Category Archives: Writing

Drones and Automated Trading Systems

Books, Inspiration, Quotes, Writing

This week I reread William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive for the umpteenth time. It’s the final book of the Sprawl trilogy which started with the more famous Neuromancer. This time, there were some lovely resonances between the books and the world of today, almost 25 years after it was published.

One detail that jumped out at me was the emotional resonance of drone surveillance:

She was accompanied, on these walks, by an armed remote, a tiny Dornier helicopter that rose from its unseen rooftop next when she stepped down from the deck. It could hover almost silently, and was programmed to avoid her line of sight. There was something wistful about the way it followed her, as though it we5re an expensive but unappreciated Christmas gift.

– Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson (1988), pps 14-15

 A drone pilot and his partner, a sensor operator who manipulates the aircraft’s camera, observe the habits of a militant as he plays with his children, talks to his wife and visits his neighbors. They then try to time their strike when, for example, his family is out at the market.

“They watch this guy do bad things and then his regular old life things,” said Col. Hernando Ortega, the chief of aerospace medicine for the Air Education Training Command, who helped conduct a study last year on the stresses on drone pilots. “At some point, some of the stuff might remind you of stuff you did yourself. You might gain a level of familiarity that makes it a little difficult to pull the trigger.”

— A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away, The New York Times, July 29th, 2012

And while we don’t yet live in a world where Artificial Intelligences control major corporations, we have started talking about things as if we do:

She remembered Porphyre once maintaining that major corporations were entirely independent of the human beings who composed the body corporate. This had seemed patently obvious to Angie, but the hairdresser had insisted that she’d failed to grasp his basic premise. Swift was Sense/Net’s most important human decision-maker.- Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson (1988), page 123

An automated stock trading program suddenly flooded the market with millions of trades Wednesday morning, spreading turmoil across Wall Street and drawing renewed attention to the fragility and instability of the nation’s stock market.

Traders on Wednesday said that a rogue algorithm repeatedly bought and sold millions of shares of companies like RadioShack, Best Buy, Bank of America and American Airlines, sending trading volume surging. While the trading firm involved blamed a “technology issue,” the company and regulators were still trying to understand what went wrong.

“The machines have taken over, right?” said Patrick Healy, the chief executive of the Issuer Advisory Group, a capital markets consulting firm.

— Flood of Errant Trades Is a Black Eye for Wall Street, The New York Times, August 1, 2012

Science fiction isn’t terribly reliable at predicting the future, exactly. But sometimes it does a nice job of predictng what the future will feel like.

Corporate apologies: An appreciation

Product Design, Writing

Imsorry

I have a small collection of corporate apologies.

I think software companies in particular are getting quite good at apologies. (Whether they're getting better at not doing things they should apologize for is another matter). Modern software companies generally expect to move quickly and to have relatively transparent communication with their users (at least compared to pre-Internet corporations). Both of these expectation mesh well with good apologizing.

I'm interested in corporate apologies for three reasons.

First, many of the apologies I've collected come from companies whose products I use, like Netflix, EVE Online, Flickr, and Airbnb.

Second, I work for very similar companies, and so while I hope to avoid it by never screwing up, it is entirely possible I'll be in the position of having to write such an apology one day. If that happens, I'd like to do a good job.

Finally, I love looking at different genres of writing. I think of corporate apologies as a very specialized genre, one that is usually written under a great deal of stress (because it usually follows something unpleasant happening), to an unusually critical audience (the apology is happening because some people are very unhappy), in a short period of time (an apology is best delivered as soon as possible). 

Here's a few of my favorites:

1. Path apologizes for mishandling user data.

We are sorry.We made a mistake. Over the last couple of days users brought to light an issue concerning how we handle your personal information on Path, specifically the transmission and storage of your phone contacts…. 

2. EVE online apologizes for not listening to the community

Dear Followers of EVE Online,

The past few months have been very humbling for me. I’ve done much soul searching, and what follows is my sincere effort to clear the air with all of you. Please bear with me as I find my way through. 

The estrangement from CCP that many of you have been feeling of late is my fault, and for that I am truly sorry. There are many contributing factors, but in the end it is I who must shoulder the responsibility for much of what has happened…. 

