Category: Interdependence

Money for nothing

I haven’t ever really gotten into video games post-Atari, but I used to joke that eBay was my favourite video game. There’s something game-like about searching through its huge market for treasures, finding things that seem like good deals, and adding those things to my Watchlist. Then eBay gamifies it even more, sending notifications to say, ‘oh, you’re running out of time,’ and I quickly decide whether or not the item is really what I want (usually not). It’s pretty fun.

But sometimes I’ll be in a certain mood, or have a story that I ‘need’ something more urgently, or the deal just seems so compelling from a ‘level of discount’ perspective and I go and snipe the auction, only to realize once the item arrives that it was not actually necessary at all. Like when I bought a dress shirt (designer! only $20!), thinking, I’d really like to wear more dress shirts and blazers, only to come back into reality and realise that I live in Portland and mostly only am seen by people other than my family on dog walks or Zoom calls, neither of which necessitate the wearing of items that require professional dry cleaning, ironing, or for that matter, even frequent washing.

But eBay is not the only vector of my aspirational shopping. I fantasized for a while about a reMarkable tablet before buying the second generation when it came out, only to have it end up in a drawer. I own socks that are still attached to their little plastic sock hanger.

There are many things I honestly thought I needed (NEEDED!) that barely saw use once they arrived at my doorstep.

And another interesting thing about me, I guess, is that in fact if I buy something that I like a little less, something less special, like items from Portland’s infamous Goodwill bins, I will often use them much more than the great deals on fancy things I’ve found elsewhere, because I don’t want to ‘use up’ the nice things. I have a gallery of ‘nice things’ and an actual experience of items that are good enough.

I have a general policy about buying most things used, or sometimes new from individuals who never used the items, as a way of living without directly encouraging sweatshops and the overproduction of discretionary items (food is an exception, and let’s face it, I still use Amazon to buy some things). But this policy doesn’t really protect me from my own games, the idea that some additional item will enhance my life in some way, that there are rational reasons for purchasing something that fundamentally implies that right now things really aren’t good enough.

I don’t think I am alone here.

We are producing so many things, so much of which is bound for landfills, so much of which comes with this idea that material goods can ease our discomfort, so much of which we really just don’t need.

I notice that there’s a sense of security I am seeking with this kind of behaviour, being able to have new versions of things that are still functional, having clothing options, keeping backup supplies of things we ‘might need’, or buying groceries that are good deals but don’t get used before the best-by dates (accelerated by my proclivity to shop at Grocery Outlet, or grossout as it is known in my household).

Then there are these moments where Marie Kondo shows up and is like “what if you only keep things that spark joy?” And then we purge all the extra stuff, leaving so much room for additional things to refill our home, because homes in North America are really built for stuff more than for people.

Enough already

Let’s start thinking about what is enough. Let’s start thinking about what it means to have everything we need.

To do this, we can consider some basic questions:

  • What matters?
  • What would the world be like if everyone had what we think is enough for ourselves?
  • What is sustainable?
  • What if there’s no security? What if no money or possessions can protect us?

Everywhere around us, we are being sold the idea of needing more. We need new clothes, appliances, cars, phones, things long before our old ones wear out. If we have abundance, we can satisfy our whims to travel or to eat out at restaurants or just buy things because shopping is pleasurable. We can have treatments to make us more beautiful.

So often I hear the idea that spending money on yourself equates to caring for yourself, that when things are challenging, just ‘do something nice for yourself,’ suggesting you can buy your own self love.

Scarcity isn’t a mindset

It’s no fun to live in a state where basic needs can’t be met because of our lack of resources. I’ve been in a situation where I ran out of money. I depended on public assistance to eat, and even couldn’t get to work or interviews for work without scrounging for change for the transit fare. This experience was transformational because it happened at a time when I had been beginning to invest in practices of self-growth and collective practice. I experienced the fear of what would happen as I ran out of money and the awe at realizing I was OK because other people cared about me and were willing to help me get through a rough time.

Without community support, the panic response and elevated stress of survival mode lead to degraded decision-making and mental and emotional exhaustion. Children living in this situation have lifelong effects. 10-15% of people worldwide and in the US live in this state.

People live with the effects of our overconsumption globally: pollution, war, climate-related famine, and other kinds of stress-inducing situations to contend with, much of which is made invisible to affluent people whose neighbourhoods are situated away from landfills, Superfund sites, and areas of direct conflict. In my own neighbourhood, for example, there are nearby encampments that are regularly cleared out, making it seem as though public spaces are “really” owned by only people who also can purchase land around them.

Let’s stop celebrating the idea of abundance.

