Social processors are combinations of the two existing types of social software, social networks and crowd processors. This solves two problems:
Crowd processors do a ton of processing on all their members to calculate recommendations of various types. They take two approaches:
The problem with both approaches taken by crowd processors is that they are an approximation to the real world. In the real world, you discover things you like from your friends, and the more of your friends who like something, the more likely you are to hear about it. Equally important, the closer you are to somebody -- the stronger your connection -- the more likely you are to be interested in their recommendations.
Therefore, social processors will use the data about your social connections -- gleaned from an existing social network, not a new one -- to calculate recommendations from your social circle, and only your social circle. A partial example of this is GoodRec, who can recommend things based only on your friends' recommendations. Although they currently require you to create a new friend network (or guess one inaccurately from your GMail address book), they could easily get it from, say, MySpace's Data Availability program (assuming your friends are on mySpace).
Think recommendations only from people you already know sounds a little limiting? Far from it. This is how the world already works. Your taste in food is based on what people have fed you, or eaten around you. Your taste in clothes is based, even if only subconsciously, on what the people you interact with daily are wearing. The same is true for books, movies, music, even political ideology. The difference between this way and a crowd processor's way is no false positives. Have eclectic taste in friends? Then you'll get wacky recommendations. Are your friends adventurous musically? Then chances are you are too, and you'll get their new stuff. The fundamental point here is that you are like your friends. That's why they're your friends. And the humans work, the longer you know your friends and the closer you are to them, the more like them you become.
But if this is how the world works now, why bother with software at all? Because in the real world, communication of preferences and interests and consumption is ad-hoc and incomplete. You don't start every conversation with everybody you know by asking them for an exhaustive list of the TV, movies, music and books they're consuming and their opinions of each -- although each of these things are popular topics of conversation. You can get the network to do the work for you, and when that happens, new things that are popular will spread incredibly quickly.
This is why it's important that social processors not attempt to create their own networks to work with. The network it uses has to be complete and detailed, with nuances such as lengths of friendships** and frequency of interaction (do you exchange messages all the time? Then you're probably close). It's not just tiresome to do this over and over, it's a critical stumbling block. Social data is a key part of recommendations, and if you have crappy data you'll get crappy results. It is essential that a social processor use real, accurate, detailed data.
So if this is where social software is going to go, how do we jump on the bandwagon and make money? If I knew, I'd be doing it already, I guess, but some general tactics that I think seem promising are:
* MySpace attempts to solve this by being about music. Facebook attempts to solve it by introducing Facebook Apps, but it turns out they're mainly about wasting time, because nobody wants to run a business inside of Facebook.
** Ever wonder why Facebook asks you when you met somebody?
]]>Social processors are combinations of the two existing types of social software, social networks and crowd processors. This solves two problems:
Crowd processors do a ton of processing on all their members to calculate recommendations of various types. They take two approaches:
The problem with both approaches taken by crowd processors is that they are an approximation to the real world. In the real world, you discover things you like from your friends, and the more of your friends who like something, the more likely you are to hear about it. Equally important, the closer you are to somebody -- the stronger your connection -- the more likely you are to be interested in their recommendations.
Therefore, social processors will use the data about your social connections -- gleaned from an existing social network, not a new one -- to calculate recommendations from your social circle, and only your social circle. A partial example of this is GoodRec, who can recommend things based only on your friends' recommendations. Although they currently require you to create a new friend network (or guess one inaccurately from your GMail address book), they could easily get it from, say, MySpace's Data Availability program (assuming your friends are on mySpace).
Think recommendations only from people you already know sounds a little limiting? Far from it. This is how the world already works. Your taste in food is based on what people have fed you, or eaten around you. Your taste in clothes is based, even if only subconsciously, on what the people you interact with daily are wearing. The same is true for books, movies, music, even political ideology. The difference between this way and a crowd processor's way is no false positives. Have eclectic taste in friends? Then you'll get wacky recommendations. Are your friends adventurous musically? Then chances are you are too, and you'll get their new stuff. The fundamental point here is that you are like your friends. That's why they're your friends. And the humans work, the longer you know your friends and the closer you are to them, the more like them you become.
But if this is how the world works now, why bother with software at all? Because in the real world, communication of preferences and interests and consumption is ad-hoc and incomplete. You don't start every conversation with everybody you know by asking them for an exhaustive list of the TV, movies, music and books they're consuming and their opinions of each -- although each of these things are popular topics of conversation. You can get the network to do the work for you, and when that happens, new things that are popular will spread incredibly quickly.
