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Citizens Will Decide What’s Important in Smart Cities

July 8, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The norms that dictate the acceptable use of artificial intelligence in technology are in flux. That’s partly because the AI-enabled, personal data gathering by companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon has caused a spirited debate about the right of privacy that individuals have over their personal information. With your “behavioral” data, the tech giants can target you with specific products, influence your political views, manipulate you into spending more time on their platforms, and weaken the control that you have over your own decision-making.
 
In most of the debate about the harms of these platforms thus far, our privacy rights have been poorly understood.  In fact, our anything-but-clear commitments to the integrity of our personal information have enabled these tech giants to overwhelm our initial, instinctive caution as they seduced us into believing that “free” searches, social networks or next day deliveries might be worth giving them our personal data in return. Moreover, what alternatives did we have to the exchange they were offering?

  • Where were the privacy-protecting search engines, social networks and on-line shopping hubs?
  • Moreover, once we got hooked on to these data-sucking platforms, wasn’t it already too late to “put the ketchup back in the bottle” where our private information was concerned? Don’t these companies (and the data brokers that enrich them) already have everything that they need to know about us?

Overwhelmed by the draw of  “free” services from these tech giants, we never bothered to define the scope of the privacy rights that we relinquished when we accepted their “terms of service.”  Now, several years into this brave new world of surveillance and manipulation, many feel that it’s already too late to do anything, and even if it weren’t, we are hardly willing to relinquish the advantages of these platforms when they are unavailable elsewhere. 
 
So is there really “no way out”?  
 
A rising crescendo of voices is gradually finding a way, and they are coming at it from several different directions.
 
In places like Toronto (London, Helsinki, Chicago and Barcelona) policy makers and citizens alike are defining the norms around personal data privacy at the same time that they’re grappling with the potential fallout of similar data-tracking, analyzing and decision-making technologies in smart-city initiatives.
 
Our first stop today is to eavesdrop on how these cities are grappling with both the advantages and harms of smart-city technologies, and how we’re all learning—from the host of scenarios they’re considering—why it makes sense to shield our personal data from those who seek to profit from it.  The rising debate around smart-city initiatives is giving us new perspectives on how surveillance-based technologies are likely to impact our daily lives and work. As the risks to our privacy are played out in new, easy-to-imagine contexts, more of us will become more willing to protect our personal information from those who could turn it against us in the future.
 
How and why norms change (and even explode) during civic conversations like this is a topic that Cass Sunstein explores in his new book How Change Happens. Sunstein considers the personal impacts when norms involving issues like data privacy are in flux, and the role that understanding other people’s priorities always seems to play. Some of his conclusions are also discussed below. As “dataveillance” is increasingly challenged and we contextualize our privacy interests even further, the smart-city debate is likely to usher in a more durable norm regarding data privacy while, at the same time, allowing us to realize the benefits of AI-driven technologies that can improve urban efficiency, convenience and quality of life.
 
With the growing certainty that our personal privacy rights are worth protecting, it is perhaps no coincidence that there are new companies on the horizon that promise to provide access to the on-line services we’ve come to expect without our having to pay an unacceptable price for them.  Next week, I’ll be sharing perhaps the most promising of these new business models with you as we begin to imagine a future that safeguards instead of exploits our personal information. 

1.         Smart-City Debates Are Telling Us Why Our Personal Data Needs Protecting

Over the past 6 months, I’ve talked repeatedly about smart-city technologies and one of you reached out to me this week wondering:  “What (exactly) are these new “technologies”?”  (Thanks for your question, George!).  
 
As a general matter, smart-city technologies gather and analyze information about how a city functions, while improving urban decision-making around that new information. Throughout, these data-gathering,  analyzing, and decision-making processes rely on artificial intelligence. In his recent article “What Would It Take to Help Cities Innovate Responsibly With AI?” Eddie Copeland begins by describing the many useful things that AI enables us to do in this context: 

AI can codify [a] best practice and roll it out at scale, remove human bias, enable evidence-based decision making in the field, spot patterns that humans can’t see, optimise systems too complex for humans to model, quickly digest and interpret vast quantities of data and automate demanding cognitive activities.

In other words, in a broad range of urban contexts, a smart-city system with AI capabilities can make progressively better decisions about nearly every aspect of a city’s operations by gaining an increasingly refined understanding of how its citizens use the city and are, in turn, served by its managers.
 
Of course, the potential benefits of greater or more equitable access to city services as well as their optimized delivery are enormous. Despite some of the current hew and cry, a smart-cities future does not have to resemble Big Brother. Instead, it could liberate time and money that’s currently being wasted, permitting their reinvestment into areas that produce a wider variety of benefits to citizens at every level of government.
 
Over the past weeks and months, I’ve been extolling the optimism that drove Toronto to launch its smart-cities initiative called Quayside and how its debate has entered a stormy patch more recently. Amidst the finger pointing among Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs, government leaders and civil rights advocates, Sidewalk (which is providing the AI-driven tech interface) has consistently stated that no citizen-specific data it collects will be sold, but the devil (as they say) remains in the as-yet to be disclosed details. This is from a statement the company issued in April:

Sidewalk Labs is strongly committed to the protection and privacy of urban data. In fact, we’ve been clear in our belief that decisions about the collection and use of urban data should be up to an independent data trust, which we are proposing for the Quayside project. This organization would be run by an independent third party in partnership with the government and ensure urban data is only used in ways that benefit the community, protect privacy, and spur innovation and investment. This independent body would have full oversight over Quayside. Sidewalk Labs fully supports a robust and healthy discussion regarding privacy, data ownership, and governance. But this debate must be rooted in fact, not fiction and fear-mongering.

As a result of experiences like Toronto’s (and many others, where a new technology is introduced to unsuspecting users), I argued in last week’s post for longer “public ventilation periods” to understand the risks as well as rewards before potentially transformative products are launched and actually used by the public.
 
In the meantime, other cities have also been engaging their citizens in just this kind of information-sharing and debate. Last week, a piece in the New York Times elaborated on citizen-oriented initiatives in Chicago and Barcelona after noting that:

[t]he way to create cities that everyone can traverse without fear of surveillance and exploitation is to democratize the development and control of smart city technology.

While Chicago was developing a project to install hundreds of sensors throughout the city to track air quality, traffic and temperature, it also held public meetings and released policy drafts to promote a City-wide discussion on how to protect personal privacy. According to the Times, this exchange shaped policies that reduced, among other things, the amount of footage that monitoring cameras retained. For its part, Barcelona has modified its municipal procurement contracts with smart cities technology vendors to announce its intentions up front about the public’s ownership and control of personal data.
 
Earlier this year, London and Helsinki announced a collaboration that would enable them to share “best practices and expertise” as they develop their own smart-city systems. A statement by one driver of this collaboration, Smart London, provides the rationale for a robust public exchange:

The successful application of AI in cities relies on the confidence of the citizens it serves.
 
Decisions made by city governments will often be weightier than those in the consumer sphere, and the consequences of those decisions will often have a deep impact on citizens’ lives.
 
Fundamentally, cities operate under a democratic mandate, so the use of technology in public services should operate under the same principles of accountability, transparency and citizens’ rights and safety — just as in other work we do.

