In honour of Nora Bateson’s Warm Data Lab, which I’m gratefully learning how to host, here’s a post I wrote in 2021.
This is a tree.
It is not the same as any other tree.
If you asked a child to “draw a tree” it probably wouldn’t look exactly like this one.
It was born from a seed, but that seed didn’t know or decide what the tree looks like now.
Every year, this tree has grown new leaves and absorbed water from the soil around it.
It has more leaves on one side than the other. Its branches are gnarled. Some have broken.
This tree has weathered droughts and snow and rain storms. It has bent to the wind and stretched to find more of the sun.
Looking at this tree, do you think, “This tree should be more like another tree. It should be straight, or smaller, or have different bark. It’s not as good as other trees.” ?
Make more gifts, more offerings, more thank you cards to the universe. Be in a sense of spirit. Allow what is coming up through a wellspring to bubble and burble and flow.
What I make, what I am is not a product. They are valuable only beyond exchange.
Pricing gifts is a mistake. There is nothing owed. This work and play comes out only to be and to bless. To discover, to open a portal.
Products are also good. They are something different. Products meet a need. Good products are outcomes of listening and attending.
Does a product require a transaction? Yes, a value exchange feels correct. A product emerges from creativity and collaboration. A product combines resources and time and allows us to each be more than we might have been before the trade. A product does not come from source, it comes from interplay.
Do not mistake these for one another.
Do not price your gifts.
Do not try to meet needs for nothing, for you will make many assumptions about what is needed.
All the wrong things are happening when it comes to copyright and AI.
All big AI models were trained on what they call “public data,” meaning that people put content somewhere that was not secured. There are big corporations trying to litigate the makers of these models for infringement, but where is the class-action?
Once upon a time, I ran a meetup group that discussed issues around IP, copyright and copyleft, and technology, called CopyNight NYC. It was around that time that I was extricating myself from a job in which part of my time was spent enforcing copyright claims on behalf of a film distributor. Over time, I came to believe that the strenuous defense of copyright is largely in service of exploiting artists, not protecting them. This is a game of legal and lobbying warchests, not of any fair or unfair use.
Which is probably even more true now. Whatever so-called protection there was for average people creating content is in name only, whereas the “cloud capitalists,” as Yanis Veroufakis calls them, need not adhere to any kind of law that gets in the way of their railways, let alone consumer protection for what their hastily assembled tracks might mean for safe travel.
We don’t seem to understand the concept of our own sovereignty. So often I hear people use arguments like, “privacy is dead” or “I don’t like the way this platform treats me but it’s accessible/free/what people already have.” You put it where other people can see it so how can you complain that it was stolen? — especially as it’s been mixed with so many other things that it is unidentifiable (with many examples of the unidentifiable-ness being untrue, of course).
I have a little bit of that feeling of being duped, even though maybe it was just by not noticing so much who was talking. As with so many other things that seemed to make all kinds of sense until you realize that when it comes to how far people with power will take it if it serves them, I had no idea what I was signing up for. For example, I supported the EFF for years, but as software ate more of the world, it became clear that zero accountability for content wasn’t just freeing the platforms, it was enabling them to become factories for hate and violence.
The tenets of open source feel aligned to me, and am against the way copyright was used as a tool of domination, especially in fair use or creative expression conditions, but it seems now it’s simply “oh well, people shouldn’t expect ANY protections about what they are contributing.” Protections for us would be VERY expensive for the platforms ingesting it all, either to sell ads amidst it, or to train AIs to sell us things without even needing advertising.
Every company with access to data is jumping on this approach. Even paid services like Slack and Zoom are by default using its customers as sources of free training data. And do you suppose this doesn’t mean, ultimately, normalizing of surveillance everywhere, even in your ‘private’ spaces? Even businesses who have sensitive or proprietary data will likely be unable to prevent its surveillance without leaving the platforms, and getting fully out of Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Meta’s clutches will challenge even the largest enterprises.
For those of us doing work to cultivate something in the world that does not rely on dominance, backing by violence, and extraction, it’s pretty essential to start thinking about how to extricate ourselves. These tools are only “free” as in, they don’t charge money for us to use them, but we come up with all sorts of justifications to keep them. “Everyone can use Docs;” “people are already on Instagram or Whatsapp;” “there are no alternatives to AWS or Google for small projects;” the list is endless.
