I recently saw a cartoon extolling the evils of Thomas Edison in comparison to the wonders of Nikola Tesla. I have not gone back in time and I have not had the fortune to meet the 2 geniuses, so it’s hard for me to judge the character of either man, but what bothered me was one of the reasons given by the cartoonist for deeming Edison an ass: Because he had a business acumen and was good at promoting his products.
Given, Edison reportedly electrocuted dogs and cats in a PR campaign to prove that Tesla’s Alternating Current was dangerous is enough to deem him an asshole, and most probably he was, but the fact that he knew how to make meaningful products (the Pearl Street Station, the first central power plant in the US) and then promote these products does not make him any less important than Tesla, whose contributions are also important.
The dichotomy the author of the cartoon was trying to achieve was geek (Tesla) versus non-geek (Edison) and the distinction might be important but very much overly simplified in the cartoon, because the world is better when geeks and non-geeks work together. The world is also better when we stop thinking in false dichotomies and look for those nuanced gray areas where the secrets of life really happen.
I’d like to chew on the nuances in the space between geek and non-geek and other false dichotomies—Government/Business, Open/Closed Systems, Microsoft/Apple, AC/DC—and look at how finding some sort of middle ground in a spirit of collaborative competition is what makes innovation happen. This post was prompted by recent readings of biographies on Tesla and Jobs but morphed into a whole other beast as I sat down and wrote, so that’s why it might appear jumbled, but all of it revolves around the idea of how innovation happens in the gray areas.
The times that Jobs and Tesla lived in are not that different. The Gilded Age Tesla occupied was a wild time with banks and railroads failing, the economy crashing, but even with all the chaos an Age of Invention was taking place. Sound familiar? The parallels between the late 19th century’s attempts at electrification and our own age in disseminating broadband are uncannily similar. Just as rural electrification took time (not until the 1940s did most rural areas have electricity, despite the US having a rural economy), now we are facing the difficulties of the digital divide and there is a notable disparity between those who have access to broadband and those who don’t.
It’s strange that we always forget that necessity is the root of innovation. When we can’t rely on Big Government or Big Business, inventors make it on their own with really mad ideas. Even still, the dichotomy between Government and Business—just as real of a debate then as it is now—is a false one because being anti-government is most definitely not pro-business. The two behemoths work best in partnership and when little guys find their place in the space between the two. It’s sad that the current public debate has been debased and simplified so much that people actually think that being against the government helps business when so many of our innovations (electrification and broadband Internet are the first to come to mind) come from the great partnership between government and business, though surely there is a time when government needs to get out of the way and let business do its job. After sparking the innovation with research grants and the like, because businesses have a hard time working on their own when it comes to innovating for the long term or for longer out than the reporting of next quarter’s operating results, government needs to find a position that doesn’t stifle innovation. It’s also curious that Tesla and Edison operated in this strange space between Big Government and Big Business that was widened when both behemoths were failing. (But then Edison became Big Business and Tesla joined Westinghouse who became Big Business.)
Thinking about our geek/non-geek dichotomy, on the geek spectrum Steve Jobs falls into the non-geek area (but of course with a lot of geek creds). Like Edison, as a non-geek (he couldn’t program), a businessman first, asshole, his lack of geekiness in a milieu of geeks (computer programmers), combined with his innate business acumen and even his tendency to be an asshole, were what helped him to create great products that benefit society.
Jobs pays homage to Edwin Land of Polaroid who made reference to the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, which represents the San Francisco Bay Area of Jobs’s time, where you have engineers at Ames and the legendary Stanford Engineering Department but you also have a rich music and cultural scene that inspired creative thought and was really pushing boundaries. Jobs’s greatest contribution to world history was that he obsessed over being at the nexuses of sciences and the humanities, technology and liberal arts, commodities and art. And nobody capitalized on this important intersection more than Jobs, as the iPod perfectly exemplifies, and only Da Vinci did it as beautifully.
Not an engineering geek per se, what Jobs excelled at was obsessing over a product to the point where he made the product truly meaningful to human beings. Jobs’s father, a mechanic and hobbyist cabinet maker, taught him that you have to build the back of cabinets right even though you don’t see them, a classic wood worker’s mantra. This lesson from his father isn’t surprising given Jobs’s attention to detail on products.
