Love & Work
A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.
53 years ago Stewart Brand started the Whole Earth Catalog with the words, "We are as gods, and might as well get good at it." 41 years later, he wrote "Those were innocent times. New situation, new motto: 'We are as gods and have to get good at it.'"
Here's my weekly report from the frontlines of people learning to redefine the possible.
Happy Friday.
Systems Thinking
Solutions without ideology
"(Stewart) Brand has spent his long career successfully changing people’s minds by offering them tools. The tool he offers here is simply the tool of 'changing your mind.' How do you do it rationally, smartly, wisely? What kind of evidence do you need? What is more important, principles or pragmatism?
"This book can be seen as a challenge to green theory and green dogma, but it directly challenges ideology itself. I think this is Brand’s best book yet. As you follow his arguments, you get a great education in following science and data rather than righteous assumptions. Instead, says Brand, assume much of what we think is true isn’t, and then go from there with a fresh look at the evidence. Being pragmatic about something as complex as a technological planet can lead you to unconventional ideas for dealing with planetary woes — even if they seem contrary to cherished beliefs. Some of the solutions — like nuclear power and genetically modified crops — will be dismissed as outright heresies among greens. But you get to watch a great mind change his mind. As Brand’s education continues he makes as good a case for these heresies as you’ll hear anywhere. "This book may change your own mind about things you thought you believed. What more can you ask of a book?" - Kevin Kelly
Book Review: Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
Biomimicry, Advertising, Social Messaging
Biomimicry (nature-inspired innovation) teaches us to quiet our human cleverness, and let nature’s 3 billion+ years of R&D lead the way.
"In their famous 'Think Different' 1997 television ad, Apple extolled the virtues of 'the crazy ones' — great thinkers and leaders like Albert Einstein, Amelia Earhart, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We applaud their achievements, at the same time believing that we as a species would benefit immensely by instead holding nature as our greatest inspiration and mentor. Biomimicry (nature-inspired innovation) teaches us to quiet our human cleverness, and let nature’s 3 billion+ years of R&D lead the way. What better than nature to praise in the annals of innovation, strategy, and design? So, here’s to the real crazy ones. Let’s learn to emulate their strategies, and put their lessons to use."
Advertising Spot: Here’s to the Biological Ones – The Real “Crazy” Ones
How We Live
Co-living defined families for millennia
Treehouse, in the Hollywood neighborhood of LA, is the first ever building in the city constructed from the ground up with the specific purpose of serving a communal audience. The founders envision it as the first of a multi-national network of Treehouses that will redefine how we live.
Treehouse inhabitants enjoy weekly suppers, communal working space and the comfort that their co-residents share the five Treehouse core values: being kind, present, curious, responsible and candid. Their North Star is to "make communal living more prevalent in a country where the nuclear family has long been mistakenly idealized".
Article: Is Communal Living the Future of Parenting?
Related Article: The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake
Learning, Creativity
What looks like productivity and efficiency to us are often the very activities and habits that stunt our thinking.
"I began reading this new book, “The Extended Mind” by Annie Murphy Paul. Paul is a science writer, and her book, the work here, began as an inquiry into how we learn, but then it became something else. It became a book about how we think."
"...A lot of this book is about recognizing that we have the intuitive metaphor of our minds, that they’re an analytical machine, a computer of sorts. And we’ve taken this broken metaphor of the mind and then built schools and workplaces and society on top of it, built the built environment on top of it. And the result is that our work and school lives are littered with these productivity paradoxes.
"What so often feels and looks like productivity and efficiency to us are often the very activities and habits that stunt our thinking. And many of the habits and activities that look like leisure, sometimes even look like play, like if you’ve taken a walk in the middle of the day or a nap, those end up unlocking our thinking. If the question is, how can we be the most creative or come up with the most profound productive insights, you need to do that stuff.
"And so if you read it correctly, in my view at least, this is a pretty radical book. It has radical implications not just for how we think about ourselves but for policy, for architecture, for our social lives, for schooling, for the economy." - Ezra Klein
Podcast/Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Annie Murphy Paul
Emotional Intelligence
Brené Brown helps people find their way to each other.
