Right at the top of the links blog, I keep a quotation by either Bruce Sterling or William Gibson. “The future is already here, it’s just not well distributed yet.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately.

photo credit: loungerie

I spend a great deal of time consuming the seeds of the future. I watch TED talks and Seminars about Long Term Thinking and I skim WIRED and Icon and I have RSS feeds out the wazoo of visionaries and cranks and journalists, repackaging their glimpses of the world to come. It’s easy to feel like an outsider, like I’m just on the edge of perception, getting it all third and fourth hand from bloggers re-linking to the online edition of an interview with someone who talked to a bunch of people who have some ideas about the future.

It’s easy to feel like a visionary, too. No matter where you are, there is someone further down the chain, who has not heard the news. Did you know that there are still people who are kind of skeptical about Wikipedia? Not in the healthy “I check the references before making rash decisions” kind of way. But in the fundamental “what do you mean, anyone can edit it?” way.

I met dozens of them last summer at a workshop for teachers interested in introducing technology to the classroom. These were the ones who had bothered to take some time out of their weekends to come and hear us tell them what was coming. Who knows how many of their colleagues there are out there, overworked, underpaid and no time or intention of even trying to sort this stuff out.

As I write this, I’m looking at a guy across the aisle, sitting down with a book wrapped in the kind of loose amateur-looking dust-jacket covering that screams “local library”. The chapter he’s just started has a heading that goes Where Do I Find Blogs To Read?

Think about what needed to happen for this to be the case. He needed to know enough about the Internet to know that there were blogs. He needed to be uncomfortable enough with the whole thing to decide that going to the library and finding a book on the topic was the way to go. The book is probably hopelessly out of date. The time distance from research to writing to publishing to library-acquisition to check-out is not kind to computer books. Yet, this is still how a lot of people try to come to grips with the world. If they even have access to books.

When my friends go to the library it’s for the free Wi-Fi and an excuse to get out of the home-office.

Chris Anderson of WIRED has a chart he likes to show of the media hype for new technology. It charts the rise and fall and rise again from announcement to excitement to disappointment to the slow rise to ubiquity, as the thing gets used in ways that no one expected.

What’s happening in that dip? For the technologies that make it, it’s the slow spread through all of the places that aren’t especially newsworthy, or interesting. It’s slowly seeping out to all of the people who have too many other things on their minds to keep up with every fancy new development.

This is the status quo. Unevenly distributed innovation, pockets of solved problems, and seas of that same problem, waiting to be solved. Repeating other people’s successes isn’t really glamourous. It doesn’t get you on the front page of TIME. But it’s where the lasting work gets accomplished.

So, to Gibson and Sterling’s aphorism, I add the following: We need to back-port the future.

There’s a lot of back-porting work to be done.

((Hi there, how’s your weekend going? This is slightly off-topic for Quiet Babylon, but it’s about the future of journalism which is one of my side-obsessions.

It concerns this hilarious opinion piece to which Jay Rosen linked on Twitter. Douglas Rushkoff is afraid that journalism (and by extension all content creation) can’t survive what he sees as Google’s parasitism and sees in Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch a glimmer of hope. There is so much wrong with the argument.

Hope you enjoy it. I promise that Monday will be about lanyards and augmented reality.)) Read the rest of this entry »

This is kind of a weird post, but bear with me. It was my birthday yesterday and I spent the day buying and playing with plastic bricks, so Lego is on my mind.

Earlier last month, Jason Kottke posted a story about how Lego has become single use. It’s the sort of golden-era thinking that I promised myself I wouldn’t fall in to, but I ended up nodding along. Yeah, Lego’s too corporate. Lego sold out!

Except that it hasn’t.

Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket shook me out of my false nostalgia with the Tao of Lego. Despite opening by agreeing with Jason, Robin put together a post crammed to the gills with links to amazing repurposing of the supposedly single-use bricks. Want an example?

Here’s another. As near as I can tell, those legs are made of Bionicle parts, the least Lego-like Lego I can imagine.

Click through to Robin’s post for more. There’s an astonishing array of clever construction on display.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the notion that we are playing with “other people’s imagination” these days also falls flat. When I was a kid, there was no Star Wars Lego. But there was space Lego and there were translucent antennae. My brother and I pretty quickly figured out that those things looked a lot like light-sabers. So our little guys had light-sabers.

