Robbed of thoughts
The proliferation of AI makes me think a lot about how many longtime internet denizen come of age online. We started with crude tools that were slow, inefficient, and forced us to learn how to reverse engineer them to make them do what we wanted. Today, kids get apps and tools that have the problem solved. There’s still an element of figuring out how to make them do what you want, but it’s almost gamified.
The other challenge today is cost. Free internet CDs would at least give you a glimpse of online life and hacking was a time honored tradition helping people absorb more of the culture than perhaps their wallets (or parents credit cards, in a pre-debit world) would allow. Today? Every experience is financialized to the nth degree. Board games are having a revival, but less for family game nights and more for people in their 20s, 30s and 40s to relive childhood with extremely elaborate gaming experiences that cost a lot more than a board game you bought from the department store. Online games are rife with DLC, and while the time honored tradition of kids knowing more about being online than their parents still exists, it’s an ever present blight on childhood as we know it.
It’s made me reflect a lot on the ways that I communicate online. I went from the early days of pre-blogs and personal websites, eschewing social media until I forced to make it useful. I’ve always made friends online, but it’s seemingly harder than ever to connect with people because we’ve atrophied all of the findability of the web, in favor of something far more insidious. Profit. You’d almost be willing to tolerate bearing some of the costs of this chaos, if it actually delivered on its promises from time to time. But no, time and time again, the internet of today is a charred husk of its former self.
As I think about how to communicate my ideas, I realize how much over a decade of microblogging, coupled with a pandemic has done to my own social networks. This year, I’ve found myself being more intentional about making real-life plans with far-flung friends, and trying to contemplate how to communicate my varied ideas in places where I’ll be able to find them again in the future. Tweeting to an empty audience was downright jarring, and none of the alternatives have delivered on being anything other than a fascimile of an experience that used to be somewhat satisfying.
I’m not sure if this means that I’ll be blogging more. I have lots of unfinished drafts of half-completed ideas that might be best left to the drafts. But it occurred to me that there’s some value in sharing sometimes, even if I haven’t fulled conceived of what I want to say, just to record the ideas. I don’t find AI writing tools to be especially helpful sparing partners. I just know that recording ideas on platforms that don’t belong to me, where those ideas mostly go to die feels like a really bad way to catalog thoughts.
So i’m going to think through ways to do it better.
Civil Futures and the speculative present
Beyond the obvious negative connotations of futurists, I’ve long been drawn to realities that imagine me in their ideas. One of the inherent contradictions of being a minority in the West, is always being aware that statehood, nationality, and the contents therein are fraught with complexities. You are what you say you are, but not everyone accepts this as fact.
So much of speculation is framing what you think tomorrow ought to look like. It’s easy to ignore people you don’t see in that reality, not always out of malice, but a myopia that is hard won. If you’ve always lived on the other side of the tracks, it’s hard to imagine a world that’s different. Even when you venture elsewhere, indelibable memories shape the lens of how we see the world unless you venture far afield and are forced to practice new ways of living and being.
One of my deep frustrations with long-range plans by elected leaders, working groups, and committees is they’re always ambitious, rosy and completed ignorant of the realities of the practice.
Lou Downe’s book Good Services talks about 15 principles of good services, aimed to be some kind of building blocks of what services are composed of. what the principles lack are the constraints to what makes services good. Service design has borrowed so much from user experience and interaction design that there’s often difficulty in seeing the differences and being able to differentiate the disciplines.
Service design needs more differentiation. At its core, service design is about people and the things they interact with. There are a lot of gaps between what service designs are involved with and where they should be participating. Right now, service designers are working on interactive problems, trying to make widgets better and improving the flow of making, buying and selling stuff. This is important work, but not knowing how to make something doesn’t make it easier for designers to move forward. Without being able to stop something that isn’t good, without something isn’t great.
Towards Civil Futures
In my mind, there’s a gap between the stuff that gets done and the people who need the services. There’s a poor information flow that needs disintermediation between the stakeholders, decisionmakers, and so forth and the people at the root of whatever services, system or platform. I was thinking a lot about civil engineering and the infrastructure of physical experiences and how there lacks a nomeclature and speciificity of roles for people who work spatiatlly betwen interaction and physical and being able to translate the lessons and learnings of these interactive layers more fludily and easily. The longer you work on engagements in certain spaces, the more context you develop for the problems of that specific space and how to translate the concepts of your own work.
