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tl;dr: Both talking and listening can be beneficial to others. When we assume that listeners are always sacrificing for speakers, this causes problems. ~and~ The definitions of "care work", "self-care", and "emotional labor" have drifted to transform replenishing experiences into depleting "labor".

1. The Medicalization Framework

I recently spent some time with a therapist friend. She told of a tendency for many in her life to unload their woundedness onto her, presumably because she gets paid for that in her job, doing care work. She had reached the limit of her toleration for this. She wanted to be listened to, and spend time with someone who would not talk very much and would mostly listen and make her feel heard.

I told her I share her frustrations, and I was willing to mostly agree to her request, up to a point. The times when I did most of the talking, I experienced it as her making me carry the whole conversation. I offered to try to coax more out of her. But I brought my own proposed solution, if she is willing to listen and possibly agree to a compromise.

You see, her proposed solution preserves the reference frame which contributes to the problem.

I've noticed our social circles have an increasingly common tendency to re-frame every human interaction into the reference frame of care work. Emotional labor. If every interaction is interpreted as labor, it's no wonder there's so much exhaustion. Care work is useful, important, and often under-valued, but there are entire social spheres in which it drowns out all other values. I suggested that is what has befallen both of us in our social circles.

A medicalization framework habitually assumes that anyone who is speaking is benefiting from feeling heard, and that anyone listening is burdened and paying a cost. All replenishing activities are intepreted as self-care, care work, or emotional labor. When this interpretation is a reflexive habit, it transforms every positive experience, or every positive interaction, into the following spiral:

taking turns burdening each other
depletion
counting nickels and dimes of who spent more time speaking or listening
resentment
broken relationships

If (and this is a big "if") active listening is leaned on as the only or main source of regenerative fuel, to the neglect of other sources, I suspect it depletes faster than it replenishes. It's not a wrong form of fuel, it's just lacking something else. I suggested that she flip the script: ask others to provide value to her by speaking, and to be open to her own benefit as a listener. I suggested that when she speaks to others, to look to provide benefits other than feeling heard. Benefits such as:

wonderment or "sensawunda"
curiosity
humor
playfulness
enjoyment
creativity, which loops back to wonderment and kicks off the cycle again.

There are two main ways for others to be interested in you. One way is if they practice active listening, as my therapist friend wanted. The other way is to take the initiative to be interesting. That requires that you sometimes think of talking as providing benefit and listening as receiving benefit, not always the other way around. So we agreed to use both frameworks, and the rest of the evening was great.

2. How the Medical "ization" Framework Sets In

Some of your traits are not in your control. They are neurologically wired, or involve the production of chemicals which are untreatable. This is the area of things that are medical, not medical "ized".

You also have other traits which are your mental and emotional habits. These habits serve as a perceptual filter with which you interpret what you see according to your expectations, from the script of your past experiences. Keep yourself open to the idea that some of your traits might fall into the latter category.

Suppose you start from the flat fact that you have some conditions that are medical. And suppose from there you begin to perceive all (not some) of your own traits as permanent and unchangeable. Or view the constant undesired changes to your personality as only and always outside of your control.

In the final stage of the medicalization process, you view your changelessness as a fixed identity for which you desire validation.

At each step, you become less and less alive to the possibility of personal growth. You have become medicalized, but in a more important sense, medicalization has become you. If the medicalization framework of explanation and prediction sets in hard enough, it becomes hermetically-sealed, and you can reinterpret any disconfirming evidence to fit the schema.

3. The Replenishment Framework

I recently started a meetup in Detroit for readers of Scott Alexander's Substack blog, Astral Codex Ten (formerly the blog Slate Star Codex). We had a debate coach, two college philosophy majors, and three software developers who discussed our obscure hobbies. There was abundant wonderment, curiosity, humor, playfulness, enjoyment, and creativity. There was an eagerness to contribute by talking when appropriate. Those who are in that framework tend to interrupt each other constantly. Within the medicalized framework of labor, that sounds exhausting and selfish. It's true that it would be good to get a balance between these two frameworks, but we didn't experience it as work. We had a great time, and repeat attendance is high so far.

I'm grateful that such an environment was easy for me to find from about 2003 to about 2014 or 2015.

We seemed to share an internal locus of control. Instead of waiting to first feel welcomed by others, we did and said things that others would welcome. Then, if need be, I could have reminded myself of the external referent of my welcome, outside of my own head: I had done something to be welcomed for.

The real locus of control is always both inside and outside to some degree, although it differs for each person. When the locus of control is fully external, you will believe you are unwelcome and unheard, as a default condition, unless others try to drag your participation out of you. If you frame it as labor that others need to first do to solicit you to participate, that makes it harder and less likely that you'll get it. I look forward to spending time with you! Unless your medicalization makes it into labor.

4. The Concept-Drift Of Emotional Labor

Emotional labor has multiple common definitions. Arlie Hochschild, who coined the term, meant it to mean an employer pays you, in part, for emotions you do or don't express.

From the early 2000's until about 2014, the online Geek Feminism movement brought fresh attention to unreasonable expectations on women. They used "emotional labor" to mean work that is not paid, and is done for reasons of emotional bonds. Most of the examples typically given involve spending time and effort to work with one's hands regardless of the expression of emotion in one's voice and face. This inverts the original definition, but the critique was important and needed a name.

In the past decade, during the rise of medicalization, emotional labor came to be commonly used to mean "having to feel my own feelings", or even just, "if I listen to other people speak about something other than me, they are forcing me to labor for them." I commonly encounter the view, "a speaker must ask permission before raising any conversational topic other than the listener's woundedness, or it is a consent violation."

This is called critique drift.

There are already plenty of reasons to feel exhausted, without also discounting every richness and intimacy which constitutes the warp and woof of life, re-framing it as a form of depleting "labor".

A paradox: The weaker we are, the less capable we are of showing up for others; but the weaker we become, the more social clout we receive from sympathy, with which to justify our demands for others to show up for us. And yet, others have the same perverse incentive to present their self as too weak to show up for us. As a result, I often see my acquaintances get into winner-takes-all sympathy competitions.

5. The Medicalization Of All Experiences

In a culture of extreme medicalization, every person is assumed to need, and benefit from, therapy (see the memes about "men will literally do X instead of going to therapy"). And so every interaction is assumed to be an expenditure of emotional labor. A burden. Every human experience is medicalized, both positive and negative. All positive experiences are medicalized as self-care, or care work.

When there is any negative interaction, the community will diagnose both the harmed and the harm-doer with a pathology. Terms like "narcissist", "sociopath", "ADHD", "autism", and "trauma" have clear professional definitions. But medicalization re-defines most dissatisfactions with others with the terms narcissist, sociopath, psychopath, Dark Triad, (as we see in an infinite number of questions about them on Quora). And it re-defines any and all dissatisfactions with one's self with the terms trauma, ADHD, and autism.

All of those are real and important things. Medicalization mis-appropriates them as umbrella terms with vagueness of specifics but vastness of implication. If you don't do that, then I'm not talking about you.

The harm-doer (a term of art commonly used in the medicalization culture) is reframed as a victim: their misconduct is reframed as a medicalized disease which victimizes them. This feels good as another opportunity to express sympathy. It is a way to avoid falling back on blame and shame, but brings even more under medicalization's purview.

Under this framing, both the harm-doer and the harmed person are seen as not needing to change, because their dissatisfactions with themselves are done to them, passively, by an emotional disease before which they are helpless, lacking agency over their own stances, words, and actions. Self-improvement is increasingly seen as impossible, and the social context would not reward it with sympathy. It is very emotionally-rewarding to accomplish things we like, and prevent the things we don't like. But disempowerment trains the brain to get rewards from failing and sympathizing with one's self.

That works like a poverty trap. This trap is insidious because it's telling you something that is often true: much of the time, it really is too hard, and it really is someone else's fault. That's why the trap works so well.

Medicalization, when it becomes a worldview, crowds out the openness to experience which would expose the limits of the worldview. When you want nothing to happen to you, watch out. You just might get it. And then nothing will happen to you.

6. Further Materials Toward A Theory Of The Trauma Queen

In "The Coddling Of The American Mind", Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt name this "safetyism". Lukianoff and Haidt describe the effects of safetyism on formal institutions which we all depend on. What I have said here is the spearhead in informal or less-formal groups, such as hacker spaces, druid groves, science fiction conventions, local Burning Man events, open source software projects, Mastodon or Discord servers, board game and role playing groups ("We are not therapists: gaming and trauma.").

And, to a certain extent, the disastrous polyamory meetup group whose downfall I chronicled in detail in my last post shared some assumptions and norms of medicalization. It devolved into a... it doesn't rise to the level of a "cult"... let's say "high-control group".

I've been surrounded by an unusually high degree of medicalization in my social environment. I wrote a thousand words on why that is happening in the world, involving code, laws, markets, and social norms. But I'll save that to a file and leave it for another day. For now, I'm going to look harder at whether my own life decisions have filtered those who are around me-- my life centers on informal groups such as those I listed above. It's probably not a coincidence that I see this happen so often.

Two decades ago, I rejected an ideology, and left behind almost everyone I knew and started over, resulting in tremendous wonderment, curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creativity. I think then I got complacent and tried to make my social surrounds into something that would last. Something that would not change out from under me. The old societal undertow has reemerged in a fresh form, an inevitable ebb and flow described in The Stifling Air Of Rigid Radicalism, an excerpt from "Joyful Militancy".

if you are part of my ennervated and self-infantilized social environments and projects, I'm not saying it's up to you to change that. It could be that there are emerging new social waves to surf, and it's up to me to catch them again.

I may not have control over society, but I do have control over which social environments I create, join, and maintain, and the replenishing energy of aliveness that I bring to them, and with it, all the unsafety of living life.

No matter how useful and beneficial something is, it can be done wrong. I'm not saying it's always bad. It's just done right some times and wrong other times. When we conceive of ourselves as belonging to the hero team and fighting the villains team in a superhero movie, it becomes impossible to conceive of any way that is doing it wrong. Hold that in mind.

