"Every true history is contemporary history"

"Every true history," said Benedetto Croce, "is contemporary history."

Croce is an idealist philosopher who scorned the materialist theorists like Karl Marx and Friedrich Hegel. Normally, the materialists attempt to reduce history to a few objective principles; hence not only that history has one unique truth, but also that we may look into the future of the history by tracing the path of the truth. By contrast, the idealists such as Croce and Rousseau believe that history is a series of lies. The written history is thus whatever we CHOOSE to be the closest to the truth.

Basically, my view of history is materialist. In fact, my model of Web evolution is grounded on the assumption that there exist objective laws guiding the growth of World Wide Web.

On the other hand, however, I agree to Croce's famous quote, especially when we look at it in another angle. When Croce said every true history is contemporary history, I would rather assume his emphasis was that history truly repeated itself. Moreover, any contemporary history is nothing but a repeated cycle that has happened before. This is indeed another implicit thought behind my model of Web evolution. In the model, I have analogized the evolution of the Web to the growth of mind of human beings. Web evolution is a piece of contemporary history, while the growth of mind of human beings is something that happened before (and now also of course). There is indeed nothing really new under the sun with respect to history.

swing between big and small

In his recent Harvard Business Publishing post titled "Obama's Seven Lessons For Radical Innovators", Umair Haque had a few insight on how the business might walk into the future.

yesterday, we built huge corporations to do tiny, incremental things - tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things.

In fact, the swing between big and small is a natural phenomenon that exists not only in the business sector but also in nearly any domain sector. A similar statement was claimed at least as early as 14th century in a great Chinese historical novel named "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" (Chinese: 三国演义; pinyin: sānguó yǎnyì). The novel is based upon events in the turbulent years during the Three Kingdoms era of China, starting in 169 AC and ending with the reunification of the land in 280 AC. The novel is one of the greatest oriental literature not only because of its living story and characters but also because of the war strategies described in the book. For many Japanese and Chinese businessmen, Romance of the Three Kingdoms along with The Art of War are in the short book list of must-read.

At the beginning of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the author had written the following:

话说天下大势，分久必合，合久必分。[Said the general trend of the world: when being separated lasts long time it would be united, while being united lasts long time it is going to be separated.]

In the other words, the swing between big and small are constant cycles.

After the long time period that corporations compete to be bigger to survive, being big starts to gradually lose its superiority in innovation. By contrast, being big becomes, again, the obstacle of technological advancement. On the Web, many times we have witnessed the fade of innovation once a small venturous startup is acquired by some big company.

This phenomenon is not new at all in history. Just about two to three centuries ago, our ancestors had witnessed how the big landlords tried to buy the small but aggressive industrial factories into their own territory, and they also had witnessed how some comparatively bigger factory owners tried to acquire smaller factories and then mechanically link the factories together with the lack of long-sight plans. The old-style landlords thought that by acquiring new innovations they could still maintain their old glory. The new-style capitalists thought that by purchasing the newer inventions they might strengthen the leadership. Unfortunately, however, neither of them was right.

When we are in an age of innovation (or an age of great transition), we'd better thinking less of acquiring innovation, but growing proactively with innovation!

This is how being big is swinging to the side of being small.

Fear and Leadership

Fear is reality when dealing with tough times, but how you manage it is the measure of effective leadership.

I learned it from today's Twitter. The statement was to advertise a new post at Harvard Business Publishing telling about managing your own fears.

Nevertheless is the post worth of reading, I particularly love this tweet more than the post. Yes, many of us have the feeling of fear at this tough time, even if one might be a CEO. But being fear should not lead to being panic. It is the time to look for hope out of the fear.

When a danger is coming, the cowards would see nothing but darkness. The true leaders, however, will see one opportunity after another chance. This is the real leadership is about.

Technology

By Kevin Kelly,

Technology is a type of thinking. ... However what technology ultimately offers is far greater that some more bad and some more good. In the sum it offers increased possibilities and choices. And this is why we gravitate to it so.

Technology is a type of thinking. So may Thinking Space be renamed as "Technology Space"? Sounds not bad, isn't it?

In fact, technology is a type of productive thinking. An essence of technology is to produce. Good or bad, technology produces. More production eventually leads to more choices and then more possibilities, which is thus the beauty.

Great thought may not be a secret

Jason Kolb is a wise thinker. I often read his blog and today there is a wise quote that hits my heart. I have to share it with the readers of Thinking Space.

Don't worry about keeping your great idea a secret, if it's good enough you will have to beat people over the head with it.

