Author: Laure X Cast

Who makes the makers?

Around a decade ago, I co-organized a regularly scheduled event named CopyNight NYC. As someone working in the film industry who was tasked with issuing DMCA takedowns as a component of my job, and at the same time, someone who at that time was a bit of a free speech absolutist (how times change in so many ways), I was trying to figure out how we should negotiate the tensions between people who make things and shouldn’t be exploited in the process with the obvious impossibility of preventing digital things from being copied, shared, remixed, and repurposed, or even from being sold with no benefit to the maker.

Now that we have AI that has ingested at least some of what humans have made and is taking remix to a singularity-ish level, we’re going to have to have the Napster conversation again, but this time, without the chance to blame people for being thieves. But when writers, artists, musicians or work done by other ‘creators’ becomes just an input for AI, what will that mean?

Part of me thinks it’s kind of no surprise this technology is fast-following the short-lived ‘creator economy’ that also was a driving force behind a lot of scammy blockchain projects and the emergence of extreme power law disparities that meant nearly everyone feeding the maw of the centralized creator platforms got little-to-no compensation for their efforts.

This might prove to be an uniformed take on the whole thing, but to me, most of the creators in the creator economy were simply servants of the consumption-at-all-costs ad-driven models behind social media. If you were able to skim enough of that ad money, you were also likely to be able to work for “brands” and directly shill things yourself.

Meanwhile, somehow people (millennials?) have been convinced that “personalized ads are better” – so they are more likely to get you to buy things they probably don’t need and ultimately burn down the world? I’m happy with my terrible ads for things I couldn’t care less about, tyvm.

Back in the day, I wrote an article in which I proposed that the new digital economy would work for artists if they went direct and didn’t expect to make a fortune, but instead thought of their work as a solo entrepreneur, a “cobbler” in that case.

This seems more true than ever to me now. Artists can succeed when they consider having customers, not the customer of the platform, which incentivizes erasing difference and uniqueness, but people who care about what they do.

This has changed the nature of art-making, I am sure, since there’s some aspect of art we value that might be thought of as “not caring about an audience,” being true to one’s own vision, not “selling out.” But you could also argue that artists can retain that vision if they think not about making art people like but instead, learning how to find and nurture the people who care about the truth as the artist sees it.

Historically, creative work has been something one could do if one was rich, had a benefactor, or was exploited by people who could distribute and/or sell the work. Nothing has changed much, except that it’s perhaps a lot easier from a technical aspect to make things, and for that reason, there’s a lot more to consume, sift through, or pay for.

Is there any real defense of copyright for individual creators? In this new economy, the best bet creators have is to build relationships and community around their work, and in doing so, most likely grow their business slowly, rather than trying to get that one lottery ticket ‘hit’,

But what will Disney do as AI strips out an identity from those using the work? We can hardly have an AI that just leaves out the most popular and capitalized media without creating huge gaps of knowledge- and presumably that cat is way out of the bag by now.

There are so many interesting and possibly radical outcomes of what’s happening with this technology, to state the obvious. My question for the AI: are you just here to keep us captive on our consumer treadmill, or are you going to force people to contend with making their own meaning and coming together as the still-human?

Asking

Like many people, I have a weird relationship to asking for things. There are the ‘old tapes’ that tell me my wants and needs don’t matter. There’s the story that competent people can do everything without help. There’s the strange way I have of putting off outreach when I have the idea that I could use a hand. There’s the sense that I’ll be a burden, or risk losing my relationships by being perceived as a taker, or just that I’ll look like I don’t know what I’m doing.

Rationally, I am aware that asking has a lot less risk than I perceive, and that in truth, relationships are often strengthened by the vulnerability of asking and the feeling of caring helping can offer, when it’s requested and welcomed. But I still feel so much more comfortable being the helper, the connector, the service-giver.

Being in community helps with this, because every space is held by a number of people, and I can be of service while availing myself of the benefits of this kind of connection.

Still, though, I’m thinking that this year I am going to practice asking much more often, even if it’s for dumb things, and these are not going to be those low-stakes broadcast asks like, “does anyone know…” or something like that in Slack or on LinkedIn.

In the last year, I’ve had incredible results from asking. Usually my asks happen because I think of something quickly and I don’t get all caught up in the right way to do it. And it’s not about scheming, it’s about opening an opportunity for humans to be in connection with me or their own values.

Isolation is the dream killer, not your attitude.

Barbara Sher

I’m about to experiment with an Ask support group, kind of like the “Success Teams” described in this over-the-top, problematic, but still compelling TED Talk. Or in this TED Talk, which opens the door to thinking about jobs and economies and asking as a revolutionary practice. Kind of a mastermind group for figuring out things to ask for, what’s in the way, and then just making asks. I put this here, even if no one is reading, as a reminder to myself. What will we discover when we ask together?

