Han Solo’s famous quote (and Harrison Ford’s brilliance) aside, sometimes I want to know the odds. Actually I definitely want to know the odds, because I’m someone that likes to plan things, evaluate success, and plan for contingencies. I say this as a person who has debated with himself on “what day of the week does the week really start” kind of planning.

The odds, to me, a professional Project Manager (which I suppose means I’m worth listening to), are a way to calculate what to build. They let me evaluate success, plan for contingencies, and make something solid. If I do things right, the odds barely come into play because the plan, risk assessments, and options are all in place.

The odds are, at best, a tool, a way to get better, a way to improve. For all my world of flowcharts and checklists – professionally and privately – my world is one of solidity. I deal in how and results and measurements. From personal zines to environmental systems, it’s about results

But right now it seems society is more and more about playing the odds. As my friend Serdar put it once, more and more aspects of our society are coming to resemble a casino. The problem is casinos aren’t about building things, and that’s the problem.

As of this writing there are plenty of discussions about Kalshi, Polymarket, and other activities that are “prediction markets” which are really just gambling. That’s it, they’re gambling, and you can’t call it anything else. Draft Kings may have led the way with sports betting, but now we have prominent gambling companies. Call it what it is.

Our society is a casino. But it has been for awhile.

The stock market is not the economy, as we’re often reminded. It is, to an extent, about playing the odds and estimating chances. Now any economy is going to have some of that, as will any part, but if you ever looked at overvalued stocks and wondered, it’s not about the economy in many cases. It’s about the odds that something pays off, and it’s why some investments in companies that don’t do anything pay off, because people think they can sell before they loose.

Then there was Crypto, which really is just a stock on the blockchain. Then there was the NFTs, which thankfully crashed and burned then sunk into a swamp, that was gambling as well. Now we’re just to plain almost-honest gambling. It’d be refreshing if it wasn’t so prominent, so pathological, and in more and more cases it seems about people manipulating odds.

It’s all been a bit of gambling for decades – centuries? – but now it’s all gambling front and center. Bets and odds and manipulation. Know what it isn’t? Doing something with measurable achievements..

Where’s the plan? The results? The thing built? The thing made? Something that gets something done, that helps people, that can be felt, seen, touched, used? Where’s something I can break down into a Kanban backlog, where I can say “yes, here is a distinct result.”

But it’s a Casino. It’s about playing the odds, getting money, and that’s it. Nothing to be built, to be made, to be achieved. If you can manipulate things (say, with a bit of insider political information) so much the better. Why do something that has a role, a result, a history when you can just get paid for wondering what the body count is in a train wreck?

Play the odds enough and that’s all you can do. Look for the gamble, the payoff, the high. You just slosh money around and play the odds. That’s it.

The Casino economy is forgetting how to do things, and forgetting the value of doing things for and with people. And as a Project Manager, a person, and a citizen, I hate it.

Steven Savage

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com

I was discussing jobs and careers with a friend recently, and as you may guess it wasn’t complimentary. I mean there’s a reason David Graeber wrote a book called “Bullshit jobs,” which surprisingly I have not read.

What got me thinking is not how many jobs, are well, bullshit (I mean I know that but I should read the book), but the danger of the job description itself. Jobs can become a kind of “Accountability Sink,” and I think that’s potentially more common than we may realize.

An Accountability Sink is a concept I was introduced to in – you guessed it – The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies. The idea is that some processes and parts of an organization that adsorb accountability. It’s the help line that never lets you actually reach someone. The process no one is responsible for. The idea that “number go up” means all else is fine.

Now these aren’t always bad. Some people make bad decisions due to bad data. Accidents happen. We need some Accountability Sinks where the organization takes or diffuses the hit otherwise no one would want to do anything. I mean I work in medicine, and everyone is working hard, everyone is addressing risk, and if the organization didn’t accept responsibility, everyone would go insane from stress.

However you can guess that though they may not be bad, Accountability Sinks become problematic. Enough Accountability Sinks and leadership of a company can devastated people, states, economies, and countries. They may not even realize what a-holes they are as they’ve lost feedback.

Now, let me bring it down to the level I started at – I wonder if some jobs, some positions are Accountability SInks. The job is a convenient person to blame or the job comes with the assumption of unaccountability.

