Category Archives: Philosophy

Design vs marketing mindset

Philosophy

What is it about the marketing mindset that makes it feel so familiar and so unfamiliar at the same time to my designer’s view of the world? Why do designers and marketers talk past one another if they aren’t very careful?

This is an important question. Marketing is close to design, and addresses many of the same problems. Along with engineering, marketing is design’s closest neighbor, with the large stretches of contested boundary lands, including the choicest turf, coveted by many disciplines, product management.

I think it comes down to the fact that ultimately design is about individuals and marketing is about aggregates. Design thinks in terms of each; marketing thinks in terms of all.

When design thinks about groups, it still thinks of these groups as constituted of individuals experiencing and responding to designed artifacts. The aggregates are just collections of many individuals with certain similarities that allow the designer to design something for them that each might potentially choose and use. The data a designer needs to work effectively is everything that affects how an individual (or constellation of individuals) encounters a thing (or system of things).

When marketing thinks about aggregates it is in its true element. Its basic unit is a segment that hopefully will produce some aggregate outcome. When it thinks about individuals, those individuals are samples from a mass that might give indications of mass perceptions and behaviors — what percentage of a cohort of what size can be expected to perform some desired behavior?

This, like so many things, recalls Buber’s distinction between the social and the interpersonal.

For the sake of one

Judaism, Philosophy

Rabbi Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi led Torah study yesterday. She focused on “the first thing Abraham did after becoming a Jew”: argue — and with God, no less, which she characterized as an essentially Jewish act.

Then Adonai said, “The outrage of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave! I will go down to see whether they have acted altogether according to the outcry that has reached Me; if not, I will take note.”

The men went on from there to Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before Adonai.

Abraham came forward and said, “Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?

What if there should be fifty innocent within the city; will You then wipe out the place and not forgive it for the sake of the innocent fifty who are in it? Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?”

And Adonai answered, “If I find within the city of Sodom fifty innocent ones, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.”

Abraham spoke up, saying, “Here I venture to speak to my Lord, I who am but dust and ashes: What if the fifty innocent should lack five? Will You destroy the whole city for want of the five?”

And He answered, “I will not destroy if I find forty-five there.”

But he spoke to Him again, and said, “What if forty should be found there?”

And He answered, “I will not do it, for the sake of the forty.”

And he said, “Let not my Lord be angry if I go on: What if thirty should be found there?”

And He answered, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.”

And he said, “I venture again to speak to my Lord: What if twenty should be found there?” And He answered, “I will not destroy, for the sake of the twenty.”

And he said, “Let not my Lord be angry if I speak but this last time: What if ten should be found there?” And He answered, “I will not destroy, for the sake of the ten.”

When Adonai had finished speaking to Abraham, He departed; and Abraham returned to his place.

My question was if this sequence didn’t imply an essentially liberal argument. She said, “first, you’ll need to define what you mean by ‘liberal’, and I found myself answering, almost as if the answer was being pulled from me: “For the sake of one.”

(The rabbi answered that in the ancient Jewish world, the closest thing to an individual was ten people, a minyan. There’s something in this idea, ten people as a fundamental unit, that I can feel is going to stay a live problem for me.)

After class several of us stayed in the room and talked. I pointed out a similarity between Abraham’s dialogue with Adonai and hostage negotiation as presented by George Kohlrieser in Hostage at the Table. 1) A hostage negotiator progresses in small steps, starting with any kind of response at all; 2) the goal is to move toward clarification of what truly matters to the hostage-taker, in order to find some way to appeal to it for the sake of a humane outcome; and 3) in the process to create an emotional bond and establish the negotiator as a “secure base”. It is interesting to see this newly established relationship between Adonai and Abraham starting with what can be viewed as a hostage negotiation creating a secure base of covenant.

It was a great Torah study.

Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh Jews were being gunned down by a right-wing antisemite who, after surrendering to police told them, “all these Jews need to die.”

Ink

Philosophy

At the boundary between physicality and symbol stands an object marking the line between the two: the pen. A pen can be seen as a herm, a Janus at the gate, a hand-mezuzah, by which thoughts become physical, and physical in a way that permits the thoughts to flow back into other minds. Reading deeply, my eyes tracing lines of intricately inked symbols on pages, I’ve had whole human souls flow into my being, flowing on ink. Pens, books, lines, letters, graphics… everything I love most is inky.

