Daily Writing
institutes
When Rome fell, barbarians pillaged her cities.
The Visigoth conquerors ransacked the grand mausoleums, destroyed buildings around the Senate Plaza, and burned the great courthouses that were symbols and agents of progressive Western justice. The images of Roman triumph, marble statues and paintings were torn down. The sack of Rome wasn't complete until the once-solid, but now shaky institutions of order, justice, and wisdom were unrecognizable in the dawn of a new post-Golden Age of Romanic rule.
Before Rome's fall, the court of law was the arbiter of justice, the Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR) was the first democratic government, the family was a pillar of social order, and Latin was the lingua franca (trade language) of Europe.
These institutions and innovations endured and matured as the cornerstones of western society today because of their ability to remain the control mechanisms of society, despite a geographical invasion and destruction. In the rebuilding and restoration process, their application led to a new golden era that pushed prosperity further west and through time to amass in the new world of Columbus and Washington.
As control mechanisms, these institutions act to distribute punishment and repayment (courts and legislature), to vet information and truth (schools and religion), and to establish trade and wealth (language, media, and markets). Sometimes they do this by blatantly denying access to information or regulating resources, but more often accomplish their ends by lending less weight to some knowledge and more to others.
Now we arrive at the problem of the Visigoth we have willingly loosed in society:
the foundational institutions of our day are crumbling and insufficient to cope with the nature and design of smartphone technology in its current state.
Our smartphones have created a state of mind within which we all live and act. Its bread is unlimited information, its water, the deification and goal of technological progress.
Like the Romans who became greedy and arrogant at being the pride of the western world, our technological world has created the invisible, often-lauded problem of information glut (usually called Big Data).
The supply of information increases every second on the ever-growing, worldwide web.
The equitable spread of information and access has been good for righting many wrongs in historical representation, educational inequalities, and wealth disparities, but bad for the bedrocks of social order.
The role of smartphones in this is equal parts complete and ever-unfolding.
The iPhone gave legs to search engines and media outlets running into the wall of time-on-screens in their profit equation (because potential profit equals advertising rates multiplied by consumer eyeballs). Unlocking life-hours untapped by television, radio, or computers, smartphones allowed data and ads to proliferate while citizens were away from home, in their private spaces and nature.
New influences, sources, and ideas spring from everywhere and nowhere to strain those control mechanisms that once held society together. The strain leads to new control mechanisms (Google, content moderation, platforms around niches), which further increase the supply and create dissonance between institutions and individuals.
Here we see the most consequential movement of distrust in the media, doubt in the power of officially elected positions, and a devaluing of the institutions of family, universities, libraries, post offices, and banks (and currency with the rise of crypto).
My point is not that we should place absolute faith in these entities (for many, and maybe most of them can be corrupt, bloated things). Nor that we should halt culture's evolution to rebuild systems long antiquated for an "enlightened, enriched" society.
My argument is that all institutions are failing because of smartphone technology, despite any good they bring to society, so that those who want reform over removal will see the end of any beginnings before they realize their device's hand at play in the destruction.
the search for meaning
I feel confident writing about ignorance. It's one of the subjects of which I am most aware…
What do we do when we lack context? Some of us double down. Others seek enlightenment.
We were once much better at finding answers within our own thinking. The ancients were able to orate and write without consulting databases. Philosophy, the earliest of the humanities, was accomplished void of historical records and written analyses.
But I don't want to dwell on that particular loss...
When we lack context today we ask Google. "Who won the Cold War? What makes up an ecological disaster? Who should be the next president?" Searches like these nourish our quest for knowledge, but the journey of understanding requires far greater care than a technology like Google can provide.
Humans and algorithms don't mix.
“...the closer an environment is to being genuinely good for humans, the worse it is for technology, and vice versa.”
Writer Andy Crouch explains that highways are phenomenal technology for cars but a terrible innovation for bipeds like you and I. Similarly, algorithms create pathways and procedures within which data fits nicely. Algorithmically generated information loves to populate in as many "Recommendation" inboxes and feeds as possible. This would be great if we too were machines, or even machine-like.