Right now, there’s no real job in any of this. People just show up and start trying to figure it out. Even if you write it all down, unless someone else has also experienced that same situation there’s no good way to make sense of the actual role you did, because it’s part management, part operations, part strategy, part advisory and researcher all at once. These roles exist across multiple industries and fields, but few are as peremable as designing in the civic - public sector/sphere.
Being able to grow and advance the practice of whatever service design purports to be, requires the field (?) to develop itself as a profession and practice that goes beyond the professional email job that it’s percevied as now, coupled with whatever veneer of tech workerdom that helps the roles catch the fumes of tech salaries and downstream prestige.
Civil futures is a conceptual bet that isn’t a real profession, but has one embedded. With the ways that bureaucracts persist in the ecosystem of any government, the attraction of these roles to a sort of hall monitor-type individual prevents the sorts of progress that gets demanded by the public, coupled with the artificial noise between the public, the bureaucractic layer, any sort of press/lobbying and the decisionmakers themselves. Civic futures thinks ahead and epowers people with the strategic foresight skills melded with the other stuff to make a more holistic, impactful industry.
Civil futures imagines something past what public administration roles already do, positioning people with strategic foresight and tech fluency into roles that helps move stuff forward in places.
Why the pricing out of youth sports so personal
The NYTimes opinion story today on youth sports being a multi-billion dollar industry that prices out poor, urban & rural kids is indeed a personal one to me. I reflect a lot on my own childhood experience learning to play tennis in public programs that were low cost or no cost to participants. This access enabled me a relatively low risk to try something that no one in my family had any real context for, because we didn’t know anyone who had previously played tennis save for randomly picking up a racket and playing at the park with a friend.
While eventually now looks back as though my tennis playing was some kind of accepted thing, it wasn’t and my parents were afraid it was going to be expensive and that I wouldn’t stick with it. It turns out 1) it was not expensive and 2) I did stick with it. It wasn’t only access to coaching, it was the prolifteraton of programs that included year-round playing that also helped tennis stick. This was around the same time the internet started to really bubble up and even with tennis, marching band, and whatever school activities I participated in, I still managed to make all sorts of far-flung friends online arond the same time.
Without getting me out of the house in tennis, I feel like I’d have spent more time on the computer and less time outside engaging with people I’d never have gotten to know otherwise. The other thing is, tennis literally helped me move away from home, at different times of life it supplemented my income and helped me adapt in new communities. None of this would’ve been possible had things gone differently. I’m not of the opinion that all kids need sports, cultural activities like music and a wide range of other activities are a good balance for young people to discover themselves, learn how to practice and perform and grow confidence. Working together and being part of a team — whether it’s a play, a band, or simply helping put something together — is such an invaluable part of growing up.
The fact we’ve stopped investing in these areas of life makes me sad, because everywhere in the country, activity fees proliferate increasingly strapped school districts who attempt to do more with less. This pain is felt through booster clubs who supplement, volunteers who invest their time and kids themselves who sacrifice to play the games they love with their friends. It’s just sad to me that we’ve decided to take this approach to youth activities in a single generation.
8 Arenas of Action Matrix
- Complicated: For situations that require expertise, bring in knowledgeable people to create detailed plans and make sure everyone can follow them.
- Complex: If the situation is unpredictable, use regular feedback from a diverse group to make decisions and look out for unexpected changes.
- Chaos: When everything is a mess, sometimes you have to rely on luck or make a complete overhaul.
- Aporetic: When you’re stuck between two difficult options, set up teams to explore different solutions in simulations.
- Clear: When things are straightforward and well-understood, just follow standard processes and watch out for anyone breaking the rules.
- Complex-Chaos: To prepare for emergencies, develop and test networks that can sense human behavior, and use simulations to train.
- Liminally Complicated: Use strategic foresight in advance and prepare for the unexpected, including those who don’t fit the normal patterns.
- Unimaginable: Sometimes things happen that you just can’t predict or prepare for.
Assessing the worthiness of posting in the AI era
Social media being disconnected thanks to the demise of Twitter remains something I think about a lot. I’m also wondering about the value of “posting” at all. For the posting addled among us, looking for ways to get our (posting) fix remains a constant need. Whether it’s using nuTwitter, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon or some other wild alternative. For many early adopters, the blog era was a transformative time. In the era where words are cheap and might not be written by you at all, it’s difficult to imagine the value of investing in third-party platforms.
