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.
Why should we help those we compete with? Because we want to live in a resilient society and have a thriving economy.
“There was a farmer who grew excellent quality corn. Every year he won the award for the best grown corn. One year a newspaper reporter interviewed him and learned something interesting about now he grew it. The reporter discovered that the farmer shared his seed corn with his neighbours. “How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbours when they are entering corn in competition with yours each year?” the reporter asked.
“Why sir” said the farmer, “Didn’t you know? The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbors grow inferior corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbours grow good corn.” —Author unknown — see below*
We discussed other versions of stories that were based on not taking everything and giving back to the community in our online community today. It reflects my view of leadership in a networked society, which is helping make the network smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions.
Making our networks stupid drags us all down a slippery slope. Today, while politicians and pundits spread disinformation and conspiracy theories about climate change and hurricanes, people may soon die in Florida as a result of Hurricane Milton.
I do not want to live in a stupid society but it seems this may become the new normal. If stupidity is natural then those with the privilege of leadership must step up. Cooperation is the imperative to work against the influence of propaganda, now fueled by generative AI. Cooperation is giving freely of what good knowledge and experience we have and not expecting anything in return. Misinformation is often free while solid science is frequently hidden behind a paywall. Making the network smarter is not just sharing facts. We need more powerful narratives. As I noted in constant doubt and outrage, medical researchers Kathryn Perera et al., advised to, “never bring a fact to a narrative fight”.
Bloggers can show leadership by helping make their networks smarter. Write in a spirit of freely sharing. Add the extra value to inform others. Sow some good seeds. This is a major focus of the personal knowledge mastery workshop.
* I have found many versions of this story without attribution and also some writers who claim it is theirs but there is evidence of earlier versions. If you know the original source please let me know and I will provide attribution.
Jon Naughton in The Guardian — The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted — notes that Dave Winer’s blog is now 30 years old. Winer invented RSS which easily syndicates blogs and ensures that podcasts can be played on your application of choice. Like Winer, when I started I also thought that blogging was for everyone. It’s not.
“I was born to blog. At the beginning of blogging I thought everyone would be a blogger. I was wrong. Most people don’t have the impulse to say what they think.” —Dave Winer
Naughton also notes how big tech has not completely successfully pushed blogging to the margins by creating ‘walled gardens’.
Like many of us, [Dave Winer] realised that what came to be known as the blogosphere could be a modern realisation of Jürgen Habermas’s idea of “the public sphere” because it was open to all, everything was discussable and social rank didn’t determine who was allowed to speak. But what he – and we – underestimated was the speed and comprehensiveness that tech corporations such as Google and Facebook would enclose that public sphere with their own walled gardens in which “free speech” could be algorithmically curated while the speakers were intensively surveilled and their data mined for advertising purposes.
Blogging is one of the few civic spaces left for democratic discourse. I noted in the perpetual beta series (2016) that the inconvenient truth is that our existing 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. These capitalists are no different than the robber barons of the 19th century.
For instance, in this digital age many of us no longer own anything. When we die, everything that we have rented — our music, our lodgings, our software — no longer belongs to us. Even our identities, like email addresses and usernames, disappear. We become consumers, but not owners. Is digital indentured servitude our collective dystopic future?
Questioning existing hierarchies is necessary to create the wirearchies of the future where there will be shared power and authority based on mutual trust. The dominant organizational model needs to shift on the continuum, away from hierarchy, toward networks. Reverting to old-style, simple hierarchies removes us from our obligation as citizens to build a better networked organizational model for society.
Let’s keep the blogosphere alive and well and thriving.
I have talked about the topic of owning your data in 2004, 2007, 2009, 2014, & 2017. In summary, I have promoted having a personal blog or website to initially publish any work, and then share it on various social media channels (controlled by someone else) as these come and go.
In 2014 I wrote a post sponsored by Cisco, on the ‘internet of everything’ (IoE) and owning our data. I said that the danger is that a few companies will have control of 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. 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.
That future is here.
In a 2009 post on blogs as social media’s home base I created an image that is still pertinent today — contextualize what you see, create content, connect with others, and co-create with them.
Molly White has created a better acronym for owning your online data — POSSE = Post (on) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
Rather than publishing a post onto someone else’s servers on Twitter or Mastodon or Bluesky or Threads or whichever microblogging service will inevitably come along next, the posts are published locally to a service you control. At that point, the rest is simple (if not easy): plugging in whichever social media sites you desire, and syndicating the posts through them either by copying the post there directly, or publishing a snippet with a link back to the original source.
I did not do this with Twitter and I don’t practice POSSE on Mastodon. Instead, I publish my Friday’s Finds to summarize what I found online that was interesting or informative.
Whatever your practice may be, owning your data and publishing on your own site are good long-term strategies. I started posting here in 2004.
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.
“Listen, generative LLMs and art imaging tools will get better and better over time. If your opposition is based on crappy outputs, that problem will get solved.
Problems such as unsustainable resource consumption, unfair labour practices, accelerating wealth inequity and the absolute death of joyful creativity, however, will not be fixed.” —@barsoomcore
The electric cost of GPT-4 is also quite high. If one out of 10 working Americans use GPT-4 once a week for a year (so, 52 queries total by 17 million people), the corresponding power demands of 121,517 MWh would be equal to the electricity consumed by every single household in Washington D.C. (an estimated 671,803 people) for twenty days. That’s nothing to scoff at, especially since it’s an unrealistically light use case for GPT-4’s target audience.
I am deeply concerned that this entire industry is built on sand. Large Language Models at the scale of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Llama are unsustainable, and do not appear to have a path to profitability due to the compute-intensive nature of generative AI. Training them necessitates spending hundreds of millions — if not billions — of dollars, and requires such a large amount of training data that these companies have effectively stolen from millions of artists and writers and hoped they’d get away with it.
The Carbon Tax Is Good for Canadians. Why Axe It?
Wise leadership matters—leadership guided by history, science, economic experience, and example. Now more than ever, Canadians need to be reminded of that. Families in Canada sacrifice by paying a carbon tax, but they are rewarded when they get much of their outlay—or more—back while directly contributing to climatic responsibility. That contribution is an outcome worth celebrating.
How the Apricot Tree Café became a leader in clean indoor air
The Toronto-area eatery invested in improved ventilation before reopening after stay-at-home orders. Their business is better than ever, proof that paying attention to indoor air quality is vital during an ongoing pandemic …
Since improving the café’s air quality, neither he [Franz Hochholdinger ] nor Esther has been sick despite often working 14-15 hours a day. And at a time when Restaurants Canada, a nonprofit that advocates for the restaurant industry, estimates that 62% of the nation’s restaurants are losing money or breaking even, the café’s profits continue to grow. Hochholdinger said that they had their best year on record in 2023 and are up 20% in revenue so far this year. Customers from as far away as New York City and Los Angeles have come to the café for its clean air, according to the guest book.
