Last year, we started hearing about the ongoing rivalry between Apple and Google. The two companies were poaching talent from each other, and reportedly, Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt got increasingly confrontational with each other on a personal level. Historically, the two companies both operated in the shadow of and against Microsoft, but with Microsoft sliding into irrelevance, they now appear to be competing with each other instead.

Apple commands tremendous respect, and enormous excitement surrounds its product launches, such as the ones of the iPhone and the iPad. Jokingly, one could almost describe Apple products and shops as a micro-religion, and maybe there is a grain of truth to this joke.

What Apple does so well is to create and project values that surround their products. For the purposes of this blog entry, let us forget about the usual drab meaning of the phrase “project values” as it is used by marketing people and PR consultants. Let us try to have in mind a philosophical meaning of the word value – and why not understand it as Nietzsche did, as a necessary way of relating to reality, a necessary epistemological bias? Apple has a vision for what life with digital products should be like, and the vision has no clear boundaries: its edges are carefully concealed, the vision overflows, spills over into every aspect of the customer’s life. Something that there is a definite dearth of today has been supplied. But this vision cannot easily be imitated or supplied by other companies. It is effective simply because everyone can perceive that Apple and Steve Jobs are so firmly behind it, that there is almost nothing in the way of hypocrisy in how the product is marketed. These people firmly and deeply believe what they say.

In contrast, products developed by Google are to a larger extent designed and developed through deductive reasoning. Even though Google as a company has an image as being progressive and modern, in the sense that they publicly do not want to be evil, and want to make the world’s information maximally available, their deep commitment to pure deduction and logic prevent the products from truly occupying the spiritual territory that Apple has staked out for itself. (Their approach may, however, have other benefits – this text is not a statement about product quality.)

If we establish a scale from creativity-driven production to deduction-driven production, Apple would be on the far left, Google somewhat to the left of the middle, and the likes of IBM and Microsoft on the far right. The latter two are only minimally concerned with changing consumers’ lives; in fact, it sometimes appears as if these institutions would like to be culturally invisible and project as little as possible. Their products strive to be value transparent.

The role that Steve Jobs and his team occupy, then, is something of what philosophers could be. They are, or appear to be, creators and projectors of values, which include aspects of morality and ethics. And such firmly felt values are in fact what society really wants. Apple goes some way towards filling the gap created by cultural nihilism.

Reason can be understood as man’s ability to think according to precise rules. Logic is one such set of rules: by using axioms and inference rules, we are able to generate vast arrays of valid statements. For instance, we can attempt to prove mathematical truths, or we can work out how to place furniture in a room, or the quickest way of carrying out five different errands in an afternoon.

Two essential functions of reason are finding solutions and validating solutions. In finding solutions, sometimes we apply reason as a search process, that is, we work through a number of combinations until we find one that works, or until we give up. By deduction we can reduce the size of the search space, and sometimes deduction will lead to a result without any search being necessary at all. In validating solutions, we might obtain the proposed solution from anywhere, possibly from outside reason itself, and then, again it is sometimes a search process: we may attempt to find contradictions that invalidate the proposed solution, and we do not always find them immediately. This would be validation by absence of contradictions, but we might also validate a solution affirmatively by using it in a problem. For instance, we can verify that 7 is the square root of 49 by computing 7*7, and it would be useless to verify it by testing that 7*7 does not equal any of the values 1,2,3…48,50,51,52… infinity.

