Dick Hardt explains digital identity.

My friend Sheri posted a link to this video on twitter. Recently Wired magazine argued you should never forward a link to a page that’s gotten over half a million views. I’m continually reminded that is a dangerous rule to follow. I see a lot on-line, but I missed this. It’s good. Thanks Sheri!

‘Easy’ is the key to disruptive innovation.

Kristof has an intersting piece in today’s NYT about Negroponte’s “Daily Me”  This is the future that we see in front of us today.  All Newspapers aren’t dying BTW– the super small hyper-local ones are doing just fine.  Newspaper reading has changed forever.

What concerns Kristof is Confirmation Bias–reading only the things that support your beliefs.  This is dangerous–but only for those who won’t admit its a threat to their understanding.

Here’s a hunk from my book– it’s been awhile.  Seemed relevant.

The Emperor’s New Prose
In 1996, New York University physics professor Allan Sokol wrote an article forbiddingly titled, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” published in Social Text, an esteemed academic journal of cultural studies. Among other things, Sokol claimed, “physical ‘reality’ is at the bottom of a social and linguistic construct,” and that the concept of an external world subject to laws of nature is a mistaken piece of post-Enlightenment dogma.

Still with me? Sokol utilized scientific and mathematic principles to back up his argument. He threw around imposing concepts like the “morphogenetic field,” which he called “a cutting edge theory of quantum gravity.” Sokol’s article was so steeped in the language of rigorous academic inquiry that the magazine’s editors didn’t realize it was all a hoax.

Sokol later cheerfully admitted that he purposely wrote the article “so that any competent physicist or mathematician, or undergraduate physics or math major, would realize it was a spoof.” Why? To see if the journal would run an article “liberally salted with nonsense if it sounded good and flattered the editors’ ideological pre-conceptions.” In short, Sokol wanted to test the confirmation bias of the editors of Social Text.

Sokol’s prank shows that often things are not as they appear. That principle applies as much to popular culture as it does to scientific inquiry. While there is likely such a thing as objective reality, any two people in the universe will look at objective reality and see entirely different things. And they could both be right. A dollar may be a dollar, but its value varies around the world on a daily basis.

We don’t all experience the same event or the same picture and draw the same conclusions. Each of us tends to cherry-pick objective events that make it easy for us to “prove” the logic of our opinions. Get used to it. Embrace it. Love it. Considering and accepting your confirmation bias will free you to face it and start to change how often you are trapped by it. Each of us uses the greater events that make up our worldview to prove our confirmation bias. Heck, I’ve done it writing this book. I’ve chosen to count on readers to challenge the examples I’ve described and to which I ascribe meaning to manage my confirmation biases.

Anyone who considers himself immune to this kind of biased thinking should look at mean annual temperatures in Cheraw, South Carolina, where between 1930 and 2000, it cooled by 1.5 degrees. The temperature drop could be seen as an open-and-shut debunking of the concept of global warming, and that might be right if we were talking only about Cheraw, South Carolina. Globally, the last dozen years have yielded the highest temperatures in recorded history. To a dedicated Greenpeace warrior, that fact would underscore the core theme of Al Gore’s messianic film road show, An Inconvenient Truth. Global warming is here, it exists, and we’d better do several things about it, now.
For purposes of this chapter, it doesn’t really matter if the adherents of either viewpoint could be proved right or wrong. What both sides in the global warming debate are doing with their respective scientific facts is exhibiting confirmation bias.

