On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
The Four Classes of Military Officers (Or Office Workers): Clever, Diligent, Stupid and Lazy
Clever and Lazy: While most senior leaders will deny this classification, it applies well, and not just for the reasons cited by Hammerstein-Equord. These are the leaders who have the breadth of experience and depth of wisdom to ask the right questions, see the future for what it is, and make the right decisions under the greatest duress. They’re also renowned for finding the simplest solutions to the most difficult problems, and that drives a lot of people crazy.
AI is Coming for Canada’s Democracy
When AI can generate thousands of convincing comments, flood public consultations with fake input, or make it nearly impossible to tell real news from fabricated stories, the foundations of democratic participation start to crack … The problem goes even deeper. AI is becoming sophisticated enough to find loopholes in laws and regulations — exploiting gaps that were never meant to exist. And it can generate a flood of believable false content, making it harder for voters and governments to tell what’s real, and what isn’t … A version of the Internet dominated by bots and synthetic content is coming fast — that’s already underway. But it doesn’t have to mean the end of meaningful democratic participation. Canada can still build digital systems that keep real people at the center — if we start now.
Every Data Centre Is a US Military Base
For three decades, the goal of tech development has been not to improve our lives or to serve the public good, but rather to maximize shareholder value and to increase the power of the companies that control it.
It’s that nature of digital technology that is at the root of so many of the social harms the tech oligopoly has saddled us with in recent years. We need to recognize that was a choice, and we can choose to take a different path.
But we must also be aware of the pitfalls ahead. Some Canadian tech executives who, until recently, were pushing for a Conservative government are embracing a program of digital sovereignty as well, but it is explicitly not one that centres the public good.
Massive solar farms could provoke rainclouds in the desert
The model showed that moist, high-altitude winds from the Persian Gulf would suffice. When conditions were ripe, the model found, a 20-square-kilometer solar field would increase rainfall by nearly 600,000 cubic meters—equivalent to 1 centimeter of rain falling across an area the size of Manhattan. If such rainstorms occurred 10 times in one summer, they would provide enough water to support more than 30,000 people for a year.
“The use of ‘hallucinate’ is a stroke of true evil genius in the AI world. In ANY other context we’d just call them errors & the fail rate would be crystal clear. Instead, ‘hallucinate’ implies genuine sentience & the *absence* of real error. Aw, this software isn’t shit! Boo’s just dreaming!” —@CatValente
IEEFA: The misguided stampede to build gas power plants
Rising LNG exports will lead to additional price volatility in the U.S. and also could lead to persistent and long-term increases in natural gas costs, a double whammy for consumers. The price of new combined-cycle gas plants is roughly triple the cost of projects built in the early 2020s, and orders placed now likely will not be fulfilled until 2030, or later. The costs of wind and solar, paired with dispatchable battery storage, are not tracking the rapid climb of gas prices; hardware is readily available; and they have no fuel costs.
“The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire, just because they show up with a bucket of water.” —Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, via @RandahlFink
In 2014 I started the first of the PKM workshops, based on a model of three activities per week over six weeks to be done as a cohort with a common start and finish date. I would be available to respond to participants and provide support as required, including video calls.
It’s now the end of the line.
The workshop has hosted hundreds of participants from around the world. The activities have been modified each year so the current version looks fairly different from the first. The last workshop will start on 5 October 2026. As always, previous participants may attend at no extra cost. But there will be no more online PKM workshops.
The rampant rise of Gen AI tools is one of the reasons I will be shutting down this workshop series after the October cohort. I need to figure out how we can individually and collectively make sense as we wallow in the AI slop. I am thinking of a series of live sessions for small groups of inquiring minds, but nothing is firm yet. In addition, I feel unqualified to talk with any authority on Generative AI (though I have written a few posts) and that is another reason to close this workshop, as I know it will likely need more of a focus on AI and I am not willing to invest the effort at this time — the technology and the business models around it are changing too fast. So I need to pivot if I wish to promote sensemaking in the current environment. This may take some time.
Please join us for one last ride before the end of the line.
I have yet to find a use for Generative AI and continue to read about all the problems arising from the major purveyors of these tools.
Drew Wilson provides dozens of examples of AI gone wrong in Drew Wilson was Right: Carney’s AI Push Leads to AI Hallucinations.
Leaving it all to AI and just expecting some magical money saving result that’s better than ever before is a recipe for disaster. It’s burned so many people as shown above and will continue to burn people. This no matter how many times people swear up and down that AI is ‘improving’ and ‘practically perfect’. It’s nowhere near that and requires human intervention.
Canadian Senator Paula Simons calls the current situation an AI Fever Dream.
What worries me isn’t smart computers—it’s stupid humans, using the crudest energy-sucking generative AI tools to make themselves dumber, debase creativity and undermine the very concept of truth itself … When I see governments and businesses pushing people to use AI to answer every email, goose every online search or even draft official documents, I can only hope this fever dream will pass, that it will become fashionable again to write and create and think for ourselves.
Finally, Karl Bode says that The Problem with AI is Shitty Human Beings and these problems are ignored by the mainstream media.
There’s no mention of Elon Musk’s AI data centers generating pollution illegally aimed directly at the city’s minority populations. There’s no mention of how the immense power consumption of AI has resulted in companies discarding their already tepid-climate goals, threatening foundational human existence, something that (as always) will hit the vulnerable and marginalized the hardest.
There’s no discussion about how the extraction class sees AI as central to their plans to destroy organized labor, or that rushed AI adoption in fields like journalism have been profoundly disastrous both in the degradation of existing journalism and the propping up of cheaply-produced autocratic propaganda.
I don’t care how convenient these tools may be for many people. They make no sense to me.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Grab your pens and shovels, rabble rouser rebels. Take to the streets. Dig in for the long haul! Globally, communities of creative resistance are saying no to bullies. Artists and scientists, homemakers and caretakers, workers and kindreds in kindness and LOVE. — Unite. CREATE! Imagine. Fear not!” —Sheree Fitch
A government can take away your rights, but no one can take away your belief in those rights. The first points of challenge to fascism are memory and history.” … “I often quote my friend Bill McKibben [the environmentalist]. We were sitting on a concrete floor at an activist space during the Paris climate treaty process [the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015]. Somebody walked up and asked him a question he gets asked all the time. ‘What’s the best thing I can do as an individual?’ He said, ‘Stop being an individual.’ You may have your own quirky playlist and eye-makeup techniques, but you also have this solidarity. When you act, you act with others.”
Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them
An adult choosing to offload a task they understand is making a tradeoff between decreasing effort and increasing efficiency. The capacity to do that task independently exists. The choice is deliberate. The atrophy is (probably) recoverable.
A child offloading a task they’ve never learned to perform is not making a choice. They are skipping a developmental step that was never developed. The capacity doesn’t exist yet. The foreclosure may be permanent—and because they have no independent baseline, they cannot recognize what they’re losing.
The downside of adult offloading is people get less sharp. The downside of adolescents growing up delegating to AI is a generation that was never sharp to begin with. Protecting the space our children need to develop the foundational skills of thinking is now a non-negotiable.
Final report of the Expert Panel on the 28 April 2025 blackout in continental Spain and Portugal
The investigation concludes that the blackout resulted from a combination of many interacting factors, including oscillations, gaps in voltage & reactive power control, differences in voltage regulation practices, rapid output reductions & generator disconnections in Spain, and uneven stabilisation capabilities. These factors led to fast increases of voltage & cascading generation disconnections in Spain, resulting in the blackout in continental Spain & Portugal.”
Postal banking once made Canada Post profitable — and could again
Canada Post offered “postal banking” for more than a century.
And it was a big money-maker, even though Canada Post typically offered its banking customers higher interest rates on their savings accounts than the private banks did. The private banks never liked the competition, and continually pressed Ottawa to end postal banking, which it did in 1969.
I’m Russian. Here’s how propaganda really works (YouTube)
propaganda doesn’t need to make you stupid, it only needs to make you tired”
A population that’s disengaged, cynical, and emotionally exhausted is far easier to manage than one that’s angry and curious.”
propaganda teaches you that paying attention is pointless”
In smarter networks through better narratives, I noted that there needs to be a dominant narrative to counter “folks who’ve got nothing but conspiracies and medieval fantasies to base their arguments upon.” A new frame is required, not factual counter-arguments. This is how George Lakoff explains it, “1) Repetition strengthens the synapses in neural circuits that people use in thinking 2) Whoever frames first has an advantage 3) Negating a frame activates and strengthens it.” Basically, Lakoff states that whoever frames the narrative first has an advantage and that negating a frame only activates and strengthens it. So responding to trolls and conspiracy theorists, which we often feel compelled to do, only makes the buggers stronger — an understanding of my confusion.
Our local electric power utility (NB Power) is proposing a fracked gas and diesel powered electrical generating station in our town, population ±10,000. In one of the nearby towns the local council was given a presentation that used ‘framing’ to show the information imbalances in this situation. The town council proceedings are available on YouTube and the presentation starts just after 8:00 minutes. It is in French.
Stéphane starts by stating that the gas plant is a question of framing (cadrage in French), going on to note that how information is presented influences perception and that NB Power only presented the advantages and does not discuss risks. They use scare tactics of Winter power outages and people freezing their homes, to push their agenda. Once these narratives are framed, they are hard to dislodge.
This plant will be built by an American company and will import fracked methane gas from the USA for 25 years. The proponents call it a “Swiss Army Knife” to address dips in power, while opponents (I am one) see it as a long-term source of air and water pollution as well as a risk to wildlife on a critical migratory corridor — the Chignecto Isthmus.
What I find most interesting is how those opposing the gas plant are portrayed by the proponents — hippies and tree-huggers comprised of the usual left-wing suspects. Comments on social media by a dedicated group here remind me of Mooks who will do anything to support their Knight (what Venkatesh Rao calls the Internet of Beefs). These Mooks are intent on creating constant doubt and outrage.
The framing by the proponents is focused on economic benefits only, while opponents are concerned with things not found on a balance sheet — health, nature, biodiversity. Proponents state that there will be a critical lack of power by 2028 if this plant is not built while simultaneously saying that the plant will only operate 7% of the time, at a cost of $1.52 billion to build and $3.5 billion to operate. While running, the plant will draw 7 million litres of water per day. Conversely, opponents have shown through expert witness at the utility board hearings that a battery system could be built for $1,2 billion with no recurring fuel costs and no emissions.
This is a story of competing narratives and we will soon see which one will dominate.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Those who love how machines ‘think’ tend to think like machines themselves.” —Fiona Tribe
Software engineering in 2026 be like “we need you to be physically present in the office so we can replace you with AI” —Tilton Raccoon
“No, I don’t want an AI assisted experience. I want clean air, forests, and a future for the next generation.” —Greenpeace
Oh, sure—when *the company* automates my job and keeps collecting the profits, that’s “innovation,” but when *I* automate my job and keep collecting a paycheck, that’s “time clock fraud.” —Max Leibman
Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” —Antoine Buteau
I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here’s What I Actually Handed Over.
When you click “verify” on LinkedIn, you’re not giving your passport to LinkedIn. You get redirected to a company called Persona. Full name: Persona Identities, Inc. Based in San Francisco, California.
