#culture

A Note To GenZ About Social Media And More.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

I was reading ‘Social Media Companies Are Having a Bad Moment‘, something written by Nick H. Penniman, who I assume is a GenZ based on the call to action, and I smiled a bit. I can never keep the generations below GenX in any form of structure, which is a failing of mine – these are generations that simply came after mine.

I suppose I could dedicate the time to keep track of which generation is doing what, but I think that’s not time well spent for me. After all, I am of GenX, a Third Culture Kid and a latchkey kid, and I was raised by Kermit The Frog.

I’m gonna let everyone in on a secret: The screens aren’t the problem, social media isn’t the problem, the message is. We can go back and forth about the medium being the message, but it’s a bit simpler than that. This is not to dismiss the concerns expressed in the article but to instead to underline the actual issue.

Every advance in communication technology was disruptive because it changed the way we did things. There was a time when reading a newspaper around others was considered anti-social. Before that were other things, like the printing press and literacy removing power from the literate. These things humanity survived.

What is different now is that during all those communication upheavals, messages got more and more sticky because everyone was trying to sell everyone else their shit. Some of it was good shit. Some of it was bad shit. In fact, there was a time when you could tell how bad a product was by how sticky the marketing was – when I grew up, if I ever did, a good product sold itself. A bad product required a lot more marketing.

Being raised by televisions, I saw a lot of advertisements targeted at me for toys that were shitty. I saved up my allowance and bought some pretty shitty toys and figured out pretty early that all that glitters is not gold. This doesn’t mean I didn’t buy crappy products in my lifetime, but at least I knew the risk.

Where things went off the tracks is Web 2.0 – the focus on marketing. Everybody got on the Internet and started selling good shit and bad shit, but the common denominator was that it was shit. If you look at the companies that survived the DotCom boom, you’ll see that those companies didn’t sell shit. They added value – some of it short-lived, some of it longer lived.

You have to be able to figure out what the shit and the value is. That’s why I wrote about the Red Dots of Life, because everyone wants to twist your ear and fill your eyeballs with their product as much as they can. If they could beam that directly into your head while you were sleeping, they would, because it’s about them. It’s not about you at all.

That’s the trick with social media. It’s about the signal to noise ratio, and the first step in that is deciding what is signal and what is noise. There’s trial and error involved. There’s a need for guidance for the younger generations who are impressionable so that they can tell the difference – and the truth is that even those of my generation and before are susceptible to all of this. In fact, politicians use it to great effect.

When you get on social media, there should be a purpose. In the days of Sesame Street’s first decade, the intent of Sesame Street was simple: Teach kids. Guide kids. And it was done by trustworthy people – to this day, nobody talks about the secret lives of Mr. Rogers and Jim Henson, and all that worked with them. Their intent was clear. They wanted to give us sticky things to help us deal with the world and, more importantly, each other. They showed up once a day and did just that for us, and we had the time to interact with our peers and elders to practice what we were taught – and my generation, the ‘Seen but not heard’ generation, didn’t do too bad despite all the problems we faced.

We did face problems, they seemed insurmountable, but somehow we survived and even thrived enough to scatter our genetics to the next generations. Like every generation before, we screwed you guys up a little. It’s what we do. We’re imperfect as a species, particularly when you get large groups of us together.

But now it’s much more dangerous. Social networks collect so much data about people that the social network companies know more about people than they themselves do – and it’s used for marketing because – guess what – they want to sell you shit. Some of it might be good shit, some of it might be bad shit. The trick is to find where the value is, and that has become more and more difficult.

When you’re young, time is cheap. As you grow older and claim more responsibility, time becomes much more expensive. It’s a part of the generation gap.

If, as individuals, we gravitate to value instead of shit, we can create a valuable world instead of a shitty one. Oh, and ease off those social networks mining your habits. There’s plenty of social media that is decentralized where you can find information, and while the social networks allow connection with others, they do not replace actual connection with others. Time away from the screens is good, but cutting them off entirely is not a good plan.

You are competing with people of your own generation to eek out a living. Those of you that win should be the ones who find value and create value, not sell shit. That’s what every generation seems to consistently get wrong.

As you’ll find, the most dangerous people of generations that came before you – dangerous to you – are the ones that are just selling shit instead of creating value.

