Freud, Jung, Hidden Impulses, the Collective Unconscious, Hitler, Putin, Conspicuous Consumption and - Finally - Community

Freud's Couch Was Sort of a Bed

About a century ago two competing models for modern media emerged in the U.S. and Germany. Using what they were learning about psychology, the Nazis created state propaganda to sway the masses to serve the interests of the state and advertisers in the U.S. used those same insights to serve the interests of the corporation. (A fascinating documentary, the Century of the Self, makes this argument and can be found here.)

William James published what some argue was the first textbook on psychology - the Principles of Psychology - in 1890 and Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and Civilization and its Discontents in 1930. If you visit the apartment in Vienna where Freud pioneered psychotherapy you don't just see that the Freudian couch was actually a bed. (Freud thought that a bed was a safe and  cozy place from which to free associate but perhaps the preponderance of sexual references would have given way to a preponderance of food references had he instead used a kitchen table.) What you get from the museum that once was his office is this very exciting sense of the mind as a new frontier. Rather than blame spirits or madness for weird thoughts and behavior, these early psychologists were taking a scientific approach to the mind, hoping to better understand the impulses that seemed to lay below the seemingly thin veneer of our civility. Jung's concept of the collective unconscious might be suspect but it gets to the reality that something binds us that is almost mystical and that these impulses could be tapped to sway large groups to do strange things - like drive to the mall on a sunny day or shout angry slogans at political rallies.

These insights were exploited with new and transformative technology of that time. The radio was the first technology to allow people across an entire nation to hear about the wonders of the Third Reich or nylons and electric razors and it was quickly followed by TV.

Obviously it made an enormous difference whether a community used these powerful new media technology to promote the interests of the state or the corporation. Someone once said that the book most likely to change minds in the Soviet Union would be the Sears Catalog. Magazines, newspapers, radio and TV shaped minds - and thus communities - as only churches and sacred texts had before. And it was no coincidence that the state and corporation undermined the dominance of the church last century.

This century's transformative media is the internet and the social media it has enabled. The shift in advertising revenue from newspapers to the internet has shattered old business models and forced a scramble to discover new audiences and sources of revenue for reporting and commentary.

And curiously, the choice about whether this model will be funded by the state or the corporation, by advertising for political interest and shared values or great values on products you'll love, is still in question. This week's senate hearings with the social media giants Facebook, Twitter, and Google gets to the question of how social media has been used to manipulate voters and thus American policy rather than merely focus on getting us to buy more goods.

It's worth noting that this is social media.

About the same time as the emergence of the radio and television, a third really powerful technology emerged: the telephone. This was intimate and personal and allowed two people to communicate and in the process strengthen relationships. I think it's telling that so much of the internet is experienced on a phone. Even though actual talking on the phone is not even in the top ten activities people do with their phones, what they're doing is closer to what was done on the phone last century than what was done with TV and radio. They're creating and feeling part of a community.

Community is a third goal, different from the goals of consumption and propaganda. I think one thing we're seeing in the success of Twitter and Facebook is the strong impulse to belong. You can dismiss this as tribalism but I think it speaks to communities of the mind and shared values, to what it means to be human and feel the part of something larger. It's worth noting that the strength and vulnerability of these brands is that they are platforms. Zuckerberg doesn't make editorial decisions about what posts your Aunt Leola or cousin Curt should make on Facebook. They do. Your friends are rarely selling goods or trying to win votes for the political party they are starting. (Although I admit I would be interested in seeing the posts of someone who was starting a new party; that sounds like an interesting person.) They are simply connecting, sharing what they are proud of, what impresses them, what they are worried about and what made them laugh. The third way beyond media as a tool for conspicuous consumption or political propaganda is media a tool for creating communities of the mind, of shared interests and simple friendships. It's not novel that people would do that; it is novel that people could do that across distances, with a tool more inclusive than the phone or the kitchen table.

The Most Overlooked Reason for Growing Polarization in Congress

An interesting study here depicts how little overlap there is in voting in Congress compared to what it was decades ago.

As you can see, Republicans and Democrats are more clearly voting along party lines.

Why?

One overlooked reason is likely the reliance on national media and the easy access of anything a politician has said. Once upon a time a politician could say things that let him establish a brand but then go negotiate and vote in ways that might suggest he was insincere about his campaign promises. To win in many districts you have to be clearly conservative or liberal. Then, once the vote comes, you have to vote consistent with those promises or you will be taken down in the primary. And your constituents will know about it because you can't hide your record or speeches in this age of Google and online data.

It is possible that we aren't getting compromise that helps a government to function because politicians aren't allowed leeway to negotiate. Instead, they're expected to be "true" to their principles and promises which means they're unable to compromise and reach agreement. The result? Even when one party owns both houses of congress and the white house it struggles to pass any significant legislation.

Is the Web Conscious?

Systems have characteristics that their parts do not. This emergent phenomenon defines them. Your car got you to work today. None of its parts could do that. Not the engine. Not the wheels. Not the drive train. Systems are defined by the interactions of their parts rather than the action of their parts.

Which brings me to global consciousness.

