in every single field of human endeavor is now predicated on advancements in computation. More profound than anything else science has discovered about nature is that information is information. Information is domain agnostic. Which means that advances in information processing machinery benefit all information dependent fields of inquiry. Which is every field of inquiry! Which also implies that all fields of human inquiry are increasingly sensitive to the subtle ways that any one computational scheme effects information and the scope of information process-able within that scheme.

At any rate, it is alarming (if understandable) to me that the trending in this industry is towards a re-molding of the computer into ego amplifier, pleasure delivery system, truth avoidance device, distraction machine, Tribbles (as in "The Trouble With…"). The more insightful among us may want to place a side bet or two (if only as evolutionary insurance) on more expansive futures. Some of us are not so distracted by the shininess of these machines or by how they are getting better and better at focusing our attention at our own navels, to see futures for computing that are more expansive than the perfect amplification of the very human traits least likely to result in innovation or progress. There is still time (I hope).

Randall Reetz

Are We But Crows? (Where Pattern is Noise)

Lets look at yet another way that the human mind gets tripped up and falters. Our propensity to find pattern makes us vulnerable to an inane form of overindulgence and counterproductive obsession with attributes of systems that do not carry essence or salience. Seems that our evolutionarily-shaped affinity for pattern make us particularly vulnerable to a level of indulgence that in smaller quantities is reasonable and healthy, even necessary.

Here is the problem. Most pattern is indicative of a lack of information or salience. If a system can get away with simple duplication along a scheme, it means that that part of the system is not very important. It means that it is cutting resource corners and systems can only get away with this type of cost cutting in areas that are not salient to the main purpose of the system at large.

Imagine going to a bookstore and obsessing over the fact that all of the books are made of the same stuff, of paper sheets cut and stacked in approximately the same geometric ratio. Imagine, in fact that this pattern overwhelmed your attention to such a degree that you could not be bothered with the content encoded as printed words on the pages of those books.

That would render all books equivalent. A book printed with random strings of words or with no words at all would be informationally equivalent to Darwin's, Origin Of The Species. In the face of an overwhelming attraction to inessential pattern, essential pattern is dismissed as noise, is ignored.

I call this the "Crow" problem… an obsessive attraction to shiny objects. There are so many examples of this type of cognitive distraction; rainbows, crystals, mirages, amber waves of grain, camouflage, fractals, golden rectangles, sacred numbers, etc.  It is where our own cognitive process amplifies some pattern in the world wether or not it is important in any information rich manor.

We are for instance, especially susceptible to and sensitive to right/left symmetry. Probably because filtering for this pattern allows you to quickly pull animals out of a complex sensory field. Having such a filter gave us evolutionary advantage, so we now have brains with a tendency to favor right/left symmetry in visual fields.

The rainbow is an other great example of pattern that is attractive but virtually meaningless. A rainbow is not actually a thing of course, but a mix of the refractive nature of light and a behavioral anomaly of our visual apparatus. A rainbow is like a hologram. What we are seeing is light reflected off of raindrops or fog. Of course it is a poor indicator of the location of rain in our visual field… there is rain in other parts of the sky than where the colored bands appear. The phenomena that is visible as a rainbow is happening every time rain is present but we only see the rainbow when our orientation to the sun is within certain fairly restrictive parameters. Yet, so attractive is the rainbow stimuli, under the influence of this pattern detection stimulus, we might just miss more pertinent information (a lion approaching?).

Another example of particular importance is the attraction to crystals and the latest crystal fad, fractal geometry.

Most people are interested in fractals (or think they should be). But what exactly do you actually KNOW about fractals? Does your knowledge of fractals include an understanding of the WHY of n-dimensional radial n-scale self-similar patterns, why they appear in dissipative systems that develop over time? Do you care to know or understand? I get the feeling that people who are the most attracted to fractals are more interested in some sort of pseudo-spiritual grooviness, the stare at your navel aspect of fractals, than the simple truth of least-energy dictated growth patterns.