This is why it's important that social processors not attempt to create their own networks to work with. The network it uses has to be complete and detailed, with nuances such as lengths of friendships** and frequency of interaction (do you exchange messages all the time? Then you're probably close). It's not just tiresome to do this over and over, it's a critical stumbling block. Social data is a key part of recommendations, and if you have crappy data you'll get crappy results. It is essential that a social processor use real, accurate, detailed data.
So if this is where social software is going to go, how do we jump on the bandwagon and make money? If I knew, I'd be doing it already, I guess, but some general tactics that I think seem promising are:
* MySpace attempts to solve this by being about music. Facebook attempts to solve it by introducing Facebook Apps, but it turns out they're mainly about wasting time, because nobody wants to run a business inside of Facebook.
** Ever wonder why Facebook asks you when you met somebody?
]]>
The various news outlets have been competing recently to publish the most presidential-looking photos of Obama they can find.]]>
The various news outlets have been competing recently to publish the most presidential-looking photos of Obama they can find.]]>
Hillary Clinton's historic but ultimately flawed campaign is finally over, and thank god. Now time to start creaming McCain. And with his awful, awful speeches and even worse policies, that's not going to be too hard.
Big update: a summary of tonight's speeches:
Awkwardly and falteringly delivered, with bad intonation and creepy fake smiles, to a very small room half-filled by an elderly white audience -- in New Orleans, so I guess the white folks were bussed in from Mississippi. (Seriously: no black people in the room? In New Orleans?) In the background, an unflattering green backdrop reveals a new slogan: "A Leader We Can Believe In".
This speech -- and that crowd -- was an excellent indication of why democrats are going to win in November. McCain's campaign is a shambles, disorganized and demoralized. Its candidate is out of touch and unlikeable. This is another Dole candidacy, and that's great news for Obama. The campaign is so adrift they scheduled McCain to speak 20 minutes before Obama started speaking, leaving McCain to get cut off literally in mid-sentence to announce Obama's nomination. Even the new slogan is terrible. Like Hillary's grating "Yes We Will" chant, adopting an awkward re-wording of your opponent's successful slogan merely underlines just how bereft of new ideas your campaign really is.
"Whoops, I didn't get the presidency! Shit! And I'm personally out $11m, so, uh... make me Vice President, because I really won! Seriously! I got the popular vote, if you don't count the states that didn't vote for me! And remember to keep donating, because I'm gonna be really broke if you don't!"
The reason Hillary isn't dropping out, by the way, is because the rules say she can't continue to raise money to pay off her debt if she drops out of the race. Her campaign is in $21m worth of debt, so the only way to get her money back is to give her hard-core fans false hope that she will stay in, and take it to the convention, or maybe get the VP slot, or something, whatever, as long as they keep donating. As soon as she breaks even she will drop out. I don't think she seriously expects to get the VP nod, in the same way that I don't think she seriously has expected to win for quite some time. She just didn't have a good exit strategy (and still doesn't).
What is there to say? The man knows how to give a speech. It was no Yes We Can (New Hampshire), no Change is Coming to America (Iowa), and certainly no 2004 DNC speech. But it was still eloquent, and passionate, and sincerely delivered by a candidate who I truly believe wants what's best for the United States and the world and has good plans, practical plans for making it happen.
The reason I love Obama as a candidate is because I believe in him. I believe in him without cynicism, knowing that while he isn't perfect he is genuine. A political candidate that I trust so deeply is unprecedented in my short life of following politics, and it is refreshing and inspiring to me and many others of my generation to be able for once to put aside cynicism and sarcasm and truly unreservedly support a cause. I love Obama for giving me that opportunity.
And now, for the first time in my life, the good guy, the guy who should have won, is the guy who did win, and he gets to fight the general election and has a good chance of becoming one of the most powerful leaders in the world. That's a wonderful thing.
]]>Hillary Clinton's historic but ultimately flawed campaign is finally over, and thank god. Now time to start creaming McCain. And with his awful, awful speeches and even worse policies, that's not going to be too hard.
