It’s that time of the year again. Last year, sponsorships amounted to about $2000 (not counting  the “buy me a coffee” micro-payments, which added another $400). This year, they’ve already crossed the $500 mark without me doing a call.

Sponsorship and “coffee” money represent a fairly small fraction of my income, but on a dumb-money to smart-money spectrum, it is the smartest money I make.  I’d trade two dollars of any other kind of income for a dollar of sponsorship income any day. The “smart” in the smart money is the unadultrated goodwill it carries. Though there are no strings attached, I feel a strong urge to reinvest sponsorship income back into the blog and related activities rather than using it to pay the bills. In a way, the money comes with the opposite of a moral hazard attached.

So if you were considering sponsoring this year, consider this your cue and sponsor away.

When I did the call last year, I shared a line (the only line, actually) from my fledgling business philosophy: go where the wild thoughts are.

This year, I’ve added another line: go deep, young man.  At 37, I think I get to call myself young man for at least another three years.

Read on for more, if you are interested in my evolving philosophy of blogging. If you are a blogger yourself, chances are you won’t learn much. I am increasingly realizing that my approach to blogging says more about me than about blogging. If you’re not a blogger, this is your annual peek behind the scenes.

Life is Long and Blogging is Young

The big thing  on my mind last year, when I did my first annual call for sponsorships, was paid members-only communities, the topic du jour at the time. My big realization was that I really disliked the idea.

At the same time, I recognized that many other bloggers did have a legitimate reason for doing such communities. One of them, Dan Andrews, is in fact one of my sponsors (two years running). He runs a great members-only community, and the model fits what he does perfectly.

But the idea just seemed wrong for ribbonfarm. Thinking about wilderness areas helped me figure out why.

This year, another big thing is on my mind, but I haven’t heard others talking about it: the thought that blogging is very young and most of us in the game have a long life ahead of us to think about. Life is long and blogging is young. 

Even Dave Winer (the original blogger in the strict, modern, post-RSS sense of the world) has only been at it for fifteen years.

The original pro-blogger, Darren Rowse, has been at it since 2002, or ten years. He was born in 1972.

Come July, I will have been it for five years. I was born in 1974.

I would guess that the age distribution of pro-bloggers — defined as “people whose financial life depends directly or indirectly on blogging” —  probably has its peak in the mid 30s. This means that most of us in this boat have at least another 30 years of financial life ahead of us.

Our personal life futures are twice as long as the entire history of blogging to date. Nobody has yet completed what could be a called a full career in blogging. There are many memoirs by writers, but none by bloggers.

It is a sobering thought. It suggests none of us knows what the hell he/she is doing.

As a useful comparison, when my dad graduated as a mechanical engineer in 1959, the profession had been in existence for about 150 years and mature for 79 years (the ASME was founded in 1880). He knew what he was getting into, and largely got what he expected.

Most of us bloggers haven’t been thinking about the long-term future at all, because it is so uncertain. I don’t even mean this in the retirement planning sense (that’s definitely in the toilet for me, for the time being). I mean in the more basic sense of what will I be doing in 2034, when I hit 60?  My dad (and most of your parents) probably had a fairly good idea. An increasing number of us (not just bloggers) have no idea. I could be living in a homeless shelter, or a mansion.

“Blogging” somehow seems like too insubstantial an answer to the 2034 question. It seems more pragmatic to think of it as just an aspect of running a business in the traditional sense. A functional, instrumental activity that falls under marketing as a cost, driving other things like entrepreneurship.

Maybe for some. There are certainly content-marketers, entrepreneur-bloggers, VC-bloggers and others whose readership dwarfs mine. But this instrumental view of blogging still strikes me as far too unromantic.

Blogging doesn’t just feel like an ancillary activity to those of us who do it seriously. It feels like the core activity. It feels like the thing that anchors our economic identity. Calling it “marketing for something else” is like calling book-writing a marketing strategy for the speaker-circuit industry (true in a financial sense for many, but no good book writer I know has priorities set up that way).

I may (in fact I will have to) do other things. Lots of other things if I want to continue to pay the rent. But the core game I’d like to keep playing is blogging.

The Long Game

So what is the state of play? What is the long game that pro-bloggers must work on if they want to be around in 2039 doing something that is a recognizable descendant of blogging?

It is hard to say because so much of relevance to the game has happened even in just the last five years.

Not only is RSS no longer the defining element of blogging, it is not even a particularly relevant element for most end-users (I think in a few years, it will turn into middle-ware technology for various delivery mechanisms).

The rise of the Kindle has already changed the long-form content game and is now taking on shorter forms. My first book Tempo has, in its first year, weathered the decisive overtaking of paperbacks by ebooks. My next book will almost certainly be ebook-first.

The looming rise of active, rich content — animations and zoomable infographics for example — threatens to change the game further.  Video is starting to explode.  Social diffusion technology is still very unstable. A few years ago, you had to ride the RSS-to-Twitter switch. Then a Facebook presence became important. Now Google+ is changing the nature of organic search.

Mobile devices were mostly irrelevant when I started. Then belatedly, I added a mobile-friendly theme to my WordPress site. Today, mobile-device traffic is over 10% of all traffic. Two years ago, it was less than 5%.  Before that, mobile was no more than a rounding error. The change has been so rapid that Wired even proclaimed two years ago, in a nice bit of rhetorical exaggeration, that The Web is Dead.

And don’t forget aging infrastructure. PHP is already an old language and WordPress a mature product. There is a very high likelihood that both will decline and die before most of today’s bloggers do. And in the transition to whatever comes after, chances are, the game will change yet again.

Many people adopt a naively classicist attitude: all that stuff doesn’t matter. Just focus on creating the best content you can and the rest will take care of itself.

Except that it doesn’t.

At least not if you want to build your financial life on top of blogging.  Changes in media kill entire generations of content producers who fail to adapt, as many silent movie stars discovered when audio hit the movies.

At the other extreme, there are bloggers who ignore content altogether, and work furiously to keep up with the rapid evolution of the medium. They know all the latest SEO tricks, are the first to figure out every new distribution channel, and experiment with every new idea. But their content stays stupendously crappy in every medium — the same old list posts (Now available as an e-Book and an app!!!) and Three Marketing Lessons from William Shatner type dreck.

Any idiot can toil away at the thankless task of producing great content that the world then fails to appreciate, let alone pay for. Any idiot can get tech-happy and run like crazy to keep up with every tiny development.

It takes serious work to figure out how to balance the two concerns.

Especially if you want to stay in the game for the long-haul: 30-40 years.

Very few will succeed at this balancing act.  Heck, most don’t even want to.  They’re doing it because they realize they have to.

That might be what makes my situation different. You see, I actually like doing this and want to keep doing it. I actively resent it when other activities cannibalize my blogging energy. I get depressed when I am forced to do things that align poorly with blogging, simply to make money.

A Coffee Date for 2050

I like doing ribbonfarm. I would like to keep doing it for the rest of my life, whatever form the underlying technology takes, be it a website or a telepathic broadcast to readers with the iPhone56 implanted inside their heads.

I would like to spend more and more time doing ribbonfarm. I’d like to continue doing it until dementia and arthritis (assuming keyboards survive the transition to digitally-enabled telepathy) stop me. It is not so much a project as the persistent anchor thread in my life, that stays with me as other projects come and go.

Some of you have been reading this site since Day 1, and I am constantly surprised by the number of people who don’t seem to go away after an initial bout of reading.

Some day, maybe in 2050 if I live that long, I’d like to get together, over immersive-holographic telepresence at my local Starbucks, with the 3.5 people who would have, by that point, stayed with me for five decades instead of just five years. I would like to reflect on the journey with those 3.5 people, and laugh gleefully at the people we’ve managed to outlive. After that conversation, in a lucid hour between bouts of senile and  incoherent yelling at my Obamacare robotic nurse (I’ll probably have the Walmart store brand rather than the high-end Roomba branded one), I would like to do one final post and hang up my spurs for good.  Some crotchety old reader will no doubt complain in the comments that I never did finish the Gervais Principle, which will at that point, have dragged on to Part XXXV without explaining Toby satisfactorily. 

Realistically, I’d put the chances of this scenario playing out at about 10%.  Surviving that long in this game is a very low-probability proposition, financially speaking.

I would say 90% of serious bloggers today are not going to be able to make blogging a lifelong calling. I have no reason to believe I am special, so while I’d like to make that 2050 date with whoever plans to attend, and give surviving that long my best shot, it is also going to be a long shot.

My best shot involves going deep.

Back in the the nineteenth century, they used to say, Go West, Young Man.

Today, the best advice I can give myself is Go Deep. What does this mean?

Going Deep

Going deep means understanding the evolving digital landscape in human terms, and situating my actions in a human rather than technological context. It means building interesting relationships rather than Klout. It means paying attention to economic fundamentals — financial and social capital in particular — rather than follower counts and RSS subscription numbers.

This also fundamentally means taking it slow and easy. I have no traffic, analytics, income or sponsorship targets. This grows (or declines) at the rate it wants to, with no artificial acceleration.

I stopped paying attention to the numbers a long time ago. I rarely log into Google Analytics anymore. I only do it when people ask me about my vital stats. If you’re curious, I’ve had 32k visits/22k visitors in the last month and my RSS subscriber count has been hovering around the 4,500 mark for about a year. My bounce rate is 5.3% (this always shocks people who understand what it means), and I get about a third each of my traffic from organic search, referrals and direct visits.

But managing any function of those numbers is like managing the stock price of a company. It will inevitably detract from managing the blog (or company) itself.

I stopped caring not because those numbers aren’t important. They are just not important in the long game. Who knows what surface numbers will matter in 10 or 20 years or what analytics model will measure reader engagement over brain-implant telepathy links?

Going deep is about adding substance, context and narrative to relationships with individual readers and evolving content themes that start out as paint-by-numbers constructs.

On the people front, at what point does a reader initially labeled as (say) RSS subscriber #4482 acquire a name and a voice? At what point does he or she become a memory of a coffee or lunch owed? At what point does he or she become a friend or a co-conspirator on some project?

On the content front, at what point does a average article become a minor viral hit that is worth examining for deeper significance? At what point does a traffic spike change the nature of the comments conversation? At what point does an anchor post like the Gervais Principle or A Big Little Idea Called Legibility turn into the seed of a longer series and eventually work its way into the voice and subtext of a blog? At what point does it give birth to a book? At what point does it turn into a tumor that threatens the vitality of the blog? At what point does it threaten to create an echo-chamber of insider conversations?

I’ve talked about content quite a lot already this year, so let me say a little more about people and relationships in relation to blogging.

Going deep is about cultivating relationships so they transcend numbers. There are obviously natural limits here. I would say I know about a dozen of you quite well by now. Another couple of dozen, I know casually.

I don’t know what blogging will look like in 2050, but I do know that masses of nameless data points won’t really matter. The ones who are more than numbers will be the ones who make this both worth doing and possible to do, psychologically, socially and financially. My limit is probably around 150, but I’ll worry about that when I get there.

I sometimes have conversations with other bloggers where we discuss propositions like “10,000 RSS subscribers is really the critical threshold at which X happens.”

But in a way, I cannot bring myself to care about such numbers games. Perhaps such claims are true. I wouldn’t know. Philosophically I’d prefer to have more stories to tell than graphs to ponder. I don’t have the right psychological wiring to play the mass-market analytics-driven game. I wouldn’t care if my readership plateaued at 4500 RSS readers (or future equivalents), so long as the evolving story kept getting richer and more interesting, with more oddball characters, weird events and strange memories accumulating every year.

Going deep is of course not the only approach to the long 30-40 year game. I suppose many of my peers with equally long views are going for the broad game: building certain numbers across multiple generations of technology, and growing a nameless, faceless, storyless “market” at a clockwork 5% a year or something.  But something about that sheer quantitative scaling vision, with no change in the narrative of the Blogging Life, depresses me.

Going Deep in Practice

Back here in 2012, the Blogging Life evolves one year at a time, one tax-return at a time, as you ponder whether to keep at it for another year, or quit the game and look for a job. So far so good. 2012 is shaping up to be a good year for me, consulting-wise, so I don’t think I’ll be forced to quit this year. This also means I am relatively unconstrained in deciding how to use sponsorship money to improve the blog, since I’ve already got rent covered.

Last year, I spent about half the sponsorship money on a new laptop, and the rest on organizing several field trips for readers in the Bay Area. I met at least a hundred readers in person, and made at least a half-dozen new friends. Ridiculous numbers for an introvert. But then, the Web is changing our ideas about what words like introvert even mean.