What is abstracted in mathematics as the "fractal" is in fact the only pattern that nature can exhibit in systems that are dominated by parts that are very much the same. Sand is a good example. Homogenous liquids and gasses are another. Fractals are a map or abstraction of dissipative systems, and all systems are dissipative. But the events and situations that matter in the evolution of complexity, the WHY that makes US possible, are not the even dissipation within a scheme, but the CREATIVE events that allow for new (faster and bigger) dissipative paradigms. An explosion is fractal in the same way that a capillary web is fractal in the same way that both a tributary and alluvial plane is fractal. It is just the end result of a history where least energy dictates the most efficient moment to moment dissipation of energy. The way you are saying that fractals are important feels religious and rapturous. As though fractal patterns in nature are a THING or a GOAL. Fractals don't know they are fractals any more than the ink making up the word "Fractal" on a printed page "knows" or "wants" to be that particular word or any word at all.

People who act this way towards pattern scare me. What matters in process is the places where pattern breaks. Else we wouldn't be here. Else we couldn't find salience.

I am afraid of and purposefully vigilant against the grand attractors of human thought, virgin births, miracles of any kind, shiny baubles, trickery, omnipotence, anecdote, life ever after, self importance, power over others, a desire to know or have access to the prediction of future events, predetermination, and pertinent to this discussion, crystals and fractals and the types of pseudo-cyclical pattern that makes us think nature is more simple than it is and that nature is of our own imagination or invention.

All systems seek equilibrium. In systems made up of subsystems, each of these subsystems seek their own equilibrium or resonance. Frequently when the resonances of several co-systems fall into an overlapping cycles, additive standing waves can and do overwhelm the integrity of the system as a whole. Feedback loops are anti-complexity mechanisms. Overarching patterns overwhelm systems and keep them from creative or information rich activities and interactions. Systems that seek to compete in the edge of evolution game are systems that spend an inordinate amount of energy keeping feedback loops in check. A creative system is a system working overtime AGAINST the information killer that is natural tendency towards simple pattern (fractals).

If you are trying to get rid of a planet or smooth out the heat cline in an ocean, fractal patterns are important. If you are a member of a species that is carrying complexity forward through the accumulation and control over abstraction, dissipative pattern and the systems dominated by them, are like Kryptonite to the program at hand… best to avoid them at all cost.

It is important to know when to appreciate pattern and when to run like hell when you see it developing. The forces that produce pattern are information destroyers.

We had better look long and hard at this issue. Choosing a false god at this level in the evolutionary game could end up causing the death of the whole complexity scheme just as it is becoming aware of its purpose and salient pattern.

As another example of pattern distraction, I give you DNA.

My favorite morphological description of DNA: "the non-periodic crystal". It harnesses the strong self-organizing (but anti-information) properties that give rise to a crystal (in this case, an almost endless wound chain of identical and stable "double-helix" spiral twists) as a stable superstructure for that will carry the information (anti-crystal) bearing base-pairs at its axillary center. The crystal spiral holds and protects the integrity of the always-vulnerable low-entropy sequence that holds our genetic recipe… DNA's real structure of importance. Even so, we humans seem to be more attracted (like crows) to the simplicity of the simple and un-remarkable spiral crystal armature instead of the non-crystaline information the crystal armature makes possible!

The larger implication of our self-destructive crow-like attraction to simplicity is that we are romantic about the very things that don't matter and ignore-ant of the anti-crystal configurations that are complex and information rich… that are salient to the information we are and the information our information may yet create.

I suspect that our attraction to simplicity in pattern is an idiosyncratic after-effect of a salience detector within our thinking apparatus that is constantly looking for self-similarity. When computer scientists and logicians attempt to design compression schemes, they are looking for ways to algorithmically discover those sections or sequences of a set of information that are un-important to the overall structure… much of data is repetitive, if you can find these repetitions, patterns, you can reduce them to simple equations or pointers to prototypical modules that can be stored once and forever duplicated as filler. Obviously, these patters are compressible because they cary so little salient information.

While it is somewhat surprising that so much of an image, musical recording, even string of text, can, using fractal math, be detected as filler and deleted, the subsequent and predictable human reaction… that of honoring the trash simply because it is pretty, is to my mind, one of the most scary attributes of human proclivity. Fractals illustrate how much of nature's structure is non-salient, is the noise, the tailings of dissipation. That we would be enamored by the pattern of noise to such an extent that we ignore the real meat of information (that which is not pattern-able) is our potential downfall as a species.

