Coming soon…

“Qualitative Literacy” is an incredibly insightful book that should be on every qualitative researcher’s shelf. I feel like it is the true contender for the kinds of next-generation theory and method guidelines that are being thrown around a lot these days. For qualitative researchers that have read their fair share of textbooks on participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and even qualitative data analysis techniques, Small and Calarco’s book may be the logical next step.

The book explores the challenges of assessing the quality of data collected through qualitative research methods, specifically in-depth interviewing and participant observation. In open and pluralistic disciplines, each method should be evaluated based on its intended purpose and provide criteria for effective execution. The authors argue that there is little disagreement among experts on quality in craft, despite differences in approach and design. Such clear standards are of crucial importance for contributing to a cumulative social science. In the book Small and Calarco then present five indicators to distinguish empirically well-executed from poorly executed data collection.

The first indicator is cognitive empathy.

“Though the difference between empathy and sympathy may seem obvious, many published studies, and media accounts, use the former but mean the latter. In fact, as we discuss later, many empirical studies are ineffective because they communicate more sympathy than empathy, a feeling of solidarity with the position of those studied but not quite an understanding of how they see the world or why.”

Cognitive empathy allows researchers to understand the perspective of those they interview or observe. However, achieving cognitive empathy can be time-consuming and requires effective questioning. Limitations include the researcher’s own perception and the superficial understanding of what is being observed. To uncover meaning, interactions with spaces and people can provide valuable clues.

The second indicator is heterogeneity.

“The qualitative researcher’s most important asset is proximity to the world, and we know the world is diverse and messy. Good field-workers cannot help but uncover this diversity and to report what they have uncovered.”

The sensitivity of a narrative can be detected through high heterogeneity, which is the degree to which the perceptions, experiences, motivations, and other aspects of the population or context studied are represented as diverse. Researchers must take care to probe interviewees enough to capture this heterogeneity, as people’s experiences surrounding any issue or topic can vary dramatically over their lifetimes or across situations. Many researchers ignore heterogeneity in their data to present a bottom-line story, exclude cases that do not fit a central point, or ignore heterogeneity to meet journal word limits. Such practices undermine the empirical grounding of a qualitative study. Good field-workers report the diversity they uncover in their research.

The third indicator is palpability.

“Ultimately, only reports of distinct persons, statements, perceptions, meanings, motivations, events, actions, responses, and places have a chance of constituting palpable evidence.”

Palpability is the extent to which the reported qualitative evidence is presented concretely rather than abstractly. Palpable evidence results from concrete data that got close to the phenomenon at hand by centring on particular events, persons, utterances, interactions, or other pieces of elicited or observed data. Palpability in evidence is the foundation of an empirically convincing text. Lengthy interview quotes and detailed descriptions are not unnecessary flourishes but are necessary to collect more data and provide concrete evidence.

The third indicator is follow-up.

“following up often leads to an entirely new research question. This tendency—to follow up effectively, whether within or outside the field—is a reason that many effective ethnographies report that the question the book answered is not the one with which it began. This change is not a flaw; it is one sign of an effective researcher.”

Follow-up is crucial in qualitative research as it allows for the collection of additional data that may not have been anticipated during initial data collection. Often during qualitative data collection, opportunities arise for new questions to be asked and additional observations to be made. This is particularly important in interviews and ethnographies where data is co-created by the researcher and participants. Saturation is a common way to achieve follow-up, and effective follow-up can lead to a change in the original research question, ultimately leading to true scientific discovery.

The third indicator is self-awareness. Self-awareness is crucial in empirical fieldwork as researchers’ backgrounds inevitably shape how one perceives the world. It refers to the extent to which researchers understand the impact they have on the data collected.

“In an important sense, it is thus impossible for the interviewer or participant observer to capture thoughts or behavior unobtrusively. Yet the point is not that measuring behavior is doomed to failure. It is that the researcher aware of this fact reflects it in how they collect and interpret data.”

Interpretation of data can vary among researchers and their identities play an important role in data collection; what data they see and what they do not see. Unfortunately, lack of self-awareness is a common issue. For example, researcher rarely disclose their own ethnic background, which can hinder thoughtful discussions on the role of the researcher’s background in access.

Small and Calarco make a strong case that, with enough exposure, two researchers can arrive at the same social facts despite differences in methods. Exposure is the precondition of strong qualitative research. Only after sufficient exposure should one evaluate a qualitative research project based on the five indicators of quality: cognitive empathy, heterogeneity, palpability, follow-up, and self-awareness. Although providing some kind of evaluative measures, Qualitative Literacy is fundamentally an invitation to pluralistic qualitative research. Qualitative researchers should evaluate their methods primarily based on what they are designed to do. In other words, no method can be reasonably critiqued on the basis of something for which it was not intended.

In “After Method”, John Law challenges traditional social science research methods and their Euro-American assumptions. He proposes new ways of thinking and practicing social science research to better capture the complexities of the world. John Law emphasises the need to unmake methodological habits that prioritize certainty and universalism, and instead embrace multiple, diverse, and uncertain methods. In other words, he calls to embrace the mess in the world and in social science research rather then trying to reduce it. The book also highlights the importance of recognizing that realities are not secure but must be practiced, and that the world is not passive but enacted. In line with Rorty’s work, Law calls for alternative metaphors and activities in academia that find ways of living in uncertainty and elaborating quiet, slow, or modest methods without accompanying imperialisms.

“This book is […] about what happens when social science tries to describe things that are complex, diffuse and messy. The answer, I will argue,is that it tends to make a mess of it. This is because simple clear descriptions don’t work if what they are describing is not itself very coherent. The very attempt to be clear simply increases the mess. So the book is an attempt to imagine what it might be to remake social science in ways better equipped to deal with mess, confusion and relative disorder.”

One important aspect of social scientific research practice, according to After Method, are the messy and uncertain ways in which knowledge is produced through inscription devices. The production of scientific reality is shaped by the “hinterland” of standardized packages, which extends far beyond the limits of what we usually imagine as “method.” This hinterland includes factors such as language skills, management capacities, and political and economic agendas. The stability of scientific reality is secured by the expense of creating alternative realities, and the hinterland of methods enacts realities that then enact the conditions of possibility of further research. The alternative that After Method proposes is to follow Latour and Woolgar’s symmetrical inquiry and devise a new vocabulary to disentangle the normativities of standard methods-talk from their stories about how methods work in practice. This is where Law defines the concept of “method assemblage”.

“So assemblage is a process of bundling, of assembling, or better of recursive self-assembling in which the elements put together are not fixed in shape, do not belong to a larger pre-given list but are constructed at least in part as they are entangled together. This means that there can be no fixed formula or general rules for determining good and bad bundles, and that (what I will now call) ‘method assemblage’ grows out of but also creates its hinterlands which shift in shape as well as being largely tacit, unclear and impure.”

The approach developed in After Method allows for investigating the complex and overlapping lives of objects in a world where different realities partially intersect and interfere with one another. The metaphor of fractional objects, which are more than one and less than many, may help to understand the complexity of these relationships. Law reviews Annemarie Mol’s study of atherosclerosis and by doing so demonstrates how objects can be separated and recombined to produce composite entities, and how separation may occur between different patients or acknowledging differences in the conditions of possibility. Mol’s alternative metaphysics of enacted fractionality suggests that realities are real enough and may take the form of in-here objects or processes, and out-there contexts of one kind or another that go along visibly with those objects. In an ontological politics, the good of making a difference will live alongside - and sometimes displace - that of enacting truth.

Law explores the concepts of presence and absence in relation to the crafting and enacting of boundaries between what is present, what is absent but manifest, and what is absent and Other. These boundaries are necessary and each category depends on the others. The inquiry into slow method suggests imagining more flexible boundaries and different forms of presence and manifest absence.

“What is being made present always depends on what is also being made absent.”

The book highlights the use of allegory to make visible the invisible and create new realities, often resulting in non-coherent and ambiguous manifestations. It emphasizes the importance of crafting a coherent account of reality, which requires determining what is to be made manifest and what is to be Othered. The inquiry must be allegorical, as nothing speaks for itself, and denies the possibility of non-coherence and multiplicity. It highlights the problem with Euro-American metaphysics, which lacks symmetry and assumes coherence as a good without acknowledging non-coherence.

“And this is what allegory always does. It uses what is present as a resource to mess about with absence. It makes manifest what is otherwise invisible. It extends the fields of visibility, and crafts new realities out-there. And at least sometimes, it also does something that is even more artful. This is because it makes space for ambivalence and ambiguity. In allegory, the realities made manifest do not necessarily have to fit together.”

Interestingly, Law offers the example of Australian First Nation people and much of what he argues for in terms of knowing resonates with the ideas in Sand Talk. The displacement of native owners in Australia in the 1940s-1960s disrupted the continuous process of creating and recreating the land, kinship, religion, and ancestral beings. Aboriginal method assemblage emphasises the importance of continuous effort and process, with nothing becoming autonomous and everything needing to be re-done and re-enacted. Unlike Euro-American mediation, Aboriginal mediation recognizes that process is inescapable and nothing is fixed.

In After Method, John Law develops an incredibly rich vocabulary and set of metaphors to reimagine social science research. For him, method is not just a set of procedures for reporting on reality, but rather a performative tool that helps to produce realities. Method assemblage is a continuous process of crafting and enacting necessary boundaries between presence, manifest absence, and Otherness. Making anything present implies that other related things are simultaneously being made absent, and thus representations go along with something out there to represent. This has an important implication. If no enactments in reality stay automatically in place, if instead they are made and remade, then that means that they can, at least in principle, be remade in other ways.

In “Get Together,” the authors offer practical advice for those looking to create and sustain a community. They emphasize the importance of starting with a group of core allies that care about the same issue and of crafting a clear identity for the community. The community must have a purpose. This identity should answer the question of why it matters and be shared among all community members, not just the leader.

“Building a community isn’t about you and what you can do; rather,it’s dependent upon what you and your people can do.”

The book highlights the importance of establishing a central shared activity that is purposeful, participatory, and repeatable. This activity should be the driving force behind the community, encouraging people to participate and collaborate, rather than just watch from the sidelines. It should also be repeatable, as communities need time to shape and grow. Feedback based on the activity should be taken into consideration.

“To determine the central shared activity for your community, ask yourself: What is something your people crave that would be better performed or experienced as a group?”

The author also discusses the importance of cultivating a sense of community identity, through the use of badges, rituals, and unique language. This can help to strengthen the bonds between community members and encourage organic recruitment of new members.

“Passionate community members will likely want to project their community identity to the world. These signature expressions encourage stronger bonds between members.”

Tracking metrics and evaluating the community’s pulse through questions and check-ins with leaders can also help to ensure that the community is thriving and moving in the right direction.

“Only a balanced combination of measurement and listening will give you the understanding you need to keep acting in the best interest of an ever-changing community.”

The way to sustain a community is to develop more leaders from within your community. Every community has a group of handraisers that keep showing up, who are prime candidates for transitioning into leadership positions. These people are genuinely motivated by the community’s purpose.

“Growing a community isn’t about management. It’s about developing leaders. This small set of passionate people will help your community flourish over the long term.”

Overall, “Get Together” offers valuable insights for anyone looking to build and sustain a sense of community. Whether it be a bridging community that brings together diverse people or a bonding community that connects similar people, the book’s emphasis on identity, purpose, shared activity, and leadership is crucial for creating a strong and thriving community. It is a valuable resource for anyone looking to make a positive impact in their community and build lasting connections with others.

In its essence, Wang’s book is challenging the idea of metronormativity. Metronormativity assumes that rural culture is backward oriented, conservative and intolerant. It is based on the idea that everyone needs to escape the rural countryside to the city to become a metropolitan citizen. Education and, more importantly for this book, technology seem to be the key drivers behind metronormative beliefs.

