becoming aware of the ways in which stories shape our perceptions, the ways in which we take information in and interpret it and reflect a set of assumptions that we may or may not want to be associated with is part of the process of becoming more media literate, becoming more aware of the role of storytelling. And when you're being told a story for a particular purpose, because you're being manipulated or you're being corralled, and the ways in which we can then take the reins and do our own storytelling in our everyday lives, online as creators, you know, professional lives, whatever capacity we're using stories of. So the parallel between the stories and the code is that learning to code, you learn particular commands, you string those together into a program that makes something happen. Learning to write, you learn letters and words, and then you learn how to string that together into a story that might have an effect on the listener or whatever your immediate is.
I mean, we have a whole class now of influencers, right, who are people who are not necessarily professionally trained as storytellers, but who use tropes and memes and all kinds of methods to engage people, capture them in whatever their world is, whether it's the Manosphere or some political world or whatever their deal is, and then become experts at that manipulating the systems that we have to make more and more people follow their program. Welcome to Humans on the Loop. I'm your host, Michael Garfield. This is the seventh episode.
I want to start you off with a quote, Whoever Controls the Media Controls the Mind. So said Jim Morrison in 1969, or So I Am to Believe, if we rely on the doors in their own words from 1988, and that might be as good as we get, because the digital surround is a metamorphic landscape of constant, confabulation, and erasure, and all of us are sleuths and archaeologists if we are even trying to get a handle on what's actually happening in the world beyond the reach of our senses. But much, if not most of what we need to know exists through the looking glass of our devices, the choices that we make about the relatively narrow, sensible, immediate concerns of daily life depend on knowledge of events about which we can ultimately say very little with any certainty. These hard epistemic limits might feel overwhelming, but we have to act regardless.
How do we ensure that we are acting on good information? This is the abyssal question that I raised in 2017 with an oral history of the end of reality, a sci-fi short about the world after deep fakes. The hopeful premise of that story was that we may all be forced by history to level up as scientists, to learn enough humility to couch our claims of fact in more transparent presentations of the means by which those facts were made, to issue claims with methods that help others reproduce our findings and sober up about the confidence with which we make them. What some have called the end of trust is also an injunction to regenerate the care we pay to our relationships with one another, with our tools and with our institutions.
And like good scientists, we're going to learn to favor narratives that stand up to interrogation. Inner subjective meaning making and empirical reality are intimately coupled. We may have to grieve the truth as something monolithic and invulnerable, but we can also celebrate a canyere, more nuanced and more just approach that welcomes in heterogeneous perspectives. And we need them if we are to navigate uncharted waters.
Ultimately, better media means better living, and making room for more diversity in points of view is just good practice when we want to hedge our bets against the risk of falling prey to the fifth generation warfare of reality control. Story is the deep code of society and if we want to cultivate a healthy one, it's up to us to notice how that code is written, who is writing it, and how we can ensure more people get support to play a part in its production. This is the molten center of the wisdom and technology discourse, making sure we automate the right things and that how we delegate responsibility for shaping the attention manifold can be reworked as necessary. And this is why I'm glad to speak with author, futurist, and strategist Jessica Clark of Dot Connector Studio today.
Jessica has honderskills for decades on a path that's carried her from triple-AS to the Library of Congress, to the Encyclopedia Britannica, to the Center for Social Media, to the New America Foundation, to the Association of Independence and Radio, and beyond. And now she oversees what she calls a refuge for social innovators working at the intersections of philanthropy media, arts, and culture, and futurism. We need Dot Connectors more than ever if we are to trace the shape of what's emerging, and I look to Jessica as an example of how do we've research, experience, design, production, strategy, and practice building into something like the raft we need to make our way through vast uncertainty to thriving futures just over the horizon. In this episode, we discussed the ideas shared in the book she wrote with Kamal Sinclair, making a new reality, a toolkit for inclusive futures, and how to rethink storytelling in new media.
Check the show notes for some superb deep dive reading after our discussion, and you'll also find links to the rest of the writing dialogues and media experiments in the series so far, as well as listings for new spaces on Discord, Blue Sky and X to stay up and get involved in the intersection of wisdom and technology. And market calendars for February 15th, 3 p.m. Mountain Time, when we'll have our second monthly members hangout. I'm going to need a language model to find new ways to say thanks to everyone who's paid subscriptions, keep this thing in the air, both as a public inquiry and media initiative and as a culture building experiment.
Shout out to new patron Jeff Hanson, and to J.G. Newhall, and T.L.X. for your support of the AI data sonification human instrumentation, Camara, that is this podcast's theme music, scalar reconfigurations, now available on streaming services if anyone still cares. More to come, because what's the point of living through a renaissance if we can't jam?
That's all for now. Get ready to soak up some hard one wisdom from Jessica Clark. Jessica. Hello.
You're on the loop. Great to be here. Like I was saying before we started, I can't actually imagine an institution that will distribute this show, because it exists upstream of goals other than fostering relationality and wisdom. I think you and I both would love a world in which institutions born of emerging media had that very upstream or rhizomatic goal.
But yeah, this is us having a conversation somewhere in the woods. I would like to start by just introducing people to you, specifically in the hope that not only does this put your perspectives on record, but that it might attract interesting collaborators for you. So who are we talking to? My name is Jessica Clark.
I'm based in Philadelphia. I'm the founder and executive director of dot connector studio. We are a strategy and foresight firm. We work primarily with auditions, but also makers and artists and experimental weirdos and fringes of various practices to try to understand how the world is changing and how to make it more just and beautiful.
