This flashback at Lapham’s Quarterly makes me realize two things: writers often don’t have much to say about writing and I will never understand how people can get anything out of presentations that really don’t say anything. Is it just the brand name? Really? Vonnegut says it and somehow it’s profound?

But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

I only tweet occasionally. Not as many people follow me on Twitter as read this blog. I’m okay with that. And, for the record, I only check my Facebook page once every two weeks. I am completely not okay with the fact that Facebook not only makes it impossible for me to get back out anything I put in, but that they are using whatever I put in to sell me stuff. Others are okay with that, but the promise of the web, to me, was that it would not only be a read-write experience but that we would own our own writing. Facebook is easy and convenient, but it’s not democratic.

But back to Twitter. There’s a guy who tweets things his dad says. Apparently he got a deal to write a pilot for television. (I’m not making that up: you’ll have to look it up on TechCrunch, though — I already closed the page.) This is kind of cool. It means people can experiment with content and it might just end up paying the bills. For the record, his dad, be he fictional or real, says mostly expletive-laden things that occasionally make you smile. Only one made me laugh out loud:

“No, I’m not a pessimist. At some point the world shits on everybody. Pretending it ain’t shit makes you an idiot, not an optimist.”

While I am writing about new forms of creativity, I would also like to point out this terrific profile of UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor David Cope. Cope was the inventor of Emmy, Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI, or “Emmy”), which was well received by some but made others uncomfortable with the questions it raised about human creativity — the short answer for me is that all the formulas Cope entered into Emmy were clearly based on work done by humans, but I don’t know entirely how Emmy works. Cope is about to release a successor to Emmy, known as Emily Howell. Two compositions by Emily are included in the article. They make for an interesting listen.

Emily Howell Sample Composition

While I was still reeling from the idea of content farms, I was heartened to come across another neologism that I didn’t know about but, in fact, was heartened to learn: layer tennis. Layer tennis occurs when two graphic artists square off in Photoshop battle to see who can trump the other in a series of transformations of a design initiated by one of them but finished by the other designer. Luckily, for me, my introduction to layer tennis came in the form of a delightful narration of a recent match between Nicholas Felton and Khoi Vinh. Vinh recaptures the heat of the moment well.

As I noted previously in observing Chris Anderson’s recent cover article for Wired magazine, the garage as shop is on the rise:

We wanted to keep that garage-atmosphere of creativity that we cherished as students. School is one of only places where one can freely experiment, discover and even fail with little consequence. When you’re out in the real world, you have to make a living and it becomes that much harder to work on projects that are truly meaningful to you. In an academic environment full of creative freedom, students are often able to experiment to their hearts’ content. Because of that, you see games that are being crafted from the heart and for a desire to push boundaries as opposed to what a marketing venn-diagram dictates. It offers a chance to play with other things besides Robots and Ninjas. Publishers are jumping at this opportunity for new IP. I think this is a trend that will only continue. (Paul Bellezza, cofounder of developer The Odd Gentleman, talking to Andrew Webster of Ars Technica. Link).

I am delighted, and fascinated, by the emergence in the last few years of interest in the mechanical arts, for lack of a better description. Mechanics, machinists, and metal workers of various kinds (welders and fabricators among many others) suddenly find themselves in the spotlight. While only a few people are familiar with Douglas Harper’s classic study of a one-man agricultural equipment repair and fabrication shop, Local Knowledge, most will have seen Richard Sennett’s somewhat overly-romanticized The Craftsman as well as Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft.

These books are, of course, joined by shows like the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs and the Travel Channels Made in America (which is no longer in production). If you throw into the bargain the assembly-line porn that is Science Channel’s How It’s Made, which regularly re-runs on the History Channel I believe, and the Food Network’s Unwrapped, then what seems to have been revealed is huge thirst in America for, as our president put it in his inaugural address, “the makers of things.”

And, it seems, those makers seems to be folks with dirt underneath their fingernails.

It should come as no surprise, then, that in their discussion of “the new industrial revolution” that Wired chose for their cover the image of a wrench turning a nut … powered by a greasy hand, which is exposed to the world by the presence of a rolled-up shirt sleeve.

One of the dominant figures for “let’s get to work” is rolling up one’s sleeve. The arm and the hand go away, but the wrench remains in this Shell ad for “ideas into action”:

The abstracted wrench here transforms into a pencil, both emphasizing the “work of creativity,” of idea generation, and also the necessity of finding “ideas that work.”¹

There is also, I would argue, a subtle reinforcing of the leveling of the playing field between hand-work and idea-work. In fact, a recent article in the Harvard Business Review makes precisely that argument. In “Restoring American Competitiveness”, Gary Pisano and Willy Shih argue that the rush to commoditize manufacturing — resulting in outsourcing — of contemporary corporations has resulted in a breaking of the link between the folks in research and development on the one hand and the folks on the shop floor actually making the products.² What is lost is the productive conversation, the feedback loop, between those two groups, and that means ideas are lost. There suggestion is that the U.S. must encourage the rebuilding of an “industrial commons.” (Here’s a link to the article but be forewarned that it’s only to a summary page and that the download requires payment.)

