What didn’t help to stay on track where the revelations about the NSA. Those kind of stories are right up our alley. They a broad, many people provide valuable perspectives and we are very keen to understand it all. So here is our take on what is happening right now.

Revelations about the scale of the surveillance state have been making their rounds on every media channel. The leak by Edward Snowden seem to have started something that should have been going all along: real reporting on the issues. We’ve been seeing multiple articles emerge that look deeper into what seems to be an extraordinary setup by the US government to spy both on its own citizens as well as on the rest of the world.

We live, once again, in times in which the future that we’ve used to read about in science fiction books is not only upon us, but is even scarier.

But I want to focus on one specific aspect in this situation. Not many years ago, the most convincing argument why companies like Google can’t screw with privacy too much was: it’s very easy to switch from one service to another. Especially when it’s a search engine. As we can see today, this is not the case anymore. Many of the big players in the technology business managed to integrate themselves into our life in a similar manner as the financial institutions did. Technology is now also too big too fail. To switch away from Gmail, Dropbox and Facebook means severing oneself from an ecosystem that many other, small vendors use to make their product work. The APIs that we hailed as saviors of the open web, those who helped create those ecosystems in the first place, are now coming to hunt us.

There are, of course, alternatives to all those services. Open source alternatives and ones that provide the user with a lot more security and privacy. And yet, convenience and the existence of those proprietary ecosystems make it very hard for people to make the switch. This is both because the lock-in mechanisms have been designed to keep user in, but it also because the open, more secure alternatives aren’t making their argument in the most effective way.

For a long time, I have been a strong supporter of the open source movement, used to run my machines on Linux and kept away from proprietary solutions as much as possible. That changed a couple years ago. Not because my views changed necessarily. I just discovered that for this stage in my life, I want convenience and “just works” more.

The same applies to security. As an informed user, I can take care of quite of few precautions. I’m mostly only going online through a VPN, I have a Tor browser installed and I could reactivate my GPG key. But this is not a scalable solution. Even after the revelations about the extend of NSA’s capabilities to tap into our data, we will not see mass adoption for those security measures.

We obviously can not rely on our governments to protect us. We also can’t rely on the companies who host and own our data to prevent governments on accessing it as they see fit.

In a world in which we still need to fight arguments like “I don’t have anything to hide”, who will be able to provide both new questions and the ways to answer them that are adequate to the world that we live in?

I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things.

-Edward Snowden

Articles of the week

• How the Robots Lost: High-Frequency Trading’s Rise and Fall
  Matthew Philips follows the story of HFTs from their inception to the present, from raking in piles of cash to fighting each other for tiny scraps of profit.
• What Amazon’s ebook strategy means
  How Amazon’s clever strategy and wild success is revealing its unsustainability in the book market (and others), and why this means that DRM on ebooks must die.
• Children of the Drone
  Vanity Fair’s portrait of James Bridle and a review of the New Aesthetic’s evolution in its first two years as a concept, covering various perspectives that have surfaced in that time on what this “found art movement (but, confusingly, not a movement of found art)” is.
• One day it will be possible to 3D-print a human liver
  A look into the current and future uses of 3D printing in medicine. Though it isn’t yet possible to print organs, we are actually surprisingly far along when it comes to implementing 3D printing in this area. Examples of applications range from converting MRI scans of pregnant women’s wombs to produce models of the fetus, to replacing a jawbone with a printed titanium substitute.
• Will robots boost middle class unemployment?
  “Dinnertime conversation starters” from a roboticist’s point of view to get us thinking about how robots change the traditional relationship between productivity and employment, and another warning that we need to think critically in order to protect the existence of a middle class.

Young programmer, I urge you to consider both sides of the startup coin. There are so many ways to make a dent in the world.

