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.
Peter Levine shared a video today of a panel he was on back in June, discussing practical ways to have difficult conversations. We could all do with a little more practice in this these days. I know I certainly could.
I found the audio hard to hear, but Peter’s post helpfully summarizes what each presenter practices, and I have gathered these principles here in a list for future reference. Each person is working in a different context, but the gathering was about teaching civics in schools in the United States. I think there is some useful transferrance of these principles, so I’m going to slightly rephrase them to be more general.
- Ground discussions in shared principles, such as living well together or a desire to find common ground
- Explore tensions (such as between equality and liberty(
- Use historical rather than current examples.
- Let the other lead.
- Set norms for addressing identities
- Allow a person to opt-out of “representing” a group
- Take responsibility for imbalances in credibility
- Give full attention to the other
- Practice receptivity, curiosity and open-heartedness
- Allow long pauses to allow quieter voices to emerge
- Make the conversation multi-centred, in other words allow it to become a real conversation rather than a mediated exchange of ideas through one person with power in the situation.
- Ask “What are you concerned about?” to uncover core values
- Legitimate concerns without needing to agree with them.
- Ground the discussion in a shared moral foundation
- Understanding your own philosophical, moral or ethical principles can help you generate good questions.
- Listen for understanding, not debate or attack.
Peter Levine (my summary , because he doesn’t cover his own talk in his post!)
- Name your own biases and make them visible
- Find a share ground of values
- Ask questions that are neither too abstract but also not settled.
- Explore unresolvable tensions
I recently found myself in a difficult conversation and I handled it really badly. It stemmed from a poor comment I made on a social media post during an election campaign where I accused my interlocutor of posting a hoax becasue a meme he shared did not reflect the data that was contained in the report it referenced. I know this person in real life, and the conversation did not go well online. When I saw him in real life, I apologized. A few days later we found ourselves together in the community and we started discussing the point of the post he made. It became a dogfight. I was triggered and upset, feeling some shame and guilt that I had kicked this whole thing off with what he perceived as a personal attack online. For his part, he is a lawyer, so the conversation became a debate, both of us convinced we were right. I was without any kind of skillfulness in creating a good curiosity based conversation. It wasn’t a proud moment.
Practicing these kinds of conversations is incredibly hard. None of us are saints. Principles like the ones above are just basic good sense for anyone hosting or participating in a difficult conversation, but they are incredibly difficult to remember and practice when we are in an emotional state and when the conversations we are having may ultimately have existential implications for the folks in the discussion.
I think at the end of the day one of the key principles that is my own personal responsibility to take is “I want this to go well, for me and the person I’m talking too.” I don’t mean that we should avoid conflict and just be civil to each other, or that we should deny any part of our emotional response to a situation. What I mean is that we should embrace a relationship, even if only for a few minutes, that can hold different experiences, different points of view and different aspiration side by side. For that we need a practice ground and before we step out onto that mat, we need some principles to guide us.
Here are some. What are yours?