Early Indications May 2020: Platforms and Truth

As I write the president has recently signed an executive order that desires to change the status of Internet platforms’ responsibility for the content their members post. The regulation in question, which originated in the Communications Decency Act of 1996, has a long and fascinating history. Here’s the text in case you’re interested.

In its early years of owning YouTube, Google invoked the “safe harbor” provision of the CDA to exempt itself from responsibility for much of the content that YouTube’s users uploaded. Even though the CDA was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, the “safe harbor” concept remained in force, eventually in section 230 of the United States Code, which is the legal underpinning of the Federal Communications Commission. Section 230 does two things. First, it protects providers of Internet services from liability for the speech exercised by users of that infrastructure. Second, when those providers do choose to police some speech or behavior, it does not imply that they must police all behavior.

Tarleton Gillespie of Microsoft Research points out a crucial distinction: section 230 was meant to apply to Internet Service Providers like AOL or Comcast, but was quickly invoked by social media companies a few years later. Because Facebook and YouTube are exempted from responsibility for what their users post, except in a few extreme cases of child endangerment and terrorism, these companies have been slow to regulate other troubling behavior. Because the law in the U.S., where the companies are headquartered, is so favorable, those companies act to moderate content primarily for economic reasons rather than legal ones. Google has repeatedly failed to pay fines levied on it by the EU. For its part, eBay first tried to block sales of Nazi-related items in only France and Germany but, finding that nearly impossible, pulled such items from the site entirely (except for postage stamps and the like). The point here is that U.S. economic logic is dictating what billions of non-U.S. citizens see and don’t see.

Note that YouTube and its kin in the U.S. are (lightly) regulated by the laws related to the phone companies. YouTube is of course heavily reliant on telecommunications, but it is also a near neighbor to the movie industry (governed largely not by federal law but by self-regulation: movie ratings derive from the Motion Picture Association of America, a trade group) and in some ways to newspapers (in the U.S., under the umbrella of the First Amendment related to freedom of the press, and thus regulated by court cases). Further, Google, as a major actor in the advertising ecosystem, is subject to oversight by the Federal Trade Commission. Predictably, any entity that spans so many jurisdictions – in only one country representing a minority of its total traffic – can often escape close scrutiny by claiming exemption from any given mandate.

For the platforms, section 230 is a great gift. Facebook et al can profit from content they neither produce nor must police. Inaccuracy, whether inadvertent or aggressive and programmatic, is rampant, and profitable. Digital literacy is troublingly low – especially when sites that could be used for fact-checking, namely Google, surface results that have been cleverly promoted by peddlers of falsehoods. Anti-Semitism, anti-vaccination falsehoods, misogyny, and racial stereotypes only begin the list of search areas that have been gamed. 

The current debate will be important to watch. Since March, YouTube has been much more activist, both in removing false content in relation to the coronavirus and in generating positive, accurate videos under its own branding, using the #WithMe hashtag. At Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg allows political ads and commentary to say almost anything (official company policy notwithstanding), and internal voices concerned about the site’s practice of ideological polarization were silenced. Twitter, as we saw this week, has a long history — of allowing harassment and verifiably false statements to stand -- that it will have a hard time walking back. The Biden campaign, for its part, is on record as opposing section 230, but in the direction of requiring platforms to do more policing of content, not less, as the Trump position argues.

This state of affairs, as lamentable as it is, stands in stark contrast to the technological optimism of the computing pioneers responsible for the conceptual and technical foundations upon which the Web, and later its platforms, were built. Stewart Brand migrated from the Whole Earth Catalog’s neo-homesteading ethos at the tail end of the 1960s to early online communities and the tellingly named Electronic Frontier Foundation. Tim Berners-Lee and his co-authors in 1992 articulated the ideal of the World Wide Web:

You would have at your fingertips all you need to know about electronic publishing, high-energy physics, or for that matter, Asian culture. If you are reading this article on paper, you can only dream, but read on. Since Vannevar Bush’s article (1945) men have dreamed of extending their intelligence by making their collective knowledge available to each individual by using machines.

Only six years after Berners-Lee, however, James Katz of Rutgers (formerly at Bellcore, the Bell operating companies’ R&D shop) astutely saw the potential for the Web to pollute that stream of knowledge rather than nourish it:

The Internet and the Web allow for the quick dissemination of information, both false and true; unlike newspapers and other media outlets, there are often no quality control mechanisms on Web sites that would permit users to know what information is generally recognized fact and what is spurious.  

Katz basically called out Internet-powered fake news 22 years ago.

The rapid evolution from Berners-Lee’s extreme optimism to the many and profound downsides of ubiquitous connectivity – mental and physical health concerns, the monetization of private life via unmonitored behavioral experimentation, the hacking of democratic institutions, trolls and shitposting, swatting, aggressively nasty disregard for the views of women and ethic populations --  is a story for another time. The dilemma of a post-fact society cannot be probed here, but it is real.

At the same time, this is not for a moment to suggest the problems of accuracy in and abuses of online platforms are easy to address. Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety Del Harvey used simple statistics to drive home the scale of the moderation issue in a TED talk in 2014. “Given the scale Twitter is at, a one-in-a million chance happens 500 times a day,” he stated. That changes operating assumptions. “For us, edge cases, those rare situations that are unlikely to occur, are more like norms.” If you assume 99.999% of tweets pose no threat whatsoever, “that tiny percentage of tweets remaining works out to roughly 150,000 per month. The sheer scale of what we’re dealing with makes for a challenge.” Bear in mind that Harvey was speaking in 2014, when YouTube uploads were probably half of 2019 levels, and that YouTube sees three times the monthly active users Twitter has, and the scale of the moderation problem — that historically does NOT include fact-checking — gets tangibly staggering. 

This moderation problem is made harder yet by the platforms’ need to maintain the illusion of civility and neighborliness. Few platforms publicize their moderation teams; in 2013 an NPR reporter was denied access to moderators at both Google and Microsoft, though a spokeswoman at the latter said moderation was “a yucky job.” Much of the work is outsourced. One moderator told a reporter in the fall of 2019 he was paid $18.50 an hour (about $37,000 a year) to watch “VE” – violent extremism, primarily in Arabic – videos all day as an employee of Accenture, the tech services firm Google contracts with for some of its moderation. In October 2019 Google reported it had removed 160,000 pieces of violent extremism material from various of the company’s properties. That’s about 450 per day, every day.

Removing or changing the section 230 “safe harbor” concept could force the big U.S. platforms to alter their business models, YouTube potentially less radically than Facebook. The concept is also well established after nearly 25 years of court decisions, so the status of case law relative to executive order will need to be decided. In any event, a law intended to protect Internet Service Providers that evolved into the bedrock on which large-scale digital platform companies were built has suddenly and loudly been called into question.

