Dynamic Hypocrisy

I feel like the world we’ve built is bigger than what our brains can process. It was probably already that way when we settled into agricultural societies. But book-printing is probably the most modern inflection point.

The moment when we made more books than any one person could reasonably consume within a lifetime.

And here we are with self-help books on how to manage email is a signal that it hasn’t gotten better.

But I think there’s more structural scaling that’s happening, but not sure if we’ve framed it into a scaling issue framework.

I think about voting for example. A fundamental necessity, but dismal turnout especially for the USA. The pacing of the world has outrun the functional speed of a government (when it is working.) But we haven’t quite found a set of tools or ideas that scale to the pace. And we see that we symbolically empower more nimble bodies to make decisions such as corporations. For better or for worse.

Armchair quarterback moment: the NBA should do team relegation like soccer does. Relegation is when teams move up and down through lower and higher leagues based on performance. The implications being less budget for lower tier teams. 

The NBA already has a minor league tier with the G League. So every year, the worst two or three teams move down to the G League. While the best of that league moves up to the major league. 

It has great implications for tanking or losing on purpose. Since instead of the worst teams tanking to get the best college prospects, they actually miss the chance and get demoted. While the best of the “minor” league will get that draft pick instead. 

It incentivizes both tiers of teams. 

Okay that’s it from the couch for now

When I think about metaphors from the universe, I go too literally and think about rocks and suns. There’s a stoic nature to both. The rock just exists, and doesn’t really bother anybody. It does its thing, and the universe goes on. 

While the sun is also doing its thing, but its thing affects everything around it. It radiates light and heat constantly. It treats all things equally, provides equally. And doesn’t look for anything in return regardless. 

It’s active yet blasé in a way. From our perspective, it never stops doing its thing, but even the most relentless — chills for half the day at night. 

In the classic cartoons of Looney Tunes, often in hard decisions, an angel and a devil would appear on a character’s shoulders. They would both debate and cajole the character into their side of things.

Jump ahead 200 years. And the internet is implanted in our brains. Setting up a poll can easily result in 7-8-10 billion responses.

From “which cereal should I buy?” To “what color should our car be?”

To “which person should I choose to marry?”

To “is there too many people in the world? Should I commit suicide for the overall health of society?”

What’s free will? And is it relevant in 200 years?

With wisdom and experience, we start making decisions faster and more informed by virtue of us understanding our craft and the our world more than our younger selves. We respect wise people.

Now jump 200 years, and the internet is implanted in our heads.

So every decision now, we can make with the collective archive of all recorded human history and the related decisions made before us.

Do we respect that more or less? Is it still instinct?

Is that decision “our own?” Can we lay claim to this?

Is there a separation between “self” and “other” and “society” anymore?

Is that a question even worth asking in 200 years?

Can you bully someone with kindness? I find myself asking that as I’m observing a co-worker deal with a client. She’s using kind words, and kind tones, and kind projections. But is it a kind atmosphere?

Is there something off in forcing certain type of space?

Is asserting something, even if it’s kind, somewhat of an aggressive act in of itself?

Is there something more empathetic to engage in a louder, more interruptive conversation if that’s what the other people want? Is it more honest to engage people on terms they’re comfortable with?

If it gets to a place of mutual understanding…is that okay even if that place has more yelling than kind soft words?

I’m starting to think so. The difference for me is malice and un-productivity. Malice undercuts the goal of work, and is cutting people not ideas. And not getting things done is not great whether people are being nice or not.

As a designer, taking pride in clean UX or clear architecture or concise content is one thing. But every time I see someone see software in the outside world, I find the biggest aspect to UX that matters is the response rate of the servers.

People start randomly tapping things or refreshing the page just trying to get to the content or data or goal they’re after. Which means it doesn’t really matter anymore how on-point the iconography is or how well placed the button is. There’s no user journey mapped out for random tapping waiting for the server to respond.

Because they don’t know how servers work, they’re just wanting to know if they can purchase those concert tickets or find that email.

There’s something ironic that the best UX design decision is something that is generally within the purview of IT and dev.

A small thought: it weirds me out that not more packages are stolen.

It both speaks to the resiliency of our social bonds. But also to how fragile and tenuous it can be.

We all grow up with things we find incredulous about our previous generations. At its most innocuous, we go “Oh that’s grandpa.” when he says something that now’s considered racist or sexist, but was fine during his time.

So I wonder what our grandkids will think of us as silly.

As an early fore-runner, it’ll be how incredibly blasé and lax we were about giving out our personal data. The fact that we handed over everything to Facebook from our photos to filling out out hobbies to what events we were attending. All for free because what’s a few banner ads?

I think we’ll find that our personal information and preferences will be one of the last commodities that will have. And only started to realize how much profiting companies have made relative to the building of server farms for our “convenience.”

I forget most of the discussion that I was listening on to years ago. Where one designer was drawing a lineage of design back to where it was more of a craft. A practice. Something closer to a carpenter than an artist or a philosopher.

And I think about that now-and-again.

The field has expanded and started tackling much more abstract problems since that discussion. So if it’s along a spectrum then the world of strategic planning and service-based problems has pushed it away from the craft end.

But how much? How much of it is still at the end of the day, creating something to towards the needs of a client? Something that is workman-like beyond the shiny PowerPoint slides in a darkened conference room?

I don’t think there’s a major implication in this thought, but more of a mental grounding in the industry. It’s hard to diminish the impact of the Steve Job’s era for design. But with the elevation was also the mysticism and hand-waving of what design can do for a client.

But there’s something to be said, that at the end of the day — it’s just a thing that we’ve been tasked with making. Sometimes a painting of a cigar is a just a painting of a cigar.