The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters — Ursula K. Le Guin (2014)
Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
In an article on the impact of AI on computer science education, the general conclusion is that all jobs will have a generative AI component and it will be necessary in most jobs to understand computer science. The piece opens with an experiment conducted by a professor with one of his computer science classes.
One group was allowed to use ChatGPT to solve the problem, the second group was told to use Meta’s Code Llama large language model (LLM), and the third group could only use Google. The group that used ChatGPT, predictably, solved the problem quickest, while it took the second group longer to solve it. It took the group using Google even longer, because they had to break the task down into components.
Then, the students were tested on how they solved the problem from memory, and the tables turned. The ChatGPT group “remembered nothing, and they all failed,” recalled Klopfer, a professor and director of the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade.
Meanwhile, half of the Code Llama group passed the test. The group that used Google? Every student passed.
In manual, not automatic, for sensemaking (2012) I said that I prefer simpler tools that force me to think and connect by myself. If it was automatic I wouldn’t think about it much, but that’s what I want to do — think more, not less. By keeping sensemaking activities ‘manual’, we are forced to do something.
Following up on manual sensemaking (2023) I suggested that sensemaking is a manual skill, which can be assisted with various tools, but the most important tool is our mind, using good practices. Sensemaking consists of both asking and telling. It’s a continuing series of conversations. We know that conversation is the main way that non-codified knowledge gets shared. So we should continuously seek out ideas. We can then have conversations around these ideas to make sense of them. Sharing closes the circle, because being a sharing knowledge is every professional’s part of the social learning contract. Without effective sensemaking at the individual level, social learning at the community and organizational levels is mere noise amplification.
Conversation, not prompt engineering, is how people learn from each other. In the knowledge artisan era, work might include self-selected generative AI tools but there remains cooperative learning, knowledge sharing, and collaborative work to do between people to get complex tasks done.
The current hype around ‘artificial intelligence’ in the form of generative pre-trained transformers and large language models is impossible to avoid. However, I have yet to try any of these out other than two questions posed to Sanctum.ai — auto-marketing — on my computer and not on some cloud. So far, these are my reasons for not jumping on this bandwagon.
- I have no need to make my work more efficient, as I am not a machine. I prefer manual sensemaking.
- There are huge environmental costs (e.g. data centre power use and CO2 emissions) associated with these platforms.
- This site has already been scraped and my writing was fed into Google’s C4 Dataset, without my permission and contrary to my copyright license.
- I still see a huge need for better human sensemaking and knowledge sharing in every organization I have worked with and in ongoing conversations in my professional communities.
At this time, my professional focus will remain with helping people to work smarter using frameworks like personal knowledge mastery.
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 was in Long Beach in 2012 when Nick Hanauer gave his, “It’s absolute bullshit that the rich are job creators” TED talk. I was so eager to share it with co-workers and friends, I checked the TED site every day waiting for them to post it. I gave up after six months
It eventually showed up on YouTube but I don’t think TED ever put it on their site or even linked to it. I’m surprised they welcomed him back to the main stage just a couple years later. —@kims
How exercise in old age prevents the immune system from declining (2018)
Doing lots of exercise in older age can prevent the immune system from declining and protect people against infections, scientists say.
They followed 125 long-distance cyclists, some now in their 80s, and found they had the immune systems of 20-year-olds.
Prof Norman Lazarus, 82, of King’s College London, who took part in and co-authored the research, said: “If exercise was a pill, everyone would be taking it.
Howard Rheingold mentioned this video about the web’s impact on the use of text — The Machine is Us/ing Us — by Michael Wesch from 17 years ago, which I have referred to several times since 2009 — Work 2.0
Medical Doctor: “Can you remove your mask? I’m concerned you’re anxious about Covid.”
Me: Shall I also remove my helmet while on a [motor]bike, my seatbelt while in a moving car, and my hat+sunscreen at noon on a cloudless, summer day, you duplicitous hypocrite? Please, for everyone’s safety, quit your day job.
—@trendless
How 12,000 Tonnes of Dumped Orange Peel Grew Into a Landscape Nobody Expected to Find
“This is one of the only instances I’ve ever heard of where you can have cost-negative carbon sequestration,” says ecologist Timothy Treuer from Princeton University.
Via @VMBrasseur
Slow productivity worked for Marie Curie — here’s why you should adopt it, too
Slow Productivity is a call to arms to reject the performative busyness of the modern workplace, where frequent virtual meetings and long e-mail chains sap so much of workers’ attention. One exhausted postdoctoral researcher interviewed by [Cal] Newport defined productivity, as it is currently measured in academia, as “working all the time”.
Are we headed toward a society of feudal techno-peasants and a small class of the analog-privileged?
The Future is Analog (If You Can Afford It)
The idea of “analog privilege” describes how people at the apex of the social order secure manual overrides from ill-fitting, mass-produced AI products and services. Instead of dealing with one-size-fits-all AI systems, they mobilize their economic or social capital to get special personalized treatment. In the register of tailor-made clothes and ordering off menu, analog privilege spares elites from the reductive, deterministic and simplistic downsides of AI systems. —Maroussia Lévesque
More thoughts on generative AI.
Once again Jane Hart is asking, “What are the most popular digital tools for learning and why?” in the 18th Annual Top Tools for Learning survey. Voting ends on 30 August.
My tools have not changed much since last year. I am not using social bookmarks much any more, so Diigo did not make the last. It’s interesting that social bookmarking was my #3 tool in 2012, and how little I use it now.
- WordPress — powers all my websites, as well as much of the entire web
- Slack — private community space including the perpetual beta coffee club
- Mastodon — my main social network
- Inoreader — my RSS feed reader
- Zoom — everyone knows Zoom, which I have been using for seven years
- Overcast — for podcasts like Jane McConnel’s Imaginize.world
- 1Password — simplifies my online life and gives me more time for learning
- Merlin — learning about birds
- Seek — learning about nature
- Signal — this secure messaging application is great for confidential conversations
Donald Clark has posted about how many people are using AI as assistive technology.
Time and time again, someone with dyslexia, or with a son or daughter with dyslexia, came up to me to discuss how AI had helped them. They describe the troubles they had in an educational system that is obsessed with text. Honestly, I can’t tell you how often I’ve had these conversations. —Plan B: 2024-08-15
Donald goes on to cite several types of assistive technology.
