Interplace

Hello Interactors,

Hints of loosening COVID restrictions are wafting through the air like a contagious air-born disease. Does this mean people will be heading back to work? Some can’t wait, some would rather not, and others would love to have such a luxury to consider. Is remote work here to stay? And if so, are we sure it’s healthy?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

COMFORTABLE BUSINESS

He had just returned to the office for the first time in two years. I asked him what it was like. I wondered how many people were there with him. He responded, “Let me put it this way, when I pulled into the parking garage I counted maybe six cars.”

I was having lunch with a couple Microsoft friends recently. Our conversation started there and then turned to the current hiring climate in the tech industry. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and a dizzying array of startups are all vying for talent. They’re offering insane starting salaries, stock grants, and signing bonuses. But there seems to be one non-negotiable with tech workers – flexible working arrangements.

Before we knew it, the three of us were talking about what cities would be best to live in knowing employers don’t really care where you live. But even among well-paid tech workers, cost of living became the most salient factor in choosing an ideal city. Rising real estate prices pose the biggest challenge, but optimal internet speeds were up there too.

One friend, who had recently left Microsoft for a startup, mentioned the downsides of remote work. She said it’s really hard getting to know a team you’ve never met in person and even harder for them to get to know you. She senses judging and fields odd questions that aren’t about her, but about her role and what she’s being asked to do. And broad communication from their CEO seems to always fall flat. She said he comes across as disingenuous, less human, and overly focused on short term deadlines and quarterly results. Reflecting on our time working together she’s said she really valued the ‘non work’ interactions that happened on our team. We did feel more like a ‘family’ than a ‘squad.’

Two years of disrupted work practice has led to a combination of ‘the great shuffle’ – people swapping companies in search of higher pay and benefits, ‘the great displacement’ – rising cost of living involuntarily pushing lower paid workers from their homes, or ‘the great resignation’ – cost cutting companies incenting early retirements or aging workers opting to retire early. It’s left companies wondering if this is a phase or if people have habituated to increased flexibility. The CEO for Stitch Fix, an personal apparel shopping service, said they’re seeing customers looking to replace a third of their wardrobe with what they call “Business Comfortable” clothes. She says their customers want to stay working in sweats, but want them to look more ‘professional’ when on Zoom calls.

Cities and local businesses are impacted too. Can they count on workers coming back in droves to commercial districts buying breakfast, lunch, coffee, and drinks? Or even haircuts. Nikita Shimunov owns a barbershop in Manhattan where he once saw 50 to 60 men pass through his shop in a day. It’s trickled to 10 to 15 customers daily and he’s been forced to reduce staff by half. His financial future hinges on the empathy of his landlord.

Many cities rely on these tax revenues to fill their coffers. But if masses of people stop going in to work, it has huge implications on urban planning. Microsoft is wrapping up the final touches on a massive new corporate campus in Redmond at a time when many, maybe even most, may remain working remotely. It’s next to a brand new light rail stop planned and designed to serve thousands that now may never come.

Not all flexible work arrangements are the same or even desirable. Flexibility can introduce or amplify home and work conflicts for individuals, teams, companies, cities, and regions. Technology, especially mobile technology, has been blurring work and home boundaries for decades. What does it mean to achieve a work/life balance when the boundary disappears? And for those with young children, the burden of parenting, home schooling, and working can become overwhelming. And given our social norms, that burden largely, and unfairly, falls on women.

Women are also unfairly expected to conform to certain traditional workplace ideals that focus on physical appearance and presence. For example, wrestling with a screaming toddler on a Zoom call with un-brushed hair, no makeup, and no sleep can make some people judge her as ‘not being professional’. And come review time, how might some managers reflect on these interactions when it comes time to hand out pay increases or offer new opportunities for growth? Meanwhile men get to poke fun at each other for wearing pajamas and having bed head.  

I had a remote employee years ago and my biggest fear was that she seemed to always be available. Remote workers can sometimes over communicate or stretch their availability. They can over compensate for not being physically present. But being always ‘on’, ‘available’, and ‘connected’ can lead to burnout. These pressures, self-inflicted or induced, can also lead to exhaustion and mental duress. Some anthropologists believe humans did not evolve as we did by working even eight hours a day, let alone 12 or more. It doesn’t necessarily lead to optimal team performance either.

Individual suffering can spill over to co-workers which creates even more stress and burnout. Team members can become withdrawn which exasperates feelings of isolation and loneliness. Quiet, more subdued, colleagues can also feel excluded or overlooked. Some choose to turn their cameras off to combat feelings of personal intrusion or surveillance. Or maybe they’re hiding their bed head. This can ultimately lead to job dissatisfaction prompting them to seek another team or company.

I know from experience how attrition can spread like an infectious infliction as those who leave prompt others to do the same. Perhaps ‘the great shuffle’ we’re experiencing isn’t just people running toward opportunity, but impunity.

IS FLEXIBILITY THE FIX?

Flexible working arrangements can take on a variety of flavors and can be called many things. Even before the pandemic, Microsoft had always had what they called ‘flex-time’. It simply means your manager doesn’t really care when you come and go so long as you get your work done. But these days flexible working arrangements can be called names like “remote work”, “tele-commuting”, “tele-work“, “mobile work”, or “virtual work”. There are also those who are “self-employed”, “on-call”, “on-demand”, or working in “shared spaces”.

A group of business school researchers at the University of Reading in the UK just published a literature review on research focused on flexible work practices. They came up with a taxonomy that clumps arrangements into four categories:

Remote, Spatiotemporal, On-demand, and Self-directed. Remote work is like the COVID caused ‘work from home’ many are experiencing today. Spatiotemporal work includes shared spaces, ‘touch down spaces’, ‘office clubs’, and even ‘job sharing’. On-demand work is for workers who are on-call like Uber or Grubhub drivers. Self-directed workers own their own companies, freelance, or contract.

Each of these come with their own advantages and disadvantages. Working from home, or Remote work, is what most people think of when considering flexible working arrangements. Products like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and a growing list of alternatives, make it easy to ‘plug-in’ remotely. Like, for example, joining a meeting from wherever you may be.

I was on a walk one summer morning before sunrise in some nearby woods when I had to join a meeting scheduled in another time zone. So I sat on the limb of a fallen tree over looking a wooded ravine and took part in the meeting as the sun rose. Halfway through, however, the limb snapped and down I went. Good thing the camera was off. And, yes, I was muted.  

But these remote work products, including Slack, Teams, Zoom and others, allow for both synchronous and asynchronous communication. This can lead to days and evenings filled with either a meeting, interruptions from notifications and alerts, or the dreaded FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out – a fear that addicts people to be constantly checking and dealing with email, channels, or text message threads. In other words, constantly working.

This invariably infringes on time spent with family and friends. These prolonged stresses can drive some people to withdrawal and become isolated. And for those who seek control and domination over others, like manic micro-managers, it means they can wield these real-time, always on, communication tools like a weapon. And the quicker people respond to their seemingly psychopathic needs, the more fervent their interruptions become. It’s a cycle that can leave people anxious, depressed, and looking to get away. Those feeling violated in their own homes sometimes seek a shared workspace elsewhere.

Sharing work spaces over different times and places is what researchers call Spatiotemporal work. This style of working hit the news a few years ago when the shared workspace company WeWork failed its initial public offering (IPO). Started in 2008 as GreenDesk – an “eco-friendly coworking space” – it became WeWork in 2010 with an infusion of cash from a wealthy real estate developer. By 2014 it was “the fastest-growing lessee of new office space in New York”. They grew too quickly and imploded in their 2019 IPO, refinanced and went public in 2021, and are now leveraging rising COVID driven real estate prices to recoup some of their losses. While their memberships still remain low, the pandemic has created a growing need for humans to come together physically to collaborate and bond. Especially as team members are scattered across regions, countries, and the globe.

Microsoft, like many organizations, have long used ‘off sites’ as temporary ways to pull teams together for a day or more – a kind of spatio-socio-temporal team building field trip. Some I attended were more sashay to build cachet than work with a perk, but some companies are now using these excursions as more routine means of encouraging more physical collaboration. New software tools like Cloudfare make it easier for managers to schedule and arrange gatherings of geographically dispersed employees in places like AirBnb’s, employee’s homes, or even existing offices – an on-site off-site.  

Some companies are even allocating money to teams so they can book these off-sites themselves as a way to bring team members together physically – even if it’s just for a picnic, a walk in a park, or a bike ride. Some companies are even buying apartments or hotel suites as more permanent ‘off-site’ locations. The Wall Street Journal reports that one 26 person startup, Aidentified,

“rents two corporate apartments, one in Boston and one near San Francisco, in lieu of offices, so employees can gather when needed. Each apartment is equipped with a conference table, seating areas, a kitchen and bedrooms where out-of-town employees can stay.” The 3,000-square-foot, three bedroom, multi-level Boston apartment has an outdoor terrace overlooking the Boston Public Library.   

If this sounds extravagant, it is. Companies rich with cash can often become embarrassments of riches. This competitive hiring climate exists within a grossly disproportionate wealth disparity that compounds these excesses as each company seeks to out do the other in attempts to lure and retain employees. But these off-sites need not always be entirely self-serving. The nonprofit Forté Foundation, a women’s business leadership advocacy group, took some time during their three-day off-site in Austin, Texas to build bikes for a local nonprofit…in between pamper parties, luxury lunches, and extravagant excursions of course.

For those laboring behind the scenes to prop these posh parades of privilege, it’s hard to see any of this as actually being ‘work’. Many managers funding these fun fests often wonder the same thing. In order for managers to know whether these remote employees are actually working or not requires more software. Task management and planning tools like Confluence, Trello, Project, Planner, or Basecamp let managers keep an eye on task completion, deadlines, and engagement. But this can make some employees feel like they’re being watched, scheduled, and controlled. The opposite of flexible, but still far from indentured manual labor most of the employed world endures.

AN ANT ANTEDOTE

Shared work, space, and calendars are sold and celebrated by the software industry as new cultures of openness and inclusion, but not everyone is equally comfortable sharing their locations and schedules. Others find the overhead required to fill out forms, schedule tasks, and report progress inhibits their ability to actually be productive. And when tasks are shared among team members, it’s not always clear who was responsible for doing what. Often times the bulk of the work falls on those most conscientious or those seeking glory and control. Managers are then stuck with no clear way of evaluating contributions fairly. That is if they can get employees to actually fill out their forms in the first place.

In addition to rogue, power hungry, and individualistic workaholics dominating a team, sporadic sharing work practices centered around short-term deliverables can also lead to groupthink. In an effort to complete tasks, individuals can be prone, even encouraged, to taking the path of least resistance instead of finding more creative and effective solutions that may be out of the norm. These can all have financial implications for companies as product quality may suffer, or those less geared for these sharing cultures and workspaces could suffer a loss in compensation or opportunities.

The results of that UK literature review revealed that researchers have been trying to tease apart the impacts of flexible work practices since the emergence of so-called ‘Smart Cities’ and ‘Sharing Culture’ around 2010. Within a year social science researchers were already looking into aspects of social isolation. By 2012 themes of gender inequality and work-family conflict entered the scene. Then came financial costs, lack of visibility, blurred spaces, and health impairment. And then, after COVID came to town in 2019, these topics blew up. And by last year, 2021, the themes of dispersed spaces and employer-employee tensions were added to the decade old list of concerns.

These researchers observed that, “while almost all the studies have explored both the positive and negative consequences of technology use, none have examined the downsides of changes in (or to) technological platforms on employee behavior and work.” They were surprised to find that

“researchers have not explicitly focused on the changes in traditional hierarchies and the dynamic nature of manager–employee relationships as a result of technology-enabled [Flexible Work Practice].”

They say existing research aims to understand technology as a facilitator of flexible work “thus perpetuating the instrumental view of technology.”

Given this finding, they call on a shift in perspective. Instead of just explaining the role technology is playing in enabling flexible work practices, seek to describe the social force it plays in shaping our behavior which in turn shapes our networks of relationships. They wrote, “Given the active role that technological platforms continue to play in organizational life, other conceptualizations of technology are required…” One theory they suggest leveraging is Actor-Network Theory (ANT).

The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography describes Actor-Network Theory as a

“unifying thread [that] constitutes the central line of connection to the field of human geography.”

It’s an ever evolving social theory that argues

“all manner of things (as many as you can imagine) are variously entangled together in specific formations or networks in the making of the world.”

As I stand here in Kirkland, Washington on the 18th birthday of my son and daughter, I can look back over those nearly two decades and see the role technology has played in bringing that central line of connection in human geography into focus. The combination of the internet, mobile technologies, and geo-political globalization have connected an assortment of ever expanding networks of people and place. And then, in the final three years of my kid’s high school existence I can see how that technology has both granted them needed flexibility but also robbed them of social opportunities.

But despite it all, they have flourished. And yet not all kids have – nor have adults. As affluent, mostly white, remote workers enjoy their ‘flexible working arrangements’ – like next day Amazon orders, late night GrubHub ice cream deliveries, and TaskRabbit handy man assignments – those ‘on-demand’ workers on which they rely suffer their own perplexing paradoxes. While ‘on-demand’ work has supplanted needed income for many struggling to make a living, it’s also taken a toll on their health.

Because laws lag in defining and representing the rights of these workers, they’re prone to exploitation by corporate overlords and overly demanding and consuming customers. It can lead to job related and economic anxiety, stress, and uncertainty. And because they operate alone, without a tightknit team – a family – it leaves ample time to reflect on their plight. They can become preoccupied with how society, their government, their companies regard, treat, and abuse them.

As I walked home from that lunch with my friends last Friday, I looked around my little town of Kirkland. It’s been shaped by nearly a century and a half of people – actors – enrolling, transforming, and interacting within nested networks of natural and engineered environments. Kirkland was intended to be a steel town. Peter Kirk’s vision was for it to be “The Pittsburgh of the Northwest.” The Peter Kirk building is now the Kirkland Arts Center. Ole Pete could never have imagined any of this. Just as we never imagined we’d be forever shaped by a measly virus.   

I looks like my next lunch with friends will likely be unmasked. Washington is currently planning for mask free restaurants at the end of March – more flexible eating arrangements will soon be meeting flexible working arrangements. I’ll be curious to see whether more Softies return to the Redmond campus over time or whether the future of their work remains primarily remote. It’s hard to tell without a string of caveats.

This tiny microbe has disrupted an entire global actor-network. Just how much our behavior has been changed permanently is unknown, but there’s no going back to some semblance of ‘normal’. The future is as uncertain as predictions for how far into the future the global pandemic will continue to circulate. As Dr. Heidi Brown, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Arizona said recently,

“Until the epidemiologists can tell you what’s going to happen in the future without massive uncertainty caveats, then we’re still in an epidemic-type situation.”

Hold on to your hats, and your masks, we’re all about to learn there is not such thing as a free lunch.

Hello Interactors,

The Olympics are in full swing. I admit I’m staying up later than I probably should be, but I’m a sucker for the Olympics. Yes it’s strange seeing a white strip of snow down a brown windy hill or watching big air competitions against a dystopian industrial waste site, but hey, that’s Beijing! But maybe I’m being too judgmental. Surely there’s more than meets the eye.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE GU GLUE

Jubilant in her successful landing, the Chinese skier put on the brakes spraying snow over the blue padded barriers as the camera centered her in the frame. She had just landed her first jump in the Olympics’ big air competition. She pulled off her goggles and beamed a big, immaculate toothy smile into the camera. My first thought was, “This girl is not Chinese.” I had never heard of Eileen Gu, but that was about to change.

She had just landed a right double 1440. That’s four full gravity defying rotations in the air after descending a hill 20 stories high and then launching off a curved ramp pointed to the sky. She was the first woman to land a similar double cork 1440 just two months prior. That prompted the French skier, Tess Ledeux, to counter in January by being the first woman to land a 1620 – four and a half rotations.

Ledeux managed to land that same jump in her opening run at the Olympics in Beijing earlier this week and held the top spot until Gu’s third and final jump. While Gu was at the top waiting her turn, her mom called from the stands at the bottom of the hill. Yan Gu introduced Eileen to skiing in Lake Tahoe where she sometimes worked as a ski instructor. She told her daughter to play it safe and stick to the 1440. Eileen responded,

“Mom, executive call here, vetoed. I am going to make the 16, and you are going to deal with it.”

After visualizing the trick when her eyes closed, arms swaying, shoulders jerking, like a dog running in their sleep, she aimed her skis down the slope. High in the sky, confident in her 1620 launch, Gu grabbed the bottom of her ski – a safety grab – a trick she had never attempted before this run. She landed triumphantly and the judges launched her into first place. As she threw her fist in the air in celebration it was rewarded with a loud cheer from the Chinese fans sprinkled throughout the stadium. Her mom, of course, being one of them.