The mix is muddled by factors in human nature that psychology postulated and sociology proved, namely our lack of discernment.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to accept information that aligns with held beliefs. This, coupled with our inability to discern truth after being spoon-fed soft-serve ice cream for 50 years of television in the Entertainment Age, leads us to inhabit that environment made ideal for machines but worse for humans with dangerous implications.
Algorithms then are a weapon, like any technology in nefarious hands.
This is most self-evident when we state the circular argument that 1) algorithms control the kinds of things we see, and 2) we see only the things that algorithms control. On this journey of contextualization, we humans desire one thing.
So let's rephrase our line of question from asking about context to inquiring of meaning...
What do we do when we seek meaning?
As I've stated, increasingly (and this should scare us) when we seek to uncover purpose and meaning to life, we use a search engine. It's reductionist thinking to say all a search encapsulates is information. Algorithms surf data streams. They compile and extend offerings on a silver-screened platter. A dictionary doesn't just catalogue a language, it eventually defines the language itself. So too does an algorithm map connections on the web to become, not just a collective model for how we think, but how we think.
If our world is made up of deceptive detours within the platforms from which we receive meaning, we need better discernment.
We need firm understanding of truths so our latitude of acceptance isn't pushed too far to an extreme.
We need insight into what mistruths look like within a culture of triviality and attention-seeking.
We need our judgement of new information to not be distorted by confirmation and conformation, but enhanced by sound logic and restless questions.
Most of all, we need to teach younger generations, who will be far more inundated in this digital water in their lifetime's, the practices of reasoning and discernment. We must integrate the purpose of truth-seeking into our curriculums. Capitalism and the marketability of technical skills has far too greatly permeated the pedagogy and end of education.
Teach students the skills to get a job, yes. But don't neglect to teach them how to find meaning, refinement, and resolutions within the workforce they are beholden to…
The most atomic habit (vitally powerful, but tiny) we can adopt is to ignore an algorithm's recommendation. Take back your choice and exercise judgement to seek answers. Be an artist by always seeking without absolutely finding.
race to the bottom of LinkedIn
When will LinkedIn begin to look like TikTok? Because it will happen soon.
The TikTok-ification of every social media platform in the ecosystem is pervasive within even those feeds that appear mere business functionaries.
This is the Race to the Bottom.
TikTok’s meteoric rise has proven to shareholders and profit-mongers the viability of what Instagram now calls “Reels”, what Youtube calls “Shorts”, and what LinkedIn will call “Clips” (or some other nonsensical synonym). This short-term benefit outweighs any cost.
If history is written by the victors, then, certainly history will be penned in 6-second audiovisual ink…
Racing to the bottom of the brain stem or the lowest extractive method or the weakest pain point of society is the only way to get ahead in a market without incentivization’s toward the inverse. When a competitor like TikTok engineers a new way of capturing attention (which equates only to dollars in the eyes of myopic Big Tech companies) the race is on.
It can’t be stressed how fundamental this feature is to the design of tech companies, and the economies unable to regulate them, today.
The only boon within this is the Instagram community’s response to the company changing (read: copying) tactics. Some users are switching to the app that does algorithmic, video content better. Many are quitting the turncoat app entirely.
If this is something Instagram doesn’t recover from quickly, maybe others will learn a lesson.
Regardless, it points out the feature of social media companies that is most detrimentally self-interested.
With damage to society ongoing, a people and community have power and a choice.
Much of power comes from perception. Public and personal. How we in culture view and talk about the platforms of today will shape the platforms of tomorrow. How we wield the power granted us now will determine the unfolding of our ethics and beliefs in reality then.
The power we have is executed through macro and micro-means.
Apple and Google can enforce accountability upon the inhabitants of their software (see Apple’s recent change to require apps to make an in-app Delete My Account button). Legislation can require tighter policing of age-appropriate content and methods for attention extraction (see the recently passed Kids Online Safety Act for some states).
In the micro, changes happen through decisions.
Parents choose to Wait Until Eighth.
Venues choose to create phone-free spaces.
Teens choose to engage a smarter social media…
We all have roles in the story. We all can choose to be good-faith actors. Or…
The comfort is that there are communities outside the norm who accept the people within broken systems.
