psychology

That Political Question

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I once had someone note that my blog wasn’t political, and that was refreshing. I can sort of get that, especially if you’ve encountered writers to A) turned “political” and B) did it for the clicks/attention/cash. “Politics” has become a dirty word in some ways, and people have made an effort to dirty it.

But that made me think. See my blog does talk politics. In fact it talks politics more than many readers may realize (and probably in some cases, than I realize). Because a lot of my blog is about organization, technology, culture, and getting things done. That’s all politics.

Ed Zitron may be the Lewis Black of technology, but if you ever heard or read his stuff, his work is political, he just doesn’t say it.

I do avoid, in some cases, making it explicitly political. Some of this is the dismal state of modern politics. A lot of it is about what I want to discuss. If I make specific political statements then that means those who automatically disagree won’t listen and those who automatically agree won’t question me. I’m fine with disagreement and agreement, but would like it to be heartfelt not automatic.

Praise me or call me a dumbass for real, not because I repeated a talking point.

When I do this consciously, I’m kind of annoyed with it, because politics should be interesting and engaging. Politics is part of society and civilization. In fact, to try to avoid politics is to avoid having a society. To emphasizes that let’s talk the Toledo Zoo and Civil Defense.

The Toledo Zoo, which I had visited many times, had some buildings made by the Works Progress Administration back in the 30s. Those lasted quite awhile, and the WPA was the result of politics. I’ve also dug up books create due to the WPA and so on. Parts of our history due to politics.

Civil Defense, for a time, interested me as well. At first for the nature of it’s communications, and later for what it meant. As a Project Manager seeing Americans come together in organized fashion intrigued me. It’s also part of my interest in disaster recovery. Yes, Civil Defense was propaganda-heavy, it was political, but it also left a legacy.

Politics can be sure we get things done. Ever go and say “someone should fix this?” Well getting it fixed is politics.

But why has it become such a dirty word? Why is it associated with screaming at each other over Thanksgiving? Why can’t we, you know, solve problems?

My short take is simply this – we’re in a media saturated culture where politics is somewhere between lousy soap opera and gladiatorial game. Some people compare it to wrestling but that’s insulting wrestling. We’ve made politics about anything but doing things, and all that does is serve entrenched interests at best. At worse (and I think we’re at worse), politics is essentially a media-industrial complex filled with people who will say and do anything for hits, money, and to release their own psychological complexes.

And while all this is going on? Terrible things are happening, only we’re not as aware of them or trying to fix them as she should be.

(I have suspected the origins of this are in Kennedy’s popularity and the mass media, but I think there’s more I need to chew over. A friend has been studying media history and his insights are depressingly useful.)

We’ve made politics not about getting anything done and politics has always had its problems. We should be engaged. We should have discussions, not arguments. We should do things for our communities of all kind. We should not be listening to some guy on YouTube who alternately argues for insane politics while pitching pills to fix erectile dysfunction or legal psychedelics.

So I may be talking politics more directly. Be the change I want to see in the world and all. Though I can’t say I won’t do a bit of a runaround before I admit something is about politics. Let’s keep things fun here – as opposed to what too much political talk is about.

Steven Savage

The Puzzle Problem

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Ages ago I was working on some scheduling software used to schedule setting up computers in data centers. This is pretty complex as you’ve got a giant building and you need the space, the power, the networking hookups, and enough ventilation. Before you schedule and do any of that you have to check if it can be done – you might be facing power limits, overheating, lack of parts, and so on. If you haven’t been in a data center, it’s a balancing act just to set things up – I can get into that in another time.

Anyway I was looking at this software which I hadn’t written but was maintaining and got ideas on how to make it more efficient. I eventually worked out a way to get scheduling tracked down to tiny increments so we’d know who was doing what at all time!

“Don’t do it, people will hate you,” is a rough summary of my boss’ reaction.

Of course I realized that my cool idea that would allow for such precision would be insufferable to the people doing the job. They’d have schedules with no wiggle room that they’d either break or have to constantly update making their jobs harder and more stressful. Plus the jobs would be less efficient because of my bright idea as the tracking tool would be the centerpiece of my life.

Besides, you know, maybe I should have thought about just trusting the people doing their damn job.

