Entries tagged “monoculture”

It's been demonstrated over and over again, but businesses refuse to learn the lesson: Homogeneity is its own punishment in the world of business. From the Washington Post today:

[T]he experience of the past year suggests that we desperately need to bring more women into leadership positions on Wall Street, in politics, in regulatory bodies and in American life generally. For decades, corporations and financial firms have sponsored expensive training programs to promote more women into their ranks. They have launched much-needed maternity policies and flexible work arrangements. Most of these initiatives, however, have been pursued to make life easier for the women involved — or, more cynically, to remove the threat of lawsuit or adverse publicity for the firms.

The financial crisis has exposed a quieter but equally pressing concern: We need women in leadership positions not only because they can manage as well as men but because they manage differently than men; because they tend — over time and in the aggregate — to make different kinds of decisions and to accept and avoid different kinds of risk. We need women who will say no to bad decisions based on male-dominated rivalries and clubby golf course confidences. We need women to blow the whistle when risks explode and to challenge the presumptions that too many men, clustered too closely together and sharing a common worldview, can easily indulge.

As the constant wail from Wall Street should remind us, diversity isn't just nice in theory. It makes for better business.

There's a related question here which no one is asking, which is whether the economic catastrophe facing the global marketplace is a result of a failure of white culture in America. The media is always quick to ask whether problems like violence plaguing minority communities are symptoms of a toxic culture in that community, but I haven't seen any questions to that effect in regard to this financial meltdown.

I've written a good deal about monoculture on this site over the years; The correlation between diversity and success has been repeatedly demonstrated.

I love it when technologists write about the human side of the geekery, and Giles Bowkett's post about Rubyfrom a few months ago, which I just got sent a link to this week, captures some beautiful truths that exist in both code and in culture.

Harmony and balance make you feel good. American Rubyists frequently take up all the points of Ruby's power, expressiveness, and efficiency, but they don't seem to register the point that Ruby was designed to make you feel good. Even Rubyists who want to explain why Ruby makes them feel good often fail to mention that it was expressly designed for that exact purpose. ...

JRuby is a first-generation American - a child born here of one foreign parent, Ruby itself. I'm a first-generation American too, and even though I have two human, English parents, rather than one Japanese parent made of code, I think I feel JRuby's pain here. So I'm just going to tell you - every first-generation American sees this happen all the time. Some idea from another country or culture disappears like mist scattered by winds unless Americans already have a synonym for it. If they don't have a word for it, they don't have a box to put it in, and the idea just falls through the cracks.

Religious wars over programming languages are just silly. The messianic zeal of Christianity's shameful Crusades a thousand years ago still lingers on in Western culture, and one glaring example is the ludicrous idea that there should be one true language or one true editor, or one ring to rule them all. It's much better when programmers can work in multiple languages, multiple editors, and multiple environments. Diversity is healthy for ecologies. This is a point Neal makes in his podcast - he calls it polyglot programming, which is to say multilingual programming. He calls it a positive trend, and I agree.

Whether you call it diversity, competition, or a lack of monoculture, I believe in it. And I do think it's a fundamental requirement for a healthy culture, whether in society or in technology.

A.J. Jacobs, master of the year-long book stunt, spent a year trying to live by all the rules dictated in the Bible. As stunts go, it's not that interesting to me ("Hey, I grew a beard!"), but one of the lessons he mentioned learning in this Newsweek interview indicates he really did go in with an open mind:

We all talk about freedom of choice, but there’s something very attractive about freedom from choice. Religion provides structure, mooring, anchoring. Should you covet? No. Should you give 10 percent to the needy? Yes. It really structures your life. After my year I felt unmoored, overwhelmed by choice. I have adjusted, but I’m still overwhelmed by choice, as we all are in America.

There's an analogy here about why those who preach simplicity in the realm of technology sound so much like they're preaching religion, and why those who agree with them often take on a near-religious fervor, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

The exact thing you are looking for is out there on the Internet, if you just know where to look. So here are some hints.

