The artist is hunched over a table top of sketches stained with coffee rings, deadline looming, until an “A-ha” moment—where the dark clouds part and a solitary ray of inspiration shines through—and everything falls into place. It’s great drama, just like the witness breaking down on the stand and tearfully crying, “Yes! I did it!” or the bottom-of-the-ninth grand slam to win the big game. All of these things actually happen from time to time, but seldom mark the end of the journey. Tomorrow, the lawyer will file paperwork, the baseball team will practice for the next big game, and the artist will endeavor to turn that perfect sketch into valid XHTML.

It’s one thing to remind ourselves that great works take great work. After all, Thomas Edison was famously quoted, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” almost 100 years ago. Or you could look to Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, and passage 94 from Art of Peace.

Progress comes
To those who
Train and train;
Reliance on secret techniques
Will get you nowhere.

These are lessons that, despite those among us always looking for a short-cut, reside deep in our hearts.

It’s another thing to fully embrace what many creative professionals consider the ultimate enemy: the revision. Yes, the dilution of pristine output into stuff barely recognizable as art, fit only for lowest common denominator mass consumption. That’s certainly one way to look at it, but if that’s what is happening to your work, I have to say “Ur doin it wrong“.

The guys behind LOLcats inspired a lot of these concepts, actually.

For the last four years, I’ve served as a webmaster for a non-profit organization. A good definition of webmaster is a web designer that has to live with the consequences. My organization had big intentions online and my first few years were spent sewing a patchwork of beautiful but disparate designs we’d commissioned from multiple agencies into a quilt that provided some sort of comfort to the people actually visiting our site. Before long, I took the reigns myself, started saying “no” to a lot of otherwise enticing ideas, and focused on traffic stats and user behavior while re-crafting our online presence. In a year, the Web Team had decreased our bounce rate by almost 20% and dramatically increased conversion to both our email list and online donations.

I don’t fault the agencies. They each danced the dance that all designers do, partnering stated client needs with personal choices both informed and intuitive. That is the ultimate role of an expert, listening carefully and then leaping forward with confidence and experience.

But they only did it once.

Briefing, brainstorming, delivery, invoice, goodbye. What made the in-house designs more successful (if the goals were objective visitor conversion and not subjective aesthetics) was each day’s attention to the previous day’s decisions. “Living with the consequences” was ultimately the fast path to good design.

Creative work is at a crossroads, struggling with what it means to be an expert in the face of the wisdom of crowds. I believe a path has presented itself and, by not taking it, we are missing a chance to fully engage the interactive nature of today’s culture.

The first books were oral traditions written down; it would be centuries before the chapter was invented. The first films were plays with a camera aimed in their direction; the innovation of the close-up caused hysteria. The web, even as it manages to wriggle out from under the book’s metaphors of pages and authors to achieve its destiny as a mode of communication, still labors under an obsolete model for its design process.

Am I just talking about Agile web design? Yes, but also how it must effect our relationships.

What would a better model look like? Consider regular check-ups with your doctor, “Looks like we’ve made some progress on your cholesterol, let’s keep working on that. How’s your back feeling, any better?” Good designers do this already. They form plans with their patients, earnestly listening to their ailments before writing any prescriptions, and providing supplemental education when important… but why stop there? Why not have the same conversation with the data?

I love the duck-billed platypus. Besides being a web-footed, duck-billed, egg-laying mammal, they also have poisonous claws and can sense electromagnetic fields. No designer, no matter how inspired, would have presented the duck-billed platypus and no client, however savvy, would have approved it. Yet, after generations upon generations of adapting to fit its environment, here it is.

It’s not hard to imagine a design process that places evolution at its center. Instead of projects guided by hunches and filled with pre-determined deliverables, we would have extended engagements guided by research with more milestones after a launch than before it. Client and designer both would sit down with statistics and decide which numbers should go up and which down, leading to either subtle or radical redesigns on a weekly basis. All of this would result in a final product quite different than anyone had expected at the onset, but evolved to fit its environment.

True not only for visual & interaction design but copy-writing, viral videos, or anything else you could measure the success of.

This kind of process requires a certain kind of designer and a certain kind of client. Both have to be willing to try new things but temper their own enthusiasm with the cold hard facts. It would require a creativity that can maintain its vitality when mixed with reality, a confidence that expertise still has a place in a world filled with data. It would require a faith that putting process over product ultimately yields a better product.

And it would require diligence.

For what better a word than diligence to describe the act of enthusiastically doing your best each day and soberly evaluating the fruits of that effort the next day, knowing that this behavior—and not any “secret technique”—is the character of great work?

