In Florida it is hard to forget the fiasco that was the 2000 presidential election. After a week of the confusion I too was convinced that I had voted incorrectly. The insufferable droning by CNN analysts on correctly reading holes punched in paper voting cards was anything but this democracy’s finest hour. Experts couldn’t agree on how to identify a partially separated ‘chad.’ Who knew there were ‘chad’ experts out there? What the hell is a ‘chad’ anyway? The whole thing smelled pretty… well… pretty foul to me.

The first thing that came to my mind was to question why we were still using such a chaddy system. Myopic Florida seniors apparently can’t read for chad, though they don’t seem to have a problem getting cash from an ATM. As I expected the debacle provided impetus for implementation of an electronic voting system, something that was painfully overdue.

Four years later and the debates over these new systems are just starting to heat up, just in time for this year’s presidential election. Apparently no one ever thought to structure the new voting system’s design requirements around the requirements set forth in Florida’s constitution. The constitution of the State of Florida explicitly requires that any presidential voting system create a paper trail specifically for recount purposes. Maybe it didn’t occur to anyone that we’d ever possibly need to facilitate a recount during a presidential election. To be fair to the framers of our state’s constitution, they just could not have known how difficult it would be in the year 2004 to make a computer print data on paper. Oh the technological marvel that would allow me to have a receipt from Macy’s when I use my credit card, or to get my balance at an ATM. Imagine one day when we all can print our vacation photos at home!

With November approaching like a juggernaut and Bush’s approval ratings stagnating at a ridiculously contempt altitude, politics are decidedly on my mind. The question of how technology can and should influence politics is often painted as a complicated one. Modern tech movements such as opensource and peer-to-peer seem to present positive and negative ramifications for democracy. New politics for a networked planet is a decent overview of these problems you can read at Opendemocracy.org:

“Our concern with technology should be transitional, as we move from an essentially pre-computing age of politics into a new political era, where technology supports political systems but is effectively invisible.”

The concept of technology influencing world politics is frightening. Countless institutions have suffered as a result of being assimilated by the tech way to do things. Democracy already functions and flourishes in a tremendously delicate balance. Well if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Howard Dean got it right. He used the Internet as a tool to organize the biggest grass-roots campaign this nation has seen in decades. Meetup.com doesn’t change the way groups meet, it just makes the meeting part much easier to organize.

There’s a new concept in the IT landscape, that of disruptive innovation. Apparently not your everyday cereal-box variety of innovation, disruptive innovation begets another enigmatically named beast — disruptive technology. I should have seen this coming.

Here’s the dust jacket summary: Disruptive innovation happens when companies get too wrapped up in their own vision, creating a so-called ‘chink’ in the fabric between what they think customers want and what the customers actually desire. This chink is an opportunity for a new player to introduce some sort of stop-gap solution. Think open-source Linux in contrast to the closed world of Microsoft. Think blogs/RSS in contrast to the traditionally exclusive publishing community. The disruption part is that some upstart punk new to the block is releasing an easy to adopt product that takes away market-share from the big guys’ bottom line.

The big guys will tell you that disruptive innovation is a bad thing for everyone - that these technologies are ill conceived and poorly designed. Forbes magazine called them “stealth attacks” which start initially as low-quality, low-margin products that most customers can’t use. But because of they are characteristically easy to adopt, they can quickly evolve into something truly competitive and transforming.

There’s nothing more disappointing to me than hearing former technology pioneers telling us that innovation is a bad thing. That means they’ve become so preoccupied by their bottom line that they no longer enjoy progress for progress’ sake. This sluggish momentum and self defeating narrow-mindedness has become emblematic of this industry. I applaud disruptive innovators for continuing to think outside of the box, a mantra that’s been otherwise discarded by their peers. It was disruptive innovation that made the transistor and the integrated circuit (that and a bit of alien technology from Area 51!) It was disruptive thinking that put a PC in the homes of almost every family living above the poverty line. It was disruptive innovation that transformed the mass storage industry, and it is disruptive thinking that will break technologists out of this new complacency and into the next revolution.

Apparently I’m not the only one struck by this. Leonard Pitts Jr., a commentator for the Miami Herald, ponders the future of our past and the new trend in unlikely mating of technology with common household items. Its a more optimistic way of saying something I was trying to get at.