Early Indications April 2020: Where comes next?

Between the coming of spring, a few epidemiology curves trending downward, and some promising medical news, it’s beginning to be possible to think about life after the coronavirus lockdown. My focus here will be on how place and space might be affected by the quarantine experiences.

Commercial space, political space, social space, and personal space are all likely to be rethought, in some cases temporarily and in others permanently. Shopping malls, already in trouble as a sector in the past few years, look ripe for reinvention or continued shutdowns. Telecommuting will be fascinating to watch relative to office real estate. If people can do all of their job tasks working from home during the lockdown, the old arguments against remote work will be hard to resurrect after it’s over. (I’m not saying co-location does not confer benefits: if anything, we will probably appreciate them more fully once we return to the office.) Look for the average number of square feet of office space per worker to continue its drop. Could a better-run WeWork-like entity find a market in the new normal of office space?

Just as there are important differences between moving a residential college course into online mode on short notice and ground-up redesign for the virtual medium, so too will work practices have to evolve as their locus changes. Here’s one example: hospitals are rushing to implement telemedicine and millions of patient visits have been successfully conducted. The workflow for the healthcare providers, however, is kludgey: the videoconference network, the hospital’s billing and record-keeping software, regulatory compliance software from the state (in the case of scheduled pharmaceuticals for instance), and the electronic signature all come from different vendors so the doctor or nurse becomes an ad hoc systems integrator with no additional time allotted in the daily schedule for the extra effort and frustration. 

Moving from a physical office visit to a virtual one includes updated workflows, additional infrastructure — both technical and cultural/organizational — and potentially new models of care: outside specialists can be patched into the video call, and patients’ home environments can be assessed in ways they cannot in a clinic. The location, size, and functions of clinics, showrooms, cubicle farms, and call centers can all be rethought given the creativity and will to do so. One quick win: hiring people with physical disabilities should become easier without the need for special transport or workplace modifications if the employee works from home, which can be anywhere with Internet connectivity, not just within reasonable drive time.

One fascinating aspect of the rush to online instruction is the cleverness and speed of students who hack the process. In China, students bombarded their learning package with 1-star reviews in the hopes the Apple app store would take it down and they wouldn’t have schoolwork. Plenty of students are learning about computers by reading the browser code for their quizzes: “if answer = 40 then points = 10” is pretty easy to figure out. Even some Zoombombers started out as high school kids putting 2 and 2 together (their own experience with organizing meetups) with a few Google searches for dial-in codes. Rethinking the workplace means rethinking security.

Another level of space is administrative jurisdiction. The economic shutdown was intended to “flatten the curve” of ICU admissions to prevent the kind of overload to the medical system that New York City is confronting as I write. For unknown reasons, some places are getting hit much harder than others: Lombardy vs Rome, New Orleans vs Tampa, Detroit vs Denver. Part of this pattern could be due to innate immunity or silent exposure that confers immunity: one survey of asymptomatic people in Iceland suggests 50% have the virus with no measurable signals. Obviously Iceland is far from representative of anything, but one piece of an economic re-start will have to be much wider testing to detect levels of potential community spread (and eventually community safety). That testing might be connected to contact tracing efforts, which could improve safety at the cost of privacy. In whom will people be confident with that trade-off? Banks, post offices, and insurance companies obviously market and sell trust, but are any of these good candidates for holding sensitive medical information at such large scale? Trust in tracing will be a major challenge: a Washington Post poll this week found few people excited about tech companies performing this function, and only about 40% of the sample was both technically capable and willing to trust _any_ entity.

The regional governors’ groups formed in response to the pandemic might wither away after the crisis, or maybe they will persist with new kinds of charges: water use, immigration, voting, education, and transportation might be candidates for regionalized response. For the time being, getting a better handle on the reasons for the dramatic geographic disparities in sickness and health will be imperative to restarting the global economy. 

Continuing on the theme of jurisdiction, how will public health agencies be situated going forward? Where do they operate? How are they funded? The WHO, CDC, and many state health departments have failed their charge of late; might there be appetite for new models of monitoring and response? Part of a return to normalcy will be a vaccine, and the Gates Foundation’s efforts to accelerate this process are obviously welcome and well-placed. Even so, getting tens of millions of doses to those who need protection most will be a massive effort. When vaccines become available, who gets them first? Best guesses have those vaccines ready in 12 to 18 months: in the interim, we need to build the social infrastructure of allocation and administration. What agencies will take the lead, and why? As with ventilators, we will need to pay attention to how scarce resources are allocated. As in many biomedical scenarios (blood and organ donation foremost), markets are a suboptimal tool for making these decisions.

The reinvention and redefinition of social space will be a critical aspect of the recovery. Because college football is a massive economic engine that supports essentially all of college athletics (except for Duke and Marquette basketball and a few other outliers), it has been in the national spotlight: everyone from hot dog vendors to sports bars to Disney (parent of ESPN) is suffering right now. College athletics could be permanently reshaped by this virus. Absent a vaccine, which cannot possibly be discovered and deployed in 4 months, how can colleges and universities allow tens of thousands of ideally screaming fans to stand inches apart? How many $5 million-a-year head football coaches will collect paychecks if no games are played? Will Covid-19 mutate to Covid-20 this fall and if so, will immunity to the former carry over? As employees, pro football players have rights and responsibilities college players — “scholar-athletes” as the euphemism has it — do not. The NCAA and NFL are unlikely to walk in lockstep as each copes with life during a prolonged pandemic.

Other social spaces will evolve as well. Yoked as they often are to malls, many movie theaters do not appear to have a robust future. State fairs, rodeos, religious worship, and concerts will be unrecognizable for a time. Orchestras in the US do not enjoy the level of community or financial support their counterparts in Europe see, so will some weaker organizations be forced to dissolve? French headlines predict many of the country’s art galleries will close permanently after the lockdown. Museums and other non-profits the world over will suffer possibly catastrophic economic losses and/or implement new admissions practices that enforce social distancing. What about parks and beaches? In densely populated areas especially, might the pandemic drive innovative urban planning to create new parklands, potentially reclaimed from roads closed to auto traffic in favor or pedestrians or bicycles, as in many European efforts?

Finally, the pandemic will forever change personal space. Breaking up via teleconference is now known as Zumping, I’m told. Watch parties virtually connect responsibly isolated friends or dating partners. Activity across various Facebook properties is surging, as is Netflix traffic. I saw a virtual doctoral dissertation defense and millions of students will experience graduation from a screen. Birthday parties have become truly creative, from drive-by honk-a-thons to surprise video greetings from celebrities. What is called “social distancing” is really a misnomer: we need our networks more than ever, but the imperative is to maintain _physical_ distance at the same time we struggle to remain socially close to the people who matter.