If you bounce off of this blog post quickly, or if you assume bad faith, at the very least please read "The Stifling Air Of Rigid Radicalism", an excerpt from the book Joyful Militancy by two radicals. It's an excellent book.

For years, communities have had to deal with emotionally-reactive members who were there to antagonize other members. This was relatively easy when we were insisting to free-speech extremists on the right wing that we require much better emotional regulation from them. It's become harder now that it's disenfranchised demographics exhibiting much the same attitudes and personality disorders. (It's important to understand that almost no members of under-privileged groups indulge in this. But it only takes a few, for reasons I'll get into. And the majority of the time, it's someone else attempting to act on their behalf.)

If I had a time machine to go back in time a few years, and tell myself this story, past-me would have assumed I was hearing a dumb and emotionally-activated right-winger describe their paranoid delusional caricature of activists. So I get what you're probably thinking. If you're like me, you're skeptical. That's why I've waited so long to write this story. I don't know what else to tell you. The caricature is coming true, making it difficult to hold people together.

Part I.

Since 2016, many of the most active leaders of my local polyamory group in Detroit rebranded themselves Relationship Anarchists, and redefined "Polyamory" to mean every bad thing that anyone labeling themselves polyamorous had ever done to them. All the parts they approved of were defined as belonging, fully and only, within their re-branded term for themselves.

They became seized by extreme conviction. They began Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion meetups which I attended and found very interesting, although the events did not succeed in their goals.

The central tenet, repeatedly emphasized at their Relationship Anarchy meetups, was that their intimate relationships in the home were filtered through the lens of a zeal for identitarian justice in the world. In seeking to "de-colonize one's own mind", they redefined "the personal is political" to reduce the political to the merely psychological.

Selecting the right label for the group took on heightened significance-- since the desired purpose of their label was to provoke confrontation, they debated the various ways clueless newbie polyamorists, who they wanted to antagonize, might misinterpret various labels to sustain their privileged comfort. They started debating whether to reject the term Relationship Anarchist ("RA") in favor of the term "Political Relater". After the rebranding cycle repeated often enough, I said maybe finding the right label is not actually a solution for their dissatisfactions.

I attended their first annual convention, RAD (Relationship Anarchy Discussions). Attendees were required to be in general agreement with a list of resources provided by the unconference. The list was roughly 134 different Tumblr posts and manifestos that often contradicted each other. Many were not really "ideas"; years later I realized these were more like slam poetry. I tried to pick out a structure of justifications from this mess, to model in my mind what would qualify me in the minds of the founders. Which criteria was really being applied privately in the minds of the four people who approved attendance applications? I wanted to go to them and just ask. But they didn't have the energy to talk to people. Sometimes they called that energy "spoons". A process of back and forth discussion would have been really constructive to ensure I was not attending wrongly. Instead, there was a form. And in this form, they asked questions that omitted what I regarded as the most likely and relevant potential points of conflict between us. I wanted to just put my cards on the table, and prevent them from having a bad experience at the unconference itself. But they didn't have enough "emotional labor" for that.

The unconference paid two medical personnel to be there. The application process had made it clear that attendees were on notice to avoid any appearance of doctrinal impurity; and yet, the indomitable spirit of a community of ungovernable anarchists was apparently no substitute for marketable skills under capitalism, possessed by these two white men, who we were there to get paid. I did not ever hear this remarked upon.

The unconference was almost entirely wishful thinking. We got to hear from one person who was living out the Relationship Anarchist dream, in a remote commune for homosexuals with no electricity or plumbing, who had all fled the violence that had been committed against them in the wider world. We learned from him that everyone there was constantly suicidal, they barely could tolerate each other, and there were constant fights. The speaker had to be coaxed into speaking at all, and seemed miserable and expressed no interest in wanting any of us to suffer the same fate.

In the final session, I asked to discuss the criteria the organizers had used to determine who was in this room and who was not, and ask the group if it matched up with the overall will of the group, in case most of us were just silently compliant. But the organizers said they did not have enough energy for that. In retrospect, I should have said they are at liberty to leave the room, and the rest of the group was at liberty to discuss whatever we wish to discover the group's goals. Wouldn't that be an expression of the leaderlessness to which we supposedly aspired?

The organizers wrapped the walls with a large sheet of paper, and invited the group to write every problem in the world. (Except the power they were exercising in that room.) Then they laid the paper out and asked the group how to solve ... *gestures* ... all of this. But... without power. Anarchism is not supposed to take power. Somehow, if they changed the world, that would not count as power? And anyway, power is energy, and energy is spoons, and using their own spoons wouldn't be fair. Instead of ideas, they had a lot of feelings, and they made each other feel heard. Perhaps if they were mad enough, other people would change the world.

When you are responsible for everything, you are not held responsible for any specific thing in particular.

After the convention, they went on to abandon publicly-accessible meetups, to form what is effectively a queer separatism commune in one of the organizers' homes. They named it "The Compound". God, I sound delusional. There is no way to describe Qanon and their Woke edgelord counterparts without sounding like one is making up things to be mean. They even have a Patreon for The Compound.

The rest of us have been rebuilding the normal polyamory meetups over time.

Part II.

It was not long before I was invited to a Zoom call, with about a half-dozen people within the Relationship Anarchy group. They described having experienced power dynamics and status slaps. (The founders of the group were among the accused. They were invited, but were not present.) I asked if I could record the meeting and make an automated transcript, which I have put in my Roam Research graph.

The discussion brought to light a lot of power dynamics. You only belonged in the group if you turn most conversations of any importance into confrontation and shame. This was done with a smile, to create plausible deniability for the passive-aggression; look at their YouTube channel and decide for yourself. If confrontation is the point of the group, why be surprised when it breaks down in acrimony? After all, the only people remaining there to be educated are each other, right? This phenomenon is so common in activist spaces that it has a name: Picking Out The Villain Of The Day.

What I saw in the group was a constant need for ever-greater measures to prove to the group that which could never finally be settled, as if one owed a societal debt, but nothing one can do will ever reduce the balance on the debt.

My own comments in the meeting were not about subtle power; they mostly concerned explicit power, as it was expressed in the RAD (Relationship Anarchy Discussions) by who was allowed to attend the annual conference and what was allowed to be posted to the Facebook group. There was no transparency around that power, and I thought it should be guided by the actual will of the group rather than the group's four self-appointed leaders.

Moments before the meeting ended, it was revealed that the meeting had not been about the annual conference or the Facebook group. Bewildered, I expressed confusion about which organization this meeting was about. In conversations afterward, it was revealed that as anarchists, they did not value organization, most of them had already left RAD, and my redesigns to rules for the conference and Facebook group were inapplicable, and moot. I realized the organization had already dissolved, and the meeting was about buddies who hang out. I finally realized Relationship Anarchy Discussions had been intended more like a form of slam poetry or dream journals. I had mistaken it for ideas about having an effect on the world.

Part III.

We see emerging, a greater awareness of the important concept of intersectionality. With it, we have also seen the rise of a simplistic misunderstanding of intersectionality, as a way to perform multi-directional status slaps and power games. This dynamic is now playing out in houses of worship, classrooms, activity groups, conventions, discussion groups, local spinoffs of Burning Man, and anywhere else where new social norms lead inevitably to constant acrimony. When not kept in check, it leads most of these groups into a revolving door of constant splitting and collapse. In the past several years, most online social groups I am involved with have developed the following unsustainable and self-defeating norms:

Redefine societal change on the world stage, to mean which buddies in the friends group get invited for parties or are shunned.
"The personal is political" is misunderstood to mean that if you don't give your friends their way, especially in terms of their feelings, it is vaguely associated with the genocide of their identity group.
Standpoint theory. If you are not a member of an underclass, you lack standing to speak about any statement about it, no matter how incoherent.
If someone makes a demand, or makes it on behalf of a less-privileged person who is not making the demand, do not ask how the demand would lead to justice outcomes. If someone asks that question, take it as evidence of opposition to the cause, or insufficient zeal. This is a double-bind in which, either you admit you are incapable of perceiving reality for yourself and need someone to take over your choices, or, by rejecting the demand, you prove that you can't perceive reality yourself, and need someone to take over your choices.
A feeling or expression of grief or outrage amounts to doing something about justice.
Effect matters, but intent does not matter at all. Therefore, any person's finances, time, or health may take second-place to hurt feelings, by escalating one's own feelings of hurt to get one's way.
Base your interpretation of your observations on your first emotional impulse. If you observe that someone disagrees with your interpretation-- especially your interpretation about them-- believe your first emotional impulse of suspicion. They must have sinister motives to undermine your ability to perceive reality, known as "gaslighting". (They can apply this to you in reverse. This accounts for mutual accusations of gaslighting.)
The social group exists for one reason: to commisserate and offer support. That's the only thing anyone should be there for. "No advice, please." Therefore, offer unqualified support with no discernment. As a result, you believe the first person who gets up to a microphone. Your sympathies might reverse if you find out more later, but you get to feel good by holding space and making someone feel heard, and that's all that matters.
Interpret "uncomfortable" as "unsafe". Safety from physical violence over-rules any other consideration, and the appropriate response to physical violence is to control others. Conflating comfort with safety means that anything you want over-rules anything another person wants.

Part IV.

Imagine if we could wave a magic wand, and get a trade-off. The magic wand would remove most congeniality and bonhomie from our own social spaces; conflicts get more intractable rather than less; it's predominated by pissing matches and personality disorders; and we burn out our organizers. Imagine that the same magic wand would eliminate redlining, job discrimination, police violence, environmentally unhealthy housing, and other worthy non-feelings objectives. Imagine also that the magic wand would raise the median income, median wealth, average lifespan, incarceration rates, home-ownership rates, and access to health care, of all marginalized people.

It would be a worthwhile trade-off, right? Certainly.

It does none of those things.

None of those important things are at stake in the argument in the online space. The only effect it can have is who likes who.

