Jed Sundwall » Jed

Why I’m an Occupier

Jed — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 21:49:38 +0000

First, a caveat: I’m not a protestor. I haven’t been to the Occupy San Diego protests. I’ve never been inclined to protest. I don’t have the capacity for it. Perhaps it’s an attention span issue. I hope this doesn’t undermine what I have to say here.

It’s a moral issue. The best label I’ve found for my moral beliefs is “agnostic Mormonism” and I’ve recently been fond of calling myself a “liberaltarian” to describe my politics. Having grown up Mormon and having been a Mormon missionary for two years, my morality is informed heavily by Christ’s teachings. I love Jesus’s humanitarianism. It’s this humanitarianism that makes me sympathetic to the occupy movement, particularly after this past week.

On Thursday in Portland, Oregon, a 20 year old girl is pepper sprayed directly in the face from what looks like about two feet.

On Thursday in New York City, retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis is arrested. From a story preceding his arrest:

Mayor Bloomberg has stated the raid was necessary because the protest encampment carried with it a risk of crime, fire and health hazards. Mr. Lewis called that rationale “a farce.”

“They complained about the park being dirty. Here they are worrying about dirty parks when people are starving to death, where people are freezing, where people are sleeping in subways and they’re concerned about a dirty park. That’s obnoxious, it’s arrogant, it’s ignorant, it’s disgusting,” Mr. Lewis said.

Yesterday, UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike pepper sprays a group of students protesting on campus. Watch the video of this one.

The video is what pushed me over the edge. Seeing a man clad in boots and a helmet spray a group of students sitting on the ground (twice!) as if he were watering a garden, is too much for me. I’m an alum of the University of California. I can’t believe this happened in my country, in my state, at my university.

That the occupy movements lack definition is a feature, not a bug. Because occupy has no centralized leader or mission, everyone is allowed to project their own meaning onto it. I’ve seen occupy as a manifestation of anxiety over the influence of organizations in our lives. I believe it’s the same anxiety felt by people who identify with the Tea Party (which I found repulsive, probably based on my own classism).

Here’s what I see happening:

Millions of Americans have shaped their lives based on the assumption that a variety of institutions existed to protect them and advocate for them: government agencies, banks, schools, corporations, religions, etc. They’ve taken student loans, mortgages, gone to war, built careers based on these assumptions. Now they’re forced to face a variety of painful truths, including:

Most of these organizations don’t care about anyone’s individual rights or welfare at all. Many of them don’t even work to achieve their stated missions. They exist merely to sustain themselves.
Beyond sustaining themselves, many of these organizations that exist explicitly to serve individuals are flagrantly serving OTHER organizations at the expense of individuals. In a horrifically ironic way, this week’s violence made this case brutally clear. Another good example of this is congress’s recent capitulation to dairy farm lobbyists at the expense of our children’s health by defining pizza as a vegetable. Wall street bailouts are another great example. The seemingly endless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are another. This disingenuousness is insulting.
Many of these organizations are partially or fully funded by tax dollars. These are tax dollars that are literally forced from individuals’ hands. If you don’t pay your taxes, you are literally separated from your family and sent to jail. You have no choice but to fund these organizations that work against you. This is where the tea party most clearly overlaps with the occupy movement. Note: the UC Davis police officer who sprayed the kids made $116,000 in 2010. I paid for part of that.

Occupy, by agitating enough organizations into showing how much they care for individual liberties, is now forcing more people to ask themselves: “is this what we want?”

Do we want a militarized police force? Do we want a police state? Will I want to send my daughter to a state university, knowing that she might be sent to the hospital with chemical burns if she chooses to protest peacefully there? Do we want to be at war? Why are we paying for this? Worse, why are we going into debt to pay for this? Do we want to concede so many of our liberties to so few organizations – particularly organizations that don’t care about us?

There are a million more questions. Each with a million answers. And each pointing to a fact that more and more people are aware of: many of the institutions we depend on are completely broken. They are led by cowards. We have been asleep. We are paying for it.

I don’t know what to do, but I will not give another dollar to the UC system until Lt. John Pike is fired and stripped of all severance pay. I will not donate to any elected official currently holding office or any major political party. I’ll have to think of some other things to do.

Wake up.

Who We Are

Jed — Thu, 05 May 2011 20:27:00 +0000

From the New Yorker, obviously.

Over dinner one night last week, Shannon and I puzzled over people’s desire to see photos of Bin Laden’s corpse. We don’t relate to people who want to see photos of dead people. Neither of us believe that photos of Bin Laden’s corpse will convince anyone who doubts his death. But now I’m wondering if there’s a moral imperative for us, as Americans, to see more of what our country does, even if it’s morbid.

We choose to live here. We pay taxes. By doing so, we explicitly or tacitly support our government’s policies. We compromise some of our beliefs and desires, trusting that our democratic system will find solutions that, while not ideal for us as individuals, are the best for most.

But can we trust this system to work if we can’t—or refuse to—see what it produces?

On Wednesday last week, John Stewart said:

Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war if we see what war actually is—and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny gold coin.

Earlier, Philip Gourevitch, talking about the Bin Laden photos, but referring to the Abu Ghraib photos, said:

…a photograph of the violence you inflict is always, in very large measure, a self-portrait.

Gourevitch advocates against releasing the photos, but perhaps we’d benefit from being more self-aware. Maybe we should let ourselves see who we are. Perhaps we’d make better decisions. Perhaps we wouldn’t be so cavalier about sending our children to kill people in other countries.

The idea that transparency leads to better decisions is the thesis of transparency advocacy. It’s easy to ask for transparency when we imagine it uncovering corruption in other people, but it becomes uncomfortable when it threatens to reveal parts of ourselves that we’d rather pretend aren’t there.

Seeing images of our victims—both our enemies and our own soldiers—could make us more introspective. It could also desensitize and harden us. Or it could just make us despair. I don’t know what it would do.

When I lived in Venezuela, a local newspaper printed a full color photo of a corpse and its decapitated head on one of its covers. The story was about a local prison riot. Most people I talked to about it were offended by the photo and complained that the newspaper shouldn’t have printed it. No one I talked to saw the photo as a call for prison reform—they saw it as a sensationalistic way to sell newspapers. I imagine it worked.

And now my mind returns to the beginning. I might be willing to confront images of our violence, hoping that they’ll encourage me to work harder for peace. But I’m nervous about life among these images, afraid that they won’t do anything at all.

Why 1.USA.gov and not 1.Gov

Jed — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 18:51:12 +0000

On Friday, USA.gov started allowing bit.ly to produce 1.USA.gov URLs whenever anyone uses bit.ly to shorten a .gov or .mil URL. A few people have asked why the short URLs use subdomains of USA.gov rather than 1.gov or go.gov. People asked the same question when USA.gov launched Go.USA.gov.

The reason is usability. While every character counts in a short URL, the purpose of USA.gov’s short URLs is to help the end user—the person who actually sees and clicks on the URL—to know what they’re dealing with.

While the United States owns the .gov top level domain, .gov is used as the official second level domain of many countries, including China and India. It is not reasonable to expect that most people understand the nuances of the domain name system and understand what each part of a URL represents.

Keeping USA.gov in the URL, while sacrificing a few characters, makes it 100% clear to people worldwide that the link will take them to official U.S. government information.

As a bonus, because Go.USA.gov and 1.USA.gov include USA.gov in their URLs, you can now search Twitter for USA.gov and any keyword to find timely conversations happening around official U.S. government information. Try it out: here’s a search for USA.gov and gas.

Here’s a list of countries that use gov as the official second level domain for their government websites, taken from the Public Suffix List:

gov.ac – Ascension Island
gov.ae – United Arab Emirates
gov.af – Afghanistan
gov.al – Albania
gov.as – American Samoa
gov.au – Australia
gov.az – Azerbaijan
gov.ba – Bosnia
gov.bb – Barbados
gov.bf – Burkina Faso
gov.bm – Bermuda
gov.bo – Bolivia
gov.br – Brazil
gov.bs – Bahamas
gov.bt – Bhutan
gov.by – Belarus
gov.bz – Belize
gov.cl – Chile
gov.cm – Cameroon
gov.cn – China
gov.co – Colombia
gov.cu – Cuba
gov.cx – Christmas Island
gov.dm – Dominica
gov.dz – Algeria
gov.ec – Ecuador
gov.ee – Estonia
gov.ge – Georgia
gov.gg – Guersney
gov.gh – Ghana
gov.gi – Gibraltar
gov.gn – Guinea
gov.gr – Greece
gov.hk – Hong Kong
gov.ie – Ireland
gov.im – Isle of Man
gov.in – India
gov.iq – Iraq
gov.ir – Iran
gov.is – Iceland
gov.it – Italy
gov.je – Jersey
gov.jo – Jordan
gov.kg – Kyrgyzstan
gov.ki – Kiribati
gov.km – Comoros
gov.kn – Sanit Kitts and Nevis
gov.kp – Kim Jong Il’s place
gov.ky – Cayman Islands
gov.kz – Kazakhstan
gov.la – Laos
gov.lb – Lebanon
gov.lc – Saint Lucia
gov.lk – Sri Lanka
gov.lr – Liberia
gov.lt – Lituania
gov.lv – Latvia
gov.ly – Libya
gov.ma – Morocco
gov.me – Montenegro
gov.mg – Madagascar
gov.mk – Republic of Macedonia
gov.ml – Mali
gov.mn – Mongolia
gov.mo – Macau
gov.mr – Mauritania
gov.mu – Mauritius
gov.mv – Maldives
gov.mw – Malawi
gov.my – Malaysia
gov.nc.tr – Turkey
gov.ng – Nigeria
gov.nr – Nauru
gov.ph – Philppines
gov.pk – Pakistan
gov.pl – Poland
gov.pn – Pitcairn Islands
gov.pr – Puerto Rico
gov.ps – Palestinian territories
gov.pt – Portugal
gov.rs – Serbia
gov.ru – Russia
gov.rw – Rwanda
gov.sa – Saudi Arabia
gov.sb – Solomon Islands
gov.sc – Seychelles (which has the best flag)
gov.sd – Sudan
gov.sg – Singapore
gov.sl – Sierra Leone
gov.st – São Tomé and Príncipe
gov.sy – Syria
gov.tj – Tajikistan
gov.tl – East Timor
gov.tn – Tunisia
gov.to – Tonga
gov.tt – Trinidad and Tobago
gov.tw – Taiwan
gov.ua – Ukraine
gov.vc – Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
gov.vn – Vietnam
gov.ws – Samoa

Bonus .gouvs!

gouv.bj – Benin
gouv.fr – France
gouv.ht – Haiti
gouv.km – Comoros
gouv.ml – Mali
gouv.rw – Rwanda
gouv.sn – Senegal

Interview with Chris Radcliff

Jed — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 02:48:01 +0000

As a part of my efforts to show the world what a great city San Diego is, I asked Chris Radcliff to talk to me about his work with the San Diego Space Society, the Space Travelers Emporium, and the wildly successful SpaceUp. He also teaches me what the word unqualified means, we wear out the word awesome, and there’s some talk about drinking coffee in zero gravity.

