Technology is Changing Us

February 4, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When we change our routines in a fundamental way—either because we need that change or the interruption is foisted upon us—we sometimes experience our world differently when we return.

Glimpses of those differences are possible after vacations, but they usually need to be long enough and far enough away. These differences in perspective also need to become realizations: our conscious efforts “to capture” what our time away “was really about” and consider its impacts “on what we do next.” At this point, the contrast between before and after might be bold enough to change our outlook going forward—like eat more pasta or dance everyday—but these realizations seldom change the basics about our living, our working or how we think about them. They’re more like souvenirs.

Clearer and longer breaks between departure and return generally have a greater impact because there’s more time to ponder the differences between this new place and the one we left behind. When we return to where we started, we are able to compare how it seemed before with how it seems to us now in light of the new perspectives that we’ve gained. As a result of these realizations, we sometimes do change our basic routines or broaden our rationales for doing them.

Insights about what-came-before, what-came-next and now-that-you’re-back can be even more profound if your physical or mental abilities changed during this interval. For example, you needed a new environment because you were injured in some way or found yourself facing an unfamiliar limitation. Only after time-away were you healed enough to return to the world you had left behind. Your judgments can be more nuanced when the changes to your body or spirit have also sharpened your awareness of where you’ve been and where you find yourself now.

Insights about before, next and now might be sharper still if changes in your perceptual abilities were behind your initial departure. If, say, you’d been partially blinded and had to rely on the heightened senses that remained to “map” the new environment where you retreated and the old one that you returned to “with new eyes.”

Finally, your insights might be at their sharpest and most valuable if the world you left had also changed in some fundamental way in the months or years before your return. The heightened awareness that you gained while away would be encountering this new topography for the first time. It is this final vantage point that Howard Axelrod brings to his new book, The Stars in Our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age.

Axelrod’s short story is that he was accidentally blinded in one eye during a college basketball game, took the next 5 years to graduate and recover physically, and spent the two years that followed living off the grid and reorienting himself with his natural environment in the woods of northeastern Vermont. After his time away, he began a teaching career at two urban universities.

Between his partial loss of sight and his return to civilization, smartphones had not only become ubiquitous, but in startling contrast to his back-woods life, these “stars in our pockets” seemed to be changing “how we navigated the world” right in front of him. It was an insight that might not have been possible if the contrasts between the world he’d departed, the one he retreated to and the one he re-entered had been less stark, or the realizations that he took from his experiences had been less acute.

In the “cognitive environment” of northern Vermont, Axelrod deepened his sense perceptions, made lucky discoveries as he wandered in the outdoors, and cultivated a sense of curiosity and patience that had been commonplace for much of human history. He learned to pay attention to the weather, the seasonal changes, the time of day, the life of the forest around him, and realized that doing so reinforced a particular kind of “mental map” that enabled his understanding of the world and how he could find his way through it. When Axelrod returned to urban life, he realized that the smartphones people were now holding as they walked down the street or sat across from one another at lunch were changing how almost everyone—including him—understood and experienced the world. In other words, the mental map that a smartphone enables is fundamentally different from the mental map he’d been using to navigate during his time off the grid.

The message in Axelrod’s book is not that one map is better than the other. His writing is more “meditation” (as he calls it) than argument or indictment. Instead, he wants to highlight some of the complications that can arise when you alternate between how humans have always navigated their lives and work and the new ways of doing so that mediating devices like our smartphones have enabled. In a recent interview and from postings on his website, Axelrod wants to convey what happens when adapting to a new environment means “losing traits that you valued” in your first one.

Just as we’re losing diversity of plant and animal species due to the environmental crisis, so too are we losing the diversity and range of our minds due to changes in our cognitive environment.

Several of these losses are worth our noticing with him. For example,:

–Tech tools may replace natural aptitudes and weaken the memories that they depend upon. Axelrod suggests that relying on GPS to navigate undermines not only the serendipity that often comes “when you’re finding your own way,” but also your reliance on innate navigational memories so that you don’t get lost. Axelrod says:

Our memory is tied inextricably to place. In our brains, the memory center, the hippocampus, is the same center for cognitive mapping — figuring out the route you’re going to take. If we’re no longer using our brains to navigate [and] coming up with these cognitive maps, studies show that we start to have problems with other kinds of memory.

–External prompts change our attention spans. As we grow more accustomed to on-line suggestions before taking the next step, autonomous actions—including immersing yourself in an activity and entering into what psychologists call productive “flow states”—become more difficult.

What [American philosopher William] James [once] said is that an attention span is made of curiosity. It’s the ability to ask subtly different questions. Whether you’re talking about intellectual attention, or sensorial attention, if you’re looking at a tree or watching a bird. Are you asking subtly different questions? Can you ask a question about one facet and then another? It feels like you’re paying attention steadily, but you’re really paying attention to a lot of different things, driven by your curiosity.
Online, there’s always something prompting your attention. It’s like a pseudo-curiosity. It comes in and will give you the next thing to purchase, the next article to read, the next video clip to watch. You don’t have to ask the next question — it’s provided for you. Your attention span will shorten because you don’t need to ask those questions, you don’t need to drive your own attention.

