A New American Dream

December 23, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I took this photo on the Fourth of July in Glenside, a town just outside of Philadelphia. Its citizens had set out chairs, waiting for a parade to honor a struggle that began in revolution but seems to have lost its momentum today.

Looking back at past newsletters and from them, even farther back in my life and my parents’ lives, I was surprised by how much I’ve been thinking about the future this year. It wasn’t my original intention.

I guess I’ve become convinced that the deep-down quality of the present isn’t the same as it seems on the surface—that the core I remember has been hollowed out—and that what’s coming next may shatter the illusion that the party we’ve been enjoying in spite of it will go on forever. Still, there is no denying that the party has been pretty grand while it’s lasted, a place to enjoy ourselves amidst all the comforts of home.

In our lifetimes and our parents’ lifetimes, America sold the Dream of sunny, middle-class home ownership, consumerism, material comfort, and upward social mobility that it thought it needed to reward its WWII veterans and win the ideological battles of the Cold War. (Our kitchens are nicer here than they are in Moscow.) Madison Avenue’s advertising machine helped with the sales pitch, and today we’ve not only won these wars but continue to live the Dream we were supposedly fighting for. And let’s face it, that American Dream has been delivered to many, if not most of us despite our rising income inequality, our concern that our kids may end up with “less” than we have today, and our shabby public infrastructure.

Of course, Edmund Phelps’ “mass flourishing” has been tapering off since the 1970’s (my 11-25-18 post) and our safety nets are fraying, but even the poorest neighborhoods have wide-screen TVs, smart phones, and more than their pets could ever want or need. So why, amidst all of this plenty, are we wondering: “Is that all there is?” Is that comfortable surface all that we’re working for? Living for?

Maybe some of the uneasiness is recalling—on some level—that we once had more ambitious dreams than getting the latest gadget from Amazon delivered in an hour, binge-watching another series on Netflix, or pleasuring ourselves with the latest meme on Facebook. We’ve either heard about or actually remember a time when the American Dream was much bolder than the warm bath we’re sitting in today—and that those more vital days weren’t so long ago.

In his 1999 book For Common Things, Jed Purdy recalls the transformative political climate of The Great Society of the 1960s where America debated ways “to eliminate” inequalities based on race and “to wage a war” on poverty. A half-century later, that debate has been reduced to “managing” the poor with welfare programs and racial inequality with good intentions. Looking at the diminishment of our public aspirations, Purdy argues that:

Americans who came of age after 1974 have never seen the government undertake a large-scale project other than highway maintenance and small wars, and relatively few are inspired by the idea that it should.

Of course, state-engineered income and racial equality would likely interfere with the mass flourishing of Phelps’ more individualistic and entrepreneurial economy. But what may be most noteworthy about where we find ourselves is the absence of any serious debate—really any tension at all—between the basic problems we face and the different ways we could solve them. This acceptance of “the way things are,” along with our sedating comfort, are the principal reasons that the American Dream has become “fossilized” and needs to be reimagined. Very little of it still resonates with any of us at its core.

Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream by Sarah Churchwell ends with that argument. But before getting to its conclusion, most of her new book is about returning to the newspapers, speeches and other original sources over the past 150 years to identify “the gaps” between “what we tell each other that history shows and what it actually says” about the quality of the American Dream.

While Churchwell finds plenty of evidence of darkness in our nativism, racism, and materialism, the forces of light have nearly always shined brightly in our history as well. In the five years between 1915 and the end of the Great War, America rocked between an isolationist, America-First agenda to making the world safe for democracy on the battlefields of Europe and trying to create a new League of Nations. Before and after the Civil War, during the Gilded Age of business monopolies and mass immigration, and during the Great Depression some of our most selfish tendencies as a nation were in pitched battles with champions of social justice and “principled appeals for a more generous way of life.”

Through much of our history, there has always been a push and pull that defined the American Dream for the generations that were trying “to make it” here—at least until fairly recently. It’s the long stretch since the Great Society of the 1960s to the present that Churchwell is most worried about.

According to the historical record she has unearthed, the America that is reflected in its Dream has “diminished,” and the fact that we once “dreamed more expansively” has been “obscured.” As she eloquently argues, “if even your dreams are ungenerous, then surely you have lost your way.” In its 300+ pages, Behold America demonstrates how a “rich, complex, difficult dream” has been forgotten in a race that focuses on wealth, material comfort and disengagement from a broader struggle for America’s soul. For Churchwell, the time to re-energize a Promise that once motivated us as workers, as citizens and as a nation is now.

So why aren’t we doing so? Churchwell doesn’t say, but I’ve tried to offer some explanations here over the past several months—at least for our personal reluctance. Beyond disengaging from any notion that sounds like rally-around-the-flag or that asks us “to believe in something” instead of remaining at a cynical distance, preoccupation with our comforts and “the rush of the future” leave little space for the kinds of activism that challenged America’s worst tendencies in the past.

