Just sayin’:

I hate to bump the New Liberal Arts off the top of the front page – go check it out! Buy it! Do it now! – but I’ve got a related meatspace publishing story to tell you. My Chronicle of Higher Education forum contribution on scholarship and teaching in 2029 – “The Faculty of the Future: Leaner, Meaner, More Innovative, Less Secure” – is out now, but the online version is sadly behind a very 2009 subscription firewall. So you’ll have to have a login to read what Mark Bosquet, Anthony Grafton, Joseph Hermanowicz, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Peter Stearns, and Cathy Ann Trower wrote. But here’s my piece as it appears in full:

How is academe different in 2029? Let’s begin with the basics: reading, writing, and teaching. If anything, Google is even more important. The 2009 author/publisher settlements that allowed Google to sell full access to its book collections didn’t revolutionize books in retail, but subscription sales to institutions did fundamentally alter the way libraries think about their digital and analog collections. Access to comprehensive digital libraries allows teachers at any institution to compile virtual syllabi on the fly, seamlessly integrating readings, assignments, communication, and composition.

Automated subscriptions powered by Google’s search services deliver articles on any topic or keyword of interest instantaneously; hyperlinked citations and references appear with the original document, as threads in a continuing conversation, creating the first genuinely hypertext documents.

Apple’s popular iRead application (launched in 2011) enables reading, writing, and recording on virtually any device. Some teachers and students still use laptops or tablets, but others prefer handhelds, like phones or game consoles. But users’ inherited assumptions about the casual use of these devices make both teaching and research more closely resemble the activity of online social networks than traditional lectures, seminars, or conferences. Courses typically emphasize collaborative research leading to immediate publication of short bursts of text. Reader feedback then powers incremental improvements and additions.

The curriculum, especially in the humanities, valorizes thoughtful curation and recirculation of material rather than comprehension or originality. The traditional unidirectional model of knowledge transmission (best represented by the now-deprecated “lecture”) has been effectively discredited, although it persists through habit, inertia, and whispered doubts about the efficacy and rigidity of the new model. Many professors periodically pause to lecture, but only apologetically, or when distanced by ironic quotation marks.

The ‘teens are as widely remembered for technical innovation and radical dissemination of knowledge as the ’20s are for job loss, technological retrenchment, and economic concentration. In 2019, when Google used its capital to snap up the course-management giant Blackboard and the Ebsco, LexisNexis, and Ovid databases, it effectively became the universal front end for research and teaching in the academy.

Many university presses were shuttered in the transition from print to digital, especially those affiliated with public universities looking to shed costs following the catastrophic collapse of the University of California system following state budget cuts in 2020. The remaining presses make up for lost textbook sales by hosting blogs where established scholars and high-octane amateurs brush shoulders (and compete for shared advertisement revenue). These in turn drive production of traditional monographs, whether published electronically, in print, or both. Scholars also directly market their services as virtual lecturers to students and other institutions. All authors now have a broader view of their audience, across institutions, disciplines, and peer levels.

Everyone is excited, but everything is uncertain. No one knows what will happen next. Just like 20 years ago

.

Read more…

Here it is.

Listen, I think you are really going to like this book. It’s a distillation of so many of the themes we orbit around here at Snarkmarket, presented through the prism of many minds, all very different, and all wrapped up in the form of a slick, slim volume that you’ll be happy to hold in your hands.

And again—I don’t want to give anything away, but—there’s a secret that can only be unlocked if you possess the physical object(s).

New Liberal Arts is $8.99 if you want a copy (or three) and you can snag it here. Update: All sold out, but you can now grab the PDF.

Keep in mind: This project isn’t over! Really, it’s only now that it can begin. We’ve collectively created a coherent piece of work worth sharing with the world. But, as New Liberal Arts itself tells us, ahem, on page 41:

Ideas succeed not by being good or bad, but by being sold effectively.

As it happens, I think we’ve got some really good ideas in here—but we do need your help selling them. And there is a lot you can do to pitch in. Blog this, tweet about it, Facebook-share it, or best of all, recommend it directly to a friend (or three) who you think might like it.

Together, we’ll sell these books, by hook or by crook*, and then—here’s the fun part—together we’ll ask: What next?

*Or in eight hours, apparently.

