Author: Laure X Cast

A platform from which to leap

At the beginning of 2023, I decided to write every day, and to put whatever came of it onto a blog that I would not promote in any way. This arrangement seemed to me to meet some kind of integrity with the idea that I was indeed ‘shipping’ as the startup lingo has it, without participating in a collective performance that would only get in the way of being open with my (probably half-formed and unpolished) words. This plan was effective in its way. I wrote a number of things that were exploratory, though also strange in their lack of recipient- perhaps language can be useful just for one’s own understanding, but only an understanding that escapes the body.

Over time, I started to drift, and post less frequently. The unfinishedness seemed odd or even risky to publish, with the trope of the internet’s indiscriminate memory in mind. And also, I feel myself, when writing to noone, becoming more likely to express myself in the form of college essay or with a touch of what you might call “archness.” I’m more interested in a constant breaking apart or disintegration that sometimes a post can’t contain.

Then I decided, for no good reason that I can think of, to begin putting the posts on Substack. It has been an experiment that brings in a kind of cognitive dissonance- can I continue writing in an undefended way when I am also presumably sending the words, or giving a VC-driven company the task of sending my words, to other people? And is it then my job to manage the ways that such a platform would like me to work for them, showing me analytics and sending me various prompts to continue my investment in their ecosystem (one that I then, for consistency’s sake, invested in to the tune of a one-year’s subscription in another newsletter (consistency’s sake being my least favourite cause in general))?

Well, I don’t know. I certainly felt uncomfortable sending out these little posts, which I’m sure a coach would cite as a growth edge of some kind- bumping into my pattern of feeling like a burden if I am not feeling unimportant. But am I really attached to those kinds of narratives anymore? They seem like this weird way of conditioning myself to be productive in service of something invisible but smelly, to think “of course, if I were seen / had a platform / gained legitimacy” then I would be more likely to get what I want or avoid harsh judgement. While that’s obviously the opposite of true, maybe I could think, “‘my authentic self’ can emerge when I don’t censor myself.” There is a stage that I am meant to be on, and that stage’s performance somehow proves my realness, or at least, my worth and power.

There are so many layers here, because even in that inquiry there are judgements that I think limit my understanding. What could it be like to write or not write, to post or not post, with both the intent to connect and communicate (why else make things public or even epistolary?) and the indifference to being read or understood? Is this even logical in the first place? Part of what is so odd about the social media metaphor is simply that there are few historical examples of social contexts that combine communication and attention-seeking with such intensity and ubiquity, along with trying to negotiate the general lack of communication or attention most of the attention-seeking efforts inspire. In a way, posts on social media are advertisements of our loneliness. What makes an unread newsletter any different?

I have a kind of guilty nostalgia for the semi-private experience of LiveJournal, back before we understood the implications of putting one’s most embarrassing experiences on a platform soon to be purchased by unknown Russians. While I have generally begun to have less interest in text-based media as mediators of communication, LiveJournal was a place for the kind of reflection that journaling offers, while being also hilarious and at least for me, an impetus to take my own problems way less seriously, because it was more entertaining to note my own stupidity. There’s probably some layers of avoidance baked in to that as well- more of a spiritual bypass than an actual loving of my own feckless humanity, but these things are not binary.

I come back to a kind of presence and present when I remember that a sense of purpose has been revealed to me, that I don’t really matter so much– or rather, that the construction of me doesn’t matter, though I matter fully and equally to any other thing, being, or human.

Does writing support this purpose? I think so. Does a newsletter support the purpose? I really don’t know. My sense is that I’m much better at asking good questions than having answers. If going down inquiry road with me leads other people to connect more with the underlying idea that freedom, responsibility, and belonging are the same thing, maybe? I’m unsure that reaching this conclusion can come from anything other than practice. But perhaps for some reason there’s value in sharing my practice with you (because there must be a you, as the tree falling would agree). There’s no more that that, is there? Just the intention of love that can somehow be alchemically infused into the electrons moving and also not moving, the virtual that is also what is.

HOPE – How Our Practice Evolves In Us

Last night I spent some time talking to my step-kid, who is a teenager, about the future. He was wondering if there’s any point to doing things that support the health of the planet because it might already be too late. Looking around at the American kids his age, for every kid who seems interested in justice, climate, or any other kind of activism, there seem to be 10 more who are coveting Jordans, eating hamburgers, and spending hours a day on social media. What does this portend for the future? It’s a self-reinforcing paradox that is not confined to teenagers.

There are radical changes needed to shift things and even the people I am around who are doing deep thinking about these things often manifest what seem like irreconcilable dissonances between their behaviour and thought. We, either as humans or specifically as people who live in this dominance-driven culture, seem to regard self-honesty and taking the actions within our power as impositions, as “what someone else thinks we should do.” For Americans (and Canadians), if ‘doing the right thing’ might involve any level of ‘not doing what I want right now,’ then it becomes a weird political thing, or a way we shame one another.

There’s frequently a big gap between behaviour and viewpoint. Someone says they are very concerned about climate collapse, who even work on green initiatives, but still eats beef or takes frequent flights. There are many folks in my world of ‘healthier tech’ who are posting and scrolling for hours a day. I have found myself among them. I know the challenge in choosing something different, something that may risk me being left out or feeling invisible. (Or not getting my package in two days for free).

This is the state of affairs when we’ve abdicated our freedom- we think that our individual actions “don’t matter” and that it’s all about what politicians or billionaires decide to do.

My experience is that it’s quite the opposite. When I am coming into a situation and feeling into my own complicity, I recognise my agency and can work towards solutions in an embodied way, in a way where I am not living in pure denial and cognitive dissonance. The process of divesting doesn’t happen all at once and I expect to be doing things that are out of alignment for all of this lifetime, but I’m closer to freedom when I see my behaviour and seek to be in more right relation to the earth and to other people. I’m more alive when I am not policing other people or waiting for someone to decide my fate while I consume and pleasure-seek.

