#humanscaleweb

Reading Oscar Wilde's fairy tales last night, I saw the quote:

“And what have we to do with the lives of those who toil for us? Shall a man not eat bread till he has seen the sower, nor drink wine till he has talked with the vinedresser?” -The Young King, by Oscar Wilde

The story's a bit melodramatic in the way fables and such can be, yet it does leave lasting food for thought on the idea of getting to know where our goods are produced and knowing producers directly -- something that The Cluetrain Manifesto (it's an oldie, yet classic) raves (and rants) about as well:

"Markets once were places where producers and customers met face-to-face and engaged in conversations based on shared interests."

Full text of the fairy tale "The Young King" by Oscar Wilde.

- Tara Hunt, The Whuffie Factor  (review)

The "Voices in Pots" excerpt from The Cluetrain Manifesto I posted, reminded me of Dave the Potter. Dave was a master potter born into the antebellum South, and a slave his entire life. He risked punishment (writing was illegal for slaves) yet etched his own verse onto the potted creations, anyway. Why do we so eagerly and voluntarily give up our right to unique human expression in a stampede to dilute ourselves in an institutional tone? More on Dave via New York Times:

Born about 1800, Dave spent most of his life in a rural South Carolina district famed for its stoneware. He labored in local pottery works and may have lost a leg in a railroad accident. This meant another slave (with disabled arms) kicked the potter’s wheel while Dave shaped mountains of clay.

. . . Slaves caught teaching other slaves were “to be whipped at the discretion of the court, not exceeding 50 lashes.” Yet Dave kept writing on his pots, for three decades.

. . . As Dave wrote on a pot just before the Civil War, after five owners and almost six decades in bondage:

Met retired LSU professor Jay Edwards whose specialty is vernacular architecture recently. Got me musing how I consider the Internet to be akin to global city with its own distinct neighborhood personalities and homes (the first welcoming page to any website is termed the "home page"). So I think of that city (or village) metaphor more than considering the Internet to resemble the TV set or a network of magazine columnists or a telephone or a bullhorn--or any communication system for that matter. So vernacular architecture is a splendid metaphor for the people's Web.

I noted in Professor's Edwards' Vernacular Architecture class syllabus he listed "How Buildings Learn," by Stewart Brand in the reading list. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's  (MIT) Building 20 is featured in How Buildings Learn, and serves as a great metaphor that might catalyze your own thinking about your own web presence within the context of a larger "campus" (universities are often small cities or towns).

The legendary Building 20 nurtured and witnessed huge advances in science and culture. Building 20 was designed quickly to serve as a temporary building, thus lending some qualities of vernacular architecture to it. Essentially it was a hack that gave its 'amateur' occupants (none were architects!) license to continuously morph it into the learning environment du jour.  

A few counter-intuitive ideas and food for thought from Wikipedia's entry for MIT Building 20:

Due to Building 20’s origins as a temporary structure, researchers and other occupants felt free to modify their environment at will. As described by MIT professor Paul Penfield, “Its ‘temporary nature’ permitted its occupants to abuse it in ways that would not be tolerated in a permanent building.. If you wanted to run a wire from one lab to another, you didn’t ask anybody’s permission — you just got out a screwdriver and poked a hole through the wall”. 

Institute Professor Emeritus Morris Halle commented that the abundance of space in Building 20 meant that “many quite risky projects got off the ground. Linguistics, my field, was one such risky project. But for the existence of Building 20, it would not have been developed at MIT.”[8] Noam Chomsky pioneered modern linguistics and generative grammar in a “shabby” nondescript-looking “miserable hole” of an office in Building 20 for several decades.

MIT professor Jerome Y. Lettvin once quipped, “You might regard it as the womb of the Institute. It is kind of messy, but by God it is procreative!”

Because of its various inconveniences, Building 20 was never considered to be “prime” space, in spite of its location in the central campus. As a result, Building 20 served as an “incubator” for all sorts of start-up or experimental research, teaching, or student groups on a crowded campus where space was (and remains) at a premium. — Wikipedia 

It can seem like the human-scale web is a retro concept. However, I find it foundational to where I believe the Internet could be heading. So I'll be throwing in a few classics from time to time here.

This one is an oldie from Hugh MacLeod, the indie cartoonist at GapingVoid.com. I recall Hugh calling me up from England beforehand to chat about what I thought of the idea. Living in Silicon Valley at the time, I was conditioned to think in terms of mass momentum, hockey-stick growth and scale, I told him flatly that one man making bespoke suits wouldn't scale. True enough, yet is mass production and economy of scale really truly the point of life?  Since then, I've come around to appreciate and prefer small batches, the care and devotion of the handcrafted, and the handiwork of the indie artisan and culture-maker.

Below's Hugh's January 2005 post where he introduces his friend Thomas and his suit-making prowess:

"English Cut", the blog of my pal, Savile Row Tailor Thomas Mahon only went live a day or two ago and already it's being talked about. Nice to see.

Just saw Tom Peters blogged it. Cool!

Yeah, I turned Thomas onto blogging and helped him set up the website. This is what I said in Tom Peters comment section:

Thomas' business is interesting to me. It's very "niche", certainly, but the demand for bespoke English suits is fairly steady, but the supply of young tailors willing to endure a 7-year apprenticeship has been drying up over the last 50 years. Now the average age for a good English tailor (at Thomas' level) is around 60.

So even if the market for bespoke is tiny, there's only about 20 people IN THE WORLD who can cut an English suit at Thomas's level. And a good portion of Thomas' direct competition have never even sent an e-mail before, let alone started blogging. So once Thomas saw the possibilites of blogging, he jumped right at it.

Right now I have no financial involvement in Thomas' blog or tailoring business.

Still, the idea of a "Wired" Savile Row tailor is such a no-brainer... it was just one of those things that came together over beers one evening.

Wow--took a look at my bio on my main blog, Crossroads Dispatches, and most of it is remarkably outdated.

However, this is still true: "I happened to be vacationing in the island of Phi Phi, Thailand when a wall of water rose up from the Andaman Sea and engulfed me. It was much later before I learned it was a tsunami. Thus I was thrust into being an accidental "citizen journalist'" here on this blog in the days that followed December 26, 2004.

Since then I've contemplated more deeply the fleetingness of life and the impact of personal, heart-felt writing in a world that is hungry for connection, intimacy, meaning, purpose and a groundedness in the eternal rather than the ephemeral.

Before that wake up call, I'd been advising clients on their word-of-mouth, participatory (and customer-centric) marketing strategies encompassing the conception, design and market delivery phases via social media (think Web 2.0, social media, blogs, wikis, RSS).

I once focused on companies and industries that are affected by the digitization of everything -- and thus fall somewhere in the blurring computing, media and communications landscape.

My interests have broadened into what I call post-industrial boutique artisan with a refined Italian Zen twist. That means soulful products and services from art, design, food, clothing, housewares, "new luxuries" and pretty much anything that is showered with care and attention by its employees."

Photo: Me and my friend Rich summer 2007. Taken by Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com at the original Philz Coffee in the Mission, San Francisco. Phil's son would often recommend little twists to my mainstays, like fresh mint to the Turkish tea I liked there. I met one of my best friends, Ulysses, on that sofa there (not pictured). During a tight cash flow week, Phil and his son gave me coffee and tea freely on an I.O.U. basis.