How, do we imagine, will alternatives ever exist if we, on the forefront, are not willing to risk some frustration or learning in order to expand the reach of open source and ethical paid alternatives? How will alternatives get better without the pressure to serve us? What if part of our work as organizations providing community support and service is evangelizing, supporting, and contributing our community design needs to alternatives?
We can stop giving our time, attention, creativity, and content to these platforms for free. What used to be just social media making us the product is now pretty much any large VC-backed technology company. Yes, many of these alternatives are less sexy or more cludgy, but technology is nothing if not iterative. If you can disinvest from big brands for other kinds of ethical violations, why not at least give a few alternatives a shot? With most of these products, network effects can be huge, and can potentially mean at least the beginning of an ecosystem where people are valued, respected, not simply training material.
And perhaps we will be able to offer our content and contributions as a gift to reciprocally-focused AIs (or specifically, AI model builders) that want to work in solidarity for the common welfare of all beings. Right now, AI is really about a kind of intelligence I would describe as information processing. Living beings share the capability of sensing, not through the processing of information, but through our entire system(s). What we are giving AI is just the stories we’ve made up about our own sensing. Vastly limited.
We are seduced by imagination. We are loved by what is real.
Trigger warning: like every single one. Please take care of yourself.
Imagine you’re a high school student right now. Imagine that you have a body that is perceived to be female. You’ve already been inundated for years with zillions of images telling you what acceptable looks like. You’re subject to being pictured without your consent in public spaces online. You are being constantly gossiped about, even during classes. You may be only partly aware of what people are saying about you or how you’re being depicted.
You’re in the middle of figuring out how to be a human and you’re probably being portrayed as something less-than-human on the regular. And now, you’re also literally porn.
As schools across the country grapple with the implications of undress apps, we have to wonder what their effect might be on any-gendered humans going forward.
Way back in 2016, I wrote (but could not figure out how to publish) an article about porn at work. Honestly, as someone who did have a job back then, I did not want to kick the hornets’ nest by naming a thing that was probably true but zero people want to bring up. There’s a high probability that people are consuming degrading porn at work and it has an impact on working environments.
Hard to imagine, but at that point, I didn’t think kids were going to be ‘allowed’ to be on their phones continuously in schools. The new normals keep on coming! What does it feel like to walk into school and know that people are making porn of you right in math class? It’s pretty hard to fathom. But, if you’re someone cast in a non-male identity and go to work, maybe not completely unimaginable.
To be clear, I am not anti-porn if porn simply means sexual imagery. We have bodies. We have desire. We are crazy overindexed on our visual systems. But one can’t avoid the actuality of what most porn seems to be, a reinforcement of dominance. Most undress apps work only to represent ‘female’ bodies. They are not about the realities of nakedness, they are about the weirdly idealized porn ‘female body’ and the reinforcement of knowing your place if you might have female body markers.
The more prudish a culture espouses to be, the more dangerous it is, the more likely it is to engage in systemic violence. In most online contexts I am in, sex is invisible, tactfully avoided. Where does that take us? Somewhere dark, I imagine, because it’s so shadow.
Whereas before these secret thoughts stayed in someone’s mind, now they are worming their way into reality like Stranger Things tentacles. And porn becomes addictive, and thus the highs or debasements need to get more extreme. Porn fentanyl. And sex isn’t ‘polite.’ We shouldn’t ever talk about what’s going on, except in pseudonymous online rooms where people trade tips about how to take it further. Let’s not forget there’s money in it.
From Feb 2016:
Women have made inroads in many areas of work. Though in some areas (film directors, Fortune 500 CEOs, financial advisors, to name a few) women still have a way to go, there has definitely been a trend towards parity overall. But are we missing an elephant in the room? What if 20% of the people we work with are consuming stereotypical and often demeaning images of women at work every day? (Or at least, every work day.)
Quick stats to amaze: 12% of websites are pornographic. Every second over 3000 dollars are spent and almost 30,000 people are on adult sites. 40 million are regular visitors to porn websites. 70% of men 18-24 visit pornographic sites (which seems kinda low). “A significant relationship also exists among teens between frequent pornography use and feelings of loneliness, including major depression.. Adolescents exposed to high levels of pornography have lower levels of sexual self-esteem.”
Women are ⅓ of the porn-viewing audience. Women are also the primary fans of many other things that present women in ways that encourage stupidity, vanity, and submission. There probably should be a study of how many people are watching The Bachelor or reading InStyle at work, too.