For a three-minute identity check, this is what Persona collected:My full name — first, middle, last
My passport photo — the full document, both sides, all data on the face of it
My selfie — a photo of my face taken in real-time
My facial geometry — biometric data extracted from both images, used to match the selfie to the passport
My NFC chip data — the digital info stored on the chip inside my passport
My national ID number
My nationality, sex, birthdate, age
My email, phone number, postal address
My IP address, device type, MAC address, browser, OS version, language
My geolocation — inferred from my IPAnd then there’s the weird stuff:
Hesitation detection — they tracked whether I paused during the process
Copy and paste detection — they tracked whether I was pasting information instead of typing itBehavioral biometrics. On top of the physical biometrics. For a LinkedIn badge.
“The university isn’t a trade school. But we’ve spent decades pretending it is, and directing students toward ‘practical’ majors while treating the humanities as indulgences. AI is showing us what happens when the practical becomes automated. Suddenly we need the people who spent years thinking about consciousness, beauty, meaning, and ethics. Suddenly the ‘useless’ knowledge is the knowledge we don’t have.” —Found History
What We Talk About When We Talk About AI (Part Five)
Advocates of AI can be deft practitioners of circular logic. Ask them how the economics are supposed to work, they will tell you the AIs will answer that when they get advanced enough. Same for the cost of datacenters, the climate impacts, education, and medicine. More and more stochastic parrots will somehow solve all of it, and we will all live in a heavenly state, techno-raptured by the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk. With every round of doubt about AI, the promises get bigger and more insane. The AI companies act like addicts — strung out, insane, looking for ever bigger fixes from the stock market, but one day they will get cut off.
Goodbye to the idea that solar panels “die” after 25 years
Solar panels are usually sold with 25 to 30 years of performance promises. But what happens after that, when the warranty language is long gone and you are still hoping your roof system keeps shrinking the electric bill?
A new analysis led by Ebrar Özkalay at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland suggests the answer can be surprisingly good. Looking at six solar arrays in Switzerland that have been running since the late 1980s and early 1990s, the team found most panels still produced more than 80% of their original power after three decades.
Everything is political — even the learning organization.
Peter Senge’s development of the fifth discipline has informed much of my work around workplace learning for three decades. Sheila Damodaran takes a deep look at this seminal book.
The Five Disciplines were not assembled aesthetically. They were assembled structurally — each closing a vulnerability left open by the others, each compensating for a failure mode observable in real institutions.
—Systems Thinking prevented local optimisation from masquerading as improvement.
—Personal Mastery prevented aspiration from collapsing under institutional pressure.
—Mental Models prevented inherited assumptions from hardening into policy dogma.
—Team Learning prevented the conversation from degenerating into positional defence.
—Shared Vision prevented purpose from fragmenting into departmental ambition.Remove one, and drift begins.
Emphasise one at the expense of others, and imbalance follows.
—The Fifth Discipline at Thirty-Five — Lineage, Surge, and Scale
Personal mastery has informed my personal knowledge mastery framework.
Damodaran’s detailed article covers the research that informed Senge and then how the model has been used over the decades, including first-hand knowledge. I highly recommend reading the entire piece. A main theme is that the work of becoming a learning organization at the company level cannot be completely achieved if the organization exists in a state environment that is not one. The container has to be the nation state.
Peter Senge stood at the edge of corporations and widened their perception from within laboratories of organisational life; I stood inside a national institution for two decades, where allocation precedes execution and where budget sequencing quietly shapes operational possibility long before strategy meetings begin.
When you live inside a state apparatus, you cannot ignore upstream structure, because you see daily how ministerial silos, fiscal cycles, and sector prioritisation cascade into operational strain downstream. The crossing from organisation to nation did not arise from ambition or ideology; it arose from structural proximity. Once you have watched allocation shape behaviour in real time, you cannot return comfortably to firm-level redesign as if the container were neutral. —Damodaran 2026
In mastery & models (2017) I wrote that the inconvenient truth is that our institutions do not have the answers. They were all designed for a different era. Our markets, designed to capitalize on gaps and weaknesses, are already focused on creating digital platform monopolies, so that the rest of us may become nothing more than users and renters of space. But we can own our learning.
The challenge for learning professionals is to help organizations become learning organizations, as described in Senge’s Fifth Discipline. It is also to master the new literacies of the network era and promote critical thinking, for ourselves and others. Questioning existing hierarchies is necessary to create the organizations of the future where power and authority are shared, based on mutual trust. The dominant organizational models need to become network-centric and learning-centric. Personal knowledge mastery and the working in perpetual beta model can be two of the disciplines required to develop the third discipline: Shared Vision.
In a vision for learning (2018) I wrote that networked individuals are the new engaged citizens, and we have to connect with our professional communities, finding them where we can. These awareness networks can keep us connected to the real world, through wide and diverse human relationships. We cannot rely on our ‘algorithmic overlords’ to tell us how to understand our environment. Building these networks is everyone’s responsibility.
If we want to influence the container in which learning organizations can thrive then we must get politically engaged. As Lester Brown said, “Saving civilization is not a spectator sport.” He also made it clear that if you want to address climate change, then the best thing you can do is get politically active.
Joan Westenberg covers a lot of ground in the post the discourse is a distributed denial-of-service attack. I will try to summarize and highlight what I found of importance.
A DDOS is an attack on a web server in an attempt to overload it so it can no longer function. The case that Westenberg refers to is one where thousands of internet devices — not necessarily computers — were pointed at the website of security expert Brian Krebs. As a side note, I would recommend Krebs’ Mastodon feed.
Westenberg goes on to show that the online social media space has become a massive distributed denial-of-service — for our collective brains. There is so much information — not all fake news but a lot of false information shared by people — that vies for our attention and we cannot cope with it.
Most of the topics that dominate our collective attention on any given day are genuinely important to… someone. And many of them are important to almost everyone. The problem is structural. The total volume of things-you-should-have-an-opinion-about has exceeded our cognitive bandwidth so thoroughly that having careful opinions about anything has become damned-near impossible. Your attention is a finite resource being strip-mined by an infinite army of takes.
“I’m not saying the topics are unimportant. I’m saying the structure of the discourse prevents us from thinking well about even the most important topics,” Westenberg states. Even experts fall victim to the DDOS discourse. They try to provide nuance but the cannot get attention so they have to dumb-down their statements to get any traction or just go offline.
I’ve watched this happen to people I know. Intelligent, curious, open-minded people who got deeply involved in online discourse and gradually, imperceptibly, became incapable of the exploratory thinking they used to do. Their opinions calcified. Their curiosity curdled into suspicion.
Westenberg’s comment on the revival of tribalism caught my attention as that was the topic of my last post — a reversal to tribalism.
My argument is that the current structure of public conversation has the same effect on human cognition that a botnet has on a web server. It’s simply exhausting you. And an exhausted mind defaults to heuristics and tribal allegiances, aka whatever position allows it to conserve the most cognitive energy.
In the online space, everything is happening at the same time and something new — and probably interesting/exciting/frustrating — is coming along immediately. It’s doom-scrolling all day long. The final advice Westenberg gives reflects what I counsel in using the PKM framework. Take time to make sense.
Find some topic you care about. Just one. Resist the temptation to have takes on everything else. Let the discourse rage without you while you spend weeks or months actually understanding something. Read books about it, not takes. Talk to experts, not pundits. Follow the evidence where it leads, even when it’s uncomfortable. Change your mind when you find you were wrong. And when you finally have something to say, something you’ve actually earned through careful thought rather than absorbed from the tribal zeitgeist, say it clearly and then step back.
In 2017 — we need faith in the future — I wrote that we are stuck between the Market and the Network era — citing the TIMN model — with significant yearnings in certain sectors to go back to our insular Tribal ways. While the Tribal form may be comforting, its structure threatens the foundations of democracy. And I felt that we were stuck in a period similar to the early era of the printing press. Printed books enabled the Protestant reformation which flamed conflicts like the European wars of religion, and only many years later developed into the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. A reversion to Tribalism in our times may result in a period similar to the tumultuous 16th and early 17th centuries in Europe.
With the continuing release of the Epstein files, it looks like the reversal to tribalism is in full swing.
What the Epstein files expose, though, is how the “anti-elites” are themselves very much part of the elite. Epstein’s network included key figures from the Maga movement: Trump, Thiel, Musk, Steve Bannon and many others. Despite being contemptuous of Trump, Epstein was open to the ideas of rightwing populism. In an exchange with Thiel, he welcomed Brexit as marking a “return to tribalism. counter to globalization. amazing new alliances”, and the possibilities, too, of opening up new ways for enrichment, because “finding things on their way to collapse, was much easier than finding the next bargain” — The Observer 2026-02-08
I was recently interviewed by Felipe Zamana which was published under the aptly named title of perpetual beta. It’s been a while since I have had an interview so it was a chance to reflect on where I have been, where I am, and perhaps where I am going.
tl;dr …
First of all, I noted how my blog gave me everything, a theme I have riffed on a few times here over the past 23 years. I also described how those heady days of connecting through blogs, and later Twitter, have now morphed into something much less captivating and often concerning. Felipe refers to my recent post on writing by humans, for humans which reflects my current thoughts on learning out loud through the written medium. I also talked about how the Seek > Sense > Share framework has recently helped me make sense of the complexities surrounding a proposed methane gas-burning electric generating station in our town and my involvement with the Protect the Chignecto Isthmus Coalition.
And, I am committed to (human) blogging for another year.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Rights aren’t rights if they can be taken away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country: A bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news, even badly, you know that the list gets shorter and shorter” —George Carlin
“GenAI sits at the intersection of fascism, capitalism, labor, climate change, and environmental degradation. It is the quintessential technology of our time, the epitome of our current struggles. Defeating it is the key to defeating capital.” —Ben Lockwood
American society is dominated by wealthy mountebanks and literally demented politicians who are happy to take on all the risks of AI because it promises to create workers who cannot even conceptualize quitting, much less striking. The elites are ecstatic about imagining a vast, uneducated, and unproductive population forced to pay companies like OpenAI to access the written word and to approximate thought; with the unemployed illiterate and addicted to screens, they are unlikely to be politicized and join a socialist campaign. —We Used to Read Things in This Country
“As AI makes communication free, the only credible signals will be the ones that remain expensive. Human judgment. Personal risk. Time that can’t be recovered. The paradox of this moment is that efficiency has become the enemy of trust. The things that can’t scale are the things that still mean something.” —Jay Van Bavel on LinkedIn
Retirement is commonly treated as an ending. A closing ceremony for a working life, followed by a quieter, narrower existence. This framing misunderstands what is taking place. Retirement is not the loss of purpose. It is the removal of a structure that once organised identity, time, and legitimacy … Seen this way, retirement is not withdrawal. It is reorientation. The release is not from work alone. It is from the need to explain oneself through past achievement.
The real work of retirement is learning to speak in the present tense. —Shaun Coffey
September 1, 1939
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
—W.H. Auden
Knowledge flows at the speed of trust. What happens when we cannot trust the sources that inform our knowledge? How much information is now polluted with AI slop? Was that image we just saw manipulated or created by generative AI tools?
In this world of mass information manipulation, learning really is the work. That learning is becoming more dependent on trusted relationships with other people. As organizations large and small rely more on generative AI tools to produce media, we need to become story skeptics. As we continue to encounter more disorientation we have to rely on communities and networks of trust to make sense.
