The Great Seduction

On Genentech and lists

Summer's here and the tech magazines are full of lists. Business 2.0 just came out with a list of 50 PLAYERS WHO MATTER NOW. Wired countered with the 40 MOST WIRED COMPANIES.

Here's how the two top tens look:

PLAYERS                                                  COMPANIES

1. You                                                      Google
2. Sergei Brin & Larry Page                        Apple
3. Paul Jacobs (Qualcomm)                        Samsung
4. Rupert Murdoch                                     Genentech
5. Steve Jobs                                             Yahoo
6. Susan Desmond-Hellmann (Genentech)     Amazon
7. The Emerging Global Middle Class             Toyota
8. Fujio Cho (Toyota)                                   General Electric
9. The New Oil Despots                                 News Corp
10. Ray Ozzie                                                SAP

I'm struck my Genentech's prominence, both as #4 at Wired and #6 at Business 2.0. How can Susan Desmond-Hellmann, who is President of Product Development at Genentech, matter more than the CEO's of Microsoft, HP, Yahoo or News Corp? There's something a bit fishy here. Is it possible that the Genentech has slipped one of their new drugs into the tech press' collective watercooler?

Genentech is wired because:

Will biotech kill the blockbuster? Rather than aiming drugs at broad populations with scattershot results, Genentech is developing treatments for specific patient groups. Its success has Big Pharma reaching for the smelling salts.

While, Desmond-Hellman matters because:

While other drug companies chase the balding and the erectile-challenged, Desmond-Hellmann keeps biotech pioneer Genentech focused on creating drugs that make the difference between life and death. She spent years battling AIDS in Uganda and cancer in Kentucky as both a physician and a medical researcher, and those experiences have done much to shape Genentech's current priorities. Thus far, she's overseen the clinical trials and approvals of such successes as Avastin (colon cancer) and Tarceva (lung cancer). She's also shepherding in a new era of patient-targeted treatments with Herceptin (a breast cancer treatment that works best on women who carry a specific pattern of genes) and ensuring that Genentech's pipeline includes promising treatments for ovarian cancer and basal skin cancer. Genentech is already hailed as a pioneer, but if Desmond-Hellmann can turn cancer into a manageable disease, she may well earn a place in the history books alongside the likes of Jonas Salk.

But who is going to pay for Desmond-Hellmann/Genentech's wonder AIDS drugs in Uganda? Not the impoverished African AIDS victims. And certainly not Genentech who aren't in the business of giving away their products for free.

No, that money will come from philanthropic foundations, particularly the Gates Foundation, with its magnificently generous commitment to AIDS research in Africa. And where does Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett and his Foundation come in the two polls? Gates is #21 in Who Matters Now, while neither Melinda Gates or Warren Buffett aren't in the top 50. Meanwhile the Gates Foundation, with its $60 billion war chest and commitment to change the world, doesn't appear anywhere on the Wired 40.

So, as lists go, these lists don't get on my list. Maybe Wired's list isn't all that wired; maybe  Business 2.0's list doesn't really matter.

Porn doesn't pay

In an April post about Veoh, an online video-sharing service distinguished by having Michael Eisner as an investor, I  asked:

How is Veoh different from YouTube and the various other me-too video technology start-ups now littering Silicon Valley? All are premised on the idea that video-amateurs like posting their work on the Internet. Some have more users than others, but there appears to be no significant difference between them.

Well, I was wrong. Veoh was different from other online video-sharing services, such as YouTube or Google Video, in one significant way. Veoh was willing to host porn, whereas the others weren't.

But Veoh's decision to allow pornographic content on its site has been, so-to-speak, rear-ended. The so-called "adult entertainment" company Io Group have filed a lawsuit against Veoh, saying that videos owned by the porn company were being broadcasted, without their consent, in the "adult category" of Veoh.

I don't usually support the ethics of the pornography business, but here I have to commend Io Group's lawsuit. These porn guys are absolutely correct to go after Veoh and I hope this is the first in a succession of expensive lawsuits against video-sharing companies. Copyrighted content is copyrighted content, whether it's tasteless or not, and it doesn't surprise me that it is the well funded and litagatious porn companies who are now leading the clampdown on online intellectual theft. So here's to Io Group stripping Veoh of all its assets.

Poor old Michael Eisner. First he gets thrown out of Disney, then he invests in a me-too video sharing site and now Veoh is being sued for showing other people's porn. How lame is that?