To create “an ethical framework for public servants and [a] line-of-sight for the city leaders,” Smart London proposed that citizens, subject matter experts, and civic leaders should all ask and vigorously debate the answers to the following 10 questions:

  • Objective– why is the AI needed and what outcomes is it intended to enable?
  • Use– in what processes and circumstances is the AI appropriate to be used?
  • Impacts– what impacts, good and bad, could the use of AI have on people?
  • Assumptions– what assumptions is the AI based on, and what are their iterations and potential biases?
  •  Data– what data is/was the AI trained on and what are their iterations and potential biases?
  • Inputs– what new data does the AI use when making decisions?
  • Mitigation– what actions have been taken to regulate the negative impacts that could result from the AI’s limitations and potential biases?
  • Ethics– what assessment has been made of the ethics of using this AI? In other words, does the AI serve important, citizen-driven needs as we currently understand those priorities?
  • Oversight– what human judgment is needed before acting on the AI’s output and who is responsible for ensuring its proper use?
  • Evaluation– how and by what criteria will the effectiveness of the AI in this smart-city system be assessed and by whom?

As stakeholders debate these questions and answers, smart-city technologies with broad-based support will be implemented while citizens gain a greater appreciation of the privacy boundaries they are protecting.
 
Eddie Copeland, who described the advantages of smart-city technology above, also urges that steps beyond a city-wide Q&A be undertaken to increase the awareness of what’s at stake and enlist the public’s engagement in the monitoring of these systems.  He argues that democratic methods or processes need to be established to determine whether AI-related approaches are likely to solve a specific problem a city faces; that the right people need to be assembled and involved in the decision-making regarding all smart-city systems; and that this group needs to develop and apply new skills, attitudes and mind-sets to ensure that these technologies maintain their citizen-oriented focus. 
 
As I argued last week, the initial ventilation process takes a long, hard time. Moreover, it is difficult (and maybe impossible) to conduct if negotiations with the technology vendor are on-going or that vendor is “on the clock.”
 
Democracy should have the space and time to be a proactive instead of reactive whenever transformational tech-driven opportunities are presented to the public.

(AP Photo/David Goldman)

2.         A Community’s Conversation Helps Norms to Evolve, One Citizen at a Time

I started this post with the observation that many (if not most) of us initially felt that it was acceptable to trade access to our personal data if the companies that wanted it were providing platforms that offered new kinds of enjoyment or convenience. Many still think it’s an acceptable trade. But over the past several years, as privacy advocates have become more vocal, leading jurisdictions have begun to enact data-privacy laws, and Facebook has been criticized for enabling Russian interference in the 2016 election and the genocide in Myanmar, how we view this trade-off has begun to change.  
 
In a chapter of his new book How Change Happens, legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues that these kinds of widely-seen developments:

can have a crucial and even transformative signaling effect, offering people information about what others think. If people hear the signal, norms may shift, because people are influenced by what they think other people think.

Sunstein describes what happens next as an “unleashing” process where people who never formed a full-blown preference on an issue like “personal data privacy (or were simply reluctant to express it because the trade-offs for “free” platforms seemed acceptable to everybody else), now become more comfortable giving voice to their original qualms. In support, he cites a remarkable study about how a norm that gave Saudi Arabian husbands decision-making power over their wives’ work-lives suddenly began to change when actual preferences became more widely known.

In that country, there remains a custom of “guardianship,” by which husbands are allowed to have the final word on whether their wives work outside the home. The overwhelming majority of young married men are privately in favor of female labor force participation. But those men are profoundly mistaken about the social norm; they think that other, similar men do not want women to join the labor force. When researchers randomly corrected those young men’s beliefs about what other young men believed, they became far more willing to let their wives work. The result was a significant impact on what women actually did. A full four months after the intervention, the wives of men in the experiment were more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job.

When more people either speak up about their preferences or are told that others’ inclinations are similar to theirs, the prevailing norm begins to change.
 
A robust, democratic process that debates the advantages and risks of AI-driven, smart city technologies will likely have the same change-inducing effect. The prevailing norm that finds it acceptable to exchange our behavioral data for “free” tech platforms will no longer be as acceptable as it once was. The more we ask the right questions about smart-city technologies and the longer we grapple as communities with the acceptable answers, the faster the prevailing norm governing personal data privacy will evolve.  
 
Our good work of citizens is to become more knowledgeable about the issues and to champion what is important to us in dialogue with the people who live and work along side of us. More grounds for protecting our personal information are coming out of the smart-cities debate and we are already deciding where new privacy lines should be drawn around us. 

This post was adapted from my July 7, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Building Your Values into Your Work, Continuous Learning Tagged With: Ai, artificial intelligence, Cass Sunstein, dataveillance, democracy, how change happens, norms, personal data brokers, personal privacy, privacy, Quayside, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart City, surveillance capitalism, Toronto, values

Democracy Collides With Technology in Smart Cities

July 1, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

There is a difference between new technology we’ve already adopted without thinking it through and new technology that we still have the chance to tame before its harms start overwhelming its benefits.
 
Think about Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon with their now essential products and services. We fell in love with their whiz-bang conveniences so quickly that their innovations become a part of our lives before we recognized their downsides.  Unfortunately, now that they’ve gotten us hooked, it’s also become our problem (or our struggling regulators’ problem) to manage the harms caused by their products and services. 
 
-For Facebook and Google, those disruptions include surveillance dominated business models that compromise our privacy (and maybe our autonomy) when it comes to our consumer, political and social choices.
 
-For Apple, it’s the impact of constant smart phone distraction on young people whose brain power and ability to focus are still developing, and on the rest of us who look at our phones more than our partners, children or dogs.
 
-For these companies (along with Amazon), it’s also been the elimination of competitors, jobs and job-related community benefits without their upholding the other leg of the social contract, which is to give back to the economy they are profiting from by creating new jobs and benefits that can help us sustain flourishing communities.
 
Since we’ll never relinquish the conveniences these tech companies have brought, we’ll be struggling to limit their associated damages for a very long time. But a distinction is important here. 
 
The problem is not with these innovations but in how we adopted them. Their amazing advantages overwhelmed our ability as consumers to step back and see everything that we were getting into before we got hooked. Put another way, the capitalist imperative to profit quickly from transformative products and services overwhelmed the small number of visionaries who were trying to imagine for the rest of us where all of the alligators were lurking.
 
That is not the case with the new smart city initiatives that cities around the world have begun to explore. 
 
Burned and chastened, there was a critical mass of caution (as well as outrage) when Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs proposed a smart-city initiative in Toronto. Active and informed guardians of the social contract are actively negotiating with a profit-driven company like Sidewalk Labs to ensure that its innovations will also serve their city’s long- and short-term needs while minimizing the foreseeable harms.
 
Technology is only as good as the people who are managing it.

For the smart cities of the future, that means engaging everybody who could be benefitted as well as everybody who could be harmed long before these innovations “go live.” A fundamentally different value proposition becomes possible when democracy has enough time to collide with the prospects of powerful, life-changing technologies.