Ever been some low-level peon on a job? First to take blame? First to get laid off? Your position is an accountability sink. You can be let go because you carried out someone else’s bad decision. You can let go to juice stock prices because of a bad quarter brought on by C-level failure. You were the accountability sink, a human crumple zone for corporate accidents.

But also ever seen how some jobs – and not necessarily leadership (but too often, leadership) can make the most dunderheaded decisions and get away with it? You’re assumed to be right as you’re an expert or a business genius. Your failure might be considered part of your job, and it’s fine that, say, a system went down as that’s expected. Yes, you decided on conflicting standards, but as it’s not apparent until people try to make shit work you’re fine because you followed the recommendations.

Your job may be the accountability sink for others or have accountability sink built in. Either way congrats, your job may reduce responsibility.

Kind of makes you want to take a look at your job again, doesn’t it? Though it might not hurt to take a look at your co-workers as well . . .

Steven Savage

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com

A second book review in a row? Well, yes it is! I just finished reading Politics Without Politicians by Hélène Landemore and it’s one you should definitely read. But let’s talk why.

Landemore’s thesis is simple: democracies in history had often used “lotteries” to select people for civic duties, along with citizen councils (often random too), rotating positions, referenda, and so on throughout history. Politics with less politicians or without politicians as we know them. It not will surprise you that someone writing a whole book in this is of course in favor of the idea that we can replace a lot of our politics with random selection and councils/parliaments.

The book is thus a breezy read as Landemore establishes her premise with historical example, then goes into a mixture of actual experience, actual implementations, research, and philosophy to justify her thesis. Her statement is simple – essentially reviving some elements of Athenian Democracy, then examining why she thinks it’d work, when it was tried, and what she’d do.

So spoilers, it’s actually very convincing, and in some ways surprising. If I were to compare it to something, it actually reminds me of my much-beloeved The Unaccountability Machine. It’s both obvious and not, and once you read it, you see things very differently.

Landemore describes our current crises and the idea of more randomized democracies as seen in Athens and in other states and societies, not necessarily democratic ones (a random council of nobles is still random). Random selection requires citizens to step up, reduces corruption, and requires building functional infrastructures to get things done. Our current political crises of modern times are, in her thesis, the result of a kind of “Electoral Aristocracy” that is clearly not responsive to people’s needs and is very disillusioning. And yes, she brings receipts on much of our dissatisfaction in our times.

Despite her cynicism about a lot of our current politics, Landemore is a passionate believer in democracy and citizenship. She wants more democracy, more power in the hands of people, and for voices to be heard. Indeed, ensuring people who are not currently engaged in politics can and will be engaged, is part of her thesis. Even when I find critiques (and I have a few) it’s clear she cares about the results and the people.

Landemore also looks at cases where randomized citizen councils were used in various countries to address issues – some of which she participated in. Coming from this direct viewpoint, she also describes experiences and why things worked – and didn’t – mostly focused on her native France. Landemore takes you into what it would be like, say, for twenty citizens to suddenly be asked to come up with policy for a referendum.

This personal experience, combined with her research, did help me understand why these kind of randomized councils and other approaches can work. If you have a diverse group of people and give them experts who respond as needed you can get a surprising amount of good ideas – something I’ve seen in my own management work. People who are responsible for results and dealing with each other as people will surprise you and probably break more than one of your stereotypes and assumptions.

Landemore did something very effectively – reminding us that our fellow citizens are probably more capable than we give them credit for. It’s just that they may be capable in different ways than us and that people coming together change. Some of her experiences made me understand my gaps, and in a few cases my arrogance. This, again, reminded me of my own worn in Project Management when people came together with just a bit of facilitation – and when I had my own assumptions proven wrong.

All of this of course reminds me of Agile, the productivity/project method I’ve used for years in various forms (sometimes inside other methods). A lot of Agile is “make it obvious, make it visible, make people responsible.” Though Agile usually lacks randomization, I see echos in Landemore’s writing.

It is clear from her writing Landemore has soured on the political classes, and even filtered, both the research she shares and the experience she has make a good case. Attempts at citizens councils often saw career politicians want to put on their own stamp, experts expect to be right all the time (thinking as experts, not impacted citizens), and so on. I finished the book with a better opinion of my fellow citizens, and a worsened one of our political class. Politicians can be distortive people, even if well-meaning, as things warp around them.

