News Fix #55: From humans in the loop to humans are the loop
I'm back with your weekly news fix, and I'm happy we're in this together. If you're new here, welcome! Get in touch anytime; I'd love to hear from you.
We are settling into stretches of long and very hot summer days, and around my house I’ve noticed the energy shift markedly downward. I still have two teenagers living at home, and their summer blues last week made me remember how much weight the changing of seasons had for me during those years. The beginning of summer and fall in particular seem to carry the potential for cinematic levels of glow-up or transformation. It's hard not to experience the normal rhythms of change as the calendar moves forward as a letdown.
It made me remember what it feels like to run the backstretch of a track, the straight section after the first curve. I still run on a track often, but haven't raced on one in three decades. I still hate the backstretch. My body remembers it as the part of every race where the adrenaline of the starting line wears off and the boost from the stands and the people gathered around the start and finish line haven't showed up yet. You hear only your own footfalls and breath, and it feels longer than it really is. “Float the backstretch” my coach used to tell us, or yell at us from 100 yards away. It was a reminder that we could choose to ease ourselves through a harder stretch by just accepting the difficulty. Don't race it, don't give up, float it.
Float the backstretch is really about how to tolerate the discomfort of the in-between, or the discomfort of ourselves without distractions, or the limits of our own abilities or realities. It's about accepting that progress and meaning require friction and finding grace in the presence of effort rather than the absence of work.
Friction is productive
I've come to believe the difference between the information systems we need versus what we have now is that we need to be able to tolerate more discomfort. Not more bad news, not tighter budgets, but the discomfort that comes with involving more people in more parts of the news process.
Last week I wrote about why the move towards a civic media field is necessary. Distilling that reasoning felt necessary but overly tactical. The move to civic media is also morally and politically necessary.
Civic media has potential as a transformative strategy, rather than as a tactic or product. It could replace an information system that too often instrumentalizes people in the service of the news or tech industries with a system that calls news and information providers into the service of people and communities.
Civic media is not about bringing people into the news process in marginal ways. It is not about humans in the loop. A dystopian phrase if ever I heard one. It’s about creating a better, stronger, and bigger human loop.
It is hard to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the more complicated and walled-off a system is, the more value and potential it has. A better way forward, perhaps, is to appreciate and build systems that are both capable and open.
Perfect systems are worse systems
A remarkable piece written as a cri de coeur for the free software movement is also an appreciation of the value that friction and discomfort create in human centered systems.
Audrey Tang, the former Taiwanese Minister of Digital Affairs, posits that resilient and meaningful systems require people to spend time in their maintenance and repair. To put it another way, you know a system is working because it takes care and attention, not because it can run on autopilot.
“The morally serious question is not whether a system is powerful,” she writes. “It is whether the people who inherit it can still repair it.”
Tang also believes repair sometimes means a system should do less. “The discipline of refusal is part of the discipline of repair,” she writes. It's important to not that Tang applied these principles not to avoid technology but to better co-create technological capacity and power for people in Taiwan, including regulations that penalize tech platforms that push misinformation and scams.
Human-centered systems aren't simple or easy. But they are valuable. The difficulty they bring builds our tolerance for this discomfort, and for democracy.
Lam Vo has another example of a decidedly low-tech civic media framework and kit that build democratic muscle, including slides for four(!) different information literacy and navigation workshops. Check them out.
Take care until next week. My heart is heavy with the continued amount of state violence the United States government and its agents continue to unleash on innocent people here and around the world. If your heart is heavy too, for whatever reason, I'm sending a little extra care your way this week.
I'd love to bring more people into these conversations. Please do me a favor and forward this to somebody you'd like to include.