One of my Sunday routines is usually to post a photo here. Sometimes that’s easy, since I’ve taken something in the past few days, and sometimes that involves trawling through my archive to select something, sometimes from years ago. One problem with that is that there are just so many photos, and it is hard to keep track of everything I’ve posted here in order to avoid duplicates. It would be easier if I had enough discipline to put each photo selected in my Sunday Photoblogging album at Flickr, but I can neglect doing that for weeks, months, and even years at a time. So I’ve spent much of today going through Crooked Timber and making sure that all those photos are in that album. Well, it turns out there are 467 of them, which is an awful lot of Sundays. Quite an instructive exercise for me: there are some I like a lot, and others where I wonder why I selected it at all. There are influences I can detect such as Kertesz, Leiter, Gruyaert (not that I’m fit to be mentioned in the same sentence) but also E. Chambré Hardman, who use of natural frames I’ve often copied. Anyway: here’s the complete set, assuming I haven’t missed any out, which I probably have.
Last week, I finished reading an advance copy of Cory Doctorow’s Picks and Shovels. No spoilers about plot specifics, but the novel has a lot to say about two things. First, how Silicon Valley used to be a place where exit was possible and a good thing. If you didn’t like your boss, you went out and found somewhere else, or founded a company yourself. California didn’t recognize no-compete agreements, and the foundation myth of Silicon Valley is the Traitorous Eight. Eight engineers found William Shockley, a hateful unpredictable jerk and a pioneer of “racial realism,” such a horrible person to work for that they all left to do their own thing, founding an engineering culture and start-ups that begat start-ups that begat start-ups.
The second theme of Cory’s novel is how easy it is to get trapped nonetheless. There is a cult-like aspect to many organizations, a quasi religious fervor. Once you get pulled in, you reconstruct your whole identity around a particular set of values. You may start in a place where it seems that there’s a strong alignment between the organizational culture and what you yourself aspire to. You may discover that you are wrong, or the place may change. The wrong people end up taking over, or becoming influential. You find yourself in workplace conversations that leave you feeling weird and disturbed. But you aren’t sure what to do. Leaving would involve giving up on the values that you thought you shared, giving up, in a sense on your fundamental understanding of who you are.