A Modest Proposal: Seth Godin Should Be...

‘Tis a melancholy experience for anyone who browses through this great medium, to see so much content of low and dubious quality, so much wasted time and energy, so much gaming and spamming and jockeying for attention.

A once powerful conduit of ideas and insight, a meeting place of the world's sharpest minds tackling the world’s greatest challenges, where the towering brands of the yesteryear – the Amazons, Yahoos, and Googles – formerly upheld the classical values of beauty, goodness, and truth, but now find themselves overrun and overburdened by their multitudinous offspring.

It’s a joke... It only takes minutes to start a blog and multiply the web’s cluttered and disorganized surplus of information, dumping out post after post of unnecessary verbiage, overflowing the digital latrines of Silicon Valley, sloshing its way around the world through the grimy gutters of Technorati and Bloglines. Daily – twice, thrice, or even twenty times daily – these self-absorbed opinion mongers and dilettantes thrust ever increasing doses of amateur pseudoknowledge into the publick domain.

And why do they do it? What are their motives? Is it some kind of conspiracy? I suppose these vermin-like strivers believe that some of their ideas and opinions might actually be interesting or useful to the rest of us. I suppose they all see themselves as some kind of exception: "... but my ideas are actually pretty good; if only they could be heard." Most of them probably begin with innocent enough intentions – curiosity perhaps – without considering what kind of slope they’re heading down.

I had to know why. My inquisitive and adventurous impulses soon overcame my more conventional habituations. So I decided to try it. Besides, some of my own ideas and opinions are actually pretty good, and may be quite interesting and useful to others; I just hadn’t had many opportunities to voice them. Now this is it. And the rest of the story – my foray into the Great Conversation – tells itself; it can be read between the lines of my past, present, and future posts.

That seems like a fine way to end, but I feel like I still have a bit more to say on the issue, and since I’ve not much else to do at the moment, let me tell you some more about my personal thoughts and experiences.

Honestly, I haven’t had very much success with the whole blog thing. One might account for this dismal result by my ambivalent attitude: remember my antipathy towards all of the gaming and selling and linkmanship that goes occurs over the web?

Nevertheless, a little feedback wouldn’t hurt. When I googled "blog advice" I discovered what a great plethora of information there is on the subject. That ultimately led me to this post by Seth Godin, who is probably the most overrated blogger on the web, and maybe the most overrated person in the entire world. But he knows a lot about marketing – he’s probably the most insightful and entertaining expert on the subject – especially on how to market a successful blog, so I read the post carefully and took notes.

Many of Godin’s points are very good – "write about blogging," "learn enough to become the expert in your field," "be patient," and "answer your email" – but then there are quite a few obvious contradictions. First he says to write short posts, then he says to write long ones; first he says to be timely and topical, then he says to be timeless; first he says you should appeal to a majority, then he says go for an "obsessed minority"; first he says to "write about a never-ending parade of topics," then he says to "write about only one thing, in ever-deepening detail, so you become definitive."

Godin obviously doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He is the kind of person who makes things even more confusing for the rest of us. Experts should be "one-handed," as a past U.S. president said about his economic advisors: don’t give us answers that say something "on one hand," but "then on the other..." People must never have to do their own thinking. Give us straight answers, with no ambiguity or contradiction, in perfect black and white technicolour.

And the stupidest thing that Godin recommends is to "write nearly libellous things about fellow bloggers, daring them to respond (with links back to you) on their blog." I would never even consider doing such a thing. It's beyond imaginable; it's totally counterintuitive. It makes me wonder about the man’s character; it makes me wonder whether perhaps the world’s most deservedly renowned marketing guru, Seth Godin, is on drugs. I’m just putting that out there.

Something else to consider is a link that Godin provides in his introduction, to some old pamphlet written by a guy named Jonathan Swift back in 1729. It’s called A Modest Proposal, and (I don’t want to go into the details, but) it recommends dealing with the problems of Irish poverty and hunger – not to mention the "melancholy" sight of it all – by more or less boiling and eating the poorest children in the country. I think that would have been a terrible idea. Shame on Jonathan Swift, and shame on Seth Godin for putting a link to it on his blog, which is highly informative and entertaining. Visit sethgodin.typepad.com.

What was he trying to tell us? And more importantly, how could anyone let such unconventional ideas be published in the first place, and then why are they still around, hundreds of years later?

