The publishing industry and its OCP

Maasai tribe welcoming the tourists to their village in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania

Iain Banks describes an Outside Context Problem (OCP) in his book Excession as the following:

"The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the ...excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sail less and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests."

I am reading the book for the umpteenth time. It is one of the most magnificent, strategy rich, intelligent books that I have ever read and it describes a situation where the culture of the day (aptly named the Culture) gets confronted by an anomaly so far outside its own frame of reference that for all their planning, scheming and devising their fate simply hangs on whether the anomaly is benign or not. This anomaly is called an OCP, Outside Context Problem, because the culture in question is intelligent enough to realise that these may occur.

As I was reading the book it became obvious to me that the shift in content from analogue to digital and the distribution of said content is to the publishing industry an OCP. I am struggling to find one reference pre 1993 where any futurologist (except the usual slew of Science Fiction Writers who nobody take serious) actually predicts the massive industrial and social upheaval that the digitisation and webification of the world would incur. Nobody but nobody foresaw this.

If we were the islanders of the first reference then the web will be the bristling lump of iron blowing smoke and the Googles and the Microsofts of the world are the men with funny sticks.  As an industry our response has been united. We are awed, we are amazed by the technology prowess of our new masters and we run to be their best friends while they impose their will on us. So with the OCP instilled as our master our publishing village has gone back to trying to eke out a living in the best way possible, in our paradigm it will be by creating content. The thing is that the way we have created content has totally been negated by our new overlords. Our village is being flooded with new and amazing products from the other side of the ocean and our overlords just pay lip service in terms of helping us maintain our economic system of revenue. But we are a clever bunch. We try to invent and create new sparkling ways of selling our produce. The issue is that our overlords understand our system better than we understand theirs. We take the moral high ground and say: but we are content creators we do not want to understand your technology. Its like the conquered villagers taking colourful beads to market and trying to hawk them next to holograms and lasers. What we fail to understand is that this new technology that the OCP has brought to our shores is unemotional. It does not understand right or wrong, good or bad, quality or not quality, morality or immorality. It is just what it is and there are no gods. We cannot impose our publishing ethos on the web as it would be like the villagers demanding that all the men from OCP lump of iron start using spears instead of guns. And in the words of John Wayne, no matter how many knives you bring to a gun fight you will still lose.

So what should the mayor of our village do? Well in this village we have being trying to protect our way of life. We try to incorporate the OCP's disruption into our paradigm while we blissfully ignore (even though we are aware of it but in some form of denial) that our whole paradigm has been usurped. Not yesterday, but about 20 years ago when the first web page said HELLO WORLD. We still see technology as an add on rather than the core of content. The mayor has been trying to maintain order but always comes up short because he can do no other than address the issue at hand with his frame of reference which in this instance is his publishers goggles (he wants to make content). He used to be the best publisher on the island, surely that has to count for something, but he forgets that the OCP does not care, does not look at the issue at hand from his point of view and ascribes no values of right or wrong. The mayor hauls out the codices where the laws of the island states that what the OCP is doing is illegal, the only problem is that the population of the island have already sold their souls to the trinkets and technological wonders that the OCP offers and come election time the laws the mayor will be ousted because laws are there of course to serve the people, not the mayor and if a society changes so must its laws.

The only option that they mayor will be faced with sooner or later is total and utter immersion in the OCPs paradigm The village should use the loyalty and resources it still has available to emulate and improve as fast as possible. In our case for instance a coder of technology should not be seen as a techy but rather a content creator v2. Technology is now part and parcel of the content creation process, that is the whole point of this Convergence Train Crash that we find ourselves in the middle off. We also need to speed up, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google stated that  "5 exabytes of content/info generated from the dawn of mankind to 2003. That amount is now generated every 2 days."  The mayor's trickle has turned into a raging torrent.(no pun intended) We as publishers have to get off our yachts and onto our surfboards. Society is changing, so should we. 

Image borrowed under cc license from Flickr user wwarby.