Doctor’s Note – Issue 11 – Ideas from the past may be closer than they appear
In this issue: Silicon Valley’s failure to get real / Revisiting The Californian Ideology / Futurists and the past / Triumph of the Nerds / The Linkhole / Books / Teaching
Welcome to Issue 11 of Doctor’s Note. 2020 seems like such a sci-fi year and I’m feeling nostalgic for a promised future, so this issue takes a look at the past to understand the future.
Photo by Lorenzo Herrera on Unsplash
Silicon Valley’s failure to get real
I finally had a chance to read Derek Thompson’s piece in The Atlantic, The Real Trouble With Silicon Valley, in which he laments the fact that “too much American ingenuity is chasing problems that simply don’t matter” and investors are funding massive companies that provide little value to the world. (Side note: the original URL slugline is “Where’s My Flying Car” – whoever changed it did Thomson a favour).
Here’s Thompson quoting economist and aerospace entrepreneur Eli Dourado:
“The internet age has been very underwhelming compared to what the expectations were,” [Dourado] told me. “I’m also worried that it’s sapping talent from other industries that might benefit from more innovation. All these people building apps and software-as-a-service companies, if they applied themselves to challenges in the physical world—especially on energy, housing, health, and transportation—they could make a real difference.”
The obsession with digital, Thomson argues, has prevented the tech industry from playing the role it should in tackling the greatest challenge facing us: climate change. He points out that the Apollo moon program was given more federal funding than the Department of Energy has recently announced for carbon-capture R&D. Ultimately, he admits that the state, that moral enemy of neoliberalism, must play a role in helping Silicon Valley find its soul again:
The idea that Silicon Valley could swoop in and solve all of America’s problems was always an illusion, conjured by technologists seeking to lure capital to California, and by politicians looking to shift responsibility away from Washington. Silicon Valley has a crucial role to play in meeting the challenges of the new century, but it can’t act alone. Transformative advances will require participation from local, state, and federal government, and from the American people, who for too long have bought into the idea that prosperity can be delivered in lines of code.
For the past two decades, we’ve funneled treasure and talent into the ethereal world of software and digital optimization. Imagine what could be accomplished if American ingenuity came back down to Earth.
Thompson is one of many voices upbraiding Silicon Valley at the moment, but he goes beyond the privacy/monopoly criticism. The lack of attention to the physical world is a crucial point of difference. Tech has all-too-frequently viewed meatspace as an annoying inconvenience that will be solved by The Singlularity and Soylent, as if eating food is simply using up valuable productivity time re-fuelling as we work to merge with machines. It’s the same mindset that sees humans as statistics to be sliced and diced by machine learning with all the problems that has brought us.
Backing those tech companies is a lot of venture capital, of course and the quickest growth is to be had from solving simple problems. When the focus is on a specific job-to-be-done, teams can sprint and iterate at pace, hence the desire to find an untapped niche that could be delivered via a digital experience. But n an over-bountiful society, there are only so many unfulfilled simple needs. In fact, the main problem people living in developed nations have is too much choice. So tech and venture money drift towards ever more frivolous products and services that nobody needs — it’s not for nothing that dog walking apps are the go-to cliché of tech criticism.
By not paying attention to the physical space and the people living their lives in it, we end up with bike-share graveyards and growing calls for unionisation in the gig and tech economies.
The Californian Ideology
While much of this criticism feels like it has arisen in the past two years after the scandals of companies like Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, Uber and WeWork, Thomson’s piece reminded me of The Californian Ideology, an essay written in 1995 by my then lecturers, Andy Cameron and Richard Barbrook. 25 years later, The Californian Ideology has turned out to be extremely prescient and it is worth revisiting.
Broadly—and it is a dense essay—Cameron and Barbrook argue that the leftist counter-culture of Silicon Valley formed a paradoxical alliance with the free-market neoliberalism of the right, underpinned by technological determinism. Here’s their prediction of pretty much where we are now from 25 years ago:
If only for competitive reasons, all major industrial economies will eventually be forced to wire up their populations to obtain the productivity gains of digital working. What is unknown is the social and cultural impact of allowing people to produce and exchange almost unlimited quantities of information on a global scale. Above all, will the advent of hypermedia will realise the utopias of either the New Left or the New Right? As a hybrid faith, the Californian Ideology happily answers this conundrum by believing in both visions at the same time - and by not criticising either of them.
We now know that both visions have not only come to pass, but have reinforced each other with huge consequences.
