All posts by anomalogue

Closest and most demonstrable

Biography, Philosophy

One of my favorite deep cut Nietzsche passages:

The two principles of the new life. —

First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon.

Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.

Someday I should make a “Jefferson’s Bible” of Nietzsche quotes that freed me from the dismal faith of my youth and initiated me into a far better one.

The Nietzsche I revere and love is not the macho Nietzsche who emerges when you start with his most popular and most tattooed quotations. “God is dead.” “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” “When you stare long into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.” And, of course, there is the new antisemite favorite “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” Midwits love a paradox.

My favorite Nietzsche is the early-middle Nietzsche who wrote Human All Too Human, Daybreak and The Gay Science. I love precisely the books that were excluded from the two Walter Kaufmann collections, Portable Nietzsche and Basic Writings, which is a little puzzling because I prefer Kaufmann’s translations to all others.

These were the books Nietzsche wrote mid-metamorphosis as he transformed himself from brilliant academic philologist to mystical firebrand. In them, he reflected on his war with his own received faith. The battlefront was questioning the sacred morality of his own culture — a morality so sacred that even asking is an unforgivable blasphemy.

Central to this drama is an intellectual conscience, sensitive, exacting, demanding, thorough and sometimes brutal. This is what Nietzsche awakened in me. He taught me to ask “Do I really believe this?” and to not confuse this question with “Can I argue this?” Because just as we must never confuse truth with reality, we must never confuse belief with faith.

Reconceiving KPIs

Design

(This is me working out some thoughts for work.)

My company hosts an event each year that we call Practice Week. It is a week set aside for reflection and learning, focused on the strange discipline known as service design. This year our team is dividing into “pods”, each focusing on some area of interest or importance to service design.

My pod’s subject is Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Service Design.

According to Wikipedia, “KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it engages. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.”

It is indisputable that KPIs are terribly important in business, and this is why we are learning about them, not because any of us are compelled by this subject. We confessed to one another that, for a variety reasons, we were suffering a lack of intrinsic interest. For us KPIs have been a necessary evil — a combination of 1) boring, 2) abstract and 3) morally suspect.

After sharing our reservations about KPIs, it occurred to us that maybe challenging these reservations directly might breathe some inspiration into our session.

We asked:

  1. Are KPIs essentially boring, abstract and suspect — or do they just seem this way to us because of how we’ve approached them?
  2. Might there be a way to approach them that makes them interesting, tangibly real and a valuable part of our service design practice?

In other words, is there a philosophical opportunity to reconceive KPIs in a way that helps service designers organically integrate KPIs into our praxis?

(Honestly, this reunderstanding of uninteresting and trivial matters as fascinating and worthy problems is a core skill for designers — or at least designers like me. If we choose to rely on work ethic and willpower to slog through work we find boring , we will inevitably produce uninspired, uninspiring designs that are good for little more than setting the stage for implementation. We will become what engineers think we are: a preliminary planning step on the way toward the real work of building. If we endure the boredom, we can certainly bullshit ourselves and others and playact enthusiasm, but our “positivity” performances will be even more boring and unconvincing than our work. We’ll contribute to transforming the world into meaningless, joyless bullshit. As someone with a feeble work ethic and poor acting skills, I’ve never had any choice but to resort to philosophy in order to find genuine interest in problems that initially strike me as irredeemably dull and pointless. I suppose I shouldn’t say things like this out loud, but imprudent candidness is a key spice in my flavorful practice.) …

…So moving toward framing this problem as a design brief, some questions emerge, pertaining to the three repellent characteristics of KPIs.

  1. Can we change our understanding of KPIs interesting in a way that reveals KPIs as an interesting aspect of design work — an aspect we are intrinsically motivated to use?
  2. Can we ground our understanding of KPIs in realities we intuit directly and concretely, and make an abstract “experience-distant” knowing more “experience-near“?
  3. If we are able to intuitively understand KPIs and able to incorporate them into our practices, what possibilities of influence does this open to us? Might KPIs empower us to find more profound and demonstrable win-wins benefitting both an organization’s bottom line and the wider world?

But should they (and measurements in general) be as all-important as they currently are? And how reliable are they? Do KPIs produce unintended consequences, both in outcome and in the experience of work?

