A participant from a 2018 complexity workshop I ran in The Hague, reflecting on an experience.
From a piece in The Walrus by Troy Jollimore, a philosophy professor, on his evolving relationship to students, AI and education:
The use of AI already seems so natural to so many of them, so much an inevitability and an accepted feature of the educational landscape, that any prohibition strikes them as nonsensical. Don’t we instructors understand that today’s students will be able, will indeed be expected, to use AI when they enter the workforce? Writing is no longer something people will have to do in order to get a job.
Or so, at any rate, a number of them have told me. Which is why, they argue, forcing them to write in college makes no sense. That mystified look does not vanish—indeed, it sometimes intensifies—when I respond by saying: Look, even if that were true, you have to understand that I don’t equate education with job training.
What do you mean? they might then ask.
And I say: I’m not really concerned with your future job. I want to prepare you for life.
It turns out that if there is anything more implausible than the idea that they might need to write as part of their jobs, it is the idea that they might have to write, or want to write, in some part of their lives other than their jobs. Or, more generally, the idea that education might be valuable not because it gets you a bigger paycheque but because, in a fundamental way, it gives you access to a more rewarding life.
Last night I was sitting with my dear friend and colleague Phil Cass and we were drinking a little bourbon and discussing our week of work together and our lives and interests. Our conversations always wander over all manner of territory. Last night, before we retired to sleep, it rested on David Foster Wallace’s well known Kenyon College commencement address called “This is Water.” it compliments Jollimore’s piece beautifully, even though it precedes it by 20 years.
If you have a half an hour, dive into these two links. In response I’m curious to know what are you thinking about? What are you writing about, even if you aren’t publishing your writing? Whose perspectives are you trying to understand?
In the past few weeks, the President of the USA has issued explicit challenges to the sovereignty of Canada, both political and economic. In response to these challenges, some of my Canadian friends who lie on the more progressive and of the political spectrum have expressed a slightly disconcerting attachment to feelings of nationalism.
I understand where they’re coming from. Over the past five days Canadians have been engaged in a nationwide conversation about what it means to be Canadian, what our country stands for, and in some cases, whether we shouldn’t just join with the United States anyway. Ironically, it’s voices on the far right, who, over the past several years, have been loudly, proclaiming that they are “defending the integrity of Canada from Justin Trudeau and the woke mob” who are now saying that perhaps we should join the United States. So for the moment, we’re going to ignore those voices in this conversation because they have nothing to offer but to sow chaos, short term, outrage, and serve the interest of those who would seek to exploit this country’s resources and markets.
Instead I think it’s important that we think about what these feelings of national defensiveness mean and how they can translate into action.
My attachment to the idea of Canada is complicated. I’m not a nationalist, but instead, I would say that I believe in the project that Indigenous nations sought to co-create when they signed the original treaties. In other words, the people whose traditional lands Canada was established upon had, in most cases, a strong curiosity and sense of what might be possible with a co-creative relationship between different peoples, who offered different gifts to one another. Despite the subsequent centuries of dishonourin the treaties from the Crown side, Canada was nevertheless founded upon a set of fundamental relationships between the Crown of England and the Indigenous nations who were recognized in 1763 as the rightful owners of these territories.
The reason for protecting Canada as a separate container of collective effort is not that we have the best public health care or proper gun laws or a well regulated banking system or a generally more progressive attachment to equality and justice. These are outcomes of the kind of things we are working on. It isn’t perfect but here in this country we are running a different experiment in living together than the US is, and I, for one, prefer it.
In its most ideal form it looks like this: Our country is a federation of two levels of government established on the basis of relationships negotiated between the Crown and First Nations governments in most places. We are a treaty country, and in places where we have not concluded treaties with First Nations, Canadian law recognizes Aboriginal title as an existing layer of jurisdiction on the land. Our governments are supported by democratic and civil institutions which , in general are set up to work for the public good.
As a treaty country, the implication I have always taken is that we have to constantly work on the relationship not only with First Nations but with each other as well. The values that we have enshrined in our Constitution are related to what’s known as Peace, Order and Good Government. Again, problematic in many ways (not the least of which is that we have discovered that it is entirely possible to build a colonial state based on these principles), but if we take these as generative principles, a Constitution that sets out the powers of the federal and provincial government focused on Peace first of all is pretty cool. Order, while seeming like the need to control things, is nevertheless a value that enshrines stability and equality and access so that what happens in the country is predictable and stable enough that people can run businesses and work together and receive services. It enshrines equality and care before the law and in our social safety net. In the early days it was often freely exchanged for Welfare, which gives you a sense of what that value could embody.
And Good Government to me means one that is free of corruption, that has integrity, that stewards the public good for the benefit of the people. As a former public servant, I always took that role very seriously. When I was out doing third part consultation on the BC Treaty Process, I was acutely aware that I was at the working coal face of democracy participation. It was my job to make spaces for voices to participate in the act of nation building and active reconciliation through treaties with First Nations who wanted to enshrine their relationship with Canada in that form. Good Governance to me meant doing that work that left good relations on the ground.