–Alex Payne

• Glass
  Dustin Curtis provides a levelheaded review of Google Glass and makes the long road ahead for Google fairly obvious.
• Is there a Social-Media Fueled Protest Style? An Analysis From #jan25 to #geziparki
  Zeynep Tufekci has been studying social media, politics and social movements and is one of the best sources on Twitter for what’s happening in Istanbul and all over Turkey these days. Here she gives a lot of background to the current protests and her perspective about the connection between social media and protests.
• The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’
  Another brutal take-down of Eric Schmidt’s book “The New Digital Age,” this time by Julian Assange. We’re always a bit wary about his conspiracy theories. But his jabs at Schmidt’s agenda are a welcome antidote to the techno-determinism of the Silicon Valley.
• You Can Stop Worrying About Moocs Now
  The MOOC hype seems to be running out of its disruption fuel. Unsurprisingly, the VCs are more interested in returns than “free education for everyone.” Time for companies like Coursera and FlatWorld Knowledge to refine their business models, which is not a bad thing, just not so revolutionary anymore.
• Aaron Swartz: hacker, genius… martyr?
  A couple of months after his death, Elizabeth Day sits down with his girl-friend Stinebrickner-Kauffman to reflect on Swartz and the circumstances of his death. A good opportunity for us to keep remembering him.

We actually feel quite good about this. It is the minimum viable version of this company. The essential Third Wave, if you will. With this in mind, we also took the opportunity in the last few months to look at our cost structures, business processes and even our inventory to get rid off all the clutter that had gathered in the last 2.5 years.

We also got our first own office space, which felt more like an important step to grow up than we expected. We could have gone with two desks in a coworking space to reduce even more weight. But for us, having this kind of a home-base is vital as we found out. We need a place where we can close the door and think out loud in a familiar environment created to our taste. Nevertheless, we don’t plan on hunkering down. We moved to Mitte to be closer to a bigger part of our network and we can already see the first fruits of this.

And while we did all of this, we’ve also been enjoying a steady stream of new business inquiries and request for talks coming in since March. For the first time, it doesn’t look like we will have a dip in our work load throughout the summer. We see a lot of interest in our thinking on the future of work and product development and are eager to dig deeper.

All of this is a pretty long lead-in to answer the question, we hear the most these days: no, we won’t replace Maddie and no we don’t plan on hiring people in the foreseeable future. We want to find out first how to make the most of our current situation and then figure out how we can grow again based on the learnings of the past two and a half years. In the meantime, we will use these Week Notes not only to tell you what’s happening with our company but also, as we started doing already, to present more of our current thinking on things happening in our fields of interest. Enjoy.

If your dystopian scenario includes no signs of human resilience, it’s probably bad futurism.

–Jamais Cascio

The algorithm is the alchemy of our age.

–Jay Owens

• Civilization and the War on Entropy
  The mind-blower of the week comes from Drew Austin. With sentences like “Algorithmic recommendation systems will eventually descend into entropic noise unless fed by the real cultural wealth that cities generate,” we really don’t know how to sum this one up. Just read it, ok?
• Big Data Needs Thick Data
  Will Big Data make the work of ethnographers redundant? Au contraire. Tricia Wang argues that Big Data needs what she calls Thick Data to uncover the meaning behind visualizations and analysis. Where Big Data delivers the numbers, Thick Data delivers the stories.
• Concert Industry Struggles With ‘Bots’ That Siphon Off Tickets
  Bots will not only steal your job, now they will also snatch up your Justin Bieber tickets before you can. Next: music fans deploying their own bots to fight back.
• Elegy for the Text Box
  Paul Ford mourns the demise of the text form field on the web, being replaced with WYSIWYG editors like Medium that leave us without the satisfying moment of seeing our text published online for the first time. It also means that text design plays a bigger role right from the start of the writing process. Another reason why we like to write our texts in Markdown and offline first before putting them online.
• Is Coding the New Second Language?
  Although we don’t believe that everybody needs to know how to code, we think it’s an important skill for the future to have some basic understanding of how the machines work that make up our lives (some Germans disagree). So hurray for more computer sciences in school. But it’s not so easy as Peg Tyre describes in this article from a US perspective.

Avoiding stagnation, being honest, practicing

A lot of human time and energy is spent sweeping dust under rugs rather than just getting out the hoover. It’s costly and unsustainable to ignore problems and hope they go away. Recurrent problems especially are worth inspecting closely and discussing, since they reveal systematic conditions or persistent behaviors that can be changed. It is, therefore, best to be the one who gets out the hoover, or at least to work with people who are good at hoovering (and are, I might add, allergic to dust in both metaphor and reality). Discussing issues as they come up keeps things moving, and this is far preferable for everyone’s mental health and productivity than pretending nothing’s up.