Irene Williams used remnants from football jerseys and shoulder pads to portray her local environs in Strip Quilt, 1960-69

1.         Smart Cities are Rational, Efficient and Human

I took a couple of hours off from work this week to visit a small exhibition of new arrivals at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 
 
To the extent that I’ve collected anything over the years, it has been African art and textiles, mostly because locals had been collecting these artifacts for years, interesting and affordable items would come up for sale from time to time, I learned about the traditions behind the wood carvings or bark cloth I was drawn to, and gradually got hooked on their radically different ways of seeing the world. 
 
Some of those perspectives—particularly regarding reduction of familiar, natural forms to abstracted ones—extended into the homespun arts of the American South, particularly in the Mississippi Delta. 
 
A dozen or so years ago, quilts from rural Alabama communities like Gee’s Bend captured the art world’s attention, and my local museum just acquired some of these quilts along with other representational arts that came out of the former slave traditions in the American South. The picture at the top (of Loretta Pettway’s Roman Stripes Variation Quilt) and the others pictures here are from that new collection.
 
One echo in these quilts to smart cities is how they represent “maps” of their Delta communities, including rooflines, pathways and garden plots as a bird that was flying over, or even God, might see them. There is rationality—often a grid—but also local variation, points of human origination that are integral to their composition. As a uniquely American art form, these works can be read to combine the essential elements of a small community in boldly stylized ways. 
 
In their economy and how they incorporate their creator’s lived experiences, I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to say that they capture the essence of community that’s also coming into focus in smart city planning.
 
Earlier this year, I wrote about Toronto’s smart city initiative in two posts. The first was Whose Values Will Drive Our Future?–the citizens who will be most affected by smart city technologies or the tech companies that provide them. The second was The Human Purpose Behind Smart Cities. Each applauded Toronto for using cutting edge approaches to reclaim its Quayside neighborhood while also identifying some of the concerns that city leaders and residents will have to bear in mind for a community supported roll-out. 
 
For example, Robert Kitchin flagged seven “dangers” that haunt smart city plans as they’re drawn up and implemented. They are the dangers of taking a one-size-fits-all-cities approach; assuming the initiative is objective and “scientific” instead of biased; believing that complex social problems can be reduced to technology hurdles; having smart city technologies replacing key government functions as “cost savings” or otherwise; creating brittle and hackable tech systems that become impossible to maintain; being victimized as citizens by pervasive “dataveillance”; and reinforcing existing power structures and inequalities instead of improving social conditions.
 
Google’s Sidewalk Labs (“Sidewalk”) came out with its Master Innovation and Development Plan (“Plan”) for Toronto’s Quayside neighborhood this week. Unfortunately, against a rising crescendo of outrage over tech company surveillance and data privacy over the past 9 months, Sidewalk did a poor job of staying in front of the public relations curve by regularly consulting the community on its intentions. The result has been rising skepticism among Toronto’s leaders and citizens about whether Sidewalk can be trusted to deliver what it promised.
 
Toronto’s smart cities initiative is managed by an umbrella entity called Waterfront Toronto that was created by the city’s municipal, provincial and national governments. Sidewalk also has a stake in that entity, which has a high-powered board and several advisory boards with community representatives.

Last October one of those board members, Ann Cavoukian, who had recently been Ontario’s information and privacy commissioner, resigned in protest because she came to believe that Sidewalk was reneging on its promise to render all personal data anonymous immediately after it was collected. She worried that Sidewalk’s data collection technologies might identify people’s faces or license plates and potentially be used for corporate profit, despite Sidewalk’s public assurance that it would never market citizen-specific data. Cavoukian felt that leaving anonymity enforcement to a new and vaguely described “data trust” that Sidewald intended to propose was unacceptable and that other“[c]itizens in the area don’t feel that they’ve been consulted appropriately” about how their privacy would be protected either.
 
This April, a civil liberties coalition sued the three Canadian governments that created Waterfront Toronto over privacy concerns which appeared premature because Sidewalk’s actual Plan had yet to be submitted. When Sidewalk finally did so this week, the governments’ senior representative at Waterfront Toronto publically argued that the Plan goes “beyond the scope of the project initially proposed” by, among other things, including significantly more City property than was originally intended and “demanding” that the City’s existing transit network be extended to Quayside. 
 
Data privacy and surveillance concerns also persisted. A story this week about the Plan announcement and government push-back also included criticism that Sidewalk “is coloring outside the lines” by proposing a governance structure like “the data trust” to moderate privacy issues instead of leaving that issue to Waterfront Toronto’s government stakeholders. While Sidewalk said it welcomed this kind of back and forth, there is no denying that Toronto’s smart city dreams have lost a great deal of luster since they were first floated.
 
How might things have been different?
 
While it’s a longer story for another day, some years ago I was project lead on importing liquefied natural gas into Philadelphia’s port, an initiative that promised to bring over $1 billion in new revenues to the city. Unfortunately, while we were finalizing our plans with builders and suppliers, concerns that the Liberty Bell would be taken out by gas explosions (and other community reactions) were inadequately “ventilated,” depriving the project of key political sponsorship and weakening its chances for success. Other factors ultimately doomed this LNG project, but consistently building support for a project that concerned the commmunity certainly contributed. Despite Sidewalk’s having a vaunted community consensus builder in Dan Doctoroff at its helm, Sidewalk (and Google) appear to be fumbling this same ball in Toronto today.
 
My experience, along with Doctoroff’s and others, go some distance towards proving why profit-oriented companies are singularly ill-suited to take the lead on transformative, community-impacting projects. Why?  Because it’s so difficut to justify financially the years of discussions and consensus building that are necessary before an implementation plan can even be drafted. Capitalism is efficient and “economical” but democracy, well, it’s far less so.
 
Argued another way, if I’d had the time and funding to build a city-wide consensus around how significant new LNG revenues would benefit Philadelphia’s residents before the financial deals for supply, construction and distribution were being struck, there could have been powerful civic support built for the project and the problems that ultimately ended it might never have materialized. 
 
This anecdotal evidence from Toronto and Philadelphia begs some serious questions: 
 
-Should any technology that promises to transform people’s lives in fundamental ways (like smart cities or smart phones) be “held in abeyance” from the marketplace until its impacts can be debated and necessary safeguards put in place?
 
-Might a mandated “quiet period“ (like that imposed by regulators in the months before public stock offerings) be better than leaving tech companies to bomb us with seductive products that make them richer but many of us poorer because we never had a chance to consider the fall-out from these products beforehand?
 
-Should the economic model that brings technological innovations with these kinds of impacts to market be fundamentally changed to accommodate advance opportunities for the rest of us to learn what the necessary questions are, ask them and consider the answers we receive?

Mama’s Song, Mary Lee Bendolph

3.         An Unintended but Better Way With Self-Driving Cars

I can’t answer these questions today, but surely they’re worth asking and returning to.
 
Instead, I’m recalling some of the data that is being accumulated today about self-driving/autonomous car technology so that the impacted communities will have made at least some of their moral and other preferences clear long before this transformative technology has been brought to market and seduced us into dependency upon it. As noted in a post from last November:

One way to help determine what the future should look like and how it should operate is to ask people—lots of them—what they’d like to see and what they’re concerned about…In the so-called Moral Machine Experiment, these researchers asked people around the world for their preferences regarding the moral choices that autonomous cars will be called upon to make so that this new technology can match human values as well as its developer’s profit motives.

