There are a lot of things Drummer has that I am pleased with, and those things will help me build things that I think Drummer should have, but doesn't. And there are many features that I'm sure will show up eventually, whether built-in or provided by someone else, somehow. #
(One of the things I'm interested in regarding scripting and GitHub is that particular aspect: Why can't I just break off a chunk of code, and let other people use it?)#
There are a lot of things I am glad that Drummer doesn't have, and I'll enumerate them all someday. Here's one: No fucking metrics.#
(Technically, this is a non-feature of Old School and not Drummer, but for me they're the same at the moment.)#
I am aware of what metrics get you, in ways that only someone would know in their bones, whose ability to eat food purchased with actual dollars instead of a benefits card depended on their ability to determine precisely who their customers are and what they want. #
The panopticon peers deeply, and you leave so much more information about what you are looking at and doing than you have any idea, and everyone around you is taking advantage of it, all the time, constantly, right now, this very minute. #
A quick example, a true story, from twenty years ago:#
The phone rings. We check caller ID. We look in Roundup, my version of the panopticon. #
Roundup has every email any employee has ever exchanged with a customer, ever. That's not your email inbox, because you work for me. When you quit, I need to know everything you ever promised the customer, because that relationship belongs to me. (You also have your own relationship with the customer, and if you want to go start your own company and poach them, it's my own fucking fault for making that situation desirable for anybody concerned. I'm not a vortex.)#
So when you email us, we can instantly find out, have we talked to you before, and what have we said, if anything. Now, that's a little oppressive, I guess, but once everybody on the team is aware that's how email gets handled, it works out OK. In fact, customers like that part because it means anybody they talk to at the company can at least look into helping them, even if their usual rep is out. No internal silos.#
We also run our own website, so we get metrics. Now, these are the kind of metrics I want, so I could give a shit about total numbers. I do not care one fucking bit if ten thousand people looked at that page. In this instance, there is exactly one metric I want: #
So I can I see, by IP address, everything on our website you looked at. I can see what links you clicked on, and I can see what pages you looked at. I can see if you came back and looked again. I can see what features you might be interested in based on what you are looking at.#
Think about that. I can read your fucking mind. I don't know who you are yet, but I can see what you're looking at.#
Now, the product we were selling at the time was aimed at a pretty small group of people. Most markets are like that, you may want everybody in the world to buy your awesome developer framework, but, reality: people do different things. Only some people care about this stuff, so there are small discussion lists for sharing ideas and code snippets and asking questions. This was 20 years ago, so everything like that was fragmented into little communities rather than just being on Stack Overflow. And this discussion would happen over email.#
Email gets delivered to your IP address. And it gets sent from your IP address. And email has headers. And all this can be stored in a database like Roundup. Just like our web server logs. Which means Roundup can make a direct connection between your anonymous website visiting and your identity and interests. #
So, when we checked Roundup, there was a very good chance that not only do we hope you are a potential customer, hello random caller, it turns out we could also find out, literally instantly: #
At the time, caller ID was just digits, not the name. But people include phone numbers in the footer of their email. And Roundup indexed literally everything. So we could type in the digits we saw on the caller ID and know all this before we even picked up the phone.#
It should be pretty obvious how useful this is to have at the literal tip of your fingers. It's creepy as fucking hell, of course, and we had to be careful when talking to people for the first time, because, well, it's creepy as fucking hell. You've never talked to us and we have a literal file on you already, organized by interests, constructed instantly, based on just normal stuff you were doing, living your life.#
Also, there is jack shit you can do about any of it, because you voluntarily provided every single bit of this information. Perhaps without being informed, without real consent, but it was yours to give and it was ours to ingest and turn into money in any way we could.#
Note that none of this depended on Google, or cookies, or URL shorteners, or geotagging, or Facebook, or facial recognition, or cell tower pings, or anything else fancy. We knew your email, because you'd sent it to us, albeit indirectly. Everything we knew, you told us.#
We didn't spam you. We didn't sell your name or personal information. We didn't even buy your personal information. You never knew, and, in fact, if you never called us, we never knew, either. What on earth could we possibly want to do with the information we gathered, besides what we did, which was provide excellent customer service? #
This is, by the way, the justification the NSA uses for keeping our network traffic around in databases, because it's not really a panopticon until you go look up someone's caller ID, right?#
We used an email client, our own Apache logs, and caller ID. (And Roundup, of course.)#
There is a me-shaped hole in Facebook that defines me as precisely as if I had a Facebook account or I was on Mark Zuckerberg's personal "let this guy on the space ark" list. #
But sabotaging the panopticon is not the only reason why I'm glad Drummer doesn't have metrics. I'm glad because I cannot possibly find out if anybody is reading this. And that is turning out to be amazing.#
You can't turn off those little hearts on Twitter. There is no way to interact with Twitter in any meaningful way that does not immediately jam it right in your face just how funny or smart or clever you really are or aren't. #