It’s harder and harder to tell which is which, but the future of the species depends on every generation getting a decent value-to-shit ratio.

Can I tell younger generations what should be of value to them? Nope. I have some ideas, things related to being able to be do things for yourselves and invest in yourselves rather than just spending money. An hour exploring the thoughts and philosophies of others in classic books isn’t a bad place to start. Finding out why things work or don’t work is always a good thing to do.

But if you find yourself just mindlessly being entertained, that’s a symptom of a larger disease.

When your kids come around, GenZ, it’s gonna be worse. AI is already more persuasive than humans because it learned from our time tested and evolved persuasive communicators.

Subjective Technology Use.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been conflicted today in writing about AI and war, mainly because I know it’s been being used in two conflicts that I know of – for Ukraine’s defense, and for Israel’s offense.

When news came of Ukraine using AI, I wasn’t too surprised. The Ukrainians have been surprisingly resilient and adaptive with the Russian invasion, and it’s hard for me not to cheer a little in my heart because I believe the technology is being used for good.

When I found out about Israel’s use of AI and how they are using it, I couldn’t agree with it and found it to be terrible.

In my mind, based on what I know and also what I believe, Ukrainians and Palestinians have much in common with occupied territory, etc, though Russia hasn’t built a wall yet. In the same way, I view Russia and Israel’s actions as very much the same because of occupation and what appears to be wanton disregard for life in very dehumanizing ways. No, I don’t support Hamas, or taking hostages, but if we go down that route I also don’t support Israel’s taking prisoners prior to the hostage taking, for years, and consider that to be hostage taking at the least, unfair persecution at the worst.

Am I right? I allow that I may not be. I don’t have to have a firm opinion, and I don’t have to be angry with people who disagree with me because I am fortunate enough not to be on a side. I believe these things because of what I have observed from afar and make no claim to be an expert. I do support sovereignty, and Ukraine has a centuries long history of problems with Russia. We’re creeping up to a century with Israel and Palestinians, and in that conflict I just think about a few generations knowing only the insides of war.

How I view these wars colors the way I see the AI use. That’s a problem. AI use for picking targets can’t be good for one and not the other. In the story of David vs. Goliath, Goliath was the one at disadvantage but the story talks about how big Goliath was and how great a warrior he was whereas David was just some guy who happened to have new technology. What happens in that story if Goliath had the same technology and ability?

When I put it into that context, it became easier to resolve the internal moral and perhaps philosophical conflict I was having. I cannot say that what I believe is empirically right. I believe I’m right, but I may not be, and understanding that doesn’t mean I’m sitting on a fence.

It means that we, as humans, are very subjective in how we view technology use in war, and we do not truly understand it until it works in a way that works against what we believe.

If this doesn’t resonate with you, maybe it should.

The Sandbox Dilemma: Walled Gardens.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

When I was a boy, maybe around 7, living in suburbia as a latch-key kid, the back yard was an important part of life. I could run, play with the dog, kick a ball around, etc.

My mother wanted a garden, so she took up about 1/4 of the backyard with that, and soon I got the chore of cleaning up the dog’s poop. There was a corner of the yard where it was dropped into a decoratively covered hole by a young version of me. It was some novelty or the other that only a knowing eye would discern that it marked where the poop went. I did this with a ‘pooper scooper’, all the rage in the 1970s for people tasked with picking up poop.

Soon, I wasn’t a big fan of the backyard. It was a place where I picked up poop, and nobody really enjoys that, particularly when they’re 7 and the world is full of far more interesting things. My father decided to get a tractor tire and fill it with sand so that I could have my own sandbox for myself and friends to play in, making the area better to play in.

This seemed like a good idea, and it was pretty fun for a few days.

It was fun until a neighborhood cat found the sandbox. I never actually saw the cat, but when visiting the sandbox, that a cat had been there was readily apparent. Being used to this from the dog, I cleaned it up and tossed it where the dog poop went, but it became a chore just getting the poop out of the sandbox and – since we didn’t have a cat – I didn’t know why that scent of ammonia clung to the tire even though all visible traces of poop were gone.

I was 7 and completely unaware of magical litter boxes that cats used. In fact, I didn’t even know that it was a cat. I just knew there was poop that needed to go away.

