Announcing a new strategic partnership with the Rite Agency

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Invitation to a dinner with "Friends of the Court Jester" (October 2024)

I've had an interest in the role of the court jester for years and invited others (researchers, artists, whistleblowers and more) with whom I have discussed this ("friends of the court jester") to a dinner in October last year. Someone gave me a tip to check out this artist, Lars Noväng, and I found his website "Frihetsförmedlingen" ("Swedish Public Freedom Service"), which is a hilarious upside-down inside-out version of "Arbetsförmedlingen" ("Swedish Public Employment Service", see image below). 

"The Swedish Public Freedom Service provides an interactive internet platform as well as temporary offices, where ritualistic and bureaucratic behavior in pursuit of freedom can be performed. 

In this way the Freedom Service offers Swedish citizens a useful alternative to the mandatory search for non-existent or imaginary jobs on today’s shrinking labour market they otherwise are required to perform.

Besides supplying and mediating freedom, the Freedom Service runs a R&D Program and also has an obligation to influence the public opinion. 

From 2019 the Swedish Public Freedom Service also has the mandate to oversee and control the level of freedom in Swedish companies and organisations, as well as in public places"

For an English-speaking audience, do check our this project/website, "The Farewell Bureau", where farewell undertakers "help individuals and organizations liberate themselves from codependency with dysfunctional cultural artifacts in society, like belief systems, mindsets and institutions:"

"A ceremonial last farewell of such obstacles is a first important step towards taking a more active role in the coming transition. So, when a person or organization has reached a decision to let go of something, Ars Moriendi can help arrange unique, dignified and memorable farewell ceremonies in order to facilitate the process. The Farewell bureau’s product portfolio also includes grief processing, consulting services on closure management, system and institution liquidation, and – when called upon – specialized palliative care for institutions."

So I invited Lars to join the dinner and he graciously accepted despite knowing basically nothing about who I am and what the dinner was about (he was in fact the only guest that I had not met beforehand). We didn't really have time to talk at the dinner and decided to meet up later (and this belatedly happened only a month ago) and have met twice more since then - including this past week. Lars and I have so many shared interests, but we also inhabit/play different roles in our daily lives (researcher vs artist) and at times also have different perspectives on the same phenomenon. Even when we both want to explore the same phenomenon, we might have very different start points and fall back on different methods.

Lars has however recently started a new project (together with fellow artist Johan Forsman), "Ritkontoret" (Rite Agency), with a focus on making institutionalized behaviors (that can be seen/framed as rites and rituals) visible, understand how they affect and limit us, develop ways of seeing the world from new perspectives, and explore other ways of living (by inventing new rites and rituals). The Rite Agency is an artistic initiative that examines how art can drive societal change through rites and rituals (both unveiling those that exist around us but that aren't recognised as such) and by inventing new rites and rituals that make us think and question that which is taken for granted.

So after a very stimulating meeting at a café a month ago, I got a lot of new ideas and sent over a list with half a dozen concrete suggestions for how we could cooperate. Since me and my colleague Elina now have a platform (a research group, SF Lab (homepage, blog that will migrate elsewhere soon), a master's programme and several different courses), we have several things we can bring to the table, including collaborating in some form around a course. We have just started to explore how we could cooperate, and the discussions themselves are very stimulating - so I'm personally totally content already as-is!

One possibility would be to recruit one or more students who would do their master's thesis with the Rite Agency as client a year from now (equivalent to how many KTH students have companies as clients for their master's theses). Exactly what such a thesis would investigate remains to be seen/specified (and it could be that we can't figure it out and nothing will come of it). But that's just one of several ideas and I'm pretty sure something will be realised this year. What's great with a thesis is that (from my perspective) the Rite Agency would be a client and a site where a student could write a very interesting thesis. The fact that a student would do a thesis with the Rite Agency and whatever comes out of it would be folded into their art project and be presented as "results", so it's a win-win for both us and them. 

