Song of Shapes, Words and Paths

Three different kinds of humans exist in this planet. Shape rotators, wordcels and journey-shifters. You are usually a mix of one, two or all of these traits.

If you’ve been following nerdish and science fiction oriented Twitter and blogs, you might already be familiar with 'shape rotator' and 'wordcels', often in snarky or oblique contexts. In Roon's famous essay — A Song of Shapes and Words, he describes humans in these two archetypes.

In this essay, I would like to argue that there is another mode of thinking which is seldom mentioned — that of a 'journey shifter'. To draw the distinction, I will go through some examples of how shape rotators and wordcels operate, and then show how journey shifters have very different traits compared to wordcels and shape rotators.

But first, what are wordcels?

Wordcels

Wordcels are verbally gifted writers and speakers. They are usually great at the verbal portion of IQ tests consisting of vocabulary quizzes, logical tests, or even anagrams. They excel at using language as a technology for business strategy, diplomacy, and even political warfare, in some occasions.

Wordcels can now be found to use history as a tool to win political arguments. They're skilled at mining history, engaging in "offense archaelogy"— the excavation of words from the recent and distant past for some useful incident they can write up to further demoralize their political opposition. They have an increasing presence in psychological warfare that have become an equal contributor to physical warfare. As Balaji describes:

This is the scholarly version of going through someone’s old tweets. It’s weaponized history, history as opposition research. You simply can’t win an argument against such people on pure logic alone; you need facts, so you need history.

Wordcels break down language into words and pointers (that point the words to meanings and attributes), and have expertise in redefining those pointers and their meanings for some benefits. As Roon describes here, the wordcel can navigate complex mazes of abstractions that are just 'concepts' that haven't made any contact with the real world:

There are many verbally gifted writers and speakers that, when pressed to visualize some math problem in their mind's eye, must helplessly watch their normally high-octane intelligence sputter and fail. They often write or talk at a blistering clip, and can navigate complex mazes of abstractions — and yet, when it comes time to make contact with the real world or accomplish practical tasks, they may be helpless. 

The wordcel moniker describes more than just one’s level of verbal skill: it’s also a socioeconomic classifier that refers to people whose verbal ability borders on self-sabotage (thus the “-cel”). Perhaps they’re driven mad by political rage, postmodernism, and disconnection from reality. It might refer to the priestly figures who work in the culture factories of the New York Times with their incomes and social prestige both precipitously declining only for the unperturbed masses on the internet to tell them in unison: “learn to code”! There’s even an implication that these folks are entirely rent-seekers (wrong, but directionally interesting).

The prowess to manipulate such concepts gives them tremendous power in this age of social media. They could be skilled/incentivised to find errors in the speech of others, rip it apart, take the language out of context in the worst possible way, increasingly through the use of 'scissor labels'. These are truth claims engineered to create dissent that happen to be maximally divisive.

Some common examples of scissor labels used strategically by wordcels: "Make America Great Again" — This political slogan from the 2016 U.S. presidential election interpreted by supporters as a call to restore traditional values and prosperity, while critics saw it as a dog whistle for racism and exclusion. "Black Lives Matter" — A rallying cry for racial justice, but some perceived it as dismissive of other lives or critical of law enforcement. "There are only two genders" — A statement that aligns with certain traditional views but is seen by others as dismissive of non-binary and transgender identities.

Wordcels also shine at language framing. They're great at both the frontend swap, and the backend swap.

1. Frontend swap — Swapping the frontend while keeping the backend constant (aka rebranding). In this paper — Strategic Framing and Persuasive Messaging to Influence Climate Change Perceptions and Decisions, the researchers highlight how just a simple change of term from 'climate change' to 'global warming' could evoke a more visceral response from supporters thereby leading to more concrete action.
2. Backend swap — Swapping the backend while keeping the frontend constant (aka reinterpretation). Examples include: (a) Chinese communism under Deng Xiaoping [2]— Under his regime, the branding of the Chinese Communist Party was kept intact while embracing capitalism. (b) New Economic Policy (NEP) in Soviet Russia — Lenin introducing NEP in the early 1920s, reintroducing limited private enterprises (capitalism) under the guise of socialism.

All these are 'language as a technology' tactics. Their unique advantage lies in a fundamental flaw of the human mind — we often feel the emotions first, and then reason comes only next. For example, if someone desires good health (a passion), reason can suggest eating nutritious food or exercising, but it cannot generate the desire for health itself.[1]

Shape rotators

As the name suggests, they can rotate complex geometries in their mind.

We all know the opposite archetype as well: the brain genius engineer that can whip up a spaceship part in AutoCAD in hours and make it look easy, but uses the wrong “their” in emails. They have preternatural intuition for technical problems that supersedes common reasoning. It might even look like the stereotypical dad skills of someone who can navigate between any two points within 40 miles of their home without opening a map, or someone who’s great with their hands. They may be very good at details and bad at seeing the bigger picture. The demarcation isn’t just between STEM and humanities — you will absolutely find wordcels in the STEM domains — rather, it’s about modes of thinking. It’s about realism, thing-orientation over people-orientation, and investigative grounding in the tangible world.

Shape rotators are thing-oriented, whereas wordcels are people-oriented. The categorisation is justified, as they are two, very different modes of thinking.

