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.

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.

When Neither of the Captains Picking Their Teams Wanted You

November 6, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s been another week of bad news.

I got to watch the Phillies lose to the Diamond Backs in the last two games of the National League Championship Series and it had me re-living my own years playing baseball and, more soulfully, about what it had been like being picked (often from the bottom of the barrel) for the team I’d be playing on.

But even before these misty memories, I was thinking about the men (in particular) who watch sports on TV but never played the game they’re watching despite their baseball caps and enthusiasm. They always strike me as having “no real skin in the game” while living vicariously through a bunch of thoroughbreds who don’t even spend enough hours in their home town to pay a wage tax.

The “never played part” seems hopelessly arms-length to me, while the players who make up the Phillies (or any professional sports team for that matter) fly in the face of every tribal instinct that adds up to “local” as far as I’m concerned. Most of the showboats out on the field don’t care enough about this place to actually live and raise their kids here. So watching this week re-connected me to the sensation of bat-meeting-ball and “that impossible catch” way-back-when, but also somewhat less so because those protean skills were being demonstrated by the best out-of-towners-that-money-can-buy who were pretending to be my home team.

Back when I could do a credible run around the bases, baseball to me was so local that I could almost hit the roof of my house with a homer if the wind was right.

We had two sports seasons back then—Spring and Fall—which roughly coincided with baseball and football. There were several, multiple-kid families near-by and one of them (across the street) had the right-sized backyard and the properly-motivated oldest brother to organize a game almost every afternoon in those swollen hours when exiting the school bus melted towards dinner time.

With winning in each captain’s mind, the biggest hurdle before starting a game was getting picked for your team.

It was more or less the same random sample of players each day so our pluses and minuses were pretty well known, but my memory is that the draft picks were always reduced to the kids that each captain either wanted or didn’t want (until the last rounds gave them only the bad choices) which was where I regularly fell. That meant you were literally in a meat parade every afternoon if you were brave enough to show up for the selection process, and some of the easily-wounded who also lived near-by skipped it altogether, got an early start on their homework, or sat around feeling sorry about being a klutz, a spaz or a cry-baby.

It felt Darwinian because it was.

As one commentator with similar memories—who may also have been watching the end of the same baseball season on TV— noted:

_{“you see yourself, maybe for the first time, through the cold eyes of an appraiser. You are no more than a body in the mind of this person, an object with too many deficiencies to catalog: chubby, knock-kneed, weak-armed, timid, poorly coordinated, scared of the ball, slow.”}

Because every game promised camaraderie, excitement and a fast clock towards nightfall, I always showed up (despite the pain of it) even though I hadn’t yet discovered that I might be able to do something to improve my “low-value status,” or even become “an athlete” someday.

We’ll return to this commentator (and his suspicions that the trauma of this experience can cause permanent scarring) in a minute, but somewhat like him I devised my own “work-around” to this miserable situation, having neither an older brother nor a father who was around enough to show me what I needed to do.

Because the neighborhood draft-pickers already knew my inabilities too well for me to ever game them, I practiced turning myself into something more desirable at school during recess, where a similar winnowing out process for the games we played took place nearly every day. Kick-ball, dodge-ball, whatever it was, I’d focus (in advance) on how to make some kind of indelible impression every single time I got the chance: kicking the ball harder and farther than the last dope, throwing the ball hard enough to smack some asshole who needed impressing, looking at how the “first picks” moved around the field compared to me, stumbling around and seemingly out-of-place.

I didn’t realize how much I was teaching myself about playing a sport, being on a team, becoming “the kind of man” that other men wanted on their team. Sure, I was trying out conformity instead of forging my own singular path, but it was also about getting better at something, and maybe something as worthwhile as self-mastery.

