Category: Responsibility

Theirstory

Do my motives matter?

“I saw the Emperor – this soul of the world – go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it.”

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth.”

—Lewis Mumford

Is one of these statements more true?

  • To be successful I require a force of will and to be a strong leader.
  • If I trust myself and continue to take action in alignment with purpose, the right things will happen.

Are “great leaders” who do important things examples of success by force of will or are some people just in the right place at the right time? Is force of will a kind of strategy that the system of dominance rewards? Or am I caught in a tautology? We make histories in hindsight.

I have a desire for something to exist in the world, in this case a technology, or really merely an app, but something that supports the purpose of cultivating containers of belonging.

In my current snarl, as much as I want to develop this tech, and do possess the non-technical skills to drive the project forward, I don’t want to invest many years building on a foundation that will ultimately be antithetical to the purpose. And so I keep looking for a container that will allow for people-oriented, thoughtful, and emergent software to be built by people who care more about impact than a now or future payday.

Does this mean I am waiting for permission or searching for the cracks to slip through?

Game B+

Over many years in the startup world, I learned how “the game” is typically played and while it’s not a game “people like me” win at often, it does have a playbook of sorts, and it does involve a set of skills I spent many years developing. There’s a culture around tech startups that is very winner-take-all, that depends on the idea that you need to make moats, guard your IP, and other adversarial concepts. There are countless conversations in this world where compromises to growth in service of community, employee, or climate health are seen as painfully naive. Anything short of hyperscale would be, ultimately, a failure. You matter when you’re the king of the world and other people challenge you to cage fights.

“Successful” tech startups founders are, for the most part, a very specific band of people who are funded and enabled to orient around experimentation and learning. The people in question are pedigreed in various ways, and also deeply committed to the ‘force of will’ hypothesis. It’s hard not to look around at popular tech companies and see patterns that look much like evidence of the success of that strategy, even though of course the entire pool of VC-backed tech looks much the same on paper and there are far more failures among them than successes. (Not to mention the large percentage of such tech companies that are still unprofitable and have engaged in growth tactics that have had negative consequences in various ways for many other people).

But you know what? That’s all irrelevant.

I am not choosing emergence and slow progress because my body falls into a category that venture investors don’t associate with tech founder-ness. My discomfort around taking action doesn’t actually come from anyone else’s judgement. There’s an uncertainty making new things generally produces, no matter whether I think I am making it happen or not.

Driving vs. shepherding

There is something about “I need to make things happen” that feels like it comes from fear not love, that feels like forcing a solution. It indicates I have something to prove instead of something that I’m called to serve.

I am naturally good at getting things to happen. I don’t need to fear that I’ll be lying in bed eating bonbons all day, but what I seem to fear most is a lack of consequence. Somehow, if I figure out a strategy, I think, I can make an impact that matters. It’s a seductive idea that is completely orthogonal to everything I have a felt sense about.

There’s a little bit of this, “yeah, but can’t I just get what I want?” It’s hard to accept that I might not matter in some grand way, it’s hard to believe that just doing things as opportunities arise is enough, let alone believing that just being is enough.

I have to feel my fear and welcome it. Not a fear of doing things, the fear of not mattering. Being Napoleonic is not in my nature (despite accusations to the contrary when I direct someone to help with dinner cleanup). I get so much more joy from leading through listening, coordinating, and having a clear and uncompromising sense of purpose.

The Great

I might not be a person of greatness. That such people even exist and have the right to dominate is a narrative underlying our ideas about leaders.

“What we now regard as states turn out not to be a constant of history at all; not the result of a long evolutionary process that began in the Bronze Age, but rather a confluence of three political forms – sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition – that have different origins. Modern states are simply one way in which the three principles of domination happened to come together, but this time with a notion that the power of kings is held by an entity called ‘the people’ (or ‘the nation’), that bureaucracies exist for the benefit of said ‘people’, and in which a variation on old, aristocratic contests and prizes has come to be relabelled as ‘democracy’, most often in the form of national elections. There was nothing inevitable about it. If proof of that were required, we need only observe how much this particular arrangement is currently coming apart.”

—David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

We may at a time in history when it is becoming clear that we have to toss out the hero mythos and figure out how to be ordinary. To feel the small power of each of ourselves as integral parts of our collective humanity.

Maybe I am misinterpreting the options. There’s room for me to make space in myself for whatever I may be called to, without attachment to recognition. Perhaps the answer is: lead, but only in ways that serve, that allow more lights to shine, that emerge from what is necessary. I can honour my vision at the same time as I recognise I am seeing from a particular vista. I can’t actually design the future but I can choose a path through the brush.

Beyond ambition

I want to do something big, but why? It seems I don’t just want to be known, I want to be known in some very specific way: written into history. It makes me wonder what the hole is I am trying to fill. The little me who was told I was smart and special but also that there was something indefinite but wrong about me?

If I am a vessel for purpose, I may become impactful but I’ll be doing so in service, perhaps even despite my intentions. It’s easy to get hooked by the want to be acknowledged, to be acceptable, to be as good as, which somehow equates to being a figure in history.

