Whenever I start to talk about teams in human agency, I end up referencing an article by Darib Lumethall called generative team design, innovation, psychological safety, and empathy. And she has this wonderful graphic, which Lincoln showed us, et cetera, where if you want innovation to change, then you need teamwork and collaboration, which requires communication, which requires psychological safety and interpersonal trust. And she has a little thing that says, this is where the conversation usually stops. But all of that requires active listening and empathy, requires vulnerability, which requires self-awareness, and self-reflection, which requires adult developmental capacity.
That fundamental ability to have a developmental capacity and bring that to being able to team together includes all of this stuff that isn't seen as expertise, the ability to actually listen to somebody and reflect what they say, the ability to take responsibility for your own shit. And unless we include that in our definition of experts, the experts are going to fragment and silo and try and pile up resources as gold in the system, just the way the financial system does. Welcome to the third episode of Humans on the Loop. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, inviting you to join me for a bold exploration into wisdom for an age of magical technologies and how we can dream better futures.
Together, we'll explore some of the deepest questions known to humankind and cultivate the curiosity and play we need to find our place amidst the transformations of the century. Today, I meant to share my latest conversation with friend and inspiration Tyson Young-Kaborda, but due to hilariously appropriate tech issues, I'm gonna need more time to sort that out. However, I believe in Kairos or sacred timing and consequently have to conclude that what I get to share with you today, which happens to be my birthday, is even more appropriate as we embark into a new year, everybody seems to know is going to be insane. This week's guest is another friend and inspiration, knowledge ecologist, Christina Bowen.
If I were to try and start a movement, I would call her first. Christina Bowen is co-founder, along with Anna and Bojana Jamborschik and Khaled Al-Kwadumi of Social Roots and NSF and Omidyar Network-funded software platform for cross-group collaboration that promotes aligned action and helps teams communicate legible impact metrics to stakeholders or in the parlance of our times, she is a master of negotiating the complexities of human communication and community. Like our last guest, Benjamin Olson, I met Christina through Andrew Dunn at the School of For Wise Innovation and we immediately hit it off over calls that ranged from ocean ecology to intergenerational relationships to leveraging decentralized leadership. She has deep, lived experience of what it takes to subvert the toxic status quo, cultivate the health of teams and rethink our social spaces so that they actually work for human beings.
She also introduced me to the world of Mycopunk, an earthier and more distributed alternative to Solarpunk that places more priority on our relationships and narrative construction as an inherently collective project. This is a warm and grounded dialogue with someone I respect immensely as a force for betterment. I want you to read how her team describes their work in principles on their own website. Our greatest challenges as a global civilization will require an unprecedented amount of cooperation and may have been caused in large part by unmitigated competition.
We have founded Social Roots on a few key principles summarized below to support this shift into a more healthy future. One, efficient coordination across groups enables more decentralized organizing and greater innovation. Two, data is a commons and must be treated as such. Platform users need to be empowered when it comes to their data.
Three, power stays healthier when shared. We are dedicated to fair, transparent, and consent-driven work enabling participatory communities to share values and approaches and to approach teamwork informed by insights from healthy living systems. There you have it. We'll mention many worthwhile documents that you'll find in the show notes.
And of course, I highly recommend you reach out to her and her team if you are trying to do better work in groups. Before we start, I want to invite you to join me in the first in a new series of live hangout calls for patrons on Saturday, January 18th at 2 PM mountain time. This project is about much more than one-on-one recorded conversations. I want humans on the loop to be a catalyst for real and lasting relationships, as well as a provider of safe spaces for collective inquiry.
When we held these calls for future fossil patrons during COVID lockdown, it was nourishing for everyone. And I look forward to whatever generative seniors grows out of these somehow bigger and yet more intimate discussions. If you'd like to get involved, become a paid supporter on sub-stack or Patreon or make a recurring tax-deductible donation at every.org slash humans on the loop. Call it a birthday present.
This is the one day a year I feel permitted to be completely shameless. I will also be hosting more public events in the months to come. So stay tuned for those or you can join the free online discussions in the future fossils Facebook group and Discord server. Thank you and enjoy this episode.
Thank you. All right, Christina, you're on the loop. Nice to remain here. Thanks for having me.
I'm going to dive right in after UNI upholstering for whatever substantial length of time for the call. But anyway, let's pretend like this is where it starts. And that's the joke, right? Because you and I are going to talk about rhizomal social interactions and the network doesn't actually start anywhere.
Speak and play some on the loop. Right, exactly. I like to pick where the Mobius strip actually turns. There you go.
Well, the action is anyway, so yeah, let's turn to you and start with a bit of framing on who you are. You can be a verb, you can be a community. I don't care. It's a safe space.
But whatever you care to say to help introduce yourself to people and why you care about the things you care about is a good place. Great. I definitely identify as a verb. I came to the work that I'm doing now by always being a biology and ecology nerd in love with the sea.
And I ended up through a long and winding path doing system and network mapping using the tools of ecology, which is basically looking at things in context to try and help organizations and communities better understand their networks, better understand where their resources were, how communication flows were happening, and tap into what I call their knowledge ecosystem to create change in the world. And so I call myself a knowledge ecologist. I have found a gap in current tooling and currently on a software team called Social Roots, building infrastructure to help networks coordinate at scale to address with the partners. So I want to use some of the articles that you've co-written on the Social Roots website as touch points in our conversation.
