Where I am coming from
Episode four: Why should we listen to you Dave?
I kind of like the idea of episode four, because it was the original Star Wars movie and its almost May fourth, and if I had a little more patience I’d wait a week and publish this on May fourth, but I’m too impatient and anyway you already know that the fourth will be with you, always. I also like it because it gives me permission for the first three episodes to be kind of crappy but it also puts the pressure on me to knock it out of the park this time.
I am going to be straight with you. I want to convince you that I have a view of the future that is worth your consideration. I hope to provide enough provocations and insights along the way to demonstrate why I think this view could be interesting, and why my theory, if true — remember, theories are not facts, but possible facts — might lead us into new and exciting territory that expands the realm of the possible for all of us.
So, since this is not just a reading exercise but a persuasion exercise, which I am structuring in a very specific and idiosyncratic way for reasons that will become clear later, it’s important for you to get to know me a little bit.
One of the things you may have noticed is that I tend to state possible facts in the present tense, as if they are already facts. This sometimes creates confusion and disorientation but it is very intentional. I do it, in part, to give new possible facts a better chance of being seriously considered, because new ideas often do not get a fair shake.
A potential fact is not a fact. It is an idea. But some ideas have such great power, that regardless of how realistic and feasible they are, they are worth consideration, which is justified purely by their logic, beauty and perceived inevitability.
So presenting a new idea in the present tense, as if it is actually real, is a way to put existing facts and possible facts on a more level playing field so they can be evaluated more fairly. Existing facts already have an overwhelming advantage, but facts are not facts forever, they have lifespans. The longer-lived a fact is, the more likely it will be continue to stick around for a while. Existing facts, like any incumbents, have more momentum and staying power simply due to the fact they they were there first, they established their niche, and they have had time to dig in.
Later in this episode I will suggest an even more powerful language to express your ideas in, if you want to give them the best chance to become real, living facts.
My observations have led me to the unshakable conviction that we have now reached a critical tipping point, where the old order is sufficiently shaken, and the new order is gaining sufficient momentum, that I am certain that we will be lucky enough, or unlucky enough (because our future is not yet written!) to experience a historic shift that only happens every few hundred years or so, when one platform becomes obsolete and a new platform emerges.
This new platform will have some basic elements that are common across everything, but it will also be an aggregation of many platforms, many of which will create opportunities to build more places and platforms, and more platforms on top of platforms. We will be able to build or grow as many platforms as we can imagine. Why shouldn’t we have a chance to see and evaluate them all?
Since platforms are grown and evolved from different opinions, and because those opinions are expressed in the form of architecture and infrastructure (this is the powerful language I mentioned earlier), they are very hard to argue with. And because people understand them by experiencing them, very hard to disbelieve or deny. This is because they are not being described verbally but are being seen and felt and experienced. They are more than ideas. They are ideas that have grown up so far that they have become not only undeniable facts, have become part of the fabric of the world itself.
I can’t wait to see what new ideas and possible facts will make it far enough to be expressed in the tangible and world-creating language of platforms: the language of architecture and infrastructure.
Another thing you should know about me is that I went to design school, and in design school I learned a certain approach to teaching that is sometimes called the studio model.
The studio model is a teaching method that mimics the guilds and master/apprentice models that preceded the enlightenment and the industrial revolution. It is still the most common approach to learning in environments where the trial-and-error, learning-by-doing model is still the only one that works. This is the simplest, most effective type of learning because it projects people directly into the experiences so they can develop good instincts. This is the most effective kind of learning when the given domain is contextual, creative, and complex, which is most of life. The design studio model is based on the following principle: watch one, try one, teach one. Meaning, in the first class you watch a master do something. The second time, you try it yourself and get feedback. Because you just watched one you can compare your result to the master’s. But you still haven’t truly mastered a skill, tool, idea, or method until you can reliably pass it on to someone else.
Since my vision is to apply the studio model to world-growing, it makes sense that I need to go first. You need to watch one before you can try one, and you will need to try one before you can teach one. So I am going to create one, from scratch, right in front of your eyes, so you can decide whether you want to grow your world from scratch or you want to grow it on top of the one I’m growing, which will be conceived and designed from scratch as an open field for platform-growing. The School of the Possible is going to be a platform that teaches people how to grow and scale thoughtful, transparent, opinionated, beautiful, meaningful platforms. This is a platform that is designed to help people find and fulfill their purpose and pursue happiness, which includes making money, not because everything is about money but because money is an important tool for sustainability, and every human group needs something to sustain itself, and although money is not always necessary it is definitely a tool that needs to be in the toolbox. While we must recognize money as an important tool, at the same time we must be sure that our platform is not based on money, with no secrets or prevarications about the opinions embedded in the foundation. This will be an institution that is fully autonomous and independent, created, supported, nourished and inhabited by its own inherent purpose and the needs of its constituents.