So, for once, porn doesn't pay. At least for Veoh and Michael Eisner. And speaking of asset stripping, one suitable ending to this rather pathetic tale would be spank Michael for his stupidity and then broadcast the video on The Great Seduction. But, on second thoughts, that might not be so smart. Io Group could sue me for stealing their content.

Anti social contracts

The withering of the traditional state continues. Warren Buffett's $31 billion "gift" to the Gates Foundation exceeds the entire US government's annual spending on foreign development and humanitarian assistance. And Gates and Buffett's cash together ($60 billion) places the Gates Foundation somewhere between the $87 billion GDP of Slovakia and the $43 GDP billion of Slovenia. It isn't absurd now to imagine an American philanthropic organization actually acquiring a small African country in the same way as Second Life allows its members to acquire new plots of virtual land.

So what's really going on here? Instead of being taxed by the state, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are redirecting their wealth to their own private philanthropic organizations. The world is fragmenting into an ever increasingly hyperpolar place in which governments just another participant in the order of things. Some of that money I spent on Windows 2000 is now going to solving the malaria epidemic in Africa. I'm not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing. But it certainly is one explanation of why smart, ambitious people go into business rather than politics.

Such an anarchic environment lends itself to the antics of mercurial philanthropists like Larry Ellison who yesterday withdrew his $115 million committed to Harvard University because of Larry Summer's resignation from the university. Ellison's action is the equivalent of refusing to pay one's taxes after a change in government. Just as the globally minded Gates is the most acceptable face of the new digital plutocracy, so the anti social Ellison epitomizes the narcissistic amorality of too many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

The modern state arose in the 17th and 18th centuries in parallel with the social contract theories of Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke. All these theorists made sense of a social contract in the context of a geographically defined, physical community of people. But in an America where the privileged and the poor are living separate lives and where the wealth of the globalized rich eventually gets diverted via philanthropic foundations to Africa or Asia, what exactly does it mean to share a common nationality? The Hobbesian/Lockean version of the social contract is one of the most serious casualties of our descent into hyperpolarity. What, I wonder, will replace contract theory in a world where allegiance is increasingly symbolic and arbitrary.

Bismarck, the iPod and the crowd

Chris Lydon hosted a great Radio Open Source show today about the digital crowd featuring a conversation between James Surowiecki and Jaron Lanier. This is one the most salient issues in the Web 2.0 debate and Lydon should be commended for the wisdom of his choice of both subject and speakers. Not only did Wisdom of the Crowd Surowiecki and "Digital Maoism" Lanier take quite different ideological positions on the value of the digital crowd, but they also displayed contrary intellectual styles and media identities.

Lanier, who is a much wiser writer and thinker than speaker, sounded muddled, especially about his pet peeve of anonymous postings on Wikipedia. I heard Lanier speak a couple of months ago at Berkeley's Cybersalon and I also left that performance with more questions than answers. Then, as now, he manifests a frustrating mix of retreatist apologia and repressed polemical passion. He laughs nervously, says "you know" way too often for such a smart guy, and never fully articulates a position. Lanier brings out the psychoanalyst in me. I'm not sure if he needs to be hugged or beaten. When he speaks, I want to figure out what he's really thinking.

New Yorker writer Surowiecki, on the other hand, was clear, smooth and generally wrong. I found his signature position on the importance of crowd logic within organizations to be particularly unconvincing. Surowiecki argued that the wisdom of the crowd is especially valuable within large corporate and political organizations. My counter argument would be the example of Apple. What would have happened had the company, in the late Nineties, sought the direct input of employees on its strategic direction? It's hard to imagine that this would have resulted in the iPod, and Apple's historic second coming as a media company. The same is true of Virgin under Branson and Microsoft under Gates. In today's dynamic business environment, large enterprises need innovative, decisive leaders willing to take risks. The larger the organization, the greater the need for singular leadership. This is my unfashionably undemocratic Bismarck/Jobs theory of organizational success. It is only great men like Otto Von Bismarck and Steve Jobs who can unify Germany or create the iPod. The purpose of the crowd is to applaud politely from the sidelines.

Rather than evil or dangerous, I think the sum of the online crowd is simply dull, inoffensive and confused. The yawningly bland content on Wikipedia, a product of consensual "democratic" decision-making, is the best evidence of this. Individuals can think clearly; crowds don't think, they  compromise. Distinguished individuals dream up the iPod or unite Germany; the best that crowds can do, in contrast, is come up with colorless, consensual Wikipedian entries on the iPod and on the unification of Germany.