–Rapid-fire “likes” on-line also requires much less involvement from us than empathy requires off-line. Axelrod notes how disorienting it can be as we shuttle between our tech-enabled environments and the rest of our lives and work, where we often need to come to what he describes as “slower” understandings of one another:

[W]hen you’re on social media, part of what’s being called for is attention that can shift really rapidly from one post to another post. And also what’s being called for is a kind of judgment: Do you like this? Do you love this? Do you retweet this? Whereas in real life, what’s called for is a slower attention, where you’re able to listen, be patient while the person is pausing, thinking, not quite sure what they’re saying. And also what’s called for is to defer judgment, or not judge at all. To have empathy. Those are very different traits, depending on which environment you’re in.

–It is hard to reconcile or internalize the different, competing ways that we use to navigate our on-line and off-line realities. Moreover, the world we experience behind the screen can become a substitute for (or even replace) the frameworks that come from navigating in the off-line world. What we risk losing, says Axelrod, are:

our connection to something larger than ourselves, our sense of perspective, our sense of what came before us or what will come after, our sense of being a part of the natural world — that doesn’t really show up anywhere on the maps on our phones.

As we adapt to a virtual world, we’re often disoriented because its cognitive maps are so different and “we’re effectively living in two places at once.” But our adaptations change how our minds work too. In what Axelrod calls “neural Darwinism,” a kind of “natural selection” also happens “on both sides of your eyes” as we adapt to living and working through our screens. “[C]ertain populations of neurons get selected and their connections grow stronger, while others go the way of the dodo bird.” In other words, the faculties that we exercise on-line grow stronger, while those from the off-line world that we rely upon less frequently weaken from disuse.

These losses are tangible: Remembering how to navigate the world without on-line short-cuts. The longer attention spans that we need for concentration. The slower attention spans we need for empathy. Perspectives that extend from the past and into the future. Feelings that we are a part of the natural world.

Our smartphones and other virtual companions are changing our capabilities in each of these ways, but like that frog in water coming to a slow boil, too many of us may be lulled into complacency by the warmth of their star-power.

Axelrod returned from the Vermont woods when the rest of us were already caught up in their magic. With the heightened sense of being human that came from his own particular odyssey, he could see more clearly not only what we’d been gaining while he was away but also might be losing as we gradually moved off our old navigational maps and started our pell-mell quest to adapt to very different ones.

The map at the top of this post illustrates how navigation, weather, visibility, air pollution—a dozen different variables—might change in light of the fires that have recently burned through much of the western US. A poor attempt at metaphor (perhaps), but many of the fires on this map also originated in northern California, where many of the technologies behind our smartphones originated.

These “stars in our pockets” with their shortcuts, search engines and diversions are causing us to adapt to the navigational demands of an entirely new environment, where the potential costs of doing so include the loss of deep-seated memory, the ability to make our own choices, and discomfort with the “slow art” of interacting with others. Because we don’t exercise these aptitudes when navigating our new mental maps, we risk losing them as we attempt to navigate the old maps of our parallel, off-line worlds.

In a December post, I shared Tristan Harris’s theory that our brains may simply not be able to handle the challenges posed by these tech-driven interfaces. Harris went on to argue that the overwhelming information they provide also produces a kind of learned helplessness in us that’s not so different from where the frog, coming to a slow boil, finds herself.

The trick, I think, is making a deliberate effort to exercise the human capabilities that enabled us to navigate the world before these awesome devices came along—not letting them atrophy—even if we have to spend some equivalent of Howard Axelrod’s time in the northern Vermont woods to come to that realization.

We may need the sharpness, the clarity, of something like his departure and return to notice that much seems to be going awry before we resolve to do something about it.

This post was adapted from my February 2, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and the contents of some of them are later posted here. If you’d like to receive a weekly newsletter, you can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Trying On a Hero’s Perspective

January 20, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

One way to get out of the box that’s dominated by our value judgments is to make an imaginative leap, like taking on the perspective of someone we admire, and trying to see a situation—it can be any situation where we’re already convinced of our righteousness—through their eyes.

Value choices fuel our strongest commitments, but the deep, subconscious motivations behind them can also close off disagreeable viewpoints before we’ve ever had an opportunity to consider them rationally. Once my moral intuitions are engaged, feeling like I’ve actually made up my mind is just that—a feeling.

It takes an effort to keep yourself open for long enough that your rational side can go to work. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that your mind is never truly open unless you’re consistently making an effort to stay open-minded.

Trying on a truly admirable perspective further improves your chances of broadening the moral framework that determines what you think, feel and end up doing about it.

Being Open-Minded Rarely “Just Happens”

First off, you have to decide that you really want to see old things in a new way, a suitable endeavor for any new year. It’s being willing to leave the garden of moral certainty that you’ve created for yourself behind—this gated community where everything that you believe feels grounded in Truth, while looking well-tended and -considered to everyone whose opinion matters.

Truly inhabiting another’s perspective takes repeated reminders to keep your doors and windows open. Trust me, without these markers it’s easy to lose track of your ambition and get “bogged back down” in the prejudices you are trying to escape.

A nagging suspicion that your certainties no longer explain every corner of the world you’re experiencing is a catalyst too.

