Dynamic Hypocrisy

Roughly every five months, a tech site will repost the statistic that teenagers are not using Facebook. That it’s passé. That their parents are friending them, and that’s the death knell. 

And each time I’m forced to think about it because of these tech sites, I end up in roughly the same position: that makes sense. 

Facebook was originally a product for college students. Graduated college students. It solved a problem that I only learned about, fittingly, after I graduated from college. It solved a distance problem. At that life juncture, we met just enough people, and we got just enough busy — that was traditionally very hard to stay in-touch with people who weren’t directly in our lives. 

Facebook’s original mission was serving as a function of distance. 

Now, by the very nature of it served it data — allowing people to peruse their friends’ lives at their leisure meant that inherently Facebook had to save this data. It had to hold on to it for access. 

In other words, to solve for the first function  — it created the second function of permanence. It dutifully Xeroxes every postcard and Christmas letter every millisecond to make sure the paper doesn’t yellow.

Now think about. The main functions of Facebook is solving for distance and permanence. 

The very two things teenagers don’t need. Their entire social network exists within 2,000 square feet (high school campuses) for seven hours daily. Nor do they need permanence. (As that is the case ever since teenagers were invented.) 

If only Facebook the company had something beyond its Facebook the product that solved for proximity and instantaneousness like WhatsApp or something.

I’m eating breakfast on my balcony. It’s a nice sunny morning. Springtime. My meal is a pear salad with a balsamic vinaigrette. The week before I had an old baguette that I oven-baked into croutons. I don’t have to be at work for another 30-40 minutes.

Also, I’m completely destroying an universe. I am the black hole/meteor/supernova that is threatening to burn up/implode/crush everything that exists within that universe. The lifeforms’ singular focus is what I’m going to do next because I am the Destroyer/the Alpha/the Omega.

It’s a pigeon.

A few weeks ago, two pigeons started roosting in a little crevice between my balcony railing and apartment wall. I saw two little eggs as of yesterday.

As I’m eating breakfast, the nesting pigeon has never taken its eye off of me. She never nods off, twitches, looks around, nothing else but staring at me. Nothing else exists except for this foreboding threat (me) that has entered that critical area that is her nest.

That’s weird, right? Because for the most part, I don’t care. Couldn’t care less really. But there’s no way to communicate that. That pigeon has no idea that I don’t really exist within its universe. 

So I get it. We all do. We’ve all had that feeling that everyone is judging us. Or gossiping about us. Or if there’s sarcasm or interiority to what a person just said. (Did they really mean that, did they actually really like my haircut, or are they just being whatever?) When in reality, very few people spend that much time about you. 

They’re all inside of their own head wondering about who’s trying to destroy them. Or if their haircut is good. Usually the latter, but most of the time…both.

Reconciliation will be one of the next-next great technological problems. 

Let’s take a step back from that. “There are two sides to every story.” “History is written by the victors.” 

We’re solving for the first aphorism right now. Social media, the internet, 24-hour news coverage is starting to capture the nuances of multiple perspectives and unorthodox angles of an event. Revolutions, wars, revolts—we have generally only heard multiple voices in the artifacts and aftermath. (This real-time documentation is the current great technological problem.)

(Side note: solving it will be marked by Wikipedia updating on parity with Twitter.) 

Which brings us to the second aphorism. Traditionally, history only really supported one version of the story. (Greeks quelled the invading Persians; China protecting against “barbarians;” Columbus discovering America.) In other words, we’ve collectively only had the capability to reconcile the story in very broad ways. 

Collecting nuances only is really useful if the interpretation is also nuanced. But that’s hard. 

We have entire industries dedicated to it: historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, biographers, etc.

But I can’t help but think about the things I know intimately. I think of friends and family. I know those people as well as I’ll ever know anything. And to know them is to know that they are never just one thing. They aren’t just my parents or my best friends, but they’re someone’s child, someone’s boss, someone’s spouse, someone’s bully, someone’s victim. 

I can hold all of those versions of these people in my mind because I’ve spent a lifetime reconciling those nuances. 

Compare that to Facebook right now: I have 815 “friends.” It feels so bludgeon-y and crude. (Much better than 20 years ago when we were just email addresses, but still.)

The next-next technological problem will be kick-offed the moment we realize that each person, moment, and event is comprised of infinite atoms of context. 

I’ll become senile at some point. I imagine a random mumbling of weird phrases and utterances to sporadic stimuli like birds chirping and air vents. 

At the same time, I wonder if I’m already senile, but it just happens that I’m oddly useful to people–so they tolerate it. 

Or let’s phrase it another way: people consider me to be “creative.” Hell, right now I’m expected to be “creative.” To think of novel solutions and clever articulations. 

Although really, what is novel but something no one has ever thought of? A random mumbling of weird phrases and utterances to assigned stimuli like UX and design and human problems. 

It’s insanity to me that a pile of neurons and brain fluids can form coherent thought. And yet that’s what we are born to do. All that mush in our skulls zapping electricity with reckless abandon somehow informs us to build that IKEA bookshelf or to run away from that bear. 