So this blog post is basically just a teaser for thing to come - since we are currently exploring different ideas and trying to figure out if/how they could be realised and how each party could benefit from such a cooperation. The great thing here is that the Rite Agency (Lars and Johan) have funding from a call, "Creativity, fantasy and imagination", that allows them to (as far as I understand), do pretty much whatever they deem to be interesting to their project without having specified it in advance. This allows them a large degree of freedom to decide how and where to explore rites and rituals (for example at KTH and in cooperation with us). It also seems to be totally ok for them to take risks and to fail when they explore something - as long as they fail in interesting (unexpected, unpredictable) ways - and make something out of it. Like documenting the failure and tying the outcome back into their artistic work, or using failure as input to explore whatever it was that was revealed in the process - which then perhaps turns out not to have been a failure at all, but the only thing that could have happened... 

Lars often creates something that doesn't exist - except he pretends it does and then makes it happen (like creating the Swedish Public Freedom Service or like me announcing a new strategic partnership with the Rite Agency). When something that has been magicked-into-existence (for example an agency) meets, interacts or possibly collides with people, their ideas, their feelings and with various structures in society, the artistic explorations start. How do people react, what do they think and what do they make out of it? Instead of asking for permission or trying to get a permit, you just make it so and observes what happens (which bears similarities to a Research through Design approach). Or something like that - that's just my interpretation and I have surely misunderstood or misrepresented something since this all doesn't come to me intuitively because I might be too much of a researcher, craving more structure even when I think/fantasise/innovate. This is also why it's interesting to continue to work with and try to understand artistic practices in general and Lars' ideas and methods in particular. 

Dinner with "Friends of the Court Jester" (October last year)

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Monthly report for special freedom to start over 

("månadsredovisning för särskild nystartsfrihet")

Books I've read (Dec - mid-Feb)

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I read books. I exclusively spend the time on my daily commute reading books, and I on average read between two and three non-fiction books per month (my performance goal is to read 25 pages (or more) per weekday and another 25 pages per weekend, for a minimum of 150 pages per week). 

I usually cluster 3-5 books that touch on some specific topic into a "batch", because reading books that relate to a topic and to each other creates a "conversation" between the books I read and it enhances my experience and my learning. The topic of the batch of books I write about below is "collapse" (or the threat/spectre of societal collapse). 

I've in fact published more than 55 blog posts about "books I've read". They used to be a regular feature on the blog and the first such post was published in December 2010 and the latest concerned books I read during the first half of 2017 (but the blog post was published one year later, so I had a year-long backlog of writing about books that I had read). Each blog post always refers back to the previous such blog post so it should be possible to track them all down by following a daisy-chain that travels backwards in time.

Let's say I published all of these 55 blog posts between 2011-2017 (a 7-year long period) and that I published no such blog posts between 2018-2024 (again a 7-year long period). Let's further assume that I on average reported on reading four books in each blog post. That would mean that I read ≈ 220 books during a period of 7 years, or around (or possibly slightly more than) 30 books per year. It could also be that I have read upwards to another 200 books since 2018. I could probably track all or most of them down since I carefully note what day I started and what day I finished reading a book inside the book itself. I might do that - but I'm not going to write blog posts about all books that I have read during the last 7 years! I will however write about books that I read from now on, starting with these four books about "collapse":

Ugo Bardi's book "Before the Collapse: A guide to the other side of growth" (2020) treats a serious topic but does so with wit, wisdom and humor. The starting point of the book is the "Seneca curve" (or the "Seneca effect" or the "Seneca cliff"), i.e. the idea that growth is slow, but collapse is rapid :

    

     

