Their downside to pet projects is that they invariably teach you something you didn’t really want to know. This time, it was that most of the people who do what I do are doomed.

Let me explain. Mostly for fun, I’ve recently built¹ a news aggregator I call Scanvine, which ranks stories and authors and publications by how often they’re shared on social media. (TechCrunch does quite well, thanks for asking.) So I’ve been paying attention to a much broader spectrum of news during this last week…which was also the week that Marissa Mayer announced that Yahoo! would no longer condone working at home.

Oh, the hysteria that ensued. The Los Angeles Times hosted a special live video chat on the uproar. Slate had duelling columnists argue the issue; neither of them, remarkably, even mentioned the possibility that perhaps not all companies are alike. The sheer intensity of massive overextrapolation from a single data point really began to feel like:

The upside of Marissa Mayer disallowing all telecommuting in US economy is, I’m assuming, a welcome end to “Work from home!” spam.—

Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) March 01, 2013

The New York Times and Wired and The Atlantic and nearly everyone else fell back on context-free speculation. (And in Maureen Dowd’s case, content-free as well.) Only a tiny minority — notably Alexia and Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson — actually dug out some of the reasons why the decision was made.

So was it the right decision? Well, as an expert on the subject by virtue of having worked at home for many years, both as a full-time novelist and as a software developer, let me explain: oh, for God’s sake shut up and stop asking already.

Working at home has some benefits and some disadvantages, for both employers and employees. Over time, the benefits have been increasing and the disadvantages diminishing, but Marissa Mayer judged that for the very specific case of Yahoo! today, the latter were outweighing the former. Was she right? Maybe! Who knows! Does it really matter, because it’s a trend-signifying bellwether? Probably not! Is all this handwringing completely ridiculous bordering on insane? You bet!

What’s really highlighted here is not just that many traditional ‘journalists’ are phenomenologically indistinguishable from ‘bloggers’ these days, if there’s any distinction at all any more: it’s that many are not even particularly good bloggers. I’m beginning to realize that the scattered collection of one-off blog posts I find via sites like Hacker News are both more interesting and more thoughtful than most mainstream-media opinion, context, or analysis pieces. Passionate part-timers with a deep knowledge of the subject matter who also happen to be good writers are a lot more interesting than most mere scribes.

Of course this doesn’t apply to what I call High Journalism: investigative journalists digging out hidden stories, international journalists reporting from wars and disasters, the fifth estate holding the feet of power to the flames of publicity. But the problem is that most High Journalism (which is expensive and has a limited audience) has historically been financed by Low Journalism: entertainment, sports, classified ads, etc.

Which is pretty bizarre, when you think about it. It’s as if the space program and Medecins Sans Frontieres were funded by the profits from Chicken McNuggets and Big Gulps. So, of course, the Internet inevitably targeted this economic discontinuity, and Craigslist killed the classified ad, and the Entertainment and Sports and Life sections of magazines and newspapers are being eaten alive by TMZ and Gawker and Deadspin and Buzzfeed–the media equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup–and now everyone’s writing empty pieces about Marissa Mayer’s decision because it’s a hot-button issue and they need the pageviews and the mindshare and the ads.

But that’s a loser’s game. “Will Journalism Go The Way Of Whaling?” asks the title of a recent New York Times conversation between David Brooks and the great Gail Collins, and I fear that the answer is mostly yes. A few of its dinosaurs will evolve into eagles, but most will be eaten alive by the modern mammals–not just because they’re faster and cheaper and more nimble, but because, as this whole Marissa Mayer work-from-home kerfuffle shows, they’re better, within their particular domains. I hope High Journalism finds a new way to pay for itself soon, because the Low Journalism on which it’s riding, once a colossus, now has feet of clay.

¹I’m only a part-time journalist: by day I write software. Whew.

Image credit: Advancing Gingerly, Flickr.

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/02/tis-a-consummation-devoutly-to-be-wished/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

johalputt Jon Evans TechCrunch

06:12

By now you must have heard of Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army: “an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate in and around [their] white tower,” claims the New York Times, who were themselves recently owned by the 1337 h4ck3r5 of the 61398. And just recently, there were “extremely sophisticated” attacks on Apple, Facebook, and Twitter! Why, those evil Chinese! We can’t just stand by while this happens! The US government has to –

to –

…wait just a minute here.