Almost a year ago (in my 1-7-18 newsletter), I quoted from a Roxane Gay essay about “the tiny house movement” that quickly turned from playful to serious regarding the promises that we make to one another.

When we talk about the American dream, we never talk about what that dream costs. We never talk about how so many Americans are one financial crisis away from losing their savings or their homes. And we don’t talk about how the American dream should not be grounded in material things like large homes or fancy cars rather than, say, single-payer health care, subsidized childcare, or a robust Social Security system.

We don’t talk enough about what should and shouldn’t be included in the American Dream and spend even less time acting on our convictions. Perhaps there’s not enough hope that anything we do will matter. But believing in our priorities enough to act on them always matters. As John Berger says in my post last month about the rescuers after the Paradise California fire, hope is the fuel, the “detonator of energy,” that drives us to act on our convictions. A dream, the American Dream, is just a good story that embodies those hopes.

I mentioned several reasons why the fuel line between hope and action gets clogged in another post last August.

The Future Is Coming At Me Too Fast to Do Anything Other Than Meet It

Whole industries can change in a heartbeat. Think local travel (Uber, Lyft). Remote travel (Airbnb). Outside shopping (Amazon). Personal transport (self-driving cars). Our phones change, the apps on them change, how we use them and protect them changes. We’re so busy keeping up with the furious pace of change, we can’t think about any future other than the leading edge of it that we’re experiencing right now.”

I’m Too Absorbed By My Immediate Gratifications To Think Long-Term

The addictiveness of social media. The proliferation of entertainment to listen to, watch, and get lost in. The online availability of every kind of diverting information. A consumer economy that meets every real and imagined need for those who can afford it. We move between jobs that fail to engage us to leisure time that gratifies us into a kind of torpor. We’re too sedated by the warm bath we’re in now to worry about a future that hasn’t arrived yet.

My General Laziness and Inertia

And not just during the dog days of August….

The only way to overcome these obstacles is by finding enough hope to want to demonstrate our capabilities and act on our generosity once again.

In the Shadow of the Washington Monument

In his poem the Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot described the moral emptiness that seemed to him to envelope everything in the wake of World War I. What he wrote then is not so different from where we find ourselves today.

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

The July 4th parade in Glenside aimed to celebrate what we’ve “created” and how we’ve “responded” to our challenges as a nation but it has fallen into Shadow. In our jobs, as members of a community and as citizens, the only way out of the Shadow is to “respond” once again to priorities that are bigger than our comfort or cynicism and to “create” an American Dream that is worth living in again: one capable and generous step at a time.

This post is adapted from my December 23, 2018 newsletter.

These Tech Platforms Threaten Our Freedom

December 9, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We’re being led by the nose about what to think, buy, do next, or remember about what we’ve already seen or done. Oh, and how we’re supposed to be happy, what we like and don’t like, what’s wrong with our generation, why we work. We’re being led to conclusions about a thousand different things and don’t even know it.

The image that captures the erosion of our free thinking by influence peddlers is the frog in the saucepan. The heat is on, the water’s getting warmer, and by the time it’s boiling it’s too late for her to climb back out. Boiled frog, preceded by pleasantly warm and oblivious frog, captures the critical path pretty well. But instead of slow cooking, it’s shorter and shorter attention spans, the slow retreat of perspective and critical thought, and the final loss of freedom.

We’ve been letting the control booths behind the technology reduce the free exercise of our lives and work and we’re barely aware of it. The problem, of course, is that the grounding for good work and a good life is having the autonomy to decide what is good for us.

This kind of tech-enabled domination is hardly a new concern, but we’re wrong in thinking that it remains in the realm of science fiction.

An authority’s struggle to control our feelings, thoughts and decisions was the theme of George Orwell’s 1984, which was written 55 years before the fateful year that he envisioned. “Power,” said Orwell, “is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” Power persuades you to buy something when you don’t want or need it. It convinces you about this candidate’s, that party’s or some country’s evil motivations. It tricks you into accepting someone else’s motivations as your own. In 1984, free wills were weakened and constrained until they were no longer free. “If you want a picture of the future,” Orwell wrote, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

Maybe this reflection of the present seems too extreme to you.

After all, Orwell’s jackbooted fascists and communists were defeated by our Enlightenment values. Didn’t the first President Bush, whom we buried this week, preside over some of it? The authoritarians were down and seemed out in the last decade of the last century—Freedom Finally Won!—which just happened to be the very same span of years when new technologies and communication platforms began to enable the next generation of dominators.

(There is no true victory over one man’s will to deprive another of his freedom, only a truce until the next assault begins.)

20 years later, in his book Who Owns the Future (2013), Jaron Lanier argued that a new battle for freedom must be fought against powerful corporations fueled by advertisers and other “influencers” who are obsessed with directing our thoughts today.

