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Vinnie Mirchandani on global technology innovation and impact on how we work, live and play
"If it is so hard to succeed as a contrarian, why do we hear so many stories of successful contrarians? Well celebrated contrarians are usually not the real contrarians."
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The lessons to draw here depends on whether you want credit or influence. If you want credit as an innovator then you should actually be pretty conservative. Become prestigious in a conservative way, until late in your career. Reject non-standard views but not explicitly; just ignore them so your quotes won’t bite you later. When the time is right, look around for ripe once-contrarian ideas and take one. Change the name and vary the methods and topics, grab the first few high profile resources, and trash the original contrarians as weirdos.
If you instead want influence, then go ahead and be contrarian early in your career. You are still well advised to be radical in a conservative way, but know that influence is easier than it seems, even if credit is harder that it seems. Most important, know that the fact that few support your contrarian view says less than it might seem about how reasonable is your view. Most people prefer credit to influence, and credit-seekers are better off rejecting a non-standard view now and grabbing it later, should it succeed.
"I think this helps us understand why universities, some of the most conservative institutions we have, are home to our most celebrated intellectuals. Academic institutions such as universities, academic journals, peer review, etc. seem far from ideal ways to encourage innovative ideas. But they seem like better ways to ensure outsiders that ideas have been safely tamed. The new ideas that academics endorse can be safely quoted and an applied with minimal risk of wild uncontrolled disruption. So when ideas originate among wild untamed academic-outsiders, we prefer to attribute them to the safe academic insiders who tame them.
When we are willing to risk being exposed to wild untamed ideas, we turn less to academics, and more to startup companies, passionate writers, activists, etc. And in our youth, many of us are eager for such exposure, to show that we are no longer children who must stay safely in camp – we are strong and brave enough to venture into the wild."
"Each of these technologies, Wu argued, started out as gloriously creative, anarchic and uncontrolled. But in the end each was "captured" by corporate power, usually aided and abetted by the state. And the process in each case was the same: a charismatic entrepreneur arrived with a better consumer proposition – for example, a unified system and the guarantee of a dial tone in telephony; or a steady flow of good-quality movies created by a vertically integrated studio system in the case of movies – that enabled a corporation or a cartel to attain control of the industry. The big question, Wu asked, is whether this will happen to the net."
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The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. The appeal of this idea is obvious: it’s always nice to be saturated in positive feedback. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work.
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As we address increasingly complex social problems like healthcare, we need to be more creative about solutions that will maximize the addressable market. Obesity alone costs the United States more than $150 billion in lost productivity a year. That's a huge market, and it skews heavily to lower income populations. We need a tool to change behavior across all demographics, and self-tracking products currently aren't doing it. Moreover, the demographics in the United States are rapidly changing: Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare and Silicon Valley diversity advocate, recently pointed out to me that, "By the year 2040, racial minorities will account for the majority of the United States population." The quantified self and accompanying mobile health revolution needs to puncture markets which are usually invited last to the party. If entrepreneurs in this space are serious about making a difference, and about staying relevant to an evolving population, they need to invite these demographics first. To wit, we need to innovate on our innovation.
"The general idea behind the Hydra narrative in a broad sense (not just what Taleb has said/will say in October) is that hydras eat all unknown unknowns (not just Taleb’s famous black swans) for lunch. I have heard at least three different versions of this proposition in the last year. The narrative inspires social system designs that feed on uncertainty rather than being destroyed by it. Geoffrey West’s ideas about superlinearity are the empirical part of an attempt to construct an existence proof showing that such systems are actually possible."
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What has been exceptional about the 2002-2012 decade is not what happened, but our intellectual response to it. The responses go beyond the well-known ones in the timeline above. There appear to be hundreds of people thinking seriously along such lines and taking on significant projects related to such interests.
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Two things are responsible for our exceptional response as a global culture.
The first is simply the slow decline of America’s relative role in global affairs, and the corresponding rise of a chaotic political energy around the globe, at all spatial frequencies from neighborhood block to planet-wide. It feels like there’s nobody in charge. This feels both liberating and scary.
The second is related to Zakaria’s point about information dissemination. The speed and completeness of our knowledge of global affairs has done more than expand our circle of concern. The potential of the Internet to enable new forms of collective action has also convinced us that we can act on those concerns in improved ways.
Unusually visible chaos, plus an authority vacuum, plus a perceived sense of greater control equal a deep restlessness.
It is a popular restlessness, not just elitist hand-wringing. The latter is a permanent feature of world history; it is hard to find a period when the intellectual elites have not been animated by a sense of both crisis and opportunity. This is not true of popular restlessness (which is different from popular unrest).
The popular restlessness has also been amplified by the collapse of traditional publishing. Not only is nobody in charge anymore, there are no official-sounding voices even pretending to be in charge. ”Newspaper of record” sounds almost archaic today.
The restlessness represents a social energy that seeks to do big things and looks for both intellectual and political leadership. It is a social energy that swings wildly between a sense of limitless potential and deep despair, and is hungry for both meaningful perspectives and rallying cries.
In other words, the social energy sloshes violently across the four quadrants, fueling a demand for all four of the emergent narratives.
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"Interchangeability of parts breaks the coupling between scaling and manufacturing capacity by substituting supply-chain limits for manufacturing limits. For a rifle, you can build up a stockpile of spare parts in peace time, and deliver an uninterrupted supply of parts to match the breakdown rate. There is no need to predict which part might break down in order to meaningfully anticipate and prepare. You can also distribute production optimally (close to raw material sources or low-cost talent for instance), since there is no need to locate craftsmen near the point-of-use.
