Michael H. Goldhaber

Sometimes it might seem knowledge is effectively built into institutions or technological systems. Take airplanes and airports. They were presumably designed so as to help ensure safe and speedy flight or takeoffs and landings. But they also create an ignorant illusion: namely that this is the best or only way that air travel may be arranged.

Current air travel grew up in a direct line from the Wright brothers, with planes fueled by gasoline or jet fuel (closer to kerosene) taking off from airfields with their long runways, holding passengers in greater or lesser degree of comfort, etc.

As airplanes grew in size and then jet planes mostly replaced piston-driven ones , unadorned airfields grew into complex, large airports  — far from central cities so that they could accommodate the lengthy runways required by the jets. Planes were designed with one or two aisles down which passengers would have to move; airport buildings for the most part turned into lengthy concourses with waiting spaces for different flights down long corridors. For quite awhile, governments assigned slots and routes  to different airlines on the basis of strict limitations, but as regulation lessened in homage to free-market ideas, airlines, to limit their own costs began to use “hub-and-spoke“ models that require most passengers to land, change planes and take off again one or more times before reaching their destinations.

More recently, Internet-based reservation systems have allowed economy passengers to choose flights on the basis of costs, which led airlines to try to reduce costs and amenities on board as far as possible so that we can almost envisage economy passengers crowded in to sit on nothing more than a slightly padded floor. As planes grow in size, meanwhile, loading and unloading the passengers becomes a longer and longer process. If you are late to reserve for a flight, you may well end up in a mid-row seat forty or fifty rows back from the single entrance. The aisles are narrow, so as to accommodate the maximum number of seats. That makes for congestion as passengers stow or remove their carry-on baggage. If your seat is way in the back you are stuck there almost an extra hour, all told, boarding and deplaning.

Meanwhile, the environmental effects of jet take-offs and landings contribute ever more to global warming. Whatever the efficiencies for the bottom-line focussed airlines, the inconvenience for the passengers, except those paying very substantial amounts, are increasingly annoying. Add to this the irksome need for added security to prevent a flight from being hijacked, or even used as a suicide weapon as on 9/11.

All this happened without any society-level consideration as to whether this is the best possible system.
So here’s the question. Could a changed system, purposely redesigned pretty much from scratch, substantially increase passenger convenience and safety while also significantly lowering environmental impact? I think so.
2. Redesigned from scratch, using contemporary abilities, flight would be strikingly different. You would take off or land in small “feeder planes” that would be powered into  the air and braked back to earth mostly by methods external to the plane itself — electrical or magnetic, say — usually relying on renewable energy. Since such planes would not be required to carry the huge amounts of fuel needed for take off and landing, they would carry less unnecessary weight, which would further reduce the net energy costs to get and keep them aloft. Such planes could be accelerated mostly in tunnels that could be located right in central cities (or in suburban hubs). The actual terminal need be little larger than an ordinary subway station. The tunnels would angle slightly up, with mouths through which the planes would emerge above ground at high enough speed to take flight take flight , then continuing on their own power.

These feeder planes would be designed so that passengers could board and deplane directly to or from their designated row of seats, instead of waiting in long lines to go through the whole fuselage from front to back. The entire roof and sides might be hinged so as to open like a gull-winged sports car. Passengers would wait for the plane right near where their row would be. The plane arrives on a sort of track — with wings hidden below the platform, say. Passengers step right on, with all their luggage, which they place in central bins. Then they fasten themselves in their seats, doors close, and the plane is off.  Boarding and getting off each might take only about five minutes total.

Where does the feeder plane go? To a hub, usually, much as now, but that hub is not an airport. Instead it’s airborne itself. This inflight hub would be a giant cross between a jumbo jet and a dirigible, permanently high in the sky, partially helium supported, partially solar-powered to require the minimum amount of fuel. The flying hubs would  remain semi-permanently above thirty thousand feet, cruising at about six hundred miles an hour  in broad circular or oval loops over  a large area, up to and including the entire US say, or an ocean. They would be numerous enough that each small feeder plane would have only a short distance to go from takeoff to reach one in moving in its wide circle. (The hubs would move both clockwise and counter clockwise, and the hub your feeder plane would dock with would be the one taking you most towards your destination.) The feeder plane would then dock with the giant hub plane, the passengers would debark, continuing towards their destinations as they wait in the hub until a feeder plane is announced to bring them to their exact goal city.  (Sometimes you would be transferred to a different hub before reaching your final feeder flight, say when you were on the way from California to Europe.)

The different hubs would pass near each city on that particular route every two- to-ten minutes or so, with the feeder  planes’ takeoffs be timed to meet up with them, traveling side by side at pretty much the same speed and then docking.

Is such docking in mid-flight possible? We know that for the past half century or more, military planes have joined together for in flight refueling. Space shuttles dock with the  international space station. I think it’s likely that using computerized sensing and navigation systems, docking firmly enough to allow passengers to debark easily would present little problem. A variety of stabilizing and safety restraints would allow passengers to move around in the flying hubs under most conditions. The hubs could contain a variety of distractions, services and amenities.

Because the giant hubs would be always aloft or at least for long periods — weeks at least — they would not use up the large amounts of fuel ordinary jumbo jets require for frequent take off and landing.

As to safety, there are two main issues: general airworthiness and immunity to hijacking or other forms of sabotage. With various pockets of helium or hydrogen kept somewhat separate from the passenger compartments and away from each other, these large hub flyers would be most difficult to cause to crash, whether by accident or design. They simply would not be projectiles; pilots could be in completely separate areas from passengers. Meanwhile the large size and various compartments of these flying hubs render very tough any sort of hostage taking or  hijacking. Because relatively few of them would be flying, on relatively fixed routes, the chances of their crashing into one another by accident would be quite small. The feeder planes would carry little fuel even when first starting out, and thus would make less of a dangerous weapon than the planes involved in 9/11. Because flights would be short, pilots could be completely segregated from passengers during flight, with no possible way to enter the cockpit.

With these inherent safety features  passenger searching could be lessened, although with more advanced detection equipment, less invasive and annoying forms of scrutiny of each passenger and her belongings would still be possible, without the long lines and near stripping required now.

3. The catch on all this is getting from here to there. Of course the various elements would have to be designed and tested, but the real problem is that this new system would not work well until many feeder planes and a proportionate number of flying hubs were in service. Most cities would have to be served by them, or passengers couldn’t easily use them. Under current market economics, no one would make the needed investments in design, manufacture,  construction and implementation.
With careful planning, though, some intermediate stages might be devised. For instance, feeder planes might take off first from conventional airports, and some of the flying hubs might be able to accept more standard passenger planes. Or perhaps one particular geographic region could first be equipped with the flying hubs, while passengers headed elsewhere would still move by more conventional means. Etc.

This problem of getting from here to there is something that assails us every time any major kind of change is contemplated, since “there” appears to be so different from “here” that a normal steady evolution will apparently never work.  Sometimes of course, evolution works quite fast, and surprisingly.

Take cellphones. They have suddenly been adopted all around the world, though that involves not only people buying or receiving the phones but the cell systems withe their antennas being widely set up. Once we have the cell phones in place, life is considerably different in many ways. When I get into a taxi, these days, the driver always seems to be on the phone. That might be bad; the old days of having a conversation between driver and passenger is over. On the other hand, the driver is no longer as isolated from friends as once was the case. Also, with a cellphone in your pocket, in many circumstances you can take risks that other wise would have seemed too scary. You and others can move around the world and not be in danger of being left alone and lost somewhere.