Wason, Come Here…We Need You
Confirmation bias is the brainchild of British psychologist Peter Wason, who observed like many before him that people use information to support their view of the world. Wason distinguished himself by testing the idea that people attach a tremendous amount of subconscious importance to proving a cherished assumption. They seize on examples that back up their ideas and ignore the rest. A sports fan may remember statistics that put his team in a favorable light while ignoring or even forgetting anything that casts doubt on his team’s lauded status.
According to Wikipedians, Wason conducted experiments in which he asked subjects to look at a numerical sequence, such as 2-4-6.  He then asked subjects to devise numerical triplets of their own until they could correctly guess the rule behind the original progression of numbers. Most people were wrong at least once or never right at all. But instead of admitting their error, they kept devising triplets to prove their own erroneous hypotheses. Here’s the amazing part: Participants avoided triplets that could eliminate incorrect rules, and resisted coming up with variable hypotheses! Paging Adam Smith.
The responses proved to Wason that people would go to great lengths to avoid considering that they might be wrong. “In the real world, the fixated, obsessive behavior of some of the subjects would be analogous to that of a person who is thinking in a closed system, a system which defies refutation such as existentialism or the majority of religions,” he wrote. “These experiments demonstrate how dogmatic thinking and the refusal to entertain the possibility of alternatives can easily result in error.” Even when staring at facts that contradict their positions, people tend to concede much less of an inconvenient truth than the facts would otherwise support.
Now recall Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner who showed that what people choose is determined mostly by the way the choice is framed. People will look for an anchor point to cling to, so that any opinion adjustments they make in the direction of truth will be severely limited. The anchor might be as mobile as Tony Hawk’s skateboard, but folks will hew to it nonetheless. Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has made a killing caricaturing confirmation bias through the bizarro-world ravings of characters like Wally, Dogbert, and especially his comic strips’ pointy-haired CEO. “The irrational part of your brain reinterprets reality in a way that lets you keep your dumb viewpoint against all common sense and evidence,” Adams writes succinctly in his blog.

Go Along to Get Along
No one is immune to seeking validation for their views from their peers. This is true at all levels of the Diffusion of Innovation model, innovators included. The vulnerability exists for everyone; it just differs by degrees. Confirmation bias isn’t just for individuals; it is essential for tribes too. Reinforcing bias often helps build and sustain them.

The innovator is the one who tribe members look to for clues about what should interest them. The innovators themselves don’t often get reciprocal feedback from the tribe. Instead, for validation, they refer to external media and other tribes. The world is often a cold and lonely place for innovators, who constitute less than three percent of any tribe. Confirmation is hard to come by. All of the innovators’ contact with outside influences is indirect, not personal. This may make confirmation bias rarer, but it makes it much stronger. Being lonely causes one to question reality a bit more, but the need to anchor onto something reliable becomes very attractive.

The newness of something is especially compelling to innovators who pride themselves on discovering and embracing things before anybody else. Their personal identity is established by recognizing innovation at its most pristine, so proof of newness or novelty is essential. But the attraction to that which is new can become a trap for innovators. They risk credibility and their own cultural currency by making quick attachments to things simply because they are new. If the phenomenon doesn’t live up to expectations (as it often doesn’t), the innovator may lose influence. To paraphrase the old saying,  “No one remembers when you’re right, but everyone remembers when you’re wrong.”

By comparison, early adopters bring confirmation bias from inside the tribe. They are leaders in their own right, with a lot of influence, but unlike innovators, they run their preferences by their friends because they care how other members of the tribe view them. Their credibility for taking a position on a new idea or product comes from their ability to channel (think like) their friends and associates.

Both innovators and early adopters have power to confirm their own opinions. People relinquish this power the further down the diffusion scale they reside, such that early and late majorities seek stronger confirmation from their friends, while laggards essentially can’t approve anything on their own. Laggard behavior confirms tastes and opinions through the affirmation of the peer group.
It may be tough for a nation with a pioneer mentality like that of the United States to accept this concept, but “the vision thing” that has become a litmus test for presidential candidates eludes a lot of people. Studies have shown that only about 16 percent of people have a self-generated vision of what they want. For the rest, peers within the tribe inevitably color and drive their choices.
The less logical and more visceral one’s allegiance is to a tribe’s core purpose, the greater the degree to which peer consensus will be a factor. Fans of college and pro sports teams in America can be very insular in their opinions about opposing teams and players. Fans will even project their own unresolved real-life conflicts onto those rivalries—for instance, sitting with their faces painted in their team’s colors—to attempt to validate their views. Tribal reinforcement of confirmation bias can get really heavy-handed. You wouldn’t dare walk into the Dog Pound at a Cleveland Browns game wearing a John Elway jersey. Likewise, there weren’t many vocal Yankees fans in the South before major league baseball expanded beyond two 16-team leagues in 1961 (and before northeasterners began their southward migration in the ’70s).

