Category Archives: Autobiography

Trilingual

Autobiography, Design, Shit theory

Back in the day, I had a business with my dear friend Vanessa.

Vanessa and I are both profoundly and intensely Gen X, and sometimes (~90%) we communicated with one another in the native language of our generation. If our client happened to be Gen X, and was sufficiently unshitty, sometimes we would speak to them that way, too.

Our little business was as bilingual as Canada. We were prepared to express every one of our key ideas bilingually. We spoke in Business Casual to uptight people, and in Pottymouth to cool people. If you made us nervous, we’d give you an FAQ on the importance of design research. If we trusted you, you got an FUQ that enumerated the horrible things that befall omniscient dumbasses who leave Frequently Unasked Questions unasked. If you asked us what we did and you seemed like an asshole we said usability and innovation. “You know, ” we’d say, with sphincters well-clenched, “Making the right thing, or making the thing right. Ha. Ha. Ha.” But if we liked the cut of your jib, we explained that we’re always either “fixing some seriously fucked up shit” or “fixing to seriously fuck some shit up.”

I mention this now because I just wrote a post in a third language, which is my first language, Flakiness. That language is infinitely less socially acceptable than either Business Casual or Pottymouth. This is a crying shame because Flakiness is the only language that does any justice at all to design. Flakiness is the language I use when I am speaking to myself about things that matter most to me.

If my last little post on hermetic design left you cold, confused or irritable, maybe try this Pottymouth post on bullshit and chickenshit, which says more or less exactly the same thing.

Fresh mintage

Autobiography, NOTA

I had to own the domain kabblahblah.com. Obviously.

Also I committed an excellent Freudian typo yesterday: postportum. Postpartum smushed with postmortem. I guess this is Paul’s signature operation.

This kind of thing is the price of deprioritizing sanity. I hope it sparked inspiration, amusement, entertaining horror or some reward for the effort.

Another meditation on meditation

Autobiography, Esoterism

For thirty-four years I inhabited one world as one self.

I say inhabited, but I dwelt nowhere, in an unreality of habitual inhibition. I was a pious heretic, an obedient radical, dedicated to satisfying the criteria of being a good person — and, even more importantly, of avoiding being a bad one. School had equipped me with critical toys for dissecting alleged beliefs of the past, still held, believe it or not, by contemptible fools still stuck there. I had it on good authority that authority was to be questioned, interrogated, tortured until it broke. In school I’d also received a beautiful set of broken idols, and I enjoyed subjecting them to ritual reshattering. But the greatest gift of my education was a headful of disdainful ideas about the commercial world, a disdain reinforced by all my entertainment heroes. But despite all these cynical thoughts about the rat race — and all those careerist rats scrambling beside me, and, hopefully slightly behind me — in my heart (and, come to find out, also in my hands and feet) I preferred death to being a bad employee.

But one deep-frozen Toronto winter, I exited. I vanished into nowhere, and returned as a new self in a new world, as crazy and wordless as a newborn. Nothing was different, but everything had changed. Urban petrichor whispered dog wisdom into my opened nostrils, in concurrency of ammonia, maple syrup, motor oil and wet gravel. The subway was overflowing with international angels. I rode my bicycle everywhere, singing and babbling nonsense, poems flowing around me. Everything was here, real, superphysical, important.

Somehow, though I was here, capable of welcoming myself into this new world. Somehow, I reparented myself, sometimes patiently. Somehow, I retaught myself speech. New meanings remapped themselves to old words. Ironic bilinguality was set like a wafer on my mother tongue, investing each word with humming, glowing irony. The daughter tongue of Pierre Menard, reauthor of the Quixote became legible in my ears. Somehow, I could still use the old meanings of the old words to communicate whatever I needed to say, provided it was nothing anyone could possibly care about.

From the outside, nothing much was different. I was the same guy — maybe happier and definitely more cryptic.

I raised this baby to a second adulthood, with a few minor rebirth setbacks along the way.

But everyone knows everything.

Meditation on meditation

Autobiography, Esoterism, Exnihilism

We sit in meditation awaiting spectacular apotheotic experiences. This distracts us from receiving the incessant gift, offered, re-offered, again and again: the insight of distraction. Who, exactly, decided to seek spiritual orgasms, flashing divine lights, the face of God? Who, exactly, decided to depart the seated now to revel in magical ambitions or to struggle with past sufferings? And who, exactly, summons us back to now, to feel the faint tickle of breath on nostril and lip, the aching or vibrating body? Nobody did. Nobody does. It is the same nobody who flees the here and now and sees me from a nonexistent elsewhere, most minutes of most days, between birth and death.

