Creative Disruption

I just came across the blog of the forthcoming book 'Creative Disruption' by Simon Waldman (Director of Digital Strategy for the Guardian Group). From the summary on the website, the book is looking at how established business interests are coping with, or engaging with new technologies. It's got a business focus, but the summary made me think about the potential implications for states, government departments, political parties, militaries etc. The 'established interests' of the pre-digital political world. (So this is a politics and technology post rather than a pure 'surveillance' one).

"Businesses that have to deal with the internet are fundamentally different
to those that are the products of it. It is great to look at Google; great to
admire Amazon, and Wikipedia is as fascinating a social and creative phenomena
as you can find. But if you are running a business that is profoundly
structurally challenged, you share very little of their corporate DNA.

Yes, everyone needs to know about their world, but thinking you can just
graft on the bits you like from them in a hope that you will ‘get digital’ is no
more likely to succeed than putting on a flashing bow tie and hoping everyone
thinks you have a sense of humour."

Waldman describes 'creative disruption' as being driven by three things, digital physics (digital files infinitely copiable, anything online is global, storage space cheaper and faster), changing consumer behaviour (desire to create, connect, challenge and control), and new entrants and entrepreneurs (where encumbants have little incentive to innovate, low barriers for entry, sparks for new ideas). He suggests that just tinkering around the edges is not enough, and that responding to these disruptions - which undeniably exist in the field of politics, will require creative thinking, agility and an ability to restructure in fundamental ways.

terrorists in world of warcraft

An old article in the wired threat level blog - U.S spies want to find terrorists in world of warcraft.
It's from February this year, but has interesting implications for predictive technologies.

Of course, the major difference between a digital world such as WoW and the real world is that things can be known with more more certainty in the game - because it's running on code that can be interrogated - if there is a a 'code' to the real world, then we're really not close to understanding it. Data about the virtual world is accurate, because it is the same data that IS the the virtual world. Apart from corrupted or misfiled data, it can't be wrong - if the game says that your avatar is in one part of the digital world, that's where it is.

Which is at least one thing to bear in mind when translating any 'lessons' from this to meatspace predictions, or actually - to non-game virtual environments, as they're going to be much messier than the restricted behaviour in ludic environment - games are defined by their rules.