Cobb

Amazon: The Next General Motors

At some point, we must consider the basic needs of humanity and figure out how the economy is arranged to provide for it and what goods and services the markets can sustain beyond those of necessity. In America, we can predict beyond necessity because ours are so well spoken for. It is that interesting gap that I spend hours thinking when I try to distinguish our 9% unemployment rate from the poverty of the second and third worlds. 

Several years ago, the NYT published a survey about the most prestigious professions. I was mildly surprised to see that Database Administrators ranked third, behind doctors and lawyers out of 447 job titles. But what has not been surprising is how much of our economy has moved into what I must call industrial dependency on computing services. We are at a point in our history where taking away the computers would be like taking away the automobiles. Information technology and telecommunications are where what we know must live or else die. The efficiencies and effectiveness of this industry too compelling to put aside. In this world there are as many microchips as grains of rice, and the trend is irreversible.

Clay Shirky, among many inquisitors into the phenomena of this age has written a book entitled 'Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age'. In i, he shows how many ventures on the internet capture human efforts quite effectively - in ways heretofore impossible. Imagine the creation of a global encyclopedia in fifty languages written by nobody in particular in their spare time. That's Wikipedia. The ability for a literate population of billions to create products and services for the intellect is the world historical process that is emerging now. 

The Industrial Revolution as we know it come to be because it generated a great surplus in one basic human need, clothing. It turned out that once properly organized, ordinary people had the skill to produce in factories, a product everyone needed. By applying a process that scaled up the ordinary work of an individual tailor, people were able to earn more money, make more clothes and create for the population of ordinary people, choices in what clothing to wear. What started as clothing, once individually crafted, moved on to other sorts of manufacture with its ultimate expressions in the automobile and jet aircraft.  For an ordinary person to have choices in how to get to a destination, and have many destinations to choose from drastically changed the shape of the world. We don't talk much about the 'jet set' because now frequent flying is commonplace. It's hard to imagine rolling back to a time when an automobile was not an option or when jet transport did not exist. FedEx overnight delivery was created in our lifetimes. In America, 'allow six weeks for delivery' used to be the standard.

In these ways the future of IT are certain to create surpluses for the common man. What is necessary is for the high cost of craftsmanship to be surpassed by the low cost of mass production. For manufacturing, that required the factory. For computing it requires the cloud. What is a factory but a streamlined and standardized version of a craftsman's workshop scaled up for mass production? The cloud is certainly that as compared to the typical corporate IT shop.

In 1908, the head of Cadillac in England famously put on a remarkable demonstration. He had three Cadillac Model Ks race around a track and then disassembled. Then he scrambled the parts and even took out some and replaced them with off the shelf replacements. He then had the cars reassembled. All three of them worked perfectly. Today, most software is built in such a way that this would be impossible, but the cloud and the open source movement are rapidly changing that condition. 

Amazon is the leading cloud provider and I predict that the services, products, standards and practices that emerge from what it is learning about computing, networks, and security at massive scale will be every bit as influential in society as the paradigms that emerged over the 20th century for the automobile at Ford and General Motors. Moreover, the effect of these new ideas will provide similar surpluses. 

It was 1903 when the Wright Brothers first succeeded. It was a mere 14 years later when the Red Baron emerged as the combat 'ace' of WW1. That is how quickly people can adapt and master something that didn't even exist, on a world scale. Amazon and its rivals now host the software solutions of companies like Netflix. 14 years ago, in 1998, high definition video on demand to mass markets of mobile devices was considered impossible.

General Motors became the world's largest business and ushered in a new way of thinking about business. Even today we have a hard time not thinking about those businesses organized around the automobile when we say the word 'industry'. Glass, rubber, plastics and steel were all made that much more important owing to their place in the autombility manufacturing. Today oil is king because it is the consumable part of the worlds automotive needs. But it is *an* economy, not *the* economy. The next economic progression will come from the real fact that we will have more literate people on the planet than ever before in our history. Their cognitive needs and wants will fuel an even larger economy than that based on the clever assembly of glass, rubber, plastics, steel and oil. 

It begins with enabling a new class of database administrators, mathematicians, computer scientists, and all of the various kinds of creative, thoughtful knowledge and communications workers we can assemble and setting them loose in the cloud - the scaled up information factories of tomorrow. 