Wang challenge such beliefs by showing how deeply intertwined the rural and the urban are and how technology exacerbates the inequalities between the two. The dynamic between urban and rural societies is central to globalisation, with rural areas serving as the industrial and agricultural engines of the prosperity of knowledge economies in urban areas. Wang have developed this argument through their journey through rural China and by observing how rural China fuels the technologies that are used in China every day as well as around the world. Many people living in rural areas seem to loose a sense of belonging to places and local communities as the technological, economic, and political system dislocates them. Many see disengaging with the physical world as the only way to reclaim a sense of belonging. But is it really possible to separate the physical and the digital world in that way?

In China, young generations leave rural villages to seek careers and jobs in the cities and even in other countries. In the 1980s, China’s economic boom was fuelled by a unique rural entrepreneurial model referred to as Town and Village Enterprises. The rural-urban divide in China is one of the main reasons for a large rate of income inequality. Migrants from rural towns for little pay in the cities, but cannot afford to live in the cities. However, due to land reforms and rural revitalization projects, migrants are slowly starting to return to the countryside. With them, they bring new knowledge and technologies.

Wang discuss the concept of trust and how blockchain as a proxy is doomed to fail. Chinese have shifted their trust from government to private companies. This has resulted in a range of cascading contradictions. For example, China has long been struggling with problems of food safety as regulation is left to the companies themselves. Now, equipped with emerging technologies such as blockchain, new private companies present themselves as the one’s that can fix what other private companies have failed to achieve. Wang discusses one such business that equips Chicken with wearable devices that track several qualities of the chicken. The devices are tamper-proof, secured by the blockchain. However, Wang argues, blockchain governance is not neutral or unbiased. Blockchain governance merely shifts governance from bureaucratic roles to technical roles, a form of colonialism.

“A system of record keeping used to be textual, readable, and understandable to everyone. The technical component behind it was as simple as paper and pencil. That system was prone to falsification, but it was widely legible. Under governance by blockchain, records are tamperproof, but the technical systems are legible only to a select few. Even exploring transactions on a blockchain requires some amount of technical knowledge and access. The technology of record keeping has become increasingly more complex. This complexity requires trust and faith in the code—and trust in those who write it. For those of us who don’t understand the code, trusting a record written in natural language on a piece of paper seems at the very least a lot clearer.”

But blockchain will nevertheless survive as a technology. Wang argue that blockchain cannot prevent falsification, but will certainly make products more expensive. But it will flourish in an authoritarian system that tries to hold expertise within its realm of power (i.e., the developers) and in an economic system that thrives of inequality (i.e., capitalism).

Wang also discuss artificial intelligence and its foundation in a logic of optimisation. Technology is used to optimise products, processes, and life. But optimisation with technology assumes control over the entire process including its outcomes. Developers assume they control for all the variables and are able to predict the outcome of a process. However, in an uncertain and irrational world nothing is guaranteed. We live in an open system, an uncertain world in which the future cannot be predicted. The imperative for tech companies then becomes to create ever tighter controls around all variables that may be have been out of their control so far.

“Until the makers and builders of AI solve the material realities of the technology, AI will be stuck in a downward spiral, as a tool to optimize life, shaping it into a closed system. Without questioning the intrinsic faith held in prediction, or the political economies of building algorithms, the field of AI ethics and algorithmic fairness will remain mere fodder for dinner party conversations among the rich.”

To show how AI is still largely dependent on humans, Wang travel to facilities that label the data that is necessary for building the large-scale AI models. There are entire, so called, “digital towns”, in China were migrants workers sit in front of a screen all day and label images. There are farmers examining training data of AI controlled pigs and labelling these pigs as healthy or sick. However, data will never be able to represent the richness of life, it is always just a small window into it that brackets other things out. There is always some bias built into data depending on how that window has been designed and what it allows us to see.

“The intractability of life to be rendered captive to simple numbers, lines on a record,reaffirms the powerful act of living against the weight of data used toward predictive ends. To shed the belief that data is predictive and powerful is to push away surveillance as necessity. Shedding our devotion to data gives a depth of meaning to presence, carving out new paths and ways of living beyond categorical drop-down menus, checkboxes, and forms.The data gathered on me is cheap and meaningless, just as the data gathered on you is already meaningless after the moment has passed.”

Another emerging digital phenomenon that Wang explore is corporate surveillance. The normalisation of corporate surveillance has been enabled by our fear and the deep desire for safety.

“In order for us to challenge surveillance, we will have to move beyond corporate,profit-driven platforms that track us and monetize our data, but more importantly we will have to combat our own fears and illusions of safety. We must question the culture of surveillance and carceral punishment that condition us to think living with fear is the only way of understanding we are alive. We must rethink what safety means, and what it means to build communities that allow everyone to live an unbounded life, instead of punishing people for being poor.”

Wang’s book is deeply critical, but not of the economic and political environment in China, but the global political economies of building AI models for control, developing blockchain solutions for trust issues, and collecting data to fuel these economies. It uses China as an exemplary case and shows how many of the problems that are unique to China are actually rooted in much larger, systemic developments.

I have read several books on process and process-relational approaches that approach the theoretical project from a philosophical (e.g., Process Philosophy and Process-Relational Philosophy) or anthropological (e.g., How Forests Think) angle. Olli Pyyhtinen’s book “More-Than-Human Sociology” is the first take on this project that I read that approaches process-relational questions from a sociological perspective. He motivates a process-relational approach via an inherent duality in the sociological literature. For him, there are either grand theorists or abstracted empiricists. Grand theorists fetishise concepts and theories. Abstracted empiricists emphasises the importance of rigorous methodological inquiry and justified knowledge claims. Both positions to sociological (and by extension organisational and IS) theorising are not well equipped to theorise complex and dynamic webs of relations. Indeed, he argues, that their concepts are reifying a static and simplified understanding of reality. The book discusses three main ontological and epistemological assumptions of a process-relational approach as manifested in a more-than-human sociology. What I find even more interesting though is the way in which Pyyhtinen uses short empirical examples to illustrate what a process-relational approach foregrounds.

A more-than-human sociology is grounded in a relational ontology. Specifically, relations that are going along together, that are moving forward. As humans we become determined through being-with-others and not only as a momentary being, but a going-along-together. There is no being without being-with.

“Things are never devoid of relations, but to be is to be related; entities become what they are by entering into relations, by affecting and being affected by others. Relatedness has primacy over quality. There is no substance to things other than their event, their actualization in relations.”

Relations do not only connect pre-existing entities. Instead, the properties and being of entities depends on the relations. Relations participate in constituting what the entities are. This importance of others, of being in relation with others to be something or someone at all, does not reduce the creativity, autonomy, or indeed agency of the individual. Relations are a precondition of agency. Without being-with-others we do not have personal freedom.

Pyyhtinen discusses in detail a unique notion of scale that is at the centre of his approach. Human geography has debated the concept of scale and its implications. The concept of scale has produced a scholarly focus on either the large or the small scale. This privileging of one of the two scales has induced a blindness to both how processes traverse across scales and how scales are produced in action, to practices of scaling. The micro and the macro are over simplifications that cannot capture the richness and messiness of the world. The global scale is produced in and through connections; it would cease to exist if the localised connections ceased to exist. Indeed, the global is itself a flow that circulates through a web of relations together with things flowing along seemingly local trajectories. The global only exists through connections between local sites Scale is not given categorically; scales are made and sustained in practice, they are performed into existence. Thus, scale itself can be turned into an object of inquiry by foregrounding the work that goes into producing scale. It is not just humans who produce scales, for example in mapping. Scales are produced in connections between humans and non-human objects.

With this notion scale, Pyyhtinen critiques the analytical practice of zooming that has become popular in practice oriented studies. He argues that, instead of zooming from the individual to the social or the other way around and thereby jumping across scales, a flow-oriented approach follows the relays of actions and interactions.

“No zooming and zooming out, but travelling in and through conduits.”

Zooming jumps between two extremes, the local and the global, the individual and the social, the practice and the structure. But to analyse how the global is produced in localised connections we need to trace exactly these connections between the local and the global rather than jumping over them.

A more-than-human sociology is deeply concerned with how materials and things are implicated in every relation. More-than-human sociology or linealogical sociology pays attention to heterogenous assemblages and changes the way of thinking of traditionally anthropocentric sociology by considering social actors as intersections (or correspondences in Ingold’s terms) of processes and flows; structures composed of dynamic relations; and society as a relation of relations.

“If we take our entanglement and foldedness with our environment seriously, we cannot limit the numerous others we depend on in our existence and activity to other humans alone. In everything we do we are entwined also with a variety of non-human or not-only-human elements and materials. They are always already present and implicated in the human.”

Understanding matter as something active in the human-material relationship shifts attention to what matter does instead of what matter is. It is not about understanding matter’s primary qualities, its essence, its being. Instead, it is about understanding matter in non-essential terms, as something whose properties are defined by its relations and are thus susceptible to change because its relations are changing. Importantly, to say that matter is active does not simply grant them some form of agency. Instead, it offers a way of reconsidering what action is by attending to the actual events in which materials are active and produce certain effects. Materials cannot be understood when stripped off their relations as it is only through the relations that they enact their particular qualities that make them what they are. However, this is exactly what we do when we focus on the materiality of objects. A focus on materiality misses the changes that materials go through together with its vagabond, variable qualities. This is a move to the flows of materials rather than taking them as clear-cut, self-enclosed objects.

Besides these three well articulated tenets of a process-relational approach, Pyyhtinen provides several beautiful examples of what a process-relational approach foregrounds in everyday, mundane phenomena. For example, Pyyhtinen draws from Calvino’s illustration of taking a shower:

“The solemn act of taking a shower ‘puts me in touch with […] thousands of years of human civilization and with the birth pains of those geological eras that gave our planet its shape’. This to say that there are different temporalities, places and activities folded into my action and making it possible. It is only thanks to the labour and inventions of various generations before me that I am able to wash up by simply turning on a tap and have clean water running out of the wall. Dams, the summoning of water to tanks, the Romans and their aqueducts as well as engineers with their equipment, calculations and know-how – all are required. And the water that comes out of the tap gushes from a place more distant than the wall and is basically as old as the earth itself, having circulated the earth for billions of years. What is more, there is a series of complex technologies and infrastructures required, from sluices, tanks, pipe work, sensors, control boards and drains that condition the luxury of having running clean water of adjustable temperature. Not a single drop comes from the tap unless these technologies and infrastructures are stabilized and function properly.”

Through action (taking a shower) we are in touch with (or corresponding with) different temporalities and spatialities. Such an inquiry is mobile, it quickly takes the researcher away from the shower box at shower time to other times, places, and actions along chains and chains of associations. Any given action overflows with other actions that are already in the action coming from some other time and some other place. Because of these complex chains of associations, actors are often not even aware of all the different actions, temporalities, and places that an action connects to. The action of taking a shower is conditioned and made possible by the actions of several others in different places and at different times. And Pyyhtinen has more such incredibly articulate examples such as the becoming of food waste, a television set, and, drawing from Latour, the becoming of a ‘nose’. With these examples, he powerfully shows how a process-relational approach can help trace some of the connections between the human and the shower, TV, food, and odours and a whole range of other materials, practices, flows, and people.

In sum, Pyyhtinen argues us how a process-relational approach takes into account not only heterogenous non-human materials, but also several spatial and temporal scales and practices of scaling. As he shows through several examples, to do process-relational research about technology, we need to take into account the bits and pieces of our smartphones and laptops, the global markets of rare earth materials, the climate change induced by their mining practices, as well as the temporal scope of our events from the milliseconds of CPU cycles to the lives of future generations who need to live on this planet. This is a type of analysis that is very similar to Kate Crawford’s work in Atlas of AI. However, Kate uses a book to do such “scaled” analyses. How one is supposed to do just that within the scope of a research paper remains to be seen. Nevertheless, what such analyses offer us is an understanding of, no matter how contemporary digital technologies may seem, they are never contemporaneous with our actions and interactions. These socio-technological flows come from different times and have their own temporality that differs not only from the particular action, but also from our experiences, memory and finite life.

Despite this being a self-help book, I was interested in it because it talks about many of the topics and issues that I am interested in with my research. In “The Pathless Path”, Paul Millerd elaborates on a metaphor… ‘the pathless path’. Path here stands for a career path and general way of living. He contrasts his idea of the pathless path with the default path that most people follow to progress in their careers.

