At a meet organized at the University of Texas- Pan American (UTPA) in August 2009, Professor A. Fuat FIRAT and associated scholars launched the CAQTUS Collaborative. The goal of CAQTUS Collaborative is to initiate, support, and critique studies of Culture, Business, Markets, Consumption, Organizations, Globalization, and related topics from poststructural and cognate perspectives. In addition to A. Fuat FIRAT, Nikhilesh Dholakia, Romain Laufer, Cory Wemberly, Alladi Venkatesh, Amy Wendling, Jorge Rocha, Salavador Trevino Martinez, and Mohammadali Zolfagharian attended the founding discussions of the CAQTUS Collaborative.
Among the initial topics that CAQTUS Collaborative will focus on are these:
- Paradoxes of Value, Contradictions of Capital
- Bureaucracy, Legitimacy, and Emancipatory Possibilities
- Cultures of Migration, Migrating Cultures
- Dynamic Reshaping of Needs, Wants, Desires
- Technology, Culture & Experience
- Cultural Embeddedness of Business Frameworks
- Rhetoric, Symbols, Strategies, Subversions
- Marketing as a Desire Machine
- Appropriation, Reappropriation, Exploitation, Liberation
Friday, August 14, 2009
Friday, February 24, 2006
The Manufacture of Relevance
Quick, who is the biggest global producer of "relevance" today?
No it's not the Philosophy Department at some Ivy-covered university hall in the the United States or Europe.
It's.... Google.
Day in and day out, in fact, every minute of every day, Google is churning out massive quantities of "relevance". No one else even comes close to Google's ability to pump out relevance -- seductive, addictive relevance that keeps users clamoring for more.
The massive brain trust that Google has built up is focused sharply on, among other things, the manufacturing of relevance. Google's famed search alogorithms continually fine hone the relevance of what Internet users are looking for, when they search for stuff.
Relevance works simple and powerful magic.
When people find relevance in something, they pay attention.
When people find relevance in something, they come back for more.
When people find relevance in something, they become admiring acolytes...
....Or should we say "addicts"?
Relevance is the dependency drug par excellence for the mind..... No, not the brain.... LSD probably has more punch for that silly, grey-matter laden organ... I am talking about that Cartesian-modernist idea... the mind...
The mind craves relevance and, when it finds it, the mind turns convivial... and supple... and effervescent... and elastic... and sweetly submissive...
As a global pusher of relevance, Google has left rivals like Yahoo, AOL, and MSN way behind... choking on the dust trail of Google's blazing fast searches.
Have you had your Google fix today?
Nik Dholakia
No it's not the Philosophy Department at some Ivy-covered university hall in the the United States or Europe.
It's.... Google.
Day in and day out, in fact, every minute of every day, Google is churning out massive quantities of "relevance". No one else even comes close to Google's ability to pump out relevance -- seductive, addictive relevance that keeps users clamoring for more.
The massive brain trust that Google has built up is focused sharply on, among other things, the manufacturing of relevance. Google's famed search alogorithms continually fine hone the relevance of what Internet users are looking for, when they search for stuff.
Relevance works simple and powerful magic.
When people find relevance in something, they pay attention.
When people find relevance in something, they come back for more.
When people find relevance in something, they become admiring acolytes...
....Or should we say "addicts"?
Relevance is the dependency drug par excellence for the mind..... No, not the brain.... LSD probably has more punch for that silly, grey-matter laden organ... I am talking about that Cartesian-modernist idea... the mind...
The mind craves relevance and, when it finds it, the mind turns convivial... and supple... and effervescent... and elastic... and sweetly submissive...
As a global pusher of relevance, Google has left rivals like Yahoo, AOL, and MSN way behind... choking on the dust trail of Google's blazing fast searches.
Have you had your Google fix today?
Nik Dholakia
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Content is Screen
>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<
A favorite mantra of digital convergence was: “Content is King.” As digital media and files proliferate and become ubiquitous, content must stand out for people to take notice.
Content, however, is constrained by screen. What can be projected on a jumbotron at Time Square in New York or Shinjuku in Tokyo cannot necessarily fit well on the tiny screen of a mobile phone. The “look and feel” of content, its hedonic properties, depend on the size and fidelity of the screen. For audio content, the screen is in people’s head – whether a musical number is imagined in the cavernous Carnegie Hall or a crowded smoke-filled noisy bar makes a big difference to listeners.
The screen that reaches most humans on the planet is that of the television. For technological, economic, and political reasons, the coming of digital content to the TV screen has been erratic and slow.
Meanwhile, another screen is becoming ubiquitous. This is the small screen of the mobile phone. This screen is very amenable to receiving and displaying digital content.
In just one country – China – the number of mobile phone users crossed 300 million in early 2004. In 2003, Chinese people sent more than 220 billion text messages to each other. This number accounted for more than half of all SMS text messages sent in the world!
Worldwide, the number of mobile users is approaching 2 billion, and is likely to reach 3 billion before it levels off. That means nearly one in every two humans may have access to a mobile phone screen.
With the largest mobile user base in the world, all aspects of mobile communications – including content – would be influenced by China.
Already, Qian Fuchang – a Chinese author – has produced a mobile phone version of his steamy novel “Outside the Fortress Besieged.” To fit the screen space of the typical SMS message, the novel has been written in the form of 60 chapters of 70 characters each. Qian, it seems, wants to dole out his titillation one SMS message at a time.
Content not only depends on screen, the screen type shapes people’s reaction to content. The jumbotron screen and the movie screen are of course public screens, free in the first case and accessible for a fee in the second case. The television screen, initially everywhere and still in the developing world, is a community screen or a family screen. The content is shared. The computer screen is mostly a private screen, but it is large enough for someone to peek over the shoulder and snoop at. The mobile phone screen is essentially a private screen. It is not unusual to see people in trains, buses, or bars of Tokyo or Helsinki staring at their mobile screens and smiling, smirking, or frowning.
These new patterns of behavior – alone yet engaged, in a public space – are barely understood. The social impact of increasingly individualized, private content – doled out in screen-sized bits, bytes, and bites – is not yet known. For now, let me end with the refrain: “Watch that screen!”
Nik Dholakia
>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<
A favorite mantra of digital convergence was: “Content is King.” As digital media and files proliferate and become ubiquitous, content must stand out for people to take notice.
Content, however, is constrained by screen. What can be projected on a jumbotron at Time Square in New York or Shinjuku in Tokyo cannot necessarily fit well on the tiny screen of a mobile phone. The “look and feel” of content, its hedonic properties, depend on the size and fidelity of the screen. For audio content, the screen is in people’s head – whether a musical number is imagined in the cavernous Carnegie Hall or a crowded smoke-filled noisy bar makes a big difference to listeners.
The screen that reaches most humans on the planet is that of the television. For technological, economic, and political reasons, the coming of digital content to the TV screen has been erratic and slow.
Meanwhile, another screen is becoming ubiquitous. This is the small screen of the mobile phone. This screen is very amenable to receiving and displaying digital content.
In just one country – China – the number of mobile phone users crossed 300 million in early 2004. In 2003, Chinese people sent more than 220 billion text messages to each other. This number accounted for more than half of all SMS text messages sent in the world!
Worldwide, the number of mobile users is approaching 2 billion, and is likely to reach 3 billion before it levels off. That means nearly one in every two humans may have access to a mobile phone screen.
With the largest mobile user base in the world, all aspects of mobile communications – including content – would be influenced by China.
Already, Qian Fuchang – a Chinese author – has produced a mobile phone version of his steamy novel “Outside the Fortress Besieged.” To fit the screen space of the typical SMS message, the novel has been written in the form of 60 chapters of 70 characters each. Qian, it seems, wants to dole out his titillation one SMS message at a time.
Content not only depends on screen, the screen type shapes people’s reaction to content. The jumbotron screen and the movie screen are of course public screens, free in the first case and accessible for a fee in the second case. The television screen, initially everywhere and still in the developing world, is a community screen or a family screen. The content is shared. The computer screen is mostly a private screen, but it is large enough for someone to peek over the shoulder and snoop at. The mobile phone screen is essentially a private screen. It is not unusual to see people in trains, buses, or bars of Tokyo or Helsinki staring at their mobile screens and smiling, smirking, or frowning.
