Gamifying the Mess

I responded to Kevin’s post from June 3 by annotating with Hypothes.is.

Here is a screencast of my responses to his page:

Here is a screencast of the annotations and Kevin’s original post side-by-side with some play-by-play commentary:

I may be Captain Obvious here, but it is clear to me (as I also state in the YouTube just above here) that Kevin’s post is the ship and the annotations are the anchor. Or a better nautical term (both naval and aero) might be “trim tab”.  Buckminster Fuller brought me to a much finer understanding of this metaphor.

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.

It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.

So I said, call me Trim Tab.

— Buckminster Fuller