This model of rapidly institutionalizing new ways of doing things ought to be adaptable, with a little advance planing to a radically altered system of transport, of energy use, of having real democracy, of having adequate medical care for all, and for many other purposes.

To achieve it we need, I think a new model of innovating change. I hope to say more about that in future.

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Crash-free No Longer

In a recent post, I discussed the current problems re sub-prime mortgages and the credit crunch in connection with ignorance in high finance and in general. The complex entities that are investment banks, which were supposedly highly knowledgeable as organizations, actually were quite in the dark, quite ignorant in fact, when it came to the mortgage problems. I argued that someone has to be knowledgeable and interested for a problem to be understood — some specific person, that is. An organization that has no one paying attention can’t function in a knowing way, in other words, and as we move further towards an attention economy, there are additional reasons to stay ignorant of what is not essential to grab an audience at the moment. As I was thinking about those issues, it occurred to me that there seemingly was a clear counter-example, namely the complex organization that is responsible for the fact that there have been no major US airline crashes since 2001.

Now, airline crashes are prevented by a combination of knowledge of what keeps planes airworthy and prevents collisions, and this knowledge as embedded in a mixture of physical  instruments, physical mechanisms and careful adherence to complex inspection and control protocols that make sure the instruments and mechanisms  are in good working order and are used correctly. But this too does not happen without there being dedicated people who pay attention to keeping all these protocols actually functioning. In the piece I was drafting, I was going to write that if no crashes occur over a long enough period, inevitably attention will shift and the the protocols will stop being followed so assiduously, so that eventually further air crashes will  occur, even though we now apparently know extremely well how to prevent them. We will lose that knowledge as active knowledge  over the course of time, because we just won’t think we need to know it if we never have crashes to remind us.

Well, it now turns out that in fact this disintegration had already begun. Luckily enough, there was enough redundancy left  in the inspection system — apparently, in this case Congressional oversight— for someone to notice that the chief federal agency in charge of airline safety had stopped doing its job. In fact, the successful period of no crashes was already the result of past momentum, not current care.  It could be that the alarm caused by the recent revelations will keep someone connected with the system making sure for awhile that it holds together, but for how long? Currently, American Airlines is in financial trouble and passengers are very annoyed because many flights have had to be canceled while forgotten inspections are finally performed. How many times would this have to happen, before passengers would insist that inspections are not really necessary? The inspectors in this way might eventually be forced to be more lax until an actual crash occurs. You cannot have knowledge without attention, but the need for attention also promotes ignorance, as I showed earlier.

Pfffffffft

Meanwhile, what of the financial system? Could it be that the “masters of the universe” who run it are so ignorant of the actual workings of what they do that a much more complete meltdown than has already taken place is possible? (After I drafted this very post, I learned today that George Soros has just come out with a book proclaiming the breaking of a super-bubble in the money economy.)  Why the possible meltdown? What would the ramifications be? As with the Enron collapse, and as with the recent sub prime debacle, the people running things seemed awfully smart and knowledgeable until it turned out they had vastly overestimated their own knowledge, or at least convinced others to overestimate it. That can happen, perhaps, to the whole current financial system. What has happened is that just as the Internet in the broadest sense permits all sorts of new social inventions with unpredictable effects, such as Facebook, it also permits a wide variety of new financial inventions,  which in reality do nothing but allow money to be moved around in new ways, and perhaps merely create new, purely numerical wealth, wealth that can certainly be turned into goods, but which stems really from nothing other than mathematical legerdemain with various complex financial instruments.

If we look at the apparent growth of the US economy since 2001, it is quite possible that most of the so-called additions to  GDP were actually only growth in the “products” of financial firms, as measured by their overall earnings. In this case no real extra anything — except numbers — was actually created. Furthermore,  these numbers only have value to the extent that the “instruments” behind them remain sufficiently credible to enough players. In other words, financial performance can be viewed, increasingly, as indeed a performance, a form of theater, which works only while there is a sufficient “suspension of disbelief” while the audience is transfixed and mesmerized. If and when that stops, the air can just go  “pfffft” out of the balloon, in much the same way as it did for Enron.

Nowhere Safe to Park?

The new rich, the old rich, plus things like university endowments and standard pension funds —  and other forms of insurance for that matter, all have to “park” their monetary wealth somewhere. Mattresses are decidedly out of fashion, since they don’t keep up with inflation. Of late, the parking lot of choice has been more and more in these new financial forms — hedge funds, buyout firms, or other exotic schemes. The alternative is mostly more traditional forms such as corporate stocks, mutual funds, bonds or even government-backed bonds. None of these is actually secure, at present. Nor, by the way, are even the more old fashioned holdings such as gold. (Gold retains its worth only if the industrial world swallows it fast enough, which requires a high level of industrial production.) Because finance is now such a large part of everything, all these supposedly reliable old-fashioned forms of wealth can fall if the financial sector falls far enough. Hedge funds and buyout firms very much need leverage in the form of extensive borrowing, but if there is no assurance suddenly that they can pay back, the value of these funds can quickly disappear. But if that happens, ordinary stocks, also based on confidence in future performance are much more vulnerable now than in the past. Very few firms simply are made up of solid assets such as factories that have fairly definite break-up values. Instead most firms today rely on the promise of innovation yet to come to retain their current value. (For all stocks, there is a ratio of price of the stock to current earnings that is often of the order of 20 to 1. That means that for an average  investor just to break even, the stock will have to pay out the same earnings for twenty years, or alternatively the profits will have to grow over a shorter time frame. In today’s world, twenty years is a very long time horizon. Meanwhile while shorter-term growth is always risky to assume, and especially so in a downturn of any duration.)

Also, current stock valuations are very tied into the workings of the financial sector these days. For instance, bankers are constantly flying first class around the world. If banks slow down, so do airlines, and numerous other related industries. Because we no longer have a (money-based)  economy that primarily produces things, and still less, fairly necessary things, a large part of it can become completely unstuck quite fast.
Since the US government, at least, has been run on substantial borrowing even during a supposed growth period, while facing increased payouts for social services such as medicare and social security even if it does nothing. So its indebtedness may become too great to pay off. There goes the reliability seemingly safe investments such as treasury bonds. Pension funds, increasingly necessary for an aging population, since they have to rely on funds parked somewhere, yielding some  not-too-small rate of return, may not be able to hold up either. That would mean a disastrous meltdown that would strorngly affect amlost everyone in the US.

Glooom, Doom,and the Bloom of the Real Attention Economy?  Away from Money?

Now, maybe these visions of “doom and gloom” are unwarranted. Quite possibly  the whole system will easily stave off collapse. For instance, it could be that the tremendous flexibility of Internet connection will allow credit crunches to be overcome with new kinds of assurances and money routed in new ways. It is possible that alternative currencies, informally constructed, will be able to replace the dollar. And so on. It is even more possible that the collapse will not so deeply effect the euro or the renminbi, etc. But given the still pivotal role of the US, it is also possible that the doom and gloom would spread across the globe. If so, we will suddenly begin to find ourselves in a new world. It could be that what emerges from the mess will be a much fuller Attention Economy with money playing a much less key role, and eventually virtually no role at all. That , while definitely no utopia, may be the best that one could reasonably hope for.

