Image by Simon Stålenhag.

I’ve decided to set up a newsletter. In it I will send out a weekly email each weekend which contains a short selection of the stuff I’m working on, thinking about and reading. If you enjoy the stuff I’m writing here but don’t check it every day (gasp!) then this might be fun for you. There are a few weekly email newsletters that I get and read regularly and really enjoy. The format is a bit anachronistic, but it’s also weirdly personal and intimate I think. My friend Jace Clayton sends out sporadic newsletters about his art, music and writing activities and alluded to this in a recent edition, that in the age of social media maybe a return to the comparatively more private space of email is interesting. I agree, so will use the newsletter to remind people of things they’ve missed or that are coming up but also to speak a little differently in private. I might end up replacing one of the weekly posts with the newsletter instead. But before I do, I need some addresses to send emails to. I will never ever share your address with anyone or send you emails more than once a week. I’ve made a little box in the sidebar of the blog to the right where you can join, and you can also sign up via this link.

In honor of it being Sunday morning here in Berlin, I am listening to this, a great exercise in subtle, minimal and carefully modulated acid house by the wonderfully named DJ Boring.

Image: Procedurally Generated Spellbook Sprites by Spencer Egart.

One of my favorite events of the year is ProcJam, a game jam about creating things that generate other things. It’s slogan is “Make Something That Makes Something!” It’s super fun and I participated this year with my project Alea City One which you can play here or buy the source code and music files for here. For the past three years ProcJam has released alongside the jam a zine called Seeds, edited by Jupiter Hadley and Dann Sullivan. This year I contributed a short article about the design thinking behind my Unity asset Strata, a 2D level generator. For me the idea of tools which generate things with a degree of unpredictability or indirection is one of my great interests. Perhaps it goes back to my Borgesian obsession with infinities. Or perhaps it’s just my love for playing with systems, and seeing what they do and seeing the outline of their rules expressed through their output.

Seeds this year is 150 pages long and consists of 43 short articles, meditations and musings on the topic of procedural generation. Many, many great people have contributed and if you’re even remotely interested in this intersection of art, software and randomness I highly recommend you check it out. There’s a great variety of ideas and approaches on display, from text based procedural jewelry exhibitions, to the wonderfully titled ‘Islands Are Just Mountains Up To Their Necks In Ocans: Parts 1 & 2’ to a piece on ‘Procedurally Generated Spellbook Sprites’ which is the image I used for this post.

The zine is free to either read online or download as a PDF. A big thank you to the entire team behind ProcJam for organizing a wonderful community and event, and for allowing us to participate in and enjoy this fascinating publication.

The Yellow Jackets movement in France and the rise of right wing racist and nationalist movement across Europe and the US are both symptoms of a popular rejection of the status quo: technocratic neoliberalism. We can point to a few figures on the world stage to identify this ideology: Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and the ‘mainstream’ Democratic party in the US, Justin Trudeau in Canada, Angela Merkel in Germany and Emanuel Macron in France. All would like to be represented as representatives of an ‘enlightened, progressive and effective free market democracy’. They are in favor racial equality, women’s rights, LGBT rights and general inclusiveness. They purport to be environmentalist, making sympathetic noises about climate change. Most importantly they portray themselves as reasonable, adult people who are in line with the broad social consensus, at least as devised by the upper and middle class educated city dwellers.

The reality is that they are in fact the polite faces of a fundamentally conservative ideology which seeks to preserve the status quo of global extractive capitalism. We find ourselves in a strange moment where the people in power are either neoliberal conservatives in the literal sense of attempting to preserve the status quo, or avowed ‘conservatives’ who are in fact a radical right-extremist reactionary force who rather than attempting to ‘conserve’ the status quo are pushing us towards a kind of anarcho-capitalist, nationalist and racist conception of the nation state. Importantly, both of these forces on the ‘left and right’ are aligned with the current true source of power: capital. The public is left to choose between racist corporatists who want to turn our society into the hunger games, and less racist corporatists who want us to hire more female prison guards and gay drone pilots. Both sides are bought and paid for by criminal bankers who are immune to prosecution, the true holders of all real power under late capitalism.

