Mile
Zero

Moving all the way across the country, I'm finding social media invaluable for maintaining connections with my friends back in DC. It's no substitute for actually being there, but it's not supposed to be: instead, I get peeks into the life of my coworkers, the other members of Urban Artistry, and my other East Coast friends--just enough information that I still feel like I know how they're doing (and, hopefully, vice versa).

But which social media? I'm active on at least three, all of which I use (and compliment this blog) in different ways:

• Twitter typically takes the place of a linkblog. It's where I post quick, hit-and-run content that I find interesting, but not enough that I want to comment on it at length. I follow more people who don't know me on Twitter than I do anywhere else.
• Facebook is not my preferred social network, because they've shown again and again that given the option of maintaining my privacy or selling me out, they will reach for the check every single time, and they don't seem to understand why people get upset when they do. But all my friends are on Facebook, and therefore so am I.
• Somewhere in the middle is Google+. They've made missteps (no pseudonyms) but the basic idea is good. I like the way G+ is built for short-to-medium length writing: I don't want to write blog posts there, but it gives me enough room to tell a decent joke. Unfortunately, most people still haven't moved over, and there aren't any desktop clients for posting.

Of course, this is not a battle to the death. I don't have a problem picking the right place to post something (in fact, I kind of welcome the audience segmentation). But it's such a hassle, switching between windows or re-opening old pages to check for updates. What I really want is a single method of subscribing to updates from all of these services (and more) and optionally posting to them from a single box--what Warren Ellis calls One Big Thing Everywhere.

But that isn't something that the people developing social networks seem to be interested in facilitating. You can't get a decent RSS feed from any of these services anymore. And even building such a thing myself would be prohibitively difficult: Twitter's API is increasingly dense, Facebook's is notoriously hostile, and the G+ API is practically non-existent.

This is not a coincidence, of course, just as it's not a coincidence that Facebook has removed RSS as an input option and that Google recently integrated Reader directly into G+. My personal opinion is that these companies are working hard, both directly and indirectly, to kill decentralized syndication standards like RSS in favor of gateways that they can control.

All of which is the kind of thing that I shouldn't have to care about. But these days, as Lawrence Lessig observed in Code, we're writing our social and legal values into software. In this case, it's the software that helps me keep in touch with my friends and family back on the East coast. That's more than just inconvenient--it's a disturbing amount of power over our personal connections. Ironically, it's only when I use social networks the most that I seriously consider giving them up.

There's one quirk in the CQ.com publishing process that has always driven me crazy (what, just one?). When we add stories to the main news section of the site, our CMS requires a separate entry for the teaser, headline, and any related links or images. Inside the building, they call these entries--each individual one, mind you--"blogs." Every time I hear it ("I'm going to write a blog for the new debt story." "Can you update the blog to add that link?" "Let's blog a new photo in the top blog BLOG BLOG BLOG.") I want to grind my teeth into little featureless nubs. Which I will call "blogs," because why not? It's not like words mean something!

Breathe. Calm. Find my happy place: Puppies. Sandwiches. Empty spreadsheets. Anyway...

After Google+ launched, something similar happened. People looked at the service, which combines Twitter's asymmetric-follow model with Facebook's rich content stream, and apparently thought to themselves "hey, this thing could be my new blog." Either they redirected their entire domain to their G+ profile (most notably Digg founder Kevin Rose) or (more commonly) they use G+ to write the kind of long-form posts that have traditionally been the province of blogs, whether home-grown or hosted on a platform like Wordpress or Blogger (similar long-form content creation has been attempted on Facebook, but it never really took off). I'm not a fan of this, obviously. It seems to be a real misconception of what blogging is, how it has developed, and where its strengths lie.

In 2011, it is past time that we understand blog culture. The practice of blogging is at least a decade old now. I realized the other day that I've been doing it here for more than 7 years, and I was relatively late to the party. So while I typically hate people who draw large categorical distinctions between, say, "bloggers" and "journalists" almost as much as I hate calling our ledes "blogs," it's not wrong to say that there is a different flavor to the way I publish here, compared to either standalone pieces or social network status updates. I think a lot of it comes down to the surrounding context.

