Subject Matter 13: Everything Must Change
Update: Residency, New Essay, New Feelings
Greetings from Berlin, where I'll be for the rest of the summer. I'm lucky to be here among friends and meeting new ones, to be having great conversations, to be writing, thinking, and prototyping.
In terms of social and professional norms, the rationale and justification for my being here is a residency. As a research resident at Trust, a community center and coworking space for platform design and utopian conspiracy, I'm holding 4 events exploring the theme of agency. The first of these events was two weeks ago, and introduced the theme with a discussion of the paradoxes and challenges of how we believe in agency in here in the Western world. The transcript of this talk, "The Desire for Full Automation," is live in essay form on Subpixel Space. I am convinced that building trust with the environment and each other in a post-abundance society means changing this definition of agency, and we can do so by learning from traditional, pre-historic, pre-monotheistic human practices.
Next Tuesday the 16th, collaborator Darren Kong (@platformpapi) will discuss building regenerative patterns of agency, synthesizing approaches from both human and digital technologies to bootstrap scalable regenerative work in the biosphere and our own communities. Over the last few years I've heard different variations on this theme in personal conversation with Darren. His perspective is grounded and pragmatic, yet inspiring. Look out for this on trust.video, 7PM Berlin time / 1PM EST, and if you're in Berlin, I'd love to see you on location at Trust.
The third event will be a no-homework reading group at Trust about agency, open to whomever. The fourth will be an experimental discussion group about the most personal aspects of agency, suffering, and the tension between individuality and collective. Keep an eye on Twitter for both of these.
..
Now I want to step outside of the bounds of social and professional norms.
Last year I wrote two viral essays. I continue to be rewarded by those pieces, in that they have led to new connections, new client work, new discussions. But early this year, I had the peculiar feeling that I no longer needed to write. As I wormed my way about this feeling, it was clear that the most salient thing these essays accomplished was enabling me to feel liked and respected by my peers. The more I have written publicly, the more I have understood that my primary motivation has been for people to like me and to think that I am smart. It probably originates in early childhood. Of course, my own curiosity has always been a motivator, but it was impossible for me not to observe that what I responded to most was praise and attention. I have often said to friends that I would not write the type of essay I write if notoriety were not my goal. Long before I had an online presence, before I did anything in public, someone told me, "toby, you do it for the fame." I don't know what they intuited about me but I guess they were right.
So this new feeling confused and upset me. For one, most of my recent professional opportunities have come from my writing. For two, I know my best work is yet to come. But there it was, the feeling that I might be ok with simply not opening Notion, simply never publishing on my blog again. The feeling of not wanting to perform intelligence has saturated me, even as I linked you to this essay above. Despite now having a residency, this public platform to share my thinking, the performance feels unnecessary, and another new feeling even creeps in: it is indulgent.
I've learned that for me, confusing feelings are signs that there is something new in myself to be understood, and so I have been trying to understand it. The feeling of not needing to write actually coincided with another event. At the beginning of this year, I felt, for the first time, accepted by a peer group. It now seems obvious to me to me that this acceptance, which is barely related to my public thinking and is based instead on a my offline self and its full range of expression, is what I have been desiring all along. Writing seems to have done a dual job for me: to fill me with a scalable yet shallow kind of fulfillment, and prevent me from pursuing the type of personal love and friendships I believed I could not have or did not deserve.
Importantly, I'm not saying I don't value your readership. On the contrary, the most fulfilling moments are those that initiate a closer relationship—when one of you has reached out and sent me a lengthy email with your own thoughts. And I doubt I'm done with writing, but I do think I'm done writing for those purposes. I can tell, I can feel it. And I'm not sure what that means for future work I do.