Roman Philosopher Seneca stated that "It would be some consolation [...] if all things would perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid". So "collapse" is "a rapid, uncontrolled, unexpected, and ruinous decline of something that had been going well before" (p.x). Bardi's book is a contribution to the under-researched questions of how things fall apart (a relationship, a company, a nation or a civilisation), i.e. it's a contribution to the non-existent "science of collapse". Over time, most things fall apart and when it's time, one problem leads to another, many things gang up and go bad all at once and collapse ensues. But collapse does not always need to be something that is only bad:

"The basic idea of the Seneca strategy is that the attempts to stave off collapse tend to worsen it. [A] useful skill derived from the Seneca strategy is how collapse can be exploited to get rid of old and useless structures, and organisations. [...] You probably have in mind your government, but it is also possible to think of much smaller systems: plenty of people try to keep their marriage together beyond what's reasonable to do and in many cases divorce, the collapse of a marriage, is the best options. But a company may also become unfit to survive in the market, burdened by obsolete products, outdated strategy, and unmanaged organisation. Bankruptcy is the way we call collapse in this case and, again, it is a way to start again from scratch." (pp.xii-xiii).

The book is full of witty, clever ideas and formulations and it's a treat to read it! Instead of raving about the book, I'll just add a few more quotes from it. If these don't convince you to read the book, then nothing I say will:

"Compulsive gamblers face [a Seneca cliff that] may start from one of the windows of an upper floor of the casino building." 

"Typically, models telling people that they have to change their ways are the most likely to be disbelieved or ignored."

"Monetary insolvency is just a quantified version of breaking a promise."

"Fictionalized catastrophes are surely less threatening than those that are described as likely to happen for real. [...] it may be that the only way for our mind to cope with possible catastrophes to come is to see them as fairy tales."

"The reason why depletion [is] neglected in the debate is [...] the human tendency to discount the future, in other worlds to think that an egg today is better than a chicken in the future."

I thought I would like Jim Bendell's "Breaking together: A freedom-loving response to collapse" (2023) since I very much liked his previous (edited) book "Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos". But I didn't like it very much and it has something to do with the author's voice and his tone throughout the book. As apart of Bardi (above), Bendell takes himself very seriously and it at times feels like he is a zealot and that he believes he is the only person who knows the truth. 

That doesn't mean there aren't many things that are interesting in the book and the first half (chapters 1-7) discuss economic collapse, monetary collapse, energy collapse, biosphere collapse, climate collapse, food collapse and societal collapse. I found the chapter about food collapse particularly frightening with it's enumeration of six global trends that work in parallell, that strengthens each other and that spell bad news for humanity (all 8.2 billion of us); 1) we are hitting biophysical limits of food production, 2) we are poisoning or destroying the biosphere that agriculture depends on, 3) current food production relies on declining fossil fuels, 4) climate chaos is constraining food production, 5) food demand is growing rapidly (and can't easily be reduced) and 6) the industrial food system prioritises efficiency and profits over residence and equity. 

"Many people who have been working on sustainability topics have their income and self-respect enmeshed in the story that they are helping to change organsiations and societies for the better. The possibility that such efforts have failed is a challenge to their identity. [...] Desire to avoid difficult emotions explains why people don't want to accept that we are in an era of collapse. [...] as middle-class professionals we are statistically far more likely to be apologists for the established societal order than working classes or less educated persons" (pp.264-265).

This quote is also about Bendell himself and about his previous career - about a time when he believed that benevolent companies would save the world by adopting and working towards attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or some other such top-down framework. But the quote is also worrying because it implies that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". A lot of knowledge (and a pinch or two of wisdom) is good, but perhaps it's better to know nothing than to know some, but believe you know enough or a lot? This puts a lot of responsibility on me as a university teacher. Am I preaching false hope if I imply that we can fix problems facing humanity? And are my colleagues preaching false hope because they can't handle (their own) difficult emotions of fears for their own and their children's future?

I bought Thomas Homer-Dixon's "Commanding hope: The power we have to renew a world in peril" (2020) because I liked his previous book "The upside of down" (2006) very much. But then I for some reason put it aside and didn't read it for several years. 

