Overconsumption: The narrative is not the media, it is the sale.

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Welcome to another rant about the culture of consumption. I’ve been watching documentaries that have made me annoyed lately, but not terribly surprised. These are: “The Corporation,” “Blood and Oil,” “Supersize Me,” “Maxed Out,” “Art & Copy,” and “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.” Yeah, I finally caught up with my Netflix queue. And they all have something in common.

In the last few years, the economic recession has always been at the tips of everyone’s lips and at the headlines of every publication you can think of. Lately, shockers are making news (insert sarcasm here). “Recession is not over yet” seems to be verbatim, and a lot of questions are being raised on what caused this, and how do we move forward?

The general outcry for solutions seem to be: the government needs to fix the state of the global economy. Cancel wars. Get more oil. New stimulus package. Spend more and regenerate the economy! Sure, why not.

But.

I think we just need to stop shopping so much.

More specifically, we really need to start being more aware about the things we buy, and understand the real cost of stuff we consume in general.

The problems that are plaguing the globe – ranging from the environment, natural disasters, gas prices, employment, health, the economy – are all traceable into a single source. Overconsumption, and an imbalance of resources versus consumption and waste.

As a usability designer, my goal is to fulfill two missions: (1) make things easy to use by way of simple and intelligent choices, and (2) make it look nice. Making things easy to use is not a simple process, because you have to constantly assess the value of what to keep and what to get rid of. If you have 500 buttons performing the same redundant function, you’ve failed to address the issue. This goal isn’t exclusive to the digital realm. We need to simplify the human experience. We should be constantly thinking of how to redesign a better world, and get rid of the useless crap we don’t need. And my list of what constitutes useless crap in the world today is pretty long.

WE ARE MAKING TOO MUCH UNNECESSARY JUNK.

And not only does it cripple the globe, it makes our landscape look pretty hideous. I, for one, do not think pollution is cute. Becoming a walking carcinogen is certainly not cute.

Observe exhibit A: The story of stuff.

The world is not your department store. The world is not your trash bin.

I’m not exempt from the human race. I’m just as guilty as anyone with habits of consumption. There is something comforting about internationalization. After living over a decade in North America, yes, I have my own creature comforts. I still want Peets coffee and Amazon.com to to set up shop out here in the Philippines, no matter how enthusiastic I am about buying local. I still want my iPhone. But what I’m getting at, is overkill. Manila, as much as many parts of North America and Asia, are turning into giant malls masquerading as cities. And yes, I have a problem with that.

When malls and shopping areas become the centerpieces of “outdoor” activity, we have issues. Norman Klein (a brilliant and very odd prof I had in CalArts), once discussed the concept of “scripted spaces” – from malls to cities, how everything is designed with one purpose – to get us to buy stuff. Casinos, movies, sporting events, and Disneyland are designed with the intent of directing traffic into shops. The narrative is not the media, it is the sale. Has anyone wondered why the gift shop is always the first and last thing you see when you go to a museum, a theme park, even a corporate building? And why food courts are always at the top floor or the basement, in the middle of nowhere? You have to walk past the shops first, and walk past the shops again to get to the damn exit. Even if all you wanted was a pizza, you will walk out with a pair of shoes. At least if you’re me.

When you watch TV, go to the movies, when you go online – you think you’re consuming content. You think you’re hanging out with your friends. You may even think you’re changing the world. But you’re probably buying something while you’re doing all of this.

It’s the propensity for overconsumption that makes us scream when we fill up our cars. Most of us are freaking out with how much gas costs at the pump. In the US, it’s about $4 per gallon, and Europe spends between $7-$10. In the Philippines, it’s relatively cheaper, but I will still scream anyway. However, considering what it costs to pump the Middle East and North Africa for oil by way of military force, and how consumption of oil is actually affecting the environment, I’m inclined to believe that $4 a gallon is cheap as hell. Can you put a $4 price tag on a dead civilian? Because you need to drive to the mall? Carpool. And this goes with escalating prices on everything, from hot dogs to designer jeans. Because you can only ignore the cost of humanity and the environment for so long.

