Leadership and Writing and Praxis
The beauty of the praxis project is that although I am clearly trying to incorporate a lot of different aspects of communication science into one holistic praxis, the ultimate praxis I’m aiming to cultivate is one of simply writing, and so I’m not burdened anything other than ensuring that the words that I feel need to be written get written — and I’m most fundamentally doing this with myself as the audience. I’m hopeful that others can see the value of the work I’m trying to do, but at the end of the day I’m driven toward this work because more than anything else, I believe in the power of the written word.
When one has that disposition, it’s extremely difficult to write about anything commercial without feeling like it must be balanced out by the sort of hard and purposeful work that comes from leading oneself. In the same way, by writing in this manner we are liberated to enter deeper into a flow state that allows us to forget the information being extended to us by the universe, instead focusing on the lived multiplicities inside oneself.
Paralyzed by Universal Multiplicities
Want to feel these multiplicities within yourself in the modern age? There is no real way, but perhaps you could go from writing about topics like virtue and technology and philosophy to listening to hyperpop music to working out to playing video games. The experience of the human condition at the present moment can be absolutely enthralling and heartbreaking, a twisted and tortured and cripplingly beautiful dream that is as necessary to behold as our own eternal fantasies and delusions.
A spiritual existence divine however — and it is more metaphysical to cultivate, something beyond the aspects of virtue that can be easily accessed. To fully elucidate a metaphysics is the stuff of machines, which when initiated in the manner of written language (and soon, graph-based communication) can further bias the development of such richer systems toward the cultures we strive to manifest.
What you end up experiencing when you endeavor into a more spiritual digital realm is a reality that altogether more jumbled and random but also rich and beautiful than the one we can experience today. What’s amazing though is the extent to which the written word is practically the only way that we can build such alternative realities into existence, and so any world builder necessarily needs to document the entirety of the system they want to configure. I personally believe this configuration can be developed through the practice of regular writing, accompanied by a thoughtful consideration of one’s virtues and perspective.
It is the stuff that one can expose oneself to when one wants to experience the abundance of the digital and therefore natural world. Sure, we can experience purely nature environments and cultivate an appreciation for the physical world, but this should also instill within us a sense of awe, wonder, and reverent responsibility toward the written word, since the written word is the more in which we can most precisely articulate lived reality.
In this way, writing is a liberating force that we should maintain as a virtue for the modern world. It is something that extends beyond Platonic virtues, instead closer to the ideals with which we have come to understand ourselves — we need to distill reality down to abstractions that allow us to make sense of complex topics in their written form, because these these foundational tools for thought allow us to think about complex internal struggles like virtues and emotions in greater depth. This timeless pursuit of a virtuous life is then meaningfully extended with an approach to knowledge and inquiry that resolves some fundamental dilemmas of the Socratic method. As this project aims to demonstrate and explain, today we are able to combine ancient philosophy and modern technology to cultivate more productive new methods of living virtuously in the world; reify a decentralized vision of the Internet; and even generate meaningful progress communication theory toward beneficent artificial intelligence.
Believing in the Technology (of the Written Word)
I believe that by writing about our lived experiences in a focused, slow-knowledge, high-fidelity manner, we can meaningfully improve the debate around complex topics like intersectionality and reason.
Thing is, I also believe there are tools that can help us do these things better — techniques that I believe can help us better understand ourselves in the context of the world.
For me, graphs are a moral thing — they are simply the most adequate tools for helping people communicate and understand complex topics that they keep coming back to. The ideas that can haunt you because they cannot be stored in a manner that allows for interaction and manipulation of small pieces of information.
I find this most important when inspecting decisions that I’ve made and how I confused theories about the world with more cardinal virtues about the nature of our existence on this planet.
For instance, in blogging about heavy topics like virtue and morality, I really don’t want it to sound like I’m just justifying my own poor decisions. Yes, I feel as though I have made deep internal miscalculations, and I feel bad if my relative silence and quietude in questing for knowledge has rendered me man of lesser character in the eyes of people I respect and admire. But you have to understand that throughout this whole affair, I candidly did not believe we had the tools to do such deep and important abstraction. Because our society had not yet developed a system through which leaders could understand themselves in the context of modern complexities (such as the digital age, neoliberalism, the anthropocene, etc.), I could therefore forgive myself for not knowing myself — and I could compel myself to go out West in near-religious pursuit of these tools.
For this same reason, I believe that humans cannot be expected to process, synthesize and interpret their own multiplicities or the complexities of lived experience. We don’t have the tools to model reality in a fashion closest to how it appears, and so we write or we use numbers or diagrams — but a clever and convenient implementation of the graph visualization is something that has not been around until recently. Today we are able to take notes about ourselves in a manner that we can trust will be conveniently located within a structure similar to how our minds interpret it. This may sound like a subtle shift, but I can assure you that if approached properly, you can use this simple technique and approach to note-taking to help you become more productive than you could have ever imagined.
To do this most assuredly, one must become in touch with oneself in the pursuit of writing the words that mean the most. When you tweet, you don’t communicate or think as oneself, because that is not what the platform is for. This is a manner of thinking, of approaching and learning about the world, that I believe is the starting point to taking notes and becoming more essentially productive in the age of the graph-enabled knowledge worker.
The same is true of technical writing, but I frankly just don’t believe it’s as essential as the writing that can be done more internally in the hearts and mind. I used to believe this made me excused from taking on the work of really understanding my virtues, principles and beliefs, because I did not have the tools to think with the features I needed.
The power of thinking through writing is that that it unlocks an ability to communicate in a higher fidelity register, liberating one to engage in a connected experience close to one’s holistic spiritual manifestation. I think this is a supremely overlooked aspect of the written word that will make it a key component of the future of artificial intelligence. When people are better able to encapsulate the complexities of lived reality using the written word (not to mention graph-based visualizations of language) we are able to understand the human condition in more vivid detail, and the reverence this affords compels us to become better people as a result.