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Good morning, RailsConf 2014! How are you guys doing? Let's do a big clap for yourselves. I haven't done anything yet, but clap for you... louder, louder, yes! While I was watching these all-stars get their awards, I realized I was responsible for 330 gems in that moment. I'm feeling so good at Ruby right now.
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Take that, No Jas! What I was very excited about was Katrina's victory. I was sitting two seats next to her and felt like maybe I had something to do with it. I didn’t, but it’s nice to feel certain things, even if you're not responsible.
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I want to start at the beginning for me, as far back as I can go with documentation. This is a photo of my mother's grandfather, my great-grandfather, Benjamin Lonesome. He was born just as slavery was wrapping up in the U.S., in Caroline County, Virginia. He taught himself to read and moved to Washington, D.C., where he helped build roads and design the highway system. He had several kids, one of whom was my mother's mother, Lorraine Martin. She was a very proud and accomplished woman.
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I found out much later in my life, and at the end of my mother's own life, that she was the first black employee at the U.S. Supreme Court building. This is something my mother never told me or my older sister; it was a weird family secret to keep. Family secrets are supposed to be embarrassing—it’s like someone had a leg longer than the other or someone voted for he who should not be named. But it turns out grandma was a civil rights hero! Don't tell people, they might respect us, like what's the downside? I can't understand exactly, but they had a very fractured relationship. My sister and I found out about this historic fact by going through my mother’s possessions after she passed away. We found this clip and thought, why is grandma hanging out with Jimmy Carter? Is there another story we don’t know about?
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Yeah, my grandmother and I didn’t have much of a relationship. I heard stories, I remember she smelled like orange juice, cigarette smoke, and vodka. That was a strong memory for a five-year-old boy. She was so busy with her own life; she traveled, had this job, was active in her church, and wasn’t always excited about being a mom to my mother. I can’t understand how she could do that because this is my mother at age four—super adorable! Who wouldn’t want to be around that? Look at those cheeks. You can see where I get my cuteness from; it's pretty obvious.
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She shipped my mother off at age eight, the year was 1948, to a rural Catholic boarding school in Pennsylvania. My mother didn’t like it, and I know she didn’t like it because she wrote a letter stating her feelings. For those who can't see this, I will share the text. "Dear mother, I am having fun, but I do not like it here. I am mad at you. Please send me some cookies and a sparkle plenty doll. They can have dolls here; please send it, because I do not have anything to play with. Yours truly, Arnita." That’s a sad state of affairs, and to add more sadness, my mom's handwriting was pretty bad.
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But in the lower left corner, you see some very clear, easy-to-read handwriting which simply says, "If your little girl is dissatisfied, we'd be glad to have her. Signed: Sister." I think when she wrote it, she barely moved a muscle. This was an early prototype of the NSA prism program! They were testing it out on would-be terrorists, also known as little black girls who wanted cookies. They knew we had to nip those rights in the bud before they got out of hand.
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My mom didn’t last long in the school; she came back and finished up in D.C. She became a features editor at her high school newspaper. She's here dressed very appropriately for the era, with a dress cut below the knees and a basket presumably filled with positive affirmations about the state of democracy in America... I am sure of it. It was a happy time; it was the 50s, and everything was great. Her social network shifted as she started hanging out with a different crowd, one that looked more like this.
00:05:12.100
This was a good friend of my mom's at the time; his name was El Dorado. I don’t know many details except that his name was El Dorado. And when you look at all the cool trends and what's happening in hip hop and culture, none of it matters. The last cool human to walk the Earth was El Dorado. Look at him again and let it sink in; allow your own lack of cool to just be out there. I feel it too!
00:06:16.400
Every time I show this slide, I feel a little less awesome. Then, my mom's out in the street, metaphorically challenging authority in a sense. This is her walking down Sixteenth Street Northwest, Washington, D.C., where I would later grow up, with Malcolm X Park in the background. Yay for me growing up, thank you so much for cheering for the hormonal process. And there's my mama right there in the middle with her eyes focused not on the prize but on the camera, because you never know—you might end up in a keynote presentation in the future. Selfies before it was cool!
00:07:01.300
When you have a mother like this, you don’t get normal reading materials as a kid. The first book I remember having as a small child was...how can I describe it? It looked really scary; it was like, was that blood? What is going on? I was just mad at people all of a sudden all the time. I didn’t know why I was protesting Cocoa Puffs. I didn’t have the arguments yet; I wasn’t strong enough intellectually to make that statement, but I was mad! Thanks, mom.
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This is the shot outside of our apartment, looking very much like a local grassroots economic activity that you're seeing here. Some artisanal, locally grown kind of things going on—very native local markets. My mom took these pictures of drug deals happening down the street. I still don't know why she took pictures of these things. She wasn’t an informant, and she didn’t like the cops either.
