Could AI Break Capitalism?

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.

What’s wrong with inclusion?

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.

Goodbye, Capitalism

How I will long for your halcyon days

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.

Theirstory

Do my motives matter?

“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.”

—David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

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.

Public Spending

Can buying be in service?

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”.

So-called “consumer spending” in the US is rising. On the other hand, there are downward trends in giving money to charity.

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?

  1. Will the money I’m spending go to support people and purposes that matter to me?
  2. Is this the best alternative or am I sacrificing my values in some way for convenience?
  3. How much waste will I be contributing to by spending on this thing? (Including intangeables like energy use).
  4. 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.)
  5. 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.

Recent Media

Good grief

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.

Yesterday’s media:

The Centre of Attention

I have this story about a non-utopia better world where each person has a sense of accountability to themselves and to a common good.

Common good seems to be debatable these days, so I will propose that at the very least, it encompasses human physical and mental health, freedom from bondage and violence, and some measure of autonomy (the sense that we have choices, not the absence of consequences for any choices).

What if each of us considered the effects of our actions on one another, including on the ecosystem, including the people we know, including the people who are involved in our survival and the making and delivering of things with which we surround ourselves? If we were aware that we are doing this together and we can feel it in ourselves? Imagine if agreement about things wasn’t a litmus for caring.

I mean, all this is possible, but not (by definition) mandatable.

We can look at what interferes with this possibility. I can literally not survive without a zillion people who have different opinions, cultural contexts, and lived experiences. Food, electricity, clothing, medicine, even the internet all come from the work of so many humans. What if these people were visible? If we understood who actually was needed for us to have anything? Could digital interaction facilitate a sense of interdependence? (Finally a good use for a blockchain!)

Before we can feel a sense of responsibility for a global greater good, which might feel a little overwhelming and possibly colonial, we might just notice at the most micro level how our choices have impact over other things that in turn have impact on us. (Not just recycling, or recycling theatre).

Consider the realm of human interaction, with people we already know. When we do things for other people, we like them more. When we offer understanding and acceptance to others, we can more easily be compassionate to ourselves.

Many of the digital tools we engage with actively work against our sense of common good. Features that reward and reflect attention lead us to feel competitive rather than collaborative. Interactions that centre on content sharing rather than conversation suggest individualism rather than interdependence. Algorithms take away our agency while promising to deliver personalised relevance, not to mention items we don’t need but might be persuaded to buy, since we want to look good, seem important, and be acceptable within the context of comparing ourselves to others.

That’s obvious with good old social media, but what about other kinds of social tech? How, for example, is the software you’re using to read this letter impacting your sense of accountability to yourself and the common good? Besides the text, most of the visible features are about attention-seeking, as far as I can tell. The tech encourages sharing, liking, subscribing, public comments – all things that ‘make sense’ for a publishing platform, but are somewhat weird in the context of reciprocal communication. Instead of writing a letter to you, it’s more efficient somehow and more rewarding to put words on a platform where strangers may find them and I don’t know, think I am interesting or give me (and the platform) money?

I am, obviously, using this software, and so I get to have an investigation into my motives, my willingness to self-justify, and my own cognitive dissonance. I am not, here, seducing anyone into ads of other things besides myself (right!?). I am inviting myself to a situation where after I write to you, I get notifications about the “stats” of my post, with the underlying message that more is better. More attention is always desired, more money is always good, more stuff is constantly necessary.

I dunno if I am going to actually wean myself off this drug or it will happen, Station Eleven-style, without my intention. In the meantime, I am interested in new approaches in the technology I make. If it doesn’t break physics, then it’s probably possible to fashion digital technology that facilitates accountability to myself and to our common welfare.

In the meantime this kitty has thoughts about hedgehogs.

Yesterday’s media:

Goals are not so smart

A shocking number of years ago, I was in a bland conference room in Vancouver, BC, presenting a workshop about goal-setting. I had come up with a little tweak on a standard approach, which I called SMARTER Goals, taking the old set of Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely, and adding Emotional and Relational. Choose a goal that matters to you, I argued, or all those other aspects will be irrelevant. Find a way to involve other people, either as collaborators or witnesses, and you’ll be much more likely to succeed.