What we will never do, however, is accept the system itself… until it is unbroken.
the spiritual dangers of owning a smartphone
There are two spiritual dangers in owning a smartphone.
One is the danger of supposing terms and conditions are to be skimmed (or entirely skipped), and the other that every moment is to be captured and "digitized" for mass distribution.
Bypassing the legal terms and conditions with which all are shoddily acquainted, the provisions we hap-hazardously ignore are those relating to technology's intentions. The unfortunate truth is that machines have machinations of their own, and digital machines have even more ability and agency to claim our attention and control our actions. Suffice it to say that more societal shifts can be contributed to technology's hand than man's...
The craze to take pictures of everything is as old as cameras themselves but was upgraded to a certifiable insanity when social media gave us an instantaneous outlet to receive adulation for our captured "contributions." Today, there's not a place or experience we can't encounter vicariously through the internet's records (a tragedy deeply understated).
To dodge the first bullet, one should keep a "tech diary" for a month, on paper not platforms, to inspect their relationship with devices and flesh out the ways, good or bad, technology is shaping their hours.
This kind of expression may seem ridiculous or dramatic to some, but the results, I know, are beneficial for all of us who experience more physical touch in a day with an Apple product than a human being.
To avoid the second, one should take a walk in nature or undergo some other venture without a smartphone to document your experience.
There's a scarcity of people who simply exist in the world. So many don't live and exercise their being without diluting the moment with photos for their social media feeds.
Many argue these dangers are non-negotiable in a world that demands humans become smartphone "users" to traverse its paths.
I won't argue an iPhone doesn't make life easier, more organized. But unfortunately, things with advantages categorized as "conveniences" often fail to invite close examination of their own consequences...
go light | utopia |
Texts are information, not intimacy.
"Social" media is anything but.
Calls do better but lose that 80% of non-verbal contact.
The idea that smartphones bring us closer together is a far-fetched utopia, a hopeful blueprint for a different iteration of what we have today.
Worse, studies show a device's presence disrupts the connection between two people, reducing empathy, trust, and closeness. Research shows the unmistakable barriers to meaningful conversation and connection with phones in hand, on a table, or chiming from your pocket.
We sense this. We feel the weight of our devices on our relationships. Yet we still force them into our friendships and think them "necessary."
This is the pernicious lie of smartphone technology to make what was once trivial essential. Our lives, transformed by Big Tech, are landscapes of myopia and inattention addled like the mind of a pumpkin-eating squirrel. We tote our supercomputers around, ignorant of how our lives would differ given their removal.
This is the intentional lie of smartphone companies who market what was once unneeded as "upgraded" each year. Planned obsolescence and a hype cycle constitute the playbook for corporations looking to dominate societal conversation.
Dual deceit prevents those desiring true connection from ever taking the leap.
We want our needs fulfilled by that which creates the deficiency.
Wanting more, we settle for less.
A smartphone directs our locus of attention outward, ignoring self-care and dignity for vicarious envy and self-doubt.
Not a good trade.
We forget we can't see the other till we choose to see ourselves.
We can't "use our phones less," as an alcoholic can't simply "stop drinking."
We can't engage community or culture when we're so engaged elsewhere...
Shameless plug: Go Light.
Ethical Technology
This is the work I have desired to create while being indebted to so many authors, researchers, scientists, philosophers, activists, and creatives before me. The journey of a writer is the most boisterously familial silent retreat.
This is a treatise of sorts. Its purpose is exploration. And commitment. I have no template or rulebook, so it will be messy. But through refining and shaping, maybe some insight, truth, seed flows out.
Some have a personal technology ethic with lifestyle principles like digital minimalism, regulating content intake, or social media fasts. These are essential. We should each take responsibility as stewards of our own attention, cognition, and emotion. This is not that.
The privilege of having the ability to create personal rules around technology is one absent 99% of civilization. While these disciplines regulate a person's relationship to technology, a technology ethic establishes how technology should relate to the user. It frees the impoverished, unschooled, and malnourished of society and simplifies the battle of conscientious device-users before the device reaches their hands.