I want groups to reach some kind of equilibrium, even if it doesn't favor me, or actively works against me. But do you see such an equilibrium emerging? It's not. The social norms I listed above don't remove privileged people. They don't even reduce our power. Those norms just get exploited, leaving the marginalized people in the community even less coordinated in solidarity than they were before.

Part IV.

I wish the above story were the only one of its kind I could tell.

There are almost no members of under-privileged groups who get a power trip from dominance tactics. Mostly it's their self-appointed representatives. The few-- the very, very few-- who enjoy doing that have ever-increasing influence.

More and more of our communities give them approval to make any demand over any behavior for any reason, or no reason at all. Asking that such demand be justified with actual justice outcomes is a violation of a taboo which was never spelled out in the rules of the online group. Instead, one person has a "fight" response from "fight/flight/fawn", and someone else responds to that with a "fawn" response, and somehow that is considered justice, socially.

No matter how many advantages are unfairly given to me in courtrooms and hiring interview rooms, that's not the balance of power in the online conversation space. Filling the room you are in with demands for subordination and silence does nothing but encourage a very few cynical opportunists to show off how much power they can display. There is an inability by victims to recognize the power in the specific room they are in. It doesn't fit the narrative.

I have educated myself exhaustively for the better part of a decade on behavioral requests around micro-aggressions and which identities own which ideas and expressions. The views I read usually do not represent most of the people in the class they intend to help. For example, the vast majority of Black people, such as my neighbors here in Detroit, are far to the right of the average white leftist on race-related issues. Almost no Pacific Islanders call themselves "poly" and most of them don't identify with the term "Polynesia" which was invented by white people. But it doesn't matter. It became taboo to call one's self "poly", and fashionable to call one's self "polyam". It is nothing more than a way for a privileged people to show their compliance with shared social norms.

When you demand someone be quiet and listen, but after they have listened, it's clear what you say has no efficacy to make change in the world, they will be unconvinced. If they just decide to agree with you because you have standing to speak and they do not, even though they know perfectly well your behavioral request doesn't lead to progress, that's not an ally. You're demanding performativity. If you don't question yourself, and you demand no one else does either, don't be surprised when you're surrounded only with the performativity of compliance.

My years-long quest to educate myself led to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion speakers and writers who use only emotionally-loaded language that's sparse on details. So I dug for the details, for years. What I eventually found was mystical Jungian-shadow bodywork. Conveniently for this "work", it is so abstract that it can never be held accountable to produce any justice outcomes.What is the actual "doing the work"? Not self-improvement evasions like "understanding", "sitting with", "holding space", "making others feel heard". If I make you feel heard, but nothing changes, that's just manipulating you. As Socko the sockpuppet said in Bo Burnham's Netflix special "Inside", one's own self-actualization doesn't change anything. OK, Socko, then what? Nothing. Socko has no solution. Eventually I had to admit it's because no one has a solution. And if those affected by the problems have no solution, and I search for years for a solution, eventually I have to admit you don't want your problems to stop. You want to feel heard. Remember? "No advice, please."

What Socko actually gets, instead of justice, is vocabulary, identity symbols, and empty symbolic gestures of belonging. We should recognize each other at the bottom of the same gladiator pit, but instead, we dig a hole in the bottom of the gladiator pit, and try to throw each other in, and feel-- for one small moment-- as though we are in the stands.

Populations everywhere have a lot in common. You cannot understand the redness of this November's election results unless you understand the parallels between the culture of America and cultures in the Middle East. You cannot force democracy on those who prefer autocracy. Neither can you force democracy on Americans who prefer the American equivalent of the Taliban. The terrorists and autocrats and supporters in other nations, and the terrorists and autocrats and supporters in our culture, differ in wealth, and in the level of their privilege and safety, but otherwise are identical in motivations and style of thinking and feeling.

I have been saying this for years. I was raised among them. This is not new.

The American Confederacy, and the American cultures that descended from it, can be understood in the "moral foundations theory" of Jonathan Haidt. You and I have two moral foundations:

1. fairness.

2. harm-prevention.

The Taliban and the modern Confederates have five moral foundations, which include the first two, plus three more:

3. loyalty to an insider favoritism group, so outsiders are competitors and can get stuffed.

4. respect for a hierarchy which is supposedly a "natural order". Whites over blacks. Men over women. Predatory animals over prey animals (i.e. the philosophy of gun culture and rape culture).

5. sexual and dietary purity.

You probably didn't expect me to tell you that there are ways the Taliban and their American equivalents are in the right about something. And that one thing is: Institutions are increasingly failing to do their jobs due to corruption. Where you and I might insist on reforming institutions, they abandon them, and turn to close bonds, like family (nepotism) and their co-religionists. There is a level of "belief" at which they don't actually "believe" the weird religious doctrines and conspiracy theories they spout. They say something outrageous as a social signal of group membership. Not in spite of its obvious falsehood, but because they all know it's false, and it's so outrageous that the outsiders (you and me) would never believe it. I'll say that again-- they don't actually "believe" it in the way you and I understand "belief". The outrageousness is a feature, not a bug.

"Credo quia absurdum." "I believe because it is absurd."

I'll say it again. They know COVID is real, and the earth is round. They know the guy who they "caught changing the votes" was actually a cameraman loading a new data cartridge into his camera. They know votes don't go in cameras, and the people they're saying this to are not fooled either. They deny these things as a unified social group, in order to defy the rigged institutions. And make no mistake-- our institutions are, in point of fact, actually rigged in a way that screwed the middle class. They take it to an insane extreme, knowingly, because the insanity is a feature, not a bug. You and I still believe in institutions like electoral politics and science, as an alternative to making it even worse. Therefore, we would never say these insane things, which is how they detect us vs them. That's how they can find each other. And organize. And mobilize.
( Read more... )

Teleconference Transcript Of "Basic Income And Human Obsolescence"
Virtual Penguicon
Saturday, April 25
11am to 12pm

[This transcript is edited to remove requests for the audience to mute their microphones and dealing with technical issues.]

Supply And Demand

1. Demand is limited by having insufficient money to spend.
2. We have practically perfected the process of creating supply.
3. Wealth inequality supercharges supply, because capital investments are in automation.
4. Wealth inequality diminishes demand. (part 1)
Describing Wealth Inequality
Defining Basic Income
4. Wealth inequality diminishes demand. (part 2)
5. As a result, markets no longer serve their function.
6. Such failing markets have a distorting rather than correcting effect on setting the values for goods, services, and labor.
You Can't Convince Everyone And Don't Need To

The Middle Class

7. A strong middle class strengthens the economy.
8. The reason it does so, is that it drives consumer spending on goods and services.
9. An economy cannot be strong if consumer spending on goods and services is weak.

Q&A

Q&A: UBI Cost And Offsets
Q&A: Circular Flow Model
Q&A: How To Convince Others. "Tiger King People", The Public Image of Capital-P "People"
Q&A: Inflation
Follow-Up Teleconference In May

( Read More... )

The book "Non Violent Communication" describes going through three phases. The first is a phase of dependency and people-pleasing. Basically having weak boundaries.

So you enter the second phase, which is autonomous inflexibility. Up until that point you were a people-pleaser, so you got very little practice at figuring out the when and where and why to have boundaries. So now everything's just a boundary. You decide in isolation what that will look like, without communication, and declare it unilaterally. There's not much relating.

To be clear: if that's what you want to do, then do it. You're just not relating. And that's fine; you don't always want to relate to everyone, or at all times.

The inflexible phase feels insecure. Sometimes the act of asking another person what they want, feels threatening. Hearing them out, feels threatening like a surrender, like a violation.

This phase is a step up from people-pleasing, so be kind to yourself. Relating needs to take a back seat, while one weans one's self off of people-pleasing. The inflexible person is busy training themselves to not buckle to shame and fear.

As you gain practice at figuring out the when and where and why to choose your boundaries and compromises, you gradually enter the third phase. You go from dependence, to independence, to inter-dependence. It's oriented toward your own goals for compassion toward those who you have chosen. Not oriented around shame or fear. Oriented around your own goals for connection, and seeking out where that might overlap with another person's goals for connection.

Here's how that works. What you are doing is two negotiations. One is between your desires and the other person's desires. The other negotiation is between two drives within you, the drive for connection and the drive for autonomy.

I like to take this negotiation literally. I make deals with myself. The "characters" (my conflicting tendencies) are sitting at a negotiating table. I know they like each other, because I'm my own friend and I get along with myself. Sometimes I make mistakes, so I'm not quick to trust just one character and always distrust all the other characters. I roll my eyes at myself when one character gets on a tear, but come on man, this is your loved one you're talking about here, this is your SELF.

One character NEVER wants to go camping; he wants to spend that time recording podcasts. Another really wants to be close to the people who invited me to go camping, and has problems with procrastinating my podcasts. And you know what? I need both of them. So I make up a dialog where they are asking things from each other and striking deals, and hash out a compromise that works for all of them.

If you're seeing this on Mastodon, I set up If This Then That to automatically link to my new blog posts here.

Announcing Penguicon.social.

Mastodon is a social media platform. My first question was "Why another one?" You know how you have a network of endless different email servers, but they can all email each other? Mastodon is self-hosted exactly like that, for social media.

Penguicon operates our own Mastodon server, https://penguicon.social, funded by Penguicon, and run on our own internet infrastructure, which can interoperate with thousands of other social media servers. That network is called "The Fediverse", a re-de-centralized web with hundreds of thousands of active users, not just abandoned accounts. It's not someday; it's real, now. It finally reached critical mass in 2016. You can see a feed of recent activity.

There are no ads, because there is no profit-motive company, just friendly neighborhood admins like me. Instead of a distant and overworked moderation team, each server has mods who they trust to design and enforce their neighborhood's code of conduct and shut down organized harassment campaigns-- at the domain-blocking level, if necessary.