Homer-Dixon is a very good writer (not all researchers are), and it was a pleasure to read his book as he weaves different stories together, including the story of Stephanie May, who campaigned against nuclear testing at the end of the 1950's and in the 1960's. She worked tirelessly against all odds because she was convinced she was doing the right thing for her country, her children and all children in the world. So the story of Stephanie May, and a central message of Homer-Dixon's book, is how to find / carve out / create a space that is both "feasible" and "enough" and to work towards what you believe is right even when success seems implausible. And we know we can change the world because it has been done before (lex Stephanie May):

"Instead of giving up on hope, or losing it, we need to find it again, reimagine it, and reinvigorate it as a potential source of strength [but] It should be honest, not delusional; passionate, not weak; astute, not naive, and brave, not timid. Most importantly, if we're going to avoid thet downward spiral of resignation and loss of agency, it must be powerful, not passive. It must give us a real sense of purpose for positive action" (p.60).

I in particular thought that Homer-Dixon's thinking about the connection between uncertainty and hope were surprising, counterintuitive and therefore refreshing:

"While uncertainty can quite reasonably provoke fear - fear of the unknown - it can also give us grounds for hope, because it creates a mental space in which we can imagine positive possibilities" (p.75).

If nothing is pre-determined and if there is uncertainty, then there is also hope - even when things look bleak! 

David Fleming's book "Surviving the future: Culture, carnival and capital in the aftermath of the market economy" (2016) is a curious choice of book, because I have no idea of why I bought it. I must have read about it and become impressed by it, but I have no recollection of where I read about it nor what impressed me. When I read the foreword, I learned that Fleming died in 2010 and that the book was edited and published posthumously. 

Despite the fact that I don't know why I bought it, it was an interesting read. It sings the praise of localism and it's thus not a coincidence that Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Network, has written the foreword. From the back of the book:

"Surviving the future [...] lays out a powerfully different vision for a new economics in a post-growth world. The subtitle - Culture, carnival and capital in the aftermath of the market economy - hints at Fleming's vision. He believed that the market economy will not survive its inherent flaws beyond the early decades of this century and that its failure will bring great challenges, but he did not dwell on this: "We know what we need to do. We need to build the sequel, to draw on inspiration which has lain dormant, like the seed beneath the snow." 

Fleming also assumes that the end (collapse) is not very far away, although he refers to it as "descent", but he doesn't dwell on it because he is already thinking about what comes after. Since Fleming has such an alternative view of the world and of what will become of it, he arrives at and elaborates on many interesting but (again) counterintuitive conclusions of his, which could be disturbing to anyone who is steeped in the current social and economic system and who has problems imagining alternatives:

"The question to consider, therefore, is not whether the crash will happen, but how to develop the skills, the will and the resources necessary to recapture the initiative and build the resilient sequel to our present society. It will be the decentralised, low-impact human ecology which has always taken the human story forward from the closing down of civilisations: small-scale community, closed-loop systems, and a strong culture" (p.8). 

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On finding the balance between imparting despair and hope

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The results of "freak" flash floods in Valencia at the end of October last year.

All in all I'm very happy about my course DM2573 "Sustainability and Media Technology". It could equally well have been called "Sustainability and Computing", but since it's a compulsory course in the Media Technology engineering programme, it's has the name it has. It's also my main teaching commitment every year, and the number of students taking the course has risen over time; last year (Nov-Dec) 135 students took the course - up from 110 the year before. Also, the course has been taught every year since 2012. And while the course evolves and changes every year, it hasn't changed fast enough to keep up with the pace of change in the world and in the student population.

We have a concluding panel debate in the course every year where five invited guests discuss "Images of the future" (e.g. anything and everything sustainability). Some years ago a student asked a difficult question; "knowing what you know, how do you get up in the morning?" and one of the panelist answered:

”I have little hope we can fix the problems, but I still wake up every day and act as if we can change the world. And who knows, perhaps we really can change the world if enough people act this way?” 