- Text-to-Speech & Speech-to-Text Tools
- Grammar and Spelling Assistants
- Comprehension Tools
- AI in Note-Taking
- Visual and Multisensory Tools
- Translation
- Chatbot assistants
- AI-Powered Personalized Tutors
- AI Accessibility Features in Devices
For the most part, these are what would have been called performance support tools 20 years ago. These tools are similar to the advent of computer spreadsheet programs like VisiCalc, Lotus 123 or MS Excel. While powerful, useful, and ubiquitous, they did not create a new trillion dollar industry. Generative AI, is in a similar situation. The tools are useful but will the billions in GenAI investment be recuperated or will there be a rude awakening?
I am glad to see this type of AI used as assistive technology, especially helping marginalized communities. I also am a bit more optimistic that this technology will be mostly on our devices and not using massive energy-consuming data centres.
Stay in your lane. Stick to your knitting. These are perhaps the worst cliché words of advice anyone can give in our interconnected, networked world.
For much of history, particularly since The Enlightenment, our societies have been quite adept at creating classifications and creating fields of work and study.
At the end of the day, fields represent a specific kind of research machinery: a collection of rallying cries, norms, funders, and bureaucratic arrangements that are designed to output new insights about the world at large. Fields rise and fall on the strength of their ability to deliver knowledge and useful ideas. Researchers – particularly the good ones – coalesce around productive fields because they are also the most effective engines for pursuing the questions they want to pursue. At the end of the day, that is what matters. —Field Essentialism
Fields are often created to be useful but they can also be used for power and control. I remember visiting the Apartheid Museum in South Africa and one of the rooms showed all the laws around race that had been in place during the apartheid regime. These started as a few laws but more kept being added as there was no way to make a complex field merely complicated.
The apartheid bureaucracy devised complex (and often arbitrary) criteria at the time that the Population Registration Act was implemented to determine who was Coloured. Minor officials would administer tests to determine if someone should be categorised either Coloured or White, or if another person should be categorised either Coloured or Black. The tests included the pencil test, in which a pencil was shoved into the subjects’ curly hair and the subjects made to shake their head. If the pencil stuck they were deemed to be Black; if dislodged they were pronounced Coloured. Other tests involved examining the shapes of jaw lines and buttocks and pinching people to see what language they would say “Ouch” in. As a result of these tests, different members of the same family found themselves in different race groups. Further tests determined membership of the various sub-racial groups of the Coloureds. —Wikipedia
Similar discussions and decisions about sex and gender are making sport more complicated.
DSDs [Disorder(s) of Sex Development] are a hugely complex group of conditions. These abnormalities challenge both our scientific and social understanding of what ‘sex’ and ‘sexual differentiation’ are. The management of DSDs is challenging; the traditional approach bases sex assignment around future reproductive potential, future sexual potential and the cosmetic appearance of the external genitalia.16 Recent neuroscience research suggests that sexual dimorphism of the brain may occur prenatally, implying that gender-typical behaviour may be determined prior to sex assignment at birth. A more flexible approach to DSD management, involving parental decision making and close liaison with a child psychiatrist, is currently suggested.
Sport has struggled with the issue of gender anomalies for years and the controversy regarding how to ‘test’ for DSD remains. Chromosomes can be tested but sex is not so easily determined – our upbringing and society’s attitude towards us plays a crucial role in defining sex. For those female athletes with DSD, it seems far more likely that they are doing their best to compete as the sex chosen for them at birth rather than attempting to attain unfair advantage through masquerading their gender. As such, compulsory gender verification seems unfair, humiliating and unproductive in the majority of situations, although vigilance must remain to identify those whose aim is to win no matter what the cost. —Intersex and the Olympic Games
I noted in hierarchies, experts, and dogma that established and institutionalized professional organizations too often lack the diversity of thinking necessary to deal with complex problems. In 2019 The Long Now Foundation stated that The Enlightenment is Dead, to be replaced by The Entanglement.
As we are becoming more entangled with our technologies, we are also becoming more entangled with each other. The power (physical, political, and social) has shifted from comprehensible hierarchies to less-intelligible networks. We can no longer understand how the world works by breaking it down into loosely-connected parts that reflect the hierarchy of physical space or deliberate design. Instead, we must watch the flows of information, ideas, energy, and matter that connect us, and the networks of communication, trust, and distribution that enable these flows … [going on to conclude] … Unlike the Enlightenment, where progress was analytic and came from taking things apart, progress in the Age of Entanglement is synthetic and comes from putting things together. Instead of classifying organisms, we construct them. Instead of discovering new worlds, we create them. And our process of creation is very different.” —The Enlightenment is Dead
Over-classification and the limitations of field boundaries may not be the best ways to understand complex relationships. In the personal knowledge mastery framework, diversity is key to sensemaking — diversity > learning > trust. Seeking knowledge networks, active sense-making, and public sharing, are practices that need to be widespread. This is how we can deal with ambiguity and complexity.
“It might be down to the time of year; it’s always quieter in the summer months but it feels a bit different right now.
Firstly, it feels like there has been a BIG pause because of ChatGPT and other LLMs. It feels like people are still getting their heads round what they can do, their effectiveness, quality, etc. And when they do look at it, they don’t ‘get’ how they’ll use it.” —Andrew Jacobs 2024-08-09
I have witnessed this same malaise in the business world for the past year. If it’s not an AI initiative, it does not get any attention. The bad and the ugly aspects of this new flavour of machine learning are dominating the IT sector and all it touches. Here are some recent examples shared in our community of practice.
From Burnout to Balance: AI-Enhanced Work Models
However, this new technology [generative AI] has not yet fully delivered on this productivity promise: Nearly half (47%) of employees using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect, and 77% say these tools have actually decreased their productivity and added to their workload.
AI models are being blocked from fresh data — except the trash
As AI crawlers are increasingly blocked from high-quality news sites, they’ll turn to low-quality sites and fill up on garbage and misinformation — and that’s what they’ll be spitting out.
AI-obsessed bosses are about to get a rude awakening
The railway mania of the 1840s left behind new infrastructure. The fibre boom of the 1990s connected the world. There was barely a blip before those assets were being used again.
But spending $1 trillion on data centres will look very foolish in a few year’s time when chips are four generations more powerful. This is capital incineration on a vast scale. Fear of losing out has driven the industry insane.
The rude awakening cannot come soon enough, so we can address the many complex challenges facing all organizations today. The reversal described in the image below may be just around the corner.