Here, I am of course speaking of the real Attention Economy, or Attention System, Epoch, Society or World which I have been discussing in the is blog and elsewhere for years   —  and not the advertising-based  much less important system that other people who use this term have come to mean. This real Attention Economy already is quite important, as I have tried to show earlier, when I pointed out that attention “transactions” are already far more common and influential for most people in the advanced countries than are money transactions. The standard economics profession as well as most people who focus on business have remained utterly blind to this fact. But the real Attention Economy, based of course on the scarcity and desirability —for persons— of the attention that can only come from other human beings, is entirely differently structured and organized than is the monetary, industrial-based or capitalist economy. That is why this new system  ultimately does not run on money in any form.

In the next installment, I will explain in detail why the (real) Attention Economy probably can only grow at the expense of the standard forms of the money-industrial system, and why both probably cannot co-exist for too long. This is another reason we may be headed there now. If it is coming, thought must go now into how to mitigate its bad features, while still benefitting from its good ones.

The high excitement among Democrats in the US about the Clinton-Obama race; the expectations on all sides of change in Cuba following Fidel Castro’s retirement; the sudden resignation of Governor Spitzer in New York and the change in the political climate there that is expected to follow. What do these have in common?

I want to point to the fact that the identity of the one, single, top leader still seems to have enormous influence on the direction of almost every political or other unit. (The others include corporations, gangs, universities, symphony orchestras…..) I suspect that Castro, for instance, stayed in power for nearly half a century precisely because he realized that his thoughts and will were necessary to keep Cuba on the course he wanted for it. His assumption —conscious or not — was, I think, that no set of guiding principles nor a common understanding among a large, intergenerational group of like-minded people could be trusted to keep Cuba on his preferred course. He was certainly being egocentric, but I think he was right about this point. At every level — from national to corporate etc. — when the top leader changes, things really do move noticeably in a new direction. It is just as true for capitalist democracies as it is for would-be Communist dictatorships or fascist ones either, or even monarchies.

NOT JUST “LARGER FORCES”
In a way, all this is a bit surprising, considering the common contemporary belief that larger forces — such as “the market” or more complex economic, cultural or social evolution or “organizational learning” pretty much determine the direction of history. I share such beliefs to a considerable extent, and yet it has long been evident to me that the person “in charge” plays an outsize role. What I want to explore here is why this should be.

P2P
(I have another reason for thinking about leadership, which I will amplify in a later post: recent discussions with Michel Bauwens. He has formulated some important ideas about p2p (peer-to-peer) communities and their possibly huge role in a better future. On its face, p2p communities suggest leaderless ones. How well can such groupings really work? What are their benefits and what are their limitations? About that, more later, but back now to the question of why nations, etc., almost always seem to have single, dominant leaders. )

FRANCISCO FRANCO THE FALANGIST

Let me offer another example: Spain around the time (1975) when the fascist dictator Franco, the Caudillo, was dying. He spent the last year or so of his near 40-year reign very ill, basically on his deathbed. By then he was much hated; the Spanish people longed for change. But he had to die, not just get weak, for that to happen. No one at all close to power dared go against him until he literally stopped breathing. Once that happened, his anointed successor, Prince Juan Carlos, who then became King according to Franco’s wishes, immediately set about becoming not an absolute but a constitutional monarch, which was not in accord with Franco’s plans. The country began a wave of liberalization which has not ended. Franco’s old deputies, though at first still highly placed, could not prevent this. Now the current government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero plans to uproot the last monuments to the Caudillo. That was obviously not Franco’s plan.

In functioning electoral democracies, change comes more frequently. Usually each head of state (or head of government — the correct title when there is a figurehead monarch or President who does not “govern”) is in office for under a decade, and usually has to face the voters after four or five years, if not sooner. Even then, the leader, as long as he or she stays in power, does determine certain essential aspects of the country’s overall direction. Within limits, to be sure. No leader can fully affect what the rest of the world does. No leader can suddenly rid a system or state of corruption or turn apathetic civil servants into strongly dedicated ones. No leader completely controls economic conditions nor technical or artistic creativity. No leader can control the weather. In a democracy, too the leader is restrained somewhat by the courts and the legislature. And so on.

LEADERSHIP WITH AS MANY HOLES AS A…
But still, how does a leader lead? Why do we give one person that immense power? What would happen if we didn’t rely on such leaders? We could do without them, it seems. Switzerland does. It essentially has no head of state or government and hasn’t for centuries.

You might argue that Switzerland is a pretty conservative place, quite afraid of change. It didn’t fully grant women the vote until 1990; it only guarantees primary education to its children. When Hitler ruled Germany, Switzerland to its shame locked out Jewish refugees and even asked Hitler to put a J on Jew’s passports to make that lockout easier. It’s history of creativity is not very impressive, with few great artists in any field, for example. But three different language groups and several Christian denominations, along with a smattering of other religions seem to live in fair harmony. It has avoided external war for almost two centuries now, and internal war since 1848. Its (money) economy ranks very high in the world, with per capita GDP well ahead of any large countries such as the US. It now guarantees a very wide range of human rights. And, the trains run on time, without the necessity of any Mussolini.

The world possibly would work better if divided into a thousand leaderless Switzerlands. So why do we have leaders? Why, when we do have them; are they more than figureheads? Why can some of them, such as Franco, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, or George W. Bush retain so much influence and the power to shape destinies even when they have become very unpopular? How can they retain such power, at times, even when barely alive, as Franco did? How might the nature of such leadership evolve, and where is it headed in the attention era?

SWEET SOUNDS
Consider a rather different example of leadership — the symphony conductor. The musicians in the orchestra quite often have the musical score right in front of them, so why can’t they just read it? (Even that begs a question: How would they decide what to play without a director? But surely they could devise a means of choosing, say by having the members of the orchestra take turns choosing the pieces for each concert. )

As everyone who likes symphonic music knows, the conductor plays a vital role because there are many subtle decisions to be made about exact tempos, pauses, and how loud or soft each group of players should be playing. The written score doesn’t exactly specify these things, and someone must judge them. Not merely someone, in fact. If the performance is to have overall coherence, that is if it is to be possible for the audience to align their minds [a concept I explain here] to the music, they can only each do this if the music itself, as played, is done according to the mind of one person. No two conductors will make exactly the same decisions, just as no two musicians would. Any good conductor will develop an set of underlying ideas and feeling about each piece to be performed, and the audience can then align with those. But since each audience member has one mind, if say every bar of music were conducted by a different person, what the hearer would hear would be very hard to pay attention to. We as attention payers can align with a single mind, but much less well with a multitude of minds each contributing at the same time. Each conductor of a particular orchestra will develop a different following among the public, a different group of people who can easily align with her and want to do so. (Also, the conductor generally decides what pieces will be played as well as how. Audiences identify with a conductor’s taste more easily than with all the varying tastes of the orchestra members, and intensify their fandom accordingly.)

That’s why we have conductors. Full-size orchestras who try to work without a conductor tend to lose their audiences. A symphony orchestra has tried, at least once, the Symphony of the Air, which originally had been the NBC Symphony under the great Arturo Toscanini, after he died. Smaller ensembles of various kinds, incidentally, can work without conductors, provided they have similar sensibilities and work together so long that they pretty much are all aligned with each other, as say string quartets. In jazz, a small group of players can satisfactorily take turns improvising. Even then they will not improvise at random but on the basis of a previously existing piece of music — usually by one single individual composer — which appeals to all of them. And in fact, even for very small jazz groups, there is often one who is thought of as the leader.

NOT QUITE SUCH SWEET MUSIC
What does this have to do with a nation, a city, or even a corporation? After all, none of these have to be as coordinated as an orchestra is in performing, where the conductor matters from second to second. No nation is engaged primarily in unified expression; none is seeking to satisfy a common audience. Still, I think, the key to the need for leadership is given by the extent nations or their governments or companies do resemble orchestras. Do they have to (or want to) present a common face to the world? Do they have to (or want to) react decisively and coherently to events, internal or external? Do the citizens need or want at times to be pulled together in subtle ways?