A snail isn't trying to build spiral. A snail grows a shell that happens to be a spiral because that is THE ONLY SHAPE allowed in three dimensions that is both a cone (expanding tube) and dimensionally minimal of solid permanent material. The snail has better things to waste its limited energy on than the shape of its protective home. So it chooses the one shape that takes the least energy and most minimal construction algorithm to pull off. We dishonor the snail as a biological scheme by paying attention to the aspect of its survival that is the least interesting. That simplicity of that spiral shell is what should tell us not to pay attention to that aspect of its being or strategy.

But in this regard and others, we act as crows despite our 100 billion brain cells and the potential therein.

Sad.

Randall Reetz

A Plan To Re-Invigorate Long-Term Capital Markets

Human behavior favors the immediate. Nobody willingly chooses to wait when an option allows instant or near-term gratification. This tendency naturally results in imbalanced systems. The recent investment market crash is evidence of what happens when short-term behavior is at odds with the medium and long term needs of a healthy economy.

To make matters worse, our tools evolve naturally in directions that mimic human proclivities, catalyzing the very natural and human obsession with the immediate. As investment securities markets are more and more influenced by and accelerated through the use of automation technologies (the computer and global communication networks), they trend naturally towards an over-valuation of short-run returns and under value long-run returns. Even if traders or fund managers start off with long-range, future-looking, wide-perspective goals, the competitive pressures placed on them simply for sharing trading facilities with companies that make money by trading on shorter and shorter time frames forces them towards similar behavior. When you are competing for money, and that money is changing hands in shorter and shorter cycles, money available for long range investments and the types of businesses and infrastructure plays becomes scarce. You either join the race towards the immediate, or you go without.

However, a thriving economy absolutely depends upon the continuous and long-range capitalization that actively supports basic science and the steady infrastructure improvements that build, promote, and maintain complex supply chains that constantly evolve towards greater productivity.

Though a healthy and vibrant economy profoundly depends upon capital fluidity, upon responsiveness to investment demand, the recent trifecta of market boom/bust cycles (energy, dot-com, and real estate securitization) has shown that revenue schemes that do nothing more than move money around can exert too much influence on the entire market landscape that shapes our national and international economies.

Three times in a row we have witnessed first-hand how second tier capitalization (business that make their money by repackaging investment risk) tend to quickly and fatally overwhelm the total investment market. These securitization schemes do better in the short term than standard capital markets because the value they trade is not directly tied to the success of the actual businesses and infrastructures that they capitalize. In market competition for investment dollars, abstraction schemes provide an artificial advantage that is impossible for real businesses to overcome.

If investors have the option of making a quick bet against market stability, an option that is not in and of itself dependent upon actual consumer or business to business demand for actual product or service, of course the capital will follow the quick and the fake over the slow and the real. This is a natural and predictable attribute of the behavior of capital markets.

So what is to be done?

There are many potential solutions and solution categories. Greater regulation of markets. Tariffs and taxes that are then redirected through government advisory boards that seek to determine the areas of funding that will have the greatest impact on future productivity. New kinds of markets and financial products that somehow reword long range investments. Public education directed towards society-wide changes in social morality and long range responsibility to future technologies and infrastructures. Switching to a benevolent dictatorship and appointing exactly the right leader with exactly the right understanding of productivity building economic mechanisms, and the will to make it so. Each of these options has deep potential for failure. Most are simply impossible or entirely romantic.

After some thinking, I came up with a plan that just might work.

Lets say the government set a Target Average Investment Period (TAIP). This TAIP (for sake of argument, lets say it is set at 'two years') would be the time delay before any investment you make could be evaluated, cashed in, or traded. It is an "Average" because you can make any number of investments but the average duration of your securities each time you invest has to be at least as long as the current TAIP setting. Some algorithm or official committee (Fed Board?) sets the value of the TAIP at some set interval (every year?) or, as is true of the Fed Rate, whenever the governing body decides the economy demands an adjustment.

