Disruption and its Discontents

I was recently listening to the 11/18/18 edition  of “On the Media” from NPR which had several segments about strange bedfellows; the Country Store, Sears Roebuck, and Amazon. The main theme that ties them all together is Disruption --- which has many definitions; some laud it while others worry about its effects. The common dictionary definition is straightforward: “disturbance or problems that interrupt an event, activity, or process.” Now that would be an example of a negative interpretation of disruption -- who wants to be disturbed or interrupted? But that’s not how it’s applied in the world of commerce according to Wikipedia:

“In business, a disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market-leading firms, products, and alliances.”

The operative word here is “creates” which acts to soften the impact of “disturbed”. However, if the disruption is successful, it can lead to the destruction of the previous business model. A good example is cited by Robbins Research International is Blockbuster vs Netflix:

“When Netflix started, Blockbuster thought it seemed insignificant. Who would want to wait for DVDs to arrive in the mail? Blockbuster didn’t anticipate where the future of watching movies was going, which ultimately led to their downfall. When Netflix came to the rental giant to sell their business, Blockbuster declined...Blockbuster didn’t realize it was under threat until Netflix tapped into streaming services, unlocking the brand’s immense profitability. Then it was too late. Today, Netflix is worth billions of dollars and Blockbuster is bankrupt.”

OK, on that note, let’s consider the thesis: the Country Store was disrupted by Sears and Roebuck which in turn was disrupted by Amazon.

The Country Store served most all of the needs of rural folk. Just recall the early cowboy movies and what the inside of a country or general store looked like. Not only could you buy food but also other necessities like fabric for clothes and furniture. Except perhaps for the Trading Post which mainly dealt in animal furs , the Country Store was the first one- stop shop in North America.

The general protocol for the country store was that clerks accompanied customers, collected their wares and cashed them out. Whites were always served first (even if a black arrived before them) and clerks had the power to decide what blacks could and could not purchase. This Jim Crow policy led to an unintended consequence: It allowed anyone to purchase just about anything regardless of their color. In this way blacks could make an end run against this heinous Jim Crow policy.. At the same time it made it easier for Sears and Roebuck to disrupt the institution of the country store.

And so the country store was disrupted, indeed almost destroyed by Sears’ ability to deliver goods chosen from a huge catalog (the 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue was about 300 pages and when the last edition was offered in 1993 it had doubled). Choices ranged from houses ( “bungalows in a box” ) to hairpins --- you could even order opium! No need to travel into town to get your coffers filled, just order it from Sears and Roebuck then sit back and wait until it’s delivered to your door. Sears was smart enough to change with the times, evolving from a strictly mail-order enterprise into stand-alone stores to stores embedded in shopping malls. By the time Sears was declining due to other competitors like Walmart, Amazon.com entered the picture providing the the crushing blow: the disruption of Sears.

Like Sears, Amazon started with a single product (books) and expanded its offerings to other products --- lots and lots of other products. I could order parts for my lawnmower as easily as I had previously ordered books. It was a genius enterprise and I still kick myself for not buying shares earlier.

I remember the day during the mid Nineties when I nervously entered my credit card number into the Amazon.com website to purchase a book. Until then I was assiduously ripping up my carbon copies of credit card purchases to foil any would be fraudster. And there I was, sending that number over who knows what connections on its way to Amazon. For me, it took a giant leap of faith to reveal the key to a source of my current wealth. However, three days later when the book I ordered magically appeared in my mailbox, my elation quickly extinguished my previous trepidation. Yes, I did feel some pangs of guilt about not buying from my local Mom and Pop bookstore but the price was so good (plus no state tax back then), and I didn’t have to get off my butt to drive down to the store, look for a parking spot, then drive back home. Searching for a book was also easier and the genie at Amazon would even offer advice on other books I might like based on my previous book selections. These advantages easily overcame the three-day wait.

All of this is not to imply that all disruption leads to an inevitable destruction.