Last year I was reading a book called “Blood and Oil” by Michael Klare, which was also turned into a documentary by the BBC. The central thesis is American dependence on oil, and how far-reaching the effects are. However, one of the most interesting things that came up is the persistence of the US government to preserve “the American way of life” – from postwar America up to the present. And what is the American way of life? No, seriously, someone please explain this to me.

No one is crazy enough to WANT to reduce their level of comfort. But right now, the availability of goods is somewhat frighteningly overwhelming in some parts of the world, and frighteningly scarce in others. Behold the advertising boom of selling you junk you don’t need, but desperately want. In 500 colors you never knew existed. With 500 million different ads to market it. It’s the Paradox of Choice – when more is not necessarily better. Especially in the age where social media has ceased to become a buzzword, and has, instead, seeped so insidiously into our being. Come on. We rely on Twitter for newsfeeds and bloggers to tell us what to buy. And we drag our heels all the way to… Wal-Mart. Your $1 t-shirt forced out small business owners from your community, of which could have actually generated real jobs with real pay and benefits, so you wouldn’t have to panic about spending less all the time. Congratulations.

“As the number of choices we face continues to escalate and the amount of information we need escalates with it, we may find ourselves increasingly relying on secondhand information rather than on personal experience. Moreover, as telecommunications becomes ever more global, each of us, no matter where we are, may end up relying on the same secondhand information… Those friends and neighbors will have the same biased understanding, derived from the same source. When you hear the same story everywhere you look and listen, you assume it must be true. And the more people believe it’s true, the more likely they are to repeat it, and thus the more likely you are to hear it. this is how inaccurate information can create a bandwagon effect, leading quickly to a broad, but mistake, consensus.”

- Barry Schwartz, “The Paradox of Choice”

I’m not going to make a blatant criticism on large corporations. That’s too big of a cliche. At the end of the day, it is still individuals who work in these massive corporations. Individuals decide the fate of what gets procured, manufactured, distributed, or destroyed. It’s so easy to pass the blame around on one solitary enemy; that is what propaganda is made of. In “The Corporation,” one interesting note was made on the construction of the model of a corporation, and how it is personified: “If the dominant institution of our time has been created in the image of the psychopath, who bears the moral responsibility for its actions?”

If we, as individuals, working within the system of corporations and a consumption-based society, make better decisions in what we what we make, what we market, and what we consume, then maybe we can arrive at a model of a corporation that is not in the image of a psychopath. Because what is a corporation without the people in the building running it?

The FB rants on Education and the Philippines

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I hope my friends don’t mind that I’m taking this public. For good measure, I blocked their personal info out. These were the rants that fueled my previous post. The general consensus according to N, more than education, is the Filipino attitude of “that’s the way it is,” or “pwede na” in the local tongue.

A general note about my friends in this posting, is that we all share an experience of living in Manila and various parts of the world, which includes San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Belgium, and Milan. Our references of comparison come from living on both sides of the border, in almost equal amounts of time in our lives so far.

That Dumb Kid

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I always thought I was a smart kid. At least, based on my own understanding as a kid. Until I started going to school.

Then I started to believe that I was the slow kid who could never keep up with everyone else. My exam papers through grade school would convince anyone to buy stock in red pens and markers. You could even consider trademarking the frowny face and make bank because all my teachers would have to pay licensing fees. In fact, I almost didn’t graduate high school. Through standardized testing, my school had determined that I was at the bottom 10% of the entire graduating class. I even flunked every college entrance exam I took in the Philippines. I was on my way to a successful career as a 3rd world hobo.

Students do not fail. They are in school to learn. In order to learn, you will make mistakes. If students fail to learn something, however, it is the adults that have to take a good look at what – and HOW – they are trying to teach their kids.

I’ve decided to write this extended manifesto on education after spending a week at TED. It’s something I’ve thought about for a while, but this past week really fueled questions – even answers – on why I had such a hard time in school. I never hated learning, but I always hated going to school. And this is something I think a lot of kids can relate to. In parallels, a lot of people hate going to work. They don’t hate the idea of working, they just don’t like or understand the value of what they’re doing half the time. So essentially, we’re all back in the 5th grade, except older, fatter, balding, and sustaining failing organs.