Ladenmore finishes with ways to implement more direct Democracy, and her thoughts of were to go next. She’s ready to go, clearly passionate, though I wished she’d done more to provide “next steps” and ‘who to talk to” that was more clearly spelled out. Still, I found some resources to investigate my own interest.

Ultimately, it’s hard to fault her case – we need more citizens and less politicians. Indeed, having more “governing-by-lottery” would mean people have to step up if called – and step up to help neighbors and friends and family who might be called upon. Certainly I’m a believer in her method because I am a believer in citizenship and this is a way to cultivate that.

As for flaws, there are moments her humor or references, especially about American figures, seems a bit off. There are a few cases where I wanted her to address some truly vile things we see like racism and religious fanaticism. But these are minor – she has a thesis, she justifies it well, and she takes us into the experiences and mechanics of it.

Much like The Unaccountability Machine, Politics Without Politicians is about why things are obviously wrong, how we probably had the solution, and what to do next. It’s also about giving a damn, which makes both books passionate. Maybe Landemore and Dan Davies should team up, so I have yet another book to go on about until people are tired of it.

A recommended read. Perhaps you’ll want complete rule-by-lottery, perhaps you’ll become a booster of citizen referendum, but I think you’ll have a lot to think about. Best of all, you’ll become a better citizen, and we need all of those we can get.

Steven Savage

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com

Ever read a book that was very obvious but also a must-read? Well that’s Enshittification by Cory Doctorow.

You’ve probably heard the term Enshittification before because Doctrow made it famous. It’s a term to describe how things get worse and worse as they’re exploited, usually technology companies that were Doctrow’s initial targets. Well this is the book about why everything seems to be worse in the technology world. Companies locked us and their customers in and are squeezing us for every dime.

There’s very little in here that’s a surprise. But at the same time you’ll have a much better grasp about why your phone overheats when you go to web pages, why you get spam, and why your damn dishwasher has an internet connection.

Doctrow dives right in by discussing case studies of companies and services that Enshittified. None of this is going to be news to you in general, but the specific instances he invokes are eye-opening. You probably have at least one tech company you complain about and though it’s bad, it’s actually probably worse.

After giving you some examples that you’re all-too familiar with Doctorow then explores the Pathology of Enshittification. Simply put, there are usually social, government, and financial processes that keep companies from making their products worse. If you break those then, someone is going to start messing with the system, exploiting their locked-in users as much as they can.

Doctrow is pretty much of the opinion that modern corporations would Enshittify immediately, and gotta say, he has a point. Again a lot of this is very obvious, but when you see how many guardrails and limits to keep companies from making you insane for profit are gone, it’s worse than you think. Obvious, just worse than you think.

Then Doctorow does a deep dive on the Epidemiology of Enshittification, the various pathologies and signs and methods. This section introduces a number of useful terms, research, and concepts to help you understand what’s going on – and going wrong. Again, not a lot of it is surprising, but when you see the whole picture the depth is surprising.

To give an example, let’s talk what he calls “The End of Self Help.” We’re all aware of how many companies restricted the ability to repair devices, but the legal restrictions on what you can do with devices and software are probably far more strict than you realize. Repairing, playing with, modifying, or even accessing some devices in an “inappropriate” way can be made impossible or even illegal. Throw in internet-enabled tools and devices, and companies can lock you in and go after people who try to undo said locks.

Think about how that affects business, competition, and removes the concept of ownership. Now take this bit of Enshittification and multiply it by a whole lot of others. As I’ve mentioned a few times a friend decried in 2025 that it seemed technology hadn’t done anything truly new and good for ten years or more, and I kind of agree with her.

(Yay, we have better graphics, great, that’s being used to make Slop AI just like it was used to mine Bitcoin).

Finally, Doctorow looks at solutions. Some of this is the weakest part of the book as the solutions are obvious, but also we face a lot of challenges. Doctorow needed to give people more suggested action paths, communities to get involved in, and so on. The solution are movements and I think he could have done more with that.

And all of this, all of this is familiar. It’s just actually worse and dumber than we expected.

So my recommendation is that this is a must-read book but I’m not sure it’s a must-keep book. You’ll probably “get it” in one read and move on – hopefully after looking at the section on solutions and deciding to take action. So I do recommend buying a hard copy (which can’t be enshittified like a virtual one) and then when done lending it to someone else. Or have your book club do the same.

Let’s make sure this book doesn’t become a timeless classic.

