For two years in college (1990–1991) I shelved books at the University of Nebraska’s Love Library. One day I discovered a whole class of reference books I had no idea even existed: town directories. Love Library had collected all of Nebraska’s town directories for the past several decades.

I found a copy of the Scottsbluff directory from the mid-1970s, when my family lived there. On first glance it looked a little like a phone book: lists of businesses and individuals, their addresses and phone numbers. But to simply pick it up you knew it was’t a phone book. It was heavy: printed on thick 20-poundish stock, hardbound. There were very few ads, no yellow pages. A town directory didn’t just give you contact details, it gave you personal details. The listing for Souders, Vernon gave my father’s profession, employer, his wife’s name including maiden name, and children’s names. I think it might have had ages in it as well, and fraternal associations like VFW, Elks or Rotary. Town directories were the pre-marketing-database equivalent of a marketing database. To be fair they also listed businesses, and (probably) their owners. I suspect they were maintained by the Chamber of Commerce, city newspaper, or some other, similar quasi-governmental organization. They were printed in smaller quantities and less frequently than phone books, and held in CoC offices and libraries. They were public, but not publicly distributed.

I imagine there was something grown-up about being listed in your town directory. Only people (mostly men) with stable jobs and addresses would be listed there. If you found your name in the town directory, that meant you were a bona-fide Member of the Community. Speaking as a man with a stable job and a permanent address, I would find something reassuring about such a listing. “The community knows I’m here. I matter.” Conversely: it would serve to temper potentially bad behavior. I’d be a lot less likely to pick fights in bars if everyone knew where I lived and who signed my paychecks.

In even more ancient times, the church registry would have signified something similar, but more basic, more animal. Paul Souders was born on this day, baptized on this day, confirmed into adulthood on this day, married on this day, had children on these days, died on this day, buried on this day.

I suspect credit scores have largely replaced town directories and church registries as a signifier of your social stability. You can’t rent an apartment or get many kinds of jobs without a credit history (and forget trying to buy a car or house.) A century-plus ago your worth as a person was measured by birth/adulthood/marriage/death, and recorded by the church. A few years later the local merchants wanted to make sure you were a reliable member of the social order. Nowadays it’s the credit card companies.

The Internet, for the past twentyish years, has allowed a strange new kind of personality to emerge: the anonymous citizen. I have no idea who CmdrTaco really is, but I know he(?)’s a heavyweight on Slashdot (or was when I used to hang out there anyway). Despite his(?) amorphous personhood, CmdrTaco is bona-fide Member of the Slashdot Community. Early netizens took for granted that, on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog. This was radically liberating, and like other forms of radical liberation (see also: “The Sixties”) encourages a lot of bad behavior. Trolling, especially.

But social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, and (especially) Facebook have tipped that balance in another direction. I created a sock puppet on Facebook — it’s not hard — but it’s pretty pointless. On Facebook, maybe no one knows you’re a dog, but the only people interested in you are other dogs.

There’s a lot of chatter lately about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg’s notion of “radical transparency,” which he describes approximately thus:

“You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”

Zuckerberg — a second-generation netizen — knows what he’s at here. Speaking as a first-generation Netizen this kind of terrifies me. But as a grownup person with kids and a mortgage I’m kind of glad to see people posting comments on forums with their real names and links to their blogs or Twitter streams. “I am a real person. You know I am here. My blog and Twitter stream indicate that I matter” If we’re all listed in the Internet’s Town Directory, we’re a lot less likely to pick fights in the Internet’s bars.

I just wish wish wish anyone but Facebook were doing this.

Two things are slowly driving me personally off Facebook:

1. They keep moving the goalposts (“oh we built our platform on privacy...except for demographic info...and except for OpenGraph...and we expire the stuff exposed to external sites in the API after 24 hrs...or maybe never...of course you can change this in your privacy settings...did we mention we reset your privacy settings?”). Respectful businesses do not behave this way.
2. Exposing the social graph. Even if I scrupulously manage my privacy settings, my friends might not. I volunteered my demographic data so I expect FB will use it. But I can’t vouch for my friends’ expectations.

Like any narcissist I’m a chronic over-sharer, this blog is proof. But when I realized I was inadvertently exposing marketing data on Jenny — who is not a narcissist, and not an over-sharer — that pretty much did me in.

