pt1 – articulating frustration with current social media configurations
pt2 – talking a little about nerdposting (there’s still room for a more thoroughly fleshed out guide)
pt3 – collaboration (you are here)

we already collaborate

Alrighty. What’s collaboration? It means quite simply to co-labor, to work together. What does it mean, to work together? What is the status quo? Why aren’t people already collaborating all the time? Well – they are. I like one of Lewis Thomas’s points about language being possibly the largest collective endeavor we all collaborate on as a species – it’s not obvious to each of us individually that we are shaping language just as we are being shaped by it, because it is so large, and we are each so small. And yet, language does change and evolve, and it changes because people change it.

there are many things that keep us from collaborating more – mindset, representation…

Okay, so what’s this about then? I’d like to see people collaborate more. I already do a lot of fun little collaborations with people on Twitter – I want to accelerate that. I want to do more of that. Because I know from experience that it’s extremely satisfying, and interesting, and that I would be happier if I did more of it – and I’m convinced from my early findings that other people enjoy it too. To me, collaboration is part of the answer to the question “how do we deal with the fact that people seem to be lonelier than ever?” The point is to play, publicly, without any expectations or demands, and to allow people to play with you.

Why aren’t people collaborating more? Part of it I think is that we’re conditioned to think of ourselves as individual, solitary atoms. Kids are natural collaborators – they go to the playground, they negotiate, they explore, they experiment, sometimes they get into little scuffles and get scuffed and bruised – but then they get up and do it again. My personal hypothesis, based on my own experience and in conversations from hundreds of people over the years, is that this starts diminishing when kids go to school, which is basically a sort of prison where the collaborative spirit tends to die.

What else? I think a lot of people don’t hear enough stories of playful collaboration. I think people don’t see collaboration happening around them enough. Representation matters – it’s very easy for people to think “if I don’t see it, it isn’t happening – if nobody is asking me to collaborate with them, nobody wants me to collaborate with them.” This is really a sort of fog-of-war issue, a problem of imperfect information.

people tend to approach collaboration in overly-clunky ways (or not at all)

Finding collaborators is a sort of lightweight way of finding companions. Asking people “will you be my friend?” is a big, open-ended ask – unless you’re already high-status/well-known, most people aren’t going to say yes. Asking “wanna work on X together” is slightly better – but best of all is to just start working on X yourself, publicly, and convey that you are open to collaborations.

You can also seek out people to collaborate with! That’s one of the amazing things about twitter, and one of the amazing things about blogs before it. And again, to use the Ramanujan–Hardy example – sending cold emails / letters can be incredibly powerful. The important thing is to NOT be a selfish, solipsistic clown who’s entirely focused on what YOU want. You have to discern what the other person wants.

Tweeted elsewhere before: every utterance contains an implicit proposal. You can make friends simply by reading the proposal correctly and responding supportively. The challenge is to read the proposals correctly – that requires developing sensitivity. Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People is still very relevant and powerful in this space.

It’s interesting how many of our social norms are designed to minimize negative variance. It’s kind of a tragedy – because they minimize positive variance, too. If your first instinct is to think “fuck yeah, the rules don’t apply to me” – there’s a good chance that you’re the kind of solipsistic, belligerent person that these rules were developed to keep out.

What else can you do to become a better collaborator? Well… practice good reply game. That’s a pretty low-effort, low-risk thing you can practice doing, and over time as you get better at it, you find that people like you more, want to associate with you more, and your general sense of people becomes more refined.

belief is a bottleneck

Once you’ve had some experience collaborating on little things – coming up with inside jokes together, responding to someone’s setup with a punchline, riffing on someone else’s thought in a way that elevates both of your ideas and perspectives – you start to develop a greater sense of possibility. You start to notice that most people seem to give up too early – maybe this is the right decision for them, if the effort is more than they can bear. My task here is not to persuade those people to change their minds, but to find people who are already kinda trying, and want to be doing better.

That said, I don’t believe that people fail to collaborate because they’re lazy or can’t put in the effort. I think people put in tremendous amounts of effort into things if they believe that it’ll pay off. The problem is that most people don’t think it’ll pay off. They can’t clearly picture how amazing it is to be surrounded (even digitally, via twitter) by other playful individuals who are eager to riff off of your ideas. It feels very human, it feels very warm and loving and joyful.

As I approach the end of this post, I find myself thinking again that I must be skipping over a lot, leaving out a lot. But here’s the cool thing: the best way for me to find out what I’m leaving out… is to share this with other people, and ask them what they think. Ask them what they wish I included. That’s collaboration for you. It makes us smarter, it makes us more interesting, and it creates better work.

tbc

[Here’s a galaxy-brain footnote: Some will say that there’s an element of courage required – a willingness to share incomplete, imperfect work with others, to subject oneself to scrutiny and examination. This is true only as long as you believe that the self is real. If you realize that the self is fiction, then there is no courage required. There is only the joy of discovery and learning. Yeah, I know that sounds a little wooey and unrealistic. But I don’t expect anybody to discard their entire worldview because they read “the self is fiction”. It’s an idea to be considered, and it’s best considered without hedging.]