The world is full of situations in which it at least seems decisions of all sorts must be made. The Swiss mostly evade this by carefully following past precedent, avoiding getting involved in external treaties, and at times, following what seem to be good advances in other countries. The Swiss may engage in a little yodeling, but as a country they do not much play to an an audience who would have to align to their expressions. If they did that they might need a leader who had a somewhat coherent policy, even if not the full-fledged control over the public that a symphony conductor has over his musicians.

So if —a big if — a country wants to engage in the world in a more intense way it does need a single mind behind it. This can evince itself in wars, sabre-rattling, colonizing, foreign aid initiatives, moves for peace, for disarmament, offers of new kinds of trade or trade treaties, proposed new immigration rules, making changes in the currency, new doctrines, seeking to be the venue for some international event, pontificating, etc. But all of these with a somewhat unified mindset. We might say that the country only exists as such to the extent that there is or can be though to be such a single mind. Otherwise it is just a random group of communities who happen to live within certain geographical boundaries. In today’s media-saturated world, a president or head of state who moves before the cameras gets attention, and the country as a whole then is more or less captive to that person’s actions and expressions, as for instance Bush, Chavez of Venezuela, Sarkozy of France, and much the same for most of the over two hundred countries in the world.

The single leader can also work internally, shaping the citizens’ sense of how they all fit together or should. The larger the country, it seems, the more a single leader, even an unpopular one, is necessary for this sense of coherence or unity. A majority may want to “throw the rascal out” but usually can only conceive of this in terms of putting someone else in the single office, someone with a distinctly idifferent personality and different promise.

Let me add that Switzerland is not the only example outside music of operating without one dominant leader. So did Revolutionary France under the Directorate, which lasted for just few years until taken over by Napoleon. Medium size and small law firms and very small collectives do not have single, dominant leaders, and possibly a few larger such partnerships exist. And of course, there are any number of more amorphous communities without definite leaders. But it evidently isn’t so easy unless aims and desires change.

Many and many a year ago….
In the distant past, even a few thousand years ago, kingdoms such as ancient Egypt were held together by images placed all over the country reminding people of the leader. Where there was writing, proclamations by this leader were sent throughout the kingdom and read aloud, or at times posted in public places. By the time of the Roman Empire, the emperor’s likeness was sculpted very realistically and placed prominently throughout the Empire; coins with similar images were minted and circulated. Similar kinds of things happened in other empires throughout the world. In the Middle Ages, in Europe, monarchs tended to move through their kingdoms demonstrating their existence even to the illiterate.

AND THEN…. TV AND THE WEB
Today, of course, video images of the leader are seen everywhere , with new ones circulated more than daily. Candidates for the highest office become highly visible as well. As we see in the current race for the US Democratic Presidential nomination, very large groups of what we might as well call fans eagerly cohere to each side; the candidates have achieved even more than rock-star status. With the web, the fans can encourage each other to align more closely with their preferred candidate.

We don’t for the most part vote for polices, but for personality. In terms of specific policies, neither candidate is too precise about what she or he will do, neither is the Republican opponent. Yet we fully expect that things will be different depending on who wins. And, it would seem, the more difference a large number of us expect, the more difference there can be.

As with any star to whom we pay attention, we somewhat align our minds with those of the leader, whomever it is. In so doing we become different people than we were under the previous leader, though of course not all of us align to the same extent, and some tend to align against rather than with this leader.

A BRIEF ASIDE
“Aligning against” is a two -step process. If someone says to you “2 + 2 = 5” to be paying attention you have to form this thought in your own mind, but then you instantly compare it to what you are sure of, namely that 2 +2 = 4, and so reject the thought. If the same person keeps saying things which you find yourself rejecting, you may well begin more or less automatically to reject anything connected to that person even if it might otherwise seem innocuous in itself. You then view whatever that person says or does as false, duplicitous, hateful, stupid or some combination of these. Hitler was responsible for his hateful anti-Semitic policies; he also was the instigator of the original Volkswagen. In rejection of Hitler, many Jews would never buy this car.

The more a leader is “in your face” as is made possible by today’s media, the more sharply we must react to avoid aligning our thoughts and actions with his or hers. That helps lead to today’s political polarization. Such polarization becomes even stronger at a distance. “Inside the Beltway,” a variety of politicians engage in day to day business with one another, more or less as equals, not as stars. From a distance, attention is focused on just a few of them, and humanizing contacts are not present, so any antagonism will build and build. Today this is aided by the Internet, as I suggested already. Fans of one politician or another can support their champion and malign the other and his or her fans. Then, even those on the inside find they must play to that antagonism to keep the allegiance of their followers. If we do become fans of someone, or loyalty becomes more and more intense, unless we feel somehow betrayed.

KEEPING THE FOCUS
However, to keep the focus and the loyalty, the political leader, or any other kind of leader, must keep doing or saying new things to hold active attention. Someone like the President of the United States has a huge press corps following him (so far, it’s a him) around; this press corps get attention when the President does, so they try to make even his most insignificant statement seem important. But this overemphasis on trivia can go only so far. The President to maintain leadership, must exercise it by more vigorous assertions and actions. The same is true for leaders of other countries, and for all other kinds of entities. At the same time, it is increasingly true that a leader must demonstrate a very distinct and outsize personality, a personality always on view as this leader constantly seeks and achieves the limelight with new actions, statements and policies.

As long as this leader is not in a coma and shows any signs of life, or, in a democracy. as long as the term of office has not ended, the leader retains a built in audience for any whisper of a remark. People who have been paying attention, will align to who the leader was at his or her height, rather than to the present decrepit reality, or even the supposed lame duck status.

THE PRIMROSE PATH TO….
All this assertion and activity can be dangerous. Is it worth maintaining coherence as a nation if that results in a collection of more and more assertive personalities on the world stage? On the other hand, without a single leader, how can a nation (or company or university or museum or even web community, or whatever) make substantive changes if necessary? How can new creative solutions to the world’s problems come into existence without single minds, single leaders somehow propelling them? Or would we be better off with less creativity, less leadership, less change? These are the questions that the world is increasingly, if unknowingly, forced to confront.

If we could do without leaders, prospective leaders cannot do without our wanting them. So they have a growing vested interest in exaggerating the kinds of situations and problems that would require a leader’s response. What would it take for us to just stop paying attention? For that to be effective, would almost everyone have to stop? Could we do that without strong leadership? Or could we perhaps build enough peer-to-peer communities that we don’t have time to listen or obey the would-be leaders’ clarion calls?

Lately, much has been written about the “dilemma” of too much e-mail. See Zeldes et al., or Krill for instance) Some write on this from the perspective of firms. They suggest that “knowledge workers” are spending too much time on e-mail, time when they could be being “productive.” The writers claim that we must deal with the “problem” of “information overload” or “infomania” as if this were something new, and as if there were a possible global “solution” to this “problem.”

I suppose the authors of these arguments would add instant and text messaging, messages over social networks such as Facebook or in Second Life, various forms of teleconferencing, and so on. I’ll just call all this e-mail for short. Also, I’m not concerned with spam here, but with e-mail that somehow seems worthwhile to the recipients. This supposed e-mail problem cannot be looked at in the ahistorical way the writers suppose, but must be seen in the context of changing economic systems. It is that context I will focus on here.

