I’m not sure how I found it, but today I discovered a bit of a gem in the blogosphere: ValleyZen.
For a quick taste, check out the interview with Drue Kataoka on View from the Bay. It is amazing how a few simple words can have such a profound visceral impact.
Drue’s suggestions resonate with my user-centric world-view:
SIMPLIFY
Focus on what’s important. Eliminate what’s not.
IMMEDIACY
React to the moment — not to your fears and concerns.
BREAK YOUR RHYTHM
Surprise yourself and those around you.
BE CALM
Find Tranquility in Action.
GREEN FROM THE INSIDE OUT
Begin with your own personal ecosystem.
Take time for yourself, reconnect and put things in perspective, and engage the world on your own terms, in the moment, sustainably.
When redefining technology in personal terms, Drue’s take on Zen packs a powerful punch.
The Washington Post today exposed considerable excesses by “fusion” centers organized post 9/11.
Intelligence centers run by states across the country have access to personal information about millions of Americans, including unlisted cellphone numbers, insurance claims, driver’s license photographs and credit reports, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post.
…
Dozens of the organizations known as fusion centers were created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to identify potential threats and improve the way information is shared. The centers use law enforcement analysts and sophisticated computer systems to compile, or fuse, disparate tips and clues and pass along the refined information to other agencies. They are expected to play important roles in national information-sharing networks that link local, state and federal authorities and enable them to automatically sift their storehouses of records for patterns and clues.
…
The list of information resources was part of a survey conducted last year, officials familiar with the effort said. It shows that, like most police agencies, the fusion centers have subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans’ locations, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like.
Centers serving New York and other states also tap into a Federal Trade Commission database with information about hundreds of thousands of identity-theft reports, the document and police interviews show.
Pennsylvania buys credit reports and uses face-recognition software to examine driver’s license photos, while analysts in Rhode Island have access to car-rental databases. In Maryland, authorities rely on a little-known data broker called Entersect, which claims it maintains 12 billion records about 98 percent of Americans.
In its online promotional material, Entersect calls itself “the silent partner to municipal, county, state, and federal justice agencies who access our databases every day to locate subjects, develop background information, secure information from a cellular or unlisted number, and much more.”
…
“There is never ever enough information when it comes to terrorism” said Maj. Steven G. O’Donnell, deputy superintendent of the Rhode Island State Police. “That’s what post-9/11 is about.”
The last statement pretty much sums up current institutional thinking on individual liberty and national security: in the fight against terrorism, we have a moral obligation to do everything we can. Everything.
It’s scary how much that position echoes that of fascism. As promoted by Mussolini, fascism builds a moral framework based on the primacy of the state. Fasciste means a bundle of sticks, symbolizing that the group is stronger than any individual. Fascism extends that thinking, declaring that each individual’s rights exist only insofar as they support the state. Or to restate, in the defense of the state, there are no individual rights.
Which, if you think about it, is exactly what anti-terrorist programs assert when claiming that terrorism trumps the rights and privileges of the suspect or accused. Due process, protection from unreasonable searches, freedom of speech. All of these have rights have been trampled on in the name of the War on Terror. The fusion centers are just one more institution created by the mindset that brought us illegal wiretaps, extraordinary extradition, secret prison camps, extra-territorial detention, and torture.
I understand law enforcement’s position. It is easier to enforce laws when you know everything about everyone, just like in a police state (see The Lives of Others for an Academy Award-winning story of pre-information age East Germany’s police state). But it is impossible for a police state to generate the economic and social well-being that emerges in a free society… and it is that well-being which, ultimately, is the core of U.S. global power. Simply put, undermining freedom undermines US security.
In contrast, consider the subtle brilliance of Kim Cameron’s Laws of Identity, in particular, law 2:
2. Minimal Disclosure for a Constrained Use
The solution that discloses the least amount of identifying information and best limits its use is the most stable long-term solution.
