I had a chat with Jonas this morning about yesterday’s post. He loves the deep canvassing thing. Then we got a bit stuck trying to figure out if deep canvassing was about empathy, comparing belief sets, convincing people to change beliefs, or convincing people to engage – to get people to act more. He said that engaging and convincing is not the same. Convincing people to change their belief set is different to changing how much people engage.

I countered that, yes, while I want people to act, I do believe this is about changing believe sets. Some people believe that some actions are more important. Others believe action doesn’t make a difference so they don’t act anymore. I, myself, struggle with these: as he pointed out, I prioritised in my Participation Curiosity Scale, or sisu-scale, those, basically, with more sisu. All the while stating in my entire research premise that I want to value all the categories equally. So, clearly, not great. And I have stopped acting. I have stopped believing I can create change. This whole proposal process is like a bit of an awakening. I want to change those beliefs. Or at least lay the groundwork to get people curious enough to get people to start wrestling with the cognitive dissonance out loud.

A quote came to mind, because, despite, still, being a researcher, I think if we stop doing research tomorrow that’s fine. We need to do stuff not just think about doing them. We talk, so much. And it means nothing. The engineers and hard scientists keep dreaming up amazing technocentric solutions that won’t work contextually, and the social scientists keep analysing and creating theories and none of us go anywhere.

“You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.”
― Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes”

Jonas kept coming back to that an ethic of care is about empathy and I felt myself getting grumpy. I don’t see it that way, and I think this is important enough to rename ethic of care, at least for this project.

An ethic of justice is sortof intuitive to understand. Things are right or wrong. Court of law, blah blah. But we don’t watch all those courtroom dramas for the ethic of justice. We can also intuitively understand the complexity, the tough choices, the no-win outcomes. The “what is legal often isn’t what is right”.

Yes, an ethic of care prioritizes empathy, compassion, and interpersonal relationships. To me, it can be about compromise, but ideally should be about a transcendent middle. And I think it often is about something other than the actual thing being discussed. As Gilligan writes on page 33 of her book, since moral dilemmas arise in situations where hurt is inescapable, there is no “right” or “good” solution. Rather than seeking justification, the moral imperative becomes “an injunction to care, a responsibility to discern and alleviate the ‘real and recognizable trouble’ of this world.” The thought of care emphasizes responsiveness to particular situations.

Say, abortion, one side can shout that abortion is about a woman’s right to choose, others about the potential health of the future human, and then we get distraught about religion and that it’s about control over women’s bodies. But I think people also think about “survival of culture” or the group, or ensuring a family unit, about the bigger picture, in other words. All of these are true when they’re stated as a simple, isolated fact; it’s all the undercover baggage that makes it fraught. I want to help people understand more of the undercover baggage inside themselves. I want people to become more receptive to the cognitive dissonance. The meta-cognition skills, why they think what they think. I think deep canvassing can do that.

Maybe this is an ethic of meta, lol. An ethic of connecting-the-dots. Right now, I don’t care what decisions people take, what actions they take after we’ve been “canvassed”, that is not the priority right now, and, part of this is that it’s out of my hands. Embracing complexity necessarily means giving up control. We can get better at our actions, but right now we’re not even out of the starting gate. Meta-phor alert: You need to get a horse thinking before it can move its feet. Only then can you start racing or doing dressage or whatever and then only then can you even start thinking about winning. If you don’t, that horse bolts from fear and crashes into the fence and dies. Anyway. I digress. Also, seeing as I found another engineer-talking post while looking for the other one and that this is very much about feminism and a human voice: the CEO of SAICE disaster – rewritten may be a good example of a transcendent way of thinking, albeit a bit tongue in cheek.

I don’t like calling it an ethic of care because it seems then people want to go, hey, I hear you, I appreciate you, do you want a hug, are you comfortable. Does the horse want a carrot. NO, fuck, it’s not about me, this is a complex problem and I want to focus on that. It’s not really about *me* being heard, it’s about all sorts of weird things being heard, and brought into context. It’s NOT about creating a safe space or anything like that. It’s very much not a safe space. It’s HARD. It’s being able to sit in a situation where a clean solution is simply not possible, that is politically charged, and then being able to navigate the complexity together to get to a thing that is awe-inspiring, ideally. To get to that association where we discover something at once familiar and surprising. Something we know, and yet didn’t know that we knew. That something isn’t always nice, sometimes it’s realising very uncomfortable truths about ourselves and having to acknowledge it. But many times, it’s magic. To move like a shoal of fish, to get to a big beautiful thing that we all thought was impossible. It’s magic, and I want a lot more of it. And sometimes, maybe often, it’s a bit of both.

Yes, this sounds lofty, but I have the nagging, persistent feeling that with our digital tools and the work of Gilligan and others that we can do this, at scale. At a global scale. The way things go viral. Maybe not all the way but we can make a really strong start, say, four steps in of the deep canvas method. So in this project I don’t want a techno-centric AI therapist. I don’t want a participation curiosity scale to analyse how curious people are and then blah blah what future research can do. Sure, maybe I need those two things in the course of things, but what I want from this project is the knowledge how to design this into a game. Something fun and deceptively simple. That is the next step for me. I want it to be useful to others too, to use without me, without some expert leading them or some canvasser helping them. Like how therapy talk has become mainstream. This is action research. I want to use my learning in my volunteer groups, as we go.

