Seventh aphorism of Scholem

Esoterism, Judaism

I have been very slowly reading Gershom Scholem’s mysterious “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on the Kabbalah”. This is the seventh:

As the actual misfortune of the Kabbalah (as with many nonindigenous forms of mysticism), one ought to consider the doctrine of emanation. The insights of the Kabbalah concern the structure of what exists. Nothing would be more disastrous than to confuse the connections of this structure with the doctrine of emanation. This confusion perverts its promising formulations in favor of the most comfortable and intellectually lazy of all theories. Cordovero would be much more at home as a phenomenologist than as a disciple of Plotinus. The attempt to construct the thought of the Kabbalists without the doctrine of emanation (and to think it through to the end)would have to pay the debt that a true disciple of Cordovero would incur, if one should ever exist. In the form of theosophical topography, which Kabbalistic teachings have assumed in the literature, its objective content remains inaccessible. The conflict between mystical nominalism and its light symbolism in Kabbalistic writings derives from the irreconcilable tension between the Kabbalists’ most significant intentions and their inability to help bring these to pure expression.

To evert subjectivity into object is — and I mean this as literally as I can mean anything — the original sin of religion. And to evert religion back to its proper relational (participatory) non-form is esoterism’s proper goal, within religion.

As I’ve said before, every subjectivity is an objectivity within which certain kinds of objects of experience (intentional objects) are taken (conveived, perceived, -ceived) as givens. Our subjects — both personal subjects (I, we) and academic subjects (subjects of study) — are finite manifestations within the infinite subject, God, who transcends not only every possible subjectivity and objectivity, but subjectivity and objectivity, per se. This is the most radical panentheism, the dialectical sublation of subject-object.

Radical panentheism is the hermetic androgyne, which today’s antireligious fundamentalists misread as gender fluidity, and cling to and enforce as sacrosanct doctrine.

Fundamentalism is the original sin taken to extremes. The fundamentalist is oblivious to the first-person garden, experiencing only the third-person objects of the garden. The foreground eclipses the divine background. Fundamentalists compulsively grasp at and mis-comprehend finite “holy” things instead cultivating awareness of who comprehends us even as we comprehend the myriad things of the world.

Twenty years ago I thought myself into social alienation. I learned that human beings need shared truth or they lose community. I’m thinking my way back to the same places now, but this time I have company. Scholem, Kaplan, Schaya, Idel…

My next sacred pamplet will be Everso.

An attempt to unfold the Sefirot

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Judaism

People have asked me to explain the Sefirot. It is not something that can be explained. It is not an object of knowledge. The Sefirot must be entered and known-from. It is a subject of study.

The sefirot is the crystallization of a Jewish esoteric enworldment. First, it must be understood from a panentheistic perspective that situates all that can be given as real within a divine beyond-being that is essentially unknowable. However, this beyond-being occasionally births surprising new being from its own (apparent) Nothingness. Until we intuit and internalize this situation, none of the rest of the Sefirot can unfold in understanding. It remains a welter and waste of symbols — a perplexity that makes even simple ignorance seem lucid by comparison. But once this panentheistic enception is born in us, the understanding erupts forth and embraces the world, infusing it with meaning — or rather, revealing the meaning inherent within reality. We suddenly feel the necessity of balance in apparent opposites. We know that love without limits and limits without love destroy both self and other. We sense that unconstrained progress and static stability destroy all possibility of living, steady improvement. We recognize that tradition and institution must perpetually reform in order to live, and that these are needed for meaningful life.

Once this enworldment becomes given truth for us — once it isn’t a doctrinal fact-system, but a faith — a glance at the Sefirot is a prayer. We might be diffused by practical life, scattered, made vague and dull. But with a comprehending glance, lightning strikes from above and below, connecting above and below, with a flash of ascending and descending light. Descending: Where are you? Ascending: Here I am.

A sacred symbol is a visual prayer.

Ein sof – Unbounded – Unknowable, infinite beyond-being. To us, pregnant Nothingness — inexhaustible wellspring of surprise.

Keter – Crown – Finitude, per se. Finite being, defined against but devoted to infinite beyond-being. The inner surface of tzimtzum. To us, the principle of panentheism.

