What do Guns, Germs, and Steel have to do with Lijit?
The following is a guest post from our Systems Architect, Zach, who loved the fact that he could incorporate his book report into this.
I am about 100 pages into a 512 page book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in history–Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond. The author attempts to explain the history of humankind for the last 13,000 years, with a brief synopsis of everything before that, including the spread of pre-human species and the rise of homo sapiens. A major question that Diamond poses is, “Why did the winners in history win?” Diamond concludes that geographic and resource advantages determined the winners. It’s a thought-provoking book, and it has made me think about Lijit’s development i the world of blogging.
Diamond says that in order for humans to advance and create anything approaching a modern society, they must first get beyond the hunter-gatherer stage. In a hunter-gatherer society, all able-bodied members of the tribe must contribute by hunting game or gathering wild plants for food, or discovering new lands to explore. Such societies are too small to support politics, and few people have time to specialize, invent or innovate. Lijit might have had a period like this, when the few founding members each had to contribute, hunting down desks and servers, gathering scraps of code to build up a search engine, and, of course, discovering new bloggers to build a healthy community.
Once a society gets beyond hunting and gathering and into an agricultural lifestyle, the doors swing open for advancement. Food surpluses build up, and political organization emerges. Societies stratify into specialists, such as farmers to generate food, trade people to develop and manufacture new technologies, warriors to protect and expand territory, and priests and chiefs to organize society. One could draw a comparison to Lijit today. Although we’re all wearing many hats, roles are forming within the company. Some of us get to concentrate on cultivating the software, others on taming the hardware. Some of us are the scribes and philosophers who commune with our publishers, and preach their wants and needs to the rest of us.
But some places that are just fine for hunters and gatherers are unable to support agriculture. And some places that might have once supported agriculture were degraded by hunter-gatherers before agriculture could take hold. For instance, hunters got so good at killing mammoths that early humans can probably take most of the credit for their extinction. Could Lijit suffer the same fate?
Australia is a good example of a place that might have supported agriculture, but failed to because of early human influence. Australia once had many large animals including giant versions of wombats, monotremes, tazmanian devils, and, my favorite, a 400 lb. kangaroo. These species disappeared shortly after the arrival of humans, leaving them without any animals to domesticate, and Diamond says this may explain why Australia’s native people never developed agriculture. They didn’t have the option.
[Let's just think about that for a moment. That is, the notion that you could domesticate a 400 lb. kangaroo. Can you imagine? I bet you could churn a lot of butter with one of those. Their legs must have been incredibly powerful. And think of how you could deploy a 400 lb. kangaroo in a conquest scenario. If you could hang on, it would be an awesome elevated platform for throwing stuff at people, and a tricky bouncing target for bows and arrows. Would you want to see your enemy coming at you on one of those things? I sure wouldn't! Better yet, you could hide your troops in their pouches for a classic Trojan Kangaroo attack. "Pay no mind," they'd say as you stealthily approached. "It's just another herd of 400 lb. kangaroos." Then, wham! Out you'd come like some giant kangaroo spawn to take what is rightfully yours.]
Anyway, fast forward about 50,000 years to our current situation at Lijit. Do we have the resources we need to fully develop into a mature and sophisticated engine of culture and innovation? Can we thrive without harming the very land and resources that give us strength? Is my analogy going anywhere, and if so, could I please get to the point?
In a word, yes. Lijit is poised for success because we have developed cooperative advantage for ourselves and our publishers. Our mission is to empower our publishers to expose more relevant content, to understand their audience, and to attract more readers. Publishers are our rich landscape and resources. We know they give us strength only so long as we give them strength in kind. And giving our publishers that advantage is something we are very skilled at.
I am just getting into this book, just as I am very new to Lijit. But I am excited to see how they both turn out.
