Marc Andreessen’s Library: Books still have power

Books still have power.  Did you know that the Silicon Valley venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz has a carefully curated library of 800 books in its waiting room?  A lot of people do now, because of this article in Wired magazine by Cade Metz. Each of the books has been selected and placed there by Marc Andreessen, the firm’s co-founder (and one of the original Internet browser inventors through Netscape).  The collection – focussing on Hollywood, Silicon Valley and computer programming – is so legendary that “as authors and publicists come through, many of them slot in their own books—sometimes in bulk”, Metz writes.  “Andreessen is the room. And the room still has the desired effect: It makes you want to talk to the people inside.”

According to the article and the photographs accompanying it, the library includes many of my favourites, including Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own:  How the Jews Invested Hollywood, David Thomson’s The Whole Equation:  A History of Hollywood and Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus.

Uber promotion crosses to the material world

There is no doubt that the digital world is changing our lives in profound ways.  Not only publishing, film and television production/distribution, newspapers and music are affected.  Accommodation – think Airbnb.  And of course now taxis and ride-sharing: think Uber.

So it comes as a shock when a digital organisation does promotion and advertising in the “material world”.  That’s just what Uber did in downtown Sydney, with a host of people handing out Uber “starter” discount cards (see below).  Perhaps there is a limit as to how much promotion can reach in the digital world?

The Intern and The Internship films have a common theme – the importance of wisdom and age

I have yet not seen the new Robert de Niro/Anne Hathaway film “The Intern”:  it opens here in Australia in mid-October, a few weeks after the US opening on 25 September.

According to the trailer (see below), this film has a whole lot in common with another film with which it may be confused: “The Internship” (2013) – which, by the way, for reasons I cannot fathom is MY MOST POPULAR POST EVER (yes. the upper case letters are on purpose).  By latest count, I have had somewhere upwards of 4,000 or more views of my review of “The Internship”.

From the trailer, one major theme of “The Intern” is that even in this “dot.com” age of youth culture and 25 year old CEOs, maturity, wisdom and experience are still valued.  That clearly was a theme of “The Internship”, and what a comforting theme it is … for those who are in the baby boomer generation who see our skills dating and the digital economy undergoing such rapid and profound changes.

The “tag line” of “The Intern” is “Experience never gets old”.  A fantasy?  Perhaps.  More like probably.

I think ageism in the workplace is a far more significant phenomenon than the professional experience of a 70 year old (the Robert de Niro character) being recognised by a corporation (except, of course, if you are a major investor, with lots of cash … but that’s a whole other story).

But “good on you”, Nancy Meyers – a baby boomer if there ever was one (born 1949), for keeping our fantasies alive.

View the trailer here:

 

Australian spatial economics

Even in this digital, online world, it’s no secret that all economic activity has an important element of physical space.

Economists and geographers know this. In fact, a whole field of study is devoted to it, and it’s called economic geography.

Unfortunately, the spatial dimension to our work and our consumer lives is something that government policy makers, economic planners and regulators often seem to forget or never even consider. Too many government policies and programs assume that we are all sitting in the same space – presumably (when here in Australia) within a five to ten kilometre radius of the central business district of one of our capital cities: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide – or perhaps Canberra (but certainly not Darwin or Hobart).

Here in Australia, about two-thirds of us live in the capital cities, making Australia (despite our “outback” and rural myths) one of the most urbanised countries on earth. Singapore, city-state that it is (with a 100 percent urbanisation), we are not. But more than 89 percent of us live in urban areas, not far behind Japan and South Korea (both at 91 percent).

So the high rate of Australian urbanisation means we can assume geography is not significant, right? Wrong. With our massive continent and our sprawling cities, we have a number of regions that experience profound and intense geographic disadvantage. Think western Sydney, western Melbourne and most regional, rural and remote areas.

The fact is that employment and economic activity is NOT evenly spread along with the population, despite our high urbanisation rate. Economic activity is particularly concentrated in and around the major central business districts, a point made comprehensively and convincingly in a report from the Grattan Institute entitled “Mapping Australia’s economy: Cities as engines of prosperity”, by Jane-Frances Kelly and Paul Donegan.