In the natural world we see instances of creative destruction everywhere: A tree dies and crashes to the forest floor and begins to decay providing a fertile rooting medium for future plants some of which will be a bit more suited to their environment. And so the Life cycle continues, just not the same individual life. To put a positive spin on this we could as well call this process “rebirth” instead of “disruption or destruction”. Today, many consider Amazon as the offspring of Sears.

Skip Twitter on Thanksgiving Day

In the beginning, there was the Internet. It was slow and it only displayed text (green text on a grey screen) --- it was so slow that you could actually see the characters as they streamed across the screen of your Personal Computer; at that time, I considered taking up knitting to put this time to good use. But it was cherished by the people because it connected you to the rest of world; you could read other country’s newspapers and find out what THEY thought about things and you could send and receive mail faster than even airmail, and you could join Bulletin Boards where members of a common interest could converse in a setting similar to an actual coffee house. Students could talk to students about music, cooks could share recipes, and shoemakers could wax eloquent ... about soles. It could also privately deliver pornography and allow you to surreptitiously cheat at word games like Scrabble. What’s not to like?

In short, you were no longer constrained by your neighborhood or limited to your local friends for interesting conversations --- you could make new circles of friends based on common interests not on geographical location. While the VCR was called a “time-shifter” (you didn’t have to watch your TV shows at the same time they were broadcast) , the Internet had become a “space-shifter” --- you could be anywhere conversing with anyone (who had access to the web that is) about anything. The headline no one ever read was, “ Man Finally Conquers Space and Time!”

All was going like clockwork until around the mid 90s When the term “social media” emerged to describe new websites like Facebook and Twitter and Google (remember Google Circles?) which displaced the slower and awkward interface of the previous generation chat rooms. These new social media websites hinted that the age of Aquarius was beginning. Families across the nation, indeed the world could share photos of reunions or Internet videos and articles (which contained videos) with other family members. When it was founded in 2004, the mission of Facebook was, “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.” It reminded me of the more straightforward mission of the ILLIAC IV Supercomputer: “To make the world a better place to live in” These were heady times It felt like it was a good time to be alive. Little did we know...

All was going well until we began to notice that some of our email was actually unsolicited advertising and this was deemed to be “spam” whose etymology was either a ham-like meat served in a tin in decades past or it was an injoke reference to a Monty Python sketch --- also decades earlier. So it was that spam filters were created that could recognize spam and send it straight to your trash can. We also learned recently that Google and Facebook were skating very very close to invading our privacy. They were selling what we assumed to be private information to companies that used that information to increase their sales under the guise of claiming that they were only trying to improve service. There was no profit motive involved. Right.

The next phase of this downhill slide was fairly recent when it became clear that the Internet had a dark side. It could do more than bring people together, it could also drive them apart. It could be used to foment social disruption by manipulating public opinion. Trolls could plant “fake news” specifically designed to elicit emotional responses from both sides of the political divide. Foreign interests began to see they could increase their global power simply by weakening our country. Vandalism has been supercharged thanks to social media on the Internet.

Twitter was either designed or has been corrupted to foment this type of corrosive discourse despite their mission statement: “To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” The flaw in this design is that while kindness begets kindness, fear leads to anger and anger begets anger. Angry responses spiral out of control as each response to the previous response metastasizes.

And so it is that I humbly ask you to consider the request in the title of this essay and eschew the use of Twitter (as well as social media of the same ilk) for just one day to see how that feels. If you feel withdrawal symptoms (as I’m sure I will) then consider the possibility of an addiction to be dealt with. And what better time to give it a shot than on Thanksgiving Day?

The Beauty of not knowing why it works

I am the Treasurer for the Friends of Point au Roche Association and one of my jobs is to periodically issue a financial reports. To this end, I use a spreadsheet supplied by Ma Google which is called, unsurprisingly, "Google Sheets".

The following description may seem somewhat technical but I'm relying on the ubiquity of spreadsheets in the business and real world and that most folks have learned to use them somewhere along the way to keep track of something. The Google Sheets are very similar to Excel Spreadsheets which are similar to Lotus 1-2-3 which was similar to VisiCalc, the first one to be tailored to the Personal Computer revolution of the late Sixties. Now, let me say right upfront that I immediately considered VisiCalc as a waste of time and money. I was of the opinion that a computer-savvy person could write their own version using the then popular (and free) language BASIC. I was so so wrong. I reveal this to warn you before askinig me for tech investment advice.

