Yes, it’s true: This story was told by an American White Lady.Yes, it’s true: This movie failed to capture the complexity of a situation from any perspective. Yes, it’s true: Everyone tried really hard to make it relatable and maybe took away some of its power.
It’s also true that the powerful version of the story is the one nobody seems to want. If they did, they’d read the real Kim Barker’s book.
I’ve tried, too, to tell my version of the story (fewer explosives, fewer parties, fewer curse words, more Afghans, longer tunics, deeper obsession with the place itself). The more I tried to relate and to simplify, the more its truth went away. I tried to explain, once, what it was like to live on a compound that I couldn’t leave without the permission of a boss who told me to my face that women didn’t matter. Someone in my writing group said, “Well, you make it sound so bad, but everybody‘s had a bad boss.” I told people how strange it felt to be in Chicago on the day all my friends back at the Embassy were under siege, how I wished I were there. “That’s dumb,” they told me. “You were safe.” As if they couldn’t even be bothered to try imagining what it feels like to have your life happening somewhere else than where you are.
It’s also true that what something looks like and what it feels like can be very, very different. I guess when you put a bed in an office and put a proposition between an official and a journalist, it’s easier to see what’s going on. But it can’t exactly make your skin crawl like it does when a middle-aged spy chief with a polo shirt tucked over his mini-gut and into his unbelted khakis makes jokes about your tits while you’re both standing on the yellow-lit patio outside a shipping container-cum-bar drinking beers sold to you by a tiny hardened Filipina woman surrounded by beefcakes fresh from the gym and suddenly all seven of them are staring right at you like they’ve never seen balls of flesh so high and round in all their lives and all you can think to do is make a joke about how creepy the joke was and none of them speak to you for weeks because he ordered them to make you suffer for his humiliation.
It can’t tell you how the dry dusty heat of a Kabul summer night makes you feel like you’re about to sweat but your skin can never quite break into a comfortable wet. It can’t tell you how it feels when you really think you’re hitting it off with some guy and he starts bragging about how he was nailing the only girl at his PRT, who’s only even “base cute” in his estimation, and suddenly this human you thought you might connect with starts to look like a sad skinny sack of straw who doesn’t realize that he’s just base cute, too. It can’t tell you what it’s like to be a 28-year-old woman fresh off of language training and a breakup who actually cares about her work and is suddenly scared as shit that she’s going to screw it all up by being too sexy, or not sexy enough. It doesn’t tell you what it’s like when you have no choice but to be your gender first, your person second, or how hard it is to write the truth even now when you know that someone will pick it up and wave it around as evidence that all women think about is our wombs and that we just don’t belong in combat zones as anything but hairdressers, lumpia makers, and prostitutes (roles in which our presence has never been questioned).
Some stories are just really hard to tell. And still we try. Sometimes we can’t quite capture what it’s like. I think that’s okay. I’m just happy somebody cared about this story enough to give it a shot.
I never feel so privileged as when someone shares their story with me. It’s the most precious thing any of us has. And for all the power of modern story telling (last night I demo’d some virtual reality tools that were powerful indeed), nothing quite has the same impact as sitting across from a real human, whose real voice is speaking with real emotion, and you can feel on your skin the difference between the words they’ve simply repeated over and over and the ones that still light their heart on fire.
What else I love is the role my own imagination gets to play. Especially when it’s disrupted with surprise.
Last night a beautiful human shared his story with me. I don’t know what I expected him to tell me, but I didn’t expect to hear that he’d ever been with a woman, or that he’d grown up in a tiny desert town, or that he still worked multiple jobs. His childhood was very unlike mine and yet, it was so easy for me to imagine what it was like. The whole time he spoke, it was nighttime in my imagination. Sparse with options like a desert landscape. A strange place to try to put together a sense of self in society, like sewing a doll from whatever scraps are lying around. Not so different from what I did, many miles and several whole climates away, what I feel I’m still doing.
I love the moments when we speak about such things in the concrete terms of which little pieces of life we chose. That’s where our stories come together, because as we speak, we keep choosing: This memory is for you. The best conversations are not pre-curated, but alive and unfolding in response to what the other person offers. Together we can forge worlds — they may still feel different to each of us, but at least we made them with one another’s gifts.
I don’t know why I’m writing this except that it feels worthy of capture. When my world was small, all I wanted to do was read about other people’s lives. Now that my world is so big, stuffed to the brim with beautiful generous souls who’ve gathered in Seattle from all corners of the world, all I want to do is write about them.
This weekend, my writing partner and I took a private ferry out to a tiny island off Kitsap County. Population: 127. GDP per capita: $53k. Number of cars that fit on the ferry: 6. Percentage of houses with “no trespassing” signs: 100. It seemed odd for a community so small to be so obviously hostile. Our host said, “People are very friendly.” And yet, on a February day so warm we walked the beach in t-shirts, we encountered only one other person, and all she wanted to know is whether it was still raining.
We could not shake the feeling that something was not quite right. Places seemed relatively well cared-for; there was a rope swing on the adjacent beach; oysters were pinned down below the surf in large black mesh wire bags; there was the occasional beachfront decor or giant anchor with a family name carved beneath it – but it did not have the feel of a pleasant retirement community – more a place people go to escape other people.
The first large house just up from the ferry had a sign hung from the balcony, probably 10’x20′ on canvas, with a stamp-like image of the Statue of Liberty in the upper right corner and this unintelligible message:
We live in the United States of America
Harassment, Bullying and Threats against our Fundamental Rights is a Crime
Respect the rights, beliefs, and opinions of others and don’t break the law
Perhaps clarification of jurisdiction was needed as the island is a membership community and is unincorporated, with no laws other than the rules they’ve self-developed: “For safety,” no one can board the ferry without a guest pass issued by a resident. Obviously, there’s no trespassing. And, as our host noted multiple times, you can’t pick anything up from anyone else’s stretch of beach.
When we got back, we found the place has a property crime rate 118.49 percent higher than the national average. Whether that’s from outsiders breaking in or people on the island breaking each other remains very unclear.
We crossed a bridge marked PRIVATE and trekked up through the only property that lacked a “No Trespassing” sign, on principle. It seemed like they were asking for it. “We know you’re here to harm us,” they seemed to be saying; “We’ll harm you back.” That kind of thing seems to be self-fulfilling.
