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As this post makes its way to you, just in time to hit the end of April, I’m getting ready to go on a personally guided creative retreat AKA I’ve gone on holiday on my own with all of my pencils. This has been a good month I think, I’ve personally felt more positive about my work and read some great, inspiring content as is evidenced in this month’s reading list. Don’t be put off by the number of long reads – they’re all great and not all that long!

SHORT READS

Marcus Du Sautoy on Creativity and AI

Although smart speakers and chatbots are helping to normalise artificial intelligence and machine learning in everyday life, creativity is one realm of human endeavour in which we’re reluctant to harness AI’s capabilities*, Marcus Du Sautoy offers some thoughts on why.

*In my mind wholly understandably!

 

Why it’s important to ‘pause’, rest and regenerate if you want to be creative

I know this isn’t the first link on this topic I’ve shared, and I doubt it will be the last but creativity is not linear. In a creative process, there is always a leap, gap or space. Researchers call it “incubation” or “mental digestion”. Business coach Robert Poynton calls it a pause. As, in the UK, we’re in the midst of a long-weekend it seemed the right time to pause on the idea of taking a break.

 

The Radical Act of Embracing Your Own Mediocrity

“Chasing joy, rather than success, is a radical act today. We’re told to turn our hobbies into hustles. We’re told that if we only worked a bit harder, someone might finally see in us the influencer we were meant to be.” So Meghan Neismith is encouraging us to find the love of being beginners again and find some hobbies we’re, well, a little bit rubbish at.

Long reads

Jocelyn K. Glei: Transformation Is Hard

In this episode of Hurry Slowly, Jocelyn K Glei talks “about why transformation is far from instant — why it’s messy and awkward and hard. And why that’s a good thing. Because once we recognize the slow burn of real change, we can approach it with more realistic expectations and treat ourselves more gently.”

 

How to Stay Calm

This guide from the every wonderful Adam JK reminds us that “it’s so easy to remember the answers when everything is okay, and so hard to see through the dark parts when life gets tough.”

 

Creative Lives — “You are good enough”: Freelance illustrator Helena Covell on maintaining a sense of self-worth

I love Helena Covell’s work, I’ve featured her illustrations here more than once and her book Jumble Wood is a thing of joy. In this interview with the ever brilliant Lecture in Progress, Helena discussees “where she sources her inspiration and, crucially, how she maintains perspective on her work and faith in her abilities.”

 

Emma Gannon on ‘side hustles’, creating the flexible career you want and why it’s good to get offline

I’m personally in the progress of trying to define what it is I want out of my career as a whole, and I’ve been finding myself turning to absolute babe and work pal Emma Gannon’s words more and more. This article on Creative Boom all about multi-hyphenate working is a brilliant place to start if you want to start digging into her thoughts, or just to get a bit of a career kick in the butt.

 

The Forgotten Women Who Hand-Painted the First Color Films

There are so many forgotten women who shaped the arts, and it feels like very week we find out about more. In this Artsy piece we learn about “the meticulous, exhausting work of hand-coloring film was one of the first careers in film production available to artistic women, and they came to dominate the field at the turn of the 20th century”

 

On Flooding: Drowning the Culture in Sameness

In this Longread, Soraya Roberts discusses what she describes as the flooding of culture.

“Flooding (v.): Unleashing a mass torrent of the same stories by the same storytellers at the same time, making it almost impossible for anyone but the same select few to rise to the surface.”

 

Meet 5 French Millennials Who Hand-Stitch Chanel for a Living

In the age of smart machines it’s easy to forget about the traditional crafting skills which still make magic in everything from cathedrals to couture. Ahead of its presentation in New York, Chanel invited No Man’s Land to Paris to visit five ateliers and meet the new generation of women making fashion fantasies come alive through the power of hand crafts.

 

How to Fight the Power with Joy, a Lesson From Corita Kent

“With Brexit looming and all kinds of global strife taking center stage,” Aiga’s Eye on Design felt there was “no better time for the first London exhibition of the work of Corita Kent. The activist nun’s career as an artist, teacher, and designer coincided with the second half of the 20th century’s most tumultuous era, and her work confronted the issues of the day with bravery and resolve— fusing art with everyday life and favoring joy over despair.” I went to see this last weekend and it was full of delight and this article really captures so much about Kent and her work.

Eye Candy

@fieldart

I’m not generally a big landscapes person, but Jessica Fields’s colourful paintings just do something to me. I love how she captures light and feeling, rather than detail. They demand to breathe.

