Payne made some of the same points that Andreas Stefik (the lead author of the paper I discussed in the Co.Design post) did about how programming languages get created, and how peculiarities of syntax can affect the learning curve of a programming language. But Payne had another insight on the design of programming languages that I found particularly interesting. I’ll quote him [emphasis added by me]:

A secondary factor that shapes the language learning curve is fuzzier: the ideas that the language is trying to get across. Programming languages are usually more than just a way to get a computer to do stuff. They’re often a collection of opinions about *how* one should go about getting a computer to do stuff. For example, the Haskell language basically argues that you should program computers in very much the way a mathematician might work out a problem. In order to program in Haskell, you need to learn both its syntax and its mindset, if you will. This contrasts with a language like Python that has very little syntax to learn and not much of an opinion about how one should program, beyond that you should do it in a straightforward way. No wonder, then, that Python is considered very easy to learn and is often used to educate burgeoning programmers.

This is tangent to another question I was curious to answer, which led me to cover the Emerging Languages Camp in the first place: why do we need many different programming languages, or new languages, at all? But if a programming language is not just an interface, but an argument, the need for (or at least desire for) making new ones all the time makes more sense.

The title character from Mark Millar's "bad Batman" comic, Nemesis

How do you kill a concept? Common wisdom is that you can’t. Just ask Bruce Wayne.

Except we just did. Just ask Osama bin Laden. Or rather, ask the Obama administration, who skillfully and quite brilliantly designed a way to not just capture an enemy of the state, but effectively neutralize the symbol he embodied. The former victory was tactical, and to be honest, almost an implicit embarrassment: according to Neil deGrasse Tyson, finding one dirty little fugitive took as much time and money as putting a man on the Moon. The latter victory, though, looks like a decisive strategic coup.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of Mark Millar’s Nemesis character when considering the blankness left by bin Laden (and bin Laden™)’s removal. Where there was once a kind of “bad Batman” out there, more than just a man, haunting our collective consciousness like a demon, inspiring others by example and, later, by simple nose-thumbing existence, now there is just a Nothing: no body, no image, no locus for more bloodlust or vengeance or worship or debate. Just a lacuna in the text, a literal dead end.

To quote the editor of Fast Company Design, whom I blog for:

All we’re left with is old images of Bin Laden, and the image of a stern, dignified President Obama. There is nothing there for Bin Laden’s cohort to twist and remix for their purposes. There is no whiff of American savagery, and no whiff of personal vendetta. Merely justice.

This isn’t justice as erasure, even though we did “rub him out.” This is something more abstract, and more quintessentially contemporary: justice as absence. The man has been disappeared. But so has his symbology, his meme, his brand. They’ll endure as memories and fixed images but (in all likelihood) won’t adapt or evolve — or at least, not in the same virulently powerful way.

The Obama administration’s expert framing of justice against bin Laden as a kind of anti-communication has an unintentional consequence, though: some Americans don’t seem to quite know how to process it. Justice is something we’re used to knowing when we see it — and feeling it — but that bin Laden-shaped lacuna may leave us at a bit of a dead end, too. (Especially after ten years.) My first reaction to the news was … well, I’m not quite sure what to call it, but it felt about as emotionally cathartic or “closure”-ey as noticing that a CD suddenly skipped on a distantly playing stereo system. Or that the wi-fi went out for a couple minutes. Or — and maybe this is the “truest”-feeling analogy I can think of — that the pointer onscreen briefly turned into a spinning beachball as “the program” called “bin Laden is still out there” suddenly hung, then halted… and then, doink, process killed, pointer restored.

Anyway, it bugged me all morning, that feeling of being gypped out of a head-on-a-pike moment and wanting one to come. To me, images like this feel moving and triumphant, but still somehow indirect. (Not for those firemen, though.) But after some reflection, and reading Cliff’s lucid essay, this dead end is actually more satisfying than “Mission Accomplished” ever could be. The memory-leaking malware called Osama bin Laden is no longer a drain on system resources. Debug complete. End of line.

Here’s the presentation:

From the program notes:

What do homemade music videos by OK Go, live Twitter updates about Egypt, and industrial films from the 1950s have in common? They all have a high degree of “process value”: a willingness to expose the creative act itself and embed it, front and center, in the finished product. And they generate intense engagement on the web — often much more than their big budgeted, high-production-value counterparts. Wired and Fast Company writer and filmmaker Pavlus looks at why that is — and how to put it to use.

