[Opinion] The Promise of the Computer Leaves Some People Behind

Access to the means of production in an increasingly computerized global economy is THE social justice issue of our time if indeed the computers ate—and will continue to eat—all of our jobs.

There is an issue with the fact that rural areas in the United States (and worldwide) have limited access to the wonders of the Internet and computer based development, because of the fact that their geographical location is not urban.

There is an issue with the fact that a student who would love to move back to their hometown of 20,000 people can’t because the computerized opportunities they were trained to take advantage of, don’t exist in rural areas.

There is an issue when the only response from the increasingly dense urban populations to the increasingly sparse rural populations is “Well…move to the city.” Or even worse “Well, you chose to live in the country.”

Yes, people have a right to move around and live where they can, and they have a right to experience the consequences that come from making those decisions. The most iconic image of post-modern film history is that one outside the window of Deckard’s car in Bladerunner as he escapes the populated, polluted, oppressive—but full of opportunity—city, to go live in the vast, open, country. It is telling that fiction gets this dichotomy righter than lived fact.

Considerations of access, of course bring to mind the question of who will pay for such changes? The choices before us are either hard, difficult, and without obvious answers as to the outcomes of any of them:

The fact of the matter is, Universal Basic Income to everyone is not economically feasible in a country of 320 million individualists.

More calls for higher tax rates will only economically stifle entrepreneurship and further the gap emotionally between the “haves” in the city and the “have-nots” in the rural areas.

So, if we really believe that the role of government is to be a safety net, then what greater net should government be providing, than the net of advocacy, pressure, and even protection around access to the computerized means of production, via high speed cable that goes past “the last mile”?

If we don’t believe that such advocacy and protection is the work of good government, then the truly fortunate few should be creating businesses, entrepreneurial opportunities, and using every means at their creative disposal to make sure that the rural populations—which are increasingly poor, increasingly white, and increasingly politically hostile to the new order of computers because they are finally experiencing the end of the Industrial era—have the means to make a living.

And another app for doing something that our mothers used to do, won’t really bring that kind of meaning through job growth to those rural populations. Nor will it bring anything but pennies in the form of “sharing” or “gig” economic structures that cannot support the needs of children, families, or communities where education levels are low, and hope is fleeting.

If we believe that education is way out, and that not increasing access, but that instead increasing skills, e.g. teaching everyone to code, is the way to go, then we need to reform the education system from K-12 in truly, deeply, profoundly, radical ways.

And the enterprising few need to leave the cities, head to the country, and be prepared to really dig in for ten to twenty years into reforming an educational system that is simultaneously perceived as the “only place to get a good job” and also seen as “the last best hope for our children.” And the enterprising few must do it while also showing a modest profit.

However, we do have another, more comfortable choice: We can collectively decide that the rural areas don’t matter. That geography is a state of mind rather than a physical place. We can decide that “those country people” are irrelevant. We can decide that the urban poor need and deserve more attention than the seemingly spread out rural poor. We can decide—when we look at all—to continue to use the language of the 18th, 19th, and 20th century to try to resolve and acutely 21st century problem.

We can make such decisions and continue to support policies, and politicians, of all stripes who engage in such decision making.

And all the reformation of education, the gradual migration toward denser and denser urban areas (and the concomitant spread of those areas outward), and the increase in computerization and automation, is guaranteed to lead to more cries of income inequality, racism, sexism, and calls for the acquisition of capital to made harder for the fortunate few, rather than easier.

Which will create more conflict, not less.

HIT Piece 7.05.2016

I’ve been disappointed before by finding out people’s secrets.

You know, the stuff that doesn’t wind up in public, or even on social media these days, but that often determines where people’s hearts—morals, mindset, and spiritual bent—really are.

The disappointment is palpable and is gut wrenching. But it is not surprising.

I am surprised only in that I am still searching for a moral man…

And that I might be foolish—and naïve—for doing so.