Big update: a summary of tonight's speeches:
Awkwardly and falteringly delivered, with bad intonation and creepy fake smiles, to a very small room half-filled by an elderly white audience -- in New Orleans, so I guess the white folks were bussed in from Mississippi. (Seriously: no black people in the room? In New Orleans?) In the background, an unflattering green backdrop reveals a new slogan: "A Leader We Can Believe In".
This speech -- and that crowd -- was an excellent indication of why democrats are going to win in November. McCain's campaign is a shambles, disorganized and demoralized. Its candidate is out of touch and unlikeable. This is another Dole candidacy, and that's great news for Obama. The campaign is so adrift they scheduled McCain to speak 20 minutes before Obama started speaking, leaving McCain to get cut off literally in mid-sentence to announce Obama's nomination. Even the new slogan is terrible. Like Hillary's grating "Yes We Will" chant, adopting an awkward re-wording of your opponent's successful slogan merely underlines just how bereft of new ideas your campaign really is.
"Whoops, I didn't get the presidency! Shit! And I'm personally out $11m, so, uh... make me Vice President, because I really won! Seriously! I got the popular vote, if you don't count the states that didn't vote for me! And remember to keep donating, because I'm gonna be really broke if you don't!"
The reason Hillary isn't dropping out, by the way, is because the rules say she can't continue to raise money to pay off her debt if she drops out of the race. Her campaign is in $21m worth of debt, so the only way to get her money back is to give her hard-core fans false hope that she will stay in, and take it to the convention, or maybe get the VP slot, or something, whatever, as long as they keep donating. As soon as she breaks even she will drop out. I don't think she seriously expects to get the VP nod, in the same way that I don't think she seriously has expected to win for quite some time. She just didn't have a good exit strategy (and still doesn't).
What is there to say? The man knows how to give a speech. It was no Yes We Can (New Hampshire), no Change is Coming to America (Iowa), and certainly no 2004 DNC speech. But it was still eloquent, and passionate, and sincerely delivered by a candidate who I truly believe wants what's best for the United States and the world and has good plans, practical plans for making it happen.
The reason I love Obama as a candidate is because I believe in him. I believe in him without cynicism, knowing that while he isn't perfect he is genuine. A political candidate that I trust so deeply is unprecedented in my short life of following politics, and it is refreshing and inspiring to me and many others of my generation to be able for once to put aside cynicism and sarcasm and truly unreservedly support a cause. I love Obama for giving me that opportunity.
And now, for the first time in my life, the good guy, the guy who should have won, is the guy who did win, and he gets to fight the general election and has a good chance of becoming one of the most powerful leaders in the world. That's a wonderful thing.
]]>
There is a bunch to talk about here, so I'm splitting these up. First, let's tackle social networks. A lot of people are sceptical of socnets as the Next Big Thing, having seen the initial success of Friendster and its demise, followed by MySpace, followed by Facebook: if everybody keeps abandoning their socnet for the next new popular one, surely the whole industry is just a fad too?
A widely-held idea about socnets, fuelled by the fact that they often get so popular so quickly, is that there is going to be some sort of "winner": that one network will finally be good enough, have exactly the right mix of features and privacy, and it will grow until everyone is a member and abandons all competing networks. This is not going to happen. Social networks have a natural size limit determined by a number of competing forces:
This is why people went from MySpace to Facebook to LinkedIn to insert-socnet-here: they aren't deleting those other accounts; they are instead striking different balances between these forces to suit themselves: using one network for their friends, maybe a different one for family, one to keep track of what people are doing, one as an address book. They're also trying to make walls between their different personalities and interests: one place they talk about their hobby, one place for relationships, one for their crazy S&M fetish group.
People will have multiple online social networks because people have multiple social circles in real life. The sooner socnets themselves learn to accept this and work with it instead of against it, the happier everyone will be. The future of social networks is that everyone will have a few, and they will mainly be small. The "address book" network will be huge, but you probably don't want to be that network: it will be dull because of high levels of social paralysis, and also a victim of constant hacking and spam, because the biggest user database makes you the juiciest price.
Socnets are not unaware of the problem of identity and partitioning, of course. Yahoo! for a long time allowed users to create "aliases", separate usernames with different profile pictures and privacy levels, that they could use selectively across various Yahoo! properties (they proved cumbersome and confusing, and have been phased out in favour of just letting people have lots of different usernames, which is what they were doing anyway). Facebook and several others have Groups, which allow you to sort your friends into categories that you can contact and invite to events as a group; this solves only part of the partitioning problem -- the easy part.
