Fake Quotations and the Speciation of Wisdom

“Stop fucking with the words man. i maybe dead, but i am watching ~ Rumi”¹

These fake words by a real poet², exemplify a persistent occupational hazard of the Internet: the fake quotation. This particular one exists, of course, to poke fun at the genre by exposing the ease with which “genuine” quotes of wisdom can be freshly minted and set loose³.

Is it any wonder then that we are living through an epidemic of fake quotations?⁴ If you spend any amount of time online, you’ve been exposed to the most virulent strains and have also helped spread some of them. Contagion is a feature, the retweet is merely an unmuffled cough.

But where the quote-mongers are amok, can the crack investigation squad be far behind?

Historians and attribution hounds⁵ harness the beneficial side of the Force, straddling both social networks and history books to ferret out the most influential fakes, splicing and dicing them and trussing them up in shaming sites⁶ and the occasional tome⁷. It appears that Rumi and his ilk have the geeks and professionals watching over their legacy - which doesn’t quite explain the surly tone above.

Investigative interrogation of fake quotations usually approaches its task through the label⁸, and in defence, of the speaker: who said that? Did he or she really say it? Those exact words, in that order? Were there any emendations or elaborations? Was anything lost in the smithery?

Much of this is valid, worthy and commendable pursuit; and there’s the cause for historical research, preservation and literacy. The generation that doesn’t pay attention to its history may not only be condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past, but also certainly won’t get to enjoy screen epics with Brad Pitt in leather skirts.

* * *
For us who live through the constant and ever-present breeze of social and technological change, life before the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution would be hard to imagine. Innovation was often an accusation⁹, and there were little output, cultural or intellectual, to speak of. Also, someone seemed to have forgotten to switch the lights on¹⁰.

There are many reasons for the Renaissance to finally get going, but what kept the dark ages dark? Why, in Europe, for over a whole millenia were there no new instances of any scientist, or even a layperson, running out of his bath screaming ‘Eureka’?

Historians blame the ancient Greeks and Romans¹¹. Western Europeans of the middle ages lived in the colossal shadows and ruins of their intellectual forefathers. Everywhere they looked were glorious accomplishments of literature and art, accompanied by impressive feats of building and conquests. Surrounded by these persistent reminders of a triumphant past, people in the Middle Ages came to ascribe the ancients with God-like prowess. How could anyone ever improve upon anything these great civilisations devised - in technology, in science or in art? Why should anyone even bother trying?

The misfortune of the Middle Ages is that they found themselves in no position to ignore what came before - it was usually colossal, in composition and in reputation.

Our misfortune, on the other hand, is that we insist on making the glory of our predecessors a constant presence within our horizons, on rebuilding their ruins using brick upon brick of their preserved words and intended wisdom.

When dealing with fake quotations, we have no doubt that everything the greats of yore said is by definition right. Every mutation and straying from it, in words or intent, is not only undesirable but also dispensable. Our only collective historical and cultural task, it seems, is to safeguard our inherited legacy¹².

But the question isn’t whether Gandhi actually said “Be the change you wish to see in the world” (he didn’t) and whether his philosophy of social change is reflected in that particular emendation of his words (it isn’t)¹³.

The question is, having established the dubious provenance of that pairing of words and attribution, should we just toss the words into the trash heap? Should we condemn every instance of a fake quotation as a documented illegal? Or should we be choosing to cherish our fake quotations by putting them back in circulation to survive (or perish) their own cultural auditions under the attribution “Anonymous”?

If we can reverse our unquestioned reverence for the words of the ancients and engineer our own Enlightenment¹⁴, maybe the culture hacks who (knowingly) fake quotations would come to realise that we value the wisdom inherent in certain quotations, not the wisdom of only certain men and women. That instead of faking attributions for ephemeral and dubious glory, their words can stand a chance on their own.

