Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 37

The economics of digital sharecropping

With a reported 900 million active members, Facebook is, by far, the largest digital-sharecropping operation that the internet has yet produced. About one out of every eight people on the planet sharecrops for Facebook today - and their collective labor is expected to put about a billion dollars of cash into CEO Mark Zuckerberg's pocket when the company goes public in a few weeks. In a 2006 post, I explained why sharecropping is such a powerful business model for social networks and other online businesses: One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It's a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It's only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale - on a web scale - that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view,...

Pay up, Yochai Benkler

My reservoir of patience, deep as it may be, is running dry. Nearly a year has passed since the culmination of the fabled Carr-Benkler Wager, and Yochai Benkler has yet to pay his debt to me. Dude, have you heard of PayPal? I haven't even received a simple acknowledgement of my triumph. What, you ask, is the Carr-Benkler Wager? Well, that's hard to say definitively. But here's how Benkler defined it back in July of 2006, when Web 2.0 was still an innocent babe cooing happily in its mother's arms: We could decide to appoint between one and three people [that never happened] who, on some date certain - let's say two years from now, on August 1st 2008 [this was later extended to five years, so the operative date was August 1, 2011] - survey the web or blogosphere, and seek out the most influential sites in some major category: for example, relevance and filtration (like Digg); or visual images (like Flickr). And they will then decide whether they are peer production processes or whether they are price-incentivized systems. While it is possible that there will be a price-based player there, I predict that the major systems will be...

First-person hoer

Galleycat notes that a team at USC has nabbed a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to, as the grant states, "support production costs for a video game based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond. The player will inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods." This game is going to kick some serious ass. Check out the trailer: Right after that bass-fishing mission, there's a killer bean-field mission where you do battle with a gang of woodchucks using a two-handed hoe as your only weapon. I also hear that - spoiler alert - the game culminates in an insane melee with the local tax collector that begins in the Concord jail and ends in the kitchen of Emerson's house. And, no, there's no multiplayer option....

The DPLA and the quest for a universal library

Ever since the Library of Alexandria burned to the ground two thousand years ago, people have yearned to rebuild it. Today, thanks to the internet, the dream of a universal library seems closer to fulfillment than ever before. But as Google's ill-fated Book Search project has revealed, the challenges to creating a comprehensive online library remain great - and they have little to do with technology. In the new issue of Technology Review, I report on the latest and perhaps most ambitious effort to create "the library of utopia": the Digital Public Library of America, or DPLA. Led by Harvard luminaries, the DPLA has big plans, big names, and big contributors, but it, too, faces big obstacles, not least of which is its hesitancy to define what it wants to be. Here's a bit from the article: If you were looking for Larry Page's opposite, you would be hard pressed to find a better candidate than Robert ­Darnton. A distinguished historian and prize-winning author, a former Rhodes scholar and MacArthur fellow, a Chevalier in France's Légion d'Honneur, and a 2011 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the 72-year-old Darnton is everything that Page is not: eloquent, diplomatic, and embedded in...

A debate on the substance of nothing

Ross Andersen has a superb interview with the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss at the Atlantic's site. Krauss's recent book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing has, by design, kicked up a controversy. Krauss argues in the book that science is now "addressing the question of why there is something rather than nothing" and that, indeed, recent scientific discoveries in this area "all suggest that getting something from nothing is not a problem." In his afterword to the book, Richard Dawkins writes, “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages." In a New York Times review last month, the Columbia University philosopher David Albert begged to differ, writing that Krauss is "dead wrong." Albert argued that what Krauss claims is "nothing" - in short, "empty space" - is actually something and that, therefore, Krauss's explanation does not "amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing." In the Atlantic interview, Krauss calls Albert "a moronic philosopher." Fun stuff. But important stuff, too. As Andersen writes, "To see two academics, both versed in theoretical physics,...