Yan Gu was born in Shanghai and grew up in Beijing. The Olympics are in her home town. Her mom, Eileen’s grandmother, still lives there. When Yan was in her twenties, she did what many other Chinese students did, and continue to do. She sought an education in America. After receiving a degree in chemistry from Peking University in Beijing, she enrolled in a master’s program in biochemistry and molecular biology at Auburn University in the late 80s. She went on to be a research associate at Rockefeller University before going on to earn an MBA at Stanford in 1994. She now works at an investment firm in San Francisco where she specializes in Chinese investments.

The director of an extreme outdoor sports high school in Mt. Hood Oregon, Mike Hanley, said “Yan is very pleasant but one of the most intense human beings I have ever met in my life. She smiles and tells you how great you are. But then you find out, after the fact, what the requests are. She loves her daughter and wants her daughter to get priority.”

Getting priority attention from coaches and trainers in America means paying more money. Extorsion? Maybe. But money talks. Yan, a single parent, was willing to pay whatever it took to secure the right training to match her daughter’s ability and her own drive to insure her child’s success. Not many parents of talented kids can afford to do this without striking deals with big name extreme sports brands, like Red Bull or Burton, on behalf of their kids. Child labor? Maybe. But it pays the bills.

But Yan has been off the hook for paying much at all since her daughter started striking her own lucrative modelling and endorsement contracts. She’s was a millionaire before hitting 18. She not only landed Red Bull, but Cadillac, Apple’s Beats by Dre headphones, Tiffany’s, Louis Vuitton and Victoria’s Secret. Those are some big names. But in China she’s also paid to represent the Bank of China, China Mobile, a milk company, and Starbucks of China. She is estimated to command $2.5 million per deal. With over 20 modelling, spokesperson, and endorsement deals she must be worth over $50 million dollars at age 18. And that was before she won the gold medal.

In addition to being beautiful, talented, and rich, she is also smart. She scored 1580 on the SAT out of a perfect score of 1600, was the first to graduate early at her private high school in the Bay area, and will attend Stanford next fall. Oh, and did I mention she plays the piano and was one of the top distance runners in the state of California before turning her attention to the Olympics? She is what overly competitive parents the world over wish their kids to be. Sorry kids of demanding parents, Eileen has set the bar high. And for Eileen, good luck living through the onslaught of Western chauvinism, racism, and ethnocentrism. Not to mention a healthy dose of wealth, ability, and beauty resentment and jealousy.

Gu decided, supposedly with her mother’s urging, to compete for China three years ago when she turned 15. She had grown up fluidly splitting her time between China and Chinese language and culture and the U.S. and American culture. As she said in a press conference this week,

“in the US, I’m American, and when I’m in China, I’m Chinese”.

But reporters, mostly male, weren’t satisfied with the answer. The English sports reporter, Oliver Brown, thought that line was “a cute line, but sadly impractical, for the simple reason that China does not recognise dual citizenship.” Gu refuses to indulge reporters on admitting whether or not she renounced her U.S. citizenship or whether the Chinese government made an exception for the girl the Chinese media call “Snow Princess”. Insistence by Western media, and many others, on making a bi-racial teenage woman pick one side or the other will likely not relent any time soon.

REPRESENTATION ORIENTATION

I’m reflecting on my own initial reaction to learning Gu wasn’t representing America. My first thought, like many, is she’s a product of American culture, education, coaching, and lavish ski schools and resorts. Other athletes are saying the same thing. Jen Haduk, a Winter X Games gold medalist and a former member of the U.S.A Women’s team, told the New York Post that

“[Eileen Gu] became the athlete she is because she grew up in the United States, where she had access to premier training grounds and coaching that, as a female, she might not have had in China…I think she would be a different skier if she grew up in China. This makes me sad.”

Eileen Gu admits the access she had to snow, coaching, and opportunity allowed her to pursue her dreams and potential. In an interview on NBC, they show her giving a speech in middle school on the impact Title Nine had on women and sport. She also reveals in that interview that every trick she learned in America she took to China where throngs of young Chinese girls were eager to learn from her.

A Chinese-American girl fluent in Mandarin teaching Chinese girls to do tricks on skis also helped her become the athlete she is. Eileen Gu would not have been the skier she is had she grown up in China, but Chinese girls will now grow up trying to become the skier she is. And you can bet the Chinese government will see to it they have what they need to succeed. In fact, some believe it was the money and support China offered Eileen Gu three years ago that may have contributed to her decision to represent that country. An offer the American team I’m sure could not match. Another Yan Gu deal made on behalf of her daughter? Perhaps. But you can bet other parents of bi-racial or dual citizenship kids would be tempted to do the same.

Eileen Gu was born with rare athletic abilities. She was also born fearless. It was one of the reasons her mother made sure she had ski lessons. She could see as a young child that her daughter lacked the kind of fear most of us have skiing fast down a mountain of snow and ice. After suffering a concussion as a young teenager on a practice run, an injury that put her out of commission for a week, she couldn’t wait to get back to jumping. These natural abilities cannot be taught regardless of where you grow up.

And we shouldn’t be so quick to diminish Eileen’s lived experience as a Chinese-American routinely visiting her family in China. While it has only accounted for five or six years of the 18 she’s been alive, it’s undeniably part of who she is, what she does, how she thinks, and what she believes. But I, like so many others, didn’t consider that in my initial reaction and judgement of Eileen Gu. I jumped to seeing her as representing a country and only after did I question my reaction and come to see her as a human being.

As geographers Alan Latham and David Conradson wrote in 2003, even the field of human geography is “Dominated by an obsession with the politics of representation.” Little interest has historically been given to “considerations of the place, or the productiveness, of practice” by individual human beings.

By seeing Eileen Gu as Chinese-American, bi-racial, or dual citizen can lead to objectification and categorization. There is a growing understanding and recognition in the social sciences that race categories often lead to either feelings of fear or desire. For example, unkept asylum seekers crossing the border from Latin America may elicit fear leading many to want to kick them out. Meanwhile, a super-model, Chinese-American, Olympic gold medal athlete elicits a desire to claim her as ‘theirs’.

As we sit and watch Eileen Gu smile for the camera after performing death defying feats with sublime grace or see a magazine cover graced with her face, we are reduced to dwelling on her race. Those of us in the West have grown up being barraged with pictures, paintings, movies, comics, and text that portrays races different from our own in insufficient and often inaccurate ways.

For China and the Chinese it’s a form of Orientalism. The word Orient is derived from a Latin word oriēns which can mean anything originating from the East, including the sky, sun, or lands and people East of Europe. Orient was thought of as the East and it’s antonym, Occident, was thought of as the West.

This word and it’s denotations and connotations allowed Western scholars, writers, artists, and designers to divide the world between ‘us’, the West, and ‘them’ the East. The Orient was portrayed as a place far away with exotic customs, cultures, and people – ‘Other-than’ or ‘Other-worldly’; a place to be explored, conquered, and diminished. Consequently, its people were portrayed as ‘Others’ who were to be either ‘saved’, slaved, exploited, or killed.  It’s a portrayal that continues to this day.

James Bond is the suave savior from the West who is shaken by exotic foreigners but stirred to action through acts of either violence or sex. And while we know it’s fiction, it’s filmed in a pseudo-authentic way that often includes a wink or a nod from Bond into the camera. Indiana Jones does the same thing. Steven Spielberg told it’s creator, George Lucas, it’s a “James Bond film without the hardware.”

MIND AND BODY EQUALITY

The late Jamaican-British sociologist, Stuart Hall led efforts beginning in the 1960s to include race and gender in the scholarship of cultural studies. He observed in 1993 that social scientists, including post-colonial geographers, continue to downplay the role text, images, and symbols play in how we relate to the representation of cultures foreign to Western tradition. He believed representation should be considered within a wider cultural context. Hall believed the

“processes of artistic production and ownership, use of media technologies, practices of distribution, government legislation and regulation, as well as different forms of audience consumption across the globe, influence how an image is ‘read’ and understood.”

For highly produced imagery like Bond films or pictures of Eileen Gu in an advertisement, there is an intent by the producer of the image to encode a particular message to the viewer. But how viewers then decode and interpret that message is as variable and complex as humanity itself. The geographical context that informs an individual consumer’s identity influences the meaning of that message.

The imagery in Bond Films or stylized photos of Gu also don’t provide a voice to the displaced or marginalized people that make up the bulk of these ‘foreign’ populations. The West can use the power of imagery to impose meaning which only perpetuates the idea that the West controls the rest. ‘We’ hold dominion over ‘them’. As geographer Anoop Nayak puts it,

“The power of whiteness to continually narrate the existence of racialised Others is a violent reminder of the privilege that comes with being located as the architects and inheritors of modernity.”

Eileen Gu just may be fashioning these Western media mechanisms into a weapon of her own. She has the potential to use her talent, intelligence, and good looks – and the dominant Western style media platforms – to give voice to those in China who do not. If we’re to believe Eileen Gu, she wants to inspire and empower young Chinese-born girls to use sport as a way to give them a voice.

She knows they don’t have Title Nine to help them in China, so she’s using her Chinese language skills and her individual beauty, elegance, intelligence, and grace as a substitute. All under a Chinese flag. She is using the media tools of traditional Western domination not to hush or misconstrue but to crush what oppresses young girls so they can see what they can do.

Eileen is outspoken and well spoken. She’s come out against increased Asian hate crime in America and supports the BLM movement. But she remains silent on human rights abuses in China. This really bothers people. Especially reporters.

Meanwhile Tesla sells more cars in China than anywhere in the world. Where are the calls for Elon Musk to speak out? Microsoft was the first software company allowed to open an office in China around the same time Eileen’s mom was coming to America. It remains a highly productive, innovative, and influential subsidiary for Microsoft. I’ve witnessed myself. I don’t see reporters demanding Satya Nadella or Bill Gates to come out against China. Eileen, just like Elon, Satya, and Bill, know that to do so means disadvantaging their chances for influence from inside China.  

Could it be that these Western, mostly male, reporters only see Gu as a two-dimensional, bi-racial American girl? Are they put off by how she expertly and effortlessly dodges their questions? Are they frustrated they can’t dominate this woman, this girl, this Asian-American who can look and sound Western one moment and Chinese the next?

When the British reporter Oliver Brown writes how her well crafted and practiced line, “in the US, I’m American, and when I’m in China, I’m Chinese”, came across as ‘cute’ to him, is that not only condescending but patronizing, paternalistic, and misogynist? And did he not politicize, objectify, and perhaps ‘Orientalize’ her by insisting her words were “sadly impractical, for the simple reason that China does not recognise dual citizenship.”? There is nothing simple about any of this.

And am I guilty of doing the same when my first reaction was to judge her on her appearance without knowing anything about her, her life, her family, her culture, or her intentions?

Who knows what her real citizenship is. Maybe China turned a blind eye to their policy that refuses dual-citizenship. It’s a practical move on their part if it means they get a world renowned Snow Princess Chinese ambassador out of it. I wouldn’t put it passed Eileen and her mom to scheme and arrange such a deal. Her mom is a professional Chinese deal maker, after all. Just as Musk, Nadella, and Gates are. Who knows what arrangements these successful Western businessmen have with China, but you can bet they’re practical.

When the ski coach from Oregon – who knows a thing or two about dealing with Eileen and her mom – was pressed on what he thought of Eileen choosing to ski for China he said, “It’s a decision that seems practical and pragmatic, just like every decision she makes.”

In the 1880s and 1890s, a French aristocrat interested in the history and sociology of sport toured America and England learning about sports administration. His name was Pierre de Coubertin. He was particularly fascinated by rugby. He believed it best demonstrated how “organised sport can create moral and social strength” and how it could “help to set the mind and body in equilibrium”. As a former rugby player, I concur.

He took his learnings back home and with the help of the French government organized the first Olympic committee in 1894. By 1896 the first modern Olympic games took place in Athens. It attracted the largest contingent of international athletes of the time.

As I watch the remainder of the Olympics I’m trying to see through the media veils that distort and disorient portrayals of people. Instead of being just another American rooting for Americans, I’m marveling at the athletically gifted, courageous, and tenacious humans participating in ‘organized sports that have shaped their moral strength.’

Maybe if we all do that together we can also build social strength. Watching Eileen Gu twirl through the air while dodging the admonishing stare can be dizzying — and then some. But seeing her as a human first and an athlete second sets my mind and body in equilibrium.

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Hello Interactors,

While the media dwells on border disputes like Russia and Ukraine or Trump’s wall, COVID, climate change, and the global economy thumb their nose at territorial boundaries. Are these borders we obsess over even real or are they products of our imagination?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A CASTLE WITHOUT HASSLE

On Sunday I pulled the beast from the closet. It had been awhile. Probably too long. It pulls with a heaviness that always takes me by surprise. Its long neck, standing tall above its body, awkwardly slumped over my shoulder as I drug its head from the darkness. I walk down the hall with its neck strung out behind me tugging on its short, stout resistant body that pressed heavy with resistance.

I don’t know why we keep it. Nobody in the family likes it. It’s not that it eats incessantly; that’s why we got it. It’s more that it’s so damn heavy and awkward. No wonder we keep it in the closet longer than we should. But there’s only so much dust and dirt one can tolerate in a house. It was time to vacuum.

We tolerate a fair amount of dust in our house. Lazy? Maybe. Is it so bad that we let a little dust accumulate? As the comedian George Carlin once said,

“Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.”

I grew up, like many people I suppose, learning to have anxiety around dust accumulation. But I was raised Methodist and it was John Wesley, Mr. Methodism himself, who most likely coined the phrase, “cleanliness is next to godliness.” He had a thing about remaining clean. But this idea dates back to the Old Testament. Cleanliness for the Hebrew people wasn’t about the home, it was about the body. That’s how we got baptism, foot washing, hand washing, and, yes, circumcision. Either way, to be clean was to be pure.

By dragging this weighty, electrified, menace with its dust breathing head across floors, window sills, and furniture I am not only sucking up undesirables into a bag, I am purifying the home. And just to make sure these impurities don’t escape the menace of this machine it features a HEPA filter on its exhaust. Why do people feel the urge to purge these dusty hombres from our home?

There are practical reasons, I am sure, just as with washing our bodies. But it’s different with our homes. These unwanted microscopic interlopers have made their way inside our home and we want them outside our home. As they invade we become territorial. We sweep dust into a bin, under the rug, or out the door. There is a spatial differentiation to ‘cleansing’ the home of ‘undesirables’. Get out and stay out!

As a child, were you not allowed to take food into certain rooms? Do you take your shoes off at the door? How about, “No pets upstairs!” Growing up I had friends where entire living rooms were off limits to kids. Parents are known to issue all kinds of spatial regulations to their families. “Go to your room!” “Get out of the kitchen!” “Take it outside!”

But rooms can also house fond thoughts. Some of my best memories were in my basement. I played pool, the piano, and with trains. I watched home movies, made art, or pulled an Encyclopedia from the shelf and was transported to another world. I told this story to someone on a Zoom call last week and they leaned into the camera looking not at me but around me and asked, “And where are you now?” “In my basement”, I replied.

But not everyone has fond memories of their homes. If they had one. For victims of spousal and/or child abuse, or even slavery, recalling memories of home – or certain rooms in a home – brings on discomfort, anxiety, and pain. Response to that anguish varies by person.

The influential feminist author, professor, and social activist bell hooks (a pen name borrowed from her grandmother’s name Bell Blair Hooks and reduced to lower case out of deference) writes in her book Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics that black women, during her childhood in the south,

“constructed their homes as places of care, nurturing and retreat from a harshly racist society in which most of them also worked outside their own homes, in domestic service at the homes of white people.

Making their own home, hooks believed, however modest or temporary had ”radical potential” to regain “their ‘subjectivity’ (their personal human identities) in a society which tended to categorize them oppressively by gender and ethnicity as ‘women’ and ‘black’.”

This interpretation of and relationship to ‘home’ can be complex. For some “a man’s home is his castle” so long as ‘he’ is the ‘master’. This phrase first read as “An Englishman’s home is his castle.” Which is to say “An English person’s home is a place where they may do as they please and from which they may exclude anyone they choose.” It was popularized after appearing in the book The History of the Norman Conquest of England in 1868 by the English historian Edward Augustus Freeman. However, it had been ensconced in British law since 1505. The law read,

“If one is in his house, and he hears that such a one wants to come to his house to beat him, he can well make an assembly of folk among his friends and neighbours to assist him, and to aid in safeguard of his person...”

But if an assembly can’t be made, or one can’t escape, then

“the house of one is to him his castle and his defence, and where he properly ought to remain…a servant can beat one in defence of his master…a servant can slay one in saving the life of his master, if he [the master] cannot otherwise escape.”

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

When the home comes to be known as a place that offers comfort, solace, independence, privacy, and the legal right to harm – even kill – an intruder you deem threatening, it also becomes a place that excludes. The ‘head of the household’ can assert their superiority; especially when coupled with traditional gendered roles. It’s where phrases like, “Are you the man of the house?” or “Who wears the pants in this family, anyway?” serve to validate and perpetuate male superiority and dominance in the home. At its worst, can even lead to domestic violence.

