Paradox and Tension in the Attention Economy

Extremely long, building on conversations and ideas from the Novitate conference and Rene Girard, probing Influence/rs and the gamification of everything; an attempt to find and offer a few solutions.

This article, or maybe two-part article depending on Substack’s word count limit is quite rambly, maybe slightly disorganized… but I’m hesistating to tidy it up too much so I’ll understand if you don’t stick with it or skip it altogether. Tune in next time for something more conventional (maybe.)

It began as thoughts developing from conversations at Luke Burgis’s wonderful Notivate conference celebrating the life and work of Rene Girard in Washington DC over the weekend, and I’ve been thinking about it and writing and typing between speakers, travel, and upon returning home, and it ended after walking my dog through a freshly ploughed field this morning.

It starts one places and takes a few unexpected side routes but I think it arrives kind of back in the main thrust of the subject by the end. It rambles and goes on, but I don’t have an editor to reign me in, and I think I’ll judge the wisdom of publishing it in this form by whether I lose or gain subscribers.

I hope you enjoy it, or find it irritating.

Illustration by and copyright Michael Aschenbach.

You may have noticed that I don’t post issues of this newsletter on a predictable schedule. I’m not going to pretend that the answer isn’t partially because I’m not great with schedules, but there’s a deeper reason, one which may have a lot to do with why my subscriber count hasn’t skyrocketed since launching this newsletter in the last year, why the ‘conversion rate’ from free to paid subscription is very low, if not untypically so.

I don’t think anyone who reads this needs to be told that all is not what it seems on social (and otherwise) media. The map is not the territory, the persona is not the person: the medium is the message.

Online, we see things at their ideal best, or worst, but rarely as they are.

I’m not telling you anything new at this point, but it never hurts to be reminded.

I might as well be up front and confess that I want to be an influencer, if not an Influencer. The pursuit of Influence, in the social media Influencer sense of the word, leads quickly to what we might call ‘influenca’. It’s a ‘social disease’ if you will (older people might chuckle, younger people just carry on please. Nothing to see here).

But whether one’s goals are driven by a pursuit of wealth, status, or in my case are humanitarian (unless I’m fooling myself) the means to achieving them as quickly and thoroughly as possibly are similar.

There are models and formulas to follow. They are tried and tested and the results are clear: it’s a reverse engineering of the path to social media success and it works on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack alike.

It’s the gamification of popularity, and popularity is a major currency of our age.

Essentially, the game is to gain and hold as much attention as possible, and your ability to do that is proportional to the rewards you can achieve. The more attention you capture, the more advertising you can sell, the more data companies can mine from your captive audience.

Here’s just one formula:

Palatability > Provocation = Profitability

or

Profitability is proportionate to palatability.

In this formula, you have content designed to disturb and provoke in order to get attention. Often it treads a fine line between overly offensive, questionable legality, et cetera. The sweet spot is where you find maximum provocation, but don’t go so far over the line as to get cancelled either culturally or legally.

You might think of it as cute kitty vs dead kitty. Or don’t. That’s awful. The fastest way to get someone’s attention is to shock them one way or another. It works. But few people really like getting shocked. And those who do… well, not the kind of people I like hanging out with. You might consider the wisdom of building an audience like that.

The ‘cute kitty’ scenario is no less manipulative, but somehow less offensive. Cute Kitty can mean literally posting pictures of cute kittens or puppies. Shock and ‘awwww!’ Or stuff like giving random people on the street $500. That one gets extra miles if you can get a tear-jerker story out of it.

Whichever way you go in order to attract attention, the method is similar:

Determine what is the most popular kind of content and style of delivery, then create and post predictably and frequently.

Of course, having the formula for success does not guarantee success. One must have the right ingredients, and that has mainly to do with style: how to look, how to act, and that magic ingredient, charisma (what the kids call ‘rizz’). You really either have these things or you don’t. They can be cultivated to an extent but if you don’t have them, I’d suggest finding something else to do with the next decade of your life.

