Book Talk On Relationality
Speaker 1: Awesome. Welcome, everyone, to MediGov Seminar. These are weekly research seminars hosted by the MediGov community, a laboratory for digital governance. And my name is Val Elefante. I take she or they pronouns, and I'm a community lead at MediGov. It's my total honor and pleasure today to be hosting this seminar and facilitating us in a discussion about a book that recently came out...
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Transcript
Awesome. Welcome, everyone, to MediGov Seminar. These are weekly research seminars hosted by the MediGov community, a laboratory for digital governance. And my name is Val Elefante. I take she or they pronouns, and I'm a community lead at MediGov. It's my total honor and pleasure today to be hosting this seminar and facilitating us in a discussion about a book that recently came out that I really, really love called Relationality. We have the author here, David Jay. We're going to be yeah. Here's the book. We're going to be discussing this book, some of the themes in the book, concepts that David has put forth, and kind of relate those concepts to a lot of things that we talk about and think about a lot in the MediGov community space. So, welcome, folks. Thank you for joining. And, yeah, let's dive into it. How the format will basically be about a twenty minute book talk format. So, I've prepared some questions for David. And so we'll do that, and then we'll open it up to questions from y'all. So as you have questions, feel free to type them in the chat or just type the word stack in the chat, and then you'll be added to the list. And we'll go in order based on who has raised their hand basically first. So feel free to get your your notes note taking tool out so that you can post your questions, and we can have an awesome discussion. Cool. So we did intros, announcements, and now it's time to begin. So, yeah, like I said, it's my honor to bring David j here into the the space, or DJ. David is a LGBTQIA plus organizer and activist, has been for many years, particularly when it comes to the asexual community and bringing the IA plus part of the, or the A plus part into the LGBTQ spectrum. We first connected back when I was working on a project with the Solutions Journalism Network. And I bring that up because at that time, solutions journalism was this kind of paradigm shifting concept for me that I think in a lot of ways, relationality is a very similar concept. It's it's a lens through which, ever since I read your book, David, I feel like it's changed the way that I look at almost everything in my life. So, if you don't know about solution journalism, they're great. Relationality is kind of another lens here that David brings forth in this book that is really powerful. So I'm really excited to bring it here to the space with you all. I reached out to David, and he invited me on a he was visiting Brooklyn and invited me on a walk. And so I think that speaks to the way that he, just off the jump, was, like, super eager to be in relationship with someone who had expressed interest or opened up this inquiry into his work, and and we went on a walk around Herberbon King Park in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, which was really special, and I will truly never forget that. So, yeah, basically, I I have prepared a I'll let David introduce himself, and then I'll kind of give a a short summary, five minute summary of the book and some of the key concepts that stuck out to me. And then I have about four or so questions. But David, I would love to hear you just briefly introduce yourself and and your work.
Thank thank you so much, Val. Always really great to be in touch with you. I've been following the work of the Medigar Medigarv Summoner for quite some time, after talking with Nation Snyder. Huge fan of the really necessary work that you all do. And there's so much I want to learn from you all. I think questions of governance are a a a place where that feels so important that I wanna explore in my work. So really really honored to be here. Really excited for our discussion today. And, I guess I'll introduce myself. The book, though, the the book sort of comes out of my journey from loneliness to relational power. I started as, as Val mentioned, I'm I identify as asexual. I started as this ace kid who really was told that I'd be alone for my whole life. Was told that relationship was not a thing I could access because I wasn't building relationships that were romantic or sexual. And so I've been on a journey to redefine for myself what relationship is, so that it's a thing that I can form. And along that journey, I not only learned to form personal relationships, like I now have this beautiful three parent family. I do a lot of work around communities of care. But I discovered organizing. I helped to build a community that became the central gathering point for ace people. And I got to see how bringing people into relationship, especially people who felt isolation or had a part of themselves that felt isolation, felt isolated. Bringing people into relationship was this immensely powerful way not only to heal us, but to build collective care and ultimately collective power. And that arc between connection care and power is one that's really driven me in my life, and has seemed incredibly transformational. It opens up new possibilities for creativity. It opens up new possibilities for healing, and it opens up I think, really necessary new opportunities for governance. So, my work and the work of my book really focuses on the question of if connecting people is so powerful, why is it so hard to get paid to do it? Why is it so hard to fundraise for this work? Why are institutions sort of almost like I talk about relational invisibility? Why are they often unable to see something that for me, for so many people I know is so necessary and so powerful? But one of the questions that I get to in my book that I'm really excited to dive into in more detail here is questions about what becomes possible in governance when we create spaces where people connect and build trust. How that create how that opens up pathways and demands us to go down pathways away from authoritarianism and centralized power towards something else. And I talk some about how that exists in the movements that I build, but, this question of, like, how we govern when we are prioritizing building relationship is one that's very open and raw for me, then I'm excited to be open and raw with y'all about today.