And just maybe, someday, our future generations will come to say, “For most of history, Anonymous was an ordinary person with extraordinary wisdom.”¹⁵

Reference and Notes:
1. I first came across this quote in this tweet. Of course, it doesn’t mean this is its first recorded instance or its last.
2. This is the same Jalal-ud-din Rumi, a 13th century Persian mystic and poet, who is documented to have said: “Out beyond the world of ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”
3. The most well-known parody of a fake quotation on the internet remains, of course, the Abraham Lincoln line: “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”
4. This piece by Louis Menad in The New Yorker (Notable Quotables) provides abundant examples.
5. To see an attribution hound at work, see this piece by Megan MacArdle on how she picked apart a compeling fake (Anatomy of a Fake Quotation).
6. I am joking, of course. Stuff like Megan MacArdle’s detective work (Anatomy of a Fake Quotation) and Snopes’ compendium of questionable quotes do us great service by ensuring we can be sure of what and whom we choose to quote.
7. They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions is but one example.
8. This piece by Brian Morton in the NYT (Falser words were never spoke) provides a example of what it all entails.
9. Emma Green provides an interesting historical tour (Innovation: The History of a Buzzword) of what else an unabashedly positive word like innovation could have meant or implied in the past.
10. This is, of course, an Euro-centric view. The centuries of the European Dark Ages sit alongside an age of glorious accomplishments and intellectual enlightenment in the Islamic and Chinese worlds. For a quick and even-handed encapsulation of this period in history, watch John Green's Crash Course World History #14.
11. The right place to read about this is of course in histories of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. I, instead, read about it in John Gribbin’s “Science: A History”.
12. Probably an exaggeration, but only a slight one. The same forces are at work in our misplaced zeal to value and preserve our inherited conventions of language. (What is ‘Correct’ Language?)
13. This piece by Brian Morton in the NYT (Falser words were never spoke) provides the closest thing to the fake quote Gandhi said and what Gandhi would have meant, not just with his words (but also his deeds.)
14. In his 1784 essay 'What is Enlightenment?', Immanuel Kant writes, “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have courage to use your own understanding!"--that is the motto of enlightenment.”
15. A deliberate misquote of a well-known Virginia Woolf line “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman." which itself is a misquote of her actual words, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

The +1 TV remote revolution

I subscribe to a mailing list called Idea A Day that sends out one idea each day. Any one can contribute an idea and most days it looks like anyone does. Usually you receive ecletcic but whimsical and impractical suggestions that make you question the whole exercise. But just when you least expect it, there turns up a cracker making it all worthwhile.

A few days ago, this idea popped up : "Supply two remote controls with every television instead of one."

It's such a fabulous idea, I wonder why no one has come up with it before and why no manufacturer practices this. It's simple, practical and would hardly cost anything - but imagine the difference it could make. Of course, one could always add to one's collection by buying additional universal remotes, but how many of us would do that anyway?

My initial thought was it would be a handy thing, in case you break or misplace your remote. And for people living by themselves, that's what an additional remote would continue to be.

But as I started turning it over in my mind, I started seeing the similarities between the additional remote and the the kind of radical shift that Wikipedia's 'Edit' button brought about - a change in this case for consumption, and not for content creation. Every channel change (or any setting change) would be merely be 'provisional' - no matter how much you willed it otherwise. Any change you make could easily be reversed or changed further again by someone else (in the same room as you, unlike with Wikipedia) the very next moment, ad infinitum. The "tools" to control the TV were no longer solely yours.

How would that affect couples and families watching TV? Would it make make them more accommodative? What kind of protocol, agreements and behavioural changes would that bring about? How would it change the equations - and negotiations - between parents and growing kids, and between a couple? How would it change what they think of the TV? If TVs always came with more than one remote, how would that have changed programming?

I was also intrigued by the possibilities for social change. What would an additional remote do in patriarchal societies and households? Could we promote individual rights and freedom - surreptitiously - by making sure families in all parts of the world start off with TVs with more than one remote?

And the commercial possibilities. Will families that have a TV with 2 remotes, pick up a second TV earlier than those who don't? Could TV manufacturers use this as a tactic to promote rapid uptake of 2nd and 3rd TVs?

Of course, it would be naive to think that additional remotes cannot be lost, broken or 'misplaced' - so that things return back to business as usual. And with the spread of time-shifting technologies like TiVos, the migration to online video and, with an overwhelming part of the world population already with access to difficult-to-dislodge single remote TVs, much of this could remain a fantasy.

I feel there was a fork in the woods a while ago with an arrow saying 'Interesting times' and we took the other path. Or probably, there is a parallel universe where the world is currently being upended by the +1 TV remote.

Information Osmosis and the case against Chief Culture Officer

Seen from the point of view of information, a modern company is a fortress - a fortress that's very good at erecting barriers to the natural flow of information from outside in and vice versa.