• Making the connection between Girl Talk and DJ Drama, Congressman Mike Doyle (Pittsburgh represent!) breaks down remix culture and the obsolescence of a lot of current IP law for the Congress. Check out the video, or refer back to hodling a gun to Dick Clark's head.

• Diversity in Open Source Communities: Lynne breaks it down. I don't need to explain this one to you folks, right?

• The Wall Street Journal alludes to Google's biggest weakness -- the lack of transparency around the AdWords/AdSense/PageRank market. It works like this: Sites can't predict how they'll rank in search results, but some sites depend on that traffic for their business to grow. To scale up a business requires managing risk and volatility, and having a key factor to growth be largely opaque increases risk greatly, limiting investment and confidence and making it impossible to plan. So sites that aren't can't reach scale without relying on search traffic have a limit on the maximum growth they can achieve in a PageRank-based economy.

• That WSJ story also reminded me that Rich Skrenta's blog is as consistently compelling as Dick Costolo's "Ask The Wizard", which I raved about the other day.

• Of course Wikipedia has a list of fictional bears. What's even better is the discussion about the list of fictional bears.

• Fuck Garrison Keillor. Yes, really.

• Nelson Minar looks at distributed computing startups that used to be competitors for his startup. The writeup is honest, smart, and geeky -- all the things that make Nelson so charming. And whatever happened to Google Compute? I used to be somewhat less critical in my analysis of new technologies.

• Todd Levin acerbically points out what's wrong with SXSW. He alludes to many of the reasons I didn't go this year, but I am pretty conflicted about getting easy laughs by tearing down something that other people enjoy. Would be a lot more impressive to get laughs by praising the conference for what it does well.

• Susan Rogers was getting her PhD to understand "whether the human mind is specialized for music [and] how musical training shapes your auditory memory and cognitive abilities". But I just love her for being Prince's long-suffering engineer during the best and most productive years of his career. I kind of have an affinity for her because her story stuck with me during a much more emo period in my life.

• And if you were still thinking about blogging technology evangelists, you might want to note an interesting trend. Recent Microsoft hires in evangelism lasted nine and a half weeks and three weeks. Quitting Microsoft evangelism is the new evangelism! Your mileage may vary.

Do you want to learn about the future of web applications? If so, when choosing an event, you might want to make sure it's one that cares about including speakers based on merit, instead of based on arbitrary gender qualifications. I judge merit to be those who meet these criteria:

1. They've already been successful
2. They have done something innovative and unique
3. They are well-known names who will draw an audience and make the event compelling
4. Their work impacts a large audience, or has great influence on the space

Caveats: This list took about 15 minutes for me to make, and I had a little bit of help from Caterina. It's also skewed towards women whom I know well or whom I have already seen speak. But in 15 minutes, I was able to construct a set of theoretical sessions that you won't see at events that specifically exclude women, or that make sure not to reach out to them.

• danah boyd: The younger generation of web users have different definitions of "public" and "private" than you do.
• Mitchell Baker: How to take something from being an interesting technology to being a mainstream tool
• Caterina Fake: How to get things done even within the constraints of a big company
• Mena Trott: How to design an application that delights its users, instead of confounding them
• Liza Sabater: Your project won't succeed unless you reach people who are different from you
• Amy Jo Kim: How best practices from game design can make your web applications like crack
• Linda Stone:What we will be paying attention to in the future
• Kathy Sierra: How to design products that make your users smarter, sexier and hungry for more
• Heather Armstrong, Meg Frost, and Gina Trapani: One person can be a successful media outlet
• Lynne Johnson: How to credibly bring new media to an old-media company
• Jane Pinckard: Anybody with half a brain could have seen that the Wii was going to win, but you were busy bickering about the Cell processor
• Meg Hourihan: A real mashup: How to combine technology with something you love
• Heather Champ: How to manage a web community shitstorm with grace and tact
• Susannah Fox: You talk about "accessibility", but what do you know about people who are sick, old, or disabled?
• LeeAnn Prescott: Everybody talks about traffic and stats -- what about someone with actual data?
• Charlene Li: What are the criteria by which real-world analysts create their make-or-break analyses?

