Joshua Foust riffs on Evgeny Morozov’s takedown of the new technoutopian The New Digital Age of Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, and winds up at Jaron Lanier’s weak-wristed response to the uncertainty of the postmodern world of work:

Of course, Lanier doesn’t have an answer. His idea – “sell your data” – only gets us part of the way there. Lanier correctly notes that the financial industry, governments, and tech firms thrive not on open data, but on expensive proprietary data (even Google, which claims to love openness so much, has a vast, private trove of your information it sells to advertisers). But his vision of selling data that is already freely out there to large data centers doesn’t make any sense.  The reason those systems are already thriving is because the cat is long out of the bag.

[…]

“In a world of free information,” Lanier writes, “The economy will start to shrink as automation rises radically. This is because in an ultra-automated economy, there won’t be much to trade other than information.”

It’s a bit late for that. The middle class has already begun to shrink, from both automation and from the torrent of free information about the public, monetized into the financial industry for the benefit of a few thousand traders on Wall Street (along with, let us not forget, incredibly abusive labor practices and banking systems). While it’s nice to think that monetizing one’s own information could create a new techno-middle class, the reality is that this is the same sort of high-minded digital utopianism that animates Schmidt and Cohen.

So where do we go from here? The post-employment economy is a scary and dangerous place — I’m learning this the longer I exist in the workforce as a free agent, not necessarily employed per se but also not without income. There are huge pitfalls (taxes can approach 45% for the first $50k of income) and uncertainties (who’s going to hire you for a project next), and it’s difficult to plan much for the long term. Yet, our society, economy, and even politics are based on the long term in their own ways. That is what a mortgage, IRA, pension plan, healthcare, and everything else we associate with adulthood is focused on — and it’s what animates the most vicious knife fights in Washington.

The scary, uncomfortable answer is that we really don’t have a solid idea of where to go from here. Wealthy people whose employers cover their healthcare, half their taxes, and provide a pension glibly suggest that young people simply “invent your own job” as if it’s that simple. The tech people, who were supposed to create the future, instead suggest reverting to a time that never existed (Lanier’s vision where we could “sell” our personal data for a profit) or a one-to-one recreation of our analog world online (Schmidt and Cohen).

The future is going to be marked by stable employment for the elite, and unstable employment for everyone else. Young people today will face more or less permanent underemployment, working far below their skills and capabilities. Poor and middle income people will face much the same. It leads to misleading jobs numbers (after all, being underemployed still gets one counted as “employed” by the BLS), and a false sense of prosperity as the 1% thrives from jobless profits.

Yet, rather than asking “how can we adjust our institutions to minimize the negative effects of unstable employment,” our thinkers are slinging around terms (“virtual” “digital” “monetize”) that were cutting edge in the early 90s, when Sandra Bullock blew everyone’s mind by ordering a pizza from her computer, than anything relevant to today. If we are going to create an economy of self employment — which is to say an economy of mass uncertainty — then we need to simplify things like the tax code, healthcare, and retirement (if that will even be a relevant term two decades from now). But instead of asking to simplify institutions and thus expand their capacity to adapt and help, we’re talking in nonsense circles about internet things.

I see some hope in the rise of placeforms (marketplace + platforms = placeforms) like oDesk and the like, some of which will figure out a way to disguise the freelancers in full-time employment clothes (albeit it, with highly variable income and a cafeteria-style pick-your-benefits-and-pay-for-‘em model). I envision the possibility of the Freelancers Union turning into an actual workers cooperative, and handling the back office side for freelancers, and maybe marketing their services.

But we will still be at risk, precarious, but operating as a connective, and cooperatively leveraging the inherent fluidarity of our way of working.

29 May 2013 40 Permalink

via Wired, Sam Gustin

Google chairman Eric Schmidt took responsibility for the search titan’s failure to counter Facebook’s explosive growth, saying he saw the threat coming but failed to counter it.

