Squinting into the future

The front cover of my forthcoming book, Potholes in Paradise, was put together today. In Design, an Adobe page layout program, was the vehicle. I was the designated driver—Anita, the illustrator, was the navigator. I felt I was at the controls of a 747, knowing little more about how the software works than I do about neurosurgery. It took a long time to decipher how to change color, how to create various effects, what looks good on the screen, how different the hard copy looks out of the printer. A crib sheet helped us avoid several head on crashes as we drove forward in the fog, making liberal use of the "undo" button, which fortunately tracks a long ways backwards. 

I've generally felt competent to operate the tools of the 20th century, and discover a growing sense of disease as I encounter the tools of the 21st. I started working with computers in 1967, having talked myself into a position at the University of Washington's Urban Data Center writing software (as a beginning grad student) for which my only real qualification was that I'd seen a computer during the last 2 weeks as an undergraduate at college. There was the usual trial by fire. Now, decades later, my enthusiasm for looking under the hood has waned even as the number of options has grown enormously. I have more power and I sense it while at the same time I feel relatively powerless because I don't know how many levers there are, what they do, how they work together, why anyone would conceive of any particular feature and whether it is worth taking the time, somehow—unfortunately not by talking to someone who might actually know, since that person is unknowable and unreachable—to find out. I feel a performance pressure—the tools exist, the examples everywhere are superb—the excellence bar grows daily higher. May the impulse to create the best infect our bankers, corporate leaders, and politicians.