I was born to an artist and a physicist, that's probably the genesis of this strange conflation of interest that I have, grew up in Miami, also a border place, a strange place of confluence. I started on this journey, I guess, in the early 90s when I was studying cyberpunk literature at the University of Chicago, I was probably the only one there studying that at that moment and trying to understand what that meant for how the public sphere was evolving and also what the gender politics of cyberspace, which didn't fix us back then, except for lines of text, were going to become more recently. I was always interested in emerging media forms and new forms of news and documentary and got on to a track of world building in relation to that, trying to understand the relationship between fiction and nonfiction, which led me to a group called the Gilder Future Architects, a collaborator of mine, Kamal Sinclair, who was the executive director at the time. And that was where I finally sort of realized like, oh, I'm a futureist.
I had been toying around with that term for a long time, but this was very clear. That was my primary impulse. Right on. So I want to go all the way into the deep end with you immediately, because while we're thinking about agency in the age of automation, the first question to ask to me seems to be one of the first questions that you ask with Kamal in this book that the two of you wrote together making new realities.
I just want to read a short little piece of page 33 of this, because I think that this really drives at the heart of it. And then we can link that back to the fact that you're the child of an artist and a physicist and how this is all related to where the boundaries are, what is legible, why, and then how that moves into downstream questions like, how do we make space in society for things that have been historically hard to measure, or maybe should not even be measured, because they would be destroyed if they were. Yeah, so this is the excerpt here. If a human's individual consciousness is the boundary of his or their individual reality, and if the five senses are the primary means of gathering data that informs that consciousness, and if these new media innovations provide augmentations that enable this census to gather and input data at a level that far exceeds typical human capabilities, then our experiences with new devices and technologies reel.
In other words, does the meaning of the word reel quote unquote need to change as our sensory and data processing abilities evolve, and if it does, who will create and control new realities? This is the meat and potatoes, right? Like, how do we make decisions if we can't even agree on what is real, right? And then how do emerging media change the way that we make claims about reality?
I'd love to hear you just riff on this for a bit and how you and Kamal were exploring that in this book. Right, so Kamal got the support to writing a new reality from Ford Foundation, and they were asking questions at the time around emerging forms of documentary, and the ways in which sort of truth claims and identity claims were litigated in public media on the screen, and how those were coming out into these new forms of embedded reality, virtual reality, now AI, all kinds of things, different ways of arriving at information that has some claims and truth. And so the questions at the time were about what are the capabilities of VR to immerse people in other people's experiences and can that create empathy? That was sort of the question of the day about when she started writing this, and then I joined her in her second phase of research, and we started to explore that.
And I think that may not be the question now, but we have new questions at the moment where Kevin's conversation, it's December 19th. So this week's news cycle has been about attacks on Haitians who are being claimed to have eaten dogs and cats in Springfield, and we're seeing this very insane generation of means that are supposed to support this claim and show Donald Trump as a cat rescuer and so on and so forth. So I think the basis upon which we litigate reality changes with the technologies we have access to, but some of the core questions remain the same. Who is the viewer, who is the creator, what are the affordances of that technology to capture reality in a way that is provable, what technologies do we have to verify?
And so we've seen successive waves of misinformation be pushed out since about 2016, not coincidentally, that's been become really like a central concern among the people that I work with among the clients, among journalists, and that's gone from text-based misinformation to photo-based misinformation to AI-generated misinformation and soon we will see fully immercable augmented disinformation and our all of our sets will be declared that way. So yeah, it's a mutually assured destruction game, it's a constant evolution. There's a couple of quotes that you pull on why storytellers are critical to reality formation and again I just want to cite these and then punt it back to you to riff on that because also this week also marks the republication of Doug Rushgoth's program would be programmed, which was my entry point and these kinds of considerations about how literacy figures into who actually gets to write reality. You quote, Sept Camvar of MIT Media Lab's social computing group, code is the new superpower, code designs a social process that social process designs our world.
And then later, of all people, Julie had a chromat of Walt Disney studios in saying that we run the risk of having about 15% of the world's population designing the world through media consumption and media creation for the other 85%. For someone at Disney to say, I don't think that's good business is an interesting claim because like one of the things that's happening right now that I'm really excited about that I see going on in the prosocial use of deep fakes to help people coordinate around a more ennobling or empowering story is work like Stephanie Lapp or Ari Kushner who are telling these obvious fictions about problematic public individuals who are being Stephanie's project deep records in particular showed us what it might look like for someone like Mark Zuckerberg to take accountability for the damage that his work has created in society. Ari just did some really amusing, although perhaps not entirely practical deep fakes of Trump and Elon Musk taking ayahuasca and having like a life change. Yeah.
And so like this question of putting storytelling back in the hands of people is complicated. And I would love to spend the rest of this discussion exploring all of the different factors here of personal institutional systemic change at play in this because there's an obvious correlation with the Protestant Reformation and the consequent 30 years war in the emergence of modern institutions of science and journalism and so on in the wake of the rise of apocalyptic cults and pamphlet hearing in Europe and so on. And yeah, like looking at the good, the bad and the ugly and how it's important to both move leverage to the edge so that we don't have these enormous concentrations of storytelling power and social code determinism. But then also how do we start thinking about the new institutions that keep this from becoming a total violent free for all.
Right. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's just for start as a question of why is storytelling important?
Storytelling is a word that could mean a lot of things. It has this kind of focus you feel to it. Like we're sitting around the fire, telling tales, but it's come to cover a variety of practices, right? So authors who write fiction, people who work in branding, folks who are doing sort of literary journalism, people who are good orators, it could mean a lot of things and the ability of you to fact check those things is partially determined by the genre and the trustworthy vis of the individual.
But also a lot of them share a similar vibe, which is that they're dependent on deep tropes and frames and that those deep tropes and frames may not be visible to us if we're inhabiting them and we're used to them, we may think that they're natural and that they're the truth. And so becoming aware of the ways in which stories shape our perceptions, the ways in which we take information in and interpret it and reflect a set of assumptions that we may or may not want to be associated with is part of the process of becoming more media literate, becoming more aware of the role of storytelling and when you're being told a story for a particular purpose because you're being manipulated or you're being corralled and the ways in which we can then take the reins and do our own storytelling in our everyday lives, online as creators, professional lives, whatever capacity we're using stories in. So the parallel between the stories and the code is that learning to code, you learn particular commands, you string those together into a program that makes something happen. Learning to write, you learn letters and words and then you learn how to string that together into a story that might have an effect on the listener or the viewer or whenever you read it is.
