Ten years later, Craigslist is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to technology and the social contract.

Transcription

1 Rev. Julia Hamilton Technology: Promise or Peril Delivered at the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara on September 20, 2015 About ten years ago, I was invited by my sister to join her at a conference in San Francisco. It was called the Nonprofit Boot Camp, and it was hosted by the Craigslist Foundation. You may be familiar with Craigslist, the online local marketplace for everything from apartments and furniture to jobs and singles ads. It s the modern equivalent of the classifieds in the newspaper, but with a kind of community-building spirit that is as much about encouraging local connections as it is about selling your old car. It started in San Francisco, but now there is a Craigslist for just about every town in the United States as well as many all over the world. This is a short sampling of some of the things that I have obtained on Craigslist over the years: An apartment. A car. A gliding rocker for the nursery. Bunches of baby things. An apartment for a week in Paris. Patio furniture. A bedframe. And here are some of the things I have sold or given away on Craigslist: A car. A gliding rocker for a nursery (yes, the same one, two years later). An accordion. A chair from Ikea. Bunches of baby things. So I was intrigued when my sister invited me up for one of the first conferences hosted by Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and a cheerleader for the way technology is changing the nonprofit world. I don t remember much in detail about the workshops I attended, or the keynote speech by Craig himself, but I do remember the sense of optimism and promise that he conveyed. He was buoyant, energetic, and really wanted the people in the room to embrace the potential that new technology was opening up. He was an evangelist for the human spirit, for basic community goodness facilitated by technology. Craigslist, after all, only works if the good experiences outweigh the bad, it only works if the collective usefulness of the site outweighs the few people who will try to scam you. It was one of the first places that I encountered an online community-based system for keeping people with bad intent at bay, where any user can flag posts that are not appropriate. In its own way, it is a covenantal based system, just like we are. It is about how you behave, not what you believe or who you are, and it is the community s responsibility for establishing the behavioral guidelines. Just like here, all people of goodwill are welcome, and it works because it relies on the social contract. The technology is just the tool that enables people to help each other out in a convenient way. Ten years later, Craigslist is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to technology and the social contract. I am not an early adopter. I m not the last person on the tech bandwagon, but I m not the first either. My sister is the one I rely on to point me in the right direction, to see where we are headed with all this. She is the one who participates in organizations with names like The Institute for the Future and writes papers on how distributed systems will impact leaders of nonprofits who are used to top-down management. I remember a story she told me from the first Institute for the 1

2 Future conference she attended, where all the participants were given little rings, little pieces of jewelry, that had information coded into them and you had to go to a booth with your ring and it activated some piece of a larger puzzle, and only if everyone at the conference activated their ring would the whole picture be revealed. Secret decoder rings, 21st century style. She was very excited as she shared this with me, many years ago, explaining that the rings were are metaphor for how the future is going to be all about distributed information, rather than centralized power. But now, now it feels like the shine has worn off some of that promise. I swing wildly back and forth between marveling at what we can accomplish with technology, being amazed that I am able to carry the world in my pocket with this phone, and being terrified that I am standing on shaky ground and that my individual humanity feels so small and frail up against this onrush of powerful global interests that are also taking up residence right here in my pocket with this phone. I went out to lunch last week with the venerable Thepo Tulku, a Tibetan monk who lives here in Santa Barbara. We got to talking about technology, and how it has been instrumental in his life as part of a culture in exile. Thepo relocated to a monastery in India as a small child after fleeing Chinese occupied Tibet, and he has lived in California for many years, working to maintain Tibetan culture and traditions across continents and time zones. He described how things have changed over the years. In the 1980s, communication was very expensive. Calling home to his family in India, or talking with people in Tibet, would mean hundreds of dollars in phone bills. Now, calling overseas is no longer a financial burden, and video conferences have greatly improved his ability to stay in touch. Not only that, there are groups of monks that use messaging tools to have conversations online, across the world, in ways that would never have been possible even just a few years ago. Imagine 200 Tibetan monks talking to each other, each from their own phone, recreating a community that the Chinese government tried to destroy fifty years ago. But he mentioned something else that happens. The connections with people across the globe are stronger, he said, but sometimes at the expense of connections with the people who are right in front of you. There was an equanimity in his voice as he shared this observation. It was not a judgment, not a criticism of smartphones or a tsk-tsk about the bad manners of people who check facebook too often. It was just an observation of the trade-offs that have come with our new ways of being. I seemed to me to be an invitation of sorts, an invitation to consider what it means to be sitting with someone, physically in the same space, while also being tethered to a wider community that interacts primarily through technology. We were in the same world and yet both of us were also, simultaneously, in another, completely separate network. All of a sudden, I was keenly aware of the restaurant. I was aware of the teapot sitting on the table between us, the chai that the waiter always respectfully poured for us as soon as the cup was half empty. I was aware of the other people at their tables, talking or sitting alone or, of course, on their phones. I was aware that I, a Unitarian Universalist minister, was sitting with a man who had been raised in a monastery from childhood, who had been in exile since he was 5 years old, 2