This is why communities of practice are essential. Doing this work alone is nearly impossible. A community of practice helps me to feel like I am not alone in holding myself to account, and it also allows me to see into my blind spots, to recognise areas for growth that I was unaware of. In a community of practice, I encounter people who seem stone-cold real with themselves and people who are currently going through inquiries or challenges that I wrestled with in the past and have now worked through. I can see my growth and my opportunity to grow. I am able to feel the love in the practice, to feel the deep and unconditional regard I have for myself and other people as we do our best.

In a community of practice, we can begin to experience what the future might look like when we become forced to recognise out interdependence. Our survival depends on our ability to cooperate and collaborate when we don’t have predetermined hierarchies or state-enforced power. In disasters, people often come together for a time to help, to work toward common goals, to surpass their own idea of what they are capable of. I’ve found something quite similar when people come together to do their own work and to begin to develop relationships that reflect a sense of total inclusion, where we are fully welcome, there by choice, willing to contribute.

The structure of communities of successful communities of practice allows us to experience collective purpose, strong norming, reflection, being witnessed, and witnessing others. It makes everyone a welcomer, even when they are practicing for the first time. Strong structures allow for every person to be there by choice, for there to be no individual who matters more than others, to function even when someone with a role or responsibility isn’t able to participate or doesn’t show up. They function as a reflection of the complete dignity and autonomy of each member while simultaneously creating a container of total belonging and connection.

There are many things we might do to contribute to a future that, as Buckminster Fuller put it, works for ‘100% of humanity.” It’s a collective hallucination to believe some people are more entitled to anything than others, that any of us are not completely responsible for our own roles in creating the future, or that we are required to participate in systems of dominance and extraction. That doesn’t mean it’s as simple as saying ‘no’– but if we’re thinking along these lines, we can start to innovate in powerful ways. The most important thing I have to contribute is my own self-ownership, my own freedom, and a recognition that my honesty, openness, and willingness to practice emerge in collective.

Our Work and Our Worth

“Money is like water. It can be a conduit for commitment, a currency of love. Money moving in the direction of our highest commitments nourishes our world and ourselves. What you appreciate appreciates. When you make a difference with what you have, it expands. Collaboration creates prosperity. True abundance flows from enough; never from more. Money carries our intention. If we use it with integrity, then it carries integrity forward. Know the flow—take responsibility for the way your money moves in the world. Let your soul inform your money and your money express your soul. Access your assets—not only money but also your own character and capabilities, your relationships and other nonmoney resources.”

― Lynne Twist

“We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.”

― David Graeber

It’s hard to reason about money when it has a kind of theological position in our culture. My old stories about money fall into a few categories. Maybe you have entertained some of these ideas yourself.

Being liked or accepted

  • If I seem to have money, I will be subtly ostracized or mistrusted by others
  • If I appear to have a low income (or even an ‘average’ income) I will not seem credible as a consultant/job candidate/human
  • If I speak of struggling with money, people may believe (or find out) shameful things about me, like I am dealing with emotional struggles or I was fired from a job
  • If I charge for my time at a rate that reflects my worth, I will be rejected or seen as greedy

Fairness

  • If I receive less money than other people with similar levels of education/experience/power/hierarchical role, it’s not fair
  • If I speak about struggling with money, I am being insensitive to people with more systemic disadvantages than mine
  • I have had many advantages so I should make a lot of money
  • I have had many challenges so I’ve been kept from making money
  • Fair pay is the same thing as getting what other people get for the work
  • Non-male founders get ridiculously little investment

Worth

  • If I receive more money than other people with similar levels of education/experience/power/hierarchical role, it’s a sign of my worth or negotiating prowess
  • My personal work is not valuable enough, not good enough
  • How much money I can raise is a reflection of the potential of my startup’s success

Safety

  • I should always be in an upward earning trajectory
  • If I don’t make enough money, my life will fall apart
  • You need at least a million dollars to be able to retire
  • Having a job, a house, a retirement account makes you safe
  • I can’t afford to take time off
  • I can’t have a vacation if I’m not working

Identity

  • I should be doing things for money that reflect ‘who I am.’
  • What’s holding me back from doing what I love is that it’s not a good way to make money
  • Finding a way to make money and do what I love is difficult or impossible
  • If people see all my sides then I will be too something to be hired
  • The person who I’m in relationship with should make enough money
  • Good people don’t care about money
  • Good people don’t neglect their responsibilities by being financially unstable
  • If I were a ‘real’ founder I would be making a product that investors were lining up to fund
  • I can’t do creative work without having enough money to take the time to do it full-time

Competence

  • If I worked harder I would make more money
  • If I made more money, my life would be better
  • I need to find a benefactor
  • I don’t have the credentials to make money
  • All I need to do is get over my fear of being visible and I will make money
  • I can’t find a job even when I lower my standards
  • I shouldn’t pay someone to do something for me if I could do it myself
  • It’s naive to think you could make money without sacrificing your principles
  • Great founders fundraise and bring in large capital investments as a result of their storytelling skills and clear business acumen

It took many years to wrangle with all of these stories and to realize I was operating with faulty priors in the first place.

When it comes to money, there are many ways to get out of right relation with myself and with others. As with any wisdom I have discovered, there are lots of ways to refute what might feel true to me, lots of ways to prove that the wisdom is wrong because there are people for whom the wisdom doesn’t apply.

Wisdom that speaks to me continues speaking, often in layers, often with my own objections layered on.

Wisdom related to money tends to activate me and other people and leads to many objections. Money often proxies for value among us, even in situations that such a metaphor doesn’t hold up well.

