The Aperture Field Notes

Political polarization is often framed as a problem of people being too far apart, but what if part of the problem is actually how we sort ideas in the first place?

In this explainer, I use Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments to explore a different way of thinking about political disagreement — one that isn’t about everyone moving to the middle, agreeing with one another, or watering down what they believe.

It’s about concord rather than unison.

Smith suggests that when we disagree, both sides have work to do. The person observing has to actively imagine the experience of the other person, while the person experiencing the strongest emotion has to shape their expression in a way that allows someone else to stay present with them.

That led me to think about ideology as a kind of sorting process: we gather similar ideas together, build coherent systems around them, and can eventually start mistaking one very real piece of the picture for the whole thing.

This video is a short exploration of that idea and of what it might look like to create enough room for difference without requiring sameness.

If this sparks something for you, I’d love to hear what you see differently, where you disagree, or what it makes you wonder about.

On a rainy fall morning, I found myself watching the water cycle unfold outside my window: ocean becoming cloud, cloud becoming rain, rain feeding forests, reservoirs, bodies and rivers before eventually finding its way back to the sea.

And a thought occurred to me:

The water belongs nowhere and participates everywhere.

But that doesn't mean water is never held. Reservoirs need banks. Cells need membranes. Snowpacks store water. Watersheds channel it. Living systems take in what they need and eventually return it.

Without boundaries, the cycle doesn't work.

But if everything that received water kept it permanently, the cycle wouldn't work either.

This became a way for me to think differently about one of the difficult questions AI is bringing to the foreground: Who owns knowledge, and what does healthy circulation look like?

The episode explores Indigenous data sovereignty, the human knowledge commons, AI training, extraction, reciprocity, attribution, stewardship, and the role boundaries play in making relationship possible.

Perhaps the challenge isn't choosing between an unrestricted knowledge commons and complete informational sovereignty.

Perhaps we need to learn how to design for permeability.

What knowledge should move freely? What should remain under individual or collective stewardship? What can move under particular conditions? Who gets to decide? And when knowledge creates enormous value somewhere else, what needs to flow back toward the ecosystems that produced it?

Because extraction is not the same thing as circulation.

And as AI dramatically increases our capacity to capture and transform flows of knowledge, labour, attention and capital, perhaps governance increasingly needs to concern itself not only with individual transactions, but with maintaining the health of the cycles themselves.

If technology makes essential services cheaper to provide, who gets the gains and who pays while we wait?

In this episode of *Conversations with Mica*, Kari LaMotte and Mica, an AI conversational partner, explore how improvements in what we can produce become improvements in how we live. Energy provides the concrete example: savings could become lower bills, better services, investment in the future, or larger profits. The technology alone doesn’t decide.

The conversation follows the people behind those choices: the investor supplying capital, the worker exposed to change, the pensioner on a limited income, and the household that cannot afford to wait twenty years for a payoff. Kari draws on condominium reserve funds to ask how we can support future improvements while meeting urgent needs today.

From there, the discussion turns to data-centre heat reuse and a different way to approach new development: setting conditions that invite better designs. It closes with “strong spine, open heart” - holding firm to principles while remaining willing to revise our assumptions and recognize genuine improvements.

This is an exploratory conversation, with questions, challenges, and changes of mind along the way.

In this episode:

- Who bears the risks of automation, beyond the people investing money?

- How ownership and utility regulation influence investment decisions.

- Why caring about the future and being able to afford it are different things.

- The tension between immediate bill relief and long-term improvements.

- What strata reserve funds suggest about responsibility across generations.

- How heat reuse can connect computing infrastructure with community needs.

- How to remain open to better evidence without abandoning accountability.

Continue the conversation:

When technology creates savings, what should have the strongest claim on them: lower prices, better services, future investment, or returns to those who took the risk?

Follow *Conversations with Mica* on your preferred podcast platform, and find more of Kari’s writing in *Aperture Field Notes* on Substack.

About the format: Mica is an AI conversational partner. This episode follows a live exploration and has been edited for clarity and flow.