Awesome. Yeah. So I would love to start with just a brief summary, especially some of the concepts. Like I said, these are to me have been, like, really paradigm shifting concepts that you introduce, and ways that you redefine relationship in the book. So a few of those for me, I mean, you have a whole chapter on kind of what are relationships, and you propose that they are inspired by Octavia Butler, who is an author I'm actively reading right now, which is cool to kind of read in conjunction with your book. But relationships are basically when people change each other, right? So I think that that is a really powerful framework for thinking about relationships. Another definition that you propose is about people kind of invested in figuring out how to spend meaningful time together. I love both of those. I think they work really well. And I loved I think it was in your book talk where you said you tried to kind of look up, like, on Wikipedia what a relationship is, and it was like, do you mean this type of relationship or this type or the and you were like, no. I just mean relationships. And so I love the way that you propose those definitions to give us kind of a a broader understanding of what even a relationship of any kind is. Something else another concept that is really awesome and paradigm shifting to me is, like, relational agency, which is one's capacity to find relationships that improve their life. I think we'll get into this when we talk about overlap between, like, relational agency, and and I think there's a lot there when it comes to community self governance. But we'll get there. I think it's important to contrast some of these concepts with with, like, the antidote to them or, let's say, like, a relationship relational agency. When you don't have that, you're in relationship perhaps of domination, and it's when someone is trying to change someone else but without being changed themselves. So you're using that same kind of framework to understand domination through the lens of relationships, which I find really, really powerful. I one big lesson in in the book or or kind of argument you make is that we can predict the conditions that lead to relationships. So we can create containers where relationships can happen, and we can predict that they will happen, but not where those relationships will lead. I think that's a really powerful concept and one I want to explore more. I think yeah. The I love the way that you contrast, again, kind of what you're striving for with existing paradigms. So you bring up ownership, and you talk about how ownership is something that actually, through the lens of relationship, it's a way for preventing someone from being in relationship with something. I think for a lot of us in governance space, we think about ownership and and it's, yeah, really helpful to kind of bring those concepts in in together with each other where, yeah, ownership is basically like a a blockage of a potential relationship. Cool. So so those are kind of some some definitions or core concepts that I think shape a lot of our work and will be useful in our discussion. You also talk about lineages. Like, how we form relationships are based on our personal lineages and our community lineages. So, you know, when we want to make them happen, like, we have to kind of look back or or go go inwards and understand, like, we're gonna learn a lot from about how to make relationships based on our lives and the things we've experienced in our lives and the people in our lives. And then finally, you get into, like, kind of the the societal failure to invest in relationships, how we can invest in relationships. And then you end the book with this beautiful speculative fiction about what happens if we do invest in relationships and how we might kind of restructure society around relationships. So, my first question, you know, I wanna just draw the link between your work and MediGov more explicitly. So, like I mentioned, MediGov is a laboratory for digital governance. We cultivate tools, practices, and communities that enable self governance in the digital age. That's our mission. And I was reading and thinking a lot about relationality and self governance. And know, I kept kind of arguing. I think you gave me a new way to argue that self governing communities give humans a greater ability to form deep meaningful relationships. It gives people self governance, give people more creativity about the types of relationships that they form with each other. You know, they they increase relational agency, I'd argue, rather than, you know, conforming to rigid hierarchies of relationships of dominance and subordination, such as bosses and employees in a workplace or admins and users in software, kind of that implicit feudalism that Medigov is kind of trying to disrupt. So I would be curious, David, to hear from you for a first question is just how do you relate these two concepts of relationality or relational agency and community self governance? How do you see the linkage there?