These new patterns of behavior – alone yet engaged, in a public space – are barely understood. The social impact of increasingly individualized, private content – doled out in screen-sized bits, bytes, and bites – is not yet known. For now, let me end with the refrain: “Watch that screen!”
Nik Dholakia
>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<
Monday, July 12, 2004
The Triumph of Gray
>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<
In the world of digital electronic commerce, the severely binary black-and-white dichotomy is giving way to an ascendant gray.
In the black-and-white world… well, things were either black or white. Ambiguity and ambivalence were frowned upon.
A brand, shiny, new car was good; a used car was a testimony to your lack of means. A new book right off the bookseller’s shelf was good; a used book was for penny pinchers and bookworms willing to rummage through boxes of such books at garage sales or thrift stores. A fresh shrink-wrapped videotape of a popular movie was the way to get great entertainment; a shoddy copy of the video was for those losers who could not afford the real thing…
The commercial capitalism of the high-industrial era was based on private, individualized, one-item/one-owner model of property. The economy – based increasingly on the proliferation and expansion of the muscular, giant, smoke-belching manufactory – depended on new goods being churned out en masse and sold to endless streams of customers in national and later global markets. The seamy businesses of recycling, reusing, reselling, refurbishing – these sorry relics of the old, penurious, preindustrial times – were shunned at worst and tolerated at best. In fact, the epithet “Used Car Salesman” came to characterize the worst concatenation of dishonest human traits.
This still was the case way back in the ancient early 1990s… before the assault of digital e-commerce and person-to-person (P2P) networks.
Then came eBay… and Napster… and Amazon…
eBay made the garage sale fashionable and profitable… it was no longer the recycling of junk, it was the global offering of oh-so-wonderful-must-have-bric-a-brac…
Napster was quashed but its mutated offspring transformed the sharing of music and video files from “copying and piracy” into a technical art form worthy of cocktail party adulation…
Alongside the brand new editions of bestsellers and weighty academic tomes, Amazon.com started offering cut-rate used copies of the same books via its network of affiliated merchants….
Even arcane B2B Exchanges made it possible to pick up surplus and/or used computers, armored vehicles, airplanes, soda ash, steel girders, or what-have-you at discount prices…
Such digital assaults on black-and-white capitalism are eroding its foundation and slowly promoting gray flea-market bazaarism, the outlines of which we barely understand yet. Gray markets are moving out of murky shadows and basking in glorious cybernetic sunshine. Gray is good, gray is great… as long as gray is digitally encased.
Gray capitalism – if it can be called that – is not even a decade old. Those who make a living from the commercialization of creativity – book publishers, music labels, and movie studios – either hate it or are trying to find opportunities in this fast-spreading grayness. Economists, politicians, and social scientists are mostly clueless about how to decipher, contain, fight, or promote such changes.
The emergent gray economy is based on partially private, shared/sharable, multi-item/multi-owner models – and I would refrain from adding the words “of property”, because that term does not quite apply to these emergent phenomena. The digital gray economy is based on the global proliferation and expansion of communication networks. Businesses of recycling, reusing, reselling, refurbishing, remixing, relaunching, and reengineering are ascendant.
Yeah… at this messy interchange of technology, economy, politics, and culture, the time has come for some serious rethinking!
Nik Dholakia
>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<
In the world of digital electronic commerce, the severely binary black-and-white dichotomy is giving way to an ascendant gray.
In the black-and-white world… well, things were either black or white. Ambiguity and ambivalence were frowned upon.
A brand, shiny, new car was good; a used car was a testimony to your lack of means. A new book right off the bookseller’s shelf was good; a used book was for penny pinchers and bookworms willing to rummage through boxes of such books at garage sales or thrift stores. A fresh shrink-wrapped videotape of a popular movie was the way to get great entertainment; a shoddy copy of the video was for those losers who could not afford the real thing…
The commercial capitalism of the high-industrial era was based on private, individualized, one-item/one-owner model of property. The economy – based increasingly on the proliferation and expansion of the muscular, giant, smoke-belching manufactory – depended on new goods being churned out en masse and sold to endless streams of customers in national and later global markets. The seamy businesses of recycling, reusing, reselling, refurbishing – these sorry relics of the old, penurious, preindustrial times – were shunned at worst and tolerated at best. In fact, the epithet “Used Car Salesman” came to characterize the worst concatenation of dishonest human traits.
This still was the case way back in the ancient early 1990s… before the assault of digital e-commerce and person-to-person (P2P) networks.
Then came eBay… and Napster… and Amazon…
eBay made the garage sale fashionable and profitable… it was no longer the recycling of junk, it was the global offering of oh-so-wonderful-must-have-bric-a-brac…
Napster was quashed but its mutated offspring transformed the sharing of music and video files from “copying and piracy” into a technical art form worthy of cocktail party adulation…
Alongside the brand new editions of bestsellers and weighty academic tomes, Amazon.com started offering cut-rate used copies of the same books via its network of affiliated merchants….
Even arcane B2B Exchanges made it possible to pick up surplus and/or used computers, armored vehicles, airplanes, soda ash, steel girders, or what-have-you at discount prices…
Such digital assaults on black-and-white capitalism are eroding its foundation and slowly promoting gray flea-market bazaarism, the outlines of which we barely understand yet. Gray markets are moving out of murky shadows and basking in glorious cybernetic sunshine. Gray is good, gray is great… as long as gray is digitally encased.
Gray capitalism – if it can be called that – is not even a decade old. Those who make a living from the commercialization of creativity – book publishers, music labels, and movie studios – either hate it or are trying to find opportunities in this fast-spreading grayness. Economists, politicians, and social scientists are mostly clueless about how to decipher, contain, fight, or promote such changes.
The emergent gray economy is based on partially private, shared/sharable, multi-item/multi-owner models – and I would refrain from adding the words “of property”, because that term does not quite apply to these emergent phenomena. The digital gray economy is based on the global proliferation and expansion of communication networks. Businesses of recycling, reusing, reselling, refurbishing, remixing, relaunching, and reengineering are ascendant.
Yeah… at this messy interchange of technology, economy, politics, and culture, the time has come for some serious rethinking!
Nik Dholakia
>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Rube Goldberg, Disney, Wal-Mart and Beyond
>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<<
What do Disneyworld, Wal-Mart, and Star Trek type science fiction videos have in common? Not much – except the pervasive role of technology. Understanding how technologies of manufacturing and marketing deployed globally is a fascinating saga of our times.
In fact, this story starts before Disney – in the early part of the 20th century, the “age of the machine”. In this period, people were fascinated by the visible and marvelous powers of science and technology – ranging from Ford Model T to the whimsically spoofed machines in Rube Goldberg cartoons. One of the great embodiments of the spirit of machines was the St. Louis expo of 1904. A website detailing the preamble and attractions of this expo states the following (http://www.bitwise.net/~ken-bill/fair.htm) :
Think for a moment about the world of 1904. The Wright Brothers’ famous flight at Kitty Hawk occurred the previous year. Gasoline-powered automobiles, motion pictures, and the “wonder drug” aspirin were introduced to the public only 10 years before. Electric lighting and telephones were less than 25 years old, and still a novelty only read about by most Americans. Food was stored in ice boxes, and the horse-drawn ice wagon was a familiar site.
But from Opening Day - April 30, 1904 - to the closing ceremonies on December 1st of that same year, the St. Louis World’s Fair played host to nearly 20 million visitors, who witnessed the public debut of air conditioning, were able to ice skate throughout the entire summer, and spoke by wireless telegraph to cities 1500 mile away.
In this era of the machine – let us honor Rube Goldberg, the whimsical cartoonist of the machine, by calling this the era of “goldbergization” – the machine produced results in visible ways.
Most of the visible mechanization was in the factories, but retail spaces saw some sprinkling of mechanization in the form of accessibility by automobiles and the use of cash registers. By the 1950s, cities like New York even had massive vending machines that dispensed all manners of food – the food preparation and stocking being done by invisible humans in the background. But retail culture proved too difficult to mechanize.
