Writing Ideas (I)

I would like to let my readers know that I will shortly be posting in a new format, where I’ll be riffing off of articles, essays and stories that I’ve read and that I think can lead to interesting new forms of writing when mildly modified. These could be beginnings of short stories or novels, or entire news articles. I might severely condense them in length, or merely change some words here and there. I might have the original available online or not. I rather think it will be more fun if the original is not online, and for the full enjoyment of what I’ve written, you will need to purchase the original. That way, my work can also be a spur for the sales of some other writer’s work. This will increase my karma and ensure me a better life in Heaven or in my next incarnation on this planet.

My endeavor, or idea, might be better understood with the aid of an example. Suppose we take the famous short story that begins thus:

“It was a dark and stormy night. The trees howled wildly with the force of a chained devil. Rain poured heavily down from the indignant heavens, battering whatever it hit — the craggy mountain side, the tops of thatched barns, and the hides of unfortunate creatures that had not found shelter from it — with merciless repetition. Through this night, we can see a single car make its dreary way up the hillside road to a small farm house that stood right at the top of a knoll.”

When I come upon this piece of writing, I might think, let us say, that it lacks a certain sense of absurdity and throw it in there to see what might happen. Imagine taking a favorite cocktail of yours and changing the Syrah for some Tempranillo, or the tequila for some cachaça, or the Irish whiskey for some bourbon. The paragraph then becomes something like this:

“The night was dark and stormy, for it had just been in a big fight with the day and it really had a hard time being in the sun. The trees howled wildly with the force of a chained devil. The rain came down heavily. The heavens were indignant — they had heard what the Day had said about the Night. Caught in the cross fire were the craggy mountain side, the tops of thatched barns, and the hides of unfortunate creatures that had not run fast enough to find shelter from the wrath of the skies. Oblivious of this battle between these Titans, a single car made its dreary way up the hillside road to a small farm house that stood right at the top of a knoll. We saw it approach, and we knew things were going to get far worse.”

You see? The same basic ingredient, mixed around a little, give us an altogether new experience. This is how everything else works in the world of aesthetics — cuisine, music, architecture, art. It’s about time someone brought this process to the boring world of literature, where every one has to start working on something entirely new or entirely derivative, neither of which approaches is fun at all.

A Thought on the Poor State of Software Technology

I just realized that computer operating systems haven’t gotten to the point, where I can type in, “Run the program that reads PDF files,” and the computer runs the version of Adobe Acrobat/Reader that is installed on it.

In the next stage of evolution, even if no such reader is installed, the computer will automatically say something like, “You need to install a program called Adobe Acrobat/Reader,” and then tell me how to do it.

When this happens, I will consider operating systems to have reached version 1.0, from the point of view of usability.

On The Question, What is Lint?

When you run your finger along the top of your entertainment center, you will find it coated by a thin, grey film of indeterminate matter. This will be part dust and part fluff and part who know what else, and will rise behind your moving finger in a plume that settles back hurriedly at a new place on the shelf, like a pack of vultures run out by jackals from the carcass they were feeding on, taking a quick hop away to a safe distance from where they wait their chance to re-alight on their dinner. You have just encountered lint.

If you stop to contemplate what just happened, instead of rushing away to the rest of your day or bringing a wipe with a mixture of shame, guilt and good intentions to thoroughly clean out your entertainment center, you will be surprised by a rich matrix of questions. Do we even know what lint is, to begin with? It defies a structural definition, for it is too small or too fragile for us figure it out by pulling it apart

Can it be defined functionally? No, because we have no idea what lint does, in the general context. It pretty much appears out of nowhere mysteriously, and then just sits there. It is hard to remove, even though it appears very slight, and delicate. It holds on with the tenacity of a leech.

Is lint defined via reduction ad absurdum? Is it what everything else is not? If it isn’t a crumb or a dead bug part or dandruff that sticks to our coats and to our cushion covers and to our drapes, then perhaps we know that it is lint. I think we shouldn’t really concern ourselves with understanding what lint is, but just on what to do once it has been discovered, much like pornography and beauty. Our inability to define these things precisely hasn’t impaired us from confronting them in our world, and ruling about their rightful place. Lint asks from us the same mode that we employ with beauty, say, or pornography.

