On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“It’s very funny to me that the dominant Twentieth Century conception of AI was a slightly awkward nerd with an inhuman mastery of facts and logic, when what we actually got is smooth-talking bullshit artists who can’t do eighth-grade math.” —Adi Robertson

“ChatGPT gets treated like technological magic, but that ignores the humans behind the curtain that make it function. OpenAI paid Sama to hire Kenyan workers at $1.32 to $2 an hour to review ‘child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest’ content. Their work made the tool less toxic, but left them mentally scarred. The company ended the contract when they found out TIME was digging into their practices”. —Paris Marx

“There is no such thing as a ‘job creator’. There are employers, who hire employees, *because they need them*. And then employers pay the employees less than the value they generate. That’s the system. How did we get to the point at which people behave as if the wealthy are giving a gift to working people? I realize it’s not a new attitude, but it remains proudly f’d up.” —Mark Sumner

Increasing ventilation reduces SARS-CoV-2 airborne transmission in schools

For classrooms equipped with mechanical ventilation systems, the relative risk of infection of students decreased at least by 74% compared with a classroom with only natural ventilation, reaching values of at least 80% for ventilation rates >10 L s−1 student−1. From the regression analysis we obtained a relative risk reduction in the range 12%15% for each additional unit of ventilation rate per person. The results also allowed to validate a recently developed predictive theoretical approach able to estimate the SARS-CoV-2 risk of infection of susceptible individuals via the airborne transmission route. We need mechanical ventilation systems to protect students in classrooms from airborne transmission; the protection is greater if ventilation rates higher than the rate needed to ensure indoor air quality (>10 L s−1 student−1) are adopted.

“I’ve been repeatedly sharing this surveillance capitalism graphic because the bird app drama is revealing the business model, whose extractive processes have second and third-order impacts on users, their behaviors towards each other, and the environments they occupy as data citizens.

Image is by Shoshana Zuboff demonstrating the discovery of markets for behavioral surplus (i.e. attention)

The lack of industrialized mechanization at scale produces a radically different user experience.”—Sampath Pānini

“Surveillance capitalism begins with the discovery of behavioral surplus. More behavioral data are rendered than required for service improvements. This surplus feeds machine intelligence – the new means of production – that fabricates predictions of user behavior. These products are sold to business customers in new behavioral futures markets. The Behavioral Value Reinvestment Cycle is subordinated to this new logic.” —Shoshana Zuboff

Are we moving into a post-job economy? Can the concept of the job continue to be the primary way that people work? Building ways to constantly change roles can be one way to get rid of the standardized job, which has decreasing usefulness in a creative, networked AI-assisted economy. We should be preempting automation by identifying what routine work should be automated as quickly as possible, so that people can focus on what machines cannot do — being curious, creative, empathetic, passionate, and humourous.

One area of dwindling jobs is at the entry level. This creates a challenge for career development. It is difficult to start as a highly skilled worker, especially since our academic institutions focus on knowledge acquisition and provide very little skill development. Standardized curricula are useless in developing those skills listed above that machines cannot do. Standardization is the enemy of creativity.

The latest push to automate work is targeted at human communication, specifically writing , the most talked-about being ChatGPT. Derek Thompson, in The Atlantic,  thinks that even creativity will not save jobs from AI, “But you don’t need a wild imagination to see that the future cracked open by these technologies is full of awful and awesome possibilities.” This led me to advise — in GPT-3 through a glass darkly —  that if you are early in your career, it may be best not to specialize but develop several complementary skills — in the sciences AND the humanities — including writing.

Dave Cormier sees a major shift in human work coming through these ‘autotuning’ tools that give everyone that capability of sounding or looking like an expert.

“The real danger is not to people who are experts in their fields. Super experts in every field will continue to do what they have always done. All of us, however, are novices in almost everything we do. Most of us will never be experts in anything. The vast majority of the human experience of learning about something is done at the novice level.

That experience is about to be autotuned.”

—ChatGPT search – Autotune for knowledge

Nobody knows how these technologies will continue to develop, be used, and most likely misused. But like many other technologies — spreadsheets, the web, search engines — they will almost certainly have an impact on how we work with each other. At this time we do not need more ChatGPT experts. What we need are people who can see these technologies in the context of human work. We need more ‘what-if’ questions to be asked. What if basic skills are auto-tuned?

Writing my essays at university was always a painful process. We were still allowed to write them, though more professors were requiring essays to be submitted typed. My essays were never good because I often left them to the last minute and hand-writing a better version was just too much time and effort. As much as I loved reading and new ideas, I was not a good writer.

A decade later I went to graduate school and word processors were widely available. I still could not type but at least I could peck away at several versions of an essay before submitting it. My writing got a bit better. David Weinberger recounts the impact of the word processor on his writing.

In any case, word processing profoundly changed not only how I write, but how I think, since I think by writing. Having a fluid medium lowers the cost of trying out ideas, but also makes it easy for me to change the structure of my thoughts, and since thinking is generally  about connecting ideas, and those connections almost always assume a structure that changes their meaning — not just a linear scroll of one-liners — word processing is a crucial piece of “scaffolding” (in Clark and Chalmer’s sense) for me and I suspect for most people.

In fact, I’ve come to recognize I am not a writer so much as a re-writer of my own words. —Joho the blog 2023-01-14

While the word processor had a significant impact on my writing, it was blogging that made the biggest difference. Blogging got me writing regularly and this place became a permanent record of my work — the good, the bad, & the stuff you will never read again. Like Weinberger, I have become a “re-writer of my own words”.

In ninety percent of everything is crap I said that in my Seek > Sense > Share framework, sensemaking is the most difficult to master. Much of my sense-making practice is posting half-baked ideas to this blog, which over time become books or presentations. My more polished writing is not a “brute force attack” [as Justin Murphy suggested in PKM is Bullshit], but rather an exercise informed through consistent blogging.

I often use this quote to show that the road to mastery is never-ending.

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1962) The Wild Years

While it is not about the technology, I must give credit to word processors and blogging software for making my transition to a professional writer. I would never have been able to do this by hand or even on a typewriter.

The following opinion article was published this weekend in local newspapers — Telegraph Journal, Times & Transcript, & Daily Gleaner.

Education changes: ‘like fixing a plane in flight’

By Harold Jarche

Politicians constantly tinker with our public education system because it is designed without a solid foundation, just a series of cobbled-together initiatives based on whatever was in vogue at the time.

I participated in my first protest at the legislature in 2008 when the government of the day cancelled the early immersion program. Gaining a second language is one of the few useful skills that students can develop and keep long after they have memorized and forgotten useless data for most academic subjects. I did not want to lose this potential for our children.

If you do not speak more than one language it is difficult to understand the richness of thought that bilingualism brings. It is not another subject area of expertise. It is a different way of understanding the world.

The current provincial government is making a sweeping change to French immersion in the English language school system, replacing it with what amounts to French taught as just another subject.

I learned French as an adult and have worked in the language in Canada, Europe, and Africa. Our children were in the province’s early French immersion program and both speak passable French. So I have seen the success of the existing program, even though it has areas that could be improved, such as having only native speakers as teachers. When there is only one person to model on, it must be a native speaker, as the Berlitz school understands.