No one other than Penguicon can ever shut down penguicon.social. Its funding is not from ads, of which there are none. It's from our convention's registrations, which is why we give attendees and Guests Of Honor a free account. Even if the creator (who crowdfunds his income from his Patreon) quit developing it, we could just pick up the open-source project and carry on. This year, I plan to join the Mastodon Server Covenant, which guarantees we would never shut it down without giving you three months to click the Export button and move your personal activity (which you own) to one of the thousands of other Mastodon servers.

There is now a new Fediverse distributed alternative to Instagram called PixelFed, and one for YouTube called PeerTube-- all of which shows up right there in your Mastodon feed. The Fediverse is the re-de-centralized web. It does not need to succeed or fail on the eat-the-world-or-shut-down profit models of Silicon Valley. It's chugging along just fine.

I imagine how the conflict with tech giants will play out. Imagine ten years from now, if Google dominated Mastodon like it did to email with Gmail, setting up an instance which interoperates with the Fediverse protocol. But instead of Mastodon they would invent something probably called "gplusplus.social", which spies on traffic. We could still pick up and move to a different server, just like we do with email. We could even block their entire gplusplus.social domain to prevent privacy violations. Power would be in our hands.

If you have not attended Penguicon, you can search for other instances who are accepting signups. You could certainly communicate with penguicon.social accounts from one of those, if desired.

If you have attended Penguicon, we'll give you your doorway into the Fediverse!

I'm eager to contribute to re-de-centralizing the web! See you there!

What commonly causes the bonds of a social group to fly apart like a shattering flywheel? What causes a project's efforts to stagnate in rigidity and obsolescence?

I will pick a bicycling group as a random example of an activity group, although I have not been in that one specifically. Bike riders can be good and bad or have good or bad politics; and yet I live out my own specific values when organizing the group.

Some of them will say, "stop politicizing bicycle outings". And I respond that the personal is political, so it's always political anyway. Our bike group is daily life, and if I'm not going to practice right and wrong in daily life, then where should I? I decline to form a group in which the title contains "[The Name Of My Faction] Bicycling". I will universalize it as a "Bicycle Outing" group, because I normalize my ethics as applying to the whole world, and bicycling is part of the world.

The short-term payoff is going on bicycling outings, or whatever else the group is about. The long-term payoff is making the world have virtue and good politics. That happens one group at a time.

II.

There is a second type of group, centered around how to live. It is not centered around an activity, but only a movement. Nothing else provides the day-to-day motivation to show up.

But here's the thing about that form of social organization. All groups have an activity (a short-term payoff) or they dissipate. In a local branch of a movement, the participants will mostly get the short-term payoff of looking a certain way when the other group members are looking, and the short-term payoff of preaching to the choir and "gotcha-ing" each other. The only ones you can influence today, and feel good about it, are the ones who are already part of the movement and listening to you.

We will quickly lose all of the people willing to tolerate that environment. Those who continue showing up, consistently tend to make it look like this:

The doctrine of Original Sin: your badness is permanent and intrinsic because of your birth, not because of what you have done.
This leads to the owing of a debt to the group, which can never be repaid. Goodness must be constantly proved to the group, but can never be settled.
Living in a fishbowl. Performances attract audiences, and audiences attract performers.
Following certain rules, to demonstrate membership in the group, instead of following rules because of the benefits or harms that result from the rule.
Helping each other is re-framed as an obligation, which is depleting, where if it had been framed as an opportunity, it would have been replenishing.
Constant distrustful fault-finding. A fixation on our own (and each other's) problems, flaws, insufficiency, inadequacy.
Doctrinal purity enforced through vocabulary.
Intense shame.
Comparison and competition.
This leads to a stance of suspicion toward each other.
This instills and cultivates social anxiety in a feedback loop.
As a result, discussions contain less and less nuance or subtlety.
Using the word "unsafe" to mean "uncomfortable". Whatever you want is never more important than another person's "safety", and therefore, your confinement is less important than another's comfort.

This is why you see "church splits" in religious organizations-- a church is a movement group. It's why the Social Media wing of activism turns into a knife fight even more than other approaches to activism.

It is not inevitable for these tendencies to take hold in a movement, and many of them mostly succeed in resisting the pull. What I have found, is that whatever the goals of a group, the above tendencies will inhibit the creativity and experimentation crucial to radical social change. And the main way to accomplish experimental or creative goals-- whatever they may be-- is to resist the above tendencies.

For more reading on this, see "Joyful Militancy: The Stifling Air Of Rigid Radicalism", by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.

Polyamory-related blogs and online discussion groups are reposting the following paragraph:

Hey, can any polyamory blogs with a follower count please inform the palagi portion of the community that “poly” is a Polynesian community identifier, and is important to our safe spaces.

Using “polyamory” is cool just like using “polygender” and “Polyromantic” and or Polysexual” is cool. But the abbreviation “poly” is already in use.

"Palagi" means "foreigner". It is a word specific to Tonga/Samoa, not all of the Pacific Islands.

The post is from a Tumblr blog, "actuallypoly", which is now replaced with advertisements for sneakers. But the Wayback Machine has an archive of the page as it existed in 2015.

Farther down the page, one of the rebloggers immediately points out "Polynesian" is colonialist. A word invented by white people.

Almost all discussions in online polyamory spaces seem to have taken the following two approaches:

#1) White people getting defensive, or shaking their fists in defiance, toward other white people who are reblogging a claim about what non-white people want.

#2) White people capitulating to the approval of other white people, about what they claim non-white people want.

You can tell a lot about what someone's goal was, by paying attention to when they stop. For example, if your goal was to please your local polyamory community, but you don't care what Polynesians want, you are now done.

Then there is approach #3. So far, I only saw it happen once.

#3) White people expressing curiosity to other white people.

As it so happens, I have a surplus of spoons to spend on a few Google searches. I would like to reward curiosity as an alternative to defensiveness and one-upmanship. The problem arose from being out of touch with Polynesians, right? So I tried to find where these online safe spaces are, which the Tumblr post referred to.

All but two of the first page of search results for "poly polynesian" are debates between polyamorists. We have already colonized the searchability of this word. Apparently, the indigenous conversation which we were trying not to talk over is quieter than our conversation about quieting our own voices.

A search for the full term "polynesian", followed by the term "online communities" in quotes, reveals page after page of results that are not online communities for Polynesians, but included several other relevant items.

Here is a paper, "I define my own identity, Pacific articulations of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ on the internet", by Marianne I. Franklin of University of Amsterdam,The Netherlands, 2003.

The paper quotes comments from participants in Pacific Island-related forums in 2003. Quotes on pages 21, 27, 30, 31, 34, 40, 67 of the PDF use the abbreviation "poly". Some arguments are among self-described "Polynesians" defending the term as one they have reclaimed, and others arguing the term is a colonialist category, lumping together two recognizably different culture groups of the east and west islands.

The paper points to two online communities that existed when it was written in 2003. I visited them.

The latest 50 posts to the Facebook group "Kava Bowl Forum" were posted in 2018, not 2003. They contain no mention of "poly", the word "Polynesian", or identity concerns. What they talk about is an economic system rigged to exploit and disadvantage them.

Another thing revealed in the search was this Tumblr post. Someone from Hawaii chimed in to say the following. I will give them the last word.

"All right, so my family has never used the word Poly. We refer to ourselves by our cultures (Hawaiian, Samoan, etc…) however, this is just us personally. There are Polynesians who refer to themselves as Poly.

http://actuallypoly.tumblr.com/post/120001313953/the-abbreviation-poly-is-already-in-use

Here is a post from ActuallyPoly. It seems that the main issue is online use. They cannot tell who is Polynesian and who is not based on blog descriptions. The bigger issue is tagging, where those who are uncomfortable with polyamorous posts end up seeing them while searching things regarding their culture. Though they are mainly pointing out issues with online use, it does seem that they want a new term formed for conversational use as well. Unfortunately, at this point, I don’t think it will happen as polyamorous people have used the term poly for decades and now poly as referring to polyamory is more popular and understood by people than Poly is.

I think in conversation where there is a context, it’s fine. At this point, we realistically have to get used to sharing the term. The Greek word Poly does mean “many” and if it’s contextual we will know what you mean. If people make crude jokes about Poly people being poly, first off, stop that shit in its tracks cause there is nothing crude about polyamory, and second they are being little shits for willfully conflating a racial identifier with something they view as crude instead of asking for clarification, so cut them from your life."

Despite the ending of the video being a punchline, in all seriousness, there is something important here about how human beings create meaning and purpose from within. Do you have a second?

Watch on YouTube

Try to describe how you tie your shoelaces. Do not demonstrate; do not use visual aids. Use only words. I'll bet your instructions will make it look complicated.

If someone else sets up the board before you begin to play, and then demonstrates one round instead of teaching you the rules in advance, you will discover that playing Settlers Of Catan is easier than tying shoelaces.

The challenge shown in this video is not intellectual problem. It is one hundred percent a problem of emotion, motivation, and self-image.

Last night I played a game with someone who could not pay attention. Most of the mental energy that could have gone toward paying attention, instead went toward talking about one's own self-image as a "stupid" person.

It's not that they were stupid. It's that they were not interested. Intelligence is almost entirely a function of interest, and having a reason to do things.

Difficulty and purposelessness are not just facts about the task you are performing. They are also things that your brain is doing. Difficulty and purposelessness are intrinsic to every task you perform, at least to a small amount. This includes tasks you enjoy; but for those tasks, you actively participate. The task is "enjoyable", but you are the one doing the "enjoying." That's you. The degree of difficulty or purposelessness intrinsic in every task you perform, all day, every day, is made worse if you experience it as suffering.

As a child, I hated math. I spent hours of my childhood, daily, sitting in front of math homework, crying, and refusing to do it. This went on for weeks on end. I did not find the fun in it. I mostly spent my mental energy thinking about how I did not know the purpose of it.

These days, this phenomenon happens less often, because I have learned how to design board games. This requires building my skills of actively finding the fun in whatever I am doing.

Worst of all, as a child, mathematics was a power struggle in which I was going to be in trouble unless I capitulated to those who would hurt me for my noncompliance. I spent a lot of my mental energy on fear and conflict instead of math.

