Some thoughts on why we need to write with our real voices.
With more and more whales living in the Salish Sea, encounters between humans and humpbacks have increased. There have been several whale strikes this year, and a number of whales killed as a result. So I’m always looking for good news. November is the time most of the humpback whales head south to Hawaii and Mexico to give birth and breed. Today I came across this amazing story of a whale that will now get to make that journey without the 140 feet of fishing gear she was tangled up in. It’s a great example of how a bunch of good people are using technology and cross-boarder cooperation to protect these creatures and why citizens science matters as well.
Dave Snowden and Nora Bateson are both helping people to work in complexity. Last night I settled in to watch them discuss a number of quite simple and important ways to approach complex situations. Especially resonant from this talk:
- the need to change interactions, and not change people;
- approach complex situations with inquisitiveness and curiosity
- working with obliquity and the adjacent possible
- relational work and messy coherence.
I might make a slightly more expanded post on this becasue I think they offer some quite direct and accessible things to do in this discussion.
My neighbour Emily van Lithe de Jeude is a wonderful artist and observer of the world and she is deeply entangled with our shared space, the forests and shorelines of our island. Here is a reflection from her on bones and the invisible processes that generate the beauty all around us. I think Emily embodies much of what Nora talks about in the above video, meeting the world with curiosity and inquisitiveness and leaving more beauty than she found.
There is a very cool exhibit on at The Hearth Gallery on Bowen Island, a virtual reality experience called “Texada.” The show features a 17 minute documentary VR film about time, rock, islands and our place in it all. It’s immersive and absorbing not just becasue of the medium, but also the story, a meditation on this small moment in time in the context of the biggest cycles of time that we are a part of. The show is on until November 30, and well worth a visit.
I spent this morning resting at home after an exhausting week of facilitation and design work, and in preparation for a week of travel to Halifax to do even more. At noon I headed up the hill to the Legion where the Bowen Island Fixit Fair was going on. It was cool to see people talking about regenerative economy with their hands on repair tools and fixed items after hosting the Business Summit on Wednesday where circular economy was the topic of the evening.
Vancouver sports continues to be unbelievable. I haven’t watched a single MLS game this season, but I tuned in to watch the Vancouver Whitecaps play Los Angeles FC in the quarter final of the MLS Cup playoffs. It was as unhinged a game of football as I have ever seen, and that’s saying something after a couple of weeks in which we had a snow bound Canadian Premier League Final, and Vancouver Rise’s road to their first ever Championship, won after two come from behind wins. Last night the Whitecaps took an early 2-0 lead and then blew it in the second half on the strength of tow goals From Son Heung-min (who about half of the 53,000 people in the stadium seemed to be exclusively cheering for. The game went into extra time with the Whitecaps down a player, and then down another as an injury necessitated that they see out the game with nine men. And so it went to penalties. Son missed his first, the ‘Caps went on to keep their nerve and ended up winning a totally improbable victory. It felt like a Cup Final. It was in reality, just the next stage with two more rounds to go, but Vancouver shook off some demons.
After 10 or so years of devoted support to the Whitecaps, I stopped following them in 2019 for reasons associated with the sexual abuse cases that they covered up. I put my effort into TSS Rovers at that point, and haven’t looked back. The Whitecaps impact on soccer in Canada, and indeed on the trajectory of development in Vancouver is really interesting though, and a recent Copa 90 documentary beautifully uncovered this. As a migrant who moved to Vancouver in 1994, I don’t feel the impact of the Whitecaps quite the same way as people who lived here through the 1970s do, and despite having been a deep fan for many years, there was stuff in this documentary I didn’t know. It’s really worth a watch.
What wasn’t worth the watch was my other two teams in games against their closest rivals. I wasted two hours this morning watching Tottenham play Arsenal with a set of tactics that seemed completely bereft of ideas about how to win the game. the only redeeming feature was a long range Richarlison lob that found the net. Other than that it was just a morning of humiliation from the foot of Eze, who was rumoured to be signing with us in the off season but who chose Arsenal instead and today scored the first hat trick in the North London Derby in Premier League history.
And last night the Leafs dropped a 5-3 result to the Montreal Canadians as the continued to drift purposeless in the becalmed waters of the non-playoff positions in the NHL. Ugh.
