Making Our Jobs as Big (or as Small) as Possible

September 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We bring our priorities into our work–making it more purposeful and satisfying–by using our capabilities more deliberately and by demonstrating our values when we do our jobs.

Our basic “capabilities” include our personal autonomy (or the drive to realize our gifts) and our generosity (or encouraging the autonomy of others who are touched by our work, from co-workers to bosses, customers, suppliers and the broader community that supports our efforts).

Our “values” are moral intuitions (or feelings) that frame our experiences and help us decide how we should respond to them. Examples include freedom, fairness, equality, personal security, an ordered life or the sanctity of living things. For each one of us, some values more than others provide quick, intuitive signals that guide us as we try to figure out how to interact with the world around us.

Work is more satisfying when it engages our capabilities and serves our values, because they are among our most basic priorities.

When talking about these ideas, people often ask me: “On a practical level, how do I align my priorities with the work that I do everyday?” It’s often followed by a second question: “What if my employer’s priorities are different from mine—won’t this put us at odds with one another?” My quick answers are as follows.

Alignment of personal priorities with job priorities usually comes down to your mindset: how you see yourself in that job. Is it doing the bare minimum, “staying within your lines” and keeping your eye on the clock so you can leave for home after you’ve put in your time OR do you pour yourself into that job, finding opportunities for your priorities either within or right along side the priorities of whomever you’re working for? In other words, how hard are you trying to find more satisfaction in every job that you do?

Sometimes these alignments are nearly impossible, as in my recent post about gig-economy workers at Uber and Amazon. At each of these companies, the capabilities of their ride-hailing and delivery drivers are being exploited instead of respected. Uber’s and similar companies’ business models depend on offloading as much risk and cost onto their workers as possible. These workers’ recourse? They have to look to governments (like California’s) to safeguard their basic priorities on the job, leave those jobs altogether, or tamp down these basic drives because their economic necessities override the personal costs.

On the other hand, in many jobs it is both possible and desirable to align your priorities with those of your employers and others who benefit from your work. It is what organizational psychologists have called “job-crafting.” When you bring a suitable mindset to your job—when you ask, “how much instead of how little can I make out of it?”—many jobs become opportunities to build more satisfaction, and even fulfillment, into your hours spent working.

After elaborating on job-crafting and my own take on it, I’ll share some fateful testimony from two practitioners of “this highly practical art” from an interview I overheard while on the road earlier this week.

The Opportunity to Job-Craft More Rewards Into Your Work

Amy Wrzesniewski, a psychologist at Yale’s School of Management was talking about job crafting on a terrific podcast called Hidden Brain this week. I hadn’t heard this episode, but a regular reader wrote me about it (thanks Joe!) and listening reminded me of how long so-called industrial psychologists (who study our behaviors and expectations around work) have been tinkering with the boundaries of our jobs and the perceptions we bring into them.

Take (as Wrzesniewski did) a janitorial job cleaning a hospital. Let’s also assume two different men filling that job: I’ll call them J and B. Both were hired to show up at regular times and keep the floors and available surfaces in their parts of the hospital clean. With the tools and working hours available, they can clean everything they’re responsible for in their 5-day workweeks. The following Monday, J and B each start the same circuit over again.

Let’s assume that J always does what’s expected of him without complaint, but rarely does more than is required. Viewing his job as a paycheck, he’s hardly fulfilled by it. Instead of satisfaction at the end of a workday, he’s more likely to feel a tinge of resentment, that it’s beneath him to clean up after other people, but he needs the income so he puts up with the indignity and has done so for twenty years. J rarely interacts with the hospital staff or patients, although he understands that keeping the place clean contributes to the overall mission of the hospital, which is to help people to stay alive and hopefully get well.

B couldn’t see his job more differently. Feeling that he’s part of a team improving patient outcomes, B regularly makes a point to give a cheerful word to patients he’s noticed have few visitors, will go the extra mile to clean parts of his area that no one else seems to be getting to, and gives staff members he’s known for much of his working life words of encouragement when he senses that they’re feeling down. Unlike J, B connects his job to something bigger than himself—promoting the health of everyone who is around him everyday—and goes home with both satisfaction and pride that he’s contributed to the hospital’s mission along with a paycheck from it.

