Cross Training for Career Completeness

Posted on by
1

Are you good at your job? Have you spent thousands of hours training to be the best at a particular discipline? Can you configure things with your eyes closed and are finally on top of the world? What happens next? Where do you go if things change?

It sounds like an age-old career question. You’ve mastered a role. You’ve learned all there is to learn. What more can you do? It’s not something specific to technology either. One of my favorite stories about this struggle comes from the iconic martial artist Bruce Lee. He spent his formative years becoming an expert at Wing Chun and no one would argue he wasn’t one of the best. As the story goes, in 1967 he engaged in a sparring match with a practitioner of a different art and, although he won, he was exhausted and thought things had gone on far too long. This is what encouraged him to develop Jeet Kun Do as a way to incorporate new styles together for more efficiency and eventually led to the development of mixed martial arts (MMA).

What does Bruce Lee have to do with tech? The value of cross training with different tech disciplines is critical for your ability to continue to exist as a technology practitioner.

Time Marches On

A great example of this came up during Mobility Field Day back in May. During the Fortinet presentation there was a discussion about wireless and SASE. I’m sure a couple of the delegates were shrugging their shoulders in puzzlement about this inclusion. After all, what does SASE have to do with SNR or Wi-Fi 6E? Why should they care about software running on an AP when the real action is in the spectrum?

To me, as someone who sees the bigger picture, the value of talking about SASE is crucial. Access points are no longer radio bridges. They are edge computing devices that run a variety of software programs. In the old days it took everything the CPU had to process the connection requests and forward the frames to the right location. Today there is a whole suite of security being done at the edge to keep users safe and reduce the amount of traffic being forwarded into the network.

Does that mean that every wireless engineer needs to become a security expert? No. Far from it. There is specialized knowledge in both areas that people will spend years perfecting. Does that mean that wireless people need to ignore the bigger security picture? That’s also a negative. APs are going to be running more and more software in the modern IT world because it makes sense to put it there and not in the middle of the enterprise or the cloud. Why process traffic if you don’t have to?

It also means that people need to look outside of their specific skillset to understand the value of cross training. There are some areas that have easy crossover potential. Networking and wireless have a lot of commonality. So do storage and cloud, as well as virtualization and storage and cloud. We constantly talk about the importance of including security in the discussion everywhere, from implementation to development. Yet when we talk about the need to understand these technologies at a basic level we often face resistance from operations teams that just want to focus on their area and not the bigger picture.

New Approaches

Jeet Kune Do is a great example of why cross training has valuable lessons for us to learn about disruption. In a traditional martial arts fight, you attack your opponent. The philosophy of Jeet Kun Do is to attack your opponent’s attacks. You spend time defending by keeping them from attacking you. That’s a pretty different approach.

Likewise, in IT we need to examine how to we secure users and operate networks. Fortinet believes security needs to happen at the edge. Their philosophy is informed by their expertise in developing edge hardware to do this role. Other companies would say this is best performed in the cloud using their software, which is often their strength. Which approach is better? There is no right answer. I will say that I am personally a proponent of doing the security stuff as close the edge as possible to reduce the need for more complexity in the core. It might be a remnant of my old “three tier” network training but I feel the edge is the best place to do the hard work, especially given the power of the modern edge compute node CPU.

That doesn’t mean it’s always going to be the best way to do things. That’s why you have to continuously learn and train on new ways of doing things. SASE itself came from SD-WAN which came from SDN. Ten years ago most of this was theoretical or in the very early deployment stage. Today we have practical applications and real-world examples. Where will it go in five years? You only know if you learn how it works now.

Tom’s Take

I’ve always been a voracious learner and training myself on different aspects of technology has given me the visibility to understand the importance of how it all works together. Like Bruce Lee I always look for what’s important and incorporate it into my knowledge base and discard the rest. I know that learning about multiple kinds of technology is the key to having a long career in the industry. You just have to want to see the bigger picture for cross training to be effective.

Disclaimer: This post mentions Fortinet, a presenter at Mobility Field Day 9. The opinions expressed in this post reflect my own perspective and were not influenced by consideration from any companies mentioned.

My Belated Review of Cisco Live 2023

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been a couple of weeks since Cisco Live US 2023 and I’m just now getting around to writing about it. I was thrilled to attend my 18th Cisco Live and it was just the thing I needed to reconnect with the community. The landscape of Cisco Live looks a little different than it has in years past. There are some challenges that are rising that need to be studied and understood before they become bigger than the event itself.