In exchange for “free” information from Google, “free” networking from Facebook, and “free” deliveries from Amazon, we open our minds to what Lanier calls “siren servers,” the cloud computing networks that drive much of the internet’s traffic. Machine-driven algorithms collect data about who we are to convince us to buy products, judge candidates for public office, or determine how the majority in a country like Myanmar should deal with a minority like the Rohingya.

Companies, governments, groups with good and bad motivations use our data to influence our future buying and other decisions on technology platforms that didn’t even exist when the first George Bush was president but now, only a few years later, seem indispensible to nearly all of our commerce and communication. Says Lanier:

When you are wearing sensors on your body all the time, such as the GPS and camera on your smartphone and constantly piping data to a megacomputer owned by a corporation that is paid by ‘advertisers” to subtly manipulate you…you are gradually becoming less free.

And all the while we were blissfully unaware that this was happening because the bath was so convenient and the water inside it seemed so warm. Franklin Foer, who addresses tech issues in The Atlantic and wrote 2017’s World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, talks about this calculated seduction in an interview he gave this week:

Facebook and Google [and Amazon] are constantly organizing things in ways in which we’re not really cognizant, and we’re not even taught to be cognizant, and most people aren’t… Our data is this cartography of the inside of our psyche. They know our weaknesses, and they know the things that give us pleasure and the things that cause us anxiety and anger. They use that information in order to keep us addicted. That makes [these] companies the enemies of independent thought.

The poor frog never understood that accepting all these “free” invitations to the saucepan meant that her freedom to climb back out was gradually being taken away from her.

Of course, we know that nothing is truly free of charge, with no strings attached. But appreciating the danger in these data driven exchanges—and being alert to the persuasive tools that are being arrayed against us—are not the only wake-up calls that seem necessary today. We also can (and should) confront two other tendencies that undermine our autonomy while we’re bombarded with too much information from too many different directions. They are our confirmation bias and what’s been called our illusion of explanatory depth.

Confirmation bias leads us to stop gathering information when the evidence we’ve gathered so far confirms the views (or biases) that we would like to be true. In other words, we ignore or reject new information, maintaining an echo chamber of sorts around what we’d prefer to believe. This kind of mindset is the opposite of self-confidence, because all we’re truly interested in doing outside ourselves is searching for evidence to shore up our egos.

Of course, the thought controllers know about our propensity for confirmation bias and seek to exploit it, particularly when we’re overwhelmed by too many opposing facts, have too little time to process the information, and long for simple black and white truths. Manipulators and other influencers have also learned from social science that our reduced attention spans are easily tricked by the illusion of explanatory depth, or our belief that we understand things far better than we actually do.

The illusion that we know more than we think we do extends to anything that we can misunderstand. It comes about because we consume knowledge widely but not deeply, and since that is rarely enough for understanding, our same egos claim that we know more than we actually do. For example, we all know that ignorant people are the most over-confident in their knowledge, but how easily we delude ourselves about the majesty of our own ignorance. For example, I regularly ask people questions about all sorts of things that they might know about. It’s almost the end of the year as I write this and I can count on one hand the number of them who have responded to my questions by saying “I don’t know” over the past twelve months. Most have no idea how little understanding they bring to whatever they’re talking about. It’s simply more comforting to pretend that we have all of this confusing information fully processed and under control.

Luckily, for confirmation bias or the illusion of explanatory depth, the cure is as simple as finding a skeptic and putting him on the other side of the conversation so he will hear us out and respond to or challenge whatever it is that we’re saying. When our egos are strong enough for that kind of exchange, we have an opportunity to explain our understanding of the subject at hand. If, as often happens, the effort of explaining reveals how little we actually know, we are almost forced to become more modest about our knowledge and less confirming of the biases that have taken hold of us. A true conversation like this can migrate from a polarizing battle of certainties into an opportunity to discover what we might learn from one another.

The more that we admit to ourselves and to others what we don’t know, the more likely we are to want to fill in the blanks. Instead of false certainties and bravado, curiosity takes over—and it feels liberating precisely because becoming well-rounded in our understanding is a well-spring of autonomy.

When we open ourselves like this instead of remaining closed, we’re less receptive to, and far better able to resist, the “siren servers” that would manipulate our thoughts and emotions by playing to our biases and illusions. When we engage in conversation, we also realize that devices like our cell phones and platforms like our social networks are, in Foer’s words, actually “enemies of contemplation” which are” preventing us from thinking.”

Lanier describes the shift from this shallow tech-driven stimulus/response to a deeper assertion of personal freedom in a profile that was written about him in the New Yorker a few years back. Before he started speaking at a South-by-Southwest Interactive conference, Lanier asked his audience not to blog, text or tweet while he spoke. He later wrote that his message to the crowd had been:

If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?

Lanier makes two essential points about autonomy in this remark. Instead of processing on the fly, where the dangers of bias and illusions of understanding are rampant, allow what is happening “to filter through your brain,” because when it does, there is a far better chance that whoever you really are, whatever you truly understand, will be “in” what you ultimately have to say.