Lint definitely occurs in some places more than others. Preliminarily, we might jump to a conclusion that it prefers the grainy or rough or furry surfaces and textures, like the back of a cat or the outside of a cupcake. Lint, however, is more ubiquitous, and altogether more versatile than that. Steel surfaces that gleam with the shiny seduction of modern technology bear lint on them. Lint will sit with nonchalance on the most forbiddingly impenetrable of Teflon surfaces, where all other substances slink away ashamedly. Lint is, depending on your point of view, incalculably friendly or irremediably optimistic about its chances. It is the ultimate nomad, the consummate hustler, frequenting every nook and corner of the hospitable universe.

Lint marks the presence of humanity, and of intelligent life. When the roving eyes and ears of astronomy locate lint surviving in some other part of this harsh and inhospitable universe, we will know that there lies a specie that has invented bureaucracy and marketing spin. Lint is the detritus of thought, manifesting consciousness and self-referential power. I am because I can think about myself, and lint announces this understanding of the ontological link between Essence and Existence. It is our cry to the universe that we have found our place in it. Like celebratory confetti, it is strewn all over the pathways of our civilizational parades.

Where there is confetti, inevitably there is the conundrum of cleanliness: who’s going to pick it all up, and how? The removal of lint is as much a mystery as its existence. We have catalogued and circumscribed more the mechanics and rituals of extinguishing and absenting ourselves than we have the science of lint removal. Never has there been a greater endeavor for which so many have been so ill-equipped. When we are visited by alien life, they will laugh not so much at our lack of inter-stellar transportation as at how utterly risible our lint removers are.

As lint spreads with inchoate insidiousness, we stand in a comically defensive posture, gripping our lint removers, picturing in our fertile imaginations a Saladin’s sword or one emblazoned with the word “Excelsior.” In fact, we look like nothing more than a baby shaking its rattle petulantly. Our lint removers are no more than pacifiers, only slightly more effective than our thumbs are in removing lint and immeasurably less useful to boot, for the sticky substance on it won’t even let us suck on it.

The only significant advance we have made in tracking the spread of lint is in recognizing that the washing machine exerts on lint the same power that it has on socks and underpants. The grasping, muddling, abilities of the washing machine stupefy, of course, the human desire for control and coordinated hosiery, but even more astonishing is how the washing machine commands vast armies of lint into flinging themselves suicidally against the lint filter, coagulating into a tightly knit and harmless mass that we can easily scrape away and dispose of. Each piece of lint, by losing its individual identity and independence, also surrenders its maddening power to float perennially beyond our reach. There is mass hysteria. As if in a cult, each particle of lint attempts deliverance into whatever it is that lies beyond the lint filte; instead it lands, balled up, in the trash can, on its way to the landfills and the incinerators.

Of course, we cannot know if lint has indeed been conquered. Perhaps it lies dormant inside the lint ball, mutated into a more powerful form. It anticipates an escape from the landfill, along with lint from other such balls, to terrorize us in greater numbers. Perhaps the lint we experience today is merely recreated through many generations of lint, tracing a lineage all the way back to medieval lint that heads falling from the guillotine blew into the air; further back, to the ancient lint that, from the togas of Ceasar’s killers, watched his death and the fall of Rome; even further back, to the proto-lint that coated the clubs and stone-cutting tools of our not-yet-human ancestors. There might even have been lint gods in those deluded times, when something so powerful was worshipped in fear, rather than mercilessly, even if fruitlessly, pursued by the pincers and vortexes of ever-improving technology.

Such a pervasive and many-layered presence leaves behind deep impressions that haunt their hosts as specters. The lint has left, but in its wake, in spite of the exhaustion that cleaning it up has entailed, we engage in fierce teleogical debates and heated recriminations. We ask, Why was the lint there in the first place, and charge, Was it someone’s fault? Some insist that lint is battled with eternal vigil and in this lint-infested world, we should all walk as if we had brooms sticking out behinds. Others counsel restraint, and say we only take action when the lint threatens to obscure the very colors and textures of your shelves and table tops and cakes into the cracks in the grout.

