Perhaps why there is such an obsession right now with trying to put voices into all of these consumer tech products is that we've lost That connection to the physical world in which everything did have a spirit and we want that back But we don't know how to do it and so we're doing it in this really awful One-dimensional way that isn't very fun and you can't really develop this relationship with Alexa like you can with a rock That's been on your land with your family for the past 20 or 30 generations Because Alexa changes more than the river does on you because it's outside of your control and it's been designed by somebody else The I have no mouth, but I can't scream problem is one where you just don't have an actuator It doesn't matter what sensors you have it doesn't matter what beliefs you formed There's no meaningful control mechanism or policy or rule because there's no actuator you can't do anything And so in a way you can expect that to be really frustrating especially if you can sense Something's a miss and so a big part of the data trust work I started from the question of what's a realistic actuator here and in the end we realized that the only really material actuator available At this time is a consent revoke or a delete request these like legally provisioned Mechanisms through which people can assert their rights in a digital environment But that power is so diffuse that on an individual basis these companies just honestly can't be bothered to care if any one particular person Or even small group of people exercises those rights because it doesn't affect their operations meaningfully Greetings future fossils. Welcome to episode 213 of the podcast that explores our place in time. I'm your host Michael Garfield and this week I am especially peaked to share a soulful conversation about technology design and society with two very interesting people Cyborg anthropologist amber case and data scientist Michael Zargam two folks I was absolutely cheesed to hang out with at the regen summit hosted by the regen network a web 3 base open registry for ecosystem services Disrupting the predations of the global carbon market and making it more viable for people to engage in land stewardship than Extractive capitalism. I'll have more to say about that project in episodes to come But this week the focus is on how the way that we design our technologies works for or against our own well-being as individuals and as collectives both of these guests in her work as a design consultant author researcher and wandering provocateur and in his work with block science systems engineering AI development and graduate level education Draw from their own unique deep wells of diverse experience But those wells are connected underground through their friendship and their palpable rapport And I cannot overstate the treat that it was for me to riff with them on these topics before we dive in I just want to thank every single person helping me keep the lights on here with your monthly support I've been unemployed with kids for most of this year And I won't make too much more of it than that But future fossils would not be here without your help And I wake up every day grateful in the knowledge that there are so many of you out there who believe that your lives have been enriched By my love is labor.
So thank you. Thank you. Thank you to explore some of the links we discussed in this episode and to learn more about upcoming conversations and Apropos of nothing except I think it's extremely cool a link to the new musical release by cases weird and wonderful ensemble glo torch Visit patreon.com slash Michael Garfield. Thank you and enjoy Hello, here we are in a barn drinking scotch thinking about cybernetics and regeneration and there's a lot of context between the two of you So I'm looking forward to just allowing this conversation to be something like the sleepover goofiness I've been hearing about but let me let me start by having the two of you introduce yourselves to a bunch of Charitable intelligent creative and curious people cool.
I'll introduce to Zargam Zargam makes things out of math and sees the worlds and systems the many worlds But but mostly I think the thing about Zargam is really important to me having like a grandpa that was a mass petition and dad that was broadcast engineers that there's a level of rigor and a level of modeling things in the world and a level of being goofy and Plain with ideas and concepts and also having a lot of whiteboards to do that with and I think the other really nice thing Is that when Zargam talks? It just seems like normal talking to me for the first time and it's a huge relief and so also it's improving how I think about the world So it's been really nice to collaborate on several projects with him I guess that means that I get to introduce case case is a Cyborg anthropologist at least if you look her up on the internet I would say that it's important to recognize that like we're all cyborgs and so far as we have prosthesis that are technologies social technologies etc and what's so compelling about cases work is the Exploration of how we write size or fit or harmonize those prosthesis to their uses within the world I think far too often we encounter people who are pursuing tech for its own sake But actually exploring technology in terms of its you know role within human systems environmental systems really any system So we just learned I'd like to think about systems but making sure that the benefits of the additions interventions prosthesis that we add to these systems are actually aligned with the goals of those systems and That the goals of those systems are aligned with their constituents whether they be people environmental systems etc And it's actually really really refreshing to have conversations with people who are willing to look at a problem from a bunch of different angles think and put themselves in the shoes of different stakeholders and ask not just whether a particular affordance technology interface or tool is Good in some absolute sense But whether it's good for what it's being put to use for and that can include also circumstances where tools are misused or abused So actually having those thoughts playing with those ideas and exploring things from a mix of technical and normative dimensions Yeah, there's a lot of scene outside the fractal and not really having an ego about something So there's a lot of people I see this constantly and I'm trying really to make this into articles or make this into words to kind of map out this concept landscape So someone could get out of like that local minima where they're just stuck in this like Valley and they don't know that there are their valleys You see this a lot of time with startups Someone says I have this great idea and they really have a notion of idea that's based on something that somebody else has done That's been successful and they just have the two-dimensional version of it And the problem with it is that you see someone dedicate the next five years of their life to a concept that doesn't actually Have any legs that doesn't have any room in an ecosystem that actually isn't the right fractal shape And then they lose like family and friends and money and if they could just step back out of that fractal Or like look at the equations of the different kinds of businesses that they could do or look at a focus on what's what's the truth? Instead of what's truthy what sounds true? What's in popular science magazine?