What, then, does this say of homelessness? If Western social norms, legal text, and financial incentives favor home and property ownership, imagine what kind of insecurities or negative connotations come with being without one? Many fear the homeless, but the fears of the homeless – or nearly homeless – are surely greater.

And what about homeless people who call their city their ‘home’? Imagine living in a city your whole life, renting as an adult, maybe even saving to buy a house, when suddenly a rent increase pushes you out to live in your car, on the street, under a bridge, or in a park. These people have not left home, but are considered ‘homeless’. ‘Houseless’ is more accurate, but does little to ease the feelings of loss, anxiety, and pain that comes with losing a roof over your head and the status that comes with it.

If homes are a place of inclusion for the owner and its occupants, a place of’ belonging’, what places outside of the boundary of the home do we ‘belong’? We perceive our environment through the most intimate of senses; touching, tasting, hearing, smelling, and to the least intimate, seeing. But we are bounded in our ability to absorb and reason over the barrage of information our senses provide. We are thus influenced by our abilities and reasons for being in particular places.

These inputs form mental images that help navigate space, are shaped by perceptions, preconceived notions, and relationships with people and place. Each individual understands and relates to their environment in unique ways. Environments, territories, places, and the people in them, do not exist in some objective ideal but in a subjective reality informed by our senses, beliefs, and histories.

Humanistic geographer David Ley, who leveraged the work of the French geographer Vidal de le Blache, asserts that ‘home’ is a combination of the very real, regional physical environment with which we can see, touch, hear, and feel – our objective reality – and the social environment formed by the lives we lead – our subjective reality – which can be influenced by our imaginations and our emotions.

Humanistic geography relates ‘home’ to a sense of ‘belonging.’ This sense or feeling exists at multiple scales from our body, abode, neighborhood, town, region, county, state, or country. We talk of ‘home towns’, ‘home field advantage’, or ‘hangin’ with my homey’s.’ And when we’re far away from them for a long time we often yearn to ‘go home.’ We become attached to these ‘homes’. They become a part of who we are – a slice of our identity and pride. The way we think of our ‘homes’ is how we would like others to think of us. There’s a word for this ‘belonging’ that combines the Greek words ‘love’ and ‘place’: topofilia.

But this sense of ‘belonging’ is more than identifying with our physical surroundings. It’s more than the senses detect as you return ‘home’ from a long journey; it may be the smell of rich soil, the humidity enveloping your body, the cool mist absorbed by your thirsty pores, the arid sun radiating your closed eyes, or that songbird signing in the tree. ‘Belonging’ can also mean belonging to the people of that place – real or imagined.

These people and places with which we feel ‘belonging’, at scales ranging from our bodies to homes, neighborhoods to cities, or states to countries become defensible. We become territorial. This need and desire to defend ourselves, our people, and our place is an act of control that aims to exclude others.

Territories are defined by boundaries. Boundaries, when seen from the inside are protectors but from the side or the ‘others’ are rejecters. National borders, for example, are not natural and often have no physical demarcations at all. Nor are they fixed in space or time. These imaginary boundaries are created and maintained by various people over the course of history who make determinations on who is inside and outside the border. And it’s based on a this elusive notion of ‘belonging’. In the case of national borders, it’s based on a national identity – a ‘homeland’.

BORDER DISORDER

A nation-state is an idea that is grounded in a fabricated ideal created by a select group based on the identity they assigned to a particular set of people. This manufactured idea and it’s origins, like any idea, is contestable, changeable, and continually in flux. Like the borders themselves. To give the illusion of permanence to these unnatural homeland borders, and the national-identity they suggest, requires a constant propagation of ‘myths’ – propaganda. To reduce or eliminate contention of a fabricated national-identity, or the borders they represent, people need to be convinced these territories must be be defended. Just as they would their own body or home.

Geographer Stephen Daniels suggests that both these real physical geographies and perceived national identities are interdependent. He says,

“…national identities are ‘coordinated, often largely defined, by “legends and landscapes”, by stories of golden ages, enduring traditions, heroic deeds and dramatic destinies located in ancient or promised home-lands with hallowed sites and scenery’.”

UCLA Geographer John Agnew calls this a “territorial trap”. He says that by “regarding states as fixed units of territorial sovereign space, unchanging through time; separating domestic (inside) from foreign (outside) political spaces; [and] treating the territorial state as a container of society” we are committing a conceptual error.

It is this very trap that Trump tapped to prop himself up as president. He would repeatedly say, “If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country.” To make the invisible border visible, he focused on building a wall. He encouraged his disciples to chant, “Build the wall, build the wall.” Staged political performances at the border drew the attention of the world. While making the intangible tangible, he strengthened the territorial trap. He perpetuated the myth that this border represents a “fixed territorial sovereign space unchanging through time”.

But the United States didn’t even have a border patrol until Herbert Hoover in 1924. It too was largely a performance with the same racist goals as Trump – sweep those dirty, dusty Mexicans outside. That same meager border patrol of the 1920s remained meager until the 1990s. And remember, Texas, a state that shares a border with Mexico, was its own country, the Republic of Texas, under President Sam Houston for nearly a decade before the U.S. annexed them in 1845. There is nothing fixed or permanent about borders or territories.

This fetishizing of territorial boundaries has fueled a rise in border walls over recent decades. Guggenheim Fellow and political geographer Reece Jones writes,

“Two thirds of the seventy border walls that exist today were built in the past twenty years by countries as diverse as Bangladesh, China, South Africa, and Norway.”  

In the 2020 book Borders and Border Walls, Élisabeth Vallet shows how border walls have gone from nearly zero in 1940 to over 72 in 2020. What’s more telling is 47% of those are built by democratic governments, 35% authoritarian, and 18% a hybrid of both. I’m assuming the U.S. is in the democratic bucket, but indeed may be slipping into hybrid.

In a 2020 paper called Populism, Sovereigntism, and the Unlikely Re-Emergence of the Territorial Nation-State, British historian Aristotle Kallis writes that it leads to

“economic nationalism and an embrace of protectionism, political chauvinism, isolationism, reassertion of strict border controls, reversal of previous international commitments, and an expansive range of discriminatory measures targeting those excluded from the narrow definition of ‘the people’.”

Reece Jones puts it like this,

“Since states the world over are threatened by the dawning of a global consciousness—a global awareness of economic, political, and environmental connections—states everywhere are responding with increasingly violent efforts to signify their control over their borders. Indeed, the border has become the location for the performance of the territorial sovereignty of the state, par excellence.”

Populist, nationalist politicians and parties are behaving like a homeowner who’s convinced their home is soon to be invaded. The dust collecting around their ‘homeland’ are people who look different and share different beliefs and ideals. In America, Black and Indigenous scholars are surfacing alternative territorial and societal histories that intrude on traditional “legends and landscapes” many in this country believed to be fixed. These people are ensnared in a territorial trap, scared the rope is about to snap. So they build walls and political clout, they make calls to keep it all out.

But the dust they fear isn’t going away. Try as they may, global consciousness is here to stay. So they best remember what George Carlin had to say.

“Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.”

Hello Interactors,

We all intuitively feel the world is falling into selfishness, defensiveness, and pettishness. Me, my, and eye for an eye. If the words we see in the books we read are any indication, it’s not just intuition but fact. And the shift started right around 1980.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

WE PRAY FOR NOT FOR US, BUT ME

Do you use words like believe, hope, fear, sense, feel, pray, soul, or mystery? Or are you more likely to use words like science, technology, model, method, fact, data, analysis, transmission, or system? If you’ve read even one Interplace essay, then I believe that my preference is no mystery! And I hope and pray you’ll read more than one. After all, I search for facts and data and then perform some analysis of the science of systems.

What if I asked whether you use the words I and me more than we and us? One look at social media and it would be apparent. All the social strife, climate fright, or COVID concern has many people screaming into the digital void or retreating to the nearest corner curled up mumbling to themselves and their rectangular shiny black mirror of a screen. This is a very personal and individual reaction that commonly begins with the word “I” followed by “hope” or “pray.”

What if I told you the world has both been increasingly using feeling words, like sense and soul and individual words, like I and me since 1980? What’s more intriguing is these two uses are correlated. The band R.E.M. was sending us clues back in 1987 when they released their song, “It’s the end of the world as we know it – [and I feel fine]. In it they sing,

“Save yourself, serve yourselfWorld serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed”

A paper came out just last month that provides evidence of this dialectical drift. The researchers, led by Martin Sheffer, of Wageningen University in The Netherlands, assembled a massive corpus of text from millions of books found on Google Books dating from 1850 to 2019. Reading and analyzing the text of this many books is humanly impossible, so they put machines to work. They used text analysis tools to search, count, find correlations, and detect sentiment.

A simple example of this can be done by anybody with access to the internet. There are websites that will count the occurrences of a given word in a body of text and then arrange them into a word ‘cloud’. The largest word in the cloud represents the most frequently used word and the smallest the most infrequent. Here's a word cloud of the over 130,000 words I wrote on Interplace in 2021.

But these simple clouds don’t say anything about what kind of words they are or what associations they may have with other words or ideas. And they don’t lend insight into what words are likely to occur together. But there are statistical methods and software tools that, if given enough clean data, can cluster words of similar meaning and correlate them to the occurrence of other words.

What these researchers discovered is that “words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined.” Words to do with senses, spirituality, emotions, and personal relationships are “sentiment” laden words that reflect a “personal world view.” Over time, they were displaced by “fact based” words used in argumentation of “societal systems”. They also found this pattern correlates with the rise of we and us and the decline of I and me after 1850.

And then, starting around 1980, this trend peaked and then flip-flopped and the trend accelerated in 2007. That is when, the authors write,

“across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.”

Of course, explaining why this happened is much harder than finding the evidence, which is also no small feat. The researchers speculate that 1850 was a time when the Industrial Revolution was hitting its stride. Science and technology were credited with economic prosperity and the promise of logic and rationalistic determinism seeped into culture and then books. Out with the mystical and in with the technical. It’s what the sociologist Max Weber called a process of “disenchantment”.

But sociologist and political theorist, Steven Lukes, researched and wrote a book on the origins of “individualism.” He reveals the word ‘individualism’ has multiple ‘semantic histories’ and meanings. It entered the scene in the nineteenth century along with two other big ‘isms’ – ‘socialism’ and ‘communism.’

The first use came in 1820 in France in response to the French Revolution. Because conservative elites, especially religious leaders, viewed the revolt against the establishment as a result of Enlightenment thinkers and doers, individualism was a derogatory term. Lukes writes,

“Conservative thought in the early nineteenth century was virtually unanimous in condemning the appeal to the reason, interests and rights of the individual.”

Put simply, it was seen as the beginnings of anarchy. According to French dictionaries, it remains a pejorative word in France to this day. There were reasons for suppressing individualistic thoughts, principles, and beliefs and they had everything to do with maintaining political, social, and religious order.

Meanwhile, for the socialists of the 1800s, the term ‘individualism’ offered a counter to their ideal ‘collectivism.’ They believed that individuals who drift from the herd become prey to exploitive laissez-faire industrial capitalism. Lukes points to the French philosopher and economist, Pierre Leroux, who argued individualism would lead to

“’everyone for himself, and…all for riches, nothing for the poor’, which atomized society and made men into ‘rapacious wolves’…”

Individualism as a counterweight to collectivism is also what the British latched onto well into the late nineteenth century. So both the political, religious, and philosophical left and right had their own reasons for squelching individualism and their associative words in the nineteenth century.

THE BELOVED RUGGED HUG

After the French aristocrat and politician, Alexis de Tocqueville, extensively toured America in 1831 he concluded democracy, of which he was dubious, is rooted in individualism. Lukes writes that Tocqueville warned that individualism led to

“the apathetic withdrawal of individuals from public life into a private sphere and their isolation from one another, with a consequent weakening of social bonds. Such a development, Tocqueville thought, offered dangerous scope for the unchecked growth of the political power of the state.”

As we sit her nearly 200 years later amidst rising authoritarian threats, he may have a point.

As the nineteenth century came to a close collectivist social and political structures were weakening. This is what Lukes claims gave rise to the beginnings of a turn toward individualism. He writes, “For the last quarter of the century was the period in which the market-driven politics of neoliberalism swept across the globe.” He notes that it was the “crisis of the welfare state and the spectacular fall of communism” that led to a “depletion of the meaning of ‘socialism.’” He says the term could no longer be “used with the same confidence” especially “in contrast to its two traditional antonyms, ‘capitalism’ and ‘individualism.’”

And then, in 1922, then U.S. Commerce Secretary, Herbert Hoover, published a small but influential book called “American Individualism.” He then campaigned on the idea of ‘rugged individualism’ and the romantic, though overstated, idea of the self-reliant American frontiersman. Having spent time in Europe at the end of WWI witnessing its devastation he returned to write in his book that there were “’two convictions … dominant in [his] mind.’

The first was that “the ideology of socialism, as tested before his eyes in Europe, was a catastrophic failure.” “Socialism”, he wrote, went against “the fundamental human impulse of self-interest” and “was unable to motivate men and women to produce sufficient goods for the needs of society.”

The second conviction was that America, “The New World” as he called it, was far removed from European “imperialism, fanatic ideologies, ‘age-old hates,’ racial antipathies, dictatorships, power politics, and class stratifications.” And to be fair, Hoover’s book portrays a fairly progressive stance on individualism. He believed there is a limit to individualism and warned that

“We shall never remedy justifiable discontent until we eradicate the misery which the ruthlessness of individualism has imposed upon a minority.”

Of course, his actions spoke otherwise as he blamed the depression he failed to remedy as President on low wage minority Mexican immigrants southern farmers relied on to keep costs down. He deported one million Mexican Americans after enacting a program he called “American jobs for real Americans.” Sound familiar? I guess individualism matters only if you’re white. And perhaps, ruthless.

Many different philosophers, politicians, and practitioners have nuanced variations and interpretations of the word ‘individualism’ over the last 200 years, but Lukes found that only these three have survived. The far right believes individualism leads to anarchy, the far left believes individualism is a symptom of selfishness, and hardcore capitalists believe individualism breeds progress and prosperity for all.

Which makes it all the more difficult to pin down what happened around 1980 that marked a shift from collectivistic ‘we’ to the more individualistic ‘me’? The authors of the study offer a clue: The Information Age. The 1980s was when the information age was just getting rolling. In 1980 Microsoft had been around for five years already. The Apple II, the first mass-marketed personal computer, had been selling for three years. And a new internet consortium was formed called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). They quickly invented and adopted three very familiar suffixes: .com, .gov, and .edu. By 1985 Prodigy, Compuserve, and Quantum Computer Services – later named America Online (AOL) – were connecting people with access to a computer to the internet.

People with such means started expressing themselves to people around the world using words and pictures over the internet. By the time 2007 rolled around the iPhone had come out and with it the ability to tap, type, and shoot from a pocket-sized super computer/phone. We may fret over the time spent on screens passively consuming massive amounts of information, but we forget not all of it is passive. If you consider all the thumbs and fingers typing into chat boxes, messaging apps, and comment streams, or posting and broadcasting pictures and videos on social media platforms, there are more people writing and publishing than ever in the history of humanity. It’s bound to have an effect on the language we use.

The 1980s also marked the beginning of what has become out-sized income inequality in America. While Jimmy Carter had spent four years making peace in the world, trying to get us on solar power, and adopt the metric system, he struggled to make progress on inflation. Meanwhile, neoliberals from both parties had grown tired of attempts of social reform since the 60s and 70s. Just as in the 1800s, neoliberals became disenchanted with the passivist and collectivist attempts at another FDR style Great Society that wreaked of socialism.

Instead, they stood on principles of American exceptionalism, classical liberalism, traditional family values, free markets, free trade, Judeo-Christian values, limited government, moral absolutism, natural law, rule of law, protectionism, Republicanism, and tradition. It was the celebration of the individual, singular beliefs, and individual gain – I/me – over the promise of a diverse collective; a systematic community of reciprocity – we/us.

WISELY AND SLOW; THEY STUMBLE THAT RUN FAST. — SHAKESPEARE

What held constant through a string of both Democrat and Republican presidents are neoconservative economic policies that have left the United States with the most extreme wealth disparity in its history. For those who have benefitted the most, it may be easy for them to point to individualism as the reason for their success. This fits with Hoover’s idea of the rugged individualist who ‘earned’ their way to the top through no means but their own effort. Like Frank Sinatra’s song, “I did it my way.” It’s just as Leroux warned in the 1800s, ’everyone for himself, and…all for riches, nothing for the poor.’

For those who have seen their relative income decline since 1980, it may be easy for them to feel, as the socialists of the 1800s worried, that they were exploited by capitalism and corporate America. Perhaps they may feel, as Tocqueville warned, an apathetic withdrawal from public life from unchecked growth of a political power that has seemingly turned their back on them over the last 40 years.

The economists at Oxford’s Our World in Data show that from 1980 to 2014, “independently of where you are in the US income distribution, those who are richer have seen larger income growth.” But they go on to point out that this hasn’t always been the case. In 1980, “independently of where you were in the income distribution, those who were poorer used to enjoy larger income growth.”

