DANGER POINT

November 16th 2012

It only makes sense, considering that the Nexus 4 seems to lack LTE to make carriers happy, who would demand many more design + software changes to Google’s “pure” Android experience in exchange for LTE.

So, in the most Google-like of ways, they decided that if they couldn’t actually work with someone, they may as well go it their own way. Unfortunately, they are going to have to lose everything they built - especially their big market share - because the status quo demands that Google not have more control over Android devices than carriers do.

Why take on such a risky move? Because Google made a gambit that turned out to be a mistake. They decided that they would cede control in exchange for market share. Now that they’ve kicked butts at that, and it’s turning out to really only be profitable for Samsung, and it’s turning out to be kind of terrifyingly bad for Google’s project of refining and controlling the Android experience, they’ve had a change of heart. They want the control that would let them build an incredible Android device. And to do that, they need power.

So they’re thinking of building their own network to generate that clout. But they’ve got one big problem: while this network is getting off the ground, it will force them to cut their ties with the existing carriers. Adoption rates will plummet. Revenues for Android device manufacturers will plummet. Availability of Android devices will probably also plummet.

Which leaves Google with what clout, exactly? You might think that they’ve got a ton of existing Android users, and they must be valuable! Yeah, read: tons of customers locked into existing contracts, who are more device-agnostic than they are provider-agnostic. They will leave Android phones before they leave their existing wireless providers. Churn is about 0.84–2% per year depending on the carrier, but device replacements happen at a rate of closer to 50% per year, thanks to the 2-year contract. So, again, carriers have all the clout, and Google’s market share is a pyrrhic victory - a number that doesn’t matter to anyone’s bottom line.

Which really does underscore why they’d be building their own network: Android is essentially worthless to Google as it currently exists. By building their own network, where they’d eventually build up some sort of sticky subscriber base, and where they’d have the freedom to create a better Android phone, they would add a lot of value to the Android ecosystem.

This is ultimately a sign that Google’s moving away from having market share as a goal, and closer to having profitability as a goal. It’s a sign that Apple is winning in all the ways that matter, because Google is now pursuing their model. And it’s a model that Google is going to have to pay dearly for, despite all they’ve already spent on Android. They’re playing a new game now, and it’s not an easy one to win at.

(Source: bgr.com)

Posted at 9:45am and tagged with: android, apple, google, tech, writing,.

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The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported that Google has held talks with satellite television provider Dish Network (DISH) regarding the possibility of a venture that would see Google launch its own cellular network and compete directly with the likes of Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T).

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October 13th 2012

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From the famous-before-it-was-even-posted exposé by Adrian Chen on Violentacrez, reddit’s biggest troll and the creator of the now-banned r/jailbait.

Considering that the response of many reddit moderators (e.g. r/politics) had been to ban links to Gawker once they heard that Chen’s article would expose Violentacrez’ identity, you can see the tension between outrage and free speech finally sort of breaking, and giving away to censorship (of a very specific kind).

I guess this really means that Gawker trolled Reddit in the same way that Violentacrez did: Chen’s article pitted the same moral sense of outrage (though this time it’s outrage at the shaming of redditors) against the right to free speech. Except that this troll (re: a noun) had the opposite effect as when Violentacrez did it. Instead of standing for free speech, as reddit has tried desperately to for all the fucked up and ridiculous things that Violentacrez posted and moderated, redditors end up banning the source of discomfort - the publication that would have them turn inwards and think that maybe, just maybe, they don’t really (nor should they really) support free speech in the unconditional way they think they do.

And more than that, it shows that prominent reddit moderators stand for the integrity of their tribes above all other values. They are partisan to the extreme; what goes into reddit stays in reddit, and that even includes criticism. I’ve spent a decent amount of time on reddit to know that this is both the best and the worst thing about the site.