Time For Friends

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.

– Aristotle

When it comes to the challenges of having friends as an adult, it seems like technologists often focus on the problem of meeting people or of having someone to do an activity with. The annals of apps that went nowhere are littered with solutions to these problems, and every year, someone tries a new version, sometimes even with funding.

But the real problem isn’t meeting people, nor is it having your friends know where you or what your plans are so you can do things with them. Those are necessary but insufficient conditions for having friends.

The problem is that friendship requires time and effort. Dr. Jeff Hall found it takes between 40-60 hours to move from an acquaintance to a casual friendship, from 80-100 hours to call someone a friend, and over 200 hours of being together to achieve being considered a ‘best friend.’

There are a number of systemic and cultural trends working against us when it comes to putting in that time and effort. We move more, work remotely, have gig work or other odd schedules, have kids and no family nearby to take the load off parents, and of course we have lots of things designed to entertain us or hold our attention when we’re alone.

What’s more, it’s just getting more unusual (and maybe weirder) to find people behaving in more casual time-and-effort ways, like stopping by someone’s house on the way somewhere else, or phoning people up without arranging the call in advance, or spontaneously making a plan to do something. This would be mostly unthinkable with people you don’t know well among most people I’ve talked to.

I’ve tried out a number of these matching-people programs, and in my experience, even when I have a totally fun and interesting conversation with someone, I probably won’t talk to them again for months, if ever.

There’s a social… taboo is too strong, but maybe anti-norm? against the idea that two individuals could meet for totally non-romantic reasons and then hang out daily with no motive other than to build a friendship. Being ‘busy’ is a marker of status, seeming like you have unlimited free time or even enough to fit a new friend in might make you look lame or needy. And generally, it does take time with someone to even tell if you want to go in the direction of time alone with them for any prolonged time period.

All of these factors make me believe that communities are the only reliable way to allow people to spend regular time with one another and become friends outside of a work or religious context (which are arguably forms of community). When you hang out in a community, you’re not implying other people must reciprocate whatever amount of time you can spend there, nor is there necessarily an expectation that you will be there at any given time, unless you specifically take on a commitment to do so (and in that case, it’s generally a service to the group, not one that implies you are lonely).

Being lonely has the odd side effect of making us more antisocial and suspicious, which means exposing our loneliness feels incredibly vulnerable. A community gives us a reason to be with people, getting to know and care about others without needing to give away that we feel isolated or alone.

There are a lot of ways communities or collectives or groups work, but I think anyone who is contributing to a community (where people care about each other) is working to alleviate a huge problem with enormous health costs and negative cultural impacts. All while mattering and co-creating meaning with other people. It’s one of the best ways we can be rewarded, be of service, without requiring a clear transaction (though some communities do have fees or admission, a good community still runs without the sense that you’re paying for someone to care about you).

Making Space

People often come together to do something, especially when it comes to activism, community work, social justice, or project collaboration. Having a common purpose can help people find each other and motivate them to invest in building relationships.

You might even extrapolate this to people coming together in any kind of democratic context.

The problem is that we often don’t take the time to build the trust necessary to making these situations sustainable.

The result of a failure to build trust can manifest in many ways. In some cases, the whole thing just implodes and people stop showing up, or numbers dwindle down to a core group of people who already had the trust with one another.

In other situations, democracy starts to look more like autocracy, perhaps with a benevolent dictator, perhaps with a shadow group running the show while the illusion of democracy is maintained.

What does trust allow for that allows democracy to function?

First, it means people understand that in a group of people, there are always differences in the level of commitment, understanding, status, and personal liberation for each person in a group.

Second, it means that making a decision can be collaborative and people can share what they really think without fear of reprisal or ostracism.

Third, it means the group is more invested and aligned with a decision because even if they disagree, they believe the choice was made in good faith and that their dissent was recognised and acknowledged.

There’s a bit of a circularity here, but before a group can be effective at making any decisions, they need to build trust. And trust largely comes from getting to know one another, having boundaries and container that allow us to be vulnerable enough to be known, and to practice listening-focused engagement. When those conditions are met, we can move on to conversations that work, and then to decisions.

For many of us who like getting s*** done, it can be uncomfortable to be in the trust-building stage. Let’s just make a decision, let’s see the fruits of our collaboration! We’re wasting time!

The problem is that when groups move quickly without building trust, they inevitably invite dominance into the process. Not everyone feels heard. The loudest voices lead the way. We start creating situations where some people feel uninvested in or confused by decisions, and people begin creating factions or leave the group.

I’m going to skip over what this looks like in nations or large-scale platforms, but in groups where we want to achieve something that requires any level of sustainability and ongoing commitment, we are best served by making sure we’ve spent the time to talk to each other.

