Making Technology Serve Democracy

October 2, 2024 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I got my mail-in ballot for November’s U.S. election yesterday, and plan to vote tomorrow.

For the first time in my voting life, I’ve been following little of the on-going campaign–beyond reviewing the Harris economic plan (detail that has probably come too late for most voters in a truncated election cycle) and wondering about her objectives for the war in Ukraine (is she for setting Russia back or accommodating it?) Stifiling my interest further has been the ominous sense that whomever actually wins in a few weeks, the result will be so close that we’ll still be fighting about it in the courts and on our streets come January.

So instead of wallowing in here-we-go-again or what these divisions might mean for America’s commitments to the rest of the world, I’ve been diving into the work of two visionaries and some of their proposed solutions to the current grid-locks besetting democracy—E. Glen Weyl, an economist at Microsoft Research, and Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Technology Minister. For some years now, Weyl and Tang have been evangelists in the quest to use our digital technologies to bolster the ways that we sort through our differences and improve our governance in democratic countries.

I start by agreeing with Weyl, Tang and many many others that innovations like social networks and AI (along with blockchains and digital currencies) have largely been deployed to maximize private profits instead of to benefit the wider public over the past 25 years. The conclusion seems inescapable that these skewed priorities have contributed to our feelings of helplessness about what-comes-next and the shape of our futures more generally.

But with Weyl and Tang, I also believe that we can use these same digital innovations in ways that promote the kinds of conversations and consensus-building that are necessary for functioning democracies. Indeed, doing so has already enabled a few fortunate governments (like Taiwan’s) to manage crises like the coronavirus pandemic with greater unity and far, far fewer “casualties” than almost anywhere else on earth.

Tang was instrumental in Taiwan’s effort, and in light of it she joined with Weyl and more than 100 other on-line collaborators to co-author a primer on how our digital technologies can be deployed to support democratic processes and reduce our political divides. It’s called “Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy.”

My aim today is to describe some of Plurality’s proposals and (via several links) point you in the direction of the wider discussion that these visionaries are hosting.

Weighing possible solutions seems a healthier way to spend one’s time these days than dreading the slow-motion trainwreck that seems likely to recur in America over the next few months.

Before the preview of coming attractions that Audrey Tang contributed to in Taiwan, a few words that might be necessary about the Taiwanese.

Westerners sometimes harbor the view that the Taiwanese people are prone to harmony than divisiveness—or what Tang laughingly characterizes “as acting like Confusius robots”—but in reality they govern themselves very differently. The primary political and social divides in Taiwan are over whether to accommodate China’s various threats to its sovereignty or to resist them. But there are myriad, leser divides that beset this restlessly modern nation, and one or more of them could easily have produced a horrible result when its population was challenged by the coronavirus a few years back.

Instead, Taiwan already had some meaningful experience using digital access to provide greater citizen engagement in how the nation solved problems and responded to threats. According to an article in Time called “Taiwan’s Digital Minister Has an Ambitious Plan to Align Tech With Democracy,” after the country’s martial law era that ended in 1987, it’s citizens embraced computers and internet access enthusiastically because they enabled them to publish books without state sponsorship and communicate without state surveillance. According to Time, it was feelings of liberation assisted by technology that also fueled:

the rise of the g0v (gov zero) movement in 2012, led by civic hackers who wanted to increase transparency and participation in public affairs. The movement started by creating superior versions of government websites, which they hosted on .g0v.tw domains instead of the official .gov.tw, often attracting more traffic than their governmental counterparts. The g0v movement has since launched more initiatives that seek to use technology to empower Taiwanese citizens, such as vTaiwan, a platform that facilitates public discussion and collaborative policymaking between citizens, experts, and government officials.

For example, these gov-zero improvements proved instrumental when Uber launched its car service in Taiwan, sparking a powerful backlash. Tang and Weyl recalled what transpired next in a post that announced their Plurality concept:

When Uber arrived in Taiwan, its presence was divisive, just as it has been in much of the world. But rather than social media pouring fuel on this flame, the vTaiwan platform that one of us developed as a minister there empowered citizens opining on the issue to have a thoughtful, deliberative conversation with thousands of participants on how ride hailing should be regulated. This technology harnessed statistical tools often associated with AI to cluster opinion, allowing every participant to quickly digest the clearest articulation of the viewpoints of their fellow citizens and contribute back their own thoughts. The views that drew support from across the initial lines of division rose to the top, forming a rough consensus that ensured the benefits of the new ride hailing tools while also protecting workers’ rights and was implemented by the government.

In 2016, when Taiwan faced mass protests over an impending trade deal with China, Tang again played an instrumental role during protestors’ 24-day occupation of the country’s legislative chamber by enabling the protestors to peacefully boardcast their views on digital platforms and avoid a longer crisis. Shortly thereafter, Tang was appointed Taiwan’s digital minister without portfolio, in 2022 she became her country’s first Minister for Digital Affairs, and last year was appointed board chair of Taiwan’s Institute of Cyber Security.

The formal appointments in 2022 and 2023 followed Tang’s assistance throughout the pandemic using “pro-social” instead of “anti-social” digital media, which she described in an interview on the TED talks platform as being “fast, fair and fun” approaches to what could easily have become a country-wide calamity.

When word first came from China about a “SARs like” viral outbreak in Wuhan, Taiwan quickly implemented quarantine protocols at all points of entry, while simultaneously insuring that there were enough “quarantine hotels” to stop the spread before it could start.

Fairness via digital access and rapid dissemination of information, about say medical mask availability, was also critical to maintaining calm during those early pandemic months. As Tang recounted:

[N]ot only do we publish the stock level of masks of all pharmacies, 6,000 of them, we publish it every 30 seconds. That’s why our civic hackers, our civil engineers in the digital space, built more than 100 tools that enable[d] people to view a map, or people with blindness who talk to chat bots, voice assistants, all of them can get the same inclusive access to information about which pharmacies near them still have masks.

