June 2012 Articles

No, commencement is life’s great ceremonial beginning, with its own attendant and highly appropriate symbolism. Fitting, for example, for this auspicious rite of passage, is where we find ourselves this afternoon, the venue. Normally, I avoid clichés like the plague, wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, but here we are on a literal level playing field. That matters. That says something. And your ceremonial costume… shapeless, uniform, one-size-fits-all. Whether male or female, tall or short, scholar or slacker, spray-tanned prom queen or intergalactic X-Box assassin, each of you is dressed, you’ll notice, exactly the same. And your diploma… but for your name, exactly the same.

All of this is as it should be, because none of you is special.

You are not special. You are not exceptional.

Contrary to what your u9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you… you’re nothing special.

In the last week or so, cyberwarfare has made front-page news: the United States may have been behind the Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran; Iran may have suffered another digital attack with the Flame virus; and our military and industrial computer chips may or may not be compromised by backdoor switches implanted by China. These revelations suggest that the way we fight wars is changing, and so are the rules.

This digital evolution means that it is now less clear what kind of events should reasonably trigger a war, as well as how and when new technologies may be used. With cyberweapons, a war theoretically could be waged without casualties or political risk, so their attractiveness is great — maybe so irresistible that nations are tempted to use them before such aggression is justified. This essay identifies some important ethical issues that have been upturned by these emerging digital weapons, which in turn help explain why national cyberdefense is such a difficult policy area.

A few years ago, DisneyWorld executives were wondering what most captured the attention of toddlers and infants at their theme park and hotels in Orlando, Florida. So they hired me and a cultural anthropologist to observe them as they passed by all the costumed cast members, animated creatures, twirling rides, sweet-smelling snacks, and colorful toys. But after a couple of hours of close observation, we realized that what most captured the young children’s attention wasn’t Disney-conjured magic. Instead it was their parents’ cell phones, especially when the parents were using them.

Those kids clearly understood what held their parents’ attention – and they wanted it too. Cell phones were enticing action centers of their world as they observed it. When parents were using their phones, they were not paying complete attention to their children.

I get it, Ms. Youngblood. And I agree with much of what you say, including this: Stop trying to force people to the next level. I could not agree more, and I have never said otherwise. We would have a big problem if everyone wanted to move into management. And I am sure that many people feel the same way you do about work being a means to an end. As you say, if you are meeting the requirements of the job, you have every right to embrace your mediocrity. The difference between you and most people, I believe, is that you know you are a mediocre employee. In fact, you defend it. Good for you. An honest, self-aware person. And I certainly agree that no one needs to be a “slave” to a company.

But I have rights, too – and not just my right to an opinion. As the owner of a business, I have the right to avoid hiring someone who only wants to do the bare minimum to get a paycheck. In fact, if I hire too many people with that attitude, I will be out of business. This is Capitalism 101, survival of the ttest. I operate in a very competitive market. I don’t have any patents, any special marketing magic, or any secret recipes. My companies can only exist and grow if they do a much-better-than-average job.

“If you don’t like how things are going, tell a different story.”

If fulfillment at work is not possible, for whatever reason, and if it looks like it really won’t change, accept the fact and ramp up finding fulfillment elsewhere. Work on that internet start-up idea on nights and weekends. Get home as early as you can to throw pots. Get up early and devote your time to the import/export idea that you have been fascinated with.

Let’s stipulate that Facebook is not a country, that real governments fulfill many more functions, and that people are not citizens of their social networks.

Nonetheless, 900 million human beings do something like live in the blue-and-white virtual space of the world’s largest structured web of people. And those people get into disputes that they expect to be adjudicated. They have this expectation in part because Facebook has long said it wants to create a safe environment for connecting with other people. (How else can you get people to be “more open and connected”?) But people also want someone to be in charge, they want an authority to whom they can appeal if some other person is being a jerk.

Except in this case, the someone really is a corporate person. So when you report something or someone reports something of yours, it is Facebook that makes the decision about what’s been posted, even if we know that somewhere down the line, some human being has to embody the corporate we, if only for long enough to click a button.

…But cooking also taps into something more primal: it’s one of the last jobs that still does what most of us don’t – make things. In this sterile, white-collar world, where meat comes from ShopRite and homes are built by “guest workers,” cooking is the last physical job many of us can relate to.

