Category: Institutions and Revolutions

How Long Lasting Internet Memory Can Be

In this Wired article ‘I Called Off My Wedding. The Internet Will Never Forget‘ we get reminded how internet can maintain memories of past events (even if they did not really happen at the end). And how this will impact the choices provided today by internet services.

“Of the thousands of memories I have stored on my devices—and in the cloud now—most are cloudless reminders of happier times. But some are painful, and when algorithms surface these images, my sense of time and place becomes warped. It’s been especially pronounced this year, for obvious and overlapping reasons. In order to move forward in a pandemic, most of us were supposed to go almost nowhere. Time became shapeless. And that turned us into sitting ducks for technology.”

Facebook memories, or advertisements for stuff we consumed years ago (I still see on my screens adverts for camper vans in New Zealand where we vacationed years ago…) are reminders that internet does not forget anything. And through AI those memories may emerge in the weirdest ways.

On the opposite, curiously, everything which happened before the advent of social networks (2005-2010 approximatively) does not exist in Internet memory, which creates a substantial gap.

The only exit from this situation is to delete it all, but that may not even be possible. We have to live knowing that the internet has in memory everything we posted and wrote all those years – and that some may come back to haunt us one day.

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How to Deal with the Challenge of Regulating GAFA Algorithm Updates

Valeria Maltoni in her post ‘Social Media Bubbles‘ reminds us that “Social media algorithms determine what you see when you search and scroll the platforms. Not your friends.” Therefore, we at the mercy of an algorithm update. Hence the idea by some governments to regulate those updates.

We all know that Google or Facebook algorithm updates create substantial disruptions in the way search results or screen results are displayed, creating considerable dismay to all those that depend on this natural or paid advertising for their enterprise. It also funds a coterie of search gurus and naturally increases GAFA revenues as people finally end up paying to get better visibility.

The Australian government has been particularly at the forefront of trying to regulate the GAFA. “If the bill passes in one form or another, which seems likely, the digital platforms will have to give the media 14 days’ notice of deliberate algorithm changes that significantly affect their businesses. Even that, some critics argue, is not enough for Big Tech.”

It is interesting to recognize that this shows that GAFA are increasingly seen as a sort of public service with real-life implications on the life of people and companies. Of course this is a bit contradictory with the commercial nature of those companies.

This tension between public service and the nature of the GAFA as commercial enterprises will only increase in the coming years as we become increasingly dependent on their services.

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How We Get Closer to Having a Second Virtual World

In this post ‘Epic Games Raised $1 Billion to Fund Its Vision for Building the Metaverse’ I discovered that some companies are actively moving into creating that virtual second world of Ready Player One fame. Epic Games is one of the largest companies in the field of video games.

“In the context of Epic Games’ announcement, the metaverse will be not just a virtual world, but the virtual world—a digitized version of life where anyone can exist as an avatar or digital human and interact with others. It will be active even when people aren’t logged into it, and would link all previously-existing virtual worlds, like an internet for virtual reality.”

“The technology needed to build the metaverse is already available.” And many companies are heavily investing in virtual reality.

The article comes with a world of caution: like in the book and movie, we may be tempted to escape the real world into the Metaverse, and there will definitely be a challenge to find the right balance between virtual and real life.

Anyway, high quality virtual worlds are coming faster than we realize, and this will be a substantial disruption in our daily life.

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How Education and Learning are Different

Seth Godin in his post ‘The revolution in online learning‘ makes the point that education and learning are quite different. Experiencing makes learning; education being increasingly recognized as a formal process which may not lead to actual learning.

“Education is a model based on scarcity, compliance and accreditation. It trades time, attention and money for a piece of paper that promises value.” On the contrary, “we learn in ways that have little to do with how mass education is structured […] If you know how to walk, write, read, type, have a conversation, perform surgery or cook an egg, it’s probably because you practiced and explored and experienced, not because it was on a test.”

Although higher education as we know it today is clearly an institution of the industrial-age, it still provides some benefits which are more on the social side. This includes an important component of networking and knowing peers, being part of a group of students that have attended the same university in the same year or close.

However increasingly learning is understood to happen outside the formal framework of education, and this probably needs to be better recognized. The experiential part of learning cannot be dismissed, as it is really the foundation of true learning (as much as failure).

I believe education is still there to stay for a while because of its social role, but that actual learning experiences will be increasingly sought and recognized, even highlighted. In any case, be sure to have much learning in addition to education!