The Institute summarises the situation:

More than three-quarters of all economic activity in Australia happens on less than one per cent of the nation’s land mass. In today’s services-driven economy, Australia’s cities are the engines of material prosperity.

For a long time agriculture was the backbone of our economy, as we rode on the sheep’s back. After World War Two prosperity shifted to suburbia, with manufacturing employing one in four Australians. This report shows that Australia’s economy is increasingly driven by knowledge-intensive services located in Australia’s large cities. Within these cities the most intense and productive economic activity is concentrated around central business districts and a small number of other business hubs. The way these areas draw large numbers of businesses and workers together makes them all more productive.

Key facts from the report include:
– “Eighty percent of the value of all goods and services produced in Australia is generated on just 0.2 percent of hte nation’s land mass.”
– The CBDs of Sydney and Melbourne – just 7.1 square kilometres – generated $118 billion during the 2011/12 financial year, almost 10 percent of Australia’s economic activity.

And the major reason for the intense economic activity? The concentrations are of “highly knowledge-intensive and specialised services such as funds management, insurance, design, engineering and international education”, with highly skilled workers. And it is the physical “proximity to suppliers, customers and partners” that promotes efficiency, generating “opportunities to come up with new ideas and ways of working” (report, p. 1).

So there you go. We communicate via digital means and at great distances quicker and easier than ever. But yet, we still prefer – in fact, many of us need – to be physically close in order to work efficiently. Economic planners take note.

Has the “Digital Tipping Point” arrived?

Yes, says Deloitte Australia: the “digital tipping point” has definitely arrived, with permanent and irrevocable changes to our information and entertainment consumption.

According to Deloitte, here in Australia this happened some time in this past year. To summarise the main points of their 2014 Media Consumer Survey, the “digital tipping points” here in Australia are:

– Using the Internet is likely to eclipse watching TV as the preferred source of entertainment within a matter of months.
– We have gone “tablet mad” across all age groups – more than half (53%) of Australian survey respondents are now ‘digital omnivores’ – owners of a tablet, laptop and smart-phone, up significantly from 28% last year.
– Smartphone ownership is at 81%, an increase of 21% over the last three years.

Other findings include:
– When we watch hit TV shows, we “binge”: some 72% of their survey participants watch back-to-back episodes (three or more) in one sitting – and more than a quarter of us (26%) are doing this once a week.

– And there’s very bad (and not surprising) news for newspapers, with 92% of Australian survey respondents unwilling to pay for news online:

Compared with other surveyed countries, Australia has the lowest newspaper subscription rates per household, whether print or digital (22%), compared with the top ranking Japan (53%), the UK (51%) and China (44%). An additional 8% have digital-only subscriptions. Within the surveyed population, newspaper subscriptions have declined by 5% over the past three years while digital-only subscriptions have grown by 26%, albeit from a very low base.

Some interesting good news for print magazines:

We love our printed mags – the printed magazine is still holding its own and remains the preferred way to read magazine content (49% of all survey respondents). Nearly half (49%) of magazine subscribers indicated that if the price of their favourite magazine was the same for various options of physical or digital copies, they would prefer to receive the physical copy only, rather than both.

And here’s a cool infographic that summarises the key findings.

Overstating the facts? Probably, as it’s not likely that their survey reached many of the bottom 20 percent of Australians, who experience “digital exclusion”. But the trends are apparent.

Still not convinced that the digital has changed our communication forever? A recent Time magazine article by Katy Steinmetz (August 4, 2014 here in Australia, published a week earlier in North America), notes, “The total number of words in all text messages sent every three months exceeds the word count of all books ever published, according to text-analytics firm Idibon”, which is a genuinely “new age” company  that is based – where else – in San Francisco.

Food for thought.

Symbol of the digital age

Here is a metaphor for our digital age, a beautifully painted large colour sign on the outside of a corner shop in Armidale NSW – a regional centre in northern New South Wales, about seven hours drive north of Sydney and five hours drive south of Brisbane.  “The Trading Post” was one of the early “buy-and-sell” services in Australia, and for many years operated as a paper (I am quite certain that it has wholly gone online).

So the lovely ad here – partially covered with green ivy – is certainly a symbol of our digital age.

Why is there no major commercial video streaming service in Australia?

