Fear of Speed and Field Building
On Parks, Garbage Collection, and Digital Infrastructure
I live near a park with a baseball diamond. Today, while sitting looking at it, I remembered the feelings that I try to hold close in my day to day. The urge and need to work somewhat more collectively than what our culture encourages us to do.
I was, for a spell, a pitcher, when I played softball. But I flinch a lot, I don’t like things coming at me fast, and eventually my mediocre pitching skills landed me in a position that felt better aligned to my instincts — to run after things. I played outfield, sometimes centre field, but not because I was fast or good but because that was a place where you ran around a lot, to be back-up, to be there if something didn’t go to plan.
I know that speed is not something I inherently like, for whatever reason. And so in working on technology, and trying to deal with things that always are told to be happening fast, I shouldn’t be surprised that this instinct remains. In the ways in which we are trying to collectively respond to digital all the things, pleas to slow the pace of the game down don’t feel plausible. There is too much commercial value in efficiency. And so my mind wanders to the positions that can be played more effectively. This anecdote all lives in a defensive posture, but unfortunately, or maybe not even, until there would ever be significant investment in public technologies, here we are.
While sitting on the park bench looking at the field I also sat beside a garbage truck. And I watched, as I could, the work it takes for the singular individuals that take garbage from the curb to the truck, fill in the gaps of the people that don’t follow the instructions, don’t put the materials in correctly, don’t place the containers right. And yet the crucial civic infrastructure of garbage collection ticks on because the people that are tasked with filling in the gaps and errors do the things to fix them.
How do we better locate our jobs and our right placed efforts in the face of digital transformations that feel all the way too big and too fast to intervene? The answer lies more in reorganizing our work to put the tasks into the right shape for the work we do every day. This means that there is no expectation that laws or guidelines will do it all. It means that norms of trying to orient the effort to what we all generally believe in matters, at the small scale. At the size of a baseball team or at the size of a core infrastructure process route.
No one has to play a sport. Most of us do have to participate in systems that are way larger than the governance we do or don’t engage in. Garbage collection processes. There is a lot of agency available there, in those units. But they don’t appear in the obvious containers we need to make our daily efforts work more in coordination with how we want to participate. There are so many aspects of the governance and management and adaptation of technology that aren’t waiting for laws, they are waiting for the force of someone grabbing what looks to be a tiny piece of agency and to work within it.
There are many places to operate in digital transformation that have nothing to do with how something is or isn’t regulated. As with many thoughts that happen in a park, there is an instinct to want to grow broader collective consciousness to how collectively we already know how to work.
Can you look at the ways technology is being introduced in your ways of existence, whether for leisure, or work, or residence, or captivity, and consider what resistance and creativity might have to offer? These are questions that feel germane to a moment where mountains of writing and legal thought on policies that seek to work in digital acceleration are missing major marks on our culture and our political ways. To democratize the use of a tool may be much more germane to this era than trying to have seven thousand people collectively become its product manager.
