Purposive Drift

Obsession by another name

Calling Mark Pesce's blog a blog is a bit misleading. He writes thoughtful essays. Essays that are worth reading very carefully and packed with ideas that deserve equally thoughtful reflection. This is one blog, like Grant McCracken's and Marc Andreessen's, where mining the archives carries rich rewards.

I give you this extract, that particularly took my fancy, from a post on Wikis as taster, but urge you to explore the rest of the site for even more intellectual nourishment:

"Everyone is an expert. From a toddler, expert in the precarious balance of towering wooden blocks, to a nanotechnologist, expert in the precarious juxtaposition of atom against atom, everyone has some field of study wherein they excel – however esoteric or profane it might seem to the rest of us. The hows and whys of this are essential to human nature; we’re an obsessive species, and our obsessions can form around almost any object which engages our attentions. Most of these obsessions seem completely natural, in context: a Pitjandjara child learns an enormous amount about the flora and fauna of the central Australian desert, knows where to find water and shade, can recite the dreamings which place her within the greater cosmos. In the age before agriculture, all of us grew up with similar skills, each of us entirely obsessed with the world around us, because within that obsession lay the best opportunity for survival. Those of our ancestors who were most apt with obsession (up to a point) would thrive even in the worst of times, passing those behaviors (some genetic, some cultural) down through time to ourselves. But obsession is not a vestigial behavior; the entire bedrock of civilization is built upon it: specialization, that peculiar feature of civilization, where each assumes a particular set of duties for the whole, is simply obsession by another name."

Coming back from the shop without any milk

I have been meaning to get hold of a copy of Gary Marcus's "Kludge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind" ever since I read about it in Neuroanthropology. I may be wrong, but I suspect that there may be some strong connections to to some of ideas I have been exploring in purposive drift.

In the meantime (again thanks to Neuroanthropology) here is Marcus's take on why we often find ourselves doing something different (and often seemingly stupid) from what we planned:

"In the mental machinery that governs our everyday decisions, kluges abound. Take, for example, the scenario described in the beginning of the essay -- the fellow who forgets his errand on the way home. His problem is clearly not in finding his way to the grocery store -- it's in remembering to go in the first place.

Alas, evolution didn't have the foresight to realize that different kinds of tasks require different kinds of memory, and it used the same basic sort of memory for everything, not just for remembering what lions and tigers look like (in which general tendencies suffice) but also for cases -- like tracking our goals -- where a bit more precision would have been helpful. As a result, trying to remember what to do next can be a little like trying to remember what you had for breakfast yesterday: There are too many breakfasts and too many yesterdays for our biological memories to keep track of."

Virginmedia: A postscript

I'd given up on getting through to Virginmedia's broadband support and was settling down to an afternoon nap (Yes, regular readers, the aftermath of the Bell's Palsy while much better still continues) when I heard a knock on my door. To my amazement it was a couple of guys from Virginmedia, who had come to install a new cable. Maybe there is hope for them after all. I'll keep you posted.

A classic case of failure demand

I'm having one of those glorious consumer mornings.

It began with an e-mail I received last night:

"Thanks for getting in touch about an issue with your Virgin Media service.

Please accept my sincere apologies for the current issue you are experiencing.

I've checked into your account and found that my colleague attempted to call you at 14.40 on the date you stated but that there was no answer. If you are still having problems with the services, I'd suggest you call into our broadband support line as, due to our being a dedicated e-mail response team, I'm unable to arrange a technician visit by e-mail. To do this you'd need to call 0906 212 1111 (calls cost 25p/min+10p connection fee, costs from mobiles and other networks may vary, but in the case of a Virgin Media fault we always refund the cost of the call).

If there's anything else we can help with, please let us know."

So this morning I tried to ring. Nobody picked up the phone. I rang again. And so on.

In frustration, I composed a reply to the e-mail I had received:

"Would be great to follow you advice and ring the broadband support line, unfortunately there seems to be nobody on the end of the line. (I started trying get through shortly after 9.00, it is now nearly 10.15. Meanwhile I have had another weekend with no broadband connection and no on-demand services on the TV.

My biggest frustration is that this has been going on for months and one of your smart, very impressive young technicians identified the problem months ago - the way we are wired up to your main box in the street means that we do not get a strong enough signal. This was confirmed by another bright young man who came last week. The problem seems to be that while you have some very able people on the ground their messages are not getting through higher up so that the necessary corrective action can be taken.

