Twelve days ago we left Vancouver for a couple of weeks of guided travel in the central coast of British Columbia. This is the region of the coast that is north of Vancouver Island and south of Kitimat. Specifically we were visiting the homelands of the Heiltsuk, Gitga’at and Kitasoo/Xai xais Nations. For decades these Nations (along with others) have worked to protect this coast from harmful logging, hunting, and fishing practices. As long as I have lived in BC the campaign and the work to protect what is now known as the Great Bear Rainforest has been ongoing. The land and sea In this region is the largest tract of temperate rainforest in the world. When you read the history of the place you encounter a story of collaboration, advocacy and recognition that is profound in its implications for how Canada can be. And when you visit the place, you can be touched by the profound impact that such places have in reminding us of our place in the world.
We were chartering with a guiding company called Mothership Adventures, started by my old friends the Campbell family 20 years ago. They own the Columbia III, a beautiful custom built mission ship. You should read Ross’s blog to get a sense of the incredible care and affection they have for the Columbia III, and for some of the stories about what it takes to keep the ship in order. Mothership provides a crew of a captain, a cook, two guides and ten guests, all of us connected to one another through work, life, or kids. This is our second trip with them and these crew are like family to each other and to us. They are incredible human beings, and we bonded together very quickly, as you do with 14 good people on a small ship together.
W spent 10 days of travelling essentially around Princess Royal Island, poking in and out of coastal fjords, salmon streams, and out to the west coast of Campania Island and its white sand beaches. We spent several hours a day gently paddling pristine waters, with exceptionally great weather, including the two days of Pineapple Express rain which we enjoyed from protected bays around Milbanke Sound. We saw grizzly bears in Khutze Inlet, dozens of humpback whales and Dall’s porpoises and we spent a half an hour in Wright Sound surrounded by 15 fin whales who were surfacing all around us. This trip was full of life changing experiences.
The most profound one happened last Tuesday. We spent a day on a bear platform sitting mostly in silence with Marvin Robinson, a Gitga’at guide who stewards his hereditary chief’s territory on Grebbell Island along a salmon stream. We sat and watch pinks running up the stream, dippers fishing for their food and were rewarded with a profound encounter with the spirit bear pictured above, Tlaiya, named for the red stripe along his back. This bear, fixated on the salmon at his feet wandered up the creek slowly, sniffing the air, loping at one point about 4 meters away from me. He had a calm demeanour, a slow cadence and a wary awareness of our presence. We stood silently on the riverbank watching, barely breathing, overwhelmed with the encounter. As the bear approached, I was flooded with feelings of humility, profound gratitude, of a deep awareness of my small nature as a creature on a planet with myriad other creatures, just being here.
The bear walked on, up the stream and around the corner, half-heartedly swiping at salmon, sniffing the air. After a period of deep silence, tears and floods of emotions, even from Marvin himself who loves these bears like no one else, we decided to stay in the forest for another hour or so. During that time five wolves appeared on the river and walked down towards us through the water, eating salmon heads (they avoid the bodies becasue of parasites). Even Marvin stood riveted filming on his phone. We watched them circle around behind us, and Marvin checked his watch and said he had to leave, inviting us to stay longer if we wished. Then he made a series of howls, and the wolves all through the little river valley starting howling. We were completely wrapped in sound, the plaintive rises and falls of the wolves sharing the story of their territory at that moment. And as that chorus was happening, a mother black bear and her cub walked up the stream, also pawing at the pinks.
It seemed impossible to leave. None of us could believe what we had experienced. When you sit in silence for hours in the forest, you become part of the place, you become absorbed in it. You become slowly aware of your place in the scheme of things. And when the animals especially get a sense of where you are, they flow around you. The FEELING of that, especially around these large animals, is so deeply profound that it feels like it comes from a deep part of our human essence, the part that never transcended our identity as animals, as parts of the world instead of something that lifts itself up and out of its surroundings as if we could somehow exercise a dominion over the uiniverse of which we are a flimsily dependant part.
Belonging is not a choice one makes. It is a status granted upon you by the people and places and creatures that you share the planet with. Even though I live in a beautiful place, surrounded by forest and sea, I am rarely aware of this feeling. It takes silence, stillness and a lowering of the mental, physical and spiritual rpms to find this feeling of openness which, if the environment consents, leads to belonging, becasue you become a part of something, of everything.