Showstopping Reveals? Or Consistent Improvement?

What was the big announcement from Cisco this year? What was the thing that was said on stage that stopped the presses and got people chattering? Was it a switch? A firewall? Was it a revolutionary new AI platform? Or a stable IP connection to Mars? Do you even know? Or was it more of a discussion of general topics with some technologies brought up alongside them?

In the last few years you may have noticed that the number of huge big announcements coinciding with the big yearly conferences has come down a bit. Rather than having some big news drop the morning of the keynote the big reveals are being given their own time to shine instead. Rather than piling up tons of news of acquisitions or new product releases and watching them all get lost in the shuffle of fanfare they’re now being spaced out or bunched up at the end of quarters instead.

The big keynotes are instead being used to push initiatives. Rather than talking products the companies are talking strategies. Things like sustainability and outreach replace speeds and feeds. The goal isn’t to show off something shiny but instead to show off what the goal is to utilize the new products. Those kinds of announcements tend to play better with the press and analysts as well as the investors.

Does that mean that we’re never going to see another big announcement during an event keynote? No. What it does mean is that you shouldn’t expect to see groundbreaking shifts happening during those discussions. Steady and predictable is what the investors like. And during those keynotes that’s what you’re going to see for the most part.

Community Marches On

Social media sure has been fun for the past few months wouldn’t you say? The decline of Twitter, the rise of Mastodon and BlueSky, and even more craziness all over the place. Proof? Check out my badge from Cisco Live this year:

Yes, I needed all of those flags to show people where I was posting things to social media. And keeping track of all of the communities can be tiring. Some people still use Twitter because it’s there. Some people have embraced the Fediverse and deleted Twitter altogether. Others are trying out BlueSky and finding their groove again. And that doesn’t even discuss the number of people that are embracing video platforms or other means of posting. It is a certainty that the former king of the hill is rolling down very quickly in the face of so many other options.

One thing that I loved is that the community around Cisco Live has endured through so much upheaval. As soon as we arrived on site it was just like old times. People coordinated hangouts and invited friends all over. Parties were held. Introductions were made. And people caught up as if they hadn’t seen each other in forever. It made me happy to see that the impending collapse of a social platform didn’t affect the people that used it to build a great group.

Another thing that I realized when I got to the event was that this was the tenth anniversary of the Cisco Live Social Media Hub. I can still vividly remember when I walked into the convention center in Orlando in 2013 to find this brand new area dedicated for us to hang out and enjoy a little spotlight. Over the years the hub has grown from just a few tables and some laptops to an entire control center that serves as a central meeting location for folks as well as a set for some creative content to be made. I remember on more than one occasion seeing folks running around staging shots for a TikTok video and seeing lots of extra content being posted from everywhere. It’s good when you don’t have to make your own little space.

Tom’s Take

What does the future of Cisco Live look like? Is it going to continue to be a huge draw for people to come and enjoy the community? Is Cisco going to keep releasing new products and making this a destination for networking professionals? Given the number of attendees increased again this year I’d say that there is definitely a desire for people to attend conferences in person again. Given that the community has continued to persevere through all manner of challenges I’d say they’re also here to stay as well. All in all, I’m glad to see Cisco Live has continued to see success. As long as we temper our expectations for what the conference will be in the future and continue to keep the community alive then I don’t see any challenges that can’t be overcome.

Using AI for Attack Attribution

Posted on by
Reply

While I was hanging out at Cisco Live last week, I had a fun conversation with someone about the use of AI in security. We’ve seen a lot of companies jump in to add AI-enabled services to their platforms and offerings. I’m not going to spend time debating the merits of it or trying to argue for AI versus machine learning (ML). What I do want to talk about is something that I feel might be a little overlooked when it comes to using AI in security research.

Whodunnit?

After a big breach notification or a report that something has been exposed there are two separate races that start. The most visible is the one to patch the exploit and contain the damage. Figure out what’s broken and fix it so there’s no more threat of attack. The other race involves figuring out who is responsible for causing the issue.