If you haven’t been a software guy or an engineer, you may figure this is obvious. But when you’re an engineer of some kind, or any other “making/solving” profession, solving a problem and making a cool solution can become paramount over anything else. Including people hating you.

It’s fun to make solutions even if they’re stupid and unrealistic in reality. If youre solutions-oriented (like me) even more so. This is also why – in part – I think our Internet Age has created so much stupid and bad stuff.

Technology also lets us solve problems quickly and at scale. You can hook up a few web frameworks and transform a web page. YOu can push a solution to A/B testing or production and people are using it right away. It’s almost enough to make you forget good QA!

(I joke, people have been always forgetting QA).

Making things happen is a rush, and technology lets us deliver it faster and get that rush. Of course it may also mean we’ve just done something dumb, quickly, and at scale.

But we might not even realize how bad our latest idea is. We made the thing fast, we got the thing working, it’s just what we wanted – and only later discover it’s a terrible concept.

Worse, the marketing department or investors may tell us it’s a great idea and we never realize our latest bright idea for a Thermos with Bluetooth is insufferably stupid.

No matter how much of the strange and stupid things spewed out of technology companies may be pandering stock-jacking ideas, part of this “joy of solving” is almost certainly part of it. Someone had a great idea – even if it’s just a way to tweak the stock price with a useless release – and implemented it. Money and power can tempt people, but that rush of a solution turn off your morals as well.

So when we look at many strange, useless, and outright immoral technologies don’t just follow the money. Somewhere in the lineage is probably more than a few people who just had so much fun “making things work” they didn’t think about it.

Steven Savage

The Result Isn’t The Thing

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

In a recent discussion with Serdar – which seems to drive no small amount of my posts apparently – we were discussing writing and results. Both of us being writers, we’ve both put out a lot of, well, product in the form of books, blog posts, zines, and so on. We’ve also encountered many people who somehow can’t get product out, endlessly not finishing things.

(Also I hate calling my writing product. I also hate calling it content. But I digress, possibly enough to have a followup blog post.)

My terminology hangups assigned,I kept thinking about how people wanted to finish product (ugh) but never got to it. Never got a book done, couldn’t get a blog post out, and so on. They would talk about finishing but never get it done. Yet product was on their mind.

This got me thinking about how the focus on product is a problem, because product isn’t writing. Product is the result of writing. It’s the result of a process.

To write you have to write. Put pen to paper, finger to keyboard, and do it.

Except you also have to plot. You have to write things down, make plans, possibly throw them all away. You have to come up with what to say be it a mystery or the narrative you tell in a business advice book on textiles.

(Trust me, any good nonfiction book has narratives, it’s how humans think).

But to get to all that plotting you also need ideas. Brainstorming. Thinking things up. Trying things out. Breaking down in frustration and eating pastries when they don’t work (apple fritter is my preference here).

Then once you do all of the above and get something written you have to get beta readers, edit, run it through legal. If you’re self-published there’s formatting, covers, setting up, marketing.

Then, only then, do you have a product (again, ugh), because of a process. The actual book, the actual blog post, or wherever, is a small part of writing and publishing. Also by the time you’re done you’re probably on to something else, possibly to avoid thinking about the book you just put out.

But the product is just what a process produces, and unless you’re into the process you won’t get out the product. Endless speculation on the final product keeps you from getting it done. I say this having written any number of things, some stunningly mediocre, but at least they were done and real. And yes, I moved on because I love the process of writing.

I think the endless enchantment of the end result deceives us. We feel it can’t be reached, we feel it must be a certain thing, or we can see it but not get there. But it misses that you just keep going keep trying, keep putting one metaphorical foot in front of the other, and write. Yes it may not be what you expected – it probably never is – but it’s done and out.

I also think this is why the fascination with AI is so powerful for some people. They imagine product dropped in their lap or made for them, ready for a bit of editing and then delivery. But the thing is that’s not the process, the real lives experience, the building of skill, the you saying something. It’s not about being a writer.

And if you want to be a writer, you embrace the process (sometimes gingerly) and write until you’re done. Or done enough. Or just disgusted so you toss it out into the world. But it’s done.

Steven Savage