We should build systems that employ identifying information on the basis that a breach is always possible. Such a breach represents a risk. To mitigate risk, it is best to acquire information only on a “need to know” basis, and to retain it only on a “need to retain” basis. By following these practices, we can ensure the least possible damage in the event of a breach.
At the same time, the value of identifying information decreases as the amount decreases. A system built with the principles of information minimalism is therefore a less attractive target for identity theft, reducing risk even further.
By limiting use to an explicit scenario (in conjunction with the use policy described in the Law of Control), the effectiveness of the “need to know” principle in reducing risk is further magnified. There is no longer the possibility of collecting and keeping information “just in case” it might one day be required.
The concept of “least identifying information” should be taken as meaning not only the fewest number of claims, but the information least likely to identify a given individual across multiple contexts. For example, if a scenario requires proof of being a certain age, then it is better to acquire and store the age category rather than the birth date. Date of birth is more likely, in association with other claims, to uniquely identify a subject, and so represents “more identifying information” which should be avoided if it is not needed.
In the same way, unique identifiers that can be reused in other contexts (for example, drivers’ license numbers, Social Security Numbers, and the like) represent “more identifying information” than unique special-purpose identifiers that do not cross context. In this sense, acquiring and storing a Social Security Number represents a much greater risk than assigning a randomly generated student or employee number.
Numerous identity catastrophes have occurred where this law has been broken.
We can also express the Law of Minimal Disclosure this way: aggregation of identifying information also aggregates risk. To minimize risk, minimize aggregation.
Whether or not you think the War on Terror is being handled well, it is a demonstrable fact that human systems fail. People make mistakes.
And that means we can guarantee that institutions–even when acting in our own best interest–will make mistakes, like the admitted errors of the FBI, as reported by the NYT:
WASHINGTON — Senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation repeatedly approved the use of “blanket” records demands to justify the improper collection of thousands of phone records, according to officials briefed on the practice.
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Under the USA Patriot Act, the F.B.I. received broadened authority to issue the national security letters on its own authority — without the approval of a judge — to gather records like phone bills or e-mail transactions that might be considered relevant to a particular terrorism investigation. The Justice Department inspector general found in March 2007 that the F.B.I. had routinely violated the standards for using the letters and that officials often cited “exigent” or emergency situations that did not really exist in issuing them to phone providers and other private companies.
WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation improperly obtained personal information on Americans in numerous terrorism investigations in 2006, but internal practices put in place since then appear to have helped curtail the problems, Bush administration officials said Wednesday.
The Justice Department’s inspector general is expected to issue a report in coming weeks that updates the findings of a major investigation last year into the F.B.I.’s use of so-called national security letters, which allow investigators to obtain telephone, e-mail and financial information on people involved in investigations without a court warrant.
Last year’s report caused an uproar in Congress when it was disclosed that the F.B.I., under powers granted by the USA Patriot Act, had misused its authority to gather records in thousands of instances from 2003 to 2005. The new report from the inspector general will examine the bureau’s use of the records demands in 2006.
At the end of the day, this isn’t about any particular individual, nor even any particular violation of our constitutional rights.
It’s about addressing the systemic problems of the information age. There will always be threats to national security. There will always be the drive to get as much data as possible into the hands of a few, elite law enforcement agencies, capable of acting in the “public good”. And there will always be those individuals who break the rules, whether for good intent or malicious device. We don’t need conspiracy theories to point out the dangers of centralizing all the information about everybody.
What we need is an open-eyed approach to building information systems on user-centric principles, such as Cameron’s seven Laws of Identity. Do that and a vast number of systemic risks of the information age go away.
I used to carry a small notebook (~2″x3″) with an equally small pen and would jokingly refer to it as my non-digital PDA whenever I took it out in front of fellow digerati. I mostly kept track of to-do items, shopping lists, and inspirations, just stuff.
Forward to 2008 and enter PocketMod. Mash up your design, print, fold, cut, fold some more. Instant paper PDA. Nicely done and just enough fun to try out.
