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.
“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.
Free sounds great. Who doesn’t love free stuff? Who can say how many random and unnecessary calories I’ve consumed at parties or at those in-store sample stands. Goodness knows I have wasted a lot of hours online that never would have happened if I had to assess the value I was getting from it. (Of course, someone made money from that time I contributed).
But free is never free, it’s only subsidised, whether that’s by others, by ourselves indirectly, or even by the earth. In a system of capitalism, free things made with someone’s labour lead to unsustainability and poor motive alignment, even if they result from the best intentions. Instead, we could think about products as either coming from collective investment with collective and equitable ownership, like public goods, or we should have models in which there is value exchange, even if we eliminate some of the regressive nature of flat pricing models. If we’re taking things from the earth, we might imagine how we can reciprocate, not just take and use.
With tech, we’re making products that are intangible, but they still require labour to produce. When we make them “free,” we are in a situation where we’re going to be dependent on money that isn’t tied to the value we’re creating for the people who use our products. And yet, we’re working in a context where many companies, especially in the social tech world, make their products free.
Free feels like it’s generous, until you’re out of funding. Free suggests there’s no needs among the people who are working on the product. And free feels like it’s a commitment to some kind of ethical stance and cooperation (see Open Source philosophies) but Open Source is rife with abandoned projects, projects with only one real contributor, and tools that mostly just serve developers. It leaves out creating the kind of relationships that emerge when people exchange energy for value. It leaves out creating systems of mutual benefit.
I’ve worked on products where we offered free versions. It’s great for growth and for giving people a sense of what value they might find by making a commitment. There’s room for free, but something interesting to me is how much less responsibility people felt when using the product for free. They often didn’t value the work of the people making the product at all, and were more antisocial in their communications with the company.
There’s a real and interesting tension in how to approach charging for technology, especially social tech. As a person who does lean to the cheapskate side, I like to ask myself, for the products I pay for, what are my feelings versus free products? Much of my thinking has to do with user experience, especially collective user experience. It makes sense to me to pay for things that allow me to extend a good experience to others. I suspect that there needs to be a re-norming if we want to create sustainable companies around social and collaborative technologies. For now, most of these make money by offering a business product. Perhaps that’s the right transitional path, as long as we don’t lose our missions along the way.
I’m in a few spaces where there’s frequent reference to the meta-crisis, this kind of collection of existential threats we find ourselves in as humans (climate, geopolitical nuclear threats, pandemics, social disconnection, etc).
You might sum it up as “the results of structures of domination and extraction.” Much of the conversation around this is too jargon-filled and quasi-academic / post-modern academic for my tastes, but the general idea that we’ll fail by trying to solve things by doubling down on the strategies that have led us here resonates for me.
I’ve noticed the meta-crisis concept brings out the brains when my sense is that most of the actually successful things we can do to be in right relation are embodied, maybe not outright abandoning the mind (enlightenment being some kind of magical state that even the greats eventually say is not a thing– the Buddha is all like, whatever you’re calling enlightenment is of course a notion that undermines whatever experience of enlightenment you may havetouched into). So we are not abandoning our thinking but as soon as things get VERY thinking-y then we’re going in a direction usually that is just a perpetuation. Stop thinking so very much and start feeling it. I wonder at this point if it’s easier to think about it or feel it, probably the former. Because it can be a social media thing, the escape by retweet, the ‘I’ve done something so now I am free to relapse into all the worst and self-destructive behaviours.’
To put this more bluntly, I sense an embodied truth that the work I do to be in integrity with myself matters much more than all the achievements I could rack up, but that perspective is terrifying in some way to the part of me that is like ‘omg you are worthless without having done anything important.’ There’s so much trust fall in being like ‘does-higher power/intuition/bigger-than-me-universe-force want me to do something important? If so it will lead me there, I do not have to create a status-seeking strategy.’
In other words, I have to become willing to not do an important thing, because let’s be honest, doing important things has been very integral to our getting to the place we’re in now. How can we extricate doing important things from the extraction and exploitation? The idea of doing important things leads us to believe other people are expendable, that the earth or resources are expendable. There’s a reason why most spiritual leaders are anti-materialist; it’s incongruous to orient around doing important things and acting from love and detachment at the same time, and of course religion is the complete opposite often, where everything goes from the spiritual freedom to materialism.
