Cold Constructs Blog

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Piracy is not a disease; it’s a symptom.

The business world (in the West at least) needs to wrap its head around this single concept: information is now free. The word “information” includes bits, those 1’s and 0’s flying through fibers across the globe.* If you make a product that is comprised of information such as software, it will be pirated. Always.

This is a Very Good Thing, even for businesses. Since information is free and running everywhere, well, that’s free marketing. If you take a look at the global games industry you’ll see that it’s earning about $10 billion, half of which is from Asia. In Asia, their games are free to play but funded by microtransactions and advertisements. So they encourage people to download and distribute their games!

What about other software like word processors and other desktop apps? Turns out, we don’t like desktop apps. They’re difficult to use and complex in general. The stupid computer crashes and eats everything we had too! A travesty. Hence the move the online apps. Google Docs is perfect for word processing and they will never lose your data — and it’s available anywhere you have a connected computer! They make it easier to share information which fits perfectly with the nature of the beast.

With online software we can also access it on our mobile systems which are only getter more powerful. We’re moving away from our centralized perspective and moving into more open, distributed (and therefore resilient) systems. We’re gradually building computing systems into ambient clouds that follow us everywhere, granting us access to knowledge in a moment’s notice.

This also grants us the benefit of platform agnosticism. It was (and often still is) a huge problem for people to get their stuff from one OS to another without problems. If everything goes online, there’s no platform to mess with at all — just pure 1:1 information transfer that’s fast and near-effortless.

The issue with microtransactions is the fact that it’s a decision. We hate making decisions. We only make them when absolutely necessary, and even then it takes too much effort. It shouldn’t take any effort at all if we’re going to move in that direction, and I think we will because we have too (look at the symptoms).

Good HCI design can solve the decision issue, although it needs to be simple and consistent across products. However, it’s too difficult to make transactions not because of the decision cost but because of the banking cost. We’re going to need institutions that don’t charge transaction fees no matter how small or how big the amount. There’s no reason for it in the first place — it’s just bits going through fiber from one computer to another and another.

Credit cards are already obsolete but the banks don’t know it. Businesses everywhere are having to work around them by using their own currencies. Think of Microsoft Points and airline mileage. This is a huge fucking sign that our monetary system is failing us. But we can’t keep fragmenting our economy with every company using its own system; there needs to be a uniform design so that everyone, from individuals to corporations, can trade money at no cost no matter the amount, effortlessly.

Until that happens, the future business models we need to cure the economic disease will fail.

* Information is not knowledge, it’s just random bits. Knowledge is relevant information.

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It seems people are still trying to find ways in which humans differ from the the rest of the animal kingdom. Again and again we discover these “unique” human features in other animals. Yet we still search for the gap.

There is no gap. You’re a fucking animal — get over it. Look outside at the world around you. Do you see a particularly unique species? Just like other animals we use language, tools, mathematics and other abstract thought (watch documentaries about ravens or squirrels or dolphins etc.), plus we all murder, play, shun those different from us, cooperate, love… all traits seen in other animals.

If there was anything that separated us from other animals, it’s that we often look to the sky for redemption, as if there was something there that would save us all from this odd tragedy (clearly your gods have made the world so much better over the millennia). But I wouldn’t count delusion as a uniquely human trait either.

People can’t stand the fact that there’s nothing special about them. Against all evidence they will always rationalize anything to get them to feel better about themselves. This can be depressing, but there’s a reason for that.

Stubbornness aside, there’s an interesting lesson to be learned here: if you want to design pleasant experiences, flatter your users. Make them feel special. Pop up a smiley face every time they successfully submit a form. Ask them how they feel. Give them a useful tip for life. Just give them any kind of positive/thoughtful and personal reaction to their actions. You’d be surprised at how much positive feedback you’ll get afterwards.

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By far the biggest hurdle that grand innovations have to jump over is the law. The internet is the most recent grand innovation as it has changed the way we work, live and play. It’s more than a new frontier though since it not only freely gives individuals some of the productive powers previously held by commercial enterprises, but it also provides everyone with communicative powers that were previously impossible. So of course it’s going to break new ground on a scale that bares no precedent and change the rules of civilization entirely. Yet the problem is not public acceptance of the change — it’s the government that must be forced to accept it.

It is believed that the government makes laws and the people follow them. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Governments were actually established to formalize existing rules that spontaneously emerged from the day-to-day interactions of people holding common ground. Communities didn’t suddenly decide they wanted a few of their members to boss them around — they simply wanted to enforce their existing unwritten rules in order to prevent disputes that arise from a misinterpretation or misunderstanding of those rules. They needed a formalized set of laws that were clear to everyone. (This worked so well that they expanded the laws to encompass everyone of their culture. Voila, the nation-state.)

So when something as disruptive as the internet comes around, it is the government’s job to mediate the progress and, when the new patterns of behavior emerge and settle, to finally formalize those patterns as laws.

