Fifteen, or one third

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO I published the first post here, and fifteen years is one-third of my life, but I’m trying to locate that math in my body and coming up short. Not because it doesn’t feel so long ago—it does—and not because I expected to still be here after all this time—I didn’t. But because the experience of having this place is so ingrained I can no longer find the edges of it. Whether this practice survives another fifteen years or not, I am here and part of me can never leave, not completely.

Fifteen years of any practice is notable. There’s so much out there about habits and “streaks” and how life is just some number of days that are counting down more rapidly than you’d care to admit so you’d better spend it well—as if you could know the full measure of your life and so budget accordingly. But if there’s anything I know about practicing it’s that it isn’t about rules or consistency or scarcity or god forbid optimizing: it’s about coming back. A practice is built on the movement of return.

I’ve been distracted over and over. I’ve been lost and submerged and I’ve drifted away. If you look at the pace of writing over the years, you’ll see many long periods of drought, punctuated by the occasional drenching storm. Which is as good a signal as any about what this place means to me: anytime some space opened up, this is where I turned. I’ve come to see that movement as akin to returning to the breath: when you sit in silence, you lose awareness over and over and over again. What matters isn’t holding on (that’s impossible). What matters is coming home.

Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of A Working Letter. Below, some thoughts about “effective altruism,” drawing from (who else) Le Guin. Plus, a new (free!) short coaching opportunity, notes about scaffolding change and metaphors for leadership, and—of course—recent reading. You can also read this essay on the web.

The other side of egoism

Among the assumptions embedded in a concept like “effective altruism” is the notion that altruism, left to its own devices, might be well-intentioned but ineffective. There’s an image of a kind of bumbling, open-hearted, slightly ashamed (possibly effeminate) fool underneath it, the kind of person who smiles wanly at a homeless person on the subway, tucking a dollar into their cup without making eye contact. Sure, that’s altruism, the story goes, but is it effective? Did it work? From whose vantage point that effectiveness is measured, and for whom did it work, is often left unsaid. But the concept looks down upon ordinary altruism as an act too oriented in feeling, too reactive and improvisational, too weak—not measured or strategic or calculated.

One of the questions I always ask of stories is how they work. Who do they serve? Who benefits? Who, if anyone, is burdened or harmed by them? Who is uplifted? What modes or methods or structures do they employ? Stories—and metaphors, which are often just stories in miniature—are never neutral actors. They always seek some change, whether through resistance or encouragement or both.

We are surrounded with illustrative examples. The phrase “office politics” frames the critical work of negotiating information, power, and agency within an organization as mere gossip, thereby serving to uphold existing hierarchical structures and preventing (or arresting) structural change. Similarly, the “cloud” obscures the deep sea cables and data centers and massive carbon costs of digital experiences behind a vision of the kind of fluffy, ephemeral, and happy image that Bob Ross delighted in. Where “office politics” cloaks structural inequities in a sheen of disgrace, the “cloud” hides the very real and visceral harms of digital technologies behind a friendly facade.

But there’s a different story I want to talk about today, and it’s a timely one: this story says that a certain kind of technology is different from all other technologies by virtue of its wit. Where other machines merely follow the instructions given them, this new kind of machine learns and discovers and creates novel and surprising results. This tech is so smart that there’s in fact a risk that it becomes too smart and gains sentience—a possibility so dangerous it requires that we rapidly expand the capability of this technology so that we have a chance to stay a few steps ahead of it, so that we have a chance to make certain it serves us instead of itself.

I’m talking about machine learning. Which is itself one kind of story—one in which machines do something like “learn,” but which really means to memorize or put into storage, and includes nothing so pedestrian as understanding or interpreting. But the more common parlance—“artificial intelligence”—expands on that story to suggest that not only are the machines learning, but they have acquired the ability to think, or to intellectualize, implying that they have desires and personalities and behaviors. One way this story works is that by ascribing “thinking” to the machines, it triggers associations many people have with “higher” beings—whether species that are smarter than others, or people that are. (I’ll come back to this hierarchical notion of intelligence in a moment.)

Hello again, this is A working letter, an occasional newsletter from Mandy Brown. This month, I’m in my feelings about rest and time, likely brought on by the clocks changing and the way the afternoon light shifts so dramatically these days, like it’s demanding my attention. Also below: work notes about building consensus, why no one is “non-technical,” and what to do with shitty feedback.

I’m currently booking coaching work for the new year; if you’re struggling with survivor’s guilt after surviving a layoff or trying to manage through a terrifically difficult time, let’s talk.

You can also read this essay on the web.