Don't read Henry Jenkins

Here is a new book that I definitely will neither read nor buy. Henry Jenkins, professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, has just written a book entitled Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press). This is the what Mr Jenkins identifies as the "key" passage from the book's introduction:

Reduced to its most core elements, this book is about the relationship between three concepts – media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence....By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted. Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes, depending on who’s speaking and what they think they are talking about. In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms. Right now, convergence culture is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms. It is shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of consumers to have the media they want where they want it, when they want it, and in the format they want....

Can anyone tell me what this really means? All I really got from Mr Jenkins' thoroughly muddy (and muddily thorough) paragraph is that consumers, like birds, have "migratory behaviour" (ie: they go from one thing to another) and that "convergence" is a word that indicates broad technological, industrial, cultural and social change. I don't see much here about the "collision" of old or new media. Nor do I see much intelligence, collective or otherwise. The only clear thing here is confusion. It's a crowd of words chasing a coherent idea.

If Mr Jenkins thinks this paragraph will seduce us into buy his book, then I dread to think what the rest of the text is like. He'd be better off putting it all up on his new blog. Then, at least, people won't have to pay for it.

Mr Jenkins is not alone in publishing turgid work about digital media. I made the expensive ($40) mistake of buying Yale Law professor's Yochai Benkler's much hyped The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Even the titles of Mr Benkler's chapters are incomprehensible for a non academic audience. His penultimate chapter, for example, is entitled "The Battle over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment." This chapter occurs on page 383 of the text and anyone who manages to get beyond page 50 must either be one of Mr Benkler's students or Deborah Schrag, his wife, who, in his introduction, he identifies as his "tag-team partner."

The sad thing is that Mr Jenkins and Mr Benkler are gentlemen who lecture at MIT and Yale. I dread to think what they are teaching their students about lucidity and clarity. I urge them both to read Orwell's essay "Politics and English Language." Clarity, chaps, is everything. Thoroughness is for the (migratory) birds. I urge you to be brief. If you can't explain your idea in a few words, then it's not much of an idea. Read, for example, Nietzsche on thoroughness (The Gay Science, # 231):

"Thorough -- Those slow in knowledge suppose that slowness belongs to knowledge."

Business 2.0's social contract

Have those erudite editors of Business 2.0 magazine been reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau?

In its July 2006 issue, Business 2.0 asks who are the 50 people who matter in the information economy. So who is top, the guy who matters most? Instead of Jobs or Schmidt or Ozzie, the answer is "you":

"You -- or rather, the collaborative intelligence of tens of millions of people, the networked you -- continually create and filter new forms of content, anointing the useful, the relevant, and the amusing and rejecting the rest."

Yes, that's you -- the "networked you". It is everyone who is reading this, everyone who is on the Internet, everyone who has added their particular will to the collective digital intelligence. So what is the sum of all these individual digital wills? This aggregation is the general digital will. It is the collective desire of the online community.

But what happens if I don't like the end result of this collaborative intelligence? What happens if the top rated articles or videos on Reddit, YouTube, Digg aren't to my taste? What happens if the content that the "networked you" deems useful is not useful to me?

in his 1762 book Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had a very similar idea to the sum of the "networked you." Rousseau called this the "General Will". It is his very flawed theory of democracy:

"Each one of us puts into the community his person and all his powers the supreme direction of the general will; and, as a body, we incorporate every member as an indivisible part of the whole."

According to Rousseau, this general will is always "rightful and always tends to the public good." Thus, in Rousseau's famous words, the general will "forces us to be free." Even if we don't agree with the general will, we have to accept that it represents the interest of the majority and is, in a peculiar way, in our own interest. A more pejorative term for Rousseau's theory is the tyranny of the majority.

So almost 250 years after Rousseau wrote his Social Contract, we are back with with his general will. This is Business 2.0's "networked you," the tyranny of an all-wise collective digital intelligence. It is what Jaron Lanier correctly identifies as Digital Maoism.

So the Internet, which was supposed to be about me, turns out to be about you. The Ministry of Truth's Doublespeak is back. Rather than Rousseau, the editors at Business 2.0 might have been better off reading Orwell.

One word equity

I'm not sure if Saatchi and Saatchi co-founder Maurice Saatchi is familiar with the concept of the attention economy, but his op ed in Friday's Financial Times made the advertising icon sound as if he'd just been listening to attention economy expert Michael Goldhaber.