Missing the flight

We were in Taipei, packing up our little AirBnB to head out to the airport to go to our next stop on our trip, a resort in Vietnam. I’ve never thought of myself as a resort kind of person, but it was our honeymoon, and we hadn’t taken a vacation in years. We gathered all our things, I assembled the visa paperwork I’d printed out, and then, hmm, where was my passport?

“Have you seen my passport?” I asked A. This is not a good question to ask A. Immediately, I could tell I was under suspicion. My loose ways were certainly to blame, according to the look I received.

We looked everywhere. I had carried the passport in my bag the day before, and on retracing our steps, soon it was evident what had happened. We had wandered into a “vegetarian expo” being held at the conference center nearby, which had been very packed, back when being in compressed spaces bumping into strangers was a thing. Obviously, someone had reached into my bag, brimming with packages of vegan jerky, and light fingers had made off with my official ID.

OK, this was bad, but I mean, things happen when you travel. I felt mad at myself but then went into ‘how do I solve this’ mode. We took our bags, left the Airbnb, and got an Uber to the American Embassy.

The staff were not very comforting. It could take a while, they said. But I explained that we were supposed to be going to Vietnam that very day, and with some vaguely questionable charges that had to be paid in cash, I was eventually (about three hours later) handed a thin emergency passport with a harried photobooth picture to take away.

We went to the airport, where we had missed our flight, but we went to one of travel agent kiosks and booked another one. We got to the check-in counter and oops, the visa was now ineligible with my new passport. Oh, and was it refundable? We went back to the kiosk and spent a lot of time trying to convince them to help us, then spending a few hours trying to get online in the one corner of the airport where there was any wifi, refreshing in that horrible jonesing kind of way, like please please please just give me my fix. Finally, we found another Airbnb and went there, tired and dejected, and I re-applied for our visas, which perhaps would come through in 48 hours, maybe, don’t pin your hopes on it, according to the translation on the official government site, which appeared to be built with GeoCities.

We wandered around Taipei as we’d been doing, getting to know the underground malls, getting chilly and wet walking outside, and visiting various Starbucks–though Taipei is a coffee mecca, the idea of decaf coffee has not occurred, which, you know, I can’t fault them for. I contacted the resort and told them we were coming in a couple of days and not to cancel our whole reservation. Staying within the vicinity of wifi on the chance that a magical visa email might appear more quickly than expected.

After two days in the tiny Airbnb, I thought, if we’re stuck here, let’s at least be on vacation and found a hotel near the hot springs in the northeast outside the city. We got there in the evening, wandered around looking for plausible food, then discovered the email had arrived. I got online and booked our flights for early the next day. I booked an Uber that would pick us up at some ungodly morning hour. YES!

We woke bleary-eyed and stumbled down to the lobby, where our Uber was right on time. The trip to the airport was remarkably fast. Finally, things are working! I thought, until we opened the door to step out and realized, oh eff, this is not the right airport. Throwing our things back into the car, we sped for an hour through the still-fluorescent-lit streets to get to Taoyuan International, where we rushed to the ticket counters about 30 minutes before the flight was scheduled to depart- and couldn’t find a ticket counter for our airline. Finally, someone explained that since the window to check in had closed, the counter was now being used by another airline.

Our marriage had lasted for six months, but I wasn’t sure it was going to make it through this. I could not think straight, I just was like, “there must be a way to get to Ho Chi Minh City today and we’re going to find it.” And so, I found myself in a conversation with a guy who was a travel agent, I guess, kinda? He seemed to know the people at the ticket counter and had access to tickets for flights that were no longer booking online. How much was this going to cost? A lot. And we weren’t going to get our money back for the flights we missed. A was by turns furious and incredulous as I allowed this dude to take pictures of my credit card as watched him flirt with the ticket agents, brandishing multiple phones, and eventually producing tickets that took us to Saigon, luckily where it was warm with a little spa outside the airport terminal, and then to Ho Chi Minh.

I’m thinking about this trip because it’s the kind of crazy situation that results from a combination of typical travel hijinks, my own ADD (choosing the wrong airport, for example), and technology systems that create their own layers of bureaucracy on top of what is already bureaucratic, like visas and airline ticketing. Will such situations be a thing of the past as we develop more effective AI?

What would this have looked like in a world with AI managing my affairs? I mean, just having AI deal with the visa in the first place would have been amazing. (I suppose there’s also an argument that just having a different human than me responsible for all the arrangements might have ultimately saved us money and heartache).

I am very good at discovering deals or hacking together possibilities, but I am not great at keeping track of all the details later. Could AI be the answer to my executive function deficiencies?