The absolute necessity of this design ethic must be understood in light of the full force of AI and persuasive design's ability within an attention economy. In scarcity-based economics, it's not profitable for designers to create systems that respect human dignity and control.
This question is not merely for designers and ethicists and businesspeople to grapple with. This question should inform our every decision as consumers. This question should pervade the way we discuss culture and the technological changes that shape it so dramatically.
We have to understand design ethics to recognize and eschew inhumane platforms and technologies that either rule our lives our ruin other's. Here's our guiding context and question:
"We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and God-like technology..."
Edward O. Wilson
...So how do we regulate and design technology to promote human thriving?
Chapters
1 on defaults and technicalities
2_Attention
3_Cognition
4_Emotion
5//Outward Presence
6//Higher Thinking
7//Communal Thriving
_//case studies
facebook: frances haugen and the files
I feel the need to bring more thoughts to bear about this topic. It is a vital, watershed moment for the direction of social media platforms in our digital age. This event may very well bring the force of our legislative and judicial branches down upon the companies responsible for so much harm to our culture and nation.
If you're unaware, one week ago, the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles based on internal research that came out of a leak at Facebook. They called it, the Facebook Files.
Within reports created by Facebook's own teams and circulated among Facebook's own leadership, negative effects on political divisiveness, teenage body image, the proliferation of fake news, and cultural unrest were uncovered.
The top 1% of Facebook employees (the 1% that steers the ship and the lives of 3 billion users) have long been aware of the harm their products cause. Not only have they been aware, they have been complicit in the attention mining and outrage-fueling of the culture war that has led to the most divided place the US has been since the Civil War.
"Accounts created by children, hidden from their parents, were termed as unique value propositions for profit for shareholders."
"The damage to self-interest and self-worth inciting self-hate inflicted by Facebook today will haunt a generation."
"Facebook maximizes profit and ignores pain."
Five days later, former Facebook Product Manager, Frances Haugen, presented convicting evidence and her own testimony to Congress. Her 3 hour testimony on the effects studied and solutions ignored impacted the lawmakers so greatly they hailed Haugen as a "21st-century America hero" in what will likely be remembered as a massive cultural moment for Big Tech reform.
Unfortunately, reform hasn't yet begun.
In their "Big Tobacco moment", Facebook has minimized, denied, and gone sailing to avoid answering for the accounts given. No changes to the way Facebook monetizes their site, deals with user data, or measures their performance have been announced. In fact, the opposite has been declared.
For context, "Time-on-site" (TOS) is Instagram and Facebook's metric equated to dollars. Their profit model is attention (this is where the phrase "attention economy originates). The best way to maximize TOS is by customizing content for users that appeals to our basest and most dangerous desires. Sexualized, sensationalized, shock-appealing, schismatic content.
The content you are watching, reading, and hearing has been carefully selected to keep you outraged, depressed, and confused enough to drive you back to the mind-numbing activity of infinitely scrolling through your feeds on Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and now TikTok.
As long as Facebook is allowed, they will not change their model. As long as users still use their platform, they still profit and fuel outrage, suicide rates, and stock prices. The importance of Frances Haugen's presentation and documents cannot be understated, but there is a second word that is needed. Change requires a destination- a vision of change.
We have to start thinking more deeply about how we are to design products, interact with platforms, and treat each other if we are ever to escape the effects Facebook, Instagram, and all the rest have had on our world....
book reviews
The worst kind of book review is not the one that says, "this book will change your life" for that review is simply stated and courteous.
The worst kind of book review is the one that says, "the worst kind of book review is the one that says "this book will change your life"... but for this book, it's true", preceding to write its own worst book review.
Too meta?
climb
When you sit down for work everyday, you can’t accomplish your annual goals.
No matter how much you desire to finish the project you’ve set out to do or achieve the lifestyle you've wanted to create, you can’t finish within a day.
Annual goals are made up of weekly objectives are made up of daily tasks.
While it's solid advice to focus solely on the tasks of the day, we also need to be able to see the carrot from closer than 365 days. The carrot becomes closer and more tangible when we set the intention to review our goals at the beginning of our workday and update them at the end.
So, as with everything, there is a yin and a yang- balance. Creatures of habit are prone to be short-minded.
