Community Intelligence: How well do you understand your community?

Still busy with grad school, but I'm coming up with tangentially relevant stuff from time to time:

Relational Economics

I'm on vacation, which means I get to spend some quality time nerding out with my brother. We just used a big chunk of beach as a chalkboard to explore this question:

Can relationships be meaningfully described as a series of rational decisions?

My mom's immediate answer, when she walked by to see what we were up to, was "don't be silly." First off, looking at the decisions that get made in a relationship doesn't really tell you about the heart and soul of that relationship, the emotion and subtlety that make that relationship work. Second, anyone who has experience with these things will tell you that relationships can be anything but rational. There's no rhyme or reason to love, and we had all better get used to it.

Despite the fact that she's my mother, and therefore always right, my brother and I persisted. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that relationships can be described that way. That means that a relationship can be thought of as a series of decisions that people make, and each of those decisions can be broken down to a sort of cost/benefit analysis that has one logical conclusion. This kind of a theory isn't meant to be practical, like most real world examples of physics most real world relationships are far too complicated to be predicted with any precision. (Physics can't, in any practical way, tell you how a teapot is going to shatter.) It could be interesting in thinking about overall trends in the ways that people connect with one another and communities come together.

Because, irrational as relationships seem, the decisions that we make in them almost always ARE rational (or at least as "rational" as our decisions to purchase things, and that hasn't hurt the field of economics.) To test this my brother and I decided to explore the following scenario:

Bob has called Alice and invited her to play golf on Saturday. Will Alice say yes?

As I've mentioned before in this blog, decisions about time are particularly important to understanding what makes relationships tick. A quick poll of the beach seemed to hint that this was, in fact, a problem with a rational answer. When presented with the scenario, people immediately sought to define factors which would define a rational decision.

"I think she would," said a passing six year old "because girls like golf."

Her friend, eager to contribute to the problem, added another condition "She might stay home if she was sick though."

The response of these two girls was telling. If the decisions that we make in relationship were completely irrational then they would have simply shrugged their shoulders, as they would if I asked them whether it would rain in a month. Their guts and life experience told them that the situation with Bob and Alice COULD be understood if the right initial conditions were known. That is, if we know enough about how Alice feels about golf, enough about how she feels about Bob, enough about her other options for that Saturday and a few other tidbits of information then we can predict her decision with at least the theoretical certainty that economists predict real-world economic behavior. My brother and I had fun for the better part of an hour mapping these criteria on the sand, but I won't bore you with them here.

Instead, I'd like to talk about the possible implications of this rationality. Let's pretend for a moment that the statement at the beginning of this post is true. If it is, then the process by which relationships form and thrive can be mapped in a new sort of theoretical detail. Rather than bitching about dating, we could tease the process of dating apart and ask ourselves whether a better system could be designed for producing intimate human relationships. Rather than trying to build professional communities by throwing 500 people with business cards in a room together we could begin to build a real set of knowledge about what makes relationships happen and what doesn't. The art of community building seems stuck at the developmental stage of medieval medicine; a conglomeration of pet theories, wives tales and one-off solutions. It seems like we can do better.

I'll leave it here for now, and solicit people's responses to the questions above. Can relationships be described as a series of rational decisions? When (if ever) can't they? And if you had to map the criteria influencing Alice's decision to play golf with Bob then how would you do it?

Asexy Pride Video

I made an incredibly cheesy video about this year's AVEN Pride contingent. Check it out:

The Power of Smalltalk

I'm playing with video again!

If you like it, please digg it. Thanks!!

A/Sexy

There's nothing sexy about starting a band.

Talking about starting a band is sexy. Playing in a band, once everything is said and done, gets you laid like the Mattress Giant off I-270, but the process of starting one is anything but. It's just you in a room with a bunch of other dudes fumbling around to try to find a sound. Things are not quite clicking yet, your styles and personalities haven't quite figured out how to fit together. But there's something thrilling in that, the possibility that it all COULD come together, and that possibility is what keeps you at it, keeps your failing and trying again and growing closer as a group. Starting a band is asexy.

If sexy is about being alluring and desirable, asexy is about being unapologetically true to oneself and one's passions. According to the urban dictionary:

An adjective used to describe an asexual person showing intelligence, confidence, style, physical attractiveness, charming personality, baking skills, or any other combination of sufficiently positive and unique characteristics.

DJ is one asexy amoeba. I hear he can bake a three-layer cake in thirty minutes flat.

While Dictionary.com defines sexy as:

–adjective, sex⋅i⋅er, sex⋅i⋅est.

1.	concerned predominantly or excessively with sex; risqué: a sexy novel.

2.	sexually interesting or exciting; radiating sexuality: the sexiest professor on campus.

3.	excitingly appealing; glamorous: a sexy new car.