In fact, we’ve become voyeurs to the exertion our lives no longer demand. Every popular series about jobs has some physical component – Deadliest Catch, Project Runway, American Chopper, Dirty Jobs. Not surprisingly, no one fetishizes typing, even if it’s done loudly and with gusto. Digital desk jobs feel empty because they are empty. They deprive us of the very things that make us human: our five senses and the satisfaction of tangible output. It doesn’t have to be that way. Quietly, our bodies have been plotting a revolution. Winning it will take heart, guts and possibly, bacon.

But the Turing Test’s application is no longer limited to questions of artificial intelligence: Social scientists too are getting in on the action and using the test in a completely new way — to compare different human subjects and their ability to pass as members of groups to which they do not belong, such as religious and ethnic minorities or particular professional classes. With the Turing Test, sociologists can compare the extent to which subjects can understand people who are different from them in some way.

In the words of sociologists, what they’re now studying is called “interactional expertise.” The easiest way to understand what interactional expertise entails is to contrast it with a more common idea, contributory expertise. Contributory experts are the typical array of professionals (physicists, chemists, lawyers, economists, musicians etc.) who develop specialized knowledge and skill through formal education and long experience.

One of the most enticing possibilities for Facebook is helping businesses identify, cultivate and leverage customer advocates among its billion users. Facebook’s current challenges with Sponsored Stories are significant, of course. Identifying users who “like” an advertisement as advocates, without clear and explicit permission, violates the basic trust that real advocacy requires.

As Influitive CEO Mark Organ put it, “It would be like the phone company recording snippets of conversations about some product, and broadcasting that information, without context, to other people loosely affiliated with the people being recorded.”

But such missteps need not, and should not, be anything more than a stumble. The potential is too great for customer advocacy on Facebook. In addition to having a billion users, Facebook is establishing a distinctive identity, and carving out an especially valuable and timely niche, in the minds of corporate users: it’s where companies can become human in the minds of customers and prospects, where they can show their personality, where actual people (employees) can engage naturally in authentic conversations with customers and prospects that help build relationships – which are key to successful customer advocacy.

Compare Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page to the founders of Hewlett Packard and Intel, and you’ll nd a paradigm shift as to how the tech industry treats its customers.

The deep in ltration of digital information into our lives has created a fervor around the supposed corresponding loss of logged-off real life. Each moment is oversaturated with digital potential: Texts, status updates, photos, check-ins, tweets, and emails are just a few taps away or pushed directly to your buzzing and chirping pocket computer – anachronistically still called a “phone.” Count the folks using their devices on the train or bus or walking down the sidewalk or, worse, crossing the street oblivious to drivers who themselves are bouncing back and forth between the road and their digital distractor. Hanging out with friends and family increasingly means also hanging out with their technology. While eating, defecating, or resting in our beds, we are rubbing on our glowing rectangles, seemingly lost within the infostream.

…The [iPod] Mini had a worthy replacement - the ash-based iPod Nano - and it was likely that favorable price points for ash memory were a driving force in the new product. But why not milk it? The Mini had been on the market a year and a half and Apple was still having difficulty keeping the Mini in stock. Why kill a best-selling product?

I think the reason, and, more importantly, an emerging Apple strategy, was announced as part of the keynote. Steve spent multiple slides showing off the Mini’s competition, and, not surprisingly, it looked a lot like the Mini. So rather than letting them catch up, he changed the game.

If there was ever a moment where Steve Jobs tipped his hand regarding what drives him, it was this moment.

I had been warned.

When I decided to end my eight-year stint in Washington, D.C. and decamp to Los Angeles last summer, my friends in the capital looked at me like I had announced plans to eject myself into space. They rolled their office chairs toward my cubicle and pressed their hands to my shoulder at happy hours. Los Angeles residents are not like the rest of us, they said. These people were preternaturally tan. They drank their kale. If I moved there with my boyfriend in tow, they told me, I might survive. But I should not attempt to date in Los Angeles. Between dark basement beers during my last month in Washington, my friends presented me a phantasmagoria of single life in L.A.: It looked like skeletal Asian models pair-bonding with balding producers over low-calorie cocktails.

At the time, I wrote off the soothsaying as another symptom of what I had come to see as D.C.’s Stockholm syndrome–a coping mechanism for having settled for a steady, dull job in a too-small town with deficient natural lighting. In the year that followed, I’ve learned that my friends and I were both half right: Washington is for nesters, and Los Angeles is for loners, but this has little relation to our populations’ reputations for titanium SAT scores or prominent cheek bones. In fact, it has very little to do with the people playing the game, and everything to do with the way they are scattered across the board.