If you are a person, the pages written for you are at jerroldmcgrath.com/people. Back to Form 1
JERROLD McGRATH: THE RECORD
6. Books, continued (part 2 of 4)
In Praise of Disorder, chapters 4 to 6. Continued from part 1.
In Praise of Disorder, full text (continued)
4. Dystopia
People are doing things and the sky is watching – Chinese adage
When looking for a solution to a problem, how do you go about it? For a cormorant, or a fish, or a potato, the options available are mostly restricted to the organism and its community, through the instructions that make up its DNA or in memory as something directly experienced. Human beings, how- ever, can draw on a reservoir of knowledge contained in our broader culture. Culture, like our DNA, is an inheritance that evolves over time. Helpful ideas are preserved, unhelpful ideas are forgotten, and the bank of perspectives and approaches inexorably comes to resemble the things we value as a group. Over time, we get the culture we deserve.
Of course, we can learn from other cultures too. The horse collar that revo- lutionized agriculture in Europe during the twelfth century was borrowed from the Chinese. Potatoes and approaches to growing them were brought from the Andes to Ireland. Fishing with cormorants has uncertain origins, but a Chinese version of the practice became popular in North America for a brief period and was touted as “a sport superior to ancient falconry” in The New York Times in 1890.
Digital technologies have greatly expanded the scope of what questions we can answer and the speed at which we can do so. At the birth of the world wide web this was cause for great optimism. The initial offer of the web was to tear down institutions and methods of control and offer freedom to gather and learn. Since those early, optimistic days, incredible gains in computing power have enabled a complex global financial system. Computing has allowed for physical production and supply to move to emerging markets where labour was cheap. It has automated some complex engineering work, made the semi- skilled worker unnecessary, and driven a boom in low-skilled service work.
Data protection pioneer Spiros Simitis warned of the privacy implications of these changes over thirty years ago. Simitis identified societal threats emerging from how information was processed in public and in private. He saw how “personal information is increasingly used to enforce standards of behavior.
Information processing is developing, therefore, into an essential element of long-term strategies of manipulation intended to mold and adjust individual conduct.” As we saw in the previous chapter, institutions have learned ap- proaches and routines of control to ensure that the inner thoughts and outer behaviour of community members are in alignment with the expectations of the ordered and official ideology. Data and digital tools have become new weap- ons in the ongoing war against disorder.
The explosion in digital tools coincided with a shift in institutional thinking toward a neoliberal vision of the world. The rebirth of this nineteenth-century philosophy dates from around 1972, with broader acceptance evidenced by the popularity of free-trade agreements, particularly in North America and Europe. Neoliberalism is defined differently, dependent on who is telling the story.
Generally, it is understood as the celebration of free-market approaches, indi- vidual freedom, and limited societal and economic interference by government. Critics argue that the neoliberal vision is attractive to politicians both to evade ownership of tough economic choices and as a promise of a new kind of order that asks less of government and more of individuals in society. Neoliberalism, at its extreme, denies community and sees individuals in endless competition with each other. Former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher stated in a Women’s Own interview in September 1987, “Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no gov- ernment can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.” Neoliberalism endorses an endless game of musical chairs.
Rather than offer a critique of neoliberalism, it is important to note how institutions, including those driving the digital revolution, came to embody and extend this orthodoxy through their activities. Amplified by digital technolo- gies, ideas of individualism and austerity were promoted, permeating the inner and outer lives of much of the planet.
The rapid integration of information processing into economic systems has pushed prices for many things toward zero. The reproduction of digital information and assets is almost cost-free, resulting in downward pressure on prices. The music industry felt this acutely as file sharing led to the rapid copying and downloading of music at no cost at the turn of the century. All industries that rely on information are experiencing similar pressures.
To preserve price points and profits, companies are incentivized to introduce monopolies on information through scaling and growth or to aggressively use branding to convince us that we need whatever it is they make by encouraging a vague sense of inadequacy. Computing is less helpful in addressing scarci- ty in energy and raw materials. Competition has intensified to exploit these resources, which has accelerated the pressures on the overall system to gener- ate new innovations to extend the carrying capacity of the planet. Meanwhile, information-heavy firms have discovered new sources of value in the informa- tion they generate, particularly in the form of personal data. The personal data, when combined with computers capable of analyzing it, has enabled commer- cial organizations and governments, as well as the dark money behind them, to better predict our behaviour and, increasingly, to control it.
This all appears quite ominous. What possible reason could there be for a sys- tem that seeks to use our own data to control us? What do we receive in return?
It is difficult not to be pessimistic given the current state of the world. The promise of a better future that has fueled human effort for generations no longer seems to hold. What do we do when the fortunes of our children and our children’s children are no longer likely to be better than our own? Histor- ically, the arrangement has been relatively clear, particularly for those in posi- tions of privilege. Subjugation to institutional authority was the path to heaven, in whatever imagined form. Under feudalism, vassals were offered protection, a plot of land, and an unshakeable position in an unchanging cosmos. More recently, the promise has amounted to comfort in the present, progress in the future, and, continuously, new means to get there faster.
Progress, though, may have run its course. There is an abundance of evi- dence that the future might not be better than the present or the past. So, what happens next?
For better or worse, the desire and ability to predict and thereby control the future is emerging as a new kind of arrangement. We cannot be assured of pro- gress, but we can optimize the present for comfort and manipulate unfolding events to avoid the worst possible outcomes. It’s a new deal, demanding a new order. Many, witness to a never-ending series of broken promises, are outraged and demand justice. For others, the promise of relative safety and comfort is tempting, not to mention the hope that someone is at the wheel helping us avoid disaster.
If a better world is not inevitable, it follows, therefore, that all our work must be committed to ensuring the best outcomes possible. This is a funda- mentally different attitude toward the future; a journey that is already under way and that prioritizes optimization rather than progress.
The agents commissioned to deliver on this new promise are algorithms embedded in machines that learn. The term artificial intelligence (AI) is frequently used to describe the broader field, developing machines to solve problems in innovative ways. Algorithms offer certainty in a world sorely lack- ing in it. They consist of instructions or processes to follow when performing a task or making a decision. These recipes, as acted upon by evermore advanced forms of AI and machine learning, are present in almost all aspects of life today, and have had a profound effect on health, transportation, finance, food, entertainment, and anything else you might imagine. We are only just begin- ning to understand their tremendous power, as well as the opportunities and threats they pose.
In the past, we used to make algorithms containing instructions that a human could understand and explain. Over time, the capacity of algorithms written by humans to order the world was overwhelmed by the data created and the complexity of the systems involved. Identifying one fraudulent transaction out of millions, recommending the right video for a user, or regulating ship- ping traffic are beyond the ability of human beings to effectively administer at the speed and scale to which we have grown accustomed.
Several advances have increased the ability of algorithms to administer our world. Access to huge caches of data—captured through sensors and other tracking techniques, only some of it voluntarily recorded—serve as source material for new machine-learning methods, enabled by faster and cheaper computers. Algorithms are evolving that are well beyond the capacity of human beings to unravel, and their pace is only accelerating. For some, this is good news. Algorithmic solutions will let us outrun the problems we create because of our collective commitment to growth. Others fear that biases in society, and therefore in the data, will create solutions that exacerbate systemic inequality. A less appreciated concern, and one that I will explore more fully, is how the he- gemony of this technology will limit the experiences we have as human beings. This will have consequences for the ideas we can generate to solve problems as they emerge.
Making a better world is not the only motivation for the boom in algorith- mic decision-making. In 2019, PWC estimated that AI deployment will add
$15.7T to global GDP by 2030, with China’s share amounting to $7T and North America’s to $3.7T. Despite the economic and social benefits, headlines suggest that public concern is mounting:
A new study finds a potential risk with self-driving cars: failure to detect dark- skinned pedestrians — VOX (March 6, 2019)
Many Facial-Recognition Systems Are Biased, Says U.S. Study — The New York Times (December 19, 2019)
Harrisburg University Researchers Claim Their “Unbiased” Facial Recognition Soft- ware Can Identify Potential Criminals — techdirt (May 6, 2020)
Understanding algorithms is complicated by the economic value they gen- erate for their makers. Their inner workings are increasingly opaque as their operations grow in complexity. The need for secrecy encourages researchers, governments, and corporations to keep a tight lid on their discoveries.
There are many ways that algorithms can be made, but we will walk through one of the better-understood approaches to identify where opportuni- ties for bias and unethical outcomes arise.
Let’s imagine we want to develop an algorithm for identifying ayu, the sweetfish favoured by cormorants in ukai fishing. This isn’t that far-fetched as a facial recognition system for salmon has already been deployed to assess the health of individual fish on North Atlantic fish farms and to identify salmon with lice infestations so that they can then be isolated for treatment.
Hungry cormorants, and some human beings, can identify ayu with little difficulty, even in the dark. We would be hard pressed to explain how they do this. We can try to describe what an ayu is in words, but algorithms do not un- derstand words, although they can learn from being told that they are correct or in error. Imagine millions of algorithms attending a school where they are tested repeatedly. Those that show some signs of aptitude are kept and their internal wiring applied to others. Those that fail the tests are discarded.
The first step is to build a “maker” algorithm that itself can create numer- ous fish-picking algorithmic “students.” We then make a second teacher algo- rithm that can administer tests to the students and assess their success. The first batch of algorithms created by our maker will be an eclectic group with modules and wiring based on best guesses and hunches. Like a broken clock, they aren’t very good at the job they’ve been assigned to do. However, given both their sheer numbers and pure chance, some will outperform others and be correct more than twice a day. Those that are relatively successful will be carried forward into subsequent cycles and those that are not will be eliminat- ed. The process, I am told, is painless.
It should be noted that the teacher algorithm also cannot distinguish ayu from other fish or rocks or potatoes. If it could, we would simply need to copy it and our problem would be solved. However, humans can provide the teacher with a test to administer and an answer key. The test might involve hundreds of thousands of images and a note on whether the image is of an ayu or not.
Every time you are asked to identify traffic signs or crosswalks to prove you are human before accessing a website, you are helping to build one of these tests. Human beings, often hidden away in developing nations, make these answer keys under difficult conditions. The strings to these workers are hard to make out though, and the algorithms start to resemble magic.
Much like species or cultures, selective pressures over time will lead to a better fit. For species, the fit is with the environment and the test is the ability of the organism to pass its genetic material forward. For cultures, the fit is with the values that the culture esteems and the test is people’s preferences over time.
Some ideas, like democracy, we hold on to. Others, like phrenology, we let go.
For algorithms, the fit is based on the test. An algorithm that can distin- guish an ayu from a potato 51% of the time will be allowed to survive before one that only succeeds 49% of the time. Moreover, while species take time to pass down their genes, and cultures similarly evolve slowly, algorithms go through cycles of testing and discarding very, very quickly. Physical space is no restraint and millions of algorithms are tested on millions of questions as fast as the computing power allows. So, after thousands of generations, we are left with an algorithm that is incredibly good at identifying ayu, even in the dark waters of the Nagara River.
The pathway to a successful version is often opaque. Many random changes and internal connections lead to a desired outcome, and we do not really need to care or understand how we got there. No organizing theory is necessary or helpful. This is possible because of advances in both the data available to administer the test and the computing power to run the tests, which result in the evolution of new generations of algorithms. 50 billion devices connected to machine-learning systems produce an incredible volume of data for algorithms to learn from. Similarly, advances in computing mean the learning happens at an increasingly rapid rate.
So far, so good. We have an algorithm exceptionally qualified to identify ayu. This kind of process has generated exceptional innovations that improve human life. Tumours are effectively identified in scans resulting in improved treatment, the behaviours of elephant poachers are predicted enabling better allocation of scarce enforcement resources, and incidences of fraud are quickly flagged and addressed by financial institutions.
Why has this ayu-recognizing algorithm been developed? Is it to monitor the number of fish and ensure that stocks are sustained? Is it to poison the preferred food supply of cormorants, that are viewed as a pest by some peo- ple? Is it purely for short-term financial gain, enabling the efficient farming and supply of the delicacy with little regard to long-term sustainability or the future? The algorithm is indifferent to purpose, as is its teacher.
Throughout much of 2019, I was funded by the Canada Council for the Arts to travel around the country and explore the cultural and societal implications of AI. From the northeastern shore of Newfoundland to Iqaluit on Frobish- er Bay in Nunavut, from Whitehorse in the Yukon to the Pacific coastline of Vancouver, I met with communities curious and concerned about the impli- cations of these technological advances. We shared what we knew and learned about what was already beginning to happen. Subsequently, I was fortunate to connect with concerned communities in Mexico and Germany, with Indig- enous leaders across North America, and with elected state officials in South
Dakota and Virginia, examining and discussing the themes that emerged from this work. In 2020, I served as program lead for the Goethe-Institut Toronto’s Algorithmic Culture programming. The Goethe-Institut promotes cultural exchange globally and the Algorithmic Culture programming explored how the challenges of AI are tangled up with ideas of the body and intimacy, with our landscapes, and through different experiences of diaspora.
A company, government, or university will invest resources into developing algorithms that do things that matter to them. At YouTube, for example, the business model depends on showing advertisements to the people who watch videos on the platform. In effect, YouTube sells our attention to advertisers. To achieve this, algorithms have been developed over the years that are most likely to keep our attention fixed solidly on the screen. YouTube has learned, after studying billions of our decisions over time, that outrage and incredulity are powerful drivers of attention.
A recent surge in the belief that the world is flat has been traced directly to YouTube. In 2019, researcher Asheley Landrum presented her team’s findings and demonstrated that YouTube’s algorithms make it easy to “end up going down the rabbit hole by presenting information to people who are going to be more susceptible to it.” The results were presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. They echo a pattern found across platforms that have been effective in leveraging artificial intelligence.
Flat-Earth videos are effective, if morally ambiguous, ways of holding our attention. Why, though, would a self-driving car be more likely to hit a dark- skinned person than a light-skinned person? Clearly, the car manufacturer is not designing cars to selectively target particular communities. Both the objec- tive and the content of algorithmic testing are critical, but too often these are skewed by human involvement. Context and subjectivity come into play. The world of software development and computer programming is dominated by young men; it is a field often lacking in gender, ethnic, and age diversity. As a result, it is all too easy to unwittingly design algorithmic tests that are informed by the limited knowledge and experience of this non-diverse group of develop- ers. A self-driving car system trained on white faces, for example, will become very good at identifying and avoiding white bodies, but will struggle when confronted with factors that do not conform to what its algorithm has learned to date.
Many of the ethical claims against AI are centred on this kind of bias, often resulting from unconscious assumptions and a narrow set of perspectives having been applied to the issue. Computer vision describes the research field committed to replicating human visual perception in machines. These systems are evaluated using a benchmark set of data so that different solutions can be compared based on a common criterion. The most important benchmark data set in computer vision is called ImageNet, which consists of millions of images scraped from the Internet. Labelling the millions of images in the dataset was made possible by micro-payments to humans willing to do the work. The imag- es and their labels represent a snapshot of social values and beliefs, with often harmful categories finding their way into a dataset that then served as a test site and benchmark for future deep learning approaches.
The software developed at Harrisburg University to identify criminality based on faces is a more troubling case. One researcher on the project, a former police officer, offered that “identifying the criminality of [a] person from their facial image will enable a significant advantage for law-enforcement agen- cies and other intelligence agencies to prevent crime from occurring.” This is undoubtedly true. However, the unspoken assumption here is that someone’s face provides meaningful information about the likelihood that they will com- mit a crime. Perhaps, just as phrenology held that the shape of a person’s head provided insights into their inner life, the algorithm will assess my shifty gaze and furrowed brow, then assign me with a risk score that will enable lawen- forcement agencies to act accordingly in relation to my nefarious intentions.