I love Doc Searls. Few people inspire the future as well as Doc, especially when he is on a tear. Here’s a delightful short (<5 min) romp in an interview at LeWeb3 in Paris about the future of the web and the critical importance of making user-centric open systems the core of a ubiquitously connected future. (Think VRM and The User As the Point of Integration)
A few gems:
What is meta about life transcends what is meta about electronics.
We have to look to solve problems for ourselves.
What really matters is our indendence, our freedom, our ability to act on our own
Many thanks to Robin Hunicke for pointing me to this absolutely wonderful reminder of why childhood dreams are so important.
As Robin says, if you haven’t seen it already, take a moment and do. You might start with the Wall Street Journal article about Randy’s “last lecture.”
I’ve not met Randy, but I’m glad Robin introduced me to him in time to appreciate him and his work.
David Hull recently responded to my post-Information Age article suggesting that we are in fact, just at the end of the beginning rather than the end of the Information Age itself:
I like the article, I like the argument, but I don’t quite like the conclusion. As Churchill said, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
What has happened is that we have moved from information scarcity to information abundance. You could just as well argue that this marks the beginning of the real information age. In which case I think Joe is saying the same thing, except that instead of “real information age” we should call it something else.
Since I didn’t attempt to name the next Great Age, I can’t wholly disagree with Dave. Perhaps it will come to be known as the “real” information age. However, I think Dave’s missing the point of my post. In fact, Dave’s later comments reinforce that assessment:
For that matter, when did the “classic” information age start? Did it start when it became possible for someone to make a living dealing solely in information? That would be quite a while ago. Did it start when information management allowed geographically large entities to persist over time? Also quite a ways back.
Did it start when people on opposite sides of a continent could communicate with each other instantaneously or nearly so? That would be sometime in the 19th century. When the first modern computer was built? Mid-20th. The first PC? The first use of the term internet? Take your pick.
Ages are not mutually exclusive. We are still very much in the industrial age. New industrial products and processes are invented all the time. Large parts of the world remain largely unindustrialized — even as they build out their information infrastructure.
Great Ages are, by definition, mutually exclusive. This is a subtle semantic distinction, yet it is the essence of my article. Great Ages are periods in time when individuals uniquely define themselves in the artifacts of that age–or perhaps historians have come to define people based on the fundamental artifacts of their Age. Take the Bronze Age for example. The impact of bronze was so transformational that it redefined the political, economic, and social fabric of every civilization it touched. Bronze defined the lifestyle of the people who lived through the Bronze Age.
With this definition, no two Great Ages can co-exist. When people start defining themselves in different terms, it becomes a different age. The evidence suggests that significant conversations are growing in our society which are inherently post-information. That is, people are starting to explore and adopt post-information perspectives as part of their self-identity. Not everybody, but perhaps enough to reach a tipping point soon, if it hasn’t already.
Dave suggests we are still in the Industrial Age because we still have industrial aspects of our world. However, we are beginning to leave the Industrial Age as I define Great Ages, because we are starting to define ourselves beyond the industrial context. Sure, we continue to innovate in industry and spread the first-world model of industry to the rest of the world. But the former is more about industry’s enduring value and the latter is about the uneven pace of progress. Neither of which touch on the self-defining characteristics of the leading wave of civilization.
We almost always retain the machinery of our prior ages, even as our cultural identity moves on. The farm is a great thing; a factory farm is far more productive. The factory is a great thing; a knowledge factory is far more profitable. The Information age defines itself by its flow of information, but folks are already craving, experimenting, and searching for new means of engagement and production, searching for ways to put information back into its role as an enabler rather than the focus of our attention.
