First – I get it: why four(+) books underway at once?

To understand that – look at these as not four but one. My research questions had me delve VERY deep into the past (History of Thought, Book 1& 2), and then comprehensively at the present (Disruption of Thought, Great Irony of Technology, & the Return of Magic project). In fact, these works were all contained, as ideas, in a single extremely overly ambitious title.  My apologies to those few people I asked to read that.  Even after I cleaved the past books out (one of my co-authors had health issues, so those stalled), I still had Disruption of Thought and Great Irony of Technology within the scope of a 600 page tome. My thanks specifically to David Weinberger and Rollie Cole, who both made it through that draft, and both gently coached me to realize that ‘there are 2, if not 3 separate books here’. So I split again. That’s why there’s 4 complete but unpublished titles, which I’m now working assiduously to bring to life.

The simple visual I have for how I think is that of the street busker spinning plates on top of sticks, gradually adding more and more, until I’m somehow keeping dozens of plates in constant motion, going back and forth between them.  Within this constellation of plates, I begin to see patterns, and make some sense of things that are even more complex.  Each of the books is a massive set of spinning plates, and I’ve usually got ALL of them going at once, in my head, as one cohesive  (to me) universe of ideas. Along with each of the underlying thousands of citations.

Which is why I don’t play golf, would suck at Fantasy Football, make for horrible small talk at social functions, and don’t engage with social media. Not a lot of attention/resources left, as I tend to this nagging obsession 🙂

Second: what the heck? Where’s the label or bucket that I fit into? We sense-make by categorizing others into roles we are familiar with. Me? I’m a non-academic , writing peer-reviewed academic books.  I’m a technologist with just a BS in Finance, writing about the most complex and emerging issues of the cognitive sciences.

My industry doesn’t reward work like this, nor do many others.  There are no incentives, only disincentives. When one steps back from our hyper-specialization and follows research questions wherever they take them, one leaves the safety of being a recognized expert in one area to become, at best, an open minded and curious beginner in many other areas.  The risk here is being a dilettante – a person who dabbles in fields they know little about.  That word implies that one is an amateur, with no commitment or knowledge. But my commitment was to understand the intersection of cognition and technology, wherever it took me, regardless of the discipline, type of tools, approaches, or underlying data.  No one approach was sufficient, so I had to weave together many to see the whole (a la Alison Wylie’s archaeological ‘cabling and tacking’ methodology).

I’ve since found a few others who also stepped back from their recognized area of expertise and looked at the big picture results of their work and industry.  Take Daniel Humm, the chef/owner of the New York restaurant 11 Madison Park. In 2017 it was named the best restaurant in the world.  Immediately afterward Humm started to think about what he could or should do next to challenge himself and the business.  As he set out to simply raise the bar, he also looked back at the dramatic changes in his food supply over the previous few years, particularly the shift in sourcing from wild-grown to farm-raised and he realized that the quality of food was changing rapidly. As he unpacked that, he also started to learn about the impact of farming on the environment, especially from farm-raised meat and fish. He had a growing sense of unease about his profession, and began to feel guilty that, for a long time, he hadn’t questioned enough about exactly where his food came from, and the full impact of his supply chain.

Reflecting on this journey and these insights and learnings, Humm says, “When you have that knowledge, you have a responsibility to speak about it.” Humm did more than research and talk; he acted and committed, taking the very bold risk of converting 11 Madison Park into a vegan restaurant. In doing so, he knew he was probably going to lose all he had accomplished. But he was committed to aligning his organization, work, and passion with what he had learned when he took the time to step back and really consider the full consequences of his efforts.  He wanted his work to be a manifestation of his well-considered values, and he traded what he was willing to sacrifice in exchange for the hope of contributing to a better world for all.  Not just his customers.

The last decade and these books and talks represent my similar quest: I started out simply with some mild curiosity and introspection, and then found myself unpacking bigger issues that were nested within even more complex ones.  Like agriculture, technology has provided many miraculous benefits. But this, too, also generated many unintended negatives consequences. Some play out right in front of us in ways that are so obvious that is hard to even sense the thing. It’s just a given, the way fish may not even consider that they are swimming in water.  Many other downsides play out across a diffuse landscape of circumstances and stakeholders, out of sight.  A cumulative result of this landscape composed of the all-too-visible combined with the hidden corners is a connected web of interactions that is almost impossible to understand from any one perspective.

This map has been my main focus over the last ten years.  Of course, unlike Humm I’m not looking upstream at the supply chain feeding into tech, but rather I’m considering technology holistically, and then looking downstream at the cumulative effects on people and how they think, individually and collectively. Now, like him, I believe I have a responsibility to share what I’ve learned, and to begin making the actions and changes that align with what I’ve learned. 

In a nutshell, I’ve been doing right-brained thinking in a left-brained world.  I highly recommend Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary on this topic, and you can find my notes on McGilchrist’s relevance here: https://patscannell.com/elementor-1213/

(BTW, a very large hat tip here to my colleagues who tilt at their similarly scaled windmills of global human challenge/opportunity and inspire me every day, whether they know this or not, including Carl Pabo, David Bray, Michael Robbins, Paul Quaiser, Cyndi Coon, Guy Huntington, Julie Mossbridge, Jamie Arbib, Divya Chander, Tony Aghazarian, RJ Cordes, Alex Ruiz, David Weinberger, Sam Arbesman and so many others out there doing massive right-brained efforts to make the world a better place! And folks like McGilchrist, Vaclav Smil, Peter Carruthers, Oliver Sacks, David Brin, Jim Rutt, Jacques Ellul, Robert Sapolsky, Steven Pinker, Kevin Kelly, Hans Rosling, and so many hundreds of other writer/thinkers who’ve lit the lamp leading the way towards greater understanding and building the foundations for a more flourishing human future for all.)