The Goat Library
Posted: August 14, 2023 Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Creativity, Technology | Tags: AI, Creativity, futurology, Goat Library, music, Technology Leave a commentTalent as a distribution channel, AI and eternal talent
When the world started writing, en-masse, about the explosive arrival of generative AI many journalists made predictions about who would be AI winners and who would be losers. The inevitable fears, that any new valuable and scalable technology will bring mass unemployment, were tempered by the equally abundant observations that such innovation cycles usually see a transfer of jobs to newly required skills, rather than a simple destruction of jobs on an aggregate level.
The transfer argument, while historically accurate, rather glosses over the fact that often the new jobs do not necessarily go to those that have lost their old jobs. The common accusation thrown at those that decry such innovation, that they are Luddites, is in fact quite a distortion of the actual complaints of the Luddites. They most certainly did destroy the new technology as it appeared in ‘their’ factories, but the complaint was not about the arrival of new efficient technology, rather that they were to be cut out of the value it would generate and left with no way to support their families and communities. A fear that played out as they suggested it would.
It is, therefore, reasonable to ask who the losers will be because there will be some.
One sector that got an early mention in much of the coverage is the voice acting industry.
Apple, for example, has already offered AI voice to creators for audio books. It seems inevitable that AI voice will eventually decrease the size of the established voice market that is currently served by human actors.
Sadly there is a bigger problem for the voice community which will inevitably hit other creative sectors too. Eventually, and it will take a while longer, a library of Goats, a library of the greatest voices of all time, will establish itself killing the capacity for new market entrance to all except a smaller number of generational talents.
Think about how you build a career in sport. Maybe you are a gifted 14 year old and you dominate in school, have trials for the regional team and then maybe even the national team, all while you’re still 14, playing for the under 15s. Eventually after a stellar school career you look to the professional game, but now you are competing not just against your own age cadre but all the credible adult players too. Now you are competing against all the kids who were 15, 16, 17 and 18 when you were 14 and everyone else already in professional employment. Depending on the sport that might mean playing against opponents up to age 28 or, as is the case in Formula One today, maybe you are now looking at fighting for your place against 40 year olds as well.
The sporting world has one big advantage over much of the creative world because sport must occur in real time. Sure, you can watch old matches or archival footage of the greats but the live experience is treasured for obvious reasons. Indeed it is the primary value proposition of any contest as entertainment, who will win? The advantage that sport has in this context, is that, eventually, all the Goats will stop playing and new generations will step up to replace them. Even if we could digitally capture and transfer the skills of the greatest, we still hold to the fundamental concept of zero artificial enhancement in sport, which means we would baulk at the idea of implanting today’s youth, for example, with Pele’s footballing chops. That is not the case with our creative industries. If you are a voice actor in the future you will be competing for work against the greatest voices of all recent history, living and dead. Voice will become a tangible post-mortem asset. That wasn’t true until this current technology cycle, but it is now.
A counter argument in favour of the status quo is that the capacity for human voice actors to improvise or to understand and translate the emotional nuance of a piece, and then reflect that in their performance, cannot be replaced by AI. There is something in this but even here there might be a Goat library correction. Such interpretation is currently executed by those that have the vocal characteristics for the piece in question, today’s voice actors. But once those uniquely held vocal skills are replaced by the Goat library then a smaller group of specialists, using their natural voices, will be able to offer their interpretive and improvisational services across a much larger range of work, the actual vocal characteristics for the work will be transplanted onto the architecture created by their natural vocal performance. David Attenborough might still be the voice of nature documentaries well into the next century or more.
There’s no reason to think that a Goat library could only apply to voice acting.
For some time now CGI has been used to replace actors who have passed away either before a sequel is planned (Peter Cushing in Rogue One, 20 years after his death) or as a result of an untimely passing before a movie can be completed (Oliver Reed in Gladiator). There is already a specialist field of work for CGI actors, skilled no doubt but cheaper than the box office stars, living or dead, that they replace.
Google and Universal Music have just announced a partnership to produce tools that allow fans to produce AI generated music but that also enables the musicians to receive payment in recognition of their intellectual property being appropriated, either in their voice or their musical style.
Grimes has offered a partnership agreement to musical creators who want to use her vocals on their music, original or AI produced, as long as she gets a 50% cut of the royalties.
This is a tech continuation of an already established trend in the music business whereby big name’s will only sing on music written by others if they get a share of the song writing credit, because that’s where the money is. The fame and following of established musicians has become a distribution channel in and of itself. Talent itself has become a distribution channel and a powerful one at that.
The impact of social media is a key component of the talent as distribution dynamic
Today’s digital social media dynamics have already skewed the money distribution of creativity, creating a huge power distribution with a smaller number of bigger winners and a long, getting longer, long tail (more artists, less money). Taylor Swift is a massively talented musician but she is also a master of the social domain, both of these talents contribute to her economic reality. It is quite possible that AI will contribute to a deepening of this power distribution, not for artists that are alive but by extending the effect to some of the dead ones too.
Did you write a great song? Can you get Elvis to sing it for you? Tupac? Maybe, and maybe it’s not so far away that this might be the most effective distribution strategy available to you.
The Hollywood actors and writers strike is also about digital distribution via captured talent, even if the headlines are mostly about AI and job loss. The studios are trying to lock in this new economic surplus to their advantage, and, subsequently to the disadvantage of the creative talent.