In time, it became unmanageable because apparently that cat told it’s friends, and I ended up seeing cats come into the yard, flinging sand all over as they covered their sandbox surprises. They were being cats, their owners were being owners of inside-outside cats with no care for where their cats took their potent poops, and there I was at 7 watching how uncaring people had cats that, as long as they pooped somewhere else, it wasn’t their problem.

On Mastodon yesterday this all came to mind when someone equated walled gardens and ‘enshitification’. It’s pretty much how it works, it seems, at least in the broad strokes.

You might have a walled garden, but your neighbors with cats don’t care about their cats taking dumps in your sandbox. If you build it, they will come.

Billionaires Donate to SCEB

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

In a strange turn of events, billionaires have decided to donate billions of dollars to the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus through stock options of their company so that they all can avoid taxation and to re-invigorate the ever-failing philanthropic system. This was done at a Philanthropy Reveal Party on April Fool’s Day.

Of course, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus had to make some concessions for this to happen. They will both be driven by self-driving vehicles, and they will exclusively communicate through social networks. To this end, they will have the user name ‘SCEB’, for ‘Santa Claus & Easter Bunny’, while their full names will have the Easter Bunny preceding it in a personal agreement.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, after the release of their sex tape earlier today1, did a mutual press release about their social networks and interactions with SCEB, stating that children wishing to communicate with SCEB must be paying members of their networks. Bezos has also created a SCEB affiliate store so that the purchases that SCEB makes to fulfill orders allows them to mitigate pricing, while Amazon takes a minimum 30% administrative fee.

The bad news hidden in this is that all of their former employees are now competing for your jobs. Expect assorted creatures on LinkedIn. SCEB’s press release stated that they would be giving recommendations for all their former employees and would not gift the children of employers who do not hire their former employees.

An Associated Press journalist was banned for asking how a bunny can lay eggs, and Reuters was physically thrown out of the building for questioning whether the coal Santa Claus distributes was clean. The Washington Post was the only group left in the building by the end of the Philanthropy Reveal Party.

Various religious figures weighed in about the Philanthropy Reveal Party. The Pope said something in Latin, Buddhists around the world said that they had nothing to say but showed up to not say it. Muslims were busy with Ramadan, and did not show up, but Benjamin Netanyahu, democratically elected to a State that self-identifies as Jewish, applauded the endeavor and said cryptically that ‘settlers are standing by for naysayers property’.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump were in the audience and almost stole the show when Joe sniffed Donald’s hair while Donald ‘grabbed him by the…’ and shouted, “BIGLY!” A sex tape is expected to drop sometime before the Presidential Elections.

Of course this is an April Fool’s Day post, if you haven’t figured that out yet.

  1. They decided they would be lovers instead of fighters. ↩︎

Lost In Thought

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

I started off researching an angle on intelligence for a blog post and ended up down the rabbit hole.

Sometimes you can’t find the line between indulging yourself and researching something. Learning things. And that’s oddly very important. Sure, you may be exceeding the limits of what you have to do, but you stand a better chance of doing whatever it is better because of it.

You find new tools along the way, part of that lost art of browsing. Indulging my innate curiosity is a lot like how I browse. “Oh, what’s that for?” “Oh, that could be useful, let me make a note of that!”

You also get the, “that’s a terrible idea!”s and “I think they’re smoking crack laced with LSD again”.

So you dig deeper. If I agree or disagree something too much and can’t explain why, I’m just not done with it, I haven’t learned enough to consider anything I write to be good enough. As a layperson, you can get away with a lot, but you shouldn’t. As someone who likes finding the truth rather than spamming out posts, it’s an exhausting conflict at times.

Indulging that curiosity means I miss internal deadlines, then I feel bad about it because I had this plan that had to change with all the new knowledge. It took away from my main writing project too.

But… I think it will actually make that project better too. I feel it. See, that’s the trick for me, even if it’s a technical topic with references and links with footnotes and diagrams. I have to feel it, and while AI is supposed to be making it easier, I find dodging all the AI generated articles with no references to be increasingly tiresome.

This is why we’re supposed to use that grey matter encased in that imperfect helmet atop our necks. To experience other ideas, perspectives, and whatever else – so that we can improve our knowledge of a topic rather than being shoveled it like coal into a steam engine – as the media tries to do, as AI has done to it.

