How Toxic Is Masculinity for Men?

March 28, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Social isolation has reduced the space between us and where we fall short, providing some particularly uncomfortable close-ups. That includes the part of masculinity that’s depressing and harmful to men before it’s toxic to anybody else.

Elderbrook is the stage name of the English musician, songwriter, producer and singer behind a remarkable 4-minute music video that has, over the past year, invited millions of us to consider the emotional isolation of men who show up for a group therapy session because they know they have a problem (but not what to do about it) until somebody in the group finds the courage to break their isolation.

Elderbrook wrote the mesmerizing music and vocalizes the lyrics, which are about the absence of companionship when something bad is happening to you, that is, when someone who’s not there when you need them might have helped “in keeping me sober.” For the flow and rhythm of the interactions between the ensemble of characters, Elderbrook’s voice is accompanied by an electronic music collective called Rudimental, which is a big deal in Britain but mostly under the radar here.

The gifted director who visualized the narrative is Luke Davies, the choreography (that fits this assortment of clueless blokes to a tee) is by Jacob Holme, and the lead actor is Michael Socha, who is pictured above and plays his part throughout with a non-comprehending beauty. All of these elements come together in a mix of throb, gut-punch and whimsy that speak with terrific economy to how utterly alone men can be and what needs to happen before we do something about it.

I found it jaw-dropping.

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Here’s how the video opens:

You’re about to enter some kind of group dynamic where you’re expected to contribute—a meeting, a book group, a seminar room with limited students—and a big part of you “would just rather not today.”

They’ll want me to open up, show who I am, know what I’m talking about, have something to say, share.

Call it performance anxiety, because all things considered, on most days I’d rather not.

And because it’s a group therapy room for just men, it’s even harder.

You come to deal with whatever’s been going on with drugs, alcohol, depression or just being messed-up, and it can get pretty personal.

I don’t want to look at the stain in my drawers let alone his drawers!

Maybe they’ll want me to make some gesture at taking care of one of my fellow losers. Or maybe, one of them will want to start doing that [shi~ver] to me.

They always said, “you’re not good with emotions,” that you keep what’s hurting you at bay or push it down.

Yeah, it is pretty thin ice. I might fall through and keep falling, so I hold on to the brittle however angry or irritable I get when it’s tested, or beat myself up with only a beer for sympathy, so I suppose they’re right.

What good is anybody in here for that?

And besides, they’ll be holding a pretty sad safety net.

So the first thing I’ve got to do is get it up to walk in the room with the rest of ’em instead of bolting for the stairs.

Today, it’s a long hesitation but I decide to step in anyway, and suddenly I find myself in a silence of furtive eyes, waiting for the so-called therapy to start and the first shoes to drop.

The boss starts canvassing for volunteers. “Who wants to go first? Do you Kevin? Michael?”

Then I hear some background music and, against all odds, it’s my feet that want to start talking.

I stand up like the prototype man, like Popeye—making arm muscles with both hands next to my shoulders to show how strong I either am or not, while shuffling a bit tentatively.

And then I’m off.

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Here’s your link to the “Something About You” music video. Watch it now if you can. Then think about it for a minute or two and maybe watch it again.

I can’t get over it, and maybe you’ll feel the same—particularly that part when two men make cautious eye contact and start to approach one another, and maybe you’re feeling some of the anxiety our culture has taught us that something “forbidden” or at least “not quite right” is about to happen.

Call it Taboo. Call it an acknowledgement of vulnerability. Call it one of many insights in a startling stream of them.

After he wrote and recorded “Something About You,” Elderbrook sent it out to film directors to get bids on content for the video. The request mentioned the summery nature of the track, but Luke Davies (who went on to win the bid) also heard a melancholy sadness, and “after listening to the song for an hour and a half” came up with the inspiration for a men’s self-help group (as he recounted in an interview after the music video went viral). Never really imagining that Elberbrook and his team would go for any of it, Davies had always wanted to make a short film that included line dancing “as a kind of metaphor for something else,” so he built dancing into his bid as well. And then there was this final association:

I always think of cowboys and for me, cowboys are an archetypal symbol for men. I think of Clint Eastwood and all these Hollywood archetypal superheroes before there were superheroes.

True creativity is always a leap into the dark, and Elderbrook ended up loving where Davies wanted to take his song.

Interestingly, after the performers were hired and the “cowboy” rehearsals had begun, Davies dropped on the actors that there would not only be line dancing but also “slow dancing,” and, for all the obvious reasons, he was worried about their reactions. This is how he describes what happened next, and (given the theme) the reality in that room was pretty magical in its own right.

The whole day, without a doubt, was one of the most satisfying and enjoyable shoots of my life. I gotta admit, all the dancing was so much fun to do, especially the slow dancing on rehearsal day, because the actors had no idea it was going to be a part of the music video.

They knew there was going to be line dancing but I hadn’t told them they were going to be slow dancing. And these guys had only met each other a couple hours ago. I was like ‘right, ok so everyone stand in the middle of the room, here are your partners, now I just want you to sort of hug each other’. They hugged each other for about a minute. And once we had done that and got the awkwardness out of the way, we just started slow dancing for a bit.

And what was weird is that I thought that people might be funky or not take it seriously and be embarrassed but straight away, people were just so emotional leaning into each other and it was quite romantic and funny seeing a bunch of blokes slow dancing.

You can see how well it turned out, but in some ways the story behind this little film was just beginning. The choreographers posted a how-to-do-the-line-dance instructional video on You Tube shortly after “Someone Like You” began to attract attention, and it beautifully reinforced the overall simplicity of the message: This isn’t so hard to do. And then, all of a sudden, there were young men dancing to it in a “Together is Stronger” challenge on TikTok.

Because men who let their guards down together really do become stronger.

Negative emotions eat away at you when they don’t get out, and men often have a harder time than women getting them out. No one denies it. It’s society’s, your parent’s, your own advice to “just suck it up,” to put your negative feelings behind you or bury them deep inside instead of working (even dancing) your way through them.