One thing I wasn’t able to talk about in the presentation (because I’m just not knowledgeable enough about it) is how this idea of process value applies to architecture. Luckily, there was a gentleman in the audience who filled in that gap for me during the Q&A session, explaining how Frank Lloyd Wright himself was very much into “exposing the scaffolding” of his process both literally and figuratively in his architecture and architectural philosophy.

Here’s a list of links to the videos that I included in the talk:

C’Etait Un Rendezvous, by Claude Lelouche

Here It Goes Again, by OK Go

Touch Wood, by Morihiro Harano, Kenjiro Matsuo, et. al.

A Glorious Dawn, by Symphony of Science

The Monitor, by me, Christie Nicholson, and Christopher Mims

7 Ways to Walk the Walk, by Alissa Walker

Lego Antikythera Mechanism, by me, Andrew Carol, Misha Klein, Adam Rutherford, et. al.

Also:

RadioLab, Infinite Jest, Longshot magazine, slow food, Michael Bay, Kickstarter, and many more.

I’ll put a finer point on it. Editors are desperate for blogging talent. Two really good ones — with non-slave wages to offer — recently emailed me, literally saying: I’ve got money I need to spend, tell me who to hire — please. So it’s not just us writers who feel like we’re stuck in a forbidding economic jungle, fighting over scraps — it’s the editors, too! How do these two camps manage to stay so damned invisible to each other? Who knows. But I do know (or, at least, have some anecdotal personal experience to relate) about how to nip it in the bud from the writer’s side of things.

Basically, you just have to not give a shit. (While totally, passionately giving a shit.) Wait, what?

Well, think about it: isn’t that a pretty darn good (if a bit profane) definition of what good blogging is? You do it not to satisfy quotas or word counts or contracts, but because you kind of can’t not do it. Sometimes you don’t even know (or much care) if anyone’s even out there reading, but you can’t keep yourself from typing anyway. In short: you don’t give a shit, but also totally do.

That’s what editors want to spend their money on. Not because they’re stingy, malignant sociopaths who are just looking for rubes to take advantage of (well, okay, some are like that, but none that I’ve worked for) — but because fundamentally, that’s the only kind of  blogger that’s any damn good. And they’re hard to find, because that kind of writerly attitude can’t be faked, taught, or bribed into existence — at least not without a short expiration date, which in the end is just a waste of the editor’s time and money. It’s paradoxical but it makes a sick kind of sense: the writers who’d probably work for free or cheap are the ones that editors are most keen to pay.

The flip side is that it’s the only way blogging makes financial sense for the writer, too. The top end of compensation for daily blogging seems to be between $40 and $50 per post, although some rare outlets will pay higher. If you’re being paid that little to find, sometimes research, and write stories longer than tweet-length, the behind the scenes work of every post has to be stuff that “doesn’t count” — stuff that you don’t give a shit about while you’re doing it. Or rather, stuff that you do give a shit about so much that it feels like you don’t. Stuff you’d be doing anyway, stuff that just happens without really trying.

Whatever stuff you find yourself paying attention to while you procrastinate your “real work”, and bore your friends with at bars, and (ideally) write/read/tweet/etc. about already, is what you can be paid to write/read/tweet/etc. about. In fact, it’s the only stuff. Because otherwise the economics don’t make sense and you’ll just burn out, get canned, or go postal. But if you’re blogging “without really trying”, then you’re already generating good, authentic material and probably quite efficiently too — at which point the economics do start to make sense!

OK, so how do you make your supposedly valuable-ass self visible to these editors who are supposedly dying to hire you? Obviously it helps to already be doing the job you want to be hired for on your own blog or whatever (and be an above-average writer, of course). But even more, it helps to, like, ask for it. Here’s the sequence I went through to get my current blogging job without knowing a damn soul at the place beforehand:

1. Pick my favorite blog, which was that one.
2. Email the editor to introduce myself as a fan and say I want to blog for him if he’s got any need for more people.
3. ….
4. Profit!!1

I left #3 out because that’s the unpredictable part that you can’t control anyway. But everything else you can control. And you beat out 90% of the competition for these jobs (as well as find 100% of them in the first place) simply by showing up.