Today, we sit on the verge of enabling the common man a choice of thought previously only available in the same ways a choice of clothing was scarcely affordable in an age of hand sewn tailored garments. He will demand his choice and those who provide it will profit. The economy of intellect is at hand and it will be the Americans, once again, who light the way forward by providing the infrastructure necessary - the largest and most advanced software factories in the world. Considering what Microsoft and Oracle have been, I do not see how Amazon can lose. 

Chris Bowen: First Trumpet

Jeremy Winters at ChefConf 2012

Nouning Hatey

Nouning is the application of a platonic label to a person who exhibits behavior in some form of the platonic ideal. It is an error of absolutism. Consider the essay Nouning Considered Harmful. Excerpt:

Here's the thing: Using adjectives as nouns obscures meaning, harms discourse, impairs communication, and ultimately reduces our ability to think in a careful and nuanced way about controversial issues, let alone effect social progress. Anyone who wants to see our society become less divided rather than more, and in particular anyone who wants to combat racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other forms of prejudice and modes of oppression, should try hard to avoid the practice, and refrain from calling a person a sexist, or a racist, or a homophobe, instead applying those descriptors to his or her actions.

Good catch, rather obvious from my perspective. It was one of the singular lessons from my highschool debate class. The only thing that doesn't change about you is your last name. So call people by their last name and describe their attraction to ideas they express. If you do this enough times, you make the distinction between the person and the ideas they hold. People as vessels of spirit, et al. Very basic and fundamental thinking. 

Up Yours, Mighty Race

The Baby Boom isn't dead. Sometimes this is a good thing. Sometimes not. 

Like most of the people slightly older than me, I thought the Space Race was a thrilling time and I picked up the usual compliment of values and heroes. Like the Boomers, I have lamented the failure of vision and see no flying cars or colonies on the Moon. I have lamented the lame days of the 80s when American Muscle cars disappeared from the planet - enough to make Knight Rider a superstar. But unlike Boomers, especially those that don't get the 'Information Superhighway'. I know where the energy of all that inspiration has gone. It has gone into my generation through different metaphors, like Star Wars and video games, and come out different and more powerful. I never forget the inspiration and the original vision, but I don't mistake the different shape and form of today's reality for failure. No matter how brilliant Kubrick may have been, the future of computing was never HAL 9000. 

Whenever I hear somebody older than me (and I'm 50) talk about how many race problems we have in America, I know immediately that we are hearing the voice of some pesky Boomer demanding his flying car. Another clue is the phrase 'post-racial America'. 

A thoughtful reader has reminded me that Frank Rich might be exactly the kind of bummed out Boomer missing his racial utopia. Consider the following litany of complaint ailing our poor critic's conscience, and presumeably that of our nation:

Just a short list would include: the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Cambridge; the hysterical tea-party rally against health-care reform that showered obscenities on black congressmen entering the Capitol; the ousting of the African-­American Department of Agriculture worker Shirley Sherrod after she was ­libeled as a racist; the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia; the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida; and, this month, the protest of more than 40 percent of West Virginia Democratic-primary voters, who pulled the lever for an obscure white federal-­prison inmate rather than endorse a second run for the incumbent president of their own party. Last week brought the pièce de résistance: the Times revelation of a proposed super-PAC TV commercial that would slime Obama as pretending to be a “metrosexual black Abe Lincoln.” 

and then finally

I still remember seeing A Raisin in the Sun as a white middle-class kid in 1961, a few months after the Kennedy inaugural, when it played the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., on tour. It was just as Martin Luther King was bringing his gospel to the nation. For an 11-year-old attending a (de facto) segregated public-school system in the nation’s capital, it was an awakening to the unreconstructed apartheid America all around me. Anyone of any race who remembers that America knows just how epic a difference the civil-rights movement made in sweeping so much of it away. The actual lives of many, if hardly all, black Americans have improved immeasurably in those 50 years.

What about 'Blues for Mister Charlie'? Didn't he see that play too? Or how about 'The Colored Museum'? Or ar the only plays that have anything significant to say about race bound to be that old sentimental favorite? 

I happen to be blessed with the curse of having read at least 50 books by black authors over the past 20 years. My sentimental favorite is 'Drylongso' by Gwaltney. The premise and proof of this book is that black Americans see their situations very well and do so continuously with a very clear understanding of their individual predicaments. The implication of this is that for the purposes of justice and the general welfare, there needn't be great orators, politicians, speechifiers, playwrights or their critics. 