Attribution is something that security researchers value highly in the post-mortem of an attack. If the attack is the first of its kind the researchers want to know who caused it. They want to see if the attackers are someone new on the scene that have developed new tools and skills or if it is an existing person or group that has expanded their target list or repertoire. If you think of a more traditional definition of crime from legal dramas and police procedurals you are wondering if this is a one-off crime or if this is a group expanding their reach.

Attribution requires analysis. You need to look for the digital fingerprints of a group in the attack patterns. Did they favor a particular entry point? Are they looking for the same kinds of accounts to do privilege escalation? Did they deface the web servers with the same digital graffiti? For attackers looking to make a name for themselves, attribution is pretty easy to figure out. They want to make a splash. However, for state-sponsored crews or organizations looking to keep a low profile it is much more likely they’re going to obfuscate their methods to avoid detection as long as possible. They might even throw out a few red herrings to make people attribute the attack to a different group.

Picking Out Patterns

If the methodology of doing attribution requires pattern matching and research, why not use AI to assist? We already use AI and ML to help us detect the breaches. Why not apply it to figuring out who is doing the breaching? We already know that AI can help us identify people based on a variety of characteristics. Just look up any kind of market research done by advertising agencies and you can see how scary they can predict buyer behavior based on all kinds of pattern recognition.

Let’s apply that same methodology to attack attribution. AI and ML are great at not only sifting through the noise when it comes to pattern recognition but they can also build a profile of the patterns to confirm those suspicions. Imagine profiling an attacker by seeing that they use one or two methods for gaining entry, such as spearphishing, to gain access to start privilege escalation. They always go after the same service accounts and move laterally to the same servers after gaining it. This is all great information for predicting attacks and stopping them. But it’s super valuable for tracking down who is doing it.

Assuming that crews bring new attackers on board frequently to keep their crime pipeline full you can also see how much of the attack profile is innate talent versus training. One could assume that these organizations aren’t terribly different from your average IT shop when it comes to training. It’s just the result of that training that differs. If you start seeing a large influx of attacks that use repetition of similar techniques from different locations it could be assumed that there is some kind of training going on somewhere in the loop.

The other thing that provides value is determining when someone is trying to masquerade as a different group using techniques to obfuscate or misattribute breaches. Building a profile of an attacker means you know how long it takes them to move to new targets or how likely they are to take certain actions within a specific window. If you work out the details of an attack you can see quickly if someone is following a script or if they’re doing something in a specific way to make it look like someone else is trying to get in. This especially applies at the level of nation-state sponsored groups, since creating doubt in the attribution can prevent your detection or even cause diplomatic sanctions against the wrong country.

Of course, the real challenges is that AI and ML aren’t foolproof. They aren’t the ultimate arbiter of attack recognition and attribution. Instead, they are tools that should be introduced into the kit to help speed identification and provide assurances that you’ve got the right group before you publicize what you’ve found.

Tom’s Take

There’s a good chance that some security companies out there are already looking at or using AI to do attribution. I think it’s important to broaden our toolkits and use of models in all areas of cybersecurity. It also provides a baseline for creating normalized investigation. There have been too many cases where a researcher has rushed to pin attribution on a given group only to find out it wasn’t them at all. Using tools to confirm your suspicions not only reduces the likelihood you will name the wrong attacker but it also reduces the need to publicize quickly to claim credit for the identification. This should be about protection, no publicity.

Time Is Not On Your Side

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been almost five years since I wrote about the challenges of project management and timing your work as an engineer. While most of that information is still very true even today I’ve recently had my own challenges with my son’s Eagle Scout project. He is of a mind that you can throw together a plan and just do a whole week of work in just a couple of days. I, having worked in the IT industry for years, have assured him that it absolutely doesn’t work like that. Why is there a disconnect between us? And how does that disconnect look to the rest of the world?

Time Taking You

The first problem that I often see when working with people that aren’t familiar with projects is that they vastly underestimate the amount of time it takes to get something done. You may recall from my last post that my project managers at my old VAR job had built in something they called Tom Time to every quote. That provided a way for my estimate to reflect reality once I arrived on site and found the things didn’t go according to plan.

Part of the reason why my estimates didn’t reflect reality was because there are a lot of things that go into a project that can’t quite be explained or calculated into the final estimate. For example, how long does it take for a switch to reboot? Some of them can be ready to pass traffic in a couple of minutes. Larger devices that need to test modules may take up to ten minutes to be ready to go. If you have to reboot that switch multiple times during your project how do you account for that time? Is there a line item for a hour’s worth of switch reboots? What about the project closeout meetings a paperwork? How do you build that into a project timeline?

