The strange case of Jacob Freeze (or why most PowerPoint sucks)

How can any of us be brilliant at everything? The revolution of computer technology is that now all of us can dabble in art, communication, arithmetic and business planning. Most of us aren't very good in our best category and we usually stink in our worst. This is why most PowerPoint is so awful, because the format encourages business authors to try to postulate, evince, sketch, write, lay out, calculate, organize and conclude at the same moment of creation. Edward Tufte, the noted visual-display-of-information author, goes so far as to blame the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster on one poorly conceived PowerPoint slide.

Which brings us to the brilliant exception of Jacob Freeze. Freeze is an intense author/artist/analyst whose most recent post on Daily Kos dissects how Atlanta and its conservative politics are shriveling as the result of drought.

Considering the fantastic cloud of ambiguity that the petroleum industry and its friends throw over every environmental issue, it's probably a good idea to be explicit about the sort of thing that you would normally expect any idiot to understand. So... when Atlanta runs out of water, Atlanta will die.

Whatever your politics, you have to admire the attack, a verbal equivalent of a boxer in a bad street fight. Which brings us to our next investigation of Jacob Freeze. He's actually an artist producing work such as this:


And this:


While writing this:

The United States is happy to reserve the privilege of 'humanitarian war' for itself and Israel, preserving 'universal human rights' against the threat of terrorism, but now that Turkey is claiming the same privilege to defend itself against Kurdish terrorists, 'the community of civilized nations' has undergone a strange contraction.

A few years ago, souls like Jacob Freeze would have been confined to a news room, or an art gallery, or a photo studio shooting newlyweds -- but only one of them. Now, thanks to connections and computers, he can move from media to media.

Professor Tufte missed the point. Sure, PowerPoint may have messed the shuttle planning logic. But the problem wasn't software; it's just we all can't communicate on every level as well as Jacob Freeze.