My hope was to finish writing a talk. I felt massively creative on the way there. We had a ferry and some long waits to spark our imaginations. And Seattle’s Best from a vending machine, and Sour Patch Kids, and cranky ferry workers who asked us if we were children. On the boat we made a dictionary of new and needed words. Fluffl: the delightedly overfull feeling you get from eating sweet carbs for breakfast. Sufra: when you want to use an object in the way its origins intended but it is too fragile and lovely to use. Dejadant: having a wildly inappropriate, lush deja vu in a very public place. Etc.
But then we got out there and my head went to mush. It was like we were in non-space, watching time tick by as no new words hit the page. I mean, we typed, we sighed, we moved our pens, but nothing happened. It was all the same stories, rearranged in less interesting ways. Like regurgitation of a regurgitation. I was staring at word-vomit that had all the flavor taken from it many cycles ago. I mean how many times can I talk about the accident before it ceases to have existed? I mean isn’t there something left in my brain I haven’t already turned into a one-liner? Twenty minutes is a long time to talk at people with no plan, and making slides will suck your soul.
I try to remind myself that the creative process is supposed to be torturous, but it’s strange when other forms come so easily. I dropped into Facebook on Saturday morning and bam! five paragraphs surrounding a new and beautiful thought that somehow connected everything in my life. I’m used to having a moment of inspiration and watching it all just pour out of me. It doesn’t seem like it’s supposed to be this hard. Especially not when I have a planet’s worth of secrets in me. Stories collected from corners of the world most people have never been. Friends who spark laughter and movement and ink flow. There are ideas I have yet to chew.
I keep hoping that if I just keep thinking, some aha! moment will strike. 30 days in to this #togetherequal campaign I’ve learned that just ruminating on why I care so much about gender equality calls up all kinds of lovely tiny stories on a near-daily basis. But trying to take the big abstract thoughts that guide my daily work and put them into a single story that people will love – I mean, I thought they were paying me generously, but it will work out to about $2 an hour by the time I get where I need to go.
For now, I blame the place. But I know better. It is only me who decides what makes its way out of my soul and onto the page. And behind all those flavorless, safely digested words is a trapdoor that some part of me is afraid to open. With this post, I give that part of me a warning: Somebody is about to trespass.
In the 1990’s, the Laurelhurst community stood up to University of Washington and said: No more growth.
The university fought back. Its victory in that battle helped turn Seattle into a hub for medical innovation, biotech, and computer science, which in turn made our region what it is today. That’s the story Technology Alliance Executive Director Susannah Malarkey offered in her closing remarks at Xconomy’s Seattle 2035 conference, held this past Friday at Northeastern University’s Seattle graduate campus.
In 2015, as the city faces a new host of growth-related challenges, many of our most innovative companies realize that their continued development depends on the choices we all make as a city about land use and other public policies. Many speakers voiced concerns over affordable housing, transportation, and education. However, only one CEO – Redfin’s Glenn Kelman – took responsibility for his company’s influence on the city.
A comprehensive recap is below. Here’s the TL;DR version:
Major companies and investors are concerned about Seattle’s long-term livability, meaning: maintaining housing affordability, ensuring we have a transportation system that can handle growth, and not losing our diversity or “middle-class feel.”
Seattle is home to some pretty incredible innovations in urban sustainability (e.g. the Bullitt Center, the University of Washington’s new Urban@UW initiative), virtual reality, and space exploration.
Technologists have immense faith in communications, the Internet of Things, and AI to smooth out all the challenges of our future, but are not actively engaged in a corresponding conversation about ethics and the socioeconomic & political dynamics that influence how technology is applied in real life.
That last gap worries me. If we continue to design technology & urban policy as if data/algorithms are magically neutral and immune to the influence of power, we will end up not only replicating, but worsening historical inequities. We already are. While the conference offered few insights for how to turn tech growth into a rising tide that lifts all boats, it offered some unique insights into what’s happening now.
Redfin: Seattle’s looming housing crisis + #Techquity in the end-to-end company Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman shared his company’s data to illustrate just how close we are to a housing crisis in Seattle – a problem that could temper the gains of our current economic boom and lead us toward a San Francisco-style collapse.
Red is for Seattle’s techies, who spend less on their homes as a percentage of income than everyone else in town.
“The only thing growing faster than income in Seattle is housing prices,” Kelman said. For tech workers, cost of living is still reasonable, but even so, the majority of those surveyed by Redfin (including 52 percent of technologists) do not anticipate being able to afford Seattle 20 years from now.
Much of the growth here is driven by Silicon Valley-based companies such as Facebook and Google that are opening engineering offices in other major hubs, from Austin to Portland. Seattle, he says, is the #2 destination after San Francisco for companies and their workers, who are fleeing Silicon Valley in search of more livable cities.
Redfin’s data on what new homeowners prioritize offers some hope for urbanist policy – public transportation and public education rank high on their list – but they are less likely to support new development. High density, Kelman said, is essential to economic mobility. He advocated for land use and zoning that makes it possible for people with all backgrounds and income levels to share neighborhoods, creating the rich network of accidental interactions and economic integration that makes cities great places to live.
“What I loved about Seattle when I came here is that it’s an amazing middle-class place,” he said. Right now, that middle class is disappearing. That is largely due to the way we value labor under present market conditions, with intense competition for a small pool of engineers but little economic incentive to pay fair wages or offer benefits to the contractors who do the work on the other end.
This is crucial now that technology companies are becoming end-to-end companies, delivering both the software and the service. Many of them have set up two-tier systems, in which technologists earn high salaries with benefits, while the people who do the work – think Uber’s drivers and Amazon’s warehouse laborers – are shut out of company gains. At Redfin, the real estate agents have access to the same health care and benefits as the engineers.
“We would be a much more profitable company if we treated our agents differently,” Kelman said, but Redfin is committed to having one culture for all its employees. Kelman also defended the role of Uber & Lyft in building support for public transit, such as buses and bike lanes. He noted that the availability of on-demand car services helps people let go of the idea that they need to own cars, ultimately building support for public transportation.
