Ultimately It Comes Down To Taste

Writing is catharsis, writing is catharsis, writing is catharsis...

This morning I'm reminded of a post to FoRK I made in February 2001 quoting a Wired magazine interview of Steve Jobs by Gary Wolf in February 1996:

Steve Jobs: We live in an information economy, but I don't believe we live in an information society. People are thinking less than they used to. It's primarily because of television. People are reading less and they're certainly thinking less. So, I don't see most people using the Web to get more information. We're already in information overload. No matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can assimilate anyway.

Gary Wolf: The problem is television?

Steve Jobs: When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.

Gary Wolf: So Steve Jobs is telling us things are going to continue to get worse.

Steve Jobs: They are getting worse! Everybody knows that they're getting worse! Don't you think they're getting worse?

Gary Wolf: I do, but I was hoping I could come here and find out how they were going to get better. Do you really believe that the world is getting worse? Or do you have a feeling that the things you're involved with are making the world better?

Steve Jobs: No. The world's getting worse. It has gotten worse for the last 15 years or so. Definitely. For two reasons. On a global scale, the population is increasing dramatically and all our structures, from ecological to economic to political, just cannot deal with it. And in this country, we seem to have fewer smart people in government, and people don't seem to be paying as much attention to the important decisions we have to make.

Gary Wolf: But you seem very optimistic about the potential for change.

I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals. As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what's happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don't seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.

The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind's problems. I believe that very much.

I believe that people with an engineering point of view as a basic foundation are in a pretty good position to jump in and solve some of these problems. But in society, it's not working. Those people are not attracted to the political process. And why would somebody be?

...

There's a phrase in Buddhism,"Beginner's mind." It's wonderful to have a beginner's mind.

...

We live in an information economy. The problem is that information's usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time.

...

Gary Wolf: You have a reputation for making well-designed products. Why aren't more products made with the aesthetics of great design?

Steve Jobs: Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

This in turn reminds me of what Steve Jobs said to Robert X. Cringely in Triumph of the Nerds:

Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. I mean Picasso had a saying he said good artists copy great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas ehm and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

...

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste, and what that means is - I don't mean that in a small way I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product and you say why is that important. Well, you know proportionally spaced fonts come from type setting and beautiful books; that's where one gets the idea. If it weren't for the Mac they would never have that in their products and so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success - I have no problem with their success, they've earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products.

If I apply the principles of remix culture, and creatively remix Steve Jobs' words from those two interviews, I get:

When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want... information's usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time... To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that... Ultimately it comes down to taste... they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste, and what that means is - I don't mean that in a small way I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product... they just make really third rate products.

And that pretty much sums up the product philosophy for Things Created By Corporations. We get the technology that most people want. We get the music and movies and television that most people want. We get the government that most people want.

On that last point, in America 2004, most people want government that represents their views on God, Guns, and Gays (more than their views on other things such as fiscal responsibility, jobs, healthcare, environment, education, and America's relationship with the rest of the world, though certainly some people want government that represents their views on those things, too).

Steve Jobs has said (in a Fortune interview) that "Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service." What's important to note post-election is that we've gotten the government we have by design.

Ultimately it comes down to the Taste Of The Majority, which in its purest form boils down to the principles of the Median Voter Theorem ("If preferences are single-peaked, then the median voter determines the outcome in a majority vote.") and The Politics Of Small Differences:

The secret of Bill Clinton's campaigns and of George W. Bush's election in 2000 was the much-maligned politics of small differences: Find the smallest possible majority (well, of electoral votes, for both men) that gets you to the White House. In political science, something called the "median voter theorem" dictates that in a two-party system, both parties will rush to the center looking for that lone voter—the median voter—who has 50.1 percent of the public to the right (or left) of him. Win that person's vote, and you've won the election.

The two-sided coin of "Moral Values" and "War On Terrorism" seems to have convinced that median voter, who as Nicholas Kristof writes in the NYT, lives poor but votes rich:

[John Kerry's supporters] should be feeling wretched about the millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses who ended up voting - utterly against their own interests - for Republican candidates.

One of the Republican Party's major successes over the last few decades has been to persuade many of the working poor to vote for tax breaks for billionaires. Democrats are still effective on bread-and-butter issues like health care, but they come across in much of America as arrogant and out of touch the moment the discussion shifts to values... Democrats peddle issues, and Republicans sell values.

...

"The Republicans are smarter," mused Oregon's governor, Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat. "They've created ... these social issues to get the public to stop looking at what's happening to them economically. What we once thought - that people would vote in their economic self-interest - is not true, and we Democrats haven't figured out how to deal with that."

As it turned out, the CEO of Diebold delivered on his promise of "helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president", despite what the exit polls might have suggested.

George W. Bush did not run as a "uniter not a divider" this time, and he need not worry about re-election. He's ready (and now has a mandate) to spend all of his time through 2008 giving America the government that most people want.

Steve Jobs said it best: "Ultimately it comes down to taste." That line will echo in my head for years to come...

Comments

[Amit D. Chaudhary]

I would not agree more.

I think we have a few things in common as far as line of thinking goes. Yesterday, while having lunch with a entrepreneur, I mentioned that "Every country elects\gets the leader that they deserve."

Amit

[NudeCybot]

Great post!

Now remix what you wrote about getting what the majority want and "The Long Tail" article in Wired (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html) about how technology is making it possible to meet the demands of the minority more effectively. I wonder what Steve Jobs would say about that. Perhaps it won't be possible to include the long tail in product design due to the costs, which are small in the case of information products, but huge in the case of designing a new iPod.

[NudeCybot]

Oh I forgot to mention...incredibly I now have 6 American friends planning moves to Canada. Most to Vancouver and some to Montreal. I'll be blogging about this soon.

[Account Deleted]

Each person clickity click clicking away at a little machine that they are sucked into like a fly to light. Sorry, but that's just entirely too open for me. This is a Brave New World turning out as prophecy of our immediate future. There are at least three things about Kevin's comment that made Rohit smile: the invocation of physics, the notion that 30 is relative, and the thought of seeing you next week.

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