Having grown up in the Bay Area, I deeply relate to Jobs’s obsession with the elegant design simplicity of Eichler homes (Eichlers are the little details I really miss about home)—clean modernism made for the masses of engineers, doctors and professors, condensed along the 280 corridor, particularly in the South Bay Area. In many ways, the simplicity of Eichler homes became a model for the iPod and the first Mac.
Working for a powering solutions company that makes power supplies for broadband applications, I appreciated Jobs’s obsession with power supplies as a way to improve product and the power supplies’ very importance in how Jobs innovated computing. Geeks like Wozniak paid little attention to the analog and very mundane power supply, but Jobs, because he was obsessed with detail, obsessed over the power supply in the Apple II. In particular he wanted to provide power in a way that would allow the Apple II to go without a fan, and this lack of fans is something that characterizes Apple products to this day. The less is better mantra makes Jobs’s products more useful. Jobs dropped by Atari where he used to work and visited Rod Holt, a chain-smoking Marxist who turned Jobs onto power supplies like those used in oscilloscopes, which instead of switching power on or off 60 times per second, switched power thousands of times in a second, allowing it to store power for a longer time and release less heat as a bi-product. Hence, Apple’s fan-less products created fans of efficient and beautiful products.
For Jobs, packaging was key and he knew how to package from the get-go. Wozniak deserves the credit for the design of the Apple computer’s clean circuit board and related operating software, which was one of the era’s great feats of solo invention. But Jobs was the one who integrated Wozniak’s boards into a friendly package, from the power supply to the sleek case. He also created the company that sprang up around Wozniak’s machines while Wozniak was more like a goofy geek who just wanted everybody to have fun and not get caught up in Jobs’s tirades or the idea of making a profit from the enterprise. Noble but naïve ideas, but the world is better because Jobs promoted products with unique packaging.
The day Jobs got Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1979 to “open the kimono” and show him what Xerox’s West Coast skunk works division was working on was a historic day that put Apple on the map. Jobs instantly recognized that PARC was sitting on a gold mine and “borrowed” so many ideas that PARC was working on, like a GUI with a bitmapped screen and the mouse. Per Picasso: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” The difference is artists know how to package their theft well.
When people complain about Apple products, they complain about their tight integration and the notion that the products are packaged too well, as if it were a bad thing. It wasn’t as if Jobs just stole PARC’s mouse to commercialize it. He took an entirely theoretical idea with little to no practical application and made it user friendly. PARC’s mouse couldn’t drag items around on the screen and really couldn’t be used for anything practical when Jobs first saw it.
Jobs’s team ran with the desktop metaphor theorized by PARC and transformed it into virtual reality by allowing the user to directly touch, manipulate, drag, and relocate desktop icons. Using complex coding, they made regions in which windows could overlap each other, something that we take for granted now but was a big deal in its time.
What makes Apple products is the tight vertical integration between application software, operating system and hardware device. Jobs was all about control and the closed system that Jobs championed is anti-hacker, anti-free spirit and against some of the espoused ideas of his 60s ideals. No time in our history represents such strange contradictions.
But Jobs was a man of many contradictions and that he could stand in between these contradictions is what made his ideas so innovative. As Walter Isaacson, author of his biography points out: Jobs “was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business. And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.” Once again, here we are back at the idea of false dichotomies and the notion that innovation happens in the gray areas.
In his dedication to tight integration, Jobs was so strong-willed that he didn’t want his creations mutated by unworthy programmers. As ZDNet’s editor Dan Farber said, tinkering with Jobs’s products “would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.” Jobs instituted such practices as designing a case so that it couldn’t be opened with a screwdriver just to keep people from tinkering.
One thing I learned from reading about Jobs’s life was that we have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose and the false dichotomy between Microsoft and Apple, and nowadays it’s Apple versus Google. Jobs and Bill Gates were tighter as friends and collaborators than I would have imagined. One of Jobs’s more humble moments comes when he convinced Gates to still design software for the Mac and got an investment from Microsoft in Apple: “Bill, thank you for your support of this company. I think the world’s a better place for it.” And it’s true that these 2 very different philosophies work better for everybody both when they’re competing and working in harmony at the same time in a sort of collaborative competition.