People that underestimate the timeline of a project are almost always only focused on the work. They see that it should take them about five minutes to copy the config the switch and ten minutes to put it in the rack. Did they think about the time to unbox it? Cable it? Do a final test to ensure all configuration is correct and saved to the startup config? Each of these things sound trivial but they add time. Maybe you don’t do the final config test and hope for the best. But you can’t shave time on unboxing unless you have someone helping you do that. Which, of course, just adds time to the project in a different way.

The Price of Time

Does this mean that you just need to increase the amount of time that you put on a project? No, it doesn’t. One of the connectivity providers I worked with in the past had what they called a “foolproof method” of getting the right time estimate for a circuit. They doubled the number and increased to the next time unit. So two hours became four days. Three days became six weeks. And I became infuriated when I realized how much time something like this would take.

Part of the reasoning behind that thinking was that the project management overhead always took longer than expected. But the other thinking was that quoting much longer timelines gave them more room to cram in too much work for a single team. They could juggle deployments because they had enough hours in the quote that they could be more interrupt driven. Work on something until someone complains then move to that project and work on it until the complaining stops. You can see why providers like that quickly get a reputation for padding their projects.

Time costs money. Either someone is paying you to do the job or you’re paying for that resource to be unavailable for doing the job. You have to learn how to allocate your resources effectively. If you need to help your teams or your contractors understand the additional time that it takes to do a project you need to either package that time as a line item or educate them about what additional tasks you see. Accounting for that extra time is a better way to show value than just adding lots of extra wiggle room to a project so you don’t go over budget. The education aspect is especially important for talent that isn’t familiar with things from the outset. Teaching them how to look for those time sinks and making sure they’re tracked means their estimates will be much more accurate in the future.

Tom’s Take

My son is going to complete his project but he’s going to learn a lot about the way the world works in the process. Paint doesn’t dry overnight. It takes time to load and unload lumber. People need more than 24 hours notice to show up to work on something. These are all lessons I’ve learned over the years that I’m happy to teach. Time is important to us all because we don’t get any more of it. Every minute that goes by is a minute we can’t get back. Make the most of your time by tracking it appropriately and building those hidden things into your project estimates. That’s how you get time to be on your side for once.

Aruba Isn’t A Wireless Company (Any More)

Posted on by
3

Remember when Aruba was a wireless company? I know it sounds like something that happened 40 years ago but the idea that Aruba only really made wireless access points and some campus switches to support them isn’t as old as you think. The company, now known as HPE Aruba Networking (née Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company), makes more than just Wi-Fi gear. Yet the perception of the industry is that they’re still a wireless company looking to compete with the largest parts of the market.

Branching Out of Office

This year’s Aruba Atmopshere showed me that Aruba is trying to do more than just campus wireless. The industry has shifted away from just providing edge connectivity and is now focused on a holistic lineup of products that are user-focused. You don’t need to go much further than the technical keynote on the second day of the conference to see that. Or the Networking Field Day Experience videos linked above.

Do you know what Aruba wanted to showcase?

  • Campus Switches
  • Data Center Switches
  • Private 5G/LTE
  • SASE/SSE
  • IoT
  • Cloud-Enabled Management

You know what wasn’t on that list? Access points. For a “wireless” company that’s a pretty glaring omission, right? I think it’s actually a brilliant way to help people understand that HPE Aruba Networking is a growing part of the wider HPE business dedicated to connectivity.

It’s been discussed over the years that the HPE acquisition of Aruba was a “reverse acquisition”. That basically means that HPE gave Aruba control over their campus (and later data center) networking portfolio and let them run with it. It was successful and really helped highlight the needs that HPE had in that space. No one was talking about the dominance of Procurve switches. HPE was even reselling Arista gear at the time for the high end customers. Aruba not only was able to right the ship but help it grow over time and adopt home-grown offerings.

When you think of companies like Juniper and Cisco, do you see them as single product vendors? Juniper makes more than just service provider routers. Cisco makes more than just switches. They have distinct lines of business that provide offerings across the spectrum. They both sell firewalls and access points. They both have software divisions. Cisco sells servers and unified communications gear on top of everything else they do. There’s more to both of them than meets the eye.