Indeed, so pervasive is this effect that even the lint filter is not spared. This one place we might imagine, where lint lies humbled, there would be cause for rejoicing and that mutual love that springs amongst us when we see the end of a mutual foe. Instead, the filter is can be sometimes the site of the greatest battles. When a new load of laundry is to be dried, the lint filter is never satisfyingly clean. Should someone have done it right after they used the machine? Or can we pay it forward, and clean someone else’s lint before one’s own round, knowing that the reward for touching someone else’s lint, cleansed though it may be, is to be allowed to shave a few moments off when picking up one’s own laundry on the way to work, to pick up the kids or a hot date?

Lint has touched us and left us wondering, fuming, questioning and negotiating, and in this might lie its final redemption, that by remaining so elusive and evanescent, it keeps out thirst for answers, and thereby us, alive.

Shooting Each Other In The Trenches

When you are fighting big enemies, with big guns, you can’t expect not to have friendly fire. And sometimes all of your privates and officers might end up talking more about how big their guns are, and enjoying shooting them blindly in the dark more than actually locating and capturing key positions.

Why does this happen? Doesn’t everyone know that the point is to win the war against an enemy eager to fortify their defenses, and destroy your offenses? Of course they do. When the details of a war are going wrong, I cannot bring myself to blame the foot soldiers, the people on the ground. They know what their goals are, and I think any analysis will show they are truly doing their best to get there.

So can we blame the planners? The temptation is strong, but to do so would violate the principle of the continuum, which states, roughly, that if at each step on the way, things don’t get worse, you can’t pretend that things at one end are much worse than at the other. The funny thing of course is that when you compare the two ends of the War Machine continuum, the principle seems not to apply but even if it doesn’t, it does give us reason to stop and reconsider if indeed the problem with a slowly-fought war necessarily is in the utter incompetence of its top people.

I doubt you’ve figured out that all of the words in the first two paragraphs of this post are in fact completely metaphorical — I am not talking of a real military war, or of any actual leaders, generals and statespeople. This isn’t yet another anti-war post; I am really not interested in pronouncing opinions on something so universal, current and “real-world.” That would be quite against the theme of my blog writing.

No, this post is about a dinner I had with members of my “team” at Yahoo. I knew, even as I sat at an all-expenses paid table at a mid-range restaurant in the Valley, that a blog post was imminent, but it took me a while to figure out exactly what was bothering me about the event and the conversation that flowed around me. I considered each of the attendees to pick my prime victim — who would be the best lampooned, or most inspiring of sardonic but insightful commentary? Funnily, after enough wine and moyenne cuisine, none of the usual digs seemed fair, or interesting enough.

But after a few days of thinking, it occurred to me that what was really conspicuous by its striking absence was the User. In all of our discussions, about all the things that the groups at Yahoo that were represented at the dinner, and those were some well-known groups at that, would be building, no one ever asked, “What do our customers want?” I don’t blame any of the folks at the table, because I don’t think that is on the minds of most Internet companies right now, except the very few that are really known for their good user experience. (No, I am not going to name any names. That’s a discussion I don’t want to have. Let’s just agree that the number is small compared to how many Internet companies there are out there.)

No, honestly, who has time to think about the User any more? Most Valley companies are run by a significant numbers of engineers, and engineers would much rather make the User a statistic to be matched against a scale, instead of trying to come up with a comprehensive and usable model of what it means to be a User, a model that goes beyond numbers, to articulating the User’s needs via words. Of course, this isn’t a model in the strict sense that engineers and mathematicians like to think of it, but it is a model all the same because it describes the User and their problems in a way that allows the Engineer to solve the User’s problems.

I don’t think there’s a left-right brain divide here that makes this task impossible. I would suggest for example that Engineers think about the object hierarchy implicit in their products from a user’s point of view, and think about their front-end and product design from the perspective of this hierarchy. Even as small a step as considering users as objects with properties can go a long way in cleaner design — a user can be logged-in or not, can have a history with the site or not, and so on. Each of these properties could impact the view of the products in a different way. Each property can be assigned a weight and ranked — the most important property, or combination of properties, can be picked to decide the experience the user has of the product.

This view of the User isn’t completely unquantifiable. There’s no marketing speak, and new-age talk here of user happiness, and user satisfaction, and user love and user actualization. For a large number of interactions, people engage in quasi-economic transactions, where aspects of their identity affect their expectations of the world around in them, in fairly determinstic ways. An engineer’s mind can go a long way in modeling these aspects and delivering a pleasing experience, without the help of a lot of visual design and usability studies.