@beya.illustration

The texture of French artist, Beya Rebai’s landscape sketches are almost as wonderful as her consistent colour palette. They just make me want to try out some more en plein air work.

@neilfarber

I like to imagine the stories that might be contained in Neil Farber’s fictional book covers. Each and everyone seems to come to me at just the right moment, and I like to think they probably always contain the advice I need.

@kikuhughes

Okay this isn’t an Instagram recommendation, but a Twitter one, but it’s worth it. Kiku Hughes’s comics are gorgeous. She’s currently working on a book about Japanese American incarceration and every image she shares is so human and moving. There’s just something about how she draws and more monochrome style for this book which is incredibly tender.

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Every man and his dog and his dog’s best friend has a blog or a YouTube channel or a podcast or at least has a social media account where they share their take on the day publicly. But far gone are the days when those takes on the day are just “Natalie is eating cereal this morning. We don’t document so much as dispense now.

 

There’s a pressure that what we dispense online must come with a value. We crave communities or just crowds to share our lives with. You’re meant to be able to find your tribe online, or at least feel like you might be part of something more than just a person looking at a screen. But the internet today is an attention economy, and that means more often than not you have to provide a value exchange in order to get the attention of that tribe.

 

As we drift further apart that value exchange is less about a mutual love of breakfast foods and more about providing insight. You have to be able to teach people something or show them something completely new. You have to have that sparkling perspective. You have to have it even if you’re their peer. You have to have it even if you’re just working the thing out for yourself. You have to have those perspectives, all the time.

 

The concept of having to share some value in your perspective obviously isn’t new, people have written articles and books for centuries. But at this scale and frequency, where it’s baked into so much of all of our lives, it feels unprecedented.

 

It seems like as soon as anything newsworthy happens there’s a rush to have the trending opinion, to be the first to take a different or woke perspective on the issue. As soon as Notre Dame caught on fire twitter was awash with images and condolences. Then, before even taking a breath, it was filled with perspectives. When the Mueller report on his investigations into Trump was released, there were people claiming insight within half an hour, despite the fact that they couldn’t possibly have read, let alone digested, the document. With that same release, we also saw commentators offer live, blow by blow, page by page, tweet by tweet hot takes.

 

If you don’t have a perspective, you’re not seen to be engaged.

 

One person I follow, in a moment that has stuck with me during the last election, retweeted a lot a number of articles by political journalists and economists. She clearly had an opinion due to the lean of what she was sharing but never came out with an ‘original’ argument or declaration. She was called out for it. Why hadn’t she just come out and given her thesis on the subject if she cared so much? Her reply: ‘I’m not an expert. I want to share the information I’m using to make my decision from people who know what they’re talking about. The world doesn’t need me to try to make sense of this publicly’.

 

That seems like a pretty rare stance.

 

And it’s not just in the ‘public’ sphere or online where there seems to be increasing pressure to have an opinion. There’s now a service “that matches people willing to rent out their opinions on sports, film, TV and music to people too busy to consume pop culture.” People are paying for pop culture coaches, so because they feel the need to have a perspective so badly.

 

Now, none of this is new. Has anyone ever wanted to be isolated from the latest tea station (I’m using this instead of water cooler now because I can) gossip? We’ve all checked the latest scores, skimmed the headlines or crammed an article on last nights big thing before. But it seems like our thirst to have framed the world just right ahead of time, to be in the know, to have the woke perspective is ever increasing.

 

I don’t know how we break out of this, or if we will. Sometimes I think the answer is to stop sharing altogether. Sometimes I think it’s about sharing differently. Most times I think it’s a symptom of much greater cultural forces which are at play.

 

So, for now, I’m just going to do what feels right in the moment.

While I’m writing about perspective, I also want to address the fact that the tone of this space, this blog has been shifting recently. I’ve been giving more weight to ‘think’ style pieces because topics like embracing uncertainty have been on my mind. These baby essays had been reserved for my newsletter, but they’re some of the pieces I enjoy writing the most and that gives me the most reward. There’s something powerful in sitting down to work out your thoughts on something tricky, to try to structure them, before you open them up as dinner table fodder. I guess it’s the naval gazing version of framing the world just right ahead of time. I am an anxious bear after all.

 

I’d been reluctant to share those kinds of perspectives here because they felt self-indulgent or even self-aggrandising. I’ve sat uncomfortably with the idea of this blog having a (tiny) audience since the start. I write, illustrate and research what I want first, always. But it’s incredibly difficult not think about who might read whatever I come up with, how it might be received and if it has the potential to support my other work – often people find me for commissions through this blog or my social media.