The default path is about conforming to the norm. It is defined by life scripts, culturally shared expectations as to the order and timing of life events (something that is surprisingly similar across cultures and countries). Millerd argues that the default path worked very well for previous generations, but it does not work that well anymore today. Economic growth across all sectors, a young population, two-parent households, generous pensions and company loyalty that are the foundations of the default path are anomalies of the past.

The pathless path, on the other hand, is about embracing uncertainty and discomfort. The modern world offers many more paths with opportunities for people around the world. This abundance comes with the challenge that one might choose to pick a path that offers security and certainty rather than doing the hard work of figuring out what one really wants. Millerd argues that the fixed points along the default path, such as job, marriage, and children, are not inherently bad. The problem is that they have been defined by others and that they represent the expectations of others. On the pathless path one can set one’s own constraints and fix points, in fact, this process of defining fix points is part of the learning along the pathless path.

“The pathless path is an alternative to the default path. It is an embrace of uncertainty and discomfort. It’s a call to adventure in a world that tells us to conform. For me, it’s also a gentle reminder to laugh when things feel out of control and trusting that an uncertain future is not a problem to be solved. Ultimately, it’s a new story for thinking about finding a path in life.”

The first observation that Millerd makes and that resonates with my own research is concerned with work-life balance. The concept of work-life balance does not really apply anymore in the 21st century. An entire generation of workers believes that work is the most important thing in their lives and that it enables them to thrive in non-work aspects of their lives. Work has become so prominent in peoples’ lives that almost everyone identifies as a worker first and foremost. Few people pause and think what working means for them and what kind of work they want to be doing rather than just going with the flow and doing the work that others expect them to do.

“Similar to expectations around meaningful work, far too many people limit their imagination of work worth doing to things that either come with a paycheck, require qualifications, or have a socially accepted story of impact.”

The second observations is concerned with local communities and the role they play in this new world of work. Because our connections to local communities are slowly deteriorating, we are looking more than ever for traditional signs of prestige such as money, status, and fame. On the pathless path, the goal is to search for the work that you want to keep doing. Finding something that you want to keep doing indefinitely is more powerful that any form of security or certainty. Millerd’s recommendation is that you should experiment with work and life until you find something that helps you continue move in a positive direction. This is work that you enjoy doing and that naturally leads to new opportunities that make your life better.

“This is not just a lesson for individuals to unlearn, but one for society to unlearn, and we’ll be amazed at the energy that’s liberated when we do.”

One such experiment that pushes people out of their comfort zone and naturally leads to new opportunities is to live overseas. Moving abroad and living in different places makes you resilient to change and makes you become aware of your steps toward the default path. Millerd argues that the capacity to embrace change and reinventing oneself over and over are some of the most valuable meta-skills in today’s society. The pathless path is all about having the courage to walk away from an identity that only makes sense in the context of the default path and to embrace things that one does not understand yet. It is about experimenting in new ways and remixing your path to develop your own definition of freedom.

“As more people invent new paths and enter new environments, communities, and online worlds, many will be forced out of their comfort zone. The sooner this happens the better because the era of living your entire life in a small, local, and familiar community is over. Whether we want to or not, we’ll have to keep reinventing ourselves.”

Interestingly, Millerd also riffs on the relationship of work and time. Our relationship with work is changing primarily because our understanding of time has changed drastically. Only after the invention of clocks did people start to think about time as something related to money. These observations resonate well with ideas discussed around modern time management and the historical evolution of work more broadly.

Lastly, Millerd talks about the notion of gift economies (something that was also referred to in Sapiens). He argues that our economy is largely based on a zero-sum game. This organisation is in opposition to a gift economy, in which more for one person is also more for another person. Gifts are the manifestations of a participation in something greater than oneself which, yet, is not separate from oneself. In other words, the self expands to include something of the other. Gift giving is different from a financial transaction in that it creates a persisting tie between people, a kind of temporal relationality. After gifting a feeling of gratitude or obligation remains between the parties. Generosity is not only a skill worth practicing, but it has compounding benefits over time.

“The world is changing and the pathless path is just one way to exit the world of bad tests. As more and more people decide that these tests are silly, we can create new and better games. Ones that aren’t optimized for how employers like to see the world, but rather align with how we are motivated to learn and grow through our lives.”

Paul Millerd lives, what I would refer to, a digital nomad life. That is not only because he working from Asia with his laptop, but also because he embodies many of the core digital nomad lifestyle ideas around freedom, autonomy, independence, and mobility. He condenses all of these ideas into his metaphor of the pathless path. Many of his ideas are very interesting on an abstract, theoretical level, but I am not sure how many actionable insights the average reader who seeks to make changes to his or her life can pull from this book.

A book about writing a book… In “Write Useful Books”, Rob Fitzpatrick offers not just some advice on how to write a book. He outlines a new and radically different approach to writing books, specifically non-fiction books. The core suggestion of the book is to write in public, expose your book to real readers and learn from their feedback as soon as possible. While this advice resonates well with ideas put forward in The War of Art, Fitzpatrick’s book is unique because he weaves in plenty of highly actionable advice all the way down to particular Amazon pricing settings or cover designs for maximum recommendability.

Modern authors increasingly abandon the traditional book publishing approach. That is, they do not publish a book in the traditional way with a publisher. New authors (especially first-time authors) increasingly choose a more modern approach to publishing books. They self-publish first and only later sell to a publisher once they have already sold the first copies of their book. They follow a hybrid model that maximises early profits without sacrificing scale later on.

To be successful with self-publishing and zero marketing, a book needs to be recommendable and useful. Useful books solve a problem. Such problem-solver books can be reliably designed, tested, and provide value to potential readers even before publication. To write a useful book, be very clear about who your book is for and also who it is not for.

“You can’t fully prevent bad reviews from ever happening, but you can certainly make them a rare exception by plainly stating who your book is for and what they’re going to get out of reading it.”

State what readers will get out of it. Be as niche as possible. It is better to satisfy a few readers than keeping many readers in a larger audience unsatisfied. In other words, your book needs to be the best, not for everyone, but for someone.

One of the core strategies of Fitzpatrick’s approach is to test and get feedback on a book idea long before publication.

“A major theme of this guide is to stop writing your manuscript in secret and start exposing it to — and learning from — real readers as quickly as possible.”

You want to write something that delivers real value to the average reader. To know whether your book can deliver real value you want to test the book with the readers before it is written. A recommendable book needs to have a good value per page ratio.

“From a reader’s perspective, your book is a multi-hour journey experienced as value received over time spent. If too much time passes before arriving at the next piece of meaningful value, a reader’s engagement drops and they’ll drift away.Designing a strong reader experience means deciding exactly how to pace and where to place your book’s major insights, takeaways, tools,actions, and “a-ha” moments. It’s the difference between a page-turner and a grind”

Fitzpatrick recommends to get to the first piece of value as soon as possible. Try to reduce foreword, introduction, etc. to as few words as possible and move theory and background to the end. The aim is to get feedback from 3-5 deeply engaged beta readers for each editing round. Make it as easy as possible for beta readers to provide feedback. Tell your beta readers what type of feedback you want. Do not think of the feedback of criticism of the book or even you personally. You and your readers are working together to improve the book.

Recommendable books have the potential to enter the back catalog. Back catalog books are responsible for 90% of the publishing industry’s profits while requiring only 2% of its marketing budget. To get into the back catalogue you need to offer your readers something that will remain relevant for more than five years. In other words, do not focus on temporary tools, trends, and tactics.

In the later parts of the book, Fitzpatrick offers valuable bits of very actionable advice. For example on seed marketing tactics for modern book publishing, which can include digital book tours via podcasts and online events, Amazon PPC advertising, giveaways and bulk sales, or an author platform via content marketing.

He also discusses different techniques for profit-boosting such as offering upsell-bundles or creating a business around the book that sells services or digital products. Similarly, once the book is published optimisation strategies include setting up a purchase funnel (title, subtitle, cover, store page, reviews), adding percentage sales boosts (extra platforms, formats, related products), and paying attention to your fans.

Building an author platform is the best but most time consuming tactic to market a book and position oneself as an authority.

“Of the four options for seed marketing, building and maintaining anauthor platform is by far the most time-intensive. But in the long term, asupportive audience is incredibly valuable. It’s a permanent,compounding asset that will travel with you from project to project foras long as you continue doing interesting work.”

To build an author platform you need to decide where to post (communities and platforms), what to post (drafts, research, references, learnings, process, behind-the-scenes), when to post (schedule to make it a habit), how to capture interest (turn audience into direct contacts (email subscribers)). Start with pillar content (podcast, video, book chapter, research paper). Repurpose it into micro content (articles, quotes, images, stories). Distribute across several social media platforms and communities. Make publishing content a habit, a repeatable process and find some way to stay accountable.

Fitzpatrick does not have much to say about the actual content of a recommendable book (besides the niching down and testing). Write Useful Books offers mostly small, but extremely practical pieces of advice for self-publishing books and establishing oneself as an author(ity). Considering that the traditional publishing market is ripe for new models and that the traditional process is highly opaque for novice authors, this book offers a surprisingly refreshing read for any potential book authors.

David Deutsch’s project that he starts in “The Fabric of Reality” is an ambitious one. His goal is nothing less than to develop a theory of everything or as he calls it a theory that explains the fabric of reality. Importantly, he does not abandon existing theories and try to come up with an entirely new theory of his own. Rather he tries to integrate four of the most sophisticated and powerful theories of our time.

First, the theory of quantum physics and the multiverse. A particular explanation of quantum theory, rich with illustrations and experiments, that is strikingly unintuitive and refreshingly different from common explanations taught in school, for example. His second strand of theorising that he tries to integrate with quantum physics is Popperian epistemology. Basic ideas of how we get to know things and cumulatively develop explanations about phenomena. Third, Darwin-Dawkins theory of evolution. He compares the cumulative development of knowledge an theoretical explanations with biological evolution. Finally, Turing’s theory of universal computation. Discussing primarily virtual reality and its possibilities in computing the multiverse he links together all four strands of theorising.

Understood individually the four strands are reductionist. They have explanatory gaps. However, taken together, they can form a unified explanation of the fabric of reality.

“Connections have been discovered between the basic principles of these four apparently independent subjects that it has become impossible to reach our best understanding of any one of them without also understanding the other three.”

Our deepest theories become so integrated with one another that they can only be understood jointly.

Deutsch’s book is already an interesting read based on the description of the four strands and the connections that he develops between them. Yet, the book is also interesting because it discusses basic ideas of philosophy of science. For example, Deutsch starts with a basic introduction about the nature of theory.

For Deutsch, what matters about a theory is its explanatory power. Its predictive power is only supplementary Deutsch’s focus on explanation and critique of induction resonate well with abductive approaches to theory building.

“We seek explanations when we encounter a problem with existing ones. We then embark on a problem-solving process. New explanatory theories begin as unjustified conjectures, which are criticized and compared according to the criteria inherent in the problem. Those that fail to survive this criticism are abandoned. The survivors become the new prevailing theories, some of which are themselves problematic and so lead us to seek even better explanations. The whole process resembles biological evolution.”

He argues that theories are becoming deeper and more general. Theories are superseding the myriad of detailed theories that come before them. Deeper and more general theories say more about a wider range of situations than several detailed theories did together. Deutsch explains this as two opposing effects of the growth of knowledge. The increasing breadth of theories and the increasing depth of theories. Importantly, he argues, depth is winning, which makes it not only possible to conceive of a theory of everything, but also easier to understand then several detailed theories.

Deutsch also offers a compelling, for a natural scientist, explanation of the different sciences, including the social sciences. Higher-level sciences (compared to physics) such as chemistry, biology, psychology, economics, and the social sciences are able to be studied and understood because of what he calls emergence. Higher-level simplicity and comprehensibility emerges out of low-level complexity. The idea of emergence also prevents us from simply using low-level physical theories to explain, for example, social processes. Lower-level theories have implications for higher-level theories and vice versa.