He’s right to be optimistic. Not every step moves you forward and what you learn from mistakes often slingshots you towards greater enlightenment. But beneath the gloss of his wit and optimism he touches on a greater problem. “The future is always sold to us bright and shiny by big corporations making bigger promises about how new technology will render us complete. There’s always a sense of ‘Buy this and all your worries will be over.’ You’ll be smarter, thinner, wealthier, healthier and have more sex. Somehow it never works out that way, but we keep lining up anyhow..”

Our misstep isn’t that we feel the need to put a television in a refrigerator, its that we line up to buy them. With every new invention comes a marketing slogan that claims this new thing will make us whole. Every time it fails to. Over and over, ad infinitum ad nauseum. Our lack of identity and self confidence keeps us from breaking the cycle; it keeps them making power toilet brushes.

If we keep buying, they’ll keep selling. I believe in personal responsibility for choice and our choices. Free will is somewhat like an ouroboros because how do we make choices if not by personal experience and values, if those experiences and values have been set by some external will? Most of what people know and believe comes from 3 places: family, religion and the market. Most people won’t immediately admit the third. Its not until recently that smoking cigarrettes carried a stigma. For decades tobacco companies convinced us that smoking was sophisticated and sexy. What is sexy about foul smell and yellow teeth? The only thing our nation spends more on than food today is dieting — we’re supposed to eat more but be thinner. That sounds like a lucritive partnership between industries to me!

Perhaps it is not impossible for consumerism to drive real innovation, though it may seem that way. Perhaps it is not the corporations’ fault for doing what it takes to make money. Perhaps its our fault for spending so much money on items we think will give us a soul because we apparently have none. Perhaps if we didn’t count our self worth in dollars. Is it their fault for lying or ours for believing?

Ask anyone 5 years ago what the next holy grail would be in technology, and many of them would have said ‘Video on demand’. The rapid proliferation of bandwidth and processing power turned the internet into a virtual New York City - a place where you could get just about anything you want whenever you want. It only made sense that someone would find a way to offer every movie ever whenever you get the urge.

The startups came and went. The ROI of further expanding what people do with their PCs came into question. Cell phones and music players however were sure things. The so called burst bubble pretty much marked the end of any large-scale attempt to develop new content delivery technologies. In a move very uncharacteristic to the industry, it seemed like everyone had given up.

There are a few logistical problems with such a challenge. Storage is cheap, but its not that cheap, and there are a lot of movies out there and only a small percentage of them are currently in digital format. Bandwidth is still a problem. Even though many people now have DSL in their homes, bandwidth requirements for the provider would be huge. And of course there is the notorious question of copyright protection.

Any good problem solver will tell you that if your requirements have painted you into a corner, your only way out is to reexamine and refine those requirements. So let’s review the requirements that we have problems with:

It would be too costly to store a consummate repository of television and film

It would be too costly to procure enough bandwidth to stream high definition audio and video to millions of subscribers

It would be too costly to purchase the rights to distribute every TV show and film ever made.

These problems can be addressed by asking the following questions

Who already stores this media?

Who already has the distribution rights to this media?

Is there already a high-bandwidth mechanism in place to all our potential subscribers?

Where is the greatest benefit in ‘on-demand’ video?

The folks at TiVo asked these questions, and this is what they came up with. Existing cable and satellite networks can provide hundreds of channels of high definition video at once, over a distribution network that is already in place. These networks already subscribe to the networks who own and have rights to the content people want. What people like and dislike in entertainment is for the most part predictable, otherwise networks like The Sci-Fi Channel, Comedy Central and MTV wouldn’t be such a success. If someone likes Star Trek, they probably like Stargate; If they like The Apprentice, they probably like The Restaurant. TiVo learns what you like to watch, and records things it thinks you’ll like to watch based on what other people with common interests watch. With a properly trained TiVo you’ll never again be frustrated that you have 400 channels with nothing on.

What about movies? Is it really that hard to drive a 1/2 mile to Blockbuster to rent it? And if Blockbuster doesn’t have what you want or you’re just sick of their rediculous late fees you can always try NetFlix.

TiVo is a great example of how to innovate in this industry. Their success did not come from building faster and more powerful hardware, nor is it limited to people with T1 internet connections in their homes. They solved the elusive video-on-demand problem in a much smarter manner: by changing the requirements from what the industry had prescribed to what the customers would actually use.