Nicholas Carr

"Although I certainly believe that any member of our highly digital society should be familiar with how these platforms work, universal code literacy won’t solve our employment crisis any more than the universal ability to read and write would result in a full-employment economy of book publishing."

I read the article. I have seen similar arguments made by Nicholas Carr in "Peak Code" (http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5594) Perhaps learning to code and universal code literacy (for now, lets not argue exactly what literacy means) may, or may not save individual jobs. I sense as software development as a discipline matures, at the level of the firm, software developer wages as percent of a software project's budget, may shrink. At a macro level, software development as percent of GNP may rise but the software developer employment may look like the numbers involved in manufacturing, or farming. The point I feel Ruskoff misses is that coding literacy may not save an individual's job. Or having a sizable chunk of the U.S economy (or any sophisticated modern economy's) GDP coming from software development. However a critical mass of the population programming, like universal literacy, will most likely translate into vast productivity gains and ability to create new opportunities. An example. The idea behind "software carpentry"http://software-carpentry.org) is about teaching scientists just enough programming, so they can write tools be productive at their main activities, instead of…

Nicholas Carr wrote a great piece on this exact topic. You might like it.

It looks like his site is struggling so I'll include an archive.org link too.

Here are his last three paragraphs:

"There’s something bigger going on here, and I confess that I’m still a little fuzzy about it. Silicon Valley seems to have a good deal of trouble appreciating, or even understanding, what I’ll term informal experience. It’s only when driving is formalized — removed from everyday life, transferred to a specialized facility, performed under a strict set of rules, and understood as a self-contained recreational event — that it can be conceived of as being pleasurable. When it’s not a recreational routine, when it’s performed out in the world, as part of everyday life, then driving, in the Valley view, can only be understood within the context of another formalized realm of experience: that of productive busyness. Every experience has to be cleanly defined, has to be categorized. There’s a place and a time for recreation, and there’s a place and a time for productivity.

"This discomfort with the informal, with experience that is psychologically unbounded, that flits between and beyond categories, can be felt in a lot of the Valley’s consumer goods and services. Many personal apps and gadgets have the effect, or at least the intended effect, of formalizing informal activities. Once you strap on a Fitbit, you transform what might have been a pleasant walk in the park into a program of…

Two observations:

1. As much as the reading on an electronic device is "convenient," there is also the problem that the same electronic device can be used to check your email, read hacker news, and do other procrastination activity. This availability of "other things to do" has a terrible effect on the attention span of the reader.

2. Also, I don't like phrasing the debate print VS. eBook. A book is an informational product, distilled knowledge organized by an author for his/her readers. The information is the product, not its physical(or digital) manifestations. As far as I'm concerned it should be print AND eBook, so that the readers can enjoy the same material as they find more convenient. This is the approach I follow with my math textbook (http://minireference.com/#book_details): people who purchase the printed version get the PDF for free.

Okay, three things. This article reminded me of a previous study on digital books at the UC system of schools: http://www.roughtype.com/?p=2922 TL;DR students are not ready to switch to fully digital.

> Why should I work to benefit their service if they're hoarding the resulting data and not making it available to me or people like me in the future?

This I believe is generally called "digital sharecropping"
https://www.roughtype.com/?p=634

> What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative.

This is good for Wikipedia, and nice of Google, but I'm also reminded of Nicholas Carr's observation:

The next thing to be said is: what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history's eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia - and I admit there's much to adore - you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

(From <http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/all_hail_the_in.php>.)

I keep saying this to anyone who will listen — I doubt very much that he's interested in running for anything. As CEO of Facebook, if he's not as powerful as a US president yet, he very well might be in 5 or 10 years. He hinted in his globalization "manifesto"[1] that he wants Facebook to become what the UN could not be. I recommend everyone read it in full, as well as some critical commentaries.[2][3][4]

If anything, it's much scarier to think he sees this as a necessary part of his job as Facebook CEO.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634/

[2] https://medium.com/@CharlieBeckett/facebook-grappling-with-political-reality-4a18999f12aa

[3] http://www.roughtype.com/?p=7651

[4] https://stratechery.com/2017/manifestos-and-monopolies/