Translator: Denise RQ Reviewer: Robert Deliman
I'm here to talk about collective intelligence,
and the notion we're all better off if we share what we know,
if we build on what we know and what others know,
and that we're better off
if we approach each other with trust and respect
rather than with fear and raised fists.
I believe this is more important than it's ever been in human history, right now,
because of the technology
and because of the major technological paradigm shift
we're in the middle of right now.
There haven't been that many technological paradigm shifts.
It's a rare event.
So the first was the move from foraging to hunting and gathering.
It wasn't a clean break.
None of these are clean breaks. There's always overlap.
Then, there was the move from hunting and gathering to horticulture -
which means using either a digging stick or a hoe -
then, horticulture to agrarian -
which means using a heavy animal-drawn plow -
then, agrarian to industrial, and now, industrial to informational.
We're in the midst of the informational revolution right now.
The world is changing around us. It's a very exciting time to be alive.
But what are these changes doing to us?
Are we getting smarter or dumber?
Are we getting more selfish or more compassionate?
The unfortunate answer seems to be
we're getting dumber, we're getting more selfish.
Our brains are being rewired to accept nothing but instant gratification.
I've noticed this myself.
In the last handful of years, I've seen my own attention span shrink.
In the Wi-Fi years, the YouTube years,
the download-whatever-you-want fast-and-free years.
(Laughter)
This is not my joke. Google Image search is great.
I found this while I was procrastinating writing this piece.
(Laughter)
In theory, this technology is all good for us, it's bringing us together.
Communication channels are more open than they've ever been before.
It's easier to stay in touch, to keep up with what people are doing,
to do research, to get your ideas out there,
but how much online interaction is meaningful?
How often does it expand our knowledge?
Or more importantly,
how often does it expand our circle of care and our compassion?
If you would ever like to feel your soul die a little,
just read the comments on any YouTube video.
(Laughter)
Or even worse, following any article on any widely-read website,
and just track how quickly the ignorance comes out,
and the intolerance, and the racism, and the sexism, and the homophobia,
and the accusation that someone is Hitler,
and worst of all, the misspellings, the cutesy abbreviations, the emoticons.
(Laughter)
A very quick word about emoticons:
the reason I dislike them so much, it's because they're a shortcut.
They're a substitute for creative expression.
If you need a little sideways happy face at the end of a sentence
to let me know you're kidding,
why not just come up
with a more creative combination of words to let me know that you're kidding?
(Laughter)
Keynote is so much fun.
And that's the thing: I don't believe
technology is inherently bad, or any technology is inherently bad.
Writing is technology.
Language is technology.
It's the way you use it,
the mentality you have while you use it that makes all the difference.
Although I do believe that technology can prompt us in certain directions,
towards certain kinds of behavior.
And it does seem to me the Internet age
is prompting us towards distraction, isolation, and argumentativeness.
So, what can we do?
What if you were to try to do something about this?
What if you were to wade against the tide and see what you can do
to brighten the digital landscape, and maybe, by extension, the world?
Two years ago, six friends and I co-founded this idea's blog:
beamsandstruts.com, a magazine for hungry brains and thirsty souls.
We conceived of this as an experiment in collective intelligence.
I'd like to tell you some of the story about what we did, and how it unfolded,
because what we were trying to do was create a magazine, online
we'd like to read and would offer something to anybody who came to read it.
What we ended up doing was creating policies and practices
that are all direct challenges to these prompts from the digital age.
Anybody can do these things. They're all very simple and very basic.
Anybody can use them in their lives whether they're running a website or not.
They're all very simple.
So, the Internet is upping our argumentativeness.
It's making us more inclined to verbal sprawling,
but it's online and anonymous, so it's worse than it's ever been.
So what can you do?
Well, we instituted a policy of respectful commenting.
It's doesn't mean you can't disagree with us; you can, radically.
But what is your aim?
Are you trying to further the conversation or are you trying to win?
Our wold is rife with dualistic thinking.
That's something this Catholic priest, Father Richard Rohr, talks about.
I'm not even Catholic, and I'm obsessed with this guy.
He's a progressive Catholic priest, writer, lecturer, he leads retreats -
brilliant guy; check him out if you can - a fountain of wisdom.
In this one lecture, he talks about how we think dualistically.
This is what our reptilian brain wants us to do.