Think about it. If you were writing about computers in 1961 and you cared about equality, you might be concerned that the government would create some Colossus or WOPR to take the planet to the brink of nuclear war - something no black Americans wanted. Today, 50 years later, black Americans have more compute power in their pockets than Neil Armstrong had on the moon, and they play chess better than HAL 9000. That's because the vision of the future and the nature of social reality is in the hands of the people, not so much in the hands of great orators, etc. 

There are not flying cars. But a car has gone faster than the speed of sound, and there are cars that parallel park themselves and there are styles of automobiles that reflect the specific and uniques cultural tastes of some black Americans. 

Like many Boomers, I had some trouble thinking past '2001'. For decades we thought of that year as 'the future' and we all through we knew how it would be shaped. But we were as wrong as the Japanese filmmakers of Godzilla were about the effects of nuclear tests at sea. We were as wrong as the animators of the Bugs Bunny era were about household robots that looked like toasters with their own arms and four-fingered hands. We were as wrong as Edison was about DC electrification of the country. 

But let's talk about race shall we? 

My parents don't. They've done their share, and as black parents they stand pretty much in awe of what has transpired. I speak as the son of a mother who dodged bricks thrown at her when she was pregnant, protesting restrictive housing covenants in Los Angeles County. Something far less odious than Jim Crow. I speak as the son of a father arrested and thrown in jail for dating a white girl in New Haven, CT. I've known what they think about race for my entire life, a conversation that has never been difficult to have, or require the ministrations of a Broadway production. I speak as the nephew of one of the first black stewardesses in the American airline industry, and as the nephew of a college president.  I speak as the brother of a young man who died in police custody. I speak as the brother who is a sworn police officer. My black family has experienced a lot of the things we like to talk when we talk about race and a lot of things we don't like to talk about when we talk about race. 

I have the choice to abstract these experiences into that narrow kind of plus and minus calculation we like to use when we talk about race in America. But since I know, like all reasonably unsentimentally thoughtful people know, race is a fiction - a narrative kept alive by people who want to believe something about race and have some idea how things ought to be when it comes to race. I'm tempted to say that I have no idea how things ought to be when it comes to race, but I have my druthers. In fact, thinking about race is as easy to me as thinking about sin and I understand very well what a lack of moderation in thinking about sin turns you into.  So on the whole, it's very clear that you take race like you take sin, like you take war. Which is to say, you bury the dead and you move on.  

I am not stunned that wars end. I am not amazed that the future happens.  But here is Frank Rich:

There has been change on the American playing field of race since Inauguration Day 2009—not so much for the better or the worse, but a shift into a kind of twilight zone where the nation’s racial conversation has moved from its usual gears of intractability, obfuscation, angry debate, and platitudinous sentimentality to the truly unhinged. It’s as if everyone can now say, well, that’s that, we’ve elected our first African-American president, we can pat ourselves on the back for doing so, and, with that noble and historic accomplishment in the bank, we will sign on to sideshows ranging from a Herman Cain stunt presidential run to a malicious jihad mounted by a right-wing hit man in Los Angeles, Andrew Breitbart, to destroy Sherrod, an obscure federal worker in Georgia. You’d think Obama’s victory gave the entire country permission to act out like the racial brawlers ofClybourne Park.

There is something unhinged about detatching the narrative about race from its traditional boundaries of 'civil discourse' to the kind of sideshow freakorama it takes on these days. I think two things about that. The first is that Rich, among his Boomer peers, remains bound to articles of faith about race that were set in stone by simple American conventions that are passe and were never quite welded to sound philosophy. And the second is that the unreality of race - its essential Orwellian nature has made all civil discourse about it plainly absurd. These thoughts reinforce each other when taken in the historical context of the Negro Problem and the international attention it once commanded and now no longer deserves. If Herman Cain is a joke, perhaps it is because Thurgood Marshall had to be so serious. But in Thurgood's light, Barack Obama is a joke as well. Perhaps a more sophisticated joke, of the sort that gets giggles of the sort reserved for New Yorker cartoons, but a cartoon nonetheless. For how could this, the administration of the NDAA and secret B-52 bombings, er drone assassinations, be considered serious in contrast to the civil libertarian standards of Justice Marshall? All these jokes are acceptable because there is no deadly or world historical subtext. No great Communist conspiracy is attempting to turn the Negro against America in any Cold War context. No great Pan African Summit awaits great black American keynote speakers about the post-colonial future. Skip Gates is no WEB DuBois. He's just another Harvard professor, and that's all he needs to be. So we don't need to think about him, his predicament or his predictions do we?