And you and I agree that maybe the right place to start is with a piece you call build capacity, scaling your network without burning out, which I think to the degree, let me anchor this in two of the six dimensions of humans on the loop, one being parenting and the other being spellcasting. Right. Because to the extent that social networks can be framed as a technology, they have something in common with magical working, especially like in the mundane sense of prompt engineering, of being governed by non-deterministic or non-linear forces that tend to escape one's model. They tend to be below the threshold of resolution of the model.
And so you get these source of resapprentis type scenarios where you don't see the fine print because it's written in UV ink or whatever. And suddenly your house is full of brooms. That feels, I think, resonant with anyone who has ever brought a project into the world, be it a company or a person or a new invention, deals with the reckoning with those fundamental blind spots. One of the ways that they manifest is in having to relate with the thing you are intending as an entity with an agency of its own.
And so that's where the parenting part comes in as well. And in both cases, obviously scaling, like my wife and I have been basically burned out since we had kids. I think most parents can relate to that. That's a scaling your network in a very fundamental sense.
And you all have a protocol here in business language. So I want to attach it to the team building explicit layer here. But then I want to be able to generalize it to thinking about working with systems more broadly. Wonderful.
Well, I am a mom. And at the recent decentralized web camp, I ended up having a witch write me a poem on stage in front of my son and two other random people. So this spellcasting of parenting frame is just wonderful. I think when we name things, this is part of why I'm so fascinated, not just biomimicry, but how are we literally living systems when we work in groups together?
And what does that membrane look like? Because it tends to be when you name things when they're born, so to speak, that the membrane comes about. And there's a definition of who is in and who is outside of any group, depending on what they're there to do. And I think in how groups are trying to play with self-organization, we have to look at history where we have this very networks tribal background as humans that's very innate and organic to us.
But also we have this history of civilization getting bigger and bigger as Dr. Seuss points out. And hierarchy was the only way that we had to organize that scale. We had to do ships, captains, et cetera, to make that happen, because we didn't have an electronic network that allowing us to communicate at speed with each other.
And so when you get over 150 people or so, you end up needing some way to organize so you don't just end up in chaos. Or if you have a bunch of different tribes doing their thing, you just have smaller groups and you're not organizing at scale. And so we have this new thing, the internet, and we're exploring how to use it together. And as a parent, I really look at us as a little baby.
Humanity is in this stage with this new collective brain, in which we are just a child. Before it can even turn over, a three-month-old baby trying to figure out, gosh, this thing that I was punching my face is actually at the end of my arm. And so I don't really know where you want to go with this, but I think this metaphor is really apt in that we have to look at, as people try and self-organize at scale and address this giant problems that are facing us, that we're coming from a context of everybody's use to working in very hierarchical systems. And to the extent that you try not to, the system pushes back.
And so you have to try not to in very distinct and explosive in sort of unlearning ways. It's like humanity needs an unschooling to remember what it's like to be net. Yeah, okay, so this article is actually very well structured. And although I don't have the time on this call, I really go deep on every single point that you make.
There are a couple of points here that I see as being obviously pertinent to both helping establish a, okay, it's like layers of explanation, a metaphysics of technology, or what are we actually trying to accomplish when we come together in groups or in the decision to use this tool? I want to focus on those points. And one of them is the point that working out loud is vital, which is working out loud, learning out loud, which is where I have always seen a value in precisely what we are doing now, to the extent that a solar flare doesn't destroy the drive storage, in which all of these conversations are being added. But yeah, so working out loud, but then there's a piece in here, there's a graph in here where you go from like one axis is the diversity of perspectives and the size, the scale of things.
And then the other axis is from like goal oriented and collaborative to opportunity driven and cooperative. So in the corner, you have this line where it goes from stronger social ties to weaker social ties from the ability to share complex knowledge to the diversity of ideas, opinions and perspectives. And so that's a fantastically useful graph. There's a question I want to, like after just talking about the virtues of working out loud, I want to get into the way that the blessing is also the curse, which is that cohesion in the corner is so difficult on the other corner.
And when you're talking about scaling, when you're talking about coordinating large groups of people that don't share familiarity and common experience and so on, which I think when you're talking about the baby hitting in some face, that's what I see, I watch it happen on social media every single day. And I'm always wondering, like my what with technology is what can be done to make it easier for people to feel like they're meeting over dinner instead of in a dark alley? What can we do to bring that diagonal line a little shorter as we get into like millions or billions of collaborators? Right, so I want to immediately just shout out Harold and Turkey's work for many variants of that graph where working and learning out loud connect us.
It's really looking at like how knowledge is created and when the group is big and on the X axis, or sorry, on the Y axis, when the group is big and when they're looking for opportunities, et cetera, that's like where serendipity happens. That's what is exciting about social networks. It's like knowledge discovery happens there, but it's very hard to test knowledge or act on knowledge in large groups. So to answer your question at the end there, I think that what we really need to get better at, which is why I'm excited about knowledge ecology, is that ecology is another word for context.
And we need to get better at understanding the context that we're in when we're talking. So are we actually putting something out for everybody to see and working out loud in public? Or are we working out loud just a little bit past our comfort zone by sharing with four members of our team something that we're trying to articulate, that we would have normally kept to ourselves until it was perfect or done. We're trained to like that, ta-da, I did it well, and get the attaboy.