Video conferencing is incredibly different from what AT&T envisioned in the Picturephone almost 60 years ago. Multi-party meetings, shared screens, fake backdrops, and side-channel text are all important features. But the privacy implications of Zoom/Webex/Teams/Google Meet need to be explored. Here’s a thought-provoking essay. Leave aside for a moment the question of what data and/or metadata the conferencing provider is collecting. Zoom is terrifically intimate and we see into the home lives of co-workers, interviewees, students, and other people around whom norms traditionally created physical distance and structure. Now, there are dogs or babies or personal mementos to mark that 2-dimensional screen as theirs, but now also mine. School systems are wrestling with this privacy issue already: I as a parent would be extremely uncomfortable having random teachers see the bedroom of my child, but that may be the only room with quiet and/or wi-fi access and/or adequate workspace.

The whole camera-on/camera-off question is getting a lot of attention in pedagogical circles. I may want to see faces to track student engagement and slow down or speed up my lecture based on various kinds of feedback. At the same time, people may be shy, want to hide a disability, feel unsafe from stalking or similar behavior, or have religious issues with video representation. I used to teach asynchronous online classes to students who worked at Saudi Aramco, and those female students operated under very different cultural rules compared to what I was more familiar with. Mandating cameras-on there should not be a unilateral or casual call, or anywhere else for that matter.

The digital divide, long remarked-upon but timidly addressed, consists of more than computing and bandwidth. Without public libraries or coffee shops as “third places,” working or learning from “home” should not be understood simply as the replication of prior social interactions. What we hold private, dear, and shared used to be governed in large measure by physical space: architecture professor Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language analyzes all manner of structures in terms of privacy gradients among other factors. Now we need to build both the grammar and vocabulary of personal video representation, and perhaps surprisingly this derives heavily from our physical location. Class and other signaling via our clothing, our speech, our transportation, and our diet is familiar. (Some people hate Android phones because their texts show up in green bubbles with limited functionality on Apple devices.) How we will use this new medium for the discourse of social segmentation and hierarchy — and for much else besides — will be fascinating to watch.

Early Indications March 2020: The Coronavirus hits higher education

After what might have been the weirdest month of my life (I was on a plane to Europe on business 12 days after 9/11, whereas now most of us will be on lockdown for months), much remains uncertain about the world’s economy, politics, livelihoods, and of course sickness and health. Not wishing to join the chorus of people who claim overnight expertise in public health and epidemiology, I can say a little bit about how fast the world of higher education has been upended.

Let’s start with instruction. Obviously colleges and universities are moving to online course delivery fast and furiously. This process relies on software: content management systems were sub-branded learning management systems, and one LMS recently instructed its instructors to call it a Digital Learning Platform. Then there are video bolt-ons, Zoom being the flavor of the month — except for that part where it sells user information to Google et al. Overall, online instruction seems to work really well except when it doesn’t: labs, studio courses, and testing are hard to get right. In addition, student privacy in the US has its equivalent of HIPAA called FERPA, and lots of online tools being pressed into service (Facebook Live?) lack the necessary protections when student IDs and other PII are exchanged, as in a testing scenario. Going forward, we will hear from rural people who lack broadband for online learning, telework, and telemedicine: synchronous video can be finicky and lost frames/speech are quickly frustrating. Our dean wisely advised us to prepare for low-bandwidth scenarios, which fortunately seem not to have materialized in the US (overseas is another story).

The virus's effect on research will be fascinating to track: there are so many conflicting forces emerging. Pro: people have more time in solitude to think and write. Con: it's hard to maintain concentration on research when existential questions -- Central Park hosts a field hospital; predicting 200,000 U.S. deaths constitutes optimism -- confront us daily. (The Stones' "Gimme Shelter" and Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime" are in heavy mental rotation around here.) Pro: there are so many natural experiments running before our eyes, from air pollution measurements to industrial policy to cell-phone tracking of people under various levels of lockdown. Con: labs are closed or staffed only minimally for animal feeding and such. Pro: the virtual infrastructure seems to be performing admirably to deliver needed resources, whether compute cycles or network uptime. Con: student workers including research assistants are pretty much barred from campus. Pro: libraries are offering a lot of services over the wire, though most work with archives and artifacts is halted. Con: academic travel and meetings are shut down. Pro: academic travel and meetings are shut down. Overall, the research output of the next few years will be informed by this chapter of epidemiological history in ways nobody can foresee.

It’s a tough year to be a graduating senior. Internship and job offers can’t really be extended if the hiring company is closed and/or losing money. Students in the travel and hospitality fields, the arts, and retail (Macy’s just furloughed 130,000 people yesterday; TJX has closed more than 4,000 stores worldwide) will be desperate, but even big manufacturers like Boeing and GM face huge uncertainty. Accounting/consulting as a field is rapidly adapting to work from home, raising the question of client-site travel down the road. I doubt it will rebound to previous levels as both managers and clients identify areas for lifestyle improvement and cost savings with no loss of service quality. Given such dismal job prospects, MBA admissions would stand to improve: applications often run counter-cyclically as people step out of a bad labor market to improve skills and earning prospects. Given the timing of this pandemic, that effect -- if there is one -- won't show until September 2021.

Late winter is the culmination of hiring season in many academic disciplines, and new PhDs are usually flying to various on-campus presentations and interviews in January-March. Absent flights, these proceedings are harder to move to video modes of interaction: taking the candidate out to dinner often reveals important cues about his or her cultural fit with the institution. Also in the travel vein, we see hundreds of academic conferences being cancelled or postposed. These are also important in some hiring processes as schools can see as many job candidates as they want at the big professional meetings (the American Psychological Association meeting sees 10,000+ attendees). Doctoral workshops, catching up with colleagues, and networking all are more difficult in a video scenario, which some groups are piloting as we speak. Papers will still get published, albeit without the often valuable feedback one can get in a live room. Also, I recently witnessed our first-ever online PhD defense that went extremely smoothly, so established academic practices are already adapting.

For sake of argument assume a new PhD made her flight to the school that wanted to hire her before everything shut down: I’m hearing of schools that are already rescinding offers. Other departments’ offers are being honored, but all their other in-process searches are being cancelled or frozen. The reason for this is university finances, which are about to be stress-tested to the extreme. Here’s how.