The absurdity of this is that not only do you end up with a frustrated customer, who is beginning to wonder why he is paying Virginmedia over £1200 a year for a sub-standard service, but it is also costing you money in terms of calls to support (when I can get through) and unnecessary technician visits."

And received this reply:

"IMPORTANT - your e-mail has not been delivered.

To contact Virgin Media, please complete the contact form on our web-site http://www.virginmedia.com"

Am I surprised when I see this in last Sunday's Observer:

"Virgin Media, in which Richard Branson holds a £240m stake, said in February that year-on-year losses increased from £88m to £163m, as a result of higher interest charges. Virgin Media's new chief executive, Neil Berkett, who took over from Steve Burch, said the company was concentrating on improving its broadband offering and reducing 'churn' - the number of customers leaving."

Not really.

Be careful what you throw away

Be careful what you throw away

Many years ago I lived on the edge of Islington nearest to the City in what some claimed was the smallest house in London. It had a kitchen about the size of my current kitchen table, a bathroom that was not much bigger, another reasonable sized room downstairs and upstairs there was one large studio room, with a huge window overlooking the gardens at the back.

The kitchen was largely free of paper. The bathroom usually had a couple of books, a newspaper and some magazines in it. But the other two rooms were piled high with paper, books, magazines and newspaper clippings.

Sadly, my partner Mimi doesn't share my enthusiasm for paper and when I moved in with her to the depths of Hackney most of the paper had to go. Her argument was, "You can always find it in a library."

This I discovered was untrue.

When my then colleague Liz McQuiston was researching her book "Graphic Agitation" she would often mention that she was looking for a particular copy of an underground magazine without success and I would remember it sitting in my collection - a collection tragically dumped when the College I had donated it to decided they would clear the room where it had been archived to make more teaching space.

Even now I still get flashbacks to that collection. I was writing a piece about the Sixties and how at the time I had been pretty snotty about much of what going on and wanted to reference a piece written by Raymond Durgnat, which I knew once had but no longer did. I remembered that he was being critical about much of the sloppiness in thinking and execution that characterised many in the underground or alternative society. The bit that stuck in my mind went something to the effect of, "There are two ways, the easy way and the hard way. The easy way isn’t easy and the hard way is bloody hard". Of course, I haven't been able to find it on-line, so, for the moment, it remains an echo in my memory.

(Curiously, the point I was trying make in the unfinished piece I was writing was that although I was snotty at the time, in retrospect the period I think of as being the Sixties, which ran from some point in the mid-Sixties to somewhere in the mid point of the Seventies was more fruitful and productive than I had realised while it was happening. Durgnat and I may have been right to feel critical of the sloppiness, but what we failed to recognise was that the sloppiness was the price for the festival of ideas and possibilities that was being generated. I guess I, at least, was taking that for granted only to see the fear of freedom generated by the festival take over as economies fell into the phenomenon we called stagflation. As the fear took over, categories hardened, people moved back to old positions and the conceptual and creative space contracted. And yet, if we look carefully we can see much of the world we live in today had its origins in the ideas and experiments of that time. It's just that some of that took a long time to work through the system. Reading through the various looking back at Sixty Eight pieces that are popping up now, I am struck by how much of the important stuff has got lost or forgotten and what has remained is essentially superficial and transitory. Perhaps this is another example of "be careful of what you throw away. (To bracket within a bracket - I have a very strong sense that if you were to look at that time like the waste from an old mine you would find that there was still much valuable ore amongst the rubbish that while not realisable then would now seem fresh, doable and pertinent to the world we face today))

But to return to my narrower theme. Now we are in the process of trying to sell our house - it seemed like a good idea a year or so ago - I am again under instructions to dispose of at least some of my accumulated paper. In the process of throwing away some magazines, wrapped in plastic at the back of a cupboard, thinking if I haven't looked at them for years I might as well get rid of them, I discovered a copy of the very last New Society.

New Society was a great quirky weekly magazine (originally seen as a kind of social science equivalent of the New Scientist) which featured some great writers such as Reyner Banham, Colin MacInnes, Laurie Taylor, Peter Hall, John Berger, Angela Carter, Ray Gosling, George Melly, Simon Frith, Colin Ward and others I will remember after I have posted this piece. (New Society also has a special place in my heart because as well as opening up my young mind to ideas and people I might not otherwise encountered, it also was the first place I was published - a very short piece on the ferment in art schools going on at the time - somewhere in my piles of paper I still have a photocopy of the cheque I received - so, thank you Paul Barker, one of New Society's great editors, for my very first commission.)

