Kerabu

Good Design, Great Design and Carnality

Today I'm thinking about what's good, and what isn't. It came together just now when I watched the Avalanches' Frontier Psychiatrist, which made me go: "Oh, wow, it took 20 years, but someone finally made a music video worth watching. Hmm." 

It takes a good video to confirm the badness of all that went before (and no, those Michael Jackson videos from the 80's weren't "good." They were just pervy-compelling because we could tell there was something really, really wrong brewing there).

Frontier Psychiatrist is a real artwork, because it's a whole thing that exists in visual and aural dimensions--not an illustration of a song. And because it uses sampling to talk about a more primal form of sampling--memory, dreams, the "psyche." It also uses kitschy Americana to sidle up to the sentimental grandeur of a raw, individualist culture that thrives on the romance of the "frontier," much in the manner of Aaron Copeland, or even William Burroughs.

Which brings me to a newer phenomenon than music videos: the web. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no one has yet designed the first great website. No one has yet published the web's Don Quixote, let alone its Naked Lunch. Though the Million Dollar Homepage is pretty cool, it's still more of a prank--and I'd argue that it's not even all that well executied.

I agree with Andy Rutledge that most websites are bad and succeed in spite of their bad design, including Ebay and  Amazon. I also agree with Andy that Craigslist isn't bad, because the design suits the site's purpose so very well. (I'm not sure I agree with him about Google, though--its homepage is pretty close to being a gesture of greatness.)

I think there's a philosophical divide preventing us from transcending our design rules, and that is that we persist in thinking of design and technology as completely separate métiers. Technical innovators tend to be proud of the ugliness of their product (Slashdot, Technorati). While web designers tend to let their tool kits drive design (tables, CSS), "applying" style as if icing a cupcake. There's precious little design-driven innovation out there. And even less purely carnal artistry taking place online (I'm thinking of Van Gogh eating his paints). I think our approach to new media has been way too cool to date. Not nearly enough madness and intuition to achieve great leaps of insight.

I have a hunch that it's about time for things to get more interesting, though. I'm looking forward to reading the forthcoming book from 37 signals, Getting Real (despite a truly cringe-worthy title that makes it sound like something by Anthony Robbins or Suze Orman). In the excerpts on the website, they say things like this:

Getting Real is all about starting from the user interface and customer experience and then building out. Visual design first, programming second. The more traditional process is starting from the abstract (documentation, diagrams, charts, etc.), coding a skeleton app, and then homing in on the real by finishing it up with an interface. We think that’s backwards.

I'm going to take their advice, and get out my watercolor sketchpad next time I want to noodle around with designs for Kerabu. Time to stop worrying about CSS; maybe the fact that I can still draw a fairly realistic horse will lead me closer to the anatomy of good site design.

Stop Making Sense

The best movie review I ever read (?!), of Chronicles of Narnia (haven't seen and probably won't unless on an airplane), is by Tyler Cowan on Marginal Revolution, and reads, in part:

OK, I missed the first thirty minutes and heard the rest in a blurry Mexican dub.  My question remains: What does scarcity mean in a fantasy film?

If you are a Queen with an ice palace and a magic sword, why do you use (hire?) two lumbering polar bears to pull your chariot?  Especially in the temperate climate of New Zealand.  If a lion can be reincarnated, is the rest of the plot all for show or a test?  Just how do resources get allocated?

Perhaps it is faith which is scarce in fantasy stories.  As stocks of faith rise and fall, other complementary resources, including the power of your weapons, are reallocated accordingly by the principles of the imaginary world.

That seems to imply that fantasy films cannot operate under the game-theoretic assumption of "common knowledge."  People must disagree about the true model governing the world, otherwise greater faith yields no relative advantage.

Are fantasy movies what economic models would look more like if we took the absence of common knowledge more seriously?  (Yes there are stylized models of non-common knowledge in the specialized literature but the notion is kept under check; the game-theoretic results we use typically are built on common knowledge assumptions.)  Keep in mind that, above a certain level of subsistence, much of your welfare springs from your inner stories and narratives, not from concrete goods and services.  Your real advantage in life, if you are born sufficiently wealthy, is your ability to tell yourself beneficial stories.