Being in myself is much harder than coming up with great ideas and talking about great ideas and debating about ideas, and I am so into the thinking and talking. I’m now noticing that thinking and talking and building and designing are possible escapes, that all those activities are simply more effective to address the ‘meta-crisis’ when they are emerging from embodied practice, from learning how to be with ourselves without the story of our worth being tied up in these activities.
This is essentially why, though there are so many big problems we may or may not be able to work our way out of, there’s just no point if we don’t do the work to be both in integrity in ourselves and in right relation with the people we’re interacting with. To do this, we have to shift our mindset away from thinking it’s somehow valuable to know all the things going on as surfaced by unimpartial algorithms, and towards being very present to what is going on in the spaces our bodies (or even our intermediated but still connected virtual bodies) inhabit. This is why we keep returning, to ourselves and to the fractal wisdom of almost all spiritual traditions, that love and responsibility are what can make a difference, we keep hearing it and feeling it, but it’s so seductive to slip back into diagnosing and solving.
On Friday, I was lucky enough to be in the virtual room with Peter Block, who was celebrating the release of his new book, Confronting Our Freedom: Leading a Culture of Chosen Accountability and Belonging. I was struck, to use Peter’s word, by the palpable love in the room, and the presence of so many people who have known Peter for many years, have worked with him, and been impacted by his practice and ideas.
As has been the case when I’ve shared a room with Peter in the past, I found myself wanting to write down everything he said, even though I own his books, where these thoughts re-emerge again and again. And still, every time I encounter them, there’s a gong that goes off in my body.
Belonging and freedom and accountability are the same.
People mistake freedom and autonomy; freedom comes from connection.
Liberation is the absence of oppression, but it’s not freedom.
Freedom is the antidote to a leadership mindset. The task of leader is to get people to connect with each other.Leaders are not there to fill the expectations of ‘subordinates,’ they are there to partner.
Peter Block
Belonging = freedom = accountability.
YES!
What an amazing distillation of everything I’ve been thinking about lately. How can I live into my full power, be fully in love, be fully in responsibility, be fully free, be intimately interconnected with everything and everyone, be in connection, be able and willing to hold my boundaries with total compassion and humility? How can everything I build and do and contribute come from a place without fear? (Though Peter talked a lot about the anxiety of accountability – perhaps as I read the new book I’ll understand this more).
Belonging means letting go of so much, as does freedom, as does real responsibility. I belong when I belong to myself, which requires a container that is expansive and also an embrace. I can not belong if I’m only about myself, though. Such a paradox and that’s what real community is about, feeling into the mutual possibilities, taking on the ways I am part of the problem I want to see change, and coming with curiosity to hearing how you and others want a future to look. Coming with the kind of real wonder that is a result of love and letting go of the aspects of identity that depend on othering – othering myself and othering others.
I think this makes sense but I am still working towards this. I still find myself with a sense of frustration that there’s oppression around us, that there are so few BIPOC or disabled or non-binary or trans people or even women in some of the spaces I’m in, despite those spaces often being oriented around collective practices, community, and particularly creating spaces or technologies around bringing people together. I spend time in other spaces where there’s more melanin and queerness and look forward to finding ways to develop more and more overlap.
True community are spaces in which we feel that we are accepted in the wholeness of who we are. And that doesn’t mean that every part of who we are is expressed in every given moment, that’s not possible. But that the body, the collective of people that we are in relationship with, there is no request to leave a part of ourselves behind in order to be accepted in this group of people.
To have spaces like this, I think, requires us to not feel like the only, but is “the only” just a story we have of ourselves where we don’t belong to our selves? This stuff is complex, and in the end, I can only work on letting go, freeing the part of me that will love fully and not supposing the rest of me, the layers of protection, the shell, the veil, the disguise, is needed for its protection. That part is the strong part, the badass part, the part that can’t be abandoned because it’s where belonging is freedom and where freedom is owning my experience.
I’ve trained that algorithm to deliver the things that make me say, “right on!” My feed, which I also feel fine ignoring for periods of time without any sense that my absence will be noticed, is full of people whose faces I like to see.