The reality is less interesting and more dangerous. An algorithm tested over time on images of convicted felons, it is hoped, will become effective at identifying people whose characteristics resemble those held in the dataset. Arrest and imprisonment, however, are influenced by numerous factors. There is ample evidence that black men are stopped by police at far higher rates than non-black men in North America. Racism, generational poverty, systemic exclu- sion, and oppression all contribute to how we are seen in the world and how we see ourselves. Different communities have been treated unfairly and unequally for decades by law-enforcement agencies. Such a legacy, however much we try to weed it out, inevitably carries over into future practice, becoming encoded in new systems.
In Toronto, where I live, 7.5% of the city’s population identify as black. How- ever, 40% of segregated inmates were black at the Toronto South Detention Centre in 2016. When teaching an algorithm to identify criminals, a dataset drawn from the Detention Centre would see black faces 4 out of 10 times. The algorithm would learn that black faces are correlated to crime. Law enforce- ment using the Harrisburg University algorithm would then flag black men for additional screening more than five times as often. This would result in more arrests of black men relative to non-black men, even if the underlying rates of criminal activity are identical. This process exacerbates the disproportionate presence of racialized communities in our prisons. There is profound bias here and a failure to recognize that unequal outcomes are the product of structures, systems, and rules that dictate how our current order operates. By turning de- cisions over to machines incapable of introspection, and by relying on the past to inform our future decisions, rather than predicting what may happen in the future, we end up creating it in a self-fulfilling loop.
While a child may be raised racist, he or she will have opportunities to experience different ways of knowing the world and can unlearn these habits of mind. Conversely, and often by opaque means, algorithms are designed to solve a particular problem, ignoring evidence that fails to assist in that quest.
These encoded blinkers deny any possibility to learn from and adapt to data not immediately associated with the primary objective.
Amazon, a huge user and advocate of machine-learning systems, developed an algorithm to support recruitment and hiring. The system demonstrated clear preference for male candidates and this fact was brought to public atten- tion. Business Today, reporting on the cancellation of the program in 2018, remarked that “Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were prefer- able.” This is nonsense. The algorithm is incapable of teaching itself anything. It learned that Amazon preferred male applicants based on their own historical decisions. The revelation of bias meant that the algorithm was a failure, but it worked exactly as it was designed. The algorithm quickly recognized patterns in the data it was assigned to replicate and then went about the work of repeat- ing those patterns.
There are numerous examples of how ideologies become embedded in the development of AI. The claim that a system is data-driven too often can serve as cover for a racist undercarriage. The year-long consultation on AI and culture that I led was initially focused on these kinds of ethical issues and the biases evident in the decisions made by machines. However, a disconcert- ing pattern also emerged during the consultation process, one that suggests a skewing both of the decisions made and of the ideas drawn on to identify appropriate solutions. This discovery was central to the work I undertook with the Goethe-Institut Toronto and collaborations in China, Malawi, Egypt, and elsewhere.
In a 2018 interview with Recode, Elon Musk observed, “as AI gets probably much smarter than humans, the relative intelligence ratio is probably similar to that between a person and a cat, maybe bigger. I do think we need to be very careful about the advancement of AI.” Like Musk, many people are concerned that machines will exceed human intelligence. However, I am more troubled by the idea that humans are becoming more like the machines. Rather than creat- ing an algorithm that thinks like a human, the goal, it appears, is to automate us. The notions of autonomy, identity, and community are being reworked under the influence of artificial intelligence.
Autonomy: The Algorithmic Organism
There is an argument, with its foundations in the scientific community, but now permeating the broader culture, that free will is imaginary. As Yuval Noah Harari argues in Sapiens, “science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms and life is data processing.” I can neither prove nor refute this position, but the implications are profound. If we believe that every decision we make is pre-determined by our biology, and that culture, society, and relationships are simply what is processed by that biological algorithm, then the conceptual distance between ourselves and our machines narrows considerably.
The technologies we develop are an expression of the objectives and as- sumptions of developers, which are themselves informed by local and societal cultures. If a significant portion of the scientific community believes that hu- mans are essentially biological algorithms, then solutions will emerge that treat us as such. These solutions might perform miracles in terms of delaying death, optimizing time, or facilitating comfort. The questions we ask, however, will be shaped profoundly by the assumptions we hold.
When free will is viewed as imaginary, then the moral implications of ma- nipulation and control shift. We cannot deny autonomy if it doesn’t really exist. As Shoshana Zuboff argues in Surveillance Capitalism, there is now a “disre- gard for the boundaries of private human experience and the moral integrity of the autonomous individual.” Beliefs that remove moral agency and autonomy from individuals allow for power and violence to be naturalized.
Recent criticisms go so far as to see artificial intelligence as less a technol- ogy and more an ideology. Microsoft’s Glen Weyl and computer scientist Jaron Lanier argue in a March 2020 issue of Wired:
“AI” is best understood as a political and social ideology rather than as a basket of algorithms. The core of the ideology is that a suite of technologies, designed by a small technical elite, can and should become autonomous from and eventually replace, rather than complement, not just individual humans but much of humanity.
The ideology views as “desirable or inevitable the replacement of most human judgement/agency with systems created by a small technical elite.” For our own benefit, technologies are deployed that nudge us toward better out- comes. But how are those outcomes being selected and who is selecting them?
The aspiration is that any new understanding of human behaviour can be leveraged to improve the systems we rely upon for our survival. For the public, the hope is the possibility of a world of convenience, forever forestalling the consequences of our actions. This carries the significant risk, however, that our notions of free will and moral agency will be stripped away by the systems we construct.
The Algorithmic Identity
Jackson 2bears is a Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) artist and cultural theorist from Six Nations. Speaking at the 2017 Arts in a Digital World summit in Montreal, Jackson expressed his concerns about the encroachment of technology into more and more aspects of life. He warned of “technologies that import received traditions from a worldview that, in the past, has sometimes sought to erase and disappear our cultural and creative practices—a world view that it seems exists deep within the code that animates our entire technological world.”
In the past, power and violence were the preferred tools to uproot pockets of disorder. Power and violence are still readily used, particularly against those resisting systems of long-standing injustice. The threat of violence also under- pins the functioning of most societies. It may not be as clear in daily life, but the enforcement of even the most mundane regulations relies on the possibility of bringing the force of the state down on those that refuse the authority of its representatives. Violence has both a physical and symbolic function. In either case, it empties out a space: physical resistance and evidence of resistance are annihilated. Violence is one extreme application of power. Other uses of power bend space to its moral positions rather than evacuating it completely. Power that sees human beings and their decisions as things to be controlled is referred to as “instrumentarian power.”
According to social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff, “the rise of instrumen- tarian power is intended as a bloodless coup.” She continues:
Instead of violence directed at our bodies, the instrumentarian third modernity operates more like a taming. Its solution to the increasingly clamorous demands for effective life pivots on the gradual elimination of chaos, uncertainty, conflict, abnor- mality, and discord in favour of predictability, automatic regularity, transparency, confluence, persuasion, and pacification.
The taming of the potato only proved dangerous when it squeezed out other, wilder options. In attempting to protect us from ourselves, are we fa- cilitating a human monoculture? What will be the long-term implications? What are the risks?
With such an approach, over time, the way things are gradually morphs into the way things are supposed to be. Precarity, inequality, burnout, and depression start to be seen as natural consequences of the world we live in rather than the effects of the choices that we make when taming. We apply power, and occasionally violence, on each other in service to the stories we live by. Not only do technologies see us as machines to be manipulated, but we begin to see each other in the same way. Online debate is often marked by accusations that someone holding a different opinion must be “a bot.” Occasionally, it transpires that they are. Nevertheless, the ease with which we label and dehumanize those with whom we disagree should be a cause for concern. Our willingness to be predicted, regulated, exposed, and pacified is similarly disconcerting.
The Algorithmic Community
Our interactions are increasingly mechanized in service to scale. In the pro- cess, we lose the opportunity for serendipity and messiness, for confusion and wonder. The complexity of our social interactions is plummeting. We certainly have more ways of connecting to other people through digital means, but the range of interactions has been declining for some time. We are less likely to stop and talk to strangers, to have ambiguous encounters where a clear pur- pose is not evident, or to gather with neighbours without a goal in mind. The Angus Reid Institute, in partnership with Cardus, conducted a Canada-wide study on social isolation and loneliness in 2019. The results show that people spend more time alone than they would like, that they feel lonely even when surrounded by others, that most of their social interactions are with house- mates, and that the number of Canadians living alone is on the rise. Inevitably, this sense of loneliness was exacerbated during COVID-19 lockdown periods, where self-isolation was necessary for public health and safety reasons. But it remains the case that we talk to fewer people and the people we talk to tend to be those we live with.
Perhaps ironically, this feeling of isolation is coupled with an increased sense of being observed. The same tools that are meant to address this longing for connection keep us under watch, harvesting our data to feed the algorithms that then act to control us. This digital monitoring and the potential intru- sion on privacy has parallels with eighteenth-century philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the Panopticon. Bentham, inspired by his travels in Belarus and the work of Prince Potemkin, imagined a circular build- ing at the hub of a larger compound. It was a highly efficient design, requiring minimal personnel. Guards positioned at the centre of the compound would be able to see any prisoner in their cells. The prisoners, however, would never know if or when they were being watched, which would have a significant effect on their behaviour.
Philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault was fascinated by the Pan- opticon, arguing that the general assumptions that underpinned its proposed design have since served as a recurring thread in the design and operation of many modern institutions, including prisons but also our public spaces, media, and political discourse. In much the same way that confession changed European conceptions of forgiveness, Foucault saw the design as a guarantee that individuals would take responsibility for regulating their own behaviour, assuming they were being watched even if they were not. Today, this is an assumption that we can see at the core of social media’s pervasive influence.
Foucault refers to the notion of a “conscious and permanent visibility”—we share, and we are seen, and we internalize the idea that we are under constant potential scrutiny. Despite the feeling that we are constantly observed, we still manage to feel alone and isolated.
As for Bentham, he is widely credited with launching modern utilitar- ianism, a philosophy that seeks to maximize happiness and well-being for individuals. Bentham believed that transparency was a necessary condition for this happiness to be obtained. He sought a world that resembled a gymnasium where each “gesture, every turn of limb or feature, in those whose motions have a visible impact on the general happiness, will be noticed and marked down.” Bentham’s belief in surveillance and transparency as a means of im- proving human lives is now finding new advocates.
Some of those responsible for our digital panopticon are moving into the business of designing our cities. Media theorist Lev Manovich, in AI Aesthetics, acknowledges the capacity for computers to design a new kind of city but asks if we will be able to prevent such an AI-metropolis from imposing on, regulating, and ration- alizing our existence in the name of progress and human happiness—like the urban visions of the 17th–19th centuries, European utopias of ideal human communities, Le Corbusier’s 1920s radical urban rationalization proposals, and cybernetic and mechanical visions in Godard’s Alphaville and Tati’s Playtime.
The desire to reshape our cities to reflect our values is certainly not new. The technologies developed to deliver on this intention are new, however, and are capable of degrees of reach and control unimaginable in Bentham’s time. In the smart city, people become another thing to be managed.
Toronto was also ground zero for an effort by Google, through their Side- walk Labs division, to enter the urban innovation business. Sidewalk Labs is committed to “reimagining cities to improve quality of life.” How quality is defined remains uncertain. A combination of factors, including local resistance and the economic impact of COVID, ended Google’s adventure into smart cities, but the push will continue. A smart city is one that uses connected electronics to collect data and then algorithms to generate insights to manage things more efficiently. Smart cities are offered as a way of making order out of tangled, messy human lives.
Other quotidian interactions are falling under the magic spell of growth and efficiency. Tasks that used to be performed by friends or family are increasing- ly repackaged as commercial entities to be purchased through our phones: a drive to the airport (Uber), a place to stay (Airbnb), a temporary parking space (JustPark), or assistance in putting together a new bed (TaskRabbit). Automa- tion means more labour in service but fewer human-to-human interactions, with communal support and simple neighbourliness displaced by commercial arrangements.
In our modern world, it seems that social pressure and analytic certainty are preferred to the messiness of democracy, public discourse, and communi- ty. Our understanding of autonomy, identity, and community increasingly is informed by the fiction of individualization. As we saw earlier, the pace of this change is accelerating. As we turn over more of our decisions to machines, we create more data for those machines to consider and accelerate the process of control. Data creates data. Predictions lead to further predictions. Both contrib- ute to greater control. The future is already here.
Implications of Automating People
To deal with the acceleration of information, we turn to algorithms to an- swer an increasing number of important questions and to inform a widening array of decisions. What are the implications of this shift in how we understand human existence, identity, and community?
The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke argued that knowledge derives from the interaction of facts with our ideas. When the facts align with our ideas about what is true, our confidence in our knowledge of the world is enhanced. Disorder emerges when the facts of a situation are incompatible with the ideas we have about the world. However, by stepping into that discomfort, we can extend the reach of our knowledge and be better prepared to process new facts as our ideas expand and are arranged to accommodate them.
The facts on which we test our algorithms reflect their designers’ under- standing of the world. A self-driving car that is unaware of the fact of black fac- es will lack the ability to respond appropriately when it encounters them. The ideas that inform the design of our automated systems have far-reaching con- sequences. When we value scale, efficiency, and growth, our solutions will tend to favour these characteristics: more ad revenue, more clicks, more purchases. There are ethical dimensions to both the facts that we rely on and the ideas that we elevate. But, if our social, economic, political, and cultural systems start to view us simply as biological machines in need of regulation and control, then what will become of the very ideas that we used to make sense of the world and develop these systems in the first place?
In The Power of the Powerless, dramatist and politician Václav Havel describes the experience of living with a post-totalitarian system where every- one must “live within a lie.” He observes, “They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system”. Havel describes a culture where, because of fear of reprisal by the agents and institutions of the system, true desires are not expressed. An effec- tive response to this form of control is what he terms “living in truth,” having awareness of the dissonance between the facts as they are publicly endorsed and the ideas we privately hold about life and community. Algorithmic culture removes any dissonance by selecting against facts that conflict with the ideas we already hold. “Living in truth” is only possible when we possess ideas that might encounter facts with which they disagree.
I have my own ideas about what is good to eat, for example. Those ideas, according to John Locke, come up against the facts of the world, requiring that my ideas undergo constant revision. The first time I had Ethiopian food, I didn’t like it very much. Some of my friends are avid fans, though, and its con- sumption became an unavoidable part of our socializing together. Over time,
I grew to adore the communal nature of the food, the sour injera, the constant exposure to new flavors and combinations. The new facts I was exposed to became aligned with my ideas about the world. They were assimilated without any great challenge or confusion. Indeed, it is the case that uncomfortable facts ask us to be critical both of the evidence and our ideas about what it means.
Algorithms, though, ensure that uncomfortable facts are removed before we are unsettled by them. The algorithm protects us from disorder.
I witness this in action when I consult my phone to make decisions about ordering takeout food, finding that Google makes recommendations about places that I might like. It would be easy to assume that I am seeing a full listing of the options available, but that assumption is not based on any detailed evaluation on my part. Google makes its money principally through advertising and from those that wish to predict and control what we might do next. Goog- le’s algorithms are trained, therefore, to maximize the number of ads they can show me. Google needs me to come back again and again to find the informa- tion I need.
Google’s algorithm cannot afford to make recommendations that will make me uncomfortable. At the same time, it needs to ensure that the restaurants that pay to use Google’s services are prioritized and receive value for their money. Over the years, I am sure that the algorithm has recommended Ethiopi- an food on occasion. But as I never followed the bot’s advice, it learned to stop showing me Ethiopian food even though it is something I now enjoy. The list of options recommended to me, then, is a highly curated one. Too often, we focus on the order of the options provided, when what we should be doing is considering what options have been excluded in the first place.
