Adam Sternbergh breaks down The Internet Fantasy of the ‘Perfect Response’, that mythical one-liner that puts someone in their place, makes them realize the error of their ways, and changes their minds in an instant:

But the Perfect Response you cheer for and re-post frantically also tends to be one that (a) confirms whatever you already believe and (b) sticks it to someone you already despise. The Perfect Response is, in essence, not a radical new perspective, but simply a person saying a thing you agree with to a person you disagree with. It’s a kind of linguistic record-scratch, a perfectly crafted gotcha that ostensibly stops trolls in their troll-tracks and forces them to deeply reconsider the sad wreckage of their wasted lives. Which means the Perfect Response is also largely a figment of the internet’s imagination.

The problem is that the idea of a ‘Perfect Response’ makes us think that changing hearts and minds isn’t hard work. And that’s simply not true:

The Perfect Response, while apparently so bountiful in theory, is actually appealing precisely because, in practice, it’s so rare as to be almost nonexistent. It’s just a fantasy we yearn for, and to which we happily subscribe, because the hurly burly of actual internet interaction can be so imperfect, and frustrating, and wearying, and hard. The give-and-take of real debate can be all of those things as well, but it also has the attractive by-product of potentially leading to change, something no Perfect Response has ever done. Which is how we ended up with the phenomenon of the Perfect Response in the first place—it’s an imperfect response to just how difficult real communication can be.

Halfway through his day at work, Norman yawned.

“Oh no, don’t start doing that!” a coworker joked.

Norman chuckled. “Yeah, I know.”

“Rough night?”

“You could say that,” Norman lied.

Norman didn’t have a rough night. Norman had gotten eight hours of restful sleep. Norman was just always a little tired.

That’s a story from The Life of Norman, a reddit thread where thousands of people tell boring stories about the fictional Norman’s boring life. And it’s fascinating. From Michell Woo’s The Life of Norman (and the Rise of Boring):

Now, all day, every day, redditors construct the intricacies of the life of this unremarkable man, mostly in 500 words or less. Reading through the titles feels like watching paint dry. Norman goes into his office building. Norman makes a steak for dinner. Norman receives a text message. Norman does the laundry. Norman meets a friend and they talk about how they both used to enjoy opening Microsoft Paint, drawing some squiggles, and coloring in the spaces. Life of Norman is possibly the most action-deficient fanfiction series in existence—and that’s what makes it so compelling to its creators and audience.

Why are people drawn to this? One possible reason:

After writing 40 stories about Norman and following his journey so closely, [Cameron Crane, a moderator of the Life of Norman subreddit] believes he’s drawn to the character partly because he’s an example of what he doesn’t want for his life. Redditors will sometimes tell him that they’re grateful for Norman, sharing with him that they’ve been depressed and stuck in a rut and that Norman serves as a wake-up call.

That’s true for him, too. “At the heart of it, I think I’m just afraid, afraid of becoming Norman,” Crane says. “Norman isn’t a role model. It’s okay to be like Norman, but you shouldn’t accept it. He’s comfortable, and the only way to get ahead in life is to make yourself uncomfortable.”

I really enjoyed Clive Thompson’s history of How the Phonograph Changed Music Forever. I found a couple of observations particularly interesting. First, on the “new” phenomenon of listening to music alone:

A curious new behavior emerged: listening to music alone. Previously, music was most often highly social, with a family gathering together around a piano, or a group of people hearing a band in a bar. But now you could immerse yourself in isolation. In 1923, the writer Orlo Williams described how strange it would be to enter a room and find someone alone with a phonograph. “You would think it odd, would you not?” he noted. “You would endeavor to dissemble your surprise: you would look twice to see whether some other person were not hidden in some corner of the room.”

This is particularly interesting when you consider it in the context of the latest trend: headphones as the new walls for people in open-plan offices. We went from listening to music together, to listening to music alone, to using music to indicate we don’t want to be bothered. Also see How Headphones Changed the World as a great companion article to the phonograph one.

Second, this is something I hadn’t considered before1:

“In the age of the iPod, and the age of Pandora, and the age of Spotify, we’ve seen the average college student go from being a hard-core ‘rock fan’ or a hard-core ‘hip-hop fan’ to being a connoisseur of a lot of different genres, and a casual fan of dozens more,” he says. “It’s very rare to come across someone of college age or younger who’s only invested in one or two styles of music,” and they’re less likely to judge people on their musical taste.

I’ve written before on the tyranny of endless musical choice, and how much we lose in the age of streaming, but this is most certainly a positive thing. We used to be narrowly defined by the genres we liked, and now we’re able to dip in and out of interesting musical experiences we wouldn’t have been exposed to in the age of the phonograph and CDs.

1. These “man, I’m old” moments are happening with increasing and concerning frequency now. ↩

Jon Kolko wrote a wonderful personal essay called Look, I Made a Thing: Confidence in Making:

If you stick with it, through the years of shitty ashtrays and embarrassing critiques and rejections, you start to learn that making things is powerful, mostly because on the way to making things, you build confidence. You can take on problems that are out of your league. You can become a teacher with no teaching experience. You can make money and provide value. You can lead a conversation, advance an idea, and drive specificity where there were only vague generalities.

This idea—that just because you’re not good at something right now, it doesn’t mean you can’t become good at it—is something I try to instill in my daughters as well. And in doing that, I end up lecturing myself in the process too. One of my favorite books to read my daughters is Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts, because it explains this concept in language even I can understand…

I find the common meme of “Oh, that’s ugly—a developer must have designed that” pretty misguided (and I’m not even a developer). The reason is that most developers I know have exceptional ideas (and taste). So these words from Marty Cagan really resonated with me:

I consider this mindset of the product owner (or more generally, the CEO or stakeholders) as the only one that can determine what to build, as toxic to teams, and a major reason for the lack of innovation. I’ve tried to explain many times that often the best single source of true innovation are our engineers. That doesn’t mean every engineer is going to be like this, but the mindset where no engineers can do this is a very serious problem. The engineers are working with the technology every day and are in the best position to see what’s just now possible. They are also disproportionately very bright people. When you combine this deep knowledge of technology, with a first-hand experience of the customer problems, great products can result.

“The best single source of true innovation are our engineers.” True that.

In my latest column for A List Apart, called The Distance to Here1, I discuss a theory I’ve had for a while now:

The larger the distance between people who build a product and people who make decisions about the product, the harder it is to make a good product.

The post goes into detail on how I think companies can continue to make good products as they grow.

1. Anyone else old enough to get the reference? ↩