Mutuality and reciprocity

Design

In my “Six Sensibilities of Service” course, I’ve gone back and forth on naming one of the sensibilities. I’ve called the same sensibility both “Reciprocal” and “Mutual”.

Each has advantages and tradeoffs.

“Reciprocal” emphasizes the interactivity inherent to the sensibility. An interaction takes place where value is exchanged between participants in a service.

“Mutual” emphasizes sharedness — specifically, shared benefit. In a good service, an exchange is well-designed when it is of mutual benefit.

This sensibility is meant to represent an idea in Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) which has variously been called “value exchange” or “value-co-creation”. The former seems to favor “reciprocity”, where the latter seems to favor the latter, as the participants in the service collaborate to produce an event of mutual benefit to all involved.

I still don’t know which term I prefer. This is partly because this sensibility belongs to a larger system of sensibilities, which includes one called “Polycentricity”, which is a way to translate pluralism into designerly terms. Until recently, most designers who have defined their goals with a single subject in mind — a user, a customer, an employee. Even when they have designed to accommodate multiple personas, those personas were understood as isolated subjects of the experience. In service design multiple participants experience the service simultaneously, and experience one another within that service, each a center-point of their own experience. It is within this polycentricity that reciprocity and mutuality occurs or fails to some degree.

Double ignorance of illiberals

Philosophy, Politics

In Martin Luther King’s last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? he dedicates considerable space to the problem of the Black Power Movement.

King demonstrates understanding of a principle to which Progressivism is oblivious: Power and Love are not enemies, but partners in marriage. It is only when the two are divorced that they become enemies:

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

There is nothing essentially wrong with power. The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed. This has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral persuasion devoid of power and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

It has become fashionable and a mark of superior wisdom to condescendingly dismiss King as a man who meant well and was helpful in his own time, but that we have outgrown. According to these evolved thinkers, King was naive, and out of touch with the realities of race. But if you read King himself, instead of uncritically believing his critics, you will learn that this “evolved” thinking was around in his own time. They said all the same things today’s black racists say. And King answered them.

This rejection of King is part of a comprehensive dismissal of liberalism in general among today’s clever degree-holding elite who believe themselves educated. Liberalism is either naive, or cynically preys on the naive.

But it is the dismissers of liberalism who are naive. Worse, are arrogantly naive, and thus entirely closed to detecting their naivety.

Of course, there is a simple word for this: fools.

The wise are aware of their ignorance, and — more importantly — prepared practically to respond to ignorance. To theoretically acknowledge the possibility of being wrong or the impossibility of omniscience is a necessary condition of wisdom , but it is far from sufficient. Wisdom knows what to do in response to the ineradicable omnipresence of ignorance.

Fools, on the other hand, assume if they don’t already comprehend something, that something is incomprehensible. If something is inconceivable, it cannot be. If something doesn’t make sense, it is nonsense. If “I cannot understand why” there is no why, and whoever claims to know or feel why is delusional. It is what Socratics call “double ignorance”. Here we can see exactly how foolish is opposed to wise. If Socrates was, as the oracle said, the wisest man in Athens for knowing that he did not know, fools do not know they do not know and imagine themselves wise in their knowingness.

So returning to liberalism, every illiberal I know, whether a Progressivist or Alt-righter, is a demonstrable fool with respect to liberalism. Every time I try to engage one of these them in liberal interaction, they crap out. They say all kinds of dismissive words about liberalism. They say lots of words about how the world really is and how it actually ought to be. They say a lot of words about words and the limits of words.

But when the time comes where liberalism is most needed, they cannot do liberalism.

And the know-what theory of liberalism is useless if it is not married to the practical know-how of doing liberalism.

Ward Farnsworth on double ignorance:

Socrates regards unconscious ignorance as the source of great evils. Ignorance is why we go wrong in general.

People have vices, do wrong, and make themselves wretched because they don’t really understand what they are doing and why. They haven’t thought hard enough about it. But there’s a special tier of Socratic dread and contempt for double ignorance— the ignorance of those who don’t know but think they do. Everyone is in that position sometimes. We have a felt sense of confidence built on sand. It wouldn’t survive cross-examination but doesn’t receive any. Those in that position are badly off and also dangerous to others, like drunk drivers who think they are sober.