Trump preyed on the beliefs and emotions that surround this science and these facts and it got him elected.

Meanwhile, other fears and anxieties have led many more to retreat to hyperbolic emotion and self-righteousness. A pandemic hit stoking fear and uncertainty. Climate change has caused extreme variability in weather patterns heightening existential anxiety in many. The list goes on and on.

Consequently, we all have reasons to be afraid of something and it can influence the words we use. The authors of the paper lean on what some scientists believe are two different cognitive modes of operation: System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow). System 1 is intuitive, effortless, and without control. System 2 is deliberate, effortful, and rational. The researchers plotted System 1 words that relate to “belief, spirituality, sapience, intuition, and senses” and System 2 words that are rooted in “science, technology, and quantification”.  They show the frequency of System 1 words decreased after 1850 and then increased after 1980 while System 2 words increased after 1850 and then declined after 1980. They plotted words found in American English, British English, German, French, Italian, and Russian and similar patterns emerged.

Could it be the more connected we become and the faster we consume and react to information, the more reliant we become on System 1? Are we too quick to respond, leaning on our beliefs, intuition, and senses? But what does it mean to slow down and let System 2 kick in? Is it even possible to slow down a global society connected through a vast and complex digital network?

Or did the lethargy of the tools, technology, and social and political structures of the eighteenth and nineteenth century slow us down enough to reason and rationalize? Or maybe rational thought is an illusion. After all, these bi-modal cognitive scientists claim 98% of our daily cognition is System 1. We react, they claim, more than we ponder.

It was Daniel Kahneman who won a Nobel Prize for his advances in bi-modal cognitive research. It led to a best selling book called, “Thinking Fast and Slow.” But in subsequent interviews he reveals more nuance into what is happening. He’s beginning to believe our choice of beliefs and the words we use to describe them are more chance than anything. Kahneman asks,

“What does it mean to know something?...It has very little to do with actual evidence…it is anchored psychologically by the fact that other people you trust also believe in this thing. And it is only then that you invent reasons for it. It’s because the reasons that they cite for their beliefs have very little to do with their actual beliefs, which are usually informed by chance social factors.”

He claims it’s what makes people create nonsensical associative beliefs. For example, those who are against gay marriage also typically don’t believe in global warming. He says,

“It has an associative and emotional coherence, that’s all.” System 1. Emotion, intuition, and belief. Kahneman believes, for example, that “if you want to influence people about global warming, you have to speak to System 1 – we overestimate the influence of speaking to System 2. It’s quite disturbing when you realize people consider facts irrelevant.”

I’m no Nobel prize winning cognitive psychologist, but I question whether we can boil cognition down to two modes. But, I have no evidence; though others are collecting it. And in a global vote between ‘we’ and ‘I’, I doubt the ‘I’s’ have it. Just as our own eyes can’t see themselves, an “I” can’t be itself alone. The only way an eye can see an eye is by looking into the eye of another being. We did not come into this world alone, we did not survive birth alone, we did not learn to walk, talk, learn, or earn alone. And we’re not alone, around this world. Many, though not all, are on social media, blogs, newsletters, or podcasts writing and saying words that we believe – in volumes unparalleled in human history. We are alone together, bounded by words, tethered forever. Even if we are just echoing the people we trust.

Hello Interactors,

Two years ago yesterday, the first case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was reported just north of Seattle in Everett, Washington. By the end of the month, my town, Kirkland, became famous for more than just the brand of Costco toilet paper. It was the site of the first serious outbreak of COVID in the United States. How many more years will this last? It all depends on if we’re honest with each other and behave ourselves.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

I WANT YOU

It wears many crowns: multae coronae; this virus, this disease. CO-VI-D. COVID. We watched as its thorny tips gripped the tender tissue deep in the lungs of unsuspecting Chinese victims in Wuhan. Replicating, mutating, devastating. Like many crowns before, it sought expansion; new territories to explore, humans to exploit, and lives to destroy. But not the impenetrable America, we thought. Not immutable Americans. Epidemics are for poor countries. Others. What collective stupidity.

Viruses know no borders. America’s first serious outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus occurred in a health center just over a mile from my home in Kirkland, Washington. Like any invader, it scared people into their homes. First reactions were to stay clear of the facility from whence it was spreading…and anyone who may work there.

Doctors and nurses at the home were early spreader suspects. Would they spread it to hospitals, other patients, or their families? Not yet knowing how it spread or how to avoid it, early advice was to simply wash your hands. Wash everything – your clothes, your groceries, and even your Amazon packages. Masks were regarded as ineffective by many U.S. medical pundits and practitioners. Wash your hands, they said.

The United States has a history of denial when it comes to epidemics. When the Spanish Flu was first reported in 1918 in a U.S. Army camp in Kansas, the U.S. had just entered World War I the year prior. Citizens of warring countries in Europe, including Great Britain, were experiencing outbreaks of the flu but were loathed to report it. They feared their enemies would know their troops were vulnerable and weakened. They also didn’t want the public, especially draftees, to fear both the war and an epidemic. And they wanted the media to focus attention on the war, not public health.

Spain, who’s King had contracted the flu, was neutral during War World I so freely reported the outbreak that was soon to be ravaging Europe. The Spanish flu did not originate in Spain, just the honest reporting of it.

The U.S. government, and its high ranking military, were equally hush on the outbreak. It didn’t help that two months after the first reported case, Congress passed the 1918 Sedition Act.  This made it a crime to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States." Newspaper editors may have had their own reasons for not reporting on the epidemic, but fear of legal action by the federal government may have topped the list.

By the end of summer, the flu had spread enough that doctors became increasingly worried. For example, in September of 1918, doctors in Philadelphia asked the press to advise the public against attending an upcoming “Liberty Loan” parade. Local papers refused to run the articles. Doctors pleaded with Philadelphia’s public health director to cancel the parade, but their pleas were dismissed. The parade became a super-spreader event. Over the course of the next month, over 12,000 people in the Philadelphia area died from the Spanish Flu.

President Woodrow Wilson didn’t help. Wilson, borrowing a page from the Europeans, chose a combination of censorship and propaganda. This was America’s first real governmental threat to the freedom of the press. He demanded “loyalty” from all Americans in the lead up to World War I and his administrations pursuit to “make the world safe for democracy.” Days after Congress declared war in April of 1917, Wilson issued an executive order creating an agency called the Committee on Public Information. It was led by the journalist, George Creel, and was intended to persuade Americans to support the war and recruit soldiers.

One of the departments was called the Division of Pictorial Publicity and included volunteer artists and illustrators. One of those illustrators was James Montgomery Flagg. Perhaps drawn to patriotism with a name like Flagg, he made one of the most enduring illustrations in American history. It’s the ubiquitous poster of Uncle Sam sternly pointing his finger at the viewer with the face of an angry father, with words in all-caps, “I WANT YOU…FOR THE U.S. ARMY.”

Wilson’s PR man, Creel, was not unlike the over controlling press secretary’s that Trump appointed. Creel demanded the White House only publish good news, flattering reports of the government and the country, and, most of all, propaganda supporting America’s efforts in the war. Mentioning the spread of infectious disease across America did not fit the agenda. Especially when, as in Europe, the bad news included soldiers being infected. Many of whom, were being shipped to Europe where they continued the spread of the virus.

Military doctors pleaded with their superiors and the President to stop sending troops overseas, suspend the draft, and quarantine soldiers. All Wilson was willing to do was temporarily suspend a single draft and reduce the numbers of troops headed to Europe by 15%. By the end of 1918, 45,000 soldiers died from the Spanish Flu. That’s just over one-third of 116,000 who died fighting.

In November of 1918, during one of the epidemics largest spikes, the war came to an end. Some believe the Spanish Flu brought World War I to an end. But far be it from any nation’s leaders to admit as much. While Wilson was in Paris in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, he came down with a bad case of the Spanish Flu. The White House tried to hide this fact from the public issuing a statement saying the nasty Paris weather had given him a cold.

MASKING REALITY

Not all leaders ignore the advise of medical professionals reporting from the field. Just a few years prior to the Spanish Flu epidemic, in 1910, a plague was ravaging Northern China. All those infected were certain to die within 24-48 hours. In a race with Russia to claim scientific and medical superiority in a cure for the disease, the Chinese Imperial Court assigned a little known doctor, Lien-teh Wu, to head eradication efforts.

Dr. Wu had discovered through an autopsy that the disease was spread through the air and not by fleas, as suspected. Wu had spent time in Europe as part of his training and observed surgeons using gauze masks during surgery to avoid sneezing or spitting into open wounds. If the mask prevented particulates from escaping the nose and mouth, he thought, perhaps it could prevent them from entering. He began experimenting with his own masks by layering cotton with gauze and fitting the mask close to the face.

But there were skeptics. One was an experienced French doctor who was practicing in China at the time. Dr. Wu explained to the doctor his theory of the plague being spread airborne and that his mask reduced spreading. The Frenchman responded, “What can we expect from a Chinaman?” To prove he was right, the racist doctor visited a hospital housing victims of the plague without Wu’s mask. He died two days later.

News of the efficacy of Dr. Wu’s invention spread around the world. Mask use was commonplace in the medical profession by the time the Spanish Flu hit. Even ordinary citizens were aware of its effectiveness. While it’s impossible to prove at this point, populations in U.S. that wore masks faired better than those that did not. Seattle was one such city that embraced mask wearing.

But just like today, there were detractors. The same excuses were used one-hundred years ago as we hear today. People complained they couldn’t breath. Others felt it was a challenge to their civil liberties. Businesses worried mandatory mask wearing would hurt business while some thought masks would offer a false sense of security.

San Francisco passed a law mandating mask wearing, but enforcement posed challenges. One over zealous enforcer shot a man who refused to wear a mask. And when a photo emerged of the mayor and other public officials not wearing masks at a boxing match, citizens revolted; especially when they were not charged or assessed fines that ordinary citizens faced. Still, San Francisco stood out as the mandate resulted in a significant decline in cases.

The widespread prevalence of mask wearing in America, and news of San Francisco’s success abating the disease, spread to other parts of the world. Most notably, Japan. In February of 1919 their National Public Health Bureau pushed local health workers to wear masks while tending to flu victims. Later they added guidelines for mask wearing by the public in crowded places like trains and trams. By the fall of 1919 Japan was distributing free masks to those who could not afford them. They then included cinemas and busses to the list of suggested public spaces for mask wearing.

As the Spanish Flu subsided in America, so did mask wearing in public spaces. But it stuck in Japan, and other East Asian countries, to this day. Maybe we’ll be seeing more of it in the West even after COVID subsides. If it ever does.

As the COVID pandemic unfolded, we witnessed a proverbial passing of the buck as the world searched for answers. The finger pointing started at the origin. Doctors and nurses were put on the spot as people demanded clues as to what it was and how it spread. Western medicine has taught us to view doctors as omniscient beings, fountains of knowledge – surrogate paternal or maternal oracles of comfort. But through three surgical masks and a plastic shield they said, “Don’t look at me, you need to talk to the virologists. Besides, I’m just trying to stay alive myself. Now excuse me, this person can’t breathe.”

The virologists, a bit removed from the mess, summoned their knowledge of microscopic distress. They spoke of gamma phage, viroids, prions, and nano plagues. And when peppered for clarity amidst the hysteria – to get the gist on this viral mist – they pointed to epidemiologists.

These fine folks are the furthest from the pain. People become numbers and points on a plane; Statistical patterns that seek to explain; hints at causation of a transmission chain. But the models they use assume we’re the same. They think we behave like lemmings in a game.    

Epidemiologists (as well as virologists and physicians) perform mathematic experiments using a fixed set of variables that assume humans behave, and react, the same across diverse populations. Those assumptions are largely modeled after behavior Western science has been most focused on over the centuries:

WEIRD people. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.

And as we know, even within the WEIRD community, there is a lot of variation in behavior!

When statistical models assume idealized behavior of the so-called, rational man – people who consistently and optimally perform subjective but rational acts – they ignore the fact people do not largely act rationally. This makes it hard to then predict how the virus will behave across diverse sets of populations. Especially when those who do act rationally are randomly exposed to interactions with people who may not act rationally. Human social behavior, especially at the scale that epidemiologists study, can be more random than not.

THE COMPLEX ALTERNATIVE

But there are those seeking to change this. A November 2021 study by a diverse set of researchers, mostly out of the University of Illinois, introduced randomness into the more traditional and relatively inadequate epidemiological models to simulate human social behavior. Instead of using variables that assumed people would act rationally and predictably, they seeded them with a distribution of random numbers that more accurately account for the random interactions we have with people and place.

By capturing multiple features of COVID outbreaks they discovered a “small fraction of individuals were responsible for a disproportionately large number of secondary infections.” Traditional models assumed this would lead to herd immunity. This has not shown to be true even among those areas hardest hit by the first wave. They also discovered another “puzzling aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic.” They observed frequent regional plateaus with an “approximately constant incidence rate over a prolonged time.”

They reasoned it is human behavior that likely causes this pattern. They surmise that what causes “both suppression of the early waves and plateau-like dynamics is that individuals modify their behavior based on information about the current epidemiological situation.” They also suggest these epidemical dynamics of “long plateaus might arise because of the underlying structure of social networks.”

What they claim is happening is local outbreaks cause people to adjust their behavior, either voluntarily, through social pressures, or both commercial and governmental restrictions. When people move less the cases plateau. But as soon as they start trending down, everyone starts moving again. Some of these people, even during the peak, travel to different regions that may be experiencing a slump of outbreaks. A portion of whom are carrying the virus and inadvertently spread the disease creating a new wave of cases in that locale.

These short-term localized waves, and commiserate behavior, repeatedly occur around the world. They create, and perpetuate, persistent long-term waves of the pandemic. These researchers claim these longer-term waves have the potential to stretch out for years given current human behavior.

When the pandemic first started to unfold, the Santa Fe Institute started a podcast series called Transmission. It looked at the pandemic from a Complexity Science perspective. The host, Michael Garfield opens by stating, “The coronavirus pandemic is in one sense a kind of prism: it reveals the many interlocking systems that, until disrupted, formed the mostly invisible backdrop of modern life…” He continued, “The virus acts on, and invites new understanding through, the complexity we only take for granted at our peril.”

The Institute took the transcripts from those episodes, and other Santa Fe Institute reports, studies, and insights from a set of international complexity thinkers, and published them in a recent book titled “The Complex Alternative: Complexity Scientists on the COVID-19 pandemic.” It invites the authors of these early reports to reflect on what they got right and what they didn’t.

Garfield recently interviewed the two editors, the current and former president of the Santa Fe Institute, David Krakauer and Geoffrey West. He had them reflect on the book, but also on what they believe Complexity thinkers got right and where there’s more to be learned.

Krakauer mentions a split in opinions and hints at what is the essence of the study I quoted from before,

“There are those who will say we have to get behavior into the mathematical models. Otherwise they're going to be useless, right? And we've talked about this before; the early phase of infection being quite biological and well-behaved exponentially, and then going nuts with human behavior dominating rather than biology.”

But he goes on to point out that it’s not that mathematicians have thrown in the towel.

“But then there are others who said, no, we just have to find the new course grain models. We just have to be more sophisticated. Drop the deterministic mass action, put the stochasticity [randomness] in, and then we get the causality out. We don't get prediction out, but we get causality out. So there, even the community is internally riven on the question of what the right response should be.”

Near the end, Krakauer concludes by saying, “I think we do not understand how collective intelligence works.” but that over the last two years, “we were all schooled in collective stupidity.” He thinks “we haven't even begun to understand what's going on here” and that we’re “not even in the foothills of understanding how complex reality works.”

Geoffrey West reminds us that “we can't solve these problems unless we have everybody together.” And he’s not just talking about the scientific community, he includes “society in terms of the shakers and movers [like policy makers] who are thinking about these problems from a completely different, and usually non-scientific viewpoint.”

I sit here in Kirkland on this inauspicious anniversary and reflect on my non-scientific point of view. Sadly, what the virus of multae coronae has taught me is this: Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt. That’s Latin for “Generally people believe what they want.” But beliefs, like viruses and mask wearing adherence, has the potential to change locally in the short-term while spreading globally in the long-term.

Thank you for reading Interplace. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Hello Interactors,

Our family hit a snag in the transportation department last week. Our routine was disrupted making us scramble for remedies — including possibly needing a new car. It all came at a time when the state of Washington released its 2021 figures on automobile related deaths. It made me wonder and reflect on car dependency, the Covid funk, and the psychology of cars.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG

“It’s making a strange noise, shifts awkwardly, and smells funny,” my son and daughter exclaimed. There had been similar reports previously, but things had worsened. “It seems ok on the straights, but sounds and feels worse going down hill,” they added. Then, as my daughter got in the car to go to swim practice, she soon came back inside and said, “I’m taking the other car. Uno is making an awful noise and smells even worse than before.”

