With our consent? Behaviours to inspire positive change.
I want to ask you, straight up, what do you value most deeply?
I’d like to invite you to write down 3 things of infinite value to you.
Sacred, precious, special.
Of value for its own sake.
That which makes the world truly alive.
In any dimension — an emotion, relationship, part of the natural world, a quality, an object.— from The Infinite Game by Niki Harré
I’d love it if you could do this alone.
Take your time, think carefully. What is of infinite value to you?
Done?
Great.
I’m curious about what you’ve written?
If there’s someone sat next to you, you might share what you’ve written with them.
What do you notice about these things you’ve written?
Do you see any patterns or themes?
Does anything seem especially dominant?
In 2017, four psychologists in New Zealand asked 1085 people the same question: what do you value most deeply?
Here’s what they came up with:
How does seeing that make you feel?
For people seeing this for the first time, the most common responses to the psychologists were that seeing this word cloud gave them:
A sense of belonging to a human community with shared values
Afeeling of safety and reassurance, as if others could be trusted
The sensation of being uplifted and filled with hope
Maybe you felt something like one of those today?
I wonder, when was the last time you truly felt these things before today?
Because it turns out that these aren’t just nice to have. The icing on the cake. They’re critical in our lives. They’re the cake.
One reason they’re critical to us humans is that we know from social science that people are more likely to act for the common good if they feel they are part of a community of like-minded others that they can trust.
We also know from some other social psychology experiments that when you expose people to narrower norms, for instance calling them ‘consumers’, you prime reactions that are more selfish, far less open to social participation, way less motivated by environmental concerns.
Call someone a consumer and you are literally telling them not to care. Yet we do this to ourselves more or less constantly every day, right? We even do it without consent. See how long you can avoid looking at an advert today…
The third thing we know from social psychology is that people will almost always underestimate how others might respond to values questions like these. We have a strong negative bias. Basically, in today’s world, we imagine far worse from our neighbours than they are hoping for themselves.
Seeing as we’re at a tech conference, I guess you might be wondering what any of this has to do with digital? Or change-making? Or leadership?
Well, everything and nothing.
What do I mean?
I’m wondering how you manage to keep what you truly value in play? Those three infinite values you wrote down, how do you ensure they guide you, day-to-day?
I’m also wondering how we do it — organisationally, communally, societally?
Now is the point where I think I’m supposed to tell you that tech can really help. More tech, and we can make it happen more…?
I think we need to think very carefully about that, perhaps more carefully than we tend to have done so far…
In June this year, something quite unexpected happened in Istanbul. After 25 years in charge, Erdogan’s AKP Party lost the city’s Mayoral elections to the CHP party. Even after forcing a highly questionable rerun…
Taken from a similar playbook to Trump and Farage, you might be aware of Erdogan’s populist authoritarian approach? For any of us wondering how to tackle this scourge, there are perhaps a few clues in the new Istanbul Mayor’s Playbook. Here’s a page translated from his CHP party’s campaign manual, I think it’s worth reading it.
Elsewhere, the CHP party explicitly calls out nationalists and populists as ‘opposition traders’, put-down merchants involved in a lucrative trade of anger and polarization. Social Media has been like oil for their fire.
Instead, says the CHP, “we saw that we cannot change Erdogan so we fight by changing ourselves”. How? One way, they suggest, is to “ignore Erdogan but love those who love him”.
Of course, this event in Istanbul can’t tell us what will happen with Turkey’s near future. It might yet prove to be just a blip. There are many other reasons behind the CHP’s success — increasing economic hardship among them.
But I’m wondering if the CHP might have managed to turn social media into something more fruitful. Like turning water into wine, have they found a way to use tech as a tool against the populists? More intentionally and less nefariously, as a way to keep some infinite values in play? Building bridges across the false divides?
I used to work with the NGO Index on Censorship where I helped to found the Freedom of Expression Awards Fellowship. An annual award for activists or organizations tackling authoritarianism, anywhere in the world, offering 12 months of strategic and emergency support. I want to tell you some of their stories and the ways they’ve used digital tools to keep infinite values in play.
Journalists like Rafael Marques de Morais from Angola who endured intimidation, imprisonment and 24:7 surveillance for bringing human rights abuses to global attention through a simple Wordpress Website MakaAngola.com.
Or Saudi Arabian Safa Al Ahmed who secretly filmed undocumented civil unrest and street protests inside Saudi Arabia, smuggling the footage out to let the world see what the regime was trying to hide.
