Feedback is Overrated

This is a mission statement of sorts for joining the small

web. It is great that some small http sites exist, but it

is much better to live in an ecosystem where small is the

norm and feedback is greatly slowed.

It is more accurate to say the feedback provided over the

web is overrated. To a person who is intellectually honest

enough, the entire universe provides feedback.  This is the

broadest possible feedback, and so this confuses people who

are operating from a narrower view, such as "What is hot

right now?" or the deeply related "Okay, but how do I win?"

The paradox: by widening the feedback, you increase the

individual vision -- and the reverse is true.

Paul Graham in his essay Taste for Makers has it right

(web)

>Good design is often strange. Some of the very best work

>has an uncanny quality: Euler's Formula, Bruegel's

>Hunters in the Snow, the SR-71, Lisp. They're not just

>beautiful, but strangely beautiful.

. . .

>Most of the qualities I've mentioned are things that can

>be cultivated, but I don't think it works to cultivate

>strangeness. The best you can do is not squash it if it

>starts to appear. Einstein didn't try to make relativity

>strange. He tried to make it true, and the truth turned

>out to be strange.

The disaster that is web 2.0 -- the Internet of Money

(I.O.M? . .  .I.O.$ ??) is pushing the model of feedback

into our face so much that is simply taken for granted to

the point that it is an ideology, if not a superstructure.

Feedback here in the information age is used by businesses

to better sell to clients. Too much feedback for a creator

only leads to giving an audience more of exactly what they

wanted before.  It never gives an audience the opportunity

to grow and learn to appreciate something new.  And for the

creator, it never lets them get to an individual vision --

deep, inner (yet also outer) strangeness -- that is at the

heart of good design.

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I'd love to hear from people. My email is the handle minus

"net" (work by Voltaire that starts with "c"), at sdf.org.