When I was a child I understood everything
about, for example, futility. Standing for hours
on the hot asphalt outfield, trudging for balls
I’d ask myself, how many times will I have to perform
this pointless task, and all the others? I knew
about snobbery, too, and cruelty—for children
are snobbish and cruel—and loneliness: in restaurants
the dignity and shame of solitary diners
disabled me, and when my grandmother
screamed at me, “Someday you’ll know what it’s like!”
I knew she was right, the way I knew
about the single rooms my teachers went home to,
the pictures on the dresser, the hoard of chocolates,
and that there was no God, and that I would die.
All this I understood, no one needed to tell me.
the only thing I didn’t understand
was how in a world whose predominant characteristics
are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment
people are saved every day
by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth.
This year I’ll be
thirty-nine, and I still don’t understand it.

Every good room has a ghost.

When we made you, we left part of ourselves behind so you would never be lonely.”

The problem, as McCracken sees it, is:

…there isn’t any financial architecture that makes it possible for us to pay Jimmy his nickel. … What we need is a financial system capable of delivering fractional amounts in a frictionless way. When looking at one of Jimmy’s videos we that they can just hit a button and keep going. No signing in or keeping track. Jimmy gets a nickel. We fill up our virtual wallet every quarter or so, distributing fractional amounts til it’s gone. [emphasis mine]

That’s a huge part of the problem, absolutely. Existing micropayment systems haven’t really delivered fractional amounts in a frictionless way.

Past schemes created friction in two ways. First, you had to figure out if something (a video, a story) is really going to be worth twenty-five cents for you to see, and the cognitive load associated with that decision is probably not worth twenty-five cents of your time so you skip it. The second problem is restricting access to folks who have paid, and the hassle of hoop-jumping to access stuff worth a quarter is pretty much a non-starter for most people, so again, you skip it.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve read Clay Shirky on why micropayments are doomed:

These systems didn’t fail because of poor implementation; they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response.

I think the real friction is the resistance to requiring small payments. But what if micropayments worked more like a tip jar?

Not pay to play it, but tip if it was great. Make it optional, so you as the user get the goods first, and then you give something back if you want to give. This gets around the real reason for previous failure with micropayments: users hate them.

Most of us don’t hate giving gifts. Imagine setting up an account once (arguably, here’s the hassle part still) and depositing money once every few months. (Maybe the transfer happens automatically, even easier.) Then, with just a click or two, you give tiny gifts — along with a comment on a blog post, or marking a flickr photo a favorite, or after you watch a video on YouTube — to the people who create work you love.

I vaguely remember learning about Venn diagrams in middle school. I liked that I didn’t have to draw very well to make good diagrams. (It took me longer to catch on that thinking well wasn’t really necessary either, at least for the purpose of my class at the time.)

One thing I didn’t learn then was that Venn diagrams could be funny, like
Jessica Hagy’s Indexed, which she describes as “a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.”

My fifth grade teacher would not have appreciated her The world used to be flat post, but I do.

Jac Jemc’s Rejection Post-Acceptance by Other Magazine, but not Post-Withdrawal (eek!): Rejection 177 included a Venn diagram, an untentionally-but-sort-of-intentionally-funny one, I think. I like the big circle with “unconscious competence” in it.

Then I noticed another serious-type diagram, Bud Caddell’s how to be happy in business diagram. It displays wisdom in three overlapping circles: what we do well, what we can be paid to do, what we want to do. There’s a “hooray!” in the most overlapped space, but you need to do a fair amount of learning to get there. Of course.

There is no shortcut, one isn’t aiming for a bullseye with these things. They are diagrams after all, not targets.

Which is just as well, considering how Roxane Gay uses them in her story “Between Things” (at Pindeldyboz): “My hopes and dreams, fading” is in the middle of her most overlapped circles, most of the time. It’s a sharp, painful story that is made stronger by the six diagrams being part of it.

Which makes Venn diagrams art, even if you can’t draw.

I don’t quite understand how these diagrams keep capturing my attention, I just know they do. When I saw the mythical creatures one making the rounds a week or so ago, it made my day. It includes manticore, how marvelous is that?

Three circles, but infinite possibilities.