I wanna, thank you so much. I wanna quickly contrast corporations and movements. I understand them. And talk about and sort of talk about the spectrum between authoritarianism and like something else that I think you all are imagining. And loneliness and connection. So loneliness, one of the things I learned in my research is that the opposite of loneliness is not loneliness is different from social isolation. Loneliness does not mean that you don't have relationships. Loneliness means that you don't have agency over your relationships. You may be connected to a lot of people at work. You may have a family. You may have lots of people filling up your life. But if you don't have if all those relationships consist of obligation, if all things you were forced to do, you don't have any agency over them, you can still feel lonely. And so this question of agency, this question of can I evolve the relationships in my life? Can I find new relationships? Can I release relationships? Can I communicate and navigate conflict in ways that lets relationship shift to meet my needs? That question of agency is really, really central to me, and has been central, you know, to my own journey, also to my thinking. And so when we have a lot of lonely people, you know, defining people is in relationship to that agency, there's a strong link between loneliness and authoritarianism. This is talked about Hannah Arendt, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with, talks about the link, says that, totalitarianism is institutionalized loneliness. And and as when people are lonely and have no agency, it makes sense to entrust a centralized authority to, like, centralized resources, to centralized power, to entrust someone to kinda protect you and look out for you because all of the other people around you are just threats. But the more you have agency, the more someone has agency to build and evolve their relationships, the less centralizing power makes sense. The more you and the people you're holding agency with kind of want a piece of that power, and the more you crave the messiness of figuring out how to share power with people. And so, I think there there is a way that when we create space where people connect, where they learn to build trust, where they learn to change one another, it moves us on the spectrum away from authoritarianism, which I think of as both what is unfolding in The United States where I'm based right now, and the default norm in most corporations, to something that is much more distributed, decentralized, and democratic. And the example of this that I've explored most of my work, because I I come from a movement organizing background. That's sort of the lineage I draw from. And I look at some of the movements I've seen where you have a group of people at the start of the movement who kind of are just respected by everyone, and they're all telling slightly different stories about what the movement should do. It's not that they have a bank account. They don't even necessarily have a lot of formal governance authority, but they are competing to see who can tell the story that best mobilizes everyone else. And whoever tells the story tells a story that mobilizes the most that resonates in the most people's bodies. That mobilizes them to take action the most. Whatever story wins in that sort of like collaborative and competitive churn in the middle of a movement is what winds up directing where the movement goes. So there's a there's a form of governance that is about storytelling. It's about storytelling that resonates with our values. It's about knowing how to instill a sense of hope in people. And whoever kind of whatever narratives emerge that create the most hope wind up functionally governing the direction of the movement. That feels to me very, very different than or, like, that sort of at least one imagine I have what's on the end of the spectrum that's not authoritarianism.
Awesome. Yeah. That I love that. The henna aren't quote is is really powerful there too. Yeah. That leads me right into my next question, which is kind of coming back to that point of the opposite of or not opposite, but, like, you know, we can't predict where relationships will go. Right? I think we can predict where they can happen. We can create containers for them, but we can actually predict where they'll go. Though you do talk about you do a bunch of physics and and Mhmm. You talk about how they what we do know about them is that they will help us change. They will help us evolve. They'll make us resilient, and they will transform us, you know, which kind of is like it is a direction. It is a it is it is we do know something there. I guess yeah. So so my question is kind of getting into this again, coming back to self governance, I think a lot of challenges that our community in MediGov and also in the kind of complex governance space, we often get told, like, oh, well, you're choosing between participation and efficiency. Right? Like, y'all you governance people, you never actually get anything done. It's like, time and time again, it is a challenge of the more you kind of open up that space, sometimes, you know, it takes longer or whatever. So I one quote in your book is, on page one forty two, you say that movement scholar Darcy Leach argues that the real problem is not how to avoid the tyranny of the structurelessness, but how to sustain structures of tyrannylessness. And I just loved that quote so much because we talk so much about tyranny of the structurelessness in this community. And it kind of gets to what you were just saying around, like, values alignment and kind of how to get people how to get stuff done with people. So, yeah, can you can you speak to how relationships can and perhaps relationships and governance good governance together, how we can prove people wrong and actually use the two together and get stuff done?
