Playing for Style Points
I’ve joked – well, half joked – that you can tell things like true coworking, community, and collaboration from their empty, soulless clones the same way you can tell the difference between art and porn: you know it when you see it.
What that really means is that there’s a sense of “style”, not necessarily aesthetic, but moreso a sense of self awareness of being , that differentiates one from the other.
Ludicorp, the company founded to build Flickr, posted this except on their about page in the early 2000′s:
Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.
But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine’s activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.
The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.
The goal is to kick ass.
Hat tip @ Kottke
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SXSWi: The Festival
I have a feeling this is going to become a meme of some sort, as people begin to bail on SXSW for “jumping the shark” or, “not scaling”.
So I AM going to Austin in March with between 2 and 3 dozen members and friends of Indy Hall. Some are first timers, others are veterans like me (this will be my 5th). I’ve been asked quite a bit about what to expect, so here’s my take:
SXSW Interactive is 2 separate concentric events: a Conference and a Festival.
The conference is about things like “learning” and “networking”, regardless of your industry. Over time, it’s become more about one and less about the other, as is evident by the quality of the panels and the presentation selection system. So much to the point where I’d say it’s no longer about learning and it’s ALL about network – but the conference unfortunately parades as an educational opportunity.
The attendance is simply too large and too diverse for anyone to know what they’re there to learn – or who they’re presenting a lesson to. The conference suffers from the “tragedy of the commons” between industries represented.
The festival is about things like “reunions” and “serendipity” and “tacos” and “chaos”. The festival is fundamentally about gathering great people and seeing what happens. That was the ethos of what made SXSWi the conference so magical, and unfortunately, seems to have many people increasingly morose about the event.
My take on SXSW Interactive is that I’ve outgrown the conference – but still crave the festival. As the radius of the conference has swelled – with the convention center at the epicenter – the festival has been pushed to the physical fringes of that radius.
So this year I’m experimenting – I intend to stay a mile away from the convention center. Just far enough from the blast zone, but not so far that it’s inconvenient for friends to bump into each other. A number of us from the Philly contingency have booked up a significant ratio of rooms at a couple of amazing boutique hotels just off south congress, not far from the river.
We’ll be there, kibitzing, enjoying music, drinks, tacos, and friends. Geoff and his crew at P’unk Ave have been doing this for the last couple of years and during my visits with them on their South Austin “campus”, have had some of the best times I’ve had at any SXSW.
If you’re comfortable with being done with SXSW the conference – as I am, I feel some form of closure in the relationship with the event – maybe consider visiting SXSW the festival.
I’ll let you know how this year’s festival is – if you’d like to join me, send me a note when you’re in Austin. I’d love to meet you or catch up.
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Let’s Be Honest
That there isn’t much of [a startup community in Philadelphia]. Of course, that’s not to say that there aren’t lots of people doing great stuff, but there just isn’t enough. It’s young. People are still figuring out how the whole thing works. From a larger perspective, most of the technology people in Philly metro are connected to big tech, finance or biotech firms or companies that service them as clients.
I also want to make the distinction between the tech community and the startup community. The community of people involved with design and technology is vibrant. It’s driven from grass roots and it’s bad-ass. That doesn’t directly translate to lots of jobs working at start ups or start up clients.
- Kevin Fitzpatrick
Finally, somebody who is unabashedly honest about Philadelphia’s place in “high tech as business”. Maybe it’s because Kevin is safely located 3000 miles away compared to the the 100 miles between Philly and New York and doesn’t risk being pelted with ice-balls. 
I’ve taken the last year relatively quietly, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been watching everything that’s going on. I’ve also NOT spent most of 2010 from a desk at Indy Hall, so while my bias is clearly laid, I’ve been able to achieve some new perspective that was hard to get when surrounded by the ethos of Indy Hall every day.
I have a lot on my mind for 2011 and I’m extremely excited about the growth opportunities that the independent technology and creative community have within their grasp. A remarkable number of thoughtful leaders have emerged in the last 2-3 years, and their visions are beginning to crystallize in bigger ways than I ever imagined for this city.
New communities on the fringes of one another are courting each other in ways that I haven’t seen in the last 4 years. That’s brilliant.