In conversation with Peter Limberg from the Stoa / Less Foolish we’ve explored the idea of Alivelihood, framed as “How to make money while doing what makes you come alive?“

Right now I believe that at some point a choice is required to commit to aliveness. For me, any kind of strategising doesn’t support this, it only gets in the way. In other words, aliveness as I experience it starts in the body, in the choice to listen to what is there for me in the interplay of breath, blood, being. The truth rests and abides. It doesn’t need to lead to making money. It does need the conditions to be able to be nourished, literally and spiritually. At times I hear people say having this nourishment is a privilege or a right. To me, it is a choice.

There are a lot of ways this can feel unskillful to express. Do I think it’s easy for people who are financially struggling to make this choice? No. But it’s also, at least from what I’ve observed, quite hard, at least as hard, for people who do have resources.

Making this choice doesn’t mean, “now I am alive all the time in everything I do.” Very few people I have met get to even 50% aliveness without making many choices, without being constantly in the practice of choice, without bumping up against all the deadening we are culturally conditioned to.

What I’m experiencing is that being alive, listening to the body, being willing to be slow leads to more discernment about opportunities. There are certainly people who have found material success by grinding and hustling, and sometimes it feels very alive for me to work hard, to work a lot, to press up against exhaustion. But it does not feel alive to be in fear about the repercussions of not making enough money. It seems more like a situation where, when I keep returning, keep doing the things that feel like they have a positive impact on the world, ways of supporting that show up.

In the conversation with Peter, I came up with a list of heuristics or ways of approaching money that emerged from a time when I went through the (unintentional) experience of having no money, no housing, and no income. I had an amazing transformation when I saw that I remained loved and cared for and that my main job was surrender.

How to be alive while making money

Taking action

  • Know my worth isn’t about money
  • Act from love, not fear
  • Know that I’m OK, loved, where I need to be
  • Believe that it’s possible to have what I need without having to be something that isn’t aligned
  • Welcome fear as an opportunity to see where faith is leaky
  • Ship things – get things out into the world not just in my head
  • Know that I am going to die no matter how much money I have
  • Welcome the possibilities in uncertainty
  • Be willing to live without convenience or comfort if doing so makes aliveness possible
  • Put connection first, be in right relation

Letting go

  • If opportunities to make money arise that align with my values, don’t turn them down
  • Don’t under-charge for my work or discount myself
  • Don’t prioritize free work over paid work
  • Put my full self into the paid work I do, even if it’s small or not ‘important’
  • Don’t let ego get in the way of being honest about my needs and my availability
  • Don’t spend my free time sucked into things that don’t create value for me, i.e. scrolling, shopping, or participating in social media except as very necessary (but still have fun and read and take in information that feels valuable or thought-provoking)
  • Notice when I want to blame, make excuses, or get into grievance
  • Address any dishonesty, mistakes, or dis-compassion
  • Amend situations where my actions impede others’ opportunities to live in their fullness

Any prescription that says, ‘this is how you make money’ feels like it takes me in a direction away from my source of aliveness.

Instead, the more I can feel into the interconnectedness of everything, the more it feels like my best bet is to be in trust, neither trying nor resisting earning money. There’s an underlying abundance that only gets distorted by trying to claim some of it as “mine.” As a tech person, I love the metaphor of open source, of cascading open-ness. The world is not headed in a direction that has any security other than what I can find in my own body and my connection to the world and the people with whom I’m in relationship.

Race & Space

When I enter a space I always notice the whiteness level in the room. This has been true for me ever since college, when I transferred from Columbia in NYC to the University of Victoria (in BC) and was like ‘what is it about this place that feels so weird? Oh, it’s ‘normal’ to be in a public space only populated by white people?’

I am often in ‘personal growth’-related or tech-related spaces with a lot of other white people, including a surprising number of spaces that are 90% or more white. I notice that, no matter how awesome the context is, and often there’s a lot of awesomeness, I feel a little less trusting of the space when it’s so predominantly white.

There’s so much complexity around this topic and even naming it seems to invite all kinds of unconscious reactions to show up.

I am a white-bodied person. When I enter in a space that is more mixed in race, I make it more white. I’ve seen several communities struggle when they began as more non-white and white people came in and began to, if not dominate directly, become the majority.

When I have entered into spaces where I’m the only white person, I have wondered whether I’m just killing the party. Whiteness in the form of me enters and provokes code switching, or just like ‘what is this person going to do?’

Many people I have spoken to who convene predominantly white spaces I’m in have expressed some dissatisfaction with the homogeneity. “How can we get more diversity?” or “we are open and welcoming if non-white people come here.”

But what makes actually ‘diverse’ spaces work? I’ve noticed a few patterns.

First, good collective spaces centre the margins (not just racial margins, but all people who deal with structural marginalisation). They don’t ‘include’ or ‘welcome’ so much as seek to be guided. This mindset can be quite challenging when we’ve been sold the idea that colour-blindness or other assimilation-oriented concepts are the key to getting along with different people. When a collective does the work of centring the margins, that means that everyone in the group looks for ways that all can strive and looks out for ways that default thinking can leave people out or behind. Awareness of inaccessibility, gendered language, or assumptions of common experience can all be gently and lovingly addressed. Governance can include practices of bringing in minority opinion and orient around consent instead of majority rule.

I’ve noticed that collectives with cohesion among many skin tones often have a culture of calling in without policing. Most of us as white people have huge blind spots when it comes to our own assumptions. Realistically, all humans have blind spots, but as a rule, status creates significantly larger zones of blindness, simply because people in lower status roles have to learn to negotiate with the behaviours status engenders. Everyone has their own intersections in terms of status, and each has different areas that become easy to overlook.

In spaces with a lot of white folks I’ve often heard a variation of, ‘how do we ‘fix’ this?” It’s probably worth questioning whether ‘fix’ is the right metaphor but putting that aside, my gut instinct tells me it’s not very easy. Most of them seem to want to change nothing except who is ‘invited.’

I suspect that when a group develops and grows with a supermajority of white people, it’s partly because no one even noticed, so familiar is such an experience for its members. It will be hard in this context to not assume, when people who look different join, that those people should attempt to fit in or conform to group norms, much as other white people have.