Imagine a world where all these systems we’ve built talk to each other, in that convivial style we’ve already seen with ChatGPT. Oh, hey, airline system, my AI might say, let me look at all the flights you have scheduled, match them up with all the hotel rooms and Airbnbs in the world, and take my [owner? friend? client?]’s preference into account along with any paperwork involved and get amazing deals that involve no real compromises at all. I mean, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

My AI could be going through all my email, noting the things that need my attention, and deleting or archiving all the dross. It could be making arrangements with other people’s AI so there’s never a need for calendar games. I mean, all of these things are what people have assistants for, but obviously AI could be even more effective, since it can scan a zillion things in no time and access APIs hidden these days from humans.

Maybe being ADD won’t matter when most of these memory and time management functions can be taken care of, especially in a world where AI can just ask you what you want with no data entry required.

But I wonder then, what will we need ourselves for?

One could get very Buddhist here and recognise that the self was just a construct anyway, so the purpose of oneself is, in a way, just to be, and if you’re next-level, to notice your being and how everything around you is also how you’re being (social networks, systems of domination, ecologies, quanta, whatever). I like sitting in the storm of all of it and feeling it gust against me.

Another way of thinking about this has to do with value. Naturally, in the way things are set up now, one’s access to an AI of this kind, and perhaps the access the AI has to systems it can manage, will cost something.

I haven’t yet read Bullshit Jobs, but what I infer about the concept tells me that the onset of technology (in the context of ‘late-stage capitalism’) thus far has only pushed us into having far more bureaucratic responsibilities than ever before. We spend less time being creative and less time in real connection and more checking emails and websites and looking at analytics and scrolling and liking and dealing with more and more paperwork, even if the paper part of it isn’t visible. If we actually read all the terms of service we’ve agreed to in the last 10 years, we probably wouldn’t have had time to eat or sleep. My stepson has 20+ apps and sites he has had to learn to navigate for academic assignments, and has yet to read a book after a semester of high school.

The trend is definitely in the wrong direction, but it seems like it could change. It could remove the need for all kinds of trustees of paperwork, but then what?

We developed money, it seems, in large part to deal with lack of trust. You might be fine extending credit to people you know or who is part of your general community, but maybe not so much to a guy with a weapon who you don’t know from Adam. Graeber suggests that we have money for one main reason- armies.

Once we had money, we could use it to buy things or pay people for doing a service, but then things got more weird. People started accumulating money just to have more money, and then power and money became more synonymous. I’m really compressing this- please do read Debt: The First 5,000 years where it’s more expansive. But the way one accumulates money depends on there being ways to multiply money, which turn out to largely be loans of one form or another.

So in our current system, I can get money by working for someone who pays me for the time I spend working, or by making a good that someone else buys, by producing goods from farming or extraction of natural resources, by selling things I ‘own’, or by offering a service that someone else pays for. Alternately, I can loan money and demand interest or fees as a condition of the load, or I can make an ‘investment’ in which I will get a return, should the business itself produce money in one of the ways outlined above.

In all these scenarios, I now have money, but what can I do with money? I can purchase things and pay for services. Some of these things are necessary for my survival, whereas others may make my life more convenient, easy, or pleasant, and others might signal my status. (Side hot take question: do you only need status signaling in types of work where what you do is largely unnecessary?) Alternately, I can use the money to make more money, and this is where things maybe go off the rails, but OK, it’s a thing).

In a future where we don’t need so many people to produce needed goods, or to perform valuable services, what are people going to do? And what will we do about money?

On the plus side, I won’t have to have systems to organize my to-dos and I’ll have a lot fewer to-dos of the kind that seem boring but necessary.

I think I am lucky, very lucky, in fact, that not only do I have systemic advantages, being white and educated, but I also already spend much of my time making meaning for myself, which does seem like one of the things no AI can replace. It doesn’t mean that we’re all suddenly going to have the freedom to spend our time meaning-making, of course, but I do have that pragmatic optimism, that if we can avoid burning down the world (a big if) then perhaps we’re going to see big, big systemic changes as the unsustainabilty of what we’re doing now becomes readily apparent, not just environmentally, but also in the way we’ve become bound to superficial levels of meaning.

This morning I was in a dream in which I had forgotten to go to the airport for my flight, and a huge sense of relief came with the realization that I could wake up. Maybe that’s on the horizon for us all.

The future of perspective

There must be a word for what happens when you’re thinking about something and then seemingly randomly you stumble across other people talking about that thing in a way that adds a whole new dimension. Serendipity is sort of what I mean, but there should be something more specific?

When I went to take a shower this morning, I did my usual thing and put on a podcast.