The challenge here is not simply to create a platform but to do it publicly and transparently in order to blaze a trail that others can follow. So I’m sharing my theory in this way, as a story, so I can create a learning journey for you as well as track and record my own progress.
So what I’m doing here is not just starting a team, not just starting an organization. Not just starting a platform. My goal is to create an incubator, or maybe I should say nursery (because growing is different than building) that will give any idea, generated anywhere in the world, the best possible opportunity to grow into a platform.
A platform is anything that supports and enables certain activities while constraining or prohibiting others. A platform is what happens when an idea is considered important enough to become a place in the world, or even part of the fabric of the world itself. Every government, nation, state, city, or town, is a platform, because it creates the boundaries for what is acceptable and unacceptable, what is allowed, what is encouraged, and what is not. At the School of the Possible we are studying the processes that generated the world we live in today, and we are designing the tools and systems to support them.
Why? Because these are not just possibility tools but world-growing tools.
So, you see, what I am doing here is not just explaining an idea, or an opinion, or a vision. This is a demo. A live demo, like the ones I learned from in design school. I am building a global platform, from scratch, with no money, and with a foundation that has no hidden agenda.
Because it’s my first time doing this, I expect there will be a lot of redundancy as I explain every idea in multiple ways. But even the redundancy is important because many of these ideas are counterintuitive and need to be seen from multiple angles before they can be understood.
I am trying to explain a very big theory with a lot of pieces and parts. I am trying to create an artifact, a document, a theory and a story, that is also a proposal, which will include some exercises along the way, and which, later, will involve an experiment, that you must must do for yourself.
My goal is to convince you that I have developed a mindset and worldview that is worth replicating. And that I want and need to get this world view down on paper and I need to spread it out on the table so you can see it more clearly, view it from multiple angles, think about it more deeply, and evaluate it, in order to think about what it might mean for you and where it might fit into your life’s priorities.
I’m not proposing a vision for the entire world but one personal vision, which can serve as an example for you to follow when you decide that you are ready to create a platform that will support a new way of being in the world that you have created or discovered.
So, in order for you to join my research lab and sign up for the School of the Possible, you need to understand the vision and what you’re getting into. And you also need to understand the things I have found in my research to date. I’m inviting you into my mind, and if you accept that invitation, I’m going to share a world view that I have been developing my whole life, and sharing with others, in books, keynotes, and workshops where I have been teaching recipes, tools and methods for the last 25 years.
It’s a world view that resonates deeply with a few, but feels oblique and, well, just really really strange and incomprehensible to many. In part this is because it introduces concepts that require new language in order to be expressed.
That’s why it’s important for you to understand how I got here.
To recap our story so far:
I announced the birth of the School of the Possible in episode one. I described the big trends that I and many others have noticed.
Episode two demonstrates how careful and thoughtful observations naturally and organically lead to questions, that become ideas. The next step for an idea that gets some love is an opinion. And most ideas stop growing at that point. Because most of our opinions are throwaway opinions. We don’t really absorb them and act them out in our lives. A few opinions become deeply held, because they lead to rules of action that create feedback loops that we find rewarding. It is your most deeply-held, embedded, personal, idiosyncratic opinions that will offer the most beautiful and interesting ideas for expression in the form of architecture and infrastructure,
I know I am throwing out a lot of terms here, but all this language I am using will be defined very precisely and personally very soon. Although these words will have a specific meaning within the theory of possibility, it doesn’t mean you can’t use them for anything else that you want to use them for. That’s why when I do release my personal dictionary, which will be shortly, you will note that every term has a definition 1, even if there is no definition 2, as a reminder that words are fluid, and they must be fluid and flexible if we are actually going to start building possible worlds. To build a platform you must be able to think of language as a living and fungible design material.
Episode three introduced the idea that platforms have opinions, and pointed out that most current platforms are driven by assumptions and opinions about how the world works, many of which are becoming obsolete or at least vulnerable enough to be questioned. This one simple observation leads to many possible facts and interesting vector-generating and fuzzy-goal-generating questions, because all you really need to start creating a new world is a new set of observations and a new set of questions about those observations. There is a way to grow new observations into new ideas, by asking and answering enough questions to give them form, and once you have a rich pool of ideas, you can keep visualizing them and creating theories and models and turning them around and observing them and investigating them by asking more questions until your ideas grow into opinions. You then can continue to repeat this nurturing process until your opinions can be shaped into into a unified theory that forms the basis for a vision. That’s the stage the School of the Possible has now reached, and since its a great big vision, it’s going to need a fair number of people to grow this particular vision into a belief. That’s the next stage for this one, and that’s why I’m going slowly here, and telling you all this in the form of a story, because beliefs are formed through experiences and the lessons we learn from those experiences, and the best way I know to share experiences and lessons is by sharing stories.