Steven Savage

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com

OK folks, I said I will discuss politics more, albeit in my own way so don’t assume this is going to be typical ranting. It’ll be my ranting, so it’s from a source you can trust.

So let’s talk the Iran War. A lot of people are talking about the Iran War of 2026, and everyone is wondering what will happen and in a lot of case telling us what is going to happen.

Now me I am going to say that I think the war is a bad idea, done under multiple questionable circumstances, with multiple unpredictable factors. There’s a can of worms, then there’s this, and know what, we don’t need this.

But am I going to say exactly what will happen? No, because:

1. My skills relevant to this are Project Management, Technology, and a slight bit of economics.
2. My knowledge of the Mideast is mostly “oh, gods, not another war” when other people know it far better than me.

I’m not exactly the guy to predict things. I am the guy to go “oh, not again” and “hey, remember how things went for the Kurds before?” but not laying out probabilities. In fact I’m suspicious of people who seem sure how things are going to go, because my PM instincts say a lot of people don’t know what they’re talking about.

Whenever some political event happens like the Iran War people start making very solid predictions about things. It’s not academic predictions (many an academic seems to be more in the “oh, no” category). It’s stuff that I’ve seen christened Political Fanfic, stories spun of wishes, dreams, hallucinations, agendas, and possible substance abuse.

I love that term, because it’s accurate.

It’s not hard to find politicians, pundits, preachers, and a lot of people on social media who have too much time on their hands writing political fanfic. They’re sure what’s going to happen. They spell it out in excruciating detail that sets off my Project Manager senses (if people can’t agree on fonts, you can’t predict the next ten years, bub). They’re very sure and very elaborate.

If your response to a war is to do some Game of Thrones level description, you are, as the kids say, “sus.” Also I will try to drop no more slang in the rest of this essay as it makes me feel old.

I see this all over and have seen it for so long. People just weaving tales for whatever reason – to feel smart, to get attention, to get social media clicks, or just plain arrogance. When it gets to actual politicians it’s potentially fatal, but when it’s just someone with fourteen Instagram followers it can still become a force multiplier for B.S.

It’s really starting to wear on me. The world is quite messy before the Iran War, and as this all can get very bad and fatal I’d like to focus on actual goals and solutions. It’s not reality TV here, even if the Iraq War seemed to kick that politics-as-reality TV into overdrive further all those years ago.

We don’t need political fanfic. We need to be asking what kind of world do we want and how do we get there. It’s two very hard questions! They’re so hard and so revealing that maybe it’s easier for some people to create their political fanfic.

But take it from a Project Manager – something I am qualified to speak on – we need people who show us goals and ways. Not political fanfic. If I want fiction, I’ve got plenty of that, and the plots are more sensible than whatever the heck people are spinning about Iran.

Steven Savage

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com

When you work in IT if you have a problem, someone has The Solution – for money. Ok there’s free/open source versions but a lot of times people want to pay cash. You don’t get fired for spending someone’s money in too many cases.

There’s always some new piece of software, new module, or new upgrade that’ll solve The Problem. I get this at home as a hobbyist and writer, and I get it at work. My friends who usually work in IT experience the same thing.

However there’s a problem with buying The Solution.

That new software tool or module that will solve The Problem also requires you to follow procedures, and enter data, and do things just a bit differently. Sure you can get customizations or do them yourselves, but usually The Solution to The Problem also adds The Work.

Which, you figure will pay off. Eventually. Yeah you have to track this and add that, but eventually it’ll be more efficient.

Except, then sometimes you add another Solution to another Problem and add more Work. So yeah, you just added a bit more of extra stuff to do, right? It’s worth it! You have The Solutions to the Problems!

Now zoom ahead a few years (or maybe a few months at some places) and you’ve purchased or expanded so many Solutions and added so much Work that you have a new Problem – all the extra Work added to solve the Problem in the first place. Hell, at that point you may have been better off with the Old Problem before you decided to solve things.

We’ve probably all been there when The Work to use The Solution becomes more important than actually solving whatever The Problem was. We may miss the old Problem. We understood The Problem.

Essentially companies and individuals have paid to get more overhead. I’m sure you’ve been there. You may be there now. You may be drinking because you’re there now. Stop that, it’s bad for you.