It's a survival mechanism, it's necessary, it's not bad in and of itself.
We think in diades, in opposites, "Are you for me or against me?
Are you my friend or are you my enemy? Are you right or are you wrong?"
When two people think dualistically - which most of us do, most of the time -
and they're engaged in a conversation -
not even a fight, a debate, or an argument -
if they just have a conversation and come up with a point of difference,
"I think this is the case," "No, I disagree. I think is this,"
as soon as that happens, the conversation is over.
Because at that moment, each person's ego becomes invested in their opinion.
And from that point,
to cede an inch means to lose space, and that simply cannot happen.
So the inner script is to defend my position
no matter what facts are actually being exchanged.
But we can evolve past this.
If you look at that exchange with any clarity,
you can see that's actually a lose-lose proposition,
even if one person wins the argument, or the discussion.
If I trounce you in an argument, I've lost because I haven't learned anything.
All I've done is confirm my own biases and opinions,
and I've shamed you, I've made an enemy out of you,
and I've guaranteed you will never listen to what I have to say;
you'll be even further entrenched in you own opinion.
But if I approach the exchange as if we're both on the same side,
then somebody who disagrees with me
is actually somebody who can teach me something.
They can tell me things I never would've thought of.
And if they're approaching with the same attitude,
then there is no dualistic winning and losing.
We're both listening and asking questions.
We've both spent at least some time
looking at this issue we were emotionally invested in
from a new point of view.
I actually had an opportunity to try this out this morning,
talking with Grant, who talked about emoticons in his presentation.
When I mentioned to him I had a dig about emoticons in mind,
he did not get defensive; he asked questions and so did I.
And we were listening.
He brought up a very interesting point that hadn't occurred to me:
some people's creativity is not verbal.
That's a good point.
(Laughter)
Now I'm not quite so sure about that opinion any more.
Anyway...
(Laughter)
That's non-dual thinking.
The next thing the Internet is doing to us is it's upping our isolation.
We're more isolated, we're atomized.
So with Beams and Struts, there's seven of us, we thought,
"What could we do? We can work together."
OK. How?
For one thing, we edit each other's articles - we make it this policy.
Anything, any of us wants to publish on the site,
we first send it to two other members to get their feedback.
Working like this does not come naturally to me.
I am very individualistic. I always have been.
I got good grades in school,
but I didn't like being there doing the same things as everybody else.
It was my dream to be an actor - I went to university to study theater -
and I didn't like being in plays with other people.
(Laughter)
I didn't like saying other people's lines, and doing what the director told me to do.
I wanted to do my thing, my way; I gravitated towards doing one-man shows.
This is what I do now for a living.
I stand on stage, like this, and I talk about myself for a living.
And I have no director, I have no collaborator of any kind.
There's just me and the audience. I get 100% creative control.
So now, when I'm writing something for Beams and Struts,
I'll work on it, and work, and work,
till I reach a point where the article is perfect.
Not even a comma can be changed. And that's when I send it off for notes -
purely as a formality -
(Laughter)
There won't be any. It is perfect.
And, of course, the thing comes back
covered in notes, comments, and suggestions,
and my initial response is always very defensive.
Because there's that dualistic mind frame.
Somebody is threatening the position my ego was invested in.
I've learned to recognize this.
It's part of my process now.
It doesn't mean it doesn't happen or it feels any different.
I've just learned to notice it, "Aha! There goes that reaction again."
It's not necessarily mean, right, or wrong; it's just a reaction.
"Calm down, observe it. Don't identify with it. Let it go."
And then I actually read the notes.
Then I see the wisdom in it;
then I remember they're coming from somebody I trust and respect,
who trusts and respects me,
and then I almost always rewrite with the notes in mind,
and I can't believe how much better the new one is
And all it took was somebody else's point of view
to show me something important I could not see on my own.
The next thing we also decided to do
was start writing on common themes every now and then.
The seven of us are all writing on different subjects,
what if we wrote about the same subject?
So we did a theme week; we all wrote about sports for one week.
Another theme week was about community, and the most recent one was about women.
For that one, we upped the engagement.
We met before any of us started writing,
we told each other what we planned to write about,
the feedback started right away, we shared research,
we helped shape each other's drafts at every stage,
we wrote a couple of follow-up articles,
based on comments people left after we published the articles,
so the readers became part of the circle of collective intelligence too,
and we gathered for group writing sessions
to help battle the last, big, bad boogeyman of the Internet age -
distraction.