Ink is miraculous.

Personality and civility

Philosophy

I haven’t tracked this alleged Hannah Arendt quote, so it probably isn’t her: “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians — we call them ‘children’.”

Barbarians, how?

I would say half of the children enter the world as me-less I’s, and the other half as I-less me’s. My crude, simplistic theory: Babies start out autistic or borderline, and must be raised out of that condition by parents and communities.

Children are civilized when they develop both an objective sense of me and a subjective sense of I, and put these two aspects of self into relationship with one another as a maturing personality.

First, second, third people

Philosophy

First-person thought is perspectival, understood when it is inhabited, seen-from, felt-from, known-from, experienced from. Understanding first-person thought is about finding the from, from which the thought understands whatever is presented. It is “where you’re coming from” as hippies say. First-person thought does not always refer to I; the best of this genre omits I to leave room at the center for the addressee (the reader or hearer) to occupy. It invites to understand, and if the invitation is declined, the understanding (subject) is misunderstood as something to be understood (object). Do you understand?

Second-person thought is relational, understood when it is heard as addressed-to. Second-person thought makes the thinker’s being actual and particular: from me to you. It might give, or demand, or praise or accuse, or ask or tell, but in second-person two people are present in the thought.

Third-person thought is objective. It is universalistic. It’s not about me or you, but what is. It’ll argue your head off.

Drops away into blindness

Philosophy, Star

This passage from Voegelin’s Anamnesis sparked the insight I diagram as an asterisk.

In the illuminatory dimensions of past and future, one becomes aware not of empty spaces but of the structures of a finite process between birth and death. The experience of consciousness is the experience of a process — the only process which we know “from within.” Because of this its property, the process of consciousness becomes the model of the process as such, the only experiential model to serve as the orientation point of the conceptual apparatus through which we must also grasp the processes that transcend consciousness. The conflict between the finiteness of the model of experience and the “infinite” character of other processes results in a number of fundamental problems. (The term “infinite” indicates already by its negativity that along with it we enter on an area transcending experience. To speak of a process as infinite is tantamount to saying that we have no experience of it “as a whole.”) One of the most interesting of these problems is that of the antinomies of infinity in Kant’s sense. We can subject the finite process to certain derivative transformations, the so-called “idealizations,” which conduce to such concepts as the infinite series or the infinite regress. When such “idealizations” are related to finite series, there result the paradoxes of set theory; when they are related to such processes as the causal nexus, there result Kant’s antinomies. The causal series cannot begin in time because we have no experience of a beginning “in time”; more precisely, one could say that because we have no experience whatsoever of a time in which something might begin — for the only time of which we do have experience is the inner experience of the illuminated dimension of consciousness, the process that drops away, at both ends, into inexperienceable darkness.

Two elaborations: 1) We have more “illuminated dimensions of consciousness that drop away, at both ends, into inexperienceable darkness” than just time. In my asterisk, I added two other dimensions.

2) I also another analogy to illumination and darkness. We may not see objects in darkness, but we do see the darkness that prevents us from seeing. In my own experience, sight and blindness is a better analogue for our experiences of finitude and infinity, because blindness conceals not only what is concealed, but the concealment itself. With blindness, we can fail to see what we look at, because when nothing is there, nothing is also missing. If we do the blind spot experiment, wherever falls in our blind spot simply dis-appears — becomes visually nothing — without any tell-tale something blotting it out — there is no visual “nothing” to see. When nothing is there, no thing is missing, as far as we can tell.

We have to wonder — or rather, it is good to wonder — that if we can’t even tell the difference between a blind spot and a seen spot, what exactly is going on in our field of vision, which seems so continuous to us? And if we extend sight to perception, and perception to consciousness, and ask the same question — the question of what happens in in the nothingness of existence? — things get weird.

When we sit in meditation, for instance, we learn how this happens constantly at all times even in our own concentrated awareness. You could say that meditation is an existential blindspot test. We cannot see it directly, and we never have to see it at all if we do not want to (for instance if we wish to imagine ourselves to be self-omniscient) but if we allow our perplexities to bloom we will see ample signs that our consciousness is as sporadic and permeated with nothingness as our visual field. I think, therefore I am? The corollary: I don’t think when I am not, in the gaps that permeate my existence.