James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, wrote an interesting piece in the New Yorker titled "The Collective Intelligence of the Web." The first example he uses of collective intelligence is of a project NASA began in 2000 to map Mars.

"There were two very interesting things about the results. First, although there was no financial incentive to participate, more than a hundred thousand people took part in the study, generating more than 2.4 million clicks. Second, and even more striking, the collective product of all those amateur clickers was very good—as a report put it, their 'automatically computed consensus” was “virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of a geologist with years of experience in identifying Mars craters.'"

He goes on to write about how Google ranks pages based on the actions of millions of users, and cites other examples. This isn't just about judgment. This is about creating. At one level this is not new. For centuries humans have been walking down trails that have been defined by the steps of thousands of people who have come before. But this capability of the Internet to knit together individual consciousness into something collective is something newly emergent, it seems to me.

Collectively, civilization can do what individuals can't. On our own, we really are just intelligent apes. But with one other person we can create a new human. With one million other people we can create a new community or set of institutions. And with billions of people online, maybe we can create a new sort of understanding that would be impossible for the individual or even any community within it.

It might just be that the web is enabling a new kind of consciousness to emerge, awareness and problem solving and project execution that would never be possible at the level of individuals or even teams traditionally managed. If so, it raises a fascinating question. Has the web developed consciousness yet? And if it was self-aware, would we be aware of it?

What if Free Markets Really Were Free?

“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”
- Warren Bennis

Increasingly, the digitized world is making products free: movies, music, articles, books ... even the software that lets "customers" get these products for free.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that as the portion of free goods we consume rises so does unemployment.

Maybe in the future there will be good news and bad news. The good news will be that everything is free. The bad news is that no one will have jobs.

In such a world, conspicuous consumption will take on a new urgency. Economically, there will be little else to distinguish us.

The Internet is Re-Wiring Your Brain

In the latest Atlantic, Nicholas Carr provocatively asks, "Is Google Making us Stupid?" The point he makes is that our new style of search, hypertext, and scanning rather than "deep reading" is actually changing how our minds are wired. He speaks to it as a problem of diffusing attention, and I agree that there is an element of that. But, as I tend to be, I'm an optimist on this score. I think that the Internet is changing how we attend to issues in a positive way.

The Internet has created a new kind of communication that facilitates understanding, coordinating, managing, and participating in systems. Such facility with systems - from ecosystems to economic systems to technical systems to social systems - is emerging none too soon.

The last century or so has been characterized by the emergence of specialists. We have experts who can improve the design and performance of products like combustion engines, bombs, and financial derivatives. They are heads down focused on parts of larger systems but their actions have implications that spill outside of their products. Getting here has been a journey characterized by "deep" reading, drilling down to greater nuance and detail and understanding. The problems created by their success has created a need for a different kind of thinking and communication, a communication that looks shallow at first glance.

Going further down the rabbit hole on these specialties won’t necessarily improve our world. The issues that matter are those that spill across domains, that don’t neatly fit into Cartesian boxes of categories that say more about what we project onto reality than reality itself. “Deep” reading and thinking promises less in the way of progress than “shallow” reading and thinking that make connections and perceives system dynamics.

The Internet is changing how we think. By raising our awareness of connections, it raises the probability that we will properly understand and manage the systems that define our world. This, it seems to me, is a good thing.

---
On a related note, Milena pointed me to Hyperwords - a program that allows you to make any word on a page searchable, as if it were all hypertext. Talk about connections! Economist article here.

Addictions to Things Inescapable

People addicted to cocaine, it seems to me, have an advantage over people addicted to food. It is feasible that someone could construct his life in a way that let them avoid cocaine altogether. It is impossible to avoid food. I don't intend to trivialize drug addiction, but there has to be something uniquely challenging about scaling back on a necessity.

The computer has become a necessity. The little company I work for employs about a half dozen programmers and a half dozen of us consultants. We're spread across the US, from Connecticut to here in San Diego, from Portland to DC. There is no way we could operate this company as we do without email and on-line tools and our work with clients is computer-centric.

This blog has become my voice, the one place where I can speak uncensored about topics that may or may not relate to what is most important to me - my family, my work, or my beliefs. I can write what strikes me as silly and absurd or profoundly important, history or future - any topics that interest me. Blogs – my writing and reading – all take place on the computer.

Through emails, I've kept in touch with friends from every stage and area of life. Through my blog, my list of friends has grown. I love my contact with friends and family and would never cut off from any of it.

As the world goes digital, the internet is the simplest way to get information. Video of Keith Olbermann pointing to the idiocy behind George Bush's latest policy, articles by James Fallows explaining social trends in China, or Robert Wright interviewing Karen Armstrong about God in the 21st century are all examples of things that can be easily accessed on line and represent brain stimulation I could never find in the local media.

But is it too much of a good thing? My wife thinks so. And I can't argue with her. Particularly when a batch of travel coincides with her spring break, my gravitating to the computer to catch up on news, favorite blogs, and emails is trying for her. As the world becomes digital, more of our life seems to stream in through the same monitor window. Our mind might perceive variety, but our butt does not move.