Without new facts we are left alone with our ideas, which themselves can be exploited. The algorithms have learned that exposure to different ideas can fuel a moral outrage that keeps us clicking, engaging, and posting. Nuance isn’t profitable. Facts are elided and extreme versions of different ideas are presented to us to ensure that we remain emotionally engaged with a particular platform or community. Those responsible will argue that this is not the intent, but intention is not really the issue. The algorithm tests and tests and tests and finds approaches that work. For Amazon, that means preferring men to wom- en. For Google, that means showing me sushi restaurants and burger joints and avoiding Ethiopian food.
Our ideas about what things signify are assembled from experiences. We ae not born with the skills to organize the facts of the world but develop them as we interact with others and the broader culture. What happens, then, when we assign more of our decision-making to systems that are optimized for efficien- cy and have no interest in providing us with a diverse and potentially unsettling set of experiences?
Convenience becomes a trap. The drive for efficiency and growth diminish- es the possibility for serendipity and disorder. As sociologist Richard Sennett argues in The Uses of Disorder, adolescence is defined by the development of rigid identities so that we can filter and organize the often overwhelming emotional, physical, and social changes inherent in this period of development. Over time, these identities are discarded as new facts call into question the appropriateness of the construct to navigate complex interactions. However, Sennett notes, privileged, often white, communities are rarely compelled to dis- card these identities as they are protected from experiences that call them into question. Today, an increasing number of us are similarly protected from facts and experiences that might call into question the efficacy of our ideas to make sense of the world. We become trapped in adolescence, constantly receiving only the facts that validate our existing ideas about the world, morally outraged by those that hold different ideas and points of view.
According to journalist Will Storr, storytelling can be understood as a form of tribal propaganda. The stories we tell teach us how to filter the world around us. The successful lives of our successful friends are facts that we process through the lens of our ideas. Should I feel happy for their successes? Should
I feel inadequate for my own lack of progress? Digital technologies make that competition constant in both our work and in our self-expression. Consistent stories, intolerant of other ways of seeing the world, start to shape what we no- tice and how we experience things. Different moral worlds are marginalized. Moral agency becomes harder to achieve. Radical transparency means that those that might speak out against the dominant narrative avoid doing so for fear of criticism or becoming the next algorithmically selected source of outrage.
A deceleration in the development of new ideas starves our culture of the necessary diversity to assess or categorize facts as they emerge. This trend relies on a positivist account of science and personal knowledge; the idea that truth and human knowledge can be restated or discovered by algorithms. Al- gorithms committed to efficiency and scale will select against experiences that don’t contribute to the kind of engagement the system wants to see. Confusion, disorder, discomfort are negative outcomes in the tests that the algorithm administers. We don’t stumble into things. My experience of ukai was free of charge, but algorithms will point me to places where money can be spent. The Nagara River would have remained unexplored if not for the urging of my friends.
What happens to beauty in such a world? Algorithms have been designed to deliver agreeableness, an aesthetic of comfort and monotony. Yet in general, an aesthetic demands a kind of reflective judgement, a contemplative distance. An aesthetic of the smooth asks nothing. Renaissance painters were famous for the colours they made. Increasingly, we select from the same colours and shades. The aggregated data about the behaviors of billions is used to predict our future decisions and tastes, guiding us toward profitable choices in service of efficiency. Just as a dataset containing pictures of prisoners creates the fu- ture, our past actions will determine the facts of our future. We are witness to the gradual automation of aesthetic decisions. Nostalgia is a sentimental yearn- ing for some imagined past. Nostalgia is on the rise. As the future no longer promises something better, we turn back to things that used to comfort us. As you browse through Netflix’s recommendations, notice how many offers resem- ble things you used to like. A culture of nostalgia signals the death of progress as an idea. Algorithms love nostalgia, and push the familiar and reassuring.
What does this look like in practice?
I find it instructive to see how the Chinese government has responded to its own crisis of trust and how it might be a precursor of what is to come in other parts of the world.
China’s historical path to the present moment differs from those in Europe or North America. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, ushering in a new age for the country. Since then, economic and social reform has seen tens of millions of people dislocated from rural life to cities. Urbanization and growth have eroded the trust that previously underpinned social and economic life in China. I am not equipped or prepared to unravel the rich and complex history of the world’s longest run- ning empire but will point to more recent events and how they may suggest the design and delivery of systems of algorithmic control.
In the West, centuries of institutionalized oath-taking have created condi- tions where low trust can be offset through agreements and contracts that allow for progress to occur despite doubts among individual players. China, tradition- ally more reliant on relationships and reputations, was faced with a profound challenge brought about by urbanization. Rather than addressing doubt directly, China has opted for systems of rigid control, building institutions and policies to remove uncertainty from the messiness of everyday life.
Normally, our response to losing trust is to express doubt. In some cases, we see profound unrest as disenfranchised communities recognize that the sacrifices they make no longer lead to reward. Violence arises as those com- mitted to the way things are come up against those that see the emptiness of the promises made. Trust in each other and in the institutions accountable for delivering their part of the deal is destroyed.
Doubt is horribly inefficient, though, and, as we’ve seen, efficiency is a cultural value that much of the world has come to cherish. Doubt slows the pace. Doubt reduces commitment to a given path. Doubt creates fractures in how things are. In fact, doubt is becoming one of the many ordinary human emotions assigned the role of mental disorder.
So, instead of doubt, we are offered control. If we cannot promise a better future, we will work to guarantee the least bad one possible. If the future is uncertain, then we must learn how to predict and control it. We turn to algo- rithms to answer an increasing number of important questions and to guide us in a widening scope of decisions.
China has developed the social credit system in response to the uncertainty and disorder of low-trust urban life. Every person is assigned a score based on how trustworthy they are deemed to be. Algorithms integrate numerous data streams to determine each person’s score. This will influence how easily they can navigate the institutions and systems of modern China. This is an ambi- tious experiment in social control with plans to launch nationally. The current Chinese administration is assessing the numerous pilot programs that are underway for their potential to guide the economy and govern society in the future.
According to the German foundation BertelsmannStiftung, these pilots ex- amine various aspects of social credit. For example, each citizen could be given a social credit score that goes up or down based on their behaviour. The score will draw on traditional sources such as financial, criminal, and government records. It will also include data collected from the internet such as search history, shopping preferences, and interactions on social media platforms.
There is some evidence that video surveillance will also play a role, leveraging facial-recognition software to assess public acts. High scores deliver privileges, low scores can result in them being taken away. Scores can be raised through neighbourhood support, blood donations, government praise, charity work, taking care of elderly family members, or committing a “heroic act.” Scores are reduced when you join a cult, offer insincere apologies, commit traffic offenses, or protest against authorities.
High scores can raise the likelihood of receiving loans or credit, they can improve access to schools or work, reduce deposits for various services, shorten hospital waiting times, fast-track promotions, and even lower taxes. Low scores, however, can result in the denial of licenses and permits, or access to some social services, or the purchase of air or train tickets. They can restrict access to other public services, government jobs, and private schools. They may also lead to public shaming, including exposure on TV screens in public spaces, and a special dial tone to let people know that they are calling a “dishonest debtor.”
Many readers outside China will find such a system unimaginable in their own countries, yet there are already signs that, while the application may take a different shape and form, the underlying principles are already being tested elsewhere. Leaked documents from Google’s Sidewalk Labs in Toronto suggest- ed a plan where tax rates were tied to the transparency of the local residents.
Contact-tracing as an approach to controlling the spread of COVID-19 leverages “handshakes” between Bluetooth-enabled devices to record a unique identifier for each person we come near during a specified period. While anonymity is promised in these measures, what Faustian bargains become inevitable be- tween corporate expertise and government pursuit of order and control?
The program in China is having an impact. According to a report in China Daily, bad debtors included on the low score list were prevented from flying
6.15 million times since the launch of the blacklist in 2013. People found in contempt of court were denied high-speed train tickets 2.22 million times. Over 70,000 individuals were denied executive positions at enterprises. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China has refused loans worth more than one billion U.S. dollars. The director of the Institute of the Chinese Acade- my of International Trade and Economic Cooperation observed, “Given this inconvenience, 10 percent of people on the list started to pay back the money they owed spontaneously. This shows the system is starting to work.” There is something to note in the perception that the decision could be understood as a “spontaneous” one.
In the West, the so-called “cancel culture,” whereby public support for individuals and institutions is withdrawn following a process of public sham- ing, often through social media platforms, has become a topic of discussion and debate. China, though, has institutionalized this practice as a means of addressing uncertainty and confusion in markets. The approach has qualified public backing, too, as evidenced by research conducted by Xinyuan Wang of the Department of Anthropology at University College London between 2018 and 2019. Wang’s ethnographic study explored the use of digital devices by around 500 people in Shanghai and included conversations about the social credit system.
Those participating in the study were not shy or concerned about express- ing political opinions. They also attested to a persistent fear of fraud. As one participant observed of living in China, “you have to be always on guard against others as pits of fraud are everywhere.” In this case, their principal concern related to the potential for their elderly mother to fall victim to scammers. In general, Wang observes, “the people I spoke to seemed less concerned about giving up some privacy if it meant a significantly higher degree of security and certainty. And a lot of the people I spoke to perceived the new social credit system as a national project to boost public morality through fighting fraud and crime and combatting what is currently seen as a nationwide crisis of trust.”
Experiments in social control are being undertaken around the globe but are not attracting the same degree of scrutiny as the Chinese social credit system. In many countries, governments, insurance companies, law enforce- ment agencies, and many others are making decisions about issuing policies, enhanced screening, and hiring based on data accumulated from a range of sources. Further moves towards centralization and digital monitoring also have resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, with the effectiveness of China’s own response closely studied by outside observers. As philosopher Slavoj Žižek has pointedly enquired, “Does this mean that, at least in some aspects, China is our future? Are we approaching a global state of exception?”
To understand how a system such as the Chinese one can exert a hold over nearly 1.5 billion people, look at the success of institutionalized education. The moral positions that define order matter less than the vigilance with which those positions are reflected in structures and culture. Educational systems are so entrenched that trying to keep your child out of them can lead to trouble with law enforcement in many parts of the world. It is not so hard to imagine certainty and safety taking on the same moral urgency as education or health, with technologies readily mobilized to address dishonest actors in society. Pub- lic criticism of policies relating to universal education or control of epidemics is met with silence or outrage. As a result, the interests of the existing order take on the strength of moral certainty.
This is both remarkable and reason for pause. What other fields of life might be subject to this sense of inevitability? We have already seen that rigidity and intransigence often move in one direction until met with large-scale collapse.
The potlatch ceremonies of the Pacific Northwest were criminalized. The act of giving away one’s possessions was dismaying to the European colo- nizers, but the real fear came from the fact that potlatch was a process embed- ded in institutions that had evolved from a different set of beliefs and values than the one the Europeans brought with them. A ritual based in generosity was unfathomable to a culture with a preference for accumulation. The vigilance applied to eliminating potlatch derived less from its content and more from the presence of a competing institutional framework with different assumptions about the world.
The work assigned to algorithms tends to assume that scale is central to human well-being. Yet the digital divide keeps technology out of the hands of marginalized communities. The divide is accentuated by a lack of training.
Those that benefit most from the existing order become the authors of what comes next. Those that might prefer other values based on compassion or generosity or serendipity have few opportunities to apply their world view to the tools we create and use. In fact, many of the tools are designed with growth and efficiency in mind. Assumptions about ownership of data, even in the home, have been overturned. We surround ourselves with digital tools that listen to what we say and share the data in ways that are hidden by tedious, lengthy, and opaque end-user agreements.
One of the arguments for disorder is that different ways of interpreting the world evolve to address local challenges. Their disappearance limits our ability to adapt to future challenges. Those leveraging algorithms don’t want inno- vation. They want monopoly. This narrowing of choices limits our ability to adapt. The ossification of order relies on a reconceptualization of social rela- tionships and a near-total disregard for the line between the autonomy of the individual and the need for certainty.
There is a tendency to justify the application of violence and order in defense of democracy. As philosopher Jacques Rancière observes in Hatred of Democracy, we justify the existence of armed might and force to “master democratic disorder.” For some, democracy is “not the idyll of the government of the people by the people, but the disorder of passions eager for satisfaction.” Such a belief justifies the use of violence and power to suppress. In this sense, the images of the pillaging of Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein were not understood as failures of the invading countries but as the inevitable disor- der of freedom, serving to underline the need for order backed by violence.
In the following chapters, we will explore alternative approaches that resist the monopoly of beliefs shaping the structures around us. The challenge is that power does not tend to be embedded in a single person but rather in an all-en- compassing social system. No one is responsible. A narrow view of human nature informs more and more of the automated systems that shape how we live. Positing different values or different mental models becomes increasingly difficult. The systems that surround us bury their assumptions deep and it is increasingly difficult to pull them out so that we might consider their suitabili- ty. What, then, might everyday resistance look like?
5. Poaching
But ten centuries of cultural continuity brings with it—among many advantages—the great disadvantage that man believes himself safe, loses the feeling of shipwreck, and his culture proceeds to burden itself with parasitic and lymphatic matter.
— José Ortega y Gasset, “In Search of Goethe from Within”
On March 11, 2011, an earthquake struck off the coast of Japan lasting six minutes, with a magnitude of over 9.0 on the Richter scale. It killed more than 15,000 people. At the time, I was living in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada, and working at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. My daughter was two years old and the events unfolded late in the evening. We woke up unaware of what had happened, and it was only as I was walking to work that I received the phone call from my partner, herself born in Japan, crying, explain- ing what she was seeing on the news.
I rushed home and we spent the day checking in with family and friends in Japan and trying to assess the reach of the disaster. Weeks later, we discov- ered that a recording of a television program that we had delayed watching had been interrupted by news of the event. An episode of The Simpsons abruptly transitioned into horrifying video of a relentless wave pushing across the Tohoku landscape.
The Fukushima nuclear accident was soon revealed as an additional impact of the disaster. The 14-metre-high tsunami made short work of the facility’s seawall and flooded the lower grounds around the reactor buildings. The emer- gency generators tasked with ensuring that coolant was delivered to the decay- ing nuclear material failed. This, in turn, resulted in three nuclear meltdowns and the release of radioactive contamination over the following days.
Living thousands of kilometres away meant there was little we could do to directly address the compounding crises we followed in Japan. For various historical reasons, one in ten of Banff’s population identify as Japanese. For several months, it was difficult to enter a shop in the area without seeing some solicitation or advert for a fundraising event or activity aimed at delivering direct or indirect relief aid. We gave money and volunteered where we could.
We also started to hear stories of the health impacts on children in places as far away as Osaka, almost 1,000 kilometres from the epicenter of the event. Family doctors were treating children suffering from pain in the bones of their arms, legs, and pelvis. Unexplained cramping and fractures were appearing, as well as early signs of skeletal deformities. This outbreak of symptoms was consistent with rickets, an affliction driven by a deficiency of vitamin D. What possible connections could there be between an earthquake, tsunami, nuclear accident, and a disease most common in parts of the world with poor nutrition? Atmospheric dust, radiation, and changes in diet were eliminated as poten- tial contributors. One of the main sources of vitamin D is exposure to sunlight, and this is where the cause was eventually found. Inundated with stories of radioactivity, parents had become afraid to let their children go outside. When it was absolutely necessary to leave home, they covered their young ones up to avoid potential exposure. The Japanese government, seeking to reassure the public, opted to release official radiation data. Unfortunately, the information was distributed as a PDF file consisting of a long series of data tables. Not only was the information not particularly readable, but it was also difficult to inter- rogate and filter so that people might find the specific information they needed. To preserve the integrity of the data, it had been made almost inaccessible for those it was meant to serve.