Chokhmah – Wisdom – Intuition of All, as yet enfolded, undeveloped, charged with potential. To us, the flash of knowing, preceding knowledge. Enception.

Binah – Understanding – Unfolding knowledge. Alchemical “adaptation”. To us, intelligibility. Conception.

Chesed – Love – Grace, mercy, lovingkindness. Self-transcending We.

Gevurah – Power – Limitation, boundary, law. Self-defining Us.

Tif’eret – Beauty – Balance, harmony, perfection, completeness, rightness. The bringing together of difference into manifest wholeness.

Netsach – Eternity – Agency, initiative, command. Compulsion to take action, challenge, innovate, effect change.

Hod – Splendor – Devotion, receptivity, obedience. Inclination to accept, respond, participate, shelter, conserve.

Yesod – Foundation – Establishment, tradition, teaching and learning, dynamic stability.

Malchut – Kingdom – Meaningful world. Divine presence in given reality. Also, Shekinah, divine feminine.

Closer and further

Philosophy, Religion

Charles Sanders Peirce:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. …

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

Nietzsche:

The two principles of the new life. —

First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon.

Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.

Latour:

Religion does not even try… to reach anything beyond, but to represent the presence of that which is called in a certain technical and ritual idiom the “Word incarnate” — that is to say again that it is here, alive, and not dead over there far away. It does not try to designate something, but to speak from a new state that it generates by its ways of talking, its manner of speech. Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blase, bored.

Conversely, science has nothing to do with the visible, the direct, the immediate, the tangible, the lived world of common sense, of sturdy “matters of fact.” Quite the opposite, as I have shown many times, it builds extraordinarily long, complicated, mediated, indirect, sophisticated paths so as to reach the worlds… that are invisible because they are too small, too far, too powerful, too big, too odd, too surprising, too counterintuitive, through concatenations of layered instruments, calculations, models.

Boundless

Judaism

I am bothered by objective theological accounts of divine time or space or being.

Divinity has no outer edge, and so it cannot be defined or known objectively. Until we grasp this fact, any attempt to think religion is rooted in a category mistake that leads directly into a ditch of doctrinal nonsense. If this root idea is incomprehensible, a person is better off not thinking at all, and, rather, taking a purely devotional or practical path into religious life. Thinking objectively about religion will only damage one’s relationship to One.

If we are to approach religion with the intellect, we must start with knowing that there is absolutely nothing against which infinity (qualitative infinity, not to be confused with quantitative infinity, which is a relative infinity) can be seen as object. By definition infinity is all-encompassing and all-inclusive. Whatever is not-infinite must be encompassed within infinity as an intrinsic part of it. Even nothingness itself is encompassed within infinity.

Ein sof is real to us as only as uncomprehending acceptance of this unknowable point preceding the ultimate point of departure, Keter, where the possibility of finitude is established within the infinite. If I am not mistaken, Rosenzweig’s Aught and Naught is born within Keter.

So the opposition is all-inclusively infinite superset versus exclusive finite subset. There is nothing that is not entirely of God, but there is nothing that is the entirety of God, except God. In this view, the only contrast that matters is the purity of one’s orientation to the all-inclusive. This is an everted purity. Mundane purity is a matter of excluding all non-essential elements. The infinite is essentially all-inclusive, so here impurity is a matter of any exclusion of anything however vile, worthless or trivial.

Hazards of monotheism

Judaism

Susan reminded me of something Dara Horn said in a talk we attended last Thursday. She said that what has gotten Jews in trouble throughout history* is Judaism’s stubborn refusal to worship political gods.

Telling people that the bullshit they worship is not, in fact, God is an eternally unpopular act. It’ll get you ostracized in a hurry. And if you keep going, it will get you killed.

And Jews didn’t just point their critiques outward. Jews pointed their critiques inward, too, at their own rulers, priests and population. Jewish prophets were possible because of Judaism’s uncompromising monotheism. They knew the difference between the one and only God, and the myriad human imposters who attempt to usurp God’s place, and replace the transcendent God with some all-too-immanent monarch, aristocratic gang, make-believe divine character or ideology. This rebuking of anyone — including oneself, one’s own rulers and one’s own people is intrinsic to the Jewish tradition, and Jesus was very much a part of it.

