BEWARE LOVING THE INTERNET

I was surprised to see so little follow-up after reports last week in the New York Times about recent Russian naval activity around underwater internet cables. It said  “American military officials are concerned that Russia might be preparing to sever the communications lines in case of a conflict".

These fibre optic cables account for more than 95% of daily communications and financial transactions worth more than $10 trillion. In a world increasingly dependent on high-tech communications shouldn’t we be worried? Wasn’t the TalkTalk debacle a shot across the internet bows - even if the shot may have been fired from the pop gun of a 15 year old Irish hacker?  It seems the internet might be more vulnerable even than we’d thought. According to the magazine “Signal” a TechNet magazine which describes itself as “more than a magazine”, the main vulnerability is in the switchers and routers which can be overloaded in a cyber-attack. What would ensue would be the tech equivalent of “goodnight Vienna”.

The older you get, this Black Swan activity that Nassim Taleb describes becomes decreasingly surprising. The internet is a young entity cobbled together with no one in charge of it. In the early days of its existence French investors asked an American techie “who’s CEO of the internet?” Now, just 24 years after the Word Wide Web went live, the same question resonates even more strongly.

It’s the Wild West out there and something’s going to go wrong. A Russian, North Korean, Isis inspired or a freelance disruptive force will bring the infrastructure down. Think tech tsunami.  Now the reality of all this (which is culturally, technically and intellectually way beyond me) is that human resourcefulness, being what it is, this outage would be a serious but just a temporary blip not a long term catastrophe.

Nonetheless imagine the psychological damage first-generation- internet-dependents would suffer. This weekend Twitter suffered a series of outages over a twenty four hour period and   the woe that ensued from that was enormous.

Beyond these blips Twitter is discovering new problems. Its market capitalisation is around $20 billion yet its very existence is beginning to be questioned. Here’s what Caitlin Moran said - she’s the “columnist of the year.”

“Twitter promised access to a new global consciousness where we would have the dizzying thrill of hearing voices we’d never heard before. The reality is that it has ended up sounding like everywhere else. Except …nastier”

She called Twitter the global Town Square. Yes we used to have those where people like my Grand Dad might have said something apparently true….

“If the trees be in leaf on November the 1st
The winter that follows will be one of the worst”

Now just because it sounds plausible (or it appears online) don’t lazily believe it….question it. And don’t delegate your entire life and mind to an infrastructure so vulnerable to collapse. Imagine a world without the tyranny of technology.

I regard this (like Signal) as “more than a blog” but with more of a smile.

I CAN SEE FOR MILES AND MILES

The memory of the Who’s 1967 hit fills the head of any futurologist who wants prove their infallibility. But it isn’t really like that. Look at those economists who thought the US property boom would last forever.

Justin King who used to run Sainsbury’s once said derisively that the High Street was over and out-of-town was the future.  Everyone from Lord Beeching onwards was wrong in predicting the demise of trains.  And the book (a paper David to the Kindle Goliath) is making a remarkable recovery from the literary morgue.  Even records in their own small way are on the way back.

From learning Latin in school to the seeming forever price decline of oil, nothing is any longer impossible. No trend is irreversible. The future is opaque and turbulent.

Which brings me to the internet.

I was phoned by a very senior guy from a big multinational last week to say he’d been to a talk by someone from the Harvard Business School about the future of technology. He laughed and said I was so out of touch - all quill ink and parchment - but that even he and probably his 15 year old son were off the pace too. It could have been Dave Eggers that was talking as  in his book “The Circle”, a fantasy of the future of the web and the end of privacy.

I mildly said this was probably wrong, that technology had a curious tendency to self- consume and that irreversible, bet-your-house-on-it trends had a nasty habit of leaving you homeless.  The internet is obviously wonderful and has changed a lot of lives for the better. Yes, it has served its original purpose of sharing knowledge generally to great benefit but its frailties are equally obvious - a force for evil as well as good as ISIS is showing.

Andrew Keen has written a book entitled “The Internet is not the Answer”. In his most recent blog he says “Be afraid, be very afraid.”   Be afraid that the internet is a winner-takes-all market leading to monopolies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.

 Be afraid that usually the nastiest people in business seem to be the owners of the space

Be afraid of Wikipedia as a knowledge source.

Be afraid of the virtually unchallengeable assumption that this is the only future there is so we naysayers had better shut up because they’re right and we’re wrong.

Well not necessarily.

Here’s another scenario.

A perfect storm erupting of persistent cyber terrorism, of critical systems failures and of the internet equivalent of a virus that’s a cross between Ebola and bubonic plague. All simultaneously.
Imagine in short it’s time for the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, megalomaniac geeks without any good on their minds.

