virtualeconomics

In search of lost nostalgia

If I'm reading a book, I can remember what page I'm on. It's hardly a superpower or a talent, barely even worthy of being called a trick, but I find it a slightly useful propensity - reading just before I go to sleep I wake up, pick up the book and think "ah, I stopped at page one hundred and forty seven. About halfway down". It saves a little skimming, a little re-reading, the odd accidental spoiler. And while I know that technology as basic as a bookmark - for which read absolutely any scrap of paper that happens to be lying about - would do the same job, it amuses me to be able to do it.

When I first got a Kindle at the end of last October (a kind parting gift from my lovely colleagues at Northcliffe) there was a lot about it I liked. The thing I disliked about it - and I disliked it viscerally, almost as a personal affront - was that my my utterly trivial mental trick of remembering page numbers had been rendered even less useful than it was before. The Kindle knew what page I was on. I need never remember a page number again.

Adapt by Tim Harford

Tim Harford's third book, Adapt, is much braver than his first two.

The Undercover Economist, his first book, leapt on the post-Freakonomics enthusiasm for popular economics and - alongside Steven Lansberg, Tyler Cowen and others - explained how we can all use economic principles to make sense of our everyday lives. It was clever, fun and accessible: a better introduction than most to demystifying economic theory and making it actually useful to the man complaining about ticket prices on the Clapham omnibus. The Logic of Life, his second, told us simply that logic underlies even our most seemingly absurd decisions. Tim's narrative, that people act rationally even when they seem not to, drew examples and theory from the field of behavioural economics to tell the reader what was again an ultimately comforting and familiar story that helped them make more sense of their own life.

Where The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life were reassuring, Adapt is confrontational.

Seminal books for each decade

Completely off what I am pleased to imagine is my topic...over at MR Tyler Cowen has invented a game - "seminal books of each decade". I agree with only one of his eight choices (yes, I'm sure he's bothered) so thought I'd call it a game. The point is not to pick the book from each decade that you think best, but the ones with the greatest cultural significance. Incidentally I think The Great Gatsby an odd starting point and my pick for the 1920s would be one of the Wodehouses - any of the Jeeves or Psmiths would do just fine.

Anyone can play, should it amuse you to do so.

Amazon dating

It occured to me yesterday that Amazon should offer a dating service.

They have all the information that it could possibly be useful to know about a prospective partner. How much do they spend on books? Which books do they buy? How close to publication date do they buy the important ones? Their reviews record would probably be handy too, just to make sure they understood what they were reading. Amazon has locational data for all its customers of course, so all they'd need to do is tweak some privacy settings, add a photo upload facility and let people search for cute potential partners near them who love the same books.

400 year trends from Google books search

Google's new book search tool comes with the ability to make charts out of searches through the 500 billion words that make up 5.2 million catalogued books. Here's what ReadWriteWeb used it to find. Here's what I looked at - changing religious values (especially the decline of God and the fall of heaven vs hell); cars overtaking horses; vampires beating zombies; political shifts at the middle and end of the century; and finally, my favourite chart last, perhaps offering some hope that mumbo-jumbo has not yet conquered the world. 

 

Creative Disruption by Simon Waldman; book review

 

Anyone interested in the future of news will have been following Simon's work for a while now, both the theory - at Creative Disruption and previous blogs - and the practice in the form  of the Guardian. (It would, I think, rather badly miss the point of what Simon did in his time there to call it "the Guardian's website".)

And in that context it's a surprising book, in both tone and message. The subtitle of the introductory chapter and accompanying blog, "OMG! The internet ate my business", is exactly what I expected to see - fiery neologisms exhorting immediate embrace of an inevitably digital future. Creative Disruption is nothing of the sort. It is a sober how-to for business leaders facing a variety of challenges including (but, also suprisingly, not limited to) the fundamental shift of attention online, and like all the best guides one is left with the deliciously illicit sense of being let in on some hard-won secret knowledge which the author should probably have kept to himself.  