Taiwan’s rapid challenges to unfounded rumors before they had the chance to spread included another key element: the effectiveness of viral humor as a antidote to panic buying and similar anxiety-driven behaviors. Here’s Tang again:

[I]n Taiwan, our counter-disinformation strategy is very simple. It’s called ‘humor over rumor.’ So when there was a panic buying of [toilet] tissue paper, for example, there was a rumor [circulating] that says, ‘Oh, we’re ramping up mass production, masks use the same material as [toilet] tissue papers, and so we’ll run out of [toilet] tissue soon.’ [So to counter the rumor] our premier digitally shared a very memetic picture that I simply have to share with you. He shows his bottom, wiggling it a little bit, and then the large print says ‘Each of us only have one pair of buttocks.’ And of course, the serious table [that he also shared] shows that tissue paper came from South American materials, and medical masks come from domestic materials, and there’s no way that ramping up production of one will hurt the production of the other. And so that went absolutely viral. And because of that, the panic buying died down in a day or two. And finally, we found out the person who spread the rumor in the first place was the tissue paper reseller.

Through the use of digital tactics and strategies like these, Taiwan got fairly deep into the pandemic before it reported a single case of the coronavirus among the locals. In many ways that was because, as Time reported, “Taiwan leads the world in digital democracy.” It not only shares vital information with its citizens in a timely and engaging format, it consistently provides them with digital access to their government so that issues of public interest can be debated and often resolved.

Notwithstanding this momentum, in Plurality Tang and Weyl foresee even greater public benefit when democratic processes are more closely aligned with technology.

Some of these pro-social benefits involve counteracting the most anti-social effects of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchains and crypto-currencies when they introduce disruptions into the democratic conversation. As reported in the Time article:

Plurality argues that each of these [technological innovations] are undermining democracy in different, but equally pernicious ways. AI systems facilitate top-down control, empowering authoritarian regimes and unresponsive technocratic governments in ostensibly democratic countries. Meanwhile, blockchain-based technologies [like crypto-currencies] atomize societies and accelerate financial capitalism, eroding democracy from below. As Peter Thiel, billionaire entrepreneur and investor, put it in 2018: ‘crypto is libertarian and AI is communist.”

To elaborate on the substance of these threats a bit, it’s clear that AI’s ability to muster and re-direct vast amounts of information gives governments with anti-democratic tendencies the ability to manage (if not control) their citizens. Moreover, it is block-chains’ and crypto currencies’ ability to shelter transactions (if not entire markets) from regulatory control that can undermine a country’s ability to “conduct business” in ways that serve the interests of its citizens. Tang and Weyl argue that more robust digital democracies can help to resist these “pernicious” effects in myriad ways.

But these are just the defensive advantages; there is also a better world that they’d like to build with digital building blocks. As Tang and Weyl described it while announcing the Plurality concept and book, what has already been accomplished in Taiwan’s digital democracy:

just scratches the surface of how technology can be designed to perceive, honor and bridge social differences for collaboration. New voting and financing rules emerging from the Ethereum ecosystem [which also relies on blockchain technology] can reshape how we govern the public and private sectors; immersive virtual worlds are empowering empathetic connections that cross lines of social exclusion; social networks and newsfeeds can be engineered to build social cohesion and shared sensemaking, rather than driving us apart.

From where I sit this morning, I can stew in the bile and trepidation of America’s current election cycle or try to conjure a better future beyond the digital mosh pit of Twitter/X and much that appears on our news screens every day.

Tang, Weyl and Plurality are providing a platform for reinvigorating a democracy like ours by aligning it with digital technologies that can be put to much better uses than we’ve managed until now.

Tomorrow, I’d rather be voting for a robust future that our tech could enable if only we wanted it to.

+ + +

In line with two recommendations in Plurality, previous postings here have considered how community theater and a virtual reality headset can foster both engagement and empathy around issues like policing and homelessness (“We Find Where We Stand in the Space Between Differing Perspectives”) and how to guide the future of AI with a public-spirited “moon-shot mentality” instead of leaving its roll-out (as we seem to be doing today) to “free market forces” (“Will We Domesticate AI in Time?”).

This post was adapted from my September 29, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Our Work Includes Repairing the Commons of Public Life

June 21, 2024 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’m somewhere between anger and resignation, sadness and fear these days because the quality of almost every “public good” that we share as Americans seems to be declining in quality faster than the public’s servants can process erosions like these, let alone address them.

By the public’s servants, I’m not talking about government workers whose jobs are to maintain and improve our communities. No, it’s the members of our communities—the folks that JFK had in mind when he observed: “Ask not what your country can do for you.” The rest of us also have personal stakes in the quality of the streets we walk on, the governments we elect, the markets that build our wealth, and the political debates we have with one another. These days, fewer of us seem to be bearing those responsibilities, and those who continue to do so can easilly despair given the extent of the challenge.

No bureaucracy will ever be large enough to do the work of a public that no longer feels these stakes or finds them too daunting to bear.

There are many examples of course, but I’m thinking this morning about the the kinds of quality-of-life “crimes” that riled a New York City Police Commissioner 25 years ago, and that persist to this day just outside my door.

For almost my entire life, I’ve lived, worked or gone to school a few blocks from Route One. Both proximity and congestion on this Maine-to-Florida roadway always had me thinking about the public (and semi-public) spaces that we’ve carved out for ourselves along the expanse of it. It’s also let me observe the sad path from neglect to disrepair of these shared spaces, with self-interest (and its debris) trumping the public’s interest at nearly every turn.

For instance, almost daily I see its casual evidence on the grassy strip between sidewalk and street in front of my house.

I live one-house-down from a small intersection and traffic light, which has come to mean a daily tide of discarded water bottles, fast food wrappers, and similar rubbish washing up on my strip of green from the stream of passers-by. Since my neighbor at the corner rarely picks up her yard, the downward sweep of traffic also brings much of “her” litter my way before too long. During the pandemic, when I complained on this page about regularly picking up discarded underwear, used Kleenex and rubber gloves, one of you gifted me with a trash-picker so I no longer had to think about touching it.

My much-maligned strip is a semi-public space. The City owns the trees, the energy and communications providers their rights-of-way. Anyone is free to stop or park along the curb. For all that public access, I get to mow the grass and maintain “our curb appeal.” Driver and pedestrian disregard has always been an irritant, but over the past 20 years the mess that’s left in their wake has become a daily chore.