While these impermeable walls of opacity were (and probably continue to be) essential to being in business, they also raise the cost of doing business - by making it expensive to haul information across the border, both ways.

Expensive two-way communication across corporate borders may seem the natural order of things - but I don't think it is.

In nature, when water is transported across cell borders it happens through a process called osmosis. Osmosis itself extracts no energy from the cell to transport water - instead it is a property inherent in water, coercing it to perpetually flow from an area of low solute concentration to an area of high solute concentration. Provided the barrier is permeable (or semi-permeable.)

So also with information. The natural propensity of information is to flow to where it is needed - without the need for anyone to grease its path. A company builds secure borders around it precisely to impede this natural flow and profit from it.

But a border built to impede outflow can also be very efficient at doing the opposite.

And it's not just at the borders that the influx of information is resisted. In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky writes about how the modern corporate hierarchy was designed to make the inward journey for information perilious.

"In addition to revolutionising management structure, McCallum wrote six principles for running a hierarchical organistion. Most of what you'd expect (number one was ensuring a "proper division of responsibilities"), but number five is worth mentioning: his management system was designed to produce "such information, to be obtained through a system of daily reports and checks, that will not embarass principal officers nor lessen their influence with their subordinates." If you have ever wondered why so much of what workers in large organisations know is shielded from the CEO and vice versa, wonder no longer: the idea of limiting communications, so that they flow from one layer of the hierarchy to the next, was part of the very design of the system at the dawn of mangerial culture."

One way of countering this is to airlift information (and along with it culture from the outside) to the very kernel of the organisation - the C-suite. And that's what Grant McCracken is suggesting with his idea of Chief Culture Officer.

I am inclined to be skeptical of any idea that introduces a) a new job title and b) an expensive kludge to stand in for the natural state of things. This one does both.

It is true indeed that companies could and should resonate more with the culture around them and do everything to avoid being blindsided and blown off-course by unforeseen developments.

That can be achieved by making the borders more porous and by flattening the hierarchy to put everyone, including the CEO, on the periphery - not just close to the rank and file but close to the information and culture that permeates on the ground.

Both can be achieved without a Chief Culture Officer. Both can be achieved with the right approach to social media.

When we are exhorted to "Listen!" on social media, it's not just advice to obsessively seek out what people are Twittering about our brand. It is also a battlecry to leave our mental and coporate doors ajar, so that when information and culture want to waft in they can.

Grant McCracken's own choice of the perfect Chief Culture Officer, in my opinion, proves the case for the opposite.

Steve Jobs is able to read and ride culture not because his designation or responsibilities are that of a Chief Culture Officer. He's able to do that because he's a CEO with a porous mind and a propensity to live on the periphery.

The future of: news reporting?

Sometime in the near future, Wikipedia will absorb and back up all the information in the world even as it’s being created. It’s already doing a good job of it – and it’ll only get better.

And when that happens, we will be able to follow the latest news by simply subscribing to the ‘Recent changes’ page of Wikipedia - which will hopefully come with RSS feeds, and tags to help us find the stream(s) we are interested in.

Encyclopaedias will then stop being the long-term by-products of the gathering, analysing and reporting of news. Instead, news will become the by-product of creating an encyclopaedia.

Which, probably, is the way it should be.

To monetise or not : lessons from chess

In a recent column for Campaign, Russell Davies writes that the difference between the previous dotcom boom and the current one is the seeming indifference of current digital media startup brands towards monetisation. Which is why, he concludes, the incumbent media owners will have to figure out how to compete with someone who's happy working for free - or for comparatively little.

In line with Russell's point that people who are talking about monetisation now are those that don't get it, this current fashionable point of view holds that we may have finally reversed capitalism. The new 'with-it' breed of companies are willingly embracing the small is beautiful outlook - small payroll, small profits, small VC funding, etc.

I think something a little more complicated than that is happening. And to illustrate it, I will draw upon the game of chess.

There are two kinds of advantages you can hold in a game of chess - material or positional. Material advantage is holding more pieces than your opponent (having captured more pieces or lost fewer due to blunders.) And material advantage will almost always lead to a win (ie., in the hands of a competent player.)

Positional advantage is a bit more tricky. It's an advantage gained out of the relative positions of pieces on the board. Though positional advantage is ultimately intangible, in the hands of an expert player any positional advantage will eventually convert into a material advantage (which will lead to a win.) Which is why the better chess players play gambits - willingly sacrificing material pieces to gain much more positional influence.