They could have so much more depth than what they're doing and actually find something maybe the next thing that's interesting Versus trying to make something that looks like a thing that's successful And I think we see this a lot of time in new technology where because we saw in films that Computers should talk we should have computers that talk at home versus you just want to have a washing machine that does the work for you And then tells you when it's done and the not obtuse away and it works Versus someone that some washing machine that wants to have a conversation with you So there's a lot of these like almost it's like that game with with the marbles that you're moving around this wooden board with all the holes I'm like how do you not go into those like little tiny those tiny dead ends constantly with what you're doing? So case you don't want your washing machine to be connected to an LLM and have it talk to you while you're washing your clothes It's so weird that the general public is told that this is important that this is the next thing It's as if somebody made it up the next thing is all of your device is talking to you You know, there's this kind of terrible comic about it's called What is it family circus and there's so many speech polls and the whole thing is that you should have room to be more human and the technology You should have manners and and be quiet and and learn self when when it needs to be heard That doesn't mean that it should be so intelligent to be like a good housemate But it should be just doing what it does as a pass through and that's hard to design We don't think of a pencil or a pair of shoes as high-tech But there's a ton of work that goes into a pencil a lot of the work is in your brain and how you use it and when you're using it You don't focus on the tool you focus on the task you focus on the writing It's a lot of the tech that we're building today focus you on the tech puts that front and center instead of the pass through of how you use the tech So this is I guess first to you But just relate to both of you because something I think about a lot on this show we talk about a lot is this Eric Davis calls it reanimism, you know the cultural retrieval of Animism in the condition of being immersed in an ecosystem of digital technologies He gives an example of kids that grew up in the 90s and developed a more nuanced Non-binary approach to life and what constitutes life because they grew up in the company of Furby's and so they were able to identify a third category You know something that was not merely simply alive or simply dead But was responsive and interactive and you know I've seen my daughter have whole emotional conversations with Alexa Which is not something I keep in my home and I absolutely despise that particular tool But like I'm curious I'm curious about your thoughts about what becomes of this What I see is kind of a promising thing in a way which is a return to a notion of the cosmos in which it is in spirited and in which we have a place kind of in the middle of the Cosmic food web of things and yeah It seems like as off-putting and annoying as a you know product focused rather than a user focused thing is you know Like these these tools have come to dominate our lives in really oppressive ways But there is this kind of silver lining I think which is that we are thinking differently about What it means to be intelligent and what it means to be in relation With all of this stuff that I think the last several generations took for granted as objects over which we had dominion and that like there's I don't know I'm thinking like you know the critiques of Design as merely the agency of the designer being exacted like a one-dimensional one-directional thing and it's missing the way that the designer is Themself the interference pattern of all of these these environmental influences and constraints So I'd love to hear that I'd love to hear you riff on that and likewise sure okay. We have like 40 things Yeah, first we have animism you know I hang out with various communities I'm just gonna call them original peoples because it's more accurate I guess it doesn't it doesn't there's all sorts of different people out there and there are some people that have been around a piece of land for A thousand years and they have a thousand years of memory. It's a really good blockchain It's called ritual and storytelling and it's very efficient and it's also in unison with the environment But when you go and hang out with various people you see that there are names for almost everything every single rock has a name The river has a name there's an understanding of what that river looks like over time There's a story and everything and everything kind of has the spirit and the Santa mism if you go to traditional Japan most people are have a shintuist notion of their spirits and everything and Perhaps why there is such an obsession right now with trying to put voices into all of these consumer tech products Is that we've lost that connection to the physical world in which everything did have a spirit and we want that back But we don't know how to do it and so we're doing it in this really awful One-dimensional way that isn't very fun and you can't really develop this relationship with Alexa like you can with a rock That's been on your land with your family for the past 20 or 30 generations Because Alexa changes more than the river does on you because it's outside of your control and it's been designed by somebody else And so you know there's this post I wrote with a lot of his argument put called design is governance Which talks about going into a coffee shop this coffee shop opened up in Los Angeles and everybody was really excited about the coffee shop But all of the chairs and all the tables were really far away from outlets and the coffee shop owner did not fundamentally understand How people would be using their coffee shop?
So there was a mutiny on opening day Everybody moved all of the tables and chairs around so that we could actually use it for the purpose of what the community needed to use it for And this was really important in that this coffee shop wasn't designed particularly well But a good designer and I would call it a traditional designer a civil engineer someone with ethics and and rigor and redundancy built in or Electrical engineer or a very good traditional designer a blue collar engineer a blue collar factor maker is going to have the process of design That considers lots of lots of different people using the system Versus kind of what design is like right now in which it's almost like a lot of it is not well thought through its Russian spritle This is not necessarily the fault of designers But the incentive model around making stuff and so much of the stuff is short term that we don't actually get to build a relationship With it and it doesn't actually last and so we become used to this new idea of you can't just go into your garage and work on your car You can't see anything beyond the two dimensions And so a lot of people end up living these kind of two-dimensional lives or two and a half dimensional lives in which you're not even Hanging out with real flooring anymore You're not hanging out with with anything that has what Mark Ojay might call it relation identity and history We're basically living in these non places in a lot more of our world becomes non places And then the phone gives us the idea of a place it gives us the idea momentarily that we have relation identity and history on its device Using super normal stimuli like a candy store and it becomes like this impossible feast That's hard to look away the siren call where we want meaning and we get it in information style junk food And it's really really hard to have that and it takes some time to actually get accustomed to nature Which has this nice fractal content and actually has all that information that we want There's a really high information nutrient content and so I think a lot of this new notion is we've lost a lot of almost Information ecology in our