Moving away from intense use of French for about 40 per cent of anglophone students to less French for all students may seem more democratic, but it misses the objectives of bilingualism. Instead of almost half of students with the potential to work or serve in French we will have almost all graduates without a mastery of French. How much will they remember after graduation?

An important moment in my learning of French – after 13 weeks of immersion in Québec, and one hour per day at university for four years – was when I started dreaming in the language while working in a francophone military unit. I hope many anglophone students can have a similar experience some day.

Real learning or language acquisition happens below the level of conscious activity. This is why immersion can be highly efficient – learners can focus on doing other useful tasks without explicit reference to the target language. It’s a true case of learning by doing. I started dreaming in French only when I was working in French.

So why is the government changing this major educational policy? First of all, we cannot lay all the blame on this government, though this new approach is being ramrodded down the system with little thought. It is also doubtful there will be enough teachers available. It is highly unlikely there are enough native French speakers in the anglophone system.

This initiative seems to be driven by a need for the government to be seen taking action, under the guise of opening French ‘immersion’ to all students. But in the name of equality we will likely get many fewer graduates able to actually work in their second language. This will appease all those who see bilingualism as an elite prerogative used against the majority anglophone population.

There is no foundational methodology upon which public education is based. One cannot go back to first principles to see if a new approach adheres to the tenets of education because there are none. Education has always been whatever the experts think should be taught.
Is education as socialization our priority? What about education as a quest for truth, or education as the realization of individual potential? It cannot be all three. Public education has become all things to all people and that makes it an excellent political football.

The minister of education is using his powers to change the curriculum and one group of parents feels bullied — those who may be perceived as having their children in the ‘elite’ early immersion program. Others, who may have felt threatened by the perceived dominance of French culture and language feel more empowered. No matter what happens, someone will feel like the victim at the end of this.

Basically, standardized curriculum is the confinement of the human experience. It is a blunt tool that winds up bullying someone. It’s time to throw this tool away, but first we have to ask why we’re using it in the first place. That is the job of our professional educators who should be providing some leadership.

Nobody can take the government to task on first principles when they do not exist. Much of the blame lies with the professionals managing the system. They have handed over this cobbled-together system to each successive government to do their political whims. And so it will continue.

In the short term, this change will be a challenge for teachers. While what are called ‘core’ subjects will be in English, a new curriculum will have to be developed for the French language activities. How much time and assistance will teachers get? How will parents understand the new system and learn how best to help their children? There is no other program like this so schools cannot even find existing good practices to pass on. They will all have to learn and work at the same. It will be like repairing a plane in mid flight.

I do not think this new approach to French language instruction will be a success but I am also certain that future governments will continue to tinker with public education. The losers will be students graduating without the richness of a second language.

TJNEWS 2022-01-14

Previous blog posts on the topic of public education

First, we kill the curriculum (2008)

Immersed in New Brunswick (2008)

Learning in NB (2012)

Our education system stumbles into the future (2014)

In the book, Only Humans Need Apply (2016), the authors identify five ways that people can work with machines. They call it ‘stepping’. We are seeing an increasing need to do what they call ‘stepping in’ or using machines [and software] to augment work. In GPT-3 through a glass darkly I used the McLuhans’ media tetrad to examine this form of machine learning, which is all over the media today.

GPT-3

• Extends each voice & mimics creativity
• Obsolesces copy-writing and essays so that human insight becomes a luxury
• Retrieves the polymaths of the European Renaissance so that the best writers must be multi-talented to earn a living
• Reverses into mass deception and provides answers without real questions behind them^{see quote below}

We may be in a ‘golden age’ of AI, as many have claimed. But we are also in a golden age of grifters and Potemkin inventions and aphoristic nincompoops posing as techno-oracles. —Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 2022-12-01

For many years I have promoted the development of human skills and not trying to compete with computers and machines. They are better than us with their constant diligence, compliance with rules, perseverance, and brute intelligence. I still think we should focus human work on curiosity, cooperation, sensemaking, and novel thinking, among many other human talents. But I am also seeing a need to add a new important skill — stepping with the machines.

Machine assistance is coming to workplace near you. Perhaps you do not need to use ChatGPT or DallE2 at this time but we should all understand what machine learning is, and isn’t. For example, some form of machine learning will be coming to Microsoft’s Office Suite very soon — Microsoft is adding OpenAI writing tech to Office.

An understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of a tool like ChatGPT becomes critical when we are using its outputs, or when policies or decisions are based on these outputs. Stephen Wolfram has written a clear contrast and comparison between ChatGPT and Wolfram|Alpha. He shows examples of ChatGPT getting simple calculations like distances between cities or the size of countries — wrong. He suggests that the two types of processing can be used together.

Machine learning is a powerful method, and particularly over the past decade, it’s had some remarkable successes—of which ChatGPT is the latest … But the results are essentially never “perfect”. Maybe something works well 95% of the time. But try as one might, the other 5% remains elusive. For some purposes one might consider this a failure. But the key point is that there are often all sorts of important use cases for which 95% is “good enough”. Maybe it’s because the output is something where there isn’t really a “right answer” anyway. Maybe it’s because one’s just trying to surface possibilities that a human—or a systematic algorithm—will then pick from or refine. —Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT

Anyone affected by these technologies needs to understand their basic functions and their underlying models. These tools will be thrust into our workplaces very soon. So let’s step-in to working with machine learning but with a clear understanding of who needs to be in charge — humans.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published a recent issue on misinformation and disinformation in Canada. Here are some of the highlights.

Disinformation: New tools, same poison

Before it was called public relations, it was called propaganda. Many of the people who built the modern PR industry got their start in the Committee on Public Information, the propaganda arm of the American government, which aimed to sell the deeply unpopular First World War to the American public. Among other tactics, the CPI pioneered the use of what we would now recognize as “influencers” in a program called the “four-minute men” in which they recruited community leaders to show up to parties, silent film screenings, and community events to give short speeches in favour of the war … While the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses,” as Edward Bernays put it, used to be the confines of a small number of powerful individuals, that is no longer the case. Such tactics—which have always been used to foment violence, as seen in their origins in WWI—are now widely accessible through tech companies … From John D. Rockefeller to Donald Trump, disinformation has always been a tool the powerful use to protect themselves. The tactics may have changed, but the poison remains the same. —The Monitor 2023-01-05

Canada can’t be complacent about threats to our democracy

Even more worrying, populist communication from mainstream political actors is becoming more commonplace and there seems to be an increasing willingness by the Conservative Party of Canada and its newly minted leader, Pierre Poilievre, to peddle misinformation. Poilievre has falsely accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of planning to tax pickup trucks as well as claiming that the Trudeau government would be banning nitrogen-based fertilizers for agricultural purposes … Poilievre is not alone in providing a platform to conspiracy theories. In a 30-minute live broadcast on Facebook earlier this spring, then-leadership candidate and now the Government Critic for Infrastructure and Communities, Leslyn Lewis, alleged that Prime Minister Trudeau was entering Canada into an international pandemic treaty governed by the World Health Organization (WHO) that would restrict Canadians’ travel and medication choices, suspend the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and would ultimately pave the way for a global government.

