72 million people with 500 million voices I’ve been trying to find a way to understand and explain some of the non-obvious ways in which it matters that our formerly only-bricks-and-mortar customers are online and connected. This clear statement by Jared Cohen helps.  Cohen, co-author of The New Digital Age with Google’s Eric Schmidt, was recently asked a question about the degree to which technology will undermine autocratic regimes in the future. Cohen replied,  …Let’s take a country like Iran. 72 million people, roughly 25% of the population connected to the Internet. When everybody in Iran is connected - - everyone has a Gmail account, everyone has a social networking account, every one of them has various voice-over-IP services that they use… The population of Iran in the physical world may still be 72 million people, but in the virtual world it may look like half a billion people. And this presents a serious problem for the regime in Tehran: how do they account for 500 million voices online that are coming from the same 72 million people? Video and event information: Book talk with Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen [quote starts at 5:00]
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72 million people with 500 million voices

I’ve been trying to find a way to understand and explain some of the non-obvious ways in which it matters that our formerly only-bricks-and-mortar customers are online and connected. This clear statement by Jared Cohen helps. 

Cohen, co-author of The New Digital Age with Google’s Eric Schmidt, was recently asked a question about the degree to which technology will undermine autocratic regimes in the future. Cohen replied, 

…Let’s take a country like Iran. 72 million people, roughly 25% of the population connected to the Internet. When everybody in Iran is connected - - everyone has a Gmail account, everyone has a social networking account, every one of them has various voice-over-IP services that they use… The population of Iran in the physical world may still be 72 million people, but in the virtual world it may look like half a billion people. And this presents a serious problem for the regime in Tehran: how do they account for 500 million voices online that are coming from the same 72 million people?

Video and event information: Book talk with Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen [quote starts at 5:00]

And I love that dark bird you hold in your arms.

Courtney Johnston.

(from the NZ Digital Forum, 2012, at 28:30, here)

Forget innovation: focus on being good. Most products out in the world are not very good. You rarely need a breakthrough to improve things, beat the competition, or help people suffering from a problem. If you carefully study the problem you’re trying to solve, you will discover many clear ways to make it better. That’s the best place to start. If you solve a problem for customers that makes them happy and earns you money, do you really think they will care whether it’s innovative? They just want their problems solved. If you cured cancer conventionally, would patients refuse, saying, “But it’s not innovative!” Of course not, so don’t worry. Use the workman-like language of people who are later called innovators: problem, prototype, experiment, design, and solution, instead of the jargon of breakthrough, radical, game-changing, and innovative. This keeps you low to the ground, and prevents your ego from distracting you away from simply making good things.

Forget Innovation

From Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation, p. 163

When the fruit bat Pteropus allenorum was finally described by scientists, it was already extinct. One specimen of the bat was shot in Samoa in 1856, skinned, stored in alcohol, and shipped to the United States. It spent the next 153 years, inconspicuous and ignored, on a shelf in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Drexel University. When bat specialist Kristofer Helgen visited the museum, he immediately recognised that it was a new species. Sadly, it was too late. There are no fruit bats in Samoa nowadays, so the jar on the shelf represents our only encounter with this now-extinct animal.

Inconspicuous and ignored

From “New” species gather dust on museum shelves for 21 years before being described, Discover Magazine, November, 2012. Via Ely Wallis

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped in pavement and weedy lots and jump heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonics, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.

Opening paragraph of Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck, 1945.

I was writing something this morning and I had a sudden hunger to hear these words in my ears. The forward momentum of them. This book means a lot to me. 

books.google.com/books?isbn=0140177388 

N.B.A. scoring champions are, as a rule, weirdos and reprobates and in some cases diagnosable sociopaths. Something about dominating your opponent, publicly, more or less every day of your life, in the most visible aspect of your sport, tends to either warp your spirit or to be possible only to those whose spirits are already warped.

The Freak Zone

The opening sentences of A Basketball Fairy Tale in Middle America By Sam Anderson, New York Times Sunday Magazine, November 8, 2012. 

The first paragraph ends:

it’s a near-solid roster of dysfunction: sadists, narcissists, malcontents, knuckleheads, misanthropes, womanizers, addicts and villains. While it’s true that plain old N.B.A. superstars do occasionally manage to be model citizens (cf. Tim Duncan, Grant Hill, Steve Nash), there is something irredeemable about a scoring champion.

A) I love some of these words - - the language. (Misanthropes! Reprobates!)

B) I’m interested in the character traits - - the state of mind cultivated, sought, by highly creative people.