Chris Anderson on managing tech for abundance
Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity
Perhaps the best example of a glorious embrace of waste is YouTube. I often hear people complain that YouTube is no threat to television because it's "full of crap"--which is, I suppose, true. The problem is that no one agrees on what the crap is. You may be looking for funny cat videos and think my favorite soldering tutorials are of no interest. I want to see funny videogame stunts and couldn't care less about your cooking tutorials. And clips of our own charming family members are of course delightful to us and totally boring to everyone else. Crap is in the eye of the beholder.Even the most popular YouTube clips may totally fail in the standard Hollywood definition of production quality, in that the video is low-resolution and badly lit, the sound quality awful, and the plots nonexistent. But none of that matters, because the most important thing is relevance. We'll always choose a "low-quality" video of something we actually want over a "high-quality" video of something we don't.
A few months ago it was time for my kids to choose how to spend the two hours of "screen time" they're allowed on weekends. I suggested Star Wars and gave them a choice: They could watch any of the six movies in hi-def on a huge projection screen with surround sound audio and popcorn. Or they could go on YouTube and watch stop-motion Lego animations of Star Wars scenes created by 9-year-olds. It was no contest--they raced for the computer.
It turns out that my kids, and many like them, aren't really that interested in Star Wars as created by George Lucas. They're more interested in Star Wars as created by their peers, never mind the shaky cameras and fingers in the frame. When I was growing up, there were many clever products designed to extend the Star Wars franchise to kids, from toys to lunch boxes, but as far as I know nobody thought of stop-motion Lego animation created by children.
(Image: Rodrigo Corral)
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Until society rids itself of the underlying mechanisms that promote scarcity (largely relating to the use of money) will abundance be suppressed. You cant make much money off of abundance and therefore abundance is not well rewarded.
Until society rids itself of the underlying mechanisms that promote scarcity (largely relating to the use of money) will abundance be suppressed. You cant make much money off of abundance and therefore abundance is not well rewarded. Im all for the idea though. Right on! Running rtorrent off of unmetered euro hosting services is the place to be!
I'm not sure I agree with "glorious embrace of waste"
I wouldn't call it waste when I get to listen to the songs I like on youtube. Or seeing valuable interviews with well-known bloggers. And I certainly wouldn't call it waste when a video changes my point of view.
With the coming of youtube I no longer crave for another version of a story being told to me. It's right in front of me. And yes, sometimes it's crappy.
But when a thing like keyboard-cat comes lurking around the corner and amuses me, than that makes my day a little brighter. That's more value to me than a depressing movie shot in HD.
What Youtube needs is a search engine for "that guy" or "something about that stuff I saw once before".
Our motto for the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group (BMUG), 1984-1999, was "We're in the business of giving away information." This took the form of providing technical assistance/advice/education via BBS/phone helpline, and distributing Public Domain/shareware software. It was quite an education, seeing the effects of gift-economy/membership-based economics (i.e., since we were helping people for free, our best investment was in educating them and getting them to help others, not just solving the problem of the moment and getting them to come back for more help) and what scaled (the group rapidly grew to 10,000ish members) and how the margin dropped out of CD-ROM sales with the rise of the internets.
It's just Folk Art, after all.
so why is nobody demanding a free copy of the book? or at least a PDF version. ok i see the audio version, but that is rubbish as it doesn't include the graphics. Anderson should eat his own dog shit and make the book available at least as a free PDF. once he does that i will be more likely to believe in his idea.
The piece is good, but there should be a drinking game for whenever someone describes YouTube as a "business model."
It will be offered free of charge on the internet tomorrow.
Why should we listen to anything he says when YouTube and Facebook are losing such horrific amounts of money on servers for all this free information? Clearly the costs aren't too cheap to meter.
There is a good write up over at the New Yorker that critically evaluates parts of his message, I think it's worth reading -
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all
The Gladwell article in The New Yorker was spot on.
Lost in this discussion seems to be any thought about perceptions of "quality". Just using the example above, Anderson acknowledges the fact (even revels in it) that YouTube Lego Star Wars is poorly made as compared to the movie of the same story.
Quality isn't everything, but it is essentially relevant. Yet is central premise seems to be "The proliferation of low quality junk is great!"
I'm not sure I see that as groundbreaking, really. As just one easy example, the very same mentality led to mass amounts of cheap goods being made and imported from Hong Kong in the 70s. Did that better us as a culture? Do YouTube videos?
I'm by no means waiting to dance on YouTube's grave, but I also don't see it's "value" beyond the obvious meme-ing and diversion functions. In #7 above, in fact, Rob Beschizza sort of sums it up perfectly.
@11, link?
I have to laugh at the notion that YouTube can't compete with TV because the latter is "full of crap" ... as if the former isn't.
@11 The Gladwell article could have been a critique of BLINK or any of his other recent titles.
Facebook and Youtube are walled gardens, walled gardens and centralized services costs more $$$ to the service providers.
Gladwell misses this point, Torrents are a much more efficient model for video dispersion then youtube or hulu combined.
The technology is here, making money out of it is not likely.
The assigning of anthropomorphic characteristics to an abstraction such as information, i.e., that it "wants to be free" really points at the human desire to be free. Of course there is a semantic difference between free, as in no cost , and free as in liberated, but the addition of a single consonant, 'd' to the end of "free" conveys the second meaning more clearly: "information wants to be pried loose from those who are hoarding it". No wonder free market ideologues like Bill Gates are quacking in their boots.
Currently The Market, as it has operated over the last several hundred years, truly is the central arbiter of our lives. Nevertheless, as Thoreau once wrote, "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." One might infer, then, that the less we are obliged to pay for something, the more of our owns lives we are able to reclaim. Free = Freedom.
What broader implications there might be to kids, for example, downloading music that, in a prior age would have cost them a good portion of the wages of a summer job I can't say. And while it is true that transistors are a lot cheaper now than they were 50 years ago, I'm not sure whether this has resulted in a net decrease in human suffering. I'm not sure whether there is any link at all.
Nevertheless, I do have a quixotic hope that "free" might represent the beginning of the reorganization of human energies in a way that will increase the net happiness quotient of society by more fairly and efficiently distributing goods, services, and even things like justice and freedom.
Youtube is a vast wasteland. That sounds like a good business model for me.