I looked at Gen AI using McLuhan’s media tetrad, which states that 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
Generative Al
EXTENDS each voice & thought — mimics creativity
OBSOLESCES human thinking & writing — bullshit by design
RETRIEVES 19th century imperialism — Neo-feudalism
REVERSES into one more bubble burst — collapsed data-centres
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.
Note: Regular readers may have noticed that my blog posts are rather infrequent at this time. I am taking a break from blogging through the Summer and intend to be back this Autumn. There are over 3,500 older posts always available to peruse here.
“Everyone is tired because individually we’re trying to do all the things that can only really be achieved by communal living.” via @gemelliz
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” —John Kenneth Galbraith (2002)
Long COVID puzzle pieces are falling into place – the picture is unsettling
Despite overwhelming evidence of the wide-ranging risks of COVID-19, a great deal of messaging suggests that it is no longer a threat to the public. Although there is no empirical evidence to back this up, this misinformation has permeated the public narrative.
The data, however, tells a different story.
COVID-19 infections continue to outnumber flu cases and lead to more hospitalization and death than the flu. COVID-19 also leads to more serious long-term health problems. Trivializing COVID-19 as an inconsequential cold or equating it with the flu does not align with reality.
The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the Rise of Italian Fascism
Despite the renewed interest in the 1918 influenza pandemic as a frame of reference for anticipating potential effects of COVID-19, evidence of its impact has largely come from economic and social studies. Here we extended this work by looking at political outcomes, and we suggest a prima facie case for its contribution to the rise of populism: Italian Fascism. Our analysis shows a significant correlation between influenza deaths and vote share for the Fascist Party in 1924, even after accounting for other determinants of the rise of Fascism. Looking at Mussolini’s newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, we also found that the rhetoric of some of today’s populist politicians concerning the COVID-19 pandemic mimicked that of earlier Fascist leaders.
Lesson learned from the COVID-19 pandemic: toddlers learn earlier to read emotions with face masks
In conclusion, our findings demonstrate that toddlers exhibit an enhanced ability to interpret emotions from masked facial expressions after one year of exposure to face masks. This observation provides a positive response to our initial inquiry regarding whether the altered availability of facial visual features during the COVID-19 pandemic might hinder or delay the development of emotion recognition skills in early childhood. Our results indicate that this is not the case; conversely, such development appears to undergo an acceleration. The resilient and adaptable nature of the brain, even under challenging conditions, likely fosters adaptation to enhance the face processing skills in young children, enabling them to successfully engage in social interactions.
Work is constantly evolving but technological and social changes are accelerating certain aspects of work. Working from anywhere has exploded since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and does not look like it will disappear. The digital workplace requires unique skills in collaborating in distributed teams and cooperating in knowledge networks.
The most recent technology to influence how work gets done is artificial intelligence — specifically generative large language multi-modal models (GLM). The rate at which these new technologies are being integrated requires agile sensemaking from workers adapting to the changing human-machine work interface. It is highly likely that the pace of change will continue and even accelerate.
While we cannot predict the future of work or know how GLMs will develop, we can assess what human meta-skills are necessary to individually and collectively understand working with smart machines. There are three meta-skills that can help us adapt to a future of work with smart machines.
- Learning ‘How’ to Learn — curiosity & the resolve to solve problems
- Adapting to Change — agile sensemaking
- Collaboration & Cooperation — knowledge-sharing
Learning ‘How’ to Learn — not ‘What’
Learning how to learn is making sense of the environment and using this knowledge to take action.
We learn from experiences and exposure to people and ideas. Social networks can provide inspiration but sensemaking requires the resolve to solve problems. This means the integration of learning and working.
Flipping from learning to working is a continuous process on a daily basis. Everyone has to seek to understand their environment, seek and make sense of new ideas, make sense of practical experience, and share new practices — continuously. We learn from our teams, our communities, and our knowledge networks.
A core skill is curiosity. Curiosity about ideas can foster creativity, while curiosity about people can develop empathy (not sympathy). We get new ideas from new people, not the same people we see every day. We get new perspectives from people whose lives and experiences are different from ours. We cannot be empathetic for others unless we are first curious about them. We cannot be creative unless we are first curious to learn new ideas.
Networks are made up of nodes (people) and relationships between them. Curiosity and learning can create new connections between people and ideas. Constantly learning fractal beings can make for more resilient knowledge networks.
Curiosity yields insight.
It starts with curiosity and humility.
Adapting to Change
Much work today is in a state of perpetual beta — adapting to constant change while still getting things done.
The human work that is emerging from increasing automation is complex and creative. In complex environments, emergent practices need to be developed while simultaneously engaging the problem. Social learning is the best medium for groups of people to cooperate and learn with and from each other. As discourse augments formal training, social learning in knowledge networks becomes a critical skill in order to adapt to a changing work environment.
New methods and practices — often ‘just good enough’ — have to be developed, used, modified, and eventually discarded as the nature of the work changes. The only way to stay ahead of the machines will be by using our unique human capabilities. In addition, people will have to understand how the machines and algorithms work, to ensure proper human oversight.
Developing the skills of a knowledge artisan in every field of work are critical for success. While getting work done collaboratively will continue to be of importance in all organizations, it will not be enough. New ideas will have to come from external professional networks in order to keep pace with innovation and change in all fields.
Safe places are needed to connect new ideas to the work to be done — communities. The need for communities of practice continues to grow as knowledge artisans look for places to integrate their work and learning in a trusted space. As the gig economy dominates, communities of practice can bring some stability to our professional development. These are owned by the practitioners themselves.
Agile sensemaking could be described as how we make sense of complex challenges by interacting with others and sharing knowledge. More diverse and open knowledge flows enable more rapid sensemaking.
Collaboration & Cooperation
Work in networks requires different skills than in directed hierarchies. Cooperation is a foundational behaviour for effectively working in networks, and it’s in networks where most of us will be working, if we are not already. Cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate, so that people in the network cannot be told what to do, only influenced. If they don’t like you, they won’t connect. A lone node is of little value to the network. In a rigid hierarchy you only have to please your boss. In a network you have to be seen as having some value, though not the same value, by many others.
Cooperation is not the same as collaboration, though they are complementary. Collaboration requires a common goal while cooperation is sharing without any specific objectives. Teams, groups, and markets collaborate. Online social networks and communities of practice cooperate. Working cooperatively requires a different mindset than merely collaborating on a defined project. Being cooperative means being open to others outside your group.
Effective knowledge networks are composed of unique individuals working on common challenges, together for a discrete period of time before the network shifts its focus again. We must move from a ‘one size fits all’ attitude on work and learning to an ‘everyone is unique’ perspective. The network enables infinite combinations between unique nodes.
