…I’m really enjoying jQuery. I’ve never really written JavaScript before, so I very much enjoyed writing this little thing.
Author: stevereads
This is the first time in my career that I’ve used JavaScript extensively, so I’m trying to learn some best practices. A few people have recommended Crockford’s [book: JavaScript: The Good Parts], so I picked it up. While skimming through it looking for something else, I ran into his description (on page 44) of using memoization (essentially, caching) to speed up the computation of certain functions.
The example people always use here — and Crockford is no exception — is the Fibonacci sequence. The shortest way to implement it is recursively. As Crockford points out, the recursive solution doesn’t scale: the number of recursive calls necessary to compute the nth Fibonacci number is proportional to the nth power of the golden ratio. (From what I can see, the constant of proportionality converges very rapidly to about 1.11803. That number must have some special name.) I’ve coded both versions up in Python; the recursive version keeps track of how many function calls it had to make.
So then Crockford’s solution, and the solution written in lots of places ([book: Higher-Order Perl], for instance) is to use memoization: cache the results of fib(n) for smaller n, then use the cached results rather than computing those values anew when you need them later on.
This isn’t really a solution, though, as my friend Seth pointed out to me some months ago. It’s certainly clever, and languages like Perl or JavaScript make it very easy. In Perl, you can automatically memoize any of your functions with the Memoize module: just do
use Memoize;
memoize(‘fib’);
and voilà: all of your calls to `fib()` will be memoized from then on. Pretty cool, really. Manipulating the symbol table is kind of neat.
But this has only temporarily disguised the problem. Let’s look at the time and space requirements for all three of our `fib(n)` implementations:
__Recursive, non-memoized__: exponentially many function calls, hence exponentially many stack frames, hence exponential memory usage. Linear running time.
__Recursive, memoized__: linear memory usage (one cache entry for every [math: i], for [math: i] less than or equal to [math: n]). Linear running time.
__Iterative, non-memoized__: constant memory usage (must keep the [math: n]th, [math: (n-1)]st, and [math: (n-2)]th values of the sequence in memory at all times, but that’s it), linear running time.
By using some language cleverness, you’ve made the problem harder than you need to: memoization increases your memory usage from constant to linear, and does nothing to your running time. By thinking harder about the problem, you can improve both performance aspects and not need any clever language business.
Seth has told me for quite a long time that recursion and higher-order programming (closures and so forth) are interesting but make debugging a lot harder. His contention would probably be that you can often replace a clever recursive solution with a non-clever, easier-to-debug, better-performing one.
That said, at least some higher-order-programming tools make my life easier. In Python, I love list comprehensions:
print [x**2 for x in xrange(1,11) if (x**2 % 2 == 0)]
or the older-school but perhaps more familiar `map()` and `filter()`:
print filter(lambda x : x % 2 == 0, map(lambda x : x**2, xrange(1,11)))
(because I favor readability over concision, in practice I would expand this into several lines: a `map()` line, and a `filter()` line, and so forth)
As I’ve mentioned, I lament the absence of first-class functions in Java. Then again, I’ve seen enough people shoot themselves (and me) in the foot with unreadable Perl or Python, using all the cleverness that the languages provide to them, that I think I’d be okay with a less expressive language that forces programmers to be really boring.
I think owing to busyness at work, limited sleep, lack of exercise and similar things, I’ve been way behind on writing book reviews. Rather than wait until I have the time to handle each of them properly, I’m going to summarize as many as I can right here.
* __Doug Henwood, [book: After the New Economy]__
(With thanks to Henry Farrell for recommending this.) The new economy — everyone blessed with thousands of (as it turns out, worthless) stock options, everyone making money off senseless business ventures, everyone a “web designer” — is over, and we’re back to the old economy. Henwood argues convincingly that the new economy was only really lucrative for the small handful of people on top, and that most of us just continued to get screwed: the American economy got a lot better for the rich and not all that much better for the rest of us. This all avoids being a tirade, because the author combines the prose of the pamphleteer with most of the erudition of a scholar. (“Most of” here is a compliment: most people don’t read scholars, and people should read Henwood.)
* __Ken Auletta, [book: Googled: The End of the World As We Know It]__
I’d say there are three parts to this book, woven all around one another: first, and most sizably, lots of Ken Auletta being a Google fanboy (see his onstage interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt if you want to see a man keeping just on the respectable side of fawning); second, a rather powerful chunk reminding us of just how completely the Internet has changed the world; and third, some nonsense, of the sort that drives engineers nuts, about how Google’s focus on rationalizing markets means that they may fundamentally lack wisdom.
