Posts by matt

Something about the Tokyo! trailer seemed pretty Robin-esque to me:

So, Sloan, how’s my Ro-dar? Planning to see this? Seen it already?

By the way, I caught this in the trailers before The Class, which is just as marvelous as everybody says it is.

I recently had one of those moments where a few disparate thoughts click into place, and I was left with an insight that seems obvious in retrospect. (Trouble is, you never know when those moments actually are obvious, and have occurred to everybody except you ages ago. Forgive me if this is one of those.)

It starts with the mobile “phone,” or whatever you want to call it. First, as has been widely remarked, half the world has one. Adoption rates exceed 100 percent in countries from Romania to New Zealand. Here in the US, it’s not hard to imagine a near future where smartphones with touchscreens are as ubiquitous as the Nokia bricks of yesteryear.

Here’s what strikes me about mobile phones: they correlate pretty well with actual people. To a degree unmatched by a computer and certainly by a landline, a cell phone is a personal device. Every member of a family is likely to have one. Not all that many people carry more than one. Between phone number portability and Google Voice, you can almost imagine a person’s phone number becoming an identifier almost as reliable as a Social Security number, certainly more stable than, say, a driver’s license ID.

This got me thinking about biometrics. The notion of your mobile phone touchscreen reading your fingerprint isn’t exactly new, and these devices are almost made for voice recognition, right? The point is, verifying identity with a mobile device seems like it should be easier and more accurate than it has typically been throughout the digital transition, yes?

We’re already paying for things with our cell phones. You can see the vast upsides to voting via cell phone. I’m already jonesing for my cell phone to interface with all my other electronic devices: “Desktop and air conditioner, Matt’s on his way home. Work it.”

The upshot of all this is that we’re hurtling towards a moment when your mobile telecommunications device is entangled with your identity in all sorts of curious ways. What does this mean? What does it mean to be that closely enmeshed with a computer?

And how does that enmeshment implicate our relationships with the telecom industry? It’s already squicky enough that I rely on T-Mobile for phone service. I am not at this moment OK with signing on to T-Mobile’s Identity™ service.

Perhaps this epiphany occurred much earlier to those of you with iPhones, but it felt novel enough to me to remark upon it. At any rate, “mobile phone” is not cutting it any more. If this thing really is becoming the prime representative of our digital identity, it needs a more accurate rebranding. Nominations?

I’ve reached the terrible moment. Google Reader has long since stopped telling me how many unread items I have, opting instead for the euphemistic “1000+”. I’ve dumped all the folders I’m willing to dump. I am unwilling to declare bankruptcy, but I don’t know how long I can stave off my attention creditors.

Here’s what I’ve come to realize about myself: I fully accept that there’s not a particular link in that ridiculous heap that will change my life. It’s been a while since I worried about missing a single killer post or app or XKCD or whatever; if it’s valuable enough, it’ll find me, I got it.

What I most value, and what’s most difficult to recreate outside of my RSS reader, is the exchange of perspective that erupts around a particular moment. Tim Geithner outlines a massive bailout plan, and my economists folder becomes an accessible but rigorous debate about scenarios and probabilities and consequences, light years more interesting and enlightening than a cluster of news stories. I found Jake DeSantis’ resignation letter and the attendant comments instantly fascinating as a drama about class that doesn’t quite resemble any story I remember. But the claims and counter-claims thrown about in the letter and its responses would have been impossible to untangle without the referees in my reader, who shed light even in their disagreement with each other. Atul Gawande’s broadside against solitary confinement sparked a characteristically luminous exchange between Ross and Ta-Nehisi. It’s not the Gawande piece or the DeSantis letter or the bailout story that I worry about missing, but what insights those writings touch off.

Babies won’t die if I don’t read these things. I am fully aware of all the precious, precious insight I’m forgoing to blog at this very minute. My aversion to the “Mark all as read” button is irrational; I recognize this.

But I have a proposal that could make this all a lot less difficult.

Google, I want you to give me a button labeled “Compress into diamonds.” When I click that button, spin your little algorithmic wheels and turn my reader into a personalized Memeorandum. Show me the most linked-to items in the bunch, and show me which of my feeds are linking to them. And take it a step further. You’ve got all that trends data that reflects the items I’m reading. Underneath the hood might very well be data about the links I click on in those posts. Use that information about me to compress my unread items into diamonds I will find uniquely wonderful.

The dirty little secret, Google, is that you barely even have to make this good. Even if the diamond-making algorithm is super-basic, all it needs to do is neutralize the psychological hurdle of the bankruptcy button. I just hate the very idea of clicking “Mark all as read.” Make me a cheap promise, and I will bite.

One interesting SXSW session from yesterday was Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh’s keynote on what makes his company tick. Among his most arresting lines was this (in paraphrase): Contrary to popular belief, the most important goal for us is not customer service. It’s culture. Hsieh proceeded to outline an exhaustive strategy for enforcing a fairly specific corporate culture, including the creation of an annual “Culture Book,” which features statements from Zappos employees characterizing the culture of the company.

Hsieh’s presentation was striking because it seemed to cut firmly against the grain of the current prevailing attitude towards corporate culture. We hear a lot nowadays that the best CEOs work hard to produce a sort of rigorous autonomy among their employees. Google, of course, famously permits its employees to spend a day a week merely following their own curiosity in the pursuit of work. The Obama campaign was praised for replicating the organizing structure of a good jazz group – a legion of micro-maestros, all empowered to excel at their own strategies in their many focused domains.

The Zappos of Hsieh’s description, on the other hand, is in some sense a very top-down, command-and-control environment. Prospective employees are carefully screened for conformance to a preordained culture, and anyone hired can be severed for failing to conform to that culture. One of Hsieh’s “10 commandments of Zappos” (how often do you hear “ten commandments” these days in companies?) – “build a positive team and family spirit” – is about eradicating the division between work and life, according to the company’s recruiting manager. “Employees work together, play together, break bread together and come to think of each other as members of an extended family,” she says. I.e., Zappos aims to encompass the entirety of its employees’ lives. This runs counter to, say, Best Buy’s much-praised embrace of allowing its employees unprecedented flexibility in scheduling and telecommuting.

Of course I’m simplifying. The “commandments” ostensibly allow room for plenty of employee autonomy. “Be adventurous, creative and open-minded” is on the list. Which reminds me of trying to come up with funny post-song banter for a cappella concerts in college. At some point, after even our lamest ideas had stopped trickling out, someone would croak out an exhausted, “Be funny!” And we’d all laugh. Because, of course, you can’t command humor into existence. Can you command creativity? And can you really make jazz when all your musicians were pre-screened for favoring the same improvisations and flourishes?

Also notable was the warm reaction Hsieh’s sessions got. Aside from some jokes about the cultish picture he was painting, and some grumbling about his sort of flat presentation style, the Twitterverse was surprisingly (I thought) aglow about what Hsieh was saying.

Is the dynamic changing? Is top-down the new bottom-up? What’s the right balance between Zappos’ approach and Google’s, or Best Buy’s?

Later, also: Robin got at some similar questions in his post about Apple, the iPhone, secrecy and transparency.