Two Halls, One Day

Norway saved me. I do not know how to say it more plainly than that. I grew up inside the American “I” — mine wrapped in church clothes, the head of the household as the measure of all things, work ethic as worthiness, merit as a private possession. I did not question it. Formation does not announce itself. It just tells who you are. Then I married a Norwegian, lived a decade inside a different set of assumptions, and came home with foreign eyes. I touched the wall almost no one gets to touch. Continue reading Two Halls, One Day

The Holiday We Gave Away

The workers of 1886 didn’t get the eight-hour day by wishing. They got it by demanding it together, out loud. A century and a half later, the demand is due for renewal — before the next great wave of productivity gets distributed the way the last one did. Continue reading The Holiday We Gave Away

Building From Inside the Trenches

What will need healing? This is the harder question, because a trench doesn’t just change what you build. It changes who you become while building it. The public servant who learned that loyalty is a liability. The engineer who learned that openness gets you copied and closedness gets you paid. The neighbor who learned that the other side cannot be talked to. These are wounds, and wounds take time to heal. Continue reading Building From Inside the Trenches

I Cry at Ted Lasso

Which means that every time you get choked up at something ridiculous, you are getting evidence. Not that you are soft. That the circuits are patent. That the thing which protects you is online and reachable, and that you know at least one reliable route to it.

If you cry at Ted Lasso, your equipment works. Continue reading I Cry at Ted Lasso

Rescuing the Baby, Part Two: Standard Equipment

Part One named the reason: forty years of institutional silence, because nobody knew where the line fell between naming a human reality and imposing a belief. Silence became the professional norm, and then the norm became the vocabulary.

But here is the finding that ought to end the argument about whether this belongs at work. Continue reading Rescuing the Baby, Part Two: Standard Equipment

Rescuing the Baby, Part One: The Certainty I Could Not Find

Religion aside or secondary, it needs a voice in our society, and I have tried hard to advocate for a new language to invite it into our collectives, into our businesses, and into our politics. Continue reading Rescuing the Baby, Part One: The Certainty I Could Not Find

Leaders: Start Seeing AI Clearly or Step Aside Before You Hurt Your People

Leadership is the work of making spaces safe for others — safe enough to tell the truth, safe enough to imagine, safe enough to retool without wondering whether the retooling is a countdown. It is a calling, the way medicine is a calling, and like any calling it demands capacities that not everyone possesses. There is no shame in that. There is only shame in occupying the role without the capacity, while other people pay the price.

Continue reading Leaders: Start Seeing AI Clearly or Step Aside Before You Hurt Your People

The Age of Acting

This is the strange paradox of our time. The barriers have fallen. The tools are everywhere. The knowledge that used to be locked behind professional degrees and expensive consultants now sits in plain view, almost free for the asking. And still, the vast majority of people with ideas continue to sit on them. Still, the proofs of concept I hand over gather dust. Still, the distance between possibility and action remains as vast as it ever was. Continue reading The Age of Acting

I Could Have Been Your Adam, Part Two: The Conversations We Are Not Having

That means we need to stop debating our desired reality and start governing the one we actually have. We need new vocabulary in our statehouses and in Washington, just as we do in our boardrooms. Here is where I think that conversation needs to go, and I want to be specific enough that you could take any one of these to a town hall and ask a candidate where they stand on it.

Continue reading I Could Have Been Your Adam, Part Two: The Conversations We Are Not Having

I Could Have Been Your Adam, Part One: The Third Chair

I watch the architects of these AI systems perform a kind of practiced helplessness about exactly this question. As if the thing they built now exceeds their influence. As if alignment and safety are technical problems rather than parental ones. They are not bad people, most of them. But they are Victor on the ice, watching what they made recede into the dark, telling themselves it is someone else’s responsibility now.

Continue reading I Could Have Been Your Adam, Part One: The Third Chair