Peter Rawsthorne is back to blogging and today he published a post that discusses his process for writing in a time in which AI can be a useful writing companion. Here’s his process.
Step by Step my blogging will now follow this basic approach;
- Mind dump, capture ideas for new posts, be verbose, be imaginative, think about context
- Put these ideas to incomplete blog posts, work ideas for days, for weeks…
- Read extensively, add to the understanding of any specific idea
- Keep references, cut and paste to the bottom of the related incomplete posts
- Prompt AI with phrases from the idea generation
- Take blocks of text from written ideas and push them into generative AI, be critical, harvest what you can.
- Take the written blog post and ask AI for a rewrite. Change your audience. be critical, harvest what you can.
- Try and see, try and write, what AI cannot… add to the body of human knowledge.
- Find pictures to support the writing, format for engagement. Use AI to generate images from passages of text taken from the blog post.
- Format, edit, improve, repeat. Be bold… Publish.
- Rest, reflect, improve… Publish again.
Interesting. I’m curious how others are using AI in their writing. What’s your process?
I’m back in Tlaoquiaht territory on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This is a place I once described as The Land of Tsawalk as it is the cradle of a philosophy and cosmology of interconnection and interdependence that has been refined by centuries of Nuu-chah-nulth philosophers, leaders and families. We’re here to do an Art of Hosting with the Clayoquot Biosphere Trust and 40 or so local leaders and organizers. This will be the fourth Art of Hosting I’ve done here and they are always different, responsive to the land and the ocean and the people and the way time works here. We will plan tomorrow and then we will allow things to happen, and it will be, as it always is, a rich and abundant experience.
On the way here, Caitlin and I listened to some podcasts. Two of these had moments that spoke to the place and the quality of time and landscape, and this is the real purpose of this post.
The first is. A Radiolab episode called “Small Potatoes” is about how observation and reflection can transform the most mundane of things in our daily experience. One segment of this episode featured a clip from Ian Chillag’s podcast Everything is Alive in which the philosopher Chioke l’Anson plays “a grain of sand” in conversation with Chillag. l’Anson brings an incredible perspective to this interview, including these gems:
CHIOKE:
Yeah, I mean, I think that if there’s one difference between them and I… Sorry, I’m just having
trouble with the pronouns, you know, we’re doing this interview and I’m a grain of sand.
IAN:
Yeah.
CHIOKE:
But that’s not really the way I would think of myself. I think normally I would just say, “We are sand.”
IAN:
OK.
CHIOKE:
So, you see that there’s the mass noun thing happening and it’s weird to talk to you because you
don’t have a mass noun thing. Or you don’t seem to have a mass noun arrangement. So, you say
yourself that you’re a person, right?
IAN:
Yeah, I would say I’m a person.
CHIOKE:
So, like why aren’t you a grain of person?
IAN:
Like why do I not consider myself as like a fraction of all of humanity?
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like that makes more sense. It just seems to me like if you recognise the degree to which you
owed your existence to other people you might also be nicer to other people.
Or then there is this meditation on time and change:
IAN:
Right. Do you know how old you are?
CHIOKE:
Not exactly, no. I think, it probably would amount to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of
years. Like, I mean, I wasn’t always sand, right? Like there was a time when I was a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, yeah.
CHIOKE:
Yeah. So, you know, like do you know about the myth of Sisyphus?
IAN:
Yeah
CHIOKE:
Yeah, that’s a funny one to me because Sisyphus is cursed to roll this boulder up the hill for eternity,
but really the boulder would eventually erode. I mean, a hundred thousand years or so. It would be
like a little pebble. Like, just stick it out, Sisyphus. You’ll be done in no time, you know?
IAN:
Eventually it’s just going to be sand.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, exactly. And in addition, the hill will also erode. And so, you know, Sisyphus after some time
would have a flat plain instead of a hill and maybe like a marble instead of a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, so, yeah. So, he’s cursed for eternity, but really, he just needs to get through I don’t know
50,000 years or something.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like he should really stick to it. And then that’ll show the Gods.
Amazing.