It was seeing Michael Young's name on the cover that saved me from consigning this very special copy to the bin. It was Michael Young, who suggested the idea for the magazine to Timothy Raison, who had found the New Scientist. (A gem that that I have just discovered as I write in a fascinating history of the magazine by Steve Platt in this last issue.) I shouldn't have found this surprising for Michael Young was one of the most extraordinary social entrepreneurs, whose list of achievements makes the mind boggle - go and see for yourself.

However, it wasn't Michael Young's role as a social entrepreneur that saved this copy from the bin. It was his work as a sociologist, in particular some of his later work on time. As regular readers will know, one of my current pre-occupations is with the nature of time, particularly the Greek idea of Chronos and Chairos, which can loosely be translated as clock time as opposed to the right or appropriate time. So I was anxious to re-discover Michael Young's thinking on this matter.

What I had forgotten was that in the article in new Society Michael Young was not just talking about time, but also biology - as the blurb accompanying the article read, "Michael Young has been credited with being the first to propose a magazine called "New Society". If he is right in his new book that there is going to be a unification of the social and biological sciences, the magazine which in due course replace New Society will eventually be named "New Society and Biology""

Which, curiously, brings me to the roots of this piece. The other day I was flattered to find this web site recommended by Daniel Lende of Neuroanthropology along side Grant McCracken's This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics, which regular readers will know is an old favourite of mine and three others that were new to me, Open Range Anthropologist, The Restless Mind and Experientia.

With a little superficial digging I saw that Neuroanthropology was concerned about crossing the boundaries between cultural anthropology and the neurosciences:

"In general, cultural anthropology has not kept abreast of new research in the neurosciences so that our theory of culture does not sufficiently take into account what we now know about the brain. A more open exchange is likely to produce a cultural anthropology that is not only more scientifically plausible, but also much more scientifically engaged with those interested in cultural variation (although they might not call it that) in a host of fields."

So Greg Downey and Daniel Lende actually seem to be pushing forward the enterprise that Michael Young was advocating at the end of the Eighties. A link I wouldn't have seen if that copy of New Society had been put in the bin. Which, of course, was what got me thinking about, "be careful what you throw away". (A further question comes to mind, would I have then gone on to explore the site in so much detail had I not made that link? Maybe. But, certainly, having made that link encouraged me to explore the site in detail and to my delight found a cavern of riches, filled with ideas, suggestions and stimulating stuff, which will keep me busy and thinking for quite a while.)

Writing this piece has also surfaced some thoughts that have been bubbling around in my mind for a while. Back in the Sixties I thought of myself as a radical and I guess I still do. When we look around at the world there is clearly much that needs changing, but our hunger for change should be tempered by some humility and empathy. Our bright, clear visions for a better future too often do not take account of the seeming messiness and complexity of our world. In our eagerness to implement change we should pause occasionally and consider whether there maybe something valuable that in making our changes we are throwing away. So to all of us who see ourselves in the business of change I would extend this warning, be careful what you throw away, it may be more important than you imagine.

Expectation Design

The ever interesting Russell Davies has just written a piece on what he calls pre-experience design or expectation design, which is worth a long hard ponder. I think he may be on to something really important. Read it, spend some time mulling it and see what you think.

Useful idiots

Why am I reminded of Stalin's useful idiots who wrote about ballet in the cornfields while millions died in the purges and famines of the Soviet Union when I read stuff like this from Dominic Lawson and others of his ilk, "...we live in a system where wealth is allocated by the market place – which is to say, the accumulated decisions of millions of us, as consumers..."?

Just enough

Another gem from Grant McCracken talking about the trend to Just-Enough:

"In the case of an entrepreneur, "just enough" is about control.  Staying small(ish), staying private, supplying your own capital, all these mean calling your own shots.  Venture capitalists and Wall Street can drive someone else crazy.  The just enough entrepreneur can take his or her own chances.  When it comes time to choose between interesting and profitable, you can go with interesting.  Just enough in this case is about control."

A nice example of what he is talking about is David Heinemeier Hansson's talk at Paul Graham's Startup School at Stanford University, 9 April 2008. Watch the video and hear some sense.

Not fluffy bunnies

I had been planning to write a follow up to a piece I wrote about a year ago "Saving the Planet is easy", only to find that Jamais Cascio had already done it in an essay more elegant than mine would have been. (Thanks to John Naughton for the link) Here is the opening; read the rest:

"The grand myth of environmentalism is that it's all about saving the Earth.

It's not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves."

So let's say it one more time, " Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves", not about saving fluffy bunnies.