…

Double ignorance has practical consequences. Being wrong isn’t a terrible problem if you know it’s a risk and account for it. But when people are wrong but feel unshakably right it takes away their will to learn and eventually involves them in disaster. And if they are put in charge of anything, their double ignorance produces disaster for everyone else, too. Most political calamities can be seen that way.

Existentialism

Philosophy

Existentialism is a style of philosophy that attempts to keep thought in relationship with reality by resisting the natural human tendency to confuse essence (whatness) for existence (thatness), and reduce existence to essence.

We strive, against human nature, to maintain our personal faith that “existence precedes essence.”

Perhaps for some existentialists, the maxim “existence precedes essence” is a statement of fact. For me, however, it is a profession of faith — an intention — an aspiration — a prayer.

What set me on this course this morning was a sentence from Kaufmann’s translation of I and Thou. I will make minor edits to make it more digestible to contemporary readers:

The doctrine of immersion demands and promises penetration into the thinking One, “that by which this world is thought,” the pure subject. But in lived actuality no one thinks without something being thought; rather, that which thinks is as dependent on that which is thought as vice versa. A subject that annuls the object to rise above it annuls its own actuality. A thinking subject by itself exists — in thought, as the product and object of thought, as a limit-concept that lacks all imaginable content; also in the anticipatory determination of death for which one may also substitute its metaphor, that deep sleep which is virtually no less impenetrable; and finally in the assertions of a doctrine concerning a state of immersion that resembles such deep sleep and is essentially without consciousness and without memory. These are the supreme excesses of It-language. One has to respect its sublime power to ignore while at the same time recognizing it as something that can at most be an object of living experience but that cannot be lived.

Philosophical content is conceptual, and therefore, necessarily I-It. But philosophical practice may or may not do its work within a context of I-Thou, and it may or may not take its content as given within an I-Thou metaphysic. In other words, it might proceed from I-Thou, toward I-Thou, or it might confine the entire endeavor to a generic, solitary I constructing and It-system to account for an It reality.

When Buber says “that which thinks is as dependent on that which is thought as vice versa,” I read him as acknowledging the necessity of I-It for I-Thou, while denying its sufficiency.

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” — Saint-Exupery

Viddui: I have mysticized

Biography, Judaism, Religion

Mysticism reduces one’s relationship with God to one’s own experience of God. It belongs to a more general tendency to reduce all relationship with being (and beings) to one’s own experience of being (and beings). Like all religiosities, including, especially, fundamentalism, mysticism can even take forms that dispense with God. It goes like this: “I experience something that points beyond my experience, and that experience-beyond-experience is a kind of revelation of a mystery: the mystery of inexhaustible moreness.” Spiritual-but-not-religious Nones fall under this category.

Mysticism takes root in souls who have nothing against which to contrast this reflexive comprehensive mystical response: “Experience… as opposed to what?”

I can describe mysticism because mysticism is a personal vice of my own: O God, I pray to “you”, be way over there, blessing me and this world with your opalescent existential backglow. I ask nothing of you, except that you ask nothing of me. Make me unspoken promises that can never be broken, but infuse my life with an enchanting hopefulness, which is hope for nothing in particular. Drape my life in a protecting veil of the gentlest contempt toward all who expect from me what I give only to you. Amen.

To tease out the truth of a mystic, to get a glimpse of their soul, need something from them, ask them for something, even something very simple, and notice what ensues. Parallel lines are held apart by a sacred void. Thou shalt not obligate.

Mystics want freedom, and will pay whatever price they must for their redemption from obligation. But this payment for freedom does not redeem. It isolates.

Martin Buber says this:

That there is no justification for invoking the “are one” is obvious for anyone who reads the Gospel according to John without skipping and with an open mind. It is really nothing less than the Gospel of the pure relationship. There are truer things here than the familiar mystic verse: “I am you, and you are I.” The father and the son, being consubstantial—we may say: God and man, being consubstantial, are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal relationship that, from God to man, is called mission and commandment; from man to God, seeing and hearing; between both, knowledge and love. And in this relationship the son, although the father dwells and works in him, bows before him that is “greater” and prays to him.