The long-term is made tangible when we are reminded of what it will take to get there. Everyday our task list can be a game- how much further along towards the mountaintop will we climb...
it's not your story
You might assume your food comes from the sky before it arrives at Walmart because it's in-store every morning.
You might assume the right to speech online because we've all been given a mega(i)Phone.
We believe ourselves the center of some grand story because we've never read another's. This is a spiritual pitfall in a digital age.
With agrarian society's end, we lost touch with food's source.
Processed food, GMO's, additives and substitutes. These rob nature of her privilege of provision. Favor Delivery, DoorDash, and online shopping further divorce us from the origins of our daily sustenance.
Regardless of creator's intent or context, we're adamant "freedom of speech" is a built-in feature to our identity and we ignore its misuse and abuse in online spaces (...and in offline spaces: the sale of "F--- Biden" flags in parts of the south should cause deep sadness for all at the state of our political polarization and gross mistreatment of the privilege to speak our minds).
Only in May of 2021 did Twitter add a prompt to users to reconsider "potentially harmful or offensive language" in tweets or comments (I won't even criticize the fact that this prompt only appears for explicit language and not more subtly crafted disinformation or slander, and ask, why did this take so long? 15 years of hate-speech and cruelty too late).
Twitter's lead, "what's happening", fails to advise you of your tweet's public immortality. It reinforces a solitary and selfish story-telling paradigm.
This (among a devolution of too many of our cognitive abilities thanks to social media) is a reason for the slow dying of books and reading in America. We no longer believe someone else's story to be relevant to us. Now, it's paramount that my story/post/tweet is heard by my followers (a term historically attributed to followers of religious figures who truly are central to a people's story).
An intriguing trend in our cultural moment is the 'everyman' as a frequent protagonist. Filmmakers in the mainstream desire to create a hero the viewer can relate to or see in themselves.
This is not the purpose of a story.
A story (especially, an origin) tells another human's struggles. No clichés.
It doesn't put you in their shoes- it reminds you their feet are a different size. No hand-holding. It gives you the raw, unfiltered version.
We need to be constantly reminded that our story is not whole.
Plant a garden. Engage history to learn the origin of free speech. Read someone else's story (not on Instagram Stories... because it has to be said).
What did you notice today? ///
Twitter virtues
Social media is void of opportunity for integrity and full of depravity, training our virtues in the wrong direction.
The proliferation of twitter-wars and online harassment have left us unaccountable. The most platforms will do to reprimand users is shut down their (typically anonymous) accounts- hardly a slap on the wrist. Interacting in perceived isolation, an internet user will callously or consciously act.
What dictates a person's actions when they live in a digital-forrest disguised as a physical echo chamber?
Prolific conservationist and author, Aldo Leopold writes of the solitary sport of hunting in the same light:
Whatever the hunter's acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers...
Voluntary adherence to an ethical code elevates the self-respect of the sportsmen, but it should not be forgotten that voluntary disregard of the code degenerate and depraves him.
What if there was accountability in our networks for slander and cruelty? Could we remake social media like a true society with checks and balances?
What if we could have a mental health department devoted to checking public digital spaces to identify users at risk before the damaging effects of social media go to far?
We are behind the curve. The UK holds an appointed office for a political Minister of Loneliness devoted to bringing cross-community services together around those experiencing isolation (created pre-COVID; now especially vital).
Before this, we still must ask how we are training ethics through digital platforms. We're setting users up for profound failure or neutral complacency about the existence of these choices.
Such deer-hunting is not only without social value, but constitutes actual training for ethical depravity elsewhere.
what's costly
Why is manipulative design cheap while permissive design is costly?
We know the tricks- the limbic hijacks to take over a person's attention circuitry, notifications to evoke curiosity, "Hot Deals" to soothe buyer's remorse, a smattering of fake-not-fake testimonials to increase authenticity.
These are a dime-a-dozen and effortless to cram onto our site.
What's hard is not taking shortcuts to build loyalty. Not using clickbait to gain viewers. Not advertising half-truths (or blatant lies, because sadly it needs to be said).