Like all assets the economic power of creative talent lies partly in it scarcity. Today that economic power is shared between the industry and the talent itself. In a world full of Goat libraries the economic power share will change because the talent itself, not the person, will be tradeable post-mortem, as a tangible asset. An asset not inextricably attached to a living human being with agency. The talent scarcity balance will shift towards a greater abundance allied, quite possibly, with a wider access to that abundance. The industry will have options it never had before. Abundance it never had before.
Years ago I was writing, speculating, about the business model for content on the internet. At the time a much used adage was “Content is King”. I came across an adaptation of that saying. “Content is King, but Distribution is King Kong”. The observation was that ownership of distribution, the theatres, cinemas, TV channels, cable channels and then the internet was more economically powerful than artistic genius. Its obvious once noted but it wasn’t widely acknowledged, and still isn’t. The real takeout though, is that ideally you are both King and Kong, talent and distribution in one package.
If today big artist’s are to become distribution channels then a simple reading suggests that this change should empower them, King and Kong. But this dynamic will eventually, if not immediately, turn in favour of the industry as they alone will be able to afford to build Goat libraries alongside the business architecture required to monetise them.
There are at least 3 factors working in favour of the commercial side of the entertainment industry.
- Social media favours power distribution rewarding fewer big names, often more handsomely, and extending the long tail for everyone else.
- AI will extend its capacity to extract the ‘essence’ of an artist’s unique gift. Vocal characteristics are an obvious example but it can and will go further. We can already use generative AI, today, to create images in the style of Caravaggio for example. This has 2 impacts. First the Goat libraries will favour those with a significant canon of work or the time and resource to produce it (training data) and secondly it reduces the scarcity value of an artist’s gift. Your voice may be stunning and unique, but will it outsell Elvis on the same song? Will someone take the gamble when they believe Elvis is a banker?
- The scarcity of living talent will be commercially devalued if we can call on the talent of the dead.
The long tail will get longer and the established big name stars will take more of the money while they live. After they are dead the industry will consolidate its control of both the economic and artistic sides of the business. The incentive for new entrants will diminish, but it won’t disappear, the industry power to gate-keep opportunity enhanced. A significant degradation but not a demolition.
I do try to look for silver linings. I don’t subscribe to the AI doom cults even if I worry about what stupid humans will do with ever more powerful technology. If my logic here turns out to be valid then maybe there can be an upside, even if it’s a small one. Maybe the long tail will inspire/force more localised musical community, a return to the idea that expression is sometimes best consumed as a live performance in small settings. If that sounds ludicrous ask yourself if you would be excited to see your favourite superstar stadium performer in a small club playing to 150 fans? They’ll still play the stadium but much like ABBA they might not be there when they do, widespread musical engagement may become more intimate again?
Linkdump Feb 2018 (2015 vintage)
Posted: February 18, 2018 Filed under: 4 or 5 Things, Learning stuff, links, Technology, Uncategorized | Tags: links Leave a commentBruce Sterling on cognition and computing, in reference to AI, shows that conflating the 2 ideas can be misleading and restricting. A different perspective to view AI through.
This is 2+ years old now but shows, very effectively, that the malware/botnet/ad-fraud space is complex. Google’s efforts with spider.io
Lot’s of short pithy bits of advice about writing, from Paul Graham. Really worth reading.
Working in top end restaurants can be like this.
Quantum field theory explained in a children’s picture book kind of way.
r/pics June 2017
Posted: June 7, 2017 Filed under: Pictures, Technology | Tags: Pictures, r/pics Leave a comment4 from 2014 (links)
Posted: June 4, 2017 Filed under: 4 or 5 Things, Globalisation, links, Technology, Who's going to pay | Tags: futurology, globalisation, Technology Leave a commentI periodically revisit the links at the bottom of my reading list (managed by pocket) to see if I can either dump them from the list unread, leave them there for reading at an unspecified future point or ideally read them and push them to my archive.
Having done this recently these 4 links from 2014 stood out. All of them talk about the way the world is today, and are particularly interesting to me as they could all just as easily have been published this year (with some small changes no doubt).
The Economist challenges the principle of driving shareholder value and notes that since it became a corporate mantra the value of a CEO’s remuneration has increased 8-fold, which most certainly was not the point. Please remember the quote that follows is from 2014 when no-one thought Brexit or Trump likely to come to pass….
And that trend, which has spilled out to the rest of the developed world, is leading to the growing anger of voters and the resistance to globalisation which may eventually cause even more damage to business and investors.
This link is a guide to Shenzhen, almost certainly out of date in some regard (I’m no Shenzhen expert), but the reality of the Chinese tech markets is fascinating and although it took me nearly 3 years to read this I’m still glad i did.
A good overview from the Guardian about progress made by ‘robot’ writers. The primary example here is a quick news story about an earthquake report, in this case some gentle tremors. Published and approved by a human, but written by a computer. This was in 2014, I can’t help but imagine this is more widespread today.
Hammond was in the limelight recently, having claimed that by 2025 90% of the news read by the general public would be generated by computers. “That doesn’t mean that robots will be replacing 90% of all journalists, simply that the volume of published material will massively increase,” he explains. “Take the example of small amateur baseball games. They don’t interest the media, but several dozen people follow each one. Quill collates data on thousands of these games and can produce thousands of articles almost instantaneously, one for each match, in a style similar to sportswriters, who are easy to imitate.”
The last link is about the nature of the global clothing industry, although the article concentrates on the Korean impact on LA’s Jobber market.
How did this neighborhood become what it is? The answer lies in a 50-year process of migration and generational progress—one that has recently reached a kind of critical mass.