It also requires really hard work and dedication and leads inevitably to burnout sooner or later.

Once you have attention, the only way to keep it seems to be keeping the content mill running 24/7. More posts equal more reactions, more follows, more revenue. Fall off and people move on quickly and without sympathy.

But it’s not as great as it sounds.

Hopefully it hasn’t sounded too great.

Content Creators are not content, that is, they’re not happy people off-camera. They’re probably more miserable, pound for pound, than the rest of us. Influencers who make it wish they hadn’t; they know how toxic the Influencer hustle is and every one of them if they’re honest will admit it and likely if they could do it over, would do something else.

The drive to constant content production and consumption is the fast food, consumerist ideal ported over to the internet, and it’s not ok. It’s an ultimately toxic grind on the producer, and it’s empty calories for the consumer – except for my content of course. I only produce and consume healthy stuff. Educational. So it’s good for me, right? And for you, right? You’re surely better off reading this than a few thousand words of celebrity gossip…right? Right…

Sidebar: I’d originally wanted to produce a physical, printed newsletter. A few people wanted it, but I couldn’t convince anyone to back it. Basically, if I had 1m followers, they would have backed it. (I talked to nice people at a major magazine publisher, and that was essentially their apologetic answer).

Sidebar, not unrelated: I recently looked up average screentime exposure to discover that the average US person 8-18 years old spends 7.5 hours every day looking at screens for “non-educational” uses. The language there suggests that were it only ‘educational’ it would be ok. I’m sorry to remind you that ‘the medium is the message,’ which means that regardless of what the screen shows you, you’re being ‘educated’ the same: your senses and brain are being rewired and reshaped, and consequently you, your being, your identity, your values, are also. It doesn’t matter if you scroll Instagram or Facebook, PBS or YouTube, Twitter or Substack, the effect of the form is essentially the same.

You are also being reshaped: you are also being consumed.

This is the flip side of the equation – while on the surface you are being manipulated consciously and for economic ends, while your attention is being harvested to influence you to buy things, while you are consuming, you are also being reshaped, and you are also being consumed. Again, you don’t likely need me to tell you, but I will remind you, that while your attention is occupied, your attention is being monetized, harvested. And, while all that is happening and you are blissfully being entertained or educated, the technology is having impacts on you on a sensory level which is changing who you are and your identity: the medium is the message.

while your attention is occupied, your attention is being monetized

The uncomfortable truth for content creators, is that every dollar you gain from ‘advertising revenue’ is at the expense of your audience’s attention, data, and ultimately if in a very small part, at the expense of who they were and who they are becoming. It gets lumped in, quite disingenuously as ‘advertising revenue share,’ probably to make it less bleak… but it is very bleak if you think about it in these terms – and they are true terms. It ‘aint pretty.

We all know it’s a problem. If we know what to do about it, why don’t we do it? If we don’t know what to do about it, why aren’t we working harder to figure it out.?

What choice to we have?

We have a lot of agency, many choices. We give away the agency because the choices are difficult, virtually impossible. But the choices, hard as they are, exist and if you make one, and if you make one, and if you make one… if enough of us make a choice it makes a real difference. The models only work if we facilitate them. We have to do our part. If we don’t the model falls apart. The models only work as far as we allow them to work, and we allow them to work out of ignorance and complacency.

Consider opting out.

How can you opt out? Unlike, unfollow. If whatever person didn’t have 10m followers, they wouldn’t have a voice. Every like or follow is a degree of amplification. It’s also a vote, an agreement. It’s you saying you’re cool with whatever you’re participating in. Following a celebrity or controversial figure for laughs or keeping tabs? You’re voting for them. You’re giving them a dollar. You’re validating them.

Maybe do a follow audit. Pare down that list. If you treat every follow like a dollar in their pocket, or as a co-sign to their content, it might make you look at it differently. Wouldn’t vote for Trump at the booth but follow him on Twitter? You’re voting for him just the same.

Maybe resist the urge to ‘react.’ Do you have to thumbs-up or -down anything at all? Are you able to not add your comment?

