Trials of Job

The Occupational Hazards of Eden

Project Management in the software development lifecycle has been my vocation for over a quarter of a century. I won't provide a job description, which may instead be discovered in any number of places. Briefly, it is the process by which applications are created, bundled, tested, and released to the world. In theory, an application is a mechanism or utility—technology designed to grant an end-user some incremental ease, measured in that scarcest of currencies: time and effort saved. My own role has been to govern project teams and orchestrate their tasks as the work is performed to elaborate software applications and manifest an end state. All the while transparently reporting progress to various stakeholders—the sponsors or champions who own the product and fund the initiative.

At the time of writing I am 56 and have lived most of my life in a region of exceptional prosperity; a modern Eden which must seem like paradise to many. Canada is endowed with both vast wilderness and culturally sophisticated cities—both are types of resources with profound potential such that the country draws a ready flow of migrants, now largely from the Indian subcontinent. One could make an argument that this constitutes a brain-drain of ready-made generally trustworthy and sufficiently educated talent for its laborious menial requirements from a country which might make better use of their talents; it is also where my own heritage and patrimony arose: those of my grandfathers, both of whom were born in India's northwestern state of Gujarat. But India, like Canada, is a democracy, and it won't stop people from leaving to look for opportunities elsewhere—something my grandfathers did as young men during the Great Depression, when they left Colonial India for what was then British East Africa and the original Eden. One settled at the shores of Lake Victoria—the source of the Nile—and the other on the Rift Valley, the very cradle of human civilization. The trail between them surely the original one that ultimately saw our ancestors make their way out of Africa and into the wide world.

Looking at the current extractive orientation of our political economy, then, and the nature of its avarice—encompassing both human and natural resources—change is due. We must husband all our resources with a global and internationalist lens and with a long-term, sustainable vision of the future wherever we live—one which creates new markets everywhere instead of extracting existing ones at the expense of someone somewhere else and far poorer than you or I.

My work, while not physically taxing, has strained far more than just my administrative faculties. It has exacted an intellectual, emotional, and dare I say, even spiritual toll. My career has at times been profoundly grueling. What I have learned about the world—and, in particular, how humanity expresses itself within it, specifically how it values and prices things—has taken me to the edge of despair, one from which I am only beginning to walk back. I am not alone in this, of course. It is, in my view, an entirely normal and even healthy thing to question one's existence and right to persist when it is so destructive to our shared global commons.

For me, this was the personal instantiation of the biblical myth told in the Trials of Job—a visitation of torment upon a seemingly upstanding man as he went about his way, making his path toward a distant horizon, minding his own business while caring about how the world unfolded before him, yet failing to fully grasp his fundamental ignorance about how things really were. In time it became a grueling contest between his two internal forces: an Alpha which sought to build utility through well-governed harvesting of the commons, and an Omega which demanded charting a course toward a sustainable, holistic destiny for human progress. My struggles are yet to be fully reconciled and brought to a conclusion. I expect to bear the scars as long as I live—ones which will never fully heal.

However what I have come to realize on this journey back from the edge is that the trauma I carried was not a standard professional burnout, but a deep and specific psychological wounding. In psychology, they call it moral injury. It occurs when we find ourselves participating in, witnessing, or carrying out actions that profoundly violate our core moral beliefs, driven by institutions we were taught to trust.

For over a quarter of a century, I brought my best traits to legacy infrastructures, executing the work under the deep assumption of its ultimate societal utility. To look back now with unclouded eyes and realize that the macro-machinery was no longer saving time, but complicit in the strip-mining of human attention to process our personas into behavioral data, feels like a profound and dizzying betrayal. It reveals that what I once saw as legitimate and credible—the sovereign power of authority—was, in truth, a plain fraud wrapped in self-satisfied homilies of liberal progress.