It also helps when you are opening yourself to the perspective of someone you already acknowledge as a moral leader, even though you suspect you might disagree with some (or even a great deal) of what he or she stands for.

In short, the promise of growth through openmindedness requires your will as well as your imagination. You have to be dubious enough about your own moral certainties and willing enough to see the world through, say, Martin Luther King’s eyes, that you’ll actually make the effort to do so.

Yes. My suggestion today, on this day before we honor him, is to try to see your judgments and convictions about life and work through Martin Luther King’s eyes.

But First, a Brief Look At Some of What MLK Stood For

Most who were alive when Martin Luther King was assassinated are now more than 30 years older than King was when he died. They remember him with teenage and grade-school memories because few who are alive today ever reached mature judgments about him while he walked among them.

As a result, in the years since his assassination in 1968, MLK has often been appropriated by those who have attempted to pour his life or words into what they stand for instead of what he did. Taking heroic figures from the past and making them serve current agendas often distorts their legacies. For example, while MLK spoke passionately about the white racism that held his people down, he also spoke about anti-social behavior in poor black communities, telling a black congregation in St. Louis that “we’ve got to do something about our moral standards” as well.

We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world too. We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.

He repeatedly urged his young followers to assume responsibility for their actions despite the racial barriers they confronted. While not always succeeding, King always tried to be “color-blind” by holding every combatant in the struggle for civil rights accountable for what they said and did. He was also convinced that everyone–black and white–shared a basic decency, even when their words and deeds suggested otherwise.

This is why one black commentator lamented the divisive way in which at least some of King’s legacy is being distorted today:

A generation of blacks who have more opportunity than any previous generation are being taught that America offers them little more than trigger-happy cops, bigoted teachers and biased employers. It’s not only incorrect, but as King and a previous generation of black leaders understood, also unhelpful.

Why unhelpful? Because it denies that MLK saw “a unity among people” that goes deeper than their actions and provides the ground for hope that’s essential to problem-solving and reconciliation.

Another part of King’s legacy—and one that the passage of time has been less able to distort—is the power and eloquence of his conviction that better days are coming.

Martin Luther King (like Lincoln and Churchill before him) understood that people need to be stirred to appropriate action during times of upheaval. As much as anything, it was his beautiful words, beautifully delivered, that drove the Civil Rights Movement and continue to inspire us today. It’s a rare feat when you’re able to carry the hopes of a crowd or a nation on the shoulders of your words.

Another thing is also true of great leaders like MLK. It is never just about how to resist your personal fears or hostile forces that are beyond your control. It is also about how you and your opponents can recover so that you’ll both be strong enough to confront the aftershocks of your discord together.

While MLK never stopped challenging injustice, he also never waivered in his vision of a better America at the other end—a hope that he struggled mightily to personify. We remember his resistance today, but what we sometimes forget was his ability to balance his challenge to racial injustice with a restorative view of the future. For him, the anguish of non-violent protest and the hostility it unleashed were almost always relieved by his belief in human decency and our ability to overcome what divides us. It’s the dream that sustained him as he marched doggedly forward.

Martin Luther King’s charge that we should always face what’s coming “now,” “next” and “ultimately” reminds us of Lincoln during the slog of the Civil War and Churchill through the long nights when England was bombed during World War II. It was his ability to affirm our basic decency and resilience at each stage of his resistance that can continue to rally us today.

A Stirring Proposal

To get out of our moral comfort zones, the proposal is to try-on MLK’s perspective. As in these pictures from the sidewalks of NYC’s Upper East Side, the recommendation is for purposeful wandering beyond the confines of the tidy borders and careful gardens that our value judgments have arranged for us. In other words, you become (for awhile) the dogs and dog walkers in this scenario, sniffing around the edges of what we believe and finding out whether we can be more open to those who disagree with our views about what is right and true.

Trying on Martin Luther King’s perspective wasn’t my idea. It comes from Cornel West and Robert George, both at Princeton, where West teaches something called “the practice of public philosophy” and George teaches jurisprudence. In a “Houses of Worship” column of the Wall Street Journal, they wrote as follows:

One of us invokes “the radical King” in criticizing empire, capitalism, and white supremacy. The other recalls King’s principles in defending the unborn, Down syndrome and other disabled people, the frail elderly, and every life…
[Because of the range and depth of his views], in judging and acting, we must avoid sinning against King’s legacy by facilely claiming him for whatever policies we favor. A more fitting attitude, one consistent with what was truly radical about King, is to imagine him as a critic: “If Martin Luther King would be on the other side of where I happen to be on this question—why?”
This self-critical stance honors King by recognizing the centrality of his Christian faith to his work and witness…
King was truly radical in his literal reading of Jesus’ command that we love others unconditionally, selflessly and self-sacrificially. And by “others,” he meant everyone—even those who defend injustice. He believed in struggling hard, and with conviction, for what one believes is right; but he equally insisted on seeing others as precious brothers and sisters, even if one judges them to be gravely in error…
King saw himself as the leader of a love-inspired movement, not a tribe or “identity group,” and that is because his radical love ethic refused to divide people into tribes and identity groups.

You can read the West-George piece here. I also propose, with its authors, that you put MLK inside your head and imagine that he’s your interlocutor.

