a. natasha joukovsky
journal
RAPID-PROTOTYPING LIFE
We are all the end-users of our own lives, but what we think we want often turns out to be different from what we actually want. I decided to test a few things before going into the next round of production.
When my husband and I started talking this past summer about going on a "sabbatical" of sorts for a few months I was deep into an ilab project for a client and couldn't help thinking about our potential leave in the language of innovation.
The advantages of rapid prototyping in the context of business and technical innovation are well-documented, the biggest perhaps being the ability to test end-user reaction without the up-front investment to actually create the product or service. What you're creating with a prototype is, essentially, a simulacrum of the product or service--something that seems real, mimicking at least one aspect of the real product or service you'd like to test--but is actually just a shell of the real thing that is faster, cheaper, and easier to produce.
One big challenge with rapid prototyping is that there tends to be an inverse correlation between ease of prototypability and the stakes involved. In general, the bigger the investment the actual product or service will require, the harder it is to get people to try to simulate and test it. It's a lot easier to prototype, say, a digital app than a nuclear power plant, so we're often inclined to prototype the app but just take our best guess on the power plant, even though the consequences of making a bad decision re: the power plant are like to be astronomically harder and more expensive to correct downstream.
I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that it is worth the effort to try and prototype the power plant; that--while you should absolutely prototype the app too--it's actually more important to prototype the power plant; that just because something is hard to prototype does not mean you can't or shouldn't try; that low-fidelity is infinitely better than no-fidelity.
Life--that is, where you live, in terms of city, neighborhood, and apartment/house--seems to have way more in common with the power plant. Decisions tend to be long-term, expensive-to-get-out-of, and difficult to try-before-you-buy--it's something, in short, we should absolutely make the effort to prototype but almost never do. It usually takes years if you want to "try out" a few different cities in any meaningful way. No one lets you live in an apartment for a few weeks before you decide whether you want to rent or buy it (kind of a cool idea though). Decisions are often highly-influenced by glamour--by persuasive cognitive illusion.
We are all the end-users of our own lives, but what we think we want often turns out to be different from what we actually want.
I was excited to try it, to rapid-prototype life before making any kind of long-term decision. My husband and I factored in a few weeks of designated "vacation" time into the sabbatical, but built in three month-long stays. A month is long enough to really "live" somewhere vs. traveling; it's long enough to have days where you want to do precisely nothing and, perhaps more importantly, days where you will have to do things you don't want to do (e.g., laundry, grocery shopping). It's long enough to strip the glamour from a place and see it for what it really is. But it's short enough that, if you see something you really don't like, you don't have to live with it for too long; it's short enough to log these preferences and try to correct them fairly quickly in the next monthly iteration. We spent a month in (1) a rural town - Belfast, Maine, (2) a small-mid-size city - Nice, France, and (3) a non-NYC big city - Paris, France. Simultaneously, we experienced living in (1) a residential neighborhood, (2) an "old city" pseudo-residential neighborhood, and (3) a primarily commercial neighborhood, and (1) a huge house, (2) a studio even smaller than what we had in NYC, and (3) a very spacious one-bedroom apartment.
It was low-fidelity, of course. Life is just different when you don't have a day job, and while I spent a fair amount of time writing, we didn't really even try to control for this. Not working is kind of the point of a sabbatical. We definitely did some touristy things outside of designated vacation time.
But even so, in terms of developing a more informed perspective, a deeper personal understanding of what I want in a city/town, a neighborhood, and an abode, I think the experiment resoundingly supported my ongoing hypothesis that a low-fidelity prototype is way better than no prototype at all. I now know, for instance, that I infinitely prefer having a washing machine but no dryer inside an apartment to having both in a communal space shared by the building. I care more about specific neighborhood than greater city. Light and views matter a lot. Size, less than I would have thought (mess, like work, expands to fill the space you allow it), but it is important to have at least one very comfortable, cozy place.
We're leaving Paris tomorrow, and I have no regrets. I recognize how unusual it is and fortunate we were to be able to do something like this, but for anyone who can, I highly recommend it.