While I was re-living these early, tooth-and-claw chapters of my team-playing evolution, I remembered a New Yorker essay that’s never left me about a remarkable coach (who also happened to be a world-famous art curator) and how he turned a gaggle of 9-year old boys from Manhattan into the Metrozoid’s football team. Among many other things, he had the boys break “that mystical game” down into its component parts so that they could “get good at” each part before getting good at the whole. A few years ago, I wrote here about Kirk Varnedoe’s game mechanics and general wizardry in Who We Go-ToTo Learn How To Get There.

Similarly, I worked at each part of my baseball game and at the-putting-it altogether-part and never stopped until I slowly started inching up the pecking order– or at least high enough to know that I didn’t have to be a passive victim of a selection process that was going to repeat itself for decades and through entire careers.

Somebody else is always going to pick or reject me. So what am I going to do about it?

Some rejects spend the rest of their lives fleeing those first rejections in a kind of “safe harbor” they’ve built for themselves.

Instead of rising to positions somewhere beyond their capabilities (a phenomenon once called “The Peter Principle”) because higher-ups kept falling for these individuals’ confident self-promotion, there is also (in my observation) a category of under-achievers who only go as far as their easiest successes because the risk of being rejected when putting yourself out there is simply too painful to ever attempt again.

The aforementioned commentator (Rich Cohen writing in the Wall Street Journal), sees this kind of pain as plausibly originating at team selections in the course of childhood games and grade-school gym classes, those earliest and, for some, indelible brushes with “natural selection.” He also explains why this might be so:

_{“the feeling of randomness, being misunderstood, underestimated and judged for all the wrong reasons. We will never get rid of it because it’s a pure expression of the human condition.”}

To be judged unfairly. Or maybe (because you really do suck as a ball-player) to be judged fairly, and then to feel badly about it because in its harsh light, somebody else’s judgment has revealed something about you and how you’re viewed by others.

Of course, it’s what you do (or don’t do) next that matters. While he never says anything as matter-of-fact as “just try to get better at taking the test you just failed,” Cohen does seem to see the benefit in working through your suffering somehow.

_{“Maybe it’s better to face [a draft, selection process like this one] and learn to overcome it in the same years that you are learning about the Declaration of Independence and human reproduction [that is, while you’re young]. After all, you only learn to disregard the draft—and, better still, turn it to your advantage—once you’ve suffered it.”}

But the lack of specificity of his thinking here—for example, he never exactly says how one can turn this situation into an “advantage”—made me wonder whether Cohen really thought his way through the traumatizing quandary and out the other end, particularly when he wonders out loud:

_{“Were these [meat-market] auctions the source of all my problems, the insecurities and panics, the angers and paranoia, that still haunt me? Were they the cause of the occasional drinking-binge, meditation retreat and need to write?”}

Could all of that possibly be happening to this day if he’d truly found a way to leave his particular meat-markets stronger instead of weaker?

I can only speak to my years being assessed in these ways. It seems to me that the only way to gain some measure of damage-control over selection processes like these is to first off, be clear-eyed about your weaknesses, and then to do whatever you can to mitigate their impact in whatever game you want to be playing in. Then, even if you’re the last one picked—or not picked at all—you’ll have the empowering satisfaction of pushing yourself to the point of improvement.

Of course, this is not just a boys-to-men phenomenon. And, to the extent it is still “a man’s world of business” out there (but one with far more women in it), the girls-to-women cohort needs to deal with these selection processes too—just as endlessly and ad nauseam but also the only way you can deal with them effectively. (It’s one reason I’m a proponent of girls playing team sports: so they too can get familiar with and learn how to triumph over these gruesome dynamics.)

Which was why I was taken aback by Cohen’s citing and then providing his own rationale for a growing opposition to the playground/gym-class draft picking process. Apparently for some time now, the practice is being phased out, and at least part of Cohen seems to approve.

