An Unthinkable Manifesto

Well, here we are at the beginning of our third year. It's been a great couple of years for us, but like any new business, we acted with a mixture of instinct and opportunism, hunches, idealism and realism. In the background, though, we've been quietly building an understanding of our shared goals and passions, of our complementary skills and of our strengths and genuine points of uniqueness. An understanding is one thing, of course; an articulation is another. Never afraid of stridency, we've synthesised these goals into an Unthinkable manifesto. So here it is. As ever, all thoughts welcome!

Justin, Matthew, Sarah, Simon

Four Unthinkable Positions

One: It's all about people
Technology doesn’t exist without people. Technology is something that people and organisations make, use, adapt and subvert constantly. Sometimes it breaks.

Two: Better connections, not more
Digital technology, more than anything else, is about connections - between people, things, companies and information. And it is better connections, not more, that can make everything we do fuller, more productive, more enjoyable and more likely to surprise.

Three: Remember your own agency
There is a tremendous pressure to keep up with the next big thing. Simply responding to that pressure means letting technological change happen to you. It’s all too easy to forget that you are making the decisions.

Four: Don't fear complexity
Human life consists of a set of interlocking technological, social, corporate, political and cultural systems of astonishing complexity. If we don't confront that complexity, we will remain its slave (which is never a good thing - unless you’re into that).

How we work

Unthinkable offer deep and careful analysis of the problems we are set by our clients, in the light of these beliefs, and based on decades of collective experience of the digital economy. We know that only by taking human culture, motivation, frailties and processes as seriously as we take technology can we hope to reach fresh insights.

Working with us is sometimes tough, but it's always exhilarating. We bring serious, rigorous, straightforward and cross-disciplinary thinking to our work - and seek to inculcate it in our clients' work, too. We enjoy getting to know our clients, in large and small organisations, as individuals and as businesses. We never want to stop learning. And we never want our clients to stop learning either. We believe that good things happen when smart people listen to each other. Even if we wind you up a lot on the way there.

By working together to understand your needs, and those of your customers, we can help you define what you need to do and we can help you do it: quickly, cost-effectively and with less pain than on your own.

What we do

We help you take better informed risks that will set you apart from the competition. We help you form stronger digital processes that suit your organisation. We help you find the right agency, the right funding opportunity and the right audience. But we are also honest about what we don’t know and can’t do, and can make an introduction to people who do and can from our networks of contacts across the worlds of media, culture and technology. We like making these connections.

These beliefs and these opportunities are what get us out of bed in the morning. That and the kids and the alarm clock.

Unthinkable Things #12: The twilight of peer review?

A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for serious academic journals to publish non-peer-reviewed work, or for universities to grant promotion on the basis of such work.

photo by David Michael Morris - some rights reserved (Creative Commons 2.0)

So says Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, quoted in a recent article in the New York Times reviewing recent and forthcoming experiments by Shakespeare Quarterly, Postmedieval and repec.org. The flagship of the wiki world, Wikipedia, has had a mixed reputation at best in academic circles, where it's often mistrusted for its open nature and its lack of dependence on traditional academic structures to verify its contents. Wikipedia itself is not likely to become a source worthy to be cited in serious academic work - nor has it aspired to. But it has done a huge amount to promote and prove the principle that work in progress is likely to be improved through being exposed to the collective judgement of as broad as possible an interested audience, who choose to spend what Clay Shirky would call their "cognitive surplus" on engaging with it.

For the time being, the kinds of experiments described in the article are very much the exception rather than the rule. Whether they will in time eclipse the traditional peer review process - described by Katherine Rowe, an academic at the USA's Bryn Mawr College involved in the Shakespeare Quarterly trial, as "a settlement for a particular moment, not a perfect ideal" - will depend in part on the respective efficacy of the two approaches in generating good quality work.

But, as with so many aspects of change driven by digital technology, the speed, nature and extent of this change will also depend on the readiness of institutions - in this case, those who govern academic career structures - to accept it. Too fast, and there is the danger not simply that vested interests will be challenged but also that rigour will suffer. Too slow, and academia risks losing credibility as both pioneer and guarantor of the world's knowledge.

Unthinkable Things #11: Why do I no longer trust the evidence in front of me?

photo by Ray Bodden - some rights reserved (Creative Commons 2.0)

Recently I was in a house on the upper edge of North Norfolk considering the summer heat and wanting for some reason to quantify it. My natural instinct as a modern citizen was to reach for my iPhone and check the BBC's weather website. After a certain amount of fiddling I got the weather for Norwich, because it was the nearest city and therefore the biggest link nearby on the tiny map. 

The site said something like - sunny 23 degrees. It seemed hotter than that.

The BBC gets its weather data from the UK Met Office and the Met Office gets its data as 'millions of observations from satellites, ships, aircraft, buoys, balloons, and weather stations covering the entire planet.' All of that data is then 'beamed back to the Met Office headquarters and fed into [their] supercomputer, a high performance machine, capable of doing more than a hundred trillion calculations a second'

The software used for prediction has 'more than a million lines of code, the equations form a mathematical model designed to mirror the dynamics of the atmosphere.' 