His other point is about what you risk becoming if you fail to claim a space for your freedom to assert itself in your lives and work. When you’re reduced to “a reflector of information,” are you there at all anymore or merely reflecting the reality that somebody else wants you to have?

We all have a better chance of being contented and sustained in our lives and work when we’re expressing our freedom, but it’s gotten a lot more difficult to exercise it given the dominant platforms that we’re relying upon for our information and communications today.

This post was adapted from my December 9, 2018 newsletter.

Flourishing in Every Job

November 25, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Taking greater satisfaction from your work may be your goal, but it seems that it’s hardly the government’s or the economy’s goal. Not so long ago it felt differently, that those goals were all more aligned—and maybe they could be again–but only if we gain a better understanding of how that alignment came about in the first place and the choices we can make in the workplace and at the ballot box to support it again.

Economist Edmund Phelps provides a powerful argument for how the American worker’s wellbeing and capitalism’s productivity became intertwined in his 2013 book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change. His aim in writing it (I think) was to remind us that there used to be more of an alliance between how good we felt about ourselves when we were working and the benefits that our good work produced in the economy at large.

Phelps makes several proposals to restore that sense of equilibrium. But in a wide-ranging argument that relies on history, philosophy and quantitative analysis, his primary objective seems to be an ethical one: to get us thinking about what is important about our work and how to advance those priorities in the choices we make about the quality of life we want to be working for.

When his book came out, Phelps (who teaches economics at Columbia) gave a lecture with the related title: “Mass Flourishing: How It Was Won, Then Largely Lost.” It summarized several of his book’s arguments in a highly accessible format. Most of the quotations below come from that lecture. It is only a few pages long and well worth your time to read it in full.

Phelps’ thesis is that modern American capitalism created a culture of innovation, which refers to each worker’s entrepreneurial mindset as well as to the broader economic and social benefits that mindset produced. For the individual worker, this culture fostered:

a spirit that views the prospect of unanticipated consequences that may come with voyaging into the unknown as a valued part of experience and not a drawback.

In other words, at the same time that an innovation culture produces economic growth, it also gives rise to the experience of human flourishing as workers become more powerful and capable both as explorers and creators of the new world where they’ll be living.

According to Phelps, it was the Industrial Revolution (around 1800) that ushered in a period of individual and countrywide thriving that continued in America through at least the 1960’s. It was an explosion of individual and economic energy that would not have been possible without the Enlightenment values that took root, particularly in America, during an overlapping historical period.

The impetus for high dynamism, my book argues, was the modern values arising in Jacques Barzun’s Modern Era – roughly from 1490 to 1940 – particularly the values we associate with individualism and vitalism. They include thinking for oneself, working for oneself, competing with others, overcoming obstacles, experimenting and making a mark. The courage to express one’s self by creating or exploring the unknown and the gumption to stand apart from community, family and friends are also modern values. The thesis is that these values stirred a desire to flourish; they shaped a modern conception of the life to aim for – the good life. A prevalence of these values in a nation tends to generate an economy that offers work gratifying those desires – an economy that delivers flourishing.

How these values changed individual workers and the economy around them may be Phelps’ central insight. The standard argument has been that capitalism or “free enterprise” merely took advantage of discoveries and innovations that had been produced by science. Phelps argues that competition between workers in order to prosper contributed at least as much to individual and economic advancement—that capitalism creates innovation instead of merely feeding upon it. For him, it is the Enlightenment values that we brought to work for more than a century and a half that made “the good life” possible.

As quoted in a Thanksgiving article from a few days ago, this is the vitality and ambition that Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed when he traveled across America in the 1830’s, with its grassroots “religious, moral, commercial and industrial associations” standing in for the nobility and bureaucracy that limited European progress. It is what Lincoln was talking about when he observed that in America, “every man can make himself,” as illustrated in a speech he gave in 1859:

The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This… is free labor — the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.

But then says Phelps, starting around 1970 and extending into the present day, the values of “free labor” have been constrained or overtaken by other values. In the wake of the New Deal of the 1930’s and even more so of the Great Society of the 1960’s, “traditional” social values have increasingly challenged what used to be our “vigorously individualistic” ones, including the current preference for “solidarity, social protection and security.” Among other things, these society changing priorities gave rise to “a vast canvas of entitlements… [and] to thickets of regulation” that impeded and sometimes overwhelmed the culture of innovation.

Instead of driving an economy that championed a good life from the ground up for individual workers, American policymakers began to manage the economy from the top down so that it would be what they conceived of as good for everyone. For Phelps, the satisfaction that came from realizing yourself through your talents at work along with the explosion of productivity that accompanied it in the economy—a century and a half of “mass flourishing”—was increasingly constrained by the parallel pursuit of other, well-meaning priorities. We tried to do two things at once, with a number of unintended consequences.

