Everyware on Google

Oh, this is great: Everyware, free, searchable and in its entirety pretty severely truncated, on Google Book Search.

I had originally wanted to release a free, downloadable PDF of the book concurrently with its publication, but the powers that be at New Riders thought they knew better. (”But that would cannibalize sales!”) Nor, for still harder-to-understand reasons, would they even agree to submit the book to Amazon’s Search Inside This Book indexing, something I’d badly wanted.

It appears these questions are moot now, and I’m delighted. The format isn’t everything it could be, but all the words are in the right order. Go, have at it, enjoy.

(UPDATE: Yeah, I spoke too soon, misled by the interface and my own hunger. I still, for the life of me, can’t understand why publishers don’t get how valuable things like this are as a marketing tool.)

@ equanimity

Man, it’s peaceful here.

The snow’s shrouding everything, all the sounds of the city are muffled. I’m standing at the window looking down at the garden, listening to the little sleety pellets pinging off the pane, and it hits me: everything’s perfect.

Everything here is warm and whole and complete. Tomorrow’s another turn of the wheel, but for now…perfect.

Listen, the snow is falling…

A day to stay in, brew some coffee, listen to Galaxie 500, and get some work done.

Ping me if you need me, elsewise I’m lying low.

Initiates of the cult of ic! berlin

At dinner the other night, 23’s Magnus Christensson and I laughingly admired each other’s ic! berlin eyeglass frames, and it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write about both this superior product line and its social implications for quite a good while.

Unaccountably, I don’t appear to have sung its praises before, at least not that Google is currently able to help me find. I’ll never forget the day I saw my first pair, in a tiny optometrist’s in Portland during the 2003 IA Summit (and mere hours after the outbreak of “shock and awe” in Iraq): the frame was a minimal armature of matte titanium, mechanically utterly unlike any I’d seen before, and the lenses themselves were refreshingly novel in shape. Even the temple pieces were special, terminating in “pads” formed of latex surgical tubing.

The overall effect was unmistakably European, just a touch louche, and subtly and self-confidently malevolent: think Michel Foucault, appearing at the door in a kimono. Yow! I remember going a little weak in the knees; of course, they had me at “minimal armature of matte titanium.”

What really set the glasses apart was their ingenious simplicity: by notching the temple piece just so and holding the tongue thus formed in tension against the frame, the designers did away with a conventional hinge and its attendant hardware, bulk and weight. (The ic! berlin logo alludes to this.) It was simultaneously clever and materially elegant; you couldn’t possibly have designed a line more likely to appeal to architects and designers of whatever stripe if you set out to do so.

Point is this, though: up until about a year, year and a half ago, you could be reasonably certain that anybody sporting a pair of these things was worth talking to, in all the best ways. Aesthetically distinctive and not always easy to find, they’re simply not glasses that people are likely to choose at random, and so the pool of users has always tended to self-select for traits like persistence and attention to detail. The result has been that people come up to me in video stores, in airports, at the counter at Jo’s during SXSW to talk ic! berlin, and whenever they’ve done so the encounter has continued in interesting directions.

They’re more than mere conversation starters, though - as Magnus points out, some bond is forged between ic! berlin wearers at the moment of mutual recognition, however tiny. It reminds me of the little rituals VW or Volvo owners used to enact upon recognizing each other, way back when those marques were rare in North America: they’d dip their headlights at one another, or wave, in the spirit and shared pleasure of reciprocal appreciation. Back in the day, you could have said the same thing about Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, or Ann Demeulemeester’s lines, on the fashion side of the house, but those were all at considerably higher price points; the analogy is imperfect.

What a delicate sweet spot this must be for product designers. You’ve got a customer base large enough for users to plausibly imagine that they’ll meet others in the course of their daily lives, but not so large as to deprive those users of the conceit that they’re in on something special. I tell you what, if I had a product I was about to launch, I’d think long and hard about how to maximize the time it spent at this point of precarious balance - what you might call “dwell time.”

Because, inevitably, one day I know I’ll be on the checkout line at the grocery store, and find myself face to face with a tabloid headline in which some tacky-ass celebrity is sporting a pair of ic! berlins, and that’ll be it. They’ll be everywhere, and that’s the kiss of death for a certain kind of value proposition - sure, short-term revenue will spike and spike and spike some more, but they’ll be over as anything of real interest. You’ll never again be able to map the fact that someone is wearing these glasses onto a plausible assumption that they’re fun to talk to or be around.