At the same time, I, for one, appreciate Kevin’s distinction between the “tech community” and the “startup community”. The “tech community” is building a foundation for the future. Meanwhile, with a handful of remarkable exceptions, the “startup community” seems to building a future based on a present where everybody complains about what they don’t have yet. Not enough attention. Not enough capital. Not enough talent.
Yawn. Go read a book and call me when you wake up from your dream world of entitlement and neediness.
I’m still looking for more voices in the Philadelphia “startup community” that lead by example of unique Philadelphian success rather than an example of applied gospel from elsewhere. I know I’m not alone in this search. It’s simply not good enough to be a leader in Philadelphia, we need leaders FOR Philadelphia.
The “startup community” in Philadelphia may be growing, but it’s uninteresting, uninspired, and safe.
If you want to challenge me, members of the “Philly Startup Community”, I suggest you challenge yourself, first.
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Socially Acceptable
My reading regiment has been predominantly non-fiction for most of my adult life, which is a bummer and a half. I struggle to read fiction these days, mostly because there’s not enough time in the day to read all of the non-fiction stuff I want to. Also, for all of my love for storytelling, most non-fiction has a hard time roping me in anymore. It’s a shame, really. I’m working on fixing that.
I did, however, decide that I needed a break from my “business and communications” shelf. My dear friend Amy Hoy, the bookworm she is, recommended some science. This is how I stumbled upon Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. I can’t say that I’d expected to find myself immersed in science text, but I’m pretty sure the chances are higher if the text was written by Gilbert.
Inside, he puts together a strong argument for why we’re so bad at making choices that will make us happy in our futures. As a species, we’re driven towards instant gratification and it’s getting worse – Gilbert looks into the reasons why.
For a book whose title suggests that it’d be found in the self help section of Borders, it’s actually full of science. And not just science, neuroscience. Heady shit, pun intended. Luckily for me, it’s mixed with things I’m a little more comfortable with, like behavioral economics and a lick of psychology. But this isn’t a review of the book. It’s a new posit of my own based on some of the things I learned inside.
Evolution
Assuming we weren’t all brought here on a spaceship, I think that I’m comfortable with the theory that we evolved from some ancestral species. There’s supposedly evidence (citation needed) that right around the time that humans began to evolve towards the “intelligent” species we know and love today, making and using tools and organizing into societies, another physiological change happened. Our brain, the most advanced animal brain known on planet earth (though we’re biased), went through a remarkable growth spurt.
It didn’t just get bigger, but it got bigger in all the right places.
The majority of that growth took place in the frontal lobe. Enough so to force the cranium to change shape during that evolutionary phase just to make room for the extra goodies inside.
So correlation isn’t causation, but it’s certainly worth noting that these two events happened in near succession.
So why would the human brain grow in a particular way that may or may not have led to the foundations of society as we know it? Let’s start with the fact that the frontal lobe is responsible for, among other things, managing consequences.
Gilbert narrows this further to a “feature” of the lobe that seems to be unique to humans, and he calls this feature “futuring”. It’s different from “predicting” the future. It’s also different from the instinctive compositing of past over present to influence an action, commonly found in creatures with simpler (or no) brains than ours. An example, loosely borrowed from the book
Rabbit: I smell something. Bear: Oh, look, a rabbit. Rabbit: Last time I smelled that, a bear almost ate me. That sucked. Bear: I’m gonna eat that rabbit. Rabbit: If I don’t avoid that smell, that sucky thing will happen again. Bear: Dinner in 5…4…3 Rabbit: I’m outta here! Bear: 2…hey! Where’d he go!?
That’s not futuring, and doesn’t require an advanced frontal lobe. Rabbits, squirrels, even jellyfish and sea cucumbers (which have NO brain whatsoever) instinctively behave this way.
Futuring is the consideration of ones future. An element of thoughtfulness towards things that “could be”.
Connecting the dots, it makes some sense that when our brains evolved the capability to consider what “could be”, we’d start creating tools and subsequently, society and all of the goodies (and baddies) that come with it.
Futuring
Again, we’re not talking about the ability to predict the future, but instead consider possible outcomes from actions in the present. Further, we think about the different things we could do now to achieve a desired future from a set of possible futures, and the paths between them.