You do you obviously, but hopefully that’s some food for thought. Considering your behaviour in this way is what they call ‘anti-mimetic.’ Instead of just doing something, following the herd, you’re making a conscious choice.

What about me?

For my part, I have a tension between wanting to make available my family’s work, a 3-generation tradition of studying technology and its personal/social effects in individuals and cultures, and not wanting to contribute to the problem. Reminding myself that ‘the medium is the message’ I’m essentially attempting to become part of the problem to be part of the solution. The wisdom of that is questionable. Maybe I’ll look back in a few years and think I should have followed my father’s example rather than my grandfather’s and focused more on the reading and writing.

I do have a tradition. As I said, I’m the third generation here, and if you’re reading this, chances are you know who Marshall McLuhan, my grandfather, was. And the reason you know who he was is because he was a ‘public intellectual,’ a sort of Influencer of his day. A grandfather of media studies, he’s also a grandfather of influencers. For example, in a 1967 speech he said:

“Here is another thought for you that is very controversial: I don’t see any point in making anything but controversial statements. There is no other way of getting any attention at all. I mean, you cannot get people thinking until you say something that really shocks them, dislocates them.”

Marshall McLuhan

‘Education in the Electronic Age’

1967

So these formulas are nothing new: they’re tried and true.

I could join TikTok. I could post here weekly, or better yet daily, crafting my posts to be as catchy as possible, and I know I would see the results. I would get more subscribers.

I could paywall posts, making paid-only posts for people, activating the darkest arts of fomo, mimesis, and McLuhan, and grow the revenue I get from this newsletter, probably even making enough money from it to fix the furnace in the office and not have to work in my kitchen through the winter this year.

I’d see results. I’d get more subscribers, faster.

Sidebar: there’s a whole quality vs quantity part to this which I’ve avoided getting into, but there may be a side-formula… opposite to the ‘fast food’ content analogy, the ‘slow food’ equivalent. It’s more expensive, it takes longer, but everyone gets more out of it. People who follow you not because of shock but satisfaction. That’s a higher-value audience. They’re there because they want to buy, to support. I think it’s a healthier relationship all around. No one’s being taken advantage of. Everyone wins.

Captivation Capitalism

My mission is to liberate people, not to captivate them. Ironically, the one depends on the other.

So I post when I have something to share. I try to write an article like a few times a month, at least once a month. I post the pithiest McLuhan aphorisms on Twitter, some images from the library/archive on Instagram. And I use the time in between to keep learning so I have more to share and build my ability to share it skillfully. I also have a family I like spending time with. I used to have art and music hobbies.

I don’t put up paywalls.

I’m not interested in ad/data harvesting revenue.

I try to bring down the average screentime statistics by spending as little time on-screen as I can, and try to balance the sensory and cognitive effects of the time I do spend (and I spend a lot of time despite my desire to spend less) by letting my senses enjoy the environment around me without the mediation of screens, speakers, headphones. I read as many books and papers as I can.

Breaking the Mimetic Spell

I’ve been composing this on my way home from a conference around the work of French American thinker Rene Girard. I didn’t know a lot about Girard previously. I was invited to attend the conference to be part of a panel to contribute McLuhan thoughts on ‘mimesis’ to the discussion.

Sidebar: This was the first Novitate conference, dreamed up and organized by Luke Burgis, honouring Girard, hosted at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. It was amazing. These last years doing a lot of conferences, classes, speeches online on Zoom, what a remarkable privilege it was to do something in person. I actually met people. Had meaningful interactions. Felt the audience while I delivered my comments. Got the swag, got the tag (I missed getting conference badges). Luke and his team delivered so much, so well. I’m quite grateful.

There’s quite a difference between the McLuhan approach to (or appropriation of) ‘mimesis’ and the Girardian. I’ve realized I have a lot of work to do to make the various McLuhan positions on mimesis clear, so I won’t try to go into that here and now.