_{“As long ago as 1993, the New York Times headlined a story, ‘New Gym Class: No More Choosing Up Sides.’ Because it traumatizes kids, separates them, leaves a mark on their psyche.”}

(At this point I wondered: Is this what happened to those wimpy, TV sports-team fanboys who shied away from team sports themselves because they couldn’t “live with the rejections that came with it”? Are they seeking a jolt of toughness or even of “masculinity” by watching a team of mercenaries pursue what they never had the fortitude and resilience to pursue on a competitive playing field?

These will have to be questions for another day.)

All I can speak to is my experience once again, and how glad I am that no one was protecting me before I got the chance to prove what I needed to prove to myself.

Because one day, long ago, on the Burn’s family’s Spring-Season baseball field, I actually got picked first by one of the opposing captains. Some other player may have been sick or on vacation that day, providing an opening for the top spot (my memory is a tad hazy about that), but about the moment when I was picked there is nothing but clarity.

One of the captains (maybe Walter) must have remembered my recent hitting, catching and sliding into third-base before he had a chance to recall his earlier impressions of me. And because he wanted to be on the winning side when the game was done, he went for the best player that was available in the first round.

I still remember how proud I felt that day.

I had already felt the empowerment of those prior games, when I’d seen myself improving in all those ways.

Now, when somebody else was finally noticing, I got the first-hand opportunity to view them side-by-side and realized (in some ways, once-and-for-all) that getting your own shit together was the better of the two..

This post was adapted from my October 29, 2023 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 Consolations of Boredom

October 9, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written about some of the better escapes I’ve been enjoying in posts about “shoe gaze” music and “gourmet cheeseburger” TV, but after having these experiences and telling others about them, I always return to the same place I briefly left behind.

It’s the every-day-to-day where we spend most of our lives—because even when we’re trying to escape it’s routines and foregone conclusions, its mono-tones and tastes, we still carry its most troubling baggage with us. (Have you ever noticed how little you can truly “get away” on vacation?)

So I’ve been wondering for years now about ways to eke more sustenance out of the familiar places we want to escape from while reducing their uneasiness.

The question gained greater-than-normal urgency when we sheltered in place during the pandemic. At the time I argued for establishing everyday rituals to conjure more satisfaction, even meaning, out of a meal or how we get up in the morning (Extra From the Ordinary). I also drew some comfort from seeing how others—like comedian Bo Burnham—not only coped but almost thrived during the isolation because he knew, from being a kind of outsider as a child, “how to turn an uncomfortable situation into comedy” (Why We Gravitate Towards the Work We Do).

Moreover, the bankrupting aspects of everyday life don’t have to be a problem we solve on our own or just with the aid of our immediate families. By expressing our intention to face a common fate together, so-called “intentional communities” that share religious or social convictions can elevate some of the day’s opportunities and relieve some of its burdens by enabling their adherents to approach them together (The Re-Purposing of Ancient Wisdoms).

That time my example was of a kind a modern, Benedictine-Rule-based monasticism. But even then, its high level of commitment to any community made its solution wobble a bit (particularly here in America) where we keep saying we value our freedom and independence far too much to subordinate ourselves to the tyranny of any group. Like Groucho Marx, I feared too many of us would rather be alone than join any club that would be willing to have us.

So if we can’t imagine the long-term community benefits that might come with sacrificing some of our short-term personal preferences, what else might offer a consistent path to less stressful “living and working” on a regular basis? This week—yet another one I found difficult to weather “with my chin up”—I’ve been wondering out loud about the following:

Is it possible to experience a blissful relief within the boring intervals between our occasional escapes?

_{Pictured here (and up top) are different views of an “action sculpture” from 1999’s Wasser[or Water] installation Series by Swiss artist Roman Signer. As a boy, Signer dreamed of navigating white-water rivers and as an adult embarked on kayaking trips in remote mountainous areas until, one day, a companion of his failed to return with him. The kayak has been a recurring element in his work ever since. According to one commentator,“Wasserinstallation creates a vacuum where the beginning and the end of an imaginary journey converge.” You can explore more of Signer’s lifetime of visual artistry here.}

When Robert Signer lost his kayaking companion, he tried to make sense of it, but when he found that he couldn’t he started creating what he called “action sculptures” to help him (along with those viewing them) go inside themselves, into a kind of meditative place, where instead of providing answers to impossible questions “meanings flow into one another effortlessly, without ever taking definite shape,” thereby offering a semblance of peace.