My Chris-worship is evident in the interview, but if you don’t already know who he is, I urge you to read on. Chris is a great soul—a creator of movements, a maker of things, a real friend, an awesome dad and husband, and a person who constantly reminds me just how wonderful human beings can be.

Chris is currently organizing the second San Diego SpaceUp, a space unconference being held on February 12th and 13th at The Loft at UC San Diego. More info on SpaceUp San Diego’s website.

Meanwhile, SpaceUp Houston will take place on the same dates at Houston’s Lunar & Planetary Institute. More info on SpaceUp Houston.

Also, we conducted this interview at the end of October 2010, so I want to apologize to Chris, and the world, for not publishing it sooner.

Will you go into space?

Yes. I can give an unqualified yes on that.

An unqualified yes?

Unqualified yes.

What do you mean by that?

Well, up until a few years ago, I would have said “I would love to go into space” or “I plan to go into space.” But as of probably the last six months or so, I can definitely say that I’m going into space, and nothing’s going to stop me.

OK. But it’s still unqualified meaning you have no certainty? I mean, you can’t like…

No, no. Sorry. ‘Unqualified’ means that…

I don’t even know what that means.

“Unqualified” means “yes, I will go into space.” And it’s not “I will go to space if—whatever.”

And by going to space, you mean like suborbital space in a craft?

Mm-hmm. (yes)

Anything beyond that, like spacewalk?

Absolutely. I would like to go into orbit. I’d love to visit a space station at some point. Just today I saw a couple of new models that are coming out that look pretty spectacular.

So what changed in the past six months?

In the past six months, I’ve gotten to know a lot of people who are actually making these things happen. Even a year ago, a lot of it was very theoretical. There were people out there doing this “new space” thing: making the ships, making the space stations, doing the work of actually producing the way of getting there. But then I started to really get to know these people, and they are passionate—not just in the way that the people that we know who are passionate about their jobs or their side projects, but just amazingly single-minded. This is a thing that they will do. They’re passionate about something like “I will design a low-cost awesome spacesuit.” That kind of thing.

The people who are doing this will work for no pay or will take cruddy jobs so they can work nights in their garage to build rockets. There are so many of them now, and they’re starting to find each other and support each other. They’re going to make these things happen, and they’re going to make them happen in abundance.

It’s not just “Great, a bunch of them will go to work for NASA and they will develop a rocket that goes to a space station that goes to a planet.” We’re going to be swarming all over the solar system within a decade.

They still need money to do this. Is there grant money?

There is money, actually. The funny thing is that most of the money in the new space arena is coming from the people who made their millions, and in some case billions, in the tech arena. So, you’ve got your Elon Musk from PayPal. He made his money in PayPal and piled it into SpaceX. Those are people who made their money doing something they were good at, but when they asked themselves what they really wanted to do with their lives many of them chose to explore space.

Just the other day I heard a story about Pete Worden, head of NASA Ames Research Center, talking with Larry Page. Page had asked about going to Mars and how much it would cost to do a one-way trip to Mars. Worden told Page it’d be about a $10 billion-dollar trip. Page, very seriously, responded “Can you get that down to about 2 billion?”

This is the kind of number that’s being thrown around as an individual who has that kind of money saying, “I am willing to pour that into your project so you can take me to Mars.”

There’s Bigelow Aerospace, founded by a guy who made his money in hotels and has always wanted to build a space station. So, he set aside $500 million and said, “I’m going to do it. Even if I have to burn through all of this money, I’m going to make this happen.”

Like a vacation fund. Like, “Here’s my space station fund, here’s our trip to Cabo fund.”

Exactly. And the interesting thing about that is that once you get a source of funds, and a backer who is laser-focused on making it happen, the other people will start working on it because they’re just waiting for the opportunity.

SpaceX has something like a thousand people working for it now, and everybody that I’ve met from SpaceX has that same focus where they’re like, “We would come work here for free.” I’ve been there at midnight on a Friday night and there are people working. I’ve been there Sunday afternoon and there are people working.

Tell me about the Space Emporium.

The Space Travelers Emporium actually came out of two needs that we had, and then one idea that put them together.

One need was that we needed a place to be because the San Diego Space Society is a shoestring non-profit. We don’t have grant money coming in. We’re entirely member-supported and volunteer-based, so we didn’t have a place to get together and just sit down and do the things that we wanted to do. So, we needed that—a workshop.

At the same time, we didn’t want to hide away in an industrial park in Kearny Mesa or El Cajon and make it this secret clubhouse. Space is coming into people’s lives right now, and it’s going to come into people’s lives even more over the course of the next decade. So, rather than hide away, we wanted to be there. Be right up front. Be the place where people go when they want to know more about space.

I’ve been a fan of the 826 groups for a while. There’s 826LA and 826 Seattle. It’s a writing workshop group that does creative writing workshops for underprivileged kids. And as a fundraiser, they operate a storefront that’s kind of whimsical. So, for instance, the one up in L.A. is the Echo Park Time Travel Mart.

They get lots of attention and it’s attention from people who are interested in the fanciful thing that they present, much more than the thing that they’re actually raising funds for.

I thought in terms of a NASA store. What if you had a NASA store that was kind of like the Apple store? Take the abstract idea, and make it real. Could we create something where you would go in and have this very specific interaction, and come away from the interaction both having this new thing that makes your life more awesome, but also having become kind of a devotee to the idea that goes with it?

We thought about doing that for the Emporium. It’s the place where you go and learn about this amazing new stuff that you can do in space and none of it is in the abstract. It’s not “here’s what people will be doing in 50 years, here’s what astronauts do now.” It’s “here’s what you can do.” You can go take a ZERO-G flight right now. You can go plop down your money. You can go and buy a ticket on a suborbital flight right now. There’s zero barrier to that other than having the funds to do those things.

How much does that ticket cost?

The suborbital flights? The cheapest one that’s currently available is $95,000.

It’s still high. But again, the ZERO-G flights are $5,000. There’s an astronaut-training package actually in use by the folks who are going to go on space flights and other private astronauts. That’s available for, I think, $5,000 to $7,000. There are things that are within reach to anybody who can walk in.

So, you can come in, you can get the ideas, but then you can take something away with you. We had the idea of selling T-shirts and model kits and that kind of thing.

Do you have freeze-dried ice cream?

No, we don’t. We tried not to carry anything that’s twice removed from actual space travel. So, the freeze-dried ice cream is great from a conceptual point of view, but no one on the space station actually eats freeze-dried ice cream.

That’s good to know.

We have tried to get space food. There are things that are like freeze dried ice cream that astronauts eat, but they tend to be very specifically prepared, and while you can actually get some of that, it’s more difficult to get.

We’d love to have something that’s a little bit more unexpected. For instance, we were talking just today about the possibility of offering zero gravity coffee cups. This is actually something that was just invented on the space station by an astronaut, so there’s only one degree of separation from the reality of it. As much as it works to drink coffee from a straw out of a little plastic bag, astronauts hate that. They want to have a cup, and you want to have a cup you can set down and your coffee won’t go everywhere because that’s kind of bad.

Well, have you seen Avatar?

No.

Because the bad guy in Avatar is this military commander dude and he always has his coffee mug. He’s at the helm of some sort of futuristic craft, killing things, and he’s got his mug. It’s like, you’ve got to hold your mug.

There is definitely something to that.

They actually did the physics of it and figured out that the kind of thing that they use for propellant tanks in zero gravity, where you use capillary action and surface tension to control fluids can be used on coffee too. I thought that would be a great thing to make that because, I mean, it’s also a perfectly serviceable mug that you could just have on a table.

And you never know when the gravity’s going to go off.

Exactly, you can even write that right on the side: “This mug still works even if the gravity turns off.”

And that’s a little unexpected. We want people to walk in, see real things used in space and say, “That’s really cool.”

So the emporium remains a destination place because you’re going to get things there and see things there you wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else.

Right.

And is that idea bearing fruit?

It is.

It’s very early, but at the same time, people’s eyes light up when they find out that there is a Space Travelers Emporium. And then their jaw drops when they found out that it’s real, which was another thing we had to walk that line of. It has to be the absolute cutting-edge of space travel, but it has to be real because you can do crazy spaceships all day and people will say “Oh, that’s neat. I like crazy spaceships,” and they’ll walk away. But people come in and they say, “This is about helping people go to space. Here are the ways you can go to space.” And then they see that there are prices, and they say, “You mean you can actually go to space?” That’s when the jaw drops.

You said you’ve met people who working to make it possible for you to go to space. What are you doing to make it happen?

What I am doing is probably not a whole lot, to be honest. My role in it is really small compared to the people with the laser-like focus who are driving forward and bringing everybody with them. What I have tried to do is work to my strength, which is bringing people together and having them meet other people, the combination of which could be awesome.

So, one thing that I’ve done to that end that’s worked pretty well is SpaceUp, which takes the unconference idea from the tech community and brings it to the space community because nobody in that community has heard of it at all. It was completely off the radar. We got a small group to come together and have a BarCamp and unconference for the first time, showed them how it’s done, and then said, “Look, you can do this anywhere,” and now we’re seeing what heppens. You get people bubbling ideas, and it’s not about view graphs or sitting in a conference room seat for three hours.

Would it be fair to say that you started SpaceUp?

Yes. SpaceUp is entirely from my head. Now, the name came from John Tantalo, and he will always remind me of that.

Yes, and he is wonderful. I would say that SpaceUp is a whole lot though.

Yeah.

The first SpaceUp was in San Diego?

Right.

There has since been a SpaceUp in DC?

That is correct.

Anywhere else?

No. There will be another in San Diego if I do not keel over first. (Note, again: The next San Diego SpaceUp will take place on February 12-13, 2011 at the Loft at UC San Diego, and SpaceUp Houston will take place on the same dates at Houston’s Lunar & Planetary Institute.)

There are others being planned all over the place. They’re in the early stages in places like London, India, Vancouver, Houston, Minneapolis, and DC again because everybody really loved DC.

How about Brazil?