Additionally, both Poilievre and People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier have singled out journalists by name and journalistic outlet, further contributing to Canadians’ growing distrust in the mainstream media. —The Monitor 2023-01-05

They came to my city

In my community of Peterborough, there have been ongoing protests since 2020. These protests ostensibly started in response to public health related “lockdowns” and “mandates” but have continued even after these government policies were lifted. In a discussion between members on a local anti-vaxx Facebook group, someone commented: “we want to keep protesting, but the mandates have been lifted, so what should we protest now lol” [sic]. Such comments indicate a rampant opposition to democratically elected governments and a proliferation of general misinformation … The far-right nationalists behind the various “events” appear to be seeking notoriety and recognition, and nothing more. Misinformation through ignorance, and disinformation through malice, will continue to plague our communities and country until there are meaningful repercussions for the perpetrators. A lack of informed, educated, civil discourse in any society is a death knell to democracy and social cohesion. No longer can we ignore the deeply embedded problems in our society; the problematic behaviours—such as hurling abuse at elected officials and public servants—that continue to escalate. —The Monitor 2023-01-05

Progressive politics and the age of misinformation

Progressive leaders must now craft narratives that say, “yes we recognize the way mainstream institutions, whether government or the media are failing you, but we also still need these things, so here is our plan for how to revitalize them.”

Balancing a righteous anger at the imperfections of our system with a hopeful call to still engage is not an easy feat, but it has to be done … Probably it’s fair to say that in the face of uncertainty the best thing to do is to try and test as many approaches as possible. The work won’t be easy. But the alternative is accepting a ‘post-Truth’ society. A new age of misinformation where rage and polarization will only increase. An age where building cross-sectoral coalitions that can deliver meaningful progressive change will become increasingly elusive.

To avoid that, there is no option but to tackle the rise and origins of misinformation head on. —The Monitor 2023-01-05

Bots, trolls, deception and the hacking of the human brain

A hashtag like #TrudeauMustGo, for example, has been routinely amplified by adversarial actors and is meant to form an identity marker for an “in” group. But its use is also meant to form a subconscious cue in both the “us” group and the “them” groups, thus exploiting social cognition.

While bots may have been used to trend hashtags like this, getting authentic users to do the same is the goal. As the entrenchment of the echo chambers around drivers of hashtags like #TrudeauMustGo increases, so, too, does the real-world hate and ultimately, the real-world death threats.

Adversarial actors both exploit and hack the social cognition that results from the messaging and feedback loops in these echo chambers … By giving the impression that many others feel the same way and believe the same things, it has a powerful effect on human psychology. In other words, it’s a system designed to hack human psychology and hijack the emotional response system of the brain, to give people a sense that they are right, they are supported and that they belong. —The Monitor 2023-01-05

Further reading on this blog

there is a crack in everything

algorithmic amplification

debunking handbook

countering populism

What is the Tragedy of the Commons?

In economics and in an ecological context, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action in case there are too many users related to the available resources. —Wikipedia

But the idea of the tragedy of the commons was disproved by Elinor Ostrom even before it was published by Garrett Hardin in 1968.

The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions. —The miracle of the commons

Yet the story continues and the tragedy of the commons continues to be quoted and taught.

If academic citation indexes are any guide, the tragedy of the commons remains far better known to scholars than any of Ostrom’s findings. It continues to be taught, uncritically, to high-school students in environmental science courses. It’s used as a justification by those who support severe restrictions on human immigration and reproduction. Even more frequently, it’s casually invoked as an explanation for human failures: even the eminent biologist E O Wilson, in his book Half-Earth (2016), describes the weakness of international climate-change agreements and the ongoing depletion of ocean resources as tragedies of the commons, without making clear that such tragedies can be averted. —The miracle of the commons

I have previously discussed the power of story, and this is an example of how certain simple and easily understandable ideas can pervade society, even when they are wrong. I concluded that, given the power of stories, a critical literacy skill today is the ability to deconstruct them. Thinking critically about how a story affects us emotionally is important before hitting the Tweet or Post buttons that are now so handy on our ‘smart’ devices. We have to constantly confront the post-truth machines.

The medium is the message, and the medium of story is able to route around our rational brain and go straight to our most primitive feelings. We need to become story skeptics so all those emerging master storytellers on social media platforms do not lead us astray.

Today we need sense-makers even more than storytellers because stories can hijack our minds. We are more open to receiving stories than we are to understanding facts and logical arguments. First we have to make sense, and only then can we find unifying stories to help guide us.

Stories that fuel the constant doubt and outrage online only serve to distract us. Whose story wins will depend on how smart we are. Let’s avoid the tragedy of the wrong stories.

We all need to be story skeptics in an age of pervasive media

Harvard Business Review described The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, as one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years. I reviewed mastery and models and showed how they still pertain to organizations 30 years later. I concluded that the challenge for learning professionals is to help organizations become learning organizations. It is also to master the new literacies of the network era and promote critical thinking, for ourselves and others. Questioning existing hierarchies is necessary to create the organizations of the future where power and authority are shared, based on mutual trust. The dominant organizational models need to become network-centric and learning-centric.

“Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization — the learning organization’s spiritual foundation.” ―Peter Senge (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

I later looked at shared vision and team learning as well as the fifth discipline that connects the other four — systems thinking. I suggested that organizations need to switch from short-term to long-term thinking about learning. Executives have to understand that learning is not something to get. People need time to master these skills, but they cannot do this in an organization where mistakes are not tolerated. People need to be able to share openly and this may work against existing performance management systems, most of which should be put in the dust bin anyway. Yes we can develop a shared vision for learning if we learn together.

The four disciplines of Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Shared Vision, and Team Learning must be in place before Systems Thinking can unify them. All of these disciplines are about learning — individually, as teams, and as an organization. Senge described Systems Thinking as, “A very deep and persistent commitment to ‘real learning.’” Only by actively engaging with our work and questioning our assumptions can groups of individuals, over time and through practice, become a learning organization.

“We will never transform the prevailing system of management without transforming our prevailing system of education. They are the same system.” ―Peter Senge (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

From a perspective that work is learning, and learning is the work, then it it becomes clear that both work and learning have to change for real organizational change and the potential to truly create learning organizations.

Image: Postcard by Red42

As the pandemic emerged in 2020 I sought credible information and advice first from institutions and authorities and later from a network of expertise — encouraged to do-your-own-research — in view of growing misinformation and disinformation, even from authorities like the CDC and WHO. I am not the only person to turn to a networked solution — Twitter pandemic list — for my sensemaking in this pandemic.

The People’s CDC is a networked alternative source of credible information that bypasses the corridors of institutional power.

What emerged was the People’s C.D.C.: a ragtag coalition of academics, doctors, activists, and artists who believe that the government has left them to fend for themselves against COVID-19. As governments, schools, and businesses have scaled back their COVID precautions, the members of the People’s C.D.C. have made it their mission to distribute information about the pandemic—what they see as real information, as opposed to what’s circulated by the actual C.D.C. They believe the C.D.C.’s data and guidelines have been distorted by powerful forces with vested interests in keeping people at work and keeping anxieties about the pandemic down. “The public has a right to a sound reading of the data that’s not influenced by politics and big business,” Fullilove said.