The “Prudent King” Beats Us to It
Information overload as a phenomenon is of course nothing new; the term was in use long before e-mails were ubiquitous, starting easily 30 years ago. Well over 500 years ago, although no one had heard of the term “information overload,” King Philip II of Spain along with many of his aides, were inundated with handwritten reports, requests, queries, etc. They kept this “prudent king” busy from morning to night for over 40 years. King Philip thus mostly held together a huge empire, but what made him the ruler was precisely that numerous people sought attention from him and in so doing, necessarily gave him attention in return.

Today, one of the main reasons people read their e-mail is undoubtedly because it gives them the sense of being at the center of attention — in effect the centers of of their own little personal empires. After all, each e-mail received demonstrates that someone thinks they are important enough to try to get their attention, at least apparently by paying them attention in return. E-mail appears to be addressed personally to the recipient, and often is. The very fact you have received it means someone seems to have been thinking of you. If you fail to respond, you run the risk of falling off the radar. If you make it impossible for anyone to send you e-mail, you lose a sense of your own importance in the outer world.

A Fan’s Notes

Or think of e-mail as like “fan mail.” A star can measure her worth by the amount of this she gets. She may choose to reply formulaically, but if she can stand the effort of replying —at least minimally — in person, she is likely to tighten her connection with fans. In terms of e-mails, each person becomes a minor “star,” who who would suffer a small defeat were she to disappoint one of her fans. Equally bad is to disappoint part of her apparent audience collectively, say the members of some formal or informal listserv [by an informal listeserv, I just mean a group of people who are cc’d together quite often by any one of them] or a social networks such as a grouping within Facebook. To ignore what such groups send out or never to take active part in their interchanges risks losing one’s role as a focus in that community.

This talk of stars and fans might hints that something new is happening. What? One major difference between King Philip’s day and now is simply technological. In the sixteenth century, sending messages over many miles was an arduous process from beginning to end — arduous in the hand writing, sealing, finding a messenger to to take it in general the direction of the king, and then often waiting many months for the message to reach the King’s palace, where it might languish for more months before being answered.

Technology has certainly advanced since then, and even since the more widespread notice of information overload thirty odd years ago. Before personal computers were widespread, sending a written or typed message was much more complex than e-mail is, and often required some sort of use of a stenographer, secretary, personal assistant or typing pool to be at all efficient. This meant that relatively few were in the position of originating letters. With e-mail has come a great democratization, but that just means far more e-mails can be sent and therefore received.

When you receive an e-mail, furthermore, it is extremely easy to open. Neither you nor anyone else has to pick up, sort, and distribute the mail. No one has to open each envelope individually or unfold and mark the letter within as received. It arrives with an automatic date and time stamp. All this encourages the flow of ever more e-mail.

Beyond the Obvious

However, change at a deeper level is also taking place. The number of people who now work or spend time in settings where they easily can send and receive e-mails has grown fantastically. Compared to King Philip’s era or even to thirty years ago, a far higher percentage of the world’s people do not have to engage in actual physical labor, such as farming (or tending flocks) rowing the galleys, carrying things and people on their own shoulders or backs or in their saddle bags, making things, being part of armies, etc.

Philip II ruled early in the development of market-based industrialization. Today industrialization is fading out in terms of the hold it has over people’s actual lives and focus. In the twenty-first century a whole new kind of economy — the Attention System (or the Attention Economy as I define it, not as in Davenport and Beck or others who think it only deals with advertising or simply the paying but not the desire for or receiving of attention) — has now come to the fore. An increasingly large — even if not formally or consciously recognized — preoccupation is the securing, individually, of the scarce attention of the rest of the world — or whatever part of this attention one can snag.

The aim in this new economy is not to be productive from the viewpoint of the firm in which one formally happens to work, which is tied to the old economy. Regardless of where one works, what is of increasing importance is the attention one receives, wherever it comes from, via networking of whatever sort. Companies can only hold themselves together if their leaders (formal or informal) can genuinely hold a great deal of the attention of both their wider audiences and of their own workers. But they cannot hope to succeed in this just by shutting off outside connections, especially today, for with the wide variety of means to to stay connected to whomever one wants — Blackberries, iPhones, browser connected e-mails (Yahoo! or Google, for instance) and the many social networks — even an employee locked into a company has plenty of ways of reaching and being reached by those outside it.

Worth Stressing?
This does not mean that the new economy is somehow stress free or devoid of competition. Quite the contrary, in fact. The total attention the world can offer is limited; thus the competition for it keeps getting hotter, once it becomes seen as desirable in any form. E-mail’s ease means that is going to continue to be relied on, and by more and more senders, many of whom will continue to seek to make their messages as irresistible as possible. The senders do want attention after all.

By age three or four, most children have learned to modulate their efforts to get attention depending on their own sense of urgency and the circumstances. One learns, for instance, not to scream at full volume at all times. Adults dealing with e-mail have mostly developed a keen if not always conscious sense of how to get attention for themselves, through their ideas, jokes passed along, pointers to others deserving of attention etc. They and their recipients will continue to refine these abilities, some with greater success than others. That is about the best we can hope for.

Each person must develop her individual ways of dealing with the overload and handling the stress. Whoever is less easily stressed or finds inner resources that allow better coping will likely do best. The limitations of e-mail mean that cultivating real relationships in person will continue to be highly necessary for some time, and finding the right individual balance among the complex of relationships, real and virtual, will be essential.

Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid

But no general contrivance to reduce e-mails (always excepting true spam) can work, whether for a firm, some other kind of association, or for the world at large. Any such attempt ignores the very value of e-mail receiving as well as sending for the individual. It ignores the rise of the Attention System (Attention Economy). Whatever contrivance is tried will surely lead to work-arounds, usually rendering the contrivance null and void in short order. If work-arounds are impossible, loyalty to whatever entity has adopted the contrivance will plummet, so its adoption will prove counterproductive. (I would guess most smart leaders intuitively grasp this anyway, so they are unlikely to adopt such contrivances in the first place. )

A Burden We’d Better Bear
Information overload really means not enough attention to satisfy everyone’s desire for it. This can only end if almost everyone agrees not to compete for attention — or if the entire technosphere breaks down in some general calamity. A peace treaty of the first sort seems far, far away. Let’s hope we escape a calamity as well. If so, then information overload or infomania will be with us for a long, long time.

This is supposed to be the era of knowledge. Yet I think we should be increasingly worried that it is in fact even more the era of ignorance. The two are in some ways complementary. An expert has long been known, at least by cynics, as someone who “knows more and more about less and less.” That means that even experts — as well as the rest of us — also know less and less about more and more. And more gets missed by even experts. We might view expanding knowledge as a yeasty sort of bread — the faster it expands, the bigger the holes all through it. Meanwhile, there are new reasons that cause people to adopt ignorance as a stance, as all right, as even desirable. Many people have noticed this, but it seems to me some of the root causes and the nature of the new ignorance escape them, just as some elements still escape me.

Still, despite my own ignorance of the topic, this this is my contribution to the study of ignorance, a study I think we should all take more seriously.

So, welcome to Ignorance Studies 101.

First, ignorance comes in more than one flavor.

Ignorance type A = not knowing what no one else knows either, also known as “Society-Wide Ignorance.” As overall societal knowledge grows and grows, igA obviously decreases.

However, that leads to a growth in Ignorance type B, not knowing what some other people do know. If experts each “know more and more about less and less,” a corollary is that they also know less and less about more and more of what is known. Non-experts also each find igB growing.

