Paper and Pixels

I walked into the Poets House in Battery Park for the first time in December, and realized that I wanted to spend more time there. At first glance I thought that Poets House was  beautiful, but also I didn't think there was much to do there. This was the instinctual response of 21st century  over-stimulation. There was actually a near infinity to discover in that very non-technological world of books. I went last week and read a translation of a Euripides play I had loved in college. I can’t wait to go back.

I am a techno- optimist, but am also conflicted when it comes to my rather nostalgic attraction to books and my passion for technological progress. I would not want to live in any other time. In fact I am one of the 1% of the population who feels that life in the future will be significantly better than the past. In terms of literature, I write poems on anything that is around, whether it is a napkin, a notebook, my laptop or even if I really can’t find anything else, my I-Phone. The tech and the poetry seem unrelated. I was a very early adopter of the Amazon Kindle, and have owned every generation. At a conference I met one of the founders of E-Ink, and I sincerely told him how e-reading has changed my life. Strangely though, I think I haven’t been completely honest with myself. I didn't realize this until I read this quote by the Technology oracle Tim O’Reilly (who has a blog and podcast that i really like) in a Wired Magazine interview where he said,

“I don’t really give a shit if literary novels go away. They’re an elitist pursuit. And they’re relatively recent. The most popular author in the 1850s in the US wasn't Herman Melville writing Moby-Dick, you know, or Nathaniel Hawthorne writing The House of the Seven Gables. So the novel as we know it today is only a 200-year-old construct. And now we’re getting new forms of entertainment, new forms of popular culture.”

His facts about the age of the novel are right of course, but a counter argument could be made that the novel is much older than computers, the internet or the cell phone. Would he have the same dismissive feelings towards Turing, or Jobs, or Berners Lee? Would the comment

“I don’t give a shit if computers die.  They are only 50 years old, and it is elitist anyway, as poor people can’t buy them.”

This is rather extreme of course, but progress can be measured in slow motion adaption like evolution, or in rapid frame leaps of insight like Moore’s Law and Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns. These two things do not need to exclude each other, and I am not the only technology minded guy who feels this way of course. I am not certain that O’Reilly has such a complete lack of interest in a nuanced view of progress through knowledge, regardless of how it is gathered. He said in Edge.org just this week:

“Consider how in 375 AD, after a dream in which he was whipped for being "a Ciceronian" rather than a Christian, Saint Jerome resolved no more to read the classical authors and to restrict himself only to Christian texts, how the Christians of Alexandria murdered the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia in 415, and realize that, at least in part, the so-called dark ages were not something imposed from without, a breakdown of civilization due to barbarian invasions, but a choice, a turning away from knowledge and discovery into a kind of religious fundamentalism.”

This analogy could be used for a society who does not read Moby Dick for instance, as we could enter a kind of Dark Age of societal and introspective reflection.

The computer pioneer Danny Hillis made an interesting remark to this point when writing about search tools. In the near future, and to some extent now, what we read is guided by Google. Hillis warns that

“In the past, meaning was only in the minds of humans. Now, it is also in the minds of tools that bring us information. From now on, search engines will have an editorial point of view, and search results will reflect that viewpoint. We can no longer ignore the assumptions behind the results.”

Perhaps what he is saying applies to literature as well. If an advertising company becomes powerful enough to influence meaning, it can even more easily influence what we read. It is possible that literature can become buried in the abyss of pages with no hyperlinks, and even when it is discovered it is remastered by algorithmic editorial.

One of the best sci-fi novels of recent years is Rainbow’ End by Vernor Vinge. A friend who knows Vinge feels that he is one of the best at predictive fiction. In many cases this is actually a positive thing, as the near future of Vinge can be very exciting. In Rainbows End however there is a bit of a warning when it comes to mass digitization. Vinge does not point a finger at the non-destructive means by which Google creates the largest on-line library, but instead talks of a fictional corporation that uses a technique to digitize which involves shredding library books in order to preserve the content. At first thought this would not be so bad. Cloud servers are backed up, and in a way contain a perfection that the decaying paper which books are printed on don’t. The problem however is that a corporation doing the cataloging is making money some way, and if they are anything like Google or Facebook, advertising is a large part of this money making exercise. We might wonder how this is different than traditional ownership rights by traditional publishing houses, but it is not the same. A publisher and a book store sell a book, and a library loans books, or lets you read them. I saw this funny cartoon about Facebook which makes the same point about being led advertising companies.