All modern attempts to reinterpret this primal actuality of dialogue and to make of it a relationship of the I to the self or something of that sort, as if it were a process confined to man’s self-sufficient inwardness, are vain and belong to the abysmal history of deactualization.

— But mysticism? It relates how unity within duality feels. Have we any right to doubt the faithfulness of this testimony?

— I know not only of one but of two kinds of events in which one is no longer aware of any duality. Mysticism sometimes confounds them, as I, too, did at one time.

First, the soul may become one. This event occurs not between man and God but in man. All forces are concentrated into the core, everything that would distract them is pulled in, and the being stands alone in itself and jubilates, as Paracelsus put it, in its exaltation. This is a man’s decisive moment. Without this he is not fit for the work of the spirit. With this — it is decided deep down whether this means preparation or sufficient satisfaction. Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to his encounter — wholly successful only now — with mystery and perfection. But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction. Everything along our way is decision — intentional, dimly sensed, or altogether secret — but this one, deep down, is the primally secret decision, pregnant with the most powerful destiny.

The other event is that unfathomable kind of relational act itself in which one has the feeling that Two have become One: “one and one made one, bare shineth in bare.” I and You drown; humanity that but now confronted the deity is absorbed into it; glorification, deification, universal unity have appeared. But when one returns into the wretchedness of daily turmoil, transfigured and exhausted, and with a knowing heart reflects on both, is one not bound to feel that Being is split, with one part abandoned to hopelessness? What help is it to my soul that it can be transported again from this world into that unity, when this world itself has, of necessity, no share whatever in that unity — what does all “enjoyment of God” profit a life rent in two? If that extravagantly rich heavenly Moment has nothing to do with my poor earthly moment — what is it to me as long as I still have to live on earth — must in all seriousness still live on earth? That is the way to understand those masters who renounced the raptures of the ecstasy of “unification.”

Which was no unification.

And then he describes the precise error Julius Evola made in his starkly solipsistic book on sex, where he claims a woman’s essence is revealed to a man in the moment of climax:

Those human beings may serve as a metaphor who in the passion of erotic fulfillment are so carried away by the miracle of the embrace that all knowledge of I and You drowns in the feeling of a unity that neither exists nor can exist. What the ecstatic calls unification is the rapturous dynamics of the relationship; not a unity that has come into being at this moment in world time, fusing I and You, but the dynamics of the relationship itself which can stand before the two carriers of this relationship, although they confront each other immovably, and cover the eyes of the enraptured.’ What we find here is a marginal® exorbitance of the act of relation: the relationship itself in its vital unity is felt so vehemently that its members pale in the process: its life predominates so much that the I and the You between whom it is established are forgotten.

I will conclude now with an image (from despair.com) that I have used more than once in project post-mortems and in summaries of my long and twisting career path.

3,007

Biography

This is my 3,007th post since August 2008, when I stopped using LiveJournal and switched over to WordPress. 257 of them were private and some others are password protected. This is not counting the 1,045 posts I abandon as drafts.

Now I want to count my LiveJournal posts and tally my total output since 2003.

Update: I counted 4,094 posts on LiveJournal between 2003 and 2009.

This brings the total to 7,101 posts.

If you care, I care

Biography, Ethics, Love

Friend, if you care about something, I care about it, too.

I care about it for the sake of its importance to you. I may care solely for that reason and no other.

I may not be able to care about it as energetically or as exhaustively as you do. I may not reach the same conclusions you have reached, and we might never agree on what is true and right on this matter.

But if you care about something, I will do everything I can to understand why you care. I will try to see the validity of your understanding, and in light of that understanding, care with you. I will see how far I can go in sharing your convictions. Where I am unable to share your convictions, I will try to explain why and justify it.

In this way, I will make both my agreement and disagreement with you an expression of our friendship.

I cannot promise to believe what you want me to believe. I cannot promise to feel what you want me to feel. But I can promise you this: I will care as much as I am able about what you care about.

And where one or the other of us refuses to care, there we find the limits of our friendship.