This connectivity is already resulting in an increasing number of discoveries from non-traditional areas, as we have witnessed in the rapid development of vaccines during this pandemic. In a networked workplace, where everyone is unique, there is a diminishing need for generic work processes (jobs, roles, occupations) and for standard curricula.
The Internet Time Alliance Memorial Award in memory of Jay Cross is presented to a workplace learning professional who has contributed in positive ways to the field of Informal Learning and is reflective of Jay’s lifetime of work.
Recipients champion workplace and social learning practices inside their organization and/or on the wider stage. They share their work in public and often challenge conventional wisdom. The Award is given to professionals who continuously welcome challenges at the cutting edge of their expertise and are convincing and effective advocates of a humanistic approach to workplace learning and performance.
We announce the award on 5 July, Jay’s birthday.
Following his death in November 2015, the partners of the Internet Time Alliance — Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn, and myself — resolved to continue Jay’s work. Jay Cross was a deep thinker and a man of many talents, never resting on his past accomplishments, and this award is one way to keep pushing our professional fields and industries to find new and better ways to learn and work.
The 9th Annual Internet Time Alliance Jay Cross Memorial Award for 2024 is presented to Ryan Tracey
Over the past 25 years Ryan has consistently demonstrated a resilient approach to, and advocacy for, workplace learning. He speaks pragmatically about supporting learning with an irreverent yet supportive style. His blog, e-Learning Provocateur is a source of insight. He’s recognized for looking beyond formal learning to social and informal learning, recognizing that learning happens, and the job of L&D is to support and facilitate it, not to be completely responsible for it.
Ryan has served in multiple roles for organizations across industries and government, moving from academic products through organizational learning & development and innovation roles to his current position as capability manager at Macquarie Group. As a learning professional, Ryan has also demonstrated support for colleagues. He has pointed to opportunities, given advice, and served generously.
Ryan has also contributed widely to the global profession through membership of the editorial board for the Association for Computing Machinery’s eLearn Magazine and other committees.
His children’s book ‘Ryan the Lion’ which explores themes of social tolerance, self-esteem, and personal identity reflects Ryan’s own beliefs in human-centred learning and development.
Ryan has been a gracious host to several of us during visits to Sydney.
For his contributions and continual advocacy for going beyond instruction Ryan is the 2024 recipient of the award.
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.
Note: Regular readers may have noticed that my blog posts are rather infrequent at this time. I am taking a break from blogging through the Summer and intend to be back this Autumn. There are over 3,500 older posts always available to peruse here.
“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” —Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD)
We are organisms, not computers. Get over it. Let’s get on with the business of trying to understand ourselves, but without being encumbered by unnecessary intellectual baggage. The IP [information processing] metaphor has had a half-century run, producing few, if any, insights along the way. The time has come to hit the DELETE key.
“The biggest lesson conservatives-fascists learned about media is that it’s not necessary to have total censorship level control, at least in the run-up to a fascist takeover. They just have to flood the zone with shit. Make truth and expertise irrelevant and people will give up trying to tell the difference and believe whatever they want to believe. You eventually exhaust not only people’s critical faculties but their empathy, too.
When nobody trusts media and government — and when media and government keep proving themselves untrustworthy — people will retreat into localized subcultural bubbles, relying on the people around them as a reference point. That means there will still be, e.g. anti-fascist and anti-capitalist groups online and in person but they will be more isolated and ignored and have a harder time organizing a mass movement beyond themselves, especially if prevailing norms work against them.” —Nowhere Girl
Back in 1998, “The Simpsons” joked about the Canyonero, an SUV so big that they were obviously kidding. At that time, it was preposterous to think anyone would drive something that was “12 yards long, two lanes wide, 65 tons of American Pride.”
In 2024, that joke isn’t far from reality.
And our reality is one where more pedestrians and bicyclists are getting killed on U.S. streets than at any time in the past 45 years – over 1,000 bicyclists and 7,500 pedestrians in 2022 alone.
Vehicle size is a big part of this problem. A recent paper by urban economist Justin Tyndall found that increasing the front-end height of a vehicle by roughly 4 inches (10 centimeters) increases the chance of a pedestrian fatality by 22%. The risk increases by 31% for female pedestrians or those over 65 years, and by 81% for children.
Rojava Revolution: Women’s Liberation, Democracy and Ecology in North-East Syria
Over the past decade, the most far-reaching social revolution of the 21st century has taken place in Syria’s Kurdish-majority Northeast, commonly referred to as Rojava. Though still largely unknown, today roughly a third of Syrian territory is governed not by a nation-state but through a federation of participatory local councils known officially as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES). Despite conditions of constant war and isolation, the people of Rojava are building and defending a society rooted in principles of direct democracy, women’s autonomy, cultural diversity, cooperative economics, and social ecology.
Scientific American: We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality
Time and again, society pressures people not to see, hear or speak about the elephant in the room. To maintain our own “cognitive tranquility,” we tune out, malign and shoot the messenger because they remind us of what we would rather disregard. Just look at physician Ignaz Semmelweis, environmentalist Rachel Carson and NFL player and social justice advocate Colin Kaepernick. Indeed, people are regularly punished for being accurate.
These tactics are how we get used to so many bad things, from mega-fires to insurrections.
So what can we do about our “Ignore more, care less, everything is fine!” era? We need to stop enabling it. This starts by being more attuned to our “everyday ignoring” and “everyday bystanding”—like that pinch we feel when we know we should click through a concerning headline, but instead scroll past it.
Stop Thief, by Peter Linebaugh
On this day, 16 June 1531, English king Henry VIII modified the vagrancy laws he brought in the previous year, which were key in creating the working class. People kicked off communal land who were not in wage labour were designated as vagabonds, and on their first offence were to be whipped, then on the second whipped with half an ear sliced off and upon a third offence they were to be executed. This and similar laws enacted across Europe, backed up by intense state violence, created a class of people forced to sell their labour to survive: the working class.
Karl Marx described these legal mechanisms in volume 1 of his work, Capital: “Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.” This expropriation was extended across the globe by violent colonialism.
Rather than being a natural state of affairs as it is often portrayed, the creation of the working class was fiercely resisted for hundreds of years, and indeed still is to this day in some areas.
Augie Ray on From Long COVID Odds to Lost IQ Points: Ongoing Threats You Don’t Know About
Great interview:
I should point out that there are, in fact, places that have installed all of these: fresh air, filtering, and germicidal UV lights. Do you know where they are?
Where?