The Open and fragmented versus Closed and integrated question when it comes to operating systems and computing products will be a perennial one, but I’m a believer that the answer is always both. Advancement of humankind by putting the best tools in our hands only happens when we utilize the advantages of both these competing paradigms and what they have to teach us. The tidy user experience, unified field theory, a testament to Job’s control and belief in simplicity and unity doesn’t allow the tinkering and customizing a product might need for certain applications that a Gates-philosophy product would give us. The answer is always both, and both Jobs and Gates came to that conclusion in a 3-hour discussion they had near Jobs’s death after Gates walked through Jobs’s back gate. What surprises, even more than Jobs keeping a rather simple house instead of a mansion, just allowing Gates to walk in through the back door, is the deep friendship the two had, and the (dare I say it) heart-warming discussions the 2 purported adversaries had.
Just like we have a Jobs because we had a Gates pushing him, and vice versa (coincidentally they were born in the same year), we have a Tesla because we had an Edison pushing him.
Much has been made of Edison not having invented the light bulb, an urban myth commonly repeated in polite conversation because nobody can think of the person who did. Let’s credit a number of scientists and inventors who either worked in unison or borrowed each others’ ideas in a spirit of collaborative competition, which also marks Tesla and Edison’s divisive but productive rivalry. In the end, Edison was the first to make a commercially practical incandescent light and the first to market the light bulb to households, but much credit must be given to his predecessors.
Edison was strong at promoting his inventions. Tesla worked for a time as a ditch digger because he could not convince others of the worthiness of his AC inventions while Edison furthered his campaign against AC. Tesla’s AC eventually won out in its time but there are a number of advantages to DC in certain applications: safer low voltage operation, increased efficiency, seamless transfer, use in electronics and battery applications. The competitive collaboration, because their lives did touch, though not usually in friendly ways, was what made innovation happen in power.
While Jobs found use for other people’s inventions, Tesla sometimes suffered when he experimented without thought for use of his inventions, which isn’t really bad, but just made it harder for him. Jobs made the important contribution of making technology more than just technology for technology’s sake but for real and practical use. Tesla, though genius, had a hard time crossing the dichotomy and finding the middle grounds between technology/invention/art and mundane human tasks whereas Jobs succeeded when he got that very subtle notion of not being a programmer/technologist or really a “true” businessman, but understanding the importance of being at the nexus between the two where creativity happens.
In the end, we have to let go of false dichotomies, which doesn’t mean we don’t fight for our ideals (which all of these innovators did). We just have to know when to concede and where to find the middle ground that is really meaningful. It’s hard work, but somebody’s gotta do it.
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
The title of Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is so great that this review/reflection/summary of the novel will have no other name.
As the title suggests, there are 2 stories that slowly but deliberately coalesce, one about a hard-boiled wonderland in a semi-futuristic Tokyo (and what Tokyo wouldn’t be futuristic for a Western American?) and the other about the End of the World, creation of the main character’s consciousness, a strange world where people seem to live eternally but without mind and without shadow.
The End of the World imagined by the main character/narrator is not unlike a voyage I once took to the end of the world: Finisterre, Spain, which for a long time was literally the end of the known world for Europeans at this most northwestern point of the Iberian Peninsula. Prior to Columbus’s sailing for the New World, one would look out from a viewpoint and could only imagine a deep dark space filled with monsters of the unknown beyond the horizon. This not knowing, this battle with the unknown, eternal, but in a way peaceful, because deliberately there is a peace in not knowing, is like Murakami’s End of the World. “There is no beyond,” the librarian at the End of the World says to our protagonist. “Did you not know? We are at the End of the World. We are here forever.”
Our protagonist’s job at the End of the World is to read Old Dreams that come in the skulls of unicorns that the Librarian hands him ad nauseam until his job is “finished.”
Our protagonist in the Tokyo of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland, whose consciousness is creating this End of the World, is a Calcutec who shuffles information and his shuffling password is “End of the World.” And we begin his story wandering through an infinite labyrinth of hallways—one imagines an MC Escher painting— in a skyscraper that seems to have no end and through a waterfall to the laboratory of an old Professor, who is the mad scientist responsible for rearranging our protagonist’s consciousness so that he can shuffle. In a mad experiment, Calcutecs, shufflers of information, maintain the sanctity of information, transferring it through the tubes of thought.