An overall theme of Girard’s is his concept of ‘mimetic desire.’ Essentially, we want things because other people have (or want) them. Imitation. (McLuhan called this ‘matching’ versus his use of the term which he called ‘making.’ ‘Matching’ is imitation. ‘Making’ is about transformation. Marshall was interested in the metaphysics of media, his was a ‘transformation’ theory rather than a ‘transportation’ theory. (More on that in the future, or read the relevant few pages in ‘From Cliché to Archetype,’ and in ‘Theories of Communication’)

This applies to the Influencer equation as well: we follow because other people have followed. If 10m people think that idea is great, well it must be great. The visibility of popularity lends a potent kind of credibility, and this credibility is more influential than rationality is today. This is why celebrities get a lot of money to shill (sorry, ‘endorse’) products: because it translates into sales. This is also why all the facts in the world won’t change someone’s mind anymore.

As an exercise, to kind of mimic the ‘Practical Criticism’ method of I A Richards, you could take some Twitter celebrity with a 10m following, and strip the name off the Tweets. In a lot of cases, what they have to say isn’t very original or profound. It just seems that way. Likewise, you can have them say the silliest, inane things and guaranteed people will like and share them.

Consider: the reason that you wouldn’t buy a product endorsed by a figure you despise, is the same reason you would buy a product because it’s endorsed by someone you like.

They are flip sides of the same mimetic mechanism.

So… yeah.. please like, share and subscribe.

This post came about because I met someone at the conference who works at substack. I said, ‘oh, that’s cool. I have a substack, haha.’ ‘You do?’ ‘Yeah, it’s ‘the McLuhan Newsletter.’ ‘Oh, that sounds great…’

Then we got into a little discussion about how I don’t have a ton of followers (but y’all are quality, and I appreciate you, especially those 1-3% of you subscribers that support this work financially through a paid subscription.) but how I know that I could grow that pretty easily if I posted more frequently and regularly. I told him that I knew that, but that’s just not how I roll. I really don’t know whether he thought that was admirable or stupid, but I think admirable.

That Thursday night exchange (while sipping a tasty ‘Mimetic Manhattan’) got me thinking, and I chewed it over, made notes and tweets, and here we are: some thoughts about the gamification of all things social and some suggestions about how we might get ‘anti-mimetic’ and do things differently. That is, if we actually do want to do things differently (it would entail doing things differently. That means me, and you.)

Am I perfect? Do I practice what I preach? Am I better than you?

Obviously.

Sidebar, but related: Here’s one thing I’m doing that’s a bit different, and I’m doing it differently: I started a radio show a month ago on my local non-profit FM station. It’s called ‘The Spoken Word,’ and it’s all about words and voices, reading and reciting and talking and sharing. It’s live, and the archive is not (at least not yet) available. Tune in, or don’t. You could probably find it if you tried – Sunday evenings, 8-9pm ET.

So. If I don’t post tomorrow, or next week, will you hold it against me, or think better of me for it?

I invite you to consider supporting, if you are able, my work, if not my content. I’m out here trying to preserve my father’s library and archive, and the work my grandfather began, my father carried on, and which I am trying to bring to the world today which sorely needs it. I don’t have all the answers but I have a few, and I know there are more out there waiting to be discovered in shared – in due time.

Hold up, Sidequest Time:

I have sat on this rather than post it immediately and turns out I had more to say. Given the length, I’m probably going to publish it in two parts, maybe the second part later today, maybe tomorrow. [Nope, since Substack will allow it, here it is.]

A recently ploughed-under corn field just up the lane from home and The McLuhan Institute, Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada.

Part Two

It’s Tuesday morning.

I’ve caught my breath a little. The headiness of the conference, collision of people, personalities, ideas, my own thoughts, has subsided a little bit. Being at the conference, I missed Virgil’s game against Gananoque where he scored a hat trick (three goals) and Ezra’s game where he scored twice. (Virgil’s two years younger, newer to hockey, so that’s a feat.) I did get to Ezra’s game Sunday night where he got four (or was it five?) goals. In the locker room after the game, the coach awarded him The Golden Jersey – not because of the goals, but because he played the whole ice. He raced back from the offensive zone to stop a player from the opposing team. A forward, he didn’t just play his position but made sure to help out the defense. I’m so proud.