First, here's my favourite paragraph and a taste of what the book's about:

"A business with a legacy of costs, systems, people and products in need of reinvention is nothing like a business without any of those worries. There are always lessons to learn from successful companies of all shapes and sizes, but we ignore the fundamental differences in corporate DNA at our peril. Google has a host of great practices about innovation, and ways of working that have helped to make it the phenomenon it is. But these all sit on top of a massively profitable search advertising business. To think you can adopt the former without the latter, and somehow radically reverse your fortunes as a result, is as misguided as watching a Superman movie, putting on a red cape and assuming you will be able to run as fast as a speeding bullet."

In that sense, Creative Disruption is both a how-to and a "how-not-to"; both a helpful guide to dealing with the unique challenges of C21st change management and a litany of mistakes made by legacy businesses which the current crop of leaders should now know to avoid. The key how-to message can be summarised (and indeed is so summarised in the introduction) as "transform the core business; find big adjacencies; innovate at the edge". Each of these messages is then illustrated with numerous case studies and examples. The "how-not-to" is harder to sum up - examples are spread throughout the book of mistakes that business can make and have made as they struggle to deal with the new digital reality, from panicky and near-random acquisitions of web businesses that look cool but offer no tangible synergies with the core to directionless "build it and they will come" web projects like the Economist's Red Stripe that pull together the brightest and best from across the business to dream, ponder and achieve precisely nothing.

To my mind the book is oddly structured, with case studies book-ending the theoretical framework so that the examples of Britannica, HMV, IBM and Apple sit towards the front, Kodak and book publishers right at the back. Still, this is quibbling over minutiae - the concepts and the examples come across clearly enough and alternative structures would present their own problems.

If your business faces challenges from digital (hint: if you have a business that's you) it's well worth the couple of hours it will take you to read Creative Disruption. If you can't spare a couple of hours buy it anyway and read pp1-10 (which handily summarises the key arguments in bullet points) and skim chapters 5, 6 and 7 for the how-to guide. You'll save yourself at least one expensive mistake - and while of course the day's wasted if you don't make at least one expensive mistake (f0r how else does one learn?), you'll learn a lot more making new ones and Creative Disruption will definitely help you avoid some of those that people have already made before.

(Disclosure: Simon is a friend, and was kind enough to invite me to the launch party for the book. However I turned up so late the tab had run out and I had to pay for my own drinks so the conflict of interest probably isn't material.)

Books and films of 2008

This has been a strange year for popular culture - more than half of the best books I've ever read came to my attention (not necessarily came out though) in the past twelve months, but I've barely seen one decent movie.

The year started well with The Lies of Locke Lamora, a Christmas gift I read as soon as I got back to London in January. It pulls off a new genre crossover, as far as I'm aware, pitching a Sting-like heist in a fantasy world. Its morals and pacing are all Flashman, the backdrop is as rich as New Crobuzon.

Then in February my dear friend Serena bought me All My Friends are Superheroes for my birthday, a book which is little short of perfect. It is far too short to really count as a novel, is the sweetest, silliest love story I've ever seen, and if you can spare just an hour of your life to give it a try you won't regret it for a moment.

Some time in April I read The Road. My review of it is here. A staggering book, still probably the best I've ever read.

Summer saw me finally get around to The Time Traveller's Wife, under the mistaken belief that my friend Dan had chosen a passage from it to read at my wedding (he actually chose his passage from To Say Nothing of the Dog, he assures me, which I still haven't read). Still, it was an extremely happy mistake and hugely enriched an already magical holiday that roamed through Cornwall, Devon and bits of Somerset.

And honourable mentions should go to Soon I Will be Invincible, to the first of Garth Ennis's The Boys (though not the second and third, which are just awful), to Warren Ellis's Fell (which, as apparently predicted even by collaborator Ben Templesmith he seems to have got bored of after only a handful of books), The Rawshark Texts, and surprisingly to the tenth and final volume of Y: The Last Man (though not the first nine, which are weak, which begs serious questions about why I kept reading the damned things, but it was worth it for the end).