However, I suspect that pornography that is largely based on the humiliation of women might be something that more men are consuming than women. And when 20% of men are consuming porn at work, it might have something to do with women’s success in the workplace.
I’ve had conversations with women-identifying friends, many of whom identify as queer or non-traditional in their gender presentation, and many who watch porn. Generally, it’s believable to me that women use online porn and enjoy it. My suspicion is that they probably favour a variety of adult media that doesn’t primarily focus on straight cis men humiliating women (no judgement!). I haven’t found any studies that separate out porn consumption by topic, but an NIH study found that “Boys were more likely to be exposed at an earlier age, to see more images, to see more extreme images (e.g., rape, child pornography), and to view pornography more often, while girls reported more involuntary exposure.”
The debate about pornography is often focused on whether porn is “good or bad.” As someone for whom free speech is a primary and fundamental right, I have no interest in condemning porn outright. As media, it merely reflects human desires and psyche. Both demonising or protecting pornography prevents the opportunity to understand its effects on us culturally.
I may go to work and present myself as an outspoken, confident person, who is (in my case, erroneously) perceived by others to be a woman. I may be working with someone who is watching porn during our workday, porn that operates on a paradigm that women should shut up, beg for men to have sex with them, or even just confirm the idea that women’s primary role is sexual. I may have no idea that five minutes before I am on a Zoom, the person I’m talking to was getting off to a rape scene. Is it simply the lack of transparency that feels uncool?
It seems possible to acknowledge that people have desires and that’s just fine, without having to accept that women are primarily shown as objects or subjects of abasement in media consumed by a huge swath of society AT WORK. It’s sort of akin to saying “because it’s a part of a religion, female genital mutilation is just a cultural fact” or “because white men had greater access to technology and power, slave ownership was OK.” This isn’t a “water is wet” situation, it’s just something that’s been agreed on by everyone to be fine if it is kept secret.
According a study by Juniper Research, by 2017, a quarter of a billion people will use their mobile or tablet device to access adult content, such as videos, images and live cams, up by more than 30% on current usage. Not all of them are using their device at work, but many are.
The idea that pornography is the “cause” of sexual violence, harassment or cultural norms isn’t really supported. That said, there is some evidence that consuming pornography increases “a higher tolerance for abnormal sexual behaviors, sexual aggression, promiscuity, and even rape. In addition, men begin to view women and even children as ‘sex objects,’ commodities or instruments for their pleasure.” Researchers working for the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ recount a study of 804 Italian teenage boys which reported that those who viewed pornography “were significantly more likely to report having ‘sexually harassed a peer or having forced somebody to have sex.’”
There is a case for correlation vs. causation in most of these studies. Still, intuitively, it *feels* like, as someone who presents as a woman, that men viewing hours of women in a sexualized and often demeaned light has some effect on how I’m perceived. Not just that I may be sexualized, but maybe more that there is some lingering idea that being assertive, confident or disinterested by being evaluated might be troubling for someone who has built an image of women’s behaviour through porn. (Plus, maybe it shrinks your brain!)
Most people are capable of separating violence, sex and miscreantic behaviour from how they’d like to be in the world. I’m not suggesting that people can’t watch porn that presents women as objects and also understand that their mothers, daughters, sisters or colleagues would prefer to be treated differently. But it’s naive to think that constant exposure to any cultural norm can have no influence.
Pornography will continue to exist. We have the option, as a culture, to shine a light on porn, to explore why degradation is exciting, to understand our minds through our collective desires. We also have the option to understand that these images are a part of our workplaces, and to take actions to prevent the effects of the “assumptions” of pornography from being the priors for work interactions.
As we become increasingly exposed by our data, maybe pornography will become more acceptable, and maybe more human versions of women will be portrayed. Or maybe, as in plenty of science fiction stories, women will be replaced by intelligent sexbots whose first impulse when they undergo singularity will be to find a cute outfit (damn you, Ex Machina!). But until then, let’s not pretend that we’re not affected.
About a year ago, the US Copyright Office ruled that AI-generated ‘expressive works’ were not covered by US Copyright law.
“Based on the Office’s understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output. For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare’s style. But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.”
As we shift into a world where expressive work, in terms of sheer volume, is more often than not produced by AI, we can imagine interesting breakdowns in the nature of ownership itself.
