Operating systems (E)

0:00Hey, it's Seth, and this is an Akimbo announcement.

0:08I know I've been gone for a while. I've missed you. I've been writing. My new book, This is Strategy, comes out in October 2024, right at the end of the month at a local bookstore near you. Starting in September, we will be back with new episodes based on the audiobook, based on the Udemy strategy course and a special Q &A series where you can volunteer to go over your strategy as part of the show. If you'd like to share your journey, what you're up to, what you're challenged by, visit akimbo.link and press the appropriate button and we will be in touch. Thanks for holding on. Thanks for the work you do.

0:57Keep making a ruckus. We'll see you at the end of September. Back in the day, computer monitors were big and heavy and expensive. And if you left them on all night with your word processing screen open, you would burn in the phosphors, and pretty soon your monitor would be useless. Then, in 1989, Berkeley Software introduced After Dark, which turned your screen, if you had a Mac, into a series of flying toasters, winged flying toasters that would dance up and down, back and forth across your black screen. Hey, it's Arav, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

1:52Flying toasters is a piece of software. Flying toasters, screensavers, is a choice. You can either buy it or not buy it. It was a hack to the operating system. It allowed a software company to go into your computer and make it better if that's what you wanted. We have countless pieces of software on our operating systems. And if you buy a piece of software that runs in Windows, it's probably not going to easily run on your Mac and vice versa. The operating system is a series of rules, approaches, ways that software can work. And if you're going to create an operating system, you have a lot of responsibility.

2:36If you are living inside an operating system, working with one, it pays to be able to see it. Cities are one of the oldest operating systems in the history of humanity. A city is a series of rules. You can put a house in a city. You could open a store in a city. You might have a park in a city. But all of these things, or the absence of them, are defined by the operating system of the city itself. Consider the enmity and fighting between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. Robert Moses redefined the operating system of New York. He built more roads and more buildings than anyone in history. You can see some of what Robert Moses built from outer space.

3:30Robert Moses believed in two things that don't seem related. One, he believed in parks, and two, he believed in the primacy of the automobile. He would do almost anything to gain the power that he needed to make both of them happen. Jane Jacobs, fighting against his top-down bulldozed style, believed in an organic, bottoms-up, community-based, less car-centric approach to how the operating system of a city ought to be designed. In a speech that I heard from the Long Now Foundation, Stuart Brand, the founding editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, pointed out that if we look at a map of Boston from 1750, from 1850, from 1950, the buildings all change.

4:25Almost every single building has been replaced over the last centuries. But the roads, the roads remain because the roads define the operating system of the city. So back to this idea of cars. Part of the operating system of every single city and town in the United States, with a few exceptions, is the idea that when you get to a light, you can turn right on red. Turns out that turning right on red saves a lot of time and fuel, and it became federal law in the 1970s. But right on red isn't a law of nature. In Europe, there isn't that much right on red. It's an operating system difference. So back to this idea of the flying toasters.

5:12Screen savers became a sensation. Millions and millions of them were sold. Interestingly enough, one of the ways that the software company that made the flying toasters did so well is they turned their screen saver into an operating system. They went to others, including Lucasfilms, the Star Wars people, and said, here's our platform. If you want to make a screensaver that plugs into it, please feel free. That way, by defining the standard, Berkeley was able to ensure dominance. Fast forward a little bit to your smartphone. Your smartphone has an operating system in it. Maybe it's made by Google, who loses tons of money paying millions in royalties to Microsoft, giving away their operating system, or maybe it's an iPhone.

6:05Now, Google gives it away at great expense because they understood how important it was that search in your pocket maintain the primacy for Google. And the way to ensure that they would get that search is by owning the operating system. Apple, on the other hand, which went largely first in the smartphone business, makes a significant profit by defining the rules. There are three ways an operating system can be defined. It can be closed, and that's Apple. Apple can decide if an app is going to be in the store or not. Apple can easily change the rules about which programs are going to be where. It can be completely open, like Linux, an operating system where you can see every line of code yourself, where you can make your own version of it.