It’s good to get lost now and then. It means you’re seeing a new part of a map, or an old part of a map in a new way.

The Lost Art of Browsing.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

It disturbs me a little that there are people out there right now that have never physically browsed books, or music.

I would spend a lot of time in particular wandering bookstores, looking for things to read. Harold Bloom’s quote comes to mind; “We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.”

In the 1980s, I would frequent a bookstore in Trinidad – Manhin’s – on High Street in San Fernando, checking to see if the new Byte magazine, Compute! magazine, etc, would show up and when I did, I invariably picked up other books. It was never time wasted and, even if I didn’t buy some of the books, browsing them made me aware of other aspects of the world. Neil deGrasse Tyson pitches it to businesses as not making as much money if people cannot browse, but the benefit for the consumer is not that businesses can make more money but that consumers can get things that they want or need.

Thrift stores were a special kind of fun for me, before Walmart took over the United States, because you could find some really good stuff in them – including books, books that were cherished by someone, books that were kept on a bookshelf over years and sometimes decades because to them, there was something important in that book that they wanted to be able to revisit.

That seems lost now. In fact, bookstores have become more like Amazon with ordering specific books to sell based on what is popular when I’ve found some of the most interesting books aren’t popular. It used to be that you would walk into a bookstore, the smell of paper and ink permeating the place- some that traded in used novels smelled of old newsprint paper – and you got a feeling that you might find something. A good book found was like an archaeological find in an excavation.

Largely, we’ve lost that. Algorithms have taken away the discovery of our ‘B-Sides’, and feeding artificial intelligences on our habits, likes and dislikes, leaving our lives to be victimized by our options not just in politics but in everything. Everything is marketed, everything about our habits of looking are tracked and recorded, implicitly telling us we should be what we were instead of what we could become.

Manipulation of Tech.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

Manipulation doesn’t really require much. It’s pretty easy to manipulate or be manipulated, and despite the negative connotations, manipulation doesn’t always have to be bad.

What differentiates good and bad as far as manipulation is subjective. Being volunteered for a ‘greater good’ is usually seen as ‘good’, but being manipulated against one’s own interests for a ‘greater good’ that doesn’t include you doesn’t seem very good.

An example: WordPress and Tumblr users were volunteered rather than asked to volunteer information being sold to artificial intelligence companies. If they were actually volunteering, the default setting that was set up for 3rd parties being allowed to use the data would have been off. It wasn’t. The manipulation here was, “Hey, we told you to go in and do this if you don’t want to do it.”

That’s not voluntary in most stretches of the imagination except the unimaginative: Law. It was a manipulation, and I’d offer that it wasn’t fair to people.

If WordPress.com and Tumblr users were paid for it, maybe I’d think it was worth doing. Instead, the owner of the platform decides. It’s not in the interest of the users.

It’s only in the interest of those that own the platform.

Of The Caves.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 5 Comments

We are of caves.

We’ve found caves with cave paintings and ways of communicating over time and between people.

We’ve found underground cities where the caves became networked, like in Cappadocia, Turkey. There are underground cities all over the world.

And what are our homes above the ground but customized caves that we build of different materials?

And what so many workplaces but caves? What is most transportation but mobile caverns? They give us a false sense of security as we careen from one cave to another, hopefully avoiding other mobile caverns along the way.

Drinking and hurtling is not only not suggested, it is actually now Law in most places in the world.

Like all caves, we have these views of the outside. When people congregated in the same geography, they had similar views. When two neighbors look outside, they see the same thing from slightly different angles. The larger the distance between people, the greater the angles, the greater the difference in perspectives.

This could be pretty manageable once the view was not too far away. It helps if everyone’s looking at the center, at the same thing, but that’s not how it works usually and also seems pretty much like a panopticon: a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control.

Meanwhile, our world evolved.

It was pretty manageable. Then we got mass communications and installed another ‘window’ into the caves we run back to, and people within range could see and/or hear exactly the same thing at the same time.

That was pretty manageable.

Channels showed up, people followed their preferences, and things got a bit more complicated.

We have curtains in our caves, and we pull them when we don’t want the light to come in, or we want privacy which is little more than a sense of security for our secrets.