Today, too many Jews worship political gods. They see themselves, no doubt, as prophets who critique the false nationalist god, Israel. But what they really do is criticize a nation for defending itself against an international theocratic totalitarian movement who will stop at nothing to annihilate it. And they refuse to acknowledge this basic fact because they are Progressivist ideoidolators, who worship a set of incredibly spurious beliefs as a god, and have lost the capacity for normal moral discernment and reasoning. To quote one exceptional Jew, “they strain gnats and swallow camels.” As I mentioned in my last post, they are driven not by principles but projections of their own petty emotions. Republicans, whose beliefs are stuck in the 2010s, remind them of their mean daddy, where Islamist dictators, whose beliefs are stuck in the 1200s, are exotic orientals who remind them of dangerous revolutionary possibilities.

Note: Jews were persecuted even before the wholesale theft of its scripture, divine status, tradition and land by the world’s two largest religions, who repaid the Jewish people with incessant persecution for the dire offense of continuing to exist past their expiration date.

Misusing esoteric symbols

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy

I have a long habit of turning esoteric symbol systems into all-purpose concept models.

Two of the most dramatic examples: the trigrams (and hexagrams) of the I Ching and the Sefirot of Kabbalah.

When I interrogate myself on what I genuinely believe, I find that I I believe that this (mis)use of esoteric symbol systems that is the ground of their validity. It is primarily their value in practical use — helping us make sense of our own subjective experience, inspiring, motivating and animating our responses (or non-responses) and guiding our actions — that suggests that they are “true” beyond this sense-making use.

But I am a Pragmatist, and I’m not sure that I believe that truth is meaningful beyond this kind of practical use.

To repeat, the value of these models is threefold. They can help us live more lucidly, meaningfully and skillfully.* And I think it is important that the models engage us intuitively, that is, in a way that transcends what is explicitly sayable. This is the power of concept models, both in design and in religion. These models reach beneath language and help our intuitions organize themselves into living faiths, instead of forcing intuitions to push paper in the bureaucracy of talk — essentially enslaving them to doctrine.

All art and design derive their power from transcending the centralized control of language, which filters out all but the commonest experiences.

Note: * This, of course, is a paraphrasing of Liz Sanders’s Useful, Usable, Desirable framework, which is itself a concept model of supreme importance. It is, in fact, a mundane expression the Great Triad: Earth, Man, Heaven.

Earth is What-lucidity, that is objective mastery. Man is How-skill, that is practical effectiveness. Heaven is Why-meaning, a capacity to experiencing value, positive or negative.

The downside of modernity, especially its scientific aspects, is that it emphasized What/Is/Usable/Earth and How//Can/Useful/Man to the exclusion (or more, the compartmentalization) of Why/Ought/Desirable/Heaven. We got amazing at explaining and manipulating the physical world. We developed myriad techniques for doing whatever we want. We accomplished this by bracketing all questions of meaning. When scientists ask “why?”, they are not asking for a meaningful why, they are asking for a causal account, “how?”

In late modernity Why/Ought/Desirable/Heaven part of life has been sawed off from everything else entirely, and quarantined in museums, theaters and religious spaces. During the day, we are scientific, practical and dutiful, doing things without any Why at all, pretending very unconvincingly to be “passionate” about our drudgery. At night, after we’ve used ourselves up doing meaningless tasks all day, we try to regain some meaning through entertainments and spiritual stuff, and it fails to replenish us.

And this is why we can do anything we set our minds and hands to, but we find it harder and harder to want any particular thing. We have a crisis of caring. We are nihilists because our ways of understanding fail to take seriously the problems of value and meaning. We are forced to emotionally hype ourselves up to care about anything outside our most mundane needs. We project our own petty childhood feelings onto the world stage, finding stand-ins for our shitty moms, dads, friends, teachers — maybe movies or stories that touched us as kids — and wherever these projections fail, we force them into some shape we can feel about, or we just drift off into confused apathy, or cosmic generalizations that license indifference and dress it up as wise detachment. This is why, once our kids are taught the correct way to think about the world, they fall into hysterical despair and display every symptom of distress. We know damn well we damaged them, but we shout over our intuitions and call them prejudiced and phobic.