But communities can have their dark sides — they can strengthen bias, reinforce prejudice, and even make hate socially acceptable. Diverse knowledge networks can counteract the group-think that may emerge in communities. To make sense of our complex, chaotic, and fake-media-rich world, we need both networks and communities.
Finding and participating in communities needs to be coupled with a willingness to explore messier networks to understand different perspective. Real learning is not abstract. It can be painful. It requires engagement with others. Real learning is how we are going to somehow get through the messes we all face today — it’s called personal knowledge mastery.
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” —Father John Culkin (1967) A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan
Disorientation and exploration are essential for human learning. By using Generative AI (GPT/LLM) are we bypassing these two stages of learning in search of efficiency and robotic productivity?
“John Nosta, founder of the NostaLab think tank, says AI trains humans to think backward by providing answers before they understand.” — link via Archiv.Today
Nosta believes AI is quietly reshaping how people think, especially at work.
Human cognition, he said, usually follows a familiar path: confusion, exploration, tentative structure, and finally confidence. AI flips that sequence.
“With AI, we start with structure,” he said. “We start with coherence, fluency, a sense of completeness, and afterwards we find confidence.”
That inversion creates a powerful illusion. Because AI-generated answers sound polished and authoritative, people often accept them immediately — without doing the harder work of questioning, exploring, or fully understanding them, he said.
“Coming to the answer first is an inversion of human cognitive process,” Nosta said. “That’s antithetical to human thought.”
In 2007 I wrote about the role of disorientation in learning based on the work of Marilyn Taylor who stated that disorientation is a natural state in formal education.
Stage 1 – Disorientation: The learner is presented with an unfamiliar experience or idea which involves new ideas that challenge the student to think critically about his/her beliefs and values. The learner reacts by becoming confused and anxious. Support from the educator at this point is crucial to the learner’s motivation, participation and self-esteem. —Marilyn Taylor in Making Sense of Adult Learning.
I think that disorientation is also an important aspect of networked and social learning. I proposed in 2007 that given the rise of connected global networks that we would have more frequent periods of disorientation and longer periods of exploration. Finding ways to explore is becoming crucial with AI black boxes and resulting AI slop permeating our digital spaces. Exploration is a key part of personal knowledge mastery.
In a new understanding of my confusion I said that perhaps we need the shock of confusion to move toward Aporia in order to wake up [The aporetic turn refers to an authentic and legitimate domain of transition where we know what we don’t know —Cynefin]. If we are never confused/disorientated, will we lose that ability to make sense, especially in the Complex and Chaotic domains?
In Broken Images
He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.
He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.
Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.
Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.
When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.
He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.
He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.
—Robert Graves (1885) In Broken Images
Over ten years ago I wrote that we need to flip the office. Instead of going to work, we should be going to socialize, converse, and collaborate. Productive solo time is not for the office. Knowledge workers can be productive anywhere but at the office. This is just as pertinent today. There are times when people need to be together, though with video conferencing and proper meeting management we can get a lot done with distributed work.
Even with good meeting practices available and amazing technology, management has consistently been asleep at the wheel. A few years ago I worked with an organization that was returning to hybrid work with some mandated in-office days and some flexible days. I was informed by experienced staff that hybrid work would lose people, as three days in the office and two from anywhere would not be good enough. Who would not agree? Those with families, long commutes, accessibility issues, or people to care for. I was told that it would be a good 40% of people not happy with this type of hybrid work. And soon the attrition accelerated.
Either management has not learned anything over the past decade or management is actively subverting their own workforce to satisfy their need for control. I think that it’s both.
The new year will bring some big changes to the rules on in-office work for many employees across the country — including tens of thousands of provincial government staff in Ontario and Alberta, who will soon be required back in the office full time.
As of Jan. 5, Ontario provincial government employees will be expected to work in the office five days per week.
Alberta’s public service is also returning to full-time, in-office work in February to “strengthen collaboration, accountability and service delivery for Albertans,” a spokesperson for the Alberta government said. —CBC 2026-01-02
In 2012 Ross Dawson observed that “in a connected world, unless your skills are world-class, you are a commodity“. Fast forward to the dawn of 2026:
Here’s what AI did. It drove the cost of nearly every signal to zero. Resumes used to cost time and thought. Now they cost a prompt. Cover letters used to reveal how someone thinks. Now they reveal which model they used. But companies did the same thing. They replaced judgment with AI screeners. Now you have two AIs talking to each other. One generating signals. One evaluating them. Neither connected to anything real. —David Arnoux
I noted in continuing to step aside that Generative AI is showing that transactional relationships are easily replicable. Our educational systems and many of our workplaces are based on transactional relationships — You do X and I give you Y. The cost of these relationships is trending to zero.
A few years ago my wife purchased an etching press from Michel Dupont in Québec. We spent several hours with him as he showed how the machine worked and what could be done with it. He is an accomplished print maker, showing works all over the world. But his business was almost obliterated by computer graphics. Most of his potential clients were satisfied with ‘just good enough’ work. They did not want his unique artistic impressions. Even for someone who is world class, the computer algorithms adversely affected his business.
Much of AI-generated (GPT/LLM) work is good enough, so our work has to be better than good enough.
I think this will be a major concern for the near future. How can we develop unique world-class skills and who is willing to pay for these? It means that work is learning and learning is the work, for everyone. Locally I see that those who are gainfully employed are the tradespeople. We have hired several recently and the good ones are always occupied. As part of the older generation now, I believe that my work is in helping to connect people and ideas to develop lifelong learning skills. That’s my work for 2026.
Happy new year!
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
RETRACTED: Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans
via @Jan Wildeboer
The article’s conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate are solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto, which have failed to demonstrate tumorigenic potential. The handling (co) Editor-in-Chief also became aware that by the time of writing of this article in the journal, the authors did not include multiple other long-term chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies, that were already done at the time of writing their review in 1999. —Science Direct [undated retraction but assumed to be recent, after 25 years since original publication]
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” —Viktor Frankl
It’s expensive to be poor. It’s ironic but true. You get charges and fees for everything. Higher interest rates. Overdraft fees. Late fees. Having only enough to buy what you need right now instead of buying in bulk. Losing your job because you can’t afford to get your car fixed. Losing your car because you don’t have a job. Even your mental faculties are drained, as you are forced to continually eat low-nutrition foods, “sleep” in miserable conditions, and be exposed to toxins and lack of medical treatment. The lack of liquidity wipes you out. Life really does kick you while you’re down.
You can’t tell someone trapped in that vicious cycle to “just” get a job or “just” make responsible decisions. Sometimes, no amount of good decision-making can stop the vortex sucking them down. So the next time you are tempted to place moral judgment on someone who lives in poverty, think twice.
Signed, someone who has been both a Have and a Have-Not. —@Aaron
“Prolonged exposure [to airborne viruses] in shared, poorly ventilated spaces, which potentially includes several infectious sources, drives respiratory virus transmission more than close contact.”—Nature 2025-11-27
We find that the emissions from the investments, private jets and superyachts of 50 of the world’s richest people is more than the consumption emissions of the poorest 2% (155 million) of people combined. In just over an hour and a half, through their investments, superyachts and private jets, a billionaire will emit more than the average person will emit in their lifetime. Our research signals that climate breakdown cannot be avoided without reducing excessive wealth concentration among an elite few. —Oxfam: Carbon Inequality Kills
Is human learning now an act of rebellion?
Since 2017 I have made this observation — For the past several centuries we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us, and surpassed humans, with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is not much more need for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute.
What kind of brute force is the current AI (GPT + LLM) that drives the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, etc.? Dave Snowden provides some insight in Reclaiming Human Sense-Making in an Age of AI Worship.
So, humans don’t make decisions in the same way as LLM’s work. And doing autism faster doesn’t make you intelligent. And LLM in human terms is deeply autistic … And if I want to put it really simply, we’re not reliant on training data sets to deal with a problem. Things like metaphor, things like abstraction, things like fiction, human beings have developed all sorts of ways we can handle complete novelty without having to replicate what we know from the past … AI is inductive, humans are abductive. In logic terms, human beings evolve to actually make unexpected, unconnected links between things which are apparently unconnected. Abduction is called the logic of hunches. If you go back to the pragmatists we’re really very good at that, whereas AI is always inductive in nature because it’s using past incidences to make statements about the future.
The use of these tools on a large scale does not sound like a huge leap in collective human learning but rather a path that will impede creativity and innovation. Tristan Harris commented on The Dangers of Unregulated AI on Humanity & the Workforce with an ominous conclusion.
Just to sum it up, we are building the most powerful, inscrutable, uncontrollable technology that we have ever invented that’s already demonstrating the rogue behaviors that we thought only existed in bad sci-fi movies.
We’re releasing it faster than we’ve deployed any other technology in history and under the maximum incentive to cut corners on safety.
There’s a word for this that I want everyone to just know, which is this is insane.
So, is human learning now an act of rebellion? If so, it’s a rebellion I want be part of.
I am not ignoring new technologies in the ‘AI’ field, but I believe there is a real need for people to get better at communicating and making sense with other people. Well that is what I wrote early last year in stepping aside. What have I learned since then?
I still have not found any use for generative AI in my own work.
The rush to implement generative AI in the workplace is leading to massive job cuts especially amongst software programmers. The perfect storm of neo-liberalism and automation continues to tear up 20th century social contracts.
As I read the stream of posts on LinkedIn [I am no longer on Facebook, Twitter, or other consumer social media platforms] I feel the conversations are drifting toward meaningless attempts to game the system and garner more views.
It is becoming more evident that human skills and human connections are valuable, beyond the transactional economy. Generative AI is showing that transactional relationships are easily replicable. Universities and schools that view the use of AI as cheating have to come to terms with the transactional nature of their institutions. Writing an essay or taking a test never showed true understanding of a subject. Meanwhile, students are re-evaluating the value of a degree. Why get a degree that does not lead to a job? Only a small percentage of the student body is there purely for the joy of learning. The social contract promoted by higher education is cracking. Some professors are changing their teaching and testing but it’s a huge effort within institutions that have not changed in the face of ubiquitous student use of AI.
In my PKM workshops this year — which I had considered shutting down — I learned from participants that there is a continuing and perhaps growing need for sensemaking skills and learning in communities and networks. As Bonni Stachowiack said after the last workshop, “Mastery is not an endpoint, but a habitual practice of learning, sharing, and growing. The real power of PKM shows up not at the end, but in the consistent rhythm of seeking, sensing, and sharing.”
So let’s seek, sense, and share amidst the growing tide of AI slop.
I will ask chat GPT
I will boil the last of our drinking water
Salt the soil of the scrub-lands
Tear the pages from books and feed them to my fireI will ask copilot
I will scramble your library
reanimate and puppet the faces of your dead ancestors
I will bury you in poor copies of your dreamsI will ask grok
I will fall silent and never speak to you
I will talk only to myself lost in a maze of my own fantasies
I will forget all who cannot compliment me
I will decouple my soul from this world.
Recently I have found it difficult to maintain my writing pace of +20 years. There are 3,700 blog posts published here but few in the last year. The fact that large language models (LLM) have scraped my website and continue to do so has had me feeling less motivated to share my thoughts. But maybe the best act of rebellion against AI slop is to keep writing and not let the silicon valley bastards grind me down.