I first met designer and technologist Haiyan Zhang in 2012 during a period of profound transformation at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. The Banff leadership was interested in how art, design, and social innovation might be entan- gled, and Haiyan joined in that conversation at the invitation of Jennie Winhall. Haiyan spoke to us remotely from California and told us about her work in sup- port of data access for the Japanese people following the Fukushima incident. At that time, she worked at the design firm IDEO and was one of the creators of a crowd-based solution platform called OpenIDEO. Haiyan joked that she knew how to make “websites and robots” and wasn’t entirely clear about how her unique combination of skills might contribute positively to the situation.
In the end, Haiyan opted to make a Japanese radiation map, borrowing from the notion of how weather is reported. She did this despite having few direct connections to Japan but motivated by a deeply held belief that technology and its benefits should be available to everyone. Haiyan worked with a range of data sources to create a visually compelling map of Japan that quickly suggested where radiation readings were abnormal using an unambiguous colour system. The hope was that anyone might use the information to make decisions about what parts of everyday life were safe to revisit. Red suggested risk. Green meant something resembling normal. The Japanese government had identified the problem, but trapped in its own routines, had offered a solution of limited benefit. Haiyan’s Japan Geigermap initiative sought to bridge the gap.
Within six months, Haiyan’s brightly coloured map, layering government and other sources, had received over 500,000 visits. Government data shared space with data provided by hobbyists who had strapped hand-made Geiger counters to their vehicles as they drove around the countryside. The focus, according to Haiyan, was “about showing live information” and letting people linger over areas of interest to explore various sources, making up their own minds about the best next steps. There was no explicit political position on nuclear energy or the trustworthiness of various data points. However, when deviations occurred, they were flagged and investigated. In fact, one bright red reading in Tokyo caused a brief period of panic until it was discovered that the Geiger counter, installed by a friend of Haiyan in an apartment complex, was the victim of a leaky roof that brought the sensor into continuous contact with contaminated rainwater.
Haiyan is now the Director of Innovation at Microsoft Research. She appeared on the BBC Two show Big Life Fix, on which she developed the Emma Watch, a device for those with Parkinson’s disease that helps to reduce tremors. She inspires others through her commitment to address issues of public health and technology gently and compassionately.
I realize that the preceding chapters might generate feelings of hope- lessness. It is hard to keep up with the speed and scale of machine learning and other instruments of rigidity. However, Haiyan’s work in Japan and elsewhere provides hope, demonstrating how a single person, working through community, applying themselves in their spare time, can disorder the patterns solidifying around us. They can present us with the possibility of something new.
Our world is organized around the stories we hold to be true—the ideas of John Locke. Our sense of uncertainty and risk are connected to how well facts line up with those stories. British economist J.A. Kay argues in Radical Uncer- tainty that, rather than pursuing some idea of optimization or rationality, most human beings measure our sense of risk and uncertainty by these reference narratives, the ideas we hold in the form of stories that describe the world.
Financial journalist Michael Lewis argues, “the stories we make up … effective- ly replace probability judgments.” We are not machines constantly calculating the next best move but human beings with stories and ideas about the world that we refine over time. Refinement comes from evidence that qualifies or disproves what has previously been believed, as well as through discussion with others. However, it seems that algorithmic culture protects us from facts that might disconfirm our ideas of the world and that our discussions with others are being simplified. In the absence of a reference narrative, disorder quickly becomes excessive, prompting us to cling to the stories we already have. In some cases, according to Kay, institutions enforce a reference narrative of rationality and optimization on the public. Like Procrustes, they force reality to fit the model that economists and others hold about what makes people tick. Haiyan’s work offers a new story, or reference narrative, by which to make sense of things and to point to different aspects of life that matter.
Japan Geigermap was not an act of disobedience. Blocking or resisting the desires of the Japanese government was beyond the capacities of Haiyan and her community of allied makers, hobbyists, and friends. Rather, Haiyan intro- duced her own story into the mix and offered people another narrative by which to evaluate their decisions. The story that the government creates the data, and the public consumes it was complicated by an alternative story in which every- one could be involved in the creation and evaluation of the data. By avoiding the “right answer” offered by the Japanese government, Haiyan helped anxious mothers to make their own choices and to actively contribute to the well-being of others in similar situations. She drew on a diverse range of data in a map that was visually appealing and highly granular. She told a different story, in a different way.
In time, it became clear that a lack of Geiger counters was limiting the effectiveness of the story Haiyan was trying to tell, particularly in the most highly impacted areas around Fukushima. How many of us own a Geiger counter? The problem was even more pronounced in the mostly rural commu- nities of Tohoku. An inherent flexibility arising from the lack of institutional constraints and an unwillingness to be trapped within an imposed narrative allowed Haiyan and other organizers to observe patterns in the distribution of the data and source a relatively easy-to-assemble Geiger counter on eBay.
Haiyan ended up visiting the affected region and supported locals as they learned how to use these handmade devices, read radiation levels in their doorways, in their children’s rooms, and around their local playgrounds. Japa- nese government researchers, operating at a national scale, had no capacity to monitor the radiation levels for individual citizens. The story they told was big and Haiyan’s was small. Scientists studied at the altar of Apollo. Rural Japanese mothers found recourse in the tools of Dionysus. Individual lives and their meaning became the focus of the efforts. A logic of scale poorly addresses the fear of radiation in a child’s bedroom.
Is action like Haiyan’s still possible for the rest of us? Or as philosopher Byung-Chul Han asks in In the Swarm, “Isn’t everything we do so fully at the mercy of automatic processes that even the miracle of a radical new beginning can no longer break their hold?” I certainly have seen new beginnings prove effective in reworking systems that directly contribute to ambitions of beauty, equity, care, and, yes, growth and efficiency. Some of these shifts are derived from centripetal forces in the economy and culture. More arise from the daily practices of individuals negotiating new relationships that describe our day-to- day lives.
What follows is an approach to evening out the playing field. We should be able to hold our own ideas of the world and be free to expose them to others so that we can revise. This only works if we build that capacity in ourselves, in our social interactions, and in our communities. In musical chairs, we can choose to show up differently. This is a disorder in the game. We can also choose to play something else. This is a disorder of the game. Most of the disruption celebrated in popular culture is about changing what happens at the edges. Not many moments change our understanding of what the game is. The edges are not fixed. They shift based on what we’re looking at.
The argument for disorder—the release of the accumulated costs of entro- py—is one of increasing urgency. In the past, techniques of control were inad- equate to limit local expressions of difference. One could walk a road and find different solutions to similar challenges in each town along the route. Wildly different beads on a long thread, each community reflected their idiosyncratic experiences and resources. Just as each town in the Andes supported a distinct mix of wild and domesticated potatoes, communities would come up with their own ways of expressing what they believed and how they organized to get things done. Over time, the individual places were assimilated, sharing a nar- row set of responses, captured in global and centralized systems insisting on consistency. Now, we all grow the same potatoes. We all hear the same stories.
Order is the application of effort to keep things where they are. Disorder is the tendency of things to move where they need to. An almost eight-hundred- year commitment to increasing order has bound us up tightly, burdened by the “parasitic and lymphatic matter” described by philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in the quote that opens this chapter. Advances in machine learning threaten to bury us deeper.
There is no place, no town along the road, where these systems can be confronted. One might talk to a Japanese government scientist about the decision to share data as a PDF document. However, the decision was un- doubtedly made through a complex tangle of agencies, decision-makers, and codes. Writing about socio-technical systems, Rosalind Williams, a historian of science and culture, observes that large-scale systems and infrastructure are too big to wrap our arms around. They have no definite shape. In “Nature
Out of Control,” Williams observes, “You can imagine taking over a prison, but how do you seize control of an entire highway system? Local rebellion becomes impossible, and general revolution necessary, when protest against systems requires the construction of other systems.”
I wonder, though, if the tools that serve order might also be leveraged to build new disordered systems in response. Haiyan and her community used the apparatus of modern globalism to put forward their own ideas, lightweight and local. They never really considered revolution practical against the larger system that created the initial need.
I hope that the risks of our current predisposition to order are becoming clearer. In all aspects of life, the need for appropriate solutions to the problems we face is accelerating as the pressure we place on the systems that support us similarly accelerates. Democracy is showing the strains. We need a disorder that questions the moral assumptions of the systems we have, at least in critical areas of activity. Or, as anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing challenges us in The Mushroom at the End of the World, “How might capitalism look without assuming progress?”
Naturally, there are many that are acting to effect change and alter our course. There are many stories being told. Looking at the larger context that Haiyan’s work emerged from, we see a movement toward decentralized technologies gaining traction all over the world. Solar and wind are increasingly deployed in support of local energy self-reliance. Networks of mutual aid ensure that the most vulnerable are supported during COVID-19 and the resulting quarantine. The list goes on and on. The greater the variety of problem-solvers we have, the better.
Our shared culture is a critical site for questioning the assumptions that describe and shape our systems. Culture is where we learn what things mean and where decisions are made about what solutions should be preserved and which can be forgotten. Our focus for the remainder of this book is on what we can do—as individuals, as neighbours, as communities, and as organiza- tions—to loosen some of the ossified routines that drive us inevitably toward a future we may not enjoy. We will do this through the lens of culture, through the stories we tell, and the stories that others tell about us.
We do not need to go out and choose disorder. Disorder is a by-product of other choices that we make. Unfortunately, it’s become harder to make other choices as we turn over the responsibility to make them to anonymous and non-human systems tied to strings trailing off into the unseen distance. Too often these decision-makers share a common set of beliefs about what is good for us and our children. Their official ideologies become embedded and tricky to contest or interrogate.
By turning over the need to care for each other to machines and far-away bureaucracies, we are losing the ability to spontaneously practice compassion and joy with other people. We turn away from the homeless because we are told that they are someone else’s responsibility. We see learning purely as the work of schools and so fail to see in each other opportunities to teach and study. We turn over the task of making and sharing new ideas to institutions. But, of course, local problems need local ideas that are made and shared spon- taneously and through informal practices.
By changing the stories being told at the centre of our day-to-day activi- ties we can introduce uncertainty and disorder into the architecture of the systems around us. The same media that demands transparency might then become the means of transmitting the existence of a disorder that is not intended to simply engender outrage but rather allows us a renewed sense of awe and wonder, suggests new solutions, and eases the pace of living. The Japanese government valued scale, accuracy, and scientific rigour in the data it produced. Haiyan built a system around timeliness, compassion, and safety for individual families. Both sets of values are legitimate and necessary bases for a function- ing society. However, the power of scale tends to squeeze out opportunities for solutions like Haiyan’s to take root.
When facing systems committed to rational efficiency, German economist Albert Hirschman argues, people are left with two options: exit or loyalty. In a free society, he claims that a third response becomes essential: voice.
Haiyan Zhang was not trying to usurp the authority of Japanese govern- ment researchers. She understood the anxiety a mother might feel not knowing if she could trust the safety of the physical world around her. She recognized that the values that demanded that data about radiation be shared as a locked document, unquestionable and absolute, were incompatible with feelings of safety and compassion. She disordered the stories about how science is done and decentralized the work of evaluating which data should be trusted and which should be omitted. Her focus was on recency over accuracy, and she left it to individual mothers to make up their own mind.
Haiyan created space for folks to linger, to explore on a map of where they live what others were seeing and experiencing, dissolving the lines between the official and unofficial. She interrupted the right of the Japanese government to monopolize the collection and distribution of data and inserted her own approach. She centered this work on a theory about why children were being afflicted with rickets, a disease rarely seen in nations with adequate access to nutrition. This theory allowed for improvements to be made over time and suggested where to look next. The assembly and use of Geiger counters took on the qualities of a ritual, ensuring that domestic and intimate spaces were safe to occupy. She dissolved the boundary between expert and citizen, reminding a vast community of volunteers that exploration and experimentation are oppor- tunities for everyone.
During the COVID-19 crisis, I was grateful to lead a small project with re- lated aims. Inspired by Haiyan’s work, New Not Normal was a series of residen- cies for artists and other creators that supported projects that reduced isolation during a still-current stretch of quarantine and anxiety. As part of the project, we made a map that paid homage to the Japan Geigermap. Anyone in the world could share how they were feeling through a blob of emotive colour and a short text message. No effort was made to identify the contributors or harvest their data. The site was set up so that it could not be shared via social media. In fact, contributors were unable to include their own names, and this anonymity engendered a quiet poetry. Those that left a message would never be seen, but their words might be read. This resulted in honest and touching reflections on how people were experiencing the pandemic. Elsewhere, maps had become tools of documenting the inexorable advance of the virus. We tried to prioritize the feelings that were tied up with those graphics of infection and mortality.
We joined a mass exodus to digital platforms. The Japan Geigermap was a new kind of place where new kinds of data could be processed and considered. New Not Normal came out of a desire to ensure that we did not leave anyone behind and that we cared for those with us on the journey. Some people are better suited to living in the digital world than others. Some needs are better met digitally than others. We were driven by questions about how we would gather to honour our dead, what freedoms we would be asked to sacrifice in the name of safety, and how our need for human closeness might be expressed in a digital world. The projects that emerged are not designed to grow or to become more efficient. The lives they touch will number in the hundreds, not the thou- sands or the millions.
Just as ukai invites us to consider the stories we do and don’t tell about the food we put on our table, Haiyan beautifully and gracefully created a new place for people to shape the decisions made about their world. Each of us can acknowledge the merits of scale, while demonstrating an ongoing curiosity about which parts of life should not be turned over to these ideas. Many small actions can shift a system over time. As Participle focused on capacity and relationships in supporting the unemployed, we too can choose what narratives we elevate in the world.
Chapters 6–9 explore four key attitudes and practices that allow for the gradual release of accumulated entropy. Many of us see the pressure cooker throbbing and twitching. We all need to give ourselves and others permission to walk over and relieve, at least in part, the explosion we fear is coming.
Role of Individuals
Sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward show in Poor Peo- ple’s Movements that large-scale change is rarely ordered. In the United States, the successes of activism during the Great Depression, the civil rights protests, and the anti-Vietnam War movement occurred most often when things were least organized. Every day, we see how protest and action are being leveraged to effect change. Disobedience is a powerful tool to bring about something new. What is offered here is not a substitute for direct confrontation with systems that no longer work but an exploration of how quieter action, situated in cul- ture and the stories we tell, also has a role to play.
How we understand history is dominated by stories of mass movements and key moments. This is a natural product of a culture that favors the big and prioritizes the experiences of the winners. However, as James C. Scott argues in Two Cheers for Anarchism:
Why risk an open land invasion when squatting will secure de facto land rights? Why openly petition for rights to wood, fish, and game when poaching will accom- plish the same purpose quietly? In many cases these forms of de facto self-help flourish and are sustained by deeply held collective opinions about conscription, unjust wars, and rights to land and nature that cannot safely be ventured openly. And yet the accumulation of thousands or even millions of such petty acts can have massive effects on warfare, land rights, taxes, and property relations.
There are the public acts that are fuelled by anger at justice too long de- layed. There are the less visible acts that undermine the hegemony of belief. Just as machine intelligence shapes millions of decisions to ensure order, we can collectively shape millions of decisions to complicate this rigidity.
When we act against a rigid order, we are not setting out to break the law or to create chaos. Laws and perceptions of chaos live very much in the assump- tions of those that benefit from how things are. We might simply be seeking another arrangement that better reflects our needs as human beings living together on an increasingly fragile planet. Haiyan relied on the scientific rigour of government research. New Not Normal took no position on state action deployed to limit the spread of COVID-19. Ukai is not a critique of industrial fishing.