Jedediah Purdy foresaw these quality-of-life and broader erosions of our public goods in 1999’s For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today. In the course of his provocative book, he describes what he means as “the commons of public life” from two different angles. On the one hand, it consists of:

“the things that affect us all, and [that] we can only preserve or neglect together. In the end, they cannot be had alone.”

But at the same time, it is:

[a] good deal of what we value most, whether openly or in silence, meaning…the things we cannot avoid having in common, and whose maintenance or neglect implicates us all.

The commons is a roadside or park. It is a communications medium like the internet or the evening news. In a democracy like ours, it is the gears of governance and decision-making. We hold such things “in common,” Purdy argues, whether we acknowledge our ownership and our responsibilities as owners or not.

He also mentions what ecologist Garrett Hardin once called “the tragedy of the commons” or the consequence of the public’s exercising freedoms that come with common ownership but not their responsibilities.

According to Hardin, self-interest often causes those with access to the commons to take as much as possible, such as overgrazing or clearing forests, before others [who are similarly motivated] can do the same…. What is taken is not renewed, and soon the commons are exhausted….[But] the laws of self-interest that move Hardin’s analysis are not laws at all. Instead, the tragedy is a cultural and ethical event. It takes place only when we join self-interest with mutual indifference.

How do we rise to our common duties? Purdy’s response: “Just by living in the world, just by caring for things, we take on a responsibility for the world’s well-being.”

Will our care be enough to over-come the tragedies that degrade it? His response is much the same: “The question is not whether to hope” that our common things will be maintained, repaired or even improved “but whether to acknowledge our hope, to make it our own.”

_{The common areas around trees on the Upper East Side of New York and somewhat less grandly (but more accessibly) a few streets over in my neighborhood.}

Where the commons are concerned, things always come to a head when there is not enough of a common good that people prize. Such is the case with “green space” in cities like New York or Philadelphia, and for my interest in a recent Times article called “In the Fight Over N.Y.C. Sidewalks, Tree Beds Are the Smallest Frontier.” (Here’s a paywall-free link.) When the surface-level green on a street is as small as its tree-beds, who gets to decide how this shared and common space gets used?

Street trees provide shade in the summer and lower ambient temperatures while producing oxygen and absorbing CO2 year-round, so the Parks Department (which has jurisdiction for maintaining New York City’s) has been enlarging tree beds to allow roots to spread and to drink in more storm water. Formerly no more than 5 by 5 feet in size, they now can be 5 or even 10 feet longer. That means these tree-centered areas have been expanding. As of today:

Over 660,000 trees line the streets of New York City, and the beds around them take up more than 400 acres, according to a city estimate. While many people just walk by the rectangular openings in the sidewalk from which the trees spring — or, worse, use the spaces as trash cans— others lay claim, unofficially, to these pocket-size patches of land for their own uses.

“As the weather warms, these caretakers swing into action.

“They plant flowers, post signs to ward off dog owners, and fashion fences from broomsticks, linoleum tiles and old skateboards. Some create mini memorials to departed loved ones.

“It all makes sense. In a concrete jungle where few residents have yards, the tiny parcels offer New Yorkers a rare chance to dig into the soil, connect with nature and make something beautiful grow.

Moreover, weekend gardeners (and their admirers) aren’t to only ones who want to benefit from these common spaces. Tree advocates argue that barriers about tree beds block rain from flowing off the sidewalk and reaching the tree’s roots, while placing too much soil in a concrete or brick “container” around a tree’s trunk can cause the bark to rot and lead to disease.

Not surprisingly, dog owners have their own perspectives. The Times article mentions that a local dog owner ripped out a picket fence that had been erected around a tree bed “to make it easier for his dog to do its business,” noting (with some satisfaction) that he was “hauled into court” shortly thereafter. The writer also observes how “[p]ooch pee and poop, it must be said, can harm plants, not to mention create hazards for those who work the soil.”

But having spent time with a dog in New York, I was often at a loss while searching for the necessary bare (though fragrant) ground that Rudy (at the time) or other City dogs would find appealing during walks. Maintenance and improvement of common areas amidst the concrete could also dictate tree-free but open stretches that dog owners (in turn) might maintain, including the relatively-modest provision of poop bags to all comers, a can to dispose of the waste, and an arrangement with the Parks Department to empty them regularly.

When users become owners–transforming the hope that these common places will be maintained and repaired into their hope–it’s possible for competing needs to be accommodated, for the beneficial sharing of common resources to become a reality, and for communities to strengthen.

_{Wild flowers that I noticed somebody had planted in a West Philadelphia median strip, maybe as their own expression of hope for this public space.}

As I write this post, I notice that today’s newspaper includes two more stories where public neglect and private self-interest have been sullying—more than any dog could—other features of the American commons. One story was about a cheating scandal affecting a Little League baseball team in suburban Washington D.C. where the player’s prominent and powerful parents may have had more of an incentive to see their kids win than was good for anyone concerned.

Another story involves the misuse of America’s financial markets to raise billions of dollars for a politically-connected company with little track record, deep losses and principals who have utilized the public stock offering process unsuccessfully before. Marketing this so-called “meme stock” seeks profit with no fundamentals and, while technically legal, makes a mockery out of performance-based attempts to secure public financing though stock offerings on a national exchange. At a time when the U.S. economy’s success is the envy of the world, its guardians (like my bosses at the SEC) should be far more aggressive than they’ve been in deterring questionable use of the public-offering process.

Neither of these stories recounts “somebody else’s problems.” Little League baseball and the nation’s stock markets—along with the hopes that we invest in them—belong to us all.

Unfortunately, instead of re-claiming this hope too many of us (including me) fall into resignation and withdrawal from public life because the challenges facing the commons I benefit from too can feel overwhelming.

The antidote is reclaiming our ownership over the parts of our public lives that are most important to us, perhaps starting with the most proximate ones. If it’s trash between the sidewalk and street in front of your house, then clean it up as part of your gratitude for living in a beautiful neighborhood that you hope will remain beautiful, and stop grousing about it. (There may also comfort in the fact that clean sidewalks invite less future trash than already littered ones.)

Is it the use of tree-beds on City streets? The quality of the conversations on social media? Opposing bias and propaganda in the local news. Whatever it is, we can put our stakes down and clarify (at least to ourselves) why we’ve done so in this valued part of our public lives.