Fear and conflict strikes at the heart of our motivation to do things. It is poison for creative problem-solving tasks, which are best performed voluntarily. The human brain works on goals, which are emotional and motivational in nature.

I still put in effort to overcome this challenge every day. When working on a task with a team, I cultivate the ability to get my mind off of power, insults, and threats. For example, suppose I need to decide whether to write a script in an object-oriented style, or a functional style. I can think "Which manager am I trying to please, to cover my ass, so I still have an income?" Or, I can put in massive mental effort to ignore my self-image and my financial risks, and ask "If I do it one way rather than the other, how maintainable, resilient, testable, and performant will this code be?"

It is similar to my techniques for quieting my mind so I can fall asleep. It takes a great deal of mental energy every day. That is not intellectual. It is emotional.

In volunteer organizations, and in board games, I never have that struggle. In volunteer organizations, and in board games, I want to always treat my collaborators in a way that gets their mind off their self image and their personal risks.

Mathematics has now turned into a system which I can play with like a toy. And as I play, I learn. That's what most tasks can be, if threats get out of the way, and we learn how to approach a task as play.

This week, Adventure Time had its series finale. Here's a link to an article on Vox about it.

One of the show's storytelling techniques is, we might say, "Ha Ha Only Serious". It grappled with painful and disturbing subjects, by placing them within in a juvenile setting which was difficult to take seriously, and then getting farther out in left field whenever it would start to lose a sense of fun.

To be clear, in case you start to watch the show and feel like I misled you: many episodes are simply a straight-up goofy kid's show with pretty much nothing behind it. These are not the episodes I rewatch, but they were necessary. They had to be sincere about the hyper-adolescent context, or the rest of it would have been hollow.

I suspect this approach set up its audience with a specific style of coping with burnout, in which we keep in touch with the spark of what we originally saw in the world, that got us excited in the first place. I appreciate the show for that.

Revisiting Pendleton Ward's original viral video (which was picked up by Cartoon Network to make into a show), it seems to me like this theme was buried in the subtext all along, beneath all that over-the-top hyper-adolescence. Beneath it, or because of it. It's a show about how to grow up without degenerating into a disillusioned husk. Or how to lose your mind when you need to, and get your mind back.

Thanks very much to Dana for turning me on to Adventure Time and overcoming my skepticism. I was glad we watched the series finale together.

"Don't you draw the Queen of Diamonds, boy
She'll beat you if she's able
You know the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet."
-- Desperado

This post broadly categorizes four styles of conflict resolution. Ignoring or denying it (Diamonds); sentiment without follow through (Hearts); endurance, shame, and blame (Clubs); and solving problems (Spades).

If people can be categorized into Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, and Spades, I want Spades. Bear with me for a minute.

-- PART 1: DIAMONDS ---

I almost chose to not discuss Diamonds in this article. except you would wonder why I skipped them. I wanted to skip them because you're probably over this person already. Think of your elderly relative who does not believe problems exist, unless they have seen the problem personally. They are Diamonds. They are uncomfortable admitting negative feelings exist. Diamonds are uncomfortable admitting you have unmet needs.

Here's how to be the King or Queen of Spades toward the Diamonds in your life. If you want a better connection to them (a big "if", and I am not saying you necessarily want to do this), ask for their help, by pointing out their apathy and ignorance is making it difficult to be close to them. Then, once you have done this, it is important to realize that you might not be able to be close to them. They are not putting in the work. You are putting in the work. And work is Spades.

Let's move on.

--- PART 2: HEARTS ---

We all start out in life with the ignorance and apathy of Diamonds. But if all goes well, might gain a bit of awareness, and graduate to the guilt and sentiment of Hearts. Don't get me wrong-- we all need to be able to apologize. It's good to have some humility. It's good to focus on others. But having gone through that growth, you might think you're done.

You might think you want the people in your life to be drawn from the suit of Hearts. But the suit of Spades puts in an effort. Hearts are sentiment. Love puts in the work, not just the words. Work is Spades.

You know that guy who has a lot of big talk and no follow-through? He's the King of Hearts. Follow-through is work. Work is Spades.

Any infatuation can look like a connection. So can any shiny new friendship. But it's an illusion which makes you think you understand each other. You don't; not yet. Understanding fails a lot. Then you rebuild it through the hard work of communication. Then it fails again, and you regain it, and that takes work. You just keep failing and regaining it.

But Hearts thought their passion meant it was supposed to be easy. So Hearts quit.

Love requires energy. Patience. Going to some trouble. Not just good intentions.

If you think your strength is your heart, well... in a way, it is. But look twice. I'll bet you'll find when you care for someone, it takes work to show it. And that's Spades. Sentiment is quick and easy. Love is time-consuming and challenging.

If all you have going for you is a bunch of empty promises, passionately-proclaimed... well, you've been the suit of Hearts.

The suit of Hearts is not about solving the problems of your loved ones.

It is about getting yourself off the hook.

"I consistently do not make time for you, but, but, but, I love you!"

When you hear "thoughts and prayers", and they could do something, but they don't, that's the suit of Hearts talking.

And Hearts sure do want to get the credit. But credit for what?

Credit for caring. Just caring.

Until it's unfair. Or until it's hard. That might take work. And work is Spades.

Here's how a Spade can interact with a Heart.

Try to place very little value on getting sentiments from Hearts. They will apologize and grovel before you. They will express how they didn't mean it. How sorry they feel. Ignore it. Do the emotional labor of identifying your unmet needs, and making requests in clear action language. You don't want their validation, you want their help. Their work.

--- PART 3: CLUBS ---

The Clubs are all about enduring things that are unfair and hard. But don't expect your problems to be solved. Just endured. Admittedly, the Clubs in your life are a step up from Hearts. At least Clubs are not surprised about difficulty and unfairness.

The empty talk of the Hearts was all gooey. They grow a spine and it is replaced with the threatening talk of Clubs. Clubs can occasionally get something done. (For a while.)

And just like the previous stage of growth, you might think you're done.

Clubs hope they can use fear and guilt to get their unmet needs through control. When I build connection instead of control, then you meet my needs because you like it when I'm happy. If I'm a Club, and you help me because of guilt and fear, that motive for helping me would not trouble me. It would not trouble me that you don't care whether I'm happy.

Just like the dark side of the Force, control seems faster than connection. Easier. More seductive. Clubs think the problem must be solved now. Not through patient work.

One of the reasons control does not succeed, unfortunately, is that the Club is mostly empty bluster and bravado.

Clubs don't have much energy. And what energy they do have goes to waste. They are pretty much tapped out.

And so... (here's the kicker)... those around them soon learn to see through all their empty machismo. The King and Queen and Knave of Clubs will form alliances with each other. And then they, too, will soon see past each other. "I don't have enough spoons. You do the work." "No! I'm exhausted! You do the work!" "But you're better off than I am! You do the work!" And then the accusations will fly. They'll try to control each other through guilt and fear, and turn on each other. Then they are weaker than the sum of their parts. Their social support structure falls apart and turns into a downward spiral of antagonism and failure and more antagonism and more failure.

There could have been a connection, and the hard work of clearing up misunderstandings. There could have been shared goals, and shared progress. But that would have required more than commandments.

Blame is how your brain tricks you into feeling good about leaving your problems unsolved.

Are your problems solved yet? No? Then you're not done.

Did you try to yell at someone until they solved your problems? OK. But I'll bet it failed the minute your back was turned. Right? You thought you could get it done by yelling at somebody, but you're right back where you started. You're not done.

It's unfair? I agree. It's hard, and you are in the right. You should not have to do this. But you do have to do this. Become the suit of Spades; that will make progress toward solving your problems. Not immediately, but over time.

Do you say "no it won't solve my problems?"

Despair is another trick your brain plays to feel better about leaving your problems unsolved.

Now here's how a Spade interacts with a Club.

Just like you observed Hearts and noticed the empty promises, observe Clubs and track how often they carry out their threats. I mean, threats other than just yelling some more. When you see a Club yelling, remember this: That person is exhausted. And defeated. Lacking the energy for more imaginative ways of solving their problems.

If that person is a genuine danger, you probably don't need to fight them. Find their victims. Find the people who are wandering off from the community. Form relationships with them. Gather them to you. The asshole probably has physical stuff and money and legal documents and the look of legitimacy about them. But you have the people. And the people are all that matter. You just got one hundred percent of that asshole's workforce, and now let's see what they really won. Do something awesome elsewhere with the workforce; then come back in a year or two when they have burned everything to the ground, and you can take it all back.

With work. Creation, not destruction.

What about the type of Club who is no danger at all? You see somebody asserting that they control all they survey. But with this Club, you notice it is little more than self-validation. It this a misdirected attempt at self-care, destructive to their own social support system. They will usually just vent, and then, having given themselves some compassion by venting, they will take a nap.

ln that case, just offer a glass of water, and some food. Listen to the unmet needs behind the accusations or threats or boasts. Through those needs, see if you can find a basis for negotiation.

WHATEVER YOU DO, do not shake your fist in defiance. If you shake your fist, you're trying to make them see it's not working, but you just proved it is working. Because if it were not working, you wouldn't care whether they see your defiance.

Instead, ignore what they say, and fixate instead on what they feel. Their unmet needs. Do not engage with their accusations or threats. It's a tragically misguided expression of their unmet needs. So try to act as a translator, in your own brain.

That translation, from accusations and threats, into needs, is work. That is the work of connection.

-- PART 4: SPADES ---

Most of what a Spade looks like is how they interact with the other three suits, which I have described above, but here is how to describe it directly. When Spades have a conversation, it is really about what the subject of the conversation seems to be about. They focus on unmet needs and how to meet them, problems and how to solve them.

The other three suits spend most of their energy trying to prop up their failing self-image. Even when it looks like they are talking about something else. You can distinguish that goal by noticing what outcome people get. Notice whether they are making progress towards the goal, or towards letting themselves off the hook. Diamonds prop up their self-image through denial. Hearts prop up their self-image through a focus on their inner goodness. Clubs prop up their self-image through blame-shifting and suffering.

