Category: .

Knowledge not content

Jeff Jarvis is against content:

I took Swartz’ action not as a protest but instead as an object lesson in the true value of content. We from the content business think our value is encased in our content. That is why we sell it, build walls around it, protect it (and, yes, I will still happily sell you mine). Inside the Gutenberg Parenthesis, that is the only model we have known.

But the net has taught me that content gains value as it travels from person to person, just as it used to, before Gutenberg, when it wasn’t content but was just information.

Google and Facebook have taught me that content’s worth may not be intrinsic but instead may lie in its ability to generate signals about people, build relationships with them, and deliver relevance and value to them. In that, I think, is a new business model for news, one focused on value delivered over value protected, on service over content. For content is merely that which fills something—a page or a minute—while service is that which accomplishes something for someone.

Lessig and company have taught me that content’s value can lie in what it spawns and inspires. Locked away, unseen, unused, not discussed, not linked, it might as well not exist.

David Weinberger has taught me that knowledge confined in a book at a single address on a shelf is limited.

And Aaron Swartz has taught me that content must not be the end game for knowledge. Why does knowledge become an article in a journal—or that which fills a book or a publication—except for people to use it? And only when they use it does content become the tool it should be. Not using knowledge is an offense to it. If it cannot fly free beyond the confines of content, knowledge cannot reach its full value through collaboration, correction, inspiration, and use.

I’m not saying that content wants to be free. I am asking whether knowledge wants to be content.

I think this is an elegant distinction. It’s an intuitive way of drawing a line between free speech and commercial speech.

Why does Daisy exist? Here’s why.

Here’s my guess for the vision behind Ian Rogers going to MOG/Beats/Daisy: much tighter integration between the content business and subscription service. The service will have business deals to heavily promote artists. It’s similar to paying radio stations to play a single, but rather than pay them, the label will own one.

If the Daisy service can break even and attract a reasonably large number of users, it will become a marketing platform. It may even become a profit center for the label if it can avoid giving too much of the revenue to other labels.

What did the MOG acquisition cost? I would guess 20 million or so. I think I’ve seen that number around, but if I’m just making it up I bet I’m within ten million. That’s a reasonable budget for a publicity machine with so much potential.

The Daisy service itself will be marketed like a music product. Having a sub will be cultural identity just like those red headphones or the white earbuds before them. Rappers will all have subscriptions. It will be design-forward and style-forward. It will be perky, gym-toned, safely dangerous. Compare to this heinously unhip MOG ad.

Or, that’s Iovine’s vision. I can’t say for Ian or the investors.

Related: Jimmy Iovine on why he can make the on-demand streaming business work:

Why tech companies can’t succeed at music subscriptions:

I was shocked at how culturally inept most consumer electronics
companies are. And what I also learned is that you can build Facebook,
you can build YouTube, you can build Twitter — you can be a tech
company and do that. But those [sites] program themselves.
Subscription needs a programmer. It needs culture. And tech guys can’t
do that. They don’t even know who to hire. They’re utilities.

Why Beats/Daisy will be different:

[Other music subscription] companies, these services, all lack
curation. They call it curation; there’s no curation. That’s what we
did as a record label, we curated. There’s 150 white rappers in
America; we served you one.
We are heavy on curation, and we believe it’s a combination of human
and math. But it’s a give and take.

Right now, somebody’s giving you 12 million songs, and you give them
your credit card, and they tell you “good luck.” You need to have some
kind of help. I’m going to offer you a guide. You don’t have to use
it, but it’s going to be there, and it’s going to be a trusted voice,
and it’s going to be really good.

What changed?

Ian’s getting back into the on-demand streaming business. So here’s the interesting question. When he took over Yahoo music, Yahoo’s on-demand streaming business went away. Now he’s going there again. So what’s different?

  1. He might feel that Yahoo’s service was too far ahead of the market, and the market has now caught up.
  2. He might feel that costs have come under control since then, so that it’s now possible to make a healthy business.
  3. He might feel that Beats is the right parent for such a product and Yahoo was the wrong one. Maybe the company has more leverage in the market, or more plausible marketing to consumers, or the company can deliver higher quality.
  4. He and Beats might have a new, yet undisclosed product vision which changes the game. What they’ve been talking about is curation, and it’s reasonably likely that all parties really believe that.

Rod Furlan built his own version of Google Glass, and found that it acted as extension of his senses :

My world changed the day I first wore my prototype. At first there was disappointment—my software was rudimentary, and the video cable running down to the onboard computer was a compromise I wasn’t particularly pleased with. Then there was discomfort, as I felt overwhelmed while trying to hold a conversation as information from the Internet (notifications, server statuses, stock prices, and messages) was streamed to me through the microdisplay. But when the batteries drained a few hours later and I took the prototype off, I had a feeling of loss. It was as if one of my senses had been taken away from me, which was something I certainly didn’t anticipate.

