oncoming de-urbanization

Why do we live in crowded cities? The answer is simple: Network effects. When we live literally on top of each other, it is easier to meet people and do business. Density creates optionality as well. Serving the long tail becomes a possibility, because there is a critical mass that is interested in all sorts of weird things, ranging from fusion cuisines to underground parties.

But cities also take a toll on you. Air pollution, noise pollution, light pollution. Stupid neighbors, inconsiderate pedestrians, maniac drivers. You name it.

Istanbul, the city I happen to live in, has especially turned into a fucking nightmare. Decades long corruption, short-termism, populism, distastefulness and sheer ignorance have achieved the impossible and turned one of the most beautiful cities in the world into an unlivable place.

• There are no common spaces left, no green areas neither. People have no option but to go to shopping malls and get sucked into a giant blackhole of timeless, contextless, blood-sucking sameness. Everywhere is gray, a nasty dirty brutal tone of gray, and a substantial majority of the buildings look plain disgusting. There are no regulations, no shared patterns, no aesthetic commonalities.

• There are no laws neither. You can get run over by a motorcycle while walking on the fucking sidewalk. Taxis will not stop for you if you have a kid or if you do not look like a clueless Arab tourist that they think they can rip off.

• Sidewalks are generally so thin that people who come out to light a cigarette can not help but blow their smoke right in your face, and they are so irregular that if you do not pay attention you can easily trip over and land on your face (or press on something loose and get all wet).

• In popular places, you constantly have to dodge street sellers and beggars. Most beggars (especially the young ones) will follow you until you give up, or until they give up and curse at you.

• The entire city has become a giant billboard. You get grabbed by the eyeballs while driving, walking, standing in public transportation, waiting for public transportation, literally everywhere… Unless you are flying over the city with a private helicopter, you are guaranteed to be brain fucked by the time you arrive home. As usual, corporations ask you to buy their brand new shit. But that is not enough. Municipalities also have to inform you about their recent achievements. (Yes, you heard that right. Municipalities boast about things they are supposed to do as part of their job description.) Eventually you become so visually desensitized that even the nasty gray color that has encapsulated the entire city starts to look adorable.

Insane, right? I guess it takes a very long time for people to realize that they have gone insane when they do so both slowly and collectively.

Anyway, today I see a lot of people taking action (or at least displaying the will to take action). There seems to be two very different forms of de-urbanization happening.

1. There is a growing number of people who live in the city but just go from point to point, without interacting with any strangers or encountering anything unplanned. They get chauffeured from meeting to meeting, from one air-conditioned special-purpose location to another. When they take their family to a theatre, they land directly inside the theatre and then get beamed back into their living rooms. These people have managed to achieve a pseudo transcendence from local conditions. I view this de-fragmentation and the subsequent decoherence of the single unified social texture into many co-existing social textures as a form of de-urbanization. (In other words, I define de-urbanization abstractly, as a process that leads to a decrease in the physical connectivity of the social texture.)

2. There is a growing number of people who leave the city and head for the country side, simply because they can. Their jobs have been completely digitalized and all the network effects they need for social and commercial purposes can now be mediated by the internet. They often work from home, for companies with (globally) distributed (permanent and temporary) work forces.

Those who hate the city but can not give up on to its cultural vibrancy usually fall into the first bucket. However, more and more of them are transitioning into the second bucket by virtualizing their cultural needs as well. (Do you really need to go to the theater to watch a movie?)

My belief is that the de-urbanization trends, in both forms, will become increasingly stronger for two reasons:

1. Software is eating world and the entire economy is becoming more and more digitalized. This is not a short term trend. It is a fundamental phase shift that will continue to affect each and everyone of us. In the digital world, distances do not matter since information travels at the speed of light. There is no long tail problem neither. (In fact, the rise of the internet has resulted in a vast proliferation of subcultures.) In short, the cities are no longer needed. They are archaic remnants from the times when the world economy was going through its physical phase. Network effects can now be mediated by actual networks.

2. Cities are designed to mediate network effects. This means that they are viral in many ways. News travel faster, but so do diseases. This makes the cities particularly vulnerable to outbreaks. (Remember, viruses travel through physical networks, not digital networks. You do not get sick when someone sneezes on your face during a video conference.) Why do I even bother to point this out? Because there is another major technological transformation underway, a transformation that will soon force everyone to revize their entire pros-and-cons tables. Recent breakthroughs in genetic engineering (like CRISPR) are enabling easy, cheap and accurate engineering of DNA. This is a great development for precision medicine but also great news for school-shooting freaks and suicide-bombing terrorists. Are you panicking about Coronavirus? You have not seen anything yet. Not too far in the future, we will be worrying about the fast-evolving viruses engineered and unleashed by deranged high-school kids working from their bedrooms. Cities will suddenly and completely become unlivable. Just look at what is happening in China today. The entire social texture has become pulverised in a matter of a few weeks. (People are not leaving their apartments, at all.)

