Month: March 2015

 

Some of you are probably asking yourselves “Why the Grateful Dead? Why not the Rolling Stones?” Every time you hear this song, a part of you goes Stones!

Some of you may be asking yourselves “Why the Grateful Dead? Why not Buddy Holly?” After all, he co-wrote it and then was the first to perform it, with the Crickets.

Your experience matters. Where you heard the song, when you heard it, what you were doing at the time, whom you were with, the sights, sounds and smells that surrounded you.

How you experienced it matters.

That’s why I chose the Grateful Dead. Every time I hear this song, they’re the ones that come into my mind. Even though I know who wrote it and who first played it and who made it really famous.

How you experienced it matters.

History has always been about people and experiences. When those experiences are shared at human scale, they take on a life of their own. That’s why eyewitness accounts matter. That’s why contemporaneous records matter.

It’s said that history gets written by winners. But sometimes victories can be Pyrrhic, and it’s hard to figure out who really won.

I can see from your coat, my friend, you’re from the other side

There’s just one thing I got to know

Who won?

[And that gives me an excuse to plug one of my favourite versions of one of my favourite songs. I was torn between choosing one of the early Crosby Stills and Nash versions, or going for a classic Kantner/Slick Jefferson Airplane version. Wooden Ships happens to be written by Crosby and Nash. And Kantner. So I couldn’t decide. They were both integral parts of my memories of the song. I went for a version that had Crosby as well as Slick.]

Memories.

I was there.

I. Was. There.

History is at its most interesting, at its most engaging, when it’s written by people who can say “I was there”. Memories.

History used to be by humans, about humans.

Humans have had memories ever since humans had humans. But it hasn’t always been easy to share those memories. Archiving them, “persisting” them, so that they can be shared across generations, that used to be hard. Doing a Lazarus on those memories, bringing them back to life in audio or video, that used to be hard as well.

When the power to print and publish was held by a narrow elite, history was written by “winners”. When the power to record, to edit, to publish audio was held by a narrow elite, history was heard through the voices of “winners”. When the power to film, to edit, to publish video was held by a narrow elite, history was seen through the eyes of “winners”.

Those powers are democratising now. Those powers are available to all of us. There are those who are unhappy with this state of affairs, as their erstwhile powers erode. But for humankind as a whole, this is a Good Thing.

History can be recorded, archived, shared, read, heard and seen at human scale now. For years we’ve lived with the broadcast paradigm and for years we’ve felt an increasing loss of authenticity. That’s not to say that everything that was broadcast lacked authenticity, far from it. But the ethos of broadcast was riddled with that risk.

Today, in the era of the internet and the web and smart mobile devices and increasingly better connectivity, we don’t face those challenges. Instead, we face new ones, to do with airbrushing and Photoshop and provenance and curation. We face new ones to do with the longevity of the materials and techniques we use to record and archive our memories.

But they’re new problems, and we will find new solutions.

In the meantime, we should celebrate our new-found abilities to be part of the historical record at human, individual scale, yet always in community. Because that’s part of what makes us human.

Crowdfunding techniques allow us to become patrons at human scale, to allow people to capture and share their memories of the momentous events that they were part of, that shaped their lives. Events that we may all learn from, become vicarious participants in, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, always human.

That is why I chose to participate in the Kickstarter campaign for The House On Coco Road. It’s the shape of things to come, about the shape of things that once were.

Take a look at the trailer for the documentary. And then decide whether you want history to be human again, to be by humans about humans. Make that house on Coco Road part of your history. Because today you can.

This one’s going to be flying off the shelves.

iWatch? shmiWatch! I’m going to be whistling Nixie.

Here’s the concept video.

 

Pattie Boyd. An amazing woman. One person. Two husbands. Three songs. The woman about whom three of the world’s greatest rock love songs were written. Something. Wonderful Tonight. Layla.

She’s taken some great photographs over the years; I was lucky enough to pick up a fine framed set of large prints some years ago, taken when they were all in India. [Incidentally, if you’re in or near San Francisco, you can take a look at some of them at the San Francisco Art Exchange. She has an exhibition there, titled Like a Rainbow, running till the end of March. You can buy limited-edition prints there as well].