Crap. I’m out of time. There’s new stuff here, so I’m going to go ahead and post this.

Whitehead, Levinas, Schuon

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Taoism

Reading Whitehead’s Modes of Thought I’m reminded of Levinas’s dichotomy of totality versus infinity, and Schuon’s similar indefinite versus infinite. The former term (totality/indefinitude) is some particular conception of all possibilities, against which all particulars are defined; the latter term (infinity/infinite) is real possibility independent of any and every conception. According to Schuon, the indefinite (within a totality) simply repeats a finite entity interminably. The idea of time extending endlessly backwards and forwards is indefinite time, and should not be confused with infinite time, Eternity. That, at least, is what I took from him 15 years ago when I read Stations of Wisdom.

From within any particular conception the difference between totality/indefinitude and infinity is indistinguishable, and for casual practical purposes we treat them as identical. The difference between the two comes into view only when reality defies our conceptual repertoire by producing an inconceivable actuality that refuses to fit within possibilities anticipated by the totality in question and its indefinite possibilities.

We encounter infinity as such when we experience viscerally an incapacity to comprehend, and I will list three instances where this happens:

  1. When we encounter a natural phenomenon that cannot be understood in natural terms as we know it. If we confront the phenomenon as an anomaly to be understood by changing our understanding of nature as a whole, and we do come to understand it in new term, the before and after of our understanding hints at infinity.
  2. When we encounter another mind who attempts to convey concepts inconceivable within the terms of our current conceptual repertoire. These concepts are used to explain reality in alternative terms that conflict with our own, resulting in apparent factual disagreements, but the intensity of such conflicts betrays that more is at stake than epistemic differences. If we shift from disputing facts to attempting a plurality of understandings to compare, the parallax among worldviews opens a depth vision capable of penetrating further into infinitude.
  3. When religion works on us, and draws us from contemplating the indefinite into a living relationship with infinity, which permeates reality, and addresses us continuously.

I’ve travelled a long way from the passage that inspired this reflection:

Matter-of-fact is the notion of mere existence. But when we seek to grasp this notion, it distinguishes itself into the subordinate notions of various types of existence­ for example, fanciful or actual existences, and many other types. Thus the notion of existence involves the notion of an environment of existences and of types of existences. Any one instance of existence involves the notion of other existences, connected with it and yet beyond it. This notion of the environment introduces the notion of “more and less,” and of multiplicity.

In Taoism the infinite is Tao and the indefinite is “the ten thousand things”. I love thinking about people’s totalities as “everythings” and then imagining a totality of totalities as “ten thousand everythings”, each potentially forming a relationship with infinity, starting with forming relationships with one another and their shared realities. This is not intersubjectivity worship.

Public shaming as cruel and unusual punishment

Ethics, Politics

Fron Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed:

The common assumption is that public punishments died out in the new great metropolises because they’d been judged useless. Everyone was too busy being industrious to bother to trail some transgressor through the city crowds like some volunteer scarlet letter. But according to the documents I found, that wasn’t it at all. They didn’t fizzle out because they were ineffective. They were stopped because they were far too brutal.

The movement against public shaming was already in full flow in March 1787 when Benjamin Rush, a United States founding father, wrote a paper calling for their outlawing— the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post, the lot.

“Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death… It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth up on any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error.”

—BENJAMIN RUSH, “AN ENQUIRY INTO THE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC PUNISHMENTS UPON CRIMINALS, AND UPON SOCIETY,” MARCH 9. 1787

In case you consider Rush too much of a bleeding-heart liberal, it’s worth pointing out that his proposition for alternatives to public shaming included taking the criminal into a private room—away from the public gaze—and administering “bodily pain.”

To ascertain the nature, degrees, and duration of the bodily pain will require some knowledge of the principles of sensation and of the sympathies which occur in the nervous system.

Public punishments were abolished within fifty years of Rush’s paper, with only Delaware weirdly holding out until 1952 (which is why the Delaware whipping critiques I excerpt were published in the 1870s).

The New York Times, baffled by Delaware’s obstinacy, tried to argue the state into change in an 1867 editorial.

“If it had previously existed in [the convicted person’s] bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. Without the hope that springs eternal in the human breast, without some desire to reform and become a good citizen, and the feeling that such a thing is possible, no criminal can ever return to honorable courses. The boy of eighteen who is whipped at New Castle [a Delaware whipping post] for larceny is in nine cases out of ten ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the launt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows.”