So I guess two things. One is just we have really drawn on Harold's work for understanding this middle layer, which in those three bubbles, where you look at the opportunity driven and cooperative social network at the upper right, and then down in the lower left, you have strong social ties, work projects, goal oriented, the middle space where you have mixed social ties, maybe some people you don't know. And you're really testing ideas is community. That is where the boundary of community is.
And it's usually in technology has been historically seen as this valueless place, but it is actually where knowledge that you've discovered goes and gets tested and then what is actually actionable drops out of that in companies or organizations pick that up and run with it as their core mission. So we think my team and collaborators think that community layer is underserved, super valuable, and needs support in technology that it just doesn't have today. Because the technologies are either built for core teams doing work together, which is like enterprise class or giant social networks that are basically allowing people to mine for data. So I feel like I have some intuitions about what community focused technology would look like.
And I'm about to give you some examples, but I wanna take a minute to get there. And I wanna just ask you, if you see anything that is actually serving the kind of functions that you're addressing here right now, like where are we doing this well in the world? In the technologies? Technology has broadly defined.
We can be talking about social protocols of any kind. So social protocols of coordination, definitely I learned a lot about how to not do hierarchy and not descend into chaos through the response of dot work that work. We'll be going down to a conference next in a couple weeks here at the Oakland Museum for looking at that responsive way of working. And it's funny because a lot of the people that are trying to not just do hierarchy to actually support this self-organization capacity that's not wide open public, but it's not lockdown core team either are coming from either tech and advertising where people have pressure to adapt or die because the industry is removing so quickly or coming from a sort of psych and human happiness point of view.
And there was not as much emphasis, although I think that's changed a bit on living systems. And so fundamentally, I think that we have to look at technology that has good boundaries and it is social coordinating protocols that have teams or a team of teams to pull on the crystal stuff, coordinating like once a month, once a quarter, anybody who's pushing that rhythm in a community is giving a social protocol that helps coordination happen because it's allowing people to not work out loud in a fire hose, but to drink from the faucets that make sense for them and then hear from others in a pulsed way, in a digestible way, what is needed, where they might help, how they might coordinate and more easily find the others at a time when they need it. In terms of technology, we've seen dumpster fires on social networks that are just, I think that there's a real problem of healthy boundaries in technology, they're either really strong in siloed or they're wide open public. And exploring this question is why we got the NSF funding to explore social routes.
But I think where we do that, well, humans usually stand in just to come back to the parenting thread, we talk about that as care work of networks. We talk about that coordinator bottlenecked person who is pulling the network together and helping people find the resources they need when they need it and making the network a really generative place to be, it's usually falling on a small core group of people, often non-white, non-male, often under recognized and underpaid. And it is the care work, it is making sure that people get the love and resources that they need in those networks. It's funny because I'm doing this show in parallel with future fossils and so a lot of those backlinks are gonna seem archeological when these conversations finally come out.
But yeah, we just dropped the conversation with Alyssa Eligredi and I was talking about invisible labor with her including the invisible sort of para-academic knowledge commons of mommy vlogging and other kind of domestic influencers trying to navigate healthy boundaries precisely between making tacit knowledge that they're developing in their homes and in their families visible without inviting the kind of thing that my dad is always emailing me about, which is some social media influencer who got robbed because I put too much information online. I think this is like great fear of my life that I share too much. It's just a different space. And the nature of the difference space between my dad's career and mine lies in the nature of the media that I feel governed those two lives, namely that his career was siloed by design.
It's a very protected NDA bound space, IP management stuff. And in my case, I think about this conversation I heard at the ASU's Center for Science and Imagination about again, about mushrooms and about how the mushroom is the token or the symbol of the internet era and what it means to be a self in that era. Jeff Andrew Mira was a part of this. Merlin Scheldreich and Caitlin Smith were on his panel with the, and they kept coming back to this pair of words networks and permeable, right?
So again, that has to do with the next thing I wanted to discuss with you, which links back to that question of which, where do we see these social technologies actually succeeding? And that is invest in the invisible, right? Because like the idea of my co-punk is that the enormous amount of value is invisible underground in the forest and hah jokes on us. It turns out that basically, there's like a a pernican shift to realizing that none of the terrestrial life on Earth would exist without this, this economy that we only recently discovered and realized is some kind of sentient.
And something like that is going on with all of the people I know who work in these weird sort of liminal spaces online, where I see it going really well. And it's funny because I was just telling a friend this morning who is trying to organize a scene and made the mistake of trying to put 60 of her friends into the same Twitter group chat, which is utter chaos. Even at that small scale, there's no partitioning inside that group, there's no information structure. And I think looking at different specific softwares or design approaches for how to deploy conversation spaces online has been a big piece, my own thinking in the kind of logic that US bowels in this piece that when you say for instance, take yourself out of the middle of participants' connections.
That was what I was trying to explain to the Santa Fe Institute about why they should start a Facebook group in the first place, right? Because these people need to meet each other and not just through you because that's what creates a scaling crisis. So I would just let you rip on this section and add whatever threads you feel are relevant to the yarn call. There's so much here, like we could do a podcast on just what you just passed, but I'll skip over the surface a little bit and just touch on a few things that really stand out.
One is you ask early on, what are we even trying to do? What are people looking for when they're playing in social networks? And I think that fundamentally we're looking for belonging. And so one person coming in and throwing all their friends into a group chat is trying to say, let's all be friends.
It's trying to introduce people to each other. It's very fundamentally what we're looking for. But when we look for belonging in a context that is too public, then we end up with dumpster fires because people feel free to yell at each other because they don't actually have to deal with the repercussions of being in person with a person. So there's that, there's the belonging thread and how do we find that in our little new mushroom network?
