Part 1: The Neighborhood
Intro, Part 1, Part 2. Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Reflection gives me shape — light reflecting off the eyes of my neighbors. My privilege hides this from me. White CIS men understand ourselves as seers; not as seen.
The poet Audre Lorde says she “stands outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women” and from this vantage point she describes being seen. She says
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. … As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. — Audre Lorde, Poetry is not a Luxury
I’ve always understood this as a brave choice, “to bear the intimacy of scrutiny”. A choice. But that’s wrong. I think that for Ms. Lorde, scrutiny is unavoidable and maybe this is how it should be for all of us, that “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live” because, as Ta-Nahisi Coates said, “evil does its business in the shadows, ever-fearing not the heat of the Great Fire but the light.” Too many of us are allowed to hide in the dark, unaccountable, unavailable to our neighbors.
In the late 90’s my wife and I were living in Palo Alto while she finished graduate school and I was in my first year of teaching high school. In the evenings I would borrow her University ID card and sneak into the computer lab. This was before the Internet had pictures. I would type commands into a monochrome terminal and try to decipher the streams of text that came back to me. I remember the moment when I realized that the commands I typed were not asking questions of the computer in front of me. I was asking questions of machines in rooms across miles, across oceans. This is the invisible truth that describes the significance of what we built. The computers that we sit in front of, the screens which intermediate our lives, are physically connected; connected by wires that run from house to house, underground across miles, underwater across oceans, just like string connecting tin cans in the hands of children. Computers are not in a cloud and the metaphor of the internet as a cloud is a lie that hides the simplicity of the truth. We are not all suspended in a brilliant, mysterious and unknowable cloud. It’s more physical and real than that. We are connected, all of us to each other.
We, humanity, more than any time before, are connected. We share an evolutionary moment in Africa maybe 7 million years ago and now, we are physically connected; real wires; not-magical machine connected to not-magical machine; across miles; across oceans.
The fact of our individuality is now challenged by the immediacy of our collective.
I want for this to be a good thing. I want our human neighborhood to be essential, to sustain us, and I believe that it could. Unfortunately Capitalism demands the opposite. Capitalist ideology demands that we strive for purity; that we each try to win alone; that we each take what we can from the collective to own it for our self. Capitalism has turned against us the physics of our neighborhood. Because we are connected we cannot hide. We cannot be alone and Capitalism knows this and uses our connection to manipulate our decisions by telling each of us we are special in contrast to our neighbors.
In this moment it could be easy to reflect myself upon Other. I could compare our shape. I could traverse the similarity of being human to find the serendipity that is only possible in the context of difference. We could use our connection to explore and discover like we did when the world was new. Instead, we balkanize. We buy things like the people that like things like the things that we like. Love is a heart to click. A heart we are made to click that drags us to the next and the next and now we believe in lizard overlords and demonic deep state pedophilia rings. All that we have is each other and taking from my neighbor to hoard for my self is the poisoned Kool-Aid we are all made to drink. Alien archeologists will find our bodies not scattered across the globe but isolated and starved in petrified clusters of self-worship and ignorance.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can reject the cult of personal wealth and the homicidal mirage of clout. We can choose instead to live in a vibrant and sustaining neighborhood and I know that I sound like yet another idealistic Socialist naively imagining a benevolent human nature when the truth is that humans are and always will be all of the things, the good and the bad.
But our relentless pursuit of greater efficiency and profit has devolved the complexity of the human neighborhood into a shiny, magical idiocy that declares the most wealthy to be the most pure. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can redesign the rules that govern our interactions to prioritize the vibrancy of the market over the wealth of the individual. And again, I know that I sound like a naïve Socialist but markets and neighborhoods are networks and networks have identifiable dynamics that are the result of interactions. The more interaction there is the healthier and more vibrant the neighborhood is and the greater the ability of the neighborhood to sustain its members.
We can increase the sustaining capacity of our neighborhoods if we can figure out how to incentivize the behaviors that increase vibrancy.
Currently we incentivize the hoarding of wealth by the individual even though this exact behavior is detrimental to the health of all of us. The role of the individual in a healthy neighborhood is to be a conduit for value. While it is true that you have to get something of value in order to give it away, giving it away is the essential and defining behavior of vibrant and healthy neighborhoods. We need to care less about the amount that we have and care more about the amount that passes through us.
This is the second post in a series:
Intro: Replacing Milton Friedman with All Of Us
Part 1: The Neighborhood
Part 2: Incentivizing the Health of the Human Neighborhood
Part 3: Difference Defines Us
Part 4: On Freedom
Part 5: Behavioral Economics and The Algorithm
Part 6: We Can Build That