My own personal opinion – and this takes us back to the problem with which I began – is that the World Wide Web is an opportunity to finally suppress all of these different ideas and opinions. It might seem quite the opposite; it might seem that the web empowers everybody to appreciate life from their own personal perspective, so that eventually each person might develop their own philosophy and worldview, creating a lifestory that interacts and mingles 'harmoniously' with the views and stories of everyone else, seeking new challenges, being adventurous, testing conventions and assumptions, and continually looking for ways to learn and grow more effectively.

But I don’t believe this will necessarily happen on its own; only human meddling and striving could give the movement enough force to overcome the opposite tendency – our "conventional habituations," the impulse to conform.

The many connections, opportunities, and challenges provided by the web don’t just have the potential to make us more self-reliant and personally responsible; they also carry the potential to make us more uniform. If we keep going this way, then the challenges I outlined at the top – the irrepressible and uncontrollable flood of information and ideas coming through the web – will be stopped dead.

But this too is something that won’t necessarily happen on its own; this too can only happen through human meddling and striving – to overcome our "inquisitive and adventurous impulses."

If this is something we really want to accomplish, I think we need to recognize that it will be a very long term project, perhaps exceeding our own lifetimes. But look at the great result: the children of the future will live obediently in a world of strict authoritarian control, with no margin for such frivolous things as "creative freedom."

Let us also admit that this will be far too broad a task to be done with any kind of overt or head-on force. Large-scale communism and other authoritarian experiments of the twentieth century have demonstrated this much; we should learn from their mistakes. People won’t conform if they know they are powerless, but if we can somehow trick everybody into mistakenly believing that they have creative freedom...

Here is my modest proposal. We should begin by designing systems that will efficiently determine what are already the most popular ideas, activities, interests, etc. Let’s call this Phase 1.0. The point here is that we’ll have a much better chance of tricking people into conformity if we find out what most of them already like. In this early phase, we also want to begin conditioning people to incorporate these systems into their everyday lives.

When the ‘measurement’ systems of Phase 1.0 have been refined, then we can begin designing the ‘management’ systems of Phase 2.0. The aim of this phase is to direct people’s activities and condition their habits and tastes. This means rewarding people who enjoy and engage in things that are already the most popular, and doing it in a way that makes them feel empowered.

I think the most effective way to do this is to encourage more and more people to become content producers and providers – without necessarily having any knowledge or skills, nor much interest in improving the knowledge and skills they already have. The kind of people we want to make productive should not have any aspirations as to personal growth, or improving the originality or difficulty of their work; they should be mainly concerned with popularity and some of the more trivial rewards which that entails.

There will always be a few aspiring radicals – creative, inquiring, and adventurous types – who will try to question assumptions and challenge conventions, but I think the overwhelmingness of a highly motivated and organized majority might eventually push such people too far out into the periphery to be of much concern.

I’m not really sure what will happen next, but I think with enough momentum, the accomplishments of Phases 1.0 and 2.0 might be enough to carry us towards a perfect authoritarian uniformity, where people can finally live in a world of ordered and ideal ignorance, where children will be freed from the burdens of creative freedom, and even adults will never be compelled to develop their own competence and knowledge.

There is only one thing that might prevent that from happening: people might somehow learn how to use the systems from Phases 1.0 and 2.0, to take advantage of them as creative resources, not for the sake of popularity and immediate reward, but rather to learn even more, even better. If people learn to think and create for themselves, sharing real understanding and actual control, then our deterministic destiny might be foiled.

Fortunately, that’s an even more challenging task, requiring long-term investment, with continual risk-taking and evaluation. It also faces a basic paradox: how can individuals unify their efforts against uniformity?

These are just a few modest suggestions that I'm putting out for discussion. I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary work.

The End.

Résumé/Manifesto

[Originally written in March, 2007. Please see the Preface to this work.]

Contents: i. A Résumé, a story about itself, a creative consummation...
ii. Common points of reference / Meaning / Live dramatically /
iii. Story of ideas / Discipline for freedom / ROI? /
iv. Intrinsic motivation / Self-becoming / Self-preservation /
v. Education for progress / Progress for education / Generativity /
vi. Perception of change / Organization / Responsibility /
vii. Learning to learn / Learning to love learning / Autonomy /
viii. ... an active, adventurous, authentic accomplishment.

i

This is meant to be a kind of résumé; it’s an attempt to compose a more creative professional story, a program of self-discovery and self-creation; all of my education and experience grows with it.

But it goes beyond that; it isn’t merely a story about ‘Me’; it is more precisely a story about itself – an autobibliography. It is a story about ideas, composed by the ideas themselves. It represents a practical theory of education and experience in the process of its own discovery and creation.

