The December 13 (#43) show was our pre-holiday show.  It features some fun chatter by the hosts, largely in the nature of complaints about corporate bailouts and gubernatorial ethics crises.  In the spirit of the season, guests Mike Hennessy and Jenny Carlisle discuss their work for local Tampa Bay charities.

The January 10 show (#44) features Barry Shevlin, CEO of $50MM Tampa Bay company Network Liquidators, and Reid Sigmon, Executive Director of the Tampa Bay Superbowl Committee for 2009.  The middle segment features a right fancy rant about entrepreneurship in Tampa Bay.

Enjoy!  If you like the CEO Lounge, please check out the show’s main page (warning, there is a (pausable) auto-play that fires when you land) or subscribe to the podcast.

27 Oct 2008

Part 2

Taking Society to the Net

This portion of the lecture was heavily inspired by the brilliant and visionary work of my dear friend and philosophical mentor, Mark Pesce.  Thank you, Mark, for your fecund cranium!

The modern rate of innovation knows no precedent.  Today we are innovating faster than yesterday, and that rate will be faster still tomorrow.

It took us 3.8 billion years to evolve from microbes to Australopithecus, but only about another 200,000 years to go from proto-human to global civilization.

We modern humans are the only creatures on the planet today capable of giving meaningful voice to ideas of any complexity and sharing those ideas with others.  It is the sharing of ideas among humans that has caused the rate of technological innovation to increase exponentially, if not asymptotically.  Every so often, we invent a new technology that increases the rate at which ideas can be shared and broadly inculcated.  And that act of sharing moves us faster along to the next idea, and so on.  La vitesse!

With the invention of paper we gained the ability to memorialize our ideas on a portable substrate easily shipped to distant minds.  The movable type printing press helped us more easily make copies of our ideas in books.  The steam engine made long distance travel easier so ideas could be shared face to face.  The telegraph, radio, and the telephone permitted instantaneous idea transmission to practically anywhere on the planet.  Then, of course, the television with the pretty pictures and the 24-hour news and the American Idol…

And today, roughly 1.5 billion people use the internet, and over half the population of the planet subscribes to a mobile telephone service.  Let me repeat that: over half the population of the planet subscribes to a mobile telephone service.  Over 2.4 million emails are sent globally every second.  A client in the biz recently told me that over 5 million text messages are sent per minute in the UK alone.  Twitter didn’t exist as a company before May 2007; in August, 2008, Twitter processed about 3 million tweets per day.  China alone boasts about 80 million blogs.

We are now (almost) all connected, (almost) all the time.   Author and futurist Mark Pesce calls this hyperconnectivity.  Our degree of connectedness grows exponentially every year, and gives rise to a concomitant power to socialize and form relationships.

We have been social since before we were apes.   Humans cannot survive in solitude.  Our sociability is finely tuned.  We play well with others.  It’s deeply coded in our brains.

According to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, each human brain is capable of keeping track of about 150 close social relationships at a time.  Your Dunbar number is 150.  That’s where your viable population of friends maxes out.

To route around this cranial limit over the millennia on our long march to the modern world, we’ve invented roles and rules, hierarchies and monarchies, all to reduce the number of relationships we need to tax our brains with.  Know the king, know the country.  Keep your horse on the left of the oncoming stranger so you can engage in more dexterous swordplay, should the need arise.  Sign contracts to govern your business deals.  All of these things are shorthand actions suited to a world populated by brains than can only truly know and trust in a mere 150 relationships at once.

Middle management exists because after a company grows to a certain size (150 people?), a single chief can’t track all pertinent operational functions alone.  Vice Presidents have jobs because there is no direct dashboard from factory floor to CEO.

I am not a Facebook poweruser by any stretch.  At this moment, I’ve got 247 Facebook friends and that number has flattened out significantly over the last few weeks as I have exhausted the places where my reali life friends can be found.  I follow 193 people on Twitter and 162 people follow me, though that last number is growing by 2 or 3 daily.  All of these numbers exceed my cranially encoded Dunbar number.