Having everything we need feels different than abundance. Abundance can be infinite. Access to more wealth and privilege expands one’s idea of what abundance might be. Having what we need is more definable, collective, and possible.

This is not a communist polemic. I don’t think everyone has to have the same things. I am skeptical of the blunt ideas of equality or fairness, which tend to disregard the beauty of difference. I don’t think we can have a world where everyone has what they need through a state-enforced program.

As a reflective practice, though, I think it’s very helpful to feel into what enough looks like. To start to notice when wanting more is more an addiction than an genuine longing or need.

How I spend my time and money have consequences. Most purchasable items involve some level of complicity in systems of extraction and dominance. I can’t extricate myself from this but I can participate less and operate with more awareness.

When I buy something new, I wonder, what am I actually trying to obtain with this purchase? Am I imagining I will be more attractive, have more peace of mind, more fun, more sense of being accepted? This applies to the little purchases as well as the big ones. What’s more, a lot of my purchases are just things I need because I bought some other thing I need, when the need itself was always an illusion.

But what about them?

There are always people with more wealth and more conspicuous consumption around to use as a fake barometer of our own behaviour.

It’s not useful to police or to call out people who are, by virtue of factors including luck and effort, able to own property or properties, to accumulate wealth, to travel as tourists, to buy expensive items, to eat at restaurants that charge hundreds of dollars per meal, or take advantage of other kinds of ‘luxuries.’

And, it’s fair to say that most luxuries come at a cost to others. It’s fair to say that most means of acquiring wealth come with some exploitation of others. It’s fair to say that Western people’s ideas of enough or abundance are pretty weird, and that we’re often imagining something for ourselves that would be inconceivable to a large percentage of the world, if we hadn’t invented social media and streaming media to let everyone know about the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

How can we open a discussion about what enough looks like, that doesn’t lead to pointing fingers, resentments, or ignoring blind spots or areas of conflict?

What can I do to be honest with myself about the ways my earning and spending money impact others?

Money doesn’t care about us

Money is a stand-in for many relationships in our culture. We measure love in the cost of gifts (two months salary, for example). We pay people to do care work, such as child care, elder care, and health care. We hire and fire caregivers, making care something we think is a result of spending rather than relationship. Les and less do we invest in reciprocal caring.

We feel isolated though we have more people around us than ever in human history. We have to pay others to listen to us, to take care of our kids, to make us food. And when we pay people to do things that are associated with care, we necessarily make care transactional, we don’t feel like we have to care in return. Think of the day care centres who tried charging extra to mitigate the tendency of parents arriving late, making staff work longer than they were meant to, only to find that it made the problem worse. “I’m paying for this service so now I deserve to get what I paid for,” completely divorcing themselves from the human consequences.

My sense of why many paid forms of community are strange is something like, ‘you can’t pay someone to be your friend,’ but even that truism is being tested now, whether by paying actual people to perform friendship, or with new forms of technology or drugs that are supposed to replace the need for actual humans to care for us.

Delusional currency

We see money as a sign of our worth. And we see other people’s worth in terms of money. But we’re fond of stories that upend this paradigm. “Greed is good,” goes the Gordon Gekko memetic mantra, but in the end of Wall Street, Gekko has fallen. We are in this weird shame cycle of wanting money, power, recognition while recognising we’d be much happier investing in our communities, relationships, health, and skill-development.

In one study, when participants watched a video of a child talking a test, those who were told the child comes from a wealthy family rated the child as smarter, more capable, and the test more challenging than when the same video is shown to people who’ve been told the child comes from a low-income family. We truly believe people with money are better, despite the widespread evidence that wealth and power often lead to less empathy and more bias and irrational thinking.

When the conversation about what it might look like to live without the aim of making a lot of money, many people I’ve talked to seem to regard the whole idea as fanciful and misguided. Some are dismissive entirely, some retort with some version of the ‘do good to do well’ concept of finding ways to be “good” and still make a lot of money. It’s not money itself that is the problem, of course, but every argument in favour of wealth accumulation I’ve heard involves bypass and contortion. Yes, it may be that my accumulation comes at others’ expense, but I’ll do good things with the money, or I will be able to stop doing terrible things and commit my time to collective good once I have enough money for my own security, or I don’t want to live with scarcity mindset.

Real scarcity mindset is a belief that money can offer meaning, acceptance, or security. We are most likely to live longer, have good health, and feel our life has meaning when we’re integrated in contexts of interdependence and care, where we feel loved and where we’re not vastly unequal in resources to those around us. When we think of money in terms of a practice of cooperation and collaboration, where we create value with other people, and can then pass along resources to those creating value for us, where we by and large know the people we’re creating value with and for as well as those who are creating value for us, we can understand money as simply a metaphor for our connection.

