Link: Kevin Kelly on Disruption, Stagnation, Bureaucracy and the Media Industry

on op-ed, technology, startup, links, disruption, media

The Shirky Principle:


“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky


I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in an organization will be promoted to the level of their incompetence. At which point their past achievements will prevent them from being fired, but their incompetence at this new level will prevent them from being promoted again, so they stagnate in their incompetence.


The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions (like a company, or an industry) can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.


... They inadvertently perpetuate the continuation of the problem ... they are the solution to because as long as [the problem] exists, [the actor] feel they need [the problem] to offset them, and so the two became co-dependent. In effect problems and solutions tend become a single system.


In his brilliant, classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clay Christensen demonstrates how disruptive technologies almost always arise from the margins of an industry, where they start out as insignificant, or toy, solutions. Honda’s hobbyist electric bicycles were no threat to the big four automobile companies, until electric bikes become motorcycles and motorcycles became small efficient cars. Cheap crumby dot matrix printers were no threat to big offset printing companies until dot matrix became injet printers and injects became the HP Indigo 5000 on-demand printers. In each case, the solutions were marginal, barely working, at first, and therefore ignored. I think what Clay Shirky is pointing out is that many problems, too, are marginal at first, and therefore ignored. Established industries like to focus on established problems.


Shirky made his quote in a recent talk, a bit from his upcoming book Cognitive Surplus. Shirky also referred to a similar idea in a recent blog posting about the ways in which media companies and the media industry are often constitutionally incapable of changing because they are still solving the last problem.


In a strong sense we are defined by the problems we are solving. Yin/Yang, problem/solution, both sides form one unit. Because of the Shirky Principle, which says that every entity tends to prolong the problem it is solving, progress sometimes demands that we let go of problems. We can then look to marginal solutions and ask ourselves, what marginal problem is this solving that might be a more appreciated problem later on? -Kevin Kelly (The Technium)

Great article from Kevin Kelly on disruption, stagnation, bureaucracy and the innovator's dilemma in the context of the technology industry. The principles behind the Innovator's Dilemma, and the Shirky Principle can also be seen to be manifested in the media/news publishing industry.

Unrelated to this...

There's a war going on, waged in the background on the Internet, for the soul of the modern media industry.

Platforms, on the one hand, want to control the channel and host the content that producers create. Publishers, on the other hand, want to retain their branding both in name and the delivery infrastructure. It looks like the platforms are going to win.

Why now?

The news delivery (and the advertising industry, as facilitated by such media platforms) is absolutely immense. A billion, possibly trillion-dollar industry.

Technology platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat) have eclipsed the traditional media industry (both news media, and content media) in terms of the audience size.

By gaining control over the delivery and hosting of the content (and thus cheapening the production cost of such media, or in some cases, removing it entirely), the platforms are able to tap in and leverage their existing user base and capture this new market. This is with a twist, however. Rather than producing their own content, the platforms are repackaging the content and reselling it again. The Uber of news. Essentially securitisation of sorts, but for news content. And rather than managing risk, it is managing the exposure of an audience to advertisers. As Butterick in 'The Billionaire Typewriter' suggested, the platform-holders are interested in creating 'a publishing platform' that 'generates usage data that's valuable to advertisers'.

Google and YouTube have been incredibly successful in creating such a platform like that (in the respective search and video industry). The text-based social networks (Facebook and Twitter, mainly) are interested in doing this for news.

There has been some pushback from the publishers, but in the long-run, the disintermediation of content, and the creation of a zero-sum game (where the platform holders will be the sole financial beneficiaries, rather than the content holders and the platform holders jointly sharing in the marketing/ad spend.) will happen. Publishers who are able to adapt, and move beyond the 20th century paradigm will be able to navigate during these trying times, and consequently survive.

Some further reading:

Also unrelated to this overall theme of online media and industry disruption... I'm still thinking of a good domain name for this blog. I obviously don't expect this blog to amount to much: just a mere outlet, for fleshing out my ideas, or a mere container for my notes and thoughts while I try to understand something new.

Nop-ed? A play on 'op-ed'?

noped.io and noped.org is avaliable, as is nop-ed.com. ... I'll keep thinking.

Also unrelated to the unrelated theme of domain names for this blog... A post by the team at Ghost on using Markdown to format posts.

Some useful stuff... <del>strike-through</del> for strike-through. ==highlighting== for highlighting (which will be very useful when I annotate a post).

... This post took longer to write than I expected.