environments We've hollowed out a lot of the Wayne Scotty in or even like wallpaper on our walls or like they do have a nice object And now we have this flat industrial lifestyle and condos that have no soul and then we seek meaning and we get it in a way that Doesn't feel very good. And so let's put these companions into everything. Let's let's put this life into it And it's like wait that isn't life. That's this like cartoon of life, and it's not a fun one to watch Yeah, I guess you know I'm gonna pick a spot to jump off But maybe I'll start with this information density because I think it's something we talked about frequently that the preference for dense information and again not like a vacuous density But like something that can be engaged with and that you can kind of go down in the fractal and find new and compelling ideas as you're doing it For me at least as a electrical and control systems engineer electrical systems engineering And we have this concept of like the frequency domain where you reason about things in time scale And so one of the things that really resonates with me about the connection to nature as opposed to say a non-place Is that like a nonplace is kind of a place with which you don't have a relation It's a it literally is a place you pass through you don't think about it You don't develop a relationship with it you are on your way to some other place However, when you develop a relationship with a space That means that you know that the nooks and crannies and the details if you if your family has been in a particular piece of land for a Long time then the story is within your family account for that hill or that tree and that rock and it's a fundamental different relationship to the ecosystem Around you including the you know various species that live there and maybe you've lived there long enough to see a decline in what was previously a common Site like whether it was a kind of bird or even a larger predator I mean at my house were lucky enough that we still see wild turkeys large birds of prey deer on a regular basis And just like living there reminds you how much richness is actually Imminent within a natural environment and that you develop a very different relationship with that kind of place Then one that doesn't have life to it and kind of rolling back to cases earlier points Like in the absence of that like vivid connectedness We definitely have a longing a desire and you know as one does we start to strive to fill that gap and especially out of You know a larger scale that manifests as a market And I think the capitalist institutions that are currently in power are really good at identifying a want a need an impulse And then provisioning a resource that will even if it doesn't fill the need will capture the impulse and results in some extraction and or Some economization on their part arguably at the expense of the people who could instead develop a healthier relationship with a longer-term system And I know that's kind of pedantic normative But I'm basically suggesting that if we were able to moderate our impulses with regards to Technologies that strive to give us those serotonin hits because we need them and actually go outside put our phone down like hang out hang out with each Other for a relationship both interpersonal and person to space then we might actually find that some of the things we're trying to fulfill with the Talking washing machine might actually be met in a possibly a more healthier more sustainable way Like it also doesn't cost as many rarer minerals or as any as much energy to literally go hang out outside with your friends It's this really interesting time in which I like to call different times like it's the second Victorian age We've never been modern we still have a bunch of junk that we're that we're ingesting There aren't super great regulations on what we put into our bodies and what things are made from and also the idea of Having everything so short-term is that it isn't affordable anymore to make the kind of middle layer that you might see in like a German society That that actually allows for small and medium businesses to have long-term multi-generational good stuff that you can rely on And so they do have good stuff goes away And actually I wanted to make in the sense really silly But oftentimes you see like indigenous communities and then Fashion lines get really inspired by them and then they make something that's in a vogue magazine You look at Vogue and it's a $3,000 dress I wanted to make a photo shoot of like various tribes where you would have the tribe and you would have them in their traditional dress and You know let's just say like a snow suit, you know a Nunavut, right?
And you would put the price and it wouldn't be $3,000 You would actually you would actually have the real price of what it cost to produce that community and that nature in the ecosystem And so to produce that piece of material if you were to pay for it would be $3 million And it would blow Vogue out of the water by saying that actually all these communities are the richest and all the things that we're doing are very Inefficient Western society that we have to hoard resources so that some people can wear art and have castles and have enough space to think and have enough space to Listen to nature and enjoy nature and a bunch of other people don't get to be full three-dimensional humans Yeah, so okay one of the one of the recurring tropes in this show is me talking about Blade Runner and there's that line where he goes to Visit the facility and he meets Rachel Deckard meets Rachel and she's got the owl in the office And he's like is that a real owl? She's like what do you think you know like even even in the halls of power in this particular vision of post-apocalypse the wealthiest People in society can't afford an actual owl and yet we still cling to the owl We still want that the sense we've got that biofilia You know that and so I'm also thinking I'm glad that you brought up Japan and you know Shinto it because one of the episodes I get the most positive feedback about on this show is a conversation I had with my buddy Tata Hazumi last year and Tata is in like the 57th generation I think of the oldest lineage of imperial temple keeper like Shinto temple keepers in Japan and they went back to Japan last year to get to know them They're history and their family into the esoteric dimensions of their families life ways and we had this whole conversation about how you know the Shinto tradition understands Technology and how the sort of ambient Japanese relationship to in spirited tools is so profoundly different than it is in American popular culture And one of the things that they said about that is that the in that world space They don't regard something was a commie. They don't regard it as having become fully real in like a velvety rabbit kind of way Until it's been around for I think 99 years, you know So they have this notion that you can have an insult huster or whatever But it's something that has to have survived long enough to be passed down to you And so yeah, this this question of built to last and I like I like this inversion of the hierarchy where or the sort of economic book cooking in which you can say that it's you know the privilege to have something that survives long enough for it to become real is You know what a lot of us are actually after but instead we get industrially distressed jeans, you know like that's yeah Yeah, so I wanted to hop on this and say that like I think this time is also a proxy for entanglement So these things that become real because they entangle become entangled with people with each other with places And so if we're thinking in this network on topology then sort of a thing that's disconnected from everything else is in a sense Not real because it doesn't have relations and so these objects that are you know brand new How do you know that it's just not gonna work like how like instead of worrying about that? We're just like okay.
Well, I've had it. I've used it. It broke. I fixed it.
