A Modest Proposal: Seth Godin Should Be...

‘Tis a melancholy experience for anyone who browses through this great medium, to see so much content of low and dubious quality, so much wasted time and energy, so much gaming and spamming and jockeying for attention.

A once powerful conduit of ideas and insight, a meeting place of the world's sharpest minds tackling the world’s greatest challenges, where the towering brands of the yesteryear – the Amazons, Yahoos, and Googles – formerly upheld the classical values of beauty, goodness, and truth, but now find themselves overrun and overburdened by their multitudinous offspring.

It’s a joke... It only takes minutes to start a blog and multiply the web’s cluttered and disorganized surplus of information, dumping out post after post of unnecessary verbiage, overflowing the digital latrines of Silicon Valley, sloshing its way around the world through the grimy gutters of Technorati and Bloglines. Daily – twice, thrice, or even twenty times daily – these self-absorbed opinion mongers and dilettantes thrust ever increasing doses of amateur pseudoknowledge into the publick domain.

And why do they do it? What are their motives? Is it some kind of conspiracy? I suppose these vermin-like strivers believe that some of their ideas and opinions might actually be interesting or useful to the rest of us. I suppose they all see themselves as some kind of exception: "... but my ideas are actually pretty good; if only they could be heard." Most of them probably begin with innocent enough intentions – curiosity perhaps – without considering what kind of slope they’re heading down.

I had to know why. My inquisitive and adventurous impulses soon overcame my more conventional habituations. So I decided to try it. Besides, some of my own ideas and opinions are actually pretty good, and may be quite interesting and useful to others; I just hadn’t had many opportunities to voice them. Now this is it. And the rest of the story – my foray into the Great Conversation – tells itself; it can be read between the lines of my past, present, and future posts.

That seems like a fine way to end, but I feel like I still have a bit more to say on the issue, and since I’ve not much else to do at the moment, let me tell you some more about my personal thoughts and experiences.

Honestly, I haven’t had very much success with the whole blog thing. One might account for this dismal result by my ambivalent attitude: remember my antipathy towards all of the gaming and selling and linkmanship that goes occurs over the web?

Nevertheless, a little feedback wouldn’t hurt. When I googled "blog advice" I discovered what a great plethora of information there is on the subject. That ultimately led me to this post by Seth Godin, who is probably the most overrated blogger on the web, and maybe the most overrated person in the entire world. But he knows a lot about marketing – he’s probably the most insightful and entertaining expert on the subject – especially on how to market a successful blog, so I read the post carefully and took notes.

Many of Godin’s points are very good – "write about blogging," "learn enough to become the expert in your field," "be patient," and "answer your email" – but then there are quite a few obvious contradictions. First he says to write short posts, then he says to write long ones; first he says to be timely and topical, then he says to be timeless; first he says you should appeal to a majority, then he says go for an "obsessed minority"; first he says to "write about a never-ending parade of topics," then he says to "write about only one thing, in ever-deepening detail, so you become definitive."

Godin obviously doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He is the kind of person who makes things even more confusing for the rest of us. Experts should be "one-handed," as a past U.S. president said about his economic advisors: don’t give us answers that say something "on one hand," but "then on the other..." People must never have to do their own thinking. Give us straight answers, with no ambiguity or contradiction, in perfect black and white technicolour.

And the stupidest thing that Godin recommends is to "write nearly libellous things about fellow bloggers, daring them to respond (with links back to you) on their blog." I would never even consider doing such a thing. It's beyond imaginable; it's totally counterintuitive. It makes me wonder about the man’s character; it makes me wonder whether perhaps the world’s most deservedly renowned marketing guru, Seth Godin, is on drugs. I’m just putting that out there.

Something else to consider is a link that Godin provides in his introduction, to some old pamphlet written by a guy named Jonathan Swift back in 1729. It’s called A Modest Proposal, and (I don’t want to go into the details, but) it recommends dealing with the problems of Irish poverty and hunger – not to mention the "melancholy" sight of it all – by more or less boiling and eating the poorest children in the country. I think that would have been a terrible idea. Shame on Jonathan Swift, and shame on Seth Godin for putting a link to it on his blog, which is highly informative and entertaining. Visit sethgodin.typepad.com.

What was he trying to tell us? And more importantly, how could anyone let such unconventional ideas be published in the first place, and then why are they still around, hundreds of years later?