The model that succeeded was the opposite of the automated New York food-vending delis. This is the model epitomized by McDonald’s. In the typical McDonald’s retail outlet, the mechanization is largely obscured, behind a partial wall where food preparation is done. Human order takers are key parts of the McDonald’s retail equation. They are trained to smile, accept orders, punch in codes to transmit the order to workers in the back doing the preparation and packing, accept money, and make change by automated methods.
While goldbergization had limited sway in retail spaces, it was Disney who took retail technology to the next step. In disneyfication, the retail technology is invisible and yet palpable. The wondrous animatronics are close to (caricatures of) live humans and animals, but the wiring and the motors are invisible. Disney’s “cast members” – the smiling, friendly human workers with some histrionic skills – assist the animatronics performers and settings.
In goldbergization, the viewer-customer is awed by visible technology producing visible results. In disneyfication, the viewer-customer-guest is awed by invisible technology producing visible results.
While the technologies of disneyfication are invisible, they are palpable at some level: viewers-customers-guests have faint cognitions of the awesome technological prowess that must lie behind the Disneyland backdrops.
Now, “Welcome to Wal-Mart”! The gentle elderly greeter at the door mutters this, and offers to help and guide anyone that asks for assistance. The loose-fitting uniforms, the price-marking gun in one hand, the Normal Rockwell grooming, the “Aw, Shucks!” demeanor of the Wal-Mart “associate” – technology is the farthest thing in your mind as you enter Wal-Mart, unless you came in to buy a computer or a flat-panel TV. Everything is done to promote the schlock milieu of “Always Low Prices.” The tacky newspaper ads that have the aesthetics of 19th century news bills, simply stacked shelves, somewhat unkempt aisles overflowing with seasonal merchandise, the functional fluorescent lighting – this ain’t Abercrombie & Fitch, or even Old Navy.
Yet, behind the schlock-laced façade of Wal-Mart, there is powerful and ruthlessly efficient technology that disciplines every link of the supply chain and keeps employees on their toes, almost literally. So legendary is the back office technology of Wal-Mart that it has elicited paeans of praise in consulting company reports and Harvard Business Review articles. Wal-Mart of course is the biggest company and its owners, members of the Walton family, the richest people on the planet.
So, what is walmartization? In goldbergization, the viewer-customer is awed by visible technology producing visible results. In disneyfication, viewers-customers-guests are wowed by invisible (but palpable) technology producing visible results. In walmartization, totally invisible technology disciplines unseen supply chains to produce seductive low prices for the customer in schlock low-tech settings.
In the 16 March 2004 issue of The Guardian, George Monbiot has this to say about Wal-Mart and similar superstores:
In the US [Wal-Mart’s] sales clerks made an average of $13,861 in 2001, almost $800 below the federal poverty line for a family of three. It is reported to have told new employees how to apply for food stamps so that they don’t starve to death….By forcing down the prices of the goods they buy, the superstores encourage even more repressive conditions in the companies which supply them. A recent study by Oxfam documents the systematic abuse of workers in the factories and farms they buy from. The Waltons are so rich because others are so poor.
But, capitalism, technology, and globalization grind on…. So, where is the next stop? This brings us, somewhat surprisingly, to Star Trek. In the types of sci-fi fantasies favored in some of the story lines of Star Trek and similar video fare, there are often “worlds” that are serenely pastoral – somewhat like the “Aw, Shucks” Norman Rockwell world of the visible side of Wal-Mart. Yet, in those sci-fi worlds, as the story line unfolds, we usually learn of deeply embedded technologies orchestrating the whole serene-idyllic-pastoral thing.
The logical extension of walmartization is to push super-efficient technologies offshore – to the factories of China and Indonesia, to the software shops of India and Vietnam, to the call centers of Ghana and the Philippines. Then, not only are these technologies invisible, they are unreachable except via long and tiring plane rides, or via super-high-bandwidth telecommunications. Walmartization spawns goldbergization in the super-efficient factories in China, ten times the size of football fields, to support the schlock-style disneyfication of its retail superstores in America.
But wait, there’s more… as those pushy late-night TV commercials tell us! Here is what Forbes magazine (the self-proclaimed “Capitalist Tool”) reported in March 2004:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc, which runs 33 chain stores across the country [China], posted a more modest 5.85 billion yuan [about $0.8 billion] in sales, but bought $15 billion worth of goods in 2003, the [China Securities Journal] newspaper said. Underscoring the emphasis placed on the mainland by foreign retailers, Wal-Mart said last week it had held its first-ever annual board meeting in China…
The next act of the Goldberg-McDonalds-Disney-Wal-Mart saga would likely end not with Mickey’s Midnight Parade in Orlando, Florida but with a spectacular dragon dance in the streets of Shanghai.
Nik Dholakia
>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<<
What do Disneyworld, Wal-Mart, and Star Trek type science fiction videos have in common? Not much – except the pervasive role of technology. Understanding how technologies of manufacturing and marketing deployed globally is a fascinating saga of our times.
In fact, this story starts before Disney – in the early part of the 20th century, the “age of the machine”. In this period, people were fascinated by the visible and marvelous powers of science and technology – ranging from Ford Model T to the whimsically spoofed machines in Rube Goldberg cartoons. One of the great embodiments of the spirit of machines was the St. Louis expo of 1904. A website detailing the preamble and attractions of this expo states the following (http://www.bitwise.net/~ken-bill/fair.htm) :
Think for a moment about the world of 1904. The Wright Brothers’ famous flight at Kitty Hawk occurred the previous year. Gasoline-powered automobiles, motion pictures, and the “wonder drug” aspirin were introduced to the public only 10 years before. Electric lighting and telephones were less than 25 years old, and still a novelty only read about by most Americans. Food was stored in ice boxes, and the horse-drawn ice wagon was a familiar site.
But from Opening Day - April 30, 1904 - to the closing ceremonies on December 1st of that same year, the St. Louis World’s Fair played host to nearly 20 million visitors, who witnessed the public debut of air conditioning, were able to ice skate throughout the entire summer, and spoke by wireless telegraph to cities 1500 mile away.
In this era of the machine – let us honor Rube Goldberg, the whimsical cartoonist of the machine, by calling this the era of “goldbergization” – the machine produced results in visible ways.
Most of the visible mechanization was in the factories, but retail spaces saw some sprinkling of mechanization in the form of accessibility by automobiles and the use of cash registers. By the 1950s, cities like New York even had massive vending machines that dispensed all manners of food – the food preparation and stocking being done by invisible humans in the background. But retail culture proved too difficult to mechanize.
The model that succeeded was the opposite of the automated New York food-vending delis. This is the model epitomized by McDonald’s. In the typical McDonald’s retail outlet, the mechanization is largely obscured, behind a partial wall where food preparation is done. Human order takers are key parts of the McDonald’s retail equation. They are trained to smile, accept orders, punch in codes to transmit the order to workers in the back doing the preparation and packing, accept money, and make change by automated methods.
While goldbergization had limited sway in retail spaces, it was Disney who took retail technology to the next step. In disneyfication, the retail technology is invisible and yet palpable. The wondrous animatronics are close to (caricatures of) live humans and animals, but the wiring and the motors are invisible. Disney’s “cast members” – the smiling, friendly human workers with some histrionic skills – assist the animatronics performers and settings.
In goldbergization, the viewer-customer is awed by visible technology producing visible results. In disneyfication, the viewer-customer-guest is awed by invisible technology producing visible results.
While the technologies of disneyfication are invisible, they are palpable at some level: viewers-customers-guests have faint cognitions of the awesome technological prowess that must lie behind the Disneyland backdrops.
