Culture

Step Out, Stand Out, Freak Out

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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)

There’s something about American culture that is all about Standing Out, and I think it explains a lot of our problems. Or is part of our problems – our many, many problems.

Anyone remember when Personal Branding first hit? I actually loved it because it was a vision quest to ask who you are and communicate it. In time it became more about standing out and marketing, being visible but not being who you are. I probably “got out of it” too late for my own dignity, but in the end I realized it had become marketing and standing out.

Then there’s all this Influencer Culture. I keep trying to figure out what’s there, but there’s no there there – it’s standing out so you can sell projects. The goal is to be Known but not be something worth Knowing. I resent the fact that, to understand the world, I actually have to understand who Mr. Beast is – and further resent he’s not a metal singer or superhero.


Then there’s the usual business advice of standing out. I think I resent that a lot as a Project Manager, because my job is to make sure nothing noteworthy happens. If my status reports are not filled with the color red and panicked comments, then I did my job. But a lot of business gurus and youtubers want to tell me to stand out even though if what I do is interesting it’s probably time to worry.

But standing out is part of our technology, economy, and culture. And I think it’s a problem because it seems it may be all there is in our politics and economy.

We’re conditioned to stand out, to market ourselves, to be noteworthy. Sure, it gets into the job search, but Social Media has made everything about standing out. We’re in a race to get hits, get likes, be better than that other Instagram addict. The Modern Web 3.0 feels like everything is a social media competition and a job search. In short we’re all trying to be Influencers without being anyone.

(While of course the Social Media companies make bank).

So many people are now in a competition to be celebrities, we also treat people who have made themselves into celebrities as the most trusthworthy. How many people out there with real financial, cultural, and yes, political influence are indistinguishable from some supplement-hawker Social Media Influencer. You can’t tell the difference, and maybe they can’t either.

Survival of the fittest? No survival of the most noticeable.

Being noticeable gets you money. Being noticeable gets you elected. You can end up getting people to throw venture capital at you, CEO positions, etc. It doesn’t mean you’re good at any of this, but boy will you get it handed to you especially if you fit certain demographics.

When getting noticed pays off, then that’s all you do. That’s all you aim for. That also attracts a certain kind of person that probably should not have their sweaty hands on the levers of power and loads of money. Once you have loads of money you can buy people to say you’re right, and you probably believe it.

It doesn’t seem to be working out for us. I want my politicians to solve problems, not be posting internet memes and Instagram photos. I’d like to see more talk of people doing their job as opposed to making that killer LinkedIn profile. I want to stop having the suspicion that people with lots of power and money are so performative that’s all their is to them.

I kinda want things to be like me and my status reports.

When standing out is all that matters, people’s ability to assess aptitude and character atrophies. It certainly isn’t doing too hot to judge by the state of the world.

Steven Savage

Efficiency Fallacy

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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)

“Efficiency” has been in the air a lot in the world of business, technology, and now government. I find this amusing because after 30 years in IT I’m more in the “keep hoping” mode on achieving real efficiency in organizations. Most people don’t think about what efficiency really is, but boy are they ready to try and achieve what they don’t understand.

The illusion is usually somewhere in a Daft Punk-esque dream of “better, faster, cheaper.” We will somehow achieve efficiency that means everything is of higher quality, gets to us faster, and costs less. When you put it that way, it starts to sound suspiciously like marketing and not actually a plan which is what a lot of efficiency efforts turn out to be.

See, sometimes efficiency as people conceive of it is actually not what they want. Yes, sometimes, better, faster, and cheaper is a terrible goal. However a lot of consultants, politicians, and marketers don’t want to admit it, and in many cases are too deliberately ignorant to understand it.

To illustrate this, let me give an example from computer code. Once I was working with a coder that was pulling their ever-thinning hair out over some legacy code that was incredibly brittle – simple modifications created cascading problems. Upon closer examination, the conclusion was a case of people being “efficient” – to stay on time they’d done all sorts of tricks of half-reusing code, ignoring good long-term choices for the easiest-to-code, and left us a mess.