It could transform our dread about an impoverished future into something that includes (in our actions) a small engine of hope about the repairs we’ve begun.

+ + +

On a related note, I briefly profiled an excellent New Yorker essay called “The Theft of the Commons” in an earlier post. Among other things, its arguments have implications for currently unclaimed parts of the oceans, the Arctic and Antarctic, and nearly every aspect of outer space.

This post was adapted from my March 24, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The 2024 Super Bowl Ads Totally Missed America

February 27, 2024 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

One of the conclusions that might be drawn from last week’s post is that Americans aren’t nearly as generous as they used to be. Why? Because we’re no longer able to muster “a celebrity soup” of sponsors behind well-meaning causes like “famine relief in the horn of Africa.”

These days, if the recent Super-Bowl ads are any indication, we’d rather deploy the likes of Beyonce and Jennifer Lopez to sell stuff like Verizon plans, Dunkin’ Donuts (and themselves, of course)—while we’re presumably basking in the stun-guns of their celebrity. I suppose the theory is that we’ll feel better about ourselves eating a donut because a goddess like J-Lo eats them too. (Yeah, right) But since a minority of viewers are susceptible to delusions like this, they keep serving them up to the rest of us.

“Viewer identification” with products like these should be making the Super Bowl the most powerful sales vehicles of the year. But beyond the faux “feel like a celebrity too” experience, shouldn’t marketing success depend on how many of us are actually buying more donuts or wireless plans because of them? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this year’s Super-Bowl ads totally failed to boost consumption if “more” was actually their mission.

But it might have been otherwise if advertisers had plugged into the far deeper currents that are running through Americans these days.

In this country I remember when there were social institutions (other than the National Football League) competing for our allegiance and attention.

But we already know that fewer of us are going to churches and other houses of worship every weekend. And beyond the social justice warriors and conspiracy theorists, the vast political middle no longer affiliates very strongly with either political party, whatever the draw of a marquee huckster and his supposed foil. Local organizations formed around shared work, heritage or region are struggling for members when they’re surviving at all. On the other hand, American sports—which always appealed to some—have gained near-monopoly status when it comes to belonging to something bigger and (so we’re told) more important than ourselves. That means an event like the Super Bowl becomes a kind of national ritual with its own priests, altars and a stadium full of true believers that get trotted out for us to share in on an annual basis.

These days when considering the faces that we use in public, it looks like a lot of Americans might be fans before we’re anything else. And if your team happens to melt-down after early signs of greatness (like my team in Philly did this year) well, then our fandom easily shifts to, say, the incumbent Super Bowl champions or this game’s underdogs, as well as to the famous faces that dot the stands, the half-time spectacle, and the ads that hold us captive in our seats for 3+ hours.

With 120 million pairs of eyes glued to their Super Bowl screens on February 11, it’s fairly easy to make the case that National League football (and its Big Game in particular) provides the town square or national house of worship where the greatest share of Americans gather during the fall and winter months, culminating in a kind of High Holy Day when February finally rolls around.

So for the marketers—convincing their clients to pay $7m for every half-minute of product promotion—the ads themselves provide a kind of “read” or “diagnosis” about Who (exactly) the ad creators Think We Are these days, and therefore, How Best to Reach Into Our Hearts as well as Our Wallets before we’re on to the next riviting visual.

Sadly this year, neither the viewer diagnosis nor the sad parade of ads that it spawned hit their intended mark.

_{Ben Affleck crashes Jennifer Lopez’s party, but only Matt Damon seems embarrassed by the ridiculousness in what, we’ve been told, was one of the Super Bowl’s most beloved ads.}

In an op-ed she wrote around 2023’s Super Bowl, WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan described her view of its advertisements this way.

I have been watching these ads closely for 40 years, for fun but also to hear the inner dialogue, the sound of a nation talking to itself as it sells things to itself, which, in America, has always been about as intimate an act as there is. [emphasis mine]

Indeed, even more so than sex.

Noonan knows this because she’s been a kind of marketer herself, first deploying her skill with words and their particular heartstrings to build affiliation with her former boss (the already kindly-sounding Ronald Reagan) when he was president and she was one of his speech-writers.

What the marketer in Noonan saw last year was a Super Bowl audience made up mostly of Americans still suffering a pandemic hang-over, experiencing new assaults from inflation at the grocery store and gas pump, and increasingly worried about the arc of their day-to-day lives. So why, she wondered, were the ads she’d just seen “jittery, rather cruel and cynical—Super Bowl ads for a nation of losers.” She thought “the ad makers must have asked themselves: What does America want? And answered: dumb, loud, depthless and broken.”

It wasn’t at all the audience she was seeing last year, and certainly not what she thought any of us needed as a sales pitch. Noonan began, rather grandly, with how she knows that the stupid and cynical approach “for an intimate act” like an ad pitch doesn’t work:

I’m here to say I’ve met America and that’s not what they want. What they want is ‘Help me live, help my kids live, help me feel something true.’

To those who made the commercials and pay for them: Advertising is a great and honorable craft, at its best even an art. But you can’t do it well if you have no regard for and barely even know your audience, which is your country. Why don’t you go into another line of work? Why not go to a nonprofit and dislike America from there? Or go into politics. [again, the italics are mine]

That’s not to say that some percentage of Super Bowl viewers aren’t dumb, loud, depthless” and maybe even “broken;” they surely are. But Noonan’s sympathies were going towards that “silent majority” that no one ever seems to be listening to or trying to meet where they live—the folks that Reagan (and even Bill Clinton after him) kept zeroing in on with their political-animal instincts.

We were worried last year, in need of assurance and a genuine sense of solidarity with our fellow Americans instead of some juvenile, celebrity-driven kind.

So did this year’s Super Bowl ad creators similarly miss the audience mark?

Yes they did: and even more spectacularly than they did last year.

_{Beyonce, trying to be inoffensive as Bar-bey, in her self-promoting ad for Verizon.}

According to a quick post-mortem I saw called “Super Bowl Ads Launch Celebrity Blitz with Goal of Playing It Safe”:

The Super Bowl ads on Sunday variously appealed to America’s sweet tooth, pleaded for tolerance and sought redemption for Bud Light [after its transgender promoter led to a customer boycott]. But most shared one thing: marketers’ even deeper-than-usual desire to avoid offending anyone.