Reasoning is a slow, tedious process, and it can only consider so many possible solutions in a given amount of time. But it is reliable, and the results of different pieces of reasoning can often be composed to yield a larger, consistent result. But it is clear that our minds have other ways of functioning as well, with other strengths and weaknesses. In particular, it seems that reasoning is essentially a reactive process. It reacts to a given problem with given constraints and rules of inference. But it seems to be unable to create. Creativity appears to always come from extralogical, extra-reasonable places. Creativity in the spontaneous sense of a child drawing a picture with crayons, or a novelist writing a book, or an orator using a particularly persuasive combination of words that captures a fleeting feeling, or a commuter taking a different route home from work, out of curiosity. The distinction is not always clear-cut: a decision like choosing the colour of a wallpaper could be done both using “principles” with which one reasons logically, or using a spur of the moment feeling about what is good. It is clear, though, that the two can interact very productively: often a complex mental activity needs a dialogue between reason and extra-reason, and not just in the sense that extra-reason produces a suggestion that reason validates. This seems to be the danger with excessive reliance on rationality and scientific skepticism, then – it risks shutting out the essential extralogical factor and reducing decision making to searching, or from another viewpoint, it risks invalidating the most powerful search heuristic of all.

It seems as if there is a parallel, of sorts, with modern democracy in this distinction. Democracy at the national level, too, is a reactive form of decision making today. It is true that groups of a small or moderate size sometimes can create things collectively, and when they do, it seems to be the case that the form of the group enables individuals to take turns in influencing the group and being responsible towards it: the individuals make serial contributions that layer on top of each other to form the collective contribution. But voters in a national democracy do not have a format that allows this process to take place across the entire group, and the scale is too great. Those who create proposals are smaller subgroups or elites, and the voters are reduced to playing one of the roles that reason can play: affirm or reject proposals. In fact, not even this, since they are typically not asked to affirm every proposal – they are able to stage a revolution if their discontent becomes tremendously large, and otherwise they only have the ability to voice rejection every four years or so. (The exceptional case where very large groups can create something collectively would be when they share a common sentiment very well, for instance in the event of a national crisis.)

The seat of creativity is ultimately in the individual, and not in the collective. When democracies create agendas, goals, projects and proposals, they are not acting democratically, but channeling individual elements within.

This is hopefully the start of a short series of posts in which I attempt to relate the concepts of value and value creation, in particular as they were understood by Friedrich Nietzsche, to the modern world, in some kind of way. Comments of all kinds are encouraged!

In the beginning (understood as ancient Greece), there was philosophy. That is to say, most systematic inquiry into matters worth thinking about was collected under this umbrella term. Ethics, politics, epistemology and metaphysics went side by side with physics, biology and astronomy. As millennia passed, the collective human knowledge and scholarly labour grew, and some philosophical disciplines got their own name, cut the umbilical cord, and got to stand on their own feet.

There are many definitions as to what a philosopher is; one definition would be those who study the academic subject of philosophy in academic institutions. The German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche wrote at length about what a philosopher really is; in his definition a philosopher is someone who creates values. Nietzsche rejected morals and universal truth as laid down by a God or higher authority; instead they are created by subjective human beings, and by philosophers in particular.

Perhaps [the genuine philosopher] himself must have  been critic and sceptic and dogmatist and historian and also poet and collector and traveller and solver of riddles and moralist and seer and “free spirit” and almost everything in order to pass through the whole range of human values and value feelings [...] But all these are merely preconditions of his task: this task itself demands something different – it demands that he create values.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, s. 211, Walter Kaufmann transl.)

We may understand a scholar to be a person who processes knowledge. Good scholarship entails marshalling what has been written and studied previously, perhaps with a view to settling a question or supporting a perspective. Scientists and philosophers can make use of scholars in their work. To the extent that the scholar does more than merely process knowledge, he or she is something more than a scholar.

In contrast, a scientist, as we understand him or her today, is someone who combines scholarship and primary investigation (in the form of calculation, experimentation, measurement and so on) in order to create models of nature and the world, in order to gain the power to explain. The classical scientific process involves repeated refinement of hypotheses until one that cannot be proven wrong has been found.

Today, science, which formerly was known as natural philosophy, has grown enormously large, and to most people probably appears to have much greater value than philosophy. The scientific mindset is widely appreciated and respected throughout the world — perhaps too respected. Scientists learn as one of their highest virtues to be skeptical and to reject assertions that are made without a basis in measurement or theory. Paralysis by skepticism is very much a possibility. To see the danger in this, we have to recognise that a great deal of valuable things in human history have been created without such a basis – by people who have been something like the ones Nietzsche describes.