New York is but one state that is delaying state income tax filing because of the pandemic. This delays the state’s budgeting process. Without budgets in the summer, state colleges and universities don’t know what they will have to spend in the academic fiscal year that starts July 1 or thereabouts. (Wild guess: it will be less than last year.) It gets worse. Many schools are issuing refunds of room and board after campuses were closed. This was far from expected: one university official said on the record that Penn State’s liability is more than $40 million. Furthermore, many schools in the US have cultivated pipelines of international students, particularly from China and India. With the combination of travel bans on potentially both sides of the trans-Pacific flight, those tuition dollars might not make it to campus for the fall semester (if there is an in-residence fall semester). The University of Iowa is particularly dependent on China, but fell out of favor last year for a variety of reasons. The University of Illinois, meanwhile, has a $424,000 policy with Lloyds of London to insure against the loss of $60 million from Chinese business and engineering students who cannot attend for specified reasons (pandemics may or may not be on the list.) For their part, Iowa could be in very deep yogurt this fall, and they are not alone. According to Moody’s, about 30% of US colleges and universities, both public and private, were operating at a deficit before Covid-19. Only 5% of private institutions had 90 days of cash on hand. 

Stateside, the US is witnessing the single biggest spike in unemployment claims in history. How many parents or grandparents will pull financial support from a student come fall? Students on scholarship, meanwhile, might be funded by proceeds from a college/university endowment, and with the stock market’s recent tumble, endowment proceeds will come in far below projections. Given family financial hardship, lower state appropriations, and smaller investment returns, budgets will get out of whack pretty quickly. Athletic revenues already took a hit with the cancellation of the NCAA basketball money-fest, and fall football is no sure thing. Precarious liberal-arts colleges, and more already-marginal law schools, will be forced to close.

Markets are often efficient, and it may be time for a culling of the herd given so much oversupply (in law schools, for example). What can we expect as the situation stabilizes? First, instruction will benefit as new hybrid models of face-to-face and online delivery are configured in clever ways. Second, asset utilization will likely improve: expect university real estate to keep its lights on longer, potentially including Saturday classes, in order to contain costs to appeal to cash-strapped families who realize how good virtual instruction can be. Third, as with the world of business and non-profits, professional meetings will increasingly have an online component as everyone sees how good WebEx/Zoom/Teams can be in the crisis. They will become the default for certain kinds of conferencing rather than the exception. The video provider with the best technology, business model, and interoperability could realize dominant market share of a newly huge market. Microsoft squandered Skype’s first-mover advantage; might Teams prove the company’s redemption? Other providers — online testing comes to mind insofar as cheating is a massive issue — will occupy new niches in the hybrid ecosystem. Overall, education is but one locus of what will be a wave of what Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” Where else will old rules be rewritten?

Early indications February 2020 YouTube at 15: The evolution of an Internet platform

YouTube was launched in 2005, when the World Wide Web was about 15 years old. In 2020, YouTube is now the same age the Web was when online video changed the landscape. In the course of those 15 years, YouTube has seen a number of defining moments, and each of these proved decisive in shaping the future course of the platform. At the same time, paths not taken raise substantial questions about the power of a planet-scale video (and commentary) site that does much to change how people are educated, entertained, manipulated, and commoditized as audiences. The history of these turning points illustrates both the issues of private control over crowdsourced contributions and the scale of the barriers to entry Google has erected with technical, behavioral, and economic engineering.

Note some of the common threads:

1) Monetization, whether by ads, donations, or merchandise. YouTube is in part a massive platform for commerce.

2) Content moderation, from copyrighted works to p*rn and terrorist materials, cannot be performed at human scale.

3) The mechanisms for finding content are continually evolving. While human gatekeepers – editors, publishers, etc – are less visible, algorithmic gatekeeping is obscured, overwritten, and has unintended consequences, especially at the scale of 80 years of content being uploaded to the site every day. At the same time, new voices and even media (eg TED talks and video game replay/commentary) break through and are reshaping culture.

4) A privately-owned digital platform is subject to very little legal regulation so a small number of managers (mostly in one zip code) end up making editorial decisions that affect billions of people, most of whom are not otherwise subject to Silicon Valley norms and laws.

2005

YouTube launches just as U.S. dial-up Internet access is being superseded by broadband.

Nike uploads “Ronaldinho: Touch of Gold,” which amasses 255,000 views, most ever on the platform.

2006

YouTube is serving 100,000,000 videos per day and litigation from copyright holders could potentially have forced it to shut down, as Napster did. Instead, Google buys YouTube for $1.65B, bringing scale to the site’s infrastructure and a fully mature legal department to the copyright discussion.

GoPro introduces its ruggedized high-definition video camera.

The Ohio-based motivational speaker Judson Laipply uploads “Evolution of Dance” which stands as the most-watched video in YouTube history for almost 3 years. 

2007

Viacom sues Google for copyright infringement. Google relies heavily on a “safe harbor” defense from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. In coming years the suit would be repeatedly decided then partially overturned.

At some point Google promotes videos on view count. Video search is not parallel to web search insofar as _content_ is not crawled or indexed. Instead, user _behavior_ disproportionately contributes to which videos get promoted. Like web search, the algorithm evolves and is never made public.

Michelle Phan begins uploading makeup videos. Less than 10 years later her ipsy cosmetics company is valued at more than $500 million.

2008

Google releases Video Identification, a machine-learning tool to proactively identify copyrighted material.

2009

Samsung and Apple release smartphones with video cameras. YouTube videos get longer, on average, and uploads soar over the next decade.

Salman Khan quits his job to work full time on the Khan Academy learning platform.

Chicago-based OK Go release “Here It Goes Again” (AKA the treadmill video) via YouTube, then cut ties with their record label. 

2010

Nike releases its “Write the Future” World Cup campaign including a 3-minute ad that airs on both conventional television and YouTube. Dutch yodeling re-enters the cultural lexicon.

TED impresario Chris Anderson shows how online video breaks print’s monopoly on large-scale spreading of ideas and uses TED talks as a case study. 

Old Spice releases 186 follow-up YouTube responses to social media responses to “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” TV ads. Old Spice surges from mid-pack to #1 body wash.

2011

Twitch launches as a streaming service for video gameplay. YouTube offers numerous commentators on related channels soon thereafter and by 2015 most of the top 10 YouTube channels relate to game content (and YouTube launches a separate gaming app that same year).

2012

The Kony 2012 movie is released paving the way for later social activism such as the ice bucket challenge. 

“Gangnam Style” by the Korean rapper/performer Psy is uploaded and becomes the most watched YouTube video of all time. 

Red Bull's Stratos balloon takes Felix Baumgartner to 128,000 feet from whence he sets a world skydiving record. 8 million concurrent live streams on YouTube is also a record.

YouTube promotion algorithm is expanded to include time on site as a factor alongside view count.

2014

YouTube and Viacom settle out of court.

A Wired article draws attention to the content moderators (often contractors) who watch beheadings, terrorist recruitment, child endangerment, and other atrocities every day for work.