Totally “efficient” and a total disaster to maintain and easy to break.

Something that works may not be the cheapest, or the fastest, or even the best. However it is reliable, consistent, enduring, and keeps going. You can save money, cut corners, overload what you’re doing but it will break. Efficiency is sometimes bad for actually getting good results because when you’re goal is to save time, money, or whatever you don’t ask will it work and keep working.

If you aim for better over some single-number driven measure of efficiency – more stable code, a better process, have higher standards for your company – you will probably get gains in efficiency anyway. Your company database not crashing saves money. Not having lawsuits due to better testing of a product is good. Efficiency sometimes comes from you know, doing things well.

I feel we’ve created a cult of efficiency in America. Maybe it’s also part of our weird health craze trends or a way to cope with economic differences. Perhaps it’s some malignant leftover part of the Protestant Work Ethic. But I think we’ve really overdone it because efficiency may not be what you want – or the only thing.

In closing, let me talk about another traumatizing event in my long career. A project I was assisting with once had employed a contractor who had software that gave answers perfectly. A quick test revealed they’d basically made software that could only past the test.

It was very efficient in its own way, and absolutely totally wrong.

Steven Savage

Where Are All The Superheroes?

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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’m always thinking about technology, culture, and organization, because it’s kind of my job. Pop culture falls under that purview because it tells us a lot about how we think – or what we don’t think about. Let’s take a break from my recent deep dives into something fun.

Let’s talk Superheroes.

I love superhero stories as they’re a kind of metagenre. Where else can an alien, a detective, and a half-goddess team up to fight a megalomaniacal billionaire? Superhero stories are a chance to tell tales where characters and genres collide. Despite the oversaturation in our media, I feel we haven’t really learned what we can do with superhero stories (which may be a separate column).

But one common element to superhero stories is transformation via trauma. A bad trip down an alley may inspire an orphan to become a caped avenger. An inventor’s efforts to deal with heart damage inspires an armored suit to fight evil. Lots of people get exposed to radiation and chemicals and magic and get powers. Mutants pop up in an evolving humanity, and an entire short-lived DC comics story dealt with humans put through a horrific obstacle courses so the few survivors would activate metahuman potential. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasters_(comics)

Trauma is a big part of superhero stories. Only, if that’s the case in a superhero setting, and said setting is a lot like ours, I’d expect a lot more superheroes.

Only one bereaved child decided to go on a crime-fighting crusade in a world of super-technology and succeeded?

How many traumatic deaths, how many wars and executions, would result in the deceased making deals with supernatural entities, or returning and spirits of vengeance, or whatever?

Shouldn’t there be a lot of inventors out there crafting all sorts of wild stuff that’s superhero-worthy? Wouldn’t startups be kind of a nightmare as every fifth person is secretly making a battlesuit instead of whatever useless product they’re working on.

With all the radiation, microplastics, and weird chemicals in our environment shouldn’t we have legions of mutants and superhumans? For that matter how many drugs (legal or illegal) might trigger superpowers? You go to the doctor, get a prescription, and discover that your cholesterol drug gives you super strength.

And that’s not dealing with aliens and supernatural creatures. But they’d probably notice the planet with so many costumed weirdos running around.

Most superhero tales have so much dense continuity, so many ideas slapped together, that the worlds they’re set in should be awash in superhumans. They’re just not because hey, then they’re not that distinct in a setting where they’re supposed to be distinct. Though My Hero Academia sort of goes there.

This issue of trauma, power, and transformation is something I think superhero stories can explore more. When power is accessible, or when the events that can lead one to develop it or seek it are common, what happens to the world? If you’re going to slam so many genres together, how long until there’s nothing recognizable in the world you’ve created?

Though, sadly, we probably won’t explore this as much for awhile. Superhero stuff seems a bit tapped out thanks to endless Marvel movies. But maybe at some point we’ll ask about power, causality, and what keeps a setting of superhumans from being overloaded – or perhaps asking what happens as it is . . .

Steven Savage