I was about to say no, and then that tickled something in my head from somebody in Brazil. Maybe you just asked me that question before.

I don’t know. The only reason I bring up Brazil is I was there in 2003 when they had a disastrous explosion. They were building a launch pad because they’re on equator where the Earth is actually moving faster, which allows them to whip things into space with less fuel.

It’s so brilliant. I understand how the outside of a record moves faster. It never occurred to me that the equator would move faster and that you could actually leverage that energy. But anyway, it blew up and they lost a lot of their top scientists, and because I was there at the time I know there’s an aerospace industry in Brazil. That’s the only reason I thought of it.

SpaceUp and the unconference idea is great for a place like that where you don’t necessarily have a big company or big space organizations bringing people together already. And what you end up with is a lot of people who are working satellite-wise for other groups around the world. But then they realize that they’re all in the same place.

I think this is just part of knowing you and being exposed to the things you read and share, but it seems to me that there is more chatter about space these days, particularly since SpaceUp. It seems like space is becoming kind of hip. Is that just because I know you, or is that true?

It’s a little bit of both. Part of it is that you know me, and so I’ve thrown you over the wall into the people who understand new space. But it is a real movement. This kind of new space or alt-space—people are still trying to figure out what to call it. I’m going to call it new space.

There’s a lot of excitement. I think it’s a lot like Silicon Valley in the 70s when Apple was being founded, because that was a time when you had the home brew computing club, and then suddenly there was a lot of interest in turning their crazy inventions into real products. Apple was, of course, the first group to do that really well, but then suddenly it was like, “oh, what other nerdy computer guys in this area do you know? Would they like to form companies too?” And they did.

The same thing is happening right now in space, where you have somebody who has maybe been a secret space nerd all their life, made their money in software development, and then sit down and say, “You know what? All these other secret space nerds now have rocket companies. Why don’t I have a rocket company?” And they form one!

So there’s a lot going on right now, and I think it’s building on itself now to the point where honestly I give it two years in which we’ll see the first paying passengers to go on these spacecraft, we’ll see the launch of the first private space station, we’ll see a government lease a private space station for the first time, we’ll see the first private astronauts.

And again, it’s just going to build on itself because there are companies that have been working on this for a decade now or more. There are a lot more companies that have been working on this for about five years, since the X PRIZE was won, and they’re all really reaching ahead now.

Is there anything special about San Diego that lends itself to being a good city for space stuff?

There are a couple things that are special about San Diego. The history surprised me a little bit. The Convair Corporation was here, and the rocket that put the first American in orbit was built in Kearny Mesa. That’s pretty cool stuff.

But we also have the Air & Space Museum here. Now that it’s a Smithsonian affiliate, they get a lot of attention, special collections, and those kinds of things that are really neat.

But the other part of it is that we are driving distance to some of the real hot spots in this new space arena—L.A. and Mojave. That’s where the companies are all coming together to do their work. It’s not like lots of people live in Mojave, but lots of people will drive to Mojave from San Diego.

One of the things that we saw at that first SpaceUp is that collecting the people from the general area together and getting them exposed to each other was like lighting a fire. It was amazing because, of course, you also have Hollywood and L.A. and you have things like the biotech industry and UCSD and the other groups that are in San Diego that are very technically-oriented.

I think about this all the time. It’s taken me about 10 years to fall in love with L.A. I don’t go there very frequently. I would never want to live there, but just really admiring what an engine it is of creativity and making awesome things happen, and just the amount of work that comes out of that city. And I envy it in a way because there’s all this creative energy up there, and I feel like San Diego is kind of like the nerdy brother or cousin or something like that of L.A., which is clearly where I belong.

But the more we can get ideas going back and forth through Camp Pendleton, I think there’s so much potential.

The nice thing about San Diego’s relationship with L.A. is that you can hold something like a conference in San Diego and draw people from L.A. because they love to come here for vacation.

And it’s just that kind of “get away” sort of place that’s also a city, and you can still go get Pinkberry at 2 a.m. if you need.

Is it part of your M.O., as Chris Radcliff to be awesome? Do you ever think that way?

No.

OK.

I tend to think that lots of other things are awesome, and I often worry that I’m too much of a cheerleader for things. But at the same time, part of my point of being is to find the thing—or person, usually, or group—that I think is great and do something to help them be awesome. That, to me, is just success, and the more successes like that I can rack up, the better I feel about what I’m doing.

It’s taking the great, helping them be awesome.

So, maybe occasionally I get some reflected awesome from that, but I don’t think that I’ve done the awesome thing that I want to do with my life yet.

One of the reasons why I wanted to interview you and why I find you so inspiring, and awesome, is how you advocate for this garage culture so well. You’ve done a good job of reminding me that if a human being wants to build an inexpensive spacesuit, they can do that.

Just like a human being who wanted to go to space figured out how to go to space. I mean, it’s been done. We’ve gone to the moon.

Yeah. We know that now.

And it’s this constant reminder of how epic the realm of possibility really is.

Oh yeah.

I guess there’s no question about that.

So, maybe I connected you to the awesome.

I would say that’s awesome.

I’ll check that off in my awesome book of awesome.

There you go.

And now it’s lost all meaning – until the word gets recharged.

Yes.

OK. Well, done.

Things Done in 2010

Jed — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 08:58:21 +0000

I was lucky to have done or been a part of a lot of awesome, big, new, fun things in 2010. Here are a few of them.

Lost 23 pounds. I ran a lot. I ate less. I ate more plants than animals. I used the Workout of the Day app, which I highly recommend. I gradually put about 7 pounds back on after I reached my goal of 180, and I’m probably up another 5 more because of the holidays. Looking forward to doing another “line diet” between now and my birthday in May so I can keep my pants from turning into meggings (again).
Learned that I can run much faster than I thought I could. I averaged 7:55 miles in a Thanksgiving 10k, while I’d averaged 9:06 miles in the first half marathon I ran in January. This is straight up bragging, but I’m also writing it because I really didn’t believe it was possible.
Bought a house. It was an ordeal, but we love the house and are excited to live in it for a long time. It feels strange to be grown up like this in a “Well…how did I get here?” kind of way. Because of the house, I also learned how to fix leaky faucets, patch drywall, install light fixtures, hoist a kayak, and a few other things. I also bought a pipe wrench!
Started/shipped Measured Voice. Shipping software is hard, and I’m proud to be part of the club of people who’ve been embarrassed by shipping first version software. I have high hopes for Measured Voice in 2011 because our team and our customers are just…too good for words. I love the people I work with and they made 2010 great.
Officially launched Go.USA.gov. I get to see Go.USA.gov URLs being used by agencies and programs at all levels of government every day. I think we’re up to about 3,000 users. It’s awesome, and I feel really lucky to have been a part of it. Short .gov URLs are going to get even better in 2011.
Worked on the the Kids.gov “How Do I Become President?” Challenge, which was the first challenge run on Challenge.gov.

I was skeptical about this project when we started on it because I didn’t think we should let kids participate. We had very little time to pull it off, and I thought it’d be too much trouble to deal with the legal issues caused by having kids participate and that we should focus on getting a good poster from a professional participant. Well, we got a really good poster from a professional participant and we got a lot of priceless involvement from kids at the same time, including an entire elementary school art class. I’m really proud of how it came out and I’m glad my skepticism didn’t win out.
Launched Open San Diego. The response has been overwhelmingly positive and we’re excited to get to work in 2011.
Read a bunch of books, but not all the ones I wanted to. I blame Instapaper, Angry Birds, and Awesome Solitaire for distracting me. I’d list my Angry Birds accomplishments, but they’re too embarrassing.
Made a mix.
Got really into Tumblr, which is nice because it makes me feel like I’m blogging again.
Went to Mexico City and Tepoztlan. The time we had, the friend we stayed with (Scott), the friends we made, and the tacos we ate were wonderful. We only went for a week or so, which isn’t enough time, so we’ll have to go back.

Of course, I couldn’t have done any of these things without Shan, or my family, or my friends, or the friends I get to work with. I’m a very lucky guy.

I’m sure we did other things, but it’s time to start 2011′s list.

Sad 2.0

Jed — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 17:17:52 +0000

Every few days I encounter a tweet or status update from someone fretting about not being able to keep up with technology. It always makes me sad, but now it also makes me laugh because the Bajillion Hits guy used this as his #1 rule to being a power Twitterer:

Read EVERY Tweet. If you let even one Tweet slip through cracks, you could miss the secret of the whole universe.

What a great joke! Of course you won’t miss anything. Some of you may remember that time when Google Wave was the secret to the whole universe. Others are lucky to not remember that at all.

Remember: Internet technology moves SUPER fast. The Internet moves far faster than a single human could possibly comprehend. It moves faster than language, which is why it’s common to hear people say “read my new blog!” when they mean “read my new blog post” or “I saw the funniest YouTube today,” etc. This is also why people think it’s funny to refer to the Internet as the interwebs (please note that I capitalize Internet—out of respect).

The Internet moves faster than our legal system, which is why copyright law seems so insane now (e.g. I can get sued for comments on my blog?).

The Internet allows people to organize much more quickly and efficiently than ever before, which is undermining the existence of many organizations, including entire governments (see Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody for more on this).

The point is that the Internet is growing and changing faster than anything ever, and it’s impossible to grasp (books are published weekly on this topic). Nonetheless, we can be sure of one thing: major disruption is accompanied by major money being both lost and made.

All of that opportunity to win and fear of losing causes a lot of anxiety. It’s natural to fret, but I have a solution. I think.

It’s this: while everything is changing, focus on what won’t change—like the problem you’re trying to solve.

If you work for an agency (or business, or non-profit, or almost any organization, or yourself), step away from the Internet and take another look at what you’re supposed to do and imagine ways of doing it better. There are probably some new Internet tools that can help. Finding them, learning how to use them, and applying them will take some work, but don’t adopt a new technology before figuring out how it will help your mission—you’ll waste your time. If you do it right, you might add a lot of value to the world and someone might pay you for it!

We’ve been talking about “web 2.0″ for at least six years now. I’m not sure when Govt 2.0 became standard, but I’m tired of it. 2.0 is a geek chic way to say newer. It’s clever (as far as software versioning conventions are clever), but it doesn’t represent anything tangible or applicable.