I don’t know how the NYT defines “overwhelming,” but those Apple/Facebook/Twitter hacks? Those apparently originated in Eastern Europe, a long, long way away from Shanghai. And Chinese hacking? Old, old news. Why, the NYT reported on it — courtesy of Wikileaks — back in 2010:

For example, in 2008 Chinese intruders based in Shanghai and linked to the People’s Liberation Army used a computer document labeled “salary increase — survey and forecast” as bait as part of the sophisticated intrusion scheme that yielded more than 50 megabytes of e-mails and a complete list of user names and passwords from a United States government agency that was not identified.

“Sophisticated.” A word that gets thrown around a lot in reference to these attacks, without much in the way of substantiation. Reports indicate, however, that most of them begin with a so-called ‘spear-phishing’ attack, wherein a hackee is tricked into clicking on a malware-ridden link in an email. “The e-mail, in perfect English,” marvels the NYT, “discussed security weaknesses in critical infrastructure systems, and asked the employee to click a link to a document for more information.”

Full points to the Chinese for spear-phishing with an email about security weaknesses. That’s irony worthy of a crack team of Brits turned Mission hipsters.

It’s true that the Internet would be a lot safer if people’s work machines weren’t typically riddled with bug-ridden bloatware like Flash or (client-side) Java. Believe it or not, software does not have to be a frothy Swiss Cheese of security holes, and we should all uninstall that which is. Instead we seem to have collectively descended into a kind of learned helplessness when it comes to malware.

(Consider, for instance, the Silk Road, a web site that sells drugs and other highly illegal goods online–and yet, despite intense interest from law enforcement, has continued to operate unmolested for years now. They don’t have anything like the resources of a government; they just understand security.)

Google’s doing its best to make the world a safer place. As are security startups like Cryptocat and YC alumnus Cryptoseal–the latter co-founded by one Ryan Lackey, whose colorful war-zone exploits I’ve chronicled before.

But we still need to be fairly worried. As everything-and-I-mean-everything gets networked and automated, hackers grow ever more dangerous. (I wrote a whole novel about this eight years ago.) So what’s a poor antediluvian behemoth of a government to do?

Not what they did, which was bring back CISPA. Sigh. As the EFF put it: “CISPA essentially equates greater cybersecurity with greater surveillance and information sharing. But many of our cybersecurity problems arise from software vulnerabilities and human failings … the types of issues that CISPA doesn’t deal with.”

More generally, security solutions that actually work tend to be bottom-up, not top-down; government attempts to increase its control over the Internet have historically led to worse security. Consider the Chinese hack of Gmail in 2011, when “In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access,” to quote security guru Bruce Schneier, who says of the latest China hacks:

Wow, is this a crazy media frenzy. We should know better. These attacks happen all the time, and just because the media is reporting about them with greater frequency doesn’t mean that they’re happening with greater frequency. [...] This is not cyberwar.

Indeed. So disable Java, turn off Flash, and don’t click on attachments (especially PDFs) unless you’re sure they were sent in good faith–but don’t lose too much sleep over PLA Unit 61398, and put no faith in heightened government control over the Internet. That would probably only make things easier for all the world’s “highly sophisticated” hackers, whether they hail from China, Eastern Europe or right next door.

Image credit: Tiananmen Square, by yours truly.

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/23/the-chinese-are-coming-the-chinese-are-coming/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

johalputt Jon Evans TechCrunch

06:12

“Technological revolutions happen in two main phases: the installation phase and the deployment phase,” observes Angel of the Year and new Andreessen Horowitz GP Chris Dixon, who says that the turning point between those phases for the Age of Information is…now.

Meanwhile, “profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down,” notes Paul Krugman. Walter Russell Mead agrees: “The old industrial middle class…has been hollowed out, and no comparable source of stable high income employment has emerged.” Recent data supports that: “Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of (American) earners during the economic recovery, but barely at all for everybody else … Median household income is about 9 percent lower than it was in 1999.”

Coincidence? Nope. The great tech revolution of the last 30 years is finally beginning to metastasize into every other human domain–in other words, software is eating the world, endangering almost every job there is. I argued a few weeks ago that this means America has now hit peak jobs. Let me now unpack that a bit.

