We’re All Acting Like Dogs Today

July 29, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Saul Steinberg in the *New Yorker,* January 12, 1976

I recently read that dogs—through the imperatives of evolution—have developed expressions that invite positive interactions from their humans like “What a good boy” or a scratch behind the ears whenever, say, Wally looks me in the eye with a kind of urgency. There’s urgency all right, because he’s after something more than just my words or my touch.

The reward that he really wants comes after this hoped-for interaction. It’s a little squirt of oxytocin, a hormone and neuropeptide that strengthens bonding by making me, and then both of us together, feel good about our connection.

As you might expect, Wally looks at me a lot when I’m working and I almost always respond. How could anyone refuse that face? Besides, it gives whatever workspace I’m in a positive charge that can linger all day.

Social media has also learned that “likes”—or almost any kind of interaction by other people (or machines) with our pictures and posts—produces similar oxytocin squirts in those who are doing the posting. We’re not just putting something out there; we’re after something that’s both measureable and satisfying in return.

Of course, the caution light flashes when social media users begin to crave bursts of chemical approval like Wally does, or “to feel rejected” when the “likes” aren’t coming fast enough. It’s a feedback loop “of craving to approval” that keeps us coming back for more. Will they like us at least as much, and maybe more than they did the last time I was here? It’s the draw that always makes us stay on these social media platforms for longer than we want to and always keeps us coming back for more.

Social scientists have been telling us for years that craving approval for our contributions (along with not wanting to miss out) causes social media as well as cell-phone addiction in young people under 25. They are particularly susceptible to its lures because the pre-frontal cortex in their brains, the so-called seat of good judgment, is still developing. Of course, the ability to determine what’s good and bad for you is also underdeveloped in many older people too—I just never thought that included me.

So how I felt when I stopped my daily posting on Instagram three weeks ago came as a definite comeuppance. Until then I thought I had too much “good sense” to allow myself to be manipulated in these ways.

For the past 6 years, I’ve posted a photo on Instagram (or IG) almost every day. I told myself that regular picture-taking would make me look at the world more closely while, at the same time, making me better at capturing what I saw. It would give me a cache of visual memories about where I’d been and what I’d been doing, and posting on IG gave me a chance to share them with others.

In recent years, I’d regularly get around 50 “likes” for each photo along with upbeat comments from strangers in Yemen, Moscow and Beruit as well as from people I actually know. The volume and reach of approval wasn’t great by Rhianna standards, but as much as half of it would always come in the first few minutes after posting every day. I’d generally upload my images before getting out of bed in the morning, so for years now I’ve been starting my days with a series of “feel good” oxytocin bursts.

Of course, you know what happened next. My “cold turkey” from Instagram produced symptoms that felt exactly like withdrawal. It recalled the aftermath of cutting back on carbs a few years back or, after I was in the Coast Guard, nicotine. Noticeable. Physical. In the days that followed, I’d find myself repeatedly gazing over at my phone screen for notifications of likes or comments that were no longer coming. Or even worse, I’d explore identical-looking notifications for me to check other people’s pictures and stories, lures that felt like reminders of the boosts I was no longer getting. I felt “cut off” from something that had seemed both alive and necessary.

It’s one thing to read about social media or cell-phone addiction and accept it’s downsides as a mental exercise, quite another to feel withdrawal symptoms after quitting one of them.

Unlike the Food & Drug Administration, I did’t need anything more than my own clinical trial to tell me about the forces that were at play here, because at the same time that IG owner Mark Zuckerberg is engineering what feels like my addiction to his platform, he is also targeting me with ads for things (that I’m sorry to say) I realized I was wanting much more frequently. That’s because Instagram was learning all along what I was interested in whenever I hovered over one of its ads or followed an enticing link.

In other words, I’d been addicted to soften me up for buying stuff that IG had learned I’m likely to want in a retail exchange that effectively made both IG and Mark Zuckerberg the middleman in every sale. IG’s oxcytocin machine had turned me into a captive audience who’d been intentionally rendered susceptible to buying whatever IG was hawking.

That seems both manipulative and underhanded to me.

It’s one thing to write about “loss of autonomy” to the on-line tech giants, it is another to have felt a measure of that loss.

So where does this leave me, or any of us?

How do lawmakers and regulators limit (or prevent) subtle but nonetheless real chemical dependency when it’s induced by a tech platform?

Is breaking the ad-based business models that turn so many of us into captive buyers even possible in a market system that has used advertising to stoke sales for more than 200 years? Can our consumer-oriented economy turn its back on what may be the most effective sales model ever invented?

To think that we are grappling with either of these questions today would be an illusion.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has just fined Facebook (which is IG’s owner) for failing to implement and enforce narrow privacy policies that it had promised to implement and enforce years ago. The FTC also mandated oversight of Zuckerberg personally. Unlike the CEOs of other public companies, because he has effective ownership control of Facebook, his board of directors can’t really hold his feet to the fire. But neither the fine nor this new oversight mechanism challenge the company’s underlying business model, which is to (1) induce an oxytocin dependency in its users; (2) gather their personal data while they are feeling good by satisfying their cravings; (3) sell their personal data to advertisers; and (4) profit from the ads that are aimed at users who either don’t know or don’t care that they are being seduced in this way.