This year my plans have changed. Thanks to the success of Refactor Camp in paying for itself without much subsidizing, I think offline events can safely be left to fund themselves if money is required.  My future plans on that front are to make all such events no-profit/no-loss, and paid for entirely by attendees.

That also makes it fairer, since I don’t want to use global sponsorship money only in the few physical locations where there are enough Friends of Ribbonfarm around to sustain ongoing real-world activities.

So my spending plans this year, depending on the sponsorship levels, will be split between supporting core writing projects  and “going deep” experiments.

On the first front, at some point this year, I hope to start my second serious book. I thought of doing a Kickstarter funding drive for it separately, but then I realized I prefer the looser sponsorship model for this sort of thing, with fluid expectations and commitments. After all, with Tempo, I moved my publication date something like six times and got it out the door two years later than I planned. But I got it done.

On the second front, I will be trying out a few online “going deep” experiments. I am not sure what those might be yet. I’ve thought of (or had suggested to me) various ideas like offering paid blogging apprenticeships, holding “online field trips” based on the offline ones from last year, supporting a sort of online coworking studio (free, but with qualifying requirements for members), and a webinar series.

We’ll see. I am open to suggestions.

So with that, I’ll leave you with the link to the 2012 sponsors page.

There is a fascinating set of ideas that has been swirling around in the global zeitgeist for the past decade, around the quote that will keep Donald Rumsfeld in the history books long after his political career is forgotten. I am referring, of course, to the famous unknown-unknowns quote from 2002. Here it is:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.

Rumsfeld put his finger on a major itch that set off widespread scratching. This scratching, which is about the collective human condition in the face of fundamental uncertainties, shows no sign of slowing down a decade later. But the conversation has taken an interesting turn that I want to call out.

Out of all this scratching, four broad narratives have emerged that can be arranged on a 2×2 with analytic/synthetic on one axis and optimistic/pessimistic on the other.  Three are rehashes of older narratives. But the fourth — the Hydra narrative — is new. I have labeled it the Hydra narrative after Taleb’s metaphor in his explanation of anti-fragility: you cut one head off, two emerge in its place (his book on the subject is due out in October).

The general idea behind the Hydra narrative in a broad sense (not just what Taleb has said/will say in October) is that hydras eat all unknown unknowns (not just Taleb’s famous black swans) for lunch. I have heard at least three different versions of this proposition in the last year. The narrative inspires social system designs that feed on uncertainty rather than being destroyed by it. Geoffrey West’s ideas about superlinearity are the empirical part of an attempt to construct an existence proof showing that such systems are actually possible.

My own favorite starting point for thinking about these things, as some of you would have guessed, is James Scott’s idea of illegibility, which is poised diplomatically at the origin, equally amenable to being incorporated in any of the narratives. It is equally capable of informing either skepticism or faith in any of the narratives, and can be employed towards both analysis and synthesis.

I haven’t made up my mind about the question in the title of the post, but am on alert for new ideas relating to it, from Taleb and others.  So this is something of an early-warning post.

A Timeline of Significant Events

The Rumsfeld quote captures the widespread (but mistaken) sense that this decade has been unusually full of unexpected major disasters, and the sense  that systemic global reactions to those events have been inadequate.

Here’s the rough timeline of some major and/or representative events in this particular trend.

• 1999: James Scott publishes Seeing Like a State
• 2001: The 9/11 attacks
• 2002: Donald Rumsfeld enters the history books with unknown-unknown
• 2004: Indian ocean tsunami
• 2005: Hurricane Katrina
• 2007: Nicholas Nassim Taleb publishes The Black Swan
• 2010: Haiti earthquake
• 2010: BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill
• 2011: Fukushima nuclear disaster
• 2011: Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe institute starts talking about new research on superlinearity, and why cities are immortal while corporations and people die
• 2012: Global Guerrillas blogger John Robb starts a new site, Resilient Communities
• 2012 Nicholas Nassim Taleb book, Anti-fragility (due out in October)

It is important to note that the decade itself has not been exceptional. As Fareed Zakaria noted in The Post-American World, we simply hear about big, unexpected, global disasters much faster than we used to, and in much greater (and more gory) detail.

If you don’t believe me, simply take an honest inventory of any other decade in the last century (you could go further back if you know enough history). You’ll find big natural disasters and political cataclysms in every decade.

What has been exceptional about the 2002-2012 decade is not what happened, but our intellectual response to it. The responses go beyond the well-known ones in the timeline above.  There appear to be hundreds of people thinking seriously along such lines and taking on significant projects related to such interests.

In the last year alone, I’ve been introduced to two such people in my local virtual neighborhood: Jean Russell (who coined the word thrivability as an alternative to sustainability) and Ed Beakley, who has been studying preparedness for unconventional crises through his Project White Horse since Katrina.

You might say a major movement is afoot. Whether it will go anywhere is unclear.

An Exceptional Response to an Unexceptional Decade

Two things are responsible for our exceptional response as a global culture.

The first is simply the slow decline of America’s relative role in global affairs, and the corresponding rise of a chaotic political energy around the globe, at all spatial frequencies from neighborhood block to planet-wide. It feels like there’s nobody in charge. This feels both liberating and scary.

The second is related to Zakaria’s point about information dissemination. The speed and completeness of our knowledge of global affairs has done more than expand our circle of concern. The potential of the Internet to enable new forms of collective action has also convinced us that we can act on those concerns in improved ways.

Unusually visible chaos, plus an authority vacuum, plus a perceived sense of greater control equal a deep restlessness.

It is a popular restlessness, not  just elitist hand-wringing. The latter is a permanent feature of world history; it is hard to find a period when the intellectual elites have not been animated by a sense of both crisis and opportunity.  This is not true of popular restlessness (which is different from popular unrest).

The popular restlessness has also been amplified by the collapse of traditional publishing. Not only is nobody in charge anymore, there are no official-sounding voices even pretending to be in charge. ”Newspaper of record” sounds almost archaic today.

The restlessness represents a social energy that seeks to do big things and looks for both intellectual and political leadership. It is a social energy that swings wildly between a sense of limitless potential and deep despair, and is hungry for both meaningful perspectives and rallying cries.

In other words, the social energy sloshes violently across the four quadrants, fueling a demand for all four of the emergent narratives.

The Rehash Quadrants

I don’t have much to say about the three older quadrants.

The bottom left is basically fatalist, and the label is due to Bruce Sterling. He uses it to cover the top left quadrant as well (in his scheme such “hairshirt green” thinking is a subset of “acting dead” and therefore part of “Dark Euphoria”), but I think this is a little unfair, since the thinking generally includes the idea of regeneration after a Dark Age. So “Spore” thinking seems to me to be a more accurate label than “acting dead.”

The bottom right quadrant includes your usual suspects who offer revisionist counter-narratives to every Dark Euphoria narrative. Contemporary thinkers in this quadrant include Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist) and Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) and the late Michael Crichton (State of Fear).

Their general rhetorical strategy is to focus on data showing that things are actually improving and that perceptions of impending doom are either mistaken or overblown. Zakaria and most pro-globalists also belong in this quadrant. Their revisionist attempts enjoy varying degrees of success.

The optimistic-synthetic quadrant is the one where the most fresh thinking has emerged.

The Hydra Quadrant

There are two elements to the Hydras-eat-Unknown-Unknowns-for-lunch narrative.

One is simply a massive amount of Gung-Ho sentiment around Internet-tool-enabled individual empowerment. This is a mob of Horatio Alger heroes busily connecting the dots between 3D printing and worldwide abundance and peace. It almost feels as though, given the right cue, they would break out in a collective, worldwide song-and-dance flash mob involving a billion people.

This (non-dark) euphoria element is not new. It accompanies every major wave of technology.

What is new is the idea that we might be on the brink of a successful theory of social engineering.

The great hope is that we might somehow be able to put together ideas about anti-fragility, immortal cities and resilience to solve the problems that defeated the similarly-inspired authoritarian high-modernist (a term due to Scott) social engineers of a century ago.

The old failure, in the Hydra narratives, is framed as both a moral failure (a case of hubris and hamartia), and a technical failure: (they didn’t understand “bottom-up, organic, open-systems, network thinking.”)

It is important to note that no believer in the resurrected social engineering narrative has any clue what ”bottom-up, organic, open-systems network thinking” actually means. In fact they typically understand what they mean far less clearly than Le Corbusier understood authoritarian high modernism.

What lends them confidence in their narrative is, firstly, a sense that their efforts are now informed by an appropriate humility and a penitent understanding of past failures, and secondly, the (unfalsifiable) idea that “bottom-up and organic” cannot (or even should not) be comprehensible to any individual. There is a sense that an understanding of the idea can only exist at some, higher, collective level. Gaia knows, and we shall not want.

The moral dimension of the confidence can basically be ignored. It is merely secularized religiosity and a yearning for a moral calculus to confirm an analysis-by-faith.  There are of course psychological consequences of hubris that can be analyzed and understood, but there is nothing special about hubris as a source of failure modes. Humility and penitence generate their own failure modes.

The should not part is the culturally interesting reaction. True believers take offense at the very idea of studying the apparently ineffably-collective.

On occasion, when I’ve had this sort of discussion with the religiously Hydra-minded, and sketched out some sort of tentative model, they’ve looked at me aghast, as if I were King Nimrod attempting to build the Tower of Babel.

Building with Illegibility

I suppose I resonate with the idea of illegibility so much because it is so neutral with respect to the four narratives, and because it provides a useful amoral framework of analysis, within which things like hubris, over-reach and humility are merely minor psychological variables rather than central concerns (though Scott’s own leanings are clear, he keeps them clearly separated).

• In the bottom left quadrant, you can use the idea to understand why some grand social engineering projects fail.
• In the bottom right, you can use it to understand why other projects succeed.
• In the top left, it suggests design principles for resilient survival.
• And in the top right, the interesting new quadrant, it suggests the right questions that need to be asked in order to test, and if possible, realize, Hydra narratives.

It is this last project that interests me. Some questions that occur to me include:

• Can illegibility be understood as a reservoir of spare hydra heads in some information-theoretic sense?
• Is perfect illegibility equivalent to a renewable flow of maximally compressed information potential to fuel behavior?
• What dynamic mix of epistemic knowledge and metis knowledge best informs the growth and stewardship of Hydras?
• What is the ideal amount of illegibility in a given social system?
• What are the failure modes associated with too little legibility? (Scott documents the failure modes of too much legibility well, but mostly ignores the other end of the spectrum).

But to ask such questions, you must first give up the near-religious reverence for ineffable “bottom-up, network” models and the idea that attempting to understand them clearly within a single head rather than a swarm-head is a sinful act. It is merely a tricky one.

I am really looking forward to hearing what Taleb has to say in his book. I suspect, even if I disagree with all of it, it will fuel some fertile thinking for me. Evil twins tend to be reliably stimulating.

I’ve been procrastinating on this post for a couple of weeks, wondering what the heck to say about my first attempt at a serious Ribbonfarm event: Refactor Camp 2012, on March 3rd, at the San Francisco Zoo.

Throughout 2011, I did a whole lot of physical-world stuff, meeting people all over the country, sleeping on couches and in spare bedrooms, and organizing a handful of field trips (I think I met at least a hundred people, if not more). But Refactor Camp felt different somehow.

Every interesting thing in my life has been the result of scratching at some weird itch. Every screwed-up thing has been the result of ignoring such itches and attempting to follow some mature-sounding social script instead.

Last year, through my travels and field trips,  I was intrigued to discover that itch-scratchers are disproportionately represented in the readership here on Ribbonfarm. Which is how many of us ended up on the Sausalito docks listening to Sam Penrose talking about outlaw living on houseboats. Or how I ended up inside the storm drains under Las Vegas with Laura Wood.

Reflecting on all this led me to wonder: What would happen if you put a bunch of itchy-scratchy types in a room together? Let’s find out.

I am pleased to announce that on Saturday March 3rd, at the San Francisco Zoo, between 10 AM and 3 PM, along with a few itchy-scratchy co-conspirators, I will be hosting and partially sponsoring the first ever barcamp related to the themes of this blog: Refactor Camp 2012.

All itchy-scratchy types are invited. Use the promotional code EARLYBIRD to register before 10 PM, Thursday Feb 16th, and get $10 off the $40 general registration. You can get one of the limited student reservations if you are a registered student somewhere ($10), or one of the sponsor tickets ($100) if you want to help cover the costs, since I am subsidizing it a bit. Our meeting space is limited to about 40 people max.

