Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain

The software development “bazaar” should not be compared to the classical “cathedral” system of development. With seemingly unlimited manpower and no concept of a budget, the bazaar seems an impossible entity — one which produces marvelous works of software, but does so without itself consuming anything. It is true that many things of quality have come from the software development bazaar; however, because of the unique and bizarre way it operates, the bazaar cannot and should not be compared to cathedral development. The two systems function according to completely different sets of laws. The cathedral pays an electric bill — the bazaar has a zero-point energy module. The cathedral has a limited talent pool from which to draw — the bazaar simply expects talent to materialize. Employees of a cathedral are compensated for their work — the bazaar has no concept of employees, only “contributors”. A comparison between the bazaar and the cathedral comes with an implicit and invalid assumption: that the two systems can operate independently. The hidden truth and the subtle lie is that the bazaar isn’t mystical at all: It is cathedral which fuels and supports the operation of the bazaar, and without the cathedral, the bazaar could not and would not exist. There is, in fact, a man behind the curtain, and that man works at Microsoft, IBM, and Google.

The Möbius Strip of Technological Ignorance

The one constant in life, they say, is Change. We’re not talking about just any kind of mundane everyday change — someone moving cheese around, increased prices at the local BurgerMart, or your sister getting married — no, we’re talking about Change. Fundamental deviations in the state of the human condition: Changes which intimately influence the day-to-day life of nearly every human on the planet, and which will result in a newborn growing up, living, and dying in an innately different world than that of previous generations. For many thousands of years early humans only rarely experienced these kinds of deep structural changes, perhaps first with the taming of fire and the slow domestication in agriculture and animal husbandry. However, as humanity advanced such innovation started to arise more frequently and each one was now ushered in with an impressive new name. The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age — Change was coming slowly but steadily.

At some point the word “age” became inappropriate given the shorter and shorter durations between each Change. History was no longer divided up into distinct ages but was instead morphing into a series of high-speed evolutions; such “revolutions” as the Industrial Revolution the Computer Revolution marked our quickening ascent out of ages past. A key differences between an age and a revolution are the continuing nature of the second, and the speed at which the changes being ushered in take hold upon both human beings and human societies. These two attributes make a revolution much more difficult for society to absorb — many small adjustments are needed over a very short period of time. The most recent (and current) fundamental change of this nature, the Computer Revolution, has approached with such stealth and struck with such fervor that, for a long time, society at large was unaware that a revolution was even underway.

Phillip Armour’s Five Orders of Ignorance^* play a uniquely dynamic role in technological revolutions such as these. Instead of a relatively easy stationary target, the technological revolution provides a quickly moving and multifaceted window of ignorance which must be constantly analyzed and adjusted to. It is no longer enough to apply the Orders to a problem and transition to the 0^th level — you must make the transition, but then continuously re-evaluate your ignorance of both that one aspect of the underlying changes taking place and all the new ones being created. The normal ladder used to ascend out of ignorance has been replaced with a runged Möbius strip, and the slow self-paced approach to understanding new problems has transformed into a rapid-fire machine gun. A moving window of ignorance has been created, and one must either keep pace or fall by the technological wayside.

Such ignorance is both a blessing and curse. The first pioneers to overcome the technological ignorance of the Computer Revolution were hackers and engineers, each of whom relatively easily obtained and maintains a tentative balance between the 0^th and 1^st Orders. This understanding gave them great freedom and power over the new domain being created and expanded each day. More slowly, large bureaucracies such as governments and corporations begin to divert manpower into gaining a foothold of understanding, slowly expanding it as resources allowed, bringing them into a slowly revolving chain of the 0^th, 1^st, and 2^nd Orders. Finally, everyday consumers and users of new innovations generated by the revolution live day-to-day in the 3^rd, or if they’re lucky, the 2^nd Order of ignorance.

The key to surviving a technological revolution is, as one might expect, maintaining a balance. In this case, between the ignorance of hackers, consumers, and bureaucracies. Tilting the scale too far in favor of hackers can lead to a system of anarchy at worst and vigilantism at best, accompanied by an overbearing transparency — no security and no privacy. However, if the balance shifts overwhelmingly towards the bureaucracies — governments and corporations — we see rigid controls with little personal freedom (and true innovation requires freedom), an opaque and impenetrable system, and exploitation of consumers. Only by understanding the influences of technological ignorance can we maintain the delicate balance between such opposing forces, but by doing so we obtain the best of worlds: freedom, security, and consumer safety.

* Non-ACM version

Apple: Blight of the Personal Computing Industry

Apple is a dangerous blight on the entire personal computing industry. From their core corporate identity and their attitude towards software developers, to the dictatorial hammer wielded against third-party distributors and the utter contempt they hold their customers in, Apple goes against everything which made early personal computers flourish and which made it possible for the industry as we know it today to come to fruition. Even many who should know better — software and hardware engineers — have sold themselves, their history, and their peers out for shiny mediocre trinkets. However, the bright side is that it is these same traits which have prevented Apple from becoming more than a niche platform. Even newer markets in which Apple surged early (such as multimedia and mobile computing) have seen a steadily decreasing market share as consumers realize alternatives exist, alternatives which offer real freedom of choice. Eventually only those “dedicated” shallow-minded consumers which fear the freedom of choice will remain in Apple’s Garden of Pure Ideology. True invention and innovation require freedom of expression, and these things will tolerate no dictator, regardless of how benevolent he may seem.