For example, if a self-driving car has to choose between hitting one person in its way or another, should it be the 6-year old or the 60-year old? People in different parts of the world would make different choices and it takes sustained investments of time and effort to gather those viewpoints.

If peoples’ moral preferences can be taken into account beforehand, the public might be able to recognize “the human face” in a new technology from the beginning instead of having to attempt damage control once that technology is in use.

Public advocates, like those in Toronto who filed suit in April, and the other Cassandras identifying potential problems also deserve a hearing.  Every transformative project’s (or product’s or service’s) dissenters as well as its proponents need opportunities to persuade those who have yet to make up their minds about whether the project is good for them before it’s on the runway or already taken off. 

Following their commentary and grappling with their concerns removes some of the dazzle in our [initial] hopes and grounds them more firmly in reality early on.

Unlike the smart city technology that Sidewalk Labs already has for Toronto, it’s only recently become clear that the artificial intelligence systems behind autonomous vehicles are unable to make the kinds of decisions that “take into mind” a community’s moral preferences. In effect, the rush towards implementation of this disruptive technology was stalled by problems with the technology itself. But this kind of pause is the exception not the rule. The rush to market and its associated profits are powerful, making “breathers to become smarter” before product launches like this uncommon.
 
Once again, we need to consider whether such public ventilation periods should be imposed. 
 
Is there any better way to aim for the community balance between rationality and efficiency on the one hand, human variation and need on the other, that was captured by some visionary artists from the Mississippi delta?
 

+ + + 


Next week, I’m thinking about a follow-up post on smart cities that uses the “seven dangers” discussed above as a springboard for the necessary follow-up questions that Torontonians (along with the rest of us) should be asking and debating now as the tech companies aim to bring us smarter and better cities. In that regard, I’d be grateful for your thoughts on how innovation can advance when democracy gets involved.

This post was adapted from my June 30, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Continuous Learning Tagged With: capitalism, community outreach, democracy, dissent, Gees Bend quilts, Google, innovation, Quayside, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, technology, tension between capitalism and democracy, Toronto, transformative technology

LA Claims the Future While the Rest of Us Argue About It

June 17, 2019 By David Griesing 1 Comment

A Sidewalk in Koreatown

I’ve been re-writing quite a bit since I got back from LA, mostly stories for the book and, in particular, the heart of a central story that I‘d never managed to find before. One of the wonders of “getting away” is the space you reclaim to tackle the problems that were resisting you before you left. 
 
It’s not unlike breaking out of “group-think” by bringing in new energy and perspective to challenge the limitations that were holding you back. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
 
In thinking about this post, I remembered an observation I’d written down before I left but also didn’t know what to do with.  It was made by physicist Geoffrey West in a book he wrote a couple of years back called Scale. Among many extraordinary observations, West noted that one of the reasons cities tend to outperform companies is because cities have more weirdos in them, that is, more people who challenge the prevailing norms or group-think. 
 
Since I’m also still digesting my time in LA, I wondered whether some of the vitality in that city (and maybe in California generally) comes from the fact that there are more contrary voices–more weirdos–participating in the conversation that defines them.  After mulling this over for the past couple of days, I’ve concluded that there may be something to it.
 
A year ago, I wrote two posts: Why Voice Your Dissent? and Dissent That Elevates the Group. In the first, I summarized some of the findings in Charlan Nemeth’s book In Defense of Troublemakers by noting how hard it is to find yourself outside of the mainstream and then to persist, despite your seeming disagreement with everybody else. Summarizing Nemeth’s research, I wrote:

People automatically follow the majority as much as 70% of the time, even when the majority is wrong. People do so because the group ‘works on you’ to conform in blatant as well as subtle ways. Moreover, the remaining 30% are not unscathed by group pressure. In one study, even though the minority disagreed with the group, many reported that the majority was ‘probably correct’ because the group must know something that they didn’t know.

This pull towards conformity is powerful, but there are individual as well as group rewards when dissenters refuse to keep their contrariness to themselves. The courage to persist has three parts:

In addition to your knowledge and experience and what you believe to be true about them, the most productive dissent also contains at least a piece of the future that you are convinced everyone in the group should want.  A dissenter’s convictions engage our convictions about what we know and believe, but perhaps neither engage us as much as her hopeful vision about the future we are here to create together.

Cities more than companies listen to its dissenters more, and LA may listen harder than most. It stands on the frontlines of the future because it recognizes the outsized role that its idealists and oddballs have played in getting it there.  I also think it’s because dissenting voices are raised less loudly and vindictively on the West Coast than they are on the East. People are more relaxed, or as Emily would say (now that she’s moved there from Brooklyn) they’re way more chill dad. The tenor of LA’s conversation leaves more cooperative energy for when the debate is done. It leaves more space to imagine something better together.
 
To the hard, gritty realities Los Angelinos confront every day (their tides of homelessness, miles of aging infrastructure, the domination of their cars and roads), they seem to have made room for softness too. They seem to have smoothed the grittier edges but not forgotten them, daring to relax enough to dream with their best dreamers about how to reach a more livable future. They seem to have found ways to remain optimistic in spite of their many challenges. Really, is there any existing option that’s better for the rest of us to follow today?
 
Here are a few recent experiences in LA that may have caused this question to linger.

1.      Grand Central Market

It’s always dicey extrapolating what people are like from their built environments, but how they’ve created new homes and workplaces, shopping centers and entertainment venues (or re-inhabited abandoned ones) always provide clues.
 
When Emily was younger, we visited the zoo in every place where we traveled. It gave me a lot of anecdotal evidence about how locals thought about wildlife, nature, education, family outings and relaxation. For example, the zoos in London and Barcelona are very different, as you might imagine.
 
In these and other trips over the years, I’ve also managed to find the central food market wherever am. A benchmark for thinking about these marketplaces has been Reading Terminal Market in my hometown. It may be the most bustling and thriving institution in Philadelphia, regulating the flow of produce, seafood and meat coming in and going out while providing arrays of prepared food in an environment that balances the traditional with the up-to-the-minute. It also looks and feels both effortless and authentic given its time and place.
 
I could disparage many other cities’ tourist-oriented farmers markets, but I’d rather celebrate LA’s Grand Central Market located in a cavernous old building in the heart of its high-rise downtown. It was where I first started considering the combination of “gritty and soft” in the city.

The cavernous space was dark instead of bright from above. Its inner volumes cascaded down three or four partial levels from one elevation at the Bunker Hill entrance to the Market’s final landing on South Broadway. The building had been hollowed out, with its spine, service lines and ductwork visible, if you looked for them in the dim recesses on walls, ceilings and snaking through lower levels. Inside, it felt like what it was: the shadowy hulk of a re-purposed building. 
 
All of the Market’s establishments—featuring far more prepared food than take-home-and cook—were lit at ground level, glowing like so many individual oases, each inviting exploration while you digested their descending panorama. Food is prepared or assembled in front of you, with seating right there or at tables scattered both inside and out. I made for my recommended breakfast at Egg Slut, whose name and menu perfectly embodied the customer indulgence that seemed to be the goal of every purveyor. Maybe I was too hungry or jet-lagged when I reached the Market, but it seemed like islands of hospitality and surprisingly inventive fare, all of them floating in a multi-tiered, post-industrial space. More friendly and warm than street-level in Blade Runner, but also not unlike it. Gritty and soft.
 