For example, depression is a self-aggression of trapped emotions that tends to reinforce its isolation at every turn—with booze, drugs and even deeper withdrawals. Ultimately, the answer is putting the pain into words. (If you’re interested in the deep scholarship behind this, I’d recommend Dr. Judith Herman’s landmark Trauma and Recovery.) Unfortunately, there haven’t been many translators–between the medical community and the rest of us–who have talked about men’s particularly constricted side of it, at least in vivid voices that make both the problem and its possible solutions come alive.

Davies, the director, was aware of all that because he saw the problem in men from his own family and suspected that it had to exist everywhere.

There is basically a group of people that needs our help and support [but isn’t getting it]. The bigger idea that we’re exploring is masculinity and within that, the unrealistic standards I think society sets for men. You only need to look at mental illness, depression and suicide numbers among young men to see how much of an issue it is and I think part of that has to do with the fact that men find it difficult on the whole to talk feelings.

Some people have seen [the video] as like an attack on toxic masculinity, which for me it’s never been about. I know toxic masculinity exists and I do think it needs to be discouraged but at the same time, I think people who are most guilty of it are also kind of the victims of this idea of not being able to talk about emotions and being vulnerable.

In other words, men can be as toxic to themselves as they can be to others, and maybe that’s the root of the problem.

Elderbrook and Davies have told at least part of this story about men and their feelings brilliantly, economically and interactively. They’ve shone a light. And who would have thought that they’d do so by inviting us to slow dance.

This post was adapted from my March 21, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

A Movie’s Gorgeous Take on Time, Place, Loss & Gain

February 9, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As a kid, I was a digger. Always outside in the meadow that ran the back of my house, in the woods that huddled behind the half-circle of homes down the hill, or even in the less visited recesses of my yard, I was always looking for something “down there.” But I never found anything like the spines of the Anglo-Saxon long ship that were unearthed in the picture above.

In a post from December called Digging for a Sense of Place, I described how I didn’t really find anything you’d call “archeological” until I got to Philadelphia and came upon what might have been an 18^th century kitchen dump beneath our magnolia tree out back. (My home is a block and a half from an historical marker that tells of British troops camping here before the Battle of Germantown, so I suppose the pottery shards I found there could also have been left behind when these very soldiers moved to their next encampment.) Anyway, while thinking about my relationship to the places where I’ve lived, I also saw some of the roots of my commitment to and indifference about the ravages of climate change—and how I might get that wavering to settle down into something more like steady resolve.

Because our plots of land are relative strangers to us, we don’t embrace them with the same protective bonds that draw us, to say, a child under threat. Instead, they are… little more than addresses, places to arrive at or depart from but not necessarily learn more about, even while we’re spending most of our time there.

Maybe because I’d written this post so recently, I couldn’t believe the coincidence when a British filmmaker presented his movie, called The Dig, on Netflix this week. Told with unsettling beauty, it’s a story about the quixotic excavation of an ancient burial mound on a manor estate in southeast England. With remarkable restraint, it uses its Dark Age discoveries to throw the early bombing raids over Britain during World War II (whenThe Dig takes place) into bold relief.

These bombers, like heavy, lumbering cows, crisscross the skies above the excavation site, falling down to earth on one occasion while simultaneously calling more young Englishmen up into the clouds to risk their lives. Much like them, we also need the memories of our place in the world to anchor an uncertain future. With new viral strains announced almost daily and the need to inoculate an entire planet before “normal” or “safe” can return, it still remains unnervingly unclear how any of us will come out the other end. As with the pilots and diggers of rural England in the 1940s, it might get us thinking about what we’d most like to carry with us–what we’d most like to preserve–as we too face the unknown.

This trailer for The Dig will give you the flavor of its juxtapositions on time, place, loss as well as the kind of gain that becomes possible when you seize the day.

Among many other things, this is an actors’ movie, particularly for Mulligan, Barnes and Fiennes.

Mulligan’s Edith Pretty is weighed down by the emotional and physical ailments that have increasingly burdened her since her husband, a soldier himself, died shortly after they married and their son was born. It is her estate that houses the ancient burial mounds, she’s always wondered what secrets they might hold, and perhaps because of her own dwindling, she finally resolves to find out. Mulligan’s startling performance pushes Edith to the boundaries of her fragile condition and to small bursts of vitality beyond it.

Edith finds the complement she needs “for a dig” in Basil Brown, “a self-taught excavator” who knows “everything there is to know” about the ground and soil of Suffolk since, as he takes pains to explain, his hands have been combing through it for over sixty years. A hard-working man, he learns how to find common ground with Edith across the gapping class divides of rural England in a dance of blunt and sometimes comical exchanges. Basil Brown is played by Ralph Fiennes, who has inhabited everyone from Voldermort to Jonathan Steed (the TV Avengers protagonist) and the English Patient in his years playing leading men on the big-screen. Given those marquee roles, his understated Basil is a departure.

When interviewed about it, Fiennes (himself a Suffolk native) said he spent weeks riding an old bike along the country roads of southeast England to refresh his feelings for the place and its rhythms before filming began. In other interviews The Dig’s creative force, Simon Stone, said he encouraged his actors to ad-lib the script when it felt right to them. For the character of Basil in particular, deep knowledge of the land and the freedom to be spontaneous produce a kind of honest power that is evident throughout this performance, which is the best of his that I’ve seen in his long career.

The eight (or so)-year-old actor Archie Brown plays Edith’s son Robert. A dazzling counterpoint to the mumbling Basil and his frail mother, Robert brings the fireworks of childish excitement and gushing enthusiasm to this dig for buried treasure. In their small community quest, he also discovers a father figure, awakening in Basil the best kind of paternalism when the old codger least expects it. A sequence where Robert takes off from home on his bike in search of Basil is gorgeously realized and almost unbearably sad in its desperate longing. But while the buried treasures here are frequently emotional, there are also splendid discoveries to be made as this ragtag band carves its way beneath the ground.

What The Dig’s spirited amateurs discover became known as the Sutton Hoo Treasure, stored in the buried hull of a sixth-century Anglo-Saxon ship to honor a Dark Age king. As a long-time believer in buried treasure, if I have a complaint about this movie it’s that we get to see too little of this magnificent horde—mostly as it temporarily rests on the mossy beds of wooden crates that are placed, one after another, under Edith’s bed, near a suitcase that had been her husband’s.

