As some of my regular readers may have noticed I have moved my blog to using Octopress. How this happened was a bit of an accident that emerged from a yak shave this weekend. I had been wanting to get a VPS solution where I could use tmux and vim to host remote programming tasks.1 I had been kicking around the idea of getting off of my Wordpress blog and moving to a site whose content was statically generated (like Jekyll). The advantage of using dynamically-generated static sites is that they are not subject to cratering under heavy load thanks to no dependence on a database.

What is it about tech conferences that makes individuals who work in a highly cerebral and reflective industry like software development go quite so nuts? Why the oral sex jokes, the thong-model backgrounds on slides, etc.? And why are the sponsors so willing to bring out Hooters girls or hire go-go dancers at their events?[1] In short, why does the tech conference misbehavior look so much like the hormonal, puerile misbehavior associated with Spring Break misbehavior? I believe that a contributing force rarely mentioned is the way conventions and their host cities (intentionally or not, tacitly or not) market the host city’s “vice” industries as a selling point[2].

I recently heard Parag Khanna on the A16Z Podcast and I was sufficiently interested that I bought and read “Connectography.” In this post I’ll give an review of the book qua book and also cover an outline of its big ideas.

Note:

In subsequent posts I explore some of those ideas further:

• [Connectography and Refactoring][cf]

Connectography

It’s the Hegelian in me: I love a Europe-coming-to-know-itself through history (and economics) master narrative book. I’ve found the most predictive book for the last 15 years of economic and global theory has been (Marxist) Hardt & Negri’s Empire. Empire predicts a move to a global communist panacea only after global capitalism (i.e. multinationals) guts and obviates the nation-state. Accordingly to understand capital’s progression to this end, we should listen to the most passionate global capitalists.

In the early part of the aughts I found the leading writer on the topic to be (capitalist) Tom Friedman, NYT Op-Ed columnist and author of The World is Flat. While Friedman always had big ideas, I found his over-emphasis on who he knows and anecdotes a bit sloppy and frankly, taxing. Like Hegel, Friedman’s work benefits from being read at a swift clip: he’s meant to be enjoyed like the Romantics: with loud thundering emotions and sweeping torrents of vision.

Khanna offers an update on Friedman’s work but with considerably more economic data. While Friedman was occasionally insufferable in mentioning where he had lunch and with whom, Khanna’s core critical ideas occasionally get lost in maps or exhaustive detailing. Given a choice, I’ll take Khanna’s approach and take the data versus the Friedman’s social itinerary, but we lose sight of many of his core pillars in the sea of details about Malaysian trade agreements.

The big ideas I extracted from 390 pages follow:

[Khanna suggests][prev] that the over-large nation-states of the 19th and 20th centuries - many of which were created by the fiat and bureaucracy of the British Empire or other colonialist machinations - be “refactored” in line with the “SOLID” software design principles. In this post I take the SOLID principles and try to transform them into the language of national identity establishment.

SOLID and Refactoring

In my [previous post about “Connectography”][prev] I noted that one of Khanna’s Big Ideas is that:

Many nation-states are held together by fiat or tradition but have no real internal attraction to one another: we should let these break apart or break them apart e.g. Iraq, Yugoslavia.

As a programmer I knew exactly what Khanna was saying. How many times did I, as a beginner in object-oriented programming, allow a class to stand unchanged because its functions had “always gone together?”

I began steering away from those negligent practices when I learned the [SOLID principles][SOLID] listed by “Uncle” Bob Martin. These five simple dicta set a new bar for how (new) code ought look. But how to go about fixing the historical messes? For that, I read Martin Fowler’s book [Refactoring][] where “refactoring” is described as:

…a controlled technique for improving the design of an existing code base. Its essence is applying a series of small behavior-preserving transformations, each of which “too small to be worth doing”. However the cumulative effect of each of these transformations is quite significant.

Source

Having learned from both of these inspirations I was able to methodically pull apart complexity and limit its creeping in. So in software, so, too, in nations.

One of the points Parag Khanna brought up in “Connectography” is that mobility is a key to keeping influential cities thriving. The pointed example he pitches (around page 122) is that of the city of Detroit (a city I love) which, at one time, was the wealthiest city in America. As the automobile industry slackened, the talent largely stayed put hoping that patriotic sentiment (“BUY AMERICAN”) or trade protectionism would restore their coffers and their civic trajectory. That, of course, did not happen. Hondas and Toyotas were bought by the boatful and the future for Detroit diminished with each bill of lading.

But is there a lesson for us that we can take from this error? Let’s take a look at the systems they had built in the early 80’s in Detroit:

• early robotics-based industrial work
• industrial development practices expertise
• labor facilitation expertise

In 2016 all of those skills are valuable expertise that are, in essence, locked in an old industry and which will share the fate of it (lest they find a way to unbundle themselves).

But what might have history looked like if the experts had realized that their host incubator was not necessary to their success earlier?