In the piece, entitled "The strange death of modern advertising," Saatchi composes an obituary for his own industry:

The funeral rites have been observed. The gravediggers have done their work. The mourners are assembled. Most of them are embarrassed to say they ever knew the deceased. "Advertising?" they say, "I'm not in that business."

Saatchi might have been reading Oxford university neuroscientist Susan Greenfield too. He tells us that the media world is now divided between digital natives and digital immigrants. The natives are all under 25 years old, he tells us. These natives are multi-taskers. They can simultaneously watch, play, interact, talk, listen and read. According to Saatchi, these digital natives suffer from an affliction called continuous partial attention (CPA):

The latest affliction, according to neuroscience - and this was the death knell - is that the digital native's brain is physically different as a result of the digital input it received growing up. It has rewired itself. It responds faster. It sifts out. It recalls less.

CPA is killing the advertising industry, Saatchi say. Thus his obituary. Not only is there more and more media information, but the digital native is less able to remember any of it. So the only way for a company to gain attention is to establish "public ownership of one word." Saatchi calls this one word equity.

One-word equity... Google owns "search", Apple owns "innovation", I own "seduction".

Welcome to the brave new world of collective attention deficit disorder. A place where nobody can remember anything except single words. And where brands fight over those words so that they can imprint themselves onto the shrivelled brains of consumers.

Seduction, seduction, seduction. That's mine. What's yours?

My Space, your kids

Amidst all the furor about sexual predators on My Space, I fear we are missing the real story about childen on the Internet. Yes, as the FT report this week, our kids are probably slightly vulnerable to pedophiles on popular social networking sites. That's the easy part. But we should stop obsessing over this imaginary epidemic of online perverts and look at the increasingly antisocial behaviour of our own children.

The real issue is the impact that both old and new media is having on the mental and physical life of our kids. The Independent newspaper ran a piece this week entitled "Mental health: Children on the edge" in which it reports behavioural disorders amongst British children under the age of 15 have doubled over the past 30 years.

Among the sharpest increases in behavioural conditions are attention deficit disorder and various kinds of conduct disorders. According to the David Skuse, a professor of brain and behavioural science at the Institute of Child Health in London, the most serious increase have been in "non-aggressive" conduct disorders such as stealing, lying and disobedience.

Whilst one cannot, of course, blame the Internet for the rise of these disorders, I am not confident that the increasing popularity of online media amongst kids will make things any better. Indeed, given the libertarian atmosphere of the Web, the ease of online scams and invented identities, and the mental compulsiveness of the online environment, one could argue that the digital revolution will only compound these behavioural problems.

In an April 2006 speech in the British House of Lords, Dame Susan Greenfield, a Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford University, spoke about the hallucinatory nature of online culture.:

"I am sure that many parents and grandparents would welcome hard statistics on critical factors such as hours spent in front of a screen, critical age ranges, mitigating influences of other activities, and above all what abilities such as creativity may now be lost and what may now be gained with this new way of processing information compared to those of us educated in the last century. Perhaps the increase in prevalence of hyperactivity might be explained by sustained exposure to an unsupervised IT environment where only short attention spans were ever needed and where the child had no way of practising long periods of paying attention. That is a speculative idea but one that I think should at least be tested....I am not proposing that we become IT Luddites but rather that we could be stumbling into a powerful technology, the impact of which we understand poorly at the moment. The new technologies are also convergent, embracing not only screen culture but drug culture.

Greenfield's connection between attention disorders, hyperactivity and drug culture amongst children is particularly ominous. Aldous Huxley predicted a society of the psychologically dysfunctional more than a century ago. We are now staring this brave new world in the face. And all we seem to want to do is obsess over sexual predators on My Space.

 

 

Narrative non-fiction in Berkeley

At Harvard's Neiman journalism conference last year, Tom Wolfe argued that narrative non-fiction naturally attracted all the best contemporary American writers. Reality in America today, he said, was so remarkable, so absurd, that no fiction writer, however talented, could ever invent it.

Wolfe is right. I can personally verify it.

I live near downtown Berkeley (on Carleton at Milvia). At around lunchtime today, I was disturbed by the screech of a car chase. Then there was a huge crash, the sound of crunched metal, followed by the official wails of the police. I ran up to my first floor balcony that overlooks the street. I had a front row seat on the unfolding drama. I settled down to watch.