Our kids call our 2006 Audi A3, Uno. The Washington State Licensing authority named it when it was born. They even sent us two rectangular plates with its name stamped into it, along with a few appended random numbers. We mounted one on its nose and the other on its rear-end. Our kids use Uno to commute to school 12 miles away as well as other errands, appointments, and events. They both have a bit of an emotional attachment to this aging little black hatchback. Uno even becomes Dracula during Halloween when they affix dangling white fangs on each side of the license plate frame.

I’ve had an emotional attachment to Audi’s since I was a kid. I saw my first Audi in the mid-70s. It was Audi’s first car sold in the United States – The Audi Fox. A guy down the street owned one. His name was Delbert Woody. I was drawn to Delbert. He was a World War II veteran who personified the post-war male mystique. He rode a dirt bike in the open field behind his house, was an avid hunter and fisherman, drove construction trucks for a living, was a life long Teamster Union member, and loved pecan pie and Pepsi. He, like so many other war veterans, got married after the war and settled in the suburbs. They were the first to move into one of Norwalk, Iowa’s first subdivisions in 1960. Their single story ranch house, nestled neatly in a line of others just like it, sat on a hill below the water tower at the edge of town on a street aptly named: Edgemont.

Also in keeping with post-war tradition, he had a fascination with cars. I remember him owning more than one and this was during the 1970s gas crisis and recession. Audi entered the U.S. market selling the Fox as a ‘solution to the gas problem.’ The Fox was marketed as a sports sedan with a sporty suspicion, front-wheel drive, and an engine that could get 25 miles to the gallon. All for $3400. That’s roughly $20,000 today. I can see how a masculine blue collar gearhead like Delbert was attracted to this car, despite it being German.

I’m not sure what I liked about it. Maybe it was the novelty of a foreign car in small Iowa town, the European styling, or maybe it was the cool fox emblem on the back. Probably all the above. The truth is, Delbert and I, and all auto-dependent motorists, share something in common. We all have brains that contain two separate modules that combine to form relationships with automobiles.

One of these cranial circuits uses cool calculating rational thought that views a car as a utility – an appliance. It’s sensitive to numbers: miles per gallon, range, price, 0-60, reliance ratings, and a myriad of other self-justifying statistics. The other side of the brain tugs on our heart strings. Emotional affections warm our heart in the comfort of a climate controlled cocoon. It makes our heart go pitter patter with the status cars provide, or cause our pulse to quicken at the sudden and effortless acceleration through space.

Both of these neuro-negotiators conspire to construct our comforting and sometimes conniving relationships with cars. And automakers have learned how to manipulate both of these brainy battles through design and marketing.

Uno got its name from a random license plate generator, but automakers are less random. For Delbert Woody’s Audi Fox, Audi wanted to associate that car with a fox. A fox is agile, strong, fast…and cunning. Many animals are. Which is why it’s not hard to find cars named after animals. Here are just a few: Plymouth Barracuda, Mercury Sable, Buick Skylark, Corvette Stingray, Pontiac Sunbird, Ford Thunderbird, Dodge Viper, AMC Eagle, Chevrolet Impala, and who can forget the Ford Pinto.

As you can see all of these are American made cars. U.S. automakers also like aggressive macho sounding names. Especially Dodge, with names like Challenger, Ram, and Avenger. Europe and Japan have a few examples like the Fiat Spider or Suzuki Samurai, but nothing like the U.S. You may be thinking to yourself, what about the iconic Volkswagen Beetle? Sorry, but that’s a nickname. It’s official name in Germany was Volkswagen Type 1. What about the Volkswagen Rabbit? It was the Volkswagen Golf in Europe. And Delbert’s Audi Fox would have been called the Audi 80 anywhere else but America.

The design of vehicles are also expressive. When Uno dawns his fangs at Halloween, the gimmick only works because the headlights make the eyes and the grill its mouth. Different cars take on different personalities when viewed from the front, or more commonly, when viewed in your rear view mirror. There’s speculation by some psychologists that these personalities may even be reflected in the owners and their driving behavior. There is certainly evidence that some car design and some drivers have become more aggressive over time. But it’s equally true that some aggressive looking cars are sometimes driven by passive people. Or maybe they’re using the design of their vehicle to hide or express some other hidden or deep seeded emotion or personality trait.

RAGE DISPENSED THE MACHINE

Stefan Gössling is a professor of social science at Lund University in Sweden. He researches and writes extensively on transportation. In 2017 he released a book called The Psychology of the Car. He says there are a wide range of emotions that relate to the power and dominance that play a central role in car culture. He cites research affirming “that driving powerful cars is generally understood as a means of expressing macho personalities.” Driving a powerful car exudes superiority and control.

He lists different aspects and levels of control we have driving cars:

* Agency: To be able to decide when to leave at any point in time, and for any given destination

* Semiotics: Being in charge: control of inside (music, temperature) and outside environment (navigation system, speed), and car physics (fuel levels, revolutions per minute)

* Haptics: Holding the steering wheel, pushing pedals, shifting gears

* Smells and soundscapes: Choice of smell or music, interior

* Physics of movement: Being able to drive fast, to accelerate

But he also quotes the sociologist, John Urry. He too wrote extensively on the sociology of mobility, especially regarding the loss of control that can come with controlling a fast moving machine. The automobile, while offering us much control, can also rob us of critical experiences. He writes,

“Dwelling at speed, car-drivers lose the ability to perceive local detail, to talk to strangers, to learn of local ways of life, to stop and sense each different place. Sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures and smells get reduced to the two-dimensional view through the car windscreen and through the rear mirror, the sensing of the world through the screen being the dominant mode of contemporary dwelling. The environment beyond that windscreen is an alien other, kept at bay through the diverse privatizing technologies incorporated within the car. These technologies ensure a consistent supply of information, a relatively protected environment, high quality sounds and increasingly sophisticated systems of monitoring. They enable the hybrid of the car-driver to negotiate conditions of intense riskiness on high-speed roads.”

Our roads are designed to drive at high speeds. They even include optical illusions to put you at ease. For example, the length and distance between dashed lines on highways are designed to trick your brain into believing your body is moving slower than it really is. And while there have been many amazing safety advancements in the engineering of roads and cars for those inside the vehicle, they’ve inadvertently made them increasingly dangerous for those outside of the vehicle.

Washington state ended 2021 with the highest number of road fatalities in 15 years. There were more than 540 fatal crashes killing over 600 people. One hundred and eighteen of whom were walking or riding their bike. An additional 2,411 crashes were estimated to have caused serious injury – a 16% rise over 2020. Thirty one people were killed in Seattle alone in 2021.

While the design of our infrastructure and vehicles encourages speed, other factors are at play as well. Alcohol and drug related crashes have continued to climb 25% since 2019. Speed also was a major factor climbing 18% since 2020.

There are a multitude of interrelated factors that lead to increasing numbers of motorists killing and injuring people – especially cyclists and pedestrians. But given the social malaise that has overcome us all over the last few years, anger and aggression are likely key factors. Whether it’s lockdown lunacy, income inequity insanity, racial reality, gender gut checks, or fights between the lefts and the rights there are ample reasons for us all to be disturbed.

There are also threats to the status quo. Increasingly cities are seeing bike and bus lanes squeezing out car lanes, rising gas prices, and talk of congestion fees. Meanwhile, automakers are ditching the traditional internal combustion engine for progressive green machines. These are levels of social change that many welcome, while others reject – especially those adverse to change or who feel their individualism is threatened.

So they take it out on others on the road. We’ve all witnessed, or are guilty of perpetrating, acts of aggression on the road: dodging and weaving through traffic, tailgating, flashing lights, running red lights, honking, flipping the bird, or yelling out the window. Worse yet, extreme forms of road rage where people take chase in a fit of anger to inflict harm or intimidation. There are more passive aggressive examples too, like parking in a bike lane, stopping in a cross walk, or failing to yield to a blinkering merging bus.

In 1994, Jerry Deffenbacher, a Colorado State psychology professor who studies correlations of anger and anxiety with behavior, created a Driving Anger Scale that scientists have been using since. Results as recent as 2016 suggest personality traits like “impulsiveness, narcissism, and normlessness” confirm studies from 2013 that link narcissism to aggressive driving. One researcher concluded:

“driving anger of narcissistic individuals may result out of threats to perceived power, control, and position rather than to image and attention seeking.”

Results also vary by age, gender, driver experience, and culture. In a country who’s culture flaunts and breeds narcissism, individualism, and macho maleness – possibly even overly tolerant of outward expressions of anger as an acceptable emotional response – we should not be surprised to see increased aggression on the part of some motorists.

Sometimes anger directed at strangers can take the form of contempt. The car then becomes a way to separate one’s self from others deemed inferior or from an anxiety inducing changing environment. Here’s how one geography researcher, Jason Henderson of San Francisco State University, described an SUV driver in a 2006 study looking at the politics of automobility in Atlanta, Georgia.  

“After spitting into a toll collection device on the highway, the angry white male described his disdain at the possible alternatives to his SUV — a compact urban form with intensive transit infrastructure containing pedestrian and transit spaces where people would have physical proximity to ‘others’ of different racial, class, gender or sexual orientation. Seen in this context, his SUV was more than just an instrument for traveling through the city. It was an instrument of secession from what he scorned in contemporary American urban space.”

WITH URBAN FRICTION COMES CAR ADDICTION

We took Uno to the doctor. We had a sneaking suspicion it may be done for. When my wife pulled into the shop they said, “You best turn that off, it doesn’t sound good. You probably should have had it towed.” But after waiting a few days for the prognosis, it turned out to be a couple bad spark plugs, failing coils, and noise inducing broken catalytic converter.

When my son heard this news, he said, “Let’s straight-pipe it!” Straight-piping is when you remove emission reducing mechanisms so that the sound, and pollution, from the engine goes straight out the tailpipe. Both my son and my daughter have an affinity for loud cars. My son can tell you the make and model of a car just from the sound of the exhaust. He’s a combusting carbon connoisseur. And lucky for him, there seems to be an increasing number of loud tailpipes these days.

I’m more aghast at the uproarious racket. I grumble and mutter under my own exhaust as these cars rumble by, “There goes another UAS. Urban Attention Seeker.” And it seems I’m right. Overly loud modified exhausts, or even some motorcycles (I’m looking at you Harley Davidson), are symbols of rebellion. They signal to anyone in ear shot opposition to authority and social norms. They scream, “NOTICE ME!”

In Gössling’s book he cites the research of Robert Merton who is regarded by many as the founder of modern sociology. He also studied criminology where he developed strain theory which says strain in an individual can come about in a society that pressures people to attain more than they can possibly achieve. So they seek forms of rebellion. More recent advances in this theory by the criminologist and social psychologist Robert Agnew point to three factors that lead to criminal acts of rebellion. They largely stem from childhood stress, trauma, victimization, and neglect:

* The inability to achieve positively valued stimuli (e.g., money, status, autonomy)

* The loss of positively valued stimuli (e.g., loss of romantic partners, property)

* The presentation of negatively valued or aversive stimuli (e.g., verbal and physical abuse)

But loud cars, or motorcycles, can just as easily be driven by financially successful people at the top of the social status hierarchy. These are the cars my son most admires. They’re hyper or super cars made by companies like Lamborghini, Ferrari, or Mercedes Benz. One of his favorites is the throaty land yacht by Mercedes Benz – The G Wagon. These are less emblems of rebellion and more signals of status. Both are forms of attracting attention.

And so is an Audi A3. Even though it was the cheapest car Audi sold at the time, it is still a luxury German automobile. And while it is a brand I dreamed of owning since childhood, I can’t deny my purchase also helped to signal my status. If my rational brain had one out, and I viewed the purchase of the car as an appliance for mobility, I could have easily put myself into a more affordable hatchback. As one friend put it, the A3 is really just a Volkswagen Golf for grown ups. Works for me.

We decided to keep Uno in the family. And sorry, son, Uno won’t be straight-piped. It’s getting a new catalytic converter…even though replacing it will cost more than the car is worth. This is the last year our kids will be driving Uno to school together and they want that little car to be a part of it.

Our kids could ride a public bus to school, but it takes an hour to go 12 miles and they have afterschool activities at locations far and wide. My son took the bus for a year and it left him exhausted with little time for homework. We chose to put them in this school, but we didn’t chose the car dependent design of our surrounding cities.

When it comes to car dependency, it turns out there really are two sides of the brain at work; one rational and one emotional. Gössling breaks them down into ‘real’ and ‘perceived’ dependencies. ‘Real’ dependencies are like what I just described. There are aspects of urban planning and design that intentionally require people to have a car to live a modern, happy, healthy, and productive life. The car is an appliance that gets you to the doctor, practice facility, grocery store, or school on time – places that require a car and are practically inaccessible by anyone who cannot or choses not to drive a car.

‘Perceived’ dependencies are rooted in fears and emotions where, as Gössling says,

“alternative transport is considered ‘dysfunctional,’ i.e., creating anxieties related to complexity (buying tickets, finding ways), claustrophobic spaces, monitoring in ‘militarized’ environments (control, security), encounters with marginalized people (homeless, alcoholics, drug addicts), or specific smells and noises. Car use may also be related to status, fright-flight-fight responses, or other fears and phobias. In such situations, car reliance may be considered an addiction.”

Automakers feed this addiction through advertising, marketing, and design. As Gössling summarizes in his list of car industry appeal strategies. I can imagine these being whispered seductively to the emotional side of our brain:

* The car will be good: The car is increasingly less polluting and safer in traffic

* The car is your home: Home and car melt into one space

* The car is your partner: You are a more capable person in cooperation with your car

* The car will protect you: It is a dangerous world

* You need the car: Appeals directed at subconscious

* Be aware of government: Someone is trying to take away your car

I for one am ready to break the addiction. Who knows, once our kids leave the house for college, maybe it will be time for Uno to graduate too. That someone trying to take away the car may just be me. Unless, of course, Audi releases an electric retro Audi Fox!

Thank you for reading Interplace. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Hello Interactors,

Welcome to 2022. Or, as my son likes to say, twenty-twenty also. Today we begin our winter journey through human behavior as it relates to the interaction of people and place. As we further divide, we seem to also be drifting apart. So I turned to one of our leading philanthropic philosophizing musicians, Bono, for the answer.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BONO SCRATCHES

The holidays have a way of making you reminisce. I was thinking back 14 years ago when I met Bono at Microsoft just before the 2007-2008 holiday break. He was promoting his RED giving initiative and a small group of us in Windows were meeting with him and his team on ways to incorporate RED into Windows as a cross promotional scheme. Bono thought it especially relevant given we were in REDmond, Washington.

I was an early U2 fan. I bought their third album, War, on vinyl in 1983 when it first came out. So I brought it along to the meeting to see how Bono would react. As we filed into the Microsoft board room being greeted by members of the RED team and Bono, I was watching his eyes through his yellow tinted glasses. He immediately latched on to the album in my hand, walked over to me and said, “You just don’t see many of these.” And he took it from me as I followed him to the conference table. He asked me my name, pulled out his red pen and wrote on the back of the album cover, “It took 24 years but we finally hooked Brad. See you…” He then drew his signature profile of his long nose, glasses, and a straight smile and signed it, “Bono.”

He was shorter than I imagined. But genuine and endearing. He shared the space and time in that meeting with everyone. But, at the end, he couldn’t resist taking jabs at the Windows logo. “Look,”, he said. “I’m not a business person, I’m an artist.” He then stood up and approached the white board. He talked about how awful the Windows logo was. “Why is the Windows logo a flag?”, he asked. “It bothers me.” He then grabbed a pen and drew a simple four pane window and said. “See, a window. How hard can that be?”, he demanded. And sat down.

He had a point. And within a couple years, he got his wish. Pentagram, a design firm in New York, designed a new Windows logo. And with it came a new Microsoft logo that looks more like the sketch Bono made. But it turns out, as is often the case, even that idea was not new. Pentagram had proposed that same logo years before, but it was rejected.

But I admit, I was a bit distracted during his loquacious logo lecture. It was hard taking him seriously in his skin tight gold pants. He was distracted too. While Bono was pacing along the whiteboard with pen in hand, his other hand was routinely futzing with his crotch. He looked like a baseball player stepping out of the batters box to adjust his cup or scratch an itch. It’s not the image of a rock star you want lingering in your head.

I prefer to remember Bono as a 20 year old kid on MTV bellowing protest songs from the album he signed.

U2’s album, War, is noted for its harsh departure from their previous two albums, both musically and lyrically. They set out to tackle themes of war as Ireland had seen its fair share in his lifetime. Their biggest hit from that album, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, leads in with drums resembling a military march and features the blending of physical and emotional impacts of war. It includes lines like, “The trench is dug within our hearts.” It goes on to address the apathy around war and how our defiance against it is lessened by the numbing of the everyday violence mixed with fictionalized versions on TV.

And it's true, we are immuneWhen fact is fiction and TV realityAnd today, the millions cry We eat and drink while tomorrow, they die

The song, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” refers to a particularly bloody conflict in 1972 called Bloody Sunday. On Sunday, January 30th, 26 British soldiers opened fire on unarmed protestors in Northern Ireland killing 13 on the spot. One other died later from wounds. Many of these 14 people were either fleeing or helping other injured civilians.