 

If you will allow me a metaphor, the way I picture it is this: creating content online is a bit like being a busker. You’re performing as people pass by. Now you can perform in order to try to catch their attention for a split second, to turn them into fans. You can listen out for the things people cheer for and build on them. You can pay attention to their reactions and grow with that audience. Or you can just play what you like. You can close your eyes and not notice who stops, you can make the active choice to keep playing no matter the reaction. With you blindfolded, it’s something of a schrodingers audience. Or you can perform what you like with your eyes wide open and learn to keep going no matter what happens around you. That requires wither some incredible expectation management or some even more incredible self-confidence.

I’m trying to keep making what I want no matter who’s on the street. I’m trying to be slower with my perspectives, taking time to orient myself and take a good old look around first not at an audience but at the world around me. I want to be anthropological about it, to be in the study but not its subject.

 

But, as ever, we’ll see. As much as I try to frame them, my perspectives are always changing.

I recognise the irony of this piece. I’m questioning whether we need to have an opinion, a public opinion with a sense of authority while writing an opinion piece on my blog. But as Alanis Morisette said “It’s the good advice that you just didn’t take / Who would’ve thought, it figures”

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We live in a world in which we’re increasingly looking for control, for certainty.

Before we leave the house we can check the weather, check the tube lines, check shared calendars, check our route, check how tall our favourite celebrity is. When we get in we can check how far we’ve walked, how much we’ve spent to the penny, check how much electricity our homes have used, check if that surprisingly short celebrity has tweeted.

We can use that information to predict and change our behaviour. We’ll carry an umbrella if it’s raining. We’ll change our routes. We’ll text a friend to say we’re running late. Peer at the screen a little closer the next time we’re in the cinema. We’ll schedule in an extra gym session. We’ll save a little harder. We’ll make sure we turn the bathroom light off. We’ll log off Twitter.

All of those actions make complete sense. We’re measuring more and more personally so that we can make what we think are better choices.

But we’re also being measured on a much bigger scale, by other people. Companies are measuring how we behave online and in the ‘real world’. They’re using their measurements to predict those choices the choices we’ll make next and influence them.

This can be with our best interests at heart or be guided by their bottom lines.

Either way, I hope we can all agree that we’re (in the biggest sense) striving for certainty, understandably. As a self-confessed control freak, I, more than most people, get it. I live for routine and having solid ground beneath my feet.

But the more I learn, the more I want to fight for uncertainty in my life where I can, where it makes sense.

All the good stuff in life happens when we’re uncertain. Scientific discoveries come through testing uncertain hypotheses. Friendships and relationships come from taking the leap of faith that we can trust in someone else, even if we’re uncertain that it will become something. Narratives rely on uncertainty in order to drive the action. We find love, adventure, and the stories we tell in uncertainty.

So in this world where we are being encouraged to seek out certainty, and it’s becoming easier to do so, we have to make the active choice to embrace uncertainty and seek it out.

I want to be surprised, to be moved, to be engaged by the world as I move through it. Don’t you?

If you do, here are a few of the small changes I’m trying out as a starting place for bringing more uncertainty into my life. These really are a starting place, I want to start to work on more speculative design to jump without looking more in the future, but I’m a reforming control freak so let’s try baby steps together, alright?

 

Discuss first google later

One small rule I’ve implemented with my boyfriend, and I’m starting to bring into other relationships is not to google something in the middle of a conversation. It’s okay if you don’t have the answer to why baked beans are still called baked beans even if they’re not baked anymore. The discussion that ensues about how we label things, about the changes to food production, about that great beans on toast recipe your friend tried out on the weekend are just as valuable as having the ‘right’ answer. Speculate together and I promise you’ll find connections you didn’t expect and realise as much about each other as beans.

 

Follow the path not citymappered

Walk outside of your regular route and just amble for a bit if you have time. You might find a hidden gem. Sure you could have googled it, but there’s a romance in stumbling over a cute cafe or a pang of pride when you make a find something great on your own.

 

Get sucked by stories in not spoilers

Don’t over think it, over googled it, over watch the trailer for it just give that book/film/series the benefit of the doubt and watch it. Believe in the magic the writers are trying to make and go with it. Suspend your disbelief for just an hour or two. This has the added benefit of not having to spend forever having to try to find something to watch while you eat, not being able to decide and silently eating your now cooling soup.