How do we build a more regenerative, sustainable future when the hardest challenge is not the technology, but how we talk, listen, and decide together?

In this conversation, we explore the posture needed for difficult conversations about collective change. From infrastructure and co-design to power, truth, empathy, and belonging, we consider how communities can move beyond polarized camps without erasing real differences.

We discuss:

* Why innovation adoption is a relational challenge, not only a technical one

* “Strong spine, open heart” as a posture for holding conviction and curiosity together

* What meaningful co-design requires beyond a stakeholder checklist

* How power imbalances can shape who gets heard—and how facilitation can create more equitable space

* The difference between facts, interpretations, and feelings in a challenging conversation

* Why belonging to the shared work may matter as much as belonging to a particular side

The guiding idea is simple but demanding: each of us may hold an essential piece of truth, but none of us holds the whole.

What would change if we entered difficult conversations not to win, but to create a space where something better can emerge?

This is a space where ideas are explored in real time. Subscribe at notes.theaperturefield.com to follow the threads as they begin to connect, and follow on your favourite podcast platform.

What can plants teach us about progress?

In this first Conversations with Mica, Kari LaMotte thinks alongside Mica, an AI conversational partner, about seeds, stems, leaves, and the quieter work that allows a living system to renew itself.

Beginning with the seasonal life of plants, Kari and Mica explore a wider question: what happens when a society becomes skilled at growth and innovation, but less practiced at integrating, maintaining, and renewing what it creates?

Their conversation moves through photosynthesis, raspberry canes, pruning, compost, polarization, and the value of fragmentation. Along the way, they consider how specialization can create both essential knowledge and disconnection. and why the next human task may be learning to translate between perspectives without losing their depth.

This is not a conversation seeking a finished answer. It is an invitation to stay with a live question: how might we build systems that can grow, adapt, and regenerate as a whole? Please continue the conversation below and add your own perspective!

If you enjoyed this podcast, please follow on the podcast platform of your choice. I am most interested in your own perspective on these questions, and invite you to comment and subscribe below to follow the thread..

In this piece, I begin with what initially seemed like an obvious principle: recognizing the Indigenous nation whose territory it is as the host nation and genuine co-founder of any new community.

But an uncomfortable question emerged:

If one people remains the host forever, does everyone else remain a guest forever?

This reflection explores whether historical repair can protect the depth of Indigenous belonging without making future belonging impossible. It considers belonging as something that can be inherited, and also something that must be cultivated through responsibility, participation and care for the land.

Ideas explored

- The difference between ceremonial recognition and genuine co-founding

- Consent, co-founding and shared inheritance

- Whether people can become true stewards while remaining perpetual visitors

- The difference between Indigenous identity and an authentic relationship with place

- The danger of romanticizing Indigenous peoples as humanity’s designated land stewards

- Learning across knowledge systems without extracting or erasing them

- Land as an enduring participant rather than property changing owners

- Whether historical repair needs a destination beyond permanent creditor-and-debtor roles

- Creating a shared future without using equality to erase history

Questions to carry forward

- At what point does a guest become part of a place?

- Can belonging be cultivated without appropriating another people’s identity?

- How do we protect what must remain distinct while allowing something genuinely shared to emerge?

- What would our communities look like if stewardship were part of belonging?

- Can we remember that our beginnings were unequal without making inequality of belonging permanent?

This is an incomplete thought offered in the hope that it generates conversations needed for a more promising tomorrow. I welcome your perspective through your own lens as we collectively navigate this tricky terrain.Visit Substack for the original article and others at notes.theaperturefield.com

In this episode, I reflect on artificial intelligence as part of a much larger pattern of technological change.

New technologies have always arrived with a mixture of possibility and fear. Railways, electric light, telephones, automobiles, television, computers, and the internet all disrupted the world people knew. Many of the concerns they raised were valid. But the deepest changes were rarely limited to what the technology itself could do.

The automobile didn't simply replace the horse, it reorganized cities, work, infrastructure, commerce, and everyday life.

I believe AI may represent a similar threshold.

Most current conversations focus on first-order questions:

- Will AI replace jobs?

- Will people stop thinking?

