My Own Pirate Radio

In a recent post I listed several social issues related to the so-called attention economy. One of these is deciding how to manage the digital record — the “breadcrumb trail” — of your attention while online. For example, Amazon knows what you purchased through them, NetFlix knows what movies you’ve rented, and all the big search engines have a complete log of every query ever issued from every IP address, together with the search results clicked on. (Yikes.) As Jon Udell writes, at least some people believe this status quo is unacceptable.

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In 1971, Nobel and Turing prize-winning economist Herbert Simon said, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” (Read more about Herbert Simon in wikipedia.)

Simon died in 2001. His decades-old insight holds real staying power: the so-called attention economy that he and others foresaw is increasingly becoming real. (It’s also becoming increasingly fashionable to talk about… search here and here. I feel so hip. Where do I sign up for Web 2.0?)

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I remember bragging to my mother in highschool about being able to do homework while listening to TV and the radio, eating dinner, and talking on the phone, all at once. And I really could! The Amazingly Undistractable Boy Wonder! These days, though, I have to purge all clutter around me — audio, visual, whatever — in order to focus. I rarely pick up the phone, I never watch TV. It is almost an allergic reaction.

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As humans we long to be part of something larger than ourselves. To be part of a community, a school, a team, a family, a marriage, a project, a city, a country, a race, a religion, a movement. We each yearn to be part of something that is bigger and more important and hopefully more permanent than any of us as individuals ever could be.

This desire is deep-seated in every human. It is about mattering; when all is said and done, we want it to matter that we lived. And when we plug into something bigger than ourselves, when we help design it or build it or make it go, we’ve undeniably done something that matters. We’ve changed the world and people around us, hopefully for the better.

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I just finished reading “The Shadow of the Sun”, a book written by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapucinski and published in 1998. It’s a collection of essays about Kapucinski’s years living in and travelling Africa, from 1957 onwards. Erik Silmberg recommended it to me, along with another book “Imperium” by the same author.

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While working at Microsoft I wrote a few essays on work-related topics. These were all personal essays… no confidential work secrets, just my own rambling thoughts. People still ask me for copies of the essays from time to time, especially the one I’ve republished below, originally titled “What it takes to succeed at Microsoft”. I think it hit home for many people, and not just Microsofties. It’s cheesy, I admit. I hope you’ll agree it holds up pretty well over time.

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This July I wrapped up ten years in Seattle and moved back to Toronto to reunite with family here. I’ve been back for two months now and am settling in to a new rhythym.

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