It’s the system, baby

It’s interesting that so many of the destructive materialisms we’re engaged with are subsidized by taxes and seen as beneficial to ‘our economy’.

Our current economic strategies rely on people buying stuff (or traveling, or eating junk, or pursuing wealth accumulation or whatever) in lieu of being satisfied, and anti-social patterns work in service of those strategies.

It’s economically advantageous, at least for corporations, to have people living apart from one another and needing to buy individual versions of everything, to pay for care, to be fined into prison. In theory, we’d have governments (meaning, a group that we’ve selected to ensure our collective wellbeing) looking to more of a holistic measure of economic benefit. This would involve holding corporations accountable for the economic costs growth strategies involve, such as environmental damage, heath care costs, even things like crime (though punishment is simply another corporate-benefit industry without accountability). We’ve stopped regarding government in this light especially in the US (or, for example, in more universally accepted as despotic regimes).

I have to suspect that people who have learned how to live with fewer financial resources and more community will be in a better position as things collapse, whether due to war, climate, or other scarcity-inducing situations. Whether that will be ‘enough’ is hard to say, but there’s no downside I can think of to learning to share resources, support each another, and recognise how deeply satisfied I can be with all my needs being met.

Is it OK to feel OK?

There are catastrophic things happening in the world around us. In many ways, it feels like humanity on the whole lives on borrowed time. Floods, earthquakes, and other weather disasters, wars, famine, addiction, houselessness, structural racism and oppression, and even genocides. Most of these involve at least some level of human culpability. As a human, I am involved in all of these things.

At the same time, I am sitting in a warm bed in a comfortable home in a pretty neighbourhood, with working electricity and high-speed internet. I have been able to eat healthy food without fear of running out, am covered by health insurance, and can use a library system with endless books to read and access to more films and television than I’ll ever watch. I am surrounded by love, family, and two extremely wonderful pets. I participate in a number of groups and have a deep sense of meaning and purpose. My practices include meditation, journaling, walking, and reading, which bring me joy and satisfaction. I feel a daily sense of gratitude.

In Al-anon, which has been an important part of my recovery from the effects of trauma, there’s a saying, “we can be happy whether the alcoholic is still drinking or not.” In other words, our inner and felt sense of wellbeing isn’t dependent on other people changing. There’s something about acceptance that is critical for my own sense of OK-ness.

But, as I said earlier, the problems of other people and other beings are not just other people’s problems. So should I feel OK?

From the perspective of what I’ll use the word ‘consumerism’ to describe, no. I don’t use social media much anymore and in part, it’s because there’s a constant state of overstimulation and fear there, on every topic from war and climate chaos to politics, to stuff you need to be OK. Not being OK on some basic level is an unsurprising message in a place designed for advertising.

From that perspective, my OK-ness is freedom, it is choosing how I am and how to respond. It’s recognising there is not an immediate crisis that I need to attend to in my personal life.

And yet, this line of thinking can lead me astray, and definitely becomes its own consumerist seduction. The ‘wellness industry’ is massive, it’s all about feeling good, feeling good about yourself, feeling calm, feeling detached, having abundance, manifesting what you want, going to retreats and getting bodywork and never having anxiety.

What’s going on around us should make me anxious, and does. I don’t want to feel better simply because I have the option to live with my needs met. It’s not true that there is any actual security, if that’s defined as ‘protection from harm’ or any kind of predictability. When I see myself accurately I am interdependent with other people, and other beings.

There are not refuges untouched by the crises around us. I feel waves of grief, seeing images of people hurting and killing each other, of elephants being rounded up and massacred, of fires displacing people from their homes, of animals being abused for the food supply, of forests clear-cut and the mantle of the earth stripped for resources.

Real freedom isn’t being OK, in other words, it’s the capacity to feel, and to sit with the paradox that feelings include fear and grief as well as joy and love and wonder. Real freedom, perhaps, is OK-enough to look for what is within one’s capacity to address a crisis, and to be willing to do things that have a real impact- moving to a smaller place, contributing time and resources to community and collective efforts, letting go of the need to win or have everything I want. It’s discovering the ways I participate in dominance and extraction and avoiding denial or justifications. It’s the willingness to stay in the discomfort of awareness, not to feel like I’ve done my part by recycling or posting articles somewhere. It’s by committing to love and being with the trouble.