For one thing, the personal pride and psychic reward that were yours when you seized the opportunity “to make yourself” through your work were replaced by the promise of material wellbeing. Realizing your potential and learning new things about yourself while you overcame challenges in the rough and tumble working world were increasingly exchanged for the security of income and savings and for your leisure time away from work. According to Phelps, this trade-off no longer serves the individual worker’s “non-material experience” at all, draining work of everything that had once made it so satisfying.

These [recent] formulations overlook the world of creation, exploration and personal growth. Gone is the conception of the good life as a wild ride through an economy with an open future, an economy offering challenges with unimagined rewards. In this climate, young people are not likely to grow up conceiving the good life as a life of Kierkegaardian mystery, Nietzschean challenge and Bergsonian becoming.

(I know, pretty philosophical for an economist.)

Unfortunately as a result, work today has not only become the 8 hours you have to “get through” on your way to a paycheck and a week of vacation, but it also accounts for the startling pull-back of national productivity over the past 50 years. If we accept his thesis, “mass flourishing” has been replaced by widespread worker dissatisfaction, a decline in economic opportunity with few “haves” and many “have nots,” and an overall economy that seems to have run out of gas.

According to Phelps, the creative competition inherent in grassroots capitalism and the Enlightenment values that allowed it to thrive are essential to an innovation culture that brings prosperity at the same time that it makes work engaging. For him, Washington and the decision makers in other Western governments may believe that they can create more orderly and just societies by regulating, taxing and reducing economic growth, but by doing so they have nearly killed the golden goose.

When the values of the corporate state overtake the values of an innovation culture, the result is slower wage growth, reduced productivity in the economy, greater inequality among the nation’s stakeholders, less inclusiveness in promises like “the American Dream,” a sharp reduction in individual job satisfaction, and workers who have lots of stuff at the end of the day but little sense of personal meaning in their lives. One of the great virtues of Mass Flourishing is that it backs its arguments with the kinds of statistics that you’d expect from a Nobel Prize-winning economist like Phelps.

Artist Saul Steinberg imagines today’s workers, out to recover what they’ve lost

What Phelps does not provide are any statistics that quantify the loss of individual, work-related “meaning” over the past 50 years. But to me at least, his conclusion seems bolstered by the findings of a Gallop Poll that was taken around the same time that Phelps’ book came out. Its data proved the sorry state of worker engagement both here and elsewhere, as measured by an employee’s “psychological commitment” to his or her job as well as worker disengagement due to a “lack of motivation” and the disinclination “to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes.”

Among North American workers, the Poll determined that 71% of the workforce was disengaged, while globally the level was an even more alarming 87%. Moreover, a substantial subset of checked-out workers was found to be “actively” disengaged. These individuals were not only “unhappy and unproductive,” but also “liable to spread [their] negativity to coworkers.” That all four corners of Phelps’ argument are evidence-based makes it particularly compelling food for thought.

As a result, his thesis challenges my sometimes belief (or is it arrogance?) that greater justice, equality, etc. can be achieved by enlightened government policies, even though experience tells me that there never seems to be a large or robust enough majority to produce real change. Does a tried-and-true system like Phelps “grassroots innovation,” with its mix of individual and system-wide incentives, have a better chance than well-meaning political agendas of producing “a good outcome” for both workers and the country’s economy?

Unfortunately, many of Phelps’ proposals for recovering what’s been lost seem impossible in today’s America. One of them still appeals to me however. It would mandate that members of Congress be people who have done more with their lives than practice law or connive in politics. Phelps’ proposes that all of our legislators be workers who have experienced competition first hand and, therefore, have been forced to innovate on the job. They would bring what they know about flourishing at work to Washington before returning, after term limits, to their highly productive lives.

Today, at the end of 2018, there is still grassroots innovation in America, and not just in the garages of Silicon Valley. When your work goals are in line with Enlightenment values like thinking for yourself, enjoying competition and overcoming obstacles, while experimenting, creating and exploring the unknown, you’ll find the opportunities for innovation at work. But these days, you may need to make a more deliberate effort to find them.

This post is adapted from my November 25, 2018 newsletter. Subscribe today.

Building Confidence in the Future

November 18, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The future was on my mind a lot this week, probably because several stories were arguing for its importance and vulnerability.

Some of it was the mid-term election, which the press kept reminding us was about choosing our political future, as if we’d be able to get it right or wrong in one fell swoop. Now with the hype behind us, it looks like all we’ve done is kick the can down the road.

Then there was the centenary of “the Great War,” and all the future-talk back then. “Making the world safe for democracy” was what Woodrow Wilson promised as he navigated us from continental isolation to European battlefield that first time, going back again 20 years later, and on to Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. It’s what keeps us in the tribal mess of Afghanistan today–maybe safer, but not quite safe.

What am I voting for, fighting for, working for if not for what I hope? Is it to be safer tomorrow? To make one thing better? To change even more about the world than that? So far this week, 2018 seemed an ill-suited time to build much confidence in the future.