Hanging out with the Beatles, with George, with Eric; travelling to India with them in the midst of the great Maharishi movement, I’m tempted to think that Pattie would have seen everything, that nothing would surprise her.

Except for this.

Yup. Layla. In Sanskrit. Why ever not?

While on the subject of amazing women in the world of music, here’s one more.

Jayashree Singh.

Here’s what someone in Rolling Stone said a few days ago.

And here’s coverage of the debut album Skinny Alley released last year.

Here’s a sample of the title track.

I’m biased. She’s my cousin. The drummer, who’s incredible, is my nephew. And I still miss Gyan Singh, her husband, his father, who died way before his time a few years ago.

This is what I wrote then about Gyan.

Spending time with him, spending time with Jayashree, chatting with them, listening to them play music as if their lives depended on it, being a pretend-roadie as they toured the deep and dark recesses of Calcutta and Shahgang and Diamond Harbour in the 70s, those were important times for me. They helped make me me. Mark the music.

 

The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;

The motions of his spirit are dull as night,

And his affections dark as Erebus.

Let no such man be trusted.

Mark the music.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I never tire of using Gerald Waller’s iconic photograph of an orphan boy with his first pair of new shoes in 1946. Thank you Gerald Waller.

Only the very hard of heart would not be touched when faced with a newly orphaned baby or child.

Only the very hard of heart would not be touched when faced with someone who’s lost a partner having spent their lives together.

We understand something about the importance of being not alone. And yet, in between the baby-state and the octogenarian-state, we spend a lot of time and energy fighting for personal independence.

When I was young, I was told repeatedly that both organisations as well as organisms went through stages of maturity. People, families, neighbourhoods, companies, even countries, went through a dependent stage, an independent stage and an interdependent stage. Interdependence was seen as a sign of maturity.

As an adolescent at the time, it made complete sense to me. I could see the need for me to flex my independent muscles, understand my bearings, my abilities, my limits, and then to “settle down” in peace and harmony with all around me. So I thought of interdependence not just as a sign of maturity, but as a form of “collective independence”.

For adolescents, being with other people is hard, harder than others would find it. Any form of agreement with others was hard, especially if the others were older people.

 

It’s what Carly Simon wrote about in The Carter Family:

Grandma used to nag at me to straighten up my spine
To act respectful and read good books
To take care of what was mine
I hated being criticised and asking her permission
So what if her advice was wise, It always hurt to listen

Cat Stevens, now Yusuf, expressed similar views in a litany of songs: Father and Son, Wild World, Where Do The Children Play et al. [Many years later, I would learn that many of the songs in Tea For The Tillerman and in Teaser and the Firecat were written as part of a single work, Moonshadow, telling the story of youth and love across barriers of age and culture].

Photo below courtesy of Simon Fernandez. [A rare example of Che-wearing-a-Che-T-shirt IRL].

Getting agreement from a group is hard. That’s why teenagers are often seen lolling around, apparently disenchanted with everything in life, unable to articulate what they want to do next.

It’s not just about teenagers. If, as an adult, you’ve ever tried to get a group of people to agree to do something — anything — you know the challenge. Organising a golf day. Going to see a film. As soon as you need to gain the support of many people, even organising a picnic is no longer a picnic.

It’s not just about groups. The best marriage talk I’ve ever attended was given by a woman called Faith Forster at the wedding of some close friends. She asked us to imagine that every one of us was a house. Getting engaged meant becoming a semi-detached house. Getting married meant converting that semi into something larger and deeper and potentially more wonderful. But it took time. Working out the plans. Breaking through the walls. Choosing which rooms you’d merge to form a bigger one, which ones you’d choose to retain in preference to the other choice, which ones you’d keep both of, which ones you’d do away with. It took time, mess, compromise, agreement. All things that a true covenant relationship can deal with.

I remember the first time I learnt that every town had its own time, set by nature. That the very idea of a universal time came out of the need for synchronisation, something that the Industrial Revolution hastened via the steam engine and steam trains. As soon as you want to connect two things you need some basis for synchronisation. Common languages, standards, protocols. These ideas have nothing to do with computers or digital or data. Just about connections, analogue or otherwise.