The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist” – so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. [...]

Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized, “desecularized” enthusiast and sot of god. And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher”, it hardly means more than “prudently and apart”.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, s. 205, Walter Kaufmann transl.)

In fact, scientists today do not, in my experience, work like the ideal scientist described above. Scientists often use their own judgment and their own values in order to influence how their science is to be used. Einstein and Oppenheimer had opinions about the use and misuse of the nuclear bomb. Creators of vaccine may have opinions on how it is to be distributed and may be able to influence this. Sometimes these value statements made by scientists are pure judgments, applications of an ethic that the scientists already believe in. However, sometimes the situation is so new that the scientists effectively have to create values. To the extent that they do this, these scientists dabble in ethics, morality and philosophy, but this is often overlooked, as is the fact that scientific method itself was created by philosophy.

Nietzsche calls for philosophers to make use of scientists and artists, and create values in the service of mankind. He calls for a new recognition of the true role and dignity of philosophy, which does not at all need to mean a reduction of the value of science, but rather an expansion of the whole system. Philosophy stands naturally above science and scholarship and uses them as its tools. The activity of creating values based on philosophical insight by necessity goes on constantly and should not be confined to little nooks in the margins of society. The full extent of and need for this activity needs to be acknowledged.

Has the situation changed since Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil in 1886?

The global idea space is partitioned in various ways. One example would be peoples speaking different languages. English speakers all understand each other, Japanese speakers all understand each other, but there are relatively few people who speak Japanese and English very well. We can understand this situation in an abstract way as two large containers with a narrow passage connecting them.

Similar partitionings occur whenever there are groups of people that communicate a lot among themselves and less with people in other groups. For instance, there would be a partitioning between people who use the internet frequently and people who use it rarely (to some extent similar to a partitioning between young and old people). This partitioning is in fact orthogonal to the language partitioning, i.e. there is an English internet, a Japanese internet, an English non-internet, etc.

The partitioning of the space into containers has effects on the establishment of authorities and the growth of specialised entities inside the containers. The establishment of authorities is in some ways a Darwinist selection process. There can only be one highest authority on philosophy, on history, on art, on mathematics etc. that speaks one given language or acts inside a given container. Or for a more banal example: pop charts and TV programs. (Even though, inside the Anglosphere, each country may still have their own pop chart, they influence each other hugely.) If there are two contenders for the position of highest authority on art in a container, either they have to be isolated from each other somehow, or they must interact and resolve their conflict, either by subordination of one to the other, or by a refinement of their roles so that these do not conflict. As for the specialised entities, the larger the container is, the more space there is for highly niched ideas. This is in fact the “long tail” idea. The Internet is one of the biggest containers to date, and businesses such as Amazon have (or at least had) as their business model to sell not large numbers of a few popular items, but small numbers of a great many niched items. Such long tails can be nurtured by large containers. (In fact this is a consequence of the subordination/refinement when authority contenders have a conflict.)

We may also augment this picture with a directional graph of the flows between containers. For instance, ideas probably flow into Japan from the Anglosphere more rapidly than they flow in the reverse direction. Ideas flow into Sweden from the Anglosphere and from Japan but flow back out of Sweden relatively rarely. Once an idea has flowed into a space like Sweden or Japan from a larger space like the Anglosphere, though, the smaller space can act like a kind of pressure cooker or reactor that may develop, refine, or process the imported idea and possibly send a more interesting product back. A kind of refraction occurs.

In the early history of the internet, some people warned that the great danger of it is that everybody might eventually think the same thoughts, and that we would lose the diversity of ideas. This has turned out to be an unrealised fear, I think, at least as long as we still have different languages. But are languages not enough? Do we need to do more to create artificial partitionings? What is the optimal degree of partitioning, and can we concretely map the flows and containers with some degree of precision?