This morning I walked to Tell Your Friends, my local coffee shop to write and reflect in the late summer sunlight. I wanted to capture that feeling that was seeded in me last week in the Great Bear Rainforest so I first sat by the lagoon, watching some chickadees flit in the alder trees, watching the crows pulling mussels from the rocks and a flock of short-bill gulls resting on the tidal flats. Nothing profound, no spirit bear or whales or charismatic mega-flora. But that feeling. It’s there. To sit and rest and be remembered by the land that chooses you because you have decided not to move over it so quickly. That you have sat and opened your eyes to see what is always there and have the world reveal itself to you as kin, not as performance. You are related. You belong to everything. Human life, so abstract and far above the rhythms of the tide and sunlight and season and epoch, fall away. Rather than observing and processing, you become observed and processed by everything.
I know this. We all know this. But I think most of the humans I know, including, and maybe especially, me, need to remember this, in the animal bodies that we have, in the landscapes that sustain us, on a planet which produces life in a myriad of uncounted forms, playfully exploring how a universe might populate itlself with creatures and plants that reproduce themselves from within, and fill every available niche life can find.
The older I get the more I realize that as people get older they witness changes and pine for the good old days. It’s cliche for a reason, because it seems nearly universal. I get it. Things aren’t what they used to be. Younger generations than me (and they are plural at this point) have a language and experience that I cannot be a part of. I occasionally break through with folks where we are enjoined in common cause, like in our supporter-owned football club, or in some of the workshops and courses I deliver. But mostly, I can my peers living in increasingly agitated nostalgia. Things are not as good as they were before.
Is this the default setting? Nostalgia is practically a genre in art, culture, and fashion. But what is it called when a person of middle or advanced age writes or paints or composes about how THIS moment is amazing. How things that he or she wanted in the past have finally come to fruition and the new people in the world and teethings they are making and the places they are building or protecting are awesome? I remember when I got my first iPhone. It was like a childhood dream come true. Finally, the device of my dreams was here in my lifetime! I made the above image the lock screen. If you know, you know.
It’s not a pollyanna-ish sentiment I’m after. It’s not a carpe diem, or affirmation-based gratitude practice. There isn’t a word for it in English, which is why I’m reaching. Is there art to be made that features characters who grow old feeling like their experiences are the ones they have been hoping to have, that the demographics and the culture and the things that are happening are what they wanted all along?
There is a lack of this, eh? We all pine for a future we can’t have yet, an alternative we will never have, or a past that is gone. It’s hard to listen for the good things in the present in the monotonous moan of complaint in all that.
(Yes there is suffering. There always was. The “good old days” my generation pine for featured apartheid in South Africa, death squads in Central America, a hole burning in the ozone layer, residential schools in Canada, acid rain, and famine. I’m not naive.)
Spent the day in Vancouver visiting family and heading to the Bard on the Beach matinee performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Bard is the Vancouver summer Shakespeare festival, and is known for their cheeky mountings of the Bard’s plays. For whatever reason I think we’ve mostly seen comedies over the past number years, so my take on their repertoire may lean more towards “excellent masters of farce.” But I love the ethic of this company and even with well known plays, there is often a twist that sends a message, whether it is the setting, or some topical asides, some clowning, or some casting or editorial decisions. My impression of the production principle here is that Shakespeare is presented faithful to the experience that the original audiences might have had, and that means not sparing the sacred cows of the day. The commentary is cutting and contemporary, and I often leave feeling what I imagine Shakespeare’s original audiences felt in the 16th and 17th centuries watching these plays, entertained by a production that spoke to them, and that spoke a little truth to power.
Today it was The Two Gentlemen of Verona which is a play I have never seen or read. It’s one of Shakespeare’s earliest and weakest plays, and has been performed only sporadically over the centuries. We did some pre-game research on the play, just because these romantic comedies tend to twist and flail and it’s easy to get lost. This one features the foibles of Proteus and Valentine, two buddies from Verona who head to Milan for some adventure. Proteus, true to his namesake, is a shape shifter, falling in and out of love depending on the circumstance. Valentine has more integrity, although that observation has to be tempered by the fact that these two are consummate boneheaded bros The setting of this production was the 1980s and as a result. each of these characters evoked people from my own high school days, which made for an interesting personal experience.
The lead characters are semi-loveable idiots. In this production they occupy a kind of anti-hero character arc. As the play progresses and they twist themselves into more and more ridiculous and narcissistic situations. It gradually dawns on the audience how reprehensible these guys actually are. They treat romantic love as an inferior form of relationship to the bro code and that has been a knock on the play through its history. It has some truly troublesome misogyny in it, not the least of which is how the play ends. Throughout history critics have wrestled with how to interpret the ending of the play. Directors have rewritten it, edited it or just ignored it altogether. I think rather than dancing around the problem of the ending, director Dean Paul Gibson learned into it and SOLVED it. He adds no dialogue to the play, adds nothing to change the ending at all except a shifted perspective that melts the fourth wall. It’s brilliant. It’s very moving. It becomes immensely real for every single person who has aged out of that immature world of superficial high school relationships. You should go and see it, and maybe after the festival is over, I’ll spoil it.