2.0 can be applied to everything new, including communication tools, collaboration tools, organizing tools, archiving tools, infrastructure, hardware, security, databases, etc. It’s impossible to understand previous versions of all of these things, let alone how they’re all changing. Being an expert in any broad “2.0″ category is, by definition, oxymoronic. Developing expertise in what’s new is nowhere near as valuable as developing expertise in what matters and what works (see also: Stephen Few’s post The Unprecedented is Overrated)

Nonetheless, much of the “Govt 2.0 movement” is driven by assumptions that:

There are humans that understand all of these things
There are organizations that need new versions of everything right away
Everyone’s in risk of missing some figurative boat

None of these things are true. If you let anxiety about “keeping up” distract you from whatever problems you’re trying to solve, you’ll:

Be anxious
Make me sad
Fail at solving your problems

Triple fail! (assuming you don’t want me to be sad)

Conversation with Jay Porter from El Take It Easy

Jed — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:02:58 +0000

Jay Porter and I sat down in early July to talk about El Take It Easy, the new cantina that he and his Linkery cohorts had recently opened on 30th Street just north of University Avenue in North Park. We agreed that it was time to follow up on the interview that I posted to this blog a little over two years ago, when the Linkery was still at its original location near 30th and Upas.

Jay is a friend, and I’m not a journalist, which means that what follows is totally biased, fairly geeky, and obnoxiously long—so long that I created an approximate table of contents to let you skip ahead if you want.

I’m proud to know Jay, and I believe San Diego’s lucky to have him and his collaborators. As you’ll read below (if you make it that far), San Diego’s food scene has developed rapidly over the past few years. While Jay can’t (and never would) hog the credit for the progress being made in San Diego, much of it couldn’t have happened without his vision, passion, and doggedness.

Beyond working extremely hard to make truly exceptional food, Jay does something that more of us need to do: tell San Diego’s story. Through his blog and the menus at the Linkery and El Take It Easy, Jay is constantly telling a beautiful story about our fine city—a beautiful corner of the world populated with an amazingly diverse and peaceful community, full of neighborhoods rich with friends working together to make it even finer.

Also, the menu at El Take It Easy is spectacular. Get the goat torta.

Ingredients:

Introducing El Take It Easy
The state of Linkery, Inc.
San Diegan food (where we’ve been, where we’re going)
Good food will always be expensive
The people v. the city attorney
Growing pains
Food trucks in San Diego
Ham!
Jay teaches me about restaurant regulatory agencies
Jay predicts the future of restaurant regulatory agencies
From the yeoman class to the flabby class

Introducing El Take It Easy #

What is El Take It Easy? How do you describe it to people?

In an essential way, it’s like the Linkery, in that it’s a neighborhood gathering place. It’s a gathering place for people. But it’s a very unique kind of gathering place, in that we’ve chosen to express the idiom of a cantina as the primary way in which we create the space.

A cantina is a place where you feel super comfortable, where there’s no expectation of a coursed meal or of turning a table. You go to a cantina because you want to be in a public space and maybe have a drink, maybe have a snack. You might stay there five minutes, you might stay there 10 hours. You might start with two people at your table and end with 30 because it’s so freeform.

The Cantina is an idiom that isn’t explored very often in San Diego, despite the fact that we’re culturally integrated largely with Mexico, we’re physically al lado. We’re right next to it.

Are there cantinas in Tijuana that would resemble this place?

We’re borrowing the idiom. Cantinas in Tijuana might function in a similar way, but the culture in North Park is different than the culture in Tijuana or Mexico City. We’re adapting the idiom in a way that makes sense to how people live in San Diego. Take the hours, for instance: we’re open for lunch and we stay open late, whereas the cantinas I know of in Mexico City often are open for lunch and closed by the middle of the evening. And certainly, we who work here have our own set of interests, passions, and culture, and we express those as well.

We’ve chosen the idiom of the cantina, but the menu that we’re presenting is not in accordance with any rules about what cantina food should be, or Mexican restaurants should be, or North Park restaurants should be, or a table restaurant should be. We conceive of it as something that’s unapologetically sensuous and delicious—something meant to strike you in the head with deliciousness. That comes from our passions about food and how we want to live.

Look at our draught list. It’s craft beers. The financially expedient thing to do is to put another four handles on that have mass market beers. 95 percent of the people who walk in without any understanding of us and our interests would feel more comfortable if we served Corona and Dos Equis and Heineken—they would be more likely to stay around and experience other parts that we do.

But to us, that experience is not worth providing. The experience of drinking Corona is not worth our time to provide to our neighbors. They can get that experience anywhere. There’s nothing special about that. And, as you know, I used to work in an industry where I did lots of nothing special and sold it to America.

You’re talking about Directv?

I worked for Directv, yeah, so I worked providing 1,000 channels of nothing special.

Of Heineken commercials…

Yeah, potentially to hundreds of millions of Americans, and I found that to be not worth the gift of life we are given.

The state of Linkery, Inc. #

You’ve been talking about “us.” Who are you talking about?

“Us” refers to this group of likeminded people that compose the business called Linkery, Inc., which in reality is a group 40 people who come to work every day and provide food and drink to our neighborhood. There’s something that ties this group together, and we’re not monolithic. Everyone has different priorities and feels different things, but there’s an overlap for our passions and our interests which have created this thing, which is the Linkery, which is now El Take It Easy as well.

We often get cast as puritans at the Linkery. We walk a little straighter there in order to make our farm to table ideals as approachable as possible. There’s a very louche side to food and alcohol that was at the Linkery the year we opened—we were boozing it up in the bar with a lot of our guests. But the Linkery has become an established door to farm-to-table eating establishment. We have a particular food consciousness and consciousness of drinks. For instance, we get Domaine Tempier world class rosé and we’re proud of it, we think it’s great. The Linkery is a casual place, but it’s a high-quality, upright farm-to-table place too, a place worthy to serve world class wines.

It’s possible to go into the Linkery and be quite moderate and get a meal that’s full of life that’s not terribly expensive. But because of where it is, a lot of people make a special effort to go there and they dine really well. I think people go to the Linkery and feel compelled to have a three-course meal because of the idiom of “a restaurant.” That tends to be more expensive than casual dining.

One of the things we wanted to do with our cuisine was make it much more approachable. At El Take it Easy we want to create an environment in which you have three beers and a salad and nobody even notices, let alone makes you feel like you’re not following the script.

What’s more, we all got into the food and drink world because of the experience that goes along with eating and drinking. It can be intellectual or cognitive, which it often is at the Linkery. But sometimes it’s experiential in base, and fun, and a little bit dirty, which is the kind of experience we’re trying to create at El Take It Easy. The food at El Take It Easy is unapologetic, it’s a little bit naughty.

What kind of food do you serve?

It’s really interesting from a culinary point of view. The menu is largely a mixture of some very refined cultivated cooking techniques. We’ve combined French technique with some really authentic rustic Mexican preparations. In fact, there’s probably more French culinary influence here than at the Linkery, which is mostly based on the grill.

Some of the sauces are family recipes from various people who are or have been in the group. Some of the dishes have really slow-cooked, really complex components to them that highlight some of the things we’ve learned about authentic Mexican cooking. But this is by no means a Mexican restaurant. Because of where we work and who we are and where we’ve traveled and who our friends are, we’ve learned some of these things, both these high-end preparations and these very traditional, equally complex preparations.

Looking at it from the dining side, it’s freewheeling. The underlying theme of the menu is that the stuff is going to be delicious. I describe it as stuff that when you finish, you’re already craving again. It’s food like crack. That’s the spirit we’re looking for—stuff that when you wake up the next morning, the first thing you’re going to think of is “damn, I want another one of those cazuelas.”

I’m fairly sure that yellowtail gravlax is not a dish associated with any cuisine in Mexico. There’s a reason that we open the menu with that particular thing. It’s local—yellowtail’s phenomenal here. It’s a great preparation. It’s super delicious. It reflects curing fish, which is a very authentic thing to do in a localist cuisine. If you respect the idea that the animal you have is not limitless, then something that you do is cure parts of it to preserve it. And here we are on the sea, so we’re going to cure this fish.

It’s funny that people think El Take It Easy might be Mexican because one of the four words in the name is a definite article of Spanish. It shows you how tied in we are to this Latin place we live, where putting a definite article in Spanish in front of the name of your restaurant immediately triggers culture “oh, that’s obviously a Mexican restaurant.”

I look at this menu thinking this is San Diegan food or this is American food. It reminds me of how David Chang talks about American food, insisting “We serve American food.”

I don’t think any of us would be offended if somebody said, “Oh, they’re taking a David Chang approach to San Diego.” I think we share that idea. And I would even go so far as to say it’s not so much American food as it’s here food. It’s food for here from here by people who live here and experience this place.

San Diegan food #

This is getting at what I think is the next step of culinary growth in San Diego. Good chefs know that their food is only going to be great with the best ingredients in the world. In a place like New York, which is served by the Hudson Valley, or the Bay area which is served by these fantastic markets in Sonoma, there is the ability for chefs to put together a menu that reflects their vision.

Oftentimes in San Francisco, you see a lot of Italian, real nurturing influenced things. That’s the culture. There are historical reasons for that. But chefs in those places are privileged to put together menus that reflect their desires and get world-class ingredients to prepare and make those menus come alive.

In San Diego, there hasn’t been a viable infrastructure for world-class food getting to restaurants. When we started the Linkery, almost all the food that was available was simply, at best, high-end commodity food. And the difference between high-end commodity food and real ingredients is significant enough for your palate to notice. You can’t make those sows’ ears into silk purses.

You can’t have fantastic food with ingredients that are merely above average. The infrastructure to get world-class food into San Diego has started to be developed in the past few years.

Suzie’s Farm is a great example. In the last year, Suzie’s Farm has come to be an amazing producer of world-class ingredients—locally farmed, delivered five days a week to restaurants, insanely fresh. They’re real people, doing everything by hand. They’ll plant things for you if you want. They run the farm like a small operation, but it’s large enough to supply a lot of produce to restaurants. This is the kind of farm that exists in areas that have world-class food. And there are more places coming up like that.

La Milpa has been around for a long time and they’re also the same quality, fantastic quality. They haven’t been able to deliver as much product because they have stronger limits on how much food they can produce.

So now these farms exist and more and more of them exist. It’s now possible to get world-class, fresh, ingredients—at least on the produce side.

I should point out that we’ve had Chino Farms for a long time, too, and they’re obviously delivering the same quality of produce. But again, there are limitations, in terms of price, availability, and accessibility that restricted Chino produce to a few very high-priced fine dining restaurants.

And it’s important to qualify when I’m talking about restaurants like this—it’s always been possible in San Diego to do a place with world-class food if you’re charging the equivalent of $45 a plate. It’s possible anywhere. Hell, you can fly shit in at whatever price.