It depends on the goal. Are we writing to riff? Are the ideas throwing into the ether, begging for engagement or a way to generative ideas outside of your own head? It’s probably not that deep. I like a good long-form story. Documentaries are favorites of mine, but I’m not going to read even a reddit post that seems like it might be written by an AI. I think LLMs are mostly a scourge, but I’ve also come to understand how they could be utilized productively. So much of social media usage was about expanding networks beyond where you live, work or play. It’s not that it’s impossible to do this with LLMs, bots have been around a while. The extra work required to sift through the noise just makes everything worse to use.
I reflect a lot on whether it’s worth continuing to post — even as I do it — because the habit is difficult to break, and there are brief moments where it feels like “old times.” But so many good ideas get trapped onto networks we don’t own, forgotten about and/or lost. Even bookmarks can be difficult to dredge, and hundreds of other people’s good ideas get deleted and forgotten without a second thought, because all of this stuff is fleeting.
On social media platforms & separation of concerns
Twitter’s demise has brought a variety of imposters aiming to give users a semblance of what we had for years. Twitter’s magic had less to do with the platform itself, but rather, the people who found themselves there. For instance, you could have multifacted conversations in real time with different people around different topics. Twitter was like the sports bar, tech conference hallway conversatons & professional post-work gathering all at once. At its peak, it enabled academics, comedians & regular people to engage and connect in ways that weren’t possible at the same velocity. This isn’t a celebratory post, since social media has wrought far more than it delivered, but like any tool it’s about how you use it, not about the tool itself.
Not to double down too heavily on a metaphor, but the concept of ‘separation of concerns’ is a design principle focused on the distinctive sections of software. For instance, the separation of HTML, CSS and Javascript. When I think about separation of concerns in the context of social media platforms, it’s a bit different but related.
The nicest thing that the web 2.0 offered aspirants who had some other interesting thing to share, was the chance to get out of their own networks and into new spaces. Moving to a new city gives you a chance at reinvention, the same way that a new job can do. The stories about people in the pre-internet age who would leave home one day, turn up in a new city with a new name and family, having left their own one behind is essentially what platforms like Tumblr and Twitter did in the form of user names.
I remember when an internet personality who had a huge following from a forum community and eventually on Twitter passed away. His family had no idea about his other life and they raised thousands of dollars for a kid he’d left behind, and they were overcome by how many lives he’d touched through his internet antics over the years, they just knew him as the person he was and that was it. It’s so gratifying to see how many public scholars leveraged this era to grow massive followings, sell books, and transform their lives from backbenchers in Faculty Senate to global icons. The pathways to the public square is always full of gatekeepers, but being able to amplify your work to larger audiences, through consistency, is one of the most powerful parts of the demise of Web 2.0
This brings me back to separation of concerns and the original premise of this post. Facebook’s twitter clone “Threads” (via Instagram) has a feature that blasts Threads posts of your instagram followers into the instagram feed. This is an understanding growth nudge aimed at creating FOMO for any instagram laggards who refuse to jump on the Threads train, as it’s normie Twitter vibes continue to grow in the most anodine ways.
Besides the growth hacking reasons for feeding your users complimentary app content, it’s not user friendly. Casual posters might appreciate these nudges, as it might get their friends to engage with them on a new platform. But the beauty and joy of older social media was meeting people you’d never get to reach out to.
Celebrities hawking their newest sponcon were never the reason anybody signed up for Myspace, created a blog on Tumblr or spent hours on Twitter. You showed up because there wasn’t anyone in your immediate orbit to share your wacky ideas about random Star Trek episodes with, or to livereact to a TV show that’s in Season 1 and not popular enough for your friends to care about.
Beyond identity layer cakes, old school platforms scored wins by connecting people across interests and scenes accidentally. On Tumblr or Twitter, even your weirdest takes could find true fans and new BFFs. Knowing at least one wonderfully weird someone would embrace your eccentricities made scrolling forever feeds irresistible.
At its heart, old school web’s network domination was people connecting through shared weirdness and words, not code or cash. As platforms trade online/IRL separation and welcoming weirdos for digital dollars and attention, can today’s social giants resist turning vibrant human connection into metrics on a spreadsheet? I think there’s magic to be found elsewhere online — and in real life — and the platform age will continue to erode, having already lost of the magic of what made the original eras great.