In case you were wondering–

I guess this means it’s not so cool anymore. For the record, I’m trying to get my mom to get on Twitter. Sorry for the crappy player–Youtube had to take it down. Viacom doesn’t like being too popular.

From The Last.fm blog:

On Friday night a technology blog called Techcrunch posted a vicious and completely false rumour about us: that Last.fm handed data to the RIAA so they could track who’s been listening to the “leaked” U2 album.

I denied it vehemently on the Techcrunch article, as did several other Last.fm staffers. We denied it in the Last.fm forums, on twitter, via email – basically we denied it to anyone that would listen, and now we’re denying it on our blog.

So it appears that overly-excited bloggers go a little too far out in front of the story.  Sad for Last.fm as these stories die hard.  A number of people told me they thought Last.fm was fine and that Techcrunch got a little out front of it.  Seems reasonable.  Here’s hoping.  I love Last.fm.  I’ve invested a ton of my meta data in it.  I even pay for premium service.  Good luck guys.  We need you.  You too Techcrunch.

I hate it when my friends fight.

From http://snltranscripts.jt.org/79/79fupdate.phtml

Jane Curtin: Well, the 1970’s are in their final month, and with some thoughts on this decade and the one we’re about to enter, here’s Weekend Update’s Social Sciences Editor Al Franken.

Al Franken: Thank you, Jane. Well, the “me” decade is almost over, and good riddance, and far as I’m concerned. The 70’s were simply 10 years of people thinking of nothing but themselves. No wonder we were unable to get together and solve any of the many serious problems facing our nation. Oh sure, some people did do some positive things in the 70’s – like jogging – but always for the wrong reasons, for their own selfish, personal benefit. Well, I believe the 80’s are gonna have to be different. I think that people are going to stop thinking about themselves, and start thinking about me, Al Franken. That’s right. I believe we’re entering what I like to call the Al Franken Decade. Oh, for me, Al Franken, the 80’s will be pretty much the same as the 70’s. I’ll still be thinking of me, Al Franken. But for you, you’ll be thinking more about how things affect me, Al Franken. When you see a news report, you’ll be thinking, “I wonder what Al Franken thinks about this thing?”, “I wonder how this inflation thing is hurting Al Franken?” And you women will be thinking, “What can I wear that will please Al Franken?”, or “What can I not wear?” You know, I know a lot of you out there are thinking, “Why Al Franken?” Well, because I thought of it, and I’m on TV, so I’ve already gotten the jump on you. So, I say let’s leave behind the fragmented, selfish 70’s, and go into the 80’s with a unity and purpose. That’s what I think. I’m Al Franken. Jane?

Jane Curtin: Thank you, Al. That’s the news. Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

“At high tide fish eat ants; at low tide ants eat fish.” Thai Proverb

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” French Proverb

The punditry was stunned.  Stunned by the overwhelming indictment of the Bush years and the fatigue of war and economic crisis.

When Bush 43 was elected in 2000 I had abandoned all hope.  Not because he was conservative (I’m a Republican who felt his party had abandoned him) but because he was so clearly a cog in a machine that was too full of itself and its ideology,  I feel quite the opposite this morning.  Affirmed for my country and it’s ability to bounce back from the edge of potential catastrophe.

This shift is one of demography in the electorate.  I’ll admit I was honestly indifferent about who won this election.  I liked both candidates.  McCain proved me right with his elegant concession speech–perhaps the most gracious I have ever heard.  For me it was proof he was a worthy candidate and would have been every bit as good a president as Obama.

It’s 1932, 1960, and 1980 again in so many ways– and once again proof that the electorate is always way ahead of its leaders.  We are on the precipice of an emergent new youth culture that is both multi-racial and  in utter opposition to the Baby boomers that preceded it. In this emerging youth revolution, Information technology will alienate the older generation much in the same way recreational drugs alienated the parents of baby boomers.

Liberalism has changed too.  It’s rather easy to see where this is going.  The left must get practical fast– and while I suspect that Obama will lead from the center–much like Kennedy, he will face extreme pressure from a left that has waited a very long time to correct what it has seen as great injustice.

