sandkasten

"Was ist ein guter Unternehmer?"

2010-02-13T10:28:00.000-08:00

Nicolas G. Hayek beantwortet die Frage hier (um 10:32): "ein Künstler, der kreativ neue Ideen, neue Reichtümer erzeugen kann, bringen kann, der ein Macher is, der realisiert, nicht nur schwätzt die ganze Zeit, sondern realisiert, macht, und der in der Lage ist, die Menschen um ihn herum so zu motivieren, mit viel Liebe, Emotion und Intelligenz, daß sie alle die innovative Fähigkeiten die uns angeboren sind - wir haben sie alle, von Geburt an - benützen können und immer neue Innovationen und neue Reichtümer schaffen."

Nicolas G. Hayek answers the question "what is a good entrepreneur?": "An artist who can produce, who can bring in a creative manner new ideas, new wealth, who is a doer, who makes, not just talks the entire time, who makes and is able to motivate the people around him, with much love, emotion and intelligence, so that they can all use the innovative abilities that we are born with - we all have them from our birth on - and always create new innovations and wealth."

Musil's Fiction of Crowdsourcing Failure

2010-01-12T12:41:00.000-08:00

Musil's great book The Man Without Qualities is set in Vienna in 1913. People are pondering how they will celebrate the anniversary of the reign of the Emperor. The themes of the first part of the book converge on the problem of finding content for this event. A comitee is set up to scout for great ideas that the "great action" would then support. Uncountable propositions flood the organizers.

The great action dissolves in the stronger currents of nationalism and war. One could say that the book tells the story of the modern failure of the intellect from the point of view of the intellect.

Similarities with our time exist. A pessimist would say that "crowdsourcing" in politics is, perhaps comically, similar to the "great action" described in the book more often than not.

The solution offered (in vain) by the main protagonist Ulrich also speaks to our time. How to identify and organize the content of the "great action"? Ulrich envisions a general office for "precision and soul", a thorough classification of ideas managed as if the Day of Judgment were to come in a year.

Classification was becoming a problem in itself for the author :

"Mit Hilfe eines ausgeklügelten Verweisapparates, Seiten-Chiffren, die aus Abkürzungen und Ziffern kombiniert sind, strebte Musil ein Referenzsystem an, das sein gesamtes Arbeitsmaterial intern durchdringen und für stets umfassendere konzeptionelle Ordnungen verfügbar halten sollte. Die Verweise binden die zahlreichen Konvolute zu einem organischen Textsystem zusammen; die durch die Chiffren hergestellten Verbindungen sind die Nervenbahnen dieses Organismus. Alles in allem bedeutet er einen sich selbst reproduzierenden, erst im Tod zum Stillstand gekommenen Körper, ein bewusstes, damit potenziertes Fragment."

Villö Huszai, Digitalisierung und Utopie des Ganzen

["By using a link-system based on page-codes combining abbreviations and numbers, Musil attempted a reference-system that would penetrate the inside of all his working material and make it available for ever more comprehensive conceptual reorderings. The links connect numerous masses into an organic text system. The code-engendered connections are the nervous pathways of this organism. All in all this system points to a self-reproducing body, only brought to stillness by death : a conscious, and thus empowered fragment."]

The new Klagenfurt Edition permits to navigate the vast ocean of fragments that were never to be united in a finished work.

It is a book in which problems of form are inseparable from problems of content. There is a chapter that depicts the bewilderment of an army general confronted with the challenge of finding a great idea inside a library. Are these not the same challenges we meet today when it comes to extracting relevance from information networks? The ancient human theme of thematic organization has been intensified by modernity via the diffusion of bureaucracy analyzed by Max Weber, but the Internet Age has truly made it its absolute central theme.

Perhaps we are in some ways closer to 1913 than we'd like to think. What would 1914 have looked like if a great international crowdsourcing action in 1913 had actually been successful?

Lists vs Groups

2009-10-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

Interesting move by Twitter. There is potential in the recent 'list' feature. Unlike the 'groups' on Facebook, LinkedIn, ... list members do not apply for membership, they are simply picked by the list creator. There is nothing official about the list (as opposed to LinkedIn especially). Although the social factor is not eliminated from relevance production, it is a lot less present. It is a lot more about content than people, in this sense. The lists are less about identifying a tweeter than about organizing tweets. Many have noted that the number of lists functions as a popularity index. But this popularity could contain a lot of relevance-based, weakly-personal popularity. Lists are inherently theme-oriented, as opposed to person-oriented. Groups on the other hand are more person- and community- oriented. But again Twitter functions differently here, via hashtag-coordination.

These different design strategies are fascinating. What Twitter just did with lists reminds me of the 'interests' feature on Livejournal (see here for a brilliant analysis by C. Shirky). It is not necessary to have built-in heterogeneity-reduction, because the system will self-organize. It will be interesting to observe and participate in list diffusion on Twitter.

I am also liking what Delicious did with tags. Very simple and flexible solution.

Classic Foucault vs. Chomsky (1971) Revisited

2009-09-21T13:12:00.000-07:00

Chances are you've already seen this great debate. Chomsky believes in context-independent norms and Foucault doesn't, i.e. for Foucault norms are historical creations and for Chomsky norms are universal constants of natural reason. What does this imply? Uncertainty in Chomsky's world appears to be lower than in Foucault's world. You could in theory plan out political change in the first, but not in the second, because when norms are merely human creations getting somewhere is something that keeps unpredictably modifying the reference system which tells you where you are.

Now it is clear that meaning emergence occurs naturally all the time in and around us. But it is also clear that there are limits to the applicability of this model. The meaning of events changes over time, but not necessarily in the radical manner Foucault suggests. In fact, meaning typically emerges through gradual learning. Learning implies there is something out there you adapt to, and that reality doesn't adapt to you. But as Foucault would have it, social reality is something that you make up in the course of deconstructing inherited institutions, i.e. past fictions. If reason and learning are reduced to imagination and making up fictions, universal norms will appear as over-stretched fiction-empires, a territory ripe for fragmentation and colonization by unforeseeable forces, by individuals beyond present-day classifications and analysis. The old ways we see things need to be opened up by the new things we do.

Foucault's thinking isn't far from the idea of creative destruction. Right now the concept applies nicely to what's going on in the dying world of print media and to the emerging ways of looking at the internet-economy. Entrepreneurs are going at it and figuring ways out to become sustainable as they forge ahead. The process operates on the assumption that the whole thing will eventually end up making sense, even if we can't exactly figure out how right now.