There are a bunch of much harder problems still to be solved around partitioning. Feel free to base your startup around one or all of these:
So what are the key conclusions to be drawn here:
* I'm not going to talk about Friendster much. Friendster failed for technical reasons, so it's not really interesting.
]]>
There is a bunch to talk about here, so I'm splitting these up. First, let's tackle social networks. A lot of people are sceptical of socnets as the Next Big Thing, having seen the initial success of Friendster and its demise, followed by MySpace, followed by Facebook: if everybody keeps abandoning their socnet for the next new popular one, surely the whole industry is just a fad too?
A widely-held idea about socnets, fuelled by the fact that they often get so popular so quickly, is that there is going to be some sort of "winner": that one network will finally be good enough, have exactly the right mix of features and privacy, and it will grow until everyone is a member and abandons all competing networks. This is not going to happen. Social networks have a natural size limit determined by a number of competing forces:
This is why people went from MySpace to Facebook to LinkedIn to insert-socnet-here: they aren't deleting those other accounts; they are instead striking different balances between these forces to suit themselves: using one network for their friends, maybe a different one for family, one to keep track of what people are doing, one as an address book. They're also trying to make walls between their different personalities and interests: one place they talk about their hobby, one place for relationships, one for their crazy S&M fetish group.
People will have multiple online social networks because people have multiple social circles in real life. The sooner socnets themselves learn to accept this and work with it instead of against it, the happier everyone will be. The future of social networks is that everyone will have a few, and they will mainly be small. The "address book" network will be huge, but you probably don't want to be that network: it will be dull because of high levels of social paralysis, and also a victim of constant hacking and spam, because the biggest user database makes you the juiciest price.
Socnets are not unaware of the problem of identity and partitioning, of course. Yahoo! for a long time allowed users to create "aliases", separate usernames with different profile pictures and privacy levels, that they could use selectively across various Yahoo! properties (they proved cumbersome and confusing, and have been phased out in favour of just letting people have lots of different usernames, which is what they were doing anyway). Facebook and several others have Groups, which allow you to sort your friends into categories that you can contact and invite to events as a group; this solves only part of the partitioning problem -- the easy part.
There are a bunch of much harder problems still to be solved around partitioning. Feel free to base your startup around one or all of these:
So what are the key conclusions to be drawn here:
* I'm not going to talk about Friendster much. Friendster failed for technical reasons, so it's not really interesting.
]]>You sign up, and fill in an exhaustive, hour-long survey about your personality, interests and temperament. You can do it in stages -- I did the first 10 minutes about a month ago, then finally was bored enough to finish it off tonight. At the end of all that, it was finally ready to search its database:
You have no matches.
Yes, I know. That's the problem you're supposed to be solving.
It's been that kind of week (and it's only been 2 days of week so far).]]>
You sign up, and fill in an exhaustive, hour-long survey about your personality, interests and temperament. You can do it in stages -- I did the first 10 minutes about a month ago, then finally was bored enough to finish it off tonight. At the end of all that, it was finally ready to search its database:
You have no matches.
Yes, I know. That's the problem you're supposed to be solving.
It's been that kind of week (and it's only been 2 days of week so far).]]>
Let me be clear: nothing is going to kill Twitter because no currently existing service competes with it. I don't mean "they're not as good", I mean nobody is doing what Twitter does, and the sooner people realise this and shut the fuck up the sooner I will stop screaming at my iPhone as I read Techmeme.
What does Twitter provide that nobody else does?
The first and last of these are not convenient extras, these are the absolute foundation and the bright future of Twitter and why it is so useful, so flexible and so popular.
The most important, far and away the most important feature of Twitter is its SMS aggregation feature. It drives me insane that people don't seem to get this. Twitter doesn't require mobile Internet access. It works on all mobile devices already. It gets better the better your phone, but this fact means that as a mobile communications platform its install base is 100% of mobile phone users, which is practically everybody, a market at least 5 times bigger than the market with even the most basic access to the mobile web, and more than a hundred times larger than the market of users of iPhone, currently the only device to provide a mobile web browsing experience that is anything but painful.
