Jamie Thingelstad

iPhone Upgrade “Waterfall” today. New iPhone 14 Pro for Tammy and I, and our old phones heading to the kids who will finally be out of the dark ages with their devices. Thankful that migration tools are so much better these days!

We escaped the Diamond Dilemma room at Missing Pieces with 17m 14s remaining — and only one clue used! Great teamwork with the kids cousin joining us! 🔓

Scanning…

During the week between Christmas and New Years I like to focus on some different things.

Write a meaningful blog post each day ✅

• What, Why, and How to Improve Your Security and Privacy (Monday)
• Polarizing Technology: Encryption and Crypto (Tuesday)
• On Audience Capture (Wednesday)
• Having a Style Coach (Thursday) and Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?
• Organizational Dissonance (Friday)

Focus on Meditation

• Meditate 20 minutes each day, double my usual. ✅
• Take “The Stoic Path” by William B. Irvine in Waking Up. 30% complete

Read “The Bed of Procrustes” by Taleb ✅

Finished reading this, but read it like a book so I could read it all. I will plan to come back to this and reflect on select aphorisms from time to time.

Complete Christmas LEGO ✅

Each Christmas Tammy surprises us each with a Holiday LEGO project. I got the Super Mario 64™ Question Mark Block this year.

• Through bag 3
• Through bag 9
• Finished

As a leader you are always seeking to move your organization forward toward the market opportunity that you are seeking. Moving your organization forward means constant change and always keeping ahead of the “jaws of death” that threaten your organization. As you move forward you are continually affecting change and defining where you want to be.

The gap between where you are and where you want to be divided by the time you have to get there is something I think of as organizational dissonance. I’ve found it valuable to name and manage this.

Dissonance is elastic and can be increased or decreased as part of your culture. Faster growing companies tend to need more dissonance, and need to invest in culture to allow that dissonance to stay higher. Said another way, the more organizational dissonance that your organization can handle, the more potential you have to change faster.

Examples of Dissonance

What does too much dissonance sound like? Leadership is “out of touch” and doesn’t understand what is happening in the “real world”. If you pushed these even further you could “snap the band” and lose the confidence of your entire team.

The other side is being too much in the teams work, and getting in their way. In this case you hear “micromanagement” and lack of ability to get things done. Here you may think you are helping your team by being close, but you are not leading toward the market opportunity, and are holding the team back from escaping the jaws of death.

How does culture play here?

Technology companies typically need to grow fast, and they also tend to focus on culture more than the average. Having a robust culture can enable for more organizational dissonance. And with that increased dissonance your organization can “stretch” out further and move faster.

Trust and Integrity in your culture are the two things that will enable this the most. As dissonance in the organization increases, knowing that the leaders operate with high integrity, and having trust amongst all team members, will allow the organization to continue to be very successful amidst all that dissonance.

Everyone Leads

Everyone is affecting change, at whatever the domain that you manage. This isn’t just about manager and leaders, you may be affecting change in the domain that you oversee. You have dissonance to manage as well. Whatever the difference is from where you are today, and where you need to be tomorrow — approximately divided by the time you have to get there is some idea of the dissonance.

***

Questions to consider:

• Is the dissonance in your organization high enough? If it isn’t, are you not trying to change enough or are you giving yourself too much time? Or both?
• What can you do to increase the organizational capacity for dissonance?
• Does your organizational structure allow for dissonance to be managed directly? Or does it leak in odd ways outside of clear accountability.

The term “Web3”?

Good: It describes a set of use cases that are easier for people to understand than “crypto”.

Bad: It is frequently used in opposition to the “current” web, instead of an evolution.

Ugly: It is a made up marketing phrase, just like Web 2.0.

I have spent most of my life really clueless about clothing and style. I’m fine protecting myself from the elements, but when it comes to dressing with intent, or for a specific event, I have never had any confidence. Sure I can figure out a suit, but go to a networking event over cocktails and I would panic. I’d always considered it lucky that I’m a technologist, as we are usually given a pass on looking all that presentable. I would often exclaim in frustration “I have nothing to wear!” when going to an event. In fact I didn’t have the right things to wear, but I also had no idea what I should wear!