Apart from the ending, there was an added level of brilliance having the play set in the 1980s. To me it made it feel like I was watching a high school play from my own era. The play becomes even more funny when one remembers that these characters are basically all teenagers (in maturity levels if not actual age) and the company play them with a remarkable take. These actors appear to me not to be earnestly occupying the characters, but rather earnestly occupying the character of teenage actors staging this play. You know the way that high school theatre sometimes tends to typecast the actors into characters that resemble them in real life? It felt like that. These are actors playing actors playing Shakespearian characters. The detachment and the 80s setting lends a layer post-modern irony to the whole thing made it even funnier. And it’s probably the best way to handle the fundamental weakness of the play in general: lean into it. I loved it.
One of the things Shakespeare’s characters often do is to reason themselves into tragic or comedic situations. The reasoning itself is such a device of the age. It’s as if Shakespeare, writing on the edges of of modernity, was trying out these new forms of thought: a scientific reasoning of how one’s passions are at work and what it means. His soliloquies are full of this stuff. You see the origin of the characters’ limiting beliefs, you see the mental gymnastics they are doing to justify and rationalize absurd beliefs that give legitimacy to the emotional lives. It’s immensely relatable.
Part of the fun of Two Gentlemen of Verona is watching these dudes try to reason their way into abominably stupid situations and the more they do so the more respect they lose. By the end of the play they are so convinced of their rightness in the world that their triumphant and confident exit is easily turned to a complete mockery. As a former teenage boy, I found myself staring into a pretty brutal mirror at times. Simultaneously guffawing at these idiots and then slapping my brow with uncomfortable recognition.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona runs until September 19.
Rob, from a recent Facebook of his which he captioned “The new me.”
My friend Rob Paterson is dying. I found out on Facebook today as he shared a remarkable thing that his daughter is doing.
Rob was one of those bloggers that you’d meet sometimes in the early 2000s who posted tons of interesting stuff, and thoughtful, place based and personal posts. At his blog you’d learn about PEI, and finance and management, British history (which was essentially his own personal history), and food and health and all the things that his brain and heart were driven to explore. And he was one of those bloggers from those early that, when I met him in person for the first time in about 2006 or something, I connected with instantly. It was like that with Johnnie Moore and Euan Semple and Lila Efimova and Harold Jarche and so many others. In 2009 we visited Rob and his family in PEI and we even made a little video about living systems together.
Rob was always really interested in my work and in 2005 he and Johnnie Moore and I had a conversation about some new idea we called “unconferencing.” We talked about Open Space Technology and ways that people really do want to meet if only people who think they know better would get out of the way. That is such an interesting conversation because Rob described what might be one solid thread of the origin story of podcasting which happened at a conference hosted by Peter Rukavina in 2003 at which Dave Winer and John Muir met and discussed how to use RSS to broadcast radio shows.
That was how it was blogging back in the day. I feel like those of us still doing this or returning to this are keepers of some arcane traditional knowledge. We know what it’s for, what it does, how it changes people. We know how it brings people into our lives in surprisingly deep ways. It is not social media. It is slower than that. More relational. More real.
Rob has left an incredible legacy of writing and musing and conversation and his daughter Hope has embarked on a project to upload all of this to an AI. It’s an intriguing proposition, and perfectly suited to Rob’s penchant for using technology to feed wisdom and connection.
So much love and fondness goes out to Rob and family. My hope for you, my friend, is that your transition is soft and beautiful and that you are carried away on the stories we all hold of you.
Thank you for being in my life, and thank you for inviting me into yours.
Update: Rob died on August 24.
I’m not sure that this shows up in the training set
About 8 years ago I remember Dave Snowden coming to Vancouver directly from a conference of security experts where they were discussing the top existential threats to humanity. In ascending order, at that time, they were: nuclear war, climate change and AI. At the time I remember thinking that how strange that seemed given that climate change is an absolute certainty and at least with nuclear war, we could actively try to prevent it. I had no idea what AI could really look like.
Nevertheless this particularly dystopian view of things had me on alert as I watched for signs that this might be happening. I am no AI expert, and the only AI I regularly and consciously interact with is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is now the best search engine out there, as everything else has become ruined by algorithms. It works, but it is also highly flawed and there is a simple reason for that: It acts like a human being.