She ultimately gives the Sutton Hoo Treasure to the British Museum despite sniveling among the “professional” archeologists and museum curators that provide the film’s suspense (“What will become of this magical discovery at a time when we all need to feel the joy of it?”) Representing an almost entirely unknown chapter of the nation’s memory, there is never really any doubt where it’s headed. The Sutton Hoo Treasure will go to the place where the greatest number of Edith’s and Basil’s countrymen and women can gather around its campfire and face whatever tomorrow holds together.

Well into The Dig, Basil’s bedrock of a wife wonders at his conviction and tenacity, over “just how he is,” not really asking as much as telling him: “Why else would you be playing around in the dirt while the rest of the country prepares for war?”

So it’s fitting that his and Edith’s quiet obsessions play out not in a “post-card pretty England” but in more of a dreamscape of grays and ochers during the day or in a nightmare when it’s dark and raining and Basil is trying to pull reluctant tarps over the excavation site despite being blinded by the spattering mud. What’s at stake here is not the rose-colored surfaces of England’s countryside but what supports that splendor underneath: its long buried past and the quiet furnaces that animate the men and women who have lived for centuries “closest to its ground.”

In an echo of the Anglo-Saxon ship that’s being unearthed, my favorite scene in the movie is of a contemporary sailboat drifting along the same nearby river that carried the burial chamber of an ancient king to what might have been his final resting place 1500 years before. It was like a message-in-a-bottle or maybe a promise of things to come. Like Basil for a moment, I could almost hear the past reverberating into the present and maybe even the future.

When you see The Dig, you’ll know what I mean about “how Basil is,” the silent quest that drives Edith, and how valuable spirit voices like theirs might be in each of us too as we worry and wonder about what’s worth preserving in our fragile world today so we can take it into the future.

This post was adapted from my February 7, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Amish Test & Tame New Technologies Before Adopting Them: We Can Learn How to Safeguard What’s Important to Us Too

October 13, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Given the speed of innovation and the loftiness of its promises to improve our comfort or convenience, we often embrace a new technology long before we experience its most worrisome consequences. As consumers, we are pushed to adopt new tech (or tech-driven services) by advertising that “understands” our susceptibilities, by whatever the Joneses are doing next door, and by the speculation “that somehow it will make our lives better.” The sticker shock doesn’t come until we realize that our natural defenses have been overwhelmed or we’ve been herded by marketers like so many sheep.

By tech devices and services, I’m thinking about our personal embrace of everything from smart phones to camera-ready doorbells, from Google’s search engine to Amazon’s Prime memberships, from car-hailing services like Uber to social networks like Facebook. Only after we’ve built our lives around these marvels do we start recognizing their downsides or struggle with the real costs that got buried in their promises and fine print.

As consumers, we feel entitled to make decisions about tech adoption on our own, not wishing to be told by anybody that “we can buy this but can’t buy that,” let alone by authorities in our communities who are supposedly keeping “what’s good for us” in mind. Not only do we reject a gatekeeper between us and our “Buy” buttons, there is also no Consumer Reports that assesses the potential harms of these technologies to our autonomy as decision-makers, our privacy as individuals, or our democratic way of life — no resource that warns us “to hold off” until we can weigh the long-term risks against the short-term rewards. As a result, we defend our unfettered freedom until we start discovering just how terrible our freedom can be.

If there were consumer gatekeepers or even reliable guidebooks, they could evaluate the suitability of new technologies not just for individuals but also for groups of consumers. Before community adoption, they’d consider whether a new innovation serves particular priorities in the community, asking questions like:

– Will smartphones make us more or less distracted?

– Will on-line video games like Fortnite strengthen or weaken our families?

– Does freedom from outside manipulation outweigh the value of, say, Facebook’s social network or Google’s search engine, since both sell others (from marketers to governments) personal information about our use of their platforms so that these outsiders can manipulate us further given what they are learning about us?

Gatekeepers that are worried about such things might even urge testing of new technologies before they’re marketed and sold so that: the initial hype doesn’t become the last word in buying decisions; the crowd-sourced wisdom of advance users can be publically gathered and assessed; and recommendations that consider the up- and down-sides become possible.

By welcoming testing data from across the community, this kind of gatekeeper authority would likely gain legitimacy from the strength of its feedback loop. Back-and-forth reactions would aim to discover “what is good (and not so good) for us” instead of merely relying upon tech company claims about convenience or cost-savings. Before endorsing a new device or tech-driven service, these testers would take the time to ensure that it serves the human purposes that are most important to the group while also recommending suitable safeguards (like age or use restrictions). Moderated time trials would be like previewing and rating new TV shows before their general release.

What I’m proposing is a community driven, rigorously interactive and “take as much time as needed” approach to new tech adoption that — to our free-market ears — might sound impossibly utopian. But it’s already happening in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, and has been for generations. Amish gatekeepers and community members continuously test and tame new technologies, making them conform to their view of what is good for them, with startling and even inspiring results.

Startled, then inspired were certainly my reactions to a story about the Amish that Kevin Kelly told Tim Ferriss in his podcast a few years back. It led me to a Kelly essay about Amish Hackers, a post from a different storyteller about an Amish community’s “experimentation” with genetic technologies to fight inherited diseases, and other dispatches from this rarely consulted edge of American life. (Kevin Kelly is one of the founding editors of Wired magazine and a firm believer that wandering beyond the familiar is the most effective education you can get.) I’d argue there are broader lessons to be taken from Kelly’s and other sojourners’ perspectives about how Amish communities have been grappling with new technologies, particularly when you start (as they do) with a sense of awe that skews less towards “what’s in it for me right now” and more towards pursuit of the greater good over time.

As Kelly followed his curiosity, he noticed that the Amish seem to choose all of their gadgets or tech-driven services “collectively as a group.” Because it’s a collaborative endeavor throughout, they have to start with “the criteria” that they’ll use in their selection process.

When a new technology comes along they say, ‘Will this strengthen our local community or send us out [of it]?’ The second thing that they’re looking at is what’s good for their families. The goal of the typical Amish man or woman is to have every single meal with their children until they leave home.

