On Putting Yourself Out There
I chose to move to a more urban part of the city after the COVID lockdowns. My old area had coffee shops and food, a weekend buzz of people, but it wasn’t close to downtown to feel the tourist crowds, though they did show up sometimes.
I respond better when I see people out and about. I don’t fear missing out, because I’ll do something alone if I want to. Moving blocks from downtown has been more lively.
There are people who seem mentally distressed that sit for hours at the nearby bus stop. One just uses his phone. Another acts out animated conversations with someone invisible, getting more agitated as it continues.
Computers unraveled our world, aided by people. This stuff happened before the internet too, but there were different safeguards when you had to solve problems locally, and it was harder for troublemakers to unleash outrage on strangers. Worse, they don’t understand the chaos they cause because they’re busy chasing internet points.
When I talk of consequence design, I mean how “human-computer interaction” created incentives to disengage from neighbors. There were never incentives to talk to strangers, but we used to do it. Metrics-driven data mining has us seeking connections while ignoring answers in front of us.
A TV ad shows a mom giving her son’s resume to anyone, to help him find work. How quaint it once was to fill out an application and get hired on the spot by a manager who knew their hiring pool. Lamenting empty offices overlooks that landlords don’t connect with local small business owners getting by on small margins who can’t afford leases. These problems seem chicken and egg. Why take a lease you can’t pay? Why don’t cities give space to grow? Corporate welfare lures companies with no local ties who leave when tax breaks expire.
It’s wild that people want to starve local schools of money, with officials whose kids don’t attend public school. This isn’t consequence design, but part of a narrative I can’t escape.
I don’t see improvement. My practice now involves strategic foresight and design futures because you have to envision the future you want. For decades, companies and governments invested in future-casting that led to today’s developments, almost always certain types of men, as if no one else was qualified.
My frustration with civic life is that many solvable problems await action while we remake time horizons. Winning is fun, and you might luck into it when circumstances align. But sustained winning is hard work. Decision-making isn’t about winning; we must constantly reevaluate our definitions of “good” and “wins.”
As a kid, I wondered why school districts experiment in the name of progress. How can latchkey kids think the best thing is to deprive kids of field trips, sports and infrastructure built for them before?
It’s as if we’ve decided everyone could have a good life by just applying somewhere, rather than fix the structural harm done in the name of progress.
On Rage Tweets, Reddit & the painful silence of a post-twitter world
There’s something cathartic about putting half-baked ideas into the world and getting feedback. Losing Twitter is hard to quantify, even though I didn’t like it, because it amplified voices literally out of obscurity. I’ve seen similar laments from academics who did important but disconnected work in random places. Conferences help, but gatekeepers structure our world in ways that make it hard for those not at “the right schools” or with “the right titles” to pole vault into consciousness.
Many people I came up with in the early 2000s blogosphere have risen from Blogspot to prominent publications and media. It’s cool to see their ascent. A challenge has been figuring out how to market myself, message my ideas, and where to start.
Mostly, I’ll talk about sharing ideas freely, owning my ideas, and tie this to my post on the anti-engagement era, where disinformation and rage tweets are currency in a metamodern world.
Generative AI tools like Midjourney show bias plainly by revealing their default audience. Now it may seem fun, but when a few people “train” the new canon on what we’ll see and hear, they determine what’s important.
There’s never been another Oprah, because she was a glitch in the matrix, benefitting from timing, self-belief, and assuming her show wouldn’t work, ensuring there would be no other like her. We see this in tech too.
What will happen if the tech monoculture designing our tools erases key parts of our existence due to blind spots or malice? It doesn’t matter for those who know how to find things without them. But future generations won’t remember life before the internet or making things from scratch.
The experimentation gold rush is a 1.0 thing. The next generation learns to consume, not build. Early adopting means wasting time learning the new puzzle, contextualizing it, and adding it to life. It seems wasteful from outside, because it mostly is. But taking these tools and breaking them to understand how they work, think, and are programmed is crucial for living in an increasingly modern and hostile world.
Notes from the age of disengagement
We exist in the Age of Disengagement, an era marked by weaponized speech online where our words are not only used against us but also synthesized by machines to form a new canon of beliefs and attitudes. Yet, behind the algorithms are people, curators who selectively shape this modern narrative akin to a new Bible, impacting how we view different individuals, genders, and non-conforming identities.
Transitioning from this idea, the primary actors often present themselves as benign, assuring us that our private data is safe and being used ethically, yet the mechanisms of their operations remain veiled in secrecy. Our state bureaucrats and policymakers live in a world where they believe there’s no need for transparency regarding measurable progress. However, if tangible change isn’t apparent to the public, leaders need to leverage their power to demonstrate meaningful progress. Public relations gestures, like press conferences, ribbon-cuttings, or podcast appearances, are inadequate substitutes for genuine accountability.