We are prone to find solutions and yet our solution-oriented thinking comes along with an inability to know everything and predict the outcomes of our actions. It comes with our modern aversion to taking responsibility- and leads to pretty terrible ‘solutions’ that benefit a few at the expense of most, or give us a false sense that we can keep on with short-term pleasure-seeking or reward-oriented behaviour. It leads to very selective evidence inputs, or the pretense of holism when we’re simply unable to be holistic while we’re in solutions-thinking, which doesn’t even include parts of our own brain and wisdom systems.

I can be with the trouble, I can notice the cracks, and there are no answers. I can slow down and be with other beings, I can witness and feel the shudders of death and destruction around us. I can love all the beings regardless of their actions or inactions. This will have an impact and it won’t solve anything. I am in wonder, I am OK, and it hurts sometimes.

Weeding a community

Definition: For the purposes of this conversation I define ‘community’ (with the understanding that this definition leaves out much if not most of what the term ‘community’ is used to describe now) as:

A number of people interconnected in various ways, who feel a sense of identity with the collective as well as a sense of being known and cared about by the others who consider themselves part-of, and who are interdependent with at least some of the others.

A community is an emergent phenomena. You can’t build a community. You can’t manage a community. Instead, if you are interested in community, you can create the conditions for emergence, including structures that reduce the opportunities for malignance.

What to weed out

Some things that will likely lead to toxicity or a failure to cohere:

1. Over-leadered spaces: a community thrives on egalitarian structures. Leaders emerge rather than appoint themselves. Expertise can be offered but not imposed.

3. Too much enclosure: No community can survive when there’s not progress, which requires new people. Lives change, people leave. Newcomers offer the opportunity to see one’s own evolution through others at different stages, and a sense of ownership that comes from welcoming.

4. Too much openness: There needs to be a threshold, a sense that there is connection, purpose and shared identity. There needs to be a sense of consistency with the people you’re with.

5. Dominance: If one individual has power over others, there are limitations on being, and this has cascading effects for the whole community

6. Unstructured interaction: We come into every space with the shapings of our lived experience, our inherited trauma, and many blind spots. When there’s not enough structure, people can miscommunicate, make assumptions, or play power games like ‘helping’ in ways that feel imposed onto others.

7. Too much identity: belonging is both an action and an experience. We choose to include ourselves, and part of growth is rooting out where we might be excluding parts of who we are. Communities can easily develop anti-patterns in which membership depends on suppression or hiding of parts of who we are. Fitting in the opposite of belonging.

8. Rules or weak norms: again, as an emergence, a community shifts and changes. Strong (articulated) norms allow people to be at different stages of development and to feel into how things work. Rules lead to policing and power games. Weak norms lead to confusion and disintegration.

9. Action before trust: trust takes time and is torpedoed by many things, often interaction that doesn’t accommodate full agency or freedom to be.

10. Not enough deep interaction: an essential part of community and belonging is being seen and known. Parasocial dynamics need to be coupled with actual social connection, but also should be voluntary and fairly unstructured. These are the ‘spaces between’ in community.

11. Under-leadered spaces: communities need structures that keep things happening. Much of this can be ‘automated’ in a way with regular meeting times, a standard format, and fallback options. But communities develop leaders naturally and offer ways for ‘leaders’ to be in service or stewardship without authority. Under-distribution of work leads to burnout.

12. Not enough togetherness: frequent, positive interaction with the same people is the basis for emergence. There may not be such a thing as ‘too frequent’ except insofar as it tends to build trust that is more difficult for newcomers to penetrate.

AI and the Myth of the Creator Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom’s just another word

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.

Rev. angel Kyodo williams

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.

Trust, Identity, Community

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.’

FreeQuency

Centralized power is violent

Note: This isn’t a fully fleshed-out argument, but a provocation- I’d love to hear what you think.

As we ‘evolved’ (or devolved?) from hunter-gatherers into agrarians, humans became ‘owners’ of property. I imagine that the first owners were also workers of the land, but it didn’t take long in most cultures for there to be people who owned land and then hired other people to work that land, and then enslaved other people to work that land and build palaces and such, and then began developing ways to go out and get more land, leading to systems of speculative investments and colonialism and eventually, Facebook (or whatever the best symbol of global tech imperialism might be – Palantir?).

David Graeber and many other authors I’ve read recently propose that violence underlies all systems of bureaucracy, and I suspect, all centralized systems. Humans are more rhizomatic than programmatic and self-organize in unorderly ways. To achieve ‘efficiency’ in a way that might directly serve one aim (or capital returns) requires hierarchy, and to do so at scale requires that hierarchy to be backed by violence. Maybe to have organizations with more than a marginal amount of inequality also takes violence.