Spades prop up their self-image through putting in work to get something to feel good about. After enough of this, it stops being a prop. Their self-image becomes a settled issue in their own brain.

They are curious about how to achieve the outcome, more than they are thinking about whether you believe they care. Spades do not let themselves off the hook. They tend to be curious about the hook they are on. What is attached to this hook? If I pull on this hook, would anything get better, or worse? Is it an opportunity? To a Spade, curiosity about being on the hook is not about what you think of them. The hook is probably an interesting opportunity.

Becoming the suit of Spades is a matter of practice. You start off thinking about a problem, but then you accidentally change the subject: you see it through the lens of how it reflects on your own self-image. So you deny. Or you let yourself off the hook with guilt and empty sentiments. Or you lash out because you're not to blame. Whatever is the easy way out. To conserve energy, your brain will do anything to make you feel good about leaving problems unsolved.

But keep practicing moving your attention back onto the unmet needs. The blade of your spade will slip back into the ground. That's not a failure, that's just how it works. Lift it again. Oops, you start thinking about excuses or blame. Don't beat yourself up over that-- it's OK, this is how it works. Lift the spade. Gravity drops it. Repeat. You're getting exercise.

And there are plenty of ways for Spades to graduate even further. I could go into Coins, then Cups, then Swords, then Wands. (None of whom you are likely to see posting to social media.) As for me, I'm struggling just to get through the first four suits. Let's walk before we run, and run before we fly.

So give me the Queen of Spades. The King of Spades. Even the Knave of Spades. We can make things better together.

Let's talk about what's grandstanding and what's not. I try to charge myself a Righteous Outrage Fee when I leap into a fray on the internet and publicly render a judgement against a specific person. That trains my habits. The anger is about an unmet need, right? So I ask myself first, "Am I willing to make a concrete sacrifice to meet the unmet need?" If not, then I'm not helping. All I would be doing is grandstanding.

In this case, Person A co-signed a loan for Person B for thousands of dollars. Person A's credit was tanking due to Person B's nonpayment. Person B was truly a tragic figure... but was not picking up the phone any more. Person A was patient for years, but ultimately resorted to a fundraiser, and asking for help in getting B on the phone, despite B's feelings of shame.

(Third parties to the discussion did not approve, because they assumed B would feel shame. B did not participate in the discussion.)

Then there resulted an argument (between third parties, in which neither A nor B participated) over which was more important:

1) Saving Person A's credit rating and forgiving a debt of thousands of dollars which Person A did not accrue.

2) Person B experiencing a negative emotion because the truth came to light.

The GoFundMe was already fully funded, but I gave anyway, because I can afford it at the moment, and if I jump into a fight, I want to put my money where my mouth is.

"Virtue-signaling" is a cruelly-misapplied concept, but it's a real thing. Those who misapply the concept to denigrate actual virtue are usually virtue-signaling at that very moment.

Here's how I tell the difference between virtue, and virtue-signaling (or "grandstanding", or "dick-measuring contests"). If I make a concrete sacrifice to meet an unmet need, I don't need to take credit. It's a focus on pragmatic problem solving.

If someone caused the unmet need, but they have been removed from the situation and can no longer do harm, leave them alone after that. If punishment is involved at all, it is usually a last resort-- a group removes a person who will not stop harming the group. And then we leave that person alone.

In this case, the fundraiser was virtue, not virtue signaling, because it is a last-resort attempt to solve a concrete problem when all non-public means have failed. If I jump into the argument, and I can afford to give, but I give nothing, then I'm grandstanding.

The overflow of the funds will probably go to Person B, and I don't mind at all; it's not about punishing B, it's about helping.

Imagine if instead, I publicly shine a spotlight on myself and someone who the audience hates, and I cut that person down in front of a sympathetic audience, and then I throw tomatoes at their retreating back while the audience cheers, and that's all I have done. Then the main outcome is to make myself look better by comparison to that person.

It's easy to indulge, and feels good.

You probably want to cheer that person, but you'll come to regret it.

I have learned to predict three things whenever I see a public dick-measuring contest:

1) The winner of the grandstand will gain influence in their relationships and organizations. Look for it and you'll notice.

2) The winner of the grandstand is likely to commit misconduct. Those who gain power in this way cannot be trusted with it.

3) Whoever is cheering them on the loudest is gaining status by doing so. To a grandstander, the person cheering them on the loudest is perceived as a competitor. That cheering person is loudly expressing animus and shadenfreude, which makes it easy for the grandstander to turn the crowd against them. That is probably the next candidate for public humiliation, because the combination of those two factors makes the grandstander perceive their biggest fan as a rich lode of social status, which is also vulnerable.

This does not change if your cause is right and just. Quite the opposite. The more righteous a cause, the easier it is to use it as a dick-measuring contest. For every one hundred helpers who are quietly working hard to make change, at least one of them is in it for the dick-measuring contest. To determine whether someone is your ally, watch their actions.

Someone in your group frequently misbehaves. In your own private relationship with that person, you can take their good intentions into account, one-on-one; those good intentions determine how much energy you spend educating them. But groups must exclude individuals based on outcomes-- the damage they do to others. Good intentions don't change that.

I'll tell you something which summarizes a large part of the last several years of my life. Many people avoid participating in a group, in order to avoid a specific individual who is imposing a severe cost on them. Sometimes this is a serial rapist. Sometimes this is a stalker. But it ranges in severity and subtlety. Sometimes it's public mockery which results in a chilling effect on the group's creativity.

Lots of people want to avoid paying that cost, so they quietly leave the group.

Despite this, time and time again, those who remain in the group refuse to turn their backs on the individual perpetrating the mistreatment. These are the "Good People". Good People will change the subject onto good intentions. Good People will feel pity. Good People will debate whether the person is "really bad at heart". Good People will accept empty apologies for behavior which never stops. The one thing Good People will not think about is the terrible outcome the group is getting.

Because Good People will not, as a group, formally turn our backs on one individual who mistreats us, Good People effectively turn our backs on the countless people who don't want to come around any more because they will be mistreated.

I watch that pattern repeat over and over. I have stopped arguing with the rapists and the thieves and the stalkers and the intimidators. I argue almost exclusively to get the Good People to come around. I have spent years of my life documenting rapes, stalking, thefts, complaints. Years arguing and cajoling and working to convince groups, such as Penguicon and i3Detroit hacker space, to turn our backs on an individual.

The argument I have found most persuasive is this. You may not realize just how high a cost you have personally paid in relationships you did not develop, with people who just vanished before that could happen, because someone was consistently harmful but you were too much of a Good Person to fire them, to exclude them, to tell them to leave. You paid an invisible cost for that. I am paying it too.

I want to make it visible to you.

Please read this if you think we are experiencing the same pendulum-swing of power we were used to. You are probably confused by the fear you have been seeing after the election.

I'm surprised by how little of my fear has to do with the same old partisan fights. What you are about to read is not a partisan article. It is not an attack on you, or on Conservatism, or on Republicans, but a recognition of something larger than that which I hope will concern you as a citizen.

We are used to the pendulum of authority swinging between factions. Millions of well-intentioned Americans thought they were voting for that. They saw the label "Republican" and thought it still referred to a stable party structure and its policy agenda.

Instead, something else is happening in American society, with parallels to the autocratic regimes of weak democracies such as Russia and Turkey.

The winning campaign was based on unprecedented insults. And unprecedented threats. The threat of jailing a political opponent. The threat of suing journalists. The threat of refusing to accept the election as legitimate if the nation had not put them in power. And yet our society rewarded that.

There is nothing intrinsically conservative or Republican about the fringe faction now coming to power. They center around, not ideology, and not pragmatism, but taking for themselves as much as they can seize by force from our bank accounts and our bodies, and allowing you and me, the "losers", to have as little as possible in a zero-sum game. The principle of working together to solve a shared problem is being replaced by enemy-creation.

We now see our incumbents continuing the peaceful transfer of power which is the envy of the world. What if it is our last free election? We have our work cut out for us to counteract gerrymandering, unlimited political spending by corporations, and the threat of violence or imprisonment against journalists, dissidents, or any citizen who declares a willingness to vote against those in power.

The disrespect for peaceful political resolutions, with checks and balances on power, is irresponsible. During the campaign, we already saw the willingness to use nuclear war as a bargaining chip.

A President can be elected without releasing tax returns. How many corrupt Americans will now run for office, realizing they no longer need fear exposing their conflicts of interest?

Possibly the most frightening quote of the campaign was that the candidate claimed he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any voters. We are exhausted by wondering whether bluster is a threat or just a joke. Especially when the global economy must also suffer this uncertainty, and our livelihoods are inextricably tied to it. Especially when nuclear-armed global powers must wonder what is a threat and what is a joke.

The Democrats lost the 2016 Presidential election on November 8, but in an important sense, the Republicans lost on May 4, to a demagogue with no party loyalty. Party elders lacked the organization to stop it at their convention. Their own Speaker resigned last year because the party's five-way electoral coalition between the 1. Establishment, 2. Tea Party, 3. Moderate, 4. Evangelical, and 5. Libertarian wings of the party could not hold together to get anything done. Anything goes. Don't tell me this transition is business as usual.

For those readers who are confused by why someone you know is freaking out about the election:

Please do not conflate these points about institutions and norms with an attack on specific conservative policy goals you may have.

Bush, McCain, or Romney bore very little resemblance to any of the above.

There is nothing calming about "anything goes".

There is almost certainly someone in your life who needs a conversation in which their emotions are acknowledged as a problem they are experiencing, regardless of the legitimacy of their factual conclusions. They do not necessarily need you and I to agree with their conclusions, but a response of mockery or outrage does not make emotions go away.