A blog post is not an independent document in the way that (for example) newspaper stories on the same page would be. It's part of a larger dialog with the writer's surroundings, be those people or events. Most of the innovations in blogging--permalinks, comments, blogrolls, trackbacks, and organization-by-tagging, to name a few--revolve around exploring that dialog, implicitly or explicitly. When I write a post, it's informed by many of the posts that came before, by the audience that I expect to read it, and the direction I'm trying to take the blog as a cohesive work-in-progress.

Social networks have some of these aspects: they create dialog, obviously, and they allow sharing and permalinks. But social networks like Facebook and Google+ are not persistent or cohesive the way that a blog is. When you add a status update or whatever they're calling it these days, it's an ephemeral part of your lifestream (to use a now-unfashionable term), alongside all kinds of other activity from across your connections. Unlike a blog, those status updates are not a purposeful body of work. They're a rolling description of you, accreted from the detritus of what you do and what you like. Which is a useful thing to have, but a distinctly different experience from writing a blog.

My blog exists separately from me, while my social media profile is a view of me. That doesn't mean that they're not both valuable ways of interacting with the world. Social networks are great for retaining a kind of "situational awareness" of what my friends are doing, and to maintain a basic connection with them. It's like small talk: it doesn't replace real interaction, but it keeps us from becoming strangers between visits. Blogging, on the other hand, is where I feel like I can dig in and engage mentally. I don't have to worry about being rude by taking over someone's stream, or getting hidden behind a filter. It's a space that's all mine to use, controlled by me, and expressly used for my own purposes. A blog is a place to be a little selfish.

From a technical perspective, a blog is the more curated experience. When someone writes a blog entry, it gets published in a standard, exportable format via RSS. It lives in a database (or in my case, a filesystem) that can be edited and moved. Writing on a blog is property that you can own and control, and it starts from a position of ownership. Writing on a social network, although possible to extract through various APIs or Google's Data Liberation Front, is not under your control in the same way. That may not matter to you now, but one day, if you decide that you want to preserve those words--if you think your writing could become a book, or you want to give your favorite entries to a loved one, or if you just want to preserve them for your own satisfaction--a blog is probably a better option.

There are places of overlap, I think. By relaxing the character constraints, Google+ makes it possible to at least present more complex thoughts than Twitter, and it's a better writing experience than Facebook is. But when people say that they're planning on using Google+ as a blog, I can't help but think that what they really mean is "I didn't really want to blog anyway." I'm glad they've found a solution that works for them: not everyone is cut out to be a blogger. Some days I don't feel like it myself. But when I look back on writing here, on how I feel like I could develop a voice and indulge my obsessions, I wouldn't give this up for all the fancy circles in the world.

Last week Gina Trapani wrote an insightful post on Smarterware about designers, women, and hostility in open source, including how she has applied that to her social-networking scraper application ThinkUp, in terms of welcoming non-coders and contributors from a diverse range of backgrounds. And Trapani's been working around those kinds of problems for a while now: as the founding editor of the Lifehacker blog, she created a space for tech-minded people that was a breath of fresh air. From the post:

At Lifehacker, my original vision was to create a new kind of tech blog, one that wasn't yet another "boys worshipping tech toys" site, one that was helpful, friendly, and welcoming versus snarky, sensational, and cutting. (That was no small task in the Gawker-verse, and I learned much in the process.) ...

I learned something important about creating a productive online community: leaders set the tone by example. It's simple, really. When someone you don't know shows up on the mailing list or in IRC, you break out the welcome wagon, let them know you're happy they're here, show them around the place, help them with their question or problem, and let them know how they can give back to the community. Once you and your community leaders do that a few times, something magical happens: the newbie who you welcomed just a few weeks ago starts welcoming new folks, and the virtuous cycle continues.

One of the things that has struck me, as I've paid more attention to the tech news ecosystem online, is how rare that attitude really is. Trapani alludes to the general tone of the Gawker properties, which start at "snark" and work down, but (thanks to imitation and diffusion of former Gawker writers) most of the other big tech blogs sound pretty much the same, which is one of the major reasons that I dropped them from my usual reading habits and blocked them in my browser.

The typical industry blogger persona is aggressive, awestruck (both as irony and as an expression of genuine, uncritical neophilia), and uncompromising to other viewpoints. When they break their pose of cynicism, they usually rave in extreme superlatives, as though it simply wouldn't do to be quietly amused by something. The tone is, in other words, exactly what you'd expect from a group of young men who arrested their development at a precocious seventeen years old--and I say this as someone who is not entirely innocent of similar sins, as a trip through the archives here would show.

