Last week I threw a tantrum about segmentations. I was sick, and my mood was slightly overintense. I call it “vehement”, and it is bad for my writing. The idea I wrote about is important, and deserved better, so I want to try again.

I talked about a situation designers often face. To do our work effectively, we have to understand the people who will use the things we design.

But sometimes the people we’re designing for have diverging sets of requirements. Their needs might be different, or they might have different attitudes or behaviors or use what we are designing in different contexts. We find there is not one, but multiple ideal users, and if we design only for one user, the design is unlikely to work for the others.

(Don’t be distracted by the term “user”. This is an all-purpose term for a person for whom we design. The design field has been debating this term for decades, and I’m sick of this debate, this category of debate, and the kind of person who’s into this kind of debate, aka 15-years-ago me.)

Whenever we discover that we are designing not for one ideal user, but for multiple ideal users, we develop a design segmentation. Sometimes we will express the design segments as personas — representative fictional characters who help flesh out the segments and make them feel real to designers.

I will give a real life example. I was working for a telecom, helping them design a better billing system. But we discovered that, with respect to bill payment, customers fell into three categories. People who wanted to pay as little attention to their bill as possible and didn’t much care if something was weird on the bill if it wasn’t huge, people who were way into inspecting every bill line-by-line and disputing the crap out of anything that looked irregular by so much as a nickel, and people who were living paycheck to paycheck, juggling their bills and trying to orchestrate income and outflow of cash to keep their households afloat. These people wanted very different levels of detail in their bills, very different degrees of control and very different kinds of help if something goes wrong. We called these segments something like “Set-and-Forget”, “Bill Auditor” and “Paycheck-To-Paycheck”. A successful design solution would need to accommodate all three of these segments.

With this example in mind, imagine the frustration designers face when clients tell them they already have a segmentation, and that we will be required to use those.

Why?

• They have already made the investment, and it is wasteful to redo the work.
• We should build on what they’ve already done, so we can move things forward instead of going back to square one.
• It is important to maintain consistency. It will confuse people if every project uses different segments.
• Turf. “Marketing does segmentations and personas in this organization.”

Much of the time, marketing did the segmentation.

But marketing segments for marketing purposes, and often those purposes are different from ours and have no relevance to the design problem we are trying to solve.

Imagine, for example of our client had made us solve our billing problem with typical telecom marketing segments. I’m just going to make them up:

• Wire-Cutters: customers who live on wireless networks and stream everything.
• Cable-Connecteds: people who still need all their devices (TV, telephone, maybe computers) securely attached to a wall, via a cable, for some combination of entrenched habit and a perception of reliability.
• Sports Fans: people who care only about their sports and who’ll gladly pay for cable TV in order to see all their games.

Imagine trying to use these segments to solve the design problem of accommodating different bill paying preferences. Telecom marketing segments tell you a lot about media consumption habits and attitudes and incredibly little about bill paying.

The lesson here is that segmentations of people are always relative to some specific purpose. Again:

Segmentations of people are always relative to some specific purpose.

Another way to state it is that any schema for dividing up sets of people is useful for asking certain kinds of questions, and useless for asking other kinds of questions.

This principle is not only true of marketing and design segmentations.

It is equally true of personality types. A personality typology is psychological segmentations that might (or might not) be useful for answering questions pertaining to commonalities and differences among groups of people.

Myers-Briggs and Enneagram enthusiasts can sometimes succumb to seeing their models as capturing the essence of personalities. But that essence says more about the essence of typologist than the essence of the people they type. I can say all this as someone who actually experienced this essentialist lapse, and obsessively viewed the entire human world as a complex play of Jungian personality functions. I know this way of thinking from the inside.

But now I will get to my deeper and more urgent point: This principle applies most of all to political identity.

It is all-too-easy to essentialize political identities. It is even easier when we are equipped with sociological theories that claim these identities are the outcome of cultural processes that generate personhood. We aren’t just segmenting populations, now, we are defining the very mechanisms that produce personhood. Identity penetrates into the essence of people, and the commonalities and differences that unite and divide us as political actors.

But as with personality types, this belief about says more about the essence of the identitarian than the essence of the people they identify as belonging to one identity or another. It tells us how they understand society, culture, politics and personhood — and it also tells us how they understand themselves in relation to others.

Consider the extreme case of a white supremacist, who will insist that their identity is that of a white person, their identification with being white is far more indicative of who they are as a person than their status as a white person can possibly say. Is the white supremacist aware of this meta-identity and its significance to who they are? Usually not. Their understanding of the world has psychic roots deeper than the content of their belief. Their beliefs, and indeed, their perceptions, their animating logic, their feelings grow up from this depth and bloom as racist beliefs about themselves and others. They compulsively project this schema onto their thoughts, experiences, memories, expectations. They are imprisoned within them. And they become neurotically incapable of segmenting people in other ways that might be more relevant to resolving practical problems,

Our white supremacist has succumbed to the same rigid limitations as the marketing department we discussed earlier, or the Enneagram fanatic who must know your type right away. They’ve lost track of the purpose of their segmentation, and essentialized it as a natural structure of society or of customers or of human beings in general.

And this is true of not only right-wing identitarianism.

It is exactly as true of left-wing identitarianism also known as “woke”, and what I prefer to call progressivism.

Progressivism has essentialized its segmentation to such a degree that it seems incapable of thinking politics in any other way. Not only is its identity-centered way of thinking politics fixed, but the segmentation it has been using is fixed.

This has caused progressivists to address a second-generation Mexican Catholic who loves America, who struggles to afford rent and food, for whom social roles like mother, father, sister and brother are central to their conception of the world as POC, with essentially the same concerns as a keffiyeh-wearing trans Latinx graduate student in the Queer Studies program at an elite university. These two people probably want diametrically different things.

And if someone takes a fresh look at the diverse citizens of this nation and tries segmenting it by economic class, social values and levels of patriotism they’ll probably have a more compelling value proposition — at least to our working class, traditionalist Catholic patriot. I think there’s more of them than genderqueer anti-Western progressivist graduate students.

That segmentation will also probably work better for policy design than — let’s face it — the marketing segmentation developed by the Democratic National Committee for use in designing and disseminating progressivist marketing messages. If a school or criminal justice system, or public health system only analyzes, measures and addresses performance of people according to the DNC marketing segmentation, they’ll certainly find differences among segments. But if they were to try other segmentations — for instance income level — the differences that emerged might be dramatically sharper. Poor lives matter?

And with respect to last week’s Democrat defeat, if progressivists insist on — or just default to — compulsively relying on the progressivist identity segmentation to account for the loss, they’ll generate a heaps of hypotheses on attitudes of each DNC marketing segments toward people from other DNC marketing segments, and the answers produced through this process will be just as wrongheaded and out of touch as the ideas that lost the Democrats this election.

It is time we recover our recognition that people are, first and foremost, people, and that our beliefs about them are less about them than they are about ourselves. We have lost this understanding and it is harming our humanity and our ability to deal effectively with the human world around us.

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I think this is better than my last two attempts. Certainly I’m less sick and less vehement. I’ll probably have to try a few more times to get this out right.

By the way, my segmentation of people is around their faiths and the ideologies that express those faiths. I see progressivists as an identity that trumps all other identities. Same with post-liberal trads, QAnons. Conservatives, Jewish Conservatives, Libertarians and old school liberals. These segments are far more meaningful to me than the identity schemas projected by each of these segments. I suppose today I’d call myself a metaliberal.