stevenberlinjohnson.com

My Political Forecast

I've been meaning to write something about the Obama candidacy for a while now, and just haven't found the time, so now that it's the day of the Iowa caucus I thought I'd just jot down a quick thought and prediction that I've been pretty convinced of for the past month. And that prediction is that Obama is going to win it all -- Iowa, the nomination, the Presidency. And I think it ultimately comes down to the fact that he is a rare combination in American politics, in that he is both the "emotional" choice and the "electable" choice. The whole concept of an Obama presidency is just intrinsically inspiring, particularly after the last two terms. And yet at the same time, all the polls suggest that he's the candidate who can beat pretty much any Republican in the field -- unlike Hillary. All the independents in my extended family would vote for him in a heartbeat, and they'd never vote for Hillary. Everything I've read suggests that this pattern is going to repeat itself all across the country.

Traditionally, we've always had to make a tradeoff between the emotional and the electable choices -- "Sure this Howard Dean campaign is exciting, but the guy's never going to win a national election, so let's go with the politically experienced war hero." But with Obama the two sets overlap: you want the guy to win, and he also has the best chance of winning.

So there it is -- we'll see where things stand tomorrow. (My Iowa prediction last year turned out to be dead right, for what it's worth.) The other thing I've been thinking is that it's entirely possible that the Clinton campaign is going to implode quickly -- it's entirely possible that she could start the primary season with back-to-back third place finishes which would be a stunning early defeat. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we had an Edwards/Obama race by Feb 6.

My Year In Cities

I've always liked Jason's "year in cities" recap that he posts at the start of a new year, so I thought I'd follow suit with my own list. Multiple visits are indicated by a number in parentheses after the city name. Interesting to see here that San Fran beats out DC (my original hometown and where my parents still live). Also, note that the multiple Vegas trips were all for speeches and not blackjack/strip clubs.

I haven't compiled this list in the past, but I think this would certainly be at least tied with the last year or two in terms of the volume and breadth of travel. (Both those years were book tour years, unlike this year, which adds at least six or seven cities to the list.) I can imagine that this data would be really interesting to look at over a twenty-year period, charting both the changes over time, and the overall distribution.

If you are a good friend of mine living in any of these cities, and I didn't manage to say hi on my way through, rest assured that my layover in most of these places was as short as humanly possible, given that my wife was at home with the three kids.

Brooklyn, NY
Washington, DC (6)
Grand Cayman
Helsinki, Finland
San Francisco (7)
Las Vegas (3)
Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida (2)
Orlando, Florida (2)
Palm Beach, Florida
New Brunswick, NJ
Indianapolis, IN
Minneapolis, MN
Boston, MA
Edgartown, MA
Los Angeles, CA
Manchester-By-The-Sea, MA
Clemson, SC
Pittsburgh, PA
Shelter Island, NY (3)
Providence, RI
Rochester, NY
Salt Lake City, UT
Birmingham, AL
Barcelona, Spain
London, UK
Chicago, IL
Montego Bay, Jamaica

The Rest Is Noise

Somewhat belatedly, I wanted to add my voice to the rising -- and not in the slightest bit atonal -- chorus of praise for my old friend Alex Ross and his amazing book, The Rest Is Noise, which just made the Times' list of the ten best books of 2007, as well as about a dozen other best of 2007 lists. I've known Alex since I was twelve, so call me biased, but I think the book has established convincingly what a lot of people have been thinking for a while now: that Alex is the best American music critic of his generation -- and not just classical music critic. (He has a great pop ear as well, for all forms of media, and actually turned me on to about half the TV shows that I celebrated in Everything Bad Is Good For You.)

The subtitle of the book is "Listening To the Twentieth Century" and in the opening pages, Alex explains that his goal is ultimately an account of the century "heard through its music."  But to my mind The Rest Is Noise is something slightly different, and maybe just as interesting. It's the history of a certain related set of sounds -- atonal, twelve-tonal, serial, dissonant, random -- that were more or less nonexistent in Western musical culture circa 1900 that became, if not dominant, then at least ubiquitous by the end of the century -- in classical compositions, Hollywood scores, indie rock, and countless other venues. In other words, it's the story of the rise of a certain sonic appetite for noise that would have been unimaginable to the ears of the late 1800s but that is commonplace today, in both low and high culture and all the middlebrow realms between.