AI & Equity Next up was Oren Etzioni from the Allen Institute from Artificial Intelligence. His presentation explicitly pointed out that while computers are great at solving computational problems such as chess games, they are not designed as well to understand what cannot be represented in numbers. He referenced Fei-Fei Li’s recent TED talk on computer vision as an example of how challenging this is. “Problems that we [humans] don’t even know how to formulate,” Etzioni said, “the computer can’t solve.”
Problems that we [humans] don’t even know how to formulate, the computer can’t solve.
Oren’s predictions for 2035 were simple: 1. Driving will be a hobby, not a way of commuting. 2. AI assistants will revolutionize science.
He showed a video of cars moving through an intersection in all directions at once, with no help from drivers or traffic lights, managing a level of chaos with all the aplomb of Cairo drivers. “The algorithm makes sure everyone passes through as efficiently as possible,” he said.
As he spoke, I could not help but think of #listen2mercer. While I would love to share Etzioni’s idealism about technology, I can’t see that working out unless we address the political issues that prevent us from living up to that dream of efficiency. Elites almost always demand priority in transportation systems, such as dedicated lanes (as Mercer Island residents requested, with permanent single-occupant access to HOV lanes just for them) and special vehicle privileges (such as the blue “migalki” that Moscow’s elites used to get through bad traffic).
I asked Etzioni about this afterwards – how we can expect algorithms to fix historical inequity on their own, when history suggests that some drivers would demand privileges denied to others – and I heard what I usually hear: “That’s a good question,” without much to say in response. He acknowledged that we should scrutinize algorithms for their behavior, looking at what values they represent.
I would add to that: We need to consider the impact of algorithms in the real world before deciding whether they are neutral. Mechanisms that are “neutral” on their own can have extremely discriminatory outcomes. In housing, we consider both “disparate treatment” and “disparate impact” to be forms of discrimination, as upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year. It’s time that we brought this thinking into the realm of technology as well.
Oren also raised the principle of Amdahl’s law, which applies to non-linear situations, showing that scalability is hindered by increasing complexity. “AI has not and will not increase exponentially,” he said.
It struck me that this concept helps explain why technologists are often vexed by social and political problems. Helping wealthy people is easy – markets exist, and solutions scale. For challenges such as homelessness, war, and refugee crises, there’s no app or magic bullet that will follow the trajectory of Moore’s law. Humanity happens face-to-face, one moment at a time.
Until we recognize this, and invest energy and resources into innovation on social and political problems with the same long-term, persistent, innovative, solution-centric mindset we apply to technological innovation, we will be stuck in the middle of Amdahl’s curve – or, even more likely, slipping down.
Big Data Is So Last Year The panel, “From Big Data to Machine Learning to AI” started with some discussion on the title itself. Textio CEO Kieran Snyder commented that, 18 months ago, top engineers looking for jobs gravitated toward listings with the keyword “big data.” Roughly 12 months ago, that shifted to “machine learning,” and then 6 months ago, it was “AI.” These are her words–I haven’t seen that data myself and the timeline may be fuzzy, but it was interesting to note.
I was happy to hear Snyder offer a truism I say often: “Data tells us what; it cannot tell us why.” For that, you need an explanatory layer that translates data for humans. For example, data can tell you whether your job listing is appealing to women or not, but you still need someone to help you fix it.
Data tells us what; it cannot tell us why.
That’s assuming the data makes sense to begin with. Socrata CTO Deep Dhillon pointed out that scalability of data analysis is hindered by inconsistent classification. Many of Socrata’s customers are municipalities, whose classification of data in some cases goes all the way back to the pioneer days. There’s a lot of work yet to be done before everyone joins those top engineers on the bleeding edge of technological possibility.
Reality: Augmented, Virtual, Immersive, Mixed, Volumetric, Etc. Although all the companies represented here–Pluto VR, EnvelopVR, and VRstudios–have VR in the name, each of the panelists said that “Virtual Reality” did not quite capture what their companies were about, but agreed to keep using the familiar term to describe the entire range of what they working on.
Asked to describe their biggest challenge, one panelist said, “Not making people sick.” Built around visual experiences, most available VR has adverse effects on the human body. This flowed into my conversation with some other attendees afterwards. As long as we still live in human bodies and on this planet, we will need clean air, clean water, and healthy food. Even in the future, not everyone will be able to hop into an idealized reality and escape homelessness, domestic violence, or chronic disease.
What About Actual Reality?
The conference then made a welcome shift into the real-world trends that are happening now, briefly focusing on which people and problems are not being addressed by the market.
At lunch, students from Urban@UW showcased their project from the NEXT SEATTLE challenge (where I was a mentor), JobBox. Their project aims to support homeless youth to get and keep jobs. It was a refreshing foray back into the world of the now, and was followed by presentations on the future of agriculture, living buildings, and energy. My biggest takeaway from this combination of panels was the importance of connecting scientists and researchers to one another and to the realities of the world. To quote Nitin Baliga, in an optimized system, “scientists are not just thinking in esoteric ways.” This is where Urban@UW and similar projects shine.
The later panel, “Developing All of Washington’s Talent: What’s Working” offered another solution. Currently, by tapping only the same pool of talent, companies and the industry as a whole are looking at only one set of problems in one way. Infusing diverse perspectives into the work doesn’t just improve team performance, it changes what we work on. Not everyone in our state is a multi-millionaire for whom a functioning self-driving Tesla is the end to transportation woes.
Glowforge CEO Dan Shapiro said, “If we can create companies that look like the world around us, those companies are going to have a strategic advantage.” I hope he’s right. But that’s only true if we continue to have a broad base of consumers.
If we can create companies that look like the world around us, those companies are going to have a strategic advantage.
Right now, the growth of Washington’s tech industry is overlapping with a downward spiral in affordability for those who don’t work in tech. We are creating companies that create products and services only for the small slice of people who can afford them, leaving out the billions of people who lack access to even the basic necessities. We are on a trajectory toward greater inequity. I would modify Shapiro’s comment to say, “If we can create companies that look like the world around us, we’re going to live in a more interesting, vibrant, creative, exciting, livable world.” It will take more than a commitment to the bottom line. It will also take moral courage. I’d like to see more companies like Redfin and Glowforge get into that game.