Any communications platform is powered by the long tail. For every A-list blogger with 10,000 twitter followers there are 10,000 random users who use Twitter to communicate with three or four close friends, and they are doing it on their phones because if they wanted to do it on the web there are a hundred ways to do that already. Pownce is not filling any need whatsoever. Pownce is just a really short Tumblr, and Tumblr is just a really quick Blogger, and you don't need it to be any quicker unless you get some extra utility out of it, like Twitter provides.
But it's the sheer size of the market that makes Twitter, potentially at least, absolutely staggeringly powerful. Mobile phone penetration in the developed world is 100%. Not "100% of web users": 100% of people. And the developing world has phones too. More people can use Twitter than can use the web, and even though realistically very few of them will, it underlines the fact that you have to stop thinking about Twitter as some kind of web 2.0 service. Twitter is not the web; it's global mobile communication for ad-hoc groups, and that's a whole different beast. Friendfeed isn't any kind of competition for that; Friendfeed is not even part of the same ball game. Friendfeed is an aggregator of content, not any kind of communications platform.
SMS-based consumption is the gigantic market of potential consumers of Twitter. Add to that XMPP, aka Jabber, which is a well-defined standard for instant message passing, and you have a mature and powerful, standards-based way of producing content as well. This is what truly makes Twitter a platform, not just a website. Companies or organizations or services that want to push content via SMS no longer have to go through the gigantic mess of contractual and technical issues involved in negotiating with carriers (or even SMS aggregators like mBlox), because they can just layer on top of Twitter, and users can "follow serviceNameHere" via SMS without ever needing to know what Twitter is or how it works.
Push content via SMS is enormously valuable. Real-time information is like that. And Twitter is a disruptively easy and cheap way of doing it, a classic case of a disruptive technology: so cheap and easy it doesn't matter that it basically sucks right now, it's just barely good enough, and it will get better over time and overtake all other solutions.
But wait, some will immediately cry: SMS only accounts for 5% of Twitter posts! SMS is irrelevant! But this misses the point: content production is only a fraction of total activity. People will post from desktop clients because keyboards are often quicker and easier, but they are reading posts on their phone. And the vast majority of users of any social application are lurkers who post nothing but listen plenty. The posting statistics conceal the real pattern of Twitter usage.
Others will point out that Twitter is mainly Jabber, and "all" you have to do is layer Jabber on top of an SMS gateway. Firstly, I can say from hard experience working at Boltblue that even if you're using an SMS aggregator service, managing an SMS gateway is an extremely difficult job, and the fact that Twitter has only 16 staff but manages to do this plus anything else is a source of constant amazement to me.
Finally, it also sort of amazes me that the superhumans who are managing to juggle an XMPP and an SMS gateway with anything approaching reliability are apparently finding it so difficult to keep a mere website running. Twitter's reliability is terrible, and I make no excuses for it. But they are sitting on a gigantic goldmine, and they have been sitting on it for over a year now without anybody introducing anything that even attempts to compete with their two core features. I refuse to believe it's because nobody has thought it worth trying, so it must be that they've managed to do something really difficult, and astonishingly well.
This is Twitter's game, and it's not even theirs to lose yet. So far they the only game in town.]]>
Let me be clear: nothing is going to kill Twitter because no currently existing service competes with it. I don't mean "they're not as good", I mean nobody is doing what Twitter does, and the sooner people realise this and shut the fuck up the sooner I will stop screaming at my iPhone as I read Techmeme.
What does Twitter provide that nobody else does?
The first and last of these are not convenient extras, these are the absolute foundation and the bright future of Twitter and why it is so useful, so flexible and so popular.
The most important, far and away the most important feature of Twitter is its SMS aggregation feature. It drives me insane that people don't seem to get this. Twitter doesn't require mobile Internet access. It works on all mobile devices already. It gets better the better your phone, but this fact means that as a mobile communications platform its install base is 100% of mobile phone users, which is practically everybody, a market at least 5 times bigger than the market with even the most basic access to the mobile web, and more than a hundred times larger than the market of users of iPhone, currently the only device to provide a mobile web browsing experience that is anything but painful.
Any communications platform is powered by the long tail. For every A-list blogger with 10,000 twitter followers there are 10,000 random users who use Twitter to communicate with three or four close friends, and they are doing it on their phones because if they wanted to do it on the web there are a hundred ways to do that already. Pownce is not filling any need whatsoever. Pownce is just a really short Tumblr, and Tumblr is just a really quick Blogger, and you don't need it to be any quicker unless you get some extra utility out of it, like Twitter provides.