A well written and good exploration that reminds us that even in these times of incredible and fast change the slower moving trends driven by demographics and migration still hold some sway.
links again, 4 of ’em
Posted: May 29, 2014 Filed under: 4 or 5 Things, Globalisation, Technology | Tags: economics, futurology, globalisation, interference, internet, netflix, salon, Technology, wired Leave a commentEarlier this year Netflix and Comcast had a little contretemps about their peering agreement. Unless you spend time trying to keep up with the various layers, and the players therein, that make up the technical infrastructure of the internet then that statement potentially means absolutely nothing to you whatsoever, but actually its all quite important.
Peering is the name given to the agreements that cover the terms for transferring internet traffic between networks and they are a fundamental cornerstone of the modern internet. Because there is not one single network that covers the whole world it is important that traffic can be exchanged, as required by the needs of the user, with the least possible friction. Historically these agreements were made between engineers and each network simply agreed to open to each other as required, no money involved. Comcast decided that they wanted to buck that history and demanded payment from Netflix. Netflix suggested that prior to this negotiation Comcast were deliberately allowing congestion in certain parts of their network to negatively affect Netflix’s customers (something Comcast denied) and that they had no choice but to pay the ransom.
Level 3 is one of the big global internet backbone companies that carry enormous amounts of web traffic. They are the one of the companies that pay for, and own and maintain, the cable that runs under the oceans. This post on their blog lays out some of the dynamics that go into peering agreements and even though this post doesn’t deal directly with the situation between Netflix and Comcast it should probably give you enough information to understand who is playing the shithead and who isn’t.
I never did try playing Go the ancient Chinese strategy game, and after reading this article i’m starting to think that that is no bad thing. Like chess its a 2 player war game, but unlike chess its a game (possibly the only game left) that retains an unbeaten crown in human vs computer match-ups. Machines beat humans at checkers in 1994 and chess was added to the list in 1997. Now, 17 years later Go still holds out, and holds out with comfort. Every year the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo hosts the UEC cup where computer programs compete against each other for the opportunity to compete against a Go sage, who will be one of the world’s top Go players. The challenge is not one of brute force computing power, its more about strategic understanding and the fact that by all accounts we don’t really understand what goes into being a great Go player, human or otherwise.
Ever wondered why the airwaves are licensed by the government? If you think about it a little, the chances are you will come to what seems like a very simple and straightforward conclusion, which is that the airwaves are licensed so that broadcasting signals don’t interfere with each other. To ensure that when you tune in to 97-99 FM here in the UK, you will receive radio one, not some other outfit broadcasting on the same frequency. Which is all well and good except that electromagnetic waves simply don’t interfere with each other. This concept of interference seems to imply that there is only so much space on any particular frequency that can carry signals, that there is only so much spectrum available. Colours are on the same spectrum as radio waves, separated only by their different frequencies, to suggest that spectrum is limited is to suggest that there is only so much Red to go around, which is clearly a farcical concept.
All of that, which is sound and uncontroversial 6th form physics, does raise some interesting questions about our radios and TVs and mobile phones, all of which broadcast across licensed electromagnetic frequencies. It turns out that the problem of interference is a problem of the broadcasting and receiving equipment not the natural scarcity of the airwaves. We have a system that limits access to frequencies because we are still using a technology base optimised to an old technical paradigm.
This piece published in Salon gives you the full detail and quotes extensively from the work of David Reed an important and prominent scientist from MIT, famous for writing the text that nailed the modern architecture of the internet. Understanding what is actually going on here turns out to be entertaining and enlightening.
Salon – The myth of interference
I don’t know whether this last link is being serious or not, and that alone might be the best observation I have to make about the state of modern economics.
Alex Tabarrok is a right leaning economist who authors the blog Marginal Revolution with Tyler Cowen, both are professors at George Mason University in Virginia. This short post, one of many from the right responding to the fuss being made by Piketty’s Capital, offers “2 surefire solutions to inequality”. One is to increase fertility among the rich, dilute the inheritance and reduce capital concentration. The other surefire way? To reduce fertility among the rich! The author of the post puts a lot more detail into this position than I do here. I’m leaning towards the opinion that he is simply having a laugh, but then as he is an economist i’m really not so sure.
Links – High frequency trading, poison and Jimmy Carter
Posted: May 10, 2014 Filed under: 4 or 5 Things, Globalisation, Technology | Tags: carlota perez, economics, High frequency trading, Jimmy Carter, Litvinenko, Michael Lewis, Polonium, Technology, trading, wall street Leave a commentI’ve had my eye on high frequency trading (HFT) for a little while. I was initially fascinated by the overwhelming need for connectivity speeds driving up the cost of real estate near the exchanges. If you could locate your trading operation next to the exchange the tiny fractions of a second saved by geographical proximity were worth huge amounts in naked profit.
The whole thing struck me as another example of short term profiteering taking precedence over the more sensible longer term allocation of risk and investment capital (which is after all what stock markets are supposed to do).
The long term trend of shareholding periods has been in decline since the 1960’s when shares were held on average for 8 years. The following 2 links are in disagreement about what the average holding period was in 2012 but whichever data point you prefer, 5 days according to Businessinsider or 22 seconds according to London’s Daily Telegraph, it is clear that we are using the mechanic that is the stock market, in a radically different way than we have ever done before.