I’ve had many conversations lately with friends and colleagues about the long term cost of isolation that is exacerbated by the ease of online connection. But, as folks who know my complexity work will know, connections and exchanges are two different things. I can engage in all kinds of people and bits and digital entities now. But why then are we more lonely than ever before? And why are we losing the ability to be in real life conversations? Harrison Moony. catches the moment in this article from The Tyee.
But how do you commit to a discourse when you can’t be sure that the person you’re talking to even exists? The tech libertarians don’t even want us. We’re too hard to manage, too human, and that’s why they’ve flooded their sites with fake people, more likely to say what they want, and much easier to reconfigure, like Grok, if they don’t.
Seeking human connection online today feels like being the last one who hasn’t been body-snatched.
That’s a good analogy.
Paul McCartney is also addressing this head on and trying to show that it’s not just an analogy. Actual bodies of work are being snatched up by AI and he has spearheaded an initiative to protest this with an album of the sounds of creativity when the artists have disappeared. The project is called “Is This What We Want?” and it’s a question worth asking. As usual, Ted Gioia, whose blog pointed me to the work, does a masterful job of unpacking the cultural implications of this moment. It’s one of the things I love about live sports to be honest. You need actual people to play it, it’s a form of creativity that is very somatic and body based and the outcomes are always unknown. That’s perhaps a post for a different day, but it’s certainly an overriding concern for me these days.
For what it’s worth, This blog is always hand written. If I ever use AI here I’ll let you know.
A different disappearance in the Canadian cultural milieu happened this week in the world of sport. Valour FC, the Canadian Premier League team in Winnipeg announced that it is wrapping up operations. They were part of probably the biggest sporting moment of my life in 2023, when our TSS Rovers became the first semi-pro team to eliminate a professional team from the Canadian Championship.. We’ve been rivals since then, playing them again in May in Winnipeg where they nicked a 1-0 win against us in the preliminary round. Nevertheless, it absolutely sucks for supporters to lose their club. It sucks for players and other workers to lose their jobs. Like the rest of the global economy, soccer is a billion dollar thing only at the very highest levels in the 0.01%. Everywhere else it’s about community and connection and hopes and dreams. People make it possible. Intangibles are essential. When it dies, a little bit more community dies with it. Support for your local clubs matters because it will keep it viable AND because you will experience connection and belonging and friendship and purpose. The billionaires want to sell those to you on their own terms. Resist and make community in spite of them.
Friday night professional women’s hockey arrived in Vancouver. The Vancouver Goldeneyes kicked off their history starting with a puck drop by Christine Sinclair and then a 4-3 come from behind overtime win. It was the third game in a row that a professional Vancouver women’s sports team has won from behind if you go back to the second leg of the NSL semi final and the final of the NSL. This win happened in front of a packed house at Pacific Colosseum and. Vancouver became the first PWHL team to have its own logo permanently marked at centre ice. It’s a very special time in women’s sports in this city. Both the Northern Super League and the PWHL strive to be top tier leagues in the world of professional women’s sport. The PWHL already is. NSL has made a strong start, based on the “state of the league” address that founder Diana Matheson gave prior to the Cup Final last week. It remains to be seen how profitable and sustainable the league can be over the long term, but it is walking and talking like a top five global league after just one season, and that’s probably well ahead of schedule.
This is what our inlet looks like these days. Grey, wet, cold, and lovely.
Fridays are for me. Since I turned 55 a couple of years ago, I’ve set aside Fridays for – whatever. Since my ADHD diagnosis last year, I’ve called Friday my ADHD day where I can just let my mind carry me into an unplanned day. Sometimes that means reading, sometimes it means spending the day outside, doing errands, seeing friends, playing music…lots of options. And it’s important to give myself permission to do whatever and not feel guilty for not being “productive.”
So today, the cloud is starting to build as a 2800km long atmospheric river is set to deliver up to 90 mm of rain over the next 36 hours, then tapering off to a steady 2-4 mm of rain every day for the early part of the week. It is a good day to hang out at home, drink some lovely Guatemalan coffee from Moja and read through some interesting articles from my feed reader. Here’s a bunch of links for you to enjoy:
Last night I spent a couple of hours playing euchre up at the Bowen Island Legion where every Thursday night is games night. Euchre is not typically a BC game, but it’s played extensively in Ontario, Michigan and Alabama. Becasue our local euchre players mostly bring their variations of the rules from other places, we have to agree on the rules before playing. As a folk tradition, the evolution of card games in fascinating, and conversation last night sent me to checking out euchre’s history today on Wikipedia.