For him, questions of explanation and thereby theory are closely intertwined with questions about the acceptable criteria for reality.

“Not only do explanations change, but our criteria and ideas about what should count as an explanation are gradually changing (improving) too. So the list of acceptable modes of explanation will always be open-ended, and consequently the list of acceptable criteria for reality must be open-ended too. But what is it about an explanation - given that, for whatever reasons, we find it satisfactory - that should make us classify some things as real and others as illusory or imaginary?”

It is especially these last quotes about the entanglement of different theoretical ideas and the changing nature of what even counts as an explanation that made me think about the IS field. Are we at a stage yet where different theoretical ideas are coherently linked to one another? Will we ever reach such a state? Interestingly, the question of what counts as theory or explanation has been debated a lot recently. Although many of Deutsch’s argument about the four strands of theorising and his integration of them is highyl abstract, his more general discussion of philosophy of science and theorising is well worth reading in my opinion.

I told myself that I would not read any more productivity, self help, or time management books anymore. Yet, Burkeman’s “Time Management for Mortals” seemed to be different and made it on my reading list regardless. What attracted me personally to this one is the radically different view and critique of the extant time management literature. Professionally, I was interested in the fact that Burkeman reviewed and challenged our fundamental understanding of time itself.

The abstract notion of time that we experience today is a relic of the industrial revolution. Hunter-gatherers and even farmers during the agricultural revolution did not think about time in terms of “work time” or “leisure time”. Modern ideas such as “wasting” or “saving” time did not make sense to them. Workers got up with the circadian cycle, even experiencing variations in the length of their days depending on the seasons. Time was not something abstract and separate from life. Time was inextricably enmeshed with their daily work and lives. Their rhythms of life emerged from the work tasks themselves. Burkeman calls this a task-oriented understanding of time.

Today we have aradically different understanding of time. We are able to talk about tasks and events in terms of concrete units of time. This did not make sense before the invention of clock time, because there was no reference standard. Time or differences in time had to compared to other concrete tasks. When thinking about time as an abstract entity it is only natural to start treating time as a resource that can be bought, wasted, saved, used efficiently, and so on. Before the construction of clock-time, time was simply the flow in which life unfolded, the flow of action that life was made of. Clock time separated time and life.

Based on this interesting review of the development of our modern understanding of time, Burkeman then argues that most of the time management problems that we are trying to solve today are caused by this socially-constructed separation of time and life.

“The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.”

Interestingly, Burkeman refers to Heidegger as a way out of this dilemma. He argues that we need to acknowledge our limitations as human beings, always already finding ourselves thrown into this time and place, uncertain about what comes next. Here he draws from Heidegger’s idea that we are time. There is no meaningful way of thinking about a person’s existence except as a sequence of moments of time. This is a truly process philosophical understanding of time.

Another point that Burkeman makes and that resonates well with my own work on digital nomads and temporal rhythms is the notion of temporal relationality. Classic economical theory suggests that time is a regular good with the implication that the more of it you command the more valuable it is. However, time is also a networked or relational good. It derives its value from within the unfolding of relationships over time. The more people time is shared with, the more valuable it becomes.

I see how this idea of relational time or process-relational philosophy could explain questions of identity, belonging, and loneliness in the case of digital nomads. Digital nomads are different from traditional nomads in that community and social relations are not as important for work. Most digital nomads are independent workers or work highly asynchronously, communicating almost exclusively via digital means. Traditional nomads’ survival depends on their working together with others. This difference is again established, at least in part, by our modern understanding of time and the accompanying time management techniques. Digital nomads are optimising for personal spatial as well as temporal freedom. They want to work wherever and whenever they want. This gain in personal temporal freedom comes with a loss in social temporal coordination. Digital nomads’ lifestyle lacks the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root. Misaligned schedules make it difficult to forge connections for two reasons: on the job because you are off when others are working together and socialising, during free time because you are trying to socialise when everyone else is working. In sum, digital nomads desynchronise their schedules from the established socio-temporal rhythm.

“The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos, fueled by the demands of the market economy, has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organizing time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work, and socialize are becoming ever more uncoordinated.”

For less privileged digital workers such as gig workers the supposed personal temporal freedom seems to turn even into concrete loss of freedom manifesting in “on-demand scheduling”:

“[personal temporal freedom] means unpredictable gig-economy jobs and “on-demand scheduling,” in which the big-box retailer you work for might call you into work at any moment, its labor needs calculated algorithmically from hour to hour based on sales volume—making it all but impossible to plan childcare or essential visits to the doctor, let alone a night out with friends.”

The key message of “Four Thousand Weeks” is that our misguided attempts at managing time are based on a modern understanding of clock-time. Without a doubt, the invention of clocks, time zones, and more and more precise scientific measurement of time has come with invaluable technological advancements. Yet, for our work and social life, Burkeman argues a different understanding of time more in line with process philosophical ideas may be more useful to organise ourselves. I think, at least, digital and remote workers should take Burkeman’s ideas seriously.

All reasoning is directionally motivated reasoning; our conclusions are always biased by unconscious motives. This is the core premise underlying Julia Galef’s book. But just because all reasoning is motivated does not mean that we cannot do something about it. For Galef how we acknowledge, question, and work with our biases is a mindset question.

She distinguishes between soldier mindset and scout mindset. Soldier mindset is about protecting one’s ego by finding comforting but blinding narratives and by avoiding negative emotions. For examples, as academics we often convince ourselves about the novelty of our ideas, the originality of our theories, and the ingenuity of our methods, more so than what they really are. This often requires us to intentionally misunderstand or misinterpret other’s work thus constructing a straw man argument no one is actually making. Scout mindset, Galef’s core idea and title of this book, describes the idea that some people are aware of the limits of their understanding, are open to new information, and embrace changing their mind.

… they’re more genuinely desirous of the truth, even if it’s not what they were hoping for, and less willing to accept bad arguments that happen to be convenient. They’re more motivated to go out, test their theories and discover their mistakes. They’re more conscious of the possibility that their map of reality could be wrong, and more open to changing their mind.

Technically, making the shift to scout mindset is easy. Even though it can be even stronger when shared with others, one only needs to acknowledge to oneself that we were wrong about a decision we made. Galef’s book can be boiled down to an eight-step guide that everyone can apply to practice Scout mindset in their everyday decision-making processes.

First, we need to become aware and acknowledge the kind of biases that could impact on our decision making. Galef suggests several thought experiments that can help us become aware of these biases. These experiments include the double standard test (Am I judging other people’s behaviour by a standard I wouldn’t apply to myself?), the outsider test (imagine someone else stepped into your shoes—what do you expect they would do in your situation?), the selective sceptic test (imagine this evidence supported the other side. How credible would you find it then?), and the status quo bias test (imagine your current situation was no longer the status quo. Would you then actively choose it?).

Second, such thought experiments also help us calibrate our own decision-making processes. We become more aware of our overly certain claims and ask ourselves how sure we really are in a particular situation.

“Happily, calibration is a skill with a quick learning curve. A couple of hours of practice is all it takes for most people to become very well calibrated—at least within a single domain, like trivia questions.”

Third, decision making based on the Scout mindset is all about planning for uncertain or unexpected scenarios. Our usually response to an uncomfortable situation or worrying though is to explain it away. “This won’t happen to me.” Instead, by thinking such events through beforehand and making a plan for how we would act if the unlikely would actually happen, we are treating the unexpected scenario as a real possibility rather than falsely rationalising it away.

Fourth, Galef suggests to train our mind in a form of Socratic dialogue. We usually blind out opinions and media that stand in opposition to our own beliefs and assumptions (social media has even algorithmically configured this phenomenon). Yet, when actively seeking and listening to an author or news source that differs from our opinions, but has a coherent argument we are more likely to engage with the opposing side rather than simply dismissing it.

Fifth, similarly, when engaging with individuals we should listen to them and try to understand their point rather than dismissing their point of view as misguided all too quickly. Behaviour that might appear irrational to us nevertheless makes sense to them. Our aim should be to understand why it makes sense to them and not to us.

Sixth, Scouts look for opportunities to learn from their mistakes and update their beliefs. For a scout new information is not a threat to one’s beliefs or reasoning process, but an opportunity to improve. Instead of dismissing them as outliers, they actively seek exceptions to their beliefs and focus in on observations that they cannot yet explain with their current theory.

“But most of the time, being wrong doesn’t mean you did something wrong. It’s not something you need to apologize for, and the appropriate attitude to have about it is neither defensive nor humbly self-flagellating, but matter-of-fact. Even the language scouts use to describe being wrong reflects this attitude. Instead of ‘admitting a mistake,’ scouts will sometimes talk about ‘updating’.”

Your worldview is a living document meant to be revised.

Seventh, these success in updating one’s beliefs should be shared with others as much as possible. It is important to let those that played a role in the updating process know that one’s beliefs have been changed. Scouts are never too proud to acknowledge that others have convinced them to adopt new assumptions or explanations.

Finally, identities of one’s beliefs should be held lightly. One’s identity should serve as a description, not a central source of meaning in one’s life. Holding your identity lightly keeps your mind flexible and free to follow the evidence. It allows you to perform, what Galef calls, an ideological Turing test of the other side. Only by arguing for the other side yourself can you truly start to appreciate the other’s point of view.

Galef’s book resonates with other recent ideas on decision-making and biases such as Kahneman’s work. While the whole solider versus scout mindset metaphor seems to somewhat lead away from the core argument about motivated decision-making, the book covers several interesting ideas. To me what was most valuable were the multiple thought experiments that Galef describes. These experiments combined with the eight step guide will certainly be useful to get to the bottom of the question “Is it true?”

Storytelling seems to be one of those tiny skills that offers tremendous potential. Many academic fields including neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary biology seem to converge on the theory that humans develop stories to make sense of the abundance of information that their senses produce every second. The theory goes that as humans we would not be able to survive without the ability to tell stories of what is going on around us. Harari in his book Sapiens also argues that homo sapiens are the only species on earth that develops stories or what he refers to as religions, nations, laws, corporations, ideologies. Only because of this ability were humans able to build civilisations.

Daniel Joshua Rubin in his book “27 Essential Principles of Story” offers a simple but effective template with which one can develop stories. Rubin’s fundamental storytelling structure mirrors the classic three-act structure with its three climactic moments of theatre, film and television. He refers to the three acts as the beginning with the central dramatic question, the middle with a clash of expectations and the ending with the answer to the central dramatic question.

“When someone tells you a story, the first thing you wonder is “Does this have a point?” The end of your story answers that question—it expresses your theme, or main idea, the one the entire narrative is crafted to convey.”

This structure already reveals another central building block of story. The central dramatic question.

Every story starts with a hook that draws the reader in. The hook comes as an event that drops like a hammer and radically alters the protagonist’s life. As a result of the hammer coming down, a need to acquire an object of desire arises for the protagonist. The central dramatic question of the story then becomes: “Can the protagonist acquire the object of desire?” The entire narrative of the story develops to answer the central dramatic question. Thus, the basic structure of every story fuelled by a dramatic question then starts with setting up the protagonist’s mental state, asking the question, building tensions around it, and ultimately answering it.

The story is driven from the question to its answer through logical cause and effect relationships. These “cause and effect” actions lead the protagonist to take greater and greater risks. Stories give insight into the meaning of life by clashing expectations with reality. The clash needs to be both believable and surprising. The clash reveals the character of the protagonist. The ending of a story starts with a critical decision that will decide how the central dramatic question will be answered and whether the protagonist will obtain the object of desire.

A great story needs an active protagonist that makes deliberate decisions, because these actions reveal the true character of the protagonist. Actions fill the story with meaning through causal chains. Actions are most revealing when they entail difficult decisions and dilemmas. Great stories are full of such conflicts; conflict with oneself, personal relationships, society at large, and ultimately the physical world. Conflicts are often layered meaning they unfold at multiple levels. Ideally in building momentum these layers are revealed from the outside in until the core character of the protagonist is revealed. In showing actions and conflict, one of the most famous principles of story telling “show, don’t tell” comes to the fore.