This blog post just rings all the bells for me. I was travelling last week, and am spending the day catching up on my reading. I have several old-fashioned articles (a Gladwell thing in the New Yorker, something from Scientific American, etc.) open in browser windows, but I'm avoiding reading them. Truth is, I much prefer to get my information in these concentrated, poetic, intuitively leapy bursts. Cowen's post is about anything and everything at once, and makes no sense and perfect sense. Reading his thought is as close to actually having the thought as is possible--it's practically a Vulcan mind meld.

I guess that's what is blogging is doing to our communication styles: re-codifying the way we transmit information from brain to brain, to better resemble the way these packets are passed from synapse to synapse within a brain. Discrete, hallucinatory bursts of info that can be infinitely re-ordered, "remembered" and "reassociated" as needed. Finally, the end of that clunky, temporary construct known as "rationality" is in sight (or I should say it's in thinking distance).

Samson and Delilah

When I stumbled on this kittenish picture of Bill Gates via the Globalization Institute I knew it reminded me of someone... Damn, it's Hedy Lamarr! (It isn't often that I can cross-post with my other blog.) 

Ender's Game?

Remember Ender's Game, the sci fi novel in which children are so good at playing military games that their "parent" society tricks them into fighting "real" wars that the kids think are just games until all is revealed in the end?  This item in Business Week called "The Power of Us" contained the following niblet that reminded me of Ender (thanks to Daniel O'Connor of Catallaxis for pointing the article out):

One investment-management firm, Marketocracy Inc., even runs a sort of stock market rotisserie league for 70,000 virtual traders. It skims the cream of the best-performing portfolios to buy and sell real stocks for its $60 million mutual fund.

As Steven Johnson says in Everything Bad is Good for You, the ability to play video games is paying off in new skills and varieties of intelligence.  But then we already knew that play was productive, right--or is that Protestant work ethic still hovering around, ruining all your fun?  I do battle with it daily.

Where did Adventure Capital go?

Some of you who read an earlier version of the business plan knew this project as Adventure Capital.  I felt attached to the name, but the State of Delaware and the Trademark Office felt that others were more attached to it than I.  So I set about looking for something else to call this company, and found what I now think is a far better name for several reasons.  My apologies to Franklin, who is reading this for the second time, but I think I explained the naming process best in an email I wrote to him:

I'm hearing more and more free market ideas creeping into the mainstream these days, even though they're rarely identified as such.  I've noticed that people who think the words "business" and "corporation" are dirty are nonetheless very comfortable with the word "entrepreneur."  They even see it as dashing and romantic, and somehow noble.  Which creates at least a small window of opportunity for communication.  I have learned to choose my words carefully.  When I first thought of this  business, I called it "Adventure Capital," which was a name I  loved, but then thought better of, as "capital" is also one of those words that alerts some people's prejudices (as I suppose mine would be if something had the word communist in the title). I ended up calling it Kerabu, which is a word from babylonian mythology that describes a messenger spirit who serves the gods.  Nobody has a problem with ancient Babylon, right?

Re-reading that email, it sounds like I'm worrying about political correctness.  Okay, I am--but I want to avoid buzzwords not just because they're icky--we have to reach so many people that we can't afford to be the least bit jargony... except for the native jargon that arises from the site itself, the way eBay has created its own lingo.....

It sounds precious now--the idea that we should tiptoe around words like "capital" and "investment," but maybe there are some of these words that are more robust than others ("invest" still has legs, I think), and it bears at least some discussion..... comments?

How to Succeed in Advertising...

We may not have interested parties yet, but we do have several interesting parties, and here is one of them.  I've been reading Ilya Vedrashko's MIT Advertising Lab blog, not because I'm a general reader of advertising blogs, but because it's full of the kinds of ideas I like.  So when he posted his resume (and offered to sell advertising space on it--hah!) I contacted him.  In discussing the possibility of being one of several disparate and far flung people working on the project this summer, he came up with several extremely novel ideas like this one: 

I guess a reasonable thing to do is to put together a list of first-priority tasks that need be done over summer together with time estimates, then have each participant pick what they can do best. Then we can test Kerabu in action :) -

What I particularly like about this idea is that it allows everyone who works on this project to be an entrepreneur (which makes me sort of a general contractor).  It also seems like a good way for us to test drive each other.  By the time the company is ready for full time engagement, we should know who will be an equity partner, who else will be an independent contractor, etc.  Paul Graham, one of my favorite writers, has said that he doesn't believe in employees anymore, only entrepreneurs.  I quite agree.