Social networks as recreational drugs

This morning I had cause to look at Tim Carmody's tweetstream. Man, that cat can tweet. Anyway, it got me thinking about whether you might be able to categorize social networks according to their resemblance to recreational drugs. If a sharing site were an abusable substance, which abusable substance would it be? Here's my first cut: Twitter = Black Beauties [symptoms of abuse: hyperactivity; increased awareness of surroundings; increased interest in repetitive or normally boring activities; decreased appetite; decreased ability to sleep*] Facebook = Pot [symptoms of abuse: red, watery eyes; fuzzy-mindedness; inexplicable laughter; weight gain; self-absorption; suspicious changes in friendships] Pinterest = Quaaludes [symptoms of abuse: slowed heart rate; drowsiness; indiscriminate displays of affection; regrettable decisions; stupidity] YouTube = Cocaine [symptoms of abuse: dilated pupils; accelerated heart rate; public blathering; manic episodes; impotence] MySpace = LSD [symptoms of abuse: colorful hallucinations; bad taste in clothes; psychosis] Google+ = Ambien [symptoms of abuse: sleep, drooling]...

Technology and culture: a test case

Which is stronger: technology's power to shape local culture, or local culture's power to influence the way technology is adopted and used? If it's the former, as I suspect it is, then technology becomes a homogenizing force, tending in time to erase cultural differences. If it's the latter, then technology plays a subservient role; the uniformity of the tool does not impose uniformity on the tool's use. Culture prevails. We're going to get some insight into this question over the next decade or so as e-readers - in the form of both devices and apps - spread and become even cheaper. As Caroline Winter of Bloomberg Businessweek reports, in two of the most prosperous Western countries - the U.S. and Germany - the adoption of electronic books has so far taken very different routes. E-books are booming in the U.S. Less than five years after the introduction of Amazon's Kindle, e-book sales already account for about a quarter of all U.S. book sales, and that percentage continues to rise sharply. In Germany, where e-readers are also readily available, e-books still represent just 1 percent of overall book sales. The difference is largely a cultural one. Germany, the birthplace of Gutenberg...

Flame and filament

One of man's greatest inventions was also one of his most modest: the wick. We don’t know who first realized, many thousands of years ago, that fire could be isolated at the tip of a twisted piece of cloth and steadily fed, through capillary action, by a reservoir of wax or oil, but the discovery was, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes in Disenchanted Night, “as revolutionary in the development of artificial lighting as the wheel in the history of transport.” The wick tamed fire, allowing it to be used with a precision and an efficiency far beyond what was possible with a wooden torch or a bundle of twigs. In the process, it helped domesticate us as well. It’s hard to imagine civilization progressing to where it is today by torchlight. The wick also proved an amazingly hardy creation. It remained the dominant lighting technology all the way to the nineteenth century, when it was replaced first by the wickless gas lamp and then, more decisively, by Edison’s electricity-fueled incandescent bulb with its glowing metal filament. Cleaner, safer, and even more efficient than the flame it replaced, the light bulb was welcomed into homes and offices around the world. But along...

Pinball CPU

Here's an ingenious contraption: The creator, Lior Elazary, provides a full explanation of the clock here, along with instructions for building your own. Here's my favorite part of the instructions: Start by creating a 12” diameter disc and attach a Flip-Flop to it. A Flip-Flop is a device that alternates its state with a given input. For example, a politician might change his stance on a specific issue based on some event, and then will change it back based on another event. In that case, we say he is a Flip-Flop, and we might be able to build a computer out of him. [via Slashdot]...

The Shallows: the album

Now this is pretty cool: The U.K. band I Like Trains has a new album coming out called The Shallows, which was inspired, at least in part, by my book of the same name. The album is an eerily propulsive work - heavy and light at the same time - and it's one that's easy to get lost in. The record comes out on May 7, but if you order a physical copy now - from here - you can download a digital copy immediately. And take a listen to the first single, "Mnemosyne":...