But both types of ignorance can be further sub-divided into: Ignorance about things humans cannot affect (call this “Nature”); and Ignorance about things that we can, including things that humans ourselves create (call this the “Human World”). Of course, as knowledge of Nature grows, so does our often unknowing ability to affect it, increasing Human-world ignorance in a sometimes dangerous way. (Think global warming.)

Ignorance about ignorance grows too: Ignorance about what is known (by society, in other words by someone somewhere) — and ignorance about who knows or does not know what. Finally, comes ignorance about whom and how to ask about what one does not know. You can’t even begin to ask if you don’t know you don’t know, but even if you do know you are ignorant, that may not help you much.

What about Google and Wikipedia?

Wait! Don’t Google and Wikipedia and the web in general immeasurably increase each person’s effective knowledge and so decrease effective ignorance? I certainly use both of these frequently and think they are each a real step forward. Still, knowledge is not simply an assemblage of information; it must be rooted in an understanding of connections, limitations, context, and so on. If you could study all of Google, or even follow a line of links from each and every web page that surfaces from a particular query, or could study all of Wikipedia, then you would surely have knowledge, indeed almost all knowledge on a great many subjects. but this is clearly beyond anyone’s ability. So you would have to select on the basis of prior knowledge, and the incompleteness and holes in that knowledge are precisely why neither of these tools can be assumed to provide you with effective knowledge, or effective lack of ignorance. Instead, the best they can do is little more than make us more aware of the very breadth and depth of of our ignorance. As they enlarge every day, our ignorance only grows.

Attention, Knowledge and Ignorance

If I’m right, our actions are increasingly governed by the scarcity of attention that we can pay and even more by the scarcity of the attention we can get from others. That is the Attention System, or what I meant originally when I introduced the so much misunderstood term “Attention Economy.” Living in this system greatly affects and is affected by what we know or don’t as well as what find it valuable to know or to skip.
One key axiom of attention is that to pay it to someone, you must align your mind to hers. The more you know what she knows, at least what she knows that is relevant to her right now, the better you can pay attention. If, for example, you don’t even know what language she is speaking you will have a very hard time paying attention.
The first corollary: If you want attention, don’t assume much specialized knowledge. In other words: assume ignorance on the part of your listener, viewer or reader, and don’t challenge that ignorance too much. Example: the US media, but also most media throughout the world. This also explains much about politicians, business people etc.

The second corollary: don’t bother learning what won’t get you attention, because you have to pay a lot of attention to do that.
This second corollary explains a lot:
• The ignorance about many things (history, geography, science, politics) of American high school students, (along with countless other students around the world);
• The narrow focus of many business people, entertainers, scholars and other experts, etc;
• The appeal of religious fundamentalism, at least in part.
• The fact that the pursuit of knowledge itself is increasingly subject to what the philosopher or historian of science Thomas Kuhn called “paradigm shifts.”

Once Upon a Paradigm

In a paradigm shift, knowledge gets a new basis, with some brand-new central ideas, and in the process, old knowledge can safely be ignored as no longer relevant. I think it works like this. As a field grows, so much knowledge accumulates in it, that only narrow specialists can really familiarize themselves with it. Then, new people find it much easier to start over with an almost clean slate, which they can if there are hints of another paradigm around.The new one explains certain phenomena while allowing a completely new set of knowledge to be developed. “Early adopters” of this new knowledge are at a special advantage.They can reach a relatively large audience without themselves necessarily having to know much.

Paradigm shifts of this sort are not limited to science. The same causes make advantageous to be a fan of or participant in a new sport, a new music genre, or a new kind of art. You don’t have to be familiar with all the nuances established over many years. Similar reasons led to young people eagerly adopting new technologies, new kinds of web links (such as Facebook or MySpace or Second Life) new computers, new operating systems, programs, new video games, etc..

Through this process, the attentional value of having old knowledge rapidly decreases. This would be fine if the new knowledge always included or trumped the old, and if there were not whole areas left out as “progress” increases.

What a Tangled Web..

We are all now intertwined in a global society, six billion strong. As the universe of knowledge relevant in some way to each of our lives keeps expanding, the share of it we individually have any mastery over keeps dropping. In terms of attention, the accelerated demands on our attention outrace our individual supply at ever-greater speeds. We do not know enough to form reasonable judgements about many matters that will affect us quite a bit, nor do we know sufficiently well how our actions affect the world. We are often less and less capable of knowing that we do not know, or even knowing whom to ask about who would know about a host of issues. So we punt. With ignorance and half understanding, a certain carelessness is the inevitable outcome.

We can see the effects of that all around us. Take the growing technosphere in which our lives are ever-further embedded. We assume, for instance, that someone at the phone company or the cable company or the computer company or the software company or even the open-source community is “minding the store,” but often it turns out that as tasks have been sub-divided and farmed out, even simple possibilities have not been considered, or whoever was supposed to know about a certain issue has been downsized, fired, retired or forgotten. Systems simply do not work, or work increasingly badly. The managers of such businesses do not know much about the desires, limitations, habits and customs of their customers. The eagerly install such things as voice-activated automated phone systems, which add to the complexities of correcting or even finding out about how to solve common or unusual problems. And life is full of unusual problems.

Here in Northern California, we have perhaps the world’s largest congeries of technical expertise, but it is not large enough so that the companies trying to save a buck will be able to hire technically competent and knowledgeable people to do things like keep Internet or cable or even electric services going seamlessly. Perhaps even if they paid fairly well, no one would find it of interest to do seemingly mundane maintenance when that same person could be involved creating something completely new that potentially could be of interest or even value to millions.

Or take the money economy in its most direct form — the world of high finance. Very clever people invented things like mortgage bundling, which led to the bundling of sub-prime loans in ways that most actors assumed to be pretty fail-safe, at least in the short time horizon on which investment bankers now work. Theoretically, rating agencies were supposed to evaluate the the risks associated with such loans, but they simply did not understand them well enough, it seems. Rating financial risk may be one of those rather uninteresting areas, most of the time, anyway. No one gets a lot of attention for such activity, unless she offers a completely unexpected rating. If there had been no rating agencies, the bankers who took on the loans might have felt they had to be a bit more cautious, but as it was, it was easy to pay minimal attention, since it was easy to take for granted that the rating agencies knew what they were doing. No one was rating the raters. Similarly, it now seems, many other kinds of loans, such as industrial bonds and “commercial paper” may have been incorrectly rated as to risk.

Banks have suddenly realized that they are in the dark as to the risk environment, so they are newly frightened about extending loans even to other big banks. This re-creates the same sort of problem that occurred at the time of the Great Depression, even though the amount of knowledge of the financial (money-based) economic systems is supposedly so much greater.

Not Ads but Adages

Politicians are another class of people who seemingly know less and less about more and more. They rely on experts to fill them in on how to handle all sorts of areas, but these experts in turn may not really be terribly knowledgeable, nor do they necessarily understand the complex interconnections necessary to make their advice any good. Whether the subject is education, healthcare, international relations, security from terrorism, control of media, the environment or economics, politicians of all stripes seemingly adopt a few rather dogmatic ideas as a way to get by. The citizenry who elect them are even more reliant on mere adages to understand what is going on. Or they rely on the politicians to find out what they themselves have given up trying to understand. But politicians dare not go against those who do believe in certain adages, whether it is “the free market is always best” or “we need protection from foreigners stealing our jobs” (or both) or “Islamo-fascists are out to get us” or “Israel is the biggest violator of human rights, ” or “it’s cold this winter, so global warming is a false alarm,” or “we need population control in Africa to slow down global warming” among equally many other views based mostly on over-simplified ignorance. Awareness of ignorance itself breeds paranoia, such as the conspiracy theories floating around 9/11, or the view that those who warn about global warming are secretly trying to impose socialism on everyone.