Oh it broke again So I gave it to someone else they repaired it in a completely different way They've been using it to do a completely different thing and it starts to build up not just like a history But a bunch of like entanglements with people in places and activities and functions filled and functions failed to fill and stories about it And about people and I think this is actually really important because honestly like technology It keeps changing but its function in society is still prosthesis in some sense Like it entangles with us to have meaning and so I really actually can hand a off the case But like we talk a lot about the relationship between people and places and things as a way of understanding Those places and things yeah, and I think if we think about we could invert it and say all technology is actually the same What what actually is is the difference in technology is how we constructed alongside ourselves Some of it is not necessarily constructed at human scale and some of it is not really built to last but you could make this such a difference between a Technology that's 200 years old and a technology that's that's 20 years old in that very few things get to have that care And you do get you know that the the Dyson hair dryer for instance I think that was four and a half years of development where they said oh hair dryers haven't been innovated since the 1930s or 1940s What is the thing that would help people if we if we change and they marked out the hair dryer on an axis and they said actually hair dryers Are really loud let's make a quiet one in order to do that they had to change how the pieces fit against each other when Animated by very high speeds and we blow a lot of air through something. It's going to rattle any part that's not fit together You know on the machinery side very very well And so they they helped pioneer a process that had those components fit together really really nicely But that's a very long-term project to do for a company Which is kind of sad the idea of taking four and a half years to do something today versus you know Oh, we want this done in six months and it we don't say the same thing for people writing a book Someone can spend 30 years writing a book someone can spend 10 years writing a book the output is more important than the time spent producing it And because of that you also have like a lot of tragedy involved, but I like the notion of Of this idea, you know, there's there's an old hotel in Japan. That's run for 52 generations by the same family That's like a thousand years. I think if your friend is related, you know 57 generations assuming that's 20 20 years of age at reproductive cycle average that's like eleven hundred seventy years or something and so that's kind of extraordinary like to think that You know when I went to real Japan There was so much history that I would cry all the time and I really wanted by creating you know extending concepts of column technology Which I originally saw at Xerox Park in the 90s as being a set of technology Universal's I thought the greatest compliment I would know that I'd done something that was good if People in Japan liked it if they saw it as stable enough that they could use for what they were doing and one of the first times I was invited to go and speak in Japan I said why are you listening to me talk about calm tech you already understand fundamentally how to build things this way And I was told by somebody after the talk I said look there's a bunch of people in Japan right now who think that iPhones and Western technology is the thing and they're dropping their Japanese phones Because they're not as cool and they're getting Western phones and they're not wearing traditional clothes because it's suffocating and there's reasons to say that And so to have somebody from the Silicon Valley perspective tell people in Japan that they were right all along it has to come from Silicon Valley It can't come from us because that's what portions of this generation are listening to and I think a special thing about the the movie board project Which was a project made by a Japanese company to make a thin veneer of wood over home automation system So that home automation system was harmonious and beautiful instead of just kind of an ugly piece of technology They were so interested in pairing tradition alongside high technology that you don't necessarily need to have some high-tech thing That's really ugly you can have something alongside you and harmonious at the same time It doesn't have to be bad looking I think one of the only other people that did a good job of that was Dita Rams making industrial minimalism I feel like at most of the basic standard apps on iPhone like the calculator and you look at Dita Rams calculator It's the same app Steve Jobs is one of the only people I think who digitized Industrial minimalism and actually use that kind of D-Rams philosophy to build his products So when we think of them as like categorically incredible, it's actually building on something that that was a tradition of design That's been around for a really long time and inspired by I guess probably now almost a hundred years worth of design history So that thing that looks super new and super amazing is not actually super new or super amazing yet We buy it and it works I think a lot of the other aspects of it that are really addicting is probably not what you know Alan Kay was excited about when he carved the Dyna book Which is the size of an iPad looks like an iPad is made for for children to learn stuff on when he carved that thing out of Also would and ran around Xerox park with it To see if people would use it, you know this this idea was not for having an app store that would sell things And so I think some of these things got distorted Yeah, I mean I also think it's important to look at the difference between things that sell and things that stick around these are different ways of inferring value One takes a lot longer so people tend to use the what sells as a proxy for what will stick around But I think if you look long and hard at the data They're not so correlated things that people get really excited about they might run to people's impulses and like target your immediate wants and needs I'm not saying that's never good But the metric that we use of how many got sold how many people follow how many likes did you get?
These are all kind of low or high frequency signals and we get high frequency signals faster than we get low frequency signals So if we understand that a lot of this really lasting stuff We don't even really know for sure what's lasting until much later and we can look like oh this book It took 10 years 30 years to write but actually people are still reading it 400 years later That's a big deal Okay, maybe this app that you built only took a month to ship But like what are the odds someone's using it in three months much less 400 years And so just recalibrating time scales can help us get outside of this high frequency noise and see the value and taking the time to get something right And I'm not saying that it's bad to sometimes do things quickly But just understand that the time scale of build it fast probably maps to a shorter expected lifecycle for that things relevance Yes And I also think it's really important not to mistake this and say go the other way well because I tried really hard on this thing That doesn't make any money and I'm spending all of my time working on this thing and it's still excruciating that it's automatically gonna be successful Like there are very few people with a dedicated the dedication and focus that can do that You know we have stories in indie game development Where it takes a really long time to make a game and some of them do really really well because of that But there is a more three-dimensional mapping of the system and understanding and critiquing the system in order to make something that people haven't experienced And I think a lot of times people in general not that many people have seen or experienced quality And they don't even know what it feels like so how could they see the three-dimensional version of this world? So I will say this that going back to the point about entanglements Sometimes the things are long-lasting not because you got it perfectly right and you thought about it real hard But because you got close enough to the right thing that people were invested in it had relations to it It was entangled and you know we're in this awesome old barn That's clearly kind of been through the years and been assembled and reassembled and fitted and you know Sturdy up in places and I would say it has like a real entanglement with the land and the people who have been here over the years And that includes the care of it to keep it in a shape that we can come here and stay here And so we don't need to look at this long-termism as I'm gonna spend infinite time and get it perfect on the first shot We know that's not real life But actually putting enough into it that people are willing and able to invest time and to maintain it to govern it to care for it Makes a huge difference and that makes it real because it's entangled Yeah, and one more thing to add to that we don't like trees that are perfect looking if you go by a tree farm It's terrifying. They're all the same height. They look the same We love a tree because the tree tells the story of the time and its relationship to its environment And all those twists and turns and knobs and branches create that kind of fractal beauty as it sorts its way through its story with time And it's the same with this building man.