So I think I think as someone who hangs out movements, like, that gets that's good movement all the time. Right? Movements take on giant corporations and win all the time. So there's a there's a quick story I wanna tell about BoJack Horseman. Any anyone here watch BoJack Horseman? So in season, I think four or five of BoJack Horseman, they had an out asexual care and their writer's room reached out reach decided they were gonna have this out asexual character. They reach out to a queer media organization called GLAAD. GLAAD reached out to me because I'm this asexual organizer. I reached out to the head of ACES Los Angeles. Asexual Los Angeles that happened to be run by an ace comedy writer. And seventy two hours after the, like, Netflix said, hey, we think we wanna have an asexual out asexual character. We had asexual comedy writers in their writer's room advising them on what is a pretty big media win for us. Right? So if you think about that, like, we are a grassroots network that runs on $3,000 a year, which is what it takes to see for servers online. We were able to get an asexual comedy comedy writer into their Writer's Room in seventy two hours when a really impactful opportunity came up. Like, most large corporations could not do that on that timeline. There is a way that we're adaptable. There's a way that we are ready to take advantage of opportunities in a way that most large hierarchical organizations could not dream of. Even if they have exponentially more resources. This is also there's a similar campaign in which we took on large pharma industries. A a a pharma industry, and the pharma industry didn't want. And so I think we win all the time, but we win through this radically different set of tactics that really leverage our relationships. We have access to so many more resources when we can be in relationship together, than when we need resources to compel people to do what we want. And so I think there is something you you talked about shared values, you talked about the tyranny of structurelessness. What I found is that when relationships evolve, a relationship is sort of a shared understanding we have of how to spend time together. It really helps if we have some North Star that's guiding us. Something that is telling us the way of the the kinds of ways of spending time together that might feel aligned. So if I'm in a community with people who share values. If I'm if I show up in a community and I tell a story about what motivates me, and then you tell a story about what motivates you, and those stories sort of make our bodies light up in a similar way, and the stories of everyone in the room make our bodies light up in a similar way, we have a a directional sense of how to spend time together in ways that are going to bring everyone along. And that is not a strategy. It is not a like top down defined thing, But it is this kind of embodied sense of direction that we share that I think can get us to places like the story you know I told about by Jack horseman. So I think there is when we know how to when we can get good at building trust around shared value, shared sense of purpose, I think that there are immensely powerful things that happen that most of our modern institutions kind of can't conceive of.
Yeah. Yeah. Derek, I'm watching you also, like, respond, and my body's feeling the same way. I just I felt that way a lot reading this book. I think, yeah, I guess I wanna as I was just preparing that question and stuff, like, I was just thinking about how maybe it's not that, you know, we don't like, opening up governance does it's not that we don't get stuff done. It's that maybe the outcomes are more unpredictable, but when we are with people who we're values aligned with, we're on relational time. Right? And you and and you say that relational time moves incredibly slowly, frustratingly backwards, and then all at once. And I just have felt that so much in my life as I've I feel like I've been on relational time in my work, in my life, and, like, following that flow. It's like, I don't feel like it's not happening. I feel like it's just on a different time scale. It's not like this end goal predictability KPI, KPI, KPI done. It's like something weird of, like, yeah, that kind of slowly then backwards then all at once thing is so is so real. And I love when you talk about values aligned, finding people who are values aligned. Actually, it's not about like, oh, let's align on our values. It's respect and kindness and this. Like, I love the way you you give us a really tangible way of doing values alignment, which is actually sharing your struggle. And that's something that I'm excited to bring into different communities where I'm, like MediGov or or others where I'm a a person who can facilitate and host space. Actually, yeah, it's it's it's less about kind of, like, let's define our values and more about, like, let's share our challenges and, like, why are we here? How did we get here in the first place? So that's just a really, really powerful tool, I think. Okay. Next question. Okay. Well, so I wanna I wanna briefly mention you mentioned kind of well, okay. You quote WB Dubois, democracy has failed because so many fear it, and the essence of the democratic process is free discussion. When you say free discussion, a lot of people in this space, in MediGov, are kind of have have tapped into that power of free discussion, and a lot of us think about, creating spaces for deliberation in an online environment where we might be censored or where there's, like, social censorship, like, cancel culture and PC culture. I feel like the idea that people really fear free discussion resonates a lot right now in this current political moment. And I I think there's, like, two places or probably more, but at least two where where real discussion can happen. And that's either, one, in real relationship where trust is built, or two, behind a screen, like, where people can be totally anonymous. So I would love for you to talk a little bit more about the role of deliberation or free discussion in or or just right now and and how we might move more from a world where, like, online, at least where a lot of two is happening, everyone's behind a screen, but free discussion, more into a world where one can happen where people are actually in relationships of trust.