In practice, what it means is this: If you purchase a thousand dollars in 1 year stock (one year 'less' than 2 year TAIP) you must offset this purchase with investments worth at least one thousand dollars in a 3 year stock (1 year 'more' than the current TAIP). An investor can offset securities purchases with periods shorter than the TAIP with any combination of investments longer than the TAIP so long as the total average of all purchases made at that time is equal to or greater than the the current TAIP setting.

In this way, securities are not simply tied to a company or fund or product, but also to the duration of the investment. If you want to partake in microsecond trading, cool, just as long as you offset those short run investments with an investments of equal value at the opposite end of the TAIP.

You don't just buy IBM, you buy IBM at duration. An investor can choose any combination of purchases (all of IBM or short term in IBM and long term in Intel). Alternatively, financial entities can be as creative as they want to be in designing investments products so long as the end result conforms to the current TAIP setting.

The government would fine-tune the TAIP the way it now fine-tunes the prime lending rate. Hell, if it works like I think it will, this adjustment will be more important and more reliable than prime rate manipulation.

Mostly, this scheme has the benefit of promoting the types of long-range investments that a strictly free market tends away from. And, it does so without restricting short range trades or the full range of trading period fluidity or investment products.

Randall Reetz

There's No App For That!

There are now about ten thousand downloadable iPhone "apps". The tailings of a mad geek-scramble of mini-application coding and cloud-mashing, the gold rush of the 2000's. Low hanging fruit in the nerd orchard that is Silicon Valley.

Every C or Java savvy software engineer, hacker, and video gamer under 35 is trying to second guess the fickle fad-addled twenty-something market of multi-task-ers that will pay a buck or two for the opportunity to buy pretty-code-as-trinket, binary-pet-rock, boolean-back-scratcher, brickabrack-party-favor. The wave of the future? Gold rush for the new killer mini-application?

A month ago, I spent a couple of weeks in Tahoe camping with my parents and my sister's family. I don't really know how it happened, but I started saying "There's An App For That" (Apple's iPhone byline), every time someone said something of that didn't quite ring true. Pretty soon, my 9 year old nephew caught the bug and began mocking truth stretchers the same way. I don't know why this tickles me. As a student of social trends, my attention gravitates to behaviors that to-easily resonate, those memes that are to the human mind what complexity theorists call "grand attractors" (the attributes of an environment or system that have the greatest and most rapid effect on action and outcome… in our solar system it's the sun, not Pluto). We humans are embarrassingly susceptible to certain patterns of language and inane cultural cues.

Back to the "app". The word is of course diminutive for application. Where applications are big do-everything information workshops, apps, are single purpose narrowly focused seemingly useful algorithmic hacks that each do some particular information access task in some sort of (usually) intuitive and fluid way. But each of these apps, as useful as it may be in a given and highly particular situation or context, is like one of the 10,000 little doodad accouterments you can find in a fine cooking equipment store… they might be nice, they might indeed do the job better than anything else could, but you wouldn't want to have to find them in a kitchen with 10,000 other tools hanging from hooks and stuffed into drawers.

Imagine a robot as swiss army knife. That is what a thousand apps are in a devise that isn't anything more than drawers and hooks for the storage of applications. The swiss army knife is really just two pinions from which swing a whole bunch of tools. It knows nothing of those tools, just how to store them and swing them out for use.

In the same way that a cooking store is better when it has in stock every tool you could ever want, the more tools it has, the harder it is to find what you are looking for, the usefulness of any one iPhone app is diminished with the addition of each new app. In the parlance of cooking there is a hierarchy of tools by complexity: kitchen, work station, major appliance, appliance, tool, and utensil. If the OS is an kitchen, and the application is the appliance, then an app is something small like a tool or a utensil. A garlic press, like most kitchen tools has a single purpose. It is a highly specialized devise, the design of which has been fine tuned through multiple design and test iterations to smoothly and reliably function as the user would expect in highly specialized and somewhat exceptional situations (once in a while). There just aren't that many things other than garlic that you want to peel, smash, and extrude. Compare this to the average utensil - knife, fork, spoon - which is meant for repetitive use across a range of activities. You have to go find a tool, but a utensil stays in your hand, or right near by all day long. You probably only have one of each of your tools, but you have multiple copies of each of your utensils. There are an almost unlimited number of potential tools, yet very few types of utensil.