So, I realize now if I were reading this interview, I’d be calling bullshit on myself because “What about Chino, what about these really high-end places?” To me, they don’t exist. If it’s only a special occasion restaurant for rich people, then it’s not affecting cultural change.

Which if you look back at our first interview, that’s the game.

Exactly, that is the game. And actually with the recession, we’ve been pushed into a relatively higher price point. Our prices stayed the same for two years. From the end of 2007 to the beginning of 2010, our price structure changed essentially zero. Through our move, we made a real effort to keep it the same for quite a while because we didn’t want people to say, “They raised their prices when they moved.” Of course, everyone said it anyway.

But during that time, we went from being what I considered a very approachable restaurant for a lot of our neighborhood to more of a special occasion restaurant for a lot of our neighborhood, without our prices changing because the economy changed. And yet the economy going to hell did not lower the prices of real food and we’re too deep to change.

Real food has never been tied into the fake economy anyway. You’re always going to get what you paid for with food, no matter what.

Exactly.

But a lot has changed since 2005. Now, through the efforts of a lot of people, world-class quality produce is available at prices that—while still expensive compared to high-end commodity ingredients—allow you to operate a restaurant in a middle-range price.

Good meat is hard to get because have a processing facility in the region, correct?

There’s one processor in LA that will handle cows under certain circumstances, Mendenhall Beef and Home Grown Meats use it. We haven’t worked with Home Grown because by the time they came on the scene, we had finally developed some relationships we were really happy with.

We have worked hard to establish relationships with our meat suppliers, and it’s still incredibly, incredibly expensive. Because of that, there are very few restaurants that are using the kind of meat we’re using.

There was a flash where O’Brothers (an organic burger joint) had to stop because the price of good meat became prohibitive. I know exactly what that’s like since we’re in the business of selling meat like that. It’s really fucking expensive.

Good food will always be expensive #

Fortunately, because of the growing infrastructure and the relationships we’ve developed at the Linkery, we’re about to see more restaurants reach their culinary vision while using world-class ingredients, including meat. This was very unlikely before unless your culinary vision involved uni and yellowtail.

There’s another problem though. The infrastructure for quality beef is tiny and basically beyond the reach of restaurants because the consumer base—99 percent of the peak diners in San Diego—is not clued into the ramifications healthwise, tastewise, and socially of paying for grass-fed beef versus corn-fed. They’re just not willing to pay for it.

I look at our burger at the Linkery, which we charge $15.50 for, which is the lowest margin item on our menu. It’s grass-fed beef. We buy the whole animal. It comes from a small farm in San Luis Obispo. I can’t say I’ve ever tasted better beef than what we’re getting from this farm. It probably exists, but I don’t know of any beef that’s better in the world. On top of the burger, in addition to the roll we make and the rocket that we get locally, we’re putting an egg from a pastured chicken from one of two or three local farms. Pastured chicken eggs cost roughly eight or nine times what a factory egg costs. And the combination of those things is such that that burger should cost a lot of money.

Compared to what we pay for fish—say we put a fish dish on the menu for 19 or 20 bucks—the burger should really cost 23. But at this point in the consumers’ awareness of food and how the food system works, you put a $23 burger on the menu in San Diego and you will get personally vilified as being somehow offensive.

While we, as a community, have made a lot of progress in understanding food, tasting food, and learning how the food system works, we are not yet ready to accept the realities of food to a large degree. Charging what it costs to serve pastured animals forces people to look at the difference between pastured animals and corn-fed animals. It’s jarring for people to be confronted with something as stark as a burger that costs three times as much as it would if it were a commodity.

It’s a really unpleasant experience for a lot of people because once you really understand it and get to the point where you can taste it, you’re not going to eat commodity meat anymore. You’re not going to eat garbage anymore.

People see those pictures of pelicans dying in the Gulf of Mexico and they think “I should drive my car less.” They don’t think “I need to stop eating meat, I need to put down the chicken sandwich,” but the chicken sandwich is more responsible for that deepwater drilling more than the car is.

The moment when someone faces not being able to go to Umberto’s and get rolled tacos with a clean conscience is a really unpleasant moment. That future looks really bleak and painful. At this point in our evolution of consciousness in San Diego, few people have experienced that moment. I went through it, and now I’ve had the experience of living a life with constraints in what I’m willing to eat, what I’m happily willing to eat. I’m not pure, but I’m conscious about it. When I’m eating stuff that’s destructive to me and the world, I know it and I taste it. I do it anyway, but…

Right, I eat Dorito’s and I’m like “what am I doing?”

Yeah, and I have my own personal rules. When I’m traveling and I want to experience a cuisine of a place, I want to experience a cuisine of a place because that’s how you get to understand the people. And if a personal friend, if somebody I know makes me something with love in their heart, even if the original ingredients were cynical, I’m not going to refuse it. And you know what? Sometimes I’m drunk! And the only place open is the taco shop and boy that shrimp quesadilla is really good. But I know what farmed shrimp from Thailand really means.

It’s particularly hard at times when I really am poor, which happens more than I wish. It’s really a bummer to not be able to load up on cheap stuff and feel good about it, except that really it’s not. You feel so much better when you’re not loaded up on cheap destructive shit.

So we have a mortgage now, but we’re not going to stop the CSA. We’re not going to start skimping on food and buying fake food because it’s so important to us.

We haven’t had a lot of financial luxuries at our house in the last year or two, and when that started, boy, the TV went right away. I know what Directv costs, having been on both sides of that cost equation. That’s an easy $100 a month to get out. Not that eating good ingredients only costs $100 a month more, but it’s a start. How much does your CSA cost?

It’s 240 bucks for 8 weeks, which we spread out over 4 months. We belong to Inland Empire’s CSA.

It’s probably comparable to getting the bonus package from Directv. So, you have to ask, “How much value are we getting from being able to watch something that’s on Channel 717, versus being able to have locally grown fantastic quality, nutritious produce in our fridge all the time?”

The people v. the city attorney #

Let’s talk about tipping. The New York Times covered you in October 2008, talking about the Linkery’s no-tipping policy. You don’t accept tips at El Take it Easy either.

We charge for table service. It’s a profession. We charge for it.

Then earlier this year, the Consumer Protection Division of the city attorney’s office sent you a letter, saying it was unfair for you to automatically charge for table service.

Asserting that it was consumer fraud actually, that we were defrauding our customers.

They backed down though, after a lot of people spoke up on your behalf.

Basically, there was an immense outpouring of concern about whether this was a legitimate use of the city’s resources. There were actually a lot of people who didn’t care about the Linkery or Jay Porter all that much. There were plenty who did, but plenty who didn’t, and I think a lot of people shared the same reaction which is: trying to punish businesses that have openly disclosed charges and are very upfront about it is probably not in the best interests of the city and the taxpayers in a recession.

I think that was the issue people saw, regardless of whether they like our food or me personally. People see what we do and they see it’s insanely open and transparent. It was apparent that whoever wrote the letter wasn’t paying close enough attention. And like you said, our “secret charges” were talked about in the New York fucking Times. I think people saw that and just saw the kind of Kafkaesque absurdity to the situation, maybe more Joseph Helleresque absurdity of the situation, of the city trying to eat itself. The outpouring concern about that appears to be what led to the cessation of actions.

Remember: the city attorney’s office is a political office. Doing something that angers so many people that it prompts them to send impromptu letters of non-support to you in the course of a day suggests that it will not be an issue that plays favorably at reelection.

This speaks also to the power that you get from blogging and for standing for something in the community. You have strong opinions about how you go about things, so much that you can write about them in a way that’s interesting to people. It allows for a blog where you can say something and people will hear it.

Yeah, that’s always surprising, both surprising and humbling. You know how it is when you’re writing on the Internet, I’m pretty sure my mom reads it. Now we know we can track hits and everything, but it’s really unclear whether everybody’s paying attention, so it’s insanely humbling to get a reaction.

I explained your policy to a friend who responded “Well, I don’t know if that money’s actually going to the servers.” Is there any way to handle this kind of skepticism?

I don’t know. I suppose the fundamental proposition of our business to our guests is not just that we distribute our revenues according to any specific formula, although we do. We make that point to the public because we know we’re doing something unusual. We know that people will be thrown off by it and will want it to be explained to them. We need to reassure them that this is essentially functionally similar to a tipping system, except improved.

I suppose that a central promise to our patrons is that we do this thing because we believe it’s worth charging for and that we will provide good value for your money. And internally, at the base of any business operation, is an understanding that we will use the revenue wisely and according to principle and with integrity and in a way that helps the community, and, obviously, that includes taking good care of the team.

Do you have any evidence that it’s working? Do you have less turnover than other restaurants?

For a long time, we certainly did. There was a time at the old Linkery location when we had practically zero turnover. From about late 2006, shortly after we instituted the service charge and came together with our core team who believed in it to the time we moved to the current location. I’m sure there was some, but there was almost no turnover. It’s insane for a restaurant to go 16 months without major turnover.

Especially among servers.

Exactly.

Growing pains #

With the move and us getting bigger, our business has fundamentally changed. The experience of working for the business has fundamentally changed. It’s more fragmented. People’s roles are less holistic because when you work for a 40-person company, there’s not as much opportunity to do every job in the house.

For years, it was not uncommon for a dish or dessert to appear on the menu because one of the servers came in early and really wanted to cook it. That sort of thing just can’t happen with scale and that’s a tradeoff that we unfortunately had to accept in a search to grow to a point where we could become financially sustainable.

When we moved from a small place to a big place in 2008, everyone’s job became less fun, too. Honestly, we work a lot harder and make less money. We lean on people to do the same damn thing over and over again. People want to grow, and growing doesn’t happen until the expansion’s established. Right now, we’re in the process of expanding—like your job’s not growing, but you’re doing the same thing harder, more times per hour and for less money. That’s the reality of growth.

During these periods where we really have to just grind it out, we experience turnover because it’s just not for everybody. Hell, I’m not sure it’s for me, but I’m wedded to the thing and I think there’s a group of people here who are wedded to each other. We’re all committed to this idea of what we can accomplish, in terms of transforming our community. And so, we grind it out. Some people leave, and we get some new people in.

So you were able to enjoy less turnover by offering work that was more fulfilling, richer, less rote?

Yeah. It was hard and people worked hard, but it was more unexpected and lively. Unfortunately, that was also tied to the lack of financial viability. For a long time, we’ve been running not just a non-profit, but what’s effectively a community charity. In the end, it will grow to be a profitable entity, and all of the people that have invested money and time and believe in the project will receive an ample reward.

