It’s a long day, and a tiring one, but I am greatly encouraged by these simple thoughts:

We’re empowered. I know I am; let’s see about you:

Your desktop computer has a word processor with which you are empowered to create documents as complex and beautiful as a book hand-crafted by a whole shop-full of professional typographers of the Good Old Days.

Your desktop computer has a spreadsheet with which you are empowered to create detailed numerical analyses and financial summaries as convincing and comprehensive as those produced by a department full of professional accountants or analysts in the Good Old Days.

Your desktop computer has a development package with which you are empowered to create code capable of any computation, of any complexity, and with which any interface can be crafted to do anything a keyboard, mouse and screen can offer. Dammit, people, all possible software is right there, at your fingertips.

Yup. Empowered. So get cracking! You have no excuse to produce shoddy Times Roman documents filled with rambling and useless content, nor broken and bug-filled spreadsheets with the capacity to kill the people who trust your intelligence, nor sit passively by and sit and use the bland mass-produced software that’s given to you, when all along you could’ve Invented It Here instead.

Screw the editors, who merely Oppress! You! with their highfalutin demands for legibility and conciseness. Screw the slackers who think you “need” to be “professional” or “thoughtful” or “trained” in how to use something as simple as a spreadsheet! Bah. Everybody knows how to use spreadsheets. And coding. Well, coding… that’s still hard. Call the code monkeys in. We pay people to do that stuff.

At least for now.

But those other two things, dammit, they’re not hard at all. We know that, because we have tools right here. Powerful tools. Therefore, we can do that stuff for ourselves.

And what we do is the right thing to have done.

[later]

Hey, check it out! I have Visual Studio and IIS installed right here. I can do anything!

Somehow the day has gotten longer, and the world less safe.

[later yet]

Q: What’s do you get when you break up a Smart Mob into an organization made up of individuals?