When we give our whole pitch from a place of respect for human attention and dignity, it looks different- and it's much harder...
But not really. Because long-term trust is built. More opportunities for a strong customer base appear. More opportunities to resist the race to the bottom mentality means elevating our collective ethical restraint and integrity.
You put in the premium for trust, and the work pays for itself.
The best shortcut, in this case, is no shortcut at all.
Seth Godin on Permission Marketting
What did you notice today? ///
design
A friend sent me a photo of his engagement alongside a message about his attempt to get away from social media. It wasn't going well.
It's gone too far and it's too far gone- writing anything else would be an untruth- It's too far gone, but you and your attention are not.
What would it look like for a network we call social to be made up of a true picture of society?
Social is not an algorithm built to decide what you see. Social is not giving the keys to advertising companies out for a profit. Social is not the 1% of rich, famous, cool, or hip populating your feed.
I believe there is a version of social media we could create that takes the user into account- we're just not there yet. Where we are (and a starting point for this conversation) is design.
Marketing students who focus in digital marketing become adept at something called "conversions." A conversion is a sale or (in a broader sense) movement of a consumer towards an engagement metric measured (subscribe, buy, view).
Conversion can be suggestive, persuasive, or manipulative. Imagine a scale marketers can dial to raise engagement. Low success to high success, but (counter-intuitively) high cost to low cost. Manipulative conversion has high success but very low cost.
Scam sites litter their pages with bright, red "Buy Now" buttons next to auto-playing video advertisements. It's unhelpfully sorted, unnecessarily sorted, and grotesquely manipulative of our base instincts and neuroscience.
We may view these features as "distracting" or "annoying" but this view is dangerously naive. James Williams (of Time Well Spent) writes, "In the short-term, distractions keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live..."
This is the heart of conversion-centered design.
Even at the suggestive level, we are influenced to do things we don't want to do. Look at the chart above. This study was taken from a LinkedIn page (arguably the least attention stealing social media), so just imagine the manipulative design features saturated on platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
This may be a question you've had:
Why should I leave social media?
Design is an iceberg tip of polarization, disinformation, mental health problems, online bullying, addictive hooks, false realities, and a greedy attention economy.
I wish this wasn't true. Connection and life-giving community are essential to our survival, and digital spaces could be a new frontier for so many displaced by toxic culture. I wish that world existed... but social media is inherently built wrong. Manipulative design is a core feature, not a bug in the system.
The question isn't "why should I leave"... Why would you stay?
///
a marketer's confession
I wish I could say I didn't believe in marketing. That would be the easy way out.
No, my confession is that I fully believe in marketing. I believe we have been convinced of everything we believe because of marketing. I believe we have built unique lifestyles because of a marketer's influence.
Worst of all, I believe we need marketing. But first, we need a Marketing Reformation.
The seeds are slowly being planted-do you see it? Third-party tracking disabled, ethical advertisement design conversations in the Senate, the past decade of alternative systems for business outreach (permission marketing, the 3 P's, a gift economy not based on market scarcity).
There is more than a corrupted system bent on financial maximization. There is crowdfunding products we support, patron investors in creative work that inspires, ethical goods with a transparent premium to support human dignity...
There is more to unpack, but it needs to be acknowledged-
Marketing (alongside religion) is the most influential tool of culture.
How will we perceive it? How will we use it?
What did you notice today? ///
glossary
Let's define some terms.
Feed - Created by social media/networking platforms. A feed is a place providing updates whenever new content is available.
Imagine a pig hovering discontentedly over a feeding trough waiting for its master to pour another batch of toxic sludge being passed for food. Just like that.
Infinite Scroll - Created by penitent technologist (I’m so sorry, says inventor of endless online scrolling). Refers to content that can be scrolled or swiped through endlessly with a near instantaneous refresh rate.
Doom-scrolling is the anti-intentional act of going through a feed until you reach its end or your brain's jelly-fication.
User - Someone being used by social media.
Notification - Created with the invention of cell phones and smartphones. Notifications signal new content visually and audibly on your feeds or messaging apps.