Weird coincidence!

Autobiography, Design

I went down a set theory rabbit hole this morning.

Charles Stein (in his book Light of Hermes) was discussing infinine divisibilty and transfinitive sets. This reminded me of the weird math we Gen-Xers learned as kids. We were taught set theory in like 2nd grade. We were learning rudimentary Boolean logic. I’m convinced that this is why all designers of my generation are always making Venn diagrams. I found a cool book in the political history of new math — the origin of all the set theory curricula. That inspired a long and odd post on my bizarre relationship with math.

So lately I’ve working on a top secret project concerning product management practices, especially Teresa Torres’s “opportunity solution trees”. I am interested in what product management tends to exclude, and what service design might be able to reintroduce. And suddenly the word “tree” jumped out at me, and I recalled this old Christopher Alexander paper “A City is Not a Tree”. And I thought — Wow, maybe opportunities and solutions are also not a tree! And maybe these tree structures are the kind of thing that makes silo-ization inevitable in organizations. And of course, silos fragment services and introduce discontinuites, gaps, inconsistencies and all the other stuff of bad experience.

So I start reading “A City is Not a Tree”… and here is how it starts:

The tree of my title is not a green tree with leaves. It is the name of an abstract structure. I shall contrast it with another, more complex abstract structure called a semilattice. In order to relate these abstract structures to the nature of the city, I must first make a simple distinction.

I want to call those cities which have arisen more or less spontaneously over many, many years natural cities. And I shall call those cities and parts of cities which have been deliberately created by designers and planners artificial cities.

Siena, Liverpool, Kyoto, Manhattan are examples of natural cities. Levittown, Chandigarh and the British New Towns are examples of artificial cities.

It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.

Both the tree and the semilattice are ways of thinking about how a large collection of many small systems goes to make up a large and complex system. More generally, they are both names for structures of sets.

In order to define such structures, let me first define the concept of a set. A set is a collection of elements which for some reason we think of as belonging together. Since, as designers, we are concerned with the physical living city and its physical backbone, we must naturally restrict ourselves to considering sets which are collections of material elements such as people, blades of grass, cars, molecules, houses, gardens, water pipes, the water molecules in them etc.

When the elements of a set belong together because they co-operate or work together somehow, we call the set of elements a system.

I think what I’m trying to say is this:

Screenshot

Math weirdness

Autobiography, Design, Geometric Meditations, Letterpress, Philosophy

I feel that The New Math: a Political History might hold the keys to the mystery of my own bizarrely qualitative and intense relationship with mathematics.

It is a weird thing, and I do not understand it, but it matters. It is inscribed in my codeset.

I have always been appallingly bad at doing math. I cannot calculate anything without making dumb, careless mistakes. (I am a disaster in the letterpress studio!)

I cannot remember times or calendar dates. I cannot retain even short sequences of figures or of anything. No kidding! — it all evaporates from my mind on contact.

It seems like some kind of quantitative dyslexia.

The only math I excelled at was geometry. I couldn’t memorize proofs, but I could derive the hell out of them them. My teacher indulged my differently-ablement, and allowed me to work on my geometry tests through lunch. I needed this time because I memorized only the barest minimal set of proofs and had to manually derive all the derivations. This was a shorter cut than to attempt memorization of arbitrary strings of shifting symbols. I was also good at computer programming, and was briefly a comp sci major in college before discrete math drove me out of the program. I coded intuitively. My classmates always came to me to help them debug their programs.

My abilities were existent, but narrow and beyond their limits dropped instantly to zero.Yet, math haunted the primitive roots of my weird soul.

An exhibit of idiosyncrasies:

James Gleick’s Chaos was the only book I owned when Susan met me in 1989. I was obsessed with the M-Set, and Mandelbrot’s preternatural pattern-recognition talents. That was an ability I prized and desired for myself.

When I read Shapinsky’s Karma I was taken by Nicholas Slonimsky’s ability to hear a piece of music once and to be able to recall and reproduce it years later — not by remembering the sounds but by grasping its structure.

All my visual designs are — and always have been — composed to OCD-level exact grids and ratios. I do not let the measurements override my eye, but my eye is never allowed to overrule the measurements. Every finished piece reconciles visual and intellective beauty.