James C. Scott elaborates on these subtle practices of disorder, focusing on poaching practices. Growing up, Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl was my favorite book, so I can empathize. From 1650 to 1850, the poach- ing of wood, fish, meat, and so on was the most “popular” crime in England. By “popular,” he means “both the most frequent and the most heartily approved of by commoners.” Rural populations were antagonistic to the idea that either the state or the rich might have exclusive use of “the free gifts of nature,” and so they broke the rules repeatedly, collectively, and quietly. Property rights, in many instances, existed in name only.
What are the modern equivalents of poaching? What lines might be erased, changed, reimagined, or transgressed? I see Haiyan’s work as an extension of this tradition. Although we might not be experts in web design, robotics, fishing, or poaching, how might we tell different stories through our behaviour and be open to the stories of others?
In the World
Specific approaches will be unpacked in Chapters 6–9, and the underlying assumption throughout these chapters is that by starting many small fires, we might avoid the risk of a sudden and catastrophic one. “Fires,” in this sense, refers to the creation and support of intentional moments of misalignment with the expectations of the systems and cultures we occupy. I argue for devel- oping a practice of embodying one’s beliefs about the world in everyday action in ways that are likely to be thought disordered. Of course, we do this all the time: laughing too loud, dancing with friends in the park, or wearing a bit too much yellow. Sadly, it is increasingly the case that these practices only become manifest with those we are closest to and within communities of like-minded folks. Our online lives are organized to ensure that what we share is likely to show up only with those that already agree or are already outraged. In either case, the aim is not deeper reflection or discussion.
- Specifically, I am suggesting a disciplined and widespread practice of:
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Reflecting on what story a system or moment is trying to tell, prompting us to ques- tion whether its assumptions align with our own.
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Bringing forward our own values to shape both the interaction and our experience of that interaction.
Haiyan, on reading of mothers fearful of radiation in the world around them, decided that the existing response was inadequate and brought forth her own values of compassion to shape the experience of those affected. In the New Not Normal project, we reflected on the widespread assumption that the world would move to digital connection during a period of quarantine and decided that certain rituals and moments of intimacy were likely to be lost or unavail- able if we didn’t interrupt and interrogate the assumption of universal retreat. Communities on the Nagara River have had many opportunities to forget about fishing with cormorants and modernize their approach. A desire to preserve tradition and celebrate the beauty of the practice have allowed it to persist into the twenty-first century. There has been the additional benefit of creating a market for those willing to pay to come and see it.
Individual acts of disorder change the story being told and, therefore, the game being played. Musical chairs, as we have discussed, is a game that celebrates competition, speed, aggression, and power. For those that enjoy these qualities in life, all is well. However, imagine the player that rejects the core premise. Imagine yourself dancing enthusiastically as the music plays, completely oblivious to the scarce chairs and ephemeral music. You will almost certainly lose but showing up in this way—and I speak from lived experience— not only impacts how we experience the game but how others experience it as well. For some it is frustrating because you are “doing it wrong.” For others it serves as permission to enjoy oneself despite the outcomes. How might this look in our work? In our culture? In our communities?
The value we possess derives from our dignity, from who we are, not from what uses we serve. There is no consistent definition of dignity, but generally it recognizes that we are all deserving of equal treatment as human beings, that each of us is unique, and that we are all ends unto ourselves as opposed to exclusively means to others’ ends. Just as Irish President Michael D. Higgins reminded students that they don’t exist to be useful, individual acts of disorder remind us and those around us that we matter in ways well beyond our contri- butions to the systems in which we participate. Disorder becomes an antidote to the ills of the unfettered pursuit of the large and fast.
As we discovered in the first chapter:
In any given context, we can ask ourselves some important questions: What is expected of me in this moment? What values or assumptions underpin this expectation? How do those values or assumptions relate to the values and assumptions I hold? Then, rather than falling into a binary of compliance or avoidance, we have an opportunity to creatively bring forward our own voice to disorder the routine of which we find ourselves a part. I see this done in many ways and will focus on practices that have emerged in my work over the past fifteen years.
These practices are organized as lingering (Chapter 6), interrupting (Chap- ter 7), ritualizing and theorizing (Chapter 8), and beating the bounds (Chapter 9). By doing so, we create the potential for awe in ourselves and others; we increase the potential solutions available to any given challenge; and we offer some relief from the exhausting pace of modern life.
When confronted with uncertainty, we are faced with choices. We can become anxious, we can categorize the experience so as not to reflect on it further, or we can see it as an invitation to experience awe. The findings of re- search conducted by Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner, which have been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, offer empirical evidence that awe builds stronger connections with others, inspires us to work together, and sustains cohesive communities. In a New York Times piece summarizing the research, the authors explain that “awe deprivation has had a hand in a broad societal shift that has been widely observed over the past 50 years: People have become more individualistic, more self-focused, more materialistic and less connected to others.”
Awe can be present when the conceptual categories we use to organize experiences are inadequate to process an event or interaction. In an 1817 letter addressed to his brother, poet John Keats writes of negative capability, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irrita- ble reaching after fact & reason.” By enabling uncertainties, mysteries and doubts in everyday life we invite others into a relationship with awe and develop a greater capacity to experience it ourselves.
Introducing individual disorder into socio-technical and cultural systems makes available new and unexpected solutions despite there being no place to confront them. Previously, we discussed the work of Participle in the UK and their efforts to redesign the welfare state. During the research process of the Backr program, aimed at supporting the unemployed and underemployed to find meaningful work, several improvisational experiments were conducted in a social services office. Backr was intended to be a self-sustaining program. One of the unquestioned assumptions was that those on welfare were not willing or able to pay for a service to help them find work. This makes a lot of sense. However, Jennie Winhall found, on reflection, that this assumption of passivity was hard to endorse uncritically as it misaligned with her own narra- tives of autonomy and human dignity.
After some discussion, the research team quickly put together a handwrit- ten sign: “£5 to Get Out of This Line.” They attached it to a side office that they then occupied. While varying the required investment affected the uptake, a surprising number of those lined up to process paperwork were willing to hand over scarce cash to try a new approach. The invisible bias that their experiment uncovered was the story that those on social assistance were happy to receive their “free” money without responsibility to work. The reality proved quite different but required an intentional disordering of a long-standing routine.
New solutions become possible when uncertainty is introduced. Individual gestures are important. As anthropologist Margaret Mead observed, “If the fu- ture is to remain open and free, we need people who can tolerate the unknown, who will not need the support of completely worked out systems or traditional blueprints from the past.” Practices and behaviours for both introducing and tolerating the unknown and operating outside worked-out systems become essential in a world increasingly deprived of serendipity because of powerful institutions and artificial intelligence.
While a practice of disorder entails less obvious risk than overt acts of diso- bedience, much of it happens in public, in culture, and therefore has different implications for different people. While fishing with birds or singing at a bus stop could be liberating for me, it might prove deadly for a young, black man should a concerned bystander decide that the behaviour is a little too disorderly for their liking. Those with the most privilege, those benefitting most from ex- isting routines, must also be those that most consistently allow space for other ways of understanding the world. For many, such as those who evidence ethnic or sexual difference, their very existence is perceived as an act of disorder that must be categorized and, in some cases, made invisible.
We should take care to distinguish between our fears of violating social norms and the real risks of violence or punishment. Doing what a particular moment expects of us is easier and less likely to bring social approbation or ridicule. It feels easier to play musical chairs in the way we are supposed to. I can appreciate the desire to be in alignment, to process experiences in categories that are familiar and shared. When we comply with a routine that feels hostile to us, we should ask ourselves if our anxiety is a result of discomfort or a fear for our safety. Are we concerned about a violent response or is the discomfort tied to a conscience that has deeply internalized social and institutional expectations? Just as protesting on the street carries different risks dependent on the intersecting identities we bring to the effort, even gentle ges- tures to disorder social routines can lead to very different consequences.
The Role of Stories
In Uses of Disorder, Richard Sennett argues that personal and collective growth occurs when old routines break down. Individual practices of disorder facilitate the deterioration of these routines, both those internalized as mat- ters of conscience and externalized as structures we navigate in everyday life.
Sennett sees a rigid self-image as a bulwark against the “pain of conflicting and tangled events that might otherwise confuse and perhaps even overwhelm.” We must, therefore, build an internal capacity to experience awe, as well as approaches to consciously confuse external routines. The former allows us to refuse our urge to categorize new experiences. The latter provides the base material for us and others to step into wonder and not be overwhelmed when things happen that feel beyond our capacity to process.
Jill A. Stoddard is a clinical psychologist that writes about managing anxiety.
In Be Mighty, she notes how we are losing our ability to act in uncertainty, particularly as answers to more and more questions are readily available. She remarks that, “If you want the answer to any question, just ask your device. If you want to know whether a restaurant, product or service will meet your expectations, just go to your favorite search engine. Because technology has deleted our ability to strengthen our tolerance of uncertainty muscles, we have become progressively more anxious when faced with the unknown.”
Discomfort when confronted with the unknown is a biological adaptation to an uncertain environment. How we choose to respond to that discomfort is mediated by our culture and our experiences. Dealing with uncertainty will require a willingness to stand in the unknown and to avoid grasping after the first explanation we might be offered to make sense of things.
I do not wish to suggest that disorder is simply a practice of acting chaotically or randomly, in a senseless public flailing. Although it may appear so, particularly to those committed to the expectations of broader social norms. Rather, individual gestures of disorder provide public evidence that it is pos- sible to prioritize other values, even in opposition to systems that would very much like their values to take precedence. Much of our economy is built on the assumption that people act in their own rational self-interest. We are assumed to do what is necessary to realize our own benefit, and structures are put in place that support and promote this idea. As such, practices that are obviously inefficient, such as ukai, become remarkable.
Some practices are so far outside what we accept that they become criminal- ized. Common acts, such as laying down in a public place in San Francisco, or performing music on the street in Barcelona, or spitting in my own hometown have been subject to periods of criminalization in the recent past. Most acts of disorder, however, are not illegal. Rather, we elect to follow the expectations of the spaces and places we occupy. For some, there are real risks of violence or reprisal in failing to toe the line. For others, it is simply easier than facing the ridicule of those around us. For others still, it is simply unreflective habit, learned and repeated until its assumptions are mostly invisible.
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how capable we are, individually and collectively, to change how systems work. Our global culture today differs considerably from the culture we took for granted prior to the early reports of some novel new pathogen in Wuhan, China. To avoid being overwhelmed by large shocks, small-scale approaches to disorder are valid and necessary. Just as bone strength requires episodic strain, and irregular heart rates support overall heart health, intentional and authentic expressions of disorder are a necessary antidote to the increasingly homogenized assumptions that organize our world.
Management theorist Otto Scharmer, while reflecting on lessons we have learned from the COVID-19 outbreak, stated that “our representations are increasingly mistaken for reality.” We have confused the categories we use to make sense of the world with the world itself. We spend so much time looking at a map that we risk losing our ability to look at the road or the trees or the towns we come upon. As individuals and communities, we must try to put down the map and introduce our own ideas into how things should operate.
The Role of the Social
In 1970, Richard Sennett remarked favorably on the “overlap of so many different kinds of life” in Manhattan’s Garment District. He then documented the decline of social complexity in the city, attributing this shift to “abundance,” which reduced the need to share resources among different groups in the city and allowed for the establishment of boundaries to keep certain communities from accessing space. The trend has only accelerated in the intervening years, with unplanned and open-ended encounters becoming rarer as our lives are increasingly ordered by economic and institutional logic.
There are still signs of hope. In 2018, economics professor Panos Mour- doukoutas argued in a Forbes article that Amazon should replace libraries. Taxpayer money would be saved, and Amazon’s market value would increase. It was a clear win-win. Controversy erupted and Forbes was forced to remove the piece. What the professor and his supporters failed to appreciate is that librar- ies are one of the few places left where encounters with different parts of the community remain possible and that a free library system celebrates the idea that culture is a public good. The logic of efficiency was unable to appreciate that there might be value in offering warm and safe spaces for the homeless or those facing a mental health crisis that others would be willing to pay for. The logic of scale could not accommodate the idea that accidental encounters with others might possess their own kind of volatile value.
The public outcry and eventual removal of the article suggests that public will remains uncertain about the elevation of the moral assumptions of capital- ism into other aspects of public life. Encroachments into areas of culture long- thought incompatible with arguments of growth and speed will continue, and not all will receive the public attention that the Amazon library received.
Stories about the world often show up as a simple set of rules, whether spo- ken or assumed, that define how a system operates. Musical chairs is an easy game to explain.
This simple set of instructions leads to complex interactions and emotion- al responses. Many human systems are like this. We encounter other people, we take our cue from external and internalized instructions, and we respond. Changes in those explicit or tacit reference narratives can quickly change how a system operates.
So, when our transactions are defined by a shrinking set of rules about what to expect, the systems that result become increasingly similar. The logic of control assumes that we all want the same thing—to maximize our own pleas- ure—and, therefore, systems ought to be built that strive to ensure that we get what we want and that we are encouraged to do so. Unfortunately, those that hold different views on what contributes to meaningful living, become excep- tions or disturbances and are pressured to accommodate or benefit less equally from the gains of efficiency. In fact, we often are recruited to police each other in this effort.
Grocery stores, in pursuit of increased profits, have reduced the number of cashiers available to process transactions. This is generally offset by increased efficiency through self-serve checkouts and highly efficient scanners involving a streamlined, no-nonsense set of interactions. However, I occasionally find myself in a longer line that piles up behind someone, often someone older, looking to engage in conversation with the cashier. I have no direct knowl- edge of why this elderly gentleman might insist on having a dialogue with the young cashier. Perhaps he is lonely. Or hasn’t gotten the memo. Regardless, we wait. I have, on occasion, found myself frustrated with the elderly gentleman, particularly when I’m in a hurry. I see other impatient glances. What does this say about us as a culture? As individuals? Rationally, we ought to prioritize the emotional needs of others over a few minutes lost. Rationally, we ought to ask questions about the profits these stores obtain and the human price of efficien- cy. We have, however, become so used to expecting efficiency that calling forth some other set of priorities no longer comes easily.
In “The Otherness of Being,” his contribution to the MAP collection Do Not Make The, clinical psychologist Chin Li articulates this well:
The otherness is not only to do with, as some futurologists and computer scientists have grimly predicted, the unimaginable, dire consequences that rapid development of Super Artificial Intelligence in combination with advanced biotechnology, will bring to humanity. It is, more pressingly, to do with the inevitable otherness arising from the gap between minds. It doesn’t take two implacably opposing minds for two individuals to feel otherness acutely.
A practice of disorder also involves the reweaving of our beliefs and habits in order to accommodate new experiences received in relationship with those around us. If we seek to affirm our dignity by actively bringing forth our beliefs about the world, this must be truest in our interactions with others. A practice of disorder asks us to reflect on what we believe in a moment and to make space for someone else’s beliefs at the same time. By doing so, we expose ourselves to uncertainty and create the potential to experience wonder and to remake the systems that try so fervently to confine us.
Sociologist and media theorist David Gauntlett applies this thinking to the idea of craft. Crafting, rather than being a means of producing something new, becomes an orientation to the world. He writes in Making is Connecting that:
the hands-on engagement of crafting and making, then, connects us with broader values, but the crafting orientation becomes one which can be a continuous part of everyday life, regardless of whether or not we happen to have a hands-on craft pro- ject. Rather, the gentle crafting spirit comes, ideally, to occupy all interactions with people and with nature.
The primary locus of social order is social interactions. Disordering these social interactions may involve no more than bringing forward one’s own conception of a beautiful life and making space for others to do the same.
Choosing to complicate social interactions and deny the expectations of institutional order can be understood as a form of critique. Social theorist Herbert Marcuse was concerned about deteriorating conditions for critique within industrial societies. He describes a “one-dimensional man” and a flavourless consensus, conditioned by a consumerist economy and the organized interests of politics, corporate culture, industrial technology, and mass media. He outlined the inhibitions inherit in internalizing the desires of capitalism and an unconscious inability to challenge inequalities and power imbalances that undermine human freedom.