For as long as I can remember, Lifehacker did something different. Along with Make and Hackaday, their writers were less interested in tossing off snarky burns at the expense of the day's news, and more focused on appreciating the efforts of their communities. Even though Trapani has moved on, it remains an easy-going, welcoming read. I think they deserve kudos for that. It's certainly a style I'm trying to imitate more--to highlight the positive as much as I call out the negative.

When it comes down to it, I think each of us has to ask ourselves whose future we'd prefer to realize. If I were forced to live in a world represented by TechCrunch, or one built by Lady Ada, I know which one would feel more welcoming. The latter values knowledge, in my opinion, while the former values commerical product--like the difference between learning to cook and reviewing frozen dinners, the result is probably less polished, but ultimately more nutritious.

Tone has consequences beyond self-realization: Lifehacker and Make, in particular, have really encouraged me to take a closer look at open-source hardware and software in a positive way, just because their bloggers are relentlessly cheerful, low-key advocates for those communities. As Trapani noted, that kind of appeal can be a virtuous cycle. A diverse, positive tech community should be more likely to apply its energy to projects that reflect its membership, instead of an endless supply of hipster social networks and expensive new hardware. I'm glad there are writers like her out there, trying to make that a reality.

I tell everyone they should have Firebug or its equivalent installed, and know how to use it. I believe that people will find it invaluable if they're designing a page and want to test something. They might want to do some in-page scripting. They can examine the source for ideas, or to discover hidden items. But most importantly, they can use it to fix your stupid, unreadable, over-styled web page.

The development of HTML5 means that browsers have gotten more powerful, more elaborate, and more interactive. It also means that they can be annoying in new and subtle ways. Back in the day, page authors used <blink> and <marquee> to create eye-catching elements on their flat gray canvas. Nowadays, thanks to pre-made CMS templates, the web superficially looks better, but it's not necessarily easier to read. Take three examples:

• Text shadow: There's nothing wrong with a little text shadow. It's a classy effect for giving headlines a little pop. But I've noticed a lot of people lately using text-shadow everywhere, which makes my eyes cross trying to focus on mysteriously blurry text. Why is my browser anti-aliasing broken? Oh, it's not, you just hate your audience.

  Even worse are the people who have realized you can give the shadow an offset of zero pixels. If the shadow is dark, this ends up looking like the page got wet and all the ink has run. If it's a lighter shadow, you've got a poor man's text glow. Remember how classy text glow was when you used it on everything in Photoshop? Nobody else does either.

• Custom fonts: I sympathize with font nerds on the Internet. It must have been painful, being restricted to the built-in browser fonts. On the other hand, those were the defaults for a reason. Now every wannabe font nerd on the Internet can finally use their own Very Special Typeface, many of which are more "fancy" than "legible." But why stop there? Why not customize the letter-spacing and line-height while you're at it?

  I'm not an expert in typesetting or anything, but the effect of these changes--besides sometimes giving Comic Sans a run for its ugly font money--is to throw me out of my browsing groove, and force me to re-acquire a grip on the text with every link to a custom page. If I'm not expecting it, and the font is almost the same as a system font, it looks like a display error. Either way, it's jarring, and it breaks the feeling that the Internet is a common space. Eventually, we'll all get used to it, but for now I hate your custom fonts.

• "Pixel-perfect" layouts: Once upon a time, we had no real positioning tools in HTML. Oh, there was <table>, but building a layout using tables is like trying to design a travel brochure in Excel. And then someone invented CSS, and between "float" and "position: absolute" they ushered in a whole new era of web design. A new, fragile era, one that was vulnerable to a whole host of CSS sins. If I had a dime for every page I've visited where content overflowed the elaborate layout and got hidden behind an ad or a sidebar, I'd be making money in a very strange way. Setting "display: none" on offending elements has become an unfortunately common part of my browsing experience. It's enough to make me wish for the days when every page was a simple, boring, single black-on-grey column of text.
• Rebinding key events: Seriously, IGN? Taking away the spacebar and the page-up/down keys for no apparent reason so I can't scroll the page on the rare occasions that I'm linked to your increasingly-awful content farm? You're why we can't have nice things.