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How To Achieve The Right Balance in Law-Making

In those strange days of the Covid pandemics, most governments have introduced many new laws to govern our daily life. And sometimes they seem to have forgotten some age-old advice about effective laws:

“Unnecessary laws weaken necessary laws” (Montesquieu)

“Too soft laws are not followed and too harsh laws are not enforced” (Franklin)

I particularly find the second piece of wisdom particularly applicable in a country like France where lawmakers seems to love producing new laws on everything on a regular basis, which makes thinks difficult to follow. Moreover a lot of those laws don’t get really applied because they are either too soft or too hard.

Lawmaking is a change management exercise (why edict a new law if there is nothing to change?). It is not always performed with the right approach or with the right balance to be really be effective. Reverting to age-old wisdom in the matter would be a good recommendation for lawmakers.

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How Some Companies Now Declare the Conventional Work Week Dead

This article ‘Salesforce declares the 9-to-5 workday dead, will let some employees work remotely from now on‘ sets the scene for some transformation of the work environment in the wake of the Covid crisis (this was as a reaction to a Salesforce post itself ‘Creating a Best Workplace from Anywhere, for Everyone‘).

The idea is that while most employees will still be encouraged to drop by the office 1 to 3 days per week, they will be given far more flexibility in their work hours and conditions than previously. Some will even be allowed to work fully remotely. “An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our Towers; the 9-to-5 workday is dead; and the employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks“

Fully office-based employees are now expected to be only a very small percentage of the workforce and even for them, more flexible workhours may well be the norm.

As I have often said in this blog, crisis do accelerate changes and this is definitely one that is due to happen, in particular as we work increasingly globally through videoconference and across time-zones.

The way we relate to our work, how much time it takes in our day, where and when we work, is due a complete overhaul. The 9 to 5 arrangement of the Industrial Age is now obsolete.

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How to Maintain a Middle Class in a Creative Economy

This excellent HBR article ‘The Creator Economy Needs a Middle Class‘ investigates the possible mechanisms by which a middle class can be maintained in a world where “the winner takes all” according to the rule of the complex systems and the effect of the ‘long tail’.

The interesting historical point made by the article is that the creation and maintenance of the middle class did mostly happen through government intervention in the 20th century. In the Industrial Age it made also sense to compensate adequately those workers who would also be the core consumers of products and services.

In the internet creative age, left to itself, revenue tends to concentrate on less than 1% of the creators. This is what can be observed on most social media creative platforms. This is not sustainable if we want overall revenue to remain significant while we are moving more towards a creative age. What business model can then be put in place to ensure that a larger share of revenue is spread over a larger number of people?

The paper proposes a few solutions that would need to be driven by the platforms themselves (or mandated by law to the platforms):

  1. Focus on content types with lower replay value (like podcasts rather than music)
  2. Serve heterogeneity and empower niches rather than mainstream
  3. Recommend content with an element of randomness to expose others than the winners
  4. Facilitate collaboration and community
  5. Provide capital investment to up-and-coming creators
  6. Decouple creator payout from audience demographic (which is akin to some kind of redistribution)
  7. Allow creators to capitalize on superfans (direct fan payment)
  8. Create passive (or almost passive) income opportunities for creators
  9. Offer some kind of Universal Creative Income
  10. Provide more creator education and learning (as a service)

All in all, this excellent article (which I encourage you to read) reminds us that left to themselves, platforms that disseminate creative work will not all a middle class to emerge, and that active action is required to allow this.

The key point of course is that if this is not in the economic interest of the platform itself, it will need to be mandated externally until everyone understand it is of social importance to maintain a wealthy middle-class.

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How Most Companies Play a Finite Game in an Infinite Game World

In his highly recommended book ‘The Infinite Game‘, Simon Sinek makes the point that whereas we live in a world of infinite games, most companies today play a finite game. And this is not getting better in the last years.

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“Sadly , over the course of the past thirty to forty years, finite – minded leadership has become the modern standard in business. Finite – minded leadership is embraced by Wall Street and taught in business schools. At the same time, the life span of companies appears to be getting shorter and shorter. According to a study by McKinsey, the average life span of an S & P 500 company has dropped over forty years since the 1950s, from an average of sixty – one years to less than eighteen years today.”

It is quite amazing to have such a contradiction between a much more open, infinite game in business and economy with globalisation, and the fact that the financial markets promote finite game behavior. This also explains in a certain way the comparative success of fmily-driven businesses that take a long view on their development.

Let’s hope that with the development of sustainability thoughts, more economic players will start playing infinite games and that this finite-game behavior will change. This is definitely what is needed for the Collaborative Age.

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How Antitrust Regulations Are Not Adapted to the Digital Era

In this instructive post ‘The Antitrust Quagmire‘, Frederic Filloux exposes how current laws and regulations about antitrust may not be adapted to the situation of the GAFA digital players. As a result, the Collaborative Age requires a new approach to the antitrust situation.