It should be clear that iPhone apps are much more tool-like than utensil-like. And because most apps aren't very flexible or reconfigurable, they aren't in them selves appliances. The entire iPhone, as a devise, is often called an appliance. In this sense, it is of the class of appliances that is more akin to a food processor - the user can switch blades, for different tasks - so maybe in this sense, the blades are like apps and the iPhone truly is an appliance.

And that suggests an even more apropos metaphorical comparison… the people I know and their food processor. Almost nobody I know uses theirs. It sits there in the cabinet while they laboriously chop their vegetables by hand. Taking the thing out, collecting all of the parts, setting it up, finding the correct blade, installing that blade, plugging it in, preparing ingredients for processing, cleaning it afterwards, drying it, putting it all away…forgetaboutit!

The iPhone has a distinct advantage over the food processor - it has a primary use - as a phone - which keeps it within reach and always at hand. In the sense that an iPhone is a telephone, it is a tool - a tool that can transform itself into a multi-use appliance!

My argument isn't whether or not it is a good appliance, or whether the tools that can be attached (apps) are useful or well integrated, my argument goes to the difference between a well appointed kitchen, and a well staffed kitchen. Do you like food, or do you like cooking. My assumption is that there are far more eaters than their are cooks. Sure, everyone likes a great kitchen. Through the normal attrition that is gradual consumption, your kitchen slowly ends up containing more and more tools, but most people would, had they had access to more money, gladly trade in the whole kitchen in exchange for well prepared meals in a nice restaurant or brought to you in front of your TV.

If I had to dig a ditch, a good shovel is better than a bad one, but what the hell am I doing digging at ditch? Just how great would a shovel have to be before digging a ditch becomes something I choose to do?

I remember when personal computers became available. I watched grown men, highly successful, executive level professionals, choose to type their own letters simply because the technology was so cool and new. The same guys who wouldn't be caught dead typing their own letters on an IBM Selectric typewriter were firing their secretaries, and hand typing their letters in a far more complicated word processor on an IBM PC, just because they could change the font and the the color, size and style of the text. I am a big fan of fairness and equality, and shutter to think of the opportunity squandered during the age of woman as secretaries, but I can hardly conceive of the size of the gap between a word processor and a human secretary.

I shouldn't pick on the iPhone, in the sense that it is an information appliance, it isn't any different than any other computer. Just stores applications for later execution. What I am picking on is fact that a computer of any form factor, is just too stupid to act a anything other than filing cabinet. If you want a machine or appliance that will help you figure out what app to launch, well, there is no app for that, and there probably shouldn't be. The iPhone has taken the store-access-launch metaphor to the slippery silky extreme you would expect of Apple. This may in fact and ironically be exactly why it is becoming so clear where computers need to go next and how far they are from the fundamental technologies that will be necessary to go there.

[ more to come… ]

Complexity is Self-Limiting… Evolution Says "So What!" But At What Cost?

Complex systems tend towards greater complexity. That is one way, in fact, of defining evolution. But complexity is also self-limiting in obvious and unavoidable ways. What gives?

How, specifically, does an understanding of complexity's natural limits, recast an assessment of where human society is, where it might be going, and what of this potential do our own limitations in understanding complexity and its limits… well, limit?

We tend to gravitate towards a rather cleaned-up image of the future, all stainless steel and gleaming glass, and sexy robots that can't say "no" (puffy clouds, white wings, and lutes?). To be fair, this sparkly and perfect view of the future is something we reserver for "The Future". Excepting for Sunday mornings, we are refreshingly realistic about the process of getting through all of the calendar-able pedestrian futures to the final "The Future"… sometimes even positing an apocalypse or two along the way. Its as though we understand that things of great complexity and stability must be constructed, and that building is a messy and chaotic process, our self-delusion begins and ends with the absolutely fatal assumption that there is some end to the construction process, after which everything will be grand and glorious and perfect in the sense that no major construction will ever again mar the sublime and pristine quite and elegance we have built.