The shape rotators have been a minor force until very recent history. Though they’ve produced a significant portion of human progress through feats of engineering excellence, they were rarely celebrated until the dawn of the Enlightenment, perhaps 500 years ago. While the long-lasting glory of the Roman aqueducts is renowned to this day, nobody knows the chief engineer behind the project (probably Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, but who’s counting). Today their stock is climbing to the moon. The world’s richest (self-made) men are almost uniformly engineers, computer scientists, or physicists. Vast portions of society that in a prior age might have been organized by government bureaucrats or private sector shot-callers have been handed over to cybernetic self-organizing systems designed and run by mathematical wizards. We have been witness to the slow, and then rapid transfer of power from the smooth-talking Don Drapers of boardroom acclaim to the multi-armed bandits of Facebook Ads.

Terrence Tao is a perfect example of a shape rotator. Here is a description of how he was doing his mathematical research in an altered state of consciousness:

For some problems, actual physical sensation can actually be useful. Many mathematicians, you will find, they wave their hands, or gesture somehow when thinking about a problem. … There was one time when I was trying to understand a very complicated geometric transformation in my head involving– I was rotating a lot of spheres at the same time. And the way I actually ended up visualizing this was actually lying down on the floor, closing my eyes, and rolling around. And I was staying at my aunt's place at the time. And she found me rolling on the floor with my eyes closed. And she asked me what I was doing. And I said, I was thinking about a math problem, and she didn't believe me.”

Journey shifters

Now that I've given a clear background of these two distinctions (you could read more on these dichotomies from Roon's essay which I've taken inspiration from), I'll now turn my attention to the third axes of what I would like to call as journey shifters.

Journey shifters are time travellers.

They are trained to imagine the 'invisible' and shift across multiple journeys in within their mind.

If the shape rotator is rotating shapes, and the wordcel is manipulating words, the journey shifter are making paths, and shifting across journeys. It's a song of shapes, words and paths.

We could broadly put CEOs, product managers, project managers, as well as other middle-management folks into this trajectory. They are unique, in the sense, that their job involves some or all aspects of 'scenario visualisation' for various situations ranging from forecasting, risk management, decision-making etc. They create new pathways, 'connecting the dots.

Founders can also be seen shifting across various pathways while trying to achieve the holy-grail of product-market fit. Balaji coins this term called an 'Idea Maze' where you are navigating various paths you could take and how those paths could either end up in success (exiting the maze) or failure (hitting the roadblock).

Apart from the founders and the middle-management class, service designers are also a unique case study as their bread and butter involves using this perspective within orgs: to shift between journeys. They are not (usually) making wireframes, or high-fidelity mockups, but rather determining the glue which holds the service together in a consistent and coherent fashion.

Some service designers liken their role to that of a guide or facilitator—like a Gandalf—helping teams navigate toward the goal: delivering an omnidirectional, frictionless experience for users. 

For example, consider your typical journey through an airport. From entering with your flight ticket to arriving at your gate, the process 'by design' often feels effortless and intuitive. This is no accident—airlines and airports employ service designers to orchestrate this experience, ensuring it feels natural and unobtrusive. As the saying goes, great design is often invisible; you don’t notice it because it simply works!

Service design has evolved to become almost a meta-discipline which is used as a thinking tool in various other disciplines.

A common artefact often employed by the service designers is the 'service blueprint'. It is used to map the customer activities alongside the enterprise operations. For example, a service blueprint might show how the pre-service looks like (eg. browsing online), service (eg. in store purchase), and post-service (eg. follow up emails) connect with each other through shared data systems.

They simulate various imaginary journeys across all possible scenarios for direct users, indirect users as well as internal users. They map out the front stage, backstage, and even the backstage of the backstage to connect the dots. (Read this essay on Rapid Journey Prototyping I wrote earlier based on my experience at Noora Health)

Take this example of a service designer at Virgin Atlantic, who has to manage shifting of multiple journeys. If there is an update of delay or cancellation, they have to communicate across email, app, chat platforms, ensuring the customers to rebook or seek support without disruption.

I'm highlighting these examples to show how this layered approach across all touchpoints done by a service designer is very much orthogonal to the other modes of intelligence as shown by shape rotators and wordcels: visuo-spatial intelligence and verbal intelligence.

Therefore, the journey shifters are deserving of their own category.

If we were to take the metaphor of games, the shape rotator would be playing Minecraft, the wordcel would be acing the Wordle, Scrabble, Crosswords and the journey-shifter would be playing NOMIC (the game where the rule of the game is to change the rules of the game)

Where do you think you belong — Shape rotator? Wordcel? Or a journey shifter? Which way do you abstract out best — By reasoning? By imagining, or by emoting?

[1] We have three models of the mind. Plato said that reason ought to be the master, even if philosophers are the only ones who can reach a high level of mastery. Hume said that reason is and ought to be the servant of the passions. And Jefferson gives us a third option, in which reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers, like the emperors of Rome, who divided the empire into eastern and western halves. Who is right?

[2] The story of how capitalism emerged in Communist China is also quite interesting. It's a famous story (almost apocryphal) that originates from the Xiaogang village in China where all the grains produced by the farmers was supposed to go to the collective. The farmers then decide to secretly make a contract among themselves to keep some of their own grain (which was punishable by death) under communism. Based on the success of this 'pilot', Ding Xiaoping implements SEZs (special economic zones) in Shenzhen to reform the place one step at a time (instead of a drastic flip-of-switch from communism to capitalism)

Special thanks to Anand Padmanabhan, Shivam Pandey for giving their initial comments on the first draft :)