A gang of crouching Berkeley cops had surrounded a mud colored minivan that sat immobilized besides a lampost. Their guns were all drawn. There must have been about ten of them, a number quickly inflated by reinforcements, some arriving in cars, others on bicycles (this is Berkeley, after all). I could hear screaming from inside the van. Cops, guns, injured angry criminals, cars, and bicycles. It really was better than tv since I could watch the drama without advertisements, TiVo style.

But it wasn't just me obsessed with electronic media. The military stand-off continued. The cops waved their guns at the crumpled van. Then the window of the driver's side rolled down. I could see a young woman, a hugely fat thing, jabbering on her cell phone. Every so often, she would get off the phone and swear at the cops.

"Motherfuckers," she shouted at them, nonchalantly, without much civic virtue. I assumed she was from Oakland. They don't respect the cops much over there.

"Get out of the van," the Berkeley police screamed back at her.

I guessed terrorism, or at least homicide. Judging from palava, somebody must have been killed. After all, this was Berkeley, the home of politically correct policemen (and women). Surely this wasn't a regular lunchtime entertainment, triggered by something really sinister like not paying one's cellular bill or failing to stop for a disabled pedestrian.

Eventually, the Berkeley cops, their guns still drawn, succeeded in getting her out the van. The woman, in shorts and a tank top, waddled out of the vehicle, still talking on the phone. I wondered if she was talking to her lawyer, her boyfriend or her mother. Maybe she worked for Sprint or maybe she sold telephone sex. It was hard to tell. But she certainly was attached to that cellular telephone.

"Drop it!" the cops screamed.

"Fuck you," she replied. But she eventually dropped her phone. I guess she had no choice. I heard it clatter on the asphalt. I've never hard a phone sound so physical. I imagined its clatter resembling a gun.

The stand-off continued. Eventually, the cops persuaded another of the women to evacuate the van. She was an even fatter creature than the first. But less Patty Hearst, more Ross Dress For Less. Outfitted in a pink, skin tight tracksuit. And phoneless. She didn't even have a BlackBerry.

But now the story took a truly bizarre turn. Judging from the armored battalion now surrounding the crashed van, I was guessing that a crack cell of Al Quaeda hard men, fresh out of Ramadi or Fallujah, would burst out of the van and, instead of the Battle of Algiers, we'd have the battle of Berkeley taking place beneath my balcony. My own personalized, Web 2.0 style real-time media.

But no such luck. As the cops surrounded the van, their guns drawn, the door of the van swung open. There was only one person left in the minivan. A young girl in thick spectacles and pigtails, she couldn't have been more than eight or nine years old, emerged. She was screaming and running and flailing all at the same time. But she didn't have a cell phone. Nor was she very fat.

She seemed to have stumbled into this drama from another show. Why were half the cops in Berkeley going after this little girl?

As Tom Wolfe might have commented, had he been able to join me on my Berkeley balcony to watch this spectacle unfold, it was more intriguing than fiction. I only wish I owned a camcorder. Then I could have put the whole thing on YouTube for all of our entertainment. I could have even recorded a live commentary and podcast it on my own afterTV.

Where have you gone, Neil Postman?

In his authoritative foreword to the incomparable Amusing Ourselves to Death(1985), Neil Postman juxtaposes the dystopian fears of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four:

-- What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.
-- What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book.
-- Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.
-- Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be    reduced to passivity and egoism.
-- Orwell feared that the turth would be concealed from us.
-- Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
-- Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
-- Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

Postman assumes an either/or. Either our entertainment saturated world was headed for Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's brave new world. But had Postman not died in 2003 and could now critique the Web 2.0 world of personalized democratic media, I think he would be contemplating something quite the opposite -- a future that simultaneously conformed to both Orwell and Huxley's dystopias.

Take the impact of Google, the Web 2.0 phenomenon par excellence. On the one hand, Google has flattened knowledge into an advertisement riddled trashheap of irrelevant information. That's the Brave New World part. On the other hand, Google's intimate knowledge of our desires, its personalized database of human intentions derived from what each of us feeds into the ubiquitous search engine, is the Web 2.0 version of Orwell's Big Brother.

At the end of this foreward, Postman argues that "Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."

But what happens if we simultaneously love and hate technologies like Google and, more importantly, that Google simultaneously loves and hates us? What happens if we become so addicted to Google's convenience and wisdom that, even though we know it's dangerous, we can't give it up. Then is our ruin doubled?