For those lucky enough to be unschooled in Google Sheets,here is a sample command in one of my spreadsheets: =SUM(("DISBURSEMENTS"!U58):("DISBURSEMENTS"!U64))

This command happens to be stored in a cell in a spreadsheet named, " Master " and it says to add up the values in cells U58 to U64 in another spreadsheet named "Disbursements" --- a very useful operation if you have a spreadsheet that needs to reference information in another spreadsheet. And yes, that exclamation point is not a typo.

It took me much too long poking around the plethora of mostly useless documentation and just plain trial and error to figure out the correct syntax for this moderately complicated operation.

.I admit that I did run across some more streamlined methods to solve this problem (using drop-down menus,) but I wanted my spreadsheets to be as portable as possible in preparation for the day when the next Treasurer uses them. Thus, the program should be written as close to Excel format as possible using Excel-like formulas rather than high level commands found only in the drop-downs. Most all spreadsheets can use formulas lsuch as =Sum(A1:A45) but usually never use the same menus. When I type this formula into a spreadsheet cell, the contents of the cell change from the formula to what the formula calculates; in this case it is the sum of the value from cell A1 To A45

Portability is also an important piece of the strategy of Reusability in the discipline of Computer science. Why is that and what do I mean by “Reuseability”? Let me explain with a simplified example.

Let’s imagine that I have written a spiffy spreadsheet program (think app) that helps another program to decide which ads the will flash up on your screen as you run the applications you normally use (remember, it’s the ads that make the app “free”). I decide that I and other programmers could use this program in many of other applications--- wouldn’t it be nicer and easier to use just one line of code which “calls” my app rather than rewriting the whole thing every time a new program needs to use it? Of course. The best part is that anyone can use my spreadsheet app without knowing the details of the actual code which implements it.

This greatly simplifies the effort of other programmers who want to share my nifty app; so long as the input to the app is correct they can use it WITHOUT KNOWING HOW IT PRODUCES THE OUTPUT. Sound dangerous? Well, when you switch on a light must you first understand atomic physics? Of course not. All you need to know is that when you flip the switch, if the light was on, it will turn off and vice-versa. Indeed, much of modern civilization is built on this premise. That’s why you don’t need to be an automotive engineer to drive a car or a mechanical engineer to run a washing machine.

As Alfred North Whitehead has written, “Civilization advances in direct proportion to the number of operations its citizens can perform without understanding them.” We don’t need to know why it works--- all we need to know is how to work it: up is on, down is off and to heck with electrical theory. Saves me a lot of time.

Of course the downside is that rarely can anyone fix anything by themselves anymore -- we always need to call in an expert.

And how will I spend that time I saved?

Whose data is it anyway?

Facebook was recently taken to task at a Senate hearing investigating their (lack of) privacy regulations that allowed a client to place a personality test on the Facebook website that not only used the results to target them with political ads that were (supposedly) based on their personality profile during the 2016 election. Not only that, the questionnaire was automatically shared with all of the subject’s friends, resulting in 87 million people who gave their personality profiles (which another company used to predict their voting inclinations) without any permission to do so by the subjects. So one of the questions raised was: did these targeted ads influence the 2016 election? In theory, Targeted Ads are more effective than random ones.

There was a recent cartoon in the New yorker magazine showing a man missing one shoe sitting in the subway next to a sign that reads, “Shoe for Sale” Now that’s targeted advertising!

For a very nice analysis of this very complex situation, see the graphical explanation at

Vox.com and search there for “cambridge analytica” and select the article that has the words “simple diagram”. Next search on “microtargeting” on the vox website for further exposition and implications.


The root of the problem seems to be that the Facebook business model is built on selling advertisement space through its platform and it can sell more space and make more money if it can provide advertisers with targeting information from a user’s profile (data that most users believe is private). But what wasn’t discussed much at the hearing was that Google’s 2017 ad revenue is estimated at around 95 billion dollars while Facebook’s revenue was (only!) about 40 billion. Together they represent about 60% of the US advertising market. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it does raise the spectre of a duopoly which while seemingly only half as bad as a monopoly, will stifle free market competition.