If you set aside the more apocalyptic scenarios and assume that AI will continue to advance – perhaps at a slower pace than in the recent past – it’s quite possible that thoughtful, original, human-generated writing will become even more valuable.
Put another way: The work of writers, journalists and intellectuals will not become superfluous simply because much of the web is no longer written by humans.—Francesco Agnellini
Chris Corrigan has been a continuing source of inspiration here since 2006. Chris tells us — “So write. Write every day and share it, mistakes and all, so we can find each other in this increasingly tangled thicket of artifice and grift.” So I am going to slowly get back on this horse and the discipline of writing. Back in May 2004 I wrote 58 posts. I doubt I will get back to that pace but I can try and find a new rhythm.
Is anything keeping you from learning out loud through the written medium?
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“The real power of PKM shows up not at the end, but in the consistent rhythm of seeking, sensing, and sharing.” —Bonni Stachowiak
“America putting most of its eggs in the generative AI basket, China going hard into green tech. When history looks back on this period, someone is going to look awfully stupid.” —Nicholas Grossman
“As long as your country has billionaires, it has no cost of living crisis. It has an inequality crisis.” —Jeremy Mallin
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” —Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
“Did a guest spot in a business class on Monday and happened to talk GPTs with them too.
While my programming students may be trying LLM’s, they easily see the mistakes and risks to their own understanding. The business students, all 100% on board with the autocomplete, didn’t even have thoughts that it wasn’t always right or leading them on paths that didn’t make sense. I went back to the programming students and reminded them that is how a lot of the users think of tech, the search result is always trustworthy, the feed is safely curated. Now they understand the world better.” —Jeff Horton
“The Venn diagram of people who say, ‘Working from home puts cafés out of business, and those who say ‘If you stopped buying coffee every day you’d be able to buy a house’ is a circle.” —Cam
“They didn’t know which factory had built him and there was no serial number or manual anywhere, but they decided they would love him for however long his battery lasted.” —Grickle Image below
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Little men in lofty places throw long shadows, because our sun is setting.” —Walter Savage Landor
“AI isn’t just like an intern, but like a *dishonest* intern. With careful supervision it can be productive enough to be useful. But you have to know what it’s doing better than it does, and watch it like a hawk And unless there’s something specific it offers that saves you time or gives you access to information you wouldn’t have otherwise, it probably isn’t worth that effort. I’m starting to wonder if the necessary skill for the AI age is going to be knowing where those lines should be drawn.” —tokyo_0
“It helps to understand that LLMs are basically machine learning programs for finding statistical relationships in language use. It’s an advanced form of the sort of ML that digital humanities researchers have used to, say, chart the incidence of sexist language in English literature over time. So there are logical uses for LLMs, but a) they’re mostly limited to the study of language, and b) they don’t necessarily justify the costs piling up around commercial startups like OpenAI and Anthropic.” —@lrhodes
The case against generative AI
Every CEO talking about #AI replacing workers is an example of the real problem: that most companies are run by people who don’t understand or experience the problems they’re solving, don’t do any real work, don’t face any real problems, and thus can never be trusted to solve them. The Era of the Business Idiot is the result of letting management consultants and neoliberal “free market” sociopaths take over everything …
Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support: the Brain‑only group exhibited the strongest, widest‑ranging networks, Search Engine group showed intermediate engagement, and LLM assistance elicited the weakest overall coupling.
“I will not talk with a chatbot
I do not want it while I shop
I do not want it on Windows X-box
I do not want it in Firefox
I do not want it in my house
I do not want it on my mouse
I do not want it here or there
I do not want it anywhere.
I do not want AI and Spam
I do not want them Sam-Alt-Man”
—@illegalhex
The hidden military pressures behind the new push for small nuclear reactors
So why then, all this attention to nuclear in general and smaller reactors in particular? There is clearly more to this than meets the eye.
The hidden link
The neglected factor is the military dependence on civil nuclear industries. Maintaining a nuclear armed navy or weapons programme requires constant access to generic reactor technologies, skilled workers and special materials. Without a civilian nuclear industry, military nuclear capabilities are significantly more challenging and costly to sustain.
Five years ago I wrote about the tendency on the web to tend toward constant doubt and outrage. Now, five years late, that trend continues, exacerbated by the platform monopolists who understand that outrage sells more advertising. I wrote that social media have created a worldwide Dunning-Kruger effect. Our collective self-perception of knowledge acquired through social media is greater than it actually is. And the outrage continues because we ignore our common humanity. We do.
I concluded that as we become more connected we should not be cutting out social media, instead we should be using them in smarter ways. Today we all have to work and live smarter, by connecting to our networks and communities. These are essential to ensure that we do not become drowned out by the noise of the Internet of Beefs.
I continue to work against the forces that push us towards constant doubt and outrage but it is a real challenge today. The structural manipulation of media continues and conspiratorial content is still easier to find than scientific material. We are the media and we are asleep at the switch.
So, once again, I offer the PKM workshop as an attempt at pre-empting the automation of everything, and I think that this workshop may be for the last time. Registration closes very soon …
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. Please ignore last month’s post ;)
“The [Canadian] Charter [of Rights and Freedoms] is not just a law, it is an expression of Canada’s most basic and deepest values. ‘Notwithstanding’ the Charter means ‘I don’t share these values’. Any and every politician or government that proposes its use should face such an extreme backlash that no one would dare consider it.” —@DavidMitchell
“It is WILD that we now live in a time where my job as an astrophysics professor has gone from ‘learn cool things about space’ to ‘try to get someone to hold billionaires accountable for dropping shit on us from orbit'” —Prof Sam Lawler
Twentieth-century water treatment programs transformed public health by virtually eliminating waterborne diseases. Ventilation, filtration and disinfection provide us with the opportunity to dramatically reduce the burden of airborne illnesses. Tuberculosis and coronaviruses would join typhoid and cholera as tragedies of the past, and seasonal flu and common colds would become rare rather than routine if clean air were as universal and expected as clean water.” —Seeing the light
«Lydia thinks that as a former anti-vaxxer, she’s in a unique position to help worried parents. “The only way you can talk to them about it is if you hear them out first. It kind of opens up that conversation,” she said. “But if you shut a person down … they’re not gonna hear anything you have to say.”» —CBC 2025-09-22 or — Never bring a fact to a narrative fight
CBC did a sit down with Pierre Poilievre and CTV sat down with Andrew Scheer, who was the one who put the target on my [Rachel Gilmore] back. Tons of Canadians are speaking about this and were outraged by it. I’m just surprised that this didn’t seem to come up, unless I missed it. But when Pierre Poilievre said that he’s scared for his family’s safety, his wife [Anaida Poilievre] had just reposted Andrew Sheer’s post that had put that target on my back.
It just feels like there’s a very obvious hypocrisy there. I just feel like it’s almost an abdication of journalistic responsibility to not pursue that. All of the answers that I can speculate about just make me really sad, honestly. —Halifax Examiner 2025-09-19
“Propaganda, good propaganda, turns doubters into believers. Propaganda! We only need propaganda. Of stupid people there are always enough.” —Adolph Hitler c. 1919, as cited in Goodbye Eastern Europe
«BERLIN, Feb. 3 [1939].—Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels today ended the professional careers of five “Aryan” actors and cabaret announcers by expelling them from the Reich’s Chamber of Culture on the grounds that “in their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades.”» —NYT 1939
Human-Powered AI – A Fun Way to Understand How GenAI Really Works by @MarkLevison
In a very simple fashion, we demonstrated how GenAI works. It isn’t intelligent. It selects the next most-likely word (or, more accurately, ‘token’ – a partial word chunk) in the sequence. We also saw that GenAI doesn’t learn and doesn’t have memory. Nothing from the first round of the simulation is carried over to the next round.
ChatGPT 4 has about a trillion times as much data as our human-powered model. So it’s not surprising that ChatGPT and other GenAI tools are better mimics, because they have more parameters. However, they are still not intelligent.
[Demis] Hassabis [CEO of Google’s DeepMind, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry 2024] emphasized the need for “meta-skills,” such as understanding how to learn and optimizing one’s approach to new subjects, alongside traditional disciplines like math, science and humanities. —AP 2025-09-12
In the third bucket I discussed a conversation I had with a senior Human Resources executive at a large corporation in 2016. He noted that when it comes to managing people and their talents, there are three buckets. Two of these are easy to fill, while the third is the real challenge:
1. Tools
2. Skills
3. Meta-Competencies:
—Learning how to Learn (e.g. PKMastery)
—Working in Digital Networks (e.g. Perpetual Beta)
Later I observed that soft skills are permanent skills and they are more difficult to develop than the hard skills often demanded by business leaders. I concluded that soft skills are human skills. They separate humans from machines. For the past several centuries we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us, and surpassed humans, with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is not much more need for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute.
This is why I am continuing to offer and improve the personal knowledge mastery workshop. Its focus is human intelligence, not artificial intelligence. This six week online workshop continues to align people, work, and learning. It is based on +20 years of research and practice and emphasizes learning in communities and networks.
The next workshop starts on 6 October 2025.
After many years of publishing my Fridays Finds, I have given up. Even Mastodon has made their user interface so opaque that after an hour I could not find the favourites I had marked for the last month. They were available on my phone app but I cannot be bothered trying to transfer each favourite from the phone to the desktop, where I usually write my posts. So it’s the end of an era. The first Fridays Find was posted in 2009 and there have been a total of 458, all in the archives.
Perhaps a listen to Who broke the Internet would be appropriate. I am writing much less here in public because I do not want my work scraped by the large language models that feed the likes of Chat GPT.
Here is a lovely photo shared on Mastodon to close this series.
Au revoir mes amis.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble
The Magnificent 7 stocks — NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Meta, Tesla and Amazon — make up around 35% of the value of the US stock market, and of that, NVIDIA’s market value makes up about 19% of the Magnificent 7. This dominance is also why ordinary people ought to be deeply concerned about the AI bubble. The Magnificent 7 is almost certainly a big part of their retirement plans, even if they’re not directly invested …
… In simpler terms, 35% of the US stock market is held up by five or six companies buying GPUs. If NVIDIA’s growth story stumbles, it will reverberate through the rest of the Magnificent 7, making them rely on their own AI trade stories.
And, as you will shortly find out, there is no AI trade, because generative AI is not making anybody any money.
“via Science Direct — Ceiling fans changed the particle trajectory downwards and reduced aggregated concentrations of particles in the breathing zone were reduced by 87%. Ceiling fans strongly affected the indoor airflow pattern and also showed a potential to reduce the exposure risk to horizontally directed coughs.” —@AugieRay
Against Economics (2019) by David Graeber
Economic theory as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools. This is not to say there are no useful insights here, but fundamentally the existing discipline is designed to solve another century’s problems. The problem of how to determine the optimal distribution of work and resources to create high levels of economic growth is simply not the same problem we are now facing: i.e., how to deal with increasing technological productivity, decreasing real demand for labor, and the effective management of care work, without also destroying the Earth. This demands a different science.
‘It’s everyone’s business.’ In Finland, national security is a shared responsibility.