So they also ask: will a tech-driven innovation increase the quality of our family time together, or somehow lessen it?

Since owning your own car will take you away from your community, they frown on automobiles, favoring more localized forms of transit like the horse and buggy. Similarly, because electricity ties you to a public energy grid and makes the community dependent on outsiders, they limit its use, preferring fuel, wind or sun-powered energy controlled from their homes and workshops. At the same time, while Amish beliefs are founded on the principle that their community should remain “in the world, but not of it,” their inward focus has never dampened their curiosity about new technologies or the practical advantages they might gain by utilizing them.

Strengthening family ties dictates the pace and manner of their tech adoption too. While the Amish engage in a broad spectrum of industries, their work places tend to be close to home so that workers can spend meal times with their families. And there are additional benefits to this proximity. Because the Amish are effectively living and working in the same place, the technology they rely upon to forge farm equipment, make furniture or process their produce tends to be friendly to the land and the people living there. In other words, instead of exporting the environmental and social costs of their economic activities, their means of production are also sustainable for the Amish families that live nearby.

While these criteria seem to imply a kind of primitive simplicity, the reality couldn’t be more different. One wrinkle is the way the Amish distinguish between owning technology and merely using it. For example, those who need the internet at work or school might share that access instead so it’s available for an intended purpose (like operating a business or learning) but not for getting lost in distraction whenever, say, a laptop owner feels like it.

Their work-arounds for living and working off-the-grid are also ingenious. Sometimes instead of electricity, they’ll use gas- or propane-fueled appliances and equipment. The Amish also adapt a startling array of machines and other contraptions to use pneumatic or compressed-air power. Of the later, Kelly writes:

At first pneumatics were devised for Amish workshops [where compressed air systems powers nearly every machine], but it was seen as so useful that air-power migrated to Amish households. In fact there is an entire cottage industry in retrofitting tools and appliances to [so-called] Amish electricity. The retrofitters buy a heavy-duty blender, say, and yank out the electrical motor. They then substitute an air-powered motor of appropriate size, add pneumatic connectors, and bingo, your Amish mom now has a blender in her electrical-less kitchen. You can get a pneumatic sewing machine, and a pneumatic washer/dryer (with propane heat). In a display of pure steam-punk nerdiness, Amish hackers try to outdo each other in building pneumatic versions of electrified contraptions.

How some Amish communities began utilizing genetically modified seeds on their farms — after the customary period of trial and error — also illustrate how their priorities drive their decisions. Unlike the huge turbines used in commercial agriculture, their old, but highly effective (and debt-free) farm equipment could not harvest the pest-weakened cornstalks that GMOs were designed to fight. Amish farmers embraced this seed innovation because they could continue to use their harvesters in a cost-effective manner with little apparent downside. On the other hand, the Amish jury is still out on cellphones. But instead of banning them outright, they are still trying to figure out which uses are good for them and which are to be avoided. In his essay, Kelly celebrated their endless beta testing, both here and in many other areas:

This is how the Amish determine whether technology works for them. Rather than employ the precautionary principle, which says, unless you can prove there is no harm, don’t use new technology, the Amish rely on the enthusiasm of Amish early adopters to try stuff out until they prove harm.

When downsides become apparent, they find ways to minimize them (again, sharing phones instead of owning them) or to eliminate them altogether for community members (like young people) who are most prone to their harms. It’s a time-intensive process where an Amish bishop or gatekeeper can always step in to forbid them, but there is usually a dizzying array of experimentation before that happens.

These time trials may place the Amish as much as 50 years behind the rest of us in terms of tech adoption — “slow geeks” Kelly calls them — but he finds their manner of tech adoption “instructive” and so do I.

1) They are selective. They know how to say ‘no’ and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ban more than they adopt.
2) They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory. They let the early adopters get their jollies by pioneering new stuff under watchful eyes.
3) They have criteria by which to select choices: technologies must enhance family and community and distance themselves from the outside world.
4) The choices are not individual, but communal. The community shapes and enforces technological direction.

As a result, the Amish are never going to wake up one day and discover that a generation of their teenagers has become addicted to video games; that smartphones have reduced everyone’s attention span to the next externally-generated prompt; or that surveillance capitalism has “suddenly” reduced their ability to make decisions for themselves as citizens, shoppers, parents or young people.

Given where most of us non-Amish find ourselves today, we’d likely be unwilling (at least at first) to step back from the edge of the technology curve for the sake of discovering what a new technology “is all about”—for worse as well as for better—before adapting our lives around it.

In Western cultures, individuals as consumers may have criteria for purchasing or adopting new technologies—like lower cost or greater convenience—but it seems almost impossible to believe that we’d ever be willing to bring others (beyond say a parent or life partner) into this highly personal decision-making process.

Indeed, our individualism as consumers seems so complete that it’s difficult to envision any community whose criteria we would willingly subject ourselves to for the common good. Or as Kelly puts it: we’d have to learn an entirely new skill, which is how “to relinquish” technologies and tech-driven services “as a group” until their efficacy, under the group’s standards, could be demonstrated.

So is it unlikely? “Yes.” But impossible? “No.” And what about desirable? I would argue that learning how to take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest when it comes to adopting new technologies is a consumer-wide competence that’s long overdue.

The Amish are clear that strengthening community and family are the primary goods for them. Like us, they’re drawn to “more convenient” and “less costly” too, but only if these lesser priorities can be made to serve their most important ones. At the same time, they’ll work long and hard to find accommodations for the sake of convenience or low cost by crowd-sourcing their experiences and considering all of the necessary angles before deciding how to proceed. They’re also willing to be one step or even several behind the technology curve. And when they can’t get over the hurdle of likely or actual harms with a product or service, they’ll put it behind them and move on without it.

At this point, it bears mentioning that Amish families and communities are not exemplary in terms of “goodness,” and they don’t claim to be. Indeed, their faith tends to make them more aware of their spiritual vulnerabilities than lesser believers, so they’ll readily acknowledge their sinfulness and struggles with temptation. On the other hand, their awareness of sin also distinguishes them from most of the rest of us. Compared to the Amish, we are relatively thoughtless about what is more and less “good for us,” especially in the long run.