I'm a writer, I've always battled
distraction, as well as doubt, and procrastination sitting exactly
in between me and the thing I'd most like to do - writing,
and now the biggest distraction of all is right there on my web browser,
written on my writing apparatus - a web browser.
There is so much I'd like to say to the world,
but the actual act of putting it into words is terrifying.
I've been doing this for more than ten years; it's still terrifying,
because looking at that blank screen, I come face-to-face with my own mediocrity
and the distance between where I am and where I'd like to be stares at me.
It pokes me, it taunts me, it's a sneering little devil that will not go away,
and it's not little.
This kind of thing can strangle you,
it can undermine everything inside you that's of actual value.
And there's that web browser singing its siren song
of temporarily relief in distraction,
and there's 1,001 things I could do instead of sitting down, stealing myself
in doing what I know deep down will bring up the best in me,
and that I will enjoy doing while I'm doing it
and I would be very happy to have done after I've done it.
Why should that be the hard thing to do?
(Laughter)
I don't know, but it is; very consistently.
But an interesting thing happens
if you get a bunch of people together who all struggle with this same issue,
and put them in the same room, with a laptop or a notebook,
and you've all got the attention of spending at least two hours writing:
is you sit down, and write.
It's that simple and effective.
There are other people there. You're there for a common purpose,
You've created a collective space - you are there for each other.
You can bounce around the twittersphere, have the conversation any other time,
but for two hours, we have this purpose
because this means something to us, and we are here for each other.
One of the members of the group referred to it as 'literary yoga.'
We do this once a week now.
It's upped our productivity, the quality of our writing,
and I can only imagine it's going to keep going in this direction.
I do believe in the 10,000 hours theory.
The bunch of us at Beams and Struts are not unique in this endeavor,
putting our heads together for a common purpose.
Lots of other people are doing this in all kinds of fields,
and anybody can do this; it's so simple and basic.
Anybody can get together with like-minded friends or colleagues
and say, "Let's combine efforts.
Let's see what a bunch of us can do that we couldn't do on our own."
There is a growing tide of this out there, in the digital age,
even though there's so much dualistic debating,
and instant gratification, inauthentic communication.
There's also open source software
which builds on collective intelligence, creativity, effort, and people.
Give it away.
There's Ubuntu, which is an open source operating system for your computer.
It works on any system at all.
Anybody can volunteer and contribute to it
whether they're a computer programmer or not.
It changes someone instantly from a consumer to a creator.
There's Wikipedia.
There's Ted Talks.
Let's get together.
Let's pool ideas, combine what we know,
let's turn each other on to different stuff
because we are all in this together.
I know of four smaller theater companies in Vancouver
that deliberately stop seeing each other as competitors
and started seeing each other as collaborators.
They pool resources, pooled efforts, built a performance creation lab they all use,
and the art scene of the city is all [they're reaching for.]
New Scientist magazine published its letters from readers
on questions about the science of everyday life, science of the obscure:
why is earwax the color it is?
Does any animal eat wasps as part of its regular diet?
If I wanted to surf down a river of lava
what would the surfboard need to be made out of?
Their staff staff doesn't know the answers so they publish letters from readers
who do know the answers to these obscure branches of science;
they're tapping the collective intelligence
of everybody who reads the magazine.
I've taken using Facebook as a research tool.
I used my status updates to ask questions,
I pool the people I know for their knowledge and opinions.
I test ideas I'm working on for articles: How do women feel about being read to?
Who's crueler int he world of little kids: boys to boys or girls to girls?
Sometimes, I'd just ask obscure questions I'm curious about
one can't find out just by researching in Wikipedia or in the library.
How many guys use the flap in the front of their underwear?
(Laughter)
How else would you find this out?
One person who answered that question, actually;
one more than I expected.
(Laughter)
It's a really interesting research tool.
Why not take advantage of the fact I have instant access
to hundreds if not thousands of people who know things I don't?
I'll tell you why - because it's humbling.
The central myth of our culture - something David Simon said,
co-creator of "The Wire", my favorite TV show -
its central fairy tale is the transcendent individual.
I've always wanted to be the transcendent individual.