Ethos, ethic, game and rule

Ethics

Borrowing from Wittgenstein and Garfinkel, I want to experiment with a rhetorical approach of speaking of ethics in terms of games and rules.

Every ethic belongs to an ethos and serves that ethos.

Apart from the ethos it serves, though, an ethic is meaningless.

Following an ethical rule outside the context of its ethos is absurd, just as following the rules of a game outside of game-play is absurd.

Imagine, for instance, a tennis player so fanatically dedicated to the game of tennis that, even off-court, they continue following the rules of tennis, and expect others to follow the rules of tennis at all times, too.

Or imagine the Dallas Cowboys are playing the Pittsburgh Steelers, and suddenly, without warning, the Steelers begin brawling. They are joined by their fans, who swarm out of the stands onto the field and overwhelm the Cowboys with numbers. Would the valiant Cowboys continue playing by the rules of football, avoiding holding and unnecessary roughness penalties, while the Pittsburgh hooligans subject them to atomic super-wedgies and hang them from the goalposts by their blown-out waistbands?

Now imagine, following their 821-0 victory over the Cowboys, the Steelers hooligans move up the street to the basketball arena and storm the court where the Dallas Mavericks are playing. The Steelers and their hooligans crowd onto the court and score touchdown after touchdown against the confused and defenseless Mavericks. The Mavericks take the high road and stick to the rules of basketball, but they score neither baskets nor touchdowns. They score only moral points, and these do not count toward victory. Eventually, using their new formula for victory, the Steelers become the champions not only of the NFL, but also the NBA, the WNBA, the MLB, NHL and every Olympic event.

When the game changes, the rules change with it.

The problem is, a great many of us mistake our own ethos for reality itself. And we mistake the rules of our own ethos, our ethic, for absolute universally-binding laws of human conduct, which all decent people must follow. We continue following the rules of the game off-court, and expect others to do as well, even if they’ve never agreed to participate in our ethos — or even reject our ethos.

In the future, when someone invokes an ethical principle, my first question will be: To what game does this rule belong? Am I obligated to play this game? Did I explicitly or implicitly consent to it?

If I am obligated, I will ask for clarification on the rules that bind both parties, and on who referees these rules?

If I am not obligated, I will recognize that I am in a far more interesting game: the game of determining the game, the rules of the game, and the referee of the rules.

Technicracy (sic)

Philosophy

It never occurred to me before today to understand a technocracy as rule by (or under) technic (or technik or technicity, depending on translation) as conceived by Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology.

I prefer the term technicity. Technicity is the enworldment within which all things are understood, first and foremost, as means to ends. “What is it for?” is the compulsive next question, following “What is it?” It is the root of the industrial faith, and the true source of our misery under capitalism, and even more under various anti-capitalisms.

Trapped within the hollow, arid, robotically hostile strain we call corporate life, the technicity-bound rebel can dream nothing better than socialism. But socialism is a dream of technicity itself, guaranteeing the same miseries of capitalism, but in even purer form, without the vestigial consolations of pre-industrial life that have been smuggled into capitalism through liberal protections of the private sphere.

To sloganize:

  • The enemy is neither capitalism nor socialism, but their common faith, technicity.
  • Fundamentalism is what happens when the objects of religion are uprooted from their proper soil and planted in the sand of technicity.
  • Those trapped in technicity can only perceive, conceive, intuit and imagine inside the narrow limits of technicity. When the technicity-possessed say religion, they can mean only fundamentalism. When they dream escape from their misery, they dream leaps out of technicic pans into technicic fires.
  • It is trivially easy to swap out belief content within the same technic faith. Fundamentalist Christians can dump out their religious beliefs and replace them with Progressivist ones without much deep adjustment or change in life experience. But religious conversion is not essentially about beliefs. It is about the substratum that makes beliefs intelligible and persuasive (or sheer nonsense), the substratum of faith. You cannot stay in technicity and understand religious existence.
  • “A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.” — Wittgenstein

The book we need

Philosophy

Fuck yes. Technic and Magic is exactly the book this time needs:

This book is not a political manifesto, or a general call to arms. More modestly, it is a reminder that reality-­systems are contingent conglomerates of metaphysical axioms, and that their modiication is always possible. Indeed, we are always able to modify our own reality­-settings beyond the diktats of our social context, even when history tells us that we are powerless and stuck. This volume is intended for those who lie defeated by history and the present, in the most general and most tragic sense. Regardless of the historical circumstances in which we ind ourselves to live, and even if we are completely hopeless about our power to modify the balance of forces on a macroscopic scale, we are always capable of modifying our own reality-­settings  – thus giving to ourselves a different reality, a different world and a different existential experience within it. Is it pure illusion? Not any more, or any less, than any other reality or any other world that is hegemonic enough to impose its own social institutions over a speciic historical period.

It was the book I wanted to write.

I’m disappointed and thrilled.

Ideologies of hate

Politics

Ideologies of hate often present themselves as ideologies of justice. The justice is invariably justice for some group or set of groups.

But the ideology’s concern for these groups can seem inconsistent and illogical.

The groups may suffer all kinds of tragic events. But only some of the events are noticed and inspire energetic response. The groups may suffer a variety of chronic problems. But which problems become issues of concern seems to have nothing to do with severity. It is almost arbitrary. Serious problems are ignored, while relatively trivial problems provoke extreme outrage. Even attitudes toward public figures seems inconsistent. A politician or celebrity who is adored one day is despised or loathed the next. Or the reverse.

To find the consistency, ignore the positive rhetoric  — the care for the harmed or love of the admired. Instead, focus on the villains of the stories. The villains are the real protagonists, not the victims and heroes. Hate, not love or compassion, drives the plot.

Ideologies of hate look for opportunities to make their hate look like virtuousness. Where the opportunity to hate is lacking, interest dissipates, and virtues do not appear.

If you’re seeing this pattern in your own political tribe, it can be helpful to remember that most movements are made up of a variety of ideologies, some driven by positive goals, and some driven by pure hate. Hate can be very powerful, and it is tempting to harness that power.

Susan said “this makes so much sense of Progressivism. It is for women, but only when it can be against men. It is for POCs, but only when it can be against white people. It is for Palestinians, but only when it can be against Israelis. It is for Kamala, but only when it can be against Trump.”

That’s the formula: A hate ideology is for X only when it can be against Y.

Campagna

Biography, Enworldment, Metaphysics

I think I’ve found my next book, Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality.

My likely story unfolds as follows. The character of our contemporary existential experience, points towards a certain type of ordering of our world, and of ourselves within it. This ordering is supericially social/economic/etc., but in fact derives from a set of fundamental metaphysical axioms. These axioms combine together in an overall system, which is the reality-­system of our age. A reality-­system shapes the world in a certain way, and endows it with a particular destiny: it is the cosmological form that defines a historical age. At the same time, however, it is also a cosmogonic force: its metaphysical settings and parameters actually create the world – if for ‘world’, as the Greek cosmos or the Latin mundus, we understand precisely the product of an act of ordering chaos. Here comes the mythological aspect of my eikos mythos. It is possible, narratively at least, to present this cosmogonic force as almost a thing, whose world­making activity is revealed by its internal structure. I chose to call the cosmogonic form of our age, ‘Technic’.

His reason for writing this book is addressing today’s nihilism epidemic.

…the unfolding events and the apparent impossibility to put a stop both to the disintegration of those institutions that had prevented the return of recent atrocities and to the blatantly suicidal path of environmental wreckage, started to instil a doubt in me. Somehow, it appeared as if the range of the possible had dramatically been shrunk, and that our ability to act differently, or even to imagine otherwise than in a way already inscribed in the present, had been curbed once and for all. Like many others of my generation and of our time, I myself experience this paralysis. Whether by taking the form of political impotence or of individual psychopathology, the oppressive weather of our age seems to impact all of us equally. But even though the present age seems to impact all of us equally. But even though the present had little in store for anybody interested in fostering what used to be called ’emancipation’, perhaps the future still hosted the possibility of a change as-yet to come. As anybody with children, I too didn’t want to let go of a however implausible hope for a future, planetary turn in a different direction. And indeed, I too didn’t want to renounce the dubious belief that even an individual can always contribute, however marginally, to social transformations on a large scale. Yet, such stubborn hopes didn’t silence my doubts. For one, I wondered, what am I to do with myself, while we journey through these gloomy, penultimate times? And secondly, is it really true that a sociopolitical revolution would be sufficient to change the course of the events? Or is it perhaps the case that something else, at a different level, would have to change?