3. Netflix apologizes for a price hike and announces a plan to split the company in two, and then backtracks and apologizes for that.

I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation. 

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming, and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. I’ll try to explain how this happened…. 

Followed by:

DVDs will be staying at netflix.com It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs….

4. Airbnb apologizes for a truly horrific rental experience and their handling of the aftermath

Last month, the home of a San Francisco host named EJ was tragically vandalized by a guest. The damage was so bad that her life was turned upside down. When we learned of this our hearts sank. We felt paralyzed, and over the last four weeks, we have really screwed things up. Earlier this week, I wrote a blog post trying to explain the situation, but it didn’t reflect my true feelings. So here we go….

5. Livejournal apologizes for overzealous enforcement of policy violations

Well we really screwed this one up…

For reasons we are still trying to figure out what was supposed to be a well planned attempt to clean up a few journals that were violating LiveJournal's policies that protect minors turned into a total mess. I can only say I’m sorry, explain what we did wrong and what we are doing to correct these problems and explain what we were trying to do but messed up so completely….

6. Flickr apologizes for the mistaken removal of a photograph

I have to be a little quicker than I'd like because I'm writing this on a Treo in a car in the desert, coming back from a vacation (I'm not driving – no worries). I've gotten the whole back story from the team and have read the forums, various Flickr groups topics and blog posts on this topic (as of a few hours ago), so I have a pretty good idea that we screwed up — and for that I take full responsibility (actually, several team members are fighting to take responsibility)….

These are all worth reading, take a little time to check each of them out.

Each of these apologies get the basics right. They're from a specific person (usually the CEO or similar figure) and written in plain, direct language with an admiral minimum of corporate-ese. All of them contain some variation of  "We screwed up."

The EVE online apology and the Flickr apology are probably the most personal (which makes sense given the history of those two companies), but none have that strangled sound we've come to expect from a canned, PR-approved response. Which is not to say PR people weren't involved — only that good ones were.

All of them contain some variation of "I take full responsibility," so there's no pushing of blame onto another party. Most include explanations of what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what the company intended to do about it. On the other hand, the first Netflix apology contained a remedy (splitting the company in two) that was arguably worse than the initial problem (essentially a price hike). The lesson here is probably: don't get too fancy with your remedy, and don't let it get hijacked by some other corporate priority.

Context is also interesting. All of these were posted in the company blog, rather than a separate press release. Flickr's is a little different since the initial apology from Stewart came in an active community thread, and then was reposted in the official blog.

I've talked mostly about the apologies themselves, but, as most of the apologies themselves point out, actions subsequent to the apology also matter. 

Do you have a favorite corporate apology? I'll add it to the list.

Added 4/16/2012

Here's one found by Andrew Sandler, from RunKeeper, a fitness tracking app:

With all of this good stuff happening, we wanted to write this post because we feel like we owe you an apology.  You see, we have always prided ourselves on being a user-driven company.  A company that cares about your feedback.  A company that makes decisions with you, our users, in mind. We feel like recently we started to stray from those values.  We spread ourselves too thin.  We had too many initiatives going on at once.  And most importantly, we stopped listening to our users as much as we should be. 

 

I'm sorry photo CC by shandopics

What I’m thinking about this week

Books, Clothing & Costume Design, Games, Graphic Design, History, Inspiration, Not Design, Product Design, Writing

