SECRET: PATIENCE

Gregory Ferenstein, You Can Change the World

Dear Gregory,

Yours is not the only response to George Packer’s Change the World that I read but it is the only one that moved me to respond. I am not sure exactly why. Survival of the fittest has long been part of our nation’s dialogue about social inequality and at least since the days of Ronald Reagan, commentators have hailed the values of trickle down economics. None of what you said is new but for some reason - it may have been your unbridled honesty - I was struck in the middle of the night to respond.

Speaking as a thirty something Brooklynite who has a law degree and comfortable life, I join you in your commitment to progress. I live in an apartment only slightly bigger than a postage stamp and work hard to make meaningful contributions to the world. Like you, I care far more about one of my relatives surviving cancer than I do about having a front lawn. The well-being of my larger community - on a local and global scale - is more important to me that the accumulation of personal property. Experts say that our generation is more concerned about achieving happiness than professional success. That sign of progress brings me great hope. You are right to point out that our generation is tasked with loosening the chokehold of special interests. You also rightly observe that “a few very important parts of life have improved over the last half-century because technologists have delivered on exactly the things we expect innovation to do.”

You made several valid observations but in a number of other areas, you made claims that hold little water in reality. It is not that your piece is not well-cited. Where it was helpful, you linked to articles and reports by entities including TechCrunch, The Heritage Foundation, Google and the New York Times. The real credibility problem is that throughout the piece, you presented your opinions as verifiable facts. We are a generation exhausted by the partisan politics of those who have come before. Just as we seek new technologies, we seek new ways of communication. We forge new partnerships. In the best interest of our generation, we try to avoid doing exactly what has been done before. Please Gregory, if you must pander to partisan ideas, try to come up with something new.

You claim to know for a fact that the only idea anyone in the labor movement has ever had to fight inequality is to stall progress. It would be helpful to know where you got that idea. How do you know? Who are you talking about when you say “unions”? Have you had conversations with people within the labor movement? What does “labor movement” mean to you? How did you come to develop this opinion?

I work as a neutral in the area of labor law. I have seen good and bad players on both sides of the labor-management equation. On a daily basis, I entertain debates about the need for collective bargaining. On a daily basis, I watch attorneys and experts who represent management, and some who represent unions, make crazy amounts of money instigating fires between labor and management. Some of these fires are set by the attorneys and experts. That is a fact. Because livelihoods are at stake, much of what happens in the American workplace is emotional. Attorneys and experts forgo logic for victory. However I have rarely, if ever met anyone from a union who believes that “the best (and perhaps only) way to fight inequality is to stall progress.” That is a fact. I have heard such statements from my baby boomer uncle, and I have heard such statements from conservative political pundits. Those players have mostly lost support of my generation so I take what they say with a grain of salt. You seem like a smart guy. Please Gregory, have the sense and intelligence not to pander to old-fashioned partisan ideas, and come up with something new.

Again, I assume you are highly intelligent. Especially because you are an engineer in Silicon Valley, Your post considers several angles of a problem but it is misses important parts of the equation. Including empathy. Webster’s Dictionary defines empathy as, “the power to enter into the feeling or spirit of others.” In the same way that technology is critical to our evolution as human beings, so is empathy. We live on a planet covered with billions of human beings. Because these billions are different, we feel like we live in chaos. It is impossible for one person or one idea or one industry to cut across these differences and to create order. I do not have the answers and you do not have the answers. Private robotic chauffeurs offer some benefits but they do not solve the algorithm of human chaos. They will not extinguish the human inclination toward violence and self-destruction. Attempts at domination have always, always, always resulted in war (in one form or another). The most important thing we can do, as free-thinking independent liberated individual human beings, is learn to understand our human counterparts and to develop a way to work with them. That is empathy. You should learn some. Your future, our future, and our technology depends on it.

If you are unsure about how to develop this important skill, start slowly. Look at your own life. You find yourself in the middle of a technological revolution. Like the industrial revolution did, it pushes forward, always and at all costs. That is progress. Human societies have adapted to the wild speed of progress by developing laws and institutions to slow it down. Labor laws are among these controls. They do not prevent forward movement, they just slow it down. In the same way that your future self-driving car will slow down to allow that elderly woman to cross the street without harm. Consider how these controls have worked in your life thus far. Think about how your life might have been different if the people who raised you - whoever they are - were not protected by labor laws. What would the modern American family structure look like if children still worked in factories and parents were forced to work all evenings and all weekends? Somewhere along the way, you - as a free-thinking independent liberated individual human being on this planet - have been supported by the American labor movement. That is a fact. Please, next time you write publicly about protectionism and social welfare, give these realities a thought. They will help you develop empathy. Again, your future, our future, and the future of technology depends on it.

And if you’re ever in Brooklyn, let’s get a drink.

Unfrozen: The Spell of Hot Desk

NĀḌĪ: Dam Libs 1

An Open Letter to Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO

Dear Ms. Mayer,

I do not work in the tech industry and in fact, I did not know your name before Yahoo News started reporting on the duration of your maternity leave and recent rumors that you are slated to discontinue the work at home option that your employees, and many of us, appreciate deeply. But for these articles, I would not know about the important work you have been doing. Thank you for that. I am a female attorney trying to come up in the world. I struggle to do the right thing as I come, and am on a perpetual search for happiness. It feels hard. It feels harder than I ever imagined it would be. That is a first world problem.