In succeeding days, I kept detecting this balance. LA is not a beautiful city. Much of it seems yellowed by the sun and little of it has been prettied-up. But everywhere, Los Angelinos seem to have burrowed into their mid-20thcentury sprawl of storefronts and strip malls to create environments that are comfortable, nourishing and full of character. It’s a way that all of us might ride our present into our future if we chose to live within our means while being calmer and less frantic about it.

Another bright, sunny day

2.      Brunch in Silver Lake

Atmosphere like this invites perspective about what should come next as well as advice for living better right now.  

We were at a thoughtfully calibrated outdoor café in Silver Lake when a woman at the next table, who claimed to be 70 but looked 50, volunteered that Emily had beautiful skin and slender, powerful legs. (“I drink water all the time,” Emily said by way of response.) Apparently finding nothing about me to comment on directly, she spent the better part of our meal describing her odyssey as wife, mother, business owner, inventor, personal trainer, author, motivational speaker and yoga instructor and that if she hadn’t changed her life 20 years ago, she wouldn’t be here now. I must have seemed in imminent jeopardy to have aroused her like this.

She then outlined a punishing six-month program of bikram yoga and improved nutrition that made her energetic, hopeful and feeling younger than she had since she was in her twenties. I thought to ask her about her book, whether I could get a motivational tape on-line or see her TED talk but instead I asked her if that was the type of yoga where you sweat your toxins out. Of course it was and based on her apparent diagnosis, of course I said I’d look into it.

This stranger at the next table didn’t complement Emily’s skin and legs because “they looked good” but because of what both of them told her about Emily’s wellbeing. As for me, she didn’t want to sell me anything other than “a choice for me to consider” because taking it had already helped her so much.

LA has been criticized as a shallow and superficial place. I always think of stars or starlets congratulating everyone, thanking God, thanking the orphans of Mogadishu for their award when I hear that. We did see one Academy award-winning actor while we were in a sporting goods store there, but Mahershala Ali is anything but shallow and superficial and neither were most of the locals I met. Admittedly, it was a small random-sample.  But those I encountered seemed to have put their health and wellbeing in the present moment closer to the center of their lives and choices than many Americans in other parts of the country.

Being centered like this influences not only how people view the future course of their lives but also the long-term future they tend as custodians for their children and children’s children.  When you feel better, get your body and mind under control, there’s more room for optimism and broader responsibility (isn’t there?)

3.      The Getty

The Getty Museum sits on heights that overlook Santa Monica Bay and much of the rest of the sprawling city. Locals as well as out-of-towners seemed to dress up to go there. The Persian girls were flamboyant, the Japanese men causally tailored to an extent I’d never seen before and the Japanese women and girls wore complex layers that all seemed part wedding gown and spring raincoat. Everyone at the Getty seemed to understand that they were visiting someplace special to consider treasures from the past. And it was special.
 
The works of art on display were often as spectacular as the surroundings and visitors. I was particularly dazzled by the collection of marble portrait busts by the West’s greatest carvers, including Bernini and Houdon. Their arrangement was also playful, with curators positioning them so they could interact with nearby paintings or other sculptures. For example, the busts above of Belesarius (a Byzantine general by Jean Baptiste Stouf) and a Vestal virgin (by Antonio Canova) were at opposite corners of a sun-soaked gallery, the goat gazing (longingly and hilariously) into the dove’s eyes.
 
Like the La Brea Tar Pit Museum chronicled LA’s pre-history (in last week’s post), the Getty seems to serve as a temple to the more recent history of Western art and culture. 
 
It’s where LA says: this is the best of where we have been.
 
Being at the Getty also reminded me that Philadelphia’s largest foundation (the Pew Charitable Trusts) moved to LA not long ago to support a burgeoning contemporary art scene that has seen major new museums being built (the Broad) and existing ones expanded (LACMA) to celebrate new, experimental artists. LA is championing artistic expression in ways that rival New York, Paris and London.
 
It’s another way that LA is saying: the future is being envisioned and inhabited here. This is where we are going.

+ + +

The LA I saw offers a perspective that respects the past, striving to live with our history and pre-history and to understand what it is saying to us.
 
It provides some of the optimism that enables LA to step forward and say to other capitals: we’re not caught in your group-think and grid-lock. Instead, we’re already deciding where we should be going next.
 
We’re looking back in time for its lessons and encouragements as well as ahead from a center in the present that aims for health and wellbeing.
 
We’re repurposing our aging, urban sprawl into islands of comfort and hospitality.
 
We’ve made gritty soft, maybe because we’re more aware than others of what we have left to work with and are simply making the most of it.
 
Yes, LA was an eye-opener.

This post was adapted from my June 16, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Continuous Learning, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: Claiming the future, dissent, Grand Central Market, grid-lock, group-think, LA, Los Angeles, non-confomrmists, optimism, perspective, perspective of time, The Getty, weirdos, well-being

The Perspective of Time Enables Good Work

June 10, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

A Columbian Mammoth

The future seemed closer in California than it does in Philadelphia where I’m writing this post. California also seemed to be having a more active conversation with its past, despite there being historical touchstones like the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall only a couple of miles from me. Californians seemed to have a deeper sense of where humans have been already and where we are headed in our lifetimes and beyond.
 
I’ve just gotten back from Los Angeles, so some of it may be my wandering state of mind. But the West Coast, and California in particular, was also the hoped-for destination of our landlocked frontier, where the promise of a transcontinental crossing would either be realized by generations of settlers or dashed. It’s where America faces the rising East, the part that turns its back on the confusion and stalemate of Washington and dares to propose solutions.
 
How much we let the distant past reverberate into an equally distant future—how much or how little we can escape our fixation with “the way that we feel right now”—this flow of time (or the lack of it) impacts the perspective we bring to everything we do, worry about, want to accomplish and leave behind for our kids to enjoy.
 
Despite its rep for seeking shallow gratifications in the here and now, at least some of California seemed to be looking back, almost to our beginnings, for clues on how the human race has gotten to this fragile and deeply compromised place. These time travelers seem to know that if we fail to understand our past and learn from it, we may never know that we’re repeating the same mistakes when we could be avoiding them.
 
They also see the future differently. At least some Californians seem to understand that by focusing almost exclusively on the present, we are neglecting problems whose consequences are likely to endure for decades if not centuries.  On a timescale that includes our children, our children’s children, their children and beyond, they seem to be saying: we are responsible for addressing these problems because of the roles we have played in creating them. These adults seem to understand that in order to claim the future we want for ourselves and our descendants, we need to expand our perspective on time to include humanity’s full passage on earth, from the triumphs and tragedies that have brought us to today to the long-term future that’s worth working and sacrificing for. 

And because it’s California after all, they’ve done this by creating richly entertaining destination experiences.