Right. OK.

In light of the magnitude of our self delusion, it seems down right naive to apply the phrase "drink the Cool-Aid"… in some very real sense, we must, each of us, have Cool-Aid factories right smack in the middle of our brains!

The actual future, the sober future, the one we seem hell-bent on ignoring, is a future of greater and greater and more and more constant change. A future we can never get to. A future that will surely go on one day without us. There were after all, a whole bucket-load of futures before we existed, before we declared ourselves the supreme center of everything, the final future. Ultimately, of course, there is a final and absolute future to any system. If you paid attention during your thermodynamics or information science lectures, you know that there will come an ultimate future which can not support any complexity at all.

For now, we will ignore that final future-of-all-futures (heat death)… there are "miles to go before we sleep".

As complexity marches forward and "upward", evolving systems are increasingly characterized by construction and change. A static system, one that can't react to its own constantly increasing experience, is a system that isn't as complex as one that can learn and adjust itself to accumulated knowledge. The romantic vision of a completed and peacefully static future is as laughable as it is understandable.

Some fantasies drive us towards success and influence, and others towards catastrophe and insignificance.

The difference between these two forms of fantasy are, to my mind, the difference between paying attention to the greater reality that is the whole universe (its physical laws, material properties, and configuration), and paying attention instead only to the reality hacked together within our own emotionally contorted and narrowly self-centered minds. The distance that separates the two is probably a good measure of the speed with which nature will replace us with some other form of complexity generating scheme with a more accurate natural mapping of reality to abstraction of reality.

A self-centered and locally weighted perspective is both expectable and self defeating. What works in the short term often gets in the way of what works in the long run. This is one of two oxymoronic misreading of process clouding our understanding of evolution that increasingly threatens our potential as a species. The other (related) self-obfuscation we don't seem to be able to avoid, and central to the thesis of this essay, is the dream-like way we tend to imagine the future as some silicone-enhanced sexed-up version of some glazed-over and romantic version of a past that never was.

What we know, how we comprehend what is around us, is a function of the iterative process of matching the stream of incoming sensation to what we have stored as experience. What comes to be known is always heavily effected by what was known before. Leaning is a local affair. Systems always end up knowing more about the things closest to them. The closest thing to a system is itself! This is a topologically and causally unavoidable fact, leading to difficult to circumnavigate self-centered understandings of the universe around us. I am convinced that evolution ultimately (in the longest run) favors systems that can overcome this local-centrism…though to to this, a system must literally work against itself in the short term. Success in the long run is dependent on the development and protection of genetic structure that frustrates success in the short run. This big-picture learning must be accomplished through the development of an ever more accurate internal analogue (process-able map) representing the most inclusive and location agnostic understanding of the entire universe. This too is an ever receding target, we can chase but never completely capture. Evolution is this back and forth dance between what matters to a system in the hear and now and the capacity to pay attention to, model, and process that which is salient about the entire universe… context in the largest sense.

I don't want to veer too far away from the thread of this essay, but it is important to keep in mind the counter-indicated admixture defined both by the immediate local needs of any given individual and the larger, decidedly non-individual scope of evolution. A decidedly cooperative mixture that is, none the less, achievable exclusively through the lives of and genetic/cultural information carried forward exactly and only by individuals.

In any given population of individuals at any given locality, there exists a range of differences that enable some individuals to make more efficient use of the resources in their surroundings, and some individuals to be better equipped to contend with and exploit the resources of their children's inherited environment. Those better matched to the current environment will out-compete those with a better match to the environment of the future. Ultimately, of course, what matters is the capacity of the entire mélange to both survive in the present and present morphotypes that meet the demands of the future.  The demands of the present vs. those of the future are often at odds with each-other. A successful evolutionary scheme must "waste" a sizable chunk of its structure and energy on strategies that may have no immediate positive effect on fitness (and might in all actuality hinder success in the moment). Maintaining a long range understanding of evolution itself, and our place in it, is the example of this dangerous opposition that best fits the scope of this essay.