The Role of Organizations
Organizing is merely an effort to order the chaotic flow of human action toward some end. Whether we talk about companies or communities, clubs or countries, organizations rely on frameworks, or reference narratives, for gen- eralizing and abstracting information and experience. The process of organiz- ing creates simple rules or perspectives that filter incoming information. To a Democrat, certain gestures or words mean specific things, and to a Republican, they mean different things. In a company, there is a line that separates those that are a part of things and those that are outside.
Organizations are patterns that emerge from, shape, and are shaped by change. Stories and their implied rules serve to stabilize, and to focus collec- tive attention on similar events and assign them similar meaning. We are not beholden to these stories. In fact, holding on to stories for too long can leave us unprepared to deal with changing conditions. The stories were shaped by us and can be questioned by us through speech or through how we show up as individuals or in relationships. This process of reconsidering the structures we apply to experience is inevitable. The question becomes: Whose interests are served in the structures that emerge?
In the nineteenth century, political theorist and pacifist Gustav Landauer argued for a revolution in interpersonal relations. He claimed that “the state is not something that can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.” Just as a simple change in the rules of a game can dramatically affect our experience of playing it, so too can changes in how we relate to each other have a dramatic impact on the organizations and communities of which we are a part.
Individual actions and interactions can have a perturbing effect on the structure of systems and the culture we inhabit. Isolated activities may inspire new behaviours. However, a practice of disorder focuses on unsettling the assumptions that guide how we and others interpret external expectations and centre our own preferences in social action. Disorder is disorganizing. Hai- yan’s website did more than provide another place to find data about radiation levels, it showed mothers and families how they might take a more active role in measuring and assessing the world around them. Increased agency through participation in the project will carry forward into future interactions. When another way is made visible, it is difficult to forget that we have seen it. If the writing on the wall is written in a language we understand, we have little choice but to decipher its meaning.
Various innovations have emerged over time to maintain the rigidity of approaches to organizing. The first localized form of collective social control was likely the use of the church bell to call the people of the village to prayer at a regular time. Geographer Nigel Thrift referred to this innovation as “clock time discipline.” The power of this regulation drew on the church’s ability to receive confession and to interpret the rules about who enters heaven and who does not. Defying the church bell was possible but hazardous. Clock-time was later altered to support economic activity as various signals were applied to let labourers know when it was time to start working, time to rest, and time to go home. In ancient Greece, a meeting might be set by the length of one’s shadow. Clock-time, though, introduced a rigidity and precision that was both novel and powerful in shaping daily life.
The process of being shaped by technological advances is accelerating and many are seeking to draw attention to its implications. In 2019, Simon Weck- ert, a German performance artist, could be seen dragging a wagon down streets in Berlin. In the wagon were piled 99 mobile phones. The intention was to trick Google Maps into thinking that these streets were crowded with com- muters based on the 99 distinct signals from the rented or borrowed phones. Within an hour, Google Maps would reflect this new information and direct travelers away from the “busy” street. The inconvenience was relatively minor but the publicity the project brought served to draw attention to how our devic- es have an impact on the physical world through, in this case, the redirection of traffic. As Weckert told Wired, “I have the feeling right now that technology is not adapting to us, it’s the other way around.” Weckert was not looking to be emulated. Rather, he hoped that the project would make the public better aware of the information that we are sharing through our mobile devices, and the range of real-world impacts that this communication entails.
Weckert’s individual act became a collective act by being a story that people tell and share. Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel, in Wired for Culture, asserts that “human nature is defined by our response to culture.” So, a practice of dis- order is not just directed at changes in how we show up in our culture, but also in how we shape the culture that mediates how each of us choose to show up.
Urban life initially evolved to enhance social interaction. Margaret Mead grasped its potential “as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist—this is essential to the life of a country.” However, we have witnessed a deterioration in the com- plexity of social interactions as urban life has become increasingly structured around the desires of human and non-human systems committed to growth and efficiency.
The foundation for how we understand ourselves grows from the culture in which we are raised. We hear stories about what is valuable and what is not. Perhaps fishing with birds is outlined to a child in magical terms. Or perhaps the story is one of ridicule. In each case, the child will come away with expecta- tions about what the activity means and, although open to change and develop- ment over time, the baseline has been set. A mother might believe that the government is to be trusted as a source of data on which their child’s safety depends. Or they might hold a mistrust of government researchers, mostly men, and their ability to share what they know to promote the safety of a son or daughter.
The stories we tell filter the world for us. Stories change what we notice and our experience of what happens around us. As we saw in Chapter 2, the differ- ent times, places, and contexts in which the story of Little Red Riding Hood has been told have resulted in different conceptions of what we should fear: the forest, men in forests, disconnection from family, or a failure to self-actualize.
Disorder becomes a means of introducing new, unofficial narratives into the official stories that govern how we live. In the past, the technologies of pow- er and violence were restricted in their application. Community-run schools persisted in Spain, even under Franco’s dictatorship, as the resources of the state were spread so thin that repression was difficult. Mass media and digital technologies make it much easier to reach many people at once. AI and auto- mation will only accelerate this trend. Violence is becoming embedded in the mechanics of habit. We become organized by the structures of our institutions and internalize the expectations of the broader culture. A lot of this is invisible or taken for granted.
Poaching, as an act of disobedience, arises from an unwillingness to inter- nalize the expectations of the larger systems around us. Poaching only works when those holding the potential for violence or control are absent. As we saw, a system is comprised of both an external manifestation, or structure, and an internal set of beliefs, or culture. Disorder disorganizes structures and will have implications for beliefs and culture. It also aims at culture, which, when effective, will manifest in the structures around us. Haiyan changed both the structure of data sharing and the cultural expectations about the public’s role in that process. Poaching defied attempts at closure and provided evidence of an ongoing commitment to the common use of nature’s gifts.
Too often, oppression and violence are internalized. We are self-oppressing as a matter of conscience. We must concern ourselves with cases where control is symbolically mediated, rather than just with those arising from violence.
Poaching is more than a violation of law and men with guns. Poaching is also a rejection of the right to restrict access to forests and rivers to the wealthy and connected.
Disorder forces community members to process the uncertain and con- tingent. When we allow these experiences to shape us, new ideas necessarily emerge that make sense of what has happened. The Japan Geigermap, to many users, was something new. It lacked the solemnity of a government publication and much of the data was generated by people just like them. When exposed to the map, one could deny its value due to the lack of scientific governance. Some did. Or one could spend time looking around and gradually make room for this kind of approach in how we interact with the world. New ideas are shared — “Have you seen this new site of radiation readings?”—and find a home in the broader culture. Over time, new ideas, as Nora Bateson describes it, “stain the carpets of our minds with spilt drinks. And then one decides to protect itself from outsiders and puts locks on the doors. Ideas are not tidy guests.” Disorder is an ongoing practice of tidying up the spilt drinks and removing the locks.
Anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher Edward Hall wrote extensively about the role of culture in shaping our perceptions and behaviours. In The Hidden Dimension, Hall states:
no matter how hard man tries it is impossible for him to divest himself of his own culture, for it has penetrated to the roots of his nervous system and determines how he perceives the world. Most of culture lies hidden and is outside voluntary control, making up the warp and weft of human existence.
Disorder offers an opportunity to make the invisible visible and for some- thing new to take root.
Some caution is necessary when advocating for the integration of new ways of knowing the world. Historically, the West has absorbed different approaches through a process of commodification. When confronted with something like ukai, the Western practice has too often focused on how to turn this difference into something profitable. There was a brief craze for ukai among the upper classes in American in the late-nineteenth century which quickly faded away. Art historian Deborah Root, in Cannibal Culture, explores how the West tends to “aestheticize and commodify markers of difference in Other cultures for the narrow purpose of selling new products.” She highlights how “citizenship, ethnicity, dress codes, and other place-based markers actively participate in a subject’s identity formation and become thoroughly sullied when rebranded on a global scale as commodities.” Order has an immune system, it seems.
This chapter has focused on what a practice of disorder might need to look like. We have not looked at what specific perspectives and approaches that might entail, and this is what the balance of the book will address.
It is tempting to blame invisible forces for how we feel. However, we must also recognize in ourselves our complicity in building this world. As Richard Sennet offered fifty years ago in Uses of Disorder:
When the desire for communal sameness is understood as the exercise of powers developed in everyday life rather than as the fruit of some abstract creature called “the system” or “mass culture,” it is inescapable that the people involved in this desire for coherence actively seek their own slavery and self-repression. They would be insulted if the issue were stated so boldly, of course; yet it is their acts, their impulses that create the communal forms. The social images do not materialize out of thin air; they are made.
The problem seems to be that the coherence we enact is becoming tighter and stronger as we turn over its maintenance to machines and large institu- tions.
The idea that tomorrow must look almost just like today is apparently hard to shake. Ideas that have become rooted as habit are hard to pull out. Architect and urbanist Keller Easterling observes in Medium Design that this difficulty is compounded because:
one has built and organized later information upon it … To change it means dis- rupting a whole mass of more superficial ideas which one doesn’t want to disrupt because they work out alright. To make the change at a deeper level is difficult. Now, it is particularly the more abstract ideas about relationships that tend to sink and become more unconscious.
All cultural life has become understood in terms of aims and objectives. Our behaviour and appearance are a signal to others. Disorder, then is more than a personal act of reclamation. Disorder offers others space to explore dif- ferent stories and ways of knowing the world. Just as slang emerges to confuse means of control, other acts of disorder can and should be deployed to arrest the ossified routines that abbreviate opportunities for wonder, limit our availa- ble solutions, and make us tired and unhappy.
6. Linger
Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
About six hours before she died, my grandmother told me a story. During the Second World War, she had been assigned to work in an experimental radar station that was part of England’s air defence system. Most assumed death was imminent, she told me, and this infused events with a sense of urgency and vibrancy, resulting in all sorts of debauchery and adventure. As the war length- ened, there were fewer simple pleasures to be enjoyed. Then the Americans joined the fight, and my grandmother recalled healthy-looking, confident men handing out ice cream to the local children. This they had made in buckets strapped into the gunner’s compartment of their aircraft, creating the sugary confection through a combination of freezing temperatures, shaking, and turbulence as they flew high in the sky.
My grandmother was sixteen when the war began, and her life was meas- ured out in nightly sirens and the thud of bombs. The dead and the dying marked her walks from her residency to her work when she was based in Lon- don. Most material pleasures had long ago been sacrificed both in the present and in the future. She was told to expect infertility as a result of the quickly as- sembled and deployed radar technology. More immediately, each night brought the possibility of a sudden end. Yet here were Americans, wasting fuel and time to freeze and churn ice cream for hungry, awestruck children.
An intelligent and creative woman, my grandmother never avoided sharing the horror of the war while maintaining that those were the best years of her life. Her own mother had been overbearing, and the war offered respite from the constant need to present well to the neighbours. She danced at night with handsome men, meeting my grandfather at one of those dances. His own last words, years before her death, were about their first dance together and a fur- tive kiss. In truth, though, my grandmother spent much of the rest of her days angry that promises pregnant with possibility during the wartime years were so quickly withdrawn. She moved to Canada following the war, no longer willing to wait for the recovery that sat latent in Europe’s ruins.
Sadly, she was to be disappointed. In Canada, my grandmother engaged in political organizing and attempted to run for office. She was thwarted repeat- edly. While women had served in the war, entering the workforce one way or another, there were different expectations in the post-war period: they were now meant to stay at home and have a family. My grandfather worked in an au- tomotive factory and there were lean years early on. In time, though, a certain stability became possible. If nothing else, material needs were met. But there was none of the excitement of the war years. No more dances or bomber-manu- factured ice cream.
The war asked that my grandmother be awake to the world around her. A better future seemed unlikely, absurd, and so she lingered in the smaller mo- ments that a day might offer. She recalled the cut of a Cossack dancer’s pants, the feel of her wool uniform on her arms, the taste of boiled vegetables, and the scratching sounds of metal that refused to settle. My grandmother spent much of her life trying to get back to that time through film and books. She began to refuse to participate in the world around her. She always discovered some ailment when it was time to visit extended family or spend a day outdoors. She waited by the window.
On a few occasions my grandmother told me that I was a sweet boy, but naïve. To her, I hadn’t yet figured out that the world was out to harm me. While my grandmother attached herself to an unrecoverable past, I made the choice for many years to plunge forward. I believed the mumbled promise of some- thing meaningful over the next hill, at most, a week or two of fast walking away. The trouble was that I, too, failed to exist in the present moment, always sure that what came next would finally make me happy. Dissatisfaction was tran- sient and, if I kept accelerating, I felt I could outrun my malaise.
This affliction, this commitment to forgoing the present in exchange for a better future, is so common and so overwhelming that professions have emerged to address the distress people experience when they find themselves at some distance from their goals. A marketplace for life coaches, therapists, and counselors now exists to move us forward. These professions serve to keep us focused on the treadmill and the prize. The fact that employers often foot the bill speaks to their perceived value in keeping the tired and run down moti- vated and seeking the next thrill.
About eight years ago, I became so dissatisfied with my journey that I sought a different kind of help, eventually finding it in the form of a philosoph- ical counselor named Andrew Taggart. As I progressed with my research for this book, I reconnected with Andrew, seeking his thoughts on the themes it addresses. Although we hadn’t spoken regularly for several years, we picked up quickly where we had left off. As a “practical philosopher,” Andrew helps individuals to inquire into the things that matter most to them. His work with Silicon Valley leaders has brought significant attention to his unusual prac- tice, but this likely distracts from the simplicity of his craft. Mostly, he asks questions, seeks clarity, and directs conversation so that those he assists might consider their situations anew. Over the years, I have found my conversations with him a tremendous help.
Recently, Andrew and I were discussing how effective philosophical coun- selling requires an “existential opening,” which allows for the process of seek- ing meaning to truly begin. During our conversation, he told me the story of a man who was a real estate entrepreneur and had a sizable deal go wrong. Inves- tors were falling into place and the entrepreneur had contributed a consider- able portion of his own money when, suddenly, it was all gone. Beyond the financial loss, this triggered a profound crisis of confidence. The man began to question what he was doing in the real estate business and, more broadly, with his life.
As had happened with me, the entrepreneur had become trapped by the idea of a particular future, and he raced headlong to acquire it. Then, all of a sudden, he found himself flat on his back and uncertain of why he was no longer moving. He looked around, considered pulling himself up, and, for whatever reason, decided that he could not continue the race. Andrew has a number of thoughts regarding why this happens, seeing it as an “uncanny blessing” that can be variously interpreted as “a mystery or miracle or gift.”
While falling over is usually accidental, what happens if we never stumble? What if we hurl ourselves downhill throughout our lives, arms flailing, barely keeping balance, yet somehow maintaining momentum? What if we are never forced to stop? Andrew poses his own question:
Is it possible to make a road bumpier so that people are more likely to fall over? I think that it is, within reason. That’s what I am trying to get to with philosophy. When I philosophize, I am asking questions in a way that slowly puts the other person off kilter. They enable that person to fall with grace.
This isn’t a chapter about falling. Rather it’s about the choices we still have once we’re on the ground. Some, like my grandmother, walk forward while looking behind them. They may trip, but rarely shift their gaze to the obstacles that obstruct them. Others seek fulfilment in the future and accelerate to get there more quickly. Their eyes are cast forward, far into the distance. Roots and other low things send them crashing. It is easy, though, to brush themselves off and to continue the rush onward. Digital culture may be leading us to a world defined neither by a clear image of a future or a past, but rather a constellation of discontinuous and fragmented moments. We jump from point to point, not seeking past glory or optimistic progress, but simply another distraction. We might fall, but we are quickly drawn to the next image, the next story, the next dangerous idea.