And they're on MyCoPunk and shout out to Jeff Emmett for putting up the MyCoPunk principles. I saw hashtag MyCoPunk from Jeff on Twitter. And it was just immediately, oh yes, this is what I am. Thank you for helping me name myself better because I've never related to the new narrative vision of SolarPunk.
I like all of the aspiration of it, but it never resonated with me because the new narrative means nothing if we can't move resources. And we're at a point with all the different crises that we have to move resources in a real way. And MyCoPunk is all about how do you move resources and not get shut down by the system that exists, which is part of why it's important to be invisible and til fruiting. So there's that in terms of your dad and sort of the 20th century before paradigm of knowledge is power, I think the intentional silos and the NDA world, et cetera, was in that paradigm of knowledge is power.
And we're still working within largely a system that hasn't shifted out of that paradigm, but we're working with technologies that make learning power. So people that can actually move into that learning is power paradigm are able to leverage our new network turning in sometimes in various ways because you can all those lock and silo around the learning and not share it with the rest of the network. So there's that. And then the last stone skip here is coming back to working out loud.
And just to say there's all the virtues of working out loud because learning is power and because we need to learn how to do that and getting feedback in shorter and shorter cycles is useful. But we also, I guess my dad was a philosopher of theologian. And had me reading Plato early. So I'm gonna go back to Plato and say there was a censorship of the soul.
There was an intentionality of what am I actually, what information am I drawing from to shape my character, to shape my person? And I feel like we've lost that in this information flood, the sense of agency that we can actually select not to listen to spaces. We can helpfully leave a channel that we entered without being rude. And we do that all the time.
We walk out the door of a coffee shop and we're done. We walk out of a friend's house and say goodbye. We don't stay in all these spaces and hear people all the time. But that's what happens to us on the internet.
We just gain spaces and then try and listen everywhere. So, okay, because I am obsessed with this question about legible, illegible, because most people are, I think, James C. Scott seeing like a stake took over Silicon Valley and everybody thinks about the way that the resolution at which states operate lead to injustice and human rights crises, because we're getting smooshed underfoot by these things that can't even see us. And I see this in the work of people like Biau and his comments on futitivity, right?
Like I started thinking about why one might not want to be seen, why it might be good to be off record. Like there was that weird thing about the hyper-libertarians, either loving cryptocurrency or hating it, because they can't use cash. And so, okay, so there's a couple things here. Actually, before I move into that, I just wanted to say that part of the conversation with my friends forum and that has come up in structuring other forums that I've moderated over the years, is that distinction between safe spaces, inclusive spaces and brave spaces.
And it occurred to me in listening to you that brave spaces are the middle zone there, that the safe space should be the family, right? The inclusive space should be society. And I think that the point that you're getting at about being jammed together in one big room or in other ways, fragmented from our intimate associations that should provide safety in other ways by having to move to a new city to pursue some economic opportunity and decontextualize yourself, right? That these three categories are getting mixed up, where they're getting misappropriated, that we're trying to make society a safe space.
We're trying to make the home a brave space or whatever. And this is a shit show. So in light of that, and in light of understanding where good boundaries actually exist, there's an analogy I want to toss back to you, because you make this point in here, as a network grows, coordinators do a ton of work that goes unseen and undervalued. And also all my artists and philosopher friends are constantly bitching about the fact that they have to operate within a market logic for something that they consider to be fundamentally non-financial.
It's a very delicate conversation to say something like, we should acknowledge that play and scholarly leisure activity, like stoner conversations, these kinds of things have enormous value, that naps have enormous value. But when Doug Rushkoff talks about sinking his work schedule to the lunar cycle, and intentionally taking entire weeks off of writing and how it actually boosted the productivity, his first concern is that Pepsi is gonna start using this, like that it's gonna become appropriated into this Malochian extractivist kind of corporate nightmare calculus. And so this question about how to, okay, so I think about daylight, which is like the practice of taking rivers that have been covered by concrete, and reopening them to sunshine, so that the natural waterways that move through the land can run in a healthy way, and it's incredibly good for landscapes and the urban spaces that are built within them and so on. But I think that the modern world has in its mind, this notion that the light of reason must shine on everything.
And when you do that, when you make an effort to pull literally everything up out of the darkness and into the sunlight, you destroy everything that was living underground. And similarly, financialization moves capital. You see these flows that are necessary for the distribution of resources in society. It also destroys radical innovation because it prevents ideas that are not ready for prime time for ever actually developing, or it breaks the relationships that are happening between people by subjecting them and subverting them to the logic of the market.
So how do you make sense of all of this? Do you ask how do networks make invisible work visible? But then there's this other thing which is like how do we know what needs to be visible? Yeah.
So this is a wonderful analogy. The idea that using only reason and shining the light of reason on everything is basically yanking a clamp out of the ground and that immediately dies, because you unrooted it is very compelling to me. And I don't think it's really a decision we need to make. Just like when you start actually treating money as a verb, we started this podcast saying I relate to verbs a lot.
I think a lot of the shift that we need to go from the paradigm of biology to ecology, for example, of naming things and dissecting them to thinking of things in context, inches on what they eat. You have to shift from nouns to verbs. And I think money is fundamental. We think of it as a pile of gold, even in crypto distributed hash tables, et cetera.