Is this snobbery? Sure it is. There’s no way around admitting that. But I hope you’ll agree that it’s not indefensible, that there’s room in the world for people who literally do see things in an unusual way to recognize each other. And if there’s any truth at all to notions of an “long tail,” there should be a stable region of economic possibility space where products like this can dwell indefinitely - selling respectably, never getting too well-known, providing their users with almost untoward amounts of pleasure. That’s where I’d aim, certainly. But then, I’m not like most people, as we’ve already established.

What’s your favorite cult product, and why?

LIFT and left high

A few notes on LIFT, partial in every sense of the word:

- Anybody who knows how I feel about both robots and dogs will be surprised - stunned - by how much I enjoyed France Cadet’s work on recombinant traits in, uh, robot dogs. Only superficially cute, I found that Cadet’s digital hounds pose uncomfortable questions about the course of artificial evolution, in both its biotech and a-life senses.

- There was a fascinating tension between Nathan Eagle’s work on “reality mining” - that is, attempting to infer a useful understanding of rich social behavior from time, location, proximity, and other mobile-phone-derived metrics - and Jan Chipchase’s must-see presentation.

I don’t quibble with the reality mining thesis in its general outlines. I have no trouble with the idea that, if you gather large enough amounts of data about personal location over time, you can infer some pretty useful things - this is one of the points of infovisualization, after all. I’m less sanguine, though, about specific aspects of the work Eagle presented: first, the practical drawback that Eagle himself alluded to, which is that in order for any meaningful inference to be possible, both the amount and type of data collected appear to be well in excess of anything that people seem to be comfortable making available anywhere outside the contours of a well-buffered academic study.

But who knows? Younger people these days tend not to be so ["properly concerned"/"uptight"] about issues of digital privacy; it may well be the case that in the fullness of time, most people will give this data up as a matter of course, without batting an eyelash. My second reservation, though, is a little deeper.

This is a simplification, inevitably, but Eagle’s work, like much research in machine inference, is devoted to the idea that the latent semantics of a human situation are ultimately unconsciously betrayed by patterns of explicit behavior; that this behavior is something that is transparent to remote capture; and that all (”all”) you have to do is throw enough processing power at the analysis of these patterns to divine the truth of them. Whereas the point of Jan’s fieldwork is that you actually have to be there, pay attention, and ask the right questions to learn anything meaningful about a situation.

The difference between the pictures of the world produced by each of these approaches is profound and striking, and it runs deeper than the simple distinction between quantitative and qualitative inquiry - at least, I think it does.

Here it is in a nutshell: Eagle’s work left me feeling depressed (even if it did act to confirm my argument in Everyware that enough people will find the world-picture produced by machine inference credible enough to act upon it, in a peculiarly literal enunciation of power/knowledge). It felt like each of the lives represented by the dots up on his screen had been lost, departicularized - and also that if you got invested emotionally in the worldview implied to any degree at all, you’d pretty soon get to a place where very little human behavior would ever again surprise you.

For me, by contrast, Jan Chipchase’s work is all about surprise. Every time I visit his site I feel that anew, tripped up and humbled by humanity, in all its ingenuity, adaptablity and ungovernable particularity. I usually come away from Future Perfect with a sense of delight and rich equanimity a million light years from my usual well-defended High Modernist ya-ya. And this was also the feeling I was left with by his LIFT presentation, ostensibly about mobile devices and literacy.

Literacy is obviously a critical acceptance factor for devices as heavily dependent on textual mediation as mobile phones. And here a subtle motif of this block of presentations re-emerged: almost as if he was picking up on my resistance to machine inference, one of Jan’s questions was all about the risks involved in acting on indirect knowledge of the world (as one is compelled to do many times a day when one cannot read).

He showed a slide of - what was to all appearances, self-evidently - the entrance to a men’s public toilet in India, and asked, well, what makes this self-evident? How do we know that this dark and not particularly welcoming doorway leads to (is?) a place where men can relieve themselves? If the semiotics of the two mustachioed heads pictured nearby remained unclear, the word “toilet” in two or three languages probably did the trick, sure. But what if you didn’t read any of those languages, or any at all?

Jan’s question: how willing would you be to act on the assumption that this place was a toilet if the price of being wrong was, in turn, (a) minor personal humiliation, (b) the loss of a month’s salary, (c) total ruin for your entire extended family, forever? (The context made it clear to me that this was not a hypothetical.)