A saber-toothed tiger that can almost taste you

1.         The La Brea Tar Pits

More than 10,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene Age, enormous mammals (so-called megafauna) coexisted for a time with some of the earliest humans. These were mammoths, mastodons, giant bison, dire wolves, sloths with foot-long claws, six-foot tall beavers “with incisors like medieval weapons,” and saber-tooth cats. Their enormous size was a response to the cold climate. A warm climate produces smaller bodies that expel heat while glacial intervals during the Pleistocene encouraged extra layers of bone, fat and fur with a smaller ratio of surface area to volume and a greater ability to hold in body heat. The scale of this engineering feat was enormous, with the largest mammoths weighing in at around ten tons, or three tons more than the largest African elephants today.
 
These megafauna lived in the cold, grassy plains that extended below the ice shelf in North America, from coast to coast. In certain places where oil pooled at ground level producing a kind of asphalt or tar, these mammals were drawn to the thin layers of water that accumulated just above the tar when they were thirsty and wanted to drink. As they sought out the water, individual animals became trapped in the tar. Other predators, drawn by their distress, also became trapped. Before long, these tar pits become the mass graveyards of the Pleistocene age.
 
The La Brea Tar Pits are located along Wilshire Boulevard in the center of LA. Preserved in them, researchers have discovered one of the largest repositories of Pleistocene megafauna in the world. They have also found important clues about how these massive animals disappeared altogether and the Holocene—or our next geological age—began.
 
For years, the speculation was that rapid climate change or disease led to extinction of the megafauna, and both likely contributed to it. But bands of humans shared these grassy plains with these giant mammals. Our ancestors had a competitive sense of conquest and adventure, and they needed to feed their growing families.
 
In his Atlas of a Lost World, Craig Childs describes the struggle of man versus megafauna in an arresting but ambivalent way:

This is a love story—boy meets girl, if you will. One partner is a [largely] unpeopled hemisphere, the other is our hungry, inquisitive species. Some might tell you that the encounter wasn’t love at all, but domination, overkill, an invasive species hell-bent on spreading into a land that was doing just fine as it was, without us. Some scientists have called it blitzkrieg, mammoths felled like cordwood. Ours was no docile species, and the animals were not ready for us, or our weaponry. Archeologists from Alaska to Florida have found Paleolithic spearpoints and stone blades still holding protein signatures from the meat of horse, camel, sloth, bison, bear and the proboscideans, mammoths and mastodons. Ice Age bones in the Americas have been found scribed with human butchering marks, blackened from fires. But humans didn’t always win. Many died, some were eaten.  First people, wildly outnumbered by animals, would have found themselves tossed and trampled by tusks and hooves or torn to pieces by the scissoring teeth of scimitar cats. No matter how well armed they were, even with Eurasian wolf dogs at their sides, surviving among Rancholabrean megaflora would have been challenging. Nobody said love would be easy.

These encounters were difficult, but in the end the human hunters with their always improving weapons were smarter, more tenacious and more powerful. The scientists and researchers at the La Brea Tar Pits and elsewhere have concluded that it was neither climate nor disease that led to the mass extinction of the megafauna.  Whether love story (human drive and ingenuity) or tragedy (a human “blitzkrieg”), mankind triumphed over nature by wiping these enormous animals from the face of the earth.

Parallels between the annihilation of mammoths and mastodons and of entire species today due to over-hunting, over-fishing, pollution, and loss of habitat are hardly exact. Similarly, there will always be uncertainties about what happened 10,000 years ago. But the human drives (for better and worse) that contributed to these extinctions are the same. Nature is no match for man’s desire and ability to take whatever he can from it, as quickly and efficiently as he can. 

During the Pleistocene, humans killed off the megafauna. During our Holocene, the same motivations nearly exterminated the American bison (from a herd of 60 million in 1800 to only a few hundred 90 years later).

Today, mankind is likely in a new geoglogical era called the Anthropocene. For the very first time in our checkered history, human activity is exerting the dominant influence on both climate and the environment.

Can we learn lessons from the past about how to constrain our best and worst impulses so that we neither “love” nor “dominate” our earthly home to death?

Are we able to look back—sometimes very far back—to learn as much as we can about ourselves and our impacts when once again we are pushing the world around us to the brink? 

Can our minds hold a broad enough perspective of time for that?

The biomorphic Pacific Visions building at the Aquarium of the Pacific

2.         Pacific Visions

Two weeks ago, the new Pacific Visions building opened as part of the existing aquarium complex in Long Beach, just outside LA. While its biomorphic curves “shimmer like the ocean” on the outside, it’s the future of the Earth’s oceans, its life forms and our human interactions with them that are the focus of its programming.
 
Visitors are engaged by several of our oceans’ current challenges and opportunities in the Pacific Visions theater with its surround screen and multisensory effects that include wind, fog, strobe lights, seat rumblers and blasts of ocean-related scents. There is high resolution footage of sea creatures, animations, computer graphics as well as images of what cities and other ocean-facing human landscapes look like today and might look like tomorrow. In other words, visitors can quite literally “sense” our current predicament and some of the ways that we have begun to confront it. The theater is both immersive and enabling, inspiring viewers “to think creatively about out global future” while beginning to see themselves as the oceans’ “stewards.”
 
The theater empties into the Culmination Gallery which lets visitors try their hands at ocean stewardship by making the ethical choices and trade-offs that will be required to restore specific California ecosystems many of them are familiar with already. For groups, there are interactive game tables themed around food, energy and water that invite as many as ten players to make a sequence of choices while working together to create enough of each resource to sustain California’s residents into the future.
 
There are animal exhibits, including one profiling yellowtail a fish native to California’s coastal waters. It demonstrates how the fish could be raised in offshore farms to produce as much protein as beef or pork but with far less harmful environmental impacts. Another project that promises a healthier future involves Pacific and Olympia oysters. Visitors learn how oyster farming can stabilize erosion-prone shorelines while filtering and cleaning the waters that are closest to population areas.

“Future City Fly-Through” uses touch screen controls on wall screens to “fly” visitors through a virtual city while they explore innovations reducing water usage in a drought-prone locales like California and using ocean water in unfamiliar ways. Opportunities for exploration include vertical farming methods and the utilization of desalination plants.
 
Admittedly, several of the experiences offered at Pacific Visions are also available in online simulations, but our hosts seemed to know that most players will choose a game like Fortnite instead of having an educational experience during their personal screentime. So Pacific Visions offers a destination-based alternative, employing technology to provide an immersive experience that enables visitors to do the serious work of designing their futures in inherently playful ways. 
 
Unless there are more “active environmentalists” among Americans than there are today, confronting the challenge of climate change will be nearly impossible.
 
With its $53 million cost and 29,000 square foot destination, Pacific Visions is aiming for every recruit it can enlist among school children, vacationers, day trippers, and those who already support sustainability with their hearts but not so much with their actions.
 
In a recent post, I argued for the strategy of relying upon respected leaders whose own minds have been changed about the significance of climate change in the light of their Republican or Libertarian values to reach out to skeptics in their own communities with the same arguments that persuaded them. Common values will give those arguments a hearing while the entreaties of “tree huggers” with different priorities continue to fall on deaf ears. Californians are being similarly strategic with their investment dollars and objectives at Pacific Visions. They are seeking recruits to help design a healthier future for our oceans by packaging their serious purpose along with the fun of a day spent at Disneyland.

