ilya haykinson >> blog

Malcolm Gladwell seems to confuse cause and effect, to his argument’s undoing. He ignores the subtlety in the phrase “information wants to be free” that he quotes. For completion’s sake let’s take a look at the entire, original quote as it was said by the founder of the WELL, one of the first online communities, over two decades ago:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

Many aspects of “information” are already free: conceptually it’s no more controllable de jure than trying to prevent gossip or outlaw singing. Humans already share information freely, when they talk to each other in close proximity. As technology makes other types of information sharing just as easy as talking in close proximity, and just as much a non-zero-sum, it is human nature to share it endlessly.

To Gladwell, it appears that there is a choice. Do we give some information away for free, or do we put some price on it, and pay for our information power plants. This is clearly the wrong way around: some people are still willing to part with money for information because they have not found it easy enough to get it for free. They are not really interested in paying for the distribution of information; they may be interested in paying for its existence in the first place, however.

But who pays for it, and is it specified as a direct, per-item price, or something entirely different? Gladwell is fixated on seeing “free” as a $0.00 price. But when the government funds basic research at universities it is paying for the creation of information, which will be distributed effectively free. When a Hulu user pays with their time and attention during a commercial break, they get their content for free. There is always a tradeoff, but there does not need to be a direct renumeration every single individual distributed unit in order to satisfy basic economics.

Gladwell fails to accept that the rules may just change, and that consumers may not be the ones directly paying for what they consume. Or that the consumers may not pay the content distributor and content creators according to the mantra that the information is the most important part. I would argue that sometimes the consumer makes a determination that the mode of data delivery is worth some money: witness the Kindle. In other cases, they are willing to trade time to get information for free, as happens with movies downloaded over BitTorrent. Consumers have already decoupled their view of the information flow into separate steps of creation and delivery, and they deal with them separately.

In the perfect world, information would be available to anyone who wants it, and the creators of such information would get enough of a financial incentive to create and continue creating, proportional to the aggregate value of their informational assets. Unlike physical goods, a creator does not lose or gain any physical, scarce resources from a copy of the information, nor is there usually any opportunity cost.

Creators need to accept that as communication channels open up, and as inter-human connections become faster, easier to establish, and cheaper, these connected humans will not want to be slowed down by an argument that they should pay for something just because of artificially-induced scarcity. Setting a speed limit in outer space is imbecilic. Instead, creators need to find a way to get compensated through means not connected directly to distribution. For newspapers and drug companies, this may be grants or governments. For television and music creators, this may be flat usage taxes or revenue sharing. But distribution of information — it will always flow by the path of least resistance, from one person to another, whether we want it or not, always towards the free if possible.

Gladwell’s argument had rested on maintaining control, and having a choice of giving something away for free — or giving it away for some other price. Really, the only choice left to a content creator in the long term is to give it away or not give it away at all. Once released, their output will end up as free, to some people at the very least. And unless there is really an alternative with no more movies, and no more books, and no more paintings, the creators will just have to deal.

For those not in the know — Linda and I had just had a kid. you can read about our road so far at http://growingbaby.org

In ways typical of his usual punditry, John C. Dvorak decides to bash the One Laptop Per Child project. He reaches into his bag of over-the-top comparisons and sly turns of phrase, and argues that the laptop project is just the rich West being guilted into doing something for poor Africans and choosing this totally inappropriate remedy.

The British pundit Bill Thompson answers Dvorak and pokes holes in his argument — and does a wonderful job of bringing a dose of reality into the conversation.

The argument isn’t the first one out there. The debate about the OLPC has been going on ever since Nicholas Negroponte started talking about the project. It’s been both praised and criticized on aspects ranging from its technology, its cost, its educational value, and every single other conceivable aspect of its existence.

The strongest argument, however, is not one based on the OLPC at all. While talking about a green computer for kids, we are really getting in the middle of a long-standing debate in the West about how to approach post-colonial Africa and other developing nations. Is it right for the West to patronize the developing nations? Should we leave them to figure things out for themselves, even if it takes a hundred years? As people living in industrialized nations we feel a strong sense of injustice: our life expectancies are reasonable, our purchasing power is providing us with an ever-growing material wealth, and we have risen from working to provide for sustenance to being able to hold meta-discussions about our societal goals — yet, we have done a lot of this by letting others remain in the dark as we took their natural resources and at times decimated their populations.

With the world’s wealth severely out of balance, the self-conscious West wants to find ways to help. It tries sending aid – food and clothing, technology and money – most often with no long-term benefit. With aid efforts coming and going without any noticeable impact, it’s not surprising that people like Dvorak grow weary of yet another way to ram an unasked-for gift down the throats of people who most definitely like food first, and green laptops later.

The world’s resources may be seen as a zero-sum game, and the West has been playing with the developing world as if the game was exactly that. It typically talks about help to the developing world as transfer of wealth in some way, be it food, medicine patents, or even free military help to deal with internal political conflicts. What the West fails to realize is that in order to truly solve the imbalance of wealth we would have to somehow radically re-allocate our resources. This means that the West has to become really, really poor relative to its current situation. If the Gross World Product is about $65,960,000,000,000 (that’s about $66 trillion), and there are about 6.6 billion people in the world, the average per-capita GDP should be about $10,000. That’s four times less than the per-capita GDP in the United States, less than third of the per-capita figure in France, Malaysia would have to shed nearly a third, and even folks in Mexico would have to sacrifice a little bit. I do not think that the world, and especially the West, is ready to accept that kind of a transition. Indeed, even if we wanted to re-balance the world in a less-egalitarian way and, say, created a 4-to-1 disparity between the richer and poorer, we would still have to bring the per-capita figures to $16,000 in the 30 to 40 different Western countries.

