The Pandemic Reminds Us "Everything is Deeply Intertwingled" – We Need Better Logics for That

A bat catches a cold in Wuhan, and weeks later the whole world coughs. America and China battle a trade war, and then there is a shortage of PPE and ventilator parts from China.  Poor neighborhoods suffer high death rates because of poor health, but even celebrities and heads of state go into ICUs.  The economy craters, and we argue over relief to businesses versus workers based on which is more disposed to misuse what they might be given.  Health officials say flatten the curve, financiers say reopen, and corporations say they don’t dare reopen without testing.  The Federal government is too polarized to fix much of anything, and has forgotten their real job of governing by consensus.  

Modern technologies of global connection -- both physical and virtual -- make the pandemic emerge in weeks instead of years, and make all the butterfly effects far more complex.  That is our new curse, but also our new blessing.  We have global travel and supply chains, global communications and media networks -- a global village composed of local villages.  Techies moved fast and broke society, and now discourse seems too polarized to fix it.

All of these effects are driven by market forces -- however regulated.  Marketplaces of goods and services and marketplaces of ideas.  These marketplaces are driven by complex interplays of top-down structure and bottom-up emergence from billions of actors --and systems of actors.  

Technology has made these forces more dynamic and turbulent, but technology can enable smarter and better-regulated marketplaces -- if we re-focus.  We cannot undo this onrushing dynamic -- we need to get smarter about how we use technology to help us go forward.

The pandemic may be the kick in the ass we need to reform society over a wide range of domains and levels.  Seeing the commonalities can help us capture a new synergy.  If rise to that challenge, the future will be bright. If we fail it will be dark.  Many see that, but few focus on the root causes. 

Peter Drucker said “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” Two new logics can help us correct the failures of our current logics.

Ever-growing intertwingularity

The problem we now face all too urgently is that our lives are all deeply intertwingled, but we fall back to simplistic “fast” thinking with rigid categories and institutions.  Some leaders rise to the challenge and others flail, and we argue over who does which.  The regulation of our marketplace of ideas that “mediates consent” about facts has broken down, as has our social/economic marketplace.  These problems are difficult and complex – but we can get smarter about solving them – the first order and second order effects.  (To get a sense of the range of these issues, see this briefing by Tony O’Driscoll [since adapted for publication] and this McKinsey report. To see how this has reopened old questions, and may provide an opening for new thinking, see this NY Times report on the shifting issues for the 2020 election.)

 

The symbolic circle of the Tao reminds us of that truth is never entirely black or white, but shades of gray that depend on the light we view it in and the perspective we view it from.  Just how much is subject to argument, discovery, and rediscovery, as reality emerges.  This is age-old, but it is more urgent than ever that we come to grips with it.  2020 will mark a turning point in human history.

For decades our world and our markets have been increasingly stressed, even as we seemed to be progressing.  Tensions of nationality, race, ideology, religion, economics, technology, and governance are raging.  “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold /…The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”  It is now urgent that we re-center more wisely on our better convictions.

The Enlightenment has run aground because those who saw the light and had the benefits did not pay enough attention to sharing that.  Liberals turned away from “the deplorables” instead of caring for and raising them up.  Capitalists extracted short-term profits and enriched themselves with stock buybacks -- exploiting workers instead of empowering them.  Factions and political parties fought zero-sum struggles to control the existing pie instead of engaging in win-win cooperation to create and share a larger pie.

The Chinese ideograph for crisis is composed from the characters for danger plus opportunity.  Many retreat in fear of the danger and seek to throw blame and erect walls, but wiser heads look to the opportunity.  Most see opportunity in narrow domains, but some look to the big picture.  We now face an urgent and historic opportunity to refocus on a more enlightened and productive kind of cooperation across the full range of issues.

