Mokusatsu…

I am not a fan of this practice, and if you don’t know what it is you can use your favorite search engine to find out, along with a rather infamous and unfortunate case of its misinterpretation through arguably incorrect translation to English. If you do know what it is, then by all means proceed.

I had a nice phone call with a friend of mine on Wednesday. We chatted about a few things, I probably spoke more than he did, but that happens. While we often joke that the “phone” in our smart phone is rarely used as a phone anymore, and I myself am guilty of not wanting to take phone calls without some kind of warning, I’ve been re-thinking this strategy of personal isolationism lately. I even wrote my first hand-written letter to another friend a week or two ago, a practice I hope will continue.

Obviously the Facebook kerfuffle is a factor here. Facebook is and has always been the illusion of connectedness, often without actual connectedness. We can post things there as we have done on various similar (less popular) websites and assume our friends or connections will see what we said, and as advertisers clamp on like a pitbull (no offense to pitbulls, they’re cool), we get drowned out in the noise. That these interactions have been mined is not a surprise (well, it shouldn’t be… anyone who has played with the Graph API over the years knows that there has always been a lot of info per person available) but it does shine what I am calling a problem.

When I worked at Intel in Chandler, Arizona, I would sometimes visit the on-site cafeteria with a friend I had made there. The Chandler buildings were sort of sad and felt like an old hospital, made worse by the fact that the cafeteria (in CH3 or CH4, I can’t quite recall) was almost always empty or nearly so. It wasn’t the kind of place people wanted to hang out at with their colleagues, clearly, but it was there as a fall-back meal solution as needed. For me, Facebook is becoming that cafeteria… while FB is by no means empty, it may as well be most of the time.

This doesn’t mean the buildings were empty. Quite the contrary, to continue my analogy. A place for work and casual interaction, to be sure, and Facebook itself is still going to be a place to conduct business with various kinds of “pages” and the odd connection where it’s the first best choice on meeting someone new or to facilitate an introduction… but for me, it has moved to the falling edge of the personal hype curve. I’m not impressed by Facebook, I have my own “vanity” domain which I should have re-launched for my own uses years ago when I said I would, and to keep in touch with people I would much rather do so like humans do, not like nodes on a social graph.

Killing with Silence

That’s the basic translation there. There’s another translation that is less dire, regarding a contemplative silence prior to response, but this more ominous meaning is usually the take-home message from my experience. Why is that?

When I moved to Silicon Valley in 1993 to begin working at my first job, at SuperMac (don’t worry, it’s long gone, if you remember it good for us), I did so after contacting friends to get my CV to the right person, who had hired people from Harvey Mudd College over the years with success. This was a personal referral situation that involved directly interacting with people. During my brief tenure at SMac I would come across AppleLink for some online information sharing, I was already familiar with gopher and telnet from the days in the computer lab at school, and we used an old proprietary email tool (cc:Mail, if I recall correctly) at work there.

As crazy as this may seem now, I still wrote letters to and received them from friends still at school and on to their careers and continuing education. As a computer engineer the road ahead was looking to be more and more connected through a modem or ethernet cable, but as a person the connectivity was much more archaic, and that wasn’t a bad thing.

Here we are today… I found in writing that first letter to my friend in Florida, that my handwriting has regressed almost completely to illegibility. It didn’t have far to go, but it traveled that entire distance. The days of taking notes in lectures with my Pentel Rolling Writer pens on my engineering notepads on my old school clipboard are long gone also, with penmanship exercised only now and then to sign something or to scrawl on a note to Post somewhere. I was almost embarrassed to send this first letter of a mere four pages, but sent it was, and I understand via Facebook Messenger that it was in fact received!

The presumption of connectedness can and does lead to bad habits. Without a modicum of mindfulness, it is all too easy to let communications fail and intentions falter. Attention to detail, whether it’s knowing a friend’s new mailing address, remembering to check on someone’s plants while they’re away, following up on a sick colleague, attending a birthday party… these have become items we scroll through in text messages or learn about via Facebook Event notifications. Or maybe we don’t.

When I worked at Philips Electronics in San Jose, California, for the very same person who had hired me to work at SuperMac some 7 years prior, we had occasion to hire on another SuperMac colleague who had an academic background in History of all things. We were working in the Flat Display Systems group on Software & Electronics, but given that we knew this person and that his abilities exceeded the banality of a block-formatted CV, we were intent on hiring him into the group. The request and his CV went to the right person in HR, and the wheels began to turn.

Or did they?

A phone conversation (not an email) one evening there at work (we on the west coast, he on the east if I recall, and it was late there) revealed that there had been no engagement from Philips HR to turn those wheels at all. I walked across the building to the HR cube area, found the person who was supposed to be turning those wheels, and asked after this candidate and job req. I was more than surprised at what I learned, but it stuck with me.

“Oh, it wasn’t a match so I threw it away,” he said of the CV of this person whom we intended to hire whether or not he had a CV at all. The wheels of Big Company had failed us, but some personal attention to these details righted the wrong and a few shakes later he was wrecking the place in SJ. I realized through this turn of events, though, that simply emailing a CV off to a friend and hoping they would get it to the right person was not always a recipe for success, and it wasn’t because my friend on the other end didn’t have the best intentions. This was 18 years ago now, and things have only gotten many times worse from what I can see.