Digression: I ‘follow’ many podcasts and yet I often find myself in that weird paralysis that also should have a name specific to what happens when one opens Netflix or any other app with a bunch of options without having something in mind, and then faces the existential crisis of “what exactly am I feeling, wanting, going to be compelled by at this moment?” There’s often this feeling of “why do I follow all these things I have no interest in actually listening to?” except that obviously there are times I want to listen to them, or wanted to. On the other hand, there are a number of options that feel kind of aspirational, like they are smart and interesting but more of a commitment than what I can reasonably listen to in a shower/getting ready timeframe, though most of my podcast listening has to work in exactly that context. I sometimes end up listening to one podcast broken up into several showers, which explains why I saw there was a new episode of EconTalk and I hit play.

In this most recent podcast, host Russ Roberts talks to Ian Leslie (for the third time), in this case about AI and being human. In the first part of the podcast, the two discuss ChatGPT, as in nearly every podcast I’ve heard recently, but instead of “what cool things can we do with this tech” or “how will this lead to the apocalypse,” Roberts and Leslie were talking about something more interesting, namely that this kind of technology means that our own unique mode of expression will be more important now, since the nature of ChatGPT (at least in near-future incarnations) is to sort of average everything, to be competent but not revolutionary, to pull from different sources but not in the same way one individual with one’s own experiences, education, and personality might synthesize ideas.

When I am thinking about writing every day, I know what I’m producing isn’t my “best work;” everything is essentially a first draft. But I don’t want to write something generic, and when it comes to writing about ideas, it seems I may fall into that trap. Most of the things I think about on a given day are interesting to me because I don’t have a full grasp of them; I am trying to understand them myself, think through how the perspectives I encounter match up or upend what I’ve already processed.

What I’m starting to appreciate more and more is that I do have an unusual level of curiosity, and as a result, a fairly unique set of experiences. At the same time, I find at this stage of my life, I am also compelled by ideas that seem to be more universal, patterns I have seen in the myriad contexts in which I’ve explored. Then again, I also think there’s some interesting ways in which I find myself in contradiction.

I’m curious if I can find ways to tease out how my experiences lend new ways of thinking about a given subject. Trying to remove the evaluation of whether what I’m writing is ‘good’ and going a layer down into where some of my reactions and ideas come from. I’m not sure if it’s interesting to talk about this tangle of experiences I’ve had. Is writing ultimately a way for me to make sense of my life, my self, the world around me? Am I on the hook to entertain anyone who comes across my words? To give you a huge set of possible inputs that could explain how I see things? Mostly, I am guessing it only matters how you see things, and not so much whether what I’ve experienced has any bearing on our level of congruence.

What this inquiry boils down to for me is whether I can write about ideas without boring myself, without erasing myself in some “how you write an essay” generic mode of expression. What happens when I am more present, when I am visible? I will be vulnerable, or whatever the right word is to say, I’ll probably say something stupid or that I’ll disagree with myself soon, and I’ll be OK, the only real danger is wanting to appear instead of just appearing.

The right to be

Writing every day for a week has made me aware that I have a propensity to get kind of… serious? didactic? like I’m writing some kind of college-essay-meets-Forbes-think-piece? That doesn’t feel very much like me. So it will be interesting to see if I can write about things I’m interested in without abandoning the ‘pragmatic optimist with a sort-of dark/dry sense of humour’ outlook I have in actual life.

Recently I have been thinking about the idea of ‘rights.’ I’ve spent a lot of my life in contexts where there was a stated goal of defending/expanding rights, I have some ambivalence towards the concept, and I’m curious why.

Recently I read the book Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene, who describes himself as a Utilitarian, and also a leftist. While much of the book was a little too caught up in the Philosophy 101 of the trolley problem, I found his argument about the idea of ‘rights’ thought provoking.

When, and why, do the rights of the individual take precedence over the greater good? Every major moral issue—abortion, affirmative action, higher versus lower taxes, killing civilians in war, sending people to fight in war, rationing resources in healthcare, gun control, the death penalty—was in some way about the (real or alleged) rights of some individuals versus the (real or alleged) greater good… There are times when a deep pragmatist should feel free to speak of rights—and not just legal rights but moral rights. These times, however, are rarer than we think. If we are truly interested in persuading our opponents with reason, then we should eschew the language of rights. This is, once again, because we have no non-question-begging (and non utilitarian) way of figuring out which rights really exist and which rights take precedence over others.

In the United States, property ‘rights’ take precedence over other rights rather frequently. For the first part of the nation’s history, this property included people, which meant that the way the law around property worked had to accommodate the extreme removal of ‘rights’ for a huge number of people.