Oh man the floors are not even here The beams are all disjointed There are some parts that are new in some parts that are old But when you walk in you don't think like you do in an airtight conference room with an HVAC system Worrying loudly in the corner and a bunch of Herman Miller a corporate approved sale airchairs and you know Your beige carpet that is has just enough flex in it to obscure the passage of time and the dirt that comes into it I mean come on right like this room has a lot of Variation or something it just has variety it has it has inadequacies it has character it has distortions And when you look at that, it's nice. There's something about it and it feels really good You know and I think this is probably from this looks like Between like 1780 to 1830 so this has been around for a decent amount of time I wouldn't consider this old because my idea of old is about it It starts at about a thousand years before you can even get me to think that something is actually a real thing Because look at how an old tree would look at this place and be like, uh-huh, you know Like from that perspective, right? And so that's why this is this is neat though because there's something about because it gets older It's going to stick around for even longer and there's less and less of these around But when you go to Cambridge, England you're hanging out in castles from like what 1271 There is a lot of history there and that that place has lasted through a bunch of wars and bunch of unrest Now it doesn't mean the place is inherently good You had to have scorned away with a lot of people's fortunes and colonized a lot of people to have that right? But the thing is it is there and there are a lot of cultures that have a history But then what what is it to buy a bunch of clothes online with fast fashion and you know Use a ton of water to produce those clothes and ship them around Versus you might not have great clothes But you know how to fix them and you can't buy things all the time But that each object that you have you know in this disposable age imagine having few objects But they mean a lot and you can have a relationship with them and pass them down And I don't think we necessarily have that anymore except it maybe some of the upper classes like here's a Rolex Yeah, I mean I hate to be lewd here, but you have me thinking that in there's an optimistic scenario In like a kind of a gallows humor way in which my son's son inherits this deeply worn You know heavily repaired wabi-sabi sex spot That's like even more beautiful than a new one and I'm not trying to get into sex spot stuff But like there's a there's an instance or it's like, you know, like there's a that would that would be evidence of a complete reversal of Frame in terms of like, you know the dominant aesthetic I mean, okay, so like you brought up Alan Kay you brought up to your park and you know that I've been like sitting here thinking about their legacy and You know this thing that you know you talk about you know people This is one of those organizations that like people want to like bottle the lightning that they had in the 70s And yet the thing that Alan Kay and every interview I've read of him with him points out again and again is that His corporate consulting clients don't want to hear him when he says that what made that place so magical was in large part The fact that they just gave those artists Technician inventors a ton of money and just walked away and said we don't expect anything from you for five to ten years Like that there was you know They were set off on like a like enterprise 1701 exploratory mission And they weren't expected to come back right away with something that had to answer to a bottom line And you see the same thing over and over you see what was it about the Golden Age of Bell Labs that fell apart after the Devastature and suddenly the folks that were you know innovating in that space were answerable to these managers who wanted to see Deliverables on a particular timeline and they wanted to make stuff go to market So like I'm sitting here thinking what is it gonna take in a situation where we've been captured by an accelerating innovation crisis cycle Not just this thing about how we've been sort of in culture rated to fetishize novelty Right, but this other thing which is that that there is a like in spite of ourselves That we're traveling in this barreling vehicle over a kind of face transition boundary And so you know I wonder often about the luxury of being able to reclaim our time like the luxury of being able to reclaim time to learn And familiarize ourselves with something, you know It's like even if people want that you know the conditions of the economy in which most you know the circumstances much most of us reside I mean that it takes enormous effort to extract oneself from a system that's pushing everything constantly faster and faster And I also want to say like working at SFI with Sid Redner and Sid had this paper Citation Statistics from 110 years of physical review and he looked at all of these papers that had come out And he looked at how they had been picked up by the rest of the scientific community And he noticed that there was a category of extremely influential paper that basically sat flatlining for like 50 years until suddenly people realized That this was important to dug it back out of the trash and it changed everything And so you know this this was like a big piece of the cultural assumption working in a place like SFI that was sponsored That was supported by a system of patronage that like that kind of fundamental theory that doesn't have to answer to private research Concerns it doesn't it doesn't have to answer to urgency They're interested in doing work that might not mean anything for another 20 to 50 years They need the freedom to do that and how do we do that?
Like it's a problem That's like the same as arts funding generally because like something has been corrupted where people don't understand art as a kind of reservoir And making art as an investment and that you don't need to see an immediate return And like this whole show is kind of predicated on that and I'd love to hear both of you riff on this problem Like how do we get back to valuing these things in a way that we can actually act on those values in this case? We're talking about a challenge that arose when people with positions of authority and arguably accountability for the expenditure of funds Whether it was at Bell Labs or Xerox park that they had to sort of impose some sort of mechanism in order to potentially meet their own obligations fiduciary duties to shareholders whatnot coming in and maybe Misunderstanding the nature of the system they inherited so they saw it as something that could be improved by giving more rigorous timelines Oh clearly if we hold them more accountable and push them harder They'll do a better job not necessarily understanding the fundamental nature of creative enterprise requires space time thinking discussion Productivity that doesn't manifest in quite the same measurable ways But I would say that it's important to remember that not having your primary feedback channel come through that corporate style management and Bottom line interest isn't the same as not having feedback cycles some of the most important advancements at say Bell Labs included things related to Claude Shannon's work on communication Which still were anchored in the real problem of making efficient communication networks He wasn't disconnected from the real problems being faced by the organization he worked for he just had the degrees of freedom required to explore New ideas test them out and let physics and science and engineering be his feedback loops rather than some corporate hierarchy system And so keeping in mind then that the idea that we should give room for people who are experts Creatives etc to explore certain domains isn't the same as saying they are not accountable to anyone There might be principles guidelines and methodologies that provide a sort of Exclosure around them and say look as long as you're adhering to some certain basic, you