The event will run from 10 AM to 3 PM, in one of the meeting rooms at the zoo (with WiFi), and will include lunch, all-day coffee and admission to the zoo.

So sign up now. And then come back and continue reading to find out why a zoo, why the theme is “generativity and captivity” and what any of this has to do with scratching itches and refactoring perceptions.

What’s Included

Besides lunch, coffee and WiFi that is.

The main event page  has an evolving speaker and topic agenda. So far I have 4 confirmed speakers (besides myself that is): Sam Penrose, Jane Huang, Nick Pinkston and Greg Rader.

Each has helped me see very interesting things in the last year, and I am challenging them to do the same for a larger group, with a quick 10 minute whiteboard-only talk.

We’ll weave a loose barcamp style workshopping agenda around what they have to say. I expect to add a couple more speakers at most, but the rest of the time will be open time that we’ll structure as we see fit. You’ll be able to propose your own mini-sessions or speaking topics, and we’ll do the barcamp thing of voting on what we want to fill the time with.

Somewhere along the way, we’ll go look at the zoo.

I can’t predict what you’ll get out of it. It’s an experiment. You might turn an itch into a fully fleshed out passion project that keeps you awake for the rest of the week. Or you might just discover that you like giraffes more than zebras. Or you might just have an interesting time meeting people who are up to strange things.

Generativity and Captivity

I’ve often wondered about the difference between using external, social scripts to guide your actions (such as “American Dream” or “Write a novel” or “Do a YC startup”) versus being driven by strange impulses that may or may not conform to specific scripts. These are the itch-scratching behaviors that can snowball into either major passion projects or madness.

For example, I’ve had a “container-shipping itch” for years now, and it keeps snowballing in broad, metaphoric ways. I have no idea where it is taking me.

When scripts and itches align, great things can happen.

When they don’t, you have a choice.

If you let the script over-rule the itch, you end up feeling trapped by it. Both cubicle life and free-agent life are scripts. So are things like “write a novel.” Scripts are “be somebody” paths.

If you let the itch over-rule the script, you end up unleashing a lot of demented energy. Energy that can lead to obsessive-compulsive behavior. Itch scratching is a “do something” path.

The cost is that you may break scripts. You never know where an itch-scratching may lead. Script-breaking for the hell of it is a stupid idea. But script-breaking as an unintended consequence of scratching an itch always seems to trigger interesting events in my life. They may be good or bad, but they won’t be boring.

Itch scratching destabilizes your life.

With me for instance, shipping containers have become a motif for a more generalized itch. I have no idea whether that will lead to a book, a journey around the world, a painting, a video game, quitting blogging to join the merchant marines, or an idea for a start-up.

It’s simply an itch. It makes me do certain things.

Itchy-scratchy lives naturally trigger the tension between generativity and captivity. That’s what I want to poke at and explore, with others who are good at it.

Why the Zoo?

The field trips we did last year (four of them) convinced me that you only get interesting things out of your head if you put interesting things in.

Zoos have always left me both fascinated and ambivalent. On the one hand, they are critical in conservation efforts and the only way we can get up close and personal with 99% of the living world. They also seem to be the only way to keep some species going (there are now more tigers in captivity in American than in the wild in India, for instance).

On the other hand, we do keep wild things unnaturally captive in zoos, there’s no getting around that. In modern zoos, very humanely captive, but still captive. Some species are undoubtedly happier and genuinely better off as well (after all, dogs and cats self-domesticated around ancient humans), but for other species, captivity is somewhere between a mixed blessing and a curse.

The only real justification is that we do this to ourselves as well. We are one of the latter species for whom captivity is a mixed blessing. The only real difference is that our zoo cages are the scripts of civilized life.

Like zoo animals, we live safer and longer lives than we would in the wild, but like them, it leaves us restless, with no outlet for wild, barbarian instincts.

Whichever you look at them, zoos throw up difficult questions about both our relationship with nature and our own self-imposed “civilized” condition.

I hope those questions provide an interesting context for thinking about generativity, captivity and itch-scratching.

Why “Refactor Camp”

Finally, why “Refactor Camp”?

Well, refactored perceptions is the quixotic tagline of this blog, and I’ve come to realize that the main way you get to interesting and unusual perspectives on the world is to simply scratch an itch and go wherever that takes you. And one day, you find that you have ended up somewhere with a strange view of familiar things.

Scratching itches is how you do refactored perception.

So, see you on March 3rd, with an itch. Let’s see where we end up. Here are the links again.

The event page, with evolving details of agenda, speakers etc. Refactor Camp 2012.

The registration page (also linked from the page above): sign up.

Now for something a little different and spectacularly self-absorbed.

Several of you have suggested over the years that I should make up some sort of helpful landing page to get new readers oriented. I’ve been mulling how to do that in an interesting and helpful way for quite a while now, and about six months ago, I settled upon the idea of a conceptual map. This is the first draft.

The last time I froze and posted my short-term reading list on August 12, people seemed to appreciate it. Going by my Amazon Affiliate data and random conversations with some of you on Google+ and Facebook, it looks like at least a few dozen people bought one or more of the books and read along, in a sort of invisible de facto book club. So I figured I’d make it a routine feature.

I personally finished 6.75 of the 8 books I posted (one book got swapped out for an alternate) by December 31. That’s a reading rate of just under a book every 3 weeks. Which means I should be able to get through about 8.7 books by the end of June.

Here’s my book list that I plan to get through by June 30, beyond the backlog of  1.25, which leaves me with an allowance of 7.45. I’ll round that up to 8. Here’s the list.

1. Notes on the Synthesis of Form: A seminal book on design, recommended by Dorian Taylor and Xianhang Zhang.
2. Cognition in the Wild: Another seminal book on decision-making in real-world settings, also recommended by Dorian Taylor
3. Shop Class as Soul Craft: A book on the philosophy of making stuff, and the value of working with your hands. Recommended by Art Felgate, Daniel Lemire and a couple of other people.
4. Invisible Giant: Cargill and its Transnational Strategies OR Merchants of Grain: The Power and Profits of the Five Giant Companies at the Center of the World’s Food Supply (haven’t picked yet): Books on the global food industry, recommended by Megan Lubaszska.
5. The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution: From my own list.
6. Why Beauty is Truth: the history of symmetry: From my unread pile.
7. Design in Nature: how the constructal law governs evolution in biology, physics, technology and social organization: bit of a wildcard, due to be released January 24th. Recommended by John Hagel.
8. Infrastructure: a field guide to the industrial landscape: a recommendation off Quora. Seems like fun mind-candy, targeted more at the “How Things Work” kids’ market than adults, but still…

Infrastructure and Making

Two themes seem to pop out here: infrastructure and making.

My exploration of the world of infrastructure, which has been going on casually for a couple of years (I’ve written quite a bit about things like shipping and garbage) is heading into a mature drill-down-and-integrate phase. It seems increasingly likely that my next book will be related to this stuff in some way.

If that theme is maturing and getting serious, a new theme is taking root: design, building stuff, making things. What people are calling the Maker Revolution. I see some red flags of save-the-world cultishness here, but it seems like a good time to think about the subject. Two readers, Nick Pinkston and Justin Mares, who are just coming off their Cloudfab project, have been energetically trying to persuade me (and apparently everybody else they talk to) to take this theme seriously.

If nothing else, I’ll learn enough to poke fun at the solemn save-the-world makers.

Do You Want a Forum?

On and off over the years, people have asked for a ribbonfarm discussion forum. I’ve been reluctant to set one up, since it would be more maintenance work, but now that WordPress has some strong support for the feature, it’s gotten easier.

The face-to-face field trip events last year, Google+ and Facebook have been good for small and informal sidebar conversations with some of you, but there’s something to be said for a less cluttered space for conversations that are not explicitly linked to a blog post, and accessible to all.

If I do this, it will be free, but I may do some light-touch gatekeeping so administration doesn’t take over my life.

If you are interested, let me know by email or post a comment, along with any suggestions. If there’s enough interest (at least a couple of dozen people), I’ll set one up.

Turning this de facto invisible book club into a de jure visible one seems to be a good first use case for a forum.

Here we go.

The Numbers

It was a bit of a slump year in terms of number of posts. I had 35 posts, where I had 47 posts in 2010, 59 in 2009, 93 in 2008 and 50 in 2007 (which was a half year, since I started in July).

I want to share the story behind approximately $2700 dollars worth of my spending this year that reveals how I am finally starting to leave the middle class, materially, financially and psychologically. No, I am not moving up into the rich class or down into the poor class. I am doing something complicated called trading up. 

This $2700 is money that, if I’d decided to pull the trigger and spend it a few months earlier, would have spared me a ton of unnecessary frustration. Why didn’t I spend it when I should have?

One reason is that I still have residual middle-class financial programming in my head, expertly misguiding me to the wrong answers. Getting it out of my head feels like getting a bad malware and virus infection off a computer. It is painful and messy, and there are really no completely reliable tools that work in all cases. And you’re never quite sure if you got the last infected file off the system, when the infection is really bad.

Another reason is that I was (and remain to some extent) guilty of what science fiction writer Bruce Sterling calls acting dead: being irrationally averse to spending money where it matters, in a misguided attempt to “save” money to the point that the behavior paralyzes you. A large segment of the middle class is starting to act dead these days. Which makes sense since the class itself is dying. To stop acting dead, you have to resolve to exit the traditional middle class as well, unless you want to go down with it.

Not acting dead involves a strategic spending pattern that marketers are starting to call trading up: buying premium in some areas of your life, while buying budget or entirely forgoing spending in other areas. This pattern of conscious, discriminating consumption defines the emerging replacement for  the middle class.  As the picture above illustrates, there isn’t really one “New Middle Class.” Instead, it is a fragmented social space, with each little island being defined by a specific pattern of trading-up, and an associated lifestyle design script.

This effect is a sort of the opposite of what I called Gollumization earlier this year: unthinking, undiscriminating consumption to the point that consumption defines you.

There’s a pretty neat book about it, Trading Up by Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske, which you should read if you, like me, have exited or are planning to exit the traditional middle class.

But back to acting dead and my $2700 dollars, which I’ll use as my running example to get at various things.

The Dead Great-Grandfather Test

Sterling was using the term specifically to describe the hairshirt green lifestyle that is driven by eco-anxieties. For hairshirt-green types, life is all about saving water, recycling, composting, reducing eco-footprints and various other behaviors marked by a kind of fearful, non-generative retreat from living. Permanent existential hibernation.

Sterling’s rule of thumb for spotting acting-dead behaviors is a great one: if it’s something your dead great-grandfather can do better than you, it’s a case of acting dead. Your dead great-grandfather uses no water or plastic, and is actually recycling himself as we speak, not just his possessions. Try and top that.

But acting dead goes beyond hairshirt-green behaviors. While spartan frugality is a virtue, when it becomes the entire purpose of your life, there’s a problem. For a portion of the dying American middle class, frugality has turned into a life purpose.

An example is extreme couponing, which is why I used that as an example of radical Gollumization. It is saving gone amok: never buying anything not on sale (and therefore never buying things that never go on sale) and systematically being a jerk to businesses that may be running loss-leader sales to get new customers.

So how should you spend?

Spending Money

In his talk, Sterling offers up a simple rule for how to spend money. If it is something you use a lot everyday, spend the money, and get the good stuff. Don’t buy cheap. Look for deals, but don’t let deal-seeking make you compromise on quality or wait too long. It will cost you more in the long term. Sterling’s examples are obvious and physical: a good quality bed and work chair for instance. You might spend up to 8 hours a day in each; that’s 2/3 of your life.

I own both an excellent bed and a great chair. I am not sure the latter was a good investment for me in particular, since I spend most of my sitting hours in coffee shops, but in principle, it is a great example. Other examples include: a great kitchen knife, a nice car if you spend many hours commuting per day, plenty of quality gym clothes and a membership at a good gym, so you never have an excuse not to work out. Good quality produce to cook with.

If you work mostly at your desk, a large monitor. Heck, multiple monitors. The best keyboard.

Sterling also has ideas on what not to buy, or get rid of if you already own it. Expensive china sets for example, if you never do any formal entertaining. Things you think are assets but are actually liabilities. Things you are being unnecessarily sentimental about.

Sterling’s ideas seem to have been independently rediscovered by a growing segment of the middle class. Hence the phenomenon of trading up (the book has lots of data and anecdotal evidence for the trend).

