Artefacts #120
Noticing signs of emergence
More so than any other spring, I've found myself fascinated by the small signs that change is here. The apple blossom is out in the garden, and I'm keeping a wary eye on the overnight temperatures in case the frost returns. The bluebells in the local woods are on the verge of erupting. Swifts and martins are playing overhead, as we stretch out past the edgelands on dog walks with the inevitable lockdown puppy.
And of course, as the metaphor klaxon brays loudly in the background, there are signs here in the UK which give hints to what the after might look like (not that we're out of the woods yet, when you look at the global picture). What will work look like in the next few years? Where will it be? Who with? How often? Using what?
With that in mind, I thought I'd use this Artefacts newsletter to assemble some of these things together, to think them through.
The inevitable ‘Buttondown not Substack’ bit
First things first. As part of combining these newsletters together, I wanted to move platforms.
Across Smithery and Artefact Cards we'd used Mailchimp for ten years or so. Maybe the kindest thing you could say about it was we'd changed, and it hadn't. Every edition felt like crafting a tiny one-off website using tools from some distant internet past.
I wanted to just sit down with a collection of things and write.
This led me to having what turned out to be an four-day flirtation with Substack (thank you to the six people who signed up there even when it wasn't publicised), before reading Annalee Newitz's post, Here's Why Substack's Scam Worked So Well.
Quite soon, more opinions were available too.
I've always been a 'vote-with-your-feet' kind of person when it comes to companies – particularly digital and tech ones – and there's enough around about Substack's general behaviour across various issues for the warning lights to flash for me.
To be honest, I should really have been warned off when they soft-launched a new RSS-type reader thing as a place to 'read all newsletters together', which turned out to be a mass subscription dump that immediately filled my email inbox with 50+ newsletter subscriptions.
And so, here we are at Buttondown, the path to which I followed Dan, Scott and others.
It has the lightness required to compose, write and send the newsletter I want to write, and is a decent underdog to root for, as far as I can tell...
Living long enough to become the villain
But who can tell when good companies will turn bad*? The last 48 hours have seen the Changes at Basecamp post from founder Jason Fried generate a heady mix of dismay, shock and ridicule across my Twitter timeline.
Basecamp is a seventeen year-old web-based project management product, and it became the flagship product of the company in 2014. At the same time, Fried and colleague David Heinemeier Hansson wrote several best-selling books, notably Rework and Remote, on the future of work, offices and distributed workforces.
So in theory, Basecamp should have won big this past year, as companies across the world rewired themselves for whichever future they find themselves in.
Instead, they might end-up being remembered for a petty, public meltdown by management, as teams around the world string together better set-ups from Asana to Airtable, Notion to Slack.
*Spoiler: maybe they were bad all along
Overnight Update...
There's some great reporting on this by Casey Newton which just popped up, digging in to the story a bit more, talking to Basecamp employees and leaders... it ends with this zinger...
“There's always been this kind of unwritten rule at Basecamp that the company basically exists for David and Jason's enjoyment,” one employee told me. “At the end of the day, they are not interested in seeing things in their work timeline that make them uncomfortable, or distracts them from what they're interested in. And this is the culmination of that.”
Abstraction and Codification
As it happens, this month I've been working on two team projects which have Airtable at the heart of them. Airtable is a heady mix of spreadsheet and database, a visual way of assembling multiple persectives of a common set of information.
Points of note:
i. It's a tool that might underpin a lot of the practical use cases for the Information As Light, Not Liquid idea I've been writing about this past year. The gathering of the information is less important than the available ways in which people can see it.
ii. It's also very interesting because of the 'gallery' view; basically takes whatever entries you have in the main base, and turns it into a set of moveable, filterable cards.
iii. The team member / task allocation / kanban board etc etc that all come build in to the basic Airtable offering probably negate the need for a lot of what Basecamp or similar would offer a team. Everything you build as a product today is just a feature in someone else's product tomorrow.
Additionally, one useful frame for thinking I've found doing this work is Max Boisot's Information Space (or I-Space), pictured below.
(It was an influence on things like Cynefin - more about I-Space, and a good book I've got)
It's a good visual way to explain the work that needs to be done. If you want to move away from a chaotic space, where information is diffused through the population but in orderless fashion, you need to do two things.
Firstly, start to codify the information. What is this? What collection of terms help describe it? Then, start abstracting it. Stop concentrating on the little differences between things, but instead think about the larger broad things which make them the same.
What feels new about Airtable and this way of working is the teams assembled around the database. Once you might articulate a problem, sketch a solution, and hand it over to some people to design a tool or site which would hopefully do what you hoped it would do. This feels like building an inquisition engine from scratch, and discovering new ways of looking at the material as you shape it.
This social practice of working together on codifying and abstracting information in a platform that can be plugged into web sites, other applications, workflows and so on feels like a hands-on practical future a lot of people have been waiting for (whether they know it or not).
Rambling through Roam
With all this talk of new work tools, I'm pleased to be joining Nico Macdonald, Jason Mesut and Boon Chew this Thursday evening at the IxDA London for a teardown of Roam, a knowledge management tool I've been using for about a year now to explore the connections between all of the different research, tools and ideas I've been working on.
Come along for tales of simultaneous wonder and frustration.
Cardstock Monthly
We had another fascinating conversation at #Cardstock last week, welcoming new Cardstock Committee member Rina Atienza who played compère with delightful aplomb.
There's some exciting news coming in the next month about a team-up with some mighty like-minded folks in the 'tools to think with' space, which will give the Cardstock community a permanent home, and a place to announce when meet-ups are happening and so on.
We've even started talking about making an Airtable to collect all the card-deck examples we have between us, and sharing it publicly.
At a future Cardstock Meetup, Matt Ballantine might even explain what all this is about...
From the library
I was going to talk about models in this issue, but this feels long enough already. So I'll leave you with this as a teaser, from Edward Tufte's [Seeing With Fresh Eyes](https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/seeing-with-fresh-eyes.
Exit Through The Gift Shop
I received a lovely email in response to Artefacts #119:
"I'm never sure how you manage to pack so many thought provoking things into one email. If you started a Patreon or Stratechery style model I would pay for more insights into your mind!"
Firstly, thank you to the person that sent it, it's very kind of you to say.
Secondly, I'm not sure how I feel about this. My first instinct is not to have subscriptions, as it frees the writing to be whenever I choose or feel like it. Though maybe having to deliver to a certain cadence would be a useful discipline.
Yet as a broader trend, people are beginning to expect ways of rewarding creators in small ways for things when they want to.
So then, for now, here's the deal.
Enjoyed this newsletter? Well, please share it with others, or visit the gift shop on the way out, and pick yourself up a little something.
Until next time...
John V Willshire