Simplified guidelines
If we want humanist information technology, we have to build it. But: how do you build in a positive-form vacuum? We keep telling each other what not to do, and leave figuring out some good patterns to ephemerality.
For many people, it's far easier to springboard off of something that's not quite there for your specific use case, than it is to fill in a blank page. For those, I'll have a growing cadre of designed concepts.
For people who enjoy the potential of blank pages, but need a better framework than what-not-to-do, I have these guidelines as a starting point. If you want to really get into the gnarly complexity of it all, dive into information abstractions.
Underneath these guidelines are complexities and paradoxes that are not always easy to balance. So far, we’ve done a bad job at it. My hope and why I'm building this information trove: with articulation and examples, we’ll start doing better.
Acknowledge and plan for assholes
Everyone is an asshole periodically. Some of us make a habit out of it. Some of us have it so bad they can’t imagine a world where they don’t manipulate and use people.
The only effective way to deal with an asshole is to remove yourself from their sphere of influence. We have to be able to turn off the assholes.
Don't be the asshole
Find someone deeply different from you. Ask for the data like it’s been set up, verbally send them through the flow, and see what happens. Only get confusion? redesign. Feel like an asshole? redesign. Get some stink eye? redesign. Get told off? question everything, including domain/context assumptions.
Design information for people as unknown, emergent entities (orientation)
You, reading this right now, grew up on the moons of Europa as a fluid-gendered, violet-skinned xygarg and developed mastery in ephemology and tattiology. If you do not fit this: who are you to even think to exist.
Yeah. That’s what our systems say all the time, except with a different presupposition. To stop that, we need to build in ways to smudge the binary in how people can put in information. It's not just governed/ungoverned data, but mixed, with feedback and ongoing research.
Maintain understood data with honesty (findability)
People are creative in their problem solving. Our creativity is hindered by SEO-focused metadata intended to capture near-miss sales and backend systems that have been pre-smudged as lucrative bets.
People will find other ways to manage if the tools break. This smudging is breaking the mirroring of reality in digital information. If digital information is broken, people can (and are) going back to real world, where they don't have to deal with constant cognitive dissonance.
Build systems that enable people to smudge the binary themselves (navigation)
We can use existing, robust technologies with some extra connections and code to put the smudge in front-facing control. People will come up with combinations we can't imagine, and that's good because we have no idea what the next labubu might be or how someone might go about searching for the making of it.
Smudge that binary, lovey. Smudge it.
Wants abound, but we’ve got to balance taking with the sweet, sweet mango
I want to believe that “plan for assholes” would cover this, but: we’re all an asshole periodically. The most likely spot to forget our personal assholery is wanting what someone else is currently enjoying.
Sometimes that sweet, sweet mango is as simple as picking your own mango; taking is just a reach and grab to no foul. Sometimes that sweet, sweet mango is blocked from you; someone has pre-taken it, even if it's just sitting there, lonely and unenjoyed. Sometimes you know you’re allergic to the sweet, sweet mango but are having complex feelings around seeing someone else enjoying it so well; you want to take for the sake of taking. It’s hard to recount all the ways “I want” can be misapplied in the process of enjoying sweet, sweet mango.
The whole spectrum is something we have to acknowledge and develop ways of dealing with.
Tools are for everyone
Information technology took a wrong turn. It started thinking that it was a tool to bend people, to use people, and otherwise impress a top-down hierarchy on people without ever having to acknowledge the pains inflicted.
Bad decision makers forged bad lumps of metal, improperly labeled.
It’s time to make it a tool again, for every single person.
Humanity is emerging, not fighting for ascendancy on a hill of the bones of vanquished enemies and the refuse of soylent green. We’re figuring out the still-inexplicable cosmos, while surviving it.
We're all in this together
It’s a warning, a curse, and the best fucking luck ever.
Every system built that uses people; that forces adhesion to someone’s will or ideology; that weights the conversations and information passed to only what fits the logic of a pre-decided outcome: is a failure.
It’s a failure of figuring out how to manage complexity. It’s a failure to understand that diversity is healthy, and sets humanity up to survive a multitude of potential futures. It’s a failure of imagination, to find an intrinsic brittleness in a system before it causes massive harm. It’s a failure of strength, to acknowledge that one person cannot know everything, and that we are stronger together.
To build the future together takes only a few — but very difficult — things. Aim towards information literacy and good information architecture, to be able to plumb the inexplicable and try to make sense. Aim towards resiliency. Aim towards all the diversities, in all the facets, to be able to roll with the unimaginable.