I think of these sorts of examples as “physical furniture.” Stuff in your life that can make it hoarder hell if you buy the wrong things, or heaven if you buy the right things.

$2700 Worth of Acting-Dead

My acting-dead behaviors this year were more about mental furniture. Here’s the breakdown of the $2700 that I eventually spent when I stopped acting dead:

1. About $250 to get Tempo converted to epub and Kindle formats
2. About $300 odd to get an agent to file some Nevada business paperwork for me
3. $2100 for a Matlab (scientific computing software) license

In each case, I procrastinated for months, with the vague idea of saving money. Actually, it was worse than mere procrastination, since I was expending useless effort. In each case, my dead great-grandfather could have achieved what I did around those tasks during those months: nothing. And he’d have done it more efficiently.

In the first two cases, I tried to do it all myself, even though I have an aversion to fussy kinds of technical formatting work and paperwork to the point that they should count as phobias.  When I finally pulled the trigger and outsourced the work, it was like a major load being taken off my mind, coupled with severe regret for the time already spent on pointless frustration.

In the third case, it was again about saving money. I spent months mucking around with Python, R and various other open source alternatives to Matlab. Here, the messiness of having to deal with a unwieldy and weakly integrated open-source tools, along with my own serious aversion (similar to my paperwork aversion) to fussy configuration issues, and my generally poor ability to pick up new programming skills, had me wasting months in frustrated spinning-of-wheels.

And in the meantime, I was not doing things I wanted to do, simply because I was too cheap to buy a quality tool that I was familiar with, and could save me months of painful learning (especially painful now due to the Python 2.x to 3.x transition).  As with the other two cases, finally pulling the trigger made me intensely relieved.

You could say that each poor decision (each a case of delaying the right decision) was caused by specific phobias, aversions and irrationality.

But there is also a general pattern here. I really was not able to rationally assess the costs and benefits of each decision until after I had persisted with the wrong decision for months and made the right decision out of frustration. I could only see the simple logic after I’d made the right decision and stopped rationalizing the wrong one.

The general pattern that causes such poor decision-making is the middle class financial script.

The Middle-Class Financial Script

The middle class financial script is simple really. It involves uniform spending habits within a large class, based on norms that are learned via imitation.

If you are in the middle class, you are expected to own certain things, do certain things and do so at quality levels that exceed the quality purchased by the poor class (if they purchase that category of things at all) but don’t hit luxury levels.

You are also expected to not buy certain things that are either above or beneath you, or do certain things for yourself. Vanity,  humility and a sense of entitlement are all at work here. For the middle class, there are things that are beneath your station and things that are above your station. For the rich and poor, things are much more one-sided.

To take some simple examples, you’d be looked upon with suspicion if you bought a car that was either too luxurious or too cheap for somebody claiming middle class status. You are expected to vacation in certain places and not others.

In fact, imitation and uniformity in consumption define the middle class. In countries where the middle class is burgeoning instead of dying, especially in Asia, the growth of the class is tracked via measurement of ownership rates of certain typical goods at typical quality levels. By contrast, there is much more variety in how the poor are poor, and how the rich are rich.

Why does the middle class script (or any script) exist?

Mainly because it makes financial management easy. Constantly computing the total costs of ownership, potential returns and risks around all spending decisions,  is hard. And it doesn’t seem worthwhile when the income side is predictable and comfortable. Why bother to control costs when revenues are fixed and somebody else has already made up a predictable-costs script with reasonable margins designed to get you through retirement?

In other words, the middle class in recent history has been defined by its ability to both earn and spend money in very predictable ways.

Then of course, the risks started creeping back in, around 1980, slowly at first, and then with increasing rapidity over the last few years. All the things the middle class relied on — job security, defined benefits pensions, affordable mortgages, predictably rising real-estate values — one by one, all these supports began to break down.

But autopilot spending has persisted, long after the new patterns of exposure to financial risk have become clear. The reason of course is that the old financial habits were not really financial per se, they were driven by class norms rather than financial risk-management calculations.

My own examples are a case in point. My behavior is readily explained with reference to middle class norms:

1. The eBook conversion example: Middle class people do not hire other middle class people outside of a few approved exceptions such as doctors, lawyers and accountants; they work for the rich and hire the poor.
2. The business paperwork example: Middle class people do not “indulge” in “luxuries” like hiring administrative help to do paperwork. That’s for rich people with complicated financial affairs. Honest middle-class people should be able to do their own paperwork, with at most some professional help at tax time. Needing help probably means you are up to shady things.
3. The Matlab example: Middle class people do not pay for their tools. In fact, they shouldn’t need tools beyond the basic tools of literacy (books, pen and paper 100 years ago, a computer today). Poor people use specialized tools. Rich people buy them. Middle class people merely supervise the use of the rich people’s tools (capital) by the poor (labor). Even today, if you use specialized tools to work, your membership in the middle class is suspect.

Above all this, the middle class script involves a certain aversion to talking about or dealing with tough financial decisions. It is considered unseemly. Decent people don’t talk about money, let alone risk. If you work hard and play by the rules, the money should take care of itself. If it isn’t doing that, you are probably looking for dishonest and exploitative shortcuts like the evil rich or doing dumb things like the stupid poor, and deserve what you get.

If you have to budget and watch your money too closely, you were probably being irresponsible with credit cards and deserve your pain. For decent people, paycheck-in, on-time-credit-card-payments-out should work smoothly on autopilot.

And above all, you don’t speculate. If forced to speculate by pensions being turned into 401(ks) (American stock-based defined contribution retirement plans), decent people leave the actual risk-taking decisions to professional fund managers, telling themselves things like  ”you cannot beat the professionals.”

So what will happen to people operating by such obviously dangerous attitudes in difficult times?

Turns out, we’ve been here before. They’ll die out.

Middle Class Declines in History

This is not a new phenomenon in history. Middle classes have appeared and disappeared several times before in history.

Tennessee Williams’ plays (A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie) tell exactly such poignant fall-from-the-middle-class stories set in early 20th century America.

Early twentieth century British novels set during the decline of empire (such as Agatha Christie novels), often contain aging spinsters desperately keeping up appearances and surviving on small incomes derived from being “companions” to richer old women.

You can also find examples outside the Western world. In nineteenth century India for example, where the Urdu and Sanskrit-literate middle classes, which had grown around the courts of the Nawabs and Maharajas in older medieval cities, went into severe decline. The new English-literate middle class began supplanting it in the newer cities of the British Raj.

I suspect similar middle class declines can be found in the Middle East (during the Ottoman decline), China (after the Boxer Rebellion)  and Latin America (after the Monroe Doctrine perhaps? I am not too familiar with Latin American history).

When a middle class goes into decline, you get a large segment of the population engaging in a desperate scramble to keep up appearances, while switching from collective-norm-based to individual-risk-based financial thinking.

Keeping up with the Joneses becomes far harder, because the financial support starts to collapse at different times for different people, but everybody agrees to pretend that everybody is in it together.  For the current American decline, there have already been a couple of good movies chronicling the decline: The Joneses (2009) and The Company Men (2010).

A norm-based social class will persist with disastrous financial choices long after the secure financial environment, on which its scripts are based, collapses. Simply because membership of the class is the source of all social identity and access to social capital.

Except that the social capital, which the members are clinging to, is eroding rapidly as well. There is no point in two non-swimmers with immense trust between them, clinging to each other while drowning. Mutual trust and social capital within a group only mean something when there are objective reasons to expect a prosperous future of indefinite length stretching out ahead.

When this is not the case, it makes sense to cash out your hard assets, rethink your financial life more directly, write off investments in the social capital of the declining class, and look for an alternative emerging class to join.

Trading Up and Fragmentation

As the picture I started with shows, a key effect of the trading-up phenomenon is that it causes serious fragmentation. The social landscape starts to get restructured along new lines. Cultural geography changes, as governing financial scripts change from one city block to the next (you see a lot of this in San Francisco in particular).

The transition from a monolithic middle class to one of many trading-up classes is a very tough one. First, you have to go through a period where you manage your finances very directly, with no help from a script that simplifies decision-making.

Then you have to evaluate various alternative trading-up scripts to figure out which ones might actually fit your situation and encode meaningful adaptations to the new environment. Not every lifestyle design script is likely to work.

In the last few months, going back to the broader context of my three examples, I’ve done a good deal of very direct financial decision-making. I’ve made up detailed scenario planning spreadsheets, risk models and the like. I’ve done minute tracking of spending (only for a month, to sort of calibrate; it is far too difficult and depressing to do on an ongoing basis).

Here’s the funny thing: doing this kind of very direct financial management around my small-business book-keeping felt good. It felt smart, like I was learning valuable new skills. But doing it around personal and household finances still felt somehow dirty. That’s how deeply embedded the middle class script is.

The three examples were interesting and particularly tough because they bridged the two mental models: my healthy business mental model (within which the right spending decisions would have been easy) and my toxic middle-class-paycheck mental model (within which they were unnecessarily hard).

Scared, Foolhardy and Brave New Scripts

Once you’ve worked with your finances directly for a while (it’s like working in assembly language, on a computer without an operating system) to start the transition away from the middle class script, you have to end the transition. Staying in limbo doesn’t work.

The transition can end in three ways:

1. Prolonged Misery: You get so scared, you retreat to the middle class and do your best to delay the inevitable
2. Waiting for Godot: You latch onto some script and  stick to it even after it becomes clear that it isn’t working for you.
3. Quick-Change Artists: You try on different scripts for size, attempting to force outcomes and fast failures, until you find one that fits and works, the way those quick-change artists change clothes.

Prolonged misery makes for the best tragic literature but is entirely unpleasant to live through. You act increasingly dead, get increasingly frugal, gradually squeeze out all the generativity in your life, and then finally you die.

The characteristic sign that you are practicing unhealthy acting-dead frugality is that you cut back on core expenses that might help you be more generative, in order to keep up appearances as long as possible.

If you are cutting back on the quality of the food you eat (trading fresh vegetables for canned, say), in order to buy the same clothes your friends wear, you are on the prolonged misery path. This incidentally, may be part of the reason why the middle class has become so attached to recycling and other hairshirt-green behaviors (outside of the actual merits of the behaviors) during exactly the period that the class itself has been in decline.

Waiting for Godot is your classic arrival fallacy. You fixate on specific narrative elements (like moving to Bali or working for 4 hours a week), make the few big moves, and spend the rest of your life waiting for the Big Event signifying that it is working, while slipping slowly into destitution and denial. I see a lot of people in this mode right now. They’ve never really stopped to analyze the logic of the script, but accepted it on faith based on assurances from a few for whom it has worked.

Quick-change artistry is of course, the card I think you should pick. It is a turbulent, experimental approach, where there are no absolute life truths, no permanent commitments to any script, no one-book formulas, and no easy no-brainer decisions.

It involves trying different trading-up patterns until you find one that works. It involves a commitment to stop acting dead. It involves a conscious decision to leave the middle class.

Or you can wait for all the King’s men and all the king’s horses to put Humpty-Dumpty together again.

This piece is sort of a continuation of my Las Vegas Rules series, but I’ve abandoned the attempt to keep a coherent larger narrative going. This is going to be more of an occasional diary-entry sort of thing.

I’ll be in the Bay Area for some consulting work Nov 15-19, so I decided it’s time for another Ribbonfarm Field Trip. If you missed the first one (Sausalito Houseboats), I hope you can make this one. We had a lot of fun last time (here’s the post about Field Trip #1, with more  pictures).

This time, I thought it would be interesting to visit the Computer History museum in Mountain View and chat over coffee afterwards.

We’ll meet at 1:00 PM on Saturday, November 19. Click here to register (free). You’ll have to buy a ticket to enter the museum itself when you get there ($15 general admission). I’ll buy everyone a round of coffee after we’re done (after all, you guys have been buying me coffees for years now).

I keep meaning to visit each time I am in the area, but something always gets in the way. With the passing of Steve Jobs and an equally important academic figure, John McCarthy, it’s an interesting time to take stock and ponder the future of technology from the perspective of the longer story, now that Act I is sorta symbolically over. I am also reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon right now and noodling around with themes for my next book, which will likely have a strong technology angle. So all in all, we have ingredients for an interesting conversation. I’ll try to rope in a couple of gray eminences who’ve survived a couple of boom-bust cycles, to talk history and context at us.

If you register and later need to cancel, let me know. Last time, we had some people bailing at the last minute without telling me, so I didn’t have time to let the waiting-list people know, and we ended up with extra box lunches.