We change the channels in much the same way, sometimes forgetting we can close all the curtains if we want to.

Since people now can pick channels, from the radio to the Internet, we get people seeing the same ‘views’ from their caves despite geography. People who view the same content may be as far as way as possible on our planet, or right next door – but the probability that people are looking at the same things decreases the more channels we have. Echo chambers of indeterminate populations show up, and confirmation biases are fed to maintain the echo chamber because living in caves can be expensive.

We all want our own version of the ‘best cave’ after all. We want to be near the best food, not unlike our cousin primates that fight over fruit tree territory. We want the best stuff near us, and we want to have it but what we consider to be the best varies.

An advance here may seem like the opposite of progress there. A developing country’s citizens may see the rapid advances elsewhere and feel that they have no way to advance to the same level.

Broadcasts will have people believing that the ‘grass is greener’ in one area even though it isn’t, too. People may want to get caves where the grass is greener. This causes all sorts of fun immigration problems as people try to cross lines that someone drew some time ago.

Sure, people unite for good reasons, but sometimes they unite for bad reasons dressed as good reasons. Their views collide.

Here we are, staring from our caves, trying to negotiate the future from the comfort of these caves. We’re all watching different channels, we’re all more interested in some channels than others.

Somewhere along the way, going outside of caves was considered beneath some of us, and because of that the reality that the caves exist in is lost to them. A person worried about the affairs of some distant nations may not notice the garbage piling up right outside our doors because the view through the flat screens have a higher priority than one outside.

I’m sure I knew where I was going with this when it started, but it will be a stub for now. Think ‘Allegory of the Cave‘ clashing all over. Also, consider the following quote:

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

Edward O. Wilson

When the Cheese Is Announced By Book.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

Some days ago last year, someone posted on Facebook that they were getting their team copies of “Who Moved My Cheese: An Amazing Way To Deal With Change In Your Work and You’re Life“.

What he may not have known – I’m not sure how this will turn out – is that since it’s publication in late 1998, it had become synonymous with layoffs in corporate America. This is enough so that Wikipedia has some notes on it in the reception portion of the Wikipedia entry on ‘Who Moved My Cheese’:

In the corporate environment, management has been known to distribute this book to employees during times of “structural reorganization“, or during cost-cutting measures, in an attempt to portray unfavorable or unfair changes in an optimistic or opportunistic way. This has been characterized by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America as an attempt by organizational management to make employees quickly and unconditionally assimilate management ideals, even if they may prove detrimental to them professionally. Ehrenreich called the book “the classic of downsizing propaganda” and summarizes its message as “the dangerous human tendencies to ‘overanalyze’ and complain must be overcome for a more rodentlike approach to life. When you lose a job, just shut up and scamper along to the next one.”

‘Who Moved My Cheese‘, Wikipedia, accessed on January 1st, 2023.

It’s not a reflection on the authors. It’s not a reflection of the book itself. I remember when it came out, standing in a bookstore and reading it in it’s entirety in a bookstore rather than buying it because corporate America was going through buyouts, including the company I was working for at the time, and this book was being given rave reviews by everyone in human resources. I’m a fast reader, and it doesn’t take very long to read it.

Upon reading Ehrenreich’s summary in Wikipedia, I tend to agree with her. There is this flare of ‘positivity’ and ‘change your mindset’ that people in authority tend to use whenever they change things with negative connotations for others.

Taken out of that context, it’s not a bad book and probably something everyone in high school should read. It’s written that simply.

I thought that maybe this was all dating me when I read the response to the comment I left on the original post, which pointed out that when a company hands these out, update your resume because things are about to change. It ends up I was wrong.

The book has consistently been used this way, enough so that if you search for “Who Moved My Cheese Layoffs”, you’ll presently find a review by someone named Nancy who thoroughly trashes “Who Moved My Cheese” in 2009 for that reason. The comments on it are sadly entertaining, including someone named Evan stating, “I need to write the sequel: If I’d Known, I Would Have Stolen More Office Supplies.”

Honestly, if your employer distributes this book, you don’t need to ‘sniff the changes in the wind’. They just slapped you and told you changes were coming.

In all of this, I was surprised at the vehemence the original poster had when responding to people saying the same thing I was. It was disturbing, and nowhere did he say that he wasn’t going to be laying people off.