I don’t think anyone’s ever going to get rich on it, but the investors will receive something, a payoff commensurate with the risk slightly greater than if they’d invested in CDs or something. And the long-time employees who have fucking sweated out months and years, we’ll be in a position to compensate them in a worthwhile way. We’re five years in, five and a half years in, and that’s still on the horizon.

When we look at the numbers of what we do in this market, in this economy, expansion continues to be the key. In North Park in 2010, with the amount of disposable income that’s in this neighborhood, there’s not going to be a wait for a table every hour of every night we’re open. It’s just not going to happen. It’s not going to be Chez Panisse, in terms of the market. Even if eventually we execute as well as Chez Panisse does and do it for 30 years, unless the economics of this area change drastically, we’re not going to have that size of a market.

So, we have to be content with a restaurant that has a moderate market, that’s busy on the weekends, that’s fun on the weekdays, that pays for itself and pays for the capital it’s using. Then we’ll do that at another place and then possibly do that at another place. That is the path we see to financial sustainability.

So, are you coming to La Jolla or Baja La Jolla? Because I live in Baja La Jolla (Pacific Beach).

We’ve moved to north of University.

You don’t have to answer that question.

No, seriously, our farm-to-table empire now straddles University Avenue. 100 yards each direction.

And it’s taken you about five years.

It’s taken five years and we’re working our asses in order to consistently achieve the best quality, to keep innovating in terms of the kinds of foods we’re serving and the kind of ingredients we’re using, and to continue to contribute to the community. We’ve gone from 5,000 square feet in one facility to where now we cover 200 yards. I think it’s a lot.

We learned a lot in getting this restaurant open. If this is successful and the Linkery continues to be successful, if the opportunity presented itself to do something else that we viewed as a positive contribution to our world, I think we’d pursue it.

Although if we ever get to where we’re making enough money that we don’t have to work as hard, we probably won’t work this hard.

OK, I can respect that.

If these things were successful and I could spend my time blogging, I might just do that.

Food trucks in San Diego #

Some Linkery folks are now running the MIHO Gastrotruck. And we have Tabe BBQ, which is another kind of gourmetish food truck. Those are the only two gourmet food trucks I know of in San Diego. (Is there a better term than gourmet? Please?)

Yeah, do you know anything about the sourcing that Tabe uses?

No.

Because I know what MIHO’s doing. They’re using real food, they’re starting with real food. Obviously like most start-ups, they don’t have the flexibility to be 100 percent where they probably will be eventually. They’re buying a lot of really good ingredients. The way I experience food in the restaurant business is that there are places that I know I want to eat—people are making food I know I want to eat and then there is a bunch of stuff that I don’t pay attention to. So, I don’t know anything about Tabe because nobody’s told me, “Hey, these guys are using real ingredients and making real food,” so I’m kind of just not interested.

So they’re ostensibly gourmet.

It’s marketed that way, whether or not. It’s marketed to be gourmet to a community that is still learning about food.

It’s weird because just up the street in LA, there’s this huge food truck thing.

Right, it’s fantastic.

And here, we’ve got two gourmet food trucks.

No, there’s Dave Du Jour too. I think gourmet is a euphemism for most of these trucks, a way of saying kind of like targeted to…

White people?

Yeah, drunk Anglo’s.

And obviously, we have tons of food trucks throughout the city like in City Heights.

Right. Because the kind of taco truck down at 22nd and Imperial is not a place that guys are going to go when they leave a bar on Garnet. Basically, I think some of these food trucks that go under the name “gourmet” are casting a net to catch young industrialists leaving a bar at night who are probably not going to make their way down to La Fachada after they leave the bar.

What do you think of the truck model? It’s been awesome in Portland, but is it something that could work in San Diego? Are you interested in that at all?

Well, I’m certainly not interested in doing it. We spent five and a half years getting better at doing the fixed restaurant model. I am sure that the skills to do a truck are different, but we’re at a point where we need to leverage the things we know how to do. We need to take what we’ve learned how to do and do it as good as possible and get San Diego more excited about it. So, a food truck isn’t for us.

One of the things I learned early in this business was: Do what you do. Don’t do what you don’t do.

We did catering for a little bit and learned “oh, we don’t do catering.” Our catering jobs tended to not be very good and we’d lose a ton of money at it. We’re not good enough to charge what we would have to charge to make money at it because we would be charging Waters catering prices, but we don’t have a catering kitchen. We don’t know how to run an event. So, we don’t do what we don’t do. We don’t do food trucks. We do restaurants.

Ham! #

Right, and then how’s the meat bar at the Linkery, is that still going?

Yeah. We figured out how to do it in a way that it’s what we do.

We took the idea of a retail meat counter and merged it with the thing that we do, which is cure the meat that we use on the menu. Basically, if you arrange with us beforehand, we can cure meat for you and sell it to you before it makes its way into the dishes at the restaurant. We’ve figured out how to make that work in a way where it’s doing what we do. It’s insignificant to our finances, in terms of the sales of the meat.

It’s actually probably a net negative on the whole, but it’s really great for the relationship we build with people. I can’t tell you how many of our hardcore regulars buy all of their bacon from the Linkery. Basically, they come in once every week or two, they have dinner and then they buy bacon for the next week or two. And that’s their clock as to when it’s time to come back to the Linkery.

We got a ham from you guys last Christmas and it was by far the best ham we’ve ever had. A lot of our guests said it was unbelievable. We made the mistake of getting a half ham and invited too many people and it ran out really quickly. We’re getting a full ham this year, at least.

I’m confident that unless they’ve grown up in a part of the south where you have neighbors naturally doing artisanally cured hams, or unless they’re friends with Herb Eckhouse at La Quercia, 99.9 percent of the people in the San Diego area have no idea what a ham tastes like. They think a ham is something you get from Costco or like black forest ham from Boar’s Head.

Kind of smoky, maybe, smoky, salty.

Yeah. Water, liquid and salt and water and smoke. People have no idea what ham tastes like. And the first time you taste real ham, it’s a revelation, whether it’s a country ham or city ham. But boy what a hard sell in San Diego where you put ham on the menu and people are like, “well ham’s kind of average food, why would I want to order it?”

It’s like this super self-destructive feedback loop where generations have gone by without people tasting a whole category of food. We want to sell that category of food in its original form, the good kind. But generations have gone by where people have only had the ersatz version, which tastes like garbage and is cheap. Building a market for people to enjoy country ham at what it costs to get a good country ham is insane. We still have not done that. You will be one of our eight ham customers.

Jay teaches me about restaurant regulatory agencies #

You mentioned La Fachada earlier. I just went there for the first time.

Outside or inside?

You can’t sit outside right now. This is what I wanted to talk about. The city came down on them and shut down their patio. The patio’s gone, although they might be rebuilding it somewhere else on the lot. The people I went with were devastated. They went on about how it’s so nice to sit outside, how they’d go after church with their kids and family. And I immediately thought this is bogus. It’s unfortunate that La Fachada doesn’t have a blog where they and their customers can speak up about the city’s impact on their business.

Yeah, although I don’t know if it would make any difference. We were in a very unique position in that we got proactively targeted by the city attorney. It was totally a discretionary action by that attorney, by that office. They were creatively applying some laws they felt would generate revenue from us and change the way we do business. Things like patios and health codes and city zoning ordinances and so forth are subject much less discretion.

The enforcement agent is following a script there. Now the script can be changed and the scripts will be changed. The scripts we have are unsustainable—they’re a product of this moment in which we believe we have this thing called “wealth” in our city. Lots of appendages have sprung up that are funded by this very transitory kind of wealth that cities have, which in 20 or 40 or 60 years—I mean, you’ve traveled, you know what it looks like when it goes away.

The people from the County Health Department, in our experience, are really good people. The inspectors that come by are super positive. When we’ve gone through the process of opening the restaurant, they’ve been helpful. Our experience with the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control is the same way. These are people whose jobs are entirely dependent upon the existence of restaurants! They’re all about helping us.

Jay predicts the future of restaurant regulatory agencies #

But I think there will be some point when the people of San Diego, when we’re much poorer than we are today, look at that service and say, “I’d rather restaurants maintain their own health codes. We’ll just not patronize the ones that kill people.”

That’s how markets work, right?

That’s how the world works in every place except this handful of “industrialized” nations that are living a momentary fiction since World War II.

We will see what a funny weird luxury some of these rules we have are—these rules about the ways we approach zoning and land use. We will learn what people in cities across the world have learned, particularly cities in what we euphemistically call developing nations. They are actually much better developed nations than we are because they actually know what’s happening within their communities.

We will get to a point where we learn what a luxury item it was to be able to say “oh, you can’t possibly cook outdoors because we expect that you will use factory garbage for food, and factory garbage meat is super dangerous when combined with the bacteria that exists in the air.” Since us Americans have grown up in this bubble, we’re probably not even aware of the crazy things that happen if you take super bad, super unhealthfully raised ingredients that compose 99.9 percent of our food system and leave it out for a few hours. Real food doesn’t spoil the way factory garbage does.

But let’s get to a really emotional, existential question: why are we scared of food outside? Why is San Diego—which has a strong Latin component, but is basically an Anglo run city—so scared of people eating food outside in the community? Why does this regulation exist, whether it’s city or county or health or zoning, that makes it so that we have fewer food trucks and we have fewer patios?

There’s this really deep connection to the fact that we are so conditioned to eat food that’s dead—I don’t mean meat that’s dead—I mean lifeless produce, meat that’s been irradiated or frozen to death.

Full of ammonia, right?

Yeah, pink slime. We eat pink slime. There’re no butchers anymore in supermarkets, right? There’s shrink-wrapped gray meat. Or maybe it’s red if it’s been pumped up with oxygen that morning. We’re so insulated from things that are alive. We sit in our cars. We’re in cubicles. We’re in air-conditioning. We’re watching Directv. The places where people come together and talk are exceptions.

Honestly, as a society, a city, we’re not coming together and talking. We’re not around people. We’re not around things that are alive. We’re not eating food that’s alive. We’re not working outdoors. We’re not even traveling outdoors. We travel in our little steel bubble cars and it’s gotten to the point where that’s so normal that contact with life is really, really scary.

You go to any vibrant country in the world and you eat food cooked outside. You sit there and you’ve got real food and your drink and people and there’s bugs in the air, dirt on the ground, a kid playing in the dirt. And life is really rich and the air is full of microbial life and human life, and the food you eat is full of the same, actual nutrients.

We’ve completely pulled away from that. It mirrors what’s happened to our soil in our country. American food is grown in dead soil with petroleum added to create the energy, to imbue the “food” with the energy necessary to grow. So, our soil has no bugs in it, no life in it, the products of the soil have no life in it. When you interact with food in the supermarket, there’s no life in it. And now we create a governmental system in which our restaurants are expected to follow suit.