Same as last time,  let me know if you need to carpool.

Field Trip #2: Las Vegas Storm Drains

And in case you’re wondering about the mysterious, missing Field Trip #2, that was actually an exploration of the Las Vegas storm drain system a couple of weekends ago with Bay Area reader Laura Wood, who I met on Field Trip #1.

I learned about the extensive storm drain system (hundreds of miles of tunnels under Las Vegas) from another reader, Josh Ellis, one of exactly two readers I appear to have in Las Vegas, and told Laura about them during the first field trip.

I had no more than a casual curiosity at that point, but Laura got interested enough that she hunted down the author of a book about the storm drain system and the homeless people living in them (Matt O’Brien, the book is Beneath the Neon, I am reading it now).

When Laura told me she wanted to come down to Vegas and explore the storm drains, we briefly talked making it a larger group event and roping in more readers from the Bay Area and LA, but ultimately decided it would be too dicey.

So it was just the two of us. We first met up with Matt, got some advice and tips, and then spent several hours over the next two days exploring miles and miles of underground tunnels, filled with fantastic graffiti, garbage, smelly water and a few homeless people.

Later, I met up separately with Matt and Josh over coffee and chatted more about this and that (Josh did the initial explorations and co-authored some articles with Matt, who later explored the storm drains more deeply and wrote the book).

I’ll write a longer post about the storm drains at some point, once I am done with Matt’s book.

Anyway, if you’re up for Field Trip #2, go ahead and register.

Also, if you’re interested in meeting up 1:1 for lunch/dinner/coffee between Nov 15 – Nov 19, email me.

And finally, once again I am in the market for couches. Rather than wearing out my welcome with my gracious hosts from last time (thanks Mark, Jane and Greg) I figured I’d see if there were other potential hosts out there with whom I could stay and explore more Bay Area neighborhoods. I’ll need a place to stay the nights of Nov 15, 16, 17 and 18.

I am not normally a big consumer of online video content, but in the last couple of months, I’ve watched three very significant videos that together have turned my mind into silly putty. They are incredibly fertile, thought-provoking and demanding without being merely stimulating in an infotainment/mindcandy sense. This is protein, not sugar.

They total about 6 hours, but if you choose to invest a clear-brained morning or afternoon, you will not be disappointed. You should find that you’ve leveled-up your thinking about a lot of stuff that we talk about frequently.

I am also posting a roundup of the last couple of months, since I am now blogging on enough different venues to justify some periodic aggregation.

Three Deep Videos

The three videos: watch them in the following order.

The Century of the Self (HT: Cameron Schaefer and somebody I forget, on Quora)

What it’s about: A marathon 4-part BBC series about how Freud’s ideas, via his nephew Edward Bernays and daughter Anna Freud, created the modern PR and marketing industries, shaped politics, business and culture, drove secret (and nutty) CIA research and generally pwned the American national identity for a century (I rarely resort to gamerisms, but pwned is the only word that covers the case). I have my notes, summary and critiques filed away. I am going to be milking this one for insight for a long time. The video provides context for a lot of my writing that I was previously unaware of (particularly The Gollum Effect). I feel particularly dumb for having missed the direct historic influence of Maslow on market segmentation, via work at SRI.

Bruce Sterling’s Closing Address at Reboot 2009 (HT: Justin Pickard and Dorian Taylor)

In a way, this picks up where the previous video leaves off.  Where the BBC show starts in the 1920s and ends with politics and business slavishly pandering to a self-absorbed crowd in a civilization-level circle-jerk at the turn of our century, Sterling looks ahead to the consequences of our current state. It is a grand-visionary look at the next 10 years, covering the themes of collapse and survival. Justin Pickard called it one of his “ur texts” and it has become almost that for me as well. Sterling is a science fiction writer, so you should expect somewhat overwrought language. The talk is built around a few key words/phrases — dark euphoria, favela chic, gothic high tech, acting dead — that are annoyingly opaque until you’ve heard the talk, but stick in your head like viruses once you’re done; I find that I have to fight myself to not use the terms on random people, who haven’t watched the video.

Programming and Scaling by Alan Kay (HT: Jean-Luc Delatre)

Even if you don’t know much about programming (Alan Kay developed object-oriented programming at PARC), you should be able to get quite a bit out of this video. It is a great complement to the other two videos because it outlines the large-scale problems and opportunities in the current state of software engineering. With software eating the world, whether we get a Singularity scenario or a Collapsonomics scenario largely depends on whether or not some fundamental problems with software (involving entropy and bugginess) can be solved. Kay is optimistic. If he’s right, we’ll get the Singularity, and Lord Skynet will let us continue happily in our current state of self-absorbed idiocracy that the BBC documentary describes. If we fail, we get Bruce Sterling’s world: grim, with collapse looming, and rich and poor alike scrambling to adapt to inevitable decline.

The main reason I am strongly encouraging you to watch all three videos is a selfish one: I want to write about some of these ideas, and I suspect I’ll lose anybody who hasn’t leveled-up their thinking with this preparation. I’ll try to make any future essays on this stuff self-contained, but it may be a losing battle. At the very least, you’ll get more out of some of my planned future posts if you watch these videos first.

A 6-8 Week Roundup

I’ve been quite busy and all over the place these last couple of months. Here’s the roundup of the last 6-8 weeks at various venues. If you only care about Ribbonfarm, skip to the end.

Forbes

First off, I booted-up my new technology blog at Forbes. Here’s the output for the first month. I am still sort of finding my feet with this general technology theme, so the pieces are a bit all over the place.

1. Zappos and the Rise of Corporate Neo-Urbanism
2. The Social Graph as Crude Oil (Go Ahead, Build that YASN!)
3. Kubler-Ross and #OccupyWallStreet
4. Public Computing and the Next Gang-of-Four
5. We Are All Macs Now
6. The Electric Leviathan

Information Week

Next, on my Information Week column, I’ve been writing a few pieces to sort of wrap up the first phase of my thinking (which has evolved over the last 2-3 years) on Enterprise 2.0 themes. I am planning to collect my IW columns from this year, along with some of my older posts on the E2.0 conference blog, into an ebook soon. But this Star Wars style trilogy that I posted over the last 6 weeks kinda sums up the big picture view I currently hold.

1. Social Wars: A New Hope
2. Social Wars: The Enterprise Strikes Back
3. Social Wars: Return Of The Radicals

If you haven’t seen my IW stuff on Enterprise 2.0/social business (or weren’t aware that I was writing there), and the theme interests you, you may want to catch up with my dozen or so posts so far. I am sensing that the Enterprise 2.0/social business trend is shifting into a new gear, and I am trying to tie up my Phase I thoughts into a neat little package so I can sort of get it off my mind and think about Phase II.

Tempo Blog

On the Tempo blog, over the last couple of months, I’ve  had a series of loosely related pieces on mindfulness, time-management and productivity that I am really happy with. The plan to use the blog to beta-test ideas for a future edition of the book is going well. This stuff is going into the second edition of the book in some form (read in this order if you want to follow the train of thought):

1. Daemons and the Mindful Learning Curve
2. The Calculus of Grit: (this is actually an August ribbonfarm post, but seems to belong in this series)
3. Bandwagon Timing verus Biding Your Time
4. Forgivable Sloppiness: The Art of Epoch-Driven Time Management
5. Thrust, Drag and the 10x Effect

Ribbonfarm

And finally, here at home, I only had five “real” pieces in the last two months (not counting last week’s guest post and a couple of announcement posts), but they were biggies for me personally. I seem to be moving into a new phase on the home front. The impending end of the Gervais Principle series, which has sort of been the sine qua non of this blog for two years, has frankly gotten me into a soul-searching mode about where to go next.

1. The Stream Map of the World
2. The Gervais Principle V: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
3. Ubiquity Illusions and the Chicken-Egg Problem
4. The Milo Criterion
5. Fixing the Game by Roger L. Martin

Hope that’s enough to keep you guys busy for a while. I can sense some significant steering in my writing direction(s) looming in November. Not entirely sure which way I’ll be turning.

A quick heads-up on a couple of off-site items. First, I just signed on as a contributor at Forbes, and booted-up my new blog there, on technology issues. I’ve posted two pieces in two days (I don’t plan to maintain a daily-posting schedule, but I felt Steve Jobs’ passing deserves a reaction on any technology blog).

• Oct 6: We Are All Macs Now
• Oct 5: The Electric Leviathan

You’ll see some familiar ribbonfarm themes evolve in more focused ways on Forbes.  I am hoping to keep up a weekly schedule of posts there. They will be on the shorter side (for me). I’ll be aiming for 1000-1200 words at most, probably fewer.

Hope to see you in the comments there.

Second, the video of my talk on the Gervais Principle is now available on the Economist site. Now that I am writing in so many different places (here, the Tempo blog, the Be Slightly Evil list, occasional high-effort Quora answers, Information Week and now Forbes), I think I need to figure out some sort of roundup strategy. I’ll see what I can do. Perhaps a monthly roundup?

It’s been nearly a year of procrastination since I posted Part IV of the Gervais Principle, and I am finally getting my act together. I’ll post the final part in the next few weeks. Blame hugely inflated expectations for the finale for my tardiness. But I finally decided, like Tony Hayward, that I wanted my life back. So I have legitimately started work on the finale (for those who don’t know what I am talking about: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV).  Whether it turns out to be a smooth touchdown or a crash-landing, either way the end is near.

But this post is mainly a news flash. I will be doing a 7-minute talk based on the Gervais Principle at the Human Potential conference, Sept 14-15 in New York. It is part of the Ideas Economy series of events organized by the Economist.  As far as I know, this Slightly Evil revolution is not being webcast, but the video should be available at some point. If you are attending, make sure to say hello.

I am extending my stay by a couple of days to meet people. If there is enough interest, I’d like to do an NYC meetup (or  a couple of small group/1:1 meetings) on Friday the 16th. If you are interested, let me know your availability. I expect to do any meetings somewhere midtown, 34th – 44th st or so.

Also, if you can offer me a couch in Manhattan to crash on for the night of 15th or 16th, let me know.  Thanks to my nomadic summer, I’ve acquired a serious taste for couchsurfing as a way to meet interesting new people, and have actually started to prefer it to staying at a hotel or with friends/family.

The first annual ribbonfarm field trip to Sausalito and Muir Woods Rodeo Beach is now done. As of June 17th, I can safely report that at least a dozen or so real people read the blog. It’s not all hyper-intelligent bots planted on the Internet by aliens just to mess with me. We started the day-long field trip on the Sausalito docks, where houseboat owner, long-time reader, sponsor and tour host Sam Penrose talked about the ideas in the book How Buildings Learn, and how they applied to what we were about to see.

Here’s a summary of the book, a Video series based on it and the Sausalito portion of the series (episode 2, starts at 9:20). Sam also flagged ribbonfarm-esque themes for the tour, such as the idea of legibility and outsider/outlaw lifestyles.

So what did we see as we trooped around behind Sam and his wife Sue? A bunch of really fascinating houseboats that totally disturb your idea of what “normal” life is or should be (how about living in a home that’s built on a converted World War II landing craft? Or one that’s clearly the product of a seriously tripping 60s imagination?) What did we hear? A bunch of associated narratives, micro and grand.

On the micro-narrative front, we heard stories about delinquent mortgagees trying to float their homes away (at 0.5 mile an hour), old neighbors suddenly vanishing and being replaced by new ones, and outlaw houseboats randomly appearing to blot out your view of the bay.  On the grand-narrative front, we learned about the story of creeping gentrification that turned a true outlaw, non-conformist community into a faux-non-conformist community (Sam freely admits that he is a member of the latter, though working for ILM is still an outlaw job in my book).

But there is still a deep strain of badass outlaw DNA in the local community, as this sign suggests. This is not your average techie enclave. We followed Sam’s wise suggestion and avoided going down this particular pier.

We talked of several things, but one remark that stuck in my mind (I forget who made it) was that as land-lubbers, we often forget that things like sewage and the concept of “neighbor” are not necessarily as fixed as we like to think.

Sam ended the tour on an appropriately ribbonfarmesque colllapsonomics theme: the community is just one earthquake away from going from rich, living story to sepia-tinted memory. So is the rest of the Bay Area of course (named after Michael Bay, in case you didn’t know that bit of trivia), but the houseboat community seems particularly fragile.

After the tour, we picked up box lunches and trooped over to Rodeo Beach. After a picnic lunch, we began a hike up a gentle hill next to the beach.