In the meantime, Ada Developers Academy and Technology Access Foundation have more interest than they can accommodate – ADA Executive Director Cynthia Tee reported more than 300 women applied for just 24 spots in this year’s cohort. There is immense demand for STEM education among our state’s underprivileged. We just have to decide whether we’re going to supply it.
Want to give a company $2000 to own your most sensitive data? Sure you do! Meet Arivale. The other industry panels were somewhat uninspiring. We heard a 40-minute live informational for a company called Arivale, which for $2000 a year in perpetuity will collect, store, and comment on your most sensitive health data, from your sleep cycles to your blood test results to your genome. The company has no doctors, but promises to pair individuals with coaches.
From a business perspective, this seems brilliant: a platform company, like Uber, for the quantified self. Instead of collecting data in the highly regulated environment of academic research, where participants are typically compensated for their participation and protected by HIPAA and other laws, the company can get people to pay them to collect, store, and analyze their personal health, with (under current regulations on private data) no say in how their data is used.
While this sounds like a great way to deliver returns for ARCH Venture Partners, Arivale’s investor and one of the sponsors for Xconomy’s conference series, it raises a lot of red flags around ethics. Some of my concerns are specific to health, but this also raises another point I’ve been talking about more and more since the start of this year (I saw Irina Raicu speak on this at Town Hall, then ran a breakout section on private sector data at Open Seattle’s International Open Data Day event in February): We’re building an entire economy on the idea that consumer data is a business asset.
So many of the apps we use for free are supported by the perceived value and valuation of our information. That information becomes a business asset that can be traded or shared, claimed by banks in a bankruptcy, acquired in a merger or acquisition, etc. For an example of how troubling this can be, check out this recent post by John Salzarulo on what happened when Homejoy became FlyMaids.
For me, living as I do with one foot in the world of open data/civic tech, this is surreal. With government, we at least have some power to influence both our privacy and our right to know what’s going on. The City of Seattle is currently working on its own open data policy, trying to balance the need for citizen protection with the public’s demand for transparency.
Those principles we apply to government do not yet apply to the private companies who now hold the bulk of our information. What’s more private to you, census data or your credit history? Your voting record or your trip patterns in Uber? What you call your city government for or what you search on Google? Companies such as Airbnb avoid paying taxes and get away with claims that a journalist can knock over in minutes in part by not sharing their data with government (Uber’s arrangement with Boston for emergency planning is one of the only such arrangements I know of in the country).
What’s more private to you, census data or your credit history? Your voting record or your trip patterns in Uber? What you call your city government for or what you search on Google?
If Arivale succeeds in persuading our nation’s wealthy (and/or their employers and insurers) to provide all this data over a lifetime, that could be invaluable for our understanding of how to control risk factors for diabetes, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and other common ailments. Do we really want that information only to be available to their paying customers? In the name of economic development and our excitement at spinning up another company (already valued at $34 million), are we willing to look the other way at the ethical issues this raises? There is a way to craft regulatory policy that protects consumers while fostering thriving markets for the care we need most. We simply have not yet done so.
Personally, I would love to have all my health data stored in one place. If I could afford it, I’d love to work with one coach (or at least one entity) over my lifetime. Right now, my records are spread across the planet, in the seven countries in which I’ve received health care, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the same doctor twice. There are plenty of people like me who could be persuaded that Arivale’s services are worth the cost. But we desperately need better regulation of our most sensitive data first, both to protect us from those who would use it against us and to ensure that its most valuable insights become available to the public.
What’s next for outer space? The space exploration panel offered fewer takeaways, other than a succinct answer to the question, “What do we need to do to support the space industry in Seattle?” “Fix the traffic.”
One of the panelists dismissed the idea of space debris, saying it’s not much of a problem. I believe him like I believe an oil company downplaying the environmental impact of spills.
I’m looking forward to a more in-depth event the WTIA [full disclosure: they are a client] is hosting tomorrow 11/3 at the Museum of Flight, featuring Korean astronaut Soyeon Yi and speakers from Blue Origin, Space Angels Network, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and BlackSky.
Final thoughts I was struck by the fact that, when the companies stopped talking about their products and started talking about their needs as businesses, they all pointed to the same concerns about Seattle: housing affordability and livability, transportation, and developing talent.
None of those are issues industry is positioned to solve alone. At heart, they’re about policy and public goods, which have to be paid for somehow. Public education isn’t a consumer good, where you can simply pay for a person’s professional development and then own them for life. At some point, we have to recognize that we’re not going to solve the problems affecting Seattle’s tech industry without significant investment from those who are benefiting from the boom.
As Madrona Venture Group founder and early Amazon investor Tom Alberg mentioned, computer science just became a legitimate course in our school system last summer – but there still are not enough teachers and schools equipped to offer it. While not much movement toward policy advocacy was on display, I was heartened at least to hear that our city’s top tech companies recognize that their future depends at least in part on Seattle’s own.
Check out the hashtag #2035Seattle for more. Thanks to Xconomy, Northeastern University, and sponsors for a thought-provoking day.
Because wearing couture and making love to a hot actor in an exotic landscape is just WAY outside the bounds of social convention.
In the week since Taylor Swift dropped her video for “Wildest Dreams,” both she and the director have come under fire for racism, glorifying colonialism, exoticizing Africa, etc. But I haven’t yet seen anyone write about what’s missing from the video: wildness.
While lions and cheetahs and thunderstorms may be stand-ins for raw sensual passion, the dreams in this video fall neatly within social convention and the narrative history of women pining for a man to take them on grand adventures. This is the same dream that white people have been dreaming from the colonization of Africa in the 19th century all the way through the terrifying savior fantasy of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” It’s the same dream that women have been told to dream since we were little girls, beauty promoted as the only path to self-actualization and adventure.
As the kids might say, it’s basic.
That doesn’t mean it’s bad.
The most nuanced criticism I’ve read of the video so far has focused in on Swift’s problematic reliance on nostalgia. In her introduction for The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym defines nostalgia thus:
Nostalgia (from nostos–return home, and algia–longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it also a romance with one’s own fantasy.