David Graeber has a lot to say on this:

Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of Independence by directly contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights …” thus undercutting simultaneously any argument that Africans were racially inferior, and also that they or their ancestors could ever have been justly and legally deprived of their freedom. In doing so, however, he did not propose some radically new conception of rights and liberties. Neither have subsequent political philosophers. For the most part, we’ve just kept the old ones, but with the word “not” inserted here and there. Most of our most precious rights and freedoms are a series of exceptions to an overall moral and legal framework that suggests we shouldn’t really have them in the first place…

We are so used to the idea of “having” rights–that rights are something one can possess–that we rarely think about what this might actually mean… Historically, there is a simple–if somewhat disturbing–answer to this. Those who have argued we are the natural owners of our rights and liberties have mainly been interested in asserting that we are fre to give them away, or even sell them.

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Honor and Degradation

In most cases, when we create rights, they are subject to all kinds of subjective evaluation and disagreement about what they mean. For that reason, ‘rights’ are really better articulated in the negative, not as ‘you have the right to do something,’ but more like ‘no one has the right to stop you from doing something.’ This seems to require more disambiguation.

It’s perhaps difficult to talk about rights without making people with strong views angry, because rights are usually at the heart of polarizing arguments. I’m hearing my friends in my mind right now, saying “WHAT? You don’t believe in human rights?’

That seems like a weird view for someone who started an Amnesty International group in high school, has been active in queer organizations and cares deeply for freedom and self-determination. I think a lot about how incredibly layered our systems are with dominance, violence, and oppression.

And I also am naturally oriented to think about humans as not exactly divinely inspired or inherently moral or maybe just capable of getting out of our own myopia when it comes to our collective sense of being. At this point in our species-level development, we seem to me to be beautiful, capable of compassion, wildly creative, collaborative in impressive ways, short-sighted, impatient, and at least tending towards an overall narcissism that has produced many ways that we could cause our own extinction, after killing off the majority of diverse life on the planet. Did I say I was an optimist?

If we have “rights,” who decides what they are, who sets the criteria for whether they have been met, who is responsible if the rights aren’t met? What we’re actually talking about feels like a mish-mash of different categories, sometimes with conflicts that are unresolvable because they can be viewed from different categories

  • “clearly this is beneficial for an individual on every available measure” (such as being not-killed or assaulted, physically healthy, housed, or able to access nourishment)
  • “things that have evidence of being important to our sense of well-being” (acceptance of our identity insofar as it doesn’t infringe on someone else’s well-being, autonomy, ability to access education, having the option to pursue interests)
  • “things that are important given the power structures in play” (access to jobs, property rights, perhaps even free speech?)
  • “things that are important based on moral structures that are not necessarily universal” (fetal rights, right to reject laws based on belief structures)

Things get even muddier when we have categories based on identities themselves, largely made up of groups of subjects who have been denied opportunities or legal protection in the past (women, LGBTQAI+, animals, etc.). I am sure there are philosophy or sociology classes where this is articulated way more effectively than I am capable of.

Instead of thinking about rights, which to me take the conversation into a conceptual place that gets argumentative quickly, we should be taking the approach john a. powell suggests in his work on Targeted Universalism. Where do we want collectively to be (as a small community, locally, nationally, globally) and how would we actually accomplish that? Presuming that the outcome is favourable and desirable for everyone?

Of course, this gets tricky at scale, since ideally those working towards the future are the same people as those who are deciding what a good future looks like. For that reason, large-scale progress has to focus on more universally-agreed upon goals, like human survival, and perhaps Maslow-ian needs.

One thing that seems maybe obvious: there’s not really a future where ‘convenient consumerism will be sustainable. I don’t have a ‘right’ to get everything I want when I want it, and as we spend more and more of our resources trying to support that ideal anyway, we’re burning down the house from the inside and out.

This post hasn’t got a conclusion, I want to think more about this idea of ‘rights’ and how we can repair the harms we’ve done without any rights as a guide. In other words, think less about rights and more about responsibilities. Without getting too ponderous! This is the other side of the solopsism, the idea that everything depends on us, on me. It does in a way, but only for my own experience, a dream.

Product & Power

What makes technology ethical?

This question contains all kinds of interesting angles and even assumptions, but one thing that feels core to me has to do with listening and looking for blind spots.

There’s this mythos in tech, which not-coincidentally is largely led by people with a particular kind of status, that of the founder-visionary. And oh, boy, the last couple of years has given us plenty of case studies on the failures of vision.

Status and power has a negative effect on empathy and compassion. (Check out Dacher Ketner’s The Power Paradox and see citations below). “Visionaries” often start with cultural advantages, start succeeding within the parameters of scale/massive fundraising/personal wealth and then parlay that into behaviour that seems almost delusional.

Building with ethics in mind, technology product makers start with understanding the people who will use the product. To do that, we don’t just speculate or transpose our own expectations about what matters to people who we want to serve. We talk to them, listening not only to learn what problems they have but also why these challenges matter to them and what emotions, motives, and aspirations surround the problem.