I have this amazing friend. Her name is Charlie Oliver. She is an entrepreneur and she understands things about people and the universe that not everyone else does. She is the one who hipped me to the articles about what’s going on at Yahoo these days. She’s ambitious, ambitious in a way that makes me nervous sometimes. I am not that ambitious, or I am not ambitious in the way she is anyway. That is probably why we are friends. Charlie is struggling to make it as an entrepreneur. Even though she wants so many days to throw in the towel, she just keeps going. She enjoys incredible success but she has not seen much payoff. What you have done and what you will continue to do is inspiring.

Thank you again for your work. I mean that.

It is impossible to know what is really going on at Yahoo but back here in New York City, people do not really know what to think. It makes sense that you would want to get back to your work so quickly after giving birth. You have spent many years working your way into the position you have now. You love something that much? Of course you wanted to get back to work. Particularly now. Since we are in the middle of building something better, the economy is slowing down. Times are tough and they may be getting tougher. Noone ever knows. People do not need to be at their desks but they do need to be in the same office. Where they can put their minds together and imagine something beautiful. If you have done what they say you have done, you are balancing a great many little plates. A couple have fallen, or at least that is what the media is saying. But you are still there. In a position of immense power.

That is a good thing for all of us. I heard that after the contracted maternity leave didn’t work out, you designed a nursery for your son next to your office. Where you can take care of him while you work. That is an amazing idea. Around the same time that I learned about the nursery, I heard that you were going to revoke this liberal work at home policy. It seems to be either an idea thrown around, or a very difficult decision to make. Like a compromise. people need to be in the office. That makes sense.

Now what?

This is probably something you have thought a great deal about. Shorter working hours. Less responsibility. Unlimited and voluntary on campus child care for the children of all employees, sliding scale. There are number of ways to go. I am sure you have asked your employees what might work for them. The majority of multinational corporations employ consultants these days to survey the landscape and to develop a system that will make everyone happy and so, more productive. They meet with employees outside the presence of management and ask deep, non-judgmental questions about what things their employer could do better. And then they try to help the employing entity implement them. It is a good design. We have learned a great deal from the American labor movement.

I am impressed every time i meet one of these consultants. But I always have a question for them. Do you think employees hold anything back because you are a representative of management, or paid by management? Do they have absolute job security if they participate? Every consultant assures me that it is a truly safe environment. It may very well be. But based on what I know about the American workplace, and I happen to know quite a bit, those who are employees (and you can call them whatever you want) have to worry about their jobs. Bias is a hard thing to overcome. The top is a long way off.

What if the employees were encouraged to meet on their own, without an expensive consultant, to develop ways in which the organization will work better? What if space was created for this collective to sit across a table from those who make major economic decisions about the future of the organization, and share their demands? The parties could share information and negotiate. I imagine that if that happened, you would get even more constructive feedback than you are getting now.

If that model is to work, those who participate must not face the fear of dismissal. Or at the very least, they must know that even if they are dismissed, they can access legal recourse. Many organizations use arbitration to resolve disputes. It is a start but a false one. The problem with arbitration is it operates in “at will” regime. By its definition, “at will” means that there are no protections against retaliation. If an employee who, as result of her participation at the bargaining table, loses an arbitration, she has nothing to fall back on. At companies where there is no binding arbitration, that collective of employees has protection. If any one of them is retaliated against for engaging in protected and concerted activity, the federal government has a board to protect them. It is called the National Labor Relations Board. Among other things, the Board facilitates collective bargaining, runs union elections and investigates charges of unfair labor practices. Business - or industry - does not look very favorably on the Board’s work. But based on what i know, and i know quite a bit about this topic, it is a government agency filled with highly intelligent human beings who understand more about the American workplace than most others. Because through their respective roles, they have seen just about every kind of workplace you can imagine.

This is why i find John Mackey’s vision of a conscious capitalism so disturbing. He seems not to believe in government regulation and he never talks about democracy. Instead, he has created a language around efficiencies and team members and compassion conservatism. That might be enough in a perfect world but here, in this day in age, it is just not viable to assume corporations will police themselves.

People need to heal. It has been a long and wild ride. And they need to feel safe. Where they can develop their sensibility for empathy. Where they can think. I know you already know that. That is why you are the perfect candidate for the job of figuring out how to move the American workplace into an environment where human beings are not vying for another piece of pie but rather, to get along in the civilized way we were taught how to live. I know you are under a great deal of pressure but you seem to thrive there. That is why I am sitting in a studio apartment in New York and you are designing beautiful software in Silicon Valley. (We are all crazy sometimes. It just manifests in different ways.)

There has to be a different way of doing things. Whether that requires the dismantling of the preferred economic model remains to be seen. I doubt that that is either possible or necessary. At the risk of oversimplification, we could remember that what someone once said - the most effective solutions are often the simplest.

Thank you again for everything you are doing. The world is better because of it. I will try not to read the gossip rags and I will be pulling for you.

In Solidarity.

The House I Live In: a film about family

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