The fanboy part I’ll ignore; I should have expected, in any book about popular technologists, that it would coo over its subject. When Auletta steps back and describes just what the Internet has wrought in only about a decade and a half, on the other hand, it’s astonishing. Craigslist killed newspaper classified ads and thereby a large chunk of newspapers’ revenue. Google is in the process of overthrowing traditional advertising. YouTube is how many of us consume television shows now, and Netflix is how we consume movies. Amazon changes how we buy books. iTunes (Napster, really) turned music digital. Google is moving into the cell-phone industry. Their acquisition of YouTube looked at the time like they were purchasing a known massive copyright-infringement platform with the intent of directly challenging intellectual-property law. And on and on. It’s breathtaking.
Now, part of what makes Google Google in all of this — part of what all of us love watching — is the rationality driving it all. We perceive — and Auletta confirms — that Google approaches any new market, asks “What *should* this market look like?” and immediately moves to drive out irrationalities. Advertising could be done better, so Google is doing it better. Cell-phone software sucks and doesn’t reflect the computer revolution of the 1980s; Google is building Android to fix that. They see a problem and have the resources to fix it, so they fix it.
If you’re from one side of C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures,” and you’re a writer who needs to provoke controversy in a book about Google, you will wag the disciplinary finger at Google here and bemoan their “cold, logical rationality.” It’s a staple of the genre, and I can’t really fault Auletta for it: in writing a book about a tech company, you’re either going to fall into fanboydom or into These Guys Really Should Have Got A Degree In Anthropology So That They Could Understand How Humans Really Are territory; Auletta does both, and does both rather mildly, so I have little to complain about. But in any case, he has to get in his digs: Google’s founders are confused when EPIC objects to algorithmic monitoring of Gmail, according to Auletta because the founders view the world through hyper-rational blinders. This part of the book isn’t really believable, probably because I’m a geek. Humankind has not created very many men who both are prose stylists and who can talk to geeks in their language.
(Little sidebar from an earlier part of my life. I used to work for a startup that was all about openness when it could afford to be: that is, when the venture-capital funding hadn’t yet dried up. Every month, they’d show the company’s engineers the raw numbers and the bottom line. Then there came a point when maybe they didn’t want to share quite as many numbers with us. When pressed by the engineers in the room, this company’s founder explained, not convincingly, that we geeks would just take those numbers, overreact to them, and get scared. So this was for our own good, you see.
Turned out that the numbers were really just bad in an objective sense. By the time the company was acquired — because it had a lot of intellectual property, a lot of smart developers, and a world-famous founder — the acquirer bought it by just paying off its substantial debts.
I’ve taken some lessons from this: 1) that when openness disappears, it’s time to polish off your résumé; 2) that transparency is something that companies keep so long as it’s convenient; and 3) that geeks really do have a great built-in bullshit meter, which entirely derives from that cold, rational, objective viewpoint that Auletta scorns.)
* __E.L. Doctorow, [book: Ragtime]__
The only novel I’ve ever encountered that has a detectable meter. On quite a few pages I read it while snapping my fingers. Check out Ta-Nehisi Coates’s excerpt to see what I mean.
The story centers on one New York family and the intense, exploding world that surrounded them: Harry Houdini escaping from damn near everything; Emma Goldman (whose [book: Living My Life] awaits me on my bookshelf) singing the virtues of anarchy and inviting policemen’s truncheons; obsessive men falling prey to the charms of glamorous film actresses; murders happening on the roof of the original Madison Square Garden; and black men resisting abuse and getting torn to shreds as punishment. In its literary skill at combining many historical personages into one fluid story, it’s like [film: Forrest Gump] for smart people. This is an exciting, captivating, rhythmic book. My only suggestion would be that you read it in one sitting: the excitement is hypnotic, but only if you’ve let yourself settle into the trance that Doctorow has built for you.
([book: Ragtime] confirms a pattern I only started to notice when I got into Philip Roth: books by men very often feature completely unexplainable sex by their male protagonists with beautiful women. The men are often awkward nebbishes, yet they end up with curvy, sexually unslakable women. It never makes any sense, but hey: if I get into the position to write a novel, I’ll probably put my fantasies down on paper too. “Maria Romero’s raven-black locks fell around her as she collapsed breathless on the silk-covered pillow. She’d spent the previous six hours engaged in her favorite activity: ecstatic sexual congress combined with a lecture on Löwenheim-Skolem.” Get ready for it, because nerd porn is coming.)