Part of the overarching societal philosophy of share ownership was that the long term incentives held by investors, via shareholding, would act as a brake on the incentives for larceny, held by the professional management class. But those long term incentives can only act as a brake if the shares are held in a long term pattern, and today that is not the case. To be fair this is not a triumph of the managerial class over the investor class, this is driven by the profiteering of Wall street and London’s City too. Simplistically more trading generates more trading income, but there are other factors acting here too.
Firstly we have a global capital investment paradigm that is focused on the needs of finance capital not production capital. This so called casino approach to capitalism, and its relationship to production capital, is best understood through the analysis of Carlota Perez in her stunning, and surprisingly accessible, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. This is a very quick summary of her ideas.
Secondly, and something that has only surfaced into popular discourse recently, it appears that there is a fraudulent mechanic in widespread use as a result of HFT. Michael Lewis has penned the expose in his book Flash Boys.
In essence the advantage bestowed on certain traders as a result of their proximity to certain exchanges generates more than quicker sight of price movements. The original story of HFT was that this small advantage generated thousands of small arbitrage trades, but the window of opportunity to make these trades was so small that it could only be accomplished by computers acting autonomously via algorithms.
Among other things Lewis has showed that the various routings around the multiple exchanges are illegally skirting regulations that are designed to present the same price on all exchanges at the same time. This means that a trading outfit that operates on multiple exchanges can make trades based on the market intelligence of a received order. If a client instructs the trader to buy all 10,000 shares at the price they are listed they will need to buy them from multiple exchanges, but the trader’s ability to communicate to the furthest exchanges faster than the official price channels sees them instruct their machines at those locations to buy what is available. The end result is that the original client will only receive say 4000 of the shares they wanted. The differential 6000 shares are now owned by the trader, but only because of the inherent value generated by knowledge of the instruction for the original 10,000 transaction.
Interestingly a key component here is the difficulty of verification.
This lack of human insight about what is occurring through these technical networks, obscures knowledge of what is happening so much so that fraud can flourish. In this regard it is very similar to the fraud rife in the ad tech networks for digital display advertising.
This link from the Washington Post sets the scene very well, explaining the nature of the wider problem.
This piece, published by the NYT is actually an adaptation from Lewis’s book and details how the situation was eventually understood and the actions being taken to rectify the problem. Its long but really good.
In 2006 Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London with the lethally radioactive chemical Polonium. If you recall the incident at the time you will remember that it took a long time before anyone was able to understand what was happening to him, what the poisoning agent was and where he was poisoned. The original location was believed to be the Itsu sushi restaurant in Piccadilly although it eventually turned out to be the Pine Bar in the Millennium hotel in Grosvenor square.
The story is much more involved than any 5 minute news segment could possibly have hoped to portray, which I guess is not a surprise. Litvinenko himself was no innocent, with a history in the feared FSB and the KGB before that. He took a stand in favour of Boris Berezovsky over Vladimir Putin, something that no ordinary man would do, and maybe ultimately was contributory to the situation he found himself in.
This article is very long but if you enjoy a spy story, fictional or otherwise, then you will certainly enjoy this. Something I didn’t understand was how much concern was raised by the presence of Polonium in London. The decontamination program employed a staggering 3000 people and operated across 50 different sites, 2 simple numbers but they invoke images of a Men in Black style clean-up operation happening under our noses but with no obvious sign whatsoever that it was happening.
The article also describes the strange world of the Russian Oligarchs and as a result tells part of the recent history of the post cold war Russian experience.
It’s worth finding the time to read this. For fun.
How radioactive poison became the assassin’s weapon of choice
This next piece is also a pleasure to read if only because it is so refreshing to hear an American president (ex) talking so candidly about the role and position of America in the world today and issues within the scope of American domestic politics as well. Jimmy Carter never was like all the rest, whether you agreed with him, whether or not you are a natural republican or a natural democrat it is difficult to fault his sincerity and his integrity. There aren’t many world leaders that it’s easy to say that about.
On the topic of religious persecution of women’s rights.
Well, they actually find these verses in the Bible. You know, I can look through the New Testament, which I teach every Sunday, and I can find verses that are written by Paul that tell women that they shouldn’t speak in church, they shouldn’t adorn themselves and so forth. But I also find verses from the same author, Paul, that say all people are created equal in the eyes of God. That men and women are the same before God; that masters and slaves are the same and that Jews and Gentiles are the same. There’s no difference between people in the eyes of God. And I also know that Paul wrote the 16th chapter of Romans to that church and he pointed out about 25 people who had been heroes in the very early church — and about half of them are women. So, you know, you could find verses, but as far as Jesus Christ is concerned, he was unanimously and always the champion of women’s rights. He never deviated from that standard. And in fact he was the most prominent champion of human rights that lived in his time and I think there’s been no one more committed to that ideal than he is.
I’m not a religious man but I do wish there were more prominent leaders who hold a strong faith, willing to call out the contradictions within their religious texts and simply choose the side that is kind caring and decent instead of aggressive and divisive.
4 videos about technology
Posted: May 9, 2014 Filed under: Technology, Video | Tags: internet of things, Oculus Rift, Technology, video, vimeo, youtube Leave a commentThis is a fun way to look at the concept of lag. What we have here is an Oculus Rift, headphones, a webcam and a Raspberry Pi all put together to increase the lag from a third of a second to 3 seconds. It’s actually an advert for a Swedish fiber ISP selling fast connectivity, but that is easy to forgive as the message is well delivered and amusing. Its not about virtual reality at all, but it does nonetheless bring home how important latency is in the VR experience.
Ok, so this next video is VR as VR, as in it doesn’t show the Oculus interacting with the real world. Still great though. Its early days for the Rift but this is a good start, a taster if you will.