I think this is because fixing a Problem is hard and requires effort and argument. Making changes needs effort and arguments. The temptation to buy a Solution is both fast and might seem easier at the time. It’s kind of like the old “no one got fired for buying IBM,” whereas the challenges of overhauling The Problem means you have to ask how you got there.

Sometimes I think we need a new wave of minimalism in IT. How can we do more with less? What do we really need to do? How can we scale back to find what we really need to do at a reasonable price?

Because I’m finding that a lot of Solutions just create a new Problem – more Work.

Steven Savage

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com

And back to my Alternate Steves columns, where I look at how technology, politics, and culture could have diverged – told from the perspective of a “me” in those alternate universes. This one is about Ghostbusters and how the elements were there for a Star Wars/Marvel like Cinematic universe. It came from several conversations with friends.

Let’s meet another Steve Savage, a creative consultant for decades, who is currently on a speaking tour about the ups and downs of Cinematic Universes.

INTERVIEWER: . . . and my guest today is Steven Savage, a Creative Consultant and writer. So my first question Steve, is what does a Creative Consultant do?

STEVE: I help out people’s ideas for movies, TV shows, netcasts, and whatever they want to make and provide ideas, troubleshoot problems, or give warnings about bad choices.

INTERVIEWER: How much is just telling people it’s a bad idea?

STEVE: Give me five dollars and I’ll tell you if that question is a bad idea.

INTERVIEWER: (Laughs) I see. So since you’re in the spotlight for Culture Quickies, I wanted to ask you about your latest speaking engagement. You’ve actually given several talks on Ghostbusters. I’m sure my audience wants to know more, and maybe how you get paid to do that.

STEVE: Well we all know there are attempts to reboot the Ghostbusters franchise after it petered out. What I think is important is to understand just how formative it was, because Ghostbusters changed how we view media.

INTERVIEWER: Will you discuss the recent interview with the surviving stars?

STEVE: No, because that speaks for itself and for themselves and their lawyers. Anyway here’s the critical thing – Ghostbusters helped define what we call Cinematic Universes, and it nearly didn’t. It may be in its reboot phase now, but as someone who grew up in the 80s it’s hard to emphasize how formative it was.

Ghostbusters was a science-fiction action comedy with great effects and a fantastic cast. Parts of it have aged terribly, quite frankly, but at the time it was fresh, original, and fun.

Now the thing is what do you do after such a hit? Apparently there was some confusion and things could have gone different ways.

INTERVIEWER: Well there was the cartoon . . .

STEVE: Exactly, and that was part of it. And let’s not forget the cartoon was spectacular, though you can see the leftovers of the confusion. Let’s talk about that.

The rumor is that the execs weren’t quite sure what to do next. You had this big hit movie and you want to do more. But what’s the best way? The story goes that one of them brought up the line in the movie “Ask about our franchise opportunities” and the answer was go bigger.

The Ghostbusters cartoon – and people forget this – originally was a Saturday Morning affair. Some people still thought it was for kids. But the studio was getting a handle on what was going on and moved it to prime-time with a bigger budget and it became a hit.

INTERVIEWER: I know some people say Ghostbusters paved the way for The SImpsons.

STEVE: Well The Simpsons has gone on longer. Anyway, the studio decided to go all in on Ghostbusters with the idea that if you tied things together you’d get synergies. Bringing in some international animators was part of that. When they contacted West End Games to do the Ghostbusters RPG that was a critical one.

The Ghostbusters RPG could have been a shoddy affair, but they went all in. They called in creative consultants – not me, I was too young – and had some simple rules. As noted in Heading West, the idea was to make an RPG that was accessible to everyone, but also made for people into lore and RPGs. The result, let’s be honest, was slick but also easy to play.

INTERVIWER: I still have the lore books.

STEVE: West End turned out to be great at those. Remember how much detail their Star Wars game had? The funny thing being Star Wars inspired what happened to Ghostbusters.

The idea the execs centered around was to create an extended Ghostbusters franchise. Use tentpole movies to bring together properties, but also create stories and media tying into a larger universe. You’d see the movie, watch the show, get the game, but also get novelizations and even stories about other groups of Ghostbusters.

The idea was to have some continuing stories like Star Wars but old serials were also an inspiration – how do you keep people coming back? A lot of people cut their teeth on Ghostbusters – you know the old story we wouldn’t have Babylon 5 without Ghostbusters. We certainly wouldn’t have had X-files or The Hundred Year Chronicles.

