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This is a mission statement of sorts for joining the small
web. It is great that some small http sites exist, but it
is much better to live in an ecosystem where small is the
norm and feedback is greatly slowed.
It is more accurate to say the feedback provided over the
web is overrated. To a person who is intellectually honest
enough, the entire universe provides feedback. This is the
broadest possible feedback, and so this confuses people who
are operating from a narrower view, such as "What is hot
right now?" or the deeply related "Okay, but how do I win?"
The paradox: by widening the feedback, you increase the
individual vision -- and the reverse is true.
Paul Graham in his essay Taste for Makers has it right
Good design is often strange. Some of the very best work
has an uncanny quality: Euler's Formula, Bruegel's
Hunters in the Snow, the SR-71, Lisp. They're not just
beautiful, but strangely beautiful.
. . .
Most of the qualities I've mentioned are things that can
be cultivated, but I don't think it works to cultivate
strangeness. The best you can do is not squash it if it
starts to appear. Einstein didn't try to make relativity
strange. He tried to make it true, and the truth turned
out to be strange.
The disaster that is web 2.0 -- the Internet of Money
(I.O.M? . . .I.O.$ ??) is pushing the model of feedback
into our face so much that is simply taken for granted to
the point that it is an ideology, if not a superstructure.
Feedback here in the information age is used by businesses
to better sell to clients. Too much feedback for a creator
only leads to giving an audience more of exactly what they
wanted before. It never gives an audience the opportunity
to grow and learn to appreciate something new. And for the
creator, it never lets them get to an individual vision --
deep, inner (yet also outer) strangeness -- that is at the
heart of good design.
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I'd love to hear from people. My email is the handle minus
"net" (work by Voltaire that starts with "c"), at sdf.org.