The first thing I would be inclined to try, if the community truly is committed to changing its dynamics, is for each member to participate in another community where they are in the racial minority. (Probably all different groups so it wasn’t just colonialization all over again).

Desire for change is also more believable if the community or group is willing to invest resources in facilitated conversations and honest self-assessment.

I feel the dissonance of overwhelming whiteness the most when I am in spaces that are ’embodied’ but never address the effects of racialization on embodiment. White people sometimes seem to have the idea that racialization only impacts embodiment for non-white people, but obviously, people in white bodies have also been racialized. This isn’t a political stance, it’s simply a basic conclusion one can feel immediately by considering our embodied experience as it relates to what we have been taught about race. Each person will have a different experience, but that experience has had effects on our physical health, our trauma response, and our access to different body modalities.

When I am in spaces that are white and unquestioned, my mere presence is not a disruption, but such conditions don’t facilitate easy belonging for anyone with an experience of marginalisation. I am more likely to keep parts of myself protected. I am a neurodivergent, queer, nonbinary person, and also an educated, skilled white professional. The latter identity is more likely to lead in white-dominated spaces.

There are definitely subtleties. What about spaces that are, for example, filled with neurodivergent, queer, nonbinary people and are also exceedingly white? Those are, often, spaces that do question whiteness, but sometimes also do a fair amount of general policing, which purports to be in service of safety but much like other kinds of policing, often just serves domination.

Race is a very toxic invention. There are so many many people who have explained this more effectively than I can, even on TikTok, and if you want to discuss, I will link lots of things at the end of this conversation to ground us.

In some ways, our current American context rests on the power dynamics that occur when stories, totally baseless in many cases, are treated as a kind of fact, or something that demands adherence and faith. Reality is more expansive, more individual, and doesn’t end with the hero’s return.

My purpose is to support communities of practice doing what is necessary to create conditions of belonging. For me, that means collectively asking hard questions, looking inward first to see how what bothers me about other people reflects something about myself, and believing it’s possible to be together. Perhaps this means third spaces, not my house or yours, but somewhere we can co-create and co-hold, starting from scratch, but knowing that those of us with white skin may also tend to design, manage, voluntell, or feel responsible in ways that only we can check.

Resources on the invention of race:

  • Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields, Barbara J. Fields
  • Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century by Dorothy Roberts
  • Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon
  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
  • The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
  • A guy on TikTok

Post-Growth Product Management

The discipline of product management and the business goal of exponential growth have emerged in tandem.

Literally billions of dollars have poured into startups and tech companies on the promise and execution of growth, even to the point where actually making a profit has relatively little weight.

Interviewing for my last job in tech, I asked the founder, “what’s the business plan?” and he said (in effect), ‘in Silicon Valley, we don’t need a business model. Our (blue-chip) investors fund us to grow and then, once we have the growth, we’ll figure out how to make money.’

The belief in growth has been so religious that there was actually no need to have a plan to make money (it helps if you have white, male, Stanford grads on the founding team for this model to apply. No shade to that particular company who are now on a revenue track and are genuinely focused on connecting people). I have also been told that having revenue can be a problem for getting investment, and you should fundraise before you’re making money, presumably because it ties the prospects of the company to something real. Investors naturally are seduced by and/or promoters of the breathless aspirational optimism that just saying “we’re on track to have billions of free users” provokes.

There are wild stories of companies spending vast sums to ‘own a market’ so they can keep growing at a rate that admits no competition, even when there’s really no clear path to being profitable.

And look, all of that ‘works’ in a system in which the primary way things work is to attain some growth milestone and then get to ‘exit’ into public ownership. All of this ‘works’ in the sense that people who put money in as equity investors sometimes get it out at a multiple. Ideally most of the losses are written off, avoiding taxes on whatever revenues come in, or underwritten by infrastructure that’s publicly funded. It works for the investors and sometimes the founders, and everyone else? Perhaps for some well-paid employees who can live well until the layoffs start cascading.

We as PMs learn about moats and owning a market and strategies that involve winning. We listen to well-produced podcasts about blitzscaling and subscribe to the YouTubes of founders and marketers who tell us about the magic of network effects and how worth it selling a lot of your company is in service of having the capital to grow, grow, grow. You’d rather have 20% of $2B than 80% of $1M, right?

So, what if we’re burning down the world in the process?

Like, literally?

How much computing power is wasted, how much money, how much electricity, how many downstream social and economic effects does this approach have?

Product Management => Problem Management

We can use the skills of great product management to play a different game.

PMs are fundamentally problem solvers. Our skills are synthesising needs and creatively building solutions. When we are doing product well, we’re orienting around customer needs and business goals. What if we continue doing that with a much more holistic approach?

Post-growth is a term used to describe what must happen when we approach the limits of growth from a systems standpoint. There are many signs we’re at the limit:

1. We’re overloading the biosphere with pollution and using up the irreplaceable natural resources of the planet

2. We’re creating wealth creation machines that extract from the general public and only benefit a few powerful people

3. We’re living under systems of corporate surveillance and in some places, state surveillance

4. We’ve created global systems of human interaction that essentially commodify our identities and our relationships

5. Social mobility is decreasing, economic inequality is increasing

6. Pandemics

7. We’re experiencing a aack of affordable housing and increasing houselessness

8. We have heath care inequities and many people living in heath-related precarity

9. There’s a co-incidence of obesity and malnutrition

10. Ongoing wars and conflicts have a cascading effect on supply chains

11. Climate changes are affecting food production and housing

12. Probably many other things you’ll be able to come up with just by scanning a newspaper

So what might this world look like if we approach changing the outcomes from a product management perspective? (By this, I mean a good PM approach, not a “CEO of the product” approach!)