In my case (if you care about the boring details), #3 consisted of the editor ignoring me, then responding to a follow-up email, then saying he wanted to see some tryout posts, which I did (because it took almost no effort), then ignoring me again, while another editor at the site contacted me about trying out for him, which I didn’t really want to do (because it seemed like too much effort), but while I was back-and-forthing with him, the original editor did get back to me and asked if I could fill in for another writer temporarily, which I did, and then a few days after I started he asked me to come on permanently/full-time, which I didn’t really want to do, so I negotiated a rate/schedule, and then renegotiated it again a few months later, and now I have a nice chunk of income every month that doesn’t feel like it requires too much work to earn (even though it actually does).

If that hadn’t all worked out, I’d have picked my 2nd favorite blog and done the same thing, and then my 3rd, until something clicked or I ran out of blogs. But in fact, this approach led to me fielding offers from a few sites at once and then getting to decide which one fit me best. How often does that happen in this economy? Who knows. Luck did play a big role in how it all came together… but maybe luck is precisely what tends to happen when you’re “not really trying.”

Postscript, later:

It occurs to me that my belabored attempt at cleverness may obscure my point or just come off as insensitive or arrogant when there are plenty of good writers struggling to pay the bills out there. So, just in case: people who can’t find writing work are not lazy or dumb or untalented. And because I did find a decent blogging gig doesn’t make me a genius, or more hardworking, or better than anyone else as a person.  My point was just that I know for a fact there are decent-paying blogging gigs out there to be gotten because a) I managed to get one without losing my mind or dignity, and b) I happened to hear about a couple more recently that could perhaps be gotten in the same way. Where those specific ones are doesn’t matter — that’s not the point, and those editors aren’t openly advertising them for precisely the reasons I tried to explain above — the point is, if I can “succeed without really trying” (ie, try hard, but in a way that doesn’t feel like trying hard), anyone can; and in fact that particular, peculiar attitude might be a necessary condition for finding and getting and succeeding in those blogging gigs, given the way that market functions these days.

The awesome things about it are still awesome. It’s sexy as all git-out. I want to use it all day, every day. But I don’t… because the thing is

• too damn heavy. Just seriously, too damn heavy.

That’s the one attribute that kind of outshines all the others, unfortunately. My right thumb got some scary pre-carpal-tunnel feeling from scrolling while holding it with two hands in what I thought was a comfortable position. If the iPad’s weight was not fully supported by something other than my two hands, I just couldn’t use it for more than a few minutes. Casual surfing/tweeting/anything-ing (even reading long articles) on my tiny phone was much more comfortable.

Unless the next version is significantly lighter, I can’t see myself buying one.

One other thing I was wrong about: turns out that replacing the tiny Home Button with a “big” multitouch gesture makes a lot of sense on a device this size. On a small phone, though, I maintain that dropping this basic piece of haptic/tactile functionality seems dumb (because it turns a simple, one-digit/one-hand, no-look action into a multi-finger/multi-hand, requires-looking-right-at-the-screen action).

Key word there being “seems” — but I feel pretty secure in that judgment based on my experience using an iPod Touch, which already frustrated me greatly by forcing me to use two-hand/look-right-at-it gestures to do simple things like skip forward or backward in my music library, which I could not do without stopping everything else I was doing at the time (like walking down the street) and focusing on the device. No such problems with the olde-tyme physical click-wheel, which was as near to a perfect user-interface-to-use-case match I’m likely to see in my lifetime.

Touch may be the future, but it’s got its limits.

I cross-posted this on Freelancer Hacks, but I don’t think anyone’s reading that anymore, and I want to get this down, even if it’s only for myself. The most important lesson I learned about successful, productive freelancing in 2010 was this: everything is generative.

In plain English, that means this: Doing trumps planning. There’s no such thing as wasted work or projects. And whatever you do almost always snowballs into more of the same…whether you like it or not.

Case study: In 2010, I soft-relaunched my online-video production studio, Small Mammal, after letting it hibernate for a year following a painful (but amicable) split with my co-founder. I say “soft-relaunched” because the idea of doing a formal “Hello World” thing all over again with a new website and business plan and client-hunting strategy and all the rest literally gave me ulcers to even contemplate. I just wanted to do the work, when I had it, and continue my freelance writing when I didn’t… and not worry about the formal, outward-facing aspects of my in-name-only “company.”

