0.0 Sitrep

Hello paid susbcribers! It’s lunchtime, October 4 2019 and I have no idea what is going on with the political situation in the United States or the United Kingdom because I have not looked at the internet in, oh, a few minutes.

The two things that I’m doing at the moment are pretty much product strategy with the California Child Welfare Digital Service, which this week looks like reviewing giant tomes of procurement documentation. I mean, I have opinions about this (which is good, because I am being paid for them).

The other thing I am doing is co-chairing the Code for America Summit. We’re in our call for proposals phase right now, so if you’re doing anything in the government technnology space, then please consider submitting a proposal for a session or a lightning talk. Especially if you’ve never spoken before (we can help coach you). And it shouldn’t need to be said, but no manels please.

I’m starting to think of these extra episodes as a bit like those +1 discussion episodes that sprung into existence once digital TV became a thing. In the UK, on the launch of digital TV platforms (that launched in SD!) like skydigital, there was suddenly a glut of broadcast bandwidth, to the extent that a bunch of launch channels were just the same channel but timeshifted by one hour. Can you imagine! This was also before PVRs, more or less, so even the idea of having a second chance to watch something because someone was sending the exact same schedule through the ether just one hour later because the space was there was a bit insane. Anyway: it feels like a lot of that bandwidth made room for metaprogramming - shows talking about shows. You’d have your regular channel, like Channel 4 showing Big Brother or whatever late 90s/early 2000s programming and then some enterprising channel director would realize they could hire a non-a-list celeb, throw them in a small studio with a bunch of audience and have them interview and generally chat with another bunch of even less non-a-list celebs for up to an hour. Free programming! Just… telly about telly! (The logical conclusion to all of this, of course, is Gogglebox, another British TV show that is just about other people watching TV and talking about it, and they’re not even not-even not even celebs. There are a few things I miss about the UK, and the TV is one of them. I am inordinately proud, for example, that I was able to surprise my partner with the information that Max Headroom is British.

Wow. That was practically a thing in itself. So, a few little things for this meta-episode:

1.0 Some things

Actually, this more feels like a bit of flag-planting where I talk a little about what I plan to write about next. So, I dunno. Teasers? Previews? Maybe even those inaccurate previews that make you think a film is going to be one thing and then it is the other thing.

So, some things:

I think I’ve got a thing about a sort of tech NIMBYism that I plan to write about a bit more. There’s a good Washington Post story about how some residents of Silicon Valley aren’t too keen on self-driving cars being beta-tested in their neighborhoods, and the angle the Post takes is that this is News, because it’s not just, I guess, rubes or luddites not wanting tech in their neighborhoods, it’s actual CTOs and product managers and scientists and so on who are concerned. Anyway, there’s a whole thing in there that is on my list to get into in more detail, mainly centered around the idea of a parallel NIMBYism which is a sort of tech-product NIMBYism.

Some people might call it shitposting, but I honestly do think (he says, self-defensively) that when I post something like this:

* introduction to design thinking
* mastering design thinking
* dominating design thinking
* design thinking superiority
* design thinking supremacy
* overwhelming full-spectrum design thinking

I mean yes, there is clearly an element of, I don’t know, presenting as being dumb and stupid and being “provocative” (gah, I hate how horrible this sounds), but… I think the point was to mash military metaphors and CRUSH IT approaches to business and management to the fad of How We Think About Designing Things These Days.

The last element, for example, brought about the observation that if you do start thinking about overwhelming full-spectrum design thinking then you get to user stories like As A Next-Generation Warfighter, I Need A Total Air Superiority Platform So That… and it’s only a hop, skip and a jump to the F-35 Lightning II. I leave it to the reader as to the benefits of adopting an “agile” approach to one of the most expensive government technology projects in the history of ever.

I think the general point that I’m exploring with stuff like this is cargo-culting. Just take a word that actually does mean something and then throw other, shitty words at it in ways that you think other people might, and think about whether anything interesting (or horrible, most likely) would result.

I saw a super interesting makes you think thing about TikTok that feels like it has a high chance of getting stuck in my brain somewhere and then exploding out in a few {days, weeks, months, years}. I mean, I had to learn about this from Twitter because obviously I do not TikTok. The gist is that you can’t tell when anything was posted - no timestamps. For anyone who tells you that technology is not a choice and that they’re just neutral tools, please use this as an example because the choice not to timestamp content is a really duh example that affects user behavior. From the linked Wired article:

The lack of time on TikTok helps dictate not only how users behave but also what kinds of content can thrive on the app. Time stamps, for example, are an essential part of reporting news. By not having them, TikTok subtly signals to users that it’s not a platform for world events, it’s merely here to “inspire creativity and bring joy,” a far less controversial mission. [Wired]

Let’s just leave aside who’s behind TikTok and whether people are really that smart, all the time, to have nefarious plans (I mean, it would be nice sometimes to think that they are, otherwise it feels like we’re really screwed), but seriously, product people. PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO THIS: a simple decision like not choosing to include timestamps is a big deal!

I feel like this is related to Candidate for World’s Worst CEO Jack Dorsey’s corporate position on President Trump (which is to say, prone, supine and willing). If, for example, news networks like CNN and so on and decide not to cover the President’s live events because, you know, he’s spouting lies and is most likely harmful, then look again at Twitter’s behavior and decisions.