It is outside the norms, it is "against the rules" for me to be sharing these professional and personal insecurities with you. They don't have a resolution, they only lead to a small clearing from which I can enter into the thick of the forest once again. This isn't how stories are supposed to work. We are "supposed to be" building a plotline, we are "supposed to be" confident, we are "supposed to be" putting our portfolios online, we are "supposed to be" making ourselves coherent, hire-able, value-adding units of human capital. People love a narrative and I am shredding mine right in front of you.
I am not telling you this to say it's all over. I'm telling you this because it's inhuman not to change. We can all change. Learning to allow ourselves to change, to be incoherent, is the challenge. Clear narratives are easy to understand but they are almost never true. Most often the truth is in the confusing, the unreasonable, the incomprehensible. Everything that works magically is incomprehensible, and the incomprehensible often works magically. It opens spaces that have no doors and leads out into the open where there is no exit. Magic is dangerous since what accords with unreason confuses, allures, and provokes; and I am always its first victim.
..
I know less now than ever what the future holds, but I know more than ever what I want my life to feel like. It will involve friends and community, making dinner, and thinking and experimenting together. That said, I want to share a few affordances regarding work with you. I now believe that agency is relational, it lives in affordances, and by sharing this, maybe I open up a space of the unknown.
- My main work is designing, building, and consulting on software products. In February, I left my job heading product at a popular bootstrapped NY-based talent marketplace. I've been doing some consulting since, helping a few companies with product design and brand positioning sprints. If you think I could help you, reach out. Here's a recent resume.
- After a long time, I want to build our own software products again, with friends.
- For a few years, I've been working on defining the formal elements of lifestyles, cults, institutions, discourses, and cultures. I've shared this thinking through two workshops, "Cult Design Workshop," and "Value Investing in Cults and Religions," but I also have a bunch of unpublished material about this. In Thielian terms, this research is a "secret" which stands to overturn a lot of pop "knowledge" about brandbuilding and marketing. I'm looking for opportunities to develop and publish this material.
..
Things stop making sense. We do lose the way and begin to scramble around, searching for the thread we dropped. But we are like a drunk searching for his keys under a streetlight. We won't find it there. To pick up the thread we have to step outside of where the light is.
Until next time.
Greetings from Berlin, where I'll be for the rest of the summer. I'm lucky to be here among friends and meeting new ones, to be having great conversations, to be writing, thinking, and prototyping.
In terms of social and professional norms, the rationale and justification for my being here is a residency. As a research resident at Trust, a community center and coworking space for platform design and utopian conspiracy, I'm holding 4 events exploring the theme of agency. The first of these events was two weeks ago, and introduced the theme with a discussion of the paradoxes and challenges of how we believe in agency in here in the Western world. The transcript of this talk, "The Desire for Full Automation," is live in essay form on Subpixel Space. I am convinced that building trust with the environment and each other in a post-abundance society means changing this definition of agency, and we can do so by learning from traditional, pre-historic, pre-monotheistic human practices.
Next Tuesday the 16th, collaborator Darren Kong (@platformpapi) will discuss building regenerative patterns of agency, synthesizing approaches from both human and digital technologies to bootstrap scalable regenerative work in the biosphere and our own communities. Over the last few years I've heard different variations on this theme in personal conversation with Darren. His perspective is grounded and pragmatic, yet inspiring. Look out for this on trust.video, 7PM Berlin time / 1PM EST, and if you're in Berlin, I'd love to see you on location at Trust.
The third event will be a no-homework reading group at Trust about agency, open to whomever. The fourth will be an experimental discussion group about the most personal aspects of agency, suffering, and the tension between individuality and collective. Keep an eye on Twitter for both of these.
..
Now I want to step outside of the bounds of social and professional norms.
Last year I wrote two viral essays. I continue to be rewarded by those pieces, in that they have led to new connections, new client work, new discussions. But early this year, I had the peculiar feeling that I no longer needed to write. As I wormed my way about this feeling, it was clear that the most salient thing these essays accomplished was enabling me to feel liked and respected by my peers. The more I have written publicly, the more I have understood that my primary motivation has been for people to like me and to think that I am smart. It probably originates in early childhood. Of course, my own curiosity has always been a motivator, but it was impossible for me not to observe that what I responded to most was praise and attention. I have often said to friends that I would not write the type of essay I write if notoriety were not my goal. Long before I had an online presence, before I did anything in public, someone told me, "toby, you do it for the fame." I don't know what they intuited about me but I guess they were right.
