For a long time I’ve been trying to practice a kind of harm reduction to my addiction to digital devices. I love reading, books most of all, but when I’m travelling or when I just HAVE to get a hold of something that would otherwise take a while to arrive in physical form, ereaders are the way to go.
The problems are of course increasingly down to both eshittification and the dopamine hits that come from how our digital devices lock our attention. Enshittification means that our devices are tied to a seller – be it Kobo, Kindle, Apple Books or whatever – and DRM locks means we cannot transfer material to a better reading device. Getting myself off Amazon has been a challenge because the kindle really is a great device. (Ton’s posts inspired me) And my subscription to things like BookBub means I have a bunch of books on my kindle that I want to read and for which I paid a couple of dollars. I don’t want to lose those. Kobo seems like the easy answer, but again, won’t let me read kindle ebooks.
The obvious answer is to read on my phone or buy a tablet that can download apps. But that’s another problem. As I’m trying to manage my sleep better, blue light screens at night are not a good idea. Over many months I can see on my Apple Health app how blue light has affected my sleep if I use my phone within a half hour of bed. Reading on the phone is no good. And an iPad is just one more computer that I don;t need, with less utility than my MacBook, with all the toxic attractor basins of a connected device and with a poor reading experience.
And so ChatGPT and I launched into a small research project to find a device that reads like a kindle, allow me to install apps and read from them and tightly constraints its access to the web. After reading some Reddit threads and fitting some ideas to my constraint regime, I decided to order a BOOX Go 7. This is an android device – the first I have ever owned – and it allows me to load my kindle library, my Kobo library and the Libby app (which I use for library books and magazines like the New Yorker, Harper’s, Poetry and The Paris Review). It also allows me to sideload books which means I can download epub files and pdfs from places like The Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and so on and easily transfer them to the device.
And it was the cheapest device of all the options I looked at, coming in at a little over $270.
It’s all set up now and it was helpful to have ChatGPT accompany me as I learned the ins and outs of the device. Nearly every question I had got answered by the LLM which was great. It’s a whole other world learning a Chinese-designed android device that is neither a phone or a kindle, but so far I’m there, and I like it and it feels good to have my library in my hands again in a way that means I can lie in a hammock with my phone in the house and spend the summer free of distractions.
On May 1 we left for a month in France. When we returned we got the weekend at home which meant hastily harvesting spinach and making 15 spanakopitas for the freezer and a bunch of spinach pesto. Then it was off again on Tuesday morning and a few days of work in Toronto and then a lovely weekend with my brother and sister and nieces and nephew in Simcoeside, north of the city.
And then yesterday home in time for a Carmena Bowena rehearsal. The less said about that the better. I was dirt tired from the jet lag and the weekend, and as a whole, let’s just say it’s great to sound like that in rehearsal. We got to take a look at some deep holes that need patching up. We will be fine come June 27-28 for our concerts.
It is rainy and cool here on the coast, a little taste of what we call “Juneuary.” Stage 3 water restrictions have started on our island meaning that we can only water our garden by hand now. So despite a welcome steady drizzle, we are into summer gardening.
As the year is nearly half over I’m checking in on my quest to log 365 birds. When the year started with a trip to Costa Rica in January and knowing that we were headed to Europe and Eastern North America this year, I thought that might be an achievable target. Today I logged birds 300 and 301 – a Western Wood Pewee and a Western Tanager. So 64 birds to go for the year. The thing about the northern hemisphere is that there aren’t that many more birds I’m likely to see here. Migration season is pretty much over. There will be a window of birds coming back through here in the fall and then the winter birds that hang out will return. So even though it looks like I’m nearly there, there aren’t many I can add from here on Bowen Island. Most of my birding is on the coast, but I might do a trip or two to the Fraser estuary or towards the interior to see some different birds this summer. At this point, it’s about going to where the birds are.
I have one more work trip this season before finally being able to put my feet up until the fall. This summer I’ll be working through our Complexity Inside and Out materials which need some updating as we get ready for the fall 2026 offering. This is a course that is geared towards folks that are leading in complexity from an organizational position or as a consultant/facilitator/host. Given the amount of writing, thinking, and reflecting I’ve done this winter and spring prompted by Dave Snowden’s absolutely prodigious output, there is lots to say, do and clarify. Specifically I need to find clear ways to shape how my practice lies adjacent to hosting and, I hope, drives that practice into a deeper coherence with the challenges and imperatives complexity throws up for us.
Eroding democracy happens with a slow and persistent trickle of cynicism and mistrust of citizens by their governments. In this review of Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public by Peter MacLeod and Richard Johnson, Kyle Wyatt reflects:
Democracy is not an idea, not a value, not a right; it’s a practice.” For far too long, citizens have been discouraged from that practice by duly elected governments on the left and the right?—?and by the civil servants and professional consultants in their employ. “Say as little as possible, as late as possible, in the most positive way possible,” they write of a general modus operandi that shapes Queen’s Park as much as it does Ottawa, Washington, London, and most other Western capitals. “It’s a defensive posture?—?useful for political survival, but corrosive to democratic understanding.”