So that’s what I did. A small one-off project for NPR in 2009 that I didn’t even pitch (they randomly found me from a long-defunct science series I created) snowballed into half a dozen more projects throughout ’10. Same thing with Nature.com. Same thing with Ars Technica. The less I “strategized” and the more I just did, the more work rolled in — almost of its own accord. I didn’t make a ton of money, but it was the best year I’d ever had, financially, as a freelancer. And most of it was video work “through” Small Mammal, even though my website sucked and I never established an LLC. (I’m happy to say I did redo the site, finally, but it was only at the end of the year!)

And the stuff I didn’t like doing, or even hated — it wasn’t wasted time. I gained reporting experience, producing experience, contacts… even business intelligence, even if it was just “never pitch that magazine section again.” That stuff often snowballs in unpredictable, useful, remunerative ways as well.

Everything is generative. Work begets work. Plans have their place, but we all know what Lennon said about them.

So that’s the good news. The bad news — well not really “bad,” although it could be bad if you let it — is that it works in reverse as well. That’s what I’m learning already in 2011. What you do — literally do, not say you do or wish you do — tends to create more of itself whether you want it to or not.

Case study: I’ve made a few well-regarded iPad app promos for some cool clients. Now, other people are seeing them and I end up making more. In fact, I’m doing one now with another hot on its heels. This is a good thing. But there are only so many hours in my workday — or workweek, or workyear. How do I want to spend them?

I recently had to turn down two science writing assignments that I’d have loved to do, because I simply don’t have time given my previous app-promo-video commitments. This isn’t the end of the world. It’s not even a “bad” thing: I know from experience that trying to stuff 10 pounds into a 5 pound bag just ends in tears. And other opportunities will come. But it made me remember/consider: just because you’re busy as a freelancer doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing the work you ideally want to be doing (or in my case, having the balance I want to be having). Hell, that’s usually the norm. But it doesn’t have to be.

I can interpret this little blip in several different ways, regarding my business:

• Maybe I need to expand/hire help. But that creates administrative headaches I don’t want, and probably can’t afford anyway.
• Maybe I need to not say “yes” to (almost) every opportunity. Hm, perhaps, but I don’t think I’m in that much demand for such a policy to make sense, especially in this economy.
• Maybe I just need to decide to do what I want to be doing, as often as I can. That seems to make the most sense. If I want a better balance between promotional work and my science writing, I should choose to do more science writing and less promotional work. The more I mentally orient towards that “want,” the more I’ll notice appropriate opportunities and the more I will do with them, which will create more such opportunities. (Or, even better, perhaps I will notice better synergies between promotional/video and science writing that I can exploit to converge upon that desired balance.)

I also noticed that I’ve been adding to my drawerful of “dream feature” ideas for oh, about five years, but have not yet had any of them published. Maybe that’s because I rarely pull one of those ideas out and say, “Today I am going to knock this into shape as an actual pitch.” No, usually I’m too busy working on something else more important (ie: something I feel more secure about making money from). But that’s not “the world” or “the economy” making that decision, it’s me. The same me that feels disappointed that those features are still unwritten. Well, whose fault is that?

On the flip side, last fall I decided I wanted to be blogging more often… for money. I didn’t make a big honking deal out of writing out all my possible targets and devising the perfect way to pitch myself. I just paid attention to that desire and acted on it right then when I noticed opportunities. A couple months later I had two regular, paid blogging gigs. Then I had the enviable task of choosing between them.

I’m not bragging here, and I’m not getting all “The Secret” on you. Willing something to happen won’t magically make it happen. But if you look at what you spent most of your time working on in the last week, month, year, and it doesn’t seem ideal for whatever reason, the first (only?) way to change that is to stop doing that and start doing something else. Not schedule it, fantasize about it, or analyze it. Just do it. Make your own luck. There is no try. Whatever damn slogan you prefer, the bottom line is: everything is generative. But you have to do the generating.

Happy new year!

I just did that this morning. I saw a short film on the web that I didn’t particularly like. I actually engaged in a reasoned critique of it with a colleague over email, but on Twitter I just barfed out a venomous little mal mot that wasn’t terribly constructive. About an hour later I received an email from a friend asking me what I thought of his new piece and would I mind giving it some love on Twitter… the same film I had just knee-jerk dismissed. Time to invent a new hashtag! #eggonface

I apologized to him; he hasn’t responded yet, so I don’t know how badly (or if) his feelings were hurt. But I feel pretty ashamed. Hell, I know what it’s like to put a lot of creative energy into something and offer it up to the teeming digi-masses in hopes of pleasing them. There are already enough jerkwads online with nothing better to say about someone’s work than “nice job fag!!1″ Why add to it?