So, why is there no major commercial video streaming service in Australia?  Australia is one of the richest countries in the world (by some accounts one of the top two, per capita).  We have a sophisticated and well-developed tech sector.  We have very high rates of literacy.  We love the audio visual media.

In August of 2013, BRW reported that, “Netflix’s subscriber base represents 30 per cent of all US households, while Quickflix has managed only a 1 per cent penetration into Australian living rooms.”  The article gives a number of reasons:  Australia’s “free to air” broadcast culture, and by contrast to Australians, Americans “are used to paying for content”; Australia’s smaller market; punitive download limits on many Australian internet plans (I believe that one); and limited access to content because of output deals.

But, as for paying for content – really?  Has anyone noticed how expensive cinema attendance and DVDs (as well as books, for that matter) are in this country?  Australia is one of the biggest profit centre country for the Hollywood studios.  How many American cinemas charge $21 a ticket, which is normal in Sydney these days?  And somehow Australians don’t pay for content?  Please.

But the last paragraph of the article is the real giveaway, the one that matters:

Then there are the users who change their IP address to get around country restrictions and pay for access to Netflix from Australia – that’s eating into Quickflix’s growth potential, as is the continued base of people willing to delve into the dark craft of piracy to download movies and TV shows.

For years, there have been rumours and half-announcements about Netflix coming to Australia, but the widespread IP shielding that allows Netflix access from this country may be a disincentive.  Look at Amazon – the biggest bookseller in this country, including extensive Kindle distribution, without one bit physical infrastructure – and possibly not even any staff.  With Amazon’s move into video production and digital streaming, who needs an on-the-ground presence?  The Amazon model:  let the internet service providers and Australia Post do the distribution work for them.

Getting bigger?  Yes.  For example, here is a copy of an advertisement for Amazon’s new video series, a full page from a November 2013 issue of The New Yorker:

San Francisco and the changing future of tech

The day after I graduated high school in New Jersey, I flew to San Francisco.  It was my first trip to that city, and I was visiting my girlfriend, who lived in Tiburon.

The next ten days became one of life’s memorable “moments”, and San Francisco has played a role in my dreams ever since.

And I am not alone.

More than probably any other city in the USA – and possibly the world – San Francisco is setting the trends, pace and norms of social interaction for the twenty-first century.

The latest person to chronicle this evolution is Nathan Heller, whose article “Bay Watched: How San Francisco’s new entrepreneurial culture is changing the country”, appeared in the October 14, 2013 issue of The New Yorker.  (The full article is freely available on The New Yorker website.)

Heller is an interesting character.  He grew up in San Francisco and graduated from Harvard University in 2006, a classmate of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook.  In fact, Zuckerberg lived only a few rooms away from him during their freshman (first) year.  In his devastating critique of how the film “The Social Network” got Harvard wrong, Heller writes of his classmates: “The kids entering Harvard in 2002 came largely from pressure-cooker public schools, dorm-room entrepreneurships, the cutthroat upper echelon of prep institutions, or, in my case, the all-weather-fleece-wearing wilds of San Francisco.”

Zuckerberg, as we all know, came from a combination of “upper echelon of prep” schools (he attended Phillips Exeter Academy) and “dorm room entrepreneurship”.

All of this is relevant to Heller’s insights into the new technological elite.  He grew up where it is happening, and he went to college with those (Zuckerberg et al) who are making it happen.  By his own admission, Heller never learned how to drive, and currently lives in New York City.

Heller’s description of San Francisco is both literary and colourful:

San Francisco has traditionally been a Dungeness crab of a city, shedding its carapace from time to time and burrowing down until a new shell sets….  San Francisco has never been dominated by anything, but it’s always ended up pre-eminent in something. Gold, for instance. Free love. Microchips….  Those irked by change rarely stay long.

Lately, the pattern has begun to break. San Francisco is an industry town. This industry is usually called “tech,” but the term no longer signifies what it used to. Tech today means anything about computers, the Internet, digital media, social media, smartphones, electronic data, crowd-funding, or new business design.

At some point, in other words, tech stopped being an industry and turned into the substrate of most things changing in urban culture.