No one is in charge of the People’s C.D.C., and no one’s expertise is valued more than anyone else’s. The problems of “the pandemic and its response are rooted in hierarchical organizations,” Mary Jirmanus Saba, a filmmaker and one of the volunteers, told me … The organization has nearly twenty thousand followers on Instagram, and it prides itself as a resource for various groups, including people who are immunocompromised and want to find a way to protect themselves and activists who are trying to lobby their local government for more COVID restrictions. —The New Yorker 2022-12-28

A major factor in the decreasing effectiveness of our institutions is the power of the market form, currently financial capitalism.  Dee Hock, founder of Visa, saw the inability of our organizational structures — e,g. “Governments that cannot govern, and
Economies that cannot economize.” — to deal with this pandemic.

“The Covid-19 virus emerged and has spread very chaordicaly, and clearly illustrates the futility of our simplistic, mechanistic, command and control concepts of organization when it comes to managing an ever more diverse, complex society.” —Dee Hock 2020-06-15

Dr. Henry Madison put it even more clearly. Our market economy cares not one whit about public health.

Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have a public. Only individual consumers. No geographical or ethnic or any other identifier for people, except as customers of a global market … The reason modern governments decided to ‘live with’ a lethal virus, is because that’s what they’ve always done, when it was other countries. And now the globalised market (as they see it) is reaching its apogee, the distinctions between rich and poor countries are reproduced *within* rich countries as well … Look at how often conservatives say ‘move to where the jobs are’, and how transport infrastructure is one of their greatest passions. The hyper-mobilisation of humanity, nobody should ‘work from home’, because their home now is increasingly their job. Their identity is as an employee. You’ll be treated like a citizen in a developing country now, because to the market economy, that is in fact what you are. What all of us are. This is the endgame of neoliberal and libertarian politics, where it was always going to arrive. —Twitter 2022-06-02

The People’s CDC has shown the emerging power of a networked commons. So has the growing participation on Mastodon, moving online conversations from single owner platforms to collective covenants. Let’s hope the cracks in the market economy will let in more light.

Cover — Perpetual Beta 2022

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. Since 2009 many of these finds have come via Twitter. Given the current state of chaos on that platform — whither Twitter — more of my finds will be coming from Mastodon, as all are today. Tomorrow, 31 December, marks 15 years on Twitter for me, and it may be my last anniversary.

“One of my favorite Engelbart sayings might relate to the ‘Mastodon is too confusing to learn’ claim. Paraphrasing, he said that if ease of use was the ultimate aim for a tool, the bicycle would never have evolved beyond the tricycle.” —@HRheingold

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” —@DuneQuotes [a bot]

“Just tried ChatGPT. I asked it a series of specific Qs about areas I’ve studied in detail.

On all Qs, it gave answers that are plausible sounding but wrong. Not obviously wrong: wrong in subtle ways that need deep domain knowledge to grasp.

The ways humans will be practically misled by this kind of tech if trusted with, say, doling out medical, legal or business advice is horrific.

Letting this tech loose on the world will further destroy search engines that are already riddled with SEO BS.” —@TomMorris

“Things just seem so crazy today. I mean, can you imagine say in the 1930s if the richest automobile executive in America was also a media owner who used his platform to encourage anti-Semitism and allied himself with a foreign dictator waging a territory-expansion war in Europe?” —@RubenBolling

PBS — Henry Ford’s Anti-semitism

In 1918, Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. A year and a half later, he began publishing a series of articles that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting America. The series ran in the following 91 issues. Ford bound the articles into four volumes titled “The International Jew,” and distributed half a million copies to his vast network of dealerships and subscribers. The rhetoric was not unusual for its content, as much as its scope. As one of the most famous men in America, Henry Ford legitimized ideas that otherwise may have been given little authority.

Peering into the Invisible Present via @WillRichardson

Multi-decadal time-series of field observations are among the rarest and most valuable artifacts in ecosystem science because they help to overcome a peculiar weakness in our ability to perceive and interpret the natural world. Humans have developed powerful methods for reconstructing events in the distant past, from the birth of a galaxy to mass extinctions in the Devonian. We have built instruments that can parse the present down to the zeptosecond. But when it comes to the modest timescale of our own lifespans, we are like near-sighted moles.

Weren’t there more birds in this meadow when we were kids?

Doesn’t it seem like spring is a lot rainier than it used to be?

Are you sure it’s safe to eat fish from this river?

The Age of Social Media is Ending via @CelineSchill

If Twitter does fail, either because its revenue collapses or because the massive debt that Musk’s deal imposes crushes it, the result could help accelerate social media’s decline more generally. It would also be tragic for those who have come to rely on these platforms, for news or community or conversation or mere compulsion. Such is the hypocrisy of this moment. The rush of likes and shares felt so good because the age of zero comments felt so lonely—and upscaling killed the alternatives a long time ago, besides.

The Paradox of Open via @JosieFraser

This is our core belief at Open Future: Europe has a unique opportunity to restore part of the original promise of the internet. It is here that policymakers and key stakeholders have the ambition to build an internet for the people – one that can provide the basis for a more just and democratic society.

There is much debate today – in Europe and beyond – about building shared digital public spaces that can compete with the dominant, corporate walled gardens that harm the internet and its users.

Mastodon Ridge, Nova Scotia

Social learning is a regular topic on this blog and I gave a presentation on the power of social learning earlier this year. The following quotes show how learning from and with each other is a critical part of human and societal development.

“Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” —Albert Bandura 1977

“As part of a social network, we transcend ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger. We are connected.” —Katherine Giuffre 2010

“Culture is one of those terms that has lots of different meanings, and people have used it lots of different ways. In the intellectual tradition that I’m building on, culture is information stored in people’s heads that gets there by some kind of social learning—so imitation, teaching, any kind of observational learning.” —Joseph Henrich 2012

“Once humans evolved to be capable of teaching and learning, they developed a parallel evolutionary strand, cultural evolution, side by side with genetic. These two strands intersect repeatedly in many places and times. Each leaves its mark on the other.” —Nicholas Christakis 2019

“We’re a cultural species. More than any other animal, we depend on learning from others. Cultural evolution occurs alongside. You can look at a human and study the genes that they’ve inherited from their parents … but that person has also acquired beliefs, values, practices, norms, languages and ways of thinking from their parents and other members of their community. All of this affects the behavior of people. Culture – like genes – accumulates over generations.” —Joseph Henrich 2022

Social learning is becoming more important today. As our work becomes more complex, we need faster feedback loops to stay on top of it. It is becoming more difficult to make sense of the world by ourselves. Understanding issues that affect our lives takes significant time and effort, such as the pandemic or the climate crisis. We need context to understand complex issues and we can get this from those we are connected to.

The reach and depth of our connections become critical in helping us make sense of our environment and to solve problems. With social learning, everyone contributes to collective knowledge and this in turn can make organizations and society more effective in dealing with problems. But if we don’t share, we can’t collectively learn. The key is that knowledge flows at the speed of trust.