One of the central ideas of the manifesto is that our relation to music is dependent on physical presence and responsibility. Physical presence as opposed to the illusion that distances and places are made irrelevant by the internet and digital communications. Responsibility as opposed to the idea of mindlessly shuffling through a very large or infinite archive of recorded music. One of the ways in which music conveys something is when I choose music to play to somebody else, and I take responsibility for the effects of the music on that person or on a group of people.

Fleischer constructs the idea of a “postdigital situation” and holds it up as a model for how music is to be valued, critiqued, understood, and, essentially, how it is to take place, or come to matter. The postdigital situation is constrained by a physical space where music is being performed and listened to, where responsibility relations exist and evolve, and where bodies are set in motion. The digital world, the internet without boundaries, can be a means of gathering people in such a space and informing it, but it does not replace it. The “postdigital” goes beyond the naive idea of the digital, which ignores places and crowds.

Olle Olsson at SICS has also discussed this book in English. More to come!

A more advanced approach is selective forgetfulness. Humans cannot go on with their lives if they do not forget memories and experiences that are irrelevant and useless. They become unable to set and act on new targets. I think that a slightly less naive digital life would contain a measure of deletion. Deletion of files, old e-mails that have probably become useless, “friends” on social networks who are mere acquaintances or even less, and so on. Taking away the old makes space for the new. It can be especially powerful to see the number of files in your home directory reduced from 50 to 5. A lot of confusion and ambivalence is immediately removed.

Part of taking the next step step deeper into the digital age should be deciding, each for themselves, what one’s personal thresholds and principles of deletion are. What should be deleted, when and why? In our brains it has been managed by evolution for us. Now we must manage it by ourselves.

The easiest technologies to understand on an intuitive-emotional basis seem to be those that involve physical processes. Objects rotating, moving, being lifted and displaced, compressed, crushed. Gases and liquids being sent around in conduits, mediating force and energy. In short, the technology that has its foundation in classical mechanics.

If these are easy to get a feel for, it would probably be in part because an understanding of mechanical processes has been of use to us throughout history, and also before the advent of civilisation. An intuitive understanding of things such as momentum, acceleration, gravity has no doubt benefited mankind and its ancestors for a very long time.

It gets trickier when we get to the more recent technologies. Take electricity to be an arbitrary watershed. We have no intuitive idea of what electricity is, apart from the fact we might be afraid of thunder. Electricity has to be taught through the abstract idea of electrons flowing in conduits, a bit like water in pipes (to name one of many images being used).

And then there’s analog and digital electronics, integrated circuits, semiconductors and so on, where intuition has long ago been left behind. We are forced to approach these things in a purely abstract domain.

Yet, when our Mp3 players, game consoles, mobile phones and computers do things for us, we are left with a sense of wonder. Our minds, always looking for stories and explanations, want to associate the impressive effects produced by these devices with some stimuli. With a steam engine, it’s easy to associate the energy with pressure, heat and motion, all of which are well understood on a low level. With a mobile phone, not so much. A lot of very abstract stories have to be used in order to reach anything that resembles an explanation, and still it doesn’t reach the essence of the device, which might be in its interplay between radio transceivers, sound codec chips, a display with a user interface and software to drive it, a central CPU, and so on, together with, of course, the network of physical antennas and their connectivity with other such networks. Is it too much to suppose that the human mind often stops short of the true explanation here? That we associate the effects produced by the device with what we can touch, smell, see and hear?

This is of course the point where many computer geeks worldwide start to feel a certain affection for the materials that make up the machines. Suppose that we are in the 1980′s. Green text on a black terminal background. A particular kind of fixed width font. The clicking of the keyboard. The dull grey plastic used to make the case. All of these things can acquire a lot of meaning that they don’t really have, because the users lack a window (physical and emotional) into the essence of the machine. The ultimate “disconnected machine”, to relate to my field, is software.