“If Martin Luther King would be on the other side of where I happen to be on this question—why?”

You might be surprised where this act of the imagination takes you, and how quickly the moral barriers between you and those you disagree with so fervently might start to come down.

More of King’s Words

What made me write about King today was seeing a new documentary about the days in Memphis before his assassination, hearing part of his last speech at the Mason Temple on April 3, 1968, and then sitting in one place and listening to everything he said that night, from start to finish.

It’s a long speech, almost 45 minutes, but the singles, doubles and triples he sends into the choir with that sonorous voice—like “if only he’d sneezed,” so close was the knife when someone tried to kill him once before—issue forth with a kind of inevitability until his final grand slam and onto that fateful next day. It’s magnificent.

And here’s why. Not only does it consistently bridge his now, his next and his ultimately with what he calls “a dangerous unselfishness,” it also demonstrates how much Martin Luther King was living his own words.

Little was going well for King in Memphis that week. There were constant death threats against him and it must have been unsettling for him to even go out his door every morning. It wasn’t just the courage that it took to march on the City’s mean streets, he also had to look brave when he knew that he might be dead by the end of the day. It was the oppressiveness of his mortality that elevated his last words—how he embodied it and then rose above it, right before the eyes of those who had come to see him.

If you want another reason to let Martin Luther King act as a voice in your head, listen to this speech. It’s a privilege to be in the same room with him just hours before he died, hearing him live the words that hitched his own fears to a sturdier promise.

A Walk Outside The Lines

The pictures above convey the wonderful orderliness of my moral perspectives too. What’s right and what’s wrong for me is always so certain, arranged and impervious to the lifted leg of anyone who falls outside of it.

I’m for this, so I also against that and that and that: all neat and comfortable and predictable. But isn’t life messier and more interesting than that?

My self-esteem depends on projecting the best moral viewpoint I can come up with so I can be proud of what I stand for and admired by my fellow believers for our shared truths. But doesn’t our self-esteem become ossified and brittle when we keep it in such tidy containers?

On this or this or that, how might MLK see “what I’m so sure about” quite differently than I do?

This post was adapted from one I wrote two years ago but wished, at the time, I had posted closer to Martin Luther King Day when this great man is already on our minds. In addition because I was so challenged by Cornel West’s and Robert George’s suggestion, I wrote about another one of their efforts to find unity despite our deepest disagreements last February. Here’s a link to it.

A newsletter that included this post was sent to subscribers on January 19, 2020. Newsletters go out every Sunday morning and, from time to time, I post the content here as well. If you want to subscribe to my weekly newsletter, please provide your email address in the column to the right.

Good Work Needs a Cup That’s At Least Half Full

January 12, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

A counter-narrative I kept hearing before the New Year was that everything’s “so much better” than I think it is.

I’m fairly certain that’s not true, but my cup is still ” half full” (and probably a little more than that) as I start another year.

Since at least the Great Recession began in 2008, or maybe back to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, I’ve been see-sawing between pessimism and optimism. On the downside have been fewer haves, more have-nots (and less opportunity in the country I grew up in) as well as the political and environmental challenges to the ways that we live and work. On the upside, these have also been years of extraordinary innovation and I’ve gotten corresponding lifts from what our new smartphones, social networks, access to the world’s information, and gathering of “big” data (to explain just about everything) have promised.

As some promises were broken, others were kept. Ten years ago, it would have been cheaper to build new coal- or natural gas-based power generation than wind or solar, but not today. (It’s capitalism’s cost efficiencies not just government regulations that are closing coal-fired power plants.) At the same time, more and better data tells us that people around the world are healthier, living longer and that more are escaping dehumanizing poverty. This forward movement only seems to stall when the costs to the environment of more human development are factored in–so I’m back on the see saw again.

Since any good lawyer can marshal facts to prove his case for either pessimism or optimism, why am I so certain that I’m in positive territory? One part of my answer is self-serving, another part is based on experience, and still another from trying to register data-points beyond the next alarming headline.

For much of the past 10 years—and for several stretches before that—I’ve been my own boss, which means (among other things) that I have to create my own momentum every day. Because a pessimistic outlook kills my drive, I look for the good news even when I’m overwhelmed by the bad, and usually can find it lurking in plain-sight: steady instead of frantic, modest instead of boasting, less newsworthy but hardly non-existent.

This is more than a mind-game to get me to work every day. Optimism usually has the edge because the good news drowns out enough of the bad to settle me down somewhere above the tipping point.

I’m also helped by my recent experiences.

For example, I visited Baltimore just before Christmas. My home base of Philadelphia is the poorest of America’s 10 largest cities, but even with some of the sad neighborhoods that splay out around me, Baltimore came as a shock.

Because it’s always a quick read on people and place when you take public transportation, we dove right into the buses and trains after we arrived, trying to get around for a wedding Emily had to go to and to some side destinations that we had in mind together. I always get lost in a new city’s transit system, quickly needing “the kindness of strangers” to find my way, and this weekend we discovered some of what Baltimore is like today beyond its first impressions.