know high level concepts We're going to give you the space to do your thing and a time scale which is appropriate for the difficulty of the task And then look for feedback in terms of progress on metrics that may or may not be legible to a sort of a corporate institutional system And I think that problem today is only getting worse and I can kick it to case to talk about some examples At least one that I can think of where our program which was originally a three-year research cycle I think got carved down to two or maybe less Yeah, it was this huge issue about you know There's a darker program and it's always three years You don't have to make money during those three years Why because to get anything into a conversation with its environment it needs to have at least three years I mean any farmer knows how long it takes your first field You're just seeing what the soil is and the second year you might have a different crop You'll buy the third year you might know a little bit about the field 10 years in you probably know a lot about the field So why could you just skip all of that with you know trying to make new fundamental things? You don't even know the soil shape and so when a large unnamed company decided to take on this person from DARPA Have for coming and run their innovation department It was pretty good for three years at a time and then one time they're like oh, let's do this faster You get two years now, of course innovation went out the window And I think it's really important to note this idea It's interesting to you know this argument I have been playing with this concept of notions and impulses and muses which comes from a web Comic called the news mentor Which has been kind of taken offline But the beauty of this comic is about the idea that that some people live mostly in their impulses They live mostly and oh, I'm gonna watch this on Netflix I'm gonna click this on tiktok They want to do something more they might watch a really nice film and when they watch that really nice film They get inspired and maybe like a day or two and then they make a plan and then they go right back or like so they're impulses And then you have kind of muses and the muses Let's just say when Brian, you know started making music most people who are more in the notion category being told what music was Who didn't have a taste for Brian, you know? We're like this isn't music you're wasting my time It's like a very angry thing against it So a lot of corporate people are often in this notional phase What looks like innovation when they look at Xerox Park is oh just give people some time and some money and put them in a room together With some beanbag chairs and it will become innovation a two-dimensional cargo cult version of what something actually is Versus the three-dimensional view is why were the beanbag chairs there people don't ask they say oh, it's bunch of hippies Well, I think the story was that Alan Kay noticed that the engineers kept interrupting each other and he wanted to slow them down So if you sat in beanbag chairs, it would take a lot longer to get up and go to the whiteboard to write So this is this idea of like when we think about making something really innovative You have to really understand whether you're having a notional two-dimensional Understanding of it like I'm a startup and I'm gonna make the next Facebook or understanding a lot of these really successful Not necessarily monetarily successful in all fronts innovation places had a good problem to solve and spent a lot of time figuring out the problem Instead of just saying here a bunch of smart people around Otherwise you get magic leap or you get you know Some of these supposed hit films with a lot of stars in no direction So I wanted to jump in on an interpretation of the impulse notion muse Categorization system that we've been playing with and like in the impulse to sort of high frequency response that we're talking about earlier like You know situation arises respond not really thought it's a reflexive action notion is a little bit slower It's like a repeater note It's something that a meme that catches on and kind of propagates a set of ideas that are popular But you notice if you poke at it the person telling you about it can't actually answer detailed questions about it They've picked it up and sort of assumed it as part of their rhetoric But they've never really interrogated it push its limits thought about where it applies and where it doesn't apply So they're part of this sort of you know pub sub network notion propagation system Which isn't inherently bad But it's nonetheless more like a messaging system than it is like a content production system and then this higher frequency Or a frequency longer term process that emanates from this sort of muse category is one that again takes longer to produce Takes longer to bear fruit and a lot of the times the things that are associated with this muse category are Ridiculed or discarded particularly by people who are kind of dominated by a notion behavior because it doesn't match their expected message And they're like oh like until someone maybe is particularly good at rephrasing it or Positioned in a way that catches people's eye or ear and then it propagates and becomes part of the broader vernacular the accepted canon But again the next activity that you might associate with muse isn't about Rearticulating that idea it's holding it up to a different light or and it's an entirely new idea that fits into a different space And is yet again kind of not born out yet And so this categorization is not meant to be one thing is good one thing is bad So on but more characterizing like a time scale of activities ranging from really impulsive responses again Some of which are good pull your hand out of the fire no one saying that's bad You know notions propagating messages that have been adopted It's kind of like norm for an enforcement is a really important part of our institutional landscape But the creativity the adaptation the flexibility the adaptive capacity you might say emanates from this You know idea evolutionary space which is intensive to produce and requires these kinds of safe spaces or long periods of time or both And even when there is production there's no guarantee that the people who did the production will ever see any benefits from it So I want to talk about having read you brought up design as governance Oh my god, that's one of the more recent pieces case on your medium account that I dipped into before this and you make a distinction there about the way that in the particularly alienated and disempowered circumstances in which a lot of us find ourselves Even the designers in like this digital feudalism a lot of the designers find themselves Disempowered to make the kind of differences that you're talking about and I would love to hear both of you think through what a system that restores more agency to not only the Stockholders are kind of just you know shaping what projects get funded You know but Resource more agency to the designers that are setting them up in a way that gives the quote-unquote end user more agency Also, like I know that the two of you have been at work on a project or projects in which data utilization Gets people can opt out and so like rather than just being coerced into an end user agreement where all of your data is just you know signed away and like like all you can do is kind of walk away and wish it were different if you don't like the terms and Conditions then people can pull out in mass and there's like more of a good faith agreement that restores more power in the collective To the people that are actually agreeing to funnel their personal information into these systems I'd love to hear the two of you talk about that and how that can be used as a lens through which to understand a new frame for design What the consequences of that might be in a few years when in the best of all possible worlds if this kind of thinking becomes more pervasive And commonplace what is it gonna be like to live in that world and to use the kind of technologies that are gonna be produced there?