Childhood imagination is always a combination of other people’s and your own stories. Heck, so is adult imagination. You didn’t think that William Gibson invented Levi’s 501s did you?

This left the final complaint, the idea that it’s hard to find basic bricks. The good news is that this isn’t true either. I got inspired by Robin’s post and a stunning set of structures made by architects using only white bricks. So I went shopping for Lego. The cheapest $/brick kit that I could find was the widely available Builders of Tomorrow basic brick set. Every toy store that I checked had some.

I bought a pile of the standard bricks and – as an experiment – this Star Wars kit to see how ridiculous the pieces were. On the box, it appears to be made of all-kinds of single-use bits. Building it told a different story. The feet of the walker turn out to be the same part as the bodies of the Droids. Some of the joints are re-purposed guns. There are dozens of little clever things so that as you follow the instructions, there is moment after moment of discovery. “Oh, I can do THAT with that part?”

The assumption that the new sets represent a step away from the spirit of Lego says more about the poverty of imagination in those of us sitting on the sidelines than it does about Lego itself. Which is a great relief.

More Amazing Lego

• Solaris 8 Station Tour. This was recently featured on Boing Boing.
• Building Utopolis. Amazing city by a Montreal artist.
• A gallery of Lego monsters. What can you do with Lego tentacles? Turns out, a lot.
• Flickr’s Lego Microscale Pool I am rapidly falling in love with these little Lego Haiku.

photo credit: tripleman

Over at Inventing Green, Alexis Madrigal looks at the adoption of air-conditioners. He talks about how the rise of electrical cooling seems to have lead to a crash in regional building techniques.

“Of course, the use of air conditioning allowed homeowners to enjoy a new degree of comfort, but a goodly portion of the residential air-conditioning load simply replaced the comfort once provided — at little environmental cost — by good design,” Rome writes.

The whole thing put me in mind of three incidents that highlight the critical importance of a regional context in usable architecture.

1. Done Well

   A few years ago I went on a tour of the then under-construction Earth Rangers Wildlife Center in Ontario. It’s a very green building, LEED gold rating and all that. They were showing us the tech and how liquid running through the building kept it cool and how tall ceilings moved hot air away from employees and on and on about how they were keeping the temperature down. This is Canada, where the main problem, you’d think, is keeping warm. Judging by my utility bills, it certainly is.

   One of the students asked the project manager about that and he looked genuinely surprised. Heating was an afterthought, a solved problem – you just needed to keep the place insulated. And then he went back to explaining all the clever cooling solutions.

2. Done Badly

   I remember visiting my parents when they were house-sitting on Salt Spring Island. The proud owners had their home custom built, using a design from California. The result was an unusable disaster.

   Everything about the house had clearly been intended to keep a desert home pleasantly shaded. An overabundance of sunlight is not a problem in heavily-treed, often cloudy, British Columbia. They had to keep the indoor lights on pretty much all day long. Even so, the house felt dank, dark and dismal.

3. Done Badly, Then Fixed

   In Halifax, I used to deliver the paper to the Killam Library. The Killam had originally been designed with some warmer climate in mind (all my stories are about how miserable the weather gets in Canada, I’m realizing). Touches such as an always-dry stream bed that ran from outside the building under the edge into the open air atrium and then into the lobby itself, indicated an architect who imagined a place where water did not freeze for a good chunk of the year.

   During the winter, that open-air atrium became a terrifying safety hazard. Take a look at this photo. Surrounded on all sides by warmed glass, the whole thing became a chimney. The heating pushed an enormous volume of air out the top and sucked gale force winds through the pictured entry-way.

   In the late 90s, Dalhousie fixed the problem, sealing the top of the atrium with glass. The result was a fully usable (safe) courtyard where students now congregate.

So much depends on thoughtful design.

Steve Brill, entrepreneur, law writer, founder of Court TV and recently defunct CLEAR is trying to save journalism by reversing the trend of free news online. He gave a briefing today and while I did not hear it, @NeimanLab posted the slides here.