There is a cost to a lifetime of coerced performance, whether it is due to insecurity, the need to code switch or deeper concerns for safety and protection. And the good news is as you get older, you really have fewer fucks to give which, to my mind, makes you a more interesting person. Travelling through my mid-fifties, I stand in awe as many my peers find this freedom and just let the venneer slip. They become true, real and authentic. Sometimes that means they take off and find new purposes and friends and people that get them, and sometimes I get to be one of those friends and the more I see of them the more I fall for who they are.
Time for a little magic. I came across Dani DaOrtiz’s craft today for the first time and I’m impressed by how he so thoroughly and delightfully wow’d Penn and Teller. I’m less impressed by how he blew away Donny Osmond, as that seemed to be like hunting fish in a barrel.
My favourite Canadian band, Rheostatics, released a new album today called The Great Lakes Suite. It’s a meandering ode to the Canadian view of the Great Lakes, reminiscent of their album of Music Inspired by the Group of Seven. It’s like a soundtrack for static things. This album includes poetry (Anne Carson, Liz Howard, Chief Stacy Laforme), guest musicians (Tanya Tagaq, Gord Downie, Laurie Anderson) and audio snippets. I can’t help feel that somewhere deep behind this band’s approach to these uniquely Canadian icons was inspired originally by Glen Gould’s experimental sound composition, The Idea of North. Rheos are having an album launch party in Toronto tonight with Alex Lifeson accompanying them.
It’s one thing to look north and another to look west. The CCPA publishes a useful summary of the resource projects that our provincial government is pursuing in their “Look West” strategy. Some of these are potentially catastrophic, including the idea that we can ship oil by tanker across the north coast of BC, or the idea that exporting natural gas is a good thing to do in a world that is dying from fossil fuel consumption. And what about jobs? Marc Less covers that as well, as these kinds of projects tend to hire large numbers of workers from elsewhere to build them and rely on as few as possible to run them. And these companies just aren’t great neighbours, as our local LNG terminal owner is demonstrating against the Town of Squamish.
Resource development in BC has effects on salmon, which is one of our charsmatic fauna in this region. Salmon are very sensitive fish and their story is the story of the attitudes and effects that humans have on our environment, even when we can’t see it. Salmon make things visible to us. Getting a handle on the story of salmon and the story of humans and salmon is important for getting a handle on how we manage to screw things up by segmenting the management of our environment.
Segmenting our approach to things is a things we humans do. And then we develop tools that, in the words of Nicholas Carr, create “dissimilarity cascades.” this is good interview to watch or read.
I think I will go outside today in the rain to see if there are any transient orcas about. A pod was hunting seals off the west side of our island earlier this week. They might still be around. This time of year, going outside means thinking carefully about how you dress, and this podcast episode on cold weather layering is the absolutely best discussion of dressing oneself for the weather that I have ever come across. I’m a bit obsessed about this topic, and it’s both important, and hard, to get it right.
And when I come home? I’ll make myself some dinner and settle down to watch the Vancouver Goldeneyes begin their history as Vancouver’s new Professional Women’s Hockey League team. Led by Canadian hockey legend Sarah Nurse, is it possible that this team will bring another pro women’s sports championship to Vancouver this year? Let’s see!
I publish posts like this a few times a week, but I don’t send them out to my email subscribers. Every few months I send out posts like this to everyone so you can see what else has captured my attention. Every post on my blog always gets cross posted to Bluesky and Mastodon and sometimes LInkedIn, but the best way to get notified is with an RSS reader. With an RSS reader like NetNewsWire, you can subscribe to anyone who publishes an RSS feed through their blog, Substack, Medium, or other publishing platform. Facebook and LinkedIn don’t publish RSS feeds, so if your good writing is happening there, the rest of the world won’t see it and there’s not much point in folks outside those sites sharing. Several times I have seen things go through my LinkedIn feed that looked interesting and then the app refreshes and lost the content. It sucks. Also it’s algorithmically influenced meaning that these sites feed me what they want me to read and not the other way around. Imagine sitting down to read a newspaper and someone puts People Magazine in your hands. If you are writing there, I strongly encourage you to also publish on a blog somewhere. Use a free service like WordPress so that the whole world can read and share what you are offering. And when Meta or LinkedIn finally go dark, you will have a record of your thoughts, contributions and development for all time and we all will have benefitted from them.
Stay dry!