Fact is, we have no idea how to make sense of the world and continue participating in it — and at the same time, care about it. That can change, but we are resistant most of all to what will save us. We’re too clever for any human way of being. The theories of physics and our good standing with our fellow nihilists is far more important to us than living lives we can love.

antipost

NOTA

I’ve noticed I’ve become repelled by the “post-” prefix. I know it has its uses, but it has been overused too frequently, by the wrong people, with too much enthusiasm, for too many problematic purposes, and now it is musty, backwards and part of an oppressive orthodoxy who still hasn’t noticed it is the furthest thing from what it imagines itself to be.

I declare this trend not only dead, but long-dead and rotted away to wet putrescence, the furthest point from both life and rebirth.

Toward a Theory of General Multistability

Design, Holarchy, Murmurations, Philosophy

This article builds on two previous articles, “The Click” and “The Philosophical Click”. It also builds on my murmuration articles — my “murmurata”.

Any click is the rapid change of stability in an order, from one stable state to another. It is almost as if stability under stress builds up static energy that discharges itself in an instant of recrystallized stability.

There are many kinds of multistable orders, each with its own kind of click.

The gestaltists observed perceptual multistabilities. The phenomenologists and hermeneutic philosophers (I believe) observed conceptual multistabilities, which form not only our understandings but our spontaneous interpretations of whatever we encounter. The postphenomenologists focused on equipment-mediated multistabilities. Depth psychologists observed psychological multistabilities, and called them complexes. I do not know if ethnomethodologists speak of multistabilities, but they should. (Socially, we act within the rules of an ethos to make sense to others and to understand the actions of others — and we navigate the hazards of multistability to attempt to avoid misunderstanding or being misunderstood. We can take (perceive, conceive) any given action “the wrong way”, a way other than intended.) Then there is the world of cybernetics and systems theory. Adaptive systems have responsive multistabilization abilities. They are, what Koestler called holons, whole-parts existing and subsisting within a holarchy.

All these multistabilities are crucially important to designers. Designers work with (and often against) multistabilities. We try to stabilize systems of participation, where a person spontaneously takes the system as given (as intended) and responds in a way that supports that system. The response is often — and ideally — not explicitly thought about. Often people barely notice their interpretations and responses. They respond with natural instinct or second-natural habit.

Our various options for participating in social systems can be viewed as practical multistability. We can work support systems as they exist currently by cooperating and contributing to their stability. Or we can undermine systems by destabilizing them, perhaps in order to dissolve them and reconstitute them in a new stable order.

Radical pluralists cultivate awareness of all the kinds and possibilities of multistability. Whatever seems to us a given truth is always a function of what we can take (-ceive), and what we can take — further constrained by what we will take — is a matter of the myriad stabilities surrounding us and within us.

My better judgment

Design

One nugget of wisdom I try to pass along to younger designers:

Your job is to inform judgment, not to impose it.

Paradoxically, judgment becomes less arrogant as it matures, improves and becomes genuinely superior.

I learned this lesson the hardest way. I’ll be paying down my debt for the rest of my life.

Anaximander:

Beings must pay penance
and be judged for their injustices,
in accordance with the ordinance of time.

 

The temporalite

Fables, myths & parables

There is a type of person everyone will recognize.

Everyone recognizes him because there is one of him at all times in every social circle.

This kind of person wakes up one day and realizes that this truth and this reality which seems so spatially, temporally, metaphysically capacious is the slenderest experiential thread, fed through the tiniest eye of a needle: I, here, now.

This allegedly infinitely capacious and enduring universe, filled with so many people, places, things and events, is just a film reel, and at each moment, the entirety of reality is confined to one celluloid square made entirely of mind. We watch square after square after square, and our memory creates a vast world of space, time, truth and history.