It certainly seemed true given “the safety” of the humor in last weekend’s ads. According to a marketing prof at the Kellogg School of Management, nobody was “pushing the edge of these jokes” or “hinting at anything remotely controversial.”

A related story about the Uber Eats’ ad we eventually saw demonstrated how thin-skinned (as well as simple-minded) the advertising industry thinks we’ve become. This food delivery service was apparently:

chastised for a joke in its commercial, which it [had] released online before the game, that showed a man asking, ‘There’s peanuts in peanut butter?’ while breaking out in an allergic reaction. [Well] food allergy advocacy group FARE criticized the ad, saying it featured ‘inappropriate use of humor depicting food allergies.’ FARE said Uber Easts had told the group that the commercial would run without the allergy reference [and] by Sunday, Uber Easts had posted a version of its ad on YouTube with the joke removed.

What Uber Eats attempted wasn’t even that funny. But all of the ad humor in the game was reduced to the kindergarten level, where everyone who is at least 4 years old can get the jokes and nobody would go home crying to mom or dad over what they’d just heard or seen.

The same pablum and hyper-sensitivity also seemed evident in the mild suggestions of the “He Gets Us” campaign, making its second Super-Bowl appearance this year. Over pictures of individuals “who looked different than us(?)” it encouraged viewers to love their neighbors as they say that Jesus once did. Asking “Why can’t we all be friends?” a couple of times between J-Lo and Beyonce certainly wasn’t worth their million dollar price tags when the aforementioned extremists are regularly at one another’s throats and the vast Middle-of-America is afraid of where all the gnashing of teeth, automatic weapons, and purported saviors on both ends of the political spectrum are leading them.

The 2024 Super Bowl ads treated us like we’re over-protected children who can’t handle any more dissonance or discomfort. So have Americans really exchanged “want-to-get-smarter” for “just-plain-stupid,” “resilient (in the face of challenges)” for “fragile (at the suggestion of anything unsettling”)?

Again, for that vast middle of America, I don’t think so. The Americans I know—and I’ve met some too—want to be approached like adults and to become stronger instead of weaker “in the face of it all.” By refusing to treat us the way that most of us want to be treated, the Super Bowl advertisers have (once again) failed to hear the TRUE sound of our nation “talking to itself” while “it sells things to itself,” which for those of us who’ve grown accustomed to it, “has always been about as intimate an act as there is” around here.

_{These days, we’re far more “rooted” than the advertisers ever imagined.}

Why aren’t today’s Super Bowl ads speaking to:

our spirit of enterprise (or our MacGiverish ability to be practical problem-solvers)?
our commitment to fairness on every playing field (instead of wanting to treat every player like they’re equal or the same or that we’d ever want them to be)?
our desire to win (as opposed to giving everyone who shows up to play a trophy)?
our capability for wonder and awe (not only before the jaw-dropping beauty of our country, but also given the brightness—instead of darkness—of the unknowable future that we’re building, even now)?

Instead these ads have become one stupid dog trick after another, although substituting our favorite celebrities for the dogs of yore, because anything more demanding than this might offend somebody’s sensibilities.

I’m reminded of a post I wrote in April of 2021 when the pandemic was already somewhat “long in the tooth” called Higher Winds Are Coming. It spoke to the kinds of reserves we’d be needing because the buffeting we’d been experiencing still wasn’t over. Today, almost 3 years later, we need some of the wisdom that I tried to summon there even more.

For example, I cited Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2012 book, tellingly called Antifragile, which he nearly summarized in 3 of his book’s best lines:

Trial and error is freedom.

Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.

I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.

I quoted Barry Lopez, a particular hero of mine, who asked us to remember the people that we used to be:

How much natural resilience and willingness to rely upon one another has our freedom, wealth and belief in progress allowed us to forget, but that we’ll need to remember if we’re to adapt and survive in this increasingly ‘throttled’ world?

And finally, I recalled Buddhist teacher Pima Chodron’s urging us to be more curious about the fears that make us so fragile—to bring these secret worries into the sun’s bright glare so we’re no longer as frightened by their shadowy unknowns. As I went on to explain:

With true hope, she says, there is always fear that whatever you long for won’t come to pass. Accepting that your hope is always bound up with your fear—so that you are as curious about your fear as you are about your hope—can liberate you from your own constraints.

These observations actually add-up to a pretty short list of things that are great and laudable and TRUE about most of us today:

Our spirit of enterprise, or how difficulty “wakes up” our genius.

Our commitment to a level playing field where every player has a fair chance to win.

Our capacity for wonder and even awe.

Remembering our natural resilience and our willingness to rely upon one another, maybe by consulting our personal and collective histories.

Being curious about our fears so they can never inhibit our hopes.

In a national event that claims to champion our competitive drive towards excellence, it seems natural and even necessary to further elevate The Big Game with marketing that appeals to each and every one of these capabilities, commitments and emotions.

And because they would speak not only to “who we are” but also to “the people that we want to be,” marketing to an audience that’s framed like that would sell a hell-of-a-lot more (of whatever it is that we’re selling) than the fragile and stupid ads that were on parade last weekend.

This post was adapted from my February 18, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Will We Domesticate AI in Time?

February 9, 2024 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As you know from holiday post-cards, I spent time recently with Emily and Joe in Salt Lake City. They were full, rich, activating days and I’m still sorting through the many gifts I received.

The immensity of the mountains in their corner of Utah was impossible to ignore, though I wasn’t there to ski them as much as to gaze-up in wonder at their snow-spattered crowns for the first time. Endless, low-level suburbs also extend to their foothills in every direction, and while everyone says “It’s beautiful here” they surely mean “the looking up” and not “the looking down.”

Throughout my visit, SLC’s sprawl was a reminder of how far our built-environments fall short of our natural ones in a freedom-loving America that disdains anyone’s guidance on what to build and where. Those who settled here have filled this impossibly majestic valley with an aimless, carmel-and-rosy low-rise jumble that from any elevation has a fog-topping of exhaust in the winter and (most likely) a mirage-y shimmer of vaporous particulates the rest of the year.