Aruba needed to shed the wireless moniker in order to grow into a more competitive market segment. When you’re known as a single product vendor you tend to be left out of conversations. Would you call Palo Alto for switches or wireless? No, because they’re a firewall or SASE company. Yes, they make more than those products but they have a niche, as opposed to more diverse companies. I’m not saying Palo Alto isn’t diverse, just that they define their market segment pretty effectively. So much so that people don’t even call application firewalls by that name any longer. They’re “Palo Altos”, giving the company the same generic trademark distinction as Kleenex and Velcro.

User Face-to-Face

Aruba needs to develop the product lines that help get users connected. Wireless is an easy layup for them now so where do they expand? Switches are a logical extension so the CX lines were developed and continue to do well. The expansion into private LTE and security also help significantly, which are bolstered by their recent acquisitions.

Security is an easy one to figure out. Aruba has gone from SD-Branch, focused on people working in remote offices, to add on true SD-WAN functionality with the Silver Peak purchase, to now offering SSE with Axis Security being folded in to the mix. SSE is a growing market segment because the services offered are what users consume. SASE works great if you’re working from home all the time. In the middle of the pandemic that was a given. People had home offices and did their work there.

But now that restrictions are relaxed and people aren’t going into the office all the time. This hybrid work model means no hardware to do the inspection. Since SSE is not focused on hardware it’s a great fit for a mobile hybrid workforce. If you remember how much Aruba was touting the BYOD wireless-only office trend back in 2016 and 2017 you can see how SSE would have been a wonderful fit back then if it had existed. Given how the concept of a wireless-only BYOD office was realized through not having an office I’d say SSE is a perfect fit for the modern state of the enterprise.

Private 5G is a bit more complicated. Why would Aruba embrace a technology that effectively competes with its core business? I’d say that’s because they need to understand the impact that private cellular will have on their business. People aren’t dumping Wi-Fi and moving en masse to CBRS. We’ve reached a point where we’re considering what the requirements for private LTE deployments need to look like and where the real value lies for them. If you have a challenging RF environment and have devices capable of taking SIM cards it makes a lot of sense. Aruba having a native way of providing that kind of connectivity for users that are looking to offer it is also a huge win. It’s also important to note that Aruba wants to make sure it has complete control over the process, so what better way than acquiring a mature company that can integrate into their product lines?

Tom’s Take

I can’t take full credit for this idea. Avril Salter pointed it out during a briefing and I thought it was a wonderful point. Aruba isn’t a wireless company now because they’ve grown to become a true networking company. They offer more than just APs and devices that power them. There have a full line of products that address the needs of a modern user. The name change isn’t just a branding exercise. It represents a shift in the way people need to see the company. Growing beyond what you used to be isn’t a bad thing. It’s a sign of maturity.

The Shifting Lens of Mentoring

Posted on by
Reply

The other day I realized that I had become the “old man” at Tech Field Day. Not so much that I’m ready for AARP but more that I’ve been there longer than anyone else but Stephen. The realization was a long time coming but the thing that pushed me to understand it was when someone asked a question about a policy we had and I not only knew the reason why we did it but also a time before we had it.

As I spent time thinking about the way that I’ve graduated from being the new guy to the old mentor I thought about the inflection point when the changeover happened.

Green and Growing

The first part of the demarcation between mentor and mentee in my eyes is where the knowledge lies. When you’re first starting out you’re the one that needs to understand things. You ask lots and lots of questions and try to understand how things are done and why you do them that way. Focusing on that knowledge acquisition is part of the marker of someone in need of mentorship.

For those trying to mentor these eager employees don’t make the mistake of getting frustrated at the constant questioning. As someone that constantly has to understand the what and the why behind things I have been known to overwhelm those that would prefer to just tell me how things are done and move on with it.

When I see that level of curiosity in others I realize that they’re not trying to change things for the sake of change. Unlike others who might just want to make changes as a method of controlling the processes, eager learners are usually asking questions about the process because they need to understand the reasoning behind it. Often they have a unique perspective they can impart to the problem or some other knowledge they can use to streamline things. Even if they don’t you can help them understand why the process or policy is done in a specific way.

