Dave Pollard begins his new series of speculative non-fiction, looking at possibilities for post-collapse, post-civilization human life. It’s a very stimulating exercise and as he is very active in his comments, I encourage you to dive in with him and see where the journey takes you. He’s doing it because it is an interesting exercise to do, which strikes me as exactly the best reason to do it. His first post is on language and it reminded me to look again at the semiotics theory I studied in second year Cultural Studies back in 1988.
There are some great conversations happening about AI here on my blog and elsewhere. For me the interesting questions are about the nature of AI and today I saw a great interview with David Krakauer, the president off the Santa Fe Institute discussing this topic in the context of complexity and emergence. (It’s an interesting interview becasue of Krakauer, not because of Neil deGrasse Tyson, who constantly interrupts the most interesting points. He’s just not a very good interviewer.)
So many of the principles for work and community I use in my life have come through the people I met and who supported me back in the early 2000s when I started consulting (it’s the only job I’ve had this century!). One of those networks and collections of people were the folks associated with the Berkana Institute with whomI worked for many years. My buddy Tennesson, one of the OG Berkana guys and still one of my best friends, pulled up a set of principles that Berkana used back in the early days, and I’m grateful to notice how they continue to inform my practice today:
- We relay on human goodness.
- We depend on diversity.
- We treasure the power of community.
- We trust life’s capacity to create order without control.
- We nourish our relationships and ourselves.
A few others I gained from Berkana include, “no matter the question, the answer is community” and “proceed until apprehended.”
Your algorithm may be giving you a false sense of confidence about what you know. I find this anecdotally true. Stuff I learn about through facebook or LinkedIn seems to make me feel knowledgeable especially on quicker moving issues, like the North Coast tanker ban. But stuff that comes through Bluesky, Mastodon or my RSS feeds are much more nuanced because of who I choose to follow.
Football is a game played with principles, becasue it’s a complex game and requires players to react and respond to a constantly changing environment. It was a joy watching Tottenham today cover some sense of purpose after a series of poor results, especially at home. Visiting Brentfod was no match for Spurs, and we dominated possession and played incredible defence off the ball. Van der Ven and Romero are probably amongst the best centre back pairs in the world when they are on their game, which they were today. Xavi Simons finally got the start at the number 10 position and generated the first goal and scored the second. Spurs were positive and exciting to watch and won 2-0. More of that would be much welcomed.
Elsewhere in the football world, today the Vancouver Whitecaps will play Inter Miami for their first MLS trophy in the MLS Cup Final. I used to be a huge supporter of the Whitecaps and for all kinds of reasons I stepped back from supporting that organization. But many of my friends are core parts of the Whitecaps supporters movements and they are having the time of their lives. Vancouver has played their best season of football in their 41 year history and have made every final they have competed in, winning the Canadian Championship and losing in the CONCACAF Champions Cup down in Mexico. But today they have a chance to make it two from three. They beat Miami on the way to that continental cup final, and the likes of Messi and Suarez will be side-eyeing the ‘Caps today who are on a wonderful run of form. We will see what happens.
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.