But I’ve come to believe that goal-setting frameworks are a symptom of a broken culture.

Oops!

‘Setting a goal’ is usually an attempt to bring meaning or value to something I don’t fully want to do. It’s a tacit way to suggest that now isn’t acceptable, that I need to be different, that there’s something to achieve, or that my instincts are untrustworthy.

“We are socialized into systems that cause us to conform and believe our worth is connected to how much we can produce. Our constant labor becomes a prison that allows us to be disembodied. We become easy for the systems to manipulate, disconnected from our power as divine beings and hopeless. We forget how to dream. This is how grind culture continues. We internalize the lies and in turn become agents of an unsustainable way of living.”

― Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

We live in a context where we’re evaluated on our contribution to systems of extraction (be they resources or attention). We are not good enough for a variety of reasons, and so we should hustle, strive, improve. We want love, acceptance, and security, so we are susceptible to modernity’s idea that we can be both conveniently comfortable at all times and also impressive achievers who GSD.

Living in purpose is uncomfortable and mysterious.

Being in purpose does not have a set of steps that are specific, measurable, or realistic. Living in purpose involves taking actions, learning, having a direction, but also requires humility and an awareness that each step takes us into a place with a new perspective. What we think is the end-state from our current vantage is likely to be just a reinforcement of an obstructed view.

What is happening when I think I need a goal?

Maybe I have lost my way. Maybe I am getting mired in deficit, maybe I am afraid. Maybe I am hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. Maybe I am avoiding grief.

Goals are what I have when I don’t have a connection to purpose. I have to invent things that need a structure or framework to accomplish.

What do I think goals will lead to? Power, money, status, being “better” than I am now?

What if I am already OK?

Goal-setting implies that without some explicit force on myself, I am likely to do absolutely nothing. That I am ‘lazy’ or ‘indolent’ and have no internal compass that will guide me to take action. My experience is the opposite. When I take the time to listen, to be still, I discover that not only am I driven to take action, but that so many of the things I might add into a list of goals are irrelevant to the purpose. When I take the time to feel what’s inherently there, I make choices that are healthy for my physical and mental health. I am not struggling with temptations. I’m not looking for distraction.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s studies on flow state indicate I can be happy doing something that is challenging enough to stretch me, learning something, being able to confront a challenge, being uncomfortable enough to be excited. I do not need a ‘goal’ to get into flow.

If am here to be of service, rather than to ‘win,’ I know that I will do what matters. I get to rest when it feels right, I push myself because there’s joy in it. I get to trust that I’m going to show up, and if I notice that I am avoiding something, I get curious. I am compassionate.

But wait! Perhaps there are useful things about goal-setting in collaborations. When I work with other people, it helps not only to be purpose-aligned but also to have some clarity, some structure, some ways of making agreements in the same language. Work with other people often involves projects, situations where it’s useful to have a distribution of tasks and levels of abstraction. Instead of goals, what if we think of collaboration in terms of well-designed experiments?

A goal that isn’t simply “I’ll have learned something” probably is delusional anyway. We set out to achieve a goal of the SMART variety without really knowing what it will lead to. Goal-setting typically leaves out the vast unpredictability of life circumstances.

We usually want to have a feeling, because that’s what decisions are built on. When I think I need a goal, I can wonder, ‘what is it that I am hoping to feel?’ When I think I need a goal, I might also ask myself, ‘what am I avoiding?’

A life without goals isn’t aimless. I can only be in purpose when I can show up without an agenda, without needing to be important. I matter, not because I met a target, but because I am here.

Beginning again

This afternoon, after I made and ate my collards and blackeye peas (vegan! delicious!) I sat down to write to you, because it’s a new year and I am re-intending to do this frequently, as daily as I can, for the purpose of something: A record? An invitation? A practice not a perfect?

It’s been a minute and it feels at times like things are going through me as though I am sand or rocks on a beach that the tide washes over, disrupting, slurping away some grains and depositing others. Things are revealed. Are these things important? Idols and ambergris. And yet I am here, and you are, for this strange and beautiful day, pink and sunshine that has faded into cold and grey. We are here. Alive.