But I also hate LinkedIn.
Of course, there’s the fundamental problem of a centralized, traditionally-run tech company owning me as much as LinkedIn does. Of my contribution to it profiting someone, of my social relationships being owned. I can “export” a list of people I am connected to, my “data”, but I can’t easily connect LinkedIn to anything that would improve the connections – or so-called connections- I have developed.
Those corporate web 2.0 issues aside, LinkedIn is also kind of the opposite of useful for the very thing I am there for. Every time I am at an event with interesting people, or meet a new person, I “link” with them, only to have zero context about the whole thing immediately. There they are in the collection, but there’s basically no impetus to go further than that, or to be able to use LinkedIn to do the kind of basic follow-up and relationship development that would obviously be necessary for someone to go beyond being a profile to being a colleague. I hate having messages locked away in a UI that leads me to forget I ever spoke to someone. And don’t get me started on the giant misses in other parts of the product- why are LinkedIn Groups so completely terrible?
Yes, there have been attempts to disrupt LinkedIn before, but most of them are just the same ‘own everyone’s data’ kind of approaches. We are perhaps starting to have enough DeCent tech to do something more exciting? So if that’s what you are building, here are some wish list items:
You have a public profile but you can limit information you share to classes of people (co-workers, communities, friends) or even to certain people. Over time you can shift the level of sharing based on relationships that develop.
You have a social graph and when someone looks at your profile while logged into theirs, they can see your mutual connections
When someone connects with you, you have the opportunity (or even requirement? You choose.) to add context about how you know them. You can add more context as time goes on. Their profile reflects messages you’ve shared as well. This shared context is visible to both people but no one else. Could this be contained in some E2E way? Why not?
There’s an RSS feed associated with you that you can feed your various channels of public streams through, ala ActivityPub, and there’s a way for your contacts to see this as a feed with other people’s content. There’s a transparent algorithm you can adjust to favour certain people or relevant-to-you content or other preferences
You can use the platform as a mailing list. Contacts can opt-in and then you can message groups of people filtered by interests, locations, etc.
It’s easy to pass along other people’s content as well, so there are still metaphors for responding to and amplifying content (though it could be as a comment that is attached to the content or as a message only delivered to the person posting). There are ways to take content into a better UI for conversations, ideally. I’m imagining here that we’re really talking about something independent of this particular platform, no need to re-invent every wheel.
There is probably benefit in orienting around profiles as a resume as well as simply a way to connect. LinkedIn has managed to stay less toxic by both avoiding being ad-driven and by being a space that represents you to the working world. But you could make many improvements to the way information is presented- making the resume part more modular so you could choose to emphasize non-job-work more prominently, and to more easily share your non-job aspects with people you get to know more deeply. The trick is to have that information be yours and not the platform’s. Now we get into identity management, but you know, people are figuring it out, or trying to- eep.
If you’re making this, I am excited. As everyone always says to me, “I want to be a beta tester.” I am guessing something like it already is happening. And then perhaps LinkedIn will finally be… left out.
As someone who has been around in the tech freedom space for a while, though always a bit on the fringes (‘the fringe’ is dead center I suppose), I’ve been noodling on the idea of what it might look like to have control of what one shares with websites, apps, platforms, or even other people online.
It’s interesting to me (though not exactly a surprise) that the way so many developers approach the problem orients around as much automation and taking people out of the picture as possible. I read debates about “zero knowledge” that largely focus on whether the mechanisms employed are actually zero knowledge, but what problem is that trying to solve?
There is no doubt that there are certain situations where real anonymity has positive utility, primarily in situations where repressive state surveillance has a role. But the downsides of real anonymity are also real and shouldn’t be glossed over. How can we fight repressive state surveillance, not orient everything we build to address that problem?
I’m not just talking about human trafficking, child abuse, or terrorism being problematic from the perspective of anonymity. They are definitely not good and ideally we do not build technology that facilitates these harms.
But we have a bigger issue. When we consider what we need to build functional communities, democracies, and relationships, trustless systems are not just counter-productive, they create false ideas of security and safety.