Guidance for the Eager

Coming back to that moment of realization from earlier means knowing the answers to the questions being asked are ones you have. Some people are designated as mentors based on their desire to share knowledge with others. In smaller organizations that may not be possible. You may find yourself mentoring others simply because you know what they need to learn and there’s no one else to teach them.

When you realize that you’re the one that knows the answer to the question you should step forward into a mentoring role. That’s what it feels like to be the “old timer” at the office. You’ve been around when the policies were made or perhaps you were the mentee asking all the questions right after that. Either way you have knowledge that needs to be shared with others.

That is the real inflection point. The knowledge transfer. Note that this has nothing to do with seniority or age or even organizational structure. This has everything to do with skills and information. You could be mentoring a younger new employee in the process for contracts today. And that same employee could be offering you guidance and help in a new email program or social media platform tomorrow. The mentoring relationship doesn’t always have to be one-way.

The dynamic nature of the mentoring relationship is one area I feel like we could always strive to do better at. We often see the older, more tenured employees as the default mentors. While that is true it undervalues the knowledge that new employees can have. Maybe this person is just starting out in the accounting department. However, if they were an accountant for the last three years do you think that means they don’t have the skills? Or perhaps it’s just that they need to understand the specifics of their role here. I’d wager that if you asked them for ways you could improve the accounting process they’d have some suggestions for you.

Tom’s Take

I didn’t necessarily see myself as a mentor until it was staring me right in the face. Yes, I had agreed to train people in certain aspects of their roles but the idea that I was doing it more as a form of knowledge transfer hadn’t really occurred to me until I found myself answering questions because I was the only one that had those answers. As you look for ways to cultivate and grow mentoring relationships don’t forget to share what you’ve learned but also seek out things that you want to understand. That knowledge will serve you well and also give you an opportunity to give it back down the road to a new group of people in need of mentorship.

Mastodon Needs More Brand Support

Posted on by
1

As much as I want to move over to Mastodon full time, there’s one thing I feel that is massively holding it back. Yes, you can laud the big things about federations and freedom as much as you want. However, one thing I’ve seen hanging out in the fringes of the Fediverse that will ultimately hold Mastodon back is the hostility toward brands.

Welcoming The Crowd

If you’re already up in arms because of that opening, ask yourself why. What is it about a brand that has you upset? Don’t they have the same right to share on the platform as the rest of us? I will admit that not every person on Mastodon has this outward hostility toward companies. However I can also sense this feeling that brands don’t belong.

It reminds me a lot of the thinly veiled distaste for companies that some Linux proponents have. The “get your dirty binary drivers out of my pristine kernel” crowd. The ones that want the brands to bend to their will and only do things the way they want. If you can’t provide us the drivers and software for free with full code support for us to hack as much as we want then we don’t want you around.

Apply that kind of mentality to brands venturing into the Fediverse. Do you want them to share their message? Share links to content or help people join webinars to learn more about the solutions? Or do you only want the interns and social media professionals to be their authentic selves and pretend they aren’t working for a bigger company?

The fact is that in order to get people to come to Mastodon to consume content you’re going to need more than highly motivated people. You’re going to need people that are focused on sharing a message. You’re really going to want those that are focused on outreach instead of just sharing random things. Does that sound a lot like the early days of Twitter to you? Not much broadcast but lots of meaningless status updates.

That’s the biggest part of what’s holding Mastodon back. There’s no content. Yes, there’s a lot of sharing. There’s lots of blog posts or people clipping articles to put them out there for people to read. But it’s scattered and somewhat unsupported. There’s no driving force to get people to click through to sites with deeper information or other things that brands do to support campaigns.

Tom’s Take

You’re going to disagree with me and I don’t blame you one bit. You may not like my idea about getting more brand support on Mastodon but you can’t deny that the platform needs users with experience to grow things. And if you keep up the hostility you’re going to find people choosing to stay on platforms that support them instead of wading into the pool where they feel unwelcome.

Consuming Content the Way You Want

Posted on by
1

One of the true hidden gems of being a part of a big community is the ability to discuss ideas and see different perspectives. It’s one of the reasons why I enjoy working at Tech Field Day and why I’m lamenting the death spiral of Twitter. My move to Mastodon is picking up steam and I’m slowly replicating the way that I consume content and interact there but it’s very much the same way I felt about Twitter thirteen years ago. There’s promise but it needs work.