Heller continues that, “Everyone had a sense that Northern California was the source” of these major cultural changes, yet few people actually understand why.  San Francisco has come to personify the new capitalist technological elite, one that is increasingly populated by the young.  Its “growing startup culture has a dreamy, arty, idealistic bent: this is the whimsy of youth carried to a place where youth and whimsy have not often thrived.”  This is a throw-back to the 1960s, but with a major difference:  unlike the hippie “communitarian” focus, this “rising metropolitan generation … is creative, thoughtful, culturally charismatic, swollen with youthful generosity and dreams—and fundamentally invested in the sovereignty of private enterprise.”

This is not limited to the San Francisco Bay area.  You find it in parts of New York City, in Austin, in Seattle and in the back streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Here in Sydney, there is a thriving young tech entrepreneurial culture nesting in inner Sydney suburbs, from Pyrmont and Ultimo through the central business district to Darlinghurst and Surry Hills and reaching to the lower north shore.  The same exists in Melbourne, and – I am sure – many other major cultural capitals.

This is not a particularly new phenomenon.  I sensed this in my own flirtation of working as a business development manager in a (soon to fail) tech start-up during 2000 and 2001.  We wore collared t-shirts with the company name emblazoned on them, and – even then – took all of our cultural cues and most of our professional language from Silicon Valley.  I was the second oldest employee.

So while not new, as 2013 comes to a close, San Francisco has increased its dominance of our tech dreams.  Facebook did not exist back in 2000 (Zuckerberg and Heller were still juniors in high school), Google was still in its infancy and Apple was struggling.

I cannot predict where this world will be in another ten years, but I do know this:  San Francisco will continue to personify the hopes, dreams and business models of that world, one that will arrive sooner than we think.

Cyberterrorism – the new digital scourge

Suddenly it’s everywhere.

Cyberterrorism, it’s the new digital scourge.

Is it just an accident that in the last day I, (a) finished an article in The New Yorker (of May 20, 2013) by John Seabrook entitled “Network Insecurity: Are we losing the battle against cyber crime?”, and (b) listened to a lecture on the Australian ABC Radio National’s “Big Ideas” program, entitled “Cyber attacks: How war and economics are being transformed by computerisation”, given by Scott Borg.

Seabrook reports (in part) on an interview with Eric Grosse, a Google software engineer who heads up that company’s security team. Grosse’s comments on passwords:

He hopes to get rid of passwords, or at least reduce their importance in the “line of defense”. In the short term, however, the answer is more of them and not less, including the “two step verification” (including a mobile phone text message) that is becoming popular with Australian banks when making transfers to someone else’s account.

“The biggest problem is people can’t be expected to remember two hundred passwords. I mean, I have two hundred passwords, and they’re all different and they’re all strong.”

“How do you remember them?”

“I have to write them down.”

“But then that piece of paper could be stolen.”

“Yeah, but if your adversary is somebody on the other side of the ocean he can’t get the piece of paper you have in a safe at home. If you’re trying to guard against your roommate, then you need a new roommate.”

Wise words, those.

And Scott Borg? He is the Director and Chief Economist of the non-profit (501c3) U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit (US-CCU). His lecture, downloadable (at least for a few weeks) reviews the economic impacts of cyberterrorism, which he – frighteningly describes as having greater potential impacts than a nuclear bomb. He describes in great detail the implications of what would happen if all of the electrical power plants in a country (say, Australia) were to be remotely disabled.

Don’t believe me; listen to the lecture to find out.

The Internship – A movie parable on work in the digital age

Inside the film “The Internship” is a potentially very funny, satiric and deeply insightful commentary struggling to emerge about the nature of work in the new digital age.  The story is simple and yet appealing to “middle America” (or middle Australia for that matter):  two guys in their early 40s, Nick Campbell (Owen Wilson) and Billy McMahon (Vince Vaughn, who co-wrote the screenplay), have been laid off from their watch distribution company in Georgia (okay, think, the southern suburbs of Adelaide, then).  They struggle to find meaningful work in the new digital economy.  (Anyone recognise this situation?  I sure do.)   Nick even swallows his pride and goes to work for his brother-in-law, a sleazy mattress store owner (Will Ferrell).