INTERVIEWER: I remember how suddenly everything became Ghostbusters.

STEVE: Yes, and honestly it got out of hand since the franchise idea had stuck with the execs.

So you had an animated TV show, but wanted movies. But also wanted a presence, so the idea was to make movies with other Ghostbusters. So the studios carefully engineered other films with the idea of tying them together, fortunately they hit on a model that worked – for awhile.

The idea was that you find a group of actors and writers who can pull it off – within constraints. There were actually rules for how to do a Ghostbusters film. This all fed back to a central group that was trying to arrange a cinematic continuity. What we called a Cinematic Universe now.

Star Wars gave us a linear set of films. What came out of this was a relative explosion of films, tied together with crossover movies. Each film however was left in the hands of people to do their best – within constraints.

INTERVIEWER: And the other countries . ..

STEVE: Yeah thats where it got weird. Because why not give the rights to do a Ghostbusters show in Canada? In the UK? Have another franchise going! And let’s be entirely real here, more than a few of these “franchise” shows just involved someone repurposing another script or idea.

It also got hard because the cartoon was technically continuity. So people started handing off ideas and side characters to the cartoon. Then the films. But it worked as you had a lot people trying to make it work.

It was also insanely profitable.

INTERVIEWER: But it didn’t last.

STEVE: No, you hit a saturation point, but there was a lot more, which is in my speech. Which I need to plug.

INTERVIEWER: I’ll do it at the end.

STEVE: The problem is that you have many independent films and shows, some of which are good, but you can’t innovate. Everything has to feed into a tentpole movie.

Also it was hard on the original stars and the stars that came later. I mean do you want to keep getting dragged back into these films? Do you want to play second fiddle to an animated interpretation of your character? Plus are you getting your cut properly?

The lawsuits that came out didn’t help, but they didn’t kill Ghostbusters. I honestly think the idea overstayed it’s welcome and couldn’t evolve. If you had some continuing plots, if you made the shared Ghostbusters universe more of a soap opera, it could have gone on. Instead we had that crashout in the 200s..

INTERVIEWER: Oh the numbers . ..

STEVE: Terrible. And the execs panicked, the MMO they planned never happened and everyone cut their losses.

Star Wars, you’ll notice kept going. Even if it seems we’re suddenly a bit saturated with it today. It stayed steady. Which is the final thing I want to talk about.

INTERVIWER: Yeah, the nature of the CInematic Universe.

STEVE: Star Wars had the seed of the idea, but Ghostbusters solidified it. They gave us the idea of tightly linked media properties that weren’t linear or one show after another. Ghostbusters wore itself out, but so many imitated them.

We saw how the comic book movies suddenly wanted to do crossovers – that’s supposedly why Tim Burton quit the second Batman film. Star Trek The Next Generation had it’s short-lived “parallel” show. We also saw plenty of actually good attempts to adapt things or make original works.

Did they work? Well, somewhat. I was pleased about Highguard because it was low-level fantasy and honestly it was a breath of fresh air. DC outsourcing work to Japan to make some animated shows using Legion of Superheroes as a kind of “far future” touchstone was clever. But there were a lot of dismal failures, most of which we don’t see because they didn’t get made.

Oh, and there’s what Disney did. Try to retroactively build a cinematic universe. Which is both insane and almost admirable even if all they do is churn out their own fanfic.

I think the issue is that to build a Cinematic universe you need people to be into it. Existing properties may get attention, but also you’re constrained by choices. You need a lot of talent or money to pitch a new idea or to retrofit an old one.

And as always, there’s the exhaustion Ghostbusters experienced. There is nothing permanent here unless, maybe, you go the soap opera model, and I invite you to ask how we’ll that’s going.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think these Cinematic Universes or the reboot make sense?

STEVE: (Pause) Honestly? No. I’ll be frank here, we need more original works and more standalone or tightly bound works. There’s a time to do something and a time to end it. The hope to recreate the Ghostbusters gamble is a risky one and people are leery. There’s a reason we’ve seen that small press and small film explosion, and it’s not just the internet. There’s a reason that Netflix has made bank with their Skunkworks projects.

So before you ask, my advice when I consult is, if someone wants to do a Cinematic Universe of SOME kind, is to think hard. What do you want to do and why should people care and keep caring. Again, the soap opera model.