“If your character is intelligent, show them solving a problem. If they’re a good person, show them taking care of someone else, or doing the right thing when no one’s watching. If they care deeply about their appearance, show them spending two hours meticulously attending to every last detail of their outfit.”

Other important elements of story according to Rubin’s book are that protagonists need to act intelligently, they wear masks, are transformed, and face evil in the form of their antagonist. Every decision the protagonist makes needs to make sense, even if they are wrong or stupid. Stories are about change and transformation of the protagonist, if nothing changes, nothing substantive happened. The transformation manifests through the protagonist’s quest for obtaining the object of desire. It must be convincing to the reader how and why the transformation came about. The antagonist tries to prevent the protagonist from obtaining the object of desire. The more motivated the antagonist is, the harder the protagonist has to work to obtain the object of desire and the more compelling the story will be.

The setting is another important element of a story. It provides the situatedness that makes all actions appear as meaningful.

“Linking inextricably to your setting means that you evoke such a strong sense of place and time that the characters could not come from anywhere else at any other time.”

Setting is approached from different levels: the high level that includes history, culture, and landscape as well as the in-depth situations such as spaces, moments, and interactions. In telling the story, you get to the universal through the specific.

“You’ll know you have it when it’s impossible to imagine changing the setting without changing something fundamental about the characters.”

Finally, dialogue in story is the means by which characters try to get others to do things. Because these influencing acts are strategic, the meaning of what is said in dialogue is often hidden.

“There’s only one way to say what you mean. You just say what you mean. But there’s an infinite number of ways to hide what you mean.”

The 27 principles in Rubin’s book are coherent and clearly developed. They offer an effective scaffold to think about, analyse, and write stories. Yet I fear this effectiveness comes as a double-edged sword. The book brings the danger of thinking exclusively in terms of Rubin’s template whenever one encounters stories be it in books, movies, or theatre. It imposes a template onto one’s mind that makes it difficult to fully appreciate the art of good storytelling. It turns a virtuous craft into an all to formulaic procedure. I guess, as with all books, the advice should be to take the few most useful principles, but not blindly apply all 27.

Harari’s book Sapiens is the most exciting history book I’ve ever read. It constructs a compelling argument about the intertwinement of history, culture, and the human species. The core idea of Sapiens rests on the thesis that with the rise of homo sapiens, humans became the first species that entered a dual reality of the physical world and the socially constructed, imagined world of religions, ideologies, and societies. Because the first reality is rooted in biology, changes depend on genetic mutations and are extremely slow. Because the second reality is socially constructed, changes in that world do not require genetic mutations and can thus come about rapidly. The stories that constitute an imagined reality can be passed on to future generations much quicker and easier than mutations in the genetic code. Myths and stories are what allowed humans to coordinate and collaborate in large numbers compared to the relatively small numbers of animals or hunter-gatherer tribes.

Culture is the diversity of these imagined realities of myths and stories. History, then, is the ongoing change and development of cultures. Today, most developments in the world that are concerned with humans can be explained through cultural and historical narratives rather than biological theories.

“To understand the rise of Christianity or the French Revolution, it is not enough to comprehend the interaction of genes hormones and organisms. It is necessary to take into account the interaction of ideas, images and fantasies as well.”

Cultures are in constant flux. They undergo transformation both from within and from the outside. Importantly, cultures are propelled forward to change through contradictions and discord in thought; different ideas and values compel us to re-think and re-evaluate.

The second revolution that Sapiens is concerned with is the Agricultural Revolution. The agricultural revolution radically changed people’s lives by making them permanently settled and requiring much more time from them than what was needed for hunting and gathering. From a purely evolutionary perspective, the agricultural revolution was a big success both for humans as it allowed more humans to be fed and for plants as few species (e.g., rice, wheat, cows, chicken) were able to significantly increase their population. From that perspective more copies of the same DNA under worse environmental conditions are better than fewer copies under better conditions. In other words, individual happiness and suffering was severely changed during that time by making lives for farmers much more miserable than it was previously for hunters and gatherers.

“The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.”

Because the agricultural revolution with all the change it brought about happened so quickly, humans had no time to adjust on a genetical level. Instead, the cooperation networks that were required for farming projects and organisation in cities to succeed were based on imagined orders. Imagined orders such as laws, ideologies, and religions are not objectively true, but enable humans to cooperate effectively in large societies.

Large societies require a much larger capability to process and store information, especially mathematical data. This capability emerged as the ability to write. Writing has significantly altered the way humans think, by making them view the world in terms of bureaucratic categories and through mathematical script.

“Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers. And this is not the end of the story. The field of artificial intelligence is seeking to create a new kind of intelligence based solely on the binary script of computers.”

Imagined orders and scripts filled the biological gaps that enabled humans to organise in mass-cooperation networks. Historically, imagined orders come with imagined categories in which humans are being classified. These categories are seldom just and often discriminate. For example, biology only knows male and female. Culture knows man and woman (and non-binary categories in some cultures), but the terms man and woman come with a lot of cultural baggage and not every male is a man and every female is a woman.

Sapiens is primarily a book about history. Harari makes several interesting arguments about the study of history.

“What is the difference between describing ‘how’ and explaining ‘why’? To describe ‘how’ means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another. To explain ‘why’ means to find causal connections that account for the occurrence of this particular series of events to the exclusion of all others.”

This distinction between how and why makes historical analyses become more difficult the more one knows about a particular phenomenon or event. That is, the more one is able to answer the how question, the more difficult it becomes to answer the why question. For those who have only a superficial understanding of the history, the one path that history took appears as obvious, but for the knowledgeable historian it becomes less and less obvious why one path was chosen over the myriad of potential other paths. History is not deterministic. The future is unknown and difficult if not impossible to predict. Examples are the advent of the nuclear age in the 1940s (that did not happen) or the colonisation of the solar system by 2000 (which did not happen) or the emergence of the Internet (which no one predicted). External forces constrain its development, but leave ample room for serendipitous developments.

“A ‘horizon of possibilities’ means the entire spectrum of beliefs, practices and experiences that are open before a particular society, given its ecological, technological and cultural limitations.”

This becomes even more difficult because many cultures behave as level 2 chaotic systems (or performative phenomena). They are systems that cannot be predicted because they react to predictions about them and thereby prohibit accurate predictions. Studying history is nevertheless important not because it allows us to make predictions about the future but to understand the conditions that brought the current situation into being. More importantly, it sensitises us to the myriad of other possibilities that could have been possible and thus encourages us to question the assumptions underlying our current cultures and societies and that they may well be otherwise. Also because the dynamics of history and culture are not always directed toward human betterment.

Having spent now more than four years in Australia, “Sand Talk” was an interesting read for me as it was the first more or less academic book that I read about Aboriginal culture. Surprisingly, many of the general themes of Aboriginal culture resonate with my thinking with regards to process, time and relationships. While the book covers many of these more general themes, it is primarily concerned with Aboriginal knowledge and how that knowledge could help the world become more sustainable.

The basic assumptions of what could be called an Aboriginal “ontology” as described by Yunkaporta come very close to a process-relational ontology. The First aboriginal law states that creation is an ongoing process and nothing is created or destroyed as a final state because of the complex relationships between systems. It is however relatively human-centred because it also states that humans are the custodial species of the world.

“Creation is not an event in the distant past, but something that is continually unfolding and needs custodians to keep co-creating it by linking the two worlds together via metaphors in cultural practice.”

This does not mean that humans are somehow superior or rulers. Instead humans must move with this process of creation and cannot necessarily shape its flow.

The Aboriginal understanding of time as non-linear is also in line with a process perspective. Interestingly Yunkaporta brings to our attention that in the English language we do not really have a word for non-linear except from the negative. That is because it is unintuitive to consider traveling, thinking, talking and time itself as anything but non-linear. Time for indigenous Australian moves in cycles such as the seasonal cycles of the landscape or the stellar cycles of the starry firmament. Furthermore, time cannot be separated from space. Time and space are usually the same word in Aboriginal languages.

Most of “Sand Talk” focuses on Aboriginal knowledge and knowledge processes. Aboriginal cultural knowledge develops in deep relationships and long processes.

“People today will mostly focus on the points of connection, the nodes of interest like stars in the sky. but the real understanding comes in the spaces in between, in the relational forces that connect and move the points. This symbol highlights those interconnections and de-emphasises the points. If you can see the relational forces connecting and moving the elements of a system, rather than focusing on the elements themselves, you are able to see a pattern outside of linear time. If you bring that pattern back into linear time, this can be called a prediction in today’s world.”

Aboriginal knowledge is relational and processual. The knowledge product itself is not as important as the communal knowledge process itself. In the Western world, however, Aboriginal knowledge is typically only considered as a resource. A resource that can be exploited and synthesised in Western knowledge systems. There is no interest in the process of aboriginal knowing.

The core of the book is a description of the five Aboriginal ways of knowing or minds. Kinship-mind is a way of preserving knowledge in relationships. Knowledge is stored in relationships and can best be retrieved if the relationship is reestablished. This way of knowing is not limited to social relationships.

“In our world nothing can be known or even exist unless it is in relation to other things. Most importantly, those things that are connected are less important than the forces of connection between them. We exist to form these relationships, which make up the energy that holds creation together. When knowledge is patterned within these forces of connection it is sustainable over deep time.”

Story-mind is about the role of narratives and songs in knowledge transmission and memorisation. Dreaming-mind is about the role of metaphors to work with knowledge. The connection between abstract and tangible knowledge. Ancestor-mind is about deep engagement with culture and land for learning. It is characterised by a state of complete concentration. Pattern-mind is about seeing systems as a whole and the trends and patterns within them. It is about truly holistic, contextual reasoning. Taken together, an Aboriginal orientation to research would examinine multiple interrelated variables situated in place and time rather than independent of context. It is about holistic reasoning which requires a lived cultural framework embedded in the landscape and the patterns of creation one follows there.

Yunkaporta argues that Aboriginal knowledge could provide a pathway for a more sustainable future. To design sustainable ways of living we need to pay attention to the processes through which systems came to be. Not only to the knowledge product. Solutions can only be designed from within a deep understanding of the system rather from the outside. Aboriginal culture defines four operating guidelines of sustainability agents. Connectedness balances the excesses of individualism in the diversity principle. Diversification compels to maintain individual differences. Interaction provides the energy and spirit of communication to power the system. Adaption allow yourself to be transformed through your interactions with other agents and the knowledge that passes through you from them.

“Work” provides a rich history of how humanity has spend its time. Interestingly, Suzman’s book takes a social anthropological point of departure for answering this question. It primarily bases its argument on fieldwork with the Ju/'hoansi, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherers tribes. It brings forth many arguments that challenge fundamental economic theories. Indeed, Suzman develops an extensive critique of the principle economic problem. Although it is primarily a historical account of work, the book has a lot to say about today’s changes to work induced by digital technologies.

Suzman provides a refreshing, but for an anthropologist surprisingly scientific definition of work. Work for him is in principle about the energy quest. The search for ever more energy, which, in the early days, was meant to fulfil basic needs, but has turned into a self-feeding process. The story of work then in the book is the story of how humans tapped into ever richer energy sources. It describes several energy revolutions that humanity went through. From consuming plants to meat, from raw meat to cooked meat through the discovery of fire, from hunting to farming, from primarily human labour to mechanical labour and ultimately from mechanical labour to automation. This development in energy sources is directly associated with the development of the human species including its mental capacities.

