For several years now, I have been pretty active on LinkedIn. It has offered what felt like a good place to draft concise little blurbs of thought, to workshop and nurture seedling ideas and observations for a fairly responsive network. But in the last year, especially in recent months, I have shifted much of my attention and energy away from that platform and into different venues. LinkedIn started to feel different for me in ways I couldn't exactly pin down. Like... more noise, less signal. I suspect this change in experience coincides with the increase in AI/LLM use and integration. I am of the opinion that these technologies might short-circuit relationality in the sharing of information and artifacts between people.
I will try and explain what I mean by that, beginning with the role of generous postures in relational systems:
When someone I know shares something that they created with me, like a project or a piece of art, I relate to what they've shared informed by my relationship with them. The artifact serves as an interface for our relationship (how I respond affects our relationship), and our relationship serves as an interface with the artifact (how I respond is informed by our relationship). Its meaning to them informs its meaning to me. When someone I know creates an essay or a song or a painting or whatever, I approach what they've shared with a generous posture. I seek to discover what within it might resonate, provoke, move, or inspire, and I am basically never disappointed. It turns out, when you approach anything with this kind of openness, you are bound to find something worthwhile—within it, within yourself, or both. Art is impactful not of its own accord, or purely by its own design, but in the interaction between art and observer. The more open an observer is, the more they earnestly seek opportunity for impact, the more available impact becomes.
This relationship-informed approach to responding to someone else’s expression, which I think of as a generous posture, is one reason I love being in community with artists. The feel of a community (and whether something feels like community in the first place) is informed by the nature of our relationships. Many people never feel like LinkedIn constitutes community or a good place for candid expression. Due to the nature of their connections and what the algorithm feeds them, everything can feel extremely transactive and strategic. To many, that might be feature not bug—if what you’re looking for are transactions, then a transactive protocol seemingly makes sense. Most might never experience what I’m calling generous posture here.
Come to think of it, many people may never experience such a thing after high-school. The brilliant Gordon MacKenzie, in his book “Orbiting the Giant Hairball”, suggests that middle school is around the time we begin to shift the perspectives of children from one of “there is value in everything you create” to one that only celebrates artistic expression that is “correct”, from those who are “good enough”. The ontology of children is socialized to be mutualistic and appreciative only for a brief period in youth (every piece of macaroni art gets a spot on the fridge), but schooling socializes all of us into an ontology that favors “correctness” above all (one should only strive to be an artist if they are capable of producing something “good enough”).
Ironically, we then tend to have very generous postures towards those we’ve designated as artistic geniuses and therefore our collective anticipation that everything they create is a profound work of art becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. We have the capacity make it genius by simply changing our posture toward it.
As I was saying… I started to feel that sense of relatedness waning; so now, much of my energy that was previously going towards LinkedIn is going into places where relationality is prioritized—where “objective” measures of effectiveness or accomplishment (e.g. originality, virtuosity) are always secondary to the relational act of appreciation, and through that relational mechanism, actual appreciation is more likely and more impactful.
Artificial Intelligence effectively disrupts generous postures and relationality for me. As I said, in normal circumstances when someone I know shares something they created with me, I relate to what they've shared informed by our relationship. But when I get the impression that something was generated using an LLM or other AI instrument, my posture towards it changes drastically. I am less prone to consider it through the lens of my relationship with the sharer, and I am less prone to consider how I respond as an aspect of our relationship. This disembodiment of information and artifacts feels like a profound loss for me, even if it were the case that information becomes less error-prone. In my view, relationships simply matter more. A healthy, functional platform of exchange requires this relationality. As I see it, our capacity at collective, relational sensemaking cannot be the price we pay for marginally increased “accuracy”.
What I’m describing here may relate to the view/theory that relationships are that which reality emerges from, rather than reality being something fixed, non-ambiguous, reducible, and undisputable. As the old axiom goes, in ordered systems what matters is the roles of elements; but what matters in complex systems is the relationship between elements. Emergence in complexity describes how properties or behaviors of a system come into being as a result of interactions/relationships between components, despite not actually existing in those parts themselves. Reality emerges quite literally from relationships. And in the same way that a work of art can be said to have myriad meanings depending on the observer’s state and standpoint, those relationships between elements, and thus the number of possible and coexisting realities, can be understood to be a vast and varied field.