Unfortunately no one in office quite understands this historical process and so people continually have to fight the very government they established themselves in order to get it to do its job properly.

A nice article by Timothy B. Lee over at Ars Technica details this process by comparing the development of the internet with the development of property rights. Abundant land was a disruptive condition that current laws could not handle. But instead of adapting to the new conditions, the government fought to preserve old laws that clearly no longer applied (they’re just doing what they were told). Eventually the gov had no choice but to adapt to the people’s informal arrangements. It only took a few decades.

If we are to keep pace with the river of creativity and inventiveness that flows through our society, we will need to establish a political system that is just as swift and flexible. It’s a matter of trusting the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ and seeing patterns as quickly as they emerge — not acting brashly but at least be understanding of the process. If there’s a new medium that undermines almost every industrial-era business model, it should be pretty easy to spot. If you can’t see it, you should at least see the massive paradigm shift it’s leaving in its wake. In the case of the internet, it’s all of the court hearings being brought onto people who are simply acting the way that made the most sense to them — eg “I bought this CD, but I’d like to listen to it on my mp3 player or computer, so I’ll rip it.” Now it’s turning into “fuck CDs, I want download everything because it’s easier and even better.”

The onslaught of court cases should be the tell-tale sign of the shift, telling business and its laws that it needs to change because, quite simply, it’s the ‘common person’ who writes the rules and we’ve already done so. They can either catch up or we’ll force them to adapt. It’s kind of weird though, talking about ‘us’ and ‘them’ — they’re members of this society too, right? So what’s their problem?

Update: Probably this.

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Colin McGinn over at the Wall Street Journal posted a wonderful review of Watson’s book Against Happiness.

I must say that this view of happiness would go far to turn us towards a better direction in reality. Currently, it seems all we care about is happiness in and of itself. This neglects the better things in life such as satisfaction, which doesn’t necessarily end with happiness. With pure happiness (which is close to what McGinn correctly identifies as a kind of hedonism) there is no reason to make things better because they’re already so good. But how can they be? A quick look around the world and yes even around you personally and of course within your very own cognition… all is not well.

It should come as no surprise that ignoring the negativity would only result in a dull shell of a being. Take some time out to passively observe the patterns in nature. You will see that there is one fundamental principal on which the world operates: balance. Yes, too much CO2 is bad but so is too little. Certainly a lot of carnivores will ravage the lands if they’re in abundance, but without them the lands would be ravished by the herbivores. The systems of the world balance at the edge of order and chaos, achieving a beautiful synergy of opposing forces. (I’m not Buhddist, but I am a systemic thinker.)

So with a balance of happiness and sadness, we are brought away from superficiality, away from self-destructiveness, towards a keen understanding of life that can only be attained from a balanced perspective. Question yourself, the things people do and say, the way things happen. Do not blindly accept cultural norms or products as they are because everything we’ve made and done has flaws–whether it’s a flaw in usability, short-sightedness, resource usage, engineering, ignorance or what-have-you.

Interestingly, McGinn justly points out that Watson doesn’t identify sadness as having intrinsic value like happiness does. Why is happiness valuable? It obviously isn’t enough to simply be happy. As McGinn says, pessimism can lead to thoughtfulness, depth, or to add my own, the charge to improve things. Happiness, Watson argues, leads to stagnation and emptiness. So why shouldn’t sadness be held in at least as high regard as happiness? I know that I am much more satisfied with life when I am accomplishing something or fighting for something better, even though the battle inevitably brings along sadness. That is the nature of progress, movement, adventure. Embrace it why don’t we?!

Of course we shouldn’t become cursed wretches–we must approach it with a balanced perspective. Sadness is as good as happiness, not better or worse. They both have their place in our being. They can both lead to better living. But neither of them are ends in themselves. There is no end in life, but death itself. True satisfaction is in the adventure. As Lewis Black said about the book, “there are important lessons in our pain and.. a smile may make a better moment, but not a better world.” Dissatisfaction, after all, is what makes the world go round.

What a brilliant idea. Why should we continue to push sticks of graphite around? What unique purpose does it serve but to express ourselves? It is now obsolete with the onset of typing and voice-recognition software, therefore it should be forced into the category of “art”.

With the advent of computers it is entirely possible to get rid of paper and pen as a tool for writing. It was possible with the advent of typewriters, but now, with computers, it is preferable. Typing and talking is significantly faster, more accurate (no need to squint to discern letters in badly-written script) and altogether more humane.

Think about it.

UPDATE: After a 5-second discussion with my brother, it became clear that a good reason to teach handwriting is that not every place has power, for one, and also the fact that power sometimes goes out, in addition to the fact that batteries wear out at often in-opportune times. So, uh, it’ll be a while before this is a reasonable proposal.

Sometimes we get so caught up in our own little worlds that we simply take too much for granted (in this case, electricity and computers). It is in this way that bad ideas are able to parade as good ones.

Interesting food for thought, at any rate.