Someone I have a lot of time and respect for, someone I’m privileged to call a friend, Robin Chase, wrote an article in the FT recently, headlined Disrupted transport will work better for us in the end. She has a new book coming out in a few months, which I’ve pre-ordered. I’d recommend you do the same].

 

One of the themes that Robin drives through the article (pardon the pun) is how the evolution of the digital age moves us from dealing with individual frictions to dealing with collective frictions. As with the car, in almost any walk of life, there is far greater value to be had in the removal of frictions faced by collectives. It’s a theme that has been tackled by people like Howard Rheingold, Steven Johnson, Clay Shirky, providing different yet complementary perspectives on this phenomenon. I am really looking forward to hearing Robin’s views in detail.

While on the subject of collective action. I loved seeing this video of Michael Green at EF2015. A classic example of how digital technology allows peers to work together to remove a particular set of frictions.

[An aside. I find myself unduly cynical about what’s happening with Net Neutrality over in the US, and almost as cynical about what’s happening with it here in Europe. It may appear that the tides are turning towards the support of neutrality on one side of the pond while leaning unexpectedly the other way on the other side of the pond. All I can say is “regulatory capture”: there is a reason why societies came up with laws to do with antitrust and anti-monopolies and anti-restrictive-trade-practices ; these laws appear to mean very little in a digital world. That must change. That will change.]

Being alone or being not alone, these are no longer choices. Many of the problems and issues we face as mankind require collective action. The tools for collective action exist and continue to be refined. Society everywhere is being redefined as a result, and it is normal and natural for incumbent structures of power to complain and to try and stave off the redefinition.

Being not alone used to be a state that some people chose because they could. Being alone used to be a state that some people chose because they could. And some didn’t have choice as to the state they were in.

But all that has changed.

Being not alone is no longer a statement of choice. It is an imperative. And one that can bear wonderful outcomes for humanity.

I became a grandfather for the first time last Friday night, and had the opportunity to welcome grandson number one Elijah Fenn to planet earth. One of the happiest moments of my life. It mattered to me in ways that may not make sense to others: my father never lived to see any of his grandchildren; his father never lived to see any of my siblings. My mother’s mother didn’t live to see me or my siblings either. There was, for many years, a fatalistic part of me that felt that I wouldn’t live long enough to see my grandchildren.

And so it mattered to me.

I felt blessed to have been beside my wife at the birth of all three of our children, to have been able to hold each of them in my arms shortly after birth. I felt blessed to have been able to walk my eldest child down the aisle at her wedding in 2013.

And I felt blessed to have been at the hospital shortly before Eli was born, and to be able to see him and hold him in my arms. Not every gets these opportunities in life. And I remain intensely, immeasurably grateful for them. [I write this with a wry smile as I hear Eli give his lungs a workout downstairs].

At a time like this, it’s not surprising that I find myself reflecting on the world Eli will inhabit, the world my children inhabit today, and how it differs from the world I came into more than 57 years ago.

Every generation has its wars and its peaces, its political and social and economic triumphs as well as its disasters. Every generation bears its trophies and its scars from such times. Every generation has its reasons to rebel and its ways of rebelling, in appearance, in art and culture, in habits and in fashions. Every generation has its legal highs and its places to inhabit away from the rest of mankind. There is something cyclical about much of this, something that each generation will face for itself.

There are things that remain constant in each generation, even if the words change, even if the context changes. Those are not the things that concern me as I reflect.

What concerns me is to do with the things that haven’t stayed constant, where the change is material in itself.

We’re living longer. We’re growing fatter. We’re consuming resources less sustainably. Inequality is increasing. People polarise more quickly and more extremely. Intolerance is growing.

And we’re becoming more alone.

If there is one thing I would wish for Eli, for his siblings-to-be and for his cousins-to-be, if there’s one thing I wish for his parents and for their siblings (two of whom are my other children), it is this:

Be not alone.

I left India in 1980. I was 23 then. In all that time I’d never even heard of an “old people’s home”. The India I left had a different word for it. Home. With family. First the parents looked after the children, then helped with their children, and then it was time for them to be looked after by their children.