Assuming that there will never be political will in the West to voluntarily become poor in order to empower the developing world, the only solution is to think of economic growth for the developing nations as acquiring new abilities rather than simply receiving transfers from the rich parts of the world. This is where projects like the OLPC come in. With a relatively small investment from the West — mainly comprised of technical and organizational know-how required to put together the laptop, its software, and its manufacturers — the West creates a tool that may empower some creation of new wealth, and new prosperity, in the developing world. Education and other stimulants of the information economy have the power to create a set of people who will contribute to the world — and their local society — in ways that would not be possible if we were simply providing expendable food. If a million laptops are distributed, and 700,000 of them crash and burn, and a further 200,000 are stolen, that still leaves a hundred thousand kids who are exposed to the Internet, the information economy, computation, software development, hardware engineering… you name it, in some way or another. That knowledge is not priceless, but it will last a lot longer than temporary insufficiently-sized one-time wealth transfers from the ashamed West.

In 2002, the president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, was speaking to the Oraganization of the Islamic Conference’s committee on Science and Technology. In his speech he pointed out the great difference in educational disparity between the entire Islamic world, and the West (he actually used the example of the entire Islamic world having only 430 universities, and the country of Japan alone having 1000). He urged his colleagues — other heads of state — to invest in higher education as a way of lifting the member nations out of the relative darkness, as he described the situation. He even declared a jihad “against illiteracy, poverty, backwardness and deprivation”.

Mr. Musharraf’s words are encouraging. That a leader of a nation deeply in the midst of poor, developing nations acknowledges at the highest level the need to encourage and develop education as the primary method for getting out of the economic imbalance indicates at least some understanding of these same forces of creating long-term prosperity. The knowledge and information economy stimulation can also occur via other means than building universities: with methods such as the little green laptops, which cost the West fairly little but provide the developing world with a platform to build their future.

Now we just have to hope that Mr. Musharraf and others like him continue to believe in this principle, and begin this investment in their future in earnest.

By the way, I now work at Hulu, and totally loving it. If anyone else is interested in a job, and can stand up to the challenge, I definitely welcome emails or comments to this post.

After almost 6 years of working on the product, I’ve resigned from Kareo. It’s been a great journey through growing as a software developer and improving my architecture skills, spending almost two years as the manager of the development team, and in general seeing a real business grow from its foundation to something real. However, it’s now time to move on.

So to that end I’ve begun looking for a new place to work. (Here’s my resume, by the way). I’m not totally sure where I’ll end up, but I know about a few things that excite me (both on the business front as well as the technological front):

• In general, startup companies with solid business ideas
• Current (thrilling) changes in the .NET world (i.e. LINQ and other C# 3.0 features)
• The Mono Project and the availability of .NET on Linux
• Silverlight and Moonlight, as well as XAML and XUL
• Ubuntu’s success in creating a thrillingly useful Linux desktop
• Solving the many “App 2.0″ challenges of bringing desktop apps towards their web brethren
• Agile teams of smart people

If you know of places that are great in some way, let me know.

For the last few months I’ve been completely addicted to Doctor Who — I bumped into an episode on PBS, and ended up watching all of the new series (all three seasons). I then watched Torchwood (the “adult” spinoff), and have even started watching the entire old series. To that end, I’m keeping a blog, http://hookedonwho.wordpress.com, to chronicle my efforts — and my impressions.

Overall, I’ve got to say a giant Thank You to two entities: 1) Peer to Peer networks, which provided me with the the second and third seasons of the new series which was just not available in the US yet, not to mention Torchwood which is only starting in a few weeks having aired in the UK months ago, and 2) YouTube, whose users diligently upload old serials that are only available on (hard to find) VHS tapes, making it possible to watch almost the entire old series.

It’s really strange to observe BART as compared to the Moscow Metro.

BART seems to be very utilitarian, unfriendly to the visitor. The map is a bit confusing (where are the stations exactly? the lines cover up quite a swath of the city), the lines are confusing (why are there four different lines going in the same direction over the same track in the city?). It’s even less clear which lines the trains are actually from, when they pull up at the platform — there’s an announcement of the final destination, but one has to look at the map to really tell which train you really want. Finally there’s what’s announced in the train itself: basically, nothing. You can kind of hear the name of the station you just pulled up to, and then really quickly an announcement of the destination of the train again. And the cars have no information on the routes you are following — definitely not on the current route, and not even a system map that’s obvious.

Compare with the Moscow Metro. Trains to different destinations almost never arrive at the same platform at stations — you always know where the train is going based on the platform you’re on. Each platform indicates which stations are still in the direction of travel, so that you can calculate how many stops you need to wait till you should shove your way out of the car. Upon arriving at each station, the system announced “Station [name of station]. Transition to station [name of other station] on the [name of line of the other station]“. Before the train leaves from each station, the system announces “Warning, doors are closing; the next station is [next station in direction of travel]“. If you’re on a line for the first time, they’re making it very obvious what’s about to happen. If you’re there every day, it’s annoying but possible to tune out. Each car has a system map next to almost every exit door, and a map of the current line above almost every exit door as well.

In addition to San Francisco, I’ve been to subways in LA, Chicago, NYC, several cities in Russia, several cities in Europe, and in Argentina. I think the BART system really gets low points for newbie usability.

The new daft punk album is quite disappointing. Even “Discovery” wasn’t as good as “Homework” though it had a few really nice tracks. but the new album “Human After All” has completely failed to impress me on first listen.

This is really too bad, too. because I think Daft Punk is (was?) a truly revolutionary group.