Funny you should mention the F word... while reading "The Great Divide", I was thinking about the "Flash designer vs. Flash Developer" situation we had before the iPhone :)
Thanks for taking the time, that is an illuminating point.
I remember spending countless hours arguing with someone who genuinely believed 'greed is good', a total waste of time, no progress whatsoever on either side.
Thinking about it now, my sparring partners attitude makes some sense, if 'advancing our material condition' is indeed the end game. It's like two engineers arguing about implementation details, without realizing they are designing different apps.
Buzzwords like 'Goal Oriented' or 'Understand your clients motivation' fly around, but your point gives them more dimension. Thanks.
People use the 'set in stone' phrase all the time, it puts a different spin on it when 6000 years later, we are still analyzing some poor guys tax returns. This is fascinating stuff, too bad data mining the mundane lives of social media users pays better.
Other than my own list of unread bookmarks, Google Readers signal to noise ratio (as a platform) was second to none. The feeds I followed would post 95% worthwhile content. A blog post is like a dinner speech, don't want to miss it. In social media the dinner speech is also available, only sandwiched somewhere between all the small talk and pleasantries. I never found a replacement, and quite a few people I followed cut down on blogging.
I got to live parallel to some of this. In the early 00's Agencies would send their designers/creatives/frontend devs to conferences that centered around Flash. Along with marketing talks and inspirational self help crap, the events gave a platform for some very smart/creative individuals. The enthusiasm drove a circle of innovation and competitiveness, which was good fun to watch. The scene has somewhat fallen off my radar since those days, but articles like this remind me of my soft spot for it.