What I find so fascinating here is the way Alex tries to explain how those sounds came into being -- by reaching out beyond the usual biographical explanations about rogue geniuses and rivalries between them, though he has plenty of great stories along those lines as well. In reaching for that explanation, Alex does in fact pull in much of the twentieth century: political upheaval, technological developments like the tape recorder, the tragicomic Hollywood migrations of the World War II era European intellectuals. He also dives down in several arresting passages into the neuropsychology of noise and harmony, explaining how the brain translates acoustic waveforms into such emotionally charged events.

About a third into the book, Alex has a telling line where he says: "The fabric of harmony was warping, as if under the influence of an unseen force." I think of The Rest Is Noise as an attempt to bright that force to light, and in bringing it to light, explain the way in which the force is actually composed of multiple intersecting elements, many of them working on different scales of cultural experience: from neurons to individual biographies to technological innovations to World Wars. This approach is one about which Alex and I -- sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly -- have been sharing ideas over the past decade. It's the approach I used in explaining (with much less erudition) the forces behind the Sleeper Curve in Everything Bad Is Good For You. I've called it various things, including systemic criticism or "long zoom" thinking, but to really understand the model in action, your best bet is reading Alex's book.

The other reason to read Alex's book is that he's got a mesmerizing ability to translate music into verbal imagery. Take this one description of Schoenberg's Six Little Pieces for Piano: "It is built  on a hypnotic iteration of the interval G and B, which chimes softly in place, giving off a clean, warm sound. Tendrils of sound trail around the dyad, touching at one point or another on the remaining ten notes of the chromatic scale. But the main notes stay riveted in place. They are like two eyes, staring ahead, never blinking." Practically every other page has descriptions this intense and visceral; you constantly want to put down the book and load up iTunes to hear all the elements that Alex has brought into your consciousness. (Thankfully, he's assembled an extensive listening guide of samples online.)

My other favorite little tidbit from the book: in the mid-sixties, while struggling to build a career for themselves as composers, Philip Glass and Steve Reich "briefly formed a company called Chelsea Light Moving and eked out a wage carrying furniture  up and down the narrow staircases of New York walk-ups." That's just awesome. I am so totally going to go out and start a band called Chelsea Light Moving.

Potholes and the Geo Web

We have a very cool new site design that's slowly rolling out this week at outside.in (along with an entirely new database architecture and other back-end refinements), and given that it's almost exactly a year since we launched the original prototype, I thought it was about time I tried to write out some of my thinking about the geographic web as it has evolved over that time. So I've written a little essay called "The Pothole Paradox: Why Building The Geographic Web Is Hard, and Why It's Worth Doing":

The idea of requiring geographic metadata for information might strike some people as excessive, but I suspect in a few years we will look back at the first decade of the web and be amazed that we went for so long without it. Think about it this way: both email and the Web depend on standardized location information embedded in every document -- we call them email and Web "addresses" for a reason. It's a virtual location, of course, but without that universally recognized location data, the last fifteen years of online innovation would have never happened.

We are also increasingly standardizing metadata for time. One of the things that is not commonly said about the blogging revolution is that it has introduced machine-readable time stamps for billions of web pages. One of the things that made Blogger such a breakthrough product was not that it made it easy to put up a web page and publish your thoughts -- home page building tools had been doing that for years -- but rather the fact that it let you publish a reverse chronological list of your thoughts.

So we have widely adopted metadata for virtual location and for time. We just haven't made the same breakthrough for real-world location. This has resulted in a strange imbalance in the way we interact with information on our screens, and in our expectations about what should be readily available to us.

Anyhow, there's a lot there, so check it out and let me know what you think!

OpenSocial

A few quick thoughts about OpenSocial. As you can see here, outside.in is one of the launch partners for the OpenSocial platform. In fact, our developer Christian Niles was out at the GooglePlex earlier this week for a last minute Hackathon before the announcement. We're going to have much more to say about our OpenSocial application in the coming weeks, but obviously the great promise here lies in combining those two big mega-themes of the past few years: the social graph (as you're now obliged to call it) and the geo-web.