No scientific discipline has been so concerned with work as the field of economics. Economics is about the efficient allocation of scarce resources. However, as Suzman shows and as more and more people start to believe in the age of robotics and artificial intelligence, this economic scarcity has not always been the organising feature of human economic life. Economic scarcity might actually be a social construction. He makes this point by explaining how the core assumption that underlies our economic institutions and thereby our understanding of work are an artefact of the agricultural revolution. In other words, scarcity did not exist prior to farming societies and still does not exist in hunter-gatherer populations until this day. Scarcity became socially constructed when people moved to cities and developed greed of what others had. A form of scarcity articulated in the language of aspiration, jealousy and desire. Anthropologist Durkheim also recognised this problem when developing the concept of anomie which he described by the “malady of infinite aspiration”. While Durkheim imagined that humanity will eventually find a cure for this condition and become happy without work pursuing leisurely activity, Suzman argues to the contrary:

“Since then, the kind of stability that Durkheim imagined would eventually settle in following industrialisation has come to resemble just another infinite aspiration that slips frustratingly further away whenever it seems to be nearly in reach. Instead, as energy-capture rates have surged, new technologies have come online and our cities have continued to swell, constant and unpredictable change has become the new normal everywhere, and anomie looks increasingly like the permanent condition of the modern age.”

Even though basic human needs are easily met, corporations and advertisers are continuously creating new, artificial needs that fuel the scarcity problem and drive economic growth.

Based on his extensive fieldwork in Africa, Suzman shows that hunter-gatherers had much more free time than we have today. Despite the common believe that such tribes live poor and precarious lives they are able to easily fulfil their basic material needs because they did not have exorbitant desires. For example, hunter-gatherers have an immediate return economy rather than the delayed return economy of industrial and farming societies. That means they never gathered more food than they needed on one particular day and they did not think about storing food either. Hunter-gatherers like the Ju/'hoansi also employ a principle of demand-sharing rather than supply-sharing according to which it is appropriate for every member of the society to ask for food from anyone at any time. With the agricultural revolution and the subsequent migration of people into cities due to the abundant food supply this changed significantly. Farmers started to extend the labour and debt relationship they had with their land to their personal relationships in the form of exchanges and transactions. That is why much of our financial terminology such as capital or stock spring from these early farming societies.

“It is perhaps unsurprising, then, despite the fact that hardly any of us now produce our own food, that the sanctification of scarcity and the economic institutions and norms that emerged during this period still underwrite how we organise our economic life today.”

If work is primarily about seeking ever richer energy sources then the question becomes where does all this new found energy go? Suzman shows that the complexity of a society at any particular time is a useful measure for the quantity of energy that it captures and also the amount of work that is needed to build and maintain this complexity. That is why population growth has largely eaten up the improvements in productivity through farming and the industrial revolution. With the advent of farming and later automation, people started to develop new jobs and roles out of a mix of circumstances, curiosity and boredom. This is what lead to the growth of the third sector economy and service industries which absorbed most of the workers that got displaced due to the industrial revolution. Suzman argues that it is not necessarily that these people had to find work because they had to fulfil their basic material needs, but that it has to do with our understanding of work grounded in the agricultural revolution:

“Another way to interpret the expansion of the service sector is in terms of the culture of work that has become so deeply ingrained in us since the agricultural revolution. This is a culture that makes us intolerant of freeloaders and canonise gainful employment as the basis of our social contract with one another even if many jobs don’t serve much purpose other than keeping people busy.”

In other words whenever there has been a large surplus of energy, people found creative ways to put it to work by inventing new forms of work.

In the end, Suzman outlines several interesting lessons of the history of work for the next energy revolution triggered by robotics and artificial intelligence. The problem is that while we are good at inventing new jobs, we are not good at creating meaningful and fulfilling jobs. Furthermore, it remains to be seen for how much longer humans will be able to come up with new jobs.

“Even more importantly, it is now far from certain whether or not the service sector will be able to accommodate all of those whose work will be determined superfluous to requirements by the next tide of automation, whose waves are already licking against the shores of this last refuge of working men and women in the post-industrial age.”

The information age has brought tremendous growth to developing countries because jobs could be easily outsourced to countries that were less expensive in terms of wages. Automation removes those advantages because the cost of high technology such as AI, unlike labour, is the same in the developed world. Automation will inflate the wealth of business owners that are able to run largely automated businesses. It will also increase return on capital rather than labour as one is able to invest in automated businesses. This will exacerbate the divide between the rich and the poor leading to a further decoupling of economic growth and average wealth. Suzman concludes with an intriguing proposal:

“One aim is to reveal how our relationship to work - in the broadest sense - is more fundamental than that imagined by the likes of Keynes. The relationship between energy, life and work is part of a common bond we have with all other living organisms, and at the same time our purposefulness, our infinite skilfulness and ability to find satisfaction in even the mundane are part of an evolutionary legacy honed since the very first stirrings of life on earth.”

The key idea of Suzman’s book seems to be a challenge of scarcity economics. A challenge of the key principle of both our contemporary understanding of work and our unsustainable occupation with economic growth. By surfacing these assumptions and showing how hunter-gatherer societies seem to strive based on a different set of assumptions, “Work” invites us a different, more sustainable future for ourselves. A future in which we can harness our energy in the spirit of meaningful work.

In this almost textbook like handbook Spradley presents his “Developmental Research Sequence” for doing participant observation and ultimately writing ethnography. He starts by giving a concise introduction of what ethnography is all about. The one systematic approach in the social sciences and humanities to study the cultural meanings and distinct realities of other people. His statement about the power of ethnography to reveal the cultural diversity of the human species resonates well with Ingold’s argument about anthropological research. He also argues that it is anthropology’s responsibility to embrace different cultures rather than trying to prove superiority of one over the other. Spradley makes a compelling argument for the impact of ethnography as a research technique. He describes how ethnography can help overcome the vulnerability of research as producing “knowledge for the knowledge’s sake”:

“That vulnerability makes our responsibility clearer if not easier. To ignore this vulnerability is like astronauts studying the effects of boredom and weightlessness on fellow astronauts while the spaceship runs out of oxygen, exhausts its fuel supply, and the crew verges on mutiny.”

The challenge for ethnography today is thus to integrate both aims of ethnographic research: understanding the human species and serving the needs of humanity.

After this general introduction into ethnography, Spradley goes on to present his “Developmental Research Sequence” in the main part of the book. Importantly, he presents this sequence as an “ethnographic research cycle” rather than a linear sequence. The basic principle of the technique rests on the questions-answers dyad. In doing participant observation one is discovering both questions and answers. As ethnographic research is based on a cycle, these questions and answers are not one off products. Instead they are iteratively refined as the scope of the ethnographic projects narrows from descriptive to focused to selective participant observation.

“Questions always imply answers. Statements of any kind always imply questions. This is true even when the questions or answers remain unstated. In doing participant observation for ethnographic purposes, as far as possible, both questions and answers must be discovered in the social situation being studied.”

The first step in Spradley’s development research sequence is to locate a social situation that one wants to observe. He defines three basic elements that define any social situation: place, actors, and activities. To choose a situation he offers five selection criteria based on simplicity, accessibility, unobtrusiveness, permissibleness, and frequently recurring activities.

Step two then is to start doing participant observation. As a participant observer one has to fulfill a dual role of at the same time participating in a social situation and observing others and oneself in this situation.

After the fieldwork, one needs to record observations in written fieldnotes. The key consideration for ethnographers is the language that one wants to write these fieldnotes in. Key to writing fieldnotes are thus three principles: the language identification principle, the verbatim principle, and the concreteness principle.

After the introduction to these initial observations Spradley presents the core of his approach based on an iteration of observations and analysis along a narrowing focus.

“In order to discover the cultural patterns of any social situation, you must undertake an intensive analysis of your data before proceeding further.”

Namely, he suggests a sequence of descriptive, focused, and selective observations interspersed with domain analysis, taxonomic analysis, and componential analysis. Only after one has gone through these multiple iterations of asking questions in participant observations and finding answers in analyses only to ask new, more focused, questions can the ethnographer move on to develop cultural themes. This, to me, was the most interesting and also most practical part of the book. There are so many steps that precede thematic analysis and make it much easier that I have not learned as such in my doctoral training. Qualitative data analysis is usually taught as starting with thematic analysis that leads to theory development. The steps that start with the basic domains of a social scene are often glossed over though. It is these domains with their cover terms, included terms, and semantic relationships though that serve as categories for cultural meaning.

“However, the meaning of each cultural domain comes from the differences as well as the similarities among terms. Now we shift our attention to asking, ‘How are all these things different?’”

Only based on these domains, their similarities captured in taxonomies and their differences revealed in contrasting questions can cultural themes be discovered.

“Themes not only recur again and again throughout different parts of a culture, but they also connect different subsystems of a culture. They serve as a general semantic relationship among domains.”

Ultimately, the cultural themes then inform the ethnographic writing. In this final step of writing ethnography the researchers main challenge is to keep a fine balance between universal statements and specific incident statements.

“In writing an ethnography, as a translation in the full sense, the concern with the general is incidental to an understanding of the particular. In order for a reader to see the lives of the people we study, we must show them through particulars, not merely talk about them in generalities.”

It is in these last steps of thematic analysis and ethnographic writing that the scope of the analysis is broadened again from the narrow focused and selective observations and analyses.

In the way “Participant Observation” is written almost in a textbook format (actually meant to be read while one does an ethnography) it is an invaluable resource for junior ethnographers. I regret not having read it before doing my first field research about digital nomads.

In her book, “Atlas of AI”, Kate Crawford tries to highlight how AI development today is largely based on the assumptions of Cartesian dualism. She argues that AI is primarily understood as disembodied intelligence that is removed from any social or material relations and produces knowledge that is independent from the world.

“What Is AI? Neither Artificial nor Intelligent”

She then problematises this assumption by showing how AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. On the contrary, AI is embodied and always socially and materially situated. Further, AI is not rational or autonomous. It could not achieve anything without the computationally intensive training that goes into developing it. Because AI is neither artificial nor intelligent, Crawford argues, we need to consider the multiple interlaced systems of power and dominant interests that go into the design of such systems.

To show these systems of power, Crawford develops, what she refers to as, an atlas that goes beyond the conventional maps of AI; an expanded view of the multiple topological levels across which AI is extracting and exploiting.

“This is an expanded view of artificial intelligence as an extractive industry. The creation of contemporary AI systems depends on exploiting energy and mineral resources from the planet, cheap labor, and data at scale.”

The six spaces or regimes that she relates to one another and that are overlapping in the development of AI systems are:

• Natural resources
• Human labour
• Data
• Classification
• Affect recognition
• State power

While the different stories and journeys are very interesting to read and highlight many of the issues that the digital transformation of society is dealing with, I feel that Crawford sometimes drift a bit too far from AI as the core technology of the book. I understand that it is precisely the point of her atlas technique to show how seemingly unrelated topics are in fact related to AI development, but some topics that she discusses seem to be covering issues of society more broadly. Data, classification, human’s role in providing those classification, affect recognition and government’s use of such tools are clearly linked to AI, but other points that the book talks about such as rare earth extraction, time coordination in Amazon warehouses, or eventually the new space race triggered by private companies seems to be a bit too far removed from it.

An interesting point that Crawford makes is related to the notion of AI (and technology more broadly) becoming infrastructure. I have increasingly read about technology becoming infrastructure in IS and management literature. Importantly, the concept was originally developed in the IS field in the paper by Star and Ruhleder (1996) “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces”. Using the same dimensions as the original authors, Crawford argues that AI is becoming increasingly opaque, composed of mundane, everyday actions and has the potential for serious negative, unintended consequences.

The most interesting takeaways from the book, for me, revolved around her discussion of the privatisation of time, construction of biased training datasets, and the underlying assumptions of classification.

Work time is increasingly being modulated by algorithmic scheduling systems. The workforce that is building such systems is heavily biased toward young male workers that are committed to working around the clock; encoding such beliefs into the technologies. This standard of work hours, however, relies on the unpaid or underpaid care work of others. Such algorithmic scheduling and monitoring systems reduce the range at which the relation between work and time is observed. Time, whether at micro-level of time clocks in factories or at the macro-level of planetary time spanners, is a source of power for corporations.

People that are represented in AI training datasets are seen as part of a technical resource. The context of the data is deemed irrelevant and radically stripped off from the data. This is what Crawford calls the shift from image (or information) to infrastructure. This has important implications, because these datasets shape the epistemic boundaries of AI systems and thus decide how AI sees the world. Crucially, there seems to exist a genealogy of Ai training datasets. That means that AI datasets build on other datasets and thereby inherit the same issues and biases.

