What’s Rotten About the Parthenon
“But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture?” He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon.
“That,” said the Dean, “is the Parthenon.”
“So it is.”
“I haven’t the time to waste on silly questions.”
“All right, then.” Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. “Shall I tell you what’s rotten about it? …The famous flutings on the famous columns — what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood — when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?”
— Howard Roark, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
This is one of my favorite moments in any story. I know it’s not exactly popular these days to be a fan of Ayn Rand, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I don’t care. I’m a fan of her two most popular works, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In fact, I’m currently going through my yearly reading of Atlas Shrugged, which began not quite a year after my last simply because I needed it. I have a beautiful print hardcover edition, but I usually listen to the audiobook read by Christopher Hurt — his reading and characterizations are amazing.
I don’t consider Ayn Rand a philosopher, but then I’m not really offended at those who claim so. I’m also not really into the idea of altruism as some machination of human wickedness, or of the notion that selfishness should be taken as a virtue. I think a lot of what’s been said by, near, and about Ayn Rand has been said for shock value; “The Virtue of Selfishness” alone as a title rankles most who come from a modern ideological mainline.
Anyhow, I love this particular scene in The Fountainhead. “Do you know what’s rotten about the Parthenon?” The Parthenon, the great symbol of Greek Architecture, Roark explained, was a well-built but poorly-conceived relic. A copy in stone of wooden buildings, retaining the visual features of the original but without the need or purpose those features originally served. And then the renaissance came along, and builders began to copy the architectural features of the Parthenon, the columns and triglyphs, in plaster en homage, ostensibly, to the original. Copies in plaster of copies in stone of wooden buildings.
Let’s look at the modes we use to share our information. If you’re like most chapters of a professional organization, you’re having meetings, maybe once a month or more or less, and you’ve got someone lined up who’s going to deliver a presentation of some kind while others sit around and eat or have a beer or just watch. Everyone shows up at 5:30 or 6:00 after work, says hello to the people they already know — the regulars — and introduces themselves politely to a couple of folks they don’t know, then someone very politely asks the room to take their seats and shut up so the presentation can begin.
And we’ve adapted this to our new tools, our online tools. Everyone dials in at 6, and there’s some stilted chitchat — “hey how’s it gooooooiiiiinnnnnnngggggg..” and eventually enough people have filed in that the delayed, talking-over-you-but-sorry-you-go-first conversation has just become too unwieldy so let’s get started, tonight’s guest is…
But we’re clever because now the room can ask questions, they can type them out in a little chat box so the presenter can answer them whenever they want to, and can choose when to interrupt their delivery to take a question. And this is maybe an improvement because sometimes the room could just get away from you, right? Trying to get on with the show while someone who doesn’t hear very well in the first place is beating the horse you killed four slides ago. We like this, this is good. And when the presentation is over, we don’t all have to drive home and slip quietly into the house without waking the kids because we’re already at home, we just log off and walk into the kitchen and have dinner with our families. We like this too.
And so here we are, looking toward the horizon of a completely transformed culture of knowledge work, holding tools that help us communicate better, synchronously or asynchronously, across an entire planet, and we’re trying to figure out how to re-create the old work experiences using these tools. How can we read the faces in the room as they consume the presentation? How can we allow them to ask questions while keeping a hold on the rest of the room? How can we homogenize everyone’s camera backgrounds to minimize the distractions, the way we use dress codes at work to ensure everyone stays focused on the work at hand?
Maybe these are better questions: How do we simulate building our networks, chance encounters with strangers that lead to unexpected but wonderful opportunities, spontaneously breaking off from a larger group to have more meaningful one-on-one interactions? How do we simulate the experience of coming together to hear someone share their ideas on a topic, and challenge those ideas to collaboratively generate thought leadership? How do we meet people where they are, picking up new ideas where they lay, and running with them rather than forcing them to be communicated through the right tool: “Sorry, you’ll have to drop that great idea in our other chat channel, this one’s only for sharing pictures of our cats.”
It bears noting that, after the kids are fed and bathed and upstairs sleeping, and the kitchen’s cleaned up from dinner, the dog’s on her little cushion on the floor snoring and hey Siri, remind me tomorrow at 8 to schedule a haircut next week we stare at an even smaller screen, the dopamine drip of as much bad news as you can fit into about 8 inches by 4 inches, liking and upvoting and downvoting, caring and supporting and celebrating with little thumbs-ups or balloons or a caricature of ourselves making an expression that’s oh my god just so very like me I make that face all the time. And when we set about this work of sharing ourselves, we, who a couple of hours before couldn’t be arsed to hit the damned mute button when the wife set off the smoke alarm again until everyone in the meeting had thrown their AirPods at the screen in disgust, then made it halfway through a six-minute monologue while wrapping the meeting before unmuting ourselves again, we’re suddenly Matthew Broderick in Wargames. “What game do you want to play?”
Why is it necessarily different, our mode of sharing our lives and our personal stories, from sharing our work knowledge with the world? Why have we cordoned these things off from one another, these hammers are only for those nails? Why do we need a different social media platform for our work selves from the one we use to share our personal lives? These are different contexts, but experientially they’re not that different at all. We want to share things and we want to get simple feedback on whether our ideas are good or not, and we want mechanisms that get good ideas the attention they need to make an impact on the world. We want to communicate change and the need for change quickly and with articulation, and we want to let similar ideas coalesce into bigger ideas and know which ones might have the potential to make a real dent in the universe.
It’s not different. We’ve just decided it’s different; we’ve decided — or maybe we’ve been told — that these things are different from those things and so we need a new tool to do these things. But maybe if we challenge ourselves, if we’re willing to take a chance and let our work lives and our personal lives overlap just a little bit — the way they already do when people look through that little camera lens out at our bedroom or our kitchen or see our bookshelf and try to zoom in to see what we’ve been reading — maybe we’ll find that we’re already doing these things really really well; we’re just not doing them at work. And maybe we should be.