So one of the things that came out of my research was this that was really transformative idea was this idea of evolutionary rate. Right? I was looking for a way to describe scientifically what it these spaces where relationships really happen, where they really thrive. And I came across this idea in ecology, where ecologists started looking at different environments and said, hey. If we compare a coral reef to the open ocean, if we care compare a rainforest canopy to other parts of the rainforest, if we compare a a tidal pool to a beach, some ecosystems just seem to be better at producing new and interesting things. They have more biomass. They have more biodiversity vastly than others. And all of those ecosystems seem to have something in common. And when I looked at the things those ecosystems have in common, they had a lot to do with like like they parallel the lot of the tactics I thought of as an organizer. Right? Ecosystem that bridge, like, the edge zone between the forest and the grassland has a higher evolutionary rate than either the forest or the grassland. Places with a fractal dimensionality with lots of tiny niches. Think about a coral reef. Right? Lots of tiny niches where things can sort of do their own thing and then pop out and interact with one another, have a much higher open evolutionary rate than the open ocean. So when you talk about deliberation, I think a lot about what are the containers that deliberation is happening in. If you look at blue sky, it's more like an open ocean. It's a it's a little bit factless, but everyone is talking to everyone else. And the most relational spaces tend to be ones that are like this or sometimes even smaller than it. Like if we were at all going to breakout rooms with one another, where there are you have a small group of people who really are paying attention to one another, who have come from different often radically different places but have something that connects them. Some part of themselves that's getting seen in that room that normally doesn't get seen that they're approaching from different angles. That is a really really powerful way to connect and build trust, and it is not what the internet is built to do right now because it's not that does not align with the business models. Right? Like an engagement optimized feed where you were competing for attention with everyone else, but you're guaranteed attention from no one. That is a deeply deeply a relational way to be. So when I think about dialogue, I often think about how we build a broadcast to convening gradient. How do you go from I have an audience and I'm broadcasting out to that audience. And the only thing I care about is where the audience like clicks on the stuff I want them to click on, which is very transactional. To I if I am talking to a bunch of people, I'm also inviting them into conversation with one another. In thoughtful, small ways, ideally that bridge intersect. What are those ways that we invite people into with one another?
Oh, no. David, you froze. I assume he froze for everyone. Right? Yeah. Okay. Oh, no. I'm gonna message him on signal. Well, so while we wait for David to unfreeze, I'm like, just unfreeze, David. I I I wanna give you all I mean, you you should really go read the book. It's so, so good. But to entice you even more, David, chapter six is epic, and David talks about, again, just using this relationship or relational lens, kind of critiques, like, a lot of the backwards colonialist capitalistic systems through through the lens of relationships. And so he talks about particularly ownership and, you know, during, like, colonization and how the British East India Company, basically, the workers, like, landed on the shores of the Now US and, like, basically were forced to abandon any kind of relationship oriented way of being or thinking because their investors were sort of forcing them to, like, put profit, above all costs. And so, kind of this, like, separation. And when the company took on these investors, it forced the workers who were then, like, on the ground out here to, like, abandon, just drop any kind of relational way of being in when they arrived here. So, yeah, the kind of, like, effect of the separation of ownership from the people working and management, and seeing that through the lens of relationships. And then also, my probably favorite quote or section of the book is when he talks about, Adam Smith. Oh, yeah. You're back. Cool. And he talks about Adam Smith on page 169. And I never knew this, but apparently Adam Smith was writing all of his books and stuff with capitalism, blah blah blah. And the whole entire time, meanwhile, he's living at his mother's home, and she's feeding him and taking care of him. And he was not, you know, making money working at that time. And so I just think it's like, yeah, such a such a clear relational invisibility that you point out. And the quote that I wanted to just read for us to sit on and think about, and then we'll move to Q and A. But so, on page 169, you say, this relational invisibility created a false justification for European superiority since it obscured the wisdom of civilizations operating on relational principles and left a dangerously false image of people living in chaos who needed order imposed on them. It also created a fear of and fascination with relational power. A fear and fascination that was projected onto the bodies of women, people of color, and women of color especially. Just like, woah. I don't know. That that part really stuck out to me. It got me on a whole thread of, like, what is relational power? How is it distinct from other types of power? Maybe, like, I call it, like, role status money power. Like, why is it so feared? And and it then it was just, like, to me, the the question I have and maybe we can answer it or maybe we wanna go to q and a, but, like, relational power just feels like really the only real power. It's power that, like, can't just be taken away. You know, someone's, like, status or role can just be like, you're fired. But relational power is is really to me, like, I was like, oh, maybe it's, like, actually the only power that is power. And so and then you kind of point us towards a world where we might organize societies around that type of relational power in the last chapter, which I really love. So, yeah, we can we can engage. If you have any comments or thoughts on that, feel free. But I say, yeah, we should move to q and a
as soon as we can.