These lyrics are about the effects of Northern Ireland conflicts that had been occurring for more than two decades by the time U2 released this album. The conflicts occurred mostly in Northern Ireland over political and nationalistic opinions between two warring factions. On one side were Unionists and loyalists, who wanted Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom, and on the other Irish Nationalists and republicans, who sought to abandon the United Kingdom to create a United Ireland. Those seeking to stick with the United Kingdom were mostly Ulster Protestants, and those seeking independence were mostly Irish Catholics which added further religious and historic dimensions to what the Irish called The Troubles.

GROUPIES

These two factions created what sociologists call in-groups and out-groups. In-groups are defined as “a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member.” Out-groups are “social groups with which an individual does not identify.” It’s easy to imagine how these two groups in Ireland could formulate in-groups and out-groups along historical, social, religious, and political lines. And looking around today, it’s easy to spot scads of in-groups and out-groups all around us and around the world.

In many cases these attributes and divisions are real. In the case of the Irish conflict, who is a Protestant and who is a Catholic, for example, is empirically verifiable. But often times out-groups are created through fabrications of identity traits. They simply become reinforcing prejudicial stereotypes rooted in an underlying fear. Members of the in-group come to feel threatened and build elaborate cases for why the out-group should be feared.

It happened in the United Kingdom with Brexit and in the United States with the swell of conservative in-group and out-group identification that Trump helped to solidify. It continues today on the topic of global warming. Many conservatives refuse to believe global warming is a fact. They fear making multi-national corporations accountable for environmental destruction would hurt the economy and America’s dominant position on the world stage. So they invent Anti-American ‘liberal’ out-groups and throw scientists, environmentalists and anyone who agrees with them into the groups. They then sprinkle combustible myths over the lot of them and then strike the match of Fox News and watch it burn.

Many sociobiologists, like the recently deceased E.O. Wilson, would argue these people are simply executing on a well established evolutionary strategy. They’re protecting their own in an act called kin selection. It’s defined as “the evolutionary strategy that favors the reproductive success of an organism’s relatives, even at a cost to the organism’s own survival and reproduction.”

When an in-group feels threatened, they turn to their members and seek protection while simultaneously turning their back on the out-group. Regardless of which group you’re in, you can’t help but feel threatened by some aspect of the effects of globalization. And so you turn to your in-group for comfort, protection, and strategies for survival.

E.O. Wilson extends this argument further to include group-selection theory. Where as kin theory is an individual evolutionary act singled out as favorable through natural selection, Wilson also argues the same can be applied to groups. Those groups that amass the largest in-groups come to dominate the progressively weakening out-groups.

It turns out these theories are hotly debated. Arguments against group-selection theory question how a group could possibly survive natural selection if they’re hellbent on self-destruction. It turns out, like the over reliance on the physical sciences to simplify economics, Darwinian ideas, while revolutionary and sound on their own terms, fail to extend to the complexities of the modern human psyche.

The intricacies in the balance or tension, for example, of selfishness and cooperation in socio-psychological interactions are unlikely to be explained simply through evolutionary histories. Sociologist, Brian Castellani, studies the complexities of place and health and he reminds us that,

“as recent developments in the complexity sciences have made rather clear (e.g., Byrne & Callaghan 2013; Capra & Luisi 2014), psychological existence and more widely social psychology and socio-anthropological existence are different forms of emergent self-organization, which require interdisciplinary understanding beyond just the biological sciences or physics or any such attempts at reductionism.”

E.O. Wilson would likely agree as these are themes he covers in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. It’s there that he concludes,

“The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences. Conversely, the material world exposed by the natural sciences is the most important frontier of the social sciences and humanities. The consilience argument can be distilled as follows: The two frontiers are the same.”

Humans are social animals. We survived and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years by dealing with the tensions and conflicts between individuals and groups with whom they lived. Castellani writes,

“given that we are resolutely social organisms, it is better stated that our human capacity for altruism, cooperation, competition, aggression, and social commitment are, for the most part, a function of the fact that we have evolved, as a species, in highly complex social groups – group selection true or not.”

He continues,

“…the psyche’s evolution did not produce the tension between individuals and civilization; instead, the psyche’s evolution is a function of this tension.”

REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE; PREJUDICE, ABUSE, BUSINESS CYCLE

Success, or happiness, of an individual or a group, in evolutionary terms, most likely came down to a realization that in order to survive one must choose to sacrifice. Any of us who ever played on a team, a band, or worked in a group knows that collaboration through cooperation can only work with individuals who make certain sacrifices for the team. Hence the old adage, “there is no ‘I’ in team.”

We indeed are hardwired, evolutionarily speaking, to act in our own self interest to survive against an imminent threat. Fight or flight instincts are real. Yet we are equally hardwired to choose self-sacrifice. If such a sacrifice is deemed too extreme, we have the ability to choose to leave the group. Such a choice in the early days of homo sapiens came with its own risk; the group may not survive nor may you. The odds of survival are in favor of the natural forces of both local and global societies. These odds advantage the survival of groups over the survival of individuals thus discouraging such selfish behavior.

And yet it still happens. We need only look at voluntary military service as evidence of self-sacrifice for the betterment of the group. And the draft is a great example of an in-group, the government, sacrificing individuals for the survival of the larger group, the country. But such cases are rare, especially with regards to heroes, relative to the general population. But there are smaller, less drastic altruistic sacrifices people make everyday. It’s a group of people that form their own in-group.

This in-group makes small sacrifices for the betterment of the planet; they recycle, walk, bus, and cycle, drive less, buy less, fly less, downsize, or simply conclude they must grow their own food. These actions are also driven by fear of the effects of globalization. Think globally, act locally. These people perceive a global threat and fear that if they don’t make some sacrifices for the good of the group, they, nor the group, will survive.

But such sacrifices are only effective at a scale larger than one’s own home, business, or even city. It needs to scale globally. We know how to scale for powerful impact. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, developed theories on the relationship between power and knowledge. He noted two different forms of technologies of power. (He’s using the term technology broadly to mean the practical aims of changing the human environment) First there are the technologies of self which is the power to make your own decisions. The second are the technologies of power and government. For example, even if you decide not to wear a mask in public, institutions hold the power to oblige you to do so.

We are pressured individually by our in-groups, or defiant in opposition to an out-group, to behave a particular way. Yet, overlaying it all – even in the presence of fierce hatred and animosity between groups – are human invented policies, procedures, laws, treaties, and obligations that find a way to mend, connect, skirt, or correct the differences between groups. Technologies of power.

And even at a psychological level, we posses as humans innate concerns for our global commitment in our day-to-day lives. Technologies of self. Sigmund Freud, in his book titled Civilization and its discontents, talks of roles that Brian Castellani generalizes as “conforming,” “cooperative,” “cohesive,” “common identity,” and “let’s-work-together-and-figure-out-how-to-get-along.” These are the very roles civilizations have relied on to survive and thrive throughout our existence.

History has a pretty good track record of societies and governments coming together despite our differences. The outcomes are not perfect, but we made it through the Cold War, civil rights movements globally, and ongoing negotiated tensions between the United States and China or even North Korea. The social-psychologist Anselm Strauss summarizes it like this,

“The negotiated order on any given day could be conceived of as the sum total of the organization’s rules and policies, along with whatever agreements, understandings, pacts, contracts, and other working arrangements currently obtained. These include agreements at every level of organization, of every clique and coalition, and include covert as well as overt agreements.”  

Any unhappiness or fear we may feel is of our own doing. And we’ve invented social super structures, technologies of power, to address them while knowing full well they also perpetuate our unhappiness. It’s what makes people want to retreat to a simpler past. Some wish to escape to a primitive natural oasis as Thoreau did around Walden Pond while others want to retreat, like Trump does, to the 50s and 60s as a way to “Make America Great Again.”

BONO IS NO HIPPIE

Thoreau discovered retreating to nature and isolating himself from society did not yield the happiness he expected. He too, after all, was a social animal. And while many in America, especially White men, reflect nostalgically on how much better it was for them in the 50s and 60s they forget, or don’t care, to remember it was a time of rampant spousal abuse. Wife beating was not made illegal in all states until 1920. It wasn’t until the 1970’s women’s movement that it got the attention it deserved. The term ‘domestic violence’ didn’t appear until 1973.

In 1930 Freud addressed our attraction to the chimera of nostalgia by observing “that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we [believe we] should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.” Considering he wrote this at a time when Nazism and Stalinism was on the rise, it’s clear his observations would have been very real.

In 2018, the British comparative religion writer and former Roman Catholic sister, Karen Armstrong, noted

“that such nostalgia remains the primary motivator for the rise in religious, cultural, and political fundamentalism throughout the world—all a reaction to the perceived “ills” and “inequalities” of globalization and global civil society, which these nostalgic thinkers “read” as resolutely global, secular, elitist, bourgeois, liberal, harmful, and blasphemous.”

It’s not hard to identify such in-groups: nationalist movements in Europe, Muslim Fundamentalists and extremists, and the Alt-Right movement in America – which is dangerously neighboring the in-groups of the Christian right, the Tea Party, and increasingly the majority of the Republican party.

But there are also groups who want to move toward a more global civil society. They see the tolerance and blending of religions, cultures, and traditions as a way to advance the global community. These are people who live in the now and believe advances in income inequality, race relations, gender spectrum awareness, health and wellness, and reducing global warming can yield a better future for all. And they embrace the global network society introduced through the rapid advancement of the information age.

As Brian Castellani says, “at no previous point in our history of anatomically modern Homo sapiens have humans had the capacity to engage in, perpetuate, or share their social commitments (global or otherwise) on such a global scale.”

And while some dream of a utopian network society – a massive global in-group – any dip into social media will tell you it’s unlikely anyone will get that many people to agree on a set of binding principles and sacrifices.

But the global network society has proven effective at rallying local acts of defiance that lead to compromise. The worldwide BLM movement is the most immediate example. And as unpleasant as it is, defiance in the spirit of altruistic progress toward a better future may be our only choice.

It is this very progress that defines an out-group in the eyes of conservatives. The ills of globalization, in their eyes, are the progression, recognition, release, and rise of the historically oppressed. They invent scapegoats in the form of brown skinned immigrants or encroaching Asian wealth and dominance. Many in this in-group fear the grip of the mythical White Anglo-Saxon Protestant slipping away and yearn for a nostalgic Western dominance that they believe their Christian God ordained them to execute.

Progressives define conservatives as an out-group. They feel the ills of globalization are the result of over-exploitive capitalistic dominance wrapped up in Western expansionist dogma. Their scapegoats are business men, White male politicians, and toxic masculinity. They fear an allegiance to ever rising GDP will result in a collapse of natural resources and increasing climate instability that threatens the existence of all living beings. Many in this in-group yearn for a nostalgic return to local living and simpler lives that depend less on the globalist infrastructure of over-exploitive capitalism.

Castellani believes it comes down to this,

“As such, in the face of this misery, we really only have two options: bring peace and happiness into the world through civil disobedience and brutal compromise (both within ourselves and in relations to our bodies, nature and others); or allow our fear of the global to draw us into nostalgic retreat, which often quickly turns our best dreams and intentions into global nightmares.”

Track 4 on U2’s album, War, is a piece entitled “Like a Song.” It’s one of the least performed songs by the band, but its lyrics speak to today’s divided groups. In Verse Two Bono nods to in-group signaling that can trigger nostalgia while also calling us to rebel against our divisions, seek connections with others through agreeable terms, and strive to help one another.

And we love to wear a badge, a uniformAnd we love to fly a flagBut I won't let others live in hellAs we divide against each other and we fight amongst ourselvesToo set in our ways to try to rearrangeToo right to be wrong, in this rebel song

Those are some wise words from a group of 20 year old wannabe punk rockers. And after all these years, Bono continues to acknowledge that the struggles for peace and justice, while motivated by altruism, can only happen through defiance, resistance, and compromise. It is, after all, the natural order of complex systems.

In a 2015 Rolling Stone interview he’s quoted as saying,

“When you get bleak about things and think, Gosh, is there an end to this? Yeah, there is, it just takes lots of work, lots of time. I was never a hippie— I’m punk rock, really. I was never into: “Let’s hold hands, and peace will come just because we’ll dream it into the world.” No, peace is the opposite of dreaming. It’s built slowly and surely through brutal compromises and tiny victories that you don’t even see. It’s a messy business, bringing peace into the world. But it can be done, I’m sure of that.”

Hello Interactors,

The first year of Interplace is nearly complete. I want to thank everyone who supported me through 2021 by subscribing, reading, listening, commenting, and sharing. I also want to thank the London Writers’ Salon and all faithful writers who showed up on Zoom with me every morning at 8:00 Pacific time. It brought companionship, accountability, and miles of smiles.

Evolutionary biologists call interactors the individual traits that are so uniquely beneficial that they lead to natural selection. You are my interactors ­– special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. Thanks to you, that journey will continue through 2022. I’m keeping to the same structure, but may summon the courage to do occasional interviews as well.

A year ago I kicked off Interplace. In the winter I wrote about human behavior, then moved to cartography in the spring, physical geography and the environment in the summer, and economic geography this fall. This is post number 50 and the last of 2021. Should Interplace 2021 be a book, it would be comprised of four sections, 50 chapters, nearly 740 pages, and over 130,000 words.

To celebrate, I thought I’d share excepts from the most read posts from each of the four seasons. I also included titles and links to all 50 pieces at the end.

But before I start, I thought I’d share a quote from the legendary leader the city of Seattle was named after, Chief Si'ahl (siʔaɫ). These words appeared in my first newsletter and continue to serve as an inspiration for Interplace today. They’re worth sharing again as we reflect and contemplate the constellation of interactions with people and place we all had throughout 2021 and imagine what’s ahead in 2022.

“Humankind has not woven the web of life.We are but one thread within it.Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.All things are bound together.All things connect.”

And now, excerpts from the top four most read Interplace posts of 2021.

WINTER: BEHAVIOR

Take Your Head for a Walk

Your brain makes maps on your behalf. But if you want a good one, take a hike. Your brain will love you for it, and your future self will too.

It turns out walking and cognitive mapping are mutually dependent systems that are only optimized when done together. Driving or riding as a passenger are poor substitutes for enhancing our interactions with place. In the words of neuroscientist, Shane O’Mara,

“The brain’s navigational and mapping and memory systems are so intertwined as to be almost one and the same. Walking to somewhere depends on the brain’s navigational system, and in turn walking provides a vast amount of ongoing information to the brain’s mapping and navigation systems. These are mutually enriching and reinforcing systems.”

Our cities don’t make it easy to walk. A century of car culture has kept people from interacting with place. We can deduce from the research I’ve cited, that this is a bad thing. Not only do we have a biased and hazy image built in our minds of the environment in which we live, sitting in a car or a chair does not facilitate happy thoughts.

We all succumb to what these two Iowa State researchers referred to as the ‘dread effect’. The thought of expending more energy than necessary can make one dread walking. It’s all too easy to tap a destination on Google maps, hit the ‘walking distance’ tab, shutter at the time and effort it would take to walk, and then grab the keys and drive there. But since Covid hit, I instead grab my headphones, take a step, and feel the cells in my brain come alive. I am interacting with place, with a smile on my face, as a cranial cellular symphony traces a map of the space.

SPRING: CARTOGRAPHY

You Are What You Map

How triangles, topology, quadrangles, and cartography yield maps that can skew both messages and time

The Renaissance accelerated the field of cartography. This was an era of discovering new knowledge, instrumentation, and the measuring and quantification of the natural world. Mercator’s projection stemmed from the invention of perspective; a word derived from the Latin word perspicere – “to see through.” European colonial maps were drawn mostly to navigate, control, and dominate land – and its human occupants. We have all been controlled by these maps in one way or other and we still are. Our knowledge of the world largely stems from the same perspective Mercator was offering up centuries ago. The entire world sees the world through the eyes of Western explorers, conquerors, and cartographers. That includes elements of maps as simple as place names.

Take place names in Africa, as an example. The country occupied by France until 1960, Niger, comes from the Latin word for “shining black”. Its derogatory adaptation by the British added another ‘g’ making a word we now call the n-word. But niger was not the most popular Latin word used to describe people of Africa, it was an ancient Greek derivative; Aethiops – which means “burn face”. If you replace the ‘s’ at the end with the ‘a’ from the beginning, you see where the name Ethiopia comes from.

There’s another Westernized place name just west of where the Dakota and Lakota people thrived called Gannett Peak. It’s the tallest mountain in the state of Wyoming and is part of the Bridger-Teton range. I’m sure you’ve heard of the more popular neighboring range, the Grand Teton’s; another notable (and sexist) French place name which means – ‘Big Boobs’. Gannett Peak is named after Henry Gannett – the father of American mapmaking.