The Pacific Visions theater

3.          More Hurdles Ahead

California in general and LA in particular seemed poised between the distant past and the un-designed future that extends for generations in front of us. Getting out of the present and deepening our perspective of time clarifies what is truly important while gaining the wisdom from our mistakes, even when they happened in the last geological age or will only be felt by our great, great grandchildren.
 
The practical work of designing the future causes us to confront what we don’t know, what others around us are failing to appreciate, and how to deepen the understanding that stewardship requires. In researching this post, I came upon a short list compiled by the FrameWorks Institute called “Gaps in Understanding” between what the experts know about the current threats to our oceans and what the general public knows. As Pacific Visions evolves its educational programming and other forward-thinking institutions follow its lead, here are some of the gaps in public understanding that need to be bridged if we are to find a more sustainable future for our water world:

–         most people see the oceans as vast, undifferentiated bodies of water instead of supporting vastly different ecosystems with different temperatures, currents and habitats;

–         the public doesn’t understand how global warming is disrupting currents and temperatures in both the atmosphere and the oceans and how these disruptions are contributing to the extreme weather many of them have been experiencing;

–         people believe that most ocean pollution consists of plastic waste. By failing to understand the extent of pollution caused by our much larger systems of manufacturing, consumption, transportation and energy usage, they are unable to explore the kinds of solutions that are needed to stop the continuing pollution of our oceans;

–         because the public believes that the oceans’ vast capacity effectively reduces the negative consequences of human activity, it fails to grasp either the complexity or severity of the challenges to the oceans’ diverse biosystems;

–         members of the public have some understanding of the risks to particular ocean animals (like sea turtles) but fail to appreciate how overfishing, acidification and rising water temperatures are threatening the extinction of entire species;

–         people lack a clear understanding of the role that national governments can and should play, either acting on their own or in concert with other national governments. This results in “a largely empty assignment of responsibility” for addressing the oceans’ declining prospects.

–         when the public thinks about “what can be done,” it focuses on modifying individual behavior (like more recycling) instead of implementing systematic solutions like expanding and enforcing marine protected areas, reforming the commercial fishing industry, regulating and enforcing pollution controls, enforcing carbon emission limits, and incorporating “ocean protection” into school curricula and government policymaking.

To design a sustainable future, we need to close the gaps between what the experts and the rest of us seem to know.

These gaps in basic knowledge speak to the extent of the educational and motivational hurdles that are ahead of us as we confront the onset of climate change on land as well as sea.

Escaping the gratifications and distractions of the present and gaining the perspective of time–its long-term lessons as well as its long-term consequences and possibilities—provides some of the incentive to fill in these gaps in our knowledge. 

It’s the yeoman’s task that the educators and entertainers at the La Brea Tar Pits and Pacific Visions are already taking on.

This post was adapted from my June 9, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Continuous Learning Tagged With: Antrhropocene, broad enough perspective, climate change, future, future of work, Holocene, La Brea Tar Pits, ocean health, Pacific Visions, perspective of time, Pleistocene

Re-Bundling Protections and Benefits Around Our Work

May 27, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Not so long ago, jobs came with a bundle of economic advantages beyond a paycheck. Those advantages included health insurance for you and your family and a pension or post-retirement paycheck based on your years with your employer and how much you’d been paid. 
 
While already a vestige of days past, my job at a municipally-owned utility a little over a decade ago came with family health benefits, a matching 401(k) plan, a pension that vested after 5 years of employment, and days off for a raft of holidays including Flag Day.
 
That job also included additional economic benefits that I didn’t appreciate enough at the time such as the creditworthiness of my regular salary, continuous training to bolster old skills and develop new ones, regular contributions to Social Security for additional retirement security, unemployment compensation if I ever lost my job, and the stability and continuing enrichment of that job for as long as I had it.
 
Today, in many of our full-time jobs and nearly all of our part-time ones, between some and all of this bundle of protections and benefits has disappeared.    
 
It is hard to overstate the significance of this unbundling.
 
Jacob Hacker, a political science professor at Yale calls it a shift of economic risk in his new book The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream.  Hacker argues that the loss of this financial cushion around our work tests our economic resilience whenever unexpected burdens arise.

In the 50 years following the Great Depression, both employers and the government insulated workers from many of the economic risks they might confront when they weren’t working. By contrast, from the 1980s and continuing through today, there has been:

a massive transfer of risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as the government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families. This shift has fundamentally reshaped Americans’ relationships with their government, their employers and each other. And it has altered and sometimes dashed the most fundamental expectations associated with the American Dream: a stable middleclass income, an affordable place to live, a guaranteed pension, good health insurance coverage, greater economic security for one’s kids.

As a result of this sea change, the American worker is increasingly on his or her own when confronting whatever comes next, like sudden illness or loss of a job.
 
Writing this week in the New York Times, Hacker talked about how this “risk shift” is impacting the run-up to the next presidential election, particularly the fact that so many Americans feel insecure.

They may be doing well at the moment, but they fear that, however high they are on the economic ladder, a single bad step or bad event could cause them to slip. A booming economy hasn’t quieted these concerns, because insecurity remains a huge and growing problem in ways that voters and candidates instinctively get, but the sunny job numbers largely hide.

Of course, this insecurity affects not only workers but also the ability of their families, their communities and the country as a whole to flourish—an impact that I discussed a few weeks ago in the post “The Social Contract Around Our Work Is Broken.”
 
As more of us are “on our own” shouldering the economic risks that employers and the government once protected us from, it has become an increasingly important priority to re-bundle new versions of the benefits and protections that have been lost around working in America.
 
The leading edge of these rebundling efforts are perhaps most visible when it comes to the gig-economy workers who are striving to build a stable and dependable “living” out of a series of independent-contractor jobs both large and small.
 
As I argued last week, technological advances involving blockchain, digital currencies, on-line exchanges and markets are promising to make it possible for independent workers to preserve existing income streams while gaining new (and unexpected) ones. The needs of this growing number of gig-economy workers are stimulating efforts to re-bundle some of those traditional insulators around their work. Fortunately, these same innovations will also help to meet the needs of every insecure worker who is trying to get by in a job with few, if any, of the traditional benefits and protections.

1.         Getting Paid for Jobs Both Big and Small

One of the most tantalizing possibilities of a future enabled by blockchain and digital currencies is that we could all get paid for time and effort we currently give away for free. Last week I mentioned a few of them, like providing traffic information to news outlets about roads we are already driving on at rush hour or being paid by a social media platform whenever we encourage the conversation there. I also mentioned the current backlash from the banking industry to the rise of on-line exchanges that will facilitate these payments. Part of it is an old guy-new guy turf war.
 
Over the past week, I’ve come upon some additional information about the hurdle that stands in the way of more seamless payments for a succession of small and big jobs. David Galbraith is a partner at Anthemis, a company seeking creative opportunities between the start-ups and financial institutions that are dedicated to reinventing financial services for the digital marketplace. In a recent interview, Galbraith remarked on the fundamental differences between on-line platforms that cater to consumers in America and their counterpart platforms in China. 
 
