Issue 392
A notebook about how we work, and learn, and love and live.
"The only way we really create change is to enter any situation with the humility to listen and to recognize the world as it is, and then the audacity to dream what it could be." - Jacqueline Novogratz
I like Jacqueline Novogratz's observation that true change requires both humility to notice what is and the audacity to dream of what might be instead. I'd add that a dream without a plan is only a dream. Real change occurs when you hook your audacious ideas to real intention.
What big and audacious dreams are you cooking up?
Happy Friday.
Systems Thinking
"On every level from the cellular up to the societal, human life is driven by the essential drama of maintaining, of ensuring continued survival and working against the drive of entropy."
Bernard Moitessier’s yacht Joshua was the model of perfect maintenance in his 1968 circumnavigation of the globe.
"Maintenance is all around us....Yet maintenance is a largely unheralded presence in our lives. We are fascinated with the people who begin great works — from ancient rulers who ordered the building of pyramids and other great monuments to tech founders who announced revolutionary devices. The maintainers downstream of those grand beginnings, the craft workers who made sure the rock-hewing tools remained sharp or the software engineers pushing patches to cover every new security vulnerability, get short shrift in our cultural memory. Who’s the most famous maintainer you can name?"
Stewart Brand is releasing a new book, The Maintenance Race, on Audible. This week they shared the first chapter.
Article: Stewart Brand Takes Us On “The Maintenance Race”
Workspace
120 years ago Frank Loyd Wright introduced features from the home to the workplace. But who does a homey office really serve?
Frank Lloyd Wright, Larkin Administration Building Lounge (designed 1903), undated photograph (image courtesy Buffalo History Museum)
"As more white-collar employees are returning to work onsite, we continue to speculate what the post-pandemic office should be. One of the most-discussed trends, which began before the pandemic but is expected to take on new resonance in the present circumstances, is incorporating home-like elements into office interiors. Workspaces have started to look like living rooms, with oversized sofas strewn with throw pillows, cocoon-shaped armchairs nestled around coffee tables, and bookshelves styled with knick-knacks. Industry insiders believe such spaces will ease employees’ transitions back to work and make them comfortable in an environment that, for many, is anything but. Discussed as a recent revelation, the homey office is actually an idea Frank Lloyd Wright implemented almost 120 years ago. Wright claimed his design promoted the wellbeing of employees, but it was the men at the top who benefited the most. The same might be true today."
Article: What Frank Lloyd Wright Can Teach Us About Comfort in the Office
How We Work
The striking parallels between slavery and "scientific" management
"In 1911 a congressional special committee convened to investigate the impact of new business practices on the lives of workers. Of particular interest to the committee was something called scientific management, a technique that sought to measure and improve worker productivity. The system’s most vocal proponent, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor, had just published his magnum opus, The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor’s work would become an inspirational touchstone for the management profession. Indeed, his influence continues today. Articles profiling management pioneers often begin with him, lauding his efforts to apply precise metrics to even basic processes.
"However, when Taylor and others were called to testify in 1911, the tone was far from inspirational. And scientific management’s critics gestured to a very different point of reference—slavery. An experienced iron worker from the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts told the committee that scientific management felt to him 'as if it is getting down to slavery.' Managers, he said, exerted extreme control, 'following you when you are at your job . . . and with a stop watch stand over you while you bend down to pick up a few rods. . . . This is too much for a man to stand.' The head of a machinists’ union argued that the system had 'reduced the men to virtual slavery, low wages,' and that it had 'engendered such an air of suspicion among the men that each man regards every other man as a possible traitor or spy.' At the close of the hearings, though the committee took little action, it agreed that elements of the system acted 'the same as a slave driver’s whip on the negro, as it keeps him in a constant state of agitation.'”
Book Excerpt: How Slavery Inspired Modern Business Management
Futures Thinking
On making good predictions for 2050
"If you want to predict the future accurately, you should be an incrementalist and accept that human nature doesn’t change along most axes. Meaning that the future will look a lot like the past. If Cicero were transported from ancient Rome to our time he would easily understand most things about our society. There’d be a short-term amazement at various new technologies and societal changes, but soon Cicero would settle in and be throwing out Trump/Sulla comparisons (or contradicting them), since many of the debates we face, like what to do about growing wealth inequality, or how to keep a democracy functional, are the same as in Roman times.
"To see what I mean more specifically: 2050, that super futuristic year, is only 29 years out, so it is exactly the same as predicting what the world would look like today back in 1992. How would one proceed in such a prediction? Many of the most famous futurists would proceed by imagining a sci-fi technology that doesn’t exist (like brain uploading, magnetic floating cars, etc), with the assumption that these nonexistent technologies will be the most impactful. Yet what was most impactful from 1992 were technologies or trends already in their nascent phases, and it was simply a matter of choosing what to extrapolate."
Article: Futurists Have Their Heads in the Clouds
History
A history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we’re used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, and inspiring.
"The Dawn of Everything is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker; and accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men.
"Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization—literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires. Flash forward a few thousand years, and with science, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, we witness the creation of the modern bureaucratic state. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).
"It is also, according to Graeber and Wengrow, completely wrong. Drawing on a wealth of recent archaeological discoveries that span the globe, as well as deep reading in often neglected historical sources (their bibliography runs to 63 pages), the two dismantle not only every element of the received account but also the assumptions that it rests on. Yes, we’ve had bands, tribes, cities, and states; agriculture, inequality, and bureaucracy, but what each of these were, how they developed, and how we got from one to the next—all this and more, the authors comprehensively rewrite. More important, they demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces, moving helplessly along a technological conveyor belt that takes us from the Serengeti to the DMV. We’ve had choices, they show, and we’ve made them. Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we’re used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring."
Book Review: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Fun, Learning
Click to drop a raindrop anywhere in the contiguous United States and watch where it ends up.
Link: River-runner.com
Ever wondered where you'd end up if you started digging to the exact other side of the world? The Antipodes Map will show you.
Playlist
Carolyn Franklin (standing) coaches her sister Aretha through a demo of Ain’t No Way, a song that Carolyn wrote.
This week Spoon announced that they are readying their 10th album, Lucifer on the Sofa, for release in February. I've always loved this band in no small part due to the fact the co-founder and lead singer, Britt Daniels, has the perfect rock and roll voice. It's scratchy and he can control the notes when he chooses to flat them, a la Stephen Malkmus, which he does a lot.
About their 10th album, Daniels says that it projects "the sound of classic rock as written by a guy who never did get Eric Clapton." That is as good a reference point as any to describe classic rock written by a guy who didn't get Eric Clapton, but did get the German avant-garde band Can.
Article: Spoon Announce New Album, Share Video for New Song “The Hardest Cut”: Watch
Image of the Week
The image of the week is of "Van Gogh and Dali inflating the foliage" by street artist Мишкин (Mishkin) in Vladimir, Russia. About the work the artist says "summer has flown by, red-yellow days are ahead of us 🍂🍁. I would like to dedicate this work to all artists who paint on the streets. Who fill the facades and walls with their drawings, as they once filled their canvases with paints known by many artists. Regardless of the style and technique, turning the ordinary into the beautiful."
Article: Summer has Flown by 🍂🍁 – Van Gogh and Dali Inflate the Foliage in Honor of all the Artists Who Paint on the Streets.
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