👋 Hello! And welcome to A working letter, an occasional email from Mandy Brown. As a reminder, I’m available for coaching work. If you’re struggling through a big career change this summer—you were laid off, or you survived a layoff but are missing your fave colleagues, or your team is burnt out and you don’t know what to do, or something else—and you want to bring some intention and integrity to what you do from here, let’s talk. I offer free sample sessions before you commit; sliding scale fees for women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and disabled folks; and I have immediate availability.

Today, I’m here to bust up some bad office myths as more and more people face post-Labor Day RTO plans. You can also read this on the web.

I’ve read an untold number of articles about remote work in the past however many months, and among the recurring themes is the notion that young people need IRL cultures in order to grow and learn. Like a lot of storytelling about remote work, this analysis correctly identifies a challenge with remote culture but then presumes, absent any evidence, that offices must be better at resolving it. They are not.

Big news! I’m opening the doors on a new coaching practice, with the heartfelt intention of supporting people through change. Read on to understand why I think this is so important right now, or reach out if you want to learn more about how we could work together.

IN 2000, OCTAVIA BUTLER wrote in Essence magazine about why trying to predict the future was so important:

So why try to predict the future at all if it’s so difficult, so nearly impossible? Because making predictions is one way to give warning when we see ourselves drifting in dangerous directions. Because prediction is a useful way of pointing out safer, wiser courses. Because, most of all, our tomorrow is the child of our today. Through thought and deed, we exert a great deal of influence over this child, even though we can’t control it absolutely. Best to think about it, though. Best to try to shape it into something good. Best to do that for any child.

Some news: I’m opening up a limited number of free coaching engagements with underrepresented people in the media and/or tech industries. You can read about that here. Applications are due no later than March 11, 2022.

Below is an essay that is decidedly an essay—that is, an attempt. This is more tentative that I’m usually wont to share. But some of the ideas herein are, I think, resistant to fixedness. And I want to use this space to try things out, to let things unfold piece by piece. As always, thanks for reading.

The subtitle to Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is An Ambiguous Utopia. The book won both the Hugo and Nebula awards when it was published, but was also widely criticized for being too didactic or too political or both. I’ve often heard people decry that the politics get in the way of the novel, which is a bit like criticizing the leaves of a tree for being in the way of its branches. In a collection of essays about the book, Le Guin responds to some of that criticism:

I’ve been thinking a lot about binary thinking, and all the ways it limits and defeats. Either you should get a vaccine or you should mask up. Either climate change is already happening or there’s still time to halt it. Either journalism is crucial to understanding the world or it’s routinely, blatantly problematic. So many ors where there ought to be ands.

Either your workplace is a family or it’s not. It’s not, of course. The very concept of the workplace as family is a tool for exploitation. But if it’s not, where does that leave us in relation to each other? What does it mean to care about your colleagues, to love them?

By now, you’ve likely already heard that the Basecamp founders attempted to sink their company with, among other things, an edict that sought to prohibit all “political discussions” from the workplace. [1] The Basecamp post is notable for the way it aspires to an Onion-worthy caricature of bad management, but the general message here—that the workplace ought to be a politically neutral space—is very common. It is also a cover up.

I’ve noted before how phrases and concepts often “do work” beyond just what their presumed meaning might relay. The term “office politics” is one of those phrases. It turns an important part of the inner workings of an organization—how people negotiate power and authority—into a futile and dispiriting game that no one in their right mind wants any part of. It serves to disenfranchise people from participating in decision-making that affects their lives. It reduces politics to power-grabbing without any analysis of the consequences of who wields that power, and in doing so coats any discussion of political values in a film of disgrace.

Housekeeping: With today’s letter, I’ve moved over to Buttondown. Tiny Letter was a great little product for a while, but I feel better working on a platform that’s actively supported. If anything seems amiss, let me know.

Burned

In the paper of record, a man writes that millennials, flush with savings from the past year, are prepared to quit their jobs in droves. He calls it the “YOLO economy.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have problems with this framing. First, as this Gen Xer can attest, this is not a pattern specific to millennials, and really, any analysis that rests on arbitrary marketing categories is doomed to miss some things. But setting that aside, treating this like a flippant meme-driven move and not a correction to generations of worker abuse does a real disservice not only to the people making these choices but also to our understanding of how professionalized labor is changing more broadly.

Another way to frame what I also suspect will be a summer of quitting is this: given the chance, people will buy their way out of burnout. This is both a privilege and a salve. After a year of relative comfort, spent largely observing the impacts of the pandemic without being at risk from the worst of it, what a lot of people want isn’t stuff but relief—from work that is deadening and too much all at once. Meanwhile, the corporate response to burnout has been earnest but superficial: offering meeting-free Fridays and subsidized yoga, plus an extra week or two off—while the Q3 roadmap and OKRs crank along—is like trying to put out a house fire with a glass of pinot. What people really need is months of rest and control and autonomy over their work. What we need is a total reset about what work is for, and who gets to decide how it gets done.