Issue 386
A notebook about how we work, and learn, and love and live.
"I like what the future holds. I don't like thinking about the past." - John Cale
I love September. While Debbie and I haven't had a kid who started school from our home in almost a decade. The 'back to school' promise is hard to break. It's all about new beginnings.
In our gardens the hummingbirds, monarchs, bees, wasps and moths still fill our days with buzz. A deep bow to the coming equinox. Life turns.
Happy Friday.
Design Thinking, Futures Thinking
Design is a method of envisioning the future, of which optimism is a foundational part.
"2020 has amplified the vast problems in America. The inequities and interdependencies that have always existed are now impossible to ignore. We’re collectively experiencing a range of emotions: anger, despair, frustration, anxiety, helplessness. And yet I feel there’s still a palpable hope that things can, and will, change.
"Design is a method of envisioning the future, of which optimism is a foundational part. Designing with optimism is to believe in the potential to create a better future. It does not suggest trusting blindly that everything will turn out in your favor, nor does it necessitate holding positive sentiment in your process. In fact, challenging ideas or beliefs may be one of the most optimistic things you can do. By practicing optimism in design, you think expansively about what is possible, and help others to see possibilities as well."
Article: Designing a Better Future is a Moral Obligation. Here’s How to Start
Futures Thinking
Change is exponential. Most institutions think linearly. Oops.
Linear institutions, exponential technologies and the exponential gap
Azee Azhar thinks about the future. He's noticed that while the vast majority of institutions operate in a linear fashion, change is not linear, it is exponential. But It’s hard for most of us to fathom exponential change. He's concerned that our inability to do so could tear apart businesses, economies and the fabric of society.
Article: The Exponential Age Will Transform Economics Forever
Learning, Citizenship
The basic principles of logic, argument, evidence, and probability can make all of us more reasonable and responsible citizens.
"There is an epidemic of bad thinking in the world today. An alarming number of people are embracing crazy, even dangerous ideas. They believe that vaccinations cause autism. They reject the scientific consensus on climate change as a “hoax.” And they blame the spread of COVID-19 on the 5G network or a Chinese cabal. Worse, bad thinking drives bad acting—it even inspired a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol. In this book, Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro argue that the best antidote for bad thinking is the wisdom, insights, and practical skills of philosophy. When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People provides an engaging tour through the basic principles of logic, argument, evidence, and probability that can make all of us more reasonable and responsible citizens."
Book: When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves
Persuasion, Communication
Why age-old principles of resistance to manipulation don’t work against today’s style of unreality.
I'm going to let Ethan Zuckerman introduce this one.
"In this essay, author and Russia watcher Peter Pomerantsev argues that the “propaganda of unreality” is not a new phenomenon—it’s been part of the political landscape and process for decades. What’s new is that the principles of resistance to manipulation we’ve employed successfully in the past don’t actually work against today’s style of unreality, which he refers to as 'the futureless now.' But there is hope, Peter explains, and novel approaches we can take to address the propaganda of unreality and reinvigorate the democratic information space as we move further into the 21st century."
I ask you to read his last sentence again. The one that begins "But there is hope...".
Article: To Unreality—and Beyond
Persuasion
When we take an individual action, the effect of it is small, but the direct effect of what we do is not the end of the story.
"Robert Frank used to believe that any individual action a person takes to reduce their carbon footprint—eating less meat, driving a hybrid car, walking instead of driving to work—would have a tiny, negligible impact on the planet. As an economist, that was the prevailing wisdom. Not anymore. In his newest book, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work, Frank examines the ways individual decisions wield tremendous influence."
Author Interview: Under the Influence. Putting Peer Pressure to Work
Personal Development
"Great, natural sloth", and the drive to define life beyond giant to-do lists
Sybille Bedford (center) with Aldous Huxley and the artist Eva Herrmann in the south of France, circa 1931, via the New York Review
Lately I've been following threads about our culture's constant drive for maximum productivity, about our seemingly insatiable appetite to define ourselves solely by the enormity and audaciousness of the to-do lists we erect, then attempt to slay. This week I stumbled upon two articles that articulately defend the fine art of slacking in the name of creativity and output.
The first, by Mason Currey in his always inspiring Subtle Maneuvers, cites German-born English writer Sybille Bedford’s explanation "for her modest literary output, which she described in her 2005 autobiography: 'great natural sloth.'”
