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Good morning.
On Wednesday November 5th, I woke up and checked my phone to the election results. I lay in bed for a moment and let the sadness settle in my body. I was not the only one. Mandy Brown wrote, later that day: Hi friends,
The news is grim. I want to share two things that have been helpful for me and others on similarly dark days.
First, as you have oft heard from me, grief needs space and attention. Refusing to grieve is like wrapping a wound too tight—it can’t heal without light and air. We need to acknowledge it, to listen to what it’s telling us, to be patient with it. To accept it.
The same is true for fear.
Second, the work is still the work
I took the day off of work. I checked in with my kids and with some of my friends. I went for a walk. I got a haircut. I had dinner with my family. Unlike during the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, I was able to eat a small meal. I would return online to read some of the responses of the people I follow until it didn't feel like it helped anymore. Many accounts I follow were posting as if nothing monumental had happened at all. I remembered this from 2016. Sports coverage would be completely unbothered by what had just transpired. In a few days we would soon be inundated with publications sharing embedded affiliate codes in the form of Xmas holiday shopping lists. The sadness settled in me and did not move. I spent the evening reading Ancillary Sword, the second book in a trilogy of sci-fi books called that was a recommendation I followed from the Making Worlds podcast. In broad strokes, the series follows a character who was once a weapon of Empire but finds a way through grief to resist Empire. The book is notable in that gender is a non-issue in its imagined world, but class and power are most decidedly not. Reading (and writing) helped me find some clarity and calm in this moment of uncertainty and fear. In the aftermath of the 2016 US election, I started this newsletter. Two weeks from now, I will publish the 400th issue of The University of Winds.
I was debating if this should be an post-US-election focused newsletter until I realized that there was no way it could not otherwise be.
I am not the only one who believes that much of our current social and political upheaval is an indirect response to how our internet content platforms have changed our sense of self and who we hold as community. It is said that we going through a time not dissimilar to when the printing press led to the conditions for the Protestant Reformation to occur. I'd explain further but author Naomi Alderman makes these connections, as well as some surprising other ones in a short and accessible 5-part audio series from BBC 4 recently made available online again, called The Third Information Crisis. There are lots of Walter Ong references in the series. I think this is just the beginning of another wave of new media criticism. Already this week I've read that "leaders will now have more authority when they speak while sitting—not standing" and that "the values of YouTube" suggest that creators must chose to demonstrate curiosity or perform intellectual dominance. In this moment, it is telling that how the discourse is being delivered is seen as more important than what is being said.
Radical Responsiveness
On Nov. 7, 2020, Tressie McMillan Cottom published an opinion column in The New York Times that advised the necessity for the Biden administration to engage in radical responsiveness 🎁. I was reminded of her warnings after re-reading the Fast Company article from the same month, Trump shattered American democracy. Designers can help bring it back who echoed her call:
With a new administration in place, how do we begin the process of repairing our democracy? A large piece of that relies on ensuring that government can deliver what people need. That not only can government help the old and the sick, but that a social safety net exists and works. That those who are the most vulnerable do not need to live in fear of losing their jobs, homes, and livelihood because government will be there to catch them when they fall. Crashing unemployment databases and stimulus checks that never arrive have not helped tell the story of a functional government that values the American people.
I am not sharing these articles to shame anyone associated with the American political apparatus. I'm sharing these articles to try to provoke and disturb Canadian complacency with and within our governments, civil service, and civic sector. We need a Radical How for Canada. "The Radical How [pdf] is a policy think piece. Its purpose is to advise the Canadian government by providing concrete ways of improving service delivery." The paper is a 62 page PDF from the UK consultant group, Public Digital. The first half of the document describes what is required of government in this moment: a move from away from 'government projects' to small teams in-house teams who work with subject experts and small groups of residents to deliver services that iterate and scale up when ready). They provide examples of how this approach has already worked in Canada (GC Notify, Nova Scotia's HARP program) while also recognizing that this kind of work in Canadian government has proven to be precarious.
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
I've been going through my old bookmarks and re-found this Baffler essay from David Graeber in a folder marked, playful liberation. It starts with ants and ends with mutual aid.
My friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a mountain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of grass, twist about in every possible direction, and then leap to the next stalk and do the same thing. And so it proceeded, in a vast circle, with what must have been a vast expenditure of energy, for what seemed like absolutely no reason at all.
“All animals play,” June had once said to me. “Even ants.” She’d spent many years working as a professional gardener and had plenty of incidents like this to observe and ponder. “Look,” she said, with an air of modest triumph. “See what I mean?”
It makes this journey through the work of Peter Kropotkin: An alternative school of Darwinism emerged in Russia emphasizing cooperation, not competition, as the driver of evolutionary change. In 1902 this approach found a voice in a popular book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, by naturalist and revolutionary anarchist pamphleteer Peter Kropotkin. In an explicit riposte to social Darwinists, Kropotkin argued that the entire theoretical basis for Social Darwinism was wrong: those species that cooperate most effectively tend to be the most competitive in the long run. Kropotkin, born a prince (he renounced his title as a young man), spent many years in Siberia as a naturalist and explorer before being imprisoned for revolutionary agitation, escaping, and fleeing to London. Mutual Aid grew from a series of essays written in response to Thomas Henry Huxley, a well-known Social Darwinist, and summarized the Russian understanding of the day, which was that while competition was undoubtedly one factor driving both natural and social evolution, the role of cooperation was ultimately decisive.
(For more about Kropotkin see also: The ants have not read Kant.) This is a long article with big ideas to confound and wrestle with. And it has an ending that I had forgotten and that I am glad to have read it again.
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