Photo

  1. Boots! In January 1996, I was in London briefly, following a semester at Glasgow University. I bought a pair of Dr. Marten’s boots from the flagship store in . They were a sort of wingtip half boot, and I loved them. That’s them up on the right there. I’ve owned various boots over the years, and these were worn more and over a longer period of time than any others. Only a pair of boots acquired from Stompers in the 90s came close. The latter have been relegated to “garden use only” for a while now, and the Docs are just thrashed. Neither model is still made (though there are some things that come close). So last week, we went over to the Haight St. and I picked up a pair of Langstons in burgundy. And I’m in love all over again …
  2. Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. Despite being married to someone who knows a great deal about art history, I basically knew nothing about this painting or the painter (though I knew the image). I listen to the wonderful In Our Time BBC podcasts, so I got a thorough introduction from Melvyn Bragg’s usual group of slightly dotty British academics. 
  3. The history of finance, and investment theory. Not my usual area, but I’m being guided by Adam Nash’s personal finance reading list and working my way through one by one. 
  4. Visual (and to some extent audio) design in classic science-fiction movies. (And one newer one.) The ones with the white palettes, san serif typefaces and shininess.  Think 2001 and Saturn 3.  Also Tron Legacy, but the shiny white bits rather than the glowy black bits. Plus sinister computer voices like Hal and GladOS from Portal. The fun part is this relates to the previous item (at least in my head).
  5. How most of the important developments & conflicts in online identity & authentication were predicted (sort of ) by Max Headroom. 
  6. Occupy Wall Street. There’s a lot to think about, but this post pointing out how strangely some of the OWS dynamic echoes Bruce Sterling’s 1998 book Distractions I had to reread it. Sterling has a knack for predicting future socio-political events in ways SF doesn’t usually quite do (see: drone assassinations in Islands in the Net). Distractions isn’t nearly as good a book as Islands in the Net, but it has it’s moments, and it certainly resonates today:

    “Why are there millions of nomads now? They don’t have jobs, man! You don’t care about ‘em! You don’t have any use for ‘em! You can’tmake any use for them! They’re just not necessary to you. Not at all. Okay? So, you’re not necessary to them, either. Okay? They got real tired of waiting for you to give them a life. So now, they just make their own life by themselves, out of stuff they find lying around. You think the government cares? The government can’t even pay their own Air Force.”

    “A country that was better organized would have a decent role for all its citizens.”

    “Man, that’s the creepy part — they’re a lot better organized than the government is. Organization is the only thing they’ve got! They don’t have money or jobs or a place to live, but organization, they sure got plenty of that stuff.”

Thief, thief, thief! Baggins!

Books, Product Design, Quotes, Writing

I'm slowly reading "The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion" by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. It's a dense exegesis of LOTR and clearly for pretty obsessive Tolkien fans only.

It's a lot of fun, though. My favorite so far is finding out that baggins is, among other things, English country speak for afternoon tea.There's also layers of bag related language play: Bag-end is Anglicized cul-de-sac (which is in turn faux French), Baggins vs. Sackville Baggins, etc.

I like dense naming. See also Warren Ellis's explanation of how he names characters, in part:

For instance: I’m working on something right now where I think I’ve nailed the character name finally. Birch. Birch = wood = connotes a degree of strength and basic groundedness. But also birching = flagellation. Also, “John Birch Society,” skeevy and untrustworthy. And it’s a hard, sharp word. There’s a lot about the character that unpacks out of the name.

I'm working with some folks on a product name right now. It's hard. And I think the good ones have dense (and sometimes non-obvious) layers of meaning, just like in fiction.

Reffell’s law of PowerPoint writing loss

Writing

I'm in my home office, sorting old papers. And of course reading some of them. Apparently, in graduate school I was able to write clearly and analytically, at length, about complicated things like privacy regulations in the EU. There is little poetry, but there are thoughts, conveyed in English, by words on paper. There is clarity. There is precision. There are ideas that carefully build upon each other, in crisp sentences, stacked in well-ordered paragraphs, to a logical conclusion. (There are also too many commas and horrible typos, but that's always been true of my writing.)

I've had a Theory for a while (which for this post I've given a field promotion to Law) that explains why graduate school was the peak of my writing ability.  It is not because of age, or because I write less now. It is because of PowerPoint.

Reffell's law: For every year you write seriously, starting around Kindergarten, you get incrementally better at writing. And for every year you write serious amounts of PowerPoint (or Keynote) in a corporate environment, you lose one of those increments.

That's put me back, effectively, to my senior year in high school. (The startup years don't count for this, there's a low PPT count.) That's not so bad! I was a pretty good writer in high school. Better than a lot of adults. But it will go seriously downhill from here. Another two years and I'll be at 10th grade; two more and we'll be in middle school. Quickly we'll be in "Dick and Jane go up hill" territory.

I think, by the way, this is specific to intra-corporate use. Something about the highly concentrated jargon, shared assumptions, and positioning of cliches (verbal and visual) as a means of bludgeoning the decision-making apparatus into submission. Probably the decks you build for public presentations are safe. Probably.