This is useful, and really the only thing Twitter is for. It is literally Twitter's reason for being, so it's no surprise that if you look in the settings menus, you will find several pages that look like they might be the key—appearance, display, etc.—there is no option to turn this off. You can't know what's popular unless you know what everybody else is looking at. And that everybody else is looking at it.#
There is zero point to Twitter if all you can do is say things and make things and let people see them and read them and then say things and make their own things and then you say things and make things and let people see them and read them. There is absolutely zero value in human interaction that can't be measured and ranked. It is absolutely critical that you be able to see, immediately, how popular an idea is, and how many people listen to whoever said it.#
So I'm glad Drummer doesn't have that particular feature. I can't tell if anyone's already read it, so I can fix mistakes. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. I can make mistakes. I can read it and decide for myself that it sucks. I can apply my own judgement. #
I can do all these things by myself, but what happens is, in my experience, that I just never end up finishing anything, because it's not perfect. You have no idea how many things I want to fix about the way the blog part looks and reads. But I've decided that I no longer give a fucking shit. I cannot keep waiting until I finally get it right. I have too many ideas to polish each one before putting it out there.#
As I type that, it sounds completely insane. Just preview before publishing. How hard is that? I have no idea why it is hard. But I do know that you can hit that preview button for literally decades, and never hit publish.#
Which means the other feature I'm glad Drummer doesn't have, and this is one I could easily add myself—what I am referring to here is mostly an artifact of how I am approaching Drummer— is preview.#
There is something here, something about the fact that it is public, but I can still fix it, that is liberating to me. I can fix a typo. I can reword a sentence. I can clarify and polish. #
But first, I have to hit that cloud up-arrow button. #
I drive a stake in the ground and say to myself, OK, if you want to see how this reads, formatted and in context, the way the public is going to see it, bucko, you are going to have to publish it.#
If you think you are done, then publish it. If it says what you want to say, then publish it. If you've done your first couple passes, and it's time to just sit back and read for commas and typos? PUBLISH IT. #
You want a preview button? Your preview button is NO PREVIEW. FUCK YOU. MAKE SOMETHING.#
And the fact that it's easy to add new posts, in fact, you have to write new posts, that's how blogs even work, means I can go back and revisit a topic and write something new if I think I find more to say, later. I don't have to get it all absolutely fucking right the first time. I can iterate. This post covers ground I trod in the very second post I put here in the blog part. I'm making a wagon rut.#
I'll never get it right. That is literally impossible. But I can keep beating on that drum.#
There are a lot of things Drummer has that I am pleased with, and those things will help me build things that I think Drummer should have, but doesn't. And there are many features that I'm sure will show up eventually, whether built-in or provided by someone else, somehow. #
(One of the things I'm interested in regarding scripting and GitHub is that particular aspect: Why can't I just break off a chunk of code, and let other people use it?)#
There are a lot of things I am glad that Drummer doesn't have, and I'll enumerate them all someday. Here's one: No fucking metrics.#
(Technically, this is a non-feature of Old School and not Drummer, but for me they're the same at the moment.)#
I am aware of what metrics get you, in ways that only someone would know in their bones, whose ability to eat food purchased with actual dollars instead of a benefits card depended on their ability to determine precisely who their customers are and what they want. #
The panopticon peers deeply, and you leave so much more information about what you are looking at and doing than you have any idea, and everyone around you is taking advantage of it, all the time, constantly, right now, this very minute. #
A quick example, a true story, from twenty years ago:#
The phone rings. We check caller ID. We look in Roundup, my version of the panopticon. #
Roundup has every email any employee has ever exchanged with a customer, ever. That's not your email inbox, because you work for me. When you quit, I need to know everything you ever promised the customer, because that relationship belongs to me. (You also have your own relationship with the customer, and if you want to go start your own company and poach them, it's my own fucking fault for making that situation desirable for anybody concerned. I'm not a vortex.)#
So when you email us, we can instantly find out, have we talked to you before, and what have we said, if anything. Now, that's a little oppressive, I guess, but once everybody on the team is aware that's how email gets handled, it works out OK. In fact, customers like that part because it means anybody they talk to at the company can at least look into helping them, even if their usual rep is out. No internal silos.#
We also run our own website, so we get metrics. Now, these are the kind of metrics I want, so I could give a shit about total numbers. I do not care one fucking bit if ten thousand people looked at that page. In this instance, there is exactly one metric I want: #
So I can I see, by IP address, everything on our website you looked at. I can see what links you clicked on, and I can see what pages you looked at. I can see if you came back and looked again. I can see what features you might be interested in based on what you are looking at.#
Think about that. I can read your fucking mind. I don't know who you are yet, but I can see what you're looking at.#
Now, the product we were selling at the time was aimed at a pretty small group of people. Most markets are like that, you may want everybody in the world to buy your awesome developer framework, but, reality: people do different things. Only some people care about this stuff, so there are small discussion lists for sharing ideas and code snippets and asking questions. This was 20 years ago, so everything like that was fragmented into little communities rather than just being on Stack Overflow. And this discussion would happen over email.#