This process is continuous; in a sense, endless. But if discovery and creativity are not consummated, the effort is meaningless. This story both is and is about the process of creative consummation in education.

ii

All stories require common points of reference between the narrator and the audience, or else no communication can occur. The typical career-story is a simple, straightforward, efficient way to frame our personal identities – titles, degrees, awards, and achievements – but they lack the human drama necessary to keep life interesting. Our careers provide the rhythm of life, but for harmony and melody we tend to look elsewhere: hobbies, vacations, volunteering, shopping, sports, music – to name a few. We are drawn to these things by curiosity, for the novelty they offer, but they persist because they are socially relevant and meaningful, they become common points of reference, they intersect with the narratives of others.

It is impossible to be human and not live dramatically, or in a sense, artificially. This doesn’t make life less vital or ‘real;’ it simply means that our individual views of the world are limited, and within these views we are compelled to be creative – often unconsciously – to make them seem more realistic and complete. Although it is impossible to ever achieve a completely realistic conception of life, we can at least begin to perceive things more realistically if we concede that ultimately, there will always be something unreal in our perspective: a "sportive" character, as one of my favourite philosophers would say.

This project is an attempt to make my story tangible, relevant – to consummate a period of my ongoing education – to intersect and integrate into a wider, deeper social drama. In other words, this is an attempt to demonstrate my accomplishments, my professional value, my net worth in the knowledge economy. But it is not just an assessment of my own character, it is an attempt to approach the modern concept of work from a new perspective; an assessment of the character of life in general. In sum, it is an effort to reconcile the means and ends of progress and education.

iii

My story, my education, is about ideas; it is ideas. This kind of narrative has lost relevance in modern culture – it lacks intersectivity with other narratives – not because people don’t like ideas, but because machines don’t like ideas; computers can’t think the way we do, and we rely on computers to help us think. We live in an age of statistics, the ‘age of averages,’ and anything that can’t be quantified, aggregated and analysed tends not to thrive. This isn’t altogether bad: ‘average is underrated’ – at least it’s better than arbitrary.

But as things become more regulated and standardized; we learn to think in terms of keywords, buzzwords, and watchwords; we learn to think like our machines – which is to say, in a way, we forget how to think – we merely follow instructions. We are incapable of recognizing what’s true, beautiful and good without methodical, abstract analytics and techniques; we don’t trust ourselves.

And this is, to a generous degree, a good thing. However, the promoters and detractors of "instrumental reason" tend to neglect its main benefit: discipline is necessary for creative freedom. Meanwhile, it has been mistaken as an end in itself.

Unless we understand what it is for, discussions of how to use it will be senseless. We need to ask, Do these mechanistic practices have a way to analyse their own effect and value? What are the measurements and methods used to decide whether such measurements and methods are desirable to begin with? What is the actual return on our huge, intangible investment of time and energy? Who is accountable?

iv

To avoid the semantic and partisan obscurantism of those issues, I began my investigation from a more immediate perspective: Why do I learn? The answer is, I believe, that we all learn simply because we can; and in so doing, we acquire ideas, habits, and skills that make life dramatic: learning is a way to recognize our own effect in the world. We lose sight of this simplicity because our learned ideas and habits get mistaken as the real ends of education; but they are not motives in the deepest and purest sense of that term: we are not motivated by financial objectives, job titles, social standing, etc, we are motivated through them.

For example, infants do not need special motivation to learn how to walk and talk – there are obvious benefits from what is learned, but they are secondary; learning is the primary reward. And just as there is no special motive behind learning these things, there is no special motive behind using them either: "talk" naturally finds something to talk about, and "walk" naturally finds something to walk towards; and by talking-about and walking-towards objects in their world, young children continue to learn new skills, improving their effective means.

Children enjoy connecting with the world and integrating different objects of which the world is composed. Children grow to learn to see themselves in this integrity; they are impressed by the world, which they re-create and express in return, in reciprocity – as if the whole world is a mirror. But it is not enough to say children recognize themselves in it; what is more important is that they recognize themselves doing something.

The simple acts of reaching and grasping soon evolve into more complex tasks and skills, utilizing objects as tools. By the time we reach adulthood, life has a coherent pattern: we believe we know who we are, and we believe we know what the world is. Intrinsic motivation – active self-creation and self-discovery – has become regulated, conforming to the character of the environment. We have established habits, routines, expectations, conventions and institutions; these determine most of our daily activities and decisions. Adult life has a steady rhythm, and within this rhythm we find opportunities for dramatic, harmonic, melodic invention.

v

But human nature continually finds new ways to use the environment to create new rhythms; the intrinsic motivation of successive generations finds new patterns. Routines and conventions that suit adults do not suit their children in quite the same way; each generation creates their own conventions, which in turn become material for the creative impulses of the next generation. In this way, education is for the sake of progress, and progress is for the sake of education.