I may very well seem old fashioned, especially as I was going through the stacks at Poets house reading bits of Eliot, and poems of Auden. It was a beautiful day, and when I opened those books, it could have been any year in American history. Yet there was a difference in my experience. I realized that everyone visiting Poets House that morning, including me, had our laptops open, and were using the free WIFI they provide. Though I can’t speak for everyone else, I wasn’t on Facebook, or checking Twitter, or even reading the news. I was instead looking up biographical information on the writers I was reading. I wanted to know what the authors were doing at the time they wrote specific poems. I wanted to know where they lived, or are living in the case of contemporary authors. I even wanted to find out how to contact those living writers to see if they wanted to have a coffee. I did all of these things, which without Google, Wikipedia and other online resources would be impossible. These are of course some of the same companies that may very well be making the print books I was enjoying obsolete. If I take this further, I can imagine 1 or 2 years from now having the same WIFI access, but not having to even leave the stacks to learn more. I could use augmented reality glasses or contacts, and do searches on the spot, as i guess i could already do on my I-Phone. As I will do this the work that O’Reilly considers to be irrelevant to modern life  may actually be more relevant personally than it ever was before. Moby Dick will not only be a grand story and allegory of beautiful prose, but technology will be nearly instantaneously creating a context for it, making it more powerful and personal than it ever would have been before. Most importantly though, it won’t be the changing world of on-line content that I will be experiencing. It will instead be yellowing bound sheets a paper, with all of the fixed words and romantic imagery that they bring to mind.

The New Local

(disclaimer. This blog was typed from Germany on a German keyboard. I am sorry for any errors)


I remember the first time that I was asked where I was from and got confused. It was 2004 at a conference in Koln Germany. You wouldn't think that this would be a tough question to answer, but I found that my difficulty to answer said something incredibly promising about the world we lived in. Here was the confusion. I was married, and my wife lived full time in New York. I worked for my family business called Tech Pro which was located in Summit County Ohio, so I spent part of the week there (where I rented a house) and part of the week in New York (where I rented an apartment). We employed up to 50 people in Ohio. I also was a co-owner of a new company that worked with Tech Pro in a German town called Bruggen. I spent one week out of every five there, and had taken a lot of time, and some pride in starting this with my partner Peter Day. My family business also had sales offices in 13 other countries that I visited often. For the first time in my life I truly felt like the cliched, but relevant “citizen of the world”. I loved this, as it showed that internationalism was no longer an artistic construct, or economist ideal as it was in the early 20th century, but was rather a reality of life.

Now times have again changed and we live in the most hyper globalized world in history, but with a strange reactionary tendency which seems to be at odds with the “citizen of the world” ideals which I so much cared about. We live in a Facebook and Google world, where we communicate globally. Strangely, however, there is a paradox, that we seem to be communicating about the importance of being local rather than global. This is seen in a number of places.


The first is in the buy local movement. While I see nothing wrong with buying local, and actually love the idea of supporting local businesses, the more formal movement does have the unfortunate quality of blinding many people to the value of international commerce. It is global trade, not local, which brings prices down, which makes the world more prosperous as a whole, and encourages technology. There are things that are just better when we collaborate globally, such as certain types of manufacturing, sharing of customs and work principles (think of the Toyota Lean manufacturing model which was Japanese), sharing of natural resources, macro and micro economic experimentation and much more. Even for those who support “buy local” for environmental reasons this can often be misleading as local for most of the United States is considered to be anything within 150 miles. To truck small amounts of goods this distance can often have a worse environmental impact than flying large quantities from other countries. As a solution to this, I do propose urban farming which is as hyperlocal as you can get. So you can see that I don't think everything should be removed from a tight community. In fact one of the greatest things about life now is the rapid rate of increase in urbanization which is better for everyone than rural or suburban living.


The other major place where being global has become controversial is in the recent US Presidential campaign. Talk of Bain Capital and the outsourcing of jobs has basically been a standard lie for both parties. Neither want to discuss the reality, taking instead the less substantive approach of avoiding the real issue. The reality is that we need to discuss the importance of a company's survival and when outsourcing is a good idea. We need to see when it has worked, and just as importantly when it has failed. What Romney should say, and actually Obama should agree with, is that there is not a one solution answer to where to place jobs. They should not always be local. That is a reality for a company's survival and ultimately in providing good jobs both in the United States and abroad. Both Romney and Obama know this, but it is politically incorrect to say it. What could be a politically correct and accurate follow up is that often experiments with outsourcing were not the best solution, and that companies are bringing jobs back to the United States when the conditions work out well.