Redditors are incredibly self-aware and willing to consider complaints from the members of their subreddits - but not those from other sub-reddits or sites. They’re able to curate a set of links and upvote posts of relevance to the point that they are complete and fine-grained articulations of whole cultures (even if they sometimes exist only online). It’s also the problem: that this insularity, this sureness of the core tenets of identity that any online community requires if it’s to actually persist throughout the years, well, it’s shared by the subscribers of deeply troubling subreddits too. The power users of r/jailbait are just as committed to their cause as the members of r/shitredditsays.

And so reddit, the larger entity owned by Condé Nast, kinda deserves kudos. They invented a system that works really really really well. Shockingly well. It’s an amoral system for developing a culture, and it’s probably also good at encouraging myopia and insularity and so on, but in the end, it’s just a system with some flaws. Their governance of it is where they’re committing the real sin, and where the “free speech” meme originated, and where responsibility for what happens on a network as large but still as centralized as reddit can be found. They’ve successfully created a nexus of culture, a way to express and formalize and promote cultures, and now they ought to ask exactly which ones are morally reprehensible. Like subreddits, they ought to ask what behaviour will not be tolerated - and the Gawker issue shows that they just can’t hide behind the banner of free speech to take a pass on that question. They can’t just hide behind free speech when really they’re hiding behind a reddit exceptionalism: the idea that what’s upvoted, subscribed to, and promoted within an amoral system couldn’t possibly be immoral.

Posted at 12:49pm and tagged with: culture, free speech, gawker, online communities, reddit, writing,.

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A troll exploits social dynamics like computer hackers exploit security loopholes, and Violentacrez calmly exploited the Reddit hive mind’s powerful outrage machine and free speech values at the same time.

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October 5th 2012

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I figure there are a few things like happiness - things that should result from living the good life, and which we actually shouldn’t expect or demand, but rather just enjoy if (not when) they show up:

riches
love
things I’ve ordered off of etsy or kickstarter

Source: NYT

Posted at 4:17pm and tagged with: writing,.

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Happiness should be serendipitous, a by-product of a life well lived, and pursuing it in a vacuum doesn’t really work. This is borne out by a series of slightly depressing statistics. The most likely customer of a self-help book is a person who has bought another self-help book in the last 18 months. The General Social Survey, a prominent data-based barometer of American society, shows little change in happiness levels since 1972, when such records began.

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September 26th 2012

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More from the HBR. Trying to crack Generation Y (my generation, for the record) isn’t something I’m to ever try in a blog post, but here’s what I’ve got a problem with:

Calling someone ‘entitled’ is a really easy way to avoid changing anything.

It’s a great way to avoid making a more responsive business. It’s a great way to avoid making jobs that are rewarding, provide a clear path to yet more substantial positions, and are appealing to a generation that hasn’t really known much economic success in recent years.

Calling someone ‘entitled’ is a get-out-of-jail free card, and so you should be careful about how you use it. That being said, there are some things you should worry about. Do you take credit for work others have done? Do you expect to be treated better than your coworkers despite not being as experienced, as capable, as people you work with? This article notes that it can happen, especially if “they’ve been led to believe, perhaps through overzealous self-esteem building exercises in their youth, that they are somehow special,” even if they “often lack any real justification for this belief.”

So here we are at the intersection of irrational self-esteem and entitlement. There is very much a problem there. But it’s not fair to stick a whole generation with it.

My generation’s problem is that there really is a whole lot of doing to be done, and a whole lot of resistance and antipathy towards actually doing it within the systems, organizations, and companies that preceded us. Part of it is the old challenge of learning how to marshall political and social clout to yield changes you want, and that’s fun to learn in the workplace. Go make some mistakes on that end. But! There’s a generational problem here too. A couple generations ago, the people who got added responsibility were the ones who had been there the longest.

I can’t wait that long. I never have waited that long to do what I care about, and anyone who has ever tried to convince me to wait hasn’t really gotten through to me. Fortunately, my history of just doing things has at this point gotten me to a job where I can just do stuff. I feel entitled to a challenge, and that turns out to have been exactly the ticket to a challenging job (for it was my entitlement that led me to get experience that counted).

