Design in Babel

Technology's growing complexity and calcification has created a Babel-like tower of ever-increasing burden of management, power, energy, and attention to keep it running.

It feeds on people, incorporating them into its matrix.

HCI Designers see this chewing up and spitting out of humans and raise the alarm.

But they're mostly ignored because the machine must go on.

The fact is: the building must continue.

But it will grow until it cannot be sustained. It's not anti-fragile. It will collapse under its own weight.

The problem is: How's a humble designer supposed to eat their bread and drink their wine without playing the fool and contributing to the monolith?

Freedom is in your own vine and in your own tree.

It's in standing secure, unmoved, upon the rock. So when the rains fall, and the wind beats, the house will not fall.

It's only in aligning, identifying, and risking all for the sake of the Kingdom of Christ that protection is found when the King brings his judgment.

So, a designer like me might look to do the most good that he can, to continue in doing good works, to persevere in good works, as the right expression of a desire for honor, glory, and immortality.

It's in using the powers that I have, the skill, knowledge, and abilities to cultivate the true vineyard, to build on the true building, with Christ as the chief cornerstone.

The works of the marginalia are in the mediating between the level above and the level below.

Salt and light is in the world. It's a border-crossing. It's a shepherd-imitating active loving, healing, bringing in, protecting, and serving of the lost sheep of [insert city].

Take the most ennobling efforts we can conceive of, the highest possible good...

Then apply your own capacity to it. What do your powers avail of? What can you do? What can you embody?

Then work to achieve that end.

It's such a challenge to identify what real good is.

Evil often masquerades as goodness.

And tracing the goodness to the root is often quite difficult.

The love of money is the root of all kinds of evils.

And it turns out the love of money fuels all kinds of interactions, behaviors, and delusions here in the US.

So, what do we do about that?

Do we offer services only to nonprofits?

Do we offer services that are the barest, rawest form of transformation from disorder to order? The ones that are closest to the grain? Closest to hard, bare reality?

Do we find the gaps in the world that a clear, proven technology could solve, but the incentive structures don't currently exist to solve those problems?

Do we try to create economic prosperity for those who struggle to create it for themselves? And so we pursue high-paying contracts for the sake of the poor?

Do we focus on relationship, and only work with those who we have deep kinship with? Those we've confidently vetted are doing good in the world?

It seems like the whole point of contracts is to not require the deep integration of two people before they engage in economic activity.

Maybe it's something like: Build your household, and build the household of those you find building their households in honest, humble subservience to Christ.

I think there's something about working in the world – getting out into it, participating in it, and rubbing shoulders with all sorts of people.