Those who see and work on these problems in particular domains of concern and expertise can unite in spirit and vision with those in other domains.  We can forge a new Age of Enlightenment – a Reformation of The Enlightenment.  An awakening of interconnection and cooperative spirit is emerging.  Our challenge is to synergize it.  Some elements:

• Economic and health insecurity for some leads to insecurity for all.  A safety net is needed.
• Market systems need slack to respond to black swan events.  “Just-in-time” and “lean” are efficient only when not overstressed.  Global supply chains need resilience and redundancy. Too much slack and safety drain our wealth and will, but too little lead to disaster.
• Moving fast and breaking things can break things that cannot be fixed.  Experience can blind us, but inexperience can kill.
• Power among local, state, national, and global government must be properly balanced and adaptable to stress.  Power and wealth must be shared fairly among people, factions, and nations, or those left wanting will throw rocks at the crystal palace.  The resurgence of nationalism, factionalism, and the crisis of disinformation are symptoms of perceived unfairness.  Government that is too small is just as bad as too big.

Our modern, high-tech world is far too complex for purely top-down or bottom-up management and governance -- we need a smart and adaptive blend. That requires openness, transparency, trust, and fairness, so even when there is disagreement, there is a common sense of reasonableness and good spirit.

New Logics for Intertwingularity

My recent work has focused on two new ways to deal better with this growing complexity.  These new logics that do not just exhort people to be better and wiser, but better align interests so that virtue is rewarded. 

One relates to failures of our marketplace of ideas – especially our social media and other collaborative systems.  Computer-augmented human collaboration first emerged in the 1960s, and was used for disaster preparedness (natural and nuclear).  It progressed slowly until the Web made it far more powerful and accessible to consumers, but we failed to direct those social media systems to serve us well.  Struggling to find a business model, they hit on advertising. We now recognize that to be “the original sin of the Internet” because it misdirects our platforms to serve advertisers and not users.  Algorithms can help augment human intelligence to make us smarter collectively -- instead of making us stupider, as social media now do.  Systems that elucidate nuance, context, and perspective can empower us to draw out and augment the wisdom of crowds (as explained in detail on this blog) to deal more smartly with our deeply intertwingled world.  That could drive a new Age of Enlightenment in which technology augments the marketplace of ideas in the ways that we have always relied on to mediate consent – an emergent mix of top-down guidance and bottom-up emergence that can lead to new, yet natural, forms of digital democracy.

The other relates to failures of our economic marketplace – how we can shift from the short-term. zero-sum logic of extractive mass-market capitalism to more long-term, win-win forms of market cooperation.  That can restore the emergent, distributed, and human logic of traditional markets that Adam Smith saw as socially beneficial -- before modern mass-marketing alienated producers from consumers and lost sight of broader human values.  Our digital economy now enables new ways to shift from fighting over a current pie to cooperating to co-create a larger pie -- and to share it fairly.  That logic can empower a reformation of market capitalism from within that could actually be more profitable, and thus self-motivating.  We can apply the power of computer-mediated marketplaces to let businesses and consumers negotiate at a human level -- about the values they care about, how to co-create that value, and how to share in the benefits.  We have begun to think in terms of customer journeys, but have been trying to fit customers into segments or personas. Instead, we need to design for segments of one that are custom-fit to each customer, to build relationships with each customer on human terms.

These two logics are interrelated: a flawed economic logic for consumer platform services has been built on advertising revenue (“the Internet’s original sin”). That has warped incentives to favor engagement with junk content that sells ads, rather then the value to users of quality content. An improved logic for value will create incentives for our platforms to facilitate a logic for a better marketplace of ideas.

The brief descriptions of these new logics may sound like just more exhortations, but the posts that they link to provide details of operational mechanisms -- and evidence that their elements have proven effective.  These new combinations of elements can quickly become second nature, because they draw on and re-channel natural behaviors that promise to make them highly self-reinforcing.

Many allied visions for better logics of emergence are finding new relevance in this era of crisis.  We have only to join together and rise to the occasion.  We say that “we are all in this together” – we need to open our minds to really think that way, and to work with new logics and “choice architectures” that make that natural.  With better logics, our instinctive behaviors can once again synergize to flow in increasingly enlightened ways.

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For more about the new logic for the marketplace of ideas (and intertwingularity in general), see this list of selected items on the SmartlyIntertwingled.com blog.