Great for diminishing your focus and jerking your attention away from your lunch date or job. (The mere presence of your smartphone on a table, turned off and face down, drains your attention)
Like Button - Created by more technologists fighting against commandeered tech they created. The most convenient engagement mechanism on platforms (one-click) to demonstrate approval without context or thought.
Limbic hijacking - The way technology hacks our lizard emotions and brain to drive time not well spent and behavior. Tech companies engage in a "race to the bottom" of our limbic system that's base instinct is the flight response we feel every moment we reach for our phones to hide...
Gamification - Term created by psychologists after big-tech's exploitation of limbic hijacking. The leveraging of game mechanics and addiction to digitally engage and motivate users to achieve their goals.
Actually, not so bad. Fitness, nutrition, work, and mental health goals can be easily met using gamified systems. Gamified attention stealers (social media) make this a double-edged sword.
Manipulative Design - The sum game of the above definitions.
Social Connection was what social media inherently wants to be. Through manipulative design, Social Comparison is the game platforms have begun to play.
Instead of paralleling the constant upgrades iPhones receive, we are downgraded by big-tech's promotion of shortened attention spans, outrage-fueled dialogue, app addiction, vanity, and a polarized political climate. This is the water we swim in...
We just fail to define it properly.
What did you notice today? ///
tomorrow
Are we able to see past ourselves to a future for which our work exists?
We live today because pioneers staked their claim upon the belief in a better future. They didn't have lives to be desired. The bones of those before us made the ground ready for our coming. A work began long ago sees results only in generations after.
We bandy a deceptive phrase: "Building a better tomorrow."
Clearly, the results of cancer research, educational reform, or systemic justice will not be tangibly seen tomorrow. Our patience is normally limited when we exert effort for a thing. This slogan encases a brilliant marketting vision about tomorrow.
Building does not carry such weight as it previously did. The work of construction is still toilsome and costly, but it is less so in our minds due to technology and the collective mindset it carries. Through this word, we recollect community and are given tools we will need to refine...
A as opposed to the or this is based on giving both the sayer and the hearer freedom to choose. A vision of tomorrow doesn't have to be fleshed out-the vision does. Also, a vision doesn't have to look like yours. It can appeal to the imagination of the hearer...
Better is not hard- this is not the deception, but merely a nuance. Better is 1% more than yesterday (or even 0.001% more). We can see better because it looks like today but... better- not worse is nearly a substitute. The only dilemma is velocity. If we want to get there fast, we need a better qualifier than better...
Tomorrow, is the powerful deception. We can all envision tomorrow. At the same time, we're still aware of the far-reaching implications of the real timeline.
Making our framework more narrow makes it possible for a paradigm shift without the painful realization that "this may not benefit me" (which requires an untrained altruistic mindset). Removed from this limiting belief, the work begins... and continues to the far-reaches of a vision's foresight.
What did you notice today? ///
ecology
The root of ecology is consequences. An ecology of life explains the result of interactions over time. An ecology of two people (in the past, present or future) reveals how both people change after colliding.
We deal in this kind of ecology all the time. We reflect on an interaction or meeting, anticipate our words and actions, and inhabit moments of being within another's sphere.
Theories of time and relativity suspect certain ecological rendezvous of being hinge points in our lives- the day you choose college or meet the person you fall in love with.
Deeper thinking reveals these hinge points to be important but not solitary in their makeup. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit; in the same way, apathy is a habit we choose. Every decision made, habit built, leads to hinge points where we are either in control or powerless over the consequences.
A healthy framework is a preparation mindset that grows our life around readiness to approach consequences with humility and hope.
What did you notice today? ///
travel
Travel doesn't have to be disruptive to our rhythms and practice.
While travel has been infamous for ruining rhythms and halting routine, a look inside a traveller can reveal how this cycle could be transformed:
Most fundamentally, entering a new environment changes our perception of our work and our self.
I'm keen on a clear distinction between travel and sabbatical. I want to relegate sabbatical to broadly encompass any trip with its sole purpose being rest. Travel, for my purposes, assumes work and rhythm remain alongside any rest given by the trip.
Disorientation is the norm on trips and vacations. We are struck with new living spaces, public places, and scenery within which to build a week or weekend of routines and work habits.