ChatGPT as thought partner

Judaism, Philosophy

Yes, I am using ChatGPT as a weird kind of thought partner. If you find yourself recoiling slightly, I understand. I have the same reaction. But it is a valuable exercise. Consider the following exchange:

Me:

How faithfully does this represent Leibniz’s monadology? “The fundamental unit of the universe is not the atom, nor a subatomic particle of ultimate smallness, nor anything a physicist can observe. The universe is made of unique centers, no two alike, and each is boundlessly vast. In its uniqueness and boundlessness, each unit is the image of God. God however is unbounded in centrality and unbounded in time and unbounded in vastness and unbounded in boundedness, Ein Sof.”

ChatGPT:

This passage is a creative reimagining of Leibniz’s Monadology, with some important differences in emphasis and metaphysical structure.

Leibniz’s monads are indeed fundamental units of the universe, and each monad is unique, reflecting a microcosm of the entire universe from its own perspective. However, they are not described as boundlessly vast. Rather, they are simple, indivisible substances that contain the entirety of their experience and the universe within them as a kind of mirror.

Your passage highlights the uniqueness and boundlessness of each unit, which resonates with Leibniz’s emphasis on the individuality of each monad, but the vastness attributed here departs from his conception. Monads, in Leibniz’s view, are not vast but simple, spiritual, and unextended points.

The idea of each unit being the image of God is similar to how Leibniz considers each monad to reflect the entire cosmos, and thereby God’s creation, within itself. But you go a step further in emphasizing a theological conception of God as Ein Sof, “unbounded in centrality and time and vastness and boundedness.” This portrayal of God has a more Kabbalistic influence, focusing on boundlessness and transcendence in a way that Leibniz’s rational and metaphysical framework would not fully capture.

In short, the passage reflects some of Leibniz’s core ideas—uniqueness, individuality, and reflection of the cosmos within each unit—but it layers on a different metaphysical and theological interpretation, making it more expansive and mystical than Leibniz’s system.

Me:

How close is it to the view Borges explored in his essay “Pascal’s Sphere”?

ChatGPT:

The passage has a strong resonance with Borges’s exploration of infinity, individuality, and divine attributes in “Pascal’s Sphere.” Borges’s essay centers on the idea of a sphere “whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,” a phrase associated with Pascal but rooted in earlier theological and mystical traditions, including Nicholas of Cusa and the Kabbalistic notion of Ein Sof.

Similarities:

  1. Infinite Centers: Your passage emphasizes that each unit (or monad) is a “unique center,” mirroring Borges’s discussion of the universe as infinitely centered. Each unique center is an image of the divine, just as Borges’s sphere implies that every point (or being) in the universe can serve as a center from which the infinite unfolds.
  1. Boundlessness and Uniqueness: Like Borges’s interpretation of Pascal’s vision, your passage invokes boundlessness, both within each unit and in God’s transcendence. This is similar to Borges’s fascination with the infinite, with Pascal’s sphere representing an overwhelming vastness that simultaneously includes everything and nothing.
  1. Theological Conception of God: Both your passage and Borges’s essay reflect a mystical conception of God’s attributes—unbounded in space, time, and essence. The emphasis on Ein Sof in your description parallels Borges’s use of Pascal’s sphere as a symbol of a God who is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, immanent and transcendent, contained within every point and yet exceeding all points.

Differences:

  1. Multiplicity and Vastness: Your description portrays each center as “boundlessly vast,” which evokes a certain multiplicity and expansion within each unit that goes beyond Borges’s Pascalian sphere. For Borges, the idea of infinite centers emphasizes a shared infinitude rather than the idea of each center being independently vast.
  1. Imagery of the Image of God: Borges tends to focus more on the abstract implications of infinity and the paradoxes it introduces, rather than framing each individual unit as an image of God. While Borges’s conception can be seen as implicitly theological, he does not explicitly tie this to the idea of each unique center reflecting the divine in the way your passage does.
  1. Mystical vs. Philosophical Emphasis: Borges is more preoccupied with the philosophical and paradoxical nature of infinity, whereas your passage leans into a mystical or even Kabbalistic interpretation of divine boundlessness.

Conclusion: The passage is close to the spirit of Borges’s essay, sharing themes of infinite uniqueness, divine immanence, and the paradox of a universe with infinite centers. However, it diverges by emphasizing each unit as a “boundlessly vast” image of God, giving it a more explicitly mystical and theological flavor than Borges’s philosophical musings. Thus, it might be seen as a reworking of “Pascal’s Sphere” with a stronger infusion of Kabbalistic and theological ideas.