Anyway, back to passion, which a lot of gen Yers will use as a cover for not actually caring about their job: “I’m not passionate about it, yo.” That’s a fine answer, but don’t you ever get the sneaking feeling that you have no idea what your passions are?

The source article makes a really excellent point about passion: it’s not something you develop out of nowhere. It takes a long and winding road. I had no idea what I wanted to do even a year ago, but I had done some hard work in developing basic ideas about what I enjoy, so I followed those. Some didn’t work (and man were there some spectacular failures), and others did. In the end, I got a more concrete idea of what actually mattered to me - and that’s really only something you can do by trial and error.

Don’t expect to be magically fulfilled until you are self-aware enough to know what a good job means to you - and be concerned if you can only say how many dollars, vacation days, and other perks you’d like from it. From the article: “When I studied people who love what they do for a living, I found that in most cases their passion developed slowly, often over unexpected and complicated paths. It’s rare, for example, to find someone who loves their career before they’ve become very good at it — expertise generates many different engaging traits, such as respect, impact, autonomy — and the process of becoming good can be frustrating and take years.”

You’re entitled to follow that road - and even to stop going down a path you don’t care about. You don’t deserve to get to the end without the work, though. That would mean you’d miss all the fun.

Posted at 4:42pm and tagged with: entitled, entitlement, generation y, millenials, writing,.

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The New York Post called us “The Worst Generation,” while USA Today noted that we are “pampered” and “high maintenance.” Earlier this year, a New York Times op-ed called us “Generation Why Bother,” noting that we’re “perhaps…too happy at home checking Facebook,” when we could be out aggressively seeking new jobs and helping the economy recover. The fact that up to a third of 25-34 year-olds now live with their parents only supports these gripes.

To many, the core problem of this generation is clear: we’re entitled.

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September 7th 2012

Philosophy and tech startups go pretty well together

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I’m a philosophy grad. I mostly cared about analytic philosophy, especially the philosophy of science, but also the philosophy of race. I decided to study philosophy because it seemed to be the closest thing to what I did in high school: argue.

I argued incessantly on forums, chatrooms, comment threads, and my first period sciences sociales class with Mr. Mitchell. I argued there in French, and I did it for 5 minutes a day at least. I tried my damndest to communicate my opinions, and after five years of doing that, I could speak the language pretty decently.

My need to argue has helped me learn a lot of things - including how not to argue, and to instead be fair to someone’s point. But there’s one skill that has become especially important in my life, and which is serving me incredbily well at my new job at a tech startup called GoInstant. It’s the ability to find counterexamples.

Counterexamples
In philosophy, especially in earlier classes, basically all you do is analyze an argument until you understand how it fails to account for one very obvious, very important thing: a state of affairs we call a ‘counterexample.’ It’s simply the one state of affairs that shows the argument your interlocutor is making must be inadequate in some way. When Callicles says that the best people are the strongest people, Socrates points out that the masses are pretty strong, and they do some pretty horrible shit. Bam. Counterexample.

The development process is awfully similar, except the states of affairs that you’re hunting aren’t called counterexamples: they’re called bugs. And the uncovering of bugs is the challenge that keeps developers busy.

At GoInstant, we have an unbelievably enormous project: we’ve got to make our software work on the entire web. Every single webpage should work within our browser, and if one doesn’t, we have to figure out how to do make it work, so that that one state of affairs will be covered by our code.

The greatest good for the greatest number
Except, of course, it’s not that simple. It’s not just as simple as finding all the bugs, all the states of affairs in which our software doesn’t work. Instead, we must first decide: what is most important? 2nd most? 3rd most? etc. etc. ad nauseum.