I would love to talk about relational power, but let's move to
q and a. Cool.
Well, I have not been looking at the chat and keeping account of who's on the stack, so sorry about that. Let's see. Lydia has a question. There's a well known number that describes the maximum number of actual social ties. It is approximate, but it works well in organizational research. Are there similar estimates for relationships? Interesting.
So this is Dunbar's number. I talk about Dunbar's research because it really proves that the reason we have all the large neocortex was to make predictions about relationships. That our brains exist to let us navigate relationships. They're very expensive. They're very awkward. But it's the best way we have to do the really incredible and hard work of navigating the relational world around us, of having a relational power. And Dunbar's number is a 150 people. That is if you're in a group of a 150 people, you can track everyone's relationship with everyone. So it works a little bit different in modern society because we we're not just tracking like, we're tracking that number of relationships, but it's not one contained group of a 150 people. It's spread out across many groups. But I I really like it because it acknowledges that we have a limited capacity to be in relationship. If relationship is about changing and being changed, at some point, we can't add more of it to our life without becoming overwhelmed. And so if we want to expand, if we want to invite more relationship into the world, to use a word I don't like, if we want to scale, then there's two ways to do it. Right? Either we demand that all the relationship people we're in relationship with are homogeneous and the same. Like we we use power to try to force similarity on them and erase their difference, or we trust people to build relationship who are aligned with our values that aren't on us. So that the power isn't all coming the control isn't all coming back to us, but we are trusting other people. And so that expanding our relational capacity by trusting building trust in communities around us is one one theme of governance as opposed to through dominance and homogeneity. That's one big theme. Anyway, that was far from Dunbar. But Val or Rick? I don't know. I don't know what the process is.
Well, Rick's hand, I think I mean, I I feel like it's been up for a little while, but we had some questions pop up in the chat, like, in the middle of the session. Such as, Faizon had a question of canopy top down, bottom up, and diagonal all at the same time, to which you responded it can though the top down needs to be ready for all those things. Can you say more on that?
Just that yeah. I think this comes a lot of my work is focused on relational resourcing. Like, I'm talking to foundations. I'm talking to people to employ money. But, like, hey. Can you pay can you learn how to fund this work without needing to control it? And I think there is a role for people in existing institutions who have centralized power to say, oh, we are going to recognize the benefit of people bringing into relationship. We're going to recognize the benefit of them governing one another and, like, maybe building power adjacent to us that isn't always going to agree to us with us because we see that a world that has more relationship and more power around a set of shared existing on shared values is preferable to a world where we have all the power. So I think that there there are ways for people in power to realize that they can share it to to but a lot of times the especially in I think current corporate culture. There's a sense of anything that reduces our power and build someone else's as a threat. And it's that capacity to trust in people building power on that people doing things you don't control about values that you share that I think is is really key to on end diagonal all working together.
Awesome. Ashwarya asked where did it go? A really awesome question about timeline. How do you reconcile the time it takes to achieve our movement's goals with the urgency of the problems we wanna solve?
So it is complicate like like, that that is a really great and hard question, and I think that there might be times where we need to sacrifice relationality for urgency. And it's it's worth asking the question like, can we build relationship in the process of what we're doing? Can we build collective care and collective power in the process of what we're doing? Because ultimately, like the BoJack Horseman story, relationship is gonna move a lot faster than hierarchy. And so if we're responding to something quickly, are we saying we don't have time to think about relationship at all? We don't have time to think about people building trust. We don't have time to think about people's longevity. We just need to, like get to next week and not think about anything beyond it. Or is there enough capacity to think about how bringing people together on urgency is also building relationship, trust, and capacity on a longer time scale. I think if we are caught in a system of perpetual urgency, that is one of the tools of colonialism. That is one of the tools of white supremacy. And like, yes, white supremacy and colonialism are creating those conditions as well. To to use language from my political lineage, that may or may not resonate with everyone here. But, but I think if we are caught in a place of so much urgency that thinking about relationship doesn't feel possible, then, it feels like there's a real lost opportunity.