It’s akin to the facility that science-fiction writer and all-around-sage Ursula K. Le Guin was describing when she said once:

_{“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”}

—in other words, in times like we’re in today.

Why has another child needlessly been killed in a refugee boat, border war or neglectful home?

Why did the flood sweep away this family or that village?

Why do the venal and wicked always seem to triumph over the honest and virtuous?

Why did my kayaking companion fail to return, but I did?

Then I asked:

How can we learn to sit with questions like these without sadness or remorse, anxiety or recrimination?

Where in our lives and work would finding relief from these gnawing discomforts be possible?

Could it be within our least engaging and most boring activities every day?

Well, that’s exactly what Justin McDaniel wanted me to believe. He’s the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and (to my surprise) he’s been thinking and teaching others about the liberating effects of boredom for more than 20 years. McDaniel talked about the theory and his own experience testing it out on a podcast that I listened to this week.

I wouldn’t have thought of boredom—and in particular doing the kinds of things that we associate with it—as an escape hatch “from stress and darkness,” but for some reason I started playing closer attention as he started to explore the linguistic roots of the word “boring.”

The word’s root is “to bore,” of course, like putting a hole in a container and (by doing so) “rendering it useless” because it can no longer hold what it was intended to hold. In other words, it’s still a vessel, just not one that can also do something else, like hold water. In much the same way, many of our daily activities are similarly without much broader “use,” particularly when we refuse to fill them with some higher agenda, like “being more productive.”

When simply done “for their own sake” with no broader purpose, boring activities can be “incredibly liberating” according to McDaniel, allowing us to find simple relief in the task itself and not in what we’re getting done or producing. As a result, activities that are “boring” and effectively “useless” in this positive sense can trigger “a new beginning, a reset,” as he calls it, from the negativity that regularly weighs us down.

It’s a principle that’s been institutionalized for centuries by Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia where McDaniel studied as a student. Their days (and his) were consumed with tasks, repeated daily (like sweeping the same path or washing the day’s fruits and vegetables) that allowed them to empty their minds of everything beyond the task itself—like “boring a hole in yourself” and letting the extraneous out. Instead of aiming to do more, the point of boring/repetitive activities is actually to do less. In essence, McDaniel and the monks he was learning from found escape in boredom, or the repetitive monotony that characterizes many of our days too–at least when we refuse to compound the monotony with worry.

To somebody like me, who often feels overwhelmed by a 24/7 overload of “bad news” and my inability to absorb (let alone respond to) even a portion of it, hearing about an escape into boredom sounded like Relief. It was then that McDaniel started talking about how our brains “crave nothingness, crave non-productivity.” Stepping back from his remarks, I recalled making a similar point in a post from a couple years back called We Don’t Have to be Productive All the Time. But what McDaniel gestured towards was something that had been more elusive back then, namely, the potential cure that was offered by the non-productive activities that I perform all the time in the course of living and working.

It’s the every-day boredom of tasks at home: the cleaning, dressing, washing, eating, shopping, mowing the lawn, taking the dog out. It’s the daily boredom of tasks at work: research, writing, emailing, calling, meeting, promoting, monitoring information flows. All of these tasks have a repetitive monotony in them. To find their relief, I just need to strip them of their larger goals, objectives, the anxieties that I’m (somehow) not meeting them, and everything else I might be worrying about.

It really is like turning all the charging switches off while leaving the boring one on.

During his podcast appearance, McDaniel gave a beautiful illustration of this healing kind of boredom, and as he recounted it I realized he was talking about something he clearly does himself.