This video combines a few different development memes from the computing world. The internet of things, interface development, home automation, office automation, projection. It also shows some of the development directions that I discussed in my recent post about mobile. Its a table, 3 lights, a wall and a computer than can hear and see. Very interesting.
Finally a small change of direction. This is a group of kids reacting to Walkmans. There is lots in here and it is a joy to watch (particularly the one kid smarter than the others who seems to know his own mind, most are appalled at the observation that a Walkman cost $200, he calmly observed that an iPad costs $700). Perhaps the biggest take out is that the paradigm of mechanical, not computational, functionality is just beyond them. They poke the buttons gently, as you would with a touchscreen, there is no concept of opening the device, no expectation that another item is required (the cassette itself), or even headphones, and horror that a cassette might only hold 16 songs! There is some succour here for the older among us, if you have ever been confused by a new technology, or watched a parent in a similar situation, then this video will have some ringing similarities. Clearly, misunderstanding technology goes both ways.
Small phones, mobile computing, innovative disruption and speculation
Posted: April 16, 2014 Filed under: Moving forward, Technology | Tags: advertising, futurology, google, mobile, Technology, VC 3 CommentsI don’t like getting my content from apps. I use the mobile web instead if I have to, but the majority of my web access is on a laptop with a nice big screen, which means my prejudice doesn’t hurt me too much.
I know that that sets me apart from the majority of smartphone users, but as I said before, my primary web access point isn’t my phone so the limitations of the mobile web that have enabled app culture don’t really hurt me.
I also believe that it is a culture with a short shelf life.
It is a system with an unusual degree of friction in comparison to an easily imagined alternative. The whole native apps versus web apps argument that has been running for years now is largely decided, at any one point in time, by the state of play with regard to mobile technology and the user requirements of said technology. I’m pretty certain the technology will improve faster than our user requirements will complicate.
That easily imagined alternative is pretty straightforward too. A single platform, open and accessible to all, built on open protocols, that can support good enough access to hardware sensors, is served by effective search functionality and doesn’t force content to live within walled gardens.
The web, in other words. Not fit for purpose today (on mobile), but it will be soon enough.
Monetisation possibly remains a challenge but I’m also pretty sure we will eventually learn to pay for the web services that are worth paying for. Meaningful payment paradigms will arrive, the profitless start up model/subsidised media (which is what almost all these apps are) can’t last. We will get over ourselves and move beyond the expectation of free.
Should everything be on the web? No, not at all. For me there is a fuzzy line between functional apps and content apps. The line is fuzzy because some content apps contain some really functional features, and vice versa. Similarly some apps provide function specifically when a network connection is unavailable (pocket, for example). The line is drawn between content and function only because I strongly believe that the effective searchability of content, via search engines or via a surfing schema, and the portability of that content via hyperlinks is the heart of what the web does so well and generates so much of its value. If all our content gets hidden away in silos and walled gardens then it simply won’t be read as much as if it was on the open web. And that would be a big perverse shame.
Why can’t we just publish to the stream? Because it is a weak consumption architecture, it is widely unsearchable (although I suspect this can be changed although we need to move beyond the infinite scroll real quick) and because you don’t own it (don’t build your house on someone else’s land). That’s another whole essay and not the focus of this one.
I’ve felt this way for a long time so I am happy to say that finally some important people are weighing in with concerns in the same area. They aren’t worried about the same specific things as me, but I can live with that if it puts a small dent in the acceleration of app culture.
Chris Dixon recently published this piece calling out the decline of the mobile web. I think he is over stating the issue actually, but only because I think the data doesn’t distinguish effectively between apps that I believe should be web based and those I am ambivalent about. He cites 2 key data sources.
The ComScore data for total web users vs total mobile users is solid enough, showing that mobile overtook desktop in the early part of this year. Interestingly the graphic also shows that desktop user volumes are still rising, even if the rate of acceleration lags behind mobile. Not many people are taking this on board in the rush to fall in love with the so called post PC era. It’s important because to really understand the second data point, provided by Flurry, you have to look at the very different reasons people are using their mobile computers.
Flurry tells us that the amount of time spent in apps, as a % of time on the phone/internet itself, rose from 80% in 2013 to 86% (so far) in 2014. That’s a lot of time spent in apps at the cost of time spent on the mobile web.
But the more detailed report, shows that that headline number is less impressive than it at first seems. All that time in apps, it turns out isn’t actually at the cost of time spent on the web, not all of it anyway.
Of the 86%, 32% is gaming, 9.5% is messaging, 8% is utilities and 4% productivity. That totals 53.5% of total mobile time, and 62% of all time in apps specifically. The fact that gaming now occurs within networked apps on mobile devices, rather than as standalone software on desktops, only tells us that the app universe has grown to include new functionality not historically associated with the desktop web. It tells us that this new functionality has not been removed from the mobile web, that in this case the mobile web has not declined. As I said I agree with the thrust of the post I just think the situation is less acute.
Chris Dixon’s main concern is for the health of his business, he’s a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a leading tech VC), and he is seeing the rise of 2 great gatekeepers in Google and Apple, the owners of the 2 app stores that matter, as a problematic barrier to innovation, or rather a barrier to the success of innovation (there is clearly no shortage of innovation itself).
He’s not alone Mark Cuban has made a similar set of observations.
Fred Wilson too, although he is heading into an altogether different and more exciting direction again, which I will follow up in a different post (hint, blockchain, distributed consensus and personal data sovereignty). Still this quote from Fred’s post sums up the situation rather well from the VC point of view.