It's no wonder, in an environment like this, that style-stripping bookmarklets like Readability caused such a sensation. There's a fine line between interactive design and overdesign, and designers are crossing it as fast as they can. All I ask, people, is that you think before getting clever with your CSS and your scripts. Ask yourself: "if someone else simulated this effect using, say, a static image, would I still think it looked good? Or would I ask them what Geocities neighborhood they're from?" Take a deep breath. And then put down the stylesheet, and let us read in peace.

Tim Ferriss was a real-world griefer before real-world griefing was cool. Before Anonymous was putting epileptic kids into seizures, DDOSing the Church of Scientology, and harrassing teenage girls for no good reason whatsoever, Ferriss (through sheer force of narcissism) had already begun gaming whatever system he could get his hands on. And now he writes books about it. The question you should be asking yourself, as you read this tongue-in-cheek New York Times review of Ferriss's "four-hour workout" book is, did he write this to actually teach people his idiosyncratic health plan? Or (more likely) is it just the newest way Ferriss has decided to grief the world, via the NYT bestseller list?

Griefing, of course, is the process of exploiting the rules of an online community to make its members miserable. Griefers are the people who join your team in online games, and then do everything possible to sabotage your efforts. It's a malevolent version of the "munchkin" from old-school RPGs, where a player tries to find loopholes in the rules, except that griefers aren't playing to win--they're playing to get a reaction, which is much easier. The key is in the balance--a griefer or munchkin is looking to maximize impact while minimizing effort. That's basically what Ferriss is doing: he power-games various external achievements, like kickboxing or tango, not for their own sake, but to boost his own self-promotional profile.

The problem with writing about reputation griefers like this guy is, for them, there really is no such thing as bad publicity. They want you to hate them, as long as it boosts their search ranking. And there are an awful lot of people out there following similar career plans--maybe not as aggressively, almost certainly not as successfully, but they're certainly trying. They may not realize that they're griefing, but they are. Affiliate marketers? Griefing. Social networking 'gurus' who primarily seem to be networking themselves? Griefing. SEO consultants? Totally griefing.

Like a zen student being hit with a stick, I achieved enlightenment once I looked at the situation this way: it's the Internet equivalent of being a celebrity for celebrity's sake. Or, perhaps more accurately, griefing provides a useful framework for understanding and responding to pointless celebrities elsewhere. Maybe this is one way that the Internet, for all its frustrations and backwardness and self-inflicted suffering, can make us better people.

The one thing I've learned, from years of "Something Is Wrong On The Internet," is that the key to dealing with griefers--whether it's a game of Counterstrike, Tim Ferriss, or the vast array of pundits and shock jocks--is right there in the name. They benefit from getting under your skin, when you treat them as serious business instead of something to be laughed off. As Belle and I often say to each other, you can always recognize people who are new to the dark side of the Internet's ever-flowing river of commentary by the gravity they assign to J. Random Poster. We laugh a little, because we remember when we felt that way (sometimes we still do), before we learned: it takes two people to get trolled. Don't let them give you grief.

Most book-lovers, I think, have a shelf devoted to their favorite books. It's always half-empty, because those are also the books they lend out when someone asks for a recommendation--oh, you haven't read something by X? Here you go. I love that shelf, even if I rarely lend books: it's where the private activity of reading becomes a shared experience, either through borrowing or via representation: these are the books that have deeply affected me. Maybe they'll affect you, too.

Likewise, there is writing on the Internet that is classic: essays, articles, and fiction that get linked and re-linked over time, in defiance of the conventional wisdom that online writing is transient or short-lived. The Classics are a personal call: what goes on your mental shelf of great online writing won't be the same as mine, and that's okay. This post is a collection of the items that I consider must-reads, accumulated over years of surfing. As I dig stuff out of my memory, I'll keep adding more.