I cannot think of a single word that better describes Swift as an artist or why her work is so emotionally powerful. The first time I heard her music, I envied how freely she expressed her teenage romantic fantasies – from the fantasy of being remembered forever by a truck-driving country boy every time he hears a Tim McGraw song to having a literal Romeo & Juliet romance that ends in a wedding. She didn’t worry about how she might be perceived. She went all over the map, hitting every approach to female-satisfaction-via-male-attention. She was shameless, and it worked.
Swift has evolved a lot as an artist and a human since those early days, but in this one dimension her music remains the same. “Wildest Dreams” is a fantasy on top of a fantasy on top of a fantasy. Scott Eastwood might as well be James Dean. The video is a layer cake of powerful cultural touchstones and common romantic tropes, spiked with the near-universal pain of unrequited love. That’s what makes it so resonant – and, according to its critics, so problematic.
As she has grown up, grown more famous, and entered into newer cultural spaces, Swift’s reference points have changed, as have the reference points of her broader creative teams. She’s no longer singing just to a country audience that wants to hear about pickup trucks or teenage girls who dream of being swept off their feet, and her videos no longer end with a hint that the dream is about to come true. The romance of “Wildest Dreams” is acutely painful because she recognizes that it’s all a fantasy, that it, in fact, has always been unreal, and yet still it’s what she chooses to dream.
The fifth shot in the opening sequence is a stage light. From that moment on, the artifice is clear. This is a film. They’re acting, most of the time. All this romance takes place in settings where we are forced to question how real they are: exotic landscapes as film backdrops, wild nature tame enough to writhe next to, muscled masculinity as a performance, red lipped-rosy cheeked femininity as costume, a stunning gown made more dramatic with the help of a giant fan, and, finally, the artifice of Hollywood and the realization, for the audience, that not only was the relationship was never the all-in romance she wanted it to be, they never even went to Africa.
In the sense that Swift is now self-aware enough to acknowledge that these dreams are just that, she’s grown. But today, after I watched the video for the first time with a friend whose career has taken her across the African continent many times, I was both overwhelmed by the beauty of the place and the outfits and underwhelmed by its approach to wildness.
A hot, tough, angry white dude + a gorgeous, thin white woman in couture have a steamy affair that can’t last forever? We’ve seen this movie before. Taylor Swift can travel to Africa, but for now, she can only reference other people’s ideas of what the continent should look like. Her approach to romance is no different. The best she can do is remind us that none of these fantasies are real and probably never were.
A truly wild dream might take us out of the past, our tropes, idealized gender expression, and the heritage of whiteness to a place where people dream differently. That’s not something Taylor Swift can do for us right now. But you know what? She’s only 25, and she’s been courageous enough to evolve in public thus far. I have faith that someday she’ll get tired of this persona, too. And when she does, she’ll bring millions of people with her.
At least, that’s how it goes in my wildest dreams.
A hallway in my apartment in Poland. I only lived there for two years, but I painted the entire 2000sf space in an attempt to make it feel more like my own.
I came back from vacation two weeks ago to discover that my house had flooded. The floors were badly damaged, swollen in many places, and needed to be fixed right away. I had to move out quickly so they could be replaced. I was displaced for all of four days – to a shiny new apartment elsewhere in the city that rents for double what my place does, no less – and I was downright miserable.
There’s very little that means more to me than having a home to come home to at night, with a kitchen where I can make myself a nutritious meal, temperature I can control, all my clothes in a closet I can easily reach, books and music and inspiration around every corner, mementos from every place I’ve been hung somewhere on a wall. I’ve moved around a lot, and I’m over the moon to have a tiny little corner of Seattle to call my own (even if it’s only a rental).
In fact, the only things more important to me than my home are my relationships with other people. I wouldn’t be able to feel at home in a place if I didn’t know my neighbors. The language they speak. The history of the landscape. It means a lot to me that, for now at least, I am welcome here.
I think about the idea of home a lot. I work in an area where homelessness and its associated miseries are on display right outside our doors. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t pass the same woman, in the same baggy pants held up with one hand, saggy breasts visible through an old t-shirt, holding her hand out and crying. She is Black, like a shockingly high percentage of our city’s homeless population. Her pain is palpable. I would bet that she fell off the edge of affordability a long time ago.
And I live in a neighborhood that is rapidly becoming unaffordable for the very people who made it a vibrant center of arts & culture in the first place. My home is in a house that was built in 1896 – old stock, as they say – and owned by local landlords. It is a rarity: a place that was built with love and solid construction and is well taken care of by its owners and grateful residents. All around me, hideous new condos are going up, with lobbies that smell like the Yankee Candle Company aisle at Hallmark, empty roof decks, and video advertisements showing the shiny happy people who are supposed to live there – or who the advertisers are telling you you could become for just $2000 a month. Many of us can’t afford that. So, increasingly, those left out of the city’s tech-driven growth are packing up and moving further and further away, to places where they may or may not be welcome.
That’s a very long introduction to a comment on the Syrian refugee crisis, but I can’t detach these issues in my mind. We are a language, a culture, a history, and half a planet apart, but I know that I am no different from the 9 million people who have been displaced from their homes as a result of the war. More than 3 million flooded into Turkey and other neighboring countries, including nations with fragile infrastructures and economies. This has been going on for years, but only recently made the news as desperate refugees in search of a permanent home started showing up by the tens of thousands on Europe’s most fragile shores. This is the worst humanitarian crisis in decades.
It takes an incredible combination of courage and desperation to leave one’s entire world behind and go out into the world hoping that someone will help you – someone, furthermore, who may not speak your language, who may understanding nothing about you, who may think of your life-altering crisis as an unnecessary nuisance in their daily life. You must enter a new and uncertain reality with bold determination to make it work, whatever it turns out to be. You do not have the option to settle passively into creature comforts. For most immigrants, you will never again be able to move through the world in your native language, and for nearly all refugees, you will never again return to the only place that truly feels like home. You will do the best you can in a new country, for the sake of your children. Period.
In the face of this courage, many nations and people are shrinking back in fear. How can we possibly absorb all these people? political leaders ask, rhetorically, pointing to the lack of infrastructure (a real concern) and the challenges of integrating people with other cultures and languages (also a real concern). There are some ugly stories of people, including police, beating and abusing refugees in the Balkans. Many humans are rejecting their shared humanity with Syrians and choosing fear over courage.