Let me say that I LOVE the idea of a kind of iTunes for news. It is my fondest wish that I not have a separate login and password for every friggin’ site. I’d also love to be able to pay some reasonable rate to support good journalism. Like the App Store, a unified easy payment system might free up news sites to experiment with more granular payment models. I hope they do, and I hope that they understand that the results need to be consumer-friendly and mindful of the information-firehose context of content online.

I’m not a producer of news, but as a heavy consumer, the future of journalism in the face collapse is of great interest to me. As a periodic entrepreneur, I like playing with numbers. Let’s take a look at Steve’s.

Slide 4

I had NO IDEA that my time and attention was so valuable. And all this time I’ve been GIVING it away to newspapers and magazines. Heck, I’ve been PAYING some of them for the privilege. (Hey advertisers, call me! Let’s work out something where you give me the $500 directly.) But hey, look at those online numbers. Pretty grim, huh?

Taking these figures from the Boston Globe, there are only about 20 times as many online readers as as print readers, where one needs 100 unique visitors for every lost print subscriber.

Slide 5

This is where Steve comes to the rescue. There’s an untapped demand for paying for the news! 92% of us would be willing to pay $300/yr (on average)! That sounds pretty good.

Pay close attention to the chart on the right. Steve is confusing us by playing around with medians and means. The chart tells us that 21% of us are ready to pay pay up to $600, 24% would pay that “average” $300, and 45% of us will pay NO MORE than $120. (There’s an unlabelled 10%. Presumably, they are ready to pay INFINITY dollars.)

Using a mean here is disingenuous. If we charge $25/mo. for online news, we will not see 92% of visitors subscribing. We’ll see 55%. The ones willing to pay more? We’ll have to work out some kind of premium scheme, I suppose. So let’s word it another way. 55% of consumers are willing to pay $25/mo or more. 45% are willing to pay $10/mo or less. That begins to look like a lot less money.

Why this matters comes into sharp focus when we look at…

Slide 12 & Slide 13

You’re going to want to click on those and look at the fine print. The subscription models Steve has up here assume $7-8/month per subscriber, along with some per-article users who are reading only 6 stories every month. Let me be the first to say that if you are a newspaper publisher and you imagine a world where people only want to read 6 of your articles per month, YOU ARE A BAD NEWSPAPER PUBLISHER. I recognize that the idea is that these will be longtail micropayments intended to capture revenue from drive-by readership or whatever, so let’s retreat back to the monthly subscriptions (presumably, all-you-can-eat).

Steve’s numbers in Slide 5 don’t specify whether the amount people were willing to pay was intended to be per-site-they-love or overall. Given that most households only subscribe to a single newspaper and a few magazines, I think we can assume that it’s a monthly budget for online news in general.

At $7.50 a month, we’ve wiped out the budget of 45% of our online readership. They can’t afford a second subscription. Even our 24% ‘average’ readers are subscribing to only three things. Heaven help them if they want to sample from a lot of sites. At $0.25 a story, they get to read 100 stories per month across the entire Internet.

According to Google’s RSS reader, I receive 300-400 items, scan through about 30-100 of them, and read some subset of those PER DAY, not counting links from friends/Facebook/Twitter. The Globe and Mail RSS feed alone sends me 180 stories daily (note to Globe and Mail: Guys! That’s too many!). The flood is so bad that I don’t even subscribe to other newspaper feeds. It’s easier and better to click on curated links to the best articles, as picked out by friends and trusted blogs. Steve wants me to rely on a few trusted all-I-can-eat subscriptions or limit myself to 3 articles a day (assuming I’m ‘average’).

Moving from numbers to a boring annecdote: Last week a friend sent me a link to a Financial Times article. I’d gone over my article limit for the month. I went and read something else. (the end) The brutal reality of online news and opinion is that we are inundated with ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more things to read and watch than we have time to read and watch them.

I’m sympathetic with the need to fund excellent journalism and writing, but schemes that are tone deaf to the state of online news are doomed to fail. Hoping that consumers will be willing to limit themselves to a few subscriptions per month while asking them to pay (for magazines at least) 10 times as much as they used to just isn’t reasonable.

Unless the briefing contained a lot of context and nuance that were not captured by the slides, this does not look like the solution. If Brill &co. are going to convince consumers that their new service is a good value proposition, they’ve go an uphill battle.