I think this kind of thinking is happening every single time somebody has a frustration with a piece of technology and as that science fiction story talks About I have no mouth, but I'm a scream Everybody wants to be able to send feedback to somebody about how poorly they've made something But they can't most people cannot and a lot of people used to write big op-ed letters on their typewriter and have enough slack in their lives Because they didn't have to work three jobs, you know And then they would write an opinion piece and some people who wrote stuff like that would actually get hired by the companies I think that a really early story about Phillips is that there was this designer that wrote to the CEO and then Eventually was made like head designer and it was a you know The different world right like 1890 to 1930 was a different kind of space now You can make like an angry social media video But the ability to really think and construct your thoughts in a way that's kind of a cervic is is not rigorously practiced in the same way and so you end up just having a bunch of people angry at you and as a velver when you get that You're often like, oh, these people suck they don't know how to use my technology And that's an issue because you're really familiar with it You've built it for tech people you haven't necessarily built it for using it as a second thought versus Focusing all of your energy on it and you think it's really precious because you're building it or your boss just tells you to make it and you Don't have you can't deal with the code debt. So I think a lot of respects a better way to think of it And I really like the idea of cybernetics in terms of steering just think about a car There's a lot of metastable systems metastable is something like a system that works when you're not thinking about it Which is like I'm breathing right now, and I'm not really thinking about it There's all sorts of cool stuff happening to keep me alive that I'm not actively thinking about so that I can kind of steer if I'm reasonable enough in in not being so impulsive steer what I'm doing in the world and have a little bit of a tummy Arguably how much autonomy I have is this really defined by my social class my background and my trauma and all sorts of different things that construct a person in my Environment and the playfulness of the space and the people I'm around whether we're acting institutionally or Extititionally, but it's more about if we thought of people as steering technologies and not necessarily as users and creators And we used older terminology or different terminology. How would that affect how we actually built this stuff? So I guess I will take the starting point where we're case left off on steering and say that so as a control systems engineer I think a lot about the ways in which something is steered So what kind of mechanisms are available actuators as it were that can affect the behavior of a system and then kind of work backwards from those mechanisms to what kind of decisions are made what kinds of beliefs are formed to inform those decisions and What kind of sensors are available to collect data in order to form beliefs in order to inform decisions in order to take actions and with that framing?
I'm gonna come back to the discussion of the the data trust to note that I have no mouth But I can't scream problem is one where you just don't have an actuator. It doesn't matter what sensors you have It doesn't matter what beliefs you formed There's no meaningful control mechanism or policy or rule because there's no actuator you can't do anything And so in a way you can expect that to be really frustrating especially if you can sense Something's a miss and so a big part of the data trust work I started from the question of what's a realistic actuator here and in the end we realized that the only really material actuator available at this time is a Consent revoke or a delete request these like legally provisioned mechanisms through which people can assert their rights in a digital environment But that power is so diffuse that on an individual basis these companies just honestly can't be bothered to care if any one particular person Or even small group of people exercises those rights because it doesn't affect their operations meaningfully and there's a lot of network effects Walk-in effects such that even if you were considering leaving say a social media platform to be honest with you You know you're gonna give up probably a lot more than you gain on the margin as an individual But if we come back to this now we start to see a pattern that is recognizable historically Which is basically an opportunity for a beneficial intermediary and I say this specifically in a circumstance where the interface between the two systems in this case The provider of the app that's using data and potentially providing affordances to the users for that data and the class of interest The that is using it and there may be variation and likely is variation across that particular constituency or stakeholder group But nonetheless there's a enough common interest in their desire to be heard to have a voice that you can already start to benefit from introducing an intermediary and arguably There's even a benefit for the company although historically they might be in an extractive mode The truth is that's there's a really high cost to entertaining and soliciting and gathering and synthesizing the opinions of a large and diverse Acholder group and it would be arguably unrealistic to have them be voting for what they want like the terms and conditions to be And so in the data trust that we've been working on probably one of the biggest innovations is simply to allow members the ability to delegate The authority to revoke their consents and as a result put the trust itself in a position with partner organizations at least that have chosen to engage in this At this time It's only orgs that have kind of willfully entered into this arrangement because they believe it's valuable But actually to negotiate on those people's behalf help tune the terms and conditions and actually put them in a place that actually incorporates Both you know feedback directly from the trustees who have a variety of expertise is in different domains legal technical governance and otherwise as well as the User feedback collected by the trust organization from a broader constituency to inform those negotiations netting out To something that's actually pretty pleasant at the level of the contract negotiations are contentious I talked to the lawyer for this company. They're writing the draft of the terms and conditions I send it over to us we point out a bunch of places that it's a little bit extractive He goes oh yeah, you're right You know I started from the boilerplate the standard and like you're right That's something that I can correct and change or make a little different now be careful What you expect though because some of the things that seem a little bit extractive are there because they're constrained by a regulator above them Like no actually we need to retain those affordances because without those affordances We can't meet our obligations to a regulatory body that we are accountable to and that takes you into one more level That's I think really important which is having a power isn't the same as exercising it So the introduction of the bulk consent revolt mechanism allows this nice feedback loop that says look okay I get it you have to retain that affordance because you need to exercise it pursuant to your regulatory obligations But that's a use if you use that same power for something else We would consider that Inappropriate normally even though you have the legal power to do it and the law won't stop you from using those data rights in a different way The threat of a bulk consent revoke on the grounds that hey, you know You got those affordances because you needed them for these reasons You didn't get those affordances to use that data for this other thing and that's a margin on which you can negotiate debate and to the extent that it's necessary even make threats And they need to be credible threats Which is why you need that like legal affordance to actually revoke consent on mass on people's behalf So I'm pretty interesting experience mostly because we started thinking it was gonna be a really technical thing and it ended up being like a really legal heavy thing As we built out these machineries. Yeah huge and also I wrote a post on this about super set You can look at super set on my medium post But the idea behind this is most people thought that they had already done it or it already existed before that in your head It's often very easy to be like oh, yeah, we collected a bunch of information from people as a company And now we're gonna sell it and now there's a bulk