—QUOTED IN ROBERT GRAHAM CALDWELL, Red Hannah: Delaware’s Whipping Post

If the practice of public shaming was abandoned for being a form of cruel and unusual punishment, isn’t it at least a little alarming that it is being used as an instrument of vigilante justice, without trial or oversight?

From The Gay Science

Philosophy

From The Gay Science:

What makes one heroic? — Going out to meet at the same time one’s highest suffering and one’s highest hope.

In what do you believe? — In this: that the weights of all things must be determined anew.

What does your conscience say? — “You shall become the person you are.”

Where are your greatest dangers? — In pity.

What do you love in others? — My hopes.

Whom do you call bad? — Those who always want to put to shame.

What do you consider most humane? — To spare someone shame.

What is the seal of liberation? — No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.

Less toxic ideology, more human-centered design

Design, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Yesterday, I opened a can of Johnny Letter on Fast Company, for running what I saw as an uninformed and blatantly bigoted opinion piece, “Design needs more feminism, less toxic masculinity”.

Rather than complain about the bigotry, though, I chose instead to focus on what I believe is the root cause of most lousy, unempathic design: the failure to research design problems before attempting to solve them. Far too often we reflexively impose our own perspectives and interpretations upon situations and assume we know what needs doing to improve the situation — neglecting the essential hard work of listening, observing and developing an understanding of people in their contexts.

This is a failure the author herself exemplifies in making reckless assumptions about the cause of the bad design she laments and her proposed solution to this problem. Here’s the letter I sent (with slight edits):

I am disappointed that Fast Company chose to run “Design needs more feminism, less toxic masculinity”. I’ve worked with many male and female designers, and have found that the difference between those who are able to empathize and design to the emotional and functional needs of other people has far more to do with willingness to investigate and to get over our own preconceived notions than anything else. In this piece Tillyer investigated nothing. She does not know who designed that airport gate. Instead, with no attempt to understand how the design happened or who did it she applied her preconceived notions about how men essentially are and how women essentially are and decided to blame men for a design she didn’t like. If I had written that article, I’d have begun by investigating the design process that produced that gate, and if I’d discovered my suspicions were correct — that nobody had looped passengers into the design process — I’d have written an article titled “Design needs more understanding, less toxic uninformed speculation”.

I think rhetorically the choice to deemphasize morality in favor of effectiveness was the right one, but that does not mean I do not see this as a moral issue.

Our social justice discourse has become hopelessly mired in questions of Who. Who is doing the wrong thing to whom? What category of person does it? What category of person suffers? But this is exactly how irresolvable resentments are formed, entrenched and intensified. Justice is traditionally depicted blindfolded for good reason.

If we want to live in a just society, we need to refocus on the How of justice: the How of learning, understanding, interpreting and responding to specific people in specific contexts.

This kind of investigation into particulars is difficult, tiring and uninspiring work, and it is no fun at all. In this work we constantly discover where we were wrong (despite every appearance of self-evident, no-brainer truth), because that is what truth requires.

In pursuit of truth, we lose our sense of omniscience, fiery self-righteousness and uncompromising conviction, and acquire more caution, patience, reticence, reflection, humility, self-skepticism and nuance. These qualities may not be rousing, inspiring, galvanizing, romantically gratifying or revolutionary — but they are judicious.

If we truly want justice — as opposed to revenge, venting of resentment and intoxication of table-turning aggression —  we need to re-acquire a taste for the judicious virtues.

Postexistentialism?

Extended Self, Philosophy

Reading postphenomenology, I’ve become enamoured with the notion of postexistentialism. Why not? If existentialism developed out of phenomenology, why shouldn’t postexistentialism develop from postphenomenology? Each phenomenology is the personal property of a single genius: It isn’t too hard to see Ihde as the Posthusserl. Reading What Things Do, Verbeek seems to be taking things (so far, at least, up to page 56) in an existentialist direction, moving from descriptive reflection toward prescriptive praxis. I like the idea, too, of taking an engaged — a fully-technologically engaged — stance toward contemporary life. The withdrawing, renouncing, counter-, anti-, isolated-I stance of authenticity and adopted by existentialists would be replaced by a far more relational, extended/distributed/situated-I authenticity. I even like the possibilities of vulgarization — existentialism became a ridiculous pop-philosophy, a constellation of attitudes and poses, an alternative lifestyle. Perhaps philosophies have the most cultural impact when they suffer such deformations. Postphenomenology could be a new form of individualism: an extended-individualism or a popularized cyborgism.