Jonas said but if people have a shared goal, then they/we can figure it out, and make it happen. It’s just about collaborating better. This proper triggered me. It’s like saying “love is enough”. I felt, well, you and I do have shared goals and right now I feel like there is no space in here for me. I didn’t say anything, though. We batted to and fro for a while, and then a funny thing happened. I felt my voice leave, literally, physically disappear. And then I started to cry. I was just so frustrated.

It was strange because Jonas is a good friend, we have been working together on this since 2018, and it’s feedback on one post, and it’s really good feedback. It was strange because I don’t cry often. He definitely gets a lot of it, but in our discussion, and not for the first time, I felt like I did during the drought, when I wrote the “expertise during crisis” talk which I never even got to give (because a bunch of old guys didn’t want to stop talking, and no one moderated it, and we ran over time and I had to leave to another meeting and I was sitting there going THIS IS WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT and feeling so trapped and squashed). I felt like I did during the workshop with engineers where we were just so profoundly missing each other. All the people involved shared a common goal, just like Jonas and I do, and yet … I had no voice. Like, 90% of the people in these places had no voice. I felt like I do during all the times that I end up just going quiet because what is the point to keep talking or fighting when it won’t make a difference. And then, eventually, I leave. I want to make it so I don’t want to leave anymore. And I know that sometimes it’s not possible, so then I want another place where I can do my thing and bridge to the other thing and that’s the metagaming aspect.

I remembered a quote about patriarchy being about who gets to love, and how, and how much. And I thought, this is the same. It’s about who gets to know, and how, and how much. Who gets to speak, and how, and how much. Who gets to decide the expertise, whose expertise is valued, and how it gets shared, and how much.

“That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
And how much.”

― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“That it really began in the days when the Expertise Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should speak of what they know, and how. And how much.”
– me, about, is the time since Descartes?

And the feminist thing came rushing back, because this happens to us all. Yes, it happens to women, and minorities, but this is what Carol Gilligan talks about in her latest book “in a human voice“. We all need it, and we need it to repair our relationship with nature too. Man, reading my notes there again, I want to build the whole proposal around that post. This realisation, along with the constructive knowledge that my sections 3,4 and 5 are basically unpacking the methodology, and, while important, should be less emphasised in the proposal, gives me good direction, not least a good chance to make that ten page limit.

I realised, Jonas and myself are exactly the case studies I need. Sure, the two of us could go to therapy – and yes, I think deep canvassing is therapy. Maybe therapy with an agenda. And it would probably help. But then that’s the two of us helped, and I bet it will take a really long time. The whole of Debian and the whole of engineering and the whole bloody world in polycrisis would still be in trouble. (And then I wonder about the project’s chosen case studies, but I need to think of that more.) No amount of sensitivity training will help this problem though. No amount of diversity lectures or angry memes or ranty feminist Tiktoks or diversity sections in proposals or anything like that will change it at all, because it lies so much deeper than all that.

What intervention can Jonas and I take part of, that makes this better for us? That sortof rewrites a little bit of our brains enough that we can see what the other person sees? That gets us Carol Gilligan’s Association? To get us to discover something at once familiar and surprising, something we know, and yet didn’t know that we knew?

And then, that has to scale, so we can reach more people. So we need the digital.

But then why would people do this? Nobody wants to go to therapy. The people who needs therapy the most, won’t go. So it needs to be fun. This intervention needs to be fun, so fun that people just want to do it. So easy, so simple. And I think it can’t be serious, it can’t say, this is going to be like therapy, this is going to develop your metacognition. It has to be so subtle. In future, this will be an actual game, or a cluster of games. That is my next step. This project is figuring out how the game is designed, and it’s about contributing knowledge to other people who could use this in other contexts too.

Jonas and I sat with this for a bit. He asked, carefully, but, is this all? Is this not just, better collaboration? He tried other ways of asking, clearly something important was missing for him. He asked if I was doing here what I have been trying to do since the start. I said yes. He said, but is it all of it? I said yes. He said but it feels like it is “only” about resolving social conflict. And I slowly started to see, one part, not all of it, where we miss each other. He was missing the hum-tek, the humanities-technical bits. This was a useful clarification:

Peduncle has two parts, the social and the technical. Together it is hum-tek.

The social component needs the technical bit. Because of the complexity of science, because of the limits of the resource intensive one-on-one we need the technical. This project acknowledges the technical, but it’s focus is on the social.

Because of the feminist scope we need this social machinery. This project is not about the technical goals of the peduncle scope. It’s the social component. It’s also highly personal, which I think makes me stress. I could do this as part of AquaSavvy, I could do this on my own. But man, I want this project so bad.

In the same way, developing the technical without the social is absurd. The linked data, the data infrastructures … That is another project :). And hopefully, AquaSavvy is the first prototype that starts bringing the social and the technical together.