Recently announced antitrust investigations are also aimed at different problems. The Justice Department, FTC and Congress will be questioning the size of companies like Facebook and their dominance among competitors. One remedy might break Facebook into smaller pieces (like undoing it’s 2012 purchase of Instagram). However, these investigations are not about challenging a business model that induces dependency in its users, eavesdrops on their personal behavior both on-site and off of it, and then turns them into consumers of the products on its shelves. The best that can be hoped for is that some of these dominant platforms may be cut down to size and have some of their anti-competitive practices curtailed.

Even the data-privacy initiatives that some are proposing are unlikely to change this business model. Their most likely result is that users who want to restrict access to, and use of, their personal information will have to pay for the privilege of utilizing Facebook or Google or migrate to new privacy-protecting platforms that will be coming on-line. I profiled one of them, called Solid, on this page a few weeks back.

Since it looks like we’ll be stuck in this brave new world for awhile, why does it matter that we’re being misused in this way?

Personal behavior has always been influenced by whatever “the Jones” were buying or doing next door (if you were desperate enough to keep up with them). In high school you changed what you were wearing or who you were hanging out with if you wanted to be seen as one of the cool kids. Realizing that your hero, James Bond, is wearing an Omega watch might make you want to buy one too. But the influence to buy or to imitate that I’m describing here with Instagram feels new, different and more invasive, like we’ve entered the realm of science fiction.

Social media companies like Facebook and Instagram are using psychological power, that we’ve more or less given them, to remove some of the freedom in our choices so that they, in turn, can make Midas kingdoms of money off of us. And perhaps their best trick of all is that you only feel the ache of dependency that kept you in their rabbit holes—and how they conditioned you to respond once you were in them—after you decide to leave.

Saul Steinberg in the *New Yorker,* November 16, 1968

Maybe the scariest part of this was my knowing better, but acquiescing anyway, for all of those years.

It’s particularly alarming given my belief that autonomy (along with generosity) are the most important qualities that I have.

I guess I had to feel what had happened to me in order to understand the subtlety of my addiction, the loss of freedom that my cravings for connection had induced, and my susceptibility to being used, against my will, by strangers for their own, very different purposes.

By delivering “warm and fuzzies” every day and getting me to stay for their commercials, Instagram became my small experience of mind control and Big Brother.

Over the past few weeks, I see people looking for something in their phones and think differently about what they’re doing. That’s because I still feel some of the need for what they may be looking for too.

It gives a whole new meaning to “the dog days” this summer.

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I’d love to hear from you if you’ve had a similar experience with a social network like Facebook or Instagram. If we don’t end up talking before then, I’ll see you next week.

This post was adapted from my July 28, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Communities Rise From the Wreckage

July 22, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

J. M. W. Turner, “Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth” (1805)

Some days it’s good to be reminded.

I saw the aftermath of a terrible car and motorcycle accident a few days ago, and couldn’t help being caught in its blast radius because its impact reverberated almost to my doorstep.

From the epicenter, I heard the wailing of civilian rescuers huddled over what was surely the rider, the motorcycle he’d been on strewn in pieces a few feet away. Several cars had stopped already and knots of onlookers were clustered at the intersection’s nearest corners.

Traffic had backed up for much of the very long block and was throbbing to break through. One neighbor or pedestrian wearing a bright green shirt took to the center of the street, not embodying “Go” but shouting just the opposite: “You’ll have to turn around,” as one car defiantly entered the empty, opposing lane to push through his impatience. “Really,” the Green Man countered, “are you in such a hurry that you’re willing to risk more injuries?”

At their confrontation I thought of going back inside, but feeling his protectiveness too I strained for a look at the aura of assistance that was closer in than this spontaneous traffic monitor who was bravely putting himself between his own safety and more cars that were feinting to get through.

Just then, an equally improvised town crier–perhaps sensing the ambivalence of our sympathies– shouted: “It was an illegal turn, the motorcycle was not at fault” because she too may have been assuming that it was. In the murmuring that followed, it also became clear that the illegal turner had fled the scene, which made the witnesses and passers-by seem to move even closer in, as if to shelter the body that had been left alone in the middle of two city streets. Surely, it wasn’t just moth-to-flame interest that held us here. I tried to gather my vaguer explanations before another driver tried to power through the threads and associations or the sirens arrived.

They ended up converging on what Fred Rogers had said one day to a kid who regularly visited his Neighborhood:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’

Some years ago I’d been in the middle of a different accident when I hit a dog who’d run into the road and a whirlwind of help, rubbernecking and road rage had spun around me as I cradled that dog in the middle of an even crazier intersection. It added up to one of my worst and best days for many of these same reasons. I can still feel strangers hovering over me, trying to hold back the traffic like a gathering storm, helping.

People help because it allows them to draw on their ability to act–that is, to take matters into their own capable hands–before “experts,” like the police, the ambulance crews, the tow truck drivers who have been on the lookout for wreckage, show up. It’s also acting on the common bond they feel with the fallen, maybe remembering when a stranger had helped them or sensing an as-yet unrealized potential to intervene in the same way themselves.

During days like today when selfish and mean can seem front and center, there’s always hope to be found in the helpers. I, for one, never trust that they’ll come, but they still, always seem to. It’s the surprise of grace. And they were there again this week, gathering around a body that had been hit and broken before it was abandoned.

Fortunately, fatefully, these expressions of shared humanity are everywhere when we look for them, from the most extreme circumstances to the most mundane. Writer Rebecca Solnit described “improvisational communities of help” around earthquakes like the tremor that destroyed much of San Francisco more than a century ago, hurricanes like Katrina that ravaged New Orleans, and the terrorist attack on 9/11 in New York City. A half a year ago, I wrote about a helping community that materialized in a Walmart parking lot after a terrible fire had nearly obliterated a place that could no longer be called Paradise California without shaking your head.