Playing with positional advantage is tricky also because the lead you hold is vaporous. If the player who holds it doesn't continue to play the right moves, it vanishes into thin air - it is less persistent than material advantage. Which is why, the common advice for average chess players is to convert any positional advantage they have to a material one as soon as possible.

But the better, and truly great, chess players often ignore that rule. Secure and confident that they will play only the right moves in the game ahead, they carry and build on this intangible advantage and press ahead - and chase victory and greatness.

Needless to say, when chess began in its modern avatar, all players played for material advantage - in a swashbuckling style reminiscent of the time. It's only later that chess theorists and players figured out the concept of positional influence. But positional thinking didn't mean that the object of the game had changed. It merely recognised that when the other player is also competent enough to keep an eye on material gained and lost, other kinds of advantage have to be sought.

I think what's happening in the digital media marketplace is similar. The early players were the swashbuckling types - playing without any knowledge of the reputation economy (the corresponding equivalent of positional influence.) But as the market matured, the better players have taken the game forward and begun to play for positional advantage, knowing fully well that 'monetise and run' tactics will not work as well - or will not take them to their goals.

And what of those guys who don't get it and who are speaking of monetisation currently? These are the not so experienced players who have eked out a positional advantage but aren't quite sure they are skilled enough to hold it. They are taking the advice given to an average chess player - convert your reputation into money soon, because it may not last.

To conclude, just because the digital media marketplace is mature enough to told more than one form of interchangeable currency - money and reputation - it doesn't quite mean the object of the game has changed. On the contrary it has only become more strategic, layered and finally interesting to watch.

The future of: futurism

In his last column for WIRED magazine, prognosticator Bruce Sterling takes on futurism itself. After tackling the directions the Internet is going to take us - more individualism, less institutionalism, low cost connectivity, ubiquitous creativity, collaboration and a blurring of where reality ends and virtuality begins - Bruce hones in squarely on futurism.

Though he starts off saying that futurism has no future, what he surely must mean is exactly the opposite. He points out, rightly, that prognostication is no longer the preserve of the elite and anyone with a Typepad account (his example, not mine) has a license to hold forth on the future. Surely this democratisation of expertise only means a blooming of creativity, collaboration and delivery - as has already happened in other fields (and everytime there has a democratisation movement in history).

In my opinion, there will also be a bigger fallout of this transfer of the wand from the pundit to the garden-variety blogger - there will be a explosion in the width and variety of predictions, a kind of explosion never seen before. The bell-curve of predictions which Bruce refers to (in the context of the Pew Future Of The Internet II study) will remain but the volume it harbors will increase manifold as will the elongation of its tails on either side.

This newly empowered collective of prognosticators is a powerful engine that can process a far greater amount of information about the future than has been possible before. The sheer number of people thinking about the future only means that a wider variety of possibilities - from the crazy to the crazily conservative - can be considered, imagined, fleshed out and championed. And the collective's processing power will only increase exponentially as more join the fold.

However improbable, or impossible, a particular version of the future is, you can bet your last penny that there's someone out there imagining it - and preparing to champion it - right now.

The result will be the unlikelihood of encountering surprise - pleasant or unpleasant - at least for a lucky few (not necessarily the same few all the time.) Bruce begins his column by saying that "The Internet has a habit of defying expectations." The same could have been said of the future until now - but I believe beginning now the future's ability to pull a rabbit out of its habit will progressively vanish.

Whatever happens in the future, there's going to be some blogger out there logging into his blogging account to say, "Told you so."

The future of : the music album

WIRED 14.09 carries a feature and an interview with Jeff Beck about where the music album is headed.

It is clear that the future of the music album is not as a standard 13-track collection of songs. In WIRED's words, the album will become "a long shelf of songs and products, each carrying its own release date, distribution path, and price tag."

But the album exists as an entity because it was the only feasible (and profitable) way for record companies to distribute songs. Now that there are other ways and means for songs to reach their listeners, the album as we know is headed for premature retirement.

However, the term 'album' will be more die-hard. While music companies - and Jeff Beck - are re-imagining and experimenting with the various forms it can take, one should note that in the new paradigm it is the listeners who will decide what an album will be - where it begins, where it ends and what it contains.