Now, “Welcome to Wal-Mart”! The gentle elderly greeter at the door mutters this, and offers to help and guide anyone that asks for assistance. The loose-fitting uniforms, the price-marking gun in one hand, the Normal Rockwell grooming, the “Aw, Shucks!” demeanor of the Wal-Mart “associate” – technology is the farthest thing in your mind as you enter Wal-Mart, unless you came in to buy a computer or a flat-panel TV. Everything is done to promote the schlock milieu of “Always Low Prices.” The tacky newspaper ads that have the aesthetics of 19th century news bills, simply stacked shelves, somewhat unkempt aisles overflowing with seasonal merchandise, the functional fluorescent lighting – this ain’t Abercrombie & Fitch, or even Old Navy.
Yet, behind the schlock-laced façade of Wal-Mart, there is powerful and ruthlessly efficient technology that disciplines every link of the supply chain and keeps employees on their toes, almost literally. So legendary is the back office technology of Wal-Mart that it has elicited paeans of praise in consulting company reports and Harvard Business Review articles. Wal-Mart of course is the biggest company and its owners, members of the Walton family, the richest people on the planet.
So, what is walmartization? In goldbergization, the viewer-customer is awed by visible technology producing visible results. In disneyfication, viewers-customers-guests are wowed by invisible (but palpable) technology producing visible results. In walmartization, totally invisible technology disciplines unseen supply chains to produce seductive low prices for the customer in schlock low-tech settings.
In the 16 March 2004 issue of The Guardian, George Monbiot has this to say about Wal-Mart and similar superstores:
In the US [Wal-Mart’s] sales clerks made an average of $13,861 in 2001, almost $800 below the federal poverty line for a family of three. It is reported to have told new employees how to apply for food stamps so that they don’t starve to death….By forcing down the prices of the goods they buy, the superstores encourage even more repressive conditions in the companies which supply them. A recent study by Oxfam documents the systematic abuse of workers in the factories and farms they buy from. The Waltons are so rich because others are so poor.
But, capitalism, technology, and globalization grind on…. So, where is the next stop? This brings us, somewhat surprisingly, to Star Trek. In the types of sci-fi fantasies favored in some of the story lines of Star Trek and similar video fare, there are often “worlds” that are serenely pastoral – somewhat like the “Aw, Shucks” Norman Rockwell world of the visible side of Wal-Mart. Yet, in those sci-fi worlds, as the story line unfolds, we usually learn of deeply embedded technologies orchestrating the whole serene-idyllic-pastoral thing.
The logical extension of walmartization is to push super-efficient technologies offshore – to the factories of China and Indonesia, to the software shops of India and Vietnam, to the call centers of Ghana and the Philippines. Then, not only are these technologies invisible, they are unreachable except via long and tiring plane rides, or via super-high-bandwidth telecommunications. Walmartization spawns goldbergization in the super-efficient factories in China, ten times the size of football fields, to support the schlock-style disneyfication of its retail superstores in America.
But wait, there’s more… as those pushy late-night TV commercials tell us! Here is what Forbes magazine (the self-proclaimed “Capitalist Tool”) reported in March 2004:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc, which runs 33 chain stores across the country [China], posted a more modest 5.85 billion yuan [about $0.8 billion] in sales, but bought $15 billion worth of goods in 2003, the [China Securities Journal] newspaper said. Underscoring the emphasis placed on the mainland by foreign retailers, Wal-Mart said last week it had held its first-ever annual board meeting in China…
The next act of the Goldberg-McDonalds-Disney-Wal-Mart saga would likely end not with Mickey’s Midnight Parade in Orlando, Florida but with a spectacular dragon dance in the streets of Shanghai.
Nik Dholakia
>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<<+++++>>>>>*****<<<<<
Thumb Tribes of Asia?
In the sprawling, oft-cavernous mazes of Tokyo’s train stations such as Shinjuku and Shibuya roam the hip-dressed creatures of oyayubi-zoku. Yes, the oyayubi-zoku are the ubiquitous “thumb tribes” of Japan, young people who are constantly thumbing text messages, downloading pictures, or doing other e-transactions using their keitai, the mobile phone handsets.
The thumb tribes are adept at using the keypad of the mobile phones to do an astonishing variety of electronic tasks. Given the long commutes of Tokyo, and the ban on doing voice conversations in trains, it is no wonder that Japan has spawned these thumb tribes.
Technology, however, is never neutral. The growth of the thumb tribes has an unintended consequence. Japan was a nation of voracious readers, much of it facilitated by the long commutes on trains. No matter that over 40% of the reading was in the form of “manga”, the famed illustrated comics with wide-eyed Anime characters, it was still reading. Even the comic-strip manga tackled complex subjects such as global warming or AIDS. Now, the oyayubi-zoku are forsaking reading in droves and turning to thumbing. By some estimates, after the popularity of i-Mode and similar technologies, book publishing in Japan has dropped by 20% or more.
But wait! Can these thumb tribes emerge and survive in poor countries, such as those of South Asia? You bet they can, with proper motivation. Here is a story of a maid working in a rich Bangladesh household. The maid asked the rich, educated lady of the house if she could use the lady’s mobile phone to inquire about the health of a relative back in the village. The lady of the house agreed and asked for the number. The maid was illiterate and said she did not know the number. The maid took the mobile phone, however, and punched in a sequence of numbers and got connected to the village.
Amazed at this, the lady of the household asked: “How did you do it? You do not know how to read or write!” The maid replied: “It is true, Madam… I am illiterate, but I know which keys to push on the keypad!”
Rather than lamenting or celebrating the oyayubi-zoku of rich and educated Japan, perhaps it is time to promote and motivate oyayubi-zoku in the illiterate and semi-literate populations of South Asia and Africa. The mobile keypad holds the promise of bridging the growing digital divides of these regions of the world.
….er….gotta go…. that’s my cell phone ringing…!!
Nik Dholakia
The thumb tribes are adept at using the keypad of the mobile phones to do an astonishing variety of electronic tasks. Given the long commutes of Tokyo, and the ban on doing voice conversations in trains, it is no wonder that Japan has spawned these thumb tribes.
Technology, however, is never neutral. The growth of the thumb tribes has an unintended consequence. Japan was a nation of voracious readers, much of it facilitated by the long commutes on trains. No matter that over 40% of the reading was in the form of “manga”, the famed illustrated comics with wide-eyed Anime characters, it was still reading. Even the comic-strip manga tackled complex subjects such as global warming or AIDS. Now, the oyayubi-zoku are forsaking reading in droves and turning to thumbing. By some estimates, after the popularity of i-Mode and similar technologies, book publishing in Japan has dropped by 20% or more.
But wait! Can these thumb tribes emerge and survive in poor countries, such as those of South Asia? You bet they can, with proper motivation. Here is a story of a maid working in a rich Bangladesh household. The maid asked the rich, educated lady of the house if she could use the lady’s mobile phone to inquire about the health of a relative back in the village. The lady of the house agreed and asked for the number. The maid was illiterate and said she did not know the number. The maid took the mobile phone, however, and punched in a sequence of numbers and got connected to the village.
Amazed at this, the lady of the household asked: “How did you do it? You do not know how to read or write!” The maid replied: “It is true, Madam… I am illiterate, but I know which keys to push on the keypad!”
Rather than lamenting or celebrating the oyayubi-zoku of rich and educated Japan, perhaps it is time to promote and motivate oyayubi-zoku in the illiterate and semi-literate populations of South Asia and Africa. The mobile keypad holds the promise of bridging the growing digital divides of these regions of the world.
….er….gotta go…. that’s my cell phone ringing…!!
Nik Dholakia
India's 998 Million Problem
Trenchant critics of India's galloping IT-led globalization have commented, quite rightly, about the 330 million Indians whose lives have barely changed in the hubbub of India's software-saturated ethos of the twentyfirst century. India's underclass continues to be the largest in the world, and there are no easy signposts as to where economic and political policy should be headed to solve the problems of poverty, margnialization, and urban decay.
Those out of power in New Delhi, or the state capitals, of course have the easy answer: Get the bums who are in power out of office! As we all know, this rings quite hollow. Those other bums ruled for four decades, and they did not make much of a dent in the size or situation of the underclass.
There is, however, a much larger demographic challenge than the 330 million number.