Facebook isn’t a publication platform (aka “the web”) on which I’ve been hollering about myself for 15 years. It isn’t Flickr or Blogspot; it’s not about our content, it’s about our relationships. We’re not publishing memoirs on Facebook, we’re voluntarily providing free marketing data to the new town directory. I personally think the Internets needs a town directory — this is our new town square, and we should all stand behind the things we holler here with our real names. The actual reality of real communities — not Slashdot, sorry — is that words have consequences.. But like I said, I wish anyone but Facebook were publishing it.

For the last decade or so, every time I wanted to design something like a “subheader,” I’d code it like this:

And then I’d define a style in the main stylesheet like this:

.subheader {
	color: #f00;
	font-size: 18px;
}

Which would, of course, overload any styles I’d already defined for <h3>:

h3 {
	color: inherit;
	font-size: 20px;
}

Sooner or later, we’d realize that we wanted the subheaders in another part of the site (like on the “siderail”) to look a little different. So the HTML didn’t change, really:

<div id="siderail">
<h3 class="subheader">This is a subheader</h3>
</div>

So then we’d overload the .subheader selector:

#siderail .subheader {
	color: #900;
	font-size: 14px;
}

So far, this seems pretty simple, right? h3 is defined with a certain bunch of characteristics, unless it’s a subheader, in which case some of those characteristics get overloaded. Or if the subheader is in the siderail, in which case some of those characteristics get overloaded. This is what the “cascading” in “Cascading Style Sheets” means, right?

Until, of course, one of the developers forgets to add the subheader class to an h3 in the siderail. Or creates a new page region in the siderail where we want to apply a new style — forgetting that #siderail .subheader already overloads h3.subheader. And rather than diagnose where in the cascade the design is breaking, we just add a new selector, maybe a new class like .specialsubheader, that does what we want. And maybe can’t quite remember which shade of dark red (#900) wanted for subheaders in the sidebar, so we make a best-guess (#a00) ... which lets the look and feel drift a little bit.

(There’s also an orthogonality problem with this, which had never occurred to me before. I was mixing in semantic units [“subheader”] where I should have been sticking to cosmetic units [“darkred”]. An h3 should always be a “subheader,” whether it’s in the siderail or not). I noticed this most painfully in places where I used junk like <div class="subheader">. Why do I need “subheader” to tell me what that div should be doing? divs and spans are just empty containers — if you strip their styles away, the content should still cohere semantically).

Well, after only a year of this, we’d reached a point where our main CSS file was 2000 lines long. Most pages loaded 500 to 1000 CSS selectors. When I autopsied the stylesheets I found about 20 different shades of “brown.” That’s just nuts.

So, this time out the gate, I defined a bunch of selectors — mostly classes — with really generic behaviors. Font sizes, padding, foreground colors, background colors, that kind of thing. I also defined some “default” behaviors for semantic units (usually vanilla HTML tags like h3).

So, to extend our example above, the stylesheet might have some selectors like:

h3 {
	color: inherit;
	font-size: 20px;
}
.fg_red { color: #f00; }
.fg_darkred { color: #900; }
.small_font { font-size: 14px; }
.medium_font { font-size: 18px; }

This treats the cosmetic styles kind of like Legos. Where I need a certain effect, I can mix and match styles to achieve it:

<div id="siderail">
<h3 class="fg_darkred small_font">This is a subheader</h3>
</div>

As a coder, this verbosity kinds of offends me. But in addition to saving a lot of mad selector proliferation — itself a form of (harmful!) verbosity, this verbosity serves four useful purposes:

1. It separates cosmetic and layout styles (“darkred”) from semantic selectors (“subhead”). In fact, it generally lets vanilla HTML (“h3”) do the semantics.
2. It expresses cosmetic and layout styles where they are most valuable: in the template.
3. It allows me to easily experiment with styles in the template.
4. It creates a single, predictable namespace for future selectors.

I just finished refactoring MercyCorps.org according to these principles. I was surprised at how the design disciplined itself. I took a few shortcuts — mostly to work around core Drupal or contributed modules I couldn’t or didn’t care to rewrite — but this self-discipline was just amazing. Instead of building every new template from the ground up, I could go to my big box full of style Legos and put together an effect really rapidly. If I lacked a particular Lego, and couldn’t get a good combination together to replicate it, I’d add it to the Lego box, but as a generic (not nested) selector. That way I’ll have it around to use later.