These simplified adages function as paradigms, even though there is often very little behind them, and they can often be very easily be replaced, with new paradigms — that is, nice fresh adages. When a politician such as Barack Obama excites voters with talk of hope and change, he succeeds largely through his lack of being specific. If he tried to spell out detailed policies, many of his listeners would not be able to continue to pay attention, though some others might be able to follow him and perhaps like what they hear.

Deeper

A deeper problem is that no politician really is willing to recognize that a deep change is under way. They may pay too much lip service and attention to the bromides of conventional economists to see that we are entering a whole new era, in which the very meaning, for instance, of continued economic success is thrown into question.

But no Air Crashes

We should expect that the varying degrees of ignorance I have been discussing will eventually cause more and more severe human and natural world problems, if we do not find some way to keep growing ignorance somehow at bay. How might we do all this? One example that comes to mind is an area where the technosphere seems to be excelling of late, rather than breaking down. It is the system that prevents air crashes. The example may be instructive. To be continued…..

Like millions of other Americans, I watched Hillary Clinton’s “meltdown,” as the media called it, as an Internet video on Monday January 7, the day before the New Hampshire primary. I am on record as opposing Hillary, for a number of reasons, including dislike of many of her stands such as her belligerent votes on Iraq and Iran, never apologizing for  the Iraq vote, dismay at her connection to the Democratic Leadership Council, and revulsion at the whole notion of perpetuating political “dynasties” (Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton). Edwards, not Clinton, has been the candidate I most supported and still support, long shot though he now is. Yet I found myself emotionally touched by seeing Clinton “well up” and by hearing the quaver in her voice.

Even as I felt that, I also was thinking that what she was emotional about was not so much her long commitment to serving the country — millions of people have made that commitment, after all — but rather that her campaign might be faltering, her ambitions of being President might come to naught.
The point is that in paying attention to her, I viscerally felt the emotion she was projecting—regardless of whether she was sincere in projecting it, and regardless of my own reservations about her and what she stands for.  I was, in the terms in which I have explained the act of attention paying, deeply aligned with her. As such I wanted what I took it that she wanted, which was for her to emerge victorious in the NH vote. When she did the next day, I was very pleased. My impression is that many other people reacted much as I did. When you align with someone, you want what they want, even if there may be other reasons you don’t want to go along with what have become your own emotions.

With videos on the Internet enabling more of us to to view particularly emotional moments related to political candidates and others,  we must expect that  the emotional connections that result will play an even larger role than they have in the past, when it comes to deciding whom to vote for. This is not necessarily going to make us eager to support candidates we disagree with too much on other terms, but it will influence us to put relatively small differences aside. We will put less emphasis on the candidate’s “record, “ and more on what they say and how they say it. In 2004 Kerry overemphasized his record in Vietnam, leaving himself open to being “Swift-boated.” With past records less important, outside groups’ abilities ot vilify a candidate n the basis of the pst should play less of a role. That is to the good. What is less attractive is the chance that pure acting skill will allow a candidate to distort who he is and what he is for. George Bush , in my view successfully did this in 2000, with his “compassionate conservative” and “I’m a uniter, not a divider’ lines. These went right along with his “just plain folks” demeanor.

Fortunately, perhaps, in a long campaign, a candidate will have a hard hiding more unpleasant sides, if these exist. They will be circulated on YouTube and be seen by many.  Is it conceivable that eventually highly genuine people with real emotions will turn out to be the new star candidates? If so, will that be good?

In a recent post, Gwen Bell cites my work as a partial basis for her thoughts about “personal branding.” She has some sensible suggestions, but I think the idea of personal branding — common though it is — gets things backwards.

1. Meet the Smith Brothers, Trade and Mark

Of course, most of us know or would recognize hundreds or even thousands of brands: Heinz Ketchup, Toyota Prius, Apple iPod, AT&T, Hilton Hotels, Pepsi, Dr. Martens boots, Republic of Tea, Tamagotchi  “pet” and on and on.  But what is a brand? Why do they relate differently to persons than persons do to each other? Two aspects of brands are important.

The first is their linguistic role. Superficially, a brand name is an example of a “proper noun,” similar to a the name of a place or person. As it happens, I just returned from Spain. The word “Spain” is a proper noun or name, signifying a particular place, a particular country, and a particular society, all at once, and all with the same complex history. But Spain, at least in this sense, is not a brand similar to those I mentioned above. There is only one Spain, while there are many, many identical bottles of Heinz Ketchup on tables throughout the world, just as there are many, many Toyota Priuses on the roads, and millions of iPods plugged into people’s ears, etc.

Linguistically then, a brand (name) is more like an ordinary noun. It differs from a common noun, such as “table,” “cow,” or “strawberry,”  in that it is supposed to refer only to a line of pretty much identical products that all are associated with a particular company. Heinz Ketchup, Toyota Prius, and iPod, for instance, are to be kept separate in our thoughts from similar, more generic ones such as no-name ketchup (or catsup), just any hybrid-drive car, or any old MP3 player. But you or I or any person is as singular and unique as Spain. There is only one of you, not many identical versions Even if your name happens to be as commonplace as “John Smith,” you are a particular John Smith, found only in one place at one time, specific in yourself, and except perhaps for relatively rare cases of identity theft, in no danger of not being specific. (Common “identity theft” does not steal anything more than financial identity; it does nothing to the individuality of your thoughts, feelings, personal relationships, physical movements, expressions, etc.) You are already much more individual than a brand would make you.

(Philosophers sometimes say that common nouns have a definition or sense, whereas proper names only refer to or label individuals. For instance, your name singles you out, but does not define you — except perhaps by implying you are human being. Here again, brands are intermediate between definable things such as cars, and mere labels.)

2. Which Smith Brother, again?

The second point is that regular brands — far from being something that individuals need to emulate — are actually reminders of the singular persons or personalities who originated or stand behind the branded products or services.  Microsoft has thus far equalled Bill Gates as the driving force. It’s possible that it will come to mean Steve Ballmer as well or instead, but that remains to be seen. Apple represents Steve Jobs; Ford once represented Henry Ford; Kodak represented George Eastman, who invented the notion of easy photography; etc. The founder or re-founder’s personality sometimes continues to inform and shape the company in question long after she or he is gone. In the terms I have offered before, your attention  passes through the brand (or the branded object)  to the prime person or persons behind it. It is the same as how your attention right now goes through the words you see on the screen to me.

As the influence of the prime personality or personalities fades over time, the brand itself almost always tends towards the generic. It eventually becomes meaningless, except in those cases where it clearly comes to represent a new personality, who gives it new singleness of meaning. The process of dry photo-reproduction by electrostatic means was invented by Chester Carlson and introduced to the world under the Xerox brand. But soon enough, the word “xeroxing” just came to mean generic dry photo-copying, using any machine that could do it. Xerox, Inc., had to go to ludicrous lengths to “defend” its brand, but it still cannot prevent ordinary people from using the verb, “to xerox” in a generic sense, with no regard for what company produced the machine being used. The company has had a hard time finding a strong personality to give new meaning to the brand.  When you use a copier without thinking of the brand, whatever attetnio you pay to it May go without your knowledge to Chester Carlson, but  not via the Xerox brand particularly, that is it goes to no instigator in the Xerox company or any other.

