Last real vacation day. Just a weekend and then back to work. Spent this last week with a cold so not perfect but glad I didn't suffer it through the first week of work. Lots of stuff waiting to let loose.

LinkedIn, satire and art

The professional social network. Also the least real place on the Internet. Where the cheasiest, grind-hustly sales-people hype themselves up next to the life-coaches and inspirational speakers. One day it is sharing their greatest tragedy only to make it an important and very trite lesson. Or pretending their child said something profound and counter-intuitive worthy of a thought-leader.

LinkedIn is strange. And in a restless moment I decided to turn my limited LinkedIn presence into active parody. This is a bit tricky. I will get into why. But I'll list the posts so far here for your indulgence. You can skip this list and read on, if you prefer:

1. GROK, the most important acronym
   To start with, grok is a word with a distinct meaning in tech. I made it a very dumb acronym.
2. Reaction poll: Choose your stack
   Reaction polls are terrible. This one is technical nonsense. The options are not TLAs and they are not stacks.
3. Reaction poll: Best OS for devs
   For developers, this is brain-pain. It is a mood, as the kids used to say.
4. The Suffering is the Point
   This is parody of grind and hustle culture. This is the first one that garnered some attention.
5. My kid has figured out the grind
   This one is mostly inaccurate. I have two kids and while they definitely wear on me occasionally they are not this. More on the theme of grind and hustle culture using the kid trope.
6. Reaction poll: Your revolution?
   This one, also very silly.
7. Responsibility & Ownership - 5 ways to avoid it
   This is fun. LinkedIn allows attaching presentations/PDFs to posts. Because of course it does. This was kind of high-effort shitposting and had some good reactions. It is also kind of obvious about being humorous.
8. CQRS and SOAP:ing the endpoints
   This is intended to be enterprise software nonsense that should not hold up to any degree of inspection. CQRS is a love/hate pattern in software and as such, ripe for controversy. This one has had over 5000 impressions and have had more misreadings than anything else which prompted discussions which probably prompted more spread.
9. Isomorphic Javascript and the natural progression
   Taking the wrong definition of isomorphic, though related, taking it way too far and ending up at the heat death of the universe.
10. Data at scale
    The value of ephemeral storage and not persisting data. This one mixes wildly between stupid business speak and pitching a data strategy that is.. really bad.
11. Pure OOP
    Just posted. About how to take object-oriented programming to the next level. Let me know if you see the fundamental joke.

I haven't written a lot of comedy or humor. Some but not a lot. I rather enjoy it but it is challenging. Adam Conover said this in regard to writing for daily comedy shows and such that it is a very difficult and incredibly human-centric endeavour. It takes social and cultural understanding and you need to shape it in a way that surprises the audience. You don't laugh as much at a joke you've heard a lot of times. He said this in regard to why he is not concerned about AI taking over writing jobs.

But this is also where some of it gets tricky. Humor is very often excluding, not necessarily in a mean or cruel way or with intent. But because it is socially and culturally coded. Because it might require careful reading or understanding. It will miss some people. Satire or parody is risky in that regard. I have people who did a sloppy read, or have a language barrier, or with a brain-makeup that makes them miss the social cues entirely miss the joke. Sometimes they argue with me, fair. Sometimes they ask if I've lost my mind, good move. Sometimes they ask if the thing is meant seriously, wise question. I am sure a decent number of them don't interact at all.

What could I do to be more inclusive? I could put a disclaimer at the top or end to note that this is all a joke. In my book that would ruin the artfulness of the entire thing and I would just not do it. I try not to break character in those threads though I try to help people realize that I am not serious. I could also be more over the top. Again. It would shift the artistic intent. I think many of the people reacting well to the humor do so because they get drawn in, kind of provoked and then the twist, surprise and delight at the silliness of it all. Especially in such a dull, wasteland of inane fluff as LinkedIn.

This is similar to opinionated designs, this is art. I am not pretending that this particular art is important and if someone really took offence to the trickery I would likely just stop. There is much art that is important though and there is much art that is only intended for a specific community. Many groups should absolutely not labor under a requirement to make their art understandable to everyone else. This is not about alt text, it is polite to have textual representations of pictures on social media. But it has an accesibility angle.

Opinionated design of software, events and artistic intent can all make something inaccessible. I think that is almost unavoidable. The important thing seems to me to be aware and intentional in where you draw your lines. An event for programmers should hopefully be accessible for programmers who can't walk. It does not have to be accessible to people who know nothing about programming. Effort in that direction could ruin the event. A rock climbing excursion has different trade-offs to make.

Occasionally controversial is the separatist events that focus on women or other specific groups. That is a design for opening conversations that generally do not happen in the usual mix. Much like an event with only men, that is intentionally for men, can be incredibly valuable. I think you can achieve things with intentional choices and designs that you cannot by defaulting to whatever is entirely uncontroversial. Though it should be said that "aggressively, pro-actively, accessible and welcoming" is also a very intentional design and it has many times proven to be a good one.

Not everything has to be for everyone all the time. Be mindful, aware and thoughtful of whether you are excluding someone. Is there a way in which you can show them a kindness without compromising on the things you want to achieve?

What is the best opinionated designs, niched down art or particular humor you know of? You can reply to this email to reach me or poke me on the fedi @lawik@fosstodon.org.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate your attention.