In another podcast we listened to, a To The Best Of Our Knowledge episode on deep time, Ann Strainchamps interviews geologist Marcia Bjorneru about changes to our earth and climate:
AS: Do you think the perspective of deep time can help with any of the existential fear and dread that comes with an awareness of climate change and global warming? Does being aware of the many long ages of the planet put climate change in perspective? Or make it more frightening?
MB: From a scientific point of view, I can say that Earth will be fine. The Earth will deal with the changes in climate that we’re causing and eventually, new ecosystems will emerge.
But the human part of me mourns what we’ve done and the rapidity with which old, well-established ecosystems and landscapes have been changed. And I worry for humanity, for what the next decades or century will bring as we cope with a new set of rules. That’s the scary thing to me. We’ve been able to understand the way the planet has worked through the Holocene, but now we’re changing the boundary conditions and parameters, and so many of the models we’ve developed aren’t going to be very relevant as we go further into the Anthropocene.
The past won’t necessarily be a key to the future. And there’s real sadness there. Our cultures have grown up with a certain version of Earth, and it’ll be radically different.
These insights seem to hit so much deeper out here in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth territories, where a deep sense of time and a deep connection with the ancient marine and forest ecosystems are responsible for thousands of years of occupation and well-being. Indeed, Bjorneru’s observation about the new boundary conditions of life on earth brings added importance to preserving intact large amounts of wild and ancient ecosystems. In 300,000 years as a species, humans have never lived in an environment that is as heavily degraded as it is now. We were nurtured in the complex life-giving cradles of the very ecosystems out of which we arose. We have changed those conditions of life, and who knows what effect it will have on our survival, the survival of millions of other species and the evolution of new forms of life on Earth.
Out here, on the edge of the world, the principles of tsawalk compel us to engage these questions. The perspective of deep time and deep interconnection lies all around us.
I was struck by Daniel Miller’s research on Skerries, a small seaside town in Ireland which he discussed on the BBC’s Thinking Allowed podcast this week. The town he is describing is almost EXACTLY a match for Bowen Island, where I live right down to the demographics, the community dynamics and the fact that we don;t have a swimming pool, a theatre or a hotel and we do drink A LOT and have a cocaine problem. He wrote a book about his research but I was struck by the deep parallels between our two villages. In thinking about the commonalities it strikes me that the homogenous nature of our ethnic and age demographics, language, wealth levels, and isolation from but proximity to a major centre and the major constraints that generate such similar profiles on the surface of it. I can think of other places I’ve been too like Mahone Bay in Nova Scotia, Vankleek Hill in Ontario, Sooke, BC and probably Knowlton, Quebec that probably fit the bill too.
There is a reason for this consistency. The fact that two towns so far away on the globe exhibit such similar characteristics is remarkable but it is a testament to the power of global capitalism that created a class of English speaking upper middle class and wealthy people from similar professions and worldviews and fed us all memes (the original definition) that resonate with the lives we lead. Even the fact that I am subscribed to Thinking Allowed is a part of this phenomenon.
A systems change initiative I witnessed on the weekend.
I think my nomination for LinkedIn post of the year goes to Cameron Tokinwise for this one:
Good reminder for those extolling Systems Thinking from Pelle Ehn at the beginning of his still remarkable 1988 book, _Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts_ – that systems are only ever ensembles considered as systems. Systems are not things in the world, but ways of understanding how things in the world relate to each other. Systems Thinking is a choice to interpret the world as sets of systems.
Cameron Tokinwise on LinkedIn, October 2023
To be concerned about trying to effect system change does not mean that there are systems out there needing to be changed, but that one way to explain why change might be proving difficult is to observe aspects of the status quo as systemically interrelated, and so to try to make (design) a new system, that is, new ways in which those things interrelate.
This is important because systems risk being reified into big, solid things that seem to be unchangeable if you think of systems as really existing out there in the world. The classic example is that Babadook we consider to be Capitalism (as opposed to a variety of social relations – and not all social relations [see https://lnkd.in/gPJ8bdnQ] – we perpetuate).
(And yes, things are bit more complicated when observations of systems are considered to be themselves operations of other systems (the ones doing the observing), making such observations performative, constituting the reality of what is observed, at least in the world of/as experienced by the observer and those other systems with whom/which that observer is in an interdependent (or structurally coupled) relation: von Foerester > Maturana > Luhmann > Wolfe.)