Interestingly, we did not know until a few days ago that the APIs would extend to other social network platforms -- our guess was that it would live inside of Orkut, but that Orkut would become more tightly integrated with other Google applications, like Gmail. Obviously, we're thrilled that the platform is going to be as inclusive as it is. And what a brilliant move by Google. (I suppose as a launch partner, I'm biased, but still: what a brilliant move.) That $15 billion Facebook valuation got a lot of abuse over the past few weeks, but in a way I thought it made sense. Obviously, there was risk involved, but if you thought that Facebook had a reasonable shot at becoming "the social operating system of the Web", then it was probably worth making the bet -- particularly given that Microsoft had other reasons to invest. A company that runs the web's "social operating system" could easily be worth $50B or $100B. But that seems entirely impossible now, just a few days later, thanks to OpenSocial. If there is going to be a social operating system, it's going to be the open one that wins out.

And the open nature of the platform also makes it much harder for Facebook to exploit lock-in, since it will now be much easier for consumers to move over to the next, coolest social networking site. Thus far, the history of social networks sites shows that they are way more vulnerable to the whims of fashion than, say, search engines have been -- no doubt because teenagers and twenty-somethings have been their primary audience. By creating a bigger platform, Facebook was trying to fortify itself against this threat, but OpenSocial will likely accelerate the cycles of social network fashion. Big new networks will pop up every 12 months, instead of every three years.

Twitter

Okay, I caved. I'm twittering. Something about this trip to Europe made me finally sign up. We'll see how it turns out, but thus far it is pretty fun, though keeping to the 140 characters is pretty difficult for those of us who like to write 73 word sentences. I've got the last three posts running under the picture to the right, and you can follow me at Twitter.com/stevenbjohnson.

Literary Style By The Numbers

This may be old news to some of you, but I just noticed the other day that Amazon has added a whole panel of "text stats" for many of its books. I noticed it because my last book The Ghost Map just came out in paperback (go read it people --  it's a lot more fun than this post will turn out to be) and so I'm back into the swing of checking Amazon a few times a day. Text Stats is a pretty wonky page -- everything from some of the "readability" indices, to overall word count, to what Amazon calls "Fun stats" like "Words per dollar." (Quotes you never hear at Barnes and Noble: "This copy of Infinite Jest is such a bargain at only 39,574 words per dollar!")

But the two stats that I found totally fascinating were "Average Words Per Sentence" and "% Complex Words," the latter defined as words with three or more syllables -- words like "ameliorate", "protoplasm" or "motherf***er." I've always thought that sentence length is a hugely determining factor in a reader's perception of a given work's complexity, and I spent quite a bit of time in my twenties actively teaching myself to write shorter sentences. So this kind of material is fascinating to me, partially because it lets me see something statistically that I've thought a great deal about intuitively as a writer, and partially because I can compare my own stats to other writers' and see how I fare. (Perhaps there's a literary Rotisserie league lurking somewhere on those Text Stats pages.)

So I spent a few hours last week plugging in the numbers for my books, as well as a few other authors that I assembled in an entirely unscientific fashion: Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, Seth Godin, Christopher Hitchens -- and then, just to see how far I'd come, I threw in my intellectual (and, sadly, stylistic) heroes from my early twenties, the post-structuralist legends Michel Foucault and Frederic Jameson.  I compiled stats for 3-4 books for each author, except Gladwell who has written two, and then plotted them on a scatter chart, with  the y axis representing % complex words and the x axis representing words per sentence. The results were pretty fascinating:

Some observations:

1. There's a clear cluster of Hitchens/Johnson/Pinker in the center. (From eyeballing some other Amazon pages, I think Dawkins, Michael Pollan, E. O. Wilson would have been in that general area as well.) But what I thought was so striking was that even in that cluster, each author's books are closer to his other books than they are to the other two author's books. In other words, each of us has a certain sweet spot of complexity that we come back to book after book. My first and last books, Ghost Map and Interface Culture had the exact same words per sentence, down to the decimal point: 24.6. (My longest sentences turned out to be in Emergence, followed closely by Everything Bad at 25.8 and 25.7.) Pinker tends to be just slightly less complex syntactically (with the one outlier Blank Slate, which is more complex than anything I've written.) And Hitchens tends to write longer sentences by a couple of words.