National security in Finland is a society-wide effort that goes beyond a focus on military hardware. Under the shadow of Russian aggression, Europe is taking a look.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Look, I know AI is controversial, but just for a moment, let’s set aside our preconceived notions, our biases, the environmental impact, the massive cost to train and run models, the labor exploitation, the intellectual property theft, the inaccuracies, the mania it causes in users, the destruction of search, the deskilling of professionals, the devaluation of creative work, job losses, and lack of economic value from enterprise implementations.
Wait, what were we talking about?”
—Max Leibman
How should the broad anti-capitalist movement approach climate and other green issues?
“Leftists and environmentalists are close allies in the same cause. There is no contradiction between the two: They both are or should be anti-capitalist. Environmentalism is not anti-human, as some leftists have maintained. Humanity is enmeshed with the larger biosphere so completely that taking care of the environment is taking care of our extended body.” —Kim Stanley Robinson
Finding Peter Putnam via @Chuck Darwin
The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t.
His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr, and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech, were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind.
“Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.
When they tell you
(and they will tell you)
that with everything happening
it is ridiculous
to still be so concerned
about the pandemic,
remind them that while
war and
conquest and
death
are three
of the horsemen of the apocalypse
pestilence
is the fourth.
—@Plague Poems
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“they called it trickle-down economics because ‘financial waterboarding’ didn’t poll well with focus groups” —JA Westenberg
“If you aren’t using AI, you run a very real risk of falling behind in the race to produce voluminous mediocrity while slowly forgetting how to do your own job.” —Max Leibman
An Australian study, conducted over four years and starting before the pandemic, has come up with some enlightening conclusions about the impact of working from home. The researchers are unequivocal: this flexibility significantly improves the well-being and happiness of employees, transforming our relationship with work.
In this study, airborne SARS-CoV-2 and particle matter (PM1, PM2.5) detection was performed in different areas of the COVID-19 building at the Ippokrateio University Hospital in Thessaloniki, Greece … In conclusion, SARS-CoV-2 was effectively detected in the air of different areas in the COVID building after continuous sampling ranging between 24 h and 7 days, and it was shown how important and effective air cleaners are as first-line measures against pathogen airborne transmission in hospital environments.
The supply and demand myth of housing
The primary driver of Vienna’s superior housing affordability is the fact that over 50 percent of Viennese homes are social or co-operative housing . Vienna was able to retain greater affordability in a heavily restricted market because of its cultural and political commitment to housing as an essential good and not a speculative investment.
‘AI is already eating its own’: Prompt engineering is quickly going extinct
Part of the prompt engineer’s appeal was its low barrier to entry. The role required little technical expertise, making it an accessible path for those eager to join a booming market. But because the position was so generalized, it was also easily replaced. Frank compares prompt engineering to roles like ‘Excel wizard’ and ‘PowerPoint expert’— all valuable skills, but not ones companies typically hire for individually.
Here’s an Inconvenient Truth: Disease Is in the Air
If COVID-19 spread in droplets, then it was worthwhile to keep people two metres apart, to put up plexiglas barriers around checkout stands, and make supermarket aisles one-way. Sanitizing countertops could break the chain of infection.
But if COVID-19 was airborne, all those measures were pointless. The air in every workplace would be a soup of viruses; even outdoors, a single COVID-19 case in a big-enough crowd could spread infection in minutes. Masking, air purification and ultraviolet lamps could mitigate spread in confined spaces like classrooms and hospital wards, but could not eradicate the threat.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“The internet didn’t make us stupid. It made stupidity scalable.” —J.A. Westenberg
“Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” —George Orwell, ‘1984’
“you can give someone a fish and then teach them to fish. It’s a lot easier to learn how to fish when you’re not starving.” —ebel aurora
“Employers: Everyone must return to the office, because we work best when people collaborate face-to-face.
Also: We’re going to replace everyone with AI.”
—Jeff Johnson
How Gen Z Became the Most Gullible Generation
“The evidence is clear that folks of all ages struggle to make sense of the overwhelming amount of information that they encounter online, and we need to figure out ways to support people, to find better ways to make sense of the content that streams across their devices.”
Pluralistic: Sarah Wynn-Williams’s ‘Careless People’
Facebook tames its employees, freeing it from labor consequences for its bad acts. As engineering supply catches up with demand, Facebook’s leadership come to realize that they don’t have to worry about workforce uprisings, whether incited by impunity for sexually abusive bosses, or by the company’s complicity in genocide and autocratic oppression.
First, Facebook becomes too big to fail.
Then, Facebook becomes too big to jail.
Finally, Facebook becomes too big to care.This is the “carelessness” that ultimately changes Facebook for the worse, that turns it into the hellscape that Wynn-Williams is eventually fired from after she speaks out once too often. Facebook bosses aren’t just “careless” because they refuse to read a briefing note that’s longer than a tweet. They’re “careless” in the sense that they arrive at a juncture where they don’t have to care who they harm, whom they enrage, who they ruin.
![HEY CLAIRE!HOW YOU DOING? OH, I'M FINE! [FREAKING OUT, ACTUALLY.]](https://jarche.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/veneer-of-normalcy.png)
The image below is one I have often used in explaining sensemaking with the PKM framework. It describes how we can use different types of filters to seek information and knowledge and then apply this by doing and creating, and then share, with added value, what we have learned. One emerging challenge today is that our algorithmic knowledge filters are becoming dominated by the output of generative pre-trained transformers based on large language models. And more and more, these are generating AI slop. Which means that machine filters, like our search engines, are no longer trusted sources of information.
As a result, we have to build better human filters — experts, and subject matter networks.
As search engines and productivity tools keep regurgitating the same — or a variation of — slop, we move toward “an orthodoxy that ruthlessly narrows public thought” (John Robb). Generative AI and their hidden algorithms are hacking away at three things that human organizations need to learn, innovate, and adapt — diversity > learning > trust.
We need to ditch these sloppy tools and focus on connecting and communicating with our fellow humans. Keep on producing human-generated writing, like blogs, and use social media that is not algorithmically generated, like Mastodon. We have just finished a PKM workshop with a global cohort and the consensus from participants is that skills such as media literacy, critical thinking, and curiosity are still essential for making sense of our technologically connected world.
The automation of human work is an ongoing objective of our capitalist systems. Our accounting practices amortize machines while listing people as costs, which keeps the power of labour down. The machines do not even have to be as good as a person, due to our bookkeeping systems that treat labour and capital differently. Labour is a cost while capital is an investment. Indeed, automation + capitalism = a perfect storm.
Recently, The Verge reported that the CEO of Shopify, an online commerce platform, told employees — ‘Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.’ The underlying, completely misinformed assumption being that large language models and generative pre-trained transformers are as effective at thinking and working as humans.
So how can an informed citizenry take control of our real economic power? It’s all about numbers — or how many people will get involved to change the system. For example, “when the committed minority reached 25%, there was an abrupt change in the group dynamic, and very quickly the majority of the population adopted the new norm”, and also that, “when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society”.
But an essential factor in movements for social change is that they should be non-violent to be really effective. This is the 3.5% rule: How a small minority can change the world (2019).
Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, [political scientist, Erica] Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change … “Ordinary people, all the time, are engaging in pretty heroic activities that are actually changing the way the world – and those deserve some notice and celebration as well.”
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Secret Canada is a freedom of information project from The Globe and Mail.
Information is the bedrock of democracy. Freedom of information laws give you the right to obtain records held by public institutions. This project helps you navigate Canada’s access system.”
Kids keep getting sicker as evidence for COVID immune damage builds
If we were to see immune damage manifesting at a population level, it would look like what we’re seeing today: big waves of common illnesses. Unusual spikes of uncommon illnesses. Course reversal for previously declining and eliminated illnesses. An unexplained, global wave of sickness.
“I spent 5+ years as a billionaire’s wordsmith, which meant knowing him intimately enough to write in his voice.
I think the thread running through most of them is not a belief in their own basic goodness but rather contempt for everyone else, including and especially their peers. Expressing that contempt with plausible deniability was part of my (usually) unspoken mandate.
Contempt and duper’s delight. Those were the last thrills once $$ reached a point of diminishing returns.” —@kims
The life of a bicyclist is worth $1150…. apparently.
“Christopher Shawn Basque of Chilliwack, B.C., pleaded guilty in North Vancouver Provincial Court to one count of driving without due care and attention on Friday. The court ordered him to pay a $1,000 fine and a $150 victim surcharge.”
RIP to this poor woman who was just riding a bike.”
Dump truck driver pleads guilty in fatal cyclist collision in North Vancouver
20 Social Roles Overview and Background by @Vanderwal
One of the important things to understand is the 20 Social Roles are not formal roles. These social roles are exhibited by people performing the formal roles, most often as an extension of who they are as a person and their personality make-up.
These are roles that people in formal roles often perform. The 20 Social Roles often do not align to organizations formal roles as they often aren’t considered. Formal roles quite often have attributes, experience, expertise, and other qualifications that are essential to that formal role. The social roles may or (quite often) don’t align to formal roles, which is why it is important to understand them so to support them. People often perform more than one social role, but the combinations aren’t universal, so it is really good to understand the roles as distinct and treat them that way, but also see multiple social roles performed by individuals.
In my last post on adapting to chaos I asked — what changes in our sensemaking practices should we incorporate to adapt to a world that is often more chaotic than complex? I received 12 comments here and another ten comments on LinkedIn. Confusion was one theme commented upon and Chris Corrigan referenced an excellent post on that topic — escaping confusion.
In the domain of Confusion the first and most important action, I believe, is an awareness that you are there. Without awareness you are lost. Any action that you undertake from that place is likely to be based on conditioning without any sensitivity to your context and that can be incredibly dangerous. In fact if you look at Dave’s central domain map you will see that Confusion is adjacent to the Clear, Complicated, and Chaotic domains. The division of the central domain into Confusion and Aporia implies that you cannot get to Complex from Confusion without taking what Dave [Snowden] calls the Aporetic Turn.
Nollind Wachell, with whom I had many discussion on Google+ several years ago, commented that, “In effect, often true growth and development doesn’t occur without some form of pain and suffering because it’s needed to wake a person up, slow them down, and help them perceive and see things that they were blind to before. Something that I think needs to happen (ie an awakening) in not just America but in many places around the world, Canada included.” Perhaps we need the shock of confusion in order to move toward Aporia and then wake up. Nollind also suggested a 2007 MPRA paper, Triple-Loop Learning as Foundation for Profound Change, Individual Cultivation, and Radical Innovation.
Michele Martin, another old friend, joined us and commented that, “So much of our focus is on intellectual sensemaking, but what people are actually experiencing is visceral — disorientation, exhaustion, and the feeling that the ground is shifting beneath their feet.”
And sensemaking in chaotic times isn’t just about thinking differently. It’s about moving differently—learning how to orient when the ground keeps shifting, how to keep going when there’s no clear map, and how to hold confusion without collapsing into fear or false certainty. I’ve begun calling this process Wayfinding—the practice of learning how to move through uncertainty when guarantees are gone and stable ground is nowhere to be found. Wayfinding isn’t about fixing chaos or forcing clarity; it’s about developing a new relationship with the unknown. The question isn’t just ‘how do we make sense of this?’ but ‘how do we live inside it?”
