On Composability

Here I will not spend time introducing the topic; instead exploring its relevance to tech and cultural change. For introductory overviews check out Naval Ravikant’s rant on The Tim Ferriss Show ep542 (from 38m08s) and 0xjim’s article “The True Power of Defi: Composability”.

“Composition” is a term we most frequently associate with music or perhaps photography. These are highly remixable media, as seen in the advent of turntable-driven hip-hop in the 1970’s and photographic development techniques from far earlier. Indeed it is near impossible to transmit those media without transforming them to some extent by the inherent nature of the playback:

“What matters […] is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest — the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.”

― Brian Eno

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

The data governance component of all this is conceptually “Reusability” i.e. a cornerstone of FAIR. We can judge data governance standards by the extent to which assets are composable within an enterprise data estate and this depends upon component-like reusability with the applications & other data belonging to that estate. FAIR is a particularly metric-driven standard for data governance, and a favourite of information architecture teams seeking to demonstrate their adherence to a measurable set of policies.

Another metric we can derive from Reusability (as defined by Composability) is — to quote Naval in the episode linked above — “the value of a piece of art is directly proportional to the community around it […] the power of an idea is determined by how many computers it’s running on”. Now, how to go about counting that… might we use something like Google Analytics pixels?