Being honest – and by this I mean being clear about how you feel and what you think, as opposed to “not lying” – prevents known issues from cropping up again, and keeps everyone on the same page. Staying silent on matters of importance, whether out of concern for one’s pride, a fear of offending someone, or some other reason, is usually a bad choice and stands in the way of improvement. Here it has been refreshingly different from other environments I’ve experienced – issues are brought to the surface and dealt with in a matter-of-fact, reasonable way. An observation on this topic: it helps promote the conversation needed for these issues to come up when everyone sits close to each other.

I’ve been taught the importance of not just doing what you’re good at, but doing things you’re not so good at over and over again until you get better at them. This is easy to forget, and this notion of “leaning into the pain” is one that I find myself coming back to frequently.

Thank-yous

I consider myself very lucky to have met Jasmine Probst, who worked with us for a regrettably brief two months. She taught me much more than she probably realizes, and it was nothing short of inspiring to work with her and get to know her.

Our friend Peter Rukavina wrote me a touching, encouraging email straight after I’d announced that I was planning on changing tracks – I’d like to thank him, too, because that email saved me a couple of times when I was rather in doubt about the soundness of my decisions.

I am as ever indebted to Johannes and Igor for being both excellent bosses and thoughtful people, for setting a great example for me, and for being consistently supportive and helpful, no matter what. As an employee, it’s wonderful to know you’re respected and that your opinion matters – this will seem to them so obvious it isn’t worth mentioning, but I have benefitted from it and greatly appreciate it.

Three cheers for Third Wave and a wonderful year and a half.

We need a new language and framework for understanding the world as it actually is, rather than a world underserved by old metaphors, or confused by notions of remote, cartoonish capital-F “Futures”.

-James Bridle

Articles of the week

• Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity?
  A small, independent team is attempting to build the first digital life form based on the basic principles of the brain. A fascinating tale about the creation of a digital worm that re-evaluates the definition of being alive.
• U MAD??? Evgeny Morozov, The Internet, And The Failure Of Invective
  A detailed dissection of Evgeny Morozov, his latest books, but more specifically his methods. The conclusion to which Maria Bustillos and a growing number of other writers are coming about the Belarus-born writer is that his intentions are not to start a comprehensive, transformative discussion, though on the exterior they may seem to be.
• The too-smart city
  Top down vs. bottom up – the future of the term “smart city” seems to be up for grabs. On the one side, we see corporations like IBM and Cisco, on the other side advocates like Adam Greenfield and Dan Hill who argue that that smart city governance would use technology to find new ways to build and govern our cities in the future.
• The Next Facebook
  Josh Miller muses about what and how the next Facebook will emerge. While we are not particularly interested in the basic premise of the article itself, Josh does make very good observation about the current state of affairs in the field. Recommended reading for near-future product development.
• The Hidden Costs of Buying on the Cheap The collapse of the factory in Bangladesh, the cost of buying cheap clothing has been made obvious in a rather dramatic and cruel way. Naturally, this sparked a debate about buying clothes on the cheap. On a more fundamental level, we need to ask ourselves where our priorities are, what we value and how we want to use the money that we have accordingly.

The internet has been buzzing about the Tumblr acquisition for a couple of days now. Being bought by Yahoo used to be a great thing. Flickr, Yahoo Brickhouse. All those names were associated with highly competent teams and extraordinary technology. These days, the not-so-newly appointed CEO Marissa Mayer needs to openly promise that they won’t mess it up. If anything, it speaks to the fluidity of the technology business.

It will be interesting to watch what happens next. Yahoo has been clawing its way up to be considered as an equal contender among the other tech giants. Grabbing up Tumblr will help in that regard. It shows a financial commitment that will at least make the others pay closer attention. My take on this is that wether or not this take-over will be a successful one will not only be decided if Yahoo can make Tumblr profitable or not. For Yahoo this deal was not only about the potential revenue from Tumblr, it was about being perceived as a potential serious employer and partner in the near future. It’s about building a company that can change the brand perception of today’s Yahoo.

So far, the last 12 months have been successful. Appointing Mayer was a big scoop and one that gave the company credibility, but also one that has built up expectations. Mayer’s eagerness to buy Tumblr is likely to also be based on the fact that analysts and the industry in general have been waiting for a big gesture.

Her juggling those expectations seems to be working out fine so far. Launching a big update of Flickr on the next day is also a keen tactical move by the PR professional that Mayer is.