As I thought about my journey with social media and discussed it with people in the community I realized that a large part of what has me so frustrated is the way in which my experience has been co-opted into a kind of performative mess. Social media is becoming less about idea exchange and more about broadcast.

Give and Take

When I first started out on Twitter I could post things that were interesting to me. I could craft the way I posted those short updates. Did I want to be factual and dry? Or should I be more humorous and snarky? I crafted my own voice as I shared with others. My community grew organically. People that were interested in what I had to say joined up. Others chose to stick with their own circles. The key is that I was allowed to develop what I wanted to present to those around me.

As time went on I realized that I was an aberration in the grand scheme of Twitter. I made content. I offered opinions and analysis. I was a power user. Twitter wasn’t filled with power users. It was filled with passive consumers of content. Twitter wasn’t overly concerned with enabling features that allowed users like me to have an easier time. Instead, it was focused on delivering content to the passive audience. Content that Twitter determined was either interesting enough to keep users coming back to the service or generated enough revenue to keep the lights on.

That shift happens in pretty much every social platform that I’ve been a part of. Facebook moved from reading through other people’s status updates about their dogs or their lunch and into a parade of short form videos about craft projects or memes about Star Wars. Every interaction with those posts just enhanced the algorithm to show me more of them. Facebook only shoves more of what you see into your face. It doesn’t take what you create and build from there.

The algorithms that run these services now don’t care about you. They don’t facilitate the discussions and information exchange that make us all better. Instead, they feed us mindless interaction. They give us 60-word posts about a topic with vapid insights or any one of a number of endless popcorn videos about “life hacks” or people having accidents or, worse yet, very clever advertising that looks like a random person posting about how amazing a t-shirt is.

Does It Ad Up?

If you’re thinking to yourself this is starting to sound a lot like television advertising, you’re not far off the mark. The explosion of content that has been pushed in front of us is all about the advertising. It’s either brands that are looking to have users buy their product or service or it’s services looking to gain tons of users for other reasons.The advertising dollar rules all now.

This isn’t a new thing. Anyone that tries to tell you that invasive advertising is a modern construct has never opened up a copy of Computer Shopper magazine from the 90s or enjoyed hearing the host of a 60s game show shilling for Lucky Strike cigarettes. Advertising has always been a huge part of the content that we consume.

Modern YouTube videos have pre-roll ads and breaks in the middle for more ads. Podcasts have one or two ad reads, either by the hosts or through a slick, produced read. For a society that hates advertising we sure don’t mind taking money from them when they want to place an ad in the content we’re creating. Yet unless we’re willing to bankroll our own platforms completely we’re stuck with the way that those platforms make money.

This all comes together in an insidious way. The algorithms show us things out of order because they want to grab our attention. The system wants to weave in content we might enjoy along with ads that pay for the platform alongside of the content we actually want to see. Unlike broadcast television, which has specific rules about advertising, these systems can flood us with content that is designed to make us stick around or pay for something that someone wanted us to buy.

At no point in that whole process did we see highlighting of blog posts (unless they were boosted with ads) or bringing conversations to the top of the feed because we’ve interacted with those people. Power users and non-sponsored content creators are a drag on the system. Because they’re not interesting enough to draw in the regular users, unless they’re famous, and they don’t pay the platform to prioritize that content.

As the social network matures and relies less and less on users to create the interactions that sustains the user base it flips the model to be more focused on providing for the brands that pay to keep the lights on and the popcorn-style content that keeps the users hanging around. That’s the ultimate reason why the twilight of social media platforms feels so wasteful. What was once a place to grow and expand your horizons becomes the same mindless drivel that we see on TV. A late-stage social network is practically indistinguishable from what The History Channel has turned into.

Tom’s Take

I want Mastodon to succeed. I want the idea exchange to return. There are many on the platform right now that are hostile to brands because they worry about the inevitable slide into the advertising model. That doesn’t happen because of the brands themselves. The move happens when users grow and the platform needs to keep them around. When the costs of running the infrastructure grow past the ability of the users to support it. Here’s hoping the idea exchange and learning continue to be the primary focus for the time being. At least until the next new things comes along.

Perfection Paralysis

Posted on by
Reply

This is a sort of companion piece to my post last week because I saw a very short post here about doing less. It really hit home with me because I’m just as bad as Shawn about wanting everything to be perfect when I write it or create it.