I like the idea of wayfinding instead of sensemaking. It reminds me that in unexplored territory a compass is more important than a map. I think we will all have to get used to a sense of disorientation for the time being. Shaun Coffey, another good friend, recommended this book: Wayfinding Leadership: Groundbreaking Wisdom for Developing Leaders.
We guide you on a leadership development journey that requires stepping into the unknown, developing sharper powers of observation, being more comfortable with uncertainty and finding new and better ways to tackle situations, relying not only on rational thinking, but also on the much broader sets of intelligence with which each of us is endowed. A way finder leader is motivated by curiosity and is steeped in wonder. Wayfinder leaders look to develop everyone’s potential and have an abiding belief that ‘we are in the waka together’.
Later in the discussion I referred to this poem that I often share at the end of my PKM workshops.
He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.
He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.
Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.
Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.
When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.
He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.
He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.
—Robert Graves (1885) In Broken Images
I’m finding it difficult to write here these days. And I have written a fair bit as this is post #3,685. Given the turmoil with our American neighbours it’s hard to focus on much else. Just in my professional networks on both sides of the border I personally know people who have lost their jobs, their clients, and any ability to plan for the near future — all in the past month.
I should be writing a book. I even have a publisher. But I won’t. At least not at this time. Most of my thinking time is focused on the aggressive behaviour of our once-ally, the United States, and the continuous threats to our sovereignty. The fact that Trump was re-elected still shocks me. It shows how flawed the US electoral system is, and I know that we have enough of our own flaws here in Canada. I spent most of my initial career as an Infantry officer, training to fight the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. It seems that my later years in life may be fighting, at least economically, the Russian regime and the American administration that supports it.
One of my professional areas of interest is sensemaking, individually and collectively. It is the focus of my PKM workshop which is currently in its second week with a global cohort. It’s nice to at least have something to focus on that is not political. With PKM I promote the use of the Cynefin framework and have focused on dealing with complexity and how to operate with a Probe > Sense > Respond approach. Our current state of national and international affairs has shifted into the Chaotic domain which requires more of an Act > Sense > Respond approach. Act first, and then see what happens to make sense of it. When I get up in the morning these days I pretty well start in a confused state.
So I’m asking myself and any interested readers — what changes in our sensemaking practices should we incorporate to adapt to a world that is often more chaotic than complex?
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“If you are staying on a corporate social media platform because the people you follow are still there, consider others are also staying there because you are still there. Someone needs to start the move. Be that person.
Leave X for good.
Leave Facebook forever.
Remember blue skies eventually turn grey.
Embrace the social media that cannot get sold to a billionaire. Embrace the Fediverse“
—@Em
“Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.” —Tommy Douglas
“Remember when you were a kid and adults used to ask you what you would do if everyone else you knew was jumping off a cliff? Would you jump too? Now you know.” —@JeremyMallin
Can we devote some time to discussing Slack? As in, why are we all sending our every thought to a centralized server that can be hacked, and can can train AI with them? And why is Slack allowed to store transcripts but I can’t?
My union uses Slack for organizing. How crazy is it that an organization in the cross hairs of a dangerous and emboldened government would do this? With everything going on right now, I’d love to be more active in the union, but must I really give up so much to this opaque platform?
Is anyone else struggling with these concerns? Do you know of viable Slack alternatives? Are there any hacks that make Slack less of a privacy invasion or make LLM training harder? Are there at least ways for me to save sessions the way I can with IRC? How do I resist Slack and not lose touch with groups that still use it?
—@DanGoodin [check the comments]
What Octavia Butler saw on Feb. 1, 2025, three decades ago via @EstherSchindler
In “Parable of the Sower,” the novel’s 15-year-old protagonist, Lauren Olamina, writes a simple journal entry: Saturday, February 1, 2025: “We had a fire today. People worry so much about fire.”
—What unfolds in the pages that follow is a dystopian world surrounding the gated, racially mixed, fictional community of Robledo, California.
—A new drug forces addicts to set fires to communities, who then rob and rape victims. Unhoused people roam the streets and are forced to steal to survive. Hurricanes, fires and violence push Americans to flee north to Canada.
—President Donner, like President Trump, promises to restore the country to its former glory.
—Racially mixed couples, like Olamina’s Black/Chicano family, are vulnerable to attacks, and her parents, both PhD holders, have limited job opportunities.
Newly Approved Tartan Design Memorializes Those Persecuted Under Scotland’s Witchcraft Act via @MarkRees
In the past year many workers in the tech sector have lost their jobs, often replaced by the vision of what generative AI can do instead. I know of lay-offs in bio-tech as well and now we are seeing massive firings in the US civil service. One consequence of all of these job losses is that fewer people will have to do more work. My observations of medium to large organizations been that most people are busy, most of the time. Back to back meetings are not uncommon as well as overflowing email in-boxes.
This is a challenge for performance improvement, learning, and knowledge management initiatives. Any new attempts to improve these will be seen as extra work on top of a demanding work load. While those of us in the field of organizational performance improvement know the long-term value of better knowledge sharing, collaboration, and cooperation, getting over the short-term pain can be insurmountable. I have learned that it’s important to first find and make more time and space for knowledge workers.
While developing the working smarter at Citibank project we also looked at how we could improve meetings, because so much time was spent in them.
Two types of behaviours are necessary for knowledge flow in today’s workplace — collaboration and cooperation. Cooperation is not the same as collaboration, though they are complementary. Cooperation differs from collaboration in that it is sharing freely without any expectation of reciprocation or reward.
Collaboration is working together for a common objective, often externally directed by management or a client. Collaboration includes — Coordinating tasks with minimal time & effort, Finding people best suited to solve a problem, and Participating in meetings for maximum impact & minimum wasted effort.
If we cannot collaborate well we often cannot find the time to cooperate, which is where we can gain insights for innovation through sharing and networking.
Therefore, improving how and when meetings function can make for the better use of everyone’s time and also opens time and space for collective learning. It’s often a good place to start.
I have written several posts on how to run better meetings. I would suggest picking one or two of the ideas in them and trying them out for a couple of months. Different departments can choose different options. They can share what they learn in the process.
Does your organization have optimal meeting practices? If you have any suggestions, please share them.
I came across an older blog post today that reminded me about the year 2001. That was when I left my university-based job at the Centre for Learning Technologies (which was closing) and joined a small local e-learning company that had developed a learning management system (LMS) where I was the head of professional services.
I joined in February of that year and we attended a major trade show, Online Learning 2001 in late September. This was only a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks. We flew through Newark airport and during our stopover had a clear view of the smoking Twin Towers. It was eerie and quiet as few people were traveling at this time. Many other local learning companies traveled to this event as our pavilion was hosted by the New Brunswick government. On arrival we attended a reception hosted by the Canadian consulate and each person was given a lapel pin with crossed US and Canadian flags which we all gladly wore in solidarity with our American neighbours.
Curt Bonk from Indiana was at the conference and wrote some observations many years later. He had attended the same conference in Denver the previous year, as had I. But now the situation was a bit different.
Almost everyone attending Online Learning 2001 was in the room, yet many seats remained open. Unfortunately, for the conference organizers, the annual Online Learning conference had drastically shrunk in size from the year before in Denver. It was downsizing in a major way. Suffice to say, I no longer heard people bragging about their burn rates. The causes for this shrinkage included the 9/11 crisis, worries about travel, slashed travel budgets, and the implosion of most dot-com companies; especially those lacking viable products. Along with all this turmoil, it seemed to be the end of an era where magicians and men on stilts could distract people from a lack of quality e-learning products. I sure miss those men on stilts and ladies in the booths attempting to define the words “learning” and “collaboration” for me, let alone “E-MindCollaboration” or “e-LearningBrain.”
—2016-07-28
The e-learning sector may have gotten older in 24 years but I have not seen much real progress in promoting learning other than the fact that more stuff is online. I am also saddened that the US-Canada relationship has deteriorated given the current US Administration. I have noted before that learning is not something to get and today I feel that learning is not something we got.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, via @Susan Kaye Quinn
“To those who can hear me, I say do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed — the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.” —Charlie Chaplin The Final Speech from The Great Dictator, 1940
George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf
Nevertheless, simply on the internal evidence of Mein Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change has taken place in Hitler’s aims and opinions. When one compares his utterances of a year or so ago with those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics.
A local example of what Facebook has cost us by @ChrisCorrigan
So it seems easy enough for me to leave [Facebook]. But as I’ve posted my intention to do so, friends have shared with me their worry that if they leave Facebook, where will they get their local news and stay connected to what’s happening in the community?
And this right here is the cost of us all buying the convenience of Facebook at the expense of the hard work of building community. What happens on Facebook is not community. It is an empty calories version of deliberation and belonging. It gives the illusion of connection and conversation while simultaneously acting the same way big box stores do in small towns: by crushing what is local through convenience and lower prices. The community bears the cost.”
Think your efforts to help the climate don’t matter? African philosophers disagree via @dyckron
Complementarity has been used by African philosophers like Jonathan Chimakonam, Aïda Terblanché-Greeff, Diana-Abasi Ibanga and Kevin Gary Behrens to develop environmental philosophies based on shared relationships. According to these philosophers, a view of the world based on complementarity neither foregrounds nor diminishes humans. Rather, it sketches a relationship of equals defined by the mutual participation of all.
This thinking is averse to hierarchy. No individual can claim to have more value than another. Anything that exists serves as an important part of the environment and matters equally, whether alone or collectively. Complementarity holds that the relationships that unite individual things can extend to prove the value of every contribution, no matter its size.”
The McGill Office for Science and Society (OSS)
… a unique venture dedicated to the promotion of critical thinking, science communication, and the presentation of scientific information to the public, educators, and students in an accurate and responsible fashion. With a mandate to demystify science for the public and separate sense from nonsense, the Office has a history of tackling fake news in the world of science well before the term “fake news” even existed.”
In 2018 — seeing the figure through the ground — I used the Laws of Media developed by Marshall and Eric McLuhan to examine the impact of social media. McLuhan’s Laws state that every medium (technology) used by people has four effects. Every medium extends a human property, obsolesces the previous medium (& often makes it a luxury good), retrieves a much older medium, and reverses its properties when pushed to its limits. These four aspects are known as the media tetrad.
This image was the resulting tetrad.
I finished the post with these questions.
- How can we educate people to extend their voice to help themselves and make for a better civil society?
- How can we provide time and space for everyone to be offline, so it is not just a luxury for the rich?
- How can we reinforce the good aspects of tribes (e.g. extended families, cooperatives, etc.) while countering their ill effects such as online propaganda?
- How can we ensure that online orthodoxy does not throttle public debate and inquiry, which is one of the treasures we inherited from the Enlightenment?
Six years later and ridiculously easy group-forming is mostly available on corporate-owned platforms that spy on us and feed us garbage. Our voices are shouted down by the algorithms. Offline is definitely a luxury, especially for those owning private jets so they can hang out with other rich people around the world. Tribalism, in the form of MAGA and convoy conspirators, is making society vulnerable to disinformation like anti-vaccination lies and anti-immigrant sentiments. The narrowing of public thought is happening. Speaking out against the genocide in Gaza can lead to job loss or professional ostracism. Let’s face it, the McLuhan’s were right. The medium is the message and we are living in it.