Then the internet might prove not to be the answer at all just a messy problem; like 2008 but worse.
And the problem and the answer would, ironically, be the same thing.

IT SHOULDN'T BE THAT COMPLICATED

But of course it is complicated because people, who are the mystery ingredient, manage to screw it up. That’s why Jack Welch at General Electric was so keen on trying to computerise the customer interface….complete madness as nearly everyone I know would rather deal with a real idiot than a perfect computer.

Recently Russell Brand was doing a gig and reportedly, as the saying goes went “off on one”,  as he does. No one knew where his lament about modern life was going, least of all one suspects Russell, but he concluded that in the midst of modern life his cat still didn’t realise the internet existed.

Which is a shaft of brilliance.

In the techno-muddled-see-you-on-the-cloud life of today our clever pets are immune to the fibre optic stress the human race is struggling with.  And then I was struck down with a nasty dose of humility as I watched Welsh sheep farmer Kate Humble (and “humble” was an appropriate name) visiting the Wakhi people of North East Afghanistan. Hard lives, tough farming, life expectancy 35, 20% of babies die before the age of one, diet mostly rough bread and milk or a cheesy ball unappetisingly called “krut”.

Asked whether he saw this hard lifestyle would continue, the reply from a local farmer was splendidly candid and articulate:

“What else can we do? We are illiterate and we need to earn money to survive. This is hard but it works”.

And it did, with a brilliant welfare system of looking after each other and with work being described as “having something to do”.

Who are we to judge pets or humans when they make their own way with such resilience and independence of spirit? And what struck me strongly was, no, not a yearning for krut but a desire for simplification. All the news is about complexity, vested interests and what the Wakhi farmer called “bad stuff”.

Ron Ashkenas of the management consultants Schaffer preaches the need to simplify and does so with passion. But it isn’t easy because the more sophisticated people get the more Byzantinely complex are their solutions. I sometimes think HT and IT combined are the architects for long cuts in life and spiders’ web thinking leading to great debate and greater inaction.   It takes crisis and simple objectives, like survival, to force issues like simplicity and I heard it on a charity appeal on Radio 4. The idea was send a cow to the poor of Africa. The idea of a cow =a trade-able asset generating regular milk and therefore cash flow is simple.

And as they applauded “simple solutions to tough problems.”

Solutions that, say, cats would understand.

And as it’s put on my website “I like cats because they know where they are going”.

Which is more than you can say for most of the rest of us.

www.colourfulthinkers.com

THE HELICOPTER WORLD OF MONETISATION

The occasion: The London Business School Summit on Technology and Media 25/02/11
The speaker: Dr. Bobby Rao, ex Vodafone Marketing Director, now founding partner in Hermes Venture Partners.

We’ve all had that moment. One of sheer unbridled hatred of the cleverest boy in the school. Who gets all the prizes; who gets all the girls. That’s Bobby. The coolest and most suave presenter I’ve seen.

1. We are living in the midst of a game where we are all asking “where’s the ball?” Because there’s been a collision of three markets: the internet; media; consumer electronics - between them worth $3 trillion.  And the legs of each has been kicked away.
   
2. Historically media has thrived on scarcity – now through digitisation, high speed Broadband and the low price of storage, scarcity is over.
   
3. You can fight scarcity by focusing on live events. Or you can go for quality (iPad and iPhone). Or you can monetise the new usage occasions there are.
   
4. But recognise this is a new personal market meaning advertisers must really understand individual people. So who has got the best information? That’s why Facebook is valued at c. $70 billion.
   
5. Yes that’s what Bobby used to see what was going on in Egypt via live video in Tahrir Square as it happened. BBC didn’t have a chance against what they now call “pro-sumers” (producers and consumers.)
   
6. To monetise all this  we must charge people in the right way and the right amount. It’s not about how many eyeballs any more it’s about whose eyeballs and what’s going on behind those eyeballs.
   
7. Yet marketers - an “avoid-failure”, in-transit-between-jobs bunch - are conservative and lagging behind the changes that have happened already.
   
8. And of course we are living in the middle of a valuation bubble (what was later described by James Bromley CEO of Mail Online as descending from the “peak of inflated expectation” phase into the “trough of disillusionment”).
   
9. But be aware that this $3 billion game will not be played on the small market Euro stage (let alone the tiny market UK stage.) It’ll be played out between Asia and the USA.
   
10. It’s about customer knowledge, customer experience and a scale of population big enough to pay for the weaponry the big guys need. It’s a good time to be a customer and a spectator watching them - Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Omnicom and WPP. But remember - no one knows where the ball is yet.

Thank you LBS.

I’m off to look for that ball.