I prized an early, dilapidated copy Roycrofter’s chapbook edition of a legendoidal “Little Journeys to Homes of Great Teachers” bio of Pythagoras. The fact that it was hastily, sloppily and semi-factually tossed off from the semi-reliable myth-drunk memory of Elbert Hubbard was not a bug, but a feature. It was only the myth I wanted. Math mysticism harmonized with my own subsonic resonances.

For a few years I sought a way to translate musical ratios (mainly tone frequencies in melodies and harmonies, and rhythmic patterns) essential to a song, graphically as spatial and color-frequency relationships. I wanted to design record cover art that, when contemplated while listening, would fuse with the music to form a panperceptual gestalt. I failed, but the hours I sat in the USC music library studying music theory books, listening to stochastic and serialist music, straining (and failing) to find elusive structural beauty in the sonic nonsense, did something good to me.

In Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices, I was intoxicated to learn of his project of watching Conway’s Game of Life in order to train his intuition to trace the morphing organisms.

Most recently, I’ve letterpress printed both pi and phi to the myriadth place. I don’t even know what e is, but now that I know of it, I will be printing that, too. I might do a kickstarter to print these irrational constants as a series.

There’s more, but this gives a sketch of the general family of tendencies.

I should also mention: All my best thoughts originate as intuitions that first crystallize as visual diagrams, preceding language. Words sometimes lag relational gnoses by years.

I’m damn near innumerate, but some quality of quantity has a shimmery, mystical, dreadful hold on my heart.

I don’t know what is going on in my head-heart, but I think New Math in my early education somehow activated it.

Asphyxiating

Autobiography, Design

The little air remaining in the field of design — after its professionalization, after its submission to technicity, and after its deemphasis and almost complete abandonment the first-person perspective at the heart of its work — has been sucked out by the myriad promises projected upon AI by terrified, ambitious, manic managerials.

Intuition has been squeezed out of design, and what remains is calculation, explication, prediction, profusion of words.

The workworld is closing in on me and I can no longer breathe.

Younger design professionals seem perfectly fine with this evolution of the field.

And now I am recalling a passage from Richard Rorty said about institutions:

Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm.

This state of soul is found in the teachers of literature in American colleges and universities who belong to what Harold Bloom calls the “School of Resentment.” These people have learned from Jameson and others that they can no longer enjoy “the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other.”

They have also learned that hero-worship is a sign of weakness, and a temptation to elitism. So they substitute Stoic endurance for both righteous anger and social hope. They substitute knowing theorization for awe, and resentment over the failures of the past for visions of a better future.

Although I prefer “knowingness” to Bloom’s word “resentment,” my view of these substitutions is pretty much the same as his. Bloom thinks that many rising young teachers of literature can ridicule anything but can hope for nothing, can explain everything but can idolize nothing. Bloom sees them as converting the study of literature into what he calls “one more dismal social science” — and thereby turning departments of literature into isolated academic backwaters. American sociology departments, which started out as movements for social reform, ended up training students to clothe statistics in jargon. Ifliterature departments tum into departments of cultural studies, Bloom fears, they will start off hoping to do some badly needed political work, but will end up training their students to clothe resentment in jargon…

Because my own disciplinary matrix is philosophy, I cannot entirely trust my sense of what is going on in literature departments. So I am never entirely sure whether Bloom’s gloomy predictions are merely peevish, or whether he is more far-sighted than those who dismiss him as a petulant eccentric. But in the course of hanging around literature departments over the past decade or so, I have acquired some suspicions that parallel his.

The main reason I am prey to such suspicions is that I have watched, in the course of my lifetime, similarly gloomy predictions come true in my own discipline. Philosophers of my generation learned that an academic discipline can become almost unrecognizably different in a half-century — different, above all, in the sort of talents that get you tenure. A discipline can quite quickly start attracting a new sort of person, while becoming inhospitable to the kind of person it used to welcome.

Bloom is to Jameson as A. N. Whitehead was to A. J. Ayer in the 1930s. Whitehead stood for charisma, genius, romance, and Wordsworth. Like Bloom, he agreed with Goethe that the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings. Ayer, by contrast, stood for logic, debunking, and knowingness. He wanted philosophy to be a matter of scientific teamwork, rather than of imaginative breakthroughs by heroic figures. He saw theology, metaphysics, and literature as devoid of what he called “cognitive significance,” and Whitehead as a good logician who had been ruined by poetry. Ayer regarded shudders of awe as neurotic symptoms. He helped create the philosophical tone which Iris Murdoch criticized in her celebrated essay “Against Dryness.”

