But What If It Wasn’t Worth It?

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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)

As I’ve mentioned a few times here, a friend once said she didn’t think any tech “innovation” in the last 15 years was worth it overall. Admittedly considering some of the innovations are supermassive web frameworks and electric vehicles that inadvertently catch fire, I sorta get that. But this brings up a larger question.

What is it we’re used to today that actually isn’t worth it?

This makes me think of my interest in Chinese history and philosophy. Watching Taoists and Confucians discuss good government, it was in context of feudalism, so it was “what if we feudalismed right?” Like maybe feudalism was part of the problem, even if some Taoists had a kind of “Anarcho-feudalism” in mind.

So how much of what we have today we think of is perfectly fine and normal is a bad idea we’ll need to get over? And I’m not talking the usual critiques of things like AI (which is easy), but other technologies and policies and the like.

Focusing America on the automobile is one that I think is a big mistake, even if I like having one. It’s led to racist zoning, sprawling suburbs, loss of public transportation, pollution, and the like. I’m not saying automobiles are bad, but man did we overdo it for various reasons.

Try to imagine if that hadn’t happened.

I’ve also wondered about the impact of parts of pop culture. Things I loved in my youth have become sprawling, money-sucking mega-franchises. Was it large company consolidation that we needed to avoid? Something else? Why is it now when I hear of anything Star Wars, Star Trek, or Marvel I just assume I won’t like it?

What was missed because we made another Star Trek?

In another case I definitely felt that too much of our world got driven by graphics. Systems get bigger, cards get larger, all so we can watch web pages that look like movies and play games that don’t look like games. A few years ago I found Team Fortress 2 (a fave of mine for ages) still runs off of CPUs and looks fine in its stylized way.

How many resources got poured into pretty? Maybe we just didn’t need as much photorealism?

I’ve also questioned office software. I mean I self-publish out of LibreOffice, which is basically Microsoft Word ten years ago. I’ve worked with tools that store enormous amounts of data no one cares about. Look I’m fine with graphics software getting more powerful (albeit again, needing the hardware) but otherwise? Not sure.

I’d like something that does its job with options, not has something that does so much more than anyone needs. Or maybe some software can be more modular.

Try asking what we’re used to now that kind of has flaws is something we didn’t need or needed less of?

Steven Savage

Alternate Steves: The Lost Empire

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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 continue my series imagining different cultural, technical, and economic trends using myself as a lens. We’ve met a Steve who was in on the work-from-home craze of the early 90s, a Steve that watched Ohio’s high-speed rail boom of a similar era. Now let’s meet a very divergent Steve, in a world where big media empires crumbled – for the most part.

TRANSCRIPT FROM SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY RADIO: Professor Steven Savage on “TeachMeet”

Hello everyone out there! It’s your favorite lecturer on media history and the law, and by favorite I of course mean the only one. And that’s even my entire job!

So let’s get to my big announcement, one that’ll appeal to all twelve of you that took my “Media Turning Points” two-hundred level course. Can all you dozen please tell your friends?

My friend Serdar Yegulalp – yes, the guy you see in Rolling Stone – is coming to campus to speak on his new book “The Empire Of Media.” It’s his latest novel, a noir-deco tale of an alternate history where five giant corporations control world media. There’s murder, mayhem, skulduggery, and rich people doing awful things to each other. Now as much as we enjoy a good alternate history that involves annoying people killing each other, there’s even more!

You may ask why you haven’t heard of this novel yet. Well, that’s because it got released on the East Coast by Penguin. It hasn’t made it’s way here yet because, well, we all know how that works. But it also lets me speak with him on my next book – because we wrote ours together. Plus I get to ride his coattails.

Yes, some of you heard because I can’t shut up, but my next non-fiction book (with less murder) is coming out via Omnipress. It’s “The Lost Empire of Culture” and it’s going to explore how we got here in the world of media, communications, and ownership. Not interesting you say? More rich people being horrible? Well stay tuned.

Serdar and I wrote our books together because one thing that people forget – besides you specific twelve students, thanks again – is that we nearly had a world where only a few oversized corporations owned most of the media. Yes, you may have heard it, but he asks what happens if that was real, and I explore how we dodged not so much a bullet but an atomic bomb.

Imagine Disney as a dominant economic and cultural force, instead of a cautionary tale and favorite political target of politicians before you were born. Not many people remember the Berne Convention walkout of 1993. Or perhaps you’d like to get back to skullduggery as I dissect how several media companies, while pretending to cooperate, ended up backstabbing each other.

As you’ve heard me say, we dodged a world where ownership of works was basically eternal and creativity at best optional.

Imagine a world without your regional publisher. Imagine a world where Kinko’s isn’t sued over a price-fixing scandal for books! Imagine Diamond being worse than they were! Yes, I’ll even go into the famous Paper Scandal of 2015 for anyone who cares about it – which honestly isn’t me, I just like to be complete.

Serdar will cover what could have happened in a world of megacorporations putting out cartoons. I’ll cover why Publishers and Copyhouses got so big and why lawyers got into fistfights in Sweden. Hopefully it also means our books sell on both coasts.

See you there! Look for details soon! And for everyone attending my “Zines in action class” tomorrow, please bring your homework!

This was a fun one. I didn’t want to spell out the world too much, but more explore it from someone’s point of view. What’s media like when big media powerhouses wore down and in some ways destroyed themselves? What’s it like when publishers and distributors gain much more power but are also regional?

Steven Savage

This Meeting Didn’t Need To Be An Email

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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 a joke we’ve all heard – and probably repeated – “this meeting could have been an email.” It’s popular because it’s true, we’ve all had the meeting that could have been an email, and let’s be honest we’ve probably held those meetings. We’re all part of the problem.

But I’d like to argue that this joke wrong in some cases. That meeting didn’t need to be an email. That meeting didn’t need to exist in any form – email, chat, and so on – and that’s the real issue.

Am I going to analyze a joke about having too many meetings? Yes I am. If you don’t like it, send me an email.

So let’s take a look at this joke. We wasted a bunch of time getting people into a room, virtual or otherwise, to discuss things or share data. Some of us probably didn’t need to be there, certainly some of us didn’t want to be there. The end results probably could have been done in an email, not necessarily even a chain, just one.

The joke isn’t quite as funny when you analyze it, is it?

But here’s the thing. The meeting in question – or the email in question – is held because something had to be settled or something had to be done, or something had to be cleared up. Be it a meeting or email, something had to be done because something else didn’t.

So the real question is what was needed to avoid the meeting or the email that could have replaced it.

Was there some document that didn’t exist so people had to discuss it? Was there a signoff that could have been automated but is instead 5 people in meeting knowing 3 of them didn’t need to be there? Did people just not talk in the past and now you’re sitting in an actual room for hours because you could have done something earlier?

That meeting didn’t need to be an email. It needed to be a process. It needed to be an accurate help document. It needed to be a form in your software. It needed to be something that didn’t waste people’s time. It needed to not happen.

Now I am going to defend meetings as I schedule them as part of my job. But a good meeting is held when needed and should prevent even more time-consuming things from happening. A good meeting prevents other meetings.

But we shouldn’t just replace meetings with email. We have to make as many unnecessary.

Steven Savage