Classifications can never be neutral or objective. Classifications are always situated in a social, economical, and political context that shape them and vice versa shape future social and material worlds. Every dataset thus reflects a particular view of the world. It means that certain assumptions had to be made in order to reduce the complexity of the world that it tries to represent. When such systems are then used to predict future classes they are reconstructing particular social patterns based on these assumptions and worldviews. AI simply assumes that at a certain level of granularity, by zooming in close enough, things become sufficiently commensurate so that their similarities and differences become identifiable to the AI even when in reality their characteristics are uncontainable. This categorisation actually has real effects on humans that try to change their behaviours in order to fit into a different category.

Crawford ends with an interesting note on how to move forward or fight against the power regimes of AI. She argues for a renewed politics of refusal that instead of asking where AI will be applied next simply because it can be applied, one should be asking why it should be applied in the first place. This questions the fundamental idea underlying capitalism and AI development that everything that can be predicted should be predicted to maximise profits.

“Refusal requires rejecting the idea that the same tools that serve capital, militaries, and police are also fit to transform schools, hospitals, cities, and ecologies, as though they were value neutral calculators that can be applied everywhere.”

Overall, “The Atlas of AI” is a very interesting book as it is providing a very deep account of artificial intelligence. Starting with the extraction of rare earth materials all the way to the space race funded by Big Tech companies it seems as if the book describes a genealogical account of how different global issues and courses of action are interconnected.

The key theme of Pressfield’s book revolves around the idea of Resistance to creative work, how Resistance can be overcome and how Resistance relates to his idea of a higher level calling. He argues that the creative work itself is not difficult, but that what is difficult about the work is actually getting started to do the work. That force that keeps us from getting started is Resistance. He refers to Resistance as the most toxic force on earth that separates a human’s lived and unlived lives. It is the negative force that pushes us away from the work-in-potential. Interestingly, he writes, Resistance does not have power in and of itself. Resistance is feeding off of us and our fear of it. While the ordinary reader might confuse Pressfield’s notion of Resistance with the common understanding of procrastination, Pressfield argues that Resistance is more general:

“Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it’s the easiest to rationalize.”

There are other manifestations of Resistance. For example, anything that draws attention to ourselves is; anything that brings us in trouble is or anything that hurts others is.

To overcome Resistance, Pressfield suggests one clear path; becoming a professional. The professional clearly distinguished himself or herself from the amateur. The professional loves creative work so much he or she dedicates his or her life to it. Pressfield says that, to beat Resistance, the creative must learn how to be miserable:

“The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. […] He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable.”

While I agree with the idea of having to deal with isolation, rejection and humiliation, I disagree that this is necessarily about being miserable. I think while some people, probably non creatives, would see it as a miserable life, the creative probably does not see it as such. The creative is devoted to it and can find excitement in the boring and little things that others would find miserable. Only by accepting that rejection and humiliation is part of the process and at the same time the price for being a creative rather than just watching others from the outside. The professional does not take humiliation personally. Humiliation, perceived as such, Pressfield argues is simply the external reflection of internal Resistance.

In the third part of the book, Pressfield elaborates on the relation between professionals their higher level calling. When talking about muses, magic, god and higher levels of existence, it becomes a bit too esoteric for myself. There is, however, two more interesting ideas that he presents, which again relate to the idea of amateur vs professional. First, he distinguishes the ego from the self. The ego is concerned with the status quo and the things that are external. That means it is controlled by Resistance. The self wishes to grow and to create new things. The second distinction he makes is between hierarchical and territorial orientation. People that are hierarchical oriented compare themselves with and compete against others. This orientation leads to what he calls hacks; people that create what the market is looking for rather than what is in his or her own heart. This orientation can be fatal for creatives. Creatives he argues must be territorially oriented. They must do work for their own sake rather than for the status and hierarchy that comes with it. Pressfield asks:

“What about ourselves as artists? How do we do our work? If we were the last person on earth, would we still show up at the studio, the rehearsal hall, the laboratory?”

Benjamin Franklin’s auto-biography is a historical account of what today would be called a “Productivity expert” or “Performance coach”. It is extremely interesting to see how he introduces many of the personal productivity practices that these contemporary social media phenomena are promoting. It is refreshing to see how someone can write about these ideas and practices in a completely unbiased manner without the need to please a YouTube algorithm or attract attention. In the following I would like to discuss some of the practices that Franklin describes in his book that resonated well with me or that reminded me most clearly of the modern YouTube counterparts’ videos.

Franklin was writing and maintaining a plan for his life. He wrote this plan at a very young age; not saying exactly when, but one can assume that it was before he turned 21. To his own surprise as he stated he also actually followed this plan very closely his entire life. It would be interesting to know here whether this was because he actually reviewed the plan and managed his daily business according to the plan or whether he was simply living his life according to his virtues which were implicitly embodied in the plan?

Besides the life plan, Franklin also had a plan for every single day. This seems to resemble something that Cal Newport would probably refer to as time-box planning. Franklin, in his book, gives and example of how a typical day in his life is planned and conducted. He has clear time blocks for particular tasks and practices. He acknowledges that it is sometimes difficult to adhere to the plan as he is in a business where customers can show up unexpectedly.

He was using a notebook to journal. Franklin describes a little notebook that he was taking with him everywhere he goes. He used the notebook to jot down any notes or fleeting ideas that he might encounter during the day. This resonates well with the general notion of a bullet journal or daily writing practice. Franklin was a prolific writer, entrepreneur, and inventor. It seems that this journaling habit was key to his success.

Franklin set up a writing and discussion group in Pennsylvania. He gathered several of the most educated, eloquent, and industrious people in the city and organised a regular meeting with them. In these meetings they would discuss topics such as politics, philosophy, and science. Members of the group were also encouraged to produce and present pieces of their writing on topics they discussed. This discussion group resembles closely what today would be referred to as a mastermind group or more traditionally a reading or writing group.

Franklin established a set of 13 virtues that he wanted to live his life by:

1. Temperance: Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation
2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversations
3. Order: Let all your things have their place; let each part of your business have its time
4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve
5. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing
6. Industry: Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unncessary actions
7. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly
8. Justice: Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty
9. Moderation: Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve
10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths or habitation
11. Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or ar accidents common or unavoidable
12. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation
13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates

With regards to the virtues of frugality and industry he noted further that he didn’t only pay attention to live by those virtues, but that he also made sure that others saw him as frugal and industrious. He emphasised, for example, that reading was his only form of amusement that he engaged in and that even that was seen as part of his job as a printer.

Franklin explained that he didn’t try to live by all 13 virtues simultaneously. Instead he ordered the list (in the order above) and started focusing on the first virtue. As soon as he thought he mastered the particular virtue he moved on to the next one. The order of the 13 virtues represents the ease of mastering all 13 as Franklin thought some virtues will have compounding effects on mastering others. Furthermore, he described that he put in place a daily review habit for the 13 virtues. In that review, he used another notebook to record his progress towards the virtues and reflect on it.

Finally, he described a system for what appears to be a deliberate writing practice. He explains that he always wanted to write but didn’t receive the education to be a good writer. So he developed a self-learning practice to improve his writing skills. He used texts from articles that he enjoyed reading and authors’ that he admired and tried to learn from them. In particular, he developed a systematic approach to extracting key ideas from their texts and then trying to reproduce the whole text based on a simple reading of the key ideas.

Kohn’s main objective with the book is to develop a new kind of anthropology that goes beyond the human. That means he tries to overcome the social-material dualism that has been introduced as part of what he calls the double-edged sword that is social constructivism… He argues that other attempts at this endeavour have so far failed at it by attempting to erase the divide through ontological symmetry and that the issue of ontological inseparability will always appear elsewhere.

Kohn takes a different approach to moving beyond the social-material dualism grounded in semiotics. He argues that we need to radically rethink what representation is, even in the social domain. He thereby critiques two major problems with existing approaches to theorising humans and non-humans. He argues against a theorising of sociomaterial relationships in terms of materiality (i.e., attributing agency or even intentionality to materials) and also in terms of assumptions about linguistic relationships (i.e., projecting human representation to material objects).

With this approach he tries to critique existing perspectives from STS, probably the most influential field in trying to take matter seriously, and in particular Bruno Latour’s work. He critiques these attempts by arguing that not all non-human things should be treated as equal, he suggests that there is an important difference between non-human living things and dead materials. One can not just attribute agency to non-human things, because that would discredit the ability of non-human living things that are already selves and able to represent things.

Kohn in his book starts with a very gentle introduction to his ideas. Starting with very intuitive vignette from his fieldwork, he is able to slowly grow the idea of a non-human anthropology in the reader. He in fact, shows the most important ideas such as complexity, context, and entanglement ethnographically rather than assuming them as a-priori, known to the reader. He describes a scene where he was sleeping outside in the forest to show how non-humans, in this case an animal, the jaguar, also interprets signs. Sleeping in the forest with the other Runa, Kohn learned that he must sleep with his face up so that, if a jaguar comes, the jaguar can see into his eyes and thereby regard him as a predator rather than dead meat. He then goes on to argue that in such relational encounters with others, everyone involved becomes something different. Not something different as in I become different, but a different we. A “we” that is forever intertwined. To complete his argument, he then says because how the jaguar sees us matters to us, we can not simply focus on just human anthropology.

“What kind of being one comes to be is the product of how one sees as well as how one is seen by other kinds of beings.”

Broadly speaking the book falls in the field of semiotics. That is understanding the world and reality as made up from signs. Kohn is taking a particularly interesting semiotic perspective based on Pierce’s work. He talks about living signs and semiosis as the process through which one living sign gives rise to another one through ongoing interpretation of such signs. For signs to be alive means that they are not static, but that they can grow and change over time.

The key argument of Kohn’s work is that all selves are alive and they can be human or non-human. Selves are simply the locus of sign interpretation, which makes them semiotic. Sign interpretation is a process. Every instance of sign interpretation is always conditioned by past and future sign interpretations. In other words, selves are instances along a semiotic process, which he calls semiosis. Selves are the outcome of past semiosis and at the same time the starting point for future semiosis. Selves don’t exist in the present. They merely come to life in the flow of the semiotic process to be interpreted by future selves.

At first, Ahrens’ book “How to Take Smart Notes” appears to be just another self-help book for writers. However, the fact that Ahrens shifts the writing focus just a tiny little bit makes this book interesting. He argues that the most important part of writing, the one that we do not pay much attention to, is the everyday writing of notes, drafts, and jots.

“Writing is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is the medium of all this work. And maybe that is the reason why we rarely think about this writing, the everyday writing, the note-taking and draft-making. Like breathing, it is vital to what we do, but because we do it constantly, it escapes our attention.”

Ahrens argues that this everyday writing is crucial for other long form types of writing. It breaks down the amorphous task of writing a book or paper into many smaller steps (or notes). By breaking the writing down and clearly defining intermediate steps, writing becomes more interesting and motivating. At the same time though academic writing cannot be sequenced into a linear process because one has to constantly jump between the parts. I feel this is especially the case for writing qualitative papers, where once you get to writing the discussion section you have to already rewrite the introduction and background sections. It is probably because of this cyclical process that productivity systems such as GTD have never really caught on in academia. While structured planning is useful in professional practice, academic writing requires more flexibility than planning. A clear workflow as described in the book based on the German sociologist Luhmann’s concept of the Zettelkasten promises to provide such a system that is at the same time clearly defined but also offers flexibility to let insights emerge.

The key idea of the smart notes system is about having a set of clearly defined, interconnected writing tasks with intermediate writing output (i.e., notes) that offer immediate feedback and that can be flexibly performed.

To get a good paper written, you only have to rewrite a good draft; to get a good draft written, you only have to turn a series of notes into a continuous text. And as a series of notes is just the rearrangement of notes you already have in your slip-box, all you really have to do is have a pen in your hand when you read.