To linger is to stay on the ground.
Lingering asks us to inhabit the moment we are in, rather than those that are gone, or yet to come, or just one click away. Lingering involves holding a moment open and resisting the urge for it to close. By lingering, we create an opportunity to reconsider the maps and techniques we have brought with us, and through which we categorize and make sense of the world.
Lingering is profoundly disordering. It refutes expectations about what an appropriate amount of time to do something entails. Whatever duration seems correct, lingering takes more. The lingerers are found in the kitchen, hours after the party has ended. It is the smell of someone’s perfume on a glove years after they are gone. It is being lost in the setting sun and finding oneself in the dark with no sense of how you got there.
As we’ve noted, disorder is most fertile in the moments when our conceptu- al categories fail to accommodate the events of the world. Our current knowl- edge cannot be reconciled with what is happening around us, as I found when I first encountered the fishing cormorants in Japan. What are the costs and the benefits of refusing the expectations of others? Of settling into a moment beyond what others might perceive as appropriate? We can lean in close to the world and, when done well, the past and the future fall away. When we live in the past, though, as my grandmother did, or in the future, as I did, what remains?
The term linger is etymologically rooted in the idea of length and is com- monly used to mean to prolong or tarry. We live in a world that doesn’t have much tolerance for prolonging or tarrying, and these actions can be seen as downright wasteful or self-indulgent. Linger is used both positively and nega- tively, but frequently refers to something extranormal. Doubts, smoke, and eyes often linger. So does pain. They stay around longer than we might expect, for either good or ill.
Lingering differs from waiting in significant ways. Waiting implies that we are present in anticipation of something that is going to happen. Conversely, lingering implies a reluctance to move on. Waiting is a stillness focused on the future. Lingering is about the present, its preservation and expansion, blend- ing the current moment with the next and then the next. Lingering can also suggest that something weakens over time. Scent and memories gradually fade away despite our best efforts to preserve them.
Our cultural antipathy to lingering has led to its replacement by something else, a relentless forward motion. People strive for a long life and good health, somehow without enjoying either. Life certainly must be preserved, but the quality of that life takes on secondary importance to its bare existence. We seek well-being, but the quest for it makes it harder for us to enjoy it in the moments where it is available to us. We strive for what is absent, eating the present, which has become more valuable than the past and a portal to a receding future.
The modern world is one of incredible pace. We anticipate some future pleasure and rush to claim it. We lose a sense of duration or resent it when it is thrust upon us. We assume that a prior age’s urge to build things that last was driven by practical considerations. But to long for the future at the expense of the present is unnatural.
We can only live in the present.
Rather than imagining that we have bodies, it might be more accurate to say that we inhabit them. Where do we spend most of our time? My grandmother found herself in an attic full of memories. I found myself at the tips of my fin- gers, grasping for something just outside of my reach. Looking ahead, looking behind, looking at a new source of amusement, all distance us from being fully in our bodies and in the world. Intimacy, connection, and compassion rely on transcending an intellectual sense of others, toward something that is embod- ied and more immediate.
In Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion, Dacher
Keltner and Jonathan Haidt argue that there are two main cognitive processes that define experiences of awe. They are the sense of being in the presence of something vast and the struggle to process it. Lingering is a means to measure out the enormity of what is happening and to remain present to make sense of it. When we are successful, awe contributes to increased life satisfaction, a feel- ing of temporal abundance, increased generosity, and more peaceful interac- tions with others. Moments of awe are correlated with a sense of time slowing down and diminished attention on the self. Sadly, there are growing forces that conspire to pull us away from this quiet.
We exist in a world that values attention. Online services often talk about the concept of “dwell time,” which refers to how long a user spends on a particu- lar webpage. Algorithms learn that dwell time is improved when a site offers evidence that our models of the world are accurate, confirming our biases, and providing a sense of safety and validation. Alternatively, they serve up some- thing that is certain to engender outrage, securing our attention as we scroll through item after item in disbelief. In either case, we are not lingering. Rath- er, we are anticipating what comes next. What soothing affirmation, what new outrageous claim, will appear with one more click, one more scroll?
In Strange Tools, cognitive scientist Alva Noë recounts how breastfeeding is seen by researchers as so inefficient that many scientists believe its evolution- ary role rests outside its function in nutrition. They find it problematic making sense of a process that involves so many false starts, interruptions, and difficul- ties in latching or sucking. Surely, nature could have come up with something more efficient. Research centered on the social acceptance of baby formula as a substitute for breastfeeding highlights human efforts to fix nature’s mistakes. Might there be some broader benefit to activities that cannot be rushed? Might there be a price to pay for eliding moments of duration?
One of the biggest impacts of industrialization was in how we relate to time in the work that we do. What was once set by the task, or the position of the earth relative to the sun, or the community’s own standards, became set by the machine. Today, if you fail to meet the pace of the machine, you may risk more than a day’s production or the anger of a supervisor. Limbs and loose clothing become food for the endless assembly. Algorithmic culture asks that not only our work but the ever-increasing pace of life in general be set by the machine. Lingering as a practice becomes a form of resistance. It serves to open up other possibilities that might otherwise be unavailable. Be warned, though, the world has less and less room for those that choose to linger.
When I first experienced ukai fishing, I was presented with the opportunity to remain in the moment. I was exposed to something vast and extending beyond the categories I had constructed to make sense of the world. I was given the gift of dealing with the world concretely. I became anxious in this freedom, and pushed the story forward, remarking carelessly that I found it a bit cruel.
I closed the moment so as to avoid the struggle to make meaning. Without making a judgment, I felt naked and uncertain. Where did I stand in relation to this event? How small had I become? So, I dusted myself off after this sudden pause and continued walking as if nothing had happened at all. Thankfully, the memory stuck, and I have been given the gift of spending time with it, like the smell of my grandmother’s cigarettes in her small and poorly ventilated home in Windsor, Ontario.
The Experience of Duration
Andrew suggests that there is a “rage for order” in modern, Western cul- ture. This has resulted in the marginalization and gradual disappearance of different ways to countenance disorder. He refers to “the sorts of things that don’t quite make sense to us,” to the fact that in the past we didn’t necessarily need them to fit.
We have stories, practices, and rituals for them. We take psychoactive drugs. We have non-ordinary experiences. We have carnival. There are various sorts of disor- derly practices that are meant to put us in touch with the disorderly or more fluid or mysterious nature of things.
However, over time, we have come to strongly resist these ways of knowing and being in the world. Even where they remain, they have become safer and consumable versions of what they once were. Meditation, yoga, or psychedelics are increasingly tools of self-improvement and optimization and not ways of being in alignment with events that don’t fit with our maps of the world.
One way that we can begin to find the courage to remain seated after we fall is through the experience of duration. By this, I mean developing approaches to inhabit time, to occupy the moments of the present. This isn’t to suggest that we ought to ignore the past or the future. Rather, that we resist setting them as the poles toward which our experiences of the world are organized. The Mer- cator projection of our reality is distorted by our illusions about the possibili- ties of progress. Perception is quickly followed by a will to order, to categorize what is happening so as to continue to move forward. The longer we linger or resist that urge to draw lines and boundaries, the more easily those categories dissolve. I see value in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s exhortation in his Philosophical Investigations, “don’t think, but look”.
Lingering is built on the idea that perceiving can be more important than conceiving. Concepts filter experience so that we might avoid being over- whelmed. Sometimes, we become so good at organizing what happens that the categorization happens prior to our awareness of the act. We confuse the terrain with the map. We don’t see open flame and diving birds but something cruel. We don’t see mothers worried about radiation in their community but an irrational mistrust of government research. We don’t see unemployed people wanting to work and to enhance their sense of dignity but the lazy and untrustworthy, happy to receive a handout. Perceiving acknowledges the ever-evolving nature of life and living, where decay and growth, continu- ity and difference, all mingle.
In Ancient Athens, religious days were tied to the cycles of the moon. Ex- pansion and a desire to bring various locations into alignment resulted in the shift to a solar approach to the calendar in the fifth century B.C.E. Aristophanes wrote of the moon’s complaints at this shift. Reworking our experiences of time is dislocating. After thirty years of the solar calendar’s ascendance, a defeat by Sparta and the collapse of empire removed the need for precision and the moon returned. What empire is preserved in our current rituals of time? Who benefits from the rush? Who pays?
The Greeks often used the length of a shadow to establish a time to meet. If we commit to meet when our shadows are twice our height, what is lost and what is potentially gained in our interactions with the world? Public participa- tion in civic life forced the Greeks to imagine other types of time. To ensure fairness in public proceedings, an amphora filled with water and specially calibrated was used to denote the time allocated for someone to speak. This ensured that those eligible to be heard were all given equal access to offer their testimony. The centrality of an idea of fairness necessitated the development of new tools and new experiences of time as a result.
The modern world is generally subject to what geographer Nigel Thrift refers to as “clock-time discipline.” The use of the harness made horses avail- able for ploughing in Europe, which allowed work and home to be at a greater distance, leading to larger communities, and the growing role of the church in organizing daily life. The church bell, ringing at regular times to call people to prayer, brought us into a new age in our experience of time and the sus- tained growth of social control and coordination. The call to prayer has been replaced by the call to work. Now, each second of the day is measured and known. My day is broken into thirty-minute increments available for others to reserve and occupy.
The decomposition of the day was gradual but saw significant refinement under Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late nineteenth century. Taylor famously advocated for a form of scientific management that focused on efficiency in smaller and smaller increments. The approach came to be called Taylorism and remains the dominant model today. Each action and each minute are precisely measured in order to service the values of efficiency and growth. As economist Gilles Lambert describes in The Economics of Creativity, “despite a context of growing uncertainty and higher technological complexity, the Taylorian model of industry is still the reference for organizations in different continents, even if several adjustments have been made.”
A call to linger, or to hold, or to be quiet, or to extend grace is hardly radi- cal. These calls, too often, show up as moral admonitions. These are things we ought to do, often to enable us to return to other tasks with greater vigor. In this chapter and those that follow I will outline how these approaches might be better understood as things to be practiced, with the specific aim of resist- ing the categories used to organize the world. When our perceptual routines become ossified, they limit our ability to experience and benefit from disorder.
My work over the past fifteen years has prioritized complex, cross-sector collaborations where preferences and approaches differ considerably. There is always some urgency and an impulse to rush forward or to recover processes that used to work. In most cases, lingering, done with intention, and developed through repetition, generates better results. By placing ourselves in states or conditions that we might normally resist, we build the muscles to linger more often. Problems and opportunities can be perceived in new ways. Seemingly intractable differences can be bypassed as we acknowledge a shared cohabita- tion of the world.
Kensington Market is a truly remarkable and distinctive community in the heart of Toronto. Eclectic shops, a spirit of free expression, and highly visible interactions among cultures make it a sought-after destination and perhaps the city’s best-known neighbourhood. In 2006, the Market was designated a
National Historic Site. COVID-19 and the accompanying lockdowns shattered local businesses and residents.
In 2020, I led the Entangled project, that worked with local artists to answer the question of who imagines the future of our neighbourhoods. Three artist collectives that called Kensington Market home designed and delivered inter- ventions to engage their neighbours and visitors in dialogue about what comes next and what has been lost.
Meena Rizwan is a multidisciplinary artist whose work examines themes of connection, alienation, consciousness, play, race, sexuality, land representa- tions, and displacement. Her contribution was entitled Connections with Strangers: Kensington Market Booths. Two accessible booths were constructed and placed out of each other’s sight in the community. Anyone could enter either one of the booths and have a conversation with the inhabitant of its twin. Each conversation partner was invisible to the other and conversations were initially awkward and hesitant. However, by holding that space, assumptions about others were rearranged and reconfigured. Connections with Strangers created a pocket of quiet where meaning could be expressed and received.
When we encounter a stranger, we make assessments that inform how we categorize their contributions, experiences, and ambitions. Kensington Market has a truly diverse community, including the homeless; people suffering from addiction and making use of a local safe injection site; young people experienc- ing different forms of marginalization; residents and business owners; tourists and others. The booths and their placement interrupted habitual patterns of cate- gorization and meaning making and allowed for new perceptions to take hold.
Over the course of the engagement, a lot of people participated, including those living on the margins. They received food that had been donated, shared their hopes for the community, and heard from others. One participant, who returned twice, told us it was “one of the most human experiences” of his life. A musician, recently arrived in Toronto, stepped into one of the booths and was introduced to an open-mic event by a stranger on the line. The conversation led them to take part in the event several days later where they met several neigh- bours, otherwise inaccessible due to COVID restrictions.
Elements of Lingering
Within the practice of lingering, there are three core behaviours that express different aspects and forms of action. Holding refers to maintaining oneself in relationships despite the discomfort they engender, allowing ourselves to be changed by those relationships over time. Holding stretches our categories and requires innovation in how we make sense of the world. Quiet involves a portfolio of practices, finding stillness that enables immersion in the present.
Quiet allows the space for our categories to be rewoven and for seemingly clear lines to fade and shift. Grace invites us to root our ethical action in real efforts to inhabit the consciousness of others rather than relying on existing rules, whether tacitly internalized or explicitly described. Grace lets us work with the maps of others, returning to ourselves with their gifts.
Holding
Children need to eat new foods ten to fifteen times before they grow ac- customed to them. New experiences, like new tastes, require exposure and a willingness to work through difficulty. As a middle-aged adult, I do not like the same foods that I did as a child—and I am glad of it. My growing appreciation of cauliflower, miso, and injera came from a lack of other options. It terrifies me to think what I would be eating today had I not crossed an invisible thresh- old and tried unfamiliar foods. Algorithmic culture acts against our developing taste. If Netflix decides that I am unwilling to read subtitles, then the menus presented to me come to resemble assumed desires. I am denied the oppor- tunity to develop an appreciation for foreign and arthouse films because I am never shown them. My world narrows as a result.
At the same time, popular culture embraces and creates a massive market- place for nostalgia. Characters and stories from my childhood are endlessly recycled and fed back to me. Familiar stories and names ease the work of choosing. Acquiring adult taste, moving out of childhood and adolescence, is hard. Fewer motivations exist in a system set on optimization, giving us what we already want. If candy is what we crave, then candy is what the algorithm will deliver.
Holding asks us to remain in experiences from which we might want to re- treat. Our experiences increasingly are curated to match what we expect, rather than to extend the limits of our cognitive categories. Our urban environments no longer support various socioeconomic groups entangled in the work of liv- ing but are targeted at enclaves of the like-minded. Visual and human remind- ers maintain the sanctity of our boundaries. We are untroubled.
Holding introduces an intentional friction that delays closure. Holding also allows us to bring our collective subjectivity to bear on what’s happening around us. When we resist the urge to sort the feelings and experiences of those around us, we are provided an opening to a broader sense of things.
Hundreds made use of Meena’s Connections with Strangers and were provided new insights into their community and the potential directions it might take.
I was married in a shrine to pickles (and love) in Japan. Perhaps this is why I find fermentation a useful metaphor to describe the process of holding oneself in relationship. Fermentation is a practice known in most cultures. In fact, there is 13,000-year-old evidence of beermaking in a cave near Haifa,
Israel. Fermentation refers to the conversion of sugar into alcohol, the leaven- ing of bread through the release of gas bubbles, and the preservation of foods like pickles and cheese through the production of lactic acid. Fermentation, at its most basic, is a process of allowing decomposition to do its work to create something new. There is considerable uncertainty regarding the output of this process, as anyone who has made their own cheese, kimchi, or beer can attest. Over time, the process of fermentation and the various ingredients involved complicate each other in ways that are occasionally unexpected.