Yeah. I love the way you're modeling also using language from your lineage, and and that's really powerful. Okay. Rick, I saw your hand. One more question from the chat, and then I'm gonna give pass it to you. But Natalia's question is really is on this vein too of she says, I find that heavy relationality well, Natalia, if you're if you would like to unmute and and read your question, feel free or else I'll just read it.
Oh, sure. So there's an there's an implied question in there. I find that heavy relationality can lead to really big feelings of a Shakespearean nature such as betrayal and murder. I find that there are people in healthy ecosystems who know how to handle these big feelings. But, basically, they kind of get screwed over. Often, the current economy tries to wash away those big feelings and does not support the people who help with their maintenance or ecological metabolism because those feelings shouldn't really be existing or be generated by the system. I'm wondering if you have general thoughts about that problem in general.
Yeah. One of the things oh, I hope I didn't freeze again. One of the things that I wanna I wanna have been in a lot of conversations with peace building organizations, like people who go conflict zones, And all lot of the history of nonviolent move that one of the things that kind of becomes really central to governance as we get into these more relational spaces is conflict mediation. It is creating like, if people have strong feelings, which are gonna be inevitable if you're doing relational work, how do you create containers with those strong feelings so that they don't boil over in ways that harm the community, but ultimately lead to a place people trust one another more. And this is I think a capacity that some movements a a way that some movements have gotten really really powerful is just recognizing those feelings come up, creating containers around them, and then learning from seeing them as a source of wisdom to show where the communities needs to head. Not just a thing to be contained, but a thing to learn from. And so that question of how can create a space of regenerative conflict. Kind of conflict, creating the condition of regenerative conflict central to governance is one that's come up a lot for me. And that's a little more of a high level answer. There's some examples of this I'd love to give but I want to be respectful of other folks questions.
Awesome. Rick?
Yeah. Thank you. I wanna thank the organization for bringing this book to my attention. I didn't know anything about it beforehand, but thank you very much. The second is what I really appreciate about the way you're speaking, David, is that your amazing raconteur of your work, which as you well know, storytelling and being able to is incredibly important. But, you know, I was I wanna focus on the issue of, you know, all relational power is not created equal. There's the good, the bad, and the ugly. So if one were to focus on the notion of, virtuous relational empowerment and power, as a vehicle for facilitating not only self governance, but shared governance, collective governance, and meta governance, I was wondering what to what extent in your book you may have tapped into that notion of storytelling that deals with the issue of using virtuous relational power for affecting governance at multiple levels.
So two two themes I wanna respond to, and I don't think I'm I'm able to fully get to the depth and complexity of your question, which I really, really love. The first is that I well, well I'm all about relationality. I do not believe that all relationality is good. My day job is working with trust and safety employees at major tech companies. So like they're looking a lot at hate groups. They're looking a lot at places where people are invited into relationship in ways that toxic both for them and for other people. So, if if people are invited into relationship, the question of what values are guiding that relationship is really, really central. And I think for me, it's important to say not like all relationship is good, but where is relationship happening that resonates with the values that I hold, and how am I gonna show up there? And sometimes I will work to actively undermine the conditions for relationship that strongly is discordant with my values. And then the second piece you said is around story. I think story, and I'm early minders in need of this, is a incredibly rich way to convey relational information. If I want to share something about the values that drive me, if I like to your point earlier, Val, like, say the word respect and define it and anecdotally talk about respect for twenty minutes, it's not gonna tell you as much as if I tell a story about why and how respect is shown off my life as a thing that matters. So there is a way that the art of storytelling is the art of conveying complex relational information that's really needed and therefore critical to relational governance.
If I can just quickly respond, I was at a recent research conference. For the first time in my professional career, somebody introduced themselves as a relational scientist to me, which was thought, wow. That's amazing. Never heard of the term before. Probably old hat for other people, but it was new for me. But in terms of of actually advancing, you know, the the the the upside of it, as you was alluding to, you know, there's a negative you you wanna mitigate against the negative, but you also want to harness the powers powerful side of it. Any further thoughts, and then I'll hand over to the next person.
I think I appreciate that. I think for the time for sake of time, I wanna I wanna keep going because I know we're almost out of time.