This is an explanatory story though, one that’s intended to explain my personal views and a vision for how we might choose to see the world. It’s designed to convince the artist, the scientist, the engineer, and all of the other people who need to be involved that they need to be involved.
So in order to do that this particular story has to serve a lot of different audiences and to do that it must be stated in a kind of hybrid language that’s probably deeply satisfying to nobody but has a little something in it for everybody.
So it really has to appeal to a lot of audiences. And it’s intentionally designed to bore people with limited attention spans, which is most people, because in the early stages of world-growing it’s more important to have a small number of deeply committed people than a large number of half-committed people with one foot in the door and one foot on the way out.
No. This needs to appeal to that small group of people who will consider these ideas thoughtfully, and respectfully, and will be willing to come together to play with them, kick them around, and see what happens.
So it is designed to appeal to people like you. So it’s not only a theory and a story and a proposal, it also needs to be a logical argument, with axioms, rules and proofs. Because if you have read this far, you really need all of those things, don’t you? Because if you are going to commit to anything the way I want you to commit to this, it has to come from somewhere deep inside you, an inner voice that will not let you sit on the sidelines while Bezos, Zuckerberg and friends are ramping up platforms that will, if unchecked, eventually create the illusion that they are the only option.
The final proof is the experiment that I have not shared yet, because you need to fully understand the theory before you can understand the experiment, and an experiment whose mechanics you don’t understand is not a very good experiment.
Let’s go back for a second to the care and feeding of new ideas. How well do you treat your possible facts? Somewhere in the pool of observations and questions you have already accumulated — and you have, because this is a natural human process, one that’s common to all life, a fundamental process that not even rampant industrialization could expunge — you have an idea or two, a small set of possible facts, that if nurtured properly could generate world-changing visions that could potentially be proposed in the form of a platform. The primary power of a platform is that your ideas are expressed not in words but in the tangible form of architecture and infrastructure.
Are you starting to see why traditional ideas about language are insufficient? Linguists don’t express their ideas in the form of architecture, which is only one of many important observations demonstrating that linguistics is too narrow a field of study to be helpful in effecting the kinds of change we need. The concept of what language is and does must be liberated from Wordville if we are going to be able to do this work.
Some opinions are fully formed enough to suggest a meaningful purpose that will, with some care and feeding, grow into a vision. And once you have a vision, you can do what I’m doing, right here, right now, which is developing that vision into a blueprint, a design, for creating the initial conditions that you need to create a garden that is specifically designed for your own personal delight, a garden you can enjoy living and working in, one that you can be proud of and invite your friends in to work and play and have fun and do great things together, and what could be more fun and exciting that building a real world that is generated out of your deepest longings and desires.
These big world trends that we are seeing today seem so frightening partly because they appear to be out of our control. They seem vast and unknowable, yet on close examination, they do weave together into a discernible pattern, which is easier to comprehend when you are the kind of traveler, like myself, who intersects with a lot of worlds and also has a lot of privilege and access within those worlds. These platforms exhibit certain processes which are recognizable and repeatable. Not in an industrial way but in the same way a gardener comes to understand plants or an angler or hunter learns how to navigate a complex ecosystem.
I’ve been observing this shift for some time now and I’m seeing a lot of signs that we are nearing a tipping point.
I’m not suggesting in any way that I inherently deserve these privileges and the kind of access that I have, but I do have it. I can observe this, and you probably can infer it, just from looking at my photo. That would be a superficial observation, but it would also be accurate. I hope you continue to observe long enough to find some deeper and more subtle things, beyond the fact that I am a privileged white male. I would hope that as you look deeper you will find a complex, flawed individual with hopes and desires, big ideas, beautiful dreams, and similar kinds of blind spots, triggers and flaws that you commonly find in many white privileged individuals. While I have the same blind spots, I hope you will see that am working hard to overcome and transcend them in ways that many others are not.
I really do hope, sincerely, that we do not all look the same to you. I say this while appreciating that none of us can help making observations and stereotypes and generalizations about groups of people. We all do it. I do it. Of course if you are honest with yourself and actually take the time to observe yourself, you will notice that you do it too. It’s a necessary element of everybody’s life navigation systems.
But if you keep looking, even deeper and further, I hope you see a person who is driven by a purpose that matters, and that purpose is to understand the world we inhabit in order to navigate it more effectively.
One of the things that I have heard is that it is the responsibility of privileged people to find ways to create a more level playing field that’s inclusive and open to everyone. This is my contribution and this will be my legacy. I am starting a school for people who want to turn their ideas into reality. Another way to say this is that this is a school that can help you give your dreams a chance to come true.