Tammy decided that I needed some help and signed me up for a full package with Nancy Dilts for a wardrobe consultation!

When Tammy told me that I was going to spend 12 hours with a stylist I was nervous. This would involve three hours trying on clothes and filtering through my closet. Three hours of that? We would also go on at least two shopping sessions for three hours each. Wow! That was just a lot of time doing clothes things which I frankly dreaded.

Into the unknown I would go, following the lead of my new coach!

Personal Style

Before we filtered through clothes or went shopping, I first needed to get a game plan. Nancy and I had set a time to spend three hours in my closet, but she wanted me to answer a few questions first. So I opened the document she sent and stared at the question.

If you were to name your style, what would it be?

I sat for several minutes looking at that question. “None” is the only thing that came to mind. If there was something that was less than none, I would have put that in. I finally answered “Have no style. Plaid. Whatever fits.”

So that is where we were starting from.

There were two words that I put down on the worksheet that Nancy gave me that drew her attention: Tech Forward. That was what we decided to build my personal style around. I’ve been into technology my entire life and a forward looking style fits my personality, career, and lifestyle.

Nancy was able to take that Tech Forward statement and turn it into an entire collection of ideas to work with.

Clothes and Shoes

The wardrobe itself went through two phases: Removal and Acquisition.

For removal we went through my closet and frankly got rid of a lot of stuff that was, to my surprise, too big for me as well as just looked outdated. I had a bunch of shirts that Nancy was correctly able to identify as over 15 years old and out of style entirely. I tried on hundreds of things and she highlighted how poor the fits were on many items, so that I could learn what a good fit was. I didn’t keep close count, but we may have filtered as much as 70% of my wardrobe out.

It felt great. It felt like progress and the act of filtering was teaching me why things work or do not work specifically for me.

Shopping was the thing I was most worried about. I’m a big guy and not a lot of things fit me. When I did find things that fit me, they certainly didn’t seem stylish. However, we went off to DXL and it was like I found the land of options! There were a ton of looks, things with unique color and style, and most everything I could find had options that fit well.

We ended up shopping for a total of six hours in two sessions and trying on a wild number of things. I’m still not a huge fan of trying on things, but part of my frustration was a belief that nothing would fit so it was a lot of trying things on for no benefit. When I was as a place where things would fit, it became more fun to try.

Learnings

Nancy imparted some wisdom for me to use each day. Here are three highlights.

Three Things

You have to wear two things, it is the law. You need some sort of bottom, and you need some sort of top. Always pull in a third thing, and use that third item to indicate intentionality and your style. This could be a jacket or a cardigan, or as simple as a pop of color on your undershirt or the choice of of a watchband that coordinates with your outfit. Having a third thing shows that you were intentional about your choices and allows you to bring your style forward.

Shoes

Shoes can either dress up or dress down an entire outfit. Casual jeans with a concert t-shirt and a cardigan all get an upgrade with a pair of Cole Haan ØriginalGrand Chukka Boot (my new favorite shoes). And similarly a dress shirt with dark wash jeans can get more casual with a pair of Vans Checkerboard Slip Ons.

Order of operations

I never learned a method for getting dressed each morning, so I mostly would just make choices in the order that you put things on. I would never try to achieve any other goal without first knowing what I had in mind. I’ve had to reverse my order of operation and figure out what the end outfit is, and then work backwards to finding the right items. Most surprising to me is that sometimes the shoes decide the outfit!

***

I’ve worked with a handful of different coaches of the years. I’ve had a couple of personal trainers. I’ve worked with an executive coach. And now I can add a style coach to that list. Of all the coaching engagements that I’ve done, a Style Coach had the highest return-on-investment of any of them.