I mean, we have a whole class now of influencers, right, who are people who are not necessarily professionally trained as storytellers but who use tropes and names and all kinds of methods to engage people, capture them in whatever their world is, whether it's the manosphere or some political world or whatever their deal is and then become experts at manipulating the systems that we have to make more and more people follow their program. Now, when I got into this game, I was fairly naive, like a lot of people. I was partially because I was in my 20s and wanted to be a novelist and all that stuff, but also because internet was young and the media world that we were all experiencing in the early 90s was still pretty gate kept. And so the critique was about the ways in which the gatekeepers were keeping currents from us or shutting out certain voices or making women think they had to look a certain way or being racist in a coded manner.
So the rallying cry at the time was we need to break down these gates. We need to get these gatekeepers out. We need open access. We need open discourse.
This is a corrupt system. Over time, as more and more communication systems and modalities evolve, and they became more and more open and porous, the gatekeepers began to lose control and then they would struggle to re-control. They would struggle to re-consolidate every time there was some new, say like podcasting or cable TV or 1.0 or even web 2.0. There would be this explosion of democratized, relatively speaking, communication and participation in innovation along the edges and then there would be this consolidation.
And also, there would always be people left out of whatever new thing was coming down the pipe. And usually those were women and people called people without a lot of resources. That's why we did making a new reality because the idea is that when there's a vanguard is usually white men. Now maybe that's changing, how it's changing.
But that's been the pattern. And when the people who have the vanguard of a communications technology capture it, they have the ability to set the story worlds inside of that communications technology. They're the ones creating the narratives that deep code. So learning to recognize all of that and learning to be able to spot the pattern, even if it's a new thing, is part of the trick.
And then understanding that when you abandon the set of gatekeepers, you may be gaining freedom and latitude and creativity but you're also losing whatever the craft was that was created inside of that system to verify things and make them higher quality and create standards of excellence. So you might want to explode traditional journalism but then you have a bunch of citizens don't really know what they're doing. They don't really have any standards. They have to learn everything all over again.
And then they learn it and then somebody who comes along and explodes the system, et cetera, et cetera. So we have an extremely fragmented media landscape in which people are having very narrow, algorithmically deepened ruts that they're in that are very different for the people around them or the people two towns over. And so the benefit of the centralized system is that everybody's looking at and critiquing the same thing. The beauty and danger of the current system is that everybody's looking at and critiquing very different things except for highly consolidated moments and channels like the Super Bowl or the Olympics or Taylor Swift or NBC.
So there are these points of convergence, the debate, right? Points of convergence that everybody can comment on and then extreme fragmentation all around that. And people's media diets have become such an overwhelming part of their lives and identity that it's out of bounds, that they take over. And that's where the reality skewing really starts to become toxic because they get into a channel, they get either algorithmically or by their own preference funnel deeper down into the rabbit hole and then they're suddenly getting their in queue and on.
And it feels natural to them and the rest of us are like, what happened to Aunt Sally? Okay, I want to back up and focus on a particular area because this is something that comes up a lot and this conversation series so far, you and Kamal in your section on rethinking institutions specifically identify silos and groupthink as an area that troubles the development of new media and the stories that are made possible by the decisions that become implicit through the design of new technologies. As you say, these can lead to not just dangerous but deadly mistakes like the 2003 Columbia Space Shuttle tragedy being a direct consequence of homogenous top-down management structure. But you also know that countering groupthink cuts against something that is pretty ubiquitous in the logic of the corporation, which is efficiency and economy of scale.
And even if you are ostensibly making technologies for creative expression, for artistic use, there is a strange, there's like, you talk to people at Google and they're like, there really aren't that many artists in the room when we're coming up with this. You quote Marine fan of Balbao Studios, the technology is there to service the art, not the other way around. Easy for an artist to say, but as someone who used to have an art career and has basically noticed that the only way that I can get funding in 2024 is by focusing the content of conversations on art as a series about technology and our relationship to technology or the trend in elite art auction buying patterns where people are buying expensive historic automobiles or heirloom historic computers or like this kind of thing. Instead of the shift has changed so that the focus on human creativity is on engineering and engineering as something that has empowered speed and extraction and so on.
Last piece I'll throw on this for now is quoting Eugene Chung, who was the former head of Oculus Film Department and at the time of writing Current CEO of Penrose Studios saying it was very difficult to get Oculus as a company to invest in storytelling experiences that the emphasis is on like entertainment and gaming. It's like everywhere I look, the people inside of these organizations tend to realize that they can't really do something innovative or they can't do something well without diversity and inclusion meaning as you define it in this empowering diverse teams to actually function successfully. It's like, okay, you can hire these people but they're going to bail if they're being blocked in their ability to actually operate within the team. This is just a huge issue and I have more kind of specific questions about this but I would love to hear how you map the problem for us in the most fundamental way you can and then maybe that helps us understand why some of the more practical addresses to this problem work in the way that they do.
I mean there are a couple of dynamics. One is the gift economy that art operates in and the ways in which artists have been taught ideologically to shun capital, not that they should chase capital, there's a persistent divide between people who are tending to operate inside of corporations and build things with a profit motive and folks who have chosen to, we'll call it make a living, have chosen to pursue their vocation as artists and creatives and see those other people as corrupting factors. So there's just a boiling water thing going on there. I think as you identify, if it's a company that is as shareholders, its primary motivation will always be to pursue profit and if what artists are doing is unique and original and maybe a bit opaque or controversial or counter cultural, although it's just plenty of artists that don't do counter cultural things anymore but you know what I mean, that's not going to attract the most customers by detracting like interesting niche of customers but from a pure rationalist standpoint, people are not going to pursue those necessarily.