India's workforce, even if we generously include the burgeoning American-accented but barely IT-literate Call Center workers, is perhaps 2 million strong. So, where does that leave the rest of the 998 million Indians? Leaving aside children, we are still talking of 500-600 million people for whom IT is as foreign as Redmond, Washington.
The year 2004 started in India with the top politicians declaring the advent of a strangely-named "feel good" revolution of rising expectations and consumption. The opitmists hope that this Ladder to the ITES (Information Technology Enabled Services) Heaven will continue to shoot up to the ether and beyond, pulling more and more Indians up the India Shining rungs of this ladder.
Yes, colleges are exploding and technical graduates in 2010 could be double the number in 1995.
But in the demographic cauldron that is India, these IT-trained numbers will melt into the workforce without much of a trace.
Yes, even the illiterate farming family now dreams of educating some of its children for good jobs in the cities.
Yes, the notorious Trickle Down theory so favored by Ronald Reagan will come into play, but the trickles will be absorbed quickly into multitudes of India's exploding demographic centers -- the cities.
The educational revolutions and the income-lifestyle revolutions will be slurped and soaked up by the parched demographic sponge that we call India. For the half-a-trillion on the wrong side of the digital divide, there are no easy answers.
Picture this: The Ladder to the ITES Heaven has its upper rungs stretching into a misty ethereal Paradise of Pleasures. But look, there are no lower rungs of this ladder planted firmly on India's rural soil! This is a floating ladder, not the fabled beansprout that Jack planted, which stretched from strong roots in the earth all the way to the moon!
Nik Dholakia
Those out of power in New Delhi, or the state capitals, of course have the easy answer: Get the bums who are in power out of office! As we all know, this rings quite hollow. Those other bums ruled for four decades, and they did not make much of a dent in the size or situation of the underclass.
There is, however, a much larger demographic challenge than the 330 million number.
India's workforce, even if we generously include the burgeoning American-accented but barely IT-literate Call Center workers, is perhaps 2 million strong. So, where does that leave the rest of the 998 million Indians? Leaving aside children, we are still talking of 500-600 million people for whom IT is as foreign as Redmond, Washington.
The year 2004 started in India with the top politicians declaring the advent of a strangely-named "feel good" revolution of rising expectations and consumption. The opitmists hope that this Ladder to the ITES (Information Technology Enabled Services) Heaven will continue to shoot up to the ether and beyond, pulling more and more Indians up the India Shining rungs of this ladder.
Yes, colleges are exploding and technical graduates in 2010 could be double the number in 1995.
But in the demographic cauldron that is India, these IT-trained numbers will melt into the workforce without much of a trace.
Yes, even the illiterate farming family now dreams of educating some of its children for good jobs in the cities.
Yes, the notorious Trickle Down theory so favored by Ronald Reagan will come into play, but the trickles will be absorbed quickly into multitudes of India's exploding demographic centers -- the cities.
The educational revolutions and the income-lifestyle revolutions will be slurped and soaked up by the parched demographic sponge that we call India. For the half-a-trillion on the wrong side of the digital divide, there are no easy answers.
Picture this: The Ladder to the ITES Heaven has its upper rungs stretching into a misty ethereal Paradise of Pleasures. But look, there are no lower rungs of this ladder planted firmly on India's rural soil! This is a floating ladder, not the fabled beansprout that Jack planted, which stretched from strong roots in the earth all the way to the moon!
Nik Dholakia
Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Offshoring as a Cultural Conduit
New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman was visiting a software maker in Bangalore India in February 2004. The CEO of the Indian firm said to Friedman to look around the office in Bangalore: "All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent. The air-conditioning is by Carrier, and even the bottled water is by Coke..." wrote Friedman in one of his February 2004 NYT op-ed pieces after observing this office in India.
So, is outsourcing to foreign shores, or "offshoring" as it is often called, just an American corporate ploy to create new markets for American goods in developing nations such as India, China, and Vietnam? Is it in fact the backdoor Trojan horse for propagating American culture?
Such an assertion would be either cynical or it would grant an overly prescient quality to America's foreign economic policy.
That said, it is clear that offshoring has a strong cultural component. In any offshoring process originating from the United States, some aspects of American culture are transplanted abroad. Why? Because offshoing entails slicing the business process and reenacting that slice of the process abroad. In such reenactment, some cultural elements that are concomitant of the business process also get reenacted aborad. Business processes, especially service processes, are saturated with culture -- pieces of service pound cakes soaked in the American cultural rum. After all, answering the telephone from Delhi in an American accent requires a good degree of Americanization of the worker abroad.
Such cultural flows have happened in the offshoring of manufacturing industries for decades and of extractive industries for centuries. But in the offshoring of services, the cultural flow is much stronger. After all, a service is almost entirely created and delivered by humans, with some assistance by technology. Especially if such a service has interpersonal qualities, then the service worker abroad is exposed to yet another cultural influence: the voice or the email writer at the other end, in America.
In the case of services, insulating the local culture from foreign influences is far more difficult than in the case of manufacturing, and similarly manufacturing has far more cultural impact than extractive or agricultural work.
The "banana boat" of contemporary globalization brings the "service bananas" to USA while silently shipping cultural slices of All-American Apple Pie abroad. And, unlike the slow moving ocean boats, the "banana boat" of service and software globalization moves at a lightening speed, on telecom and Internet backbones.
In fact, "offshoring of jobs" -- a hot political potato of the 2004 Election Year America -- is also the cultural "invasion of the body snatchers" of this century, where Asian bodies are being abducted surreptitiously and impregnated imperceptibly by American Culture. Of course, this creates cultural anomalies, even clashes, in those exoting foreign offshoing lands. But money washes over and colors everything. Heck, what's wrong with some Americanization if it helps fatten up the pay packet at month end?
It is thus not American jobs going abroad. Rather it is the cloning of Americans abroad.
Now, if only a U.S. constitutional amedment can be passed to give American voting rights to these newly cloned quasi-Americans, then the political defenders of American capitalism would have no worries. They would get voted in, year after year, by the new "Amerindians"!
Nik Dholakia
So, is outsourcing to foreign shores, or "offshoring" as it is often called, just an American corporate ploy to create new markets for American goods in developing nations such as India, China, and Vietnam? Is it in fact the backdoor Trojan horse for propagating American culture?
Such an assertion would be either cynical or it would grant an overly prescient quality to America's foreign economic policy.
That said, it is clear that offshoring has a strong cultural component. In any offshoring process originating from the United States, some aspects of American culture are transplanted abroad. Why? Because offshoing entails slicing the business process and reenacting that slice of the process abroad. In such reenactment, some cultural elements that are concomitant of the business process also get reenacted aborad. Business processes, especially service processes, are saturated with culture -- pieces of service pound cakes soaked in the American cultural rum. After all, answering the telephone from Delhi in an American accent requires a good degree of Americanization of the worker abroad.
Such cultural flows have happened in the offshoring of manufacturing industries for decades and of extractive industries for centuries. But in the offshoring of services, the cultural flow is much stronger. After all, a service is almost entirely created and delivered by humans, with some assistance by technology. Especially if such a service has interpersonal qualities, then the service worker abroad is exposed to yet another cultural influence: the voice or the email writer at the other end, in America.
In the case of services, insulating the local culture from foreign influences is far more difficult than in the case of manufacturing, and similarly manufacturing has far more cultural impact than extractive or agricultural work.
The "banana boat" of contemporary globalization brings the "service bananas" to USA while silently shipping cultural slices of All-American Apple Pie abroad. And, unlike the slow moving ocean boats, the "banana boat" of service and software globalization moves at a lightening speed, on telecom and Internet backbones.
In fact, "offshoring of jobs" -- a hot political potato of the 2004 Election Year America -- is also the cultural "invasion of the body snatchers" of this century, where Asian bodies are being abducted surreptitiously and impregnated imperceptibly by American Culture. Of course, this creates cultural anomalies, even clashes, in those exoting foreign offshoing lands. But money washes over and colors everything. Heck, what's wrong with some Americanization if it helps fatten up the pay packet at month end?
It is thus not American jobs going abroad. Rather it is the cloning of Americans abroad.
