The deletionists (E)

0:00More than 300 years ago, a farming pioneer named Jethro Tull, no, not that Jethro Tull, the other one, figured out some technologies that enabled millions that allowed to stay alive. How did we find out? How did we find out about drilling seeds? How did we find out about crop rotation? How do we know what we know? How does it get to us? Hey, it's Seth, and this is Akimbo.

0:42Hey, I'm Alexandra DePalma. And I'm Kenya Denise. And we are the co-founders of Domino Sound, a queer woman-owned production studio and boutique diversity consulting agency, creating authentically inclusive, innovative, and provocative multimedia content. Yes. And we also happen to produce this very podcast. So we wanted to take this chance to come on here and tell you what we really thought of Seth's new book titled Song of Significance, a manifesto for teams and the people who lead them. Long story short, we loved the book. We absolutely loved the book. And in this book, Seth really ponders what it means to be a human working in the modern world and how with intention we can remain true to ourselves, our life's mission, and be a positive impact on the world through our professional lives.

1:33This book really resonated so much with both of us because we're really trying to do work that feels significant to us and create opportunities for others who want the same thing. For Kenya and I, I can speak for myself, we've learned through all of our various work experiences that productivity is not the most important thing in life. And despite what it feels like sometimes, neither is how much you get paid, although they both do matter. Yeah. But what makes a job truly great is feeling respected, feeling trusted, feeling a part of the team and knowing that deep down you're spending your precious, precious time each day doing work that really matters.

2:07And, you know, you really can maintain humanity while also maintaining productivity in our work. I've seen it happen with my own eye. So it is possible. And if you're listening to this podcast, then I know that you're going to get a lot out of Seth's new book, Song of Significance, which is out this month. There's free stuff and links at Seths.blog.com. So go check it out and go make a ruckus. Before Gutenberg printed his famous Bibles, he spent a lot of time printing letters from the Pope. because he understood that currying favor with the Pope, the dominant power broker of his time, would enable him to have the ability to keep using his printing press.

3:01Moving on to the Bible was a logical next step, and it was only after that that secular ideas began to spread. So back to Jethro Tull. Shortly after Jethro Tull began his work, a guy in Britain named Ephraim Chambers had the audacity to publish an encyclopedia, to take this new technology of the book, and to organize all of the world's information, to, in one giant volume, offer anyone who was reading in English the ability to have at their fingertips everything, everything you needed to know. Well, of course, everything is a tall order, and the first edition had thousands and thousands of things in it that needed to be corrected.

3:56The problem was that in the 1700s, books were really expensive. So British Parliament decided to pass a law, making it against the law, to update a book with a new edition, arguing that it would be unfair to require all the people who had the original edition to buy a new one. Yes, software upgrades go back that far. Well, the bill didn't pass, but in the worry about the bill, they rushed out the next edition filled with 1 ,000 updates. John Mills, who was a compatriot of Jethro Tull, lived in Britain but also spoke beautiful French. He decided that the fertile ground of rational thinking French life in the 1700s would be a great place to bring the idea of the encyclopedia.

4:56So he showed up in Paris and Kickstarter-like issued a short four-page document that outlined how this French encyclopedia would work. They got enough subscriptions and they got to work. Well, Mills had a fight with one of his backers, an actual fistfight. He got thrown out of the project and a guy named Denis Diderot took over. He was the front man for the French Encyclopedia. Even though John Mills got punched in the face and lost his job working with the French encyclopedia. The fact is that his experience with Jethro Tull, no, not that Jethro Tull, caused Tull to be in the encyclopedia, which caused the idea of his work to spread, to be accepted into the canon, to be adopted by other farmers, which caused a revolution to occur in that farming became ever more scientific, which means that a billion people didn't starve to death because John Mills translated an English encyclopedia into French, which then planted the seeds, no pun intended, for a new kind of knowledge to flourish and spread.

6:21That French encyclopedia ended up selling more than 4 ,000 copies of its multi-volume set, making it perhaps the best-selling book of the century. But Diderot got in trouble. He got in trouble because he wrote articles about being an atheist, because the encyclopedia itself was filled with an argument about the world based on reason, not based on the top-down authority of the church. Well, the heat was on, and the French government took away the charter that they had given the encyclopedia, officially banning it. Diderot, being clever, changed the copyright page of the encyclopedia, indicating that it was being created in a small municipality near Switzerland, not in Paris, and under the shroud of secrecy, continued to work on the encyclopedia.