My own personal opinion – and this takes us back to the problem with which I began – is that the World Wide Web is an opportunity to finally suppress all of these different ideas and opinions. It might seem quite the opposite; it might seem that the web empowers everybody to appreciate life from their own personal perspective, so that eventually each person might develop their own philosophy and worldview, creating a lifestory that interacts and mingles 'harmoniously' with the views and stories of everyone else, seeking new challenges, being adventurous, testing conventions and assumptions, and continually looking for ways to learn and grow more effectively.

But I don’t believe this will necessarily happen on its own; only human meddling and striving could give the movement enough force to overcome the opposite tendency – our "conventional habituations," the impulse to conform.

The many connections, opportunities, and challenges provided by the web don’t just have the potential to make us more self-reliant and personally responsible; they also carry the potential to make us more uniform. If we keep going this way, then the challenges I outlined at the top – the irrepressible and uncontrollable flood of information and ideas coming through the web – will be stopped dead.

But this too is something that won’t necessarily happen on its own; this too can only happen through human meddling and striving – to overcome our "inquisitive and adventurous impulses."

If this is something we really want to accomplish, I think we need to recognize that it will be a very long term project, perhaps exceeding our own lifetimes. But look at the great result: the children of the future will live obediently in a world of strict authoritarian control, with no margin for such frivolous things as "creative freedom."

Let us also admit that this will be far too broad a task to be done with any kind of overt or head-on force. Large-scale communism and other authoritarian experiments of the twentieth century have demonstrated this much; we should learn from their mistakes. People won’t conform if they know they are powerless, but if we can somehow trick everybody into mistakenly believing that they have creative freedom...

Here is my modest proposal. We should begin by designing systems that will efficiently determine what are already the most popular ideas, activities, interests, etc. Let’s call this Phase 1.0. The point here is that we’ll have a much better chance of tricking people into conformity if we find out what most of them already like. In this early phase, we also want to begin conditioning people to incorporate these systems into their everyday lives.

When the ‘measurement’ systems of Phase 1.0 have been refined, then we can begin designing the ‘management’ systems of Phase 2.0. The aim of this phase is to direct people’s activities and condition their habits and tastes. This means rewarding people who enjoy and engage in things that are already the most popular, and doing it in a way that makes them feel empowered.

I think the most effective way to do this is to encourage more and more people to become content producers and providers – without necessarily having any knowledge or skills, nor much interest in improving the knowledge and skills they already have. The kind of people we want to make productive should not have any aspirations as to personal growth, or improving the originality or difficulty of their work; they should be mainly concerned with popularity and some of the more trivial rewards which that entails.

There will always be a few aspiring radicals – creative, inquiring, and adventurous types – who will try to question assumptions and challenge conventions, but I think the overwhelmingness of a highly motivated and organized majority might eventually push such people too far out into the periphery to be of much concern.

I’m not really sure what will happen next, but I think with enough momentum, the accomplishments of Phases 1.0 and 2.0 might be enough to carry us towards a perfect authoritarian uniformity, where people can finally live in a world of ordered and ideal ignorance, where children will be freed from the burdens of creative freedom, and even adults will never be compelled to develop their own competence and knowledge.

There is only one thing that might prevent that from happening: people might somehow learn how to use the systems from Phases 1.0 and 2.0, to take advantage of them as creative resources, not for the sake of popularity and immediate reward, but rather to learn even more, even better. If people learn to think and create for themselves, sharing real understanding and actual control, then our deterministic destiny might be foiled.

Fortunately, that’s an even more challenging task, requiring long-term investment, with continual risk-taking and evaluation. It also faces a basic paradox: how can individuals unify their efforts against uniformity?

These are just a few modest suggestions that I'm putting out for discussion. I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary work.

The End.

Stories of Disorderly Discovery

I'm using this week’s post to consider how the "six degrees of separation" principle might apply to ideas, the same way that it applies to our social lives. The blogosphere provides a great demonstration of both aspects of the principle: it’s about networking people and ideas.

But long before we had blogs we had books. Through bibliographies and indexes we can trace the same kinds of networks among authors and ideas – though it’s more fun to find connections by accident. It makes a better story that way.

Some of the most creative thinkers allow themselves moments of disorderly discovery, allowing new influences and sources to, in a sense, ‘find them.’ One of my favourite stories is how the great cellist, Pablo Casals stumbled upon Bach's cello suites in an antique store. Consider this as something like finding an unknown Beatles album at a garage sale -- and that still isn't as big as the discovery Casals made. What Casals did with those pieces effectively made his career and brought greater respect to his instrument.