Now, if only a U.S. constitutional amedment can be passed to give American voting rights to these newly cloned quasi-Americans, then the political defenders of American capitalism would have no worries. They would get voted in, year after year, by the new "Amerindians"!
Nik Dholakia
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Silk and Seduction
Quick, what is wrong with the following seduction scene?
“He turned the key and let her into the softly lit living room. She kicked off her Taiwanese black suede pumps and curled up on the buttery-smooth American leather sofa. He flicked the remote and the sleek French-made flat panel video screen came to life, with the soft pulsating beat and images of the latest Vietnamese New Age music video. As he poured the fine Chinese cognac into the voluptuous Canadian crystal goblets, she picked up the glossy Russian fashion magazine on the center table and started turning its pages…”
Well, apart from what is likely his totally ham-handed approach (we males know this), it is quite obvious what is wrong in this scenario.
Taiwanese pumps? American patent leather sofa? French-made flat panel TV? Vietnamese music video? Chinese cognac? Canadian crystal goblets? Russian fashion magazine?
Even the ultra-frenzied globalization of today has its cultural boundaries, and these are being flouted flagrantly in the scenario that I just laid out.
Rather than the expected cultural fluidity, globalization has in some ways hardened cultural categories.
The world has become simpler in cultural terms.
America goes Pop. It is the land of everything pop culture: music, movies, clothing, etc.
Europe, specifically EU, goes Haute. It is the zenith of high culture, from perfumes to scarves to cuisine to liquor.
Asia goes Gadgetry-Tech. If it has buttons and black matt finish, it must be made in Asia.
As affluence mounts in the newly rich parts of the world, especially Asia, these hard-as-rock cultural categories become unyielding. Over 70 percent of the super-premium Scotch whiskey and French cognac flows into (of course hand-blown Europe-made) goblets of affluent Asia. For the Asians a notch below, American media provide entertainment as they munch on American fast food. Then, the next morning those KFC-munching working class Asians go to work in the factories of those rich cognac-sipping Asian capitalists turning out the black matt digital cameras, DVD players, and flat panel TVs for the homes of America and Europe.
Globalization? What globalization? The only thing that has changed from the days of the Silk Road is that now the silky smooth finish appears on those black matt gadgets as well.
Nik Dholakia
“He turned the key and let her into the softly lit living room. She kicked off her Taiwanese black suede pumps and curled up on the buttery-smooth American leather sofa. He flicked the remote and the sleek French-made flat panel video screen came to life, with the soft pulsating beat and images of the latest Vietnamese New Age music video. As he poured the fine Chinese cognac into the voluptuous Canadian crystal goblets, she picked up the glossy Russian fashion magazine on the center table and started turning its pages…”
Well, apart from what is likely his totally ham-handed approach (we males know this), it is quite obvious what is wrong in this scenario.
Taiwanese pumps? American patent leather sofa? French-made flat panel TV? Vietnamese music video? Chinese cognac? Canadian crystal goblets? Russian fashion magazine?
Even the ultra-frenzied globalization of today has its cultural boundaries, and these are being flouted flagrantly in the scenario that I just laid out.
Rather than the expected cultural fluidity, globalization has in some ways hardened cultural categories.
The world has become simpler in cultural terms.
America goes Pop. It is the land of everything pop culture: music, movies, clothing, etc.
Europe, specifically EU, goes Haute. It is the zenith of high culture, from perfumes to scarves to cuisine to liquor.
Asia goes Gadgetry-Tech. If it has buttons and black matt finish, it must be made in Asia.
As affluence mounts in the newly rich parts of the world, especially Asia, these hard-as-rock cultural categories become unyielding. Over 70 percent of the super-premium Scotch whiskey and French cognac flows into (of course hand-blown Europe-made) goblets of affluent Asia. For the Asians a notch below, American media provide entertainment as they munch on American fast food. Then, the next morning those KFC-munching working class Asians go to work in the factories of those rich cognac-sipping Asian capitalists turning out the black matt digital cameras, DVD players, and flat panel TVs for the homes of America and Europe.
Globalization? What globalization? The only thing that has changed from the days of the Silk Road is that now the silky smooth finish appears on those black matt gadgets as well.
Nik Dholakia
Monday, February 23, 2004
Cyber Labor and Cyber Capitalists
With galloping globalization, everything moves -- news, entertainment, rumors, images, terror, money, capital, technology, knowledge, people. But everything does not move equally well, equally smoothly, equally fast, or equally freely. Almost every sensible person wants the global movement of terror, for example, to stop altogether.
Of all these things, those that can be converted into digital signs move the easiest and the fastest. No wonder it is media and finance that are at the center stage of globalization.
People, unfortunately, cannot be converted into digital signs.
In decreasing order, the ease/speed/freedom of movement of people diminish as we move from (a) diplomats to (b) tourists to (c) executives to (d) entertainers to (e) skilled labor to (f) unskilled labor to (g) refugees to (h) criminals. Immigration policies, especially of the rich nations, are particularly concerned about (e) through (h) in the preceding list. Many would like such movements to stop, or be so tightly regulated that they become trickling flows under intense microscopic scrutiny. Immigration hawks are also very concerned that people try to misrepresent their true nature in global movements: unskilled job seekers may claim to be political refugees, and skilled laborers may pretend to be executives seeking investment opportunities.
Internet and cyberspace have added new twists to the global movement of labor. With cyber labor, the laborer can remain rooted in her homeland. It is tasks that move digitally and instantly to the laborer. While the cyberspace technologies were not invented by Immigration hawks, they just as well might be! There is perhaps no greater friend of immigration opponents than Internet and allied technologies -- these technologies are more potent than guns, watch towers, guard posts, attack dogs, barbed wires, electric fences, and concrete walls. They keep those rushing hordes out, simply by removing their incentives to rush!
Of course, what the myopic immigration hawks overlook is the fact that as tasks move, so do money and knowledge.
Globalization based on cyber labor has barely begun.
Corporations would go to any length to slice and dice their value chains into tasks that can be digitally transmitted to India, China, Vietnam and the Philippines; and those *#&ingly stubborn non-digitizable tasks for which they must shell out $10-70 per hour.
Of course, many in the rich world are exercised and incensed about such callous corporate behavior, especially in an election year when indignant railing against such corporate behavior could pull in votes.
So, winds of protectionism begin to blow. But such winds are really metaphorical -- wafting digital signs that can flash across the planet. These winds of protectionism thus reach Bangalore, India in almost the same instant that they reach Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
So, what do those controlling or providing cyber power from locations like Hyderabad and Ho Chi Minh City do? Some of them turn into cyber capitalists in their own right, striving to build global businesses and global brands that are not susceptible to political ups and downs such as "backlash against outsourcing." Remember the money and knowledge that flew across the net along with the cyber tasks? These provide the starting fuel to the upstart cyber capitalists from distant exotic lands.
------
Given the immense success of "Lord of the Rings" movies, especially given their efficient global production planning, this idea is buzzing in my head...a biblical-mythical-cyber movie where this scraggly bearded Mel Gibsonish character raises his hands skywards and thunders: "O... What Hath the Net Wrought?"
-------
Nik Dholakia
Of all these things, those that can be converted into digital signs move the easiest and the fastest. No wonder it is media and finance that are at the center stage of globalization.
People, unfortunately, cannot be converted into digital signs.
In decreasing order, the ease/speed/freedom of movement of people diminish as we move from (a) diplomats to (b) tourists to (c) executives to (d) entertainers to (e) skilled labor to (f) unskilled labor to (g) refugees to (h) criminals. Immigration policies, especially of the rich nations, are particularly concerned about (e) through (h) in the preceding list. Many would like such movements to stop, or be so tightly regulated that they become trickling flows under intense microscopic scrutiny. Immigration hawks are also very concerned that people try to misrepresent their true nature in global movements: unskilled job seekers may claim to be political refugees, and skilled laborers may pretend to be executives seeking investment opportunities.