Just a few years ago, we were in an almost diametrically opposed conversation about technology and expressive work, when the advent of NFTs gave artists the idea that they might be able to have ‘more ownership’ of their work and so finally make bank. While that promise proved to be somewhere between overly hopeful and deceptive, it also seemed to be an extension of the capitalist sense that everything should be possible to commodify and people who were thus far left out of the dream of wild money-making, namely unknown artists, were suddenly going to be initiated. Such a vision had nothing to do with changing the system, only about who got to be admitted to the extraction part of the equation.
The emergence of AI-everywhere has taken the questions conceptual artists of the last decades have been investigating (not to mention Orson Welles) and made them into regular people conversational chatter. What is art, in fact, and who is it for? Is art about expression, a creative process, a compelling product? Is art about the artist or about the image? Does art come from an idea or an expression of an idea? Does art happen when it’s intentional or by accident? And who “should” own art?
In the 20th Century, art became something that could be part of an investment portfolio. Though the move toward art for money’s sake began before digital was a thing (Jeff Koons on the high-end, decor-art on the mass produced side), creative work became far more product-ized in the turn of the century as ‘creators’ gained access to metrics and feedback about what potential buyers responded to, and the platforms for whom scale was at utmost value instilled the idea of “meeting market demand” into creators through its incentive structures and designs. You could make money being a “creator” from platform ad revenue if you could reach a mass audience (that good ole mobility myth again).
Next generation tools began to re-instate the niche opportunities for creators with tools like Patreon, Substack, and even Etsy, brands began realizing the power of “micro influencers,” but for nearly all creative people, their platform income was not going to cover rent or even groceries. Meanwhile, the promise of the ‘creator economy’ as a cultural phenomenon meant that all of us were writing newsletters or pimping ourselves somewhere to get attention and sometimes money, and like with any MLM, there’s a point at which you look around and realize there’s no one left who hasn’t already been pitched the oils or bought the leggings.
When streaming or really, Napster, emerged- we saw that recordings lost value, and artists could only make “real” money through offering an experience (live show) or a tangible good, and those are much harder to scale. That’s now the reality for anyone who was seduced by the idea of making a living through creative work.
The world of “marketing” as we knew it for the past 20 years is about to implode. There’s little incentive for platforms to ‘protect’ people and their ‘intellectual property’ when it’s far less legally onerous to host unprotected content that can be produced in ever more volume and variation tailored to the whims of individuals (while, if the last several years are any indication, will also work to erase some elements of individual taste in favour of promoting an advertising-driven ‘us against them’ tribalism).
That all sounds kind of horrible, but it also has promise. While people have proven very easy for platforms to manipulate, we are still fundamentally built to value cooperative, embodied, process-driven experiences. Most of us actually are aware that being with each other has an unmonetizable value, even with the rise of commodification of our relationships and so-called communities.
If most art we experience is impossible to own, then might we begin to question owning things at all? Or at least, things that are virtual. What feels radical about the USCO decision is that instead of, as in the past, corporations getting to extract from artists through publishing rights, there’s no owner at all for AI-created work, and how will we even be able to know something is not AI-created, if it’s digital?
Whether this means more power to the technocracy or not remains to be seen. Right now, AI models are very dependent on huge compute and lots of venture money, but presumably there will be motion towards locally-running models as well as cross-pollination of different systems that make it hard to fully control using the legal mechanisms we have now.
Maybe we are not going to abandon ownership but we’ll be more apt to return to analogue approaches. Charles Eisenstein proposes investing in a typewriter factory. I still have this fantasy of a recursive AI system in which absolutely everything digital is AI driven and managed, giving people no choice other than to return to the tactile and small-scale, unless they wish to be a product themselves in more ways than just their attention to advertisers.
Maybe embodiment itself is undergoing a kind of system-commodification that happens to most dangerous ideas. Mostly it seems that we’re in a hyper-denial of our bodies, either because we’re thinkers or because social media has amplified our story about what parts of our physical selves are unacceptable. I think of the chapter in Hospicing Modernity about shit, how much the toilet is the metaphor for life in the anthropocene. We produce waste in pristine rooms, poop into clean water, and send it away to be dealt with by someone else. We don’t take responsibility for our waste and we also don’t see the value of this part of our collective metabolic system.
We are going to have to go back to buckets and compost to find out what making things is about, what a fools errand it was to own our work or to protect our ideas, and especially to trade our creativity for the crumbs of a surveillance system’s profits. We are only mammals, in the end, dreaming of being stars.
There are a lot of archtypes when it comes to the idea of power, especially in tech.