But it's the sheer size of the market that makes Twitter, potentially at least, absolutely staggeringly powerful. Mobile phone penetration in the developed world is 100%. Not "100% of web users": 100% of people. And the developing world has phones too. More people can use Twitter than can use the web, and even though realistically very few of them will, it underlines the fact that you have to stop thinking about Twitter as some kind of web 2.0 service. Twitter is not the web; it's global mobile communication for ad-hoc groups, and that's a whole different beast. Friendfeed isn't any kind of competition for that; Friendfeed is not even part of the same ball game. Friendfeed is an aggregator of content, not any kind of communications platform.
SMS-based consumption is the gigantic market of potential consumers of Twitter. Add to that XMPP, aka Jabber, which is a well-defined standard for instant message passing, and you have a mature and powerful, standards-based way of producing content as well. This is what truly makes Twitter a platform, not just a website. Companies or organizations or services that want to push content via SMS no longer have to go through the gigantic mess of contractual and technical issues involved in negotiating with carriers (or even SMS aggregators like mBlox), because they can just layer on top of Twitter, and users can "follow serviceNameHere" via SMS without ever needing to know what Twitter is or how it works.
Push content via SMS is enormously valuable. Real-time information is like that. And Twitter is a disruptively easy and cheap way of doing it, a classic case of a disruptive technology: so cheap and easy it doesn't matter that it basically sucks right now, it's just barely good enough, and it will get better over time and overtake all other solutions.
But wait, some will immediately cry: SMS only accounts for 5% of Twitter posts! SMS is irrelevant! But this misses the point: content production is only a fraction of total activity. People will post from desktop clients because keyboards are often quicker and easier, but they are reading posts on their phone. And the vast majority of users of any social application are lurkers who post nothing but listen plenty. The posting statistics conceal the real pattern of Twitter usage.
Others will point out that Twitter is mainly Jabber, and "all" you have to do is layer Jabber on top of an SMS gateway. Firstly, I can say from hard experience working at Boltblue that even if you're using an SMS aggregator service, managing an SMS gateway is an extremely difficult job, and the fact that Twitter has only 16 staff but manages to do this plus anything else is a source of constant amazement to me.
Finally, it also sort of amazes me that the superhumans who are managing to juggle an XMPP and an SMS gateway with anything approaching reliability are apparently finding it so difficult to keep a mere website running. Twitter's reliability is terrible, and I make no excuses for it. But they are sitting on a gigantic goldmine, and they have been sitting on it for over a year now without anybody introducing anything that even attempts to compete with their two core features. I refuse to believe it's because nobody has thought it worth trying, so it must be that they've managed to do something really difficult, and astonishingly well.
This is Twitter's game, and it's not even theirs to lose yet. So far they the only game in town.]]>
The thing about reading a history of the place where you live is that you discover you don't know the place nearly as well as you thought you did. All sorts of things that you take for granted because you grew up with them actually have strange and convoluted back-stories. Even more interestingly, I discovered that the sketchy history of the region that I had been taught in high school in Trinidad was a sanitized, almost bowdlerized version that exaggerated the role that Trinidad played and downplayed the less savoury aspects of our recent past.
Even my sanitized high-school history was pretty clear about one point: when Columbus discovered the islands, they were inhabited by natives, and within a very short time they were all dead, of European diseases against which they had no defences. Tragic, obviously, but nobody could have forseen that, right? And there were only a small number of amerindians around to start with. A footnote in history before the real history gets started.
The reality is much worse. There were possibly as many as six million Amerindians living across the Caribbean at the time Europeans became widely aware of the islands*. Within 150 years the vast majority of these were dead, and one of the two amerindian cultures present at the time, the Arawaks, had been completely exterminated. Genocide is the only word for it, and the figure of six million may remind you of another, better-remembered genocide.
And this was no accident of history. The Europeans who arrived on the islands immediately enslaved the indians, without reservation or nobler motive. They interrupted their culture and lifestyle, moving them away from the coasts, denying them fish that were a vital part of their diet, adding malnutrition to the epidemic of European diseases like smallpox and measles that killed indians of every age by their thousands. Attempts at rebellion were cruelly supressed. The whole story is just unbelievably callous.