This double questioning — a pressing anxiety for my own well-being, and a more theoretical curiosity over the general mechanisms of change — led me to consider the problem through another angle.

And now here’s the good part:

Might it not be the case that change seems impossible, because technically it is impossible? And might it not be the case that imagination, action or even just life or happiness seem impossible, because they are impossible, at least within the present reality-settings? At their core, both questions pointed towards an element within our reality that stood as the ground of the specific cultural/ social/political/economic settings of our age. Perhaps, it is at that level, that we implicitly define what is possible and what is impossible within our world. Perhaps, it is at that level, that we decide what is our world. In traditional philosophical parlance, that is the level of metaphysics: the place where it is discussed what it means to exist, what kind of things legitimately exist, how they exist, in what relation they stand to each other and to their attributes and so on. By deciding on metaphysics, that is by deciding on the most fundamental composition of our world, it is implicitly decided what kind of things can or cannot take place in that world. In less specialist parlance, we could say that it is at that level, that ‘reality’ itself is defined. As the parameters of existence, particularly of legitimate existence, in the world change, so the composition of our world changes — and consequently, the range of the possible takes one or another shape, and with it the field of the ‘good’, that is ethics, and politics, etc.

As with most books I’m drawn to these days, the joy is mixed with terror of being scooped. His diagnosis is identical to mine.

The ingrained hopelessness of so many contemporary intellectuals is not in the contents of what they believe, which was summarized charmingly by Woody Allen in Annie Hall:

There’s an old joke.

Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.”

Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life — full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.

The litany of complaints changes generationally, and what will bring an end to the misery changes with it.

It is forever “life sucks [for x reasons] and then life as we know it will end prematurely [from y catastrophe], and this time it is different and worse than ever before [due to z criteria].” The sense that this time it is different is an element of what makes this time perpetually like all other times.

I, like Campagna, agree with Heidegger that this recurring, shifty nihilism is a metaphysical malady that goes by the name technic, technik, technicity.

I, like Campagna, see our relationship with language as central to our problem.

Only a range of the existent can be conveyed through linguistic means, much like only a range of the colour spectrum can be perceived by the human eye. No matter what the evolution of our technological prosthetics will be, there will always be shades and things that will remain immune from language and from colour detection. Yet, this last statement is, in itself, a metaphysical axiom: it is a criterion which I suggest to place at the foundation of our understanding of what exists. Also the opposite criterion, that of the limitless ability of language and of its technology to grasp the truth of the existence, is an equally legitimate axiom.

Wow. And shit.

Back to this terror of being scooped.

I must get real about the metaphysical emergency we face. I need to care more about the success of the rescue mission than whether my role in the mission is ever acknowledged. I’m corrupted by the need for recognized originality.

Once again, like dozens of times before, I’m pretty sure I’ve been scooped.

Or.

Or maybe I am a truth-seeker who got so accustomed to swimming in boundless waters that I stopped hoping for land. Forty days and forty nights, forty years of swimming through watery wilderness toward something promised but ever unfulfilled, I gave up on landfall, or even a ship. I dreamed of some ideal ark we could build together, some firmness beneath our feet.

Could it be that I can’t even recognize the feeling of terra firma when I’m finally standing on it? That I imagine others built the boat I dreamt of building, when really, we have all just wandered ashore on the beaches of the same promised land?

If that land turns out to be the Pavilion at Brighton I am going to be pissed.

Disalienation gathering

NOTA

A few things I love to do that make me feel connected with the world beyond my skullspace.

I’ve also gotten this from cycling, especially mountain biking.

Alienation is a loss of intuitive contact and participation in some aspect of reality. Total alienation is rare, but partial alienation is nearly universal. Wherever alienation occurs, things begin to feel unreal and we, ourselves, feel less real. It requires effort to overcome alienation, especially in conditions of mass societal alienation.