Inevitably, MacLeod and Johnson argue, such corrosion will “slowly poison the democratic well,” leading to widespread cynicism, strongmen, and extremists?—?and to events like the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. “Populism, resentment, authoritarian nostalgia: These are not fringe forces. They flourish wherever people feel ignored, humiliated, or locked out.”
Every year I teach a course at SFU in Vancouver in the certificate program in Dialogue and Civic Engagement. Amongst the most assertive points I make is that inauthentic consultation and engagement is a betray of the promise of democracy, especially if you are working for government but also if you work in the corporate sector.
We are reaching the point where there is very little imagination in this field. The cult of efficiency and the brute impatience of powerful interests has deprived a generation of public engagement specialists from the knowledge and experience required to do this work right. What happens in its stead is performative consultation – engagement washing, I sometimes call it – and in my course I am certainly not afraid of pointing the fingers squarely at those that work at the frontlines of consultation. If you are actively engaged in this form of performative consultation you bear some personal and collective blame for why citizens are feeling disengaged and unrepresented at every level in Canadian governance.
The solutions are beyond us at the moment because the power that dictates what happens and what standards are applied to it are now writing legislation that essentially eliminates the requirements to meaningfully work with communities or interested groups in the pursuit of public policy initiatives. We are at a final chapter for this practice as neo-liberalism has pushed such engagement to the market. Unless you own a tangible interest in a project you really aren’t a stakeholder.
Perhaps what we need now are community investment coops that buy shares of major projects in order to influence them. Many First Nations are already doing this. It’s a cynical response to the problem but at this point it’s the most influential vector for engagement.
I’ll still teach the ideal because I hope people can find avenues of practice to develop these skills during this era while the public square is being auctioned off. But, inspiring examples aside, I’m not hopeful that the kind of meaningful engagement we built in the 1980s and 1990s will be sustained for much longer.
In the absence of changes derived from time, how does a person find novelty in the horizontal changes of meaning and space? That seems to be one of the questions behind Solvej Balle’s series of books, On The Calculation of Volume, which explores a person’s experience of a date that perpetually repeats. I haven’t read the books yet, but on the strength of this review, I’m all in. If you have read these, let me know.
On writing about what frightens you, Josh Weil says: “But all of the dangers contained in writing what scares you pale compared to the greater one of doing anything else. For any of us to turn our gaze away, to waste our time on work that isn’t wrestling with what’s most urgent for us, to diminish the import our stories should hold, deny our characters the impact they deserve, to do anything other than put our most vulnerable selves out there as openly as we can: for an artist there’s nothing more terrifying than that. Sometimes my long-ago mentor would say it another way: if what you’re writing doesn’t scare you, it’s probably not worth writing.” That’s not always about fiction. Sometimes that is also about working through the little existential crises that a growing and learning human experiences as one changes through time.
I spent yesterday afternoon on a phone call with my friends and colleagues Jenn Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle talking about our next offering of Reimagining Education, to be held in Peterborough Ontario, near Toronto, October 16-18.
Our conversation was very much about the role of the practitioner in fields and contexts of uncertainty and complexity and how our work aims to support the capacity of practitioners who shape those systems.
This is an Art of Hosting, and its focus is one asking how to to bring more hosting and participatory learning work to education. In the past we have had folks from schools systems and post secondary institutions attend who come with a deep inquiry about how to improve the systems they are working in. We’ve had government folks, people who work in community services and folks who work as consultants with larger systemic issues as well. These gatherings have become an important place for people in education to encounter folks from outside their usual orbit, and for people who work with groups and systems to meet educators who are trying to deliver learning within systems that often conspire against them.
To me this focus, and the diversity of encounter, makes this a rich Art of Hosting workshop.
This is the place of no easy answers, fraught choices and no obvious way to effect the changes that are needed. In that sense, the conversations and the projects that we work with in this Art of Hosting are representative of the very biggest social challenges we face: cracking open places of genuine learning and co-creation in a context that seeks control and certainty.
Our team is well suited for this work. Jenn has been carrying this calling for her whole career as an experiential educator and consultant. She has worked on tall ships, in wilderness settings, in classrooms and in conference halls crafting spaces of encounter and genuine learning. Troy has spent his career in Indigenous education as a teacher, and leader, mustering resources to support Indigenous students and communities, and tending to a network of Indigenous educations leads in Ontario. Cédric teaches at Concordia University in the Human Systems Intervention program, working to prepare change makers in human systems.
Because of this team;s work and the people who come to this gathering, the particular Art of Hosting goes into a deep examination of what it means to lead, catalyse, and design interventions within powerful and seemingly unchangeable systems The focus is on education, but the applicability is broad. That focus though brings a grounded imperative to the work. We teach methods, tools, and perspectives that are going to be used right away to support change work. And we host in a way that the brilliance of the group, and the experiences each person is able to offer becomes a key resources for the learning.
We’d love to have you join us. Working in a forest for three days in a southern Ontario autumn with 30 other people who will get you and challenge you and support you is a gift. Registration is now open.