 

Trust don’t just tweet

I have to admit this is the one I’m worst at, but I want to try to put my trust in (IRL) people a little more and take the baby step of trying to make friends. Who knows if they’ll have any similar interests? Who knows if it will work out? Who knows if they want to deal with my weird self? Who knows if I’ll meet another human being again? Not me, but that’s the point. Also I need to find more hermits so that I can establish my anchorite community. Step one, saying hi to everyone in my anthropology class.

 

Yes and… not just okay

Rather than just accepting things as they are, build on them. I’ve used that old improv classic “yes and..” here but it could easily be “yes because” or “yes but why not?” in this scenario. Put your ideas out there and speculatively make your own future. Embrace what could be.

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Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power is the book which has had the single biggest impact on how I see the world in the last couple of years.

I genuinely think I will look back at having read it and see it as a turning point. It’s already started to influence decisions I’m making about my future.

This isn’t the kind of book I would normally pick up. Typically if I’m reading non-fiction it’s biographical of some kind or a literary essay. I’m not a historian or an economist, I didn’t study politics or philosophy. But when someone I was conducting research with at work brought up this book as an argument against the work I was doing (which having now read it, was completely unjustified) I knew I had to read it. Now, I’m so grateful for having met that angry man.

So what is surveillance capitalism?

Zuboff defines it as the below:

Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n.

1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.

I know that’s a dense read. It’s a dense topic that reaches in every corner of our lives. But to oversimplify what’s at the heart of Zuboff’s epic, for the sake of brevity in this book club review my summary is below.

Corporations are actively and consciously collecting more and more of our data unregulated. This data is not just being used to create better services for us. Instead it is being collected on such a scale that it is being used to map human behaviour at an unprecedented scale. Once mapped our behaviour is turned into predictive products, which are then sold onto other companies. Our data is not the product but it is what powers the product. These products once sold are were used in the first instance for marketing, but are increasingly being used to control our actions in highly targeted ways. The impacts of corporations having control of our futures are as yet understudied and raise real questions of what free will may look like in the future.

This month’s alternative book cover design for The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism sets the scene by covering some of the human basics that have made it possible surveillance capitalism to grow under the radar. Then Zuboff sets out some of the hopes we had for tech’s capabilities when enhanced with the collection of vast tranches of data, through the example of the smart home. But then we hear about commercial interests and human decisions (not natural growth) have led us to a very different place. Zuboff mainly focuses on Google and Facebook as her examples; they’re the biggest surveillance capitalist firms in action today. The conditions they and cultures they have created are unprecedented, so how do we push back? That’s where Zuboff leaves us. She doesn’t provide an antidote to surveillance capitalism, largely because I don’t think there is one solution, she opens our eyes and then closes with a rallying cry.

While The Age of Surveillance Capitalism ends passionately, Zuboff is clear and appears relatively biased throughout. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a little alarmist in places. But this is a Harvard Professor who has spent years investigating how the proliferation of technology and data have changed our economies and lives explaining her findings. She does dive into some more theoretical frameworks, there were moments I had to stop to google economists, but she explains everything she lays out and is never verbose of scholarly for the sake of it.

There are subtle elements of Zuboffs prose that work to constantly keep you engaged no matter how dense the material she’s covering, and I’m no economics scholar. One that stays firmly at the front of mind is that she always uses “she” in any hypothetical examples. This is a small change, but when we live in a world where male is the default it turned on a little light in my brain every time she did it. It also made me feel far more included in the story and what the future may hold than if she had used “he”.

This book was a real wake up call for me.

I had always had questions about how the big companies were making money and using my data, but I’d never pieced anything on this scale together. This is going to be one of the biggest fights for my generation, and those after us, if we want to claw back control over our own lives and for our rights to uncertainty.

As you may be able to tell from my enthusiasm , I think this is a topic everyone should read about and start to be aware of in their interactions online. If nothing else to recognise that the place we’re in right now, hasn’t just organically come about. It’s been driven by choices made by companies we’re giving more control to without understanding.

But I also recognise that not everyone is prepared to take on a 708 page book which covers some pretty heavy material, although it’s well written enough that you can certainly get through it at pace and in my opinion the details make all 708 pages worth a read. For those of you who just want to learn more, and perhaps aren’t ready for the full read instead of just sharing reviews in my articles section, this month I’ve included some pieces/podcasts on surveillance capitalism as well.