But then came the future as apocalypse. A place that its Gold Rush settlers had called “Paradise” was incinerated, burning many of those who were living there today beyond recognition. The future for the survivors who remained was also stripped bare: of homes, belongings, neighbors, pets, of familiarity and routine.

Still, a less blackened way to think about the future came from what happened next. It was not a government rescue or a swell of self-reliance, because most of the survivors live on fixed or limited incomes, with little fat to fall back on. Instead it was how quickly people in nearby towns moved beyond “the transmission of thoughts and prayers” to an outpouring of generosity.

In another irony for Paradise, just when their hopes for the future seemed obliterated a new community gathered around those who remained–even as more wild fires continued to bloom in the east. This short video clip captures some of the outpouring this week, dressed (either improbably or not) as a Sexy Panda food truck.

Regular people recognized themselves in their neighbors’ tragedy and spontaneously gathered to start building their future together, not by offering “pies in the sky” from afar but in a Walmart parking lot where displaced families had fled and are still living out of their cars. FEMA, the National Guard, and “the local authorities” may think they know better, but a future that’s worth having is usually created when one capable person cares for another.

As Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities:

much societal effort goes into withering us away from [our] fullest, most powerful selves. But people return to those selves, those ways of self-organizing, as if by instinct when the situation demands it. Thus disaster is a lot like a revolution when it comes to disruption and improvisation, to new roles and an unnerving or exhilarating sense that now anything is possible.

As if by instinct, some of that improvisational euphoria was visible in Walmart’s parking lot this week. The helpers felt empowered by their involvement while the survivors found the ability to tap into their own reserves of autonomy and generosity, telling me and everyone else who was listening that “We will make it.”

Over the summer, National Public Radio launched an occasional series where it asked listeners to identify songs that were “the most uplifting in their experience.” This week, NPR profiled one of them, Simon & Garfunkel’s “American Anthem,” and recorded listener reactions while the song played in the background. When I caught the Morning Edition segment over coffee, I was overtaken by the wistfulness in its college-boy lyrics and ethereal delivery and by how others still felt it too.

Cathy, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I’ve gone to look for America…

Cathy, I’m lost, I said though I knew she was sleeping
And I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike.
They’ve all come to look for America

All come to look for America

For me, the song transports because you can feel the movement of the bus in its rhythms and catch glimpses of the country not as a whole but in its particulars: Pittsburg, Saginaw, the New Jersey Turnpike.

As a people, we are also more interested in where we’re headed than in where we’ve been. So I wasn’t surprised when one listener said: “For me, getting to know America is more about the questions that we ask than the sort of sureness that we might reach in our own experience,” or that another added: “I think all of us are still searching for America and hoping to find it and define it and give it meaning. And we all do that in our own way.” In this gem of a song, “looking for America” is looking for the future and wanting (so very, very hard) to believe in what we will find.

In Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World, Robert Kaplan was also “looking for America” when he set out on his road trip across the country a couple of years ago. He tells us he found it near the border between Nebraska and South Dakota when he visited Mt. Rushmore. This is what he saw there:

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt: the four greatest presidents at the time of the 150^thanniversary of American independence in 1926, when [Gutzon] Borglum [the sculptor] began his work here. The granite insures that the work will stand undiminished for at least a thousand years. After I have driven across the continent into the wilderness, Mount Rushmore offers me revelations in person that all the photographs of it cannot. For Mount Rushmore overwhelms precisely because of where it is located, not on the Capitol Mall but atop a mountain in the West, part of the original Louisiana Purchase, bearing the promise of the continent that was the upshot of pioneer optimism. An optimism that, in turn, was driven by democracy and the breaking down of European elite systems that these four presidents did so much to originate and secure. The culmination of the American story—one that Washington and Jefferson began—has more to do with the West than the East.

These carvings, despite their inhuman size, are strangely not oppressive or totemic. They do not intimidate or call to mind some tyrannical force. There is light and not darkness in the eyes of these presidents. Each is looking into the future, it seems…The result…is a myth of light that puts into some tragic perspective…the darkness rained [by white settlers and soldiers] on the native inhabitants and their way of life in these same hills. (the italics here are mine)

For Kaplan, it is in the tension and contradiction between America’s loftiest ideals and its worst inclinations that hope in the future lies. In another irony, he finds the confidence that can ultimately win out in a popular gathering place a few miles away.

[I]n the adjacent tourist trap of Keystone, South Dakota, many of the waiters and waitresses are from places as diverse as Ukraine, India, Nepal and so on. They are trying to make it and stay in America—yes, still the land of opportunity. Whereas at the [Mount Rushmore] viewing terrace there was whispering and outright silence, here the tourists—who include immigrants from Asia and Latin America—are all chattering away, exchanging notes and competing with one another to tell just how far and through how many states they traveled in order to get here. The license plates in the parking lots are from every part of the country. Keystone, snaking and ramshackle, is like a vast hostelry at an ancient pilgrimage site. The great and nearby monument has shown them what they all have in common.

