thinking about: satisfaction, intuition, envy, courage
doing: writing, investing, filmmaking, organizing re: the themes below
February 2024
Offline, our senses groove our minds to form memories, while body language and intonation make room for responses to unarticulated desires-- the basis of acts like graciousness, chivalry, and delight. But most of the internet flattens these possibilities, leaving us trying to pull life from text. What would it look like to play with things like pace, space, silence, and intonation in our internet interactions, toward the end of creating digital sensation?
It’s hard to believe key societal resources like education, well-being, science, trust, and capital must be doled out by institutions for the public good when they can simply be public goods, free for any person, community, or squad to access and build lives around. If we gave people the tools to organize themselves, we could figure out what kinds of lives work surprisingly well.
When facts can be hurled or re-contextualized at will, words lose their value as a method of truth-seeking. Mapping our systems instead-- making their objectives, tradeoffs, and centers of power clear-- could help us put conversations in context and unclog some of our public discussions around what is, what should be, and why.
The default way most communities organize progress is the bureaucracy. Ideally meant to direct all of a field’s available energy into Important Projects and create clear pathways to participate in them, bureaucracies usually end up as centers of power themselves, incentivized to fund work which entrenches the status quo (and their position as sole credentialers) rather than pushing it forward.
The trouble is, many of our best discoveries have been the result of scientists, artists, and researchers having the freedom to experiment with odd, unpromising, and even heretical ideas. So what might a better-aligned system of research look like?
05 An Ideology of Agency
Humans have a habit of breaking the things we hold up as God. We’ve lent omniscience to stars, stones, animals, and sacred texts, all in pursuit of existential guidance, but nothing has given us hard and fast rules for being alive.
In our latest pivot, we’ve sunset the old answers of holy spirits and star charts in favor of a new logic, reliant on a specific set of humans: credentialed experts, the stewards of our new powers, charged with continuously updating what is valuable and true.
This transition has left the median human experience as one of watching, rather than acting, directing our gaze toward a class of experts those who enter the arena on our behalf. It asks us to fake joy, righteousness, passion, and pride as actual agency slips further from our grasp. Estranged from the responsibilities which could earn us genuine emotions, we’re left comparing ourselves to others in an attempt to forge relative ones-- turning the thing we all know to be the thief of joy into a load-bearing cultural pillar, and making the deprivation of others (in order to elevate ourselves) our society’s most salient pleasure.
The way out is to reckon with our desire for certainty where there isn’t any and build ways of living which genuinely require our presence. Which encourage us to make choices about how we live, rather than passing down the answers, and redirect our efforts toward the people and communities we spend life alongside. The stories we tell about these systems, and our reasons for building them, would comprise an ideology of agency.
Our aim shouldn’t be to pass students through the rungs of K to PhD, but to create dextrous, capable public contributors. Every field should have an open pathway to onboard interested novices to knowledge, apprenticeship, and eventually contribution to the field itself.
Every time there’s a new thing to wear, buy, do, or believe, we’re shown how to use it, and what it’s worth, before we ever get the chance to interface with it directly. So how do we know we actually want something, and not the image of us doing it, when our lives are veritable parades of images?
Sifting our experiences instead, listening to what we like and what we don’t, and acting in the face of uncertainty is a muscle we’ll have to use more than our ancestors did, but it’ll be an important one for us to train.
I’m lucky to have a great group of friends in New York who, since you made it down here, you might get along with. If you’re in town or passing through, hit me up at +1 six-oh-three 494 0576- you are always welcome.