So this new feeling confused and upset me. For one, most of my recent professional opportunities have come from my writing. For two, I know my best work is yet to come. But there it was, the feeling that I might be ok with simply not opening Notion, simply never publishing on my blog again. The feeling of not wanting to perform intelligence has saturated me, even as I linked you to this essay above. Despite now having a residency, this public platform to share my thinking, the performance feels unnecessary, and another new feeling even creeps in: it is indulgent.
I've learned that for me, confusing feelings are signs that there is something new in myself to be understood, and so I have been trying to understand it. The feeling of not needing to write actually coincided with another event. At the beginning of this year, I felt, for the first time, accepted by a peer group. It now seems obvious to me to me that this acceptance, which is barely related to my public thinking and is based instead on a my offline self and its full range of expression, is what I have been desiring all along. Writing seems to have done a dual job for me: to fill me with a scalable yet shallow kind of fulfillment, and prevent me from pursuing the type of personal love and friendships I believed I could not have or did not deserve.
Importantly, I'm not saying I don't value your readership. On the contrary, the most fulfilling moments are those that initiate a closer relationship—when one of you has reached out and sent me a lengthy email with your own thoughts. And I doubt I'm done with writing, but I do think I'm done writing for those purposes. I can tell, I can feel it. And I'm not sure what that means for future work I do.
It is outside the norms, it is "against the rules" for me to be sharing these professional and personal insecurities with you. They don't have a resolution, they only lead to a small clearing from which I can enter into the thick of the forest once again. This isn't how stories are supposed to work. We are "supposed to be" building a plotline, we are "supposed to be" confident, we are "supposed to be" putting our portfolios online, we are "supposed to be" making ourselves coherent, hire-able, value-adding units of human capital. People love a narrative and I am shredding mine right in front of you.
I am not telling you this to say it's all over. I'm telling you this because it's inhuman not to change. We can all change. Learning to allow ourselves to change, to be incoherent, is the challenge. Clear narratives are easy to understand but they are almost never true. Most often the truth is in the confusing, the unreasonable, the incomprehensible. Everything that works magically is incomprehensible, and the incomprehensible often works magically. It opens spaces that have no doors and leads out into the open where there is no exit. Magic is dangerous since what accords with unreason confuses, allures, and provokes; and I am always its first victim.
..
I know less now than ever what the future holds, but I know more than ever what I want my life to feel like. It will involve friends and community, making dinner, and thinking and experimenting together. That said, I want to share a few affordances regarding work with you. I now believe that agency is relational, it lives in affordances, and by sharing this, maybe I open up a space of the unknown.
- My main work is designing, building, and consulting on software products. In February, I left my job heading product at a popular bootstrapped NY-based talent marketplace. I've been doing some consulting since, helping a few companies with product design and brand positioning sprints. If you think I could help you, reach out. Here's a recent resume.
- After a long time, I want to build our own software products again, with friends.
- For a few years, I've been working on defining the formal elements of lifestyles, cults, institutions, discourses, and cultures. I've shared this thinking through two workshops, "Cult Design Workshop," and "Value Investing in Cults and Religions," but I also have a bunch of unpublished material about this. In Thielian terms, this research is a "secret" which stands to overturn a lot of pop "knowledge" about brandbuilding and marketing. I'm looking for opportunities to develop and publish this material.
..
Things stop making sense. We do lose the way and begin to scramble around, searching for the thread we dropped. But we are like a drunk searching for his keys under a streetlight. We won't find it there. To pick up the thread we have to step outside of where the light is.
Until next time.
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