Consider the winding down of the Industrial Age. (I did not live through this transition, but I accept the bits and pieces I have learned from various media–for I am a child of the Information Age). The hippies of the 1960’s heralded the end of the Industrial Age, but they did not define what came after. Instead, hippies became yuppies and arguably failed to escape the materialist culture they had railed against in their youth. (We should forgive them; when you grow up indoctrinated to certain world views, it is incredibly hard to change.) This counter culture wasn’t new, it echoed Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) as well as the even more timely precursor, the beatniks of the ’50s. But what the cultural revolution did was ignite a nationwide celebration of counter culture, and in so doing, opened up the mainstream world-view to the short comings of the industrial era American Dream–demanding a new definition. ConsiderHair and Easy Riderfor two of the most powerful demands of the time. The message: life isn’t about a 9-5 job, working your way up the career ladder, buying a home in the burbs, settling down with 2.5 kids. That was a pastiche of a marketer’s brochure of post World War II America. People cried out for something different, something better.
In the course of time, that something better became the subcontractor/entrepreneur-fueled economy of the 1990’s, telecommuting virtual organizations, Internet start-ups and stock option plans. In short, the Information Age.
In the same way, there are voices engaging the world today that herald the end of the Information Age. I won’t repeat the examples from the previous post, but I will add Into The Wild (official site) to the list of cultural artifacts harkening for a new age. The movie isn’t out yet, but the trailers and buzz are encouraging. Nothing rings more true about that movie than that it is a tale of one man’s journey to define himself beyond the trappings of his parent’s Industrial Age world. A morality tale of the end of one Great Age, told so that we can resonate at the end of another.
Say goodbye to the Information Age. It’s already over.
Ok, not over, completely. These things take time. You don’t just end an “Age” in an instant. But take a look around you and you’ll start to see the beginnings of the end, just about everywhere.
The last Great Age, the Industrial Age, started sometime around the invention of the steam engine, rallied with the internal combustion engine, and soared into its zenith with the jet engines.
We briefly flirted with an Atomic Age, which lasted about ten years before perhaps morphing into the Nuclear Age. You might have thought we got post nuclear when we stopped worrying about the Bomb and won the cold war, but there appears to be a nuclear renaissance ahead, thanks to both proliferation and the resurgence of nuclear energy (no green house gases, just glowing green waste…). Somewhere overlapping the Nuclear Age was about a decade we call the Space Age–thanks to Kennedy’s push to put a man on the moon by the end of the 60’s.
But the Atomic Age, the Nuclear Age, even the Space Age, they don’t mark profound changes in the average human life.
I won’t get into the uneven distribution of “progress” in today’s world, but let me make a brief signpost to point out that when I say “we”, I mean those of us blessed enough to participate generally in the first world.
When we figured out how to create factories, how to industrialize production, we profoundly changed the way we live and work. The Atomic age didn’t do that. It mostly affected the political and international landscape leaving the rest of us to continue our modern industrial lifestyle. So, not a Great Age. Just an age. Similarly, the Space Age may have inspired TV shows and science fiction, complete with new global heroes both real and imagined, but other than Tang and Teflon, it had minimal impact on our daily lives.
In contrast, the Information Age has radically changed the modern lifestyle. Computers and networks and telecommunications have profoundly disrupted and re-invented some of the most important elements of our society. How we buy and sell. How we communicate. How we socialize. How we commit crimes and how we enforce our laws. Even how we sin and how we fall in love. Without doubt the Information Age is one of the Great Ages, affecting the lives of almost everyone fortunate enough to be living in the first world.
So, how can I say it is over? What about the iPhone? Google? Web 2.0? Second Life and World of Warcraft? Or even one of my own favorite initiatives, Vendor Relationship Management (VRM)? Aren’t we still in the thick of it?
It is true that the machinery of the Information Age is here to stay, both in terms of infrastructure and social structure. After all, we didn’t give up factories or unions at the end of the Industrial Age. Nor did we abandon farming when we moved from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial–although we have lost “barn raising” as a social activity. Farms and factories became less important in the modern context as more people found ways to live without them as a major part of their life. Instead, we reinvented both in the image of the new age. We industrialized our farms and re-engineered our factories around information.
