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DIY thoughts

Sears kit houses.  Heathkit.  Home Depot.  Linux.  Blogs.  Tivo.  The emergence of DIY media like MAKE magazine, HOWTO hacker sites, etc.  The DIY ethic is a strong force.  It is an incredibly precise impulse.  One that is even enshrined in our cultural lexicon - "if you want something done right....."   But what does it mean exactly?  To me, it means taking some responsibility for your world and deriving great pleasure from it.   Anyone who has ever cooked a great dinner, grown a beautiful garden, worked wood or knitted a sweater knows what I'm talking about.  It's about doing.  It's about creating.  Ultimately, it's about living, not just consuming - the expected, instigated behavior.  The world we live in is so full of "stuff" that did not spring from our own real needs or desires.  It is crowded by things foisted on us by fancy marketing and slick advertising campaigns.  And more and more I'm feeling that people have had it with this status quo.  Not only in terms of how things are marketed but how things are manufactured, brought to market, supported and enhanced.  It touches on everything from child labor in Asia all the way to the environmentally safe disposal of toxic electronics.  It all seems broken to me.   Am I alone?  I feel the DIY spirit lurking around alot of the things I do now more and more.  I hear it whisper to me whenever I get and use a product that is so obviously the result of too many revisions and call an 800 number and speak to a clueless, hapless "customer service" rep.  Call me nuts, but I think there is the opportunity here to make alot of noise.   ALOT of noise.  More on this to come.

Swiss Army Issues

Pip Coburn strikes again and I am, again, in total agreement.  From AlwaysOn.
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"So, Ron Insana thinks everyone wants a Swiss Army knife of sorts—a view of the entire world shared by many techies and Wall Streeters. But I vigorously disagree that folks outside the tech world can handle the high total perceived pain of adoption such devices require. Anyone remember the commercial 30 years ago on Saturday Night Live for a watch that had so many features you only needed six hands to operate it?

Folks don't like Swiss Army knives, and market research on what people actually do is far away from the 'common wisdom.' If extra features raise the total perceived pain of adoption, folks will recoil. 'Common Wisdom' is wrong, and, as evidence, very few non-techies carry a smartphone.

Smartphone. Dumb product.

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But since the high tech world has no long term, sustainable use for simplicity, control must be given/returned to the suffering consumer who very much has a longer term interest in simplicity......and reliability and useability, etc. etc.

DIY Ethics

DIY - how pathetic that it has been relegated to mean "home improvement" or geek-speak for wielding a soldering iron.  DIY, that is, DO IT YOURSELF, is a marvelously liberating concept for life in general.  Why the hell should we have it any other way? 

DIY is an ethic itself, pure and uninhibited.  It is democracy.  It is the voice against the tyranny of big business.  It is applicable to everything in life, not just some things.  In the end life is all about DIY, because in the end no one else lives it but you.  Why cede control of any aspect of it to someone or something else?  DIY is a starting point for a revolution of epic proportions.

CES

Is it just me or was CES an unmitigated bore this year?  All the same gadgets in new, usually rounded, compulsively smaller, enclosures.  Phones, cameras, MP3 players. Phones, cameras, MP3 players.  Did I tell you there were lots of phones, cameras and MP3 players?  Oh! and video games and consoles.  Lots of those too.  Yes there was other stuff but neither the press nor anyone else has paid much attention.  Isn't anyone willing to stick their neck out a little bit and surprise us?  Apple gave us iPod but now they're just riffing on that too.  In a couple of years, guess what?  It will be a PDA.  And its life will be over.  But there is no other course it can take.  Apple, in order to fend off the lower cost producers will need to add greater features and functions to compete.  In the end, it will just become another piece of obese hardware, albeit in pretty clothing.  Innovation is scary, no doubt.  But, Mr. Lemming, so is the approaching cliff.