It is my experience that designers and clients such as these are bountiful. My last five years in the non-profit and responsible business communities have introduced me to a great number of people and organizations that pick big fights, take on insurmountable odds, and somehow get up each morning with the same devotion. They are guided by a trust that victory, while in some circumstances a long way off, is inevitable in the face of diligence.

Maybe you are one of these people. To work with me, please visit DiligentCreative.com.

A number of (possibly all) of my friends and family have more attachment to a spiritual practice than myself, so—although I’ve watched from afar as others have attempted to tackle this issue—I’ve kept out of the debate until now. Of course, I don’t really see what there is to debate. Didn’t Immanuel Kant say the same thing back in “Kritik der reinen Vernunft“?

For those who haven’t followed the antics of Dawkins (non sequitur: he also invented the word “meme” back in 1976), his book proposes that the term “delusion”, defined as a belief that is maintained despite contradiction by rational argument, most certainly applies to religion. He’s been interviewed by everyone from the BBC to Stephen Colbert. Both the Left and Right reviews of his book and follow-up documentary “Root of All Evil?” tend to criticize his ferocity rather than his arguments. Probably because they rightly perceive the futility in doing so. Dawkins, an extremely articulate Oxford University biologist, is the Top Dog on his issues (though I’d love to see him debate Ken Wilber). His criticism of the lack of academic rigor around religion is dead on. I’m still tempted to say, “so what?”

Religion explains religion using religion. How do we know God exists? Because the Bible says so. Why should we believe the Bible? Because it’s the Word of God. How do we know it’s the Word of God? Because the Bible says so. Around and around we go. Any rational person who doesn’t notice this should be sent back to Sunday School (another non sequitur: an overzealous Sunday School teacher once forced me to choose either Jesus and my Hindu friend Arjun… Arjun won… see you this Christmas, Arjun!). Noting circular logic need not make you an Atheist, however.

Science explains science using science. How do we know electromagnetism exists? Because scientific research says so. Why should we believe scientific research? Because it follows the Scientific Method. Why should we believe the Scientific Method? Because its results are confirmed by scientific research. Around and around we go again. As a system unto itself, science is completely coherent. As a world view, it makes basic assumptions, like “the world is understandable by the human mind”, that I’m uncomfortable saying are a priori.

The real problems come about when one system tries to govern the other. “The God Delusion” is clearly an attempt to apply science to religion and, no surprise, religions fails miserably. However, religion has been doing the same to science for years—whether it’s religious US politicians censoring research on sex education or Galileo being forced to recant for suggesting the Earth was not the center of the universe.

Can science and religion get along? There are lots of examples that attempt to merge the two. Christian Science characterizes disease as a separation from God and treatable through faith. Many find their objection to conventional medicine irresponsible, conveniently ignorant about both the Placebo Effect and that 1.5 million people are hospitalized every year due to adverse reactions to prescription medication. Another example (I’m deliberately picking on religions that include “science” in their name) is Scientology, an “Applied Religion” which offers its members specific techniques (like the ARC Triangle and Tone Scale) to lead more graceful lives. Though both of these belief systems have received more than their fair share of criticism, two dear friends of mine are a Christian Scientist and a Scientologist—and they’re both wonderful people.

That’s what it really comes down to for me. People. Many before me have asked Dawkins what, really, is so bad about religion. He shares a list of atrocities committed in its name or justified by it, ranging from genocide to homophobia. Critics of Atheism quickly retort that Stalin was an Atheist, isn’t that just as bad? Of course, those who seek to control populations always make use of belief systems to do so. Though George W. Bush claims to get his orders from God, I don’t think unprovoked assault is quite what Jesus had in mind. Let’s not forget how Darwinism led to Nazi eugenics. In short, both religion and science can be tools for evil in the hands of a tyrant.

With that, I really have to end with Nietzsche. “God is dead!” is possibly the most misunderstood three words in modern philosophy. To really understand what Friedrich was getting at in “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft“, let me include the rest of the passage.

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife—who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event—and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!

Nietzsche writes not in the first person here, but puts these words into the mouth of a “madman”. He is laughed out of the village, an Atheist village, all the while shouting, “What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?”. Nietzsche’s message is not intended as anti-religious, but an admonition of those who have dethroned God without realizing their vital new responsibility to bring order to the chaos of existence. “Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness?”

This is a question that people of science and people of faith must answer, and can only answer, together.