PA: The White House, Congress, Number 10 Downing, Parliament, the Reichstag, and WHO. All of our leaders have these protections and procedures in place.
But not our schoolchildren.
The school where former CDC director Rochelle Walensky’s children go, they have these upgrades.
Helen Mirren via @RustyBertrand
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.
“Q. You know what AI is best at?
A. Propaganda”
—@GeorgeSnorwell
“I saw a post that asked: why is divestment political but investment is not? And I can’t stop thinking about it.” —@JackieGardina
“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution … Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” —Paul Virilio, Philippe Petit, Sylvère Lotringer (1999) Politics of the Very Worst
“Slack — available work capacity — is crucial for scaling and for organizational health in general.
People with slack have headspace and time to improve things, to think ahead, to sweep out the corners, to prepare for what’s coming next. And they will see these needs before management does.
‘Running lean’ eliminates slack. This only works for a while, and only if you have a flat org of highly self-actualized people who you give autonomy. And you’ll still burn people out eventually.
If you take away both slack and autonomy, (e.g. ‘running lean’ but with a stratified org) you get the worst of both worlds.
Laborers are expected to spend every billable moment working on work defined and prioritized by someone else. They are unable to use their intimate knowledge of the work to improve how things work, to prepare for what’s next, to keep things tidy and safe, because none of this has ‘value’ for management.
This is an organization that will grind itself to powder before it succeeds.” — Chris Ammerman
In a sense, roads are the ultimate expression of One Health, the concept that our own well-being is intimately linked to the planet’s. Roads simultaneously degrade nature and jeopardize human well-being: The same dirt highways that have carved up the Amazon also facilitate the spread of malaria; the same Los Angeles freeways pulverizing mountain lions are also responsible for the city’s dismal air quality. Scientists call the study of how roads influence nature ‘road ecology’, the subject of my recent book, Crossings — and nature includes us humans. Whether you’re a pedestrian or a porcupine, you live in the thrall of roads.
How Three Big Conspiracy Theories Took Root in Canada
It’s commonly assumed that education inoculates against conspiratorial thinking. However, schooling is not a foolproof safeguard against paranoid thinking. Despite Canada having one of the world’s most highly educated populations, a poll released in December 2023 by Leger found that 79 percent of Canadians believe at least one conspiracy theory, including hallucinations about Princess Diana being assassinated and global cabals of elites secretly pulling the strings. However, the conspiratorial thinking running rampant is neither new nor an imported phenomenon. Forms of fringe thought that are increasingly relevant today, including pseudo constitutionalism, conspiratorial anti-communism, and New World Order conspiracism, have historically appeared in Canada, including among the well connected and highly educated.
Open AI is built on a culture of deception, one that obfuscates the actual abilities of their technology, and every further successful obfuscation enriches an enterprise that lacks morality, clarity and respect for its users or the tech industry at large.
The same goes for Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and, of course, Mark Zuckeberg and anybody associated with Meta … because AI can’t, by definition, know anything.
“Why yes, I am absolutely wearing this cut-off tshirt with an image of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofrenes that says ‘Girl Dinner’ to the talk I am giving this afternoon about tech-enabled abuse.” —@evacide
![Judith Slaying Holofernes c. 1620, now at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence,[1] is the renowned painting by Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi depicting the assassination of Holofernes from the apocryphal Book of Judith. When compared to her earlier interpretation from Naples c. 1612, there are subtle but marked improvements to the composition and detailed elements of the work. These differences display the skill of a cultivated Baroque painter, with the adept use of chiaroscuro and realism to express the violent tension between Judith, Abra, and the dying Holofernes.[2]](https://jarche.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Artemisia_Gentileschi_-_Giuditta_decapita_Oloferne_-_Google_Art_Project-Adjust-634x780.jpg)
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.
“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift, via Ron Dyck
“If there’s one thing I wish I burn entirely to the ground and wipe away all traces and remnants of, its the misplaced notion that the productivity of Knowledge Work can be managed, measured, analyzed, and optimized as if all one needed to do was drip feed heroin up the arse of their hapless workers … In short, understanding Knowledge Work means understanding the human condition itself, and taking a dark look at how we managed to turn humans from a social equitable animal that has unlimited curiosity and a desire to help each other succeed into a raving, bloodthirsty mass of hyperindividualistic demons solely bent on hedonistic self exploitation at the expense of the other.” —@HazelWeakly
“All major positive change in people’s civic and labour rights have come from protest. You are enjoying the fruits of activists’ labour. So to speak of them as fringe or less than, while wanting to hold onto their gains is astonishing. I cannot believe how ungrateful so many comfortable middle class people are. Keep acting as a shill for the state, see what is left when you do. And keep disparaging activists, see who will be left to fight for your lazy ass.” —@LALegault
“Next time you’re on the highway, look at the vehicles around you. Chances are you’ll see plenty of ordinary cars. But that’s about to change: in 2008, 54% of new vehicles in Canada were cars, while in 2022 it was just 17%. As old vehicles die, we will soon be surrounded by behemoths, only trucks and SUVs.” —@MadeleineBonsma on Canada’s best-selling cars
“I think one of the major lessons that I learned from this pandemic is that there are long tails to pandemics. And yes, we can focus all we want on the acute phase, or the tip of the iceberg, but the reality is that there is a really much larger chunk of disability and disease beneath that tip of the iceberg.” —Dr Ziyad Al-Aly — COVID infections are causing drops in IQ and years of brain aging
The top spender for sponsored travel (2023) for Canadian Members of Parliament was The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) at C$335,264.99 — Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
![Pierre Poilievre, opposition leader in Canada, is showing an Axe the [carbon] Tax" to the The Earth. The Earth thinks, "You know, I'm starting to take this personally"](https://jarche.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/earth-day.jpg)
The capitalist AI future is bullshit by design — AKA ‘mansplaining as a service’.
“Today’s highly-hyped generative AI systems (most famously OpenAI) are designed to generate bullshit by design. To be clear, bullshit can sometimes be useful, and even accidentally correct, but that doesn’t keep it from being bullshit. Worse, these systems are not meant to generate consistent bullshit — you can get different bullshit answers from the same prompts.” —Anil Dash 2023
What are the benefits of AI adoption in organizations? Not good for many workers it seems.
“The rise of AI technology could decrease hiring in the next five years, according to a recent survey by recruiting agency Adecco.
More than 40% of senior executives at over 2,000 companies interviewed by Adecco stated that they expected their workforces to shrink soon because of AI.
Adecco’s research included companies from industries like pharmaceuticals, logistics and defence” —Verdict (UK) 2024
Is generative AI actually degenerative?