Facebook’s strategy is to sell other companies its user profiles so the companies can target their ads more effectively, Google use a different strategy.


Imagine that it’s raining and you’re in a bus shelter waiting for your bus. Notice all the advertisements plastered on the walls. What sort of ads would you expect to see in a bus shelter? Certainly not ads for a Mercedes because most of your bus shelter audience is waiting for a bus and could not possible scrape up the cash for a luxury car. Well, as Investopedia puts it: “Google is the world’s largest bus shelter” and goes on to explain how Google makes money :

“Say you run a small company - a bakery located in Topeka, Kansas, for instance. It's safe to say that people who would Google the words "Topeka" + "bakery" would likely patronize your business. Buy an ad on a page that'd be visited only by people who are looking for a Topeka bakery, and you're targeting about as accurately as it's possible to target a potential clientele. “

This may seem somewhat abstract so let’s take a more concrete example. As an experiment I used Google to search on “tennis” and got a list of the sites you would expect from such a simple search, However, preceding them were four advertisements from businessinsider.com, tennis.com and espn.com and, not unsurprisingly, from Bayside Tennis and Health Spa right here in the good ol’ burgh which lets me know that Google knows where I live --- in a good sense, in a good sense.

But wait, there’s more. Scrolling down some more are four more Plattsburgh-related ads from: Plattsburgh High School, Plattsburgh City Recreation, Fred Villari’s Studios and Plattsburgh YMCA, followed by a cordial invitation to click on a link to “5+ more”. Not to mention pics of “Videos you might like”. Oh ... and two more “From the Web”,

You say you’re not satisfied, you say you want more examples ? Well, above the Business insider ad was the blue text, “This is everything that tennis icon Roger Federer eats and drinks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner” meaning that it was a link to another page. So I clicked on it which took me to another page with (you guessed it) more and newer ads starting with, “Today’s Mortgage Rate was 3.75% (in 48 point font) and inviting me to use its mortgage calculator which I did not click on because I had a pretty good idea where all of this was heading.

If you, dear reader, were to do the same search on “tennis” I would bet that the results would be somewhat different because Google has different profile data on you than it has on me( e.g. my zip code (very useful for targeting voting ads)). Google claims that your private data is not directly linked to you but to various categories that your profile suggests you belong to and they only “know” the IP address for your search source and destination. This is what they say.

So what can be done to insure that users of services like Facebook and Google can protect their privacy or is this the price we all must pay for the “free” service they provide?

Stay tuned.

Is the Internet the “Permanent Record” we were told about in Grade school?

By now, I’m sure you know about the shocking Snapchat incident that occurred recently at SUNY Plattsburgh.

While the racist communication is, of course, the overriding issue, I was surprised by how much I did not know about the Snapchat app itself. Prior to the incident I was aware that it’s used primarily by folks in the 10-20 yrs old age range and its main appeal is that you can send “revealing” photos and/or juvenile remarks to anyone who also has the app on their smartphone and not fear the consequences because it’s designed to destroy both pics and text 10 seconds after they are received --- like messages that say “burn after reading”.

Not exactly. As anyone who knows anything about hackers knows that nothing is 100% private once it lands on the Internet because, like the game spies and counterspies play, a safety prevention that works now will be hacked or a work-around will be found in the near future. In the case of the Snapchat app, the designers have made it so that the sender of a stupid message and/or picture will be notified if the receiver takes a screen shot ( “screenshot”) of it. So if I know that My Stupid Message” has been screenshotted, I can:

a) Let the recipient know how disappointed I am in their nonsocial behavior and chose to break up with them.
b) Demand that the recipient destroy the message that reflects so poorly on my character.
c) Blithely ignore the faux-pas and get on with the rest of my life.

It appears that choice c) was the mistake the sender of the stupid racist message made and as we all know now, it back-fired.

