loading . . . I want to stop defining by the negative Earlier this year, Vivek and I gave a talk at IndiaFoss about our practice at Diagram Chasing.
By all metrics, it went well. I think even now, by a small margin, it is one of the most-viewed videos from this yearâs conference. Plenty of people seemed to appreciate the talk, even though we werenât on the main track. Weâve even been asked to give versions of it in two or three other places over the last couple of months. Overall, the reception has been lovely. I donât know exactly why it resonated so much, but I am grateful that it did.
However, there is something I said on one specific slide that has been on my mind ever since. Itâs a small detailâa friend even told me I shouldnât hang on to itâbut the more I see this pattern in myself and others, the more it embarrasses me. In one of the early slides (18th slide out of 99), while introducing our projects, I put up text that read:
> _We aim to create things with data that arenât the same old dashboards or dry summaries_
Slide from our talk, which says 'We aim to create things with data that aren't the same old dashboards'
Then, I went on to talk about what we _are_ doing. But in hindsight, I have the uncomfortable realization that at that moment I had not really articulated what Diagram Chasing is, I had only described it in simple terms by stating what it is _not_. That is a strange way to operate, and certainly not how I want to be as a creative person.
I imagine there was someone sitting in the audience who loves building dashboards. Or perhaps someone who has a day job building dashboards that doesnât allow them enough time to do anything else. Heck, I build dashboards at work. At that moment, near the very beginning of my talk, I likely alienated them. Even if they enjoyed the rest of the presentation, for a split second, I made them feel like I was posturing above them.
Why did I do that? I donât think it was malicious. I think I did it because, as creative people, it is very easy to be critical. It is easy to put something else down or talk about why you are ânot like the others.â It is the path of least resistance. Sharing a negative attitude about a third partyâwhether a person, a group, or a methodâis often a faster, stronger bonding agent than sharing a positive one. Itâs easy to stand on a stage and bond with an audience by pointing at âboring corporate reportsâ and saying, âWe arenât that.â It creates an instant âin-groupâ of cool, creative people and an âout-groupâ of boring conformists or methods we look down upon. There is a cheap dopamine hit of superiority, but this, I think, is a brittle form of identity.
If your entire definition is âI am not X,â you are still controlled by X. You depend on the existence of the âboring dashboardâ to validate your existence as the âexciting storyteller.â You havenât actually said what you stand for, what youâre trying to build, what drives this specific work/activity/process. Youâve just pointed at something else and said ânot that.â It is much harder to do the work of articulating what _you_ actually are and explain it on its own merits.
From what I can tell, this pattern is common to the dataviz community, the FOSS community, the design community, and other creative circles Iâve been a part of. I donât think itâs because people are negative; I think itâs because differentiation is difficult. Wherever you find passionate people with strong opinions on âthe better wayâ to do things, the quickest way to carve out a niche is to define it in opposition to a vague status quo.
However, I am not arguing for toxic positivity. I recently read the Resonant Computing Manifesto, and maybe the problem isnât the criticism itself but the lack of a good follow-through. The manifesto is actually full of negative definition. It opens by dunking on âfeeds engineered to hijack attentionâ and warnings of a dystopian future, but uses that criticism to pivot toward a positive, specific vision. The resulting articulation is substantial enough that it doesnât need to position itself against something else to make sense.
Going forward, I want to try harder to articulate that kind of vision. I realize I wonât always have the time or energy to do this perfectly, and sometimes ânot Xâ is the only shorthand that fits on the slide, but it feels like the right aspiration.
For now, Diagram Chasing wants to build news applications and write stories on public data. That is the work. No comparison required.
Maybe this? And more. https://aman.bh/blog/2025/i-want-to-stop-defining-by-the-negative
