Psychology

Political Fanfic

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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)

OK folks, I said I will discuss politics more, albeit in my own way so don’t assume this is going to be typical ranting. It’ll be my ranting, so it’s from a source you can trust.

So let’s talk the Iran War. A lot of people are talking about the Iran War of 2026, and everyone is wondering what will happen and in a lot of case telling us what is going to happen.

Now me I am going to say that I think the war is a bad idea, done under multiple questionable circumstances, with multiple unpredictable factors. There’s a can of worms, then there’s this, and know what, we don’t need this.

But am I going to say exactly what will happen? No, because:

  1. My skills relevant to this are Project Management, Technology, and a slight bit of economics.
  2. My knowledge of the Mideast is mostly “oh, gods, not another war” when other people know it far better than me.

I’m not exactly the guy to predict things. I am the guy to go “oh, not again” and “hey, remember how things went for the Kurds before?” but not laying out probabilities. In fact I’m suspicious of people who seem sure how things are going to go, because my PM instincts say a lot of people don’t know what they’re talking about.

Whenever some political event happens like the Iran War people start making very solid predictions about things. It’s not academic predictions (many an academic seems to be more in the “oh, no” category). It’s stuff that I’ve seen christened Political Fanfic, stories spun of wishes, dreams, hallucinations, agendas, and possible substance abuse.

I love that term, because it’s accurate.

It’s not hard to find politicians, pundits, preachers, and a lot of people on social media who have too much time on their hands writing political fanfic. They’re sure what’s going to happen. They spell it out in excruciating detail that sets off my Project Manager senses (if people can’t agree on fonts, you can’t predict the next ten years, bub). They’re very sure and very elaborate.

If your response to a war is to do some Game of Thrones level description, you are, as the kids say, “sus.” Also I will try to drop no more slang in the rest of this essay as it makes me feel old.

I see this all over and have seen it for so long. People just weaving tales for whatever reason – to feel smart, to get attention, to get social media clicks, or just plain arrogance. When it gets to actual politicians it’s potentially fatal, but when it’s just someone with fourteen Instagram followers it can still become a force multiplier for B.S.

It’s really starting to wear on me. The world is quite messy before the Iran War, and as this all can get very bad and fatal I’d like to focus on actual goals and solutions. It’s not reality TV here, even if the Iraq War seemed to kick that politics-as-reality TV into overdrive further all those years ago.

We don’t need political fanfic. We need to be asking what kind of world do we want and how do we get there. It’s two very hard questions! They’re so hard and so revealing that maybe it’s easier for some people to create their political fanfic.

But take it from a Project Manager – something I am qualified to speak on – we need people who show us goals and ways. Not political fanfic. If I want fiction, I’ve got plenty of that, and the plots are more sensible than whatever the heck people are spinning about Iran.

Steven Savage

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