So yesterday, Wednesday, this call out of the blue from a familiar name on my smart phone lead to a 2-hour conversation about a variety of things, one of which was a question about some code review and possible development for a friend of his. As it happened, I knew someone here in Las Vegas who had done work in a similar field, surely he would know someone to talk to, or someone to talk to about someone to talk to. It was worth a shot, so I sent him a note on LinkedIn, he responded with his contact info to send on to this other person, and now we’re approaching some interesting referral conversation. There wasn’t a solution here, merely a step toward more conversation, but a mindful step in the right direction. Someone might get a little project out of this, or another connection might come of it that will eventually lead there.

Our long conversation covered other ground, though, which has lead me to mash the keys on my keyboard with something other than python and sql keywords. There are two scenarios we talked about (among many things), which have brought me here:

First, the good stuff. I’ve been working on this “Food Truck App” for far too long. The whys and wherefores are a much longer story for a different time, but we talked about some things that I always re-visit when this conversation comes up, that I’ve been developing this platform (which is larger than a Food Truck App at this point) as a business, wherein I aim to make my customers successful without gauging them. A fair price for a platform that works and helps to bring them business and, hopefully, success… it’s all I’ve had in the “why” column, and it is one of the reasons it has taken so much longer than I would have imagined to reach a point where I can find out if this works. But that is the goal, to find out if this idea will work and to try to sustain it and me in doing so.

For the longest time I’ve been including Facebook and Twitter automation as features since so many mobile food customers find food trucks through those two platforms. Or they did. Now it’s Instagram somewhere near the top of the list, but those other two are still there. Instagram makes it difficult to automate the publishing of marketing images to let people know where they can visit their favorite food trucks and when, and from a marketing perspective, that’s a bad thing.

However, Instagram initially wanted — and in fact, stated — that pictures posted to their platform were intended to be higher quality, and so they were to come from a person proactively posting from their mobile device. IF Instagram were to be a way to share pictures with friends and others, it does its job, and it would be okay. However, it has become a marketing and sales platform that also happens to have pictures from friends and others mixed in to a feed that THEY control. Instagram enables one-way following. Thus, the megaphone approach is at work again. Post an image announcing an upcoming food truck event and hope people see it and Like it and all that. The illusion of connectedness continues [no, we are not surprised that Facebook owns Instagram].

Now the bad stuff. A friend of mine here in Vegas had contacted me about a contract gig at a newly-running, well-funded facility here, and he was so excited to talk about it and show me the possibilities that he came and picked me up for lunch and drove me to the building, and then back home. What a deal. The excitement about prospects and possibilities was palpable, and for a moment I forgot all about my Platform, which is now painfully close to viability… the thing I’ve wanted to see working for so long is almost here! The possibility of giving up sleep to ramp into this new gig as a contractor was appealing, at least somewhat, and though there was very little in the way of clarity in the form of specific requirements, I knew his friend and the person he was working for, it sounded like it might be interesting, and so the wheels began to turn.

Or did they?

Without spending too much of your reading time on the silliness that ensued, I will say that it seems there was a drastic lack of communication, some assumptions that emails were read, that lack of response was a message in either direction, and so on. End of the day, my mind was still fairly heavily planted in my platform and my goal to launch it Real Soon Now, and without some specifics I didn’t feel so drawn to this opportunity. That’s the beauty of contract work, to be able to maintain some distance and work with a client through an understanding that is codified in writing. This was missing completely, there was a breakdown in communication, and in the end it was clear that there was not this necessary meeting of the minds.

Silence

Two people should be able to speak, such that Mokusatsu as a root cause of difficulty is a deep failure worthy of closer examination. Or maybe it is simply a fact of life, where we write more than we read and we speak more than we listen. One must want the recipient of a message (spoken, written, or otherwise) to receive it and understand it, and one must also be interested in a response if there is one, and most likely if there isn’t. Taking the time to put pen to paper is but one example of where I’m thinking a change can be made (for distance), and our new traditions of texting and emailing arenot without their places, but the attention to detail — that the intent is received, understood, and responded-to — is only becoming more important in the noise.

It is interesting to me as I reflect on this, that I am so personally interested in this platform, which is to enable entrepreneurs making delightful victuals to more easily conduct their business and reach the people they are intent on feeding. I have often described this undertaking as a tool designed to make it easier to bring customers to the window so they can eat something, and it occurs to me that what I am building is a way to reduce the noise and mindfully increase the connection between food trucks (and now, mobile vendors in general, which is another story) and people who enjoy them. Go to where their customers find them (Twitter, Calendars, RSS feeds, Maps, whatever the case) and make it easy for them to find and discover these Makers of Food. It isn’t quite putting pen to paper, but it is making a best effort to connect everyone involved, to avoid the “fire and forget” postings on social media that bring no customers to empty parking lots, and to facilitate meetups in the real world.

Cut down on the noise, increase the engagement, everybody wins.