“My Final Prediction”, Bruce Sterling’s last column with Wired, ends:

As a futurist, I’ve often licked my chops over rather grim possibilities. But my lasting fondness for the dark side is a personal taste, not an analysis. I’m frequently surprised, and when I consider the biggest surprises, I’m heartened that they were mostly positive. The Internet, for instance, crawled out of a dank atomic fallout shelter to become the Mardi Gras parade of my generation. It was not a bolt of destructive lightning; it was the sun breaking through the clouds.

Please, Bruce, you’re not a Futurist. And your “fondness for the dark side” is like my “fondness” for The White Stripes. I would like to like them, but I don’t actually like them. As soon as no one’s looking, I switch back to AFX and Autechre.

Futurists are violent, callous, and remorseless. An art project in college had me memorizing the 1909 Futurist Manifesto, and I can still recall the good bits:

Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! Oh, factory gutter! I savored a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!

We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired, for they are nourished by fire, hatred, and speed! Does this surprise you? It is because you do not even remember being alive! Standing on the world’s summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!

Futurists would love the world we’ve created today. Essentially, their manifesto has manifested. Even television commercials have wholly adopted Futurist values. Faster transactions with your credit card! Higher horsepower for your SUV! More blades on your safety razor! Louder crunch in your snack food!

Nope. I’ve heard Sterling speak before and I was not left wanting to destroy museums or build my own rocket pack. He had the closing remarks at last year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference. After an hour of decrying the state of the world, failed governments and devastated ecosystems, he described the beautiful world that was possible and, in a tearful rendition of Carl Sandburg’s “The People, Yes!” drove the point home. I couldn’t continue without quoting the poem myself.

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.
…
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march:
“Where to? what next?”

No, Bruce. Sorry to say it, but you’re a humanist. Maybe, on some days, a transhumanist—but mostly just a humanist. I know it sucks to be a happy, optimistic writer sometimes (what do you do for angst?) but you’ve given us a beautiful vision of an ecological sustainable future, so don’t fight your nature. No pun intended.

Sorry this post looks like a Clips Show. I’m getting sick and needed some extra sleep.

The short answer is everything, but let’s delve into a little more detail, shall we? I’ve included screenshots of RAN.org from each year, so you can play along at home.

1994

• Tim Berners-Lee founds the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
• The brand new Netscape begins to chip away at Mosaic
• Al Gore coins the term “Information Superhighway”
• Yahoo goes live
• The now ubiquitous programming language PHP is released

1995

• Java and JavaScript join the party
• Amazon starts books so cheap, everyone says it can’t last
• People can now “find it on eBay“
• Suck creates the first generation of internet famous
• Craig starts a list

1996

• The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) is incorporated, using data gathered from Usenet
• Macromedia releases Flash spawning millions of terrible websites
• US Robotics develops a Pilot that fits in your palm
• I graduate high school

1997

• The first PCs for less than $1000 emerge
• The Dancing Baby debuts
• Altavista’s Babel Fish offers sometimes useful translations
• The first DVDs go on sale

1998

• The DMCA is passed, many protest
• Windows 98 is released
• Google goes live, its importance is somewhat understated at first
• Megapopular Open Source database MySQL is released

1999

• The Y2K freakout begins
• The launch of Napster sounds the death knell for the music industry
• Seminal massively multi-player online roleplaying game (MMORPG) Everquest is released
• Prince parties, presumably

2000

• AOL, a cute little internet company, buys Time Warner, a ginormous media conglomerate
• Microsoft loses it’s anti-trust case United States v. Microsoft
• Gore loses Bush v. Gore (and the presidency)
• I graduate from college

2001

• The launch of Wikipedia tears down the Ivory Tower
• Suck posts its last article
• The iPod debuts, it seems very expensive
• Napster shuts down under the weight of multiple law suits
• Somebody sets us up the bomb

2002

• eBay buys PayPal, the only “Dot.com buys Dot.com” move that has ever seemed like a no-brainer to me
• Old school social networking site Friendster goes live
• Google News removes editors from the equation and offers algorithmically selected headlines
• The first Creative Commons licenses released

2003

• MP3.com shuts down
• Social bookmarking site del.icio.us goes live
• Google, not the first to recognize the growing power of blogs, buys Blogger
• MySpace begins its rise to fame and subsequent descent to infamy
• MMORPG Second Life is made public, no orcs are included

2004

• Photo sharing site Flickr goes live and allows people to look up ex-boy/girlfriends and see if they’re fat
• GMail introduced, requiring an invite for the tasty AJAX action
• 37signals releases some of the code to their product Basecamp as Ruby on Rails
• First mention of “Web 2.0“
• I take over design at RAN.org

2005

• YouTube goes live, amidst shrieks of “Be the media!” and “OMG, I can’t believe he ate that!”
• eBay buys Skype
• Adobe buys Macromedia
• Dog eats dog

2006

• Google buys YouTube, heads are scratched
• Despite a widespread awareness-raising campaign, “Network Neutrality” laws fail to pass
• Microsoft releases the Zune just in time for Xmas, in lump-of-coal black or log-of-shit brown
• I relaunch Sunshocked and resurrect the Stanifesto

Next year, I get to deal with a surly teenager.