Anyone interested in designing products, services and systems closely coupled to risk, especially those involving a very large and diverse user base, will surely find this a resonant and important question, and one that transcends the context of literacy. It’s also one bearing on my single big regret at LIFT, which was…

- …that I missed Fabien Girardin’s talk on embracing the messiness of the world as it is. Tom Hume’s detailed and enthusiastic notes only reinforce that regret. Fabien’s is a very timely message, one that, quite frankly, developers need to hear, and one for which I certainly feel a great deal of sympathy.

- Briefly: European conference crowds still strike me as being enamored of blogging per se. Me, I couldn’t care less about blogging per se, and I have even less time for anyone still peddling the line that it’s a solution for much of anything.

My early hopes for it went the same way my hopes for e-mail, Usenet and the Web in general did - which was good, in that it cured me of my last traces of techno-utopianism. Most of the wonderful and without question all of the revolting, heart-crushing things about being human soon enough get instantiated in a medium with low barriers to entry, and that’s really about all I have to say on the topic.

- Re: Swiss International Air Lines: Kind of meh, and a let-down after the buildup of my hopes. Certainly not the experience set up and suggested by the fastidious and thorough-going winkreative identity system. Lufthansa still sets the standard transatlantic.

- The graphic design of the conference - posters, t-shirts, motion graphics, stickers, collateral, the whole kit - was of the highest order. It managed to convey both cutting-edge contemporaneity and warmth, and did so with genuine personality. My congratulations to the designers.

- Finally, the title’s not just a cheap pun. I had at least one genuine peak experience during these last few days, for which I thank Laurent Haug, the entire LIFT team, and, well, the city of Geneva. Ben Cerveny must be praised for enduring my crankiness. Frangino, Sasha, Tom, Jan-Christoph: it was great to meet you. Régine, Jan, Arabella, Fabio, and of course the irrepressible M. Nova are the best sort of conference buddies - you make it all worthwhile.

And now back to 20-degree NYC, already in progress.

A little XC in the Jura

Many, many thanks to Nicolas and sa copine charmante Bérénice, I had an absolutely fantastic day cross-country skiing on the Plateau de Retord. Totally wonderful to be 100% back in the body, after so many days in the head. As it were.

We had the uncanny luck to be almost alone on the slopes, on a day of low skies and otherworldly (if stark) beauty. This is a memory I’ll treasure for a long time.

Absolutely airtight documentary evidence of our little trip can be found here.

And speaking of LIFT…

I’ll have some notes up soon. For now, suffice to say that any morning spent executing an old-city dérive with Messrs. Cerveny and Chipchase has to be considered a precious gift.

Transit gratis?

A week or so ago, Mr. Migurski posted on his del.icio.us a link to this piece arguing, among other things, that urban transit should “tend to the free.” I found myself sort of viscerally disagreeing, and found it hard to pin down just why until I had spent a few days getting around Geneva by bus and tram, under conditions that certainly meet that description.

Here’s my argument: it strikes me that there are really two and only two fully defensible positions on this question, with maybe the ghost of a third struggling to find form between them. Either (a) you regard transit as an absolute social good and opportunity multiplier, and you subsidize its use fully and for all, or (b) you understand it as a material system which sustains real operating costs, and believe that it is only sensible to recover some of that cost from the system’s direct beneficiaries, the riders.

Between the two, you could probably convince me that a museum-style “suggested donation” policy, made explicit, could fulfill a gently Marxian from-each-according-etc. ethic, although it’s probably far less efficient than either of the maximal positions.

But what I dislike is what you have obtaining here. The LIFT organizers were considerate enough to provide all of the invited speakers with open transit passes, at no little expense, and I’ve happilly been hopping on and off various modes of getting around town since a few minutes after I was handed mine. It’s been a real boon - a great way of getting to know Geneva, and a thoughtful organizational touch for which I’ve been not a little grateful.

The only problem is that in all of these uses, I’ve never once been asked to display it. Like many European systems, that’s not how the TPG operates: although the system is not free, and its terms of ridership enunciate the usual penalties should I fail to come up with an appropriate ticket when asked to do so, the likelihood that I will sustain such an imposition is exceedingly low. There are no turnstiles, or ticket-takers, or card readers.

In other words, this system unfairly penalizes everyone who takes its proposition at face value, proportionally rewarding those unwilling to abide by an honor system. (The author of the linked piece asserts that “most people *do* pay,” but I’m sure the percentage who do so varies from place to place.) Maybe it’s my hyperactive sense of justice, but something in me simply rebels at that. It’s a system that literally benefits free riders, and which - it seems to me - subtly undermines any notion of a social contract.