Education and progress can be understood as two modes or aspects of the same process; education shows us ‘the outside,’ progress shows us ‘the inside.’ Both give us greater perceptual awareness, conceptual proficiency, active involvement, and expressive subtlety; they help us define and maintain our relationship with the world. Thus we are better able to connect feelings to intentions, intentions to actions, and actions to consequences; education becomes discipline, discipline facilitates freedom, freedom drives progress, and progress educates.

But education and progress are not always successful in these terms. Historically, what we call "progress" has merely tended to be progressive. Some groups and cultures have failed – succumbed to evolutionary events – by either neglecting progress, or defining it within a too- narrow field, such as territorial acquisition or mechanical efficiency.

Similarly, there are educational routes that lead to developmental dead ends – a point beyond which a person’s education cannot continue. This may be the result of simply lacking the necessary skills (such as literacy or mathematics), but quite often this is a result of learning something too well – developing habits and expectations that prevent the individual from approaching a new field with the proper attitude or perspective. So the principal demand of education is that it should increase – or at least not decrease – the student’s willingness and ability discover and create.

vi

We often talk about an abstract, potential future and an abstract, historical past, but we tend to base our practical decisions on the assumption that things have always been, and will continue to be, ‘just as they are.’ In other words, we seek specific changes within our present context, without appreciating that the context itself will be subject to change. We are afraid to reflect on what the real future might become; we are afraid we might lose ground in the race to the future as we presently expect it. It is a race with no leader.

"Followership" is a habit like any other – in fact, it is a kind of skill – which deepens with practice. Over time, followers lose the ability (and the desire) to think about what they are doing, or what they might do; they can’t respond to novel problems and opportunities; they are not responsible; they cannot lead – at least not effectively, not generatively – and those around them are hemmed-in by their fatal will.

But this problem is the result of organizational, institutionalised entropy – often characterised by the rule of instrumental reason. Organizations, and the people responsible for them – which is everybody – must be actively, continuously responsible. We need opportunities to work in ways that develop personal autonomy: opportunities that are challenging, enjoyable, educational, and generative. And by doing so, organizations and cultures become more progressive and educational as a whole; they become more relevant, meaningful, and mindful.

vii

If I had limited the scope of this project to "learning how to learn," I could have written endlessly, which would have accomplished little. The problem is that the idea of ‘pure learning’ is merely abstract – impossible in practical terms. There must be some kind of content, and there is no way to assess progress unless it is treated seriously. The lessons about learning in general can only be learned through specific lessons – for which the opportunities are endless.

If instead, we find a way to make continuous learning a kind of end in itself – if we "learn how to love learning" – we can save ourselves a lot of energy in the long term. Of course, this does not mean there is no wasted energy or excess verbiage. What’s important is that we become genuinely committed: we take responsibility, we regret the waste and try to avoid it. Whereas, when learning is merely a means to some other end, distractions are mistaken as real satisfactions, entropy seems like progress.

So what can we say about learning in general that will not become just another distraction, another artificial end, another theory or technique that serves to obstruct as many opportunities as it facilitates? Not very much – all we can do is work passionately to develop our personal competence, autonomy, and expertise, in ways that intersect with the narratives of those around us, as part of a drama played on a larger stage.

viii

Learning is a continuous project, it is necessarily imperfect and incomplete; the act of learning can remain meaningful, even while meaning fades from the thing learned. The greatest accomplishment of any education is an appreciation of the rhythmic, harmonious and melodic character of life. In the process, it is possible to achieve perfection or satisfaction momentarily, in activity, as part of an ongoing adventure.

This adventure – this dramatic education – is ultimately theoretical and practical; it seeks a theory of practice through the practice of theory; but its accomplishments cannot be described abstractly – as neither theory or technique. The successful student can only claim, like Socrates, "I am now conscious of my own ignorance... I do not think that I know what I do not know," which is the most authentic accomplishment of any education.

But how do I put this accomplishment on a résumé? In order to reconcile the emerging adventure of ideas with our aging institutions, I’ve tried to change the way we approach ‘the résumé,’ to integrate my career project with my philosophical project, to create an integrated form of consummatory expression: to compose a narrative that generates, rather than limits opportunities for discovery and creation; a drama that is open to those willing to make learning its own reward, for anyone willing to be responsible, to invest, to ask questions, to discover, to create, and (foremost) to lead.

[Originally written in March, 2007. See the Preface to this work.]