But not all.
All around the world, human beings are rising up to prove that the answer to the political leaders’ question is simple: We can help, because we choose to.
Over the last several weeks, a friend of mine who works for the NATO in Brussels has been posting links to articles about those who have responded. This collection deserves a broader audience, which is why I’m posting them here.
There are the residents of Oer Erkenshwick, a tiny German town that welcomed a coach full of refugees with flowers. (Middle East Eye)
There is the Mayor of Barcelona, who proposed that the city set up a district for refugees to live in, “as we did for Bosnians during the Balkan wars.” (La Vanguardia)
There are the German armed forces, building refugee camps in public parks. (Al Jazeera)
There are the residents of Belgrade, their own conflict-driven crisis not so far back in their memory, welcome refugees to Serbia. (AFP)
[NEW] Germans welcome refugees to Munich. (The Guardian)
And, of course, there is the love heard around the world today: When Iceland’s government announced that they would accept just 50 refugees, more than 11,000 Icelanders volunteered to open their own homes. (Time)
Some of these efforts could be dismissed as well-meaning but naive, like many attempts to change the world through social enterprise or non-profit work. Even 11,000 feels like a drop in the bucket against a crisis that is 9 million people strong.
But these actions of ordinary people are a worthy investment in empathy and a necessary reminder that we do, in fact, have enough resources to take care of one another. If we can trust in one another’s humanity – that deep, profound desire to find a safe place on this planet and make it into a home – we can, in fact, make space for everyone. (In fact, the entire population of the world could fit comfortably in New Zealand.)
Which, in some long and abstract arc, brings me back to my own little world. That woman on 1st & Washington? The forces that displaced her from her home may be different from the forces that displaced Syrian refugees, and in neither case do I bear the responsibility. But here, there, and everywhere, we have the power to help. If we choose to. If we simply get up, let ourselves be grateful for all that we have, and reach out a hand to another. There is enough room on this planet for every human to have a home, if we choose to accept them as our own.
For another human connection, you might head to Twitter and follow my friend Jen Butte-Dahl @jbdseattle. She’s in Lesvos with ShelterBox, setting up temporary homes for refugees. The crisis has never felt more real to me than seeing it through her eyes.
Or if you just want to help someone in crisis right here in Seattle, there are some incredible organizations around, including the Union Gospel Mission and Facing Homelessness.
I’m cycling again. It’s a glorious thing. Instead of being stuck on a bus in traffic, I’m gliding through Seattle sunshine and getting to most places faster than I would otherwise.
There’s just one downfall: I have to beg drivers not to kill me.
Commuting by bicycle is an art as well as a science. Many drivers would prefer not to share the road, and some are even angry enough to try to run cyclists off it. Staying safe is about a lot more than just following the rules. You have to assume that most drivers are not actually paying attention to the turn signals or the bicycle lanes. You stay alert to parked cars to see if the driver might open a door right in front of you. You’re peering into parking garages to see if someone might dart out. Even when you have the right of way, you’re trying to make eye contact with drivers who could well turn into the intersection in front of you.
I find myself smiling, waving, or mouthing “thank you” to each and every driver who follow the law. I expect hostile behavior, so when someone treats me like a legitimate moving vehicle, I do my best to communicate gratitude. I do it for myself. I do it for other cyclists. I do it in the hope that they remember what a nice, grateful cyclist I was and treat other cyclists with kindness.
In this tiny way, I imagine, riding a bicycle through urban traffic is a lot like, well, Driving While Black. Or Walking While Brown. Or Working While Female. Or Dating While Gay. Or Getting An Education While Poor. Or Trying To Pee While Homeless. Or any other variety of being a human being trying to operate in a space that was built around the needs of other people and privileges them. You have to strike a delicate balance between being grateful for the space you are offered and continuing to advocate for your needs.
It isn’t too hard to imagine a different world. In an urban infrastructure built around bicycles, where we had the say, cars might feel the need to be obsequious when we generously share our lanes. Big-time bicycle philanthropists could pat themselves on the back for building little dedicated roadways. We could even be magnanimous and offer free bicycles to 20 motorists a year, a free entry into our club (conditional on their ability to keep up with us and our powerful legs after years of sedentary commuting). But is that what we really want, or do we want to create systems that meet everyone’s needs, allow freedom of choice, and create connections across communities?
Analogies are often ridiculous, but somehow, this one really works for me – not just because it shows how power allows groups to create a social, economic, and built infrastructure that serves their needs over those of others (the definition of privilege), but because it shows just how arbitrary that power is. Driving is not an inherently better way to get around than cycling. It’s sometimes faster and easier, and it is the only feasible way to haul really large loads, but it also costs more to the user and to society than cycling. Cycling, on the other hand, is great for your help and often a lot more fun, dangers aside. I’ve had a community of cyclists everywhere I live, and I am grateful for that connection. If someone handed me the keys to a Bentley tomorrow, I’d probably give it back. Just like, if someone told me tomorrow that I could switch genders with no consequences, I’d probably say, “no thank you” and go back to advocating for women’s rights instead.
I’d rather dance this delicate dance, slowly adding to the critical mass, advocating for increased cycling as a change that’s good for drivers, too, and trying to restructure privilege itself rather than trying to take down those who have it. And when I think about it, my approach to social change is no different. When more ways of being are accepted in the world, and when we build our systems around what all humans want and not just what those in power feel entitled to, we are all better off.
In preparing for a talk next week, I came across this quote from urban planner Pietro Anders Calogero‘s PhD dissertation:
Urban planners usually employ technical rationalities, often assuming that this is the only way to rationally approach a policy problem. Technical rationalities imply a uniform world: indeed, a mobile phone and the chemistry of concrete work the same way regardless of our location on the planet. But political rationalities imply localness, peculiarity, and contingency.
It is possible to substitute virtually any profession for “urban planners” above, even those who work in policy. We all want to find the “right answer” – the optimal solution that we can use over and over again, finding efficiencies and giving us useful points of comparison.
