How to Create Rituals to Change

This excellent post by Leo Babauta ‘The Art of Creating a Ritual for What Matters Most‘ reminds us that an effective way to change is to create a ritual.

“In this world where technology and consumerism have become our religion, we’ve largely lost something magical: the ability to elevate something into the realm of the sacred.” “We can lift an everyday act into the realm of the divine by turning it into a sacred ritual. What I’ve been trying to practice is the art of turning what matters most in my life into a ritual.”

Leo Babuta goes on suggesting moment and activities that could be converted into rituals, and how to achieve this transformation.

Without attempting to change everything to a ritual, I note that it can be a very useful way to induce change and ensure that there is repetition of a voluntary action where we are present. We may gain at having a few rituals in our lives, with a spiritual element added on!

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How the Former Sedentary Elite Reacts Against the New Nomadic Elite

Following up on our post ‘How the Notion of Country Is Becoming Progressively Obsolete‘, we can observe increasingly how the Industrial Age sedentary elite is reacting against an increasingly powerful nomadic elite.

My observation of the Fourth Revolution is that the revolution in communication capabilities places back the global nomad at the top of social and value hierarchy, after it had been displaced during the Agricultural and Industrial Age which depended a lot on huge local investments. The opposition and struggle between sedentary and nomads is age-old and it just took a new turn.

Many social movements such as the ‘Gilets Jaune’ in France, and more generally the crisis of local communities, can be connected to this major change. In addition to local territories, local elites feel displaced as more value is now captured by global nomads. This leads to strong reactions and struggles, one clear path being protectionism as an illusory protection against this trend. But that obviously can’t be effective if one also wants to benefit from modern connectivity at the same time.

This readjustment of the value chain benefiting nomads will be a major social trend in the next decades and an interesting way to understand what is happening globally. Still I believe the trend can’t be resisted and the future Collaborative Age elite will definitely be global nomads.

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How the American Dream of Social Mobility actually Disappears

In this excellent must-read article ‘The Economist Who Would Fix the American Dream‘, the work of economist Raj Chetty is described. His recent works focuses on equal opportunity. And shows that since a few decades, the possibility of social mobility has dramatically diminished in the US. But not only is he a scholar providing insights from Big Data, he is also taking action.

Raj Chetty’s family story itself is an example of social mobility: his parents had a humble and poor origin in India and they rose in society through academic excellence, then emigrated to the US where Raj was educated. Excelling in academics, he became quickly part of the elite of economists in the USA.

“He has pioneered an approach that uses newly available sources of government data to show how American families fare across generations, revealing striking patterns of upward mobility and stagnation. In one early study, he showed that children born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of earning more than their parents, but for children born four decades later, that chance had fallen to 50 percent, a toss of a coin” And he has shown that to a “surprising degree, people’s financial prospects depend on where they happen to grow up“.

Some of his most interesting research about a town in the US that had a dramatic positive growth showed that “All the data-scientist and business-development-analyst jobs in the thriving banking sector are a boon for out-of-towners and the progeny of the well-to-do, but to grow up poor in Charlotte is largely to remain poor.”: nomads and well-to-do benefit from opportunities, not the local poor.

And he went on further to show that social limits in place many years ago at the time of slavery and segregation continue to influence heavily the level of opportunity for children.

It is probable that the same issue of a harder social mobility is at play in most developed countries, and this also explains the disarray of a new generation that does not believe it will have better opportunities than their parents. At the same time, the work of people like Raj Chetty shows ways to understand and fix those issues.

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How the Failure of Autonomous Cars Shows the Limits of Self-Taught AI

There was a great hope of quickly achieving autonomous driving but it appears that this dream has to be postponed quite a few years. A good summary is exposed in this Quartz article ‘Autonomous vehicles: self-driving car wreck‘

The key point I find is the following. “AV researchers assumed driving enough test miles would lead to self-driving cars, an idea that emerged from an influential 2009 white paper by Google researchers, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data”. It demonstrated how […] sufficient data could solve (most) problems“.

“Driving, it turns out, isn’t one of them. The open road is too complex, and there are too many unexpected dangers to design a self self-driving system from data alone. AV companies are now shifting gears and building “safety cases” borrowed from the aviation and safety industries that identify and solve for possible points of failure. This detour means AVs will arrive later than once thought.“

This extract shows that there are limits to self-taught AI and the associated certification challenges. The future probably lies in a mix between AI and deterministic programming.

This failure has probably more importance than noted, and shows that many hopes of a purely self-taught AI technology to solve complex problems is possibly an illusion. It has not yet stopped the AI tech-bubble, let’s expect some more disappointments in this area!

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How the Notion of Country Is Becoming Progressively Obsolete

As reminded in this excellent post by Gapingvoid, the notion of country is quite recent (the formalization of the concept of nation dating back to the Peace of Westphalia (1648)). It is now under siege, and actions are being taken in real life that show its limits: “The Kingdom of Denmark has just appointed a new Ambassador… not to a country, but to Silicon Valley“.