I am designing a half-day disalienation event. I would want a mix of generations and worldviews in the room.

A rough agenda.

  • 20 minute meditation or prayer session to quiet ourselves down and prime ourselves to pay attention.
  • 30-45 minutes of gongfu tea. We will focus on noticing the sights, sounds, smell and taste of the tea, speaking only to point out subtler features of the experience so others can notice them with us.
  • 90 minutes of salon, on some experience-resonant topic. “Acquired tastes” might be a good one.
  • 60 minutes of blind contour drawing. We’ll refrain from commenting on or even looking at one another’s drawings. The purpose of the activity is the activity itself, not the output.
  • 90 minutes of salon, over some simple lunch, on some topic connected with awareness shifts. “Noticing” or “absorption” or “craft” are possibilities.
  • 30 minutes of scotch tasting. We’ll each slow sip one dram of scotch. We will share what we smell, taste and see, and try to notice what others are noticing.

That would be an amazing day.

I might want to experiment with doing gatherings in multiple cities. A friend in Chicago expressed interest in hosting one. We were thinking we could do in-person gatherings on Saturday, then have a Zoom call the next day for participants in different cities to connect and reflect.

My fantasy debate questions

Politics

The question I really want to see asked at the next debate:

“Each of you represents a party with extremist elements. How would you each address the extremists of your own party (as you understand extremism)?”

And as a follow up:

“What do you each believe the other should have said but did not?”

And as a follow up to that:

“Based on what you just heard from your opponent, what additional things would you want to say to your own party’s extremists?”

 

Sapient IA Bible

Design

For many of us, Sapient’s “Information Architecture: Practice Definition and Process Framework” (universally known simply as “the IA Bible”) was the first time we had ever seen an exhaustive documentation of UX design methodology (except nobody was calling it “UX” quite yet). It was released in March 2000, and copies of it were coveted. I still have my copy.

Up until it came out I was swimming in techniques, and did not understand how any of it came together. I think the IA Directors understood it better, but according to this document, it was only after they gathered and combined their knowledge that anyone felt they had anything like a complete picture. I think this is a historic document, and I collect design books. If you know of a book that laid out the human-centered design process like this earlier than March 2000, please let me know.

Battling design triads

Design

Designers love diagrams. We tend to be visual thinkers. Where verbal thinkers feel they understand things when they find the right words to express a thought, designers feel they understand when they find the right shape. And so it is not surprising that designers understand their own work in diagrams.

If you ask a designer what they do, there’s a strong chance they’ll draw a Venn diagram. There is an equally strong chance one of the three overlapping circles will be labeled “Desirable”.

Perhaps the most popular one is the Desirability-Viability-Feasibility triad. My first exposure to it was the late 90s, but expressed in different language. A User Experience Architect used it to explain to me that our role was responsible for finding the overlap between 1) “User” (what users want and need), 2) “Technology” (what is technologically possible), 3) “Business” (what serves business goals), and 3) . At least according to one source, it was IDEO who developed and popularized the now ubiquitous Desirability-Viability-Feasibility model. What is Desirable, Viable and Feasible satisfies the needs of people, is good for the business, and can be developed and delivered easily enough that it is worthwhile to do.

Another version, which I believe predates the other by almost a decade is the Usefulness-Usability-Desirability triad. When designers focus on the benefits they provide to people — and this is our primary focus — we often speak of these benefits in terms of good experience. This triad clarifies what is meant by “good experience”.

A good experience has three qualities: It is 1) “Usefulness” (the design satisfies functional needs), 2) “Usability” (the design minimizes functional obstacles), and 3) “Desirability” (the design is valuable beyond its function).

Years ago, I became curious where this triad originated. It turns out it was conceived in 1992 by Liz Sanders, who is now known primarily for her work in participatory design. To the degree a design affords usefulness, usability and desirability, it will be valued by people and adopted.

So which of these two Venn diagrams is preferable? They seem to do similar things with a similar shape and with one overlapping word. Do we just choose the one we like better? Do we just choose the one that we think will resonate more with our audience?