This is where personal knowledge mastery comes in. As knowledge workers or citizens, PKM is our part of the social learning contract. Without effective PKM — seeking, sensemaking, and sharing knowledge — at the individual level, social learning becomes social noise.

In summary:

Technology has enabled communication networks on a worldwide scale, so that systemic changes are felt almost immediately.  The borderless and liquid transmission of information can make for a global oral cacophony. Improving our reaction times requires better feedback loops. Our social networks can play that role.

In this connected environment we need to know who to ask for advice.  Usually we turn to our friends and trusted colleagues for advice. But this group may not have the requisite diversity to help us make informed decisions. So it becomes essential that we start sharing experiences to build trust. Developing interpersonal relationships takes time and effort, and the time to start is now.

Q. When is the best time to plant a tree? A. Twenty years ago

Q. When is the next best time to plant a tree? A. Today

Start planting …

Source: the social sweet spot

The robber barons of the 21st century are the platform owners. They have combined the power of network effects with a 20th century corporate capitalist, winner-takes-all approach. Amazon is choking the book publishing industry, Google is dominating advertising, and telecommunications companies are using their control of the pipes to directly compete with service providers. Now Uber is going after the taxi and car rental industries, getting to be larger than established rental car brands, with none of the overhead. All of these companies provide initially good services to customers. But over time their monopolistic tendencies kill competition and the entire ecosystem of innovation.

I wrote the above paragraph is 2014, not mentioning Twitter, which until recently was where journalists, institutions, and governments shared what was happening and fed the algorithms that showed what was trending. In some ways Twitter was the pulse of the world and helped drive the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and many other causes. It was the main source of visitors to this blog when I deleted Google Analytics several years ago, as a way to ignore vanity metrics.

In 2015 I defined platform capitalism as  four contributing factors, which when combined, create a perfect opportunity for maximum extraction from the free work of the many.

1. A platform — a web site and/or mobile application.
2. A critical mass of users — upwardly mobile knowledge workers, especially those in Silicon Valley or the tech sector.
3. Desperate service providers — people with no ability to organize due to weak or non-existing trade unions in their field, who see opportunities for better cash flow.
4. Lack of regulations and oversight — bureaucracies that either cannot keep up with technology advances, or political leadership that condones poor working conditions in the name of progress.

This is pretty well what Twitter became and those who built reputations on the platform are still loath to leave, in spite of what Musk is doing, such as suspending accounts of journalists and banning links to other sites, such as Mastodon.

Warning when accessing Harold’s Mastodon profile from Twitter

Elon Musk’s antics at Twitter have been a wake-up call to many. They are beginning to realize that the platform monopolists and the surveillance capitalists are at war with us — citizens of the world. They have engaged some of the best minds — from psychology, cognitive science, usability, addiction research, human factors engineering, anthropology, etc. — so that our evolutionary developed cognitive biases are used against us to sell us more crap. It’s becoming obvious that monopolies are not good for democracy.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” —Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)

I have recommended that we can and should support global social movements that promote human values. Educators should focus on developing social media literacies so that all citizens can be active and engaged online. Sense-making and media literacy skills are critical for everyone. We can also build better models to replace the current ones. Why should we replicate market capitalism with its clone, platform capitalism, when platform cooperativism is a better model for humanity? In this world of global digital networks, we can be the media.

Mastodon — an open and federated protocol/covenant — may be part of the way to a more cooperative web. Mastodon is not owned by anyone and cannot be autocratically controlled like Twitter.

“We contrast Mastodon’s covenantal federalism platform governance with the contractual form used by corporate social media. We also use covenantal federalist theory to explain how Mastodon’s users, administrators, and developers justify revoking or denying membership in the federation. In doing so, this study sheds new light on the innovations in platform governance that go beyond the corporate/alt-right platform dichotomy” —The Digital Covenant: Non-Centralized Platform Governance on the Mastodon Social Network

I think we are at an exciting juncture in the history of the web. Musk — with his behaviour verging on sociopathic — has shown the world the inherent anti-democratic nature of consumer social media platforms.  He has done us all a favour by giving a loud and clear wake-up call. Already we seeing governments move to Mastodon as well as one of the largest associations in the world — ACM — providing free accounts to anyone. Cooperation is finally rising and pushing back the free-for-all of market capitalism.

While institutions and now markets have dominated society for centuries, the emerging network form retrieves the need for cooperation in order to earn a reputation, the new power to influence others, beyond competition, hierarchy, and kinship.

Innovation comes from the edge, almost never from the centre, I wrote in moving to the edges (2014). But I noted that our inherent —  human — need for a sense of belonging can keep us in the centre and detract us from thinking critically and questioning the assumptions of our existing structures. While some organizations may have the software networks in place for knowledge sharing to and from the edges, most do not give time and space for deep thinking, as I mentioned in my last post on meaningful work. This certainly slows any insights from the edges getting to the centre.

Deep thinking often comes from those periods when we are not distracted by our to-do lists or running from meeting to meeting. Adam Kahane remarked that, “almost everything I’ve learned is through the disciplined examination of my experience” as well as an approach of, “looking for disconfirming data, as Charles Darwin did”. This is not possible with a continuously overflowing inbox. My colleague and friend Jay Cross understood this.

“Visualize the workflow of a physical job: produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce.

Now visualize the workflow of a creative knowledge worker: nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, flash of brilliance, nothing, nothing, nothing.”
—Jay Cross

‘Nothing’ time is for deep thinking.

I was introduced to Strategic Doing^TM in 2012. Once Strategic Doing: 10 skills for leadership was published, I saw the model as a practical way to connect learning, innovation, and getting things done in the complex domain, as well as a way of getting to meta-modernity. It helps connect to the edges by identifying hidden assets and constantly reviewing progress and making course corrections.

I later described Strategic Doing as agile sensemaking. An approach of strategic doing through agile sensemaking maintains awareness of the larger context, connects and promotes communities where alternatives can be tested, and takes informed action from a servant leadership perspective of honesty & humility.

New initiatives are developed in an ‘agile’ fashion, using Strategic Doing skills  — #8) Creating a short-term action plan in which everyone takes a small step, #9) Meeting every 30 days to review progress, adjust, and plan for the next 30 days. But to begin, we have to build and protect safe spaces between organizations and communities, which is Strategic Doing Skill #1).

More recently, Ed Morrison, author of Strategic Doing, posted about three types of networks.

Image: Ed Morrison

I developed the agile sensemaking framework inspired by Lilia Efimova, Strategic Doing, Asset-based Community Development, and the Cynefin framework. It reflects Ed’s image above but got me thinking about how and where does innovation really happen. If it’s on the edges, then the two boundaries that overlap communities would be likely places.

Steve Borgatti defined two types of innovation networks based on the need for either individual creativity or interactive creativity. Individual creativity is what we might gain from the diverse thinking in our social networks. Interactive creativity, on the other hand, requires closer relationships and affinity. This is what we might find in our collaborative work teams in order to get things done. Radical innovative ideas can come through the loose structural holes of our social networks, but to get things done, we need more structure that connects us to work teams focused on creating something new.

