Collect the Dots; Connect the Dots
First impressions, dead authors, short order cooks, and good/bad systems
I think about the human brain like a library or a museum that’s capable of capturing, curating, and filing away pieces of knowledge, experiences, and references for later use. Part of that is initially being aggressively curious about the world. Part of it is certainly pattern matching. And the goal — for me at least — is learning things so I can be a better human, to use my knowledge for the good of the people around me and hopefully bring about a life-giving quality to my work.
In my professional and personal life I call this deep generalism Collect the Dots; Connect the Dots (I seriously doubt the phrase is unique to me, though I’ve been using it for a long time.) CTDCTD is equal parts curiosity, curation, and pattern matching, with the goal of making new things and insights from seemingly disparate things and insights. It’s a process for bringing clarity out of chaos.
Stephen King’s advice on writing is a helpful guide: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” His maxim is true of nearly any medium where you want to gain mastery and skill — design, music, being a short order cook or a haiku guru. To become good at the thing, study a bunch of people doing the thing and also don’t forget to do the thing. No shortcuts.
To be a good connector of dots, it’s necessary to be a good collector of dots. To love both the process and the product, mentally hoarding snippets and images and quotes and ideas because one day they might be the connecting dot between two other dots, or spark an entirely new cognitive path to follow.
Let’s try an example:
⚫ One of my favorite pieces of writing/thinking is La Mort de L’Auteur1 (“The Death of the Author”), a 1967 essay by the French literary critic Roland Barthes. In the short essay Barthes argues that the intentions and identity of the author matter little once the work is in the public square. Out in the world, the reader’s individual interpretation becomes primary, and the essential meaning of a work is disconnected from authorial intent. “To give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
⚫ “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” — Maya Angelou
⚫ In 1956 business theorist Stafford Beer founded United Steel’s Department of Operations Research & Cybernetics. (Note: so rad! There’s something compelling to me — in a branding sense — about the matter-of-fact 50s/60s naming of things.) He eventually coined a systems thinking heuristic called POSIWID — “The purpose of a system is what it does” even if what it does isn’t what the designer(s) intended. Beer said “[there is] no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.”
⚫ In my role as a community organizer, living and working in a rapidly gentrifying city, we’re on the cusp of multiple real estate development projects in our neighborhood — hundreds of luxury apartments and dozens of $600–800,000 townhomes in a historic textile mill village where the community has barely had time to adjust to the real estate boom of the last ten years, seeing median single family house prices increase from $75,000 to the “new normal” of $250,000+.
Now, I’m a part of this, too. I’m fond of saying people typically act like “gentrification is everything that happened after I moved here.” We have an unreal capacity to think we’re affected by systems but not agents of those same systems. My friend Mikey said, “It's like getting mad at traffic from your car.” But there are many factors at play because gentrification isn’t one thing. It’s exceptionally complicated.
There’s a real estate theory that states in unequivocal terms that the only way to make affordable housing work, decrease rent hikes, and curb exuberant home prices is to increase the housing supply. To a certain extent, I believe this. The theory makes a lot of practical sense on its face, but assumes a few things like infinite options, good actors, plentiful land, and that housing is a simple, rational supply/demand economic problem, not layers of social, racial, economic, historical, and emotional decisions dressed up in a trenchcoat.
Housing and gentrification play out differently in different places2. Our community association recently had a developer who’s been active in the neighborhood present plans for a new 1.2ac 9-unit luxury townhome project on our street, demolishing two existing, occupied single family homes. They told us their initial, smaller plan was rejected by the county government due to a combination of minimum lot sizes and setbacks, but since they’ve paid top dollar to assemble the three parcels, their only option is to demo the homes (one of which they just finished renovating), then upzone the property to allow for more density — roughly $6M of townhomes. And this, they claim, is ultimately good for the neighborhood.
The developers feel trapped by the systems they participate in, a web of complexities working with and against each other to create a scenario where the best outcome for them and the municipality is to build this specific project on that specific land, no matter the precedent that it sets for the future of the neighborhood. And while we can’t speak for gentrification and economic redevelopment elsewhere, here in our city we already have recent precedents. The results of similar policies and actions in the neighboring historically under-resourced communities tells us it will lead to increased rents, increased home prices, more teardown to accomodate more luxury housing, and more racial displacement in a city where racial economic inequality is already among the worst in the Southeast.
Heavy, right? Welcome to my brain on a Friday afternoon.
CTDCTD Time
So we’ve collected some dots. The death of the author, first impressions, POSIWID, gentrification — how do we connect them? Heck, should we connect them? Do these things belong in the same room, having a conversation with each other? Is there a conceptual through line, or a new thought that we can chew on by adding, remixing, combining, and cross-pollinating these ideas across decades to something relevant right now?
Here’s one way it connects in my brain: if all we have to do to understand the purpose of a system is examine its actions and outcomes (not the intent of its designer, the origin of its creation, or the problem it claims it wants to solve) then the purpose of luxury housing development in my neighborhood is to provide housing for wealthy young professionals and retirees, displace renting neighbors, increase existing home prices, and make the land so potentially valuable that tearing down perfectly good homes is a better financial decision than keeping them.
When systems show you what they do, believe them.
If the co-designers of this system in local government and the private sector intend a different result from what we’re getting, they have to design a different system. Like Beer said, “[there is] no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” At best it’s self-delusional vanity, and at worst it becomes a narrative weapon used by those in power against those without it — “Look at all the good we’re intending! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”
Collecting isn’t Planning
Let’s zoom back out. The whole point of CTDCTD is that it isn’t linear. It’s not planned, at least not initially. Remove one of these dots and I may never have made these connections. Or keep them all, but in a different season I might come up with a different conclusion or way of connecting them. How many ways can you combine the same ingredients to make different recipes?
So here’s another way this connects in my brain: if all we have to do to understand the purpose of a system is examine its actions and outcomes, then my previous portfolio website was perfectly-designed to get me the types of work, clients, budgets, and project cadence I was experiencing. I could complain about what I permit, or blame external factors outside of my control like the down market, tech layoffs, and the rise of AI, but the system I created was showing me what it did. I was just too stubborn to believe it because it wasn’t what I intended.
So I changed the system. My new site isn’t perfect, or even finished. But sharing more of my process and personality, along with more work is already generating better leads and projects. If you intend a different result from what you’re getting, you have to design a different system. The one you’ve got is working perfectly.
P.S. I admit most of my collecting/connecting brain power is used every week on building new Magic: the Gathering decks or really really bad portmanteau jokes. Your mileage may vary.
Happy Friday! I hope you enjoy a weekend of collecting some dots; you never know when they’ll come in handy.
Feel free to share this newsletter with a friend or enemy.
The Internet Archive has the full text of The Death of the Author for your reading enjoyment.
If you’re interested in dipping your toes into the wonderful world of gentrification and urban planning, this op-ed on the Four Types of Gentrification is a good start.