Speaking at the D9 tech conference outside of Los Angeles Tuesday evening, Schmidt said that for five years, he’s been aware of the competitive threat posed by upstart social networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Schmidt even wrote internal memos about the threat, he said, but was so focused on running Google’s day-to-day operations that he didn’t give the issue the necessary attention.

In an interview with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, Schmidt described Google’s social stumble as his biggest regret.

“I clearly knew I had to do something and I failed to do it,” Schmidt said. “CEOs need to take responsibility. I screwed up.”

Pressed by Swisher and her co-host, Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg, about why he didn’t focus more on social networking, Schmidt had a simple answer:

“I was busy,” he said.

The most expensive error of all time?

Schmidt is looking more like a Steve Ballmer or John Sculley type: a suit occupying the front office while the business loses its way in a world of unprecendented innovations.

Let’s see if Larry Page can make up for the five years of social misteps that Schmidt oversaw.

There is still time to make Android a social operating system, and not miss the next generation of innovation, Larry.

And this is not some sideline: Google’s core business is search, and as we move into a world based on social connection the nature of search is shifting very quickly:

We’ve moved out of scarcity-based search, where there were few results for searches. In a time of super-abundant information, the problem becomes ‘who do you want filtering for you?’ Google’s foundational method is counting incoming links, weighted by a reputation, derived again on incoming links. From this it derives a position in search results.

But in an era where we can connect directly to others in social networks, we can rely directly on our connections to filter the immense web, so meaning is the new search:

Increasingly, we will switch to a social connection mode to filter and find for us. Our networks will become engines of meaning, as Bruce Sterling said.

Everything we want to find has been found, and will find us through our social connections. Like head colds and happiness.

We will find everything through social relationships: what washing machine to buy, or the best Thai restaurant in Beacon NY, or the company that makes those horizontal corduroys. People that care about these issues, and to who we matter, will share meaning with us: they have beliefs that they can justify, also called knowledge.

Google is only the echo of our linking behavior, a second-order derivative of our combined gestures. But generally, we would be happier with fewer results from trusted sources, and the rise of social tools makes that almost as fast as Google search.

Google must plan to adapt to the social revolution or fall into the spam darkness.

1 June 2011 58 Permalink

Steven Levy relates the story of Wesley Chan, a Google product manager, derailing the Skype acquisition:

if Google bought Skype, Chan concluded, it would have to rewrite the entire Skype platform.

Basically, he was convinced that peer-to-peer wouldn’t work within Google’s infrastructure, and that Google could build a better mousetrap on it’s own.

Especially interesting is the description of the meeting when the deal went south:

“Salar [Kamangar, now CEO of YouTube] and I laid the grenades,” Chan told me. According to Chan, the pair went to Sergey Brin and convinced him it was a terrible deal. Then, Chan says, they brainstormed a plan to sabotage the deal in a key meeting of top executives, a gather that presumably would wind up blessing the purchase.

The idea was bait and switch—the executives in favor of the deal would assume that everything was on track, and Chan and his allies would use shock and awe to turn things around. Chan says that he began the meeting by praising the deal. “I even had a deck that was super supportive of it,” he says.

But, according to Chan, halfway through the deck, Sergey Brin seized the floor “and started getting really negative.” He asked a series of questions that he knew would get unsatisfactory answers. Is this purchase data-driven? Who is going to spend all those months commuting to Europe? (No one stepped up.) How long is the government review expected to take? As Chan had figured, the advocates of the deal were unprepared to respond to these last-minute objections.

Chan then described the climatic moment. “[Sergey] looks at me and says, ‘Why would I want this risk? We have a team capable of building the carrier, we have the users, we have hundreds of millions of Gmail users, why do we need to have Skype?’ And at that point, Sergey gets up and says, ‘This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen.’ And Eric gets up and walks out of the room, and I’m like, okay, the deal’s off.” And it was.

12 May 2011 69 Permalink