It flatters my ego to see myself as someone who's above
taking other people's suggestions, who already knows what's going on.
There's a lot to be gained from overcoming that knee-jerk ego reaction.
Pretty much all the references I've made in this talk:
Father Richard Rohr, "The Wire,"
the different technological epochs in human history -
I got that from the writings of the philosopher Ken Wilber -
the books of Barbara Ehrenreich - who I'll quote in a minute -
all came to me from other people, and I resisted them all at first.
Then, I relaxed, and let them come into my life, enrich it immeasurably.
I know about Ubuntu, the open source operating system for your PC,
because my dad volunteers for them in his retirement,
and at Beams and Struts, we wrote on the subject of community - wasn't my idea;
I believe I used the word 'repugnant' to describe my reaction to that.
And then I let that reaction pass and thought, "This is being suggested
by people I trust and respect. Maybe I'll learn something.
It'll take me out of my regular thought patterns."
My dad put me in touch with an Ubuntu rep. I interviewed him, and he was fascinating.
He told me about the sense of community and empowerment it comes
from people contributing to something that's bigger than themselves
that benefits everyone, which is something I believe I've always known.
I think that's something most of us know deep down.
Something Barbara Ehrenreich, one of my favorite writers, journalists, author -
awesome person! - wrote in this book,
"Dancing in the Streets - A History of Collective Joy"
is how moving and chanting in unison
was probably our first step forward as a species,
a way to fend off predators, made us look bigger than we are individually,
and to form a sense of common purpose, responsibility, care, and even ecstasy.
We need more of that feeling these days
because there's seven billion plus of us on the planet,
and the Internet age is prompting us
towards distraction. Argumentativeness, and isolation.
It feels like there's a tug-a-war going on for the future.
On the one hand, it's like we're heading straight for a massive collapse;
it could even happen within our lifetime.
Our rate of pollution isn't sustainable.
We're extracting non-renewable resources from the Earth as fast as we can,
and who cares about the damage?
Many items we believe in the first world simply cannot live without
come from the third world sweatshops that don't pay a living wage
and have horrible human rights records, and we know this, but we want cheap stuff.
A lot of our food comes from factory farms and factory ships, monocrop agribusiness,
loaded with GMOs, shipped across the country or the world
leaving a huge carbon footprint, then processed,
loaded with additives and preservatives, it's fattening, and addictive.
And we know this. But we want cheap food.
Especially cheap food that gives us that jolt.
The gap between the rich and the poor is widening.
Our political discourse, some much of the time,
is nothing but partisan bickering; no one listening, or giving an inch.
A lot of us are clinging
to fundamentalist science-denying interpretations of religion
because the world is changing and changing fast, and we are scared.
We want an omnipotent authority to tell us we are in right,
everything is going to be OK, and our group is going to win.
That's not necessarily the case.
On the other hand, there are more people than ever
willing to look at the world from different points of view.
In fact, who do this as part of their regular life, every day,
and don't even think of it.
More people than ever are willing to work as a team, even with strangers;
to share, even with strangers;
people who don't just value the success and survival of 'me' or 'my group'
but of everyone and everything on the planet.
Every display of altruism counts.
If you're just thinking, "I'm just one person,"
or, "Me and my friends are eight people. What can we do?",
don't let yourself off the hook.
Every act of cooperation and collaboration counts.
Every display of selflessness and generosity counts.
Every time someone lets their ego reaction pass
and chooses to act a different way counts.
Every time someone reaches out to someone who might have thought of as an adversary
counts.
Every time someone switches
from a passive consumer to an active contributor counts.
There are ways to make the tools the Internet age is giving us
propel us to greater creativity, productivity, and empathy.
We can choose to put our heads together and build on what we and others know.
Every time anyone of us does this,
it's another set of hands on the rope in the tug-of-war
pulling us towards survival and a new of living
where we all consider ourselves to be on the same side.
I started off this talk by saying
we're in the midst of a major technological paradigm shift, and we are,
and it's a rare event which makes this an exciting time to be alive,
but this particular paradigm shift is different.
The way that is different makes it possibly
the most exciting time to be alive there's ever been in human history,
because due to it,
every single of us has the opportunity to participate in the way it will unfold.
So, what are we going to do? What are you going to do?
Thank you very much.
(Applause)