ChatGPT made this image of a cranky psychology professor playing soccer while a bellicose commentator looks on and the players stare bewilderingly at the proceedings that are not a part of
Imagine a scenario in which a well known radio host with a penchant for American sports talks with a Jungian psychologist weirdly obsessed with the culture wars, about football tactics. Neither one knows what the hell they are talking about, but they have large social media followings so somehow we should listen to their opinions. ChatGPT helped me out here, because I’m incapable of writing this dialogue without losing my mind.
Chuck Dugan:
Welcome back to The Morning Yardage, I’m your host Chuck Dugan—gridiron guy, diamond devotee, and, uh, recently inducted into the world of world football! That’s right, we’re talking soccer. And with me today is a real thinker, Dr. Leonard Ambrose Penwright, a Jungian psychologist and… well, something of a European football aficionado?Dr. Penwright:
Thank you, Charles. It is both a privilege and a burden to speak into the void that modernity has fashioned around our ancestral games. Soccer—what the Europeans call “association football”—is, fundamentally, a sacred reenactment of the struggle between Apollo and Dionysus.Chuck:
Yeah. And that’s why they play it on grass.Penwright:
Precisely.Chuck:
So, let’s get into it. There’s been a lot of talk about this whole “false nine” business. What is it, Leonard? I saw it on a YouTube video, and I gotta say, I didn’t see anything false about the guy wearing number nine. He looked real enough.Penwright:
The “false nine” is emblematic of post-Freudian identity collapse. It’s a striker who refuses to strike—like a lion who meows or a Protestant who dances. He descends into the midfield, displacing the masculine telos of the goal. It’s essentially a Jungian shadow figure, disrupting the natural order.Chuck:
So… is he like a tight end?Penwright:
No, he is less than a tight end. He is an archetype of the dispossessed prince. Tactically, this was pioneered by the Belgians during the Crimean War. Or possibly the Dutch during the Enlightenment—it’s disputed.Chuck:
Right, right. And that brings me to the diamond midfield. Everybody’s talking about it. You stack your midfield like a fantasy football draft: you got the quarterback, the wide receiver, and then two guys hanging back to clean up spills. I think that’s how Real Manchester beat Liverpool United in the Champion’s Bowl back in ’96.Penwright:
You’re close, Charles. The diamond is a sacred symbol—four points, representing Carl Jung’s four functions of consciousness: thinking, feeling, sensing, and… something else. When deployed correctly, the diamond midfield becomes a psychic mandala. This is what separated the 1934 Prussian national team from the decadent Hungarian Romantics of the same era.Chuck:
A classic rivalry! I remember my dad telling me about that match. Ended 2-2 in overtime, right?Penwright:
It ended in ideological fracture, Chuck. The referee was a Catholic. That was controversial.Chuck:
Well, switching gears here—everyone’s talkin’ about the high press. I assume that’s when the goalie comes out with a lot of pressure? Like a blitz package?Penwright:
Incorrect, but spiritually adjacent. The “high press” is an attempt to enforce rigid cultural hierarchies. It’s when every player acts as the superego, suffocating the id of the opponent. It is, in many ways, fascist.Chuck:
Love a good fascist play.Penwright:
Indeed. That’s why the Italians did it best in 2006.Chuck:
Okay. One more thing—what’s your take on VAR? You know, the video robot referee thing?Penwright:
Ah, VAR. An insidious manifestation of late-stage digital panopticism. It neuters the spontaneity of the masculine heroic quest. It is Orwellian in scope and TikTokian in attention span. When a man cannot dive theatrically in the penalty box without being surveilled, what is he but a serf?Chuck:
So you’re against it?Penwright:
I’m against what it represents. The end of myth. The death of story. Also, I don’t understand how the offside rule works.Chuck:
Me neither, pal. But hey, that’s soccer! Stick around, folks—we’ll be back after this with more tactical analysis and possibly a Jungian interpretation of corner kicks.Penwright:
Ah yes, the corner kick—the final protest of the oppressed ego against the collective unconscious…Chuck:
We’ll be right back.
Now, Imagine Chuck is Joe Rogan and Penwright is Jordan Peterson and remind me again why their conversation on climate science is relevant to anything at all?
The conversation between these two influencers is as absurd as the one I had a robot create. Being open to other points of view does not require you to listen to complete nonsense in the service of somehow expanding your worldview.
It’s undeniable that in the time I have been publishing on the web (and before that on usenet and bbs’ dating back to 1992) we have seen a shift from protocols to platforms. Back in the day, people made protocols so we could all talk to each other, regardless of the platforms we used to do it. The web today runs on these protocols, which allows us to use all kinds of different platforms to communicate. Think email. We all use different email programs, but when I send a message, it gets to you regardless.
The enclosure of the commons that I wrote about last year is the fundamental shift in the way we communicate and talk to each other. It creates walled gardens of activity that regulates what happens inside and which limits connection to the outside world. I used to be able to publish my blog posts directly to Facebook for example, but that functionality was removed a long time ago. Facebook will not allow users in Canada to post hypertext links to media sites, which is a pretty reliable indicator that they want to own the web and not participate in it. Platforms limit possibilities and are driven by control. Protocols open up possibilities and enable self-organization and emergence.
