Innovation Stagnation

Here in the United States, we believe that by providing monetary incentive (for example through protection of Intellectual Property) we can bring about innovation. However, this ideal seems to have been undermined by those at the top who are afraid of competition.

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For example, computer games. If I were to sit down and code a computer game myself, it would not have some of the things that a big-name game does. However, this in itself would not neccessarily make it a bad game, it just wouldn't have a bunch of technically advanced features. That's fine, to the discerning gamer it's not really a matter of being impressed with gee-whiz graphics or physics, it's a matter of new and entertaining game mechanics.

I can only comment from an individual's perspective. For me, the trouble is that even if I were to create a fabulous game, barely anyone's going to hear of it. In the recommended reading section of my Blog is currently a link to an excellent independant gaming Blog. How many of those titles have you heard of before? Chances are, just about none. Why?

Much like any other field (such as books or movies) big-name publishers dominate the gaming scene. I'm willing to bet that this is deliberate - they're looking to crowd lesser known game studios and individuals out so they can keep as much as the multi-billion dollar gaming pie to themselves.

If big name companies regularly came up with sufficiently good games to justify this, I'd say more power to them then. Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that most stuff released by the big-name publishers is crap. Rehashed clones, the same old boring ideas, and basically a demonstration of total stagnation. It's reached the point that, in the unusual event that something new and good is released, we're thrilled to find it.

The problem can be found beyond computer games and nearly anywhere in the U.S. Market. Books have become largely dominated by hack-writers that people know, often ghost-written or (worse) written by authors who have long since given up even trying. Movies and Television are largely dominated by imitations as well. In exactly the same way as with games, we're overjoyed to discover when somebody has released something new and interesting. We're quick to assume that there simply are no good ideas out there, but the reality is much simpler: they're quashed under the collective weight of big-name companies. Companies who have a vice-like grip on what you get to see on Television.

To go far enough down this road is to ultimately end up looking at the wealth distribution in America. Because our innovative incentive system is working so poorly, bottlenecked under the competitive pressures of those at the top, we've been losing the race for innovation. In some ways, we've actually gone backwards. You may not have noticed, but the days we can really say we're the dominant superpower in the world are gone.

We may never reach a point where our stagnating market forces radical social change, but we will reach a point where we're simply grossly technologically inferior to other countries. (Some would say that we already are in many ways: health care, social security, ect.) Once we far enough behind, the entire country becomes dependent on others for survival, in much the same way we require China to do much of our manufacturing or India to do our call centers. Whether we can change before our dependence is complete and irreversible is anyone's guess.

How to reverse the process, then? Well, that too is anyone's guess. However, my choice would be to place the incentives (tax breaks and other government support) on the bottom and not the top. Our society needs to support the little fish and, when they become big fish, see if they can float on their own. It's cutting breaks to those who feel they don't have to try anymore, putting large companies on government life support for fear the economy will collapse without them, that has resulted in stagnation.

Of course, this will mean some big fish, especially those which are currently on life support, will sink and die. The trick is in learning anticipate and accept this. In nature, the corpse of a big fish decomposes and ultimately becomes nutrients for the better swimmers of tomorrow. This is how innovation and change looks, it should not be feared, as it is the natural flow of living things. More importantly, it is needed, as without this there will be stagnation, and all the death it brings.

Illiterate Literacy: What I Learnt About Message Boards

The Internet, and Internet message board forums in particular, can seem like mentally stimulating place to hang out on. However, I have reached an epiphany about message boards, and that is that it's simply too hard to for people to get a point, even a seemingly simple one. This idea begins there and ends at the outer reaches of human intelligence.

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Much of my life, from my adolescence and the entirety of my 20s, was spent on hallowed boards throughout the Internet (and dailup Bulletin Board Systems) bickering with strangers. The emotional pull! The drama! The festering feeling in my gut that, by God, I have to show that poor deluded son-of-a-bitch where he went wrong in life.

With age, however, comes wisdom. Recently I realized that there was something funny going on with message boards, and it was simply this: A vast majority of participants have no idea what anyone was writing. The emotional pull! The drama! The festering feeling in my guy that, by God, was completely unjustified.

