The Centre Cannot Hold

Gerald Celente of TrendsResearch.com says "the entire system is collapsing."

Creative Destruction

Clay Shirk on The Collapse of Complex Business Models:

In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, advanced technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little but future archeological sites as evidence of previous greatness. Tainter asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden dissolutions.

The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it....

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.

The article is excellent throughout, so read the whole thing. It got me thinking about The Practical Rules of Bureaucracy and good ol' fashioned creative destruction. The first practical rule everyone has heard before: "spend your budget." The second is a little less familiar: "fail." Having spent its budget a bureaucracy must fail so that it can argue for a larger budget and/or more regulatory authority next year. For example, if the Department of Energy ever succeeded in curbing American dependence on foreign oil--more or less its stated mission--then there would be no reason to keep it around.

And that's where capitalism's creative destruction comes in, or, rather, doesn't. We simply have not figured out how to creatively destroy the atrophied remnants of our recent past. We continue to spend public money on libraries and public government schools while less expensive web-based alternatives are ignored. The Department of Energy, in addition to energy security, claims as its purview nuclear safety, scientific discovery, and environmental responsibility. Areas that should be the responsibility of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National Institute of Science and Technology, and the Environmental Protection Agency respectively. In other words, not only have we not figured out how to curtail government bureaucracies, but those bureaucracies have figured out how to expand their regulatory scope adding to their complexity while further burrowing into the body politic like the ticks they are.

The Future of Libraries

Harvard Magazine has an article on the future of libraries titled Gutenberg 2.0:

“A big misconception is that digital information and analog information are incompatible,” says Darnton, himself an historian of the book. “On the contrary, the whole history of books and communication shows that one medium does not displace another.”

Say what!?! Wait one while I copy and paste that bit of ivy league wisdom to my non-displaced medium of choice: a clay tablet. All-in-all it's not a bad article except that the librarians, convinced of their own self-importance, seem determined to convince others as well:

“Who has the most scientific knowledge of large-scale organization, collection, and access to information? Librarians,” says Bol. A librarian can take a book, put it somewhere, and then guarantee to find it again. “If you’ve got 16 million items,” he points out, “that’s a very big guarantee. We ought to be leveraging that expertise to deal with this new digital environment. That’s a vision of librarians as specialists in organizing and accessing and preserving information in multiple media forms, rather than as curators of collections of books, maps, or posters.”

If the categorization and organization that librarians provide is so great then Yahoo would've beaten Google; however, ontology is overrated. And there's a simple mathematical reason for that: hashing algorithms can execute in constant time. Let me explain what that means by way of an example. Let's say you have a street with a thousand houses on it. Instead of each house having a unique and ordered number, let's give them all unique names like: Bob, Joan, Steve, Kim, etc. A well written hashing algorithm will find George just as quickly as knowing that George is the 583rd house.

But the thing that really irks me about the Harvard Magazine article is the fact that it makes no mention of the real Gutenberg 2.0—the Gutenberg Project. You would think that the people committed to classifying information and proud of their ability to do so would be aware of a project to identify, transcribe, and provide public domain books. Perhaps they think the Gutenberg Project is just a fad, a flash in the pan that will disappear like so many internet start ups before, a blink in the history of human writing:

Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.

Then again, maybe "the whole history of books and communication shows that one medium does not displace another" is wishful thinking that librarians have a vested interest in perpetuating.

A New Beginning

I got an email from Let's Stop and Think drawing my attention to a post which reads in part:

Currently there are enormous issues to deal with. The economy, unemployment, government and corporate corruption, health care, and the environment are such issues.

I agree that those are enormous issues; however, I think we're facing much more pressing ones. The economy, corruption, healthcare, and the environment are the wave currently crashing on the beach. The waves behind them are bigger.

Yesterday I read the following on Slashdot:

The college where I work has decided to forego ordering a textbook for the computer class that I teach this fall. Does anyone know of a free, open-source textbook for basic computer literacy concepts (overview of hardware, software, operating systems, and file systems)?

I've followed the Open Source movement for many years. I've spoken at conferences about using Open Source software. What the Slashdotter is asking about is Open Content—a book, probably in electronic form, that is freely available.