"In surveys taken by 7,000 people over five years, Brown, the sociology professor turned best-selling author and leadership consultant, and her team found that on average people can identify only three emotions as they are actually feeling them: happiness, sadness and anger. For Brown, who made her name by illuminating the finer contours of humans’ emotional landscape, this is not nearly enough. So, in Atlas of the Heart, she sets out to map 87 different emotions, pointing out the distinguishing features of each."
"...Brown believes the ability to precisely name feelings is a crucial skill, especially in days of division. 'If we want to find the way back to ourselves and one another, we need language,' she writes, 'and the grounded confidence to both tell our stories and to be stewards of the stories that we hear.'”
Book Review: Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience
History
Robots have histories that extend far back into the past.
"Artificial servants, autonomous killing machines, surveillance systems, and sex robots all find expression from the human imagination in works and contexts beyond Ovid (43 BCE to 17 CE) and the story of Pygmalion in cultures across Eurasia and North Africa. This long history of our human-machine relationships also reminds us that our aspirations, fears, and fantasies about emergent technologies are not new, even as the circumstances in which they appear differ widely. Situating these objects, and the desires that create them, within deeper and broader contexts of time and space reveals continuities and divergences that, in turn, provide opportunities to critique and question contemporary ideas and desires about robots and artificial intelligence (AI)."
Article: Surveillance, Companionship, and Entertainment: The Ancient History of Intelligent Machines
Advertising, Social Messaging
Is this the first ever portrayal of Santa as gay in advertising?
"This year, Norway's Postal Service Posten’s annual festive spot is called 'When Harry met Santa' and features possibly our first-ever gay Father Christmas.
"The work of creative agency POL and produced by B-Reel Films, the name is a play on the 1989 classic film When Harry Met Sally while the ad not only celebrates Christmas but 50 years since Norway decriminalised homosexuality, too.
"In the creative, we meet a lonely man called Harry who develops a relationship with Santa over many years until the two finally get the courage to kiss.
"It’s a beautifully shot piece of work and comes in both a 45-second version and an almost four-minute version too. Check out both below:"
Video: When Harry Met Santa (45)
Long form:
Video: When Harry Net Santa (English Subtitles)
Article: “Mrs Clause Is Going To Be Pissed!” Finally, We Have A Gay Santa & People Are Loving It
Oneliners
Article: New York City Is Building a Wall of Oysters to Fend Off Floods
Article: White Neighborhoods Have Higher Carbon Emissions
Article: Playing Recordings of a Healthy Ocean Can Help Restore Marine Ecosystems
Article: Nonsense Words Make People Around the World Think of the Same Shapes
Playlist
"Peter Jackson joins Variety’s Doc Dreams, presented by National Geographic, to talk about The Beatles’ rumored breakup being more joyous than he anticipated, how it is the longest he has ever spent in the editing room and why George Harrison would be the best Beatle on a film set."
Video: Peter Jackson Reveals How He Convinced Beatles Paul and Ringo To Let Him Make 'Get Back'
Image of the Week
The Image of the Week is a rendering of Nefertiti, by Dutch photographer and digital artist Bas Uterwijk, who "creates amazing AI portraits of famous historical figures using innovative neural network reconstructions. His most recent additions to the ongoing series transport viewers to ancient Egypt, the Renaissance, and 18th-century Europe, among other time periods.
"To create these portraits, Uterwijk uploads numerous references of the person's likeness to the AI applications. Then, he makes small adjustments to the program until he is satisfied with the result. 'These "Deep Learning" networks are trained with thousands of photographs of human faces and are able to create near-photorealistic people from scratch or fit uploaded faces in a "Latent Space" of a total of everything the model has learned,' Uterwijk explains. 'I think the human face hasn't changed dramatically over thousands of years and apart from hairstyles and makeup, people that lived long ago probably looked very much like us, but we are used to seeing them in the often distorted styles of ancient art forms that existed long before the invention of photography.'"
Article: Artist Uses Artificial Intelligence To Reconstruct Realistic Portraits of Historical Figures
What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
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