Internet and cyberspace have added new twists to the global movement of labor. With cyber labor, the laborer can remain rooted in her homeland. It is tasks that move digitally and instantly to the laborer. While the cyberspace technologies were not invented by Immigration hawks, they just as well might be! There is perhaps no greater friend of immigration opponents than Internet and allied technologies -- these technologies are more potent than guns, watch towers, guard posts, attack dogs, barbed wires, electric fences, and concrete walls. They keep those rushing hordes out, simply by removing their incentives to rush!
Of course, what the myopic immigration hawks overlook is the fact that as tasks move, so do money and knowledge.
Globalization based on cyber labor has barely begun.
Corporations would go to any length to slice and dice their value chains into tasks that can be digitally transmitted to India, China, Vietnam and the Philippines; and those *#&ingly stubborn non-digitizable tasks for which they must shell out $10-70 per hour.
Of course, many in the rich world are exercised and incensed about such callous corporate behavior, especially in an election year when indignant railing against such corporate behavior could pull in votes.
So, winds of protectionism begin to blow. But such winds are really metaphorical -- wafting digital signs that can flash across the planet. These winds of protectionism thus reach Bangalore, India in almost the same instant that they reach Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
So, what do those controlling or providing cyber power from locations like Hyderabad and Ho Chi Minh City do? Some of them turn into cyber capitalists in their own right, striving to build global businesses and global brands that are not susceptible to political ups and downs such as "backlash against outsourcing." Remember the money and knowledge that flew across the net along with the cyber tasks? These provide the starting fuel to the upstart cyber capitalists from distant exotic lands.
------
Given the immense success of "Lord of the Rings" movies, especially given their efficient global production planning, this idea is buzzing in my head...a biblical-mythical-cyber movie where this scraggly bearded Mel Gibsonish character raises his hands skywards and thunders: "O... What Hath the Net Wrought?"
-------
Nik Dholakia
Friday, September 12, 2003
User's Friend or Usurious Friend?
Experts in the automobile industry, at least those who are candid and honest, are quite clear about this. The automobile of today, despite all its high-tech trappings, is a nineteenth century device dressed up to look modern. Since the technology is decrepit and inherently inefficient, the cost of a car keeps going up every year while almost everything else that is manufactured is getting better and cheaper every year.
Wait a minute.... cheaper, perhaps...but better?
In the case of information technology, despite tomes being written and countless seminars and workshops, usability and user-friendliness remain huge barriers, yet to be scaled.
Imagine if you had a new rental car to drive every morning, with strange locations of all controls.. the gear shift, light switches, the wipers, the radio, the heater, the defroster, the mirror adjustments, and so on.
Well, turning on your PC every morning is a bit like renting a new car every morning. In the night before, those tech trolls in Redmond, or Santa Clara, or Bangalore, or Taipei, or Tel Aviv, or some similar place have strived to make things "better" for you. Your screen opens up to new downloads, patches, "improved" interfaces, "easier" navigation buttons, "friendlier" sound prompts, "exhilirating" animations and video clips, and so on.
But, despite all the strangeness, your strange new rental car starts up in a few seconds when you turn the key.
Try getting your computer to do that. No, we won't even talk about "flick-the-switch-and-the-light-turns-on" responsiveness from your mobile phone or your PC. Just give us our daily spam-free email bread, and a glass of water, and we will be happy.
So, why is IT not user friendly and is often usuriously fiendish? All the dollars you "save" in buying the IT gadgets with their plummeting prices... well, many times more "shadow dollars" are spent in terms of the hours and hours you have to spend dealing with such IT. The Moorish Law of fiendish IT user experiences easily clubs into submission the rightly famous Moore's Law of falling costs and prices of IT devices.
Yes, okay... but why is this the case?
The answers lie, of course, in the nature of information technology and the nature of the industrial-competitive culture that supports the development of such technology.
In the techno-industrial-competitive culture surrounding information technology, rewards go to those who innovate in the next, emergent arena rather than to those who fix yesterday's and today's problems.
This is of course in sharp contrast to the dinosaur auto industry where any make and model that does not start promptly when the key is turned, or whose brakes may or may not work depending on the "mood" of the vehicle, would be driven right off the planet. Attempts at adding the extra cup holder, the surround sound audio system, and the sexy spoiler are rewarded only after the ignition and the brakes work.
But even in the high-tech world, some industries (are forced to) behave differently. Imagine a pharmaceutcal company that launches a very unreliable drug for hypertension and then moves all its research energies into the next big thing: a highly uncertain way of controlling the spread of cancer. The FDA, the professional medical community, and the vigilant consumers provide enough checks and balances that such things do not happen -- for the most part.
Until there are such countervailing checks and balances, and until the reward mechanisms of the techno-industrial-competitive culture of IT change dramatically, we are doomed to crashing computers and signal-dropping mobile phones.
Kinda makes you nostalgic for the Model T (or at least the orginal Beetle Bug), doesn't it?
Nik Dholakia
Wait a minute.... cheaper, perhaps...but better?
In the case of information technology, despite tomes being written and countless seminars and workshops, usability and user-friendliness remain huge barriers, yet to be scaled.
Imagine if you had a new rental car to drive every morning, with strange locations of all controls.. the gear shift, light switches, the wipers, the radio, the heater, the defroster, the mirror adjustments, and so on.
Well, turning on your PC every morning is a bit like renting a new car every morning. In the night before, those tech trolls in Redmond, or Santa Clara, or Bangalore, or Taipei, or Tel Aviv, or some similar place have strived to make things "better" for you. Your screen opens up to new downloads, patches, "improved" interfaces, "easier" navigation buttons, "friendlier" sound prompts, "exhilirating" animations and video clips, and so on.
But, despite all the strangeness, your strange new rental car starts up in a few seconds when you turn the key.
Try getting your computer to do that. No, we won't even talk about "flick-the-switch-and-the-light-turns-on" responsiveness from your mobile phone or your PC. Just give us our daily spam-free email bread, and a glass of water, and we will be happy.
So, why is IT not user friendly and is often usuriously fiendish? All the dollars you "save" in buying the IT gadgets with their plummeting prices... well, many times more "shadow dollars" are spent in terms of the hours and hours you have to spend dealing with such IT. The Moorish Law of fiendish IT user experiences easily clubs into submission the rightly famous Moore's Law of falling costs and prices of IT devices.
Yes, okay... but why is this the case?
The answers lie, of course, in the nature of information technology and the nature of the industrial-competitive culture that supports the development of such technology.
In the techno-industrial-competitive culture surrounding information technology, rewards go to those who innovate in the next, emergent arena rather than to those who fix yesterday's and today's problems.
This is of course in sharp contrast to the dinosaur auto industry where any make and model that does not start promptly when the key is turned, or whose brakes may or may not work depending on the "mood" of the vehicle, would be driven right off the planet. Attempts at adding the extra cup holder, the surround sound audio system, and the sexy spoiler are rewarded only after the ignition and the brakes work.
But even in the high-tech world, some industries (are forced to) behave differently. Imagine a pharmaceutcal company that launches a very unreliable drug for hypertension and then moves all its research energies into the next big thing: a highly uncertain way of controlling the spread of cancer. The FDA, the professional medical community, and the vigilant consumers provide enough checks and balances that such things do not happen -- for the most part.
Until there are such countervailing checks and balances, and until the reward mechanisms of the techno-industrial-competitive culture of IT change dramatically, we are doomed to crashing computers and signal-dropping mobile phones.
Kinda makes you nostalgic for the Model T (or at least the orginal Beetle Bug), doesn't it?
Nik Dholakia
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
The New PINs: Dvision of Informational Labor
Extolling the virtues of division of labor in 1776, Adam Smith wrote about the great efficiencies that had been brought about to the process of making metallic pins, through the simple process of division of manufacturing operations:
"___ the way in which this [pin-making] business is now carried on ___ it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head: to make the head requires two or three distinct operations to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands___ I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed___. Those ten persons___could make among them upward of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of proper division and combination of their different operations. "
Well, the new pins are, inter alia, services rife with PINs (Personal Identification Numbers). One after the other, businesses in economically advanced countries, especially in USA, are looking at their business processes and wondering how to slice up the processes and how to outsource the more labor-intensive parts to those countries where such work can be done cheaply and efficiently. As Adam Smith pointed out over two centuries ago, it is not the overall skill and education of the worker that matters. The great efficiencies result from specialization in narrow tasks, and rapid improvements in these narrow task-skills over time.