In the space of two generations, Ayer and dryness won out over Whitehead and romance. Philosophy in the English-speaking world became “analytic,” antimetaphysical, unromantic, and highly professional. Analytic philosophy still attracts first-rate minds, but most of these minds are busy solving problems which no nonphilosopher recognizes as problems: problems which hook up with nothing outside the discipline. So what goes on in anglophone philosophy departments has become largely invisible to the rest of the academy, and thus to the culture as a whole. This may be the fate that awaits literature departments.

I long for the days of mere claustrophobia, when I could still sneak a breath of inspiration and now and then make a leap of intuition, provided that upon landing I pulled on my Hermetic cowboy boots and carefully backtracked from where I arrived, paving a path of logical footsteps. +O(

You want cheap Zen?

Autobiography

 “You want cheap zen?” — Topological “one hand clapping” = the seam in a mobius strip where one surface joins its reverse, or the plane where a klein bottle is simultaneously inner and outer, the ambinity space where the shame of loving cheap beauty (for example of a yin-yang) and shame of that love blend into plasma, the stuff of transgressed taboo, hypercharged cringe.

And we want to center the marginal, normalize abnormality, establish revolutionary overthrow of the establishment? We want to flatten parallax, so the one-eyed man can be king of irony?  We have deflated counterculture of its spirit — its ambinity — and pumped this precious quality into normality…!

We paint icons of iconoclastic saints rebreaking the same shattered taboos, and we glow with comfy self-satisfaction as we receive pats on the head for being transgressors against orthodoxy. We piously recite critical thoughts without ever questioning our pieties. HR loves our rebellious ideas, our tattoo, the passions and adventures and quirks we dutifully list when we do a round of introductions. And art! It is so important to be creative.

We could not face the shame and fear and disorientation of being otherwise.

Diamond writing

Autobiography, Philosophy

Not long ago, I realized that none of the authors I love to read cut readers a break.

I love hard, compact, flashing books. Stand up and move around, strain and turn to find the correct angle, the light shines in. Sit dully in place, and you get less than nothing. You get flat, mystical gist.

I will make every effort to be clear, and no effort to be accessible.

Wabi-sabi writing

Autobiography

In an AI age, typos, mis-punctuation, bad grammar, and so on are all evidence of a human heart, mind and hands behind the written word. I can imagine these flaws becoming precious rarities in an age where fewer and fewer people know how to express themselves, or can even find a self to express.

You know, I think from now on, I’m going to go back to rawdog writing, and let the errors live. But this is not a final decision, even though I’m expressing it that way. (Sometimes, if I overdo the booze, I’ll tell people  “I’m never drinking again, for at least a week.”) I’m trying on a permanent resolution, just to see what it’s like and how my feelings toward it evolve.

(Please note, though, I have never allowed AI to do any of my writing for me. I have, however, gotten AI’s reactions to my ideas and retained some of my own spontaneous responses to its objections. And I have asked it to proofread what I write, just for errors, not for style. What I’m contemplating is excluding AI from my work flow altogether.)

On decadence

Autobiography, Philosophy, Politics, Star

Decadence, etymologically, means state of decay. To decay, to decompose, degenerate, deteriorate, disintegrate.

The overtone in decadence is the dis-integration of subject. And subject is multiscalar.

A person, a family, a community, a nation, an international class or an international order can break down.

One faction is alienated from another, and stops associating or is set against another in conflict.

In an individual, individuum is lost, and becomes multiple individual factions inhabiting a socio-biological dividuum. Each faction does what is pleases in disregard of the others. One faction wants to be healthy and disciplined, but another faction sees a slice of chocolate cake and devours it, health be damned.

A decadent organization, large or small, shatters into mutually alienated and hostile factions that no longer care about the organization as a whole.

A subjective being is decadent when it loses its integrity — its intersubjective integration — and disintegrates into intersubjective anarchy. A We or an I is divided against itself — and often cannot stand other aspects of itself. Self-loathing, other-loathing, convulsive inter-factional alienation and conflict prevail.

A place is decadent when it loses its habitational integrity — its spatial coherence — and is chopped up into dissociated spaces. (Christopher Alexander dedicated his life to repairing places.)