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I think she was simply anticipating the 20-year drug dealer reunion and figured she could sell the photos back later on! When you're on a roller coaster, it’s like, remember when this happened? This is my middle school graduation; that’s my older sister, back-to-back with me. Her name is Belinda, and she lives in Lansing, Michigan. She was all right for a living; that’s good that you guys are applauding!
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She was a journalist for over 20 years, worked at the Dallas Morning News, worked for Gannett newspapers, and was the digital news director and assistant managing editor at the same time as I was director of digital at The Onion. So we basically had the same job except... I remember having arguments with her, not arguments really, just observations from work as we launched our iPhone app.
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Her web traffic was such and such, and she would say, "But I do the real news!" I was winning likes, but also... sadly, that’s my mom obviously in the center, and that’s me with a little flair of rebellion, wearing my Kente cloth as a tie; corporate rebellion, I loved it. So here's how this family worked: my mother was the one raising us.
00:10:07.520
To finance that raising, she had a job as a systems analyst for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. She was a computer programmer and started doing this in the late 1970s. She did not have a formal college education; not a complete one. I remember sitting in community college classes with her as she tried to bolster her IT and tech skills.
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She went from being a domestic worker and dinner cook to a paralegal assistant, and then to a GS something in the government ranking system, which enabled us to afford the school I was graduating from here, and my sister was going off to become a journalist, all because of computer programming. She is the original Black Girls Code; that’s my mom, without any actual nonprofit behind it!
00:11:07.110
And this also had another big influence on me. I had the apartheid thing in my brain from an early age, and hacking into my awareness as well. But we had computers constantly as kids and were the first family on the block with one. I was playing Dr. J and Larry Bird on the internet super early, thanks to my school in 1993.
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This is a great shot my sister captured: this is me graduating from Harvard University in 1999. My mom embraced me and she said, "We did it!" I was like, what do you mean? I took the test, but it was metaphorical. Indeed, in many practical ways, we did this because of the generations that took to create this moment.
00:12:08.240
Because of the mentors I had, the studies I put in, and the investment—financial, moral, and caloric—that had been made in me to get to this point. Now, when I showed up on campus, I was convinced I was going to be a computer science major. I had been a super-internet kid, always fixing my friends' computers. I took the intro to computer science class in the fall of 1995, which meant... well, you guessed it, I didn’t end up majoring in computer science.
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I discovered the power of the semicolon to ruin everything. Everything! Like, if you misplace a semicolon in code, people still get what you mean, right? They may get judgmental, but they don’t act like you said nothing. Like...15 pages in, I found out I had said nothing about all my loops and positions! So I said, okay programming, I’m going to take a little break from you. I shifted my focus to philosophy, which was actually not that far off—a different sort of anal retentive thinking in terms of the analytic world and logic and everything.
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I couldn't fully escape that. I was one of the first online editors at the Harvard Crimson, our newspaper, and paid for school with a job testing software. I’ve tried to stay close to this world even as I've drifted from the hardcore flavors of it. But a lot of it comes down to this woman who helped make that possible—not my sister; she ended up on an even more beautiful path.
00:14:10.400
I think she started teaching yoga. She got really excited about yoga and was bothered by the notion of yoga being just the province of people who looked a certain way. So she started teaching it for free on a donation-based model in the neighborhood of Lansing, and eventually left the newspapers altogether to teach yoga full-time; which I think reflects poorly on the future of the newspaper industry! I want to give a shoutout to my sister's Twitter account; she does amazing work. If you're in the Midwest, check it out!
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So, what happens after this foundation? Well, I ended up at America’s finest news source, working for The Onion for five years. It was a fantastic way to get my job; they posted a position for a political editor in the fall of 2007, and I had just moved to New York from Boston. I thought, "That’s my job!" They don’t know it yet, but they will realize it soon. I applied for the job and got through part of the interview process, and they said, "Would you like to be the web editor as well and oversee everything we are doing online?" I was like, sure!
00:15:25.980
So, that sounded like another job, right? I mean, you’re going to pay me the same for more work? But of course, I said yes because it was the greatest job I ever had. I got to play around and have fun there. I also wrote a book towards the tail end of my time there, a very humble identity guide with a very subtle marketing message that I wish I wouldn’t have pushed too heavily. Some people were so heavy-handed with buy-buy guides that I encouraged them to come to this on their own terms, to face the consequences.
00:16:28.050
So, what's been fun about this is that the book is a memoir—it covers some of the ground I just did but in a lot more words, so you don’t even have to read those chapters. It also includes a satirical guide about how to be the black friend, how to speak for all black people, how to be the black employee, and how to be the next black president. There are also interviews I conducted with experts I called the black panel, who were all born black, giving them decades of experience in the game, tackling essential questions like, when did you first realize you were black?
00:17:43.780
Asking important questions like: How black are you? Did you ever wish you weren't black? Spoiler alert: The best part about my control group was that I didn’t just want any white guy; I wanted one of the whitest guys I could find, so I went to Canada. I also wanted someone who had some authority, so I got Christian Lander, who wrote the stuff White People Like and came up with that whole blog. He did a great job representing white interests.