There is one mistake that Yahoo could make that would ruin Tumblr instantly: take away the anonymity/pseudonymity of the platform by requiring a Yahoo login. Lets hope they won’t walk into this trap.

In other news

We’ve been working on a small project with our dear friends from MoreSleep and Freunde von Freunden. It’s a little publication experiment that aims to give executives and key decision makers inside companies a faster and more comprehensive introduction into trends that we are seeing. No, it is not yet another trend report.

It’s too early to publish it online, but if you want to take a glance at what we are up to, drop us a line.

Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate.

-Alexis de Tocqueville

Articles of the week

• Foreign Policy: Think Again: Big Data
  Kate Crawford, prinicipal researcher at Microsoft, makes the case for curbing our enthusiasm when it comes to Big Data and instead employing more caution and forethought. Most of the concerns she highlights here stem from the fact that data out of context can be misconstrued, and can therefore be a liability.
• Caixin Online: Why Foxconn’s Switch to Robots Hasn’t Been Automatic
  Johannes’ recent talk at re:publica discussed what happens when machines replace us at work. Foxconn is an interesting example of a company in the midst of just such a transition, and demonstrates many of the social and logistic difficulties that come with the territory.
• Smithsonian Magazine: What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
  Jaron Lanier is another voice advocating caution to the techno-utopians – a group he used to belong to. He’s especially critical of the notion of the “wisdom of the crowd”: “This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant.”
• New York Times Bits Blog: Google Buys a Quantum Computer
  The D-Wave quantum computer that was in the news a while back has been bought by Google and NASA, who are collaborating to work on AI and machine learning. Take note of the other companies and organizations mentioned in this article – it’s an interesting crew.
• Wired Threat Level: Drugstore Cowboy
  A long read and a crazy story about a con man who cooperated with the US government to nab Google for supporting illegal drug sales through AdWords.

Photo by Gregor Fischer

Ok, two-thirds of the spring conference season are over. It’s been an intense one so far.

NEXT13

At the end of April, I joined Teresa Bücker and Sue Reindke for a workshop at the Next conference about digital work. We wanted to reflect on all the amazing possibilities for more flexible work and why so little of the vision has become reality. So we facilitated an actual workshop. You know, one with group work etc. Insider tip: if you tell attendees beforehand that you’ll be doing this – we explained our plan on the first slide that people saw when they entered the room – some will leave. But that’s ok as the ones who are staying bring the motivation needed for a productive workshop. We divided the attendees into four groups and gave each group a role. One represented the lawmaker, one the employers, one the employees and the fourth represented the education system. Each group got the task to develop five propositions to make sure that a fictive female student could live the life she wanted in 2020. They got half an hour and then five minutes to present. This worked out beautifully. The conversations I joined where some of the most fruitful I’ve ever heard at a conference. Lots of great ideas but also a lot of new awareness about the hurdles.

republica 13

What Next is for the digital business world in Germany, Republica is for digital politics and society – a gathering of bloggers, thinkers, activists, entrepreneurs and lots more that grew to 5000 attendees this year.
I gave a talk labeled ‘The End of Work – Will Machines take away our jobs?,’ which got some great reviews. The video of the talk (in German) and most of the material I used, is linked up here.

This was one of the tougher talks to prepare as I hadn’t talked about this topic before and it’s a very broad one. It’s always a bit of amusing to observe myself going through the same process with a talk like that.
I usually prepare by reading tons of material and gathering everything in Evernote. I create the talk on post-its, every post-it representing a slide, to define the story I want to tell. I then transfer the post-its into Keynote slides. 24 hours before the talk, the panic arrives and I question everything I have so far. I think that I need much more time and accuse myself of procrastinating for too long. As I’m familiar with this pattern by now, I resist the urge to throw everything away and just keep refining the talk here and there. At the morning of the talk, the panic is usually gone and I start looking forward to giving the talk. I can’t wait to get on stage. The best talks I’ve given are the ones where I’m really fascinated with the topic and want to share that excitement.

iico 2013

Yesterday I gave another talk at the iico conference here in Berlin. I looked at the current hype around big data and took the usual stance for us at Third Wave by asking what needs to happen now that we’ve got the technology. It’s time to create a more holistic approach to data and we could start by teaming data scientists with social scientists.

But now enough with the talk-giving … for this month. I’m actually looking forward to being back at my desk and diving into some client projects.