To innovate together, we need to find more focused collaborators than just those who discuss ideas in their wider social networks. The challenge is getting individual creativity focused enough to enable interactive creativity. An adaptive innovation practice would enable a constant flow between individual and interactive creativity. One individual does not make an innovation network but is a necessary component of interactive innovation. Putting the pieces together is what the 10 skills of Strategic Doing can enable.

1. Building a safe space for deep and focused conversations.

2. Using an appreciative question to frame your conversation.

3. Identifying the assets at your disposal, including the hidden ones.

4. Linking and leveraging your assets to create new opportunities.

5. Identifying a big opportunity where you can generate momentum.

6. Rewriting your opportunity as a strategic outcome with measurable characteristics.

7. Defining a small starting project to start moving toward your outcome.

8. Creating a short-term action plan in which everyone takes a small step.

9. Meeting every 30 days to review progress, adjust, and plan for the next 30 days.

10. Nudging, connecting, and promoting to reinforce your new habits of collaboration.

I have been using the tetrad (four sides) derived from Marshall & Eric McLuhan’s Laws of Media for several decades. I find it useful for examining emerging technologies, beyond the hype. For example, according to Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology at the University of Toronto, the Laws of Media state that every new medium (or technology in the broader sense of the word):

• extends a human property (the car extends the foot);

• obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);

• retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);

• flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis)

Here is what that tetrad could look like.

Recently there has been a lot of hype around OpenAI [another organization funded in part by Elon Musk] and especially tools like ChatGPT based on GPT-3 — “Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3; stylized GPT·3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. Given an initial text as prompt, it will produce text that continues the prompt.” With a limited set of inputs — such as write me a sonnet on operations research — ChatGPT can produce a credible looking result in seconds.

Source: @MikeTrick

Marshall McLuhan stated that, “At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.” We are currently surrounded by media at electric speed. GPT-3 is accelerating the production of most forms of writing. What it retrieves may tell us something about where it will go, as McLuhan noted that, “Retrieval always seems to provide the keynote or dominant mode of each tetrad, which may explain why it is often the most difficult of the four to discover.”

For example, here are some possible retrievals that are driven by social media that currently surround us.

1. Oral stories become borderless liquid narratives that effortless cross borders and continents.
2. Tribalism drives clan loyalties which can foster  identity politics — “Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.” —Marshall McLuhan, &  “tribalization will make our society vulnerable to information warfare” —David Ronfeldt
3. The pastoral impulse becomes the undoing of scientific knowledge such as the growing number of anti-vaxxers.
4. Story telling can degrade into the gossip column — “When a thing is current, it creates currency.” —Marshall McLuhan
5. The village square exponentially becomes the global village but also connects all of the village idiots.
6. The town crier gets hijacked into social media memes.
7. A new sense of kinship improves cooperation and emerges in the business world as artisans & guilds while peer-to-peer learning fosters apprenticeship and virtual friendships.

So I decided to look at GPT-3 from the perspective of the McLuhans’ media tetrad. Note that AI (artificial intelligence) in this case is mostly ML (machine learning).

GPT-3

• Extends each voice & mimics creativity
• Obsolesces copy-writing and essays so that human insight becomes a luxury
• Retrieves the polymaths of the European Renaissance so that best writers must be multi-talented to earn a living
• Reverses into mass deception and provides answers without real questions behind them^{see quote below}

We may be in a ‘golden age’ of AI, as many have claimed. But we are also in a golden age of grifters and Potemkin inventions and aphoristic nincompoops posing as techno-oracles. —Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 2022-12-01

If my interpretation of the Retrieval quadrant is correct, it will become much more difficult to be an average, or even above average, writer. Only the best will flourish. Perhaps we will see a rise a neo-generalists. If you are early in your career, it may be best not to specialize but develop several complementary skills — in the sciences AND the humanities — including writing.

“Yet we continue with a polemic today that can be traced back at least to the time of the Renaissance, evidenced by an artificial schism between the arts and the sciences … It is why the current advocacy of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the STEM subjects, by policy makers and funding bodies seems so misguided. They are essential, but so too is the study of the humanities … It is through the hybridization of and cross-pollination between such disciplines that we will arrive at solutions for our wicked problems.” —The Neo-generalist

Kourish Dini says that, “Mastery and meaningful work develop from guided play.” This is pretty well the direction behind my personal knowledge mastery framework and the notion of ‘half-baked ideas‘.

“There is an error in our focus on productivity. I may even be labeled as a productivity talking-head. I’ve more than likely made the error myself.

The error is that the focus should not be on productivity so much as it is on mastery.

Mastery is a process, a development over time for something you care about. That could be your family or that could be a craft.

This way, you choose the thing or things you are mastering and the remainder of your world is around supporting those. You don’t need to master everything, so much as take them to a point of being strong enough to support what you find meaningful.

Secondly, I strongly believe that mastery absolutely requires play.” —Being Productive 2022-12-05

The sad reality of many workplaces is that there is not only no time for half-baked ideas but neither is there time for even generalized sensemaking around the key issues facing the organization.

“Many organizations are stuck in an information dissemination rather than a sense-making approach to communication. I’m struck at how often it becomes clear that executives are spending precious time in long meetings, but don’t have a common understanding of the ‘thing’ they’re talking about – this leads to frustration, misalignment and often significant conflict.

The ability to do deep work has been dangerously curtailed. Every week I hear executives tell me that they have no time to think. Many have confided that they have teams of dozens of employees or more and don’t know what they do all day because the executive is barely keeping up with the crushing pressure of a non-stop overflowing inbox.” —WTF is going on?

Doing deep work requires time. It requires time for reflection. Many people found that working from home (or elsewhere) gave them more time for thinking and less stress from commuting. Meanwhile, in Canada we are seeing a move back in time, for more control and less time for sensemaking.

“Several senior bureaucrats in different departments who aren’t authorized to speak publicly expect Treasury Board to introduce a new order that would set the number of days public servants have to work at the office – widely speculated to be two or three days – and spell out conditions for exemptions. Details are still being finalized, but senior officials said earlier this week they were alerted the order could come as soon as this week. That now appears to have been pushed back.” —Policy Options 2022-12-08

If we don’t give back or take back time for sensemaking we will increasingly become less capable to face complex and chaotic challenges facing us. If those in charge of organizations do not enable deep work, workers need to take it back, whether through quiet quitting or active leaving. People are the means of production, period.

I use the personal knowledge mastery framework to help create ways to make sense of all the noise around us. Active and engaged citizens are our best hope for a better future.

Race Bannon sees AI (or really machine learning) changing many jobs, such as technical writing, in the near future.

“I believe within 5-10 years much of technical documentation will be written by AI. Certainly, the basic procedural stuff (Step 1, Step 2, and so on) will be written by AI, but even the contextual stuff surrounding the procedural documentation (use cases, examples, and implementation tips) will be written by AI eventually too.” —The Future of Technical Writing

In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson thinks that creativity will not save our jobs from AI.