If you’ve used ChatGPT you will be familiar with its major flaws which include approval seeking, hallucinations and, an overinflated sense of its own abilities. It will often say it can do things – like a harmonic analysis of a jazz tune – that it cannot actually do. And when it does the work and confidently provides the user with absolute garbage, my instinct is, that if it was an employee, I’d fire it. The inability to say “that is beyond my current limitations” is maddening. I was asking for this musical analysis the other day and after it couldn’t provide it, I discussed the fact that there is a price to this misplaced confidence. ChatGPT uses a tremendous amount of energy and water, and when it does so to just waste my time, I explained, there is an ethical issue here. It acknowledged that issue but it didn’t really seemed bothered by it.
That shouldn’t be a surprise because it was trained on the documented behaviours of certain classes of humans, for whom performative ethics is the norm. We do almost everything here in the global north with a detached knowledge that our ways of life are unsustainable and deeply and negatively impactful on our environment and other people but we don’t seem particularly bothered by that, nor to we display any real urgency to do anything about it.
This training is why Yuval Noah Harari is so worried in this video. AI is unlike any other tool that humans have invented in that it has agency to act and create on its own. As Harari says, printing presses cannot write their own books. But AI can, and it can choose what to write about and what not to, and it can print them and distribute them too.
The issue, and we have seen this recently with Grok, is that AI has been trained on the detritus that humans have left scattered around on the Internet. It has been raised on all the ways that we show up online. And although it has also been trained on great works of literature and the best of human thought, even though most of that material appears to have been stolen, Harari also points out that the quantity of information in the world means that only a very, very tiny proportion of it is true.
When I watched the video and then reflected on the post I wrote yesterday about difficult conversations, I had the insight that AI will know all about the stupid online conversation I started, but will know nothing about the face-to-face conversation that I later had. Harari points out, very importantly, that AI doesn’t understand trust. The reason for that, he says, is that we haven’t figured out the trust and cooperation problem in human society. That’s the one we should be solving first.
AI has no way of knowing that when there are crises in a community, human beings often behave in very beautiful ways. Folks that are at each other’s throats online will be in each other’s lives in a deeply meaningful way, raising money, rebuilding things, looking after important details. There is no way that AI can witness these acts of human kindness or care at the scale with which it also processes the information record we have left online. It sees the way we treat each other in social media settings and can only surmise that human life is about that. It has no other information that proves otherwise.*
For me, this is why face-to-face work is critically important. Meetings are just not the same over zoom. We cannot generate the levels of trust on zoom that we can by spending a significant amount of time in physical proximity to one another. Face-to-face encounters develop contexts of meaning – what I have called dialogic containers – and it is in those spaces and times that we develop community, trust, friendship, sustainable commitment and, dare I say, peace. The qualities of living that we ascribe to the highest aspirations for human community are only generated in their fullness in person. They require us to work through the messiness of shared life-spaces, the conflict of values and ideas and paths forward, the disagreements and confusions, by creating multiple ways in which we encounter and relate to one another. Sustainable community life requires us to see one another in multiple identities so that we discover that there are multiple possibilities for our relationships, multiple ways we can work around blockages and unresolvable conflict.
We are fast losing this capability as human beings. When people ask me to work with their groups there is always the lingering question of whether we can do the work of three days in two, and the work of two days in one. The answer is no. We can do different work in limited times and spaces. Narrowing the constraints on the act of making meaning together creates more transactional relationships based on incresingly incomplete and inaccurate information. This is world we are showing to AI agents. The actual human world is also relational, multi-faceted, subtle and soaked with meaning. As we feed our robots a particular picture of ourselves it’s possible that we are also becoming that very picture. Depth of relationship and meaning becomes replaced with a smeared, shallow breadth of connections and transactions.
There is no better way – no faster way, even – to develop trust than to be together. I think this is so true that it certainly is axiomatic to my practice and how I live my life. And if trust is the critical “resource” we need as human beings, to not only live well but to also address the existential threats that we face – which are all entirely created from our own lack of trust – then being together face-to-face working, playing, singing, struggling, discussing, and figuring stuff out is the most radical act of hope and generosity we can make, to ourselves and to our descendants.
I suppose there will always be a top three list of threats to human existence, but it would be nice if those top three were things like “sun goes supernova” or “super volcano blankets the earth in decades of darkness” and not actions for which we are entirely responsible.
* It also occurs to me that alien cultures who are able to pick up and understand the electronic signals we have been radiating towards every planet within 100 light years of ours will also get a very particular picture of who we are as a civilization. Never mind what was on the Voyageur record. Monday’s TV news has already overtaken it.