Geekspeak
Yesterday my friend rlpowell told me on the phone that when he sees my text messages on the Lojban IRC channel or mailing list, he imagines them spoken by a hyperactive chipmunk on meth... and suddenly my utterances cease to baffle and dismay him. He says other geeks need to meet me in order to be able to execute this audio transformation in their minds. Otherwise, I do not come off as breathlessly offering them the opportunity to get in on something I think is amazing and fun and cool. Rather, I come off as an insufferable buffoon stomping his feet and making inscrutable suggestions that do not compute, as if I were making demands on them. I need to interact with hardcore tech geeks more often via phone.
(Is it any wonder that I so often bang the drum of "let's have a meeting" in all my volunteer organizations?)
Previous to meeting me in person, it was just as difficult for rlpowell to stomach me as it is to a few of the other hard-core engineering geeks I know. My ideas are based on social considerations, and he advised me that I need to make that clear if I am not to piss of my more logical friends. I should not assume that they're lazy, don't take ownership, or don't want to get onboard a project they are supposedly interested in. The real explanation is that they literally have no idea what I am talking about, and I need to back up and explain.
He said that when he would hear my schemes, the behavior of any humans-- actual, flawed, fallable human beings-- never entered his mind at first. It's similar to the reason some socially feral engineers are purist zealots about Libertarianism, Communism, Open Source, etc. Pure ideology works perfectly in an abstract world of perfection where the behaviors of populations actually start making sense. A lot of Lojbanists are attracted to an engineered language for precisely such reasons. That includes yours truly. But I understand the mystique of a fantasy world where America adopts the metric system, keyboards employ the Dvorak layout, everybody uses Linux, and humans stop needing to believe in God. It is a Rapture Of The Nerds, a consummation devoutly to be wished, and it is not going to happen. I'm able to simultaneously understand it as a fantasy and still like it. Experience it. Participate in it. As Heinlein would say, "grok it". That intersection is the sweet spot for promoting anything.
The embarrassing thing about Marketing is that it is grabbing a mob by the lowest common denominator of its lizard-like hindbrain and shaking it until what you want falls out. In our case, the outcome of using a hive mind of distributed wetware computation on ten million undiscriminating internet users is to get the attention of a few discriminating internet users. To call that counter-intuitive is an understatement, but it works. Art is a magical practice which works on a logic all its own, consisting of doing things that would otherwise be stupid.
(Is it any wonder that I so often bang the drum of "let's have a meeting" in all my volunteer organizations?)
Previous to meeting me in person, it was just as difficult for rlpowell to stomach me as it is to a few of the other hard-core engineering geeks I know. My ideas are based on social considerations, and he advised me that I need to make that clear if I am not to piss of my more logical friends. I should not assume that they're lazy, don't take ownership, or don't want to get onboard a project they are supposedly interested in. The real explanation is that they literally have no idea what I am talking about, and I need to back up and explain.
He said that when he would hear my schemes, the behavior of any humans-- actual, flawed, fallable human beings-- never entered his mind at first. It's similar to the reason some socially feral engineers are purist zealots about Libertarianism, Communism, Open Source, etc. Pure ideology works perfectly in an abstract world of perfection where the behaviors of populations actually start making sense. A lot of Lojbanists are attracted to an engineered language for precisely such reasons. That includes yours truly. But I understand the mystique of a fantasy world where America adopts the metric system, keyboards employ the Dvorak layout, everybody uses Linux, and humans stop needing to believe in God. It is a Rapture Of The Nerds, a consummation devoutly to be wished, and it is not going to happen. I'm able to simultaneously understand it as a fantasy and still like it. Experience it. Participate in it. As Heinlein would say, "grok it". That intersection is the sweet spot for promoting anything.
The embarrassing thing about Marketing is that it is grabbing a mob by the lowest common denominator of its lizard-like hindbrain and shaking it until what you want falls out. In our case, the outcome of using a hive mind of distributed wetware computation on ten million undiscriminating internet users is to get the attention of a few discriminating internet users. To call that counter-intuitive is an understatement, but it works. Art is a magical practice which works on a logic all its own, consisting of doing things that would otherwise be stupid.