I broke my glasses yesterday, it was one of the last remaining items from the RTW trip in 2006.
But, that’s just a convenient pun.
At Coffee Bar today, there were three separate conversations about coding, design and consumer web technology in general. One was an interview with one guy exclaiming that he’s a ‘super coder’.
At a sushi bar the other day, two young guys next to me were talking about their web project to make something 'real-time’.
Friday, my barber dropped that her boyfriend was a UI designer working for Wells Fargo and how 'hard it was to please the biz guys’.
The Bay is teeming with conversations about technology, rightfully so. And I’m tired of the buzz, the circle jerk, the incessant clatter of fads and comments and jargon.
I’m not tired of technology and it’s usefulness. I’m a bit worn out by the constant talk of widgets, apps, social advertising, market share, social graphs, UGC, who bought who, I was talking to so-and-so and didya know she-used-to-be-part-of-xyz’s?
The technology world, as with everything else, is divided between people who lead and follow, create and adapt, build and disassemble, imagine and replicate. There are few people in the Silicon Valley world who truly can bottle the sparks that shine a light on what people are actually doing (and thinking). Where are the explorers, the discoverers, the tinkerers – the brilliant minds who resist the urge to run with the herd towards the next fad, who find novel ideas in the everyday, from their reflections instead of reactions, who desire to make sense of humanity’s data and knowledge and use it to making things fucking awesome?
On the other hand, it’s easy to rely on the buzzwords of acquisition, gains-loss, valuation, brand, demand, or priorities to justify a lack of imagination.
What happened to, “Wouldn’t it be cool?” (Followed shortly by, “Fuck yeah!”)
(To be fair, it’s easier to be awesome without scale. But small is good. Smallness is valuable.)
I’ve had the pleasure of working with two brilliant minds in the past: George and Aaron. The similarity is that, unlike most of the derivative talkers in this ecosystem, they sense the improbable and the universal nature of the mundane. Observational genius is the ability to make the mental leap from reality to metaphor and back to reality again. And these guys have 'it’. I love George’s post on Here be Dragons and Aaron’s succinct thought on buckets (which translates to his work on sculpture in possibility spaces and shapefiles).
My hope is that the power of ideas can still resonate - can still invoke the spectacle and the miraculous and the awesome at the risk of being drowned out by the rattle and hum of the herd.
Go forward, inspire, and create, ye brilliant minds.