As tiny 6-year-old kids we go to school and sit in desks, and are trained to perpetually remember (re-member) a world where brains are the organs of mind, where history happened in the past, where science and mathematics precisely describes what actually exists and how reality actually behaves, where some actions, beliefs and attitudes are bad and other actions, beliefs and attitudes are good, and so on and so on.

The thread glides through the needle’s eye. The celluloid squares are projected upon the screen. Soon we are fixated and immersed in a story that is so real to us that we stop noticing our own role in that story. We lose ourselves in an infinite eternity of reality.

Inevitably this person we all know gets really excited, starts talking loudly and rapidly and obscurely, striking prophetic poses and their company becomes intolerable* — and this goes on indefinitely, until that person finally realizes that this happens all the time to huge numbers of people, and each one of them is the first to whom it has happened in the story they are living.

Note: I call this phenomenon “metannoying”. See what I did there? Metanoia + annoying? I need to submit this word to my nonexistent newsletter dedicated to disseminating newly minted words of this kind. The newsletter is called The Reportmanteau.

The eternalite

Fables, myths & parables

Once upon a time there was a man who no longer existed in time.

He experienced only the manifestation of eternal archetypes in what, within the limitations of mind occur in time, but freed from mind, eternally was-am-will-be.

He did not always experience things this way. As a small child he was, like the rest of us, caught in the universal time-delusion. He, like the rest of us, lived his life as if it were an unfolding personal story.

But then, one day, an epiphany came to him, eternity irrupted, and from that moment to his death, time was no more.

His friends, still imprisoned in time, witnessed his temporal exit with uncomprehending awe. None of their lives would ever be the same — never again.

His life, however, liberated from time, had always been the same, and always would be.

On the subject of subjects

Enworldment, Philosophy
  1. Never forget the etymology of the word “data”. Data is that which is given. And what can be given is limited by what we can — and will — receive.
  2. When a person says “objectively true” when what they really mean is “absolutely true”, this is data for those with ears to hear what it means.
  3. A personal subject and an academic subject is a subject in precisely the same sense.

Unpleasant left-liberal musings

Ethics, Politics

Can we stop pretending that efficiencies ever serve meaning?

The perpetual false promise: X technology will help us do our meaningless tasks more efficiently, and free up time to spend on more meaningful work.

No. When we do meaningless tasks more efficiently it means we can allot less time to the work. And that meaningful work that woven so awkwardly into the meaningless tasks is now squeezed all the way out. Now we can do twice as much work in the same amount of time. And half the workforce can be cut.

That is how things actually go down.

Another unpleasant truth to understand: When there is a need for exploitative labor, people are exploited. When there is no need for exploitative labor, people are eliminated.

This is why equality is a reasonable political goal. Only roughly even distribution of power guarantees general human dignity. Equality is a means to liberal goals, and not an end. When equality becomes an end in itself, we enter a politics of envy and resentment, which is the dark heart of illiberal leftism.

If a free market actually delivers roughly even distribution of wealth, it is a good thing. If it delivers gross inequality, it is a bad thing. A free market is a means to liberal goals, and not an end. When a free market becomes an end in itself, we enter a politics of pure greed, which is the dark heart of — I’ll coin it, now: illibertarianism.

Martin Shaw

Biography, Enworldment

Susan and I went on a short road trip this weekend, and spent some of our time in the car together listening to a lecture by Martin Shaw. Shaw is a storyteller and mythologist, a sort of reflective practitioner of mythtelling. His speech is poetic, and uses rhythm and repetition in a way that reminds me of James Dickey.

This talk was about a great many topics, but they all orbit around how mythical stories can reconnect us with fugitive parts of ourselves. They can help us find our way back to what he calls a “wild integrity.” If that expression makes your heart race slightly, you should definitely listen to his whole talk. The talk is filled with beautiful and consequential phrases, which Shaw always gently repeats and surrounds with just the right amount of silence. These little incantations do some of the same inner-reconnection work he describes myth doing.

Shaw is interesting not only as a source of information, but also as an exemplar. He manages to come off as primordially timeless — but, somehow, at the same time, Gen-X to the bone. In doing so, he offers something that art in its routine pastichery has forgotten. He offers an enworldment — a new way to inhabit our lives — a practical vision that we can enter and live from. This is what all great art offers us when it emerges and renews our sense of meaning. This was the true gift of the Ramones. What Shaw offers really does feel like a home.