This brings me back to my own identity. Where am I local to now? I live in Brooklyn, New York, and have a new business in Summit County Ohio that employees people who on average make over 50% more than the state average. That company also sells more internationally than in the United States. So to me I am a proud citizen of New York where I live and contribute by being a Dad and Professor, and to Ohio where I contribute by choosing to have a company and hire wonderful people there. I am still in my mind a “citizen of the world” though, even if that title is not en vogue. Something last night surprised me though. I have been giving TEDx talks in various places around the world. But I never considered, nor do i think TED would want, them to be considered local events in the way that only local topics, and a very small definition of local population would speak. Still there is a TEDx Akron coming up, which is in the same county where I grew up, and owned 2 businesses, including the current rapidly growing technology one. I was told by a friend when I asked about speaking at it, that she believed it was for locals. I said, rudely and defensively, that I am a local. (I did this from Germany and by e-mail by the way) I bring the coolest and best paid new jobs to the area. I use local banks, local patent lawyers, local accountants and our growing staff and I frequent local restaurants, stores and bars. We use local hotels constantly as well, because we are global. If I have to pick a place I am local to, Akron must be a contender, and certainly a place that should ask me to speak at a TEDx Akron. To be completely fair to my wonderful friend she is really great. She even worked with and advises our company (another example of us buying local) and she has helped change the landscape of the community. For me to talk about myself was as it sounds; selfish. She is nominated, rightly so, to speak at TEDx Akron. My worry however is not that I won't speak, which is absolutely fine. What worries me is that others like me, who have homes in New York or other places will not embrace my hometown (Akron) for starting businesses if they are perceived as outsiders, even by the very global TED community. I also worry that Akronites will see themselves as Akronites as a main definer of identity, which will prevent them from embracing globalization. I want everyone to eventually be citizens of the world. The world is too wonderful not to want that. This is not specific to Akron, but general to the ideas I mentioned before. We act more globally every day, but often seem to wish we were not. This is a shame, and should be acknowledged by communities and politicians, so that we can fully achieve the dreams that I had thought I had achieved for myself in 2004.

Innovating The Middle Class

In an interview for our company “Nanotronics Imaging” our new VP Ivan Eliashavich said something ,“15 years ago these ideas could not have been done.” His implication was that time had caught up with some ideas that we had, leading to an invention. In other words ideas often need other ideas to catch up for them to be valuable at all. This is something that is being hotly debated, as the United States is feeling the pain of high unemployment and low worker wages, and the fact that while new technologies may be life improving, they do not pay the bills for most people. Recently Tyler Cowen published an e-book where he claims innovation to be practically dead leading to stagnation in wages and employment. The counter argument to that was made along side his in a great PBS segment. When I wrote a piece about BF Goodrich 2 weeks ago, and how that company ended up employing over 50,000 people (and that was the smallest of the major tire companies) I did realize that the innovation factories of today don’t employee that many. In the PBS piece is was noted that the great social success of Twitter only employees 300 people. The PBS piece did admit to a lag time, where innovation in job creating type businesses may take longer, for instance nanotechology and biotechnology. I do agree with this. But what I am asking myself is whether it really matters that today is different than the industrial revolution, or even the 1950’s, and is there not perhaps a better opportunity that we need to embrace?

I have been a sucker for Michael Moore style nostalgia for 1950’s working class society. I grew up in a town, Akron, which was not so different than Flint. We had people living well, with good retirement plans, who were working class. This is great. What we always considered though was American lifestyle, and not world lifestyle. Suffering internationally was greater then than now. Starvation was prevalent to a greater extent than it is now, and while there were plenty of workers, new technologies were slow to come to market. I do want those days back so that the upper class/lower class gap doesn’t rise, but I don’t think that we can do it in that traditional way, and I don’t think we can do it without the rest of the world being considered. As my father said in a recent interview with me : “International is the new domestic”. In fact when I look at the blog I wrote about BF Goodrich, it wasn’t about those days in the 50’s, but instead about those days much earlier when a business was being born out of an idea, and some risk taking from backers. Right now there is more money available for BF Goodrich type people than ever, even though I do question the patience of those investors. There are also more entrepreneurs than ever. I don’t consider the major companies like Google who only employee 20,000 people to be insignificant, nor do I consider Twitter that only employee 300 minor. Where I do see a problem is that there really is room at the table of middle class employment for everyone when everyone is invited to that table.

This all coincides with Peter Thiel’s assertion that there is an education bubble. He has encouraged students to drop out of college to pursue entrepreneureal ideas. This is very controversial, and like the outlawing of burkas in France, my views on this change nearly daily. There is one part of this that does make sense to me, and that is the enormous amount of technology that exists that is not yet being used for many applications that is waiting for people to take it and do something with, which makes money and employees people. Rubber was that way for BF Goodrich, and hopefully computers and microscopes are that way for Nanotronics. It is tough to say if this will be enough, but it is encouraging. We have not reached this utopia where we have a level playing field, but eventually nationality, and even education will not be a factor, only the ability to connect the pieces of available technology, and find some of that available money to turn it into jobs.