I have long been interested in the distinction between relational, mutualistic ontologies and those that seek the primacy of singular perspectives—often claiming to be the “objective” perspective or the view from nowhere—and how those worldviews/ontologies differently inform action. Perhaps “the view from nowhere” is a useful way of understanding the attempt of LLMs. That framing might hold clues to what I’m describing as its tendency to disrupt relationality.
I believe I started to use the term “relationality” after reading Arturo Escobar’s deeply thought-provoking book “Designs For the Pluriverse”. Escobar’s “pluriverse” here is the “vast and varied field” that I referenced above—the parallel and intersecting coexistence of myriad ontologies. His project with this book was to describe how practices of design (which bring into existence artifacts and systems which have an ossifying or colonizing effect on ontology) ought to be inclusive of multiple ways of knowing and context/territory-mindful, rather than grounded in one “placeless” standpoint or worldview (e.g. Western thought, scientism, reductivism, modernity, etc.) He called the praxis which accomplishes this “autonomous design”.
I have also learned that Escobar published a new book this year and titled it “Relationality”, so I will of course be getting that.
If we all occupy parallel and intersecting universes, I picture the sharing of created artifacts like art as invitations into someone else’s perspective, a gateway into their personal universe with its distinct ontology—an opportunity to bridge the gaps between us and, through mutual exchange, create a new intersubjective world in the interaction (reality emerging from relationships). I believe this framing of the power of shared and co-created artifacts came to me by way of
, whose book “Liminal Thinking” was formative for me—it helped me grasp why visual thinking and co-creative practices like mapping together (e.g. experience mapping, journey mapping, Wardley Mapping, etc.) can help us make better sense of what is happening, what it means, and what’s next, using the parallax view—incorporating and therefore achieving coherence with our disparate standpoints.What I’m talking about here—the power, importance, and postures that foster relatedness—extends well beyond just the sharing of art or other expression with connections:
In the domain of leadership I believe that many make the mistake of thinking that decisions ought to be made irrespective of relationship, neither informed by relationship nor particularly concerned with how the decision affects relationship. Within a professional context, we are to relate to one another only insofar as it supports institutional efficacy. Homogenizing notions of “professionalism” seek to flatten our multi-dimensional selves and pluriversal, relational systems into something legible to the institution. The singular standpoint/perspective that people in leadership positions tend to employ is that of the institution. Even if they attempt to use their own standpoint or perspective, as I’ve argued in a previous Substack post, leaders are often effectively colonized by the institutional view:
Even the most competent individual, as they are promoted to roles of greater institutional power, faces increasing constraints on their capacity to apply complexity-coherent approaches to individuals and the social systems that they occupy. A direct supervisor can make sense of their subordinates’ situation and needs through continuous direct interaction, but a squadron superintendent is left to spend most of their time viewing the organization through dashboards and spreadsheets—each individual isolated and reduced to 2-dimensional indicators of “performance” or “readiness” rather than complex beings deeply entangled in socio-relational context and environment. But even the role of direct supervisor within a unit is highly constrained. Front-line supervisors face enormous pressure from those above them to operate as though the system were ordered even when it makes absolutely no sense to do so."
I will add to this the observation that individuals often become significantly more complexity-coherent and relationship-focused upon reaching a terminal rank/position or losing interest in promotion. The moment the institution no longer has absolute control over a person’s future livelihood, it can be like a switch has been flipped—a shift in perspective often follows.
So this effect that I’m describing—the tendency of leaders to lack complexity-coherence in their sensemaking around dealing with the individuals in their charge—could this ineptitude be understood as an emergent property that arises out of the relationship between leaders as individuals and the institution that employs them?
Let’s get back on track…
In pursuit of that sense of relationality, the one I found waning on LinkedIn, more of my energy has been going to smaller, more intimate online spaces, with more connection, more signal, less noise. I find myself attending to small discord channels with friends and creative collaborators. I check in on my favorite creators on Patreon because their expressions feel candid and uncalculating (that’s why I follow them). And then of course I’ve been here—on Substack—writing my little essays about whatever this is about. One of my favorite aspects of this platform is in how connected I have started to feel to other essayists, who can be very responsive when invoked.