I also enjoy prefixing our first post-modern philosophy with a post-, which feels like a sort of exit from our posteverything condition. To me, an exit from post- feels like an entrance to pre- — and pre- suggests a future, which is something we’ve almost stopped daring to desire. It also suggests progress toward acquiring of something positive, instead of more rejection, renunciation, which has long ago lost any loss for the sake of gain.

Once we grasp the insight that we really can design our selves by designing our tools, and that the example of design has provided us opportunities to move toward better futures without the depressingly impossible expectation that that we must first envision a vision before we can plan it, then execute it — things open up, and hope begins to seep in.

Social engineering has been, for most, discredited, but the last 50 years of evolving design practice has shown that engineering is only one mode of actualization. Design (and by “design” I mean human-centered design) proceeds differently, and is far more effective in satisfying human needs, because it treats human needs as a central, active question instead of a foregone conclusion. We are not stuck with an either-or of social engineering or laissez-faire. An iterative, experimental approach to shaping our public world that focuses its efforts on human existence and coexistence is still mostly untried.

I looked up the origin of the saying “First we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.” I should have known it was Winston Churchill. This maxim could be adopted as the postexistentialist analogue to existentialism’s “existence precedes essence.”

I would suggest our most immediate self-shaping tool, our most profound technology, is philosophy. As long as we put all our effort into the objects of our thought — into what we think — instead of into the subject of our thought — how we think and why — our active thought will drive us passively into old kinds of conclusions. One stale old conclusion we’ve reached far too many times is that when we’ve once again thought ourselves in a circle and “independently” reached the same conclusion as others before us have reached, we’ve recovered ancient wisdom and insight into what is essential, invariable and universally human.

Making conversational space

Design, Philosophy

A post I put on Facebook just now:

This morning I was reading a pdf book (using the Notability app on my iPad) about the relationships people have with the things in their lives. As always, I was writing all over the pages, underlining, starring, etc. However, the book format was cramped, and there was insufficient space to write my own comments in the margin. I was feeling written at. So I reformatted the pdf with generous margins to make room for myself, and turned the monologue into a conversation.

Symptom, diagnosis, treatment

Philosophy

A good doctor must respectfully trust a patient’s descriptions of symptoms — for the patient has privileged access to this reality — but respectfully mistrust all self-diagnoses and treatment suggestions, requests and demands.

Any doctor who will not listen to a patient’s about what they are experiencing and what they think might be going on is not only losing access to valuable information, but, worse, to a personal connection to the patient. But the doctor must sift through the information provided by the patient to determine the most probable diagnosis. The doctor will persuade the patient of the correctness of the diagnosis (versus the patient’s own self-diagnosis), and to accept and adhere to the best course of treatment.

Good parents and good leaders of every kind will accept the doctor’s example as paradigmatic.

Establishing the conditions for the possibility of establishing the conditions of possibilities

Philosophy

This morning I’m kicking Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics to the curb and starting Peter-Paul Verbeek’s What Things Do. It’s funny, but not entirely a coincidence, that this books starts out attacking Heidegger’s anti-technological views. I suppose I’ll mark my book transition by joining in with a few parting shots at Heidegger.

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When philosophers go transcendental and start establishing the conditions for the possibility of actual things, something deep and stubborn in my temperament rejects the self-understanding of such efforts.

By my understanding, actuality alone establishes possibilities.

When we establish the conditions for the possibility of some thing, all we really establish is a way to conceptualize the possibility, which is far from the same as proving the actual existence of the possibility.

I am cannot see how “What are the conditions for the possibility of x?,” isn’t better expressed as “How can I conceptualize x?,” perhaps with the qualifier “…so it has intuitive immediacy for me and people who think like I do?”

What am I missing here?

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A related point: Heidegger’s claim that not being is a possibility for an actual thing is profoundly doubtful. A being can change radically so that it is for us no longer what it was, but that has far more to do with how we conceptualize beings than it does the being’s being. Unless we are solipsists… and this is the crux of the matter, isn’t it?