"In her autobiography—titled Quicksands, it was published when Bedford was 94—she elaborated on the factors behind the 'long fragments of the life I wasted in not working':
Oh what has remained undone by sloth, discouragement, and of course distractions . . . Distractions of living the siren song of the daily round—chance, often choice led me to spend the squandered years in beautiful or interesting places: to learn, to see, to travel, to walk in nocturnal streets, swim in warm seas, make friends and keep them, eat on trellised terraces, drink wine under summer leaves, to hear the song of tree-frog and cicada, to fall in love . . . (Often. Too often.)
"Now those are good excuses for not writing! In all seriousness, though, a sympathetic reader can’t help but suspect that what Bedford did write would not have been nearly as magnetic if it hadn’t been for her travels, her friendships, her affairs, and her leisurely late-night meals on trellised terraces under summer leaves. (God, that sounds lovely.)"
Article: Sybille Bedford’s Squandered Years
The second's title speaks for itself.
Article: Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too
How we work
Study shows that remote working led to less interconnection.
Over the first six months of 2020 a group of social scientists sifted the data captured by the emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls and workweek hours, of 61,182 US Microsoft employees. They sought to estimate the causal effects of firm-wide remote work on collaboration and communication.
"Our results show that the shift to firm-wide remote work caused business groups within Microsoft to become less interconnected. It also reduced the number of ties bridging structural holes in the company’s informal collaboration network, and caused individuals to spend less time collaborating with the bridging ties that remained. Furthermore, the shift to firm-wide remote work caused employees to spend a greater share of their collaboration time with their stronger ties, which are better suited to information transfer, and a smaller share of their time with weak ties, which are more likely to provide access to new information." Ouch.
Research Paper: The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration Among Information Workers
Visual Identity
A truly great logo can be recognised without us needing to see the name of the brand.
Great corporate marks are so strong that they can be repurposed using completely different words.
"Keith Fleck's Corporate States of America project seamlessly places the name of each of the 50 US states plus Washington DC into the logo of each state's most recognizable brand. It makes for an intriguing map of corporate America – and offers a lot of fun when it comes to trying to identify each brand."
Article: Can You Identify Each US State's Biggest Brand From These Redesigned Logos?
Playlist
"The Rick James documentary Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James, briefly touches on James’ stint in a band with Neil Young called The Mynah Birds — one of those rock collaborations that sounds too weird to be true.
"Anyone with a basic knowledge of popular music probably thinks of James as the funk-driven, volatile mastermind of tracks like 'Super Freak' and 'Mary Jane,' and Neil Young as the earnest architect of ballads like “Heart of Gold” and protest anthems like 'Rockin’ in the Free World.'
"But their musical tastes melded beautifully in 1966 Toronto, where James went to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War, and immediately fell into a thriving Canadian music scene that spawned Young, Joni Mitchell, and Gordon Lightfoot, among others."
Video: The Mynah Birds - It's My Time w/Rick James & Neil Young
Article: Rick James and Neil Young’s Band: The Sad Story of the Mynah Birds
Image of the Week
The Image of the Week is an abandoned structure at the Nonagon Commune in Humboldt County, CA.
"From the late '60s to the mid '70s, nearly a million young people went back to the land. Nowhere was the urge to reconnect with nature more keenly felt than in San Francisco, where droves of young people were suddenly fleeing a city overrun by heroin, speed, and bad vibes. Cops were shooting down Black Panthers in Oakland and the military was tear-gassing students in People's Park in Berkeley. Vietnam veterans were looking for a salve for their PTSD. Faithful Marxists aimed to put their ideals to the test. Some just wanted to get high in the woods.
"This movement found its epicenter in a sunny swath of Northern California between the Bay Area and the Oregon border, a region where plots of land were going cheap, decimated by a century of logging and an economic downturn. Thousands of cooperative communities like Table Mountain Ranch sprouted up along the coast and the inland forests. Residents taught themselves to farm, practiced free love, and built their own homes."
Writer David Jacob Kramer and photographer Michael Schmelling went on a road trip to find what remains of the experiments. They found mostly ruins, but they did find a few communards - now in their seventies and eighties - who are still living the dream.
Article: The Last Glimpses of California's Vanishing Hippie Utopias
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