In America, digital platforms like Google and Facebook are supported by advertising revenues while in China a platform’s revenue streams come directly from consumers when they buy something they’ve seen there. In other words, the payments process in China is simplified by removing advertising from the business model. Another difference is that Chinese consumers pay for consumer goods with their bank account balances, while American platforms interpose financial intermediaries like PayPal or bank-owned credit card companies that stand between the tech platforms and consumers. As Galbraith observes, the transactions costs are lower in China, “friction is taken out of the system,” and purchases are completed in a “fundamentally more fluid fashion” on the smartphones of Chinese consumers without prompting by a blizzard of ads.
 
When the inefficiencies imposed by banks and an advertising-based model are removed from the digital “payments system” in America, payments to gig economy workers for big and small increments of work will also be facilitated—making these new jobs more robust. At the most basic level, these changes in how we get paid will support the ways that many of us are working now and even more of us will be working tomorrow.

2.         Anxiety About Retirement

When it comes to re-bundling benefits and protections around workers, none may be more significant than retirement security.
 
A recent article called “Why Work Has Failed Us: Because No One Can Afford to Retire Anymore” provides statistics that indicate how much the “shift in risk” from pensions to “figure out your own retirement” has impacted American workers:

66% of millennials have nothing saved for retirement. Among the working-age families that have retirement savings, the median balance is $5,000, according to the most recent data available from the Economic Policy Institute. For families approaching retirement, the median savings is $21,000–after taxes, on its own, enough to last a couple a little more than a year living at the federal poverty line.

At the same time, the enormity of these unfunded liabilities—how will all of these people with limited retirement savings support themselves?—presents a corresponding opportunity for entrepreneurs who want to help workers regain at least some of their retirement-related security. In the same interview where he discussed digital payment innovations, David Galbraith also considered the enormity of the opportunity for the new fin-tech companies that are trying to meet this need.

[R]etirement is the biggest [risk] shift anyone can possibly imagine. To put a number on it — the committed pension liability shortfalls in developing nations are 450 trillion dollars. That’s half a quadrillion dollars. So when people talk about billion dollar market opportunities — this is a half a quadrillion dollar shift in money. 

Of course, no one has found a feasible way to fill the deficit for those who have nothing to retire on today, but there is opportunity in providing expertise to workers who have at least some retirement savings.
 
Most of us don’t know how to take what we have today and marshal it to cover uncertainties like how much income we’ll need to live after we retire, how long we’re likely to live, what Social Security elections we should make, and how much medical care we’ll need along the way. This is where a new company like Kindur comes in, according to Galbraith.
 
Kindur helps workers create retirement portfolios that minimize their tax burdens while ensuring that the money they do have for retirement lasts as long as possible. Unlike investment advisors who charge commissions to maximize your savings, Kindur utilizes its on-line platform and need assessment programming to help individuals design their future income. There has never been a web-based service like this before. As the company’s tagline says: “It’s like fuel efficiency for your retirement.”
 
Kindur isn’t the only fin-tech company that is aiming to provide more comfort (or bundling) around worker retirement. This article from the New York Times last December discusses some of the others.
 
For a rising gig-economy workforce and the traditional workers who are seeking supplemental income and greater autonomy in the gig economy, the empowerment of acting in more entrepreneurial ways is easily undermined by retirement anxieties. Today, both traditional advocates and new companies are finding other ways to calm those anxieties too.

3.         Additional Protections and Benefits for Today’s Workforce

With the exception of supporting teachers in several high-profile confrontations with school districts and state funders recently, labor unions’ ability to protect workers in “union shops” seem to have lost much of their influence over economic decision-makers. They’ve also had a spotty record protecting their members’ bundled benefits and protections over the past 35 years. But while continuing to be the obvious champions for workers pitted against corporate profit taking, as the ways we work evolve, organized labor has other important roles to play in benefiting its changing membership.
 
Workers no longer stay in one locality with one employer for the course of their careers like they once did. Moreover, the average worker today takes on several different kinds of jobs. In this new world of work, services to meet these realities are desperately needed by the rank-and-file.
 
For example, unions could help their memberships “vote with their feet” when unbundled jobs no longer support them while providing assistance with “reskilling” when needed, help in finding new work, and housing in the new communities. Moreover, if unions were already providing these services in a tight labor market like we have today, their negotiating power with employers who are reluctant to lose workers would be enhanced significantly.
 
As Nicholas Colin writes in his thoughtful new book about the future of work called Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age:

[I]t’s time we imagine unions that support workers as they switch jobs, unions that would provide their members with all of the resources necessary to find inspiration (“What should I do?”), train (“How can I acquire new skills?”), find a new employer (“When do I start?”), relocate (“I need an affordable house close to my new workplace”).

Labor unions should be key contributors to a re-bundled workforce in traditional companies as well as in the new gig-economy as free-lancers, for example, unionize to protect themselves.
 
The tremendous need among workers that has been created by the unbundling of jobs has also spelled opportunity for new service providers beyond the need for a more secure retirement. Take a company like Portify that aims to help independent workers in the gig economy who are unable to obtain affordable credit without “a regular salary” and an employment contract.
 
Portify is currently in the beta-phase of providing financing to independent workers whose only source today is a payday loan charging an exorbitant interest rate. With access to information about its customers’ cash flows and bank accounts, Portify is able to understand what its customers can afford to borrow and to make loans at a substantially lower rate than payday lenders. By doing so, it will provide gig economy workers with the ability to finance growth opportunities so that a succession of smaller jobs can eventually add up to a sustainable and profitable business.
 
Another promising start-up is Dublin-based Trezeo, which is “an income-smoothing service” for self-employed people. The company calculates its clients’ average weekly income. If that income dips because a client takes a day off or someone doesn’t pay them for their work, Trezeo “tops them up to” their average income with the understanding that it will be paid back when the client is paid again. A service like Trezeo’s allows workers to maintain a steady quality of life–some of that bundling again–despite the ups and downs of gig-economy work.
 
Finally, Zego is a new company that provides gig economy workers with flexible insurance. For example, if you occasionally drive for Uber, you may not earn enough to afford the additional monthly or annual car insurance coverage that you should have.
 
To meet this problem, Zego sells insurance by the hour. For drivers, it utilizes an app to collect data about how often they are working and where they are driving that helps it to assess their insurance risks and issue coverage more affordably. Moreover, without a product like Zego’s, independent workers could be put out of business by a single workplace loss that they are unable to cover. A start-up company like this bundles these workers in greater risk protections than were available before.

+ + +

The upside of entrepreneurial, gig-economy jobs is that they promise greater autonomy, flexibility and self-fulfillment, but these work rewards can never be realized when the jobs themselves are laced with insecurity.

The bundling of benefits and protections around these new jobs (and their re-bundling around traditional jobs) promises to reduce more of that insecurity for millions of workers.

Instead of giving up in the face of growing income inequality and job-killing automation, there are thinkers, writers and entrepreneurs who are more hopeful about the future of work because they acknowledge their own and other people’s agency to build a future where workers, their families and communities can flourish again.
 
Slowly but surely, that hopeful future is being built by the re-bundlers of work today.

This post was adapted from my May 26, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Continuous Learning, Entrepreneurship, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: ability to flourish on the job, David Galbraith, gig economy, gig economy workforce, Jacob Hacker, Nicholas Colin, rebundle a job, unbundling of benefits and protections, work, work related anxiety, work rewards

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