We move from one great age to another when, as a Society, we let go of the trappings of the previous age and begin to define ourselves in new terms, absent the defining elements of yesteryear. We no longer think of ourselves as farmers or factory workers… the Information Age has knowledge workers, and we largely define ourselves by the information accessories in our lifestyle: our iPod, our MySpace page, our blog, when in previous ages it may have been our car, our company, or our home town, livestock or crop.
But aren’t these defining accessories Information Age artifacts? Yep. And while they may seem hot today, their days are already numbered. I don’t know how to see the future to what the next Great Age is going to be… any of a number of developments could come to define it: nanotechnology, genetic engineering, even a return to global religious militarism, God forbid (pun intended, folks).
What I can see is that many of the most engaging and compelling conversations in our society today are decidedly post-Information Age.
Consider this. The Industrial Age was an age of STUFF. The amazing material wealth generated by modern industrial engines was staggering, and as Sears Robuck and Henry Ford brought that material wealth to the people, we came to define ourselves by how much stuff we had. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” we rallied. The accumulation of stuff became the calling card of America. “He who dies with the most toys wins.” We luxuriated in our newfound wealth as a huge middle class was born from workers who began to earn enough to actually buy the things they were making. When it comes down to it, the Industrial Age was all about MORE STUFF. Making it. Selling it. Buying it. Consuming it.
So it is fitting that the end of the Industrial Age began not so much with the invention of computers (in the 1950s) or the Internet (1969)–these were merely the instruments of what came to replace it. Rather, the end of the Industrial Age began with the realization by many people that perhaps we don’t need all that STUFF. It started to end when we started to question, in significant numbers, the defining foundation of the age: do we really need more stuff? The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald was a post-industrial tirade against the American Dream, but it wasn’t until mainstream America caught up with the concept after World War II that we began to think about and define ourselves en masse as something more than the sum of the bounty of our industrial might.
The late Anita Roddick, who passed away this month, tapped into this with The Body Shop’s line of products that weren’t about more stuff, but rather about a different kind of better stuff, about products that were both good for you and good for the world. In fact, the entire movement towards sustainability has, in its roots, the necessary realization that we must move to a post-industrial world, a world that isn’t defined by our stuff. As cable television and the Internet invaded our homes, we began to find that we could satisfy many of our wants and desires through Information rather than physical goods. It was liberating, intoxicating, and led to one of the most outrageous economic bubbles since the heyday of the Industrial Age triggered the Great Depression.
Similarly, the Information Age is, (surpise!), defined by MORE information. More channels. More telephones. More email. More websites. More advertising. More media.
And in a (perhaps) surprisingly short period, we now find ourselves echoing a new version of the mantra that ended the Industrial Age: “Enough! We don’t need so much Information!”
Consider the evidence:
TMI
Perhaps the most light-hearted evidence is the oft-used phrase “Too much information” or the blithely concise “TMI” when someone divulges more details than the listener really wants to hear… typically about things you don’t even want me to mention in this article.
Google
We also see it in embodied in the most powerful brand of the Age. Google has always stood for making the overwhelming complexity of the Internet, simple. Hence, the clean look, the great results, the fast response. Google knew that you didn’t want everything that’s out there on the Internet–if you wanted that you might try the cacophonous Yahoo! What you want, is just what you want, nothing more, nothing less. Give me what I’m looking for, and leave the rest of that stuff out there. (And kudos, btw, to Google for pulling back recently from productmania to refocus on their core value proposition.)
Blink
How about Blink by Malcom Gladwell? Gladwell outlines just how powerful it can be to think less, evaluate less information, and “thinslice” complex problems, in an instant. Less information: better results. Here’s a quote that is crystal clear about the frustration of the Information Age:
We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding. (p264 in the April 2007 paperback edition)
Gladwell goes on to illustrate through uncanny stories, both anecdotal and scientific, of how we can and do make split-second decisions on the most minute sets of data. Sometimes our bias in those moments can steer us astray, but when managed correctly, those “instant” decisions are not just as good, they can be better than those made in full conscious analysis of all available data. The message is clear. If you can distill your decision making to just the right subset of the data and you prime yourself correctly, you can make better decisions with less information.