What ends up happening then is that if you do have artists in your cohort of people when trending a product to market, they get siphoned off into an innovation unit or an R&D lab or a fellowship or a place where they don't have primary access to the mean, the production, whatever the thing is. Or if you're an artist and you actually do have some business sense and you want to try to monetize your technological practice or your engineering practice, whatever you've developed, then you find yourself entering into this world where you have to tip over into this other logic at a certain point in a real investment and so the structures mitigate against sticking to your guns or whatever your original sort of vision was. Now there are efforts to try to bridge these worlds, right? There are things like zebra's united or e-corporations or there's a whole conversation around different forms of hybrid business, for-profit non-profits, type things, or creative networks, people have mutually, they have co-ops, so there are structures designed to try to mitigate these dynamics.
They're all pretty emergent and they're well with a lot of pressure on them. There's an interesting experiment called Metal Label where people have been trying to deal with art world economics and publishing economics by creating mechanism by which they can release products that have small audiences in creative and interesting ways to get to a boutique set of customers in a kind of platform manner. That's one that I'm watching that seems interesting and creative in a way to sort of route around some of this. And then of course, I mean, not every artist is monolithic, right?
People are on the craft side, they're on the hand-made side, they don't want to enter into this. The art investing world is almost entirely divorced from those people unless they get discovered in a subway way. And that's really, you know, that's a game that some artists choose to play or fall over into, and that's a different set of economics entirely. So that wasn't the most fundamental explanation, but that's a set of dynamics that are happening.
Okay, so like in that same section, you mentioned a case study by Harvard Business Review on Pixar, which is one of the five organizations that I looked at in structuring an org's processes for emergence and innovation. And it was the only one of the organizations I looked at that was not a science or technology organization first. And you note that what they found was that they put storytelling first and they put technology second. And I think that there are definitely different domains where this becomes easier.
If you're an entertainment company, obviously it's hard to lose the plot as it were about where technological innovation fits in your story. But if you're making GPUs, it's harder to imagine putting culture first. And so a lot of these conversations focus on the relationship between market forces, regulatory forces, and whatever you want to call it, civil society or culture or intrinsic value. And so this is actually where we get back to the sins of your parents, like being born of art and physics, right?
Because elsewhere, you have this toolkit for change resources, which I'll link in the show notes. And there are a couple of these that focus on this. You mentioned Marine Jiv and Ennis piece on what gets measured, what gets done, achieving results through diversity inclusion. You mentioned the mistake companies make when they use data to plan diversity efforts by Katie Waller at Shannon Gilmartin and Carolyn Samard.
And there are others. Checkbox diversity must be left behind for DEI efforts to succeed by Nicole and on. Jumping back into making a new reality, you talk about there being cases where, for instance, blinding orchestra auditions created an opportunity for more women to get involved in professional orchestras. But then there are other cases where the effort to blind occludes or makes it harder to notice the way that biases are actually entering into the selection criteria.
And so I'm thinking about this particular issue of how these issues are worked through the organizational scale with this larger issue of how do we decide at different scales at the individual level, at the social level, what is worth measuring and what the consequences of measuring are, just to give you another really concrete example from a very different domain, the carbon market, is not actually about ecosystem health. It becomes something else that people are able to hack and prey upon. And there are plenty of cases where the kind of standards that make sense for inclusivity at a scale of global economic operations don't actually work when you're trying to get stakeholders together at neighborhood scale operations because then you're mixing concerns for inclusivity with concerns for context and this kind of thing. So it's like another huge mess.
But one with a lot of really concrete examples, I guess one concrete way to ask this kind of question would be how might we help tech companies, for instance, recognize that they are the substrate for coordination at scale and for the empowerment of storytelling and the cohesion of culture. And that that function actually in some respects might come first. This is a problem that we have confronted before. So when printed publication is where the substrate of information exchange, we had policy intervention that said you could have bulk rate postage so they don't be cheaper to mail out magazines.
Television was the means by which people were most likely to receive news or misinformation. There was activism to create public television from the scattered experiments across the country to try to counter these problems and create high quality educational and news programming. When cable TV became the means by which we had to get our news, there was a set aside in policy for CSPAN. And so there was a channel on the dial or on the remote or whatever you were using to find just really boring, high quality information from legislators because that's part of the public responsibility of the people who made these concentrated communications platforms.
They were forced to acknowledge their public responsibility. So there have been many efforts over the last, gosh, I've been involved with these, well, I'm seen years. I've been involved in this conversation around public media and how it could be imagined for the digital space since 2007. And so time and time again, there have been like new media platform emerges, new group of people say we need a set aside, we need a fairness doctrine, we need a policy control.
And in Europe, they're doing a much better job of trying to hold some of these big tech companies accountable for this information that's used across their wires. And in other countries like Brazil, they're just taking wholesale, they're just like, no, no more Twitter. I've had a gun that backwards. Maybe you'll invest in that no more Brazil, I'm not sure which it is.
But regardless, like you can do it on a company by company basis, either through policy or through the corporation, or you can do it as an organizing and policy effort at a national level. And sometimes, I mean, there is a regime of public broadcasting more or less trusted in the countries in which each of those exists, but there is like a international concept of public broadcasting. And there are international public broadcasters who serve as new sources for the world, like the BBC. So these excesses can be corralled if there is political will and organizing to meet them.
It's just that the shifts happen so quickly in our policy. Apparatus is not quick and not agile and not staffed by people who understand these emerging things. Like the amount of activism that has happened around trying to regulate AI in the last three years, it's been pretty monumental and relatively quick. It's just that it's far outpaced by this company saying we're just going to dump this capability for free on the world and see what happens.
And then everybody's in a chase mode. So how do you get ahead of that dynamic? I'm not sure you have to have almost like a donut economy for technology, right? Like at what point are we ruining our ecosystem or intellectual ecosystem?