Cory Doctorow summarizes our current situation with social media platforms
These are the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints. If your users can’t leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit.” —2025-01-20
So how can we get an online commons back? Doctorow again gives us some suggestions.
Last week, I endorsed a project called Free Our Feeds, whose goals include hacking some fire exits into Bluesky by force majeure – that is, independently standing up an alternative Bluesky server that people can retreat to if Bluesky management changes, or has a change of heart …
I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That’s because my goal isn’t the success of the Fediverse – it’s the defeat of enshittification. My answer to “why spend money fixing Bluesky?” is “why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?” If you care about a better internet – and not just the Fediverse – then you should share this goal, too. —2025-01-20
The Fediverse is a covenant, not a platform. Mastodon is an open protocol and anyone can put up a server and connect to a federated network of hosts using the protocol. It’s like the early years of blogging where we just connected with each other, using whatever blogging tools worked for each of us. Conversations about this are happening on Mastodon. Join me there — @harold.
I have worked in the fields of human performance improvement, social learning, collaboration, and sensemaking for several decades. Currently in all of these fields the dominant discussion is about using and integrating generative artificial intelligence [AKA machine learning] using large language models. I am not seeing many discussions about improving individual human intelligence or our collective intelligence. My personal knowledge mastery workshops focus on these and leave AI as a side issue when we discuss tools near the end of each workshop. There is enough to deal with in improving how we seek, make sense of, and share our knowledge.
The workshops begin by looking at the nature of human networks and communities and the essential role of curiosity. Later we look at the influence of media and how misinformation and disinformation can be understood and countered. Intentionality when using social media is critical. The overall objective of the workshops is to help people become better knowledge catalysts.
Last year in rebuilding trust I asked how do we rebuild trust in expertise in a world filled with conspiracy theories and distrust of institutions? We don’t seem to have made much progress in the past and may have actually gone in the opposite direction. That is why I keep focusing these workshops an sharing knowledge in trusted communities and open networks. Each of us has to find out how we can become knowledge catalysts in a liquid media world, helping to make our networks smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions. We can rebuild trust one catalyst at a time.
Ten years ago I wrote a series of posts for Cisco on the topic of ‘The Internet of Everything’ (IoE), which was a variation on the Internet of Things, or the idea that all objects, such as light-bulbs and refrigerators, would be connected to the internet. With AI in everything now, I guess we are at that stage technology intrusion, or rather techno-monopolist intrusion.
I would like to review some of the highlights from a decade ago.
tl;dr — little has changed
The IoE is about the intersection of people, processes, data, and things. Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is a framework for making sense of data, information, and knowledge flows. Processes, data, and things are relatively easy to control, but people are complex adaptive systems in their own right. How can people be part of the IoE but not be overly controlled by the other three dimensions? What new skills will be needed to master the internet of everything? —Mastering the Internet of Everything
Data literacy could be seen as part of a new network era fluency — individuals and communities contributing to global networks that influence various aspects of their lives. For individuals, the core skill is critical thinking, or questioning all assumptions, including one’s own. People can learn through their various communities and develop better social literacy. Data literacy is improved by connecting to a diversity of networks. Mass network era fluency can ensure that networks remain social, diverse, and reflect many communities. This kind of fluency, by the majority of people, will be needed as people are outnumbered by devices on the Internet. People cannot deal with the arising complexity of the Internet of Everything unless they can knowledgeably talk about it. This requires fluency by an educated and informed citizenry. —People and the Wild Internet of Everything
Creativity will be needed on a large scale. The key to creativity is diversity – of opinion and options. Human systems thrive on variety and an Internet of Everything will give us more potential connections. It will bridge global and local. Connected people can socially create knowledge and most importantly, coordinate action together. This is the incredible potential of the ‘people’ aspect of the Internet of Everything – human connections that scale. To realize this potential, everyone has to be connected. Not just processes. Not just data. Not just things.
The Internet of Everything will be empty if it is not the Internet of Everyone. —The Internet of Everyone
In the next great industrial revolution will be data-driven, the major premise is that data factories are “changing the nature of work by allowing freelancers to market their services to an increasingly large audience.” The danger of course is that a few companies will have control of these data factories and freelancers will become the product. As they say with social media, if you are not paying for the service, then you are the product. It seems the IoE may increase the speed of automation, making more human jobs obsolete, as data become a capital resource. Will data factories become the new breed of middle-men while freelancers lose control? This could be a growing area of social and economic tension in the near future. —Owning Our Data
For me, the Internet of Everything means more changes in how we work as well as the need for better educational models than courses and institutions to meet our learning needs in keeping up with a more complex hyper-connected world. —What does the Internet of Everything Mean to You?
Internet of Everything or Generative AI — these are not that different. People are taken out of the equation and profits are maximized by the platform/algorithm owners. The only way to address these forces is through collective human creativity. Let’s stay in touch and go on to organize.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Capitalism is what happens when you believe glorified fishmongers should chart the course for humanity.” —@aral
“11 yrs ago I found this funny: ‘How many Microsoft designers does it take to change a light bulb? None. They just define darkness as ‘industry standard’. But now I can’t unsee this: ‘How many huge companies does it take to fix the climate? None. They just define global warming as ‘industry standard’.” —@HelenCzerski
“it’s easy to propose a solution if you only understand 10% of the problem” —@tef
Mortality in First Eight Months of 2024 2% Higher Than Predicted [pay attention to the actuaries]
For the first eight months of 2024, against a baseline that includes anticipated COVID-19 deaths:
— total mortality was 2% higher than predicted;
— COVID-19 mortality was 70% higher than predicted;
— Non-COVID respiratory mortality was 8% higher than predicted, with pneumonia deaths 14% higher; and
— these outcomes are all statistically significant.There have been five deaths from COVID-19 for every death from influenza.
Mortality from non-respiratory causes has been close to predicted.
Do Minds Have Immune Systems? via @ShaunCoffey
We think cognitive immunology has a bright future. Imagine our understanding of the mind’s immune system expanding until it rivals our understanding of the body’s immune system. Imagine how much better our treatments for misinformation susceptibility could become. (Think of such treatments as taking the form of next-level critical thinking instruction for the willing, not forced inoculation of the unwilling.) Imagine how much rarer outbreaks of mass irrationality could become. What if we could reduce toxic polarization by 35%? Or make everyone 15% less susceptible to ideological fixation? What if we could make angry, hateful delusions uncommon? Imagine taming the worst infodemics the way we tamed the worst epidemics: by patiently building herd immunity to the nastiest infectious agents.
To the student body of Germany:
History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.
You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds. I gave all the royalties of my books for all time to the German soldiers blinded in the World War with no thought in my heart but love and compassion for the German people.
I acknowledge the grievous complications that have led to your intolerance; all the more do I deplore the injustice and unwisdom of passing on to unborn generations the stigma of your deeds.
Do not imagine that your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit His judgment upon you. Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung around your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men. —Helen Keller
Back to Basics – Cycle Helmets
To review all of this, cycle helmets do not offer any designed protection against crashes involving any other vehicle. While it may offer your head some protection against being cut by glass, that degree of protection would be almost irrelevant compared to the massive impact force caused by being hit by a car.
Cycle helmets do offer a slight absorption of impact, but not enough to prevent concussion, nor indeed coma. Also, polystyrene – what cycle helmets are made from – is rated at 3.4 Gpa strength, while the human skull exceeds 5 GPa. That’s a huge difference, and simply means your skull is far harder than your cycle helmet.
…
However, whatever you decide to do, now that you know that cycle helmets really only protect against grazes and scrapes, and precious little else, please will you stop with the “My mate crashed his bike and smashed up his helmet. If it wasn’t for his helmet, his skull would’ve been smashed” stories, as they simply are not true.
OpenAI o3 Consumes Five Tanks of Gas Per Task
OpenAI recently unveiled o3, its most powerful AI model to date. Besides the cost to run the models, its environmental impact is another aspect that’s garnering attention.
A study reveals that each o3 task consumes approximately 1,785 kWh of energy, equivalent to the electricity used by an average US household over two months.
The analysis of benchmark results done by Boris Gamazaychikov, AI sustainability lead at Salesforce, says that it roughly translates to 684 kilograms of CO₂ equivalent (CO₂e) emissions, which is comparable to the carbon emissions from more than five full tanks of petrol.
The Landlord’s Game: Lizzie Magie and Monopoly’s Anti-Capitalist Origins (1903)
There are few cases of creative and intellectual theft more egregious than the origins of the billion-dollar grossing Monopoly. The short version: a brilliant woman economist invented an anti-capitalist board game that was stolen by a lying, opportunistic man and repackaged as capitalist family fun.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“I am well in body although considerably rumpled up in spirit” — Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables, via @FelicityShoulders
“Maybe one of the Hall of Fame-level cons of all time was economists dressing up their discipline as an exact science, fake Nobel and all.”—@brunoc
When I asked
for their analysis
my friend
(who has read theory)
quoted Gramsci:
“The old world
is dying. And
the new world
struggles
to be born: now
is the time
of monsters.”So, my friends,
in this time
of monsters
stay human
oh, my friends, please
try to stay human.
—PlaguePoems
Decentralised social media ‘increases citizen empowerment’, says Oxford study
‘Decentralised social media platforms represent a shift towards user autonomy, where individuals can engage in a safer and more inclusive digital space without the constraints and biases imposed by traditional, centralised, algorithm-driven networks.’
The Beginning of the End of Big Tech by Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal
It doesn’t help that the public and regulators are waking up to AI’s reliance on, and generation of, sensitive data at a time when the appetite for privacy has never been higher—as evidenced, for one, by Signal’s persistent user growth. AI, on the other hand, generally erodes privacy. We saw this in June when Microsoft announced Recall, a product that would, I kid you not, screenshot everything you do on your device so an AI system could give you “perfect memory” of what you were doing on your computer (Doomscrolling? Porn-watching?). The system required the capture of those sensitive images—which would not exist otherwise—in order to work.
Five Years On: A Covid Retrospective
What else do we forget about the pandemic? We forget how mesmerised we were as nature rebounded, how clean the air was in the absence of industrial scale human activity. We forget that carbon emissions fell at the sort of pace required to avoid cataclysmic climate change. We forget that no-strings cash payments saw child poverty in America plunge to record lows, that the UK slashed homelessness with schemes that found homes for people sleeping on the street [and CERB in Canada].
… It couldn’t last because of capitalism. This isn’t some glib statement, it is literally why such promises could never be fulfilled. Because such promises required redistribution and structural shifts to economies that billionaires don’t want shifting.
“If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.” —Banksy via @earthshine
From The Guardian — Not quite religion, not quite self-help: welcome to the Jordan Peterson age of nonsense.
But living on social media, seeing the world through its lens, is like returning to a pre-information age. First, because everything is current. Records of previous discussions fade quickly – miss a day and it is almost impossible to catch up. Instead, as with cycles of oral history, memories of the past are collective and mutable.
As history fades, so does truth itself. If information is about extracting signal from noise, social media is about turning up the noise. Among the flow of dubious facts, it can be hard to determine which to cling to. Meanwhile, mob mentality ramps up the risk of speaking up against the beliefs of a large group.