That means our next step would be a big one. The unfettered freedom that we “enjoy” around what we buy and end up adopting makes it difficult for us to band together with others and agree to be subject to any group’s veto power. Our ad-based, consumer-driven economies have hooked us on instant gratification to the point that most of us would be unwilling (at least initially) to wait until the other beta testers in our group have finished their work and a consensus for the greater good could be reached.

On the other hand, given the deluge of new consumer technologies that keeps washing over us and the troubling consequences that come with many of them—like the community weakening propensities of “smart” doorbells and the privacy destroying nature of “smart” home assistants—we might be better off if we joined with others to learn more about what’s involved before embracing “the next shiny new thing” and discovering the downsides later.

We could learn the restraint of slowing down, the power of beta-testing new technologies, and the connectedness of considering what we discover with our fellow experimenters before jumping head-first into unchartered waters.

And perhaps most importantly, we could learn how to come to a collective agreement on the criteria for assessing whether a new technology is likely to be good for us, bad for us, or only acceptable with safeguards in place before adoption.

– What priorities would we test against as we experiment with new products and services?

– What assessment criteria would we apply in our consumer reporting about the next smart speakers, cell phone apps, facial recognition tools or geo-tracking devices?

– How could an interactive gatekeeper group like this avoid becoming a 21^st Century version of the Legion of Decency?

On this last point, any consumer protection group would certainly have to tone down the holier-than-thou attitude in its crowd-sourced application of first principles. As tech testers and reporters, the group would need to say: “we don’t know better than you, we’ve just thought about it from various, specific angles, and here’s how.”

Instead of authority residing in an Amish bishop, the wisdom of this group of early adopters and community members could be captured in an evolving body of experience that is informed by both the testers’ feedback (like Yelp’s) as well as by moderating influences on the direction of the debate (like the guidance of Wikipedia editors). Built this way, arguments about what is likely to be good or bad for everyone will always embrace a broader perspective than that of any single tech influencer or seller. In fact, the counter-weight of a consumer protection group to each of us being “on our own” with consequential technology choices would be one of this group’s two greatest strengths.

The other would be pushing a leading edge of tech consumers to decide what is important to them and worth protecting with the strength of their numbers in the free market.

A consumer protection group like this would begin by deciding on the zones it would be committed to safeguarding. They might be our zones of personal privacy (from those who wish to exploit our data for their gain as opposed to ours) and autonomous decision-making (from those who aim to use our behavioral information to manipulate our choices). Group criteria could also include protecting socially or economically vulnerable populations (like the susceptible young or old, or even the self-employed doing ride-hailing, delivery or other gig-economy work) from exploitation or harm by new tech products and services. The group’s overall aim would be to offer a persuasive new perspective to a critical mass of the tech consuming public before we decide to consume a new technology.

Their invitation might sound something like this:

Given our stated priorities, we urge you to slow down your purchases and hold off on your adoption of this new technology until — because it will always take time — its likely impacts can be assessed. We, in turn, will provide you with regular updates as our assessment of the risks and benefits as our experience with this new technology evolves.

Group creation of a public interface that provides criteria-driven, crowd-sourced information about new technology would almost certainly have an additional benefit in the marketplace. As the group’s standing and credibility is established, it’s assessments would likely influence tech companies to be more forthcoming about the potential downsides of their products and services before we’re introduced to them, and even whether they keep fraught technologies on a path to market.

Instead of individual consumers (on the one hand) or government regulators (on the other) trying to figure out how to put the ketchup back in the bottle or toothpaste back in the tube once they’ve made a mess of things, the wisdom of a consumer protection group with “greater good” priorities could serve as a counterweight before a new technology’s stains become permanent.

The group could function like a crowd-sourced Consumer Reports, publishing its assessments on a quality-controlled Wikipedia-type page that every consumer can see, with the aim of laying out the risks (as well as rewards) of new technologies before they’re widely adopted.

The Amish have found a way to test and to tame new technologies so that their priorities of family and community are continuously served.

Aren’t there enough of the rest of us — united in our concern about privacy, surveillance and on-line manipulation — to test and then tame these same technologies?

This post was adapted from my October 11, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Two Books Worth Reading

September 16, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading quite a lot over the past couple of months, and want to recommend two books that have brought me immense pleasure during a challenging time. Each is noteworthy for different reasons.

The first is a page-turner that’s built upon the harrowing but also laugh-out-loud and stop-you-in-your-tracks details its author has unearthed and pieced together around the airborne bombing of London from May, 1940 to May, 1941. The book is Eric Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile, and it features the overheard statements and personal accounts of Winston Churchill (who, at 65, is Britain’s new prime minister when the book begins) as well as statements from his inner circle, family members, earshot diarists and a host of Londoners who were about to experience one of the worst and, on occasion, one of the best years of their lives. I found Larsen’s chronicle both bracing and timely as we absorb 2020’s assaults from a similarly vengeful host of external enemies and personal demons.

My second recommendation engrosses with its high-wire act of storytelling. Apeirogon by Colum McCann uses snippets (a line, a couple of paragraphs, sometimes a photograph) to tell at least 1001 interrelated stories that illuminate, in often magical ways, the central drama that unfolds here. It involves the coming together of a Palestinian and an Israeli father. Each has lost a child in the seemingly endless strife between tribal imperatives, but these extraordinary men somehow manage to find common cause for the sake of their pasts as well as their futures. Given America’s increasingly existential divides, Apeirogon also resonates deeply as we struggle to live and work together sanely today.

Both books are unfortunately titled. Neither what was “splendid” nor what was “vile” about this phase of World War II were nearly as extraordinary as the adaptability, courage, sense of humor, ambition, discipline, personality, or throbbing humanity of London’s inhabitants during the Blitz. For its part, “apeirogon” is a word that would stump even a crossword puzzler. It’s defined as a structure with too many sides to count, and therefore apt given McCann’s seemingly endless angles into his central story—but it too fails to suggest the emotional depths that he manages to reveal here. Don’t be put off by the titles of either book.