Strangers asking locals for help on the street are always vulnerable. But the distance between you is reduced by your need, as well as when your eyes meet, when a local’s mastery of bus color or route is demonstrated, and when you express your gratitude for the help you’ve been given. “Strangeness” shrinks further as such encounters multiply. This place that’s home to them but new to you becomes more familiar as you’re invited in by their hospitality.

What appeared to be the extreme poverty of Baltimore’s public transportation riders was completely forgotten in the generosity that these men and women kept on demonstrating as we learned our ways around on those cold, damp and gray December days. Among other places, their aid got us to the City’s art museum and to vivid paintings by Matisse that most may never have seen. But somehow “the closeness of home” in Matisse’s colors and forms were perfect embodiments of the hospitality that we’d gotten as we made our way in their direction.

A couple of days in Baltimore reminded me that a bigger story in America than any news story continues to be about the decency and generosity of its people, and how easy it still is to be welcomed into a stranger’s home.

My cup is more filled than empty for another reason too. As Matt Ridley echoed in an essay a couple of weeks ago: “good news is no news” at all, particularly when one’s fight-or-flight instincts are preoccupied by the next uptick in the threat level. Fill in the blanks with every calamity that’s worrying you most today and Ridley falls back on his data to counter your sense of impending doom:

How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better.

He doesn’t mean that there aren’t storm clouds, even some existential ones. Only, I think, that there are more reserves to weather them—and more forward momentum—than we’re able to recognize when our fields of vision are obscured by our fears.

For example, for those who argue (like me, sometimes) that we’re just “using the world up” and leaving nothing for future generations, Ridley refuses to let us lose sight of either our gains or our possibilities. He argues that we are also producing more economic growth today with fewer of the world’s resources than ever before, that is, with less water, less metal, less land, less of almost everything we once consumed. The situation in Britain (where Ridley is based) and in other “developed countries” does not reflect what’s happening everywhere else, but it’s not irrelevant either.

The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between 2000 and 2017… That’s a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources are being consumed overall;
Britain is using 10% less energy today than it was in 1970, even though its population is 20% larger;
In the past twenty years, room size computers have been replaced by smartphones, with formerly standalone calendars, flashlights, maps, radios, CD players, watches and newspapers thrown in for good measure;
Widely used LED light bulbs consume a quarter of the electricity as incandescent bulbs for the same light; and
The productivity of agriculture is rising so fast that human needs can be supplied with a shrinking amount of land (although, I’d add, the environmental costs of fertilizers, genetically modified seeds and pesticides must be factored in as well).

So my take on Ridley’s data-fueled sunshine is this: Yes, too many of us are still wallowing in consumption and heedless of the consequences, but there are also templates and practices that we’ve already put in place and can build upon—enough human ingenuity and positive momentum—that we’re not running on empty into the future, but instead have a tank that’s maybe, hopefully, a little more than half full.

Enough for cautious optimism.

Enough to preserve our impetus to act on the sense of urgency that remains.

Ridley’s argument builds on the data-driven encouragements of his 2010 book The Rational Optimist (you can read a review of it here) as well as on more recent findings by MIT research scientist Andrew McAfee in his excellent, recent More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next (2019).

(If you’re interested in delving deeper, here’s a link with an overview of McAfee’s More from Less argument that “capitalism, tech progress, public awareness, and responsive government [these last two aimed at halting environmental degradation in particular] are the four horsemen of the optimist.” Because I thoroughly enjoyed McAfee’s storytelling in a recent interview on Innovation Hub, you might appreciate his live take on our future possibilities too.)

Since the new work-year really begins tomorrow, I wanted to make one more year argument for what can be accomplished in our jobs as tech users, citizens and custodians of a fragile planet as long as we have enough hope.

It’s not just a theoretical hope that we’ll need, but one that’s confirmed whenever you ground your aims in other people at, say, a Baltimore bus stop. It’s when you have “the full-body experience” of dissenting while trying “to raise the consciousness level” of everyone who’s watching or listening, as I argued here last week in Finding a Better Home Through Action.

They are ways to be at home (alone with your work) and not “let the world turn in on you,” just as there are ways to be at home with the life force of others, either where you live or in a strange city,.

It’s inhabiting the jobs you are trying to do by finding “just enough hope.”

This post was adapted from my January 5, 2020 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Finding the Will to Protect Our Humanity

December 16, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I want to share with you a short, jarring essay I read in the New York Times this week, but first a little background.

For some time now, I’ve been worrying about how tech companies (and the technologies they employ) harm us when they exploit the very qualities that make us human, like our curiosity and pleasure-seeking. Of course, one of the outrages here is that companies like Google and Facebook are also monetizing our data while they’re addicting us to their platforms. But it’s the addiction-end of this unfortunate deal (and not the property we’re giving away) that bothers me most, because it cuts so close to the bone. When they exploit us, these companies are reducing our autonomy–or the freedom to act that each of us embodies.

Today, it’s advertising dollars from our clicking on their ads, but tomorrow, it’s mind-control or distraction addiction: the alternate (and equally terrible) futures that George Orwell and Aldous Huxley were worried about 80 years ago in the cartoon essay I shared with you a couple of weeks ago.