IN WHICH DFW & I EXPLORE CHINESE BEAUTY APP MEITU
The IPO of Chinese "Aspirational Beauty App" Meitu is an irresistible conflux of innovation, glamour, and recursion--straight from the pages of Infinite Jest.
Welcome screens from the Meitu app.
I am not the first to gape at the remarkable prescience of David Foster Wallace's largely standalone conceit on the rise and fall of videophony buried inside Infinite Jest. But with the IPO of Chinese "Aspirational Beauty App" Meitu all over the New York Times and Fortune etc. it was such an irresistible conflux of innovation, glamour, and recursion I couldn't forgo the opportunity to explore it a little bit.
If you cobble together some extracts from the Meitu IPO coverage vs. Infinite Jest, it's almost impossible to discern fact from fiction, which is, of course, the purpose of the app itself. Try identifying the sources of these four quotations: Meitu, a (1)"High-def mask-entrepreneur," (2)"allows users to aggressively retouch their faces in photos," for (3)"aesthetic enhancement--stronger chins, smaller eye-bags, air-brushed scars and wrinkles." (4)"A touch can taper your jaw. It can slim your cheeks. Widen your eyes. Of course, it can make you thinner." It runs together seamlessly, but only (2) and (4) are from the news (Fortune and the NYT respectively). (1) and (3) are from Infinite Jest, published in 1996.
Obviously I had to download Meitu and try it. (Is the app's name intentionally an English homonym for "me too"?)
"Get ready for a new you!" the first screen instructs, followed by, in what seems to me a more foreboding admonition than intended, "Get ready for hundreds of emotions!" I found the original color version of my LinkedIn photo, which I consider to be, you know, a pretty good photo of myself, uploaded it to the app, and started tinkering.
Original photo (left) and Meitu-ized version (right)
There was something almost apotheotic about the ability to make pores evaporate, slim down my face, and up the ratio of eyes-to-nose. The whole process took about 30 seconds. It was terrifying, but mesmerizingly so, even if I found the results strange and alien-like--the aesthetics, by default, lean small-woodland-creature. I couldn't help but wonder, if the tweaks were geared toward American beauty standards rather than Chinese, if I would have felt differently. Per the NYT article, this is very much in the works--and will be more or less automated via geolocation usage algorithms. I shudder with "videophonic stress" and vanity--not hundreds of emotions, only two--just thinking about it, about expectations moving from Kim Kardashian to Bambi.
Meitu can "reject[] the idea that its business model relies on people’s insecurities or cultural pressures" and insist "It’s about making you happy," but I don't buy it. In the most flattering light I can muster, it's about getting caught up in DFW's "storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm." Without a filter, of course, it's about Meitu making $$$. Precisely, $629M in the Hong Kong IPO this week and a $4.6B valuation. If DFW's clairvoyance holds, it will be a short-lived boom. Meitu already fell short its target $5B valuation, per the Wall Street Journal. "The question is whether the world wants Meitu’s idea of beauty," the NYT notes. But when innovations are rejected and their markets collapse, there can still be sticky effects:
"Even then, of course, the bulk of U.S. consumers remained verifiably reluctant to leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon’s endurance can’t be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and -delivery, and didn’t cause much industry concern."
As a business and innovation strategy consultant, I'm no luddite and have few objections to companies making money. Personally, I also love a good Instagram filter. But Meitu just feels different; using it, I'd crossed one of those invisible lines that you know when you see. I deleted the app immediately.
POLITICAL MYTHOLOGY AND GOAT YOGA
When I read this article on "Goat Yoga," in the New York Times last week, my immediate thought was, this is it, this is why Donald Trump won the election.
When I read this article on "Goat Yoga," in the New York Times last week, my immediate thought was, this is it, this is why Donald Trump won the election. We thought freedom and human rights, diversity and respect, different and weird had already won--we still had some unconscious biases to weed out, sure, but we were comfortable enough that at least formally, consciously, aspirationally, America was a country of reason and respect and humanism for us to allow ourselves this kind of kumbaya capitalist decadence.
Of course it's more complicated than that, but it was my first thought. It falls in line with numerous Rome-analogy pieces like this one from March 2016--disturbingly far in advance of the election--that are taking on a knew significance now, as the hogwash but powerful Mythology of Trump bleeds into full-on garish hyperreality.