I could go on and on, but I know the obvious question: Where are the men? Well, don't worry -- the door is open to them. As soon as one of you has done something with the impact of Flickr, something that has the number of users of Firefox, made something that's used by the elderly or the young or by someone different than you, you can participate. Hell, if you make something that makes half as many people smile as Heather, Meg, and Gina's work does, you can send along a proposal to our imaginary event.

To conference organizers: If you haven't heard of these people or their work, or you think that Yet Another Bookmarking To-Do List Guy is more important, perhaps you owe some refunds. At this event, nobody would even notice if the wifi went out.

• See also: The Old Boys' Club is for Losers

A few months ago, I spent a lot of time trying to show the tech community I belong to that diversity is essential to our survival. Not just to the Web 2.0 world being healthy and thriving, but as a matter of life and death.

Unfortunately, my diatribe on the topic was boring and thus unpersuasive. Jason Kottke kicked off another conversation about the paucity of female participants in some of the higher-profile technology conferences. I agree with Jason's point, but am disappointed that his preference for rationality and logic led to him using numbers and statistics to justify the idea: The responses quickly devolved into the expected defensive numbers game.

One bright spot is that at least some of the people on the defense are smart guys whom I respect and like. Because, while they're wrong, at least I can debate them in good conscience without feeling bad. I would have felt bad if I only linked to defensive rationales foisted by those who I think are malicious and idiotic.

So, the good guys on the wrong side of this debate include, first Eric Meyer:

In my personal view, diversity is not of itself important, and I don't feel that I have anything to address next time around. What's important is technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability. That's it. That's always been the alpha and omega of my thinking, and it will continue to be so the next time, and time after that, and the time after that.

You'll note that nowhere in that list do you find gender, race, creed, or any other such parameter. Those things are completely unimportant to me when organizing a conference. (Or, really, when I'm doing almost anything.)

In a similar vein, John Gruber:

It's not because of a lack of opportunity or aptitude; it's a lack of interest.

So the issue here isn't why there aren't more women speaking at web conferences, but why there aren't more women interested in web nerdery.

Eric and John are both good guys who mean well, but that two people who are smart, forward-thinking, and open minded are still unaware of the limits and constraints imposed by their own shortsightedness is disappointing. Eric: Are you saying that it's your explicit desire to only make a conference that's marketable to the audience you already have? Because that seems so boring and unambitious that it feels like you're saying "we're only in it for the money".

Unless I'm going strictly out of obligation, I go to events to learn things, to have my mindset challenged. Being presented with familiar, unchallenging ideas just so someone can make a buck is the equivalent of junk food. Don't get me wrong -- I'm a fan of pop music, so junk food has its place. But I expect better of those who are seen as leaders.

And John, to fall into the laziest, least persuasive argument of all leads me to believe you're being almost willfully naive. "Women aren't in these disciplines because they aren't interested?" Really? There's a simpler explanation, which falls under the heading of "I know where I'm not welcome." This kind of bias isn't new; Guys are almost always unable to see the barriers they construct.

Let me put this into terms your respective audiences can better understand:

• Limiting the speaker list of an event to those that appeal to your existing audience will yield diminishing returns as your attendees tire of seeing the same voices over and over. And in the meantime you will make less and less money.
• Saying that you want to design an event to appeal to the audience that you already reach is like making a web page to work with only the browsers that can already see your site. Do you believe in open standards and accessibility when it matters, and when it's not easy, and when it's not merely a technological problem?
• It's foolish to think that the feedback loop of a strong network effect doesn't act as an enormous barrier to new audiences. If you are an Apple fan, do you think that merely touting one's own technological superiority is sufficient? Or does it make sense to accommodate those who aren't yet part of the community by being able to run their applications, get the same economies of scale from processors and peripherals, and improving distribution and retailing? If you do, then you're saying it takes more than opening up the door -- it requires welcoming the audience you haven't yet reached.