• Flathead, by Matt Taibbi: the definitive critique of Thomas Friedman. Everything you need to know about one of the world's worst pundits.
• Creating The Innocent Killer, by John Kessel: an evisceration of Orson Scott Card's manipulative, deceptive Ender novels.
• Host, by David Foster Wallace. A lengthy profile of radio host John Ziegler, not to mention a brilliant example of hypertextual footnotes.
• The Zompist Phrasebook, edited by Mark Rosenfelder: the last language phrasebook you'll ever need.
• The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink, by Venkatesh Rao: essential reading for people going from print to online.
• The Grim Meathook Future, by Josh Ellis: there are problems with this essay if it's taken straight, as Ellis found out when he presented it to an international hackers' conference. But as a short, punchy antidote to techno-utopian thinking--a way to puncture the silicon valley bubble--I think it's invaluable.

So, you're thinking about deleting your Facebook account. Good for you and your crafty sense of civil libertarianism! But where will you find a replacement for its omnipresent life-streaming functionality? It's too bad that there isn't a turnkey self-publishing solution available to you.

I kid, of course, as a Cranky Old Internet Personality. But it's been obvious to me, for about a year now, that Facebook's been heading for the same mental niche as blogging. Of course, they're doing so by way of imitating Twitter, which is itself basically blogging for people who are frightened by large text boxes. The activity stream is just an RSS aggregator--one that only works for Facebook accounts. Both services are essentially taking the foundational elements of a blog--a CMS, a feed, a simple form of trackbacks and commenting--and turning them into something that Grandma can use. And all you have to do is let them harvest and monetize your data any way they can, in increasingly invasive ways.

Now, that aspect of Facebook has never particularly bothered me, since I've got an Internet shadow the size of Wyoming anyway, and (more importantly) because I've largely kept control of it on my own terms. There's not really anything on Facebook that isn't already public on Mile Zero or my portfolio site. Facebook's sneaky descent into opt-out publicity mode didn't exactly surprise me, either: what did you expect from a site that was both free to users and simultaneously an obvious, massive infrastructure expense? You'd have to be pretty oblivious to think they weren't going to exploit their users when the time came to find an actual business model--oblivious, or Chris Anderson. But I repeat myself.

That said, I can understand why people are upset about Facebook, since most probably don't think that carefully about the service's agenda, and were mainly joining to keep in touch with their friends. The entry price also probably helped to disarm them: "free" has a way of short-circuiting a person's critical thought process. Anderson was right about that, at least, even if he didn't follow the next logical step: the first people to take advantage of a psychological exploit are the scammers and con artists. And when the exploit involves something abstract (like privacy) instead of something concrete (like money), it becomes a lot easier for the scam to justify itself, both to its victims and its perpetrators.

Researcher danah boyd has written extensively about privacy and social networking, and she's observed something interesting about privacy, something that maybe only became obvious when it was scaled up to Internet sizes: our concept of privacy is not so much about specific bits of data or territory, but our control over the situations involving it. In "Privacy and Publicity in the Context of Big Data" she writes:

It's about a collective understanding of a social situation's boundaries and knowing how to operate within them. In other words, it's about having control over a situation. It's about understanding the audience and knowing how far information will flow. It's about trusting the people, the situating, and the context. People seek privacy so that they can make themselves vulnerable in order to gain something: personal support, knowledge, friendship, etc.

People feel as though their privacy has been violated when their expectations are shattered. This classicly happens when a person shares something that wasn't meant to be shared. This is what makes trust an essential part of privacy. People trust each other to maintain the collectively understood sense of privacy and they feel violated when their friends share things that weren't meant to be shared.

Understanding the context is not just about understanding the audience. It's also about understanding the environment. Just as people trust each other, they also trust the physical setting. And they blame the architecture when they feel as though they were duped. Consider the phrase "these walls have ears" which dates back to at least Chaucer. The phrase highlights how people blame the architecture when it obscures their ability to properly interpret a context.

Consider this in light of grumblings about Facebook's approach to privacy. The core privacy challenge is that people believe that they understand the context in which they are operating; they get upset when they feel as though the context has been destabilized. They get upset and blame the technology.

This is why it's mistaken to claim that "our conception of privacy has changed" in the Internet age. Private information has always been shared out with relative indiscretion: how else would people hold their Jell-o parties or whatever they else did back in the olden days of our collective nostalgia? Those addresses and invitations weren't going to spread themselves. The difference is that those people had a reasonable expectation of the context in which their personal information would be shared: that it would be confined to their friends, that it would used for a specific purpose, and that what was said there would confine itself--mostly--to the social circle being invited.