HIT Piece 06.28.2016

In our desire to run forward to the new, we have forgotten as a global culture, that history still matters to many individual people.

You can’t vote against history, and you can’t go back to the past, but nostalgia is a terrible driver. History matters, particularly when the rate of change is constantly being cranked up.

Then, there’s the issue of listening to the past. Somehow, human beings have convinced themselves that because our tools have changed (i.e. we use email instead of carrier pigeons to send messages) that our historical, moral, and ethical footing has shifted significantly.

This is the seduction of the new, and combined with an ignorance of (or disinterest in) history, global culture sets itself up for further conflict. And adding shinier newer tools (e.g. AI, deep learning, algorithms, VR/AR, et.al) won’t decrease conflict, it will merely increase it.

Because the most important history is that involving the human heart, human drivers, human intuitions, and human fears. All those things, wrapped deeply in our history.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

HIT Piece 6.14.2016

What do you need from your blogging and your content creation?

Do you need reassurances and pats on the back?

Do you need more fans, audience members, and readers?

Do you need more clients, attention, and awareness that leads to revenues of referral, trust, and revenues?

I made the decision that I need to tell the truth: about conflict, about resolution, about reassurance, about the future, about technology, about fear, about progress, and about the future of a field I believe in.

I made the decision that the blog is an outlet for the drip-by-drip, daily opportunity, to convince, persuade, and cajole my daily readers into thinking that way that I think and believing the way that I believe.

In essence, I decided that my blogging (though not necessarily my YouTube channel or my podcast) was going to be a long-term, dedicated, committed and consistent trust building, argument building tool. Not a tool to force my “I’m right” on people who don’t want to hear my “I’m right,” but instead, it’s a tool to have arguments, work out ideas, and test myself against the market.

I recently told a participant at a conference who was interested in signing up for my blog, that “Stick with reading it. It’ll take you about six to eight months to figure out what I’m doing.”

Do you have six to eight months to build a following, convince an audience, persuade a reader, and do so without feedback, support, or much interest?

I do.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

HIT Piece 06.07.2016

Tips, tricks, and hacks are everywhere across the Internet. As a matter of fact, I was informed of this by another professional recently.

Listicles are popular because they don’t take much time to digest, they appear to satisfy an immediate need, and they are about a short-term “pop” versus a long-term commitment to changing something that might not work.

It seems though, that the trend toward distilling, “dumbing down,” and demystifying is actually really starting to ramp up in the advice, opinion, “best practices,” coaching spaces of the Internet. As lifestyle entrepreneurs have to get more real as the glut in advice means chasing fewer dollars and more pennies they are going to have to decide to either push more listicles (a safe bet) or to advance into telling the truth (a risky bet).

Making a decision to create products that are built on taking apart assumptions, philosophies, “sacred cows,” and conventional wisdom, is a difficult decision because there’s a risk that the person doing it won’t be liked, hired, or referred to. Making such a decision requires a genuine, calculation examination of personal risk tolerance and stating out loud, and unequivocally, what you can afford to lose.  Making such a decision means abandoning the mass audience, the mass attention, and the mass awareness, and choosing, instead, to talk only to the true fans, who need to hear what must be said.

There is a choice to be made to no longer engage in listicles, hacks, one-sheets, “silver bullets” and situational advice, and to instead go deep into the heart of what matters with people; to go on a collaborative, uncomfortable, and scary journey, not focused on the past, but aimed at the future.

The decision to do this, and the courage to act on such a decision is a linchpin act. It is an act that makes a person invaluable, because Truth is scarce, but the courage to say the Truth is even scarcer, and the courage to say the Truth, and to stand by it through whatever consequences, is rarer still.

I am on the journey to making some decisions, as I hew closer and closer to the Truth. Are you interested in going on this journey?

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Opinion] The Dark Heart of Man

Let’s talk about the kind of communication we want to have.