The election of Donald Trump, while powerfully motivated by American racism, is a sign of a kind of explosive nihilism in America. The upswell of support for Bernie Sanders and the rejection of Hilary Clinton are signs of a rejection of the neoliberal status quo. After the primary was stolen from Sanders by the DNC, and given the choice between two corporatists, one who was nakedly racist and obviously chaotic, the American public decided to throw a molotov cocktail into Washington DC and vote with their middle fingers. This included many voters who voted in the last cycle for Obama, buying into his messages of hope and change. They believe that Obama would provide a ‘nice’ solution to the current global order. His utter failure to wield the power of the state against the Wall Street bankers during the global financial crisis of 2008 at the moment of their greatest weakness signaled a total capitulation of political power against the power of capital. The failure of this promised change to materialize has curdled into anger, racism and hopelessness. We saw this process in Germany with the ascension of Adolf Hitler, exploiting the humiliation, economic misery and latent racism of the German people to form the Nazi party.

The people are governed through their consent, and that consent is becoming increasingly difficult to manufacture in the era of social media. Changes in the Facebook algorithm favoring local news sources unwittingly threw gasoline on the French protests against Macron’s latest fuel tax, amplifying the virality of ‘anger groups’ centered around local districts. These groups so far have been largely ideologically incoherent (as far as I can tell), with their only consensus being that they are rejecting the Macron program and the imposition of further taxes and austerity on a population which is already pressed against the wall economically. Through street demonstrations and riots, the insurrections have brought the government to it’s knees and forced it to backtrack on their taxes and attempt to address the problem of disenfranchisement. It has gotten to the point where there has been talk of the Police joining the strike against the government. If this happens, the movement may enter full blown revolution.

People are starting to realize our issues aren’t left and right, but top and bottom.

And the just solutions will come from the bottom-up. https://t.co/nI6mzP3E9k— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 20, 2018

Interestingly American leftist Alexandra Ocasio Cortez has pointed to this withdrawal of consent by the French people to be governed in a tweet yesterday as evidence that we are seeing a realignment from ‘left vs right’ politics to a ‘bottom vs top’ politics. I agree with her analysis and am interested to see what will happen next.

Image: Concentration City by Maciej Drabik, inspired by JG Ballard

Life is complicated, and usually messy. Complexity in it’s nature, particularly natural organic complexity, often looks like chaos. Complexity overwhelms our ability to glance at and understand it. It take time, careful unpicking and unraveling, examining of relationships between parts. What is happening is often counter-intuitive and conflicts our bias. Oftentimes we can only understand what’s happening by examining data, and the data contradicts the narrative we have. We think: “Obviously, people want this.” What do we do when the evidence says otherwise? If we want to remain in control, to put ourselves atop the system we say “It must be a glitch, an outlier, an anomaly.” Evidence that contradicts the story we believe feels like a personal challenge to us and our competence. Our competence represents our capacity to be (or feel) in control. Being in control feels good, it’s whatever the opposite of overwhelming is. We feel like we have a grasp on things. The mind, the ego, the rational brain really likes feeling in control. It likes things that are clear cut, understandable and can be manipulated and controlled directly.

But of course, large portions of reality are mostly not like that. Once something rises to a certain level of complexity it starts to exhibit properties like emergence. Emergence means a system of simple rules can give rise to unpredicted results. Behavior can develop out of the system that it’s designer, or someone looking at the local details does not foresee. There is a part of our brain that loves this kind of complexity. Mostly, we call it nature. The part of our brain that thrills at a forest or jungle, or enjoys looking at a landscape is drinking in the richness of complexity, chewing over the patterns, trying to detect meaning in something which rewards every deeper level we examine. This is also something which many of us who care a lot about games are seeking. Good games can throw up wonderful possibility spaces in which lots of interesting things can emerge and happen for us to explore. In looking at nature, or a complex emergent phenomenon like a city, our brain’s pattern seeking mechanisms recognize that there are in fact patterns at work, but too many for us to discretely digest and so it gives up and crashes into a state of awe. The feeling of awe is the good counterpart to being overwelmed, through it we experience the sublime, the idea of a greatness beyond calculation.