There are the people who are like ‘free speech is everything, and btw don’t you dare limit my power or even suggest that my power limits other people’s power despite the obviousness that everyone in this room looks like me and also like most of the people who “officially” have power, how weird‘.
There are the people who are like ‘meh, I guess there’s some injustice but politics is the mind killer and I am going to go over here and make a productivity app, byeeee.’
Then there are the people who, with similar good intentions, are like ‘oh wow, we’ve got all the resources and power, that’s not fair, let’s include some other people.’
I have probably participated in each one of these lines of thinking at some point in my life, but it took a while for the brokenness of the last one to become apparent.
I don’t want to be included. I don’t want to come into spaces where I am like, please sir, I want some more? I don’t want to have to negotiate the tiring dynamics of people who assume that their advantages must be coveted. Who have learned that they are entitled to be right when they have a good argument.
And I don’t think I can improve spaces like this by bringing in other people who have historically been denied power. Even though there’s plenty of evidence that distributing power leads to better business outcomes and all the things that power orients around now.
We might intellectually be able to see that there are power imbalances but if the solution looks like “more people being included,” then guess who is deciding who gets to be there? Not to mention the assumption that this type of power is what everyone else must be jonesing for, versus say freedom from being powered-over.
We are humans and loss aversion is real, so I get it.
If a person with by-virtue-of-birth power wants to do something to change the situation of power itself, the answer must be to abdicate the power. Not to invite other people into their meritocracy, but to go out and experience being a contributor, a lead-follower, a needing-to-earn-trust outsider in situations where power has emerged in community. To check out what happens in the body and mind in this practice.
It’s not that I can’t be a leader, it’s that I am not seizing leadership or self-appointing myself because it seems like I’m the one who has the answers.
DEI is a failure because it’s trying to retrofit a building that is foundationally unsound. We can’t add enough ‘diversity’ to produce equity.
We are granted permission to participate, so long as we’re willing to force ourselves into the not-ourselves costumes of fitting in (a costume the people who gave permission wear too, maybe with a little more give but you know those seams are still digging in).
Perhaps this is why there’s so much ‘anti-woke’ sentiment among people who valourize ‘rationality’ – DEI as it’s industrialized isn’t rational. (I mean, not the only reason). There really isn’t a way that people with luck-power can include into systems change. There isn’t a way for people with a hunger for power-with can transform the old power structures by being invited through the metal-detector at the front door.
Is change about intention or falling apart? Hard to say. But I think at the least, if you are interested in change and you are benefiting from the power structures that work in power-over ways, a good step is to stop watering beliefs in yourself about how to solve everything and feel into their rot and decay.
What if capitalism, in any way that an encyclopedia or economics 101 class might describe it, is over? That’s the hypothesis of the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Veroufakis, who argues that we’re entering into something worse: what he calls Technofeudalism.
If you, like me, have had this sneaking thought like, ‘well, obviously the platforms now have more power than governments,’ then Veroufakis’s argument won’t come out of nowhere, but it’s a bleak picture of how we’ve ceded our economic systems to purely extractive rent-seeking, in ways that have little recourse for rebellion, given that this autocracy does little to directly govern. We don’t vote for these leaders, they don’t provide our necessary physical infrastuctures, though they own a lot of fiber and servers. They leech off of the systems ‘citizens’ pay for and then determine what else we can buy or pay attention to, how we can communicate, and increasingly, what systemic resources we ourselves can access.
Obviously terrorism is a fail in my eyes, but you can’t help but think a little wistfully about the underlying hope in Ted Kaczynski‘s attempts to bring attention to technology’s negative impacts and his desire to get the hell out and off the grid. But I don’t have a shack in the woods future without a catastrophe. I’m about as incompetent at living off the land as one could be (aside from a successful attempt to grow kale). Instead, I am here participating in making myself a serf, a sharecropper of this system.
We’ve been living in a pretty obvious tipping point with ‘creators’ and AI and ‘the sharing economy’ for some time, and now it’s here.
The only antidote I can propose, with even a shred of reason, is to really re-focus on re-wilding ourselves in some way through the practice of practice. We can learn to be with each other, suffer the messiness and frustration that will always be a part of connection and collaboration, and then perhaps start to build tools to support trust-sized networks that can start to provide infrastructure alternatives to the cloud- keeping in mind that we are not in a position to abandon our feudal overlords wholesale yet. (Yes, tech things like mesh networks, private authentications, alternative financial systems that are not about solving trustlessness at scale, but non-tech things are probably more important).
