Wonking and Geeking
Aug. 10th, 2009 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI hung out with Omaha at a picnic held by various successful factions of the Democratic party, met with a senator, a representative, and a county councilmember, ate some really good hamburgers and listened to some fairly good, but excessively amplified, folk music.
I discovered that there is a difference between wonk and geek. Wonk is defined as "a person preoccupied with arcane details or procedures in a specialized field," and that might sound geeky, it's not, really. There's a connotative difference that leads wonks to being very different beasts.
Geekiness is rarely exhausting. When geeks get together in a room, they turn the music down and set to exploring a problem space. The coalition of minds is always greater than its parts; geeks exchange information rapidly, cut each other off as they strive for conclusions, and seek solutions to the problems they have set for themselves and each other or, quite often, discuss the scope of the problem space and the potential pitfalls of enlarging it. Geeks might go home tired, but they are rarely exhausted; usually, an encounter with fellow geeks in exhilirating.
In contrast, wonkiness is often exhausting. It's also somewhat discordant. Geeks, for example, would never allow the music to be so loud as to discourage communication. If anything, I suspect the music came from the Democratic tradition of being a bottom-up, "many concerns all sorta moving in the same direction" institution. But working through that wore me out.
A failure of geek is lessons learned, not mortal blows. A good geek is allowed to fail, as long as progress toward a minimum viable product until a fatal assumption is hit, at which point the project diverges, the useful features and lessons are kept, and a new minimum viable product target is set.
A failure of wonk, however, often comes with loss of reputation and power that can be devastating. The people on your blackberry stop answering the phones, and rebuilding a network can take years. Dealing with people constantly has to be exhausting, even for the most social person, especially when you're tracking a number of people larger than your monkeysphere. Makes me wonder if David Brooks's observation on how socially wrecked most congressmen are fits into this observation: they've attenuated the monkeysphere they need to be human, turning that space in the mental rolodex over to remembering the power relationships they have to maintain. Wonkiness is still engaged in a certain turf-warring mindset that comes with dealing with both people and power.
When I expressed this discovery to someone, she said, "But that's not what this is about. We're not here to solve anything. This picnic is just for fun." And then she immediately turned around and asked the senator what could be done to get the health care reform issue moving through Congress once more.
And that was typical. Everyone wanted to talk about how to solve the problem of the new, angry and disruptive elements appearing at town hall meetings and so forth. There were good suggestions. They were just hard to hear over the pointless folk singing.
I discovered that there is a difference between wonk and geek. Wonk is defined as "a person preoccupied with arcane details or procedures in a specialized field," and that might sound geeky, it's not, really. There's a connotative difference that leads wonks to being very different beasts.
Geekiness is rarely exhausting. When geeks get together in a room, they turn the music down and set to exploring a problem space. The coalition of minds is always greater than its parts; geeks exchange information rapidly, cut each other off as they strive for conclusions, and seek solutions to the problems they have set for themselves and each other or, quite often, discuss the scope of the problem space and the potential pitfalls of enlarging it. Geeks might go home tired, but they are rarely exhausted; usually, an encounter with fellow geeks in exhilirating.
In contrast, wonkiness is often exhausting. It's also somewhat discordant. Geeks, for example, would never allow the music to be so loud as to discourage communication. If anything, I suspect the music came from the Democratic tradition of being a bottom-up, "many concerns all sorta moving in the same direction" institution. But working through that wore me out.
A failure of geek is lessons learned, not mortal blows. A good geek is allowed to fail, as long as progress toward a minimum viable product until a fatal assumption is hit, at which point the project diverges, the useful features and lessons are kept, and a new minimum viable product target is set.
A failure of wonk, however, often comes with loss of reputation and power that can be devastating. The people on your blackberry stop answering the phones, and rebuilding a network can take years. Dealing with people constantly has to be exhausting, even for the most social person, especially when you're tracking a number of people larger than your monkeysphere. Makes me wonder if David Brooks's observation on how socially wrecked most congressmen are fits into this observation: they've attenuated the monkeysphere they need to be human, turning that space in the mental rolodex over to remembering the power relationships they have to maintain. Wonkiness is still engaged in a certain turf-warring mindset that comes with dealing with both people and power.
When I expressed this discovery to someone, she said, "But that's not what this is about. We're not here to solve anything. This picnic is just for fun." And then she immediately turned around and asked the senator what could be done to get the health care reform issue moving through Congress once more.
And that was typical. Everyone wanted to talk about how to solve the problem of the new, angry and disruptive elements appearing at town hall meetings and so forth. There were good suggestions. They were just hard to hear over the pointless folk singing.