There is thus an increased recognition that large corporations of the Collaborative Age may have a larger influence on our lives than smaller countries. At the same time the notion of nationalism shows its limits in an open, more connected world (even if there is a temporary reaction against international trade, it remains and will remain a major economic factor).

There is at the same time a pull-back towards one own’s community (smaller entity than the nation-state) and the feeling of belonging to a wider, more international community through our social networks and through supra-state entities such as the European Union. Power is hoarded by large global corporations. At the same time, the emergence of a nomadic elite is substantially changing the perspective of the society influencers towards a more global perspective. The central level of nation-state is progressively being voided, or at least becomes less important.

The nation-state was probably a temporary useful concept suitable to the Industrial Age. It is probably not adapted to the Collaborative Age and new governance levels will have to be implemented – probably a multi-layered governance with a much stronger global level.

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How Relentless Repetition is Essential for Communication

In this interesting post ‘Relentless Repetition – By Steve Clayton Chief Storyteller for Microsoft‘ an interesting account of the use of this technique is given within a large corporation.

People too often believe that developing and formalizing the message is the most important. It is not. Communicating it relentlessly, even if it may sound boring for the person communicating, is an essential discipline.

“When communicating, either in written form or especially verbally, it can become tiring very quickly to repeat yourself. You hear or read yourself saying the same thing over and over and begin to assume that everyone has heard what you have said once you have said it more than ten times.” Yet in this particular example (the vision for Microsoft) it is estimated that the CEO repeated the message probably more than 300 times to get it embedded throughout the organization.

Don’t hesitate to relentlessly repeat the message to get it embedded. It may sound boring but that’s the only way.

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How Brainstorming is Too Often Poorly Applied

This Quartz post on brainstorming reminds us of its history. In particular how the concept was formalized and “popularized in the 1940s by an American advertising executive, Alex Osborn, the “O” in the much lauded advertising agency BBDO“

Finding the right method for creativity and lateral thinking has always been an issue and a challenge. Many methods have been proposed, from using drugs to structured approaches. The Quartz post mentions a few used by famous people: Steve Jobs took walks, Google uses a 3-step approach (“1) Know the user 2) Think 10x 3) Prototype“), Amazon practices silence while studying memos, etc.

Brainstorming is obviously a classic but not always well applied. “People groan because brainstorming is well disseminated but poorly applied“.

I like the post-it version of it in a safe environment with enough time available, and a few iterations to go deeper into the less obvious outputs. What is really important, I find, is to be non judgmental. It is a tough position to have in particular in some cultures like France where ‘critical thinking’ is so much valued. It often requires a lot of effort from the facilitator to maintain such a spirit.

What is your brainstorming routine? How could it be improved?

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How Anonymous Datasets Turn-Out to be Not So Anonymous

This paper (‘anonymous data too easy to identify ‘in French, refering to this scientific paper published in Nature ‘Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models‘) exposes how easy it is to identify people even in the midst of anonymous datasets.

In fact the paper states that any individual can be identified by only 15 demographic attributes, where common marketing databases can have 5,000 attributes per person (“15 demographic attributes would render 99.98% of people in Massachusetts unique“).

Therefore, while “de-identification, the process of anonymizing datasets before sharing them, has been the main paradigm used in research and elsewhere to share data while preserving people’s privacy“, it does not seem to work so well. Several methods are often used to improve anonymity such as for example, only using a subset of the dataset so that it is never possible to be really sure about a correct identification. However the nature paper concludes that “the likelihood of a specific individual to have been correctly re-identified can be estimated with high accuracy even when the anonymized dataset is heavily incomplete.”

Some frightening examples are quoted such as “In 2016, journalists re-identified politicians in an anonymized browsing history dataset of 3 million German citizens, uncovering their medical information and their sexual preferences“.

There is thus still some way to go to have really anonymized databases for data research, which shows again that privacy is now quite virtual! We certainly need to be aware of it.

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How the Concept of Digital Feudalism May be Exaggerated

Following on the previous post ‘How Digital Rights Management Broke Its Promise‘ where we started to mention feudalism, this Quartz piece is quite interesting: ‘We’re living in an era of digital feudalism. Here’s how to take your data and identity back‘.

“Instead of farm produce, today the new asset class is data—created by us, but captured by digital landlords such as social-media companies, search engines, online retailers, governments, and banks. “Surfing the internet” has become “serfing the internet,” with users giving up intimate details of their lives for the internet lordships to aggregate, expropriate, and monetize. We, as the serfs, only get left with a few lousy cabbages.“

The issue is then, data ownership and managing the way it gets shared with others. The post goes on to propose a solution around blockchain to avoid any institution as an intermediary (even government is not deemed safe in the post), so that we really own our data.

The post also calls for “the cultivation of a new core competence: the ability to work with huge anonymized datasets rented from large numbers of people, all handled in a distributed and trust-minimized manner“

I am not as pessimistic as the paper regarding our serfdom. In general I find that although it is true that we have given our data for free to internet giants, the benefits of the Fourth Revolution so far have been positive for many in terms of better access to services and knowledge. Therefore the bargain is not so dire. Contrary to middle-age serfs we can also choose to change our provider.

