Snark is not an umbrella

I am taking a belated day off. Most years, I take off a week in late February to kick back and start my household's taxes. However, household matters kept me from doing so this year. I worked until felt mentally beat up enough to say "no mas".

Nothing horrible had happened at work, it was the culmination of many little aggravations from a customer at work. But it was nothing worse than what I had faced before; in fact, it has been fairly smooth sailing as compared to some of the ugliness we've dealt with in the past.

So what changed? I did. At the advent of the Year of the Fire Rooster (AKA the flaming cock), I resolved not to be sarcastic all of the time. After a week or two of not snarking about my co-workers' work that I had to review, I had less to say and that it was easier to listen to others. I found that I had less patience for reading non-fiction and wanted to read more fiction. I found that not being negative by default made it easier to write, which is why I'm back here.

The author of "Writing Down the Bones" wrote about the stifling inner editor. The acerbic attitude that I had adopted naturally fed the sarcasm and the inner editor. I think that attitude became a shield, but I didn't realize that the barrier went both ways. I will try to explain what I mean.

There is the cliche about the optimist believing that this is the best of all worlds, and the pessimist fears that the optimist is right. When I was sarcastic by default about work and everything in general, I was able to focus on the task at hand and plow forward. At times that focus came at the price of being to see the other possibilities from side to side.

One of my professors, a true sensei, taught me that effective problem solving had an exploratory/broadening phase and a focus/narrowing phase. For larger scale and longer term problems, there was also an iterative loop to put new feedback to improve on the solution.

I had emphasized the focusing/narrowing phase until it became a reflex. When the challenging situations piled up, my exploratory/broadening phase focused on the steps that I could not control, because that was where the problems came from, so I was skipping that phase to go directly to the "embrace the suck" or "git 'er dun" phase, until it became a reflex.

Putting on the blinders let me push forward, but having them on too long stopped me from seeing the side paths & possibilities. The snarky mindset says to the rain "Of course, why wouldn't it rain?" It worked for a while, I did not loose to the metaphorical rain though there were many cloudbursts, but after an extended march there were times when I wasn't sure why I was trudging forward. Instead of trudging forward, sometimes I just have to get out of the rain.

Snark is not a shield, it is not really an umbrella. It is an anesthetic.

FB: Your profile is the product

When Facebook's (FB) stock was publicly offered, I thought that the $104B valuation was insane. The profiles were free, so the the people who made the profiles did not pay. Where could the revenue possibly come from? If FB charged, then the number of active profiles would drop. FB advertised, but there was only so much advertising revenue that it could suck out of newspapers, radio, and TV. There were other advertising platforms, such as the behemoth Google that was competition. Only so much money could be made off of Zynga, since portable apps were exploding with their own micro-transaction models.

So, I thought that FB investors were delusional, until I read an article about bankruptcy trustees using trawling through FB for bankruptcy cheats. The trustees used FB to find out about assets that bankruptees hid from courts that could be repossessed. That was when the light came on. According to the revenue line, the trustee & anyone else looking, sifting, and analyzing the profile data is the user. More importantly to FB, Inc., they are the PAYING users.

The person who makes the profiles is providing free raw data for research. This is the data that companies pay pollsters and researchers to gather. While the data is disorganized, there is a lot of it & a significant portion of the available data is the sort that market, behavioral, and other researchers would never think to ask for, much less get. Right now, they are not exactly sure what to make of it. However, with powerful AIs like Watson, FB was not seen as a gold mine, but a virtual undiscovered country to be explored, cataloged, and developed like the Americas to the Europeans. Better than a terrestrial country, the virtual borders of FB's keep on expanding as social media-makers worked like busy little bees to share details of their lives in exchange for server space and connectivity.

You, the average Joe and Jane, create content for FB, Inc. The data miners and research marketers are the true users of FB, Inc.