The reason for that is pretty simple. Learning how to better dress yourself and making improvements to your wardrobe are not hard things to execute if you give it priority and have a framework to evaluate it with. Much easier than working out every day for months, or making deep changes to how you handle conflict or public speaking.

Working with Nancy as a Style Coach helped me in all areas of life though. It gave me confidence in how I was showing up and that results in me being happier, and being more effective in what I do.

Plus I no longer stand at my closet and exclaim “I have nothing to wear!”

Today is Lucky’s 3rd Birthday! Some of Lucky’s favorite things: Walks, Food, Foxy Toy, Barking at things, Snow, Naps, Scratching Behind Ears, Treats, Lunging at cars.

I finished the the Super Mario 64™ Question Mark Block LEGO build! There were a lot of little hidden details. The transformation from block to show the scenes on top is great. Mario, Princess Peach, and Bowser are all there.

When I was in high school in Minot, ND I used to volunteer for Craig Nansen, the Technical Coordinator for the Minot Public School District. I got connected to Nansen when I got my Apple //c for Christmas and wrote a letter to the Apple User Group of Minot, which was organized by Craig and was defunct. If I remember right I had also written to Apple to get the name of the local user group.

That connection turned into an opportunity to work with him after school which I leapt after to get access to the labs of Apple and Macintosh computers. A lot of what I remember doing was using the special software from MECC to make hundreds and hundreds of copies of 5.25" floppy disks for the various labs.

When I was volunteering Craig was deeply involved in a cool project with Brøderbund to create a new game in the Carmen Sandiego franchise, Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?.

I knew of the Carmen Sandiego games and had played a couple of them myself. It was really cool to think that the storyline could extend to North Dakota.

I didn’t know however how rare the game was. All of the other Carmen Sandiego titles were well known, but this specific title was even missing from the founder of Brøderbund’s collection.

While examining Carlston’s donations at The Strong, Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi noted that Where in North Dakota was missing. Cifaldi tweeted about the game, explaining that he’d only recently heard about it and requested information from anyone who had more details.

That tweet initiated a domino effect. Former Minot school district administrator Craig Nansen noticed Cifaldi’s tweet, wrote him back, and arranged a sit-down conversation with as many of his ex-design colleagues as he could locate.

Craig’s reply to that tweet was the genesis of what eventually turned into a hunt to fully document this rare title. The journey is chronicled in this Screenland S1 E6: Eight-bit archaeologists episode with Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation. The segments are 5:46 - 10:41, 15:09 - 19:06, and 21:34 - 24:02.

At 18:00 into the Screenland episode you get a great overview of the history of the game. Craig as well as other contributors to the game are there. Craig was a master archivist and had a tremendous amount of material to share about the game.

Carmen North Dakota was a little unique because in addition to being a game for consumer sale, it was intended to be used in North Dakota classrooms to teach kids about the state. To go with it, there was this blue covered Carmen’s North Dakota Almanac.

The Carmen’s North Dakota Almanac was my very small part in this project. Noted from the cover sheet of the almanac:

I have the full Almanac and the ND Database Project with the cover sheet that included all of the committee members names.

Here they are:

• Mary Littler
• Bonny Berryman (she, I believe spearheaded the project and gave in-services at NDEA about the program)
• Phyllis Landsiedel
• Lola Geffner
• Kathy Froeber
• Gloria Lokken (former President of NDEA)
• Jane Ormiston
• Geraldeen Rude
• Shawneen Voiles
• Kathy Feist
• Brenda Burtness
• Pauline Wahl
• Craig Nansen (Project Director)
• Jamie Thingelstad (Page Layout)

Back then I had gotten pretty good at QuarkXPress and did some page layout assistance for the Yearbook committee and used it for some personal projects too. I don’t recall very well, but I’m guessing that is where the “Page Layout” part came in.

Additional References

You can play Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego? on Internet Archive in an emulator.

I’ve independently archived the ROM (disk) files for the game. You need to download the disk images and then load them in an Apple II Emulator.

There is a full and super detailed writeup on the game by David Craddock at The Video Game History Foundation.