“Gen AI is degenerative because it doesn’t serve our communities; rather, it feeds on us, on our content, our data, our rights and our privacy. It is extractive and divisive, it avoids responsibility for our losses, and it doesn’t care at all about the prosperity of our living systems.
Gen AI is degenerative. Or at least, the business models of the companies are degenerative. So the question becomes: can AI be regenerative?” —Matthew Moran 2024
History repeats, or at least it rhymes.
“Companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta extracting data and creating AI models without consent shares many parallels with Imperialism and the ways in which land was taken from indigenous peoples. Even the arrogance required to insist Big Tech know what’s best for society is shared by Imperialist nations … The pace of AI research is depressingly fast. Depressing because currently the Ultra Wealthy are the ones pioneering the research, in some cases backed by the Effective Altruism movement. It’s as if our only strategy is to sit patiently and wait to have another model shared with us from Big Tech and then spend entire conferences and research careers probing and prodding models trained by our Tech Lords.” —Papa Reo 2023
Have we reached peak AI?
“I believe that artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes, and when it does, it will be that much worse, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech. Once usage drops, so will the remarkable amounts of revenue that have flowed into big tech, and so will acres of data centers sit unused, the cloud equivalent of the massive overhiring we saw in post-lockdown Silicon Valley.
I fear that the result could be a far worse year for the tech industry than we saw in 2023, one where the majority of the pain hits workers rather than the ghouls who inflated this perilous bubble.” —Ed Zitron 2024
This post is a follow-up from January 2024 where I summarized the good, the bad, and the ugly of automation & algorithms during the past year.
“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” —André Gide (1869–1951)
How do we rebuild trust in expertise in a world filled with conspiracy theories and distrust of institutions?
Experts and leaders have to shift their values toward transparency, honesty, and humility in their communications and actions, being upfront about the limitations and uncertainties of their knowledge, acknowledging mistakes and failures when they occur, and being open to feedback and critiques. By showing that they are not infallible or above accountability, experts can help to dispel the perception of elitism and disconnection from the public.” —Joan Westenberg 2024-04-09
If knowledge flows at the speed of trust then our society is in a lot of trouble today. For example, the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed, “a new paradox at the heart of society. Rapid innovation offers the promise of a new era of prosperity, but instead risks exacerbating trust issues, leading to further societal instability and political polarization”. No trust, no knowledge flow.
Henry Mintzberg suggested that social pressures and isolation account for widespread mistrust and the dumbing-down of society.
Like rats in an overcrowded cage, the pressures of modern life, including the pace of change, can certainly be affecting our propensity to pause and think. Thoughtfulness is hardly encouraged in a society plagued with insecurity and anxiety … Welcome to our mindless society, poisoned by its own fake facts.”
In hierarchies, experts, and dogma 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. The fact that this SARS-2 pandemic continues and is ignored shows how untrustworthy the hierarchies leading our health care systems are. Simple measures, such as mandating air filtration in all public places, could effectively reduce several airborne diseases and simultaneously improve learning in schools. Why is this not being done? Are we collectively too dumb?
I have suggested that each of us has to find out how we can become knowledge catalysts in a liquid world, helping to make our networks smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions. How to we rebuild trust? One catalyst at a time.
Joan Westenberg promotes the idea of POSSE (publish on your own site & syndicate elsewhere) or what I have called social media’s home base — blogs. This may be just another blog, but it’s mine. Westenberg also promotes real simple syndication (RSS). So do I. Therefore, the idea that, “curation is the last hope of intelligent discourse” resonated with me.
As algorithms churn out vast quantities of information with varying degrees of accuracy and quality, the discerning judgment of human curators is the only defence against the tide of misinformation and mediocrity. Human curators bring nuanced understanding, contextual awareness, and ethical judgment to the table—qualities that AI, in its current state, is fundamentally unable to replicate.
Human curators can distinguish between nuanced arguments, recognise cultural subtleties, and evaluate the credibility of sources in ways that algorithms cannot. This human touch is essential for maintaining the integrity of our information ecosystem. It serves not only as a filter for quality but also as a signal for meaningful and trustworthy content amidst the overwhelming noise generated by AI systems. —Joan Westenberg 2024-01-10
We need manual, not automatic, for sense-making I wrote in 2012 and confirmed that manual sensemaking was essential in 2023 — The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge are interlinked activities from which knowledge — often slowly — emerges.
The deluge of artificially-generated ‘content’ is growing into a tidal wave. Skill erosion is a clear danger — If you don’t use it, you will lose it. Automate what was once a skill-developed process and those skills will decline.
Westenberg raises a good point about the democratizing nature of individual blogs.
The personal website is the ultimate sovereign territory online, enabling creators to share content on their own terms. These sites export their ideas to the digital public square while filtering outbound information to cultivate wisdom and perspective. They are living, extensible documents evolving over time based on the site owner’s journey.
Places like this blog are still our sovereign territory. It is the core of my Seek > Sense > Share practice. As Robin Good said, “Curation is about making sense of a topic/issue/event/person/product etc. for a specific audience.” We need more curators.
More on the idea of — observation > narration > curation. Curation starts with observation, which requires curiosity.
In a digitally interconnected world, those in positions of leadership should focus on helping their networks become smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions. Networks move information faster than institutions or markets. While the Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) stated that markets are conversations, today networks are memes that spread instantaneously, without conversation. The borderless and liquid transmission of information makes for a global oral cacophony.
After four years, no government has stepped-up to make us smarter in dealing with the SARS-2 virus. The pandemic continues and people keep dying and more people are condemned to live with the still incurable Long Covid.
Which government minister is going to take on the task of educating the public about the true harms of COVID-19? Which government will implement the measures needed to prevent the gradual attrition of key pillars of society?
The social, economic and public health costs of maintaining the fiction that we can live normally by ignoring COVID-19 are simply too high for this ‘business as usual’ situation to continue and the rate of attrition is too high for this to be sustainable. —John Snow Project 2023-11-25
Leadership in our connected world must come from beyond civil society, governments, and markets. For example, one pop star can have more influence on voter turnout than the best efforts of any institution. We should all use what expertise and influence we have to support democracy and a sustainable future for everyone.
If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that experts disagree, nobody has all the answers, and we (especially our institutions) are mostly making things up as we go. In a crisis it is important to act but even more important to learn as we take action. Only cooperative networks will help us make sense of the complex challenges facing us — climate change, environmental degradation, pandemics, political turmoil, genocide, etc.