Without such new personalities, the best a company can do is to stick rigorously to the initial impetus of the founder, say in the case of an unchanging product, like Tabasco sauce.  But even this is going to be a matter of interpretation, especially if there is to be any further innovation at all; someone has to at least be the “high priest” who interprets the founder’s or founders’ intent in new circumstances; so that personality will then be who is behind the name. This will be true, of course, even when most customers have never heard of this leader, just as they may never have heard of the original founder by name.

3. Why Pablo Picasso is Not a Brand

Of course, in being the brainchild of relatively few distinct personalities that still influence the “culture,” corporations are from alone. The US still is partly shaped by the visions of the likes of Jefferson and Hamilton, and, more distantly, Locke and Montesquieu, though the details have certainly changed. The Roman Catholic Church to some degree still represents the historical Jesus and some of his early interpreters.
On a still more personal basis, the great artistic, musical, literary and architectural creators are still represented by their works, and to some degree by the styles they introduced. In Spain, I went to see Picasso’s famous Painting Guernica.  It used to be in New York, but now you have to go to Madrid to see it, because it is unique, and totally unlike  Heinz’s Ketchup in being so.  A Rembrandt is a Rembrandt; a J. S. Bach cantata is clearly Bach; Hamlet is a Shakespeare play.  Much the same goes for philosophical, political  and even scientific innovators. Also for actors, singers, and other performers, especially since around 1900,  when it become possible to record their work.

The point is that by being who they are, taking their own expressive and creative impulses and thoughts seriously, all these people do not need to pay any attention to the concept of branding. They are themselves, and they reveal themselves in everything they do. As selves, they all evolved throughout their entire creative lives. A late Rembrandt or Picasso painting or drawing has some connection with earlier ones by the same artist, but also substantial differences that can only be connected by studying the works in chronological relationship. The late Wittgenstein takes off from the earlier one but is profoundly different as well. Much the same holds for more recent or living creators in whatever medium, even minor ones.   Being true to one’s evolving inner sense of what is right and important and what comes forth now — this minute —  is what one has to keep at, not some superficial characteristics.

4. Moving the Goalposts

Gwen Bell says that a blogger, be distinctive needs to be clear about “goals. In  what sense she does not make clear,: ultimate goals or the immediate creation at hand? I think goal setting is mostly a misleading concept taken over from crude business how-to texts.  A significant creator pours all of who she is into the work, and the goal of the moment can be as specific as finding the right word to use in a sentence or poem, the right gesture in acting a role, or can be much more long-range, but the goal emerges from the intensity of what one is about and who one is, not the other way round. As a portraitist, the artist Giacometti had the goal of actually capturing the face of the sitter as he saw it, but he was really never satisfied with his attempts. The intensity of his striving is what counted for him. Goals constantly change as one proceeds, just as in creating anything one continually redefines oneself.  (A corporation can have goals only to the degree that its few real leaders do, and they too are less in need of defining these than in maintaining personal intensity and expression.)

The vast majority of would-be artists, novelists, actors, essayists, columnists, journalists, political leaders, etc., get much less attention than they might like. There simply is not enough attention from other people to go around. No matter how they try to conform to some model of good blogging behavior, such as Bell’s, most bloggers will face the same problem (of not enough attention to go around).  Being successful as a blogger or at any other form of attention getting is primarily a question of luck, and after that, I think,  of being as fully yourself at the moment as you can be. Even this rule is not any guarantee of success, and breaking the rules, whatever they are, is often a good way to stand out.

5. Look Before you Leap — or Don’t

Bell mentions thinking carefully about what you are doing. That may work. (It certainly appeals to me, except I already do too much of it.) But being very spontaneous and not thinking consciously at all might work better, for some. Personal branding, though,  is a red herring, not worth worrying over. Don’t give it another though. (Except, perhaps, the one that follows….)

6. Addendum: Subtleties about Copies:
One possible response to the above would be to point out that while each creative person may be a unique individual, nonetheless, just as there are many identical but distinct Toyota Priuses on the road, defined or guaranteed as such by their brand, so the particular creative works of a person — a novel,say,  might exist in many many, identical but distinct copies. Why then should we distinguish between the author’s “personal brand”  and something like a car brand?

You could even say a blog exists in many copies, on the computer screen of every different person who web surfs to it. You want to read only “a John Grisham,”  let’s say, just as you may want to drive only a Prius.  But when you get to the bookstore, it turns out that all the John Grisham’s they have you have already read. You do not mean by that that you have read the exact copy that is on the bookstore’s shelf. To have read the book is not to have read the specific copy. The book exists more basically as an idea, separate from its physical manifestation. So in a very real sense, each novel is as unique as its author, in a way that each car of a particular brand and model is not. A painting or sculpture or building has a physical manifestation, of course, meaning it can only be experienced in a particular place at any one time, and that it is not the same as copies of it.  You cannot confuse having Picasso’s Guernica in your living room with having a reproduction of it, though you would be unlikely to think you drive a reproduction of the Prius instead of the real thing.

The idea of the Prius  is of course just as singular, just as much the creation of a single person or small group of people as a blog entry or a novel or a movie  or a painting is.  But a Prius, like most branded objects is a product of the industrial system, valuable not just for its idea, but for its utility in transporting you — in reality and not just in imagination — from point A to point B. It required many, many people’s efforts to make each individual one, whereas the human effort needed to create a copy of a blog entry on your screen is very very small. Blogs, like other works of mental value, are part of the attention system, not the industrial one. That is why personal branding does not make sense.

0. Preface

In this and the next few installments, I will be addressing a number of connected ideas: the changing role in our lives of material things; the changing nature of firms; the rise of what I shall term hyper-creativity; how it interacts with slower moving institutions such as government; some examples; and the connection of all these with advertising.  All these are involved in the change from what I will now call the “Money-Thing Epoch” to what I will call the “Attention Epoch.” The terms in quotes are my latest attempts to find suitably apt and evocative terms to replace my earlier coinage: the Money-Market-Industrial Economy on one hand and the Attention Economy on the other.  

1. Who’s Riding Now?

According to  a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson,  the “sage of Concord” (Massachusetts) and  the pre-eminent nineteenth-century  transcendentalist, “Things are in the saddle, and ride Mankind.”  Nowadays, as I’ve said, American and other advanced societies are passing beyond the Thing Epoch to enter the Attention Epoch, in which relations between minds tend to dominate, and the scarcity and desire for attention are what mainly structure our relations with each other. That doesn’t mean that we suddenly do without things, of course, but rather that their main function changes. Emerson’s observation does not hold any longer in the way he probably meant it. Where once the main value of a human-produced thing was utility, convenience or comfort, now it is its role as an attention focuser or intermediary.

Once you have first paid attention to someone you can then pay further attention merely by recalling that experience to mind. Mostly, that recalling will be triggered by some jog to your attention, as, for example, some situation that reminds you of some aspect of the earlier experience. Often, and perhaps reassuringly, that will be through objects you surround yourself with.

People put photos of close friends and relations — or pets or celebrities — on their desks and around their houses for this reason. But reminders of past attention paid certainly need not be images of the person in question. They can be anything that even slightly triggers recall. Any gift that you keep around can remind you of the gift-giver and turn attention in her direction. Sometimes this can be very subtle, even unconscious. The object need not be material, it could be a tune or an idea, a quote, almost anything. Still, material objects, just because they occupy the space in which we live our lives, are particularly likely to engage our senses and thus serve as reminders. As if they were windows, we pay attention through such objects to the people that seem to us to be behind them.

2. Through the Thing to the Mind Behind

Take the