2015

HTML 5 replaces Adobe Flash as the common-denominator video playback tool that superseded Windows, Real, and Apple proprietary formats.

Kenyan Julius Yego wins the world javelin championship after having learned to throw on YouTube.

2016

YouTube's promotion algorithm switches from page views to length of viewing as part of a larger Google emphasis on machine learning.

2017

YouTube launches SuperChat, a donation mechanism for viewers to support the performers they are watching on live chat.

Pedophiles are found to be avoiding protections of sexualized children’s content. Major brands pull advertising from the platform.

“Dispacito” by the Puerto Rican artist Luis Fonsi is uploaded and becomes the most watched YouTube video of all time. 

YouTube's promotion algorithm seeks to downgrade “inflammatory religious or supremacist” content.

2018

Logan Paul posts video of a human corpse in a Japanese park known for being the site of suicides (a clear violation of the service's rules of conduct). YouTube demonetizes him months later for an unrelated offense.

The YouTube promotion algorithm narrows the focus of monetization to top channels in hopes of ensuring quality, but 300 advertisers are found to be running ads on supremacist and similar sites they did not want to be associated with.

YouTube announces content moderators watching disturbing videos will work only 4-hour shifts, a pledge that had not yet been fulfilled more than a year later.

2019

Pedophiles are again found to be utilizing YouTube’s recommendation system and comments functionality. 3 major companies pull their advertising from YouTube.

Videos of a mass shooting in a Christchurch, NZ mosque (originally livestreamed on Facebook) are reposted to YouTube in huge numbers, defeating both bots and human moderators. Legislators call for regulation.

YouTube's promotion algorithm changes again, in the aim of banning “borderline content.”

2020

Google ends all comments and strips additional functionality from content aimed at kids.

Google/Alphabet release YouTube revenue figures: more than $10 billion in 2018 and more than $15 billion in 2019.

Early Indications January 2020: Is info tech's run winding down?

Happy new year to everyone, whenever your year starts.

First off, I send my respects to Clayton Christensen’s family and friends. The business community lost one of a small number of synthetic systems thinkers last week, and the world lost a gracious, kind human being.

I’m writing this month to explore the idea that the info tech run may be winding down. That is, we may look back at the late 1940s (invention of the transistor, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon) until the mid-2010s as an era extending from room-size computers through the smartphone and large-scale digital platforms that migrated “the Internet” into the utilities of modern life, most of them privately owned. Look at Silicon Valley: unicorn valuations are retreating after the Uber IPO and WeWork disaster, and it’s an open question how many meal-delivery startups the world really needs. Nobody talks about “the next Apple” because hardware is too hard, and “Uber for X” hasn’t really panned out as a blueprint for startups. The big (FAANG plus Microsoft) get bigger, to the point where many people are asking “how big is too big,” and nobody has broken through in well over a decade: Netflix, the 2nd youngest company on the list, is almost 20 years old, while Facebook is already 15. 

Where can tech go from here? The smartphone is being steadily but incrementally improved, Apple makes a whole lot of money on earbuds, Amazon's cloud business is very much a utility, and the privacy issues around AI-powered ad targeting have become non-trivial. (A startup has screen-scraped billions of public photos into a single massive facial recognition database and Facebook didn't stop them.) The last really interesting app was probably Uber, or maybe Tinder or TikTok, none of them known as a privacy champion. If info tech has solved the obvious problems, and the industry is “mature,” what’s next? 

If we look back, 1910-1970 was a time of sustained innovation in personal ground transportation. The Volkswagen Beetle was a lineal descendant of Henry Ford‘s assembly line, as was the Toyota production system. Dwight Eisenhower got the idea for the interstate highway system from Germany’s autobahns. Since 1970, however, while cars have gained in theoretical top speed, commute times are longer. Car sales are slowing, in part because fewer people use cars to express their identity. (For a snarky look at how some people still do this see here.) Given the generally grim state of the industry and of global urbanization, it's hard to see the car as the core of a technology rebirth.

The same might be said of medicine. The 20^th century saw mass immunization, the rise of antibiotics, and improved nutrition, all of which helped extend longevity at the global level. Now, U.S. lifespan growth is slowing and at times reversing: available nutrition has instead fueled obesity and overuse of antibiotics (including in the food supply) may render the whole class of drags useless in the not too distant future. Opioids contribute to "deaths from despair." Big pharma, meanwhile, has little to show for billions of dollars of investment except arbitrary price hikes on off-patent and other essential drugs. The money made from those high prices doesn't go primarily to R&D, as the industry implies, but to lobbying and marketing. The face of the industry is neither a Jonas (polio vaccine) Salk nor even Kenneth (aerobic exercise) Cooper: it’s Martin Shkreli and Purdue Pharma's Sackler billionaires.

What about plastics, the industry of the future as of the 1968 classic The Graduate? The oceans (where the primary source of plastic waste is not straws or even bottles but . . . fishing nets) are but one concern; other watersheds, air quality, food safety (I won't claim expertise but neither BPA nor teflon looks like a long-term winner in the human food chain right now), and landfill issues have the industry scrambling.

Aviation went from Kitty Hawk to the moon (via the SR-71 and Boeing 747) in one human lifetime, but since 1970, what can we say about the field except “bankrupt discount airlines”? Very light jets never got to scale, in part because of scheduling issues, and we now see that Boeing lost its engineering soul: it looks to be closer to a bank, in its culture and incentives, than to Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works.

If tech, automotive, pharma/chemicals, and aviation are no longer the hothouse of innovation, what might be next? One possibility might be mayors. That is, for all the talk about gridlock at the nation-state, lots of new, clever ideas are emerging at the municipal level. Whether it’s the places that James and Deborah Fallows report on in their book Our Towns, or South Bend, IN, or Paris, cities are the locus of lots of good thinking and experimentation.

South Bend’s Pete Buttigieg is part of something called the Mayors Innovation Project, run out of the University of Wisconsin – Madison since the 1990s. (He's currently too busy with his primary campaign to attend the meetings right now, but remains involved.) Mike Bloomberg is another former mayor who is convinced his hands-on problem-solving skills will translate to the next level. Cities scholar Richard Florida has been tracking and inspiring urban innovation for years, most recently via his CityLab website (now owned by . . . Bloomberg Media.) Anne Hidalgo, the first woman to be mayor of Paris, has made clean air a high priority and is pushing hard on bicycle mobility, including for the disabled. 

What tech analyst Horace Dediu (he’s an expert on Apple) calls “micromobility” encompasses scooters, e-bikes, bicycles, and the like. Given scooter-company failures all over the world, it’s unclear that the problem of moving people safely and cleanly through cities will be achieved by the private sector. (Elon Musk is, I‘m convinced, on the wrong track with both his tunneling and his battery initiatives; equities markets disagree.) As The Economist pointed out last week, fixing housing involves everything from tax policy to mass transit to demographics. (Paris is also dramatically extending the Metro.) 