Listening to him I realized how much I prize myth as a creative genre. Myth is a style of narrative abstraction, meaning that it discards all but a certain kind of truth. My favorite Borges stories have it. Casares has it. Asimov’s “Nightfall” has it. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, especially the prologue, is mythic. Dylan’s best songs have mythic lyrics. My inner-eye spontaneously visualizes all these stories in the same style, and this style is a reliable earmark. If my imagination responds to something I read or hear with this style of image, that something is mythic.

But I want to return to the enworldment question. I want to read some of Martin Shaw’s books, and so I did something I’ve been doing a lot of lately: asking ChatGPT to play librarian. “I’m interested in Martin Shaw. What should I read by him?”

It gave me a list. I won’t copy and paste it, because I’ve realized that hearing about other people’s AI adventures is even more tedious than listening to their dreams. ChatGPT asked me why I wanted to read him. And because I believe what ails our time is a crisis of inspiration I responded “I’m interested in myth as a way to reconnect with the desirability dimension of design — especially design of one’s own enworldment.”

And it then asked “Would you say your interest is more in personal enworldment (crafting how you experience reality) or shared enworldment (shaping the desirability of collective systems)?”

My own answer surprised me: “It has to be both! We need modes of self-determination that relate us — not alienate us — from others.”

In this overdue book stuck inside me — one that I now refer to constantly while reading almost anything else — where I play a tilted vision of philosophy, design and religion against each other like chords… In my overdue book, this opening-out and relating quality is what religion brings to philosophy (saving it from solipsism) and to design (saving it from empty production for empty consumption). The name of this saving relational power is Keter.

Inner and outer self-determination that deepens, strengthens and intensifies our relationships — with each other, with the world around us, with all of ourselves (tame and wild), and, most of all, with this radically shocking infinity who surrounds us and saturates us, in whom we live, in whom we participate, who wants something from us. Hineini.

Rambling on about self-formation

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Extended Self

When children engage in repetitive play, it generates habits of personhood. It is important to be patient and allow them to be repetitive, however tedious it might feel after the zillionth repetition. I find it helpful to meditate on what kind of adulthood might grow from whatever habits form in various kinds of repetitive play.

The analogue for adults is ritual. Rituals can be intentional, such as religious observances, or secular (or semi-secular) routines like exercise or other practical self-maintenance activities. Or they can be accidental, like habitually consuming certain kinds of media, playing games or performing routinized work tasks.

Prayers are verbal-mental rituals. They bring us back to a way of understanding the world along with the emotional attitudes that naturally attend that understanding. Obsessive-compulsive thoughts are a kind of involuntary prayer. Reading challenging books and having challenging conversations can also be prayer.

We also have social rituals that shape our collective existence. Ethnomethods are the meaning-making social habits we use to be understood and to understand others in any given social setting. Nearly all ethnomethods function unconsciously and recede into the background of social life, unless they are not followed, at which point things become awkward or tense. Ethnomethods are a little like well-designed tools, which disappear in use. (Design researchers who know the history of their craft know that much of what we do is rooted less in anthropology than in ethnomethodology, the systematic study of ethnomethods. Lucy Suchman pioneered thinking of physical artifacts as social actors woven into the ethnomethodic social workings of their use contexts. It is sometimes very helpful to think of design flaws as a kind of ethomethodic breach objects commit. Maybe it would be better to reverse what I said. Well-designed tools disappear into the background like ethnomethods, because, in fact, they are materialized ethnomethods,)

Ethnomethods are also verbal and mental. To participate in social sense, we adopt a certain collective vocabulary and logic, and this becomes the conventional wisdom of the group.

I’m flaky enough to believe ethnomethods (enacted by humans and nonhuman) enable distributed cognitive processes that are a conscious being of a group. This seems less far-fetched, once we observe and take seriously how each person’s own mind exhibits intellectual polycentrism among factions and alliances (complexes) within one’s own mind, but that somehow this polycentrism creates a nebulous center who is each person’s I. What shouldn’t this same intra-self consciousness-generating social dynamic be possible between people and generate consciousness that transcends any one of us? I think it is not only possible, I experience it as actual.* (If you like this line of thought, see the extra-extra-flaky note below.)