We may be in a “golden age” of AI, as many have claimed. But we are also in a golden age of grifters and Potemkin inventions and aphoristic nincompoops posing as techno-oracles. The dawn of generative AI that I envision will not necessarily come to pass. So far, this technology hasn’t replaced any journalists, or created any best-selling books or video games, or designed some sparkling-water advertisement, much less invented a horrible new form of cancer. But you don’t need a wild imagination to see that the future cracked open by these technologies is full of awful and awesome possibilities. —The Atlantic 2022-12-01

It seems that machine learning is making many jobs that humans do at this time feel a bit obsolesced. In 2014 I wrote that preempting automation was necessary in all workplaces. I suggested that jobs and roles have to become more flexible and open to change and cannot stay tied to the concept of the ‘job‘ as the primary unit of work. Building ways to constantly change roles could be a small change to preempt automation. However, it requires a new way of looking at work, collecting good data, engaging workers in the process, and being transparent about it all. If AI (ML) is really here, we need to face it.

The future of work means stepping with the machines

The human work that emerges from mass automation will be increasingly complex and creative. This is a challenge for training and education systems run by any central authority. Standardized curricula are only effective when developing instruction to deal with complicated phenomena, where all the components are understandable and can be analyzed and mapped. Best practices and good practices can align easily with a curriculum. But in complex environments, emergent practices need to be developed while simultaneously engaging the problem.

Social learning then is the best process for groups of people to cooperate and learn with and from each other. As discourse replaces the centralized training authority, social learning in knowledge networks augments and even replaces training and education. This is how we stay ahead of the machines. Let’s make sure sure the future is not all it’s cracked up to be.

John Batelle notes that many of the thousands of people who were fired from or have left Twitter after Musk’s purchase of the company were women. He provides links to the profiles of 17 of these women.

“Twitter was probably the most intentionally open, accommodating, and thoughtful work culture the Valley has ever produced at scale. And it’s not a coincidence that a healthy percentage of Twitter’s senior executives were women. Nor is it a coincidence that nearly all of them have left. I started keeping a list of the extraordinary women I worked with over the past few years who have recently departed the company. And just for posterity, and perhaps for you all to add to, I present it here. Think about all the men cheering on Elon’s ‘Hardcore’ philosophy, who agree with him that the people below, and countless others, are unnecessary. Read through these names, click on their profiles, and ponder the roles they played in the nuanced ecosystem Twitter once was.” —John Batelle 2022-11-28

This strikes me as the last gasp of men, mostly white, trying to reassert their dominance by force. In 2017 I wrote that our future is networked and feminine and showed how leadership traits traditionally seen as more feminine, are those deemed to be the most important today — e.g. communicative, reasonable, flexible. I don’t think that any of these would be used to describe Elon Musk.

In bias thwarts innovation I stated that human systems thrive on variety and diversity and gender bias thwarts diversity. Innovation requires diversity because innovation is not so much about having ideas as it is about making connections. Men cannot connect the dots if they are only paying attention to half of them.

“What really matters is to mirror the diversity of the world we serve. We need more women … more humanities majors … more people of colour … more professionals coming from other jobs … in short, a much bigger diversity of viewpoints at all levels. We also need more network and co-construction across levels, as the old pyramidal system is no longer fit for purpose.” —Céline Schillinger

If we continue to ignore fifty percent of the population, what will happen in the near future? Will companies, countries, and societies with a gender power balance outpace patriarchal ones? Here is a lesson from the long past, when not enough brains led to the diminishing of collective knowledge.

“You start out with two genetically well-intermixed peoples. Tasmania’s actually connected to mainland Australia so it’s just a peninsula. Then about 10,000 years ago, the environment changes, it gets warmer and the Bass Strait floods, so this cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and it’s at that point that they begin to have this technological downturn. You can show that this is the kind of thing you’d expect if societies are like brains in the sense that they store information as a group and that when someone learns, they’re learning from the most successful member, and that information is being passed from different communities, and the larger the population, the more different minds you have working on the problem.

If your number of minds working on the problem gets small enough, you can actually begin to lose information. There’s a steady state level of information that depends on the size of your population and the interconnectedness. It also depends on the innovativeness of your individuals, but that has a relatively small effect compared to the effect of being well interconnected and having a large population.” –How Culture Drove Human Evolution

Research from Gallup showed that female managers are much more effective at driving engagement.

“Another stunning finding is that employees of female managers on average are at least 6 percentage points more engaged than those who work for a male manager. In fact, out of the 12 different questions Gallup uses to diagnose a person’s engagement, employees of female managers outscore male managers on 11 of those items.

Only one out of three workers has a female boss today, yet women leaders eclipse their male counterparts in many of the ways known to inspire high levels of commitment, initiative, and loyalty in 21st-century workers. They more consistently cultivate the potential in their people by creating challenging assignments. They praise and value people for their efforts and contributions. They take steps to foster a positive and cooperative work environment.” —FC 2015-04-29

Umair Haque sees the need for a universal mother to emerge to counter the dominant authoritarian father.

“Why do our societies feel so out of control? So imbalanced? Like they’re collapsing and crumbling before our very eyes? The reason is very simple, in one way. Too many authoritarian fathers — not enough universal mothers. Societies like America and Britain have long histories of empire building, which reflect cultures of authoritarian fatherhood. It’s no surprise that as the world became a little more powerful, and they became a little less powerful — they retreated into a desperate search for authoritarian fathers. Reagan … Bush … Trump. But Theresa May is Britain’s authoritarian father — not its mother — sternly commanding it, threatening it with terrible punishment, cracking the whip over it.” —Umair Haque 2019-01-16

Our optimal future is networked and feminine, despite Musk and many other authoritarians. The traditional political Right wants to go back to the Pre-modern (Institutional) Era — dogmatic, faith, truth — while the traditional political Left wants to stay in the Modern (Market) Era — doubting, science, facts. However, the best way ahead is toward a Meta-modern (Network) Era — seeking, knowledge, combining.

We need to cast-off our complicated and mechanistic approaches to governance and create a society that understands complexity. This is not through an authoritarian father figure but a universal mother figure focused on renewal. Creation is complex. Only mothers can give birth. Only they can create a better world.

I recently wrote — from platforms to covenants — that I firmly believe that open protocols connecting small pieces loosely joined is a better framework than any privately owned social media platform. Twitter was just too darned easy for many years. I am now connecting more on Mastodon though I have not mastered all of its functions. Mastodon is an open protocol and anyone can put up a server and connect to what is called the ‘fediverse’, a federated network of hosts using the protocol.

During the past decade I have used Twitter as an aid to learn about social networks on my personal knowledge mastery online workshops. As Twitter continues to not only crash and burn but reinstate accounts that promote hatred, I no longer wish to advocate for any use of the platform. I am still there, for now, as I am connected to so many friends and colleagues.

The current PKM workshop has several activities that require Twitter. As I change these activities I will also do a major update of the entire workshop. Mastodon will be used for social networking and a greater emphasis will be put on RSS and feed aggregators for managing information sources.

I added the topic of Fake News on the last workshop and will likely keep it. Other topics not on the current workshop may also be added and some removed. This workshop has always been in a state of perpetual beta.