• …WHAT IF those engineers who built the assembly lines had encoded better logistics systems in software (to rival Germany’s SAP)
• …WHAT IF those engineers who built auto-assembly robotics had roboticized the port of SF, the port of Oakland (there might be dock work in SF), been influential in the upgrades to the Panama Canal, Corpus Christ’s port, the Nicaragua canal?
• …WHAT IF….that expertise had allowed the first generation of port (re-)builders to win contracts in central America in the late 90’s instead of Chinese competitors in the 2010’s?

If that were the case I could imagine many snowy Monday mornings in Detroit leading to direct flights to Managua, Corpus, or linking to a hop to Shanghai. And the reverse could be true as well: Detroit could have become the home of process optimization, industrial flow analysis and the flights (and capital, and residents) would be flowing in to offset the decline in automotive manufacturing dominance.

Based on my reading of Khanna there are two principal institutional changes that could have helped and one cultural change. Ease of mobility, ease of spot education, and the unwinding of American exceptionalism. I’ll start with the last first, after the jump.

I recently migrated my blog from Octopress 2 to Octopress 3 and thought I’d provide a write-up on the migration process. The process covers changing over with the least amount of fuss. I provide code to help automate things as well as code to help sanitize your data. This process can be completed in 6 steps. Background Jekyll is a static-file publishing platform. It’s designed to help you create a “Plain Old Web Site” with consistent look and feel. You write a plain-text document of content, run a program, and Jekyll wraps the page with template styling, footers, headers, etc. It helps turn “a heap of text documents” into a coherent site.

Methinks the machine translator needs some more training.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that I have an accumulation of tech memes: jokey one-liners about programming and programming languages. I’ve stored them all here.

A while back, while we were both looking for work, one of my friends sent me following, which includes an autocorrect error:

They would legitimately have a lot of user signal and data to process. It’s a bigger industry than the NFL.

Predicting the end of dominant paradigms or places is a cottage industry among “thought leaders,” so Tim O’Reilly’s recent post on “The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It”, came across my way with a large grain of salt. Nevertheless, his books business, and now more broadly electronic education business, has been a part of my life for the entire length of my career, so, a deeper look is certainly warranted.

Two key points:

Failure to Self-Regulate Means the Feds are Coming

In the case of social media platforms, manipulation of users for profit has frayed the fabric of democracy and the respect for truth. Silicon Valley, which once harnessed the collective intelligence of its users, now uses its deep knowledge of its users to “trade against them.”

The fatuous arguments from 1995 taken and reapplied in 2020 hearings for Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple are finally finding lawmakers who aren’t apt to be played. These companies are not “platforms” and their insufficient action against purveyors of disinformation needs to be registered and unacceptable in the future.

SV’s Tech-for-it’s-own-sake has Chased Small Potatoes Apps

SV has often pursued tech-for-it’s-own-sake and has often implemented it (or “sleeved”^* it) into businesses where it’s good, but not game changing. For all the graph traversal brilliance in Google or Facebook, the “sleeve” is still finding that person you lament you didn’t hook up with or that bully whose impecunity you want to verify and bask in from your veranda in Palo Alto.

But those same algorithms can be sleeved into science in a way that can make our lives better. The COVID-19 pandemic makes clear that the latent, under-rewarded leaps in life science have been literally civilization-saving. What would happen if the playing field for technology advance were not disinformation peddling, but gene research? Why would SV eschew life science sleeves for technology versus social networks? Simple. It’s easier.

Doing so would require:

deep knowledge of relevant science. The hubs where that knowledge can be found are not the special province of Silicon Valley, suggesting that other regions may take the lead. Second, many of the markets where fortunes will be made are regulated; navigating regulated markets also takes skills that are conspicuously missing in Silicon Valley. Finally, as Theranos demonstrated so vividly, it is harder to sustain a hype balloon in a scientific enterprise than in many of the markets where Silicon Valley has prospered. Many Silicon Valley investors have been lucky rather than smart. They may not do so well in a world where capital must be directed toward solving hard problems rather than toward winning a popularity contest.

Reading that, I could hear the technologists of Boston cackling with delight. The hub of life science research (peer to South San Francisco), home of MIT, and a short train ride from Manhattan’s ocean of cash might well call her children back to the Northeast.

Footnote

• *: “Sleeve” as a term from sci-fi referring to the “body” of a being. The implementations vary, but once computers can map a “brain,” the essence, the “soul” of a person and can re-inject it into a different body, bodies become little more than sleeves. Ugly? Get a pretty sleeve. Weak? Get a strong sleeve? Need to be a robot? Inject yourself into a mechanically powerful cyborg.

I’ve recently been remembering and exploring the “modem age” I was lucky enough to live through in the 90s. It shaped both my career and personal destiny. Ultimately all that was started by my using a modem to connect to my first bulletin board system or BBS.