So much for Luke 12:48 (“To whom much has been given….”)

Why not extrapolations of the original frontier towns I wondered instead of this undulating wave of discount centers, strip malls, and low-slung industrial and residential parking lots that have taken them over in every direction?

I suppose they’re the tangible manifestation of resistance to governmental guidance (or really any kind of collective deliberation) on what we can or can’t, should or shouldn’t be doing when we create our homelands—leaving it to “the quick buck” instead of any consciously-developed, long-term vision to determine what surrounds us.

Unfortunately I fear that this same deference to freedom (or perhaps more aptly, to its “free-market forces”) may be just as inevitable when it comes to artificial intelligence (or AI). So I have to ask: Instead of making far far less than we could from AI’s similarly awesome possibilities, why not commit to harnessing (and then nurturing) this breathtaking technology so we can achieve the fullest measure of its human-serving potential?

Unfortunately, my wider days beneath a dazzle of mountain ranges showed me how impoverished this end game could also become.

_{Boris Eldagsen submitted this image, called “Pseudomnesia: The Electrician” to a recent, Sony world photography competition. When he won in the contest’s “creative open” category, he revealed that his image was AI-generated, going on to donate his prize money to charity. As Eldagsen said at the time: “Is the umbrella of photography large enough to invite AI images to enter—or would that be a mistake? With my refusal of the award, I hope to speed up this debate” about what is “real” and “acceptable” in the art world and what is not.}

The debate over that and similar questions should probably begin with a summary appreciation of AI’s nearly-miraculous as well as fearsomely-catastrophic possibilities. Both were given a preview in a short interview with the so-called “Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, on the 60 Minutes TV-newsmagazine a couple of months ago.

Looking a bit like Dobby from the Harry Potter films, Hinton’s sense of calm and perspective offered as compelling a story as I’ve heard about the potential up- and down-sides of “the artificial neural networks” that he first helped to assemble five decades ago. Here are a few of its highlights:

after the inevitable rise of AI, humans will become the second most intelligent beings on Earth. For instance, in 5 years Hinton expects “that ChatGPT might well be able to reason better than us”;
AI systems can already understand. For example, even with the autocomplete features that interrupt us whenever we’re texting and emailing, the artificial intelligence that drives them has to “understand” what we’ve already typed as well as what we’re likely to add in order to offer up its suggestions;
Through trial and error, AI systems learn as they go (i.e. machine learning) so that the system’s “next” guess or recommendation is likely to be more accurate (or closer to what the user is looking for) than its “last” response. That means AI systems can improve their functioning without additional human intervention. Among other things, this capacity gives rise to fears that AI systems could gain certain advantages over or even come to dominate their human creators more generally as they continue to get smarter.
Hinton is proud of his contributions to AI-system development, especially the opportunities it opens in health care and in developing new drug-treatment protocols. But in addition to AI’s dominating its creators, he also fears for the millions of workers “who will no longer be valued” when AI systems take over their jobs, the even broader dissemination of “fake news” that will be turbo-charged by AI, as well as the use of AI-enabled warriors on tomorrow’s battlefields. Because of the speed of system advancements, he urges global leaders to face these challenges sooner rather than later.

Finally, Hinton argues for broader experimentation and regulation of AI outside of the tech giants (like Microsoft, Meta and Google). Why? Because these companies’ primary interest is in monetizing a world-changing technology instead of maximizing its potential benefits for the sake of humanity. As you undoubtedly know, over the past two years many in the scientific-research, public-policy and governance communities have echoed Hinton’s concerns in widely-publicized “open letters” raising alarm over AI’s commercialization today.

Hinton’s to-do list is daunting, particularly at a time when many societies (including ours) are becoming more polarized over what constitutes “our common goods.” Maybe identifying a lodestar we could all aim for eagerly–like capitalizing on the known and (as yet unknown) promises of AI that can benefit us most–might help us to find some agreement as the bounty begins to materialize and we begin to wonder how to “spend” it. Seeing a bold and vivid future ahead of us (instead of merely the slog that comes from risk mitigation) might give us the momentum we lack today to start making more out of AI’s spectacular frontier instead of less.

So what are the most thoughtful among us recommending in these regards? Because, once again, it will be easier to limit some of our freedoms around a new technology with tools like government regulation and oversight if we can also envision something that truly dazzles us at the end of the long, domesticating road.

Over the past several months, I’ve been following the conversation—alarm bells, recommended next steps, more alarm bells—pretty closely and it’s easy to get lost in the emotional appeals and conflicting agendas. So I was drawn this week to the call-to-action in a short essay entitled “Why the U.S. Needs a Moonshot Mentality for AI—Led by the Public Sector.” Its engaging appeal, co-authored by Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, is the most succinct and persuasive one I’ve encountered on what we should be doing now (and encouraging others with influence to be doing) if we want to shower ourselves with the full range of AI’s benefits while minimizing its risks.

Their essay begins with a review of the nascent legislative efforts that are currently underway in Congress to place reasonable guardrails around the most apparent of AI’s misguided uses. A democratic government’s most essential function is to protect its citizens from those things (like foreign enemies during wartime) that only it can protect us from. AI poses that category of individual and national threat in terms of spreading disinformation, and the authors urge quick action on some combination of the pending legislative proposals.

Li and Etchemendy then talk about the parties that are largely missing from the research labs where AI is currently being developed.

As we’ve done this work, we have seen firsthand the growing gap in the capabilities of, and investment in, the public compared with private sectors when it comes to AI. As it stands now, academia and the public sector lack the computing power and resources necessary to achieve cutting edge breakthroughs in the application of AI.

This leaves the frontiers of AI solely in the hands of the most resourced players—industry and, in particular, Big Tech—and risks a brain drain from academia. Last year alone, less than 4o% of new Ph.D.s in AI went into academia and only 1% went into government jobs.

The authors are also justifiably concerned by the fact that policy makers in Washington have been listening, almost exclusively, to commercial AI developers like Sam Altman and Elon Musk and not enough to leaders from the academy and civil society. They are, if anything, even more outraged by the fact that “America’s longstanding history of creating public goods through science and technology” (think of innovations like the internet, GPS, MRIs) will be drowned out by the “increasingly hyperbolic rhetoric” that’s been coming out of the mouths of some “celebrity Silicon Valley CEOs” in recent memory.