When I first stumbled across Nicole Sullivan’s “Object-Oriented CSS”, I was dubious about the philosophy. (I still hate the term “Object-Oriented CSS” — CSS is promiscuous, global, and amorphous by design — you just can’t treat selectors like objects, period.) But as I started building my box of Legos I came to think she doesn’t take it nearly far enough. I ultimately split my style “families” into color, text treatments, semantic selectors, layout selectors, and custom selectors. Most of my selectors are generic classes and have one, or at most two, rules. I refactored the entire Mercy Corps site — some 300 templates, I reckon — solo, in under a month, while dealing with our response to the Haiti Earthquake. It required minimal changes to the CMS (mostly redistributing blocks and redefining a few imagecache presets — and these changes were prompted more by our transition to the 960 grid than because of the CSS.) Because the new selectors are in a single namespace, if I need to undo them in multiple templates (for example: change all fg_dark_red to fg_dark_green, I can do this easily with grep.

Speaking of grep, the biggest shift in this exercise has been the way I’ve reimagined my workflow. For much of my career I’ve spent most of my time looking at CSS code. If I needed to change a style, I’d have to figure out a way to do it there, and construct careful namespaces to avoid clobbering selectors elsewhere. Now I don’t need to look at the template (to find the selector) and the CSS — I just edit the template. I realized that for the last decade or so I’ve been using CSS as grep. “Find all the places where subheader is inside siderail and make it darkred” That’s so backwards. I said this elsewhere:

Don’t make the stylesheet grep for you.

I don't know anyone who says anything other than “good riddance” to the first decade of the 21st century. I know lots of people who hope it was the anomaly, that the rest of the century will get better. I know a probably-equal number who think it’s only going to get worse.

Personally, the decade was rock bottom and tip top. This was the decade I became a Real Grownup. I started it gliding along with a certain degree of dissatisfaction with success. I’d just stumbled into my new career as a web designer, and my new marriage to my first wife. I was six months away from rock bottom in that marriage but had no idea what was coming or why, only that the unstable place I was in wasn’t going to hold. On this subject, the less said, the better. That new career was subject to the whipsaw vagaries of the Dot-com boom — although in the long run I’ve never been worried about jobs or work or money in quite the way I probably should be.

In 2000, that all cracked up. The marriage wobbled through two separations and a little ugliness until it dissipated altogether in 2002. The cool new career ping-ponged between Real Jobs and freelance and outright unemployment, until I regained my footing at Curiosity (also in 2002). 2002 was the year I learned that I was boy who never quite figured out how to be a man. It took breaking my marriage totally and irreparably to figure it out. The pecularity of modern American manhood is that it’s defined in contrast to womanhood, which is all backwards. Manhood isn’t the state of not being a woman, it’s the state of not being a boy. Anyway, by the end of 2002 I was stable, back on my feet.

2002 was also the year I began riding my bike. A lot. I have one piece of advice for someone who wants to be happier: ride your bike.

Three really important things happened in 2003. I shaved my head. I met Jenny. I put Sitka to sleep. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those three things taught me to release vanity, embrace vulnerability, and accept loss. Together they taught me the only important thing I’ve ever learned: my life isn’t just about me. When Orion was born I learned that the rest of my life isn’t about me at all. The rest of my life until I die is about my children and their children. My haircut is not even remotely important any more.

The glide path of my life turned upward after 2003. Jenny and I married in 2005 — probably my favorite year of the decade, if you really pressed me. We moved to China in 2006, and back in 2007. Orion joined us in 2008. The only two years in which nothing much happened to me personally were 2004 and 2009.

So that was me: pretty good decade I guess. A little bumpy, but the bumps made it good, ultimately.

Impersonally, this was an awful decade for America. (It was a lot better for 2-3 billion other people, though, something I won’t touch on.)

I won’t dwell long on politics except to note that no one got what they wanted. The nation didn’t get the president it voted for in 2000, but we did in 2004. By 2006, we had serious buyers’ remorse. It sucked elephant balls to be a liberal this past decade, but it had to really grate to be a conservative. Conservatives got everything they ever wanted for six or so years and it was an utter failure. I wonder if the resulting cognitive dissonance isn’t driving the utter batcrap crazy nonsense coming out of conservative mouths these days.