Here are a few more words about The Splendid and the Vile and Apeirogon that might convince you to dive into one or both of them.

It is personal diaries and memoirs, some of them newly available, that give The Splendid and the Vile (“The S&V”) it’s wonderfully intimate and telling point of view. For example, take this recollection from the early summer of 1940. Churchill is anticipating the fall of France from the advancing Nazi forces as well as the first bombing raids over Britain: “the softening up” that would precede the expected German invasion. Despite his worries about his nation’s ability to stand against the Nazis alone—the US is still publically proclaiming its neutrality and isolation—Churchill had no doubt whatsoever that if anyone can lead his country in its darkest hour it is him, and he revels in his self-confidence.

Some of the best passages inThe S&V interweave the worse forebodings and Churchill’s moody responses with startling periods of gaiety after a good dinner and rivers of champagne with senior advisors, family and friends at Chequers, the prime minister’s official residence. It is the place where Churchill could refortify himself today for whatever challenges will be coming his way tomorrow. It is also where his effervescence had its most emboldening effects on those who shared the weight of the war effort with him.

Churchill felt more at ease at Chequers, and understood that here he could behave as he wished, secure in the knowledge that whatever happened within would be kept a secret (possibly misplaced trust, given the memoirs and diaries that emerged after the war, like desert flowers after a first rain). This was, [Churchill] said a ‘cercle sacre.’ A sacred circle.

Sometime later Alan Brooke, who was the Commander in Chief of the Home Forces, recalled one of those nights. It was:

when Churchill, at two-fifteen a.m., suggested that everyone present retire to the great hall for sandwiches, which Brooke, exhausted, hoped was a signal that soon the night would end, and he could get to bed.
’But no!’ he wrote.
What followed was one of those moments often to occur at Chequers that would remain lodged in visitors’ minds forever after.
’He had the gramophone turned on,’ wrote Brooke, ‘and, in the many-colored dressing gown, with a sandwich in one hand and watercress in another, he trotted round and round the hall, giving occasional little skips to the tune of the gramophone.’ At intervals as he rounded the room, he would stop ‘to release some priceless quotation or thought.’ During one such pause, Churchill likened a man’s life to a walk down a passage with closed windows. ‘As you reach each window, an unknown hand opens it and the light it lets in only increases by contrast the darkness at the end of the passage.’

On another Chequers evening, when Churchill and others had spilled outside during an air raid–he loved to watch what was happening in the night skies–a similar display of confidence and personality led another high-ranking diary keeper to exclaim: “What a tonic he is!”

The S&V is a master’s assemblage of day-to-day recollections about Churchill as well as the general mood of the country from a cast of characters that extends from the Buckingham Palace to the East End. For example, there is Churchill family intrigue, as in the chapter Larson mischievously calls “White Gloves at Dawn” about Churchill’s wife Clementine or “Clemy” (“When angry, Clementine had a habit of wearing white gloves. She was wearing them now.”) In another chapter, we learn about the practical side of “defending the homeland” from a pamphlet which described, in detail, what to do if a Panzer tank suddenly appears in your neighborhood (“Jab a crowbar into the point where the tank’s steel tread passes over a guide wheel.”) And on the startling refreshment of a child’s clear eyes when everything else seems up for grabs, there is this:

The [nightly bombing] raids generated a paradox: The odds that any one person would die on any one night were slim, but the odds that someone somewhere in London would die were 100 percent. Safety was a product of luck alone. One young boy, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, a fireman or pilot or such, answered:
’Alive.’

And we think we have problems homeschooling our children.

One reviewer said that this book provides “the kind of wrenching, carefully chosen facts that not only bring a story to life but also make a reader stop, look up and say to whoever happens to be nearby, ‘Listen to this.’” And she’s right! On nearly every page, The S&V brings perspective to our tribulations today, while revealing more of a life force in its parade of characters than seems humanly possible. I’d be surprised if you didn’t feel better about just about everything after reading it.

What distinguishes Apeirogon and accounts for its emotional wallop is the way that Colum McCann tells the story.

First of all, it’s not exactly fact and not exactly fiction, but a mix of the two. Interwoven in small fragments, there is a tremendous amount of information provided about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict over the years as well as about the political and natural history of the region. At the same time, a 1001 stories from the Arabian Nights, stories about legendary heroes who happened to be Jews or Arabs, and fragments of songs passed on through generations leaven “the facts” with more metaphorical ways of understanding what has happened and continues to happen in this ancient land.

The two fathers at the convergence of fact and fiction are Bassam, who is Palestinian, and Rami, an Israeli. In their grieving over the needless deaths of their daughters, Samadar and Abir, in different terror-driven incidents, these battle hardened men cautiously strive for a measure of forgiveness and reconciliation. Their story and the stories that surround it are assembled by McCann like you would a mosaic. For example, here are story fragments that he rubs up against prior lines and paragraphs about the use of slingshots in the Middle East, the apocryphal giant-slaying David from the Old Testament, and his daughter’s random death from thrown explosives:

169
The plutonium core of the Nagasaki bomb was the size of a throwable rock.
170
And we think the myths are startling.
171
Often Rami thinks of this: but for an accident of cloud vapor—a small defect in the weave of atmospheric weather—seventy-five thousand lives were lost in one place and preserved, then, in another.
172
But for a turn toward the book store. But for an early bus. But for a random movement on Ben Yehuda Street. But for a trip to Ben Gurion airport to collect her grandmother. But for a late sleep-in. But for a break in the babysitting routine. But for the homework to do later that night. But for the crush of pedestrians on the corner of Hillel Street. But for the hobbling man that she [Abir, his daughter] had to loop around.
173
Geography is everything.

His first magic trick is McCann’s ensuring that his readers never get lost in all of these counterpoints. For example, we already know how, where and when Adir was killed and that Rami obsessively replays the circumstances that took his daughter from him and can never bring her back.

In this author’s masterful hands, one piece in the mosaic plays off another—over and over again—providing larger and smaller understandings of what is happening to Bassam, Rami and the elemental forces that are swirling around them. That accounts for the second magic trick, which is how deeply we get immersed in the overlapping storylines about checkpoints, bird migrations, hawk hunting, surveillance drones, the importance of tunnels and of access to water in Israel and on the West Bank: seemingly everything that contributes to memories and anticipations. I spent time in Jerusalem a few years ago and was regularly amazed as I read along at how vividly the layers of the place were recalled for me.