Also see Why in the world was Carmen Sandiego in North Dakota? from July 2016 in the Fargo Forum.

The Carmen North Dakota committee turned over some disks and other resources to Frank Cifaldi to be housed in the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY as a donation of materials. They also have Doug Carlston’s personal archive from Brøderbund.

When I first started writing the Weekly Thing the email service showed me two reports that I knew I didn’t want to see. The first was who opened the email, when, where, on what device, and how often. That was a clear violation of privacy. What business do I have knowing what you do in your mailbox? None. The second report was which links got clicked on the most. This caused me grave concern right away. I felt certain that knowing what links people clicked on would influence the content I wrote about each week. Even if I could somehow convince myself that I wouldn’t be influenced, how could I possibly prove that I wasn’t? Thankfully the service allowed me to turn off both of these capabilities.

The thing I was worried about was audience capture. Particularly with a project like the Weekly Thing, where I’m exploring the topics that are interesting to me and sharing that journey with others, audience capture has the potential to impact me as the author in ways that could change my journey and where my exploration took me.

[Audience capture] involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person’s identity with one custom-made for the audience. — The Perils of Audience Capture

I do many things to limit the amount of advertising I’m exposed to. I pay for ad free versions of services if I can. I run an ad blocker. Frankly I just limit the amount of advertising supported content that I’m exposed to. I also work hard to limit algorithmic promotion of content. Some of that is about protecting my privacy, but more important to me is protecting my liberty.

When I think of my liberty I’m considering the ability to act as I please, without constraint and on my own discretion. That last part is the one that I worry about in regard to advertising, or algorithms prompting me with information. It is also the primary concern about audience capture.

Captured by Analytics

The mechanics of audience capture on the web tend to start with analytics. We have analytics for nearly everything. All social media platforms show you analytics on your profile like the number of followers you have, as well as analytics on each item you share in the form of views, likes, shares, and more. I believe services have weaponized this, making analytics as addiction, and the same features open the door for getting captured by your audience.

This bit from the Waking Up podcast is what got my head spinning on this topic in the first place.

[27:01] “If I’m alert to anything, it is to not getting captured by my audience. If ever I were to find myself not wanting to say something for fear of how the audience will respond even though I think it’s true and important, that’s the thing I know I can’t do. There’s obviously a problem of audience capture in the podcasting and alternative media space. This is true wether one is getting support directly by subscription or donation, and it’s also true if you are running ads. And in several cases the evidence of audience capture is absolutely clear. There are people who’ve done 50 episodes more or less in a row on the same topic as though they had lost interest in every other thing on Earth. What’s going on there? There is some training signal coming from the audience, and almost certainly a bad economic incentive that is capturing that podcast host.” — Sam Harris, On Disappointing My Audience

That whole bit from Harris is compelling, but I bolded the key component that I think we need to be mindful of. The same way that we can train an algorithm given a data set and a target, we can also train people by giving them a training signal from the audience. That training signal is the stream of analytics.

I think you could take this further. Something akin to a principle or rule:

The more detailed metrics you have on an audience, the more likely you are captured by that audience.

The metrics provide a mirage of insight and influence. It “feels like” you are learning more about the audience, but you may be modifying yourself to fit the pattern of what you see in the data. Your audience engages a lot with this one topic? It seems far too likely that more of that will start appearing in front of you. In reality all of this data bends and shapes the creator to fit into the mold of their audience.

The opposite is also true. The fewer metrics you have, the less likely you are captured by your audience. I publish the Weekly Thing using Buttondown and I have no tracking of open rates or any links that people click on. Since I have no way of knowing what links people click on, I have no way of being captured going forward. I know that the next set of links I select are for sure not driven by what I think people will click on, since I don’t even know what people click on!

In general, as a creator, I think we need to be very cautious about what data we collect, and how we plan to use that. Don’t collect data unless you know how you are going to put it into action.