I see the arc of my journey here. It has purpose. There is nothing eccentric about driving slowly for weeks on end, from one side of the continent to the other. Keystone reveals to me exactly what I am doing, since what I am looking for actually exists.

At a time when we are criticizing many of our monuments, this may seem a odd moment for Kaplan to celebrate one of them. But at their best, a country’s monuments can be symbols not of oppression or hypocrisy but of aspiration. They can say: despite its contradictions, America is still trying to grapple with its complicated legacy and to discover a hope-filled future where the frontier still stretches out in front of it.

The Walmart parking lot near Paradise, California this week.

Like the new and recent Americans who were celebrating their commonality in Keystone South Dakota, there are always opportunities to ground our hopes.

Without the talking heads in the media, the “thought leaders” in universities and think tanks, or (really) any of the elites awakening us to what seems “right” or “necessary” to them, we can declare our hopes by driving to wherever someone whose humanity we recognize needs us right now.

As John Berger, one of my heroes, has said: “hope is not a guarantee for tomorrow but a detonator of energy for action today.” It is a way to escape the daily distractions that anesthetize us, to battle our cynicism or despair, and to claim the practical, close-to-the-ground confidence in the future that drives all good work.

This post was adapted from my November 18, 2018 newsletter.

Looking Out For the Human Side of Technology

October 28, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Maintaining human priorities in the face of new technologies always feels like “a rearguard action.” You struggle to prevent something bad from happening even when it seems like it may be too late.

The promise of the next tool or system intoxicates us. Smart phones, social networks, gene splicing. It’s the super-computer at our fingertips, the comfort of a boundless circle of friends, the ability to process massive amounts of data quickly or to short-cut labor intensive tasks, the opportunity to correct genetic mutations and cure disease. We’ve already accepted these promises before we pause to consider their costs—so it always feels like we’re catching up and may not have done so in time.

When you’re dazzled by possibility and the sun is in your eyes, who’s thinking “maybe I should build a fence?”

The future that’s been promised by tech giants like Facebook is not “the win-win” that we thought it was. Their primary objectives are to serve their financial interests—those of their founder-owners and other shareholders—by offering efficiency benefits like convenience and low cost to the rest of us. But as we’ve belattedly learned, they’ve taken no responsibility for the harms they’ve also caused along the way, including exploitation of our personal information, the proliferation of fake news and jeopardy to democratic processes, as I argued here last week.

Technologies that are not associated with particular companies also run with their own promise until someone gets around to checking them–a technology like artificial intelligence or AI for example. From an ethical perspective, we are usually playing catch up ball with them too. If there’s a buck to be made or a world to transform, the discipline to ask “but should we?” always seems like getting in the way of progress.

Because our lives and work are increasingly impacted, the stories this week throw additional light on the technology juggernaut that threatens to overwhem us and our “rearguard” attempts to tame it with our human concerns.

To gain a fuller appreciation of the problem regarding Facebook, a two-part Frontline doumentary will be broadcasting this week that is devoted to what one reviewer calls “the amorality” of the company’s relentless focus on adding users and compounding ad revenues while claiming to create the on-line “community” that all of us should want in the future. (The show airs tomorrow, October 29 at 9 p.m. and on Tuesday, October 30 at 10 p.m. EST on PBS.)

Frontline’s reporting covers Russian election interference, Facebook’s role in whipping Myanmar’s Buddhists into a frenzy over its Rohingya minority, Russian interference in past and current election cycles, and how strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte in the Phillipines have been manipulating the site to achieve their political objectives. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s limitations as a leader are explored from a number of directions, but none as compelling as his off-screen impact on the five Facebook executives who were “given” to James Jacoby (the documentary’s director, writer and producer) to answer his questions. For the reviewer:

That they come off like deer in Mr. Jacoby’s headlights is revealing in itself. Their answers are mealy-mouthed at best, and the defensive posture they assume, and their evident fear, indicates a company unable to cope with, or confront, the corruption that has accompanied its absolute power in the social median marketplace.

You can judge for yourself. You can also ponder whether this is like holding a gun manufacturer liable when one of its guns is used to kill somebody. I’ll be watching “The Facebook Dilemma” for what it has to say about a technology whose benefits have obscured its harms in the public mind for longer than it probably should have. But then I remember that Facebook barely existed ten years ago. The most important lesson from these Frontline episodes may be how quickly we need to get the stars out of our eyes after meeting these powerful new technologies if we are to have any hope of avoiding their most significant fallout.

I was also struck this week by Apple CEO Tim Cook’s explosive testimony at a privacy conference organized by the European Union.

Not only was Cook bolstering his own company’s reputation for protecting Apple users’ personal information, he was also taking aim at competitors like Google and Facebook for implementing a far more harmful business plan, namely, selling user information to advertisers, reaping billions in ad dollar revenues in exchange, and claiming the bargain is providing their search engine or social network to users for “free.” This is some of what Cook had to say to European regulators this week:

Our own information—from the everyday to the deeply personal—is being weaponized against us with military efficiency. Today, that trade has exploded into a data-industrial complex.