Philosophy By Example

All the philosophers have been sedentary men. I don’t mean by this that women didn’t make philosophers, but that the men that did (and that’s indisputably most of them) didn’t derive joy from shooting hoops, throwing discs and kicking butt. The world would have been a different place if the serious profession of philosophy, rather than the mere reaction of philosophizing through an excess of volubility, had been entrusted entirely to the athletic man, the man who can, in the ordinary course of things, spend hours simply flexing his arm muscles and admiring the sweat glistening on it. The Arnold Schwarzeneggers of this world should be writing about the meaning of existence. Instead, the history of the serious philosophical endeavor is littered with badly taken photographs of people with bad hair and a marked indifference to the effect their appearance has on their fellow men. These are people whose faces are so unremarkable that not even in this era of assembly-line photo-fantasy is any one willing to touch their bad skin up. Noam Chomsky might have a cult following and there might be minor government functionaries all around world might be losing sleep over his analyses of the deterioriation of democratic freedoms and the open state, but no one has for a moment been inspired to figure out the right lighting, angle and computer software that would put him on the cover of GQ magazine.

I am not accusing the fashion idol, the celebrity, the good looker, of leading a shallow life. I raise my hat to Bono’s attempt to eradicate poverty. I applaud all the lovely women who took their clothes off in public to protest the torture of animals. I rejoiced that Tom Cruise took as his fair wife the extremely cute Katie Holmes, announcing this to the world from the Oracular temple of the modern world, Oprah’s talk show couch — all this so that our attention could be drawn for a fraction longer onto the unusual metaphysical constructs of the Scientological world than would otherwise have been the case. Through their actions and words, these people bring the exciting world of moral contemplation into our worlds, at the same time gladdening our senses with their superbly attractive bodies. It is as if their ceaseless attention to their hotness is in itself a philosophical question — can the distracted mind engage in reaching out to the frightening uncertainties of the epistemological unknown?

Yet, I will peevishly point my finger at these people and complain that there is more they can do. We need them to produce the tomes, the speeches, the schools of thought, that we can enshrine and immortalize — in our books, in our philosophy lessons, in our libraries, and in the pedantry of the ages to come. If our stars could but take time off from just one charity fundraiser, one trip to Somalia, one photo opportunity with the Pope, and instead sit down with a ghost writer to pen their thoughts, however disjointed and cliché ridden, on the meaning of life, and our moral responsibilities, our world and the history that humanity many generations hence will see, will have changed immeasurably and perhaps for the better.

No longer will philosophy be the domain of thinkers, because the men of action will have taken it over. Philosophy will be dynamic, full of calls to bravery and risks and plunges into the unknown, rather than chin-stroking ruminations engaged in at the safe distance of the guard-railed cliff top, while the unknown is merely the yawning but innocuous abyss below. There will be no irony, because few will have time to create it as they rush into adrenalin powered assaults on reality. Even though this new breed of philosophers will hacking out new realities and possibilities with their industry, daredevilry and passionate sentimentality, they will barely pause to fruitlessly reflect on what reality itself might be.

The old philosophers will be retired, though they will be allowed to continue to spout their cross-referential screeds, in between their desk jobs as editors of literary blogs, and game show hosts.

Deconstructing Vapidity

I need to stop commenting on articles in TIME magazine, because for one, it’s too easy to poke fun at the drivel that passes for journalism at this once-venerable magazine, and secondly, I get too stressed out every time I see a piece of abominable writing or journalism pass me by. I confess it’s hard to resist coming back to TIME, however, or Newsweek or any other news source driven by commercial pressures to create tabloid-like titillation out of every news item, or essay concept. I really should stick to reading Dostoyevsky.

To return to our subject at hand, though: one recent article that amazes me for the sheer vapidity of its content was something called “The Diana Effect,” by Michael Elliott. Mr. Elliott’s purported aim is to examine if the “age of emotion” has come to an end, in Britain. He asks this question from his vantage point as TIME magazine’s International Editor, and one assumes this has given him the privilege of resources that are adequate to tackle such a weighty issue.