These verbal and mental ethnomethods are enacted in official communications of organizations; in these cases, they function like group prayer. The mental ethnomethods are repeated in popular news and entertainment media, and then we repeat them in our own conversation. This same vocabulary and logic is, more often than not, adopted by individuals, made habitual through repeated use and internalized as truth.

Like all ethnomenthods, if a person does not participate in verbal and mental ethnomethods, and insists on using idiosyncratic or disharmonious vocabulary or logics, they will create confusion, awkwardness and strain. Severe breaches of verbal and mental ethnomethods have been treated with hemlock.

Our deeply-engained ethnomethods and personal babits are self-generating activities. Whatever we repeat shapes our first-person being — let’s call it first-personality — which in turn shapes our third-person being — our third-personality, or persona — and how we perceive it.

  • Extra-extra-flaky note: For me, super-personal consciousness (also known as egregores) are not a matter of speculation, but is, in fact, a given feature of reality, as manifestly real as gravity.

And I’ll disclose right now — I’m feeling reckless, so why not? — that as service designers, we are intentional shapers of social arrangements within organizations. We attempt to create stable, mutually-beneficial interactions among people through modifications of physical artifacts (touchpoints), processes, policies and social roles.

This means that, whether we know it or like it, we in the egregore summoning business.

I got ever-so-slightly recognized (and I mean almost not at all) in some service design circles for pointing out that the essential medium of service design is organizations. An organization as a discrete social entity. As a disciple of Bruno Latour, I define “social” very broadly, and include within its scope not only humans but everything that supports a social order. Anything social is a human-nonhuman hybrid.

The medium we work with is social — organizations. But what do we actually aim to produce when we design in an organizational medium?

Monocentric designers (UXers, visual, interaction, communication, product designers) often say that, whatever medium they work in, the goal is to produce experiences — individual experiences.

Polycentric designers produce collective experiences, in which each of us partakes as participants, each with their own individual experience.

Right now, service design is heading into a new formalistic phase. It is probably necessary. But we must not lose the inward and qualitative whole as we focus on quantifiable parts.

Jeff Maurer

NOTA

Jeff Maurer has been nailing it this year. I might really have to buy a subscription to his substack.

Today’s headline and preview expresses my own exasperation, but clearly and hilariously:

Why Have We Gotten Bad at Recognizing Bad Guys?

It’s not like bad guys have gotten subtle

It’s strange that some people can’t figure out who the bad guy is in the Russia/Ukraine war. For starters, I thought that “Russia = bad” was nestled deep in every American brain; for years, the three groups that could be blasted to hell with no repercussions in movies and video games were zombies, aliens, and Russians. But more importantly, Putin’s invasion was so egregious that it was almost refreshing; in a world of complex conflicts, it was kind of nice to see a war that made you think “Well, obviously you can’t do that.”

What’s doubly strange is that this is the second time recently that some Americans haven’t been able to recognize evil when it’s practically grinding its pelvis in their faces. The number of people who took Hamas’ side in the Israel/Hamas conflict was shocking. Of course, practically no-one would admit to “taking Hamas’ side”, just as Trump claims that he’s “on the world’s side” — what a hippie! — as he does literally everything that Putin could ever want him to do. I don’t want to over-simplify these conflicts, Ukraine and Israel both have profound flaws, and I don’t want to be the asshole who accuses anyone who disagrees with him of being “on the enemy’s side”. But on the other hand: Come the fuck on. Some people are clearly Team Russia or Team Hamas, and I think an interesting question is: why?…

Another one:

Why Doesn’t Hitler McFuckface Like Us Anymore?

Why won’t this garbage-faced pile of ass cancer do what I want him to do?

Mark Zuckerberg has announced big changes at Meta. The content moderation policies favored by many on the left are out, and the company is rolling back DEI and cozying up to Trump. Zuckerberg also recently went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to criticize the Biden administration and decry the lack of “masculine energy” in the corporate world.