In my view, the album will become a specialised music term for 'tags.'  Each album name will become a tag word that a listener will choose for a playlist - in most cases it will not even be the name given by the artist/music publisher. In almost all cases, the playlist will span various artists and at least a few genres. Needless to say, albums will range from a handful of songs to the hundreds or even thousands.

Music lovers will be able to share their 'albums' with others via the equivalent of online sites like del.icio.us or flickr - and make new connections or discover new music under their favourite album names.

A lot of this is already happening - I am merely suggesting it is tied to the fate of the term 'album'.

The future of : reading

There are very few things I'd rather be doing than curling up with a nice book (preferably a non-fiction one.) But as pleasurable as I find the habit, I have to admit that reading as we know it has a bleak future.

I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about the probable future of reading ever since I read Michael Rogers' latest Practical Futurist column (also the subject of my last post.) I agree with everything he writes about in the piece except that it'll probably happen much sooner than 2025.

Why does it look all too likely that long-form reading has a not too distant expiry date? Because it's already happening. In fact, as Michael argues, long-form reading is an artificial construct. And to cultivate and retain this 'artificial' habit, we have had to invent the myth of the virtues of reading.

It's plainly obvious to most of us that long-form reading is not an indispensable skill. There are a disconcertingly large number of people who get on with life - and are even very successful - without having read a single book.

The other development running concurrent with our growing realistation of this truth is the insistence of the Book Brigade as to the indispensability of reading. I think it's a sign of an impending defeat, that makes their cries get louder and more insistent - while in reality, they only end seeming up more and more out of sync.

So, does that mean that we (and the generations to come) will stop learning anything new? Of course not. It only means that knowledge will no longer be the prerogative of books and will increasingly be found in other places than just between the covers of a book. And simultaneously this knowledge will be broken down into more meaningful bits - and one will absorb information continuously rather than be drip-fed at regular intervals with books.

In fact, I think it's a paradox that future generations will spend less time reading long-form literature but will be more intelligent and knowledgeable than us. This will be possible largely due to the multimedia rich home and work environment we'll build in the future. Additionally, the very  environment around us will be information-rich, virtually eliminating any need for an artificial habit like long-form reading.

But there are several artificial habits we pursue for pleasure. And needless to say lots of people - including me - will continue to read for pleasure. But can we afford to have a smarter-than-thou attitude because of it? Perish that thought.

The future of: highways

Wired 14.09 carries a short-feature where they asked a few experts 'what will highways be like in 2026?'

Most of the answers run the gamut of the expected - autonomous lanes, getting more capacity out of current systems and even personal aircraft. And I do agree that these are likely to happen - especially in 20 years time.

But I wonder about the other simpler but lasting changes that are more likely to happen than not.

The issue of raising capacity along with decreasing congestion and accidents comes up quite a bit when we talk of highways in the future. And one of the ways to do it is to imagine a horizontal escalator that people hop onto and out of at designated stops. The escalator has a fixed bandwidth and consumes a certain amount of power but the advantage is that there will be practically no congestion or accident related delays.

Of course, building such escalators to replace our highways will probably take eternity. But the same principle is more likely to be put to use in micro dosages. For eg. imagine a trailer truck that's carrying half-a-dozen cars. It's a far cry from the mass transit escalator we imagined but in moving as a unit, it is doing its tiny bit to address some of the problems we currently face on our highways.

Now imagine 100 trucks carrying 6 cars each. That's 100 units of traffic replacing 600 units. And cutting down exponentially the potential for traffic snarl-ups.

These ferry trucks will build the escalator highways of the future, bottom-up. Cars will be able to hop on and off at predestined stops - from where they will move on on their own steam.

There are two other trends that point to such a future. One is the increased environmental awareness and conscientiousness. The equation of 100 units moving at a constant pace as against 600 individual units huffing and puffing all on their own loads the equation in favour of the former.

And secondly, while we wait for hydrogen/fuel-celled powered cars with a wide range, we're likely to settle for electric cars designed for city/short-distance driving . These cars in combination with the truck ferries will give both reach and last mile drivability.

I do admit that the idea isn't original - ferry boats and trains have been doing it for ages. But I believe that the system will be imported to road highways and revolutionise our own understanding of highways. Highways will go from being passive patches of asphalt to dynamic systems that "ferry" your transport systems to your desired location faster, cheaper and while you catch a nap.

This "new" technology has one final advantage on its side. It's plug-and-playability with the existing infrastructure. We can start now.