A friend’s email said, “I know many of my readers aren’t techies and you’re thinking of putting this newsletter aside…”
We should get clear about what we’re talking about when we say “techie.”
I’m going to argue that involves a combination of two things:
You give technology the benefit of the doubt. You assume that it’s interesting, or perhaps benign or even useful.
You’re interested in what’s new. You don’t need to be pushed to ask about the next tech thing.
But someone who says, “I’m not a techie” might actually be saying, “I’m willfully uninformed.” They might be saying, “I don’t give tech the benefit of the doubt and it’s uncomfortable for me to keep up with it… but by giving into those feelings, I’m intentionally falling behind.”
Some people go for a run even when they don’t feel like it, because they realize that keeping fit is part of the deal. Some go to the opera or a blues club or expose themselves to culture that isn’t an easy fit, because they know it makes them more useful, more interesting or simply more alive.
I think we’ve long passed the point where an active professional can simply choose to not understand how tech works.
You’re a user or you’re being used. Best to know which.
Not simply in the classroom, but anywhere we hope to inform, inspire or educate:
Assume enrollment. Either someone is committed to learning or they’re not. While many situations place people into a spot where they are compelled to show up (exhibit A: learning arithmetic in grade school), it’s almost impossible to teach well if people don’t care. If folks aren’t enrolled, then the first job is to change that. If you’re worried that they’ll click away or drift off, it’s difficult to do good work.
Assume good intent. This is a cousin of enrollment. If you’re worried that someone is going to use an AI to write an essay, it’s easy to spend all your time building walls instead of bridges.
Assume fear. Learning creates change, and change is scary. In addition, we’re briefly incompetent just before we understand… we know that something can be done, but we don’t know how to do it (yet). When in doubt, look for the fear.
Assume a lack of context. The reason you ‘know’ something is because you know it. You understand what came before, what’s next to it, how it works, what the language of your field is (both words and concepts). If you’re teaching something new, you can’t be sure that’s true for them. More time on context and less time on tips and bullet points creates the conditions for understanding.
Assume connection. Some would like to believe that learning can be done alone, in a tower, with a laptop. But in fact, until we interact with other people or systems, all we’ve done is absorb, we haven’t yet understood.
Part of the luxury of living near the ocean or the mountains is that you can be picky. If the surf or the powder isn’t great, leave it for the tourists. Good is insufficient, wait for the great moments…
When we’re young, or the project is going really well, it’s easy to waste the good days. After all, there will be another one tomorrow.
What becomes clear, though, is that good days are precious. When you’re feeling even a little creative, don’t wait. Write it down, roll tape, speak up. When you’re feeling reasonably healthy, go for a walk.
Roger Bannister ran a four-minute mile by having a relay race of pace runners next to him. If he could keep up with his pacer, he’d finish the run in record time.
If you work in an office where people are regularly shipping breakthrough work, it’s likely your work will ship as well. If you’re in an industry or a zip code where entrepreneurs regularly build and fund businesses of scale, it’s more likely you will too.
The pacing team isn’t an accident. It’s a choice.
Just because it’s slow (or too fast, or too brutal, or too senseless) around here doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Or that you have to stay around here.
Walk into a bank with a stocking on your head and you’re probably going to get arrested.
Civil society as we know it is dependent on identity and responsibility. A person does something and owns the consequences. This requirement of identity leads to the dynamic of the free market that we call trust.
Even companies, which aren’t people but lately have been given many of their privileges, occasionally have to pay the price for abusing our trust.
But what happens when the email, the essay, the voice, the interactions–aren’t from a person, but from a swarm of bots? Is that really Donny Osmond singing us Happy Birthday or a clever AI construction?
[On the other hand, people are really making good use of the free AI on this blog–and so far, it’s pretty trustworthy.]
When the internet began to chip away at our interpersonal relationships, we relied on brand names or clues to figure out what was real. We invented captchas and filters to figure out who or what was truthworthy.
A certain kind of trust is no longer useful. Selfish hustlers are going to be one of the first big winners in the AI race, abusing systems that were built on traditional ideas of identity and responsibility.
Then what?
This is a fine moment to start taking the question seriously.
One reason we have so much trouble fixing chronic degenerative conditions is that we need to remove elements before we can start building new functions.
If we simply put effort on top of a shaky foundation, it’ll all be wasted.
The best way forward might be to take a few steps back.
A cat’s eye is smooth but doesn’t seem to be… there’s a mystery of depth. That illusion is called chatoyancy.
The same is true for some sorts of woods (cedar is an exception).
The digital age makes it more and more likely we’re experiencing things through a flat screen, and as a result, it’s very easy to file flat experiences away without a thought.
But creating something that’s chatoyant–that shifts in the light, that changes as we experience it… that’s a fascinating and useful project.
This page intentionally left blank has a long history.
I thought it was an IBM thing from the 1960s, but I was off by a thousand or more years.
There are good reasons for a page to be blank. Folding signatures, printing processes, having chapters start on the right or the left…
But there are even better reasons to let people know you did it on purpose. Particularly in a loosely bound book or a technical manual. Knowing that the page isn’t supposed to have something on it removes stress and lets the reader gain confidence that the text is complete.
Of course, as we race to fill in every moment with swiping, surfing and clicking, it’s easy to forget that we’re allowed to leave some blank spaces. In fact, not just allowed, but if we want to live well, required.
And it gets even easier if we announce (to ourselves and perhaps to others), that we’ve done it on purpose.
[HT to Andy for the prompt]
[unrelated: Here is a fascinating essay from an insider at Google about the shift in the AI universe. It’s happening very fast. There’s a ton of organizational turbulence, and this might be a moment open source has been waiting for.]
They are probably the last huge company where hundreds of thousands of people will be surveilled, measured and ordered to follow the rule book.
The pandemic didn’t create distributed work, the laptop did. Human interaction is critical, but the office isn’t actually the most effective way to create that.
David Risher might be mistaken.
The new CEO of Lyft just ordered all the workers at HQ to “come back to work.” Of course, they’ve been at work all along, they just haven’t been at the office.
It takes a different set of leadership and management skills to create the conditions for effective distributed work. But it’s incredibly powerful when you get it right.
The method is not to count keystrokes or other false proxies of productivity.
Instead, the opportunity is to offer significance.
Salt is essentially free. A bag of salted nuts is the same price (or less) as an unsalted one.
But salt used to be expensive. Truly expensive, like gold.
We keep seeing the deflation of things we were sure would remain expensive. Computer chips, disk storage and now, content.
Once computers start illustrating, writing and composing, the opportunity is to have them work for you, not compete with you.
[NOTE! Along those lines, check out my new augmented chatbot. It’s a world premiere, but I’m expecting that countless other WordPress blogs will have it one day. While it’s slow, it’s also pretty smart… it can point you to the relevant blog posts and podcasts, and often comes up with a great answer to your questions. You can even ask it, “what is the best kind of chocolate?”]
May 4, 2023
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