In “These Tech Platforms Threaten Our Freedom,” a post from exactly a year ago, I tried to argue that the price for exchanging our personal data for “free” search engines, social networks and home deliveries is giving up more and more control over our thoughts and willpower. Instead of responding “mindlessly” to tech company come-ons, we could pause, close our eyes, and re-think our knee-jerk reactions before clicking, scrolling, buying and losing track of what we should really want.

But is this mind-check even close to enough?

After considering the addictive properties of on-line games (particularly for adolescent boys) in a post last March, the reply was a pretty emphatic “No!” Games like Fortnite are using the behavioral information they syphon from young players to reduce their ability to exit the game and start eating, sleeping, doing homework, going outside or interacting (live and in person) with friends and family.

But until this week, I never thought that maybe our human brains aren’t wired to resist the distracting, addicting and autonomy-sapping power of these technologies.

Maybe we’re at the tipping point where our “fight or flight” instincts are finally over-matched.

Maybe we are already inhabiting Orwell’s and Huxley’s science fiction.

(Like with global warming, I guess I still believed that there was time for us to avoid technology’s harshest consequences.)

When I read Tristan Harris’s essay “Our Brains Are No Match for Our Technology” this week, I wanted to know the science, instead of the science fiction, behind its title. But Harris begins with more of a conclusion than a proof, quoting one of the late 20^th Century’s most creative minds, Edward O. Wilson. When asked a decade ago whether the human race would be able to overcome the crises that will confront us over the next hundred years, Wilson said:

Yes, if we are honest and smart. [But] the real problem of humanity is [that] we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.

Somehow, we have to find a way to reduce this three-part dissonance, Harris argues. But in the meantime, we need to acknowledge that “the natural capacities of our brains are being overwhelmed” by technologies like smartphones and social networks.

Even if we could solve the data privacy problem, humanity will still be reduced to distraction by encouraging our self-centered pleasures and stoking our fears. Echoing Huxley in Brave New World, Harris argues that “[o]ur addiction to social validation and bursts of ‘likes’ would continue to destroy our attention spans.” Echoing Orwell in Animal Farm, Harris is equally convinced that “[c]ontent algorithms would continue to drive us down rabbit holes toward extremism and conspiracy theories.”

While technology’s distractions reduce our ability to act as autonomous beings, its impact on our primitive brains also “compromises our ability to take collective action” with others.

[O]ur Paleolithic brains aren’t build for omniscient awareness of the world’s suffering. Our online news feeds aggregate all the world’s pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness. Technology that provides us with near complete knowledge without a commensurate level of agency isn’t humane….Simply put, technology has outmatched our brains, diminishing our capacity to address the world’s most pressing challenges….The attention [or distraction] economy has turned us into a civilization maladapted for its own survival.

Harris argues that we’re overwhelmed by 24/7 genocide, oppression, environmental catastrophe and political chaos; we feel “helpless” in the face of the over-load; and our technology leaves us high-and-dry instead of providing us with the means (or the “agency”) to feel that we could ever make a difference.

Harris’s essay describes technology’s assault on our autonomy—on our free will to act—but he never describes or provides scientific support for why our brain wiring is unable to resist that assault in the first place. It left me wondering: are all humans susceptible to distraction and manipulation from online technologies or just some of us, to some extent, some of the time?

Harris heads an organization called the Center for Humane Tech, but its website (“Our mission is to reverse human downgrading by realigning technology with our humanity”) only scratches the surface of that question.

For example, it links to a University of Chicago study involving the distraction that’s caused by smartphones we carry with us, even when they’re turned off. These particular researchers theorized that having these devices nearby “can reduce cognitive capacity by taxing the attentional resources that reside at the core of both working memory and fluid intelligence.” In other words, we’re so preoccupied when our smartphones are around that our brain’s ability to process information is reduced.

I couldn’t find additional research on the site, but I’m certain there was a broad body of knowledge fueling Edward O. Wilson’s concern, ten years ago, about the misalignment of our emotions, institutions and technology. It’s the state of today’s knowledge that could justify Harris’s alarm about what is happening when “our Paleolithic brains” confront “our godlike technologies,” and I’m sure he’s familiar with these findings. But that research needs to be mustered and conclusions drawn from it so we can understand, as an impacted community, the risks that “our brains” actually face, and then determine together how to protect ourselves from it.

To enable us to reach this capable place, science needs to rally (as it did in an open letter about artificial intelligence and has been doing on a daily basis to confront global warming) and make its best case about technology’s assault on human autonomy.

If our civilization is truly “maladapted to its own survival,” we need to find our “agency” now before any more of it is lost. But we can only move beyond resignation when our sense of urgency arises from a well-understood (and much chewed-upon) base of knowledge.

This post was adapted from my December 15, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Valuing Nature in Ways the World Can Understand

October 14, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Nature has a big problem.

Too few of us believe that climate change will happen here or will affect us personally if it does. But these misperceptions are only one aspect of the problem.

Too many decision makers–and too many workers caught in the cross-hairs of the debate–still believe that the costs of changing how we consume, digest and expel the world’s resources are too high for the benefits that might be realized once we start paying for them. They don’t see “the benefit of the bargain” I see (and maybe you see) so clearly, only their share of an unacceptable price tag.