10 PRINT "Stan is awesome."
20 GOTO 10

BASIC programs in the 80s were written as one big heap of code. This line number sent you to that line number, as labyrinthian as the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books popular at the time. I faced a hard game of catch-up when I went to college and had to discard the monolithic BASIC for the, by comparison, fractured and disjointed C++. Classes? Libraries? I want my code all in one place!

<%= 1000.times {puts "Stan is awesome."} %>

It was an evolutionary hurdle to understand that the functionality I had relied on could be abstracted into functions, to be written once and called upon whenever I needed them. Ruby on Rails is a step beyond C++ in terms of abstraction, built upon a MVC framework that separates what the program does (the Controller) from what it does it to (the Model) and how it looks when it’s done (the View). These “three branches” got me thinking about abstraction in government.

First there were monarchies, these were BASIC. A single leader who did all the governing single-handedly: judge, jury, and executioner (though of course, they didn’t use that phrase because judges and juries hadn’t been invented yet). Lots left to be desired here, obviously. There’s a big jump in 1215 with the Magna Carta, which introduced functions in the form of Barons (who could throw exceptions with the best of them).

The U.S. government is more like an MVC framework than any before, with clearly defined roles of each branch. Looking closer, the legislative branch contains two classes, Senate and House, that contain methods like Pass, Reject, and the wickedly recursive Direct to Subcommittee.

What would a truly agile government look like? How could programming methodologies like YAGNI or DRY be applied to the passage or even execution of law? Is the inevitable babbling about a “litmus test” whenever a Supreme Court Justice is nominated really just unit testing?

This is getting dangerously close to the dorkiest post I’ve ever made, so I should point out that the trend toward abstraction exists in environments other than just programming and government. In storytelling, we’ve gone from epic oral mythologies to self-contained novels to hypertext that links to pre-written content. In occupations, we’ve gone from hunting/gathering to raising specific crops for trade to trading representations of those crops in futures markets. At each step, the subject of the old level becomes an object of the new.

The official law broken, buried in this pdf, is right here:

Nevada law requires every person or group of persons organized formally or informally who advocates the passage or defeat of a ballot question at any primary or general election to report their contributions and expenditures in excess of $100.

When the Drug Czar came to town back in 2002, the Marijuana Policy Project cried foul and filed suit. The Czar countered that campaigning against the question was part of his job in “speaking out about the dangers of illegal drugs.” The paradox is that, if Question 7 passes, marijuana would no longer be an illegal drug—so would it not be his job anymore?

I won’t weigh in on Question 7 itself, living in a city where medicinal marijuana is legal makes me aware of both the positivies and negatives, neither as extreme as either side in Nevada would have you believe. That said, illegally opposing legalization of something on the grounds that it’s illegal spins my head around with its level of absurdity. Using the same logic, I could just as easily say that legalizing marijuana would keep 14.6 million Americans from using illegal drugs every month. They’d still be smoking pot, it just wouldn’t be… y’know.

My mother, an elementary school librarian, recently told me about a book in which a kid decides that a ball point pen should be called a “frindle”. Since it’s a kid’s book, his years of campaigning are eventually rewarded and “frindle” is added to the dictionary. Let’s all wish “megagaltastic” the same fate. I bring this up (and have before) because social change is not unlike language.

There were outcries over the ebonics controversy destroying the English language, and later the same over pager slang. Our nation managed to survive both. Even “MILF” hasn’t destroyed any lives, despite it not being “a real word”.

At any rate, be it language, social change, or the legalization of a controlled substance, it takes those people who either knowingly break the rules or innovate into territory where rules have not yet ventured that push us as a culture, people, and planet. No cause, be it votes for women or gay marriage, can win without challenging what is “legal”. Our founding fathers, afterall, were traitors to the crown every one. If we limit ourselves to what is legal, we’re tacitly approving the world as it is. By breaking the law, we evolve.

I’m going to stop now, before I become a Think Different ad.