That some corporations benefit excessively from the situation is also true, but they do reap only a small percentage of the value they have created for all of us. The issue is rather how to regulate and share this new added value from data aggregation. There are many ways to achieve this, including old-fashioned taxes on a basis to be renovated.

All in all, the concept of digital feudalism appears to me a bit exaggerated. I truly believe that our freedom and options have increased with the Fourth Revolution.

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How Digital Rights Management Broke Its Promise

I recommend this piece by Cory Doctorow ‘DRM Broke Its Promise‘. Although fighting against Digital Rights Management (the small programs that impeded content to be shared) has been a battle for Cory Doctorow for a long time, it is an enlightening piece about how what we have thought we had bought may disappear overnight when a service provider decides so.

The most important observation is that in a number of instances, we don’t own things anymore. We buy them from providers but in reality we pay to borrow them for a limited time. As real life examples, “Walmart announced that it was shutting off its DRM ebooks in 2008 (but stopped after a threat from the FTC). It’s not even the first time Microsoft has done this: in 2004, Microsoft created a line of music players tied to its music store that it called (I’m not making this up) “Plays for Sure.” In 2008, it shut the DRM serv­ers down, and the Plays for Sure titles its customers had bought became Never Plays Ever Again titles.”

The amazing part of course is that in spite of digital, the price of stuff has not decreased much in particular when managed by publishers. In France Kindle versions go without discount compared to the digital version, and Cory Doctorow observes the same in the US for textbooks.

The conclusion from Cory Doctorow is a bit dire: “There’s a name for societies where a small elite own property and everyone else rents that prop­erty from them: it’s called feudalism. DRM never delivered a world of flexible consumer choice, but it was never supposed to. Instead, twenty years on, DRM is revealed to be exactly what we feared: an oligarchic gambit to end property ownership for the people, who become tenants in the fields of greedy, confiscatory tech and media companies, whose in­ventiveness is not devoted to marvelous new market propositions, but, rather, to new ways to coerce us into spending more for less.“

I am not as pessimistic, but then of course we need to be wary about those new devices and again, some regulation is surely needed to protect the consumers’ rights.

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How More Redistributive Economic Approaches Are Inevitable

Following the previous post ‘How Neoliberal Economics Could Become Obsolete‘, it is interesting to put things back into perspective a la Piketty and his famous book ‘Capital in the twenty-first century‘.

Piketty shows that capital inequality has dramatically shrunk in the first half of the 20th century, mainly due to the world wars. The capital he mentions there however was mainly the Agricultural Age capital, previously inherited through generations. The Industrial Age capital represented by industrial millionaires such as famously John Rockefeller got less concentrated through taxation and anti-trust regulation that applied after a while; but also through the visionary intuition of capitalists like Henry Ford who did increase the wages of workers to reduce turn-over and make them able to buy his own products..

Are we not currently seeing the same evolution than in the early Industrial Age. Capital gets concentrated with a limited number of capitalists, monopolies develop in new activities. However regulations combined with the pressing need to provide society enough income to sustain consumption will progressively lead to another more stable situation with a stronger middle class?

Hopefully we won’t need a few world wars to accelerate that trend. The good thing is that we can see already some calls for increased regulation and breaking up of data monopolies, the only thing is to see this through.

I am not too pessimistic observing that whenever there is a new value source it seems to be a natural trend that a few innovators benefit from it first, concentrating wealth, but that on the longer term the need to find solvable clients will leads to more redistributive approaches. The speed of change and the resistance of the ones that currently benefit from the system are the unknown.

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How Neoliberal Economics Could Become Obsolete

While the discussion about income inequality becomes mainstream I find those arguments by Nick Hanauer quite refreshing, like for example in his TED talk ‘the dirty secret of capitalism – and a new way forward‘ or also the excellent ‘Beware fellow plutocrats – the pitchforks are coming‘.

His perspective as a ‘plutocrat’ belonging to the 0.1% is that social stability depends on a strong middle class, therefore it is essential to maintain and develop the conditions for this middle class to emerge and strive. One of his initiatives has been to support an increase in minimum salary in Seattle (US federal minimum salary is very low), which did have a positive impact on consumption and social stability.

He promotes new economics, based on market economy but along 5 main rules:

  • Successful economies should be like gardens (and not jungles), tended, and properly regulated
  • Inclusion creates economic growth. Neoliberal approaches have shown their limits. Economy is people
  • the purpose of the corporation should be reviewed. It is far more than enriching shareholders: it is to promote the welfare of all stakeholders
  • Greed is not good. “Being rapacious doesn’t make you a capitalist, it makes you a sociopath“. Economy depends on cooperation
  • Laws of economy are a choice (unlike laws of physics), it is a social construct. Therefore if we want so we can choose to apply a new economical approach.

Nick Hanauer is only a representative of an interesting new trend in economic thinking, calling for a change to the current neoliberal theories. Recently a number of CEOs of large companies have publicly adhered to a similar approach. It will be interesting to see how far those ideas will gain traction.

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