Even I was smart enough to realize that even if the app sends a message back to protect the sender there is nothing stopping the recipient from taking a picture of the picture on a second phone and saving it for posterity -- or blackmail. Parents actually know what they’re talking about when they advise their children to ‘Be careful what you post on the Internet, it can come back to bite you.”

While it is possible that the sender was joking or being ironic, she should have known better. She should have known how offended and angry anyone in their right mind would be after the screenshot was plastered all over the Internet. But it was too late to undo the deed and a permanent record of her action know exists as data stored on the Internet. I remember being told when I was in third grade that our misdemeanors would go into our “permanent record” which could ruin our chances of getting that job we’ve always dreamed of. Turns out that threat was an empty one but that was before the Internet. Now there really is a permanent record of your transactions with the Internet and the whole world is still struggling to balance the need for privacy with the need for freedom of information.

According to the latest news (Feb 27) she has withdrawn from the college but her misguided actions can now follow her as long as she lives, and beyond. What a terrible waste of a life because of a bad decision made before her brain was fully formed.

Unintended Consequences

When the Internet began to evolve away from a purely text-based system delivered through phone connections and to include color graphics back in the early nineties, I recall the excitement and hopefulness we had that this wonderful new medium was going to change the world --- in a good way. We finally had the tool we needed to connect everyone on the planet to each other. We could begin to really solve our problems collaboratively because we could communicate universally.

What we failed to fully realize at that point, I think, was that GOSSIP is also a form of communication. Looking back, I believe that we were mesmerized by the good the Internet could contribute to the progress of mankind and overlooked the possibility that it might also have a dark side.

If all computers are connected then, at least in theory, if you could hack into one, you could use that as a starting point to invade all other computers on the network. When we had only single stand-alone (mainframe) computing, security was relatively easy . When I worked for the Navy, we programmers all had to show our badges to guards to gain access to the computer areas. Granted a bad actor could still figure out how to hack into the machine but given that we all had to have Top Secret clearances which entails a very very thorough investigation into your past, the chances were small.

We knew very soon that we would have to deal with issue of security against hackers ( see the excellent book, “the Cuckoo’s Egg” by Clifford Stoll written almost 30 years ago) but what we did not anticipate was the issue of Privacy. Anytime you have a networked (connected) society you will have its members concerned about their personal privacy. I’m not a psychologist or sociologist so I can’t say why this is. I can guess that it’s a good evolutionary trait so your genes can get into the next generation. I also think that we choose our friends based on how much privacy we feel we can give up to them. My best friends I trust the most and I require the least privacy from them.

So we had to balance two possibly conflicting goals: to insure Security as well as Privacy because the goals of Security very quickly started to poke their noses into our individual Privacy. (Note that Privacy and Security sometimes overlap in that we sometimes view protecting our privacy as part of the security system. Confusing huh?)

It was only a very short time before non-governmental businesses and corporations followed suit. Not only could they hawk their products and services to a global audience, they could buy user profiles from other companies that tracked where users spent most of the time. Currently the top three places are Facebook, Google and Reddit and they all sell user information. When I spend time on the Internet looking at used cars, it should come as no surprise to see pop-up ads on that subject.

Recently I turned on my smartphone and on the home screen was a frowny face followed by the message:
“3 people have unfriended you. Discover who unfriended you now! It’s safe and it’s free!”

Fortunately, I learned a long time ago that if someone advertises their product or service as “absolutely free!” you should feel free to hang up or look for the exit. This message cost someone some money so that it would pop up for me and I don’t believe the business model of giving away your product has ever succeeded .

Especially bothersome is the fact that this come-on must work well enough for the advertiser to continue to pay to display it. This means there are enough people who care enough about being unfriended to follow this link. I understand that no one enjoys being unfriended but what’s the protocol here? Do I risk further humiliation by asking the ex-friends why I’ve been dumped or the uncertainty of never knowing why? Certainly the advertiser hopes that I will grit my teeth and follow the link to find out who these 3 turncoats are. Oh, and on the way I’m sure I’ll be offered the opportunity to upgrade this service --- for a small fee.

For much much more information just search on the phrase: “the true purpose of social media sites is to sell advertising”