During my year of shuttling back and forth between Missouri and Minnesota, I honed my travel regimen down to a precise science. I’ve got my High Sierra Wheeled Backpack, my Monster Outlets-to-Go travel power strip, spare contacts, spare eyeglasses and two zippered bags for liquid and dry toiletries, all ready to go whenever I need them. Most of my liquids — lotion, shaving oil, hand sanitizer, eyedropper (for contact solution) — are either refillable or are normally sold in TSA-acceptable containers, like deodorant and roll-on styptic pens.

What’s always bedeviled me, though, is the toothpaste. Travel-size toothpaste can be surprisingly elusive, and the container isn’t refillable. Or so I thought. I mean, it’s not like you could just put the nozzle of your regular toothpaste tube up against the nozzle of the travel tube and squeeze, right?

Right?

Wrong. It totally works. And just you watch, I will still be using the same grody .75-oz tube of Crest in 2011.

Kevin Kelly:

Cities may be engines of innovation, but not everyone thinks they are beautiful, particularly the megalopolises of today, with their sprawling rapacious appetites. They seem like machines eating the wilderness, and many wonder if they are eating us as well. Is the recent large-scale relocation to cities a choice or a necessity? Are people pulled by the lure of opportunities, or are they pushed against their will by desperation? Why would anyone willingly choose to leave the balm of a village and squat in a smelly, leaky hut in a city slum unless they were forced to?

Image via Wikipedia

Well, every city begins as a slum. First it’s a seasonal camp, with the usual free-wheeling make-shift expediency. Creature comforts are scarce, squalor the norm. Hunters, scouts, traders, pioneers find a good place to stay for the night, or two, and then if their camp is a desirable spot it grows into an untidy village, or uncomfortable fort, or dismal official outpost, with permanent buildings surrounded by temporary huts. If the location of the village favors growth, concentric rings of squatters aggregate around the core until the village swells to a town. When a town prospers it acquires a center

It’s here.

A project that began earlier this year now bears fruit: slim, rectangular fruit.

New Liberal Arts, a Snarkmarket/Revelator Press collabo, is 80 pages long, with 21 pitches for new liberal arts from some of the smartest minds we could find. The pitches range from attention economics to video literacy; you are gonna love what you find in this book.

It goes on sale tomorrow at 9 a.m. PST, so be sure to check in early—there are only 200 copies. Each one is $8.99. The idea is that after we sell those, we’ll release the PDF, so when you buy a book, you’re also buying a little slice of free for everybody. Or something like that.

But bear in mind: New Liberal Arts has a secret—one that can only be unlocked out there in the world of atoms and new-book-smell, not here in the world of pixels and PDFs.

To warm you up, we’ll be posting a few new liberal arts this week. It breaks my heart, because they look so lame here on the blog, without Brandon Kelley’s wonderful design—but I do want to give you a taste.

The first, micropolitics, is from Matt. He was the most prolific contributor to this book, with 3.5 entries to his credit, and I have to tell you, each one is an E.B. White-worthy gem—compact, lucid, thought-provoking. I’d pay the cover price for his contributions alone.

Read more…

Rex at Fimoculous posts this insightful conclusion to the end of his post on launching new Dan-Abrams-published meta-media site Mediaite:

If you hang around in the NYC media bubble long enough, you develop the social depression of a collapsing industry. The west coast is full of a giddy frisson about the inevitable demise of big media, while the midwest is skeptical of everything that gets force-fed to them from the coasts. NYC, which has essentially zero awareness of any of this, continues to constantly be shocked! when a TMZ or Pitchfork or The Onion comes along from the hinterlands with a massively successful enterprise.

The reasons for this amounts to a lack of vision. Even smart people, vampirically bound to the past, seem completely blind to developing new formats. The standard for online innovation right now is “launch another blog,” which no one seems to recognize is about as depressing as launching another newspaper.

Sign One that Mediaite will be smarter than HuffPo: this Jeffrey Feldman column that turns Nico Pitney vs. Dana Milbank into Marshall McLuhan vs. Thomas Jefferson. Me likey, Jeffrey. Me likey a lot.

Ezra Klein recently moved from the American Prospect to the [depending on your perspective] loftier perch of the Washington Post. I’m guessing this has also gotten him better access to the halls of power; he seems to be snagging higher-profile interviews more often (e.g. Atul Gawande, Ron Wyden, Tom Daschle, Bernie Sanders).