Our work becomes the thing in the way of travel and our self becomes a thing in need of rest, family, or friends.
But what if we could see a new way forward between our work and the rest we desperately need? What if we could travel without upsetting our lifestyle so we require days to readjust to normal life? Wouldn't this mean that travel could become part of our normal life...
Consider work: we can augment our practice with insightful parts of travel. If creative in nature, your work can be informed and grown by exposure to parts unseen or people untapped. If your home rhythm is unique, implementing fresh sparks of motivation can unlock new levels of enjoyment and benefit from it. Even a creative new room to do work can jumpstart our flow with the excitement of an added whiteboard or special chair.
What happens too often in travel is the turning off of our "serving" self (serving your audience, serving your story, serving the work). We turn instead to receiving and thinking of our travel as a time for ourselves (this is where the "work in the way of travel" mindset begins).
If we always become people "in need" when we travel, our trips will always disrupt our lives.
When we recognize our abundance when we travel, we intentionally pour out the right amounts of work and continue our commitment to a lifestyle.
What did you notice today? ///
tl;dr context
TLDR is the great myth of social media.
The idea that a story was Too Long to Read was a seemingly harmless necessity to manage overwhelming amounts of information created with rising social networks and visual media. In order to "stay up to date" with the world's happenings, one can't spend their whole day reading news.
This belief that conceived TLDR is made up of two dangerous fallacies that shaped our culture and destroyed democracy.
The first fallacy is simply that we must stay up to date.
What this fallacy implies is the need to "check-in on news" about everything, everywhere. The mental health and transformation our brains and culture have undergone this millennia because of social media are due to this large-scale connectivity.
There are still huge positives from global connectivity- the young westerner, an online witness to deforestation and illegal elephant hunting in Botswana who finds a dream of bold activism, or our ability to have global community and support mission work online- these are not negated.
Rather, we need to find balance and begin to choose what gets to detract our attention from life. If we are unable to focus the movements in the world that we truly care about, we end up caring about nothing.
The second fallacy produced a collective, diminished capacity to understand. TLDR is inherently void of nuance, voice, and representation. When you strip context from a story, you neglect understanding it.
Odell describes it best in her work about resisting an attention economy by removing ourselves from the frameworks into which we are forced:
The ability to seek out context is nothing less than a collective survival skill.
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
When allowed to absorb a summary (mere snippets of important news) we tend to feel knowledgable about the subject. The truth is, we have no idea what we know and (more dangerously) don't know.
Building our residency upon the scraps from another's distillation, we claim awareness when, in fact, we are the most ignorant. "Weak ties", rushed exposition, and misrepresented ideas make up not only the culture of TLDR, but also the disposition of our culture and the media in control of it.
"Give us 22 minutes and we'll give you the world" (New York radio station slogan). This is said without irony, and its audience, we may assume, does not regard this slogan as the conception of a disordered mind.
Neil Postman, on the best entertained, least well-informed group in the world...
America has long clung to the right to an opinion.
Let's learn a bit before asserting our own...
The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Here are the deepest implications that few outside historians have enough framework to understand: Technological advancements have exponential, unseen repercussions.
The like button, pull to refresh, infinite scroll... add TLDR to the list of design implements dismantling our ability to be human... add culture void of context and (worse) the ability to retrieve and arrange context with meaning.
I hate to simply notice and identify this dilemma, but a pretend solution to a society-scale issues aids no one. We need awareness and a collective willingness to fix these problems before things will be restored.
What did you notice today? ///
atypical
Those who are atypical need not proclaim this feat.
Originality should be shown not told.
When your claim is being different-better-newer than the competition, you're stating the obvious- every venture worthwhile has a value proposition. Saying it aloud ("This is like no other podcast online") only reveals your inability to encapsulate its uniqueness in its form. Your message, actions, and style should all radiate atypical and draw in those who are alike.
A good principle for whether a story, brand, or idea is atypical is if it's singular.
When you're intentional, focused, and excited, you're already playing in a minority bracket (because we live in a scattered world). The chances then of being purely different increase tenfold.
Be pure in your difference. Don't shout about it.
What did you notice today? ///