Since we all inhabit different worlds and have different needs, these tools might need to be adjusted or redesigned for use in different environments. But we all have worlds we need to navigate and be effective in, and my navigation system has worked pretty well across the limited set of worlds I have encountered so far.
Here is a possible fact that you can try for yourself:
Taking a theory, tool or recipe that works in one context, and adjusting or modifying it so it works for a new context, is a thousand times easier than developing a new tool from scratch.
One historical challenge is that these kinds of networks and access are only available to a privileged few. That is true, and even for the privileged, it’s not always easy to figure out ways to give access or share access, especially since access is a social phenomenon and there are so many gatekeepers with so many agendas it can be overwhelming.
Those of us who are privileged to have access to the tools, ideas, recipes, wealth, and networks that create worlds and enable systems of control and domination can also learn to observe these systems, reverse-engineer them, and reorganize them. I’m not bragging about my privilege, but just observing it right now for a second and reflecting back what I have heard so many times and in so many ways recently, that observation leads to a conclusion that I have a responsibility to understand and recognize my privilege and look for ways to create a more level and fair playing field.
I have been on the sidelines, watching, noticing and observing, and asking questions, for a number of years now. In all that watching and learning I have, with the help of a very diverse and interesting set of friends, colleagues, and fellow researchers, developed enough opinions and asked enough questions to formulate a vision, and am ready to build a platform to grow that vision into a belief, and the people who join me on this platform, which I hope includes you, will need to share that belief and be prepared to dedicate themselves to building it, not as a job, not for money or reward or expected return, but simply because they want it for the same reason that I want it. Because it’s a beautiful garden in a beautiful world that I want to live in so badly, and that I year for so deeply, that it simply must be built. Once a beautiful vision has been shared with enough people, and that group of people have developed enough shared belief, the combination of the people, the belief, and the vision accumulate enough momentum for the belief to become a fact.
The world-building expertise that the elite have developed allows them to create and maintain a privileged position. But that only works if the knowledge is not shared and distributed. My approach to learning has a few unique qualities that can help make these arcane arts more useful, practical, understandable, shareable and democratic.
One goal of the School of the Possible is to make these ideas shareable in such a way as to truly give everyone the power to imagine and propose a world. Not in the form of a proposal document or argument, but in the form of an applied research problem that has a purpose and intention to improve the world in some meaningful way. Your ideas about the world you want are much more easily understandable and easier to buy if you can learn to express them in the language of architecture and infrastructure.
I have observed that worlds develop and unfold in an understandable way that can be learned from, imitated, and replicated. Not a way that is controllable, like a machine, but in the way that a gardener works, by learning patterns and learning to recognize familiar patterns well enough to know how to respond to them with care and nurturing. Ideas instinctively know how to find each other, and connect, and link up to create more and better ideas, but we still need to learn to treat them like the precious flowers they are. We need to generate more of them and then we need to treat them tenderly.
I have been blazing learning trails with a mind toward making them easier to follow for most of my adult life. In that time I have formed some opinions about world-growing and place-making. They have worked really well for me. I can’t promise they will work for you out of the box. You will be working in a different context, with different people, facing different challenges, with different goals.
But I can tell you one thing I know. If you want to create a new, different, and better world, practice noticing things and wondering about them. Start there. It’s a gentle, beautiful and natural way to start generating meaningful and actionable ideas.
So start practicing your noticing and your wondering. One observation can lead to many questions, and each question suggests a different fuzzy goal and a different vector or line of research that might be worth following. As you start noticing things and asking questions about them, you will start to encounter new things. Try to be careful about putting these new things into old conceptual boxes. New ideas often need new words, or at least new definitions of existing words, in order to be described fairly.
This may seem pedantic but I want to remind you again that these are not facts. They are ideas, which are only possible facts. To be valid these possible facts need to be tested by experiment. For now I want you to spend some time playing with noticing and asking questions and seeing what happens with that. I’m curious if, like me, you find that these observations and questions lead to new ideas that require new words borrowed from different languages in order to be accurately described.
I did not yet tell you how this particular idea, the idea that has now become the vision for the School of the Possible, was generated. I am not sure I can reconstruct that learning trail in detail yet, because the path was very complex, and besides, I am not quite ready yet to invite you in to take a tour of the kitchen.
I’ll be happy to do that later but right now my kitchen is a mess and I have things all over the place. Besides, if we are building a platform for the next hundred years we should take our time and make sure we understand what we are getting into.
Still with me? There’s more to come. A lot more. I hope I have stirred up enough thoughts to pull you further down the rabbit hole with me.