3 who straddled a life of traditional, disciplined practice and modern, adaptive engagement. And I admired his equanimity about it, the way that it was all just part of being alive right now. It was the practice of nonattachment in action. His holiness the Dalai Llama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and one of the most popular religious figures of our time, has had much to say on the subject of the modern age. He has always been interested in the relationship between science and Buddhism, and he has embraced communication technology in very forward thinking ways. Thepo described how wonderful it was to be able to see and hear the Dalai Llama on a regular basis through his talks and teachings online, whereas before he would have only been able to see him when his holiness happened to be traveling in the United States. The internet has given the Dalai Llama a global platform, even after his local power was stripped from him so many decades ago. But he has cautioned that our use of technology is only as good as our motivations: If we 7 billion human beings rely only on material development, we can t be sure of a positive outcome. If we employ technology motivated by anger and hatred it s likely to be destructive. It will only be beneficial if we are motivated positively to seek the welfare of all beings. Human beings are the only species with the power and potential to destroy the world. It is because of the risks involved in indulging in unrestrained desire and greed that we need to cultivate contentment and simplicity, which is why our religious traditions teach self-discipline. Therefore, we need to consider our actions more carefully. Perhaps this morning s sermon has arisen from that request of the Dalai Llama s, to consider our actions more carefully. Perhaps you are a technology evangelist, like Craig Newmark, and see the promise of our technological development as a generally positive thing. The advances in medicine that alleviate suffering. The ability to connect across the globe, to see and know more about the diversity of human experience than ever before. Perhaps you find yourself on the more skeptical side, seeing the potential for environmental and social destruction that we have created. Our technology is outpacing our ability to understand all of its side effects, and we may get caught in a cascade of unpredictable consequences. Perhaps, like me, there is a twinge of fear underneath all this, and a little bit of resentment about having to change so much so fast. For example, I have decided to wait out twitter, hoping that it will be overtaken by something else before I have to figure it out. But I might as well have titled this sermon Reality: promise or peril? because technology, like life, is always both, and neither. As the Dalai Llama said, it has both potentialities within it. And I am trying to follow his example, holding on to an open mind and embracing useful tools while being mindful that there 3

4 are dangers as well. On a personal level, this means that I am working on letting go of the fear, and having more faith in what I believe to be true about human nature. That is to say, that Craig Newmark was on to something when he believed that people usually, mostly, just want to help each other out, and that as a species, we can be pretty good about setting up a social contract that keeps our community functioning. And it renews my commitment to the work that we do here, in our community. The work of welcoming and including all people of goodwill in our covenant of love, in our quest for meaning. And it renews my belief that the community we create here can be aided by technology, but it is not created by it. The real purpose of being here resides underneath all the tools that we may use. The Institute for the Future is working on a new research project called Technology Horizons. It describes a future where media and connectivity is everywhere: From always-on smartphones to networked teddy bears to digital interfaces integrated into our own bodies, we are becoming immersed in a cloud of communications. Over the next decade, the ways we collaborate, connect, and communicate will multiply and decouple from the limits of place, time, and even language. Fragmentation will accelerate as we struggle to communicate meaningful data in glanceable forms, amidst constant competition for our time and attention. Meanwhile, collaboration has never been more important as we re increasingly called to work across generations, geographies, scales, and even with bots and machines. Ok, so that paragraph gives me twinges of that fear, that fear of being propelled into change that I m not sure I want or need, but seems to be inevitable. But then I reread one part of that description: Fragmentation will accelerate as we struggle to communicate meaningful data in glanceable forms, amidst constant competition for our time and attention. And I think about how this place works. What is meaningful data here at the Unitarian Society? And more importantly, what does it mean to communicate in glanceable forms? In the context of the quote, I think they are talking about the way we glance at our phones, swipe up and down, short bursts of attention in an overstimulated media-saturated world. But in our context here, I find that it could mean something very different. The most information that I ever get in a glanceable form is when I look at another person, alive and real and in front of me. How much can be communicated in a glance between two people, rather than between a person and a screen? Do you remember the first time you glanced at someone you love, how much information was in that glance as your eyes met? Do you remember what it means to glance at the face of a child who is absorbed in their work, how much you can see in a quick glimpse of their world as they 4

5 bend over a coloring book? Have you sat in a connection circle, and glanced up as someone shares a meaningful experience and you see in their face the echoes of feelings that you, too, understand, and in no more than a fraction of a second, you are able to fully get it, all at once, just by the expression on their face? This is meaningful data in a glanceable form, right here. If the Institute for the Future is right, and we are going to be increasingly fragmented and decoupled from time and language and generation and geography, this hour becomes even more precious to me. This community of face-to-face possibility becomes critical in my life. And whatever technological tools we find that let us connect to this community, we can embrace them as the tools they are, but not ever think they will replace this face to face reality. If we can use media and databases and texts and smartphones to communicate more effectively, we will work with it, and yes, that might mean learning a few new tricks and maybe I ll even have to learn to love twitter. But behind every form of communication we use, there is another heart beating, another soul growing, another mind reaching out. It is the reality of our presence together that transforms us, that feeds us and nourishes our spirit. It is the interaction with the real, with the real truth of our flesh and blood selves, that challenges us to become better human beings and that awakens us to wonder and mystery. Our primary religious text has always been humanity itself. Human experience, religious experience, filtered through the technology for every age. We have more doorways into this text than ever before, but the primacy of who we are has not disappeared. And so to live fully in this day and age is to release the fear of technology, and to release the promise of it, too. Too much hope or too much fear placed in a technology will lead us away from where hope and fear really live, which is within humanity. Our role is to be together on this human quest, to be in relationship as we grow our souls. 5