7:22It's worth noting that one of his editors, a guy named Louis de Jacour, wrote 25 % of the encyclopedia. He contributed 17 ,266 of the articles. He wrote eight a day, all as a volunteer. year. So this encyclopedia comes out. It fuels the French Revolution. It fuels the Enlightenment. It spreads ideas far and wide, but still sells only 4 ,000 copies, because that's enough if it's the right 4 ,000 people. How do we know what we know? Shortly after the French encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica came along in English. About once every 10 years, there was a new edition. It took till the 10th edition before it found its fertile ground in the United States, even using telegrams to alert people that they only had a few days left to buy the 1903 edition.

8:28So the Encyclopedia Britannica comes along just as the United States is growing in impact and wealth. But the Encyclopedia Britannica, like the Encyclopedia in France, like the Encyclopedia in Britain, is limited. It's limited by atoms and molecules. How many volumes can we have? What's worth including? What has to get cut? Well, you probably are guessing where this goes. 20 years or so ago, Google comes along and has the audacity to once again say, we're going to organize all of the world's information, all of it. And a key engine of their ability to do that is Wikipedia. A guy named Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia, and the original idea behind it was to, the same way they built Encyclopedia Britannica, the same way Louis de Jacore and others built the French Encyclopedia, to painstakingly build an online encyclopedia.

9:35And it didn't work. It didn't work because it's a ton of work. It's really hard to find people who will, one article at a time, build an encyclopedia from the top down. At the end of his line, he decided to try one last thing, egged on by his employee, Larry Sanger by Richard Stallman, who had written about the open encyclopedia, that one last thing was revolutionary indeed. And so the 21st century began with an invitation to anyone, just anyone, to contribute corrections, additions, and articles to the successor to Newpedia, to Wikipedia. Which is interesting because John Mills was anybody, and Denis Diderot was anybody, and Louis de Jacour was anybody.

10:31And once again, anybody is editing the encyclopedia. But it was Google that made Wikipedia truly take off. Because Google needed a place to point people, an easy, reliable place to point someone who was looking for information. And all these years later, Wikipedia is still the fifth most visited website in the world. They do this with no social networking. They do this with no marketing budget. They do this with nobody trying to get you to click on more stuff, and by running no ads, and by buying no ads. They do this because Google points to them. So just as the church didn't want the encyclopedia to spread, Google, the powerful Google, wants Wikipedia to spread.

11:32But there's a challenge. Actually, there's more than one challenge. The first challenge begins with paella. Now, paella, as you may know, is a rice and seafood dish that came from somewhere near the Iberian Peninsula. But if you read the Wikipedia article, or more accurately, if you read the talk page on the Wikipedia article, all of it begins to feel really contentious. Every single page in Wikipedia has a button at the top that says talk. And if you click on the talk button, you will see the backside of that article. And what you will see is an argument about what should be in the article and what shouldn't be in the article.

12:19And in the case of Paella, the argument goes on for thousands and thousands of words, having something to do with Valencia and a little to do with rice. Here's a comment from seven years ago. The article currently states that most paella chefs use calaspara rice, by which I assume they mean the balilla ex solana variety grown in the calaspara region, and bamba rice. For all I know, this might be true internationally, but this is certainly not the case within the Valencian and Murcian regions where the senia and the bahia are preferred. And so it goes on and on and on. What do we know? How do we know it?

13:09Who gets to decide? The controversy inside Wikipedia goes beyond Paella. It goes on to a decades-long battle between the inclusionists and the deletionists. And it gets to the point of understanding where is the boundary? With Encyclopedia Britannica, the boundary was clearly known. We can't have 400 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica. The Encyclopedia Britannica cannot weigh 4 ,000 pounds. It cannot cost$100 ,000, because if it did, it wouldn't work. So there's a natural boundary. But where is the natural boundary inside of Wikipedia? Don Draper, the fictional ad man, Don Draper, his article in Wikipedia is 6 ,000 words long.

14:10For reference, that's about 6 or 8 % of the length of an entire biography. One click away, see the article about David Ogilvie, the actual misogynistic ad man who really lived, who wrote bestsellers, who changed his entire industry. His article is only 2 ,000 words long, one third as long. Aquabats, the sort of make-believe, sort of real rock band that led to a sort of make-believe, sort of real TV show, the Aquabats have a 7 ,600-word article, longer than Don Draper's, but that doesn't even include the Aquabats Super Show, which is 5 ,500 more words about a TV show you probably have never seen.