As a chaired professor at a prestigious university, his book-filled office likely hosts many “highly charged” but also “anxiety inducing” activities that could benefit greatly from the relief of a little boredom. For example, the students who visit it may want an “A” in his course, his endorsement for an internship, or a letter of recommendation that will flatter them when the time comes. As a professor, he might be hosting an ambitious colleague seeking tenure, a rival being competitive, or the professional pressure to do more impactful research himself. What all of these purposeful acts have in common, said McDaniel, is “do, do, do.”

But at that point in the podcast, he tried to offer us the same view that he simultaneously has of the books on his office’s bookshelves. “Who cares what’s in them,” he exclaimed (without the reverence I might have expected from a scholar.) What I do sometimes is “just look at them, and all the variety of the colors on their covers.” At that point I realized, that’s exactly what Justin McDaniel can be found doing in his office sometimes, particularly when his brain “craves non-productivity” and all the “do, do, do” that’s around him needs “a reset.” In these intervals, hiis books don’t have the higher purpose of scholarship or greater wisdom but simply the boredom of covers with many colors.

To me, this everyday and always-available peace is not unlike what Roman Signer is also offering in another one of his kayak-related installations.

Good luck with the boredom this week! I’ll see you next Sunday.

This post was adapted from my October 8, 2023 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.

A Communion With Our Trash

July 4, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I really don’t want anything more to worry about than I’m worrying about already.

But like you, deep in the reptilian part of my brain I’m alert to threats even though (much of the time) there’d be comfort in being oblivious to them (or, as noted here recently, “choosing to remain blissfully unaware”).

Well disregarding that survival instinct, I finally dove into articles I’ve been accumulating on life forms that are co-habiting with our plastic waste in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and, far more arrestingly, how all life forms on earth (including these garbage patch creatures) have been ingesting, inhaling and storing micro- and nano-particles of plastic within our bodies for some time now. In a kind of poetic justice for our civilization, it appears that we’re finally being occuped by our own trash.

I originally thought the floating co-existence of other life forms with plastic waste in the middle of the ocean was fascinating. (Maybe we could learn something from them about how to live more successfully on our contaminated planet I wondered.) On the other hand, the notion that plastic particles have been accumulating in my body—and may have been doing so for decades—doesn’t trigger curiosity as much as dread, particularly since there’s no apparent way to get rid of it and we don’t yet understand what this lingering debris is, or isn’t, doing to us. But it’s hard to imagine “anything good.”

(The image above puts its own point on this quandary. Taken by photographer Chris Jordan, it shows a decomposing albatross, with the plastic that remained in this great, sea-going bird’s gut after it perished.)

So what do we do with this way-too-loose-for-comfort knowledge besides inducing a little short-term oblivion to get over the initial shock?

All I have are a bid to raise awareness, made some time ago after life-forms were first discovered co-existing with plastic waste in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and some sang froid after further realizations more recently.

_{Pictures of Trash Islands currency—created by some cheeky British designers and denominated in units of debris—from when the notion of living with plastic waste was still something that seemed to be happening somewhere else.}

I’ve written about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch a couple of times before. In 2017 I was surprised by its discovery and captivated by how some enterprising Brits were calling attention to it with “a product line” that included a Trash Islands passport, postage stamps and various denominations of paper money. As we were to learn later, there were similar garbage patches in each of our planet’s oceans—it just happened that the one in the Pacific was the largest, a “gyre” of plastic waste swirled together by ocean currents that had grown to roughly three times the size of France.

When more information emerged about the life-forms that were accumulating on this debris I wrote about it again—focusing, in particular, on some scientists’ urging us to refrain from removing these islands of plastic until we could learn more about the neuston (or variety of life-forms) that were co-habiting with our debris in this “new” environment. That post was We’re All Caught in This Gyration.

