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October 2, 2003
Ozzie on Us on Email
Posted by Clay Shirky
Ray is picking up on the thread of
the brokenated horrorfulment that is email, and advocates migration to more bounded collaborative workspaces:
People who use Groove today, and people who used Notes in its early years (before most enterprises locked down the creation of databases), understand the personally-empowering feeling of doing work in "collaborative workspaces".
What, you might ask, is the big deal? It's actually quite simple: When you have a space (a workspace) online to do your work with others that truly feels more effective and more convenient than eMail, you start relying less and less on eMail for critical work processes. In Groove, for example, once you start experiencing the swarming aspects of work within its workspaces, you're hooked.
Unlike Ray (or Ross, for that matter), I love email. Love it, love it in the way it allows for what Fukuyama called 'spontaneous socialbility', a thing workspaces reduce.
However, I also have the same pit in my stomach about email in 2003 that I did in 1997 about usenet. I loved usenet as well, too literally and too well -- in the early 90's, I poured two years of my life into that sink. But by 1997, I could see that the twin pressures plaguing usenet -- volume and spam -- had no easy solution. That's how I feel now about email, and what makes it worse is that its starting to be how I feel about openess.
Open systems allow for innovation, because you don't need to convince anyone else that something will be a good idea before you try it. Innovation creates value, and value creates incentive and if that were all there was, it would be a virtuous circle, because the incentive would be to create more value.
But incentive is more neutral than that. Incentives also create distortions -- free riders, attempts to protect value by stifling competition, and so on. And distortions threaten openess. This is the process that led to the overgrowth of usenet, and its what's threatening email now.
And the thing that makes me sickest is that I may already have lived to see the high water mark of openess in my lifetime. Email's loss (and in some ways its already happened, so enormous is its current debasement) is both tragic in and of itself, and possibly a warning about the future.
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1. Lawrence Krubner on October 3, 2003 6:12 AM writes...
Host openess to outside genetic influence maximizes variability and adaptive testing thereby leading to greater mutation and a greater liklihood that the correct adaptive path forward will be found. In simple systems, like bacteria or simple technologies like spears, there is little cost to experimentation, only minor penalties as the cost of starting over is low (straighten a spear with fire? Damn, burned the spear, I'll start over. Turns out heat can straighten spears and make them stronger, but stay away from the flame). Advanced lifeforms (cougars) or advanced technology (WTC) pay a higher price for failed experimentation. Complex systems have less scope to experiment with the base systems they are built on top of.
Paraciticism is the enemy of openness. Waves of openness will be followed by waves of paracitic attack, as the openness itself raises the rewards for paracitic tactics. Thus Stalin realized that the correct way to deal with the West in the 20s and 30s was the tactic of "boring from within" - Communist operatives should join the PTA, the Brownies, the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts, the churches, the civic leagues, and, of course, the labor unions. Why fire a bullet to conquer America? It is so wide open it can be conquered from the inside.
Likewise, with Usenet, such an open system rewards paracites who pray on its openness.
Such attacks usually call forth defensive measures that reduce the rewards going to paracitic tactics, causing such attacks to recede, which allows for the next cycle of increasing openness to begin.
Whether you look at biological systems, or cultural systems, or technological systems, the same pattern repeats.
For insights about the value of Open Societies for humans, Karl Popper's work is worth reading.
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