And therefore, humanity can't survive and that we need some guideposts to keep us from doing that. There's lots of proposals out there for what would be reasonable guideposts, what would be like safeguards, but making them stick is the challenge. Yeah, just to embellish this, one of the ubiquitous features of design for emergence that came out of the study I did last year was that the golden era of all of these innovative organizations ended when the structures that they had made to incubate new ideas became overexposed to markets. Like Bell Labs was divested to in 1984 or an over-reliance on venture capital funding in a science group or these kinds of things or like Ed Catmull's history of Pixar talks about how Pixar saved Disney animation from the trash because Disney had at some point forgotten that they were innovators and were trying to reproduce the successes of the early Disney films.
And so it became less a matter of radical innovation and more a matter of incremental gains or of operating within a particular model. And so I think there's a line between this and when in making realities, you and Kamal talk about centering different cultural norms and the case that Leslie Fields Cruz of Black Public Media made for carving out protected space for specific identity groups or the complaint that Skye Winade made about trying to engage indigenous communities in game design because the way that indigenous decision making happens moves slower than the game industry wants to move. And so this is like related to this question about like if we cannot rely on state level regulation to provide these protections because that regulatory apparatus has been captured by Silicon Valley or Wall Street or whatever, then where can we create these different kinds of protected spaces where this stuff does not have to demonstrate profitability? Again, this gets to the question of like where is it useful not to measure things?
And the last thing I'll say about it is that I was just on the horn with David Jay formerly of Center for Humane Technology was working on relationality and trying to create more support for the intrinsic value of relationships inside of organizations including in the US Senate. But like in that conversation, the emphasis was back to well, what are the right ways to measure this so that we know we're supporting it? And I was just like, oh, this is such a tightrope walk because again, like you don't want to get stuck in this thing where you're measuring the wrong proxy and then suddenly you're squashing the very thing you're trying to save. Right.
Okay, I thought I'm measuring a lot in the context of the social impact of media and how do we create what's called an evaluation regime, that's a bad word, an evaluation system that allows you to, A, not just measure in a numerical way, the ups and downs and the scale and the like number crunching, but to do ethnographic and qualitative research to try to determine whether something is happening regardless of how many people are involved. And if you're going to do the mixing methods research, because everybody was once the numbers find the numbers don't only tell you so much and they tell you more what you're trying to do is make a dollar. If you're not trying to make a dollar, the numbers might matter if what you're trying to do is spread awareness or generate influence, but maybe that's not what you're trying to do. Maybe you're trying to tell an original story.
Maybe you're trying to bring a group of people together and get them to understand a concept. Maybe you're trying to break a new story that will break open a whole set of like moments of accountability. So, new-boxing, A, not using a language of measurement, using the language of assessment and evaluation and storytelling and ethnographic sort of iteration development. There's this thing called developmental evaluation, which is about being alongside the makers of a project and helping to understand what their goals are and then giving them informed feedback based on what you've been observing so that they can then evolve their thing to the next level.
That's a more useful and realistic mode of evaluation for social innovation and maybe for other kinds of innovation than this yardstick report card metrics bullshit that passes for quote unquote evaluation and so many settings. So, in order to get around this, I had been doing a lot of different case studies and interviews and reports and my papers and stuff around these questions around the social impact of media and had developed a bit of a reputation early on in my founding my business around media impact. This question funders are always asking because they're basically tasked with explaining to their boards why the thing that they invested in matters. And so, I went into a fellowship at Annenberg and I think this thing called a media impact project.
And I was like, if I write another white paper, I'm going to kill myself. So, I gave a talk about how it's sort of a symbol system for impact. I keyed it to a keyboard, like all the different kinds of impact that media might be able to have ripped into configurations and attached to symbols and people were like, you're insane. I don't know what you're talking about, but I think you might have a game there.
There's a game. So, we ended up creating a card deck called the impact pack and it's a theory of change builder. You can lay the cards out to try to decide like, what are you trying to make in what medium? What are the different outcomes you're seeking?
What are the different ways in which you might engage audiences and issue experts and communities and everybody else in your constellation? And then what will happen as a result and what might happen that you wish hadn't happened, but it's going to happen anyway because the world is full of unintended consequences. So, that kind of modular, rearrangable kind of visual system allows people to see different kinds of impacts and the different players in any media environment in a way that a metric system never could. The other thing about it is that if you're trying to be experimental and work across platforms or you're in an emergent space, you can't have metrics because they haven't created yet.
In order to have metrics, you need standardization. The only way to get to standardization is multiple successful or failures. It's a festival of clearance or failures. In order to create the report card, right?
Otherwise, it's like you get an apple and you get an A and you get a lizard. They're all different. Creating a more modular kind of extensible system makes the variety of impacts visible. And then you can claim success or failure based on what you were trying to do not on some external evaluators set of assumptions.
Yeah, okay, let's keep going with this because there's a lot here. One of the documents that you cite is William D'Risa Witt's article on the Atlantic, the Death of the Artist and the Creative Entrepreneur. And William's also looking at the history of this idea of the artist as sort of a lone genius in Western society. And says they had to be seen to be working and working hard, the badge of professional virtue.
And it helped if they could explain to laypeople, deans, donors, journalists, what it was that they were doing. So again, we're back to what you were just saying about how do you actually translate this? Because in some sense, the value of the artist in society is to provide the conceptual frameworks that are then formalized by Savants to put it in William Irwin, Thompson's language that cultural novelty emerges through the crazies, then the artists, then the savants, then the pedants, right, which is a very 20th century kind of MIT historian way of putting it. But I think this connects to issues of existential concern for humankind when we're talking about coordinating behavior at scale.
