Five Ideas That Matter

Randomness enjoyed a new lease of life with the publication of Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb but it has a long tradition. Quite apart from the impact of Tabeb’s book randomness also features in soures as diverse as rap songs, YouTube videos and Scientific American. It is integral to popular understanding of Chaos theory. And it is hip. From the Spring Season of 2007 onwards, fashion moved towards the bizarre, confrontational, and obscure according to fashion trends site WGSN.

References on Timeline to Random come in at around one third of Collaboration but outstrips the online currency of the term “The American Dream” by about 50%.

According to the Guardian: “Random is the new order. It started with iTunes. But it’s not just in music that we’re welcoming more randomness into our lives.” Randomness is also a consequence of current warfare techniques, and they give us a daily reminder of it.

Randomness is closely associated with what is also referred to depression economics and a sense that there needs to be a wider renewal, a combination of precipitous economic decline and amoral and immoral behaviour by and within western democracies.

But we can also see it as an integral part of another shift, the transformation of peer-to-peer systems with their emphasis on co-production, community, productive feedback loops or collaborative filtering towards a person-to-person economy.

Geolocation and geo-specific systems trend activity increasingly towards the local. Fixmystreet.com, for example, allows people to upload information about street repairs which then uses the post code to relay the information to local authorities and put pressure to them for repair. LIFTSHARE is as name suggests a lift-sharing site, one of many to come. Interactive heat loss maps (in the UK local authorities are providing these are doing this – Haringey in London for example is taking images from low flying aircraft of all local buildings that illustrate their heat loss).

Local heat loss map, Haringey

The economy is being relocalised by these technologies and by the new sense of scale. In place of highly scaled companies we are observing highly scaled data, data on every person, data on every building, data on all consumption.

Randomness is a reflection of the rising person-to-person culture that the millennial generation is in part is forcing upon us, often by virtue simply of the communications and networking technologies available to it, and also by waning old media control and predictability. In place of the 30 second ad we are collectively being hit by some big numbers. 250 million Facebook members, 80 million blogs.

The command and control economy is replaced not by chaos but by data flows on a scale where randomness seems inevitable.

Randomness in addition to reflecting a new era and type of scale denies legitimacy to the institutional gatekeeper that previously mediated our communications. Peer to peer or person to person economies don’t need institutions like newspapers or banks. Banks are a typical example of an institution that is exposed to de-institutionalisation by person-to-person activity. Why do I need a bank to convey my money to another person? I can use a mobile phone.

Randomness reflects also the sense that in a person-to-person world nothing can be planned or controlled. It is increasingly a subject that throws up insights into success and failure. Randomness economics for example shows that winning streaks are normal statistical outcomes, a fact that applies to good corporate results as much as to baseball home runs