I immedately noted down this quote and have it on a slide that I show the students every year. And I love the answer because it starts by establishing a low point ("there is no hope") but opens up to the possibility that there might, in fact, be hope ("perhaps we can change the world [if we work hard together]"). 

So when we started to give the course in 2012, we felt we needed to shake the students up. We were afraid there would be one or more climate deniers (or climate sceptics) in the classroom who would derail the course, and we didn't want to get embroiled in endless discussions about whether climate change was real, whether it was anthropogenic (man-made) or whether it was serious. So our strategy was to hit the students over the head with a flood of unassailable facts that would convince even the most hard-headed student that this was indeed real, that this was indeed serious and that sustainability (including climate change) is the major challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. And we succeeded, but perhaps too well. Perhaps you do need to hit rock bottom to really understand (and feel) that this is real, that this is serious and that this is scary - but you also need to see what your own role could be in making positive changes happen in the world. So lately I have come to believe that we have been successful in getting students to understand the seriousness of the situation, but that we have failed them but making despair convincing - without making hope practical. 

The world has changed and so have the students. While we have toned down the gloominess, the course still hasn't changed enough to meet current students where they are. We don’t really need to convince students anymore that climate change and climate-related environmental disasters are real and that they are serious. Every year there's one or two new disaster right before or during the course. This year it was the catastrophic flash floods in Valencia just as the course started (see image above) and the catastrophic fires in LA. just as the course winded down (see image below).

So if we don't need to convince students that "shit just got real", what then is our task? The scholar and public intellectual Raymond Williams has said that "It is then in making hope practical, rather than despair convincing, that we must resume and change and extend our campaigns" (in his book "Resources of Hope" (1989)). My own take-away version of this is that “It is then in making hope practical, rather than despair convincing, that we must… extend our [teaching in this course]”.

Humanity is in bad spot, we are surely in overshoot and there is a risk that as we wake up to "the century of declines", there will be much suffering in decades to come. But this still doesn't answer the crucial question that I face as a researcher and as an educator and teacher, e.g. “taking all of that into account, what do we do now?”.

So to me as a researcher and teacher who want to do my bit in the transition to a sustainable society, I think my teaching is a better bet in terms of "impact" than my research. I educate engineering students who will start their careers a few years down the road, and I can't think of a task that is more important than to make them care about sustainability - and for at least some of them to care enough to also want to work towards the transition to a sustainable society. And this course (with 135 students) is my single best bet for changing the world, So how do we maximise the chance that taking this course has Positive Effects in the world? More concretely, how should the course be remade to increase the chance that as many students as possible, after they have finished the course, will feel (realistic) hope and a will to act on this hope (rather than, say, despair and passivity)? And what then needs to change in the course to help facilitate such a shift?

This is the starting point of a remake of the course before the next course round starts in a little less than nine months from now. This coming week I will meet up with colleagues who led seminar groups in the course for a two-hour brainstorming session, and I've also invited other people who are familiar with the course - including students who just finished taking it. 

One of the starting points will be the seven questions we spent time discussing at the very last seminar in the course. Students in eight different seminar groups each wrote multiple post-it notes to answer the following questions: 

1) What have you learned in this course about sustainability?

2) What have you learned in this course about yourself?

3) What is the single most important lesson you take away from this course?

4) As the course winds down, what do you feel most optimistic about?

5) As the course winds down, what do you feel most pessimistic about

6) Looking back, what advice would you like to give your younger self two months ago?

7) Looking back, what advice would you like to give your younger self two or five years ago?

So we have collected several 100s of post-it notes that will serve as a starting point for our discussions, and while my colleagues (and students) will help kick this off (there will be ≈ 10 of us), the responsibility to follow through and work with the results, and later to implement changes in the course, falls on me (with input and help from my colleague Elina Eriksson). And I'm ready to take responsibility for this task and hope the changes will make a difference for hundreds of our students in years to come.