Digital applications differ fundamentally from the labor-saving devices of the past: they do not save our time; they consume it. Just as we strip-mine the physical landscape, these platforms trade some perceived convenience for pieces of our persona—who we are, what we do, and when, where, why, and with whom we do it. This is valuable data, harvested not just to market the world and its products, but as well to allow the very parties and regimes which together govern them to proctor and monitor anyone or anything they deem a threat. Like the palantíri of Tolkien's Middle-Earth, these powerful windows are used to monitor the broader zeitgeist and track those who have the capacity to influence it—both those who enjoy money and celebrity as well as the obscure and relatively modest.

What do I mean by we? What right do I have to corral and wrangle us? On the one hand, humanity is the same as it ever was—a tribal affair whose distinctions were once in a prehistoric time easy to make and based almost entirely on our physical proximity to one another. On the other hand, we—and particularly the contemplative among us—are forever looking to precisely define our own identity, so that we may draw a clear delineation between ourselves and the other. We ask: What is ours and what is theirs? What may we create and utilize, and how may we together administer, share, and conserve these things of considerable value?

The accumulation of intimate knowledge allows us from a young age to quickly infer who and what is important and material to our well-being: our family, then partner(s), and finally any number of nested and overlapping instances of what constitutes community in this modern world. I call these semantic perimeters of identity embodied (semper idem)—boundaries in which we are commonly coded to align so that we may operate in a collective fashion, interfacing with more or less ease with the other: those who exist beyond our variously constituted boundaries. These boundaries are paradoxically and simultaneously both constant and ever-changing.

Now, in a larger global context, one in which the vast majority of humanity is mired in poverty, it is a luxury to contemplate such questions. However, I believe that those of us endowed with the opportunity have an obligation to do so on behalf of us all. Call it a modern interpretation of noblesse oblige—one that is self-evident and assumed without necessarily affording any additional privileges beyond the right to spend time as I wish rather than how someone else would have me spend it. Some might call it self-indulgent—but what else beyond all I already have could I possibly want, beyond the opportunity to be creative and through that creativity express ideas that might actually resonate broadly?

On Your Mark, Beset

The need to apply mechanisms for ordering and nesting various notions of identity, grounding them in a sense of one's own personal identity fully taken into custody and owned, is the central imperative for technology as we seek to express oneness in all its manifestations and reconcile the individual with the collective.

It is a pressing need because the social network has collapsed, or rather flattened, the degrees of distance separating us, such that any one of the eight billion people on earth may reach us for whatever reason, whether it is in our interest for them to do so or not. This exposure has long been an ordinary fact of life for the most vulnerable in our society: the young, the elderly, the female, and the culturally marginalized or divergent—as well as the sensitive and alienated. However, it is now a pressing concern for even the most powerful—even the Hegemon itself—as it looks out at adversaries who have levelled the playing field of warfare on a cybernetic front with increasingly powerful combinations of logic, data, and computing power.

Each of us—including the most comfortably powerful and public personalities of regime governance—leaves a distinct impression, mark, or tell on the digital landscape: something personally constructed with every interaction and transaction. These in turn assemble themselves to become the habits with which one's persona is constructed over the course of life. A persona which is increasingly self-evident and laid bare to all and sundry everywhere. This is a good thing because it allows us to clearly and honestly infer trust—an ability which was found wanting during the Great Financial Crisis, when systemically important institutions failed notwithstanding the assurances of rating agencies and auditors. In the aftermath of that crisis we shouldered the burden and weight of debt equally through the dilution of the world's reserve currency. Then we repeated the same flawed process during the COVID lockdown.

Who we are and what we possess in accumulated capital is becoming ever more apparent and vulnerable to others who then seek to extract whatever they can of it. This will begin to exact a price on even the most privileged—those who until now have been securely ensconced in the institutions and apparatus of state, including the corporations to whom they have routinely deferred the provision of basic standards of health, safety, and security to citizens.