Housing, employment, and transport are inextricably intertwined, and such systems challenges are beyond the scope of any private enterprise, no matter how well funded. Urbanization will only accelerate, so the people-moving problem will gain in urgency. Here’s $5 that says the 2020s will be known more for progress on urban mobility than any technological field (this includes 5G). That focus on public welfare also implies investors won’t see the kinds of returns the FAANGs and Microsoft have delivered. Given the extreme concentration of wealth we are witnessing, perhaps a return to thinking about general welfare is a fair and reasonable corrective.

Early Indications December 2019: Revisiting 10-year predictions

10 years ago this week I made a list of 24 mid-range predictions. The first thing that’s striking is how little has changed: Apple was about to ship the iPad in April 2010, Facebook was already a very big deal, legal marijuana was on the visible horizon, the Internet of things wasn't hard to see coming, and the 2010 football World Cup was indeed a major moment in social media (remember this?). The physical/virtual frontier remains challenging.

At the same time, Uber/Lyft wasn’t yet visible to the naked eye, nor did I mention Airbnb. Vegetable-powered pseudo-meats are exploding in popularity for environmental rather than health reasons. I noted drugs but didn't mention opioids. In energy, the news is better than almost anyone predicted as solar and wind are becoming more viable, faster than almost anyone predicted. Google remains a central player, but Microsoft's recovery from the Ballmer years is a surprise. The Kindle did well but is not conquering the world: many high-quality physical bookstores are surviving quite nicely, in part on the rebound of physical books. Elsewhere, however, streaming media have altered the entertainment landscape considerably: Netflix stock registered a 3700% return over the decade.

Lots of big issues remain problematic. Universities continue to raise tuition faster than the pace of inflation with the resulting debt load a major burden on the US economy at large, rural broadband is a joke in much of the US and elsewhere, and obesity is getting worse rather than better. Class conflict fueled by extreme concentrations of wealth is worse, gaming remains a big business (though I don't think I was alone in missing e-sports), and I didn't give nearly enough weight to YouTube and online video, whether Khan Academy, gamer channels ranging from Pew Die Pie to Twitch, or the horrific uses of the medium by terror groups and sexual criminals.

After each entry I'll add a postscript under a "grading" rubric.
**********

In this last week of 2009, it's scary to think that it was a full ten years ago that the IT profession was holding its collective breath as midnight January 1, 2000 approached. Apart from spooking us with memories of how fast the decade sped by, the Y2K issue stands as a cautionary tale for any technology prediction.

Duly chastened, I remain intrepid, with 24 questions for the coming decade. The alphabetical mnemonic I last used in 2005 cues up a question for each letter, minus the usual suspects.

A
Having brilliantly migrated from computers to MPs players to mobile data devices, what will Apple do for its next adjacent market? Tablet rumors surface almost weekly, Apple TV has yet to fulfill its promise, and such areas as health (iDoc?) are huge in potential. In any case, it's difficult to see Apple hitting its revenue growth numbers without an addition to the product portfolio at some point.

Grade: Near-hit: the iPad and watch helped growth, but the continually-updated iPhone and associated services have sufficed to keep Apple near the top of the industry.

B
In case you missed it, DARPA conducted a brilliant experiment last month. Ten red weather balloons were tethered in plain sight at various locations around the country, and teams competed to supply the latitude and longitude of each one using social networking technologies. MIT won in nine hours, an amazing accomplishment considering a) the continental U.S. presents a surface area of over 3,000,000 square miles and b) teams worked to spoof each other. In the end, MIT's clever compensation model to attract the widest interest group of observers helped secure the win. In light of that experiment and its many findings, the B is for business models, specifically for the plethora of social media tools that are exploding in popularity. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, but this past year Facebook alone grew at a pace of 770,000 new users -- a day.

Grade: Hit, especially if you count the "sharing economy" startups that have achieved massive uptake, admittedly without much in the way of profit.

C
Here are some surprising numbers: Brazil's GDP per capita income, in constant dollars, has risen 52% in the last ten years. Singapore's is up 79%. Chile has gone up 59%. These numbers, chosen at random, illustrate the emergence of a global middle class (the C). Such groups are historically important, typically signaling political stability, economic growth, and increased presence in international trade markets. Who else will join these countries, Korea, and other fast-growing economies? How will the world change with these new entries into the economic and cultural mainstream? (For contrast, U.S. GDP per capita in 2005 dollars rose only 17% between 1998 and 2008, and class-related tensions could be big news going forward, whether in regard to labor unions, health care, the 2012 election, or unemployment.)

Grade: Hit, especially in regard to Brexit and the 2016 US election.

D
The D question relates to design. As the documentary of the same name makes clear, the "modern" presence of the Helvetica typeface (or its Ariel cousin-once-removed) is now more than 50 years old, yet it remains ubiquitous. Apple has of course capitalized on great design, and the slowdown in consumer spending in the U.S. in particular may be an indication that people are buying from a less disposable mindset. If people buy less, they may follow a generally European pattern and buy better designed items. For all of these reasons and others, the time is ripe for a design renaissance on par with streamlined toasters, or the neo-Bauhaus movement that poured so much concrete in the 1960s.

Grade: Miss. People are worried about plastic straws, which represent a whopping .025% of ocean plastic tonnage. Judging from US sales, most people don't care a lot what their car/SUV looks like. Apart from couches with cup holders and USB connections, it's hard to see much change at your neighborhood furniture store. Record covers are a dead medium enjoying a minor uptick. Overall, design doesn't seem to matter much.

D2
Drugs also merit mention. Marijuana is simultaneously a) being legalized under medical provisions in 13 states and counting, b) being decriminalized in some states, and c) contributing to political destabilization on both sides of the Mexican border. As states battle increasing social welfare and other costs in a time of declining revenues, taxing pot holds at least some appeal. In addition, mandatory sentencing laws are crowding prisons and generating hardened gang members at a staggering expense that many states simply may not be able to afford: $24,000 per year per inmate, not counting potential foregone wages and other indirect expenses. If, as The Onion memorably put it, "Drugs Win Drug War," what alternative strategies might be pursued instead?

Grade: Miss. The opioid problem is critical in many US counties, rhetoric and imagery focused south of the border to the contrary. Meanwhile, CBD is peddled as a miracle cure for almost anything.

