Caving (not the spelunking kind). Yesterday, a day before our country commemorated Canada Day, Canada scrapped the implementation of the Digital Service Act intended to tax large tech companies on their commercial transactions. Today, while the country celebrates its “sovereignty” I’m mulling over the fact that we allowed another country’s irrational leader to dictate what domestic legislation we would enact or not. Blech. (Yes I shared a YouTube link, which made Google money).
The time for Liberatory Leadership is always now, so perhaps your own Canada Day activities might involve reflection on how we can help ourselves and others become more free. Non Profit Quarterly is publishing an ongoing series on Liberatory Leadership which is thought-provoking and practical and inspiring to me. At it’s best, Canada is as aspiration to explore what might be possible in spaces of relationship, peace, friendship and reciprocity. We need tools for that. All kinds.
Darn Folksinger. Bob Snider is out of retirement for a show at the Mariposa Folk Festival, and that’s the most Canadian thing I can leave you with today. If you lived in or around Toronto in the 1980s, and you followed a particular niche of what is probably now called “alt-folk” you knew Snider. He is the folksiest of folk poets, incisive with his insights and an absolute master of the word. Darn Folksinger is a pretty good song. So is What and Idiot He Is which was my favourite song of his back in the day and which might bring us full circle to the first item in this post. You can decide who I’m talking about, but it’s not just one person.
We’re not too nuanced at appreciating sentience. Matt Webb traces our history of appreciating other-than-human sentience, with respect to aliens, AI and animism, and concludes with this thought: “Even if we don’t agree on chicken sentience, what about people who work in sweatshops, and they are definitely sentient, and they don’t get access to the same “robot rights” currently being debated for future sentient AIs.” Matt’s blog is a must read.
Perhaps I’m a process animist, but I do strongly feel the presence of a “life unto itself” when a good dialogic container emerges and relationally crackles within. Adrian Sager, who writes more than anyone on bring life to traditional conferences, has a post today which begins with a quote that is attributed to Eduardo Galeano, but cannot be confirmed to be his: ““We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content.” I think it is a journey in the art and practice of facilitation that facilitators do fall deeply in love with their structures and processes at first. The tool is the thing, or as Franz Kafka once wrote (No. 16 in The Zurau Aphorisms) “A cage went in search of a bird.” There is a fetishization of structure, as Sager points out, and a belief that just the right structure will create the conditions for life. I’ll write more about this in an expanded post, but suffice to say, that ain’t quite it.
When we take this relationship between life and structures (yang and yin) into the spiritual world, we can see that the struggle for spiritual liberation is to tussle between the structure that has emerged to hold spirit, and the spirit’s desire to be free, but also held. A dynamic interdependence exists. This is a central tenet of Taoism of course, and also shows up in the liberation theology of Judaism and Christianity. It’s chaordic turtles all the way down.
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An interesting review about a novel about fact-checking, (Austen Kelly’s The Fact Checker), a story which surely can only end in nihilism. It looks to be a book about books and the truth about truth, and I like those kinds of stories. These are the kinds of things that literary fiction is for.
Singin’ in the Rain is also about truth. Friday night our local Bowen Island film society showed a program of films featuring Singin’ in the Rain on the big screen. I have never seen the whole film, and for sure the context of the times gave it a profound spin for me. Fundamentally the film is about major changes in the technology world from the silent movie era to the talkie era. It’s a parable of the two loops. And it was made in an era when television was coming into being. The technology revealed the truth of people’s deficiencies – Lina can’t sing or speak, but her looks alone carried her through the silent film era. When she railed against the changes and tried to coerce the studio into bending to her will, they exposed her, embarrassed her and cast her aside. She did everything expected of her. The world moved on, and kicked her to the curb.
Lina is cast as a villain, but in these days when artists are exploited and deposited in the scrap heap of history, her character arc is tragic. I found myself rooting for her at the end, despite her narcissism and the fact that she “complained to the manager” and got Kathy fired from her only acting job. The world is full of jerks, but when the wheels of moneyed power turn, there is no cruelty worse than simply being treated as disposable.
An ochre sea star on the beach at Mannion Bay/Kwilakwm, on Bowen Island during one of this week’s midsummer low tides.
Most days I read through posts from my blogroll and other places on the web and publish a short set of links and notes. At the end of each week I roll these up into a post which is also sent to everyone who subscribes by email.
Here are this week’s notes. Click the links below to discover interesting places to explore:
- June 21: sounds of longing. One trans person’s experience in the USA and a beautiful new album of Persian music.
- June 23: black holes. Are we living in a real black hole? And what is the price of the cognitive black holes we live in?
- June 24: the long and the short of it. Seems people are enjoying longer cultural experiences, but having shorter collaborative ones.
- June 25: supporting creation. Freeing up time for play and creativity in life, music and sport.
- June 26: the deep history of meaningful work. Some quotes for inspiration and some long essays on how we evolved civilization from our big goofy brains.
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Thinking about how to think about work. Quotes are pithy, but that’s why they can hold such power. There are 77 to choose from here. You might find one that helps you get through the day today. Or perhaps you’re better off making your own list of instructions and inspiration like James Reeves did, which inspired Peter Rukavina to turn them into a little book. Gifts of wisdom and advice made beautiful by the giving.
Don’t squander the gifts. It took us 13.5 billion years to evolve these brains we have, 60,000 years of living with them in their current state and 10,000 years of organizing ourselves in way that requires us to list quotes and instructions to ourselves to remember what really matters.
History is much more complex than that of course, and this amazing article about “the gossip trap,” which is also about the myriad ways that our species has chosen to organize, or not organize itself, reminds me that I still haven’t read The Dawn of Everything. Anyone familiar with my idea that almost everyone in a complex systems has access to the constraints of connection and exchange will probably anticipate how delighted I am by the retrospective coherence I find in this piece!