At the same time, I don’t want my whole self, including exactly these kind of boring and embarrassing thoughts about my own insecurities, to be exposed.

Imagine we all could create a history of the world where we’re important and do meaningful things. Perhaps this, at its core, is the appeal of social media. Many billions of histories, protagonists all. It’s no wonder that influencer (or, ‘creator’) has become the most aspirational career for the youth. You can skip actually doing anything impactful and just get the attention, the sense of being important. Skip having to deal with the messiness of relationship and collaboration and go right to a follower count.

And look, no judgement. We’re talking about the fundamental aspects of human nature and a system where taking a cut of our extracted attention yields actual power and influence. (There’s an interesting sidebar here about how creators want to own the means of distribution, which might collapse into a whirlpool of recursion).

Fear itself

I don’t know how many times I will need to talk myself down from the idol-worship of achievement addiction. How many times I will have to grieve the hope that I can be saved by being called important. Maybe everyone has a Maypole they will spin around forever and this is mine. To matter, I have to put down what gets in the way of service, and in my case, it’s the fear of not mattering.

These tangles are useful. They give me a chance to revisit my motives. I am not stuck, I am not in an inertia. I’m on a path to building technology that supports our freedom, belonging, and responsibility. I believe there are amazing people who will come together and do work differently. I have a wealth of skills, experience, and intention to contribute. I’m not just thinking about things. I am acting, making, and progressing, if progress itself can be anything more than more capacity to feel my choices. And more and more, I can feel into how possible it is to create without it being about glory or redemption. I act and make because to do otherwise would leave me in dissonance or betrayal.

I am expanding my circles of collaboration, which fills me with delicious anticipation. It’s not only in my head even though sometimes I feel alone. Everyone matters. History offers no solace for us now.

Public Spending

Can buying be in service?

Everywhere I go, there are countless discussions about making money. There are just straight up “winning is the ultimate goal” kinds of conversations, “how can we make money doing good” speculations, or “how can I do what I want and get paid” aspiration. Whether we we’re trying to make millions or make ends meet, making money seems to be the primary focus of public discourse around personal finances.

What about spending money, though?

I’m curious about the idea of spending in service. Of looking at what I’m spending money on, even being transparent about what I’m spending on, and asking myself if that spending serves my purpose.

I think it might be interesting to discover my judgements about my own and others’ spending. Even without knowing about other people’s incomes, their spending is so interesting. I can find myself wondering, “can they afford that?” Either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ yields possible judgements that tell me something about me.

What’s more, I think we’re very trained in our current context to regard spending money as a balm, as therapeutic. It’s seen as self-deprivation when we don’t buy things we want, ‘if we have the money.’ There’s incredible amounts of compare-and-despair when we hear someone spent money “on themselves”.

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

There are megatons of trash resulting from all our packaged products, disposables, and fast fashions. Nearly all our food now contains plastics. Manufacturing and transporting stuff accounts for incredible amounts of energy depletion and environmental pollution. No amount of recycling could offset all the stuff we’re buying and throwing away.

I look around and see all the tangible things accumulating in the places where I dwell. Some things have not involved in transactions at all, like rocks I picked up on a beach. Some of those things I didn’t pay for, but someone did. Mostly though, these are things I purchased, and it can be surprising to think of all that buying and time considering purchases, not to mention the truckloads (literally) of things I have taken to thrift stores, in all my various moves. At the moment, we have a somewhat limited landfill contribution (less than a bin every four weeks) but over the course of a lifetime, my gracious, my pile of trash must be house-sized.

I have work to do here. I have moved in a more intentional direction over time, but perhaps I can incorporate more accountability. Not to say ‘spending less’ per se, but instead, being aware and intentional with the things I spend on. Maybe even begin a collaborative practice.

What are the questions I want to ask about spending money?

  1. Will the money I’m spending go to support people and purposes that matter to me?
  2. Is this the best alternative or am I sacrificing my values in some way for convenience?
  3. How much waste will I be contributing to by spending on this thing? (Including intangeables like energy use).
  4. Would I be OK to share that I am spending on this with my friends, family, or colleagues? (Of course, this might turn out to be more of a reflection on who I am involved with, or residual shame, rather than what I’m buying.)
  5. What would happen if I didn’t spend on this? Is there something I could do with this money that would fuel my purpose?

I’m not advocating being totally public about spending, since we’re living in a context where such information will only be weaponised to shame or to sell us more things. We already give corporations with vested interests in our spending transparency in pretty self-defeating ways. But I wonder what would happen if a few of us came together and accounted for our spending (and even time) with one another, purely with curiosity and wonder. Not like “I shouldn’t have done this” but more like “what can I learn about myself through what I’m putting money into.”

Some of the ways this kind of thinking can manifest can be precious or privleged. But I think these questions allow me to consider my intentions regardless of the options at hand. I will never be without compromise or escape complicity as I spend money. Things are just too interdependent. If I were to do this in a group, there would be interesting ways to practice my powerlessness over other people’s choices. I think we would need to agree that whatever we share about our spending, it’s no one else’s job to police, judge, or take a holier-than-thou attitude.