[Opinion] The Dark Heart of Man

In person communications have always been fraught with difficulty, misunderstandings, miscommunications, negative escalations, and conflicts. When people talk with each other face-to-face there is always the opportunity for confusion and conflict, particularly if the conversation in question is questioning deeply held stories around values, worldviews, and frames.

It takes a lot of emotional quickening to escalate from a conversation to a confrontation to a conflict to a fistfight to a war. There are many discrete steps in face-to-face communication that social norming has established, developed, and refined for thousands of years to limit such escalation. But, as is always the case, human beings’ tools for communication get better, friction and misunderstanding increases, even as the speed of communication increases, and conflicts flare up.

From carrier pigeons to riders on horseback to the telephone to mail by airplane to emails and now Twitter, there have always been people who would rather have a fight than share an idea. And as the speed of our tools has increased how fast we get a message and then react to it, (going from days or weeks to micro-seconds) there hasn’t been a commensurate increase in the heart of rational contemplation.

Thus we get to social media communication. Trolls, bad actors, spammers, and others use the immediacy of social communication tools to psychologically manipulate people on the other end of the message into reacting rather than thinking. And there’s really only two reactions such individuals are seeking: fight or flight.

They aren’t looking for a measured argument.

They aren’t looking for reasonable discourse.

They aren’t looking for knowledge or growth.

They are looking for either a respondent’s heels or their fangs.

In the case of the Internet, and the communication tools we have built on top of it, we have exchanged immediacy for escalation, and have confused passion for legitimacy of an assertion. This is particularly problematic for people delivering messages that are outside the “mainstream,” or that rely on dispassionate examination of facts, rather than passionate reaction to opinions.

Ease of access to digital tools also allows communication to be focused on the tawdry and the spectacle—which is short term—instead of the deliberative and the reasonable—which is long-term. The creators of these digital tools—the owners of the platforms—may be publicly or privately traded companies, but make no mistake: the platforms are private property and the Internet, while vast, is not a place where 1.6 billion participants need to (or deserve to) cast a vote on the operations of a series of companies that built the platforms in the first place.

What kind of communication do we want to have?

The answer to that question, at least as is evidenced by the numbers of people using these communications tools, seems to be that we want friction free, painless, non-relational based communication when we want it, how we want it, that allows us to do what we want, when we want, how we want. But this is an inherently selfish and vain position, based in our perception of want, rather than a relational need.

Online communication will always be fraught with difficulty and no amount of changing a name policy, policing speech we don’t like, or building walls and doors into platforms, is going to prevent than difficulty. This is because the tools we use to communicate are the problem because of the assumptions and expectations built into them.

We’ve got to figure this out though, because at a global scale, there won’t be a positive outcome from communications wars between people. We are already seeing the beginnings of skirmishes around the edges of platforms such as Reddit and Twitter. We are also seeing responses to such skirmishes from companies such as SnapChat and WhatsApp, which promise to build platforms with more friendly assumptions around safety, conviviality, and trust built into them, rather than welded on from the outside as an afterthought.

More special interest groups meeting with Facebook isn’t going to solve this communications problem.

More governmental lobbying at scale by Google isn’t going to solve this problem either.

More closing off, disengaging online, or demanding more censorious penalties for people we don’t like, saying things that make us feel threatened, abused, or bullied (the aforementioned trolls, bad actors, and spammers) isn’t going to solve this problem either.

The solution to all of this, as with most things, lies in changing the motivations toward selfishness, vanity, and revenge that lie deep in the heart of man.

And, to borrow from Einstein when he was talking about the outcomes of the development of nuclear weapons, I’m going to bet that the founders of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and many, many other chatrooms, message boards, and email systems since the web was democratized, secretly wish, deep in their hearts, that they could go back in time, and instead become watchmakers.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

HIT Piece 5.31.2016

Seth Godin made a good point: “In any failing system, the people at the top get hurt last.

From schools to students, higher education is playing out this maxim before our eyes in the US right now.