Enjoy, be mildly terrified, get angry, then let’s get going on taking back our rights to the future!

 

SOME QUESTIONS TO PONDER AS YOU READ…

  • Before reading, what scared you? Did it change after reading?
  • Should we push back against surveillance capitalism?
  • What can we do to push back against surveillance capitalism as individuals and as a society?
  • Are there any examples where you’ve seen surveillance capitalism at work without noticing it before?
  • What’s the best thing that’s happened to you in a moment of uncertainty, a moment where you had to take a leap of faith or put trust in something you couldn’t control?

IF YOU WANT SOME FURTHER READING TRY…

  • Public Affairs books has a great introduction to the book including section summaries and further reading links
  • If you’re more into podcasts, The Verge did a brilliant interview with Zuboff which focused on a discussion of the meatiest bits of the book
  • For those of you who like a video format The Intercept hosted an evening with Zuboff and senior correspondent Naomi Klein
  • Zuboff offers a short written discussion of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism in a feature with NY Mag’s Intelligencer

IF YOU WANT MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS HAVE A LOOK AT…

I’m sorry I don’t have any similar book recommendations for this one just yet, as I said it was the first time I’d delved into this kind of non-fiction. If you have any tips, please do leave me a comment below and I’ll update as we go!

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I have a difficult relationship with my inbox.

 

Getting my first email address, one that was named after a fandom, felt like a key to the world of the internet. It allowed me to do so much and it let me stay in touch with friends. But since then, that key hasn’t opened doors; it’s locked me in.

 

Before we jump into my relationship with email, I want to set up a bit of scientific context. Specifically, I want to talk about B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning experiments. In these experiments, Skinner famously conditioned rats to learn that when they pressed a button food would be dispensed. But after the rats had learned to press the button, further experiments were done. The button was changed so that it didn’t dispense food every time it was pressed, but rather at irregular intervals. The result was that the rats pressed the button more frequently than when the food came at every push.

 

When it comes to social media and email we are like those rats. We’ve been conditioned to keep hitting refresh for a reward, in the form of likes, comments or contact, that may or may not come.

It became less about the content and more about a constant search for the next dopamine hit. I was playing a fruit machine but instead of a flush of cherries I was getting spam from companies I didn’t care about. I refreshed indiscriminately, in any moment of quiet or anxiety.

 

This wasn’t the world of romantic opportunity we hoped for in You’ve Got Mail. It wasn’t even the efficiency of communication that it had promised in our work. I was a full on email junkie.

 

I want to start breaking the habit, the addiction.

 

My first thought was to go cold turkey. I could probably have managed it for social media, but unlike the people you read about who are able to leave email behind (often because they have assistants or as part of their role as journalists) I’m not in a position to turn my back on email. I also realised that any break, even if I could get away for a week or two, would be temporary. You could sober me up but then as soon as I was back I’d be walking through a digital liquor store every day.

 

So instead of completely cutting myself off from my email, I decided to try to reshape my relationship with it. I wanted to take myself out of the operant conditioning chamber.

 

My first step was to remove the email apps from as many of my devices as I could. Everything personal is now done through the web. That puts one barrier between me and the fruit machine. It also means I get no notifications.

 

I’ve kept my work emails on my work laptop, because it’s part of what I’m paid for, and I’ve kept my work inbox on my phone. But where I’ve had to keep the apps I’ve turned off all notifications, including that little ticking red box that counts all of your unread emails, taunting you with them.

 

My next step was to set up a new address, one that was just for people.

 

This new, more professional email address, gave me two things. First, it brought me clarity. There was no spam, no more constant cycle of emails, no clutter. Second, it had a side benefit of giving me a digital channel I was proud to use to communicate with the world. I’m in the process of growing up online and this felt like finally stepping out of my school uniform.

 

The final step I took was choosing scheduled times to check my email.

 

Rather than checking whenever I felt the itch, whenever I had a moment of boredom, whenever I felt a glint of anxiety that could only be dulled by shine of a message to remind me I was here and in demand enough to be worthy.

 

Since making those changes, I’ve felt my relationship with my inbox become healthier. I’ve been less distracted. I’ve not missed anything important either. I don’t owe anyone an immediate response, and I don’t work in the burning building business so it can all wait until I’m ready.

 

It’s a change that’s still in progress. I’ve still not managed to fully kick the habit, and I’ve not even started on social media yet. But it’s all about those baby steps.

 

I’m not a mouse. I’m a woman and I choose the conditions of my own experiments.