• navigating complexity
• sparking curiosity
• intentionality

The challenge is not finding content, as I have almost 350 posts on PKMastery here. Rather, the challenge is developing appropriate activities that can guide participants on their sensemaking journeys. As one participant wrote about their experience after a workshop, “As a master mapping out a pathway for followers, I think you’ve neatly avoided the common trap of being overly prescriptive and kept it to a minimum of discrete steps.” —Chris Mansell

I look forward to this design challenge and have over a decade of feedback from hundreds of participants to inform me. Past participants may want to take a 2023 workshop and find out what’s new. As always, anyone who registers for a workshop may come back any time at no extra charge. If previous participants have suggestions, I am open. My intention is to finish most of the redesign by the end of the year. For those who register by the end of 2022 for the February 2023 workshop, there is a $100 discount.

Workshop start dates for 2023

• 6 February
• 13 April
• 2 October

Self-determination theory states that there are three universal human drivers — autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We need some control over our lives, we want to be good at something, and we want to feel that we can relate to other people. These three drivers are what make us do what we do. Skills are just one aspect of being engaged at work. Even highly competent skilled workers can be disengaged or aimless.

One effect of the network era, and its pervasive digital connections, is that networks are replacing or subverting more traditional hierarchies. Three aspects of this effect are — access to almost unlimited information, the ability for almost anyone to self-publish, and limitless opportunities for ridiculously easy group-forming.

Clay Shirky discussed this third aspect in Here Comes Everybody (2008).

“Ridiculously easy group-forming [coined by Seb Paquet] matters because the desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct that has always been constrained by transaction costs. Now that group-forming has gone from hard to ridiculously easy, we are seeing an explosion of experiments with new groups and new kinds of groups.”

This desire to relate is what drives people to support global social movements on one hand, and to take shelter in tribal identity politics on the other. In politics, social media extend participation but also make information manipulation by motivated interests much easier.

In the 2019 HBR article Why Employees Don’t Share Knowledge with Each Other the authors found three main reasons [research paper behind a paywall]. First, people share knowledge when they are autonomously motivated, and not directed to do so, or pressured by others. Second, cognitively demanding work is shared more frequently. Third, knowledge is shared best between equal peers and not with those who are dependent on the sharer.

While this research was done with 394 Australian workers at various locations, as well as 195 Chinese workers at one company, it is reflective of the research that developed self-determination theory conducted by Edward Deci and/or Richard Ryan from 1971 to 2018. The researchers cited in the HBR article observed people who were competent in their work and were autonomously motivated to share their knowledge. But the third component — relatedness — remained the key to sharing.

Only if the workers could relate with people — as peers — would they freely share their knowledge. Autonomy and competence are not enough. Neither is the ‘sense of purpose’ that Dan Pink promoted in his book Drive. Relatedness is often the missing component to organizational knowledge sharing. Even the researchers were surprised.

“In addition to asking respondents about how they share and hide knowledge from their colleagues, we asked them if their colleagues depended on them to get their work done. We expected that if respondents perceived their colleagues to be dependent on them, they would be more willing to share knowledge and less likely to hide it.

Much to our surprise, we found the opposite. When people perceived that others depended on them, they felt pressured into sharing knowledge (the controlled type of motivation), and this in turn promoted knowledge hiding.” —HBR 2019-07-19

The historical role of management has been to reduce transaction costs in getting work done. A networked organization based on the compass of self-determination theory needs minimal management. It has the capability of sharing power between people and working together as the situation requires. This reflects the wirearchy organizing principle developed 20 years ago — “a dynamic two-way flow of  power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”. 

If organizations want to lower transaction costs through more and better knowledge-sharing they need to focus on how the workplace and its processes are designed, not individual competencies. The focus has to be on — understanding work systems.

“Over the long haul, even strong people can’t compensate for a weak process. Sure, some occasional success may come from team or individual heroics. But if you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.” —Rummler & Brache

Managers and executives have to understand that — knowledge flows at the speed of trust. When trust is lost, knowledge fails to flow. This happens in organizations. It also happens at a societal level. Networks of trust are what create value at all levels for human society. If at any point a manager/executive/politician wonders why a person is aimless, disengaged, or ineffective, then reflect upon self-determination theory.

Self-determination theory is based on three universal human drivers — autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Lacking autonomy, we are disengaged. Lacking competence we are ineffective. Lacking relatedness we are aimless.

An artisan (craftsperson) is a skilled manual worker in a particular craft, using specialized tools and machinery. Artisans were the dominant producers of goods before the Industrial Revolution. ABC Co. are the Artisans of the post-Industrial era, retrieving old world care and attention to detail, but using the latest tools and processes. To ensure that we stay current, we are members of various Open Source Guilds, such as the Drupal development community. —ABC Co. Business Plan 2005 (PDF)

I wrote the ABC Co. business plan for a small company with several years of development experience that had embraced open source software as a way to reduce customer costs, ensure long-term stability of their software, and focus on what they did best — custom development. As Ton Zylstra remarked in 2010, too often skilled workers are treated like replaceable cogs using standard, employer-provided tools.

“So we talked about how corporate systems might integrate social media tools into sharepoint and ERP-software, but not about the notion that it is quickly becoming ridiculous that IT departments should be prescribing what tools professionals should use at all, and not just stick to managing and securing the data flowing through those tools. We let craftsmen and artisans pick the tools they think fit the task at hand and their personal skills best, but we still don’t allow our professionals in knowledge intensive environments to do so.” —The Unattained

An artisan is a skilled worker in a particular craft, using specialized tools and machinery. Knowledge Artisans not only design the work but they can do the work. It is not passed down the assembly line. Many integrate marketing, sales, and customer service with their creations. To ensure that they stay current, they become members of various communities of practice or knowledge networks. One of the earliest of these communities online was for open source software which also developed many of the communication tools and processes used by knowledge artisans today — distributed work, results-oriented work (your code speaks for you), RSS, blogs, wikis, agile development, flattened hierarchies, etc.

Keeping knowledge artisans is becoming a major challenge for companies and if they are not careful they will lose their best workers, as we are seeing at Twitter, the epitome of a autocratic managerial mindset. Jane McConnell recommends that it’s much better to have a ‘gig mindset‘.

“The first big obstacle to building a gig mindset culture is old-school leadership, anchored in hierarchy and command-and-control methods. A second, equally serious barrier which is in fact related to the first, is work practices. Although it is increasingly common today for people to self-manage their work, this has limited impact beyond the individual. They are not able to have a broader, change-inducing role because they are rarely solicited to give input to business goals and strategic plans. Above all, they are not encouraged to question status quo and propose radically new ideas.” —Jane McConnell

Knowledge intensive workplaces demand cooperative learning in addition to collaborative work. This requires structural changes in hierarchy and control systems. It also means changing the employment relationship where becoming a successful knowledge artisan will take a lot more than just being a good employee. A gig mindset is a change in the status quo. While creating a status quo is more difficult than maintaining an existing one the time may be right for systemic change in how work gets done.

Commenting on the implosion of Twitter, John Scalzi asks, “why should we bring back that artisan, hand-crafted Web?” and answers, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a site that’s not run by an amoral billionaire chaos engine, or algorithmically designed to keep you doomscrolling in a state of fear and anger, or is essentially spyware for governments and/or corporations?”

“Build a better Web. An artisan Web. A handcrafted Web. Take the time to get people used to it. We’ll all benefit from it. We just have to decide to do it.” —How to weave the artisan web

It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions and willing cooperation that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers, especially management.