Not only was I there at the game, I was ‘present.’ I wasn’t on my phone on socials. I wasn’t thinking about the conference or this essay, surreptitiously making notes.

When I got home Saturday night, our two-year old Golden Retriever, Camper, was ridiculously happy to see me. He tore around in circles like an idiot, like his tail was on fire with holy love. He would not leave me along. I got knocked over and scratched up a bit from his enthusiasm. He hasn’t left me alone. The kids got on the bus (barely, ugh, mornings) this morning and he’s by my side, giving me eyes. He knows I know.

I’m itching to finish this essay (post, extended meditation, ridiculous word soup, disconnected thought dump, whatever it is at this point) but THE EYES. I roll my own. “Fine buddy, let’s go.” And boy is he ready.

Jacket, boots, treats, bags, leash, door.

As it happened, in the year my dad died, I started talking about what became The McLuhan Institute. I knew he wouldn’t be around forever, and nothing was in place to carry on – so I thought at the time. It turns out I was in place, and this place was in place.

People said I’d have to set it up in Toronto, maybe New York. But we (myself, my lady, my lads) lived in Picton. Dad, the archive, the library, were nearby in Bloomfield. My wife, many generations deep in this place, wasn’t going anywhere, so neither was I.

Walking up the lane, past the small barn library/archive/office, and the large barn, which I hope to be the future space we can host events and more, I’m suddenly looking at the creek, at freshly ploughed fields, at bare trees, at the sky. These things don’t distract me from my thoughts, they feed my thoughts. It’s not distraction-free, but it’s generative distraction. It’s nourishing, not extractive.

I have a lot to do – the conference resulted in realizing a few more things I have to do – but I don’t think being in The Big City, rather than here in the Prince Edward County countryside, would be more productive. I don’t think, were it possible, if I was teaching at a university rather than trying to find students and teach online independently, that I would have more of an impact… because I don’t think it works that way, that reach necessarily means impact. Paradoxically, it could be, that the farther your voice carries, the more it passes over.

Marshall McLuhan chose to stay at the University of Toronto, though it was frequently a hostile environment for/to him (still is). While he could have taught at many other more significant institutions, elsewhere in the world, he enjoyed Toronto and UofT because he was left alone more than he would have been elsewhere. He had his Centre for Culture and Technology, and while some people think it shameful that he had such a shabby, small building – a former coach house, tucked away behind other buildings – he had few complaints. And, it didn’t stop people like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Pierre Trudeau, then-Prime Minister of Canada, and other dignitaries, from seeking him out.

Likewise, you have to really want to visit The McLuhan Institute to come here. The airport in Picton only accommodates the smallest pleasure aircraft. It’s now ‘Base 31’ and being developed and perhaps they’ll lengthen the runway, but currently you have to fly in to Toronto, then drive 2.5 hours to come see me and the archive. But it’s worth the effort to be in the last remaining McLuhan space in the world. My father’s library is full of books, papers, art, artifacts. It’s vital. It’s a converted two-story barn which I realized a while ago is very similar in size to Marshall’s old coach house at UofT.

If that was good enough for him, this has got to be good enough for me. (Besides, I’ve got that huge red barn beside it, waiting).

TMI library/archive on left, big red barn on right.

Desire, Fame

There’s a great tension between the urgency of this work and the realities of time, and our times. I see before me all the work that’s been left to me (to us), and the dire current need for its results.

Marshall also saw the need, and when legendary ad man Howard ‘Luck’ Gossage called up from San Francisco in 1964 and said “Dr. McLuhan, how’d you like to be famous?” Marshall signed up. He understood that the classroom and the academic conferences weren’t going to reach far enough. The world need to understand that ‘the medium is the message’ and the only solution was to amplify his reach. So Tom Wolfe asked ‘What if he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Pavlov, Einstein, and Freud: What If He’s Right?” and Marshall became a ‘public intellectual,’ and the world heard, even if they didn’t at time really get, ‘the message.’