So when interchangeability was finally achieved and had diffused through the economy as standard practice (a process that took about 65 years), demand-management complexity moved to the supply chain, and most problems could be solved by distributing inventories appropriately."
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Both Moore’s Law and Hall’s Law in the speculative form that I have proposed, are exponential trajectories. These trajectories generally emerge when some sort of runaway positive-feedback process is unleashed, through the breaking of some boundary constraint (the term break boundary is due to Marshall McLuhan).
The positive-feedback part is critical (if you know some math, you can guess why: a “doubling” law in a difference/differential equation form has to be at least a first-order process; something like compound interest, if you don’t know what the math terms mean).
Loosely speaking, this implies a technological process that can be applied to itself, improving it. Better machines with interchangeable parts also means better machine tools that are themselves made with interchangeable parts and therefore can run continuously at higher speeds, with low downtime. Computers can be used to design more complex computers. This is not true of all technological processes. Better plastics do not improve your ability to make new plastics, for instance, since they do not play much of a role in their own manufacturing processes.
This is the inner, technological positive-feedback loop (think of an entire technology sector engaging in a sort of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice; a major sign is that the most talented people turn to tool-building: Blanchard and Hall for Hall’s Law, people like the late Dennis Ritchie and Linus Torvalds for Moore’s Law).
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But the technological positive-feedback loop requires an outer financial positive-feedback loop around it to fuel it. You need conditions where the second million is easier to make than the first million.
This means tycoons who spot some vast new opportunity and play land-grabbing games on a massive scale.
Both Hall’s Law and Moore’s Law led to wholesale management and financial innovation by precisely such new tycoons.
For Hall’s Law, the process started with Cornelius Vanderbilt, the hero of A. J. Stiles’ excellent The First Tycoon, who figured out how to tame the strange new beast, the post-East-India-Company corporation and in the process sidelined old money.
It is revealing that Vanderbilt was blooded in business through a major legal battle for steamboat water rights: Gibbons vs. Ogden (1824) that helped define the relationship of corporations to the rest of society. From there, he went from strength to strength, inventing new business and financial thinking along the way. Only in his old age did he finally meet his match: Jay Gould, who would go on to become the archetypal Robber Baron, taking over most of Vanderbilt’s empire from his not-so-talented children.
Vanderbilt was something of a transition figure. He straddled both management and finance, and old and new economies: he was a cross between an old-economy merchant-pirate in the Robert Clive mold (he ran a small war in Nicaragua for instance) and a new-economy corporate tycoon. He transcended the categories that he helped solidify, which helped define the next generation of tycoons.
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"But it turns out that nobody hates a free market more than the capitalist class. It was Adam Smith who observed that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The unwillingness of really existing capitalism to face market competition goes beyond a complacent assumption of the right to cheap labor. It’s at the foundation of Ashwin Parameswaran’s far-reaching account of our current troubles, which he traces to a “system where incumbent corporates do not face competitive pressure to engage in risky exploratory investment.” "
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On this reading, a big part of the historical mission of the Left was to make capitalism as revolutionary in reality as it was in its own ideological self-conception. Marx wrote admiringly of the revolutionary élan of the bourgeoisie, which “cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” But according to Tronti, the capitalist must be dragged kicking and screaming into this revolutionary fervor. Just as Corey Robin argues that right wing political theory borrows from its revolutionary antagonists in its defense of hierarchy, capitalist production adopts radical measures to defend the prerogatives of accumulation, but only in response to working class challenges. Creative destruction is only ignited by the sparks thrown off from class struggle.
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This perspective also casts the figure of the left neoliberal in a different light. The arguments I’ve described as left-neoliberal rely on certain free market tropes: competition, deregulation, efficiency. But taking such tropes seriously is perhaps more subversive than it appears, since actually existing neoliberal capitalism is not consistently based on any of these principles. It is instead, as David Harvey has said, a project of class power. In another of his essays, “Against Kamikaze Capitalism”, Graeber contends that “Whenever there is a choice between the political goal of undercutting social movements—especially, by convincing everyone there is no viable alternative to the capitalist order—and actually running a viable capitalist order, neoliberalism means always choosing the first.” So perhaps it’s not so surprising to see University of Chicago finance professors attempting to save capitalism from the capitalists, while two other mainstream economists express their hope that it will be Occupy Wall Street that ultimately helps save capitalism from itself.
"I can see several reasons for why organization theorists don’t engage with these types of, “futurist” questions. First, theories of organization tend to lag practice. That is, organizational scholars describe and explain the world (in its current or past state), though they don’t often engage in speculative forecasting (about possible future states). Second, many of the organizational sub-fields suited for wide-eyed speculation are in a bit of a lull, or they represent small niches. For example, organization design isn’t a super “hot” area these days (certainly with exceptions) — despite its obvious importance. Institutional and environmental theories of organization have taken hold in many parts, and agentic theories are often seen as overly naive. Environmental and institutional theories of course are valuable, but they delimit and are incremental, and are perhaps just self-fulfilling and thus may not always be practically helpful for thinking about the future.
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"It’s not that groups aren’t effective generators of creativity. As these studies show, innovation tends to be produced via group processes. Knowledge production is increasingly a collective outcome. Rather than assume that people work best alone, we should think more carefully about what kinds of groups are optimally designed for producing creativity. Diverse groups will be more creative than homogeneous groups. Groups that embrace conflict and critical thought will be less susceptible to groupthink than groups that avoid such conflict. Groups made up of members who have little experience with outsiders will be less creative. I agree with Peter that brainstorming is ineffectively taught in many classrooms, but rather than throw out the idea altogether, we should try to teach people how to design groups that are good at generating new ideas."
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