Speaking of which, Toni Morrison won her Nobel prize in literature 19 years ago. How many of her books do you suppose Trayvon Martin read? I happen to be one of those black Americans who tends to think a great deal more about our Morrisons than our Martins, more about our Churchills than our chavs. And I recognize that it is outside the narrative for a black American to be inspired by Winston Churchill or to use the term 'chav'. Then again I'm one of those folks that Gwaltney was talking about. I write my own words. I'm invested in the idea that my individuality matters, no matter what whomever is scribbling elsewhere about the significance of the sacking of this or that petty bureacrat or how fair or foul ethnic insults get.

I suddenly was attacked by the idea of the single word I've banned from this website being amplified in a sort of twist on the Stanford Prisoner Experiment. There is that assumption that if the white person turns up the volume dial high and hard enough that the black pain is inevitable. It's not the content that hurts, but the ridiculous volume. The narrative on race has always and ever been noise. The truth is in millions of lives who neither fit the profile, nor the audience for the utopian dreams of yesteryear. How do I get through life without a racial discourse? How does anyone?

I hear they're making plays about race on Broadway. I wonder if any line from it will ever compete with Marcus Garvey who said around the time my great-grandparents died, "Up you mighty race, accomplish what you will."  What if we had and nobody noticed? I suppose we couldn't be called a race any longer could we?

 

Certainty vs Hope

science is about certainty.

those who pursue science want to be certain. and they discipline themselves and their thought process to deal with the results of all experiments. they seek to prove things beyond the shadow of a doubt. this is how knowledge progresses. without knowledge there is only guesswork and superstition. 

 

guesswork and superstition are the enemy of civilization.

this is because if you rule your life through guesswork and/or superstition you assume others do as well.

if others run their lives via guesswork and superstition.

 

a. your guess is as good as mine.

b. my god is just as righteous as your god.

 

in other words everything is possible because the possible is defined NOT BY CERTAINTY but by guesswork and superstition. 

 

in a world of certainty, NOT everything is possible. AND, you can know exactly what is impossible.

 

in a world of guesswork and superstition, everything and anything is possible. 

 

in the world of guesswork and superstition, the way people make predictions is called HOPE. you make your prediction and keep your fingers crossed.

 

in the world of certainty, the way people make predictions is called THEORY. you either prove your theory or you disprove your theory.

 

you can also say that in the world of guesswork and superstition, you can also call HOPE: either SUPPLICATION or PRAYER.

 

when HOPE, SUPPLICATION and PRAYER fail to produce predicted results, you can always hope, supplicate and pray again for the same results. this is called 'keeping hope alive' also 'keeping the faith' also 'protest'. this can go on indefinitely. 

 

when THEORY fails to produce predicted results, you get rid of the disproven theory as soon as possible.

 

a disproven theory expands knowledge because it adds to the knowledge about what is impossible. 

 

a failed PRAYER, HOPE or SUPPLICATION does not expand knowledge, it merely tries the patience of those who live in the world of guesswork and superstition. so they tend to PRAY more, HOPE more and SUPPLICATE more, instead of changing direction. 

 

that is because they do not accept that anything is impossible. they do not accept any certainty or proof or disproof. they only accept that.

 

a. your guess is as good as mine.

b. my god is just as righteous as your god.

 

guesswork and superstition are the friend of revolution.

this is because dashed hopes, unrequited supplication and unanswered prayers try human patience to the breaking point.  such broken humans turn on those who they see as having their hopes, supplications and prayers fulfilled. they say the the others do not deserve what they possess. 

 

revolution allows the hopeful, prayerful supplicants to have their way with society. 

 

revolution becomes the means to the ends of HOPE, the hope that has no need for THEORY, for proof or for disproof. 

 

 

--- 

So when anyone says to 'keep hope alive' what they mean is to dismiss proof and certainty because anything is possible, you merely have to keep the faith, hope, supplicate and pray more. 

 

Eclipse