I’ve been asked to speak at a global supply chain management conference about the intersection between the field and marketing. I’m interested in stress-testing some relevant big ideas and new trends that inspire me. I would later boil these down into a manageable talk..
First, some of the big ideas:
1) I have an abiding interest in what is now being popularized as “Big Data.” Namely, the rapidly growing amount of stored/accessed data that is the topic of almost all of my blog posts over the past few years. What excites me about the topic is that the way people think and organize themselves is dramatically impacted by the type of information that they have available, and how they find that information.
2) Materials allocation is a central social activity. Supply Chain Management is one of the key fields where information distribution and materials allocation intersect. This makes it an area of rich interest for looking at how technical changes will affect social development.
Here are some new trends that interest me:
1) Open Source Manufacturing: I’ve been very excited to come across Open Source Ecology, which promises the creation of “a single burned DVD [that] is effectively a civilization starter kit“
2) Distributed Manufacturing: Efforts, such as those above, and others, such as Wikispeed, Shapeoko and MakerBot, promise the possibility of the eventual distribution of manufacturing, due to a decreased initial investment threshold and an increased efficacy of individual/small group planning (by means of computing power).
3) Supply Chain Analytics: One excellent writer, Lora Cecere (“The Supply Chain Shaman“) provides a perspective at how “Big Data” can revolutionize business/tecnnical innovation/distribution, by means of supply chain innovation (You can read her general comments on Big Data beneath the “Trends . . .” heading on this page or find more specialized comments here.).
My goal will be to explain how the potential for the decentralization of manufacture, while far from being realized, highlights the direction in which the Information Age is pushing the fields of distribution and logistics: towards more rapid development cycles and, flowing from that, towards a closer understanding of market forces.
I’m interested in your thoughts on these trends/topics.
Thanks so much!
My good Barak,
The main problem with Big Data, as I see it, is its tendency to centralize the traditional elements of human culture into its own unilaterally empowered alternate cybernetic hive-like social structures more suitable to the social insect phyla than to traditional human beings while rendering any alternatives either obsolete or untenable. While I realize these are not the immediate characteristics of the applications enumerated above which excite you, those applications are nonetheless necessarily dependent on the systemic underpinnings I described.
Two examples may illustrate what I am describing a little better. There was news this week of Microsoft purchasing a substantial share of Barnes & Nobles’ Nook online reader division, with the mention that the printed book – and by implication the reprinted book – was becoming increasingly obsolete in favor of E-publication and specifically the E-reader.
But while the book, a rather time-tested technology, represents a portion of transmitted human information culture that an individual can own and unilaterally and completely control, the E-reader is absolutely nothing remotely of the sort.
The E-reader, in stark contrast, is merely a marketing platform which serves to entice its owners into leasing copies of given texts for however long the owners of the central servers controlling the E-reader desire and for as long as the E-reader continues to function. Of course, one theoretically has the right to sue Amazon.com for any performance failures.
In the meantime, any previously printed human culture which has not been scanned into a database and subsequently redistributed according to the vastly more different protocols described above and which, by virtue of the market changes that arm of Big Data continues to wreak, do not get reprinted in individual-ownable book form, and thereafter disappear from human history.
Thereafter the bureaus that own the servers upon which any remaining written human history now resides now own that remaining written human history, such as it may be, not the humans themselves; they have now become indistinguishable from drones with respect to the system.
The second example is Facebook, a phenomenon which continues to reach beyond even its own 800-odd million population. Recently, the only major daily newspaper remaining in North Texas, The Dallas Morning News, wishing to rid itself of the relatively free-form commentary which still obtains in Alexandria, established a new requirement that only those with Facebook accounts could henceforth comment in its online pages. Therefore, those now wishing to comment online at TDMN must now surrender themselves to Mark Zuckerberg’s data-mining empire.
While we will certainly not be able to, like Luddites, turn back the clock on our inexorably advancing cybernetic one-world culture, what might provide at least something in the way of a solution re-balancing things in the direction of more traditionally dialectical relationships between the self-controlling individual and the collective might be something whimsically termed “inherently dangerous data”, that is, data in a functional form leaving it somehow to some effective degree still under the control of the individual whose data it is.
By analogy, if others attempt to impose relationships upon corporeal individuals beyond the boundaries those individuals have set, the usurpers may invariably find themselves saddled with material complications up to and including death and destruction. However, as far as I know, no such immediate consequence can ensue by analogy from an individual’s or a commercial firm’s data if it is acquired or used beyond mutually agreed upon boundaries; there are no actual effective boundaries which can be mutually agreed upon; I do not risk my operating system being burned out if I possess unauthorized photo or other data of some individual or firm which does not want me to possess it and use it relatively as I please.
So that, in long, is one of the fundamental still-unsolved problems I see: the unilateral centralization of data and the concomitant loss of individual ownership and control of his portion of his all-too-brief life which it represents.
Then again, this may end up only being the generational complaint of a crank, and the generations coming may find themselves entirely compliant with our ongoing evolutions without complaint.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
I fully appreciate your concerns and do not find them cranky. I shudder at some of the same possibilities you suggest. Still, I find other reasons to shudder about the usurpation of individual rights, even when 21st century technology is not involved.
That is to say, we are, indeed, entering dangerous territory but there are possibilities that can be seized by those who would carve out more space for individual freedom. The printing press, for instance, has undermined oral traditions across the world. It has also allowed for the proliferation of libraries.
Our task is to find ways to develop robust networks of knowledge that will allow us each to thrive in the (likely) event that we come across individuals/groups who would attempt to take advantage of that information about us that is publicly available or to deprive us of useful information.
Storage, for instance, is becoming cheaper all the time. Perhaps you or I will one day invest in our own data center, supported by a community we trust, in order to preserve information we consider vital.
The examples I raise in the post suggest the possibility of, for instance, the distribution of manufacture-related plans and productive capacity. The opportunity for a degree of independence is thereby suggested.
To be sure, the playing field has changed. Isolation becomes, perhaps, more difficult. The risk of exposure to unseen “data mining” eyes that is greater (though the fact that they see so much is often a counterbalance to the intentional focus on any one given actor).
Perhaps I am naive to focus, instead, on the possibilities that exist for creative individuals to organize and build in unprecedented ways. I do find great satisfaction in the task, nonetheless.
My good Barak,
Oddly enough, I had initially logged in just now in order to remove my own comment from early this morning. After having reread it several times it seemed far more appropriate to some other, different post entirely.
That said, it would serve many if not all of us immensely, me included, if you were to elaborate even further on the interests you have expressed here, whether you compare and contrast them to phenomena such as Facebook (which Infoburo causes retired KGB chiefs to sob like little girls at what might have been) or not. My exploration of your links invariably led me into pools of in-group argot entirely opaque to me, and no doubt others.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
Fair enough! I will aim to discuss those issues in my next post.