According to one of Apeirogon’s reviewers, the unusual structure of its storytelling enables readers:

to move beyond an understanding of Rami and Bassam’s grief from the outside; [indeed] we begin to share it…. By replicating the messy nonlinear passage of time, by dealing in unexpected juxtapositions that reveal latent truths, it allows us to inhabit the interiority of human beings who are not ourselves.

There is never a single truth in any story, least of all stories that are as fraught and complex as the ones told in Apeirogon. But as different truths mix and flow over one another, the certainties around each of them begins to soften and something more nuanced and hopeful begins to emerge. At least for me, the alchemy that McCann performs in Apeirogon was always fascinating and sometimes astonishing.

This post was adapted from my September 13, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

True Greatness is Always Complicated

February 25, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

After my post about Kobe Bryant two weeks ago, I heard from a number of you who couldn’t get over the accusation of rape that still metastasized in the middle of his legacy.

I’d acknowledged that Bryant was an introvert who still needed to tell his story about the struggle between good and evil inside him—and, by implication—how laudable that was. But as I read it again, the shortness of the piece didn’t do justice to the darkness in him, at least in part because so many of Bryant’s mourners didn’t seem to be grappling with his dark side at all. They were fans who had lost a hero, and for them the “Mamba” in him was mostly, if not entirely, a good thing given the adolescent ways we think about winning and sum up complicated lives while the grief of loss still stings.

So I’ve poured over the memorial articles about him, including those that Longreads (an on-line curator of stories) assembled into “The Ugliness of Greatness Reading List” about his life, his passing and our reactions to it.

After he retired from his obsession of playing basketball better than anyone, Bryant reverted to an even deeper preoccupation, making it (along with his family) into his fulltime projects. Since his retirement from basketball in 2016, a big part of his life work became telling the story that had always interested him most, so that he could profit (and others might too) from his portrayal of struggles like the ones that were inside of him. Stories about competition and the pursuit of excellence and falling along the way. Like his storytelling heroes created Darth Vader, Voldermort and Jaws, Bryant would tell stories that spoke to his alter-ego and how to hold him in check.

I thought it a worthy encore career for him (or for anyone, really), but again the short-form of my research and subsequent post didn’t remove the suspicion that this might be a marketing proposition for the Kobe Bryant product line instead of the kind of soul-searching that could impact the ways that we saw ourselves too. So I wanted to read more, and by seeing him through others’ eyes, decide whether I’d been right in concluding that there are deeper lessons in his life, in his death and in what we seemed to be taking from them.

What follows are excerpts from articles that were written about Kobe Bryant after his helicopter fell from the sky and his story risked getting lost in the shuffle of our grief. My job was easier because the Longreads editors gathered so many terrific stories, with the haunting (but unattributed) photograph up top coming from one of them: Jeremy Gordon’s “Two Things Can Be True, But One is Always Mentioned First” in The Outline.

I brought three questions with me while I read, and I’ve grouped what I discovered about Bryant and the troubling ways we process the passing of conflicted heroes under them.

What set Kobe Bryant apart?

First off, it is useful to recall the range of his excellence as an athlete. In his article in The Outline, Gordon says of Bryant:

He exemplified excellence as grim-jawed killer instinct (murder your opponents on the court), relentless hard work (practice for hours, because the sport demands it), blunt honesty (if your teammates suck, call them out), and beatific monologing about loving the game, which to him was a way of life.

Of course, as it turned out, “his way of life” was what he wanted to tell us about most. Writing about Bryant in The New Yorker, Louisa Thomas beautifully observed:

It seemed, for a while, that he only saw himself as a winner, but it turned out that he saw himself as a storyteller. At times, this quality could make him seem a little slick, aware of his own personal mythology. But as his career progressed—and as he fought back from injury after injury—he became more expansive about the narrative power of sports, its ability to transform an inner struggle into an outer one. He didn’t hide the fact that he was angry, that he could be selfish, that he was warped by his overwhelming competitive instincts. In a 2014 [New Yorker] profile by Ben McGrath, Bryant, in discussing an outburst by the football player Richard Sherman, talked about the “ugliness of greatness.

Part of it, surely, was because Bryant’s focus was narrow, inwardly focused and relentless. In his piece “What Made Kobe Different” Jonathan Abrams began with Bryant’s own words to describe his careers as a basketball player and more recently:

I have such a narrow focus. As you can see, I didn’t have much time to socialize at all. When I wasn’t training, I was writing and I was studying the art of writing, of filmmaking. My days were booked. It wasn’t that I went out of my way not to be social. It was just that I was busy preparing for what I’m doing now.

Abrams quotes Del Harris, who was Bryant’s first NBA coach, to similar effect: about his player’s isolation from others and his mesmerizing obsession with doing his best. That he was so unsocialized may also help to explain his troublingly anti-social and often predatory side.

[Bryant] never paid attention to any outside activities that I could tell. He never went out. Of course, he was only 18 and 19. On the airplane, he never had any particular fun—no cards, no video games. He was always looking at basketball things on his computer. In those days, we did not have the DVDs of games to take with us right after the game, no iPads, etc. But he had plenty of DVDs from our earlier games, or of the next team or of [Michael] Jordan. He was a total student of the game.

And, Abrams might have added, to the contributions that he wanted to make and ended up making as a positive role model, but Bryant knew there was more to his story than that.

Around the time he was charged with rape, he started talking about Black Mamba. As he explained in “Muse” (a documentary about his life), Mamba personified his attempt to channel his mean, relentless rage more productively both on the court and off of it, vividly incorporating the serpent into a personal struggle that made sense to him, and maybe to those who were watching too.

The New Yorker’s Thomas brings that story down to today as Kobe Bryant worked with his customary diligence and single focus to continue writing it.