The problem is that the technically correct solution and the one that will actually work in a specific political context are usually very different. That’s why, in international development scholarship, we’ve started to talk about “second-best” solutions – acknowledging that they might not be ideal, but that it’s better to implement something that’s suboptimal on paper than one that’s a flop in practice.
One great way to think about this is the bicycle helmet paradox. Safety experts always recommend wearing a helmet; in many accidents, they save lives. However, in places where helmets are required, fewer people tend to ride, leading to a less safe system overall, with drivers less aware of cyclists. Perversely, discussions over helmet laws also tend to shift the focus toward individual behavior and away from the infrastructure improvements that have a much larger impact on collective safety.
In other words, when dealing with humans, we should be mindful of the gap between the technically correct option (in our eyes) and the one that is likely to work.
I preach about this all the time in my work – the fallacies of big data, the challenges of using technology to solve social problems – but in my own projects, I am just as likely to get stuck pushing for the perfect solution when it simply isn’t possible to get people to behave that way.
None of us get to make decisions in perfect information environments. Even big data is no match for the uncertainty of human behavior. But when we accept political rationalities – the “localness, peculiarity, and contingency” of each place in time – we begin to see opportunities for solutions that we can actually implement, right now.
It’s a good reminder, to me, that it’s okay for some things to be “imperfect.” Real perfection is in the embrace of the possible.
Last Sunday, I spoke at TEDxUofW. It was hands down the most difficult public speaking experience of my life to-date. Normally, I like to be in front of a microphone, and I enjoy distilling things into short talks or other pieces. This time, I made it so much harder.
I wanted very much to distill my work into a single ten-minute speech. People keep asking how I do what I do, what it really is, and why I am so passionate about it. As someone who used to define herself as a professional communicator, I am frustrated to discover that I still cannot do this.
Instead, I’d like to break it down into some component parts that may be more effective than a one-size-fits-all talk.
Today, I’ll start with the basics: the infrastructure of the modern workplace. Work does so much more than take up time and energy in our lives. It shapes how we behave outside of work. It can even shape who we are in the world.
Let me use an example. A few days ago, I spoke with a reporter from Crosscut about an upcoming campaign by the Seattle Department of Transportation to encourage behavior change among commuters. If the viaduct crumbles, traffic in parts of the city is going to get even worse – quickly – and we will all need to adjust quickly. That can mean working odd hours. It can mean switching to bus or bike. Whatever people choose, the goal is the same. We need to get cars off the road.
While I fully support efforts to educate people and encourage them to make better choices, this is not a marketing problem. It’s an infrastructure problem. If employers expect everyone to work from 8:00 or 9:00 am to somewhere between 5:00 and 6:00 pm, we will always have a rush hour. If adequate public transit infrastructure is not in place, people will continue to drive. If there is not enough housing located close to work, cycling and walking will be available only to a select few people. And if we don’t consider the needs of working families with children who must attend school or daycare within certain hours, we will see fewer people choose to have children and more demand for two-car garages by those who do.
People are pretty brilliant. We naturally optimize for our own well-being within the constraints of the world around us. Since I run my own schedule, I have been able to manage my commute however serves me best, including by avoiding peak bus times. I also just moved to a place much closer to the other places I need to go during the day. I’ve wanted to be here for a while, but I needed to reach a certain level of revenue before a move to my new neighborhood was feasible. I live a nearly car-free lifestyle and could not be happier – possible only because I am able to run my life in the way that works for me.
In order for a campaign like this one to work, employers have to be on board. They need to allow employees to manage their schedules however works best for them. If they want people to cycle to work, they need to provide showers and other infrastructure. They need to provide childcare and other amenities for working parents. They need to trust their staff to work remotely or split their time between home and office, based on whatever works best for them as human beings. And that, in the modern framework, is a tall order.
Somewhere on the path to corporate citizenship, we began treating corporations as very powerful individuals themselves rather than what they truly are: frameworks that allow large numbers of people to collaborate toward particular goals. Rather than relying on the self-motivation of those people to do that work and reach those goals, the modern corporation is a beast of punishment. It is an engine that runs on carrots and sticks.
Bonuses and other incentives mask terrible work environments in a papier-mache layer of money; contracts and penalties keep people dragging themselves to their desks solely for fear of what will happen to their ability to survive if they leave. A relatively absent social safety net links all of us to our employers in a relationship of perceived total dependency, and a culture that penalizes unemployment keeps people from leaving even toxic relationships until they have found another employer whose arms they can leap into.
Here’s the thing: It doesn’t have to be that way.
I should clarify: I am for companies. I am for corporations. I am immensely proud to share a city with corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks that lift up the community and use their power to improve people’s lives. I hope one day to grow my own work up into an organization that can do similar things for the world.
However, when it comes to the way companies treat labor, I see tremendous room for improvement. There’s that old adage: “We asked for labor, and people came.” Many companies have responded to this by trying to make people less like people and more like machines (money in –> productivity out). I think we can respond to it by trying to make labor more human.
In my TEDx talk, I described several projects I have executed solely by tapping into people’s intrinsic motivations. Every time I have put on a massive collaborative project, I have done so from a place of zero authority. I had no formal authority over other sections of the U.S. Embassy in Poland when I put together the New Media/New Democracy Forum. I was not in charge of other agencies, other countries’ embassies, or the local organizations who partnered with us in Afghanistan for the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence. I certainly had no hard power over the team and partners that came together for Hack to End Homelessness. In order to get anything done, I had to adapt the structure of the work to accommodate what people wanted to do and how they wanted to do it.
In each case, the results were phenomenal – far better than any work I ever got done thanks to being able to tell underlings what to do. This shaped me as a manager. I view management, including project management, as a role equal to all the others. I may provide the hub of the enterprise, but without the support of each and every spoke, I cannot form a wheel. Using this approach, I have been able to do meaningful work in a meaningful way – without ever having to incentivize people with money. In fact, when I have introduced money into these initiatives, that’s precisely the moment when their energy begin to slip away.*
Science backs me up on this. I often refer people to Dan Pink’s phenomenal TED talk, “The Puzzle of Motivation,” for a summary of what we know about what motivates people. The gist of it is this: fear, most often triggered through competition, is a finite source of motivation. It can push people for a short amount of time to perform very basic tasks.