Human-centric Product Management

First, we’d be trying to understand what people actually care about. This might come from direct research, but as humans with a long history of self-documentation, it’s pretty clear that indicators of satisfaction are tied to some pretty consistent things:

  • Having our basic physical needs met (shelter, clean air, water, and enough nutritious food)
  • Healthy diet and exercise
  • Feeling loved
  • Having a sense of self-worth
  • Being free of oppression, abuse, and domination by other people
  • Living without a threat of violence
  • Spending time in nature
  • Being part of a collective or community where we matter to others
  • Having some sense of security and serenity

What’s crazy to me is that the vast majority of products tech companies are building don’t serve those needs, and many of them directly subvert them. In many cases, companies may have a mission to support well-being or happiness but the actual way the company operates is antithetical to those goals.

Everything is connected, so if we truly understand what supports people, it won’t be a narrow solution for some small problem without an understanding of what problems the solution itself creates. In the old world, that’s not a problem, just more “opportunities” to make money. We can’t keep thinking this way.

Internal Shifts Ahead

One thing I’ve learned in being alive for a while and seeking answers is that change begins within and reverberates.

The way we are in ourselves and in the world informs what we build and how we affect the world around us. So even with the best of intentions to ‘solve problems,’ when we’re coming up with solutions that must meet a concurrent goal of “winning a market” and increasing our status and wealth so that we can have more power or feel more important, we’re just going to fail to truly see the reality of our impact.

I was 100% into playing the game that the rule set laid out. I wrote an actual guide to “startup pirate metrics.” But these days, there are too many signs that this approach leads to very bad global outcomes and I have been on my own journey that has found me feeling like personal responsibility is real freedom.

We can do things differently, but we will have to start small, and what’s more, we’ll need to abandon growth as our measure of impact. As soon as we put growth as our top line metric, we start to undermine the practices necessary for change. It’s not that our products and companies won’t grow, but they will grow like trees, not like kudzu.

What if we tried to solve problems with these constraints instead?

1. We start by understanding what our customers value and what truly matters to them

2. We reject strategies or solutions that involve inevitable extraction

3. We reject building products or services that exploit human psychology rather than fostering well-being

4. We do the work to uncover our own assumptions and biases

5. We prioritise ensuring that the people with whom we work are taken care of and we foster healthy interdependence among our team

6. We put sustainability before growth, meaning that we don’t need capital just to juice our numbers

7. We collaborate with other teams and companies who are working on the same problem rather than trying to beat them

8. We work together in ways that recognise different roles, skillsets, and experience without creating hierachies that entrench power over and don’t allow for the possibility that people with non-traditional backgrounds may be suited and able to do work we’ve traditionally gatekept with hiring requirements

Why is it that we’re so creative and love solving problems but we also hold the belief that things have to work in the way they do now? Aren’t we ‘disruptors’ and ‘innovative thinkers?’

To think this way, we do have to give up some of the status-seeking and lottery-winning mentalities that drive our industry today, but in return, we have a big blue ocean and lots of opportunities to prototype and test. And the best part is, we can do it together, collaboratively, using the very superpower that has made humans such a growth-oriented species in the first place.

Start small and be a listener first

The first step, I think, is to create more partnership between people served by technology and builders. If you’re a technologist, don’t ignore the cultural, emotional, and societal dimensions to what you are building. Work with researchers, UX practitioners, and above all, customers to consider what might be valuable, not how you can exploit behaviour, make things sticky, or otherwise try to growth hack your way into success. Growth may be a consequence, but if you’re moving at the speed of trust, you can build with care, to create something lasting, to have responsibility to your customers and the world at large, not to make some already-wealthy people money within a short time horizon.

How else might we use our skills to solve problems, without shifting into paternalism and manipulation? Mostly, it’s about being willing to recognise our training, to find internal integrity, and to practice with others who can see our blind spots. We need to put down the master’s tools and learn a new approach, one that sees product far more holistically. I’d love to hear how this idea lands for fellow product people and how we might support one another to make a change.

In the Society of Friends

I grew up in a religious household.

From what I hear, my experience was almost the antithesis of what people imply by the term “religious upbringing.” In meeting for worship and Sunday School, I learned to be non-hierarchical, responsible for my own spirituality, and to question materialism and overconsumption. As a small child, I learned about slavery and colonial imperialism. When I was twelve or thirteen, my meeting’s youth group had no problem with me espousing agnostic or humanistic interpretations of our faith. In short, I was raised a Quaker.

As a kid, this meant that we had a place to stay on our travels with a kind of Green Book variation called The Traveling Friend. We lived with refugees, went to marches, and hosted peace activists (and our phone was certainly tapped).

As we think about distributed systems that have stood the test of time, the Quakers might be a good case study. Since 1650, Friends, as the members are known to one another, have sustained a practice that historically eschewed the idea that any one person was “closer to god” or could interpret faith for others. There are no priests or pastors in traditional Quaker meetings, just congregants. Traditional Quakers are pacifists and against state-sanctioned violence. From its earliest inception, the idea of gender equality has been a part of the religion. Quakers were abolitionists and civil war activists.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many contradictions, problematic actions, and splinter branches of Quakerism that are interwoven with the memes of dominant culture. But it’s still instructive to see that for centuries there has been a large, distributed group of Quaker communities who have been able to make collaborative practices work.

Unlike many forms of Christianity, traditional Quakerism doesn’t rely on a convening metaphor of a family with a paternal leader. Instead, it’s naturally more collective in nature.