In a new article, Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis has created “a record for analysis” out of the information that still exists about survivors of shipwrecks over a period of 400 years (from 1500 to 1900), drawing tentative conclusions about their post-wreckage collaborations and potentially opening up new ways of assembling “data sources” for testing by social scientists.

In today’s post, there is more on Solnit’s observations about human nature and Christakis’ thoughts about cooperative behavior after tragedy.

Tracking on Christakis’ research, the pictures here are of turbulent seas and the inevitable shipwrecks, all by perhaps England’s greatest painter, J.M.W. Turner. Each one invites us to imagine what comes next and to be continuously surprised by how good that can be.

J. M. W. Turner, “Shipwreck Off Hastings” (1825)

1. Spontaneous Helping Communities

Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster alerted me to how average people became rescuers during several of the worst catastrophes in American history. She explains it, in part, by how “diving in to help” brings a sense of confidence and liberation that is lacking in people’s private lives. For these civilian rescuers, it’s almost experienced as enjoyment:

…if enjoyment is the right word for that sense of immersion in the moment and solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday life, an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive. We don’t even have a language for that emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological….The desires and possibilities awakened are so powerful they shine even from wreckage, carnage, and ashes.

It’s as if we can see better versions of ourselves as leaders, problem-solvers, caring adults and members of a flesh-and-blood communities shining through.

Speaking with any assurance “about life today” is always risky, but it does seem that we exalt “minding your own business” as an excuse today for not getting more involved while building as much insulation as we can afford between our private and public lives. It may explain low voter turn-out, general political apathy and cynicism, our involvement with arms-length communities (like Facebook) instead of real ones where we have to get our hands dirty and look our neighbors in the eye, and the time we spend in echo-chambers that reinforce our sense of “us vs. them” But at exactly the same time that our private lives seem paramount, Solnit’s argument is that we also crave more meaningful engagement than we’ll ever find living behind safety glass.

It is this longing that has a chance to be satisfied when regular people find themselves helping during a car accident or other emergency. We suddenly feel more fully alive than we felt before. Solnit analogizes the fullness that regular people feel under these circumstances to the solidarity and immediacy that soldiers often experience during wartime.

We have, most of us, a deep desire for this democratic public life, for a voice, for membership, for purpose and meaning that cannot be only personal. We want larger selves and a larger world. It is part of the seduction of war William James warned against—for life during wartime often serves to bring people into this sense of common cause, sacrifice, absorption in something larger. Chris Hedges inveighed against it too, in his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning: ‘The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidity of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.’ Which only brings us back to James’s question: What is the moral equivalent of war—not the equivalent of its carnage, its xenophobias, its savagery—but its urgency, its meaning, its solidarity?

The clutch of men and women kneeling over and attending to the victim sprawled on the intersection near my front door were finding it.

It’s why the Green Man turned himself into a traffic cop right before my eyes. He was finding something that he needed too.

J. M. W. Turner, “Long Ship’s Lighthouse, Lands End” (1834-5)

2. How Shipwrecked Survivors Came Together Time After Time

In the course of his research about how people behave in social networks, Nicholas Christokis ran an experiment using data he gathered about shipwrecks that took place over the span of four hundred years. He wanted to know how survivors who had “narrowly escaped death and were psychologically traumatized,” often arriving on remote islands “nearly drowned and sometimes naked and wounded” came together (or broke down) as a network of survivors. His findings tended to prove his theory that we carry “innate proclivities to make good societies” even under the most extreme circumstances.

His “Lessons from Shipwrecked Micro-Societies” appeared in the on-line platform Quillette a little over a week ago. Christakis acknowledged many of his experiment’s limitations up front:

The people who traveled on ships were not randomly drawn from the human population; they were often serving in the navy or the marines or were enslaved persons, convicts or traders. Shipboard life involved exacting status divisions and command structures to which these people were accustomed. Survivor groups were therefore made up of people who not only frequently came from a single distinctive cultural background (Dutch, Portuguese, English and so on), but who were also part of the various subcultures associated with long ocean voyages during the epoch of exploration. These shipwreck societies were [also]…mostly male.

Still, given the similarities and differences among these survivor groups in terms of race, gender and hierarchy, it is noteworthy that they rarely devolved into a state of selfishness, brutality or violence in their quest to survive. Instead, they tended to model fairness and cooperation in their interactions, a reduction in previous status divisions, noteworthy demonstrations of leadership and the development of new friendships.

Survivor communities manifested cooperation in diverse ways: sharing food equitably; taking care of injured or sick colleagues; working together to dig wells, bury the dead, co-ordinate a defense, or maintain signal fires; or jointly planning to build a boat or secure rescue. In addition to historical documentation of such egalitarian behaviors, archaeological evidence includes the non-separation of subgroups (for example, officers and enlisted men or passengers and servants) into different dwellings, and the presence of collectively built wells or stone signal-fire platforms. Other indirect evidence is found in the accounts of survivors, such as reports of the crew being persuaded, because of good leadership, to engage in dangerous salvage operations. And we have many hints of friendship and camaraderie in these circumstances.