We try to pile it up. We don't think of it as a social exchange. Everybody got really excited about the sharing economy, that how it would like relationalize all of these transactions, but it actually transactionalized all of our relations. And I think that is a great example of pulling something up to try and put in the light and ending up with it all withered.
And yet another example of extraction where people were trying to generate value together socially. And I think that fundamentally the economy, and this is said well in the field guide to regenerative capitalism, John Fullerton's work in the regenerative capitalism. Where basically you'll have to flip it on its head. The earth is feeding the economy, which is feeding the financial system right now.
And the incentives in there are all wrong. And so if we're working with a nut system, we're always gonna be wrong because you're going to have incentives to pile up money as a pile of gold. And then you always will have this successful loop that lets people get super, super, super mega rich. And there's all sorts of incentives there.
And if you are able to flip that, if you have a financial system that supports an economic system that then supports the earth and the boundaries that we have on the planet, then you have something. And I know there's lots of people working on that. I tend not to think much about it other than supporting micro-fi in the micropunk. Because it makes me really angry.
Because we're so outside of the boundaries. So it's analogous to putting trains across the land and shooting buffaloes just for the fun of it. It's just ripping stuff out that has real value and letting it wither. And I think in terms of this let there be light kind of feeling from reason, the new God of reason.
I'm trying to remember the author, Demazio. It take cards error, emotion reason in the human brain. And he talks about that if you actually detach reason from our emotion and our intuition, et cetera, it doesn't work. Even reason has roots that aren't going to be pulled up if it actually functions well.
Just to interject, there's a great quote I use in my email signature about this. And I got this from Chris Moore at SFI, who most of the directly out of a book, because it does not come up on Google search, which it's un-googolable. Friedrich Holderlin said, poetry is the beginning and end of all scientific knowledge. There are the roots of your reason there.
I hope I didn't get really. Yeah, no, I think that is lovely. My son was actually just learning poetry in his English high school class. And there was something that the teacher said that stuck with me.
There's nothing hidden in poetry. It is a relationship between the reader and the poet. So it's just defining poetry as a verb of happening to you. It's not something you have to reason with and uncover and dissect and understand.
It's the ability to sit with the feeling and be as open as you can to that human experience that's coming off the page. And I guess I wanted to come back to what needs to be visible and what doesn't. I think it's very important that we don't get to decide that. That's not a decision, which is very much a reason word.
I think the structure of a network, when you have a hierarchy, those people at the top are hyper-visible. And those people at the bottom whose work should be visible because they are bringing real value and they are maybe up close to the customer or up close to some community need are unseen. Their supportive work is unseen. And that's not to say everything needs to be radically visible because then we make the error that you said and that we don't have any kind of boundaries between the safe and the brave and the inclusive.
But if not a decision to be made, it's a structure of a network. When you have a network with a bunch of nested hierarchies, no one hierarchy is holding all the white, if that makes sense. And so what was hyper-visible and what was invisible get balanced out and now you have the work that was invisible is becoming more visible but also the work that was hyper-visible where people got all the fame and all the glory and all the power because we have a superhero worship culture and we always look at the person on top. That doesn't happen as much in networks.
And it's not a decision, it's a structure. Now they work. I'm glad you weren't here. Like I just I wanted to dip out actually of this particular piece and bring up another piece on the social-roots blog by Anna Jamborsch Michael van der Rie.
Yeah, this is a really cool piece. Let's subvert this status pyramid. There are some quotes in here that I feel give a really good sense for this. So I just want to quickly read these pull quotes because and then I want to link it to something and then I just want to pass it back to you without trying to execute some 12-dimensional maneuver here.
Our ability to innovate and adapt together drops when the people doing the work don't have much agency. Oh, hey, there it is again agency. How do we make sure that we're designing technology is that actually recruit people into culture rather than just enforce culture by design. The next one is confusing the status hierarchy with the expertise hierarchy and making everything completely flat, which of course, as an aside, is the new age mistake, if you will.
This empowers people closest to the problems from making key decisions. Taken too far, this leads to gridlock where no one feels empowered to make any decisions. Hello, climate action. Right?
I talked about this with CTE Nguyen on Future Fossils 175 and about how expert identification, because we've scaled the aggregate knowledge of humankind so much that people don't even know how to recognize experts anymore, which is a huge piece of the institutional legitimacy crisis, is like, if you're not a climate expert, how do you identify who is one? But it's not just a one-dimensional thing. It's how do you know that your boss actually knows how to run a company. And then the last one is, no matter how much an organization claims to empower their workers, if decisions affect the underlying power structure of the company are not included, they will remain fundamentally a dictatorship.
This is really interesting with respect to when I had Amber Case and Michael Zargam on Future Fossils, and they were talking about terms we serve with instead of the normal user terms of agreement, where if you feel that the company has made a misstep and has become inshified and lost the plot, then you can pull your data permissions out of that company and go somewhere else. And obviously, the fact that the walled garden of Facebook is mostly to keep people in rather than out, is a clear example of how you end up trapping people at very low levels of agency. I just want to say about this specifically, I had a conversation yesterday with Stephen Reed, and works on Dandy Lyon, and is doing work in technological metamodernism right now, Stephen's an interesting fellow up in Sweden with Nora Bateson and those folks. And we were talking about the interspecies internet.