About halfway up the hill, we stopped at an old World War II era coastal defense gun battery cave (is there a technical term for these things?). Apparently Alistair McLean is way more popular amongst Indians than other people. Two of the three of us in the group immediately thought of the Guns of Navarone.

Then it was time for a group picture.

Reading left to right, we have: Alexander, Bess, Tieming, Sudarshan, Laura, Petra, Nick, Kartik, Pete, Greg, Allen, Sam, Joy, Geoff, Edwin, Sebastian, me and Alex Yim. Despite a bunch of last minute cancellations due to traffic snarls (access to the Golden Gate bridge was partly blocked that day) and other snafus (and presumably, a few alien-bot readers), I thought it was a pretty good turnout for quite a long event in an area famously full of too-busy people.

Thanks to the presence of a few non-reader +1 guest types (Bess, Petra, Tieming, Geoff) the conversation was thankfully rescued from the threat of getting mired in geeky ribbonfarmesque themes.

That said, it did make my day to see a container ship floating gently by. Container shipping, for those who came in late, is a sort of motif for this blog.

From the Guns of Navarone we continued up the hill to the Marine Mammal rescue center, which rescues and rehabilitates injured sea lions. Since wild thoughts are a big theme for me, it felt good to spend a silent, meditative moment with the sea lions.

Speaking of how buildings learn, the center used to be part of a missile silo command center or something. Weapons and war are not yet a big theme for me, but they are going to be. Look out for a post about nuclear weapons and the geopolitics of detente on the Tempo blog soon (I visited the Minuteman Missile National Historical Site in South Dakota earlier on this road trip specifically to research a piece, and have a lot of ideas brewing).

Garbage and collapse are also key ribbonfarm themes, and we encountered both: the courtyard of the center is full of sculptures made from plastic ocean junk.

Here is a close-up.

“Choked by plastic” is increasing in probability for me, as a thread in my personal favorite collapse narrative.

After the junk and sea lions, we had one final treat in store. Allen Knutson, Cornell mathematician and former record-breaking juggler, gave us an impromptu mini lecture/demonstration of the mathematics of juggling. You can watch a video of him explaining the ideas here, but I forgot to take an actual picture. So instead, here is a different picture: Allen deep in thought contemplating how to juggle an E8 group symmetry pattern.

Okay, he was probably checking his phone for email.

And finally, a thank you to Alex Yim, who was field-testing his new camera, which is why you get all these quality pictures, instead of just a few lousy ones from my iPhone. You can see the complete slideshow here.

A final shout-out to a non-present friend and reader, Jeremy Epstein, from whom I stole the brilliant idea of doing a field trip rather than a dull meetup. More bloggers should do things like this.

Thanks everybody for coming, and I hope to do something like this every year. Perhaps more frequently.  I wish I could do things like this in more places, but unfortunately, not many places have a sufficiently high concentration of readers (and reader-couches I can surf on). So I mostly end up meeting 1-2 people at a time in random (sometimes very random) places. When I get a chance to hang out with a whole bunch of readers at once, it is extremely disorienting in a very rewarding way. I can see no discernible pattern in who reads my stuff (besides the readership being predominantly, but not exclusively, male). This makes me wonder: am I a completely random person?

On July 4th, it will have been FOUR years since I started ribbonfarm. It’s also been about a year since I started the Be Slightly Evil email list and 3 months since I published Tempo, which I started writing nearly 3 years ago. This is also the first ribbonfarm birthday since I quit my job in February. So somehow between 2007 and now,  I transformed myself from a solid, working engineer-citizen with a real job and a writing hobby, to a blogger/writer/random unemployed person.

So there’s a lot to celebrate, and ou’re all invited to The Ribbonfarm 4th Anniversary Field Trip, on Sunday July 17 at 10:30 AM. It consists of a tour of the Sausalito Docks and houseboats followed by lunch and a hike in the nearby Muir woods (apologies to non Bay-Area people, had to pick some location and the Bay Area has the highest concentration of ribbonfarm readers).

The field trip is free and I’ll be providing lunch, but you have to grab one of the limited tickets at the eventbrite listing linked above.

Sponsor and long-time reader Sam Penrose will be hosting. When Sam offered me a personal tour of the houseboats and docks using How Buildings Learn as a lens, the idea seemed to hit on so many high-frequency ribbonfarm themes (legibility, boats and water, aging organizations, urban infrastructure…) that I figured I had to share it.  There are some links with more background information in the eventrbrite listing.

And since the Muir woods, which inspired my going-rogue Wild Thoughts, are right there, I had to tack on a hike. We’ll pick an easy trail so it won’t demand peak physical condition. I am hardly in great shape myself anyway.

We can only handle a limited number of people. I haven’t set a precise limit yet, but it’s basically “the number of people who can troop around on the docks following Sam without him having to shout to make himself heard.”

So sign up now. We do need an RSVP so we can plan lunch. Please only sign up for extra tickets if you know for sure you’ll be bringing a friend/significant other.  Email me if you need/can offer carpooling.

The field trip is one of several open events I’ll be doing during my 4 week couchsurfing trip through California. I’ll be in the Los Angeles area July 11-14 and Bay Area July 15 – Aug 4.

Details are on the new Upcoming Events page on ribbonfarm. The other scheduled open events are two Tempo themed talks in LA (July 12, hosted by sponsor Pascal Pinck) and Santa Clara (July 19 hosted by longtime reader Sean Murphy) respectively. I am also doing a Slightly Evil improv-game party in Palo Alto hosted by sponsor Jane Huang.

All these events are open, but with limited capacity. I also plan to hang around area coffee shops in San Jose, Palo Alto, Berkeley and downtown San Francisco during my weeks in the Bay Area, and I hope some of you can drop by to chat. I’ll post details as/when on the Upcoming Events page and also tweet out locations/share on the Ribbonfarm Facebook page. I’ll also have some availability for 1:1 meetings.

I am really looking forward to this.  While I’ve traveled a lot to the Bay Area and LA for work and conferences in the past, and squeezed in the occasional off-ribbonfarm meeting, I’ve never done an extended trip like this with an open calendar, purely to meet new people.

Happy 4th of July and wish me a Happy Anniversary here

Since A Brief History of the Corporation has gone unexpectedly viral (it’s been featured on kottke.org, andrewsullivan, boingboing (via Cory Doctorow) and paulkedrosky.com among others) there’s been a bit of a jump in new readers, from 3000 to 3300 or so RSS subscribers (damn, I really am threatening to break out of the D-list here). So I thought I’d do a semi-annual roundup covering the posts from the last 6 months or so to give new readers a chance to do a Vegas-style buffet over the weekend. I usually only do annual roundups. Here are the 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007 roundups. For the new readers, I’ve also included a highlights reel of selected older posts that give you a taste of what ribbonfarm is about.

So here we go.

Roundup, January – June, 2011

It’s been a weird first half for 2011. I feel like I’ve been juggling a chain saw, a bowling ball and a flaming torch for the last few months. I launched Tempo (both the book and the website), boot-strapped my free-agent consulting and pan-handling life, and did a major 3-week meet-the-readers couchsurfing road trip from DC to land here in Las Vegas, the Delinquent Capital of the World. So I am actually pretty proud that I not only kept the action going on the main stage here at ribbonfarm, but managed to produce quite a few posts that I’d mark as candidates for the highlights reel (in bold below).

1. The Las Vegas Rules II: Stuff Science
2. A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100
3. The Las Vegas Rules I: The Slightly Malevolent Universe
4. Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia (guest post by Stefan King)
5. My Experiments with Introductions
6. The Russian Fox and the Evolution of Intelligence (guest post by Brian Potter)
7. Extroverts, Introverts, Aspies and Codies
8. Cognitive Archeology of the West (guest post by Paula Hay)
9. The Return of the Barbarian
10. Where the Wild Thoughts Are (my “going free agent” post)
11. Waiting versus Idleness
12. The Disruption of Bronze
13. Boundary Condition Thinking
14. The Gollum Effect
15. How Leveraged are Your Resolutions?

Highlights Reel for New Readers

A new reader, @mcburton, recently tweeted:

christ @vgr, your @ribbonfarm blog is a damned rathole. i feel like I’m following you through a hypermaze backwards.

He’s apparently not alone. Lately there’s been an up-tick in the number of readers who seem inclined to dive into the archives and… keep going. Perhaps it has something to do with the recession. I have no idea what they are looking for, but in the last 2-3 months, at least a half-dozen people seem to have completed what I have started calling the Ribbonfarm Absurdity Marathon: backtracking through almost four years worth of archives and reading a significant chunk of it. Apparently without meaning to, I’ve created a gamified, teaser-linked jungle of incomplete thoughts, all woven together with a cryptic ribbonfarm vocabulary, which works like crack cocaine on some people. Like the show Lost. Speaking of crack cocaine, you should read The Gollum Effect, item 14 above.

And speaking of “damned rathole-hypermaze,” if you don’t want to plough doughtily through the archives like the Absurd Marathoners, but just want a cleanly-curated and legible introductory tour, or “introductory sequences” a la lesswrong.com, I am afraid I can’t help you.  But I can offer you something of an incoherent highlights reel of non sequiturs. It’s going to sound a little bit like Homer Simpson’s  bicep-curl count in the episode Marge’s Son Poisoning:

Homer: 16, 98, 54, banana…

I’ll start the highlights reel with a rationalization of why the messiness is a good thing. This post covers probably the most fertile meme I’ve ever blogged about, in terms of the sheer impact on the rest of my blogging and the fantastic conversations it has sparked. It didn’t go viral, but it is probably the most important post on the site.

A Big Little Idea Called Legibility

There is a good chance that this post, which helped popularize the ideas of James Scott outside the political science classrooms where they are normally discussed, may be among my enduring contributions to the blogosphere.

Next up, another diving-in point for the rathole-hypermaze is the much-celebrated, Slashdotted crowd-favorite, the post that put me on the map. Weighing in at nearly 24,000 words for the 4-part series so far, in the Blue Corner, I give you…

The Gervais Principle

It’s a series that’s been evolving since 2009, with the last part due any day now. You can navigate through it using the widget on the right sidebar.

After that crowd favorite (which has practically come to define this blog) a personal favorite that to my mind captures the spirit of this site and the idea of “refactored perception.”

The Parrot

Next up in our little highlights reel with a critic’s choice award, which goes to…

The Epic Story of Container Shipping

Why? Because this post — another book review actually — received what I personally consider to be the biggest compliment my work has received to date: it was tweeted by @GreatDismal, aka William Gibson, author of The Neuromancer.

How about a change of pace? Ribbonfarm is pretty much all analysis and philosophy, with hardly any prescription. This is probably the closest I’ve ever gotten to prescription. It also got me accusations of being all snooty and superior from some people.

How to Take a Walk

And finally, to wrap it up, from the “Before I was Slightly Famous” department, a post from the early days in 2007 that probably planted the Slightly Evil fragment of DNA into this blog.

The 15 Laws of Meeting Power

The writing was quite awful back then, since I hadn’t yet discovered anything even remotely resembling a voice, but I figured it might be fun. That Slightly Evil seed, by the way, has since sprouted and matured into its own illegible corner of the Ribbonfarm Global Empire, the Be Slightly Evil mailing list, which now has over a thousand members. Proof that the world is not as full of nice, non-evil people as you might think.

So there you go. I hope that sampler is enough for you to decide whether to hang around or leave.

In lifestyle design, your relationship with your material possessions — “stuff” — is perhaps the central issue. Digital stuff is stuff too, since it has to physically live somewhere. Stuff is the locus where theories meet reality. It is not particularly hard to think about money, careers and investments in reasonably clear-eyed ways.  If it weren’t for stuff, execution on those fronts would also be easy.

Stuff is different. Even thinking about it is hard. We don’t even have a good word for it.  If you’ve been living on your own for at least a couple of years, getting a clear sense of all the stuff in your life takes an intense, draining and intellectually demanding exercise like a GTD Sweep (the first stage in getting on the GTD wagon; just spending a weekend making sense of all your stuff). By comparison, developing situation awareness of your finances is as simple as logging into your major accounts. Stuff diseases, such as extreme hoarding, seem to me to be much worse than financial diseases like being over-leveraged.

In lifestyle design discussions, I find that people vastly oversimplify the stuff side.  They pick unexamined philosophies about stuff, like “minimalism” or “go local,” without ever looking at how the stuff in their life actually works. This is like deciding to save $1000 a month without actually looking at your income, debt and expenses. Worse, they try to pitch their unexamined “stuff religion” to others.

