Part I: The introvert

But this is a post about people, not security keys, so let’s talk about introverts.

Introverts are the dark matter of the social universe. If you measure the world of people by easy means, like meetup groups or Facebook pages or tweets or people who are willing to pick up the phone when an unknown person calls with a survey, you will get a massive undercount of introverts. Nobody ever shows up to Introvert Club meetings.

But every introvert has a family, so that is your most likely means of running into an introvert. When somebody tells you stories about the aunt or grandfather who doesn’t get out much (invariably accompanied with some comment about how they’re a little odd), there’s your introvert sighting. Most introverts have jobs or go to a school, so you might be able to sight one or two there. They try to stay quiet and out of the way, and are often forgotten. At five o’clock, they disappear from the social grid.

So, you’re an introvert with some creative energy. Just because you don’t want to hang out with pals doesn’t mean that you have no curiosity about the world. What could you do?

In the last couple of decades, the answer to the introvert’s dilemma was easy: get a computer and learn to code. Like a novelist (another popular introvert career path), you can create a new world using only words. Being an introvert is even beneficial here, because writing good code is time-intensive and you don’t have idle socialization competing for your time.

This is where I was as a kid. I couldn’t build physical things, because I’m a klutz and we didn’t have the money for parts. I was socially inept, to say the least. But I could spend time at the school computer lab, and I could borrow time on the PC of a friend who probably only put up with me because we’re both named Ben.

I don’t really remember what I built, and doubt any of it was very good. I recall writing something to draw Mandelbrot sets, and some basic physics stuff. It doesn’t matter; what does matter is that I liked doing it, and it felt better than the alternatives.

I sometimes worry that I’m stuck in fifth grade, where I got lots of positive feedback for being good at solving little problems and writing code-like things. I certainly still spend most of my time doing things along those lines.

I felt that same sense of empowerment all over again when I had access to the web. I was granted avocado.caltech.edu, back when the world was loose enough that Caltech’s sysadmins could hand out domain names like that, and a pal and I typed up a joke site for the Caltech Divinity School, with some verbiage about the physical chemistry of transubstantiation. The dozen people who saw it thought it was funny.

The Caltech Divinity School web site. It uses an HTML table which my pal was never quite happy with.

Of course, I built my do-it-yourself site on a laptop built in a factory, running an operating system, with a text editor and a network stack that could serve files to users. None of that detracted from the sense of DIY wonder of it all.

What kills that DIY wonder? Pulling out a credit card dampens it. Filling in registration forms definitely dampens it. If a tool is so well-built that solving the problem consists of just starting the tool up, my sense of wonder has gone from “Look what I did” to “Look what these other people did”, which is time-efficient but not especially fun. Building something from Legos takes enough personal effort and small-scale creativity that it feels like an achievement when the thing is built, but an Ikea end table is so pre-assembled that putting it together just feels like a little chore.