One assumes completely wrong, or at least, from his article, we have to conclude that Mr. Elliott was not able to command much of these resources. It might be that in anticipating the end of an emotional age, Mr. Elliott was himself so overcome with emotion, that his rational faculties temporarily went into a tizzy.

Here’s how the argument is structured, boiled down to about a dozen sentences (and I kid you not): “When Diana died, everyone cried a lot. No, no, we in the media didn’t cook this phenomenon up, it was real, man, just too real. This is because we British became “modern,” and shed our stiff Protestant path (though even in the middle of that supposedly reserved past, we weren’t past getting it on in many ways, but just stick with me here, ok?) And so, we Brits, and soon the Americans too, in a display of the tail wagging the dog, learnt the virtue of being “emotional,” and everyone wondered, wow, how come we never cried and hugged before. But now it’s all over. No, really, I tell you it is. You just believed me when I said made another off-the-cuff assertion about humanity, or at least about British culture and civilization, so why can’t you do it a second time? Come on, you have that much resilience — be like Gordon Brown, Mitt Romney and that woman, what’s her name, Clinton’s wife, who are all obviously incapable of crying convincingly on TV, and must therefore have large reserves of the doggone-it strain of determination. You have to, the stock markets are falling.”

I could write an article like this too, hell, we all can. Here’s an example of how’s it to be done. Let’s pick our favorite topic, say, cooking, and let’s postulate that Alice Water’s refusal to carry tap water is indicative of some hitherto-unknown but significant reversal of global cultural trends. Going back in time, let’s pick the opening of Planet Hollywood in Los Angeles by Arnold Schwarzenegger as emblematic of a different age, when restaurants reveled in excess. Throw in a historical reference to the culture of eating out and we are done — voila!

“A bottle of water, full of minerally goodness, former badge of honor of athletes and good health, is now the official Public Enemy No. 1. The High Goddess of the Arugula Set, Alice Waters herself, has pronounced the death knell for the seemingly innocuous plastic container, now maligned, in spite of its eminent recyclability, as a ravaging demon with a carbon footprint that has the claw marks of Godzilla.

This is not how it was. Restaurants in our land have not been holier-than-thou shrines of austerity, but on the contrary, celebratory temples to gay bacchanalia. Witness the grand opening of Planet Hollywood a bare decade ago, a spectacular event underscored by its glamorous owners, and a brilliant architect, who completed the picture perfectly, if regrettably, by jumping to death. This is how the Greeks would have had it, eating places resplendent with the passions of marbled Classical art. The Romans knew what was good eating too, as did Rabelais and Shakespeare — “Eat heartily,” said the Bard, “For what the heart pines for, the guts shall have at.”

Granted, even in our excessive past, there have been preachers of parsimony, proto-anorexics that would peck at parsley, and look disdainfully on the gourmands of the ages. But the zeitgeist was one of satiation — global treaties were signed over sumptuous banquets and from F.D.R. down, our Presidents have celebrated the Rockwellian Freedom From Want.

I wonder, though, if this age of corpulism isn’t coming to an end. As some economies face the edge of a dizzying downturn, and the head-turning upswings in others leave behind tell-tale signs of climate and trade imbalances with geopolitical fallouts deadlier than an Ebola outbreak’s, the virtues of small things is receiving new attention. So small, that even the pocketable bottle of water is too big — and we dream of small cars, stamp-sized batteries, all-in-one electronic devices to replace our laptops, PDAs, desktops, phones and stereo system in one large bite of the Apple and trips no further than our roof tops to fill our grocery baskets. Size has always mattered, and it will matter still in the future, except that the journey, as in the outer reach of the most esoteric physics, is to the smallest dimension possible.”

Low Sugar Epidemic Among The Precious Set

Entertainment journalism is going ga-ga over the High School Musical movie. I was caught completely unaware — here I thought I had my ear to the railroad of popular culture, ready to hear the rumble of every passing fad, but I was wrong. It wasn’t until gentlemen like James Poniezowik and Joel Stein, respectably balding thirty- or forty-something year old celebrities at TIME Magazine, told me that teeny boppers were raging about this big screen TV show sequel, that I became cognizant of a new movement in the teenage tectonic plate — kids don’t like being bad any more!