B accomplished this by “job-crafting” the way he sees his work and the importance of it in the broader scheme of things. From my perspective on work, he has also engaged both his capabilities and his values when it comes to service and community in order to gain additional rewards from it. As podcast host Shankar Vedantum put it, there are people who quit their jobs when they win the lottery and others who still want to work. B might keep working because the rewards he brings home aren’t just monetary ones.

After 25 years of studies in the psychology journals—from scholars like Arnold Bakker, Maria Tims and Justin Berg as well as Wrzesniewski—there seem to be three different approaches that workers take when “crafting their jobs.” Sometimes they rearrange how they characterize their job responsibilities, emphasizing certain aspects over others. Is a chef simply cooking a meal that her customers will keep paying for or is it far more important to her that she’s creating plates that are pleasing to the eye and producing delightful experiences for friends who keep coming back? One is a successful economic exchange while the others are more than just that.

A second approach focuses not on the end product but the interactions that help to produce it along the way. Instead of B deriving meaning from making the floors shine, he finds it in those interactions with patients, visitors and staff along the way.

The last approach is how you see yourself on the job. J would say, “I am a janitor” or define himself apart from this job altogether if asked “what do you do?” B on the other hand might say proudly, “I am an ambassador for the university health system, creating an environment that promotes the healing process,” and really mean it.

In a post from last February, I made an argument that uses terminology from economics and ethics instead of psychology to try and prove a similar point. When you take responsibility for your job satisfaction and don’t expect somebody else to provide it, you act like a stakeholder instead of an employee. Because job satisfaction is important to you, you collaborate to solve work-related problems that involve everyone (co-workers, suppliers etc.) and everything (like the communities and environments) that your work impacts. The compensations that follow are always more than the paycheck attached to your job description, because you’re consistently investing your effort into yielding a more satisfying job experience by addressing what’s important to you and to others.

I’m Bringing You More Than Tomorrow’s Weather

In a week that was dominated by students demanding that older generations take bolder steps to ensure that they have a livable planet in their future, it’s worth noting that most people still fail to recognize that rapid global warming is one of the most important problems confronting them. Until a proper majority engages with this problem politically, policy makers will simply avoid taking the necessary actions. Perhaps no American workers see the need to engage more of the public—while also having the ability to engage people effectively–than the men and women who bring tomorrow’s weather to millions of people who have little scientific background or knowledge in their communities.

When I overheard on the radio a conversation with two meteorologists a couple of days ago, it was clear that these weather reporters (along with increasing numbers of their colleagues) are engaging the public on the imperatives of climate change by grounding their daily reports or 5-day forecasts in statistical evidence that goes back (or extends forward) 20 or even 100 years where they and their viewers live.

They might ask: how many unusually hot days did we use to have in July or unusually destructive storms in September, and how many are we having now–before providing the relevant numbers. These men and women are accustomed to explaining climate-related information to non-scientists—so they’ve already developed more skills and gained more trust than perhaps anyone, in any other line of work, when it comes to placing the recent developments involving weather and climate in a meaningful, scientific context. Moreover, by sticking to hard data and avoiding political “calls to arms,” they are building audience knowledge and engagement while maintaining their impartiality.

When these meteorologists make the deliberate effort to locate today’s weather in a much larger story (instead of just sticking with whether their listeners need to bring umbrellas to work tomorrow), they are “job crafting” or “taking responsibility for common, work-related problems” far beyond the media contracts that they’ve negotiated. In other words, they could easily “get by with less” but refuse to do so. Both interviewees made clear how much providing a broader context for their weather reports was enhancing their job satisfaction. It was also clear how much of an impact they and a growing number of their colleagues are having when they engage the public with a problem that has long been too difficult for most non-scientists to understand.

Mike Nelson, the chief meteorologist at ABC 7 in Denver, and Amber Sullins, in the same role at ABC 15 in Phoenix, both see themselves as providing this bridge. Each realized that they needed to locate their weather reports in a climate-change context when they were confronted with new generations (Sullins having a daughter and Nelson a grand child). Nelson explained that even with only a few minutes on air, telling a broader or deeper story than tomorrow’s weather “is not as difficult as you might think.” If he knows in advance that his producer has a story about the fire season or current drought, he can work in an “explainer” about the 2-degree increase in temperatures in Rocky Mountain National Park over the past century or how ,at this rate of increase, the “climate in Denver in the next 50 to 70 years will be more like Albuquerque, New Mexico.” Sullin does much the same for her viewers when she explains the 115 degree day today by noting that prior to 1960, there were only 7 days this hot every 20 years, while in the current 20-year period, there have been 42 of them. They’re providing viewers with some relevant facts and leaving it to them to figure out what to do about the picture they paint.