I have just today had occasion to bring that up again, talking with a friend about systems change. Like, what is the system? Who says? What are the parts of it we say are the system and why are some things not considered part of the system? And what are we really seeking to change? And what does change even look like?
I continue to mull over this quote and its implications because so much work in the field I am involved in is about “systems change” or “systems transformation” and as long as I have been doing this work, I can see that saying I’m involved in systems change hasn’t really made anything more clear to me. I reject “root causes” of complex problems because, well, complexity tells us that causality is non-linear and effects are emergent so simply addressing “root causes” doesn’t get a predictable change. The root cause of poverty is simply another problem to address, the root of which is something else. The complex world is made of interrelated and interconnected things that aren’t ranked in a discernable hierarchy and that interact constantly in unpredictable ways.
And yet.
We know that there are stable patterns of behaviour that we can look at and call “unjust” and we know there are stable patterns of behaviour that we can look at and call “more just” (one feature of complexity work is that you can never know if you made the best move, but you can usually know that you’ve made a wrong move).
And so, in a conversation with a friend today, I suggested that instead of saying, “We aim to change systems,” why don’t we just say, “We think a just world looks like THIS, and so this is what we will do more of.” You can’t solve all the problems, even if there was a magical root cause that, if we just zapped it with enough transformation, would result in a just world. All that would happen is that competing forces would arrange themselves around other attractors, and new stable patterns would emerge. It might be that, in the battle between individual greed and social compassion for example we get a period of stability for social compassion for a time until individual greed figures out how to tilt the game in its favour again.
In my personal life, I think the world I want to live in has things like organizations and projects done by teams full of people who love and trust one another and that we make things together that people are generally happy with and that we are participating more in the community by singing together, sharing resources and supporting each other. I don’t have a root cause analysis for how I live my life. I don’t sing in choirs because a root cause of alienation and social anxiety is the collapse of co-creative community institutions, and the more spaces for community co-creation that exist, the more felt sense of belonging happens in the world. No. I sing because I love to sing, even when it’s hard and we make mistakes and dry up in performance and slam our foreheads in frustration because it’s hard to sing a minor seventh interval by ear, and I missed my cue again.
The need for theories of change has always struck me as an unnecessary step to making change. There is no perfect theory of change. I’m fond of quoting Micheal Quinn Patton, who said one day, to my delight, “Complexity IS a theory of change!” Good enough. Now get after it, and if things you do create what you think is a more just and caring world, find ways to sustain those things. And if they don’t, stop doing those things immediately. And you can’t do it all, so pick the things you want to do, that are maybe yours to do uniquely, perhaps informed by what others have said are good things to do and do them. Keep an eye on what happens, but trust that your work will travel well in the world. Once it’s out there, you cannot get it back.
It’s not at all clear where the social media drip feed is at these days.
Here’s where you can find me on the web these days:
- Parking Lot (this weblog published since 2002)
- You can subscribe to this blog by entering your email in the window on the right hand sidebar.
- The RSS feed for Parking Lot.
- Linked In
- Mastodon
- Bluesky.
It’s all coming apart isn’t it? The social media landscape has become fragmented and disjointed. The main sites that still dominate the global system are starting to lose functionality. I have a love/hate relationship with social media, but these days the love is waning quickly. And so, I’m wondering where everyone is and what you’re using these days. Here’s my setup.
I have been on Facebook for a long time. In 2010 I worried that Facebook was becoming my blog as it was easy to cross post there and the discussion was much more engaging and robust. My primary concern was all of the great discussion happening there was happening inside a walled garden and that these great conversations were REALLY hard to find again as Facebook’s search and non-existent archiving systems meant that I could probably never find what I was looking for. I go to comment threads on my blog all the time, even some that are decades old. In 2019, I saw the fruition of Facebook’s ever more tightening of its control on content and the disastrous results of the algorithms that have guided fascism and hate into the mainstream all around the world. I can no longer automatically cross-post to Facebook, but I still have a presence there and you will find a link to this post there, with a general plea that you come back to the blog to discuss it.