Time is decadent when it is fractured into dissociated instances. Attention is on one thing for a few seconds and then another thing. Momentum is arrested in stop-start motions. Each start lurches in a different direction, in a this-that trajectory. This meeting, then that meeting. This TikTok video, then that video. This topic, then that topic. This election cycle, then that one. This great event, then that one. This mass hysteria, then that hysteria.

There is no evolving flow or development of being through time, across places. Things fall apart. Mere anarch is loosed upon the world, and all that.

There is no time or attention for a long train of thought in a decadent world.

Everything is interrupted mid-thought, mid-sentence.

Only bite-sized bits of information will be eaten. Anything bigger than a bon-bon is too much to chew and bypassed as bad communication.

Only tactic-sized strategies may be followed. The longest long-game is to decide the next move before the problem evaporates into obliviousness.

Perspective is impossible, because each eye spasms toward what is shiniest. Cubist double-vision induces double-think dysunderstandings. A person wants perfect equity and unfettered freedom under theofascist-marxist totalitarian rule… as long as whoever made you feel like something the cat dragged in feels even worse.

A conversation of interrupted sentences is interpersonal decadence.

I am interrupted and interrupted and interrupted by people who increasingly need to not understand the truth.

Waa waa waa

Autobiography, Philosophy

An internet rock-tumbled quote attributed to William James:

When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.”

Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.”

Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.”

The entire point of getting credit for a new idea is to win credibility.

Think of it as increasing your intellectual credit score. With a high intellectual credit score we can ask people to lend us some patience or effort to understand what is not easy to understand.

With credibility, we earn the right to be taken seriously when we say something that seems untrue or unimportant — before it turns into a truism that everyone retrospectively knew all along.

But credibility simply doesn’t happen with most people. After a brief flash of recognition, the novel insight fades into the background of truth. “It was there all along, and now that I think about it, I kind of saw it, too. And it is just as mine as it is yours, now. In fact, I know more than you, because here’s some stuff I figured out with this new insight of ours…”

“…But this new thing you keep going on and on about? It is not true, and, anyway, it is not important.”

In the realm of ideas, it takes ability and effort to remember ignorance and to maintain gratitude.

Many intellectual gift thefts are innocent, but those who steal gifts innocently are not intellectuals.

People are happy to listen to you, but only if you do a good job of saying things they already know.

Folks who consume ideas others hand-feed them just help themselves to whatever’s served up on the steam tray.

If you dump your ideas onto a steam tray — if talk or blog at whoever is around — your credit score will suck and your loan applications, however small, will be declined. Folks are preoccupied with their own worries. They won’t notice and can’t focus.

Your fabulous pearls of wisdom are as painful as Legos when someone steps on them.

Serious thinkers read and are connoisseurs of ideas. They know the before-and-after of oblivion and revelation. They live this transformation every day. They live for it. This is where to build credit.

Waa waa waa.

Radical mid

Autobiography, Geometric Meditations, Philosophy, Star

Periodically, I follow a line of thought so far that I lose touch with my point of departure.

That is, in fact, my goal — my “point of failure” as bodybuilders call it. A touchstone quote from Nietzsche brings me back:

The two principles of the new life.

First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon.

Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.

What is most certain for a human being is the middle.

Voegelin called this existential middle the metaxy. The metaxy is the threefold present I-now-here.

Between the beings (beyond) who superscend and comprise us and the intuitive sparks (behind) who subscend and constitute us is a tension called I. And it extends indefinitely into an infinite living oblivion, spirit.

Between the future (beyond) which draws us forward into its indeterminate possibility and the past (behind) which constitutes our time is a tension called now. And it extends indefinitely into an infinite temporal oblivion, eternity.

Between the distances (beyond) which stretch outward interminably and substances (behind) which constitutes our immediate environment is a tension called here. And this extends indefinitely into an infinite material-spatial oblivion, apeiron.

For each of us, metaxy collects in mesocosm, suspended between microcosm and macroscosm.

Husserl called this mesocosm in which each and all of us lives lifeworld.

In this lifeworld there are myriad ways to make common sense of things, some better than others.

We make personal common sense across our senses, by seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting “the same thing” in our environment, understanding it synthetically as the common object of our sensory experience.

And we all make interpersonal common sense by talking about and interacting with common objects among us — things we experience together.