But here’s where fantasy comes in:  Nick and Billy apply – as a pair – for an internship at Google in California, have a Skype video interview from a public library (no less), and successfully bullshit their way in, despite knowing almost nothing and saying even less (see footnote below).   Apply as a pair?  To Google?  Set aside the unreality here, there is something very satisfying for those of us who are not truly exceptional to think that perhaps we could make it into a Google internship, and from Atlanta, no less.

All power to “The Internship” for engaging with what I call “the present moment” of the rapidly changing workplace.  The film also contains some wonderful pop culture, social and literacy references that I do not recall having made it into mainstream films before.  My favourite is the scene that quotes Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, which is about why highly successful people achieve their success despite extraordinary competition.

“The Internship” also is, in its own sweet way (and it is sweet), a film about northern California.  I have written separately about how northern California and the Silicon Valley IT industry promote the concept of “abundance”; “The Internship” inhabits this world perfectly.  But it goes further, providing us with delightful shots of scenic San Francisco, a sort of Edenic paradise where the sun always shines and the food is free (at least at Google).  In one scene, a team of Google interns are sitting and lying on a headland in Marin County overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and looking back to San Francisco.  If you know the geography of this location, you have to wonder, “how did they get there?”  It’s an awfully long walk (hours, really) from the nightclubs that they had been visiting in the city in the previous scene.  Okay, “it’s only a movie” (quoting Alfred Hitchcock, who reportedly said that to actor Ingrid Bergman).

Ultimately “The Internship” has some great ideas wrapped up in a script that too often takes the easy way out.  We have a long Harry Potter-ish “Quidditch” match, a very long nightclub scene, and a bunch of good guys/bad guys set ups.  (Max Minghella plays the nasty “bad” cheating intern.) The good ideas? The film nicely illustrates the value of salesmanship, relationship management and customer engagement, as well as the importance of wisdom, experience and strategy over short-term tactics, arrogance and youthful naiveté.

In one true-to-life way, “The Internship” does capture the structural re-adjustment of work in our time:  in the film there appear to be about 100 interns vying for only five places at Google.  The ephemeral nature – what Ross Perlin describes in his book Intern Nation as “the ugly new culture” of internships – is on full show here.  I wonder if Google, which apparently approved the script and helped the production, truly understood the nature of what they were endorsing, by showing publicly the cut-throat and frequently unpleasant nature of internship practice.

Despite all that, “The Internship” ends on a triumphant note.  Yes (Spoiler here!  Don’t read any further if you don’t want to know the ending!), our heroes are part of the winning team and get the jobs.  But the rest of them, the other 95, they all “lost”, right?  They don’t get the jobs.  It’s not “win-win”.  In fact, it’s very win-lose, and most of them lose.  This is a trend with many current films, where we are meant to celebrate triumph, but it’s actually disaster.  In “Man of Steel”, the bad guys lose – but New York City (and who knows where else?) has been devastated, with the loss of tens of thousands of lives.  In “World War Z”, the zombies are defeated – well, almost – but the world is a shadow of its former self.

The disaster in “The Internship” is not the other 95 interns.  They are bright young things with great educations from Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Duke and the rest.  They will probably all get good jobs, just not at Google.  No, the disaster is the changed nature of work, and the mattress salesman from Georgia or southern Adelaide.  He is not likely to find meaningful work in this age, if he can find any work at all as he ages.  And no amount of movie fantasy can change that.

Footnote:

Nick and Billy’s successful application for the Google internship reminds me of a possibly fictional story about the writer Gertrude Stein.  Stein studied with philosopher and psychologist William James at Radcliffe College (part of Harvard University) from 1893 to 1897.  As the story goes, on her final philosophy examination paper one fine spring day, Stein handed the paper back in with only these words written:  “I don’t want to take this exam.  It’s too nice out.”  To that, James supposedly replied, “Miss Stein, you truly understand the meaning of philosophy”, and gave her an “A”.  I understand that generations of students have attempted to imitate Stein’s “stunt”, probably all of them without success.  But “The Internship” hews to the line that a few words of bullshit can cut through anything and get us in to Google or the “A” at Harvard.  The problem is:  very few of us are Gertrude Stein, and extremely few of us are dealing with William James.

(Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Picasso)