Trust-breaking is not a technical problem, it’s a human problem. As we start to find ourselves in less and less authentically human contexts (interacting with ChatGPT, deepfakes, bots, etc), we’re in dire need of ways to create trusted systems and identity management that helps us verify our mutual humanity and trustworthiness as people.
One idea for this might be identity management that happens within actual human communities, where as someone who knows me, you can verify my identity. This doesn’t require a state-level or sanctioned identity, but it does require people vouching for one another. Presumably there would need to be some threshold for this kind of verification (how many people would it take?) and a complementary technology layer to support the process. We’d need to consider accessibility, but I think the genius part of this kind of scheme is that it requires people to be in relation to one another and that might mean creating new kinds of interpersonal networks to accomplish verification.
Imagine, for example, that you’re unhoused, or living with a disability, or don’t have regular access to a computer. How might a human-trust-building identity system serve these use cases? How could this work in a decentralized way, so that identity could be community-verified for communities you participate in, and proxy-verified by having one community trust another’s verification? Is it necessary to have a universally-verified identity or simply one that allows access to your particular contexts?
In general, I believe trust is built among people, not among technologies. This happens in small groups, in situations where we actually are known and show up in trustworthy ways. We just have these crazy complicated and nested systems to deal with more and more scale and therefore, less human trust. We have these systems to help giant corporations and states extract money and time, not because they actually make our life better, necessarily.
I want to build ‘identity systems’ and technology in general that looks at the world as it could be, that gives up on trying to fix something that was never functional in the first place, to take a leap into the unknown because we’re at a point of singularity anyway, so why not start from scratch when it comes to structures that support our collective humanity?
If you want a different world–and if you’re about human liberation you do–you’ll have to start thinking about things from a different perspective. Not how can we use the technologies we’re inventing for good, but what does a world look like that truly reflects freedom?
As the awesome poet, intimacy organizer, and abolitionist Mwende Katwiwa, aka FreeQuency, pointed out on the Emergent Strategy podcast:
When I say ‘better,’ I don’t mean it will be like you’ll get everything that you have here and then some and it will be great… we might never get get some of the shit we were promised if we give this world up, but I believe there are things that are better than what this world has actually given us, that are more equitable, that feel better, not just when we consume them, but when we are in relationship, they feel good for us in our collective bodies… Are you willing to lose all of this and believe there is something better than we can’t even actually imagine? (That’s the wildest part about it). You will have to be able to let go of this shit without tangibly being able to see what’s on the other side and say it’s worth it.’
In April 2020, we adopted our ‘Covid dog’, a rescue who needed a lot of TLC. There’s no better illustration of how love heals trauma than this little guy. He’s slowly becoming affectionate and playful, at least some of the time. He also spends a lot of his time lying under the table but that’s probably sensible in an earthquake zone like Portland.
Since he’s entered my life, something else has also happened: I started to listen to a ton of audiobooks. Long walks are perfect for this. I find audiobooks to be sort-of in the middle of reading and having a discussion, but one thing is annoying. When an audiobook provokes a thought I’d like to return to, it’s probably destined to go uncaptured.
I took Building A Second Brain for the first time a while ago now, and though I’ve refreshed my understanding several times in later cohorts, I have not adopted a systematic note-taking practice. In a way, this daily writing is as close as I get, and it’s definitely skipping some steps of the CODE (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express) process that the course centres around. Is this “bad?” Not exactly- I think the key takeaway of BASB for me is “focus on shipping” – or something maybe less bro engineer speak, like “move projects ahead and don’t get too caught up in the planning.”
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
-Benjamin Franklin
I love me some planning. It is valuable to plan, if only because it can help to focus, prioritize, and catch some blind spots. That said, thinking doesn’t manifest the world I want to be in. That requires action, process, practice. For a lot of things, the preparation is life. So my current PARA system (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives— oh, the acronyms!) is basically all P – a few key things I want to make sure I’m moving forward on – plus random tasks that I guess would be categorized in Areas.
That said, it would be so much more awesome if there were a way for audiobook listening to be more capturable, so here’s my proposal:
Audiobooks should have universal protocols for bookmarking. No matter where I listened to an audiobook, I should be able to take my timestamps and apply them elsewhere.
Audiobook bookmarks should sync with all eBook bookmarks. When I bookmark in the audio, I should be able to open an Ebook and find the spot easily so I can grab the text in a note.