It’s perfectly valid to assert that universally accessible and reliable transit is a profound public good, and that it ought to be free to the rider. (I tend to believe that myself.) But let’s then put aside this half-stepping idea of “tending to the free”: it should clearly and unambiguously announce itself as such, and its costs should be spread among those who derive the primary real benefit from it. It would be reasonable, for example, to assert that as businesses in many urban cores are reliant on the transit system for their labor force and/or customer base, they should shoulder much of the burden of subsidizing it.

But why should the LIFT folks devote some nontrivial percentage of their limited budget to providing this benefit for invitees, when other users of the system incur no such penalty? (A back-of-envelope calculation suggests that their outlay on transit passes for all of the speakers would have easily sufficed to cover one additional speaker’s airfare, at least from a European city.) That just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

It’s entirely possible that I’m making a big fuss over nothing. It wouldn’t be the first time.

But if, like me, you actually enjoy thinking about stuff like this, be assured that you’re not alone. In fact, I met some folks here yesterday who have a project called Toronto Transit Camp, an unconference and “solutions playground” dedicated to just such pursuits. How cool is that? And why is it that New York doesn’t have one?

Geneva, at the hour of the wolf

I’m awake, governed by tides, my consciousness of the outside world reduced to an abstract certainty of mountains ranging beyond the windows.

My LIFT presentation is nominally ready to go, but is striking me as far too wordy. There was a time when I’d gotten my talks down to three words a slide, and sometimes one, and that was a good time; now the text is gnawing its way back across the screen.

Refine, refine, a voice in me says. I know it’s correct, and yet feel helpless to comply. The right words, the ones which imply all the rest - they aren’t coming.

Wake-up call in two hours.

Why does anybody even pay attention to this guy?

You know, I like me some Left Blogistan from time to time. Yeah, I read TPM, I read dKos, I read Atrios…they have their limitations, sure, but they’ve each of them in their own way been an important lifeline to sanity for me as this grotesque decade has unfolded.

One of the reasons I like Atrios in particular is that he has a knack for raising the right questions. And one of the most sensible of the many eminently valid questions he’s raised over the past few years is why an utter non-entity like Bill Kristol, who has never been identifiably right about a single stance he has taken in the entirety of his very public life, is regarded as any kind of an authority, let alone a source of useful and timely insight.

That’s how I feel about Robert Scoble.

To be sure, I had never heard of this worthy until the day a few years back when he and Dave Winer took it upon themselves to define moblogging…inaccurately and unnecessarily, as it turned out. I was unimpressed by this presumptuous introduction, to say the least, but figured it would be the last I heard of him. As both a “tech geek blogger” and a champion of Microsoft values, after all, he was working a decidedly different beat than mine.

The moblogging dust-up was apparently but a harbinger of things to come, though, because the name of Scoble kept cropping up in my world, and every time it did so it trailed behind it a spoor of wrongness. He was apparently the kind of person people looked to for understanding, and he used that privileged position to make shallow, even demonstrably stupid observations.

And you know what? That’s fine. Being wrong is OK. Being wrong is human. Like just about everybody else, I’m wrong plenty of the time - there’s no shame there. But you don’t get to be consistently wrong, and still enjoy the privilege of being taken seriously as any kind of an authority. Call it the Kristol Principle. (Or maybe the “Friedman”? That guy’s a lox, too.)

Far more seriously, Mr. Slavin would say, it’s not the being-wrong part so much as it’s the package that the wrongness comes in that’s the test of character, and this is a test that Robert Scoble has pretty clearly flunked.

I’ll leave it to the three of you who are actually interested to do the cursory legwork necessary to fill in the rest of the story; searching a string along the lines of paid Intel video should connect the relevant dots right quick. His latest contortions, in defense of behavior that on its face seems rather hard to justify, have completely undermined whatever credibility his book (on transparency in blogging, yet!) relied upon, and managed to piss off his well-respected co-author into the bargain.

Bottom line for me personally? I’ve never regarded the guy as authoritative or even interesting in any way, so I’m good. But just like the Sunday talkshows vis à vis Bill Kristol, anyone who now looks to Robert Scoble for comment or insight lends him a manifestly undeserved credibility, and in the long run such a choice can only reflect poorly on the person or institution making it.

I exempt my gracious hosts at LIFT from this assessment, on the grounds that they delivered their invitation to Mr. Scoble before the scope and nature of his current activities had come to light. But from this point forward, anybody giving him a pulpit does so with open eyes. And I, at least, will factor that into my understanding of the person or institution in question.