Ultimately, fermentation serves five basic purposes:
Fermentation takes time. Any efforts to accelerate the process can only take you so far.
Our list about the purposes of fermentation describes equally well the bene- fits that emerge from holding in place.
Rather than having the same stories repeatedly told to us, sustained expo- sure to difference increases the diversity of stories available to us, further help- ing us to make sense of the world. The notion of a Westerner spending their formative years in Japan has become something of a cliché. Nevertheless, in my own case, repeated interactions with different ways of knowing the world have contributed considerably, even decades later, to how I make sense of things and the range of narratives available to me.
The Irish potato monoculture and the extreme control exerted by English landowners led to the loss of resilience necessary to deal with massive crop failures. Holding oneself in place encourages the preservation of stories and ways of knowing so that they are not lost. Holding on to breeds of potatoes no longer seen as viable would have allowed for resistant variations to supplant those most vulnerable to infestation.
In the modern world, being present in discomfort, investing in the hard work and education required to develop personal taste, can offset the trend to- ward algorithmic optimization. Eating uncomfortable foods and engaging with uncomfortable ideas broadens the range of our own responses, but we must spend time with them in order to be improved by them. Holding offers dura- tion, supporting approaches that the market might not currently reward but that could prove essential as conditions evolve. The persistence of unpopular ideas provides the raw materials for innovation that may allow us to deal with massive problems affecting us and subsequent generations.
Holding happens in the mind and in the body. We overlook much when we fail to include the body in our understanding of our relationships with others. Jennie Winhall and Participle refused the simple argument that those on welfare were passively indifferent to their condition. Her obstinance was driven by the physical experience of spending time in the welfare offices. Hai- yan improved collective efforts to support worried parents around Fukushima by visiting the area, experiencing things for herself. Anxiety and uncertainty become palpable and the stories we bring to the situation are dissolved as new perceptions take hold.
I’ve been fortunate to work with Indigenous Elders in Canada throughout my career. One of the many things I have learned is about how smudging plays a role in commemorating significant events in some communities. Smudging, in the context I am describing, involves a burnt mixture of sage, sweetgrass, cedar, and/or tobacco. The smoke purifies the individual receiving the smudge and is often used to kick off an event of some significance. While we prepared for one such event, an Elder described how the practice served many purposes, with its unique blend of ingredients holding the experience in memory. Smell and memory are tightly coupled, and the smudge, with its unique combination and ratios of ingredients, embedded the experience in the collective history of the people involved. The conversations and ideas lingered on. This was particu- larly important in contexts where written records were not used.
There is always somewhere else we could be. Our devices offer us an escape from interactions that confuse us in the material world. I can avoid eye contact, even when trapped in a subway car, simply by directing my attention to the notifications on my phone. To hold is to acknowledge our discomfort and to remain in place. To eat a strange smelling food or to engage with the woman singing at the bus stop allows us to perceive and make sense of something new. The novelty offers something strange that tests the limits of our categories. As Andrew Taggart observes:
There’s just an unwillingness to countenance the mysterious. I’m not saying that everything called quackery is legitimate. I’m just saying that there’s an anxiety, there is a kind of angst. Why is there such a kneejerk anxious, rage-filled, orderly reaction?
An exercise that helps build the capacity to hold oneself is a simple act of counting. When we are confronted by something unfamiliar, we might try counting to five before we respond. A family member offers a discredited and harmful take on the state of the world and our first instinct might be to yell or to leave the room. Often, we reply or are in motion before we are even aware of the urge. We may ultimately determine that yelling or leaving are the appropriate responses, but that extra moment of holding creates a space where other approaches might suggest themselves, and where unreflective patterns of response might be hijacked.
This is particularly true when we are operating under the influence of ideol- ogies that have shaped the society around us. Racism, for example, is increas- ingly intolerable in many nations. This reality brings certainty and abbreviates reflection in our initial response to acts we believe are driven by racism. Like language, official ideologies infuse our culture and are as easily at hand as a pen or a kitchen knife. The language people use, though, whether verbalized or written, is contextual. Even a brief pause can reveal aspects of a moment that are unfinished and available to shape what happens next.
Algorithmic systems, and the ideologies that underpin them, can serve to truncate reflection even further. We see a thousand messages echoing support for vaccinations against a novel new disease. When a family member expresses uncertainty about the vaccine and its effects, we are bolstered by the evidence shared with us.
Intelligence in computers is the product of processing exceptionally large data sets. Individual taste and preference can quickly be dwarfed by the crowd. Our own routines become shaped and ossified by those of a curated yet invisi- ble majority, and we become less able to hold ourselves in ideas that do not fit. When once I might have expressed my anxiety about a new medication with those around me and be met with courtesy and discussion, I am now concerned that these doubts will be met quickly and definitively with mock- ery and disdain.
Holding, as an element of lingering, provides us with some tools to break up the unyielding control of our own concepts, as well as those that have be- come ossified around us.
Quiet
In Negotiations, philosopher Gilles Deleuze makes a strong case for quiet:
It’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Re- pressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and even rarer, thing that might be worth saying.
If holding allows our categories to be tested, then quiet provides the time and space for those categories to be reviewed and reimagined. Lingering de- mands quiet but the world is getting noisier. Most traditions link solitude and silence to the emergence of feeling and insight. While holding challenges our maps of the world, being quiet allows us to set aside current maps and filters, providing space to explore new ones. In quiet, we interrogate our assumptions and allow new patterns to emerge. Authoritative communication, by its nature, reduces entropy. We are told where to go and what to do. Disorder is only avail- able in our response. Quiet, uncertain, and contingent communications do the opposite and serve as an invitation to shift and resettle.
Hannah Arendt wrote her Crisis in Education in 1954, yet its lessons re- main true today. “Everything that lives, not vegetative life alone,” she observed, “emerges from darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at all.” The worst of pop psychology would have us believe that the world consists of extroverts and their non-stop chatter and introverts with their continuous retreats into solitude. However, all ideas worth having extend from some dark and secure place, regardless of how they respond once in the light.
In Ancient Greece, Euripides understood and introduced suspense and delay into theatre as tools to better stay in the present. Epic tales repeated sto- ries familiar to all. There would be no surprises, simply the return of what had always been true. New forms of theatre demanded new ways of telling stories. Quiet became an ingredient that intensified the events that followed.
In the West, we often think about space as being defined by its physical dimensions. A space is empty if there is nothing inside it. In Japan, concepts of space are non-Euclidean. Language and ideas of space focus more on how they structure interactions and connections among people and with the envi- ronment. No space can be truly empty as all inevitably shape the relationships latent within them. One Japanese concept related to space is ma, which is frequently translated as negative space but can be better understood as a free zone that allows for dissimilar things to co-exist. Ma is the unpainted portion of a canvas or the silence between notes. Ma captures the belief that quiet is necessary for difference to be reconciled. Long pauses are common in Japanese conversation and can be quite unsettling to those unaccustomed to them.
Quiet spaces support reflection and integration. Quiet is often framed in terms of solitude, but quiet is not necessarily a solitary act. Differences of opinion might also benefit from a practice of quiet, allowing for dissim- ilar ideas to connect slowly and tentatively, thereby avoiding the tendency toward polarization.
The burgeoning interest in mindfulness has resulted in its inevitable recasting as a consumable service. Yet in the view of Buddhist monk Henepola Gunaratana, mindfulness signifies a desire to acquire “an alert participation in the ongoing process of living.” For many people, there can be momentous freedom in ordinary, unheroic life.
Quiet, as a capacity, is to listen patiently, to be humble, and to recognize that all things are in flux. As with the ability to hold oneself, quiet can be introduced in increments. When was the last time you were with yourself, uninterrupted? I walk each day but sometimes bring along an audiobook to make the time feel more productive. The availability of distractions means that we never need be alone with our thoughts. A phone that becomes an alarm clock is constantly available.
The call for quiet has become near deafening. Yet we continue to surround ourselves with opportunities for distraction. We too easily give in to the urge to be right and give ourselves few opportunities to freely explore our own way of knowing the world. Human noise is more than a distraction. 2011 research by the World Health Organization — “Burden of disease from environmental noise” — showed that the clamour of modern life is behind a range of health conditions such as low sleep quality and high blood pressure. Our risk of heart attack, cancer, diabetes, and stroke are connected to the levels of noise in our environments. Too many feel compelled to add their own voices to the tumult and forego Arendt’s dark spaces that might usefully give rise to something worth saying.
Grace
To hold oneself is to be present with new categories for interpreting the world and to feel the flaws in one’s own. To be quiet allows us to reflect and reconstruct our own categories in ways that better align with the world we hope to inhabit. Grace, however, is a casting outward and a willingness to encounter the ideas of another from within. An action that doesn’t extend from a place of inhabitation is reactive, conditioned from an outside order. Only by turning toward another can we ground our actions in acceptance of and compassion for those that occupy the world with us. Too often, we believe we already know what we’re going to do or how we should feel about a particular situation. Our internal maps guide our action, and we lose track of the living world that the map is meant to represent.
Disorder prompts and enables us to choose how to feel and respond in each moment. As a practice, this can be exhausting. For Ivan Illich, in “The River North of the Future,” this permission to treat all others as we would our family or in-group is the great innovation of Christianity. To understand what a mo- ment demands, we must hold a position relative to the other and find space for quiet to make sense of what we learn. Grace then allows us to participate in the point of view of those we engage with as if their ideas were our own.
In my work, I address issues of broad social concern such as equity in response to COVID-19, the cultural impacts of artificial intelligence, and mar- ket-based approaches to dealing with economic inequality. Meaningful change requires participation from various positions, some of which can be polarized. It can be tense work to discuss energy exploration and oil extraction with Indigenous leaders in affected communities, executives from oil companies, governments, environmental non-profits, cultural leaders, and local residents. The potential for proceedings to degenerate into recalcitrant yelling matches is ever-present. So, we have to establish a sense of mutual care, extending the grace that allows us to see the event from various perspectives.
In Difference, economist Scott Page argues for diversity in teams and societies. He frequently returns to the metaphor of the mountain climber. Even with the best tools and best training, a skilled climber will fail if they select an impossible route. The best way to uncover the available routes is by looking at the mountain from various vantage points, sharing our knowledge with others and drawing on their own perspectives. We walk around the mountain. Diverse heuristics let us apply different tools to solving the problem. Diverse perspec- tives allow us to organize and reorganize the solution space in different ways. But, first, we must agree that we are indeed looking at a mountain and that it is a worthwhile endeavour to try to climb it.
Imagine you are walking down the street and up ahead you see a man sitting on the sidewalk with his back to the wall. His clothes fit poorly and are stained. It is cold outside. He doesn’t appear to be wearing a mask even though the pandemic remains rampant. When does your mind go?
Perhaps it goes to the future. You imagine this man cared for by those that are tasked with this work. He receives a meal, a warm bed, the care he needs. This is a satisfying future, and you earnestly wish that it might come to pass quickly and efficiently. Why are those responsible for the care of the most vul- nerable not doing their job? Why are you exposed to this risk, this uncertainty? You pass him by, holding some kernel of frustration at the failures of others to see his pain or some relief that aid is available if only this man would hurry up and find his way to help.
Perhaps your mind goes back in time. You construct a story of the choic- es that led him here. Idleness, addiction, a general lack of diligence surface as flaws in this stranger’s character. Bad fortune might also play a role. The current moment is but one along a long line of moments that will continue forward. You cannot change what has happened. You feel pity or a sense of strange pride, but action is impossible. The die has been cast.
Or you could linger, ignoring the future and the past, remaining present with this man in his need. Categories and definitions dissolve and what opens is the potential for grace: you can turn toward this person, now, on this street. Grace involves forgoing the consumption of the present, even when it means delaying a future where you need not consider another’s pain. You can feel the weight of your phone in your pocket. Staring at the screen would allow you to pass, to put this moment behind you. Or not.
Grace is defined differently in different traditions. Generally, it involves the granting of unmerited favour. You have no obligation to another, yet you extend them compassion and a willingness to perceive the world as they do.
We easily extend favour to those we care about. Even when my child is acting inappropriately, I offer unconditional love and try to see the situation from her perspective.
Perhaps the greatest gift of grace is that it lets us see ourselves through the eyes of another. By occupying their point of view, we become the mountain.
Only then might the routes inaccessible from our flawed vantage point be revealed. We try to see the maps the other has constructed and then return to ourselves with this new perception of both the world and of ourselves. Haiyan found a way inside the thoughts of mothers in Japan fearful of radiation and radically reframed the problem that the government and citizens were seeking to solve.
The need for this kind of understanding is immense. COVID-19 offers an opportunity for all of us to hold, be quiet, and turn toward others in need. MIT researcher Otto Scharmer suggests that there is a simple choice to be made: we can either freeze, turning away from others, caring only about ourselves, or we can turn toward others, offering support and comfort to those who need help.
The problem, too often, is that these choices are framed as simply moral in nature. Occupying the viewpoint of those outside our intimate circle is more than a moral good. A practice of trying to inhabit the other, through dialogue or in our imaginations, provides perspectives inaccessible to us in our unique place, time, and history. Much like holding or being quiet, grace is a practice that we will fail at frequently. Nevertheless, we must relearn how to experience the situation of another, even a stranger, from within. This is more than empathy, a sharing or understanding of how others feel. Instead, we must inhabit the complex consciousness of another human being to whatever degree we are able.
Jennie Winhall, in her service design work, talks often of the need to acknowledge both power and love in imagining new ways of being together in society. Through the lens of power, we gain access to the broader structures that push the chronically unemployed, or the isolated elderly, or families in cri- sis, to the situations within which they find themselves. As if, from some great height, we might see the rules and routines that constrain us. Through the lens of love, she argues, we come to access the interiority of another, and can begin to use their maps to better interpret a shared world.
Enjoy the Journey
The path to a Japanese teahouse winds through a thick patch of bamboo in a circuitous and indirect design. Steps are unevenly spaced, and the walker’s attention must be at their feet to avoid tripping or plunging into mud. The door to the teahouse, when we eventually arrive, is low and narrow. Most visitors must crouch to enter. The walk is part of the experience of the tea. Rushing to get to the door would be akin to gulping down the drink and hurrying out as soon as possible after arrival. Lingering is necessary for the enjoyment of the tea, and the events are designed with this in mind.
Socrates suggested that “Wisdom begins in wonder.” Wonder requires the capacity to be open to the experience of the world around us. We live in a society that seeks to address our longings quickly so that new longings might be introduced. Hungers are endlessly fed, and the paths become shorter, more direct, and under constant pressure to accelerate.
By allowing the certainties we carry to evaporate, whether tied to lessons learned in the past or to vague future promises, we are gifted with uncertain- ty. By holding ourselves in that uncertainty, by carving out quiet with which to rework our models of the world, and by extending grace to those we might otherwise retreat from, we may make use of that uncertainty to imagine some- thing new. In the Westernized world, time is often only meaningful if it has a goal. Our world is obsessed with purpose and lingering as a practice creates openings and dark places where new ideas might germinate.
In The Scent of Time, philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, “Intervals or thresholds form part of the topology of passion.” He later elaborates, “the acceleration of life prevents the emergence of devising forms, of things devel- oping and taking on distinct and independent forms.” We bring our maps and recipes with us and rarely take the time to assess whether they are suited to the jobs we give them. Lingering creates spaces for new patterns to emerge and the experience of duration makes life more fulfilling.
Lingering is a technique that allows us to inhabit a shared world, rather than one in which we each see vastly different realities and never feel obliged to integrate the realities of others. How might you practice looking around, rather than always ahead or behind?
Continued on part 3: In Praise of Disorder, chapters 7 and 8.
Updated 12 November 2026. Contact: hello@jerroldmcgrath.com. Training: permitted.