Some of the components of this that inform how I see good community working:

  • The Meeting for Worship spaces are held in silence. It’s quiet until people are moved by the Spirit to share. Anyone can speak. Typically, silence predominates.
  • Decision-making is based on consensus or “spiritual unity.” All members are invited to voluntarily participate.
  • Meetings can be volunteer-run, though the meetings may choose to pay people to steward, coordinate, or to perform services such as building maintenance.
  • Action emerges through committees acting with trust of the greater meeting.
  • Quakers share a belief that every human is equal and worthy in the eyes of God.
  • There’s no religious doctrine – while Quakerism’s practices are rooted in the principles of early Christianity (such as love thy neighbour and thou shalt not kill) each individual is free to hold whatever beliefs they choose. It’s possible to be a Jewish or Buddhist Quaker, for example.
  • Quakers are called to find the light within, and to engage in their own spiritual journey to find spiritual connection.
  • Large organizations of Quakers and meetings convene to collectively sense-make but do not hold any dominion over or impose authority on individual meetings.
  • Depending on norms, collective beliefs, and practices, individual meetings are typically in groups of “yearly meetings” with a number of other meetings, and there can be many of these yearly meetings in a geographic region.
  • The practice is personal and individual. It’s also inherently non-evangelical; no one is going out preaching the Word.

Since I haven’t been a practicing Quaker for most of my adult life (though I did return for a spell to Vancouver’s meeting in the wake of 9/11), I am not sure of the general state of health of the faith. Because it’s the opposite of an evangelic religion, in a day and age where broadcast and persuasion is the norm, I wonder if the long-skewing-older meetings I’ve attended have dwindled. My parents attend a meeting that has done many things to welcome young families, and that too is an example of how to focus on what needs to be available to be welcoming rather than ‘let’s try and get new people to care and then figure out how to include them.”

Can we all be Friends? That’s not really viable. But if we consider these elements in how we create the containers for our collective process, we might just be on the path to friendship.

AI and the Myth of the Creator Economy

Once upon a time, I wrote poems. And I sing to myself quite often, so I had this kind of typical random thought, ‘maybe I should learn some easy musical software thing and write some songs.’

And then I thought, oh, well, what would be the point of that? AI will certainly get better at writing songs before I ever will. That self-defeating thought did spark a little bit of insight, though. What am I creative for?

One way to see it: creative practice is for oneself. For example, people learn woodworking or other crafts to make things that would likely look better, take less time and energy, and be cheaper if they just bought a product from an industrial producer.

If you become good at your craft, you might be a maker. You can go out to craft fairs and sell your items, but chances are, you’ll be operating at a loss when materials and labour are factored in. When you start woodworking, you are not thinking, “now maybe I can be rich and famous.”

Even before AI began inducing a mass pearl-clutching about artists’ rights, being a ‘creator’ was a pretty unlikely path to wealth.

Some kinds of creative work seemed like they might lead to a big payout: the ‘artistic’ careers that fell under a lottery system. The lottery system was always primarily one of overall exploitation and extraction.

Making music is an example. Right now there are so many people making music, perhaps more publicly and intentionally than ever before. Platform algorithms primarily drive discovery and popularity, and those things reinforce the patterns that were already in place. In other words, things that are like other things are most likely to surface. And once something does surface, it benefits from network effects- there’s great research that indicates that people listen to things because they think other people like them far more than as a result of their own individual tastes.

Few artists even make much money from the platforms. Even before there were algorithms, there was the corporate consolidation of the music business, which meant that just a few corporations owned nearly all of the sizable record labels and many of the small ones as well, so homogenization had already begun. And from the beginning, stars of the recording industry made little in comparison to their record labels.

This pattern is true in general for creative or generative work. We went from a pre-industrialized situation where ‘artists’ were mostly wealthy or beholden to the wealthy but there were plenty of people practicing creative crafts for themselves or a few people in their community, to a time when companies began to profit from the distribution of other people’s creative work. Within that system, there have been small companies that were not as extractive, but as time has gone on, the direction has been one of ever-increasing disparities between the creators and the distributors in terms of relative individual profit.

We recently went through a kind of collective delusion with the proliferation of creator platforms and the so-called Creator Economy. Many people were called to put out their ideas, art, and creative work as products. As the wave of industrialization-employment has ebbed due to automation, and because industrialization, media, and the internet have created this sense of global scale on which to market ourselves, we found ourselves looking for ways of expressing ourselves for money. And we were seduced by the corporations who distribute creative work into thinking that ‘owning’ the work was the path to protecting creators (had this ever have been true, these companies largely would not have existed, since they are the primary predators).

But many ‘creators’ were willing to buy into creator economies and copyright, perhaps because they thought they might be the exception. (Does this remind you of other delusions of social mobility that have led to many collective positions that reinforce the benefits for wealthy people against non-wealthy people’s own self-interest?) We were willing to believe that platforms ‘allowed’ creators to make a living being creative, when they would have otherwise laboured in penniless obscurity. (In fact, artists can be streamed millions of times on Spotify and not receive enough money to pay for two months of a Spotify subscription (on the individual plan, mind you). And most people don’t garner millions of streams).

Many years ago, I wrote about the idea that creators might be best served thinking about making a living much the way one might by having a shoe repair business. It could be possible to create enough direct relationships with people who like your work to get by, and that would be a remarkable success- you’d have a basic income, be in your creative practice, and not have a boss telling you what to do or what to make. Instead, I’ve seen people trying to negotiate the systems by learning how to ‘make more of what people want,’ and creating a glut of sameness, which honestly makes it that much easier for AI to step in and be as ‘good.’

Now, we’re perhaps confronting something that could be transformational to the whole notion of art-as-commerce. It might be that the only real value in being creative is in the practice itself. In the learning, experimenting, doing of the thing, not in the marketing of the product. It might be that we value human-made things because we are part of the process, because the creative output has meaning.

Perhaps we’re headed into a farmer’s market model of ideas, songs, or art. There was a moment when it seemed like NFTs were a version of this (only if you squinted) but Open Sea showed that mostly the money was in applying the same kind of platform economics that the streaming platforms have. Extraction for the few. And so, you may ask, where does that leave creators for making a real living?