I propose that these two triads complement each other. This becomes easier to see if we avoid using the word “Desirability” in two different ways. In the Desirability-Viability-Feasibility triad, Desirability is about people’s response to what is being designed. It asks if the design will actually be adopted. Let’s call it “Adoptability”.

And adoptability is the goal of good experience. Looking at the Usefulness-Usability-Desirability triad, they define what is adoptable. So the Usefulness-Usability-Desirability triad fits inside the Adoptability region of our new Adoptability-Viability-Feasibility triad.

Not one to stop while I’m ahead, I’ve decided to add yet more elements. I’ve been warned by trusted colleagues that I’m pushing it too far. I’m going to try anyway.

Years ago I heard someone, and I suspect it was Jared Spool, talk about design having two modes. 1) “Design the right thing.” 2) “Design the thing right.”

I see the first triad Adoptability-Feasibility-Viability as representing “Design the right thing.”

I see the second triad Usefulness-Usability-Desirability as representing “Design the thing right.”

So far so good?

Ok. But here’s where I got in trouble with my colleagues. While I was digging around the internet to confirm that Jared Spool was in fact the inventor of “Design the right thing.” / “Design the thing right.” I came upon an article that mapped these two statements to the famous Double Diamond of design thinking. And I got all excited about mapping the two triads to the diamonds to produce a  Grand Unified “What Designers Do” Diagram.

I received two objections. The first objection points out that we are not only thinking about adoptability-feasibility-viability while defining our problem. We also think about usefulness, usability and desirability. And once we think about designing a thing right in the second diamond, we don’t stop worrying about feasibility and viability.

Honestly, none of this bothers me. In design, when we describe what we do, we exaggerate and sharpen definitions and separate things that are blurrier and messier and more intermingled in real practice. We’re just trying to help people conceptualize, and this makes it easier. It is roughly true. Good enough.

The second objection, however, might be fatal. But if it fails, it seems to be an interesting failure, so I’ll expose the idea with the objections and see what happens. If I can’t rescue it, maybe somebody else can.

The objection is this: While it is true that the first diamond is where we determine what the right thing is to design — and while it is also true that the right thing to design is adoptable, feasible,  and viable — it is not necessarily true that the first diamond helps us determine what the right thing to design is by defining what is adoptable, feasible,  and viable. Adoptability-Feasibility-Viability is more commonly used as a framework for evaluating concepts, and that is something that belongs in the second diamond.

But then, I’m thinking… Maybe designers should be thinking more about how we can bring feasibility and viability into that first diamond.

Perhaps we are overemphasizing Adoptability when framing our opportunities and design problems.

I don’t know the answer. But I do know from years of design practice that sometimes clearly framing a question is the key to better answers. So I’ll leave it open.

Thoughts?

 

“Swiftvoting”

Philosophy, Politics

When news came down that DNC convention would be held in Chicago (based on my book purchases, it must have been in mid-January 2024, when I started reading Playing With Fire, followed by The Controversialist and King: A Life) I had a sudden epiphany that we are reliving 1968.

The October 7 Pogrom had happened three months before, followed by orgies of pro-Palestine / anti-Israel / anti-West demonstration, which invited comparison with pro-Viet Cong / anti-American activism of radical youth. I’d been thinking about Nixon’s seething “silent majority” and wondering how big today’s silent majority is. It is hard to know in times when dissent against the dominant ideology is discouraged, or even punished. I was also thinking also about how the Paris riots of May 68 disgusted a generation of ex-Trotskyite Jewish neoconservatives into existence, and how the pro-Hamas left is likely inspiring a neoneocon movement.

Then I heard that through some cosmic perversity, the DNC Convention would be held in Chicago and it all crystalized, and I hit the books and immersed myself in the era. Around that time (February 12) I posted to Facebook:

We are re-living 1968. Just keep watching.

To which I got comments like, “more like 1932”. Because Godwin’s Law.

And then I commented:

I just poked around to see if this idea is trending right now. It seems that is sort of isn’t — or isn’t much more than it always does every single election year.

Because at that point I hadn’t seen anyone make the comparison, or develop it.