Facebook's problem isn't just that the scale of a "slip of the tongue" has been magnified exponentially. It's also that they keep shifting the context. One day, a user might assume that the joke group they joined ("1 Million Readers Against Footnotes") will only be shared with their friends, and the next day it's been published by default to everyone's newsfeed. If you now imagine that the personal tidbit in question was something politically- or personally-sensitive, such as a discussion board for dissidents or marginalized groups, it's easy to see how discomforting that would be. People like me who started with the implicit assumption that Facebook wasn't secure (and the privilege to find alternatives) are fine, but those who looked to it as a safe space or a support network feel betrayed. And rightfully so.

So now that programmers are looking at replacing Facebook with a decentralized solution, like the Diaspora project, I think there's a real chance that they're missing the point. These projects tend to focus on the channels and the hosting: Diaspora, for example, wants to build Seeds and encrypt communication between them using PGP, as if we were all spies in a National Treasure movie or something. Not to mention that it's pretty funny when the "decentralized" alternative to Facebook ends up putting everyone on the same server-based CMS. Meanwhile, the most important part of social networks is not their foolproof security or their clean design--if it were, nobody would have ever used MySpace or Twitter. No, the key is their ability to construct context via user relationships.

Here's my not-so-radical idea: instead of trying to reinvent the Facebook wheel from scratch, why not create this as a social filter plugin (or even better, a standard service on sites like Posterous and Tumblr) for all the major publishing platforms? Base it off RSS with some form of secure authentication (OpenID would seem a natural fit), coupled with some dead-simple aggregation services and an easy migration path (OPML), and let a thousand interoperable flowers bloom. Facebook's been stealing inspiration from blogging for long enough now. Instead of creating a complicated open-source clone, let's improve the platforms we've already got--the ones that really give power back to individuals.

When Facebook recently announced that users would be getting their own human-readable usernames and corresponding URLs, Anil Dash linked back to his 2002 piece, Privacy through Identity Control:

...if you do a simple Google search on my name, what do you get? This site.

I own my name. I am the first, and definitive, source of information on me.

One of the biggest benefits of that reality is that I now have control. The information I choose to reveal on my site sets the biggest boundaries for my privacy on the web. Granted, I'll never have total control. But look at most people, especially novice Internet users, who are concerned with privacy. They're fighting a losing battle, trying to prevent their personal information from being available on the web at all. If you recognize that it's going to happen, your best bet is to choose how, when, and where it shows up.

It was good advice then, and it's good advice now. It's especially good advice for people in my field, new media and online journalism. Own your name: buy the domain, set up a simple splash page or a set of redirection links, or go all out and create a rarely-updated work portfolio. But leaving your Internet shadow up to chance is simply not an option for us anymore.

Here's an example: This week, I got an e-mail in my work inbox from someone who wants to work for us. Well, actually, he's interested in "pitching ideas for new online projects," and he has "a Logline Synopsis and a variety of treatments ready to send upon request." What he doesn't provide is links to any past work, or any hints as to what he wants to do. That's his first mistake: this isn't Hollywood, it's the Internet. We don't want your pitches, we want links and examples, and anyone who doesn't understand that probably isn't someone with whom we want to build online projects.

But it's possible, for very small values of possible, that someone who is aware of all Internet traditions would forget about the humble link, or would be wary of releasing their revolutionary ideas into the wild without keeping them under tight control. So I did what any prospective employer would have done: typed the applicant's name into Google.

The very first link--I kid you not, the first and only link for this guy's name--was a YouTube entry labeled "demo reel" by a username very similar to the applicant's e-mail address. Contained inside were five minutes of poorly-cut, VHS-quality video seemingly from a college TV station, focusing mainly on fratboy humor like asking groups of girls embarrassing sexual questions and being punched in the groin (not at the same time, unfortunately). As far as the Internet is concerned, that's Applicant X's identity. Think he'll get any response on his pitches for "new online projects?"

If you work in a fairly traditional job, or even a low-intensity information technology job, a minimal online presence--maybe even through something like a LinkedIn or Facebook URL--is probably fine. But if, like me, your job is to make digital content (of any variety) specifically for the Internet, you need to do more than that. You need to own your name.

"You're a tinkerer," the IT guy says to me.