I have a strong tendency towards control, towards a kind of analytical grasping, a desire to understand, measure and change reality through thinking. This is not inherently a bad thing but doing it reflexively and unthinkingly is. This is one of the things that I work on through my daily meditation: taking time to release control, to allow the mind to simply exist in and experience reality without trying to grab and hold it. I find that this is needed for me and lowers my stress levels. The constant grasping at control is like constantly holding your hands in a clenched fist. We need a balance of both expressing our intention towards reality and allowing ourselves to experience it, letting it wash over us. This is something I’m personally working on, and slowly making progress towards.

Dave Chappelle is one of the great comedic minds and social critics of our generation, particularly when it comes to race in America. I recently watched an interview with him with Christiane Amanpour of CNN, along with John Stewart. Stewart and Chappelle had a comedy tour together and Amanpour was asking questions about it, and American politics. In the interview, when asked about the 2016 presidential election of Trump and when asked about the Russia investigation, Chappelle said something profound:

Amanpour: “Do you think the division is more acute right now?”

Chapelle: “The division? No, man, no. In fact, some of the things they say, even when they say, the Russians influenced the election, it’s kind of like… Is Russia making us racist? Is that who’s doing it? OK. Oh my god, thank goodness, I thought it was us.”

Amanpour: “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” (changes subject)

Source: Jon Stewart, Dave Chappelle talk Trump and comedy tour

When Trump was elected I experienced it as a kind of trauma. It was a moment in which I was forced to confront just how ideologically fucked America was, and how racist and misogynist it is. Trump ran on a blatantly racist, nationalist platform, particularly targeting Latinx and Muslim people. There was no way to miss or ignore this fact, it was the central issue of his campaign, and has continued to dominate his policy making in the White House.

There is a group of white people on the left who absolutely do not want to internalize this fact, preferring to talk about ‘Economic Anxiety’. They don’t want to know what the fact that this worked and continues to work tells us about America. Importantly, if you asked Black Americans, even right after the election, they were not surprised by the election result. They know how racist America is, how powerfully motivated by racial fear and hatred our country is. The fact that someone like Trump could ride that wave to power was not surprising to them. Many whites of the left, particularly those who were more moderate or institutionally inclined, members of the Democratic party and so on, truly did not want to know this. They wanted to see Trump as a kind of aberration. A freakish result! Totally strange!

We heard again and again as Trump instituted flagrantly racist policy after policy “This is not America!” But of course it is, and has been, all the way back to the beginning. Perhaps this was not the America that you were forced to encounter daily, perhaps this was not an America that happened to ‘people like us’. But now that dark side of American white supremacy has leapt out of the shadows onto center stage and is beating it’s chest and howling for blood. For many American whites, who want to fundamentally believe that the institutions of white America are mostly good, this is unknowable. So there must be another reason. And they found one: Russia.

To be clear: I am not saying that the Russians did NOT interfere in the election. They probably did. Just as the US government has interfered, and still interferes, in countless elections around the world. And Trump may well have conspired with them, or done business with them, or something. But fundamentally, Trump won because he ran on a racist, reactionary, nationalist platform which told American whites that the reason their life was so fucked was someone else’s fault. The desire to believe that this was some out-of-character, totally unfathomable event for America that was only possible due to malign interference is willful self delusion. Not coincidentally this is something that we Americans are great at.

Image: Cubes by Lernert & Sander

During the week, I work from home, sitting at the desk I’m sitting at now here in Berlin. I sit at this desk and work with information and communications. My work used to be fairly straightforward. I would make videos teaching people how to make things. Then I became a manager and now I spend less time actually making videos and more time helping other people make videos, and scheduling, budgeting and communicating communicating communicating. I sit in video calls, mostly listening, sometimes talking. I write hundreds of text based messages on Slack and a smaller number via email. A lot of what I do is a kind of communication tennis, people hit balls at me and I hit them back to them, or hit them on to someone else. I know it’s unseemly to complain about this, it’s a decidedly first world problem, and I’m lucky to have a good job. But disclaimers aside, I find this work exhausting. Much more exhausting than the work of making stuff. Partly this is because I’m an introvert and so dealing with other people in general is draining rather than invigorating, but I am communicating mostly through narrow, asynchronous text based channels, which are generally more comfortable for people like me. But still. I find myself tired at the end of the day, and I sometimes wonder why. What did I do? I sat in the chair and chatted and answered emails. This doesn’t seem tiring. But in my experience it is.

