Ego Death: Great work happens between people, not inside of a single brain. A creative idea happens when open minds clash, not due to the superior spirit of a genius. Ego Death is the first step to becoming a Design master. The next step is unclear. Nobody has become a design master yet because we are still trying to kill our egos.

Elevator Rule: Based on the junior‘s misguided tendency to talk about a client meeting while exiting their building. This often happens in an elevator, hence our expression “Elevator Rule!” which states that you may not talk about the meeting (in either a good or a bad way) until we enter a new, closed environment. Apart from being highly unprofessional, prematurely talking about the meeting also works against the Post Meeting Group Meditation which we need to process all the information we received via the High Speed Camera.

Entropy: Arch enemy. Nemesis. Entropy is the mathematical opposite of Information and the antidote to Redundancy. Digital entropy in information systems does to our minds what we are currently doing to our environment. You counter Digital entropy by changing processes.

EU: The European Union, known for unfairly regulating US tech companies. While US corporations have successfully undermined their judicial system with an organized, legal form of corruption called lobbying, they have not achieved anything similar with the European Parliament yet. This makes Europe the only place that dares to create laws that guarantee that the market and not the strongest corporations decide what products we can buy or make. With its so called DMA the EU has angered (cross-reference: Apple Enthusiast)s in particular. Apple Enthusiasts who oppose the EU tend to falsely quote the GDPR as an example of how wrong the EU is while ignoring that it aligns with Apple’s key market differentiator: Privacy protection. As the debate around CSAM illustrates, the EU is not perfect either.

Europe: Continent. From the tech optimist’s point of view, Europe is a bit like the US, but dumber. Since the US market is 1.5 larger with 75% of Europe’s population, Europeans must therefore be around half as intelligent and right as Americans. This is because in radical capitalism both intelligence and justice are equal to capital. Governed by a confusing crossover of local governments and the EU, Europe is considered a doomed, ridiculous, wrong place. Meanwhile the tech optimist’s moral duty is to ridicule Europe in defense of the Anglo-Saxon Adam Smith against the more continental Karl Marx.

Everybody is always somewhat right: “Everybody is always somewhat right” can mean “Okay, there is a tiny grain of truth in there and I do see it, but it is tied to a very extreme or rare premise that we consciously ignore because we can’t make everybody happy.” Instead, extract whatever tiny truth lives in the highly negative argument and see if we can work with just that. Part of iA’s Metaphysics.

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen: Borrowed from a popular sci-fi movie. Used when things go badly wrong, or when you are winning through pure luck and against all expectations.

Explicit: Reaction to developer or project management speech loaded with abbreviations. Reference to explicit lyrics in music. Internal Github tag that denounces overuse of tech lingo in a description or discussion. If a Github entry is flagged “Explicit”, the author is advised to explain in simple words what they previously expressed using obscure tech acronyms.