A better thing for my name tag to say might have been something along the lines of ”tell me what makes you feel loved, seen, heard, or appreciated for being the essence of yourself”, or any better abbreviated version of that. And the implicit encouragement not to so, if that does not appeal to you.

But if I would have been primed for the task a day or a few ahead of time, ways of doing great at it might have had their time to crunch through the topic and, in the best of worlds, arrived at something in the spirit of the suggestion, come up with something like appreciation, love, kindness, listening. or why not touch? And that last one in particular could have worked quite okay in my non-verbal place, asking if showing rather than talking about it would be welcome.

With the band booming next door, it was a bit too loud to actually do much talk with anyone out of touch reach, anyway; it was somewhere near that bar / disco threshold where people are more likely to buy more drinks than to attempt engaging anyone else in more meaningful conversation, I’m realizing, a bit belatedly, and in retrospect, from my own point of view, rather than any other person’s private sentiments. Two hours into it, I was kind of depleted, and took the armed military-looking policemen as an excuse to go before their services were called upon, which they thankfully were not.

A bit like large parts of society skews toward catering only to neurotypical needs and preferences, a lot of it also skews toward real-time processors, or extroverts. They are not necessarily the exact same thing, but in my experience they often seem to go hand in hand. If I get primed for something ahead of time and get a feeling for its flavour, flow, context, setting, and participants, I am likelier to be a valued, contributing part of it.

This plays a big part in my appreciation for recurring things, where I can invest all in in the long game, and maybe get something out of it, myself too. Firsts, in my experience, created by others, in general often turn out a bit of a write-off. If I made them, myself, I can draw on a life-time of me, and sometimes wind up fully enjoying them, as well. Investing in incrementally taking good to great, small bits at a time, is just my way.

It’s helpful to revisit experiences for me like this when I’ve caught up with what happened, how I felt, and why, as these insights would evaporate and likely be forgotten for the most part, quickly.

In medieval times, Feudalism was a combination of legal and military customs structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land, in exchange for service or labour, where it described a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility and the people of the land.

Fast forward to the internet age, and we see something similar has happening on the internet, but with the map redrawn a little. Rulers are essentially the same, though kings and lords governing countries by law have diffused to more abstract notions. Today’s vassals hold the fiefdoms like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Google, and a host of other services that people live their daily lives with, and their users are the modern day serfs.

The power structures are part the same, but part the opposite. Today’s serfs are free to choose to live their life in any number of fiefdoms, trade off their privacy to services, to some degree, in exchange for services they derive value from. The details we divulge about our lives is the currency we pay in tribute. This trust is met, to varying degrees, by services protecting as much of our privacy as legally allowed, and the service cares to, against rulers’ great fear of people maybe subverting vested interests of the powers that be.

Feudal obligations used to include military support and mutual protection, in exchange for certain privileges, usually including the grant of land held as a fiefdom. A fidelity was a sworn loyalty, subject to the king.

These rules have largely been replaced by market economics, and the trust model turning upside down. Where formerly military support from above was to defend people and the land against invading armies, today’s battles are largely conducted secretly between lawyers and government — and the casualties of war few: the Edward Snowdens of today that stand up against oppressive government misconduct. Their punishment, losing safe harbour in their homeland, and suffering a character execution in the media, modern governments’ weapon of choice to gain popular support from the world to silence their perceived adversaries.

While power is still assymetric, and the governments and vested economic interests that partially run them have deep treasure chests and a nasty arsenal of weapons at their disposal, the power of the individual person to affect change and have a voice is greatly amplified todayby the very services rendering our privacy vulnerable against character execution.

This model of information age feudalism has been greatly simplified and omits many actors, functions and concerns, but was written as an exercise in conveying some online realities that human rights organizations of today, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Pirate Party, are well aware of, and the greater public, often less so. By bridging this divide in awareness, you can make more informed choices as a user, and place expectations upon the services you choose, both for utility, and the protection of your safety.

My employer just asked what speakers on which subjects it ought to host. Cued by the false premise of a five minute survey to give my feedback, and I should know better, I forgot to let the question bake. Now having slept on it, here is my name / topic list, linking quotes from writings of, or about them:

Brian Eno

Extending Our Thinking Into the Deep Future to Create a Better World

Duration not only made a difference — not only of degree, but of kind. And I’d noticed that societies that thought in terms of weeks and months, tend to think differently than societies that thought in terms of years and decades.
(source: The Birth of the Long Now Foundation)

Creating long term value requires long term thinking. It requires that we not only think in the here and now of you, or your application, or your users, but to learn from the past, and see the present in a greater perspective. Thinking in the now creates peep-hole optimizations that tend to erode lasting value.

Kathy Sierra

Loving People Through Understanding, Embracing and Respecting Their Needs

Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources.
(source: Your App Makes Me Fat)

It takes an honest company not to just A/B test, and then follow the money. If you mail me a link to something that appeals to me, I have a right to find that content at the other end of the link — not two links away, via an upsell.

Frank Chimero

Understanding Your Medium, and Going The Extra Mile to Make it Love People

Metaphors are assistive devices for understanding. (source: What Screens Want)

Every designer and developer should understand the cues and affordances of their medium, the constraints of being human, and how to use the former to humanize both the things they create, and the tools they use in making it.

Paul Graham

Arc Bottom-up Programming: Customizing the Language to Suit Your Application

The only reliable plan is to design for performance. Performance doesn’t mean speed; that’s taking the metaphor too literally. Speed counts, but a programming language is first of all a tool for thinking in. We want thinking in Arc to feel like driving a 911. (source: Design Philosophy)

Language can the nuts and bolts you employ to will an idea into reality — those million implementation details that lock the idea into a specific shape. Or it can be finely attuned as an expressive tool for reasoning about an idea, how you evolve, iterate, reshape and learn about it as you go along to find an ideal embodiment of it.

Bill Atkinson

Anything he likes, really. iOS development. Print colour management. Empowering people to create, spread love and make their own history.

Because they are laminated, they will be just as beautiful 50 years from now.
It’s important that they become historical artifacts. (source: Save the Postcard)

Bill knows what he wants to make, learns or creates what he needs and wants to do it, and then crafts something of great beauty, follow-through and sometimes importance.