For more about the new logic for the economic marketplace, see this list of selected items on the FairPayZone.com blog.

The Great Hack - The Most Important and Scariest Film of this Century

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Live screening with David Carroll in NYC, 9/26 at 2:30

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An Unseen Digital Pearl Harbor, Dissected

The Great Hack is a film every person should see!

America and other democracies have been invaded, and subverted in ways and degrees that few appreciate.

This film (on Netflix) uncovers the layers of the Russia / Cambridge Analytica hack of the US 2020 election (and Brexit), and clearly shows how deeply our social media have been subverted as a fifth column aimed at the heart of democracy and enlightened civilization.

The Great Hack provides clarity about the insidious damage being done by our seemingly benign social media -- and still running wild because too few understand or care about our state of peril -- and because those businesses profit from enabling our attackers. It provides an excellent primer for those who have not tuned in to this, and for those who do not understand the nature of the threat.

It is a much needed wake up call that far more need more urgently to heed.

"Prof. Carroll Goes to London"

What makes this a great film, and not just an important documentary, is how it is told as a the story of a (not so) common man.

Much like Jimmy Stewart's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, this is the story of a mild-mannered citizen, Professor David Carroll of The New School in NYC, who sees a problem and seeks to follow a simple quest for truth and justice (to know what data Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have on him). It traces his awakening and journey to the belly of the beast. This time it is real, and the stakes could not be higher.

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I found this film especially interesting, having met David at an event on the fake news problem in February 2017, and then at a number of subsequent events on this important theme (many under the auspices of NYC Media Lab and its director, Justin Hendix). It is a problem I have explored and offered some remedies for on this blog.

"Non-Binary" means "Non-Binary"...Mostly...Right?

A "gender non-binary female?"

Seeing the interview of Asia Kate Dillon on Late Night with Seth Meyers, I was struck by one statement -- one that suggests an insidious problem of binary thinking that pervades many of the current ills in our society. Dillon (who prefers the pronoun "they") reported gaining insight into their gender identity from the character description for their role in Billions as "a gender non-binary female," saying: “I just didn’t understand how those words could exist next to each other.”

What struck me was the questioning of how these words could be sensibly put together. Why would anyone ask that question? As I though more, I saw this as a perfect example of the much broader problem.

The curse of binary thinking

The question I ask is at a semantic level: how could that not be obvious? (regardless of one's views on gender identity). Doesn't the issue arise only if one interprets "female" in a binary way? I would have thought that one who identifies as "non-binary" would see beyond this conceptual trap of simplistic duality. Wouldn't a non-binary person be more non-binary in their thinking? Wouldn't it be obvious to a non-binary thinker that this is a matter of being non-binary and female, not of being non-binary or female?

It seems that binary thinking is so ingrained in our culture that we default to black and white readings when it is clear that most of life (outside of pure mathematics) is painted in shades of gray. It is common to think of some "females" as masculine, and some "males" as effeminate. Some view such terms as pejorative, but what is the reality? Why wouldn't a person presumed at birth to be female (for the usual blend of biological reasons) be able to be non-binary in a multitude of ways. Even biologically "female" has a multitude of aspects, which usually generally align, but sometimes diverge. Clearly, as to behavior in general and as to sexual orientation, there seems to be a spectrum, with many degrees in each of many dimensions (some barely noticed, some hard to miss).

So I write about this as an object lesson of how deeply the binary, black or white thinking or our culture distorts our view of the more deeply nuanced reality. Even one who sees themself as non-binary has a hard time escaping binary thinking. Why can the word "female" not be appropriate for a non-binary person (as we all are to some degree) -- one who has birth attributes that were ostensibly female. Isn't it just a fallacy of binary thinking to think it is not OK for a non-binary person to also be female? That a female cannot be non-binary?