This is not entirely a compliment. I've just been describing how I had to hard-reset my phone yesterday, after a botched process involving root access, the application caches, and the Android marketplace. It was entirely my own fault, mind you, and completely predictable. Almost a week between purchase and the first reformat? For me, that is superhuman restraint.

The IT guy would probably appreciate this more if he didn't spend his workday cleaning up other people's computer messes, to the point where it's not terribly amusing any more. But he's not having to clean up mine, so instead he just tells me that I'm a tinkerer, in the same tone of voice that most people would say "oh, you're a chemical weapons engineer" or "oh, you have rabies." That's interesting, the tone says, maybe you could tell me more about it from a little further away.

I don't mind. I'm reminded of something Lance Mannion wrote about the his Uncle Merlin and the "tinker unit" a couple of years back:

Changing a light bulb, caulking a window, nailing down a loose floorboard on the deck, hanging a picture---these are all acts of puttering.

Tinkering is the self-directed, small but skillful, not necessarily necessary work of actual home repair and improvement. There's an experimental quality to tinkering, as well. When you sit down---or kneel down, squat down, or lie down and crawl under something---to tinker, you don't always know exactly what you're going to do. You're going to try something to see if it does the trick.

Tinkering includes the possibility of using a screwdriver, a wrench, or a pair of pliers, possibly even a voltage meter, and preferably all four. To putter, you might need a screwdriver, but usually you can get the job done with a hammer or a paintbrush.

If you go out to the garage to spray some WD-40 on the tracks of your squeaky garage door, you're puttering. If you install a new automatic garage door opener, you're tinkering.

Changing the oil on your car is a putter. Installing new belts and hoses, especially if the car doesn't really need new belts and hoses yet, is a tinker.

Pouring a new garage floor or rebuilding the car's engine are serious jobs that the words tinker and putter don't begin to describe.

I just changed the filter on our furnace. That was a putter.

But the furnace has been a bit balky the last couple of days and even refused to kick on last night until I went downstairs to tinker with it. I checked the filter, saw that I'd need to change it in the morning---Note: The label on the filter says 30 Day Filter and it means what it says---but for the moment all I could do was pluck dust off it and shake dirt out of it. I put new duct tape around the joints on the outtake pipes. Tripped the circuit breaker a few times. Heard a small, sad click and then an ominous and disheartening silence from the furnace. Went upstairs to re-read the troubleshooting guide in the manual. Heard the burners ignite at last, closed the manual, and went to bed, congratulating myself on a job well done.

That was tinkering.

He's talking about home repair and I'm talking a kind of generalized electronic interference, but they're the same thing. It's the "not necessarily necessary" part that links them. Tinkering is less about problems, more about projects and potential.

Affinity for tinkering is one way to sort the population, I think. Some people get it, some people don't. Belle is one of the ones who doesn't. She has learned to dread those times when a home purchase suggestion is met with the response "oh, we could just make one of those." She also watches with amusement when I find a new project--such as, a couple of weeks ago, when I decided to make a case for my old phone, since the one I'd been using was falling apart. I wanted one of those magnetic cases, but the ones for Blackberries are too short, and the ones that aren't too short are so wide that the phone would slide back and forth and drive me batty.

No problem, I said, and I dragged her to the fabric store, where I bought some jean rivets. Then I found one of the too-short cases online for a couple of bucks (plus shipping and handling, still a deal!), snipped the leather clasp in two, and used the rivets and a part of the old case to extend it just far enough to close around the Nokia. It was my first time riveting something. I really enjoyed it, and said so. Belle rolled her eyes at me.

To some extent, I can understand where she's coming from, since I've been there myself. My family also tends to be hands-on, which makes me suspect that it may be an inherited (or at least acquired) trait, and it's certainly a lot less fun to be involved in someone else's tinkering. Which is not to say that it holds no rewards: my dad recently sold one of his kayaks, and the buyer specifically requested the one with the nose art.

My goal lately has not been to eliminate tinkering, but to make sure it's channeled in productive directions. For example, one of my regular projects has been upgrading the video drivers on my laptop--I'm always seduced by the thought of a few more frames per second, or a slightly-smoother game of Team Fortress 2. Invariably, this has become a mistake: while the early Lenovo drivers might have been a bit buggy, at this point they've pretty much caught up to the hacked releases, and all I get for my trouble is a long night of restoring backups and rebooting. Better just to leave it alone, or at least find less tedious things to disrupt.

