When Not to Use Technology...
Something about liminal space and the alchemy of insight.
This is a shorter post today. We’re up to our ears in builders and decorators who will be with us for a few weeks, and today is the first day. It's such fun…… Hopefully, we'll be sort of organised by Sunday…..
Regarding technology, I’m as big, or maybe bigger, an addict than many. I find it fascinating (and, of course, shiny). I play with it and learn how to use it, and before I know it, find it integrated into my ways of working, and develop a quiet dependency. In an earlier part of my life, I could read an ordnance survey map without effort - a quick glance would etch an image in my mind of topography, from gradients and rivers to power lines and churches. Now, like most of us, I use my iPhone, which does none of those things, but it will tell me where the nearest restaurants are with recommendations as it assumes my priorities.
A few years ago, when I smashed up my hand, I took to using the dictation and transcription features and enjoyed their ease. However, it took a conscious effort to return to the magic of the sensation and relationship of ink on paper.
Technology creates dependency. It makes things easier, but can take us to the point where we forget just what it has made easier. We become something like “skills blind”. Our grandparents could probably name every bird in their area and recognise its song and place in the seasons. Now, we have an app.
The genius of a series 1 Landrover was that you could take it apart and improvise repairs in the middle of a forest or desert. Try that with a Tesla.
There are at least eight different types of nostalgia. As America currently bathes in two of them -Restorative and Collective Nostalgia, focused on recreating the past and returning to how things used to be, often with a belief that the past was superior, we are in danger of missing out on a more generative and warranted form - Reflective Nostalgia - that celebrates the past, what is has brought and what it enables without having to recreate it. We seem to be at a point of creation through destruction in Schumpeterian style, or as one of my Indian friends noted, from a time of Vishnu, the “Operating deity”, to Shiva, the destroyer who clears the way for new growth.
As Donald Trump goes all Shiva, evokes an idea of American exceptionalism, and harnesses the vast resources, real and imagined, at his disposal, we have a choice—to fear it or to recognise it. In many ways, no matter what we might think of what he's doing, it certainly ends the hope of the “old order” that everything will return to normal.
Things will change as America puts everything on Red, with a reputed 3 trillion dollar investment in AI. Those organisations, from Corporations to Governments, who are fodder for the Wendigo being unleashed, are unlikely to provide meaningful shelter, regardless of their intentions.
Those of us who have been brought up and trained to service the system being dismantled have some serious thinking to do as professions and occupations we have assumed to be secure turn out not to be, and we find ourselves asking, what do we actually do?
Gaping Void captured it well in their post this morning:
I believe this is a time for artisans of every sort, from those who make things to those who think things, as we get to grips with rapidly changing work environments. Entire work ecosystems will be upended and recreated; there will be many unintended consequences and a need to improvise, innovate and invent.
Artisans occupy the spaces where either AI cannot go, or it is unprofitable to go. In the spaces where connection is made, insights beyond data generated, and meaning found.
It is a liminal space, between worlds, where modern alchemy sits alongside the relentless logic of data, and explores the places where technology not only cannot go, but is counterproductive when it does, because it has a limited imagination.
AI will create maps but cannot read them in the way we can because, as we know, the map is not the territory. We will need modern-day workshops, ateliers, and other spaces for community outside of organisations limited by the need for short-term profit. New Artisans is but one of them, a tiny node in a network of connected conversations, but we have to start somewhere.
And I think we’ve probably started.