And indeed, the high costs of changing how we do things today tend to crop up everywhere in the climate change debate.

If we want to stop over-fishing, there are the costs to the livelihoods of the fishermen. If we want to reduce our reliance on carbon-based energy, there are the impacts on those who build and maintain today’s energy infrastructure, and on the communities that depend on those workers and suppliers. It’s dismantling one economy—the lost jobs and abandoned investments—for a new one whose economic upsides often seem to be worth less than the high costs of changing how we do things now.

In market-based economies, the challenge is proving that these transition costs will be justified by the long-term economic gains. A rough apples-to-apples type exchange between likely benefits and likely costs needs to be argued, presented and accepted by enough stakeholders for “the human family” to “voluntarily” undertake the expensive steps that are necessary to confront climate change.

Put another way: will the “value” of a healthier planet tomorrow cover the “costs” of ensuring it today? Perhaps the biggest challenge facing those of us who are alarmed by climate change is filling in the “quotation marks” in this cart-before-the-horse equation so we can convince the many hold-outs who still need convincing. But until now, we’ve mostly failed to do so.

Only quite recently have the number crunchers begun to calculate the cost benefits of a healthier planet that will, over time, offset the costs of ensuring it today. It’s the dollar-spent for dollar-earned scenario that is essential if we’re to turn climate change advocacy into meaningful action.

In the places where we work, most supporters that we’ll need to realize our visions start out skeptical if not flat-out opposed to the better worlds we can often “see” so clearly, so we need to translate our versions of both the problems and solutions into stories they can understand. Like it or not, that’s usually the economic story where we trade tangible costs for tangible benefits as we undertake the often painful changes that will be needed along the way. It works almost every single time, but until now that story has not been properly told in the struggle to confront climate change.

Well the time to start telling it is now.

The Economic Benefits of Whales Versus the Lobstermens’ Costs to Protect Them

According to a recent story, there’s been an on-going showdown between lobstermen and environmentalists off the coast of Maine. The point of controversy is right whales that environmentalists argue are dying when they get caught in the lines that secure local lobster pots. The whales are threatened with extinction. The lobster industry, which is already undermined by warming waters, will be further crippled by putting down fewer pots or otherwise reducing the number of lines that secure them.

Is there a way that the value of having more whales in this ecosystem might cover the high costs that lobstermen, their families and their coastal communities will have to incur to protect them?

Until quite recently, I would have said “no.” But before finding a better answer, it might help to have some additional background about the Gulf of Maine controversy.

The right whales got their name because they were the “right” whales to push towards extinction with our commercial activities, first with the harpoons of whaling boats and more recently by accidentally slaughtering them with boat propellers, fishing nets and lobster pot lines. These bus-sized mammals are slow moving and “built by evolution to be oblivious forage feeders,” according to a NOAA Fisheries’ official. It makes these whales unusually susceptible to getting ensnared and killed.

NOAA estimates that today’s population of right whales is only about 400, with fewer than 95 breeding females remaining, which means that the entire population is jeopardized by a single death each year. But more than 30 of these whales have been found dead since 2017. While the reason for these fatalities isn’t always clear, it does not appear that they are dying from natural causes according to investigators.

To address the problem, NOAA has proposed new regulations to clear fishing lines from the whales’ path. While the regs will cover all New England waters, Maine lobstermen, who “dangle more than 800,000 lines from buoys to ocean-floor traps in their busiest months,” clearly have the most at stake. To satisfy the proposed standards, they will need to remove at least half of those lines from the water. Says one lobsterman in blunt response: “We don’t want to go extinct either.” In addition to 4,800 harvesters working these waters, the lobster industry supports thousands more jobs on shore while contributing $1.5 billion a year to the state’s economy.

During the rule making period that we’re in today, scientists will be arguing about whether the proposed regulation goes far enough to protect the whales while those alarmed by its likely impacts will be making their case for reasonable accommodations or to reject the new restrictions altogether.

As tensions escalate, and opponents refine the dollar amounts that are likely to be lost if NOAA’s regulation goes into effect, it seems a useful time to ask whether anyone in that debate is calculating the economic benefit that is provided to Maine (and indeed to all of us) by the survival of these whales.

Is anyone enabling an apples-to-apples comparison of costs and benefits so that both sides in this controversy are (more or less) in the same ballpark, with the opportunities for tradeoffs and compromises that “speaking the same economic language” might allow?

And beyond that, is there a way that the “value” of preserving these whales can cover the costs that will have to be borne by these communities if they can ever come together to protect them?

The Startlingly High Value of a Whale

In the past week or so, I came upon another whale story. This one involved a team of visionaries at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

As is often the case, I overheard bits of the story in a Morning Edition segment on NPR, which took me to a story that had been published that day in National Geographic, and eventually to a much deeper analysis in an IMF publication. It was worth getting to the bottom of the story.

As far as I can tell, what the IMF team discovered about whales and ended up proposing for the sake of both nature and industry was not in response to the Gulf of Maine controversy, but it could certainly help to resolve it.