And so I assume I’m going to become senile. There’s no way I can keep orchestrating these neuronal firings to be constantly useful. Today, I can connect mouse-hand coordination behaviors and digital displays to create solutions for software products. But the moment I connect blue fish, red fish, pixel, pixel, pie–it’s probably time to head to the senior center.

Scale.

It’s a relatively incredible time when you consider the sheer number of artists/musicians/creatives there are. We’ve reached a point (for awhile now I suppose) where our society can support people who don’t have to hunt and forage for their own food. We collectively can support people who aren’t solely focused on hunger and reproduction. 

Heck, we’re even at a larger moment where we can support a general public that can consume creative productions. 

But that’s created a very unique problem that new to us: there’s too much to consume. There’s so much art and music and performance going on that it’s overwhelming to try to keep up with.

For a while, we put the finger in the dam with critics, reviewers, A&R scouts (people who scour bars and clubs for the next great musician), agents, record labels. And for a little while, even the internet helped.

“Amateurs” with their WordPress and Twitters and YouTube “vlogs” help cover the gaps. All of a sudden you could start tracking the northern Midwest indie acoustic scene, or the mid-Atlantic post-pop-punk-whatever-the-fuck. 

We built an infrastructure of “gatekeepers” to help us filter and find us the “good stuff.” So we could go home and be assured that we were consuming the high-quality grade creativity. No fluff. (Unless you wanted fluff, at that point, you knew you got the good fluff.) 

But this modern age of gatekeepers has exposed the next systemic issue: there are too many gatekeepers.

Which blog do I check? What YouTube channel do I subscribe to? Which iTunes rating do I truly believe?

We’re starting to see people trying to solve this issue. Metacritic is a ratings aggregator. Rotten Tomatoes draws a line between “critics” and “audience reviews” but mushes the reviews all together.

My favorite though is still Hype Machine. I love what they’re doing. They scour all (well, a lot) of the music blogs out there, and lists all the songs those blogs are talking about. Highly consumable, and neatly put into lists. 

The next layer of infrastructure is actively being built. How deep it’ll go will be intriguing question to explore over the next few decades, but for now the practical issue has been defined:

Scale.

It seems weird nowadays that magazines were ever quick enough to be read for current events. I mean first thing that comes to mind Newsweek. Think about that. A whole week. You know how many celebrities get divorced in a course of a week? Millions. 

But I can imagine a time when the consumption pace for news was the newspaper. A weekly publication compared to a daily is still slow, but reasonable. But compared to a millisecond tweet? Yeesh.

However, my brain isn’t on that today. It’s on the fact that magazines have always known that it’s slow. It’s embraced that. You get opinioned pieces from the Economist. Long exposés by Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. When you bought a magazine, you know the weight of the content. It’s a bit more considered and purposely “slow-cooked” (relatively.)

The newspaper, however, is fast (relatively.) Quick headlines, timely reports, even it’s op-eds and editorials have to be time-sensitive.

These mature communication channels have established their paces, spaces, and areas-of-concern. And its audiences have learned those boundaries as they grow up with them. 

What’s interesting about the internet is that we’re still drawing those boundaries. Buzzfeed is cranking out SEO listicles along side with surprisingly researched long-form articles. VICE uploads food porn episodes next to war-torn mini-documentaries in its YouTube channel. Meanwhile, “traditional” media platforms like the Atlantic are struggling to migrate their boundaries/brand/reputation while considering the tactics of the Buzzfeeds and VICEs. 

The internet is both simultaneously fast and slow, shallow and deep. And more confusingly, it flattens the dimension of time and access. The two vectors of which traditional channels have conventionally defined themselves. 

The burden of today’s content makers is they have to now find new markers of authenticity and authority to garner the particular attention that they seek…

It’s gonna be fun for good long while.

Inevitably I’m retreading someone’s blog post, however I can’t help but think about the music industry. The advent of the internet and Garageband has made it the best time in history to be a musical-content creator. Unfortunately, the “music industry” extends past just creators. It extends to critics, reporters, archivists…and distributors. 

My hope at this moment though isn’t to again villianize distributors. But rather to think about them also in light of this age of the internet. 

Something that I have to remember is that our “modern economy” is still built on-top of older principles. And many times, despite feeling far removed from the “old times,” much of the time modernity is just extensions of the old ways. Like, the futures commodities market is just all goats on a large-large scale.

Imagine back in the day that the two of us were both farmers. You with say wheat, and I had goats. Winter was coming, and we both knew we wanted a bit of each other’s goods. So one day we would meet up, and start bartering. A bushel for a goat? No, three bushels for two goats. Nah, two bushels for one goat, and I’ll throw in some cheese. Deal. 

We still do this, albeit nowadays with literally everything from uranium, petroleum, cotton (and yep, goats.) 

What’s interesting about the music distribution business in the last ten years is that for the first time has a goat farmer approached them, and said “Twenty albums please, and in return I’ll give you no goats.” 

The bartering started with zero. Because the internet has completely collapsed the perceived value of distribution. I needed none of your paper printed album art, none of your CD jewel cases, none of the your distribution trucks, none of your logistics, none of your CD-burning factories. 

