14. Media (JW)
San Francisco, USA
Dear Owen,
For everything I write, I have a role model in mind — someone I’ve come to deeply appreciate not only for the insight they yield, but for the emotional quality that accompanies the insight.
This experiment in letter writing was inspired by John & Hank Green’s vlogbrothers, but my letters are more specifically influenced by John Green’s podcast “The Anthropocene Reviewed”. In this podcast, John artfully weaves anecdotes from his own life into commentary about the world, and I love the humanizing quality it brings in discussing darkness. In one episode, he explores his battle with mental illness leading to him subsisting for days at a time on nothing but 2L bottles of Sprite. In another, he highlights the resolve of the Soviet scientists guarding crops during the WW2 Siege of Leningrad, ultimately starving to death so that others could live. These elements of darkness allow the elements of light to shine without feeling like cheap well-wishing. The way that “The Anthropocene Reviewed” makes me feel when I listen to it is how I want people to feel after reading these letters: nostalgic, but also hopeful.
When I write technical blog posts like the one about color, I’m trying to summon my inner Richard Feynman. I want readers to leave with curiosity satisfied and an awe about the world. What Feynman exemplifies best is how to provide those feelings via the understanding itself, rather than through shallow analogies.
In writing reflections on my own dumb brain like in “The Pit, The Cabin, and the Dance Floor”, I’m inevitably emulating Tim Urban’s blog “Wait But Why”. Something about the silliness of the diagrams makes it so disarming that I forget he’s often explaining grand topics like the structure of modern politics, or the globe-altering power of language.
I’m immensely grateful for all of these role models, but I have to admit I feel odd about my cast of role models at times.
In early 2017, a few months after I joined Figma, another startup visited to demo their product. It was an office productivity suite, and they demoed their new software using fictional names pulled from the employee list of Pied Piper from the TV show “Silicon Valley”. As they spoke, I remember evaluating the product merits, and trying to discern the technical details for how they were doing it.
When they finished their demo, one of my coworkers, Kathryn, raised her hand and asked a simple but direct question: “Are you aware that in the entire product demo, all of the employees shown were men?”
I was gobsmacked. Not because she had asked the question, or because the assertion was true, but because I never would have thought to ask this question, because I didn’t even notice. More upsettingly, if the the cast had been entirely female, I’m sure I would have noticed. This is, in part, because it would’ve been unusual, but also because I would’ve noticed myself notably unrepresented.
Another prompt to consider what’s conspicuously missing came when I was home for Christmas later that year. I was perched at the kitchen counter on my laptop going through my list of read books on Goodreads when my mom peeked over my shoulder and asked “How many of these books are not by Western men?”. I don’t have the exact ratio, but to say it was a pitiful minority would be an understatement.
So, in 2018, I set out to read a book per month with only one constraint: the author couldn’t be a white man. This wasn’t to express any particular disdain towards white male authors, but rather to recognize the large bias in my media consumption and to course correct a bit.
I fell short by two books, but I did discover a few of my absolute favourites. The brutal realism of Octavia Butler’s post-apocalyptic “Parable of the Sower” in which characters are offered no closure for the disappearance and ambiguous death of family members. The utterly mysterious mythology and depiction of bottomless rage in N.K. Jemisin’s series “The Broken Earth”. The deeply bizarre sequences of events that nonetheless seem to have a murky logic to them in Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore”. Each of these now has a distinct place in my heart, and I can’t help but attribute some of the satisfaction they offer to the difference in perspective of the author.
In an episode from “The Anthropocene Reviewed” in which John Green reviews the iOS default Notes app, he quotes poet Donald Hall (admittedly another white American man):
“We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.”
While the eye gazing and, you know, the love making is distinctly romantic in nature, I think the idea of “third things” applies equally to friendships. While a chunk of our friendship has undoubtedly been engaged in the shared consumption of media produced by white men, part of its genesis was shared appreciation for Asian American media like Wong Fu Productions, anime like “Sword Art Online”, and the Korean movie “My Sassy Girl”.
So, here’s hoping that we can find an increasing number of our “third things” and writing inspiration from a more diverse cast. Perhaps, over time, as my attention shifts, so will my cast of role models.
Your fellow media binger,
Jamie
