Be the Change
In memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Perhaps its just the circles I follow, but I’ve been seeing a lot of angst on my timelines in regards to the recent Google layoffs and the egregious manner in which the company went about them. A few examples (by social media site) include:
The sentiment these posts express (and this is something I’ve heard explicitly stated too) is shock: “I didn’t think this would happen here.”
So I’m writing this post to remind people that we live in a non-deterministic world and that that is a good thing.
When one tries to predict the future it’s on the basis of the past: “I will probably not write a blog today because I didn’t yesterday;” or, “I shouldn’t try to do something new because it seems unlikely I’ll succeed (based on how things are trending now).” What these appraisals tell us is more about how we understand our world today than about the state of the world per se. (“I see a trend in the past and based on that expect the future to be a continuation of that dynamic.”)
What people often forget is that the event of remembering which is the basis of that appraisal, like the event of anticipating or planning, is itself a “situated action,” to use Lucy Suchman’s classic phrase. It occurs inside the context, the system, the world that it’s trying to describe; it’s a participating in and affecting of the world. It’s therefore a productive thing: an arranging, a modeling, a sense-making.
The predictive mindset which uses a trend to justify doing something or not doing something denies that. It assumes that the remembering and predicting happens from a position outside of the context, the system, the world, and that therefore one is not affecting or being affected by it.
This is a way of denying agency, which is the capacity to affect or be affected, and ultimately of ethics. If the past trend is just something that is and will be what it is, then one has no power to affect it and thus can’t be held culpable for what happens. But if one participates in the event of producing and then maintaining that trend, then one has agency and is responsible for it by way of contributing to it.
What does this have to do with people losing their jobs? I think that people should use this upsetting of their established view of the world not to feel powerless, but actually to feel powerful. The world is not determined independently of us but is actively produced by us. We have the capacity to affect it and thereby do what hasn’t been done before, to do something creative, discontinuous, and novel. We can do that when we acknowledge and affirm disruption and transform anxiety into the dizziness of freedom.
If you don’t like that companies like Google can act like they have towards their employees, don’t just accept it. We don’t have to. By working together we can act in and on our world and make it how we want. So please, let’s get together and make a difference.