Christakis is best known for demonstrating how networks of strangers can promote positive behaviors and even altruism through “the contagion” that their influence exerts in the course of their interactions. His new book Blueprint: the Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society makes the additional argument that our genes affect not only our personal behaviors but also provide the drive to join together “to make good societies” whether they are in on-line networks or in the communities where we live and work. The encouraging data from shipwreck communities that Christakis summarized in his article is part of that argument.

In what can seem like a mean-spirited and selfish time, there is hope to be found in the circumstantial evidence that “helping one another” may be hardwired into our genetic programming.

There is hope to be found every time that regular people pitch in to help instead of walking by or refusing to get involved, not because they’re heroic or brave but because they experience something akin to enjoyment and even liberation by doing so.

Whenever hope in the future seems to be flagging, look for the helpers. There are several reasons that they’re always around.

This post was adapted from my July 21, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

A Course Correction for the World Wide Web

July 15, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Pink shock and emerald green in the back yard

Emily was here for breakfast on Thursday and I had the morning’s news on public radio—the same stories staring at me from the front page of my newspaper—and she said with millennial weariness: Why are you listening to that?

It was a good question, and one I often answer for myself by turning it off because it’s mostly journalist shock, outrage or shame about whatever the newsmakers think is going on. Who needs their sense of urgency in those first moments when you’re still trying to figure out whether you’re fully conscious or even alive?

On the other hand, short ventures into my yard quickly provide more hopeful messages. It’s the early summer flush, fueled by plenty of rain, and everything is still emerald green. Summer is telling different stories than the radio, sees different horizons, including the one some kind of watermelon sprawl is trying to reach with its tentacles. These co-venturers aren’t fretting about the future, they’re claiming it by inches and feet, or celebrating it with explosions in the air.

While shock, outrage or shame can push you to do good work, it’s hope that sustains it by giving it directions, goals, and better horizons. Everything around the creeping reality of surveillance capitalism tiggers all those negative feelings and keeps me snapping at its purveyors with my canines because—well—because it deserves to be pierced and wounded.

But then what?

That’s where others who have shared these angry and disgusted reactions start showing me more hopeful responses in their own good work–the productive places where gut reaction sometimes enable you to go–and that my radio provides little if any of (ok, so now what?) on most mornings.

In the early days of the internet, the geeks and tinkerers in their basements and garages had utopian dreams for this new way of communicating with one another and sharing information. In the thirty-odd-years that have followed, many of those creative possibilities have been squandered. What we’ve gotten instead are dominant platforms that are fueled by their sale of our personal data. They have colonized and monetized the internet not to share its wealth but to hoard whatever they can take for themselves.

One would be right in thinking that many of the internet’s inventors are horrified by these developments, that some of them have expressed their shock, outrage and shame, and that a few have ridden these emotions into a drive to find better ways to utilize this world-changing technology. Perhaps first among them is Tim Berners-Lee.

Like some of my backyard’s denizens, he’s never lost sight of the horizons that he saw when he first poked his head above the ground. He also feels responsible for helping to set right what others have gotten so woefully wrong after he made his first breathtaking gift to us thirty years ago.

1. The Inventor of the Internet

At one point the joke was that Al Gore had invented the internet, but, in fact, it was Tim Berners-Lee. It’s been three decades since he gathered the critical components, linked them together, and called his creation “the world wide web.” Today however, he’s profoundly disconcerted by several of the directions that his creation has taken and he aims to do something about it.

In 1989, Berners-Lee didn’t sell his original web architecture and the protocols he assembled or attempt to get rich from them. He didn’t think anyone should own the internet, so no patents were ever gotten or royalties sought. The operating standards, developed by a consortium of companies he convened, were also made available to everyone, without cost, so the world wide web could be rapidly adopted. In 2014, the British Council asked prominent scientists, academics, writers and world leaders to chose the cultural moments that had shaped the world most profoundly in the previous 80 years, and they ranked the invention of the World Wide Web number one. This is how they described Berners-Lee’s invention:

The fastest growing communications medium of all time, the internet has changed the shape of modern life forever. We can connect with each other instantly, all over the world.

Because he gave it away with every good intention, perhaps Berners-Lee has more reasons than anyone to be concerned about the poor use that others have made of it. Instead of remaining the de-centralized communication and information sharing platform he envisioned, the internet still isn’t available everywhere, has frequently been weaponized, and is increasingly controlled by a few dominant platforms for their own private gain. But he’s also convinced that these ill winds can be reversed.

He reads and shares an open letter every year on the anniversary of the internet’s creation. His March 2018 and March 2019 letters lay out his primary concerns today.

Last year, Berners-Lee renewed his commitment “to making sure the web is a free, open, creative space – for everyone. That vision is only possible if we get everyone online, and make sure the web works for people [instead of against them].” After making proposals that aim to expand internet access for the poor (and for poor women and girls in particular), he discusses various ways that the web has failed to work “for us.”

What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared….the fact that power is concentrated among so few companies has made it possible to weaponise the web at scale. In recent years, we’ve seen conspiracy theories trend on social media platforms, fake Twitter and Facebook accounts stoke social tensions, external actors interfere in elections, and criminals steal troves of personal data.

Additionally troubling is the fact that we’ve left these same companies to police themselves, something they can never do effectively given their incentives to maximize profits instead of social goods. “A legal or regulatory framework that accounts for social objectives may help ease those tensions,” he says.

Berners-Lee sees a similar misalignment of incentives between the tech giants and the users they have herded into their platforms.