In contrast, a few days a month, usually on Saturdays when my kids are out of the house I do long a day of work on my own projects. Lately that has been working on my level generator Strata or my YouTube channel. I enjoy working on both, I direct my own work and it’s pretty low stress. It’s also deep, focused work. On those Saturdays I generally work from about 9AM until 9PM, with a nice break for lunch. At the end of these days, I do not feel tired in the way that I feel from my managing work. Why? I believe it’s because of the fractured nature of my attention during my weekday work, and the energy expended on frequently and rapidly switching contexts and responding to inbound requests. It’s rare during these days that I get to focus deeply on something. Usually it’s bouncing from one slack message, to email, to a google doc, to some distraction like Twitter or YouTube for a minute, and back around in a circle. Each of these context switches requires a kind of mental setup cost and drains my batteries. This is probably why I drink soooo much coffee during the day and why I feel so tired at the end.

There have been a number of good articles written about this by various programmers online (here’s one) and programming is one of those disciplines in which this is most pronounced. To use a non-computer metaphor, in cooking terms, this is like the mise en place of your mind. You want to have all of your ingredients prepared and laid out within reach before you turn on the heat. If you had to keep going back and forth to the pantry to get out the carrots each time you needed a handful of chopped carrots, you would waste a lot of energy. Having them chopped and ready on the counter means you can just grab them. Fundamentally this seems like a problem of organizing and sequencing tasks. But how do we do this when our job is to communicate with our colleagues? One thing I am frequently tempted to do is to turn off my inbound Slack messages for part of the day, and just check in once or twice a day. This might lead to more focus. I know Tim Ferriss in the past has advocated this with batch processing email, to respond once a day. In a way I think Slack has sort of made this problem worse because it has replaced email but also created an expectation of an instant response. Maybe we need to manage this expectation among our coworkers and establish clearer boundaries to preserve our mental space. I may give it a try and report back.

Honey from Imkerei Mädelfleiß.

A few months ago I was on a corporate team building exercise for work, in which a chef took us to a farmers market in Berlin Schöneberg (yes, companies do and pay for weird stuff like this, yes, my life is weird). To be fair it was very nice, and the chef did a great job. As we visited various stalls we stopped at a stall selling honey. The man selling the honey was friendly and explained to us that this was local, Berlin honey. The bees live in the city and harvest honey from the flowering trees and plants here. They had different types of honey made from the nectar of various plants including chestnut and robinia, which they were able to separate based on the times that the plants were blooming. Some very unique and different flavors of honey, and delicious. I didn’t write down their name but I believe based on some googling that it was this company: Imkerei Mädelfleiß.

We hear talk about urban farming, and I know some people who have been involved in it, growing vegetables and salad in raised beds in empty lots or on rooftops. I have actually heard of one family operation keeping bees in Brooklyn as well, although I don’t think it was a commercial enterprise. One of my mother’s grade school students father gave her a jar of local Brooklyn honey, from Bedford Stuyvesant. Encountering someone producing urban honey as a commercial enterprise was a new one for me though, and quite interesting. I love bees, finding their society, behavior and life endlessly interesting. As you may be aware bees are incredibly important to our food system as they serve as pollinators for many of the flowering plants that produce our food, transferring pollen from one plant to another as they seek out nectar and allowing the plants to sexually reproduce without moving. You may also be aware that they are under serious threat, due to the reckless use of pesticides and herbicides in their natural countryside habitat.