15:00Right next to it, Patricia Barber, the brilliant jazz musician who has made album after album of widely acclaimed piano jazz. Her article's only 600 words. Tom Peters, who wrote the most influential business book of all time, he only gets 900 words. He's a couple clicks away from Ernest Emerson. Oh, you know, Ernest Emerson, the knife maker, he has 4 ,000 words. So what's going on here? Who gets to decide? What gets read? What's important? Who are we learning about? The deletionists say that Wikipedia needs to be high quality and well vetted. It needs clear boundaries, that there's absolutely no room for an article that anyone might confuse as being promotional.

15:52And why do these articles even show up? Because of Google. Because Google is dumping huge amounts of traffic into a non-commercial site. And if you get a link on that non-commercial site, you'll get some of that traffic. You'll get some of that Google juice. So there are corporations and individuals who are desperately fighting to get a piece of Wikipedia. And the deletionists say, well, if the inclusionists have their way and anyone can put anything they want on Wikipedia, Wikipedia will quickly become a cesspool of junk. And if we do that, then we're not going to get all that traffic from Google because it can't be trusted.

16:33But some of the deletionists who have accrued power by showing up and volunteering a lot have taken it really far. So they'll delete stuff like, I don't know, an article about Mazzoli's, which is a butcher shop and meeting place in South Africa because they've never been to Mazzoli's and they don't understand whether Mazzoli's is important or not. All they know is it doesn't look or feel like the kind of thing they're used to seeing in Wikipedia, and so they delete it. But then it turns out the article was written by Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, and then it gets some publicity for being deleted.

17:14And then the next thing you know, there's another argument, almost as big as the Paella argument, about whether or not Mazzoli's is worthy of an article. Where are the edges? How do we update it? What does an update look like? Should updates and articles be written simply because the kind of person who likes this pop culture phenomenon is also the kind of person who likes editing Wikipedia? Now that it is the most important reference source in the history of the world. More people have read Wikipedia articles since I began this podcast today than have read the French encyclopedia in its entire history, that the flow of clicks that are going through Wikipedia is bigger than ever.

18:10The original arguments about Wikipedia were, how do we know it's true? If it says that the War of 1812 was in 1814. How do we know it's true? But most of those arguments can be set aside now, because group editing has been proven to be effective. Yes, there are errors on Wikipedia, but they get fixed faster than they ever got fixed in the French edition or the British edition of the encyclopedia. I think the interesting question, the one we're not asking very often, is, how deep should it go? How wide should it go? If there's an article in Wikipedia about a living person, is it okay for it to get longer and longer?

18:54Is it okay for it to include surveillance footage, their click stream, their religion, how they spent their Sunday? At what level of granularity is that okay? Or if a deletionist inside Wikipedia decides someone isn't notable enough to be listed, why is their opinion more important than the life that that person is building? How do we address the fact that the trivial gets far more coverage inside of Wikipedia than the important when it comes to things involving pop culture. Who decides what's trivial and what's important? When an organization like Facebook says we're going to organize all the people on the planet about who they are, who they know, what they know, and their relationships to each other, that's audacious.

19:52When Google says we're going to organize all of the world's information, what does that mean? every phone number, every job, every map point, every fact, when they outsource a big chunk of that to Wikipedia, a mostly volunteer organization, who's in charge of deciding where the boundaries are? Should it be left to this ongoing debate about this is included and this isn't included? What's the cost of including more? What's the cost of being really clear about the fact that you belong here? Your biography belongs here. That you are notable merely because you're in the world connecting to other people.

20:37That to be notable doesn't mean you have to be the first person to step on the moon. Neil Armstrong had the longest Wikipedia entry of any living person before he passed away. Perhaps it's sufficient to say, this really happened. Perhaps it's sufficient to say, this is interesting, here is how you can read more about it. I'm not in charge of what Wikipedia does next, and neither are you. But given that it's the fifth most visited website in the world, perhaps we should think a little bit more deeply about that biography that we're reading. What could we do to make it better and deeper and wider and stronger and more useful?

21:21And where are all the other biographies of all the overlooked researchers and scientists and mathematicians and politicians and community organizers and parents and friends? Because if bits are free and anyone who wants to speak up can speak up, perhaps it's time for us to really organize the world's information and continue to codify what we know and how we know it. Thanks for listening.

22:13Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. Just a heads up, in addition to collecting your questions at akimbo.link, there are notes for every single one of the episodes, sometimes with links or videos or even irrelevant decides. That's at akimbo, A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K. Hi, Seth. This is Craig Maloney from Michigan. again. My question relates to getting people to pay for things. My wife is a adjunct professor and I do a metal music podcast. And one thing that I've noticed is that we can pay lip service to people and say that we want them to do whatever it is that they're doing because it's important.