After Bryant retired, in 2016, he made an animated movie that won an Oscar. He launched podcasts, movies, television shows. Many of them were about why he was set apart from the world, even as he tried to connect with it…Bryant’s stories involved rage and self-discipline and anger and, yes, greatness. By all accounts, he was as involved—and even obsessive—with those projects as he was with anything else.

Bryant’s need to write his story was far more than a marketing angle for an encore career. It was like he was fleshing out his character in his own morality plays.

How does public grief reduce greatness by oversimplifying the conflicts that produced it in the first place?

In my prior post, I should have set out more of the facts about the rape charges against Kobe Bryant. Here are some of them.

In 2003, Bryant was accused of aggravated assault by a 19-year-old hotel worker in Colorado. She later told the police, “Every time I said no he tightened his hold around me.” A week after he was charged, Bryant gave a tearful press conference where he confessed to cheating on his wife Vanessa, but vehemently denied the assault allegation. What happened next was all too predictable for its time. Jeremy Gordon recounted what was happening in both the courthouse and in the court of public opinion:

Over the next year and a half, his lawyers attacked the accuser’s credibility by pointing out she’d had sex with another man in the week before the alleged assault, that she’d attempted suicide in the past, and that she had been initially excited to meet Kobe. (Her identity was also leaked.) Predictably, NBA fans took his side. I — and almost every other casual basketball observer from that era — can remember multiple conversations about whether Kobe had really done it, most of which concluded that he had not. (A popular line of logic: ‘Why would someone as famous as Kobe Bryant need to rape someone?’)

In 2004, the assault case was dropped by prosecutors after the accuser decided not to testify at the trial. Following the dismissal of criminal charges, Bryant made the following statement:

Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did. After months of reviewing discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.

While Gordon read this as Bryant’s “literally admitting” his sexual assault, Ashley Reese in her “How to Talk About Kobe Bryant’s Legacy” saw it differently. To her:

This came off as a non-apology. Sure, he acknowledged how she felt, but it still read as if her interpretation of the night diverted from reality—namely, his experience. But over 15 years later, the allegations are just a blip in Bryant’s legacy.

While they interpreted Bryant’s statement differently, both Gordon and Reese agree that everything seemed to shake out in Bryant’s favor at the time and both find it unacceptable to treat it “as little more than an aside” in his story now. When Bryant was killed in that helicopter crash, Gordon lamented the two divides that seemed inevitable on social media, between:

those who cared that Kobe Bryant committed a brutal sexual assault, and those who did not, at least not right now, but probably not ever. In a world in which the creative bodies of numerous public figures — some more talented than others — have recently been invalidated because they (allegedly or not) committed sexual assaults, I knew that Kobe was going to receive an infinite number of gauzy, heartbroken tributes from strangers glossing over or even ignoring the worst thing he’d ever done.

Gordon went on to describe the “acceptable” trade-off for too many people this way: “what’s one maybe-rape measured against 81 points in a game and five championships? What’s the private pain of one anonymous person against the public joy of millions?”

Ashley Reese argues that the consequences extend beyond these false equivalents, recounting the experience of Felicia Sonmez, a journalist at The Washington Post, a few weeks ago.

After Bryant’s death, Sonmez posted to social media a link to a 2016 Daily Beast story titled, “Kobe Bryant’s Disturbing Rape Case: The DNA Evidence, the Accuser’s Story, and the Half-Confession.” For doing so and triggering a thundering backlash across the internet, she was subsequently suspended by the Post. The newspaper’s argument was, essentially, that her doing so was poor timing while people were still coming to terms with their grief.

In an argument that says a great deal about our inability to hold two conflicting thoughts in our heads at one time and our rush to black-or-white judgments, Reese wrote:

People who work at news outlets are going through these same emotions, but they have a responsibility to tell the truth. It can be hard to tell the truth sometimes—especially when it diverts from the legacy we want from a celebrity; especially one who died tragically and young, one who a city revered, one who his daughters loved and who he loved in return, one who fellow athletes looked up to. But someone has to do it, and while it should be done with care, it must be done. The fact that it cannot be done without death threats as a result speaks volumes, but none louder than when a publication that prides itself on defending the truth acts complicit in that violence.

When our public storyteller’s tell an incomplete story about a hero, they effectively reduce his greatness by oversimplifying the conflicts that produced it in the first place.

Did Kobe Bryant’s full story matter to him and to those who lived (and will continue to live) in the arms of his legacy?

The strength of Bryant’s legacy depends on what you end up believing about him, but one set of beliefs risks losing the almost Greek sense of tragedy in it.

In his Esquire farewell Charles P. Pierce talks about “the terrible irony that he died in a fall from the sky,” because (I think) Bryant’s death speaks to both the lightness of his air and the pull of his gravity. Every mythic figure like him is caught in between, inviting us to look, to never stop looking and to judge him on how he met or failed to meet his internal conflicts head-on. But those judgments are never easy. According to Pierce:

There was no way to work that night in the Colorado hotel into the biography that unspooled thereafter and came to such a sudden end on Sunday. In Massachusetts, for decades, political writers wrestled with where to place Chappaquiddick into the saga of Ted Kennedy, and too many of them gave up and erased the event and Mary Jo Kopechne. But it is 2020 now, and Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Harvey Weinstein is in a New York courtroom, and erasing a female victim is no longer a viable moral and ethical strategy [if it ever was]. Kobe Bryant died on Sunday with one of the young women in his life, and how you will come to measure his life has to be judged by how deeply you believe that he corrected his grievous fault through the life he lived afterwards, and how deeply you believe that he corrected that fault, immediately and beautifully, and in midair.

I don’t think Bryant corrected his faults with the stories he’d already told or in a sacrificial fall from the sky. But I do believe he was still seeking redemption through his stories, bringing the obsessive introspection–that only someone like him could muster–to working through his torments and relieving his soul.

My intuition a few weeks ago was to believe in the earnestness of that quest and the more I discover about him, the more I believe that Kobe Bryant would have attempted to reconcile his demons and angels for his benefit and for ours for as long as he walked among us.

The real tragedy is that he won’t be here to keep trying to tell that story. Elemental struggles like his belong to all of us, whether we grapple with our own versions of them or not.

This post was adapted from my February 23, 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 (and not miss out on any), you can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.