Submitted by Matt Hart, Founder @ Better Ideas Faster
Does the Monk Outlast the Empire Part two. Picking up on my first riff around coherence, meaning and depth running on a different timescale than mere competition and advantage: Todays riff: On being curated before you wake up, the oak the algorithm can’t author, and why the fast thing might be eating its own ground.
A little while back I asked a question, argued a space, then left it open. Graeme from Punk Voices
posted it out and it went down well in the Punk community.
The question was ‘does the monk outlast the empire?’ The whole of part one was really one argument. Take the long path. Depth is slow and quiet and doesn’t scale, and that is exactly why it survives the fast loud thing that does. The empire burns bright and burns through. The monk is still here.
Fine. But I left the hardest bit untouched. Because there’s a version of this where the monk doesn’t even get to choose the long path, on account of the path being chosen before even knowing who’s doing the choosing. So let me go further. Three more thought pieces that have no business fitting together.
And a transparent heads up – I’m also chasing this down more formally. It’s feeding a doctorate-indevelopment about how creativity and innovation actually move through knowing, creating and making. But that’s a story for another day. Here I’m embracing a punkish riff on Monk Part 2:
So, One. Curated before you wake up.
Part one of Monk and the Empire assumed you get to pick. Long path or short path, monk or empire, your call.
But that’s not quite the world we’re in anymore.
The feed got there first. Before a kid today has formed much of a self, an algorithm that is optimising for engagement has already fed that kid a shit ton of hours of a curated version of who they might be – and who they might become. It’s not a self it chose. It’s a self that tested well.
Drawn from a bazillion data points of similarities. The scary bit isn’t that the empire outcompetes you. It’s that it authors you, quietly, upstream of the point where you thought your choices began.
Capture used to mean you got trapped. Now it means you got shaped, and the you doing the choosing is partly a thing that was handed to you by a system that does not have any kind of goal beyond more shaping – more of your time given to them in return for dopamine (lets capture that thought in terms of today’s drug of non-choice – another riff brewing).
So the long path isn’t even the first problem. Finding the path is. How do you walk your own road when the map is being drawn for you by something that sits in your own hand but was never of your own making…
Two. The oak was always in the acorn. But which oak?
Here’s where it turns. I’ve been sitting with this for a while – thinking, riffing, writing.
There’s an old idea, Hillman named it best, but goes all the way back to Aristotle, that the oak was always in the acorn. You don’t build a self from nothing. The thing is already in there, waiting to come out. The acorn holds oak-ness. Winnicott said something about this re true and false self.
There is a true self under there, and the whole game of a life is whether it gets to surface or gets papered over.
I believe that. But it got me thinking about the gap. Well not a gap so much, as the progression from coming into being, becoming, and to some sort of ‘become.’ The acorn holds oak-ness. It does not hold the exact oak. It doesn’t say how tall. Which way the branches go. What shape the crown takes after forty years of a particular wind on a particular hill. It does not prescribe the where, the how, the who with, nor the entire surrounding ecosystem that is the relational space as responsible for the Oak’s becoming as was the acorn. The propensity was/is given. The form is wide open.
And that, right there, is the answer to the feed.
Because the algorithm can curate the inputs. It can flood the acorn with whatever tested well this quarter.
What it cannot do is author the oak, because the oak isn’t specified in advance. Not even to itself. The final shape gets made in the meeting between the innate thing and a world that couldn’t be predicted, and that meeting is not a thing a recommendation engine can run ahead of. What can’t be specified in advance can’t be captured in advance. The indeterminacy is the defence.
The oak gets made out in the open, in the weather, in the meeting between the acorn and everything it grows up against. And that meeting is still happening.
Which is the whole thing right there.
What this riff is really saying is that our becoming can stay ours precisely because it hasn’t happened yet, and no system, however large, can pre-compute a shape that only exists in the making. It’s ours to own.