The IMF’s approach considered all the whales in the world’s oceans. Because of its boldness and breadth, it could make a significant enough dent in species degradation, at a rapid enough pace, to reduce the number of ocean-based harms that we can no longer repair. At the same time, its approach would utilize the whales’ enormous environmental “value” to help compensate the global fishing and transportation industries for the costs of adopting “whale saving” practices. Here in a nutshell is their argument (although I urge you to read the entire IMF article and to enjoy the visualizations they’ve included in it).

Essentially, the IMF team realized that a whale’s economic value comes from its extraordinary ability to capture and then sequester carbon. “When it comes to saving the planet,” they write, “one whale is worth thousands of trees.”

In building their economic analysis, the team relied on 2014 research about how whales remove (and help others to remove) carbon from the environment as well as upon international programs that have developed mechanisms to fund the preservation of carbon capturing eco-systems. The team’s signature innovation may be focusing on a particularly helpful as well as beloved animal to support this kind of cost-benefit analysis on a truly global scale.

According to prior research, a whale sequesters as much as 33 tons of carbon dioxide per year on average compared to only 48 pounds per land-based tree. Whales eat phytoplankton, which not only contribute at least 50 percent of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere but in doing so also capture 37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide or 40 percent of the entire amount that is produced globally each year.

Whales have what the IMF team call “a multiplier effect” on the phytoplankton when they eat them and produce waste products (primarily iron and nitrogen) because these waste products are precisely what is needed for more plankton to grow. As they dive and rise again to the surface, whales “pump” these minerals to the surface across their vast migration patterns, increasing both the amount of plankton and the whale populations that feed on them as long as the whales can do so in relative safety. Moreover, when whales die, the carbon they have sequestered in their enormous bodies from eating plankton in the first place descends to the ocean floor and (according to the National Geographic’s coverage of the IMF plan) “is taken out of the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years, a literal carbon sink.”

Of course, whale populations would need to recover significantly to produce the greatest benefits. Continuing their “if-then” analysis, the IMF team notes:

If whales were allowed to return to their pre-whaling number of 4 to 5 million—from slightly more than 1.3 million today—it could add significantly to the amount of phytoplankton in the oceans and to the carbon they capture every year. At a minimum, even a 1 percent increase in phytoplankton productivity thanks to whale [pumping] activity would capture hundreds of millions of tons of additional C02 a year, equivalent to the sudden appearance of 2 billion mature trees. Imagine the impact over the average lifespan of a whale, more than 60 years.

(To put these benefits in a slightly different context, National Geographic cites economists’ calculations showing that these great whales alone could either capture or help more plankton to capture 1.7 tons of C02 per year, which is more than the annual carbon emissions of Brazil today.)

The question, then, is how to restore whale populations to pre-whaling levels. Those causing the current threat include nations that still allow whale hunting, industries (like fishing and ocean going transport of people and goods) that jeopardize migrating whales, as well as the actions of individual fishermen. Without covering the very real costs of changing these practices, it is nearly impossible to imagine that the necessary changes will be undertaken voluntarily.

With the aim of meeting these costs, the IMF team made “conservative estimates” of each whale’s value. For the largest so-called “great whales,” they used science-based estimates of how much CO2 each one sequesters directly or indirectly in its lifetime along with CO2’s market price. To this base number, they added value for a whale’s other economic contributions, including fishery enhancement and ecotourism. The IMF team concluded that the value of the average great whale is more than $2 million and that the current value of the global stock of great whales alone “is easily over $1 trillion.”

By using this “value” essentially as collateral for raising the necessary funds, monies would become available (from environmentally oriented companies, non-profits, consumers and even countries) to compensate those who are likely to suffer economic losses by changing their current business practices to protect the whales. “For example,” the team notes, “shipping companies could be compensated for the cost of altered shipping routes to reduce the risk of [whale] collisions.”

What is perhaps most noteworthy about the IMF team’s “good work” is the change in mindset that their cost-benefit analysis invites to help resolve one of our most challenging global problems: the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between nature and industry until now. The team recognized that the necessary changes will never be made unless those incurring those costs can be paid and the world can unite around sufficient compensation mechanisms to ensure that they are. Finding new ways to “value” and “leverage” nature (or “earth-tech,” as they call it) is the key they have identified.

+ + +

What the IMF team proposes doesn’t fit into a tidy package as yet, and a myriad of details still has to be worked out. In other words, the economic benefits from nature and the costs to industry of protecting it are not quite apples-to-apples yet. But this proposal boldly offers a new approach to balance the needs of both nature and industry on a global scale.

While it’s a financing mechanism that’s aimed only at whales, it introduces a framework for thinking about other carbon-rich ecosystems like sea grass beds or the forest elephants of the Congo River basin.

Proposing an earth-tech solution instead of an artificial, man-made one is inspired for another reason. When I worked in the energy industry, I studied carbon sequestration plants that were being developed at the time and know first-hand about both the technology challenges and the prohibitive expense of these man-made solutions. By contrast, nature can perform much of the same work “naturally,” if only we’d let it.

And for the on-going battle between the right whales and the lobster industry in the Gulf of Maine, there is now a rudimentary framework that, with imagination and a sense of urgency, may actually be able to serve both of them.

Good work often achieves its loftiest objectives by finding new ways to confront the dollars-and-cents obstacles that are right in front of it.

This post was adapted from my October 13, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.