From the yeoman class to the flabby class #

Certainly there’s something really scary when you go from a place where everything is dead, all the way from the soil to your plate, to a place that’s full of liveliness and people and bugs, microbes in the air, possible imaginary contaminants. But that’s the choice, the fulcrum on which the future of our community rests: are we going to choose to be alive or dead? And are we going to choose to interact with things that are alive or only interact with things that are dead, only eat dead food or are we going to eat live food?

Right, but you’ll get food safety propaganda from Cargill or Monsanto talking about the security of our food system.

Now you’re getting into the really big picture, which is about dispossession of Americans from the Midwest farmlands and the concurrent growth of land grant universities. Basically, we’ve implemented policies and cooperated with corporations like Monsanto to remove all the family farmers from the American Midwest, and build land grant universities with money we got from the farmers. The dispossessed generations that would have inherited their family farms end up studying at the same land grant universities drinking the Monsanto kool-aid. We all did.

This is definitely my story and I’m not unusual in this way at all. Almost everybody in our cohort (Jay is 39, I’m 32) has a grandfather or grandparent who grew up on a farm. That’s the story of America, right? Our legacy that we should have had, of knowing how to farm land and farming land in a meaningful way, was removed. We ended up in a system of going to land grant universities and becoming partners in a world of large organizations. We became the flabby class.

The effete.

Those of us who ended up in jobs in which we did little of value.

I often think about this John Adams quote: “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.” OK, so we did that. To the point that I was in school essentially until I was 28. Most of my life has been totally awesome, really perfect in a lot of ways. Compared to most humans throughout history, I’ve never had to work very hard. I’ve certainly never worried about starving. I’m not a unique case.

Also by not having to work very hard, you got to accomplish very little.

Precisely. Mission accomplished until we’re living like Wall-E.

The research that’s going on at these same land grant universities is reductionist and it’s all about “OK, well rather than have live soil, how can you break down its components and have fake live soil? There’re only three things that matter, NPK (nitrogen [N], phosphorus [P] and potassium [K]), so we put those in and now we know about soil, it has three components!”

But people who know—who really know, who aren’t scientists, because scientists don’t know, people who know—know that the millions of living organisms and components of good living soil are completely different than dead soil with three chemicals in it. But in the world of the land grant university and the world of the research university, they’re basically functionally identical.

And you see this nutritionism with our food. People might say “food is composed of vitamins and a certain amount of fat,” but what is the difference between an animal that was fed petroleum grown corn and never could turn around and an animal that lived outdoors and ate a myriad of different wonderfully grown foods that were raised in the soil? Does anybody really believe that they’re the same? Does anybody believe that a cut of meat from an animal that was raised with absolutely nothing of value going into it and no exercise could somehow be comparable to an animal that was raised in an environment in which it had been bred for 10,000 years?

This insanely rudimentary belief about the world emanates from a particular culture that exists in research universities. But this research exists alongside research that’s been occurring in neurophysiology and evolutionary neurobiology which indicates that merely thinking something can massively change your body chemistry.

So, on one side, people are asserting that a pig raised in a factory, that’s never seen daylight, is nutritious, while at the same time we know that a human who’s never seen daylight is non-functional and chemically wildly different. It’s so insane. So we, as a culture, have this knowledge that what is coming from “agricultural and nutritional research” is complete bullshit. And yet, it’s so wound up in our food system and funded by these corporations like Monsanto and Cargill.

And we’re the students and scientists doing this research. We’re the dispossessed grandchildren of farmers, who are in huge supply in California and Iowa and Nebraska and Illinois, places that have really well known research land grant universities. It’s all tied together.

That reductionism, that idea that you can somehow get to the essential qualities of a living thing in cubicles and then reproduce it synthetically with petroleum, is deceiving. It’s like the joke about the frog: “You can dissect it, but you kill it.” That process of trying to dissect and recreate these living things that sustain us kills them. And so, we live in a world of everything being dead because this process has happened and it’s all been broken down into something we can recreate with fossil fuel, which is inherently dead.

It’s so naïve because, like you said, a human that’s never been exposed to sunlight is non-functional.

And chemically distinct, different brain chemicals, everything. We know that when they’re alive, their meat is inherently different than the meat of a human who has loving parents.

Precisely. Love. We actually talked about love a lot in our first interview.

We know that human meat, while alive, is inherently different depending on the amount of love in the human’s life, and yet we pretend that an animal’s meat is perfectly fine.

I love empiricism as much as the next civilized person, but I don’t think we’re close to figuring out the algorithm that is a human being. We can’t say definitively that you put X into it and Y will come out of it. Nobody knows.

Empiricism is created by the things you can measure, so it’s almost a fallacy to rely on it because it’s only reliable when you’re in an artificial context, in which you can measure everything. Empiricism in roulette makes a lot of sense.

Or perhaps computer engineering, software design.

In anything involving the mysteries of the universe, which includes life, matter that was once organic or is organic, empiricism provides little more than a reassuring picture.

It keeps people busy.

Right and now that we don’t work on farms, we need a lot to keep us busy.

I imagine I could come up with some study to measure the awesomeness of the goat torta I just ate.

You could probably measure the torta’s awesomeness on six different axes, but really in the end, was it fucking delicious? Do you wake up tomorrow morning wanting one?

Some links and clarification of our non-obvious references:

David Chang is a chef in New York. Much of his food is strongly asian influenced, but he insists on calling it all American food, which is awesome. Watch David Change on Charlie Rose.
CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. You pay to support a farm, and you get a box of fresh produce from that farm each week—kind of like a dividend.
Suzie’s Farm and CSA
Inland Empire CSA (our CSA)
La Fachada is an awesome taqueria in Barrio Logan
Tabe BBQ is San Diego’s Korean taco truck—worth a visit. I’m sure more are on their way.
MIHO Gastrotruck is a truck run by a few people who used to work at the Linkery. They make an amazing burger.
Dave De Jour is a chef who runs a truck around Cardiff by the Sea. I want to check it out.
Jay often blogs the things we talked about here, and you should read his blog. Here’s a deeper run down on the perils of our “developed” world’s unsustainable food infrastructure.

3 Ways to Get More Open Government Ideas

Jed — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:41:57 +0000

Photo caption: Just open it!

Last week, Andrea DiMaio pointed out some similarities in the “open government” ideas being submitted to federal agencies through their IdeaScale pages, indicating that the similarities are symptomatic of a flawed approach to public engagement.

Luke Fretwell at GovFresh called Andrea out (among other critics) for not offering any alternative approaches along with their criticism. Luke has asked all interested to offer their ideas, and this is my submission.

It’s worth noting that this first round of idea gathering isn’t even over yet, and it’s far too soon to judge its success. I do, however, have a blog, and it’s an excellent way to pass premature judgements on others’ work, so here goes…

These dialogs are too big #

Normally, I’m against big things. I think the world’s going to be solved by millions of small things.
— Pete Seeger

This quote has been bouncing around my head for the past year or so, ever since I first heard it around Obama’s inauguration. It came to mind when I read the Open Government Directive in December because the directive is a big thing that asks agencies to do big things, and I’m skeptical of big things.

That said, I consider the Open Government Directive to be a good big thing because it’s a needed big kick in the pants. It’s great that so many people in Washington are excited to respond to it, but make no mistake: most agencies wouldn’t be opening up without the directive.

Also, despite any limitations of IdeaScale, most agencies wouldn’t have such a robust tool without it or the guidance of the Citizen Engagement and Participation team at GSA. As Andrea has since pointed out, IdeaScale is an excellent—and low cost—way for agencies to experiment with openness. If it doesn’t work, awesome. We’ll learn from it and move on.

Oh yeah, ideas. Here:

#1 – Stop talking about “open government” #

We do ourselves a disservice when we talk about open government or transparency as if they were goals in and of themselves. They’re not. They’re means to accomplish greater things, like faster innovation or higher quality service.

Additionally, terms like “transparency,” or “open government” are probably lost on “the public.”

Agencies will get better submissions (and ultimately do better work) if they explain what aspects of their mission they’re trying to improve through openness. This will allow them to engage specific expert communities around their agency rather than the relatively small group of people who know what “open government” means.

The USPTO started using Peer to Patent not because it was open, but to improve the patent approval process—it just so happens that Peer to Patent is a great application of openness.

This approach isn’t the agencies’ fault, but is probably the result of instructions to allow the public to “provide input into the creation of the agency’s Open Government Plan.” Telling agencies to open up to the public to allow the public to tell agencies how to open up is probably too meta for most people to grasp.

#2 – Shine light on individual public servants #

Agencies should recruit or appoint staff to sort through ideas and publicly discuss the merits and faults of the ideas. I’m not suggesting that agencies publicly respond to every single idea (this would be paralyzing), but rather respond to trends or common themes among ideas. This is going to require a lot of work and will subject agency staff to some scrutiny, but I think it’s worth it for a number of reasons.

It gives citizens names and faces to identify with when presenting their ideas.

I imagine many citizens are dissuaded from offering their ideas up to the “crowd” that IdeaScale or Google Moderator purport to harness. If they know that Jeffrey Levy (for example) is going to read and consider their idea, they may feel a little more encouraged.

This idea, however, is not mutually exclusive from IdeaScale. It could easily sit on top of IdeaScale as a reminder that, “Yes, there is a real person at the agency reading your ideas. This is his name, email address, LinkedIn profile, Twitter account, etc.”

Without disclosure like this, tools like IdeaScale can enable public servants to hide behind an algorithm. That’s hardly transparent.
It forces agencies to pick up where IdeaScale will leave off.

IdeaScale works (in theory) because people can understand, more or less, how it works: you submit an idea and people vote it up or down; ideas that people like float to the top, burying the bad ideas. If the algorithm behind it were much more complicated, it would confuse users and they’d never use it.

This simplicity is a double edged sword because it makes the tool easy for people to game, particularly by people willing to beg for votes on their ideas. Others have pointed out how the simplicity of its design also creates a bias toward early idea submissions. My point is that we should not rely solely on these tools to identify the best ideas.

If staff at agencies were required to vet and respond to submitted ideas in public, we would get more insight into what kinds of ideas the agencies can use, allowing us to provide more informed ideas in the future. Talk about the benefit of transparency! It also would require the agency to publicly defends its decisions.
It will inevitably foster stronger relationships among public servants and interested citizens—increasing the potential for future collaborations, idea sharing, and happy hours.

#3 – Do more, smaller things #

Openness should ultimately be baked into everything we do. We shouldn’t rely on dialogs or directives to talk to the public.