My partner Brad hypothesized that it had something with the rise of native mobile apps as the dominant go to market strategy for large networks in the past four to five years. So Brian pulled out his iPhone and I pulled out my Android and we took at trip through the top 200 apps on our respective app stores. And there were mighty few venture backed businesses that were started in the past three years on those lists. It has gotten harder, not easier, to innovate on the Internet with the smartphone emerging as the platform of choice vs the desktop browser.
The app stores are indeed problems in this regard, I don’t disagree and will leave it to Chris and Mark’s posts to explain why. I am less concerned about this aspect partly because it’s not my game, I don’t make my money funding app building or building apps. But mostly I’m unconcerned because I really believe that (native) app culture has to be an adolescent phase (adolescent in as much as the internet itself is a youngster, not that the people buying and using apps are youngsters).
If I am right and this is a passing phase can we make some meaningful guesses as to what might change along the way?
I’ve been looking at mobile through the eyes of Clay Christensen’s innovators dilemma recently, which I find to be a useful filter for examining the human factors in technology disruptions.
Clearly if mobile is disrupting anything it is disrupting desktop computing, and true to form the mobile computing experience is deeply inferior to that available on the desktop or laptop. There are, actually, lots of technical inferiorities in mobile computing but the one that I want to focus on is the most simple one of all, size, the mobile screen is small.
Small small small small. I don’t think it gets enough attention, this smallness.
If it’s not clear where I’m coming from, small is an inferior experience in many ways, although it is, of course a prerequisite for the kind of mobility we associate with our phones.
Ever wondered why we still call what are actually small computers, phones? Why we continually, semantically place these extremely clever devices in the world of phones and not computers? After all the phone itself is really not very important, it’s a tiny fraction of the overall functionality. Smartphones? That’s the bridge phrasing, still tightly tied to the world of phones not computers. We know they are computers of course, it’s just been easier to drive their adoption through the marketing semantic of telephony rather than computing. It also becomes easier to dismiss their limitations.
Mobile computers actually out date smartphones by decades, they were/still are, called laptops.
Anyway, I digress. For now let’s run with the problems caused by small computers. There are 2 big issues, that manifest in a few different ways. Screen size and the user interface.
Let’s start with screen size (which of course is actually one of the main constraints that hampers the user interface). Screen size is really important for watching TV, or youtube, or Netflix etc
We all have a friend, or 2, that gets very proud of the size of their TV. The development trend is always towards bigger and bigger TV screens. The experience of watching sport, or a movie on a big TV is clearly a lot better than on a small one (and cinema is bigger again again). I don’t need to go on, it’s a straightforward observation.
No-one thinks that the mobile viewing experience is fantastic. We think it’s fantastic that we can watch a movie on our phones (I once watched the first half of Wales v Argentina on a train as I was not able to be at home, I was stoked), but that is very different from thinking it’s a great viewing experience. The tech is impressive, but then so were those little tiny 6 inch by 6 inch black and white portable TV’s that started to appear in the 80’s.
Eventually all TV (all audio visual) content will be delivered over IP protocols. There are already lots of preliminary moves in this area (smart TVs, Roku, Chromecast, Apple TV) and not just from the incumbent TV and internet players. The console gaming industry is also extremely interested in owning TV eyeballs as they fight to remain relevant in the living room. Once we watch all our AV content via internet protocols the hardware in the front room is reduced to a computer and a screen, not a TV and not a gaming console. If the consoles don’t win the fight for the living room they lose the fight with the PC gamers.
Don’t believe me? Watch this highlights reel from the Xbox one launch….TV TV TV TV TV (and a little bit of Halo and COD)
The device that the family watches moving images on will eventually be nothing but a screen. A big dumb screen.
The Smart functionality, the computing functionality, that navigates the protocols to find and deliver the requisite content, well that will be provided by any number of computing devices. The screen will be completely agnostic, an unthinking receptor.
The computer could be your mobile device but it probably won’t be. As much as I have derided the phone part of our smartphones they are increasingly our main form of telephony. As much as it is an attractive thought we are unlikely to want to take our phones effectively offline every time we watch the telly. Even if at some stage mobile works out effective multi-tasking we will still likely keep our personal devices available for personal use.
What about advertising? That’s another area where bigger is just better. I’ve written about this before, all advertising channels trend to larger dominant experiences when they can. We charge more for the full page press ad, the homepage takeover, the enormous poster over the little high street navigational signs telling you that B&Q is around the corner. Advertising craves attention and uses a number of devices to grab/force it. Size is one of the most important.
Mobile is the smallest channel we have ever tried to push advertising into. It won’t end well.
The Flurry report tries to paint a strong picture for mobile advertising, but it’s not doing a very good job, the data just doesn’t help them out. They start with the (sound) idea that ad spend follows consumption ie. where we spend time as consumers of media, is where advertisers buy media in roughly similar proportions. But the only part of the mobile data they present that follows this rule is Facebook, the only real success story in the field of mobile display advertising. The clear winner, as with all things digital is Google, taking away the market with their intention based ad product delivered via search, quite disproportionally.
There are clouds gathering in the Facebook mobile advertising story too. Brands have discovered that it is harder to get content into their followers newsfeeds. The Facebook solution? Buy access to your followers.
That’s a bait and switch. A lot of these brands are significant contributors to the whole Facebook story itself. Every single TV ad, TV program, media columnist or local store that spent money to devote some part of their communication real estate to the line “follow us on Facebook” helped to build the Facebook brand, helped to make it the sticky honeypot that it is today.