I guess I have the average 21^st century person’s ‘mimetic desire’ for celebrity, but I’m more interested in the ‘influence’ part.

When Marshall first said, at a conference in 1958, that ‘the medium is the message,’ and for many years after, people thought he was nuts. What do you mean? That doesn’t make any sense?

Today, when it’s impossible to ignore that we’re shaped by the nature and effects of technologies, that the content is actually the carrier, the delivery mechanism, it’s actually obvious that ‘the medium,’ that environment, is ‘the message.’ It’s as hard to argue against as the Earth’s shape – obviously, that doesn’t stop a few remaining determined ostriches.

And so, being mindful of what I’m wishing for, I guess I want to be an Influencer. Because the world needs to be woken up still, and might even be receptive to ‘the message’ in a way it wasn’t in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Gossage launched McLuhan in 1965 by spending a few grand wining and dining journalists and other important people in New York, throwing a Marshall McLuhan Festival in San Francisco that summer. That was enough, then, to create a splash, and carry its ripples for the rest of the decade.

Today, you can go into (mr.) beast-mode and deconstruct the ‘grammar’ of the dominant media like Tik-Tok and have similar results.

(In another essay, it might be fun to compare/contrast Marshall McLuhan and Mr. Beast. If anyone reading this can make an introduction, I’d love to interview him with that in mind).

It’s interesting. McLuhan’s star rose and fell, and he seems to have been fine with it. I think that may be because he accomplished at least part of what he set out to. He wanted to get his ‘message’ about the fundamental ‘personal and social effects’ of technologies out into the world, and he did that. If it fell on largely deaf ears at the time, so what? He knew – he knew! – that we would be able to bring up hundreds of hours of him talking and telling. So, it was a matter of time, and whether we’d wake up enough in time enough to change course before running aground.

Check out what he wrote to Ezra Pound:

"...I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of goodwill is the enemy of society. Lewis saw that years ago. His "America and Cosmic Man" was an H-bomb let off in the desert. Impact nil. We resent or ignore such intellectual bombs. We prefer to compose human beings into bombs and explode political and social entities. Much more fun. Lewis clears the air of fug. We want to get rid of people entirely. And it is necessary to admire the skill and thoroughness with which we have made our preparations to this.

 I am not of the “we” party. I should prefer to de-fuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue on the side-lines to distract the trigger-men, or to needle the somnambulists. In London 1910 you faced various undesirable states of mind. Since then the word has been used to effect a universal hypnosis. How are words to be used to unweave the spell of print? Of radio commercials and "news"-casts? I am working on *that* problem. The word is now the cheapest and most universal drug.
[McLuhan letter to Ezra Pound, June 22/51.]

Pound’s response?

"McL/ git on with the job/"
[Pound letter to McLuhan, 1953]

Marshall knew that books, the printed word, were not enough. And he courted and accepted the platform to broadcast his message, content that he’d seeded it, done his part, and I’m pretty sure he was ok leaving the rest up to us.

Winding down to some sort of conclusion here:

I am frequently asked “what would Marshall say about…” the metaverse, ai, whatever.

I do wonder, if Marshall were me, today, what he would do? Would he take a Tik-Tok turn? Would he mercilessly game whatever medium, a Substack newsletter like this, in order to maximize reach and impact?

I don’t know. I do ask those kind of questions all the time, and others like: I’m 45 now: when Marshall was 45, in 1956, what was he doing, what had he accomplished, how am I doing in comparison? I’m 45 now: when dad (Eric) was 45, in 1987, what was he doing, what had he accomplished, how am I doing in comparison? Marshall had just gotten the grant to do the work which would lead to ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,’ hadn’t quite figured out that ‘the medium is the message.’ Eric was finishing up the manuscript for Laws of Media: The New Science,’ and I’m writing some sort of Substack post which has tuned into a stream of consciousness ramble at this point.