Like many liberals, I’m shocked by this pivot. What happened to the Mark Zuckerberg who, after the 2016 election, kowtowed to progressive lawmakers? Where is the guy who backed left-wing causes and clashedwith conservatives? What’s causing this? Is it something in his personal life? Craven pandering to the new administration? Or is there any chance that it has something to do with more than a decade of people on the left calling him a corrupt plutocrat who might be the biggest pile of shit in the cosmos?

It’s hard to trace the roots of Zuckerberg’s falling out with the left. Maybe it started in 2011, when the guy from The West Wing wrote a big, award-winning movie about how Zuckerberg is a total asshole. That doesn’t happen to most people — it’s really just Zuckerberg and former Oakland A’s manager Art Howe. After the 2016 election, some on the left blamed Facebook for Clinton’s loss, and Cambridge Analytica ended up on the Rachel Maddow show more than Rachel Maddow. In 2020, progressives demanded that Biden take down “new oligarchs” like Zuckerberg, which led to Lina Kahn hunting Zuckerberg with the tenacity of Javier Bardem’s character hunting Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men.

And then there’s this one addressing Musk’s emails, demanding agency employees list five accomplishments from the last week:

All Substack Writers Must Send Me Five Delicious Pasta Recipes by 5 P.M. Friday or Be Shot Out of a Cannon

No YOU’RE being unreasonable!

Of course, I have serious disagreements with him on many topics. But I agree with pretty much nobody, anymore. Interesting and productive disagreement is now brings tears of gratitude to my eyes. Honestly, any symptom of a functioning intuition and independent intellect is a precious shock.

Win-win engineering

Design

Organizations live or die by human behaviors.

If the leaders of a company behave in a way that inspire, encourage coerce or otherwise motivate behaviors within the organization that efficiently and effectively motivate partners and customers to behave in ways that support the organization’s goals, that organization will flourish.

If leaders motivate the wrong behaviors or fail to motivate the right behaviors, and if behaviors within the organization fail to support or undermine an organization’s goals, or if they do so inefficiently or ineffectively, and if, consequently partners and customers stop engaging with the organization, that organization will fail.

Service design begins and ends with behaviors. It begins with what people are currently doing, and it inquires into why people behave the way they do. It ends with systems of behavior that cause an organization to flourish. And it looks for ways to make people want to behave in organization-supporting ways, and to willingly and spontaneously support it because that organization supports what they want.

The best service design inspires genuine loyalty.

I’ve called service design “win-win engineering”.

The convection current of history, redux

History, Philosophy

When we say “I don’t understand,” that can be a confession: “I am, so far, still unable to understand.” Or it can be an assertion “I don’t understand because it is nonsense.”

If we are powerful, we get to decide which way to say it. Are we feeling charitable today? Let’s dialogue and be good listeners. Or is the master feeling impatient and disinclined to suffer fools? We call it like we see it. We scoff at it. Or we angrily send it away. It is entirely our choice. We cannot even imagine a world where it is not we, but someone else, who decides what gets heard or dismissed.

And we have forgotten what it is like to be on the other side of this dynamic.

If we are weak and vulnerable, the decision is far less discretionary. Our leaders might be stupid and boorish or even crazy — but if we don’t get inside their heads and figure out how they see the world, we will be unable to make persuasive appeals to them, or anticipate their next action. And we cannot appear presumptuous, which means to believe our judgment is equal to that of theirs. We must act out their truth to their satisfaction, or suffer consequences. And we cannot rely on public support for our truth. We must learn to make sense of the world to ourselves. The powerful can take shelter in consensus. Everyone knows.

In this way, the weak get smarter, more insightful, more resourceful, and grow stronger, and the strong get more and more complacent and stupid and grow vulnerable.

–x–

–o–

I can’t understand how anyone could think that.”

“I can’t understand how this nonsense is so persuasive to so many people.”

“I don’t understand how I lost power.”

“I don’t get to decide everything, anymore? I must do the persuading?”

“Perhaps there is something I was averse to understanding, and refused to notice and consider.”

“Oh! I understand now.”

“Here is what we must do to change this situation.”

*

The convection current of history.