Me:

I used to call this faith “the myriad everythings”.

ChatGPT:

That phrase beautifully encapsulates the idea of infinite uniqueness and interconnectedness, resonating deeply with the themes of boundless centers and divine immanence. It also conveys a sense of plurality within unity, suggesting a faith that finds the sacred in the complexity and diversity of all beings.

Me:

How close is that passage, which I called an expression of the “myriad everythings” faith, to Buber’s theology?

ChatGPT:

Your passage has notable resonances with Buber’s theology, but it reconfigures key elements in a way that distinguishes it as a unique expression. Let’s unpack the comparison.

Resonances with Buber:

  1. Uniqueness and the Centrality of the Individual: Like your description of the universe as made of “unique centers, no two alike,” Buber’s conception of the I-Thou relationship revolves around the unique, irreducible individuality of beings. Each “I” and each “Thou” is singular and unrepeatable, and this uniqueness is central to the unfolding of relational truth.
  2. Divine Immanence and Transcendence: Buber’s God is the eternal Thou—transcendent, yet encountered in the concrete immediacy of relationships. In your description, each unit is an image of God, reflecting boundlessness and uniqueness in its own right. This mirrors Buber’s view that God is present in every authentic I-Thou meeting, where the divine is glimpsed in and through the particular. Both your passage and Buber’s thought affirm a conception of God that is infinitely manifest yet never fully grasped.
  3. The Infinite in the Finite: The paradoxical idea that each finite being can reflect or image something infinitely greater is central to Buber’s view of God. This corresponds with your phrase “each is boundlessly vast,” suggesting that every individual center contains, in some sense, the uncontainable divine. Buber would likely resonate with the way you frame each unit as containing a hint of the infinite, even if only through its infinite uniqueness.

Key Differences:

  1. Multiplicity vs. Relationship: Where Buber emphasizes relation as the essence of being—I-Thou encounters are what bring reality into vivid existence—your passage focuses more on multiplicity and vastness within each unique unit. Buber’s God is not primarily the boundless One reflected in each center, but the presence that comes into being between individuals. The myriad everythings approach treats uniqueness and boundlessness as inherent properties of each unit, while Buber’s theology treats these qualities as revealed in the relational between.
  2. The Image of God and Boundlessness: Your description suggests that each unit’s boundlessness makes it the “image of God.” Buber, however, would resist attributing such vastness to the units themselves. For him, the image of God is something that emerges through relational presence, not an inherent quality of the beings involved. Buber’s God is more of a dynamic, relational event than an ontological attribute within each entity.
  3. Ontology vs. Encounter: Your passage leans toward an ontological view—each unit is an image of God, each center is boundless. Buber’s theology, on the other hand, is deeply anti-ontological. He argues that what is real is not a matter of being but of meeting. God is never “is” but always “Thou”—a presence that emerges and withdraws in the act of relating, not a property to be possessed.

Overall Assessment: Your passage has a structural and thematic similarity to Buber’s conception, especially in the emphasis on unique centers and the divine nature of boundless individuality. But it departs in emphasizing the self-contained boundlessness of each center, whereas Buber sees the divine as primarily manifest in the intersubjective space between beings.

If Buber’s theology could be described as an orchestration of profound encounters, your “myriad everythings” faith is more like a cosmic constellation of individual luminaries, each carrying the fullness of the infinite within itself. It’s as if you took Buber’s focus on the I-Thou relationship and turned it inward, making each I a tiny microcosm of the divine—infinitely unique, infinitely complex, infinitely sacred.

Me:

Buber’s understanding is better.

ChatGPT:

That judgment feels true, especially in light of Buber’s insistence on the relational essence of reality. Buber’s emphasis on the between, where the divine is not possessed but encountered, guards against the pitfalls of solipsism and self-enclosure. By making the core of meaning arise from the I-Thou encounter rather than from the individual’s boundlessness, Buber situates God as a presence that is not within us or within things but in the relational event that breaks through our self-enclosed subjectivity.