I write about this because I have long taken issue with binary thinking. This is not to meant to criticize this actor in any way, but to sympathize broadly with the prevalence of this kind of blindness and absolutism in our culture. It is to empathize with those who suffer from being thought of in binary ways that fail to recognize the non-binary richness of life -- and those who suffer from thinking of themselves in a binary way. That is a harm that occurs to most of us at one time or another. As Whitman said:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The bigger picture

Gender is just one of the host of current crises of binary thinking that lead to extreme polarization of all kinds. Political divides. The more irreconcilable divide over whether leadership must serve all of their constituency, or just those who support the leader, right or wrong. Fake news. Free speech and truth on campus vs. censorship for some zone of safety for binary thinkers. Trickle-down versus progressive economics. Capitalism versus socialism. Immigrant versus native. One race or religion versus another. Isn't the recent focus of some on "intersectionality" just an extension of binary thinking to multiple binary dimensions? Thinking in terms of binary categories (rather that category spectrums) distances and demonizes the other, blinded from seeing how much common ground there is.

The Tao symbol (which appears elsewhere in this blog) is a perfect illustration of my point, and an age-old symbol of the non-dualistic thinking central to some Asian traditions (I just noticed the irony of the actor's first name as I wrote this sentence!). We have black and white intertwined, and the dot of contrast indicates that each contains it opposite. That suggests that all females have some male in them (however large or small, and in whatever aspect) and all males have some female in them (much as some males would think that a blood libel).

Things are not black or white, but black and white. And even if nearly black or white in a single dimension, single dimensions rarely matter to the larger picture of any issue. I think we should all make a real effort to remind ourselves that that is the case for almost every issue of importance.

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(I do not profess to be "woke," but do very much try to be "awakened" and accepting of the wondrous richness of our world. My focus here is on binary and non-binary thinking, itself. I use gender identity as the example only because of this statement that struck me. If I misunderstand or express my ideas inartfully in this fraught domain, that is not my intent. I hope it is taken in the spirit of finding greater understanding that is intended.)

(In that vein, I accept that there may be complex issues specific to gender and identity that go counter to my semantic argument in some respects. But my non-binary view is that that broader truth of non-duality still over-arches. And in an awakened non-binary world, the current last word can never be known to be the future last word.)

(See also the short post just below on the theme of this blog.)

The Real Crisis: The War to Save Democracy in 2020 Has Begun - Journalism Needs to Mobilize

"Will the Media Be Trump's Accomplice Again in 2020? We have a second chance. Let’s not blow it." That was the title of a NY Times op-ed by Frank Bruni.

This is one of the more complete of many prescriptions for journalists to manage this real crisis (and deflate the fake ones) -- but it is just another cry against the storm with no concrete plan for action.

The imminent crisis

The 2016 election in the US, similar problems around the world, "fake news," and disinformation have surfaced as crucial problems. Many are at work on solutions, but most will take time to be effective. We do not have that time.

In the US, and for the rest of the world, the most imminent threat is that Trump will use the press as he did in 2016 -- and still does. He still orchestrates a Trump-centric media circus. As Bruni points out, we need to restore meaningful conversation on the issues, whatever the policies at issue. 

Even most of those who support many of Trump's policies are dismayed at the dysfunction of this media circus (entertaining as it may be) -- this is not a partisan issue, but one all reasonable people can support.

Journalism needs to rally around best practices for containing this real and present danger now. Define them, follow them, and call out those who do not. To do that, leading journalists, publishers and J-schools should organize a Manhattan Project to unify and act now! If you do not do it right now, you may never have another chance.

Such a project should be inclusive, drawing in all who share the core values of intelligent discourse. 

Are you journalists, or cheerleaders (and profiteers) in a flame war?

Bruni's starter list

It is a long op-ed, well worth reading, and no doubt there are other important practices and tactics, but let's begin with some extracts from Bruni's op-ed (see the original for attribution of quotes):

“Pocahontas” won’t be lonely for long. …how much heed will we in the media pay to this stupidity? …That’s a specific question but also an overarching one — about the degree to which we’ll let him set the terms of the 2020 presidential campaign, about our appetite for antics versus substance, and about whether we’ll repeat the mistakes that we made in 2016 

Trump tortures us. Deliberately, yes, but I’m referring to the ways in which he keeps yanking our gaze his way.