An Open Apple a Day

Probably the most over debated topic of the last month has been about Apple computer culture versus a more open computing culture. I have wasted my time on this on a number of websites. I think that the reason I became so interested in this is because somehow I was trying to work out for myself some more fundamental questions about  technology, art and modern society in general, which just happen to come together in this particular debate. The broader discussion has not been so much about the I-Pad versus a range of existing and potential competitors, but instead deals with something that we all feel much more personally invested in; expression. The argument can be boiled down to two philosophies, which I now maintain are less transparent than we think. Apple philosophy is based on control and intellectual property. This can be seen in three famous ways; the fee based system for buying media content, the Apple Apps system which prevents any application not approved by Apple to be used and Apple’s choice to not support Adobe Flash. This has been portrayed as an opposition to Google which promotes a more open culture in most ways. My instinct was to oppose the Apple closed structure. After all I love the idea that anyone can develop anything. I like the idea of an open internet culture. The problem I find though is that neither model is completely satisfying, as the fruits of contemporary content and creativity are now lost on opposing business models, rather than the creations themselves. There are two examples, both of which are personally both frustrating to me. The first is scientific knowledge.

Yesterday I spoke at a seminar with 5 other speakers in Paris, all of whom work in a very similar field to mine, which is the physics of polymers. I left the meeting with one thought, which is that everyone should be required to go to a scientific conference, regardless of whether they are scientists. In this group, despite the daily work I do, or Ph.D. I have, I was challenged and confused. The basic science of my field is so complex that no matter how much I work in it; there is an infinity of knowledge to be gained. By the way, it is not irrelevant to this that polymers like plastic and rubber (the things we were presenting on) make up so much of our world. It may not be important for everyone to understand the models, equations and experiments that all of these scientists were working with, but to know that there are people working on them at least gives the possibility of a deeper appreciation for them.

This reminds me of the Apple Google debate because our debating is basically from an uniformed user perspective. We don’t know how Apple or Google do what they do. We use these products every day, and even debate the validity of the ideology of them without understanding how the engineers and business leaders at these companies manipulate data and perception in order to profit. This is not to say that they shouldn’t be profiting, just that it is hard to judge a particular philosophy as superior if we come from a place of ignorance. Even if we look at what we do know the situation becomes more complicated than at first glance. Apple makes their money by selling products, whether it is I-Pads, I-Phones, and computers, or paid downloads of music, movies, apps and books. How and who makes these may be secretive, but what it is we are buying is not. Google by contrast gives away most of what it has. Google makes money through advertisement. This may seem innocent enough, but all of the algorithms Google uses for everything from search to books are controlled by proprietary algorithms, which if they are serving their customer (the advertiser) will benefit their customer (the advertiser). This example is to point out the complexity of choosing a moral high ground and the basis of openness. It is also to say that we should all dig a little deeper because it is interesting and enlightening to do so.

The second point is not scientific or economic at its core, but rather artistic. I am reading the book “You Are Not a Gadget” by Jaron Lanierhttp://www.amazon.com/dp/0307269647 I am not sure how much of this book I agree with, but it is very thought provoking. One of the points he makes is a criticism of open computing culture in its ability to generate and promote originality. He mentions a belief that the last decade has failed to produce a unique musical style, which has not been true in one hundred years or more. I agree with this, even though it is impossible to quantify. Generally the access to music has been good for exposure, but has created such a mix and remix of styles that even new music sounds retro. That is not to say that there is not new music or new styles available. I work with a group called Wake Up! http://www.wakeupnyc.com I think is very new. The problem is how that will be perceived when there is so much to sample. It is a game of statistics. The more music that is available the more the average will be the same. The outliers will be ignored, rather than seen as visionaries. This applies to the Apple Google debate as well, since the two models of music distribution will push listeners in one direction or the other. Wake Up! Seems to be trying to be a part of both camps, which is what it must do in order to be responsible to its own mission. They are giving their music away for free by playing in parks, and on their website. They are also selling it on I-Tunes. My worry is that neither system is supportive of the new; the hive mentality or the micro managed authorities. This makes the struggle to get new music heard exiting, as the possibility exists to work with and without the system, but the problem of finding an audience more difficult, as there is a new paradigm which is more concerned with the system of distribution than with the content itself.

This is all to say that I, and many others on the internet, am spending too much time arguing about how something is presented to us, than what is being presented. We care whether it is advertiser, stock market, or consumer based revenue, rather than the technology or the content. I don’t have answers, other than that we need to think and listen in retro ways. That is we need to look at the technology not just as users but as scientists. We need to listen to music and make music like people who love discovering music that represents us best. We need however to take chances in new ways. We need to ignore the new common wisdom, rather it is Google “openness” or Apple “sleekness”, and focus instead on what we want to say, see and hear.