* __Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, [book: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams]__
There’s a lot to recommend this book, and lot to recommend avoiding it. On the plus side, the authors really are on the right of the battle to make companies enjoyable for their workers. Give all your employees windows, they say; it’s nonsense to claim that this is impossible, and hotel rooms — every last one of which has a window — supply the existence proof. And more: don’t push your employees to push crap out the door; let them know that you respect quality, and they will rise to the challenge. And still more: your teams need to “gel” (DeMarco and Lister may spell it “jell,” but I refuse). To make them gel, they need managers, but they don’t need managers to sit watching their every move. Your employees *want* to create great work; people want to enjoy coming to work every day, and they want to produce something that they’re proud of. Make that kind of job available to them, and the quality product will flow out of them naturally. Hence the quasi-paradoxical line: Quality is free, but you have to pay for it. [book: Peopleware] is loaded with good bits like this.
At the same time, it suffers from some annoyances. The authors seem out to sell their own consultancy, so much of the book feels like hucksterism. Just adopt practices A, B, and C, and you’ll end up with a great company. There’s certainly a selection bias: those companies that enlist DeMarco and Lister’s consulting services probably differ systematically from those that don’t — either in the negative sense that more’s broken at D&L’s clients, or in the positive sense that those clients are the more adaptable ones. D&L insist that they’ve distilled decades of experience into this book, which just makes me crave more evidence that they’ve fomented real, positive change for their clients. Then there’s the inevitable question: if you guys are so good, why haven’t you started a software company?
So expect about half this book to make you pound the desk with enthusiasm. Expect the other half to make you roll your eyes.
* __Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., [book: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering]__
Everyone in software knows this book by now. It’s most famous for Brooks’s Law: “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Brooks presided over a number of massive projects at IBM in the 60s and 70s. He writes from a whole different world: the technical specs for a new operating system would fill 10 or more feet of bookshelf space; contrary to my expectations, Brooks actually seems *happy* about that. You just have to get the right documentation guy to write clear docs.
In some ways, Brooks’s writing sounds really antiquated; it’s written for people putting together massive software projects that take years to complete. All the rage nowadays is “agile”: get something out the door within a few weeks or months, then improve it bit by bit over time. In part this is to control customer expectations: put something concrete and limited before your users; now they have a specific reference point against which they can specify their needs, rather than building a dream world in their minds that you’ll never be able to meet. Brooks’s Law certainly applies as much in this new world as it did in the old. As do Brooks’s other maxims: software still needs a designer to impose architectural harmony on the whole.
I found his “No Silver Bullet” idea the most compelling of all: that no improvement in software technology or process would improve programmer productivity by 10x over the next decade. Brooks held out some hope for object-oriented programming, but I think his hopes — feeble as they were — have been dashed. The promise and the peril in organizations comes from, and has always come from, the people in those organizations. No amount of technology is going to solve that problem. Brooks summarizes one part of this as Conway’s Law: “Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communications structures of these organizations.” That’s still the truest thing I’ve ever read on software-organization design.
For how much it’s discussed, I’m amazed that I still got so much out of Brooks. [book: The Mythical Man-Month] remains a must-own.
* __Siri Hustvedt, [book: What I Loved]__
This is another book that has to be read in few sittings, I think. It’s really an unending series of heartbreaks and frozen daggers to the gut (metaphorically speaking) for the poor narrator. Having read it over many sittings and scattered sessions on the elliptical at the gym, I lost a lot of its rhythm and its beauty. The narrator is a professor at some New York university (possibly NYU, possibly Columbia — I don’t know that the book ever says), his best friend is a mixed-media artist, his best friend’s first wife is a strange, cold woman, and he’s surrounded by a cast of literal misfits. People die suddenly, others get involved in drugs, and the world just keeps dragging him along. His voice has an exhaustion to it, which Hustvedt conveys skillfully: he’s at the end of his life, looking back on one disaster after another.
Obviously I can’t really suggest such a book for what it will do to your spirits, but it’s an engaging read.
* __Diego Gambetta, [book: Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate]__
Fascinating from start to finish. You can think of many reasons offhand why such a book would be endlessly captivating, but Gambetta will continually surprise you with the twists and turns in his subject.