I assumed good and told him in one post that if his intent was not to lay people off, to tell them up front because they could easily get the wrong idea. This resulted in ad hominem attacks, which were a little surprising, and then he went into full Elon Musk mode without being Elon Musk. That’s something I should write about as well at some point, I suppose, this Elon Musk fetish.

Yet it brought to mind many things I have seen management in different companies do over the years. Most of these people live in their own little bubbles, incapable of viewing the world around them, and it’s simple to think of other people as rats looking for cheese. It’s a bit dehumanizing, too, and I have to wonder whether the popularity of the book isn’t linked to the fact that corporate America was mass purchasing it or whether people just liked the book. It draws the whole thing into question, and I would not like to be the author associated with it.

Change is a reality. Most of the time, change is sold and marketed as a good thing. When a company needs to become profitable, one of the first things they do is gut the company’s employees. Sometimes they gut the right ones, sometimes they gut the wrong ones, usually they get a mix of both but to them it’s a matter of the bottom line – about how much money they save. So if you’ve played ‘the game’ well enough that you’re pulling in good money, you’re most likely the one who will get caught in the rat trap.

There is a certain hypocrisy to creating a game in a corporate environment and then getting rid of the winners. I don’t have a real perspective on it because every company will be different, but I do know that I know good people who have gotten the book, who were good at their jobs, and who did in fact move on to do much better elsewhere where management was not obsessed with simple books. In that way, it can be a blessing.

In the end, I am a little disturbed that the book is still used that way. Corporate America, with all that is happening with artificial intelligence, is likely to have ‘corporate restructuring’ (aka ‘layoffs’), and if this book lands on a desk near you, you should have already updated your resume.

In the end, if they don’t want you there, you don’t want to be there. Unfortunately, that means it’s risking your income and copies of the book are not accepted by any bill collectors I know of. Adapt and overcome, and while I do agree it’s insensitive and comes from a place that is dehumanizing by making people metaphors for rats and vice versa, getting wound up in that isn’t going to pay the bills.

Pay the bills. Find somewhere that wants you, and if you don’t find it, maybe you can build it or find people willing to build it with you.

As for the people who work for that person – well, shucks, just read his responses and make up your own damned minds.

A Good Result

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Back in the early 1980s, my father had one of his rare talks with me where I understood him. I wasn’t doing well in school, he didn’t understand why and I wasn’t certain why I should care other than my father being angry with me. He was always angry with me, so it wasn’t something I felt I could change anyway.

What he said was, “A good student and a good teacher will give you a good result. A bad student and a bad teacher will give you a bad result. A bad student and a good teacher gives you a bad result. A good student and a bad teacher gives you a good result.”

There’s plenty of potential for each one of those sentences to be wrong, but what he was communicating was the responsibility. He was trying to explain to me that I was responsible for my own education. The grades were my fault, but I never had to work in school before then, and I’d fallen behind by a few years.

When people talk about teachers and students, I find myself hearing about poor parenting or bad teachers. Strangely, they never say both are the problem and that could actually be a part of the problem, but I digress.

All of that robs young students – children to teenagers. It robs them of the responsibility that they can take for what they learn, as well as the rewards that come with it beyond silly grades to pass silly tests to impress silly people.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where we have to impress silly people to get silly jobs which, in turn, allow us to earn income so that we might pay for our place on the planet.

We quite literally charge rent for a planet that doesn’t really belong to us, which we’re collectively only now beginning to consider that we might have to manage a bit better. To that end, people with pieces of paper roll out the alphabet behind their names.

If only that alphabet worked in our collective interests. In the name of paying our rent on a planet we don’t really own, we do a lot of strange things. We sell people stuff that they don’t need, things that generally are supposed to elevate the experience of being on the planet from trinkets to games.

We spend a lot of time teaching ways to earn a living to pay that rent. We don’t spend a lot of time teaching about how to learn, about how to progress as a species because we’re so caught up in our own worlds that we don’t really see the world around us.

The education system could help with that, but… if we want a good result and we consider the education system our teacher, maybe we need to consider that individually we are students.

A good student and a good teacher will give you a good result. A bad student and a bad teacher will give you a bad result. A bad student and a good teacher gives you a bad result. A good student and a bad teacher gives you a good result.