Quality And Information Asymmetry

We’re approaching an age where what you own will cease to be driven by mostly physical goods. If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “The things you own, own you”, it’s true — for both physical items and digital items. Maybe you don’t understand what I’m getting at, so here’s an exercise to try:

Would you like to have 100,000 songs or 10,000 songs?

Would you like to have 100,000 songs, some ok, some good, some great, or 20,000 songs, some good, some great, or 10,000 songs, mostly great?

Would you rather have 100 apps on your phone? Or 10 apps on your phone?

Of course, this question isn’t about just music,or apps, it’s about owning “things” that take up space in your daily life. I don’t know if there’s even a right answer. What’s more interesting is the questions it raises concerning value, such as:

“Do I have enough space on my hard drive for 100,000 songs?”

“How do I keep up with 100,000 songs?”

“How do I manage album art for 100,000 songs?”

“Why am I worried about how many songs I have and whether they are quality or not? Does it even matter?”

“How does music impact my life? Does some impact it positively or negatively?”

“Do I even have time to listen to 100,000 songs?”

Let’s say, for example, you lived to 90 years old and you were able to read one good book every week. By the end of your life, you will read 4160 books. That’s not very many books, if you think about it!

I think that’s one of the reasons why we value quality so much. We only have so much time to do the things we want to do in our lives. Even then, would you like to read 4160 books, or would you like to read 200 books all focused on quantum mechanics?

It’s easy to see, that until we invent computerized brains, that people will live in a world of information asymmetry. It’s impossible for someone to read and absorb enough information to be an expert even on just a few difficult subjects. This means in a very real sense, that the information you look at day to day “owns” you. You become the information you read, speak, teach, listen to, and so on. It’s unlikely that you will ever find another person who has experienced the exact same combination of information that you have. While this may be disheartening for those seeking a “perfect match”, it’s also encouraging — you’ll never find anyone just like you. You are unique because of information asymmetry, even in the digital age.

One of my favorite shows is Ghost In The Shell — it proposes a future where humans have created cybernetic brains, allowing them to eliminate (or get extremely close to eliminating) information asymmetry. It asks questions such as, “What does it mean to be human?”

I think we’re entering at least the first step of the age predicted in Ghost In The Shell — by reducing the information that controls our lives into a digital form, we are making our lives easier to access to other people. We’re creating vibrant subcultures and “hive minds” throughout the internet — Anonymous, Reddit and subReddits, and so on. An important point is that in some communities, such as Twitter, individuality and diversity are highly valued. In others, anonymity is valued. At this point, these are largely driven by how technologies are implemented for various communities on the internet. However, it’s part of a larger question of how our behavior should be driven in the future. Are we individuals part of a whole, or are we a collective whole with individual roles? Maybe they’re two sides of the same coin and we need both — an anonymous way of networking and an individualistic way of networking. Or to put it in technical terms: Perhaps we interact with each other with an anonymous protocol, yet we retain our individual identity behind that protocol.

If we value both identity and anonymity, we need to be extremely careful about how we approach creating legislation for the internet. The internet is still young and going forward may be the primary way of networking — especially after the invention of cyberbrains or similar technologies. The internet is very real in the sense that physical goods back up the abstractions we’ve created. Because the internet is such an abstraction from the physical world, how we create laws for it needs to be put through the same rigors of testing as the protocols and information that we use to define the internet. At the moment it seems that the importance of the internet isn’t well understood, or that the technology isn’t well understood, especially with Congress considering outrageous bills such as this one. In the United States we don’t have very many people in Congress that have a deep technical understanding. Because of information asymmetry, the majority of the populace can’t inform their Congressional leaders effectively, either. That puts the entire future of the internet and similar technologies in the hands of groups such as the EFF or Demand Progress. That’s a big problem, all things considered.

So which is better, 100 laws that cover many things, or 10 laws that cover a few things, but are better for the citizens of the country? Or maybe just one law that fixes one of the biggest problems in the best way possible is all you need.

To frame it in another way: Which is easier to maintain, 100,000 lines of code, or 10,000 lines of code? Let’s assume you spent the same amount of time on each — which is higher quality? Which is more likely to break or cause problems?

Consider these things about yourself. What “owns” you?

[Originally Published July 29, 2011]