Those who until now have been exploited have been the relatively vulnerable; we see this in the anxiety and depression of the mental health crisis that unfolded in the wake of social media. This is rapidly metastasizing into a geopolitical security concern, as mistrust and suspicion between various communities—now globally distributed as diaspora—develop defensive mindsets.

The traditional centers of power have expressed this defensiveness proactively and aggressively as animus: hard, coercive, fungible power expressed as warfare or lawfare in affairs respectively foreign and domestic.

As a counterfoil, the peaceable may express defense through anima and the distillation and discovery of what each finds to be minimal and essential, so that we may sustain and nurture it while limiting further extraction from the global commons. Anima is bare liveness unclothed and representing itself without the costumes and paraphernalia used to express prestige, pride, power and place in society: the manifestations of ego.

We may too, as Joseph Campbell suggested, follow our bliss and apply ourselves through non-fungible soft power—an expression of our particular talent, skill, and experience, imbued with a broadly resonant charisma—in work which we find rewarding even if a material return is lacking. This is our Call to Adventure—turbulent and uncomfortable, but one we must in any case embrace. What choice do we have?

Veracity In Utility

What we require is a precise, detailed, and yet contextual representation of ourselves, based on what is demanded of us at any given moment as we perform life's various tasks. This resides metaphorically at the front-end—at the top of the stack known in software development as the presentation layer.

Meanwhile, at the bottom of that stack, at the back-end, sits the database: a store of the various transactions executed by our personality and its creative elements. This is the comprehensive set of truths constituting a true identity endowed with embodiment and consciousness—the very things that enable agency in life: the memory, matter, and energy used to execute kinetic and cerebral activity.

This is our private self, something we can never fully grasp, and even then, only to the degree to which we are comfortable in our own skin. To be self-possessed and self-aware, self-sufficient and self-contained, is to be ultimately self-sovereign. In practical terms, we use this inner sovereignty to safely negotiate our presence with the network, projecting only what is necessary through the utility of the devices we are required to use. Whether via smartphone or desktop, we cross these thresholds to gain access to spaces where we are permitted to be creative, or where we allow ourselves to experience the broad richness of the human condition.

In practical terms, we roll this out with a view to securing our foundational legacy institutions. In Canada, these are governmental, quasi-governmental, and non-governmental organizations, as well as the relatively small number of private corporations which many in Canada see as utilities akin to Crown Corporations. These are the precise entities I navigated throughout my career, for example its large banks and telecommunications companies.

As stakeholders in these institutions—whether as customers, vendors, partners, or employees—with each keystroke, word, gesture, and stride taken as we direct our attention and lens to focus on what interests us, we generate content and leave a distinct digital signature. Some of us use this signature, and the encrypted keys representing it, to manifest a genuine presence: one tethered to content created and housed within a local digital environment, satisfying the baseline need to feel secure while doing our work, whether we are satisfied with its nature or otherwise.

Meanwhile, all companies have a need to securely hold corporate treasuries containing the various assets used to fund their operational and capital expenditures, requiring well-defined yet streamlined processes to govern them. These funds are invariably stored at systemically critical financial institutions (FIs). These institutions must then fulfill their own requirements to provide comprehensive reporting to the Bank of Canada, various ministries, and regulatory bodies, so that public policy—both fiscal and monetary—may be effected with greater efficacy. In doing so, interest rates in particular may truly become data-driven to avoid policy error, allowing us to understand the distribution of capital and the flow of investment both within Canada's regions and via various global facilities, as we retrofit and secure them with public blockchain technologies whose architectures allow use-case dependent trade-offs and yet whose intellectual property is now our collectively owned heritage; one which is available to all without exception.

Key: The Derivation Of Order

This site expresses concepts which together may be seen as a philosophical model or an ontological framework for approaching governance through an anarchic lens. A constitution, if you will, which defines how identity, community, and the global commons may all be brought into alignment.

