32: Touch Grass
Also rolling waves, conversational formats and shining your light
Few things are more heartwarming than someone shining their light at full brightness, so we’ll start this edition with a fine example.
“Last I checked, you’re not a load-bearing structure are you, pal?”
Some shorts
I’m enjoying the light-hearted parody here: Steal My Tesla
More excellent parody, no wait, it’s real. Touch Grass is an app. You have to film yourself touching actual grass before you’re allowed to use your phone. In the vein of The Offline Club, which is growing at pace!
MEGA CUTE ANIMALS YES PLS! British Wildlife Photography Awards
Erm. $3.5bn? Sure. Niantic is selling Pokemon Go to the Monopoly Go people. Side note: their mobile app did $3bn in revenue. If you want to go down a Monopoly link-hole, there is Elizabeth Magie’s story (it wasn’t designed to celebrate capitalism and ruin family board game night!)
File Gretchen’s TikTok trends for Museums alongside Adam’s excellent Content of the Week
Now Play This is back at Somerset House (11-12 April) with a folk-themed edition, and possibly its last :(
When “rolling wave” goes bad
A friend is currently suffering at the yoke of “Rolling Wave” planning. This buzzy production methodology is based on six-week cycles, i.e. rapidly build things, test them with users and start the design cycle again furnished with insights. Which is sensible! In classic enshitification style, companies are overloading teams with ridiculously ambitious goals so the six-week cycles become death grinds.
All of which is a preamble to an article entitled “How to Reduce Planning, Deliver More, and Surprisingly, Reduce Pressure”, from which I pull the best bits for you. TLDR - agile isn’t about doing more, it’s about doing better.
Clear Goals – well, duh. Everyone should be able to articulate the goal, not just the person cracking the whip. In practice, I think goals should be less “finish line” (big, vague things like “make a good website”) and more “compass” (decision-making devices like “users must be able to find what they want in two clicks”).
How Little? – This is my favourite! Plan only as much as you need to get started and use actual progress to shape decisions. Planning fallacy is real, people! Less upfront planning means less time changing big plans later on. Hands up if you created an epic project schedule that became a painful mess within a week?
Limit Work in Progress – this is a wonky way of saying: manage your scope! The author is a fan of “rank-order” rather than “prioritisation”, which is new to me and I LIKE IT A LOT! TLDR - you’re only allowed one item in each tier of priority and this discipline leads to more achievable volumes of work.
Release Frequently – multiple benefits! Everyone gets to SEE progress and we can all agree that feedback is good. Yes, it can be messy, confusing and risks de-railing things. But if you’re on the wrong track, that’s mebbe a good thing?
Commoditised conversation
This is bigger than I might do justice to today. Here’s the nutshell: conversation is the major cultural format of our time. Now bear with me.
Our first thread is this ‘conversation’ between Kyle Chayka (author of Filterworld) and Tope Folarin (Nigerian-American writer and executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies) about how:
conversation is the medium of our moment. There's Joe Rogan influencing the election, video podcasts going viral, even Google's NotebookLM turning any text into a two-way conversation.
To which you can add the popularity of platforms like Twitch and Discord with sophisticated chat/talk channels, and creative formats like TikTok talking heads (E.g. Subway Takes) and YouTube interviews (Hot Ones, 73 Questions, Chicken Shop Date etc).
You don’t need more links on the rise of Brocasters. In making sense of the phenomenon, they frame it as the replacement of rolling TV news — opinionated background noise. Or, Fox News for young people. The scary thing is how fast and loose modern conversational formats are with facts. This is not journalism, it is commoditised conversation.
Final scare-link: US money is pushing Libertarian ‘Young Voices’ on British TV 🥵
Back to Chayka and Folarin:
The current obsession with conversation as a medium of engagement is also a response to our collective dissatisfaction with passivity.
Here I reach for examples of conversation driving positive action. A PDF about having better climate conversations, this podcast on talking to family about climate change and the comedy shorts where one person does both sides of the convo:
We could end with a final pull-quote:
A conversation provides a way for you and your interlocutor to co-create meaning, to achieve understanding (of a kind, anyway) of complex issues, and to impose order on chaos, simply by talking things through.
Audio #ftw
Claire Doherty was behind GALWAD, the astonishing blend of crowdsourced world building, broadcast TV, one-shot takes and live theatre. Still the Hours at Historic Royal Palaces is her latest but I missed it (19-30 March run).
The trailer is intense.
If nothing else, this validates Thought Den’s decision to lean into audio with our forthcoming game “Stranger Folk”, written and directed by Rosie Poebright. Other pleasing validation comes in the form of these snazzy new British folklore stamps and Sacha’s snazzy book Queer as Folklore.
Some may have noticed I’m dabbling in “content” over on the socials with some behind-the-scenes for The Landing Films. It’s very “done is better than perfect”. You shall be spared an embedded video. Like n subscribe if you’re interested in the positive side of the “everything is crumbling” coin.
Thanks for reading. Are you ok? Let’s have a conversation!
B.
PS - Everyone loves a kinetic sculpture! Here’s a behind-the-scenes. Bit long, but also 🤯