The schools at the top in the US—Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, and even second-tier, state schools like the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota (where I used to work)—are doing fine in terms of enrollment, prestige, status, and the other markers of being “at the top” in a system of higher education that’s failing.

Students who can attend those schools, and manage the debt that comes from attaining credentials that aren’t any better than the ones obtained at a third tier school with minimal cost, are also doing fine. They, their families, and their personal finances are “at the top” of attending at, participating in, and paying to a system that’s failing.

Certain racial and ethnic groups who have historically been able to attend colleges in large numbers and who have done so at a swift, continuous generational pace, are also doing fine. They and the generational wealth transfer of knowledge, confidence, and self-esteem that comes from knowing that generations before you attended higher education and did well (i.e. it was the path to financial security and relative prosperity) means that if you choose to participate in the higher education system now, then you are already “at the top” in a status driven system that’s failing.

The people at the top get hurt last.

But if you’re a school, a student, or a member of a racial or ethnic group that was either in the middle, or at the bottom, historically, economically, socially, or by any practical measure that matters, then you are being hurt first by the failing of the higher education system as it was previously arranged.

And the worst part is that, you are almost guaranteed to continue to be hurt as the system (which is failing not because of anything anybody did directly, but because of a series of decisions made steadily and non-maliciously over time) continues to spectacularly collapse into something else where the outcomes aren’t guarenteed, and the vision is cloudy.

This is why, when discussions of higher education, debt, and the inability of credentialing to match employer need, come around to minority groups, women, the poor and working classes, immigrants, and others in this country are in relation to the system that created this problem, pache Mike Rowe, but we need more Hispanic physicists than we do Hispanic carpenters. And we need fewer wealthy scions who birth Ivy league lawyers, and more state school, 1st generation, entrepreneurial wealth builders backed by the 1st college degree  in their household.

The people at the top get hurt last.

My mother went to college. So did my sisters. I went to college, though my father did not. My grandmother on my mothers’ side of the family went to college. My children are going to college.

Yes, the higher education system is failing.

But I am far from being at the top where I am protected in spite of the system failing.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Opinion] What We Subsidize…

What a society taxes it gets less of, and what a society subsidizes it gets more of.

For various social, economic, psychological, emotional, and other reasons, societies around the world, throughout history, have taxed peace, while subsidizing war.

This is not a statement of judgment, just one of objective observation.

We honor dead soldiers, and only occasionally talk about dead peacemakers.

We have thousands of anonymous soldiers who go out and make war, as we have thousands of anonymous peacemakers, who go out and make peace every day. But only one group has a flame burning eternally for them at Arlington Cemetery in the US.

We honor the dead soldier, because we (and by ‘we’ I mean humanity as whole) value valor, honor, respect, dignity, and the ideals of revenge and justice, far more than we revere those same values at the peacemaking table.  This dichotomy is the most obvious at scale, where there are holidays honoring the sacrifice of life of the soldier, but no parades in your town for the generations of deceased divorce mediators.

These are not a statements of judgment, just ones of factual observation.

When we do choose to honor the diplomat, or the statesman, who brought us peace, we tend to honor the ones most vociferously who also guided us through war. Churchill is lauded far more than Chamberlain.

Unfortunately, as was pointed out years ago by the band Pink Floyd, the statesmen turned diplomats are the very same ones who sat in the rear of the line (or sat in an office back at home) and commanded “Go forward!” even as the soldiers in front, out on the line, died by the thousands.

Young men have always died valiantly fighting old men’s wars.

The fact is, we will always have more people willing to make war, than we will have people willing to make peace. This is a sad fact of the fallen state of humanity.

This is not a statement of judgment, just one of spiritual observation.

On this Memorial Day, let us take a moment to remember those who made the peace, as well as honor those who fell in the war, because, if humanity is to move forward in any kind of meaningful way, we need to subsidize the peace, and place a higher tax on the war.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Opinion] On Winning at Nuclear Poker

Nuclear weapons are a touchy subject in geopolitical negotiations.

