People used to make things

Ron Chernow in today's New York Times picks up what I hope will be a defining theme for the coming Obama administration. Getting back to making stuff again.

The Design Service Manifesto

The recent sturm und drang on wall Street and throughout the economy point to the fact that we are at an inflection point -- the point at which society's notions of what to do and how to do it are no longer adequate for this issues we face. Of course this isn't a new concern, but the degree to which the existing financial capitalism/lawyer capitalism model had ruptured; how the system's lack of integrity has been exposed; has been quite dramatic.

I reflect on the fact that only at the begining of my worklife was I involved with a venture that made something. That company made loose leaf binders. I didn't have anything to do with the actually making of the binders; I was the "information systems guy" and I facilitated the making of them; the scheduliong, costing, and overall management of the system. But that was the last time I had anything to do with making things -- my work has been to facilitate the movement of bits in the ether, or the pushing around of air molecules. It's not bad, or wrong, but it is ethereal. And certainly while that ethereality is part-and-parcel of functioning in the new millenium, there is, for me, a sense of simething missing. And inability yo point to any thing that is my legacy. Somehow this experience is out of line with my nature; I'm discomforted by it -- I'm called to make something, and then I bemoan the fact that i don't know what to make, and more despairingly, I don't know how to make anything.

Resolving this paradox, this sense of not knowing how to make things, is step one in delving into the design service society. Because designing is making.

Electioneering, Part I

I paid almost no attention to the 2000 election. I suppose I wrote Shrub off as a joke; I remember thinking "How stupid and desperate are the Republicans that they had to settle for this clown?"
I wasn't passionate about Gore and Lieberman further dampened any trailing enthusiasm I might have had. I recall the time now as being very busy with work and not having a lot of interest.
Then watching the election returns, when one of the networks called Florida for Gore, I saw a name and a face I'd never encountered: one Joe Allbaugh. He was on screaming "no way, we won Florida, we won Florida." I found his air of certainty puzzling and at a deep intuitive level I had the thought "the fix is in."
On 12/12/2000, I watched breathless reporters on the Supreme Court steps at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday reading the court ruling aloud, trying to parse it. When it was concluded that the Florida certification would stand, I had that same deep intuitive sense "we're in for 40 years of this shit/" The architecture of the "permanent majority" had been cemented in place.
The lesson, I suppose, is that I won't let myself be so unconscious again.