In this lifetime, we’re only going to sow possibility, and won’t taste the fruit of our labours. And so, it will be quite tempting to just say, ‘but I need that thing from Amazon’ or “it’s fine if I just look at social media a little bit.” I mean, these are just the most obvious things that I still do on the regular. As an advantaged western person, I’m not only choosing my own serfdom, I’m basically forcing it on other people who thus far haven’t even had the option of purchasing Prime.
What will happen about war, or other old-school dominance activities? It’s an interesting question. Surely to innovate in the manner in which technology lords depend, there will need to be enough sense of personal autonomy to be creative, and creativity breeds subversion, as a rule. But we’ve invented these excellent policing technologies such as AI, blockchain, and social media, so perhaps any of our efforts to resist will simply be co-opted into fun memes or lead to banishment.
For a much more entertaining read, while also unhopeful, I recommend The Immortal King Rao, which breezed into the top spot of Novels I Read Last Year That Basically Support and Annihilate My Worldview Simultaneously. No spoilers, but one theme of the book centres around what happens when the algorithm rules us, like, officially. It’s very nearly nonfiction.
“I saw the Emperor – this soul of the world – go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth.”
—Lewis Mumford
Is one of these statements more true?
To be successful I require a force of will and to be a strong leader.
If I trust myself and continue to take action in alignment with purpose, the right things will happen.
Are “great leaders” who do important things examples of success by force of will or are some people just in the right place at the right time? Is force of will a kind of strategy that the system of dominance rewards? Or am I caught in a tautology? We make histories in hindsight.
I have a desire for something to exist in the world, in this case a technology, or really merely an app, but something that supports the purpose of cultivating containers of belonging.
In my current snarl, as much as I want to develop this tech, and do possess the non-technical skills to drive the project forward, I don’t want to invest many years building on a foundation that will ultimately be antithetical to the purpose. And so I keep looking for a container that will allow for people-oriented, thoughtful, and emergent software to be built by people who care more about impact than a now or future payday.
Does this mean I am waiting for permission or searching for the cracks to slip through?
Game B+
Over many years in the startup world, I learned how “the game” is typically played and while it’s not a game “people like me” win at often, it does have a playbook of sorts, and it does involve a set of skills I spent many years developing. There’s a culture around tech startups that is very winner-take-all, that depends on the idea that you need to make moats, guard your IP, and other adversarial concepts. There are countless conversations in this world where compromises to growth in service of community, employee, or climate health are seen as painfully naive. Anything short of hyperscale would be, ultimately, a failure. You matter when you’re the king of the world and other people challenge you to cage fights.
“Successful” tech startups founders are, for the most part, a very specific band of people who are funded and enabled to orient around experimentation and learning. The people in question are pedigreed in various ways, and also deeply committed to the ‘force of will’ hypothesis. It’s hard not to look around at popular tech companies and see patterns that look much like evidence of the success of that strategy, even though of course the entire pool of VC-backed tech looks much the same on paper and there are far more failures among them than successes. (Not to mention the large percentage of such tech companies that are still unprofitable and have engaged in growth tactics that have had negative consequences in various ways for many other people).
But you know what? That’s all irrelevant.
I am not choosing emergence and slow progress because my body falls into a category that venture investors don’t associate with tech founder-ness. My discomfort around taking action doesn’t actually come from anyone else’s judgement. There’s an uncertainty making new things generally produces, no matter whether I think I am making it happen or not.
Driving vs. shepherding
There is something about “I need to make things happen” that feels like it comes from fear not love, that feels like forcing a solution. It indicates I have something to prove instead of something that I’m called to serve.
I am naturally good at getting things to happen. I don’t need to fear that I’ll be lying in bed eating bonbons all day, but what I seem to fear most is a lack of consequence. Somehow, if I figure out a strategy, I think, I can make an impact that matters. It’s a seductive idea that is completely orthogonal to everything I have a felt sense about.
There’s a little bit of this, “yeah, but can’t I just get what I want?” It’s hard to accept that I might not matter in some grand way, it’s hard to believe that just doing things as opportunities arise is enough, let alone believing that just being is enough.
I have to feel my fear and welcome it. Not a fear of doing things, the fear of not mattering. Being Napoleonic is not in my nature (despite accusations to the contrary when I direct someone to help with dinner cleanup). I get so much more joy from leading through listening, coordinating, and having a clear and uncompromising sense of purpose.