Email gets delivered to your IP address. And it gets sent from your IP address. And email has headers. And all this can be stored in a database like Roundup. Just like our web server logs. Which means Roundup can make a direct connection between your anonymous website visiting and your identity and interests. #
So, when we checked Roundup, there was a very good chance that not only do we hope you are a potential customer, hello random caller, it turns out we could also find out, literally instantly: #
At the time, caller ID was just digits, not the name. But people include phone numbers in the footer of their email. And Roundup indexed literally everything. So we could type in the digits we saw on the caller ID and know all this before we even picked up the phone.#
It should be pretty obvious how useful this is to have at the literal tip of your fingers. It's creepy as fucking hell, of course, and we had to be careful when talking to people for the first time, because, well, it's creepy as fucking hell. You've never talked to us and we have a literal file on you already, organized by interests, constructed instantly, based on just normal stuff you were doing, living your life.#
Also, there is jack shit you can do about any of it, because you voluntarily provided every single bit of this information. Perhaps without being informed, without real consent, but it was yours to give and it was ours to ingest and turn into money in any way we could.#
Note that none of this depended on Google, or cookies, or URL shorteners, or geotagging, or Facebook, or facial recognition, or cell tower pings, or anything else fancy. We knew your email, because you'd sent it to us, albeit indirectly. Everything we knew, you told us.#
We didn't spam you. We didn't sell your name or personal information. We didn't even buy your personal information. You never knew, and, in fact, if you never called us, we never knew, either. What on earth could we possibly want to do with the information we gathered, besides what we did, which was provide excellent customer service? #
This is, by the way, the justification the NSA uses for keeping our network traffic around in databases, because it's not really a panopticon until you go look up someone's caller ID, right?#
We used an email client, our own Apache logs, and caller ID. (And Roundup, of course.)#
There is a me-shaped hole in Facebook that defines me as precisely as if I had a Facebook account or I was on Mark Zuckerberg's personal "let this guy on the space ark" list. #
But sabotaging the panopticon is not the only reason why I'm glad Drummer doesn't have metrics. I'm glad because I cannot possibly find out if anybody is reading this. And that is turning out to be amazing.#
You can't turn off those little hearts on Twitter. There is no way to interact with Twitter in any meaningful way that does not immediately jam it right in your face just how funny or smart or clever you really are or aren't. #
This is useful, and really the only thing Twitter is for. It is literally Twitter's reason for being, so it's no surprise that if you look in the settings menus, you will find several pages that look like they might be the key—appearance, display, etc.—there is no option to turn this off. You can't know what's popular unless you know what everybody else is looking at. And that everybody else is looking at it.#
There is zero point to Twitter if all you can do is say things and make things and let people see them and read them and then say things and make their own things and then you say things and make things and let people see them and read them. There is absolutely zero value in human interaction that can't be measured and ranked. It is absolutely critical that you be able to see, immediately, how popular an idea is, and how many people listen to whoever said it.#
So I'm glad Drummer doesn't have that particular feature. I can't tell if anyone's already read it, so I can fix mistakes. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. I can make mistakes. I can read it and decide for myself that it sucks. I can apply my own judgement. #
I can do all these things by myself, but what happens is, in my experience, that I just never end up finishing anything, because it's not perfect. You have no idea how many things I want to fix about the way the blog part looks and reads. But I've decided that I no longer give a fucking shit. I cannot keep waiting until I finally get it right. I have too many ideas to polish each one before putting it out there.#
As I type that, it sounds completely insane. Just preview before publishing. How hard is that? I have no idea why it is hard. But I do know that you can hit that preview button for literally decades, and never hit publish.#
Which means the other feature I'm glad Drummer doesn't have, and this is one I could easily add myself—what I am referring to here is mostly an artifact of how I am approaching Drummer— is preview.#
There is something here, something about the fact that it is public, but I can still fix it, that is liberating to me. I can fix a typo. I can reword a sentence. I can clarify and polish. #
But first, I have to hit that cloud up-arrow button. #
I drive a stake in the ground and say to myself, OK, if you want to see how this reads, formatted and in context, the way the public is going to see it, bucko, you are going to have to publish it.#
If you think you are done, then publish it. If it says what you want to say, then publish it. If you've done your first couple passes, and it's time to just sit back and read for commas and typos? PUBLISH IT. #
You want a preview button? Your preview button is NO PREVIEW. FUCK YOU. MAKE SOMETHING.#
And the fact that it's easy to add new posts, in fact, you have to write new posts, that's how blogs even work, means I can go back and revisit a topic and write something new if I think I find more to say, later. I don't have to get it all absolutely fucking right the first time. I can iterate. This post covers ground I trod in the very second post I put here in the blog part. I'm making a wagon rut.#
I'll never get it right. That is literally impossible. But I can keep beating on that drum.#
Copyright 2021–2022 Gary Teter
Last update: Sunday August 28, 2022; 12:06 PM EDT.