And so just to drop a little bit of dilation into this conversation, I want to invite you to gesture toward how all of these principles and insights, like we're talking about rhizomes, we're talking about forests, but we're using this stuff metaphorically. There is a real sense in which we have this opportunity that people are actively pursuing to make it possible for us to communicate with non-human forms of life. And that seems like a huge area of investigation and discovery that could very swiftly become poisoned into a situation where we're selling ads to whales or something. Rather than giving whales votes, right?
I'm very curious about how we can think even more broadly about these kinds of problems and these kinds of protocols in a technological future that seems to be rapidly en route, which is one in which human beings are hopefully not the only ones making technological decisions. Yeah. So I think that this is already happening in the legal sphere when you look at the work that the Maori have done to have rivers and mountains, et cetera, have a legal standing. I want to flag something of a little bit this is not new and emerging.
This is a remembering of indigenous knowledge, where bears are our kin and communicating with all of the natural world from non-living, like rocks to bears to whales and whatever was very part of being human, which we have lost, and large part in Western culture, obviously. And I guess this is the problem with being able to identify experts. If you have somebody who is a mycology expert who doesn't have the adult developmental capacity to take feedback on their own work, how useful is their expertise? How useful is their voice to the room?
How not even useful? How generative is their voice? Can them being in the conversation as an expert create conditions for the thriving and abundance of the others in the network? So it's not really just about utility or resource moving.
It's also about creating conditions where people can thrive, where life can thrive. And I guess one of the things that I take a stand on occasionally is there is a non-metaphorical way that you are a living system. I am a living system. And as we talk, we're exchanging an information flow that is changing the literal structure of our banks, is making different pathways and possibilities open to each of us.
And that happens at scale in communities, and that happens in families, that probably most researched in terms of interpersonal neurology and how relationships shape the brain. But I think it happens at scale in communities. And whenever I start to talk about teams and human agency, I end up referencing an article by Darib Lumathol called generative team design, innovation, psychological safety, and empathy. And she has this wonderful graphic, which Lincoln showed us, et cetera, where if you want innovation to change, then you need teamwork and collaboration, which requires communication, which requires psychological safety and interpersonal trust.
And she has a little thing that says, this is where the conversation usually stops. But all of that requires active listening and empathy, requires vulnerability, which requires self-awareness and self-reflection, which requires adult developmental capacity. And two things on that. One is that fundamental ability to have adult development capacity and bring that to being able to team together.
Includes all of this stuff that isn't seen as expertise. The ability to actually listen to somebody and reflect what they say. The ability to take responsibility for your own shit. And unless we include that in our definition of experts, the experts are going to fragment and silo and try and pile up resources as gold in the system, just the way the financial system does, because you end up with success with a successful dynamic, just too quickly.
The other thing is that I started on this path that has led me into building software using software called Kumu, KUMU, just an absolutely wonderful system and network mapping platform that I felt as, oh, good, there's a next skeleton for my brain. And as I did strategy maps with organizations, networks, foundations pulling together, 20 different organizations on a certain problem, no matter what it was, whether it was healthcare coordination, or how people view death or climate change or food security or water resources, there were always these nodes that would come up regularly, funding for quality of policy about, et cetera. And this adult developmental capacity or some version of ability to team well, ability to work well works well with others, would always come up and I call it the slowest moving node in the system, because it is tied into emotional intelligence and critical thinking. And this thing that is fundamentally a slow moving node, because it is a human development process to be able to get there.
So that gets back to the question that was constantly raised by people critical of the adult developmental stuff. And still it is, nor abates is huge in this space of looking at the flaws in adult developmental theory. And you've got the books like the dawn of everything. And I think this is really important because this actually, the conversation I've been learning about this for a while is actually what you're doing is itself a very sophisticated operation.
To be able to even issue these critiques, you might be taking for granted the fact that you are capable of seeing things that other people are not seeing. And so the question becomes like, how can we improve upon? And yes, obviously there are ways that the kind of interspecies communication and human organization at scale that I'm talking about has a sort of shared ethos with and practical structural similarities to indigenous ways of thinking. But it is different because it is emerging out of that disturbed ecosystem of us having lost the animist worldview in the West, or these kinds of things.
And so what grows back is going to look different. And it's going to grow out of the initial conditions of us thinking about ways that we organize ourselves in the human realm and the ways that we measure different capacities of human intelligence and domain specific ability in expertise among humans. Yeah. Before we get too far from that, I just want to say this, talking about the work that Vervanke has done, talking about the salience landscape is really relevant, I think, to that safe, brave, and inclusive space.
And I feel like even though this will be public, this is a little bit, the signals because we're just letting ourselves be super nerds and talk, we're in the brave space because we're not intentionally stripping jargon. We're not making this super easy because we're just exploring a conversation together. And I think that going back to humans needs to get better at recognizing context in the context that they're in is, some part of that is being able to know what your salience landscape looks like in a particular conversation and then also recognize your audience and get some sense, whether that's an individual or a group, small group or publicly, of what the salience landscape is in the popular culture or in the community you're in or in the relationships that you're in. And because I am definitely guilty of talking past people as I try and articulate things out loud because I'm using too much jargon or whatnot.
And we have to learn to understand. And some of you throw a rock in the pond, you can hear it fall. We need to hear when our rocks don't make us lash. We need to hear the silence where people don't understand what we're saying.
To understand better the match of a salience landscape. And that could actually help us define whether we're talking within an inclusive or a brave or a safe space. I'm glad you brought that up actually because to the degree that AI models are like mirrors, if that's the right analogy for what they are, sometimes you see you've got stop food on your face. And I had one of those experiences last night because I've been using an AI meeting assistant and it tells me after the fact.