Then I elaborated:

Keep an eye on the Chicago DNC convention, infantile activists, the silent majority, creepy right-wingers, deranged left-radicals, Democrat candidates bowing out, the spawning of a new generation of disillusioned ex-lefties disgusted by fellow travelers / useful idiots who support obvious psychopaths who reinforce their fanatical ideological commitments… Hopefully no political assassinations or bombings on US soil!

I’m not claiming to have prophetic foresight here.

I am claiming that I have something much, much better. I have 1) a modest knowledge of history and 2) even better, an energetically-cultivated independence of thought.

I read histories from political moments before this particular funhouse era. Do you really not understand that any history of totalitarianism is just as much about its own time as it is about the 1930s? For this reason, you’ve got to read histories written in a variety of times. You’ve got to read what totalitarians said about themselves. If you read contemporary ideologues like Timothy Snyder, Jill Lepore, Nikole Hannah-Jones and the like, you aren’t reading history — you are reading partisan editorial. This should be obvious to any critical thinker, but it is far from obvious to readers of NYT history bestsellers who read these books and are just shocked by their relevance to what is happening today!

And I read philosophy, so I can understand events from a plurality of logics. This enables me to try them on in turn, compare what each reveals, and find one that provides intuitive, cognitive and moral clarity on whatever I’m concerned or perplexed about. This hard work enables me to think things outside the narrow circular rut of Progressivist thought, and to see stark truths of which rank-and-file Progressivists are utterly oblivious.

If you are not reading philosophy, I promise you that you are running a philosophy you passively adopted through casual socialization. I have yet to meet an “original thinker” who thinks even slightly originally. Progressivists are ideologically automated to rethink the independent truths of the likeminded, and automatically dismiss thoughts from outside their logic as propaganda delusions.

But I am burying the living shit out of my lede under an avalanche of flex.

What I really want to do is make a new observation, and to mint a brand-new coinage. This morning I was expressing my belief that Kamala Harris can win this election. Here is what I said:

We live in a Taylor Swift Age where a stuffed sequined leotard can become an object of extreme adoration for no reason at all but a psycho-social need to adore.

I believe the autonomous mass-mind known as Progressivism can pull a “swiftvoting” propaganda operation to make Harris into a shining idol of hope for a Trumpless future.

I believe Harris can win.

Swiftvoting. That’s pretty good. An astroturf campaign to implement an engineered vibe-shift. Swiftboating for femme Gen-Zers and olds trying to mimic them.

And I bet you think you know why I think she’s a phony, terrible candidate. According to your omniscience, I can’t abide a woman candidate of color. If you had any capacity for self-reflection, which you do not, you’d see that the swelling backlash against progressivism has everything to do with this reflexive compulsion to condescend and progsplain people’s own motivations to themselves. You think you know better than I do what motivates my thinking? You? You’re an ideological automaton whose programming diverts self-reflection to harmless subroutines that simulate self-awareness.

The ressentiment generator

Biography, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I just said out loud a thought that has been gestating in me.

I posted it in response to Radical Radha‘s excellent Substack article, “Applying the Bhagavad-Gita to modern life”.

My danger is fury toward progressivism and its mind-boggling hypocrisy. Progressivism itself is blatantly guilty of everything it projects on patriarchy, whiteness, heteronormativity, etc. I’m constantly — obsessively, compulsively — trying to turn progressivism’s critique back on itself, trying to make progressivists acknowledge what they are really doing. I’ll say “Do a search and replace on DiAngelo, replacing ‘White’ with ‘Woke’ and you can see what’s really going on.” But it never works. They refuse to apply their principles to their own movement. They will never “do the work” when it threatens the real source of their privilege and power. Etc. Etc. Etc.

But in my better moments I suspect the problem has nothing to do with choice of target, and that the root problem is with the critical logic itself. Regardless of target — regardless of whether a real oppressor or some phony surrogate is in the critical cross-hairs — this philosophy itself is a ressentiment generator, and whoever uses it will radiate misery.

Permanent designer hat

Design, Politics

Here is why I’m reading Fritz Perls: The interlacing intellectual traditions that birthed gestalt psychology also birthed human-centered design. They are sibling traditions with much to learn from one another.