In chatting with the honey seller he explained that actually he was in contact with other beekeepers in the country and while many of their colonies of bees were suffering negative effects due to being exposed to toxic farming chemicals, his bees were not. The city bees actually are quite able to filter out and deal with the air pollution in the city. Since many fewer people are growing commercial crops within city limits and spraying poison, this beekeeper’s city colonies of bees ended up being healthier than some of their countryside counterparts. The beekeeper had even participated in exchanges, sending his bees to the country, but he said that he didn’t want to continue it because exposing them to that environment wasn’t healthy for them, and they were better protected in the city.

I am always interested in these kind of unique and perhaps counter intuitive ecological developments, where the human built environment can provide habitat for other animals in a way we didn’t expect. Germany actually is quite progressive in regard to their treatment of insects including prohibition on killing certain types of bees and wasps in the summer, much to the annoyance of many locals. This is why Berlin bakery counter displays are often found swarming with hornets in the summer. I found this anecdote about the healthy city honey bees to be a hopeful one, and perhaps an indicator of how with some wisdom and attentiveness we can find new ways to co-habitate with the other living members of our ecosystem. Also the honey was delicious.

The idea of a benefit corporation is an interesting one, but it is perhaps unsurprising that it is largely unknown under capitalism. Or at least little publicized. Kickstarter is one example, having chosen the structure instead of the traditional narrative of initial public offering or sale and ‘exit’, massively enriching the founders. Instead of cashing out, they chose a more sustainable and slow burning form, one which is far better aligned with the needs of the community they serve of people raising money to fund interesting projects. An excerpt from Kickstarter’s charter reads:

“Kickstarter’s mission is to help bring creative projects to life. We measure our success as a company by how well we achieve that mission, not by the size of our profits. That’s why we reincorporated Kickstarter as a Benefit Corporation in 2015.

Benefit Corporations are for-profit companies that are obligated to consider the impact of their decisions on society, not only shareholders. Radically, positive impact on society becomes part of a Benefit Corporation’s legally defined goals. When a company becomes a Benefit Corporation, it can choose to make further commitments.”

You can read the full charter here.

I applaud the founders and staff of Kickstarter in making such a decision and putting the longevity of the organization and alignment of it’s goals with it’s customers first. Very often the terrible and short sighted behavior of corporations stems from their legally binding fiduciary duty to their shareholders, to maximize share value at all costs. Invocations of this unavoidable duty are usually made when committing acts which harm the organization’s employees, customers, environment or future. The logic goes “Our hands are tied, it would be illegal to not chase profit before all else”. I would argue that their is no legal imperative to pursue immediate, short term profits that harm the ecosystem that the corporation exists in. Organizations like Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway and the companies it owns tend to take a much longer view and have generated massive wealth for their shareholders as a result. Buffet and his companies are not unproblematic, we need look no further than Wells Fargo and their egregious corporate crime but taking them at their word a long term view and general principle of good stewardship are part of the stated and espoused strategy of Berkshire.

The financialization of the economy however has put corporations under tremendous pressure to focus only on the next quarter year and immediate stock prices, and have resulted in reckless, short sighted and destructive behaviors. I hope that more companies like Kickstarter become aware of and examine the model of the benefit corporation as an alternative to the get rich quick schemes popularized by contemporary Silicon Valley startup culture. We need more companies that provide real value and have plans for long terms stability and an ethos of giving back to the community.

One question which this poses however is if we want more of these things to exist, how do they start and acquire needed capital? Under the existing model startups dangle the idea of a high valuation, sale and IPO in front of investors and raise cash that way. What are some alternative sources of startup capital we might consider? My thesis is that benefit corporations which care for and treat their workers and customers ethically should have a better chance of success than nakedly capitalist companies which seek only to maximize near term profits. A leap of faith, I know, but humor me. In theory benefit corporations should generate a surplus through this good behavior. That surplus does not necessarily need to be distributed to, for example public shareholders as dividends. Of course it could be reinvested in growth, or held as reserve for the original company, but not every company needs or wants to grow. There are great examples of companies which create great products with a small team, generate profits and do not grow, because they don’t need to. Basecamp is one example of a software company in this model.