Nelson says there is occasional blowback even though he sticks “to physical science instead of political science.” But he adds that for every complaint or attempt “to bully him,” there are 20 audience members expressing their gratitude. Since people are inviting him into their living rooms, he feels it’s “his responsibility” to tell them the whole story. Sullins also feels she is building an additional level of trust with her audience, explaining how the positive feedback she gets from emails and Facebook posts are continuing and broadening the conversation. As viewer’s grapple with the issues, she sees “more wheels spinning in their heads” and their pursuit of even more information. Both Nelson and Sullins are actively working with new meteorologists too so they can learn how to provide this broader context in their weather reports and avoid having their new careers derailed by a political backlash. More than “weather reporters,” Nelson and Sullin see themselves as “educators” of both their audiences and their younger colleagues.

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In a post of mine last May called “How to Engage Hearts and Change Minds in the Global Warming Debate,” much of the answer seemed to depend on how much those hearts and minds trusted the messenger who brought them the information. According to one poll I cited, that need for trust comes from the fact that only 60% of Americans think that global warming will affect the US, only 40% believe that it will affect them personally and 2/3rds never talk with anyone else about what lies ahead. Addressing climate change is still not on most people’s list of priorities, but letting trusted people “in their living rooms” to talk about it could change that.

As long as a group trusts you enough to ‘give you the floor and listen to what you have to say,’ you’ll likely engage them in your argument when it’s grounded in your values, demonstrates your care about where the group is headed, and provides a glimpse of a better future for all of you if you succeed in persuading them.

Meteorologists are “job crafting” their weather reporting and “taking responsibility” for educating their viewers who have found “what’s at stake” and “what can be done about it” difficult to understand until now. They are bringing their already trusted voices to a broader definition of their current jobs because it’s filling them with pride and they know that by doing so they could be making all the difference in the world.

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Notes: I just started publishing some of my weekly posts on Medium, an on-line opinion network, and my recent post on Uber drivers and Amazon packages was featured by its Business and Economy editors this week. Stories on Medium are usually available behind a paywall, but it you want to see my post or check out the site, here is a link that will get you there for free. (Of course, it would be much appreciated if you give it a quick read and check out the new pictures when you visit!)

This post was adapted from my September 22, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

We Find Where We Stand in the Space Between Differing Perspectives

September 16, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When you hear an argument on Tuesday and its opposing argument on Thursday, it’s always a challenge to arrange a further date where you can line them up at opposite sides of the room while you sit in the middle to figure out what you think and feel about the issue. Rescheduling your attention like this always seems to get lost in the shuffle.

On the other hand, the opportunity to listen, process and react almost immediately to opposing points of view is what can make live debate and virtual encounters with discordant perspectives both clarifying and satisfying.

They may also be ways to move beyond the polarizing shouting matches that characterize much of American democracy today.

When an issue “gets joined” you can figure out where you stand either on the spot or while continuing the conversation with yourself and others immediately thereafter. All you have to do is build this new information and its subtleties into your own perspective once you’ve had the chance to sleep on it.

When it comes to processlng opposing views, time compression seems critical. Being part of a live audience interacting with live “actors” or encountering real people in a virtual world is too. Another factor is your decision “to make yourself available to their persuasion” by the physical act of showing up, something you rarely do when you’re watching people testify on the other side of a screen. On each of these “live” or “almost alive” occasions, you’ve chosen to immerse yourself in a world of different perspectives where you’re open to changing your mind.

A final factor is also critical. Theater that is built on counterpoint stories and virtual worlds that make us confront our own preconceptions are jarring experiences. Both demand that your thoughts and feelings connect across a broader waterfront than you recognized before. They challenge moral certainties and provide building blocks you can use immediately to construct a more nuanced point of view. Their wake-up calls can often make you behave differently too—impacting the jobs you do as community members or citizens. They offer highy engaging ways to figure out where you stand and what to do next.

All of these dynamics were apparent in a recent theater production in Portland Oregon, where actors playing members of the community and its local police force held the stage in front of an audience from that same community, told their distinctive stories and changed some minds.

Similar changes in perception became evident when people put on the virtual reality (VR) headsets that were recently developed by a California company. VR technology can take you places and put you among people you may think you know about until you are literally walking among them at Rikers Island prison, on the US-Mexico border, or in a Syrian refugee camp.