At the time, I guess I couldn’t rule out a future where we (humans) might be able to live with and even thrive along side of our plastic waste too. These neuston might even tell us something about how to do so.

I was also undeterred by The Ocean Clean-up (“TOC”)’s push-back against this wait-and-study approach. TOC was the only organization with boats in the oceans’ garbage patches already, netting and removing as much of the plastic debris as possible, notwithstanding “the Sisyphean nature” of the environmental challenge (since as quickly as they could remove it, more plastic kept being thrown into the oceans to replace it.)

Still, I argued for a pause so we could try and understand what was happening between the life-forms and these plastics because (from a scientific perspective) they were “responding to an alien environment in real time.” Moreover, I thought we should try to do so without pre-conceptions or “new eyes” that might also give us clues about how to better co-exist with our polluted planet going forward. As I wrote at the time:

So if we’re not so different from these tiny creatures clinging to civilization’s debris, what kind of curiosity should we bring to the transitional environment that’s resulted–a place that’s unlike anything we knew in the pre-plastics world where all humans lived only 80 years ago?
…
A plastic-infused environment belongs to these tiny sea creatures as much as it belongs to us and it won’t be disentangled from either of our life cycles anytime soon. Of course we should bring our fullest and richest forms of curiosity to the task of understanding it.

Luckily, TOC also didn’t view its reaction as an either/or. It could get rid of as much ocean plastic as possible while also being curious about the unique accommodations that were happening on top of it. And for those who were worried about the occupying life-forms that were being “collected,” TOC had some strategies to help at least some of them too.

_{Some of the neuston or life forms that were found to be living with ocean plastics.}

Recent articles in the Wall Street Journal and Wired magazine have focused on the diversity of sea-life amidst this floating debris and how The Ocean Clean-Up folks (among others) have been studying and protecting them, because as TOC’s work gained greater attention other non-profits and governmental agencies also began to take a greater interest in these plastics-based ecosystems.

Two weeks ago, the Journal reported (here’s a paywall-free link) that NOAA, or America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had found 484 marine invertebrates in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch representing 46 different species. Moreover, most of “these hitchhikers” were coastal species that had apparently found a way to adapt to life out in the open ocean. Despite it being “a food desert for marine life that experiences punishing temperature extremes [close to the surface],” the neuston out there appear to be both growing and reproducing.

The same article quoted Matthias Egger, a scientist at TOC, talking about how the neuston are faring amidst the plastic:

’They’re having a blast [and] that’s really a shift in the scientific understanding.’

[For example,] anemones like to protect themselves with grains of sand Dr. Egger went on to say, but out in the garbage patch they are covered in seed-like microplastics. Moreover, squeeze one of them and the plastic shards spew out, he said: ‘They’re all fully loaded with plastic on the outside and inside.’

A piece in Wired this week elaborated on TOC’s and Dr. Egger’s responses not only to this brave new world but also to their initial efforts to remove as much of it from the oceans as possible. It’s headline summarizes the problem this way: “Patches of floating plastic are teeming with life, and cleanup companies hauling trash out of the water risk destroying an aquatic habitat.”

In response to this criticism, we’re told that Eggers and other TOC scientists are sampling the surface water around their clean-up operation on a weekly basis “to compare the composition of neuston, to understand which species to look out for, what effect the clean-up system has [on them]. and whether there are seasonal differences in how many neuston are present.” TOC expects to announce its findings about these and other aspects of this “aquatic habitat” shortly.

In the meantime, TOC is also trying to save as many of these life-forms as possible by revamping its netting process to give anything alive that it catches multiple chances to escape. (One worry is that if large amounts of neuston are killed, it could have a negative impact on the turtles, fish, seabirds and other animals that eat them.) So TOC has increased the mesh size of the nets to allow at least some of these creatures (like blue buttons and violet snails) to pass through their nets while continuing to capture the plastic waste. In addition, TOC is moving its nets:

slowly through the water to allow mobile species to swim away. There are lights and acoustic deterrents, underwater cameras to detect protected species such as sea turtles, and escape hatches on the underside of nets for animals that get caught. [In addition,] before hoisting the nets aboard, the crew leaves them in the water for up to an hour to give animals time to escape.