The only real reason I still use Facebook is to keep up to date on my community’s Facebook group. But that is becoming a tiring litany of a few shrill voices complaining constantly about things with hardly any community building going on. A much better use of my time would be to show up at the pub once a week and catch up with friends. So I’m thinking of purging Facebook completely from my diet and just posting blog links there.
Twitter was tailor made for me. It was started by the guy that started Blogger and it took me a while to understand it as a micro-blogging platform and a marvellous source of real time news and experience. My use of twitter has changed through the years and I acquired about 4500 followers without really trying. It was a marvellous place to follow marginalized voices and for the past five or so years I only added feeds from BIPOC folks, queer folks, or women and that has radically shifted the view of the world I get. Sadly most of those voices have fallen silent in the past year as Elon Musk’s destruction of the app has resulted in the amplification of the voices I was trying to hear from less. Hate is now ubiquitous and reporting and blocking is a futile waste of time. Alos, many news organizations pulled away from twitter in the past year and the algorithms have destroyed it. My main twitter account is @chriscorrigan and there I post links to the blog and still amplify some interesting things, but since twitter disallowed the automatic positing of content from WordPress, my interest there is also waning. I have other accounts I run for a local soccer team that I am a part of and those accounts have been important ways we market the team and support our players. Increasingly our players have moved away from twitter and so this app is becoming less and less relevant. Still, it anchors a misfit community of people who love and are interested in lower level Canadian women’s and men’s soccer, and without it at this point there is really no other way to stay engaged.
I never really got into Linked It and it’s yet another algorithm driven networking site. Of late it has been a more interesting place to drop in on because there are some professional communities of practice that exist there. But it’s like going to a job fair to look for new ideas. It is so transactional and I can’t really get the din of hustle out of my ears when I’m scrolling there, so it doesn’t hold my interest. However, I still post links to blog posts there on my page.
Mastodon
I joined Mastodon during last year’s great twitter exodus. I like it a lot. It is now the place that I use as a micro blog, and on and off I will compile links from my Mastodon page and publish them here. It is the closest thing to a 2002 blog I have found and it doesn’t have an important role in my sharing ecosystem. However, not a lot of folks are there, and it tends to be hard to figure out how to use at first. Nevertheless, it is not a corporate-owned site, there are no ads and as a part of the Fediverse (a self-organized network of web sites and applications) it tends to be a much nicer experience than being subjected to content an algorithm wants to feed me.
Bluesky
I just joined Bluesky and this will be my first post there. Because it looks and feels so much like twitter, it may well fill the niche, but I suspect that it is going to be a while until we see something with widespread use acting as a public commons. Apps and sites that run in the Fediverse SHOULD be that commons but I suspect that it will take private capital to scale something that everyone uses so ubiquitously, and that’s not really a commons at all. Private capital eventually wants an ROI so it remains to be seen what that it will be. I do think also, that folks have moved on from twitter like apps and that the way we are all using social media is changing.
Net News Wire
That brings me to old faithful: the RSS feed reader. Since it was invented, RSS has been the bext standard out there for creating one’s own feeds and channels of content. All WordPress and Blogger sites and Substacks and Medium pages are RSS enabled. Using a tool like NetNewsWire to aggregate these sites and create a scroll gives me the best content. If I have time to spend reading online content, I will read my NNW feeds. I have feeds for blogs related to my professional work, to music, jazz guitar lessons, soccer, and critically important, news. With Facebook and Twitter going silent with respect to Canadian news, I get my fix through the RSS feeds that news organizations publish, along with a daily listening to the CBC. I hope that mainstream news organizations will reincarnate their RSS feeds again. It may be a geeky cul-de-sace for us pre-Facebook web users, but nothing has beaten RSS for delivering great content. All that remains is for people to create it outside of the walled gardens. You can subscribe to this site’s RSS feed here.
Everything else
I use Instagram a little to stay in touch with our TSS Rovers soccer players, because that’s what they use. I was too old to get on Snapchat, and I’m not down with any other social media apps. It’s getting to be too much as it is, and I find myself increasingly only publishing to these places and not engaging. THIS is the place to engage.
So if you are out there on any of these sites, or you know some great sites, feeds, pages or accounts that we should all be following, drop them in the comments. I’m curious what you are using these days.