Something about the interplay between these two terms is fascinating to me. In the eyes of many of my friends, the two are one and the same. Being true to oneself and one's passions make you desirable, hands down. In my geeky queer hometown of San Francisco doing your thing, whatever that thing happens to be, is incredibly hot. Typeface nerds are hot. Drag queens are hot. Line-dancing biophysicists are hot. In open and accepting environments focusing on being asexy almost always leads to being sexy. The opposite is not necessarily true. Going out of ones way to be sexy means following the crowd, grasping for things that seem to make other people glamorous and appealing at the expense of genuine self-expression. Being asexy makes you sexy, but being sexy does not necessarily make you asexy.

This has not always been true. When the term "sexy" was in its cultural infancy it meant anything but a two-stepping, thrift-store clad graduate student. Some googling reveals that the term "sexy" first cropped up in publications like the LA times around the early 1920s. World War I had just ended, and the most advanced propoganda machine known to man, headed by Frued's nephew Edward Bernaise, was retasked to sell consumer products in what became the birth of american consumerism. People were realizing that people brought products not just becuase of their functionality, but because of much subtler social drives.

In Hollywood, where the barriers between the mainstream film industry and the porn industry were still paper-thin, people needed a way to describe the fact that stuff with "sex appeal" had a way of flying off the shelves and selling out at the box office. "Sexy" emerged because sex sells. Sex appeal became so ingrained in consumerism, and consumerism so engrained in our culture that what started (possibly) as a tagline for soft-core porn has become intertwined with the way that we think about all sorts of desire. Heirloom tomatoes are sexy. Green jobs are sexy. iTunes apps are sexy.

If "sexy" came to us from consumerism, "asexy" comes from a reaction against it. In the 1960s and 70s, a massive backlash against consumer culture led to a nationwide epidemic of unsexy behavior. Feminists gave sexy Hollywood starlets the finger, shaving their heads and rebelling against a society which defined them in terms of a sexual role in which they were fundamentally uninterested. Gay liberation followed suit, laying the groundwork for a politics of sexual identity founded on self-determination, self expression and unapologetic celebration of any and everything (so long as no one got hurt.) It was with these ideals that the asexual community first began to hobble together, much like the band in the first paragraph, around 2002 and 2003.

This early asexual community was full of people looking for a place to just be ourselves. We didn't want to be alluring or desirable, we just wanted to be validated and celebrated for who we were and to escape from a culture where the mandate to be sexy was often overwhelming. So we got busy celebrating. We busted out the cake and started partying about all of the nonsexual desires that made our lives hum. "Asexy" was our way of giving one anothers' passions an unjudgemental nod. Fly fishing is asexy. Fuck You Penguin is asexy. Your 76-page paper on the composition of medieval brick is asexy.

All of this makes me wonder if it might be time to bring asexy back. Todays hot trends aren't like the Hollywood producers and starlets of the 1920s. They look like steampunk, DIY, the viral YouTube remix and fighting climate change. What's sexy today is sexy precisely because it had the guts not to be. What's appealing isn't showing some skin or flashing some glamour, it's having the chutzpah to have fun keeping it real. More and more people are realizing that living life chasing what's sexy makes you anything but. With any luck, the juggernaught of sexy may finally be grinding to a halt and people may start looking, quietly, for a word to take its place.

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Caveats & footnotes:

• I fully acknolwedge that the majority of bands out there are not just a bunch of dudes, and that in many circumstances a bunch of dudes together in a room is totally sexy. For the purposes of this exercise we're assuming a straight, all-male band totally in it for the chicks.
• Oh god. If you look up "asexy" in the dictionary is my name really there? That's terrifying.
• As my friends will attest it takes me, like, forever to cook anything.

Make Love Not (Necessarily) Sex

I've been nerding out on the history and philosophy of nonviolence.

Sparked (kinda) by Mahatma Ghandi and brought to the US by Dr. King, nonviolence has had a profound impact on the way that we think about social change. The biggest misconception about nonviolence is that it is a form of absolution, swearing off the use of force because hitting people isn't nice. Nonviolence is a tactic. It's a set of principles and strategies for groups to create social change which are, in almost all circumstances, MORE EFFECTIVE than hitting people.

This seems kinda counter intuitive. After all, isn't power ultimately about who has the ability to hit who? Isn't refusing to literally fight for what we believe in a cop-out? Aren't we just yielding power to those willing to use violence to achieve their ends?

Non-violent activists would give a calm, resounding "no" to all of the above. Power isn't about who can hit who, it's about who can stand together. When given the option between a powerful violent group and an equally powerful nonviolent one people will almost always choose the latter. Sure, it takes guts to fight for what you believe in, but it takes even more guts to stand up to anger and violence with compassion instead of retaliation. Standing up to anger and violence this way doesn't yield power to it, quite the opposite. If someone wants to hit you and you show them compassion, they stop wanting to hit you. Effective nonviolence dismantles violence, and in doing so it demonstrates that violence is a lot less powerful than everyone thinks.