It seems obvious to me that the amount a system must "waste" anticipating changes in the future of its environment is inversely relational to the accuracy of its internal mapping of the universe in total. Systems that know nothing of the universe, must produce a great variety of random solutions. A very expensive prospect that best fits very very very simple individuals produced in absurd numbers. Atoms, molecules, single celled organisms.

Understanding the process, "THE" process, evolution, is probably the most salient predictive mechanism an organism might seek to internalize. We seem to have limited capacity as a species to model and abstract and then effectively navigate an abstraction of this "THE PROCESS". Especially when it comes to understanding the limitations and usefulness to "THE PROCESS" of any one scheme, species or individual.

The spirit of this essay isn't Nietzschein pessimism or a catastrophist's Cassandra; "I told you so!". I am an eternal optimist, so these words are intended instead as a wake-up call, and offered up as a Windex Wipe to the foggy lens through which we view reality… in the hope that we use it, adjust our behavior, and rectify the self-defeating distance between what is and what we want to see.

Nature doesn't stand still. Not at least until the very end. Heat death isn't at all like my fantasy of an endless Mediterranean resort vacation. Any system that bets its future on stasis, no matter how advanced, is betting against its longevity or influence on the real future.

I've compiled a list (below) of some of the most obvious side effects that haunt complexity, that push back against its growth. If we illuminate these barriers we might be better equipped to consider ways to get around them, and we might discover something of how systems get better and better at finding cheats in the march towards greater complexity.

For a system to be complex, it must have structure and difference within that structure. A crystal has structure, but its lack of capacity for internal differentiation means it can never be complex. But differentiated structure isn't enough, it has also to have some way of protecting and maintaining that structure, that shape or behavior over time. Shit happens. A complex system must employ some set of mechanisms in a constant fight against entropy. Without which, a system's complexity will be short lived, and short lived complexity isn't very complex at all.

Which brings up an important and much ignored aspect of an evolving system. We have a tendency to over emphasize the moment, the present situation or system. Nature on the other hand doesn't care about the individual or the moment except as a vehicle for the transmission of structure into the future. What matters isn't how complex a system is today, but the potential of a given configuration to influence the greatest complexity in the longest future across the widest expanse of the material universe. Many aspects or measures of complexity cross over between the here and now and the deepest future… but not all and not always.

Back to our list.

1. One way to maintain structure is to build yourself out of stuff of great material integrity – say titanium, stainless steel, or diamond.

2. Another is to adopt a vigilant and obsessive Mr. Fix-It program of self maintenance. Yet another option is to replace yourself with a pristine copy before you dissolve into an entropic heap.

3. A simple cousin of this replacement scheme is playing the numbers game… make sure there are so freak-n many copies of you in the first place that one or two of you make it into the distant future by virtue of the dumb luck of large number.

4. Or, you can choose to live a life of extreme isolation – limit your interaction with other systems and you limit the deleterious effects the second law dictates.

5. Then there is wall building. Wall building is a self-made form of the isolation scheme… instead of finding a place to hide in a pre-existing landscape, dig yourself a tunnel or build yourself a wall or a mote or a shell or a nest or fast legs or wings with which to run away with.

And then there is the problem of resource acquisition. Anything of value to a complex system tends to be reactive. Reactive things are destructive. Installing your self within a reactive environment means you have more access to energy and materials, but it also means you have to spend more energy and structure just to protect yourself from your environment. As your energy demands increase so too does your need to locate yourself closer and closer to more and more reactive and ever changing environments. A cave full of grain is great at first, but as you eat your way through it, its original attractiveness decreases. Better to install yourself at the mouth of a river, next to a mid-ocean vent, or on the floor of a flood plane. As your complexity increases, so to does your appetite for energy and materials. Access means proximity. Proximity to greater and greater concentrations of energy demands protection. Protection is expensive in terms of the self-protective physical structure and its maintenance.

Worse still is the negative feedback that metabolic waste presents. The more you eat, the more you go. The more you go, the harder it is to find food. As complexity increases, guess what happens to the magnitude of this problem and the need therefore to spend more and more energy on waste removal schemes?