His view prevents the sacred from being something we are or have and shifts it into something we can only approach through a genuine openness to the other. That approach seems to safeguard humility and mutuality in a way that a view focusing on inner vastness might lose. In Buber’s understanding, no being—no matter how unique or boundless—contains God within itself. Rather, God is realized in the space between, in that shared horizon where the boundaries of the self become porous and a new kind of presence emerges.

This means Buber’s understanding offers a dynamic that’s self-transcending rather than self-centered, maintaining the mystery of the divine and preserving the distinctiveness of each being without reducing them to isolated absolutes. It’s as if Buber’s theology holds the tension between self and other without collapsing into either.

So, if your instinct is to feel that Buber’s understanding is better, it’s likely because his formulation preserves the paradox of unity-in-separation that your own vision, by affirming boundlessness within each center, might not express as sharply.

Oblivia

Metaphysics

Inside every soul is a blot of unique obliviousness: an incapacity to conceive some truth that is obvious to all other beings. And this one truth is so obvious to all others that, to them, it is inconceivable that such an obliviousness could exist. And so the world is oblivious to the obliviousness, unable to locate to precise origin of this particular world-bending nothingness.

Evil exists, dumbass

Ethics, Judaism, Politics

We can become so idealistic about human nature that we stop believing genuine, active, positive evil is possible. We cannot believe that one person can desire and pursue the goal of inflicting misery or destruction on another person.

Then we drift into seeing evil solely in negative terms — as a refusal to desire and pursue another person’s welfare. Evil is only to be unconcerned or insensitive toward other people, or even insufficiently concerned or sensitive.

Such people can, perversely, fail to understand the necessity of defense against evil, and the unavoidable consequences of such defenses. Perhaps if the defender had been more concerned or sensitive to those who needed it, there would never have been conflict or need for defense.

And blind to the reality of positive evil and consequently the necessity of defense, such people see evil only in the defense, in the form of insufficient concern and sensitivity toward the innocent victims — innocent victims accidentally but inevitably and unavoidably harmed in every war, however carefully and humanely fought.

If you cannot consider the reality of positive evil, your thinking on Israel will be both stupid and callous, however intelligent and empathetic you believe yourself to be.

Continue reading Evil exists, dumbass →

The beauty of tradeoffs

Biography, Design

I was talking to my friend Blondeau about the oddball glory of the Brompton foldable bike, and I found myself saying something that seems worth keeping:

The belief in absolute perfection — perfection without compromise — is the death of design. Design is the art of relative perfection — perfection within constraints for some limited purpose.

I intended to link Brompton to my description of how foldable bikes design always involves stark tradeoffs, optimized to some purpose, and sacrificing other desirable qualities, and how this constraint, precisely, is what makes foldable bike design beautiful. Except, it turns out I never posted on this subject. So I will dig through old emails and texts and try to patch together a post I should have written years ago.

I guess I’ll start with an email I wrote Blondeau.

One word of warning: If you get a Brompton, you’ll never be able to do without one again, especially if you’re living nomadically. Any Brompton-less bike stable will feel incomplete.

What sold me on Brompton was looking at the design problem different foldables tried to solve. Each optimizes for some purpose.

Some are all about easy shipping of mostly-normal bikes from one location to another. Set up and breakdown requires significant effort. Once the bicycle arrives at a location, you set it up, and leave it set up. The design is optimized solely for providing a conventional cycling experience, and ease and speed of folding and unfolding is sacrificed.

Brompton is designed for multimodal transportation. It breaks down and sets up in about 1 minute. The folding-unfolding is assumed to happens one or more times in the course of a trip. You set out for a train station on the Brompton. There you fold it down and carry it onto the train. When you arrive at your stop you unfold the Brompton and ride it to your hotel. There you fold it down again and take it up to your room. If you are Eurailing around the continent and want cycling to be part of how you get around, you cannot beat Brompton. They make all the right tradeoffs for that style of getting around, and I love that.

If you just want to have a bike with you in Spain and maybe other places you visit having a normal bike that folds might be better. You’ll get a smoother, more refined ride.

Brompton is pure quirk. 

Another design that made clear, decisive tradeoffs is the Mazda MX-5 Miata. The origin story of the Miata is one of clarity of vision and refusal to blur it in order to live up to the bland ideal of meeting the expectations of most people for most purposes. The product managers, designers and engineers behind that car sacrificed passenger and storage space and engine power for a very specific roadster driving experience. They knew exactly what the car was for, and what it was not for, and every decision was driven by that clarity.

