Relationships – Questioning

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.

Time For Friends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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