Still, some marine life remains with the plastic waste that is removed. And even for the successful escapees, the future could be complicated. Will they continue “to thrive” with plastic particles throughout their bodies or will the consequences for them be far more dire?

_{Harmful consequences for tiny sea-creatures in the middle of the ocean may be difficult to contemplate, but we’re even less willing to consider what might happen to us when these plastic micro-particles enter our bodies.}

Mark O’Connell begins his recent, harrowing essay in the New York Times (here is another paywall-free link) by contending that our bodies are just as suffused with microplastics as the bodies of the anemones in the oceans’ garbage patches. (And from the limited research I have done—including consulting the authorities he cites—there seems to be little dispute about it.)

There is plastic everywhere in our bodies; it’s in our lungs and in our bowels and in the blood that pulses through us. We can’t see it, and we can’t feel it, but it is there. It is there in the water we drink and the food we eat, and even in the air that we breathe. We don’t know, yet, what it’s doing to us, because we have only quite recently become aware of its presence; but since we’ve learned of it, these ingested plastics have become a source of profound anxiety.

Maybe it’s nothing; maybe it’s fine. Maybe this jumble of fragments — bits of water bottles, tires, polystyrene packaging, microbeads from cosmetics — is washing through us [eventually] and causing no particular harm. But even if that were true, we’d still have the impact of knowing that there is plastic waste in our bodies. This knowledge registers, in some vague way, as apocalyptic; it has a whiff of divine vengeance, sly and poetically appropriate. Maybe this has been our fate all along, to achieve final communion with our own trash.

(In addition to lending this post its title, O’Connell also pointed me towards the Chris-Jordan albatross photo that announces it.)

When I read his essay this week, his words hit me like the biblical Jeremiah’s. O’Connell believes that by recklessly consuming our planet, trashing it with our throw-aways, and naively assuming that there will be no consequences when all of this trash breaks down, we plainly deserve whatever it is that comes back to haunt us.

On the other hand, (like with the neuston’s uncertain fate) O’Connell readily admits that neither he nor the scientific community knows what these internalized particles of plastic are doing to us—if anything—in the long run. At the same time however, he brings more than his outrage and his eloquence to his assessments.

Some of the power of his essay comes from the fact that he’s been a kind of canary in this particular coal mine. O’Connell suffers from I.B.D, a chronic autoimmune condition. While not life threatening, it periodically saps him of energy, sometimes making him unable to work for weeks at time. His suffering led him to discover a 2021 study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology that found significantly higher levels of micro-plastics in the bodies of I.B.D. sufferers than in the rest of us, although he adds that only circmstantial evidence as opposed to “direct causation” was established.

But to add to the coincidence as it relates to humans, O’Connell also mentions scientific studies on the harmful impacts of micro-plastics on sea-life from 2018 (documenting lower growth and reproduction in fish), 2020 (changes in fish behavior), and just last month (intestinal tract disease in seabirds). But again these are early trials, none involved human subjects, and the causal links that were identified were tenuous when they were made at all.

So nothing is conclusive, but there is more than enough to feed our apprehensions. And then there is the rough justice that comes from realizing that, at last, we may be reaping what we have sown. As O’Connell writes in his powerful conclusion,

[T]he idea that we are eating our own purchasing power, that we might be poisoning ourselves with our insistent consumerism, burrows into the unconscious like a surrealist conceit.

From this vantage point, could the sea-life in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch really be “having a blast”?

And it seems even harder to look at ourselves—now effectively in their place—with new, fresh and anything like shame-free eyes.

Will our culpability help or hurt the ways that we’ll respond?

This post was adapted from my May 7, 2023 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.