Another beautiful story of tradeoffs was the development of the Palm Pilot. That team watched Sculley-era Apple try to brute-force design the first PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), the Apple Newton. The device tried to be a handheld computer that could do anything. Consequently it did nothing well. It was too big, so it did not fit in a pocket. It tried to recognize natural handwriting, but failed comically most of the time. It supported syncing with computers, but the process was similar to a data backup procedure. Palm optimized its device for data lookup. It assumed most data would be entered on a computer and synced to the device. They devised a clumsy but reliable text entry scheme called Graffiti instead of relying on immature handwriting recognition technology. Best of all, the device was tiny and pocketable. And it came with a syncing cradle that supported one-button sync. The product took off, despite being vastly less advanced that the doomed Apple Newton.

If you read these two case stories, you’ll notice crude prototypes play a central role in refinement of the product, but also in building alignment around the vision, and enthusiasm for that vision.

Funny. I’ve been watching videos and listening to audiobooks by product management guru, Marty Cagan. I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed. What he describes as a revolution is stuff we’ve been doing for the last 30 years in UX and Human Centered Design.

But today I’m wondering if the problem is that designers try to do this work from a position of weakness. Maybe when we do this work from a position of strength, and take responsibility not only for the user experience, but also the feasibility and viability of the product (all power entails responsibility!), we are no longer just designers. We become product managers.

I wonder if that is the profession I should have pursued? I love tools. I love beautiful, clearly-conceived, faithfully executed products. But this difficult work cannot be done by charm, influence and lobbying alone. It requires power.

Hmm.

(Now I’m thinking about the app reviews I’ve written over the last decade. The majority of them are addressed to the product management — usually bad — of the app, not the features or the design. I get angriest at the product management philosophy behind wrongheaded design decisions.)

Some dreams are just for you

Ethics

Some things are for us, alone, to do.

We, alone, decide what our identity is or is not, and what that entails. When you decide that for others, that is bigotry.

We, alone, decide if we are to be held to a higher standard, and what that entails. When you decide that for others, that is a double-standard.

We, alone, decide what we must sacrifice to live up to our higher standard. When you do that for others, that is human sacrifice.

You decide these things for yourself, alone; I decide these things for myself alone.

Unsolicited advice, to take or leave. You decide:

Find the people with whom you identify, who accept you as one of them, and participate in that community. Then you will have an identity. Did you know that identity is something you do with others, not a classification of what you are?

Live the ideal that inspires you. Do the inner and outer work your conscience calls you to do. Then you will have an ethic. Did you know that an ethic is a way to inhabit an ethos, not a set of codes and criteria to which one must conform, by which one is judged?

Make the sacrifices you feel compelled to make. Then you will have a greater self. Did you know that nobody makes sacrifices to others? All sacrifices are made to one’s greater self or to one’s petty self.

Dreams are a genre of art for an audience of one.

Megalopolis

Art

Inspired by Kat Rosenfield’s hyperambiguous pan of Coppola’s Megalopolis, I went with my filmmaker cinephile son-in-law to see it firsthand and participate in this very weird reflection on this very weird moment in history. Her review brought to mind the failed tightrope walker from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The tightrope walker tried to cross over to an unknown destiny. He was jeered at by the crowd, he was jeered at by his own conscience, he lost his faith and balance and he fell to his death. Zarathustra honored him for taking the risk and for failing. Rosenfield seemed to want to pick up Coppola’s broken body and honor it with an honorable burial. Which is weird, come to think of it, because this film is modeled on Rome, its protagonist is a man named Cesar, and the comment I posted in Rosenfield’s review was “So you come to praise this movie, not bury it?”

Pretty much everything associated with this movie concerns burials and questions of what deserves honor, or ridicule or an ironic blendings of the two. And ah, sahib, it is this very question all the way down, apparently to infinite depths. Except, if you pay attention, the depth effect is obviously just an infinity mirror of self-consciousness looking into own self-consciousness and seeing its own self-consciousness reflected in itself, ad infinitum. The whole infinity effect is produced inside the dimensions of a stage. But maybe this is precisely Coppola’s point? So is it a feature? A bug? A stupid gimmick?