Let’s not be visionaries, let’s be creative, compassionate, and collaborative.

Most likely, we are limited by our own backgrounds and lived experience as technology builders. So we also can include more people when we explore solutions. Early-stage entrepreneurs can develop communities and advisory boards that can open the door to innovative and thoughtful ways to address the needs and motives of customers.

There are a lot of ideas that are built using resources and energy that were not developed around what people care about or how the business will serve them. De-risking with research, prototype tests, and other discovery practices can save not only time and energy, but also lead to more success in creating real value.

I work with other product people trying to change systems toward sustainable, human, equitable outcomes. And for me and for other product folks, it’s not always simple.

Right now, we have some pretty unsustainable practices around actually building technology. One problem is funding. Behind most venture capital, there’s the idea of creating wealth for its own sake as opposed to creating people-centred, sustainable businesses. VC-backed tech entrepreneurs build businesses to grow and “capture markets” rather than to develop long-term relationships with those they serve. And, perhaps even more than other kinds of corporations in the US and other ‘business-friendly’ locales, tech companies often take advantage of public infrastructure without investing in local communities.

It’s very hard to build anything in tech without using tools like cloud infrastructure owned by big corporations that avoid examining their own cultural and climate impacts in the interest of short-term shareholder gains. This doesn’t even include the problems of digital surveillance and bias that are introduced in the ecosystem we’ve created around building technology.

Ethics can feel really squishy when you’re a founder trying to figure out how to get something off the ground in this context. I know for myself, I have been moving a lot more slowly because I’m looking for opportunities to build differently, but I also know that I am not going to be able to avoid choices that have downstream effects in building anything.

My hope is that starting with listening and understanding, choosing communities to serve that themselves demand good stewardship, and constantly looking for ways to be creative and not accept the status quo will ultimately lead to a product that contributors will feel proud of.

Further reading

van Kleef, G.A., Oveis, C., van der Löwe, I.,LuoKogan, A., Goetz, J., & Keltner, D. (2008). Power, distress, and compassion: Turning a blind eye to the suffering of others. Psychological Science, 19 (12), 1315-1322.

Hogeveen, J., Inzlicht, M. & Obhi, S.S. (2014). Power changes how the brain responds to others. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 143 (2), 755-762.

van Kleef, G. A., Oveis, C., Homan, A. C., van der Löwe, I. & Keltner, D. (2015). Power gets you high: The powerful are more inspired by themselves than by others. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6 (4), 472–480.

Guinote, A. (2007b). Power and goal pursuit. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 1076-1087.

Galinsky, A.D., Magee, J.C., Inesi, M.E., & Gruenfeld, D.H. (2006). Power and perspectives not taken. Psychological Science, 17 (12), 1068-1074.

Lammers, J., Galinsky, A.D., Dubois, D., & Rucker, D.D. (2015). Power and morality. Current Opinion in Psychology, 6, 15-19.

(references here from an article by Elizabeth A. Segal, Ph.D.)

The pleasure of being wrong

One of the ways I define a conversation I want to be in is that there’s a possibility I will discover I am wrong about something.

For me, there’s often a rush of excitement when I think “oh, my mind is changing about this!” And “oh wow, I had such a superficial understanding of this!” Sometimes it happens just from reading or listening to an audiobook, but conversations are where discoveries feel the most thrilling.

Allowing for this possibility is not a feature of many social platforms, in my experience.

There are two reasons that stand out : one, that most things tend to stick around, so there is a social cost to saying something and then discovering you’re wrong, to the degree that I see many people entrenched in a position that doesn’t make sense, or being afraid to say anything that isn’t benign or, maybe even more often, a sort-of self-congratulatory bid for attention.

Second, nearly all social technology is either broadcast-oriented, meaning everything you say is on some kind of stage, even in a small Slack or Discord. Or it’s very private, in ‘messaging’ that is at least intended not to be shared even though someone is storing it on a server somewhere indefinitely.

In person, conversations can happen more freely- like where you’re talking to someone or a few people and there might be people who can hear but aren’t participating, or people who might come over to the conversation, hear a part of it, and decide to join in. There aren’t invisible people listening, but the conversations aren’t exactly private either.

You can have conversations on Zoom, but it’s pretty hard to do without a fair amount of management and mediation. VR-ish spacial chat apps try to mimic some of these ‘stumbling in’ aspects of physical space. So far, my experience is that they require a lot of fiddly stuff tying you to a larger screen, but I’m sure they will improve.