How will a year go?

The last one contained multitudes. Kernels popping.

A few days ago a harbour seal said hello to me on the Seawall. A month ago I was petting a baby elephant outside Nairobi, another before that wandering NYC with new Fellow friends from the Integrity Institute. There were sunshine coffees in California. Wanders in Portland. It’s actually hard to catalogue all the things that happened or didn’t so much happen as became part of me, or I became a part, not apart. Dancing with mountains. Collective process. A lot of people to love.

My musings are often some attempt to capture learning, lessons, some whiff of meaning that drifts through as I write in the morning, they are not ‘about me’ and what me is can be elusive. Who are you? I don’t know if there are really more than questions, but I love a rich, gooey, chewy, brownie question.

In 2023, I read 101 books, not counting the ones I abandoned. That might be approaching a limit. I’m down to discuss any of them.

In 2024, I have a few intentions:

  1. Develop more containers of belonging
  2. Choose freedom
  3. Physically become stronger
  4. Act from love, not fear

This little place where I am putting words down may become more fragmented, perhaps some kind of rubble pile for you to find rare and unexpected treasures. Let’s be on a scavenger hunt together this year. I expect grief. I invite joy. I welcome it all.

Nothing left to lose

“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”

-Ralph Ellison

I’ve been listening to the Art of Accomplishment podcast for a long time (and am a graduate of the associated Connection Course and Connection Challenge). The podcast often has gems, but this week was perhaps my favourite, maybe because it comes at a time that feels so aligned with where I’m at right now; it’s all about freedom.

“I’m not constrained by the voice in my head or by the thoughts of the people around me or by some set of ‘shoulds’ that society may place. And that freedom is a birthright. Right now every single person can be themselves. There’s nothing stopping them. There are consequences, potentially. You might not like them. You might choose to not be yourself because you don’t like the consequences. That’s all true. It doesn’t mean you can’t be yourself.“

—Joe Hudson

As much as this resonates and I enjoyed the whole thing, I also want to throw in a ‘yes, and’ regarding freedom. As Joe puts it, freedom of the kind we’re journeying to find is about the freedom to be who we are.

But as soon as we think we are doing this as a self, we’re falling into a trap. We so easily lose our freedom. Why?

At one point, Joe mentions Maslow, that having our basic needs met helps in some ways, and paradoxically, having an abundance of resources can get in the way of freedom, because freedom takes work and vigilance, and people with abundant resources may have more to lose, in a sense, or because material benefits can make us lazy.

Maslow, as we know, had himself a little bit of a warped view. His pyramid was an unacknowledged adaptation, really an inversion of indigenous thinking that places responsibility to one another and the world around us as a necessary condition for having what we need.

When we seek to be free without considering how our actions, behaviours, and beliefs prevent other people’s freedom, we are still caught up in something; we’re still entangled. Joe uses Mandela as an example of being free even when his body was imprisoned. And Mandela famously said, “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.“

There’s a paradox here, there’s a crack to fall through. People with status are less able to see certain aspects of their non-freedom. It’s possible to ‘feel free’ in a way that abdicates responsibility, and at the same time, part of freedom is that it’s about not trying to manage, fix, or even judge others or oneself. How can I be free and also belong? How can my freedom explicitly be integrated with yours?

Going deep into freedom means seeing where I’m engaging in dominance even without thinking about it or feeling identified with it. This isn’t to chastise myself or to feel guilt, it’s about recognising that true freedom is not possible in my context as a middle-class white North American, even as I taste freedom sometimes, when I am operating from love and curiosity rather than fear. That I am shaped even when I choose to ‘be myself.’ That true freedom for any individual may not exist, and yet is always available as a choice.

When I am free, I am by necessity not inhibiting your freedom. I am you.

The trick here (and it is a trickstery adventure) is to not call comfort freedom, to not get into spiritual materialism, to be both free and inexorably part of unfreedom, to be a decaying mess of microbes and mites and temporarily animated flesh and to be something else, to be nothing. To be as still as space and as fast as quantum particles. To be myself and bewildered. When I am free, it will not be me.