This was for an interview with Sublime
1) Your work is remarkable for the way in which it uses digital tools and platforms in unconventional ways to make new connections. How would you describe your relationship with technology?
It’s complicated, but I would start by saying that I’m grateful to technology. I still remember being a kid feeling alienated and disenfranchised by my social reality, and technology for me was a window into other worlds. Technology for me meant freedom. I’ve always thought of the internet as an extension of the library. Books themselves were once cutting-edge media technology which we now tend to take for granted – Carl Sagan had a beautiful quote about how a series of funny dark squiggles imprinted on dead trees allow us to hallucinate the mind of another person who may have been dead for thousands of years. Our current technology allows us to read and write and speak near-directly into the minds of others, instantaneously, for almost negligible cost.
Technology is an enabler, and it enables people, for both better and worse. Ev Williams, one of the cofounders of Twitter, said that if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company, you identify a human desire – something people have always done – and then you remove steps from that process, make it easier to do. I love the optimism in that, but a tragic thing that techno-optimists have always overlooked (or disregarded) is that not all human desires are healthy. Sometimes people want to hurt others, and technology enables that, too. Technology is a magic mirror, and it’s tempting to hate or resent the mirror for what it shows us. And there are legitimate complaints people have for the way the mirror behaves, and I encourage people to think through those grievances honestly.
But for the most part I remain grateful. I always think about the next alienated, disenfranchised kid like myself, particularly those who are struggling in parts of the world where things are much rougher than most of us currently-online are accustomed to. I suppose you could say that I’ve taken it upon myself, as part of my life’s mission, to make things better for the next kid. I don’t think technology alone can fix that. It takes people who care about other people. Caring, I think, is the one thing that cannot be outsourced or automated. We can certainly create the illusion of care, and that illusion might be better than nothing for someone who has none, but ultimately I hope everyone gets access to people who care about them. Technology can help facilitate that. But it is not a substitute for it. That’s what I believe.
2) What are your strategies for rising above the noise of the ever-shifting algorithms and staying focused on the purposes we want to leverage them towards?
People first. I’ve always found that to be the simplest and most potent idea. When I was a teenager in ~2005, there was this local band that I admired. The show would be rowdy and rebellious, yet the singer would hang around after the show and talk to everyone who remained, ask them questions, and really listen to the answers. And he’d hand out little pieces of paper with the band’s website on it. That’s the sort of direct “talk to people” process that I’ve always tried to be true to.
I try to participate in as many real conversations with real people as possible. Online, this means leaving thoughtful replies and comments as much as possible. I don’t have to care about algorithms if I have people who care about me. And I get people to care about me by first demonstrating that I care about them. Some people I’ve talked with over the years have said that this seems like “too much effort”, but I counter with “it’s effort that actually pays off over time”, contrasted with minimal effort that doesn’t.
People first. People have problems. People have worries. People are struggling with stuff. People are lonely. People need help. People are eager to hear from anyone who’s willing to actually talk to them, as a fellow person.
3) If the medium is the message, how can we keep our tools in service of our goals, and resist succumbing to thinking and acting in service of our tools?
Put the goals first (which, for me, is people). What do you really want to be doing? Why? Why do you want to be doing it with? How? The tools are just scaffolding, support structures, facilitators. What specific outcomes do you actually want? What are the conversations you want to be having with people?
“Resist succumbing” is one of those phrases that I can nerd out for hours about. I think it’s a kind of trap. It’s a “don’t think of an elephant” type of situation. The way out is to focus on what you actually want, and continually return to that. When a couple is struggling in their relationship and they go to a counselor or therapist, one of the first questions they’ll often ask is, “how did you fall in love in the first place? What did you love about each other?” And I think there’s a version of that that applies to everything. There’s a great Ben Horowitz blogpost titled A Good Place To Work where he describes how he, as a CEO, communicated a problem to one of his executives. And he began by asking a question: “Why do you think I came in to work today?” It’s very illuminating to observe the conversation that follows. By asking such open-ended questions, Ben invited the executive to consider his point of view, his goals, his motivations, which then made it easier for them to get aligned on the problem.
Similarly, I think people need to ask themselves – and maybe it might be easier if we ask each other – What do you really want to be doing? How did you fall in love in the first place? People start optimizing for things like “hm, if I did this I would get 5% more traffic” or “I would get to the next follower milestone” I think because it’s visible, and it feels like a scorecard of some kind: more is good, less is bad. But that’s an illusion. One right connection with one right person can be worth a passing glance from a million random strangers. You get to decide what matters to you. If you’re John Lennon, you don’t want to impress as many people as possible, you want to impress Paul McCartney. So yeah. What do you really want to be doing? And how can you do some of that right now?