Amidst this backdrop, the current era has also seen a transition in information dissemination. We moved from an age where you could voice any opinion, largely unnoticed, to an age where attention could potentially garner you a book deal off of Twitter, to our current reality. Now, capital has co-opted the democratized mechanisms of free speech, turning them into engines of disinformation—a venture that’s become disturbingly profitable.
This shift leads us into a realm where, in the absence of credible information and veracity, we find ourselves in a vacuum. Instead of holding the powerful accountable, we fight among ourselves on platforms like Reddit, engaging in endless debates about what should be. We find a parallel in the non-profit sector, where many are part of the problem while believing themselves to be part of the solution.
The narrative further unfolds as complicity becomes a universal trait in our current state, and at some point, we must coalesce all stakeholders, including the public, for a moment of reckoning. We all must share the burden to solve our problems, acknowledging the vast organizational technical debt we’ve accumulated. Our societal architecture is burdened by a debt that can’t simply be dissolved through bankruptcy. We must be agile and nimble in addressing these issues, despite society’s inherent resistance to such change.
In reflecting upon this, we live in a world of escalating crises, always on the brink of being permanently upended by the next pandemic. Those in power must recognize that secluding oneself and making reactionary, self-serving policy choices are no longer acceptable. If the instability of the Global South hasn’t made it abundantly clear, those in power are only one day away from losing their seat.
Drawing parallels to our own situation, we like to think we’re beyond such instability here, but the proliferation of societal fissures and bad actors who invite and exploit these divides for personal gain suggests otherwise. In the face of societal upheaval, those who have contributed to the instability wouldn’t shed a tear for the repercussions.
Bifurcated modalities
There is a youngish man who sits at the bus stop several days a week staring at his phone and watching something for what amounts to an 8-hour work day. I was at the grocery store the other day and heard the cashier talking about going home to stream and making a little money doing it. Both of these random experiences made me think about how I experience the world day-to-day and how it evolves rapidly.
I mean to explain the ways people experience the same society in dramatically different ways. This stratification has always existed between rich and poor, or because of people’s gender. The information age, coupled with free trade, has changed the landscape to the point where there’s a bit of a monoculture that permeates everyday life. People in far-flung places are culturally aware of what’s happening in dominant markets, whereas 30 years ago, the information flow was slower, less fragmented, and more localized.
In local markets, this manifests in ways where people can operate substrate without anyone knowing that’s a way to live at all. For someone with an office job who lives in the suburbs today and who might be over 40, they have no idea there are people younger than them who experience the world in very different ways than they did or even their parents did.
People growing up before the information age had relatively similar experiences, despite the improvements in nutrition technology and social advances. But in the information age, there are no “common shows” that bind people because it’s possible to never listen to the radio and find your music through alternative sources. TV shows are streaming, and live sporting events are mostly on cable, leaving out people who don’t have access to those services or can’t get them from elsewhere.
It’s possible to do what you once did, but it’s harder to find community when people walk around with earbuds, and it’s harder to initiate a conversation about common topics because these things were always difficult, but it’s even harder now.
We need to be thinking not only about how these bifurcated modalities affect us but also how they impact our ability to develop empathy about how other people—our neighbors, fellow travelers, and others—experience the world.
The endless cycle of blogging
I’ve been blogging for more than half my life at this point. My first blog platform was Movable Type, and then it all went from there. Most of my blogs vanished either because I deleted them when I outgrew them or because of my penchant in the early 00s of letting domain names lapse. I bought my first domain — changeamerica.org — in 1996 and I had to mail the money to InterNic to get it, but I naturally let that one lapse too. Kinda silly, huh?
The hardest part of blogging when you know how to build a website, roll your own CMS, and have opinions on a web stack is getting started. If I had a dollar for how many times I started working on a site, only to get distracted by setting up something in the back end, I’d be able to buy a nice meal. Over the years, I’ve opted for easier solutions because ultimately, I just want to get ideas out. For a while, Twitter was useful for this because it mostly served the purpose of what a blog would do, I grew a decent sized audience for a nobody and so, there was no real point in creating a captive space for anyone.
Well, we all know how that worked out. So I’ve been pondering all year about getting back to “owning my own blog” again, but rinse, wash, repeat the cycle from the second paragraph. Not to mention, when your job is web stuff and your hobbies are also on the internet, a bit of fatigue can set in at times.
So here we are now, trying this once again. My main goal is to write for myself. I always find that I do better when I’m using a blog as a documentation engine, rather than trying to “gain a audience” or worrying about what people want to read from me. It’s an easier habit to keep up that way and I’ve been practicing by using my long dormant Substack about music to get back into the habit of writing about something. It’s still a chore at times, even when you’re writing once a week roughly, and it’s just for your friends, but the habit is still good nontheless.