Because of the many small steps that make up the smart note taking workflow it could benefit from a compounding effect. The more notes one adds to the system the more links can be made. More links ultimately lead to the emergence of idea clusters. These clusters can serve as starting points for new ideas to write about.

The smart notes approach offers a deliberate writing practice because it provides immediate feedback when writing by testing our understanding. Writing and linking notes always requires us to ask questions of how new information fits into our existing understanding. When trying to link and combine ideas in the smart notes system it will uncover flawed arguments and gaps in our thinking. The conventional, linear process of academic writing comes with few such learning opportunities, because feedback is usually only received when we have written a full draft.

The “Smart Notes” approach clearly emphasises creating new information over storing existing information. That is one of the key differentiators from personal wikis or “second brain” approaches. Smart notes are more of a “tool for thought” rather than a tool to archive information. Not trying to replace our brains, like “second brain” approaches seem to suggest, it is rather the correspondence between the note taking system and the brain that supports writing as a facilitator for thinking.

“Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have. Notes build up while you think, read, understand and generate ideas, because you have to have a pen in your hand if you want to think, read, understand and generate ideas properly anyway.”

Because smart notes are meant to create new ideas, Ahren’s book also emphasises the idea of working in public or, in academic terms, publishing what you create. Putting ideas in writing as part of taking smart notes is the necessary first step to publish. While the traditional academic approach would be to publish ideas written up in the form of papers in journals or books, advocates of Zettelkasten and digital garden approaches have taken the idea of working in public to the extreme by even sharing their working notes online.

Ahrens’ argues that personal inertia are the most dominant inhibitors for independent and novel thinking. The smart notes approach is supposed to help overcome our own orthodox thinking habits. But does not the approach also introduce a kind of filter bubble or confirmation bias?

Coming up with creative ideas or theorising is about building connections and bridges between existing pieces of information. The structure of the smart note taking approach with its flat hierarchy and linked notes provides enough structure to build up complexity. At the same time it gives the flexibility to change direction at any time. This flexibility is what allows notes to freely mingle with other ideas in the system and enables a creative way of playing with ideas.

The slip-box is as simple as it gets. Read with a pen in your hand, take smart notes and make connections between them. Ideas will come by themselves and your writing will develop from there. There is no need to start from scratch. Keep doing what you would do anyway: Read, think, write. Just take smart notes along the way.

Overall, the idea of a deliberate writing practice in the form of smart notes sounds attractive. Especially since the approach does not seem to require many changes to the common workflow of academic reading and writing it is something that can be easily implemented. To me the smart notes approach can be a good habit to practice writing in your own words based on what you read. Whether it can really help me come up with new ideas by thinking in the smart notes system remains to be seen.

The key concept that Ericsson develops in this book is what he refers to deliberate practice. He distinguished deliberate practice from common practice as systematic and purposeful practice. Deliberate practice requires focused attention on the task at hand. Deliberate practice also requires clear and measurable goals one is working towards. Finally, deliberate practice requires immediate feedback so that one can track one’s progress towards the set goal. In other words, it is key for deliberate practice to work to break down a larger task into small actions with clear goals that one can see improvement on. Ericsson suggests that a trainer or mentor is capable of assisting with all three of these principles by steering one’s attention, setting goals and providing feedback.

However, Ericsson also provides examples of how can practice deliberately without a trainer. He draws from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and shows how he has developed deliberate practice techniques to become better at writing.

While students that follow a common practice routine also see improvement over time, they most certainly hit a plateau at some point from which on they will not improve any further. A deliberate practice routine can help overcome such plateaus. For instance, Ericsson argues that expert performers such as avantgarde scientists who push the boundaries of their fields follow the same or similar practice routine that brought them to the edge of their field in the first place. Innovation in scientific or other fields is a long, slow and iterative process or deliberate practice.

Rescher in his book “Process Philosophy - A Survey of Basic Issues” develops a pragmatist view of process philosophy that also extensively draws from Whitehead’s ideas. Rescher starts his introduction into process philosophy by describing the ontological substance bias that permeates Western philosophy. He refers to the root of this bias as the process-reducibility doctrine according to which processes are simply the doings of substantial agents and thereby derivative. Every action must have an actor and every event is the outcome of the agency of such actors. Thus, this view does not question the existence of processes but downgrades their significance compared to substances.

“A process is an actual or possible occurrence that consists of an integrated series of connected developments unfolding in programmatic coordination: an orchestrated series of occurrences that are systematically linked to one another either causally or functionally. Such a process need not necessarily be a change in an individual thing or object but can simply relate to some aspect of the general condition of things.”

Process thinking does not deny that there are some processes that relate to the doings and undergoing of beings or even the collective action of actors. However, process thinking also opens the possibility for processes that are subjectless.

“Not stable things, but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities they manifest constitute the world. We must at all costs avoid the fallacy of materializing nature.”

Rescher proposes four basic principals underpinning his process philosophy:

1. Change, emergence, novelty, creativity are among the principal meta-physical categories
2. Process is a principal ontological category
3. Processes are more fundamental than things as ontological categories
4. All major elements of ontological description are better understood in process terms

An interesting argument for process thinking that Rescher brings forward showing his pragmatist approach to process thinking is based on this significance or autonomy of process and things. A substance ontology cannot work without processes due their epistemological importance. Substances remain inherently unknowable without processes. A process ontology on the other hand allows for processes without a connection to substances.

“A process ontology thus greatly simplifies matters. Instead of a two-tier reality that combines things with their inevitable coordinated processes, it settles for a one-tier ontology of process alone.”

If one where to look for a simple ontology, process philosophy has a lot to offer.

There are two ideas that are core to Rescher’s book and that are also to some degree distinct in his line of thinking. The first focal idea of his process philosophy is the notion of “unowned” processes that are not associated with change in an individual person or thing. Unowned processes are free-floating and are different from owned processes in that they do not represent the actions of actual beings. For example, systemic change such as a change in temperature or a decline of the purchasing power of money are processes that are simply related to some aspect of the general condition of things.

The second important idea of Rescher’s writing is the idea of hierarchies of processes. In this aspect he differs from other process theorists such as Mesle, who take a flat perspective toward process and do not engage with the idea of hierarchies of process. Rescher instead discusses how processes always consist of a variety of subordinate processes or what Whitehead calls a “nexus” of process. This complexity of process goes in two directions: inward and outward. Processes form part of a wider structure and at the same time have an inner structure consisting of micro-processes.

Where Rescher gets very close to Tim Ingold’s view of flowing lines of action is the proposition of how beings are becoming in process. It is not the present properties of a process that make a being but rather the history of a process; the temporal quality of its descriptive unfolding (or flowing) across time.

In Rescher’s view processes have patterns and periodicities. Processes are always of a certain type that share a commonality of structure. Again, similar to Mesle, Rescher shows how this idea of process patterns aligns well with the understanding of modern physics and quantum theory according to which there are no substances but only patterns of process that exhibit temporary stabilities.

“The quantum view of reality demolished the most substance-oriented of all ontologies—classical atomism. For it holds that, at the microlevel, what was usually deemed a physical thing, a stably perduring object, is itself no more than a statistical pattern, that is, a stability wave in a surging sea of process.”

Finally, Rescher also provides an interesting overview of the process philosophical movement at large. Specifically, he describes how process philosophers, although united in thematic approach, differ in their opinion of what types of process are most important. For example, he argues that Bergson was focusing on organic and biological processes, James based his ideas on psychological processes and Whitehead emphasized physical processes, whereas Dewey developed a more sociocultural process philosophy.

Mesle opens the book “Process-Relational Philosophy” with a wonderful statement to describe why it is so difficult for us to think in terms of process and becoming rather than being.

“Shadows, wind, and clouds pass so quickly that they seem mostly unreal. So, time and Becoming seem unreal to us. Rocks, iron, and mountains suggest unchanging reality-Being. We can count on them to last, to be there tomorrow and next year.”

This is the challenge we face as humans living in the world. Being is real and tangible to us whereas becoming is much more ephemeral.

Mesle aim with the book is to give an introduction into the ideas of process philosophy primarily drawing from Alfred North Whitehead. He introduces the idea of process-relational thinking by showing how a process philosophy differs from the Cartesian dualist thinking that underpins much of Western thought. The key issue lies in the mind-body dualism first introduced into Western philosophy by Descartes. Interestingly, Mesle describes that Descartes himself saw a unity and mingling of the mind and body to some degree, but because it did not fit his mental model he simply left it out of his philosophy. As many other philosophies try to achieve, process philosophy tries to overcome this dualism by treating mind and body as inseparable. The approach with which process philosophy and Whitehead in particular try to achieve this, however, is unique. Mesle shows how Whitehead’s idea was not just to develop a general philosophy of the world based on mathematics and scientific laws. Instead, Whitehead tried to develop his generalities from the ground of particular observations.

Experience is thus one of the most important concepts of Whitehead’s philosophy. Importantly, experience that goes beyond the commonsensical understanding of conscious experience. Mesle explains how our bodies are taking in so much information every second that most of it does not rise to the level of consciousness. It would thus be flawed to think of experience only in conscious terms. This notion of experience is much in line with Tim Ingold’s understanding and distinction between intentionality and attentionality as well as doing and undergoing. Attentionality in Ingold’s sense is an openness to experiencing the world; a resonant coupling with the movements of the things to which one attends in going along with them. Undergoing then is the unconscious experiencing that only becomes conscious in the doing that follows it; in order to act inside an experience of the world one needs to be already experiencing or undergoing it. This explanation of unconscious experience—doing-in-undergoing in Ingold’s terms—is a much more pragmatic one in that it argues for using our commonsensical understanding of information overload and unconscious bracketing out of certain events and experiences that we nevertheless experience.

Mesle goes on to develop a convincing case for why a process-relational perspective on the world matters. He shows how obviously relational our globalised world has become through technologies such as the World Wide Web. Equally glaring, he argues, is the fact that these global relationships are dynamic processes. The world is changing so fast, that no one can keep up with the change. Some things might change slower than others or even so slow that we cannot even see them changing, but all things nevertheless change. That is why, he argues, the world is better thought of in terms of events and processes rather than things—that is, the core argument of the book:

“Process philosophy is an effort to think clearly and deeply about the obvious truth that our world and our lives are dynamic, interrelated processes and to challenge the apparently obvious, but fundamentally mistaken, idea that the world (including ourselves) is made of things that exist independently of such relationships and that seem to endure unchanged through all the processes of change.”

Time and temporality are important concepts for process philosophy. Common among more sophisticated treatments of temporality is the idea that the distinct notions of past, present, and future are actually existing simultaneously and that the past is always already conditioning the present and at the same time the present is already foreshadowing what is to come in the future. Mesle interestingly develops a different understanding of time by saying that the he does not believe that the future exists at all. He says that there is no future out there already pre-determined and waiting to happen. Instead, there is always a myriad of possibilities for future action that are always in becoming. Again an interesting parallel to what Ingold would call the conditioning flow of action. These collective actions, interactions and decision bring new moments or the future into being. Mesle then compares the understanding of time that process philosophers have with that of modern physicists. He explains how contrary to Newtonian physics process philosophers think that there is no universal time or space that exists as some fixed background on which beings can act but that time is simply the passage—the becoming and perishing—of events.

In the second half of the book, Mesle then goes on to show how many classical social concepts such as identity and power can be reframed through process-relational thinking. Most importantly, he critiques an exclusively social constructivist view of the social world and instead argues that social beings always start as bodies and biological organisms:

“Yet, process-relational thinkers remind us that these social constructs, as deep as they are, are created out of our lived embodiment as biological organisms engaging in causal webs deeper than our social practices, languages, and concepts.”

Mesle talks about the world, including the social, in terms of a vast web of causal relationships that he refers to as relational processes.

I have started this summary with a quote of the book and I would also like to end it with a quote that beautifully summarises Mesle’s core idea in the book and process philosophy more broadly:

“Everything that is actual becomes and perishes. Becoming is the ultimate fact underlying all others. How can we speak of “becoming”? It is not any particular thing or kind of thing. We can never point at becoming apart from specific events that become. Yet it is a feature shared by all things.”