If a person ever asked me to join a “dialog” with them, I’d probably think I was in trouble; it sounds like something involving a lawyer, and that it’d take a long time.

I don’t have any research to back this up, but I don’t think that most people have time or interest in talking about policy making or bureaucratic operations; I think people are more likely to have ideas about how to shorten the lines at the DMV, or feel safer on planes, or make tax filing easier.

Instead of inviting citizens to help us by inviting them to dialogs, we should ask for their help at the point of interaction, when they’re already thinking about us. By opening ourselves up to feedback on discrete things, we’ll get more actionable information to use to improve those things. A flaw of large scale dialogs is that they tend gather a lot of unfocused anecdotal information that’s difficult to quantify and apply.

Every government web page, service, tool, brochure, and program should come with an invitation for citizens to help us make it better. In my perfect world, these invitations would even include names and contact information of a public servant accountable for the quality of the web site or service in question.

This might sound preposterous, but I prefer audacious, like hope. For the Open Government Directive to accomplish real change, it will require a dramatic shift in how we do business and interact with the public. I’m not recommending this because I believe in openness for openness’s sake, but because I believe that closer interaction with the public and more accountability from agencies will help us build a better government.

Government as Technology

Jed — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:01:41 +0000

Photo caption: The National Congress of Brazil — Brasília kind of looks like a circuit board

Writing about the iPad got me thinking (again) about why I care so much about technology. I’ll write another post about that, but I want to explore a tangential idea first: the idea that any form of government is a form of technology.

I started thinking about this after reading Anil Dash’s post wondering why we’re so much more interested in the iPad announcement than the State of the Union. I confessed to Michael that, while I share Anil’s concern, I was actually much more interested in the iPad than the State of the Union; the iPhone has made a noticeable impact on my daily life and I imagine an iPad could as well. The actual effects of the State of the Union are harder to pinpoint (which is not to say that the government doesn’t have an impact on my life).

Then Slate posted an article inspired by the iPad v. State of the Union debate asking “Which is more important: politics or technology?” with a dizzying list of examples of how technology is creating new markets, empowering jihadists, and otherwise enhancing or undermining the role of governments around the world. It’s really good.

But why politics or technology? Technology, broadly defined by Wikipedia “can…encompass broader themes, including systems, methods of organization, and techniques.”

Using this definition, any system of government is simply an application of technology.

Indeed, a legislative body is akin to an algorithm that receives inputs (votes, analysis from technocrats, etc) and produces outputs in the form of legislation. I’ve been having fun thinking of DC as an immensely buggy piece of software.

If you’re worried about how technology is impacting the government (I’m referring generically to the various levels of government in the United States), there might be some value in thinking of our government for what it is: a remarkable innovation that has effectively governed millions of people for over 230 years. It’s accomplished this by empowering its citizens (or at least making them feel empowered), informing them, defending them (or at least making them feel safe), building infrastructure, etc, etc, etc.

Now, look at how new innovations are doing these things better than the government (note that I’m not saying how “technology” is doing these things better).

I don’t believe that many governments will be able to innovate as rapidly as the private sector, and they will continue to become irrelevant in the face of more compelling technologies. This isn’t a bad thing per se, but it could make us more dependent on non-democratic organizations that have no incentive to serve the people who can’t afford their services. That would be a terrible thing.

Arnold Kling wrote a piece called Why the U.S. is Ungovernable in which he argues for a greater distribution of power among state and local governments to stoke more government innovation. He frames the problem:

The theory is that there is a discrepancy between trends in knowledge and power. Power in the United States is remarkably concentrated. We are creating increasingly specialized knowledge, which means that the information needed to make good decisions is located outside of Washington, D.C. And yet we have a central government attempting to do for 300 million people what governments in places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Denmark, and Switzerland do for many fewer people.

Kling’s argument makes sense to me. One of the major takeaways (for me) of all the “Government 2.0″ events and chatter of 2009 was that smaller governments can benefit the most from applying new citizen-facing technologies. I’m looking forward to the fruits of city-centric initiatives like Code for America and CityCamp.

Oh, and I’m trying to figure out how to make San Diego more innovative. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Apparently I Have Opinions About the iPad

Jed — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:49:40 +0000

Hyperbole is fun

At least five (5!) people have asked me what I think of the iPad, and—while I don’t want to be a tech pundit—it turns out that I think a lot of things about it. Here are some of them.

I will not buy an iPad when it comes out

I’d probably enjoy having an iPad, but I’m not planning on buying one any time soon. I’ll probably get a few chances to play with an iPad over the next year, and I’ll probably be blown away by it. I’ll then hold out until I can buy a 2nd generation and laugh at all the suckers with the far inferior 1st generation.

Plenty of people have complained that the iPad is missing some feature, but I’m confident that the overall experience of using it is compelling enough without whatever feature they’re talking about. People who complain about missing features are thinking in terms of products that already exist; I’m pretty sure that Apple designed the iPad to be unlike anything that already exists.

By many accounts, the iPad’s speed, touch navigation, and large screen create a truly novel computing experience. I think the iPad will be a big deal.

I’m most interested to see how easy it is to type on the iPad while in bed. If it’s easy, the iPad would probably help me blog more.

I’m not worried about the iPad

If you’re a geek, you’ve probably come across a few blog posts expressing dire concern about the iPad. Alex Payne worries that the iPad may spells an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. Rafe Colburn wonders if the iPad is a harbinger of doom for software development as we know it.

I think Alex is wrong, and I think Rafe is probably right, although I think “doom” makes it sound like ending software development as we know it is a bad thing.

I think the iPad will successfully broaden the market for smallish devices optimized for a few common applications (Internet browsing, email, IM, music, photos, video, etc), and this will create an entirely new space developers to work in. It’s too early to tell if this is all bad or not. At the very least, it’s different, and that makes people uncomfortable.

That said…

I don’t like the App Store

Because the iPad is based on the iPhone OS, the only way to create a native iPad application is by submitting it to Apple for approval before they make it available through the iTunes App Store. This is a bad thing; I’ll try to explain why.

With the App Store, Apple has conjured a marketplace for 100,000 apps for the iPhone OS in a remarkably short period of time. 3 billion apps were downloaded from the App Store within its first 18 months. This happened because the iPhone is an extremely compelling product. People love it, and they love using it. They want things to do on it.

Developers love that the App Store makes it easy for them to charge for their software, and Apple shareholders are fine with the App Store because it makes enough money to pay for itself.

Consumers could not care less about how their software is made as long as it’s cheap and easy to get, and Apple deserves a lot of credit for training consumers to feel safe spending a few bucks on digital consumables. The iPad will likely add to the App Store’s success.

This success, however, is what has some developers so concerned. Alex Payne even claims that “[t]he tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model of computing for many people – perhaps the majority of people.”

I fail to see the tragedy in developing a better model of computing for the majority of people.

The concern shouldn’t come from the fact that Apple’s model is better, but that it has sucessfully compelled many developers to hand over a bit of creative freedom to Apple in exchange for distribution. They didn’t have to do this before, and it’s unclear why it’s necessary now. It certainly doesn’t prevent developers from selling terrible (albeit awesome) applications.

Requiring all iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch apps to pass through the App Store allows Apple to throttle—however gently—development of software for the platform; it hobbles the wild and organic innovation allowed by unrestricted software distribution.

Apple says the approval process is intended to ensure a better user experience by preventing bugs and protecting user privacy, but it’s not clear why Apple is better at doing this than the market. More concerning, it puts Apple in a position to stifle competition as it may have done when it blocked the Google Voice app.

Developers are afraid that the success of this model will embolden other organizations to get in their way and act as arbiters in the software distribution process. It looks like it’s already happening, although with varying degrees of control (see Apps.gov, Intel’s AppUp, Roku’s Channel Store, and Samsung’s pending HDTV App Store).

The Internet is an open App Store

Regardless of the App Store’s gentle throttling, the iPad isn’t going to kill software development for at least three reasons:

The iPad will probably be awesome and developers will want to build software for it
Apple does not have a monopoly on tablet computers or mobile devices
The Internet exists

Even if the iPad dominates its market, there are many other platforms open to developers. There will be plenty more netbook/tablet/whatever platforms as Apple’s competitors inevitably launch their iPad killers. And regardless of how many mobile platforms spring up, the Internet will still exist and developers will be able to develop for it.

As irritating as Apple can be, it is undoubtably a powerful champion for an open Internet—Webkit being one of the more obvious examples.

Perhaps one of the less obvious examples is Apple’s consistent refusal to support Flash on their mobile devices. I interpret this as a really gutsy kick in the pants for the web standards community make HTML5 video truly competitive. People (myself included) are constantly frustrated by the iPhone’s lack of support for Flash, but Apple keeps snubbing it because it’s a proprietary format and it should not be considered a standard component of the web alongside HTML, Javascript, or CSS.

This reminds me of their decision to release the first iMac without a floppy drive. Talk about gutsy!

Of course, this is assuming that I know what I’m talking about (highly unlikely) and that Apple’s motivations are so noble. If I’m right, Apple deserves some credit.

Don’t forget also that Apple was mocked for insisting that developers could use JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to develop applications for the first iPhone. Granted, web standards could not, and cannot, take full advantage of the iPhone/Pad OS, but there is plenty of evidence of convergence between web applications and desktop applications. This will continue.

Web developers can already access a device’s GPS, and I’m sure they’ll eventually be able to easily hook into microphones, speakers, cameras, accelerometers, compasses, and other features of mobile devices.

Developers who want to build for the iPad, but aren’t willing to deal with Apple’s approval process, should feel motivated to work on the vanguard of web apps. The web is where I think software is headed, and this, ultimately, is a very good thing.

One more note: It would be nice if Apple made it clearer to users that they can can add links to websites (or web apps) to their iPhone home screens. It’s a great feature, and putting icons for bookmarks alongside icons for apps helps drive home the fact that web apps are “real” apps.

Google has been really good about this. Adding a link to Google Reader to the iPhone home screen creates an icon that looks exactly like any other app. And now Google is making Google Voice available, not through the App Store, but as a web page optimized for the iPhone’s browser.

Behold! The Internet is a vast app store!

Many thanks to Ted for sharing many of the articles that inspired this piece and to Dave Dayton for spurring me to write it.

For more informed perspectives on the iPad, please read:

Rafe Colburn’s Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?
Yehuda Katz’s The Irony of the iPad: A GREAT Day for Open Technologies
Alex Payne’s On the iPad
Joe Hewitt’s iPad
John Gruber’s The iPad Big Picture