The device I listen to the audiobook on should allow me to use voice controls to pause and take notes. As someone living in a place where cold and rainy is pretty common, I can’t keep a little notebook or even use a notes app without pain or at least basic dysfunction – have you ever tried typing with a wet screen? This seems like it’s the furthest out, but why? One reason, when a phone is playing audio, it isn’t listening too. If a watch could solve this problem, I would fork out for it in a heartbeat, but I was disappointed when I got an Apple watch and realized it wouldn’t work with Libby nor capture audio separately from my phone.
Stop the terrible BS of walled gardens around eBooks. I get it, everyone believes DRM can keep people from “abusing copyright” but it’s nuts to me that I have books on my Kindle that I can’t read with reMarkable, audiobooks in Libby that can’t talk to eBooks from the same library, Scrib’d which rocks for all the content but doesn’t work on a Kindle, I mean everything about this is dumb. Perhaps THIS is a good use of the blockchain, to allow copyright holders to license content in the various ways they can today but let those systems communicate because they are tied to a user. (I’m inclided to say this will never happen because capitalism. But in a post-extractive world, I dunno, maybe?)
Imagine you write a book, and you release it in the various ways one does now:
Paper book
E-book for purchase
E-book as a license (like on Amazon)
E-book licensed to a distributor (a public library, a subscription service)
E-book licensed to an organization (corporate, educational)
Audiobook for purchase (note: does this even exist?)
Audiobook for individual license (Amazon, Apple)
Audiobook licensed to a B2C distributor (library or subscription service)
E-book licensed to an organization (corporate, educational)
What if these licenses were on some kind of chain, so whenever an individual accessed the title, they could associate it with another format if they have access to it. This is convoluted, not for technical reasons but because copyright and licensing is a mess. Wouldn’t there be utility, though, for the copyright holder (ideally the author) to have a way to see how the book was being read, maybe even to be able to have some way to reach these people?
I do wonder sometimes if it’s a good thing to imagine business solutions to problems that only exist because of other businesses, I mean, it’s easy for this to all end up creating more bureaucracy rather than creating a clearer path. But if we had a solution like this, would we even need copyright? (If we’re pretending that copyright serves its stated purpose rather than being a tool of power and violence). Can copyright survive Dall-E and ChatGPT anyway?
I like thinking of even more interesting possibilities too, like what if as I’m listening to an audiobook, I could be connected with other people who have recently read the same thing and have a little 10 minute book club? It’s interesting to me that we don’t have a better book-based social media, since people who read books potentially are also more able to have prosocial conversations.
How are you doing your audiobook note-taking? I’d love to know.
My partner works as a project manager, which is funny for a few reasons. One, because in my world of product management, there’s a palpable shudder when the job is confused with project management- PMs of the product variety should spend their time determining what to build, not managing the building process! Two, because nothing seems to stress this person more than what they refer to as “calendar games.” (Ironically, they’re pretty into other kinds of games, such as ridiculously complex board games or totally uncomplex retro arcade games).
Calendaring is a weirdly hard problem, for a technology that has been around at least since the industrial age and presumably far earlier. You have a calendar, I have one, and if we need to find a time when both of us are free, it seems pretty intuitive that simply laying one over the other would expose availability.
But there are complications, especially when there are more than two of us. For one thing, I might be in a different time zone. And offsets change and complicate things further (yet another reason why daylight savings is outmoded).
OK, but Calendly and similar services have basically solved this problem by letting you limit your availability not just by claimed slots, but also by your individual schedule. And Calendly works very well for one person choosing a time on another person’s calendar.
This still gets messy when say, you travel and you’re in another time zone, but that’s possible to deal with if annoying for either the person with the calendar or the developers trying to accommodate the traveler.
There’s another challenge, this time not so technical. We are, as a rule, very emotionally invested in the idea of “owning our own time.”
Every day in my meditation practice space, I hear, “Time just is,” but it’s still quite hard to turn over the perceived control of that time to someone else. Conversely, and as reflected by a social media controversy, some people take affront at being asked to select times based on when another person is available, with the idea that whoever set up the calendar is enforcing their own boundaries as an act of dominance. Anger is a boundary energy, as they say, so it’s no surprise people get irritable when it comes to trying to converge into mutual time without feeling controlled in one way or another.