Because when I spoke to T Nguyen at University of Utah about this issue of quantification and gamification in his philosophical research and the way that we express agency within different ways of making value legible, we spend a lot of time talking about the expert identification problem. And how do you make an idea that arises in one area legible so that you can say we've satisfied our own criteria, but that's a somewhat different process than saying actually I believe that this thing that we've stumbled across here with our own weird idiosyncratic qualitative system might be pertinent to something that you're doing in a completely different domain. And then there's the bigger problem of the fact that the credential systems that we have now, and you were saying something to this point earlier in the conversation that there are places where the PhD still really matters. But when it comes to like climate science, if you can only communicate to other PhDs, then you're gonna have a really hard time communicating to the general public or to Congress.
And yeah, what I want to explore with you next is how new institutions that are digital media native institutions can start to bridge local intersubjective agreement of someone's credentials with a global system that does not have time to actually rely on that sort of specific credentialing system in its decision-making processes. Well, I mean, I think we have a lot of romantic stories about the avant-garde and the innovator and then the lone genius and so on and so forth. I'm thinking of this graphic that Ward Shelley created, which is about the sort of evolution of the avant-garde and the kind of proliferation of avant-garde, and the mechanisms by which novelty is mined and has been systematically mined for commercial purposes with a greater and greater facility and for us, it will last 20 to 30 years. So I think that the systems by which people used to be recognized have broken down and become marketplaces.
I think about Tom Frank, who wrote a lot about the hollowing out of authenticity and originality through the collaboration into advertising and art markets and investment markets. So the story telling that we've done about how genius is discovered is false. I think what I was just saying about if you're in your niche, doing your thing, accomplishing what you're trying to accomplish, if you do it well, it'll get noticed by somebody, whether that's the media or the other people on your field or the tastemakers and curators of the world, or you made a difference, right, in the world I'm living in. If you actually got the dictator to be toppled because of the reporting that you did, somebody will notice.
Once that happens, one of the outcomes, one of the impacts that is in my Cuydaco cards is adoption. If somebody notices that and they copy you, they replicate you, whether it's in your own domain or in a different domain, then that is an impact that is worth noting and is about catalyzing innovation across disciplines. But you can't just have the people doing the work doing that thing, right? You need somebody in the other field to notice and you need these spanning people.
The reason that my company is called Dot Connector Studio is because it's about connecting the dots across disciplines, across people, across time. So I was working with Jennifer Brandell, who was a long time collaborator and she and I were walking down to be talking about the interstition, which is the human organ that was discovered not that long ago. And she ended up becoming really inspired by this and creating this concept called interstitionaries, which are the people whose work is mostly unrecognized, but who wander around from realm to realm, spotting useful ideas or new movements or ways of being and then sharing them across boundaries. So I think if we were to imagine our innovation systems differently, if it wasn't a lone genius, if it wasn't a Bell Lab, if it wasn't that curator in New York or that editor in that publishing house that did the work, but it was somebody who happened to be a planner wandering from discipline to discipline, who made some of the work happen, then we might have different reward systems and we might also think about the pros and cons of siloing people inside of their practices.
I want to pin this back into the article I just mentioned where D'Ressawith says, the democratization of taste embedded by the web coincides with the democratization of creativity. Among the most notable things about those websites that creators now all feel compelled to have is that they tend to present not only the work, not only the creator, which is interesting enough as a cultural fact, but also the creator's lifestyle or process. The customer is being sold or at least sold on or sold through a vicarious experience of production. I've been thinking a lot about this with respect to this conversation series in particular, and I want to link this into what you were just talking about, how the system can reward brainy nose like curation as dominant art form of the 21st century, or the fact that the self-construct of digitally native people is inherently networked, that the product here, if we're going to talk about it in those terms, is not actually whatever I manage to compress with you and everyone else as a working definition of wisdom in the age of technology, but is an example of how to actually engage in what Jennifer Brandell is calling to work of in an interstitionery.
And so we're moving from a product to an open source protocol and working through all of this. It's become very hard for me to determine what it is I'm actually asking for people's money to do. So this is a public goods initiative, but wait, no, it's the independent derivation of a set of proxy credentials that might empower me to do the kind of consulting work that you're doing, but narrow, it's actually me trying to exalt and empower people as the producers of their own local story and knowledge formation. But no, it's like, where this thing actually fits inside of a legal business structure is a complete mystery to me.
And yes, I guess that's all just to say that I would love to hear you double down on what you think actually works in concrete terms for the kind of people that are doing this, because you're kind of an outlier among the people that I've identified in a commitment to a similar sociocultural niche, because you really do have a formal operation with staff and stuff like this. And whenever I've tried to partner up with kindred spirits, it comes back to this issue of, well, all of us are running faster and faster just to stay in place. And it gets us back to that question that we were talking about earlier about, how do you actually make it possible for people who have relational or interstitial values working within large tech companies to do that work, other than just like the political protection of the C suite? This is the same problem at multiple different scales.
Right. I mean, it's a much different problem if you're trying to make your rent because you decided to invest all of your time and energy into doing a sub stack, then if you're able to do this on the side at your vacation, your second home, because you think it's fun and interesting. Those are two different problems. I mean, I cooked up this identity out of a failing industry.
It's like, OK, I can't stand journalism. This thing is collapsing. I can see it in front of my eyes of documenting it in real time. And like perversely, for a long time, I made my living documenting the death of journalism and trying to come up with ways to like short up.
And what has been happening in that period, I've come to understand this, that I've been documenting the shift of it from being a commercial enterprise to a non-commercial enterprise, especially the kind of journalism that I think needs to exist in that lots of people say is central democracy. And that's a depressing thing, but it's also an interesting phenomenon. And I decided like, OK, well, I can see big commercial journalism is terrible. People are getting laid off, constant waves of things cresting and then dying.
And I can see that small nonprofit journalism is no way to make a living. So I'm going to follow the advice that all of us in the 90s got, which has become a brand, you're going to be a brand, turn yourself into a brand. And so that's what I decided to do. And along the way, and have it in a lot of different identities, entrepreneur.
Right. That's not very comfortable. Happen to put it on for a while. Journalist.