His arguments revolve around four topics:

  • internet time is much faster than traditional legal process time which spans over years, giving the opportunity for digital players to render cases obsolete before they are judged,
  • a difficulty to determine exactly the market and competitors of interest, due to the cross-sectional approach of the digital disruption,
  • another difficult in the physical world when it comes to compare e-commerce with traditional commerce, and the fact that e-commerce provides a selling avenue to many small, independent producers that would not be available otherwise,
  • the fact that possible measures and compensations can’t easily be the same that presided in the geographical or product division of Standard Oil or AT&T – in particular because value is in the network effect.

Thus a new antitrust approach is required that is adapted to the digital universe of the Collaborative Age. It is needed to prevent too powerful private players to take decisions that border on national sovereignty. What could it look like? It is a bit unclear at the moment, however a quicker bit-sized approach as promoted by Frederic Filloux may be the answer.

Antitrust approach to digital players in the Collaborative Age should be one the major research areas in business law at the moment, and innovation will be required.

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How Leaders Influence Organisations

In this interesting article ‘Party supporters shift views to match partisan stances‘ a Danish scientific paper is mentioned that studies how the opinion of political party members changed after the leadership of the party changed. They found that opinions could change significantly to match the leader’s.

“Supporters of a political party change their policy views “immediately and substantially” after that party switches its position on an issue, new research suggests, a sign that political elites could be shaping the opinions of the voters whos views they are supposed to represent“

In general, this is aligned with my experience in (business) organisations: I am always amazed how quickly it is shaped by the leader, and this is particularly visible in good or worse when the leader changes. However it was for me less obvious in the case of a looser setting like a political party.

And indeed it is an interesting question in this case as the political party is supposed to represent the views of its members. Or is it really? Is not more a way to align over a number of main positions to seek power? This certainly provides interesting food for thought about the operation of modern democracies.

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How the GameStop Stock Event Ushers a New Era of Collective Resistance

The Gamestock event a few weeks ago where individual investors banding together drove the stock price up to create havoc in hedge funds and institutional investors is an interesting illustration of the power of the collective mobilized by social networks against institutions. This happened in a context of a brand loved by passionate geeks being under attack by finance hedge funds. I believe it is only the start of such situations and regulators in all industries will have to develop guidelines to deal with such collective mobilisations.

It is today very easy if there an online community with similar passions to create a movement, and this movement can have real-life effects. It happens on the political scene (various revolutions, not to mention the infamous US Capitol invasion) and will also increasingly happen on the economical scene (various boycotts, or joint action against certain companies deemed nefarious).

In the case of Gamestop, some wonder if it is a manipulation (i.e. a movement started by some people who had a vested interest to win heaps of money) but that will be hard to prove because it does not fall under the traditional stock manipulation definition (see for example this Forbes article “Reddit And GameStop Lessons: Former SEC Enforcement Chief Explains Stock Manipulation And How To Avoid Trouble“). At most an intent may be proven, but individuals that played along can’t get indicted.

Now that it is obvious how online communities can create substantial change in the way markets and regulated activities happen, regulators should develop strong guidelines about how to deal with such events: early detection, preventive actions and also a raft of corrective actions (mostly of the cool-off type) if effects are visible. At the same time collective action has always been part of political and trade-unions freedom and can’t be banned. It is a thin thread and it is essential to develop the right approaches and methods to deal with those events.

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How the Data-Industrial Complex Analogy Has Limits

Lately Tim Cook the CEO of Apple has been using the term ‘data-industial complex’ such as in this article ‘Tim Cook on Why It’s Time to Fight the “Data-Industrial Complex”‘. This is of course a parallel to the ‘military-industrial complex’ and calls up all sorts of influence and lobbyist games, not necessarily for the greater good.

While Tim Cook is using this term in a way to market Apple’s privacy initiatives, it is useful to comment how relevant this parallel with the ‘military-industrial complex’ really is. Wikipedia defines the latter as “an informal alliance between a nation’s military and the defense industry that supplies it, seen together as a vested interest which influences public policy“.

While the data industry certainly creates much value and not necessarily in the best interest of citizens, the alliance with government is more uncertain in particular in view the recent attempts to try to limit the power of major players and anti-trust cases. However, there is certainly an alliance with some powerful political forces and much lobbying to defend data-centric company positions.

In a way this terminology is quite adequate to name a powerful social and political force, in another the analogy has its limits in particular when it is used by Apple CEO, a company that also greatly benefits from user data. Still it reminds us that data management is indeed an industry, with powerful and well resourced players that may use all possible means to defend their power.

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