Along with this generalized frustration, we also tend to not want to have the same personal and work calendars, nor make plans the same way with work and personal contacts. For example, I tried to make a Calendly event for a friend but discovered we were meeting within business hours, unless I could figure out how to block things on my ‘work calendar’ that are personal, many of which are not as specifically time blocked, like “going out with a friend.” And it could get very awkward if people at your work can see what’s on your calendar.
But for those of us who find services such as Calendly a welcome relief from sending emails back and forth, it feels mysterious why there’s been almost zero innovation in finding times for multiple people to meet. Partly this is a function of the aforementioned power dynamics- who gets to be the one determining the time for everyone? Because if it’s not one person, then things just return to endless group email chains with one person inevitably coming in at the last minute to spoil everything.
Partly though, it’s something else, which is that there is no, as far as I know, service that can look at multiple people’s calendars across different organizations and calendar clients and let you know when everyone is free. I am guessing there may be some complexities in the technology that make this hard- but I mean, really? Up to 10 people’s calendar on a given week should be within the capability of an not-too-complicated algorithm to evaluate. (No, you tell me- how hard is this, really?)
Perhaps the last piece of the problem is that while people may have space in their calendar or have meetings booked, there’s another wrinkle- what I might loosely characterize as FOMO. Yes, I may have a meeting booked but if something more compelling comes along I might want to move it. As a Calendly user, I’m often caught by mildly irritating surprise when someone reschedules an hour before we were to meet, leaving me with a 45 minute gap that doesn’t lend itself to actually getting things done. But as a researcher, I quickly gave up on any rebooking or even no-show resentment since it’s a fact of life. Still, when you have multiple people in a meeting and a key person develops a conflict, it quickly becomes everyone’s headache. But even this seems much better to give to AI than to have to spend additional time negotiating a new slot.
I propose we have an AI that is granted more limited views of people’s schedules, maybe for just enough time to cross reference a week and surface availabilities, with rules input by the players about how to choose the preferred time among what’s possible. I suppose if you wanted to get really fancy, it could even figure out travel time and factor that in.
Could this work? I am guessing the APIs are available if we can have Calendly connections with the various clients. So how about it? Surely, we can surpass Doodle and make meeting as easy as just showing up?
I predict that as we figure out calendar games, we’ll also move away from separate productivity tools and have planning, goal setting, tasks all live in the calendar. Right now this is pretty terrible on Google Calendar, but someone will come along and make this new category of time-management exciting. Or we’ll end up working for our robot overlords when they figure out how to schedule us. Either way, I won’t be filling in Doodles.
Writing every day for a week has made me aware that I have a propensity to get kind of… serious? didactic? like I’m writing some kind of college-essay-meets-Forbes-think-piece? That doesn’t feel very much like me. So it will be interesting to see if I can write about things I’m interested in without abandoning the ‘pragmatic optimist with a sort-of dark/dry sense of humour’ outlook I have in actual life.
Recently I have been thinking about the idea of ‘rights.’ I’ve spent a lot of my life in contexts where there was a stated goal of defending/expanding rights, I have some ambivalence towards the concept, and I’m curious why.
Recently I read the book Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene, who describes himself as a Utilitarian, and also a leftist. While much of the book was a little too caught up in the Philosophy 101 of the trolley problem, I found his argument about the idea of ‘rights’ thought provoking.
When, and why, do the rights of the individual take precedence over the greater good? Every major moral issue—abortion, affirmative action, higher versus lower taxes, killing civilians in war, sending people to fight in war, rationing resources in healthcare, gun control, the death penalty—was in some way about the (real or alleged) rights of some individuals versus the (real or alleged) greater good… There are times when a deep pragmatist should feel free to speak of rights—and not just legal rights but moral rights. These times, however, are rarer than we think. If we are truly interested in persuading our opponents with reason, then we should eschew the language of rights. This is, once again, because we have no non-question-begging (and non utilitarian) way of figuring out which rights really exist and which rights take precedence over others.
In the United States, property ‘rights’ take precedence over other rights rather frequently. For the first part of the nation’s history, this property included people, which meant that the way the law around property worked had to accommodate the extreme removal of ‘rights’ for a huge number of people.