Here we have two very different technologies, one creating the problem and the other one dissolving it. Cities will soon become both unviable and irrelevant. So, in order for us to make this grand sociological phase transition with the least amount of damage, we should do our best to make sure that cities become irrelevant before they actually become unviable.

Many people think that urbanization will continue forever. Futurists, as usual, simply interpolate the current trends to infinity. May be they are right. May be we will all end up living inside a single monolithic megalopolis, but I believe that the shell will a lot thinner and spread-out than they imagine.

complexity and failure

Complex structures that are built slowly over time via evolutionary processes (e.g. economies, companies, buildings, species, reputations, software) tend to be robust, but when they collapse, they do so instantly.

In the literature, this asymmetry is called the Seneca Effect, after the ancient Roman Stoic Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca who said "Fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid".

Some remarks:

• That is why only highly educated people can be spectacularly wrong. Only with education can one construct contrived highly complex arguments of the type which can fail on several different levels and lead to a spectacular failure. (Remember, the most outrageous crimes in history were carried out in the name of complex ideologies.)

• That is also why good product designers think hard before beginning a design process that is sure to complexify over time. Complex designs collapse in entirety and are very difficult to salvage or undo. Similarly, good businessmen think hard before opening a new business since the decision to close one later is a much harder process.

• Once entrepreneurs start building a business, they immediately start to suffer from sunk cost and negativity biases, which are specific manifestations of the much more general asymmetry between construction and destruction. We tend to be conservative with respect to complex structures because they are hard to build but easy to destruct. (Unsurprisingly, these psychological biases look surprising to the theoretical economists who have never really built anything complex and prone-to-failure in their lives.)

science vs technology

• Science (as a form of understanding) gets better as it zooms out. Technology (as a form of service) gets better as it zooms in. Science progresses through unifications and technology progresses through diversifications.

• Both science and technology progress like a jellyfish moves through the water, via alternating movements of contractions (i.e. unifications) and relaxations (i.e. diversifications). So neither science or technology can be pictured as a simple linear trend of unification or diversification. Technology goes through waves of standardizations for the sake of achieving efficiency and de-standardizations for the sake of achieving a better fit. Progress happens due to the fact that each new wave of de-standardization (magically) achieving a better fit than the previous wave, thanks to an intermittent period of standardization. Opposite happens in science, where each new wave of unification (magically) reaches a higher level of accuracy than the previous wave, thanks to an intermittent period of diversification.

• Unification is easier to achieve in a single mind. Diversification is easier to achieve among many minds. That is why the scientific world is permeated by the lone genius culture and the technology world is permeated by the tribal team-work culture. Scientists love their offices, technologists love their hubs.

“New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organised, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.”
- Max Planck

• Being the originator of widely adopted scientific knowledge makes the originator powerful, while being the owner of privately kept technological knowledge makes the owner powerful. Hence, the best specimens of unifications quickly get diffused out of the confined boundaries of a single mind, and the best specimens of diversifications quickly get confined from the diffused atmosphere of many minds.

• Unifiers, standardizers tend to be more masculine types who do not mind being alone. Diversifiers, de-standardizers tend to be more feminine types who can not bear being alone. That is why successful technology leaders are more feminine than the average successful leader in the business world, and successful scientific leaders are more masculine than the average successful leader in the academic world. Generally speaking, masculine types suffer more discrimination in the technology world and feminine types suffer more discrimination in the scientific world.

• Although unifiers play a more important role in science, we usually give the most prestigious awards to the diversifiers who deployed the new tools invented by the unifiers at tangible famous problems. Although diversifiers play a more important role in technology, we usually remember and acknowledge only the unifiers who crystallized the vast efforts of diversifiers into tangible popular formats.

• Technological challenges lie in efficient specializations. Scientific challenges lie in efficient generalizations. You need to learn vertically and increase your depth to come up with better specializations. This involves learning-to-learn-new, meaning that what you will learn next will be built on what you learned before. You need to learn horizontally and increase your range to come up with better generalizations. This involves learning-to-relearn-old, meaning that what you learned before will be recast in the light of what you will learn next.

• Technology and design are forms of service. Science and art are forms of understanding. That is why the intersection of technology and art, as well as the intersection of science and design, is full of short-lived garbage. While all our “external” problems can be tracked back to a missing tool (technological artifact) or a wrong design, all our “internal” problems can be traced back to a missing truth (scientific fact) or wrong aesthetics (i.e. wrong ways of looking at the world).