When interacting with a scared person, consider that a year ago, everything about our current President-elect was a joke. When the news told us about famine, genocice, and insurgencies in far-away autocracies, we reassured ourselves it could not happen in America. Almost everyone I knew was prepared for election night to result in a boring Democratic candidate perpetuating the status-quo. Suddenly, we found ourselves far closer to collapse than we thought was possible. Now we are wondering how much worse it can get.

So, when you reassure us that we are not living the plot to an outlandish James Bond movie, if you can only do so with insults, please do not bother. No one will listen to you until they trust you. Why double down on a Presidential campaign like this one, with further escalation of insults?

You could scoff at someone you know, who is wondering if the next four years presage food riots or World War 3. We are not there yet. Again, for emphasis: We are not there yet. But it's scary that your friend who you are scoffing at had to wonder about it at all.

We were just proven wrong about what we do not need to worry about.

All the factors listed above used to be disqualifying. Those factors are no longer a barrier to becoming the most powerful person in the world. And you can't blame someone for spending some time thinking about where the bottom is. It's not like you liked the ugliness of this election either. The prospect that this campaign style is the future of every election is troubling, regardless of which side of the aisle you are on. Reach out with compassion.

For those readers who have been freaking out about the election:

First, do not allow this to be normalized. I'm posting this because it is not normal. Someday the normal practice in politics may become the complete lack of a filter between the mouth and the lowest impulses. Then we are lost. Speak up every time you hear that this is a normal shift of power, and tell them both parties lost this election to a demagogue.

When looking for empathy, stop scooping the bottom of a dry well. Always remember the words "family" and "friend" cease to have any meaning in relationships involving shame and intimidation. Do not waste your time counter-attacking the insults and threats. Set limits on those interactions to whatever degree possible. Try to build other relationships which start their disagreements from a place of empathy first.

Let's get to work. No one can afford to be politically inactive.

Every day for about a year, for stress relief, I looked at infographics on Fivethirtyeight.com. Sometimes it gave our current outcome a one-in-four chance. Sometimes a one-in-three. That meant my work was desperately needed. But I was complacent.

In my imagination, I now see that same infographic, but it looks like this.

What will America look like in 2020 compared to 2016?
Status quo; Physical and economic safety comparable to 2016: 10%
Recession; Two or more quarters of negative GDP growth: 50%
Depression; American GDP declines equal or more than Great Depression: 25%
Militia insurgency uses IEDs on food trucks, attempting to starve out an American metro area: 10%
Conflicts occurred on earth using nuclear explosives: 5%

Do not despair. America is far from "over". Physical danger and economic destitution is not a certainty in our future. We have another chance. And this time, we can not fail. Our work is cut out for us. For one thing, I want to contribute my software development skills to BrandNewCongress.com. Give some thought to how you can contribute.

What does it mean for America to be "Great"? From a game design perspective, this is a question of scoring systems. In life, you get to think about which scoring system results in the world you want to live in. Each of us is our own game designer. You get to decide what it means to you.

If America were a game, the scoring system would involve two scores. There is the Well-Being Score of each individual player. Most of the systems use those to get the second score, which is the Greatness Score. But we don't use Well-Being at all for the first one:

1. Greatness is serving your instinct. Feel ennobled. Don't feel dirty.

In Virtue ethics, an act is moral if it's consistent with your brain's moral instincts, even if it results in reducing everyone's Well-Being. Talking to many third-party voters, I have heard them implicitly use Virtue ethics and reject Utilitarian ethics. The act of voting is not about what outcome it will get; it is about whether your brain's most basic instincts give you an ennobled feeling, or a dirty feeling.

Most Clinton voters use Utilitarian ethics, in which an act is moral based on its outcome-- the Well-Being scores. That takes the form of one of the many systems described below. So, morality is a strategy game to maximize all values, not just your self-image. To a Utilitarian, holding your nose in the voting booth looks like delayed gratification. But to Virtue Ethics, it looks like evil. They are concerned entirely with how they feel about themselves in each individual moment. They will sacrifice every other value they have to preserve one value: increasing the sensation of ennoblement, and avoiding the sensation of contamination.

I know this feeling is one of the factors of Well-Being. I'm just saying, be curious about other factors.

2. Greatness is scoring a higher Well-Being Score than all other players.

This is like most traditional sports and board games. There is only Greatness if others receive a lower Well-Being Score than yours. If you hold others back, you win. Donald Trump's show "The Apprentice" designates "winner" or "loser" in this simplistic way.

3. Each person's Greatness Score is the sum of everyone's Well-Being Score.

This is the simplistic version of Utilitarian ethics, in which it is ethical to ruthlessly destroy an individual for the sake of the collective.

I suggest we not stop listing alternatives.

4. Each player's Greatness Score is the opposite of their own Well-Being score.

You are proud of how much you endure, so you keep your problems alive in order to stay proud of overcoming them. Surprisingly, I see this all the time. I live in Detroit and see t-shirts that read "DETROIT: WHERE THE WEAK ARE KILLED AND EATEN". I see Navy Seals on YouTube boasting about an enormous litany of things they refuse to complain about, and how holding a candle to the palm of their hand proves their machismo. I have been in many workplaces where we could make the process easier on everyone, but instead my colleagues have boasted about how awesome they are because it proves they care about the company.

5. Each player's Greatness Score is equal to the highest Well-Being Score.

Even if most people are sick, poor, and lonely, their Greatness consists of basking in the glow of happiness of their group's representative. Many North Koreans feel their success is reflected in the success of Kim Jong Il. Most of the time it's the exemplar of one's own religion.

It's human nature to use this scoring system. But we can rise above this too. Jesus is a better game designer than Kim Jon Il, because in Matthew 25:40 he leap-frogged off of this scoring system to switch elegantly to a better scoring system:

6. All players' Greatness Scores are equal to the Well-Being Score of the player who is lowest.

See that person begging on the side of the road? Jesus kind of said that's your score. In this form of Utilitarianism, America is only as Great as the condition of the least among us.

This conversation will go better if we admit this still needs some work. In this version of the game, all 250 million Americans are guaranteed to have a Greatness close to zero, no matter what we do. We might want to live in that world, but there have never been very many willing players for that game. A game designer's task is to motivate players. Most of these simplistic systems are game design failures because they don't motivate enough players.

7. If any player falls below a minimum Well-Being, all players have zero Greatness. Otherwise, Greatness is the median Well-Being score of all players.

This is the favorite game design I have encountered so far. Your score will never rise by sacrificing one person to utter destitution for the good of the many. There is an absolute floor of Well-Being. If any player falls beneath it, everyone's Greatness Score is zero.

The floor is however much it takes to motivate most people. Which social science finds out is pretty sustainable-- food, shelter, and some time off of work to nurture social bonds.

We can continue to refine our scoring systems, but you get the idea. What makes us choose one game design over another? Whether it motivates the players to participate. If too many players flip the table, the design has not met its goal. And like I said near the top, for a Utilitarian, it's all about the outcome, not about feeling good about myself in the voting booth.

Keeping people in the group, contributing, is the only thing that affects the outcome we get. There is no point to an ethical system in which the participants constantly flip over the table and leave. At the same time, if five people sit around a game table, and one of them is completely unskilled, and that ruins it for everyone, that's also a bad game design. Why? Because they won't participate any more. You have to make the scoring system OK for one person to be terrible at the game, which someone always will.

Not everyone has to reach spectacular heights, but everyone has to be minimally OK in order for there to be any point in continuing what we are doing together. And that's an intro to how you design an ethical system.

It has taken me a long time to learn the social dynamics of shame. Do you know when I feel shame? When I ignore the voice of past-me and future-me telling me "you know you'll regret this". I did it during 2015 for several months. Then I noticed something: that is the only time I feel shame. When someone else tells me their needs and asks me to meet those needs, I usually just do that, without involving my self-image. So, I need to learn what it's like to be the kind of person whose self-image comes from outside, and who feels external shame intensely.

I've always regretted involving another person's self-image in any conflict. You know I've done it repeatedly over the years. How did that work out for me? Poorly. It worked out poorly.

When you need something, and someone else is in the way of it, shame will often get them to double-down in order to defend their self-image. It's best to avoid making their self-image seem to be at stake, when really what you want is an alliance: you need their help with something they are doing or failing to do that you don't like.

When shame does not result in defensiveness, it usually results in the paralysis of despair. When I ask someone for what I need, and all they hear is their own shame, the last thing I want to hear is "I'm a terrible person". That is kind of like telling me I will never get what I need. They are focused instead on their goodness or badness.

Even if you succeed in inflicting shame, and it does not result in despair, it is likely to result in groveling. This will serve only to annoy you, as it becomes clear this person is not paying attention to your needs, and is focused on their self-image. They want to get back to thinking of one's self as a good person. Why? Because that's where you put their attention.

Another consequence of shame is that my use of shame sets a context for what to expect from future interactions with me. From then on, everything else I ask for will be perceived as an attack, no matter how gently I word my requests. This is difficult to undo. In some circles, that is the bed I have made, and I must sleep in it indefinitely.

The saddest intimacy I can think of is two enemies who are married to each other. I watch a highly-shame-filled couple leave their needs implicit, or sort of vaguely gesture toward them, and instead attack each other's self-worth. "If only my partner has sufficient self-hatred, I'll get my needs met." All they get from this is a sort of generalized, nebulous, mutual capitulation.

Attempts to provoke shame in me usually result only in expressions of sympathy like "that sounds hard", followed by attempts to determine what the plaintiff needs in case I can provide it.

I have started to notice several people in my environment appear surprised when they see no shame. In that case, their goal (usually) is a sense of vindication, or the attainment of personal power through the moral high ground. Usually such a person loathes themselves-- they perceive mere disapproval from others as if it were a threat to the survival of their self-image. Whereas I am nearly unassailable.

"When a person tells you that you hurt them, you don't get to decide that you didn't." - Louis C.K.

You don't get to convince them that you didn't. The truth in this quote is that you do not get to unilaterally resolve the conflict. However, if I accuse you of hurting me, you actually do get to decide that you didn't. Consider what Louis C.K. is proposing in the above quote. If you believe the above quote, and if I wanted to keep you in an abusive relationship with me, I could do so with a series of groundless accusations.