This isn’t to say I (or anyone) should water down honest opinions, but it is possible to be constructive and nuanced in 140 characters. It’s not as easy. But it’s surely possible. Or if it isn’t, there’s always your blog… or — ka-razy though this might sound — just keeping your opinion to yourself.

I’ll certainly be considering that as a New Year’s Resolution…

I like to think about who my heroes are instead. It’s more aspirational — about where you want to go, versus looking backwards and constantly analyzing, as if you’re talking to James Lipton, where you came from.

Tomato, tomahtoe, I know. But it makes sense to me. So for a pre-Thanksgiving post for all of my 2.5 readers who care, here’s a short list of my creative heroes — each of whom I’m thankful to, for inspiring me.

As a writer, I actually don’t really have any heroes. Not sure why. I guess if I really think hard I’d say someone like John McPhee, just because he’s so mindwarpingly amazing as a science journalist and nonfiction storyteller. But truthfully, that’s a stretch.

As a filmmaker, on the other hand, I’ve got heroes up the wazoo. Not sure why about that, either. I nowhere near embody all the ideals these folks stand for, but I’d like to. Here they are:

Werner Herzog and Claire Denis, for ecstatic truth and images above words. (Very hard to come by in science media.)

Spike Jonze and Christopher Nolan, for physical authenticity and process value.

Stanley Kubrick and David Fincher, for precision design and atomic attention to detail.

Steven Soderbergh and Paul Thomas Anderson, for fearless genre experimentation without being pretentious. (Mostly. I’m looking at you, Paul.)

And the big three:

Michael Mann, for embodying all of the above at once, and being from Chicago like me;
James Cameron, for never not aiming for awesome, and being a sci-tech geek like me;
and Steven Spielberg, goshdarnit, for the sheer wonder, joy, and palpable “holy shit I get paid to do this?”ness in all his work. (And for indirectly inspiring 10-year-old me to imagine tracking shots, whip pans, and slow motion closeups in my head as I played with my G.I. Joes.)

Thanks, y’all!

What is it about Zuckerberg’s brainchild that compels otherwise-smart writers to make pretentious asses of themselves when “analyzing” the subject? First we heard that Facebook’s “Hide” function was some dark new harbinger of the Impending PhonyFriendpocalypse, when actually it’s just a digital version of what humans have already been doing since time immemorial. Now Zadie Smith has written an essay-review about The Social Network in which she makes New-York-editor-dazzling leaps of critical thought that, to anyone who actually uses Facebook, come off more like the stumbles of someone who accidentally tied her shoelaces together.

I realize I may be succumbing to the same ill-conceived urge that these other writers have, simply by writing this. But what the hell.

First, it’s important to say unambiguously that I enjoyed Smith’s essay — it was a delightful experience, just like The Social Network was. But it says pretty much zilch about Facebook, or “us” vis-a-vis its ubiquitous presence. It says a lot about Zadie Smith, and it’s not all flattering. (See? Delightful!) Like the constant spew of status updates she Thinks So Hard About, her own essay merely paints a pointillistic image of Smith’s own mundane hangups and self-absorptions. They’re fun to get glimpses of, but they don’t have anything to do with “us,” and — despite being published in the Weekly Bulletin of the Pointyheads — they’re not all that deep, either.

Smith tips her hand pretty much immediately, drawing an intellectual/generational distinction between “2.0 people” (Facebook users; her students; people not much younger than her but somehow different enough to induce a vague existential agita that is great for plumbing at length in the NYRB) and “1.0 people” (herself, the middle-aged filmmakers behind The Social Network, you the NYRB reader, perhaps, who has used Facebook, but only “for a time” or “because I have to”). She has always felt distant from the 2.0′s. The two groups “have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be.”

I submit that this is not actually true. If there is a difference, it’s that 2.0 People are simply those of us for whom it has not yet become an occupation to constantly ponder what it is, or should be, to be ourselves. But to Smith, for whom it is an occupation, it follows that they (the 2.0-ers) are a generation shaped by software that is “unworthy of them” — and obliviously so. I dunno, isn’t this just a long, annoying way of saying they’re young and, therefore, have more concrete concerns than existing as self-conscious avatars of their 1.0 counterparts’ inchoate cultural anxieties? Every “2.0″ group or generation takes what was new to their forebears for granted. It’s just there. The very act of distinguishing 1.0 from 2.0 is itself, to a member of the latter group, as banal and faintly pathetic as marveling that magnets work. (If not more so: at least Insane Clown Posse doesn’t strike a pose of fashionably befuddled angst toward the fact that stuff, like, exists.)