These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded, and sold. This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them. This should make us very uncomfortable.

Technology is and must always be rooted in the faith people have in it. We also recognize not everyone sees it that way—in a way, the desire to put profits over privacy is nothing new.

“Weaponized” technology delivered with “military efficiency.” “A data-industrial complex.” One of the benefits of competition is that rivals call you out, while directing unwanted attention away from themselves. One of my problems with tech giant Amazon, for example, is that it lacks a neck-to-neck rival to police its business practices, so Cook’s (and Apple’s) motives here have more than a dollop of competitive self-interest where Google and Facebook are concerned. On the other hand, Apple is properly credited with limiting the data it makes available to third parties and rendering the data it does provide anonymous. There is a bit more to the story, however.

If data privacy were as paramount to Apple as it sounded this week, it would be impossible to reconcile Apple’s receiving more than $5 billion a year from Google to make it the default search engine on all Apple devices. However complicit in today’s tech bargains, Apple pushed its rivals pretty hard this week to modify their business models and become less cynical about their use of our personal data as the focus on regulatory oversight moves from Europe to the U.S.

Technologies that aren’t proprietary to a particular company but are instead used across industries require getting over additional hurdles to ensure that they are meeting human needs and avoiding technology-specific harms for users and the rest of us. This week, I was reading up on a positive development regarding artificial intelligence (AI) that only came about because serious concerns were raised about the transparency of AI’s inner workings.

AI’s ability to solve problems (from processing big data sets to automating steps in a manufacturing process or tailoring a social program for a particular market) is only as good as the algorithms it uses. Given concern about personal identity markers such as race, gender and sexual preference, you may already know that an early criticism of artificial intelligence was that an author of an algorithm could be unwittingly building her own biases into it, leading to discriminatory and other anti-social results. As a result, various countermeasures are being undertaken to minimize grounding these kinds of biases in AI code. With that in mind, I read a story this week about another systemic issue with AI processing’s “explainability.”

It’s the so-called “black box” problem. If users of systems that depend on AI don’t know how they work, they won’t trust them. Unfortunately, one of the prime advantages of AI is that it solves problems that are not easily understood by users, which presents the quandary that AI-based systems might need to be “dumbed-down” so that the humans using them can understand and then trust them. Of course, no one is happy with that result.

A recent article in Forbes describes the trust problem that users of machine-learning systems experience (“interacting with something we don’t understand can cause anxiety and make us feel like we’re losing control”) along with some of the experts who have been feeling that anxiety (cancer specialists who agreed with a “Watson for Oncology” system when it confirmed their judgments but thought it was wrong when it failed to do so because they couldn’t understand how it worked).

In a positive development, a U.S. Department of Defense agency called DARPA (or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is grappling with the explainability problem. Says David Gunning, a DARPA program manager:

New machine-learning systems will have the ability to explain their rationale, characterize their strengths and weaknesses, and convey an understanding of how they will behave in the future.

In other words, these systems will get better at explaining themselves to their users, thereby overcoming at least some of the trust issue.

DARPA is investing $2 billion in what it calls “third-wave AI systems…where machines understand the context and environment in which they operate, and over time build underlying explanatory models that allow them to characterize real word phenomena,” according to Gunning. At least with the future of warfare at stake, a problem like “trust” in the human interface appears to have stimulated a solution. At some point, all machine-learning systems will likely be explaining themselves to the humans who are trying to keep up with them.

Moving beyond AI, I’d argue that there is often as much “at stake” as sucessfully waging war when a specific technology is turned into a consumer product that we use in our workplaces and homes.

While there is heightened awareness today about the problems that Facebook poses, few were raising these concerns even a year ago despite their toxic effects. With other consumer-oriented technologies, there are a range of potential harms where little public dissent is being voiced despite serious warnings from within and around the tech industry. For example:

– how much is our time spent on social networks—in particular, how these networks reinforce or discourage certain of our behaviors—literally changing who we are?

– since our kids may be spending more time with their smart phones than with their peers or family members, how is their personal development impacted, and what can we do to put this rabbit even partially back in the hat now that smart phone use seems to be a part of every child’s right of passage into adulthood?

– will privacy and surveillance concerns become more prevalent when we’re even more surrounded than we are now by “the internet of things” and as our cars continue to morph into monitoring devices—or will there be more of an outcry for reasonable safeguards beforehand?

– what are employers learning about us from our use of technology (theirs as well as ours) in the workplace and how are they using this information?

The technologies that we use demand that we understand their harms as well as their benefits. I’d argue our need to become more proactive about voicing our concerns and using the tools at our disposal (including the political process) to insist that company profit and consumer convenience are not the only measures of a technology’s impact.

Since invention of the printing press a half-millennia ago, it’s always been hard but necessary to catch up with technology and to try and tame its excesses as quickly as we can.

This post was adapted from my October 28, 2018 newsletter.