So where is the balance to be found?

We each must hold ourselves accountable to hear people out when they complain. Sometimes they have a solid case, but sometimes they feel entitled to get whatever they want for no good reason. Carefully ask questions, then make up your own mind about whether the problem is caused by you. Sometimes you'll be wrong, but there's no good alternative. The only true sincere remorse is in an accurate understanding of how you caused the problem, so you can stop causing it. You cannot offload that responsibility onto your accuser.

Sometimes if I'm seeing a lot of disapproval from a person, and they can't express their needs, or their demands are based on groundless entitlement, I'll either ignore them, or just politely remove myself from the sphere in which I can negatively influence that person.

Your needs probably seem easy and obvious to you, as they usually do to most people. They are rarely easy or obvious. Conflict resolution requires sincere curiosity on the part of the defendant and communication on the part of the plaintiff.

So let me tell you something that I need: please send me a message or drop me a line and tell me what you need, and if you would like something from me that's different from what I'm doing, which you think would cause your need to be met in some way.

If you also wish to tell me about the reduction in self-image you want me to have, you may. Sometimes it's necessary to just let you be mad, and stay mad for as long as you need. Self-validation might be a kindness you need to give yourself. A kindness of validation for which you are starving. Feel free to do that for yourself as well, and I will try to respond compassionately. But I won't feel shame.

There is a line that keeps coming into my head. "In their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand." I did some searches for the line in Superman comics and movies, assuming it was about the storyline in which Lex Luthor was elected President. The line turned out to be from Christopher Nolan's film The Dark Knight, in reference to the Joker.

The quote comes to mind every time I hear something about Trump supporters who-- somehow-- also follow Jesus of Nazareth.

For decades, everyone from preachers to comedians to journalists have held up Jesus and Donald Trump as polar opposites on the spectrum of sacred vs. sleaze. And yet, if Trump is the opposite of Christ, consider this: among fundamentists during the nineties, it was de rigeur to wonder out loud whether Bill Clinton was the Antichrist.

Look through the eyes of a fundamentalist and see if you understand the choice between the Antichrist, and merely the opposite of Christ. The world is growing up, electing a black President twice, celebrating the victory of gay marriage, legalizing weed. Their way of life is coming to an end, so some of them might feel like the world may as well burn down.

I vividly remember being a fundamentalist Christian in the nineties. I remember the conspiracy theories which I believed about the Clintons twenty years ago, as a college student. I believed they killed a lot of people in cover-ups. I believed, as a teenager, that they were capable of any crime.

To you and me, Hilary Clinton might just look like any other untrustworthy politician. But consider how it looks to fundamentalists that twenty years later, this is the family which the nation seems to want to put back in the White House. It looks to them like the end of the world.

Imagine if Dole or G. W. Bush had not run for President. If the nominee had been a real-estate mogul who was rebuked by every preacher my whole life, would I have panicked and slammed my hand down on the Trump button?

Desperation. "In their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand."

Perhaps the Trump candidacy is an extinction burst for conservatism as we know it. Just before a bad behavior finally goes away, there is one last tantrum of defiance. Parents and pet trainers are deeply familiar with extinction bursts, but it is not just limited to kids and pets-- it's human nature. Perhaps that pattern operates on the scale of entire societies.

A few months ago, a former Penguicon Board member phoned me, who I had not spoken to in about four years. It turned out we were thinking about a lot of the same issues lately, and some of those issues included how to keep in touch with people, and who to keep in touch with.

What are your strategies for maintaining contact? Mine is to detect another person's level of reaching out to me, and reach out the same amount plus one step.

My strategy is due to my unique circumstances. I have a lot of projects and communities that I work on with other people. In my personal life, when someone stands me up or flakes out, I can simply decide to move on. Whereas in a group, not all of the other group organizers will see it that way. I need to plan around chain reactions in which the loss of one participant results in the loss of more.

Sometimes when someone proposes to work with you, you assume you can take that seriously at face value. But often, you can't. An important part of social calibration is recognizing when another person is not going to follow up; either they are engaging in a pretense to save face, or they are too optimistic about their availability. If I don't realize that, and I take them seriously and follow up, this can be perceived as pushy.

Not only do they have no recognition of the problem they just caused me, they also do not understand the solution. The problem is not that this person will not follow through, but that they will not inform me of it.

The simple solution to overcommitment is to admit when you're overcommitted. Say "I can't do what I wanted to do." Sometimes we all set up expectations we can't meet; it's normal. Keeping those expectations alive makes it much worse. All you have to do is say "I don't have time to work on this project until two months from now". By accepting your own limitations, you have released me from the nebulous semi-commitment of my time during those two months. I would be able to put it on my calendar to follow up then, and it's no longer occupying my mind until then.

I'll walk you through how to make a logo look good when reduced to a 16x16-pixel image. The easiest methods produce ugly results. Craftsmanship is fiendishly challenging at this level. When you only have 256 pixels, each one matters.

Favicons are the tiny images that appear in the title bar of your web browser. It's usually the logo of the site. If you're reading this article on Livejournal in 2015, look for a blue circle with a black pencil in it. Notice how each tab you have open in your browser has a favicon.

When I was hired to create BlackBoxMontreal.com, the designer of the company's visual identity Christine Garofolo, sent me her art (used here with permission).

To demonstrate the simple and ugly way to make a favicon, I opened it in Photoshop, and used Image Size to scale it down to 16 pixels wide:

There are two problems. The logo is wider than it is tall, and as you can see, the forms are no longer distinct. This is like ordering pizza, and receiving it after the pizzeria put it through a blender-- the crust, cheese, sauce, and toppings are still there, but their forms are gone.

This has a lot of what we call "anti-aliasing": a quality of digital art in which pixels on an edge between two colors are a mixture of those two colors, to create the illusion of smoothness. Unfortunately, we used an automated process to shrink the image, which made each pixel an average of several nearby colors. Each pixel is trying to represent too much detail with just one color. The resulting color is an average, weighted by the distance of several colors from the center of the pixel. But the colors in the original image were not designed keeping in mind their distances from a grid of 256 point. The result is blurrier than it has to be.

Next, I took the second ugly approach to a favicon, by limiting the image to 9 colors: black, white, green, two shades of purple, and four shades of grey. I used the Pencil tool to color one pixel at a time.

The edges now look jagged and harsh. When anti-aliasing is in the right place at the right amount, it doesn't blur detail; it actually increases the perception of detail. With all the anti-aliasing removed, we have even less visual information than we did before. This is like if you order a pizza, and you receive all of the ingredients separately and unbaked.

A good favicon would find a balance between keeping the forms distinct from each other, and keeping them smooth enough to approximate their true shape. But making a pizza is not figuring out how long to put it through a blender; it's all about arrangement. And so it is when making a favicon.

Fortunately, the source art of the logo is in vector format, which will make this much easier. So I will open it in a vector drawing program, Adobe Illustrator.

A word about "vector" and "raster" formats. These are two main ways to represent visual information in a computer. Raster art is a grid of pixels, each of which is assigned a particular color. Vector art is a mathematical description of paths that connect coordinates in 2D space. A color is assigned as a stroke following a path, or assigned to fill the interior of the path.

Photoshop processes raster information (which is good for photography), and Illustrator processes vector information (which is good for logos). They each can import each other's files, so in Photoshop, you can "rasterize" vector art, and in Illustrator, you can "vectorize" raster art.

My first task in Illustrator is to remove fine details. Those details would be lost in the favicon, and would do nothing but add blurriness. I will select all the shapes and remove the white strokes on the paths. I will change the fill-colors of the shapes until there remain only six colors: the black of the box, the green of the monster arm, the white of the claws, the grey of the robot arm, and two shades of purple for the tentacle.

That color reduction removes all the details except for the monster claws and the tentacle suckers. I could remove those too, because in the final image, they will be faint hints-- if they appear at all. But we'll see how it comes out.

Next I'll open the art in Photoshop, which converts the vector paths to a raster image of pixels. Then I once again will use Image Size to scale down the raster to 16 pixels wide. The colors do not sufficiently stand out against each other at this scale, resulting in indefinite forms. I'll throw away this raster and go back to the vector art in the state I left it, in Illustrator.

I'll select each shape and apply Effect > Stylize > Inner Glow. For the black shapes, I'll select a white glow color, and for the light shapes, I'll select a glow color which is a dark version of that shape's color.

You might wonder how this is better than the strokes which I previously removed. At 16x16 pixels, your eye will not see this gradual transition as a detail. At a glance, your eye will see a solid color. Now when I rasterize it in Photoshop, and scale it down to 16x16 pixels, the forms stand out to the eye. Each glow is a gradual transition. Your eye will not resolve these transitions as details. Instead it just tricks your eye into seeing each shape as one consistent color throughout. But now the dark edge on a light shape will stand out against the light edge on a dark shape, so each shape is distinct from its neighbor.

This is better, but the logo still does not fit well into a square. I'll throw out this raster and go back to Illustrator.

If I crop the image to only show the center, I would lose the important shapes at the sides. So instead, I'll carefully adjust some of the shapes so that the logo occupies less width.

Each shape is made out of invisible coordinates called "anchor points", connected by paths. Illustrator will show me these anchor points and let me drag them around to edit the shapes of the monster arm and the tentacle:

I made some tradeoffs here. On the one hand, I distorted the actual shapes. On the other hand, this step provided a bigger payoff in legibility than any of the previous steps. The irony is, the best way to preserve recognition is through distortion. Previously, each feature of the graphic occupied a tiny space, in order to fit blank space into the top and bottom of the image. Now, each individual shape now takes up a larger area. When space is at a premium, when it comes to making something more legible, nothing beats making it bigger.

Here are all of the versions side-by-side:

I would like to hear your thoughts or contributions for how to accomplish legibility at such a small size.

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C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error

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In Their Desperation, They Turned To A Man They Didn't Fully Understand

Maintaining Contact

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