Start with the obvious question: you’re a criminal, and you want to communicate with your fellow-bad guys. How do you do it? That’s intriguing on its own. If you know the other bad guy, you can vouch for him (or think you can — see “Brasco, Donnie”). If you don’t know him, you need to much more carefully apply the vetting that we use in the legit world: find someone you know who knows him, ask around about him, and so forth.
Obviously your big concern as an underworld fellow is the police. They’re constantly trying to listen in on your communications, get fellow bad guys to turn state’s evidence, and plant undercover cops in your midst.
When your organization reaches a certain level of success and infamy — think of the Mafia here — you now have a brand to protect. Rival organizations start claiming your name to strike fear into their enemies’ hearts. To avoid brand dilution, you need to make sure that only those people who are actually in the Mafia say they’re in the Mafia. Trademark law isn’t going to protect you here, so you need to enforce your own brand.
And how do your establish your bona fides as a bad guy? One intensely fascinating thread in [book: Codes to the Underworld] has to do with commitment strategies: imposing some heavy cost on yourself — some cost that absolutely no one outside the Mafia (or whichever group) would ever think of fakin. Henry Farrell, over at Crooked Timber, excerpts one amazing bit on this score:
> Erefaans face is covered in tattoos. Spit on my grave is tattooed across his forehead; I hate you, Mum etched on his left cheek. The tattoos are an expression of loyalty. The men cut the emblems of their allegiance into their skin. The Number [the name of the hierarchical system in Pollsmoor prison] demands not only that you pledge your oath verbally, but that you are marked, indelibly, for life. Facial tattoos are the ultimate abandonment of all hope for a life outside.
Gambetta has spent decades studying the Italian mafia. He’s a brilliant economic naturalist, with story upon story from the world out there. He’s a gripping writer, to boot. [book: Codes of the Underworld] is one of the few works of economics that you’ll be unable to put down. This may be because it’s not recognizable, at first glance, as a work of economics. But its economic cred is pristine; it’s filled with references to the great Thomas Schelling. Highly recommended, both for those who love economics and those who love [film: The Godfather].
(I’d be remiss here if I didn’t mention, by the way, Schelling’s [book: Micromotives and Macrobehavior]. It’s an boundlessly interesting piece of work.)
It speaks to our failings as a society that Harry Reid could be pushed to resign for *saying some words* about Barack Obama, whereas the entire Republican party feels no compulsion to resign for, objectively speaking, consigning many thousands of uninsured poor people to die every year and resisting all attempts to improve the lives of the less fortunate.
It speaks to the Democratic Party’s failings that they don’t say this.
Looking at the chart on Andy Gelman’s post about health-care expenses and outcomes, I wonder if there’s any way to put all of those data points in an order. You want to say that country A is better than country B in its health-care outcomes and expenses, and you want to be able to do that for all countries.
There’s an obvious *partial* ordering for all those countries: A’s health care is better than B’s if A’s health-care outcomes are better than B’s and if A spends less on health care. That is, if A is to the left of and above B, then A is better than B. But we’re unlikely to be so lucky that countries can be put into a line that slopes uniformly down and to the right.
If there were some widely accepted way to balance expenses and outcomes, then we could achieve a total ordering here. Let’s say, for instance, that we defined the “goodness” of a health-care system as 1/3 times its per-capita price, plus 2/3 times its health outcome. Then our two-dimensional chart would collapse into a one-dimensional line, and all countries would naturally be totally ordered. But unless I’m missing something, there’s no objective criterion for combining these two quantities.
What I’m asking, I think, mathematically, is whether there’s any natural total order on ordered pairs. Probably not, right?
__P.S.__: I wonder whether the ratio of quality to price has any claim to objectivity. One would expect, though, that the marginal gain in quality for every marginal dollar spent would decrease with the quantity of dollars. (Diminishing returns.) So if we’re not careful with this ratio, it will tend to reward those countries that spend hardly any money and have mediocre health outcomes. So I wonder whether the ratio of quality to price, limited to the set of countries with quality above a minimum threshold, would be an interesting metric. This does, however, start to get us into “how much money is an additional year of life worth?” territory, which is ethically contentious.
This particular ratio, too, depends on some possibly special features of the response function (i.e., the response of quality to increased cost). In particular, the response function probably has a positive first derivative (every extra dollar buys you *some* increase in quality) and a negative second derivative (…but the amount of extra quality attained for every dollar is decreasing). This is somewhat specialized, but decreasing returns of this sort are fairly common.
__P.P.S.__: Even without this specialization, it seems fair to say that country A’s health index is less than country B’s if they spend the same amount of money but A has lower quality.
