Making it “ert”
Hi there,
I have the usual, nominal reason for writing to you, which is to share some new work that I’m proud of. But mostly I’m just using that as an excuse to share something with you that someone else wrote that makes me feel irrationally happy and reassured (and, I promise, will make that subject line make sense).
So, first: my thing. Did you know that money is the world’s oldest social-networking technology? It’s true: three different experts told me so while I was researching the background for this essay I wrote for Fast Company. It’s about Libra, the new global digital currency that Facebook is hoping to launch next year. Why would the world’s largest social networking business want to do something so out-of-left-field, like make its own money? Here’s the gist of the answer I came up with, in one sentence:
There's no #deleteyouraccount for the dollar.
Hopefully that makes you curious to read the whole argument, even if you don’t care about Libra. In fact, that’s the whole point: I assume you don’t care about Libra. (I don’t, either.) I just wanted to play with an intrinsically interesting idea-slash-question—“what if money literally was social networking?”—and set it spinning, like the top in Inception.
So that’s craft, which I’m proud to share. But then there’s art.
Here are my favorite two sentences in all of journalism, from a 38,000-word “unsplainer” by Paul Ford called What Is Code? that took up an entire issue of Bloomberg Businessweek in 2015:
Code is inert. How do we make it ert?
I mean. Just. Wow. I suspect many of you are like “uh…” after reading those nine words, but to me it’s soul-amplifying, Sistine-Chapel-level shit. A perfect couplet, or a film edit so sublime it makes your knees weak, like that one in Lawrence of Arabia. Except it’s funny, too. It’s the wardrobe that leads to Narnia... and it’s Liz Lemon murmuring “I want to go to there.” It collapses 38,000 words into a glorious, goofy, beckoning singularity of possibility.
That some regular human being had the inspiration to join those two thoughts together by unzipping one already-great word into a new half-word that may have never been uttered before by any other human ever but also instantly feels like it has always, perfectly existed… It's like a little miracle. It feels joyful to witness, and it also makes me believe. (Again.)
And then it all wraps back down to earth, because it’s so divinely unpretentious—like something a kid might say and make you grin at how wise they can seem, totally on accident. It's the best thing ever, and it's no big deal.
Damn.
Obviously, all Paul Ford meant was: “How do we make written symbols do stuff inside computers?” That’s the idea-slash-question he sets playfully spinning for tens of thousands of words. But these particular nine words (and two punctuation marks) can also feel a bit like a totem to me. As if they’re describing something bigger and richer and realer, while also being a perfect example of that something.
“Making it ert” is more than getting it right or being useful or achieving an objective, and it’s more than making it interesting or being creative or expressing yourself. It’s more like... calling forth the spirit of a thing as a gift to that thing, and as a gift to someone else, at the same time.
In other words: those two sentences don’t just make the subject of Ford’s article “ert”. They make me that, too.
Which is a nice thing to have in your pocket, when you need it.
Hope you have a great autumn,
J