Recently read childhood hero (a la WIRED) Kevin Kelly’s hugely enjoyable What Technology Wants, a book that seeks to make sense of the ‘technium’ that wasn’t so much created by man as ordained by the physical laws of the universe.

The technium according to KK :

extends beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts. And most important, it includes the generative impulses of our inventions to encourage more tool making, more technology invention, and more self-enhancing connections

KK places the ‘evolution’ of technology in the continuum of the universe’s evolution:

The technium contains 170 quadrillion computer chips wired up into one mega-scale computing platform. The total number of transistors in this global network is now approximately the same as the number of neurons in your brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain.

He calls Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near a mythic book and in some ways so too is Kelly’s:

Technology is not just a human invention; it was also born from life.

Interestingly kk spends much of the book studying the lives of luddites the Unabomber and the Amish in trying to assess technology’s impact on society (Kelly has plenty of respect for the Unabomber as a technium theorist). After positing that technology is in some ways a creation of the natural order (i.e. the big-bang ) with attendant built-in possibilities and outcomes, the book addresses the question of whether or not technology is a positive force. It usually comes down in favor albeit in a more balanced contest that one might expect from a co-founder of WIRED. The reasoning seems weak to me, coming down to a tautological ‘choice is good’ and technology offers more choice and therefore ‘technology is good’.

So how can a spoon possibly want something? It’s important to differentiate the complex system he calls the technium from the underlying technology. Similar to how we talk of evolution and markets wanting certain outcomes (and there are lots of issues with doing that!), kk talks of the technium.

Kevin’s tone is at once matter of fact and yet full of awe of the technological forces he describes. Towards the end of the book his wonderment at technology turns mystical and uses the kind of language that helps me communicate my post-religious worldview with my mother’s religious views:

There is even a modern theology that postulates that God, too, changes. Without splitting too many theological hairs, this theory, called Process Theology, describes God as a process, a perfect process, if you will. In this theology, God is less a remote, monumental, gray-bearded hacker genius and more of an ever-present flux, a movement, a process, a primary self-made becoming. The ongoing self-organizing mutuality of life, evolution, mind, and the technium is a reflection of God’s becoming.

Unquestionably one of my most enjoyable reads of recent times.

Kevin reviews the book himself over at cool tools.

Customarily great EconTalk podcast with Russ Robert.

My kindle highlights.

Loved The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu: a history of US “speech industries”—as Wu terms any information industry

It begins with Alexander Bell’s telephone and tracks its path to commercialization noting that:

time and time again, it is investors as much as inventors who decide what our future will look like, and what we call genius might better be described as smarts coupled with capital.

The phone of course leads us swiftly to AT&T – the book’s central character or perhaps more accurately villain – and its archetypal leader Theodore Vail:

We must try to understand Theodore Vail, for his basic character type recurs in other “Defining Moguls,” the men who drive the Cycle and populate this book. Schumpeter theorized that men like Vail were rare, a special breed, with unusual talents and ambitions. Their motivation was not money, but rather “the dream and the will to found a private kingdom”; “the will to conquer: the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others”; and finally the “joy of creating.” Vail was that type. As his biographer put it, “he always had a taste for conquest … here was a new world to subjugate.”

Vail and AT&T appear again and again as themselves or reincarnated across all the media industries as does “the cycle” which takes us:

“from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.”

The cycle is the story of radio (RCA), Hollywood (Paramount / Warner), television (NBC) and the book’s open question is whether or not the inherently distributed Internet can be moulded to follow this tested arc.

Was the Internet truly different, a real revolution? We don’t yet know the answer. But here, at its origins, we can gain the first inklings of what might account for that sense. The evidence boils down to the idea that of its singularity, the computer and the Internet attempted to give individuals a degree of control, of decision-making power unprecedented in a communications system. These were systems whose priority was human augmentation rather than the system itself. The aim was therefore an effort to create a decentralized network, and one that would stay that way.