The problem is many-fold, and to try to generate a list in one sitting (as I am now) is likely to not produce a complete and all-inclusive list. However, here's some of the more obvious things that come to mind that have lead to this situation:

1. The simple limitations of language.

The English Language has over 300,000 words, about three times as much as most other modern languages, and yet, it still fails to hold meaning in itself. It's an abstraction, we say "tree" but the word does not encapsulate a specific tree down to every single knothole, and sometimes the difference trips us up. Language is merely a tool we use to try to convey meaning, but is still easy to misinterpret even today.

On forums, syntax is the main offender. Something as trivial as forgetting to add a comma can totally change the meaning of a sentence. Here's a story where a faulty comma was responsible for $2.13 million dollars in damage. This is just one example of a plethora of ways that language remains imperfect for conveying absolute meaning of a thing.


2. Most people simply don't make time to read.

The Internet is big, far bigger than any forum reader has time for, and so they will bother to read entire posts. The current rule of thumb is to try to prevent your paragraphs from exceeding 4 sentences. Even then, big blocks of text will scare people away. I know this entry won't be read by many people because it looks long and who has that kind of time?

You can't trust people to take much time to do more than skim your messages. Misinterpretations are inevitable.


3. The matter of interpretation

Lets say our audience did bother to read what we wrote. As modern Western thinkers, we like to believe that a clear, properly ordered sentence can be universally identified as having the same meaning to everyone. However, as we bridge the gap into postmodern thinking, we are coming to realize that the reality is actually the opposite:

Everyone will interpret what they have in front of them differently based on their own life experiences.

It's cognitive psychology in action. It's not just "stimulus" and "response" anymore, now there's a "belief about the stimulus" in between. What's read is the stimulus and the reader's beliefs about the stimulus will radically transform their response. It does not really matter if that's what you meant to write or not, what the reader believes they read is all that matters to them.

For example, lets say you're skimming the net and you come across the sentence, "Black people should not do road construction work." The wheels in the head start turning and, before you know it, you've written a 95 page dissertation about racism. Yet, what you read was referring to studies done by the American Cancer Society that indicates that people of African American descent are actually particularly susceptible to the benzene ring aerosols released by freshly paved roads. Suddenly, the 95 page dissertation should have been about why people's heath concerns should not deny them employment.

It's incredibly and unexpectedly easy to misinterpret a sentence. You might be thinking to yourself, "Well, just be more specific then, so these little mistakes don't happen." However, it's not that easy. To prevent this, you would need to know how every single reader is likely to interpret it, and that would require an understanding of their life's experience you simply won't have.

Expand this beyond a single sentence and into paragraphs. The bigger the block of text you've written, the more supporting angles you have to prevent misinterpretation. However, so also are the sentences you've created that can be misinterpreted. Nit pickers, people who read simply to find the one sentence that offends them, are not uncommon on today's Internet message boards.

Where I used to sit on message boards and bicker for hours with somebody, trying to get them to see things my way, I now realize that this endeavor is simply pointless. For me to generate total agreement in someone who seems unable to do so, I'd likely need to overcome all three of these hurdles. I'd need to write paragraphs that cannot be misconstrued, I'd need to get the reader to read it, and I'd need their life experience to be compatible enough with what I'm writing to understand me implicitly. Fat chance.

The personal growth in accepting this realization is great. Applied to others, away goes all the stress of trying to convince them of anything. When I apply this lens to myself, I realize that I am also susceptible to these limitations as any other. It's okay if people say I'm clueless or deluding myself - I am - and so, for that matter, are they.

Where there was once chagrin that some people could not seem to understand me, there is now a sense of humor, and this probably the best policy. Humor is a better policy because people are more likely to be open-minded to somebody they feel friendly towards than some bitter old sod quoting them inalienable truths. (I think I better understand why so many of those Zen Buddhists have a sense of humor.) A sense of humor also comes in handy to when dealing with the inevitability of being unable to be truly understood.

The Internet has become the focal point of the information age, a beacon of what we can accomplish if we gather humanity's knowledge and put it up for all to access. However, in doing so, we're coming to grips with the very fabric of what we call information and how we communicate it. We're bumping elbows with our own human stupidity, how far we really have come since we descended from the trees, and it has not been very flattering.