When I wear my prototype, I am connected to the world in a way that is quintessentially different from how I’m connected with my smartphone and computer. Our brains are eager to incorporate new streams of information into our mental model of the world. Once the initial period of adaptation is over, those augmented streams of information slowly fade into the background of our minds as conscious effort is replaced with subconscious monitoring.

The key insight I had while wearing my own version of Google Glass is that the true value of wearable point-of-view computing will not be in the initial goal of supporting augmented reality, which simply overlays information about the scene before the user. Instead, the greatest value will be in second-generation applications that provide total recall and augmented cognition. Imagine being able to call up (and share) everything you have ever seen, or read the transcripts for every conversation you ever had, alongside the names and faces of everyone you ever met. Imagine having supplemental contextual information relayed to you automatically so you could win any argument or impress your date.

Military spending

Look, I realize this is obvious, but US military spending makes no sense. There is no adversary and no threat.

You could argue that military adventurism serves American business and thus the American economy. But I’ve never seen credible evidence of this. Do you know anybody who got a job off the Iraq war? There were patronage jobs aplenty for Republican party careerists. There were jobs for soldiers, obviously, but with a death and severe injury rate that makes it a pretty terrible job, even in comparison to the service industry.

You could argue that the military advances policy goals, but those goals can also be pursued with diplomacy or economic pressure. The military is more expensive.

The money spent on the military is corruption. It’s payoffs on behalf of politicians in exchange for help with their careers. They get to look masculine by being pro-war, they reap campaign donations and votes from defense contractors, they please local voters who make money off military bases, they stroke their egos by supporting the idea of American exceptionalism.

Military spending was 20% of the federal budget in 2010. We don’t need to spend any more on military than other first world powers. We spend 10X more than our peers, so we could cut 90% of spending without making in dent in our actual ability to defend ourselves.

The military budget *doubled* under W Bush. So that 20% of our budget could drop to 10% by cutting his increase. Why aren’t we doing that? Because the corruption maw grew once again.

Ok, whatever. We all knew it already. No new info here. I had a momentary feeling that the obvious needs to be stated every once in a while, so that we don’t lose track of the ground truth. It will pass.

Compass sense

Northpaw compass anklet

North Paw compass anklet is a transhumanist hack to augment your sense of direction.

A North Paw is an anklet that tells the wearer which way is North. The anklet holds eight cellphone vibrator motors around your ankle. A control unit senses magnetic north and turns on and off the motors. At any given time only one motor is on and this motor is the closest to North. The skin senses the vibration, and the wearer’s brain learns to associate the vibration with direction, giving the wearer an intuitive sense of which way is North. Most people “get it” mere seconds after putting it on, and can then reliably point north when asked.

What makes it way more awesome than a regular compass? Persistence. With a regular compass the owner only knows the direction when he or she checks it. With this compass, the information enters the wearer’s brain at a subconscious level, giving the wearer a true feeling of absolute direction, rather than an intellectual knowledge as with a regular compass.

Because of the plasticity of the brain, it has been shown that most wearers gain a new sense of absolute direction, giving them a superhuman ability to navigate their surroundings. The original idea for North Paw comes from research done at University of Osnabrück in Germany. In this study, rather than an anklet, the researchers used a belt. They wore the belt non-stop for six weeks, and reported successive stages of integration.

I can imagine this being squeezed into a discrete little anklet on the order of a rubber band.

As a Google Glass app this would still be useful, but not as much. As the blurb says, it would be “an intellectual knowledge as with a regular compass.”

The difference is in the very unusual form factor – a band around your ankle whose only output channel is where on your body it is vibrating. As you rotate in one direction the location of the vibration rotates in the opposite direction. You’d stop paying conscious attention to this pretty quickly, leaving you with a strange new “compass” sense.

Compass sense already exists in nature – it is called biomagnetism. This works by having cell-sized chains of magnetite, the stuff that makes compasses work. Magnetite has also been found in animals that navigate by compass direction, such as bees, birds, and fish.

magnetite chains in the brain
Single Magnetite Crystal
in the Human Brain

We should (but don’t) have this sense already, because humans have magnetite chains as well:

Magnetite has also been found in animals that navigate by compass direction, such as bees, birds, and fish, but scientists do not know why the magnetite is present in humans, only that it is there.

It’s not just birds, bees, and fish, but also ancient Martians.