As we make sense alone or together, we, ourselves, are shaped. Our objectivity shapes our subjectivity. Or, more accurately, our subjectivities are shaped, and learn to cooperate within a single, multifaceted subject. We learn to understand (to varying degrees and predominance) via all the subjects we learn in school, plus many other, far more local subjects, like the subject of the inhabitant of our home, city, region, nation and internationality.

These subjects and supersubjects are not objects and cannot be known objectively. They are who does objective knowing. The tree of subjectivity is known solely by its objective fruit. Trying to have the tree by possessing its fruit everts being. We compulsively evert being. It is how we are.

Some of these subjects are harmonious with one another and can be used simultaneously and integrally, and some conflict and can only be used serially. The latter are the ones that make us feel self-estranged. We are one person at work, another in public, another with friends and another at home.

But our souls are expansive. We want to extend our I to wider scopes of we. And we want to go deeper to involve finer and finer, subtler and subtler sparks of intuition. We want to integrate with and without, to be self-possessed but to belong. We want to concern ourselves with more varieties of materials networked across greater expanses. We want to come to understand and come to terms with our personal past and the past of our peoples and of our species, of life and of the universe, and we want to see beyond the horizon of the future and anticipate what is in store for us.

As we dilate our souls toward spirit, eternity and apeiron, structures of meaning emerge.

These structures are sacred. They link us to subscendent and superscendent transcendence, which is our source of being. It is a trellis to hold us firm as we extend ourselves, entwine ourselves, ascend beyond the I-here-now point.

Religion is a trellis.

Now I am back in the middle, rerooted in what is closest, most immediate and real.

Treatment for mistreatment

Autobiography, Ethics

I just capped my Wimbledon Hooligans fable with a nice, pat moral:

We must never confuse the ethical with the moral.

Ethics are binding within their particular ethos. Morality is universally binding.

My mistake has been moralizing respect.

Respect is an ethical principle, not a moral principle.

I prefer respect, of course, because I flourish only in a respectful ethos. But this is always where the moralizing vice strikes. “What is good for me defines what is good.”

The world as it is right now has very little genuine respect. We have only the remains of respect — vestigial manners. Manners have degraded into behaviors having nothing to do with establishing or maintaining mutual respect. In work settings, manners are instruments of professional depersonalization. In social settings manners are class performances. In corporate-political life manners govern socially-acceptable forms of petty sadism — subjugation, humiliation, recreational coercion, etc.

So be it.

The new program:

  • Do not cheapen respect by throwing it on the street like shriner’s candy. Do not run around expressing every admiration you feel. In the market, oversupply cheapens.
  • Exchange respect with the precious respectable few, who are capable of receiving, valuing and reciprocating respect in kind. Treat the rest with cheerful dispassion. It is nobody’s fault that they have become whatever they are, but it is also not to their credit.
  • Just as liberalism is an ethic at home only in a liberal ethos, respect is an ethic at home only in a respectful ethos. Do not follow the rules of a game nobody else is playing, and then resent them for not playing along. Mutuality is for the mutual.
  • The world is what it is. The world is not obligated to conform to your ideal or bow to your judgment.
  • Lower daily dose of vitamin B, and start loading up on vitamin N.

Symptom or perception?

Autobiography

My wife is worried about me.

She says I sound crazy, running around blaming the whole world for offending me with subtle and overt signs of disrespect. She is especially worried that I am no longer suppressing my offense. For instance, I have been ending conversations without warning whenever I have been disrespectfully talked over.

Shit’s getting ugly and awkward, and I am 100% ready to make it even worse.

My wife is an insightful, reasonable woman, and her concerns are grounded in the best sense.

First, as a general rule, if a person has problems with the entire world, we should not only hypothesize but fully assume the problem is with the person, not the world. We will rarely go wrong following this rule.

Second, I was born into a respect vacuum. My psyche knows and detests this kind of disrespect ethos and fears being sucked back into it. There is every reason to expect that my mental malfunctions will take disrespect as a theme.

Third, I am battered beyond belief by the work I have been forced to do for the last several months. I am not well. It is indisputable that I am crazy to some significant degree. The question is how much of the disrespect I perceive everywhere is real, and how much of it is craziness.

All I can say in defense of my perceptions is that history teaches us that there have been times and places where respect has, in fact, broken all the way down. Entire generations have come to biological adulthood without training or cultivation of mutual respect — or even exposure to it. These generations have felt no respect for the past, for the institutions that hold their life together, for anyone who wishes to preserve or defend these things that still work, however imperfectly.