I take these values to be the aspirational directions of travel we are moving in together. We disagree about how. We violate these principles constantly. There is no easy way to do it, but if you are Canadian, you live under a Constitution that is based on these values.
I just want to say that we have done this with mixed results in Canada through our history. We have some cool things here and we have also done some truly horrible things in Canada under the laws and principles enshrined in our Constitution. But this is the project and Canada is the container that I’m interested and committed to working within.
I distrust nationalism in any guise. Even in it’s progressive forms where I can see benefits (like the way Quebec nationalism has created incredible co-operative movements, credit unions and social safety nets) there is, very close to the surface, a vein of exclusion that can press differences into otherness and foster mistrust and hate. It is easy to take what has happened over the past week and generate a pro-Canadian stance that is also anti-American and also sublimates the real challenges we need to struggle with in this country. We don’t have to do that. I am not anti-American. My American colleagues and I have common cause in the world. We don’t need to adopt any kind of nationalist rhetoric or approach to defend the best of what this Canadian project is and to keep the vultures away so we can continue the hard work of trying to fulfill the promise of this place. We need only remember what we are trying to do here, and maintain the container of shared purpose, and double down on our efforts to show what is possible.
It is time to leave the enclosures. It is not worth trying to make our social networks work under the terms of unfettered fascists and venture capitalists who prey on our attention for profit.
The set up for the weekly staff meeting at the Alaska Humanities Forum offices in Anchorage.
We spent the day yesterday with our colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum (AKHF) preparing for the Art of Hosting that begins this morning. AKHF is an organization that has long embraced the Art of Hosting as a way of operating both their internal organizational functions and their relationship and gatherings with their partners and programs. All over the world there are organizations like this, not always obvious or seen by the global Art of Hosting community, because they labour away on their own work. But until the pandemic every staff member of this organization was sent south for an Art of Hosting once they were hired on. It has been six years since that happened so we are here to partly fulfill that need and to work with several of their partners.
What’s great about this is Kameron Perez-Verdia is on our team. As President and CEO of the organization, he is embodies the practices of participatory leadership which he first learned at a Shambala Institute Authentic Leadership in Action workshop back in 2008 with Toke, Monica and myself. Kameron was raised in the whaling village of Utqiagvik, which is the most northerly point in Alaska. We talked a lot yesterday about the kinds of community gatherings that take place there when the whale hunting crews bring in humpbacks for the community. We talked about the importance of presences and check ins in meetings and how that grounded start to important work is a critical aspect of every part of day to day life, from whaling to a staff meeting in Anchorage.
Kameron and I were talking about the balance between chaos and order yesterday as we were exploring how we could teach the four-fold practice together and he shared with me a term that Yupik elders had taught him about dynamic balance: Yuluni pitallkeqtuglluni, which translates roughly as “just enough to live a good life.” It refers to the amount of connection that we need in a gathering or community, or the amount of structure in a meeting or a process to bring about a feeling of family (tuglluni means family) but allows for agency. We talked about “balance” which in the Yupik world is not a stable equilibrium between two competing forces, but a dynamic, constantly sensed state that is reposnsive to the context.
Perhaps this will be come a theme of our work in the next three days, but it’s a helpful way to contextualize the practices of the Art of Hosting: presence, participation, hosting and co-creating. Each of these are context dependant, which is why they are practices. Bringing just enough to live a good life is the art that implicit in the name of the practice “Art of Hosting.” While many folks seek a stable, always applicable tool or way of doing things, the art of hosting or participatory leadership is about the application of a world of practice to an ever changing context. In being sensitive to what is needed, and how to do it depending on conditions, we constantly create the right balancing moment between too much and not enough, just enough to live a good life.
We start in 2 hours.
Sitting here in the Seattle airport in the midst of a very long travel delay. We are working in Anchorage this week and flights there have been delayed and cancelled all day due to a massive windstorm. Our flight was due to leave an hour ago. We have another six hours to wait. All good. Travelling in northern North America in the winter requires endless patience and the occasional bout of creative travel planning. There is nothing better than threading the needle to get the last seat. It’s a much better way to channel energy than getting angry at the weather.
So I was reflecting on some old blog posts and found this one from 2015 where I talked about my working tech set up. Back then it was kind of popular to share things like that on blogs. Ten years later it’s interesting to see what has changed.
Infrastructure
I have a full office now. Since our son moved out in 2020 I have occupied a downstairs bedroom which affords me a proper office chair, an adjustable desk and a space for two guitars, a digital keyboard and books. I need more shelves, as the piles accruing in the corners of the room are starting to give me anxiety.
Our internet comes through Rogers now. Since 2015 when I last documented this set up, Rogers has run fibre to our island, and bought out Shaw. Internet is reliable and high speed and we’ve had very very few problems.
When I’m home on Bowen Island, I often walk the 1.5 kms to village and work in our library which has just installed a booth for taking calls. It’s a good place to write and a fantastic community asset. I think public libraries are as important as schools, water systems, and ferries.