So, you have college graduates in India poring over the details of USA's Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and training their ears to the multiethnic accents of American physicians. Why? So that they can listen to voice dictation files sent via the Internet by USA -based physicians and hospitals, transcribe these into text, and email back the transcriptions at one-tenth the cost of getting the same job done in the United States.
Sounds like 1776 all over again...
There are of course differences. Once the division of labor goes global, whether in manufacturing or informational labor, it sets into motion political forces that decry the loss of jobs, and economic forces that want to lower costs at any cost. Moreover, especially now, there are the voices of caution from the security apparatuses that worry about the vulnerabilities that arise from shipping intricate software and information-intensive tasks overseas.
So the Americans IT firms work furiously to automate processes so that some of the new "PIN work" can be kept home, partly as a mild political sop to the rabble-rousing pro-proletarian populist politicians, but mostly as a strong way of ingratiating their firms with the military-informational complex.
And the Indians work furiously to lower costs even further while upgrading their IT worker skills even more. After all, India is not the only outsourcing destination -- the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, South Africa, and Ghana are nipping at India's heels. And there is always China. That great global manufactory is in a massive phase of adding on a great global software-service industry. Yes, the world would eventually start taking MSL (Mandarin as Second Language) classes. But that is still decades away. Way before that happens, China is going to saturate perhaps a modest 10 percent of its population with ESL (English as Second Language) training, creating an over-100 million-strong IT workforce ready to take on any comers.
So, dear friends from rich nations, as well as my fellow ethnic Indians, have you practiced your Mandarin today?
At least get started with your new username and password in Chinese -- it is going to be your new PIN.
Nik Dholakia
"___ the way in which this [pin-making] business is now carried on ___ it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head: to make the head requires two or three distinct operations to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands___ I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed___. Those ten persons___could make among them upward of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of proper division and combination of their different operations. "
Well, the new pins are, inter alia, services rife with PINs (Personal Identification Numbers). One after the other, businesses in economically advanced countries, especially in USA, are looking at their business processes and wondering how to slice up the processes and how to outsource the more labor-intensive parts to those countries where such work can be done cheaply and efficiently. As Adam Smith pointed out over two centuries ago, it is not the overall skill and education of the worker that matters. The great efficiencies result from specialization in narrow tasks, and rapid improvements in these narrow task-skills over time.
So, you have college graduates in India poring over the details of USA's Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and training their ears to the multiethnic accents of American physicians. Why? So that they can listen to voice dictation files sent via the Internet by USA -based physicians and hospitals, transcribe these into text, and email back the transcriptions at one-tenth the cost of getting the same job done in the United States.
Sounds like 1776 all over again...
There are of course differences. Once the division of labor goes global, whether in manufacturing or informational labor, it sets into motion political forces that decry the loss of jobs, and economic forces that want to lower costs at any cost. Moreover, especially now, there are the voices of caution from the security apparatuses that worry about the vulnerabilities that arise from shipping intricate software and information-intensive tasks overseas.
So the Americans IT firms work furiously to automate processes so that some of the new "PIN work" can be kept home, partly as a mild political sop to the rabble-rousing pro-proletarian populist politicians, but mostly as a strong way of ingratiating their firms with the military-informational complex.
And the Indians work furiously to lower costs even further while upgrading their IT worker skills even more. After all, India is not the only outsourcing destination -- the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, South Africa, and Ghana are nipping at India's heels. And there is always China. That great global manufactory is in a massive phase of adding on a great global software-service industry. Yes, the world would eventually start taking MSL (Mandarin as Second Language) classes. But that is still decades away. Way before that happens, China is going to saturate perhaps a modest 10 percent of its population with ESL (English as Second Language) training, creating an over-100 million-strong IT workforce ready to take on any comers.
So, dear friends from rich nations, as well as my fellow ethnic Indians, have you practiced your Mandarin today?
At least get started with your new username and password in Chinese -- it is going to be your new PIN.
Nik Dholakia
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
Techlemma
The enormous power of information technology, especially the instantaneity and efficiency of getting tasks done, paradoxically creates its own dilemmas. When such technology fails, or is incomplete; or is corrupted, compromised, snatched away, or attacked, we are left helpless. This is a new, near-nihilistic level of helplessness. It is paralyzing to the extreme, and frustrating to the core.
Such paralyzing dependence on technology is new. Yes, such dependence has characterized all technologies that become popularly entrenched. But nothing, not even the automobile, has embedded so deeply and pervasively in the lifespaces of the information working class as contemporary IT has. Even electrical outages, such as the Great North American Blackout of 2003, are less paralyzing because atavistic memories of how to subsist without electricity can be summoned up. In fact, all you have to do is hark back to that camping or fishing trip in the wilderness. But with the IT-drenched lifeworld, there is nothing to hark back to. Carrier pigeons and horsedrawn stagecoaches are not pre-IT formats, in ways that a camping trip is a pre-electricity format.
IT transforms and redefines lifeworlds.
This irreversible escalation of vulnerability that IT brings about.... in the retro perspective of looking back from the next millennium, that would perhaps be the hot topic of salon discussions...
Nik Dholakia
Such paralyzing dependence on technology is new. Yes, such dependence has characterized all technologies that become popularly entrenched. But nothing, not even the automobile, has embedded so deeply and pervasively in the lifespaces of the information working class as contemporary IT has. Even electrical outages, such as the Great North American Blackout of 2003, are less paralyzing because atavistic memories of how to subsist without electricity can be summoned up. In fact, all you have to do is hark back to that camping or fishing trip in the wilderness. But with the IT-drenched lifeworld, there is nothing to hark back to. Carrier pigeons and horsedrawn stagecoaches are not pre-IT formats, in ways that a camping trip is a pre-electricity format.
IT transforms and redefines lifeworlds.
This irreversible escalation of vulnerability that IT brings about.... in the retro perspective of looking back from the next millennium, that would perhaps be the hot topic of salon discussions...
Nik Dholakia
Thursday, August 28, 2003
The End is Always a Beginning...
THE END IS ALWAYS A BEGINNING...
It has all ended.
The Millennium. The Soviet Empire. History. Postmodern Excesses. The Bottomless Cup of Coffee for a Quarter...
And yet, in the interstices of those technology-laced lifespaces and culturescapes... in those sloshing, moss-laden, brine filled cracks and crevices -- alternately saturated and drained by the ebb and flow of finanzkapital and political expediency -- resilient new beginnings are taking shape.
In the Tekzume blog, I will strive to present my interpretations and guidemaps of these spacetimes. Once the tone and character of the blog have identifiable shapes, then other selective members will be invited to join the Tekzume blog.
The commentaries, critiques, and connections in this blog stem from observations, personal experiences, research, introspections, and -- very importantly -- the flashes of insight and patches of enlightenment that emerge from friendships and intellectual discourses.
Visit often, and be a part of the beginnings..... the start of things beautiful, just, and peaceful.
The end is near... of forces that stifle new beginnings.
Nik Dholakia
It has all ended.
The Millennium. The Soviet Empire. History. Postmodern Excesses. The Bottomless Cup of Coffee for a Quarter...
And yet, in the interstices of those technology-laced lifespaces and culturescapes... in those sloshing, moss-laden, brine filled cracks and crevices -- alternately saturated and drained by the ebb and flow of finanzkapital and political expediency -- resilient new beginnings are taking shape.
In the Tekzume blog, I will strive to present my interpretations and guidemaps of these spacetimes. Once the tone and character of the blog have identifiable shapes, then other selective members will be invited to join the Tekzume blog.
The commentaries, critiques, and connections in this blog stem from observations, personal experiences, research, introspections, and -- very importantly -- the flashes of insight and patches of enlightenment that emerge from friendships and intellectual discourses.
Visit often, and be a part of the beginnings..... the start of things beautiful, just, and peaceful.
The end is near... of forces that stifle new beginnings.
Nik Dholakia
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