OK, well, I wasn't really working. Para, academic. That's fine. There's some security there, but then you're in a different system where you're being judged by your credentials.
And I have a interdisciplinary master's. It's from the University of Chicago, but still this semester. OK, foundation advisor. Sure.
It's a living. So I think I was aided early on in working on this book with Tracy Manslike called Beyond the Echo Chamber, where we mapped out the ways in which people at the time from the cost of one web 1.0 to web 2.0, we're moving around this kind of chessboard of influence. They were journalists. They were lobbyists.
They were politicians. They were progressive journalism space. They're like early podcasters. There was this whole set of systems and amplifiers there in think tanks, blah, blah, blah.
So I just said about to go be in each of those settings over time until I insert myself into different environments where I saw power and influence was accruing to try to learn that system. And what that adds up to is the portfolio career where you do a little teaching, you do a little writing, you do some consulting, you get a job, you quit your job because you hate having a job, like you try to get some IP, you learn that the IP is not worth anything. You put a lot of bets down on the table. And you can find ports in the storm along the way.
Like I had a long time relationship with the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University. I have had a long time relationship with MIT's Open Doc Lab. These fellowships give you some credentials and some institutional standing as you go with the one I had at Annenberg and through this kind of hopscotching of institutional to independent identities and even vocational identities, you can amass enough cred to command the fees. But it's not easy and it's not secure.
And I don't know if there is an easy and secure way to be now. Some people make it through and they become one thing and they become good at it and they become known for it. That's just not my skill set. At one point you cite Victor Picard writing in Jekyll Bean on We Need a Media System that Serves Peoples Needs and Not Corporations.
And Picard makes an interesting point. Imagine if we designed public education according to the logic that if students elected not to pay for civics class, then it would be discontinued. It's precisely the savage logic that snuffing out journalism in broad daylight, only public investments in non-commercial media can support journalism that's expensive to produce but rarely profitable. I keep thinking back to this being related in some core way to the need for eldership and intergenerational discourse and steering in these conversations.
And I'm curious where you see opportunities, because obviously there's a sense in which if you've only lived for a short while, you only have a short time horizon. And if you've lived long enough to see things rise and die off and you've learned to see where there are lessons, but the problem with the modern world broadly could be characterized as an obsession with the idea of the future at the expense of the past. This was actually William Irwin Thompson's point in the book The American Replacement of Nature, trying to explain America to Europe. When you say that Europe is doing a better job with this stuff, it's because it actually cares measurably more about heritage and about the conservation of history.
And so there's a Chesterton-Spencil here, right, which is like don't take out the fence until you know why it's there. When we get back to this question of reality being defined based on where we decide to place the boundaries, what I want to know is where you see there being more opportunities for us to lift ourselves out of the Lord of the Flies situation in which we found ourselves. How do we actually either cultivate this kind of eldership as leadership in older generations? I mean, America being for the first time an economy in which five generations are in the workforce at the same time, seems to be part of what's characterizing the problem of like, well, we're not giving these people time to be elders, because we're stuck in the apparatus of production.
But yeah, we keep swirling the same question from multiple different perspectives, but like, specifically, how do we regenerate the topsoil of partitioned life stages and give people an opportunity to weigh in as elders in this kind of conversation do you think? Well, I mean, I think that we're approaching of time when the demographic will be weighted into the elder end of the scale. So we're going to see, we're already seeing a mass redefinition of what it means to be old and what life periods that actually constitutes, you know, 60 is a new 40. So I think there are going to be a lot of new models that emerge and that part of wisdom of being elderly or being whatever the hell I am in my 50s mature is you do see the same patterns, especially if you're a pattern recognizer, like I you do start to see things come around multiple times in different forms.
And that's just a by virtue of the life stage. So I think if people are able to see that as a benefit and not as making you sort of surplus, making you no longer relevant, that's part of the mental shift that we need to make seeing experience as valuable, not as making you as a more inept. I think I was talking to a future sister Harris for a project that I'm doing. And she said, well, when you have, if you have a cross generational foresight session, it's great to have the young people in there with their new ideas and their excitement and their take on things, we'd have old people there, but there's sense of perspective.
So it wouldn't be that hard to come up with a platform or a program or a show or whatever to try to make that more regular. I think also, you know, there's a lot of talk right now about indigenous wisdom and they're always bringing up the elders and our ancestors and so on and so forth. Like, how do we not tune out when that happens? And like, that's not about me.
And actually think about who in our lives have been mentors. I've been thinking about my mentor at after Heidi. She's the person who hired me to work at the Center for Media and Social Impact. And at the time, I wasn't that young, I wasn't my 30s, but I was like, I don't want to be in the Academy that seems boring and stultifying and I don't want to learn how to write with footnotes and everything else.
And she's like, well, this is where culture is archived. This is the way in which things get encapsulated so that they can be rediscovered later by other people who are trying to study patterns. It might not be as exciting as writing in real time about things that seem very vibrant to us in the moment. But those systems exist so that we can reflect, right?
And they don't have to be inside of the Academy. I mean, I work for the Internet Archive, I work for Encyclopedia Britannica. These are two very different efforts to try to encapsulate codify and preserve knowledge over time. And I worked for the Wikimedia Foundation.
So three different models of how do you arrive at a sense of what is what constitutes expertise and then share it with people who are trying to learn. So I think at this moment of the AIification of knowledge, we're seeing yet another model. And the question is, can we arrive at a model that is more than a summary, more than the lowest common denominator, more than the average of what people have to say. And that actually it beds nuance and sourcing and deep tradition and conflict in it.
Because that's part of what was interesting about the Wikipedia model is the conflict was real and it was happening on the page. You could follow it in real time, so revisions. So yeah, how do we automate wisdom? I think is maybe where I'm getting to with that.