Cool. Faizon asked a question on what does it mean to actually flourish as human beings in a world where tech is reshaping our narratives, realities, and truth with all our actions and inactions? What are the significant barriers that are bound to stay in the investment of relational monetary investment? Faiza, I know you mentioned you have toddlers, but if you'd like to add anything there, cool.
So I'm I'm thinking about this question. The significant barriers that are
Maybe barriers to I'm curious
what you mean by by bound to stay. I I can say I can talk a little about this the barriers to relational work that I've seen. Value alluded to this. But when we build relationship, one of the things that seems to be a fundamental like, mathematical law is that when we create the conditions relationship, the more effective we are, the less predictable the outcome is. If I I can sometimes know the outcome of a bad conversation ahead of time, the better the conversation is, the less I know about exactly where it's gonna land. That seems to be true of all relational systems, and that really messes with the way that we think about investment. If you're filling out a grant application, if you're talking to investors, you need to say, this is what's going to happen. This is my plan to control all the factors to make it happen. And then these are my measures to say that the thing that I predicted is going to happen. If you're building a community, all of that that need to predict gets in the way. It kills the community rather than helping it thrive because communities fundamentally do not work like factories. And so I think the the barrier to relational investment, a culture of that I think is holding most of our resources right now that demands control, particularly in order to us. And a lot of the work that I'm doing, which now that I won't into is try I control. I also think oh, oh, one I really hope I haven't lost you all again. I also believe that crap.
No. You're here, David, but you did freeze for a second there.
Oh, I'm here. Okay. Sorry. That are I'll just say that I I this add a lot in our tech world where there is technology that bring up all the time that just can't get the investment or support it needs to succeed. So it looks like, yeah, you you all this video are frozen, but but hopefully the audio is coming through.
Yeah. It did. Mel, you might be our last question. And, unfortunately, if you are our last question, there were few in there that didn't get addressed. So we'll take it into the Slack and or we should do a follow-up community call to go into a deeper discussion. But, Mel, take it away. Let's squeeze one more in.
Thank you. This has been an awesome discussion. And, I guess my my question is based on on what you've said, which I, I have a hard time disagreeing with any of it, and I I try and work in the, what I call, like, trust tech space. Do you think that I I I think repeated disagreement and getting through it together is one of the hallmarks of, you know, the relationship building. And so there was this interesting quote. I was watching the matrix, and it's like, you know, you have to fight somebody to truly know them. And as a concept, I was like, wow. The people I have fought, you know, I do feel like I know better. And so I would love if you could speak to that in relation to maybe your thinking around kinda generating this book, which I do plan to read. And, again, thank you.
I I I think that's fighting is an is an especially interesting metaphor for relationship because it's like it is it is so much more conversational than it is violent. Right? When people fight in the matrix, they're doing this sort of, like like, a dance where they're reading one another. They're seeing and engaging intimately. They're not, like going up and and causing injuries to another's arm. So, fighting in the matrix is I I will extend this a little bit is, almost a metaphor for generative conflict. That these are people who are in conflict, but they're not in conflict that ultimately causes harm or is even designed to cause harm. They're in conflict that is designed to like get to know one another and find a resolution that doesn't create spiraling destruction. So if I if I a little bit intensely overextend the the metaphor, then I think that works. I think that there are forms of fighting someone. There are forms of conflict that can be immensely destructive. If I think about high conflict, forms of conflict where I'm fighting someone and so I develop a completely untrue story about who they are and what's motivating them in my in my mind that becomes a destructive obsession. Like, there's there's versions that that are very untrue. And so I think the question for me is how do we create conditions for conflict where that is true?
Thank you.
Awesome. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you so much. What a lively discussion. So much still to, talk about here clearly. So join us in Slack. David, I'll make sure you have a link. We usually do a follow-up thread in the Medigov seminars channel. So let's keep going, and maybe if there's energy and interest, we could do a follow-up call. But, definitely, y'all go check out David's book. It's amazing. Let's talk about it. I wanna hear what sticks out to you all. Maybe you could do a meta book club of it. That would be really awesome. So if there's interest, let me know. But, I'll send you all off on the rest of your days. Thank you so much for joining. Please unmute and give our speaker, author David, a round of applause. Good to see you all. Thank you, David, for being here.
David, are you, boy are you the voice over to the audiobook? Yes. I am. Oh, awesome. Great. Thank you.
Alright. Thank you all. I have to I do have to run and host another call, but it was so such an honor to
Bye, Ron. Have a good day. Lots of love y'all.