And I don't know the thing that annoys me is I don't know precisely how this is calculated. But it tells me after I had a call that I thought was really vibing with somebody that at seven minutes there was a decrease in engagement or you, it gives feedback, this is the reading level at which you are communicating or feedback like that you are using non-inclusive language, which I don't even know what that means. I was like, oh my God, did I insult the other person on this call? Or was it that the machine is being hyped like it's like very tuned to the inclusive space and it's not it doesn't help you understand that.
And I'm just like talking shit with somebody I know really well and that it's okay to do that between these two people and that it's like, oh, you said something that might have been considered insulting. I'm like, well, that's the feedback I've been getting for years. But yeah, no, your point is really valid. And I think the whole like what I'm coming to in engaging with this particular kind of software and what I'm seeing when people say, ask chat GPT, let me rephrase this like ELI 5, right?
Like the cool thing, I think maybe the quote unquote killer app, although killer is not maybe the best way of creating set and setting for this technology. One of the more promising applications of these translational tools is what the founders of the personal computing internet revolution laid out back in the 60s and 70s, which is human augmented communication where two people can come from very different places and the machine doesn't just connect them and then leave them to fend themselves, but allows one person to speak in a way that they find natural and comfortable and then to take that and translate it into the language, not just the language, but the actual metaphor and jargon and whatever. Basically, to have the computer do the work that I was doing inside of the San Fe Institute research community and foster interdisciplinary agreement between people that are not coming from the same place. And of course, that creates a sort of endless regress of like, how do you know that it's doing it right?
But how do you trust the translator, which I think is part of the paranoia that people are experiencing justifiably in a highly algorithmic world? That's all just to say. Thank you for bringing that up. I have a chronic problem with this.
But also what I'm hoping is that because I'm a lazy bastard, that the golden goose of this technology is to let people feel safe enough to engage in brave discussion or to be brave enough to go into inclusive spaces where inclusivity is enforced without creating cancel culture style mismatches or without hiding themselves from creative social interaction, because you don't have to deal quite so hard with this impossible problem, which is how do I talk to everyone that could be listening? Right. Right. Yeah.
And it is fine to have a conversation that's available publicly that has signals that only super nerds want to listen to it. That is fine. I think there's so much here. There's it's almost like you need to bring in when you're getting a concept across there's a need for why is this relevant to any given person at a given time?
And in what context do you need to understand in order to understand the conversation that's happening in a space? And I feel like that's sort of why group boundaries exist. But there is such a thing as the society for conservation biology. So a bunch of conservation biologists can talk that garden together and move the field forward.
And that doesn't need to be translated to wide public until they intend to communicate with public and then you have more publicly accessible language. So there's a sort of what are you actually trying to generate or do? About a year ago, Joe Eilman made a good little video overview of some of his emerging ideas. And this idea that tech is either funnel to more space is really interesting to me because I think that the work that is unseen that we were talking about before of network care and network coordination is space making.
And if you're not like developing a thing or doing a thing or creating a feed, it's often hard for mainstream culture to understand why you would do that thing because you're making space for relationships to happen. You're not actually doing a thing. It's very yin. It's like I'm making a bowl, not the soup and everybody's expecting you to be selling and I think that there's something here like what are the applications of natural language processing, plus machine learning or whatever you want to do as AI, which I think is neither artificial nor intelligent at this point.
No, but what is artificial and what is intelligence? So I guess I'm very curious about how new powers and technology can make space because I think that funnels and tubes are how a lot of the internet has been thought about and that space making, mothering, like parenting in general, the work of teams, there's a wonderful article of what's her name, Tanya Riley, on being glue, on her experience of being on an engineering team and completely being sidelined because she was doing that space making team building work to make sure that the right things got worked on and not pushing code all the time, it was just pushed aside. This goes back to the prioritization our culture gives to reason over intuition and et cetera, et cetera. And I think if we don't learn how to allow our tech to make space, which requires boundaries, like the condition of space making is in some way exclusive because you are intentionally saying here is a boundary between what is inside and what is outside.
So it is much more relevant in those community and action team spaces than it is in some sort of global conversation or inclusive or, you know, say this at a fixed level, so anybody can understand this was reading kind of Hemingway app. How do I tune my writing? I don't know where I'm going to say this right now, but I think that there's something that's great. I make sense.
It's just another funnel, another tube. We're freely into the riff mode of this, which is great. We're at cruising altitude. I was just looking back over the Michael Punk principles for where this lands in this list and something that we've been tying together over, I don't know, the last 20 minutes or so of this conversation is in 14, margin-centered wisdom, edge-based sense and response mechanisms obviate the need for centralized hierarchies.
There is a sense in which people forget when they identify as the person living inside the head, like a sort of homuncular identity of modernism, that I really like the way that I heard Luis Muhika and Sophie Strand talk about it in a conversation I just listened last night because I'm prepping to have Sophie back in dialogue and Sophie is very fond of saying, I am like soil, I am composted. And it's a very sort of non-dual or rebootist thinking of the self as interfaces. I forget who exactly she quoted that's bad, but I'll list the episode in the show notes here about not being a person that any sort of static identity that you ascribed yourself is basically a drag show, which I really love. But if you are a process, you don't have to choose and stay chosen.