Lots of people will want to think September 11, 2001, was a nadir for America (and maybe the world), but I think in a couple of decades it’ll look like the 21st equivalent of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. A big deal only for the stuff that happened around it. Really big objects are in motion, globally, stuff that only crackpots and visionaries discussed ten years ago. Global warming, peak oil, globalization, the shift of global capital eastward and southward, the imminent plateau of human population, the emergence of the infosphere as a pervasive element of society. Ferdinand’s death didn’t start the Great War; the Great War was the first, protracted battle of World War II. The whole mess fell out of the final crackup of the ancient world order of empires built by monarchs.

I wonder whether the 2000s weren’t so much the first decade of the 21st century as the last decade of the 20th. The 19th century didn’t really end until 1918. And then it got worse.

The Internet and mobile phones — the democratization of information, actually — are quietly and relentlessly euthanizing whole industries. 2009 was the year people stopped consuming printed matter. Think hard about what that means. 20 years ago, if you wanted to know a random piece of information — for example, who played the second Catwoman in the Batman TV show with Adam West, for example — it would require several minutes, perhaps hours, of legwork. Minimally, a trip to the library. That’s a measure of how free information has become: we no longer rely on institutions or interlocutors to tell us what apartments are for rent, what a used car should cost, or how much our neighbors’ houses are worth. When people say “information is power,” there’s a concrete case. Twenty years ago, I was at the mercy of the used car guy. I had to hope he was honest, or I had to do days of expensive legwork to keep him honest.

The democratization of information will have consequences. Lots of people depend on that friction for their paychecks. In just a few minutes I can name a dozen or so professions fast becoming obsolete: publisher, newspaper editor, used-car salesman, newspaper carrier, ad buyer, payroll clerk, shipping clerk, bank teller, real estate agent, travel agent (anyone with “agent” in their title, really).

On the other hand, and this really blows my mind, my job title didn’t even exist when I graduated high school 20 years ago. The industry didn’t even exist. The words “web designer” were a meaningless nonsequitur. Man did I luck out there.

All this change was in the air 10 years ago, but most people overlooked the “destruction” part of “creative destruction.” The 90s had been pretty good — pretty great, actually...remember when gas was 89¢/gal? — and the 80s were nearly as good. The 70s sucked a little, sure, but Disco wasn’t as bad as everyone remembered, and black people could finally sit in the front half of the bus. 1975 was the point at which the disparity between rich and poor was lowest in the United States. (I wasn’t alive in the 60s so I can’t tell you whether anyone felt nostalgia for the passing decade on Dec. 31, 1969.) 1999 was coming at the tail-end of 50+ years of economic, political, and military stability for the United States.

I understood this, growing up, in an indirect way. When I read about Henry Huggins in 1979, the life he lived in 1949 was pretty substantially like mine. No kid lives like that in 2009.

So this is where “personal” hits “impersonal.” I’ve led a blessed life: a trouble-free childhood, my teenage and twenty-something years no worse than usual, a career I stumbled into by a fluke of history. All the troubles of my life — the divorce, mostly — are entirely of my own doing. This blessed life is a result of a lottery I won at birth. I was smart enough to be born in America, smart enough to have middle class parents with a good marriage, smart enough to be born into a largish extended family in a prosperous midwest state. All at the point in history when America was doing great and we had plenty of everything we needed: energy, water, topsoil, forests, fisheries, family farms, colleges, factories, credit cards, doctors. We still have doctors and colleges in good supply, I’m not too worried about those. Some of that stuff — e.g. factories and family farms — we’ve surrendered more or less intentionally through economic relationships, so we can get them back. Most of the rest we’ve simply eaten up and crapped out. However much there may be left of topsoil, or forests, or energy, or fresh water, we aren’t making more of it nearly fast enough. For 50 years, America’s been on a pretty effortless upward path; but there’s nothing in history or our present situation to suggest we can rely on momentum alone. I think we need to grow up a little and get a little serious about what America can do (halt global warming) and can’t do (build shopping malls in Kabul). But none of that is gonna fix itself, the way my life just kinda sorta turned out awesome. I think the “era of stuff just turning out awesome” is over.

Before Orion I used to say: I could imagine a heaven no better than to live my life again. But that’s not the heaven I want any more. Heaven to me now would be: I want Orion (and his sibling[s], and their kids) to live a life as good as mine. I mean this literally, by the way, not figuratively. I would gladly surrender personal immortality in paradise for the guarantee that my progeny get to live happy, fulfilling, plentiful lives.