This brings up questions such as: how far can we as a species proceed with technology that we cannot understand instinctively, how can we teach such technology meaningfully and include it in democratic debate, and how can we use people’s tendencies to associate sensory stimuli with meaning and effects in a more meaningful way? – for instance, when we design hardware and software interfaces.

In the chilly yet sunny winter afternoon, I took a walk past the imperial palace in the centre of Tokyo. I find sunny winter days refreshing.

The palace is interesting to behold. It is fronted by lots of that most precious of Tokyo commodities, open space. Supposedly, during the height of the land bubble, the land on which the palace is built was worth more than the state of California. This is in turn surrounded by some of Tokyo’s most prestigious office buildings in the Marunouchi and Hibiya districts. Tokyo station is just a few minutes away on foot.

The scene is one of juxtapositions. Open space meets tightly packed high rise buildings. Traditional Japanese architecture counters sleek office buildings. Yet this  never feels contradictory, because there is an underlying theme of restraint and control.

As you might expect from a royal residence, the public courtyard is immaculate. The grass is so well cut and even as to resemble a golf course. The trees on the lawn are of uniform height, lushness and distance from each other. The gravel is supremely even.

The office buildings are similarly controlled: shades of grey and brown, a certain minimalism and homogeneity in design that is easier found here than in Europe, the sense that unnecessary detail has been removed.

There is a sense of power in all this; a will and a shared set of ideas that have been realized to a high degree. The homogenous, flat skyscraper with a grid of windows is the triumph of human, platonic ideas over the organic and the irregular. The palace garden is man’s will taming the uncontrolled vegetation we find in nature. Yet such control is always a question of scale. We can cut and prune the trees, but we cannot control the color of their leaves or the exact angle of every branch. And we can cut and prune the buildings, but generally, we cannot control the shape of the overall skyline in detail. Something organic manifests itself in the multitude, even as some parts are controlled.

Power and rebellion, in constant struggle and symbiosis.

For a long time, the level of comfort allowed us by technology has risen persistently. This trend shows no signs of slowing down. One of two things would have to happen: either we reach some point where a fundamental barrier prevents us from extracting or converting certain natural resources beyond a certain rate, and this becomes a hard constraint on humanity for all time, or physical matter ends up being under our complete control. In this latter scenario, which I don’t view as unlikely, we’d be able to convert trash into useful things at our whim, for instance.

This scenario is sometimes referred to as an age of abundance. It may have a large intersection with the singularity, an idea first championed in 1993 by Vernor Vinge, or it may be a consequence or a necessary prerequisite of it. For now, let us focus on the economic aspect of abundance only.

If these things come to pass, one of the fundamental assumptions of classical economics – scarcity – would be contradicted. I would suggest that we are culturally unprepared for this kind of world.

As countries’ economic productivity increases, we are faced with the choice of whether to work less and enjoy the same standard of living, or work as much and enjoy a higher standard of living. My understanding is that people have always chosen the latter.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber puts forth the view that the development of capitalism in Europe was largely influenced by protestant values, particularly Calvinist ones. Even though many European peoples today consider themselves to be secular, it is clear that a Christian legacy has left a big mark on contemporary European culture. Simply put, many people only feel proud when they work and feel that they serve a useful purpose to their country. This is why they cannot choose to work less.

In an era of abundance, people would not be needed for the carrying out of most tasks. If they insisted on carrying out the tasks anyway, they would have to know that they were being costly and useless, thereby depriving them of enjoyment – unless we deluded them!

I see a few ways out of this situation.

• Craftsmanship is considered a uniquely human and artistic activity, and people who turn to art and crafts can continue to feel that they are important.
• Some work is fundamentally centered on human interaction and human meetings, for instance care, psychotherapy, hairdressing and leadership. These roles are unlikely to grow useless even as technology advances (purely materially).
• Culture would have to change, allowing people to rest and feel valuable even without contributing to their society’s affluence. If this is possible or not is an open question.

I should point out that the contribution-as-pride mindset is a feature not just of European protestant cultures, but also seems to be one of Japan – though for different reasons. And probably one of many other countries as well.