“When you cover this as spectacle…what’s lost is context, perspective and depth. And when you cover this as spectacle, he is the star.” 

Trump was and is a perverse gift to the mainstream, establishment media, a magnet for eyeballs at a juncture when we were struggling economically and desperately needed one. Just present him as the high-wire act and car crash that he is; the audience gorges on it. But readers…[are] starved of information about the fraudulence of his supposed populism and the toll of his incompetence. And he wins. He doesn’t hate the media...He uses us.

Regarding their fitness for office, they [Trump and Clinton] were treated identically? In retrospect, that’s madness. It should have been in real time, too.

We need to do something else, too, which is to recognize that Trump now has an actual record in office and to discuss that with as much energy as we do his damned Twitter feed.

“Instead of covering Trump’s tweets on a live, breaking basis, just cover them in the last five minutes of a news show. They’re presidential statements, but we can balance them.”

We can also allow his challengers to talk about themselves as much as they do about him. …“It was deeply unfair… the question was always, ‘What’s your reaction to what Trump just said?,’ there’s no way to drive your own message.”

“It got to the point where it was one outrage after another, and we just moved on each time” …Instead, we should hold on to the most outrageous, unconscionable moments. We should pause there…. We can’t privilege the incremental over …the enduring. It lets Trump off the hook.

"…if you put enough experts on arguing… people will watch. And that’s what we’re doing with our politics. The media is not using their strength, their franchise, to elevate and illuminate the conversation. They’re just getting you all jazzed up about the game.”

But the lure of less demanding labors …is always there, especially because readers and viewers…reward it. What they lap up …is Trump the Baby…the Buffoon…the Bully… And that’s on them.

The real story of Trump isn’t his amorality and outrageousness. It’s Americans’ receptiveness to that. 

“Trump basically ran on blowing the whole thing up.…It’s critically important that we find ways to get at what it is people imagine government should be doing and…really look at what kind of leadership we need.”

A Manhattan Project for Journalism - the war to extinguish the flame war

When America became the "arsenal for democracy" in the battle against fascism, we mobilized for conventional warfare -- and with a massive Manhattan Project to change the game with an A-bomb. The best minds were assembled, tested many alternative strategies, and then focused the best resources in the world on what worked.

Trump has conquered the presidency with an artful flame war. Many have written very intelligently about the issues and strategies that Bruni raises. There is no silver bullet (or A-bomb), but there are a suite of strategies that promise to contain the nonsense -- but only if widely understood and practiced. No one person or organization has the knowledge or ability to do this alone. Bruni's points (and similar suggestions from many others) can be distilled, formalized and supplemented to provide a guide to best practices, both at high level, and in the guts of how journalism is practiced. Our best minds for journalism must come together and quickly define these best-practices, and then we must see to it that all understand them and work to enforce them.

If we have clear guidelines, we can call out and marginalize those who fan the flames - whether Trump and his supporters, or others.

Fair process is not partisan - the real challenge for "mainstream media"

Such a focus on process is not partisan, but simply a matter of a fairness to all citizens, and to the spirit of enlightened democracy that made America great. To the extent Trump or others (on either side of any issue) make responsible policy proposals and argue them responsibly, this would treat them fairly. To the extent they do not, it marginalizes them fairly.

Obviously our current government will not make this happen - no new "fairness doctrine" can be expected now. Journalists are uniquely positioned to step up to their responsibility. It must be a voluntary effort. Some prominent pundits and outlets will not cooperate, for political or business reasons. But a truly responsible "mainstream media" can work together to become a powerful force for reason. If we do not all hang together to fight the flame war, we will all hang separately.

Real Journalists of the World, Unite!

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(If any broad effort to do this already exists, please let me know.)

(I am not a journalist, but one focus of my career has been on how technology can augment our collaborative intelligence. Journalism in this age is a form of such augmentation -- or more lately, de-augmentation.  I am ready to contribute to this effort as I can.)

Originally posted on my User-Centered Media blog.