I bring this up here because increasingly when I think about what it means to be "nonsexual" the idea of nonviolence comes up. To be clear- unlike violence, sex is NOT a Bad Thing. But like violence, sex is a massive source of fear, power and control in our society. And like nonviolence, nonsexuality can be an extremely effective tactic to dismantle that power. Replace "violence" with "sexuality", "nonviolence" with "nonsexuality" and "social change" with "intimacy" (or vice versa.) When used correctly, nonsexuality can be a more effective tactic to create intimacy than sexuality. This is counter intuitive. We live in a society which largely equates intimacy with sex, which loudly celebrates sex as a THE way to create intimacy in popular media. Sex is a blunt instrument, a way to monitor and control the intimacy that people create without really delving into the reality of what makes that intimacy happen. But the power that sex has is also fundamentally fragile. As someone experienced in the practice of nonsexuality, I have learned that if I respond to sexuality with open, nonsexual compassion the sexuality miraculously dissolves and the other person winds up thanking me for it.

There are some powerful implications here. In our society, both sex and violence are tightly controlled as a way to control the ability of people to create social change and form close connections (two pasttimes which are more than a little connected.) What if nonsexuality works like nonviolence? What if we can go around creating whatever kind of intimacy suits our fancy without regard for society's tight constraints? I'm not suggesting that sexual people start lining up to take vows of celibacy, just that we asexuals should think of the nonsexual stuff that we're doing as more than a form of absolution. Nonsexuality is a tactic. It's a set of principles and strategies for individuals to create intimacy which are, in almost all circumstances, more effective than sex.

What is a Relationship Model?

Relationships are everywhere. We have relationships with our friends and our family. When we go to the store we rely on a relationship with the person at the checkout counter. The onion that we buy got to the store through a (probably complex) relationship between the store and a farm. When it grew, it grew through complex relationships between the plant, the soil around it, and the sunlight and water which rained down on it. And the crazy thing is, none of these relationships ever stay the same. How we buy food from stores is not the same today as it was 100 years ago, and it will probably be different 100 years from now. How the onion relates to the soil around it changes drastically as the onion matures, and has changed in a larger sense as onions have evolved and been selectively bred. 

We're used to thinking of these things as things: stores, onions, sunlight and people, but sometimes it is useful to think of them differently. You can think of the entire chain- from the sunlight hitting the soil to the onion soup you eat at your pot luck- as an interacting series of relationships. Understanding how all of those relationships evolve and change can be just as useful as understanding the things and people involved. 

This is useful because when it comes to relationships, especially relationships between people, we tend to be very very smart. If I ask you to explain the impact of the federal funds rate on housing prices you could probably read 5 articles on the topic and still be scratching your head. But if I ask you how bringing your new girlfriend to Thanksgiving will impact the conversation between your grandma and your uncle, you'd probably be able to tell me. A computer could never do that. People are incredibly complicated, much more so than obscure financial data, but because we have a deep intuitive understanding of the way that relationships work we are able to operate in them remarkably well. Thinking in terms of relationship models allows us to tap into that intelligence and use it to enhance our understanding of just about anything.

A relationship model is a set of expectations about what will happen in a relationship. If I call my friend Sam we will probably make plans to hang out next week. If I go on a date with Lori's sister things may get weird between Lori and I. If I work hard and kiss up to my boss, I may get promoted. If I buy this onion, I can cook with it. Relationship models allow us to confidently take actions in a largely unpredictable world, they consciously or intuitively tell us how relationships work. 

The relationship models that are easy to describe tend to be static. In these relationships expectations are written down in laws, scientific studies, or cultural customs. The relationship between a customer and a teller at the grocery store is one example, in most grocery stores around the world that relationship works in essentially the same way. Science tells us what to expect from the relationship between baking soda and vinegar, legal documents tell us what to expect from the relationship between a corporation and its shareholders. Even these fairly static relationships are constantly being redefined and disputed, which makes laws, science and cultural custom riddled with controversy. 

What's harder, but generally more fun, is thinking about dynamic relationship models. These models describe relationships where what we expect changes radically over time. We generally can't say where the relationship will wind up, but we can develop an understanding of the forces that will get us there. Falling in love is an example of a dynamic relationship model, so is scientific innovation or the development of an ecosystem or market strategy. Dynamic relationship models can't tell us exactly what will happen, often they can't even come close. They tell us what to pay attention to (ie the look in his eye, your gut instinct), and give us guidelines for how to act (keep an open mind, communicate clearly and openly) while we hold on to the changing situation for dear life.

The interesting thing about dynamic relationship models is how much they are similar. Did you notice how "keep an open mind" and "communicate clearly and openly" apply equally well to falling in love, making a scientific discovery and selling a product? It is not uncommon for dynamic relationships in widely differing circumstances to behave very similarly. A dating scene is a little like the trading floor on wall street which is a little like the woods regrowing after a forest fire. Relationship modelling is about finding a common, flexible language to describe those relationships, so that our understanding of one kind of dynamic relationship (building a lifelong friendship) can inform our understanding of another (building a stable company.) 

What are some concepts that you use to think about dynamic relationships?