The focus of this essay are the aspects of complexity (and complexity's demand for energy and structure) that put counter-productive limits on strategies that would otherwise allow for greater and greater complexity… and how evolving systems find work-arounds. The fact that we are here at all is proof that evolution finds a way.

What interests me is the way increases in complexity puts increased demand on energy and material resources, and how these processes are self-limiting and at the same time actually define the purpose that drives evolution.

In the particular, real systems manifest great creative variety in the fight for the extension of structure and integrity over time. For instance, once brains appear, trickery and guile become the standard approach to wall building. You don't need to go the long and arduous course of developing poison and some specialized hollow teeth through which to deliver it, if you can just tweak your skin coloration or shape to mimic those who have. Or you can become invisible by adopting a color and texture scheme that mimics your less vulnerable or edible surroundings. In essence, trickery schemes are the same as isolation or wall building except the wall you are hiding behind is within the brain of another creature (either it's already there or you build it in your foe's brain through behavioral conditioning).

But here is the rub. No matter which scheme a system adopts in the maintenance of structure… that scheme hardens their structure, making it more difficult and expensive to adapt to an always changing environment. In a very real way, what makes you stronger in the present makes you vulnerable over time.

Example: When Teflon was developed it was obvious to its creators that its extreme inert-ness, its aversion to chemical interaction, would make it an ideal lining for any reaction container (including frying pans and irons). But this same property made it almost impossible to figure out how to affix Teflon to the surface of a container (it took over 10 years to solve this problem).

On the opposite end of the isolation spectrum is metabolism. When a system seeks a means of extracting and drawing energy or structure from its environment, it needs to maximize its reactive interface to that part of its environment that has the most entropic potential. In earth biology, this usually manifests as an active interface to oxygen and or sunlight – both of which are highly corrosive to structure. In order to both exploit the energy of these highly reactive sources, biology has adopted a myriad of selectively self protective (and expensive) mechanisms. Playing with fire is an attractive AND expensive proposition. Simple systems have no option but to hide from highly reactive environments – to dig themselves into deep cracks in the earth. Only a system of great complexity has the structural and behavioral leeway to adopt the complex and selective mechanism necessary to both use and avoid concentrated reactive resources.

As a system becomes more complex it reacts faster to internal and external change. It evolves faster. This is a circular definition of "complexity"… configurations that facilitate faster development of configurations that facilitate faster development of configurations… ad infinitum. The capacity to do things faster always comes at a cost. To mitigate that cost, the system must learn to be efficient and effective in its environment. This means going with the flow. This means fitting in. This means doing what the environment is already doing. This means not fighting the system. To work with a system (instead of against it) means internalizing and abstracting a model of the environment's most salient structures. If you have some knowledge of what a lion will do when you enter a clearing it is sitting within, you have a better chance of surviving the encounter. If you have legs and eyes, your very structure is an acknowledgment of the physical constraints of your environment.

An accurate assessment of this whole concept becomes increasingly complex as we realize how system and environment blend in a co-evolutionary super-system.

In science fiction, the future is presented in one of two ways. Either the world has devolved into some filthy post-appocolyptic entropic mess, or it is a perfectly complete stainless steal and glass uber-infrastruture with everything in its place and everything perfectly maintained. Both projections are impossible, but the hermetically sterile one is the most problematic as it seems to resonate more completely with human emotional projections.

The problem is this; the more complex a system becomes, the faster is its capacity to change, leading to a system that is constantly in flux, constantly reworking itself, constantly under construction. Try to find a day in a modern city devoid of numerous construction cranes marring its skyline. This situation will only become more intense as human society evolves.

Biological systems have learned to accommodate the constancy of change, deterioration, ware and tear, construction, etc., through complex molecular mechanism of growth and repair played out at the (largely microscopic) cellular level. Furthermore, these anti-entropic mechanisms are largely automatic and do not therefore overly burden the larger and more overarching consciousness and behavioral control mechanisms (our mind).

Though humanity has reached a level of complexity that supersedes the capacity of its infrastructure to effectively carry its own complexity demands, we don't seem, as a species to be able to see this problem as systemic.

[more to come…]