From Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death:
“We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it.”
In his most recent book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier presents his case as a Silicon Valley veteran with a dream for a better technologically connected future.
I think it's easy to make the leap that if the exchange of ideas, the idea sex, is the vehicle for human progress than social media might be the best thing yet. But Lanier would argue that the incentives are not in the right place. Remember, social media companies are some of the largest corporations in the world. When there are stakeholders in a boardroom somewhere, time has told us that people are going to get fucked.
The magnitude of social media corporations means no one knows who is driving this thing.
Not Zuckerberg. Not Larry Page. Not even Trump.
Lanier writes:
“The algorithms are rarely interrogated, least of all by external or independent scientists, in part because it’s hard to understand why they work. They improve automatically, through feedback.”
But if no one is driving, the least we can understand is the road we're on. The algorithms are "improving" to sell us ads and our attention. It might be time to find something new, and just maybe delete our social media accounts.
In the foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death, media critic Neil Postman proposes that while the world worriedly anticipated Big Brother of Orwell's 1984, we should have been better prepared to fight Huxley's Brave New World.
“Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell wants that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”
It's hard to argue that modern technology is without flaws. I wonder, probably too much, how I'll feel on my death bed (or some futuristic equivalent), cursing how much of the years where my knees still worked I binged away on Netflix.
But it might just be unreasonable to suggest we need everyone to think in the same ways their parents or grandparents might have.
It could be the dawn of a new weird time. It could be idea sex has the capacity to give birth to an endless amount of innovation if we're able to keep rubbing up against one another.
It's been a week and this daily blog is consistent and all over the place. It's easy to blab about things that move me, but it makes more sense for both of us if I pick something and stick with it. Consistency and commitment.
In searching for direction, I returned, as I often do, to Sarah Peck's article Why Starting a “Blog” is a Terrible Idea. Instead of a blog, Peck recommends committing to a project of small steps, declaring to yourself and others: “I’d like to talk about x topic in 4 posts, within the next two months.”
The timeframe doesn't matter, the focus does. You need to start somewhere and it's better to have a direction than an explosion.
I'd like to talk about idea sex in 3 posts within the next two months.
What is idea sex? That's probably a good place to start on post numero uno. But I started to learn about it through Matt Ridley's TED talk When ideas have sex.
It's worth the watch and if you like it, be sure to come back for more.
Tim Ferriss wrote the Four Hour Work Week more than a decade ago.
Today the New York Times wrote about a successful experiment of the four day work week. New Zealand firm Perpetual Guardian shrunk the week to 32 hours and found that " 'Supervisors said staff were more creative, their attendance was better, they were on time, and they didn’t leave early or take long breaks.' "
And " 'Their actual job performance didn’t change when doing it over four days instead of five.' "
We're getting somewhere. But Ferriss made a point about this too:
“For all their bitching about what’s holding them back, most people have a lot of trouble coming up with the defined dreams they’re being held from.”
I caught photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield's magnum opus Generation Wealth at the Angelika Film Center this evening. It was a heart-breaking and jaw-dropping collection of stories she spent 25 years capturing through her lens.
I'd like to think more about it before I say too much but I can say now that it made me remember one of my favorite bits of Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Work Week:
“People don’t want to be millionaires - they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy.”
Weekends without plans are often weirdly difficult for me. I'll wake up on a Saturday and grab a habitual bacon and egg sandwich and an iced coffee, but facing the rest of an empty day or two sends me into a downward spiral of decision paralysis. "What's the best way to spend a weekend, right now?" I wonder as the clock ticks time away.
Luckily, this weekend had one plan - my sister planned to take a drive over to Hoboken with my mom, my niece, and my nephew. Even better was that Hoboken was hosting the St. Ann Italian Festival so we walked around chowing down on sausages and meatballs and Italian ice. Plus, Sabrina, my niece, got her wiggles out, spastically dancing to the classics:
Kids can be exhausting but as an uncle they give my energy. And as Dilbert creator and blogger, Scott Adams, explains that's the idea when you're presented with the choice of everything else.