They readily admit that “there’s nothing wrong with” corporations seeking profits from AI. The central problem is that those who might approach the technology “from a different [non-commercial] angle [simply] don’t have the [massive] computing power and resources to pursue their visions” that the profit-driven have today. It’s almost as if Li and Etchemendy want to level the playing field and introduce some competition between Big Tech and those who are interested (but currently at a disadvantage) in the academy and the public sector over who will be the first to produce the most significant “public goods” from AI.

Toward that end:

We also encourage an investment in human capital to bring more talent to the U.S. to work in the field of AI within academia and the government.

[W]hy does this matter? Because this technology isn’t just good for optimizing ad revenue for technology companies, but can fuel the next generation of scientific discovery, ranging from nuclear fusion to curing cancer.

Furthermore, to truly understand this technology, including its sometimes unpredictable emergent capabilities and behaviors, public-sector researchers urgently need to replicate and examine the under-the-hood architecture of these models. That’s why government research labs need to take a larger role in AI.

And last (but not least), government agencies (such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and academic institutions should play a leading role in providing trustworthy assessments and benchmarking of these advanced technologies, so the American public has a trusted source to learn what they can and can’t do. Big tech companies can’t be left to govern themselves, and it’s critical there is an outside body checking their progress.

Only the federal government can “galvanize the broad investment in AI” that produces a level-playing field where researchers within our academies and governmental bodies can compete with the brain trusts within our tech companies to produce the full harvest of public goods from a field like AI. In their eyes it will take competitive juices (like those unleashed by Sputnik which took America to the moon a little more than a decade later) to achieve AI’s true promise.

If their argument peaks your interest like it did mine, there is a great deal of additional information on the Stanford Institute site where the authors profile their work and that of their colleagues. It includes a three-week, on-line program called AI4ALL where those who are eager to learn more can immerse themselves in lectures, hands-on research projects and mentoring activities; a description of the “Congressional bootcamp,” offered to representatives and their staffs last August and likely to be offered again; and the Institute’s white paper on building “a national AI resource” that will provide academic and non-profit researchers with the computing power and government datasets needed for both education and research.

To similar effect, I also recommend this June 12, 2023 essay in Foreign Policy. It covers some of the same territory as these Stanford researchers and similarly urges legislators to begin to “reframe the AI debate from one about public regulation to one about public development.”

_{It doesn’t take much to create a viral sensation, but when they were published these AI-generated images certainly created one. Here’s the short story behind “Alligator-Pow” and “-Pizza.” At some point in the future, we could look back to the olden days when AI’s primary contributions were to make us laugh or to help us to finish our text messages.}

Because we’ll (hopefully) be reminiscing in a future when AI’s bounty has already changed us in far more profound and life-affirming ways.

If the waves of settlers in Salt Lake City had believed that they could build something that aspired to the grandeur of the mountains around them—like the cathedrals of the Middle Ages or even some continuation of the lovely and livable villages that many of them had left behind in Northern Europe—they might not have “paved Paradise and put up a parking lot” (as one of their California neighbors once sang).

In similar ways, having a worthy vision today, and one that’s realized by the right gathering of competitors, could make the necessary difference when it comes to artificial intelligence?

So will we domesticate AI in time?

Only if we can gain enough vision to take us over the “risk” and “opportunity” hurdles that are inhibiting us today.

This post was adapted from my January 7, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Restoration After Another Hard Year

December 13, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The past month has been challenging here, so a more meditative post today: a retreat into relative quiet after what has felt like too much noise.

Wally has been sick since I travelled to New England for a grade school class reunion more than a month ago, and multiple trips to the vet weren’t getting to the bottom of it.

It’s a constant burden when a pet or a child who’s living with you is ailing. They tell you how sick they are by how little they seem like themselves, or by how worried they look when they see your worry. Sick family members are also a lot of work.

“He looks pale to me,” said Dr. Niggemaier even though I’d never heard that said about a dog. Well the treatments (a lot of mine and several of hers) seem to be working—the burden of prior weeks released like a sigh—and I want to write about the break that I feel like having now that my insides are freed up again.

I want to pay attention to something that makes no demands for a change, that begins with relief and flows from there into a wider current that has been moving along-side the whole time but whose unfolding had become little more than a backdrop. What I mean is how week-by-week the Fall, this season we’re in had been slowly sliding into Winter without my even noticing.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Quiet, seasonal steps have weekly features, like the different expressions of a familiar face, their “right now” smells and sounds too, but I’d missed all of this (I wonder, did Wally miss them too?) and all I want to do right now is drift along in the inner-tube of that parallel flow. To advance the scenes that came just before today, and remember from prior years what might be coming up next. To feel the reboot of a deeper movement carrying me through to the end of the year.

It took me until February last winter, to write my first post of the year about rebooting and recharging. Today, I want to revisit that post (A Time for Repair, for Wintering), to consider whether “a Japanese calendar” that breaks the seasons into weeks can help with that kind of restoration, and finally, to take a stab at re-constructing the five weeks I just “missed” along with the three that are coming up before the new year in a bid to slow things down and return to better health.

_{Nestled in sod.}

For insulation or because they like the way it looks or maybe because it’s so deeply rooted in the ways they’ve always done it, Norwegians love their sod roofs—some so much that they’ve created their own human+natural landscapes.

Both like and unlike them, English writer Katherine May has brought a variation on that composite landscape inside. She discusses what the seasons have to tell us about the need to stop and recuperate from all the usual challenges. Her 2020 book, and the springboard for last Feburary’s post, is called “Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.”

For May, “to winter” is to learn how to flourish when times are lean, when we no longer have the spring’s freshness, the summer’s warmth, or the autumn’s harvest to fall back on—when we’ve been stripped down to the basics and our batteries have been drained of their juice. As she tells it:

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

“It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting….”

Too bad then that we seem to lack the evolutionary roadmaps to make ourselves stronger and more resilient by “wintering” in ways that the rest of Nature does. Perhaps that’s why her accumulated wisdom about time for rest and repair came not from preference but from necessity.