In films I've seen only three this year even worthy of comment. First, Doomsday. I cannot believe this film got made. There's this girl, right, and she has a glass eye which is also a camera, a fact which is elaborately set up and then never mentioned again. Some sort of virus has eaten everyone in Scotland, except actually they're fine but have chosen to regress their societies either to an absolutely bog-standard cyberpunk cannibal dystopia* or a bloody silly medieval fantasy in a castle. And there's a car chase between a vintage bentley and some Mad Max extras. The whole thing is incoherent, meaningless and quite astonishingly bad - worthy of some sort of special award for Attempted Cinematography. American Gangster was the only really good film I saw this year, and even that was just a remake of The Wire. And Wall*E, which I looked forward to all year after the brilliant viral marketing they did for it last year, was clever, probably far too clever to really be worth it. Wall*E for me was mainly about pulling a sort of intellectually satisfying but dramatically grating metafilm trick, in that the movie is really well-paced, moving and enjoyable until the humans turn up, at which point it becomes a grotesquely ugly, garish farce. Sure, the central message of the piece is that humans screw everything up, but did they really need to make two movies - a good one about a robot and a bad one about people - to make that point? Perhaps.   

*spoilers? Seriously, are you even paying attention to this review?   

Winter is coming

Some of the most exciting news I've seen for a while just broke - George R R Martin's A Game of Thrones has just gone into production as a TV pilot episode. If you don't know it, A Game of Thrones is the first book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, which I would call without any hesitation the greatest fantasy epic ever written (yes, easily including Lord of the Rings, and just - if only just - including the Farseer trilogy) - even though it's still only about halfway through.

There's lots of things to like about being alive at the start of the C21st - a level of material prosperity that the emperors of just 100 years ago would have bitterly envied and the reasonable prospect that having survived this far we'll live to see and benefit from de facto physical immortality spring immediately to mind. But the one that probably brings me the most immediate satisfaction on a day to day basis is that all the best books are being written right now. And so. A Song of Ice and Fire TV series. Winter is coming. Best news I've had for a while.    

Bobbyland

From William Gibson's brilliant Spook Country:

"Then why aren't more people doing it? How's it different from virtual reality? Remember when we were all going to be doing that?" The yellow rectangle was made of die-cast hollow metal, covered with glossy paint. Part of a toy.

"We're all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn't need the goggle, the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right? The locative, though, lots of us are already doing it. But you can't just do the locative with your nervous system. One day, you will. We'll have internalised the interface. It'll have evolved to the point where we forget about it. Then you'll just walk down the street..." He spread his arms, and grinned at her.

"In Bobbyland", she said.

"You got it."

This is the big one, the one that'll make the web and the Internet and games that take nigh on half a billion dollars in their first week look like a minor distraction, a sideshow or at best a precursor to the main event: an interface that seamlessly overlays a locative virtual environment on the corporeal world. So I can walk around New York playing Grand Theft Auto XIV with the other half million people who have bought into that particular virtuality, while you're playing some LRP World of Stacraft with a different half million guys in the very same space. Over to the endlessly fascinating Grant McCracken:

"I love the idea of sharing New York City with people who are playing an Area/code virtual game as a result of which the city takes on new drama and urgency that completely involves them but remains invisible to me."

You can already see the beginnings of this in PacManhattan and the - now sadly defunct - Botfighters. Incidentally, if you're long virtuality you should be short as hell on real estate. When I take my exodus to the virtual world and start living in a castle made of pixels I'm not taking half a million quid's worth of bricks and mortar with me. From that point my postal address will probably be a shipping crate.

Now in handy book form

Today's favourite thing - web spoof The Internet Now in Handy Book Form. Go see.

(The book cover is from Amazon spoof Amasszone, though for my money the best bit is Firebox spoof Cocoon For Men. Quoth: "It's a big scary world world out there. Full of responsibilities, difficult situations and death. And you simply don't want to face it. So, If you'd rather have kid's toys delivered direct to your door and spend your weekends playing with remote-controlled AV technology, you've come to the right place!")