What got me all interested about writing this post, was how Stein led off his article: “Past teen idols ,” he wistfully declared, “often got famous for delivering slightly gritty entertainment: a hip swivel, a risqué rock song, having sex on a sinking ship.” But Efron, and HSM, do none of these — presumably, poor Mr. Stein had been looking forward to some under-age nipple slips, or a tastefully produced teen titty romp and instead, all he, and Mr Poniewozik, who must have been sitting in an adjacent cubicle when writing his review of the movie, got was a “(chaste) feeling,” creme brulee and plots that were “asexual and pre-adolescent,” which must have seemed extremely out-of-character and hard to believe, given that the musical was all about high school kids, whose uncontrollable hormones and sex drives are now legion in our culture. I get the suspicion that if this script were submitted in a writing group/workshop, of which Mr. Poniewozik was a member, he would have marked it as being the kind of fabrication that holds no place in the world of serious writing because none of its characters behave like they should, i.e. in a way that offers the typical past-sexual-peak writing group member a chance at incidental titillation. No wonder James Frey had to sex up his life the way he did (about which more some other time).

I wonder why those writing about a teenage movie, none of them teenagers themselves, should create a “phenomenon” where there isn’t any. It’s not altogether surprising that someone made a musical — witness the return of the form ever since the days of Moulin Rouge and Chicago. And any one who’s been watching even reasonably risque young adult shows like Malcolm In The Middle or That 70’s Show, or of course the steady diet of moralizing, wholesome animation shows coming from Pixar and the like, should know that there’s a high tolerance for candy and over-saturated hues among American youth and even the vast majority of their parents.

I am sure there will always be an edge and a fringe to satisfy some journalists’ prurient interests, so that our scribes always have a chance to write about sex and violence, but I always say, you can’t make an edge without a good bit of middle.

Not porn at all, why do you ask?

So when I realized the other day that posts on WordPress get a lot of attention based on the tags that are applied, I got as excited as a baby that has just discovered its feet. I tagged a post, “Politics,” meaning something more like “Games People Play,” rather than something like “Systems Governing Societies,” but that was enough to get me more views in a day than ever before. I also noticed that some tags are used by WordPress to populate their front page News Departments section. This is a rather clever product trick, because the posts are rarely what would qualify as “News” and yet the design clearly leads you to believe that they are. It’s a neat way to make the front page look more interesting than it is, and also to transfer some link love to loyal WP members. Win-win all around, except for some users who click through and realize that they aren’t reading any news. Or perhaps the loser also is the idea of news, because now a list of jobs available at YouTube ends up under “Business,” rather than anything interesting about failing economies or crashing stock indexes, items presumably no longer very newsworthy.

Ok, I’ll stop griping about inaccurate product lead-ons, because I have to confess that  this entire post is a lead-on in all kinds of ways, and fails rather remarkably to fulfil the promise it makes, which is that it has something to do with the topic of ‘porn.’ The reason I’ve tagged this post as ‘porn,’ and also the reason I’m liberally sprinkling it with the word ‘porn,’ is that I’m excited about an experiment in finding out what tags people click on. Apart from ‘politics,’ a post tagged ‘management’ also got a lot of attention, so it appears that some topics interest people on WP more than others. I had posts labeled ‘art’ and ‘culture’ lying around for a while, but they got precious little action.

Also, my posts have started appearing on search engine results, so I thought I’d give my appearances and my domain name a boost  by saying ‘porn’ a lot of times, because right after ‘politics,’ I know that ‘porn’ is the topic uppermost in the minds of most right-thinking folks.

All right, that’s about it. Here’s a post that’s not really about ‘porn,’ if you are disappointed, I apologize. The next time, I’ll try to throw in a dirty joke or two to satisfy those of you that are idly surfing WP tags for something salacious.

Do Meetings “Work”?

From a former co-worker would come the frequent complaint, “Meetings don’t work.” It was a small-ish company, that grew while I was there from under twenty employees to over fifty. What bothered me the most about this complaint of my co-worker’s, apart from that it seemed to issue forth usually when what was being proposed was something that he didn’t want to do, was that he was a senior manager.

To my mind, a manager, in any capacity and in any department, should never shy away from meetings. It’s part of the job description of a Manager. There seems to be a misconception that being in a meeting entails not doing anything creative or not contributing novel ideas.