To make this worse, my life has been characterized by serial obsessions. I don't do well with prolonged moderation. I prefer moving from peak to peak - whether it is immersing myself in computer chip design with one client and then drug development a couple of years later with another client, or systems thinking one year and neocons in another. For me, context is essential and immersion still seems the one way to gain that.

Now, I'm trying to moderate what is inescapable - at a time when my work schedule has peaked and my knee-jerk reaction is to spend even more time on the personal side of the computer to make up for its displacement by the work side. Rumor has it there is more to do off the computer than get calories eating and expend calories exercising.

So now I'm dealing with what might be addiction but is certainly a habit. (A habit defined as anything one needn't consider before doing.) I'm actually glad that Sandi has pointed this out. She often calls me Mr. Variety and I've generally worked to stay away from habits - preferring to change the rhythms of what I eat, how I exercise, who I socialize with, etc. (You've probably guessed by now that I do a miserable job of observing rituals or traditions.) The internet is, for me, such a varied place that it seemed to me that I was getting my dose of variety - even while continually coming to the same physical place and position again and again.

As much as I appreciate the push to reconsider this habit, I wonder if the underlying cause is my addiction to thought. I’ve learned that sans writing, my thoughts tend to become circular, or at least, repetitious. Writing allows me to stretch my thoughts over a broader canvas than they’d expand with only talk.

It is not my intention to drop off the computer – just cut back a bit and lose a few virtual pounds, so to speak. I’ve never done well with balance, but maybe it’s time to learn.

The Internet Is Closed

The Internet was to be closed today. It's Labor Day and when the Internet is functioning, it suggests lots and lots of working folks - systems administrators, programmers, and web site administrators. The intention was to give everyone the day off.

The problem? They couldn't find a place to hang the sign.

Be Rupert Murdoch for only $5,000

The Gutenberg Press, arguably the first tool of mass communication, was invented in about 1440. The Gutenberg Bible was printed in 1452, becoming the first volume produced book. (It's worth remembering that in Medieval Times it was a capital offense to have a Bible written in one's native language.) In 1517 - about 77 years after the Gutenberg Press was invented, Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, effectively igniting the first flames of the Protestant Revolution. In 1531, Henry VIII broke with Rome and made himself the head of the Church of England and by 1540, he had seized church land.

100 years from the time this tool of mass communication was invented to the time that it had effectively transformed the church and state - helping to transition power from the dominant institution of the church to newly dominant institution of the state and in the process forever changing the nature of the church in the West. By making the Bible available in private homes, it effectively helped to make real Martin Luther's declaration "We are all priests!" Power of the church was diffused and every part of life was impacted.

In 1989, Vincent Cerf made public his work that he'd been doing for the government that allowed computers to exchange email and for a person on one computer to remotely access anothe computer. (People tend to say that they "surf" the Internet as if they were riding waves. They really ought to be saying that they "cerf" the Internet in honor of the man who developed the technology they are using.) It has been only 18 years since the inception of the Internet, a technology that is arguably to our time what the Gutenberg Press was to its time. The Gutenberg Press transformed the church - that period's dominant institution. I predict that the Internet will transform the corporation - our dominant institution. And along the way, it will transform media.

One of the more fascinating steps in that transformation is a recent product by NewTek that effectively enables any person with $5,000 to create his or her own TV studio. You can learn more by clicking here:
http://www.bootcamp.com/report.jsp?reportId=2185

or read the excerpt of the report here: [start of excerpt]

In the new age of the net…anyone can become a TV network. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today’s technology. Time Magazine took note….naming you…the person of the year in 2006. You meaning the millions of people who contributing content to the Web…through YouTube and other sites. Can you really compete with the TV networks?

A company called NewTek has built a ten pound box called the TriCaster…..that is essentially a self contained studio…that plugs into the Internet.

CEO Jim Plant … “It allows you to connect multiple cameras and do everything you do in a live studio…the graphics...the rolling in the tape… multiple cameras…live digital video effects… all those things that are the hallmark of a live production… you can now do that in a ten pound box. And also we can connect this to the Internet. So we can live stream that…that multi camera production… all in real time.” It essentially…is a specialized high end PC. The price…about five thousand dollars. It works so well…some professionals…such as ESPN Radio have been using it.

About the future…Plant says think YouTube…but think live… "And the Internet now has enough bandwidth to make that possible. That’s the distribution side of it. Now we come in on the production side and make sure that what you put out on the air…and I use on the air in quotations…looks like a professional broadcast. Because that does make a difference.” ------- [End of article]

Just think about how this could revolutionize media. Suddenly, you can be Rupert Murdoch. The Gutenberg Press was instrumental in dispersing power to the individual. Now, NewTek's TriCaster has become another revolutionary product. And I do mean revolutionary. Like Gutenberg's Press, the TriCaster disperses power from the elites to you. Even if you choose not to be a mini-Murdoch, you have to agree that this is a fascinating time to be alive.

[Full disclosure: NewTek CEO Jim Plant was a good buddy in junior high and my freshman year of high school. We were on a Little League Team together. So, you are free to dismiss the above as biased ... but if you do, you may well miss out on one of the most amazing developments of the next few years.]