(2023-05-05) Kissane Patterns Prophets And Priests

Erin Kissane: Patterns, prophets & priests. I’ve been working on communication and community online for a couple of decades, but the past few years have shaken up my understanding of what we’re really doing here.

Here at the start, though, I’m circling around a set of books that I’m thinking of as framework-level—not all theory, but abstracted out a couple steps from the down-in-it reading about experiments in community and sociability.

One of the clusters of framework texts I’m working with is the series of books by Christopher Alexander and his rotating crew of collaborators

Right now I’m wrapping up a proper reread of Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building and finding a bunch of connections to another framework text I’m working through, adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy.

there’s some stuff I need to get out of my brain first, so this is that.

I like reading Alexander and brown together in part because they’re so divergent in tone and form. I wrote around this contrast for days, but I think Henry Farrell’s essay this morning on tech-company founders as prophets in the Weberian sense of prophet vs. priest handed me exactly the distinction I’d been flailing around for

Reading Emergent Strategy is a dramatically different experience from working through the Alexander books: brown’s book is brief and delivered on the wing and frequently incantatory, intermingling leadership notes, theory, and poetry

the book has been tricky for me to work with because it operates at a level of abstraction that sometimes reminds me of a very particular kind of learned, citation-heavy, often religious, ultimately charismatic leadership style

ANYWAY, now that I’ve done more of the reading around brown’s work—and been dragged backward through the events of the past few years—my sense of Emergent Strategy now is less that it’s a reference work I can’t quite click with and more that it’s a floating world of perceptive field notes and marginalia

Alexander grappled—as a teacher, in his books, in his buildings—with an elusive but unifying theory of how to make buildings and other built spaces good, whole, and alive in ways that nourish the people inside them, sustain themselves, and improve the environments around them

Alexander, to his credit, never tried to dodge the weight of his beliefs.

adrienne maree brown is also investigating big mysteries, but from a different angle; she takes it as table stakes that her readers are dedicated to social justice and communal survival.

But she’s also done that kind of justice work long enough to recognize that it’s difficult and often heartbreakingly ineffective—and frequently needlessly destructive to the people inside it.

Reading Alexander and brown together, it seems to me that right in the center of the Venn diagram of “bungled deadened spaces that make us and the world worse,” and, “perverse behavioral patterns and incentives that warp even well-intentioned interactions” is… the internet.

We did some great things, too, almost all of them related directly to to the starry scatter of individual and small-group (and briefly, movement-sized) human connections that are heartening, strengthening, and good for the whole system. Also Wikipedia and whatever your equivalent of appliance-repair YouTube is, without which I personally would be back to breaking things with screwdrivers and swearing

But now? I’m not sure we’re as stuck as we were even a year ago, though not because of any of the certainties the fully financialized humans trying to make Web 3 happen are selling.

I think things feel wiggly and interesting right now because we really just do not know how things are going to shake out

But experience suggests that the window of opportunity will slam closed on our fingers as soon as the Duplo blocks of technocapital sort themselves into a sturdier new configuration, so we gotta try to get everyone out while we can.