The nice thing about digital tinkering, as opposed to the home infrastructure kind, is that there are ways nowadays to make sure that all you lose is time. That's part of the reason I love mobile platforms and virtual machines: in both cases, mess something up and all you've lost is less than an hour, most of which is just restoring from the default image. If only there were a way to say the same for our apartment, since then I wouldn't have a large packet of rivets, a Dremel tool, a box of half-disassembled guitar pedals, and several yards of unused vinyl lying around.

Or maybe I just need the right project for them. Any ideas?

I've never particularly cared for Kevin Kelly, but the man's outdone himself this time. In a post quoted at Global Guerrillas, he writes that "we are all collapsitarians these days" because progress is boring, so we all secretly hope that the civilization will break down.

Yeah. Wait, what?

There are two kinds of really stupid reasoning going on here. The first is that he opens the post with a chart of Google Trends for "collapse" and "depression," both of which have spiked since mid-2007. Friedman-like, Kelly reads a lot into the word "collapse," a trend which could be more simply explained by the financial markets, you know, collapsing, and the fact that there's only so many ways that journalists can describe a market breakdown before they start to hit the more obscure parts of the thesaurus. It doesn't mean that the world's population suddenly became infatuated with dystopia. But then, you don't get a reputation as a tech visionary by using common sense.

Hence Kelly's second mistake, in which he decides that these brand-new "collapsitarians" come in six varieties, including luddites, anti-globalists, and conservationists. I say that these are brand-new, because Kelly writes that their existence is "surprising." Why it's surprising, I have no idea. None of the ideologies named began in mid-2007. None of them have been particularly altered by the financial crash, although I imagine the anti-globalization crowd is feeling pretty smug. Why is it surprising? Particularly to Kelly, a person who has been (according to Paula Borsook's Cyberselfish) a pretty hard-core Christian, the existence of apocalyptic or end-times movements should be familiar, historically if not personally. Does the Great Awakening ring any bells?

Now, you may ask why we need to worry about Kelly, who to the outside observer just looks like another geek with odd-looking facial hair (seriously: his headshot seems to have been taking right before he went out to churn some butter, raise a barn, and perhaps sell some fine quilts to Pennsylvania tourists). But of course, as a former editor of Wired and a figure of some standing online (albeit much diminished), Kelly acts as a kind of weathervane for the flakier parts of Internet culture. While those with a healthier viewpoint have begun to think multi-generationally, Kelly represents the people for whom a future without shiny jetpacks and nanotech is unbearably boring. This outlook is one of dangerous extremism that we can't afford.

In many ways, we've already moved beyond our previously-imagined futures. I remember reading William Gibson's Virtual Light in high school, which includes a passage about trucks running on cooking oil that smell like fried chicken, and thinking "Huh. That'd be pretty wild." This weekend I went back to my university for a forensics reunion and ate at a brand-new cafeteria, where all the cooking oil is recycled into bio-diesel. That may not be jetpacks, but how can you say it's not fascinating? What kind of person can look at the dilemmas we face, as well as the solutions we're creating, and not be excited--indeed, who would look forward to destruction instead of inspiration?

"Collapsitarianism" is, at its most basic, a kind of tantrum: you didn't get exactly what you wanted, so you'd rather tear it all down. I'm sorry that you picked the wrong future, guys. But the sign of an actual adult is that they recognize when circumstances have changed, and adapt to them. The process of solving ecological and social problems is going to be very exciting. There's going to be plenty of wizardry to go around without crying that the world looks more like Herbert than Heinlein.

Perhaps the root problem is that we continue to make a distinction between present and future, as if there were a solid break between the two. There's not, of course. The future is just an extension of where we are now. Ironically, this is part of the point of the Long Now Foundation, on which board Kelly sits. But where the Long Now decries a culture in which "people in 1996 actually refer to the year 2000 as 'the future'", I think we should close the gap tighter. We need to get used to the idea of the future as connected and intertwined with modern times--we already live in the future, in other words. By placing ourselves on the arc of history, instead of imagining it vaguely in front of us, it's easier to spur ourselves to action. It certainly beats waiting for the collapse.