This kind of radically disrespectful generalization destroys civility on their way to destroying civilization.

I believe we are in such a time and place, facing a disrespect pandemic.

To feel human, I need exchanges of respect, but in a world where people only know domination, submission, cynical suspicion and revolt, this need will not be met.

So, that is truth as I know and perceive it, laid out for judgment. Judge away.

Wimbledon hooligans

Autobiography, Design, Fables, myths & parables

A horde of rioting football hooligans burst the gates of Wimbledon and flooded onto the courts, mid-match.

The officials instructed the players to play on.

“Yes, the game is more challenging with drunken louts milling about on the courts, vomiting on the grass, shredding guitar solos on snatched tennis rackets and hanging the players from the rafters by their tighty tennis whities. Quite challenging, indeed.

“But,” the officials reasoned, “many of these people have never experienced the great sport of tennis. If they see the game up close, played by the best players, perhaps they will be won over to tennis. Maybe they will become the most passionate tennis fans of all!”

So the tennis players did their best to play around the active and occasionally brutal interference of the hooligans, and tried to win the conditions required to play tennis by playing even better tennis, by the rules of tennis.

Ethics are the principles that sustain an ethos.

Loyal members of an ethos appeal to and honor these principles.

Ethics are not binding beyond the ethos, even for the most principled member. In fact, to meet an existential threat to an ethos with ethics is unethical.

We must never confuse the ethical with the moral.

Ethics are binding within their particular ethos. Morality is universally binding.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

Unacceptable interruptions

Autobiography, Ethics

Jews famously interrupt a lot. It’s just how Jewish conversations go.

And apparently, even healthy married couples constantly interrupt.

Many interruptions happen in an atmosphere of mutual respect, and I barely notice them.

But there are three varieties of interruption that I will no longer tolerate.

  • Aggressive interruptions. You know it is an aggressive interruption because if you keep talking through the attempted interruption, the aggressor continues. It is a conversational stare-down. I’m not having that. And I will not be in a relationship with a person who does that. It is a sign of low arrogance.
  • Disregard interruptions. The partner just does not value what is being said, has no curiosity about where it is going, and feels too little respect for the speaker to ignore whatever they’re saying to the end of the sentence.
  • Apprehensive interruptions. These happen when a conversation presses against the comprehensibility limits of one of the partners, and they try to divert them conversation back to safe regions. The interruptions are self-defense against aporias.

I am not fucking around. If I feel disrespectfully interrupted, I might give one warning and I might not, before I bring things to a sudden and awkward close.

I’ve already ended several meetings both in and outside work.

I have accumulated too many people in my life who have made me doubt their respect. Part of the problem is they have never learned to signal respect. They have also never been taught to refrain from inconsiderate behaviors. I have too little time and patience to allow people like this in my life.

I don’t command respect. But if someone withholds respect from me, there will be no effort to establish respect. I will remove myself from the source of offense, or remove them from where I am.

The Medium

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

I have connected design and gifts for a good while.

When I understand the core service design concept of value exchange in the clear light of gift exchange, so that it includes, but also transcends, transaction, and enters the domain of freely given gifts, service design gains importance and universality.

Let us define transaction as any exchange of goods that is purely functional and impersonal. Neither party has any reason to feel any bond of solidarity. All parties performs their respective functions precisely as specified, without deficit or surplus. A transaction leaves a sum of zero in the accounts ledger.

Exchange of gifts is qualitatively different. First, it is bad taste (for it indicates bad faith), to quantify or even sharply calculate the value of any gift exchange.

This is because, (second), gifts always, necessarily and essentially carry an indeterminate, intentionally obscure, surplus.

And that indeterminate surplus goes directly into a mysterious qualitative fund belonging to the relationship itself. The surplus fund of the relationship is felt in various ways by the members of the relationship. It might be felt as gratitude, love, respect, trust, wonder or awe. But it will be felt as some sort of voluntary solidarity.

A relationship is not only, or even primarily, a formal arrangement or social status.

If it is a real relationship, it has a being of its own that transcends the being of any of its members. It is that transcendent third being who “owns” the surplus of any gift exchange.

A person in a relationship who aspires to perfect fairness is a person seeking transaction rather than gift, and that person will be incapable of forming real transcendent relationships with others. They will suffocate inside their own isolated tit-for-tat ingratitude and stinginess.