Coworker Dan (obviously baiting me, a Mac user, from the other side of the room): “At least it’s not a stupid *Mac*. Those suck.”
Me: “I don’t do religious wars; sorry.”
Dan: “Oh, I do. I love them. And Macs suck.”
Me: “Oh yeah? Vim versus Emacs?”
Dan: “Vim.”
Me: “Open brace on the same line versus open brace on the next line?”
Dan: “Same line.”
Me: “Good. Glad we got that out of the way.”
…They’re more similar than you might think.
First of all, cards on the table: they’re both beautiful films, and I strongly recommend going to both.
What unifies them is that you don’t really go for the plot. You go for the astonishing visuals. In the case of [film: Broken Embraces], you also go because the cinematography has a rhythm that lulls you into a trance-like state.
Years ago, David Thomson — author of the quirky, curmudgeonly, contrarian, authoritative [book: Biographical Dictionary of Film] — said on some NPR show (probably Terry Gross) that it doesn’t even make sense to call a film “melodramatic”. Film is the medium that allows you to dissolve from a shot of a tear running down a woman’s face, says Thomson, into a shot of a dagger. The medium that allows this has long since run past the “melodrama” line. Film is melodramatic *at its heart*.
Pedro Almodóvar has taken this to heart. At one point in [film: Broken Embraces], a single tear runs down the side of a tomato; the tomato and the tear fill up the entire screen. Like all Almodóvar films, the colors are all intensely saturated, and every object in every frame stands starkly out from everything behind it. Perhaps 90% of the shots in [film: Broken Embraces] deserve to be framed and hung on the wall. (This, by the way, is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, with a lot of films. [film: Rear Window] would get first dibs on my wall.)
And then there’s Penélope Cruz. [film: Broken Embraces] is Pedro Almodóvar’s love song sung directly to Cruz. She fills nearly every frame of the movie. She is luxurious. If you’re not into Penélope Cruz … well, first of all, what’s wrong with you? But secondly, you’ll probably find [film: Broken Embraces] a bit much. In many ways it reminds me of portraits I saw in the National Gallery: beautiful women looking coquettishly at the painter, who either had already slept with his subject or dreamt of doing so and who splashed his desire on the canvas.
You don’t watch [film: Broken Embraces] for the story. You watch it because its director exploits the medium for all it’s worth.
You also don’t see [film: Avatar] for the story, though actually there’s more there than I would have guessed. In fact it’s a rather moving, heartbreaking story; I was shocked. It’s also a thinly disguised attack on U.S. military policy in Vietnam (heavily armored military centered around helicopters, destroying the indigenous people within their dense jungle home), or on the U.S.’s massacre of American Indians in the 19th century.
In fact, there are two parts to [film: Avatar]: a live-action part in the human world, and an animated one in the alien civilization’s world. I hope I speak for most of the movie’s viewers when I say that the animated world is much the more compelling. I think James Cameron realizes this, because most of our time is spent in the alien world. It is beautiful, lush, and absorbing: it is its own world, with its own language. [film: Avatar] is the reason you go see movies on the big screen, with surround sound. [film: Broken Embraces] could be viewed with the sound off, but you still need the big screen; you need to get lost in the world of the film, which is something only the theatre can buy you.
The trailer for [film: Broken Embraces] suggested to me that its score would be another haunting Alberto Iglesias construction, like that for [film: Talk To Her] (which is one of my few favorite films). The trailer turned out to be deceptive; I can’t actually recall any part of the soundtrack from the film itself, whereas [film: Talk To Her] featured the immortal “Raquel” and “Cucurrucucu Paloma”, performed by Caetano Veloso.
These are two entirely different films, but I strongly encourage you to see both. They are examples of filmmakers at the top of their games.
I seem to be running into topics of conversation that return to mathematical logic in some form or another a lot lately. E.g., Adam Rosi-Kessel and I got to talking about [book: Gödel, Escher, Bach]-type topics recently, namely the connection — if there is one — between consciousness (whatever that is) and self-reference in formal systems. Then there was this blog post today about programs that can print themselves and other topics.
I need to learn me some mathematical logic already, extending (let’s say) all the way from propositional logic through predicate calculus, up to Gödel’s theorem. Anyone have any recommended readings here?
Those of us who have been reading or watching the various purported “revolutions” in business for a while should have noticed a few patterns:
* Whatever decade we’re in, it’s purported to be entirely different from all decades that preceded it.
* The companies purported to be the revolutionaries all ostensibly treat their employees in novel ways.