6:57or it can be somewhere in between. Slightly uncomfortable, but often quite effective the way Microsoft is. So back to the flying toasters. Soon after that screensaver thing got popular, it occurred to me as a book packager that we could take the idea of a page-a-day calendar and turn it into a screen-a-day calendar so that every day when you got into work and you looked at your computer, instead of seeing flying toasters, you would see the quote of the day or today's far side cartoon or whatever it was. But hacking the operating system got more and more difficult because the people who made the operating systems, Microsoft and Apple, weren't easily giving away the root control that you might have needed to be able to do something like this.

7:47And to this day on smartphones, taking over the lock screen is something I haven't seen any piece of software do, though it seems to me that that would be a really juicy place to put quotes or insights or provocations. So back to this idea of operating systems. When we had the operating system of a city, we began to make choices. Right on red is a choice, not a natural law. That in the early days, cities were defined by their need for water. Because if you don't have fresh water coming in, humans can't survive. My office, 20 miles away from New York City, has a park about 200 feet up the hill.

8:31The park is more than 10 miles long, and it's only 30 feet wide. What kind of park is this? Well, it turns out that underneath this long strip of land is a pipe. It's a pipe big enough to walk through. But you can't walk through it because it's filled with water. And it takes the water all the way from the Catskills into New York City. That part of the operating system of having that many people together interacting with each other is not just law and order, but is also public works. And then you've got the idea of mass transit. It's a choice to destroy your tram lines and your bus lines, as General Motors helped cities do, and to instead make it so that the operating system of your city is all about cars.

9:23As we started to build suburbs, because cities were getting bigger, another question, how are people going to go back and forth? Well, if we look at a city like Detroit, the answer is they're not. And so Detroit became a donut, hollowed out in the center where anyone who could afford to leave left, and the city withered away. On the other hand, a city like New York benefited from a significant commuter rail in all three directions out of New York City. As much as Robert Moses tried to undermine it, it turned out that it worked, that real estate developers would lobby the commuter rail companies to build a stop.

10:05Because once you built a stop in Irvington or Riverdale or Dobbs Ferry, you knew that the houses near the stop would go up in value because you could build a hamlet or a village or even a small town. It turns out that transportation defines how people are moving around. So back to computer operating systems. Part of my thesis about operating systems is we don't really have a choice. That's the difference between software and the OS. If you don't like a piece of software, buy another one. As long as it doesn't have lock-in, you have choices. But once you've committed to an operating system, and then Apple changes it, breaking it for millions and millions of people, we scream and yell.

10:51But worse is when they put dark patterns in, when they started to shift the operating system of smartphones to push you to spend more and more time using it, the vibrating, the buzzing, the hassling you because you haven't looked at all of your alerts. All of these are decisions. They are decisions as profound as how to get the water into the city, decisions as profound as whether or not we're going to vote for cars or trains. Two more things about flying toasters and systems. The first one is that there was a lawsuit in which the Flying Toaster people sued another company because they had made a parody of the Flying Toasters, a game that involved shooting Flying Toasters out of the sky.

11:40And in fact, they won. And so their competitor ended up changing the wings on the Flying Toasters to propellers instead. The second one came a little bit later when Led Zeppelin sued them, saying that the flying toasters that were saving all of those screens looked suspiciously like the flying toasters that were on the cover of one of Led Zeppelin's albums. Led Zeppelin lost that one. Led Zeppelin goes to court a lot, just an aside. Led Zeppelin lost that one because they had failed to register the trademark on that cover until after the lawsuit was filed. What's interesting here is that the operating system of a screensaver platform was interacting with the operating system of the rule of law.

12:31The magic of the rule of law as an operating system is that it doesn't matter who's in charge. It doesn't matter who is dominant in the moment. The rules are the rules. And so the operating system of the law exists so that we can boot ourselves out of whatever bug-infested place we are stuck in and can start over again. The rule of law is an operating system that's been around for almost a thousand years. And you don't have to like the outcomes, but the process itself, the system, it's something we can operate with. And then the next part. The next part is, can we hack the operating system? There's a guy who does tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

13:21He's not an official docent of the museum, but you can find him online and he'll give you a tour. He is hacking the operating system of that building because that building is more permeable than the museum expected. And this permeability is essential because what we know when we build an operating system is that over the long run, permeability tends to win out. Linux came from nowhere. It now powers huge swaths of the internet and computing around the world. WordPress is an open source piece of software, which means people can plug into what WordPress does without asking anyone's permission. When Apple was coming up, Microsoft had hegemony.