He was one of many geographers throughout the history of western colonization. Sure he was more influential than most, but they were all tasked with the same thing. Whether it was triangulating British territories in India, finessing French regions in Africa, or delineating Dutch districts in Brazil they were all measuring, mapping, and manipulating how others should see the world. It’s the paradox of mapmaking. No matter your intent, whatever line you draw will reflect the bias you bring.

Mercator was biased by perspective because that’s what the culture of his time led him to do. Gannett mapped natural occurring features of the land because the mapping of minerals and other natural resources was in high demand. Iowa was named Iowa because that’s the word they knew. Even attempts to counter-map the dominance of cartesian colonial cartography can’t escape its own bias. Nobody can. But we live on a melting planet, so our days remain a few. If we’re going to survive this calamity, we must see that our thoughts are skewed. So the next you look at a map, consider its point of view. If we all do this together, we can invent a world anew.

SUMMER: ENVIRONMENT

Calamity in Klamath

Mukluks suffer over water for suckers

California’s fires have claimed two million acres. Ten percent of the sequoia population was taken by a single fire; trees that have been on this planet for thousands of years – gone. It’s so dry in southern Oregon’s Klamath valley that wells are drying up. Homeowners are having to drive for their water. The county has ordered cisterns from as far away as Oklahoma, but are running up against shortages of rain barrels due to choked supply chains and increased demand.

The Klamath valley has seen its fair share of emergencies, but every generation seems surprised. And sometimes apathetic. The first occupants of this area were the Klamath Tribes: the Klamath, the Modoc and the Yahooskin-Paiute people. They were sometimes referred to as mukluks or numu – the people. People, while differentiated by name, are still animals. And like our multi-legged, finned, scaled, and winged companions, we are an integral part of the environment. This was, and remains, a pan-Indigenous concept that deserves reminding. The Klamath Tribes embraced this belief in a shared communal slogan, “naanok ?ans naat sat’waYa naat ciiwapk diceew’a “We help each other; We will live good”

By the 1950s the Klamath Tribes became one of the most prosperous tribes in America. In keeping with their traditional ways, they owned, managed, and sustained the largest stand of Ponderosa Pine in the West. Driven by a self-sufficient determinism millennia old, they were the only tribe to make enough money to pay the United States Government for the services their people utilized. 

But their success made them a target. The Klamath Tribes stood out. Having demonstrated just how profitable their land could be, it was time the United States took even more than they had a century prior.

On August 1, 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 was issued by the United States Congress announcing the official federal policy of termination. The resolution called for the immediate termination of the Klamath Tribes. Included were the Flathead, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa, along with all tribes in the states of California, New York, Florida, and Texas.

Between 1945 and 1960 Congress terminated more than one hundred tribes and small bands, 11,500 Indigenous people lost their native legal status, and over one million acres of land lost its trust status. Not a single tribe has improved economically since, while corporations have profited handsomely.

I’m convinced that a combination of traditional knowledge and new science, technology, and invention will yield the best path forward for managing our global climatic conundrums. But we can’t just tech our way out of this. We’re going to have to change our food habits, reduce extractions, eliminate commercial and consumer waste, and overhaul the global food system.

The dam has been cracked, but it needs to be broken wide open. All living organisms depend on water. They depend on us. Let’s listen to the ancient words of the Klamath people: When we help each other, we will all live well.

FALL: ECONOMICS

Cryptocurrency, Euro-insurgency, and Economic Urgency

Untangling economic supremacy through heresy while offering an alternative destiny

Cryptocurrency was invented to circumvent the juggernaut that banks, governments, and credit card companies hold on the currency market. But the more it gets legitimized as an alternative currency, the more interested these traditional institutions become. For example, one form of cryptocurrency rising in popularity are stablecoins. It’s a digital currency that can be converted into ‘real’ money and is issued by the very institutions the inventors were hoping to circumvent. It seems there is no escaping Western economic dominance.

The truth is, alternative currencies and economies exist all around us and have for centuries. For example, in a district of central London call Brixton, where David Bowie once lived, shops no longer accept the British Pound. Instead they take an alternative currency called the Brixton Pound that features a picture of Bowie on a paper bill that is as nicely designed and proportioned as Bowie himself.

Many schemes like this exist outside of the Western world too – and they’re often not tied to the dominant currency system. For example, there’s a settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya called Bangladesh. Not to be confused with the country of Bangladesh. It was named after an early settler who unexpectedly packed up and moved to Bangladesh never to return. The area was hence called Bangladesh. It’s a poor informal settlement made of self-made homes and little to no infrastructure, yet is home to over 20,000 people. They work at nearby industries at the fringe of Nairobi doing odd jobs regularly paid workers refuse to do.

Many are well educated, but work is intermittent and there are more qualified workers than there are jobs. It leads to extreme poverty, apathy, and strife. One local teacher in the Peace Corps, Will Ruddick, became frustrated that he was graduating kids with no where to go. He said many of whom were more skilled academically than many he’d witnessed at Stanford. Ruddick happens to also have a PhD in econophysics – a branch of economics that draws inspiration from the field of physics. He began wondering how he could devise a way for residents in areas like Bangladesh to earn consistent wages doing meaningful work in their community. He wanted ways for them to create and share in their abundance, take charge of their own livelihoods, and build a self-sustaining economic future.

American economic geography professor, Eric Sheppard, from UCLA offers that because Western style capitalism relies on “uneven and asymmetric connectivities” that end up “driving uneven geographical development”, we’ve arrived at a place where the dominant global economic scheme of globalization has failed “at scales ranging from the globe to the neighbourhood.”

Instead of propagating or placating a dominant global economy, what if we acknowledge, embrace, fertilize, understand, celebrate, and experience alternative economies embedded within or on the fringe of the establishment, like those Ruddick has pioneered. After all, these are economies that have been forged through the interaction of people and place whose shared histories have, as Sheppard says, “found them encountering, rather than propagating, Capitalist economic development.”

Following is an index of all the pieces I’ve written over the last year. Thanks, again, for the support. I’ll see you all next week and next year.

FULL LIST OF INTERPLACE 2021

WINTER: BEHAVIOR

THE INTERACTION OF PEOPLE AND PLACE

My First Subscribers

Raccoons Destroyed My Lawn

What the World Needs Now is Love

The Lone Star Is in a Frozen State

WASPs and Weeds Gone Wild

A Computer on Every Desk and a Car in Every Garage

Bill and Brad's Excellent Adventure

Take Your Head for a Walk

SPRING: CARTOGRAPHY

I'd Rather Be Spinning Logos

A Groma from Rome Finds a New Home

A Nation Squared

Miami Priced, Ohio Diced

Guns, God, and Gold

Make Your Own Survey in Under a Day

You Are What You Map

The U.S. Census: Mapping a Sense of Us

Boomtown Maps

Winning Over the Windy City with Watercolors

Maps as Logos; Atlases that Impose

Spring 2021 Cartography Review

Cul-de-sacs, Caucasians, and the Kansas Garden City

SUMMER: ENVIRONMENT

The Obscene Man

A New Chapter to Behold as the Network of Life Unfolds

Ruckelshaus and Hickel Get us Out of a Pickle

Big Science Meets Big Ecology under the Big Sky

Muggy Conditions, Buggy Coalitions, and Collegiate Ambitions

Nature, Nurture, Math, Art and Virtue

An Olympic Sized Metabolism

An Ancestor's Garden

Solar Powered Imperialist Addictions

Charlie Watts and the Strange Attractor

Calamity in Klamath

Ditches, Wells, and Dams. Riches, Cartels, and Scams.

Lay Dung; Feng Shui

FALL: ECONOMICS

The Wealth of Generations

Space Cadets and the Earthy Crunchies

Only a Nobody Walks in L.A.

From a Shoe Lust Hit, to 'Just Do It'.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Hitler and the Capitalist's Fix

Supply Chain Pains as China Gains

Bond, Bezos, Gates, and Musk

Black Friday and the Christmas Creep: Part 1

Black Friday and the Christmas Creep: Part 2

The ‘One Click Buy’ Empire Needs an Umpire

Hoops, Groups, and Feedback Loops

Cryptocurrency, Euro-insurgency, and Economic Urgency

WINTER: BEHAVIOR

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree, Your Story Has Many Branches

Hello Interactors,

For all you Christmas celebrators out there, happy Christmas Eve. Since many will be gathering ‘round a Christmas tree, I thought I’d tell the story of its origin. And like so much of America history, it has ties to immigrants and slavery; but in this case — anti-slavery.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A TREE SO YEE MAY BE FREE

“If the morning drives are extended beyond the city, there is much to delight the eye. The trees are eased in ice; and when the sun shines out suddenly, the whole scene looks like one diffused rainbow,—dressed in a brilliancy which can hardly be conceived of in England. On days less bright, the blue harbour spreads in strong contrast with the sheeted snow which extends to its very brink.”

These are the words of Harriet Martineau. She was a English writer, journalist, and social theorist who pioneered observational methods that came to influence the field of sociology. One of her more popular books came at the end of her travels through the United States in the 1830s titled, Retrospect of Western Travel. The passage above describes what she saw as she left the Boston city limits in the snow the winter of 1835.

You may have images of her bundled up in a one horse open sleigh, over the hills she went, dashing all the way. But according to Martineau, you can let go of any such romantic inclinations. Here’s her take on sleighing.

“As for the sleighing, I heard much more than I experienced of its charms. No doubt early association has something to do with the American fondness for this mode of locomotion; and much of the affection which is borne to music, dancing, supping, and all kinds of frolic, is transferred to the vehicle in which the frolicking parties are transported. It must be so, I think, or no one would be found to prefer a carriage on runners to a carriage on wheels,—except on an untrodden expanse of snow. On a perfectly level and crisp surface I can fancy the smooth rapid motion to be exceedingly pleasant; but such surfaces are rare in the neighbourhood of populous cities. The uncertain, rough motion in streets hillocky with snow, or on roads consisting for the season of a ridge of snow with holes in it, is disagreeable, and provocative of headache. I am no rule for others as to liking the bells; but to me their incessant jangle was a great annoyance.”

And if that’s not enough to convince you, she offers up a quote from unknown source that puts a finer touch on the realities of sleighing.

“Do you want to know what sleighing is like? You can soon try. Set your chair on a spring board out in the porch on Christmas-day: put your feet in a pail full of powdered ice: have somebody to jingle a bell in one ear, and somebody else to blow into the other with the bellows,—and you will have an exact idea of sleighing.”

Martineau was on her way to a Christmas evening celebration at the home of a former Harvard German language professor, Charles Follen. Although, due to scheduling conflicts the event was actually on New Years Eve and not Christmas Eve. The cozy holiday scene that Martineau proceeds to unfold came to be the most, though not the first, read articulation of what came to be the center piece of American Christmas celebration – the Christmas tree.

Follen was a German immigrant so perhaps it’s not that surprising that a Christmas tree would feature prominently in her story. It’s been a long held belief that German immigrants brought their time-honored Christmas tree tradition with them. Though, as we’ll soon see, the evolution of the Christmas tree tradition in America paralleled that of Germany.

Martineau’s account of that evening, while factual, leaves out important historical details as to why she was celebrating Christmas with Follen and his family that night. These were two radical Unitarian abolitionists who bonded over their insistence that slavery be eradicated totally and immediately. Northerner’s, and New England Unitarians, were split on the matter of abolition. Follen’s convictions are what got him fired from Harvard a year prior.

As for Martineau, she was a well known and respected journalist but not yet a public activist. But after attending a women’s abolitionist meeting that November, she was convinced she needed to act. She was asked at that meeting to write publicly avowing her beliefs. Being one of the only women writers of her time to sustain herself through writing and still requiring access to America’s mainstream elite for her book, she faced an ethical dilemma.

Later she wrote, “I foresaw that almost every house in Boston, except those of the abolitionists, would be shut against me; that my relation to the country would be completely changed, as I should suddenly be transformed from being a guest and an observer to being considered a missionary or a spy.…”

News leaked of her position on slavery and Boston newspapers ridiculed her. Their headlines spread across the country and she was forced to alter her itinerary. The event she was attending at Follen’s home wasn’t just a Christmas celebration, but an anti-slavery strategy session. That spring, she (in the company of Charles Follen) took to the road not as journalist, but as an activist.

CHRISTKINDLE AND BELSNICKEL

Historians and folklorists have determined that the first Christmas tree in America was most likely in the home of a German immigrant in Pennsylvania. But it’s unlikely to have occurred anytime before 1810. The first known sketch of a family celebrating Christmas, featuring a small tree atop a table, was not printed until recent decades but dates to either 1812 or 1819.

Recall from my November posts on the origins of Thanksgiving, this was also the time when St. Nicholas was also entering the picture in New York. The Christmas tree tradition was also just emerging in Germany at this very same time. The Christmas tree, like Santa Claus himself, wasn’t a long held German tradition but a story told by a select group of elites who latched on to a small, isolated, and obscure holiday event that was occurring in what was then Strasbourg, Germany but is now part of France.

It was established sometime in the 17th century as a quasi-religious way of judging children on the basis of them being naughty or nice. If you were nice you got a visit that night from Christkindle (i.e. the Christchild) and if you were naughty you got a visit from Hanstrapp; Strasbourg’s equivalent of what became known as Belsnickle (roughly translated: St. Nicholas in Fur).

This character has echo’s of behavior seen by Wassailers during Thanksgiving celebrations where men, often of lower class, would dress up and go door to door, often times even welcoming themselves in. Perhaps this offers a clue into how Santa became a home invader. Though, should Belsnickle determine a child in the home had been naughty, he gifted the parents with a stick with instructions to whip the poor child.

The Christmas tree tradition expanded beyond Strasbourg around 1750. Its spread may have been accelerated by a young up and coming writer, naturalist, and scientist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1771. Recall from my October post, that by the dawn of the 18th century Goethe had established himself as the go-to guy by the German government for writing, organizing, and evangelizing his opinions and observations on everything from gardening, to parks management, to economics.

He had spent some time in Strasbourg and “discovered in this city a new sense of “German” identity that transformed his larger cultural vision.” His 1774 novel, The Sufferings of Young Werther, is a story of a love triangle that ends tragically. And in the lead up to this tragedy, Goethe writes how young Werther “spoke of the pleasure the children would feel and remembered how in times long past he had himself been transported to paradise by the surprise opening of a door and the appearance of the decorated tree with its candles, sweets, and apples.”

It wasn’t until 1810 that the Christmas Tree tradition made it’s way to Berlin. It was introduced in Munich in 1830 by the Queen of Bavaria. Goethe had inspired a string of writers publishing stories of Christmas trees that were disseminated throughout Europe and the United States. And it was all happening at the same time of the first recorded evidence of a Christmas tree in America – 1820.

And then, in 1836, came the first printed image of a Christmas tree in America. It was titled “Christmas Eve” and was featured in a story called The Stranger’s Gift. It was written, as you might expect, by a German immigrant. But not just any German immigrant. It was written by Herman Bokum, the professor who replaced Follen after Harvard let him go for his public opposition to slavery just one year earlier.

YOUR BOUGHS CAN TEACH A LESSON

After Follen lost his job at Harvard he was hired by a family to home school their two children. Follen strictly followed a progressive teaching method derived from a Swiss educational reformer named Johann Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi had a child-centered and directed educational philosophy. He believed every child is born with inherently good qualities and it’s the teachers role to find them and cultivate them. It’s unclear whether Follen’s enemies convinced the family to reconsider, the family themselves had a change of heart, or Follen, ever dogmatic in his principles, refused to budge on his teaching approach, but two weeks before Christmas of 1835 he was terminated.

It is in this context that Harriett Martineau attended the Christmas celebration in Follen’s newly built home on the corner of Follen Avenue outside of Boston. Martineau did not mention Follen by name in her retelling of their Christmas tree celebration, only Follen’s son who everyone called “Little Charley.” She writes,

“I was present at the introduction into the new country of the spectacle of the German Christmas-tree. My little friend Charley, and three companions, had been long preparing for this pretty show…I rather think it was, generally speaking, a secret out of the house; but I knew what to expect…The tree was the top of a young fir, planted in a tub, which was ornamented with moss. Smart, dolls, and other whimsies, glittered in the evergreen; and there was not a twig; which had not something sparkling upon it… Charley looked a good deal like himself, only now and then twisting himself about in an unaccountable fit of giggling. I mounted the steps behind the tree to see the effect of opening the doors. It was delightful. The children poured in; but in a moment, every voice was hushed. Their faces were upturned to the blaze, all eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps arrested. Nobody spoke; only Charley leaped for joy.”

It was two years before Martineau’s book was published. She continued her friendship with Follen until his tragic death in 1841. He was killed when a steamship he was traveling on exploded. His photograph hung on the wall of her home until she died in 1876.

And in the intervening years of her book being published, a writer friend of theirs, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, wrote a fictional story called “New Years Day” that included a brief mention of a Christmas tree celebration akin to what actually took place at the Follens. It was published that same year, 1835, making it the first piece of American literature to mentioned a Christmas tree.