This does not mean that gift-governed relationships should be unfair or unbalanced. What it means is that the standard for its balance is not calculation.

The standard is an intuition of whether the relationship feels “worth it” to all involved. And that “worth it” is signaled by a feeling of solidarity, connection, goodwill, loyalty, identity and most generally, love, which is what value is.

I had a wonderful talk yesterday morning with one of my oldest, dearest friends. She is working on her brand, and has been preparing a brief for a talented designer who is working on her visual brand identity. She had this brief in mind, as we spoke about how she serves her teams and helps them serve organizations.

We agreed that the kind of brands people care about and feel connected to are collective persons with independent being that transcends particular members. Living brands are egregores.

Egregore is another name for a collective person. They are collective beings in whom we participate, from whom the world is received as given in some particular way.

An engregore enworlds some patch of reality in some specific way, and carries with it explicitly stated beliefs about being, truth, action, morality and maybe even transcendence. Each has its (Nietzsche once asked if gods philosophize, and the answer is, of course, yes — but to varying degrees. Most gods are like people, spending most of their time spontaneously perceiving and acting, and only stopping to reflect and articulate when some bit of their enworldment breaks.

An organization that can only work by stacking up words and calculations and other constructed systems, who rejects the philosopher’s stone of transcendent being, who tracks its transactions in a pristinely balanced ledger, and organization that sells precisely as high as it possibly can a buys precisely as low as it possibly can in order to shunt all surplus into the pockets of anonymous shareholders — that organization might (or might not) have some kind of collective being — but if it does have personhood it will not have be one anyone can want. Whether soulless or mis-souled, the organization don a phony persona and try to run charisma moves on whoever gets involved in it. It will be corporate.

Egregores organize themselves by assembling persons who serve the organization as organs. The life of the organization is a distributed throughout its organs and their relationship, actualized in value exchanges and the givens they receive in common as an organizational common sense. An egregore in its transcendent being can be understood as a materialized faith that receives givens (qualitative and quantitative data), responds in particular ways and instaurates and evolves ethomethods for regulating its internal organ system.

All that.

Engregores form around my friend.

She draws together designers (“creatives”) of various kinds — each with a unique ideal value exchange — and brings them to collective life, exchanging their best gifts with one another, in order to gift clients with their best work. She is weirdly good at this.

Whenever she leaves an organization, people cry. They cry hard. They are grateful to her for giving them the rare opportunity to meet their deepest need in the practical world: the conditions needed to give their best gift.

But clients don’t see this value. The value is concealed as the indispensable subjective container of the objective value it contains and pours forth. The client sees only the objective outputs: the deliverables. Tangible things is all they are willing to pay for.

I told her this reminds me of Marshall McLuhan’s cryptic aphorism: “The medium is the message.” Medium, as opposed to what? As opposed to the content conveyed by the medium. According to McLuhan engaging a medium changes the enworldment of a consumer far more than whatever the medium conveys in the foreground. You can watch hours of Howdie Doodie or Masterpiece Theater, and either will transform you into a TV viewer. In the early 20th Century the new medium of radio created a new kind of mass man, which could be molded into egregores of unprecedented size and aggression. Folks who doomscroll all day become doomscribes.

My own experience with a medium being the message was my encounter with Nietzsche. In order to make sense of the content of Nietzsche’s thought, I had to learn new ways of thinking it, and that way of thinking applied far beyond the scope of his books. It didn’t matter what facts he asserted. The message was the medium of thinking in a Nietzschean way, and that message changes literally everything. Pragmatically, what follows from my utterance of “everything” is different from what follows from yours. Everyone knows everything, but everythings vary in size.

This is when I brought up the branding classic, The Hero and the Outlaw. This book is about using Jungian archetypes and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey to find potent brand archetypes upon which, allegedly, living brands can be modeled.

The Medium is the message. A medium who channels talent and converges it in order to summon the perfect team for a design problem. Medium!

I suggested she look for something approximate to “The Medium” — the summoner of collective being.

I also suggested that the brand itself is not an archetype. The archetype is one organ in a brand’s organ system, not a representation of the whole brand. Brands are not spectatorial, they are participatory. And the brand invites a customer (or employee or partner) into the living brand as a fellow character in the drama.

Often the brand archetype is not even the hero of the story. Sometimes the customer plays the hero.

I used to be obsessed with branding.