David Graeber has a lot to say on this:
Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of Independence by directly contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights …” thus undercutting simultaneously any argument that Africans were racially inferior, and also that they or their ancestors could ever have been justly and legally deprived of their freedom. In doing so, however, he did not propose some radically new conception of rights and liberties. Neither have subsequent political philosophers. For the most part, we’ve just kept the old ones, but with the word “not” inserted here and there. Most of our most precious rights and freedoms are a series of exceptions to an overall moral and legal framework that suggests we shouldn’t really have them in the first place…
We are so used to the idea of “having” rights–that rights are something one can possess–that we rarely think about what this might actually mean… Historically, there is a simple–if somewhat disturbing–answer to this. Those who have argued we are the natural owners of our rights and liberties have mainly been interested in asserting that we are fre to give them away, or even sell them.
In most cases, when we create rights, they are subject to all kinds of subjective evaluation and disagreement about what they mean. For that reason, ‘rights’ are really better articulated in the negative, not as ‘you have the right to do something,’ but more like ‘no one has the right to stop you from doing something.’ This seems to require more disambiguation.
It’s perhaps difficult to talk about rights without making people with strong views angry, because rights are usually at the heart of polarizing arguments. I’m hearing my friends in my mind right now, saying “WHAT? You don’t believe in human rights?’
That seems like a weird view for someone who started an Amnesty International group in high school, has been active in queer organizations and cares deeply for freedom and self-determination. I think a lot about how incredibly layered our systems are with dominance, violence, and oppression.
And I also am naturally oriented to think about humans as not exactly divinely inspired or inherently moral or maybe just capable of getting out of our own myopia when it comes to our collective sense of being. At this point in our species-level development, we seem to me to be beautiful, capable of compassion, wildly creative, collaborative in impressive ways, short-sighted, impatient, and at least tending towards an overall narcissism that has produced many ways that we could cause our own extinction, after killing off the majority of diverse life on the planet. Did I say I was an optimist?
If we have “rights,” who decides what they are, who sets the criteria for whether they have been met, who is responsible if the rights aren’t met? What we’re actually talking about feels like a mish-mash of different categories, sometimes with conflicts that are unresolvable because they can be viewed from different categories
“clearly this is beneficial for an individual on every available measure” (such as being not-killed or assaulted, physically healthy, housed, or able to access nourishment)
“things that have evidence of being important to our sense of well-being” (acceptance of our identity insofar as it doesn’t infringe on someone else’s well-being, autonomy, ability to access education, having the option to pursue interests)
“things that are important given the power structures in play” (access to jobs, property rights, perhaps even free speech?)
“things that are important based on moral structures that are not necessarily universal” (fetal rights, right to reject laws based on belief structures)
Things get even muddier when we have categories based on identities themselves, largely made up of groups of subjects who have been denied opportunities or legal protection in the past (women, LGBTQAI+, animals, etc.). I am sure there are philosophy or sociology classes where this is articulated way more effectively than I am capable of.
Instead of thinking about rights, which to me take the conversation into a conceptual place that gets argumentative quickly, we should be taking the approach john a. powell suggests in his work on Targeted Universalism. Where do we want collectively to be (as a small community, locally, nationally, globally) and how would we actually accomplish that? Presuming that the outcome is favourable and desirable for everyone?
Of course, this gets tricky at scale, since ideally those working towards the future are the same people as those who are deciding what a good future looks like. For that reason, large-scale progress has to focus on more universally-agreed upon goals, like human survival, and perhaps Maslow-ian needs.
One thing that seems maybe obvious: there’s not really a future where ‘convenient consumerism will be sustainable. I don’t have a ‘right’ to get everything I want when I want it, and as we spend more and more of our resources trying to support that ideal anyway, we’re burning down the house from the inside and out.
This post hasn’t got a conclusion, I want to think more about this idea of ‘rights’ and how we can repair the harms we’ve done without any rights as a guide. In other words, think less about rights and more about responsibilities. Without getting too ponderous! This is the other side of the solopsism, the idea that everything depends on us, on me. It does in a way, but only for my own experience, a dream.