22:58But yet, whenever it comes time to pay for things, we don't tend to pony up. It seems that whenever adjunct professors ask for more money, they're told there's not enough money, and that when musicians ask for a dollar a track, they're usually resorting to doing pay what you want sort of things. So my question, again, how do we get people to pay for things? Thanks so much. This question's a juicy one. Thank you for sharing it. I think it gets to the heart of the competitive nature of capitalism and where it bumps into the idea of humans doing labor. because one way to hear the question is how do we get consumers to buy stuff?

23:39But I'm going to answer the part about how do we get institutions, organizations, or companies to pay people more than they have to. Now, in traditional blended capitalism, which means that the person who owns the means of production is also part of the community, what we find is that owners tend to want to pay people more if they themselves are making enough of what they think of as a profit. What that means is that being a benevolent owner in a community is a high status, pleasurable place to be. On the other hand, being a robber baron who is racing to the bottom and clawing for every penny is not socially acceptable in most places.

24:32So when we have capitalism with a small c living in small places, what we often find is people being able to piece together a decent living and being part of the community. But one thing that's happened with capitalism is it keeps ratcheting toward multinationals and toward public markets. And in public markets, the investors largely don't care about the local community. They have money and they're trying to make that money grow. So when two or three or four or ten companies are competing, if one of them or three of them are taking short-term shortcuts, hurting the local labor, hurting the local environment in exchange for quarterly profits, the way the culture of public capitalism with a capital C is structured is that these companies feel pressure not to do what they know is the right thing, not to play for the long run, but instead to sacrifice what they believe in, in order to make the stock price go up.

25:42This leads to a cycle of competitive destruction, because once you race to the bottom too low, you crash, and then someone takes your spot. So it's been demonstrated again and again that corporate statesmanship, that investing in education in local communities, in treating people well pays off in the long run with better products, more stability, and ultimately more profit. But when there are a lot of people in the organization who benefit from most people in the organization getting paid less, then that's what's going to happen. And the gig economy has made it worse because the gig economy says if you use Upwork or any of those other services where you can find someone anonymous, far away, who you will never look in the eye to do a task for you, and where those tasks are pushed to be commodities, then it's no surprise that you want the cheapest one.

26:38Because if they're all the same, buy the cheapest one. And you compound that and compound that and compound that. And what you end up with is a more callous, hurtful version of capitalism, which leads to this idea of adjunct professors because the idea of the academy was that professors had tenure, they did research, they had jobs that by most measures were both high status and pretty cushy. You weren't digging holes in the ground, you weren't getting minors long. You were able to teach smart, engaged people to research, smoke a pipe, and know you had a job for a really long time. Well, universities come under pressure, just like corporations do, and they discover, wait a minute, I can bring in an adjunct professor, somebody who doesn't have those same rights, somebody who's going to spend all of their time in this building teaching.

27:35I can articulate that that person is bringing life experience, higher energy, fresh ideas, and I can pay them one-tenth as much as I have to pay a tenured professor. Bring them on. And so when it's time for the organization to pay these people more, they say, why? There's a line out the door of people who want to do it for less. So we'll just pay them less. And now we're at the heart of it. We're at the heart of what individuals need to do in order to be treated fairly and with respect, which is one of two paths. The first one, super difficult, is to push hard for changes in the system. The second one, also difficult but under your control, is to become the one they can't live without, to be the one and only, the one where there are no good substitutes, and to find a customer base that's willing to pay for the quality that you create.

28:36When you do those two things, when your value is clear and your customers see the value and want it, then you get paid more than fairly. But everything in our educational system has pushed people to go in the other direction, to fit in, to be a cog in the system, to do what they're told, to go to the placement office, to get picked. And so my rant, which has now been going on for 25 years, is that the opportunity for the individual is either A, to own the means of production, to have technology or tools that give you more leverage than other people, which is way harder to do than it used to be, and B, to be a linchpin.

29:17the one and only, the one that we can't live without, the one that we would miss if you were gone. I know that path isn't easy, and I know that path might not feel fair, but in the economy we are living in, that is the path to where you get what you deserve. Thanks as always for listening. Just a little aside here as we enter season three, the episodes I get asked the most about are one of the early episodes on status roles, and the recent episode on sunk costs. I hope you go back and check those out and others that might interest you. And we'll see you next time. Thanks.