By the time I was 15 I’d met one divorced person. Just one. And when I left India that number had grown out of all proportion. It had doubled. To two.

I knew a few people who lived on their own. They were bachelors. Yes, all male. Mainly between 21 and 30. There was one exception, my next-door neighbour, who was in his sixties.

I was brought up to believe that family mattered. That friends mattered. That these were covenant relationships. Something I’ve written about before. Many times.

I left India at a difficult time, leaving family behind, believing that what I was doing was best for me and for my family. For a few years it was hard. But I’m grateful for how time and distance have been headed off at the pass, how I feel close to my mother, my siblings and my extended family, as close as I’ve ever felt.

Be not alone.

Regular readers of this blog would know that I’ve stayed close to my schoolmates, many of whom I will have known for 50 years by this time next year. We’re spread out all over the world, and I’ve had the privilege of meeting perhaps 25 regularly, and another 40 or 50 occasionally. There’s a smaller group of us who went to university together, and social networks have helped us re-engage at greater levels. When we meet, the years roll back as if they were but seconds.

With the advent of tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the networks that were spawned on e-mail have strengthened. It now means that I’m in touch with a good number of my colleagues, people I’ve worked with sometime over the past 35 years. We meet occasionally, and yes the years roll back.

Be not alone.

When I moved to London for the first time, I was mortified to see that some people didn’t even know their neighbours. The closer to central London I got, the more this happened. In contrast, the last time I went to Calcutta with my family, I spent time with neighbours I’d grown up with, whom we’re still in touch with. We were in a group that spanned age and creed and time; yet somehow we found ourselves celebrating Christmas, with a large roast ham, with Hindu and Sikh family and friends, hosted by a Jewish family. Yes, that’s Calcutta for you.

We were in Goa just before Christmas, and the daughter of one of our other neighbours turned up there; she knew my sister would be there. They’d grown up together. It meant something. I’ll probably be in NYC in a week’s time. And I’ll be spoilt for choice if I get a spare evening. Schoolmate? Tick. Neighbour? Tick. Erstwhile colleagues? Tick.

Be not alone.

No man is an iland intire of itselfe. I read advertisements on railway stations telling me that there are people in the West who go weeks on end without speaking to anyone. And it saddens me. Over the past decade, I’ve seen more and more reports about possible connections between Alzheimer’s and loneliness. And it saddens me. We don’t know much about depression or other mental illnesses, but what we do know points towards the role played by loneliness.

Settlement man lived and died within a short distance of where he was born, and this has largely been the case for millennia. Migrations happened, but they tended to be involuntary: there were climatic, environmental, economic or political reasons, and even then the migrations happened in groups, more exodus than exit.

The Industrial Age demolished migration costs, and for the last 200 years or so man’s ability to migrate has increased unrecognisably. It became “normal” for people not to know their neighbours, to want to live alone, to live “secret” lives, with no accountability to anyone. One-person dwellings became more common. One-person anything became common.

Then the Information Age came along and demolished connection costs, and we’ve been in a renaissance ever since. People are rediscovering the social fabric that was torn beyond belief during the interim.

Vint Cerf has been warning of a “digital dark age” where many of the artefacts we trust computers to look after disappear.

Leonard Nimoy’s last tweet, not long before he died a few days ago, is already the stuff of legend:

Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. Whose memory? The memory of our families, our friends, our colleagues, the people we live in covenant relationship with.

We live in times when the art of conversation could itself die out, when some of the practices that made us human fade away. Practices like the oral passage of knowledge and history and values from generation to generation, via stories on your grandparent’s knee or by the fireside or underneath the stars.

I’m having to learn a lot about what it means to be private in a public world, what privacy means in today’s age. Reading the work of people like Sherry Turkle and Daniel Solove and danah helps me understand some of it. But I spend as much time as I can seeking to understand community rather than solitude. I enjoy solitude. But that’s quite different from loneliness.

Be Not Alone.

That’s what I wished for myself when I was in dark times. That’s what I wish for those close to me, my wife, my children, my family and my friends.

That’s what I wish for my grandson. And for the generations that his arrival signals.

Be Not Alone.