Two myths currently limit our collective imagination: the myth that advertising is the only possible business model for online companies, and the myth that it’s too late to change the way platforms operate. On both points, we need to be a little more creative.

While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people – and can be fixed by people. Create a new set of incentives and changes in the code will follow. …Today, I want to challenge us all to have greater ambitions for the web. I want the web to reflect our hopes and fulfill our dreams, rather than magnify our fears and deepen our divisions.

As the late internet activist, John Perry Barlow, once said: “A good way to invent the future is to predict it.” It may sound utopian, it may sound impossible to achieve… but I want us to imagine that future and build it.

In March, 2018, most of us didn’t know what Berners-Lee had in mind when he talked about building.

This year’s letter mostly elaborated on last year’s themes. In addition to governments “translating laws and regulations for the digital age,” he calls on the tech companies to be a constructive part of the societal conversation (while never mentioning the positive role that their teams of Washington lobbyists might play). In other words, it’s more of a plea or attempt to shame them into action since their profits instead of their public interest remain their primary motivators. It is also unclear what he expects from government leaders and regulators as politics becomes more polarized, but he is plainly calling on the web’s theorizers, inventors and commentators and on its billions of users to pitch in and help.

Berners-Lee proposes a new Contract for the Web, a global collaboration that was launched in Lisbon last November. His Web Summit brought together those:

who agree we need to establish clear norms, laws and standards that underpin the web. Those who support it endorse its starting principles and together we are working out the specific commitments in each area. No one group should do this alone, and all input will be appreciated. Governments, companies and citizens are all contributing, and we aim to have a result later this year.

It’s like the founding spiritual leader convening the increasingly divergent members of his flock before setting out on the next leg of the journey.

The web is for everyone, and collectively we hold the power to change it. It won’t be easy. But if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the web we want.

In the meantime however, while a new Contract for the Web is clearly necessary, it is not where Berners-Lee is pinning all of his hopes.

The seed came from somewhere and now it’s (maybe) making watermelons

2. An App for an App

The way that the internet was created, any webpage should be accessible from any device that has a web browser, including a smart phone, a personal computer or even an internet-enabled refrigerator. That kind of free access is blocked, however, when the content or the services are locked inside an app and the app distributor (such as Google or Facebook) controls where and how users interact with “what’s inside.” As noted recently in the Guardian: “the rise of the app economy fundamentally bypasses the web, and all the principles associated with it, of openness, interoperability and ease of access.”

On the other hand, perhaps the web’s greatest strength has been the ability of almost anyone to build almost anything on top of it. Since Berners-Lee built the web’s foundation and its first couple of floors, he’s well-positioned to build an alternative that provides the openness, interoperability and ease of access that has been lost while also serving the public’s interest in principles like personal data privacy. At the same time that he has been sponsoring a global quest for new standards to govern the internet, Berner-Lee has also been building an alternative infrastructure on top of the internet’s common foundation.

One irony is that he’s building it with a new kind of app.

Last September, Berners-Lee announced a new, open-source web-based infrastructure called Solid that he has been working on quietly with colleagues at MIT for several years. “Open-source” means that once the rudimentary structures are made public, anyone can contribute to that infrastructure’s web-based applications. Making the original internet free and widely available lead to its rapid adoption and Berners-Lee is plainly hoping that “open source” will have the same impact on Solid. Shortly after his announcement, an article in Tech Crunch reported that open-source developers were already pouring into the Solid platform “in droves.” As Fast Company reported at the time: Berner-Lee’s objective for Solid, and the company behind it called Inrupt, was “to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it.” Like a second great awakening.

First and foremost, the Solid web infrastructure is intended to give people back control of their personal data on-line. Every data point that’s created in or added to a Solid software application exists in a Solid “pod,” which is an acronym for “personal on-line data store” that can be kept on Solid’s server or anywhere else that a user chooses. Berners-Lee previewed one of the first Solid apps for the Fast Company reporter after his new platform was announced:

On his screen, there is a simple-looking web page with tabs across the top: Tim’s to-do list, his calendar, chats, address book. He built this app–one of the first on Solid–for his personal use. It is simple, spare. In fact, it’s so plain that, at first glance, it’s hard to see its significance. But to Berners-Lee, this is where the revolution begins. The app, using Solid’s decentralized technology, allows Berners-Lee to access all of his data seamlessly–his calendar, his music library, videos, chat, research. It’s like a mashup of Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify, and WhatsAp.

The difference is that his (or your) personal information is secured within a Solid pod from others who might seek to make use of it in some way.

Inrupt is the start-up company that Berners-Lee and John Bruce launched to drive development of Solid, secure the necessary funding and transform Solid from a radical idea into a viable platform for businesses and individuals. According to Tech Crunch, Inrupt is already gearing up to work on a new digital assistant called Charlie that it describes as “a decentralized version of Alexa.”

What will success look like for Inrupt and Solid? A Wired magazine story last February described it this way:

Bruce and Berners-Lee aren’t waiting for the current generation of tech giants to switch to an open and decentralised model; Amazon and Facebook are unlikely to ever give up their user data caches. But they hope their alternative model will be adopted by an increasingly privacy-aware population of web users and the organisations that wish to cater to them. ‘In the web as we envision it, entirely new businesses, ecosystems and opportunities will emerge and thrive, including hosting companies, application providers, enterprise consultants, designers and developers,’ Bruce says. ‘Everyday web users will find incredible value in new kinds of apps that are impossible on today’s web.