And that like that Sophie and I have both wrestled with as well as I just met pre-Bertushi who works on a diversity box and sex box out of Brazil, huge inspirational figure in the global queer community who expressed to me this issue where it seems people identify as queer or non-binary or whatever, then it's you know, the new boss, it was the old boss, where the margin comes in here is in remembering that that sort of self definition emerges in the latency space where peripheral sense perceptions are aggregated, right? Like in the model of consciousness as the delay space where everything that your body is experiencing is felt at once, which is why you have a frame rate. This idea of making space and how space relates to boundary is like sense signals travel from the membrane of the organism in. And so again, you need to have a membrane, like something that a lot of the organizations that you are critiquing in this work is the idea that, I don't know how to put this, this is ridiculous, but it's like that basically like the person in a K-hole is in charge of the organization.
Like if there is an assumption that behavior starts at the direct center, that is direct center of what? If there is no perceived interface between the core and periphery of the person or the group or whatever, then sensing isn't really happening. I think you're pointing at, and this goes into the organizations that try and push decisions to the edges. They even ask people to work in networks.
They ask people to act like an owner, even though they're not owners. They don't actually have power to first. They don't actually have real resources. And so there's like, I don't want to call it greenwashing kind of thing, but it's almost like an internal pretending to be in order to gain some of the sentencing capacities of a coherent network that would create conditions of abundance for everybody.
But these organizations that kind of tack it on, but retain the power structure and the control at the center have a mismatch between that. They're trying to get the sentencing capacities of the network so that they can compete better in the system so that they can gain resources for themselves. And they're then saying, oh, no, actually you're not a network as soon as the resources come in. So the reason the network doesn't actually get to redistrict them.
And it feels like you're pointing at that, if that makes sense to you. You have to have real power in order to act as a coherent agent in an ecosystem. The kelp doesn't tell the otter to turn around and stick its butt on the seafloor and grow. They could just let the otter do with the otter does and kelp does with kelp does.
And it's these networks that start to pull together, but the organizations within them are still very basically pulling together a network in order to gain power themselves, whether that's a large corporation who doesn't actually want to break up into a coherent network or conveners that bring a network together in order to turn around the funders and say, look at the network, I've convened, aren't I great? Can't you give me money? And so there's a way to try and do networks that doesn't actually release the intelligence of the system. And I think is fairly dangerous because it does consume a lot of the intelligence within the system and effort and passion, et cetera, of the people that are trying to make change in the world.
If the nodes of power at the beginning of the network aren't actually trying to get away that power, there's a danger there. And I think that's one of the reasons that I really love the micropon principles, really trying to articulate there's a whole set of things you don't just get to pick. And to me, that's also why it's so important to not just use ecological or biological metaphors, but to actually rid us, the question ourselves, how are we living systems, how are our organizations living systems, how are our community living systems? And what does that mean to the extent that we treat people like cogs, to the extent that we tell the CalPits find the artists around?
Like, what does that mean? What does that do to our capacity to create value in the world and to thrive together? And again, I think comes back to the resource system as it is with money and financial incentives as they are. It's going to be very hard to change unless we find a different way to exchange value that articulates it more as relational, verb-like about the flows rather than about how big a pile of gold is.
Continuous flow, principle number 11. And then also lastly, in the sense that this is a document that doesn't claim to be leading from the middle 15, your principle here, actually living the thing. Yeah, thank you for not just this conversation, but for the every conversation we have, which I always find really fun, I would like to end by just inviting a real quick two points. One is who else should be on the show?
And then the other is, do you have a highly compressed encoded kernel of wisdom that you would distribute freely into the wind, not worrying about where it lands? That would be one thing that you think would be really helpful for people to think about when they pick up a phone, if that makes sense. Like, do you have anything that you can say a universal advice? All right.
The who should be on the show in terms of thinking about technology and how that might shape itself. I'm going to say actually two people, Ruth Milan, who does a lot of work on bringing a systems view to leaders in technology companies and taking a systems point of view to designing tech. And Don Ahukana, who is a UX architect at IBM and really just contextualizes the use of tools and what does it mean to be human using tech in a really amazing way. And then in terms of, I don't know, universal.
I literally think that 95% of our problems would dissolve in some way, however, slowly or rapidly, if people would learn to have decent posture and breathe. So I think that if the advice is that moment when you pick up your phone, one thing that was really amazing for me was the physical experience of realizing how different it is if I turn on the accessibility feature that makes everything grayscale. So if you don't have the super shiny colors, you just spend your settings and play with that and turn everything gray on your phone and just realize all of that information you're getting is the same content-wise. But the design of it is made to be addictive.
And so if you can, there's good advice of like when you wake up in the morning and your feet hit the floor, remember to be grateful. And there's like a physical reality and a prompt to trigger that sense of gratitude to start the day with. So I think when you pick up your phone, can that be a moment where you intentionally take a breath? You remember that this is designed to addict you and you try to use it more mindfully.
And that can look like a lot of different ways for me. I turn it on grayscale sometimes when I'm feeling very frenetic and too much in the interwebs. That looks different for a lot of people. But I really do think that we need to bring the human back in the room in a way that our culture hasn't allowed very concretely because it taps into all of this other stuff of building empathy and building, et cetera.
Empathy starts with empathy for yourself and being able to have empathy for yourself starts with being able to recognize your physical sensations in your body and your experience of being a self. That is a perfect place to land. Thank you so much. Thanks again for listening.
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We'll talk about her latest extremely fun effort to mainstream tackling complex social issues from multiple perspectives with faces of acts. Take care and remember attention is our greatest natural resource.