So if we have generated a surplus, what do we do with it? This is where bees come in. Bees swarm when their original hive has grown too crowded, having generated a surplus of biomass (too many bees). Individual bees reproduce when the queen lays eggs. Swarming is a means of reproduction at the colony level. When a swarm occurs, about half the bees leave the hive with a new queen and stores of honey, searching for a spot to build a new nest. What if we applied this model at the company level? As a company grows past a certain point and begins to generate a surplus which is in excess of what’s needed for reserves or capital investments, instead of increasing in size or repaying investors, what if it hived off, providing startup capital, an organized group of workers and a leader for a new enterprise?

One example of this type of behavior which I remember from the nineties in New York was a taco chain called Fresco Tortilla. At the time New York was not particularly well served by Mexican food, but had a surplus of Chinese restaurants. As a result, a group of Chinese immigrants got their hands on a tortilla press and decided to open a restaurant serving cheap tacos. The result was not precisely Mexican food, nor was it Mexican/Chinese fusion. It was a kind of imagined simulacrum of Mexican food, made entirely by Chinese people. The food was cheap, pretty fresh and not too bad to eat, and there was one around the corner from my house, so I ate a lot of it. I was not the only one and the restaurants practically exploded across New York over a year or two. Tons of them, very noticeable because they all had more or less the same menu and were all serving this kind of psuedo-Mexican food, with all Chinese staff. This was pretty weird and I remember being intrigued and deciding to learn a bit more. The mechanism for how they spread were through a kind of community funding model in which a group of immigrants would chip in to create a pool of money and a kind of lotto. Someone would be picked as next in line to open a restaurant, be given the pool of money and would then launch. They would contribute back to the pool and fund the launch of the next restaurant. Importantly this wasn’t a chain or a franchise in the traditional sense, even though they all served more or less the same food and probably had shared suppliers etc. There was a moment where these restaurants were absolutely unavoidable in New York, and there are still a good number of them around. The fact that the food was cheaper than it was delicious allowed them to survive, but not exactly thrive. Was this enabled because many of the employees were coming directly out of Chinese communism? This might be an interesting topic to learn more about.

We live in a society in which economic power has usurped political power. Corporations and their officers are at the top of the hierarchy of power in the West. As a result many of the ills of the world in my opinion are a result of corporate malfeasance, and much of it comes back to this amoral and shortsighted concept of fiduciary responsibility. Discovering alternative models which are less bad for companies employees, customers and our natural environment is I believe, part of a solution for a better future.

Image by Nicholas “Sparth” Bouvier, 2018

My brother is visiting me in Berlin this week and we were talking over some of our frustrations with our highly specialized work. We both work in digital marketing fields. Being a specialist in the modern capitalist system can be a great way to make money. If you choose to become really good at a very specific thing that companies need, you can do very well. The problem with this is that a lot of the time the work can lack variety or a sense of meaning. Are we making the world a better place by tracking and optimizing marketing channels? It’s needed and useful for the companies we work for, but a little disconnected from meaningful outcomes for us or the customers we want to serve. It also can get very myopic, looking at details and drilling into and optimizing minutiae. This is part of the nature of highly specialized, highly skilled work.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein

I brought up the above quote from science fiction author Robert Heinlein to give a counter-example of what being more of a generalist would look like. Someone who can do many things and move between domains. I think that this approach is at odds with capitalist life since the logic goes “Why do something you’re not specialized at when you can just do more of the thing that you are a specialist in, and then pay someone who is a specialist in the needed skill?” This logic I believe falls prey to the common fallacy of most economists which thinks of humans as “rational economic actors”. Basically they model humans as capitalist robots without desires, subconscious minds or emotional motivations. Honestly, I think most of modern economics is total quackery, a kind of veneer of scientific rationalization based on a kind of Newtonian-physics-of-value. The main purpose of it is to rationalize why capitalism is actually very scientific and reasonable, which it isn’t. Capitalism like all markets is full of complicated, irrational actors aka humans.

The specialist economic model turns us into assembly line workers in which we repeat specialist tasks and then distribute our earnings to other specialists in exchange for the goods and services we need to survive. This produces an explosion of specialization and complexity, which lead to the current conditions of modernity, technology etc. I would personally argue that our current outcomes, while rich in complexity generally speaking are not doing such a wonderful job of supporting the non-economic needs of humans for things like meaning, connection, variety in life and overall feelings of satisfaction and fulfillment. We could also discuss the value of complexity and whether it actually leads to stable and sustainable human civilizations.