And in passing, I am not surprised that those who advocate yelling at their customers tend to get very defensive about their lack of ambition. It is a fitting punishment that the web of some people's "future" only includes more boys like themselves, progressing further and further into a rounded-corner of irrelevance.

That brings me to my final point, which I'll explain more in my next post: Those of you who are defending this status quo are defending a culture of failure.

And that's the most important thing to remember: Those who are reaching out to include all members of their community, who are seeking out new ideas and voices, are not only winning, they're the only ones who will continue to win. You may succeed in defending the boys-only nature of your treehouse. But you'll be dooming yourselves to irrelevance.

• For more reading: The Essentials of Web 2.0 Your Event Doesn't Cover

There's no shortage of animosity towards the mainstream record industry from its customer base, but the RIAA's thug mentality's become brutally obvious of late. The major labels have relied on DJ mixtapes to scout new talent and promote the most popular artists on their rosters, expending significant resources to fund their efforts. And now they've turned on mixtape DJs, supporting the efforts of Federal authorities to raid prominent studios merely for doing the work the labels paid them to do.

Fifty years ago, the equivalent would have been for the labels to tell the FBI to kick down the doors at American Bandstand, and lead Dick Clark off in shackles for promoting their records.

I'd heard mention of the story a few weeks ago on most of the music news and hip hop sites I follow, but the best explanation was Jay Smooth's video on hiphopmusic.com.

See Jay's Report

Then, this Sunday's New York Times covered the story of DJ Drama's arrest and the raid on Gangsta Grillz in depth:

Drama and Cannon’s studio was not a bootlegging plant; it was a place where successful new hip-hop CDs were regularly produced and distributed. Drama and Cannon are part of a well-regarded D.J. collective called the Aphilliates. Although their business almost certainly violated federal copyright law, as well as a Georgia state law that requires CDs to be labeled with the name and address of the producers, they were not simply stealing from the major labels; they were part of an alternative distribution system that the mainstream record industry uses to promote and market hip-hop artists. Drama and Cannon have in recent years been paid by the same companies that paid Kilgo to help arrest them.

What's happening, in short, is exceptionally underhanded and despicable, even by the standards of the recording industry. Every major label uses underground mixtapes to promote their work -- whether it's the ceaseless parade of MCs dissing each other, new artists getting their big break by dropping a few verses on someone else's track, or major artists testing out new singles and sounds by giving a taste to the mixtape crews first, this is an essential and integral part of contemporary music promotion. And it has, of course, been part of hip hop culture since the very earliest days.

And just like Dick Clark's early popularity in the 50s and 60s, this channel has grown in popularity due to sheer necessity. A vital, evolving musical scene needs a champion who has the credibility of being close to the street while also having the reach and distribution to catch the attention of a wider audience. Major artists like Lil Jon and T.I. have gotten their start or gotten a big push from Gangsta Grillz mixtapes. And now DJ Drama, the driving force behind Grillz, has spent time in jail at the behest of those he was helping.

How bad does it get? Check out this definitive example of shoddy local news reporting -- The Fox affiliate in Atlanta manages to get an R.I.A.A. spokesperson acting typically shady, and a law enforcement officer pointing out that "no drugs or weapons were found this time". (Hint to the Feds: The really huge drug stashes are in the offices of the actual record labels.) To be clear: The R.I.A.A. is implying that their distribution, promotion, and A&R partners are drug dealers with stashes of illegal weapons. Of course, they already think their customers are criminals, but this must mark a new milestone.

The overall cluelessness and lack of literacy about Atlanta's own local music scene in this TV report should be shocking, but sadly, it seems inevitable.

A note to Matthew Kilgo: These people you're calling criminals are fundamental to generating the income that your salary is leeched from. The only positive effect that might come from your efforts is that you might stop feeding the stream of money that lets you keep your job.