In his Calcutec training, our protagonist is told by the System:
After a certain age—our calculations put it at twenty-eight years—human beings rarely experience alterations in the overall configuration of their consciousness. What is commonly referred to as self-improvement or conscious change hardly even scratches the surface. Your ‘End of the World’ core consciousness will continue to function, unaffected, until you take your last breath […] All efforts of reason and analysis are, in a word, like trying to slice through a watermelon with sewing needles. They may leave marks on the outer rind, but the fruity pulp will remain perpetually out of reach. Hence, we separate the rind from the pulp. Of course, there are idle souls out there who seem to enjoy just nibbling away on the rind. In view of all contingencies, we must protect your password-drama, isolating it from any superficial turbulence, the tides of your outer consciousness. Suppose we were to say to you, your End of the World is inhered with such, such, and such elements. It would be like peeling away the rind of the watermelon for you. The temptation would be irresistible: you would stick your fingers into the pulp and muck it up. And in no time, the hermetic extractability of our password-drama would be forfeited. Poof! You would no longer be able to shuffle.
This whole description of shuffling and password-drama seems like a strange metaphor for being a worker bee in our current Information Age, shuffling through data on spreadsheets or in the infinite library and parallel universe unto itself, the Internet.
The mind goes when your shadow dies in the strange dimension that exists in our protagonist’s consciousness at the End of the World. When this happens, the shadow dying, the mind won’t matter, according to the Colonel who shares a room with our protagonist at the End of the World. “It will go, and with it goes all sense of loss, all sorrow. Nor will love matter. Only living will remain. Undisturbed, peaceful living.” Here is life’s great dilemma in a nutshell. We want peace but we only get peace when we are at war, struggling with life’s big ideas. It would be nice to not have a mind. Indeed, maybe peaceful. The mind is imperfect, “but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow.” But where do they lead? To oneself. “That’s what the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere.” The fear of losing oneself or one’s mind when the shadow dies elicits the question of eternality. And belief. Because “to believe something, whatever it might be, is the doing of the mind […] When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the the way of the mind.” Which puts us in a strange position. Do we choose eternality, peace, and not having a mind? Or do we choose life and all of the inherent problems it presents?
The End of the World is a visualization, a mapping of the mind, its core consciousness. As the protagonist creates memories, he’s creating a parallel world. Professor: “The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound, painters do the same for color and shape. Mental phenomena are the stuff writers make into novels. It’s the same basic logic. Of course, as encephalodigital conversion, it doesn’t represent an accurate mappin’, but viewin’ an accurate, random succession of images didn’t much help us either.” It would be amazing to transpose our minds into a world that others can see and hear, and this is what great art does.
The idea of shuffling shows the mind as a black box. As the Professor informs us: “Even without you knowin’, you function as yourself. That’s your black box. In other words, we all carry around this great unexplored ‘elephant graveyard’ inside us. Outer space aside, this is truly humanity’s last terra incognita.” The protagonist of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland thus becomes part of an information warfare as in his shuffling he carries the Professor’s data from experiments. The Calcutecs and the Semiotecs are at war and our protagonist’s mind is the booty, but the Calcutecs and Semiotecs are two sides of the same coin. One protects information while the other steals, and they’re like the snake that is constantly biting off its tail. Not unlike the debate we have today with our information, privacy and the NSA and Wiki-Leaks and everything in between. We want privacy but we choose a form of communication that puts our lives into a strangely permanent universe, preserving it for posterity and for everybody to see, if they can just get through a few clicks of a password-drama.
The Library of Babel |
The Internet, the End of the World, is this endless circle of data, not unlike Borges’s ficción “The Library of Babel.” With the great power that the Internet bestows upon us comes great responsibility and great questions: Who owns this information? Who owns information? Does it really matter? Can you really own it? The Chinese don’t seem to think that you can own Intellectual Property, and they have a really strong point there, because you can avoid the drama of having your information stolen or having your privacy infringed upon. Because, really, Who owns information? Does privacy exist? Which is why so many open source systems seem to be taking off even in the West. You can avoid the whole drama of having your information stolen by making every piece of data “open” and forgetting this whole notion of privacy, which really was a fiction anyway. The information warfare continues, though, as information is the new gold in our Gold Rush.
What we get in Murakami’s novel is a strange, complex, but really fun theorization of the mind and a look at life in the Information Age, and is highly recommended for those who love having their minds transported to other dimensions.
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