Not of course that for awhile having everything Ghostbusters wasn’t fun. I wonder if it’s success was one of the reasons I got into Creative Consulting in the first place. People wanted to make their shows work and I knew my nerd stuff.

INTERVIEWER: Well we’re at time, and you can see Steve’s Nerd Stuff this Friday . . .

I’d love to hear what regular readers think. Could Ghostbusters have become a Cinematic Universe before others?

Steven Savage

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com

As per my last post I said I will be talking more (but not entirely) about politics. And if you think I’m going to jump into something big, right now, not really. Well I kind of am. Because I want to share something that I find useful in thinking about society, politics, and how we get things done at scale.

It won’t surprise you that it’s about Agile methods, but one that affects my politics – and might give you a few ideas.

For anyone not familiar with Agile (a vanishingly small number of people who read me as I talk about it a lot), it’s an approach to work, started in software, about reasonably-sized teams working in short increments. The popular method is Scrum, where teams take a list of priorities, tackle a limited set over a short time, and then review and do it all over again. I’ve applied it to writing, art, and more.

But as you may guess, small teams is like about 5 people give or take. So how do you do a big project? Well someone invented Scrum At Scale. You have teams, but team leads from those team meet on their OWN Scrum teams to coordinate. Bigger project? Then you have teams of team leads of team leads, and pile it as high as possible. It’s pretty cool and isn’t the giant process-haul that rival SAFE is.

It also affected my view of politics.

First, one of the problems of politics is non-participation or exclusion. To be part of society is to be part of it, like it or not. At the same time plenty of people want to exclude others to get their own “selectorate” to make holding power easier, and of course usually screwing over everyone else. Scrum at Scale made me realize how important it is for people to be involved and involved at multiple levels.

You should pay attention to your community, but also to your state/province, federal, and the world and be involved. If necessary hold office even if it’s an informal community thing. Good leaders should also be trusted if they can and have held positions at lower levels and have actually done something. I’m no military adventurist by a long shot, but there’s a reason I sometimes vote for ex-mils as well as doctors, emergency workers, etc.

Scrum at Scale is about being involved and being in touch among levels. A team lead on the lowest level scrum team might be a representative on one team, and the team above that, and so on. That’s the kind of thing software development or society needs – integration of people.

But there’s one more factor as well. Scrum of Scrums, especially, emphasizes communicating problems upward. What a team below can’t solve, the team above tries to tackle, and so on up the chain. Eventually unsolvable problems land on a leadership group, and if no one else can fix them that’s their job.

Problems go up, solutions come down. If you’ve ever seen politicians try to solve issues that they usually make up you realize how important this idea is. The higher up the chain you are the more you should help fix the unfixable things below. If no problems come up then you keep things running, which is important because I can say quite cynically many a problem is caused by a politician trying to keep their job.

Honestly, a lot of my politics are influenced by things that aren’t seen as political – project management, biology, and so on. But as I’ve noted before everything is really political, so we should learn from everything.

Steven Savage

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com

I once had someone note that my blog wasn’t political, and that was refreshing. I can sort of get that, especially if you’ve encountered writers to A) turned “political” and B) did it for the clicks/attention/cash. “Politics” has become a dirty word in some ways, and people have made an effort to dirty it.

But that made me think. See my blog does talk politics. In fact it talks politics more than many readers may realize (and probably in some cases, than I realize). Because a lot of my blog is about organization, technology, culture, and getting things done. That’s all politics.

Ed Zitron may be the Lewis Black of technology, but if you ever heard or read his stuff, his work is political, he just doesn’t say it.

I do avoid, in some cases, making it explicitly political. Some of this is the dismal state of modern politics. A lot of it is about what I want to discuss. If I make specific political statements then that means those who automatically disagree won’t listen and those who automatically agree won’t question me. I’m fine with disagreement and agreement, but would like it to be heartfelt not automatic.

Praise me or call me a dumbass for real, not because I repeated a talking point.

When I do this consciously, I’m kind of annoyed with it, because politics should be interesting and engaging. Politics is part of society and civilization. In fact, to try to avoid politics is to avoid having a society. To emphasizes that let’s talk the Toledo Zoo and Civil Defense.

The Toledo Zoo, which I had visited many times, had some buildings made by the Works Progress Administration back in the 30s. Those lasted quite awhile, and the WPA was the result of politics. I’ve also dug up books create due to the WPA and so on. Parts of our history due to politics.