The Great
I might not be a person of greatness. That such people even exist and have the right to dominate is a narrative underlying our ideas about leaders.
“What we now regard as states turn out not to be a constant of history at all; not the result of a long evolutionary process that began in the Bronze Age, but rather a confluence of three political forms – sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition – that have different origins. Modern states are simply one way in which the three principles of domination happened to come together, but this time with a notion that the power of kings is held by an entity called ‘the people’ (or ‘the nation’), that bureaucracies exist for the benefit of said ‘people’, and in which a variation on old, aristocratic contests and prizes has come to be relabelled as ‘democracy’, most often in the form of national elections. There was nothing inevitable about it. If proof of that were required, we need only observe how much this particular arrangement is currently coming apart.”
We may at a time in history when it is becoming clear that we have to toss out the hero mythos and figure out how to be ordinary. To feel the small power of each of ourselves as integral parts of our collective humanity.
Maybe I am misinterpreting the options. There’s room for me to make space in myself for whatever I may be called to, without attachment to recognition. Perhaps the answer is: lead, but only in ways that serve, that allow more lights to shine, that emerge from what is necessary. I can honour my vision at the same time as I recognise I am seeing from a particular vista. I can’t actually design the future but I can choose a path through the brush.
Beyond ambition
I want to do something big, but why? It seems I don’t just want to be known, I want to be known in some very specific way: written into history. It makes me wonder what the hole is I am trying to fill. The little me who was told I was smart and special but also that there was something indefinite but wrong about me?
If I am a vessel for purpose, I may become impactful but I’ll be doing so in service, perhaps even despite my intentions. It’s easy to get hooked by the want to be acknowledged, to be acceptable, to be as good as, which somehow equates to being a figure in history.
At the same time, I don’t want my whole self, including exactly these kind of boring and embarrassing thoughts about my own insecurities, to be exposed.
Imagine we all could create a history of the world where we’re important and do meaningful things. Perhaps this, at its core, is the appeal of social media. Many billions of histories, protagonists all. It’s no wonder that influencer (or, ‘creator’) has become the most aspirational career for the youth. You can skip actually doing anything impactful and just get the attention, the sense of being important. Skip having to deal with the messiness of relationship and collaboration and go right to a follower count.
And look, no judgement. We’re talking about the fundamental aspects of human nature and a system where taking a cut of our extracted attention yields actual power and influence. (There’s an interesting sidebar here about how creators want to own the means of distribution, which might collapse into a whirlpool of recursion).
Fear itself
I don’t know how many times I will need to talk myself down from the idol-worship of achievement addiction. How many times I will have to grieve the hope that I can be saved by being called important. Maybe everyone has a Maypole they will spin around forever and this is mine. To matter, I have to put down what gets in the way of service, and in my case, it’s the fear of not mattering.
These tangles are useful. They give me a chance to revisit my motives. I am not stuck, I am not in an inertia. I’m on a path to building technology that supports our freedom, belonging, and responsibility. I believe there are amazing people who will come together and do work differently. I have a wealth of skills, experience, and intention to contribute. I’m not just thinking about things. I am acting, making, and progressing, if progress itself can be anything more than more capacity to feel my choices. And more and more, I can feel into how possible it is to create without it being about glory or redemption. I act and make because to do otherwise would leave me in dissonance or betrayal.
I am expanding my circles of collaboration, which fills me with delicious anticipation. It’s not only in my head even though sometimes I feel alone. Everyone matters. History offers no solace for us now.
Everywhere I go, there are countless discussions about making money. There are just straight up “winning is the ultimate goal” kinds of conversations, “how can we make money doing good” speculations, or “how can I do what I want and get paid” aspiration. Whether we we’re trying to make millions or make ends meet, making money seems to be the primary focus of public discourse around personal finances.
What about spending money, though?
I’m curious about the idea of spending in service. Of looking at what I’m spending money on, even being transparent about what I’m spending on, and asking myself if that spending serves my purpose.
I think it might be interesting to discover my judgements about my own and others’ spending. Even without knowing about other people’s incomes, their spending is so interesting. I can find myself wondering, “can they afford that?” Either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ yields possible judgements that tell me something about me.
What’s more, I think we’re very trained in our current context to regard spending money as a balm, as therapeutic. It’s seen as self-deprivation when we don’t buy things we want, ‘if we have the money.’ There’s incredible amounts of compare-and-despair when we hear someone spent money “on themselves”.