As part of this recent reflection on where my energy is going and why, I looked back at my writing on Substack so far this year—13 pieces published since January, with a gradually growing subscriber base (thank you!). This is feeling like it has value and potential. It offers me an effective way to refine, nurture, and explore my and others' thinking in ways that grow and evolve into what feel like more mature and beautiful structures (though perhaps at times just more confusing ones).
In my first post of this year on Substack, "Reflecting on a Year", I found myself drawn again and again to
That first essay of the year focused a lot on the value of long-term goals (finite games) versus the smaller arcs of infinite games—those things which are continuing, which are valuable in and of themselves, regardless of whether they potentiate some grander, fixed and pre-determined outcome. Here’s a relevant excerpt of that essay, starting with an exchange between McGilchrist and Vervaeke:
Iain McGilchrist:
“So when we come to talk about purpose and its relationship with meaning, what I would say is, first of all, to make the distinction, which really, we've made, but it's the distinction between Carse’s finite games and infinite games. Finite games have a purpose and when you’ve achieved it, the game is over. Infinite games are things that have their value in being performed at all, and therefore eternally have that value. We've got locked into the type of belief that everything is a finite good, which it very clearly can't be, and the things that give us meaning, I think, are for very obvious reasons not specifiable as extrinsic goals: we should try and do this and make that, and so on.”
John Vervaeke:
“John Keats made a distinction between goals and ideals and the word “purpose” equivocates between them. A goal is an end state that everything else is in the service to, and it's utilitarian, where an ideal is not. An ideal is something that is part of the grammar by which you interpret and make sense of yourself in your life.”
Goals… the topic at hand every year this time of year, and the subject of maybe 50% of LinkedIn traffic the rest of the time—the strategic underpinnings, abstractions from the future intended to attenuate our attention, drawing it away from the present and into a future anchored to abstractions about the past—the most effective technology at hand to turn what might otherwise be a fluid and shifting life into a series of finite games.
In that essay, I arrived at a notion which I found reflected again in the piece last week about the book "Never Let Me Go", the idea that we ought to be attending to meaning in the mundane—the smaller arcs of that which is continuing—rather than subordinating meaning to greater arcs—hopes of great accomplishment or peak experience, the pursuit of which so often comes at the expense of that which is (ought to be) continuing—infinite games which (ought to) comprise the majority of living, which are valuable in and of themselves, irrespective of output or systemic effect. I think this might be a way of understanding the pitfalls hinted at in my essay from May, "Stop Making Sense"—the tendency we have to subordinate the present to the future, vying for some great goal or accomplishment or clarity or becoming, so much that we fail to live and appreciate and be and attend to the continuing and ultimately irreducible present.
That essay was also (in part) about LinkedIn—about the unspoken rules (doxa) of the platform—the design which (as Escobar describes) designs us, which colonizes our thinking so that we constrain ourselves (and one another) to behave only in ways which perpetuate its underlying ontology—which is transactive and finite rather than mutualistic and infinite.
So if it's not clear (it likely isn’t...) the way I'm thinking about it is like this: in a relational community, we respond to one another on the basis of our relationships. What matters to you matters to me, because you matter to me. When someone shares something, we respond on the basis of it building relationship and achieving effects the sharer might be seeking in the present. The interaction holds value in its occurrence in the present, not specifically because it serves some longer-term goal (thus infinite game), but its inherent relationality, it does potentiate more interactions of its type and logic.
In a place/platform like LinkedIn, mostly people are posting things in the interest of future accomplishment (finite games). They are responding only to those things which fit their niche (niches mostly being oriented around success-goals) or to showcase their own competence (which helps potentiate future success). Even “relationships” are built there mostly on the premise that they will serve some future goal (networking for the sake of job-seeking or business development). So everyone is effectively colonized and constrained by the underlying ontology of the platform. Add to this the disembodiment of information facilitated by AI/LLM use and integration, and we cease to be any longer people relating to other people. We become mere representations of abstractions and institutional goals, without personality or individual point of view, conveying ideas and expressions of the perspectiveless LLMs in a manner that might approach thought and discourse, but is even less real (being less embodied) than the “simulated thinking” described by Jordan Hall.
I’ll take the joyful, flawed exchange of friends and fellow amateur artists over that any day.
Thanks Daniel, I really enjoyed this article and being a people person myself, strongly relate to your perspective and choice to choose the personal over the ai relations. Mart