• Scientific progress contracts the creative space of religion by outright disproval of certain ideas and increases the expressive power of religion by supplying it with new vocabularies. (Note that the metaphysical part of religion can be conceived as “ontology design”.) Technological progress contracts the creative space of art by outright trivialization of certain formats and increases the expressive power of art by supplying it with new tools. (Think of the invention of photography rendering realistic painting meaningless and the invention of synthesizers leading to new types of music.) In other words, science and technology aid respectively religion and art to discover their inner cores by both limiting the domain of exploration and increasing the efficacy of exploration. (Notice that artists and theologians are on the same side of the equation. We often forget this, but as Joseph Campbell reminds us, contemporary art plays an important role in updating our mythologies, and keeping the mysteries alive.)

• Scientific progress replaces mysteries with more profound mysteries. Technological progress replaces problems with more complex problems.

• Both science and technology progress through hype cycles, science through how much phenomena the brand new idea can explain, technology through how many problems the brand new tool can solve.

• Scientific progress slows down when money is thrown at ideas rather than people. Technological progress slows down when money is thrown at people rather than ideas.

• Science progresses much faster during peacetime, technology progresses much faster during wartime. Scientific breakthroughs often precede new wars, technological breakthroughs often end ongoing wars.

uçak vs tren yolculuğu

Tren yolculuklarına bayılıyorum. Uçakla bir yere gitmek kesinlikle aynı keyfi vermiyor.

• Uçağa binip inersiniz, arada ne olduğu ise muammadır. Yolculuğunuzu ancak dijital bir harita üzerinden soyut bir şekilde takip edebilirsiniz, o kadar. Oysa trende koca koca camlardan dışarıyı bir film şeridi gibi izleyebilirsiniz. Bir yere doğru ilerlediğinizi görsel açıdan tam anlamıyla hissedersiniz.

• Rayların sesi kalp atışı gibidir, ritminden hızınızı kestirebilirsiniz. Uçakta ise doğal olmayan kesintisiz bir uğultu vardır, doğal olmayan sabitlikteki hızınıza eşlik eden.

• Uçakta herkes aynı yöne bakar, daha doğrusu herkes önündeki ekrana bakar. Ortak bir deneyim filan yoktur. Trende ise karşılıklı oturabilirsiniz. Paylaşımlı masalar garip bir sıcaklık yaratır.

• Uçakta türbülansın bile keyfi yoktur, her şey önceden anons yapılır. Trende ise aniden savruluverirsiniz. Herkesin paylaştığı güzel bir hazırlıksızlık durumu vardır. Ayrıca her savrulmanızın da bir sebebi vardır. Tren yolundaki kavisler geçtikleri coğrafyalarla şekillenirler. Yani savrulmalarınız (camdan bakarak kolayca gözlemleyebileceğiniz) harmonilerden kaynaklanır. Uçakta yaşanan türbülanslar ise anlamsız bir soyutlukta gerçekleşir. Niye gelirler, niye geçerler belli değildir. Saf belirsizlik saf gerginlikliklere yol açar.

• Uçak yolculuğu genel olarak kasıntı bir deneyimdir. Havalimanları şehrin dışındadır, gitmek derttir. Gitsen uçağa binmek derttir. Uçağa binsen sonrası bin bir türlü çiledir.

• Bir sonraki durakta inebilme özgürlüğü o kadar güzel bir özgürlüktür ki! Kesintili de olsa bir nefes kaynağıdır. Her istasyonda bir sigara yakıp sonra trene dönenleri izlemek bile keyiflidir.

meta product design ideas

Here are three meta principles for generating new product design ideas:

• Either focus on one domain and be an expert or cut across all domains and be a generalist. (e.g. Zappos vs Amazon, Seven Bridges vs Palantir)

• Either offer the barest essentials or address the need in the most comprehensive way possible. (e.g. WhatsApp vs Facebook, Simplenote vs Evernote)

• Launch a premium version of your product once it becomes widespread enough. (e.g. Youtube vs Youtube Red, Tinder vs Tinder Gold)

fitness and virality

In general, restricting your audience enables you to design more effectively around your users' tastes and needs. Resulting structures are more fitting. The downside is that their speed of adoption is slower due to the lower virality coefficients associated with dispersed audiences.

Prone to critical thresholds, growth of social structures like marketplaces and social media platforms are very sensitive to speed of adoption. This is the primary reason why social verticals repeatedly fail to take off while non-social verticals easily succeed. Those that take off are usually subgraphs of already existing general graphs and therefore suffer from serious design defects.