It’s our ability to future that has desiring to achieve anything in the first place, and part of that human uniqueness.
Our handy dandy frontal lobes also manages consequences. It recognizes more than just the positive potential results, but the negative potential results of a decision or action. Tempered with societal norms, it’s this balance that keeps us progressing as a society while still relatively safe from ourselves.
Well, most of the time.
Futuring also comes a whole slew of problems. Anxiety, for one. I’d suggest a theory that the increased level of anxiety in our lives over the last several decades is the result of hyper-connectivity. Rather than blaming the anxiety rate on the volume of information we’re expected to consume information (which surly doesn’t help the situation), I’d point a finger at the contents of the information itself.
Today, we’re more aware of a greater number of potential futures we could be experiencing than ever before. We used to see just a few strata of society:
- people worse off than us
- people like us
- people just a little better off than us
- people WAY better off than us
The gap between 3 and 4 being huge, very few people really considered the possibility of achieving #4. The greatest thing we could strive for was to jump from 2 to 3. And once you were at 3, there would be a new 3. A hierarchy, a ladder, where each rung only really becomes visible once you’d reached the previous one.
This notion is reflected in many generations of hierarchy, in the workplace, in education, in government, and society.
We’ll come back to this ladder in a moment.
An empty room with no chair in it
What happens if you take away the ability to future? In Stumbling on Happiness, Gilbert recounts some studies of interactions with patients who’d had frontal lobotomies performed on them. See, in the 1930′s, some doctors found that their patients who were suffering from extreme forms of mental illness could be “cured” of their psychosis (the symptom, not the cause) by scrambling their frontal lobe with a giant ice pick. Neat, huh?
The weird thing is, these patients, along with other cases of accidental damage to the frontal lobe, sometimes returned to relative normal behavior (rather than the more common vegetable-like state you’d expect). But while they could hold a conversation where their veggie-brethren couldn’t, they’d lost their ability to answer questions about things happening in their future.
Asking someone with this kind of damage to their frontal lobe what they were going to do tomorrow yielded confusion, while they retained the relative ability to recall from their past and be aware of their present. This is an awkward concept, but was cleverly illustrated by Gilbert:
Imagine being put into an empty room, and being told to sit in the chair. Clearly, you’re aware of the walls, ceiling, and floor. Any entrances or exits are clearly marked. You even know what a chair looks like. But there isn’t one – despite the clear instruction to sit in it.
That’s the sort of confusion experienced by someone with the “futuring” part of their frontal lobe damaged.
Before, I mentioned that the two parts of the frontal lobe that kept each other in check were “futuring” and “consequence management”. Let’s talk a little bit about consequences and risk, and get back to our ladder analogy.
Risk-taking
With visibility into society through vast oceans of information at our fingertips, we see that there are actually more rungs in that seemingly massive gap between 3 and 4. It may be possible to jump ahead to one of the hundreds…if not thousands…of rungs between 3 and 4, without needing to take the small steps in between. When industries cross over in interesting ways – like they do at Indy Hall, for instance – we become aware not just of new runs on our own ladders, but of more ladders in parallel that we can jump across.
As necessary, we can move up, down, left, and right, in our ladders of life. It’s like a game of Frogger.
Further jumps require bigger risks (and sometimes, bigger points are scored). But since we’re able to consider the potential future at the next rung, we put ourselves through all sorts of crazy trying to figure out how many rungs to skip.
Realistically, most people don’t climb much at all. Some people climb, slow and steady, putting one hand in front of the other. Some get lucky and realize that they can skip a rung if they stretch just a little bit, but still don’t let go of the ladder to begin with.
And yet some, so eager to arrive at the future they’ve decided that they want, take seemingly ludicrous leaps.
So what happens when the part of your frontal lobe that protects you from yourself - the consequence management part of your brain – isn’t there to balance out the “futuring” part of your frontal lobe? What sad, dangerous lives could these people live, with such a critical part of their brain missing, damaged, or otherwise malformed?
Many have found a socially acceptable label, self-appointed or otherwise.
I wonder how many people would be scrambling to be an entrepreneur if it were viewed as an affliction instead of being glorified?
I’m not an entrepreneur because I don’t want to be one.
I’m just me, because I don’t have any other choice of who I can be.
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