That’s not just a comfort. It’s a structural fact. The oak is coming and nobody, not you, not them, knows quite which oak. Fcking great. It makes me feel we have to work very very hard to keep it this way, for ourselves and the next generations.
Three. The thing about eating your own ground.
Now this that keeps me up.
Look at the empire as it actually stands. It is enormous and it is accelerating and its own high priests are on record saying that within a decade the machines will be smarter than us and money itself may stop meaning what it means. Data centres drinking rivers. Power draws you can see from space.
Heat domes settling over cities like a lid. A coming El Nino that is literally off the charts. And under the spectacle, the quiet numbers. Sovereign threat papers going out fully redacted. The UK, three days of food in the system if the trucks stop. Finland, nine months. Sit with that gap for a second.
Three days against nine months is not a statistic. It’s a worldview (I haven’t done the data dive on that last part – got that from the Rest is Politics boys so am trusting their numbers to make the point).
But here’s the reflex the whole thing runs on. All of this looks like it demands more speed to fix.
Climate, AI, food, the lot. Go faster. Build bigger. Out-accelerate the mess. That reflex is the trap, and it’s a beautiful trap, because it feels like agency. It feels like each of us doing something.
But you cannot out-accelerate a crisis that acceleration caused. The empire only has one move, which is speed, which is the exact thing that is eating the ground it stands on. Compute needs water and power the planet can’t keep handing over. An economy that automates away its own workers eats its own customers. A system that optimises for engagement slowly degrades the humans it’s engaging until it’s just bots raging at other bots – human or otherwise. Get your head around that for a minute. Especially those of us with kids!!
The empire isn’t just fast. It’s fast in a way that consumes its own substrate. Even our stories know it. We’ve stopped writing sci-fi about nations and started writing it about worlds owned by families (Alien: Earth still has me thinking deep on that – the Aliens feel totally superfluous to the actual story inside – which tells you where the cultural nervous system already suspects this is heading).
So does the monk outlast the empire?
Maybe. But not the way part one had it, where the monk quietly wins on a long enough timescale.
Because that time scale was millennia. And self interest says how does that work in our lifetime?
Well, maybe the monk outlasts the empire because the empire goes on noisily eating itself, and the monk isn’t building on the thing being eaten.
Then, can it be true that depth doesn’t run on data centres?
And where’s our agency in all this? Surely it’s not in matching their speed. Who can compete with that now – at a $billion to play in, that horse has surely bolted. I think the answer is somewhere in being made of the one thing the empire is structurally incapable of manufacturing or consuming.
I think it’s in the knowing of the ground you’re standing on, that you’re not digging up, and sharing that ground with like humans (kudos to you Graeme).
And here’s my small confession – because maybe I’ve been on the wrong side of this.
I used to be called Better Ideas Faster. That was the name. It said everything the client wanted to hear. Insight, creativity, problem-solving, potential and advantage, and all of it faster. I sold speed for a living. I built the horse.
But there was a thing I kept quiet inside that name. The method never actually ran on speed. What made the ideas better was the slow part. Time given for real empathy to pay its way. Curiosity allowed to wander before it was told to be useful. The fast label was the way in. The slow human thing was smuggled inside it. Like Odysseus and mates currently lighting up the IMAX near you.
I’m done hiding the horse.
Because that’s the oldest story we have.
Troy doesn’t fall to the biggest army. It falls to the trick. That trick then burns. And the man who actually makes it all the way home does so years later in beggar’s cloth and sandals.
Not in armour. And not to a monument. He walks in rags back into his own hall as simple human which is what he always was under all of it.
The spectacle was the disguise.
The – simple? – human was the truth the whole time.
No more Better Ideas Faster.
The monk way is something of the stunning ideas, slower. More human. More knowing, creating, and making. Together with others.
I know how that sounds. But on the timescale that matters, this one life we get here, I’m no longer sure slower is the smaller ambition.
I think it might be the only one worth innovating for.
Cloth and sandals anyone?
