Category: Relationships

Life is Wild

This is an update I never expected or wanted to share.

In mid-August, I moved ‘officially’ back to Vancouver, driving up with all my possessions in a U-Haul, which I put in storage while I found a place to live. 

On August 29, I went to the apartment I had rented but hadn’t fully moved into. It was full of boxes, and I was on the way to pick up a vehicle to move my things from the sublet I had been living in. As I was riding towards the rental car place on the bike path under the Cambie Bridge, a man on a Lime scooter came around a corner going so fast he couldn’t control the turn, swerved into my lane, and hit me head on. 

Both of my arms were crushed and I lost consciousness as I flipped over the handlebars, my helmet flew off, and landed somewhere on the edge of the path (two bikers behind me stopped to help and later told me what happened.) As I came to, there were people telling me they had called an ambulance, and I could hear someone saying they were sorry they had gone over the line (the scooter person it turned out). The paramedics came and put me in the ambulance, my arms were both misshapen and my left arm had a break that left the arm kind of hanging from itself. (Sorry! Ugh!)

The next hours and days were full of crazy pain, long waits, and little sleep, as I was in ER for 15 hrs, then in hospital for ten days. For the first week I couldn’t move my arms and had to be fed like a baby. After a few days, plates and screws were put into both of my wrists and a bigger one in my left arm. I got about three hours of sleep each night as the lights were on constantly and in my four-person room, people played videos at top volume throughout the day and night. When I got out of hospital I went ‘home’ to an apartment I had never lived in, completely full of boxes, sleeping on a daybed, unable to open doors or lift anything.

And oh my goodness- it was also amazing every time a friend or family member showed up or sent me messages, and the amount of help I’ve received has been truly staggering. After a month I have an apartment that is at least 75% unpacked, a bidet and other things needed to live without much manual ability, and just fundamentally so much sense of love and connection for the ways I have been cared for and supported. And every day I feel a sense of progress even though I also have to reckon with the potential of months of recovery.

It’s been a lot.

My life in the last several months has been more eventful than usual even before this accident. 

Wonderful things and not as wonderful – I won’t go into the details here. And let’s not even get into the state of the world.

Things are different.

Suddenly life is full of stops. All the plans and projects I had going on came to a screeching halt. 

We had to cancel the first Community-Owned Tech conference in the Bay Area, I missed my final Voqal fellowship convening, and several nascent projects were put on hold. The launch of our Spacious app alpha was waylaid. And since I had only been in Vancouver for a couple of weeks, I do not qualify for my health care to be covered as a resident, so another shoe will eventually drop financially.

If you’re interested in being part of my life, recovery, work projects, belonging experiments, or just knowing more, please keep reading.

Gratitude is real.

Perhaps it was a blessing this happened at a transitional moment, even though it feels like it has interrupted the momentum of my fellowship and the events of the summer. I feel so called to collaboration as I get back to being able to work. And it really makes it clear that anything can happen, at any time, and all we have really is now.

My entire life for the last several years keeps bringing me back to a question of belonging. And living in ways that involve my body not performing to the expectations of the built world only brings this home even more. But it’s not just about being a person in these circumstances, it’s about being in general.

And feeling into how much joy I get from being of service, and wondering if there are ways I can support others in whatever ways a person with broken arms can! Need a sounding board, someone to see and witness, a brainstorming partner, an accountability partner, or a mentor, now’s the time!

Some projects I’m looking forward to returning to:

Relational Design Lab

What it is:
an R&D Lab for Tech and Belonging
What we do:

  • work with organisations, groups, and communities in the practice of belonging, participatory design, and prototyping, using technology development to bring people together, whether or not technology is the end product
  • prototype and develop digital and social technologies oriented around community-owned tech and collective praxis

How to support:

  • Hire us to bring participatory design, facilitation, and prototyping around belonging and technology to your organisation
  • match us with aligned partners
  • make intros to folks who might want to work with us
  • support our projects
  • try our tech 

Folk Tech

What it is:
A solidarity-based movement among designers, developers, and people in communities who want digital technology that supports their daily life and interdependence without the extraction, exploitation, or surveillance found in most proprietary technology today.
What we do:
Convenings and workshops online and in-person
How to support:

  • participate in gatherings
  • help with admin tasks
  • contribute to support our in-person events

Spacious

What it is:
A p2p audio messaging app for groups. Built with prosocial, community-owned tech principles.
What we do:
Let groups of people  talk to each other without big tech mediation 
How to support:

  • become a tester if you love voice memos
  • connect us to groups who want to try the app
  • help us promote when we actually launch

Practices & Praxis

I’m part of a few programs and offerings that orient around belonging, freedom, and responsibility, including AI Stewardship Practice Program and Spiraling into Uncertainty with The Emergence Network. Other practices are in incubation stages as well. If you’re curious about how to practice belonging, let’s talk more. I’m also still on the board of Prosocial Design Network: we’re going to be looking to expand the board soon, stay tuned!

And of course there’s just the general bringing people together activities I love to do and am planning to ramp up here and in other places as well. Please reach out.

I won’t be at full strength for at least a few more weeks but I am excited to talk and especially meet in person if you’re around Vancouver. This whole experience has led to so much more appreciation for connection. 

At the same time, it’s incredibly vulnerable to feel so much uncertainty about what will happen next and how basic needs will be met. It’s been a crash course in patience, asking for help, and humility. I could not be more grateful for the folks who have showed up and showed care and I can only live into the possibility of returning that energy into the world. And I am grateful for the beauty all around me every time I go outside or even look out the window, for these amazing trees and mountains and ocean and raccoons and seagulls and black squirrels.

Being alive is amazing! And hard if we don’t do it together.

What’s wrong with inclusion?

There are a lot of archtypes when it comes to the idea of power, especially in tech.

There are the people who are like ‘free speech is everything, and btw don’t you dare limit my power or even suggest that my power limits other people’s power despite the obviousness that everyone in this room looks like me and also like most of the people who “officially” have power, how weird‘.

There are the people who are like ‘meh, I guess there’s some injustice but politics is the mind killer and I am going to go over here and make a productivity app, byeeee.’

Then there are the people who, with similar good intentions, are like ‘oh wow, we’ve got all the resources and power, that’s not fair, let’s include some other people.’

I have probably participated in each one of these lines of thinking at some point in my life, but it took a while for the brokenness of the last one to become apparent.

I don’t want to be included. I don’t want to come into spaces where I am like, please sir, I want some more? I don’t want to have to negotiate the tiring dynamics of people who assume that their advantages must be coveted. Who have learned that they are entitled to be right when they have a good argument.

And I don’t think I can improve spaces like this by bringing in other people who have historically been denied power. Even though there’s plenty of evidence that distributing power leads to better business outcomes and all the things that power orients around now.

We might intellectually be able to see that there are power imbalances but if the solution looks like “more people being included,” then guess who is deciding who gets to be there? Not to mention the assumption that this type of power is what everyone else must be jonesing for, versus say freedom from being powered-over.

We are humans and loss aversion is real, so I get it.

If a person with by-virtue-of-birth power wants to do something to change the situation of power itself, the answer must be to abdicate the power. Not to invite other people into their meritocracy, but to go out and experience being a contributor, a lead-follower, a needing-to-earn-trust outsider in situations where power has emerged in community. To check out what happens in the body and mind in this practice.

It’s not that I can’t be a leader, it’s that I am not seizing leadership or self-appointing myself because it seems like I’m the one who has the answers.

DEI is a failure because it’s trying to retrofit a building that is foundationally unsound. We can’t add enough ‘diversity’ to produce equity.

We are granted permission to participate, so long as we’re willing to force ourselves into the not-ourselves costumes of fitting in (a costume the people who gave permission wear too, maybe with a little more give but you know those seams are still digging in).

Perhaps this is why there’s so much ‘anti-woke’ sentiment among people who valourize ‘rationality’ – DEI as it’s industrialized isn’t rational. (I mean, not the only reason). There really isn’t a way that people with luck-power can include into systems change. There isn’t a way for people with a hunger for power-with can transform the old power structures by being invited through the metal-detector at the front door.

Is change about intention or falling apart? Hard to say. But I think at the least, if you are interested in change and you are benefiting from the power structures that work in power-over ways, a good step is to stop watering beliefs in yourself about how to solve everything and feel into their rot and decay.

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).