It is a New Day but with the same old problems.  We are refreshed though, and the world will rally behind us for a short time.  I believe it will be time enough.  Markets, after all, are about trust.  Americans have given the world a reason to trust us again.  Things will still be tough–but like our president elect I am more optimistic than I’ve been in some time.  A new generation has officially stepped forward– From Chapter 3 of my book:

Hackers and hippies shared the same historic and subversive pursuits as they railed against the prevailing technological or political apparatus. They defined themselves and formed their identity either in opposition to, or through the sheer dominance of, that structure. For flappers it was cultural mores that frowned on exuberant dance and drinking. For the Beats it was the banality of literary and societal conformity to a value system that seemed to celebrate consumerism and us-versus-them geopolitics. This repeats over generations: What changes is the sand in the oyster creating this black pearl of a personal identity. Raging against the flappers, the Beats, the hackers and up-against-the-wall hippies became the battle cries and formed the attitudes of those not in these tribes.
How does this relate to youth culture? In the struggle to learn who they are, adolescents identify their tribes and what currency those tribes value (i.e., what they have to offer). By 1979, divorce had become so commonplace over the prior 15 years that one out of two marriages ultimately failed. That left a lot of kids with fractured lives and sometimes missing one parental rudder to steer them through their growing pains. Figuring out what happened to split mom and dad up became a huge factor in their identity crises. Who were they in this broken family? Where should their loyalties lie? In the ′79 film Kramer vs. Kramer, Billy Kramer’s confusion about his parents’ breakup reflects this issue. He was played by a seven year old in the movie, yet adolescents and even adults often feel the ripple effects of their parents’ divorce many years later.

Kramer vs. Kramer was a harbinger that showed what was going to unfold as a central crisis point for the coming generation of youngsters in the ’80s, when the divorce rate continued to rise. In youth culture, one generation’s pioneering experience with a social (e.g., divorce) or artistic phenomenon is something that gets reinterpreted by its successor. Though the Beatniks were post-adolescents, teens really dug their nonconformist alienation, and that defined the young counterculture of the ′60s and early ′70s. The early Internet’s underground hacker culture presaged the new millennium’s multitasking, multi-channel youth pop culture.

Using nostalgia is a powerful way to connect with an audience.

From Chapter 3

So many factors converge to make youth culture dominant in determining cultural momentum. Nostalgia and irony have their sharpest spikes in adolescents, especially those on the cusp of adulthood. Or said another way, the multi-stage struggle for identity reaches its crescendo in the late teen years. The ruling Boomer generation in its heyday seemed to invent extended adolescence, and to the extent that science and technology can keep up, Boomers will continue on this path. But, though the Boomers have been dominant for decades, their time is rapidly fading. Generation Y—the Echo Boom—is evolving into that role.

Tribal formation and articulation, the yeast of cultural change, are most volatile and fertile in youth and youth-conscious populations, and the struggles for identity and regeneration are the most powerful forces driving this. For in those years lies the time of the greatest, most passionate conflicts, which yield the most entertaining experiences for the rest of the culture to share in vicariously.

Youth culture is an essential driver of all of pop culture. The intensity that youth brings and the time youth has for development make youth’s culture the most dynamic and vital piece of the puzzle for the whole of pop cultural forecasting. Compounding the difficulty of forecasting for this segment of the population are the unique symbols, language, and channels youth employ to communicate with one another as they seek to distinguish themselves from those who came before and those who have held sway over their development. With their new voice and empowered by their beauty and regenerative powers, youth still strain for credibility and authenticity even while borrowing from the scraps of the cultural dustbin that preceded them. These totems hide conspicuously. They are there to be translated. You can dig what they say. Just don’t betray yourself by trying to say it. It’s essential to speak through translators and stay true to the language of your tribes.

Rebellion is not an obvious given, but only one of the many means of distinction that youth have at their disposal. In new, more subtly subversive ways, youth have embraced many of the conventions of their parents and move to separate themselves not through opposition, but through achievement. Youth leverage their entitlement and achieve a greater sense of themselves through even more conscious, conspicuous, and discerning consumption.
Decoding these trends is easier for the forecaster who is willing to seek new channels of communication and new methods of using them. Youth employ these new channels not for sheer novelty alone, but out of a real need to explore the meaning of having a unique voice rather than silent complicity.