All of that current analysis and prediction data is sent over from the Met to the BBC in two big data dumps a day - one at 07.30 and one at 19.30 GMT, which turns into four updates a day on the BBC site which can be adjusted and fine tuned by the Duty Forecaster at BBC Weather Centre.

To recount, I was accessing the BBC site mid-afternoon about 7 hours after the last data dump from the Met Office, using an iPhone pulling data in over a 3G network supplied by Vodafone, which told me that 60 miles away in Norwich the average temperature measured in the shade should be 23 degrees as predicted by their supercomputer using millions of points of data yesterday. 

It was at that point that I noticed the thermometer on the window. 

It seems I had forgotten this kind of thing existed, and even when I did see it I had my suspicions right away. What if it isn't in the right position, what if it's old and gone funny over time, what if it has been stuck at 26 degrees for the last 5 years?

Why did I distrust a simple tool that was in front of me, telling me that it was indeed hotter than the BBC had told me? 

I don't want to draw out some tenuous universal issue from my obviously idiosyncratic shortcomings, but it did make me wonder why I put so much faith in the technology of the network and so little in the mechanical technology that was the bedrock of my grandparents' generation. And more than that, why am I so programmed to seek out highly mediated evidence over that which I could gather at first hand?

As Matthew pointed out to me the other day, maybe it is because I have come to believe that the network gives me access to better tools than I could ever have locally, and better ways of processing the data they generate. In this case the network did something truly remarkable, something that even a few years ago would be impossible, but ultimately gave me the wrong answer.

Unthinkable Things #10: Musical originality and collaboration through the ages

In the 16th century, it was almost unthinkable for church composers to write entirely original music.

Early 16th century manuscript of Missa de Beata Virgine by Josquin des Prez (Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Cappella Sistina 45, folios 1v-2r, via Wikimedia Commons)

OK, so this is might appear to be one of the more wilfully obscure of our "unthinkable things", but there is a serious point here, so bear with us.

The idea of more than one voice sounding at once, which is central to the development of western musical history, started from the premise of embellishing Gregorian Chant. Although not universal, the idea that complex musical forms were in some ways decorations that owed their true structure and essence to raw materials sanctified by time and use was a hard one for composers to shake off.

The principle of working second-hand material into music (and especially religious music) actually reached its zenith in the work of Palestrina and his contemporaries during the Renaissance, at a time when culture was supposed to be throwing off its mediaeval shackles. (This might be through cantus firmus, where typically the tenor voice part is taken in full from an earlier source (often plainchant); paraphrase, where the borrowed material is both varied and spread around different voices or parody, where whole polyphonic chunks of earlier works, often masses, are worked into the new composition.)

There's a popular cult of the individual genius that surrounds classical music, thanks largely to the colourful personas of the Romantic 19th century (think Beethoven struggling alone against destiny). But that perception is in danger of blinding us to the fact that, if we take the long view of the history of classical music, collaborative composition has rarely been far from the mainstream. Even in the 18th and 19th centuries - the high watermark of belief in the primacy of originality - the principle was re-asserted through the form of variations and through arrangement and orchestration. More recently, in the twentieth century, composers like Stravinsky acknowledged their debt to tradition by quotation, or even as in the case of Stravinsky's ballet Pulcinella, by full-scale recomposition.

The point here is that while jazz, blues and latterly sample-based dub or electronic music have pioneered new forms of collaboration, western music has always been the object of a tussle between building on tradition and the expression of novelty. And borrowing and stealing material has always been central to that tussle. As we are currently exploring on this blog, digital communications technology facilitates (and sometimes forces) innovations around both intellectual property and models for collaboration, far beyond the field of music, but the aesthetic foundations for those innovations are deep and ancient.

Unthinkable Things #9: 100 years of copyright

300 years ago, it was unthinkable that copyright would one day be extended to more than a century.

photo by Thomas Hawk - some rights reserved (Creative Commons 2.0)

Great Britain's Statute of Anne (1709) is widely regarded as the first formal copyright law in any territory. It gave rights to authors rather than publishers, and "included protections for consumers of printed work ensuring that publishers could not control their use after sale. It also limited the duration of such exclusive rights to 14 years (21 years for works published before the law was enacted), after which all works would pass into the public domain" (Wikipedia).

Since then, for good or ill, publishing in all its forms has blossomed into a huge branch of the world's economy. Its backbone, copyright, has been extended, across most of the western world, to a massive 70 years following the death of the author. The very existence and publication of the photograph in this post shed some interesting light on the status of copyright in our culture.

Many parts of the publishing industry are in crisis today thanks to the assaults of digital technology, and some of the evolving solutions look decidedly troubling. But amid panic about the impact of technology on the ability of creative artists to ply a trade, it's as well to remember the relatively modern pedigree of the financial and legal apparatus that feels so timeless.