To unlock the creativity that is required for solving complex problems, however, people need to be liberated from fear. Competition doesn’t work. Punishments don’t work. Even prizes don’t work. People need the space to explore their own creative capacity and think expansively about what they want from the world.
Which brings me back to labor. In the current structure of work, it is difficult if at all possible for most people to tap into that creative energy. As a result, employees can only do what they are told, with diminishing value on their time the longer they do it. It is no wonder that people burn out so quickly – even when, like me, they absolutely love the work they are supposed to be doing.
Working in an inhumane bureaucracy is like putting a glass jar over a burning candle and then wondering why the flame goes out (or worse, blaming the candle itself).
The candle is still there. It works beautifully. The wick wants nothing more than to burn. It loves the work it was made to do in the world.
Yet instead of lifting up the jar, we keep lighting new matches. Employers try the same old tricks of carrots and sticks. We rely on brief respites – weekends, brief vacations, and increasingly, sabbaticals – to keep up our self-esteem, but it never works for long. We design projects that give us little bursts of oxygen so we can keep going and still get recognition for being who we used to be. Eventually, gasping for air within these tight containers, we lose touch with who we really are. Even if we do get the courage to leave, it can take years for us to rediscover our passions and re-ignite our flame in a way we can sustain.
My work in the world is to prove that it’s okay for all of us – parents, children, teachers, employers, and government bureaucrats – to lift the jar. The structure of work should empower humans, not try to turn them into machines. (That’s what the machines are for, anyway.) We can give people time, space, and tools to rediscover who they are. Then, we can honor who they are by asking them to do the work they love in the way that works for them. When we do this, my friends, we will have an infinite well of energy and creativity with which to make life better for everyone. When we replace fear with love, there is no problem in the world we cannot solve.
But I’m not waiting for the powerful bureaucracies to change. I weaseled my way out from under the jar, and over the last couple of years, I have rediscovered what lights my fire. I encourage everyone else in the world to do the same. Then and only then will labor be forced to become human again.
* That does not mean I do not pay people or ensure they are otherwise being compensated for their contributions. People cannot offer their gifts if their basic needs are not being met, and the way we meet those needs in our society is with money. I firmly believe that we need to find better ways as a society to pay people to build the things we need – releasing ourselves from structures of ownership and intellectual property – but that’s for another time.
Yesterday, I attended the annual benefit luncheon for YWCA, one of our partners from Hack to End Homelessness. YWCA provides a safety net for women in our community by offering housing support, employment services, and the reassurance that women have somewhere to turn. As one of the speakers put it yesterday, what YWCA really does help women “get out of survival mode” – that stressed-out, fear-driven state where everything feels impossible.
Once they turn the corner from survival into life, these women go on to do amazing things. Eighty-six percent of people exiting YWCA housing facilities move on to more stable housing. Six in ten job seekers find work. Children (98 percent of those who participate in YWCA’s programs) go on to meet developmental milestones and/or enroll in kindergarten. The impact of simply caring for people’s basic needs is tremendous.
That should be no surprise to anyone. “Survival mode” is a killer – literally. When we believe that our survival is on the line, we live in constant fear. We avoid risks, even when those risks may be necessary to exit survival mode. We become emotionally unstable, viewing everyone around us as a threat, even those who are trying to help. This mental state reinforces itself, convincing us that there is no way out. It strikes me that the most important thing YWCA does for people is to be there for them, reassuring them that they will survive, and helping them shift toward medium-term and long-term solutions.
While not all of us have experienced the levels of personal, generational, and network poverty faced by one in three women-led households in the United States, we have all experienced “survival mode.”
We’ve had to work for bosses who constantly hold over us the threat to fire us and destroy our reputations.
We have been in relationships that we felt we could not live without, even when they were not meeting our needs.
We have had long-dreamed-of opportunities within our reach and shrank back, terrified that we would not be able to manage the disruption to our known world.
Even when we are far removed from the true survival pressures faced by billions of people on our planet, we are stuck moving through life with cortisol and noradrenaline sabotaging us through our brains and bloodstreams. We gain weight, feel depressed, and worry about whether we’ll be okay.
The current social paradigm in the United States keeps us in survival mode all the time. We often disconnect from our family networks to pursue careers in what is referred to as a “dog-eat-dog world.” Everything, even doing good (or pretending to do good), is a competitive sport.
A scene from season two of HBO’s “Silicon Valley”
Does this seem insane to anyone else? Why, in an era of so much plenty, when for most of us, survival is a guarantee, do we continue to be stuck in survival mode? And what can we do to get out of it?
The answer is simple. “Survival mode” is a state of mind. It is harder to battle the closer you are to death, but even then, survival mode is a psychological state – one humans have been stuck in for most of our history, and one we are ready to transcend. To do so, we need to communicate to our egos that everything is going to be okay. Here are a few ways to do that:
First, we can remind ourselves what the edge of survival really looks like. Volunteering with or at least learning about the work of service providers like YWCA can show us just how okay we really are. Philanthropic giving gives us a psychological boost. These activities remind us that, at least from a basic-needs standpoint, we are going to be okay.
Second, we can think back to situations we thought we would never get out of, but somehow did. We may never wish to go back there, but we can eliminate the fear of survival by reminding ourselves that we have survived. We can thank the people who were there for us when things were not okay.
Finally, we can, very intentionally, create support networks in our communities, much like YWCA staff do for their clients. We can remind our friends that they will always have a place to stay and food to eat. We can help them think through the worst-case scenarios and let them know how we will be there for them if those scenarios comes to pass. Recognizing that we all go through times of shortage and plenty, we can create a social safety net of our own.
By living generously, we release ourselves and others from survival mode.
When that happens, we can all go forth and do great things. We can bring our gifts into the world – works of art, acts of service, feats of engineering, study of puzzling problems, resolution of conflict, inspiring stories, management of complex systems, leadership in difficult situations, the next generations of human life. By giving freely to one another, we not only ensure our own survival, we make life richer for ourselves and everyone around us.
So get out there. Know that you will survive. Build communities where no human is left behind. And then, together, let’s get past survival mode and into the life that awaits.
Candace Writes Here. 