The violence is often invisible to many in these systems, particularly people who have power. It’s only been in the last few years, for example, to have widespread dominant culture awareness of the frequency of examples of white people summoning armed men when they encounter Black folks performing such activities as barbecuing, jogging, or bird watching. But there are more subtle examples, like what might happen if you have medical bills or even parking tickets you can’t pay, or choose to walk around in a park at an hour in which the park “is not open,” or publish academic articles to a website without permission. In all of these cases, people with guns may be summoned with the force of law justifying their presence.

This is important because there are counter-examples in which people figure out how to handle almost all situations without needing strongmen, who can handle non-normative behaviour that is not violent without resorting to dominance. These happen in community settings, where people build trust among one another.

There’s a bit of a truism in the startup world about “flat” companies not being very successful (or being covertly hierarchical). If you want to get things done as a business that ‘can scale,’ you require forms of dominance. People will roll their eyes at more creative or esoteric Lalouxian structures. Part of the reason for this may be that it is, as I’ve noted before, simply easier to rule with dominance than to lead with a collectivist mindset, but that doesn’t mean it’s ultimately sustainable. It may work in the time horizon of most startups (fail fast!) but at least some of the hundred thousand tech workers who’ve been laid off in the past few months were the casualties of hierarchy and power structure that made no sense. (I want to connect those dots more explicitly- but for now I’ll just point out that in the US, at-will employment itself is a system backed by violence).

I’m not a communist. I’m not sure it’s possible to live in a world as ‘connected’ as we’ve become without forms of centralized power. But I do think we will be much better off if we can learn to live within additional systems that work differently, without the threat of physical danger or incarceration for non-violent actions. We can actually figure out how to work things out together, in spaces that orient around accepting difference and minding our own practice. We can come to see that when the trappings of the centralized systems are stripped away, we’re pretty good at finding common ground.

The spaces that contain this kind of shared power, self-empowered spaces, are small. We can develop decentralized autonomous groups that work when they operate at the speed of trust and don’t scale rapidly.

But they can proliferate rapidly. It’s really about shifting the ideas of dominance, monopoly, and scale into pollination, pullulation, and emergence. Interconnection within and among but not as a monolithic network.

To make a great community, join before you build.

In my work with people “building” online communities, it’s been a huge surprise to discover that a fairly large percentage of them are not members of other online communities, or even in-person communities. My mind is consistently blown by the idea that someone might consider themselves the right person to run a community without being a part of a community first.

This reflects a basic misunderstanding of the concept of community, I think. It suggests that one person can be at the center of a community and manage it, when how real community functions is naturally decentralized, more Brownian than linear.

Joining a community is not the same thing as taking a class; following an influencer or brand; or attending an event, though these can be entry points. Joining a community means you’re intending to be interconnected over time with other people who you can relate to and potentially befriend or collaborate with.

As community stewards, our experience of joining a community can help us to empathize and understand people seeking out the community we’re shepherding. What drives us to contribute to a community? What experiences give us a sense of meaning, fellowship, or belonging?

“But,” I hear some hypothetical person saying, “my skills are in convening and bringing people together, so shouldn’t I be the one starting or managing a community, not wasting my time in someone else’s?”

In my experience, contributing to a community offers opportunities to lead and grow in ways trying to start one from scratch can’t match.

Communities that work start small. Communities are built on trust, which takes time and doesn’t scale quickly. It turns out you have more opportunity to make an impact by developing into a leader in an existing community than you do by starting a new one.

When people do start new communities, they can easily destroy necessary trust by exerting too much control, or making it about them or their product and not about what members need or care about. On the flip side, one person trying to serve the needs of a whole community is destined for burnout.

It’s often more effective to find a community, participate, contribute, and support other members’ goals than to start a new community.

Sometimes, there’s no alternative to creating a community because the collaborative goals people have aren’t currently served, but beware that self-serving interests always get in the way of the relationships a community depends on. This is part of why brand communities or community-as-a-business often fail: narcissism and community aren’t great companions. Communities aren’t promotional channels. If you’re a business fostering community, think of it as part of your product, user research, and customer development programs, not sales or marketing.

Sustainability and growth rest on a philosophy of collectivism. In other words, the best communities don’t need a manager, they need stewards who share responsibility and a process within the community that develops more stewards, so nothing depends on just one person or authority.

If you don’t find joining a community compelling, what makes you a good person to bring one to life? As someone working in service to the community, you’re much more effective as a member than as an administrator. Start your journey in community by being a great participant- the best part is, you may find your own sense of community in the process.

Asking

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

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

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

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

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

Isolation is the dream killer, not your attitude.

Barbara Sher

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

Making Space

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

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

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

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

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

What does trust allow for that allows democracy to function?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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