Obfuscated Networking

Obfuscated Networking is just a place to store ideas and thoughts. It's not clear what, why or how, but they are all here. Hopefully you will find them entertaining, thought provoking or interesting and will be inspired to leave your thoughts.

8/29/2004

The Future

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— Mike @ 1:21 am Edit This

Jeremy Zawondy talks about the future. The following is a response to him and his commentors, some of whom may be readers. In his article he talks about the inevitable future and why we wait for it. His commentors simply talk about why his example is bad.

You may not agree that something seems obvious and that it’s going to happen but Jeremy makes a good point. Many people in and out of politics fail to support an idea because they feel “the public just isn’t ready for it yet.” There’s a premise here that something *is* going to happen and he uses gay marriage, which you may or may not think is going to happen. If you don’t simply substitute a different example which you believe is going to happen, get over the issue of the example and think about the concept.

Where I see this often is with technology. People talk about how X technology or Y technology will change things in the future and how things will be in the future but they don’t do anything to bring it about even when they could. Sitting around and talking about how good things could be or will be is nice but no more intellectual than talking about what John and Jane (you know, the Doe family) did. Exploring how to bring the idea to fruition, what problems need to be solved and what problems it will create is interesting. Thinking about the idea in such a way lets you explore the effects of the idea so you can prepare for and circumvent opposition, be it gay marriage or multi writer database clusters over wan links.

I like to think of it as the Wired Syndrome. I know a lot of people who’ve read Wired over the last decade and talk about the future as if they have some magic globe that lets them see it. These people can never talk intellectually about the implications outside what they’ve read. They just know the future is coming and it will be cool. There will be protein and holographic storage, the library of congress will be on one disk, the Internet will be this magical place where all information will be available for free, the Internet will be free, the MPAA and RIAA will die. There are thousands of examples of things I’ve read about that never happen. I think part of this reason is that people never implement them.

There’s a joke about a physicist and a mathematician on a trip together. One night a fire starts in their hotel room and they both get up. The physicist looks at the fire, gets some water and puts it out. Both go back to bed. The next night another fire starts. The mathematician gets up, looks at the fire, then goes back to bed. The physicist asks if he’s going to put it out and the mathematician tells him he doesn’t have to, it’s a solved problem.

This illustrates the Wired Syndrome, the mathematician sees the future (no more fire) and knows the solution (liberal application of water) but doesn’t do anything. The difference between people with the Wired Syndrome and people who don’t have it is problem solving. An unimplemented idea is simply a problem. It doesn’t matter if the problem is technical or non technical, it’s just a problem that needs to be solved.

Let’s look at the example of Gay Marriage. Let’s accept for the sake of argument that it’s inevitable, but people simply aren’t accepting it for now. I won’t argue that it’s a simple problem or one I know how to solve but I see people doing a lot of different things about it. Some people just sit and complain that it’s not happening. Others are actually addressing the issue and working to change voters minds. One of these two tactics works. At the same time there are many people who see a future without gay marriage. I promise you they are doing one of a few things and a lot of them are problem solving and implementing.

I had a talk the other day about getting rid of the MPAA and RIAA with some friends. They simply wanted to enjoy the idea that it would happen, and quite honestly I probably should have respected that, but I was confused why two intelligent people didn’t want to think about the problems associated with it as a means of finding solutions. I believe that you can’t get rid of the groups until you can replace their marketing and advertising function and it’s not worth getting rid of them until you find a way to accomplish that task without creating a new group of a different name. Eventually I came up with the idea of automatically targeted ads. What if Google’s AdSense didn’t require you to target your advertisements. You simple identified the website you wanted to advertise for and how much you were willing to spend and allow Google to figure out the most effective places to advertise for the amount you’re willing to spend. They could do this by setting up a system that compared content (not just text, but audio/visual as well) and calculate a likelihood of interest in website A in the readers of website B. Tracking click through rates of the advertisements in a neural net they can refine their idea of what websites readers of a site might also be interested in and create networks of websites where proximity is based on likelihood of a reader of one clicking on an ad for the other. Using this system an artist doesn’t need to know for themselves who’s going to be interested in their content and spend time identifying Ad Words. They simply know their budget. This system has a good chance of putting their product in front of the largest quantity of most interested readers and you don’t need a marketing expert to figure it out for you or the money to broadcast your message to everyone whether they are interested or not.

My friends simply thought I was being argumentative and negative and didn’t see any reason to think about the problems faced by trying to get rid of the MPAA or RIAA. I, like Jeremy, don’t understand this. Why is this important at all? Because there are people who don’t like your vision of the future and some of them will work to prevent it. The RIAA didn’t like the future that Napster proposed and they solved that problem. they don’t like the future that other P2P networks propose and they are working to solve that issue. They are goal oriented, driven and well financed. They are using technology, culture and politics to solve their problem. For far too long technologists have simply said “This is how the future should be and if you don’t think so you’re wrong.” This attitude was prevalent with respect to the idea of a free internet where anyone can get published and everyone will find the content they are interested in, but how many well written blogs go unread by thousands of people who might be interested in what the writer has to say. How many small personal websites have interesting information that no one sees. How many users simply read what AOL or their favorite portal puts in front of them. I attribute this to the fact that we all had this idea of how the internet would be and that it was inevitable, but we just waited for it to happen. In the mean time the media companies had their idea of what they wanted the Internet to be and they solved that problem.

Many of you will not agree with the fact that the Internet is like that, but remember, you are out of the ordinary. Based on my web server logs you are in a very small minority of people who read my blog and likely part of a larger, but still very small minority who read someone else’s blog.

See a future? Do what you can to implement it. This can be anything from supporting a political party, a PAC, a special interest group (IEEE, ALA, EFF) or other organization to implementing the solution your self. It’s not hard, you just need problem solving skills.

8/29/2004

The Future

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