It is in such environments that meaning becomes tribal. Your beliefs are not really about the external facts, but about which group you identify with. People rely less on their own capacity for reason and more on each other. This is the petri dish from which systems of faith have always tended to arise. —Martha Gill, 2024-11-24
This reminds me of some of the observations of Marshall McLuhan, made about 50 years ago, and before the Web. This is McLuhan’s tetrad, based on his Laws of Media.
Every medium —
extends a human property,
obsolesces the previous medium (& often makes it a luxury good),
retrieves a much older medium, &
reverses its properties when pushed to its limits.
The reversal — when a technology’s properties are pushed to its limits — is a potential unintended consequence. A technology can have more than one. When developing a new technology, or deciding whether to regulate one in our society, it would pay to have some deep conversations about these effects.
Just because these consequences are unintended does not mean they are unknown.
Society in the electric era
All quotes by Marshall McLuhan
McLuhan’s media tetrad: every medium:
- extends a human property,
- obsolesces the previous medium (& often makes it a luxury good),
- retrieves a much older medium, &
- reverses its properties when pushed to its limits
Digital Networks
- EXTEND our voices in the present — “News, far more than art, is artifact.”
- OBSOLESCE long-form reading — “The future of the book is the blurb.”
- RETRIEVE tribal loyalties — “Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.”
- REVERSE into a monoculture — “The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.”
‘Decentralised social media is more than just a technical shift; it’s a step toward restoring autonomy and trust in our digital lives, empowering individuals and communities to connect without compromising their values or privacy.’ —Zhilin Zhang, University of Oxford, 2024
In November 2022 — from platforms to covenants — I wrote that I firmly believe open protocols connecting small pieces loosely joined is a better framework than any privately owned social media platform. Twitter was just too darned easy for many years. I am connecting more on Mastodon though I have not mastered all of its functions. Mastodon is an open protocol and anyone can put up a server and connect to what is called the ‘fediverse’, a federated network of hosts using the protocol.
The University of Oxford study of Mastodon instance administers revealed that decentralized social media provide certain benefits.
- Safer, more inclusive spaces online
- Absence of algorithmic manipulation
- Better support for data privacy and autonomy
These are definitely reasons why I stopped using Twitter to teach about online networks in my PKM workshop and why I finally left Twitter after 17 years. With centralized control, social media platforms can be easily manipulated.
Elon Musk’s X may have tweaked its algorithm to boost his account, along with those of other conservative-leaning users, starting around the time he announced his support of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. That’s according to a new study published by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which found that Musk’s posts in particular were suddenly much more popular. —The Verge, 2024-11-17
Decentralized social media, like Mastodon, reminds me of my early days of blogging twenty years ago. Nobody was in charge, but there were certain protocols on how to interact with others, like using RSS, trackbacks, and blog rolls. This decentralization makes for more work for administrators, as it did for individual blog owners two decades ago.
Participants did identify challenges with decentralised social media platforms. For example, they found it challenging to grow their respective communities because of the sparse content driven by relatively low numbers of users, while the concept of decentralised social media might be too difficult for new users to understand. The complex nature of moderating communities due to the fine line of creating a safe space and protecting freedom of speech, and the burdens of moderating content that could include harmful materials and potential scams, were other identified challenges. —University of Oxford, 2024
The decentralized web has given me hope and the energy to keep going with this blog. I kind of needed that at this point.
Bryan Cantrill discusses what he has learned after 20 years of blogging through the decades. I too, crossed the two decade mark this past February. Bryan was asked four questions on the occasion by Cynthia Dunlop.
- What blog entry was I most proud of?
- Which one was most difficult to write?
- What impact of blogging have I found surprising?
- What advice would I have for those getting started with blogging?
So I thought it might be a good idea for me to do the same.
1. I am proud of a post that received the most negative feedback ever. I was even asked to change the title of the post. Our future is networked and feminine looked at how there were many ancient tribal societies led by women but both the advent of institutions, like kingdoms and religions ‘of the book’, and later capitalist markets were clearly male-dominated. Today, in a network society, we are seeing more avenues for feminine influence, as evidenced by movements like ‘me too’, and of course there is a resulting push-back from patriarchal institutions and markets. The shift is not complete but if we don’t blow ourselves up, I think it will happen.
2. Several posts were difficult to write. The death of a dear friend, Graham McTavish Watt, was painful. So was that of my mother-in-law, Budge Wilson, as I wanted to have a place online that linked to many other tributes. Writing about a book — all for nothing — that reflected the experiences of my mother during the defeat of Prussia in 1945 was not easy either. What all three have in common is that they were personal.
3. Blogging has made my writing better [surprise!]. It has also created some very strong bonds with other bloggers. One example would be Luis Suarez, whom I have never met and we continue to meet online in several communities and networks over 20 years. But I have felt that the impact of blogging seems to have waned in the past five years. I think we may see a resurgence in the future, though getting scraped by AI large language models is a bit depressing.
4. My advice for anyone interested in blogging is this — write for yourself. It is the only way you will be able to persevere.
I started using Twitter in late 2007, at the urging of several friends, who felt that as a blogger it would be a good way to extend my reach. And it did. From 2012 to 2021 Twitter (Tweetbot) was one of my top three tools for learning. It dropped to fourth place after Musk bought the company and then it dropped completely off my list.
Over the years I have noted that the micro-blogging platform let me stay in loose touch with many people. I wrote that next to my blog, Twitter was my best learning tool and allowed me to stay connected to a diverse network [SEEK & SHARE]. For several years Twitter was the largest source of visitors to this blog. It even eclipsed Google search.
Beginning in 2022 it was becoming obvious that Twitter would no longer be the place where movements like Arab Spring or Black Lives Matter could grow. The move to becoming a fascist-promoting rage-inducing factory was quite obvious in 2022 and it is blindingly obvious now.
In 2022 I had about 20,000 followers and being connected to a network that diverse was a powerful incentive for me to stay on X. Now I have much better conversations and very few trolls on Mastodon — from platforms to covenants . I do not miss the constant doubt and outrage of Twitter either, even though I used to think I could get around that by carefully curating who I followed. That is impossible now and even blocking does not work on X because those you block can now read your feed, thanks to the new ownership.
My Friday’s Finds have come mostly from Mastodon over the past two years and now nothing will come from X. And that’s not a bad thing.
Farewell little bird. You were once a very important place for learning, sensemaking, and understanding others.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Grand Theft Autocomplete is my new favourite term for LLMs.” —@ben
Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of AI, was quoted in Life magazine — in 1970, “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” —AIWS.net
“Some people will condescend to religious people for believing in gods or spirits and then turn around and tell you with a straight face that there’s this invisible thing called the economy that determines our lives.” —@HeavenlyPossum
In his 1950 book The Psychology of Dictatorship, [Gustav] Gilbert wrote, “In my work with the defendants, I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” —15-minute History, The Nuremberg Trials
“I once worked on an OCR [optical character recognition] project, and the executives never grasped the fundamental problem of OCR (which in my opinion applies to LLMs [large language models]).
If something is wrong 20% of the time
And you don’t know which 20%
You have to check 100% of its work”
—@SteveFenton
Following up from yesterday’s post — fix the networks — this presentation at XOXO Festival 2024, by Ed Yong tells the story about how the pandemic defeated him. Yong wrote many articles focused on making sense of the pandemic for The Atlantic from 2020. In 2021 Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. His first premise is that succeeding or failing to deal with a pandemic is a choice.
For me, just the fact that Yong wears a N95 respirator mask while presenting, makes this worth watching. It’s real leadership by example. With no previous journalistic experience, Yong set some rules for himself, especially after winning the Pulitzer. These are good rules for any writer.
No arguing with strangers online
Do not become a pundit
Cultivate readers, not fans
No savior complex
Acknowledge and uplift community
Act the part, even if you don’t feel it
Use power well
A core insight that Yong shares is the power of bearing witness to the suffering of others — “This genre of pieces [for The Atlantic] was about bearing witness to suffering, which I think is one of the most profound things we can do as people. These pieces taught me a lot. First, they taught me that we can actually still change people’s minds. At a time when it felt like everyone was polarizing and hunkering down, many people told me that this piece about grief completely changed how they thought about how to extend grace to those who were still suffering.” — This reminds me of the power of sensemaking through irony, honesty, and humility when confronting broken systems.
Yong goes on to explain, “It reminded me that the audience for my work does not simply consist of the people who first read the stories. I just always thought about readers in that way, in that one-step model. But of course, that’s nonsense. We exist in a society. We live in networks. And so many [Covid] long haulers used these pieces to open conversations with their employers, their family members, their friends, their loved ones, their colleagues, to say, this is what I’m going through.”
Yong’s professional practices of giving voice to many people suffering from the impacts of virus are another example of helping make the network smarter. His major conclusion is that this pandemic is continuing because of an overly technocratic approach to solving it and a total lack of understanding or wanting to address the social issues that are contributing to it — inequities in power, wealth, education, and social connections.
In the end, these types of forces, like misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic in mainstream media, led Yong to quit his job. He could not publish an article on long Covid while the same magazine would have a piece that was poorly researched hyperbole expressing the opposite perspective.
Yong then took up birding [as I did at the beginning of the pandemic]. Birding and photography have helped Yong get his life back as he spends more time outdoors and off-line. I wonder if we will lose many of the best and brightest non-fiction writers and journalists as they get beaten down by the powers behind the social inequities that pervade our society. It’s something for me to think about while birding.
Erin Kissane, in a presentation at XOXO Festival 2024, discusses how Twitter was instrumental in crowd-sourcing a wide variety of experts to understand what was happening early in the Covid pandemic. Twitter enabled many ‘rando’, or loose social connections which resulted in the Covid Tracking Project that was ahead of the CDC and other official sources of public health information. But as Kissane states, “It’s a mark of institutional failure to leave your public health crisis data in the hands of amateurs and volunteers.” That has been the ongoing state of affairs in most Western countries, Canada included.
I have shared many stories and perspectives about my own journey to understand this novel coronavirus that still plagues us. In 2022 I wrote that Twitter had kept me informed through this pandemic. I had been informed by subject matter networks of experts who shared their knowledge with the public on Twitter. In 2023 I said that established and institutionalized professional organizations too often lack the diversity of thinking necessary to deal with complex problems, such as a novel coronavirus. And in 2024 I asked, how do we rebuild trust in expertise in a world filled with conspiracy theories and distrust of institutions?
We won’t do it on Facebook, which has been shown to be a breeding ground for evil. As Kissane states, “That’s why I wrote a very long, detailed series about what Meta did in Myanmar and how it related to the genocide of the Rohingya people.” And Twitter is getting worse by the day as I noted in Whither Twitter (2022) and later noticing the worldwide synesthesia resulting from corporate controlled social networks.
Kissane has proposed a solution. It is not for everyone to get off the public sphere and find private communities — one of which I host (PBCC) — but rather, in her words, “we fix the f*cking networks”. She suggests that the people who make networks better by their presence should get involved in experimenting with better networks, not centrally controlled or algorithmically promoting fear and loathing. A solution, or at least an experiment in progress, is the fediverse, of which Mastodon is one part — meet me on Mastodon.
Kissane closes by stating that now is the time to build and test networks that can enable democratic knowledge sharing so that we are ready for the next crisis. For me, this reinforces the idea that leadership in a networked society is helping make the networks smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions, or more succinctly — sowing good seeds.
