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Category: zettel

scraps of paper

Alex Ross and the Economics of the Inky Conversation

Published November 1, 2008 by cgerrish

Ink blot

Black ink impressed on paper in specific patterns is decodable by a very large segment of the population. Part of the infrastructure we depend upon for our daily conversation is the machinery to put ink on paper, produce large numbers of copies and deliver an individual copy to an endpoint for consumption and decoding. Information, thought and opinion is defused into the language of our society to be discussed, ignored, judged and routed or relayed to others. The speed and regularity of this system are a key part of its economics and value proposition.

The discussion around the merits and demerits of classical music is one of the threads delivered through the news/ink/paper system. The other night I went to see Alex Ross, the classical music critic for the New Yorker, in conversation with Joshua Kosman, the SF Chronicle music critic. Ross is touring the country in support of his book on classical music in the 20th century called “The Rest is Noise.”

One of the threads of the discussion addressed the fact that classical music criticism is disappering from America’s daily newspapers. Music critics are being dropped and they aren’t being replaced. The conversation is dying out as expressed through the medium of daily ink. People are still talking, but the economics of daily ink no longer can support it as a venue. Certainly it continues in both weekly and monthly ink. Our daily conversation about classical music becomes a gypsy looking for more hospitable environs.

Rather than the typical ‘the Internet killed the newspaper’ meme, Alex Ross was very positive about how the conversation had moved into a new home and in many respects is now more lively. Ross’s own blog is perhaps a model for capturing the swarming interest around a particular performance, topic or conversation. He can go very deep into an obscure composer, make a stunningly poetic link between Wallace Stevens and Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, or compare Queen and Aaron Copland.

Jackson Pollock from Life Magazine

There was a moment in the stream of our public conversation when a publication like Life Magazine could focus our attention on the work of someone like Jackson Pollack. An editor could set the topic and the nation weighed in. We hated Pollock. We loved Pollock. Our kid could do that. We never understood it or knew about it until now. Discovery was delivered to us in our mailboxes. Alex Ross is no Life Magazine, but he now has the tools to put both the major cultural event and the little experimental downtown concert in front of us.


Night Fantasies from The Chamber Music Society on Vimeo.

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Big Theory

Published October 27, 2008 by cgerrish

…each one of these things is the product of a variety of forces and constraints. 

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Acts of Faith: A Network of Things

Published October 26, 2008 by cgerrish

Mark Lombardi Network Drawing

It was an article in the New York Times about online backup of files from a local hard drive that provided a glimpse of the larger migration in progress all around us. The great migration of data from the earth to the sky; from the hard drive to the cloud. When all your local files have duplicate copies in the cloud, their backups– could you really say which was the original and which was the copy?

The Network and the digital fundamentally changes the way we think about a thing. Things are singular, they occupy a specific set of spacial coordinates along the arc of time. In a given moment, in a slice of time, the thing occupies a single point in space. Often we prefer to stop the flow of time when we consider the qualities of the thing.

The digital thing, living on the Network, cannot assume its existence. It is not extension of matter in space, but rather bits in a particular pattern in a volatile memory system. The digital thing has a biological impulse, it must exist in multiple exact copies because each copy is so fragile. Continued existence necessitates this strategy.

Charles Darwin a la Warhol

The digital thing is not singular, it is a multiplicity by nature. When a unique digital thing is created on a local system, it wants to be duplicated to increase its chance of survival. All duplication is not created equal, duplication to the cloud actually increases a thing’s chance of survival. Interestingly, the pre-produced purchased digital thing, an MP3 of a song for instance, always already exists in the cloud. It doesn’t need to be duplicated and transferred, it only needs to be matched.

Once a digital thing has assured its multiplicity and persistence through time through a migration to the cloud, its next imperative is presence via a connected device. The digital thing wants to seep back out of the cloud into any and every device that can portray it. Sync-ing, versioning, caching, duplicating– these are some of the biological actions of the digital thing.

There are a few companies building pieces of this ecosystem for the digital thing. Ray Ozzie, with Mesh, probably has the most complete vision. One can imagine business models revolving around encryption. When the identity of a digital thing is masked through encryption, its persistence is financed through subscription. When the data is in the open, an attention/gesture economy guarantees persistence. Other models will certainly surface.

For those digital things that are publicly visible through the Network, the next biological imperative is to attract pointers, hyperlinks. The more pointers a digital thing can attract the greater its chance of survival. Like a physical thing, an unseen, unspoken digital thing has a very shadowy existence.

Paul Klee

The digital thing seeks to live as a multiplicity within a networked mesh with the ability to manifest its presence through as many attached devices as possible. To attract pointers, a highly efficient system for producing hyperlinks must co-exist with the network of things. Network meshed objects need search, track, microblogging (Tw*tter) and RSS to produce links– and links are always to some thing.

Pointers are digital things as well, they’re just moving through a faster stream. Their velocity gives them a fundamentally different character. Think of Einstein’s ideas around the relationship between matter, energy, light and velocity.

world trade center tight rope

The primitives for this ecosystem exist today. Its outlines can be seen dimly through the pointers flowing through the stream. How does such an ecosystem manifest in the full presence of its being? Like a memory or a learned skill, it is created through neural pathways— it is only through human attention and focused energy. It’s not what we wish or hope, but rather what we do. Acting on partial information within a barely visible system is an act of faith. But like the man said, “there’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.”

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Office Coffee: A Leading Economic Indicator

Published October 22, 2008 by cgerrish

Office coffee machine

My office supplies coffee, tea and hot chocolate to its employees. There’s filtered cold water and hot water for the tea and chocolate. Coffee requires at bit more work. Someone has to make a pot of coffee which includes putting a filter into the machine and then loading 1 1/2 portions of ground coffee from pre-measured packages. Through experimentation and oral history, I have learned that 1 package of coffee is too weak, and 2 packages of coffee are too strong.

Office coffee is perpetually bad. There many reasons for this. Often the coffee will sit in the pot cooking away for hour after hour– the flavor boiled out of it. Even when cut with milk it’s barely drinkable, an acidic brown liquid. Good office coffee requires social cooperation of a fairly high level. Reasonably good raw materials must be provided. And then the key, there must be a willing group of people dedicated to making and then maintaining the freshness of the brew.

If you think about it, the social contract around the quality of good office coffee requires an effort equal to that of a business like Peets or Starbucks. A single person is unlikely to make that effort; social cooperation is necessary.

The quality of office coffee produced in this manner is a leading economic indicator. We’ll leave to the side for the moment the idea of subsidized office coffee. When the cost of social cooperation to yield a good cup of coffee is sufficiently below the cost of buying a good cup of java– people switch. Labor replaces capital. The better and fresher the office coffee, the worse the surrounding general economy. As the economy improves, the quality and freshness of office coffee will start to deteriorate, and alternatives will start to seem economically feasible. Capital replaces labor (the general replaces the specific).

In a good economy, there are those who will cling to office coffee as a matter of principle. But as the general quality of office coffee will tell you, this is an utopian ideal. Of course “office coffee” is just a variable, we could just as easily be talking about enterprise software.

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