Tools For Building

A Tribe Blog entry from 20th January 2024

Despite me taking a few days to visit family, this week has still been a pretty significant one, with the release of a new poem and the migration to Substack.

The move away from posting poems directly to website was quite a sudden decision, including for myself. I feel it’s worthwhile using my Tribe Blog for this week to talk about this, as well as some of my thoughts on how we are using technology, and ways in which we can make it serve us rather than us serving it.

What Do I Stand For?

Let’s begin with Monday, and the release of the poem “Battle or Build?”. The inspiration from this poem came directly from an article that my good friend Rain Trozzi wrote some time ago from Over To The Youth, entitled “Battle or build | What do I stand for?” I would link it here, however, the article is currently unavailable on Over To The Youth while the project undergoes maintenance, and he is yet to share it on his personal Substack, which I’ll link below as a not-so-subtle hint for him to add it on to there (he is a Tribe member so will hopefully be reading this!)..

Rain’s piece concerns the difference between being “against” a cause and being “for” a cause, correlating with the “battle” or “build” aspects respectively. It concerns itself with an experience Rain had of someone trying to use an “against” mindset against him to show themselves as a morally superior force. He suggests, however, that a constructive “for” mindset would have been far more beneficial for everyone. Here’s a relevant quote from his piece:

It is like armies and castles. Armies are there to tear down the castles, and castles are there to produce resources and wealth, stockpile supplies and protect the villagers from the armies. The army must take the castles to be profitable, but the castles are perfectly happy during times of peace – much more so. I´m sure there are good armies and bad castles, and bad armies and good castles, but ultimately the army is temporary, and the castle is ever lasting. What is more meaningful? To take a life, or to lay a cornerstone?

Battle or build | What do I stand for? - by Rain Trozzi

Being very sympathetic to this approach myself, I wrote “Battle or Build?” to capture this same conversation and idea, but posed in a new format and with additional context. If you haven’t seen the piece yet, please give it a read below.

Battle or Build?

Building With Purpose

Monday also saw the move to Substack from my main site. Substack offers a route for a far cleaner implementation of the Tribe functionality and for archiving newsletters than what I am currently able to provide on my own. Combined with the social benefits of being on Substack and being able to engage with other writers, it was a move that made sense for me given the current state of this venture. I’m open to reviewing this as the situation changes, but for now this will be my home.

The drawback of relying on Substack is that I have sacrificed control over the visibility of my poems; in theory, Substack could take down anyone’s writings at any time. Having my poems purely on my own website means I didn’t have to think about this solution. This poses a challenge for the idea of “digital sovereignty” - the idea that we have appropriate control over the digital extensions of ourselves.

Ask me to shift my content from a platform I control to a platform I don’t a year ago and I probably would have said “no”. However, I am more and more considering the context of time. If using a platform like Substack will allow me to reach others and get my poems out in a more effective way than just on my website, that is ultimately a greater service to the move towards increased personal sovereignty than otherwise. I consciously choose to use Substack, but I am also not bound to it permanently should it make sense to transition to a hypothetically more “digitally sovereign” setup.

This is the same reason why you can now find me on Instagram. To be clear, I do not like Meta as a company. What I do like, however, is being a bridge from that world into what many of us are now looking for build. I do believe in meeting people where they are that, and this is one avenue for doing such. I also believe there will be a time where systems like Instagram and that data-harvesting moderation-heavy model will crumble. So why not use it while it’s still here in aid of that crumbling?

Technology as a Tool

The conceptualisation of technology as a tool, seen in my use of Substack and Instagram, has been a theme for my personal life this week to. I’ve been on the no-smartphone life for well over a year now, and I’m very grateful to have made that decision. However, I am now seeing opportunities and routes whereby it makes sense to have a smartphone for very specific purposes. As such, there is a second-hand smartphone on its way to me. I have returned to the dark side.

I do plan to do some serious work with it to ensure the phone is serving me and not the other way round - something the no-smartphone life has prepared me well for. I’ll be using custom software for improved privacy and security, as well as only having the most critical applications installed. Similarly, I’ll be keeping up a lot of my no-smartphone habits, such as leaving my phone at home when I can, or leaving it turned off. This, to me, is true digital sovereignty - being able to set lines so we can use the tools at our disposal and for our benefit without being beholden to them.

This is also reflected in my approach to AI. The eagle-eyed of you will note that the art for both “Black Dog” and “Battle or Build?” is AI-generated. The art used on my upcoming book, “Born Anew”, also uses AI (more on this next week!).

Both these pieces used Canva to generate images based on text prompts.

I see many comments both publicly and privately about how AI is supposedly inherently evil and exists only as a means of destroying human creativity and flourishing.

I disagree.

Firstly, “AI” is not sentient. AI is simply a set of clever programming techniques and design principles that allows a program to iterate on data that has been fed into it in creating something “new”. AI is nothing more than a tool. As I allude to in “Battle or Build?”, an axe can chop wood to help build a house, or it can be used to slice into people. The tool is just a tool - it is not inherently evil, nor inherently good. What matters is the intention behind the use of these tools.

Could AI be used to harvest data from people and then be used in a way that takes people’s livelihoods away from them. In theory, yes. But it will be other people who use AI to destroy the lives of others, not the AI itself. I am using AI to create potent visuals to accompany my poetry. I am not gifted when it comes to visual art. AI is therefore expanding my capabilities to help me enhance my creative works. In how I’m using it, AI is in service of my human creativity. Again, this is digital sovereignty.

The fearmongering that we see around AI strikes me as yet another control narrative. Why else would we see the likes of Google and the WEF talk about how dangerous AI supposedly is? Do we really think their intention here is to side with humanity, given how all their other actions and sentiments carry a particular anti-human element with them?

I suspect the AI fear narrative is being driven to create legal and financial barriers to individuals and organisations looking to use AI for good, creating a scenario where only the “Big Tech” firms have the resources to navigate those minefields. They can position themselves as a “trustworthy force”, playing a vital role in keeping the invisible threat of AI at bay.

Sounds familiar, right?

Creating The Future

As I mentioned earlier, most of this week has had me away from home seeing family. As I postulated in my previous Tribe Blog post, I did indeed find time to write a few new poems. One of these I have chosen to enter into a competition, so I can’t share that with you just yet. Another I am about halfway through, and need to do some more work on to finish.

There is one other finished poem that I am very happy with, and I feel is timely given some of the recent developments we have seen with some of the figures purporting to represent “freedom”. It’s not one that belongs in my upcoming book, which will be the focus of next week’s Tribe Blog, but it is an incredibly important one. Look out for that on Substack soon.

That wraps up this week’s Tribe Blog. Until next time, my friend.