That is the question, isn't it, right? That's the thing that inspired and obsesses me with this project. And so that's the last question I have for you really is, if we start by knowing that whatever it is we talk about, if AI is a spell that we're casting, any given model is a story about reality that we know at the outset in codes and amplifies biases. And we disabuse ourselves of the notion that pure objectivity can ever actually be accomplished or realized.
And then we come back to the work of model building to say, okay, well, this is going to feed back into the way that we understand ourselves and the way that we behave in the world and a way that will amplify whatever bias exists in that model. Then it strikes me that we have an opportunity to start out rather intentionally and think about the counterweighting that goes in to this. Like, okay, I'm telling a story. It's not a story about reality.
It's a story about the reality we want. Right. So if you were to cast a spell on society that would bend collective thinking in the direction of the best possible future, you can imagine what bias would you intentionally seed into your models? Or what is the best possible story that you think would really get its hooks into people's reward mechanisms that would become like a positive addiction, you know, that would become a game that people want to play that would inspire people to be the best version of themselves both quote unquote individually and together.
Well, there are a few ways I can answer this. I think, I mean, I could go away right as well. I'm trying to cast this on UC that it would barring my crystal ball and so on and so forth. I was really struck by this thing I learned yesterday, which is that Mocha Older, who is a sci-fi writer and as humanitarian work just came to become the executive director of Global Voices, which is a site that brings together reporting on global issues from the people who live in the places that are being reported on.
I haven't read it in a while, but it's the original idea of it's like citizen journalism, but done well. And the reason that's useful to understand is that she wrote this series called the Her Democracy Cycle, which was all about efforts to create basically like a global Wikipedia that would become the source of truth and the ways in which that failed and people hacked it. And so she's an expert in this question. Maybe the spell I would cast is everybody would have to listen to 17 verified but very distinct perspectives on any given problem before they would open their stupid mouths.
I go online and talk about it. You know what I mean? Good luck. Inculcating the habit of curiosity and synthesis.
I mean, yeah, good luck for sure. So maybe if they were paid for it. Yes, right. If that was part of their UBI, you're paid to be an informed citizen.
Right? This is the dream. Strike the citizen part. Pay to be an informed human in the world.
Another way I get to answer this question is that one of the projects I'm working on with Tracy here with that book with that I mentioned. She's at a single Puck culture collaborative and we're working on a project called Digital Waves, which is about how do you understand the dynamics of fandoms and fan cultures and how they're being sort of deployed across a variety of online systems for people to be indoctrinated into different ideologies. And what does it take to make that ideology pluralism, which is not just the idea that there are different perspectives in the world and they're equally valid and maybe even valuable to culture, but that you are going to actually take a stand if you see somebody practicing bias, because that's part of your value system. And some of the deep narratives that go along with pluralism are like an interest in the other, the desire to travel, the trying of things and understanding of the richness of different cultures.
And so how do we get people out of their parochial blinders and their fear of the other and there's xenophobia and I mean, we're seeing it in spades right now in our national culture. And you're not just able to empathize, but able to grant other people full personhood and to understand that whatever ideology or religion or sports team, you know, are brought up to revere that you're just a person or a person. I mean, this is very like Sesame Street 101 kind of 1970s that I was raised in, but I mean, that is the dream of America, right? That is the dream of liberalism, not in a political sense, but in an individual sense.
Yeah, how do we make that habit? I'm not sure. Last thing I'll say here, because it is a bonus round thing, but I keep thinking about how, as you see, to think about fandom and its growing prominence as secular religion, right, let's get back to where we started this conversation about people taking the helm of storytelling. And there's a weird thing that's going on right now that I love actually, which is when you start to see this strange convergence between acceleration as capitalism trying to make the most of a particular IP, like Star Wars at Star Trek.
And so it's like splitting off and splintering into this whole manifold of different series. Like, okay, now you've got Star Trek, Lower Decks, which is for like Rick and Morty fans, and you've got Strange New Worlds, which is for like conservative white guy fan of the original series. And you've got Discovery, which is for people who want non-binary characters on the show, and you've got all this stuff. And then all of the little subgroups complain about how there's no coherence anymore.
But then on the other end of the spectrum, I know folks that are working on this Star Trek fan fiction series called Dark Trek, which is their effort to use generative AI to basically demonstrate to film studios that you can tell really solid fan fiction stories with like five or 10% of the staff. These things are going to grow together in a way so that the institution of any given fandom cracks open and becomes much more about career opportunities for people to actually tell fan fiction in a way that's way more integrated with like the Vatican and your first Presbyterian church are in cahoots somehow, and it's working out for everybody. Yeah, I mean, I think on the way as a fan, as a person who's considered many franchises and have opinions about them, I'm intrigued. As a person who has tried to make a living making media, I'm mildly horrified but also still intrigued.
As a person who has only 24 hours in a day, I'm be salceded. I don't care anymore where your canon is. I don't know what shit about dark dark dark things. Like I'm in a good bed.
So yeah, I don't know. I don't know how to feel. Right on. Yeah, I guess we're never going to get rid of the forces of centralization, right?
But this question that you're pursuing with tracing others on digital waves about actually utilizing the affordances to make pluralism pop to make it cool. I have to believe that there's a kind of a balance to strike so that we don't just become the next empire. You just fell into the star wars. Right, right, right, right.
Or that the Federation doesn't become the next. Right. I mean, that is the journey. That is the mission of each generation, at least since revolutions became the way of the world, try to keep that from happening.
So, we're here, we're having this conversation, we're doing our work and we're doing our part. Thanks for doing your part and for suggesting so many excellent people I need to try and loop into this. All right, thanks for having me. Thank you again for listening.
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Let's make sure it's less of a shit show for them. Okay, our next episode with a Howard Rineville singular critic writer, teacher, former member, Institute of Neurotic Sciences, Xerox, park, the holder for a few, hot wire, author of smart mobs, net smart. If you don't know who he is, you're in for a treat and if you do, you know you're in for a treat. Until then, take care and remember, attention is our greatest international project.