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I’ve heard it said that solipsism is easier to assert than to live. I disagree. I think many people — maybe most people — live solipsistically, while asserting the existence of an objective truth that exists beyond their subjective experience. This is practically inevitable if we treat truth and reality as alike — if not in substance, in correspondence — and if not certainly, in principle, possibly. In other words, even a fallibilist non-idealist can, for all practical purposes, live solipsistically.

A bad case of apotheosis

Philosophy

Yes, apperception involves awareness of one’s own experience of perception and conception — but it also requires adopting other modes of perception/conception, for only these alternate modes of perceiving help us detect the difference between our own immediate perceptions of objects and the objects we perceive, which are always necessarily perceived partially, in every sense of the word. We must shift modes serially and notice how much changes and what (so far!) remains constant.

Without the aid of serial multiple partiality, we confuse our own partiality with direct access to reality, resulting in naive realism, which is non-apperceptive however obsessively we self-reflect on our experiences of experiencing what we take to be objective reality. We stay unaware of what we bring to truth when we know it, and we succumb to apotheosis.

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I’m currently reading Heidegger in his pro-Nazi period complaining about how demonic America was at the time, and how America and Russia were more or less metaphysically identical, and I’m trying to keep my criticisms from turning wholesale against him. It is helpful in times like these to understand the partialities of most radical kinds of right-wing thinking, and what kinds of diagnoses and recommended treatments these modes of thinking almost automatically produce. Or, as they put it, the timeless perennial Truth they recover.

A sample of 1935 Heidegger:

The darkening of the world involves a disempowering of the spirit, its dissolution, diminution, suppression, and misinterpretation. We will try to elucidate this disempowering of the spirit in one respect, namely, the misinterpretation of the spirit. We said: Europe lies in the pincers between Russia and America, which are metaphysically the same, namely in regard to their world-character and their relationship to the spirit. The situation of Europe is all the more dire because the disempowering of the spirit comes from Europe itself and — though prepared by earlier factors — is determined at last by its own spiritual situation in the first half of the nineteenth century. Among us at that time something happened that is all too readily and swiftly characterized as the “collapse of German idealism.” This formula is like a shield behind which the already dawning spiritlessness, the dissolution of spiritual powers, the deflection of all originary questioning about grounds and the obligation to such grounds, are hidden and obscured. For it was not German idealism that collapsed, but it was the age that was no longer strong enough to stand up to the greatness, breadth, and originality of that spiritual world, that is, truly to realize it, which always means something other than merely applying propositions and insights. Dasein began to slide into a world that lacked that depth from which the essential always comes and returns to human beings, thereby forcing them to superiority and allowing them to act on the basis of rank. All things sank to the same level, to a surface resembling a blind mirror that no longer mirrors, that casts nothing back. The prevailing dimension became that of extension and number. To be able — this no longer means to spend and to lavish, thanks to lofty overabundance and the mastery of energies; instead, it means only practicing a routine in which anyone can be trained, always combined with a certain amount of sweat and display. In America and Russia, then, this all intensified until it turned into the measureless so-on-and-so-forth of the ever identical and the indifferent, until finally this quantitative temper became a quality of its own. By now in those countries the predominance of a cross section of the indifferent is no longer something inconsequential and merely barren, but is the onslaught of that which aggressively destroys all rank and all that is world-spiritual, and portrays these as a lie. This is the onslaught of what we call the demonic [in the sense of the destructively evil].There are many omens of the rise of this demonism, in unison with the growing perplexity and uncertainty of Europe against it and within itself. One such omen is the disempowering of the spirit in the sense of its misinterpretation — a happening in the middle of which we still stand today.

 

Rewrite of Autumn 2011, when the canary died

Philosophy

A friend texted me a link to an article by Yascha Mounk, “Authoritarian by Instinct“. What follows is a somewhat edited (and hyperlinked up) version of my SMS avalanche of a response.

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I was about to say that I’m surprised at the naivety of so many liberal critics, and that this reminded me of my frustrations with Mounk… Has he not read Arendt?

The whole thrust of authoritarianism is to replace all principles, all laws, all ideological systems with the arbitrary rule of one person or group, whose momentary intuitive impulse is all-powerful! We tend to think of intuition as this lovely creative thing that just wants to generate beauty and novelty in the world, and in a sense this is true, but not nearly true enough…

I discovered the dark side of intuition when I went to work at an ad agency after toiling for a decade under the “rigid” methodologies of User Centered Design (UCD) consultancies.