Well, right. Corporate capitalism evolves to take more out and leave less for most people. And this is where I think (being fairly ignorant about political science) I don’t resonate with Marx when I think about what’s next. Because “workers” seems to me like a function of industrialization itself, and what’s happening is that we won’t have work. This may seem kind of nice for those people with enough advantage to enjoy leisure and minimally-paid creative pursuits. There will likely still be work for those who sell access to their own status for a time, and perhaps people at the upper echelons of corporations will still be needed to formulate strategies or be figureheads for a time.

There are still low-wage jobs and service providers who are more challenging to replace, but industry is plugging away at making them dispensable too. From my life on the edge of Silicon Valley I see that there are ideas to automate everything from drivers to service workers to doctors, lawyers, and therapists.

If we keep going down this path without alternatives, most of this displacement will come without alternatives for ‘making a living.’ Capitalism is a vacuum hose trying to suck every particle of wealth and power out of the earth and its inhabitants. In the US, the top 1% have more wealth than the bottom 90%. Even with supposedly more access to investing with the advent of platforms like Robin Hood, the top 1% own more than half of all stocks. Access to wealth overall is decreasing, with the top 10% owning about 90% of all stocks, and every year the gap widening. A group of 725 individual people have more wealth than a collective 50% of Americans, and that doesn’t even factor in global disparities.

I can see why cryptocurrency seems attractive as a solution. If we just had a way to create capitalism for ourselves! seems to be the idea. I mean, was capitalism a good thing, leading to post-scarcity where, once we find a collective way to revolution our way out of disparity, we can all live in a happy place where we have all our needs met and can just play and be creative and garden and get on up in the Maslow’s hierarchy? (Or a more appropriate framing.) Hmm. As we experience massive climate upheaval, intense scarcities in housing, pandemics, and all the other things that in the short term, money can still largely mitigate, I don’t know if post-scarcity looks imminent.

And yet. We are darn resistant beings. If we can resist the commodification of post-capitalism itself (not a joke- capitalism is cunning, baffling, and powerful!) we might discover this truth- that it really is all about practice. That if we give up the idea that our identities, relationships, and creative process are all really products, we might find out that there’s a lot of power in our collective and interdependent practice. Doing that practice gives us the opportunity to find new ways to collaborate and contradict the idea that it’s just naive to find an alternative to states, corporations, or other systems of control.

AI is not benign. We can regard it with curiosity and wonder, and also recognise that the vast majority of the energy around it right now is focused on figuring out how to make more money and add it to the arsenal of corporate domination. Creative hackers may find ways to use it as a tool of subversion as well. But the general idea that it’s going to put artists out of business implies that artists were in business in the first place, and that’s something we can see through without any help from GPT.

Freedom might not be free

Free sounds great. Who doesn’t love free stuff? Who can say how many random and unnecessary calories I’ve consumed at parties or at those in-store sample stands. Goodness knows I have wasted a lot of hours online that never would have happened if I had to assess the value I was getting from it. (Of course, someone made money from that time I contributed).

But free is never free, it’s only subsidised, whether that’s by others, by ourselves indirectly, or even by the earth. In a system of capitalism, free things made with someone’s labour lead to unsustainability and poor motive alignment, even if they result from the best intentions. Instead, we could think about products as either coming from collective investment with collective and equitable ownership, like public goods, or we should have models in which there is value exchange, even if we eliminate some of the regressive nature of flat pricing models. If we’re taking things from the earth, we might imagine how we can reciprocate, not just take and use.

With tech, we’re making products that are intangible, but they still require labour to produce. When we make them “free,” we are in a situation where we’re going to be dependent on money that isn’t tied to the value we’re creating for the people who use our products. And yet, we’re working in a context where many companies, especially in the social tech world, make their products free.

Free feels like it’s generous, until you’re out of funding. Free suggests there’s no needs among the people who are working on the product. And free feels like it’s a commitment to some kind of ethical stance and cooperation (see Open Source philosophies) but Open Source is rife with abandoned projects, projects with only one real contributor, and tools that mostly just serve developers. It leaves out creating the kind of relationships that emerge when people exchange energy for value. It leaves out creating systems of mutual benefit.

I’ve worked on products where we offered free versions. It’s great for growth and for giving people a sense of what value they might find by making a commitment. There’s room for free, but something interesting to me is how much less responsibility people felt when using the product for free. They often didn’t value the work of the people making the product at all, and were more antisocial in their communications with the company.

There’s a real and interesting tension in how to approach charging for technology, especially social tech. As a person who does lean to the cheapskate side, I like to ask myself, for the products I pay for, what are my feelings versus free products? Much of my thinking has to do with user experience, especially collective user experience. It makes sense to me to pay for things that allow me to extend a good experience to others. I suspect that there needs to be a re-norming if we want to create sustainable companies around social and collaborative technologies. For now, most of these make money by offering a business product. Perhaps that’s the right transitional path, as long as we don’t lose our missions along the way.

Feeding on Empty

When we think about communities and community platforms, we as builders help communities thrive in part by not reinforcing an illusion that the platform is the community.

Great community technology can emerge by observing how great communities function outside of technology. And sometimes from questioning some of our assumptions about what communities actually need.

There is one metaphor that shows up in most community platforms that comes not from how communities work, but instead how technology and social media work: the “Post Feed.”

Posts and post feeds are problematic for a number of reasons.

  1. They create a hierarchy – the person posting is dominant.
  2. They encourage a self-promotion mindset. Posts are structured like ads of oneself.
  3. They are not conversational, one posts not knowing who will or won’t see the post and thus often lacks meaningful context or a clear idea of what the information shared is meant for.
  4. They are, in most online communities, dominated by just a few people. They feel like overkill to share a small piece of information and can lead to lower participation overall as a result.
  5. They ‘contain discussions’ that are usually not very easy to follow, not transparent, and easily get lost. And yet lead people in the discussion to feel as though they’ve been sharing transparently and others should be informed as a result.
  6. The conversations within a post are typically text-based, have a high bar for expression, are disembodied, and are easy to misunderstand.
  7. The feed metaphor leads to a finger-in-the-river feel when most community information-sharing benefits from being able to be either retrievable or to be clearly ephemeral (such as date-driven information)

Can we actually think of any real-life communities where there even exists something that mirrors the metaphor of a Post (which is essentially one person broadcasting some information and then other people having clearly less important responses to that broadcast) and a Feed (an endless list of things people share)?