So I have to get this rant out of my system before ADD strikes and I forget all about it. It’s stemmed from a private rant on my Facebook wall, but I’m starting to realize that some folks I went to school with share my sentiments. I spent most of my time as a student at the Immaculate Conception Academy (ICA) in Manila before I moved on to various parts of North America and Europe for higher learning. I received scholarship grants that sent me to college, on top of my parents’ support and a million internships. I graduated with a BFA from CalArts, arguably one of the best creative institutions in the world. Since then, I’ve been fairly successful in my field as a designer, and as a filmmaker. Once in a while, I’ve managed to walk away with an award or two. For a dumb kid, I think I’ve done alright. So what exactly happened in between?

Sir Ken Robinson discusses the concept of lateral thinking. Our current educational system is a vertical where we’re passed on level to level based on age, force fed information from one class to the next, whether or not we understand them, whether or not we know how we can apply this information practically. Salman Khan (The Khan Academy) brought up a great point at his TED talk: some kids will score 100% at an exam, some will score 80%, some 50%, and so on. Do the kids who get less than 100% get a chance of actually learning what they’ve missed? No. They move on to the next exam with gaps in their education that will never be addressed. Do the kids who get 100% retain and value what they’ve learned, or do they forget about it as soon as the exam is over? Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone, as the initial argument poses. Some kids learn better in the system that we have in place. Fine. But what about everyone else?

We all have different learning styles. And my learning style can’t keep up with the assembly line, because I like to understand all the small pieces that make up an idea. I was once sitting in Grade 9 Math and asked why a quadratic equation was structured this way. Why should I care if this number multiplies with another number, and why the hell does it matter? Can someone explain to me why the formula became this way? Does this formula have a wife and kids? Where am I going to use this once I graduate? The response was often “just memorize it so you can pass the exam” or “you’ll find out later,” and it just doesn’t seem fair. When we are out in the real world, no one gives us a formula for reducing the cost of war, or even war itself. No one gives us formulas to raise a happy home with all our unique circumstances. We have to have an ability to really understand these formulas from its inception and why it was necessary. We have to have an ability to create competing formulas, or we will ultimately destroy everything in our path without being aware of it. Education is not religion. I don’t believe that we should simply trust it and have faith that our so-called education will be our ultimate salvation. Sometimes it even works against you. Heck, my education told me I was going straight to hell with my grades.

John Hunter, who was also at TED this week, addressed some of my problems with the system. He created “The World Peace Game” for his 4th graders to do just that – find out, for themselves, exactly how the world works. They play a board game as world leaders with specific problems they needed to fix, from the environment, to war, to basic human needs. And these are issues even adults don’t have answers to, like global debt. I think this is ultimately what we need to be able to pass on to kids, because they need to start thinking about what they will be up against as early in life as possible. Giving kids the power of solving problems is no small feat. Making them understand the humanity, causes, and effects behind problems is no small feat. Kids aren’t stupid, but we treat them like, well, powerless children. We are all like Tempurpedic foam beds. As adults, we’ve gone through our own routines, we’ve established deep-seated ways of how we handle things, and this impedes our abilities to look at certain things outside our comfort zone. Kids, they don’t have the baggage of being imprinted with stupid ideas like whether they’re Democrats or Republicans. They are simply people trying to make sense of the world they live in, without any pretense that they understand it any better than you do. As Khaled Hosseini once wrote, “Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.”

Salman Khan also brought up an interesting point: some kids are too embarrassed to ask questions that will make them look stupid. And with our particular culture at ICA, this was definitely a path I followed. We’re not Americans. We highly value how people perceive us, and no matter how ridiculous this really is, it is embedded in our genetic makeup. Needless to say, I always flunked Math because I ended up drawing all over the numbers during exams. I also figured I’d make my own formulas since I didn’t understand the ones that were being taught, so I basically solved problems my way with utter disregard for formulas in question. I usually got a +1 point bonus for creativity. What I find interesting now is my +1 bonus for creativity. Is this really all creativity is worth? Weren’t the original mathematical equations formulated by a creative thinker? Even the concept of a number in the first place is an arbitrary distinction for a specific value – someone had to make it up. Our entire civilization is a result of creative, abstract thinkers challenging the formula. Imagine if we still all thought the world was flat. Imagine if nobody thought, hey, maybe humans could fly. Things will always sound ridiculous and wrong on the first try. That’s what learning is.