And now if you want to leverage those communities, you have to pay again. Ha.
Oh but there’s value in having a loyal active base of followers I hear the acolytes say. Facebook is just the wrapper. Ok, then in that case ask them all for an email address and be guaranteed that 100% of your communications will reach them. Think that will work? Computer says no.
Buying Facebook friends? That’s starting to whiff too.
That leaves Google/search. The only widely implemented current revenue model that has a future on the mobile web. Do you know what would make the Google model even more effective? A bigger screen, and a content universe on the open web.
To be fair the idea that we must pursue pay models is starting to take hold in the communities that matter. This is good news.
Read this piece. It’s as honest a view as you will find within the advertising community and it still doesn’t get that the mobile medium is fundamentally flawed simply because it is small. There is no get out of jail card free for mobile, unless it gets bigger.
Many of the businesses we met have a mobile core. A lot of them make apps providing a subscription service, some manage and analyze big data, and others are designed to improve our health care system. The hitch? None of them rely on advertising to generate revenue. A few years ago, before the rise of mobile, every new startup had a line item on its business plan that assumed some advertising revenue.
What did you think about the Facebook WhatsApp purchase? It can’t have been buying subs, it’s inconceivable that most of the 450m WhatsApp users weren’t already on Facebook. Similarly even though there is an emerging markets theme to the WhatsApp universe, Facebook hasn’t been struggling in pick up adoption in new markets. My money is that Zuckerberg bought a very rare cadre of digital consumer, consumer’s willing to pay for a service that can be found in myriad other places for free. WhatsApp charges $1 a year, a number of commenters have noted this and talked of Zuckerberg purchasing a revenue line. I think they have missed the wood for the trees. That $1 a year, its good money when you have 450m users, for sure. It’s even better when you have nearly a billion and many of them are getting fed up with spammy newsfeeds. What will you do if you get an email that says “Facebook, no ads ever again, $5”. He doesn’t just get money, he also gets to concentrate on re-building the user experience around consumers, not advertisers.
The WhatsApp purchase is the first time I have tipped my metaphorical hat in Zuckerberg’s direction. The rest is morally dubious crud that fell into his lap, this is a decently impressive strategic move. I still won’t be signing up anytime soon though.
Ok. Small. Bad for advertising. What else?
Small devices also have necessarily limited user interfaces. The qwerty keyboard for all of its random derivation works really well. There is no other method that I use that is as flexible and as speedy for transferring words and numbers into a computer.
The touchscreen is impressive though, the device that, for my money, transformed the market via the iPhone. My first thought when I saw one was that I would be able to actually access web pages and make that experience useful through the pinch and zoom functionality. I had a blackberry at the time with the little scroll wheel on the side. Ugh. But even that wonder passed, now that we optimise the mobile web to fit on the small screens as efficiently as possible. No need to pinch and zoom, just scroll up and down, rich consumption experience be damned.
Touchscreens are great, they just aren’t as flexible as a keyboard. As part of an interface suite alongside a keyboard they are brilliant. As an interim interface to make the mobile experience ‘good enough’, again brilliant. As my primary computing interface … no thanks.
When the iPad arrived the creative director at my agency, excited like a small child as he held his tablet for the first time, decided to test its ability as a primary computing interface. He got the IT department to set up a host of VPN’s so that he could access his networked folders via the internet (no storage on the iPad) and then went on a tour of Eastern Europe without his MacBook.
He never did it again. He was honest about his experience, it simply didn’t work.
What about non text creativity? Well, if you can, have a look inside the creative department at an advertising agency. It will be wall to wall Apple. But they will also be the biggest Macs you have ever seen. Huge glorious screens, everywhere.
You can do creative things on a phone, or a tablet but it is not the optimised form factor. It seems silly to even have to type that out.
If small is bad, and if mobile plays out according to Christensen’s theories (and remember this is just speculation), then eventually mobile has to get bigger. Considering that we have already reduced the acceptable size of tablets in favour of enhanced mobility this seems like some claim.
For my money the mobile experience goes broadly in one of two ways.
In both scenarios it becomes the primary home of deeply personal functionality and storage, your phone, your email (which is almost entirely web accessible these days),your messenger tool, maps, documents, music, reminders, life logging tools (how many steps did you step today) as well as trivial (in comparison) entertainments such as the kind of games we play on the commute home.
The fork is derived from what happens with desktop computing. The computing of creation and the computing of deeper better consumption experiences.
We either end up in a world with such cheap access to computing power that everyone has access to both mobile computing and desktop computing, via myriad access points, and the division of labour between those two is derived purely on which platform best suits a task. Each household might have 15 different computers (and I’m not even thinking of wearables at this stage) for 15 different tasks. This is a bit like the world we have today except that the desktop access is much more available and cheap, and not always on a desk.
Alternatively, the mobile platform does mature to become our primary computing device, a part of almost everything we do. This is much more exciting. This is the world of dumb screens that I mentioned earlier. If mobile is to fulfil its promise and become the dominant internet access point then it must transcend its smallness. There are ways this could happen.
We already have prosthetics. Every clip on keyboard for a tablet is a prosthetic.
We already have plugins. Every docking station for a smartphone or a tablet is a plugin.
The quality of these will get better but they still destroy the idea of portability. If you have to haul around all the elements of a laptop in order to have effective access to computing you may as well put your laptop in your bag.