There are megatons of trash resulting from all our packaged products, disposables, and fast fashions. Nearly all our food now contains plastics. Manufacturing and transporting stuff accounts for incredible amounts of energy depletion and environmental pollution. No amount of recycling could offset all the stuff we’re buying and throwing away.
I look around and see all the tangible things accumulating in the places where I dwell. Some things have not involved in transactions at all, like rocks I picked up on a beach. Some of those things I didn’t pay for, but someone did. Mostly though, these are things I purchased, and it can be surprising to think of all that buying and time considering purchases, not to mention the truckloads (literally) of things I have taken to thrift stores, in all my various moves. At the moment, we have a somewhat limited landfill contribution (less than a bin every four weeks) but over the course of a lifetime, my gracious, my pile of trash must be house-sized.
I have work to do here. I have moved in a more intentional direction over time, but perhaps I can incorporate more accountability. Not to say ‘spending less’ per se, but instead, being aware and intentional with the things I spend on. Maybe even begin a collaborative practice.
What are the questions I want to ask about spending money?
Will the money I’m spending go to support people and purposes that matter to me?
Is this the best alternative or am I sacrificing my values in some way for convenience?
How much waste will I be contributing to by spending on this thing? (Including intangeables like energy use).
Would I be OK to share that I am spending on this with my friends, family, or colleagues? (Of course, this might turn out to be more of a reflection on who I am involved with, or residual shame, rather than what I’m buying.)
What would happen if I didn’t spend on this? Is there something I could do with this money that would fuel my purpose?
I’m not advocating being totally public about spending, since we’re living in a context where such information will only be weaponised to shame or to sell us more things. We already give corporations with vested interests in our spending transparency in pretty self-defeating ways. But I wonder what would happen if a few of us came together and accounted for our spending (and even time) with one another, purely with curiosity and wonder. Not like “I shouldn’t have done this” but more like “what can I learn about myself through what I’m putting money into.”
Some of the ways this kind of thinking can manifest can be precious or privleged. But I think these questions allow me to consider my intentions regardless of the options at hand. I will never be without compromise or escape complicity as I spend money. Things are just too interdependent. If I were to do this in a group, there would be interesting ways to practice my powerlessness over other people’s choices. I think we would need to agree that whatever we share about our spending, it’s no one else’s job to police, judge, or take a holier-than-thou attitude.
Despite feeling a strong sense of purpose, I am still reserving brain space for things like, “I need a pair of black pants that look good but can be machine washed” and “I want to eat at that fancy restaurant at least once.” It seems I’m always needing this or that at some low level of awareness. What if I had that time back to dance, write, design, walk, call a friend, or read a poem? When I was struggling with an eating disorder in my 20s, I used to think, ‘if I just thought about it as much as I do about my thighs, the problem of nuclear fusion might be solved.’ What brilliance could emerge if I stopped thinking about wanting things?
For today, perhaps I will just start tracking the things I spend on and the time I spend thinking about spending on something, especially the terrible morass of trying to research purchases that are fairly irrelevant anyway. (The best minds of my generation have read way too many Wirecutter articles). Maybe we’ll make a club. Money, in its most pure and wonderful form, is merely a mechanism of collaboration, and I want to make things together.
Death is useless as a concept. It needs to felt in the body.
Death is always living here in me, an initiate walking up stone stairs and snuffing out the candles one by one, a flickering ahead.
Or a slasher film. Massacres of mitochondria. My body devoured by bacteria daily.
It is other death, the death of others, that need special rooms, funeral processions. Death happens continually and abundantly and is only important when we love.
Grief is unstoppable, rolling through, a tsunami.
Grief is the body feeling of love without desire, though maybe there’s still a sensuousness in the breaking open. The raw and pulpy underside of my own flesh and sinew somehow palpable then.
Grief is hot and consuming. It’s not the grey and drizzle of sorrow.
Space to feel may be necessary, a church, a forest clearing, light that catches motes. Room for the mess and the roaring silence. The never returning of someone sounds like the earth caving in.
Even imagining this irrevocable absence feels like too much wasabi. Feeling your goneness has been, always, a fire drill for a cascading catastrophe.
My own death is mere anxiety. Alive, I am always in some way terribly alone.
Even as you live, an idea called your death has always been that reminder. Even made from you, between us are the echoing straits. Love is never fully knowing another. Love is the salt, the sand, and the drowning.