E
As more of the world's citizens want automobiles, and electric lighting, and central heating, and meat in their diets (see C), the demand and competition for energy sources will intensify. That energy, usually provided by burning something, will in turn play into the global climate debate. Whether in oil prices, coal emissions debates, or nuclear power lobbying efforts, competition for energy will have geopolitical consequences, potentially including more armed ones.

Grade: Miss. The US fracking boom has rewritten the global flow of hydrocarbons.

F
Football (world football, not the U.S. version) will be huge news in 2010 as the World Cup is contested in South Africa. Apart from the intense fan interest in both powerhouses and upstarts, the role of mobile and new media will bear watching. Far more people own cell phones than own televisions, so the deluge of texts, Tweets, and web-hosted highlight clips could be a global coming-out party for social media, just as the 1958 NFL championship game or the JFK assassination were for television.

Grade: Hit. Social media (particularly related to fantasy) has changed the sports media landscape decisively.

G
It's difficult to think of a G bigger than Google. The question before us relates to the company's many efforts to expand its presence (and eventually its revenue base) beyond the lucrative search franchise. Will the Android mobile, or the location-based ad service, or the office applications, or some new innovation break through to profitability? How will copyright-holders react to potentially universal access to their work?

Grade: Hit. The aforementioned questions still are live 10 years later.

H
H is for housing. The economic impact of the shelter industry is of course considerable, and everybody is watching home prices for both personal and analytical reasons. Beyond sales figures, however, some larger forces are coming into play. Demographically, the baby boomers now entering retirement (or an approximation thereof) want and need different things from real estate, and it will be a while until a later wave has enough children, income, and interest to buy up the empty-nesters' housing stock. In addition, as U.S. income stagnates, the average house size will likely retreat from its high point of circa 2005.

Grade: Hit but too early: US single-family structures are only now starting to shrink, and the baby boomers are trying to sell off their historically overlarge residences to a next generation both more eco-conscious and cash-strapped. Something will have to give.

I
Identity is increasingly something people actively manage. What's your relationship status? How are you feeling today? What do you think about sports, politics, other people, your possessions? At the same time, lightweight and incredibly powerful tools lower the barriers to association. Whatever one's interests, whether obscure, weird, or outright criminal, finding like-minded individuals is now possible in ways that were simply inconceivable in physical space. As more people grow up breathing the oxygen of online, all-the-time social broadcasting, what will be the unintended consequences, the business opportunities, and the backlash?

Grade: Hit. Social media is driving identity, without question, and the reviews are mixed in terms of quality-of-life impact.

J
Building on the July letter, jobs remain at center stage. How much will this recession prove to be an interruption in the way things were, and how much will it prove to mark a shift in underlying forces of globalization, the balance of product- and services-based work, or long-term costs and benefits of modes of agriculture, consumption habits, and population pyramids? What are the odds that GM, Citibank, or Sears -- and the industries they represent -- will return to their positions of past dominance? More likely, but similarly daunting, is the question as to how entrepreneurs could possibly generate tens of millions of new jobs, on any continent.

Grade: Hit, but I didn't see Amazon becoming the behemoth it did. Meanwhile the question of "who is an employee?" being sorted out with regard to Uber in particular could just as well be phrased "what is a job?"

K
Kindlemania is in full flower, driving the publishing industry to confront some long-held assumptions. Back in May, CEO Jeff Bezos announced that Kindle sales had hit 35% of book sales when Kindle editions are available for a given title. In a matter of months, Amazon has disrupted 500 years of relatively stable technology that dated to Gutenberg. The implications will be all around us. At Princeton, for example, a trial using Kindles for textbooks was problematic insofar as page numbers (and footnotes to page numbers) needed to be rethought. Searching a textbook is useful; not being able to use sticky notes requires getting used to.

Grade: Miss.

L
Long tails make the list -- no surprise, in the age of YouTube and eBay. What's interesting is the Economist's assertion that fat tails (hit movies or blockbuster drugs) are remaining as vital as ever. The surprising conclusion appears to be that the middle market could turn out to be no-mans-land, as the Harry Potters and Transformers movies (the latest of which merely grossed over $400 million) dominate the mass market while endless, hard-to-serve niches proliferate elsewhere.

Grade: Hit. Netflix in particular must generate blockbuster hits or else their tenuous cash flow will suffer.

M
In the developing world and the OECD countries alike, mobility is not only redefining the telecom sector, as major as that may be. In addition, the notion of always being reachable, or becoming accustomed to connecting to people rather than fixed locations, is becoming commonplace so fast that we may not realize all that is happening. Worldwide, the number of cellphone subscriptions per 100 people has soared from just over five in 1998 to nearly 60 in 2008. In the midst of it, this change can be lost in fashion wars (RAZR vs. iPhone vs. Blackberry Pearl, or whatever), but eventually, in hindsight, we will see the magnitude of what we lived through.

Grade: Hit. Wireline connections for residential telephony will soon be a thing of the past in many places, and with mobile broadband, cable modems might also face a similar fate.

N
News is moving in new ways to new people. The broadcast model is augmented (not replaced) by millions of electronic conversations. The utility of owning a big antenna, a printing press, or a television studio has dropped precipitously as lightweight digital equivalents proliferate. Even though free societies need reliable news, at a time when such countries confront complex debates over everything from immigration to climate to aging to employment, the business model for news is highly unsettled. The conundrum of the need for news and the problem of organizations' being able to afford to report and provide it must be resolved, and such efforts as Google's Living Stories experiment with the NY Times and Washington Post will, I hope, spawn still more innovation.

Grade: Hit. The business model for news remains problematic, with severe consequences. The "conundrum," it's obvious, was not resolved, and democracies the world over are seeing the consequences.

O
O is for open book, shorthand for the myriad of issues relating to privacy and scrutiny. Open records, or open meetings, laws were never intended to broadcast local, paper-based information to the entire planet. At the same time, "sunshine is the best disinfectant," as Louis Brandeis so aptly put it. How and where will different people and groups trade off voluntary and involuntary exposure of private information for what perceived benefits? How will generationality play out, especially as data turned loose in one's early years may be uncomfortably or even dangerously revealing later, with different attitudes, tools, and agendas in play 10 or 20 years from now?

Grade: Hit, if only because of the Edward Snowdon discussion. I don't think we have seen the generational consequences fully unfold yet.

P
Given the speed and magnitude of the changes afoot, and given the essential characteristics of "being digital" as Nicholas Negroponte titled it, competition is playing out not just between products (Dell's PCs versus HP's or Lenovo's), it is also evolving to situate competing platforms (the P word). The choice between Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3, between an iPhone and a Nokia, or between a Chevy Volt and a Toyota Prius are more complicated than merely deciding on features and price. What are the two ecosystems -- of accessory makers, of software developers, or of product owners (and so of a current or future secondary market)? How will future innovations be incorporated into today's purchase? Will Google establish a beachhead in the browser as a quasi-operating system, on the mobile device, or in mapping? Where is Microsoft (see S)? Will still more industries begin to exhibit platform dynamics?