revoke where people can say I don't like how you're using that They thought that it already existed and to our knowledge is the first time it's ever been done and the minimum viable legal fees to even get this thing to happen Are hilariously huge and it's weird kind of cutting a path of being a pioneer on this because it means that you know Nobody can just fork this and make their own version It's really a lot of overhead and it hilariously has so little to do with the tech and so much to do with the governance and the legal stuff And then of course every you know every day people using this they don't want to be involved in governance decisions In a huge overhead way so how do you soften that so that you're taking care of a lot of stuff for them The same that you might not have to worry about sanitation if you live in New York City because there's a toilet But you have to worry about calling a plumber if the toilet breaks or using the toilet or cleaning your own toilet But you're not actually responsible thinking about the sanitation system But you can you can have some choice over it and so it's about that you're not dumbing someone down to say Hey, here's a toilet you can use at all But you are empowering people at least to be like, you know, you could protest if you didn't like how sanitation works It's just that sanitation has to work or people die and so in the real world in the blue-collar world People die when you make a bridge wrong in the digital world people just get really really frustrated and waste a lot of time configuring stuff or get hurt But the harms are a lot less specific and it takes a lot longer for someone to be like, I'm gonna go to court over this So it's harder It's diffuse and I think you know one of the biggest criticisms I think I've heard since this project is people who have a strong preference for decentralization saying oh well That's not very decentralized This is a centralized intermediary and to an extent that that's true But though part of the way that you address a diffuse harm is to centralize it into a voice and to exercise that voice so that The solution at some level is a form of centralization But also it needs to be one exercised in good faith with a fiduciary duty our particular trust is a special purpose instrument that has its fiduciary duty to literal purpose that's a purpose trust and this was authored by a friend of ours and co trustee Eric Alston who is A bunch of great things currently a scholar in residence at CU Boulder, but who works on institutional economics including work on constitutionalism is super helpful to have his input and I kind of want to give him one other shout out before we wrap up this discussion which is we were discussing the sort of concept of decentralization and legitimacy of these kinds of organizations and The joke is the path dependence a heresy and the reason for this is that in order to actually get anything like this going There's a bunch of concentration of authority in the people who found it even when they aspire to a much more decentralized system Where for example, it came out of a I guess he gave a lecture at the Austin where Ashram workshop and talked about this project and when you know People kind of some people some people went over great But some people kind of pushed him on the on some of the dimensions around like well Why aren't the trustees elected like well because when we constituted it they didn't have any members yet Like there had to be people doing the like two years of work that led to it existing before there were people being served to elect the trustees So like even a universe where we aspire to increasingly democratic modes of governance for an entity that actually does meaningfully represent a public It makes sense to get that thing on some rails and moving in a right direction because the real world has path dependence We can't just teleport to an ideal future state where we have you know a democratic election process for trustees because someone had to do the work Before there was a constituency to do the electing and even the incremental changes over the course of its life need to preserve its life So we can't make rapid abrupt changes because of some ideological vision We have to like incrementally identify stabilize finances figure out how to have the right data secure data infrastructure And a lot of what we're doing is back office So if you go looking for this thing, you probably won't find a lot of information yet because a lot of the hard work is foundational It's it's legal.
It's technical It's trying to make sure that this thing actually might be around a long time in the future Yeah, and I would just say all of that which in a lot of cases sounds extremely boring and has lots and lots of tedium associated with Is all swept under the rug when someone says oh, that's cool Or I want to do that because they see the two-dimensional product at the end and they say oh, that's the thing Or it's like when you see great movie like wow, I want to be a filmmaker Oh, and that's why I watch documentaries I want to know you know the seven years I took them to pitch the script and then how hot it was in the desert in the two weeks They shot and all the stuff that went wrong and then they produced it and then editing failed and wow That's the story like it's that struggle its interest, you know and and and also man What do you have to do to do that thing and you get all of that out as a as a single note when you see a press release? And so always remember like there is so much more that goes behind the scenes when something is delivered in a really clear way That being able to see all of that is really important to not fall down that whole of thinking that just because something is clear nice And then it was easy to make on that note I just want to say that I had one hope for this conversation that we have not achieved We've not realized which was to get the how hard it was to make the two of you into the people that you are today like the actual Biographical thing so I hope that I get another chance with each of you at some future point to talk about what it took to make the cookie because clearly both of you are deeply in sold and the result of a long non-linear backstory and I just Appreciate your ability to present something very articulate and sensible and thank you for being here sit with me on this Thanks a bunch. Thanks for having me. I saw the look of horror on your fish.
It's like shit. You almost asked me about childhood I think did you stop it already? No here? Well the bonus track, you know if you have a CD and you just keep it going sometimes Sometimes there's like a little commentary patreon supporters only know I won't do that here.
Here's the secret There's a lot of people after I get off stage and they're like wow I want to be like you or I want to be you I'm sick stop be you know And and you don't get to see many many years of being like wow I don't fit in anywhere this sucks and will I ever fit in somewhere and will ever I'll say that the it's been one year since I've been able to be in a room with people and be my full self so you're one year ahead of me Hopefully there's a great book that I really like called winter journal by Paul Oster like very often when I have trouble I just read like biographies of people and it helps because you get to see somebody else's life You don't want to follow what they're doing But you just at least can feel like okay other people are experiencing this thing And you know think things aren't perfect But man they're heck of a lot better than they were before it But I had to first I had to be like nobody owes me anything I just need to like go out and figure out what to do and then the cool thing is that there's enough people on the planet that The more you are yourself the more polarizing you'll be but also like you may meet some cool people through the filter And maybe take the introductions that people give to you because you might get closer or people might have a two-dimensional understanding for you Are and introduce you to somebody weird so that's not the right shape But keep going so figure out whether it's a notion or a muse that's introducing you I suppose Lovely. Thanks y'all now. Let's go teleport to that idealized future in which we are jamming in the barn See ya Thanks again for listening future fossils a listener supported program made entirely possible with your monthly support You recognize this show as a public good You can help me keep it going by rating and reviewing it on Apple podcasts or on Spotify or by supporting it financially on Patreon sub stack my new hollow foil patreon appreciation stickers are going out soon the new album is up community calls return in January And I have much much more wonderful stuff in queue for you. Thanks again and have a wonderful be on