Since Heinlein has already introduced insects, I’m reminded of a wonderful short story by Bruce Sterling in his collection “Schismatrix Plus”. In it there are rival factions of humans who favor bio-hacking vs a cyborg trans-humanist ethos. They are both competing to take over an asteroid colony of insectoid aliens. Basically giant ants in space. Drama ensues and (spoiler alert) in the end the queen-like entity which controls the hive awakens a conscious, intelligent avatar to respond to the threat of the colony’s enslavement and dispatches the intruders, revealing that the colony has survived for thousands of years precisely via it’s rejection of complexity and even individual consciousness. We could have a fun discussion about whether creating complex modern civilizations are actually a pro-species-survival evolutionary adaptation. Based on the legacy of Western technological civilization and our legacy of genocide, extinction of species and climate change, I’d say it’s pretty strongly debatable whether any of this was a good idea at all. Perhaps a topic for a longer blog post.

Some people of course feel that the human race made a wrong turn at the introduction of agriculture, which is another fun discussion to have for another time. I think that the persistent feelings of alienation under the specialized, assembly line lifestyle of contemporary late capitalism is an indicator that as a culture we’ve made a wrong turn, and the bounty of technology and complexity that’s ensued may not be a worthwhile trade off. Ricardo Semler, who I’ve discussed before, places a great emphasis on wisdom, seeking it out and optimizing for it. Our explosive pursuit of complexity and carbon subsidized material abundance externalizes costs onto the natural world, including human life.  It particularly impacts the lives of those lower on the white supremacist west-lead capitalist hierarchy. I think it is proving to be unwise in the long term, and therefore is worth challenging. One way for those of us in the west to challenge this is to choose not to follow the dominant, specialist economic actor narrative and begin to withdraw some of our energy into local, family and community economies in which we meet our needs more directly without interfacing with the macroeconomic structures, a process some, including David Holmgren, refer to as downshifting. Downshifting may in fact become a more involuntary process if we encounter economic or ecological hardship in coming years, so thinking about it now may prove wise.

What the process of downshifting will look like for each of us is a question, and probably one worth thinking about. I think the potential for more localized, human-scale and varied activities like cooking, fixing things, growing food and caring for children and elders are all great examples of human activity that is important, meaningful, rewarding and not incentivized by the macro-scale market or capitalism in general. Refocusing some of our energy on these human activities has potential to both withdraw our energy from a harmful economic machine and to enrich our individual lives.

Image by the incomparable Jean “Moebius” Giraud, 1938-2012

One of the key skills of being an independent artist or anyone who works on their own projects is self discipline. The ability to be a bit inflexible with oneself and motivate oneself to do challenging things. To work hard when you’re alone at home surrounded by distractions, or to follow through when you’re tired or feel you deserve a break. I have been doing this for many years and am pretty good at it. In fact at times I am so good that I risk over working and burning out.

This is a hard balance to find. How do you set limits when you love what you do and are in charge of the schedule? For me I do well with momentum and streaks, doing things in a routine ways consistently over periods of time. Every Saturday I do a bit of work on this, every morning I do certain routines. The steadiness and feeling of momentum keeps me going.

But then something happens which blows those things up. Today my son fell on the steps in the train station on the way to school and hurt his leg (it turns out it’s just a bruise, after doctors and xrays, he’s fine). As a result my daily routine and rhythm are totally scrambled. This is a bit scary as I feel like it threatens my momentum and my system that’s been going well lately.

But as much as systems and structure are helpful, we are human and the world is messy. Just as we need to show compassion to others, we also need to show it to ourselves and keep perspective. I didn’t slack off today or choose to disrupt the routine. It’s foolish to cling to a pattern if it’s so brittle that breaking it will disrupt your progress. So here I am, finding balance between internal structure and external chaos and allowing myself a little suppleness, a little flexibility. The trees that can bend and blow in the wind don’t get blown over.