From a romantic perspective, I want that life to have the exact elements I had: snow in the winter, trees to climb, bears in the mountains, paper routes and bicycles, cheap college with cheap beer, travel to fun places, no military draft, and a little dose (but not too much!) of free love. But that world isn’t gonna happen (see above re: creative destruction, stuff in short supply), and nothing as good as that will happen again unless we make it happen.

Which occasioned me to reflect that this year is my twenty year high school reunion.

The year I graduated from college:

• The big summer movies were Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade, the first Batman movie (with Michael Keaton), and the Abyss. Only the Abyss used computer special effects to any great degree, and then only in one scene.
• John McTiernan filmed Hunt for Red October because the Soviet Union represented a safely evergreen nuclear threat.
• There were two Germanys and one Czechoslovakia.
• China was a hermitic third-world country with a troublesome democracy movement.
• There was no World Wide Web. The industry where I have made my career did not yet exist.
• Futurists like John Naisbitt and Alvin Toffler thought industries like finance, media and publishing would lead the new Information Economy.
• HS advisors said journalism was a solid career choice for the future.
• Cell phones cost about $3/minute to use, and weighed about a pound.
• Colleges would accept neatly-handwritten application essays.

Crossposted from the new Mercy Corps Blog.

In a recent New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell wonders why more basketball teams don’t employ a full-court press. Instead of dropping back to your own net and defending, you press the other guys on the inbounds pass and at the mid-court line. You don’t defend 30 percent of the court (inside the 3 point line), you defend the entire court. This surprising strategy gives underdogs a fighting chance: it keeps the stronger team always on the defensive, and makes greater virtues of speed and endurance (as opposed to ball-handling and shooting). Gladwell’s article has sparked a little interest among webheads, like Martin Kelley of O’Reilly Media, who sees the web enabling a sea change in marketing and communications:

“Traditional marketing campaigns are batch: we plan out a commercial, pick its theme, hire directors, do audience testing and months later air it on broadcast television. Even low-budget nonprofits operate this way: they create a schedule of newsletters to distribute by postal or electronic mail, with carefully constructed branded templates and standardized lengths and formatting ... Many of the most adept citizens of the new web culture don’t sit down to write pre-planned blog posts. Twitter has taught us to capture the moment, to express the thought now and just move on. ... Most of the ubiquitous ‘how to make money on Twitter’ posts fail to make the difference between real-time and batch processing. If you’re real time, you’re part of a conversation and building a community that might be virtual and asychronous but is authentic in its own way.”

The rise of social networking gives organizations with underdog marketing resources (like, um, certain non-profits) a stellar chance to press the full court. In Ye Olden Days (ca. 2005), marketing was planned around calendars (monthly, quarterly, etc.) or for “windows” like Holiday, Mother’s Day, Back-to-School. But with flexible and rapid media tools like Facebook, Twitter and blogs at our disposal, Mercy Corps can substitute speed and effort for ad buy dollars. My colleague Floyd has already written about how our newish design makes this much, much easier.

But more importantly, these tools allow us to turn a liability into an asset. Mercy Corps’ world doesn’t always obey the calendar. We can’t predict when or where the next cyclone or earthquake will strike. We can’t hope that military conflicts will helpfully schedule themselves between the Dads-and-Grads and Fourth-of-July windows. But each of these events represents a unique moment to communicate, with little filtering, what Mercy Corps is doing. Not some abstract brand promise, or mission statement, but the daily reality of our recipients and fieldworkers: yesterday we delivered aid packages to displaced people in the Mardan and Swabi Districts of Pakistan. And here are the pictures. They might not be the studio-quality portraits the art director I used to be would have chosen for the Memorial Day E-Blast, but they show what is actually happening right now.

I came to Mercy Corps almost two years ago after a decade working in the for-profit sector. I’m a great believer in commerce, but I can’t recall ever getting as worked up about printers or software or t-shirts the way I am about giving blankets to cold children. I have a (perhaps naive) faith: the best way to “sell” Mercy Corps to our constituents (and trust me, non-profits have to make the same marketing and branding and sales decisions as for-profit companies, but with the hitch that we don’t actually deliver products to the people who give us money), is to talk about what Mercy Corps is doing.