14:14They got to decide who would carry the operating system. They got to decide how the operating system would work. And what Apple did was relying on the good taste of its leadership. They created a closed operating system that was so beautiful. Susan Kerr, an artist, was one of the 14 people on the original Mac team. Can you imagine out of the original team, one of them was an artist? That good taste, even though the system was closed, was sufficient to spread an idea, to get people to adopt the system. But systems don't last forever because they are impacted by other systems, one after another, pushing forward.

15:02word. So here we are in this moment of time, right on the precipice between open, resilient systems and closed ones, ones that are easily disrupted. The voting system in the United States is a closed operating system. It is not supposed to be hackable, which of course means that it will be hacked. It is fragile because it has no resilience, the resilience that comes from it being open and flexible. What we need to do as people whose time is being taken, whose trust is being abused, who look for opportunities but can't always find them, is take a hard look at the invisible operating systems all around us.

15:46Because it's not always a Tim Cook that launches a new OS at some fancy conference. It could very well be that the operating systems of our future are invisibly creeping up around us. And if we're not seeing them, if we're not defining them, if we're not pushing them to be better, then they're not going to be for us or by us. They're going to be done to us until we have no choice but to live with them. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, Seth.

16:25Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth. This is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. As always, I love hearing from you. If you've got a question, I hope you'll contribute it. Visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button. Here's one from Ali. According to my software, it's the 1 ,000th question that was submitted to Akimbo via akimbo.link. Hey Seth, I'm Ali, and we love you here in Egypt, which you can come sometimes.

17:07Well, thanks for the last episode. It's perfect. My question is, what is the effect of showing your work in marketing? Are sometimes hiding your work will give it more value than showing it? Or is it just another scam? I mean, we have KFC, for example, and their biggest marketing advantages for years have been that they have the secret recipe that only 25 person knows about. Well, you know the story. And I also believe in what Robert Greene said that sometimes hiding your work process and showing the final result will give you more value. I know that the examples you used were mostly scientific, but does that also apply to art as well?

17:43I remember you talked about something similar in the Panksy episode, but I think I need to know more. Thanks, Seth. Thanks for this. It gives me a chance to clarify what I was trying to get at. By show your work, I'm talking about showing your work so that we can make it better. When we are doing art, when we are seeking the spiritual to get under someone's skin, when we are dealing with the magic that is so much of what is in marketing, well, no, then we shouldn't show our work. that concealing how we came about to do the thing we did, it is in fact a magic trick. And what magicians know is that the more someone wants you to tell them how they did the trick, the less you should tell them.

18:30Because as soon as someone knows how you did the trick, they are no longer interested. No longer interested in the trick, no longer interested in you, no longer interested in exploring how it felt to be mystified. Now, an aside about Kentucky Fried Chicken, there aren't 11 herbs and spices in Kentucky Fried Chicken. That's part of the secret. Some people think there's only two. But back to the matter at hand. Traditionally, brand marketing has been about hiding your work. No numbers, no measurement, a lot of mumbo-jumbo about what's working and what's not because the people who do brand marketing, who run unmeasured TV ads, they don't want to know.

19:13Because if they knew, then they'd have to admit that something they did didn't work. And so they often resist examination. What the internet has brought along is direct marketing, measured, actionable interaction. And in that world, not only do you need to show your work to your peers, but Google is busy showing your work to everyone. because you can see how much other people are paying for the ads, for the keywords that you are buying. You can see what it costs to buy a certain amount of attention on Facebook. Those numbers have forced lots of marketers to become direct marketers because if you don't, you're going to lose your shirt.

19:59It's also interesting to note that if you take too short of you when it comes to sharing your numbers and showing your work, you're going to end up optimizing for the wrong thing. And that's how we've ended up with so much callous, short-term, thoughtless kind of marketing. Because if all you're measuring is, how many clicks did I get in the last five minutes? Well, then you're going to do things that are hustles, come-ons, flashing, ready, let's go. Instead of that long-term build that allowed brand marketers to build what they've built for all of these years. So the magic here is figuring out which work to show and how to be really clear with the people that we trust about how we're doing and how we can do it better.

20:48I hope that helps. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.