Grade: Hit. Whether you count Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or Uber, we have seen a decade of platform-centric competition. GE under Jeff Immelt tried in vain to make a platform play. John Deere is somewhere in the middle.

R
While the phrase "real time" is not new, the advent of people-powered notification means that rather than coming from capital-intensive air-traffic control, equities trading, or medical monitoring systems, real-time data is now the product of real people. Whether in natural disasters, social movements, or just a dozen families attending an out-of-town soccer tournament, the spread of lightweight, mobile coordination mechanisms will soon make many of us wonder how we ever got along without them.

Grade: Partial hit. Waze is a good example of a success story, but much of the foreseen benefit remains ahead of us.

S
The software industry is at a crossroads: enterprise vendors still work on adjusting the mix between license and maintenance revenue, between hosted and premise-resident installations, and between consumer, middle-market, and large enterprise sectors. Software as a Service sounds great in theory, but Salesforce still has bugs to work out (regarding scale, for one thing), and the industry is still in search of other viable exemplars. In consumer markets, meanwhile, the days of CompUSA or Computer City being the dominant channels for distribution of diskettes or CDs are over: Apple's app store model has redefined developer programs and consumer software distribution essentially overnight. Open- and closed-source models are still being sorted out. With so many dimensions of the business up for grabs, who will emerge in the coming years? Who will be left behind? What further surprises still await?

Grade: Hit. Pretty much everything from mapping to enterprise managerial backbones is moving to a cloud/service model. It's getting harder and harder to "own" one's software, either applications (Adobe's Creative Suite) or data (streaming media).

T
T is for thermostats, a proxy for an entire class of inanimate objects and devices that are increasing the reach and complexity of the global network. Whether implemented for energy savings, human comfort and well-being, or security reasons, building automation joins health monitoring, security cameras, and a vast number of other devices in a quietly but rapidly growing "Internet of things." While this domain frequently lacks glamour, the possibilities for drone vehicles, for dramatic cost and energy savings, and for increased human welfare (via care-giving robots for instance) verge on the realm of science fiction.

Grade: Hit but a decade too early, most likely.

U
Whether in the U.S. or elsewhere, the place of universities is being questioned. While California's 32% tuition increase grabbed headlines and motivated nearly nostalgic building takeovers, the fact is that California education remains underpriced. The University of Texas, by comparison, has raised fees 60% in the past five years whereas California has a cumulative increase of only 20%. Such numbers appear to be unsustainable, raising the question of what will be cut when dramatic spending decisions will have to be made in the coming decade. One-time budget relief from the stimulus package is similarly unsustainable, while long-term curriculum directions scream out for reassessment. As desirable as it might be to add labor relations, African-American studies, or forensic science to the course catalog, how can universities simultaneously a) steer resources toward the future, b) respect their role as custodians of the past, and c) keep expenses under control? Classics is a frequent target for programmatic termination, but what about sociology, recreation management, or broadcast journalism? Does the U.S. need more than 200 law schools? Who decides? How? At both public and private institutions, the next decade will force tough decisions to be made.

Grade: Miss. Apart from a few closures of small liberal arts colleges and selective refocusing (closures of MBA programs and downsizing of law school classes), the great reckoning hasn't occurred yet. Meanwhile the University of Phoenix, once a glamorous harbinger of a new era, earlier this month forgave $141 million in student debt that was incurred on the basis of misrepresentations.

V
While virtualization is a widely used term of art among computer architects, my sense here is broader: Webster's Second defines virtual as "being in essence or effect, but not in fact." Not only are computing resources not resident at the point of use, neither are people for more and more tasks. Very few people could work by telephone from their homes, yet today one's physical presence and one's "essence or effect" can be many miles and time zones apart. Whether in dating, or education, or telecommuting, or elder care, we are seeing the start of a particular kind of disembodiment: just as Descartes split mind and body for the individual, will some latter-day philosopher distinguish physically co-located groups and digitally "present" assemblages?

Grade: Hit. Just walk through a college cafeteria and ask "where" people are: with the party on the screen or with the bodies at the same table?

W
Whereas in M we discussed what it means for people to be mobile, the W refers to the coming demand for wireless bandwidth. On every populated continent, we're seeing dramatic increases in mobile data and telephony. AT&T is confronting the problem of the iPhone's success as its data networks are at times showing signs of overload. Countries from Pakistan to Estonia are leapfrogging wireline infrastructure, at which they never reached mass-market penetration, and getting the majority of these country's households connected via wireless in less than a decade. By contrast, it took nearly 100 years to bring 100 million wired phones into service in the U.S., at the time a nation of 200 million. As usual, there is no free lunch, and we will be seeing radio spectrum continue to be a political hot potato. Whether in regard to suspicions (not yet confirmed) about heath issues, to spectrum auction formats, to "interference" with other activities on other frequencies, wireless demand is driving a shortage that is invisible and intangible - until the call drops or the application crashes.

Grade: Miss. The fact that Apple is reported to be building satellite access into future phones illustrates the bandwidth shortage over most of the world's land mass.

X
What is an electronic game? Despite the success of Modern Warfare ($550 million in sales in five days), console platforms such as the X-box find themselves in competition not only with each other but with unlikely channels: Electronic Arts (maker of Madden and other category-leading titles) laid off 1,500 people in November, while web-hosted low-resolution, lightweight games (often running in Flash) can command vast audiences. The Scrabble knock-off Scrabulous help drive Facebook's early growth, while more recently Farmville counts 73 million players per month. Put another way, Farmville grew to 11 million daily users in two months; World of Warcraft took four years to hit the same figure. Just as MP3 files convinced listeners to trade convenience for fidelity, perhaps the game industry will see further segmentation between low-resolution (but heavily social) Flash games and high-fidelity, computationally-intensive titles.

Grade: Miss. Not only do people continue to flock to processor-intensive game titles, an entire industry has emerged for people to watch other people play and talk about those games.

There you have it, minus entries for Q, Y, and Z (Scrabble value: 24). Additional questions of course remain, particularly in the areas of nutrition (water is a likely battleground), health (obesity, medical education, step-function gains in bureaucratic efficiency, and pharmaceutical risk/reward allocation), and aging: the time is due for an honest debate about age-65 retirement, and the role of families, villages, and societies in the care of elders.

Before any of these issues unfold further, I send my personal best wishes for a peaceful holiday and a prosperous new year. The community of readers has become virtual (see V) family over the years, and I take it as a solemn responsibility that so many of you keep reading and commenting. Thank you, and blessed holidays.