In other words, if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the web that we want.

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At this stage in his life (Berners-Lee is 64) and given his world-bending accomplishments, he could have retired to a beach or mountaintop somewhere to rest on his laurels, but he hasn’t. Instead, because he can, he heeds the call of his discomfort and is diving back in to champion his original vision. It’s the capability and commitment, hope and action that are the arc of all good work.

Telling him that Solid is a pipe-dream would be like telling my backyard encouragers to stop shouting, trumpeting and fruiting.

This post was adapted from my July 14, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

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

June 17, 2019 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I’ve been re-writing quite a bit since I got back from LA, mostly stories for the book and, in particular, the heart of a central story that I‘d never managed to find before. One of the wonders of “getting away” is the space you reclaim to tackle the problems that were resisting you before you left.

It’s not unlike breaking out of “group-think” by bringing in new energy and perspective to challenge the limitations that were holding you back. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In thinking about this post, I remembered an observation I’d written down before I left but also didn’t know what to do with. It was made by physicist Geoffrey West in a book he wrote a couple of years back called Scale. Among many extraordinary observations, West noted that one of the reasons cities tend to outperform companies is because cities have more weirdos in them, that is, more people who challenge the prevailing norms or group-think.

Since I’m also still digesting my time in LA, I wondered whether some of the vitality in that city (and maybe in California generally) comes from the fact that there are more contrary voices–more weirdos–participating in the conversation that defines them. After mulling this over for the past couple of days, I’ve concluded that there may be something to it.

A year ago, I wrote two posts: Why Voice Your Dissent? and Dissent That Elevates the Group. In the first, I summarized some of the findings in Charlan Nemeth’s book In Defense of Troublemakers by noting how hard it is to find yourself outside of the mainstream and then to persist, despite your seeming disagreement with everybody else. Summarizing Nemeth’s research, I wrote:

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

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

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

Cities more than companies listen to its dissenters more, and LA may listen harder than most. It stands on the frontlines of the future because it recognizes the outsized role that its idealists and oddballs have played in getting it there. I also think it’s because dissenting voices are raised less loudly and vindictively on the West Coast than they are on the East. People are more relaxed, or as Emily would say (now that she’s moved there from Brooklyn) they’re way more chill dad. The tenor of LA’s conversation leaves more cooperative energy for when the debate is done. It leaves more space to imagine something better together.

To the hard, gritty realities Los Angelinos confront every day (their tides of homelessness, miles of aging infrastructure, the domination of their cars and roads), they seem to have made room for softness too. They seem to have smoothed the grittier edges but not forgotten them, daring to relax enough to dream with their best dreamers about how to reach a more livable future. They seem to have found ways to remain optimistic in spite of their many challenges. Really, is there any existing option that’s better for the rest of us to follow today?

Here are a few recent experiences in LA that may have caused this question to linger.

1. Grand Central Market

It’s always dicey extrapolating what people are like from their built environments, but how they’ve created new homes and workplaces, shopping centers and entertainment venues (or re-inhabited abandoned ones) always provide clues.

When Emily was younger, we visited the zoo in every place where we traveled. It gave me a lot of anecdotal evidence about how locals thought about wildlife, nature, education, family outings and relaxation. For example, the zoos in London and Barcelona are very different, as you might imagine.

In these and other trips over the years, I’ve also managed to find the central food market wherever am. A benchmark for thinking about these marketplaces has been Reading Terminal Market in my hometown. It may be the most bustling and thriving institution in Philadelphia, regulating the flow of produce, seafood and meat coming in and going out while providing arrays of prepared food in an environment that balances the traditional with the up-to-the-minute. It also looks and feels both effortless and authentic given its time and place.

I could disparage many other cities’ tourist-oriented farmers markets, but I’d rather celebrate LA’s Grand Central Market located in a cavernous old building in the heart of its high-rise downtown. It was where I first started considering the combination of “gritty and soft” in the city.

The cavernous space was dark instead of bright from above. Its inner volumes cascaded down three or four partial levels from one elevation at the Bunker Hill entrance to the Market’s final landing on South Broadway. The building had been hollowed out, with its spine, service lines and ductwork visible, if you looked for them in the dim recesses on walls, ceilings and snaking through lower levels. Inside, it felt like what it was: the shadowy hulk of a re-purposed building.

All of the Market’s establishments—featuring far more prepared food than take-home-and cook—were lit at ground level, glowing like so many individual oases, each inviting exploration while you digested their descending panorama. Food is prepared or assembled in front of you, with seating right there or at tables scattered both inside and out. I made for my recommended breakfast at Egg Slut, whose name and menu perfectly embodied the customer indulgence that seemed to be the goal of every purveyor. Maybe I was too hungry or jet-lagged when I reached the Market, but it seemed like islands of hospitality and surprisingly inventive fare, all of them floating in a multi-tiered, post-industrial space. More friendly and warm than street-level in Blade Runner, but also not unlike it. Gritty and soft.

In succeeding days, I kept detecting this balance. LA is not a beautiful city. Much of it seems yellowed by the sun and little of it has been prettied-up. But everywhere, Los Angelinos seem to have burrowed into their mid-20^thcentury sprawl of storefronts and strip malls to create environments that are comfortable, nourishing and full of character. It’s a way that all of us might ride our present into our future if we chose to live within our means while being calmer and less frantic about it.