Goat Yoga has everything you could possibly want in a news story right now to comfort the reeling elite liberal ego: off-beat intrigue, factual reporting, adjectives like "hummocky"; a hip way to get healthy exercise with a global internet community and a mantra of inclusion (despite its definitionally-expensive actual physical requirements).* It's comfortable and warm; the mere existence of such an article leads us to feel like we're living in a Hillary Clinton world. It's the very feeling that, perhaps, prevented us from actually living in one.
We need a better MacGuffin, sadly, one farther removed from detail and fact. As different as Trump's and Obama's objectives and ideologies, and as measured and pragmatic as the latter has been as President, as candidates, they won the same way: with a general, blanket feeling you could twist to build your own narrative on. It's a rhetorical platform you can use to incite discord as well as harmony, for anger and fear as for hope. They both, notably, tapped into a fervent desire for change. We now need a new mythic counter-mechanism, another unifying, positive emotion with the power to override things like goat yoga for our attention. I'm not sure yet what the the right MacGuffin-myth is--i think, maybe, Bernie hit a chord close to it--but I have my eyes peeled.
*When I re-read this sentence I realized it sounded like Stefon from SNL reviewing the city's hottest new club, but decided to stand by it, yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.
RECURSION: THE REMIX TO COGNITION
Recursion transcends academic disciplines, unites art and nature, and may be the fundamental linguistic and even cognitive function that differentiates human from animal existence.
The power of recursion, almost by definition, boggles the mind. Its reach transcends academic disciplines, unites art and nature, and may be the fundamental linguistic and even cognitive function that differentiates human from animal existence. Its propensity toward complexity and infinity quickly defies comprehension, with the highest-IQ humans able to process only 6-7 embedded layers. A single infinite loop can crash the most powerful supercomputers, and there's certainly no escape from infinite self-referential nerd jokes.
Broadly, I define recursion as "self-similar embedded repetition." I'm not going to try to rewrite Wikipedia on recursion's many discipline-specific applications and examples, but this list includes:
The Sierpinski Triangle, a fractal
- The Droste Effect and Matryoshka dolls in art
- Mis en abyme in art and literature
- Frame stories and stories within stories in literature
- Fractals in natural phenomenal and mathematics
- Fibonacci numbers, factorials, and the golden ratio in mathematics
- Infinite loops and circular references in computer science
The first chapter of Michael Corballis's book The Recursive Mind provides an excellent extended introduction to recursion, including several choice humorous examples. Building on Chomskyan universal grammar, Corballis holds recursion as not only the distinguishing attribute of human language, but of human thought, the foundational function of not just linguistics, but philosophy.* (He also nicely distinguishes recursion from its cousin simple repetition, and sister iteration.)
It's worth noting that frame stories and stories within stories pervade Classical mythology; Ovid's Metamorphoses, the gold standard, is woven together almost entirely in this way, with multiple layers of embedding. The story of Echo, for example, is embedded within the tale of Narcissus, which is in turn embedded in the that of Tiresias. This example is particularly rich, as the stories each individually contain recursive elements--Narcissus, for example, falls in love with his own self-similar reflection, embedded in a pool. So, here we have 1) textual recursion, 2) metatextual recursion (stories within stories), and 3. recursion of recursion--between levels 1) and 2).
John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1903
Recursion is all over the business world, even though the word itself isn't part of our vocabulary. We do financial analysis on financial analysis, make a plan for the plan, and innovate on innovation. Especially as operations standardize and scale, recursion often pops up in organizational hierarchies and operational algorithms as well.
And then there's the underlying function of human existence, which I'm very surprised is not mentioned more in connection with the word recursion: mammalian reproductive biology. What is gestation but embedded self-similar repetition?
Is the cultural ubiquity of recursion--in art, literature, business, technology--a subliminal cognitive response to our physical and biological nature? Is our underlying obsession with recursion, like sex, a natural instinct in the quest for survival?
I think so. But the more I think about it, the more I think about it.
*There have been some interesting recent challenges to Chomsky, universal grammar, and recursion as a fundamental law of language.