There’s a normative project behind every single app that has been ever designed: what matters most, given that we have limited time and money to put towards the project? It is the question that fuels all design decisions, for anything. It is the question whose answer separates great products from awful ones. It is the question I intend to spend the rest of my life answering, because it is that complicated and nuanced and fucking cool to work on.

Good answers for the hardest question
This question is a question of what good design really is. There are a lot of answers, but there’s only one way to solve it: find counterexamples. And these counterexamples are states of affairs in which human beings are using an app* and finding it wanting, unable to fulfill its purpose as well as it should (to borrow some more normative terms).

But the complicated thing is that for a design to matter, it also has to be just one thing in an ecosystem of creation: an ecosystem that makes yet more wonderful things. It has to be the product of a deeply talented team, because it’s not easy to make that one thing. It has to generate revenue to power every stage of its development and creation. It’s an organism that’s created and which can give the power to create, and that’s kind of awesome.

Finding a niche
It’s also unbelievably rare. If it grows and has any staying power, it is because it occupied a niche that was brought about from the combination of available technology, models of commerce, political dynamics, and social trends at a particular time and place. To read those signs well is impossible; it’s easier to just occupy the time and place and see what it is that you’ll find yourself needing in five years time. That is to say, it’s always a crap shoot.

There’s someone, or a group of someones, in the design process who will have to make the tough decisions about their little organism. They’ll have to see the connections between commerce and possibility and usefulness and human need, the ones who’ll have to tinker with their creation until it fits. After that, they’ll have to do everything they can to make everyone else aware of those connections. That latter part - the making aware of - is called marketing. Everything before it is product management - or intelligent design, if you think of designers as the sort of god figures of this weird ecological analogy.

So what do you do if you have an idea? To turn it into anything important, you need to do more than just make it a physical object or a collection of lines of code. Importance is determined by how it fares. You need to find out where it sits, and you need to get it there. If there is no spot for it, or if it bleeds money while crossing a desert in search of an oasis, then shit. You’re out of luck, this time. I hope you didn’t risk too much, and I hope you can still change it enough so that it can thrive, somewhere. Probably not where you expected, though.

There’s always the rare possibility that you find the spot for your app, and it grows and flourishes and makes everything that nurtured it just all the stronger for having gotten it to this point. It’s not something that happens often, and a lot of the time, it’s less about being the perfect solution than it is about just having been good enough for the time and place. Until, of course, the perfect solution comes along.

There’s a problem with perfect, though. Nothing that evolved has ever been perfect. And no theory is immune to counterexamples. As long as those two things are true, and they always will be, opportunity can be found. Apps can be made, and can thrive. The universe will keep spinning, and entropy will gather in the practiced hands of an unusual, unpredictable force.

*I’m just gonna use app as shorthand for anything that can be used by a person, ever.

Posted at 10:23pm and tagged with: apps, counterexamples, development, lean development, philosophy, tech, tech startups, writing,.

September 2nd 2012

The new rules of gamification

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1. The basic unit of a game is time. All value reduces to this unit.

2. Not all time is equally valuable.

2. Not everything motivates equally.

3. Not everyone is motivated by the same things equally.

4. All other things being equal, motivation is an output that’s proportional to how much effort you put in.

4b. The trophy doesn’t matter, but the effort behind it does.

5. Cooperation is its own motivation.

6. A reward’s value ought to be just a little bit more than the cost to secure it. A reward’s cost is therefore also a function of its value: it shouldn’t be so challenging (read: costly in time) that people regularly abandon its pursuit, but it shouldn’t be so cheap that just anyone could do it immediately.

6b. The function that determines a reward’s cost and value should be fairly consistent across the game. Otherwise, you end up making a time arbitrage minigame that doesn’t enhance the user’s experience in meaningful ways.

7. Forget the neuropsychology of motivation and learn about the art of telling a story.

Posted at 1:07am and tagged with: badges, foursquare, games, gamification, tech, writing,.