Many times, I hear people saying that they want to keep their "brilliant" idea as secret so that no one else may steal it before they figure out how to make profit from the idea by themselves. Actually, an idea could not really be brilliant if somebody else may steal it by just hearing it once. In the other words, great idea never needs to be a secret because nobody can steal it without intensive thinking.

I was authoring about human mind in the past few days and so I have thought much about human mind. Human mind is such a beautiful thing that sharing only improves its quality. At the same time, mind embodiment is so difficult that nobody can do it well if the embodied mind is brilliant, i.e., with high quality. Without a well embodiment, how could a person steal a mind from another's brain? Speaking is simply not good enough for embodying a brilliant mind. Therefore, we may have only one conclusion. If somebody says that his "brilliant" mind is stolen by discussing it with another person, it only tells that the shared mind is actually shallow and inferior.

Jason said that he had many experiences of how sharing improves his mind, and so do I. I have authored many novel thoughts in this blog (Thinking Space) and I have never worried that somebody may steal them from me. There could be three consequences. One is that the reader cannot understand, and hence the idea is safe from being stolen. The second is that the reader reads and takes it, and hence the idea is shallow (I do not lose anything from a shallow thought). The last is that the reader reads and thinks and takes it. At this situation, the readers must have thought of this issue before and most often they have thought even more than what I have authored. Otherwise, it is impossible for them to grasp the spirit of a real brilliant thought. Hence to the end I still does not lose much, if I lose something. In any other cases, people must get to touch with me to consult about the thoughts because actually nobody can steal brilliant ideas.

I have just authored two posts about "we are in a new transition" in which I have discussed a phenomenon that mind is substituting the position of capital in our society. When I wrote the articles, I noticed that there is a fundamental difference between capital asset and mind asset. When someone shares capital asset, the amount of his asset decreases. It is similar to that if one has only a cup of water, the more he shares the less water in his own cup. By contrast, however, when one shares mind asset, the value of his asset will not decrease but often increase instead. It is like that if one has a can of air, the larger room he gets the greater space his air can fill.

I believe that this is why we often says that it is a beautiful mind.

A Wise Slogan

A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

It is the slogan of the US United Negro College Fund since 1972, and recently mentioned again by Prof. Peter Doherty. Moreover, Prof. Doherty emphasized in his article, "With a population of only 21 million, can we afford to waste a single, talented person?"

I happen to read across this article and this slogan. They shocked me because I was just writing my newest post about mind asset. This is a brilliant slogan and so is the comment made by Prof. Doherty. We indeed cannot afford to waste any single person. In fact, nobody is not talented. Everybody is just talented in different way. Mind asset is the most valuable wealth in the world but being overlooked for long time. We need to change this situation.

Believing and Understanding

Nothing is easier than believing we understand experiences we've never had.

A quote from Gwen Bristow found written on a wall in Covent Garden. It is also read from the Mind Hacks Blog.

Many of our beliefs are indeed, however, deviating from the fact. The understanding of facts is often twisted because of the belief that we understand what we really don't understand. This is why a semantic world is so complicated. When a world contains not only the facts but also the understanding (or interpretations) of the facts, this world becomes a semantic world.

A semantic world is both complex and exciting. On the negative side, the existence of various interpretations of same facts makes a semantic web super complex. Therefore, it is very difficult to construct such a world from scratch. On the positive side, however, a pragmatic semantic world must endure a great level of forgiveness, i.e., we do not need to enforce any great-scale agreements in such a world. In fact, the reach of greater scale agreements in a semantic world must be established by self-willingness. This type of self-willingness can also be addressed as social communication, a significant character of Web 2.0. Isn't it a natural evolution when Web 2.0 emerges before the Semantic Web?

Reality Divide

A recent post by Sean Ness is interesting. He mentioned a phenomenon that is likely happened in the future---Reality Divide. In short, it means that we are going to be confused between real and virtual worlds. Isn't the popularity of Second Life a perfect example of Reality Divide?

"The poor will have access to virtual, while the rich will get to experience the real thing." This is an assessment addressed by Sean. And I believe so too. In fact, quite a few new sci-fi novels have started to address this division and predict that in the future poor people can only live in a virtual world but with very poor real living condition; while only the rich people can have life in reality, even real sunshine is a luxury.

Since most of the people can live in their dream, this world may afford many more people to live under a low real expense but allowing them dreaming every day. Ironcially, it may help achieve world peace! But is this type of peace really perferred?