Our institutions are not up to the task of collective sensemaking and there is no public in the global market, only consumers and workers. Answers to how we address the current pandemic (it’s not over even if our institutions and markets say so) will not come from government or from the market. They will come from networked committed people. The challenge will be to ensure that these groups do not become tribal populist counter-movements, as we have enough of these already. Saving democracy is a worthy objective. ‘Draining the swamp’ and ‘freedumb rallies’ are not.
Each of us has to find out how we can be knowledge catalysts in a liquid world, helping to make our networks smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions.
We can each start to seek > sense > share.
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.
“Definition: Conspiracy Theory
—A belief that the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community, who have spent their lives researching the subject, missed something you figured out in two minutes due to your superior Google researching skills.” —Meanwhile in Canada
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” —Carl Sagan (1995) The Demon-haunted World
“I recently purchased a CO₂ monitor (an Aranet4, which works nicely and is designed with just shocking good sense and practicality, great device).
One interesting pattern I notice: CO₂ is consistently lower in campus spaces at Macalester [College, MN, USA] than it is in almost any other indoor space — including even my own house when I’m the only person in it.
Why? Well…
Macalester did a systematic audit of ventilation across campus and made HVAC adjustments across campus to improve filtration, increase ACH, etc etc, in response to the possibility that COVID is airborne … in summer 2020.
Not 2021. In 2020. Before aerosol transmission was clearly established. Before the WHO and the CDC were even admitting COVID could travel more than 6 feet. Summer of 2020.
And apparently improved ventilation is still in effect now.
Don’t tell me better isn’t possible.”
—Paul Cantrell
Scientific American — Covid-19 leaves its mark on the brain
“In addition to brain fog, COVID-19 can lead to an array of problems, including headaches, seizure disorders, strokes, sleep problems, and tingling and paralysis of the nerves, as well as several mental health disorders.
A large and growing body of evidence amassed throughout the pandemic details the many ways that COVID-19 leaves an indelible mark on the brain. But the specific pathways by which the virus does so are still being elucidated, and curative treatments are nonexistent.”
The Tyee — How an Underdog Biochemist Won a Nobel Prize
“Science interests governments only for its political value. Whether in Hungary or in the United States, [Katalin] Karikó [Nobel Prize winner in physiology or medicine 2023] had to break through political barriers while working in institutions that relied on government or private funding. Despite her stubborn work ethic and understanding of science, her achievements ultimately depended on luck — and good child care.”
Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice — Vaccine disinformation from medical professionals — a case for action from regulatory bodies?
“Regulatory action against doctors will not solve the complex problem of rising anti-vaccine sentiment among the lay public. But a rebuke from the regulator, should an investigation deem this appropriate, will send a clear signal to the public that a doctor has been judged to have acted inappropriately, which will help limit audience reach and mitigate potential harms. This is especially critical in the current era, as medical influencers have vast reach and social media companies may be motivated by the revenue from misinformation circulating on their platforms.”
“An oldie but a goodie:
What did Watson and Crick discover?
Rosalind Franklin’s lab notes.”
—@Coral
I just presented at the first annual European PKM Summit, with a formal presentation yesterday and a casual chat today. Next year’s summit is scheduled for 14/15 March 2025. Some of what I covered is posted at 20 years of PKM. I mentioned several projects and resources which are available on this site.
What Domino’s Pizza learned about implementing PKM practices — Solo change agents set you free
Changing the corporate university at Cigna 2010/2011 — working smarter case study
Reforming the government of Finland’s operating practices particularly moving toward a more collaborative culture — toward distributed governance
How can an organization like Cooperative Extension at UNL adapt to the network era? — networked knowing
How do you improve collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and sensemaking in a globally distributed company [Citi] with over 200,000 employees? — working smarter 2020
The continuous changing nature of professional development to keep up with new demands for knowledge workers — PKM Workshop
There were many questions on how PKM connects with organizational knowledge sharing. I explained that team collaboration requires the transparent sharing of knowledge — using enterprise social networks and other technologies — so that everyone on a team knows what is going on and why. Decisions, and why they were made, are shared. New processes and methods are co-developed to create emergent practices. This method of work has to be supported by management by enabling — innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions, and willing cooperation between workers. More at — adding value with teams.
I write this blog mostly for myself, though it’s great to have people join in and create conversations.
“But there’s also a part of writing, of online writing particularly, blogging, that’s all the humble without the security, that’s full of risk, that’s vulnerable even if what you’re saying isn’t necessarily personal or deeply meaningful or anything you or anyone else even really cares about. This thing we do, blogging, is crazy. Really. What a trip, what a concept, what an experience. It’s a place where the public share is instant and your little words can tromp their way across the world before you have time to regret it.”—Annie Mueller
I highly recommend reading all of Annie’s blog post — it’s just a blog (thanks to Euan Semple and Chris Corrigan for highlighting Annie’s work)
There are a lot fewer comments and conversations on this blog than there used to be, as people have moved to consumer social media platforms like LinkedIn and have conversations there. The last comment to this blog was posted on LinkedIn as well as here, which was a nice touch (thank you Beth).
Joan Westenburg has noticed this recently and said that ‘indie’ creators need to build their own platforms.
“Relying on someone else’s platform means that creators are subject to the ever-changing algorithms that dictate visibility and reach. The algorithms are designed to prioritize content that keeps users engaged and on the platform, rather than necessarily rewarding quality or creativity. Meaning that creators are constantly chasing the algorithm, trying to crack the code and optimize their content for maximum visibility, to the detriment of their message, their identity and their purpose. It’s an exhausting and often futile endeavor, as the algorithms can change at any moment, leaving creators scrambling to adapt.” —the creator economy trap
This reflects my own recommendations calling blogs — social media’s home base — in 2009. As Joan says, “Building your own platform is undoubtedly harder than relying on someone else’s”. I can completely agree after twenty years of building this platform. The algorithms are against us, as well as the suppression of RSS.
As I said at the beginning, I blog for myself. I think that is the only way to keep at it. Blogging is not a business model. It’s a form of expression that suits certain people. I just happen to be one.
Ten years after publishing Seeking Perpetual Beta, the latest e-book in the perpetual beta series is here. This book is based on my writing for the past two years, with a particular focus on automation with artificial intelligence. The previous edition, perpetual beta 2022, is still available at a reduced price.
This year also marks twenty years of blogging. I may take a short break later this year, after my last scheduled public PKM workshop, for 2024 but I intend to keep on writing. As I mentioned on Mastodon, this is how I write now — I have no plan. There is no schedule. If I see something interesting I make note of it. Sometimes I think that might be worth a blog post. Repeat.