Despite feeling a strong sense of purpose, I am still reserving brain space for things like, “I need a pair of black pants that look good but can be machine washed” and “I want to eat at that fancy restaurant at least once.” It seems I’m always needing this or that at some low level of awareness. What if I had that time back to dance, write, design, walk, call a friend, or read a poem? When I was struggling with an eating disorder in my 20s, I used to think, ‘if I just thought about it as much as I do about my thighs, the problem of nuclear fusion might be solved.’ What brilliance could emerge if I stopped thinking about wanting things?

For today, perhaps I will just start tracking the things I spend on and the time I spend thinking about spending on something, especially the terrible morass of trying to research purchases that are fairly irrelevant anyway. (The best minds of my generation have read way too many Wirecutter articles). Maybe we’ll make a club. Money, in its most pure and wonderful form, is merely a mechanism of collaboration, and I want to make things together.

Recent Media

The Centre of Attention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the meantime this kitty has thoughts about hedgehogs.

Yesterday’s media:

Creating the Conditions

“Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other ‘undesirable’ side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.”

― Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Systems are complex and interwoven. When we imagine or feel into a different world, it’s clear that mitigating symptoms won’t change the system. When we treat the symptoms, we are often perpetuating the problem itself or enabling the root cause to continue.

In many ways, critiques and analysis are part of the system of dominance and so reinforce it, even as we might think we’re making a difference. Instead of just engaging in a practice of evaluating and identifying symptoms, we can focus on creating the conditions for change. When we start with our own conditions, we can see they are a fractal of world change, change that is emergent and more complicated than we can plan for. As long as we feel compelled to hold onto the stories in ourselves that fuel dominance, our prescriptions for others will come from a warped and reinforcing-systems perspective.

It is far more difficult to do the work of rooting around in ourselves and changing our own behaviour than it is to analyze what is wrong with a system or to make recommendations for what everyone should be doing. The latter approach lets us eat popcorn and feel smart whereas the former means contending with the ways we are out of right relation with ourselves and others while also resisting the dominance trap of self-judgement.

In my own inquiry, some of the conditions that I can foster are: being in practice and returning, living as body and attending to body needs, noticing the things that hook me, being willing to listen, curiosity, wonder, love as an action, action as emergence, and radical compassion.

Creating the conditions involves two aspects. We do the work of letting go of the stories, identities, and behaviours of dominance. The other side of this practice is fully generative, living in the real possibilities of the present, not the future. What does now have to offer us?

We have been taught that to make change we need a plan, a strategy. As humans, our imagination is a gift, that we can create things in our minds and then figure out the steps to accomplish such a thing. And to be sure, there is complexity in thinking about the tradeoffs between beautiful and staggering achievements and the dominance and manipulation required to enact them. Cathedrals and pyramids are wonderous, and are also enshrined power structures. The concept of ‘modernity’ seems to me to be a world in which nearly everything around us depends on some measure of exploitation, of others and of resources, and also of invisible interdependence, relying on the work of thousands of other people without any sense of appreciation for each of their contribution to our wellbeing.

We can make change with a strategy but it is the kind of change subject to co-opting by the system because inevitably goal-setting is a reinforcement of the system itself. Instead, if we put the focus on ourself and the reality of the present, we see that much of what we call ‘reality’ when we are in the more typical state of past and future focus is actually just a story, a narrative, an often collective hallucination.

As I say these things, I am reminded that just by speaking these things I am perpetuating a lie, and thus, though my intention is to articulate something I believe to be true about how change is possible, I simply perpetuate the falsehood that anything is knowable.

Even the practice of creating conditions is that it disintegrates when it is called truth. Any truth that is, only is and can’t be named and explained. It falls apart under the weight of whatever might be called ‘good and bad’ or ‘correct and incorrect.’ Evaluation on a linear spectrum is meaningless when it’s put into a multiversal container of what is.

My experience of this involves the unsettling and exciting sense that there’s an unknowableness, something my body has evolved to feel as supernatural or divine. I am in a near constant state of questioning, and when I go to a place of ‘I know something’ there are interesting effects. I feel the initial rush that comes from being in analysis, synthesis, seeing something to be definable, I have the pleasure of arrogance, like ‘look at what I discovered!’ especially when I see that it seems to resonate for others, but soon enough I get another feeling, an uncomfortable body-sense like a residue of a chemical, the aches that arise from unnatural contortions, strain from trying to lift a boulder.

At the same time, trying on these various knowings and wearing them as costumes is fun. Unknowable as source means that all things are true equally as nothing is true, or at least definitive. But there is a body truth that can be felt, something I can trust until I start to narrate, as in meditation where the mind will be like “oh, I think I have gotten somewhere with this meditation!”

The results of the right conditions, I think, are quanta-like in this way. They involve a deep sense of peace that evolves from our removing urgency, they involve an anxious hypersensitivity when we let go of the defense structures of of blame and judgement. The conditions involve both the freedom of knowing I am not all-important or able to predict anything on any scale beyond the immediate, as well as the responsibility of seeing that I am fully the agent of my own experience, that I am in choice.