It’s quiet. Early winter quiet. Camper’s resting off his walk. Junipurr (the cat, Camper’s worst nightmare) click clack’s her way down the hall in search of whatever a large grump cat searches for. I’ve got a ‘meeting’ this afternoon and just have to bring this thing to a half-way reasonable conclusion and post it before lunch.

I had started this essay/post/whatever as a bit of a redux of the conference, and to address at least in a small part the challenge of Influence, Attention, Ethics, and Repercussions. What, if anything, can we do about it. What can ‘creators’ do differently, what can people do differently. What can any of us do to

a)     break the spell and the cycle

b)    reclaim the agency we give away

What can we do to determine what might be a better way of doing things for everyone involved? I hesitate to say ‘to things in a more healthy way’ because that presumes we even know what’s healthy for us in terms of media, and I’m not at all sure we do.

“Diagnosis before prescription,” is the way Marshall put it at one point, and I think we’re very much in the diagnosis stage still. We know things are not right. We even have a pretty good idea of what’s not right. We need to figure out what we can do about it – individually and collectively – and, crucially, we need to ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

These attempts at shutting the barn door after the horses are out isn’t cutting it. These regrets at the cost of success after success has been achieved is not cutting it.

What we need to do is back that thing up a second, take a breath. Take a walk.

Trigger Warning: Values.

I’m increasingly sure that we’re starting at the wrong place. We need to begin with first principles: we need to begin with values.

There’s no need to get worked up here. I have an invitation for you, feel free to accept it or not. The invitation is this: spend some time over the rest of the week considering what’s important to you. That’s it. On a granular, rubber-meets-the-road level, what’s important to you? What gets you out of bed (literally and figuratively) in the morning? What gets you through the day? What do you look forward to? What’s most important? What matters?

Think about the answers to those questions, those values, on a personal level. Then think about them on a family level. Think about them in relation to your work. Think about them on a community level. Think about them on a national level. Think about them on an international level.

What’s important to me, what’s best for me, isn’t necessarily what’s best for my family, for my work, for my community, my country, the world. But these things do need to align for everyone to get along and flourish.

The next pivotal question is: are the technologies we use, we rely on, (in some cases, are the technologies we’re developing) supporting or undermining these values? Are they making it easier or harder flourish on a personal, work, social level?

If they aren’t, and it’s pretty obvious they aren’t, globally, then what can we change, and why don’t we?

The solutions here, I hope it’s obvious, do not occur on the level of ‘content’ when it’s painfully obvious that (say it with me)

And the solutions are neither simple nor easy, even if I can throw them out there like this as if they are. Who among us can resist these urges. What techn company has the courage to not develop something they see could maybe be not great in the short or long term? (This, again, is why I think it’s great that it’s never been easier for younger people to develop powerful tools… because they have less to lose in doing the right thing.)

the medium is the message.

This is a conversation, if internal, that doesn’t seem to have an end. There’s a lot more thinking and work to be done. But I’ve got to end it somewhere, so let’s stop here for now.

I want to close with this: as I mentioned earlier, I started a radio show recently, an honest to goodness old fashioned FM radio show called The Spoken Word. It’s a celebration, exploration, of words and voices. It’s live and recorded but I’m not sure whether I’ll make the recordings available any time soon. It’s early days, I’m not totally sure exactly where it’s heading but so far so good. It’s been about poetry and literature and stories and feelings and family. My guest this past Sunday evening was one of my favourite humans, and she spent the hour relating her ‘Thanksgiving Address,’ expressing her gratitude for all things great and small. And at the end, she shared this which I want to pass on.

“You woke up this morning, you drew breath: you were meant to be here.”

[Rebecca Maracle, Mowhak Feathersmith.]

I can’t believe you read all that, but if you did, thanks. Apologies if it was too much, and for likely spelling and grammar errors.

Thanks for reading.