At any rate, I’m curious how to design systems that support a discovery process, not just of entering into conversations but also in allowing the possibility of a hypothesis or assumption being questioned. I’m thinking about what might lead to more curiosity and willingness to experiment. To encourage the kind of joy that comes from a mutual exchange of perspectives, where everyone has progressed with their thinking in the end, even if no one agrees fully. This is essentially what creative collaboration is, right?

Even better if there’s a way to act on the progress, if there’s a collective process. I’m not an idealist. Instead, when we look at amazing eras of progress, there are a lot of people exchanging ideas from different perspectives and seeing different angles or nuances that they missed on their own.

To address the problems we want to tackle (or at least, some of them), we need the space and grace to be wrong.

The relationship work ethic

Social media has negative effects on our well-being for a reason we don’t talk about enough. It’s created a fallacy that relationships, finding friends or partners, finding collaborators, developing community should be easy. When it’s not, people come up with ideas to use technology to make it easier: I know! AI that will tell you your friends are nearby, or that you have the same musical tastes as someone, or you can ‘join a community’ that puts you in a space where you can look at people’s self-promotion and job postings at the same time as other people. (Yes, I get animated about the community platforms, obviously).

But really, there isn’t a way to completely circumvent the process of getting to know other people, figuring out ways that you can be with each other and ways that don’t work, of negotiating all the ancillary aspects of a relationship like your proximity, whether you get along with their existing circles, whether you share enough of a common goal to accomplish something, who is going to do the work of initiating contact or planning things to do, I mean the list goes on and on.

There are interesting ways to facilitate or open the door to the process of forming relationships. Some of the needs we have now are side effects of other technology we have developed over time, and we could look at how to tweak or rethink the ways we’re together as mediated by technology. But making it ‘easier’ or especially ‘faster’ feels a little like abandoning the very needs at the core of relationships, which is belonging, mattering, loving, being loved, none of which make any sense to make “frictionless.”

I have wished before for the kind of learning depicted in The Matrix, where I could just plug something into my head and suddenly play piano or tennis or be a wicked martial artist. How cool would that be? Except that why are skills valuable in the first place? I suppose if I could play tennis well I’d enjoy playing tennis more, but on the other hand, if I enjoyed tennis enough as a beginner, why not stick with it and get the joy of improving? I mean, if I was great at tennis I would need technology to also expand time so that there’d be hours free to go to a tennis court, not to mention some kind of point to playing tennis in the first place, if everyone can just get out-of-the-box proficiency. Would I “win” tennis matches by virtue of anything I was doing or just have a more impressive tennis game upload?

A digression, but isn’t the same thing true about friends or collaborators? What makes us long for connection has to do at least in part with wanting to be known and seen as individual, unique, and special to someone. Or in a group, to be a trusted part of the interpersonal dynamic, and to feel like our presence and our perspective are valued. Even more importantly, we know and value our friends and collaborators. If we didn’t, then why would it matter if they care about us?

There are people working on AI that is supposed to emulate this but it misses something obvious. Probably most people have had the experience of being in a one-sided relationship. Sure, there’s ego validation at some level, but doesn’t it actually feel bad to be the person who is less invested? My experience is that I’ve felt like a bit of a jerk for not caring enough, resentful because I didn’t invite the level of connection that it seems like I was asked to reciprocate, and even a little bit lonely since it’s a situation that puts lack of connection front and centre.

We can create spaces that reduce the sense of interpersonal obligation to the degree that we can feel a generalized sense of connection, and many of those spaces open the doors for people to be vulnerable and feel a sense of belonging, but when the rubber meets the road, we really want someone who will know what we’re going through, who we’ve negotiated challenges with so we know they are in it with us in a serious way.

I have to question myself here, because I do think there’s something powerful about finding people who share passions, values, a mission, or a desire to change and grow. But finding is really such a small part of the work to be done to have connection and meaning. And so the key is starting small, with one or two people, building and understanding the speed of trust within your relationship.

It’s not even the perfect people we need, it’s the people who are willing and open to showing up for one other. But in a world where you can sift though thousands of profiles, of the ads we create of ourselves, it’s easy to think that our job is to pick the right product, rather than to experience the discomfort of early and emerging relationships.

Because it is uncomfortable to not know whether someone likes you, is reliable, will call you back. To not be sure what their reaction will be to your flaws, or just to things about each of us that might not be appreciated by everyone. To reveal things that you’re not sure about yourself, to love people when they don’t always receive it. To know if they’re just busy or have passed on getting closer. So many things are hard.

And getting through the discomfort is what actually lets us know we care and are cared for.

This isn’t very revelatory, but it’s still interesting to me. The last few years have opened so many spaces to me and I’ve met a lot of amazing people. I hope some of them will become friends and collaborators! And it’s also helped me see how, no matter how much time I’m ‘with’ people, if I don’t put work into my deeper relationships, I will still feel alone.