“We humans want many things: good health, financial freedom, accomplishment, a great social life, love, sex, recreation, travel, family, career, and so on. The problem with all of this wanting is that the time you spend chasing one of those desires is time you can’t spend chasing any of the others. So how do you organize your limited supply of time to get the best result?
The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.”
Firas Zahabi is no stranger to toughness. He cofounded Tristar Gym and has trained multiple MMA champions, including, arguably one of the best ever, George St-Pierre.
Zahabi on toughness and the pressure of fight night performance:
I always tell my fighters, you’re not scared of fighting. That’s not true. We fight all the time. What you’re scared of is the camera and the lights and the people watching and the judgments, thats what you’re scared of. You're worried about the judgments. Because bad days happen.
Sometimes guys come in the gym and they kill everybody. And one day they have a bad day. What if that one bad day is on fight night? And that’s the one they’re recording. That’s the one people will remember. That’s the one that counts.
But I always tell my guys, look we know, if it does happen and it’s a possibility it could happen, we know that’s not true. That’s what matters.
Cop killer or kind heart?
Every few months or so, I pick up my copy of Dale Carnegie's classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. It hits me a bit different each time, but the story of Francis "Two Gun" Crowley kicks it off perfectly.
First, he has a badass nickname, especially for the 1930s. Second, for a book about learning interpersonal communication, Carnegie strategically drops you in the middle of a West End Avenue shoot-out in New York City. "Two Gun" Crowley, a career criminal and cop killer, found himself surrounded by a hundred and fifty policemen firing machine-guns into his sweetheart's apartment where he hid behind a couch.
And when the end seemed near, Crowley made an effort to scribble down a note from the heart. He wrote, "to whom it may concern, under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one - one that would do nobody any harm.”
Even when sentenced to the electric chair, Crowley didn't give in. He said, "This is what I get for defending myself."
It felt all too familiar when I read a recent WIRED article on Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of one of the most spectacular start-up frauds ever created (with a company value of "up to $9 billion without a working product"). It was an interesting take on the Holmes story and how her justification has not yet been fully revealed.
But a smaller section on another fraud, Bernie Madoff, echoed the sentiment of "Two Gun" Crowley. In the WIRED article, Virginia Heffernen writes:
To my mind, Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi virtuoso who was arrested in 2008, only came into focus in 2011, when Steve Fishman conducted a masterpiece jailhouse interview with him. In it, Madoff makes a clean breast of his crimes, but he also describes feeling, as he ran his fraud, ill-used by his clients. He sees himself as the victim of their tyrannical greed. They treated him like a slave, he complains. The clients, Fishman writes, “became giants of philanthropy, happy to take public bows, while, in his view, it was Bernie from Brooklyn who thanklessly drove the engine.”
This, after all, is the best starting point to understanding humans. No one is perfect. We're just doing our best telling ourselves stories.
Stupid is one of my favorite words. It definitely sounds like what it is.
It can definitely be fun to be stupid sometimes too. But writer/teacher Matt Thomas made a good point when we went back and forth on Twitter this afternoon - he wrote "Stupid has become too much of an entertainment value."
I like this revision. But there are so many smart people who aren’t interviewed ever who should be. Stupid has become too much of an entertainment value.
— Mαtt Thomαs (@mattthomas) July 18, 2018
We need balance. We need to stop amusing ourselves to death.
I started writing consistently after I hit the road back in September 2011. My little green car buzzed me around America. And in the subject of my emails to my friends and family back home I wrote "Explode Into Space". It was a reference to the greatest roadtrip song of all time, Born to Be Wild by Steppenwolf. And it made me laugh.
The section I like goes like this:
Yeah Darlin' go make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space
The song feels like a ridiculous adventure. It's an anthem to throwing caution to the wind.
And with that being said, that's what I want to do now. I want to play again. I want to write again.