Instead, what if we use a different structure, one in which we design for conversations that happen between people more naturally and equitably, and for information-sharing that may prompt discussion but doesn’t masquerade as such?

There are two key ways information-sharing typically works in non-platform-based community.

One is some kind of “bulletin board” or “announcements time”, where there is just the information being shared, and often that kind of broadcast is normatively reserved for things clearly of importance to the group at large.

The other is in an actual conversation or meeting where information is submitted or shared to be discussed (often as an agenda item) and there are facilitated or normative ways that a discussion occurs.

Though it’s perhaps difficult to move away from technology designs people are “used to”, or the way technology has trained us to interact with it and one another online, it’s not actually that difficult to design a different kind of division between information sharing and discussion. Information in posts is very difficult to organize and filter, whereas a system where people can share information only makes it easier to make sense of.

When we look at how great communities and collectives operate, connection and trust-building is prioritised and baked into the practice. It’s also fractal, in which individual values, relationships, and collective actions and communication are aligned.

It makes more sense to emphasize meetings and conversations where connection and trust emerge and to let information-sharing be a smaller piece of the platform. It makes sense to choose design patterns that work against dominance. It makes sense to help communities support members’ journeys and to encourage real interaction than to be a private social media where everyone sees a feed of posts.

Communities online have begun to regard platforms like Mighty Networks, Circle, Slack, or Discord as gathering places but for the most part, they are not very broadly participatory, inclusive, or connecting.

This is a UX problem. As community platform builders, we have a real opportunity to use the best practices of offline communities to inform the way we imagine spaces we offer online. And choosing to do things differently is only a good thing when it comes to what the impacts we’ve seen are from how technology has been built in the past, not to mention the benefits of positioning and innovating.

A Cold, Cold Problem

One of my apparent side hobbies is reading startup advice books.

These books follow a predictable formula: know your customer, build cheaply, be a painkiller not a vitamin, raise VC, and grow as though your life depends on it. I’ve been in the startup world for a while and most of these books are pretty successful at describing what someone would do to play the game of startup we’ve seen for the last decade or so. They are all manuals for getting funding and then scaling, without much question about whether either one of those is the ideal path for a business.

I remember when I first got into tech and took a lot of this at face value. I wanted to play the game because I wanted to be a winner. I thought people who were successful at tech startups knew something, and that I needed to learn that thing. I learned a lot about building product, and those lessons have been incredibly valuable, no matter what kind of business you want to apply them to. I’ve learned from some very smart people.

But there are some things these books largely ignore or gloss over. For one thing, they will explain how VCs put money into lots of startups but only a few scale, and therefore VC investment is only for products that have huge markets and want to blitzscale. For one thing, this framing instantly leads all founders playing the game to try to win by ‘articulate solutions that are broad-based enough to be a big brand someday ‘go after big markets.’ Most startups should be doing the opposite, looking for niches and building a viable company. What’s more, getting VC funding is, by the accounts of nearly every founder I’ve met who has done it, somewhere between risky and business-killing. Ceding control of your company to VC means trying to extract as much value as quickly as possible, not to build a sustainable and profitable business.

Even if you wanted to play this game, good luck to 50% of the population. Of the companies funded by VCs last year, less than 2% were not men. Imagine the stats for being not male AND not white. Why even bother with the game in the first place?

With the waves of tech layoffs, it seems like perhaps at least a few people will question the very nature of the industry or I don’t know, corporate-centred capitalism. I’m very curious to see if what comes of that might look different or if it’s just going to be more people trying to follow the playbook.

Back when I got into tech, I heard the disparagement of what was known as “lifestyle companies,” which if you weren’t trying to scale and become a monopoly, you were by default. It’s kind of like regular business fundamentals are simply ignorable when you’re a ‘disruptor.’ And the IV of VC keeps that story alive.

I started reading Andrew Chen’s The Cold Start Problem recently. There are some interesting insights about network effects in the book, but I have to admit I get hot under the collar every time he explains how Uber did growth. You have to be willing to hustle, you have to do what works even if it doesn’t scale, so you can ruthlessly undercut the existing industry and find a way to incentivize people to exploit themselves on your behalf. THIS IS HOW YOU WIN!

But is it? What would happen if founders played a different game? Can we get out of winner-take-all if we just radically decide to do something different? Collaborate, for example?

Peter Thiel’s famous paean to monopoly thinking, “competition is for losers” will surely be an epitaph for this age of do-anything-to-win, whether it’s because we burn down the planet or because we learn we actually succeed more sustainably by cooperating- making competition for losers of a different sort.

I’m sure this would have sounded naive to my younger self, but it turns out that when you get on a path to having values and living in integrity, you don’t really give an eff whether people playing the game think you’re an all-star. You’d be surprised how many people actually win by building trust, connection, and products and businesses people care about instead.

I began this post a while back and it’s funny how possibly ‘radical’ or ‘realistic’ I have become since. In the interim time, big tech companies have laid off 200,000 people and SVB and other banks have failed. It’s becoming more apparent to me every day that even when a company isn’t in a VC-driven death spiral, tech is largely being built to reinforce systems of extraction that are a death spiral for the whole world, that tech is being built in a culture with all the hallmarks of white supremacy. It might not be crazy at all to reject the very basis of tech economics, in which foundations and pension funds must, through VC, waste so many resources by funding companies with a 9/10 failure rate, that the answer, even for most investors, is to find “something that can scale.” The game is not just rigged, it’s a battle royale.