Clarity for Teachers: Day 41
‘If you don’t understand how things work, you will never be clear about anything. Get clear about how things work.’
One day in the first half of the 1980s, my dad came home with a BBC Model B. I remember the presence of this object, the texture and form of its casing, the weight I attached to it. Even secondhand, it must have cost a fortune by our standards and I doubt if my mum was impressed, but here it was: a box of the future had arrived in our lives.
We subscribed to Acorn User magazine and I would work through the pages of programs, tapping them methodically into the computer. If my mind had been shaped differently or my attention drawn another way, I might have been learning to code, but in truth this was just data entry: type in line after line of BASIC, then run the program and see what it does.
Twenty years later, I walked into Access Space in Sheffield and fell in love. In this scruffy building behind the BBC newsroom where I was working, a handful of hackers were teaching anyone who wanted to how to make things using Free Open Source Software and salvaged computers. The deal was that you had to make time to pass on what you’d learned to others, if someone needed what you knew. And you had to have a project of your own: you couldn’t learn to build a website by following the steps of a worksheet about some non-existent small business, you had to bring something that mattered to you. That was how I got started in HTML and CSS, making an online home for my work. Meanwhile, the back room was piled to the ceiling with old machines, and people learned to open the boxes, to mix and match parts, then install Linux and get a working computer that they could take home. It was demystifying, to disassemble junk tech and make it work again, and it was a step towards a vision of a world where people use technology to produce rather than to consume.
It was also the last moment at which some version of this seemed possible. Within a few years, the rise of mobile meant that possibility vanished — literally, in as much as the workings of the device had shrunk and disappeared from view, and also in that the demands of different screens rendered largely obsolete the kind of handmade websites we had taught each other to build.
We live in a world where most of us don’t know how things work. I can’t pretend to grasp the workings of the machine on which I’m writing this, or the networks on which much of what I do with it depends. I have friends who are experts, who can explain these systems to me, who can get involved in fixing them when they go wrong, while I stand helpless. Yet, as we moved from a world of tools that could be picked up and put down, to a world of systems which we find ourselves inside, some of the technology thinkers I talk to would say we’ve reached a situation where no one understands more than a part of the systems on which we depend.
Even assuming it is possible to know how it all works, there is a cost to knowing. I saw a Serbian professor trace out extraordinary maps of the supply chains of all the materials and labour that go into an iPhone. Think of the lives and journeys and resources implied by the labels in the fruit and vegetables section of the supermarket: if you spend too long reading and thinking about those labels, you can start to lose your appetite.
The cost can come, too, in the sense of precariousness. My expert friends often sound scared at how easily the systems we depend on could break, and break in ways that are not easily fixed. If things happen to be working for you just now, there can be a bliss in your ignorance of how they work.
The advice we have been following here has its source in a world where most people were involved in the growing of food, and where tools were mostly made by people you knew: there might be secrets in their making, but you knew how they worked and what they were good for. My point is not that we should or could go back to that world, but that the instruction to get clear about how things work is directed at something other than the mystifying technologies in which the lives of most of us are swathed just now. It is directed, rather, at human undertakings — at the craft of working with the material of human experience, as I called it on the first day of this journey.
There’s a claim here, then, which is that things work: that human experience is not just a random flow, a sequence of stuff that happens to us. There are patterns within it; there’s a certain consistency, a subtle grammar that can be learned, and attention to this will be rewarded with clarity. The world will become less confusing as a result.
Is there a single user’s manual that can be extracted from paying attention to how things work in this domain of human experience? I doubt it. Rather, there are maps that can be made of the landscape of experience, these maps can be useful, they can be suited to different uses. But no map is a blueprint, because though the world works, it does not work like a machine.
Yet it’s hard to resist the pull of machine language, so I’m tempted to say that the kind of map I have in mind is something like an interface. Multiple interfaces are possible to the underlying reality we are dealing with, and these may be internally consistent, functional and give different results. Depending on the map you are following, you will find yourself in a different world: in the first instance, because the map will lend significance to certain aspects of your experience and downplay other aspects, shaping the world as you experience it; and then, because your actions will be based on the map you are following and the experience it produces, and as you act you reshape the world in smaller and larger ways that go beyond your experience and shape the experience of others.
I’m sitting on a sofa in a bare-walled space in east London with the guy whose space it is. He works where technology and politics meet, and he’s sharing some of his map with me. ‘Communication,’ he says, with a shrug, ‘that’s basically finding ways to bully people into doing what you want.’ I feel myself flinch at this description, and I turn the conversation around to a story that might illustrate, indirectly, why I don’t agree with this definition.
After one of the early West Norwood Feast meetings, a council officer we were working with told me, ‘We always think you have to drag people to get them along to meetings, but you had all these people who looked happy to be here.’ Well, I thought afterwards, if you come up to me and try to drag me anywhere, I’m likely to dig my heels in. There is an art of invitation which has to do with how you ask someone to do something in a way that has a decent chance of working, when you don’t have the power to compel them. But if you are used to applying rules and regulations, you may forget that there are other ways to bring people together and make things happen.
I tell this story as we’re sitting on the sofa, but two days later I hear him repeat the point about finding ways to bully people. It sticks with me, because I like the guy and he doesn’t strike me as a natural bully. And the thought occurs that if your map of the world says things get done because people bully each other into doing them, and your experience seems to validate this, then you could end up going through life, trying to be the nicest, most ethical bully that you can be.
There are maps according to which the art of invitation is too weak a thing to be taken seriously. For one thing, it doesn’t scale that well; it mostly works best at the level at which we live our lives rather than the level at which we try to order our societies. As far as I’m concerned, though, few things matter more, because it holds clues to how things worked before we could take for granted the impersonal systems of the market and the state which have ordered our societies around here in recent generations, and therefore clues to what might still work when those systems prove to be more precarious than we assumed.
For this reason, anything which has to do with how people come together to make things happen for reasons other than because they have been paid to or told to is marked as significant on the maps that I’ve been working with. Yet this is not about drawing a blueprint for a better world: it is about learning how things work in situations where these other ways of being and doing together are present, developing a feel for the subtle grammar of this side of human culture. So I pay attention to this and celebrate it, and this shapes my experience of the world, but in doing so I may also be contributing to the emergence of a different world, one in which practices which elude the logic of the market and the state will be less marginal than they have seemed around here lately.
Västerås, 29 April, 2020
This is the forty-first in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