I have never heard of “cultural and activity research” until a CFP (call for papers) came across the Digital Humanities mailing list. But here’s a CFP for the Nordic Conference on Activity Theory and the Forth Finnish Conference on Cultural and Activity Researc which describes itself as:

The conference is dedicated to examining human creative activities. The conference theme is “Perspectives on social creativity, designing and activity”. We conceive of design as a field of knowledge and activity concerned with the creation of artifacts. Creative activities operate with diverse modes of knowing and representations. Creativity is a social quality that involves communication and community formation. Creative activities and design are needed when humans transform their circumstances by developing new technologies and institutions. Creation of the new relies on cultural mediation and historically accumulated resources. Activity theory and socio-cultural approaches offer fresh perspectives on these themes. The conference aims at bringing together diverse points of view and disciplinary orientations to discuss social creativity, design and activity.

It looks great, but the conference comes at the end of this academic year, which is also close to the end of the university’s fiscal year. And, as many know, there just isn’t that much money to begin with. Let along enough to help subsidize a flight to Helsinki and a $350 (200€) registration fee.

Sigh. It looks amazing.

Fake Steve Jobs is a bit off my usual path, but thanks to one of those odd trails of links, I ended up at Dan Lyons’ ventriloquist act. FSJ is good for poking fun at Steve, but he is also good at poking fun at the larger tech industry. In his most recent post, he does an amazing job of not only pillorying AT&T for complaining about, of all things, pesky users who actually want to use their phones for crazy things like making phone calls and the 3G network for wacky things like moving data around, but also of pillorying corporate America in general which really does seem to have fallen into something of a malaise in the MBA era. (The re-thinking of the MBA by no less than its home, the Harvard Business School, is something for another time.)

Here’s the best two paragraphs from his pretend dialogue with AT&T:

While I’m ranting, let me ask you something, Randall. At the risk of sounding like Glenn Beck Jr. — what the fuck has gone wrong with our country? Used to be, we were innovators. We were leaders. We were builders. We were engineers. We were the best and brightest. We were the kind of guys who, if they were running the biggest mobile network in the U.S., would say it’s not enough to be the biggest, we also want to be the best, and once they got to be the best, they’d say, How can we get even better? What can we do to be the best in the whole fucking world? What can we do that would blow people’s fucking minds? They wouldn’t have sat around wondering about ways to fuck over people who loved their product. But then something happened. Guys like you took over the phone company and all you cared about was milking profit and paying off assholes in Congress to fuck over anyone who came along with a better idea, because even though it might be great for consumers it would mean you and your lazy pals would have to get off your asses and start working again in order to keep up.

And not just you. Look at Big Three automakers. Same deal. Lazy, fat, slow, stupid, from the top to the bottom — everyone focused on just getting what they can in the short run and who cares what kind of piece of shit product we’re putting out. Then somehow along the way the evil motherfuckers on Wall Street got involved and became everyone’s enabler, devoting all their energy and brainpower to breaking things up and parceling them out and selling them off in pieces and then putting them back together again, and it was all about taking all this great shit that our predecessors had built and “unlocking value” which really meant finding ways to leech out whatever bit of money they could get in the short run and let the future be damned. It was all just one big swindle, and the only kind of engineering that matters anymore is financial engineering.

Tell it, Fake Steve Jobs. Tell it.

Derek Powazak has a nice post about SEO optimization: don’t do it. Or, as he details, do it the way you would have done good content in the first place and don’t spend time, nor money, trying to “optimize” for various search engines (e.g., the mighty Google, which shifts and tweaks its algorithms weekly anyway). Powazek goes on to argue that SEO is, in fact, poisoning the web.

It goes without saying that this applies a broad range of industries, disciplines, vocations and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there YAP (yet another post) that really is some version of do what you love because you love it — okay, the echoes of Joseph Campbell’s “follow your bliss” make my head hurt — which is really becoming something of a Web 2.0 mantra. Don’t get me wrong, I like it … I even believe it. Yikes!

As I begin seriously to write The Makers of Things, I am already thinking about where I am next headed. Part of me is interested in trying to think about the nature of creativity in the Cajun-Creole music scene; another part of me is interested in attempting something like an ethnography of a coding project. Towards that end, I am starting to keep a list of books I’d like to read:

• Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Addison-Wesly 1995).
• Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age (O’Reilly, 2004).
• Andy Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master (Pragmatic Programmers).
• Scott Rosenberg, Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software (Three Rivers Press, 2008).
• Peter Seibel’s Coders at Work (Apress, 2009).
• And of course Joel Spolsky’s books.