“Your particular goods are worth zero to me, give me that Nirvana album.”

That can’t be a good feeling to wake up to, and very hard to negotiate. You can’t help but perceive the general public as criminals. Especially when you disagree that you and your work is not worth zero. 

And so the tension of the last decade. Between the $13.99 CD album and the $0 Napster/Limewire/Bittorrent, we’ve settled on $9.99-ish for an iTunes digital download.

For now at least, until the next generation of goat farmers approaches Apple and asks “So what do you really do?” 

Early Twitter seems so archaic back in the day. Initially named “twttr,” it was geared for the SMS era. Piggy-backing on existing paradigms when secretly it was a new thing. However, it was hard to tell because it looked sorta like a blog, and it looked sorta like texting. So people sorta knew what was going on. 

In the same way that early television sorta looked like radio. Storytelling and voice was there, but didn’t make much use of the visual-ness of the form. And it seemed like a fad up until it turned out it wasn’t. That it was a new medium to express ideas. 

What I’m thinking about today is those annotation links on YouTube videos. That things that you can click on, and jump to a new link or video. 

They look sorta like hyperlinks. So you know we sorta know what’s going on with those, right? 

And that’s the thing, just today I smelled something “twttr”-ish. Not quite “Twitter”-ish, but “twttr”-ish. 

Because they also sorta look like videogames. And YouTube being closer to videogames than its immediate ancestor of “movies” and “television” tells me that there’s something new here. There’s a new way to play with the audience (for the content creator.) Like how Twitter is a new way to talk. And television is a new way to broadcast. 

If you can imagine those ugly annotations being beautiful and robust: then you can imagine a structured yet non-linear way to communicate that’s visceral and immediate. And making an audiovisual medium beautiful is still hard. Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro are hard. Making beautiful videogames is hard. (Just ask how much it costs to make “Grand Theft Auto,” and that’s just to let you kill virtual hookers.) 

But YouTube is easy. (Garageband easy…and you know how the music industry looks nowadays post-Garageband.) 

Now let’s re-phrase YouTube: an easy way to create a new audiovisual medium that’s interactive like videogames in a beautiful manner. 

Oh man. That’s gonna be fun.

It’s been some time now, which means we’re entering the backlash phase of “open work environments.” Let’s bypass this phase real quick: ultimately, the ideal workspace is a compromise of open and closed spaces relative to the preferences and work-styles of the team and company.

The nuance I’m curious about is social contracts. What I think is the ultimate factor is whether the inhabitants of an environment feel safe. Not in the physical chased-by-a-bear sense, but safe to work, act, and move in the ways they think is most conducive.

A common reaction to “cubicles” is that they’re isolating and oppressive. But I think the larger picture of that situation is that often the company and its management had often already gotten isolating and oppressive. And the physicality of the cubicle reinforces those policies.

On the other side, open offices can engender trust, but only if there’s trust in the first place. Dave Coplin’s “Re-imagining work” does a beautiful job of illustrating the finer details. 

Thinking about how so many follow start-up culture. I would venture that the open office movement was embraced by start-up culture because:

1. Many were leaving said oppressive companies, and wanted to visually rebel from “cubicle life”
2. But I would say the real reason was that they couldn’t afford furniture, so open offices were a byproduct of circumstance.

But again, my focus is the social contract. Start-ups, by nature, have the implicit benefit of a strong social contract. They already like and already trust each other. It’s okay for them to have a ping-pong table because all two, four, six of them actually enjoy ping-pong.

What gets complicated is when a company grows, and the social contract gets diluted. Whether because the implicit-ness doesn’t get communicated, or is actively altered by the new people.

At that point:

1. Cubicle people will start regressing into pockets of gatherings, or self-isolate
2. Open office people will re-position their monitors to create walls, or remove themselves “to get coffee” or “take a phone call” (because those two slacker coders keep goddamn playing ping pong.)

 The point is the architecture of an environment can (and will) amplify either negative or positive policies, but I wouldn’t assume just changing the architecture will solve foundational issues between a group of people. 

“Turkey in the dryer” is my proudest linguistical creation to date.

It was, of course, borne out of those idle daydreams when you take your morning shower. That particular morning, I was thinking about machines, and realized that ovens and dryers are essentially the same thing.

They’re large boxes that heat up inside of themselves. However, the nuances and configuration of the respective boxes creates functional differences and efficiencies. So conceptually, you can treat a dryer like an oven, throw a turkey in there, and you can imagine that it would cook it…eventually.

Very inefficiently, but it could conceptually do it. 

That’s me in a nutshell. There are tasks and problems that I am very proficient at, and can easily oven out solutions in a timely manner.

And then there are other tasks that I could conceptually tackle, and technically get to a solution. But it would require so much effort and the result may be so unappetizing that you would have been better off finding someone more geared towards that problem.

The hard part about growing up so far is knowing when I would be an oven versus being a dryer, and harder still is telling other people what is ovenable to me and what is dryering. But slowly I’m getting better at it.

Which is kinda funny. I’m a turkey in a dryer when it comes to figuring out when I’m dryer or not.