Everyone knows that slavery was horrible, and that a lot of slaves died on the journey across the Atlantic -- something like 20% on every trip initially, although this decreased as sanitation and nutrition improved. But what I hadn't heard was that these deaths were only the tip of the iceberg. Unknown numbers of slaves died on the overland journey to the slaving ports in Africa, and a shocking 1 in 3 slaves died within 2 years of their arrival on the islands -- and all new slaves were young people.
Again, this was only partially out of cruelty -- though there was plenty of that -- and partly out of ignorance. Slaves routinely died of malnutrition as meat was scarce and they were fed only grain. They also died of many of the same diseases such as smallpox that had killed the Amerindians. But the horrifying death rate was uniquely Caribbean. The slaves of North America reproduced naturally, giving birth faster than they died: by 1825, there were 2 million North American slaves even though only 375,000 has been brought from Africa. In the Caribbean, by the same year, nearly 4 million slaves had been brought over, but there were only 2 million left.
Jan Rogozinski, the author of this history, estimates that to bring over the 4m slaves that were in the Caribbean by 1870, 8 million more had died. This is an unbelievably large number of people and I can't believe it's new to me.
On top of the horrors they inflicted first upon the Amerindians and then upon the Africans, the Europeans who settled the islands were also dying in huge numbers. The most severe form of malaria, brought over from Africa with the slaves themselves, killed something like 75% of European adults encountering it for the first time. Yellow fever was similarly deadly, killing 50-75% of the people infected. In Europeans, who had little or no natural immunity to these things, the death rates were insane.
This was particularly obvious in invading soldiers, as they were large groups of non-immune individuals arriving at the same time. To take an utterly typical example: in 1655 the French landed 1500 soldiers on St. Lucia; a few months later, only 89 of them were still alive. And despite repeating this pattern for literally hundreds of years, the Europeans were strangely unable to learn their lesson: in a 4-year occupation of Santo Domingo starting in 1793, Britain lost more than 12,000 of the 20,000 soldiers it sent to disease alone. From 1817 to 1836, Jamaica lost 12% of its white troops every year.
These were only the largest and most surprising of the many things about my own region's history that I didn't know. For instance, with reference to Trinidad in particular, it was a total backwater for literally hundreds of years -- ships didn't visit for 15 and 20 years in a row! -- and there were less than a hundred households on the whole island until well after 1700.
The other fact that was a surprise to me about Trinidad was his description of Eric Williams, Trinidad's first prime minister and widely admired within Trinidad, and especially his description of Trinidad's economy under Williams:
By the early 1980s, the government employed two-thirds of all workers, and it had more control over the economy than in any other Caribbean country except Cuba. ... Trinidad had taken socialism much further than the Manley government in Jamaica[.]
To hear my own country described as the second-most socialist nation in the Caribbean after Cuba is, to put it mildly, surprising to me. I think most Trinidadians now regard themselves as enterprising and independent and fiercely capitalist. There were lots of other little interesting tidbits, and I heartily recommend reading the book (no, that's not an affiliate link).
* Without getting into the debate about whether Columbus "discovered" the islands or not -- he probably wasn't even the first European to make it to the new world. He was just the first one to come back and tell everybody about it. ** Although after flying through 400 years from 1492, it gets rather slow around the 50s and 60s, which I guess is when the author was a young man and closely following the politics.
The thing about reading a history of the place where you live is that you discover you don't know the place nearly as well as you thought you did. All sorts of things that you take for granted because you grew up with them actually have strange and convoluted back-stories. Even more interestingly, I discovered that the sketchy history of the region that I had been taught in high school in Trinidad was a sanitized, almost bowdlerized version that exaggerated the role that Trinidad played and downplayed the less savoury aspects of our recent past.
Even my sanitized high-school history was pretty clear about one point: when Columbus discovered the islands, they were inhabited by natives, and within a very short time they were all dead, of European diseases against which they had no defences. Tragic, obviously, but nobody could have forseen that, right? And there were only a small number of amerindians around to start with. A footnote in history before the real history gets started.
The reality is much worse. There were possibly as many as six million Amerindians living across the Caribbean at the time Europeans became widely aware of the islands*. Within 150 years the vast majority of these were dead, and one of the two amerindian cultures present at the time, the Arawaks, had been completely exterminated. Genocide is the only word for it, and the figure of six million may remind you of another, better-remembered genocide.