Many of the responses and critiques of The Californian Ideology really haven't stood the test of time, like the vitriolic response of former Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Wired magazine, Louis Rossetto. It’s hard not to view Rossetto’s anger psychoanalytically as his darkest fears exposed. Others, like Jeffrey Kaplan's corrections, are much more considered and rightly critique the closing manifesto.
I encourage you to read the complete essay, but here’s a closing snippet that could have been written yesterday:
In the 1994 election for governor in California, Pete Wilson, the Republican candidate, won through a vicious anti-immigrant campaign. Nationally, the triumph of Gingrich's Republican party in the legislative elections was based on the mobilisation of 'angry white males' against the supposed threat from black welfare scroungers, immigrants from Mexico and other uppity minorities. These politicians have reaped the electoral benefits of the increasing polarisation between the mainly white, affluent suburbanites - most of whom vote - and the largely non-white, poorer inner city dwellers - most of whom don't vote
Podcasts
Whilst we’re exploring the future by examining the past, I can recommend two podcasts from This is HCD.
The first is my latest Power of Ten conversation with with futurist and founder of Changeist Scott Smith. I stole the title of his upcoming book, How to Future, for the title of the episode in which he discusses his work as a futurist, guiding large organisations towards better futures by blending foresight, narrative design, and strategic thinking. I felt I barely scratched the surface of Scott’s depth of knowledge. I’ll see if I can grab him for a part two.
The second is Jay Hasbrouck’s Ethnopod with Genevieve Bell. The super-smart and always insightful Genevieve talks about setting up the 3A Institute at ANU and establishing a new branch of engineering to ensure the responsible use of AI at scale. It’s a very good example of why asking the right questions is often more important than trying to have the right answers.
If you enjoyed Genevieve and looking back to look forward, you should go and listen to her and Mark Pesce’s 1968: When the world began. Us folks working in digital should know our history.
The Linkhole
Invisible technology everywhere - Tomorrow’s World’s 1998 predictions of 2020 were pretty accurate.
Inside the Mind of Dominic Cummings. By now you have probably seen the hiring blog post by Boris Johnson’s Gríma Wormtongue, Dominic Cummings. Much has been made of Cummings circumventing the usual HR channels, but I think this is more of an interesting insight into his theoretical foundations—or at least the image he wishes to project of his intelligence—than an HR faux pas.
The Triumph of the Nerds - all this tech history reminded me of the 1996 documentary by Robert X. Cringley, based on his book Accidental Empires. Most of it is available on YouTube thanks to later nerds. A key idea in Triumph of the Nerds is how the worker engineers who understood the technology flipped the power relationship and became the masters. Neither Boris Johnson nor Donald Trump strike me as particularly intelligent, but they are crafty. Crafty enough to employ people who are smart and who understand the technology—the systems theory behind societal change and the wiring under the circuit board of politics. A similar flip of power may be on its way. This also feels wasted on power scrabbles, because people who understand complexity and systems are exactly those needed to tackle climate change.
Life Under the Ice – while Australia was experience the fiery effects of global heating, Ariel Waldman a previous guest on Power of Ten led a five-week expedition to Antarctica for the project. The website is a fun an beautiful way to explore what she found.
Now an old-timer virtual artist, Hatsune Miku will be appearing at Coachella. As predicted in the synthetic realities essay, ever more virtual artists are taking the stage. The back story is worth reading about.
The Irishman in Conversation. If you haven’t watched Scorsese’s The Irishman on Netflix, subscribe for a month just to do so. Much has been made of the de-ageing technology used to make Joe Pesci, Robert de Niro and Al Pacino look younger in the flashback scenes, but I found their discussion of how they had to remember to act younger—springing spritely out of a chair or skipping down a flight of stairs—fascinating in the In Conversation extra.
Along with people and apartments, these feet do not exist.
I wasted way too much time reading Fesshole recently. The confessions seem to me to be very English.
Books
Good Services: How to design services that work by Lou Downe is absolutely excellent. Very readable, very important for anyone involved in delivering services (that’s everyone) to read. And Lou is my guest on an upcoming Power of Ten, so stay tuned.
I just started Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, a book about race and priveledge. So far every bit as good as everybody says it is.
Teaching
Apart from in-person coaching and consulting to design teams, I am planning some online teaching, both live and recorded, and office hours. I plan to sense and respond and change material over time, but I’d love to hear what you content you would find most useful. You can reply to this or drop me a line.
That’s a wrap
That’s it for this issue. If you liked it, please consider forwarding it to a friend or colleague to sign-up. You might also like my podcast, Power of Ten, which is all about design operating at different levels of "zoom," but mainly consists of me talking to people smarter than me from a broad range of disciplines.
Cheers,
Andy