For me, the basic metaphors for anarchism remain anchored in two specific memories of London, where I spent my early childhood—ones which express order and alignment without the presence of permanent authority: the easy give and take of traffic entering and exiting roundabouts, and the orderly assembling of queues at a bus stop. No warden or governor was required to mandate learned habits which generatively create ad hoc frameworks that arise and dissipate as necessary. We come together to interface or interact in context, and then disperse. Another obvious anarchic reference is how we somehow in the throng of traffic all generally travel in two opposing lanes: not just on our highways, but as we make our pedestrian way through stations and malls and along sidewalks. These behaviors are characteristic of prosperous societies in which ordinary folk develop and apply habits as they come together to use shared utilities.

Anarchism does not imply that we are unaccountable, or that given an opportunity to do so, we will be irresponsible, deliberately obstreperous, or passive-aggressive in our behavior with one another. The vast majority of our expenditure on governance is geared toward keeping a relatively small percentage of people aligned to the common good, often through costly, coercive, and sub-optimal utilities. What if this capital might be freed up and geared toward other urgent, pressing priorities?

To give you one example: if access to money or other forms of capital—such as a motor vehicle or a safe, collaborative workspace—are digitally enabled, it becomes vastly easier to consent to or deny access based on how we dynamically assess trust in a civil society.

Those of us operating at the nexus of information technology and political economy have an obligation to express alternative, more efficient frameworks when we see the opportunity to do so. We are not attempting to delegitimize or invalidate our institutions, but rather are setting them up to persist far into the future.

Collectively, we define both explicitly and implicitly certain basic standards, guardrails, and principles to govern our spaces, both real and virtual. We then delegate, rather than defer or cede, to an authority their execution based on clearly defined social contracts—contracts that are adaptive and which learn from the gossip protocols which emanate on the social network as we participate upon it. It then serves to keep us together, ever more securely, prosperously and contentedly.

Our eastern spiritual traditions offer as much of an insight as the patience of Job enduring his trials as we make a critical transition: Acknowledging that civil engineering today amounts to the digital framing of two ideas as layers which are at once both esoteric and practical: meaning and belonging.

Returning to notions of animus and anima; one represents exuberant competition and the other bare liveness. We may represent these in civil society as two aspects of ourselves—one public and the other private, together holding life itself together as an ongoing intercourse between self and community. Our public and private keys are in reality a single, two-sided aspect—much like a coin—of who we each are holistically. Yet, laid flat upon a base, only one side would face upward. Nevertheless, like 気 (the ki or key representing vital energy, but one which carries profound structural homonyms in 機 for mechanism, and 規 for standard), this holistic aspect must be allowed to roil or flow like the water moving from one layer to the next, moving inexorably downward until it reaches the objective base: Sea level. So that its notional equivalent, the Coinbase—a unified but immutable notion of money—may finally be deemed legitimate, credible, and sovereign. That true Coinbase—in stark contrast to the eponymous corporation which may well be weaponizing IP (both internet protocol and intellectual property) via its capacity to lobby and fund incumbency and through its institutionalization as an organ of the state for the sake of its own profit—is, in actuality, our planet and its finite yet boundless wealth perpetually in motion around the Sun.

The real risk is that we surrender our sovereign institutions anywhere and ordinary people everywhere to the whim of powerful actors whether they operate outside or inside of jurisdictional perimeters of state. We no longer have to be particularly distant from the core—the hegemon's metropoles to be preyed upon—just foreign in any way shape or form. It is the time to belong to something rather than to own it. Otherwise all hell will break lose and there will be space enough for all of us.

Prepare, prepare the iron helm of war, Bring forth the lots, cast in the spacious orb; Th' Angel of Fate turns them with mighty hands, And casts them out upon the darken'd earth! Prepare, prepare! ~ Blake

What makes me an anarchist is that I choose to belong to the planet, that spacious and mobile orb rather than the petrified constraints of a pyramid; and through it loyal to creation alone—however you may prefer to define it.