People frequently also complain, “Today was awful. I’ve been in meetings all day,” as if to say that they couldn’t have done anything of value, or been insightful, because the responsibility of being in meetings, even if they were running the meetings themselves or were called in as important contributors, distracts them from the insights that presumably were part of their “real” or intended duties and interests at work.

There need be nothing about a meeting that precludes a manager from being effective at their job. I can understand if someone whose responsibilities are more task-oriented (say, a developer who wants to not be distracted while s/he is learning the latest programming techniques and technologies) would have to be dragged into a meeting against their wishes, but managers live to synthesize information from others’ inputs. Nothing facilitates this better than a meeting. Effective and coherent strategy decisions shouldn’t be made on-the-fly, as the result of random collisions in cubicle corridors. A meeting should be the starting point for a manager to gather the inputs they need to make their decisions, and have them discussed in a large group so that the chance of receiving incorrect information is minimized.

A “day full of meetings” isn’t one where a manager has no time for introspection. There are gaps between meetings, and people show up late. Wireless access is something most employees of technology companies can take for granted now. Each meeting is an opportunity for a good manager to channel resources into the right projects, to stay up-to-date on what’s happening “in the trenches,” so to speak, and make the right calls to action that need to be communicated in the next meeting.

A series of meetings can be proof that a manager is doing his/her job more effectively, not less.

A Spectrum of Symbolisms

There are, ostensibly, two worlds — one of Nerds, and the other of Artists. The latter is noticeably hipper than the former, in general, ceteris paribus.

I have always been comfortable in both worlds. Honestly, I have. I can geek out with the best of them, talking at at least an average level of technical arcana, if not being resoundingly confident in my abstruseness. At the same time, I also empathize with the glory and the agony of most artistic souls.

One of my personal theses is that these two worlds can be bridged. At the root of my comfort at either end of this dichotomy, and also underlying my attempts to bridge these worlds, is the fact that at heart, every Tech Nerd is also an Artist. What is more, as Technology becomes more and more a lynchpin in the production of Art, the reverse is becoming true, as well.

To an audience, the work products of these two categories of creative beings, seem very different. This illusion exists because traditionally, Artists have been those that have catered to more of our senses, while Tech Nerds, or just Nerds, for short, are seen to deal solely in the beauty of the underlying ideas. The idea that therefore, these two categories lie at opposite ends of a spectrum of symbol-making, is almost antiquated now, as quaint as the idea that each one of us is either a Left Brained rationalist, or a Right Brained intuiter.

In reality, there is a seamless progression from an Artist of the Senses — the dancer, the cook, the painter — to the Artist of Abstract Ideas — the philosopher and the mathematician — with the Artist of Natural Language — the writer, the poet, the orator — existing somewhere in the middle. We, the Audience, react differently to all of them, but they have a more affectionately fraternal bond via a shared vocabulary of passions, than we can imagine.

Engineers are filled with a need for “creative expression,” as much as “proper” artists are, but few of them would thus articulate their motives. Engineers talk of wanting to “make things,” which is “creativity” too. The fruits of their labor seem, however, less “expressive” because a tool or program or system carries a finality that seemingly lies outside the personality of its creator. A car is only that thing that provides transport. A pot is only that thing which contains a plant. The engineer’s and the technician’s products are defined not by the creator but by the owner. Its form appears to be dictated by the user and by immutable laws of Physics, rather than by the personal philosophies of the its maker.

However, we must see that the functionality of an engineer’s creation does not emanate entirely from our desires. The engineer creates a new reality by virtue of having invented something. If that reality had not existed, we might not even have had the desires that we now deceive ourselves into thinking were the true genesis of that product. The needs that this new product seems to satisfy were in some sense called into being by the product itself having been invented. And the Engineer invented it because she wished to, rather than in response to our desires.

In this respect, the Enginee, or Nerd, is behaving no differently, and with no less independence and expressiveness, than an Artist. In fact, as our lives become more luxurious, and are serviced by technology in more and more mundane aspects, the aesthetics of techical design become as much a source of sensual joy as traditionally, the Arts have been. A well-designed ATM machine becomes something akin to walking into a gallery of artfully executed paintings, or watching a particularly good theater performance.