What used to seem black and white and came cloaked in moral certainties can be shaken into reconsideration by these “live” or “virtually alive” experiences. Abstraction and over-simplification are no longer quite as possible when issues that we thought we understood have faces. Once we’ve learned more and have the experience to know better, we may no longer wish to view ourselves (or be viewed by others) as being so cold in our certainties or so removed from the blood, sweat and tears of most people’s lives.

Do these kinds of experiences offer a way to move past the knee-jerk polarities that undermine our collective purpose?

Are they vehicles for helping at least some of the undecided and disengaged in this country to make up their minds and help build a future that they want instead of leaving their prospects to others?

Finding Shared Human Perspectives While Looking At and Listening To One Another

The chasms between diverse communities and the police who are charged with protecting them yawn widely across America. In Portland, some creatives in the performing arts and forward-thinkers in law enforcement came together to try and reduce them. Their approach: a stage adaptation of the dueling perspectives, only this time with several rarely heard points of view along the stark divide—including the witness provided by minority police officers who, in more ways than one, have come to embody it.

Much of this story about perspective building in the community, and all but one of the quotes here, come from a PBS NewsHour segment that ran on the same day in August that New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo was fired for his involvement in subduing Eric Garner, an arrest that ended in Garner’s death.

Kevin Jones and Lesli Mones founded the August Wilson Red Door Project, a theater company, to provide a platform for addressing issues of importance to the City’s African American residents. The other driving force in this story is Robert Day, the former deputy chief of the Portland Police Bureau. Jones and Mones asked him to gather perspectives from policemen who serve in minority neighborhoods like theirs and he pursued their invitation with relish.

What ultimately came together in one performance were a series of monologues from two different plays. “Hands Up” was written by African Americans about their experiences being racially profiled by police. “Cop Out” tells the stories of individual police officers when they are wearing their uniforms as well as the lingering effects after they take them off.

Jones and Mones each described the intent behind bringing witnesses from both perspectives onto a single stage. Said Jones:

We’re not dividing the story into two sides, right, the good guys and bad guys. On both sides, we have a group of people who feel that their stories are not being told, that they’re being vilified, that they’re being shunned, that — and nobody wants to really hear their story.

For her part, Mones addressed early criticism she’d heard from the African-American community in an earlier interview with the Portland Mercury:

From a social power perspective, you can’t compare the experiences of the two groups of people. But from a shared human perspective, the feeling of being unseen, depersonalized, and stereotyped is something both groups can relate to. It’s in the DNA of Red Door to honor a multiplicity of viewpoints, because we know it’s imperative in producing a healthy racial ecology for the community.

Four excerpts from the monologues suggest the power of this “shared” and “deeply human” approach.

– Community member: ‘They slammed me to the ground. One of the officers had his foot on the back of my neck. Another officer pointed a gun to the back of my head and said, ‘Move one inch and I will blow your head off.’ Oh, I went into survival mode. I tried to convince them I was one of the good ones.’

` Policeman: ‘I used to think nothing about being a cop would shake me up. But when you arrive on scene and watch your partner pull an infant out of a microwave because his meth head father couldn’t stop the kid from crying, your lens gets colored.’

– [A community member asks everyone in the audience to raise their arms in the air]:

A voice representing the police: ‘Hands up.’

Members of the community: ‘Don’t shoot.’

A voice representing the police: ‘Hands up.’

Members of the community: ‘Don’t shoot.’

-Policewoman: ‘The only reason I carry a gun if for protection, primarily mine, sometimes yours, sometimes, in highly specific circumstances, like an active shooter, or –no, that’s about it.’

The theater company is hoping to take performances of these combined monologues across the country, starting later this year. However, the fundraising and logistical hurdles that need to be surmounted before the show can hit the road are daunting. But no one provides a better reason for persevering than former deputy police chief Day:

We’re touching on sort of the third rail conversations of race and policing. And I think they are conversations that are happening in African-American families in homes and communities, and I know they’re happening in police communities, because I have heard them, been a part of them, I have seen them.

But they’re not happening publicly, and they’re not happening generally across from each other, because of the sort of high-voltage nature of them. So, the theater allows us to put it all out there. We can speak what has been left unsaid.