* The employees themselves are purported to want more time with their families, want freedom to set their own schedules, etc.
* All companies eventually become authoritarian.
Does everyone remember when Microsoft was the new hotness? That was back in the 80s and 90s, when they were the anti-IBM. Microsoft eventually became — at least in the public eye — everything against which it had previously revolted. I have precisely zero doubt that Google will go the same way. Eventually the exponential-growth phase will end and Google will have to start looking like a traditional company.
I’ve been convinced for a long while that there is nothing new under the sun in how corporate “revolutions” are purported to happen. I am convinced that none of the descriptions of corporations from the start of the computer revolution through the dot-com era to now would have been out of place in a business book from the 1950s. Back then the dichotomy they presented was between “20th-century companies” and “19th-century companies”. Apparently we’re far enough into the 21st century that we can now talk about “21st-century businesses” and how they differ “fundamentally” from “20th-century businesses.” Plus ça change…
So I’ve decided to start a reading project that will approach this from a few angles:
* business-“revolution” books from the 1950s and before. I’ve got a couple Peter Drucker books from the ’60s on their way to me.
* computer/dot-com “revolution” books from the ’80s and ’90s. I’m going to reread [book: Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire], as well as [book: Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date] waiting for me at home in this vein. I remember lapping these books up when I was a wee tot, dreaming that I — who also could not get a date — would one day be a billionaire tech mogul. I read a book about Google recently that is isomorphic to any of the computer-revolution-porn books of my youth. I should reread [book: The Soul of a New Machine] to see whether Tracy Kidder describes early-’80s DEC in the same way.
* [book: False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their Ideas Are Bad for Business Today], recommended by a friend. As the [mag: Publishers Weekly] blurb puts it, “management gurus, by nature idealistic and utopian, are uncomfortable addressing the fundamental discrepancy in American culture between [authoritarian] corporate power and [democratic] political ideals.”
* As I read Drucker and friends (Tom Peters leaps to mind), I’m going to try to work my way backwards to business books of the late 19th century.
Of course, the story wasn’t always that those companies were best which treated their employees like individuals. That may partly be a conceit arising from the notion of the “knowledge worker,” a term coined by Peter Drucker. Knowledge workers are supposed to confront vague, ill-specified problems and translate them into concrete products — unlike the mythical industrial worker, lashed to his machine and stamping out identical product after identical product until the day he dies. I strongly suspect that this is a mischaracterization in two directions. First, I doubt that industrial workers were as close to automata as the story makes them out to be; the Taylorist time-and-motion ideal exists alongside the work-to-rule strike, in which workers demonstrate how poorly a company would actually function if they followed processes to the letter. So I suspect the stereotype understates the role of creativity in “19th-century” industrial companies. At the same time, I suspect that it *overstates* the role of creativity in “21st-century” companies. Yes, projects often start with vague specifications from the customer, but there’s an awful lot of mechanical work to be done between there and the end product. We’re not all knowledge workers, and we’ve not always been automata. In part, I think this story reflects the [foreign: soi-disant] masters of the universe to whom these books are directed: “Maybe all *those* people are automata, but not I; I’m *creative.*”
Even if we *were* all knowledge workers, and had previously all been automata, my strong suspicion is that we’ve been telling this same story over and over again for at least a century. At time T, goes the story, we were automata; but now, at time T+k, for some k, we are all creative, working in “flat hierarchies” (ahh, remember that other fantastic buzzword?). If this story has always been told, then it’s reasonable to suspect that it has never been true.
Finally, there’s another part of the story, which is actually the opposite of the above. People like John Kenneth Galbraith and Alfred Chandler believed that “the market” would eventually give way to a GM- and IBM-shaped economy driven by bureaucracies indistinguishable from a government. I will need to address this strand as well; reality has not been kind to it.
My frustration with unending business sloganeering has finally boiled over. It’s time to read and eviscerate.
__P.S.__: This Bruce Sterling piece (via Cosma Shalizi) seems oddly appropriate — at least for the 21st-century globo-info-twittersphere-mega-virtual economy that all us knowledge workers are now part of.
__P.P.S.__: By the way, everyone in the ’90s was a “web designer.” Now everyone is a “social-media marketing” expert. I think 3/4 of my followers on Twitter are marketing drones whom I’ve never met and will never meet. They’re hoping that I’ll follow them back, I guess. And when everyone has tens of thousands of followers … well, something awesome will surely happen.
Steve Reads 