As I said the other day, I’m reading.
Things need to get better here. Hell, they need to get better everywhere, for almost everybody.
We need to build a thing. A thing I’ve been discussing quietly, planning, and formulating for nearly six months now — at least during those gaps when life has been winding up its punches and giving me a chance to think.
And, in a strange juxtaposition, I’ve also been diligent in trying to clean out my Inbox. Got it emptied out completely today, by the expedient of deleting lots of things I might have wanted to read someday, and tucking the rest off into a “Do Soon” box. But clean it is.
First new email to appear in my cleaned-out inbox, this gray Christmas Eve morning? I will take it as an omen of deep import, somewhere between a fortune cookie and a confirmation of growing conviction:
A new issue of Industrial and Corporate Change has been made available:
“Special Issue: Information, Appropriability and the Generation of Innovative Knowledge” December 2006; Vol. 15, No. 6
This particular Contents Alert is, indeed, ominous. Ominous in the sense of being an omen, of being fraught; an echo of a pattern of ideas that have been playing off one another in my soul for more than that six months. The time I spent and the scientific lifestyle (good and bad) I experienced at the Santa Fe Institute; my jokey-but-half-serious Erdös Number Auction; the motivation for my recent Return to the Academy after too long spent in Real Life; the future of intellectual property, commerce, and publishing; the echo-chambered frustration emanating from four hundred foiled academic bloggers; the question of who gets to play at science, at engineering, at history, at invention and innovation and scholarship; the growing (and threatening) expense of — and underbudgeting for — basic and applied research; the innumerable smart people I’ve met through 30 years, forced to climb over one another’s bodies to make their way towards an uncertain tenure-track position, or forced to give up on the entirety of the academic mode of life because it’s so “incompatible” with Real Life; the increasing and powerful success of collaborative work; the misunderstood economics of intellectual property, and constrictions pre-emptive secrecy and patens can place on collaboration and innovation. The imminent end of American science and engineering. The ruthless pressure of time, that leaves forever untouched the countless notebooks full of good ideas that every smart reearcher accumulates. The struggle, above all else, that ideas face in coming to light.
What a load of stuff. How does a little esoteric journal issue spark a flood?
Who can say what notions will form the keystone, the hub of a new network? It’s all about the exaptation, baby.
And so, while the world winds up again, I hope to explain it all. Time to move from waiting, to reading, to doing. Time to revive a sentiment I’ve let slumber for too long:
Let’s change the world, and see what happens.
There’s got to be something between academic strangulation (bow to the received wisdom or else! if you don’t get a job, you’re not 133t!) and Wikipedia free-for-all, where the published academic has exactly the same standing as the 17-year-old from Mumbai who can’t write grammatical English.
I wonder if it would work to have a Virtual Academy, where you won admission to the discussion by passing a test of language competence (in the language of the academy) and general knowledge, and worked up through increasingly restricted circles.
I wonder if this could be mapped onto Wikipedia. I don’t think the folks who run WP understand that it is not just a resource for the readers, but for the participants, who learn from discussion and modeling of good research and writing. Well … sometimes.
It would have to be autonomous. No waving academic degrees to jump over levels. It would also have to issue no certificates and offer no rewards other than the pure joy of scholarship. That would shut out a fair number of academics, who are happy with their iron rice bowl.
Looks a little grumpy and sour-grape-ish, ne? Can’t be helped.
A merry Newtonmass to you and Barbara! May the blessings of the calculus be upon you, and the next year a dramatic improvement over this.
Yes.
I know a number of people who are thinking along these lines. Science Commons, among others, seems to have some sentiments like this. I’m personally thinking way farther out of the box; something very, well… retro. Hard to explain. More as it develops. Business plan first; funding and/or founding; and then I give my announcement.…
I have spent some time thinking about the “pure joy” of scholarship. A fair amount of my joy has come from conversations, and enlightening pointers provided by correspondents and collaborators. Less so from the act of doing work; more so from the knowledge that a road has been traveled before, or that somebody, somewhere thought my idea was good enough to follow up on — even decades before.
What I’ve wanted above all is to attend professional meetings all the time, hear others’ great results, get new ideas, pass them back to those others, and watch to see what they do with them. As with many (I suspect), I’d as soon read something in New Scientist as do the work myself. Screw the Nobel Prize: the whole world is a Wunderkamer.
Pingback: Tracking some interests | Eccentric Eclectica @ ToddSuomela.com