What would Smith make of an older person who waxed philosophical about how the phone book was subtly warping society? She’d probably find it fascinating, but then again we all would: atavistic weirdos, especially the articulate ones, are kinda fascinating. In the meantime she’d continue using the phone book without a whit of existential dread. And that’s exactly how I, as a member (I guess) of this group of “2.0 people” that actually comprises just plain “people,” engaged with her essay.

And it was all fine and dandy until she coughed up this pseudo-intellectual cud near the end:

I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX

When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive?

Simple: no. Followup: are you fucking retarded? (Sorry, my coarse 2.0-person argot got the better of me there.)

This not-even-thinly veiled condescension tricked up as “critical thought” is why people in the Real World™ often want to beat people who, like Smith, went to Hahhhvahd (and teach there, and write there, etc) with a lead pipe. Set aside the fact that Smith would never make such a boneheaded remark about people who leave flowers on gravesites or tag walls where their friends have been gunned down, or anyone who has ever felt the urge to memorialize someone’s death using a physical offering or raw communique. But because Facebook is digital, and everywhere, and the people who use it “have different ideas about what a person is,” why, they must be pitiful wretches too illiterate to adequately express their lamentations, or superstitious fools who literally believe the deceased person will hear them.

Does it take an Ivy League education to become this offensively dense, or is that just part of being 1.0 and proud? Actually, neither. At this point I think that Facebook is so ubiquitously, opaqely banal that it drives public intellectuals temporarily insane to behold, like Cthulhu in reverse. Smith apprehends the “just plain fact” of Facebook — and, crucially, the fact that 500 million people somehow manage to use it in wildly varying ways without morphing into zombies or Morlocks — and simply cannot abide the semantic shrug-worthiness of it all. Isn’t there some there there for me? is the silent shriek of these writers, scrabbling for something to unpack or deconstruct about Facebook, no matter how ridiculous. The phantoms they invent or project in order to fill the void — whether it’s Rob Walker‘s suffocating miasma of phony relationships, or an entire generation rendered shallow and un-selfconscious per Smith, or simply the idea that Facebook could not possibly have been invented by someone who wasn’t a titan of Shakespearean hubris, as the writer of The Social Network apparently believes — are all much more illuminating about their authors than they are about the blank, rather boring fact of Facebook itself.

Facebook is important. It is interesting that 500 million people are now engaging with a system originally (key word, that) built to simulate undergraduate social norms as they were understood by a rather odd young man. Zuckerberg chose blue as Facebook’s color because he’s colorblind? Interesting! But these are tweets, not deeply trenchant observations that illuminate a culture. I’m not sure, at this point, that Facebook’s “thereness” supports any deeply trenchant observations about the culture. It’s the new normal, and normal changes. It’s where and how 500 million people do stuff, in 500 million ways. Some odd, some strange, some scary, some silly, but mostly, much the same as they always have. Smith perceptively points out that 2.0 People, especially programmers, “build worlds,” which is qualitatively different than writing novels or making music. But you don’t attract half a billion people into your hand-built world if it’s not a lot like the world we already know and live in, with a few tweaks that people find — above all else — useful. Which is different than perfect. That’s pretty much the long and short of it, and it doesn’t take a megamind to point out or understand.

Yes, it’s a Facebook world. And Zadie Smith spends a lot of energy trying to pretend like it’s the end of the world as she knows it. But I have a hunch that deep down, much like the rest of us, she actually feels fine.

Someone on Twitter asked how long I spent on this. All told, about a day and a half or maybe two. Most of that was just spent figuring out what I wanted to shoot, and tediously reversing all the shots. The actual production was easy-peasy: I storyboarded the sequence out on my whiteboard as I wanted it to appear in the video (ie, reversed), and then literally recopied it in reverse (ie, reversed reverse=forward) as written instructions to follow after turning on the camera.

To do the funky Twin Peaks backwards-but-forwards speech at the end, I just recorded the line normally, flipped it around, split it into phonemes, wrote those down, and read them off this Post-It note when it came time to deliver the line:

Now you know how to say “Unlike everything in this video” like a weird David Lynch midget!

Also, the music by The Books is amazing, and you should buy it like I did.