Like the film, like this time this film critiques, our film-watching experience was so self-consciously aware of its own awareness of its own experience that the film itself became one layer in a stack of meta-experiences reflecting on other meta-experiences. I doubt it is possible to watch this film without watching yourself watching it, while also imagining the experience of those enlisted in the making of the film and the state of being of someone who would make a film like this. This is a reflection on grand decadence from a perspective of the most grandiose decadence. To watch it is to step into a hall of mirrors, and to become crazy.

Coppola’s now got me, and any other sucker who buys a ticket all wound up in his egotistic vision. We’re so busy asking ourselves what people like us ought to think about a film like this by a director like Coppola, it no longer occurs to us to just become absorbed in the film and involved with the characters and to be moved however the art actually, in fact, moves us.

So shoveling aside all meta-bullshit, how was it to watch this movie? At about the ten-minute mark, I began waiting for it to end. I was watching it and straining to be generous, trying to see what it had to offer. But, experientially, the closest comparison I can make the 2016 AI experiment-parody Sunspring, which shackled talented actors to a script that computationally imitated meaningful human speech without meaning anything at all. I suppose we could call the effect this sort of thing has on meaning-seeking minds “hallucinatory” or “dream-like”. But we could also call it “boggling at nonsense”.

Now another text comes to mind, a debate between two architects. And I swear it is pure coincidence that Coppola’s Cesar character is, in addition to being Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, also an architect — a Howard Roarke with magic powers.

The debate took place in 1982 at the very height of postmodernism, pitting antimodernist Christopher Alexander against ultrapostmodernist Peter Eisenman:

Alexander: …when I make an arcade I have a very simple purpose, and that is to try to make it feel absolutely comfortable — physically, emotionally, practically, and absolutely. This is pretty hard to do. … The thing that strikes me about your friend’s building — if I understood you correctly — is that somehow in some intentional way it is not harmonious. That is, Moneo intentionally wants to produce an effect of disharmony. Maybe even of incongruity.

Eisenman: That is correct.

Alexander: I find that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible. I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the world.

The two luminaries go back and forth for awhile, with Eisenman defending the importance of reflecting the anxious, uncomfortable and disharmonious state of the world through architecture, and Alexander insisting that the role of architecture should be to materially improve the state of the world by creating comfortable and harmonious structures thereby reducing anxiety.

Eisenman: I am not preaching disharmony. I am suggesting that disharmony might be part of the cosmology that we exist in. I am not saying right or wrong. My children live with an unconscious fear that they may not live out their natural lives. I am not saying that fear is good. I am trying to find a way to deal with that anxiety. An architecture that puts its head in the sand and goes back to neoclassicism, and Schinkel, Lutyens, and Ledoux, does not seem to be a way of dealing with the present anxiety. Most of what my colleagues are doing today does not seem to be the way to go. Equally, I do not believe that the way to go, as you suggest, is to put up structures to make people feel comfortable, to preclude that anxiety. What is a person to do if he cannot react against anxiety or see it pictured in his life? After all, that is what all those evil Struwwel Peter characters are for in German fairy tales.

Alexander: Don’t you think there is enough anxiety at present? Do you really think we need to manufacture more anxiety in the form of buildings?

And there we are.

I’ll suggest that Megalopolis is just another bucketful of the water we are drowning in.

Escape

Fables, myths & parables

A prisoner was isolated in a cell with nothing but a cot, a chamberpot and a footlocker. It was a mystery to him why he was given a footlocker. He had nothing to put in it except one change of underwear and a spare pair of socks.

He had nothing to do all day except dream of escape. How this could be accomplished was even more mysterious, for there was no door or windows in his cell, just six inner surfaces — six directions teasing infinite extension, halted by impassable cinderblock.

He did not know how thick the cinderblock walls were. Dayless and nightless eternity, stretching onward without end, but without access to future or past, persuaded him that the cinderblock extended infinitely in all directions.

One day the two mysteries — the inescapable cell, the pointless footlocker — became one, and he had his answer. The prisoner climbed into his footlocker, closed the lid and achieved the impossible.