We all have an audience now

Audience capture is an interesting concept for people that publish things. Bloggers, podcasters, newsletter writers all have obvious audiences. But it no longer stops there does it? Thanks to social media services we all have an audience, in fact many audiences. You have a set of followers on Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn. Those services give you many metrics about how your “followers” engage with the content you share. This is a perfect setup to be captured.

Much has been written about how social media damages discourse and how people do all of this performative dunking. Typically that is connected with the idea of eroding civility, or not knowing the person as a person but as just an avatar. But some of that performance could obviously be for your audience as well. And if the likes pile in the right way, the vicious cycle will continue. You become what your audience rewards. If you are in a room full of barbarians, be mindful of what they will reward!

As we ponder the challenges of social media, perhaps it is worth considering if we really need another audience — and if so, how will this audience influence us and impact our identity.

Captured Media

Audience capture is easy to personify in the form of a person, particularly an individual creating something. Clearly the activities of thousands of people in the audience can have impact on that one creator. However, I don’t see any reason that an audience can’t capture a brand or a company.

A company doesn’t have liberty or free will. So the capture of a company or brand is very different. In fact, many brands may want to be captured. That may be their ultimate goal. And for some there may be no downside to that. Harley Davidson is probably a better company if they are captured by their audience. They may call that customer obsessed!

But take a moment to think of media. Is media bias accurate? Or is it more accurate to say media is captured by their audience? This is a bit of a chicken and egg question, and perhaps the end result doesn’t really matter. But as we think of modern media organizations they tend to obsess about data. They have a never ending “training set” of data on what their audience likes. The smartest thing as a company may be to feed more content into that known topic. Repeat. More engagement. And magically audience capture.

Where this lands us may be no different than media bias, but it speaks to a totally different cure.

Media bias says that the actors in the media are intentionally biased to one perspective or another. Certainly true for some, but I don’t believe true for all. And I don’t know how you can fix that. Likely you just give up and say everything is biased. But if we frame this different and suggest that modern media has gotten itself trapped, captured by their audience, then the answer is pretty simple. Ditch the analytics. Stop telling the creators what the audience engages in. Starve them of that feedback loop and the capture will die away.

Kids with audiences

The last area of audience capture that I’ve been thinking about scares me the most. Most teenagers use some form of social media. They are acutely aware of their follower counts, likes, retweets, and whatever other feedback loops these platforms have. They have an audience, and that training set of data is coming right at them. Now, lets consider two things about this point in someone’s life:

1. Most teenagers are working as hard as they can to fit in. To be part of the group. They may not be aware of audience capture, but they are seeking to be captured in the most desperate way.
2. These same teenagers do not have a strong sense of self. They are in the act of defining that. Liberty, free will — these are new thoughts and they are building their identity as they go.

Adding an audience to a child that is still developing their own identity will forever alter that persons identity.

Yes, you could argue that there is nothing new here, this is just part of growing up and forming your identity. To an extent that is true. You maybe had an audience in Chemistry class that you performed for. You might have had a club that you connected with that was a form of audience. But not really. In-person groups are totally different. They are not an audience, they are friends and acquaintances. There is no training set here. You don’t get a data feed of likes and engagement scores at the end of the event. The performative behavior for an audience that social media enables is completely different.

***

Thinking more concretely about audience capture highlights for me the importance of collecting very little data, and on platforms that you cannot opt out of it, try to avoid it at all costs. Want to know a shameful secret of mine? I take note of how many likes and retweets my content gets on Twitter. I’m not proud of it. I don’t know that it has changed what I write about, but I also don’t know that it hasn’t. That notifications section on Twitter is one of the things that makes me want to disengage from that platform.

I know there are certain topics that I blog about and mention in the Weekly Thing that are not popular. Some folks don’t like one topic or another. I know that because they have told me directly, not through analytics. That is fine, but I’m going to keep writing about whatever I want because I’m not selling a product to get maximum engagement. I’m sharing my journey of learning. And where that goes is only up to me. Liberty!

So ask yourself, are you captured? What audiences do you have? How are you protecting your liberty?