And this was no accident of history. The Europeans who arrived on the islands immediately enslaved the indians, without reservation or nobler motive. They interrupted their culture and lifestyle, moving them away from the coasts, denying them fish that were a vital part of their diet, adding malnutrition to the epidemic of European diseases like smallpox and measles that killed indians of every age by their thousands. Attempts at rebellion were cruelly supressed. The whole story is just unbelievably callous.
Everyone knows that slavery was horrible, and that a lot of slaves died on the journey across the Atlantic -- something like 20% on every trip initially, although this decreased as sanitation and nutrition improved. But what I hadn't heard was that these deaths were only the tip of the iceberg. Unknown numbers of slaves died on the overland journey to the slaving ports in Africa, and a shocking 1 in 3 slaves died within 2 years of their arrival on the islands -- and all new slaves were young people.
Again, this was only partially out of cruelty -- though there was plenty of that -- and partly out of ignorance. Slaves routinely died of malnutrition as meat was scarce and they were fed only grain. They also died of many of the same diseases such as smallpox that had killed the Amerindians. But the horrifying death rate was uniquely Caribbean. The slaves of North America reproduced naturally, giving birth faster than they died: by 1825, there were 2 million North American slaves even though only 375,000 has been brought from Africa. In the Caribbean, by the same year, nearly 4 million slaves had been brought over, but there were only 2 million left.
Jan Rogozinski, the author of this history, estimates that to bring over the 4m slaves that were in the Caribbean by 1870, 8 million more had died. This is an unbelievably large number of people and I can't believe it's new to me.
On top of the horrors they inflicted first upon the Amerindians and then upon the Africans, the Europeans who settled the islands were also dying in huge numbers. The most severe form of malaria, brought over from Africa with the slaves themselves, killed something like 75% of European adults encountering it for the first time. Yellow fever was similarly deadly, killing 50-75% of the people infected. In Europeans, who had little or no natural immunity to these things, the death rates were insane.
This was particularly obvious in invading soldiers, as they were large groups of non-immune individuals arriving at the same time. To take an utterly typical example: in 1655 the French landed 1500 soldiers on St. Lucia; a few months later, only 89 of them were still alive. And despite repeating this pattern for literally hundreds of years, the Europeans were strangely unable to learn their lesson: in a 4-year occupation of Santo Domingo starting in 1793, Britain lost more than 12,000 of the 20,000 soldiers it sent to disease alone. From 1817 to 1836, Jamaica lost 12% of its white troops every year.
These were only the largest and most surprising of the many things about my own region's history that I didn't know. For instance, with reference to Trinidad in particular, it was a total backwater for literally hundreds of years -- ships didn't visit for 15 and 20 years in a row! -- and there were less than a hundred households on the whole island until well after 1700.
The other fact that was a surprise to me about Trinidad was his description of Eric Williams, Trinidad's first prime minister and widely admired within Trinidad, and especially his description of Trinidad's economy under Williams:
By the early 1980s, the government employed two-thirds of all workers, and it had more control over the economy than in any other Caribbean country except Cuba. ... Trinidad had taken socialism much further than the Manley government in Jamaica[.]
To hear my own country described as the second-most socialist nation in the Caribbean after Cuba is, to put it mildly, surprising to me. I think most Trinidadians now regard themselves as enterprising and independent and fiercely capitalist. There were lots of other little interesting tidbits, and I heartily recommend reading the book (no, that's not an affiliate link).
* Without getting into the debate about whether Columbus "discovered" the islands or not -- he probably wasn't even the first European to make it to the new world. He was just the first one to come back and tell everybody about it. ** Although after flying through 400 years from 1492, it gets rather slow around the 50s and 60s, which I guess is when the author was a young man and closely following the politics.
Feeling: The fierce urgency of now.
Listening to: Always be my Baby by Mariah Carey, because I don't care what you think.
Procrastinating: packing for Las Vegas tomorrow. I had to go once.
* For instance, immigration rights, so I can't just get married for a green card. But thank you to all 100 mostly-straight people who suggested this. Way to sanctify the institution of marriage there.
]]>Feeling: The fierce urgency of now.
Listening to: Always be my Baby by Mariah Carey, because I don't care what you think.
Procrastinating: packing for Las Vegas tomorrow. I had to go once.
* For instance, immigration rights, so I can't just get married for a green card. But thank you to all 100 mostly-straight people who suggested this. Way to sanctify the institution of marriage there.
]]>