The Zero Inbox
Have you heard of the 43 Folders Inbox Zero tutorial and video? From the introduction:
Clearly, the problem of email overload is taking a toll on all our time, productivity, and sanity, mainly because most of us lack a cohesive system for processing our messages and converting them into appropriate actions as quickly as possible.
Too much email! Nicely written and well worth the plunge. You’ll appreciate it. And as a post-email junky, you’ll find yourself liberated from one of the Information Age’s most consuming behemoths.
Burning Man
Have you heard of Burning Man? Arguably the most happening annual ritual qua week-long party on the planet. Not the largest, but certainly an indulgence of the hippest order, where the many of the most adventurous, most “out there”, and most creative head to the Nevada desert to unplug and reinvent themselves in a microcosmic society, disjoint from the “real world.” It is a ritual in unplugging from our information drenched reality to celebrate the physicality of life in the brutal extremes of desert heat, sandstorms, dust, and frigid cold nights, with only ice, coffee, and porta-potties provided as basic civic services (the first two for a fee). The rest you provide for yourself in a form of “Radical Self Reliance” that is a core principle of the event. Why would anyone endure such extremes? In large part because it is incredibly, primally, satisfying to extract yourself from the world of information overload and engage with real people in an real–albeit redefined–world. Whether you like it or not, Burning Man is a undeniably relevant celebration of the post-Information Age human experience.
VRM
In its small way, VRM is also contributing to this trend to reduce information overload. VRM redefines customer relationships with vendors by focusing on what individuals have and need, rather than what vendors have to offer. Rather than trying to index and analyze everything, just capture what’s near the user, and give people tools to leverage what they do know to have smarter, more rewarding engagements with vendors. The result will be a system focused on the individual and his or her relationship to vendors, rather than an aggregated, centralized knowledge base, index, or repository of all the world’s information.
These are but a few examples of how we, as a society, are starting to realize that perhaps we have too much information at hand. That instead, what we need is better, more meaningful information. As more and more of us define ourselves as something more than the information we consume and create, we are accelerating the end of the Information Age and clearing the ground for something new.
Of course, the end of the Information Age isn’t a particularly new or original concept. Just as Fitzgerald pre-dated, yet ultimately helped catalyze, society’s transition from the Industrial Age, so too have others observed and written about the post-Information Age.
“The transition from an industrial age to a post-industrial or information age has been discussed so much and for so long that we may not have noticed that we are passing into a post- information age…
In the post-information age, we often have an audience the size of one. Everything is made to order, and information is extremely personalized. A widely held assumption is that individualization is the extrapolation of narrowcasting–you go from a large to a small to a smaller group, ultimately to the individual. By the time you have my address, my marital status, my age, my income, my car brand, my purchases, my drinking habits, and my taxes, you have me–a demographic unit of one.
But the Information Age was surprisingly short. In an age of Wikipedia, powerful search engines, and forums loaded with insights from volunteers, information is truly becoming free (economically), and thus worth even less than agriculture or manufacturing. So what has replaced information as the source of value?
The answer is expertise. Because most activities offering a good return on investment require some rule-breaking–some challenge to assumptions, some paradigm shift–everyone looks for experts who can manipulate current practice nimbly and see beyond current practice. We are all seeking guides and mentors.
What’s fun is actually seeing the transition with your own eyes, rather than hearing or reading about it as an intellectual exercise.
Take a look around you, in your own life and work. You might be surprised how often you find yourself craving less information and culling the dead bits from your data (can you say “Spam Filter?” I knew you could.). As you do, savor the end of the Information Age and the beginning of something new…
Assuming they can deal with scaling at a Google or YouTube pace (and it looks like they probably can), their approach to multi-resolution experiences and automated image linking, extraction, & assimilation, truly changes what images mean on the web.
You might think of what they are doing as creating the visual Semantic Web.