As I examine the differences of my Philippine versus my American education, sometimes I wonder if these patterns have anything to do with why society and our standards of living have come this way. In the US, I’ve always been taught to challenge the status quo, if I believed that the status quo was stupid and irrelevant. I was taught to ask the basic question: WHY? with the follow up question, HOW? Something I found sorely lacking in my Philippine education. I’m back in Manila these days, and as much as I hate to say it, it almost seems like we keep progressing backwards rather than forwards. And I’m not just talking about the economy, or politics. I’m just talking about the basic methods of how we think about our place in the world, and how we react to what surrounds us. I complain a lot about things that I don’t like, or things I don’t believe in. One thing someone who never left the Philippines told me, was that I needed to learn how to stop complaining, slow down, and adapt. But there is one thing with adapting to ideas that are quite good (or at least interesting), on any scale. And there is quite another thing with asking me to revert backwards and say, “well, that’s just the way it is, isn’t it?” Forget it. I dream of a Philippines that will surpass any developed nation, perhaps not in economy or scale, but how we create and redefine our own world, without looking outwards and copying the formula of “the American Way” but rather looking inwards, asking, “what is the Filipino Way?” or even, “what is MY way?” In my lifetime, I want to see a culture that doesn’t look like something trying hard to fit into the formula that it can never get. Because quite frankly, I’m sick and tired of the Starbucks revolution in Manila. We need to reassess what the next revolution needs to look like. God knows we haven’t had a real one since 1987, and we haven’t really done much since then, either. Who the fuck cares that People Power happened, if the people are still powerless? Because no matter how frustrated everyone is, at the end of the day, everyone just agrees, “that’s just the way it is.”

It’s taken me over a decade out of ICA to be able to believe, once again, that it’s ok to be dumb and different. As long as I can understand my own capabilities and be able to justify what I believe to be true, I think I’ll be ok. And if the kids in Manila can even get a semblance of the education I wish I had with the Khan Academy or The World Peace Game, I’m hoping they can get a head start now, where they can teach themselves by collaborating with each other and not rely on a broken system. These methods are not inaccessible, and could be totally customized for Filipino kids. We should, as adults, at least give them a fighting chance for the future and not surrender to saying: “that’s just the way it is.” This is my formula.

Mentioned in this post:
John Hunter – The World Peace Game (http://www.worldpeacegame.org)
Salman Khan – The Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/)

The Mystery of the Like Button

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These days our social engagements have been consolidated down to the Like Button. It’s the Internet equivalent of sitting in the middle of a conversation, and all you can say is “cool.” More and more, marketers want to engage their consumers socially by giving us more ways to “like” something. Anything. Even pipe cleaners.

And then we’re barraged with the blinding flash of awesome graphics and proceed to start asking ourselves: are pipe cleaners cool? Do I want my friends and colleagues to know that I have an unhealthy relationship with pipe cleaners? Maybe pipe cleaners are cool now. I mean, they were cool enough to eat with glue in kindergarten. I want to be cool. Like!

And so begins our vicious love affair with the Like Button.

A friend once said: it’s easy to like something. To “love” or “hate” is a strong feeling, while you can like just about anything.

Has the Internet turned us into passive-aggressive beings that are too lazy to contribute to a conversation? Then maybe the “conversations” aren’t good enough to begin with. Maybe we need to talk about real things like where the economy is going, instead of pipe cleaners. Maybe we can talk about how pipe cleaners affect the GNP and childhood dreams of glue.