I’ve already spent more time continuously in Portland than I have anywhere I’ve lived and I’ve been at my job longer than any single job I’ve ever had in my life, by a longshot. While this is all cause for a bit of celebration — yay, Ron is “putting down roots” — it’s also been very jarring for me to make sense of what I’m doing, where I want to be, and most importantly, how I see the world.
The last few years, talking and writing about Consequence Design has given me an opportunity to think about my work from a different lens. Mostly, I have increasingly more opinions about the work, how we work, and how our framing of the work changes our perspectives about 1) how we frame problems 2) what we think is possible and 3) the lengths we’re willing to go to solve the problems, but this 4) assumes that we think there are problems at all.
Me doing an in-person event last fall during the Portland Design Festival
At some point, I got tired of talking about it and just retreated to buy more books than I feel like shipping, and coupled that with my own understanding of history. I’ve become more observational, and think about design in broader terms than before. I’m less concerned about the minutia of design systems, and while I still geek out about good layouts, typefaces, and literally have a whole instagram account full of neon signs I like, (another area where I have opinions) I think that designers — people working in tech broadly — and public servants, and really everybody — need to have some discussions about what’s being done in our names and whether we’re going to have a say about it or not.
So yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot. There’s no guarantee I’ll share any of this stuff. But in theory, I’d like to write a lot and release my writing in the form of talk-style chap books. I’ve enjoyed when folks like Keller Easterling and Dan Hill did that with Strelka and I want to do it myself. There’s nothing like Strelka in the US, and I’m not an architect. (No, information architects don’t count, but we are real…)
Usually, the things I’ve started were because no one else did it first. Or I was part of a thing they did and it wasn’t very good. But I’m almost always inclined to be a joiner than a starter, but over the years, people would put me in the “okay you’re gonna be in charge of this” role often enough that I’ve gotten fairly accustomed to it. It works okay, but I’m usually inclined to put the power back into their hands in key ways. I’m not so much interested in consensus, as much as I want to work with people who believers.
So I figure it’s time for me to get on the record (once again) about what i believe.
Why I keep coaching
Players have to earn trust, but I like building a culture where players have agency to help direct their practices. I’m very vocal about asking players things they want to work on, I’m not shy on abandoning ideas that aren’t working. As I’ve gotten further into this, I’m a lot more directive about what I’d like to see in matches, and I can be very reflective about the ways we need to improve.
My practices are fluid. Throughout my career, I’ve leveraged both technology and video as tools to help players improve. It’s harder to do in high school because of the resource-intensiveness of tennis (basketball teams can all be on the court at opposite ends, whereas 12 tennis players on one court is a lot.) but we make it work.
A lot of programs are pretty rigid about varsity status. In that, once the “tryout” period is over, you can try again next year. If I ran a program at a school with cuts, or if it was a hyper-competitive, state championships above all culture, I’d have to adopt some of these methods too because of sheer practicality.
Because I’ve run a no-cut program that past few years, at a school with only tennis and track as spring girls sports options, I end up with a fairly large JV bench every year. Half of those JV players aren’t interested in playing competitively, but like practicing with their friends. The other half end up comprising our B-team and depending on their progress and who our opponents are, I’m very liberal about bringing them up to varsity. I’m especially this way about seniors, who through their participation and commitment earn that sort of reward if they’re showing up and putting in the work.
I operate a ladder out of necessity, but challenge matches on our team are rare because the season isn’t really comprised of enough time to make it worthwhile. Injuries, school assignments, trips, and other things will often shift the lineup on its own. If two players are particularly close in level, we leverage opportunities for them to test themselves in a higher spot or to pair together and try doubles.
Our best players are often ones brought by their friends to a practice to see how we operate. Players say people assume that a championship winning team must have a scary culture, based on their experiences with other sports, and when they see how “chill” it is but that we still perform, entices them to come back and stick with it. After they get match action and realize how much progress they make in a short period, they sometimes become year-round tennis players.
I run a program that I’d want to participate in. It doesn’t mean it’s always easy. You don’t get what you want all the time. You can earn trust, role changes, and opportunities to try new things. I just don’t think it makes sense for a sport that’s so individual to be rigid, so I work to keep things interesting throughout the year.
Last year before the state tournament, I changed our entire pre-state week routine. We did our usual practice setup for the week of state (it’s different than the regular season, but I’m not telling you about it here) but I also changed up the normal routine with different activities at the end of each practice. One of those was bringing in a friend who teaches yoga to help us with flexibility. It was less about the yoga practice — though it went over well — and more about getting us off the court and focused elsewhere.
What brings me back year after year are the people. Not only my players, the parents, or our administrators. But the rival schools, seeing opposing teams kids grow up and improve too. So much of my professional life is through screens, tennis gives me an opportunity to switch up contexts and I learn as much about myself, as I think my players do.