So what do I call these people?  Surely they’re not all my friends in any meaningful sense of the word.  My Dunbar number of 150 prohibits that.  We need a new ontology of relationships to adapt to the technology that connects us with people we’ve never met in person, or haven’t seen in decades, but still consider, in some form, friends.

My kids are growing up with digitally-mediated hyperconnectivity written on their hearts.  The age of all-to-all is the only social world that they will ever know – a world where each of us can forge a relationship with anyone else, and everyone else, as the need and the will arise.  With the right tools, my kids’ capacity for relationships will be without bound.  With the right tools, my kids won’t need some of the shorthand structures erected by prior generations to alleviate the mental pressure of relationship management.

In the age of all-connected-to-all, we need new methods of qualifying and categorizing people and our relationships with them.  We need tools that augment our capacity for “friendship.”

Our heretofore useful structures for operating society are now seen as chokepoints, forms of censorship really.  And we should not copy them into our digital lives if we can avoid it.  Any role whose value is derived from privileged access to arcana is dead.  The internet means the end of hierarchy, the end of censorship.  As John Gilmore famously said, “The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”  The internet means the end of walled gardens.

My kids will be accustomed to unearthing the truth at every turn.  There will be no hiding from it.  The internet means the end of getting away with dishonesty.  We are rushing headlong into a world where the only product is authenticity, the only currency is trust, and we will all stand or fall entirely on our reputation, which will be instantly accessible to all.

It may even come to pass that we finally begin to integrate into our governance the concept of the online world as its own place, a world hegemony divorced from geography, anointed with its own universal laws and rules.  A civilization unto itself.  How quaint it will seem for future generations who know nothing but global uniformity to reflect back on our time when the laws we must obey change depending on the particular hunk of the planet we happen to live on.  Is the net the end of territorial jurisdiction?

And is it really much of a stretch from there to ponder a world of pure, direct democracy, where everyone participates on every issue they feel competent to vote on, with expert crowdsourced help always at the ready?  The net can vote on everything.  If you can crowdsource the winner of American Idol to the tune of some 30-50 million text messaged votes per week, why not crowdsource votes of all kinds?  Why not crowdsource the presidency?  Is there any reason why that office needs to be held by a single person?  After all, isn’t ruling the free world a lot to ask out of one person?  Why not crowdsource that very bastion of civilization, the courtroom jury of 12 good persons and true?  Does it have to be 12?  Can it not be 12 million?

Well, I’ll tell you why not.  Because we don’t really always play so nice, after all.  Yes, we’re all getting connected; yes, the hierarchies are flattening.  The walls around the more rigid parts of our ancient habits are showing some cracks.  But we have a long way to go.

“Real reporting existed for a few years in the 90’s… until journalists started dying because of it.” – Vladimir Semago, former Russian Parliamentarian

Parts of the world still don’t run like my parts do.

Every single person who applied for a permit to protest during the Beijing Olympics was arrested and jailed.  In August of 2008, the Chinese saw that they could oppress everyone, round up peaceful dissidents, wipe out neighborhoods, conscript thousands to serve the Olympic effort, and the rest of the world would stand up and say, “Great work!”

As one senior Chinese Government official put it, “only the North Koreans could have done this better.”

With ideas like that out in the crowd, can the crowd really be trusted?  How do we turn the crowd into a community?  How do we go from mob to task force?

If it does nothing else, the net takes what we are and amplifies it.  So what are we?  Are we gentle collaborators or are we fearful bullies?  We had better answer that question, and soon.  Because the repuconomy is coming.

Someone out there is going to be deciding whether to give each of us the good housekeeping seal of approval, or not.  And it will matter.  Our survival may depend on it.

How do we overcome our fears and learn how to work together as a community?

We need to be able to trust in the authenticity of those around us that they will treat us fairly and will report fairly on how we treat them.  We need to be able to enforce the metes and bounds of our relationships with them, without the outmoded controls and structures of the analogue world.

How do we do that?

Stay Tuned.