2. Brunch in Silver Lake

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. The Getty

The Getty Museum sits on heights that overlook Santa Monica Bay and much of the rest of the sprawling city. Locals as well as out-of-towners seemed to dress up to go there. The Persian girls were flamboyant, the Japanese men causally tailored to an extent I’d never seen before and the Japanese women and girls wore complex layers that all seemed part wedding gown and spring raincoat. Everyone at the Getty seemed to understand that they were visiting someplace special to consider treasures from the past. And it was special.

The works of art on display were often as spectacular as the surroundings and visitors. I was particularly dazzled by the collection of marble portrait busts by the West’s greatest carvers, including Bernini and Houdon. Their arrangement was also playful, with curators positioning them so they could interact with nearby paintings or other sculptures. For example, the busts above of Belesarius (a Byzantine general by Jean Baptiste Stouf) and a Vestal virgin (by Antonio Canova) were at opposite corners of a sun-soaked gallery, the goat gazing (longingly and hilariously) into the dove’s eyes.

Like the La Brea Tar Pit Museum chronicled LA’s pre-history (in last week’s post), the Getty seems to serve as a temple to the more recent history of Western art and culture.

It’s where LA says: this is the best of where we have been.

Being at the Getty also reminded me that Philadelphia’s largest foundation (the Pew Charitable Trusts) moved to LA not long ago to support a burgeoning contemporary art scene that has seen major new museums being built (the Broad) and existing ones expanded (LACMA) to celebrate new, experimental artists. LA is championing artistic expression in ways that rival New York, Paris and London.

It’s another way that LA is saying: the future is being envisioned and inhabited here. This is where we are going.

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The LA I saw offers a perspective that respects the past, striving to live with our history and pre-history and to understand what it is saying to us.

It provides some of the optimism that enables LA to step forward and say to other capitals: we’re not caught in your group-think and grid-lock. Instead, we’re already deciding where we should be going next.

We’re looking back in time for its lessons and encouragements as well as ahead from a center in the present that aims for health and wellbeing.

We’re repurposing our aging, urban sprawl into islands of comfort and hospitality.

We’ve made gritty soft, maybe because we’re more aware than others of what we have left to work with and are simply making the most of it.

Yes, LA was an eye-opener.

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

Re-Bundling Protections and Benefits Around Our Work

May 27, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Not so long ago, jobs came with a bundle of economic advantages beyond a paycheck. Those advantages included health insurance for you and your family and a pension or post-retirement paycheck based on your years with your employer and how much you’d been paid.

While already a vestige of days past, my job at a municipally-owned utility a little over a decade ago came with family health benefits, a matching 401(k) plan, a pension that vested after 5 years of employment, and days off for a raft of holidays including Flag Day.

That job also included additional economic benefits that I didn’t appreciate enough at the time such as the creditworthiness of my regular salary, continuous training to bolster old skills and develop new ones, regular contributions to Social Security for additional retirement security, unemployment compensation if I ever lost my job, and the stability and continuing enrichment of that job for as long as I had it.

Today, in many of our full-time jobs and nearly all of our part-time ones, between some and all of this bundle of protections and benefits has disappeared.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this unbundling.

Jacob Hacker, a political science professor at Yale calls it a shift of economic risk in his new book The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream. Hacker argues that the loss of this financial cushion around our work tests our economic resilience whenever unexpected burdens arise.

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

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

As a result of this sea change, the American worker is increasingly on his or her own when confronting whatever comes next, like sudden illness or loss of a job.

Writing this week in the New York Times, Hacker talked about how this “risk shift” is impacting the run-up to the next presidential election, particularly the fact that so many Americans feel insecure.

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

Of course, this insecurity affects not only workers but also the ability of their families, their communities and the country as a whole to flourish—an impact that I discussed a few weeks ago in the post “The Social Contract Around Our Work Is Broken.”

As more of us are “on our own” shouldering the economic risks that employers and the government once protected us from, it has become an increasingly important priority to re-bundle new versions of the benefits and protections that have been lost around working in America.

The leading edge of these rebundling efforts are perhaps most visible when it comes to the gig-economy workers who are striving to build a stable and dependable “living” out of a series of independent-contractor jobs both large and small.

As I argued last week, technological advances involving blockchain, digital currencies, on-line exchanges and markets are promising to make it possible for independent workers to preserve existing income streams while gaining new (and unexpected) ones. The needs of this growing number of gig-economy workers are stimulating efforts to re-bundle some of those traditional insulators around their work. Fortunately, these same innovations will also help to meet the needs of every insecure worker who is trying to get by in a job with few, if any, of the traditional benefits and protections.

1. Getting Paid for Jobs Both Big and Small

One of the most tantalizing possibilities of a future enabled by blockchain and digital currencies is that we could all get paid for time and effort we currently give away for free. Last week I mentioned a few of them, like providing traffic information to news outlets about roads we are already driving on at rush hour or being paid by a social media platform whenever we encourage the conversation there. I also mentioned the current backlash from the banking industry to the rise of on-line exchanges that will facilitate these payments. Part of it is an old guy-new guy turf war.

Over the past week, I’ve come upon some additional information about the hurdle that stands in the way of more seamless payments for a succession of small and big jobs. David Galbraith is a partner at Anthemis, a company seeking creative opportunities between the start-ups and financial institutions that are dedicated to reinventing financial services for the digital marketplace. In a recent interview, Galbraith remarked on the fundamental differences between on-line platforms that cater to consumers in America and their counterpart platforms in China.