“‘However it arrives,’ May writes, ‘wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.’ In her own life, she needed to learn how to cope and then recover after waves of disruption roiled the core of her existence. (Her husband fell ill and nearly died. Her own health declined to the point that she could no longer work. Her 6-year old son became too anxious to go to school. Many of the things that May had counted on as a partner, as a professional and as a mother now felt “provisional and unsettled.”) In this ‘fallow season’ for her, May had to learn to admit the extent of her disorientation and unhappiness, and that validating these feelings neither encouraged them nor made them worse. Instead, by making a place for her desolation she began to learn how ‘to winter’ through it, something that the natural world already knows instinctively.”

For me, it’s not just Wally’s challenges that call for wintering. It’s the barrage of “bad news,” economic uncertainties, an annihilating 24/7 war, alarming politics, how much it sometimes seems that “the good times” are behind us. And as all of it has sanded me down, new demands arrive.

So when do I admit that it’s time for the repair shop?

When will I accept that my batteries only work intermittently, and one day may not work at al?

When do I: Stop, look, listen, (smell, taste, absorb and reboot) before crossing the tracks again?

_{My favorite thing about this picture: the two inward facing chairs.}

As a mindful reset to what can feel “like the fury of everyday life,” the Japanese (and the Chinese before them) thought they could slow the rush of time in a beneficial way if they broke down their annual calendars into microseasons. During the 16^th Century, some Japanese contemplatives broke the year down into 72 of these “5-day long seasons” in order (as they described it) to “soothe your passage” through the calendar “in a journey that draws your focus to subtle shifts of the natural world.”

They called these microseasons kō and instead of having names, each is described “in a mellifluous phrase” that aims to capture what is happening on the ground or in the sky outside in each 5-day stretch. “Bush Warblers Start Singing in the Mountains.” “Damp earth, Humid Heat.” “The Maple and the Ivy Turn Yellow.” “Dew Glistens White on Grass.” You get the idea. As described in a short (4-minute long) video, these mindfulness masters “found patterns in the cycles” within the seasons and “ways to recall them” so that when you finally slow down, life becomes a more satisfying journey “taken with much smaller steps.”

If this journey seems to have your name on it, you can take it exactly the way that the Japanese do via a free mobile app (for both iOS and Android devices). But just like the Japanese adapted what the Chinese had done before them, I’ve been thinking about my own house-in-nature adaptation this weekend, starting with the 5 weeks in November and December that I just “missed” and the 3 that are left before New Years—thinking that someday I might be able to conjure the mental images for all 52 of them.

Because I do a lot of my work from home, a place where my senses could be filled with the seasons (both outside and in) if I bothered to pay attention, I began with the role that its doors and windows play in this “slower parade of time.” With light pouring in from the East and the West as each day comes and goes, my work and living spaces function a bit like sundials, particularly as the leaves fall from the trees and new blades of light can angle in when clouds don’t get in their way.

Moreover, without the dampening effect of the leaves, sounds are different too—sometimes more grating (I get to hear a surprising amount of bad music blaring from passing cars) but not always. Sometimes it’s bird song, a distant dog, or gust of wind.

There are also environment changes inside when the heat comes on. Cooking smells linger a bit longer. Winter holidays bring visitors, with their new smells, sounds and feelings, and year-end transitions beckon.

So here’s what I’m “contemplating” today as I go back in time (to those “missed” weeks) and then try to recall what it was like here in prior years for those weeks just ahead of me. In doing so, I won’t even attempt to be as “mellifluous” in my phrasing as they are in Japan, except for that one week where their words instead of mine seemed like the perfect fit.

November 1-6

V’s of Canadian guess honk their ways through the mottled gray sky and, once in awhile, through the blinding sunshine as they depart the reservoir nearby, always aiming north by north-west.

November 7-13

This is the first week where the sun comes up on the same axis as our driveway, making the experience of walking down it (for Wally’s walk each morning) a little like being at Stonehenge. Fewer leaves interrupt the light at this point in the calendar, lengthening the shadows that seem to stretch behind us for 20 feet or more. I often close my eyes and let the sun warm my face when it’s damp and cold while trying not to trip as he pulls me along.

November 14-20

Dew Glistens White on Grass. (The first frost date in Philadelphia this year was on November 17.) We also don’t get much fog here, but when we do, this is when it first shrouds everything outside in a cloud before burning off later in the day.

November 21-27

The air inside is softened by small tubs of evaporating water that we put out to counter the drying effects when the heat “comes on.” At this time every year, our noses breathe easier with more moisture in the air.

November 28-December 4

The house next door has a ground crew regularly cleaning the leaves from their lawn, which makes it a verdant base for the golds and rusts of almost everything else. The walkway to their front door is flanked by two, twenty-foot, ornamental trees that are shaped a bit like tulip vases. This is the week that their leaves always fall down in a rush (like our gingko did after the first frost) leaving round skirts of yellow and red on a sea of impossible green.

December 5-11

Sun’s rising fills the top floor with light that glows so brightly that it bounces down the staircase, lighting the family pictures, certificates and pictures of friends lining the walls. It’s their week to shine down on the still sleepy floor.

December 12-19

With wreaths up inside, the house smells like pine—something that can last for weeks by misting them with water every once in awhile. It’s also when a little Christmas tree I made as a kid, our tin ornaments from Mexico, and the lights that look like chili peppers come back out like old friends.

December 20-27

One of the best things about living in these few blocks is that the bell tower of the school near-by tolls, sonorously, every hour, like it would in a small village before watches and phones told you “the time.” I listen for these bells all year long, but this is the week that another bell tower, in a neighborhood that’s somewhere to the east of us, plays short phrases that remind me of Christmas with its 5 or 6 church bells. Somebody in that tower keeps this over-heard tradition every year and I realize that I always look forward to hearing from them in this particular week of it.

So see how the light is streaming through your front door in a way it couldn’t manage for the past 42 weeks, or how the shadows play across your office at 3 p.m., or how chestnuts fill your house with fragrance when you roast them each year during the week of Thanksgiving.

They’re sensations that can return for as long as you want them to: details to mark the passing of time and to maybe “get lost in” as everything slows and has the space to repair.

This post was adapted from my December 11, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.