I was the crazy intuitive guy at my UCD jobs — the guy with the big, crazy ideas. I thought the free-wheeling intuition-friendly air of an ad agency would be refreshing…

Wrong. The ad world was crushing. Layers of creative directors with massive organizational clout were authorized to creatively intuit and dictate to their subordinates what was best. The pace and the genius ethic made appeals to reason (especially experimental reason) practically impossible.

I came to realize that UCD — or as many of us have decided to broaden it — Human Centered Design (HCD) — might slow us way down, and require us to articulate, justify, experiment and demonstrate the virtues of our ideas, but it gives everyone a chance to contribute and to shape what the team is doing.

These processes and requirements meet exactly the same resistance in the workplace as liberal institutions meet out in the public political sphere. It’s slow, formalistic, uninspiring, expensive. We need change, now!

This is not a coincidence. Human Centered Design is liberalism for the workplace. HCD designers have managed to institutionalize liberalism on teams, in departments, even in whole companies. It has everything to do using the scientific method, government by assent, respect for reason and adherence to processes that make reason possible.

So, here comes my “design as political canary in the coal mine” story that I compulsively retell to anyone who’ll listen, and to many who won’t:

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The reason I have been so upset about the state of design is that in 2011 — autumn of 2011, to be exact — all the liberal progress I’d been seeing in my field suddenly reversed, due to three developments.

  1. Front-end frameworks, like Bootstrap (August 19, 2011) and Foundation (September 2011), hit the development world, empowering coders to do themselves what they always depended on designers to do, namely make their presentation layer look nice.
  2. Lean Startup was published (September 13, 2011), and taught developers and product managers a “scientific method” that made rushing products to market a virtue, and made thinking, testing and refining a time-wasting vice, which is what they always suspected, anyway.
  3. Steve Jobs died (October 5, 2011) and his authorized biography by Isaacson was published (October 24, 2011) and became instant mandatory reading for every businessman in the world, all of whom identified with Jobs and became executive-driven design evangelists.

All three of these factors served to marginalized human-centered design, and it has had a powerful impact on ordinary folks.

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There’s a reason why our digital lives are in perpetual turmoil. Remember back when we would count the hours to the next Apple product release, and felt excited anticipation when one of our favorite tools had an upgrade available? Now we feel an uneasy pit in our gut, because it means yet more disruption where we really crave stability. New features are more likely to make things harder for us than improve our lives.

This is not an inevitable effect of the world getting more complex. It is a direct effect of design’s marginalization. Engineers now run the show, and they’re into the Thing they make, as opposed to the experiences real-life people have interacting with things in real-life situations. This is what designers do, and it is why we use the language of “experience” when speaking about our practices. They are all focused on getting at the experiences people have.

But now the language of design has been appropriated and emptied. Engineers call their Things “Experiences”. When they hack together a front-end using a front-end framework, they call this “designing the User Experience”.

People who lack understanding of the radical paradigm shift (meant literally, in the Kuhnian sense) at the root of HCD — a root that could not be more at odds with the objectivist Industrial Age paradigm — are blind to the relapse to which we’ve succumbed. They never made the shift anyway, and these new retro-practices make more sense to the engineering mindset.

And sadly, this relapse has spread into politics, hitting both left and right extremes of the political spectrum, each feeding on conflict with the other, and is rapidly closing in on the center. We have the uncritically critical sophistication of children trained by disillusioned Marxists to perceive the world in the terms of racist, sexist and other identitarian sociologies (ironically called “hermeneutics” of this and that) facing off against aggressively anti-intellectual thugs. Liberalism is now widely disparaged and declared vapid, naive and obsolete by the very people who are blind to what Liberalism is, how it is done and why it is so important.

Hopefully, soon everyone will have known all along all these things I’m saying, and I will retroactively have not been the only one freaking out about the loss of liberal democracy, the loss of design and seeing very vividly the connection between the two.

Approval or love?

Biography, Philosophy

When I was in my early 20s I made a sharp distinction between what I loved and what met my approval, and I noticed my music taste split along those lines, and the best of both tastes conflicted with the other taste. I did not love what I found most acceptable and what I loved was unacceptable. At the time I decided to emphasize what met my approval, and shortly after that I fell in love.