Tomorrow: Introducing Company 2.0

Part 1

Cosmic Innovation

It is said that we live in an age of unprecedented innovation.  Actually, that’s a bit redundant.  Innovation invokes the unprecedented by definition; all innovation creates something having no precedent, something that did not exist before.  At the moment of innovation, you perform magic.  You become the latest link in an unbroken chain of transformative miracles that the universe has visited upon itself extending back to the beginning of time.

Lest you feel that was an overstatement, or if you do not fully appreciate that when you innovate you are the very universe innovating upon itself, consider this: Nearly three quarters of your body is composed of water, whose molecules are comprised of 1 atom of oxygen and 2 atoms of hydrogen.  So if you weigh 150 pounds then you consist of about 10 and a half gallons of water, or over 2.5 octillion (2,532,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) atoms of hydrogen swarming about within your body.

The hydrogen atoms in your body were created some 14 billion years ago during the big bang.  The nucleic protons and orbiting electrons that make up the hydrogen atoms in your body first condensed out of an almost infinitely dense quark-gluon plasma less than a second after the universe came into being and was roughly the size of a turtle. 

It took about 380,000 years of expansion for the temperature of the universe to cool sufficiently so that each of those protons could capture and hold an electron to actually form hydrogen atoms, but that’s barely the blink of an eye on the cosmic time scale. 

So for all intents and purposes, pretty much all the hydrogen that exists today was created at the dawn of time.  In the beginning, all the matter in the universe was hydrogen. 

You and everyone and everything that was to come, every thought and every dream, all of the sacred and all of the profane: all of it was contained within one big, rapidly expanding cloud of hydrogen atoms.

Roughly 2.5 octillion of those original hydrogen atoms are in you.

You are a highly organized matrix of big bang exhaust.

So, how did that happen?  How did a cloud of hydrogen atoms turn into most of what you’re made of?  Well, turns out, the hydrogen cloud was just a shade on the clumpy side.

If you look closely enough, and with the right instruments, you can see echoes of the Big Bang in what is called the cosmic microwave background radiation.  It shows you more or less what the universe looked like shortly after its creation when it was composed entirely of hydrogen. 

Some parts of the early universe became empty, intergalactic space, and other parts became galaxies of stars, stars that were made when the clumpy parts of the hydrogen cloud collapsed under the force of gravity, the hydrogen atoms getting so close together that they actually stuck together to form helium, in a process called nuclear fusion. 

Through nuclear fusion, our sun converts 600 million tons of hydrogen into 596 million tons of helium every second.  The other 4 tons becomes the life-giving heat and light for which our sun is so universally admired.

OK, so if all the hydrogen came from the big bang, and the helium comes from nuclear fusion in stars, where does everything else come from?

Well, eventually, stars burn up all their hydrogen and get hot enough to fuse their helium atoms into carbon, then the carbon fuses into neon, which fuses into oxygen and silicon, which then fuse into iron.

At this point, in stars that are a bit larger than our sun, the fires of creation go into overdrive, the star collapses, which ignites a course of runaway nuclear fusion, that creates a supernova.  For a brief moment in time, the exploding star is the brightest thing in the universe since the big bang.  And it is here where everything else is created.

The big bang made the hydrogen.  Some of the hydrogen is in the water that is 70% of you.  Most of the rest of the hydrogen made the stars, and the stars made everything else.  From the oxygen you’re breathing, to the carbon in your cells, to the gold on your fingers.  The universe made itself into these things. 

And these things eventually condensed into you.  You are part of the slimy film coating a rock adrift in the inky blackness of space.  The slime, the rock, and you share a common ancestry in the very fabric of the universe itself.

Why the cosmology lesson?  Because this blog is going to be about modern business, entrepreneurship, and intellectual property law… oh and also how the internet is fundamentally transforming civilization.  And that’s less daunting when you take a cosmic view.  If you want to think meaningfully about where you’re going, I think it’s important to have an idea about where you’ve been.

I consider this to be sacred:  When you innovate, you are the universe innovating upon itself.  When you invent, you are the universe inventing.  When you advance the state of the art in a particular technology, when you author a work of art or literature, when you turn raw materials into something new and polished, you are doing what the universe has spent the last 14 billion years preparing you to do.

Innovation is never unprecedented.  It’s what we do. 

The only constant is change.