It’s so easy to dismiss products. I have a speculation that the Like Button may play a part in diluting the human experience. I much prefer the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down method of polling a product’s value (bear in mind that a political or cultural movement is also a product when evaluated for consumption). I was sitting in YouTube’s San Bruno office last year, and we somehow started talking about the user engagement of the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down buttons. The general consensus was that users will usually Thumb Up videos they really like, and Thumb Down videos they really hate. If they’re on the fence, nothing gets clicked. Now this is a direct affront to the concept of the Like Button. Whether or not which one is better for market sales is not the point I’m trying to make. The point is, do you really want a lot of lukewarm likers, or do you want a concentrated group that you know love your product?

It’s the same idea as collecting Twitter followers. Some people have 50 followers, some 500, some 5,000, and if you’re the local celebrity blogger, 5 million. But how many of these followers actually care about what you have to say, and how many are just trying to get you to click on porn?

How To Date A Female Geek

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Look, it’s not the boys club anymore. Look around you. There are female geeks everywhere. At school, at work, at the local bar, even at your non-geek friend’s baby shower. This is not your dad’s generation of pocket protector nerds. You can’t really tell the difference between a regular female and a female geek at first glance. As opposed to their male counterparts, many female geeks are into hygiene and looking nice for public viewing. But that’s where similarities end.

So you’ve spotted an awesome female, and she might be a geek. Wanna date her? Great. Female geeks have very particular needs, and if you can’t meet them, consider yourself pwn3d.

So here are some clues on how to handle your female geek, you lucky bastard.

1. Be a geek too.

Your female geek will always be tethered to one device or another. iPhone? Android? iPad? Laptop? Nintendo DS? Xbox? Vintage calculator watch? Check, check, check, check, check, check, check. She will have ALL of these devices, or their proper counterparts. Do not be shocked. Ignorance is not looked on kindly by the female geek. Want to spend more time together? Go online. To her, it will mean that you’re truly making an effort to be with her. If you’re already online more than she is, bonus points for you. No, seriously. She will design a point system that will measure all of your actions for future grudge reference.

2. Give the girl some room!

The female geek is obsessed with how things work (or how they don’t). In the quest for answers, she may at times, lose a grip on reality. Do not disturb her when she is in deep thought. She might either be in the middle of saving the world, or at least her WoW clan. At a point that you stupidly decide to interrupt her, she will somehow materialize laser blasters out of thin air and burn you like a cockroach. This does not mean that the female geek is not affectionate. You just have to catch the right moment, when she’s not building anything. Which is…. 5% of the time you’re together. Patience is a virtue in dating the female geek. At times it will feel like you’re not dating anyone at all, but do not despair. The female geek still needs to get up and eat, so seize that window of opportunity before she uses that time to play video games or take a nap.

3. Listening skills.

It is a known fact that most females talk a lot. They will talk as long as they have an audience. At the end of the day, you will ask, “hi babe, how was your day?” Most women will gossip about other women, the clothing of other women, who’s still single, and who smells like cabbage. They will talk about being bored at work. Then they will talk about themselves until you fall asleep. The female geek will talk about the same things, but in small doses. To her, your question is an invitation to elaborate on her recent discoveries and ideas that could change the way the world operates. And she will keep refining these ideas in the same conversation until you fall asleep. So you either need to develop a keen interest in whatever it is she’s working on, or you need to date someone else. Because the next day will be the same conversation, until she actually finishes that project. If it’s a “passion project,” prepare to spend eternity with it.

4. Gifts

Forget the flowers, the candy, and whatever notion it is you have of what “romantic” looks like. (Actually maybe you can bring back the candy, but bring lots of it.) She will leave very subtle indicators of what she actually wants from you. Usually with an online posting trail. If she posts a video about pouncing kittens, think. Is this REALLY just about kittens or is there some deep-seated rationale behind the kitten-to-pounce ratio? Does she want a kitten? These are questions you need to ask before giving your female geek a gift. A thoughtless gift, or even the wrong kind of gift, is unacceptable. Because it sends messages that you are too clueless about her needs. “It’s the thought that counts” doesn’t work in this terrain.

5. Tell her she’s pretty

Duh.