In America, digital platforms like Google and Facebook are supported by advertising revenues while in China a platform’s revenue streams come directly from consumers when they buy something they’ve seen there. In other words, the payments process in China is simplified by removing advertising from the business model. Another difference is that Chinese consumers pay for consumer goods with their bank account balances, while American platforms interpose financial intermediaries like PayPal or bank-owned credit card companies that stand between the tech platforms and consumers. As Galbraith observes, the transactions costs are lower in China, “friction is taken out of the system,” and purchases are completed in a “fundamentally more fluid fashion” on the smartphones of Chinese consumers without prompting by a blizzard of ads.

When the inefficiencies imposed by banks and an advertising-based model are removed from the digital “payments system” in America, payments to gig economy workers for big and small increments of work will also be facilitated—making these new jobs more robust. At the most basic level, these changes in how we get paid will support the ways that many of us are working now and even more of us will be working tomorrow.

2. Anxiety About Retirement

When it comes to re-bundling benefits and protections around workers, none may be more significant than retirement security.

A recent article called “Why Work Has Failed Us: Because No One Can Afford to Retire Anymore” provides statistics that indicate how much the “shift in risk” from pensions to “figure out your own retirement” has impacted American workers:

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

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

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

Of course, no one has found a feasible way to fill the deficit for those who have nothing to retire on today, but there is opportunity in providing expertise to workers who have at least some retirement savings.

Most of us don’t know how to take what we have today and marshal it to cover uncertainties like how much income we’ll need to live after we retire, how long we’re likely to live, what Social Security elections we should make, and how much medical care we’ll need along the way. This is where a new company like Kindur comes in, according to Galbraith.

Kindur helps workers create retirement portfolios that minimize their tax burdens while ensuring that the money they do have for retirement lasts as long as possible. Unlike investment advisors who charge commissions to maximize your savings, Kindur utilizes its on-line platform and need assessment programming to help individuals design their future income. There has never been a web-based service like this before. As the company’s tagline says: “It’s like fuel efficiency for your retirement.”

Kindur isn’t the only fin-tech company that is aiming to provide more comfort (or bundling) around worker retirement. This article from the New York Times last December discusses some of the others.

For a rising gig-economy workforce and the traditional workers who are seeking supplemental income and greater autonomy in the gig economy, the empowerment of acting in more entrepreneurial ways is easily undermined by retirement anxieties. Today, both traditional advocates and new companies are finding other ways to calm those anxieties too.

3. Additional Protections and Benefits for Today’s Workforce

With the exception of supporting teachers in several high-profile confrontations with school districts and state funders recently, labor unions’ ability to protect workers in “union shops” seem to have lost much of their influence over economic decision-makers. They’ve also had a spotty record protecting their members’ bundled benefits and protections over the past 35 years. But while continuing to be the obvious champions for workers pitted against corporate profit taking, as the ways we work evolve, organized labor has other important roles to play in benefiting its changing membership.

Workers no longer stay in one locality with one employer for the course of their careers like they once did. Moreover, the average worker today takes on several different kinds of jobs. In this new world of work, services to meet these realities are desperately needed by the rank-and-file.

For example, unions could help their memberships “vote with their feet” when unbundled jobs no longer support them while providing assistance with “reskilling” when needed, help in finding new work, and housing in the new communities. Moreover, if unions were already providing these services in a tight labor market like we have today, their negotiating power with employers who are reluctant to lose workers would be enhanced significantly.

As Nicholas Colin writes in his thoughtful new book about the future of work called Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age:

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

Labor unions should be key contributors to a re-bundled workforce in traditional companies as well as in the new gig-economy as free-lancers, for example, unionize to protect themselves.

The tremendous need among workers that has been created by the unbundling of jobs has also spelled opportunity for new service providers beyond the need for a more secure retirement. Take a company like Portify that aims to help independent workers in the gig economy who are unable to obtain affordable credit without “a regular salary” and an employment contract.

Portify is currently in the beta-phase of providing financing to independent workers whose only source today is a payday loan charging an exorbitant interest rate. With access to information about its customers’ cash flows and bank accounts, Portify is able to understand what its customers can afford to borrow and to make loans at a substantially lower rate than payday lenders. By doing so, it will provide gig economy workers with the ability to finance growth opportunities so that a succession of smaller jobs can eventually add up to a sustainable and profitable business.

Another promising start-up is Dublin-based Trezeo, which is “an income-smoothing service” for self-employed people. The company calculates its clients’ average weekly income. If that income dips because a client takes a day off or someone doesn’t pay them for their work, Trezeo “tops them up to” their average income with the understanding that it will be paid back when the client is paid again. A service like Trezeo’s allows workers to maintain a steady quality of life–some of that bundling again–despite the ups and downs of gig-economy work.

Finally, Zego is a new company that provides gig economy workers with flexible insurance. For example, if you occasionally drive for Uber, you may not earn enough to afford the additional monthly or annual car insurance coverage that you should have.

To meet this problem, Zego sells insurance by the hour. For drivers, it utilizes an app to collect data about how often they are working and where they are driving that helps it to assess their insurance risks and issue coverage more affordably. Moreover, without a product like Zego’s, independent workers could be put out of business by a single workplace loss that they are unable to cover. A start-up company like this bundles these workers in greater risk protections than were available before.

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

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

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

Slowly but surely, that hopeful future is being built by the re-bundlers of work today.

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

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