So a few months back, I decided I needed to understand stuff and start experimenting with doing things to it, before getting all caught up in pretty lifestyle theories. Understanding stuff is Stuff Science.

Stuff is an Illegible Machine

Stuff Science is harder than finance or career planning, and there are far fewer ideas you can borrow from others because the stuff in your life is a unique configuration of stuff, even if the components are commodities.  Creating a smoothly functioning configuration of stuff in your life is Stuff Engineering. It involves applying Stuff Science, guided by a keen sense of Stuff Aesthetics.

Stuff is multi-dimensional. Your stuff embodies your cultural defaults and unconscious and conscious decisions about a lot of things. Utility, convenience, ideology, personality, marital compromises, class affiliations, beliefs about how things can and should be done, rituals, dietary preferences — everything is embodied in your stuff. Often a single significant element of your stuff, like your main kitchen knife, will embody all those things. Can you visualize the lifestyles of people who might own the following types of primary kitchen knives?

1. A special-ordered hand-crafted Japanese knife
2. An expensive 8″ Wustof knife from an upscale store like Williams-Sonoma
3. An unusual knife (in the West), but still from Williams-Sonoma, like a santoku
4. A cheap knife from a department store
5. A “never needs sharpening” ceramic knife only available from TV infomercials
6. A dull steak knife re-purposed as a kitchen knife
7. A Bowie knife
8. A Swiss Army knife

Your stuff comprises what I called externalized mental models in Tempo. This means that despite the connotations of a haphazard jumble, your stuff is actually a complex system of interacting parts that embodies a lot of your thinking.

We don’t clearly understand the complex interactions in our stuff for the same reason we don’t understand the other complicated machines we deal with, like airplanes, computers or cars: they are complicated. But at least with those machines you recognize that there is a complex machine behind the scenes. You may only deal with what product designers call the user experience (UX), but you know there’s more going on, and experts behind the scenes who know how things work.

When it comes to stuff unfortunately, though there is a complex machine behind the UX, there are no experts. If you want more control, you will need to become that expert.

If you choose not to become an expert, your stuff will stagger through life like a zombie, as an unexamined set of externalized mental models, gathering entropy and crud, until it becomes so poorly adapted to your actual life that it seizes up. At that point, you step back stunned, pondering the revelation that your life is a mess.

Even if you do try hard to become an expert, your stuff will remain a somewhat illegible machine, because it was  not designed top-down. It was designed as a series of hacks and modifications to an inherited lifestyle, which itself has been evolving for many generations. Understanding it completely would be like understanding the lifestyles of all your ancestors.

The Stuff-Shock Doctrine

Naomi Klein made up the term “shock doctrine” to describe a macro-economic phenomenon she calls “disaster capitalism.” It’s about how various powerful parties take advantage of big disasters (shocks) like Hurricane Katrina to further their nefarious agendas.

In lifestyle design fortunately, there are fewer interested parties — typically only you and your immediate family — and fewer nefarious interests. So shocks can be a good thing.

In fact they are necessary. Lifestyles are just too complex to understand and re-engineer without them. There is really no gentle, gradual evolutionary approach. Each time you want to make a significant change to your lifestyle, you have to deliver a shock.

I call this the “stuff shock doctrine.”

Without stuff shocks, mainstream lifestyles create an anchoring bias for those who want to try alternative lifestyles. Since these mainstream lifestyles are local optima, small perturbations are useless. You’ll be dragged back to that optimum. To break out of the local optimum, you need a shock.

The stuff-shock doctrine motivates the basic method for getting past the immense complexity of thinking about your stuff. Just do something dramatic like deciding to live out of a suitcase or moving to Bali for a while. You don’t have to fully understand how the stuff in your life works for this method to be at least temporarily effective. You just need to successfully compress your stuff down to a suitcase.

The reason this is at least temporarily effective  is that it knocks you out of a rut and gives you a fresh start. When you arrive at your new city with a suitcase, you may not have everything you need. The illegible machine in your suitcase may not work. But at least you get an opportunity to evolve a small illegible machine, one consciously considered addition at a time, until it works. You may never understand how your old life used to work, but who cares, so long as your new one does. Let sleeping ghosts lie.

But stuff shocks are only temporarily effective unless you do more, because community life is built around shared lifestyles. To the extent that you want to belong to the community around you but don’t want to share their lifestyle, you’ll be faced with a contamination problem. If you are already a minority in some aspect of your life  you’ve experienced this on a small scale.  I am a vegetarian for instance, which means in groups where I am the only one, I often have to be the bottleneck constraint and apologize for making everybody adapt a little to my needs.

Imagine such issues affecting your whole life and you’ll get a sense of the immense pressure involved in a truly novel lifestyle design that is different from neighboring lifestyles in many respects.

Default lifestyles can start to sneak back into a stuff-shock created alternative lifestyle. Meshing your alternative lifestyle with traditional lifestyles all around you is a lot of hard work. Many people either cave under the pressure or simply exit the mainstream altogether, choosing to live in exile communities alongside others with similar alternative lifestyles.

One way to understand the magnetic pull of traditional lifestyles is to note that the value of a locally-optimal lifestyle increases with the number of people practicing it, an unusual instance of Metcalfe’s Law, better known as the fax machine effect or network effect. So even if your lifestyle is in effect a better fax machine, it will be less valuable if it cannot talk to traditional fax machines. If you like, you can even think of communities as basically networks of lifestyle nodes. They are more than that, but for the purposes of this discussion, those additional features don’t really matter.

In lifestyle design, you have to choose a point on a spectrum between isolation and interdependence with respect to people whose lifestyles don’t synchronize well with yours, and whose lifestyle ideologies you may not agree with. Another network analogy may help: in electrical grids, new generators can only join the grid if they are synchronized, in terms of the alternating current they are pumping into the grid.  This synchronization is one of the elements of a larger design practice called impedance matching. You cannot efficiently deliver power into a network that then delivers it to a load somewhere else if you don’t do impedance matching.

Impedance mismatch can be a severe problem for lifestyle design.

The more you lean towards isolation, the harder you’ll have to work to maintain connectivity while minimizing contamination. Due to Metcalfe’s Law and impedance matching this is a practical problem. The isolation/interdependence dichotomy is also a moral problem. But I won’t talk about that today, I’ll simply assume that you’ve chosen a fair degree of interdependence. For a variety of reasons, I believe that is the smart and right choice.

Smart Stuff

I have personally experienced many stuff shocks. I have moved 17 times across 7 cities in two countries in my adult life, not counting periods when my wife and I were in a two-body-problem situation and effectively maintaining two households.

Early on, I used to be pretty dumb about stuff shocks. I hate moving, and each time I moved, I’d swear that I’d never collect so much crap again. But each time, as I unpacked my life and settled into a new place, stuff would creep back in.  Somewhere along the way — perhaps it was the 5th or 6th move — I got more sophisticated in thinking about my stuff, and started managing the isolation/interdependence tradeoff more carefully. I stopped moaning about the fact that my life, which used to fit into the trunk of my car a few moves back, now takes a 10x10x10 storage unit and a truck.

I no longer subscribe to this sort of naive minimalism.

I have given up the idea that you can make up purely abstract beliefs that tell you how to deal with stuff.

Instead, I believe you have to think about individual lifestyle elements down to things like knives and shoes. You have to put more thinking into every act of ownership. This thinking doesn’t just add value inside your head. It adds value outside your head, to the stuff itself. Your stuff gets smarter. More information — the output of thinking — gets embodied by it. Your bits-to-atoms ratio increases. Some people like to think of this as conscious living, but that’s unnecessarily mystical for me. I prefer to think of it as smart stuff. If you learn to peel vegetables with a knife and eliminate a separate peeler, your knife got smarter.

It isn’t the quantity of stuff in your life that matters. What matters is how smart the stuff is and whether it is smart in service of your needs.

A four-bedroom-house packed with smart stuff that you govern wisely is much better than a minimalist backpack that enslaves your mind because you cannot let go unexamined assumptions about stuff. Your behaviors become trapped within archetypes and doctrines derived from stuff. Instead of being a guy who lives out of a backpack, you become a caricature, a backpacker.

When you don’t govern your stuff, your stuff governs you. There are two variants of this, bad and worse. When your stuff is merely dumb, your life merely gets dumb and random. When your stuff is actually smart in the service of the goals of others, your life gets worse than random. It gets toxic, and predatory forces squeeze all value out of it (I wrote about this in The Gollum Effect).

The bad news is that thinking hard to turn dumb or other-smart stuff into smart-for-you stuff takes time and multiple stuff-shocks. It is an iterative process. With each shock,  your stuff  gets smarter.

This led me to a sort of broad goal for Stuff Science. Stuff Science is the study of stuff compression. Compression as in file compression. Shoving more information into fewer bits. It is an empirical and local science. The only way to study it is to subject your life to periodic stuff shocks and thinking about the results each time to design the next one.

When you understand this in a naive way, you end up believing in the religion of minimalism: doing without, cutting away stuff simply because it is illegible, and preaching about the evils of stuff. You end up idolizing backpack-nomadism for its own sake. You end up not taking on challenges that might help you grow simply because they might involve more stuff.  You drop out and avoid challenges and pretend that the relief that actually comes from shying away from challenges is coming from the mere act of giving up stuff. Your life ends up full of little hypocrisies, like swearing by a “small and local” philosophy, but carrying around an iPad that takes the might of the entire global industrial system that you complain about, to build.

When you understand this in a sophisticated way though, you can start to consciously make your stuff smarter. You may possess more or less stuff through life as the challenges you take on change, but you aren’t navigating by some unexamined drive to merely eliminate stuff.

Cognitive Nomadism

If you’ve been following my previous writing, you’ll notice that I’ve snuck in an idea that seemingly contradicts my own earlier idea: that externalizing intelligence makes institutions smarter and people dumber. If your stuff is getting smarter, are you getting dumber?

Not if your stuff is getting smarter because of shocks you are engineering, as Stuff Science experiments.  Stuff-shocks keep you in charge, and don’t allow stuff to grow by unexamined accretion for too long. We cannot think about every ownership decision, but periodic shocks force us to periodically inject a large dose of intelligence into our patterns of ownership.

There are many ways to deliver stuff-shocks to your lifestyle, but the easiest way is to simply uproot yourself geographically and move to a different place. This is one reason nomadism is strongly associated with lifestyle design (and also the reasoning behind my claim, in The Return of the Barbarian that pastoral nomads are individually smarter, but collectively dumber, than settled peoples).

What keeps nomads smart is that having to constantly pack up and move keeps them sensitive to the meaning and purpose of all the stuff in their lives, and forces them to keep making decisions about what to keep and what to leave behind. It is easy to let stuff pile up in the attic. Out of sight out of mind.  Stuff that was smart when you bought it can become dumb if your lifestyle changes and you either don’t notice or are in denial about it.  I once bought a keyboard a long time ago but didn’t touch it after a few piano lessons. I lugged it around for the next 4 moves, telling myself I’d take lessons again. But at some point I realized it wasn’t going to happen. I gave it away. If I hadn’t been moving so often, I’d probably still have it.

That said, while nomadism is the easiest way to deliver stuff-shocks to your lifestyle, it isn’t the only way. It takes discipline, but other techniques, ranging from intensive spring-cleaning to maintaining a “Goodwill Bag” (a bag of stuff to give away via Goodwill, a chain of stores in the US where you can get cheap used stuff) can deliver large and small shocks to your lifestyle.

So to generalize the principle of using shocks to design your lifestyle progressively and iteratively, we can call it cognitive nomadism.

There are two basic kinds of shocks. Expansion shocks put more stuff into your life. Compression shocks eliminate stuff. Both are good so long as your stuff gets smarter on average.

Most lifestyle design relies on compression shocks rather than expansion shocks simply because it is easier to make your stuff get smarter if you are eliminating rather than adding.

This is because additions are born dumb. If you add a home gym, it is dumb stuff until you settle into a routine of actually using it. Eliminations can also be dumb, but there will usually be immediate acute pain, and you will find out immediately. If you were to give up your cellphone due to a romantic notion of “living off the grid” you’ll realize how much your life revolves around it in a day or two. So a good default assumption is that additions are dumb unless you experience immediate relief (no integration costs), and eliminations are smart unless you experience immediate pain.