Friedrich Nietzsche is another great example of a disorderly explorer. He’d never heard of Dostoevsky until he spotted the French translation of Notes from the Underground in a used book store. He liked the title and decided to pick it up. If it hadn’t been for the near-miracle that his weak eyes happened to spot that particular book on a crowded shelf, the great existential philosopher might have never known about the great proto-existential novelist (at least not until much later); Dostoevsky almost immediately became one of Nietzsche’s favourite writers.

As with making social connections, there is a kind of ‘knack’ for experiencing these coincidences, which is simply a reflection of your personal lifestyle or approach. This lifestyle has three primary characteristics: (1) you possess an already well-established network, with which you are familiar, and you cultivate your network so its nodes are diverse and alive, ie. you keep in touch with friends, or you keep reminding yourself of your ideas; (2) you actively put yourself in circumstances where new connections are likely to occur, i.e. by reading, or in the case of social networking, going out; and (3) you actually want to find new connections: you are open, interested, and attentive.

Thanks to the web, we don’t have to leave as much to chance as in the time of Casals and Nietzsche. Now the semantic web, with customized content and ambient findability, are supposed to be taking care of these connections for us, bringing recommendations to us automatically. (I’m going to assume that everybody’s heard this pitch before: Amazon, TiVo, etc...)

But from a creative person’s perspective, there’s no replacement for being actively organized, open, and attentive. Genuine creativity demands an intuitive ability to conceive new relationships, patterns, compositions, rhythms, harmonies, melodies, and syntheses [associations]. And the ability to conceive syntheses is learned and practised by perceiving syntheses in the real world. Our habit of making connections imitates our habit of finding connections. If we don't allow ourselves to discover new relationships, we won't be able to generate them either.

More importantly, as the quantity and diversity of content expands [I mean, on the web, or just in general], the greater chance we have of finding books, music, and movies similar to (and increasingly similar to) what we’ve already read, heard, watched – which is bad, at least from the creative perspective. It creates an ever-smaller range of specialization, an ever-shorter feedback loop. Without continually challenging and expanding our experience and taste, there is a greater danger of 'inbreeding' our influences. The more specialized we become, the less open and attentive we will be to new ideas.

Another problem is our tastes evolve – and perhaps not in a way that an algorithm will be able to predict. Anyone who ever loved, say, the Toronto Blue Jays as a kid, and then received nothing but Blue Jays stuff from relatives as gifts, will understand how difficult it can be to ‘reprogram’ our supposed preferences and tastes.

This is where something like Facebook becomes especially useful. Software can more effectively predict changes in our preferences if it considers our friends’ preferences as well – along with the evolving behaviour and characteristics of similar people we may not even know. It can make a pretty good guess what we might like, because it knows what people like us like. Examples of this include Last.fm and Library Thing.

But I don’t really have the expertise to carry this topic any further. Actually, I hadn't even heard the term ‘information architecture’ until about a year ago. The story of how I stumbled upon it is coincidental enough to be another example of ‘disorderly discovery,’ but it's also an example of orderly discovery, an example of the way the web helps us pinpoint the exact information we need.

I was doing a little recreational research on Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, and I read a comment in a book that claimed he was influenced by Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten. (That an architect could be 'influenced' by an educator is itself is a demonstration of how diverse influences work on creativity). When I googled "Froebel's influence on Wright," one of the first results was an article on Boxes & Arrows, the online journal for information architects. My research on Wright stopped immediately: I'd just stumbled into information architecture as a whole new field of discovery.

But that isn't an especially interesting story. It mainly serves to demonstrate how the web helps us to balance orderly and disorderly discovery, making both more productive. My main worry (which may or may not be important) is that stories about our connections – both between people and between ideas – won’t be as good as the old ones. Consider dating sites: they may help people find their "perfect match," but a story about sorting through carefully selected profiles doesn’t seem to make as great a wedding speech as stories about... I don’t know, what are some stories that you have?

I’m not asking for stories about meeting people; we've been telling those stories since the dawn of civilization. I think there is an important ‘human’ side to ideas, which tends to be ignored in favour of the orderly, refined, finalized forms that they take. If we pay more attention to this aspect of discovery and creativity, and share more of our stories, then we may generate valuable insight into how minds, social systems, and idea systems work -- which helps us to harmonize them -- to work, learn, and live more effectively.

[25Oct07: Since writing this, I made a few more 'disorderly discoveries' about creativity, like Howard Gruber's notion of having a "network of enterprise," and Dean Keith Simonton's notion of "creativity as a stochastic process," or something roughly analogous to the chance variations involved in Darwinian evolution. See my post on the Origins of Creative Genius.]