Maximizing Mistakes

One of the things that I’ve noticed in a lot of content that I’ve been consuming recently is the inclusion of mistakes. When you’re writing you have ample access to a backspace key so typos shouldn’t exist (and autocorrect can bugger off). But in video and audio content you can often make a mistake and not even realize it. Flubbing a word or needed to do a retake for something happens quite often, even if you never see or hear them.

What has me curious and a bit interested is that more of those quick errors are making it in. These are things that could easily be fixed in post production and yet they stay. It’s almost like the creators are admitting that mistakes happen and it’s hard to read scripts perfectly every time like some kind of robot. Honest mistakes over things like pronunciation or difficult word combinations help remind us that not everything needs to be exactly perfect every time.

That’s not to say that you can get away with not doing things with the appropriate amount of practice. The difference between a simple mistake in a long passage of text and a haphazard idea just thrown out there without care is very apparent. As I tell the people that I work with for public speaking, the more something sounds off the cuff the more practice went into it to make it sound natural.

Accumulating Assets

My friend Ivan Pepelnjak reached out to me after my last post and reminded me of something he wrote a decade ago that talks about his view of the creative process. One of the big takeaways for me was the section on ideas. It’s important to realize that nothing will spring forward from your mind completely realized.

It’s a lot like baking. The ingredients are easy enough to measure. The trick is mixing them together. You have to add the right ideas in the right amounts and then let them mix together and even settle a little bit before you can make something out of them. However, you also have to be careful about how you go about doing it. Mixing merengue is a very different skill than a pound cake. Some things shouldn’t be mixed too much lest they become ruined by the extra attention. It is entirely possible to do too much to ideas without realizing it.

Tom’s Take

If you find yourself struggling with creativity or need to figure out a way to make something happen don’t be afraid to mix things up a little. Go for a walk. Play some music to force your brain into a new space. Look over your collection of half-formed ideas and see what pops up. Make something happen to change the status quo. You’d be surprised what might happen. But above all don’t get stuck on the idea that it needs to be perfect. The best ideas are very often imperfect.

Content Creation Complications

Posted on by
1

If you’ve noticed my regular blog posts have been a bit irregular as of late you’re not alone. I’m honestly working through a bit of writer’s block as of late. The irony is that I’m not running out of things to talk about. I’m actually running out of time to talk about them the way that I want.

Putting in the Work

By now you, my dear readers, know that I’m not going to put out a post of 200-300 words just to put something out during the week. I’d rather spend some time looking into a topic and creating something that informs or encourages discussion. That means having sources or doing research.

Research takes time. Ironically enough I’ve always had a much easier time writing things so long as I have the info to pull from in my head. One of the side effects of neurodivergence that I’ve learned about recently is that neurodivergent people tend to write their ‘first draft’ in their head throughout the creation process. Rather than writing and rewriting over and over again I pool all the information in my brain and work through it all to put down my final thoughts. That means what comes out is what I want to say.

However, the time it takes to make that content soup isn’t immediate. Sometimes I find myself doing a massive amount of research to learn about something that ultimately becomes two or three sentences. The rest of the information gets discarded or filed away for use later on in something that might be totally unrelated.

Lightning Bolts

Now you probably see the difficulty in the content creation process when it happens like that. When I’m motivated to write something the words are flowing as I create and edit on the fly. I have lots to say about things and I often change course in mid-stream to pivot into an entirely different idea.

However, when I’m not feeling it the content is a bit harder to create. I have starter ideas that need to germinate but just like growing a plant it takes time. Sometimes that happens when I listen to a podcast or get a spark. Other times I’m walking in circles in my backyard hoping for a bolt from the blue to hit me with inspiration. When that doesn’t happen I just find myself struggling to come up with anything that can develop into a few hundred words.

I’ve been told by many friends that this is how the creative process feels for them all the time. They have ideas but no way to gain the inspiration to write them down. I would hope that there are ways to create and inspire that kind of creative process frequently. I can honestly say that it sucks when you can’t create because the information is stuck in there and it wants to come out. I just can’t make it do the work!

Tom’s Take

The behind-the-scenes part of content creation isn’t easy. It’s also much less glamorous than you might imagine. Remember that when you wonder how you’re going to create something. Don’t worry about making it perfect but make sure to get it all down. Keep yourself to your schedules and make something happen. Otherwise you’re going to be wandering in circles until you do.