There is an issue, a problem; and there are opposing parties: the terms in which the problem is stated are taken from the policies, vested interests, and history of these parties, and these are considered to be the only possible approaches to the problem. The parties are not constituted from the reality of the problem (except in great revolutionary moments), but the problem is thought to be “real” only if stated in the accepted framework.

But in fact neither of the opposing policies spontaneously recommends itself as a real solution of the real problem; and one is therefore continually confronted with a choice of the “lesser of two evils.” Naturally such a choice does not excite enthusiasm or initiative. This is what is called being “realistic.”

The creative approach to a difficulty is just the opposite: it tries to advance the problem to a different level by discovering or inventing some new third approach that is essential to the issue and that spontaneously recommends itself. (This then would be the policy and the party.) Whenever the choice is merely and exclusively the “lesser evil,” without envisaging the truly satisfactory, it is likely that there is not a real conflict but the mask of a real conflict that no-one wants to envisage. Our social problems are usually posed to conceal the real conflicts and prevent the real solutions — for these might require grave risks and changes. If a man, however, spontaneously expresses his real irk, or simple common sense, and aims at a creative adjustment of the issue, he is called escapist, impractical, utopian, unrealistic. It is the accepted way of posing the problem, and not the problem, that is taken for the “reality.” We may observe this behavior in families, in politics, in the universities, in the professions. (So, afterwards, we notice how past eras, whose social forms we have outgrown, seem to have been so stupid in some respects. We now see that there was no reason why a spontaneous approach, or a little more common sense, could not easily have solved their problems, prevented a disastrous war, etc., etc. Except that, as history shows, whatever fresh approach was at that time suggested, was simply not “real.”)

Most of the reality of the Reality-principle consists of these social illusions, and it is maintained by self-conquest.

Phenomenology, Pragmatism, Existentialism — application, reflection, re-application, re-reflection — iterated until both practice and account of practice are internalized and made extensions of one’s own being — heart, soul and strength.

Designers should never “take off their designer hat.” Design is a better mode for doing everything a person can do — politics, friendship, marriage… and worship.

When I say “design” I do not mean what past generations of designers meant.

I certainly do not mean what design technocrats mean: envisioning a utopian world, and actualizing that utopia into a new, better reality. Design technocrats see themselves as revolutionary heroes with a vision, a plan, faith and courage to take action — cutting through all resistance to make things better for all. It encourages us to use all available power to treat those who question or resist our utopian plans as vicious (small-minded, unimaginative, greedy) and invalid, if not nonhuman — mere obstacles to overcome.

This kind of revolutionary technocratic attitude is narcissism, and anathema to design as I know and love it.

This vision of design neglects design’s very essence — the hard work that precedes the technical work — the hard work of going to the rough ground of reality, getting in touch with it, experiencing it, participating in it, learning from it and intuiting for ourselves what seems relevant and salient.

And we don’t do this work alone. We do it with others. Inevitably we find that we intuit reality differently, and these different intuitions produce different truths.

A crucial designerly faith: while these initial truths are true to some degree, they are never true enough. We collaborate with others to instaurate ever-better truths. The truths bring us closer to reality and they allow us to find agreement, or at least alignment, with other people.

This idea that we should just overwhelm other people with power because we, ourselves, know best — and those other people can be explained away into inhumanity — this makes us unreasonable, inhuman. It makes us into enemies who can only be met with violent force. People who cheerfully advocate revolution never imagine themselves subject to the revolutionary violence. Revolutionaries unconsciously assume the superior power they pretend to lack. Revolution is the fantasy of the privileged-in-denial.

Sadly, few people will meet us as equals and design with us. As long as people think they can ignore us, or overwhelm us or annihilate us they’ll continue to do so. But if we accept that we must live together and prioritize our life together over our own narcissistic utopian ideals we can start making progress — not toward some set revolutionary goal imagined by some prophetic genius — but away from a state of affairs we would prefer to put behind us.

Coming together on approaches to reform the real world: this is the part of design that matters most. If we do the work before the work — the political work — the engineering efforts we employ to effect the changes will create peaceful, second-natural improvements to our lives.

None of us knows better, least of all those who believe we know best. We only know best when we know together.