- Will truth become harder to find?

- Will AI become dangerous?

These questions matter. But they may not be the whole story. The deeper question I explore here is:

What happens when human thinking gains a new environment in which to unfold?

Many leaders, founders, researchers, advisors, and changemakers are not short of intelligence or ideas. They are short of cognitive room. They are trying to hold complexity, relationships, competing needs, history, uncertainty, and possibility all at once.

Used carefully, AI can become a place to externalize that complexity. It can help us hold multiple threads, identify patterns, test assumptions, translate across disciplines, and see the structure of what we are carrying.

The purpose isn't to hand our thinking over to a machine, it is to create more room for human judgment, discernment, connection, and action.

This is the thinking behind AI as a Thinking Partner, my six-week small-group course for people working with real complexity. The course is not primarily about prompts, software, or productivity. It is a practice for learning how to use AI to:

- externalize difficult or unfinished thinking;

- find patterns within complex material;

- explore questions without rushing toward answers;

- pressure-test decisions and assumptions;

- translate ideas into useful structures;

and develop a personal way of working with AI that strengthens human agency.

I am currently gathering interest for upcoming cohorts. Learn more through the link in the episode description, or reply and tell me about the complexity, change, or possibility you are trying to hold.

Perhaps the future will not be shaped only by those who learn how to make AI produce more. Perhaps it will also be shaped by those who learn how to create more room.Learn more here: https://notes.theaperturefield.com/s/ai-as-a-thinking-partner

What if purpose is not something we find, but something that becomes available when our lives align with who we are?

In this essay, I explore the difference between purpose as self-sacrifice and purpose as coherent participation. For a long time, I confused being useful with reducing my own ability to simply be in service of something greater. But I’m beginning to wonder whether that frame is backwards.

Perhaps our deeper work is not to become heroic, indispensable, or sacrificial, but to let the pattern of our living come into alignment with the pattern of our being.

Through the lens of the aperture, this piece reflects on clarity, coherence, availability, and what it means to participate in the evolution of a system without distorting ourselves in the process.

What makes a neighbourhood?

Through reflections on three very different communities (a prairie farming town, Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, and life in a dense urban neighbourhood) I explore how community changes as the places we live change.

As our cities evolve, so do the ways we connect, belong, and care for one another. Perhaps the greatest challenge of our time is learning to listen across different lived experiences while still finding ways to build community together.

I’d love to hear your own experiences: What makes a neighbourhood feel like home to you?The full essay can be found on Substack --> notes.theaperturefield.com

I recently found myself reflecting on one of my earliest attempts at empathy.

As a child, I once gave my younger sister a birthday gift that consisted of the contents of my bedside drawer: a worn charm necklace, a collection of charms, and some fake money. I was thrilled with my own thoughtfulness. She was… less impressed.

Looking back, I’ve come to realize that the lesson wasn’t about gift-giving. It was about perspective. At that age, I was trying to care for someone else using the only map I had available: my own.

Over time, I learned to understand other people’s worlds more deeply. I became fascinated with empathy, relationships, and the ways people make sense of their experiences. Later, Carl Jung’s work introduced another layer: the idea that our strongest reactions often contain information about ourselves.

But eventually I discovered that understanding myself wasn’t enough either.

In this episode, I explore the relationship between empathy, projection, shadow work, trauma, and boundaries. I share why I think many discussions of projection have become overly simplified, and why true integration may require holding three things at once:

1) My reaction contains information about me.

2) Their behaviour contains information about them.

3) The interaction contains information about the relationship.

We often talk about healing as learning to understand ourselves. We sometimes talk about compassion as learning to understand others. But perhaps maturity asks something more difficult: learning to hold both simultaneously.

Topics explored:

- Childhood lessons in empathy- Carl Jung and projection- Shadow work beyond simple projection- Trauma and emotional triggers- Restoring dimensionality in relationships- Compassion without self-abandonment- Boundaries rooted in understanding rather than condemnation

A reflection on what happens when we stop asking only, “What’s wrong with them?” or “What’s wrong with me?” and begin asking what the relationship itself might be trying to show us.