Safety for whom

Chris Messina wrote a bit about Google, authentication and the GData API. Then followed it up with another post clarifying some of the issues.

There are a few meta-notions that I've been watching that I think are relevant to discussions such as this. The list them, they are: safety, trust, connectedness, reactivity and balance.

When powerful companies start dictating standards, and those standards are meant to benefit both the larger community and the company itself, the conflict of interests get pretty hairy.

The key notion here is safety. The issue is, safety for whom? It looks different from inside Google's walls, than it does here, from the outside. But I think we can do a jedi mind trick, or vulcan mind meld, or some other sci-fi mental-fu, and get a pretty good idea of what's really going on.

Google thinks they are protecting us, when really a significant portion of their activity is geared toward self-protection. We know that. It seems so intuitively obvious that we could almost just call it a fact. But I'd wager that the obviousness of this insight isn't as clear from within Google's walls.

Here's an example that illustrates the slipperiness of "safety."

I participated in a team-building kind of experiential exercise once where about a hundred of us stood in a darkened room, each clutching a single unlit candle. The leader of the event was in the center, and lit his one candle. We all observed the puny light given off. He then lit the candles of those standing nearest him and asked people to pass the flame on once their candle was lit. In a matter of moments, the room was brightly lit.

This is a great example of reactivity, sure. But what of safety? Let me rewind the scenario and add one detail. Instead of a team building exercise for employees, imagine that the leader is a preschool teacher, and the participants are three-years old. Here, we'd likely not have each child holding their own candle for obvious reasons, so we have other teachers acting as a proxy to illustrate the power of sharing. The fast thinkers will suggest we give the toddlers flash-lights, which is a fantastic suggestion. This lowers the risk, increases the safety and allows for greater participation (reactivity). Let's hold off on the flashlight for just a moment and add a smidgeon more complexity to the scenario.

Now, instead of a uniform class of three-year olds, we've got a mixed group ranging in age from 3 and 4 year olds, with one 5-year old. The teachers recognize that the 5 year old is mature enough to hold a candle, and so he act as a proxy for the class alongside the other teachers. There are 10 candle holders including the 5 year old (who understands the seriousness of his duties, and carries them out faithfully: show the light, but be careful of the fire, and don't let the younger kids get too close). But, there is issue. We have one precotious 4-year old in the bunch, whose birthday is next week. He believes he is old enough to hold a candle, and wants to share the turn with the 5-year old. What do you think happens?

Whose safety is the 5-year old considering? From within the five-year olds mind, he is following his duty and watching for the safety of the other children. But, from the outside, do we think that the 5-year old can adequately assess the maturity of the precotious 4-year old? Hardly. In addition to safety, the 5-year old is wielding power, and the notion of safety gets tangled as he simultaneously attempts to protect the other children, and his own privilege.

Is this an oversimplification of what Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Enron, Dell and Walmart do? Yes! Is that a problem? I think the metaphor sheds insight on some of the motivations involved regardless of the scale of the issue. When power is threatened, the increased risk decreases reactivity. This is natural. Transparency decreases and frictions heat up. When there is plenty to go around (as in the first scenerio), no one feels more powerful by holding a candle, therefore free-form sharing works out for everyone.

As we move toward open-source and peer-to-peer models, those who feel it is their duty to protect us from ourselves will sound the alarm that we're being unsafe. It us up to us to ask another question: unsafe for whom?

Comments

[Chris Messina]

David -- interesting take on my posts. Strangely, I'm unable to answer your final question: "unsafe for whom?".

On the one hand, Google is doing us some good, playing the 5-year-old -- weilding a powerful system and letting the rest of us share in its "light".

On the other hand, and an extension of your metaphor that I hope you'll induldge me, what the 5-year-old with the candle doesn't realize is that there's a child in the corner who's shivering and can't get warm. Though the perceived value of the candle is light, for others, it is warmth.

This is the point that I was making I think -- that Google is providing some very powerful and useful services, but it's also segmenting itself off of true third-party interoperability and the potential for that-which-they-hadn't-thought-of.

This is why I'm such an advocate of open source -- if you're able to focus on providing a good basic set of services and open source your code, you allow for the possibility that someone else with needs that you aren't sensitive to could use your work to satisfy themselves.

For many people, Google's software is good enough as is. They've done well reducing complexity and making most things just work. But, this is in the face of years of Word Macros and custom software that was built on top of Microsoft Office. We know that one size doesn't fit all, so why would Google think that they're so clever that they can make tools that portend to offer such a panacea?

I do hope that, over time, Google and others realize that centralizing their power and control is contrary to their ultimate goals and potential -- that there are other uses for their candle's light... and warmth... that hold much promise for the next generation of technology that serves humankind.

[oppmind]

Hey Chris,

Good points, and thanks for the response. I'm really using your posts as a basis for heading off into a tanget of meta-considerations that I'd like the defacto standards bodies to consider, and not so much commenting on Google specifically.

I think Google actually does show a bit more maturity than some of the other heavyweights on the playground. As you point out, they are still more biased toward making their own stuff play together nicely, rather than thinking of how the individual participant's life could be made easier.

The Digg commentator misses the point of this completely. In an age of mashups, we'll simply deconstuct and reconstruct the pieces in the ways that solve our problems most effectively. Standards are launchpads, not silos. Any attempt to lash the synthesisers and creators (vs. Bradley's consumers) to a particular stack of functionality will become obviously, obnoxiously, manipulative and coercive.

It's true that huckster in plaid jackets on used car lots are helping people by enabling their transportation needs. But that's not their primary objective. "What's in it for me?" is a question that is never leaves the forefront of their minds.

Google? They get it more than most. Yahoo is more huckster, and Google is the original Saturn dealer. Almost no one is looking out for the best interest of the public good. Is it their place? I think we'll start seeing this question as a major differentiator in the next 5 - 10 years. I've been called overly optimistic before.