Social Media, Candide, and Thinking vs. Doing

Are you familiar with Candide? I recently read it for class and have been thinking about the last line of the novella ever since.

Candide first, then social media.

At the end of the novella, Candide, the titular character and protagonist, finds a home far away from his original home in Germany and converses with his old tutor, Pangloss. Pangloss, an ‘optimalist’ who believes that all is always for the best, vindicates Candide’s past misfortunes:

"There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts."

Candide spends the entire novella trying to reconcile Pangloss’s optimalism, which he believes in so thoroughly as to appear brain-washed, with all the woes that befall him. Now, however, rather than agree whole-heartedly with Pangloss’s assertion, Candide only answers:

"That is well said, but we must cultivate our garden."

After blow upon bruise, Candide altogether renounces theorizing and philosophy—Pangloss’s or otherwise. He is done with circular reasoning. He will pay attention to that which is before him. He will cultivate his garden.

Now the volta from Voltaire to social media.

Ostensibly, social media enables us to connect with one another. Even if you only buy the origin story advanced by The Social Network, in which Harvard students join Facebook merely to see who is single and who isn’t, Facebook began as a platform for connecting with other people. It was a glass in which the reflections of others (their profiles) directed us to them in the real world.

Soon, the “like” trumped the relationship as the basic unit of Facebook. As people paid our profiles attention and showered us with likes, the glass in which we saw the reflections of others shifted just enough for us to glimpse our own. We were enthralled. We turned from the real-world garden of relationships to our online identities.

As Pangloss seeks to explain the world with theory, we sought to explain ourselves with our profiles. Pangloss reduces the complexities of the world to the motto “All is for the best”; we quantified our self esteem with likes, followers, retweets, notes, and so on.We forgot that social media is about relationships, not profiles.

That’s why, on Switchboard, your profile is your past post history and nothing more—no likes, no followers. Check my profile and you might find that I posted an offer to host people in Maine, or that I asked for advice about finding a job at the Spacing Guild. The only potential action you can perform in response to my profile is contacting me to fulfill my ask or take me up on my offer. There is no intermediate “like” or “follow.” Switchboard is useful. Human. You are not directed to interact with my online persona, you are directed to interact with me.

Like Candide through most of Candide, social media has lost its way. Our online profiles beguile us, and we forget our real relationships and our real selves. But no matter how much detail I add to my Facebook profile, my Facebook profile will never be me. My Facebook friendships with my friends’ Facebook profiles will never be my real relationships. We cannot explain ourselves, only become ourselves.

We must cultivate our garden.

On Seamus Heaney

The PIE office is silent this morning. In the meditative hum of devices and screens I’m thinking about Seamus Heaney and wondering if there is a Start-Up Founder Bereavement Group for Mourning the Loss of Great Poets. Anyone? Anyone know of such a meet-up? 

It was 1995. I was fifteen years old and a friend gave me an issue of Doubletake Magazine. On the very first pages were Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy." That was it. I bought Death of a Naturalist. I sought out his readings.  District and Circle carried me through my late twenties. 

In the inaugural letter of Doubletake, the founder, Alex Harris, writes of his motivation to build a community around “the renderings of the world as it is and as it might be.” And now, almost 20 years later, that same ethos very much informs what we build at Switchboard. “This is what is. This is what could be.” At the end of the day that’s what most conversations we have boil down to. It’s the mantra of anyone building something new against all odds. 

I haven’t found a more moving description of this optimism to will something different into the world than in “Troy.” So here it is. 

Thank you, Seamus Heaney. 

Chorus, “The Cure at Troy”
Seamus Heaney’s translation of “The Philoctetes” by Sophocles 

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

We're pivoting!

Do you know what today is? Why it is Y Combinator’s demo day of course! Are you following it minute by minute like we are?

So is it just me or is there a restaurant delivery service in every class (too lazy to actually do the research to confirm this)? 

Me: “Isn’t there a restaurant delivery service every class?”

Sean: “It’s a huge opportunity if you can do it well.”

Me: “Someone should mash up Über with restaurant delivery and just pick you up and drive you to the restaurant. It’d probably be faster.”

Sean: “No. Someone should pick you up and then hand you a burrito. And call it Üburrito.”

Then, because it is 4 PM on a Tuesday Sean made a logo for our new company. We’ll be lining up an investor call at the end of this week. The market, obviously, is huge.

Whistling While We Hustle

Yesterday was a big day. We went from having the Most Complicated Business Model Ever to Simple, Elegant Awesomeness thanks to PIE Mentor Jason whose past successes include a happy hour locator app and an online mail order bacon business, in addition to co-founding PIE (snaps). Signing off with this song that’s going to propel the next week, if not the rest of the next 76 days 19 hours 20 minutes and 47 seconds.

PIE Day 2

Good morning. I’m guessing that exactly zero people are reading this, which is why I feel free to pivot from the trials and tribulations of a new tech startup to talking about teens and broken condoms.

So yesterday I went to this meetup sponsored by GigaOM. And no, I had never heard of their site until last night. Also, these events have delicious food. I’m sorry I forgot to take a photo of the pulled pork sandwiches.

I struck up a conversation with Connie. I was like, “Hey, Connie. I do not understand what you do or why I am here.” And she was like, “Uh, almost 6 million people read our tech news site and buy our research reports.” Useful.

We started talking about what Connie did in her previous life (protip: really good question for people new to tech) and she mentioned the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) which has programs for underserved youth. We got to talking about ISIS (Internet Sexuality Information Services). If you want to read a totally incomprehensible description of what it is that involves women’s underwear, go here. If you want to spare yourself the dozen clicks it takes to figure out what they actually do, go here. 

Basically: BAVC works with teens. Teens have sex. Horrible things happen during sex like condoms breaking (pictured above?). So BVAC partnered with ISIS’s SexINFO so teens can text to a phone number and then sex counselors answer their question. Connie underscored that for low-income communities feature phones (also called “dumbphones”) not smartphones, are the norm (and that goes for the rest of the developing world and also, surprisingly, 60% of the US market).  

I arrived at the office this morning amped from my conversation with Connie and I was like, “Sean, we should allow Switchboard notifications to arrive via text.” And then he was like, “Yes, I will put that at the bottom of my much more urgent list of things to do” and looked at me with His Particular Look of Dread When I Start a Sentence with “We Should.” (Should I come up with an acronym for this now because it happens so often? HPLDWSSWS?)

Very often we get the question, “Is there a mobile app?” and for college students and 40% of the US, this makes sense. Mobile! App! All the rage! But if you are thinking down the line of how Switchboard can be used in, say, Africa (or an Oakland high school, or for migrant workers) often there are simple features like “can I get notification by text?” that are easy to lose sight of. Even Facebook is expanding to dumbphones. 

Day two also consisted of me eye rolling at this Tom Friedman piece, “Welcome to the Sharing Economy.” (Welcome? Really?) and listening to this Design Matters interview about Le Corbusier. My favorite part is where Cohen talks about how shells and snails appear everywhere in Le Corbusier’s work that he gathered on beaches of France. He started to collect “objects of poetic reaction…objects that had a poetic potential that could generate thoughts…When he died in 1965 his apartment was cluttered with bones, stones, shells, pine cones which at some point appear in his paintings.” My object of poetic potential from yesterday to inform what we are making was a text from a teen that might say, “I think I have herpes.”