I am one of those who thought a McCain -Obama race would be good for the country.  And, in fact, I think it has been.  I hear policy discussions again.   Yes, it will start to get ugly tomorrow as the 527’s launch their vitriol and that’s too bad– because I like Johnny Mac–but I think now he might lose.  And God forgive me, I think Glenn Beck might be right.  He blew his chances with the bailout bill.

There was his chance– right there– to stop the madness of the gaudy, bejeweled pork-fest.  Now don’t get me wrong– the Government needed to step in to restore confidence in the credit markets.  But John could have (actually he did) demanded a Kosher version of the bill.  He could have further demanded Obama join him (Obama wouldn’t of course)–positioning Obama as a sell-out and not a leader.  He could have looked liked the maverick he needs to be.  Of course McCain’s failure to call for another bill will be spun as McCain doing the right thing for the country in a time of panic- but it really looks like a kind of capitulation to the Shock Doctrine of the last 8 years. Many Independent and undecided voters will feel it– even if they don’t necessarily understand it.

Now that the pork has been passed, the hue and cry will begin.  Pragmatic financial conservatives are  furious over the details (not the principal) of the plan.  But now McCain has no other cards to play on the number one issue in the election: the economy.  This had all the markings of a Bush bill and John fell in line.  Obama’s hands are clean–something needed to be done and this was the only option to get those opportunistic Republicans over to the “big government” side of the fence.  Now McCain looks no different than the rest of the big government Republicans–just an older part of a broken establishment.  Is there any politician more easily demonized than a big government Republican?

I like political tension-I think checks and balances keep things from spiraling out of control.  Both Obama and McCain are worthy candidates and honestly I’m proud of them both.  Nevertheless for McCain the time came to take a stand and show leadership–not be be obstructionist– but to say “I’m going to be the next President and I demand better”.  He must of thought that he couldn’t rally his own troops–they looked so utterly ridiculous when they claimed Pelosi’s speech was the reason they couldn’t vote for the bill as it was originally.  Why didn’t he call them on it?

The election really may be over now.  McCain is going to look all grumpy and frustrated in the debates– Obama will look calm.  The strategy of tying McCain to Bush will have been successful as the economy drags the last few drops of approval Bush out of the Bush administration.  If McCain tries pulling the “guilt by association” card on Obama, it will just be embarrassing.   Of course less so when the 527’s do it– but it will all be marking time.

I was certain McCain would be the next President.  Now, not so much.   It just goes to show you.  Nothing is certain.  Hell, Obama could be caught with hookers and blow tomorrow–you never know.   I wouldn’t bank on it though.  Come to think of it, banking anything isn’t really a good idea these days.

Of course McCain’s flip-flopping and the trouble it caused him got me think about how to exploit these Treasury shenanigans  for my book.  The lesson:  Don’t abandon the date that brought you to the dance without exhausting all options.  From Chapter 2:

Of course, to understand how a tribe will change, you need to know a little bit about its culture. And to know its culture, you have to speak its language. This can be difficult because tribes are built around insular values, language, and symbols that are designed to distinguish them as unique and to manage potential members. From acronym-heavy business lingo to the secret rituals of fraternities, tribes create their own definitions and want to be spoken to on their own terms, in their own language. These rituals and lingos determine the deference and proximity of those who would be—or pretend to be—a part of the tribes. It is essentially human to define those not “with us” as “against us,” and language is a fundamental means to that end.
Let’s say you get lost on the way to the boardroom and accidentally find yourself in the warren of cubicles housing your company’s IT drones. As you listen to them discussing the finer points of the new complete cluster node with DDR-2 memory, multiple memory controllers, and a high-performance cluster interconnect, you might realize that you have no idea what this means. Well, you’re not supposed to—you’re not in the tribe.
Tribal language is a way to distinguish those in the know from the poseurs. But a sharp forecaster will find a way to decipher the code and determine what’s important to these culture-defining tribes.
Words aren’t the only things that differ from tribe to tribe. Tribes adopt their own value structure—that is, their own sense of right and wrong.

McCain got tangled in economic theory, lost his bearings, and the language of his base.   I think he may have lost the election.