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This discussion is related to another blog post where I viewed abstraction as a lever between probability of longevity and probability of success.

• In the practical realm, general and useful structures are easier to find but also easier to kill. (They eventually get dismantled by verticals which can more efficiently solve each of the collectively-addressed problems.) In the theoretical realm, abstract and useful results are harder to kill but also harder to find.

• In the practical realm general structures emerge first and verticals come later. In the theoretical realm specific results emerge first and abstractions come later.

These dichotomies stem from the difference between serving and understanding. Former gets better as you zoom in, latter gets better as you zoom out.

müdavim dolabı

Bazı lokantalarda müdavim müşterilerin arta kalan rakılarını saklayabilecekleri şeffaf buzdolapları sunuluyormuş. Herkesin görebileceği yerlere konan bu dolaplarda, şişelerin üstlerine isim etiketleri yapıştırılıyormuş.

Ne kadar zekice bir buluş!

1. İsraf engelliyor, arta kalan rakılar çöpe gitmiyor.
2. Aitlik hissi ve bağlılık yaratılıyor. Müşteriler mekanda kişisel bir iz bırakıyor ve geri dönüp kalan rakılarını bitirmek istiyorlar.
3. Daha fazla rakı tüketiliyor. Artsa da saklayabilecekleri için, müşteriler korkmadan küçük yerine büyük rakı açıyorlar.
4. Normal müşteriler bu dolabı görünce onlar da müdavim olma hevesine kapılıyor. Daha sık restoranı ziyaret ediyor ve sonunda onların da isimleri müdavim dolabına giriyor.

Dizayn konusu ilginizi çekiyorsa, şişeler ve bombeler üzerime yazımı da okuyabilirsiniz.

extremity of randomness

Hell is not the most tormenting space. Limbo is.

Uncertainty is unbearable for the human psyche. Torture methods that involve randomisations are the worst. For instance, releasing water droplets onto someone's forehead at random intervals apparently drives people insane. (Disordered raindrops have a calming effect on rough oceans. It has the opposite effect on brain waves since our natural resting state itself is actually pretty wavy.)

Reward mechanisms also perform best when they involve randomisations: 

Whether the subject is a pigeon, rat, or person, Skinner found, the strongest way to reinforce a learned behaviour was to reward it on a random schedule.

- How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games (Simon Parkin)

In other words, randomisation has an overall amplification effect, making the negative more negative and positive more positive.

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Although we are not good at psychologically guarding ourselves against randomised suffering, we are very good at offloading our psychological suffering onto random factors. (For instance, we consistently underestimate the role of chance in our successes and overestimate it in our failures.)

We can not offload the pain associated with randomised suffering back to random factors because stories can be deformed only after the fact, not when they are unfolding in realtime.

mathematics and ux design

Just like mathematics, UX design is a discipline with very few principles and many manifestations of those same principles over and over again. But as human beings we often mistakenly focus on manifestations and forget the underlying structures. Appearances can be fooling.

Notice that the tendency to mistake unity for multiplicity is another fundamental UX principle. (For instance, similar objects should be grouped together to hint at an underlying unity.)

Hence, just like mathematics, UX design is a discipline that is strong enough to take itself as its subject. One can study UX design itself from a UX point of view, just like one can study mathematics itself using mathematics.

optimize mallık

Sanırım insanoğlu bundan sonraki her bir inovasyon dalgasında televizyonu tekrar keşfedecek. Facebook en zeki insanları bünyesine kattı, onlara dünyanın kaynağını ayırdı, optimizasyonun dibine vurdu, sonunda dönüşe dönüşe televizyona dönüştü.

Bu gelişmeye pek de şaşırmamak gerek. Televizyon zaten olgun bir teknolojiydi ve uzun yıllar boyu Facebook'un dikkat ettiği parametrelere benzer parametrelere göre optimize edilmişti.

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Dizayn yaparken ahlak nedir unutuyoruz. Millet mala bağlıyor biz seviniyoruz.

"İyi de ne yapalım, insanlar bunu istiyor!"

İyi de insanlar kumar da oynamak istiyor. Herhalde kapitalizmi tamamen kendi haline bıraksak hepimiz şeker hastası, cahil, şişko kumarbazlara dönüşürdük.

İnsan yetiştirmek ister istemez biraz despotluk içerir, çünkü bugün için değil gelecek için optimizasyon yapmanızı gerektirir.

Doğru. Başkası adına kararlar almak, gelecek için optimizasyon yapmak ahlaki açıdan problemlidir. Fakat en azından başarılı olma şansı vardır. Bugün için optimizasyon yaparsanız, insanların içindeki hayvanı dışarı çıkarmaktan başka bir yere varamayacağınız kesindir.