Artists like Smockey, a musician from Burkina Faso who’s music studio — the only such facility in the entire region — was twice burned down in return for him singing about injustice, sharing his studio with younger voices and helping to organise a citizen-led movement that eventually ousted the country’s dictator.
Or El Haqed, a Moroccan rapper for who the experience of censorship was so severe that the authorities once turned off all the power to a neighbourhood in which he was about to perform an underground concert. The concert went ahead, lit by and recorded on the mobile phones of the audience.
Digital activists like GreatFire who operate from inside mainland China, building tools to circumvent the Great Firewall. Work that is so dangerous that the team is entirely anonymous, having never met each other in person and telling their families they go to work to do a different job each day. Encryption is their oxygen.
Some of these challenges might seem incomprehensible to us. And tech most obviously shows up as some of the equipment, tools or gadgets that they’ve used.
But across these and many other stories I’ve witnessed, I’ve asked myself how do these people manage to keep their infinite values in play against all the odds?
Does digital increase or diminish the obstacles they face?
There’s a Maori Proverb that might help to shed some light on this:
“those who build the house are built by the house”.
Thinking of tech as more than a set of tools, I wonder if digital has actually begun to influence the way we think and act — and perhaps it’s not all bad?
Let me share some of the patterns I’ve noticed:
- First, all of these activists above have deep faith in their voices and those of others around them. They refuse to surrender belief in their agency. Despite having endured horrendous oppression, they choose not to be afraid and instead stubbornly celebrate the potential agency of their fellow countrymen and women. Critically, this enables them to work with rather than for people, rousing self-confidence and breaking the habit of obedience.
- Secondly, they don’t try to foist or force change on people — a sure-fire way to fail… Did you ever change because someone told you to? Far more astutely, they tend to try to tackle blind spots by drawing awareness to what’s really happening. They notice where their infinite values are being challenged and they try to live more honestly with themselves and their immediate community. They remind me of that great saying ‘Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.’
- As is also evident in the Istanbul example, they consistently and determinedly deconstruct dominant narratives. Especially toxic narratives pushed by those in power who divide and conquer via fear, powerlessness, separation, and polarization. Instead, they work hard to repeatedly draw attention to the myriad ways in which we are interconnected and interdependent.
- Finally, if you meet them, these people are almost all surprisingly normal. They don’t live on some sort of pedestal, they’re just like all of us. That reduces the distance between them, us and the unnecessarily privileged notion of ‘heroism’. We can all be heroes, whatever that means.
Of course these patterns — belief in the value of everyone’s voice, awareness of blind spots, deconstructing dominant narratives, disrupting hierarchies — are not seeded by tech alone. Old tales like ‘Facebook fomented Brexit’ or ‘Twitter caused the Arab Spring’ are way too simplistic — the reality is far more complex.
And to be clear, plenty of tech (social media especially) has been wilfully designed in a harmful way. Putting money before morals, companies like Amazon, Google and Apple are also complicit in oppression globally.
But I wonder if the way we are with each other online has sparked some changes in the ways we are with each other offline? And perhaps they’re not all bad?
To the extent that Tech can help us evolve the capacities to connect, listen and share — and through doing so help to keep our infinite values in play — I celebrate it.
To the extent that it can also powerfully stand in the way — deafening us to ourselves, isolating us from each other, distancing us from the earth we come from — I am equally cautious.
Everything. And nothing.
What matters more, I think, is how we come to these tools. What sort of intentional relationship we’re in with ourselves, each other and the planet itself before we pick up our devices?
Tech isn’t going to take our lives out of our own hands. AI and the robots aren’t going to sweep into town and make us all redundant — at least not without us choosing for that to become the case.
Thinking about some of the stories above, I’d like to take that word hero and offer it to all of us. I might say it’s typically misunderstood — at least now that we live in a digital world it’s shifted in meaning and potential. It’s not actually about a brave, lucky few. It’s far more to do with realizing our privileges and then choosing to give them away, doing the obvious decent things right in front of us.
And the more intentional, balanced and boundaried a relationship that we can have with tech, the more it might help us keep our infinite values in play.
What are you going to do to keep your own infinite values in play?
To revisit a line from the Istanbul Campaigning Manual:
We can’t call a knife useful or hurtful. The important thing is how we use it.
- From a speech I gave at the Charity Digital Tech Conference ‘Take Action’ in June 2019, hosted by Reason Digital and The Directory for Social Change.