It’s unfortunate America’s Christmas tree origin story doesn’t start with the telling of Charles Follen and Harriett Martineau and their New Years Eve anti-slavery strategy meeting around the Christmas tree. Not only is their relationship full of intrigue, but the idea of the Christmas tree immortalized as an historic symbol of freedom from slavery seems an appropriate American Christmas tale. Perhaps the story of Follen and Martineau is what we should be reading to children every Christmas eve and not just T’was the Night Before Christmas.

Both the story of the Christmas tree as a time-honored German cultural tradition and America’s favorite Christmas time fable, T’was the Night Before Christmas, were largely fabricated and perpetuated by a select group of elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

Clement Clark Moore, the author of T’was the Night Before Christmas, — and his reactionary New York Episcopalian Knickerbocker friends — were interested in imbuing their Christmas tales with aristocratic authority. In contrast, Bollen and his Unitarian Christmas tree literary acquaintances used the Christmas tree to add momentum to the swelling progressive reformist movement of the 1830s.

Stephen Nissenbaum, in his book The Battle for Christmas, explains the similarities between the unfolding of these two events, American traditions, and these two men,

“There were important similarities between the antislavery sensibility and the new attitude toward children. Abolitionists and educational reformers shared a joint empathy for people who were powerless to resist the wrath of those who wielded authority over them—slaves and children, respectively. (Both types of reformers had a particular abhorrence of the use of the lash as a form of punishment.)”

He continues,

“In fact, what Charles Follen did in 1835 is similar in that sense to what Clement Clarke Moore had done more than a decade earlier, although his reasons—Moore was a reactionary, Follen a radical—were profoundly different. But both men had reason to feel alienated from their respective communities, and both responded by turning inward, to their own children, and using Christmas as the occasion for doing so.”

And in both cases, literature, and access to it, played a starring role. Nissenbaum, writes,

“As it turns out, the most important channels through which the ritual was spread were literary ones. Information about the Christmas tree was diffused by means of commercial literature, not via immigrant folk culture—from the top down, not from the bottom up. It was by reading about Christmas trees, not by witnessing them, that many thousands of Americans learned about the custom. Before they ever saw such a thing, they already knew what Christmas trees were all about—not only what they looked like, but also how and why they were to be used.”

It seems another mythical folk tradition is still propagated from the top down more than experienced from bottom up. Recalling Harriet Martineau’s American observation that “As for the sleighing, I heard much more than I experienced of its charms.”

Hello Interactors,

This is the last full week of fall and so the last episode on economic geography. Happy early winter solstice everyone. Soon we in the North start tilting toward the sun. I’ve learned a ton this season and hope you have too. Today I conclude with a summarization of the history and effects of capitalism as we know it today and offer a glimpse at alternatives. We like easy answers to hard problems, but I’m here to tell you it’s messy and complex. And that’s just the good stuff.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE URGENCY OF CRYPTOCURRENCY

Cryptocurrency was trending as a topic again this fall. It spiked in October. I still see residual evidence of this in my social media feeds where debates rage on over whether it’s a legitimate form of currency or just a speculator’s delight.

Cryptocurrency was invented to circumvent the juggernaut that banks, governments, and credit card companies hold on the currency market. But the more it gets legitimized as an alternative currency, the more interested these traditional institutions become. For example, one form of cryptocurrency rising in popularity are stablecoins. It’s a digital currency that can be converted into ‘real’ money and is issued by the very institutions the inventors were hoping to circumvent. It seems there is no escaping Western economic dominance.

Money in the U.S. is commonly believed to come from the government, but most greenbacks issued today come from banks. They order currency from the Federal Reserve based on public demand which is then put into general circulation – which is growing worldwide. In fact, there are more U.S. dollars circulating outside of the U.S. than in it. Much of which is used by people struggling financially around the globe.

Meanwhile, those not struggling are using cash less and less. Recently, some New York retailers even attempted to go cashless. It prompted the city to pass a law requiring food establishments to accept cash or face a $1,000 fine.

Still, increasingly we see people paying for items with their phone. In this digital, post-cash society it’s easy to imagine an alternative virtual currency sneaking in. If our democracy can be challenged, why not our currency? A recent New York Times article by Peter Coy on the slipping grip of cash notes that “Some economists believe there is a risk that we’ll someday find ourselves with nothing that is universally accepted as a medium of exchange.” He goes on to remind us that is was Socrates who “originated the concept of a noble lie, which is a myth that elites propagate for what they view as the good of the public.” He then quotes Michael Dorf of the Cornell Law School who believes “the solidity of money is one such lie.”

The truth is, alternative currencies and economies exist all around us and have for centuries. For example, in a district of central London call Brixton, where David Bowie once lived, shops no longer accept the British Pound. Instead they take an alternative currency called the Brixton Pound that features a picture of Bowie on a paper bill that is as nicely designed and proportioned as Bowie himself.

It’s been in circulation since 2009 and 250 area shops accept it. Workers in Brixton also get paid with it and you can even settle your utility bills with it. It’s a hyper-local monetary scheme that incentivizes local residents to shop local, buy local, and live local. The Brixton Pound has inspired cities across the UK to do the same and now Bristol, Cardiff, Hull, Liverpool, and Plymouth all have their own alternative local currencies.

Many schemes like this exist outside of the Western world too – and they’re often not tied to the dominant currency system. For example, there’s a settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya called Bangladesh. Not to be confused with the country of Bangladesh. It was named after an early settler who unexpectedly packed up and moved to Bangladesh never to return. The area was hence called Bangladesh. It’s a poor informal settlement made of self-made homes and little to no infrastructure, yet is home to over 20,000 people. They work at nearby industries at the fringe of Nairobi doing odd jobs regularly paid workers refuse to do.

Many are well educated, but work is intermittent and there are more qualified workers than there are jobs. It leads to extreme poverty, apathy, and strife. One local teacher in the Peace Corps, Will Ruddick, became frustrated that he was graduating kids with no where to go. He said many of whom were more skilled academically than many he’d witnessed at Stanford. Ruddick happens to also have a PhD in econophysics – a branch of economics that draws inspiration from the field of physics. He began wondering how he could devise a way for residents in areas like Bangladesh to earn consistent wages doing meaningful work in their community. He wanted ways for them to create and share in their abundance, take charge of their own livelihoods, and build a self-sustaining economic future.

So in 2010 he launched an alternative local currency experiment called Eco-Pesa in three informal settlements in Kenya. That experiment became permanent in Bangladesh with the creation of their own currency; the Bangla-Pesa. Unlike the Brixton Pound, this alternative currency can’t be exchanged for the national Kenyan currency. It’s a closed system of money creation that serves one purpose: support a shared willingness among community members to accept and trade money in exchange for goods and services.

It has over 2000 members and 220 businesses and has helped fill the settlement with money, eliminate market instability brought on by outside nationalistic forces, provide opportunities for investment, and grow Bangladesh businesses that generate jobs.  

He went on to found Grass Roots Economics which is a resource and platform that supports and inspires experiments like his. The platform has launched seven different forms of local currency in poverty stricken informal settlements across Africa, including two in South Africa and one in Congo. Last year the Red Cross leveraged the organization to establish more local currencies during Covid helping to grow the number of registered users of local currencies to over 50,000 people. Ruddick sees no reason why it can’t continue to scale regionally and even nationally. Maybe even across the second largest continent in the world. And he has the track record and models to substantiate his claim.

GREAT DIVIDE; WHITE PRIDE

The primary obstacle to such schemes taking hold too pervasively is the default global capitalocentric economic system of the West; a scheme that relies on places like Bangladesh to perpetuate its dominance. It’s a form of power and control that has existed since the spread of European colonialism starting in the 1400s.

Europe had yet to be introduced to capitalism. Which means, contrary to popular belief, they didn’t invent it. There’s now ample research pointing to evidence of capitalist trade and profit already occurring across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Folks like Christopher Columbus would have tripped over these capitalist trade routes as he stumbled his way upon their shores. In fact, it’s more likely European colonial scouts like Columbus were in the untenable position of trying to convince these well established economies that they should allow lowly Europeans to even participate in their capitalistic schemes.

The Ming dynasty in China and the Mughal Empire of South Asia would have been two of the more established world centers of economics at the time. Medieval Europe, in comparison, would have looked primitive and backwards by their standards. But over the course of centuries, the Europeans managed to disrupt (often violently) existing capital structures creating what has been called the Great Divergence – a socioeconomic shift in balance to the West.

Just how ‘great’ it was is a matter of perspective, of course. To Amer-Europeans it was great. I certainly grew up learning that. I was taught Europeans were fortunate geographically, gifted intellectually, and superior culturally. Their ‘enlightened’ selves rose above the paltry ills of feudal medievalism to erase an embarrassing historical stain. Their inventiveness gave rise to free and fair democracy and capitalism that eventually spread from America’s sea to shining sea. Not so fast.

A new book by Anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow show compelling evidence that it was actually a visit from the Native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman, Kandiaronk, who planted the seeds of ‘enlightenment’ with European philosophers in his eloquent and observant criticism of European ways. Here is a fragment of a speech he delivered to a group of French philosophers and statesmen in 1703:

“I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, – of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?”

The heart of Kondiaronk’s critique is what fueled the ‘great divergence.’ Their ‘slaughterhouse of the living’ is what disrupted existing Asian economic dominance. It wasn’t ‘enlightenment’ but well documented, practiced, and executed forms of slavery, racism, and war-instigated establishment of European controlled capitalism. They re-centered economic activity around themselves through force, but convinced themselves, and others to this day, that their actions were justified. The British and American economic geography professor, Eric Sheppard, from UCLA puts it like this:

“The stories Europeans told themselves, and imposed on others, amounted to a self justification of their role as a uniquely civilizing force, marginalizing the colonized (from Ireland to India and the Belgian Congo) as less-than-civilized, in order to justify their less than-human treatment by self-described liberals.”

In the late 1800s, after the U.S. slaughtered 3,000 Filipinos as part of an overnight raid in the colonization of their land, America’s favorite poet at the time, Rudyard Kipling, wrote a poem that emblemizes the racist, violent, and self-justified imperialistic sentiment of the time:

Take up the White Man’s burden— Send forth the best ye breed— Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need; To wait in heavy harness,On fluttered folk and wild— Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

It was published in the New York Tribune, New York Sun, and San Francisco Examiner. It was also loved by President Theodore Roosevelt who sent a copy of it to his close friend and Massachusetts politician, Henry Lodge, with a note that read:

“Rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.”

Capitalism is rooted in racism and its emergence was tied to the colonization of captured territories over seas through militaristic invasions. By the time Roosevelt was putting it in practice in the U.S., it was a centuries old well-oiled machine. The rights of European territories to claim sovereignty and organize captured territories first emerged in Europe after the signing of the Treaty of Westfalia in 1648. After 80 years of European territorial and religious wars, this peace treaty forced the Holy Roman Empire to divvy out sovereign states (countries) across Europe and allowed them to also choose their own official religions.

This event coincided with the emergence of political economists in Scotland, England, and France who had been debating and writing socioeconomic theories for years. Especially after the visit from Kondiaronk. They seized the opportunity to imbue their concepts with a secular vision that allowed capitalism to thrive between diverse European countries, and religions, for their mutual benefit. One such economic theory to eventually emerge was Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand.’

With a European model of economic abstraction established, it was then tied to government controlled nation-state territories. It was a no-brainer to replicate this model for any remote territory conquered, bartered, and stolen overseas. And just like that, global colonization had taken hold. The emergence of the great divergence.

It is from this confluence of events that the Western educated world has come to believe capitalism as conceived in the minds of Enlightened European thinkers. And because they self-justified themselves as intellectually and spiritually superior to other races and religions, including Kondiaronk, they believed, and we’ve been taught, that the European colonial and capitalistic expansion was for the good of humanity.

But let’s be honest, this is fantasy. And it’s dangerous to abstract away capitalism from the real and documented horrors of racism, slavery, rape, persecution, theft, exploitation, and extermination that allows it to flourish to this day. It shouldn’t be sanitized as a ‘great divergence.’ It should be chastised as a hate insurgence.

With the rise of Trumpism we are witnessing the sheen of capitalist oriented racism shining through decades of opaque but fading layers of failed attempts and promises of liberty and justice for all. And it’s in the spirit of domineering nationalists taking up Kipling’s distant, but misguided, call to accept the ‘White Man’s burden.’ And how much better is the Biden administration when kids captured at the border under Trump still remain in cages like ‘new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child.’ In the words of Kondiaronk, “the world’s worst behaviour.”

Both the left and the right, who are still smarting from Covid supply chain woes and wringing their hands over increasing inflation, are both viewing the global economic juggernaut their parties helped to construct with suspect for the first time. They’re not alone. Every country in the world is scrambling to reconsider their local economy as it relates to Western capitalistic global domination. No wonder the world is suffering a collective anxiety attack.

DON’T CRINGE AT THE FRINGE

We are witnessing an array of identity crisis across the socio-political spectrum. From far right nationalistic white-supremacy authoritarianism to the far left hopes of reconstituting socialist theories of idealized utopias. Both of which are different forms of top-down autocratic attempts at organizing social order and economies – one through neoliberal capitalistic oligarchies and the other through socialistic governmental central control. And because our poor human brains are attracted to binary polars, seek simple answers, and loath the messy middle, we suffer.

Meanwhile, fringe experiments in alternative economic schemes continue to flourish as they always have. But some encroach on the establishment more than others. And one in particular operates at a scale big enough to challenge the West’s strangle hold on global economics – China. China’s global Belt and Road Initiative, while China-centric, is also undeniably globally inclusive.

They have been dispersing their investments in infrastructure and commodity creation and extraction in a myriad of countries – big and small, rich and poor – around the world since 2013. At home they operate a hybrid Socialist and Capitalist government that then orchestrates attempts at controlling a global economy. If a hybridist socioeconomic experiment is seriously challenging the default world economy of the last 50-60 years, shouldn’t the U.S. and Europe consider conducting experiments of their own? Or has hubris and denial taken too strong of a hold? Only history will tell.

It’s safe to say that the days of claiming Western style capitalism and U.S. exceptionalism have been exposed and debunked. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” has come into the light and it’s empty. And the neoliberal free market economy is anything but free and has financially imprisoned millions for decades. Also gone are the Eurocentric interpretations of history. It’s time we stop insisting that the capitalistic scheme dominating the world today, while not perfect, is the least-bad option and therefore every country must adopt it. It’s rhetoric like this that the global North uses to twist the arms of the poorer global South to align them with their socio-political and economic agenda.  

Our beloved binary brains, again, are attracted to global North versus global South battles of theories and victories. The same can be said of East versus West. But most countries caught in this polarization have their own theories, some invented, and some borrowed or influenced – good or bad – by centuries of globalization, education, and financing from the global North. It’s no fun, but we need to wrestle with the messy middle.

We in the West are so trained to assess and judge other geographies, cultures, and economies from our ivory towers of exceptionalism – as if surveying a globe from a godly perch – labeling, cataloging, and objectifying human and non-human entities, that we forget the interaction of people and place. As the late great economist, Herb Simon, says, (as illustrated on my about page)

Those folks in Kenya stand at the fringe of a global economic system that either ignores them, exploits them, or starves them to death. It’s what it means to be marginalized. But with the help of a friend, they are discovering their plight is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which they find themselves. They have found a way to stand up, recognize and accept the apparent complexity, and act out of respect for each other’s position relative to one another…and the selfish globalized economic apparatus that put them there.

Professor Sheppard concludes that he and his Western educated colleagues, “suffer from a particular set of geographical blinders.” He says, “they look at our world in ways that normalize the European perspective on how development happens.” It’s a perspective he’s critical of because it’s a model of economic geography that “fails to deliver on its promise of development for all, everywhere.”

He goes on to offer that because Western style capitalism relies on “uneven and asymmetric connectivities” that end up “driving uneven geographical development”, we’ve arrived at a place where the dominant global economic scheme of globalization has failed “at scales ranging from the globe to the neighbourhood.”

To help combat his own implicit bias, he planted himself in Jakarta to do his research. “Thinking through Jakarta”, he says, “the raggedy fringes that matter are the hybridity of Indonesia’s political economy, informality and biophysical processes.” Instead of hypothesizing over concepts or proselytizing projects from the canons of capitalism, he’s asking that we recognize, as those in Bangladesh and Brixton did, that “relations with Capitalism are crucial to understanding how” emerging alternative economies embedded on the insides of dominant systems “coevolves with its outsides.”

Instead of propagating or placating a dominant global economy, what if we acknowledge, embrace, fertilize, understand, celebrate, and experience alternative economies embedded within or on the fringe of the establishment. After all, these are economies that have been forged through the interaction of people and place whose shared histories have, as Sheppard says, “found them encountering, rather than propagating, Capitalist economic development.”

Cryptocurrency is likely to trend again. Our anxiety has us looking for easy answers and social media likes shiny technocratic objects. Meanwhile, I’m rooting for Will Ruddick and his grass roots economies. A humane form of reciprocity that even the brilliant, eloquent, and enlightened Kondiaronk would recognize. And maybe even support.