Mike Masnick’s paper on Protocols,Not Platforms traces this history very well and makes these arguments for focusing on protocols that “would bring us back to the way the internet used to be.”
I came to Mesnick’s paper after reading an article in the New Yorker about J Graber and her involvement with Bluesky. I was struck at the parallels between the work I do with social technologies and the work that people are doing around social network technologies. When I first got into working as a facilitator, I focused on large group work (and I still do) and my focus was on the platforms of Open Space Technology and later World Café and Appreciative Inquiry and other methods of large group interventions.
These methods for large group dialogue are platforms, but what underlines them our protocols of organization and facilitation the protocol I use is the Art of Hosting, a simple four fold practice, which is applicable to a variety of contexts from meetings to structuring organizations to planning large scale change work. The art of hosting is a protocol that enables more collaboration, more creation, and more resilience among individuals and groups who are leaning into complexity and uncertainty.
On Friday, I’m going to talk about this more and I think I will use the Protocols, Not Platforms idea as the way to talk about how we do change work, and you could join us. The organizational development world is besotted with methods, and a good method for the right need is a good thing. All methods are context bound, however, so to really make change in complex domains, one need to be aware of the context for the work and rely on a context-free protocol to help engage and work. So if you join in on Friday you will learn about how context matters, how complex contexts in particular are composed, the simple protocol for working in complexity that is rooted in the four fold practice, and then maybe some stories of using methods that fit the need.
Spending the past few weeks immersed in football culture in England and back home at Canada fed my soul. There is so much about football that I love, from the complexity of the game, all through to the culture and atmosphere of the stadium. I have been a dedicated and deeply involved football supporter of the Vancouver Whitecaps (2010-2018, ended over a series of unresolved sexual abuse scandals) and of TSS Rovers (2017- the present). The thing that drew me to football as a kid was hearing Liverpool supporters singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” on the BBC Match of the Day broadcasts when I lived in England in the late 1970s. The SOUND. The sound of a big stadium full of enthusiastic supporters is unreal. It’s not something you are likely to witness in professional sports in North America except in soccer. And being present on a European night, like Finn and I were a couple of weeks ago as Tottenham hosted Eintracht Frankfurt, is absolutely magical.
The essence of football culture in the rest of the world is its organic and participatory nature, from the creation of tifo to the penning of songs and chants. As a songwriter, writing songs for my football teams has been a passion of mine. I especially love coming up with player chants, which are even more meaningful at the lower league levels, where young players ply their trades in relative obscurity, loved only by a small handful of fans.
As a complexity practitioner, I love watching the way football supporter culture ebbs and flows and wanes and flows again. I love the way we try songs out that flat out fail, or we have some instant inspiration that locks itself in as a tradition.
Recently the podcast 99% invisible did a nice piece on football songs, including some deeper history of this cultural practice that I wasn’t aware of. Even though it’s pitched at an American audience, and it is focused somewhat on Arsenal (I’m a Spurs fan, remember!) it’s well worth a listen. It gives us insight about what culture really is and how it really functions.
It’s late April on the coast. Huge flocks of geese are finding their way north making a beeline from their stopping grounds in the Fraser River estuary and heading straight over our island as they follow the inlets and mountains on their journey to Alaska. The sea lions are still out there barking and normally their presence would be a sure sign of spring as they come in with the herring, dragging all the mammal eating killer whales with them. But this year has been weird and we’ve had a herd (pride? flotilla? complaint?) of sea lions in Mannion Bay since November. Several docks have orange storm fencing around them so the lions won’t take refuge on the floats, but a couple of absentee dock owners don’t and so these amazing creatures encamp on the floats down below our house and bark 23 hours a day.
The only thing that frightens them off is a killer whale and the news came this week that 79 of them have been spotted in the Salish Sea this month, including a new baby for J-Pod, the group of orcas that are resident to the souther Gulf Islands. A grey whale has been hanging around English Bay and the humpbacks will soon be back. The abundance of Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, a combination of local recovery and globally warming waters, continues unabated.
This is a brief touch home, to try to get some crops in the garden, do a little maintenance work with clients and finish up some writing. My son and I were in England earlier in the month on a long awaited father/so soccer trip, and we had an epic time. We got to see our beloved Spurs in a rare patch of good form beat Southampton 3-1 and then draw Eintracht Frankfurt 1-1 in the Europa League quarter final. We also caught games at Watford, Charlton Athletic and Notts County before ending our trip as the guest of a friend at the Etihad in Manchester for an epic 5-2 victory for ManCity against Crystal Palace.
Getting to spend time with my 24 year old son is a gift and this is the longest we have spent together ever, just the two of us. I was able to take him around the places I lived in Herts as a kid, and we met some cousins and visited museums in-between football matches and early morning drives across the Pennines.
Soccer continued unabated, as we went to the inaugural match of the Northern Super League this past week, contested between the Vancouver Rise and the Calgary Wild. A couple of former TSS Rovers were in the squads for both teams, keeper Kirstin Tynan for Vancouver and defender Tilly James for Calgary. Our TSS Rovers women and men played on Friday night in a couple of disappointing losses to Langley United in League 1 BC, which is the second tier of Canadian soccer. Lots of soccer in my life these.
This has been a year of travel., so coming home to familiar things for a few moments is nice. A long awaited holiday in Italy awaits so I am savouring the coastal springtime as much as I can.