Only when “it’s all out there” and being processed by the folks in the audience who are most impacted by it can there be any hope of actually “seeing the other,” identifying shared objectives, and pursing them together.

The Issues Are No Longer Vague. They Feel Like Lived Experiences

With VR or virtual reality, the divides aren’t personified on a stage and the processing doesn’t begin when you’re seated in front of it. Everything you need for your views to be jarred into a broader perspective is brought into the perceptual space “between your ears” by this advanced technology.

Emblematic is a VR studio that was founded by Nonny de la Pena and is based in Santa Monica. De la Pena was profiled as one of 2018’s top innovators by the Wall Street Journal, both for developing groundbreaking VR technology that enables you to feel like you’re moving through a real space (instead of just standing in it) and for the rationale behind her inventiveness.

The author of the profile explained her intentions this way:

The idea is to put people in places they wouldn’t normally find themselves, experiencing situations they would not normally experience. Often, these are related to urgent issues, issues that are, in their sprawling complexity, seemingly difficult to grasp or even care about. But suddenly, there you are, standing in a cell in solitary confinement, or at the foot of a melting glacier, or before a protest line outside an abortion clinic. When you are in these places—hearing the anguish of a prisoner, the calving of a glacier, the vitriol of the protesters—the issues no longer seem like issues, with vague names attached, like prison reform or global warming or women’s health. Rather, they seem like lived experience, like people you’ve met and places you’ve been—like memory.

Within Emblematic’s VR headsets, the perspective you’ve brought with you is jarred by the unfamiliar in “real” time and you’re invited to start responding immediately to the flood of new information that’s washing over you. Particularly when you enter environments with other people in them, it feels like you are entering a reality as it’s being lived by someone else, providing unprecedented opportunities for connection and empathy.

Before you put the headset on, you also know where you’re going and have made yourself available to broaden and deepen your point of view. You find a new place to stand in the neurological mindspace between your thoughts and feelings about this issue before and the virtual experience that you’re having now. As long as it’s programmed as an exercise of free will, this technology can help you to make up your mind or intensify your most important commitments.

Unlike the challenges of putting the “Hands Up/Cop Out” show on the road, the financial and logistical challenges for de la Pena and Emblematic are likely making their technology cheap enough and portable enough that it can someday travel on its own to wherever people are undecided or simply want to know more. They (and other monitors) will also need to mind the gap between its use for illuminating an increasingly complex world and simply manipulating our reactions to it.

Sometimes, groundbreaking innovations like de la Pena’s have their roots in childhood, and so it is with the story of how she first learned the value of differing perspectives–even when one of them is hers. The Journal’s profile of her actually begins with it:

When Nonny de la Peña was in junior high, in West Los Angeles, her math teacher wrote a note home to her parents. ‘It was about something I’d rebelliously done,’ she says. ‘It was something minor, like speaking up, or speaking too loudly.’ Her father read the note, then turned the paper over and looked at her. ‘This is what she says you do, he said to me,’ de la Peña recalls. ‘Tell me about her. What does she do?’ De la Peña listed some of her own unflattering observations about the teacher, and her father wrote them down on the back of the note, so that now the piece of paper contained two notes, two different perspectives. Then her father signed it. ‘So what does that make you do? Of course [says de la Pena], it makes you think about the structure of things…. Of how situations are multidimensional.’

Her father knew, and early on it seems that she came to know too, that the truth can usually be found somewhere in the space between perspectives.

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I’ve written before about the space “where we can make up our reasonable minds” because I’m concerned (and sometimes alarmed) about how our demonizing of those we disagree with has disabled us from building anything of consequence in America today. It also comes from how others’ “not caring enough to have points of view” further undermines “what those who do care enough” hold in common. These sentiments were behind my post on the remarkable public exchange between two academic friends, the left-leaning Cornel West and the right-leaning Robert George, and what we all gain (but seldom enjoy today) from politically charged conversations, as well as another about the clarifying nature of dissent.

These arguments (and the one today) feel personal to me.

When I abandon my reasoned points of view, or don’t bother to come up with them anymore, I cede control of my future and my family’s future to somebody who may know less and care less. As long as I hold this right and it has not been taken away from me by those who want to control my mind, I’d be a fool not to exercise it.

Where I decide to stand and what I decide to do about it in the work I do and the way I live are among the most valuable contributions that I can make to myself and others. As long as it’s mine, I’ll continue to find the space for evolving my perspectives because it’s part of feeling alive.

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

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.