#[informative-hashtag], #[motivational-hashtag], #[humblebrag-hashtag]

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Leadership course from hell

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I read a (Swedish-language) essay/article almost two years ago (March 2023) about a "leadership course from hell". It referred to an experiment that was conducted 15 years ago when managers who applied to a leadership course were randomly divided into two different groups. One group attended a traditional leadership course, while the other group were exposed to strong aesthetic experiences that made demands on them and that were hard to understand and take in; texts that were shocking and that clashed with each other, musical performances that complemented or enhanced the texts that that stirred up strong feelings in the audience. The performances were followed by space for discussions between the participants, but with very little guidance and leadership. Some people were disgusted, others were angry and many were confused. The performances forced these managers (who were anonymous to each other) to confront difficult feelings in themselves, like what does it mean to be a leader and what does it mean to be a human being? What would I have done had I been in that situation (as, say, a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp - or one of the guards in that camp)? What guides me in my everyday life, and what is my purpose in life? 

As it turned out, the people who took the traditional leadership course had their pre-existing beliefs reinforced; felt selected and special and distanced themselves from the employees they were meant to lead. They in fact became worse leaders by disengaging and caring less for their employees compared to before they took the course, while those who took the alternate course and experienced the "Shibboleth" performances instead became better leaders. How do we know they became better or worse leaders? We know that because the medial researcher who led the experiment, Julia Romanowska, made before-and-after measurements of a hormone, DHEA-S, that protects people from stress. Her research established that stress levels of both leaders and their employees dropped when the leaders had taken the Shibboleth "leadership course from hell", while they instad rose among employees whose leaders had taken the traditional leadership course. 

All of this happened not because, but despite the participants own experiences of taking these two courses. Those who had taken the traditional leadership course believed they had become more self-confident, as well as humbler and better listeners, while the Shibboleth group became more self-critical, more aware of their responsibility and more unsure about their ability to live up to what their conscience demanded of them.

All of this was extremely intriguing and I therefore bought the book, "Schibbolet-effekten: Ledarskap, konsten och människans ansvar" (2021) ["The Shibboleth effect: Leadership, art and human responsibility"] and read it half a year ago. I had met Julia Romanowska a year earlier and I got in touch with her to invite her to give a guest talk at KTH during the autumn, but it didn't work out for various reasons, and not the least because she has become very busy as of lately (after her book was published). She did mention that she would give a Shibboleth course during the first half of 2024 and that it had become fully booked only two hours after she had announced it on LinkedIn. Fortunately there was a selection process based on a personal application letter, and I felt that I had a good opportunity to write a good letter after I had read her book (and worked with related leadership concepts through Art of Hosting). The course started this past week and I attend it together with a colleague of mine from KTH, Anders Rosén (who also incidentally is responsible for teaching the pedagogical course I started this past week - the topic of my previous blog post!). I have thus been to the first of six meet-ups during the spring and look forward to attend the remainder at the pace of about one per month. 

One difference between taking the course now (compared to the experiments she writes about in the book) is that people back then had no idea what they had signed up for. People were very confused and wondered when the course would start, who had put together this disconcerting performance and what the heck this performance was about? It is different now, I don't think it's possible to attend the course I'm taking without knowing pretty well what you have signed up for in advance. 

All in all, the first day was characterised by three main activities; a Shibboleth performance, repeated solo reflections/journaling, and whole-group discussions (sitting in a large circle). The performance we experienced led to wide-ranging discussions about good and evil, efficiency and dehumanisation, responsibility and moral preparedness, complexity and control, means and ends, perpetrators and victims, forgiveness and reconciliation, life and death, love and hate, friends and enemies, cooperation and competition, collaborators and objectors, secularisation and faith, facts and feelings, body and soul, right and wrong. I look forward to the next time we meet in the course!

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