2. Gladwell's sentences are fully 25% shorter than mine. I'm not sure if the average reader would notice the difference between the Johnson/Hitchens/Pinker cluster, but a 25% drop in sentence length has to alter the reading experience dramatically. Clearly, the only things separating me from selling ten million copies of my books are those extra 6.5 words per sentence.

3. Check out Foucault and Jameson. They are literally on another planet. The top spot goes to Jameson's "Postmodernism" book which I read like scripture my first year of grad school: 53 words per sentence! Interestingly, most of the variation shows up in sentence length not in word complexity -- you often hear people complain about the impenetrable jargon of critical theory, but it looks here like the sentence length is as least as much of a culprit.

4. I would love to see some stats on dynamic range here: not just average sentence length, but how much the sentence lengths vary over the course of each book. One of the things I learned when I started writing in a less academic style (largely when I was doing FEED) is the importance of throwing in a very short sentence for emphasis at regular intervals. (Come to think of it, I may have learned this from reading Gladwell's early pieces in the New Yorker.)

5. Is there a Literature grad school version of the Lazy Web? If so, I would love to see a study that cross-referenced sales and syntactical complexity across thousands of books and determined who had the highest sales-to-complexity ratio of all time.

6. After looking at the Jameson number, I went back to one of my papers from junior year at Brown to see how awful my prose was. I pulled up the scariest sentence in the first paragraph and did a quick word count: 75 words. 75! And no semi-colons either. I bet Fred Jameson's pretty psyched I never finished that PhD...

Apple Opens Up

It struck me yesterday reading Steve Jobs' personal note about plans for third-party apps on the iPhone that the most telling thing about the announcement was the opening five-word phrase:

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.

Let me just say it. What we're starting to see here (and of course in the anti-DRM letter from earlier this year) is a pretty significant shift in Jobs' public relations strategy, in that he seems to have recognized that there are limits to secrecy. Yes, some developments are best kept under wraps for as long as possible -- like the iPhone or the Intel switch -- contrary to all the principles of Web 2.0 openness and transparency. But with other decisions, you're sometimes much better off going public early, and exposing some of your thought process when you do. I had been thinking about posting something over the past week or two about the iPhone SDK issue, arguing that if Apple indeed was planning on opening up the platform sometime in the nearish future, there was absolutely no reason not to announce those plans -- unlike release specs for, say, the iPhone, keeping the SDK plans secret wasn't a competitive advantage in any sense, and it was bringing on a ton of ill will from people who would otherwise be iPhone fanatics.

But as it turns out, I didn't need to write that post, because Jobs decided to go public with Apple's plans, even if they weren't fully-formed. That suggests to me that he's still evolving as a CEO and as a PR wizard, still capable of adapting to new situations -- yet another reason for Apple's competitors to be nervous.

Here's my big question, though: I wonder whether Apple had the SDK as part of its plans all along, and merely changed its mind about whether to go public with it in response to the criticism -- or were they truly debating the merits of opening up the platform, and thus reluctant to say anything until they were 100% sure of their plans?

Wonderful essay by Andrew Blum about "Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change":

Jacobs fought modernist urban planning’s “dishonest mask of pretended order,” and what concerns me today about cities is a corollary: Call it the dishonest mask of pretended localism. Thanks in great part to Jacobs, we talk a lot about preserving neighborhoods, which most often means keeping them the way they are. But for me, preserving an urban community—not merely its architecture, its open space, or its independently owned stores—now means recognizing what the local is made of, the warp and weft of all its pieces, wherever they come from, near or far. And that requires recognizing the global community behind it—for better or worse, in the face of both nostalgia and change.

A Brief Outside.in Update

Some of you might have seen that we just closed another round of financing for outside.in, raising $1.5M this time from the same stellar group of investors. We've made a few great additions to the team, including some new folks on the business side of the operation who are making my life as CEO much easier. We spent most of the summer moving the site over to a new database structure (and to Ruby on Rails) which will let us do a lot of cool new things in the coming months. The new version should be live in the next week or so -- I'll post more about that when it goes up.