But his heightened proximity to the legislative sausage factory might be having a depressing effect. Lately, he’s gotten more and more negative about the deficiencies of our government structure. Most of our biggest problems, he’s been saying, can’t really be pinned on individual actors like Obama or, say, Tom Harkin. They’re systemic.

To illustrate, he offers a nice fable:

Imagine a group of men sitting in a dim prison cell. One of the walls has a window. Beyond that wall, they know they’ll find freedom. One of the men spends years picking away at it with a small knife. The others eventually tire of him. That’s an idiotic approach, they say. You need more force. So one of the other men spends his days ramming the bed frame into the wall. Eventually, he exhausts himself. The others mock his hubris. Another tries to light the wall on fire. That fails as well. The assembled prisoners laugh at the attempt. And so it goes. But the problem is that there is no answer to their dilemma. The problem is not their strategy. It’s the wall.

This is kind of a cool idea. Let’s say that evolution writ large is only accidentally about the preservation, transmission, and development of living species, but essentially about the preservation, transmission, and development of information. On this view, organisms are just a means to an end, particularly well-adapted couriers for all of this chemical data.

If that’s the case, then maybe there isn’t anything particularly special about the specific form of that data (i.e. DNA) or the way it’s been transmitted in humans (sexual reproduction). That’s just one way of doing things – in nonconscious, nonverbal, or nonhistorical species, genetic transmission, instinct, inherited traditions are the only means you’ve got. But once modern humans arrive on the scene, with all their increasingly sophisticated means of representing information, then Evolution 1.0, internal transmission of information, isn’t the only game in town — you’ve also got Evolution 2.0, characterized by the external transmission of information.

Once you reframe evolution in this way, then you can say that our species’ rate of evolution “over the last ten thousand years, and particularly… over the last three hundred” is actually off the charts.

So the guy who’s arguing this is a physicist named Stephen Hawking. (Maybe you’ve heard of him – he’s awfully smart, and was part of Al Gore’s Vice Presidential Action Rangers.) He also says that our tinkering with evolution ain’t over:

[W]e are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls “self designed evolution,” in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. “At first,” he continues “these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression.”

If the human race manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate the risk of self-destruction, we will probably reach out to the stars and colonize other planets. But this will be done, Hawking believes, with intelligent machines based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than macromolecules, which could eventually replace DNA based life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life.

I can’t decide if this is totally anthropocentric, or exactly the opposite. But it’s kind of exciting, isn’t it? I’m evolving the species right now, just by typing this! And so are you, by reading it! And so are Google’s nanobots, by recording all of it in their fifteenth-gen flash brains!

Tim and I had a fun Google Chat back in March about a concept for a book called “Too Big to Succeed.” The window for a book on this theme to become a blockbuster is almost closed, so I figure it’s time to stop hoarding the idea and make it a blog post.

The phrase “too big to succeed” has already infected the cultural lexicon this year. A quick sweep of Google shows it being applied to the banking industry, the auto industry, Twitter, big Pharma, China, and Washington, among other things.

It’s a good phrase, springing up (as best as I can tell) in response to an even-more-popular recent construct: “too big to fail.”

The concept of an entity or industry being “too big to succeed” deserves an extended riff. Do industries just have to congeal into tiny networks of giant institutions over time? And if so, does that tendency pretty much force the massive flameouts and market inefficiencies we’ve seen all over the economy recently?

I don’t think this does have to happen, and therein lies the thesis of the book.

I think the era where every industry has to become an oligopoly is nearing an end. I don’t think the shift towards mass institutions was a natural, inexorable network characteristic. If we look at the tape, I think we’ll see that the oligopoly era was a network distortion produced by our industrial-age regulatory framework. And it’s time to leave these things to a quiet rest.

In industry after industry, I think we’ve got an opportunity to shift our policies towards supporting nimble, durable markets that mimic real networks: diverse collections of nodes with a few particularly well-connected hubs. Let’s look at a few examples:

The news industry

Over the past century, the news business went right past oligopoly into monopoly and got stuck there. Today, most of the journalism produced in every American city is an accidental byproduct of a giant, dying media conglomerate. As with all these other oligopolistic industries, the news titans are clamoring for a bailout, asking the government to prop them up and regulate away their competition.