For 50 years now Moore’s Law has been (to oversimplify) doubling computing power every two years. People like Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge look at that astonishing history of nonstop exponential growth and predict a technological singularity within our lifetimes.

Me, I’m pretty skeptical. Kurzweil claims that whenever technology hits a limit, “a paradigm shift (i.e., a fundamental change in the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue.” That’s not much more than a convenient article of faith. As Peter Thiel points out, “technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds … reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003.”

On the other end of the spectrum from Kurzweil and Vinge, there are people who think that nothing new is going on: witness Megan McCardle’s dismissal of the economic troubles faced by America’s middle class as “a slight expected income downshift during the Great Recession” in an otherwise bizarre and statistically nonsensical piece.

The reality seems to be somewhere in between. Moore’s Law has finally escaped the confines of the tech sector; as a result, our world is no longer changing linearly, and what’s more its rate of change is increasing; but Kurzweil’s would-be exponential growth is still damped down by the enormous technological barriers outside of the relatively simple world of semiconductors, by regulatory restrictions, and by simple human unwillingness to change that fast.

So I see no mystical Singularity on the horizon. Instead I see decades of drastic nonlinear changes, upheaval, transformation, and mass unemployment. Which, remember, is ultimately a good thing. But not in the short term.

That’s all pretty abstract. Let’s take a specific example: Google’s self-driving cars. What happens when they finally make their way onto American highways en masse? (Which, to be fair, Kurzweil predicted for 2019 back in 1999.) What happens if and when it turns out that they’re much safer than human drivers? Insurance costs will make human driving very expensive, and fewer vehicles will be sold–partly because cars will last longer, partly because fractional ownership of a pool of self-driving vehicles will make more economic sense than having your own.

Improved safety, lower insurance overheads, more efficiency–that’s all great, right? Sure! Of course it is! …Unless you’re one of the more than 2 million truck and taxi drivers out of work.

Self-driving cars are a striking example of software eating jobs, but far from the only one. Almost every job, in every field, probably including yours, will increasingly be threatened by obsolescence and/or automation. That’s a simple and inevitable corollary of software eating the world and the concomitant increasing rate of change. As that rate accelerates, technology will soon start destroying jobs faster than it creates them…if it isn’t already.

Think it can’t happen to you? Already “many of the jobs being displaced are high-skill and high-wage; the downside of technology isn’t limited to menial workers,” warns Krugman. The Economist concurs. Krugman goes on to add: “Still, can innovation and progress really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even workers in general? I often encounter assertions that this can’t happen. But the truth is that it can, and serious economists have been aware of this possibility for almost two centuries.”

Mead argues in The Blue Elites Are Wrong that the information revolution is like the industrial revolution, and will lead to “empowering ordinary people.” Which, again, is true–eventually. Whether you believe that new and better jobs will be created, or whether you’re willing to think a little bigger and imagine that we’ve finally begun the slow evolution towards a post-scarcity society built around reputation economies rather than “jobs” as we understand them, almost all of these new disruptive technologies will ultimately be good for everyone. I’m no Luddite.

But in the interim, until we retool our societies around these new technologies and new economic realities, the next few decades will be extremely difficult for many people who have grown accustomed to thinking of themselves as middle class. Not everyone can become a computer programmer, genetic counselor, or startup CEO; a whole lot of Mead’s “ordinary people” will be stripped of their jobs and left behind in debt, poverty, and despair. No wonder the rich and skilled are doing their level best to entrench themselves at the top of our soon-to-be-rapidly-narrowing economic pyramid.

I’ve tried to make a point here by citing sources across America’s traditional and tedious left/right divide. This is bigger than that. (To the rest of the world: I’m sorry for fixating on the USA here. I’m not even American myself. But it’s almost certainly going to happen here first. Watch carefully.) If left-versus-right is the only lens through which you can view the world, then you really need to start thinking outside the box in which you have jailed yourself. Because everything will soon be changing, faster and faster, and I assure you that the future will be weirder than we imagine now–and you’ll need a flexible mind if you hope to prosper and thrive.

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/16/this-time-is-different/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

johalputt Jon Evans TechCrunch

06:12