00:18:19.090
For those of you who are white (and there are a couple of you), you have a great ambassador in Christian Lander. Send him your vote of support, or rather whatever it is you do in your councils. I just watched Game of Thrones, and I feel like it’s all messy; he should get a thumbs-up from me. Another fun aspect of all this has been watching people play with the meme of the book. I’ve really enjoyed seeing Instagram's take on how to be black.
00:19:16.420
You start to see this blend of old school editorial with the flattered network world where everybody can publish, and photos start to emerge on this theme. Every image has a story of at least a thousand words, preferably less if you have a good editor! In this case, the man holding the book prior to this photo was white; he still is... the book is not that good—a spoiler alert! You’re going to stay whatever you are. But he walked into the subway and was coincidentally surrounded by a group of black men who were curious about the object in his hands.
00:19:59.740
They said, "What, good sir, are you reading?"—and that’s just how older black men talk! Now, I don't know how many of you are in touch with that, but it was decided last week that their faces capture the full range of reactions I’ve seen on the internet to the book. You’ve got Dopey Smurf on the left who doesn’t get it, checking out not for him; that’s okay, not everything is for everybody.
00:20:41.700
Then, you've got the super engaged reader who is probably going to miss the train because he's so into it. He's got a healthy skepticism that's going to take him to Reddit or some Twitter hashtag later, but right now he’s building up his arguments. Then, you’ve got the brother on the right who’s in a special case because he’s offended; he doesn’t need some stupid book to tell him how to be black! Obviously, look at his matching turtleneck, leather jacket, and baseball cap—he's got blackness on lockdown.
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Then you see people beginning to play around. Some of these photos are from Tumblr and some from Reddit. Every six to seven weeks, something actually pops up on Reddit, just like a clownfish; it forgets itself constantly. What I’ve found is fun is watching people have the same argument over and over again. The wisdom of crowds, I believe is what they call it, and you see people staging some interesting critiques.
00:22:35.850
The book has been assigned in schools, so make sure to get into that if credits are on the line. It becomes a growth market! Since then, I've tried to think about how to bring these threads together: storytelling, humor, and creativity into a home bigger than just my own body. I’m a finite being with limited capacity, and I’m going to die at some point. On the other hand, companies can live forever, and they have better tax benefits.
00:23:22.700
So, I started this company called Cultivated Wit as I left The Onion, based on this quote from Horace: a cultivated wit can persuade all the more artful ridicule over contentious issues.
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That’s our marching order, trying to bring these threads together. We are operating on several bands—at least one of those is doing marketing and digital storytelling instead of making beautiful campaigns. We merged with a design studio out of San Francisco to work on behalf of good clients to tell good stories. We also do an event series called Comedy Hack Day, which I’ll tell you more about later. It’s the best comedy show and definitely the best hackathon building tools!
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We’ve got a tiny software department of one developer. We feed him Red Bull and give him two hours of sunlight per week; he’s doing great! He’s a co-founder. Then we do speeches and workshops. We also have some fun things on the blog. Let’s walk through one of the engagements on our site. We created something called Section Four, and it’s like, "Do you care to join?" It’s casual, and here’s a glimpse.
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So the user engages by clicking through and providing their information. We ask some fun and silly questions like, "What’s your superpower?" and," How would you rate your experience so far?" Then, we can share that with our community. It's been a huge hit with our audience.
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The fun thing we've noticed is how people enjoy engaging with outrageous scenarios when prompted. Being on top of the current trends can generate some interesting discussions. In that spirit, we wanted to explore further how comedy and tech can cross over in unique ways.
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So at our Comedy Hack Day, we encourage developers and comedians to pair up, resulting in something awesome. An example is Sly Sound, which was built by a team who wanted to create an app similar to Shazam but without the embarrassment of people around you knowing what you’re doing. It disguises itself as your Twitter feed while tracking music in the background.
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When it identifies a track, it texts you the information! Essentially, you look like a cool person casually checking Twitter. We humorously refer to it as Shazam for hipsters. It’s a fun way to bridge the creativity of comedy and the innovation of coding.
00:28:10.120
The winning team from the last Comedy Hack event built a website that builds conspiracy theory websites dynamically. It’s a party game; input a proper noun or a person of note and it generates something like a comic book-style conspiracy site—it’s simply wild!
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I also received some fantastic updates from some other recent trips regarding how Google is blending improv comedy with their performance technology. They created something called where scripts that let players wear Google Glass, and we had this awesome interaction.
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Improv players could create their scenes in real time while seeing prompts, and it changed the speed and dynamics of creativity, which inspired new ways of co-creating experiences.
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To wrap it up, I want to encourage you to think about how the boundaries between comedy and technology are blurring, creating a new landscape for innovation and creativity. Embrace the chaos, enjoy the fun, and remember that the future belongs to those willing to imagine!
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Thank you for having me, and enjoy the rest of RailsConf 2014!
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My life at Rails is phenomenal!