One of the joys of the book for me was the shedding of new light on how recent seemingly eternal American ideals of competition and deregulation really are:

We fancy having in the United States the most open of markets for innovation, in contrast to the more controlled economies of other nations. In truth, however, the record is decidedly uneven, even given to excesses that would shame a socialist, with the federal government, at the behest of an entrenched industry, putting itself in charge of the future. Fortunately for the Free World, while the Nazis may have beaten us to television, we nicked them out for the Bomb.

in the 1930s, the United States, once a nation of small businesses and farms, was dominated by monopolies and cartels in nearly every industry. As the economist Alfred Chandler famously described it, the American economy was now dominated by the “visible hand” of managerial capitalism.

Can’t be bothered reading the whole book? Try this Tim Wu WSJ op-ed, his Apple Vs Google framing at Slate or this Nick Bilton NYTimes Q&A.

My Kindle highlights are here. Tim Wu and Clay Shirky talk Wikileaks on NPR here.

Mediabistro on the new ad network from The Economist:

Stephane Pere, VP of the Channel, defines audience for us:

Don’t think I have blogged about FashionStake.com a neat startup in NY that my sister works at. Think Gilt Groupe and Kickstarter lovechild.

The founders are two super impressive current Harvard Business School MBAs (Vivian Weng and Daniel Gulati) and the company’s is backed by Battery Ventures.
Just heard the exciting news that Alexis Maybank (co-founder of Gilt Groupe, ex eBay) has decided to invest in FashionStake and I urge all you digital fashion types to keep an eye out on these guys.

FT’s Lex expect some of Google’s non-search initiatives (Android, YouTube, DoubleClick) to start moving that needle soon:

By 2015, the Googlers think mobile phones will be the most popular screen for web browsing, and the display advertising market will grow to $50bn.

Much guesswork is required, but assume 15 searches a month on 300m smartphones. If 80 per cent go through Google, and each is worth only a third as much as a PC search ($35 per 1000 searches), Citigroup estimates mobile ad revenue could be running at $450m annually by December.

That third as much as a PC will surely soon be more like 3x as much as a PC search- more personalized, geo-relevant ads should be more valuable to users and advertisers alike.

Lex thinks non-search revenues will be in the $1.5bn ballpark out of total revenue pie of $27bn.

The Middle East Institute presents a lecture entitled, “Media Revolution in the Middle East” with Wadah Khanfar, the Director-General of Al-Jazeera network. Khanfar was ranked as one of the most Powerful People in the World by Forbes Magazine, named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (Davos), recognized as the 3rd most influential Arab in the world by Arabian Business, and one of the most influential Muslims in the world (Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre). During his tenure Al Jazeera went from a single channel to a media network with multiple properties including the Al Jazeera Arabic channel, Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera Documentary , Al Jazeera Sport, Al Jazeera’s news websites, the Al Jazeera Media Training and Development Center, the Al Jazeera Center for Studies, Al Jazeera Mubasher (live), and Al Jazeera Mobile.
Date: March 24, 2010, 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm EDT
Location: Columbia University, Morningside Campus, International Affairs Building, Room 1512
Contact: For further information regarding this event, please contact Leia Reisner at lrr2131@columbia.edu

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and bestselling author of The Long Tail and Free will be giving a talk at Columbia March 18 at 12.30.

There are a few tickets left to this year’s MBA Media & Entertainment Conference.

Speakers include Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures; Ron Stern, Marvel Entertainment; Bob Guccione, Jr., SPIN Magazine; Derek Sivers, CD Baby; Gavin McInnes, Street Carnage, Vice; David Cho, The Awl; John Sloss, Cinetic Media; Dennis Crowley, Foursquare; Jay Rosen, PressThink; Richard Tofel, ProPublica; Steven Brill, Journalism Online.

Gavin McInnes’s panel should be fun!

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My J-school prof is giving a talk next week:
Join the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies for a discussion:
Covering Israel: The First and Second Drafts of History with Gershom Gorenberg Krueger Family Visiting Professor, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and Nicholas Lemann Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism.
Monday, February 22 at 6:30 PM, Columbia University School of Journalism, Lecture Hall—Third Floor.
Mr. Gorenberg, a National Jewish Book Award finalist, has written for Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Newsweek, Ha’aretz, and many other publications.

Christian Dicarlo, VP of the CBS SIlicon Valley trip asks Is It Better to Go to a Start-Up or an Established Firm? on CBS’ Public Offering blog and recaps the trip on his own blog Philtered.com.