But we can imagine a system of better, more sustainable journalism built on a robust network of independent newsrooms threaded throughout every neighborhood. Networks of editors could package this work for diverse sets of overlapping communities. In places like the Bay Area and Seattle, we’re seeing the beginnings of this new model, but to thrive, it will require at least as much regulatory support as the big dogs got when they were buying their presses back in the day.

The medical industry

This was what got Tim and I started. Today, most health care is provided by big, unwieldy hospitals. They tend to cluster in these giant office parks, often far away from the inner city, where they’re needed most. You walk in and have to navigate a maze of rooms, bouncing back and forth between receptionists and nurses and physician’s assistants and doctors.

But the vast majority of medical care people need on a daily basis doesn’t require a hospital to provide. As Tim said in our chat (punctuation mine), “There should be as many clinics as there are coffee shops, pharmacies, or copy stores. Universities do this (at least Penn does). We have a student health center; they have walk-in and appt hours, you pay a fee and it’s free. They see you and administer standard care, run tests, give physicals and vaccines and such, and then refer you to the hospital or a specialist if it’s more serious. You HAVE to go to the clinic if you’re in Philly and it’s not an emergency. And in part b/c it’s a tailored operation, geared towards younger people, it’s tremendously efficient.”

The food industry

I just saw Food, Inc., yesterday, which might be what got me off on this riff again. If you read Fast Food Nation or The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you know that Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan both identify monoculture (i.e. oligopoly and monopoly) as the primary villain in our awful global food situation. The last century saw food production shift from the local farmer to the multinational factory conglomerate. That shift is ruining our health, our environment, international diplomacy, and perhaps worst of all, our food. Meanwhile, the unbelievably obese food lobby has taken control of our government, writing intrusive laws to ensure its survival even as it crumbles under its own weight.

The movie industry

At this point, Hollywood basically exists to churn out quarterly blockbusters that each aim to repeat the formula for one blunt, universal emotion: love (“The Proposal”!), fear (“Saw XI”!), excitement (“Transformers!”), humor (“17 Again”!), etc. Nuance is lost, and art suffers. Like the food titans, the news kingpins, the health care lobbyists and others before them, the movie moguls are descending on Washington to seek protection as the twin forces of distribution implosion and supply explosion shred their profits.

But when my nephew is cooking up mindboggling special effects on his laptop, who needs Hollywood? The industry’s product is unsustainable. You can’t flog the formula forever. Let a universe of independent artists flourish, and overhaul the laws to help them make their magic.

Etc.

We can lay this pattern onto the energy industry, the publishing industry, banking (of course), transportation, post-secondary education, you name it. If I were editing this book, I’d make that the first third, in fact: spend the preface and first chapter making the overall argument, then spend a few chapters exploring how it plays out in all these different industries. Follow up this part with a chapter laying out the history — how this screwed-up oligopoly system took root in the first place. Trace it back to the industrial age and beyond.

The middle third of the book (I’m taking this straight from the gChat) could be about the rules of a new, more natural network system. The role of big companies in this ecosystem, what differentiates successful lean businesses from unsustainable niche businesses, how a network of microbusinesses can collaborate and compete effectively.

The last third might address how society generally would benefit, and how it would have to evolve to support this. This is where you explore the policy piece — how our laws have to change. It’s also where you talk about the Richard Florida stuff — our evolving understanding of how properly organized urban environments should function — and how this shift facilitates that.

Of course, as I said, I think the moment for this book is almost gone. From last September to this past January, we had a brief interlude of just transcendent possibility. Monumental shifts in our society seemed graspable. People talked about spending a trillion dollars over just a few years to fundamentally remake our economy, and we actually passed a stimulus package that got closer than anybody imagined.

But we’re seeing that ambition melt quickly. We’re on the verge of historic health reform legislation, sure, but now we’re choking on a price tag of $1 trillion over 10 years, regardless of how much it saves us over the long term. Our chance to achieve forceful climate change legislation is dimming by the day. And our September lust to reform the banking industry has molded over into a desire to, er, re-form the banking industry, in much the same shape as it was in 2001 or so.

There was a window where a big, Gladwellian book selling this notion of industrial transformation — not as some sort of hippie anti-corporatism but as a breakthrough business idea — might have made some traction. But I think that window’s almost shut. So this book is, for now, a blog post.

Or maybe the next Snarkmarket collaboration?