I can see (hold for the sci-fi wishlist) projection solutions, for both keyboards and screens where the keyboard is projected onto a horizontal surface, the screen onto a vertical surface. Or what about augmented and virtual reality? Google glass is a player, although the input interface is a dead duck for full scale computing, but how about an optimised VR headset that isn’t the size of a shoebox? Zuckerberg might have been thinking about the metaverse when he bought Occulus but there will potentially be other interim uses before humanity decides to migrate to the virtual a la “ready player one”, VR could be a part of that.
The more plausible call is a plugin / cheap access model hybrid. Some computing will always be use case. I think it’s likely that a household’s primary AV entertainment screen for example, the big one in the living room, will have its own box, maybe controlled by a mobile interface but configured such that your mobile platform isn’t integral to media consumption. The wider world, though, I think will see dumb screens and intelligent mobile devices working together everywhere. Sit down slot in your mobile, nice big screen, all your files, all your preferences, a proper keyboard (the dumb screen is largely static of course, so it comes with a keyboard) and touchscreen too of course, all in all a nice computing experience.
There are worlds of development to get there of course. Storage, security and battery life among other areas will all need a pick up, but if we have learnt anything since 1974 it’s that computers do get better.
I really woke up to Christensen’s theory with the example of the transistor radio, which was deeply inferior to the big old valve table tops that dominated a family’s front room, often in pride of place. The transistor radio was so poor that the kids that used them needed to tightly align the receivers with the broadcast towers. If you were facing South when you needed to face North, you were only going to get static. But that experience was good enough. Not for mum and dad who still listened to the big radio at home, but for the teenagers this was the only way they could hear the songs they wanted to hear, without adults hovering. All of those limitations were transcended eventually and in the end everyone had their own radio. One in the kitchen, one in every teenager’s room, the car, the garage, portable and not portable. Radio’s eventually got to be everywhere, but none of them were built around valves like those big table top sets.
Mobile computing is a teenager’s first wholly owned computing experience (I’m not talking about owning the hardware). It happens when they want it to, wherever they are. It’s also been many an older person’s first wholly owned computing experience, and it’s certainly been the first truly mobile computing experience for anyone. I might have made the trivial observation that laptops were the first mobile computers, and they were, but you couldn’t pull one out of your pocket to get directions to the supermarket.
Christensen’s theory makes many observations. Among them are that the technology always improves and ends up replacing the incumbent that it originally disrupted. The users of the old technology eventually move to the new technology, the old never wins.
We aren’t going to lose desktop computing though. Or at least we aren’t going lose the need states that are best served by desktop computing, if you want to write a 2000 word essay, your phone is always going to be a painful tool to choose. But you might be able to plug it in to an easily available dumb workstation and write away in comfort instead.
At least let’s hope so.
Speaking Truth to Power
Posted: April 14, 2014 Filed under: Digital vignettes, Globalisation, Moving forward, Technology, Video | Tags: futurology, Quinn Norton, surveillance, Technology, video Leave a commentQuinn Norton is a name that hovered on the edge of my consciousness for a chunk of time. She dated Aaron Swartz for 3 years and in the resultant furore after his death her name was a part of that story as it became clear that prosecutors had put pressure on her to offer testimony against him, something she did not do.
At this year’s Chaos Communication Congress she spoke on the topic “No Neutral Ground in a Burning World” with Eleanor Saitta which gave an historical perspective on governmental surveillance and how technology is impacting this need for legibility.
Then finally I found this piece, “A Day of Speaking Truth to Power, Visiting the ODNI”. The ODNI is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, spook central, a scary place for anyone let alone a journalist with a reputation for speaking ill of the intelligence community (IC). It’s a great read for so many reasons. It paints a picture of the IC that is both confirming and revelatory and it also surfaces a number of interesting ideas, that could have been brought up in a completely different context, but found their way into this conversation instead.
When I read longer form essays I often take one quote, sometimes two, and send them to my email for recycling into a post (credited of course) or to remind myself to dig deeper into a topic, or just to add a highlight to a particular piece, to make it standout against everything else I am reading.
With this essay I sent myself 9 different quotes, I’ve listed 5 of them below. Please read all of it though, it’s fascinating.
It was clear to me part of this mess we’re in arose from the IC feeling that if everyone was giving away their privacy, then what they, the Good Guys, did with it could not be that big of a deal.
I said the end of antibiotics and the rise of diseases like resistant tuberculosis would mean that tech would end at our skin, and we’d be limited in our access to public assembly. It was probably the darkest thing I said all day, and one of my table mates said (not unkindly) “I don’t like your future.”
I realized that one of the problems is that being at the top of the heap, which the security services definitely are, makes the future an abomination and terror. There is no possible great change where the top doesn’t lose, even if it’s just control, rather than position. The future can only be worse than the present, and a future without fear is a future to fear.
They were mostly pleasant and thoughtful people, and they listened as best they could. One told me I made her feel like Cheney, “And I’m not used to feeling like Cheney.”
When we learn to live online we will want to be full humans again. When, as one of the outside experts put it, the Eternal September is over, we will learn once again to mind our own fucking business, and we will expect others to, as well.
That last quote is something we are going to visit again and again over the next 20, 30 or 50 years (it will likely be a hard slog). The truth is that being online is such a young concept and we haven’t a clue yet, what it means in human terms, social terms, societal terms. In the same way that we expect privacy at a coffee table in a public coffee shop, even though it is possible for someone to listen to our conversation, we will find a social code developing that covers the digital in ways we will find reminiscent of the analogue.