I recently answered a question about writing skills on Quora, and emphasized the role of rewriting and editing. Stuff-shocks are the rewrites of your life. And as with any editing processes, by default you should assume that cutting stuff is smarter than adding stuff.

If you try expansion shocks, not only will it cost you more, there is a much higher chance that others will determine what stuff gets put into your life. When you buy a house for instance, you are inheriting an entire set of lifestyle assumptions from am architect paid by a developer. When you move from a house to the trunk of you car, there is simply much less space for others to put stuff into. Expansion shocks that make your stuff smarter on average are hard to engineer.

So there is nothing intrinsically great or noble about living out of a suitcase or a car trunk, being nomadic or being minimalist. That’s merely the simplest pattern you can use to deliver frequent cognitive-nomadic shocks to your system, with a high probability of things getting smarter.

My Experiments

Recently, I delivered the biggest compression shock of my life to my stuff. My wife and I put most of our stuff into a 10x10x10 storage unit and sublet a part of her parents’ home in Las Vegas. We will be living here for at least 4-5 months. It isn’t exactly living out of suitcases (though we only have a few suitcases worth of our own stuff) because the house is furnished and has almost everything we need.

But it’s a start. I am learning very fast what stuff I actually need, what stuff is just leftover crud from the past, and what stuff I am hanging on to for sentimental reasons. Living in someone else’s furnished home is giving me a sense of how much my lifestyle has in common with others’ at the micro-level — things like spatulas and dishes. I am learning for instance, that I have an irrational attachment to certain kitchen equipment. I am realizing I can do most of my preferred cooking in anyone’s kitchen, not just my own.

Though this particular shock is reversible (and likely will be reversed to a large extent with the next move), both of us are starting to think the same radical thoughts: if we can put 90% of our things in storage and do without them for 6 months, how much do we really need any of it? We are starting to understand different things — ranging from couches to books — in broader terms. How much does it cost to acquire? To rent? How long would you have to store something for the marginal storage costs to exceed the costs of just selling it and re-buying it later? Is it seasonal-use (our winter stuff is in storage for instance)?

But beyond these sorts of obvious computations is a sort of sensibility that is taking root in my mind, where nothing is ever allowed to become a taken-for-granted possession. It’s all negotiable at the next stuff-shock.

Actually, I experienced an even more severe temporary compression shock. As many of you know, I turned the move from DC to Vegas into a 3-week road trip, during which I was essentially living out of my car, others’ spare couches and the odd hotel room. I will be doing several more weeks of that later this summer. Living out of a car is an excellent test-drive for those considering lifestyle design.

Ever since I started thinking in terms of lifestyle design as an ongoing series of stuff shocks, things have started seeming both more comprehensible and more manageable (I don’t have to figure it all out right now, I just have to figure out the lessons of one stuff shock at a time, making this a sort of lean/agile lifestyle design model).

The idea of stuff shocks also gives you an easy way to estimate whether your lifestyle is in good shape. Just ask: what was the last stuff shock you subjected it to, and how strong was it? If your answer is “a spring cleaning 10 years ago,” chances are your stuff is fairly dumb and/or toxic. I am not suggesting that everybody should become a real nomad. That’s just not possible for (say) somebody with a house, an underwater mortgage and two kids in school. But I think anyone can be a cognitive nomad and deliver frequent stuff-shocks to their lifestyles to keep their stuff smart.

Post comments on the original post on the Tempo blog.

I haven’t liveblogged much of the last week of the road trip, primarily because I was doing broader ribbonfarmesque things, rather than meeting readers. Expect to see some blog posts out of my travels between Omaha, NE and Jackson, WY soon, both here and over at Tempo blog.

I am now in Vegas, and I’ll be here for a few weeks before hitting the west coast. All our stuff is currently in storage, and we are subletting a part of our in-laws’ house for a few months while we figure things out.  Arriving in Vegas felt strange. It wasn’t like coming home because it isn’t my home. Over the years, I’ve moved so many times (14 times in the last 14 years, across 5 cities, so an average of once a year) that my sense of place and home has mostly been about a few possessions that have traveled with me through all of them.  Getting used to true nomadism and living out of others’ homes for the last 3 weeks has deepened that sense of comfortable rootlessness. Now I am going to be living in limbo for about 6 months.

These thoughts reminded me of one of my favorite chapters in The Wind in the Willows, “Dulce Domum” (Sweet Home), which is about the sudden attack of homesickness that descends on one of the characters, the Mole, after he’s been on the road having adventures for way too long. Sample this chapter.  You don’t need to understand the plot or characters to appreciate this chapter. Here’s a particularly eloquent chapter.

Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way! Why, it must be quite close by him at that moment, his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again, that day when he first found the River! And now it was sending out its scouts and its messengers to capture him and bring him in. Since his escape on that bright morn ing he had hardly given it a thought, so absorbed had he been in his new life, in all its pleasures, its surprises, its fresh and captivating experiences. Now, with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him, in the darkness! Shabby indeed, and small and poorly furnished, and yet his, the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day’s work. And the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling him so, through his nose, sorrowfully, reproachfully, but with no bitterness or anger; only with plaintive reminder that it was there, and wanted him.

The call was clear, the summons was plain. He must obey it instantly, and go. “Ratty!” he called, full of joyful excitement, “hold on! Come back! I want you, quick!”

“Oh, come along, Mole, do!” replied the Rat cheerfully, still plodding along.

“Please stop, Ratty!” pleaded the poor Mole, in anguish of heart. “You don’t understand! It’s my home, my old home! I’ve just come across the smell of it, and it’s close by here, really quite close. And I must go to it, I must, I must! Oh, come back, Ratty! Please, please come back!”

The Rat was by this time very far ahead, too far to hear clearly what the Mole was calling, too far to catch the sharp note of painful appeal in his voice. And he was much taken up with the weather, for he too, could smell something—something suspiciously like approaching snow.

“Mole, we mustn’t stop now, really!” he called back. “We’ll come for it to-morrow, whatever it is you’ve found. But I daren’t stop now—it’s late, and the snow’s coming on again, and I’m not sure of the way! And I want your nose, Mole, so come on quick, there’s a good fellow!” And the Rat pressed forward on his way without waiting for an answer.

Post your comments over on the original post on the Tempo blog.

I am in Memphis, where I plan to meet up with Daniel Pritchett, some local entrepreneurs at a startup incubator, and anyone else who might be around. Next stop, St. Louis on Tuesday. As far as I know, I have no readers there, but I wanted to check out the Billy Goat chip company, maker of my favorite chips. If anybody is out there, it’d be great to meet up. From St. Louis I head to Omaha and after that, the road-trip basically goes into a sights-over-people mode, since my destinations in Nebraska and South Dakota (North Platte for a second visit to Bailey Yard, Alliance for Carhenge and Rapid City for Deadwood) aren’t places I am likely to find any readers. I’d be shocked to find somebody beyond Omaha. After South Dakota, I head to Jackson Hole in the heart of Yellowstone, where oddly enough I do have someone to stay with. After that, depending on how much time I have left, I might dawdle or dash my way to Vegas, the end point for this leg.

Posts from Week 2

• Strategies, Counter-examples and the UnAha! Experience
• On Ritual Time
• The Author’s Journey and the Blogger’s Journey
• Functional Fixedness and Kata Learning
• Freytag Staircases in Nashville
• The Car/Truck Ratio

Post your comments over on the original post on the Tempo blog.

I am in Ann Arbor, MI as I write this, preparing to head south tomorrow. The plan is to wander down to New Orleans over the week, and then start up along the Mississippi next week. For the coming week, I have Atlanta plans nailed down and Nashville and New Orleans plans almost nailed down. According to Google Maps, Dayton, Cincinnati, Lexington, Knoxville, Montgomery and Mobile are along the route. If you suspect you are within a reasonable band off this route, give me a holler.

Here are links to my the posts I liveblogged on the Tempo blog during the first week. Delay-blogged rather.

• Time Travel for Ghosts
• Darwin, Some Rationalists and the Joker
• Peak Oil and the Tempo of the Earth
• Talking Temporal Illegibility in Montreal (video)
• Why Some Drives are Fun (video)
• The One Way of the Beginner
• Haircuts and the Guy Clock
• An Evening of Pace, Pace, Lead with Chuck
• Island Time vs. Mainland Time (video)
• The Tempo of Food
• A Moment of Silence with John Boyd

Some reflections on Week 1 follow, for those interested in the metatext.

So week 1 of the road trip was, hmm… how do I put it? Surreal. Equal parts enlightening, puzzling and just plain odd. This road trip project was based on the idea that I could combine book promotion with a sort of literary-performance-art approach to market research. The term “market research” somehow seems inappropriate for a guy bumming around sleeping on people’s couches, but since the net effect is that I am slowly beginning to understand who reads my writing and why, I guess you could call it that. Maybe there’s a second book waiting to come out of this road trip that I could call “market research for bloggers.”

I am experimenting with a lot of things at once: high-tempo/short-length posting, video, photography, interviews and other random things. So prepare to be somewhat befuddled. I know I am. One thing I’ve learned already is that when you are generating raw material very quickly, it becomes far harder to process it into insight, especially in real time. In other words, this road trip is turning out to be far more interesting than might be coming through in the writing (the video in particular is probably awful; very new medium for me, at least in the improv self-recording sense). I dislike reality-TV style blogging (my life, even on a road trip is not a good spectator sport), so I’ve been trying instead to focus on the key memes that I am encountering in my conversations and solo experiences, rather than the people.

But really rich and dense conversations and experiences don’t yield either value or key memes immediately. The real-time story, rearranged with the benefit of hindsight into a remembered story, makes for much more interesting reading. But on the other hand, liveblogging does seem to be more “live” and immediate, and that’s worth something. At least to me. By capturing a view of the journey in real time, ambiguity, dissonances and all, I am sort of creating a reference narrative which I hope to return to later to jog my memory when I need to.

There is one specific way in which meeting people in real life is interesting and immediately valuable. In my online interactions with people, I usually see only a tiny slice of who they are, and that in the context of my life, since the interactions are in places like the comments section of this blog, where I play host. Meeting them in person as a real-world guest instead of virtual host allows me to see why and how my writing fits into various individual lives. It is particularly interesting to see my writing in relation to the other things in people lives, and how people integrate the information they consume from different sources into a whole that makes sense in their lives. I admit the view is somewhat unsettling, since I am only used to seeing my thinking within the context of my own life. The process feels at least a little voyeuristic, since my ideas seem to provide a more intimate look into people’s lives than strangers normally get. It felt weird, for instance, to hear a reader explain the Gervais Principle to a friend who had never heard of me.

Note: while the main stream of liveblogging will be over at the Tempobook blog, I will be cross-posting a weekly summary/itinerary on ribbonfarm. This is the first one. If you want to join in for this week’s action, post your comments on the original post. If you want the blow-by-blow liveblogging, subscribe to the Tempobook blog.

Here’s the itinerary for week 1, with approximate days/times and a partial itinerary of planned events. Post a comment if you want to do something at any of these locations or any obvious waypoints.

Tuesday, May 3

Morning: micro-meetup at Caffe Amouri in Vienna (a DC suburb) at 11 AM with readers Benjamin Eason and Julio Rodriguez. Join in if you’re around.

Afternoon: drive to Baltimore to check out the Beehive Baltimore, a coworking spot I’ve always been meaning to check out. Julio will be riding along and I’ll get to test my in-car iPhone based video interview rig. Fingers crossed.

Evening: drop Julio off and drive on to Wilmingon, Delaware.  Why? Stay tuned.  Plan for the night is to couchsurf.

Wednesday, May 4

Drive leisurely north to Albany, NY, stopping randomly along the way. Holler if you are along the obvious route. Will probably make a stop in New Jersey somewhere. Plan is to camp out at an old friend’s home for the night.

Thursday, May 5 and Friday, May 6

Drive to Montreal. Seb Paquet has kindly offered to host me for a couple of days and I’ll also be meeting up with Daniel Lemire.  Trying to pull together a talk about the book for the group Seb runs, Technologies et savoirs. I thought it means “Technology is our Savior” but apparently it means “Technology and Knowledge.” Good. I don’t do Messianism well.

Saturday, May 7 and Sunday May 8

Get myself to Ann Arbor, MI by Sunday night, weaving vaguely through Ottawa, the Lake Ontario shoreline and Toronto. Haven’t made any concrete plans yet, so I am very open to ideas. I’ll stop somewhere if I can find free/cheap  accommodations (hint, hint), otherwise it is a straight dash to Ann Arbor where I have accommodations.