Hardware
My workhorse these days is a 2021 iMac. It’s the first desktops I’ve had in a while, but once the pandemic changed life forever, my MacBook Air could handle the load of a lot of video and the screen wasn’t big enough to host online. The desktop is starting to show its age, and I probably need to give it a good cleaning. My old MacBook Air failed me in 2022 and I replaced it with a new one then.
An Epson printer is mostly used for printing music these days. Almost everything I do is done digitally now.
I have a iPhone 13 which keeps me connected. I’v started weaning myself off it, so it currently sits in another room from where I am most of the time. Even still, it’s remarkable how much I use it. I have some social media presence and I read various newspapers and news sites most mornings. I am studying Italian on Duolingo and I’m a crossword fan. Tripit is how I keep my travel schedule straight.
I have a Kindle which holds documents and ebooks that I find on BookBub, as well as free ebooks from Project Gutenberg and elsewhere. I mostly read actual books, but the Kindle is still always in my backpack.
Basic apps
These days almost everything I do now is in the cloud, using apps and web tools. It’s pretty remarkable. Caitlin just bought a new laptop and it was so easy to open it up, download a few apps and get back to work. Back in the old days, doing migrations was a day of work. Instead of buying software outright these days, we have subscriptions.
Over the past few years I have migrated most stuff to the Apple Universe. If Apple has the app for it, I’m using it. Once Safari acquired the capability to to Voice Typing on Google Docs, that sealed the deal for me. Chrome is on board but very rarely used. For Google I do use Gmail still as my primary email address, but I read all my mail through Mac Mail and the Calendar is kept in iCal. The only reason to enter the Google verse is to set calendar dates and attach a Zoom meeting automatically. I wish Apple would bring that functionality to iCal.
I use Apple Maps for navigating because it has better integration with my calendar, but Google Maps tends to be a better option because I assume it has more data points, so the real time updates are useful. Also for driving in unfamiliar places, Google Maps tends to give clearer instructions with lane selection and the names of streets more constant than in Apple Maps.
Most of my writing is done on Google Docs. Especially since the pandemic, this just remains the easiest and most universal platform for collaboration. I still use Evernote for capturing and clipping web sites, articles and papers. It’s my digital library. However over the years it has become clunkier and clunkier and so I have moved my notes and reminders back to the Apple apps. It makes them easier to share with my partner too.
We use Zoom for video meetings and workshops, and Padlet and Miro as our white board collaborative spaces. Since Google Jamboards were discontinued, we’ve subscribed to Padlet and find their Sandbox app to be a very good substitute, and slightly more powerful. We are using Kajabi to manage our courses. I use NarraFirma for Participatory Narrative Inquiry projects and run a separate NarraFirma server for that work.
Apple Music is my preferred streaming platform. Not Spotify.
Web publishing and Social Media
If you are reading this, you will know that I still use WordPress as the engine for my blog. Folks seem to find posts here through Google searches, reposting to social media and subscription. I’ll do a separate post on my approach to blogging these days, but suffice to say I think that self publishing is probably more important than ever now. I keep an active set of blog feeds in NetNewsWire, which is my feed reader of choice these days.
I was a power Twitter user from near the beginning and build a decent following there. Musk’s take over ruined that as a useful app. The app has long ago been offloaded from my phone and my business and soccer accounts have both been made dormant. They will just sit there now.
Likewise I have gone off Facebook for almost everything but republishing blog post links and a few specific connections to communities I am a part of. I hate Facebook, and as Zuckerberg has firmly entrenched his presence in the gallery of fascist oligarch propagandists, it’s losing its usefulness daily. I despair how many continue people use that site as their entire experience of the web.
I use LinkedIn to share posts and find interesting stuff. It’s tough though. It’s like walking through the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul trying to make friends and have a good conversation while people constantly try to sell you stuff you don’t need.
So these days I have pledge not to invest in building a social network on any platform owned by a billionaire who can just change his mind on a whim. To that end you will find me on Mastodon, and specifically on the mstdn.ca instance which is large and inclusive and has a values statement I can support. On Mastodon I share links and engage in some conversation. I think of it as a true microblogging platform, so it compliments this one. Every month I publish a summary of links I find there on this blog.
My Mastodon feed is bridged to Bluesky so if you can follow me there if you like, if you prefer that app. I don’t engage in conversation there on that account.
You will find me active on Bluesky at my account devoted to my participation in the world of Canadian soccer.
Social Infrastructure
Since that post in 2015, things have changed and things have stayed the same. Still singing in local choirs, one based in our United Church and the other, Carmena Bowena, an a cappella Renaissance choir that performs locally. Things have changed since the pandemic, but village life is still the same. I feel less close to friends these days. I’m not drinking as much, so I don;t show up at the Pub, but I’m not averse to a spontaneous hour long cup of coffee, like I did yesterday.
My volunteer commitments have mostly wound down for now with the exception of TSS Rovers, the semi-professional soccer team that I co-own with 450 other shareholders. We are Canada’s first supporter owned soccer team and play in the Men’s and Women’s divisions in League 1 BC, basically the second tier of Canadian soccer. I’m a member of the leadership group for the Supporter’s Trust which represents the voice of the community owners on the Board. I absolutely love being a part of this.