The features begins with a seemingly inspiring question…

Can we turn capitalism into an open source design project and make it more sustainable and responsible to our and future generation’s needs?

… And then becomes a version history of sorts, beginning with 1.0 (Shortage Capitalism) and ending with 4.0 (Sustainable Capitalism). I would link to the article itself but Adbusters is a bit exclusive with their content, so I’ll just recap it here.

Shortage Capitalism (1.0) is the capitalism we all learned about in high school. People have needs, businesses make products to fill them. If demand exceeds supply, prices go up. If supply exceeds demand, prices go down. Everyone acts in their own best interest and “the market” does the rest. It’s easy enough to understand, but capitalism hasn’t really functioned like this for a long time.

Next came Surplus Capitalism (2.0). Resource extraction and manufacturing are exported to the Third World, lowering costs but sending externalities skyrocketing. With a wealth of goods, supply far exceeds demand—but corporations have learned how to prevent that from translating into lower prices. Advertising becomes the new business of business. To pay for all the things they don’t need, consumers turn to credit and go into debt. This is the most current version… and it has a lot of bugs.

Commons Capitalism (3.0) is Barnes’ proposed next update. Inspired by Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons, he envisions a capitalism that includes a commons transformed from a victim to a market force of its own. Nature (including air, water, or even DNA), along with communities and culture, would have representation via a trust tasked with defending and preserving the commons and paying dividends to the collective shareholders.

The essence is to fix capitalism’s operating system by adding virtuous feedback loops and proxies for unrepresented stakeholders.

Since there are efforts out there that are trying to do something like this, I’m comfortable saying that while 3.0 may be in Beta, we might see a Release Candidate soon.

Finally, Adbusters imagines Sustainable Capitalism (4.0). This conglomeration of existing ideologies like True Cost Markets, Ecological Economics, the Tobin Tax, and Corporate Social Responsibility come together to create a model of capitalism that could evolve beyond the EOLed version we have now.

I have two major responses to the article. The first is that, while the metaphor of capitalism as open source software is a great one, power over corporations and their “operating system” is already in the hands of civil society; we just keep forgetting. It is dangerous to objectize “Capitalism” as something not fundamentally controlled by humans. At the end of the day, we are the programmers and the responsibility for providing tech support (in the form of patches, updates, and new features) falls squarely at our feet.

Second, and this comes back to my friend trying to decide if she is an anti-capitalist or post-capitalist, I want to caution anyone thinking that merely having a roadmap to 4.0 secures its inevitability. Every oil worker kidnapped or brick through a Starbucks window is a bug report reminding us that the current product is not working. Put more fancily, the Hegelian synthesis requires conflict between actual and potential ideologies in order to manifest progress.

Finally, can we all take a moment to appreciate how incredibly clever I am to have put the Web 2.0 reflection under the Monopoly Guy?

First, there are lots of contexts in which noise specifically contributes to signal. George Lucas often quotes Akira Kurosawa on the notion of “Immaculate Reality”. In an old interview with Wired, Lucas says,

“[O]bviously everything is kind of dirty in the real world, and everything is kind of beat up, and everybody doesn’t drive around in a brand-new car.”

However, isn’t this really just noise serving as signal? The signal in this case is the Immaculate Reality used to convince movie-goers that what they’re seeing is real and a little dirt here and there is “value added”.

The case for noise is better made by the lives of woks and Yixing teapots. A wok is never washed with soap, but instead allowed a patina seasoned by the dishes it has cooked before. Similarly, teapots were traditionally for personal use and would be flavored by the past teas brewed by its owner. Thus the same tea from different teapots might have a subtly different taste. In this case, non-random data (the tea is brewed deliberately) is affecting the current signal in a random way, with the intention of enhancing the content.

Lest you think noise’s only friends are entirely Eastern (though I should mention that Buddhism’s First Noble Truth is Dukkha, or dissatisfaction, before moving on), let us not forget the West’s very own Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution. Afterall, if DNA got the signal right every single time we reproduced and there were no mutations, we would not only be just like our parents (scary enough) but our parents would still be single-celled goop. Noise is the driving force of evolution.

The question that is left for me is how noise can be allowed for in digital media. It’s one thing to imitate it with distressed text and bump maps, it’s another to let external forces actually affect your work. Signal vs. Noise has a post about Wabi-sabi, but mainly praising its comfortable simplicity and kind of missing the point. Will a format made out of 1s and 0s ever achieve the chaos of an unprimed canvas? If so, would it be any better than what we’ve got now?