Oh, right: the other dumb thing was this passive-aggressive take on the expansion of “ops” to other things, as in:

* DevOps
* DesignOps
* ExecOps
* KitchenOps
* HospitalityOps
* HomeOps
* FamilyOps
* VacationOps
* WeddingOps
* DisputingHealthInsuranceExplanationsOfBenefitsOps
* ParentTeacherCouncilOps

One reply was the inevitable #DadOps, and I’m just going to say that felt like kind of proving one of my underlying points which is that all of these Ops are things that… people already do? Like, is there anything in common with all of those things and the people who stereotypically or in most cases perform those jobs? (Apart from, say, ExecOps, which I find somewhat hilarious as an “imagine executives learning how to integrate with operations, how funny, ha ha”)

I mean, you say #dadops and I think: what, you mean like the problematic and continually negotiated division of labor both intentional and unintentional in a heteronormative western family unit? Like, we need a name for “looking after the home”?

I mean, I do it too. The reason why the top bit of the newsletter is called sitrep is because it is short for Situation Report, which is a total gung-ho military thing, but is also something that my partner and I have turned into one of those idiosyncratic in-jokes that we have with each other, where our shared private language is a sign of intimacy. And by that, I mean that when our kids were young and they were breastfeeding and also now, when they are still quite young and bedtime is a chore and we have made the decision as parents to have fairly high-maintenance bedtimes and stay with them, then we text each other a sitrep request which is to say: are you stuck under a sweaty baby; do you require immediate extraction?

But! This is a loaded military term. I supposed we are reclaiming it and repurposing it in our way. But I think about words at the amateur level and the adding of *ops to things feels like how some people think guys will only care about things if they are tactical, or if they use ballistic nylon, or if something is MILSPEC like, I dunno: a baby carrier. Seriously. MILSPEC baby carriers. I mean… okay?

There are words like “go bag” which feel like they have a military bent, and I have to stop and think to myself: well, what’s a word that doesn’t bring those connotations? All this stuff comes with the word or something like a “bug-out kit”.

This is, I suspect, primarily a reflection of the fact that I am perhaps not that widely read.

One last example. I have been in quite a few war rooms. But wait! It’s okay, I have never served in the military. You would expect war rooms to be in the military, but turns out and I have a hunch that there are significantly more non-military war rooms than military war rooms! I may have written before about how in advertising land, you might launch a campaign into a territory and with the advent of digital networks with real-time feedback and statistics, you may find yourself in a war room with your colleagues, and if you’re in the right kind of environment, you might even find yourself holding such a war room in the bunker or Number 10 because you’re somewhere that names conference rooms.

But I have also been in war rooms where, really, nobody is actually at war? There is no enemy. There is no, uh, rival brand to be dominated or crushed. There is no awareness to reign supreme for the next quarter. There is no earned media to be captured, like a sort of flag. There is instead a terrible, horrible situation that has required a number of people to come together under pressure of urgency, and they will now work together in a manner in which they may not have historically worked. But… maybe they’re not at war with something. It certainly feels like they are at war with something closer to an abstract concept like, say, the war on terrorism or the war on drugs or in some cases, the war on unacceptable error rates or the war on unacceptable latency or the war on the misconfigured network switch and I guess everyone is together and against the thing, but perhaps there is a way of thinking about and labeling the experience that also a) encourages camaraderie, b) bonding, c) collective problem solving that does not also bring with it the baggage of concepts like collateral damage. I will probably get called out for some pussy SJW for even thinking out loud such terms as “The Fixing Team” or “Project Make It Work Again” or “Let’s Get Together And Figure This Out” or “Doing Things Together Team”. Obviously some of these are problematic because at the end of the exercise, some members of said teams may question why they have not been working together and, e.g. a) fixing things; b) making things work; c) “getting together”; or d) “doing things together” and seriously evaluate their organizational, management and reporting structure, but actually those things are part of the reason to do those not-war-rooms in the first place, because if they work, people realize there’s actually quite a lot you can get done if you just sit down next to each other.

(Aside: I’ve been reading Eldest a book about Knights lately, and one that popped into my head was Knights of the Weird Ping That Doesn’t Go Away or, further in the fantasy vein, the Fellowship of the I Guess If We Don’t Test Our Backups They’re Not Backups Then).

OK! That was about 40 minutes and a slice and a salad! I do like the pizza here at Sizzle Pie on East Burnside here in Portland, but there are lots of flies in the front seating area and that does not feel very good when they are buzzing around you and your food. Like, a solid B on cheap, varied pizza and salad with good vegan options if you are that way inclined, but, like, definitely something like a D- on the flies.

Have a good weekend! We’re going to check out some pumpkins, which is an American thing I do now, not like in Britain where some people had to make do with carving turnips which, I gather, is a lot harder than carving a pumpkin. Anyway, here is the first pumpkin I ever carved; take a look and let me know if it is sufficiently on brand.

Send me notes!

AND ALSO for this one, feel free to forward this newsletter around to people or even little bits if you liked them because I always like getting new subscribers even though I’m writing this for me and not for you, I am not above having my ego stroked.

Best,

Dan