Gen has captured the cost of monoculture with his excellent look at the unfortunate result of some technology choices made in South Korea years ago:

This nation is also a unique monoculture where 99.9% of all the computer users are on Microsoft Windows. This nation is a place where Apple Macintosh users cannot bank online, make any purchases online, or interact with any of the nation's e-government sites online. In fact, Linux users, Mozilla Firefox users and Opera users are also banned from any of these types of transactions because all encrypted communications online in this nation must be done with Active X controls.

Where is this nation?

South Korea.

The constraints on web culture in South Korea are a result of the adoption of SEED, an essentially proprietary cryptographic cipher mandated by the Korean government. The Wikipedia page, in typical geek fashion, describes the technology but not its social implications. The official page for the technology, in typical governmental fashion, has a skin of friendliness tautly stretched over an underlying hostility.

This morning, I had the opportunity to speak to the Northern California Grantmakers' meeting, which was a fantastic chance for me to speak to a group of people who really help make society better.

Among the many warm, intelligent people I met this morning was Lucy Berhholz. She very kindly blogged a lot of my presentation, but also made me really happy by pointing out a horrible cultural assumption I made while talking:

on timeframes and multi-tasking. His example: being in a meeting getting interrupted by an email newsletter that breaks his train of thought about the email he was looking for. Most of the audience is of a generation that uses email to be less intrusive than the phone.

Lucy's post is great, it even includes audio of the presentation. I pride myself on trying to not talk about things that are too insular or too geeky for an audience, but here I revealed myself for the geek I am. These reminders are really helpful if you're trying to not simply talk to people who are just like yourself.

Okay, I've been mumbling about the threat of monoculture for months now, but what's really gratifying is how much attention the idea has gotten in many of the year-end roundups that are saturating the press. Even better, the people who've been thinking about this a lot longer than me are doing a great job of explaining the ideas.

The New York Times Magazine's "Year In Ideas" issue had a few nods to the importance of cultural diversity online; Homophily is a great piece from Aaron Retica, pegged to Nat's post on O'Reilly Radar from back in October.

This year, other academics have cited homophily in elucidating everything from why teenagers choose friends who smoke and drink the same amount that they do to “the strong isolation of lower-class blacks from the interracial- marriage market.” Researchers at M.I.T. even published “Homophily in Online Dating: When Do You Like Someone Like Yourself?” which showed that you like someone like yourself most of the time, online or off. So much for “opposites attract.”

In the same issue of the Times Magazine, Steven Johnson covered Digital Maoism, Jaron Lanier's long-time meme (first introduced in his Edge essay) which shows the dangers of a tyrannical majority in many situations. (Steven also contributes a cogent assessment of Web 2.0 for Time.) Jaron's argument is summarized succinctly:

But all the hype over the powers of the so-called hive mind was bound to provoke a reaction, and in May of this year, it arrived in the form of a thoughtful — though controversial — essay by the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier. “What we are witnessing today,” Lanier wrote on Edge.org, “is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments and major universities have all gotten the bug.” Lanier dubbed this newthink “digital Maoism.” Against this collectivist mythos, Lanier tried to carve out a crucial space for the insight and creativity of the individual mind.

Jaron shows up in Time's year-end YouTube lovefest, too. "Beware the Online Collective, he exhorts:

One of the most wonderful things about the rise of the Web and other Internet-based communication schemes is how anti-mob they have been. I was in heaven 10 years ago watching millions of people build web sites for the first time as a form of expression. I'm just as excited today when I run across a creative web page, MySpace site, YouTube video or whatever. There are zillions of people out there who are developing themselves, reaching out to others, becoming more creative, better educated, and richer than they otherwise would have been.

...

So what's wrong with this pretty picture? All too many entrepreneurs seem to think that if you reduce the human element, the scheme will become more efficient. Instead of asking people to create videos or avatars, which require creativity and commitment, just watch their clicks, have them take surveys, have them tweak collective works, add anonymous, unconsidered remarks, etc. This trend is lousy, in my opinion, because it encourages people to lose themselves into groupthink.

All well worth the read. Now we just have to see which meme naming will win, "homophily", "digital maoism", or "monoculture". Because all that's missing so far is a Long Tail-style name for the idea for it to really take off.