It’s a pity that Umair Haque’s SXSWi keynote interview was such a train wreck. What started as Tiger Beat fluffing (to Twitter founder Ev Williams: “Do you think you’re… Awesome?”) morphed into breathless self-linking. At the interview’s nadir, he rambled about one of his own blog posts, slowly drifted to a stop, then asked Ev to comment. “What do you think about that?”
Leave the self-referential shit to Camille Paglia, that’s what we think. The Twitter backchannel, as the kids say, was unforgiving.
The SXSW crowd is defined by narcissistic wanking, but it’s quick to shred anyone who takes the act onstage. The real pity, though, isn’t that Foursquare crashed before everyone could get a badge for their disgust. More troubling are the genuinely disastrous ideas slipped into the interview’s Twitter-More-Awesome-Than-Jesus triumphalism: they seem to have gone unnoticed and unchallenged.
“We believe an open exchange of information can be a force for good for the world.” - Ev Williams
The sentiment isn’t shocking, coming from someone whose current business is the leading pop-culture fire-hose. It is a bit startling, though, that a crowd constantly prowling for new filtering tools didn’t even blink.
Data is agnostic. Information is amoral. Pointing the narrative-free fire-hose at the digital citizens of the third world does nothing to empower them, and U.S. politics is proof that More News just means More Influence for the person with the craftiest narrative. Once the saturation point is reached, even valuable information is part of the problem: no one has the capacity to sift and filter, and we fall back into the embrace of our trusted interpreters. Paging Foucault: we’re poisoning the well with too much water.
“WalMart built a new information network, and they started many years ago, and it was focused on what we are talking about - new links to new information, to build stuff that makes the world a better place, rather than deforest it.” - Umair Haque
WalMart? A force for good? How novel, how post-physical-goods of them! No one who’s worked the retail back-end has any illusions about the Waltons’ motivations, though. They’re building things that externalize costs, internalize profits, and cut the legs from under their competitors. They’ve been at it long before the Open Data crowd started talking about digital omniscience, and the love-fest is in for a big surprise if they think oligopolies have found religion.
At the end of the day, we’ve hit the cognitive saturation point. Every new bit is a net loss for understanding, and only the people building the filters will come out on top. Leave data fetishism to the mystics! We need a new breed of geek savant: tool-builders who understand what humanity needs, not what it clicks on.