August 13th 2012

Peter Thiel vs. Eric Schmidt on the 'role of technology,' whatever that means

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Though they’re ostensibly on either side of the debate, these two dudes have a lot in common. Here’s a couple things I’d dispute in their accounts:

1. Technological progress isn’t necessarily or inherently good, moral, or even useful.

2. Government as it exists may be a broken system, but maybe it’s also trying to do things other than make it easy for companies to do things.

These two dudes seem deeply libertarian, so I’m not really gonna agree with much of what they’re saying. But in any case, it’s kind of shocking how naive their ideas about politics are, and they’re really just bullshitting wildly when they try to tie technological change to political climate or policies or whatever. “Policy” is mentioned 7 times in this transcript, and there’s a lot to be said for minimizing roadblocks (Schmidt has a great point about how there are huge limits to what Google to do - real estate limits, regulatory limits, recruiting limits - that prevent it from spending its huge chunk of cash in the bank), but there’s no acknowledgement of how hard it is to develop policies that protect citizens while also enabling technological progress and economic growth.

Also interesting was how Thiel’s argument was mostly predicated on the fact that incomes haven’t really been rising for the past 40 years. I honestly wonder what the libertarian response is to that - how do you ensure rising incomes for the lower 80% of the population? Those are the people who haven’t been treated so well by the last 40 years.

Posted at 11:14am and tagged with: writing,.

August 10th 2012

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If you’ve ever read No Logo by Naomi Klein, you may have noticed that everything she dislikes about advertising is everything that really good marketers hate about advertising too. When it’s hollow and meaningless, then, well, who gives a shit? Not I! And increasingly: not anybody at all.

And then there’s the problem of faking it, for when you stand for something mediocre or just plain wrong. You can have the most beautifully designed, elegant, and minimal marketing material in the world, and if you don’t stand for those same things, you aren’t gonna look like Apple. Instead, you’re gonna look like Altria, which is really just a fancy new name for Philip Morris. Is that what you want to stand for?

(Source: sashadichter.wordpress.com)

Posted at 9:40am and tagged with: branding, hat tip to seth godin, marketing, philip morris, writing,.

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The reason brand conversations get so convoluted and end up feeling like wordsmithing exercises is because so often brands don’t stand for anything. So instead of capturing what you stand for, or capturing how what you stand for needs to evolve or be sharpened, you instead end up pretending to stand for something and then writing pretty words around an idea that has no core and no truth.

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August 9th 2012

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This one’s from Keith Ridgway in the New Yorker. I’m kinda going nuts with the metafiction stuff these days, but sometimes I get in this mood where all I can do is reflect on creativity. Usually, it’s when I’m at my most creative, and since I’ve started my new job at GoInstant, where we make co-browsing software for the internets, I’ve had no shortage of chances to use my brain on exciting projects.

Anyway, perhaps a note on why I’m sharing this quote: it’s kind of how I feel about my life. I work on everything by writing it out. I can’t really process much until I have a chance to get it on paper somehow, somewhere. It’s more of a process than it is a means to an end. An ongoing process of uncovering and articulating the things that are going on in my mind. And it can be a lonely, frustrating process - a process that gets me stuck in process, unable to just experience things. But it’s the only way I know.

We construct our worlds on top of something we won’t ever get to experience directly - or so think Kant and I. And we’re lucky enough to get to build the world up from those experiences: we can metacognize, we can give order to our experiences with narrative, and we can eventually make sense of the goings-on out there. And if we don’t, the world will gently or not-so-gently remind us that there is something underlying our experiences that also gets to overrule our constructions and fabulations and fictions about what is going on in the world.

Posted at 1:30pm and tagged with: metafiction, writing,.

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And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

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August 9th 2012

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Every so often, great life advice comes in the form of a Fitzgerald quote found on an inbound marketing blog. Props to ya, SEOmoz.

Posted at 9:38am and tagged with: metafiction, passion, writing, fiction, creative work, creativity,.

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I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

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