There were many responses to his request.

Some authors are apparently willing to write without remuneration. That's not surprising; after all, there are a lot of bloggers doing the same thing. Wikipedia rivals and, in some areas, exceeds the best encyclopedias you can buy. It's available for free.

What the Slashdotter may not understand is that his lectures can be replaced by recorded ones and it's possible to automate his tests (Brainbench comes to mind). In other words, I see very little value add from teachers and professors. In the unaccredited St. Louis City School district, I see none. While recorded lectures will not work for all age groups (young children need teachers) and all subjects (you probably need hands on instruction to learn the oboe), we could jettison a huge part of education spending, to say nothing of mitigating future pension obligations, simply by recording the best teachers and firing the other million.

Somewhat related to that is the question: what is the carbon footprint of a school/college/university? I'm not a global warmonger, so I don't particularly care; however, it strikes me as odd that we have two places for almost every person: home and work/school. As more and more people work and learn from home, property values will decline.

However, we need to learn a lot more before working from home becomes a norm. As a former boss of mine remarked back in 1999:

You're walking down the hall and you meet someone. You talk. Work gets done. We don't yet know how to facilitate that hallway meeting.

He's right, for now. Tools like twitter and Facebook are beginning to change that. The killer business app for Facebook will be a collection of tools that 1) filter your content so that you only see co-workers and work related material, 2) prioritizes the content so that you see your project's tasks, then your department's, then your company's, 3) automates your Facebook updates so that others are aware of your progress without you doing anything (other than your work), and 4) manages complex work-flows like document revision and sign-off, financial reconciliation, etc.

Working from home will have little impact on manufacturing, retail, and restaurants. Nonetheless, the impact from other industries combined with all those unpaid authors and unemployed teachers will drive down GDP and tax revenues.

Why do we have libraries? It used to be that librarians knew where to find obscure bits of knowledge. Today, you're probably better off Googling for it. Libraries have added services to remain relevant: internet connected computers, book readings for children, etc. However, the ability to keep a library on a Kindle is almost here—once they workout that ironic Orwellian bug.

This transition is not limited to government funded operations. Record labels and journalism are the obvious commercial interest that are facing implosion. A talented band could make a go at a career with a blog and an Ebay store to sell their music. Other industries will also be effected. It seems likely that banks and other financial institutions will need very few employees in the future. My bank has one location and I've never been there. About two years ago, they began accepting scanned checks—go to their website, scan the check, and it's deposited. When I last refinanced my house, I met my mortgage broker at a restaurant—even without a secretary to direct me to his office, we were able to complete the transaction.

Journalism... I've blogged about it before, journalism is in transition. Thousands of years ago, if you wanted something written down, you hired a scribe. Today, we're all scribes. I see the same thing happening with journalism. It will be painful for journalists, but I believe it will, eventually, be good for society. The crossroads we're standing at is best described in an article by Clay Shirky about newspapers and thinking the unthinkable. Television and radio will face similar problems.

And this is why I think the waves behind those now crashing on the beach are of greater concern. We're standing at 1500 AD. Our printing press is technology: cell phones, cameras, computers, networking. As Shirky writes:

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.

What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

That is our world—the emerging second world.

The Coming Second World

We think of the nations of the world as falling into one of two categories on the development axis: First World and Third World. I believe that one of the side effects of the current global economic turmoil will be a convergence towards a more uniform level of development around the world. The first world countries will come down a peg due to mountains of debt, unaffordable government bureaucracies, falling populations, and civil unrest. The third world will rise by largely dodging the economic problems of the first world, collecting interest payments (China in particular), and maintaining stable population growth.

The most important factor leading to this convergence will be the Internet and the various technologies that it has spawned. The global economic crisis is not the driver of this change, it is merely the catalyst. The Internet and technology will facilitate our evolution.

Government corruption will hamper progress of both First and Third World countries. The surprising thing is how rife the First World is with graft. This gives well governed Third World countries time to advance while the First Worlders are spinning their wheels. Of course, that doesn't mean they'll do so—I don't expect any meaningful improvement in Zimbabwe for another generation.