Almost everyone involved in the negotiations around nuclear weapons knows what the outcomes of launching them against another country could be, which is why, following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, regionalism in arms races became a geopolitical concern.

But in reality, the issue with nuclear weapons is not really the weapons themselves. In reality, the issues around negotiating with developers of nuclear weapons is the attitudes, motivations, and psychological desires of the people who run the governments that are either developing nuclear weapons (North Korea, Iran, etc.) or who already have them (Russia, the US, China, etc.)

This is similar to negotiations that go on around issues that are less geopolitical and more commonplace. When you are negotiating with your wife about where to go to dinner, her mindset, attitude, body language, motivations, and your previous history with her, matter more to the outcome of that negotiation, than where you eat.

In our individual and corporate lives there are many nuclear weapons that we hide inside of our interactions. Some of them take years to build and only a minute to deploy and to wreck destruction.

We often don’t talk about our tendency to build up resentment, unforgiveness, anger, bitterness, and hatreds, until they are primed and ready to launch. Exploding on another party. Usually, not the party that we want to have them explode upon.

That person (a parent, a child, a former spouse, a family member, a neighbor, a politician) is usually either too far away emotionally, or too distant physically, for us to actually launch our carefully curated and developed personal stockpile of nukes upon them.

Mob behavior, direct democracy, these are both example of personal nuclear behavior writ large, at scale, and just as destructive as at the personal level.  Nuclear poker is played at this level as well: by politicians, pundits, professional prognosticators and others. But here’s the thing, from the geopolitical level all the way to your individual level of your individual world:

  1. Nobody knows how anybody else is going to respond to a nuclear strike—either personal or global.
  2. The appearance of being crazy, or dysfunctional, enough to destroy everything can sometimes act as a deterrent to people actually going ahead and pushing the button to destroy everything—either personally or globally.

The personal (and global) question in any negotiation where the threat of nuclear destruction is on the table, is: How crazy do you want to be to ‘win’ at nuclear poker?

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] Building an Arbitrage Machine for Entrepreneurship

In financial markets, in gambling, and even in entrepreneurship, there are two skills that are critical for success: making small bets consistently through developing a model (buying) and breaking an old model (selling), and building an anti-fragile machine that can withstand the shock of either of those small bets failing.

Arbitrage is the process of hedging bets (through the purchase and the sale of an asset) so that, no matter how much is spent, the buyer/seller can always either come out ahead, slightly behind (not enough to be far back, but enough to catch up), or slightly ahead (building a continuous lead). Hedge fund managers and stock traders with fancy algorithms understand arbitrage. So do insurance agents, financial advisors, professional gamblers, and even entrepreneurs.

Many people though, make bad large bets (thus financial collapses and the development of ‘flash’ trading via fancy computer programs) and take massive losses with little to no gains. This is due primarily to ego driven betting that has nothing to do with market conditions, and everything to do with personal psychological and emotional tics. The most successful people bet small, bet consistently—or they don’t bet at all.

Day by day, step by step, entrepreneurs should be building a machine in their unique niche that will arbitrage against their unique market. One that will allow them to see opportunities, take advantage of them, and not lose their livelihoods, their families, or their peace of mind. This does not have to be a stressful process, but it does have to be done.

When the entrepreneur makes those small bets they don’t become business people (business is about maintaining a consistent place in one spot with gradual upticks in growth, rather than about advancing a model) instead, they become evangelists for a new way of doing things. In whatever field they’re in, they begin to make bets that will fundamentally breakdown the model they saw as problematic (which lead them to entrepreneurship in the first place) and will replace it with a new model.

Customers, clients, and others don’t have to know what model the entrepreneur is building. As a matter of fact, they don’t really care. But the entrepreneur should care. Otherwise, freelance work is always an option.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/