Innovation and Growth in a Flat World

Yesterday afternoon, I attended (Dr. Dobb's sister publication) InformationWeek's CollabNet-sponsored executive summit, dubbed Innovation and Growth in a Flat World -- the centerpiece of which was a two-hour, lightly-but-provocatively-moderated (by David Kirkpatrick, Sr. Editor Internet Technology at Fortune) panel discussion featuring Thomas L. Friedman (New York Times foreign affairs columnist and author of business bestseller The World is Flat), Tim O'Reilly (technology books, Web 2.0), Brian Behlendorf (the godfather of Apache and founder of CollabNET, subversion, etc.) and Devin Wenig (COO at Reuters -- a business undergoing rapid upgrade and Web 2.0-ification).

The subject of conversation (as folks who have read Friedman's book will readily infer) was: "how do we deal with a world where everything is connected to the extent that collaborative brainwork can be placeless, borderless, and friction-free?" Or, as it was more simply and trenchantly put by Friedman towards the end of the session: "Everything you do with your left brain will now be done faster by a computer or more cheaply by a guy in India. What do you do now?"

Listening to these folks vamp on that topic was a great way to spend a couple hours. As Kirkpatrick later said (he was washing his hands at the time -- at J-school, they teach you to solicit unrehearsed quotes by accosting luminaries in the men's room), "it's hard not to have a good dialogue when you're sharing a stage with these guys." And he's right: all these folks are big thinkers and terrific talkers: entertaining, full of ideas, interested both in conveying a message and in exchanging feedback with each other, and with the audience.

I must admit, I went to this conference prepared not to like Thomas Friedman, simply (and irrationally) because aspects of his message disturb me. But I liked him very much. For one thing, he doesn't want to be the next George Gilder. Instead, he turns out to be a real journalist of the old and hallowed school, who holds himself above the fray of hype and seems to have no vested interest in specific outcomes. While generally optimistic about the potential of the complex phenomena of globalization and internetification to increase economic equity, grow wealth and abet global happiness, he also warns eloquently against the downsides, at one point reminding peers that: "If the world is flat for InfoSys, it's also flat for Al Quaeda."

The other commentors seemed more vested in presenting an optimistic picture. Strictly speaking, everyone was merely reporting observations and making inferences -- no heavy agenda was asserted. But the goal of the exercise (as anyone awake during the latter half of the 90's could immediately see -- in my case, the perception inflected with a strong sense of: "Oh, geez ... here we go again,") being to overcome FUD, enhance the buzz around marketable content and topical brands like 'Web 2.0,' and start shaking money loose from suits so that geeks can do cool stuff with it.

Which is, of course, fine by me. It's high time we stopped looking at globalization, friction-free mindwork, "constant partial attention," opensource ethics, hyper-commoditization, and "community" as aspects of the jack-knifed 18-wheeler that's about to force us over the embankment at 80mph, and started looking at them as the FedEx truck that's going to carry our displaced locus of value to a world of eager customers. (Insight from the panel: "When the software is free, the value doesn't disappear -- it goes somewhere else." The job at hand, of course, being to make sure that "somewhere else" is eventually "your pocket," as opposed to "the black hole of consumer appetite for technical novelty.")

In characterizing the kinds of everywhere-at-once change occasioned by fast-forward globalization, the presenters offered many resonant anecdotes. We heard from Friedman about the pottery seller in Cuzco who discovered that his competitor, down the dirt road, was buying 'Peruvian' pottery from China; about the Hungarian cab driver with a trilingual website; about taking a cab from Charles de Gaulle into Paris and realizing that the driver was watching a video and chatting on a cell phone, even as Friedman himself was wordprocessing a column and then listening to his iPod (to his credit, Friedman's point in telling the story was to note that he and the driver may have been doing six technologically-mediated things at once, but failing to communicate with one another); and about how his daughter, away at college, was made aware of her father's speaking agenda because she was 'friended' on Facebook by a naval cadet who, earlier the same evening, had attended Friedman's lecture to the academy. We heard from Behlendorf about the core author of Subversion (an incredibly productive and brilliant coder who happens to be blind), and from Devin Wenig who reassured us that -- a scant few years after Reuters outsourced 50 low-level news-writing jobs to India -- they've now hired back more New York writers than they lost, but have obliged them to climb the value food-chain to produce more astutely-analytical material.

We also heard quite a number of trenchant formulae -- my favorite being "Every Employee a Volunteer." For the presenters, this seems to mean: "Winning companies will learn how to let their smartest people do what engages them most passionately, thus engaging their highest levels of productivity and creativity (a la opensource movements)." Which sounds like a wonderful notion, but (judging from my limited experience of 30 years of work, on two continents, in four or five industries) only connects beneficially with the real world in locally-recursive scenarios like the Apache project, where a bunch of frustrated programmers get together and share in creating tools that let them do their jobs better. From very close up, this sure looks like progress. But the sense of unalloyed benefit needs to be modulated by recalling that opensource emerged, at least in part, as a productive adaptation by developers to increased institutional demands and reduced budgets.

So great: if you starve and overstimulate programmers long enough, they'll get together and do something brilliant that you can then exploit for nothing. And they'll defray the huge personal cost of participation via the spiritual dividend of being able to help build cool stuff. The problem is what happens when you try this with people who aren't deeply-trained and characterologically-inclined creative, independent, purely-meritocratic problem-solvers who live in an abstract universe where "flow" is the goal, data really matters, and everybody, at minimum, has access to necessary and sufficient means of production (a brain, a 'puter, and bandwidth).

What I kept waiting for was for someone to talk about the bell curve. The presenters -- these guys are the smartest people in the world, right? So as far as they're concerned, it's fine to gently advocate for a frictionless global economy where labor reconfigures itself instantly to the shape of opportunity and capital. But it simply doesn't account for what happens to the (conservatively) 98% of businesses who can't turn on a dime, and the 99.5% of people who aren't emotionally, intellectually or logistically equipped to re-engineer themselves on a constant basis.

Nor, in promoting "frictionlessness," did these scenarists acknowledge the burdensome fact that value also inheres to friction. It might be to the benefit of capital to move at lightspeed. Those without capital, however, can only accumulate wealth in conditions of relative continuity: slowly accumulating tiny bits of land, small collections of material goods, fragile networks of human dependencies and cultural memory -- none of which are readily portable. And nobody has yet explained to me how an increasingly-flat world is not inevitably hostile to these.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 09:41 AM  Permalink

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