Civil Defense, for a time, interested me as well. At first for the nature of it’s communications, and later for what it meant. As a Project Manager seeing Americans come together in organized fashion intrigued me. It’s also part of my interest in disaster recovery. Yes, Civil Defense was propaganda-heavy, it was political, but it also left a legacy.

Politics can be sure we get things done. Ever go and say “someone should fix this?” Well getting it fixed is politics.

But why has it become such a dirty word? Why is it associated with screaming at each other over Thanksgiving? Why can’t we, you know, solve problems?

My short take is simply this – we’re in a media saturated culture where politics is somewhere between lousy soap opera and gladiatorial game. Some people compare it to wrestling but that’s insulting wrestling. We’ve made politics about anything but doing things, and all that does is serve entrenched interests at best. At worse (and I think we’re at worse), politics is essentially a media-industrial complex filled with people who will say and do anything for hits, money, and to release their own psychological complexes.

And while all this is going on? Terrible things are happening, only we’re not as aware of them or trying to fix them as she should be.

(I have suspected the origins of this are in Kennedy’s popularity and the mass media, but I think there’s more I need to chew over. A friend has been studying media history and his insights are depressingly useful.)

We’ve made politics not about getting anything done and politics has always had its problems. We should be engaged. We should have discussions, not arguments. We should do things for our communities of all kind. We should not be listening to some guy on YouTube who alternately argues for insane politics while pitching pills to fix erectile dysfunction or legal psychedelics.

So I may be talking politics more directly. Be the change I want to see in the world and all. Though I can’t say I won’t do a bit of a runaround before I admit something is about politics. Let’s keep things fun here – as opposed to what too much political talk is about.

Steven Savage

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com

Ages ago I was working on some scheduling software used to schedule setting up computers in data centers. This is pretty complex as you’ve got a giant building and you need the space, the power, the networking hookups, and enough ventilation. Before you schedule and do any of that you have to check if it can be done – you might be facing power limits, overheating, lack of parts, and so on. If you haven’t been in a data center, it’s a balancing act just to set things up – I can get into that in another time.

Anyway I was looking at this software which I hadn’t written but was maintaining and got ideas on how to make it more efficient. I eventually worked out a way to get scheduling tracked down to tiny increments so we’d know who was doing what at all time!

“Don’t do it, people will hate you,” is a rough summary of my boss’ reaction.

Of course I realized that my cool idea that would allow for such precision would be insufferable to the people doing the job. They’d have schedules with no wiggle room that they’d either break or have to constantly update making their jobs harder and more stressful. Plus the jobs would be less efficient because of my bright idea as the tracking tool would be the centerpiece of my life.

Besides, you know, maybe I should have thought about just trusting the people doing their damn job.

If you haven’t been a software guy or an engineer, you may figure this is obvious. But when you’re an engineer of some kind, or any other “making/solving” profession, solving a problem and making a cool solution can become paramount over anything else. Including people hating you.

It’s fun to make solutions even if they’re stupid and unrealistic in reality. If youre solutions-oriented (like me) even more so. This is also why – in part – I think our Internet Age has created so much stupid and bad stuff.

Technology also lets us solve problems quickly and at scale. You can hook up a few web frameworks and transform a web page. YOu can push a solution to A/B testing or production and people are using it right away. It’s almost enough to make you forget good QA!

(I joke, people have been always forgetting QA).

Making things happen is a rush, and technology lets us deliver it faster and get that rush. Of course it may also mean we’ve just done something dumb, quickly, and at scale.

But we might not even realize how bad our latest idea is. We made the thing fast, we got the thing working, it’s just what we wanted – and only later discover it’s a terrible concept.

Worse, the marketing department or investors may tell us it’s a great idea and we never realize our latest bright idea for a Thermos with Bluetooth is insufferably stupid.

No matter how much of the strange and stupid things spewed out of technology companies may be pandering stock-jacking ideas, part of this “joy of solving” is almost certainly part of it. Someone had a great idea – even if it’s just a way to tweak the stock price with a useless release – and implemented it. Money and power can tempt people, but that rush of a solution turn off your morals as well.

So when we look at many strange, useless, and outright immoral technologies don’t just follow the money. Somewhere in the lineage is probably more than a few people who just had so much fun “making things work” they didn’t think about it.

Steven Savage

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com